Mumbai: The MiG-21 Bison that Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was flying when he was downed by a Pakistan Air Force F-16 was well past its retirement age, and kept alive with repeated upgrades and service life extensions, experts have told IndiaSpend.

Anantnag: Debris of MiG-21 fighter plane which crashed on May 27, 2014.

The accident-prone Russian-made MiGs–482 of which were lost to accidents between 1971 and April 2012, averaging nearly 12 a year–were first inducted into the Indian Air Force in the mid-1960s. These were to retire by the mid-1990s, but were upgraded to Bison standard, even as successive variants were inducted until the 1980s.

“India is the last country in the world with a serious airforce to still fly the MiG 21s,” Pushpinder Singh, founding editor of the Vayu Aerospace and Defence Review, told IndiaSpend. “The poor young man who flew the aircraft against an F-16 didn’t stand a chance… [He] is now a prisoner of war and it is a national shame that in 2019 we are still flying these planes.”

As aircraft age, the number of failures due to the ageing of their functional equipment or system components grows. As system components often hold a longer life potential than the certified life of an aircraft, subsystem or service life extension programmes are carried out to maximise the use of their equipment.

However, every aircraft has its lifespan and the MiG-21s reached the end of theirs two decades ago, Singh said. After numerous upgrades and service life extensions, India will begin phasing out the MiG-21s along with the MiG-23 and MiG-27 from 2022.

But that may not be soon enough.

The MiGs are built on the technology of the 1960s and the 1970s, Air Marshal Padamjit Singh Ahluwalia (retd), former chief of the western air command, told IndiaSpend. “[We] are now nearing 2020… [It] is phenomenal of the IAF to sustain its use till date as these jets are no comparison for the F-16s.”

A history of crashes

Of 28 IAF aircraft crashes recorded between April 2012 and March 2016, more than a fourth (eight) involved the MiG-21, six of which were the upgraded MiG-21 Bison variant, the government told parliament in March 2016.
 

Source: Lok Sabha
*Both killed in MiG BISON aircraft

From 1971 to April 2012, as many as 482 MiG aircraft accidents took place killing 171 pilots, 39 civilians, eight service personnels and one aircrew, the government told Parliament in May 2012.

The MiG-21s generally report the maximum number of crashes, Air Marshal Ahluwalia said, “These planes are difficult to fly–they have the highest accident rate.”

From 1993 to 2013, 198 MiG-21s specifically–often dubbed “flying coffins” by pilots–of different variants have crashed, killing 151 pilots, according to data from Bharat Rakshak, a website run by military aviation enthusiasts, citing government data. IndiaSpend has not been able to independently verify these data.

MiG-21 vs F-16

For over 50 years, the IAF has been using the Russian-made MiG-21s and its variants, which are the oldest fighters in its fleet. “We still have squadrons of the older models,” Air Marshal VK Jimmy Bhatia (retd.), who commanded the Western Air Command, told IndiaSpend. “More than a decade ago, we began upgrading these to Bison standards which include new radars and new navigational capabilities, among other upgrades.”

The MiGs “delivered in terms of quality–as these were supersonic fighter jets, keeping up with the technology of the time–and quantity, as we could have them in large numbers to serve us for over four decades,” Singh told IndiaSpend, adding, however, that every aircraft has its lifespan and the MiG-21s reached the end of theirs two decades ago.

By 2022, these aircraft will have reached the end of their lifetime and the MiG-21s along with the MiG-23 and MiG-27 will be phased out.
The US-made F-16s, which the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) uses, “have pretty advanced radars, navigation systems and other capabilities. In terms of range, the F-16s are better than the MiG-21s,” Air Marshal Bhatia said. The PAF has been using F-16s for less than 40 years now, and received its newest batch of the Block-50 model 10 years ago.

Nevertheless, Air Marshal Bhatia said, the MiG-21s can rival the F-16s: “The MiG-21 Bison is capable of carrying the latest Russian missiles and in that sense you can’t say they are inferior to the F-16. I would still say they are comparable. But the fact is we are nearing the end of the air frame for these–there is very little residual life for them. Even for those aircraft that have received extensions–we are nearing the end of their extended life.”

Way back in 1983, the government had acknowledged the need to design and develop new-technology fighter jets, Singh said. “But since we couldn’t afford to buy them at the time, we created the Light Combat Aircraft  (LCA) programme Tejas,” he said. “Now 35 years later, the programme has yet to really take off.”
To hold up against today’s fighter-jets, an aircraft needs the latest technology such as advanced avionics and radar, greater weapon-load capacity, stealth technology, electronic warfare capability, precision weaponry and other such features, which the MiG-21 does not have, Padamjit Singh Ahluwalia (retd), former chief of western air command, told IndiaSpend. “As a fighter jet, the MiG-21 is a basic plane with regular avionics, it doesn’t have precision-strike weapons, or a reliable engine…”

After Wing Commander Varthaman’s MiG-21 Bison was shot down and he was taken prisoner, IAF sources defended the use of the MiG-21 Bison, saying it was one of the fighters in its inventory and that aircraft are rotated based on operations, time and threat level, The Print reported on February 27, 2019.

The need for newer aircraft

The first Tejas was inducted into the IAF in July 2016. On February 20, 2019, less than a week after the February 14 Pulwama attack, the IAF received final operating clearance or ‘release to service’ documents for the Tejas Mk1.

“In 1999 in the Kargil operations we used the Mirage 2000s which worked beautifully,” Singh said. Three air chiefs pushed very hard to acquire these aircraft with multi-role capabilities to replace the MiGs, but “the system did not allow their procurement”, he said.

Instead, in 2007, the Congress-run government initiated the process to develop Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MRCA). Six vendors were shortlisted–Russian Aircraft Corporation,  the Swedish aerospace company Saab, France’s Dassault Aviation SA, the US’s Lockheed Martin Corporation and Boeing, and a consortium of British, German, Spanish and Italian firms. The first 18 aircraft were to be sold in ‘fly-away’ condition while the remaining 108 were to be manufactured under transfer-of-technology agreements.

In April 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, side-stepping a three-year negotiation for the MRCA tender, announced the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter aircraft after a deal struck directly with the French government. Later, in July 2018, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar informed Parliament that the Centre had withdrawn a multi-billion dollar tender for 126 MRCA fighter jets.

This has led to a high-decibel controversy, with the Congress, currently in opposition, accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of non-transparency and calling the deal “one of the biggest failures” of the ‘Make-in-India’ programme.

“Rafale jets, which are more sophisticated and high-end, are honestly not the aeroplanes to replace the MiG-21,” Singh told IndiaSpend, “We need jets that are smaller, lighter and cheaper fighters for the frontline.”

Indian Air Force needs more jets

Currently, the IAF has 31 fighter jet squadrons, against an authorised strength of 42. This gap is due to the slow induction of newer fighter aircraft after the existing planes retire from the fleet on completing their technical life, the December 2017 parliamentary committee report found.

Over the next decade, 14 squadrons of MiG 21, 27 and 29 will retire from the IAF fleet, leaving only 19 squadrons by 2027 and 16 by 2032. To arrest the drawdown, the Air Force will induct Sukhoi-20, Tejas Light Combat Aircraft and Rafale jets, the IAF told the parliamentary committee.

“There is a certain size of a force needed to deal with threats and challenges and we are currently in severe depletion,” Air Marshal Bhatia said. “We need as many as 400 new fighter jets to meet our requirement… We need to be locking-in deals and inducting more fighters into the fleet, not piecemeal decisions,” he added.

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

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Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over at the Centre, the growth of beef and leather exports, in which India plays a key role in the international market, has nearly come to a halt. This has affected India’s foreign currency reserves, the report states from an analysis of data from the commerce and industry ministry from 2010-11 to 2017-2018.

Between 2010 and 2018, India reported 123 attacks of cow-related hate violence–98% of these after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP government assumed power at the Centre, according to the FactChecker.in database that tracks such crimes. The Human Rights Watch report relies on this database, along with some others.  

Vigilantism affecting livelihoods, forex reserves

Many Hindus consider the cow sacred, and 99.38% Indians now live under cow-protection laws, as IndiaSpend reported on April 14, 2017. In February 2019, the central government announced a national commission for cow protection.

“These policies and the vigilante attacks have disrupted India’s cattle trade and the rural agricultural economy, as well as leather and meat export industries that are linked to farming and dairy sectors,” the Human Rights Watch says.

India is the largest exporter of beef in the world, exporting buffalo meat worth $4 billion a year. However, since 2014, exports have mostly declined.

Policies of the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP state government in Uttar Pradesh, India’s top meat-producing state, have led to further uncertainties over the future of the trade, the report observes.

In 2014-15, India registered $4.78 billion worth of buffalo beef exports–the highest since 2010–although growth declined by 26.05 percentage points from 35.93% in 2013-14 to 9.88% in 2014-15. Thereafter, the quantum of exports has hovered around $4 billion, declining 3.93% in 2016-17 and growing by a smaller 3.06% in 2017-18.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Similarly, India accounts for 13% of the world’s leather. The industry records an annual revenue of more than $12 billion, 48% of which is from exports ($5.7 billion), and provides employment to about 3 million, 30% of them women.

In 2017, the government identified the apparel and leather sector as globally competitive and “eminently suitable” for generating jobs for growth. At the same time, a government survey admitted that “despite having a large cattle population, India’s share of cattle leather exports is low and declining due to limited availability of cattle for slaughter in India”.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Fear of cow vigilantes and shutdown of hundreds of slaughter houses has led to disruption in the availability of cattle hides, the report says.

While export of leather and leather products grew by more than 18% in 2013-14 and 9% in 2014-15, growth declined by nearly 20 percentage points to -9.86% in 2015-16. It grew again but at a much smaller rate of 1.4% in 2017-18, the report says from its analysis of government data.

“Hindutva leaders who are promoting this obsession with cows don’t realize how much loss they are causing to their own Hindu community, and damage they are causing to their country,” said M.L. Parihar, a Rajasthan-based author and expert on animal husbandry, quoted in the report.

Violence mostly targeted at minority groups, but economic fallout hurts majority Hindus too

In recent years, several BJP-ruled states have adopted stricter laws and policies that disproportionately harm minority communities, the report observes. The attacks, often by groups claiming links to militant outfits linked to the BJP, largely target Muslim, Dalit or Adivasi (indigenous) communities.

Dalits, customarily responsible for disposal of cattle carcasses and skin for leather goods, and Muslims, the traditional managers of slaughterhouses and meat shops, are disproportionately affected by attacks carried out in the name of cow protection, the report notes.
Among victims of such violence, the Muslims and Dalits account for 56% and 10% of those attacked, while Hindus comprise 9% of victims, according to the FactChecker.in database. Muslims, particularly, account for 78% of those killed in such attacks, FactChecker.in shows.

The inadequate response from the authorities to these attacks is hurting communities, including Hindus, whose livelihoods are linked to livestock, the report says. This includes farmers, herders, cattle transporters, meat traders and leather workers.

Nearly 55% of India’s population is engaged in agriculture and associated activities, contributing 17% of the country’s gross value added. India, the world’s largest milk producer, is home to about 190 million cattle and 108 million buffaloes. Farmers maintain and trade this livestock to supplement their incomes and food requirements.

But growing violence over cow protection appears to have contributed to a significant decrease in the number of animals traded at government-organized cattle fairs, the report says. For example, the Rajasthan state government organises 10 cattle fairs annually. In 2010-11, more than 56,000 cows and bulls were brought to these fairs and more than 31,000 were sold. In 2016-17, 11,000 cattle were brought and less than 3,000 sold, the report says.

With the growing mechanisation of agriculture and the ageing of cattle, farmers are forced to abandon cows because they cannot afford the costs of maintaining them, the report says. This had led to a rise in the numbers of stray cattle, endangering farmers’ crops. Counter-measures by state governments to curb damage are in turn compromising efforts aimed at improving health and education outcomes, the report observes.

India is party to core international human rights law treaties that prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity or religion, and require governments to provide all citizens with equal protection under law, the report points out.

“The government is obligated to protect religious and other minority populations and to fully and fairly prosecute those responsible for discrimination and violence against them,” the report says. “The authorities also should reverse policies that harm livestock-linked livelihoods, particularly in rural communities, and hold to account police and other institutions that fail to uphold rights because of caste or religious prejudice.”

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend

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In anticipation of this, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched three major urban flagship schemes in 2015: Smart Cities Mission, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U or prime minister’s urban housing scheme).

With the 2019-20 budget set to be released in an election year, urban India can expect a bigger slice of the pie, experts estimate. But with the government lagging behind its targets, development in the sector remains dismal, showed an IndiaSpend analysis of available government data.
Here are our main findings:

1. While the union budget expenditure on urban development in 2018-19 was the highest ever, as a share of the grand total this had actually declined by 0.2 percentage points to 1.7% of the budget.
2. Barely 7-20% of the central assistance earmarked for the three flagship schemes have been used since their launch, indicating that states remain chronically underfunded.
3. In the three schemes, work has been sanctioned for not more than a third of the set targets which will meet their deadlines in 2019-20 and 2021-22. The number of works actually completed is even lower.
4.  

On January 28, 2019, IndiaSpend contacted the ministry of housing and urban affairs for comments. We will update the story if and when they respond.

Why we need to pay attention to urban development
Over a century to 2001, the population residing in India’s urban areas grew by 17.1 percentage points to 28.5%. By 2011, this grew to 30% with 377 million Indians now residing in urban areas. In 20 years to 2031, the population is expected to double to over 600 million or 41% of the country.

The Indian economy is expected to grow alongside the urban population expansion as cities and towns offer several entrepreneurship and employment opportunities. More than 60% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is generated in urban areas, the government said in this 2014-15 standing committee report. The country’s 100 largest cities, which hold 16% of the population and occupy 0.24% of its land area, produce 43% of its GDP.

Rural-urban linkages need to be strengthened for “comprehensive and inclusive development”, the government said. The transition to a quasi-urban society has to be accompanied by a commensurate increase in the supply of housing and basic urban services such as water supply, sewerage and drainage network, garbage disposal facilities, and planned urban mobility, it added.

Despite the government’s recognition of the fact that unbridled urbanisation can lead to a rise in slums, worsening environmental conditions, and a decline in standard of living, the problem is set to snowball with not only continued rural distress and migration, but also the expansion of villages into small towns.

About 190 million Indians–equivalent to the combined population of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka–live in overgrown ‘villages’, according to a new study, IndiaSpend reported on January 23, 2019. Classified as ‘large’ and ‘very large’ villages–less than 25% of their population is engaged in non-agricultural work–these areas continue to miss out on urban infrastructure, housing and basic services necessary for sustainable living in densely populated regions.

How is government spending on urban development?
As we mentioned earlier, current spending on urban development constitutes 1.7% of the total budget, a 0.2-percentage-point decline since 2017-18 when it was 1.9%–the highest in a decade, showed an IndiaSpend analysis of budget data over 10 years since 2009.

In 2018, finance minister Arun Jaitley allocated Rs 41,765.13 crore for urban development–a 64% increase from 2014 when the NDA took charge of the government from the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. This is actually a 2.8% increase over the previous year 2017-18, when the NDA merged the ministry of housing and poverty alleviation and the ministry of urban development. In 2017, the allocation had grown a significant 35.7% from 2016-17.  

Still, the highest rate of increase in expenditure allocation for the two urban ministries was recorded in 2014, when the UPA released its interim budget before the general elections of May 2014–the urban budget then rose 108.8% from Rs 11,831 crore to Rs 24,702 crore, and its share of the grand total rose from 0.7% to 1.4%. When the NDA came to power a few months later, they increased the allocation by 3% to Rs 25,548 crore.

How NDA’s flagship schemes are faring
Smart Cities Mission:
For the mission, the government has so far allotted Rs 16,604 crore, roughly a third of the promised outlay of Rs 48,000. Of this, Rs 3,560 crore has so far been utilised, 7% of the programme’s outlay, according to this Lok Sabha response by the ministry on January 1, 2019.
The mission is supposed to transform 100 cities into “smart cities” by 2022, through the application of information and communications technology to manage basic services such as water supply, sanitation, housing, waste management and mobility.

With a budget of Rs 48,000 crore, the Centre was to invest Rs 500 crore per city. The state governments had to put in a matching contribution through private investments in projects. The mission could be implemented either as a “pan-city” programme that incorporates information technology (IT) with the use of public infrastructure across the city, or as an “area-based development” which introduces IT infrastructure in a smaller portion of the city.

In terms of physical progress, the ministry has approved 5,151 projects worth Rs. 2.05 lakh crore for the selected 100 cities, according to this Lok Sabha response by the ministry on December 11, 2018. As of November 30, 2018, work on less than a third of these–or 1,675 projects–worth Rs. 51,866 crore (25% of the approved cost) is being done, the response further said. It is unclear how many of those projects have so far been completed.

The mission also came for criticism from the latest standing committee meeting on urban development held in July 2018. While the budget allocation over the last three years for the scheme has been over Rs 15,000 crore, “the revised expenditure is much lower at around Rs 10,094 crore with an even lower actual expenditure”, the committee observed in its report, adding it was “perplexed” about this.

“The committee observe numerous instances of one agency undoing the work of another agency and strongly feel that lack of coordination between implementing agencies is a major reason why the intended benefits are still not visible to public,” the committee said, adding that it had reservations about the mission causing “uneven development” in the areas surrounding smaller towns.

Of projects worth Rs 2.03 lakh crore, 21%–worth Rs 43,088 crore–are being carried out in convergence with other schemes, the ministry told the standing committee in its response.
 

Source: Lok Sabha, Press Information Bureau

AMRUT:
AMRUT, like its predecessor, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), aims to develop basic urban infrastructure. For five years upto 2019-20, and with a focus on water supply, sewerage, septage management and stormwater drains, the government has so far allotted 27% or Rs 13,447 crore of the Rs 50,000 crore central assistance promised to states. Of this, Rs 9,877 crore (19.88%) has so far been utilised, according to this Lok Sabha response by the ministry on January 1, 2019.

Upto July 2018, the ministry had approved State Annual Action Plans–proposed by states as plans for each year–under the programme to the size of Rs 77,640 crore for various infrastructure projects, it informed the standing committee. Of this, 50% of project funds have been allotted to water supply works, 42% to sewerage and septage management and the rest to other components included in the AMRUT scheme. As many of these works are capital-intensive long-term projects, they are expected to be completed in three years, the government said.

While real-time information on actual implementation of the scheme at the ground-level across India remains unavailable, here are some achievements made under the programme:

• In the water supply sector, contracts for 600 projects worth Rs 21,762 crore had been awarded as of July 2018, according to data presented by the ministry in its reply to the standing committee in July 2018, the latest and only data available in public. Of these, 42 projects, or 7%, worth Rs 112 crore (0.5% of awarded contracts’ worth) had been completed.
• In the sewerage and septage management sector, contracts for 318 projects worth Rs 15,058 crore had been awarded, and four projects (1.3%) worth Rs 12 crore (0.07% of approved spending) had been completed as of July 2018.
• In the storm water drainage sector, contracts for 71 projects worth Rs 1,139 crore had been awarded and 11 projects (15%) worth Rs 4 crore (0.3%) have been completed, the ministry said.

Source: Lok Sabha, Press Information Bureau

PMAY (U): Of the Rs 1 lakh crore worth of central assistance sanctioned so far for constructing homes under the PMAY scheme, which is an amalgamation of previous housing schemes, about a third of funds, or Rs 33,652 crore, have been allocated and 20% or Rs 20,892 crore actually utilised, according to the Lok Sabha response from January 1, 2019.

Of a targeted 12 million houses to be constructed under the PMAY urban scheme, as of December 10, 2018, 6.8 million or 56% had been sanctioned for construction, according to this press release. Of these, 3.5 million or 29% of the target had been grounded for construction and 1.2 million houses (10%) had been completed, the ministry said. In the next three financial years, to meet its target of 12 million houses by 2022, the government will have to finish construction on roughly 9,813 houses across India every day.
 

Source: Lok Sabha, Press Information Bureau

Data on the government’s actual progress of its urban schemes remain inconsistent, making it difficult to assess their progress, experts who we spoke to pointed out. This is especially so for centrally-sponsored schemes such as Smart Cities, and AMRUT, where states are expected to meet some part of the cost and maintain records of implementation. “It is difficult to gauge what exactly is happening at the implementation-level of the programmes. We can’t rely on any of the figures,” Nilanchala Acharya, research coordinator at the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), a Delhi-based think-tank, told IndiaSpend.

Experts also complained about the lack of clarity and accountability. “There is absolutely no transparency in the way these schemes are functioning. It is obvious there are overlaps and no clear accountability for various works under different schemes,” T R Raghunandan, advisor to Accountability Initiative of the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think-tank, told IndiaSpend.

What the urban sector needs right now
The upcoming budget is likely to increase its spending on urban India, experts said, but will probably focus more on highly publicised projects that mainly serve the middle and upper classes. “It is likely that the government will allot over Rs 51,000 crore for the urban sector–in absolute figures, this is high but when you adjust it for inflation, it is not that much of an increase,” Acharya said. He added there is likely to be more funding for water supply projects, and the Smart Cities Mission this election year as it has quicker, tangible output compared to other schemes.
But the budget for urbanisation needs to focus more spending on the social sector. “Current schemes are directed towards serving 20-30% of the urban population who comprise the city’s elite–we need to focus on urban healthcare, livelihoods, affordable public transport, public housing, community centres and parks to improve the all-round quality of life,” Acharya said.  

Experts also welcome more investment in the rural sector as it may help stall the burgeoning pressure on cities. “People come to cities in search of jobs, it is necessary to try and ease the distress migration by focusing on these rural linkages,” Acharya said.  
Raghunandan believes that while the government needs to focus more on urban development, it has to do this by empowering local urban governments. “Obviously a lot more money needs to be pumped into the urban sector but we need decentralisation of power for the money to be actually used,” he said.

While the UPA’s JNNURM programme intended (but eventually failed) to offer states monetary incentives to bring in reforms aimed at strengthening participatory governance, the new flagship schemes, run by special purpose vehicles (SPVs), discourage the decentralisation of power to urban local bodies and citizens altogether, Raghunandan said.

“Citizens have no say in how they want their city to develop,” he said. “We can’t have smart cities without streamlining processes and fixing accountability.”

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Paddy farmer Nanasaheb Armo (58) of Ghatbarra village in northern Chhattisgarh amid the remains (left) of what was once the Hasdeo Arand forest, which was used for generations by his Gond tribe and a part of which is now an open-cast coal mine. The village, in mineral-rich Sarguja district, is the first in India to have its community forests rights revoked, within two years of being granted. The same forest (right) before mining rights to 1,898 hectares were granted to a Rajasthan state power utility, on behalf of whom an Adani company now mines coal.

Thousands of trees were chopped and strewn across land larger than a football field. The silence was punctured only by the noisy beeping of a hydraulic mining shovel, at work in a nearby open-cast mine. Armo and his Gond tribal community knew this forest to be theirs for generations– and to which they were given official titles five years ago.

But their subsequent dispossession and anger is a story that explains how mineral-rich forest land in tribal areas is being taken back by the state of Chhattisgarh. With 31% of its population tribal–more than any other large Indian state–the unrest now threatens the re-election prospects for a three-term Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

In the first phase of its assembly elections on November 12, 2018, Chhattisgarh witnessed a 70% voter turnout in tribal areas. If the second phase registers a similar higher-than-normal turnout on November 20, 2018, it could reflect the discontent over the slow progress of individual tribal land claims–more than half of which have been rejected–and the particular struggle for community claims in the mineral-rich north.

“I heard in Delhi, the government planned to cut 1,700 trees, and the Supreme Court stopped them,” said Armo. “Do they even know what is going on here?” Next to him, Janandhan Singh Purte (38) joined in the conversation. “These trees have existed before us,” he said. “They gave us everything we needed. Now our grandchildren, their children and the generations after them will never know what it is like to grow under their shade.”

The Gonds are one of Asia’s largest tribal groups, varied in their livelihoods, from hunter-gatherers to regular, modern occupations. Here in Sarjuga district’s Ghatbarra village in the north of India’s most tribal state, they live almost exclusively in rural areas, which are home to 98% of Chhattisgarh’s tribal people, or Adivasis.

It was in recognition of this close-to-the-forests-and-land existence that Adivasis were to be given land rights over the forests that make up 44% of the state’s area. In 2006, Parliament recognised “historic injustice” in denying traditional rights over forest resources to forest dwellers nationwide and passed the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, or FRA in short. In 2013, five years after they applied, the Gonds of Ghatbarra were granted their claims.  

Two years later, that claim was revoked.   

How a land title is revoked
In 2014, the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RVUNL), a Rajasthan state-owned power utility, contested the legitimacy of Ghatbarra’s rights, on the grounds that the government had already granted it mining rights for the same area in 2011. That was when the ministry of environment & forests (MoEF) cleared the handover of 1,898 hectares–63 times the size of New Delhi’s Connaught Place business district–of forest land. Adani Mining Private Limited, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Limited, one of India’s largest conglomerates, controlled by one of its richest men, Gautam Adani, runs the mining operations for RVUNL.

The revocation of Ghatbarra’s community rights to its forest in 2015 was the first such move in India. The Chhattisgarh government argued that villagers were misusing the rights to obstruct mining work around the area. The MoEF revalidated RVUNL’s clearance in 2015, claiming due process was followed: Public hearings, and approvals from the gram sabha, or local government, under the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act (PESA), 1996, and environmental clearances under the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006.

Residents of Ghatbarra, like their neighbours in the villages of Salhi, Hariharpur, Basan, Parsa, Kante, Fatehpur, and Saidan, assert that the forest has been their home for generations. Only Ghatbarra received community forest rights and its people pointed out that the FRA recognises rights of all forest dwellers residing in the area up to the day before the Act came into being — 31 December, 2007. They denied ever approving the company’s mining plans at any of the public hearings held in 2009, or recently in 2016 for its expansion plans.
“We have never attended any hearings–the minutes of these meetings are fabricated,” alleged Ram Lal (35) of Salhi village. “The recent 2016 hearing was managed. They invited a few people from each village, bribed them with drinks and money and asked them to sign a paper.”

On November 16, 2018, IndiaSpend reached out to Adani Enterprises for their comments on the Ghatbarra case and the allegations put forward by villagers. On November 19, 2018, the company responded saying they are working on a response and that they will share the same once they are ready. We will update the story when we receive the company’s statement.

Saransh Mittar, the Sarguja district collector, who is responsible for all local administration, said he was new to the area. “Right now, the elections are taking up most of our time, so I haven’t actually visited the area or got to know the minor details yet,” Mittar told IndiaSpend.
While the Ghatbarra villagers’ case over community forest rights is pending in the Chhattisgarh High Court, the environment ministry issued a new environmental clearance to RVUNL on August 10, 2018, to expand mining operations, from 10 million tonnes annually to 15 million tonnes. Over a fortnight later, human rights lawyer and social activist Sudha Bharadwaj, who was working on the villagers’ case, was arrested by the Pune Police on charges of having links with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

“We have all been arrested at some point in the last few years,” said Balsaiku Ram (48), a member of the Salhi Block Development Council, the local government council of a village near Ghatbarra. “Whenever we try to protest, hold the company accountable for what has been promised, they use the law to silence us.”

The BJP’s sliding popularity in tribal Chhattisgarh
Carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2001, Chhattisgarh is slightly larger than Greece with a population comparable to Australia. About 44% of its land is forested, under which lie some of India’s richest mineral deposits: Coal, iron ore, dolomite, bauxite, limestone, quartzite and tin.

These forests are concentrated in tribal lands, where 7.8 million Adivasis live. Barely 2% of Chhattisgarh adivasis live in urban areas. The tension roiling their lands is reflected in the BJP’s dwindling popularity among the state’s tribal peoples.

During state elections in 2013, the BJP won 11 of 29 seats reserved for scheduled tribes (STs), eight fewer than in 2008 when it won 19 (of 90 in the state assembly). Among seven constituencies with a tribal population of more than 70%, the BJP won just one seat in 2013, compared to five in 2008.

With farm distress evident across Chhattisgarh, as IndiaSpend reported on November 16, 2018, and pre-election surveys predicting a close contest, the constituencies reserved for tribals could prove to be electorally important.

As Raman Singh, the BJP’s longest-serving chief minister, now seeks his fourth term, the simmering frustration over land rights among his state’s indigenous peoples could impede his political future.

As literacy grows–the state’s literacy rate among scheduled tribes went up from 52.1% to 59.1% between 2001 and 2011–and awareness spreads about the FRA, so does discontent.

Village conversations: From cattle grazing to forest rights

Villagers of Hariharpur and Salhi, in Sarguja district, northern Chhattisgarh, are still waiting for community forest rights, under the Forests Rights Act of 2007. Along with neighbouring Ghatbarra, these are the three villages most affected by the open-cast coal mine run by Adani Mining Pvt. Ltd.

Off the dusty, rugged Ambikapur-Raipur highway, under-construction since 2016, past rolling fields of rice, vegetable patches and thatched-roof houses decorated with vines of yellow cat’s claw flowers growing wildly over wooden fences, villagers gathered in the courtyard of farmer Meghnad Marabi (65)’s home.

“Years ago, when I was a boy, we used to meet once a week and discuss village matters about who will take the cattle grazing, who will collect forest produce, who will till the land,” said Marabi of the Gond tribe. Dressed in a cream vest and white dhoti, with a long necklace of red beads, the village elder sported a thick, white mustache and white spots painted on his forehead, wrist and arm. “Every day, all we discuss is vanadhikar (forest rights) and pattas (titles).”  

Since the FRA came into force on December 31, 2007, India has distributed about 1.87 million titles over 14 million acres–equivalent to the size of Himachal Pradesh–of forest land nationwide, according to May 2018 union tribal affairs ministry data.  

After Maharashtra and Odisha, Chhattisgarh ranks third in number of land titles distributed. But parsing the data revealed that 53% of these claims are either rejected or still under process.

Of 887,665 title claims, Chhattisgarh’s government has issued 416,359 titles across 2.7 million acres, which is 7.8% of the state’s area or 18% of its forest area, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of title data.

“We estimate that nearly half the tribal population has not even demanded their rights yet,” said Alok Shukla, convener of the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan (CBA), a broad nine-year-old coalition of 22 civil rights groups. “Approximately 1.5 million individual rights should have been claimed, titled and distributed, so the implementation rate of a state with (India’s) largest forest cover and highest concentration of tribals is much poorer (than others).”.

Further, 95.6% of titles distributed relate to individual forest rights (398,181). Community forest rights–central to the agency of Adivasi tribes as they recognise the authority of the gram sabha (village council) and responsibility to protect, manage and conserve its customary forests–account for the rest 4.4% or 18,178 of 416,359 titles distributed.  

“It is not that adivasis in this area do not have community forest rights,” said chief conservator of forests for Bastar division, Nitin Nonhari. “Across the state, all traditional forest dwellers are given rights through the joint forest management (JFM) committees. Everyone above the age of 18, regardless of social group, can be a member. Through the JFM, villagers are empowered to collect and monetise minor forest produce, so it is the same as granting community forest rights.”

But JFM committees are controlled by the forest department with no rights to indigenous people, the charity Oxfam said in a 2016 report assessing the implementation of forest rights in India. “FRA supersedes JFM, or similar arrangements, by vesting management rights and empowering the gram sabha to govern all CFR areas,” the report said.

Our analysis of district-level data showed that fewer claims were rejected in the southern districts that report Maoist influence and violence: Bastar, Dantewada, Sukma, Bijapur and Narayanpur. In the North, where mining operations are widespread, districts such as Sarguja and Korba–called the power capital of India, home to 14 thermal power plants and accounts for 17.3% of India’s coal production–reported the most rejections.

The northern district of Bilaspur, home to SECL’s headquarters, vast coal deposits and fertile lands–it is regarded as Chhattisgarh’s rice bowl–reported the highest rejection rate at 74%.

Source: Chhattisgarh State Forest Department
Data as of December 2017

“We don’t know what is the exact situation in most of south Chhattisgarh because it is difficult for NGOs to reach the people in the on-going war with insurgents,” said the CBA’s Shukla. “If we try to work with the people and hold the government accountable, we are accused of having Maoist-links.”

“The conflict for resources by private interests has not reached the south because of the ongoing war,” said lawyer Shalini Gera, who specialises in land conflict. “Where there is a conflict, we have found the government is more likely to reject claims.” Gera, currently with land rights NGO Maati, based in Kanker district, closer to central Chhattisgarh, was the co-founder of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group in Jagdalpur, Bastar, in the south. It offered free legal aid to poor tribals embroiled in legal cases with the police, companies or government organisations. In 2016, the group was forced out of the area by local police.

As we moved to the north, the issues changed, but the hostility to the government remained.

In the industrial north, short-changed on land titles

The Paharikorwas, a particularly vulnerable tribal group, of Govindpur village in Sarguja district, northern Chhattisgarh. Barely a quarter of 222 households in the village, have received titles–and to less land than they said is due to them.

Among Adivasis who received individual forest rights, for lands officially recorded as forests but actually occupied for habitation or cultivation, several villagers told IndiaSpend that the titles granted covered a much smaller patch of land than their claims.

For example, in Sarguja, Mangal Sai (38) of Hariharpur village received a fourth of the claim–two of 8 acres–he inherited from his father’s forest rights. About 10 km away in the neighbouring village of Ghatbarra, Rupan Singh Verma (45) and Srinath Markham (31) received titles for 1.5 and 0.86 acres, respectively, instead of 5 acres. “Most of us have got barely 0.5-2 acres, and nobody in the area has received more than 3 acres,” said Verma.

About two-and-a-half hours north of Ghatbarra, past rolling paddy plantations, rugged roads lead to Govindpur village, where 92 of 222 households of the Paharikorwa tribe, a particularly backward tribal group, applied for forest titles in 2013 under the FRA, so they could protect themselves against land grabs by other tribal groups in the area.

So far, 60 families, or a quarter of Govindpur’s households, have received titles: 15 have received titles for more than 1 hectare (2.47 acres), according to NGO Chaupal Gramin Vikas Prashikshan Evam Shodh Sansthan (Rural Development Training and Research Institute), or Chaupal in short, based in Ambikapur city, Sarguja district. The NGO used satellite imagery to help villagers frame applications to claim titles that matched their land use.

“As in several other areas, the Paharikorwas of Govindpur were unaware of how to apply for  rights over the land under the new law, until they saw their land getting encroached on,” said Chaupal president and adivasi rights activist Gangaram Paikra. “We found that in many cases, forest titles are bestowed haphazardly. Who gets how much land is a lottery, there is no logic behind why one family got more than the other.”

Shukla of the CBA said they found cases where titles were given to land covered by ponds and several titles issued for the same plot of land.

Such inefficiency has sparked protest. On August 23, 2018, 32 Adivasi villages of Sarguja went on a 11-day hunger strike to protest the slow implementation of the FRA. For the first 10 days, the government said nothing.

“When the strike started to make headlines, the district magistrate visited the protest site and threatened to arrest us,” said Paikra, one of the chief protest organisers. “When he saw the villagers would not budge, he requested we wait to speak to the new collector. We’ve been waiting to hear from them since we first applied (for forest rights) in 2012.”

Still, protestors of the 32 villages asked the new collector–Saransh Mittar, quoted previously as saying he was “new to the area”–for a solution.

“He appealed we wait till the state elections are over,” said Paikra. “So now, we are waiting.”

In the south, they get land titles without asking
Recently, in 2015, villagers of Madanagar village in Pratappur, Surajpur, a northern district bordering Madhya Pradesh, installed an 11-ft high, 6-ft wide, green metal board with sections of the Constitution and laws relating to local panchayat rights and Adivasi rights. This is a local variation of what is called the pathalgaddi (stone order) movement, a silent protest that began in Jharkhand in 2013 and has since spread to the nearby northern borders of Chhattisgarh.

“The RSS-BJP try to dismiss pathalgaddi, calling it a communal conspiracy by Christian missionaries to convert Adivasis,” said Phulgence Xalxo (26), leader of the protests against the mining operations of South Eastern Coalfields (SECL), a subsidiary of state-owned mining giant Coal India Ltd. “But this is not about religion. We just want our rights.”

Madanagar has not received any community forest rights, and has little hope of receiving community rights since mining began in 2006, a year before the FRA came into force on December 31, 2007.

Sections of the Constitution, the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, painted on a green board and erected near villages in Surajpur district, northern Chhattisgarh. Villagers are yet to receive individual or community forest rights.

Down south in the tribal-dominated districts of Dantewada and Bastar–a verdant region rich with flora, fauna, waterfalls and over 100,000 police and paramilitary forces battling Maoists–several Adivasis we met revealed they had received land titles in 2012, a year before the previous state assembly elections.

They had never applied for these titles.

“Adivasis here are uneducated and illiterate, so while mapping the area, we carried out the work ourselves, taking into account the encroachment and land-use patterns,” R R Patel, range officer of the Bacheli forest division, Dantewada told IndiaSpend.

In the south, locals, who struggle to eke out a living, were not concerned with land titles. This is an area with low literacy–51-64% compared to 67-81% in the north or 77-83% in central Chhattisgarh. Health and development indicators are also worse: 15.9% of Bastar’s children under five are severely wasted (low weight to height), indicating they suffer from malnutrition, compared to 7.1% of Sarguja’s children, showed 2016 national health data, the latest available.

Now, with mining companies turning their attention to the south, those land titles, enthusiastically granted by the government, could be a hurdle.

“We are already coming across cases in Kanker where officials regret issuing land titles over areas now marked for mining,” said Gera of Maati, the land rights NGO. “Ghatbarra may be the first case, but it is likely not to be the only one.”

Devils in the details, and a flood of companies
The issue of land and forest rights is tricky because despite the wide ambit of the law, tribals must prove they have lived in the area for generations and prove they are indeed tribals–some are scheduled castes and other backward castes, groups that may qualify as “other traditional forest dwellers”. In some cases, officials allege land-grab attempts.
In Dantewada’s lush Bailadila mountain range–under which lies one of the world’s largest high-quality iron-ore deposits–not a single forest-land title has been distributed under the FRA law, forest officials told IndiaSpend.

“The soil is bad for plantations, the vegetation is shrubbery and nobody can use land anyway, so there is no meaning in giving away land titles for this area,” R Ratnam Patel, district forest officer, told IndiaSpend. He said a portion of the Bailadila range, rich in biodiversity, is marked as reserved forest area and kept out of the area reserved for mining.

Currently, the National Mining Development Corporation (NMDC), a public sector company, is the only company mining here. But as India privatises mining, others, such as Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, and Essar Steel Ltd, are entering the region. Critics said these mining rights clash with the FRA and the lives of indigenous people.

“The Forest Rights Act is meant to undo the historical injustices of the colonial era,” said former Congress union minister and former member of parliament Arvind Netam, a Gond tribal leader. “Yet, we find that even after 71 years of Independence, and more than a decade of the Act’s existence, we are still struggling with a despotic mindset as the government looks at these areas as its mini-fiefdom.”

A further marginalisation of tribals

Most households of Kudkel village in Sarguja district, northern Chhattisgarh, have yet to receive forest rights under a 2006 law. Without these rights, the villagers say, they cannot move beyond subsistence farming.

Poor implementation of the FRA further marginalises Adivasis, who are already among India’s poorest people, with five of 10 falling in the lowest wealth bracket, according to latest national data, as IndiaSpend reported on February 28, 2018. About 46% of adivasis were in the lowest wealth bracket, compared to 26.6% of scheduled castes and 18.3% of other backward castes.

“If we had the rights, we could at least start plantations and earn some money,” said Samturbai (45), a Gond resident of Kudkel village in the northern district of Sarguja. “Without the patta (title distribution letter), anyone can come take our land any time. Already, some city folk have come to this area to survey the land.”  

In Hariharpur, Salhi and Ghatbarra, villages considered to be most affected by the Adani mines, villagers argued that the land they now had could not sustain them. RVUNL’s new environmental clearance says it must employ 1,805 persons (without specifying if they must be “project-affected persons”) and build local infrastructure. However, no more than two or three families from each of the three villages had jobs at the mines, according to local Adivasis.  

“We need jobs, we thought they were going to give us work in the mines,” said Sahi block development council member Balsaiku Ram. “All they have done is brought their own people from outside the area and made a few of our work as security guards and toilet cleaners.”
On the outskirts of the village, we passed rows of low-rise buildings with fresh paint. A few kilometres ahead, a bus stop with seats and roof built of high-grade stainless steel, sits amid tribal houses. Clouds of dust rise from the rough, unpaved road.

“Whatever they have built, they have built for their own employees,” said Janandhan Singh Porte of Ghatbarra. “They don’t care about us.”

The mining and employment contradiction
The discontent in Ghatbarra echoes a national contradiction in poor states that seek rapid economic growth and the inadequate employment that such growth provides. In most cases, the locals do not have the skills that companies driving such growth require.

In Chhattisgarh, the gross state domestic product (GSDP) grew 6.7% in 2017-18 over the previous year. Industry and manufacturing, of which mining forms a major portion, contributed most to GSDP, 48%, but it employs no more than 5% of the workforce. The sector is expected to grow by 5.8% in 2018-19. The services sector, which contributed to 35% of GSDP, is expected to grow by 9.5% and employs 30% of the state labour force.

Agriculture contributes to 17% of the GSDP, is expected to grow by 2.9% but employs nearly 80% of the population. Of 3.7 million farm households, 76% were from the small & marginal class, according to a 2015-16 state report.

While the number of agricultural land holdings operated on by Adivasis rose from 1,105 to 1,243 statewide over a decade to 2016, the cumulative size of these holdings declined 5%, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of agricultural census data, indicating growing fragmentation of land holdings.

Further, despite the concentration of mining operations in resource-rich forest areas where Adivasis are found in greater numbers, they are least employed nationwide in mining work (3,010), compared to SCs (5,830) and OBCs (14,760), according to 2013 government data, the latest available.

A
river runs through the Semersot Wildlife Sanctuary in Balrampur district, northern Chhattisgarh. The river bed was once visible only in the summer. Now, in November, the river runs dry, an indicator of changing local climate.

In Sarguja, as in the other districts we journeyed through, locals said the lack of livelihood was compounded by changing climatic patterns–possibly linked to growing industrialisation–dying forests and a dwindling of what is called “minor” forest produce: Mahua flowers, fruits, tendu leaves, gum from the trees.

Usually, the monsoons arrive in Chhattisgarh in early June. In 2018, it came two months later, as July was ending. “Our whole field dried out, we barely got enough to survive,” said Phuleshwari (35), of Sarguja’s Govindpur village. “The forest is (also) dying. Earlier we used to earn at least Rs 10,000-12,000 from selling vanopach (minor forest produce). Now, we barely manage Rs 3,000-Rs 4,000.”

About 150 km to the northeast, in Balrampur district’s Sargawa village, every household (about 100) had a cow shelter with at least seven to eight cows. “Now barely two-three households in the village can afford to keep cows,” said Kesur Kausaliya, a 36-year-old farmer who cultivates paddy, and vegetables for subsistence and works as a labourer when food stocks run out. “There is little left for them to graze on, and they are too expensive to keep.”

Adivasis recognise their contribution in Chhattisgarh’s declining forest cover, which fell 12% over two years to 2017, according to this 2017 Forest Survey of India report.

“We also cut trees for forest produce, we know it,” said Phuleswari. “But the rate at which we did this, and the rate at which it is being carried out now, is far more than the damage we could do in decades.”

In hushed voices of disbelief, villagers said recent deforestation has not spared the sacred mahua (Madhuca longifolia) tree, a kalpavriksha or wish-giving tree, which nourished the first humans in Adivasi folklore. Used in most religious ceremonies, the mahua tree is never cut by Adivasis.

“Recently, for Dussehra we had to go looking for the mahua flower for pooja,” said Srinath Markham of Ghatbarra. ”Earlier we used to get it within a few minutes walk from the village.”  

“They are cutting so many trees, don’t they hear the earth crying?” asked 65-year-old Meghnad Marabi. As he spoke, the earth shook several times that day from explosions at the nearby mines. The bamboo thatched roofs with clay tiles rattled, and locals pointed to a crack in the cement and brick walls.

“We have earthquakes here every day,” Janandhan Singh Porte said, grinning. “We understand what this is, but the animals don’t know what is happening. Earlier we used to see deer, jungle cats and bears. Now, even the elephants have changed their path.”

And so to the elections that will solve nothing

A child of the Gond tribe outside her home in Badrimau village, in Maoist-affected Bastar district, southern Chhattisgarh. Many villagers received forest titles without applying, but in the absence of government services and development, land titles and elections mean nothing, locals say.

With so much change and unrest, most villagers we spoke to appeared bewildered about questions about the elections.

“Nobody cares,” said Chamru Budu (45) of Nerli village in Bacheli, in the southern district of Dantewada. Moments after our conversation on November 8, 2018, less than 5 km away, Maoists bombed a bus, killing four civilians and one paramilitary soldier. Later that day, a few residents in nearby Bhasi village said they would support the BJP. “Maybe they will bring us development, improve the lives of the poor,” said Naturam Telang (24) with a shrug.

With little to no development under the BJP for 15 years, locals near the Kanger Valley National Park in Dhurwa, in neighbouring Bastar district, pledged support for the CPI (Marxist). The densely forested area–notorious for the Jeeram Ghati Naxal attack of 2013 that killed more than 25 senior state Congress leaders–is riddled with land mines and no signs of the government.

“Neither the BJP nor Congress have bothered to come visit us for years now,” said Sanna Muchaki (27). “We are still waiting for a water hand pump. This village will only vote for the CPI (M)–only if they are given a chance, will we get our rights.”

In Sarguja and Surajpur districts, where villagers are alert to the land-mining conflict at their doorstep, most Adivasis we met appeared determined to vote the BJP out of power, regardless of the alternative.

“BJP ka bahut ho gaya (enough of the BJP),” said BDC member Balsaiku Ram of Salhi in Sarguja district.

Yet, despite a palpable anti-incumbency sentiment, some are sceptical of a BJP loss.

Bhisheshwar Singh, a social activist of the Kawar tribe, referred to the government’s public distribution system, which offers 25-35 kg of subsidised foodgrain, a frequently cited success story (here and here). “My people are poor and uneducated,” said Singh. “We want our rights but how can we fight when our stomachs are empty?” Now, with more getting educated, we are urging them to demand their rights, ask more from the candidates, not be bribed by the murga (chicken) and mahua (alcohol) offered during elections.”

The BJP made no direct promise of implementing the FRA in its election manifestos of 2008, 2013 or 2018. The Congress, after enacting the FRA in 2006, only made mention of the Act in its 2018 manifesto, saying, “The Forest Rights Act will be completely implemented. As per the Act, STs, SCs, OBCs and general class will be given individual rights over natural resources, and gram sabhas will be given collective rights. The PESA Act will be fully implemented in tribal-dominated areas.” Like the BJP, the Congress also offers monetary incentives for forest produce.

Back in Ghatbarra, Gond farmer Armo said neither the BJP nor the Congress were concerned with Adivasi issues.

While the BJP government had revoked his village’s community forest rights, it was the Congress government in Delhi that had cleared mining in what were marked as “no-go” protected forest areas.

“Our leaders do not seem to understand the bond Adivasis have to their land, the trees, the earth,” he said. “We want development too. But give us our rights first. If you take away our land, our livelihoods, our future, what are you leaving us with?”

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post As India’s Poor, Tribal Heartland Votes Today, Widespread Unrest Over BJP Failure To Settle Land And Forest Claims appeared first on SabrangIndia.

This is because women legislators are likely to be less criminal and corrupt, more efficient, and less vulnerable to political opportunism or attempts by politicians (mostly male) to stay in power, said the May 2018 paper from the United Nation’s University, World Institute for Development Economics Research.

“While there is evidence that raising the share of women politicians has substantive impacts on the composition of government spending, there is scarcely any evidence of how it influences economic performance…,” said the paper’s authors. They said their study was the “first systematic examination of whether women politicians are good for economic growth”.

The researchers examined election data for 4,265 state assembly constituencies between 1992 and 2012, which spans four elections in most states, a period of “strong economic growth”, during which share of state legislative assembly seats won by women increased from about 4.5% to close to 8%.

To isolate the causal influence of a leader’s gender on economic growth, the study focused on constituencies where women beat male MLAs by a small margin and those where men won against women MLAs by a similarly narrow margin.

Women light the way
To assess the economic impact of electing women MLAs, the researchers superimposed state-level election data on NASA satellite images to track the annual average “luminosity growth”, or the spread of electrification over an electoral term, a proxy for economic growth.

In constituencies run by women, this growth was 15.25 percentage points higher than those run by men, which translated to a 1.85-percentage-point rise in the gross domestic product (GDP) growth compared to constituencies that voted for men.

“Given that average growth in India during the period of study was about 7% per year, our estimates indicate that the growth premium for constituencies stemming from their having a female legislator is about 25%,” the paper said.

The economic progress witnessed in women-led constituencies does not come at the cost of lower growth in neighbouring male-led constituencies, the study found. To find out why, the researchers explored gender differences related to corruption, efficiency (completion of federally funded road infrastructure projects) and motivation–factors linked to growth in developing countries.

Men go to the dark side
Analysing the affidavits of elected MLAs, the study found that while, overall, men are twice as likely to have criminal charges pending against them, in closely-fought elections, this was significantly higher for elected male MLAs compared to women.

Women MLAs were also, on average, also younger.

While the study found about 10% of women legislators had pending charges, this was about 32% for men. An analysis of female and male MLAs accused of crime revealed that women legislators had significantly fewer charges than men.

“We estimate that this can explain about one-quarter of the difference in growth between male- and female-led constituencies,” the researchers wrote.

To support their findings, the paper ran quantitative research experiments, used in another 2014 study, to measure gender difference in corruption while holding office, as understood through an MLA’s net accumulation of assets and wealth during an elected term. These data become available when MLAs file affidavits before contesting the next election.  

The study found the annual rate at which women MLAs accumulate assets while in office is 10 percentage points lower than it is for men.

“These findings align with experimental evidence that women are more fair, more risk-averse, and less likely to engage in criminal and other risky behaviour than are men,” the researchers concluded, citing other studies from 2001, 2008 and 2010. “It establishes corruption as a likely contributor to the economic advantage of women legislators,” they wrote.

Women more effective at delivering infrastructure for growth
To assess the gender difference in efficiency of elected legislative members, the paper analysed the growth of road networks.

While male and female politicians are both likely to attract federally funded road building projects in their constituencies, women MLAs are more likely to oversee completion, the study’s data showed.

The share of incomplete road projects in constituencies run by women was 22 percentage points lower than those run by men.

The study did not find any significant difference in the size or cost of projects undertaken, suggesting women are more effective at completing projects, and, hence, infrastructure for growth.

“More clearly, since road construction in India has been shown to produce higher returns in terms of job mobility for men than for women, our findings establish that women are not only good at serving the interests of women,” the researchers wrote.

Women MLAs more motivated, men more opportunistic
To analyse the gender differences in legislators’ motivations to perform in their constituencies, the study divided the sample into “swing”–where the victory margin was less than 5% in two consecutive elections–and “core” constituencies. Consecutive closely fought elections involve greater competition with electoral incentives for MLAs to work harder, they found.

In swing constituencies, growth did not depend on the legislator’s gender, or the difference in performance between women and men legislators was insignificant.

However, in the analysis of non-swing or core constituencies, the study found that constituencies run by women have significantly higher growth rates than those led by men.

“One explanation of this is that women legislators are less opportunistic and exhibit higher intrinsic motivation,” the researchers wrote.

9% of MLAs in India are women
Currently, of 4,118 MLAs across India–where 48.5% of the population is female–only 9% are women, according to the 2018 Economic Survey of India.

Differences in preferences between men and women play a role in determining the better economic performance of women legislators, according to the study.

“We provide important new evidence at a time when women are increasingly participating in government across the globe,” the researchers wrote, drawing attention to the Women’s Reservation Bill of 2008, pending parliamentary approval for over a decade. The bill seeks to reserve a third of all seats for women in the Lok Sabha (Parliament’s lower house) and state legislative assemblies.

“The feminisation of politics is one of the most exciting political phenomena of our time,” the researchers wrote. “Yet, we do not know what it portends for growth, the rising tide that is thought to lift all boats.”

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post Better Roads, More Lights, Higher Economic Growth, Less Corrupt MLAs: Benefits Of Electing A Woman Revealed appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
If the Congress had lost all the elections it narrowly won at the district level between 1960 and 2000, India would have experienced 11% more Hindu-Muslim riots (1,114 instead of 998) and 46% more riot casualties (43,000 instead of 30,000), according to the study published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science in 2016, an abridged version of which has recently been published in Ideas for India, a platform for discussion on policy issues.
 
If the Congress had won all the local elections it had narrowly lost, riots would have reduced by 10% (or 103 fewer riots), the study said, adding that Congress MLAs exerted the same downward effect on the incidence of rioting whether or not the state chief minister was a Congressperson.
 
The findings of the study underscore the wisdom of electoral rules that encourage multi-ethnic parties to form and prosper, the study’s authors, Gareth Nellis, Steven Rosenzweig and Michael Weaver, suggested. Nellis is now the Evidence in Governance and Politics postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley; Rosenzweig is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University and Weaver is a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.
 
“It [the study] also suggests a need to insulate police from political pressures, and to increase levels of police professionalism, so that their decision to step in to quell attacks on minorities won’t be swayed by which political party happens to be in power at the time,” Weaver told IndiaSpend in an email interview.
 
Local-level leadership can curb communal riots
 
A number of researchers have suggested that secular nationalist parties, and especially those relying on minorities for electoral support, play an important role in consolidating democracy and maintaining peace between different ethnic and religious groups, Weaver told IndiaSpend, “[W]e wanted to put this theory to the test, using the case of India.”
 
Finding thin evidence to back claims that the avowedly secular Congress had used its position of dominance in the early post-Independence years to curb communal conflict, the authors observed that the bulk of research thus far had focussed on the role of the central government, even though maintaining law and order is the responsibility and charge of state governments.
 
With a newly compiled data-set from the Election Commission of India, and geocoded data on Hindu-Muslim riots recorded in the Varshney-Wilkinson dataset created by scholars Ashutosh Varshney and Steven Wilkinson, the authors of the Yale study carried out quantitative research experiments to assess how the election of Congress versus non-Congress MLAs had affected the probability of riots breaking out. They studied data from 315 districts for the period from 1962 to 2000. The Congress controlled the state governments for a full 58% of the state-years analysed.
 
The study focused on district-level MLA constituencies where a Congress candidate won or lost by a margin of 1%, contending that such election outcomes are as random as a coin-flip, dependent on unpredictable factors such as the weather on voting day. (In such places, the electorate would be equally distributed across party lines, so that the effect of the MLA’s role in curbing communal tensions would be most visible.)
 
For a deeper analysis, the study also split the study sample of districts into those under Congress state governments and those under other parties’ rule.
 
“Our findings show that MLAs have historically been able to make a difference in reducing riots,” Weaver said. “In today’s context, the results might suggest that if voters insist on action by the state to stop or prevent violence, politicians may do more.”
 
Acknowledging that the findings would surprise some political analysts, the researchers emphasised that the study does not address the impact of Congress incumbency on conflict stemming from other religious, caste, or economic cleavages, which may be governed by other factors.
 
They also noted that their work assessed the probabilistic outcome of Congress incumbency. “While Congress politicians have, at times, instigated Hindu-Muslim violence, our contribution is to show that this represents an aberration from the norm,” the researchers wrote. They added that the result is specifically true for state legislators. “[W]e cannot be sure whether an equivalent pattern holds for politicians at other tiers of government.”  
 
The findings withstand numerous checks for robustness, the researchers said, “making it, to our knowledge, the most watertight empirical finding yet uncovered about the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India”. The study calls for a reappraisal of Congress party’s post-independence legacy, “and, more speculatively, the promise of multiethnic parties in divided societies worldwide”.
 
Electoral incentives explain why Congress incumbents discourage communal violence
 
Reliance on Muslim votes and multi-ethnic electoral prospects are the likely reasons why Congress MLAs forestall communal violence in their constituencies, the study further found.
 
In constituencies with higher-than-average Muslim populations, the dampening effect of Congress incumbency was found to be stronger, or the likelihood of riots breaking out was lower, the study found. This gives evidence to claims that the Congress is heavily reliant on Muslim votes to win elections.
 
As the primary victims of communal violence, Muslim voters often care deeply about electing politicians who will protect them from attacks, the researchers observed. “To maintain the support of this key voting bloc, Congress politicians have needed to take strong action to quell Hindu-Muslim riots–mostly, we suspect, by instructing the police to quickly put down disturbances before they escalate.”
 
The researchers did not separately look into areas with higher Hindu populations, they told IndiaSpend. “But given that districts with more Muslims would generally be expected to have fewer Hindus, we would expect to see that Congress did less to prevent riots in areas with larger Hindu populations,” Weaver told IndiaSpend.
 
Keeping all multi-ethnic groups happy is particularly important because the Muslim minority vote alone cannot win elections, the study surmised. Parties with a multi-ethnic voter base such as the Congress may also be motivated to forestall ethnic violence to avoid polarisation, which weakens their own electoral prospects while benefiting competitor parties that rely on ethnic votes.
 
How communal riots affect electoral outcomes in India
 
In the year preceding a state assembly election, the outbreak of each riot was linked to a 1.3-percentage-point decline in Congress vote share, on average. In contrast, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recorded a 0.8-percentage-point increase in their vote share, on average.
 
When interreligious trust declines, the Congress loses the support of some religious groups, notably the Hindus, the researchers wrote.
 
A study by Cambridge research scholars Sriya Iyer and Anand Shrivastava, who analysed the effect of Hindu-Muslim riots on state government elections in 16 Indian states between 1981 and 2001, echoed these findings.
 
If a riot occurred in the year preceding an election, it specifically led to a 5-7-percentage-point increase in the BJP’s vote share thereafter, according to Iyer and Shrivastava’s 2015 paper published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany.
 
“The most important implication of our work is that it provides a basis for the argument that the majority identity party has a clear incentive to incite ethnic tensions or even to cause riots,” Iyer and Shrivastava said, adding, “Recent events in India have shown that this was used as a strategy in western Uttar Pradesh.”
 
Emphasising that their research had focused on the effects on electoral results of exogenously caused riots (as opposed to politically engineered ones), Iyer and Shrivastava said the results showed that a party that systematically benefits from riots may have a clear incentive to cause riots for electoral benefit.
 
The Yale researchers also studied the possibility that Congress politicians incited riots after losing close elections. Their analysis of data found this to be “implausible” as riots reduced the Congress’ vote share in subsequent elections, creating the possibility of a “feedback loop”.
 
“The outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence seems to cause Congress to lose votes and seats, which in turn leads to more riots, and so on in a downward spiral–one that could threaten democracy itself,” the researchers said. “Congress’ decades-long dominance may therefore have been pivotal in forestalling this possibility.”
 
The researchers also separately examined the effect of the Congress narrowly winning or losing only against parties that embrace a more multiethnic platform. “We were surprised to see that even in these cases, there were fewer riots when Congress won, and that the size of this effect was similar to that seen when Congress won against explicitly ethnic parties,” Weaver said. “This led us to conclude that Congress politicians had more specific incentives to prevent riots.”
 
This sheds new light on the puzzle of how democratic institutions have endured in India, the world’s largest democracy, against challenging odds, the study concluded, adding, “Democratic stability in divided societies depends not just on institutions or the nature of social cleavages, but on which parties citizens choose to vote into power.”
 
(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Across eight states–Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana–55% of Indians would prefer a political leader from their own caste and religion, found the study, ‘Politics And Society Between Elections 2018’, carried out by the Azim Premji University (APU) and Lokniti (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies [CSDS]) in 22 assembly constituencies with 16,680 respondents.
 
No more than 10% would actively choose a political leader from a different caste or religion (9%). A little more than a third of those surveyed said caste (35%) or religion (37%) of their political leader would not matter.
 
“There is a distrust of leaders from outside the community across all classes, and all caste-class intersections,” the study, accessed by IndiaSpend, said.
 
“The upper castes in general express the lowest trust in leaders from outside their own.”
 
Indians with higher education more willing to have leaders of different caste/religion
 
Caste and religious identity of a political candidate were less likely to make a difference to college-educated persons (47%) compared to non-literates (63%) and those educated up to the school-level (56%), across social groups, according to the study.
 
For example, while upper castes in general expressed the “lowest trust in leaders from outside their own”, according to the study, this was more so among non-literates (68%) compared to those with schooling (56%) and with college-level education (46%).
 
Among those educated at the college-level, adivasis or scheduled tribes (as they are constitutionally called), displayed a higher preference for a leader from their own social group (60%). This is six percentage-points lower–lowest among all social groups–than the preference expressed by non-literate adivasis (66%).

Source: Politics And Society Between Elections, 2018, by Azim Premji University and Lokniti (CSDS)
 
While college-educated Hindus and Muslims were less likely–by 14 and 15 percentage points, respectively–to want a leader from their religion, this preference did not change for Christians: 56% wanted a Christian leader regardless of their education.
 
College-educated Christians were the least-likely (3%) among all religious groups to prefer a leader from a different religion.

Source: Politics And Society Between Elections, 2018, by Azim Premji University and Lokniti (CSDS)
 
Caste and religion bias for political leaders highest in Madhya Pradesh, lowest in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
 
While 55% of all respondents expressed a bias for a political leader from the same caste and religion, these results varied between states.
 
More than two-thirds of those surveyed in Madhya Pradesh revealed a desire for a leader from the same caste (65%) and religion (64%)–highest among all states included in the study; states expressing the lowest such desire were Andhra Pradesh (43% for caste, 38% for religion), and Telangana (48% for caste, 46% for religion).
 
“This suggests some obvious homogeneity between these two contiguous states, only reinforced by the information that they constituted a single territorial entity till mid-2014,” the report said.
 
Jharkhand and Rajasthan had the most respondents (10%) who said they would actively choose a leader from a different caste or religion.

 
 
 
(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)
 

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Across urban (47%) and rural (40%) areas, young girls reported feeling more susceptible to molestation or abuse while using public transport, said the report, Wings 2018: World Of India’s Girls, released by Save The Children in India, an international non-governmental organisation. This finding was particularly true for girls from higher income groups (53%), belonging to the other backward classes (OBC) and general castes (45%), according to the study
 
Girls from medium and small towns (51%) reported feeling more unsafe than those in large cities (44%), small villages (42%) and large villages (39%).
 
“A possible reason [for greater fear among adolescent girls of higher income groups] could be that these girls lead a more cocooned life without the required level of resilience and therefore feel relatively more threatened,” the study said.
 
India is considered to be the least safe country in the world for women with the worst record for sexual violence, harassment from cultural and traditional practices, and human trafficking, according to a global perception poll carried out by Thomson Reuters Foundation, IndiaSpend reported on June 26, 2018. A failure to improve conditions led to the country now ranking the most dangerous for women, after it ranked fourth in the previous poll of 2011.
 
Conducted across six states–Assam, Delhi-National Capital Region, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana and West Bengal–the adolescent girls’ perception report covers the east, west, north, south, central and north-east of India, surveying across 30 cities and 84 villages in 12 districts. The sample included 3,128 adolescent girls, 1,141 young men (aged 15-18), 248 young women (aged 19-22) forced to marry early, and 842 parents of adolescent girls.
 
Within their respective regions, the selected states performed worst on child sex ratio; incidence of crime against women; early marriage; spousal violence against women; and working women, the report said.
 
After public transportation, narrow roads leading to school, local markets or private tuition were regarded as most unsafe. Young women belonging to scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) from lower income households found these areas particularly unsafe.
 
Over a quarter of young women from large cities (28%), especially those from low income groups and slums, said they felt unsafe in cinema halls, the study found.
 
“A plausible explanation for this could be that these girls from the slums or the economically weaker section fear that their complaints may go unheard in a place occupied by the relatively better placed–class wise and caste wise,” the study observed. “Maybe for similar reasons, SC and ST girls find the school and the road to the school more unsafe compared to general caste and OBC girls.”
 
Girls least likely to report molestation/abuse to police or teachers
 
In urban and rural areas, girls reported feeling most comfortable confiding in their mother, father, close friends and peers, if subjected to molestation or abuse in public. They were less likely to confide in siblings and other relatives and least likely to approach teachers, other school staff and the local police.
 
“Besides, adolescent girls, their parents and brothers felt that finally it is the ‘name’ of the family and the girl which will be negatively affected–providing an iteration of ‘family honour’ that accompanies girls and women,” the report observed, describing a “trust deficit” with policing and judicial systems.
 
“Most of them were against going to the police because they (the police) were considered insensitive. It is also perceived that the process involves lot of time and resources and, in the end, damages the reputation of the girl.”
 
Girls avoided confiding in families because they feared restrictions on leaving home; this was more in urban (49%) than rural (36%) areas.
 
The second-most reported reason for not confiding in their families was fear of retribution, the report found; 44% of urban adolescent girls and 38% rural girls felt they would be scolded for “letting” themselves be harrassed.

 
 
Over 50% of parents agreed that they would “probably end up scolding their daughters” for “letting” sexual harassment occur, while 42% admitted they were likely to regulate their daughters’ movement in public spaces thereafter, the study found.
 
Less than half of India’s girls leave home to meet friends, take morning walks, play in parks
 
Generally, more urban than rural young girls and women used public spaces, the report said.
 
For urban and rural areas, “going to school” was the most universally accepted safe public space (96%) for girls, the study found. Attending private tuition–significantly higher for urban (54%) than rural (32%) residents–followed.
 
After public transportation, local markets, private tuitions or roads leading to school were regarded as most unsafe among young girls, as we said.
 
Less than half of adolescent girls in urban areas (41%) could go out to meet friends; in rural areas, no more than a third of girls (34%) could.
 
Among adolescent girls surveyed in urban areas, only a fifth or 20% felt they could safely play in a public park or go for a morning walk; no more than 15% of girls in rural areas felt similarly.

 
 
Young girls also perceived a higher risk of molestation and other gender-related crimes at crowded public places, such as local markets in urban (41%) and rural areas (37%).
 
Here too, young women from higher and middle-economic classes (42%), belonging to the OBC/general castes (40%), reported a higher perception of risk.
 
Despite the fear of narrow roads leading to schools, private tuitions and markets, over 80% of young girls preferred walking to these public areas than using public transport, the study found. Cycling also emerged as a popular choice among adolescent girls in small and medium towns, where traffic is lower and perception of risk in using public transport was highest, as we said.
 
“The sample selected was not representative of a pan-India picture but aimed to assist studying in depth the prevailing perceptions on the issue of safety of girls in public spaces, the related dynamics and implications,” the report said.
 
(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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This is just one among the 73 incidents of misuse of the Unique Identity Authority of India’s (UIDAI) Aadhaar programme that have been reported in the English-language media so far this year (up to May 7, 2018). This averages nearly four incidents each week, as per a new database created by independent researchers Anmol Somanchi and Vipul Paikra.
 
Of these, 52 cases involved fake or forged Aadhaar numbers–coming up with entirely new Aadhaar enrolment based on fake details, or forging existing cards by replacing certain details like photographs–and 21 involved Aadhaar-related banking frauds.
 
In the six years since the launch of the Aadhaar programme in September 2011, 164 cases of forged or fake Aadhaar numbers and Aadhaar-related banking frauds have been reported in the English-language media, the database noted. These include 123 cases of fake or forged Aadhaar numbers or cards and 41 cases of Aadhaar-related banking fraud.
 
“This database does not include the whole gamut of reported incidents of Aadhaar-related fraud and forgery,” Somanchi told IndiaSpend. “We had initially included Hindi reports and found more such incidents. However, since we couldn’t include all other regional languages we restricted the database to English news reports.”
 
Several attempts to reach out to the UIDAI for comment on the findings of the database met with no response. On April 30, 2018, IndiaSpend reached out to the office of the chief executive officer of UIDAI via email. On May 2, 2018, we reached out again and were told by the communications team that UIDAI would get back to us. On May 3, 2018, IndiaSpend reached out a third time, telephonically. On May 8, 2018, we sent out a third email.
 
The story will be updated with the Authority’s response when we receive one.
 
Lack of clarity
 
“The ambiguity around Aadhaar has led to an increasing number of cases where citizens are swindled of their money,” Somanchi said. “India is still grappling with limited financial, technological literacy–people aren’t sure of what they should or should not share and the authorities have failed to provide that clarity.”
 
The government has been speaking “with a forked tongue” in this regard, Somanchi said, adding, “On one hand they insist the uniqueness of the Aadhaar number prevents duplicity and is an in-built layer of security–on the other hand they advise caution on sharing of Aadhaar details. So what should citizens believe?”
 
As of April 2018, more than 1.2 billion Indians–99.7% of the population–had enrolled under the programme. The Aadhaar database, which the government is keen to integrate with policy, regulation and benefits-transfer programmes, includes fingerprints, iris scans and demographic details of every enrolled individual. From July 1, 2018, the system will also include facial recognition features for identity authentication.
 

Source: Unique Identity Authority of India; Somanchi & Paikra’s database of media reports on Aadhaar-related forgery, counterfeit and fraud
Note: *Data as of May 2018
 
1/3rd cases involve multiple UID numbers
 
Among cases of fake or forged Aadhaar numbers or cards, 52 of the 123 reported incidents (42%) involved forgery of only Aadhaar details, according to the database.
 
In at least 38 cases (31%), other documents such as permanent account number–a unique 10-digit alphanumeric identity allotted to taxpayers by the income tax department–driver’s license and voter identity card were also forged or faked, the database showed.
 
In a recent case of forgery reported from Mumbai, 40 bank accounts had been opened using forged documents including Aadhaar, as noted in the Hindustan Times report of March 31, 2018, that is included in the database. The accused–who had acquired eye and finger scanners to produce fake Aadhaar numbers–would charge Rs 2,000 to make a fake Aadhaar card, Rs 800 to 1,000 for a fake PAN card, Rs 10,000 for a fake driver’s license and Rs 1,000 for a fake voter identity card, the report said.
 
Information on how many documents were forged was unavailable for 33 or 27% of cases, the database noted.
 
More than a third (43) of the fake or forged Aadhaar card/number cases involved forgery of multiple Aadhaar numbers, which researcher Somanchi has described in the database as an “Aadhaar racket”. These include five cases where Aadhaar numbers have been counterfeited to misuse the public distribution system (PDS), under which subsidised foodgrain and non-food items are provided to underprivileged citizens across the country.
 
In Bengaluru, for instance, the Karnataka state food and civil supplies department had discovered large-scale use of fake Aadhaar numbers linked to bogus below-poverty-line (BPL) ration cards to siphon off subsidised foodgrain distributed under the state’s Anna Bhagya scheme, according to this Deccan Chronicle report from October 13, 2016, listed in the database.
 
Controversies, contestations
 
However, Aadhaar-related hiccups are far fewer than other problems holding up beneficiaries’ access to PDS, the State of Aadhaar Report 2017-18 by philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network, released on May 17, 2018, showed. Between September and December 2017, about 2 million PDS beneficiaries in rural Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal, accounting for 0.8%, 2.2% or 0.8% of all PDS beneficiaries, respectively, were found excluded from the states’ PDS programmes due to Aadhaar-related factors. However, a much larger proportion of beneficiaries, 6.5%, were excluded due to non-Aadhaar factors (such as non-availability of ration), the report said.
 
From 2014-15 to 2017-18, Aadhaar’s direct benefit transfer system as well as digitisation and other initiatives had enabled the government to detect and delete 27.5 million fake and duplicate ration cards, saving Rs 16,792 crore in the PDS programme, the report added.
 
However, the government did not provide data to back this claim. It also did not clarify how the deletions were counted, if they included genuine beneficiaries caught up in the system’s technical snags, and how Aadhaar specifically contributed to deletion of fakes, the report said.
 
Eliminating identity corruption has been one of the primary aims of the Aadhaar programme, but some experts believe Aadhaar integration has led to no significant gains for welfare programmes, as economist Reetika Khera said in this study published in the Economic & Political Weekly in December 2017.
 
Aadhaar-linking has facilitated over-centralisation of administrative controls, Khera argued in her study. “If a person does not get authenticated, there is no easy or accessible redress available… adding a sense of disempowerment,” she said. Further, privileging Aadhaar over other technologies that had a proven track record at improving administration displaced efforts to scale those up, she said.
 
“The evidence increasingly suggests quantity fraud more than identity or eligibility fraud is the main problem in welfare corruption,” Somanchi told IndiaSpend. “Despite Aadhaar, there are still instances of individuals getting more or less than the allotted amount of foodgrains and other rations under the PDS and this issue remains unaddressed.”
 
Aadhaar rackets aside, 19 cases of illegal migrants faking or forging Aadhaar identities to reside in India have also been reported, the database noted. In four cases, Aadhaar numbers were forged to fraudulently obtain bank loans. In two cases, terrorists had procured fake/forged Aadhaar numbers to legitimise their stay in the country.  
 
The Aadhaar programme has always been controversial, particularly since the government’s 2016 move to compulsorily link several government services and benefits with Aadhaar, as IndiaSpend reported on March 31, 2017. The Supreme Court has just finished hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar–the second-longest oral hearing in the history of the top court–and is likely to announce a verdict in July or August, DNA reported on May 11, 2018.
 
At one of the hearings, Attorney General K.K. Venugopal, appearing for the state, argued that the programme would prevent bank fraud, illegal financial transactions, and the misuse of telecommunication networks by terrorists, The Financial Express had reported on April 5, 2018.   
 
However, the apex court observed that Aadhaar could do little to stop banking fraud and questioned the government’s move to demand that the entire population of the country link their mobile phones with Aadhaar “just to catch a few terrorists”, the The Financial Express report said.
 
“This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what causes terrorism or banking frauds,” Somanchi said. “Serving up Aadhaar as a panacea for all problems is taking it too far. A socio-economic problem such as terrorism can’t be solved with a technological fix like Aadhaar–assigning sophisticated numbers to individuals isn’t a crime deterrent.”
 
Further, there have been cases where individuals have been unable to use their Aadhaar cards as proof of identity because their biometric data did not match with the records.
 
At a recent court hearing, UIDAI admitted that 6% of Aadhaar authentication requests using fingerprints (927,123 transactions) are known to fail, and 8.5% (36.9 million transactions) using iris scans, LiveLaw reported on April 3, 2018.
 
In all, Aadhaar-based biometric authentication for accessing government services have been recorded as failed 12% of the time, UIDAI told the court, according to this report in TheQuint on March 29, 2018. It denied, however, that this meant exclusion from or denial of subsidies or benefits, saying the authentication requesting agency is supposed to use alternative means of identification in such cases, the LiveLaw report said.
 
Combined with the findings of the database, UIDAI’s submissions in court suggest neither are Aadhaar biometrics reliable, nor are the cards infallible, Somanchi said.
 
(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend. Manpreet Singh, an intern with IndiaSpend and a graduate student at the Symbiosis School of Economics, Pune, contributed to the story.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Swapnil Sonawane (16), a Dalit from Navi Mumbai, was allegedly assaulted and murdered on July 19, 2016, for dating an upper-caste girl from his school. Nearly two years later, the trial has yet to begin.
 
Formerly called ‘New Bombay’, the township was part of a 1960s and 1970s dream to create a better-planned, egalitarian, and greener version of its namesake, ‘Bombay’, Maharashtra’s capital city. Celebrated architect Charles Correa, renowned for his work on housing the urban poor, had hoped New Bombay would emerge as the New Delhi for the financial capital, and give India’s most populous city something inconceivable at the time: A new beginning.
 
In the following years, even as a lack of political will left much of this dream unrealised, Navi Mumbai, with wide roads, well-planned localities, swathes of green open spaces, and less-expensive homes than Mumbai, sold dreams of a better life.

 
It was with this hope that the Sonawane family moved here in 1996.
 
Shahaji Sonawane, a staffer at the nationalised State Bank of India, married Gauri in 1999, three years after he moved to Navi Mumbai from Mankhurd, one of the least developed neighbourhoods in Mumbai’s central suburbs. A year later, in 2000, they had their first child, a boy. They named him ‘Swapnil’, the Sanskrit word for “dream”. In 2002, Swapnil’s sister, Sakshi, was born.
 
A smart student, Swapnil scored 85% marks in grade X and was admitted to Navi Mumbai’s famous D Y Patil college in July 2016, said 40-year-old Shahaji, beaming. “He dreamt of becoming a motorman.”
 
But before Swapnil’s first day in college could end, on July 19, 2016, he was dead, his skull cracked, chest and groin injured, as a consequence of an alleged romantic relationship with a 15-year-old girl from his school. The issue of contention: Swapnil was a Dalit–previously regarded as ‘untouchable’ and relegated to the bottom of the Hindu caste system–while the girl belonged to the Agri community of Maharashtra–classified as an ‘other backward class’ in 1993 owing to their poor socio-economic development, but claiming lineage to the upper caste Kshatriya, or warrior caste.
 
“We had never raised our children to know caste. We didn’t even feel the need to talk about it. We really can’t say we felt discriminated for being Dalit until now. Now caste is all we think about,” said Gauri, adding that the family has since learnt every nook and cranny of the law for the prevention of atrocities against scheduled tribes and scheduled castes–as Dalits are constitutionally called.
 
Even as more Dalits complete school and enrol in colleges, even as their incomes increase and poverty rates reduce, opposition to inter-caste marriages still rears its head in urban areas like Navi Mumbai–ranked eighth cleanest in India, with one of its best sports facilities, and the venue for international pop sensation Justin Bieber’s Asia tour in 2017.
 
Swapnil’s murder is a manifestation of a deeper conflict simmering within Indian society, and of India’s failure to provide justice to its lowest castes. Upper caste resentment of Dalits–comprising 16.3% of India’s population–as they assert their rights after centuries of subjugation under the Hindu caste system, has escalated into a political flashpoint in the run up to the 2019 general elections, and eight state assembly elections in 2018.  
 
This story is the second of a two-part series, the first of which showed how Dalits across four Indian states are questioning centuries-old traditions such as those restricting their rights to mount a horse or walk in a procession on the village main road.
 
‘For the last 600 days, this is all we do’
 
Elderly women draped in worn chiffon saris walked under the evening shadows of wilted Ashoka trees, and children on rickety bicycles drew number eights on a narrow street of railway colony, Juinagar. Coloured clothes, from a spectrum of faded to shiny new, hung off boxed grill-windows of tiny flats in four-storeyed buildings, with worn out paint, a stark contrast to the swanky high-rises in the background.
 
Across the road, as the sun set over a wild cricket ground, two armed policemen got out of a dusty Maruti 800 car. Shahaji Sonawane, a short man with deep set eyes and dark circles, dressed in a short-sleeved white vest, khaki pants and black leather shoes, and Gauri, a petite woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and dressed in a magenta pink and dull gold kurta (a long top) worn over gold leggings, followed.
 
She was exhausted. They both were.
 
“We spend most of our time here so, by default, the police are here too,” Shahaji told IndiaSpend, sitting cross-legged on the mosaic-tiled floor on the ground floor one-room-kitchen flat of their lawyer, Amit Katarnavare.
 
Katarnavare, a man with ruffled hair, sat propped up by two pillows on the bed, his legs stretched out. A pair of crutches lay across the wooden table, cluttered with papers and books. Since the murder, when Katarnavare and his wife, Mamta, also a lawyer, took on the case pro-bono, the former railway clerk, with a masters in law, has been attacked twice. The latest incident left him hospitalised for over two weeks.
 
His 10x10ft bedroom, painted in mauve, had turned into a war room. The three spend six to seven hours every weekday, and all weekend, studying laws and strategising the case of Swapnil’s murder, they said.
 
“For the last 600 days, this is all we do,” Gauri said, as she sat leaning against a wooden almirah.
 
Numerous hurdles riddle the path to justice from the time a crime is committed against a Dalit until the court of law pronounces the verdict.
 
Even as reporting of crimes against Dalits grew by 26% over a decade to 2016, from 16.3 cases per 100,000 to 20.3 per 100,000, conviction rates remain low, IndiaSpend reported on April 4, 2018.
 
In the decade to 2016, across India, cognisable crimes against Dalits pending police investigation rose 99% from 8,380 cases in 2006 to 16,654 cases in 2016, according to the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
 
In 2016, 89.6% of crimes against Dalits were awaiting trial, which was 2.2 percentage points higher than the 87.4% of crimes against the general population awaiting trial.
 
In Maharashtra–where Dalits constitute 11.2% of the state’s population–crimes against Dalits rose 25%, from 10.6 per 100,000 Dalits in 2006 to 13.2 in 2016. Cases pending investigation rose 137% from 346 cases in 2006 to 821 in 2016. Cases pending trial were up 28% from 6,181 cases in 2006 to 7,913 cases in 2016, data show.
 

The ‘wilful negligence’ of public officials
 
On the evening of Monday, July 18, 2016, exactly 649 days ago, 15-year-old Swapnil sat down to eat his favourite food, a box of chicken momos. “That’s when he received the call,” said Shahaji. A man waiting outside their building asked Swapnil to come down with his phone and a flashdrive. When Swapnil came down, the man accused him of dating his sister. The man and his friends pushed Swapnil into a rickshaw and beat him up as it drove away.
 
The same evening, the family of his alleged girlfriend called Gauri and her sister-in-law to the Nerul police station. The girl’s family (names withheld to protect the identity of the minor) said they did not accept their daughter’s relationship with a lower caste boy, and demanded Swapnil immediately end the relationship, Katarnavare told IndiaSpend.
 
The police allegedly asked the Sonawanes to ensure the boy ends the relationship. “The lady police inspector told my wife–‘Aap log bachhon ko school mein ladkiyon ko patane ke liye bhejte hain kya? (Do you send your child to school to pursue girls?) Why are you acting like characters in Sairat? Your story will also turn out the same way. There will be bloodshed in your home’,” Shahaji alleged.
 
Sairat, a 2016 Marathi film, released three months before Swapnil’s death, is the story of a romance between a low-caste boy and a rich upper caste girl, ending in the tragic murder of the young lovers by the girl’s family, for ‘family honour’.
 
After Swapnil returned from his first day of college, on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, Shahaji took him to the police station to file a complaint against the girl’s family for protection, but a police officer refused to let him speak to the senior inspector. “My complaint against the girl’s brother was not registered. If they had listened to us and taken us seriously, my son would have been alive today,” the father alleged.
 
“Since the matter is now in court, we cannot comment on details,” a senior police officer at the Navi Mumbai Nerul police station told IndiaSpend.
 
The delay in registering first information reports (FIRs) is the starting point of delayed justice for Dalits. It results in a delayed arrest of the perpetrators–which as per the then SC/ST Act rules should have been immediate. (The law had now been changed.) “The delay provides an opportunity for the accused to then use various means to stop registration of the case, or to influence the police officer in charge of the police station to dilute the information,” said Sukhadeo Thorat, a professor emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and managing trustee of the New-Delhi based Indian Institute of Dalit Studies.
 
Apart from reflecting caste bias and corruption, FIRs are delayed because of the pressure on police to keep the reported crime rates low in their jurisdiction, as a high crime rate is not viewed favourably among police personnel, according to a 2014 National Human Rights Commission study. “Police views the Act as an obstacle to caste harmony,” the report added.
 
In an assessment of the country-wide implementation of the SC/ST Act, the ministry of social justice described key problems in its implementation, including such behaviour as “wilful negligence of a public servant in discharging duties for registration of complaints, recording statement of witnesses, conducting investigation and filing charges”, in its 2016 annual report.
 
While Swapnil and Shahaji were at the police station, Shahaji’s daughter called to tell him of some men who were banging at their front door. When he rushed home, he found 15 to 20 men gathered outside their home. “They forcibly took me, Swapnil, my wife to the girl’s house,” Shahaji alleged. When they reached there, the girl’s father hurled casteist slurs and slapped them, even kicking Swapnil in the groin.
 
“At that point, we ran out of the building. We tried to flee but the family’s relatives and friends chased us. They were intent on thrashing him,” Shahaji told IndiaSpend. On the street outside the building, the group brutally assaulted Shahaji, Gauri and his son, Shahaji alleged. The police station was 5 minutes away.
 
“They only left us when Swapnil was unconscious. We rushed Swapnil to the hospital but looking at his face, we knew he was gone,” Shahaji said.
 
Swapnil, with a cracked skull and injuries to his chest and genitals, was dead when he arrived at the hospital, the Indian Express reported on July 21, 2016.
 
The girl’s parents, brother and seven others were arrested on several charges, including kidnapping, murder, promoting enmity, rioting and unlawful assembly under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
 
If “the police had acted in time, there would not have been such an incident”, the defence said, in a bail application for Vikram Thakur, a friend of the main accused, the girl’s brother. The application also said that the post mortem reports imply the injuries pointed to an accidental, not homicidal death, and challenged that Swapnil had suffered a head injury. “There is no fatal injury. There were 15 to 20 persons who gave kicks and fist blows,” the defence argued, insisting “there was no intention to kill”.
 
The court denied Thakur and several other bail applications, based on the prosecution’s evidence of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage and eye-witness accounts, available court data show.
 
Many crimes against Dalits have more than one perpetrator
 
Like the attack on Swapnil, in 86%–or 45 of 52–Dalit atrocity cases in Maharashtra reported between 2013 and 2016, the crimes involved more than one perpetrator, found a 2017 study on the pattern of atrocities in the state by Thorat, the professor.
 
“The collective involvement of high caste members is much higher in cases of heinous crimes like physical assault and murder and destruction of property,” Thorat wrote.
 
Thorat’s study, which will soon be published in a book, is the first comprehensive analysis of caste-based access to justice in Maharashtra, based on 139 fact finding reports on cases between 2007 and 2016 by multiple civil society organisations. The study also included cases in Beed between 1990 and 2008.
 

Loopholes in the SC/SC Act
 
The disparity in access to justice is clear from the gap in the conviction rate between Dalits and the rest of the population.
 
Among cases of crimes against Dalits that do go to court, conviction rate for crimes against Dalits was 26% in 2016, a decline of two percentage points from 2006 (28%), even as conviction rate for general cognisable crimes increased 4 percentage points from 43% in 2006 to 47% in 2016.
 
While Maharashtra’s conviction rate for crimes against Dalits nearly tripled since 2006 (4%) to 11% in 2016, it was still less than half of the the all-India average conviction rate (26%) for caste crimes. In other words, 89% of caste crimes in the state lead to acquittals in court. In contrast, Maharashtra’s general conviction rate for all cognisable crimes, at 34.3%, in 2016, was three times as high as that for crimes against Dalits.
 
Concerned about the high acquittal rate in caste crimes countrywide, assuming these are the outcome of a misuse of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, the Supreme Court on March 20, 2018, ruled there shall be no immediate arrest of a citizen or public servant for crimes under the Act, without prior permission. It also introduced the provision of anticipatory bail if the complaint was found to be malafide.
 
In early April 2018, the judgement triggered widespread violent protests by Dalit and Adivasi (tribal) organisations across the country, in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Odisha, Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh, resulting in the death of 11 people. In response to the central government’s plea to review the decision, the SC refused to stay its order, asserting that the amendment was meant to protect the rights of innocent people without affecting those of marginalised communities.
 
“The court’s doublespeak on the matter of atrocities is breathtaking,” wrote Alok Prasanna Kumar, a senior resident Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy in New Delhi, an independent legal policy advisory group, in this April 2018 FirstPost editorial. “On the one hand, no effort is made to find out the impact of the law in improving the lives of Dalits or Adivasis…on the other, it is assumed that it is the law itself that is not promoting constitutional values of fraternity and integration of the society. It’s quite obvious where the court’s sympathies lie.”
 
One of the reasons he points out is the lack of diversity in the judiciary. In the past eight years, no Dalit or Adivasi judge has been elevated to the Supreme Court, and none of the 24 high courts have a serving Dalit judge, The Print reported in April 2018. In lower courts, Dalits comprised less than 14% of judges, and tribals 12%, the Times of India reported in January 2018.
 
“If the problem with the Act was misuse, at the first stage, when produced before the magistrate court itself the police would file more false reports,” said Thorat, adding that fewer chargesheets would be filed if cases were false.
 
Of 40,801 crimes against Dalits reported in 2016, police found 7.6% or 5,347 cases to be false, 2016 NCRB data show. Chargesheets were filed in 78% of cases.
 
Most of the cases of acquittals under the SC/ST law are because of procedural lapses such as delays in filing an FIR, and investigations done by incompetent authorities, rather than for substantive reasons such as witnesses turning hostile or lack of evidence, found a 2014 National Commission for Dalits Human Rights (NCDHR) study on cases in five courts in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh.
 
For example, after a crime and registration of an FIR, an officer at least of the rank of a Deputy Superintendent of Police must visit the site of the incident to assess the extent of the crime, number of victims, extent of damage to the property, and list of victims entitled for relief, for a report to the state government. “However very often, an officer of a lower rank is sent to investigate the site and this information is used by the defence lawyers to have the case dismissed,” Thorat said.
 
“It appears to be highly discretionary as to whether the police and then the public prosecutor ensure that the correct sections of the law are applied while charges are framed in the Special Courts” under the SC/ST law for caste crimes, said the 2014 NCDHR study. For instance, when crimes are registered under the Act, sections involving milder punishment are applied more often than others, the study observed.
 
In several cases, police doesn’t provide protection
 

Gauri (left) and Shahaji (centre) Sonawane at their lawyer, Amit Katarnavare’s (right) house in Railway colony, Juinagar, Navi Mumbai. The Sonawanes spend most of their time here preparing for the trial of Swapnil’s death.
 
The rules of the SC/ST Act mandate the police protect the witnesses in the case and provide immediate relief to the victims. Yet, in 66% of 52 cases in Maharashtra, victims were initially not provided with police protection, according to Thorat’s analysis of civil society reports.
 
In the Sonawanes’ case, the family has 24-hour police protection. Katarnavare, their lawyer, also filed for police protection, first in September 2017 and later in November 2017, after the  second attack on him. For three months, he did not hear back. He had also applied for a license to bear arms, but did not hear back from the Navi Mumbai Police
 
“We spend most of our time here (at Katarnavare’s house) so that he also gets protection,” Shahaji said, of the time when their lawyer did not have police protection. Katarnavare quit his job at the railways, and said he doesn’t move around outside his home without company or, “witnesses”, as he calls them.
 
On March 16, 2018, four months after the second attack and a few days after IndiaSpend visited the family at the lawyer’s house, the Thane sessions court directed the Navi Mumbai police to provide protection to Katarnavare.
 
“We decide cases for police protection on the basis of merit. We assess the threat perception and grant the applicant an answer. We had initially denied the lawyer’s application but now basis the court’s order we have given protection,” a senior police official told IndiaSpend, on the condition of anonymity.
 
‘Exclusive courts’ overburdened by non caste crimes, delay caste-related crimes
 
For speedy trials for crimes against Dalits, the SC/ST Act proposes setting up special courts. “It is the duty of the State Government to establish adequate number of Courts to ensure that cases under the Act are disposed of within a period of two months, as far as possible,” the 2014 amendment to the law stated.
 
The chargesheet in the Sonawane case was filed on September 13, 2016, 56 days after the murder. If a trial is to be completed within two months from the date of filing the charge sheet, according to the 2015 amendments to the SC/ST Act, the Thane special court is already past its deadline in this case.
 
In fact, more than 15 months later, the Sonawanes’ case is about to begin stage two, where the accused will be plead “guilty” or “not guilty” to charges framed against them in 2016. Thereafter, the prosecution’s victims and witnesses will be examined, statements of the accused heard, defence witnesses cross-examined, and final arguments heard before the judge pronounces a verdict that may be then challenged in the High Court.
 
Currently, 195 exclusive special courts have been set up in 14 states covering 27% of 716 districts across India, according to the 2016 annual report of the ministry of social welfare and justice. In 2011, the Maharashtra government had promised six such courts. Today, of the 35 districts in Maharashtra, special courts had been set up in three–or 8%–of districts at Thane, Aurangabad and Nagpur.
 
These courts appear to be buckling under the weight of trying cases unrelated to caste crimes, the 2014 NCDHR report found. “Exclusive Special Courts are not functioning as exclusive courts in reality. This seems to be occurring regardless of the high number of atrocity cases pending trial before the Exclusive Special Courts.”
 
“The most significant link between prolonged trials and obstructions to justice is that, in the interim, pressure can be exerted on the victims and witnesses to recant their statements as to the atrocity,” observed the NCDHR report.
 
Counter cases filed against victims worsen the situation as often the victims are too poor to fight simultaneous cases leading to further delays, Thorat said.
 
The prolonged wait for the start of a trial also affects the victims and witnesses’ ability to recall incidents accurately, thus compromising the case, Thorat pointed out. “By the time of the hearing, there is a difference between what is said in the FIR and what is said in the chargesheet and this is used to the advantage of the defence,” he added.
 
Fearing this, the Sonawanes’ lawyers have requested the family to refrain from retelling the crime to unknown people to prevent their words from being twisted in court at the time of the hearing.
 
The Sonawanes also refused to testify in court unless the proceedings were recorded on camera. On July 8, 2017, 355 days after Swapnil’s murder, the Thane district and sessions court, designated a special court, ordered all further hearings in the case to be on camera. As of March 2018, the court had yet to acquire these cameras, court documents show.
 
Since the first hearing in the case on November 25, 2016, the 10 accused, including the girl’s parents and her brother, have posted several bail applications, available data from Thane Sessions court show.
 
Days after the crime, the girl had reportedly blamed her father for the incident, the Indian Express reported on July 26, 2016. “She said that the rest of the family simply followed his lead,” the report said, adding that the minor’s education had also been affected since she moved to a Children’s Home.
 
A month later, a juvenile magistrate found Swapnil’s reported girlfriend innocent in the crime, and released her from the Bhiwandi Children’s Home. She now lives with her uncle’s family, the Indian Express reported on August 23, 2016.
 
“The girl has resumed her education and appeared for her 12th state board exams recently. She doesn’t talk much about the incident and we don’t either, the focus is on rehabilitation and helping her move forward in a positive way,” Vijay Doiphode, chairman of Mumbai’s child welfare committee, told IndiaSpend. Until recently, Doiphode was a senior social worker at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences working on the girl’s case. “She goes to visit her family in jail on and off,” he added.
 
The two police officers–assistant inspector Yogesh Mane and sub-inspector Sonali Rajguru–who had been suspended for dereliction of duty and for passing the casteist “Sairat” remark at the Sonawanes the night before Swapnil’s death, resumed duty three months after Swapnil’s death, a police officer at Nerul police station said.
 
About sixteen months later, on November 21, 2017, the girl’s mother, and a friend, among the 10 persons the Navi Mumbai police arrested for the murder, were granted bail, the Indian Express reported on December 22, 2017. The court had previously rejected the bail application of the girl’s mother on August 2, 2017, observing “the prosecution has successfully shown” that she was “a member of unlawful assembly who killed Swapnil Sonawane”, court documents show.
 
Eight of the accused still remain in jail.
 
The next court hearing is scheduled for May 8, 2018. So far, the Sonawanes have attended 33 hearings, though the trial is yet to begin, court data show. “Every month, they give us a date and then for some reason or the other, the hearing is adjourned. This has been going on for months on end,” Shahaji said.
 
‘Don’t they deserve justice too?’
 
Sakshi, Swapnil’s sister, is set to start college this year. “She doesn’t talk much anymore. We thought about changing her school but her friends have been very supportive so we decided not to,” Gauri, her mother, said. “She misses her brother but she doesn’t say anything. She fears that if she talks about her pain, it will remind us of our own pain,” she said wistfully. “I want to see justice for my son.”
 
The long-running case has not deterred the Sonawanes but they said it has left them isolated. “Since then (the day of the murder) our neighbours don’t talk to us anymore. Nobody has come forward to help us, in fact they have made things more difficult for me at work. But it doesn’t matter, we just want justice for our son,” Shahaji said, shrugging his shoulders.
 
“This is all we care about. We died that day along with Swapnil. Now what happens to us doesn’t matter. We just want justice,” he repeated, as if in prayer.
 
Their lawyer cited the example of another case in Maharashtra, and said he wishes Swapnil’s case proceeds in the same way, especially as there is a special law for the protection of Dalits.
 
On July 13, 2016, six days before the murder of Swapnil Sonawane, a 15-year-old girl was found brutally raped and murdered in a field in Kopardi village in Ahmednagar, less than 300 km away from Navi Mumbai. The crime, perpetrated by three Dalit men of the Mahar sub-caste, horrified the Maratha community the girl belonged to, and sparked state-wide protests, demanding speedy justice, an amendment to the SC/ST Act and reservations for the Maratha community in educational institutions and government jobs. Two weeks later, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the family of the victim.
 
On November 18, 2017, after 15 months, the Ahmednagar sessions court found the three Dalit men guilty, and within 10 days, on November 29, 2017, sentenced them to death.
 
“Those men deserved the strictest punishment for the heinous crime they committed–and justice should be delivered so quickly,” said Katarnavare, their lawyer.
 
“We’re only asking why is there a difference in the way the police, administration and the courts handles these cases? There is no question that someone has killed the Sonawanes’ son. Don’t they deserve justice too?” he asked.
 
This is the second of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.
 
(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)
 

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