Charu Bahri | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/charu-bahri-0-11737/ News Related to Human Rights Mon, 07 Jan 2019 05:07:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png Charu Bahri | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/charu-bahri-0-11737/ 32 32 ‘Delhi’s Reforms To Improve Ease Of Doing Business Largely Window-Dressing’ https://sabrangindia.in/delhis-reforms-improve-ease-doing-business-largely-window-dressing/ Mon, 07 Jan 2019 05:07:03 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2019/01/07/delhis-reforms-improve-ease-doing-business-largely-window-dressing/ Mount Abu: In 2016, India stood 130th among 190 countries in the World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ ranking. A year later, having implemented a slew of reforms, India climbed to the 100th position. This year, 2018, the country moved up to the 77th position, ranking among the top 10 reformers, a list led by […]

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Mount Abu: In 2016, India stood 130th among 190 countries in the World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ ranking. A year later, having implemented a slew of reforms, India climbed to the 100th position. This year, 2018, the country moved up to the 77th position, ranking among the top 10 reformers, a list led by New Zealand, Singapore and Denmark.


A new study by the Centre for Civil Society has found that recent reforms by the Delhi government to improve ease of doing business have not been beneficial for small entrepreneurs. The reforms are “largely window-dressing”, a co-investigator of the study, Alston D’Souza, tells IndiaSpend in an interview.

Has this changed things substantially on the ground? This is the question researchers and policy analysts are asking.

In Delhi, one of the only two cities (Mumbai being the other) in India that the World Bank considers for the ranking, recent business reforms have not been beneficial for small entrepreneurs, a new ‘Doing Business in Delhi’ study by the Centre for Civil Society has found.

Consider an eatery: In Delhi, an entrepreneur needs at least eight licenses to start a non-alcohol serving eatery, 11 if they want to serve alcohol and 13 if they play recorded music and choose to install a lift. By contrast, it takes four licenses to open and run a restaurant in China and two in Turkey. One of those licenses is the Eating House License, a document issued by the Delhi Police. Despite taking the process online, there are long queues in front of the Eating House desk of the Licensing Unit of Delhi Police, the study observes. One respondent said, “Bribery is widely regarded as a legitimate way to obtain the Eating House License,” while another remarked, “The licence is delivered at your doorstep if you know the right price to pay.”

Making it easier to do business is vital to promote entrepreneurship and employment. About 18.6 million Indians were unemployed in 2018–3.5% of the workforce–according to the International Labour Organization. At 16%, unemployment among the youth and those with higher education is the highest in the country in the last 20 years, according to the State of Working India 2018, a report by the Centre for Sustainable Employment of Azim Premji University.

“[T]he steps taken to ease doing business are largely window-dressing, merely ticking off boxes on a reform checklist,” said Alston D’Souza, a co-author of the study, in an interview to IndiaSpend. “Delhi government must rethink and rewrite the rules of the game to improve conditions for micro, small and medium enterprises, such that licensing requirements are rationalised, procedures streamlined, the processing of permit clearances is made faster and less expensive, and transparency is improved,” he said.

D’Souza was part of the India Fellow Social Leadership Program, which trains young people in development management, at Prayog in Bihar. He completed his undergraduate studies in engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, and is now a senior research associate at the Centre for Civil Society.

India’s ease of doing business ranking has jumped from the 130th position in 2016 to the 77th in 2018. You feel that this improvement does not reflect the business scenario faced by the average micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) across India. Why?
Firstly, the World Bank ranking is based on the conditions prevailing in Mumbai and Delhi only, so in that sense, the index covers a niche; it ignores India outside of those two megacities. Within those cities, too, the assumptions that the index is based on [to enable a comparison of business regulations across the 190 participating economies] narrow the focus to larger, typically manufacturing enterprises with access to expert assistance. For example, a ‘business’ under the ‘starting a business’ aspect is defined as one with office space of approximately 929 sq m (10,000 sq ft); which is 100% domestically owned by five people; which has a start-up capital 10 times the per capita income and a turnover at least 100 times the per capita income; and which has 10-50 employees within one month of starting operation. Many MSMEs in Delhi and Mumbai do not meet these criteria and hence, their experience is not considered for the index.

Second, if you look at the reasons for India’s improved ranking, the rise in 2017 is largely attributed to reforms such as the extension of the validity of industrial licenses and the enactment of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The rise in 2018 is attributed to reforms in obtaining construction permits, trading across borders, streamlining procedures, reducing the time for processing permit applications and improving transparency at the state level. Aspects such as industrial licenses, construction permits and export norms are of no relevance to most MSMEs.

To boost the ease of doing business across states, in April 2017, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, in partnership with the World Bank, introduced the Business Reforms Action Plan (BRAP), a set of 405 recommendations covering reforms on labour, contracts, property registration, construction, environment, and so on. States’ progress on the action items prioritised in the preceding year is assessed based on self-declaration. What was your finding for Delhi?
In Delhi, reengineering of business process has been a window-dressing exercise. To increase transparency in and accountability of environment- and labour-related inspections, state departments were meant to publish standard operating procedures, deploy risk assessment algorithms, randomise the allocation of inspectors, and make inspection reports/findings available to enterprises. Many of these steps have been ignored.

Another DIPP recommendation, to set up specialised commercial courts to focus exclusively on commercial disputes and to fill 90% of the vacant judges’ posts, has only been addressed in name. The Delhi government has created a commercial division at the High Court of Delhi. However, despite being established to deal exclusively with commercial disputes, the total time spent by that court on non-commercial disputes was 2.73 times the time spent on commercial disputes. The time spent on commercial disputes was not proportional to the number of pending commercial cases nor was the time available with judges assigned proportionally between commercial and non-commercial cases.

The Delhi government has created a commercial division at the High Court of Delhi. Despite being established to deal exclusively with commercial disputes, the total time spent by that court on non-commercial disputes was 2.73 times the time spent on commercial disputes.
The capacity of the court to hear commercial cases remains the same since no new judges have been recruited. Implementing the DIPP recommendation in the right spirit would have meant creating two sets of judges, one commercial and one non-commercial, or at least instituting measures to ensure the resources of the court were shared rationally.

In 2018, we understood that the BRAP assessment would consist of business-to-government feedback as well. We don’t know if that survey has been conducted. There is a general lack of transparency surrounding the assessment.

You surveyed several industries including the retail food business, slaughter houses and small meat shops, and e-waste handlers, to name a few, to determine how easy (or difficult) it is to conduct a business in practice. Based on your survey of the e-waste industry of Delhi, what are your conclusions about how red tape adversely impacts business? Since the disposal of e-waste impacts the environment, does this business harm Delhi residents?  
The National Capital Region has 28 authorised (licensed) recycling firms with a capacity of processing 107,976 metric tonnes annually, considerably more than the 85,000 metric tonnes of e-waste generated annually. Theoretically, these authorised recyclers should be utilising 79% of their combined capacity. However, six authorised recycling firms in Faridabad, Rohtak, Manesar and Hapur were operating at 39.9% of their capacity when we surveyed them.

We found that some authorised recyclers were diverting their e-waste to unauthorised recyclers instead of recycling within their facility, because doing so fetches them a higher return. Informal recyclers can offer e-waste sellers up to twice the amount offered by authorised sellers because they incur lower operational costs by avoiding environmental and labour compliance. For instance, they circumvent rules mandating that the toxic components of e-waste such as mercury and lead be treated before being disposed. Unauthorised recyclers simply dump this waste in the open where it contaminates the soil and pollutes water bodies.

Our visit to Seelampur actually showed collusion between unauthorised and authorised handlers of e-waste. We posed as potential consumers looking to sell e-waste and asked if we could have some legitimate proof of our transaction. The informal recycler offered us a certificate that verified his status as an authorised recycler and a Goods and Services Tax transaction ID validating our sale. He rented these documents from authorised recyclers for a fee. If we were to insist on documents verifying our transaction, he would accommodate this fee in the e-waste prices he would charge us.

If government checks on the industry were effective, unauthorised recyclers would not be handling the bulk of the e-waste generated in India.

As in other avenues of business, the existing licensing process for e-waste handlers is way too slow. In the official version, the average time taken to obtain Consent to Establish and Consent to Operate from the Haryana and Uttar Pradesh State Pollution Control Boards for recycling e-waste is 1.3 months. We found it actually takes up to 24 months.

A good business would show concern for its employees, especially workers who occupy the lowest socioeconomic strata. The World Bank takes cognisance of this, in tracking key labour market regulation indicators on the doing business website even though the report does not consider those indicators for each countries’ aggregate ease of doing business score or ranking. What were your findings on the welfare of labour in Delhi?
The labour department of the Government of NCT Delhi claims to have adopted two reforms proposed by the DIPP–checklists and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for inspections under seven key labour acts covering various aspects of hiring and compensating workers and their conditions of work (Payment of Bonus Act, 1965; Delhi Shops and Establishment Act, 1954; Equal Remuneration Act, 1976; Payment of Wages, 1936; Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972; Contract Labour Act, 1970; and Minimum Wages Act, 1938).

We assumed that following processes aimed at speeding up resolution of complaints was a major step towards ensuring worker welfare, and so investigated whether these processes were being followed by the New Delhi District Labour Office. Of the 846 labour complaints we analysed, 33.6% inspections were carried out later than the SOP-mandated deadline of 15 days. More than half of the complaints we analysed (54.8%) remained unsettled for an average of 311.5 days, or almost a year.

Department officials cited manpower shortages as the key reason for the high pendency, claiming they dealt with approximately 60 to 80 cases per month. However, we concluded that low levels of awareness among inspectors of labour law provisions and what constitutes a violation was partly to blame. For example, inspectors said discrimination during promotion does not constitute a violation under the Equal Remuneration Act 1976, which is incorrect. Moreover, the additional labour commissioner claimed that the Act was redundant as there were no complaints under it in the last 25 years. Their own website contradicts the claim by showing that 2,826 inspections were conducted under the Act in 2002 alone. While 83% of the sanctioned inspector positions remain unfilled, we concluded that the department is not overburdened because the complaint register shows that an inspector receives 25.9 complaints a month, which implies approximately one complaint per day.

(Bahri is an independent journalist based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Police Continue To Make Arrests Using ‘Unconstitutional’ Section 66A of IT Act, Struck Down By Supreme Court 3 Years Ago https://sabrangindia.in/police-continue-make-arrests-using-unconstitutional-section-66a-it-act-struck-down-supreme/ Mon, 03 Dec 2018 04:45:22 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/12/03/police-continue-make-arrests-using-unconstitutional-section-66a-it-act-struck-down-supreme/ Mount Abu: On March 20, 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court accorded the status of living human entity to the rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The same day, Zakir Ali Tyagi, an 18-year-old from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh posted a comment on Facebook questioning whether “criminal charges would be initiated if someone drowned in the Ganga”. A week […]

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Mount Abu: On March 20, 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court accorded the status of living human entity to the rivers Ganga and Yamuna. The same day, Zakir Ali Tyagi, an 18-year-old from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh posted a comment on Facebook questioning whether “criminal charges would be initiated if someone drowned in the Ganga”.

A week later, then newly elected Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath made a comment about ridding the state of goonda (rogue) elements. “They have the option of leaving UP or else they would land in places designated for them (jails),” he said.


On March 30, Tyagi noted in a Facebook post that the chief minister had 28 cases pending against him, of which 22 were serious.

[Tyagi did not mention the source of his information. Adityanath’s candidate affidavit for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections listed multiple pending criminal cases under a dozen sections. In 2017, MyNeta.Info listed four cases pending against Adityanath, based on his affidavit submitted for election to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council.]

A few days after making those posts, Tyagi was arrested.

Tyagi was booked under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act (IT Act), a statute that criminalised sending offensive messages online. He was additionally booked under Section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), because Tyagi had changed his Facebook profile photograph to that of slain sub-inspector, Akhtar Ali, to pay homage to the officer who was killed in an exchange of fire during a raid to arrest a suspected criminal at Dadri, Noida.

Except that Section 66A had been struck down by the Supreme Court in March 2015, two years before it was used by the police against Tyagi, because the top court found the statute too vague to be applied.

How do you decide what is offensive?
“What may be offensive to one may not be offensive to another,” explained the Supreme Court in the landmark judgement (Shreya Singhal v. Union of India) in 2015 that repealed 66A. “What may cause annoyance or inconvenience to one may not cause annoyance or inconvenience to another…. If judicially trained minds can come to diametrically opposite conclusions on the same set of facts it is obvious that expressions such as “grossly offensive” or “menacing” are so vague that there is no manageable standard by which a person can be said to have committed an offence or not to have committed an offence.”

So, how could Tyagi have been booked under an overruled statute?
Was the use of Section 66A by the police an outcome of ignorance of the law, or was the police knowingly challenging the legitimacy of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned it?
The answer is a bit of both, according to a new paper ‘Section 66A and other legal zombies’ by lawyers Abhinav Sekhri and Apar Gupta.

“There is no system in place to give proper effect to the decisions of the Supreme Court of such significant import,” co-author Gupta, also executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told IndiaSpend.  “There exists a lack of mutual respect between the judiciary and executive, and the power balance skewed in favour of the executive allows it to get away with the abuse of the law.”

Gupta noted that it is important to understand that courts do not strike down laws on the mere possibility of misuse. “Judicial review of substantive penal legislation is a rare event, not because the legislature always comes up with bulletproof choices on what to criminalise and how to do so, but rather because of a convention that courts cannot continually question the legislative choices in that arena. Courts try to maintain a balance of powers between the branches of state — the executive, judiciary and legislature — by abstaining from interfering in or negating law-making.
Besides, imagine how challenging law enforcement would become if the validity of the law itself were forever in doubt?”

In the case of Section 66A, the Supreme Court ruled that the law violated Article 14, providing for equality before the law, Article 19, which includes freedom of speech and expression, and Article 21, or right to life and personal liberty, all constitutional Fundamental Rights, said Gupta.
Respecting the position of other branches of the State would assume that when the judiciary does engage in that rare act of review, its decision is scrupulously honoured. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. The struck-down statute Section 66A, and other scrapped sections such as Section 303, IPC continue to be used, according to Sekhri and Gupta.

Gupta told IndiaSpend that this effectively puts the onus of enforcing the apex court’s ruling on existing defendants and those newly booked under the now defunct section.

Edited excerpts from an interview:
Citing the example of Zakir Ali Tyagi, who spent 42 days in jail after being booked under Section 66A of the IT Act and Section 420, IPC, you concluded that due to “considerable mainstream media coverage by national newspapers”, “the likelihood of the police discovering the error of continued used of Section 66A would have become apparent,” and the allegations under Section 66A were converted to Section 66. Once Tyagi was released on bail, the police added the offence of sedition. Is this switching of sections reflective of ignorance of the law?
Dropping an alphabet did not impart greater legality to Zakir Ali Tyagi’s case, since Section 66 and Section 66A are vastly different. The former deals with hacking and monetary losses; the latter deals with offences of speech, and can be contracted and expanded like an accordion. What often happens is that the police first arrest someone under 66A, then, if the case gets media attention, they find out about the invalidity of the statute and look for another section to justify the arrest. Incidentally, Tyagi’s case is still ongoing.
Since the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) stopped recording Section 66A cases in 2016, we found an increased incidence of the use of Section 66 (computer-related offences) and Section 67 (transmitting obscene material in electronic form), despite the legal objective of sections 66 and 67 being distinct from Section 66A. It is possible that these provisions are serving as mere proxies for a continued reliance on Section 66A, suggesting that Shreya Singhal affected only form and not substance. A research report released in November 2017 by the Mumbai-based not-for-profit Point of View inquires if Section 67 is being used as a substitute for Section 66A.

Equally disturbing was our discovery that this issue of ignorance of the law, and hence, the application of unconstitutional penal laws, long preceded Shreya Singhal and Section 66A. In 1983, the Supreme Court had struck down Section 303, IPC [which mandated a death sentence for murder if committed by a person convicted for life imprisonment], in Mithu v. State of Punjab. In 2012, almost two decades later, the Rajasthan High Court intervened to save a person from being hanged for being convicted under that offence by a Sessions Judge.

You concluded that Section 66A continues to be used because the pertinent authorities simply do not know that it has been struck down, because no method exists for getting word of Supreme Court decisions to other stakeholders, such as the lowest rungs of the criminal justice system. What solution do you propose for this situation?
Allow me to digress to say that we concluded that Section 66A continues to be used because the pertinent authorities do not know that it has been struck down, simply because we could not assume that the police, prosecutors and courts are actively committing contempt by refusing to stop cases under Section 66A, or that they see the decision as not requiring them to act to offer relief to defendants of pending cases. That said, we found it fairly plausible that authorities don’t know about the decision on Section 66A, because when a law is declared unconstitutional, it is not automatically deleted from the statute books. Statutes can only be changed via an amendment, and if parliament does not pass an enabling amendment to give effect to the Supreme Court decision, then the unconstitutional provision will remain in the text. So, if one accesses India Code—the official source for the text of central statutes—Section 66A still exists. Commercial publishers such as Universal, LexisNexis and Commercial that are required to faithfully reproduce the official text of statutes also carry unconstitutional provisions, often with a footnote citing the Supreme Court decision.

How else could the lower courts and police force get to know that Section 66A had been struck down? Through the government’s official gazette, which carries updates on new legislation or rules? It doesn’t carry details of recent judicial decisions of constitutional import. Through government advisories or notifications? While an advisory was issued to chief secretaries and director generals during the litigation asking them to use Section 66A with restraint and prior approval of their administrative superiors, no advisory or notification was addressed to the same set of persons informing them about the decision itself.

High Court Rules (we studied the Delhi High Court provisions) don’t allow for decisions of the Supreme Court to be conveyed to the lower courts under its jurisdiction. Similarly, there is no rule mandating district judges to issue circulars for bringing new Supreme Court decisions to the notice of other officers. To get information about important decisions, members of the subordinate judiciary are expected to refer to yearly digests published by the judiciary or similar digests published by commercial houses.

What impact should scrapping Section 66A have had on the people of India and its judicial system? How does that continued application of the unconstitutional statute impact persons booked under Section 66A?
When an important decision like Shreya Singhal was passed, you would have imagined that prosecuting agencies and magistrates across the country would proactively give effect to the ruling, by examining pending cases and withdrawing those where the defendant was booked solely under Section 66A. In doing so, they would effectively reduce the burden on the criminal justice system, which we all know is besieged with the lack of policing resources and pending cases.

As we found, this did not happen. Far from it. The police continued to book people under the scrapped law (and they continue to do so; this recent case happened in Gurugram and this case in Guwahati), in doing so placing the burden of enforcing legal change on newly booked and existing defendants. What we mean by this is most defendants depend on their lawyers to navigate the legal system. So, if the lawyer is aware of the rollback of Section 66A and capable of explaining the illegality to the court, good for the defendant. If not, the defendant would needlessly suffer. We found proof of this, in the fact that Shreya Singhal was used to quash only some of the 66A cases pending before the same presiding officer in the Kerala High Court. Where the lawyer did not claim the invalidity, the courts simply went on with the case as if Section 66A was valid. In India, how many defendants have the financial wherewithal to engage the best lawyers who offer quality counsel? Those who lack these means are left hopelessly beyond the Constitution. This is their justice.

What data formed the basis of your study? To what extent is that data indicative of the total section 66A cases being registered in the country?
We searched two online databases for Section 66A cases—IndianKanoon, a popular public access platform, and Supreme Court Cases Online, a subscription-based platform. Between January and September 2018, IndianKanoon listed 45 cases, while Supreme Court Cases Online listed 21 cases from March 2015 till September 2018.

These were by no means exhaustive lists. These databases crawl the internet and index information. We know that they primarily index high court cases and collect data from the few district courts that are digitised. A main source of data—crimes registered through First Information Reports (FIR) in police stations—remains wholly outside the scope of these databases. Also, we are not clear which cases they omit since their algorithms and documentation are not made public. Incidentally, Tyagi’s case was not listed.

We also referred to cyber crimes reported by the NCRB, which collates data sourced from police stations. NCRB data for 2015 and 2016 showed that widespread arrests continued despite Shreya Singhal. However, the NCRB issued a “corrigenda” in 2016 clarifying that those numbers were incorrect due to an error in the internal data processing system, and also said that it will not publish data on Section 66A in subsequent reports.

Because of these data limitations, we limited our study to examining the general continued use of Section 66A in the criminal process. In many instances this includes FIRs filed after the Shreya Singhal judgment and trials that are proceeding as on date. Having read each order in our data set, we can confidently assert the usefulness of our data set as a tool for analysis and evidence of the continued misuse of a scrapped statute. What could be more revealing than this comment of a police inspector in Ahmedabad on being asked why he booked a lawyer-activist working for minority rights under the scrapped Section 66A in August 2018? The inspector first said that the top court did not give any such judgement, then later said, “The Supreme Court must have said that in one particular case only and the section remains in the Act. Pathan was aptly booked under Section 66A of the act as he circulated messages through a cellphone.”

(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Why Open Prisons Are The Solution To India’s Overcrowded Prisons https://sabrangindia.in/why-open-prisons-are-solution-indias-overcrowded-prisons/ Fri, 21 Sep 2018 06:50:53 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/09/21/why-open-prisons-are-solution-indias-overcrowded-prisons/ Udaipur: Kalu Tulsiram*, 35, a bespectacled, serious looking man, was brewing tea at a stall near the Udaipur central bus depot on a recent monsoon day. It was close to noon, a busy time for the tea stalls lining the main road. A few metres away, Deepak Lalaprasad*, 33, heavier built and more relaxed in […]

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Udaipur: Kalu Tulsiram*, 35, a bespectacled, serious looking man, was brewing tea at a stall near the Udaipur central bus depot on a recent monsoon day. It was close to noon, a busy time for the tea stalls lining the main road. A few metres away, Deepak Lalaprasad*, 33, heavier built and more relaxed in demeanour, was helming another stall, waiting for a customer.

Open prison

Since 2014, murder convict Deepak Lalaprasad, 33, has been living in an open prison in Udaipur, having conducted himself well for 10 years in a conventional prison. One of 24 inmates at the open prison, Deepak now runs a stall near the Udaipur central bus depot. As many as 1,127 prisoners in 29 open jails in Rajasthan work as accountants, school teachers, domestic help and security guards.

Casual passersby or customers could never guess that these two men were convicts serving life sentences under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860–for murder.

Since 2014, Kalu and Deepak have been living in an open prison in Udaipur, having conducted themselves well for 10 years in conventional prisons. Inmates at this prison are permitted to stay with their families and go out during the day to earn a living. As many as 1,127 prisoners in 29 open jails in Rajasthan work as accountants, school teachers, domestic help and security guards, even those serving time for murder.


Prisoners’ rooms at the Udaipur open prison. Inmates at this prison are permitted to stay with their families and go out during the day to earn a living.

Not only do these prisons present an early opportunity for prisoners’ reform and rehabilitation back into society, they also cost less in terms of money and staff, a 2017 report on Rajasthan’s open prisons said, based on which the Supreme Court in May 2018 ordered state governments to fully utilise and expand the capacity of open prisons as well as set up more open prisons.

Why open prisons
Conceptually, open prisons were developed to rehabilitate prisoners who had almost completed their sentence. In the earliest open prisons developed in the U.S. in the 19th century, prisoners nearing release were sent to work as labourers to evaluate their behaviour. In India, the earliest open prison established in 1953 in Uttar Pradesh housed prisoners who were requisitioned to construct a dam over the river Chandraprabha, near Varanasi.

It was in Rajasthan’s first open prison–a farm set up in Durgapura near Jaipur in 1955–that prisoners were first allowed to stay with their families and work on the farm or nearby.

In December 2017, the Supreme Court asked states to establish an open prison in each district based on a 2017 report that detailed the success of Rajasthan’s open jail system. It followed up this suggestion with an order on May 8, 2018, asking states to “try and utilise the capacity of these open prisons”–which number 63 and have a capacity of 5,370, but have 30% seats unutilised–adding that states should consider increasing the capacity of existing open prisons and “seriously consider the feasibility of establishing open prisons in as many locations as possible”.

In creating open prisons where the rehabilitation of prisoners could start from the day they are incarcerated, instead of after they have served the greater part of their sentence, India would not become any less safe, the report mentioned above showed.

Commissioned by the Rajasthan State Legal Services Authority and released on National Law Day–November 26–in 2017, the report showed that open prisons “reduce the burden on the exchequer”, “reduce overcrowding in prisons” and “strengthen the social fabric by mainstreaming estranged individuals who are in conflict with the law”, to quote Kalpesh Satyendra Jhaveri, executive chairperson of the authority, who commissioned the report. He is now the chief justice of the Odisha High Court.

‘Not a threat to society’
Consider this scenario: A man’s daughter is raped. The man murders the rapist to avenge the crime. He is put in jail to serve a life sentence. The man is a murderer alright, but to what extent is he a threat to society now that he has no motive to kill?

Very low, according to prison researcher Smita Chakraburtty: “Seeing all prisoners through the same lens doesn’t help use the limited funds available for prisons judiciously.”

Or, consider how Kalu landed up in jail: “I squabbled with a man over a piece of land,” he told IndiaSpend. “I had a piece of wood in my hand, so did the man I murdered, we were beating each other,” said the native of Ghosunda village, in Chittorgarh tehsil of Rajasthan.
In the scuffle, the opponent got hit on the head and died, and Kalu became a murderer. “I hadn’t planned on killing the man,” Kalu said.


Kalu Tulsiram, 35, was imprisoned after a squabble with a man over a piece of land led to the latter’s death. Such accidental or unplanned murderers constituted 57% (244) of the 428 prisoners that researcher Smita Chakraburtty met during her visits to 15 of 29 open prisons in Rajasthan.

Such accidental or unplanned murderers constituted 57% (244) of the 428 prisoners Chakraburtty met during her visits to 15 of 29 open prisons in Rajasthan. She spoke to 90% of the inmates, except those out on work during her visit, so the 57% figure is fairly representative. Eighty-one percent (347 of 428) of the prisoners were also first-time offenders, with no previous police record.

This situation is mirrored in prisons across the country. Habitual offenders or ‘recidivists’ accounted for 3% of the 186,566 convicts admitted in prisons across the country during 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) prison statistics for that year.

“Repeat offenders are the ones with real ‘criminal minds’, who pose a threat to society and hence must be kept in closed jails, but they are also the ones who need reform and rehabilitation the most,” Udaipur Central Jail superintendent Surendra Singh told IndiaSpend.


“Repeat offenders are the ones with real ‘criminal minds’, who pose a threat to society and hence must be kept in closed jails,” Udaipur Central Jail superintendent Surendra Singh said. Habitual offenders or ‘recidivists’ accounted for 3% of the 186,566 convicts admitted in prisons across the country during 2015, government data show.

Often, people are incarcerated merely due to lack of awareness of the law, Chakraburtty said, citing as an example people imprisoned in Rajasthan for possession of opium. This reflects a lack of understanding of the nature of their offence, she said, “Because their communities have had access to opium since time immemorial, and they have no idea of the prevailing laws.”

The possession of any narcotic is a non-bailable offence under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985. However, the cultivation of opium is permitted, under license, in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Apart from offenders who are psychopaths or who have performed exceptionally brutal crimes, most prisoners do not need to be removed from society, Chakraburtty said. They need to be watched over, made aware of their crime and rehabilitated.

“Justice is not revenge. It has to work for the victim as much as for the perpetrator,” Chakraburtty said, “If society responds with more violence, the prisoner develops vengeance for society and comes out hardened. If we ignore a prisoner’s need to earn a livelihood for his family, a man could enter the prison as a rapist and leave as a gangster.”

Open jails and prisoner behaviour
At Udaipur’s open air camp for prisoners (open prison for short), a roll-call each morning and evening keeps a count of the prisoners.

Overall, 1 in 45 prisoners in Rajasthan’s open prisons absconded from parole or escaped, while the all-India figure for closed prisons is 1 in 481, as per 2015 prison data. Chakraburtty’s report attributed most of the escapes from open prisons to “problems related to procuring parole and remission”–in other words, due to prisoners’ failure to furnish a bail bond, or due to adverse reports by police personnel willing to err on the side of caution.

“Administrative issues regarding parole are a common problem in prisons across India, and should be addressed,” said R.K. Saxena, former inspector general of prisons, Rajasthan, and the director of the 1982-83 Justice Mulla Committee on Prison Reforms. “Parole is a prisoners’ right, a conditional release and an opportunity for prisoners to assimilate into society.”

The report made several suggestions that would improve parole administration and thereby lower the number of prisoners recorded as having escaped. These are: Reducing the bond amount; encouraging personal bonds instead of requiring guarantors (unless a prisoner misbehaves); considering a prisoner’s behaviour alone based on social welfare department statements instead of police reports for the second parole onwards.

The police, on their part, could be sensitised on the role of open prisons in prisoner reform so that they make unbiased investigation reports when parole applications come up.

“A proactive approach in addressing the rights of prisoners is much needed,” said Ajay Chopra, an artist and social worker who was imprisoned in 2017 on corruption charges but was released on bail after three months. He now campaigns for greater acceptance of open prisons, especially after the Supreme Court’s endorsement. “A positive mindset towards prisoners is essential for prisoner reform,” he said.

Prisoners in Rajasthan’s open prisons have generally conducted themselves well, Chakraburtty told IndiaSpend. “Open jails in Rajasthan are doing something very right,” said Chakraburtty, a leading prison researcher and honorary prison commissioner for the aforementioned report, “Prison authorities have actually had to evict open jail inmates who asked for extensions after they had served their sentence because their children’s exams were approaching or because they were receiving decent medical care as convicts.”

In conversation with IndiaSpend, Kalu and Deepak, who are among 24 prisoners currently lodged in the Udaipur open prison, emphasised that a life of crime was far from their minds.

“Hotel business” is how Kalu described his tea stall work, something he said he wanted to continue doing after he was freed.

“I’d like to live in peace and work,” said Deepak about his plans after his prison term.

Segmenting by threat level
Rajasthan’s open prison system is considered a best practice in prisoners’ welfare and rehabilitation in the NCRB’s 2015 prison statistics. It has been acclaimed for “facilitating social adjustment and financial independence” of prisoners before their final release. Eligibility typically extends to “prisoners who have completed their one third part of total sentence and whose conduct in the jail was found good”, subject to the “recommendation of the committee formed by the State government,” the compilation notes.

Chakraburtty has proposed expanding the open prison network across the country to make it the norm instead of the exception, particularly for female prisoners; aged and physically infirm prisoners; people convicted for one-time offences, accidental offences, petty offences and those categorised as low risk for not showing any violent trait in prison; accused persons who surrendered; and prisoners undergoing extradition requests.

While the existing system provides for only convicted prisoners to be kept in open prisons, Chakraburtty has also recommended extending the facility to undertrials–who account for two in three people in prison in India today–to significantly lower overcrowding and inhuman living conditions in prisons.

But not everyone agrees with this idea.

“A person is denied bail and sent to judicial custody only when a magistrate has applied his mind and assessed that if not incarcerated, the evidence may be tampered [with] or investigation hampered, or there is a flight risk, thus disabling the trial process,” said Sugandha Mathur, senior programme officer for the prison reforms programme at the Delhi-based advocacy, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. “If none of these reasons exist, an accused should be released on bail to uphold their right to liberty,” she said, implying that basically, if the circumstances warrant bail, the undertrial should be freed, and if not, the prisoner should be put behind bars and not in an open prison.

Mathur is a member of the sub-committee convened by the Bureau of Police Research and Development in February 2018 to draft the Model Uniform Rules for the Administration of Open Correctional Institutions.

Economic sense, societal benefit
India has 63 open jails with a capacity of 5,370, enough to house 1.28% of the 419,623 prisoners across the country. However, 30% of their seats are unutilised, the Hindustan Times reported on December 12, 2017.

While Rajasthan tops with 29 open prisons, Maharashtra has 13, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have three each, and Gujarat and West Bengal have two each, according to Prison Statistics 2015.

The Rajasthan report advocated opening two open prisons per district because they are better suited to prisoner reform and pose less of a financial burden on the state. By comparing monthly spending on prisoners, it showed that Jaipur’s Central Jail was 14 times as expensive as its open prison in Sanganer town.

The report also recommended making legal aid and health services available to open prisoners and helping them get gainful employment by negotiating working hours with potential employers to facilitate their timely return to the camp. Keeping prisoners in their home district and improving the remuneration for those employed on state farms and facilities were some other recommendations.

“You can’t put people in prison and expect them to come out as Gandhi after seven (or however many) years unless the system is conducive to reform, which the existing closed prison system isn’t by any measure,” Chakraburtty told IndiaSpend, adding, “Open prisons should become the norm, the prisons of the future.”

Why prison reform is needed urgently
The fact remains that overcrowding is a pressing issue involving the “violation of human rights”, to quote the Supreme Court.

In 2015, the prison occupancy rate exceeded 200% in Dadra and Nagar Haveli (276.7%), Chhattisgarh (233.9%) and Delhi (226.9%), according to NCRB data. Prisons in another 13 states were full beyond capacity.


Source: Prison Statistics 2015, National Crime Records Bureau
In a recent TEDx talk, Chakraburtty, who has interacted with 30,070 prisoners lodged in closed jails in Bihar, described prisons so overcrowded that inmates tied themselves to the bars to sleep because there was no space to lie down.

Adopting the concept of open prisons–or “semi-open prisons” where eligible convicts could be allowed to work within the jail premises during the day, or in a factory after making special arrangements for their secured transport, which Mathur proposed–would free up scarce resources, in terms of funds as well as staff.

The Jaipur Central Jail spends 14 times as much as the Sanganer open prison–Rs 7,094 as against Rs 500–on each prisoner each month, Chakraburtty’s report said.

In the Sanganer open prison, Rajasthan’s largest with a capacity of 400, one staff-person manages 80 prisoners while in Jaipur Central Jail, one manages six prisoners (the recommended number is one staff for four prisoners), Chakraburtty recorded.
Staff shortages are a reality across prisons. In Rajasthan, of the 4,426 sanctioned jail department staff positions, nearly half or 2,129 are vacant.

“We’re managing roughly 1,250 prisoners with 155 guards today, while in the 1970s we had 165 guards to manage 250 prisoners,” said Singh of Udaipur Central Jail.


Staff shortages are a reality across prisons. “We’re managing roughly 1,250 prisoners with 155 guards today, while in the 1970s we had 165 guards to manage 250 prisoners,” said Surendra Singh, superintendent of Udaipur Central Jail.

Having more open jails would enable better management of closed prisons too.

“If only every state could set time guidelines for parole applications to be processed, and make prisoners aware of these rights and actively implement them, possibly fewer prisoners would abscond from parole and make open prisons a stronger proposition in prisoner reform,” Mathur said.

*The prisoners were introduced by their first name and their father’s name, as is prison convention in Rajasthan.

(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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India Can Double Its Per Capita GDP In 30 Years By Turning More Secular: Study https://sabrangindia.in/india-can-double-its-capita-gdp-30-years-turning-more-secular-study/ Sat, 18 Aug 2018 06:15:50 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/08/18/india-can-double-its-capita-gdp-30-years-turning-more-secular-study/ If India discards religious beliefs that perpetuate caste and gender inequalities, it could more than double its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth of the last 60 years in half the time, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of a new study.   Secularisation precedes economic development and not the other way around as is […]

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If India discards religious beliefs that perpetuate caste and gender inequalities, it could more than double its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth of the last 60 years in half the time, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of a new study.

India Religion_620
 
Secularisation precedes economic development and not the other way around as is commonly believed, said the study, Religious Change Preceded Economic Change In The 20th Century, published in the journal Science Advances. The study used data from the World Values Survey, which mapped people’s changing values and beliefs, to estimate the importance of religion in the 20th (1900-2000) century.
 
India stood 66th among 109 nations ranked by secularisation. China was first, Pakistan 99th, Bangladesh 104th and Ghana last.
 
India’s per capita GDP per annum grew 26 times between 1958 and 2018. “This increase could have been higher if Indians were less rigid in their religious views,” co-author Damian Ruck, a post-doctoral researcher at the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, University of Bristol, told IndiaSpend.
 
What are the dominant religious beliefs that could be holding back India’s growth from reaching its maximum potential? IndiaSpend research found that these relate to the two most vulnerable social groups in India — women and marginalised castes.
 
Both groups are allowed to play a limited role in India’s economy. Consider caste: The proportion of scheduled-caste individuals in the lowest wealth bracket was close to thrice that in other castes — 26.6% as against 9.7% — according to the National Family Health Survey 2015-16 (NFHS-4), as IndiaSpend reported in February 2018.
 
Social and cultural factors restrict women from working outside their homes in India, IndiaSpend reported in this nation-wide investigation. At just 27%, India’s female workforce participation is amongst the lowest in South Asia. Between 2004-5 and 2011-12, the year of the last census, 19.6 Indian million women left their jobs, according to an April 2017 World Bank report.
 
India’s secularisation (and its tolerance rank, 69th) would suggest that its per capita GDP per annum should be higher than it actually is. “Our model thinks that India should be around Rs 457,015 ($6500) per person richer than it actually is,” said Ruck. “What this suggests is something else is holding back the Indian economy but that is for Indian specialists to analyse.”
 
But India would still stand to benefit considerably from increased levels of secularisation, estimated the author. “If India were to reach secularisation levels seen in western Europe (like Germany, which was ranked 6th of 109 nations), then it could expect to see a Rs 70,175 ($1,000) increase in per capita GDP over 10 years, Rs 196,490 ($2,800) over 20 years and Rs 350,875 ($5,000) over 30 years,” said Ruck.
 
To put this in perspective, India’s per capita GDP increased 2682% by Rs 133,613 ($1904) over the last 60 years, from Rs 4,982 ($71) in 1958 to Rs 138,595 ($1975) in 2018.
 
China, whose development India aims to emulate, has been ranked first in secularisation. The US, a developed country where hate crimes in the 10 largest cities touched a decadal high in 2017, stood 57th.
 
It needs to be noted that the study, jointly conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of Tennessee in US, did not establish that an increase in secularisation drives economic activity. It only established that secularisation precedes high growth. It did, however, rule out the belief that religion loses its importance once material development begins to satisfy the needs of a society.
 
Why Indian economists can’t ignore links between economy, religion
 
In India, religion has not lost its place in society though the country has seen economic development: More than 90% respondents rated religion as “very important” or “rather important” in the latest round of the World Values Survey.
 
India and Kyrgyzstan are the only two nations where the percentage of people who considered religion an important part of their lives grew by over 10 points over the decade through to 2014, with India logging 12.1% growth, from 79.2% to 91.3%, according to the survey.
 
A key takeaway of the new study is that policy makers looking to boost economic growth, particularly inclusive economic development—a stated aim of the incumbent central government–need to consider the linkages between religious thought and economy.
 
“Economic theory tells us that a competitive environment–one without different types of stratification, of markets–produces the best possible outcomes for consumers and society,” said Amaresh Dubey, a professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. “But by precluding a huge section of the population, women and scheduled caste people, from equal access to resources such as capital and know-how, in India, religion majorly impedes economic activity.”
 
Women are, in large part, low-skilled informal workers in India, engaged in work that requires low productivity and offers low pay, as IndiaSpend reported in March 2018. The inequality between what men and women earn in India is far worse than gender skews in pay noticed in South Africa, Brazil and Chile, if we consider the gender gap in median earnings of full-time employees.
 
Caste is another divisive factor in development. Scheduled-caste individuals are among India’s poorest people, as we said. “Caste, kinship or family, either or all these can hamper economic progress if they impose restrictions,” said Andre Beteille, professor emeritus, department of sociology at the University of Delhi.
 
But sociologists see a problem: Initiatives to get India’s women and scheduled castes better access to resources could boost overall economic activity and promote individual well-being, but they are unlikely to change their social status, according to Dubey. Casteism is so deeply entrenched in India that even scheduled caste converts to Islam and Christianity continue to carry their dalit status, he said.
 
“As religions go, Islam and Christianity do not practice caste segregation but we see dalit converts call themselves dalit Christians and scheduled caste Muslims,” he said.
 
Development will be ‘short-term’ in times of communal strife
 
India’s per capita GDP has trended upwards since 2014, according to the United Nations’ World Happiness Index 2018, IndiaSpend reported in May 2018.
 
India also saw rising intolerance in this period, available data show. The year 2017 recorded the highest death toll (11 deaths) and the most number of incidents of hate violence (37 incidents) related to cows and religion since 2010, according to an IndiaSpend database that records cow-related hate crime.
 
Does this simultaneous increase in the annual per capita GDP and the decline in secular values defy the findings of the new study?
 
Apparently not. “What we measured are the slow changes in public opinion on secularisation and tolerance that occur over many decades as new generations replace older ones,” explained Ruck.
 
Nations can see a rapid increase in intolerance over the short-term but it can be associated with different forces influencing public opinion, he said. The scholar described these as “period effects”.
 
“In the current political climate, prominent identity qualifiers such as caste, religion and gender are being stoked for short-term gains, creating negative emotions of distrust, hate, prejudices and so on against the ‘other’,” IndiaSpend reported in May 2018.
 
But “rapid changes are not linked to sustained economic development and tend to be temporary and average out over time”, said Ruck.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Climate Change Crisis: Why Fatuhi Khera In Punjab Changed From Cotton To Rice https://sabrangindia.in/climate-change-crisis-why-fatuhi-khera-punjab-changed-cotton-rice/ Sat, 14 Jul 2018 07:07:26 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/07/14/climate-change-crisis-why-fatuhi-khera-punjab-changed-cotton-rice/ Mount Abu: Harsimranjit Brar, 26, has an unforgettable childhood memory of his family’s fields in Fatuhi Khera, a village in Punjab’s Sri Muktsar Sahib district. Just before harvest, it would be a sea of white fluff. Brar’s father, a seasoned farmer, used to cultivate cotton on a 40-acre plot every kharif (monsoon) season.   In […]

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Mount Abu: Harsimranjit Brar, 26, has an unforgettable childhood memory of his family’s fields in Fatuhi Khera, a village in Punjab’s Sri Muktsar Sahib district. Just before harvest, it would be a sea of white fluff. Brar’s father, a seasoned farmer, used to cultivate cotton on a 40-acre plot every kharif (monsoon) season.

 

Fatuhi Khera_Punjab_620
In Fatuhi Khera, Punjab, crop losses following a deluge in 2009 prompted a switch from growing cotton to paddy in 75% of the acreage that was earlier under cotton. Since paddy withstands water logging better than cotton, farmers see its cultivation as a means to protect their income against losses emanating from excessive rainfall during the monsoon.
 
All that changed after a deluge in 2009 submerged their land under 4-5 feet of water, wiping out their cotton crop, recalled Brar, now an inspector with the Punjab Agro Foodgrains Corporation Limited. Three days of rain damaged the cotton crop in 60-70 villages of the around 238 villages in the district.
 
It took months for the standing water to percolate into the saturated ground. “The damage to our land was so substantial that it washed out the possibility of growing any crops in 2010,” he said.
 
To avoid a repeat of the disaster, in 2011, Brar’s father and elder brother decided to grow paddy–parmal, as it is called in Punjab–on 9 acres of their land because paddy can withstand water-logging.
 
The family has now switched to paddy on 38 of 40 acres. In the district itself, 75% of the acreage dedicated to cotton is now used for paddy, Brar reckoned.
 
“Monsoon rainfall used to be spread across the season but we had started to see more downpours followed by dry spells,” Brar said. “Downpours invariably led to water-logging. We strongly felt we needed to de-risk our income.”
 
The farmers of Sri Muktsar district chose to play it safe; elsewhere farmers might choose to deal with climate change differently. In semi-arid regions, for example, “farmers adopt more risky cash crops such as cotton instead of more resilient dryland cereals or pulses, in the anticipation of higher returns but at a very high risk of failure”, said Anthony Whitbread, a research programme director at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
 
ICRISAT_620
To withstand climate change, farmers need adequate support by way of know-how and practical assistance for adoption of drought- or heat-tolerant crop varieties (cultivars), soil and water conservation technologies, said Anthony Whitbread, a research programme director at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
 
For instance, this 2010 ICRISAT study examined a change in the cropping pattern in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra–from cereal crops (except maize) to pulses and other cash crops such as sugarcane and cotton.
 
India is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change. It has increased the frequency of downpours as well as the gaps between rainy days during the monsoon, as IndiaSpend reported in January 2018 and February 2018.
 
Extreme rainfall shocks could reduce farmer incomes in the kharif and rabi seasons by 13.7% and 5.5%, according to the Economic Survey, 2017-18. To reduce the impact of these shocks and to double farmer incomes, as the government wants to, the following are vital, according to Whitbread: “adequate support by way of know-how and practical assistance for adoption of drought- or heat-tolerant crop varieties (cultivars), soil and water conservation technologies, changing sowing dates and so on”.
 
Farmers’ observations mirror scientific predictions about climate change
 
In Punjab, 97% of the agricultural land is irrigated while in Madhya Pradesh, this percentage stands at 40%, leaving farmers more vulnerable to fluctuations in the monsoon. Despite this, farmers in both states have felt the effect of climate change.
 
Over three-quarters of the 150 paddy farmers in Punjab were sure that climate patterns have changed, Brar found in a 2016 survey he conducted for his master of science (MSc) degree in five districts–Hoshiarpur, Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar, Ludhiana, Faridkot and Sri Muktsar Sahib. This covered the the north-east, south-west and central parts of the state.
 
One in five farmers in the study was somewhat sure that climate change had happened. However, they differed on how it manifested. Eight in 10 farmers believed climate change had raised temperatures, seven thought the rainfall pattern had changed, four felt a rise in air pollution, nearly four perceived a fluctuation in the hours of sunshine, two thought droughts had become more frequent and less than one believed that floods occurred too frequently.
 
A couple of these observations match scientists’ predictions for climate change in the coming decades, as we will see in the following sections.
 
Arid pockets of western India may see increased rainfall
 
Between now and 2050, India is likely to see an increase in the baseline mean, minimum as well as maximum temperatures and these could have a warming effect that could raise sea levels, said Whitbread.
 
By the 2050s, some regions of India are likely to see more rainfall, in contrast to the African continent that is getting drier, he added. These predictions are based on 20 general circulation models, climate models simulating the future change in precipitation and temperature around the world. The highest increase in rainfall by 2050 is predicted in the arid western parts of India while the south and parts of the Gangetic plain bordering Nepal may see moderate increases.
 
However, this prediction comes with a rider: “Large uncertainties exist in quantifying precipitation changes,” said Whitbread. “Rainfall during the monsoon months will be uncertain; rainfall could be inadequate after the onset of the monsoon or involve pronounced dry periods juxtaposed against heavy spells. Since the number of rainy days is not projected to correspondingly increase, India could see more extreme events.”
 
There is little advice on how to adapt: Farmers
 
Jabalpur district in Madhya Pradesh has the largest area of rainfed agricultural land in the state–235,058 hectares. In its Shahpura block, where 45,274 hectares of the land is rainfed, seven in 10 farmers listed the lack of knowledge about ways to mitigate the effects of climate change as their biggest challenge, in a 2015 survey conducted by Amrita Singh, a student of Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, Jabalpur, for her MSc degree.
 
All the farmers featured in the survey were aware that they should delay the sowing of the kharif crop because monsoon now tends to start late. About eight in 10 had some idea of measures such as ensuring adequate drainage and avoiding the use of fertiliser during heavy rainfall to avoid nutrients leaching into groundwater. Six in 10 farmers were aware that selecting a suitable cropping pattern could help deal with the current vagaries of nature.
 
While farmers in Shahpura acknowledged that government and non-government bodies were holding agricultural extension activities to equip farmers with information about dealing with climate change, more than half complained about the non-availability of information in local languages. This plea for information is universal.
 
Brar is of the opinion that technical know-how is sparse and what is being shared is not customised. “Drafting an advisory for a state or large region ignores the fact that the characteristics of land differ from area to area,” he said.
 
“We need to strengthen the agro advisories covering market information and other know-how being circulated to farmers,” agreed Anil Sharma, assistant director (TV and radio) of the Centre for Communication & International Linkages, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. He suggested the use of the internet to disseminate the advisories because rural Punjab is net-savvy.
 
Farmers need better seeds to cope with climate change
 
Left to their own resources to adapt to climate change, nine in 10 paddy farmers Brar surveyed in Punjab had switched to growing shorter duration varieties of crops while eight were relying on the weather forecast–these are two of the most popular measures. Less than one in 10 farmers had opted to change their cropping pattern, a potential outcome of climate change with drastic implications. If farmers switch en masse from a food crop to a cash crop, the quantity and variety of food available to the country would be adversely impacted.
 
More than half the respondents wanted the government to develop crop varieties that are insect- and disease-resistant; close to half wanted varieties that are resistant to water logging and almost a third wanted varieties that could cope with temperature variations and water stress.
 
Indian scientists have developed drought- and heat-tolerant varieties of certain crops but farmers don’t seem to be aware of all that is available.
 
Harsimranjit Brar_620
Harsimranjit Brar, from a farming family in Sri Muktsar Sahib, Punjab, feels that farmers need more technical know-how on climate relevant to their situation. State-wise or regional advisories ignore the fact that the characteristics of land differ from area to area.
 
For instance, ICRISAT has developed the ICGV 91114, a strain of groundnut with better drought tolerance, that has been shown to increase pod yield by 23%, net income by 36% and reduce yield variability by 30%, in a farm impact study conducted in 2011 in Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh.
 
In 2016, the Odisha State Seed Certification Limited procured about 54 tons of the ICGV 91114 from the seed-producing farmers in four districts to distribute to other farmers in the subsequent season. Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka also produce the ICGV 91114 seed for distribution to farmers. But this is still little considering that the top five groundnut producing states in 2015-16 were Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
 
“Apart from low awareness, diffusion of our new technologies in farmers’ field is slow because of the non-availability of seeds in the market,” Swamikannu Nedumaran, a senior scientist with ICRISAT told IndiaSpend. He believes that this is due to the limited attention paid to developing and distributing seeds for dryland crops and promoting them through price support. 
 
Dryland crops are a traditional source of income for thousands of small farmers in rainfed regions. “There is much more focus across the country on the major food crops such as paddy, wheat and maize,” said Nedumaran.
 
Poor access to technology compelling small farmers to switch crops
 
In Madhya Pradesh, soybean covers 45% of the state’s total cropped area during the monsoon. This was the case in Raisen and Hoshangabad districts too, till a few years ago.
 
Of late, frequent and heavy monsoon rains in the two low-lying districts have caused crop failures and prompted a shift from soybean and pulses to paddy, said Nalin Khare, professor and head, Agricultural Extension, Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, Jabalpur.
 
“Water stagnation from unpredictable rainfall affects soybean more than paddy,” he said.
 
Soybean became a favourite crop of farmers “mainly because of [its] short duration (90-105 days) with high net return”, reads the 2015-16 Annual Report of the directorate of pulses development, Bhopal, a body under the ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare.
 
However, the report tells us that “soybean production was more drastically declined during kharif 2015 due to excess rains at vegetative phase [the period of growth between germination and flowering], long dry spell at seed filling stage [when the seed develops in the pod] and infestation of yellow mosaic virus [a viral disease affecting plants] and other insect pest”.
 
In certain districts, the soybean crop loss in 2015 was 60-70%.
 
During agricultural extension activities in Madhya Pradesh, farmers have been taught how to use the ridge and furrow method and raised bed system to protect the soybean crop from heavy rain, Purushottam Sharma, a senior scientist (Agricultural Economics) with the Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore, told IndiaSpend.
 
The state government is trying to make available the required tools for this system through professionally-run hiring centres established for the purpose. “But as the reach of these hiring centres is limited, far-flung farmers are still deprived, keeping the adoption of these protective methods low,” he said.
 
Brar is grateful for the government subsidies farmers in Sri Muktsar Sahib received a few years ago to bore tubewells. “A tubewell priced at Rs 100,000 to install cost us only Rs 9,000,” he said. However, he acknowledged that this benefit has not been extended to all the needy farmers, many of who cannot afford electricity.
 
Sri Muktsar Sahib_620
Harsimranjit Brar’s family in Sri Muktsar Sahib, Punjab, is grateful for the government subsidies that reduced the cost of a tubewell from Rs 100,000 to Rs 9,000. However, he acknowledged that this benefit has not been extended to all the needy farmers, many of whom cannot afford electricity.
 
Why India can’t delay developing and implementing climate change strategies
 
Globally, climate change has already extended the growing season in some middle and higher latitude areas that were earlier too cold for the cultivation of most crops, such as the northern precincts of Russia, according to this 2013 study published in the journal Economics. In contrast, Southern Russia, one of the world’s breadbaskets, would suffer a decline in wheat yield as the climate becomes drier, it predicted.
 
Russia’s bumper wheat harvest in recent years is partly attributable to record temperatures boosting yields, this April 2018 Bloomberg report noted.
 
In India, while agriculture in parts of the country might benefit from the 5% to 20% increase in rainfall expected by the 2050s, the adverse effect of rising temperatures across the country and the mixed effect of rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would also need to be factored into future plans.
 
The combined impact of precipitation, temperature and carbon dioxide will depend on the crop variety grown, crop management practices and location, said Nedumaran.
 
ICRISAT crop simulation models of the impact of climate change suggest that maize, sorghum and groundnut yields may increase due to higher rainfall, but rising temperature will decrease the yield of crops, especially rabi (cool) season crops such as chickpea, particularly in south India.
 
Gram, soybean, onion and castor could benefit from the higher atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, while rice, wheat, maize and sorghum could see a decline in yield, according to a recent modelling study.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Lessons From Rajasthan For India’s Latest Universal Health Coverage Programme https://sabrangindia.in/lessons-rajasthan-indias-latest-universal-health-coverage-programme/ Fri, 08 Jun 2018 05:06:37 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/06/08/lessons-rajasthan-indias-latest-universal-health-coverage-programme/ Mount Abu, Rajasthan: Rambha Prajapati, 54, a resident of Mount Abu in Rajasthan’s southern district of Sirohi, has kidney disease. She needs regular dialysis, a life-saving procedure without which she would succumb to bodily toxins that her kidneys cannot eliminate. Rambha Prajapati, 54, is grateful for the Rajasthan government’s Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana for having […]

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Mount Abu, Rajasthan: Rambha Prajapati, 54, a resident of Mount Abu in Rajasthan’s southern district of Sirohi, has kidney disease. She needs regular dialysis, a life-saving procedure without which she would succumb to bodily toxins that her kidneys cannot eliminate.

Rambha Prajapati_620
Rambha Prajapati, 54, is grateful for the Rajasthan government’s Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana for having saved her the recurring cost of dialysis, a procedure she needs twice weekly. Since seven in 10 Indians have no health insurance and government hospitals have limitations, even poor Indians are left with no option but to pay for treatment at private hospitals. Ayushman Bharat, the central government’s new universal health coverage programme, must aim to reduce this burden.
 
The community health centre in Mount Abu has no dialysis facility, so twice a week she visits a private hospital, where she presents her Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (Bhamashah Health Insurance Scheme, BSBY) card and photo identification to undergo dialysis at no charge.
 
“When I fell very sick last August, I was saved by this hospital,” a visibly moved Prajapati told IndiaSpend on a recent May day, recollecting the bout of illness that had led to her kidney failure diagnosis.
 
Free treatment under the BSBY scheme, named after Bhama Shah, a fabled general and minister in the erstwhile kingdom of Mewar, has won the Rajasthan government Prajapati’s gratitude for sparing her the recurrent health expenses that would have pushed her family deeper into poverty. Widowed some years ago, Prajapati and her son live on the latter’s income of Rs 9,000 a month from working in a small shop during the day and offering tuition in the evening.
 
Without BSBY, Prajapati’s story would have mirrored that of seven in 10 Indians who seek outpatient and inpatient care from private hospitals when they fall sick because the government health infrastructure falls short. Without insurance, they end up paying from their own means (hence, “out-of-pocket” expenditure). Serious or chronic diseases that entail high expenditure push them into deep poverty–health-related expenses accounted for nearly 7% of Indian households that fell below the poverty line between 2004 and 2014, this Brookings India research paper, based on National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) figures, said.
 
As many as 52.5 million Indians were impoverished due to health costs in 2011 alone–almost half of the world’s population impoverished annually–FactChecker reported in December 2017.
 
Previous schemes unsuccessful
 
Recognising the imperative to protect India’s poor and vulnerable, the central government announced Ayushman Bharat, a programme covering primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare, in February 2018.
 
The programme aims to provide free essential drugs and diagnostic services for illnesses that do not necessitate hospitalisation (outpatient care) through 150,000 health & wellness centres, as well as an insurance cover of upto Rs 5 lakh per year per beneficiary family for hospitalisation (inpatient care), both secondary and tertiary care.
 
Ayushman Bharat is expected to take India towards universal health coverage, the situation when “all people obtain the health services they need without suffering financial hardship when paying for them”, to quote the World Health Organization.
 
To cover more than 107 million poor and vulnerable families, or about 40% of India’s population, the government claims that Ayushman Bharat will be the world’s largest government-funded health protection programme, and will have “a major impact on reducing out-of-pocket expenditure on health”.
 
How would Ayushman Bharat be different from previous government-funded health insurance schemes? Several such schemes have been launched since 2007, both at the state level–such as the Rajiv Aarogyasri Health Insurance Scheme in Andhra Pradesh and the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana in Maharashtra–and at the Centre, namely, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).
 
None of these has significantly reduced out-of-pocket expenditure on health, this 2017 PLOS One study and this 2017 study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine show.
 
Previous inpatient schemes have led to more people utilising the services made available, but have failed to reduce the out-of-pocket burden of people, agreed Shamika Ravi, director of research at Brookings India and a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India.
 
The lack of support for outpatient care, insufficient coverage and the inaccessibility of empanelled hospitals for rural residents have been blamed for the failure of earlier schemes, the PLOS One study noted.
 
One state government scheme that stands out from others is Rajasthan’s Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (BSBY), launched in 2015, which was designed to avoid the shortcomings of earlier schemes. IndiaSpend visited a private hospital in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, to see what BSBY has got right.
 
Outpatient spending on medicines high
 
While the private sector provides 75% of outpatient care and 55% of inpatient care in India, it is outpatient care that accounts for 75% of the out-of-pocket expenditure on health, as per the Brookings India research paper cited before. Of this, NSSO 2014 data show, 72% of all health expenditure in rural areas and 68% in urban areas is on buying medicines for non-hospitalised treatment.
 
“People’s health burden mostly arises from the purchase of medicines for frequent illnesses (such as colds, coughs and fevers) which are mostly preventable and do not need hospitalisation, and from spending on managing chronic diseases,” Chhaya Pachauli, a public health activist associated with the Rajasthan-based NGOs Prayas and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, told IndiaSpend.
 
To plug this gap, in October 2011, the Rajasthan government launched the Mukhyamantri Nishulk Dawa Yojana (Chief Minister’s Free Medicine Scheme) to provide free essential medicines to all, and in April 2013, the Mukhyamantri Nishulk Jaanch Yojana (Chief Minister’s Free Investigation Scheme) to provide free basic diagnostics.
 
Then, during the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17), the Rajasthan government expanded its primary healthcare infrastructure on a war footing. As a result, today Rajasthan has more health sub-centres (the first point of contact between the primary healthcare system and the community), primary health centres (PHCs, the first point of contact between the community and the medical officer), and community health centres (CHCs, referral centres for four primary health centres staffed by four medical specialists–a surgeon, physician, gynaecologist and paediatrician each) than the minimum recommended by the government for the rural population.


 
This seems to have worked. Nearly 80% more people accessed government health infrastructure in Rajasthan in 2016 as in 2013–eight million per month as against 4.4 million, as per a September 2017 presentation by the Rajasthan Medical Services Corporation. The government attributes this to the free medicine scheme.
 
However, although distributing free medicines has increased the government’s per capita health expenditure eight-fold from Rs 5.70 to close to Rs 50, the impact of this spending on beneficiaries is yet to be formally evaluated.
 
Anecdotal evidence is mixed. “Overall the free medicine scheme is useful for poor patients who cannot afford to buy them,” said Nishtha Singh, a respiratory diseases specialist with the Indian Asthma Care Society, Jaipur, which procures medicines at a low cost for free distribution to the needy. “Our only concern is some of the drugs we buy from the government for distribution to asthma patients are of inferior quality,” she said.
 
At another Jaipur charity, a hospital which also procures low-cost generics from the government for free distribution to needy patients, Anil Maheshwari, the medical convener, was of the opinion that “the free medicine scheme hasn’t made as big an impact as it could have because doctors tend to prescribe branded formulations apart from the generic medicines the government provides”.
 
There were 605 medicines in the essential drugs list for medical college hospitals in August 2017, 525 for district hospitals, 446 for CHCs, 242 for PHCs and 33 for sub-centres, the Rajasthan Medical Services Corporation presentation said.
 
Staff at government health centres inadequate
 
While there is no denying that the carrot of free medicines and free diagnostics has attracted more patients to the government health sector, some patients still shy away from government hospitals believing they are short-staffed and offer poor quality of service.
 
When Bachchi Babu Ram, 54, had a fall a few weeks ago, she travelled to Palanpur town in Gujarat, 50 km from her village on the outskirts of Abu Road, to have an X-ray taken and consult a private practitioner. At the private hospital in Mount Abu where she was later admitted for surgery for a fractured femur in April, she told IndiaSpend she believed the local CHC was short of doctors and offered poor quality of service. “Patients just lie about, nobody cares,” she said of the government hospital in Abu Road.
 
Bacchi Babu Ram_620

When Bachchi Babu Ram, needed surgery for a fractured femur, she got admitted to a private hospital enlisted with the Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana. She told IndiaSpend she believed the local community health centre was short of doctors and offered poor quality of service. In fact, 11% posts of senior specialist, 37% of junior specialist, 31% of senior medical officer, and 27% of medical officer were vacant in Rajasthan as of March 2018, as per government statistics.
 
As of March 2018 in Rajasthan, 15% of sanctioned posts for auxiliary nurse-midwife (village-level female health worker), 28% posts of grade-1 nurse, 11% posts of senior specialist, 37% of junior specialist, 31% of senior medical officer, and 27% of medical officer, were vacant, according to health department data shared with IndiaSpend.


 
Such shortages are common, particularly in rural areas. Across India, 7% of PHCs were functioning without a doctor as on March 31, 2017, according to government data. The shortfall of specialists in CHCs was 81% and of radiographers, 64%. CHCs and PHCs together had a 22% shortfall of pharmacists and a 40% shortfall of laboratory technicians.
 
“Finding doctors and nurses willing to serve in rural India is challenging,” Prem Singh, State Nodal Officer at the Rajasthan unit of the National Health Mission, told IndiaSpend.
 
“For one, the rural and small town lifestyle puts off people, everyone wants the amenities associated with city living, and secondly, qualified doctors and specialists find jobs in the private sector in cities more academically and economically rewarding than running a simple practice in rural India,” Singh said.
 
As the Centre prepares to provide free medicine and diagnostics under Ayushman Bharat, finding the staff for that health network will be critical.
 
Singh suggested the government will bridge this gap by creating a new cadre of health professionals consisting of ayurveda doctors and nurses specially trained in preventive, promotive and curative care. “We must empower these trained personnel by giving them the right to prescribe, distribute and administer medicines that are most likely to be useful in rural areas,” Singh said.
 
However, when health minister J.P. Nadda introduced a bill in parliament to allow doctors from alternative streams of medicine such as ayurveda and homoeopathy to practice allopathy after clearing a bridge course, there was a backlash. Among the bill’s opponents were the Indian Medical Association, the professional association of allopathy doctors in the country, and many experts as this April 2018 report in The Quint noted.
 
Adequate health cover essential
 
RSBY, the first national health insurance scheme, covered households for expenses of up to Rs 30,000 per year, far too little to pay the cost of treating serious illnesses such as cancer.
 
Rajasthan’s BSBY was designed to plug the weaknesses of earlier state-subsidised health schemes, Naveen Jain, secretary at Rajasthan’s health department, who is also mission director of the National Health Mission, Rajasthan, and CEO of the State Health Assurance Agency, told IndiaSpend.
 
BSBY is a dual-cover scheme. The nine million families it insures get a Rs 30,000 cover for general diseases and Rs 3 lakh for critical illnesses.
 
At nine million, BSBY covers more than three times the 2.6 million families in Rajasthan who were entitled to benefits under the national-level RSBY, reaching 67% of the state’s 69 million population in 2012. Essentially, it covers all the families entitled to free ration under the National Food Security Act. “This top-up to the basic cover under the RSBY is beneficial,” Ravi said, adding that all states should be encouraged to do this.
 
The higher cover and wider coverage under BSBY seem to have set the tone for the National Health Protection Scheme, one of the two elements of Ayushman Bharat. The scheme will provide a Rs 5 lakh family cover as opposed to the earlier Rs 30,000 under RSBY.
 
Additionally, when BSBY was rolled out in December 2015, it was on the presumption that two existing schemes for free medicine and free diagnostics would adequately cover the two critical components of outpatient care, Jain said.
 
Given staff shortages at government health facilities, IndiaSpend asked Jain if there is scope to empanel private hospitals to deliver outpatient care. “That would be difficult to manage,” he said, adding, however, “[A] year into the scheme, we tweaked the criteria to include the cost of post-hospitalisation medication dispensed to patients at the time of discharge, in the package price.”
 
As a result, BSBY now covers hospitalisation, diagnostic expenses incurred during the seven days preceding admission, and medicine and other expenses incurred in the 15 days after the patient is discharged. However, any diagnostic expenses that the patient may have incurred prior to the seven days before admission, or any medicines they may have bought prior to admission, are still not covered.
 
Implementation of the scheme is monitored by measuring beneficiaries’ satisfaction levels, which BSBY gathers at the point of delivery.
 
Prajapati, the Mount Abu resident with kidney disease who we met at a private hospital in Mount Abu, had to certify her satisfaction with the service she received as part of her discharge procedure.
 
Beyond this, “aggrieved patients can register their complaints with the District Grievance Redressal Committee”, Jain said.
 
Experts said this is not enough. “NHPS must use the experiences of the last 15 years of implementation of publicly financed health insurance schemes across states and invest in IT systems to plug inefficiencies and mis-targeting,” said Ravi.
 
Essential to build-in sustainability
 
To be successful, a government programme has to be sustainable. To its credit, the current Bharatiya Janata Party government in Rajasthan has kept alive the free medicines and free diagnostics schemes that were conceptualised and launched by the previous Congress government.
 

Controlling costs without rejecting genuine claims is essential. Fair control is a key concern due to the involvement of the private sector, as this 2017 study noted while pointing at the “large private sector presence, which has perverse incentives to induce demand; and the intermediary purchaser/insurer, who has perverse incentive to reduce utilisation through cream-skimming”.
 
In government-subsidised health insurance, over-utilisation increases the cost of care to the exchequer, Ravi pointed out.
 
With BSBY, the government strictly guards against over-utilisation, which private hospitals can do by over-prescribing treatment. One of the most common examples of over-treatment by the private sector is the higher-than-necessary rates of Caesarean-section deliveries in private facilities across India, as IndiaSpend reported in July 2017.
 
BSBY has inbuilt rules to protect against this. For instance, 67 treatment packages including gynaecological surgeries such as hysterectomy can only be availed of at government institutes.
 
One way to ascertain over-utilisation is to examine whether claims under BSBY have increased or stabilised, Jain said, adding that in 2016-17, 1.8 million claims amounting Rs 985 crore were submitted, or about Rs 2.7 crore per day, but since then claims have stabilised at Rs 2 crore per day.
 
With this, the government’s premium payment would stabilise at Rs 1,263 per family per year for the second phase of BSBY that began in December 2017, Jain said. The premium of Rs 370 that the government had paid during the first phase–roughly a third of the present premium–had been considered too low to be commercially viable. In contrast, the NITI Aayog has indicated that premium payments for the National Health Insurance Programme would be about Rs 1,082, which is closer to the BSBY’s current premium.
 
Government health services must be improved
 
Since BSBY was launched in 2015, 88% of villages have made at least one claim, Jain said, adding that this “shows that rural people face no barrier to access care on account of the location of the private empanelled providers”.
 
Nevertheless, such schemes cannot be a substitute for improved government healthcare. “[P]ublicly financed health insurance schemes are not the panacea to achieve Universal Health Coverage in India. Instead, these schemes need to be aligned with proper strengthening of the public sector for provision of comprehensive primary healthcare,” the PLOS One study referred to before concluded.
 
As much as the government ropes in the private sector, “the primary healthcare infrastructure… [will] be necessary to provide basic health services, besides serving as gatekeeping for specialist services”, the study pointed out.
 
Also, universal health coverage is not simply about providing treatment, Pachauli said, emphasising that essential programmes to promote health and prevent disease, particularly for women and children, deserve greater attention. “[A]nd this can only happen if more resources are put into government health infrastructure rather than diverting them to private agencies,” she said.
 
Back at the private hospital in Sirohi, Bachchi was satisfied with her experience of using her BSBY card. “Ghani seva kidi,” she said, describing her experience at a BSBY-empanelled private hospital, meaning, “They served me well.”
 
From what has worked, and not quite worked, in Rajasthan, the planners behind Ayushman Bharat would do well to ensure that the programme offers a realistic insurance cover and adequate coverage of free diagnostics and free medicines.
 
It must put strict limits on the services that empanelled hospitals can provide, ensure strong monitoring on the ground, and make the redressal system easy and speedy.
 
At the same time, a fully staffed primary healthcare network will remain indispensable.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)
 

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How Arctic Weather Could Affect Indian Farmers https://sabrangindia.in/how-arctic-weather-could-affect-indian-farmers/ Sat, 12 May 2018 06:37:22 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/05/12/how-arctic-weather-could-affect-indian-farmers/ Mount Abu, Rajasthan: While the Indian Meteorological Department has predicted 97% of normal monsoon rains this year, meteorologists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune are keeping a close eye on unfolding weather conditions at the Arctic Circle–5,000 km away–for their potential to help forecast, and possibly impact, this year’s monsoon.   […]

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Mount Abu, Rajasthan: While the Indian Meteorological Department has predicted 97% of normal monsoon rains this year, meteorologists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune are keeping a close eye on unfolding weather conditions at the Arctic Circle–5,000 km away–for their potential to help forecast, and possibly impact, this year’s monsoon.

Monsoon
 
Data spanning the years 1951 to 2014 show that temperature and pressure conditions at specific locations in the Arctic region during the pre-monsoon period correlate with the Indian summer monsoon rainfall, according to recent research led by Santosh B. Kakade, a scientist at the IITM.
 
Kakade will test his hypothesis against Arctic and Indian monsoon data over the next few years. If it turns out to be correct, his research could give Indian scientists another parameter to forecast the Indian summer monsoon.
 
The summer monsoon contributes more than 80% of Indian rainfall. The accuracy of these forecasts impacts India’s vast farm sector as well as the overall Indian economy, and 17% of the world’s population.
 
An Arctic connection
 
India has come a long way from the forecasting methods of a century ago, when the Indian Meteorological Department’s forecasts depended only on snow cover, with lesser cover understood to indicate a better monsoon.
 
Yet, despite advancing to the use of supercomputers, India’s weather forecasting system is obstructed by limited data and poor models, which result in insufficient understanding, experts say.
 
So far, the Indian summer monsoon has been known to be influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation, two wind patterns that also interact with each other.
 
In 2000, Kakade and a colleague conceptualised the Effective Strength Index (ESI), the net relative strength of those two oscillations. The ESI and the ESI-tendency, the evolution of the ESI from winter to spring in the northern hemisphere, can be measured in early May.
 
If this ESI-tendency is positive, meaning the North Atlantic Oscillation has evolved more strongly than the Southern Oscillation, Kakade will look up the average May temperatures at the sea surface and at 5,572 m above sea level, at specific Arctic locations well defined by their latitude and longitude. Hypothetically, if those May temperatures are higher than normal, they are indicative of a weak Indian summer monsoon, and vice versa.
 
If the ESI-tendency is negative, Kakade would study the average temperature at 5,572 m above sea level during spring and the average temperature at 11,770 m above sea level during May to predict the intensity of the Indian summer monsoon.
 
But the strength of the Arctic Oscillation will also need to be factored into this complex forecasting process, Kakade said.
 
The Arctic Oscillation refers to cyclonic winds circulating counterclockwise at around the 55°N latitude. When these winds are strong, they lock in the cold Arctic air. Earlier this year, however, a weak Arctic Oscillation allowed the cold to move southward, causing an unusually cold spring in Europe even as temperatures at the North Pole and across the Arctic region were 20 degrees Celsius above normal. Climate scientists have dubbed this anomaly–warm Arctic, cold continent–“wacc-y”.
 
Whether or not a weak Arctic Oscillation persists through the rest of the year to impact the Indian summer monsoon also depends on the evolution of the other oscillations.
 
A positive ESI-tendency is linked with a negative Arctic Oscillation from May to October (and vice versa), which, as explained, allows cold Arctic air to penetrate southward. “By cooling Eurasia, and even increasing the Eurasian snow-cover, this situation could possibly reduce rainfall activity over India,” Kakade explained.
 
Forecasting errors, farmers’ losses
 
Indian scientists are now fairly good at short-term forecasts.
 
“While short-term (2 to 3 days in advance) weather forecasting based on laws of physics is quite good now, forecasting the week ahead is not that accurate,” J. Srinivasan, distinguished scientist at the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, and honorary professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, told IndiaSpend.
 
Shortcomings in weekly forecasting include models that do not represent clouds accurately and the inability to correctly predict the weather in other parts of the world, Srinivasan said.
 
Variations in the Indian monsoon are known to be linked to climatic variations in Central Asia, the equatorial regions and the Pacific Ocean.
 
“Long-term forecasting, predicting the monsoon a season in advance is considered even less accurate than weekly forecasting because we do not fully understand the link between the ocean, the atmosphere and clouds, and certainly, insufficient satellite data impedes this understanding,” Srinivasan added.
 
Poor forecasts spell losses for farmers.
 
In July 2017, a group of farmers in Beed district of Maharashtra filed a police complaint against the Indian Meteorological Department for having forecast that the monsoon would “most likely” be normal.
 
Considering India as whole, forecasts of a normal monsoon often turn out to be accurate only because regions getting excessive rainfall make up for the deficit in other parts of the country when average rainfall is calculated. However, such all-India, long-range forecasts cannot protect farmers in a particular district or block from crop failure and losses. Because farmers in Beed were not told in advance that after a good start their district would face a long dry spell, their sowing proved useless because they had insufficient water for protective irrigation.
 
“We wouldn’t have suffered this loss if the forecasts had been accurate and communicated to us about 10-20 days in advance,” said Yogesh Pande, spokesperson of the Swabhimani Shetkari Sangathan, a farmers’ collective in Maharashtra.
 
More relevant data could improve the monsoon forecast
 
While Kakade’s hypothesis remains to be tested, an older analysis of data from 1955 to 1980 shows that a relationship does exist between temperature anomalies in the stratosphere at 30 mbar (a unit of atmospheric pressure)–which correlates to an altitude of 21,629 m above the North Pole–and the Indian monsoon rains.
 
Temperature anomalies during November were found to have the potential to cause up to 20% variability (excess or deficit) in rainfall during the ensuing Indian monsoon, while temperature anomalies during March could cause 10% variability, that study, also by scientists at the IITM, and published in the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics in 1992, concluded.
 
Now that a fresh study tells us that a statistical relationship exists between the Indian monsoon and the temperatures at specific locations and times in the Arctic region, should such relationships be factored into the annual monsoon prediction exercise?
 
“Yes, we should incorporate new data into the statistical model to predict the monsoon but only after understanding the teleconnections, the relationship between the two climatic anomalies occurring a long distance apart,” Sandeep Sukumaran, assistant professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, told IndiaSpend.
 
“We need to establish the physical mechanism between the Arctic Oscillation and the monsoon just as we understand how other atmospheric/oceanic oscillations in the tropics such as El Nino Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole Mode affect our monsoon,” said Sukumaran.
 
The El Nino, well known around the world after the recent string of hotter-than-usual years globally, is a variation, irregularly periodic, in winds and sea-surface temperatures over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The Indian Ocean Dipole Mode is a variability pattern involving anomalously low sea-surface temperatures off Sumatra and high sea-surface temperatures in the western Indian Ocean, with accompanying wind and precipitation anomalies.
 
In Pune, Kakade is keen to see if this year’s Arctic data hold up his findings. “Any new parameter found to definitely impact the Indian summer monsoon rainfall could potentially help improve the accuracy of our long-term forecasts,” he said.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)
 

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Indians Richer But Less Happy Today Than 3 Years Ago https://sabrangindia.in/indians-richer-less-happy-today-3-years-ago/ Thu, 03 May 2018 07:12:52 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/05/03/indians-richer-less-happy-today-3-years-ago/ Mount Abu, Rajasthan: India has been ranked 133rd among 156 countries in the United Nations’ (UN) World Happiness Report 2018, 15 places down from its position in 2015.     This is despite the report’s finding that India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the standard of living, and healthy life expectancy, […]

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Mount Abu, Rajasthan: India has been ranked 133rd among 156 countries in the United Nations’ (UN) World Happiness Report 2018, 15 places down from its position in 2015.

 

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This is despite the report’s finding that India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the standard of living, and healthy life expectancy, a marker of wellbeing, have trended upwards over the last three years.

Source: World Happiness Report 2018
 
Further, participants surveyed during 2017 for the current report expressed greater satisfaction with their personal freedom–the freedom to make life choices–as well as greater confidence in their national government.
 
Then what makes Indians less happy today than they were three years ago? And why are Indians the least happy people in the Indian subcontinent? Myanmar (130), Sri Lanka (116), Bangladesh (115), Nepal (101), Bhutan (97) and Pakistan (75) all rank higher than India, while neighbouring China stands at 86.
 
Indians are suffering the impact of weaker social support networks, a less generous society, and fewer reasons to experience positive emotions such as laughter, at a time when they are feeling more negative emotions such as worry and anger, social scientists have told IndiaSpend. At the same time, socio-economic inequity is preventing per capita GDP growth from translating into happier people.
 
Why higher per capita GDP has not made Indians happier
 
In July 2011, a UN General Assembly resolution recognised that “the gross domestic product indicator by nature was not designed to and does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people”. It invited member-nations to develop measures to better reflect the pursuit of happiness and wellbeing to guide public policy.
 
Since 2012, with the exception of 2014, the UN has been publishing a report on the state of happiness in countries around the world, remarking on the causes of happiness and misery, and their policy implications, primarily based on the Gallup World Poll that specialises in tracking citizens’ opinions.
 
India recorded a higher growth rate in real GDP at constant prices between 2014-15 and 2016-17 than in the previous three years from 2011-12 to 2013-14, according to data from the World Bank.
 

India’s GDP/ Per Capita GDP Rising
Year Real GDP Growth Rate Log GDP Per Capita (WHR 2018) World Happiness Ranking
2012 6.60% 8.48 111
2013 5.50% 8.53 111
2014 6.40% 8.59 117
2015 7.50% 8.66 118
2016 8.00% 8.71 122
2017 7.10% 8.77 133

Source: World Happiness Report 2018, World Bank
 
Per capita GDP is frequently used as an indicator of standard of living. However, that only works in a society where the distribution of income and wealth is reasonably equitable.
 
“In India, income, wealth or other forms of human capital inequalities are starkly visible,” Hema Swaminathan, chairperson of the Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, told IndiaSpend.
 
“Here, an accident of birth decides your life’s prospects, and with the steady erosion of the structures that could help individuals achieve mobility, such as the primary education system and public health system, little scope exists for social or economic mobility,” she said.
 
While per capita GDP is rising, socio-economic inequality is, too. In 2014, India recorded the widest income inequality since 1980, according to a report by the World Inequality Lab.
 
In 2013, 390 million Indians, making up the bottom half of India’s earning population, earned 67% of the share of the top 1%, which consisted of 7.8 million people. In 1980, India’s bottom 50% had earned 319% of the income of the richest 1%.
 
Social inequities militate against happiness, as a seminal study on the topic showed in 1970s U.S. Richard Easterlin, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, showed how increases in income from 1946 to 1970 coincided with flat levels of reported happiness.
 
Recent data from the U.S. bear out this association, economist Jeffrey Sachs, co-editor of the World Happiness Report 2018, noted in the report. He added that absolute increases do matter for happiness, “albeit with a clearly declining marginal utility of income”.
 
More recently, scientists from the London School of Economics and Political Science examined data from the Gallup World Poll and the World Top Incomes Database and found that the more income is held by the richest 1% of a nation, the more likely individuals are to report lower levels of wellbeing, life satisfaction and more negative daily emotional experiences.
 
This is not to say that higher income does not matter. Very poor people, when their income increases, become happier as their basic needs are met. However, once these needs are fulfilled, they stop experiencing greater happiness with rising income if there is also growing inequality, as it leads to unfavourable comparisons, said Shreya Jha, a doctoral candidate in Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, U.K., who has studied well-being in the Indian context.
 
Indians worry more, feel sadder and angrier
 
In the last three years, Indians have reported experiencing fewer positive emotions and more negative emotions, two variables that influence World Happiness rankings.
 
Did you experience happiness and enjoyment during a greater part of yesterday? Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Participants’ responses to these questions made up the positive emotion variable, called ‘positive affect’.
 
To what extent did you experience worry, sadness and anger yesterday? Participants’ responses to these questions made up the negative emotions variable, called the ‘negative affect’.
 
In India, the effect of positive emotions has been reducing since 2015, while the effect of negative emotions has been increasing as compared with the previous three years (2012-2014), the World Happiness Report shows. This means that Indians perceive fewer reasons to smile and more reasons to worry and feel angry.
 
Research suggests that negative circumstances could have a stronger effect on our emotions, Jha said, adding, “Essentially, negative circumstances take precedence in our attention especially when there are no other factors that can alleviate their negative effects.”
 
 
Source: World Happiness Report 2018
 
Social scientists believe the current political climate can partly explain the current mood of gloom in the country.
 
“In the current political climate, prominent identity qualifiers such as caste, religion and gender are being stoked for short-term gains,” Swaminathan said, “The ensuing negative emotions of distrust, hate, prejudices and so on against the ‘other’ are not conducive to a state of happiness.”
 
At the same time, fewer Indians reported having someone to count on to help tide over troubled times in 2017, the World Happiness Report noted.
 
“It is known that relationships both in the family and broader environment affect happiness,” Jha said.
 
Greater confidence in government, yet perception of greater corruption
 
Indian citizens surveyed in 2017 for this year’s happiness report expressed greater confidence in the national government than in the previous few years. Trust in the government is a measure of social capital, or the quantity and quality of social relations in a community, to cite the first World Happiness Report, which also concluded that trust adds to life satisfaction.
 
But Indians also reported perceiving greater corruption in government and business, which seems to take away from their happiness gains.
 
Sweeping measures such as demonetisation and implementation of the Goods and Services Tax made people think this government was capable of taking bold steps to improve the economy, Swaminathan said. People thought corruption would reduce, at least in the ordinary transactions involving the common person. However, with new scams unfolding, that perception has changed.
 
Confidence in this government is still high, Swaminathan said, because this government has a sophisticated marketing machinery and an active public relations network that gives the impression of a system that is responsive to citizens.
 
Why India must measure its people’s happiness
 
Happiness is a subjective feeling. However, that is not to say that it is immeasurable or that the government should brush it aside as irrelevant to public policy. Happiness is, after all, everyone’s life goal.
 
“Some Indian states are already starting happiness surveys, but national coordination would be invaluable,” John F. Helliwell, co-editor of World Happiness Report 2018, told IndiaSpend.
 
In 2017, the Madhya Pradesh state government declared it would gauge the happiness quotient of its people, the maiden such initiative by an Indian state. Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said feedback from the happiness survey would be “factored into our government policies and public expenditure priorities”.
 
“You should petition your statistical agency to start measuring satisfaction with life in surveys large enough to show how life is going in different states, and for people in different life circumstances,” said Helliwell, who is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “Then you and we could see more clearly why the Indian ranking as a whole has fallen relative to others in recent years,” he said.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Over 15 Years, India Slides On Key Marker Of Gender Parity https://sabrangindia.in/over-15-years-india-slides-key-marker-gender-parity/ Sat, 03 Mar 2018 06:37:37 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/03/03/over-15-years-india-slides-key-marker-gender-parity/ Mount Abu, Rajasthan: Poonam Gaur was a 21-year-old bride when she sought permission from her in-laws to complete her graduation and work. She had applied for a clerical job in the government and had been called for an interview in Delhi, her hometown. Twenty one years ago when Poonam Gaur was a young bride, her […]

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Mount Abu, Rajasthan: Poonam Gaur was a 21-year-old bride when she sought permission from her in-laws to complete her graduation and work. She had applied for a clerical job in the government and had been called for an interview in Delhi, her hometown.

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Twenty one years ago when Poonam Gaur was a young bride, her in-laws in Bas Padamka in Haryana disallowed her from studying further or working. Today, she is part of a group of women who help disadvantaged, illiterate women understand the message behind Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, the government’s awareness campaign aimed at gender sensitisation. While Indian women now have much better access to education, they have a long way to go in terms of achieving real freedoms–participating in decision-making in political, economic and public life, having control over their own bodies, and having the right to choose when and who they marry.
 
Her new family in Bas Padamka, in Pataudi tehsil, Haryana, would hear nothing of it. “Women in Bas Padamka were expected to depend on men for everything,” Gaur, now 43, told IndiaSpend. “We weren’t allowed to set foot outside the house. I was somewhat educated and wanted to move ahead but unaware of how to fend for myself and too cowed down to fight (even) for my daughter’s rights.”
 
Gaur’s story was common enough two decades ago. But large-scale government campaigns to achieve gender parity in education have resulted in changes that brought India closer to the United Nations Millennium Development Goal for 2015 on gender equality. Today, girls in India are almost as likely as​ boys to attend secondary and senior secondary school and college.
 
But in 2015, these UN targets gave way to its Sustainable Development Goals which sought greater equities for women. The new goals formalised two parameters that were earlier only being tracked–women’s participation in the workforce and the number of women members of parliament in a country.
 
The sustainable development goal on gender equality also spells out other pro-women targets, such as universalising access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights–which based on the maternal mortality rate, currently still vary significantly across India typically with women in the south being better off. It also aims at eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls in the public and private spheres: Violence against women rose 83% in India in the last decade, as per this December 2017 IndiaSpend report.
 
So while Indian women now have much better access to education, they have a long way to go in terms of achieving real freedoms–participating in decision-making in political, economic and public life, having control over their own bodies, and having the right to choose when and who they marry.
 
Gaur’s life finally turned 13 years ago when she came in contact with the social workers at Deepalaya, an NGO working for less privileged people. The group taught her to assert herself, something that formulaic education had not.
 
“Deepalaya taught me and 15 other women forming a self help group how to save, the basics of banking and empowered me to start a small business,” she said.
 
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Gaur’s life finally turned 13 years ago when she came in contact with the social workers at Deepalaya, an NGO working for the underprivileged. “Deepalaya taught me and 15 other women forming a self help group how to save, the basics of banking and empowered me to start a small business,” she said.
 
Today, Gaur is part of a group of women who help disadvantaged, illiterate women in Pataudi understand the message behind Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (save daughter, educate daughter), the government’s awareness campaign aimed at gender sensitisation.
 
Fewer women in workforce: Social pressures at work
 
Equal opportunities for leadership in economic life and equal rights to economic resources–these two targets under the sustainable goal on gender parity are relevant in India, where patriarchy, cultural and social attitudes continue to keep women indoors.
 
Women made up 27.2% of India’s workforce in 2011. In south Asia, this is the lowest rate of female employment after Pakistan. Among G-20 countries, only Saudi Arabia is worse, IndiaSpend reported on April 9, 2016. Globally, women constituted 41% ​of the paid workforce outside of agriculture in 2015.
 
If the number of women who quit jobs in India between 2004-05 and 2011-12 (the last year for which census data are available) was a city, it would, at 19.6 million, be the third-most populated in the world, after Shanghai and Beijing, IndiaSpend reported in its ongoing nationwide investigation on women and work.
 
The reasons why women are keeping off the workforce in India are largely social and cultural, the series had found. Family and responsibility for household work were found to be the biggest constraints.
 
The responsibility for household chores rests largely on women but this work is neither recognised nor valued. Until women get support by way of public services, infrastructure, social protection policies or just the promise of responsibility sharing, both of which are targets of the Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality, they are unlikely to join the workforce in larger numbers.
 
There is a problem with higher education as well. Almost half of India’s girls did not make it to the senior secondary level in 2015-16, and three in four young women received no higher education.
 
Young women were also significantly less likely than men to enrol in job-oriented technical, law and masters of business administration programmes. In the bachelors of technology course, 39 women enrolled for every 100 men, as per a new survey by the ministry of human resource development. In the bachelor of law course, 47 women enrolled for 100 men.
 
Political participation: Women need affirmative action
 
Women in India hold only 11.8% of seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) as against the 50% target of the UN’s sustainable development goal on gender equality and the current 23.5% world average.

 

 
Women fare better in neighbouring Nepal with 29.6%​ of parliament seats, in Pakistan with 20.6%​ and in Bangladesh with ​20.3%​. This is despite the fact that these countries have Gender Inequality Indices comparable with India’s 0.53​. (The scale measures 0 to 1, where 0 represents gender parity and 1 represents gender inequality in every sphere of life.)
 
A clue to how India can improve on female representation in parliament lies in the three countries with the most female parliamentarians—Rwanda (61.3%​), Bolivia (53.1%​) and South Africa (​41.8%​).
 
Affirmative action has been a key driver of female representation in parliament in all these three countries, and also, in 39% countries globally. Rwanda and South Africa both have laws stipulating that a certain percentage of seats–30% and 50%, respectively–be held by women while Bolivia has legislation requiring equal numbers of male and female candidates in elections.
 
India introduced the Women’s Reservation Bill to reserve 33% of all seats in Lok Sabha, and in all state legislative assemblies, in 1996. In 2010, the Bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of the parliament) but not brought to vote in the lower house due to strong opposition from lawmakers, especially those from backward classes who argue that such a bill would favour women from upper castes, who are better educated and more resourceful–a weak argument considering that even women from upper castes have not made it to the parliament in sufficient numbers.
 
IndiaSpend reported in January 2018 on five laws that Indian women need as urgently as the ban on instant triple talaq. The Women’s Reservation Bill is an older and equally pressing piece of legislation for the empowerment of women across India.
 
Women’s health, a measure of gender parity, is still not a priority
 
Improving public health facilities to universalise access to sexual and reproductive health is critical for achieving any women’s empowerment target. Inadequate public-health infrastructure and sometimes, the apathy of the service providers (see this August 2015 investigation by IndiaSpend and Video Volunteers), push pregnant women to seek private treatment, which the poor can ill afford.
 
This medical care deprivation, in turn, affects the maternal mortality rate, a leading indicator of the gender inequality index. Good quality free or low-cost healthcare would also positively impact the child sex ratio by giving the baby girls a better chance at life.
 
When babies fall sick, especially among the poor, son preference makes it more likely for parents to seek treatment for boys (than girls), thus improving their survival rates, Juthika Banerjee, a gender activist and former head of the Gender Training Institute, Delhi, told IndiaSpend.
 
Indian baby girls have a significantly lower chance than baby boys of living till age four, and this prospect has diminished in these last few decades. Whereas 56​ boys died for every 100 girls aged 0 to 4 who succumbed to childhood diseases in the 2000s, the corresponding figure was 75​ male deaths for every 100 female deaths of the same age group in the 1970s.
 
Public campaigning on gender rights has limited focus
 
So far, the Indian government action on the Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment has focused on the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign.
 
It was first launched in districts where the patriarchal mindset is the strongest and is reflected in a low child sex ratio.
 
All the northern states logged a child sex ratio less than the national average, 914, the lowest since 1951, in the 2011 census. At the district level, roughly 80% of the 100 districts with the lowest child sex ratio lie in north and northwest India.
 
“While Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao is a national level awareness campaign, in the first phase, it was implemented in 161 districts with the lowest child sex ratio where women also need to be empowered,” Jupaka Madhavi, a gender expert and consultant with the government, told IndiaSpend.
 
Early results show that Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao has helped improve the sex ratio at birth in 104 of the 161 districts, prompting the government to take the scheme to the rest of the country.
 
But the campaign would do well to widen its focus. Without affirmative action to draw more women into politics and a concentrated effort to get them into the workforce, India may struggle to meet the UN targets.
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend

 

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How Caste Networks Enabled Corruption In India’s Rural Roads Programme https://sabrangindia.in/how-caste-networks-enabled-corruption-indias-rural-roads-programme/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 05:40:17 +0000 http://localhost/sabrangv4/2018/02/28/how-caste-networks-enabled-corruption-indias-rural-roads-programme/ Between 2001 and 2013, state lawmakers unfairly awarded rural road building contracts worth Rs 3,592 crore ($540 million) to contractors from their own caste, a new study by Princeton University, USA, published in the Journal of Development Economics, has shown.   Legislators colluded to unfairly award rural road building contracts worth Rs 3,592 crore, a […]

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Between 2001 and 2013, state lawmakers unfairly awarded rural road building contracts worth Rs 3,592 crore ($540 million) to contractors from their own caste, a new study by Princeton University, USA, published in the Journal of Development Economics, has shown.

 

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Legislators colluded to unfairly award rural road building contracts worth Rs 3,592 crore, a new study suggests. When MLAs and district collectors shared a surname, a contractor with the same surname was more likely to be awarded a contract. These roads were 7-12% more expensive to construct and in 497 instances, were possibly not constructed at all.
 
The contracts amounted to 4% of the total spending on the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). Unfairly awarded contracts often resulted in more expensive road construction, the study found. Hundreds of these roads appear to have never been built, based on the 2011 census records, keeping hundreds of thousands of people cut off from road access.
 
Princeton researchers evaluated data from 88,020 rural roads projects awarded just before and after closely contested state elections, to contractors having the same surname as the sitting member of legislative assembly (MLA). In close elections, the winning and losing candidates are presumed to have similar characteristics. If MLAs are intervening in the award of contracts, a shift toward contractors with the same surname would be evident, and no equivalent shift for the unsuccessful contender.
 
The use of a surname or last name as a measure of proximity between MLAs and contractors was based on the presumption that being caste- or religion-specific and following the paternal line, the last name is “a good predictor of connections between individuals from the same area (state, district or constituency) or linguistic region, which both the contractor and MLA are likely to be,” Jacob N. Shapiro, co-author of the study and professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, told IndiaSpend.
 
Connection does not necessarily denote a familial connection but a common background or network that increases a contractor’s comfort level in approaching an MLA when bidding for a contract, and the likelihood of the MLA being receptive.
 
If the MLAs had not influenced the allotments, the researchers would expect to see around 2,200 roads allocated to contractors with the same name as the MLA, based on a model they created. In fact, there were 4,127–roughly 1,900 too many. Essentially, the share of contractors whose name matched that of the winning politician in close elections increased from 4% before the election to 7% after, showing the power of the MLA to intervene in the allocation of roads in their constituency, despite having no official role to play in the PMGSY.
 
The researchers excluded elections where the winning and losing MLA had the same names, and elections in Tamil Nadu, where surnames are not commonly used.
 
That favouritism exists in the allotment of the PMGSY projects has been reported earlier. In 2013, of 113 mega road construction projects awarded by the Vijay Bahuguna government in Uttarakhand, 75 contracts were reported to have been awarded to well-connected people on a single-bid basis. One of the awardees was reported to be the brother-in-law of state rural development minister Pritam Singh.
 
MLAs with the surnames Kumar, Lal, Patel, Ram, Reddy, Singh and Yadav were most likely to have indulged in corrupt practices, Shapiro’s study says.
 
IndiaSpend spoke to a PMGSY contractor with one such surname who did not wish to be identified. When asked if the local MLA has to be bribed to get a PMGSY project, he said, “We bribe the MLA, but everyone in the system, including the local journalist who observes what it going on, expects a share and gets it.”
 
When IndiaSpend asked a representative of the rural development ministry about Shapiro’s findings, they refuted the allegations of collusion, saying, “A system exists for roads constructed under the PMGSY to be inspected by national- and state-level quality monitors.”
 
How corruption prevents uptake of essential services, increases inequality
 
Before PMGSY was launched in 2000, 40% of India’s 825,000 villages lacked a road providing all-weather access to markets, jobs and public services such as healthcare and education. The programme aimed to plug this gap for villages with more than 1,000 people by the year 2003, and for habitations of more than 500 people by 2007, eventually reaching 178,184 habitations in all.
 
By December 2017, 130,974 habitations had been connected under PMGSY and another 14,620 had been connected through state government programmes, so that 82% of the total eligible habitations had been connected.
 
Shapiro said this has been a significant initiative with huge growth benefits, but there is clearly some undue influence on the programme which means the benefits are not as large as they could have been.
 
Roads built by politically connected contractors were roughly 10% more expensive to construct, or, worse, possibly not constructed at all, denying a large number of people access to a road, the report found.
 
Across the sample, they found that 497 all-weather roads listed as completed and paid for in the PMGSY monitoring data were missing in the 2011 census all-weather roads data suggesting that these roads were never built. These missing roads kept 857,000 people at least partially cut-off from the wider Indian economy.
 
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“There is no question of a missing road,” a source in the ministry of rural development said, in response to IndiaSpend’s question about the findings of the study. However, the ministry requested a few examples of missing roads. Co-researcher Jacob Shapiro provided IndiaSpend with three examples, which were shared with the ministry. In response, the ministry shared this photograph as proof of construction of one of the missing roads. This project completion marking stone states January 18, 2004 as the date of completion of the road whereas the entry for this road in the study data set states December 22, 2005 as the date of completion. The ministry did not provide any photos to support the construction of the other two examples, despite IndiaSpend’s request.
 
A 2016 performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India for the period from April 2010 to March 2015 drew a similar conclusion. In the CAG’s sample of 4,417 works costing Rs 7,735 crore–12% of the Rs 63,878 crore spent during the period–19 states had shown unconnected habitations as connected, while excluding eligible habitations from road projects; nine states had built roads to connect habitations that were already connected; and seven states had shown 73 road works as completed though they did not provide complete connectivity to targeted areas.
 
The preferential allotment did not favour small firms or first-time contractors, Shapiro’s research found, which is not unexpected.
 
“When a good network becomes the qualifier for getting a road construction contract, the chances of an unconnected contractor from a less privileged family tapping this business opportunity are lower,” Rama Nath Jha, executive director of Transparency International India, which monitors corruption and transparency, told IndiaSpend. “This is one more example of how corruption perpetuates poverty and inequality.”
 
Corruption in India is largely opportunistic, and spurred by greed, not vote-buying
 
Shapiro and his co-researchers concluded that the corruption they saw in PMGSY was opportunistic. Contrary to the common perception that politicians who win elections favour business persons who funded their campaigns, the study found no clear evidence of vote buying.
 
Instead, they found that corruption arose within kinship networks because these provided the trust needed to engage in risky collusive behaviour. “Members of a family or caste network are likely seen as trustworthy, the least risky collaborators,” Shapiro explained.
 
“We have observed that people who indulge in corruption work in tandem, they create a good network among themselves,” Jha of Transparency International India agreed.
 
In a December 2017 survey by Transparency International India, 45% of the 34,696 respondents across 11 states said they had paid a bribe at least once in the past year. “People paid up because they had good reason to believe that without doing so their work would be delayed or never done,” said Jha. “And they feared or did not want to take the trouble to blow the whistle.”
 
“On the other hand, corrupt public employees are driven by greed, they are willing to take and enjoy what is not rightfully theirs,” said Jha. “The absence of a deterrent goes in their favour.”
 
Anti-corruption laws have not deterred malpractice because of delays of up to 25 years in award of punishment for corruption-related offences and diluted sentences, he said.
 
Break bureaucrat-politician nexus, monitor closely, make politicians accountable
 
The first step for ending corruption is to acknowledge it exists.
 
“There is no question of a missing road,” the ministry of rural development source said,  “Sometimes, a small portion of a road may not have been constructed due to land acquisition issues or forest department issues.” They said the ministry is conducting geospatial mapping of all roads, which will show their exact alignment and verify their existence.
 
In 2017, a parliamentary panel had reported gross anomalies in implementation of rural road projects and asked for the creation of a national database of corrupt contractors to be blacklisted from bidding.
 
As big an issue is figuring out how to deter politicians from such corrupt practices. For this, it is important to understand how the MLAs pulled off preferential allotments when they had no official role in the programme.
 
Compared to other public works programmes, PMGSY is designed to limit the scope for corruption. Funded by the central government, it is managed by local implementation units, which are controlled by State Rural Roads Development Agencies. However, the central government monitors the programme.
 
In finding that road contracts were more likely to be preferentially influenced when the highest ranking bureaucrat in the district, the district collector, shared the MLA’s surname, the study provides evidence for the role of district collectors as intermediaries for corruption. “From a policy perspective, these findings indicate that more could be done to insulate the officials implementing government programmes at the local level, including those involved in PMGSY,” the study suggested.
 
Interestingly, the study found less corruption–defined by missing roads and inflated construction costs–in districts where the district collectors were in their 13th and 16th years of service. These are milestone years when IAS officers’ performance is scrutinised for promotion.
 
Also, while the preferentially allocated roads were between 7% and 12% more expensive to construct than fairly awarded roads, the cost inflation was lower before elections. The researchers explained this on higher pre-election scrutiny and the greater cost to a politician of getting caught.
 
Therefore, more stringent monitoring would help constrain corrupt practices. In fact, Shapiro said the continuing involvement of the central government is why his study found evidence of corruption in limited aspects of the programme.
 
Another deterrent may be to formally involve MLAs in the PMGSY and other local projects where they are likely to have a say.
 
IndiaSpend asked the PMGSY contractor why he approached the MLA when MLAs have no official role in the tendering process. “MLAs understand the local conditions, they help ensure that we get the road projects and that we can design these as needed for the carriage expected to run on the roads. They also ensure we get paid for implementation,” he said.
 
If the general experience is that the MLAs play a role in implementing a project, albeit informally, it may make more sense to actually make them responsible and therefore locally accountable.
 
“If voters held their MLAs responsible for the services delivered under PMGSY, the latter would have an incentive to limit corruption,” said Shapiro. “By contrast, a scheme in which local politicians have no formal role but over which they still retain influence through informal channels is an ideal opportunity to engage in corrupt practices.”
 
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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