The continuing polio challenge

Polio has bounced back with a vengeance in Pakistan. Compared with 53 cases reported during the period January to September last year and 54 in 2012, there have been 174 cases during the corresponding period this year. As on November 5, all of 235 cases have been recorded, the highest-ever in the past 15 years; there were 558 cases in 1999. With a sharp spike in the numbers, Pakistan has turned into a bigger polio reservoir, accounting for 80 per cent of the world’s cases. The Taliban militants’ role in preventing nearly a quarter of a million children in North Waziristan from being vaccinated against polio over the last two years has marked a severe setback to the country. The repercussions of a fake Hepatitis B immunisation programme carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency in Abbottabad in 2011 are also there for everyone to see. If lack of trust in polio immunisation efforts already existed in the community, the militants exploited the fake programme to exacerbate distrust. The exodus of virus-carriers from the region to the rest of the country in June this year has greatly increased the risk of transmission. But the good news is that none of the regions remains inaccessible to health workers. Yet, there is a monumental task ahead for the polio programme in Pakistan as no province is free of the disease; even cities such as Karachi and Lahore have recorded a few cases this year. “The polio programme [in Pakistan] is a disaster. It continues to flounder hopelessly, as its virus flourishes,” notes a recent report of the Independent Monitoring Board.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has just set an ambitious goal of ridding the country of polio in six months. Aside from collective action by all actors, there has to be an immediate, transformative change in the polio programme for Pakistan to get anywhere near disease-elimination. As November to May is a low-transmission season — the virus is the least active and the vaccine most effective during this time — a great opportunity exists now to tame the virus. As the Type 1 virus spreads quickly, is tenacious and is the most difficult to get rid of epidemiologically, vaccination coverage should be 100 per cent; herd immunity is the least in India and Pakistan. It should also explore the option of giving at least two polio shots to children in addition to the oral polio drops. The double-vaccination strategy can greatly boost immunity and reduce the number of oral drops campaigns needed. With the Pakistan virus paralysing children in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, the possibility of it emerging in India is real. India, which has been polio-free for over three years, cannot lower its guard till such time as polio is eliminated from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, the three polio-endemic countries.

Nov 13 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Microsoft to Invest Rs 1,400 cr in India Cloud Data Centres

Varun Aggarwal

Bengaluru:





Seeing a $2 trillion promise in India’s cloud market, Microsoft has decided to spend .`1,400 crore on setting up three data centres in the country. In a filing with the Registrar of Companies, the US software giant said it has started work on setting up the cloud data centres in Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. The company is setting up local centres in a bid to capture the India market, especially customers in the banking and telecom industries, which have had data sovereignty concerns.
For Microsoft, which earned .
`2,261 crore from India in 2013-14, the country is among the fastestgrowing cloud markets globally, with 2,000 customer additions each month. The company hopes to scale up its cloud offerings by setting up more global data centres.
“The biggest cloud data centres we have globally are capable of handling 600,000 servers in just one region. That’s a massive amount of compute. Increasing this scale helps us in being more competitive,” Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Azure Jason Zanders told ET.
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said during his visit to the country in September that he sees the India cloud computing market as a $2 trillion market opportunity.
Top cloud players have shown keen interest in setting up data centres in India in the past few months. IBM launched a centre in Mumbai this month and plans to add another one soon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had indicated in September that the company could set up its centres in India.
The situation was quite the opposite about a year ago when all major companies shied away from India, citing infrastructural issues such as unpredictable power supply, patchy Internet connectivity, limited bandwidth and unreliable optical fibre connectivity.
“There is a huge demand for cloud services in India, especially among the SMBs (small and medium sized businesses) because of which companies like Microsoft are willing to spend so much on setting up data centres in India,” said Sanchit Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research.
However, seeing high growth in cloud adoption in India, companies are working out ways to overcome such issues. IBM has set up multiple sets of power equipment and signed up multiple bandwidth providers to increase reliability for its Mumbai data centre.
Microsoft is in talks with telecom companies to connect large enterprises directly to their data centres, which will ensure faster and more reliable bandwidth. According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in India is expected to grow from $423 million .
`2,550 crore) in 2013 to $1.3 billion in 2017. Gartner expects India to be the fastestgrowing market for cloud adoption globally.





Nov 13 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Even 10-yr-olds abused in slums

Ambika Pandit

New Delhi





A Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights study on adolescent girls in the slums of Delhi has revealed that abuse--emotional, gender-based, physical and sexual--is not an uncommon experience for them. As many as 10% of the 528 girls surveyed in focused interviews, numbering 51, admitted to have been victims of some kind of abuse.Conducted across 55 slums in 11 districts of Delhi, the DCPCR study also included focus group discussions with 45 Gender Resource Centres in slums, 43 municipal ward councillors, 35 NGOs and 43 Anganwadi workers. The report analysed the socioeconomic status and education, health, nutrition and work data of the girls to establish problem areas. Dedicated sections of the report also offer an indepth look at child abuse and child marriage.
According to the report, girls over 16 are soft targets of abuse. Most who reported child abuse belonged to the age groups of 16-17 and 18-19 years (35% in each group). A total of 25% falls in the age group of 14-15 years. Even 10year-olds reported abuse.Two percent of girls in the age groups of 10-11 and 12-13 years had been subjected to abuse. Nearly 85% of vio lence victims described the nature of abuse as `emotional'. While 12 girls confessed to have been abused physically, two came forward to share they had suffered sexual abuse.
The study also assessed the socioeconomic factors that affect the life of adolescent girls. A total of 87% girls lived in joint families, 74% had mothers who were illiterate and 50% had fathers who had never gone to school. In 57% cases, mothers were found to be housewives while 465 fathers, seen as primary breadwinners, were daily wagers.
While 41% of the girls came from homes earning Rs 2,000-5,000 monthly, 40% belonged to households with an income of Rs 5,000-10,000.However, 40% of girls had over four siblings, followed by 33% who had four. Shockingly, even in the capital, young girls were still being given away in marriage. The number may be small but the evil is yet to be eradicated from society. Parents in nine slums believed that the ideal marriageable age for girls is 15 years. Also, 33% of 45 GRCs surveyed shared that child marriage existed in slums. While 59% girls said they consumed only seasonal vegetables, just about 17% girls had access to fruits while 11% consumed milk.Of those interviewed, 22% of respondents felt they were malnourished and 26% suffered from anaemia and weakness.
While awareness about menstrual hygiene is growing with 56% girls using sanitary napkins, there were still 30% who reused cloth. There were 6% girls who used both.A total of 47.38% said they got sanitary napkins from school. As many as 44% bought them from the market when they had money or else used cloth. About 8% girls got these from their area Gender Resource Centres.
DCPCR member Mamta Sahai, who supervised the study, reflected on how the respondents were keen to study even as most were forced by circumstances to leave school after upper primary education. Of the 104 dropouts, the majority (53.84%) left school after primary education (6th to 8th standard).
DCPCR chairperson Arun Mathur said that in the context of Delhi there were not enough studies focusing on the four important aspects in the life of an adolescent girl--health, nutrition, education and protection.“The present study aims to address this gap,“ he said.

IIM-C, Tata Group join hands to promote social entrepreneurship 

Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in collaboration with Tata Group, has planned to popularise social entrepreneurship model among the companies for utilisation in their CSR initiatives. Both the groups together have been organising yearly competitions for social entrepreneurs since 2012.

Professor Ashok Banerjee, Dean (New Initiatives and External relations) of IIM-C, stated “We have expanded the scope and reach of Tata Social Entrepreneurship Challenge (TSEC) to include three more elements – conducting seminars, round tables and a revamped TSEC website to create a repository of all information on social entrepreneurship in India. In future, all the activities of TSEC will be held under the umbrella of IIM Calcutta Innovation Park – the newly formed incubator at IIM-C.

A nation-wide awareness campaign – ‘Thinking Social’ was also launched to include students and budding social entrepreneurs. For this campaign four seminars will be held in a year – one in each region in a tier II city. The first seminar has already taken place in IIT Guwahati on 1st November.

The round table series, establishing link between CSR and social enterprises, will also kick off in New Delhi shortly.

IIM-C also planned to provide its professional expertise in CSR delivery, reporting and monitoring for the companies. Moreover, IIM-C would be responsible for monitoring, reviewing and certification for the social entrepreneurs who would contribute companies on CSR assignments. Meanwhile, TSEC has invited detailed business plan for its 2014-15 edition from early-stage (not older than three years) social enterprises or people with actionable ideas in the different areas.

- See more at: http://digitallearning.eletsonline.com/2014/11/iim-c-tata-group-join-hands-to-promote-social-entrepreneurship/#sthash.1NpEsvpJ.dpuf

Nov 12 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

THE JEAN DREZE INTERVIEW - `NREGA Is In Need of Reform'





The economist shoots straight: While there's no need to `capitulate' to corporate interests, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act could do with simplification, besides a perk-up in transparency. The government needs to put the recipients back in the picture, he tells Atmadip Ray

For one who had worked so closely to frame the world's largest job guarantee programme, known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, it's not easy to see it succumb to pressure.It's no wonder that economist-cum-activist Jean Dreze will raise his voice against this, along with eminent academics such as Pranab Bardhan and Maitreesh Ghatak.Dreze says corruption related to NREGA and leakages -its major blemishes -are on the wane. In an interview, Dreze also lays out his vision of how strong banking and financial infrastructure can make NREGA stronger.The government seems to be planning to squeeze the scope of NREGA and money allotted to it. What, according to you, is prompting the government to do so?
The new government appears to be caught between conflicting demands from the public and its corporate sponsors. People, especially the poor, want more social support and better public services. The corporate sector, however, tends to oppose social spending, because it means more taxes, or higher interest rates, or less public money for infrastructure and so on. Employers are particularly averse to NREGA, for obvious reasons. A government that prides itself on being pro-business was bound to take a fresh look at this programme. However, my sense is that the government is yet to make up its mind on the issue.
A major chunk of NREGA money is said to be siphoned off by middlemen.
What is your experience?
If leakages alone were a good enough reason to wind up government programmes, a lot of things would beg to be shut down: the university system, the defence establishment, the Ganga Action Plan, and so on. Leakages actually raise two questions: is the programme worth it despite the leakages, and can the leakages be reduced? In the case of NREGA, I would answer `yes' to both. Official employment genera tion figures are increasingly consistent with independent house hold survey data, suggesting leakages are going down. This is also plausible in the light of various steps that have been taken to plug leakages, from bank payments of NREGA wages to social audits and proactive display of all essential records on the web. More needs to be done, but there is no reason to capitulate.
NREGA seems to be the driving force behind financial inclusion. Payments through banks and post offices were meant to safeguard against corruption. But what's the scene on the ground?
What are your suggestions to reduce the level of corruption related to NREGA?
The most vulner able link at the moment is the post office. It is not a reliable payment agency as things stand. Village post offices are vulnerable to being captured by corrupt middlemen, especially in the poorer states. The postal system also seems to be unable to pay wages on time. Yet many states continue to rely heavily on post offices for NREGA wage payments, because of the limited capacity of the banking system in rural areas. One option is to modernise the post office, another is to expand the capacity of the banking system. Both raise difficult operational issues and the solution may differ between states. For instance, some states have been able to use business correspond ents to expand the reach of rural banks, but in other states, this arrangement has not worked, at least so far. There are real possibilities of major advances in this field in the next few years.
Even if we admit that corruption played a part in NREGA payment, top economists including you have argued that NREGA should stay in its current form. What is the trade-off here?
We did not argue that NREGA should “stay in its current form“. We argued that workers' entitlements, including the right to work on demand, should not be curtailed.Speaking for myself, I am very much in favour of reforming NREGA. To start with, I believe the programme should be simplified. For instance, there are needless complications in the planning process and the work measurement system. Aside from stifling the programme, these complications affect the transparency of NREGA. So there is no trade-off between reforming NREGA and fighting corruption.Alas, the new government seems absolutely clueless as far as constructive NREGA reforms are concerned.
What is your view on the Jan Dhan Yojana?
Is it possible for banks to open at least one savings account for every household given the existing infrastructure bottlenecks like power and rural road connectivity?
Opening accounts is not difficult -it was done on a large scale under NREGA much before Jan Dhan Yojana was launched. The difficulty is to provide adequate services to t the account holders, including, for instance, prompt and convenient payment of wages or pensions. How Jan Dhan Yojana is sup posed to help in that respect is not clear s as things stand. Some people think cash transfers are seamless, but flow-of-funds problems affect most social programmes in cluding NREGA, social security pensions and even midday meals.
The government runs about 22 pro-poor schemes but you and Prof Amartya Sen have argued that India has fallen behind its neighbours in South Asia in every social indicator -from literacy to child malnutrition to access to toilets. What is going wrong? Is there a need to consolidate the schemes for a better result
It is not quite true that India has fallen behind “in every social indicator“. But this certainly applies to many social indicators, including some very important ones such as infant mortality and sanitation. The contrast with Bangladesh is particularly telling, and we also know something about why, say, infant mortality is lower in Bangladesh than in India. To illustrate, the proportion of children who are fully immunised, get vitamin A supplements, are treated with oral rehydration therapy when they get diarrhoea and were breastfed within an hour of birth was above 80% in each case in Bangladesh in 2007. The corresponding figures for Indian children were uniformly below 50% in the same year.
The contrast in sanitation coverage is even sharper. To catch up with this deficit, a consolidation of pro-poor schemes may help, but more importantly, core interventions need to be improved and expanded -public health is a prime example. The new government seems to hold the odd view that India can send rockets to Mars and run bullet trains, but is bound to remain a Third World country as far as public services are concerned.
atmadip.ray@timesgroup.com

Nov 12 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

LEARNING WITH THE TIMES - What is net neutrality and why is it important?

TIMES NEWS NETWORK





What is net neutrality?
Net neutrality is an idea derived from how telephone lines have worked since the beginning of the 20th century . In case of a telephone line, you can dial any number and connect to it. It does not matter if you are calling from operator A to operator B. It doesn't matter if you are calling a restaurant or a drug dealer. The operators neither block the access to a number nor deliberately delay connection to a particular number, unless forced by the law. Most of the countries have rules that ask telecom operators to provide an unfiltered and unrestricted phone service.When the internet started to take off in 1980s and 1990s, there were no specific rules that asked that internet ser vice providers (ISPs) should follow the same principle. But, mostly because telecom oper ators were also ISPs, they ad hered to the same principle. This principle is known as net neutrality . An ISP does not con trol the traffic that passes its servers. When a web user con nects to a website or web ser vice, he or she gets the same speed. Data rate for Youtube videos and Facebook photos is theoretically same. Users can access any legal website or web service without any inter ference from an ISP .
Some countries have rules that enforce net neutrality but most don't. Instead, the princi ple is followed because that is how it has always been. It is more of a norm than a law.
What will happen if there is no net neutrality?
If there is no net neutrality, ISPs will have the power (and inclination) to shape internet traffic so that they can derive extra benefit from it. For exam ple, several ISPs be lieve that they should be allowed to charge companies for servic es like YouTube and Netflix because these services consume more bandwidth com pared to a normal website. Basically, these ISPs want a share in the money that YouTube or Net flix make.
Without net neutrality , the internet as we know it will not exist. Instead of free access, there could be “package plans“ for consumers. For example, if you pay Rs 500, you will only be able to access websites based in India. To access international websites, you may have to pay a more. Or maybe there can be different connection speed for different type of content, depending on how much you are paying for the service and what “add-on package“ you have bought.
Lack of net neutrality , will also spell doom for innovation on the web. It is possible that ISPs will charge web companies to enable faster access to their websites. Those who don't pay may see that their websites will open slowly . This means bigger companies like Google will be able to pay more to make access to Youtube or Google+ faster for web users but a startup that wants to create a different and better video hosting site may not be able to do that.
What is the state of net neutrality in India?
Legally , the concept of net neutrality doesn't exist in India. Sunil Abraham, director of Centre for internet and Society in Bangalore, says that Trai, which regulates the telecom industry , has tried to come up with some rules regarding net neutrality several times.For example it invited comments on the concept of net neutrality from industry bodies and stakeholders in 2006.But no formal rules have been formed to uphold and enforce net neutrality .
However, despite lack of formal rules, ISPs in India mostly adhere to the principal of net neutrality . There have been some incidents where Indian ISPs have ignored net neutrality but these are few and far between.

Nov 12 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Nehru vs Patel vs Ambedkar

Sagarika Ghose





Political contests over historical figures do a disservice to their legacy

Jawaharlal Nehru's 125th birth anniversary nears and the tug of war over history has begun.Nehru is our family property , shouts Congress. Nehru neglected Patel, yells BJP.Blasphemy to compare Narendra Modi to Indira Gandhi, says Congress. Indira Gandhi personified Indian nationalism above all else, says BJP. Vivekananda was the icon of Hindu nationalism, asserts BJP. Ambedkar belongs entirely to us, asserts BSP. Shivaji is the exclusive monopoly of Shiv Sena, and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh the preferred political symbols for those who want to attack Congress.
As India celebrates the Nehru quasquicentennial this week, the question arises, why are modern India's heroes all drawn from the freedom struggle or even earlier? The only heroes a globalising India seems to possess are those from the freedom era. Also, in the process of `remembering' these figures and trapping them in contemporary politics, are we in fact destroying everything they stood for?
Historical figures provide legitimacy to politicians. Congress has harnessed pre-Independence stalwarts to the cause of the Gandhi family . A party ossified by dynasty and paralysed by high command culture still believes it carries a halo because of its monopoly rights over the freedom struggle.
BJP and Sangh Parivar at first lacked mainstream political icons, instead drawing margdarshaks from religion and mythology. But now that BJP straddles the political centre stage it seeks to capture Congress's `neglected icons' to confer on itself the moral and ethical legitimacy of the founding fathers. A reinvented identity has created an ancestral longing for a political heritage more immediate than the Ramayana. Thus BJP and Sangh have hit upon Patel as their messiah of the moment, given that RSS sarsanghchalaks Golwalkar and Hegdewar are not known to have played a stellar role in the national movement. Bahujan Samaj Party has attempted a similar monopoly over Ambedkar.Ambedkar's highly modernist vision has been entirely buried by the usurpation of the entire Ambedkarite lexicon by BSP. Ambedkar detested idolatry and hero-worship. Yet BSP has made Ambedkar into a demigod, dotting the UP landscape with his statues. Indian citizens have paid a price. Caged as a `Dalit icon', many have no idea about Ambedkar the modern Indian committed to annihilating caste and social orthodoxy .
The Modi government has decided to `out-statue' the statue culture of BSP and take idolatry to the soaring heights of a 240 metres tall statue of Patel. Instead of statues, why not commission a series of independent scholarly works into Patel's life and thought? Instead of Congress naming close to 500 schemes after Nehru-Gandhi family, why not support independent writings and scholarship on Nehru's legacy?
But history is now competitive politics. So harnessed is history to party politics that any complex understanding of the past is attacked as vociferously as a political opponent. James Laine's book on Shivaji is not seen as book of history but as an anti-NCP-Shiv Sena document; Romila Thapar is not a doyenne of history, she becomes a political `enemy' of the Hindu rashtra; A K Ramanujan's essay Three Hundred Ramayanas cannot be studied in Delhi University because it conflicts with ABVP's notion of the Ramayana. In the process, future citizens are not allowed to access varied readings of the past because the history class is turning them into political activists.
The tussle between Nehru and Sar dar is now like an electoral contest, complete with competitive advertisements and sloganeering. Yet as Neerja Singh demonstrates in her book Agreement Within Differences, they were lifelong allies who may have had differences in opinion, but they were hardly `rivals'.
For Modi, invoking Patel is a means to establish his credentials as an assertive nationalist, the He-man who talks tough on national security. For Sonia Gandhi, Nehru is a shield to stave off challenges to the embattled dynasty. The run for unity event on Patel's birth anniversary was not exactly a mass event, rather a wellchoreographed political exercise designed to confer Patel's aura on a PM who until recently had claimed Golwalkar as his inspiration, the Golwalkar-led RSS having been banned by Patel after the Mahatma's assassination. But historical facts are expendable in the race to capture ancestors. Congress wears the Nehru jacket but would Nehru have approved of the high command culture or of the Emergency?
It's time to reclaim history from politicians and make it bipartisan. Netas are rampaging over history because India's historians ­ except a few like Romila Thapar and Ramachandra Guha ­ are not committed to writing accessible popular history. The teledons, or TV academics, in other countries ­ Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson or Mary Beard ­ have emerged from their cloisters to bring in newer audiences to their academic enquiries.
But in India we have a plethora of politics over Nehru but hardly any accessible account of his political journey. We have Ambedkar statues but no widely disseminated works on his modern vision; we are about to get a Patel statue but as a figure tied to a party ideology .Political warfare over icons does immense disservice to their legacy .
Nehru's 125th birth anniversary celebrations have already been marked by competitive Congress-BJP committees.Instead of war by committees, why not create a bipartisan platform that is able to evoke Nehru not as a Congress politician but as a modernist and democrat who probably would have encouraged a genuine debate on his life and work.