Dr Ambedkar Centre of Excellence to be launched nationally on April 22, will be set up in 31 central varsities

 The Banaras Hindu University (BHU) will play host to the national launch of Dr Ambedkar Centre of Excellence on April 22, 2022. The centre will be launched by the Social Justice and Empowerment Minister, Government of India, Virendra Kumar. The centres are being launched to provide coaching facilities to scheduled caste (SC) students for civil services examination conducted by the Union Public Services Commission (UPSC).

The proposed centre is being set up in 31 central universities from all over the country, Banaras Hindu University, being one of them. The launch programme is scheduled to take place at the Shatabdi Krishi Prekshagrih, Institute of Agricultural Sciences. Vice-chancellors of all the other universities, where the centre is to be set up, will also participate.

Two MoUs shall also be signed between the Dr Ambedkar Foundation and implementing universities for setting up the centres and Dr Ambedkar Chairs.

Each centre will have 100 seats for coaching and over 33 per cent of total sanctioned seats may preferably be given to eligible female candidates of the scheduled caste (SC) category. As many as three faculty members are to be appointed in each centre. The centres are proposed to have separate classrooms, library, hi-speed WiFi connectivity and other required infrastructure for smooth functioning. For taking admission to the centre to avail coaching, candidates will have to clear an entrance test.

Source: Indian Express, 18/04/22

India needs a new social contract

 

Harsh Mander writes: The pandemic exposed the horrors of the existing economic and social arrangements that privilege some but treat others as expendable

The pandemic has dramatically laid bare the catastrophic public costs of inequality. Thousands of lives could have been saved if much greater investments had been made in public health provisioning. The explosion of mass hunger and joblessness and the dislocation of millions of working poor people could have been averted had labour protection, social security, and wage levels of workers been secured.

“Inequality Kills” is the apt title of a devastating report by Oxfam India released at the time of the World Economic Forum in Davos. For India’s super-rich, the pandemic became a time to swell their wealth dizzyingly. The worst year of the pandemic for India was 2021. In this year, the net wealth of just one Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, multiplied eight times, from $8.9 billion in 2020 to $50.5 billion in 2021. The net worth of Mukesh Ambani doubled to $85.5 billion in 2021, rocketing him from India’s to Asia’s richest man. In fact, Ambani added Rs 90 crore to his wealth every hour right from March 2020, the start of the pandemic. In 2021, the number of dollar billionaires in India expanded by 39 per cent. India is home today to the largest number of dollar billionaires, after the US and China, with more billionaires than France, Sweden and Switzerland combined. In 2020, 98 families held more wealth than 555 million Indians. India’s top 10 per cent owned 45 per cent of the country’s wealth. Three-fifths of India’s top 100 added $1 billion or more to their wealth in 2021 over the previous year.

In this same period, as many as 84 per cent Indian households suffered a fall of income, for many into deep and stubborn poverty. The RBI estimated a GDP contraction of minus 8.7 to 7 per cent. 120 million jobs were lost, of which 92 million were in the informal sector. In 2021, FAO reported there were 200 million undernourished people in India and India was home to a quarter of all undernourished people around the world. Pew estimated that the number of poor people in India doubled from 55 million in 2020 to 120 million in 2021. Oxfam reports that daily-wage workers topped the numbers of people who committed suicide in 2020, followed by self-employed and unemployed individuals.

Evaluations in the media do not adequately recognise that the greater part of the grim economic devastation that surrounds us in India today — deaths, joblessness, hunger — is not caused primarily by the Covid-19 virus. They are the consequence of market-led public policies that have fostered unequal life chances. This got exposed more in these times of global calamity.

Imagine a vastly different India. Imagine, for instance, a country that has secured free and quality healthcare for every citizen, a guarantee of food for all, workers’ rights to social security and wage payments to all during lockdowns, and decent housing and clean water. The deaths and unemployment that engulfed a large section of Indians could have been eschewed. If millions of working people had more money in their hands, the greatest contraction of the economy since Independence could have been forestalled. If decent social housing and clean water supply had been secured by governments for all residents, it would have enabled the millions forced into overcrowded shanties to protect themselves by keeping distance in well-ventilated tenements and washing their hands regularly. Millennials might then argue: All of this is unattainable; what, then, is the point of painting scenarios of utopias?

But just as the humanitarian crisis today could have been prevented, the alternative is eminently feasible if people and government commit themselves to the goals of the Constitution. India spends only 3.54 per cent of its budgetary resources on healthcare, much less, as noted by Oxfam, than other middle-income countries like Brazil (9.51), South Africa (8.25) and China (5.35). Income inequalities reduce life chances in India even more for those disadvantaged by caste, gender and religious identities. A Dalit woman, for instance, has 15 years lower life expectancy than an upper-caste woman. Confronted by a broken and starved public health system, even the poor have to rely on private health providers, and 60 per cent of health spending in India is out-of-pocket, among the highest in the world, and a major cause of poverty. In the pandemic, the exclusions were even more spectacular. Oxfam found middle-class families spending Rs 4 lakh a day in private hospitals during the second wave — sometThe starting point of our vision of a new India is for the state to assume responsibility to provision quality healthcare, education, food, pension, clean water and housing, free or in affordable ways for all citizens. Economist Prabhat Patnaik, in his contribution to the India Exclusion Report brought out by the Centre for Equity Studies, says that to resource all of this would demand a public resolve to expand taxation of the super-rich. Sufficient to fund all of this, he calculates, is two taxes levied only on the top 1 per cent of the population — a wealth tax of 2 per cent and an inheritance tax of 33 per cent. Our government is doing the opposite; it withdrew the wealth tax in 2015 and reduced the already low levels of corporate tax. The result is regressive taxation burdening the poor and abysmally low public spending.

Those who care for a kinder world must not miss this moment when the pandemic has revealed to us the horror of our moral collapse; of economic and social arrangements that privilege some lives, but treat the rest as expendable. The struggle of our times must be for a new social contract based on solidarity and inclusion.hing a casual worker earns in 1,000 days.

Written by Harsh Mander

Source: Indian Express, 29/01/22

India justice report 2020: One in 4 cops in Bihar a woman, highest among states

 At 25.3 per cent, Bihar leads the list of 25 states for employing most women in its police force, according to the second annual survey on police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid, India Justice Report, released on Thursday.

The state finished ahead of Himachal Pradesh (19.2%) and Tamil Nadu (18.5%).

However, although it is the only state to have more than 20 per cent women in the police force, women account for only 6.1 per cent in the officer category. Tamil Nadu, the report says, has the highest percentage of women police officers (24.8%) , followed by Mizoram (20.1%).

On diversity, Karnataka is the only state to meet its quotas for SC, ST and OBC in both officer cadre and constabulary, Chhattisgarh being the only other state that meets the diversity requirements for constabulary.

The report analysed expenditure, vacancies, representation of women and members of SC, ST and Other Backward Classes, across 18 large and mid-sized states with a population of over 1 crore and eight smaller states. The report was an initiative of Tata Trusts, along with the Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, CHRI, DAKSH and TISS-Prayas and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

The lack of representation of women as judges in high courts is telling. Sikkim tops the list with 33.3 per cent women – Sikkim High Court has just three judges, Justice Meenakshi Madan Rai being its lone woman judge. Overall, only 29 per cent judges in HCs across the country are women, but no state except Of the rest, Andhra Pradesh tops the list with 19 per cent, followed by Punjab and Haryana, where the common HC for the two states has 18.2 per cent women judges.

Four states — Bihar, Uttarakhand, Tripura and Meghalaya — have no woman judge in its high courts.

Despite the low figures, women’s representation has marginally increased in police, prisons and the judiciary, the report mentions. Women account for 10 per cent of all police personnel, up from 7 per cent in January 2017; 13 per cent prison staff (10% in December 2016); 29.3% of judges (26.5% in 2017-18).

Overall, Maharashtra retained the top spot on delivery of justice to people among 18 large and mid-sized states, followed by Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab and Kerala.

The report also noted that an overwhelming two-thirds of all prisoners are undertrials awaiting a conviction.Sikkim has over 20 per cent women judges.

Source: Indian Express, 29/01/21

Virtual courts cannot fully replace a process that demands direct human interaction

 

The dispensation of justice is a human endeavour made up of laws, ethics, morality, wisdom and compassion. The absence of any one of these five ingredients, short-changed by restrictive virtual situations, would render the exercise of justice only partially satisfactory or even downright unjust.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice, in its recent report, recommended holding virtual courts even after the pandemic ends. The chair said, “the parliamentary panel strongly pitched for virtual courts… digital justice is cheaper and faster besides addressing locational and economic handicaps; ensures safety of vulnerable witnesses providing testimony, expedites processes and procedures and are an improvement over traditional courts as they are most affordable, citizen-friendly and offer greater access to justice”. Meanwhile, there is a large group of lawyers of the Delhi High Court clamouring for more physical hearings and a smaller group of them objecting, citing health concerns.

While the government popularly believes digitisation is the answer to all the problems of governance, and these are often excitedly referred to as “game changers”, issues related to digital technology solutions need careful analysis and an overhauling of both laws and existing systems before they are introduced. While I am neither a lawyer nor a digital expert, I have attended court hearings more than 180 times since the 1980s on cases related to trespass, defamation, right to livelihoods of artisans and against administrative injustices. Over almost two decades, 150 of these were related to a CBI case emerging out of the Tehelka.com allegations. Of these, the last 12 were video hearings on final arguments, verdict, sentencing and appeal, which took place during this pandemic. One personally experienced the benefits and flaws of the virtual system.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a notoriously abused maxim in our court system considering there are 3.1 crore cases pending in the lower courts (83 lakh pending for over 10 years), 44 lakh in the high courts (32 lakh pending for over 10 years), and 60,000 cases pending in the Supreme Court (the figures are as of 2019). Prisons are over capacity by 114 per cent, of which two-thirds are undertrials, who have had no justice at all. The massive injustice already done to them is unforgivable.

It is hoped that virtual courts will reduce the pendency of cases by reducing the time taken on small financial issues like insurance, traffic claims and challans that clog the system. But major policy changes always have unintended consequences, so careful thought is required on what types of cases and what parts of the judicial process are amenable to going online. It should also be a matter of choice if participants on either side want to use the virtual route. Certain cases of tax, insurance and some corporate matters could move to the online dispute resolution processes through negotiation, arbitration and conciliation. Reducing pendency through virtual courts will reduce travel costs, although lawyers are unlikely to reduce their fees. When government agencies file cases or appeals, they ignore these costs as they come out of the public exchequer. Very often, the police and other criminal investigative agencies take years to produce witnesses. Judges hesitate to compel them. Repeated adjournments are sought, not just by the accused, but by prosecuting agencies who are nonchalant. Examination of the causes of pendency should, therefore, extend far wider afield.

Essentially, technologies alone do not improve the system, people do. Adoption of new and evolving technologies requires careful preparation to ensure that “justice delivery services” created by software engineers is matched by local court systems and the level of training given to those who handle them in India’s courts. Currently, judges have had to speak from landline phones or without video, and lawyers have been compelled to argue cases from inside their cars if the network in their homes is faulty. There are audio failures, and lack of connectivity in rural areas. Unless connectivity is established, it cannot be presumed and compelled. Rushing into new protocols without understanding uses and applications will disempower the poor even further, especially undertrials who cannot afford lawyers.

In India, we are already applying digital services to industry, businesses, agriculture, defence, governance, education and health. Today, court rulings have been applied not only to human beings but to animals, rivers and even gods. Therefore, any case involving decisions affecting the life and liberty of persons must remain in the realm of physical courtrooms. Forceful interventions, and often repeated stressing of a point is required in a courtroom. Lawyers need to interrupt when they feel the arguments of their counterparts are factually inaccurate — we are, after all, according to Amartya Sen, “argumentative Indians” — but this cannot happen unless the “host” of the video court hearing unmutes you. Facial expressions such as fear, guilt, regret, sadness, anger, which can affect a case, are constricted and almost frozen into a small space. Faces are often out of proportion and distorted. Nuanced arguments that are most important in law sometimes need perseverance to get across, as is the ability to display evidence creatively (recall OJ Simpson’s famous glove), or the room for presenting many crucial options to create reasonable doubt. Appealing for compassion for the elderly and the disabled, and pleas for leniency of punishment for senior citizens with co-morbidities in COVID-19 times are easily ignored by judges, when the accused is only a small square on a screen and not a frail human being standing before them in flesh and blood.

Seminal and crucial matters that need direct human interaction should never be replaced by virtual courts. The dispensation of justice is a human endeavour made up of laws, ethics, morality, wisdom and compassion. The absence of any one of these five ingredients, short-changed by restrictive virtual situations, would render the exercise of justice only partially satisfactory or even downright unjust.

 Jaya Jaitly

This article first appeared in the print edition on October 22, 2020 under the title “No software for justice”. The writer is former president, Samata Party

Pseudo-social justice

Policy is not based on assessments of deprivation — it merely addresses specific groups

The Gujjars of Rajasthan are back on the streets. This could be seen as an attempt to corner the newly-formed Congress government in the state. Both Congress and BJP have had the taste of Gujjar wrath earlier. It could also be seen as an extension of intra-party factionalism playing out in the open for the Congress. Nevertheless, the renewed agitation alerts us to the larger complications facing policy-making. Reservation appears to be the only answer to all our socio-economic complications. Thus, over and above party competition and internal factionalism, the Gujjar agitation represents the difficulties and distortions that have crept into the reservation regime. And it is not the only agitation of this type.

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A similar agitation is waiting to happen in Maharashtra — by the Dhangar community, over their demand for inclusion in the ST category. Unrest among the Patidars of Gujarat and Jats of Haryana is simmering and can explode any time into another round of agitation for reservation. At the same time, the Bombay High Court is hearing a petition demanding that the state’s decision to extend 16 per cent reservation to Marathas be stayed/struck down. The apex court, similarly, is hearing a petition against the constitutional amendment extending reservations to economically weaker sections. Petitions over expansion of reservation beyond 50 per cent are already pending before the court. Thus, even as reservation appears to be the only solution for demands by many communities, the reservation regime is becoming more and more litigation-prone.

For staunch proponents of reservation, these troubles can be resolved by doing away with the 50 per cent cap altogether. The latest amendment giving reservation to the poor has already opened the doors for such parliamentary adventurism. It has done away with the constitutionally permitted gatekeeping mechanism of social and educational backwardness and opened up reservation to everyone — irrespective of social backwardness.

In other words, the solution is to free the reservation policy of the chains of constitutional reasonableness as mandated by the judiciary. This overemphasis on the idea of reservation is marked by four critical aspects that signify a move away from the constitutional scheme of positive discrimination.

One, as we recently witnessed in Parliament, there is a complete absence of genuine debate on the question. No party could take a nuanced position on the issue of “reservation for poor”. In a sense, this is only to be expected if one considers the political fallout of such nuance. Post-Mandal, there has seldom been any serious review or re-examination in our public political life of the way in which the reservation policy is moving. The political arena is much more strongly affected by this new consensus that quietly took shape in the post-Mandal era. So much so that, recently, a lawyer arguing on behalf of the petitioners challenging Maratha reservation was manhandled outside the court. No political party or politician can raise questions about the matter. This is a classic case of consensus as closure. There is a complete closure of the public debate on reservation.

Two, over the quarter century since Mandal, the reservation regime has expanded in many directions. Ironically, most of the times, expansion has contributed to the de-legitimation of the original idea behind reservation. When the reservation policy went beyond SCs and STs, despite the fact that the expansion was justified, it effectively diluted the sharpness of the tool — that it would be employed for extreme cases of discrimination and exclusion. Down the line, when different communities began to claim that they are backward and deserving of reservation, the political clout of these communities and their relatively less deprived conditions meant that the logic of discrimination got diluted. Finally, when the idea of reservations is used to address economic infirmity, the entire basis of the reservation policy gets displaced.

Now, the reservation policy will no more be seen as an intermediate tool to address ingrained social injustice in the Indian social order. As a result, the moral basis of the reservation policy is almost lost. The enabling provision in the Constitution was predicated on the logic that the social order is fundamentally unjust and therefore the state should intervene in favour of the most oppressed sections to enable them to compete in the public sphere and stake their claims for a share in public power. This logic is no more applicable. Instead, the logic now is that there are different groups in society and they need to be accommodated, as far as possible, in a proportionate manner (as I argued earlier too, ‘The New Reservation’, Indian Express, August 1, 2018). This new logic implies that reservation is not a remedy for traditional social ills but a routine policy tool to arrange political and administrative power.

Three, and paradoxically, while reservation for economically weaker sections delegitimises social justice as the basis for reservations, at the same time, the post-Mandal churning has brought forward caste as the primary basis for making claims on the state. Not the injustice perpetrated by the caste system, but caste in itself has emerged as the primary social group for which demands are made, robbing policy-making of the more justifiable bases of deprivation. Instead of an expectation that policy should be directed at and based on some agreed ways of assessing deprivation and its amelioration, now policy can be based merely on the fact that it addresses specific groups. Besides, such public display of caste claims leads more to strengthening identity than ensuring advancement. The identity excess this has brought about has been seldom taken into consideration but effects of this development spill over beyond the policy realm. India’s entire public discourse and political calculus are deeply influenced by single-caste considerations. Caste and caste identity are not new factors but the traction they have now received not just in political calculations but in more routine social relations and personal identifications is a new factor in shaping the public sphere.

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Finally, the language of pseudo-justice being popularised by the “quota-for-poor” policy is symptomatic of a larger failure. It replaces the principle that welfare should be the basic raison d’être of public policy, it hides the colossal failure of the state in handling questions of poverty and deprivation and, at the same time, it indicates a dead end in policy making.

What is common between the demands of Jats, Gujjars, Marathas, Dhangars, Patidars, etc on the one hand, and the recently effected coup against the Constitution through the quota-for-poor amendment is a public admission of the absence of imagination and innovation in policy-making. Post-Mandal, the first section to ignore the possibilities of imaginative policies for social justice consisted of the intellectuals. In their haste to brand parties as pro-social justice and anti-social justice, they latched on to reservation as the only policy tool to address social injustice.

The political players were quick to succumb to the temptation of postponing the substantive social justice agenda in favour of decorative policy measures of limited effect. In the process, the fundamental task of politics that it throws up alternatives and enables the imagination, got stunted. We have a consensus on reservation and yet social groups continue to agitate for reservation — representing the closure of imagination in public policy-making.

Source: Indian Express, 13/02/2019