Like him, 13 others died of starvation in Jharkhand over the last 10 months, according to the latest available data from the Right To Food (RTF) campaign, an advocacy group. They should have all benefited from Antodyay Anna Yojana (AAY), the food ration scheme meant for the poorest of poor in India.
 
In most cases, the Jharkhand government denied that deaths were caused by starvation (You can read those denials here, here and here). The state food and supply minister Saryu Roy has accused food activists, who see a link between starvation and these deaths, of “playing politics”.

 
IndiaSpend spoke to medical experts and social activists and found that the government response does not take into account two factors involving the links between malnutrition and starvation:
 

 
As the following table shows, in half the cases of starvation deaths reported from Jharkhand between September 2017 and July 2018, the deceased did not get the ration promised under the public distribution  scheme (PDS) and AAY.
 
The reason can be traced to the complications arising from the government mandate that ration cards and bank accounts be linked to Aadhaar, according to RTF campaigners. Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every citizen and declared mandatory for various government welfare schemes.
 

Source: Right To Food Campaign
* Cases where Aadhaar-related failures clearly contributed to starvation
 
Compulsory linkage of Aadhaar, ration card continues, despite govt claims
 
In line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Digital India, the Jharkhand government in July 2016 transitioned to a “paperless” public distribution system (PDS), linked to individual Aadhaar numbers, as TheWire.in reported on July 18, 2017.
 
This system has two requirements: One, each person’s ration card has to be linked to their Aadhaar card; and two, each time a person wants ration under PDS, she must have biometric authentication done at a ‘point of sale’ machine, which then calculates eligibility. These machines are installed at PDS shops, where the dealer is supposed to authenticate each transaction.
 
In the two months after this Aadhaar-PDS linkage rule, in Ranchi district, ration-card holders received only 49%, or less than half, of their entitlement, according to an analysis of government data in July and August 2016 by development economist Jean Dreze.
 
The denial of foodgrain in Jharkhand has been reported before (here, here and here) and contested.
 

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@roysaryu ‘ji, Hope you take note of the story of this elderly woman. #UshaDevi lives in Ranchi, has #Aadhar & #RationCard & hasn’t received her entitled grains from #PDS dealer in last #6MONTHS. A widow with both her sons dead, she can be ‘face’ of next #hungerdeath. @DC_Ranchi

9:00 PM – Jun 9, 2018 · Ranchi, India

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In October 2017, the Jharkhand government claimed that Aadhaar is not mandatory for collecting foodgrain under PDS. However, district administrations in the state continue to adhere to the mandatory Aadhaar-ration card rule, according to RTF activists. This happened in Birhor’s case as well.
 
“Whatever the food minister or others may have told the media, the Jharkhand government never retracted its policy of compulsory linkage of ration cards with Aadhaar,” Dreze, also a visiting professor at Ranchi University, told IndiaSpend.
 
Activists are demanding that Aadhaar be delinked from all social-security schemes, including pensions, to save the poor from distress. Swati Narayan, an activist with the RTF in Ranchi, believes that the Aadhaar-ration integration requirement is behind the trail of starvation deaths in Jharkhand.
 
“The Jharkhand government needs to immediately universalise the rural ration eligibility from 86% to 100% of the population to ensure that no family is left out,” she said. “Additionally, excluded families should be immediately paid compensatory food security allowance for the last one year at least to prevent more horrific deaths due to starvation.”
 
Food and supply minister Roy insisted the 14 deaths were not related to starvation. “(They) can be attributed to the lack of ration cards, which is due to the lacunae in the government system, but they are not starvation deaths,” he told IndiaSpend. “RTF activists are hyper-ventilated (sic) people who are motivated against BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] governments. I have not seen them commenting on the starvation deaths in Delhi.”
 
On July 27, 2018, three sisters were found dead under unexplained circumstances in Delhi’s Mandawali area. They possibly died of malnutrition or starvation, their postmortem reports said.
 
Given the inequalities in India’s population–India’s top 1% have 73% of India’s wealth–it is the government’s responsibility to provide food and nutrition to the marginalised, said Anjali Bhardwaj, an activist with the RTF in Delhi. “In Delhi and Jharkhand, the political will is lacking,” she said. “They may promise a lot of things, but on ground, the ill-thought move of PDS-Aadhaar linkage is starving people.”
 
Shamika Ravi, research director, Brookings India and a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, countered that the emphasis should be on resolving systemic problems, not discrediting Aadhaar.
 
“Any exclusion error or case, where a person is being denied their benefits, is unacceptable and absolutely unjustified,” she told IndiaSpend. “However, the focus should be on strengthening the Aadhaar system. There are exclusions, yes, but what is still not clear to me is at exactly what stage is the problem (occuring)? Is it a problem at the point of authentication? Or there is a problem in how the PDS programme is linked with Aadhaar? Aadhaar has become a favorite whipping boy of many activists, but we need to identity the exact pain points and work on strengthening them.”
 
Dreze concurs partially with Ravi. “If Aadhaar is to be used at all for welfare schemes, it should be restricted to cases where it serves a clear purpose and where Aadhaar seeding can be done in a reliable and non-coercive manner,” he said. “Aadhaar-based biometric authentication should never be made compulsory.”
 
Starvation deaths must be established by social, medical history, not autopsy: Activists
 
In June 2018, the Jharkhand government made an autopsy a must for starvation deaths. But campaigners say this is not a fail-proof method for determining if death was caused by hunger.
 
“Historically, if post-mortems/autopsies have found a single grain of rice in bodies, they haven’t been classified as starvation deaths,” said Dipa Sinha, assistant professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi.  “In Odisha, people have eaten mango kernels as they didn’t have anything else to eat. So, officially, they may not be starvation deaths medically, but I would classify them thus. In Jharkhand, the government has been hiding behind technicalities to absolve itself of responsibilities, but we cannot miss the fact that denial of food leads to chronic malnutrition.”
 
Narayan pointed out that the medical and social histories of those living in starvation zones are more important than autopsies to fix the reason for death. “After one year of screaming, the Jharkhand government has finally changed its definition of starvation, but has done little else,” she said.
 
In March 2018, the Jharkhand government set up a nine-member committee which was supposed to define parameters by which starvation deaths can be established officially. However, the committee has missed its second deadline to compile the report and make it public, as the New Indian Express reported on July 31, 2018.
 
“From what I know, the committee has analysed information and (is) almost done with its report,” Jharkhand minister Roy said. “It will release the final report very soon. However, I cannot comment on the exact date as it is an autonomous committee and they will take their own time and decisions.”
 
There is no need to set up a committee to define starvation as a lot of literature and research already exists on the subject, said NC Saxena, former secretary of the erstwhile Planning Commission and former commissioner of a Supreme Court-monitored committee on food and hunger. “In my experience, in Jharkhand, the government usually under-reports starvation and malnutrition levels,” he said. “They should rather focus their energies on collecting proper data and on how severely malnourished children and people can be identified and intervened (with).”
 
Malnutrition and infections: A two-way causal association
 
In September 2017, an 11-year-old girl Santoshi died allegedly due to starvation. She and her family did not get foodgrain because their Aadhaar cards had not being linked to ration cards. In response to criticism over Santoshi’s death, Amit Malviya, incharge of the BJP’s information technology cell, cited a district official’s report and claimed that her death was due to malaria, and not starvation.
 

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11-year old girl in Jharkhand died because of malaria and not because her family was denied ration. DC’s report enclosed. Fact check anyone?

1:19 PM – Oct 17, 2017

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However, experts told IndiaSpend that malnutrition and disease are so interlinked that it is hard to separate the two. Undernourished children principally die of common infections and immune defects, according to this 2016 paper.
 
“Lack of adequate nutrition or undernutrition leads to infections which can be life-threatening,” said Bhavna Dhingra, a pediatrician with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal. “However, these infections can reduce the appetite of children, which severely affects the already precarious nutrition situation.”
 
Giridhara R Babu, an epidemiologist and additional professor at the Public Health Foundation of India, explained how malnutrition works to weaken the body: “In the shorter term, malnutrition leads to weight loss due to depletion of fat and muscle mass, including some of the organs. In the long run, prolonged decreased dietary intake leads to a reduction in functional energy reserves and changes in body composition.”
 
Starvation itself rarely results in death which is usually caused by infections among those lacking in malnutrition, said Nehal Vaidya, a pediatrician from Bhuj, Gujarat.
 
“In case of a reported case of child malnutrition, where a child has stayed hungry for many days, first, a clinical assessment should be done to analyse the child’s body and hunger and then the appropriate intervention should be done and the parents should be counselled on how to feed the child,” she said. “However, in rural and urban areas, lack of infrastructure is a big problem. You need specialist doctors, paediatricians, nutritionists and public health experts to deal with such cases.”
 
Severely malnourished children in state-run malnutrition treatment centres (MTCs) in Jharkhand showed poor recovery, most demonstrated poor weight gain, and a high number of illnesses were reported post- discharge, according to this 2018 paper which examined the efficacy of an MTC in Jharkhand. Malnourishment at an early age can have long-term consequences, affecting an individual’s motor, sensory, cognitive, social and emotional development, as IndiaSpend reported on July 22, 2017.
 
There is a 90% shortfall of specialists (surgeons, obstetricians & gynaecologists, doctors, and paediatricians) across community health centres (CHCs) in Jharkhand, according to the Rural Health Statistics 2017. Other than specialists, India is short of doctors in general. India’s doctor-to-population ratio of 1:1,674 is 75% lower than Argentina and 70% lower than the US, as IndiaSpend reported on November 16, 2016.
 
The CHCs constitute the secondary level of health care and provide specialist care to patients referred from primary health centres, four of which feed into each CHC, serving roughly 80,000 people in tribal, hill or desert areas and 120,000 on the plains.
 
(Devanik Saha is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. He also works as consultant with Policy & Development Advisory Group, Delhi)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post Did Aadhaar Glitches Cause Half Of 14 Recent Jharkhand Starvation Deaths? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
 
Building upon Narayan’s research, IndiaSpend analysed government nutrition data, spoke to several experts and government officials, and found that:

In India, 7.5% children under five years of age are severely wasted–a rise of 1.1 percentage points from 6.4% in 2005-06, according to National Family Health Survey 2015-16 data. All the experts IndiaSpend interviewed were of the view that eggs included in the mid-day meals of children could be a critical factor in combating malnutrition.
 

Source: NITI Aayog, Swati Narayan
 
“Eggs will be helpful in addressing malnutrition among kids because scientific research shows that animal-based protein is better than plant-based protein,” said Mansi Patil, a public health nutritionist and metabolism clinical dietician at AshaKiran Hospital, Pune.
 
Though some states in India had introduced mid-day meals earlier, this was universalised only in  2001. Eggs were first served in mid-day meals in Tamil Nadu in 1989, when the state was governed by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). The initiative started with one egg every two weeks and then was stepped up to one every week.
 
So why are administrations in BJP governed states–some of which, like Gujarat (39.3%) and Madhya Pradesh (42.8%), report a significant percentage of underweight children–not serving eggs in mid-day meals?
 
Officials in BJP governed states interviewed by IndiaSpend said they were concerned about offending the sentiments of vegetarians. “In Gujarat, most of the population is vegetarian,” said RG Trivedi, commissioner (mid-day meal scheme) in Gujarat. “Additionally, we provide pulses daily in mid-day meals as protein-rich food, hence we don’t serve eggs.”
 
Trivedi is correct–61% of Gujarat’s population is vegetarian, according to the latest available census data on food habits. This, however, is not true of the average Indian–70% of Indians eat non-vegetarian food.
 
“You can compare protein content of vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods, but the quality of protein in eggs is higher than others according to the protein digestibility corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS),” said Purnima Menon, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Delhi. PDCAAS is a tool to evaluate a particular protein’s quality based on human requirements and how they digest it.
 
In Himachal Pradesh too, officials spoke of the concerns of vegetarian parents. “We do not give eggs because of religious and cultural issues,” said Naresh Sharma, nodal officer (mid-day meal scheme) for Himachal Pradesh. “People in Himachal Pradesh consider eggs non-vegetarian and there are children whose parents would have problems if we served them. To avoid controversy, we don’t.” The census doesn’t provide data on vegetarianism in Himachal Pradesh.
 
Non-BJP states avoid eggs too, but BJP states most resistant
 
IndiaSpend investigations found that non-BJP states that do not offer eggs in mid-day meals were more constrained by the lack of resources than religious or cultural sentiments.
 
“Non-BJP states such as Punjab, Delhi and Mizoram also do not provide eggs. And Jharkhand, a BJP majority state, does,” said Sinha. “But, in states like Gujarat and Rajasthan, you cannot even talk (about providing eggs) for the fear of hurting upper-caste Hindu sentiments. Over the years, activists have been demanding eggs, but there is more resistance in BJP states due to cultural issues.”
 
On April 22, 2018, the ministry of health and family welfare set off a controversy when it tweeted a stock photograph that seemed to indicate that a vegetarian diet is the only way to stay healthy. The tweet was later deleted, as Scroll.in reported on April 23, 2018.
 
Manisha Chachra, a research scholar in political studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University who has studied the Hindu right-wing, explained the importance of sattvik food in its ideology. “The BJP is an affiliate of the Sangh Parivar, which ideologically follows certain upper-caste Hindu beliefs as characteristics of Hindutva,” she said. “One of this is the sattvik diet, which excludes non-vegetarian food, onion, and garlic. There is a bigger dietary politics to this kind of exclusion (of eggs).”
 
In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government has not been able to fulfill its promise of boiled eggs as part of the mid-day meal scheme for school, according to this April 9, 2018, report by India Today.
 
Sinha’s argument about the need for more resources to provide eggs can be corroborated by Arunachal Pradesh’s 2018-19 mid-day meal policy. “Green leafy vegetables and fruits are available in rural areas with minimum prices and these are important items included in the menu, but eggs are not available and unaffordable,” it said.
 
The north-east has a particular problem. Eggs are largely unaffordable here because there are free poultry industries, and this pushes up the price of procurement, said Narayan. “If the central government wanted, it could have provided funds to all states for providing eggs, but it did not,” she added.
 
Former union health secretary K Sujatha Rao told IndiaSpend that costs are a major concern in the inclusion of eggs in mid-day meals. “It would be ideal to have village communities encouraged to develop hatcheries under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme and have eggs provided to schools and anganwadis,” she said. “These interventions should be decentralised and communities should be more involved rather than only the government.”
 
The other view: Introduce eggs with caution
 
Some dieticians advocate caution in the push for eggs to be included in mid-day meals. “We should ‘introduce’ eggs rather than include them,” said Mansi Patil. “If children are malnourished and we suddenly introduce eggs (into their diet), it may have a negative impact on their bodies. So let’s say we should start with 2-3 eggs a week and then slowly increase (the numbers). We need to realise that a body needs fats and carbohydrates too. There needs to be the right mix of nutrients.”
 
Patil added that the number of eggs that need to be consumed depends on the kind of malnutrition a child suffers from and what kind of metabolism her body has. “In severe acute malnutrition (SAM), as opposed to moderately acute malnutrition (MAM), we cannot introduce eggs right away. We need to focus on carbohydrates and energy first so that the body slowly shapes us to be able to take protein.”
 
Dipa Sinha, assistant professor, Ambedkar University, and an activist with Right To Food campaign, however, said that this cannot be a reason to deny eggs to children. “The overall proportion of SAM kids is low so that cannot be a reason to not provide eggs,” she said. “For SAM kids, there is an established protocol, where they need to be taken to the hospital by anganwadi workers and treated accordingly because they are given a proper diet.”
 
Animal rights activists who advocate vegetarian food in the context of cruelty against poultry birds argue this differently. “Chickens used for eggs are among the most abused animals on the planet,” wrote Bhuvaneshwari Gupta, a former campaigner and nutrition adviser with PETA India, in June 2015 for the Huffington Post. “Most are forced to live their entire lives in an area smaller than the size of an iPad screen. Their beaks are typically cut off with a hot blade to prevent them from pecking each other in frustration, because the industry simply won’t give them more space.”
 
Narayan agreed that the poultry industry needed better standards of hygiene and should be more aware of animal rights. “However, that cannot be a reason to deny eggs to children,” she said.
 
(Saha works as media & policy communications consultant with the Policy & Development Advisory Group, Delhi. Starting September 2018, he will be pursuing his Ph.D. in International Development at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.)

First Published on India Spend
 

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These are the conclusions of an IndiaSpend analysis–of government data–of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2, 2014, with the aim to make India free of open defecation by October 2, 2019.
 
The World Bank has termed the scheme’s implementation as ‘moderately unsatisfactory’. However, a August 2017 survey conducted by an autonomous government body–Swacch Sarvekshan 2017–found that nine in 10 (91.29%) rural households having access to a toilet are using it.
 
‘Toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters’
 
It was on August 15, 2014, during his Independence Day speech, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), with these words: “Brother and Sisters, we are living in 21st century. Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in open? Whether dignity of women is not our collective responsibility? The poor womenfolk of the village wait for the night; until darkness descends, they can’t go out to defecate. What bodily torture they must be feeling, how many diseases that act might engender. Can’t we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?”
 

 
The mission is divided into two components: Gramin (rural) and urban
 
Swacch Bharat Mission (Gramin)
 
 

• 38.7% of rural households had individual household latrines (IHHL) on October 2, 2014, the day SBM was launched; 

• 249,811 villages were open-defecation free (ODF) in 2017, of which 63% (157,935) were verified officially; 

• 207 districts are ODF, of which 62% (127) were verified officially.

Note: Data not available for Delhi and Lakshadweep.
 
Villages are considered ‘open defecation-free’ when “no faeces are visible and every household and public/community institution uses safe technology to dispose of faeces in such a way that there is no contamination of surface soil, groundwater or surface water; excreta is inaccessible to flies or animals, with no manual handling of fresh excreta; and there are no odour and unsightly conditions”, as the ministry of drinking water & sanitation ( MoDWS) website explains.
 
As of 2016, 36.7% of rural households used “improved sanitation facilities”, according to data from the National Family Health Survey 4, conducted between January 2015 and December 2016. A majority (51.6%) did not, IndiaSpend reported on May 24, 2017.
 
“The current statistics on the construction of toilets, ODF villages and districts and states are indeed a positive development. I believe that even if we do not achieve the target of 100% toilet coverage and usage by October 2, 2019, and have 70-80% full coverage and usage compliance, that would be a big achievement in itself,” said Avinash Kumar,  director- policy & programmes at WaterAid India, an advocacy. “Construction of toilets, however, needs to be context specific. For instance, in several villages, the faulty design of toilets leads to contamination of groundwater.”
 

Behind the government’s data, unverified details
 
While the government’s data reveal substantial progress over three years, experts pointed out much of these claims were not verified.
 
“It is important to remember that ODF declarations are self-reported,” said Avani Kapur, fellow, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a think tank, and director of the Accountability Initiative, a CPR programme. “If we look at the numbers, as of today (September 29, 2017), while 252,430 villages have been declared ODF, only 1.5 lakh have been verified meaning that nearly 40% have not been verified as yet.”
 
States are allowed to define their own verification process, Kapur said, which does not help standardised verification.
 
“Ideally, there should be regular, third party evaluations which conduct their own independent surveys to ensure actual ODF,” said Kapur. “What we have seen on the ground is that declarations often follow presence of toilets rather than actual ODF. Worryingly still, once a village has been declared as ODF, most monitoring efforts come to a stop and there isn’t a concerted effort to maintain the ODF status.”
 
The World Bank, which had promised a loan of $1.5 billion (Rs 10,500 crore) for SBM-Gramin, did not release the first instalment due in July 2016 because India did not fulfill a condition of conducting and announcing results of an independent verification survey, The Economic Times reported in January 2017.
 
The World Bank’s current ranking of the overall implementation progress of the project is ‘moderately unsatisfactory’.
 
Swacch Bharat Mission (Urban)
 
As on September 29, 2017, this is what data from the ministry of drinking water and sanitation show:
 

• 44,650 wards (of 82,725) have 100% door-to-door waste collection;
• 12,526 community toilets built in three years;
• 11,806 public toilets constructed.

 
This is “slow” progress, said Kapur of CPR. No more than 53% of wards have 100% door-to- door collection of garbage, and only 23% of trash is processed. “Until the solid waste management issue is resolved, even achieving 100% ODF declarations will do nothing for our public health crisis and could, in fact, worsen it,” said Kapur.
 
Six states and union territories, including Gujarat, Assam and Kerala, had not received funds  for solid waste management since the programme started on October 2, 2014, according to this January 2017 brief from the Accountability Initiative, which Kapur co-authored.
 
The central government had also not released 46% of funds set aside to build toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), according to this reply to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) on July 26, 2017, as IndiaSpend reported.
 
Is constructing toilets = using toilets?
 
The SBM rhetoric has moved from constructing toilets to using them, as it should.
 
“At every level–state, district, block or even gram panchayat (village council)–the common phrases you will hear are “triggering”, “demand driven” and “behavior change,” said Kapur. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the actions follow the language.
 
In 2016, the budget for “information, education and communication (IEC)” indicates that no more than 10% of the money set aside to change behaviour was spent. Till January 2017, no more than 12% of the IEC budget was spent.
 
“The argument now seems to be ‘build toilets first and then people will use them’, which is the exact opposite of the community-led sanitation (CLTS) model and what SBM itself had envisaged in its guidelines,” said Kapur.
 
However, the CLTS model may not be effective in India due to the prevalence of casteism, according to American scholars Dean Spears and Diane Coffey, sanitation researchers and authors of the 2017 book, ‘Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development, and the Costs of Caste’.
 
Once the pits fill, likely Dalits will have to empty them
 
“In CLTS, people are supposed to come together as a community against open defecation. In most places, community means local area, my town or my village but in India, it means religion or caste,” Spears and Coffey told IndiaSpend in an interview on August 13, 2017. “The whole idea of CLTS is to get the whole village to cooperate, but people in villages in India unfortunately don’t cooperate, especially ones where open defecation is common.  Exactly the places where casteism is important, those are the places where open defecation is common and those are the places where there is a lot of conflict among castes.”
 
“Imagine if SBM was successful and magically everyone is using the latrines. In a few years, they are going to fill up and who is going to empty them? It is going to set back progress in social liberalism because, one way of the other, Dalits will be the people who have to empty the latrine pits. I don’t think there is a solution to the problem and I think it is problem that we should all be thinking about.”
 
The SBM targets appear to be in conflict with the imperative of behaviour change: Government officials have little choice but to focus on deadlines.
 
“This means that every stakeholder, especially government officials, is under pressure to achieve targets,” said Kumar of WaterAid, an advocacy. “This leads them to use questionable tactics such as public shaming and taking away public welfare services.”
 
He cited the example of Uttar Pradesh, which accounts for a fourth of open defecation in India. UP has set a goal to be ODF by December 2018. He said “A state, which has limited resources and capacity, will then use questionable tactics to achieve their targets,”Kumar said.
 
Coercion has been reported in Rajasthan, where the poorest people in a village were threatened with withdrawal of public services, and in Jharkhand, where officials confiscated lungis from violators.
 
From the government, empirical evidence that toilets are being used
 
The Swachh Survekshan Gramin 2017 survey–covering 140,000 households and 700 districts–conducted by the Quality Control of India (QCI), an autonomous government body, is more optimistic than those who have watched the SBM unfold.
 
“In the criticism of the Swachh Bharat Mission, many have cited anecdotal evidence about toilets being used to store grains, but there is empirical evidence of a dramatic improvement in both coverage and usage of toilets,” wrote Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, QCI, in an op-ed for Indian Express on September 28, 2017. “Three years after the launch of the mission, a behavioural change is discernible, especially in rural India.”
 
More than nine in 10 (91.29%) rural households with access to a toilet use it, said the QCI survey. The results are similar for urban areas. Of 73 cities that participated in Swachh Survekshan 2016, 54 cities have improved their score in overall municipal solid waste management in 2017.
 
These findings have shortcomings, according to this August 10, 2017, analysis of the QCI survey by Down To Earth, a environment magazine.
 
“Though 34.6% villages in India have declared themselves ODF, but factors like availability of water, sensitisation, long-term affordability (based on soil type and groundwater level), cleanliness and maintenance may deter toilet usage,” said the analysis. “The Swachh Survekshan Gramin ignores employed toilet technology, solid and liquid waste management, adaptability and acceptance by villagers in its method of study. QCI surveyed 1.4 lakh rural households from 4,626 villages, a miniscule 0.72% of the total villages in India.”
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: http://factchecker.in
 

The post 3 Years Of Swachh Bharat: 50 Million More Toilets; Unclear How Many Are Used appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Akshay Kumar’s movie Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (A love story), releasing on August 11, 2017 tells the story of a young bride who walks out of her marriage when discovers that her in-law’s home does not have a toilet. The satire deals with open defecation and Kumar calls it his “contribution” to the Swachh Bharat Mission spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Source: YouTube/Viacom18 Motion Pictures
 
The prime minister responded with words of appreciation for the film.

 
In the film, the young woman’s revolt leads to social change, but in real India, women do not appear to be a position to rebel–even if they are educated.
 
Women have limited decision-making powers in the construction of toilets in homes, according to a 2016 study conducted in Puri, a coastal Odisha district, by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
 
Women and girls are most vulnerable to problems associated with open defecation.
 
In 80% of households, decisions on the construction of sanitation facilities were made exclusively by men, the study found. In 11%, the decision was made by men in consultation with their wives, and in no more than 9% was the decision made by women.
 
These findings are relevant because only 37% of households in Puri district have improved sanitation, according to the National Family Health Survey 2015-16 (NFHS-4). However, this is higher than rural Odisha’s average of 23% and state average of 29.4% of households with toilets.
 
Improved sanitation facilities include the following: Flush to piped sewer system, flush to septic tank, flush to pit latrine, ventilated improved pit (VIP)/biogas latrine, pit latrine with slab, and twin pit/composting toilet, which is not shared with any other household.
 
The study sampled 475 households, of which 217 had no latrine, 211 had a functional one and 47 had one that didn’t work.
 
Only 42% of households in rural Odisha have individual household latrines (IHHL) under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India campaign), third lowest among states, according to government data.
 

 
Compared to households without latrines, households with functional latrines had more educated men and women, larger family sizes and higher incomes.
 
Households with latrines more often owned agricultural land (85%) and a tubewell (83%) and were less likely to be employed as share croppers or labourers, the study found.
 
‘Husband is the head of the family’: how social norms trump female literacy
 
Gender inequities within the family influenced decisions on sanitation too, interviews conducted during the study revealed. “After all, the husband is the head of the family, he is elder in age and in relationship and he will spend for the latrine, therefore, the decision making power lies with him,” said a 52-year-old woman.
 
Confined to the home and village, women also seemed to have little confidence in their decision-making skills, interviews showed. “We females don’t know anything. All things beyond my house boundaries are done by my husband, so they [husband and other males] can decide for the family’s welfare, not we,” said a 42-year old woman.
 
This is despite the fact that in rural Puri, 83% of women — and 92% of men – are literate, according to the NFHS-4 data. This is higher than the state average of 67.4% and 84.3% respectively.
 
A woman’s power to make decisions about marriage or visits to a healthcare centre are not necessarily strengthened by a high literacy rate or a better sex ratio at the state-level, IndiaSpend reported on February 13, 2017. This suggested the overpowering role of social norms that differ across India.
 
The IndiaSpend report, based on data from the Indian Human Development Survey 2012, showed that almost 80% of Indian women said they had to seek a family member’s permission to visit a health centre. Of these women, 80% said they permission from their husband, 79.89% from a senior male family member, and 79.94% from a senior female family member.
 
The IHDS survey in 2012 covered over 34,000 urban and rural women between the ages of 15 and 81, in 34 Indian states and union territories.“The bias against daughters can only end if women’s education is accompanied by social and economic empowerment,” concluded a study conducted over 30 years in Gove, Maharashtra, by Carol Vlassoff, a professor at the University of Ottawa, as IndiaSpend, reported in December 2016.
 
No jobs, limited bargaining power
 
Financial constraint was commonly cited as the reason for not building latrines or keeping them functional. The perception was that latrine installation is expensive, so men who controlled the household budget were not keen to build one. Those who had some money were reluctant to invest in latrines as they had other priorities.
 
The study found that women see latrine construction as a “big decision” that men could take. Women relied on their husbands even for small purchases: “I alone cannot decide, we depend on them [husband] for every penny. Even for small things like purchasing bangles, saree for ourselves, we ask them for money.”
 
Even in other decisions involving money, women had limited bargaining power. For instance, in 91% households, only men took decisions on determining healthcare expenses for women. And 85% of women respondents were housewives, which probably limited their bargaining power. Puri district’s female work participation rate is 7.5%, third lowest among all districts in Odisha, according to the 2011 census.
 

NGOs focused on toilet building targets perpetuate gender inequality
 
The study found that even NGOs involved in latrine construction perpetrated these inequalities. They were given targets for latrine construction and field workers mostly approached men for faster permission to construct.
 
Women complained about this. “The NGO person looked for the males. They had meetings with them [husband and other males], and told us to dig a pit and keep it ready. One day, they came with a mason, and started constructing the latrine. He was the only mason to construct all the latrines in the village, so, due to his unavailability, he left the structure unfinished,” said a 65-year-old female respondent.
 
Image courtesy: Viacom18 Motion Pictures
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 
 

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The data provide perspective to the death of six farmers in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur district on June 6, 2017, when police fired on protesting farmers demanding better prices.
 
As many as 796 civilians died due to police firing between 2009 and 2015, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
 

Source: National Crime Records Bureau, Crime In India reports for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015

 
A plentiful harvest in 2016 and imports drove some prices down 63%. A shortage of cash because of demonetisation led to “fire sales”, accentuating the price drops. Despite Rs 3.5 lakh crore–enough to build 545 Tehri-sized dams–invested over six decades to 2011, more than half of all farms depend on rains. These are the three factors agitating Indians who depend on farming–90 million families, or 54.6% of India’s 1.2 billion people, IndiaSpend reported on June 8, 2017.

 
The Madhya Pradesh Human Rights Commission has issued notices to the state government in response to the deaths. The state’s home minister initially denied reports of firing by local police on agitating farmers but later admitted that police resorted to firing to gain control of the rioting mob during the protest.
 
“The National Crime Records Bureau statistics say 318,528 farmers committed suicide between 1995 and 2015. A study suggests more than 2,000 farmers are heading to cities every day to make a living.” wrote Shashi Shekhar, editor-in-chief, Hindustan, in a column for the Mint on June 12, 2017. “The time has come when New Delhi and state leaderships thought seriously about this issue. The police or para-military force of independent India don’t look good firing at their own people. We don’t need more Mandsaurs.”
 

J&K drives decline in police firing
 
As many as 4,747 incidents of police firing were reported between 2009 and 2015. Over the years, firing incidents have decreased, mostly due to decline in incidents in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), which witnessed severe unrest between 2008 and 2010. For instance, in 2010, 662 incidents of police firing were reported in J&K, in which 91 civilians and 17 police personnel died, and 494 civilians and 2,952 police personnel were injured.
 

Source: National Crime Records Bureau, Crime In India reports for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015

 
55% firing incidents in 2015 classified as ‘on other occasion’
 
Of the 156 incidents of police firing in 2015, 86 were classified as ‘on other occasion’, 30 to effect arrest and 21 in riots. These incidents killed 16, five and 11 civilians, respectively. In the same year, 19 incidents of police firing in self defence led to 10 civilian deaths.

Source: National Crime Records Bureau, Crime In India reports 2014, 2015

 
Among the states, Rajasthan reported the maximum occasions (35) where police resorted to firing in 2015, followed by Maharashtra (33) and Uttar Pradesh (29).
 
Before 2014, the incidents of firing were categorised as: Riots, anti-dacoity operations, against terrorists and extremists and others. Between 2009 and 2013, these categories saw 1,371, 174, 815 and 775 incidents of police firing, respectively.
 

Source: National Crime Records Bureau, Crime In India reports for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 & 2013

Between 2009 and 2015, as many as 471 police personnel died during police firing, the NCRB data reveal.

 
Source: National Crime Records Bureau, Crime In India reports for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Average enrolment in government schools–where teachers are paid, on average, salaries that are four times those in China–declined from 122 to 108 students per school over five years, while it rose from 202 to 208 in private schools, according to this March 2017 research paper by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, professor of education and international development at the Institute of Education, London.
 
Yet, 65% of all school-going children in 20 states, about 113 million, continue to get their education from government schools, according to District Information System for Education (DISE) and education ministry data.
 
Why are students opting out of India’s government schools, which educate the poorest and most vulnerable students until the age of 14 for free, and migrating to fee-charging private institutions in such large numbers?
 
The study, which uses DISE data, traced this student migration to the belief among parents that private schools offer better value for money and better teaching than government schools. Multiple evaluations after controlling for students’ home backgrounds indicate that “children’s learning levels in private schools are no worse than, and in many studies better than, those in government schools”, said Gandhi.
 
Despite the Rs 1.16 lakh crore ($17.7 billion) spent on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)–the national programme for universal elementary education–the quality of learning declined between 2009 and 2014, IndiaSpend reported in March 2016.  
 
Less than one in five elementary school teachers in India are trained, IndiaSpend reported in May 2015. In Delhi, India’s capital city and its richest state, by per capita income, half of all government-school teachers are hired on temporary contracts. These teachers are likely to be less motivated and accountable than teachers with full-time jobs, we reported in January 2017.
 
Fewer cheap private schools in states where govt schools function well
 
At the primary level, 58.7% of Indians cite “better environment for learning” as a major factor for opting for private schools, IndiaSpend reported in May 2016.
 
However, the preference for private school education and the differences in learning outcomes of private and government schools vary between states. For instance, in 2015-16, in Uttar Pradesh, over 50% of children studied in private schools, while in Bihar, less than 4% of children attended private schools, according to DISE data.
 

In 2016, in Kerala, the proportion of children (aged 11-14) enrolled in government schools increased from 40.6% in 2014 to 49.9%. In Gujarat too, it increased, from 79.2% in 2014 to 86%, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016 data. ASER is a learning assessment of children in rural India.
 
In Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, government schools outperformed private schools in reading skills in local languages, once household and parental characteristics were controlled for, according to a state-wise analysis in ASER 2014.
 
In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where government schools were better than private schools to start with, learning outcomes improved between 2011 and 2014, once other factors were accounted for.
 
States with better-functioning government schools have more elite–that is, more expensive–private schools because there is no market here for the ‘low-fee’ budget private schools that have been sprouting across the country, Gandhi’s study said.
 
This explains why in poorer states, such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, about 70% to 85% of children studying in private unaided schools pay less than Rs 500 per month as school fees. Up to 80% of private schools in India are ‘low’ fee schools when benchmarked against per capita and daily wagers’ incomes, the data show.
 
It must, however, be pointed out that ASER 2016 has shown small improvements in learning outcomes in government schools. Over 25% of children in grade III could at least read a grade II level text in 2016, up from 23.6% in 2014. The proportion of children in grade III who could subtract increased from 25.4% in 2014 to 27.7% in 2016, IndiaSpend reported in January 2017.
 
Private schools up 35%, government schools by 1%
 
In 2016, for the first time in 10 years, private-school enrolment did not increase in rural areas–it fell from 30.8% in 2014 to 30.5% in 2016, according to the ASER 2016 report. But this has not stemmed the growth of private schools nationwide.
 
Between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the number of private schools grew 35%–from 0.22 million in 2010-11 to 0.30 million in 2015-16–while the number of government schools grew 1%, from 1.03 million to 1.04 million. Section 6 of the Right To Education Act 2009 legally obligates states to create more government schools.
 

 
Tiny (with 20 or fewer students) and small (with 50 or fewer students) government schools are being abandoned, according to Gandhi. In the five years considered by the study, the number of tiny government schools rose 52% and small ones by 33.7%. As many as 5,044 government schools had no students in 2015-16, up 14% from 4,435 in 2010-11.
 
The migration out of government schools has left many unviable, with high per-pupil expenditure, and low value-for-money from public education expenditure. About 24,000 government schools across Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh have closed, according to the study.
 
West Bengal witnessed a 280% rise in tiny schools–more than any other state–followed by Madhya Pradesh (225%) and Jharkhand (131%). However, Bihar bucked the national trend by reporting a 98% decrease in tiny schools.
 

Govt teachers in India earn four times China salaries but don’t perform as well
 
India’s government teachers earn more than not just their counterparts in private schools but also in other countries, Gandhi’s analysis shows.
 
Despite being paid at least four times the salaries of teachers in China (in terms of multiples of their respective per capita incomes), the performance of Indian teachers judged in terms of their students’ learning levels, has been poor in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test in 2009, with India ranking 73rd and China ranking 2nd, among 74 countries.
 
PISA is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.
 
Up to 80% of India’s public expenditure on education is spent on teachers–salaries, training and learning material, according to a six-state report. Teacher salaries in of teachers in Uttar Pradesh are four to five times India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 15 times the state’s, according to a 2013 analysis by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze. This is much higher than the salaries paid to teachers in OECD countries and India’s neighbours.
 

Source: Analysis by Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze, quoted by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon here (Table 14, page 26)
 
“This suggests the need to link future teacher salary increases to the degree of teachers’ acceptance of greater accountability, rather than across-the board increases irrespective of performance or accountability,” said Gandhi.
 
The reason private schools get away with paying their teachers less, argued Gandhi, is because of the “bureaucratically-set high ‘minimum wage’, which may also be influenced by political pulls and pressures and be responsive to lobbying by strong government school teacher unions”. Also, she added, the private education sector offers salaries based on market factors of demand and supply–and given that there is a 10.5% graduate unemployment rate in India, jobless graduates are willing to settle for low salaries in private schools.
 
Will increasing spending help? Unlikely
 
A common suggestion is increasing India’s spending on education. In 2015-16, Indian central government spending on school and higher education was less than other BRICS countries–India spent 3% of its GDP on education, compared to Russia (3.8%), China (4.2%), Brazil (5.2%), and South Africa (6.9%), IndiaSpend reported in January 2017.
 
However, increased government spending in education is not enough to improve educational outcomes. Between 2006 and 2013, public expenditure on school education increased from 2.2% to 2.68% of the GDP. But India’s education policy must be thoroughly revised to put in place better accountability and monitoring mechanisms to exploit the gains of increase in fiscal outlays on education, this January 2017 Mint column argued.
 
Public private partnership (PPP) model may be the solution, Gandhi argued, combining the best of both worlds–public sector funding and private resources for education.
 
“Given the tattered state of govt schooling in the country, the first best option–government as producer and also funder of elementary education–is not viable because the reform of the sector is not politically feasible (vested interests, eg teacher unions, will oppose any efficiency and accountability-raising measures),” Gandhi told IndiaSpend in an email interview. “Therefore, perhaps, a well-designed PPP (model) would be the best. But the devil is in the design of the PPP–there are some good models around the world.”
 
Before choosing any particular form of educational PPP, India must study these different designs and their relevance/applicability/adaptability, and must also pilot test the chosen models before scaling up any novel intervention, Gandhi suggested in her paper.
 

 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)
 
 

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What can MHWs do in rural areas? Gender inequities in developing societies mean that men play a dominant, decision-making role in reproductive health. MHWs can make a difference by educating men about maternal health issues and guiding their decisions, said the study. They can also complement the efforts of female health workers in delivering health services in remote areas and at late hours.
 
However, this may prove to be difficult in India. There are no MHWs in 48% of health sub-centres in Indian villages; and overall, there is a 65% shortage of MHWs in public health centres, according to the Rural Health Statistics 2016.
 

Source: Rural Health Statistics 2016
 
It is clear India has to improve its maternal-health services. The government scheme to reduce maternal mortality rate, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), has helped push up institutional deliveries by 15% over the decade ending 2014, according to this 2016 report by Brookings India, a think tank. But as IndiaSpend reported in February 2017, JSY is often not delivering quality care to the country’s poorest women.
 
This lack of access could explain why India accounted for close to a fifth of 303,000 maternal deaths and 26% of the neonatal deaths globally, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2016. MHWs can help improve the coverage of maternal and newborn child health services delivered by the formal health care system, and improve home-based management of these services.
 
To research the role MHWs could play, the study recruited and trained men to complement the work of female health workers. An IndiaSpend analysis of the findings of the study and other data reveals three reasons why MHWs were effective in improving the quality of maternal and newborn child health services:
 
1. Female health workers struggle with mobility, security issues
 
In rural India, sub-centres are the ‘first port of call’ for accessing health care. Ideally, sub-centres in remote and hilly areas should be manned by at least two auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs), one male multipurpose worker, one pharmacist and one AYUSH doctor or community health officer. There was an increase of 5% in sub-centres from 2005-15, IndiaSpend reported in February 2016.
 
Each ANM is assisted by four to five Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers who are responsible for delivering health services to the village population but they face some obvious challenges at work given prevailing gender norms.
 

• Night deliveries: The study interviewed women who spoke about the risks associated with night deliveries when villages are far from health facilities and there is a lack of ready transportation. In such cases, female health workers (FHWs) are often unable to help pregnant women reach a hospital. MHWs, on the other hand, can facilitate pregnant women’s access to health services, especially during night, as observed during the study.
• Communication gap with husbands: The reach of FHWs to men in local communities is limited due to gendered norms and other factors, according to the study. MHWs can bridge the communication gap with husbands and educate them about various aspects of reproductive health.

An estimated 22% of sub-centres are short of ANMs and in 30% of India’s districts, sub-centres with ANMs serve double the patients they are meant to, IndiaSpend reported in September 2016. MHWs can help the system deal with these shortages.
 
2. MHWs can convince men about the need for better maternal care
 
The subordinate position of women in Indian society has been acknowledged as a fundamental constraint to women’s access to reproductive health services. Women tend to have less access to household resources.
 
Nearly 80% of women in India said they had to seek permission from a family member to visit a health centre. Of these, 80% said they needed permission from their husbands, 79.89% from a senior male family member, and 79.94% from a senior female family member, according to the 2012 Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) survey, IndiaSpend reported in February 2017.
 
However, regional variations exist. As many as 94% of women reported needing permission to visit a health centre in Jharkhand, the highest in any state, while only 4.76% of women in Mizoram said they needed to ask family members, the lowest.
 
Given this social structure, MHWs can convince husbands–who have poor knowledge on the do’s and don’ts during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period–about the importance of providing antenatal care and health services during pregnancies.
 
India’s RMNCH+A (Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent) health strategy–formulated in 2013–recognised the central role of men in women’s reproductive health and includes guidelines for training of health workers to provide husbands of pregnant women with the relevant information.
 
Interventions to promote the involvement of men during pregnancy, childbirth and after birth have been strongly recommended by the World Health Organization in its 2015 report on recommendations on health promotion interventions for maternal and newborn health.
 
3. Complementing the work of female health workers
 
Coverage of maternal health services in west Odisha’s Keonjhar district, where the study was focussed, improved due to increased MHW engagement. The male health workers arranged transport and accompanied pregnant women to distant health facilities in emergencies and, according to the ASHA workers interviewed in the study, also sometimes climbed hills to reach distressed households in different settlements.
 
At the time of deliveries, the gendered division of labour was apparent, researchers found. MHWs handled tasks outside of the delivery room–keeping track of the family’s personal items, obtaining medicines, and in cases where a blood transfusion was necessary, obtaining donated blood.
 
One ASHA worker who was interviewed during the study said: “He [MHA] cannot enter in the delivery room. He brings the medicine which is required and all things he [the health professional] tells; he [MHA] tells the husbands (sic). I can convince the mothers but not the husbands.”
 
Male health workers have made a difference in other developing nations
 
Health initiatives that are shouldered by both male and female health workers have worked well in other countries. There is a significant need to scale up men’s participation in maternal health and provide them with the sufficient information to help them make decisions and support their partner’s decisions concerning family health, wrote Olena Ivanova, a maternal health expert at the International Centre for Reproductive Health, Belgium, in this blog in February 2015.
 
“More rigorous evaluations of male involvement initiatives, attention to vulnerable and disadvantaged families, acknowledgement of heterogeneity of fathers’ groups, revision of policies and laws and closer collaboration between different sectors are needed in order to strive for better maternal and newborn health outcomes and well-being,” she added.
 
Evidence from Rwanda, among the few countries to pair male and female health workers, indicates that the approach could work in settings where it is not safe or socially acceptable for women to travel alone. And educating pregnant women and their male partners leads to better maternal health behaviour than educating women alone, according to this 2006 study in urban Nepal.
 
However, it is important to tread cautiously, said the study.
 
To reinforce these successes, as the study showed, MHWs should operate in ways that do not contribute to widening gender inequalities in favour of men.
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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On March 5, 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tweeted that “unemployment rate falls sharply, as Modi government’s efforts to create rural employment are yielding results”.
 

The tweet claimed that India’s unemployment rate had fallen from 9.5% in August 2016 to 4.8% in February 2017, based on a report by State Bank of India (SBI) Ecoflash.
 
The unemployment rate in Uttar Pradesh registered the maximum decline during August 2016 to February 2017 from 17.1% to 2.9%, followed by Madhya Pradesh (10% to 2.7%), Jharkhand (9.5% to 3.1%), Odisha (10.2% to 2.9%) and Bihar (13% to 3.7%), Indian Express reported on March 5, 2017.
 
A FactChecker analysis of various data sets reveals that unemployment data in India is either outdated or unreliable, as multiple government reports and analyses give different figures.
 
India’s unemployment rate was 4.68% as on March 5, 2017, which is in sync with the BJP’s claim, according to real-time data from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Urban India reported a higher unemployment rate (6.13%) than rural India (3.9%).
 
On August 31, 2016, India’s unemployment rate was 9.7%; urban India had higher unemployment (11.14%) than rural India (9.01%), the BSE data reveal.
 
India’s unemployment rate was reported to be 3.7% in 2015-16, according to data presented in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) on February 6, 2017, by labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya.
 
However, on the same day, minister for state for planning Rao Inderjit Singh informed the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) that the unemployment rate was 5% and rising in India, especially among the backward classes (OBCs), Hindustan Times reported on February 6, 2017.
 
If the unemployment was declining as per the SBI report, why did the government admit to rising unemployment in the Parliament?
 
Over 30% of youth aged 15-29 in India are not in employment, education or training (NEETs), according to this 2017 report by Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Livemint reported on March 6, 2017.
 
India needs 23 million jobs annually, according to a Kotak Securities report, but over the last 30 years, the country has created about seven million jobs every year, IndiaSpend reported on February 23, 2016.
 
The government needs to focus on improving the measurement of employment and wages even as it works towards improving the ease of doing business and enhancing India’s manufacturing and employment capability, economists Dharmakirti Joshi and Dipti Deshpande from CRISIL had written in a column for Financial Express in June 2015.
 
“In July 2014, the Labour Bureau released the provisional results from its sixth economic census. This data pointed towards an increase in job creation rate in India in the last 5-6 years—a finding not supported by the NSSO data, sending out a contradictory message,” wrote Joshi and Deshpande.
 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

This article was first published on factchecker.in
 
 

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The outrage over sexual attacks against female revellers in Bengaluru on new year’s eve further grew after the video of a woman being groped and molested on a street in Kamanahalli locality the same night went viral. The main accused has been identified and four arrests have been made in connection with this incident, according to this report in Firstpost.

 
 
In 2015, of 5,112 cases registered under Section 354, only 69 (1.3%) ended in conviction. Of the 9,118 persons arrested in these cases, only 107 (1.2%) were convicted.
 
Source: National Crime Records Bureau
 
Across India, 82,422 cases of sexual assault were registered, of which 8,408 (10%) ended in conviction. Of 101,571 persons arrested for these attacks, 11,342 (11%) were convicted.
 
While the number of cases under this section rose by 92% from 42,968 in 2011 to 82,422 in 2015, conviction rates declined from 16% in 2011 to 10% in 2015.
 
Maharashtra reported the most sexual assaults (11,713), followed by Madhya Pradesh (8,049) and Uttar Pradesh (7,885) in 2015.
 

Source: National Crime Records Bureau; *Read as cases registered for ‘incidents’, and persons arrested for ‘persons’
 
The rise in cases registered can be correlated to the change in laws–which were tightened, possibly leading to higher reporting–after the 2012 gangrape of a physiotherapy student, now widely known as Nirbhaya, which sparked nationwide protests and outrage.
 
Conviction rates reduce by more than 1/4th for Section 509 cases
 
In 2015, 8,685 cases were registered in India under Section 509 of the IPC–“Insult to modesty of women”, of which no more than 870 (10%) resulted in conviction, a drop of 33 percentage points from 43% conviction rate in 2011.
 
Under this section, 9,870 were arrested across India, of which 1,108 were convicted (11%).
 

*Read as cases registered for ‘incidents’, and persons arrested for ‘persons’
 
In Karnataka, of 154 cases registered under Section 509 in 2015, no more than seven (5%) ended in a conviction. Of the 163 persons arrested in these cases, nine (6%) were convicted.
 

 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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A foreign tourist looks on at a ghat in Varanasi. In 2015, 365 crimes against foreigners in India were registered, of which 223 were theft cases, according to National Crime Records Bureau data.

 
The American said she was raped by her tour guide, two hotel staffers and two other men.
 
In 2015, 365 crimes against foreigners in India were registered, of which 147 (40%) were in Delhi, followed by Maharashtra (53) and Uttar Pradesh (33), according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.
 
Of these 365 crimes, 271 were against tourists and the rest against foreigners resident in India. The number of crimes, however, was 25% lesser than the 486 registered in 2014.
 

 
61% of crimes against foreigners were thefts
 
Of the 365 crimes registered, 223 were theft cases, followed by assault with intent to outrage a woman’s modesty (23 cases) and forgery (15). There were twelve cases of foreigners being raped in 2015 nationwide, of which three (25%) were in Delhi.
 
Rape cases in Delhi increased by 284% in five years
 
The number of rape cases, in general, registered in Delhi rose 284% from 572 cases in 2011 to 2,199 in 2015.
 
Delhi reported the highest rate of rapes in 2015–23.7 per 100,000 population–followed by Chhattisgarh (12.2) and Madhya Pradesh (11.9), IndiaSpend reported in September 2016.
 
It is not clear if rapes have increased or more women are reporting rape; it could be either reason or both. The rise in rapes reported can be correlated to the change in rape law–which was made more stringent, possibly leading to higher reporting–after the 2012 gangrape of a physiotherapy student, now widely known as Nirbhaya, which led to protests and outrage.
 
Rapes in Delhi tripled and the reform process promised after the 2012 Nirbhaya case had failed, IndiaSpend reported in August 2016.
 

 
In its India travel advisory for citizens, the UK government classified Delhi as potentially unsafe for women. Some of the advisories include:
 

• British women have been the victims of sexual assault in Goa, Delhi, Bangalore and Rajasthan and women travellers often receive unwanted attention in the form of verbal and physical harassment by individuals or groups of men.
• Women travellers should exercise caution when travelling in India even if travelling in a group.
• Do not leave your luggage unattended on trains at all. There has been an increase in handbag snatching in Delhi.

(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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