Why abrogation of labour laws is problematic

It could reduce participation of women in workforce, create incentives for exploitative practices.

Written by Ashish Bharadwaj and Shohini Sengupta

In terms of the number of people infected by COVID-19, India is amongst the worst-hit by the disease. The impact of the pandemic has been particularly tragic for the socio-economically depressed categories of people, including informal economy workers, migrant labourers, pensioners, women and children — people who lie at the intersection of abject poverty, caste and other systemic forms of oppression. The nation-wide lockdown aggravated their problems leading to the mass exodus of migrant labourers who have little or no social security. The institutional response to this humanitarian crisis was grossly inadequate.

Last month, labour laws in 11 states were changed in an attempt to promote business operations and maintain industrial output, particularly in the manufacturing sector. The major changes proposed include increasing working hours from 8 to 12 hours — Uttar Pradesh, however, took back the ordinance on this issue — no inspection of SMEs and firms employing less than 50 workers, easing the process of securing a business license, amending the Industrial Disputes Act to increase the threshold for lay-offs and limiting the submission of annual returns to once a year as opposed to multiple returns under various labour laws.

There has been a growing need to rationalise labour laws in India, with several scholars and economists pointing out the perils of having a vast multitude of labour laws operating at the Centre and state level. This has resulted in both overregulation of the formal economy, driving labour costs in the regulated market, and expanding the number of people outside this formal economy (roughly 90 per cent according to some estimates). The move to assimilate various labour laws into a draft code on social security last year was a necessary first step in this direction. However, removing the scant social welfare protections to correct existing regulatory arbitrariness creates incentives for employers to continue with exploitative labour practices, and even terminate businesses without compensation and other terminal dues.

Women and children have been excluded from the changes in the labour laws. On the face of it, this may appear a good step. But this could create a new incentive for not hiring women, since it is now cheaper to hire men. In addition, a sizeable portion of the relaxations involve doing away with inspections by labour commissioners, resulting in the creation of a regulatory black hole where employers might get away by hiring low-cost child labour. Whilst the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act (1986) remains in effect, there are fears that several employers will pay no heed to the legislation.

Relaxation of labour laws can also have other far-reaching, adverse implications on the rights and well-being of women, young workers and children. According to the World Bank, the female labour force participation rate in India was a meagre 17.5 per cent in 2017-18. Extended working hours and other labour law relaxations are likely to further decrease the participation rates of women in the labour market and increase the already widening wage gap. It will also have a detrimental impact on childcare and could force elder siblings (particularly girls) to shoulder the responsibility of providing care to younger children. Adverse working conditions could have an undesirable impact on the mental health of parents and lead to children adopting adverse coping mechanisms, including violence and self-harm.

The absence of inspections and monitoring and a reduced focus on safety measures at workplaces will increase health hazards and may translate into an increase in health expenditure. This could divert limited resources away from childcare. Informal economy protection measures adopted by countries across the world include unemployment insurance, facilitating direct cash or in-kind transfers, public work programmes and support to struggling small businesses. The right to satisfactory working conditions has to be a necessity both during a crisis, and otherwise. Efficient monitoring mechanisms are the only way to reduce if not prevent exploitation and abuse.

Complete de-regulation of an already oppressive labour market, in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, represents a failure of the state to cater to the needs of the most vulnerable people.

(Bharadwaj is Professor & Dean and Sengupta is Assistant Professor of Research, Jindal School of Banking & Finance, O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat. Views are personal)

Source: Indian Express, 17/06/2020

We must walk tightrope between online and offline learning

If schools do not focus on adapting teaching materials that can reach the last child, then the consequence could be a generation of young illiterates. This will be detrimental for the society at large.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on the way children learn. The accelerating force of digitisation has created a disruptive online phenomenon across schools and learning spaces around the world. It is true that new challenges and opportunities have emerged for educators, parents and students, but we have also entered areas of many uncertainties. Will schools, functioning within old paradigms, summon the courage to shift their practices to support the personal growth of the next generation of learners equitably — whether they are the privileged, marginalised or the disabled?

The teaching landscape has shifted from the notion of a singular path, towards a much more elastic understanding of how we have to walk the tightrope between online and offline learning. Quite suddenly, teachers in the classrooms are learning to redistribute, benefit and liberate learners through technology. At one level, online classes will connect students, and on another, create limitations. This has made us reflect on the inequality not only in bandwidth, gadgets and devices, but also in the fact that most parents do not have the time or ability to support their children in this venture.

If schools do not focus on adapting teaching materials that can reach the last child, then the consequence could be a generation of young illiterates. This will be detrimental for the society at large. The definition of what is meant by quality of education will have to be constantly revised becausConsider this Waldorf concept for education: “The danger lies in thinking that new technologies can substitute old realities or replace them without consequences. When basic experience in nature, in everyday life activities, social interaction and creative play are replaced with too much screen time, a child’s development is compromised. There is a great need to experience learning through all the senses. When children are surrounded by authenticity in the environment and in human interactions, a sense of self is supported in a positive way”.

Schools are larger ecologies that are both human and cultural. And classrooms are palpable living spaces which are diverse in many ways. Clubbing them into one homogenous online model will destroy diversity, inclusivity and dissent which is the essence of education.e too much emphasis on technology could also exclude many children from education.

In many private schools, despite the Right to Education, equality and equity are not integrated into the system. Reportedly, we only have 12 per cent of children from the economically weaker sections attending private schools across the country instead of 25 per cent. In Delhi, several of these students have dropped out because of the lack of facilities, or they have returned to their villages as their parents have lost their livelihoods. These children will be left behind because of their socio-economic condition.

The greatest poverty generally occurs in nations where education is not prioritised through investment in its funding by the state and central governments. The central and state governments must invest in uninterrupted free broadband and create apps like Microsoft teams/Zoom or Google platforms, to which teachers and students should have access — this will lessen the financial constraints. These apps should be synced with programmes like VidyaDaan and e-Pathshala, and a twenty 24/7 support system should be available for seamless functioning.

Unfortunately, millions of children are at severe learning risk now. They may miss weeks, months or even a year (and more) of education. Its impact will only be realised after a decade, when there will be a high rate of young adults who are neither in school nor employed.

Some states have decided not to conduct online classes for primary students because it would be inequitable. Their understanding is that if learning is not available to all, then it should not be available to one. Are we, then saying that everyone should stay unlettered together? Systems should come into place that can ensure a variety of methods to equip all learners — privileged, poor, middle-class and disabled. A child should always be a priority, not an afterthought. It must be remembered that disasters affect everyone: However, children from fragile families are more likely to be traumatised.

Educators must have the generosity to share resources, build communities of practice and develop design thinking as there are no copyrights to learning. This new mutuality will create a culture of engagement towards staff, students and their families.

The pandemic has really laid bare some of the deep-rooted problems in education. It has brought unprecedented challenges for educators, one of which is to recognise the highly excluded category of children with disabilities. The entire focus is on online education, but no announcement has been made about the learning that should be provided to children with disabilities. None of the open education resources (e-Pathshala, SWAYAM etc) have any beneficial platforms for children with special needs. Some progressive schools are negotiating the inclusive learning space independently. However, there are no provisions to ensure any kind of distance, open or home-based education for these children. Therefore, we need to develop a coherent and comprehensive national focus towards technolOnline and offline teaching have to be embedded with emotional and social learning. This will help to create a psychological safety net, increase thinking conversations, decrease social conflict and encourage diverse opinions and questioning minds. Children are educated so that they can take forward primary values, culture and learning, and keep them alive. This can only happen if there is a holistic, empathetic and adaptive audit of online learning which includes without prejudice every child in the community with compassion and care.ogy which also incorporates a humanised approach.

Source: Indian Express, 18/06/2020

Black death: The great plague that killed millions, and feudalism

In Europe though, the catastrophic plague eventually played out to be a boon for some -- the serfs who were legally committed to providing labour to landlords in exchange for allowing them to live and work in their lands.

In autumn of 1347 CE, when a fleet of 12 ships reached the docks of a Sicilian port, people gathered there were horrified to meet with a pile of corpses. Most of the sailors in the ships were brought dead, and those alive were a shocking sight, all covered in boils dripping blood. While the ships were immediately moved out of the harbour, the demon of a disease it brought aboard was there to stay, claiming the lives of nearly one-third of the European population in the next three years.

The ‘Black death’ as it came to be called later, spread out from Italy to most parts of Southern Europe. By 1348 CE, it had reached England, France and Spain, and by1349 CE, it made an appearance in the Scandinavian countries while making its way to more remote countries like Iceland and Greenland. It also hit the great Arab cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Tunis. The plague caused by Yersinia Pestis, the same bacterium that caused the Justinian Plague in the sixth century, played out as the biggest human tragedy of medieval Europe.

The scholar, Ibn Khaldun, who was a contemporary witness to the plague, wrote of its magnitude: “Civilisations both in the East and West were visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish… the entire inhabited world changed.”

In Europe though, the catastrophic plague eventually played out to be a boon for some — the serfs who were legally committed to providing labour to landlords in exchange for allowing them to live and work in their lands. The impact of the plague was such that it put an end to the feudal system of economy that persisted in Europe for centuries, allowing the serfs to move up the social and economic ladder.

The Silk route origins of the plague

Between the second and fifteenth centuries of the Common Era, a network of land and sea routes connecting the East and West, known as the ‘Silk route’ was the prime source of economic, cultural and religious interactions between communities. The route carried everything from spices to languages, and is believed to have been the one carrying the disastrous plague as well.

The rise in trading activities during the medieval era is known to have been one of the foremost reasons for the widespread impact of the plague. Flea infected rodents travelled along with freight to China, India, the Middle East, and Europe.

“To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful creator,” writes historian John Kelly, in his book ‘The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time’. “To many others, the only credible explanation for death on so vIn its most common form, the Bubonic plague showed itself on people when egg-shaped swellings appeared on their bodies. Bruise Like purplish splotches often appeared on the chest, back, or neck, and were referred to as ‘God’s tokens’. These tokens became inspiration for the popular children’s rhyme that remains common till today- ‘Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes (hemorrhages), we all fall down’. A stench from the body and delirium were other symptoms associated with the disease.

The 14th century Italian chronicler, Agnolo di Tura, wrote what he saw of the plague. “And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in their groins, and fall over while talking… And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead.”

Extremes of human behaviour resulted. While on one hand there were those who blamed and murdered Jews for the outbreak of the disease, there were also those who put their lives at stake to take care of the plague victims.

Close to 25 million people are believed to have been wiped out by the early 1350s, which was approximately one-third of the European continent. The plague lingered on for centuries, manifesting itself in recurrent outbreaks. One of the measures adopted for checking its spread was to hold arriving sailors on their ships for 30 or 40 days before allowing them to move around- the practise which was the origin of the term ‘quarantine’.

A boon to the serfs

The strongest impact of the plague though was in the way it overturned the economic structure prevalent in Europe. Europe in the 14th century was a feudal society, with the king at the apex, and peasant labourers at the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the middle were the landlords, on whose land the peasants were given the right to live and work. In return the peasants were expected to pay part of their harvest produce to the landlords as rent. It meant that the landlords could survive on the service and produce of the peasants, while for the latter it resulted in never-ending cycles of unpaid work and no hope to rise up the social ladder.ast a scale was human malfeasance,” he adds.

The drastic reduction in the population of the continent after the plague resulted in dire shortage of labourers to work the lands. The economic historian Walter Scheidel notes in his book: “Such a shortage of labourers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.”

The unprecedented sharp rise in wages became a cause of worry to the landlords who requested the monarchy to intervene. In June 1349, the Crown in England passed the Ordinance of Labourers, mandating that all those who do not own lands and are not involved in trade practices be obliged to take up employment offered and accept wages as applicable five or six years ago. The Ordinance also prohibited any landlord from offering higher wages.

Despite the order though, wages continued to show an upward trend, resulting in the Crown passing a second ordinance in 1351.

Each of these measures failed to contain the new found economic freedom of the serfs. The contemporary ecclesiastical historian, Henry Knighton wrote of the situation in his chronicles: “The workers were so above themselves and so bloody-minded that they took no notice of the king’s command. If anyone wished to hire them, he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the worker.”

“For all its severity, the initial wave of the Black Death alone would not have been sufficient to cause urban real wages to double and to sustain this increase for several generations,” writes Scheidel. He goes on to note repeated plague visitations well into the late medieval period, ensuring that wages remained high. There were about 15 in England alone between the 1370s and 1480s, 15 in the Netherlands between 1360 and 1494, and 14 in Spain between 1391 and 1457.

Consequently, feudalism in Europe came to an end by the 15th century. As Scheidel rightly described in his work: “Society experienced a wholesale reversal of the earlier trend that had made the landlord class stronger and richer and most people poorer: now it was the other way around.”

Further reading- ‘The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century’, by Walter Scheidel; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time; by John Kelly; In the wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the world it made, by Norman F. Cantor.

Source: Indian Express, 8/05/2020

Pandemic offers chance to pursue an alternative model of urbanisation

With this major transformation and with the onset of COVID-19, it is surely the time to reconsider our habitation model.

Between the year 1 CE and the start of the Industrial Revolution (around the early 1800s), the decadal growth of the global population was around 0.8 per cent. With the advent of concentrated production centres, improved medicine and the era of fossil fuels, the global population has shot up by seven times in the last 180 years, clocking a decadal growth rate of over 11 per cent.

This population growth rate has been largely urban and metro-centred. Today, cities consume two-thirds of the global energy consumption and account for more than 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. London became the first modern city to cross the one million population mark around 1800. By 1960, our planet had 111 cities with over a million inhabitants. In China and India, the number rose from 371 in 2000 to 548 in 2018, with 61 of these cities in India. Recently, the UN projected that by 2030, 28 per cent of the world population will live in dense, congested spaces, jostling for ever-dwindling space and choked infrastructure. Population densities have increased enormously, with the Dharavi slum in Mumbai registering a mind-boggling density of 3.75 lakh persons per sq km.

But COVID-19 has raised the question: Will concentrated, high-investment, high-density cities have a prominent place in the new, emerging world? Are they successful at providing an adequate return on investment? And, above all, do they provide a quality of life and happiness to all their inhabitants? An average Mumbaikar daily spends 95 minutes commuting between office and home, wasting nearly 10 per cent of his time awake everyday. Eight people die every day in Mumbai in local train-related accidents, and in Delhi, five people lose their lives in road accidents.

Going by present trends, India will build a new Chicago every year to accommodate new urban dwellers. This will require about $2.5 trillion of investment until 2030 — to create more congested urban spaces. Should we not look at alternative models of habitations, which are more frugal, more sustainable and offer more satisfying lifestyles and higher welfare levels?

Once cities expand beyond one million, they start to experience dis-economies of scale with pressure on every urban amenity increasing exponentially — more people means more vehicles, more vehicles mean need for more roads and increased pollution, which mean more hospitals, more energy and more waste. Even the most robust megacities can easily witness the “domino” effect where a minor and local failure is compounded into a catastrophe. In China in 2010, due to some broken cars and road repair work, a minor traffic snarl expanded quickly into a massive jam of 120 kilometres on the highway connecting Inner Mongolia and Beijing. Drivers were left with nowhere to go for a punishing 12 days. Even in India, we have witnessed smaller but painful versions of the same phenomenon. The truth is that overpopulated cities strain their resources inordinately and leave little room to successfully tackle every contingency.

Thus, cities are the most affected by natural and man-made disasters. Nearly every hot-spot of the COVID-19 outbreak is a congested urban centre. The low-income areas of cities, where anything from drinking water to sanitation can be a shared facility, are the most vulnerable to any disease outbreak. Congested low-income urban spaces not only bear an inordinately high disease burden, they also bear the brunt of air pollution, water contamination and crime infestation. In the face of any disaster like a flood, earthquake or, worse still, a pandemic, migrant workers, who throng these megacities, rush to go back to their villages. India, with its approximately 72 million migrant workers (including their families), is vulnerable to such disruptions as amply demonstrated in recent weeks.

Some of the principal and strong advantages claimed for megacities with their sky scrapers are the economies of agglomeration and the generation of new ideas and innovations through multi-disciplinary interactions. These advantages have been largely nullified with advances in digital technologies that have made online interactions numerous, equally rich in content and covering a wider range of disciplines. The “cloud” is the new interaction space, which can be accessed by innovators from widely-spread geographies. Digitisation has apparently resulted in the loss of cities’ innovative mojo.

With this major transformation and with the onset of COVID-19, it is surely the time to reconsider our habitation model. Gandhiji’s model of gram swaraj, APJ Abdul Kalam’s vision of providing urban amenities in rural areas and Nanaji Deshmukh’s idea of self-reliant village development clearly deserve of fresh and focused attention. We have vast swathes of land, people and resources located in our over 6,00,000 villages. These offer another chance for us to pursue an alternative model of development where agriculture, industry and service sectors move in sync for sustainable development, which is in harmony with nature. This will minimise our carbon footprint. At the same time, it will also minimise social disruption with jobs coming to people rather than the other way round. New technology, the carbon constraint and diseconomies of congestion and density must force us to review our urbanisation landscape.

Kumar is vice chairman NITI Aayog, Singh is CEO of Dr. Kalam Centre, New Delhi. Views are personal

Source: Indian Express, 8/06/2020

The first plague in history ended the Byzantine empire, was considered an act of God

The plague “would mark the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Along the way, it would consume at least 25 million human lives.”

A moment is all it takes for the world to change and the way we see it. The first plague of written history had caused the Byzantine Empire to fall. The Black Death of the 14th century on the other hand, ended the practice of serfdom in Europe. In India, the Bubonic plague of the 19th century came as a God-given opportunity for colonial officials to suppress the resident population, while the Spanish flu of the 20th century led to a nationalist awakening. The pages of history are replete with instances when major disease outbreaks have altered and overturned the ways in which societies and political structures functioned.

Many would say the Covid-19 outbreak may change forever the world as we have known it till now. Power structures may be shifted, economic systems remodeled, along with significant changes in the way we touch, behave, and breathe. With the number of cases continuing to surge and the prospect of a vaccine still distant, we are yet to see the impact that the virus will play out in times ahead. Lessons from thIn the year 540 CE, a fleet of ships left the port of Alexandria for some of the greatest trading cities in the Mediterranean region including those in Turkey, Italy and Spain. The Byzantine empire for which it was headed, had for centuries depended on North Africa to meet its requirements of food grain. This time though, along with the food grains, came a disease that would wreak havoc across the empire, and alter the course of its history.

The Plague of Justinian, as it came to be known after Emperor Justinian I who held the throne of Byzantium, is found to have transmitted through black rats that traveled on the grain ships and carts sent to Constantinople. Having conquered large parts of North Africa, and the Italian peninsula, the Byzantine Empire under Justinian I was at its peak when the plague broke out. As historian William Rosen wrote in his book ‘Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe’, the plague “would mark the end of one world, and the beginning of another. Along the way, it would consume at least 25 million human lives.”

A disastrous act of God

The Justinian plague is known to have originated at Pelusium at the Eastern edge of the Nile delta in Egypt, even though the roots of the bacterium causing it was first found at Qinghai in China. From Egypt it spread through trade routes and by 544 CE had spread through Central Asia, Europe, and the Mediterannean.

The plague was caused by Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium that caused the disastrous Black Death in Europe, in the 14th century, and later the third plague pandemic of the 19th century. The Justinian plague itself is recorded to have recurred multiple times in the course of the next two hundred years. While some accounts of it suggest the plague recurred 14 times, others say 18 or 21.e past though can provide some insight into what lies ahead.

The plague resulting from the bacterium took different forms. The Justinian plague was a Bubonic plague that is transmitted by the bite of an infected flea or rodent. In the world of antiquity, however, it was understood as nothing more than a catastrophic act of God.

“To the people of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, only the act of an angry God could explain the colossal disaster of the plague,” writes historian J N Hays in his book ‘Epidemics and pandemics: Their impacts on human history’. Contemporary descriptions of the disease noted that it struck suddenly with a high fever; the buboes, or swellings, appeared in the groin, the armpits, behind the ears or in the thigh. Further black spots might appear in the skin and the victim would slip into a coma and would die soon after.

People traumatised and unsure about the situation, soon resorted to irrational acts hoping the disease would disappear. “There was a deliberate smashing of pots; people making a clamour. This may be an illustration of a population experiencing traumatic shock. It might have been done in panic but also might hWhile it is difficult to ascertain the precise number of casualties left behind in the wake of the Justinian plague, some details put forth by contemporary witnesses might be useful to gauge its magnitude. The Byzantine Greek scholar Procopius in his elaborate eight-volume work, ‘The history of wars’ noted how the epidemic claimed 5000 or sometimes 10,000 lives daily only in the Byzatine capital city of Constantinople. Emperor Justinian himself was struck by the plague but managed to recover from it.

The contemporary historian John of Ephesus, on the other hand, claims to have witnessed “villages whose inhabitants perished altogether’. He described the scene of destruction at Constantinople in the following words — “noble and chaste women, dignified with honour, who sat in bed chambers, now with their mouths swollen, wide open and gaping, who were piled up in horrible heaps, all ages lying prostrate, all staturers bowed down and overthrown, all ranks pressed on upon another, in a single wine-press of God’s wrath, like beasts, not like human beings.”

Ushering the end of the Byzantine empire

The plague of Justinian had a far-reaching impact on the fiscal, administrative and military framework of the empire. The population of the empire was dramatically reduced. While some scholars have noted that 40 per cent of Constantinople’s population had disappeared, others believe that the plague caused the death of a quarter of the human population in the Eastern Mediterannean. For an empire that was primarily agrarian, it meant a shortage of food, as well as a sharp drop in the amount of taxes being paid to the state. The immediate result was famines that occurred in 542, and then again in 545 and 546.

Before the plague arrived, the empire of Byzantium under Justinian had expanded far across North Africa, southern France, Italy and Spain, and was well on its way to re-establish much of the golden era of the Roman Empire. The decrease in the population of the empire also significantly weakened the military. The Empire’s capacity to resist its enemies had weakened.

By 568 CE, Northern Italy was invaded and conquered by the Germanic tribes called Lombards. “Within decades, Rome and Persia were so plague-weakened that the armies of Islam, formed in one of the only parts of either empire to remain plague free, could conquer Mesopotamia, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and most of Asia Minor,” writes Rosen.

While historians have noted several other factors that aided in the weakening of the Byzantine empire, including the administrative weaknesses of its monarch, they agree that the plague of Justinian did play a crucial role. While the Byzantine Empire did revive briefly in the 10th-11th centuries under the Macedonians, it could never again reach the same heights. The plague in many ways marked the end of the era of Classical antiquity and marked the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Extra reading: The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, by J N Hays | Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, by William Rosen | Economy and Society in the age of Justinian, by Peter Sarrisave been done to somehow disturb and clear the atmosphere,” writes Hays.

Source: Indian Express, 8/05/2020