Previously when the monsoon rains arrived, villagers like Gangrude were assured of at least two months of work, earning between Rs 200-250 per day in the nearby rice fields. Now the work available has decreased and is more irregular. “The population is growing but the number of jobs is reducing each year,” Gangrude told IndiaSpend one hot March morning. “Last year some people got just three weeks of work in the whole season. With more machinery around too, the work is done faster.”

Gangrude’s husband is one of the lucky ones. A few years ago, he found a non-farming job as a tailor in the neighbouring town and earned Rs 6,000 last Diwali. But others, especially the village’s women, are often left jobless outside of the monsoon–the two-month period when the only farming work of the year is available. “After the plastic ban, an NGO came to the next village and taught the women how to sew cloth bags, petticoats and such things,” Gangudre said. “I would have liked to learn too but they didn’t come here; I don’t know how else you can find this kind of work.”

Kamal Gangrude, 35, with her son in Pimplad village of Maharashtra’s northwestern Nashik district. In the backdrop are the fields that used to provide a steady supply of farm jobs, but have now been sold to developers, thus restricting employment options for the village’s poor.

Like the villagers of Pimplad, an increasing number of women in Indian villages are being left with little employment options, except low-paid and erratic farm work. The number of female agricultural labourers in India increased by 24% between 2001 and 2011, even as 7.7 million farmers left farming, indicating how any limited, non-farming opportunities are increasingly being taken up by men, who are perceived as higher-skilled, better educated and more able to migrate for work.

This ‘feminisation of agriculture’ is “not to be celebrated”, said Ishita Mehrotra, assistant professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi, because farm jobs keep women confined to “low paid, insecure and oppressive labour relations”. Agricultural work is indicative of “a patriarchal ideology and a socio-cultural value system” that keeps women bound to the village and consumed with domestic work, while gender roles allow men to migrate for economic and social reasons, she said.

Mehrotra has authored a chapter on rural unemployment and inequality in Oxfam India’s second India Inequality Report, ‘Mind The Gap – The State of Employment in India’. This is the latest in our ongoing investigation of India’s jobs scenario, and is based on Oxfam’s analysis of the jobs situation in its new report and our investigation from the field.

Unequal economic growth

Despite four-fold growth in gross domestic product (GDP) since the early 1990s, India’s rural economy has undergone a crisis, with women and marginalised groups suffering the most as income-generating opportunities have disappeared.

An estimated 32 million casual labourers lost their jobs between 2011-12 and 2017-18, with 94% of those being farm jobs, according to a leaked National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) report published by The Indian Express in March 2019. At the same time, the proportion of employed rural women fell by 31% from 2011-12 to 2017-18, compared to a 6% reduction in employed men, reflecting how women have fared worst in the economic crisis.

Amid such turbulence, the country has seen numerous farmer protests, rising debt levels among rural households and falling crop prices, leaving the 600 million Indians dependent on farming struggling to get by. As a result, rising unemployment and agrarian distress have become salient election issues, with more than 70% of people in a recent survey citing a lack of jobs as a significant concern, IndiaSpend reported in March 2019.

Marginalised groups most affected

Non-farm activities now represent more than 65% of rural household incomes, as agriculture as the main source of income becomes gradually less prevalent, according to this 2017 paper released by Niti Aayog, the government’s policy think-tank. This reflects the way workers have had to diversify out of traditional, farm-based employment, as opportunities have shrunk.

The need to find alternative employment affects the working poor (who also are more likely to be Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims) significantly more than the upper-caste, landowning classes who can rely on trade and renting out of machinery, as examples of asset-backed wealth generation, the Oxfam report found. Wealthier rural households are also more likely to find skilled, white-collar jobs as a result of higher education levels.

As farm workers leave an unproductive agriculture sector behind in search of new and better employment, “who gets what job and under what conditions” remains governed by “unequal power relations” that are a norm in rural labour markets, the report said.

For example, 29 million rural women have vanished from the labour market between 2011-12 and 2017-18. When labour markets constrict and demand for jobs heightens, women are more likely to lose out, especially in rural construction jobs, said Ritu Dewan, former director & professor at the department of economics, University of Mumbai.

“One reason is the occupational and gendered technological division of labour,” she said. “Men tend to be higher skilled, potentially experts like carpenters and masons, for example, whereas on construction sites women are condemned to work as coolies, carrying bricks and cement, and are more dispensable.”
A lack of employment options and an increasingly desperate situation can also mean a greater chance of exploitation amongst marginalised groups, the report found. As the non-farm sector becomes “the single most important source of alternative employment” and many men migrate for work, women are left to bear the burden of keeping households running. For low-caste Dalit women this can mean taking up low-paid, and sometimes even unpaid, labour, in return for social security provisions by upper-caste landowners, Mehrotra explained.

“When men send money back to the villages from urban centres it comes irregularly and after long gaps, so on a daily basis where do you get your food from?” she said. “Often women become beholden to dominant castes, unable to dictate the terms of their employment just to pay school or medical fees.”

For women there can be an added layer of sexual exploitation too, as a condition for securing employment, Dewan found during her fieldwork across labour nakas (hubs) in rural areas. “Before you would see groups of waiting workers divided by skill, language and of course gender too; but now in the past two years and especially post-demonetisation a new division has emerged amongst the women,” she said. Operating with the upper hand as demand for jobs has decreased, employers have been asserting their bargaining power to divide the women on the basis of sexual attraction, with “the younger and slightly less-malnourished” separated from older women, said Dewan.

A reduction in the number of rural jobs is also translating into a decrease in the quality of work that remains, creating a “highly mobile and fragmented” workforce, the report said. Many workers (a group largely represented by the Scheduled Castes, the official name given to the lowest castes in India and regarded as the most socially disadvantaged), have a ‘multi-occupation’ existence, in an attempt to make a living through a mix of irregular casual labour, petty self-employment and migrant work.

While such work may pay more than agricultural labour, it still comes “no way close to providing a decent regular wage”. Indeed, the proportion of Indians expected to be involved in such ‘vulnerable employment’ is estimated to be around 77% by 2019, five percentage points higher than the South Asia average.

This is an indication of the extent of the livelihoods crisis in rural India, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, “where it’s hard to get enough days of employment or even full days of work in most activities, and no single activity is enough to provide a decent standard of life”.

While the negatives of such insecure working conditions are clear, Ghosh also pointed to a more worrying trend of an increasing wealth gap between “those with sufficient assets (like land and other wealth) as well as those with proper regular jobs (local bureaucrats, school teachers on regular payrolls, etc) and the rest”.

That rural job markets have been narrowed and it is poor, marginalised workers that are getting left behind is a situation that Mohan Kankate knows only too well. Pointing to large bungalows in the far-off fields, the 23-year-old narrates how the village landowners left some 10 years ago to build new, larger homes outside the boundaries–a visual display of how the two communities’ fortunes have fared over recent decades.

“I would say around 20% of the young men around here are working,” he said. “It is possible to find work in the city but no one really wants it–you earn Rs 6,000 per month but you only end up taking home Rs 2,000, and after such long hours and hard work as well.” As a result, many of the village’s youth are more often seen drinking alcohol and playing cards during the day, than seeking out an unappealing alternative.

Mohan Kankate, 23, and a resident of Pimplad, a village in Nashik district in northwestern Maharashtra, says only about 20% of the men in his village are employed. Most others spend their days drinking alcohol and playing cards.

Social norms hold women back

While up to 34% of men in rural areas have migrated in search of employment and better economic opportunities, the figure for rural women is about a tenth at 3.6%. Though out-migration can provide access to economic and social mobility, such options remain out of reach for many women in rural India due to “a patriarchal ideology and local socio-cultural traditions” that confine them to the village, the report found.

Sitting on the raised steps outside her home with her neighbours for company, Bharti Chabilal, 32, explained how women’s lower education status and the need for monetary investment mean it is mostly the village’s menfolk that can migrate for work to towns and cities.

“Each journey costs Rs 50 so not everyone can go. If anyone is going to travel into the city then and look for work, it will be the men,” Chabilal said. “They are more skilled and so more likely to get the job,” adding that she and many of her female peer group are only educated up to the 8th standard, while the men in the village mostly completed school, leaving after the 12th.

Norms assigning the burden of domestic care work like child-rearing, and time-consuming tasks like firewood and water collection, also mean few women are able to explore opportunities outside the village. This further entrenches their low socioeconomic status and exclusion from paid labour, the report said. Chabilal, for example, said with her list of household responsibilities that take up a large portion of her day, she has no option but to remain close to home. “We just go between our village and our parents’ village, rarely anywhere else,” she said. “We don’t get to hear about any available jobs in the area either, as the men do,” she added.

Bharti Chabilal, 32 (centre), with her neighbours sitting outside her home on a hot March afternoon, in Pimplad, a village in Nashik district in northwestern Maharashtra. While their husbands are able to migrate to nearby towns and cities in search of work, women like her have to stay behind due to the burden of household chores and a lack of education that reduces their chances of finding skilled jobs.

Her experience is common to many Indian women in rural areas, unable to join migration flows and find suitable non-farm employment, leaving agricultural labour as the sole option. While overall rural employment is becoming de-linked from agriculture (only 30% of rural households depend on cultivation as their main source of income), this is not the case for women, 75% of who are currently engaged in low-paid and unskilled agricultural work.

Not only are more women becoming concentrated in a form of labour that provides an “insufficient” source of income, but they also continue to face multiple forms of discrimination that indicate “wage relations are not just an economic contract”, the Oxfam report said. The gender pay gap, for example, among male and female rural casual workers is currently estimated at 45%, 10 percentage points higher than the national average of 34%, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2018.

Multiple women in Pimplad village confirmed that for men the daily wage rate for farm labour was Rs 50 higher than for women (Rs 250 vs Rs 200). “I’ve never really thought about it but I suppose women should be paid the same as men,” Gangrude, who we met earlier, told us. “But if you ask for more money they just tell you ‘don’t come’.” They use the fact that men do more heavy-lifting as the reason for paying them more, she told us, “but we are all doing the same amount of hours”.

When women are able to find alternative and limited off-farm opportunities, for example in home-based work, discrimination follows them. Their wages, skills and participation are all determined by “local value systems and patriarchal norms”, the report said.

The government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has helped provide some non-farm employment to women in areas where previously they may have been excluded, such as construction, the report said. The programme also helped raise women’s wages across the labour market. Indeed between 1993-94 and 2011-12, the national gender wage gap narrowed by 3 percentage points and was largely attributed to MGNREGS and its introduction of a rural minimum wage, in this 2018 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Economists like Dewan recognise the scheme’s contribution and call for greater investment in the face of rising demand for work. “In the early years of implementation, you did hear of upper-caste men not allowing MNREGA to be implemented in some areas since gender equal wages were seen as ‘insult’ to the men, but on the whole, it has been positive,” she said. “We need it to not only continue but in fact strengthen, particularly in the context of agrarian distress… At the national level, we now have 53% of workers as women, with some states reporting almost two-thirds.

While other government programmes such as the National Rural Health Mission and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education For All movement) have been able to provide occupational diversification for women, such as ASHA and Anganwadi (community health and childcare) workers, they have also perpetuated existing beliefs that social and care work can be remunerated at a lower rate, thus keeping women’s labour unequal.
“We need to not perceive women only as reproductive agents and secondary citizens who are only suited to social welfare, education and care,” Dewan said. “Women also exist in the wider economy and their contribution needs to be recognised, made visible and quantified.”

Policy measures needed

Despite the fact that 85% of Indian women are engaged in agriculture, no more than 13% own the land they till. Such dispossession and ‘landlessness’ means not only are women not officially recognised as farmers, but are also unable to access formal credit options that require asset-backed security, the report said.

Correcting the land rights issue could be a first step to creating visibility around women’s farming work, as well as “improving their bargaining position and intrahousehold allocation of resources”, said Mehrotra. This would also produce a “multiplier effect” that could lead to “better social outcomes”, she added, with numerous studies showing that women invest up to 90% of their income in their children and families, including educational materials and nutritious food, compared to 30-40% of men.

However, as of now, landless farmers remain excluded from government schemes that offer productivity generation provisions like subsidised seed prices and fertiliser. Delinking land ownership and farmer status, therefore, is a key way the government can help to improve infrastructure and institutional support, the report said. Many have also called for an affirmative action policy mandating 33% reservation for women in all public schemes supporting women farmers and which could raise their income level.

“The state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have introduced rules whereby there are methods to identify all cultivators regardless of their land titles and ensure that they get access to government schemes,” said Ghosh, adding that there should be a “prerequisite” for women’s reservation in such schemes.

While supporting the agriculture sector through increased public investment in irrigation, better storage and transport facilities is a “priority”, in order to raise equity and employment standards in rural areas, there is also a need to focus on non-farm employment generation and raising skill levels with publicly-funded training programmes, the report said.

Any training programme targeting rural women workers should be “gender friendly”, given the patrilocal social norms governing women’s mobility discussed earlier. Providing transportation and childcare facilities as well as addressing barriers around cost and women’s domestic work responsibilities should all be considered.

As of now, women continue to be left out of state-funded training programmes, or at best driven into gender stereotyped activities such as tailoring and papad making, said Dewan. “In several states, you still find that training is only being provided for the economic activities which men are working in, excluding those done by women and which sometimes consist of up to 80% of all economic activities,” she said. “So not only are women’s contributions currently invisible, they are actually being ‘devisibilised’ or actively ignored.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend).

Courtesy: India Spend

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Gandhinagar: Congress President Rahul Gandhi with party leaders Manmohan Singh and Priyanka Gandhi during a party rally.

Since 1999, the Congress has had 36 dynastic MPs elected to the Lok Sabha, with the BJP not far behind with 31. In 1999, the beginning of the 13th Lok Sabha, 8% of Congress members of parliament (MPs) were either descended from or married to former MPs, only slightly ahead of the 6% among the BJP. The most similar density of dynastic politicians was in 2009 when the Congress and BJP had 11% and 12% dynasts elected, respectively.

With the Congress having been in power for the longest period since India’s independence, the prominent position of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the party has identified the Congress with nepotism in Indian politics. However, political dynasties are common across all major parties, as per an IndiaSpend analysis of data compiled by researchers at Harvard University, US, and the University of Mannheim, Germany.

“What is interesting is just how cross-party the phenomenon of dynasties is,” Siddharth George, a PhD candidate at Harvard University, and one of the researchers who compiled the dataset, told IndiaSpend, “which is something that if you just read the media, you wouldn’t come to this view.”

“The BJP is a generation younger [than the Congress] but in statistical terms and controlling for age, is comparably dynastic,” George added.

A ‘dynast’ for the purpose of this article refers to any politician whose father, mother or spouse preceded them in the Lok Sabha. The dataset therefore does not capture extended family relationships such as cousins or in-laws. Neither does it capture if an MP has relatives at the state assembly or Rajya Sabha level. The figures therefore likely underestimate the actual density of political dynasties among India’s elected officials, though “between son, daughter and spouse you end up capturing more than 75% of dynastic relationships”, George said.

Smaller and regional parties have also centralised power in the hands of prominent families. In fact, they have had some of the highest concentrations of dynasts in power in recent times. Of the three MPs the Jammu & Kashmir National Congress elected in 2009, two were dynasts (Farooq Abdullah and Mirza Mehboob Begum), meaning the party’s proportion of dynasts was 67%, the highest of any party. During the same term, 40% of Rashtriya Lok Dal MPs were dynasts and 25% of Shiromani Akali Dal politicians.

Parity between BJP and Congress
The prominent roles of the Gandhi family at the head of the Congress is the reason why the party bears the brunt of nepotism charges and not because it is overwhelmingly more dynastic, said Arjun Chawla, research associate at LSE IDEAS, a foreign policy think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. “Right now the BJP can play the anti-dynast card because their dynasts are less visible and you don’t have top party leadership handed down from generation to generation within the same family,” Chawla said, adding that the BJP also has a better PR machinery that can leap to its defence when attacked on the same grounds.

Dynastic politics has again been brought to the forefront of the national conversation, with BJP leaders such as Amit Shah drawing lines between “55 years” of Congress leadership by one family and “55 months” under Modi. In a blog post published on Facebook last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley suggested that Congress’ “dynastic character” is leading to the party’s decline, while at the same time claiming the BJP is one of the three “prominent non-dynastic parties in India”.

Despite harbouring dynasts of its own within the party and at senior levels of authority (such as cabinet ministers Maneka Gandhi and Piyush Goyal, whose father was the party treasurer and mother a three-time state legislator), the BJP appears to be deploying the same, seemingly successful, anti-dynast rhetoric in this election campaign as in 2014. It is a smart move, Chawla said, “because they have successfully been able to invoke a sense of anger in people and break this line of thinking that bloodline and your last name should determine your outcome.”
“Now the conversation is less to do with specifics of policy or a report card of BJP’s time in power, but back to old binaries like ‘kaam-dar vs naam-dar’ [those who perform versus those who have a name],” Chawla said, “It’s a clever and persuasive strategy.”

Modern-day politics becoming increasingly ‘dynastic’
The 15th Lok Sabha beginning in 2009 was the most ‘dynastic’ term yet, comprising 53 MPs with family ties to politicians, 9.5% of the total lower house. The proportion dipped to 8.6% in 2014, but the data show an upward trend in the proportion of dynasts occupying parliamentary seats, with almost double the proportion found in 2014 than 15 years earlier in 1994.

On the one hand it is unsurprising that with time, there would be an increasing pool of people entering politics whose ancestors were also active in the same profession, which George of Harvard University called a “purely mechanical function of time”. Nevertheless, the impact of political power becoming concentrated in a few families remains a concern.

“It’s not that dynasts getting into politics is inherently bad or unusual, but it means our political representatives are becoming far removed from citizenry,” Rahul Verma, a fellow at the New Delhi think-tank Centre for Policy Research, explains. “We have a class of people who are making our laws skewed in favour of the few, and that is bad for any democracy.”

A third of people surveyed recently said they thought politicians actually care what ordinary people think and 58% said nothing really changes following an election, IndiaSpend reported on March 26, 2019.

Several countries have elected members of the same family to their highest offices, from the US and Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia, so India is not unique. In fact, politics the world over is a highly dynastic occupation. Individuals are 110 times more likely to enter into politics if they have a politician father, compared to other elite professions such as medicine and law, according to this 2018 study.

Being a young country too means a certain level of dynasticism in politics is to be expected and that the rising political families holding power may yet continue for some time, Verma said. “Once you cross say 20-25 elections in around 100 years, then you would expect to see this trend going down,” he said. “You can look to the US as an example of this and how in the future we would expect to see the rate eventually decline.”

Within this election period, prominent political families, such as the Abdullahs, Badals and Patnaiks, continue to make their way onto parties’ candidate lists. One of the reasons established families continue to flourish is their ability to leverage wealth accumulated across their tenure.
Competing in an election is a notoriously costly business, and one that is only getting more expensive. Major contenders were spending anywhere between Rs 1 crore and Rs 16 crore in 2014, almost 50 times the statutory limit. Investing tickets in candidates that contribute both funds and a certain amount of hereditary political or ‘brand’ capital, mean dynastic candidates then are an attractive option for political parties.

The number of successful independent candidates in Lok Sabha elections has fallen from a peak of 42 in 157, to no more than 3 in 2014, a symptom of the rising costs of contesting elections, Chawla of LSE IDEAS said. “The reason why you have dynastic politics in India is therefore much more structural and to do with how democracy functions in our society.”

India’s poorest state elected most dynasts, majority in BJP
Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest as well as poorest state, has had 51 politicians with dynastic links elected to the Lok Sabha since 1952, the most of any state. Bihar follows with 27 dynasts, then Punjab and West Bengal with 10 each.

Though UP is famously the state where all four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family have held their constituencies, the BJP has had the highest number of dynasts in power. An estimated 17 of the 51 dynasts from UP have belonged to the BJP, while no more than 15 belong to Congress (six under the Congress (I), an erstwhile faction, and nine under the current INC), and four to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

In Bihar, the Congress represents just under half (12) of all the dynasts ever to have been in power in the state, followed by four dynasts in the BJP and three in the Janata Party. In both West Bengal and Punjab, dynasts have been found most in their respective regional parties, with three in the All India Trinamool Congress, and four in Punjab’s Shiromani Akali Dal.

That UP tops the list of most dynasts could be a pure function of its size and the fact that currently 80 out of 543 constituencies are based in the state, increasing the chances of electing dynasts. However, West Bengal has 42 constituencies, four more than Bihar (38), yet has elected almost three times fewer dynasts since 1952.

While there is limited research on why some states elect more dynasts than others, the high incidence of dynasts in UP and Bihar could be a function of caste politics, Chawla said, where repeatedly voting-in a family that represents specific communities or an economic class acts as a form of affirmative action or reservation policy.

“There’s a high level of correlation between caste-based politics and dynastic politics in UP and Bihar, the fulcrums of caste-based voting,” Chawla said. “Very often here you have a leader that is seen to be taking that community’s representation forward and a whole community then identifies with the descendents of that leader.”

The UP-based Samajwadi party founded by Mulayam Singh Yadav in 1992 and which features his son, Akhilesh Yadav, as the current chief minister, is an example of caste-based politics tied to one particular family. For the upcoming elections the party has formed an alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party, also dominant in UP and Bihar, representing the ‘lower-caste’ Jatav and Yadav groups.

While it may be possible to suggest a link between the high incidence of dynastism and caste-based voting in UP and Bihar, in the past three Lok Sabha terms Dalits (“lowest castes”) and Adivasis (indigenous tribals) have overall lagged behind “forward” castes in the formation of dynasties, said Kancan Chandran, a New York University professor, in her book Democratic Dynasties: State, Party and Family In Contemporary Indian Politics, as reported by Scroll.

In 2014, no more than 27.23% of MPs belonging to the “forward” castes were dynastic compared with 8.4% of Scheduled Caste (official name for the “lowest” castes) MPs and 16.67% of Scheduled Tribe (official designation for indigenous peoples) MPs.

No clear North-South divide emerges from a state-wise analysis of political dynasts since 1952, rather it appears politics as a family business is common up and down the country. At the same time, though, some states and union territories (federally governed areas) have had no political dynasties at all, mainly the North-Eastern states and Goa, whose exception is Vishwajit Rane, currently a cabinet minister in the BJP-led state government of Goa, who is the son of Pratapsinh Rane, a former chief minister of Goa (which is not captured by the dataset).
Among the North-Eastern states, Assam is the only state to have experienced political dynasties and comes eight overall in a ranking of states with most political dynasts.

Longest-reigning dynasts
The longest serving dynast since 1952 was Somnath Chatterjee, who served a total of 10 terms in the Lok Sabha, nine with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and his last term in 2004 as the House speaker. His father NC Chatterjee had held the constituency seat of Burdwan in West Bengal for three terms (during the first, third and fourth Lok Sabhas) before his death triggered a by-election and Somnath took his place.

The Congress contributes three of the top 10 longest-serving dynasts, followed by two from the BJP and smaller parties such as the Rashtriya Lok Dal and Bharatiya Navshakti Party contribute one each.

Top 10 Longest Serving ‘Dynast’ Politicians
Source: New dataset compiled by researchers from Harvard University, US, and the University of Mannheim, Germany

40% of the longest serving dynasts have inherited their seat in parliament — they were elected from the same constituency as their father, mother or spouse before them. The average duration of each unbroken chain of successive generations in power is 10 terms, or roughly 40-50 years.

Whether long-standing political dynasties have a negative impact on a constituency is hard to determine. At least in the initial stages, “strong founder incentives” for a politician wishing to establish a dynasty could encourage them to perform well when in office, according to this 2018 study. It is in the next generation, when the founder incentive is removed, that dynasts are found to be bad for development, with villages represented by a descendant for an electoral term suffering a 12-percentage point decrease in wealth rank (a locally determined level of wealth measured against the corresponding economic status of community members).

The Aam Aadmi Party has banned family members from contesting from the same constituency, an attempt by leader Arvind Kejriwal to avoid the growth of dynasties within his own party.

This many not necessarily be the right approach, Verma said, calling instead for a change to the laws governing India’s electoral system. “To ‘ban’ things is a bad word in democracies, this means you are punishing someone for crimes they haven’t committed,” he said. “But if you make your politics more transparent, it would allow for more people to participate and weed out others based on merit.”

Verma calls for greater reforms of election finance campaign laws and making nominations more accountable in order to reduce the number of wealthy, well-connected dynastic candidates. “This has to happen across parties. Only once reforms in these areas are worked on, can we create a more open political environment.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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The unemployment rate is currently estimated to be at a 45-year high, reaching 7.8% in urban areas and 5.3% in rural ones, according to a leaked National Sample Survey Office report for 2017-18.

This may go some way to explain why the proportion of people “happy with the way things are going” in the country has also fallen by 15 percentage points since the previous year (from 70% in 2017 to 55% in 2018).

This marks a return to 2015 satisfaction levels–after the first full year of Narendra Modi’s government–but levels are still significantly higher than in the last two years of Manmohan Singh’s government, the report based on a survey of 2,591 people said.

Corrupt officials, terrorism and crime are the next major problems identified, with over 60% of people saying they are a ‘very big problem’. The findings mark no change from last year when employment opportunities also topped the list as the biggest problem facing the country.

Little progress, deteriorating situation

On key issues such as employment, corruption and inflation, the majority of the respondents said there had been little improvement over the past five years, the period encompassing the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance’s term, the survey found.

Jobs: No more than 21% of respondents said the employment situation had improved over the past five years, while 67% said it had deteriorated. With India’s shrinking employment opportunities viewed as a key concern for three quarters of the population, 64% of respondents said emigration in search of jobs was also another major problem affecting the country.

Corruption: Attitudes towards stemming corruption were similar, with 65% saying the situation had become worse and 21% saying it had improved. The rising prices of goods and services were another major concern, as 65% said inflation had exacerbated since five years ago.

Inequality: On the wealth gap, communal relations and air pollution, at least a quarter of those surveyed said the situation had improved. Proportionally, more people said there had been improvement on these issues than on jobs, inflation and corruption. Nevertheless, the majority said things had gotten worse.

Just over half (54%) said the gap between the rich and the poor in India had widened over the past five years, and 27% said it had narrowed.

The wealth held by the richest 1% of Indians reportedly saw a 15-percentage-point rise in just over a year, from 58% in 2018 to 73% 2019, according to a 2019 Oxfam report on inequality, as IndiaSpend reported on January 24, 2019.

Air pollution: Nearly 51% of respondents said air quality had declined since 2014, while 27% said air pollution had improved.

As many as 15 out of the top 20 most polluted cities are now found in India, as IndiaSpend reported March 5, 2019.

Communalism: Just under half (45%) of the respondents said they believed communal relations had worsened since 2014, while 28% said the situation had improved.

The number of communal riots increased by 24% from 703 in 2015 to 869 in 2016, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). With the annual Crime in India reports for 2017 and 2018 yet to be released, trends for the last two years are unclear.

Partisanship: There is a “decidedly partisan take on the direction of the country and the challenges facing India”, with significantly differing views found on either side of the political spectrum, the report said.

For instance, supporters of the opposition Indian National Congress (Congress) party are 21 percentage points more likely to believe job opportunities have worsened over the past five years, than those backing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Partisan attitudes are similarly found on issues regarding wealth inequality, corruption, terrorism and communal relations. BJP supporters are 17 percentage points less likely to think inequality has become further entrenched, and 12 percentage points less likely to say that corruption has become worse under the Modi government, the report said.

How well is India’s democracy performing?
Amid concerns over India’s economic health, security and air quality, there was mixed response towards India’s democratic performance.
“Indians voice strong frustrations about elections and elected officials”, the report said, with up to 64% of respondents saying they believed most politicians are corrupt and 58% saying they believed nothing changes much after elections.  

No more than 33% said they believed elected officials actually care what ordinary people think. A further 54% said they believed most people live in areas where it is too dangerous to walk around at night, indicating concerns around safety and the rule of law among more than half the population.

These attitudes may explain why no more than 54% said they were ‘very satisfied’ with democracy, down from 79% a year ago–a decline of 25 percentage points.

Nevertheless, 58% said free speech is protected and 59% said they believe most people have “a good chance” to improve their standard of living.

Just under half, however, said they believed the court system treats everyone fairly (47%), with a sizeable proportion (37%), saying they did not believe that is not the case.

Foreign affairs and global perceptions of Modi’s leadership
More than 75% of respondents viewed Pakistan as a serious threat, and only 7% said Pakistan is no danger to national security.

However, since the survey was conducted nine months before the Pulwama terror attack in Kashmir that killed more than 40 CRPF officers, these figures do not account for any change in perceptions following the attack and India’s subsequent military response, the report noted.

Even ahead of the Pulwama attack, 53% of respondents said the situation in Kashmir had deteriorated over the last five years, with just 18% believing it had improved. Further, 58% of respondents said the government should step up its military action against Pakistan.

Partisan attitudes are evident on this issue, too, with those expressing “confidence in Narendra Modi” 70% more likely to see Pakistan as a threat than those with less confidence in the Prime Minister, the report said. Among those with less favourable attitudes to Modi, a slim majority (51%) viewed Pakistan as a threat.

International perceptions of India throughout Prime Minister Modi’s term in office have remained largely stable, the report added. Several countries including Australia, South Korea and Japan recorded improved attitudes towards India between 2014 and 2018, the highest being a 13-percentage-point rise in the Philippines. The US and Japan both posted a “negligible” five-percentage-point decline.

There is some mismatch in how Indians view their country’s position on the world stage, and how India is received by a wider audience. While 56% of Indian respondents said their country is now playing a greater role in global affairs, an average of no more than 28% of people among 26 surveyed countries agreed.

However, sizeable groups in several wealthy countries said India’s role was growing, namely France (49%), Japan (48%), South Korea (48%), Sweden (47%) and the UK (46%).

Most people across the countries surveyed (34%) said India’s role had stayed the same for the past decade. In this category are Brazil and South Africa, two fellow BRICS nations, where larger groups (32% and 37%, respectively) saw India as having a less important role in the world today compared to 10 years ago.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

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

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Like many women in rural India that lack basic amenities, Damsari Ozre, 29, is up at 5 am every morning to collect enough water for bathing and breakfast. It is a task she repeats in the evening, spending 3 hours a day on this.

The 29-year-old is an ASHA (accredited social health activist–a community health worker under the National Rural Health Mission) in Velgaon, a village in Palghar tehsil, Thane district, 95 km from Mumbai, India’s financial capital.

Ozre is used to spending four to five hours a day at work, away from home, but this can rise to upto 24 hours when there is a baby on the way. In addition, she must wake up at daybreak to fetch water for her family, cook and clean for them, and work as a hired farm-hand during planting and harvest seasons.

Often, the precarious balancing act of managing household chores and the responsibilities of her government health job leave her feeling drained. “It often feels like I still have work left over at the end of the day, but especially so if I get called to help with a delivery,” she told IndiaSpend one recent March afternoon. “Whenever I leave housework unfinished I don’t like it, I feel a lot of tension.”

Indian women like Ozre do the most unpaid care and domestic work of any country globally, except Kazakhstan–a country with 94% lower gross domestic product (GDP) than India ($163 billion vs. India’s $2.6 trillion). It reveals that India is not investing enough in social care and “leaving its female population to carry the burden”, said Diya Dutta, a researcher at Oxfam India and author of a forthcoming Oxfam report, Mind the Gap, to be released on March 28, 2019.

This is the first in a five-part series on how structural inequalities, especially gender disparities, affect lives and society, based on our reporting and Oxfam India’s second India Inequality Report, Mind the Gap.

The burden of unpaid work falls disproportionately on women in India because tasks such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water and firewood are highly gendered, and patriarchal norms dictate that women also perform care work, validate men’s failure to assume domestic responsibilities and thus entrench women’s unequal social status, the report says.

Women in India currently spend upto 352 minutes per day on domestic work, 577% more than men (52 minutes) and at least 40% more than women in South Africa and China (the other two BRICS countries for which data are available), according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data.

No way out
Up at 5 am, a couple of hours before her husband and three children surface, Ozre’s daily routine features the repeated drudgery that many women in rural India have to contend with due to the lack of basic infrastructure.

Lugging metal pitchers to the village hand-pump, she spends an hour collecting water each morning, only to return later in the day, spending a total of three hours on this one task. It is her least favourite job. “Although I don’t like it, I have to do it,” she said. “The kids need to be bathed. It’s not like we can go without water.”

In July and August, when the monsoon arrives and the arid landscape dotted with bristling cacti transforms into a green, fertile plain, Damsari will also take up planting work in the neighbouring rice fields. It is tiring work, she said, “the kind that makes my hips and legs ache from all the standing and crouching”. But the additional income cannot be foregone.

Her duties at the ASHA centre continue, as do the chores waiting for her on her return from the fields. It is the number of hours in the day which must be flexible, stretched to accommodate as much as possible.

Indian women’s unpaid work plays a crucial role in sustaining economic activity, equivalent to 3.1% of GDP. However, much of the contribution goes unrecognised or is incorrectly measured, amounting to a “systemic transfer of hidden subsidies to the economy”, the report said.

India’s last ‘Time Use Survey’ was conducted in 1998-99, and there has been no similar exercise since. Fixing this will be the first step in understanding the issue of women’s unpaid work and correctly addressing it, said Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the centre for economic studies and planning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

“The whole point of unpaid labour is that you want to recognise it, reduce it and redistribute it,” Ghosh said. “A Time Use Survey would tell us where men and women spend their time, in which kinds of paid activities and what kinds of unpaid activities. So far the government has been unwilling to do that, but I hope at some point public pressure will make it happen.”

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey is inadequate because it does not take into account women’s double burden of cooking, cleaning and other domestic duties, Ghosh said, “It just asks about your ‘principal activity’.”

Poorest suffer most from ‘time poverty’
For poor, marginalised women, the effects of shouldering the bulk of domestic responsibilities are even more acute, said Dutta. “In poor urban and rural households there’s no question of hiring anyone to do your domestic work, many of them are staying awake between 17-19 hours a day to complete their tasks.”

Women in low-income households are also more driven to find paid work than women in higher income households where not working can be a marker of social status, as per the report. Combining paid work commitments with a mountain of menial, domestic labour at home means poor women are more likely to suffer from ‘time poverty’. This is understood as experiencing such acute time pressure–anxiety that there is little freedom to choose how to allocate one’s time, with little or no room for leisure.

Time poverty fundamentally undermines women’s human rights since it undermines women’s agency and ability to make choices, as per the Oxfam report. The immense burden of work therefore prevents women from pursuing further education, employment opportunities, raising their skill-level and tending to their own wellbeing.

When asked what she would do if she had more free time to herself, Sunandhan Bhoir, 45, grinned sheepishly, took a while to reflect, and said: “I’d sleep, of course!”

Bhoir and her family are subsistence farmers, cultivating rice on a small plot of land in Damkhind, a village in Palghar tehsil of Thane district in Maharashtra. When she was pregnant, she recalled, her daily routine did not change and she was back on the farm just over a week after giving birth. If she is not around to do them, she knows the domestic tasks will not get done. “If I’m ill I just take myself to the hospital, buy the medicine, and get back to work,” she said.

Sunandhan Bhoir, 45, bears the brunt of domestic duties at home. She knows if she does not perform the housework, it will not get done. “If I’m ill, then I just take myself to the hospital, buy the medicine and get back to work,” she says.

Up to 64% of women said they have no choice taking up care work, since there is ‘no other member to carry out the domestic duties’, the 68th round of the NSSO survey found.

Bhoir’s experiences reveal how the burden of unpaid work impacts women’s health–domestic chores are often prioritised above personal wellbeing. Cash benefit transfers under the Pradhan Mantri Matritva Vandana Yojana (Maternity Benefit Programme, formerly the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana), for example, have not meant more rest for pregnant women because they were found doing agricultural work until the time of delivery.

Women also spend eight hours less on activities such as learning, social and cultural activities according to a pilot time-use survey conducted by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MOSPI) between 1988 and 1999. This meant that the burden of unpaid work not only impacts a woman’s family and community relations but also her ability to play an effective role outside home, in turn perpetuating the gender skew.

Unpaid work keeps women out of jobs, disempowered
When asked if she would be interested in a paid job, Bhoir’s reply was clear: “There’s no time, who would do the work at home?” While extra income would be welcome, the long list of chores at home would not allow her to take up a job.

Despite a period of rapid economic growth following market liberalisation in the early 1990s, many women like Bhoir have not traded domestic work for new employment opportunities. Between 2003 and 2013, the number of women at work fell by almost 14 percentage points, from 34.8% to 27%.

A mismatch in the jobs available for women and their skills, an inherent gender bias in labour, as well as social norms which restrict the suitability of certain jobs for women, are some of the factors driving this trend, IndiaSpend reported in August 2017.

The immense burden of unpaid work that will remain at the end of a working day is another “major deterrent” for women to participate in, or rejoin the workforce, says the Oxfam report–and is one that is increasing.

The proportion of women aged over 15 and in rural areas who spend the majority of their time in domestic duties has increased from 51% in 2004-05 to 60% in 2011-12, the year the last NSSO employment survey was released.

“When you’re spending up to six hours each day fetching water, how can you be expected to go out to look for work, too?” said Ghosh. “There’s a real crisis of infrastructure and amenities that is translating into more unpaid work for women. It’s a supply-side problem which urgently needs to be addressed.”

A woman in Velgaon village, Palghar tehsil, Thane district, leaves home to collect water from the nearest well. Without piped water supply, many women spend multiple hours a day collecting and ferrying water to their homes in this village, just 95 km from Mumbai, India’s thriving financial hub.

This lack of public-sector provisions–such as basic infrastructure, elderly care homes and childcare facilities–and affordable private-sector services, means that women are being increasingly left to shoulder the care and domestic work burden, forcing them out of the workforce. This can create a vicious cycle of disempowerment, said Ghosh.

When asked by researchers if they felt their unpaid work burden had increased over five years, a significant proportion of women participating in Oxfam’s qualitative survey of 1,000 households across Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh said yes. One common reason they cited was that families are becoming smaller.

The average family size in India is shrinking, the report states–in 2001, each family on average had 4.67 members, down to 4.45 in 2011. In rural India, the proportion of nuclear families, where each sibling sets up a household of their own has increased. In 2001, 83.9% of families were nuclear, which rose to 84.5% in 2011.

Fewer adult women at home means fewer hands to help with domestic work. And as more girls stay in school longer (a positive impact of the Right To Education Act 2009) and spend more time outside of the home, adult women end up having to take on more domestic work.
No more than 49% of girls were enrolled in secondary education in 2005, compared to 74% in 2016. Boys’ secondary-school enrollment increased at a similar rate (24 percentage points) over the same period, but an inherent gender bias means their help with domestic duties is not expected.

“The fact that women don’t have an income gives them less agency, less decision-making power within the household and ultimately less mobility,” Ghosh said, adding that women undertaking too much unpaid work also means the work they do in the paid market becomes devalued. “Society assumes the work they do is less significant and so the occupations that women are crowded into get badly paid,” she said. “There’s a wage penalty imposed on those that do the unpaid work.”

The wage penalty is so evident in India that “we are at the point where even the government and the public sector don’t pay women properly”, Ghosh said. She cited the example of Anganwadi and ASHA workers, professions dominated by women, that do not even command minimum wage. Instead, these government workers, who form the backbone of the public health system, are paid Rs 2,250- Rs 4,400 depending on their role and miss out on pension, maternity, holiday and other benefits.

How women-friendly policies can help reduce unpaid work burden
In households with access to the government’s National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP), women spent on average 22 minutes less per day on care work and 60 minutes per day more on paid work, the Oxfam report finds. The results for households that had begun using LPG gas cylinders for cooking under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) programme were similar–49 minutes less spent on care work and an hour more on paid work.

Such results highlight how the provision of basic infrastructure to communities can have significant benefits for women in terms of time-use allocation. However, these programmes require adequate long-term investment and effective management to ensure success, both elements lacking in the two schemes, critics pointed out.

For example, despite spending 90% of available funds, just 18% of the rural population was connected to piped water supply between 2012 and 2017, against a target of 35%. Poor execution of projects left them “incomplete, abandoned or non-operational”, a key failure of the NRDWP scheme, as per this 2018 report from the Comptroller and Auditor General, the government’s auditor.

Expensive cylinder refill costs are affecting PMUY, a scheme that Ghosh believes was “potentially very effective”. Up to 40% of households in Chattisgarh had never refilled their cylinder, followed by 17% in Madhya Pradesh, citing costs, according to a 2018 study by MicroSave, a consulting firm. Policymakers have so far failed to address how households will overcome the affordability barrier, with refills priced anywhere between Rs 700 and Rs 800, a significant portion of a poor household’s income. Prices can also fluctuate according to international fuel markets, meaning planning for this expenditure can be difficult.

“Most households can’t afford to keep buying gas cylinders after the first free one,” said Ghosh, “So basically the cylinder sits there, in pride of place, only to be used on a special occasion. The rest of the time they’re back to using firewood.”

Need for equitable social norms
Up to 48% of women currently stop working within four months after returning from maternity leave, while up to 50% more men are working between the ages of 15-24 and 25-34, the child-rearing period, found a study by Intellecap, an investor in social enterprises. Greater attention paid to childcare and maternity leave policies could help restrict the effects of a ‘motherhood penalty’ which entails women dropping out of work, worrying about being absent from work for a long time and accepting less-satisfactory employment, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2018.

While private-sector provision for childcare is expected to grow at over 23% annually between 2017 and 2022, and the Maternity Benefit Act 2017 mandates employers with over 50 staff to provide crèches, options for the poorest in society remain limited.

Workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are entitled to free onsite childcare provided by their employers, but in reality this is not enforced and many go without. Severe funding cuts to the centrally sponsored National Crèche Scheme meant that 8,143 crèches closed between 2013-14 and 2016-17, hitting those with no way of affording private alternatives the hardest, IndiaSpend reported in January 2019.

Damsari Ozre, 29, with her two daughters outside their home. There is no crèche available near Ozre’s village so she often ends up taking her youngest to work with her, which can affect her concentration at work, she tells IndiaSpend.

Addressing the issue of childcare and flexible work could also help initiate positive social norms that “encourage the redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work burden”, the Oxfam report says. If more children saw both parents going out to work, this could help change established social norms that say a woman’s role is purely a domestic one.

Existing patriarchal norms “pose a significant constraint to the take-up of public or market services”, said Farzana Afridi, associate professor in the economics and planning unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. In experiments providing childcare in Bangladeshi garment factories, for example, the use of crèches was low because of “the expectation is that it’s still the woman who should be doing this, coupled with worries about the quality of the service provided”.

This does not mean we should give up on public provision of facilities though, Afridi said, placing education and awareness about skewed gender attitudes at the core of a multi-pronged approach to tackle unequal labour division. “We often talk about how women need to be educated or emancipated but we don’t include men in any of this,” she said. “We used to have courses talking about civic duties, inculcating moral values in school curriculums but we have less of this now. It’s difficult, I know, but there should be experiments and changes to the curriculum to address this.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

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

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Mumbai: Bengal tigers could vanish from the Bangladesh Sundarbans in the next 50 years–by 2070–as a combination of climate change and rising sea levels threatens their last remaining habitats, says a new study by a team of researchers from Bangladesh and Australia, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Bengal tigers are in danger of losing 100% of their habitat in the Bangladesh Sundarbans by 2070, due to the effects of climate change.

The Sundarbans in south-coastal Bangladesh is the world’s largest surviving mangrove ecosystem, spanning over 6,000 sq km, and “the last stronghold” of the Bengal tiger, a species that is particularly adapted to living in this environment. Situated on the lower Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, up to 70% of the Sundarbans area is less than one metre above sea level, meaning rising water levels pose a significant threat to the low-lying tiger habitats. Meanwhile, climate change effects such as changing weather patterns, heatwaves and extreme weather events are likely to have an even greater impact, the study says.

Using computer simulation models based on two climatic scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), coupled with projected sea level rise in the area, the researchers have assessed the future suitability of the Sundarbans region for tigers.
“While this is preliminary analysis, we can conclude that the largest population of Bengal tigers is in an area where a combination of actors including climate change and human encroachment could both contribute to the decimation of habitats,” William Laurence, distinguished research professor at James Cook University and co-author of the study, told IndiaSpend.

The global tiger population is currently estimated at just under 4,000, with an illegal trade in tiger parts, hunting and habitat loss having culled the population by 96% from 100,000 in 1990, the study says. Three of the eight sub-species of tiger have already become extinct, with the remaining five species currently either ‘endangered’ or ‘critically endangered’.

As global temperatures rise and melting polar ice raises sea levels, the influx of salinated sea water can make it harder for certain plants to grow, subsequently decreasing the availability of certain food types. The Sundarbans’ spotted-deer population, a key food source for the Bengal tiger, is likely to be affected as the tree leaves on which it feeds begin to disappear. As resources become scarce, tigers are more likely to stray into human settlements in search of food, increasing the chance of tiger-human conflict.

Spotted deer, a key food source for the Bengal tiger, are facing food shortages as the vegetation they feed on struggles to grow in salinated land–an example of how climate change and rising sea levels is impacting the Sundarbans ecosystem.

The loss of the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem also raises concerns for human populations and other animal species. Mangroves are an effective water regulation system, preventing shoreline erosion that also act as a shelter belt against cyclones and tsunamis. Villages surrounded by mangroves experienced less loss of life and capital during the 2004 tsunami, than those that were not, according to this 2005 Annamalai University study.

“From an environmental perspective, mangroves are recognised as environmentally critical ecosystems,” said Laurence, “they store a lot of carbon and are very important for trapping sediment along coast lines.” Their role as nurseries for fish is often not appreciated, he said, adding, “They are critical environments for crustaceans and fish, as well as acting as buffers for extreme weather events.”

Shrinking habitat, declining population

Each climate projection, based on two different levels of global greenhouse gas emissions used by the IPCC, estimates “a dramatic decline” in suitable habitats for the Bengal tiger. Up to 49.7% of habitat loss is projected under the first scenario by 2050, and up to 96.2% under the second scenario.

Although sea-level rise will further threaten the Bengal tiger’s habitats, the effect will “not be as pronounced as climate change”, the study says. Under both IPCC scenarios, sea level rise will contribute 5.42% and 11.3% habitat loss in the area, respectively.
 

Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014
Note: Scenario 1 refers to Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 6.0 and scenario 2 refers to RCP 8.5, both of which are future scenarios projected on the basis of greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations, air pollutant emissions and land use.

However, with the effects of climate change and sea level-rise combined, “there will be no remaining Bengal tiger habitat in the Sundarbans by the year 2070”, as the habitat loss will be complete, the study says.

Projected Tiger Habitat Loss In Bangladesh Sundarbans Under Two Climate Scenarios

Likely distribution of Bengal tiger in the Bangladesh Sundarbans – (top left) distribution in 2050 with IPCC’s RCP6.0 scenario; (bottom left) distribution in 2050 with RCP8.5 scenario; (top right) distribution in 2070 with RCP6.0 scenario; and (bottom right) distribution in 2070 with RCP8.5 scenario. The black borders show the current location of three wildlife sanctuaries.
Source: Combined effects of climate change and sea level rise project dramatic habitat loss of the globally endangered Bengal tiger in the Bangladesh Sundarbans, Science of Total Environment

“Sea level rise of course relates to climate change, but in this particular study they were analysed separately,” said Laurence. “Our models analysed how weather trends and extreme events should affect habitat suitability for the Bengal tiger and these climate change effects came out as having a stronger impact than sea level rise.”

The effects of rising sea levels and climate change in the Sundarbans delta area have been widely reported in recent years. An increase in Bengali-speaking students in Kannada-medium schools in east Bengaluru, for example, may be the result of forced migration, IndiaSpend reported in December 2018. Rising tides in low-lying areas of West Bengal are threatening traditional coastline communities, encroaching on buildings and negatively impacting agriculture.

For the Bengal tiger at least, researchers believe the population could continue to live in the region if tiger conservation is prioritised. The study calls on the Bangladesh government to designate more areas for tiger conservation, create corridors to help tigers move around the region more safely and continue monitoring illegal human activity in the area to avoid further losses.

However, while this study estimates total decimation of suitable tiger habitats in the next 50 years, not all experts believe the outlook is so bleak.

“I don’t subscribe to such a doomsday view,” said Sugata Hazra, professor of oceanography, school of oceanographic studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. “When we conducted our 2016 study, we accounted for a ‘sediment attrition rate’, since mangroves are also building land in the area as they attract sediment.”

“This has to be compensated for as well as sea level rise,” Hazra said, “Our study estimated maximum 17% area loss.”

What does this mean for India’s Bengal Tigers?

Up to 40% of the Sundarbans region, a 4,000 sq km area slightly larger than Goa, is situated in West Bengal in eastern India. An estimated 103 tigers currently inhabit the area, which houses the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve.

The effects of climate change and sea level-rise are expected to affect the Indian Sundarbans in a similar way as the Bangladesh Sundarbans, suggesting the fate of Indian tigers is deeply intertwined with that of their neighbours.

However, some believe classifying part of the region and parts of the tiger population as Indian, and some as Bangladeshi, may be hindering conservation efforts.

“We need to think beyond boundaries in order to form joint ecosystem best management practices,” said Hazra. “Tigers can cross easily between India and Bangladesh so the tiger population is not a separate one; they live in a transnational ecosystem.”

A basin-level approach with closer cooperation on forest sharing, tiger habitat sharing and management of the freshwater supply is what is needed, Hazra said, adding, “We need to form this joint force now, perhaps led by an international organisation. If we start now, we’ll see the benefit in 20 years–but if we don’t, then we won’t see anything.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

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

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Six cities in the National Capital Region (NCR)–Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Bhiwadi, Delhi and Noida–represent almost half the number of Indian cities in the top 20. Gurugram was the most polluted city in the world in 2018, closely followed by Ghaziabad, recording 135.8 μg/m3 average daily PM 2.5 levels, more than 13 times the limit of 10 μg/m3 recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).

PM 2.5 refers to particulate matter measuring up to 2.5 microns in size, small enough to “penetrate deep into the human respiratory system and from there to the entire body, causing a wide range of short- and long-term health effects”, the report said. PM 2.5 is known to pose the greatest risk to human beings, potentially leading to cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and cancers.

Source: 2018 World Air Quality Report

While Delhi “typically receives most media coverage as one of the world’s ‘pollution capitals’”, there are other cities in northern India and Pakistan recording higher annual average PM 2.5 levels, the report notes. Patna (7th) and Lucknow (9th), both outside the NCR, rank higher than the capital, but receive markedly less attention in the national media, suggesting that there may be other air pollution hotspots going unnoticed.

Indeed, Thane near Mumbai in Maharashtra showed the worst air quality in the country today (March 5, 2019), according to the IQAir Air Visual website, a centralized platform for global and hyper-local air quality information in real-time, which was used to compile the report. The city recorded a “hazardous” figure of 354 on the US Air Quality Index (AQI) scale, which uses a colour-coded scale between 0-500 to communicate health risks.

Source: airvisual.com/india
 

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Instead, such change of law between 1970 to 1990 has inadvertently led to increased female foeticide and higher female infant-mortality rates, finds the 2018 study that analysed families’ desires for a second child if the first child was a girl.

The findings are supported by the Economic Survey 2017-18, which found an estimated 63 million women–roughly the population of the United Kingdom–‘missing’ in India.

The study finds that girls born after legal reforms were 2-3 percentage points more likely to die before reaching their first birthday, and 9 percentage points more likely to have a younger sibling if the firstborn child was a girl. Legislative changes, coupled with the advent of prenatal ultrasound screenings that enabled sex-selective abortions, intensified the practice of female-foeticide to an extent that made girls 4 percentage points less likely to be born at all.

The study was conducted by researchers at King’s College University, New York University and the University of Essex, and published in the Journal of Development Economics, using data from three rounds of the National Family Health Survey (1991-92, 1998-9 and 2005-6) and the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) 2006.

The researchers studied families living in five “early-reformer” states–Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka– which amended the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, to allow equal inheritance rights for women and men, at different dates between 1970 and 1990. These were compared against a control group of families in states that reformed inheritance laws only in 2005, when the central government mandated equal inheritance rights across the country.

While previous studies had examined the reforms’ impact on women’s position in the marriage “market”, this is the first time researchers have analysed the impact on son-preference, female foeticide and “son-biased fertility stopping behaviour”, the authors said.

Son-preference entrenched, women remain dispossessed

Under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, only sons had a direct right to ancestral property, excluding daughters from inheritance claims where the father did not leave a will.

From the 1970s onwards, changes in inheritance legislation sought to empower women by strengthening their financial and social position and reducing dependence on male relatives.

The traditional preference for sons was also supposed to lessen, because daughters, backed by possession of the family home, would be able to offer parents security in old age. Equally, this was expected to eradicate the dowry system, a key contributing factor to the perception of a daughter as a financial burden.

Instead, the reforms appear to have had “unintended” effects leading to the “elimination of girls”, as social norms that organise family structures and alliances have not kept pace with changes to the law, the study finds.

“Awarding inheritance rights to women makes parents more averse to having a daughter rather than a son,” the study says. This is because families fear that the cost of having a girl increases because property inherited by women risks falling into the control of her in-laws.

“If you transfer assets to a woman under the Hindu system it will go outside of the family to her marital home,” Pronab Sen, India’s former chief statistician and programme director at the International Growth Centre India Programme, explained this line of thinking to IndiaSpend. “Changes to inheritance law are therefore not likely to improve women’s income, since it’s unlikely the woman would get to control that new asset — which has now been acquired by her marital family.”

There also remains a strong incentive for parents to continue rewarding a son who works on and develops a family’s land, thus contributing to the family’s “wealth creation” and security for both parties later in life, the study says. Parents perceive the risk of upsetting a son by dispossessing him of the entire property as too high, one that could impact on the quality of their future care.

“In a dominantly agricultural household, the land is most important and comes before anything else,” Sen said. “Parents would want to avoid splitting up the property, making it less productive, since the only way of sharing between siblings is by selling the property and distributing the proceeds.”

The proportion of women inheriting property “did not increase significantly following the reform,” the study says. Although laws now allow women to make legal claims to property, very few make such a move, which is perceived as anti-social and rebellious.

“The family is a close knit-system, girls don’t want to go against parents and brothers and fight for property if they are denied it,” Radha Chellappa, child protection and gender advisor at the NGO Save The Children, told IndiaSpend. “The entire dowry system says that the daughters have already been given a share of the money, so they’re not entitled to the property.”

“Therefore it’s not just about having a law, it’s about effective implementation of it too,” said Chellappa. “This is a civil law, not a criminal one and depends on girls actually going to court and exercising their rights. Right now, I’m not sure this is actually happening.”

Sex-selective births increase, female infant mortality higher

Imported ultrasound machines in the 1980s enabled families to discover a foetus’ sex before its birth, allowing sex-selective abortion, or female foeticide.

As a result, the probability of girl babies being born fell by up to 4 percentage points in states where parents were both exposed to inheritance laws and ultrasound was available, when the first-born child was a girl, when compared with the control group, the study says.
This indicates that families still showed long-held cultural preference for sons, the study says, adding that the magnitude of decline in the number of girls born–which “lies outside the range regarded as consistent with biological variation or slow-changing environmental factors”–shows a deliberate response to the change in inheritance laws.

Since foeticide is a “conscious and staged act”, it is a “clean measure of parents’ preferences for having sons rather than daughters,” the study says.

In addition to eliminating girls through pre-birth sex manipulation, there is evidence that parents rid themselves of girl children by neglect, thus adjusting their household sex-composition despite legislative reforms.

There was a 2-3 percentage point increase in the number of female babies dying before their first birthday, where the first child was a girl, in post-reform and post-ultrasound states. Denying access to medical treatment and withholding food and nourishment are common methods employed to bring about premature death in unwanted children, other studies have shown.

Families were also found to be “extending their fertility”–having children at later ages–in attempts to ensure there is a boy in the family, despite inheritance reforms supposedly equalising both sexes in terms of economic standing.

Families where the first-born was a girl were 9 percentage points more likely to have a younger sibling (12% of the sample mean), than families where the first child was a boy, the study found. This, combined with the previous results, suggests that the post-reform and post-ultrasound environment inadvertently “intensified son preference in fertility”, rather than having the opposite and intended effect.

Patrilocal norms stick, son preference remains

Up to 77% of Indian parents expect to live with their sons in old age, following a ‘patrilocal’ system where sons remain in the family home after marriage while daughters leave to join their in-laws. As per this system, by remaining in and working on the ancestral land, plus caring for parents in old age, the son is usually ‘rewarded’ by inheriting the entire property after the parents’ death.

Legal reforms mandating that parents must now share equal portions of the ancestral property with both sons and daughters appear to have not changed this dynamic, the study says.

Son preference remains the status quo, suggesting that patriarchal traditions exert a stronger force on parents than legislation correcting historical gender biases.

A scant public-pension system and social security net is a key reason why co-residence with sons, as well as son preference generally, has not changed, the study suggests. No more than 35% of India’s elderly population are currently covered by pensions, with close to a third, or 39 million continuing to work in lieu of an adequate social security net, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.

The way forward

In light of persistent biases, how can discrimination against women be reduced and their socio-economic position be elevated?
“I do not doubt the necessity or effectiveness in the long run of such legislation but we need a multi-prong effort focused on empowerment, education and targeted social welfare schemes that work at various levels in society for adult women,” Rajeshwari Deshpande, professor in the department of politics and public administration, University of Pune, told IndiaSpend. “Although [legislative reform] is perceived as a property issue, it’s not really — there’s a deeply ingrained internalised bias in favour of the male child which needs to be addressed.”

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

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

Courtesy: India Spend

The post ‘Reforms Of India’s Inheritance Laws Inadvertently Increased Female Foeticide And Deaths In Infancy’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The proportion of girls out of school has also declined, from 6% in 2010 to 4% in 2018. The number of states where the figure is higher than 5% has dropped to four major states, compared to nine states eight years ago. These achievements are attributed to the Right To Education Act 2009 (RTE) legislation, which mandated free and compulsory education for six- to 14-year-olds and is credited with reducing “inequalities in access between states” and “beefed up infrastructure in government schools”, the report said.

Such improvements, however, mask latent issues in the country’s rural school network, where numeracy and literacy standards remain sub-par and in many instances lower than standards recorded 10 years ago in 2008.

The ASER survey is a nationwide household survey, covering 596 districts in rural India. A total of 354,944 households and 546,527 children between ages three and 16 were surveyed to evaluate learning outcomes.

After five years of schooling, at age 10-11 years, just over half (51%) of students in India can read a grade II level text (appropriate for seven- to eight-year-olds). This figure is lower than in 2008, when 56% of grade V students could read a grade II level text.

The results for arithmetic ability show a similar picture: Just 28% of grade V students are able to do division, compared with 37% in 2008.

Learning outcomes witnessed a decline following the “push towards univeralization” after the RTE came into force in 2010, the report noted. One explanation given is that the exercise to ensure every child was enrolled meant children that had dropped out, or were never enrolled in from the beginning were brought back in to schools and lowered average learning levels in government schools.

But while there have been improvements across numeracy and literacy indicators since 2010, levels remain below those seen a decade ago and significant disparities in learning outcomes across the nation’s states persist. For example, while over three-quarters of students in grade V in Kerala can read a grade II text, significantly higher than the national average (51%), the proportion drops to no more than 34% in Jharkhand.

Poor performance in school-based reading and math tests also signals future problems in adulthood, as the lack of foundational skills impedes children’s ability to carry out basic life tasks. Under a third of 14- to 16-year-olds (29.3%) were able to calculate the 10% discount applied to a T-shirt costing Rs 300.

“The fact that we are seeing some improvement in learning outcomes now is a welcome change,” the report said. “But, first of all, the positive change is slow and uncertain. It has to be understood that we are struggling even with basic literacy and numeracy.”

“This means that not only are we not creating a sufficiently literate population, but that most of our population is functionally illiterate,” said the report. “We are far from becoming an educated nation.”

Reading and arithmetic levels remain low, govt-private school gap widens
Just 27.9% of grade V children can solve a division problem, showing little improvement over a 10-year period. Meanwhile, no more than half of grade V children are able to read a text appropriate for grade II level students, down from 56.2% in 2008.

While these attainment figures have been climbing since 2012, they remain low and suggest over 70% of grade V children have not yet attained the foundational maths skills children are expected to grasp after the first three years of education, meaning the majority of students are not ‘ready’ for the grade in which they have been placed.

The national averages hide a fragmented state-wise picture, regarding how different states compare on literacy and numeracy indicators.

Himachal Pradesh has the highest proportion of grade V students able to do division at 56.6%, 49.4 percentage points higher than Meghalaya, which had the lowest at 7.2%.

The gap is similar for literacy levels: The best performing state in 2018, Kerala, records that 77.2% of its grade V students are able to read a grade II level text, compared to 34.3% of students in Jharkhand (a 42.9-percentage-point difference).

Government schools showed a significant drop in the percentage of children passing ASER’s numeracy and literacy tests after 2010 (potentially for the reasons associated with RTE implementation mentioned earlier), but have started to show signs of improvement over recent years.
In 2012, the proportion of grade V children in government schools that could read a grade II text had declined to 42% from 53% in 2008. In 2018, the figure has climbed back up to 44%, which is “indicative of a change of emphasis towards improved learning outcomes”, the report said.
This is good news for the most disadvantaged in society–the group most likely to attend government-run schools, as ‘better-off parents’ choose to distinguish themselves by sending their children to available private schools in the area–according to the report.

Several states now match or have surpassed 2008 literacy levels, where the proportion of children in grade V who can read a grade II level text is higher than before the RTE was implemented. These include Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

However, the gap between learning levels at government and private schools is widening, the report said. In 2008, the percentage of grade V children able to read a grade II level text in government schools was 53%, compared to 68% of children in private schools–a 15-percentage-point gap, which has widened to 21 percentage points in 2018.

Private school enrollment increased from 18.7% to 30.8% between 2006 and 2014, but has now plateaued, with 2018 enrollment levels showing little change from 2016. Up to 30.9% of children are enrolled in private schools in 2018, up from 30.6% in 2016.
Indian classrooms are filled with students grouped together by age-group, rather than attainment, a situation which has not altered over the past ten years. For example, 12% of children in grade III could not even recognise letters of the alphabet, while 27% are able to read an entire grade II-level text.

‘Multi-grade’ classes, where children with varying levels of ability are mixed together, can leave struggling students behind, as teachers following the grade-level textbook reach only the top of the class, the report said.
 

Source: Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2018
Improvements to the pupil-teacher ratio could help tackle varying abilities in classrooms, as more resources help reach a larger number of children and address specific learning challenges.

The percentage of schools complying with the RTE-mandated pupil-teacher ratio–of 30:1 for primary schools and 35:1 for upper primary schools–has almost doubled since 2010, rising from 38.9% to 76.2% in 2018.

However, the state-wise breakdown shows extreme disparities between states, with the proportion of schools complying with the pupil-teacher ratio in Bihar at no more than 19.7% (up from 8.8% in 2010) and Jharkhand at 28.3% (up from 11.2% in 2010), compared to 99% in Sikkim.

School facilities see notable improvements, but state-wise disparities remain
The proportion of schools with usable girls’ toilets has doubled since 2010, the year the RTE Act mandated that separate facilities must be available for girls and boys, rising from 32.9% in 2010 to 66.4% eight years later.

Further improvements have been seen in the proportion of schools with boundary walls, important for protecting child safety, rising from 51% in 2008 to 64.4% in 2018. Up to 91% of all schools now have a kitchen shed (up from 82.1% in 2010) and the proportion of schools with reading material other than textbooks up from 82.1% to 91% over the same period.

However, as with educational attainment levels, the national averages hide widely-differing state-specific realities. For example, while 74.8% of schools nationally are recorded as having drinking water available on site, in Manipur (6.5%), Meghalaya (15.5%), Nagaland (27.3%) and Jammu & Kashmir (57.8%), the figures are significantly lower.

Similarly, while states such as Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab now have over 80% of schools with girls toilets available, many of the northeastern states like Tripura (32.7%), Mizoram (34.9%) and Meghalaya (47%) are languishing at under 50% in 2018. Having girls toilet facilities on-site and in a usable condition is an important way to help improve the retention rate of girl students, some of whom are at risk of dropping out if safe and hygienic facilities are not to hand.

On average, a mid-day meal was found to be served in 87% of schools on the day ASER surveyors visited in 2018, a seemingly impressive outcome for a key government programme aimed at tackling the prevalence of malnutrition in children.

Yet, the state-wise breakdown shows a more unequal picture. In several northeastern states, under 50% of schools served the mid-day meal, including Manipur (46.4%), Meghalaya (47.9%) and Nagaland (27.4%).

In many states, the proportion of schools that served the mid-day meal on the day of the visit had decreased from 2010. For instance, in Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, over 90% were found to be serving the mid-day meal in 2010, whereas in 2018 the figures were 88%, 82.9% and 85.3%, respectively.

Sports infrastructure in primary and upper primary schools was assessed for the first time as part of the ASER survey and revealed a shortage of physical education (PE) teachers across the country. PE teachers are available in no more than 5.8% of all primary schools and 30.8% of all upper primary schools, with just three states (Haryana, Rajasthan and Kerala) scoring better than the national average.

Just over half of primary schools (55.8%) and almost three-quarters of upper primary schools (71.5%) have some kind of sports equipment.

Without solid foundations, adolescents struggle in real-life scenarios
By grade VIII, at age 14, the percentage of children able to read a grade II text, suitable for seven- to eight-year-olds (73%) or who can do division (44%) remains far from 100% and showing little improvement over a 10-year period.

This suggests over a quarter of children lack the basic reading skills, and over half lack the basic numeracy skills thought necessary in their last year of compulsory schooling.

Their lack of of foundational math and literacy skills is further emphasised when applied to real-life scenarios such as calculating time or financial decision-making. No more than 47% of 14- to 16-year-olds were able to correctly answer a time-calculation question, while just 29.6% were able to figure out the price of a t-shirt after a 10% discount is applied, highlighting how many children are leaving school without the basic skills required in adult life.

Girls performed worse than boys in each of these tasks: Up to 48.4% of girls aged 14-16 were able to correctly calculate how many purification tablets were required per litre of water (requiring children to apply the unitary method) or calculate discount, compared to 56.2% of boys.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Together, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram are home to 93 million women. Among the MLAs these states have voted in, only 9% are women, down from 11% from the previous 2013-14 assembly elections, when female candidates had won 77 of 678 seats.

Only in one state, Chhattisgarh, has there been an increase in the proportion of female MLAs, even though more female candidates contested elections across all five states than the last time.

Mizoram will continue to have zero female representation in its state assembly. Women comprise 49% of the state’s population of 1 million-plus population.

“Women might be coming out in higher numbers to vote but in order for democracy to be truly representative, more women MLAs and MPs need to have a seat at the table,” said Rithika Kumar, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “We have seen at the panchayat and municipal level that women are not only capable of winning elections but also getting re-elected.”

In fact, female representatives are more likely to provide public goods that take into considerations women’s needs, Kumar said. “It’s simple—women need to have an equal say in matters that affect them, the economy and society at large,” said Kumar. “It’s time for all big parties to step up and walk the talk and give more tickets to women.”

How the states voted
Although more women have been contesting elections across the five states over the last three elections, they have not been winning in greater numbers–women’s representation at the assembly level has failed to match the increment in the number of candidates.  

Madhya Pradesh saw the highest number of female candidates this year–235 of the total 2,716 contestants–higher than the 108 in 2013 and 226 in 2008. However, its number of successful women candidates is at its lowest, at just 22–down from 30 in 2013 and 25 in 2008.
In Rajasthan, 182 female candidates contested out of 2,291 (8%) in 2018, up from 152 of 2,030 in 2013 (7%) and 154 out of 2,194 (7%) in 2008. In 2008, 28 women won the elections to become MLAs and in 2013 the number was 25, but this year it has fallen to 23. In 10 years from 2008 to 2018, the proportion of female candidates has fallen from 14% to 11.5%.

Nevertheless, the proportion of female winners was higher than that of female contestants–women comprised 11.5% of the winners in Rajasthan, even though women contestants comprised only 8% of all contestants. Similarly, 9% of contestants in MP were women, and 10% of winners; 10% of contestants in Chhattisgarh were women, and 14% of winners.

Source: Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), State Assembly Reports 2018-2008, MyNeta.info

Note: Figures used for number of contestants refer to the number analysed by ADR and may not reflect the total number of contestants in all cases. *Telangana voted for its first assembly in 2014, ahead of separation.

Chhattisgarh is the only state where more women contested as well as won over previous years–13 (14%) of its 90 available seats were won by women candidates, up from 10 (11%) in 2013 and 11 (12%) in 2008.

At 13, the state’s legislative assembly will have its highest number of women representatives over the past three elections.

Mizoram did not elect a single woman, though its number of female candidates has been rising year-on-year. In 2018, 18 female candidates contested state elections, 200% and 100% higher than in 2013 and 2008, respectively.

Party-wise breakdown
Both the Congress and the BJP fielded no more than 12% women candidates, as per National Election Watch, an umbrella organisation of NGOs working for electoral reforms and improving governance. In absolute numbers, the BJP fielded more, 80, the highest number among all parties, while the Congress fielded 70.

An estimated 79 female candidates contested independently of any party affiliation, 40 under the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and 303 under various regional parties.

The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the winner in Telangana, gave tickets to the lowest proportion of female candidates, at 3%. The BSP, led nationally by a woman, Mayawati (who goes by one name), had 9% female candidates.

Source: National Election Watch by Association for Democratic Reforms
Note: Figures used for number of contestants refer to the number analysed by ADR and may not reflect the total number of contestants in all cases.

Among the winners, the maximum number of female candidates belong to the Congress, which will have 33 women MLAs across the five states.

It is followed by the BJP with 21 female MLAs. The TRS has elected three women MLAs, the BSP will have two and the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh Jogi and the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party one each.

One female candidate won as an independent.

Source: National Election Watch by Association for Democratic Reforms and Electoral Commission
Note: Figures used for number of contestants refer to the number analysed by ADR and may not reflect the total number of contestants in all cases.

In the last state assembly elections, the BJP had the most female MLAs, and its number of women MLAs has more than halved–from 50 in 2013 to 21 in 2018.

The TRS similarly has half the number of female MLAs–from six in 2014 to three in 2018.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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

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A heatwave exposure event refers to one heatwave, being experienced by one person.

The frequency, intensity and duration of heatwave events in India have also increased over the past half-century and the country will likely be among the worst affected by climate change given its “weaker health systems and poorer infrastructure”, the study said.

These are the findings of a study called Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change–a global, interdisciplinary research collaboration between 27 academic institutions and inter-governmental organizations, including The Public Health Foundation of
India (PHFI) and The Centre for Environmental Health.

Tracking 41 indicators across finance and economics, public and political engagement, mitigation actions, vulnerability and more, the study uses data compiled by the Lancet Countdown, which documents the human impacts of climate change and provides public health recommendations in response.

Since 1990, every region of the globe has become steadily more vulnerable to extreme increases of heat, the study found.

In 2017, 157 million more people globally were exposed to heatwave events compared to in 2000, with the average person “experiencing an additional 1.4 days of heatwaves per year over the same period”.

Increased exposure to heat can cause a decrease in labour output, exacerbate urban air pollution, burden health systems ill-equipped to cope with the effects of heat stress and promote the spread of diseases like cholera and dengue fever across endemic areas.

“Climate change threatens to undermine the public health gains of previous decades and is one of the great existential threats of this century”, said Nick Watts, Executive Director, Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change.

“In the past we have seen the health profession and medical profession come together and move mountains in response to the health risks from tobacco, HIV and polio,” said Watts. “We need a similar response to climate change”.

India already bears significant “social and economic costs” from climate change, with each additional tonne of carbon dioxide emitted costing India $86 — almost double the expense borne by the USA ($48) and Saudi Arabia ($47), according to this 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change, a scientific journal.

This year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that if the global community are not able to limit a temperature rise to 1.5 degrees as forecast, climate-related risks to livelihoods, food security, health, water supply and human security will further intensify, IndiaSpend reported in October 2018.

It is therefore “of prime importance” for India to reduce its carbon emissions and air pollution levels, specifically targeting the use of coal, oil and natural gas.

While a number of sectors have begun “a low-carbon transmission”, overall slow progress and lack of preparation for the effects of climate changes across the past two to three decades is threatening “both human lives and the viability of the national health systems they depend on”, the report warned.

Heatwaves and heat stress
Over the last two decades, there has been a “marked increase” in the the duration of heatwaves in India, as well as the numbers of Indians exposed to heatwaves the report said.

The average duration of a heatwave has increased by 150%, from 2 days in 2012 to almost 5 days in 2016.

Change In Average Duration of Heatwave

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

The number of people across the country exposed to extreme heat events has also been increasing.

In 2012, just under 20 million people were exposed to heatwaves, compared to 60 million in 2016 — a 200% increase.

Change In Exposure To Heatwaves (millions)

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Heat exposure can increase the risk of multiple diseases and lead to heat stress — illnesses which occur as a result of the body’s inability to prevent its temperature rising from beyond a normal range.

Severe heat stroke, occuring when the core body temperature rises above 40 degrees celsius, can lead to multiple organ failure, seizures and death, the study said.

Advance implementation of local Heat Action Plans, plus effective inter-agency coordination is a vital response tactic which the government can deploy in order to protect vulnerable groups, the study suggested. This will require identification of “heat hot spots”, analysis of meteorological data and allocation of resources to crisis prone areas.  

Labour loss
India lost nearly 75 billion hours of labour in 2017 as a result of rising temperatures “making sustained work increasingly difficult or possible” and negatively affecting workers’ output.  

This is an increase of over 30 billion hours since 2000 and represents under 50% of the total hours of labour lost globally (153 billion hours) in 2017.

The agriculture sector experienced the largest increase in labour loss, with 60 billion hours lost in 2017, up from 40 billion in 2000 — a 50% increase.

Hours of Labour Lost In India, By Sector

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

While the industrial and service sectors also saw a similar trend in the reduction of labour hours between 2000 and 2017, the indoor and less strenuous nature of these types of jobs meant losses were not as significant as the agricultural sector.

The substantial “climate-related impacts” on the workforce and economy could be significant for India, with 18% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) tied to the agricultural sector, the report said.

Equally, a fall in living standards, due to reduced precipitation and temperature changes, could therefore affect just over half of the population who are employed in agriculture related jobs.  

An urgent review of occupational health standards and labour laws that regulate maximum working hours and safe working conditions must be carried out, the study said.

Carbon emissions exacerbating premature deaths
India’s dependency on fossil fuels is contributing to high levels of ambient air pollution containing PM 2.5 — fine particulate matter 30 times finer than a human hair, which are known to pose the greatest risk to humans– and which in turn is translating into premature deaths.
Pollution effects from coal alone are responsible for 107,000 deaths annually in India — just under three quarters (73,000) of which are due to use in power plants, 24,000 related to use in industry and 10,000 from household coal consumption.

Premature Deaths in India, By Source

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Land-based transport is “responsible for a substantial number” of PM2.5 related deaths, comprising 12.5% of the annual total. However these emissions can be addressed through improvements to travel infrastructure.

India’s urban population is growing rapidly, expected to increase by 416 million between 2018 and 2050, with a large proportion of the growth taking place in small non-Tier 1 cities. These cities should tackle the population’s transport needs through public infrastructure, limiting the rise in of car-users and keeping vehicular pollution at bay, the study suggested.

Types of Transport Use in Smaller Indian Cities

Source: Lancet Countdown 2018 Report: Briefing for Indian Policymakers

Ahmedabad and Pune, both cities “with a remarkable growth rate”, have high proportions of motorized transport users (vehicle users), representing 42% and 48% of all transport modes used.

Raising awareness of such pollution-related issues, their associated health risks and climate change overall is a key way to mobilize preventative actions, the study said.

Media coverage of climate change and health issues has increased by 40% globally over the last decade, buoyed by large increases in South-East Asia. The Times of India and Hindustan Times have shown a 458% and 415% increase in climate-related coverage between 2007-2017 respectively.

Increasing regional, non-english media coverage of climate change and health issues across states can further help to stimulate a “state-by-state policy response”.

(Sanghera is a writer and researcher with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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