The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is India’s richest civic body. The decline in its disaster management and fire-brigade budget unfolded alongside a 60% rise in funding, over two years to 2020, to build an eight-lane, 32-km coastal road along the island-city’s western seaboard, according to our analysis of municipal data from 2015-16 to 2019-20.

The inadequacy of the BMC’s fire-and-disaster response was evident in the fact that only one in three emergency calls to the fire brigade in south Mumbai received help within eight minutes–the internationally accepted standard–according to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay study quoted in the Hindustan Times on June 2, 2019.

The IIT study recommended more fire stations and extra vehicles for the brigade’s fleet to better service south Mumbai, an area with 92,312 people per sq km, compared to 10,796 per sq km in New York, a city with four million fewer people than Mumbai’s 12.4 million.

The dire situation in Mumbai is mirrored nationwide, with 1,830 “structural collapses” reported in 2015, the latest year for which data are available, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Up to 59% or 1,080 such collapses were of “dwelling-houses/residential buildings”.

That same year, 1,885 people–or five every day–died in “structural collapses”. Of these, 1,109–or three every day–died in “dwelling-houses/residential buildings” collapses.

In the 2019-20 municipal budget, the BMC set aside Rs 201.4 crore or 2% of its capital expenditure, for the Mumbai Fire Brigade. This covers investments for new disaster management equipment, safety gear, vehicles and fire stations.

While this is an 11.5% increase from 2018-19, the fire brigade’s budget is still recovering from a drop of 39.7% and 7.5% over two years to 2018-19. Before that, the BMC’s budget for this head had seen a five-year peak at Rs 273.9 crore in 2016-17.

In 2017-18, the BMC included the coastal road project in its capital expenditure, allocating Rs 1,000 crore ($156 million) for the year. Thereafter, spending on the project rose by 33% in 2018-19 and by 6% in 2019-20.

The July 16 disaster came 709 days after the BMC, on August 7, 2017, identified the Kesarbhai building that collapsed in south Mumbai’s Dongri as a “dangerous structure” that needed to be “vacated & demolished”.

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post 499 Mumbai Buildings On Same High-Risk List As One That Collapsed, Trapping Scores appeared first on SabrangIndia.

• Rs 18,000 as assured monthly income for farmers or 2.8 times their current average, increase official markets, storage and refrigeration
• Refresh the 27-year-old national education policy, ensure 97% of students who enroll in school stay on till high school, instead of 79.2% who currently do.
• Reform labour laws, so 40 million small enterprises that hire fewer than ten workers can expand.
• An independent environment protection agency that can clean up poisoned water and toxic air in India’s cities, 14 of which occupy the top 20 spots globally of cities with worst air.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the first cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi on May 31, 2019.

These are some suggestions for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), as it prepares for its second consecutive term in office, according to experts and IndiaSpend research.

With 42% of India’s land area declared as drought hit, the farm crisis may deepen, and so our recommendations focus on making farming more rewarding, while simultaneously getting millions off the land, at a time when the country faces its worst unemployment in 45 years.
For jobs to be created, experts recommend a raft of labour reforms, so that small, unorganised enterprises, which currently employ 92% of India’s workforce, can expand without bureaucratic interference or requirements.

For this workforce to be more qualified, we recommend a revamp of the education system, the failure of which begins by failing to retain about three-fourths of students till high school and continues in a quality of education that leaves millions unprepared for employment.
Our other focus is on quality of life, which is related to labour productivity: India’s cities have some of the world’s most toxic air, and about 70% of the nation’s water is polluted and 600 million–according to a 2018 government think tank report–face “high-to-extreme” water stress.

Our eight-sector analysis:

Agriculture: Infrastructure, incomes

• Investing in more storage and refrigeration facilities in a country where a third of farm produce spoils for lack of them.
• Increase mandis–markets authorised to sell farm produce–from 7,600 to 42,000 nationwide, so that there is one within a radius of 5 km.
• Government needs to make farmers aware about its own programmes, such as crop insurance, which will be of use only if they are told about crops that need insurance.

One of the major suggestions to make agriculture more remunerative is to re-calculate what is called the minimum support price (MSP) to farmers, the price at which the government buys farm produce. But, as food-policy analyst Devinder Sharma pointed out, even if that is done, no more than 6% of farmers would benefit. He is right; this 2015 report backs that datum.

Sharma recommended “assured income packages” to farmers, worth Rs 18,000 per family. The income package, he said, should arrive as a top-up over the monthly average income a farm family gets by district. The average income of an Indian farmer is Rs 77,976 per year, or Rs 6,498 per month, according to 2017 data, which the government wants to double by 2022.

It its 2019 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised a Rs 25 lakh crore agricultural investment, 75% more than the budget for 2018-19. Between 2012 and 2015, India  invested no more than 0.4% of gross domestic product (GDP) on agriculture, which supports 60% or 770 million people.

There are many ways to direct this investment: increase irrigation access from the current 35% of farms–the BJP manifesto promises irrigation to all farms by December 2019, an impossible task; or improving storage and refrigeration facilities in a country where 30% of produce is spoiled according to a 2013 report.

Harvest and post-harvest loss of India’s major agricultural produce were estimated at Rs 92,651 crore in 2016, as three of five components–pack houses, ripening chambers and reefer vehicles–in the cold chain remained almost entirely without funding, IndiaSpend reported on August 11, 2016.

New investment can also be directed at the expansion of mandis, or farm-produce markets, which are supposed to offer fair prices and immediate returns to farmers, said Sharma, from 7,600 to 42,000 nationwide, so there is one in a radius of 5 km instead of the 464-km average gap that currently separates each.

The government does need to provide “assured and stable prices” for vegetables, such as onions and tomatoes, and agricultural extension and information, said Madhura Swaminathan, a professor at the economic analysis unit of the Indian Statistical Institute.
“We need to make the farmers aware about new technologies and schemes,” said Swaminathan. “A scheme like crop insurance will benefit people only if they are informed about which crops need insurance. And the government needs to intervene at the right time to stabilise prices.”

“Now that the BJP government is elected in most of the states, it should carry out key marketing reforms (remunerative prices to farmers, electronic trading facilities, boosting agro-processing facilities and crop insurance),” said Sukhpal Singh, professor and chairperson, Centre for Management in Agriculture at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Economy: Jobs, cities, reforms

• 100 new cities that will absorb millions of people moving out from agriculture.
• Create jobs in the infrastructure and services sector through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) instead of doling out money.
• Reform land and labour laws, remove inherent conflicts in them, so that industries can hire more workers.

India’s unemployment rate is at a 45-year high, according to National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, released on June 1, 2019.

Unemployment is highest among educated people, 17% among women and 20% among men of whom did not have a job in rural areas, according to the NSSO data.

“The biggest issue before us is unemployment,” said Anupam Manur, Economic Research Fellow at Takshashila Institution. “We need at least 14-15 million jobs annually, but we are able to create only 1.5 million jobs. That is a huge gap.”

The unemployment rate for rural male youth (aged 15-29) rose from 5% in 2011-12 to 17.4% in 2017-18; for rural women in the same age group, it rose from 4.8% in 2011-12 to 13.6% in 2017-18, according to the NSSO data.

A majority of the people seeking employment will come from rural India, whose cultivators and agricultural labourers account for more than half of India’s workforce and contribute to no more than 16% of GDP. These millions will need to be accommodated in new cities, and older cities will require infrastructure expansion.

“We have more people doing agriculture than we need, and it’s a form of disguised unemployment,” said Manur. “The solution is urbanisation and industrialisation.”

The BJP manifesto promises, for instance, metros in 50 cities and piped cooking gas in major tier 1 (more than 100,000 people) and tier 2 (50,000 to 99,999 people) cities, of which there are 34, Manur suggested that the government might need to create 100 new cities.

That will not be easy with land difficult to acquire: Despite the supposed focus on infrastructure projects, 453 projects were stuck due to land-acquisition problems, the Economic Times reported on December 13, 2018.

These challenges emerge at a time of slowing investments, declining growth and rising bad debts.

Gross non-performing assets (NPAs) in Indian banking were Rs 8 lakh crore and Rs 10.3 lakh crore, in March 2017 and March 2018, respectively, IndiaSpend reported in February 2019, as the share in NPAs of large borrowers rose.

“We are witnessing growth due to consumption and government spending and not due to investments,” said Manur. “This is not sustainable.”

The government needs to create jobs in the infrastructure and service sector through the MGNREGS programme instead of doling out money, said R S Deshpande, former director, Institute for Social and Economic Change, a think tank in Bengaluru.

Deshpande said conflicts between land and labour laws require resolution. “Our labour laws [discourage] organisations from becoming big,” he said. “In a country that has so many hands, these organisations choose to be capital intensive and work with more machinery to avoid the labour laws.”
 

Sources: Bharatiya Janata Party, 2019; IndiaSpend research

Sanitation: Beyond declarations and claims

• Households that did not get government subsidies to build toilets should now get them
• Beyond certifying villages, towns and states as being free of open defecation, the government must now focus on getting people to use toilets
• Focus on educating citizens on toilet pits, that they fill up in five years, not two months, and that anyone can empty them, not just scheduled castes

More than 99% of Indian households now have toilets and 30 states and union territories have been declared “open-defecation free” (ODF), according to the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM)–Gramin or rural website. The mission to clean India added 91 million toilets over five years to 2019, increasing toilet access from 39% of the population to 99%, the government has claimed.

“Now is the time for the government to promote use of toilet now that bulk of the construction is done,” said Aashish Gupta, research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a think tank, which found in a 2019 study that despite an increase in the construction of toilets, 44% of people in north India still defecated in the open.

It is almost certain that by October 2019, the national SBM deadline, India will be declared ODF. But many households clearly do not have toilets, working or otherwise, in areas declared ODF, as FactChecker reported in 2018 (see here and here). A third of households in 120 villages declared ODF in Gujarat did not have access to toilets, the government auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, reported in September 2018.

The government needs to acknowledge that sanitation is “a continuous process” and continue with programmes that educate citizens on building and using toilets. “We know that states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, which have been declared open-defecation free, have no SBM activities going on,” said Gupta.

There are concerns about how toilet pits will be emptied, for instance. In Uttar Pradesh, the government has been “fairly successful” in communicating that the pits get filled in five years and not in two months as people thought, said Gupta.
“It is time that they (government) show that the pits can be emptied by anyone,” said Gupta, referring to a stigma that forces scheduled castes to do the job. “It would great if (Prime Minister) Modi can empty a pit, reducing the stigma, and spread the message of safe decomposition of sludge.”

Health: More money, better use of money

• Find funding to increase public healthcare spending from 1.4% of GDP to 2.5% of GDP
• Improve utilisation of central healthcare funds by the states: Only 32% of National Health Mission funds were spent over five years to 2016.

The biggest challenge for the new government would be finding funding for healthcare, said Oommen C. Kurian, public health fellow at Observer Research Foundation, a think tank.

“It is widely known that our public healthcare funding should be increased to at least 2.5% of GDP, but over the last decade governments have only been able to reach 1.3% to 1.4% of GDP,” he said.

This funding is important because India has the world’s highest population of stunted children–short for their age–and the country’s failing primary healthcare and overburdened tertiary care are ill-equipped to handle the crisis of childhood malnutrition, leaving India unable to fulfil its national potential, IndiaSpend reported in January 2018.

“Until the federal government in India takes health as seriously as many other nations do, India will not fulfil either its national or global potential,” said a November 2017 editorial published in the Lancet, a medical journal.

“This is the bottom line: if you walk into the future economy with 40% of your workforce having been stunted as children, you are simply not going to be able to compete,” Jim Yong Kim, president of World Bank, said on his visit to New Delhi in June 2016.

Another challenge for the government is to improve the utilisation of central funding to states, a proportion of which returns unutilised.

National Health Mission (NHM) funds unspent by states over five years to 2016 increased by 29%, according to a 2017 audit by the government’s auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, which also reported delayed transfers and misallocation of these funds. The NHM, launched in 2005, is India’s largest health programme aimed at providing universal access to healthcare. One of its primary missions is to improve maternal and child health and control communicable and non-communicable diseases.

India accounts for 17% of global burden of maternal deaths, non-communicable diseases made for 61% of deaths in 2016, communicable diseases such as leprosy and malaria are yet to be controlled and 55 million Indians slipped into poverty in 2011-12 because of health catastrophes they could not afford.

“Health is a state subject, so there has to be a broader consensus between Centre and states involving all major political parties when it comes to healthcare,” said Kurian.

For example, despite agreeing to be part of Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the insurance arm of the Ayushman Bharat initiative, many states over the last few months since its launch in September 2018 have opted out due to political reasons, “This causes unnecessary delays and  impacts access, especially of the poorer households,” said Kurian.

Some 2.4 million Indians die of treatable conditions every year, the worst situation among 136 nations studied for a report published in The Lancet in 2018.

Poor care quality leads to more deaths than insufficient access to healthcare–1.6 million Indians died due to poor quality of care in 2016, nearly twice as many as due to non-utilisation of healthcare services (838,000 persons), IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.

Women: More state support

• Women in rural areas must get access to education, skilling and digital and financial literacy.
• The government must increase the budget for shelter homes and court infrastructure.
• Women must feel safe in their work spaces and on their commute to work

The unemployment for rural women aged 15-29 rose 8.8 percentage points over six years to 2018, according to 2019 NSSO data. For educated rural females, the unemployment rate ranged from 9.7% to 15.2% between 2004-05 and 2011-12, rising to 17.3% in 2017-18.
The share of women in the paid workforce has been declining across major sectors over the 11 years to 2015, according to a September 2018 report published by the Centre for Sustainable Employment, an arm of the Azim Premji University. In agriculture, the share of women dropped by six percentage points from about 35% in 2004 to 29% in 2015. It dropped by four percentage points in manufacturing, from 26% in 2004 to 22% in 2015.

The government must step in to stop the decline in women’s participation in the workforce, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her suggestions include: improving work conditions, more public-sector employment, increase minimum wages and improve rural- and urban-employment schemes.

“At 17% of GDP, the economic contribution of Indian women is less than half the global average, and compares unfavorably to the 40% in China, for instance,” said Annette Dixon, World Bank South Asia vice president in March 2018. “India could boost its growth by 1.5 percentage points to 9 percent per year if around 50% of women could join the workforce.”

That can happen if the government make extra efforts. Experts cited two barriers to the decline of women in the workforce: attitudes and infrastructure gaps.

“Safe transport, decent working conditions and emphasis on decent employment should be the focus of the government,” said Aparna Sivaraman, programme officer at the Public Affairs Centre, a Bengaluru think tank. “Additionally, women in rural areas must be provided access to education, skilling, as well as digital and financial literacy. This actionable knowledge will help them to access and be part of better employment opportunities.”

Education: Arresting drop-out rates, improving quality

• Increasing enrollment in higher education to match the rate at school level
• Increased funding for state public universities, which cater to over 50% of students
• Larger budgets and support for the education of marginalised communities, children with special abilities and higher education of women.

One of the government’s foremost challenges is to make sure that Indian children stay in schools, experts said. In 2015-16, 97% of children were enrolled in a primary school, according to government data. This rate, called the gross enrollment rate, drops to 79.2% in grades IX and X and to 56% by grades XI and XII.

“The government should primarily focus on ensuring that children get to complete their education along the entire continuum from preschool till the higher-secondary level,” said Puja Marwaha, CEO of Child Rights and You, an NGO working for child rights.

“Unless we get students to stay in schools until higher education, we will not be able to utilise the demographic dividend to the fullest,” said Antara Sengupta, research fellow at ORF.

India’s demographic dividend is the world’s largest population of young people aged 15 to 24–241 million or 18% of all Indians–and is ahead of China’s 169.4 million, according to a 2017 report by the United Nations (UN) department of economic and social affairs.

Yet, India’s expenditure on higher education as a percentage of its total budget has remained largely stagnant, hovering around an average 1.47% over 12 years to 2018-19, the UN report said. Over 70% of 18- to 23-year-olds in the country are not enrolled in a higher educational institute, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education, 2017-18.

Education has been strongly linked to poverty alleviation. On average, one year of education is associated with a 10% increase in wage earnings, said a 2014 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report. It also protects the working population from exploitation by increasing the band of opportunities, improves health, reduces income disparities and drives economic progress, said the report.

To expand education, government also needs to extend the Right to Education to include pre-primary classes (nursery and kindergarten) and higher secondary classes (grades IX to XII), said Marwaha. The extension of the RTE Act to include children from ages three to 18 is stated in the New Education Policy, 2019, submitted to the education ministry by a policy committee on May 31, 2019. The policy was released to get feedback from the public. After getting feedback from general public, and after consulting state governments, the policy will be finalised by government, a press release from the ministry said.

This policy, when passed, will replace the National Policy on education, which was framed in 1986 and modified in 1992. A new, comprehensive policy with “clear, set goals” is important to set the roadmap for educational reforms, said Sengupta.

India also needs to improve the quality of state public universities, where 50.7% of students study, said Sengupta.  

Marwaha also emphasised the need for inclusive education. The new government needs to focus on resources and support for traditionally marginalised groups, such as girls, children from dalit, adivasi and others and also for children with special abilities.

India also needs to address the gender gap in higher education, said Sengupta. No more than a third of students in India’s top universities are women, the Times Higher Education (THE) Survey reported in May 2019, among the lowest ratio in a group of 20 countries that feature more than 10 universities in THE’s world university rankings.

Forest and lands: Protect local rights and the law

• Recognise and protect the authority of gram sabhas (village councils) to govern community forest resources with the full participation of women.
• Fund gram sabhas to manage forests that are mostly handled by forest departments.
• Do not transfer forest land by violating the law and rights of gram sabhas; respect their free, prior and informed consent.

The Forest Rights Act, which legalised the land rights of forest-dwellers in 2006, is critical to the rights and livelihoods of at least 200 million Indians–as much as the population of Brazil–of whom 90 million (45%) are tribespeople, IndiaSpend reported on March 20, 2019.
This is why it should be the new government’s priority to implement the FRA. Individual and community rights of scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers, including the rights of women, particularly vulnerable tribal groups–with the lowest development indices–displaced communities, nomadic and pastoralists should be settled, said Tushar Dash, a member of Community Forest Resource–Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA), a network of nonprofits working on the FRA.

The BJP government has been criticised for not protecting the rights of tribespeople during court hearings that led to a February 2018 Supreme Court order that forest dwellers whose claims had been rejected by respective state governments be evicted. The order was later put on hold.

The order dilutes and undermines the FRA, said Dash. The government should, on priority, review all land-title claims under FRA to ensure that 1.8 million “wrongful rejections” are corrected and land rights restored, he added.

At least 40 million hectares of forest land–more than 50% of India’s forest area, larger than the area of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh combined–is governed by the FRA and issues related to the rights and livelihoods of forest-dwellers and tribespeople. At least 170,000 villages, a fourth of all Indian villages, are eligible for rights under FRA, we reported.

Environment: A new regulator for many crises

• The government should set up an independent environmental regulator or independent environmental protection agency, divorced from the environment ministry, a conscience keeper of sorts.
• The government must simplify laws governing coastal and ocean issues and consider them together.

The one very important step that the new government should take is a complete overhaul of India’s environment ministry, said Sanjay Upadhyay, an environmental lawyer and founder of the Enviro Legal Defence Firm (ELDF), India’s first environmental law firm.
“We have been talking about an independent environmental regulator or independent environmental protection agency for a long time now, which is above the ministry and has a conscience-keeper role,” said Upadhyay. “Closed-door, non-consultative, officialdom-driven image of the environment governance in the country will have to be changed.”

Eight of 10 Indians breathe toxic air, which killed 1.2 million Indians in 2017–more than the death toll caused by tuberculosis, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria the same year. More than 100 Indian cities have been identified by the government to be India’s most polluted, yet the crisis deepens.

In 2019, after three years of deliberations, the government announced a flawed national programme that lacks clear sectoral targets and timelines to reduce air pollution by 20-30% by 2022, a promise made in the BJP manifesto.

The issues of air pollution in Indian cities and the pollution of water bodies need “urgent attention and action”, said Upadhyay.

India’s water is similarly in crisis, with 70% of it polluted, at a time when 600 million face “high-to-extreme” water stress, according to June 2018 report from Niti Aayog, a government think tank.

Another crisis has been unfolding along India’s coastline of 7,500 km–nearly three-and-a-half times the distance between Ahmedabad and Kolkata–divided almost equally on the east and the west of the country. Along it are nine states, two union territories (UT) and two island territories. Of the country’s 1.28 billion people, 560 million, or 43%, live within these coastal territories.

Millions living on India’s coasts are threatened, as India has lost 33% of its coastline to erosion in 26 years between 1990 and 2006, according to a report released in July 2018 by the National Centre for Coastal Research (CCR) in Chennai, which is mapping changes to India’s shoreline.

India’s coasts are under attack both from man-made activities–such as growing construction, damming of rivers, sand mining and destruction of mangroves–as well as natural causes linked to climate change such as rising sea levels, according to the CCR report.

“Till now we have been tinkering with government notifications here and there, but that is not enough,” said Upadhyay, urging “a holistic approach”, starting with the simplification of the Coastal Regulation Zone Act, which has been amended 76 times over 17 years to 2018.
India’s environment must be better protected, but environmental clearance procedures need to be made simple. “Compliance has to become cheaper than non-compliance,” said Upadhyay. “Currently, it is the other way round. Unless you make compliance cheaper and more broad-base people are going to find other ways of bypassing the process.”

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

Courtesy: India Spend

The post A Transformative Agenda For India’s New Government appeared first on SabrangIndia.

• Rs 18,000 as assured monthly income for farmers or 2.8 times their current average, increase official markets, storage and refrigeration
• Refresh the 27-year-old national education policy, ensure 97% of students who enroll in school stay on till high school, instead of 79.2% who currently do.
• Reform labour laws, so 40 million small enterprises that hire fewer than ten workers can expand.
• An independent environment protection agency that can clean up poisoned water and toxic air in India’s cities, 14 of which occupy the top 20 spots globally of cities with worst air.

These are some suggestions for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), as it prepares for its second consecutive term in office, according to experts and IndiaSpend research.

With 42% of India’s land area declared as drought hit, the farm crisis may deepen, and so our recommendations focus on making farming more rewarding, while simultaneously getting millions off the land, at a time when the country faces its worst unemployment in 45 years.

For jobs to be created, experts recommend a raft of labour reforms, so that small, unorganised enterprises, which currently employ 92% of India’s workforce, can expand without bureaucratic interference or requirements.

For this workforce to be more qualified, we recommend a revamp of the education system, the failure of which begins by failing to retain about three-fourths of students till high school and continues in a quality of education that leaves millions unprepared for employment.

Our other focus is on quality of life, which is related to labour productivity: India’s cities have some of the world’s most toxic air, and about 70% of the nation’s water is polluted and 600 million–according to a 2018 government think tank report–face “high-to-extreme” water stress.
Our eight-sector analysis:

Agriculture: Infrastructure, incomes

• Investing in more storage and refrigeration facilities in a country where a third of farm produce spoils for lack of them.
• Increase mandis–markets authorised to sell farm produce–from 7,600 to 42,000 nationwide, so that there is one within a radius of 5 km.
• Government needs to make farmers aware about its own programmes, such as crop insurance, which will be of use only if they are told about crops that need insurance.

One of the major suggestions to make agriculture more remunerative is to re-calculate what is called the minimum support price (MSP) to farmers, the price at which the government buys farm produce. But, as food-policy analyst Devinder Sharma pointed out, even if that is done, no more than 6% of farmers would benefit. He is right; this 2015 report backs that datum.

Sharma recommended “assured income packages” to farmers, worth Rs 18,000 per family. The income package, he said, should arrive as a top-up over the monthly average income a farm family gets by district. The average income of an Indian farmer is Rs 77,976 per year, or Rs 6,498 per month, according to 2017 data, which the government wants to double by 2022.

It its 2019 election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised a Rs 25 lakh crore agricultural investment, 75% more than the budget for 2018-19. Between 2012 and 2015, India  invested no more than 0.4% of gross domestic product (GDP) on agriculture, which supports 60% or 770 million people.

There are many ways to direct this investment: increase irrigation access from the current 35% of farms–the BJP manifesto promises irrigation to all farms by December 2019, an impossible task; or improving storage and refrigeration facilities in a country where 30% of produce is spoiled according to a 2013 report.

Harvest and post-harvest loss of India’s major agricultural produce were estimated at Rs 92,651 crore in 2016, as three of five components–pack houses, ripening chambers and reefer vehicles–in the cold chain remained almost entirely without funding, IndiaSpend reported on August 11, 2016.

New investment can also be directed at the expansion of mandis, or farm-produce markets, which are supposed to offer fair prices and immediate returns to farmers, said Sharma, from 7,600 to 42,000 nationwide, so there is one in a radius of 5 km instead of the 464-km average gap that currently separates each.

The government does need to provide “assured and stable prices” for vegetables, such as onions and tomatoes, and agricultural extension and information, said Madhura Swaminathan, a professor at the economic analysis unit of the Indian Statistical Institute.

“We need to make the farmers aware about new technologies and schemes,” said Swaminathan. “A scheme like crop insurance will benefit people only if they are informed about which crops need insurance. And the government needs to intervene at the right time to stabilise prices.”
“Now that the BJP government is elected in most of the states, it should carry out key marketing reforms (remunerative prices to farmers,
electronic trading facilities, boosting agro-processing facilities and crop insurance),” said Sukhpal Singh, professor and chairperson, Centre for Management in Agriculture at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Economy: Jobs, cities, reforms

• 100 new cities that will absorb millions of people moving out from agriculture.
• Create jobs in the infrastructure and services sector through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) instead of doling out money.
• Reform land and labour laws, remove inherent conflicts in them, so that industries can hire more workers.

India’s unemployment rate is at a 45-year high, according to National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data, released on June 1, 2019.
Unemployment is highest among educated people, 17% among women and 20% among men of whom did not have a job in rural areas, according to the NSSO data.

“The biggest issue before us is unemployment,” said Anupam Manur, Economic Research Fellow at Takshashila Institution. “We need at least 14-15 million jobs annually, but we are able to create only 1.5 million jobs. That is a huge gap.”

The unemployment rate for rural male youth (aged 15-29) rose from 5% in 2011-12 to 17.4% in 2017-18; for rural women in the same age group, it rose from 4.8% in 2011-12 to 13.6% in 2017-18, according to the NSSO data.

A majority of the people seeking employment will come from rural India, whose cultivators and agricultural labourers account for more than half of India’s workforce and contribute to no more than 16% of GDP. These millions will need to be accommodated in new cities, and older cities will require infrastructure expansion.

“We have more people doing agriculture than we need, and it’s a form of disguised unemployment,” said Manur. “The solution is urbanisation and industrialisation.”

The BJP manifesto promises, for instance, metros in 50 cities and piped cooking gas in major tier 1 (more than 100,000 people) and tier 2 (50,000 to 99,999 people) cities, of which there are 34, Manur suggested that the government might need to create 100 new cities.

That will not be easy with land difficult to acquire: Despite the supposed focus on infrastructure projects, 453 projects were stuck due to land-acquisition problems, the Economic Times reported on December 13, 2018.

These challenges emerge at a time of slowing investments, declining growth and rising bad debts.

Gross non-performing assets (NPAs) in Indian banking were Rs 8 lakh crore and Rs 10.3 lakh crore, in March 2017 and March 2018, respectively, IndiaSpend reported in February 2019, as the share in NPAs of large borrowers rose.

“We are witnessing growth due to consumption and government spending and not due to investments,” said Manur. “This is not sustainable.”
The government needs to create jobs in the infrastructure and service sector through the MGNREGS programme instead of doling out money, said R S Deshpande, former director, Institute for Social and Economic Change, a think tank in Bengaluru.

Deshpande said conflicts between land and labour laws require resolution. “Our labour laws [discourage] organisations from becoming big,” he said. “In a country that has so many hands, these organisations choose to be capital intensive and work with more machinery to avoid the labour laws.”
 

Sources: Bharatiya Janata Party, 2019; IndiaSpend research

Sanitation: Beyond declarations and claims

• Households that did not get government subsidies to build toilets should now get them
• Beyond certifying villages, towns and states as being free of open defecation, the government must now focus on getting people to use toilets
• Focus on educating citizens on toilet pits, that they fill up in five years, not two months, and that anyone can empty them, not just scheduled castes

More than 99% of Indian households now have toilets and 30 states and union territories have been declared “open-defecation free” (ODF), according to the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM)–Gramin or rural website. The mission to clean India added 91 million toilets over five years to 2019, increasing toilet access from 39% of the population to 99%, the government has claimed.

“Now is the time for the government to promote use of toilet now that bulk of the construction is done,” said Aashish Gupta, research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a think tank, which found in a 2019 study that despite an increase in the construction of toilets, 44% of people in north India still defecated in the open.

It is almost certain that by October 2019, the national SBM deadline, India will be declared ODF. But many households clearly do not have toilets, working or otherwise, in areas declared ODF, as FactChecker reported in 2018 (see here and here). A third of households in 120 villages declared ODF in Gujarat did not have access to toilets, the government auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, reported in September 2018.

The government needs to acknowledge that sanitation is “a continuous process” and continue with programmes that educate citizens on building and using toilets. “We know that states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, which have been declared open-defecation free, have no SBM activities going on,” said Gupta.

There are concerns about how toilet pits will be emptied, for instance. In Uttar Pradesh, the government has been “fairly successful” in communicating that the pits get filled in five years and not in two months as people thought, said Gupta.

“It is time that they (government) show that the pits can be emptied by anyone,” said Gupta, referring to a stigma that forces scheduled castes to do the job. “It would great if (Prime Minister) Modi can empty a pit, reducing the stigma, and spread the message of safe decomposition of sludge.”

Health: More money, better use of money

• Find funding to increase public healthcare spending from 1.4% of GDP to 2.5% of GDP
• Improve utilisation of central healthcare funds by the states: Only 32% of National Health Mission funds were spent over five years to 2016.

The biggest challenge for the new government would be finding funding for healthcare, said Oommen C. Kurian, public health fellow at Observer Research Foundation, a think tank.

“It is widely known that our public healthcare funding should be increased to at least 2.5% of GDP, but over the last decade governments have only been able to reach 1.3% to 1.4% of GDP,” he said.

This funding is important because India has the world’s highest population of stunted children–short for their age–and the country’s failing primary healthcare and overburdened tertiary care are ill-equipped to handle the crisis of childhood malnutrition, leaving India unable to fulfil its national potential, IndiaSpend reported in January 2018.

“Until the federal government in India takes health as seriously as many other nations do, India will not fulfil either its national or global potential,” said a November 2017 editorial published in the Lancet, a medical journal.

“This is the bottom line: if you walk into the future economy with 40% of your workforce having been stunted as children, you are simply not going to be able to compete,” Jim Yong Kim, president of World Bank, said on his visit to New Delhi in June 2016.

Another challenge for the government is to improve the utilisation of central funding to states, a proportion of which returns unutilised.

National Health Mission (NHM) funds unspent by states over five years to 2016 increased by 29%, according to a 2017 audit by the government’s auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, which also reported delayed transfers and misallocation of these funds. The NHM, launched in 2005, is India’s largest health programme aimed at providing universal access to healthcare. One of its primary missions is to improve maternal and child health and control communicable and non-communicable diseases.

India accounts for 17% of global burden of maternal deaths, non-communicable diseases made for 61% of deaths in 2016, communicable diseases such as leprosy and malaria are yet to be controlled and 55 million Indians slipped into poverty in 2011-12 because of health catastrophes they could not afford.

“Health is a state subject, so there has to be a broader consensus between Centre and states involving all major political parties when it comes to healthcare,” said Kurian.

For example, despite agreeing to be part of Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the insurance arm of the Ayushman Bharat initiative, many states over the last few months since its launch in September 2018 have opted out due to political reasons, “This causes unnecessary delays and  impacts access, especially of the poorer households,” said Kurian.

Some 2.4 million Indians die of treatable conditions every year, the worst situation among 136 nations studied for a report published in The Lancet in 2018.

Poor care quality leads to more deaths than insufficient access to healthcare–1.6 million Indians died due to poor quality of care in 2016, nearly twice as many as due to non-utilisation of healthcare services (838,000 persons), IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.

Women: More state support

• Women in rural areas must get access to education, skilling and digital and financial literacy.
• The government must increase the budget for shelter homes and court infrastructure.
• Women must feel safe in their work spaces and on their commute to work

The unemployment for rural women aged 15-29 rose 8.8 percentage points over six years to 2018, according to 2019 NSSO data. For educated rural females, the unemployment rate ranged from 9.7% to 15.2% between 2004-05 and 2011-12, rising to 17.3% in 2017-18.

The share of women in the paid workforce has been declining across major sectors over the 11 years to 2015, according to a September 2018 report published by the Centre for Sustainable Employment, an arm of the Azim Premji University. In agriculture, the share of women dropped by six percentage points from about 35% in 2004 to 29% in 2015. It dropped by four percentage points in manufacturing, from 26% in 2004 to 22% in 2015.

The government must step in to stop the decline in women’s participation in the workforce, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her suggestions include: improving work conditions, more public-sector employment, increase minimum wages and improve rural- and urban-employment schemes.

“At 17% of GDP, the economic contribution of Indian women is less than half the global average, and compares unfavorably to the 40% in China, for instance,” said Annette Dixon, World Bank South Asia vice president in March 2018. “India could boost its growth by 1.5 percentage points to 9 percent per year if around 50% of women could join the workforce.”

That can happen if the government make extra efforts. Experts cited two barriers to the decline of women in the workforce: attitudes and infrastructure gaps.

“Safe transport, decent working conditions and emphasis on decent employment should be the focus of the government,” said Aparna Sivaraman, programme officer at the Public Affairs Centre, a Bengaluru think tank. “Additionally, women in rural areas must be provided access to education, skilling, as well as digital and financial literacy. This actionable knowledge will help them to access and be part of better employment opportunities.”

Education: Arresting drop-out rates, improving quality

• Increasing enrollment in higher education to match the rate at school level
• Increased funding for state public universities, which cater to over 50% of students
• Larger budgets and support for the education of marginalised communities, children with special abilities and higher education of women.

One of the government’s foremost challenges is to make sure that Indian children stay in schools, experts said. In 2015-16, 97% of children were enrolled in a primary school, according to government data. This rate, called the gross enrollment rate, drops to 79.2% in grades IX and X and to 56% by grades XI and XII.

“The government should primarily focus on ensuring that children get to complete their education along the entire continuum from preschool till the higher-secondary level,” said Puja Marwaha, CEO of Child Rights and You, an NGO working for child rights.

“Unless we get students to stay in schools until higher education, we will not be able to utilise the demographic dividend to the fullest,” said Antara Sengupta, research fellow at ORF.

India’s demographic dividend is the world’s largest population of young people aged 15 to 24–241 million or 18% of all Indians–and is ahead of China’s 169.4 million, according to a 2017 report by the United Nations (UN) department of economic and social affairs.

Yet, India’s expenditure on higher education as a percentage of its total budget has remained largely stagnant, hovering around an average 1.47% over 12 years to 2018-19, the UN report said. Over 70% of 18- to 23-year-olds in the country are not enrolled in a higher educational institute, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education, 2017-18.

Education has been strongly linked to poverty alleviation. On average, one year of education is associated with a 10% increase in wage earnings, said a 2014 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report. It also protects the working population from exploitation by increasing the band of opportunities, improves health, reduces income disparities and drives economic progress, said the report.

To expand education, government also needs to extend the Right to Education to include pre-primary classes (nursery and kindergarten) and higher secondary classes (grades IX to XII), said Marwaha. The extension of the RTE Act to include children from ages three to 18 is stated in the New Education Policy, 2019, submitted to the education ministry by a policy committee on May 31, 2019. The policy was released to get feedback from the public. After getting feedback from general public, and after consulting state governments, the policy will be finalised by government, a press release from the ministry said.

This policy, when passed, will replace the National Policy on education, which was framed in 1986 and modified in 1992. A new, comprehensive policy with “clear, set goals” is important to set the roadmap for educational reforms, said Sengupta.

India also needs to improve the quality of state public universities, where 50.7% of students study, said Sengupta.  

Marwaha also emphasised the need for inclusive education. The new government needs to focus on resources and support for traditionally marginalised groups, such as girls, children from dalit, adivasi and others and also for children with special abilities.

India also needs to address the gender gap in higher education, said Sengupta. No more than a third of students in India’s top universities are women, the Times Higher Education (THE) Survey reported in May 2019, among the lowest ratio in a group of 20 countries that feature more than 10 universities in THE’s world university rankings.

Forest and lands: Protect local rights and the law

• Recognise and protect the authority of gram sabhas (village councils) to govern community forest resources with the full participation of women.
• Fund gram sabhas to manage forests that are mostly handled by forest departments.
• Do not transfer forest land by violating the law and rights of gram sabhas; respect their free, prior and informed consent.

The Forest Rights Act, which legalised the land rights of forest-dwellers in 2006, is critical to the rights and livelihoods of at least 200 million Indians–as much as the population of Brazil–of whom 90 million (45%) are tribespeople, IndiaSpend reported on March 20, 2019.

This is why it should be the new government’s priority to implement the FRA. Individual and community rights of scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers, including the rights of women, particularly vulnerable tribal groups–with the lowest development indices–displaced communities, nomadic and pastoralists should be settled, said Tushar Dash, a member of Community Forest Resource–Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA), a network of nonprofits working on the FRA.

The BJP government has been criticised for not protecting the rights of tribespeople during court hearings that led to a February 2018 Supreme Court order that forest dwellers whose claims had been rejected by respective state governments be evicted. The order was later put on hold.

The order dilutes and undermines the FRA, said Dash. The government should, on priority, review all land-title claims under FRA to ensure that 1.8 million “wrongful rejections” are corrected and land rights restored, he added.

At least 40 million hectares of forest land–more than 50% of India’s forest area, larger than the area of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh combined–is governed by the FRA and issues related to the rights and livelihoods of forest-dwellers and tribespeople. At least 170,000 villages, a fourth of all Indian villages, are eligible for rights under FRA, we reported.

Environment: A new regulator for many crises

• The government should set up an independent environmental regulator or independent environmental protection agency, divorced from the environment ministry, a conscience keeper of sorts.
• The government must simplify laws governing coastal and ocean issues and consider them together.

The one very important step that the new government should take is a complete overhaul of India’s environment ministry, said Sanjay Upadhyay, an environmental lawyer and founder of the Enviro Legal Defence Firm (ELDF), India’s first environmental law firm.

“We have been talking about an independent environmental regulator or independent environmental protection agency for a long time now, which is above the ministry and has a conscience-keeper role,” said Upadhyay. “Closed-door, non-consultative, officialdom-driven image of the environment governance in the country will have to be changed.”

Eight of 10 Indians breathe toxic air, which killed 1.2 million Indians in 2017–more than the death toll caused by tuberculosis, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria the same year. More than 100 Indian cities have been identified by the government to be India’s most polluted, yet the crisis deepens.

In 2019, after three years of deliberations, the government announced a flawed national programme that lacks clear sectoral targets and timelines to reduce air pollution by 20-30% by 2022, a promise made in the BJP manifesto.

The issues of air pollution in Indian cities and the pollution of water bodies need “urgent attention and action”, said Upadhyay.

India’s water is similarly in crisis, with 70% of it polluted, at a time when 600 million face “high-to-extreme” water stress, according to June 2018 report from Niti Aayog, a government think tank.

Another crisis has been unfolding along India’s coastline of 7,500 km–nearly three-and-a-half times the distance between Ahmedabad and Kolkata–divided almost equally on the east and the west of the country. Along it are nine states, two union territories (UT) and two island territories. Of the country’s 1.28 billion people, 560 million, or 43%, live within these coastal territories.

Millions living on India’s coasts are threatened, as India has lost 33% of its coastline to erosion in 26 years between 1990 and 2006, according to a report released in July 2018 by the National Centre for Coastal Research (CCR) in Chennai, which is mapping changes to India’s shoreline.
India’s coasts are under attack both from man-made activities–such as growing construction, damming of rivers, sand mining and destruction of mangroves–as well as natural causes linked to climate change such as rising sea levels, according to the CCR report.

“Till now we have been tinkering with government notifications here and there, but that is not enough,” said Upadhyay, urging “a holistic approach”, starting with the simplification of the Coastal Regulation Zone Act, which has been amended 76 times over 17 years to 2018.

India’s environment must be better protected, but environmental clearance procedures need to be made simple. “Compliance has to become cheaper than non-compliance,” said Upadhyay. “Currently, it is the other way round. Unless you make compliance cheaper and more broad-base people are going to find other ways of bypassing the process.”

Courtesy: India Spend

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“This indisputably is a result of prevailing governance deficit in these sectors that is causing deprivation to the average Indian voter,” the survey report said. A similar survey by ADR conducted in mid-2017 had found the rating on voters’ top five concerns ‘above average’.

Carried out between October 2018 and December 2018, the ‘All India Survey On Governance Issues and Voting Behaviour 2018’ covered 534 of 543 Lok Sabha constituencies, with 273,487 participating voters spread across various demographics.

ADR’s report identifies 30 voters’ priorities including drinking water, electricity, roads, food, education, healthcare and public transport, in their respective regions. For assessing this, voters were asked to list their top five concerns.

‘Better employment opportunities’ emerged as the topmost concern for 46.8% of voters, followed by better healthcare (34.6%) and drinking water (30.5%).

These findings are similar to a Pew Research Centre survey conducted in May-July 2018–the beginning of the last year of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led NDA government–in which more than 70% of 2,521 respondents identified the lack of employment opportunities and rising prices are India’s most pressing challenges, as IndiaSpend reported on March 26, 2019.

ADR also asked participants to rate the government’s performance on each of the 30 voters’ priorities. A three-level scale of ‘Good’, ‘Average’ and ‘Bad’ was used, where ‘Good’ was given weightage if 5, ‘Average’ was weighted 3 and ‘Bad’ was weighted 1.
The government’s performance on addressing the top three concerns–employment, healthcare and drinking water needs–was rated 2.15, 2.35 and 2.52, respectively, or below average, according to the report. In fact, in all 30 listed issues, across rural and urban areas at the all-India level, the government received a rating below the average score of 3 out of 5.

“It is a matter of serious concern that for none of the 30 listed voters’ priorities, the performance of the government was rated as average or above average,” the report said.

Other issues that featured in the top 10 voter priorities include better roads, better public transport, availability of water for agriculture, agricultural loans, better prices for farm produce, subsidies for seeds and fertilisers, and better law and order.

Source: Association of Democratic Reforms, 2018

This makes it evident that Indian voters prioritise provision of employment and basic amenities such as healthcare, drinking water and better roads over issues such as terrorism and a strong defence/military, the report said.

Of the 30 issues, the government’s performance was rated worst on encroachment on public lands and lakes, terrorism, job-skilling, a strong defence/military, eradication of corruption, lower food prices for consumers and mining/quarrying.

The government’s rank on providing better employment opportunities–voters’ primary concern– stood at 16, behind its performance on providing better healthcare (7th) and drinking water (3rd), the other top concerns.

Source: Association of Democratic Reforms, 2018

Ratings of government performance on top voter concerns has declined since 2017
In a comparative analysis with ADR’s All India Mid-Term Survey 2017, better employment opportunities and better hospitals/primary healthcare centres remained top concerns for voters, the 2018 ADR survey found. Meanwhile, the government’s performance on providing for the voters’ top-five concerns declined to below average in 2018, the report showed.

In 2018, drinking water, better roads and public transport featured in the top five, replacing agricultural loan availability, better law and order, and electricity for agriculture, which featured in 2017.

Voter concern for better employment opportunities in fact grew from 30% in 2017 to 47% in 2018. Rating of the government’s performance on this issue declined from 3.17 on a scale of 5 in 2017 to 2.15 in 2018.

Similarly, voter concern on the need for better healthcare facilities grew from 25% in 2017 to 35% in 2018. Rating of the government’s performance in this regard declined from 3.36 (above average) to 2.35 (below average).

Drinking water as voters’ priority increased from 12% in 2017 to 30% in 2018. The government’s performance rating fell from 2.79 to 2.52.

Source: Association for Democratic Reforms, 2017 and 2018

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Currently, the formula for calculating the national minimum wage presumes that each wage earner supports three persons (“consumption units”), and that a “consumption unit” needs at least 2,700 calories per day (in addition to essential non-food items such as clothing, medicines and transport).

The new formula, arrived at by using new evidence on how and how much households consume, suggests increasing the number of “consumption units” per household to 3.6.

Given “a reduction in the proportion of workers engaged in heavy work and an increase in the number of workers in moderate and sedentary occupations”, the committee recommends reducing the per head (adult) minimum calorie requirement to 2,400 calories, but also that the monetary value for food consumption used in the formula must account for including 50 grams of protein and 30 grams of fat in an adult diet.

With the new formula–which also ascribes enhanced values to essential non-food items–the committee has arrived at a figure of Rs 375 per day, or Rs 9,750 per month, as the national minimum wage.

The Report of the Expert Committee on Determining the Methodology for Fixing the National Minimum Wage has been prepared by a committee chaired by Anoop Satpathy, a fellow at the VV Giri National Labour Institute, an autonomous institute under the labour ministry.

Estimation Of The Daily National Minimum Wage (NMW) (In Rs)

Source: Report of the Expert Committee on Determining the Methodology for Fixing the National Minimum Wage

Such a national minimum wage would apply across the country irrespective of sectors, skills, occupations and rural-urban locations, the report recommends, and would represent the basic minimum wage that enables healthy living and efficient performance at work.

More than 80% of Indian workers are employed in informal jobs, as per the International Labour Organization’s 2018 report, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. These workers are unable to negotiate decent wages and working conditions, and often have no social security benefits.

The increase in minimum wage recommended by the committee–to Rs 375–looks like a lot compared to the Rs 176 at present, “but if you compare it to the central minimum wage, it is not an increase”, Sabina Dewan, president and executive director of research organisation JustJobs Network, told IndiaSpend.

The central minimum wage is what is paid to workers in central government organisations or those working on central government projects, e.g., a building in Odisha for the IT department.

It starts from Rs 333 for agricultural unskilled workers and goes up to Rs 728 for highly skilled, industrial workers.

“Such a minimum wage is in no way representative of the workers’ skill levels and the employer’s capacity to pay,” the report says, “It is just enough to meet the basic requirements of workers and their families and can be made statutory.”

Region-wise alternative
Alternatively, the committee suggests, the country could be carved up into five different regions with diverse socio-economic and labour market situations. The national minimum wage for each region could be estimated using a nationally representative food basket (but at regional average unit price of each food item), the committee says.

The report discourages using regional food baskets in order to “dissociate the consumption pattern from the level of poverty and ability to pay in a region”.

The required expenditure for non-food items would, however, be estimated separately for each region.

As per the committee’s estimates, the minimum wage for various regions, thus calculated, would range between Rs 342 per day (or Rs 8,892 per month) and Rs 447 per day (Rs 11,622 per month).

Source: Ministry of Labour and Employment

Rent allowance extra
Recognising that house rent “accounts for a significant proportion of the overall non-food component”, the committee has recommended an additional house rent allowance, averaging up to Rs 55 per day or Rs 1,430 per month in cities, to be paid “over and above” the national minimum wage.

The rent allowance may vary by city and town, and the committee has recommended that a separate study look into it.

Wages by skill-level
At present, various state governments have opted to fix minimum wages for at least three or four categories of workers based on their skills level–unskilled, semiskilled, skilled and highly skilled.

The national minimum wage recommended by the present committee applies to workers across skill levels.

However, the committee says, to know whether minimum wages should vary by skill level would need a detailed analysis of the National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF), as well as a standard approach to define skill levels at the national and state levels.

It recommends that a separate committee be set up to study this in collaboration with stakeholders such as the skill development ministry as well as employers’ and workers’ organisations.

Six-monthly revisions
The panel has also recommended reviewing the minimum wage every six months based on the changes in retail price fluctuations, as some states do at present (and others do after a gap of five years).

“I think it is a good idea to revise the minimum wage based on inflation and other economic indicators that change regularly, but implementation will undoubtedly be difficult,” Dewan of JustJobs Network said. “For one, how do you ensure that enterprises of all sizes are apprised of the changes on a regular basis? What will the administrative cost of revising payroll be?”

Beyond subsistence
The labour ministry, in its preface to the report, says the committee’s work aims to achieve “decent work and inclusive growth” for India’s workers, and acknowledges the need for India to address issues such as low pay, wage inequality and gender wage gap.

“The government is ever committed to improving the living conditions of informal economy workers who contribute significantly to India’s economic growth and progress,” the preface states, “A minimum guaranteed income for all workers would therefore go a long way towards bettering workers’ living standards and help India achieve many of its socio-economic goals, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

The Code on Wages Bill introduced in Parliament in August 2017 aimed to achieve these objectives by making the national minimum wage legally binding by giving it statutory backing.

At present, although a national minimum wage floor has been in place since the 1990s–and has risen progressively to Rs 176 per day in 2017–some 62 million workers are paid less than the indicative national minimum wage, as per the International Labour Organization’s 2018 India Wage Report. The rate of low pay is higher for women than for men.

Making the national minimum wage legally binding would require fixing a single national minimum wage–or different national minimum wages for different states or geographical areas–which was the remit of the present committee.

However, the term of the 16th Lok Sabha having ended, the Code on Wages Bill has lapsed and would have to be reintroduced in parliament after the next government comes to power. The committee’s report would also have be considered by the subsequent government.

A study by JustJobs Network that looked at wages across the globe suggests that successful wage regimes include a minimum wage that serves as a floor to ensure workers’ basic needs, Dewan said. “They must also provide compensation ladders, established through sound industrial relations and collective bargaining in which wage growth is aligned with productivity and prices,” she added.

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

Courtesy: India Spend

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Based on an analysis of self-sworn affidavits submitted by electoral candidates prior to the last election they contested, the report found that MPs and MLAs belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have reported the most (27, or 47% of all) cases of hate speech filed against them, followed by MPs/MLAs from the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), with six each.

 
The maximum number of MPs/MLAs who have self-declared cases of hate-speech filed against them are from Uttar Pradesh (UP, 15), Telangana (13) and poll-bound Karnataka and Maharashtra (five each).
 
As many as 15 sitting MPs in the Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) have declared hate-speech cases against them–10 from the BJP, and one each from the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), TRS, AIMIM, Pattali Makkal Katchi and Shiv Sena.
 
No MP from the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament) has declared cases against themselves, the report said.
 
Among the current members of legislative assemblies (state legislatures), 43 have declared cases against themselves, of whom 17 are from the BJP; five each are from the TRS and AIMIM; three from the Telugu Desam Party; two each from the Indian National Congress, All India Trinamool Congress, Janata Dal (United) and Shiv Sena; one each from Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party; and two are independent MLAs.
 
Two leaders of political parties–Asaduddin Owaisi of the AIMIM and Badruddin Ajmal of the AIUDF–have declared cases.
 
Uma Bharti, the serving Union Cabinet Minister for Drinking Water and Sanitation, has declared cases related to hate speech against her.
 
As many as 198 candidates with declared cases related to hate speech have contested elections for parliament or state assemblies in the last five years.
 
We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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These data indicate the government move to prioritise a change to legislation that allows courts to grant the death penalty to rapists of children younger than 12 will not bring quicker or better justice because there is no plan to address conviction failures and court delays.
 
The new ordinance also adds a minimum punishment of 20 years to anyone who rapes a woman below 16.
 
Of 39,068 rape victims–including women and girls–in 2016, 43% (16,863) of the girls raped were minor, below the age of 18, while, 5% (2,116) were less than 12 years old, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.

 
The union cabinet on April 21, 2018, approved an ordinance to the Indian Penal Code, Indian Evidence Act, Code of Criminal Procedure and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), allowing for harsher punishments to those committing sexual crimes against women and children. An ordinance is promulgated by the President of India when the union cabinet so recommends and used when Parliament is out of session to quickly pass legislation deemed urgent.
 
The amendments, known as the Criminal Law Ordinance 2018, come during a period of national uproar. April 2018 was a month where the high-profile rape cases of eight-year-old Asifa in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district, and the alleged rape of a minor in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, allegedly by a BJP MLA, dominated the national media and fuelled much politicised debate along religious and ethnic lines.
 
Reporting may be deterred, rather than rape
 
There were 19,765 reported child rapes in India in 2016, or 54 every day, under section 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 4 and 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences  (POCSO) Act–an increase of almost 6% compared to 2014 when 18,661 cases were reported.
 

Source: National Crime Records Bureau
Note: Child rape cases in 2016 have been recorded under section 376 of the IPC and section 4 & 6 of the POCSO Act. In 2014 and 2015, these cases were recorded separately under IPC crimes and POCSO Act, and we have included them for comparison. Cases reported in 2012 and 2013 were only under section 376 of the IPC.
 
Madhya Pradesh reported the most 13% (2,467) child rapes nationwide in 2016, followed by Maharashtra (12%, 2,292 cases) and Uttar Pradesh (11%, 2,115 cases).
 
Sikkim reported the highest rate of rape, 32.5 rapes per 100,000 children, followed by Mizoram (26.7) and Delhi (14.5), as against the national average of 4.4 child rapes.
 
About 18-20% of child rapes occur in the family and 50% in an institutionalized setting, according to this 2013 paper published in the journal Psychological Studies.
 
Offenders were known to the victims–including both women and girl child–in 94% of the rape cases reported in 2016, NCRB data show. Most of them (29%) were neighbours, followed by ‘known persons on promise to marry the victim’ (27%) and relatives (6%); 30% were other known people.
 
The introduction of a death penalty for those accused of raping a child under 12 years could have a negative effect on reporting, as families fear ostracization and legal consequence for family members.
 
“The introduction of the death penalty is not a great move. In the family these cases will not be reported, so many of these things happen by known people, the community will protect them,” Flavia Agnes, a women’s’ rights lawyer and co-founder of MAJLIS, a Mumbai-based organisation that provides legal initiatives for women, told IndiaSpend.
 
“Reporting rates were definitely increasing, but now I believe more people will not report (rapes) for fear of the consequences,” she said.
 
Conviction delays and a 72% failure rate
 
Up to 90% of rape cases reported were pending trial at the end of 2016.
 
The conviction rate for child rape was 28%–inclusive of cases reported under section 376 of IPC and section 4 and 6 of POCSO Act–in 2016, compared to 34% in the previous year under section 376 of IPC, and 41% and 32% under section 4 and 6 of the POCSO act in 2015 respectively.
 
“Expedited trials are just not happening in India, it will take 20-30 years to improve the system,” said Ms Agnes. “Just one or two special courts is not enough; this is why so many cases are pending. Plus trials take too long.”
 
Six fast-track courts were set up in Delhi in 2013 after the gang rape of a 23-year-old paramedic student, to address the  high rate of unfinished investigations and encourage swifter convictions. However, in 2012, regular courts resolved 500 cases compared to 400 in fast track courts, which failed to serve their inherent purpose, Business Standard reported on December 14, 2014.
 
The last person to receive capital punishment in India for reasons other than terrorism was Dhananjoy Chatterjee who raped and murdered 14-year-old schoolgirl. Chatterjee was hanged in August 2004.   
 

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