Area of Darkness

The new Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) shows that deterioration in learning outcomes has been arrested in 2014, but absolute numbers are still dismal. Less than half of class 5 students can read a text of class 2 level; less than half of class 8 students can do a division. If that was not worrying enough, the gap in learning outcomes between private and government schools is huge.

There is a 20 percentage point difference between the proportion of students in private and government schools who have achieved basic learning outcomes in reading and arithmetic. This is despite public schools spending more per pupil in almost every state except Bihar. The only efficient way to improve learning outcomes is by introducing more accountability in government schools. In the absence of improvements in the way government schools function, improving learning outcomes will be an extravagantly expensive affair. If government schools continue to operate at the same level of efficiency, an excess Rs.2.32 trillion of spending is needed to achieve the learning results of the private sector, estimate Lant Pritchett and Yamini Aiyar of Harvard Kennedy School and Centre for Policy Research, respectively. That number is not only higher than the entire current spending on education, it is another 2.8% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The excess cost for the government sector to reach the same learning outcomes is a sum of two parts. One, the raw cost differential or the excess spent by public schools over private schools and the incremental estimated cost needed to achieve the same results as the private sector. This number has been multiplied by the number of students to arrive at the Rs.2.32 trillion number. As the above charts show, there are huge state-wise disparities. In terms of absolute spending per pupil by government schools, Goa tops the charts with nearly Rs.45,000 per pupil, while Bihar spends the least at Rs.4,300. At the same time, higher spending is not always commensurate with better learning outcomes. According to ASER 2011 and 2012 data, the average learning outcome for government schools in Goa is only 6 percentage points higher than that in Bihar. In Goa, the government spends nearly Rs.40,000 more per student compared with privately educated pupils.

This difference is the lowest for Bihar which is the only state that spends less money per pupil than its private sector. But a narrow gap between government and private school per pupil costs doesn’t mean that government schools are more efficient. For example, this gap in raw costs for Uttar Pradesh is Rs7,890 compared with Rs.14,877 for Maharashtra. But the learning gap between children in government and private schools is only 5.8 percentage points for Maharashtra compared with 32.3 percentage points in Uttar Pradesh.

Thus, when it comes to overall excess public costs, Uttar Pradesh has to spend nearly five times more, though it should be noted that the greater number of students enrolled also adds to costs. Pritchett and Iyer warn that merely hiking teachers’ salaries might have no incremental impact on learning outcomes in public schools. This is exactly what many political parties have been promising. It is well known that the higher expenses in government schools mostly go towards wages and salaries. Any such additional spending will have to be done sensibly.

Schools are supposed to be the temples of learning, but the average primary educational institution in India is likely to be a dingy, dilapidated place without access to electricity, toilets and with too few teachers. True, just having great school infrastructure is not sufficient to improve learning outcomes, but it is certainly a necessary condition.

The latest Annual Status of Education report shows that learning outcomes are abysmal in Indian schools. The following charts show that there is a lot of work needed in school-level infrastructure when the government announces a new education policy which is in the works. The 2013-14 edition of the District Information System for Education (DISE) report shows that India’s schooling system is overwhelmingly skewed towards primary schools.

There are five times more primary schools than there are secondary schools. At the state level, this discrepancy becomes even more stark. The worst performer in this regard is Bihar with a ratio of 13.3:1 while the most balanced is Chandigarh with a ratio of 1.2:1. The reason for this skew is a sharp rise in small schools (enrolment of fewer than 60 students), and these are all primary schools, says Rukmini Banerjee, Director at the Annual Status of Education Report Centre. This explosion in primary schools is often counter-productive since the schools are too small to have adequate infrastructure or teacher strength. Increasing the size of these schools and including a secondary education section is the way forward, she added.

Even within larger schools, the level of infrastructure needs a lot of work. The DISE data shows that only 6 out of every 10 schools in the country have access to electricity. State-level data throws up an even grimmer picture—one-third of states do not provide electricity to the majority of their schools. Bihar again is the worst offender with only 10% of its schools having access to electricity. Some other states such as Punjab, Gujarat and Haryana fare very well in this regard with almost all their schools getting electricity.

In the case of toilets, however, India fares quite well. According to DISE data, 86% schools in India have boys’ toilets while 91% have girls’ toilets. Most of the states have toilets in more than 80% of their schools. Among the worst performers are Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. However, the DISE numbers may be a little misleading since they do not make a distinction between usable and unusable toilets. While, there are very few schools that have no toilets at all, the latest ASER report says that only 65% have usable toilets.

The average class size—or students per classroom—in India across the levels of schooling was 42. States like Bihar and Jharkhand fare worse with an average of 78 and 67 students per classroom, respectively. Bihar’s secondary education facilities seem especially strained, with 97 students per class. Jharkhand has that issue in higher secondary education with 94 students per class. The student-teacher ratio in India stands at 27.25:1 across all levels of schooling. This seems healthy in light of the Right to Education Act stipulation of a ratio of 30:1. However, the student-teacher ratio of 41:1 in higher secondary education needs some work. Uttar Pradesh, in particular, needs to hire many more teachers as its ratio of 60:1 is well above the recommended level. The discrepancy between these figures and those in the latest ASER edition (which shows higher student-classroom and student-teacher ratios than DISE) can be put down to the fact that ASER is a survey and focuses only on rural India. The quality of the teachers is also important for learning outcomes. The DISE data shows that only 69% of all school teachers in the country have a graduate degree or more.

However, around 91% of all higher secondary teachers in the country have a graduate degree or more. Only eight states have a proportion lower than this. The current education policy was formulated by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986. It is high time it was updated and these are just some of the issues that need to be addressed in the new policy. However, “The real priority focus of the new education policy must be learning outcomes and the syllabus. There must also be publicly available targets for students to meet at each level so that even parents can contribute in helping the children meet these targets,” says Banerjee.

Education can make India globally competitive

Focusing on education and healthcare will be the key to success of the government’s ‘Make in India’ programme, helping the country’s labour force become globally competitive, World Bank has said.

“I think the key is to focus on quality of primary and secondary education. It is really important that India competes with the rest of the world because the ‘Make in India’ means that your labour force has to be competitive with the rest of the world,” said Onno Ruhl, World Bank Country Director in India.

He was speaking to reporters while releasing the World Bank report, ‘Addressing Inequality in South Asia’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the ‘Make in India’ campaign in September to attract foreign investors and make the country a global manufacturing hub. Manufacturing contributes about 16-17 per cent to the GDP. Government aims to increase the share to 25 per cent by 2022.

Ruhl also said that the national health mission is an opportunity for the government to build a good healthcare system. “It is really good that there is a conversation about national health insurance. The national health mission is a good opportunity to build a good health care system. Healthcare is a challenge to every country,” he added.

Besides, he said India should ensure that subsidies reach the targeted segment. “I would say look at subsidies and make sure that the money spent actually reaches the targeted people. There is a need to improve and work on health and sanitation because it is an opportunity. Create as many jobs as you can for everybody,” he said.

The World Bank report said jobs and migration are supporting considerable upward mobility among both the poor and the vulnerable sections of the population in India. Households from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes considered together experienced upward mobility comparable to that of the rest of the population, according to the report.

As per the World Bank analysis, increase in non-farm jobs in rural India was one of the main drivers for upward mobility.

Women need freedom, not protection

The underlying image of the woman as ‘victim’ in the Delhi election campaigns has led to parties competing over who will push for a more policed and disciplined city

If the Freudian question “what women want?” were posed to the parties contesting the Delhi polls, their responses would be: “more police, more surveillance, more suspicion and control.” The underlying representation of women in Delhi’s electoral campaigns, election manifestos and the news is dominated by a talk of victimisation and helplessness. It is this underlying image of the ‘victim’ that has spurred campaigns where parties compete over who will push for a more policed Delhi, a more oppressively disciplined Delhi, a city perpetually threatened by and suspicious of crime. Following Professor Ratna Kapur, let us call this representation the “victim subject.”

Similar solutions
On issues of gender and sexuality, the Delhi voter does not, in fact, have a genuine choice at all. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) offer very similar solutions in their visions and manifestos to the gender question. A quick perusal of the AAP manifesto and the BJP’s public statements reveals their exclusive reliance on this victim rhetoric, which can ultimately be debilitating and limiting. Yet the parties are busy competing, not about who can promote more freedom but, rather, who can be more protective. The metonym of the latter is of speedy trials, security forces and CCTVs while the former is as simple as being able to take a peaceful midnight stroll in the streets of the city. One may argue that a policed society will eventually lead to a freer city but this is far from true. A protectionist imagination is entirely based on a perception of masculine superiority, and only breeds more fear, threat and alienation in society.

Political visions and manifestos

All the references to women in the 70-point AAP manifesto are based on this above-mentioned protectionist-victim rhetoric. The controversial Mohalla Sabha replaced by the Delhi Dialogue will now decide the action plan for a city “safe for women.” Because “unlit streets become scenes of crimes, particularly against women,” the AAP promises adequate street lighting. The AAP and the BJP are competing about who will install more CCTV cameras and the number is now in lakhs. They promise to set up fast-track courts dedicated to handling cases of sexual assault and other crimes against women, with courts “running in two shifts” and a special Women’s Security Force (“Mahila Suraksha Dal”) consisting of a 10,000 strong Home Guard and 5,000 bus marshals. Even Wi-Fi in Delhi is meant to “tie in with women’s safety initiatives.”

“A protectionist imagination is entirely based on a perception of masculine superiority, and only breeds more fear, threat and alienation in society”

Similarly, with regard to the BJP’s candidate, you can take Kiran Bedi out of the police, but not the police out of Kiran Bedi. She seems to lack any sense of imagination that goes beyond disciplining, policing and militarising the environment. Her 25-point blueprint promises community policing, increased patrolling, CCTVs, home guards, civil defence escorts on buses and ladies’ special buses. Not to forget self-defence training, safety kits with sprays and whistles, “widely publicised” punishments, quick FIRs, Special Women’s Security Force… the list just goes on. She then tweeted, “I look fwd2 [forward to] working w/[with] each of u [you] to make this 25-point program successful in keeping our women safe.”

Freedom and positive liberties

Of course, one can genuinely appreciate the fact that these campaigns have at least been gender-centric in their approach as compared to the blatantly violent campaigns in other parts of the country. But beyond appreciation, a more nuanced public debate is much needed. Our discussions must include a politics of freedom rather than a repressive politics that is threatened by any expression of desire and sexuality in the public sphere. A politics of freedom would not be obsessed with Ms Bedi’s 6-P’s (prisons, prosecution, outreach to people, parents, improving policing, including community policing, and the press.) or with C’s (crime, controls, CCTVs and courts). Such an imagination of a city can be suffocating and repressive. We need to discuss not protectionist measures or even negative liberties, but positive liberties. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting in autonomous ways and taking control of one’s life, as opposed to negative liberties, which is more about absence of constraints.

Approaching a politics of positive liberties will require a move away from a subjectivity that is exclusively of the “victim subject” into an alternative one. Following several prominent queer theorists, this alternative subjectivity needs to be a subject that can appreciate and accommodate a strong notion of desire. One finds an instance of this subjectivity, grounded in freedom and desire, in the prescient and progressive judgment of the Supreme Court in National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India & Ors. (2014).

The judges in this case suggested that “gender identity refers to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body which may involve a freely chosen, medication of bodily appearances or functions by medical, surgical or other means and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms.” As per the Supreme Court, gender identity therefore refers to “an individual’s self-identification as a man, woman, transgender or other identified category.”

Sexual violence is not an expression of desire, but an expression of power. Desire is a far more layered, ontological category that the logo-centric liberalism does not adequately understand. A politics grounded in such a ‘desiring subjectivity’ based on a notion of positive liberty will be far more fruitful than that of the ‘victim subject’ forever seeking protection and paternal oversight. Only a truly democratic and plural city will allow for the discourse to shift from the latter to the former.

A leaf out of Newton’s notebook

Sometime between 1661 and 1665, an undergraduate Isaac Newton took an unlikely academic diversion from his pursuits of mathematics, optics and physics. A neat black-ink notebook jotting, sourced back to his Cambridge University days, reveals that Newton in fact briefly pondered plants too.

Titled quite simply ‘Vegetables’ (and entered between his notes on ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Attraction Electricall & Filtration’) Newton hypothesizes how plants transpire — or how water rises from roots to leaves — against the pull of gravity. Most intriguingly, “His ideas came over 200 years before botanists suggested an extraordinary and now widely accepted theory that explains how plants, from herbs and grasses to the Earth’s tallest trees, transport water from roots to leaves,” says a comment in the latest edition of the journal Nature Plants.

In distinct Early Modern English, Newton describes the process by which fluid matter “continually arise up from the roots of trees upward leaving dreggs in the pores.” This “makes the plant bigger untill the pores are too narow for the juice to arise through the pores & then the plant ceaseth to grow any more.”

What appears to be described here “is the evaporative escape of water from a shoot — transpiration — driven by energy from the Sun,” says the Comment.

It does indeed come as a surprise that Newton dwelt on plant physiology in the middle of his math pursuits at Trinity, author of the Comment David Beerling FRS, Sorby Professor of Natural Sciences, University of Sheffield, told this Correspondent by email.

While there is very little known about the context of his jottings on plant fluids, it could be that he had the note book with him when he retreated from Cambridge to Woolsthorpe Manor (Lincolnshire) in the summer of 1665 to avoid the plague. “Conceivably, it may have been his sojourn in the English countryside that inspired it. But really this is pure speculation.”

The notebook was first judged “not fit to be printed” by Newton’s executor, but later in 1872, it was later presented to Cambridge University Library by the fifth Earl of Portsmouth.

“In the minds of most, Newton’s association with plants begins and ends with the famous apple falling incident and his discovery of gravity. But notes buried within one of Newton’s undergraduate notebooks suggest otherwise,” says the Comment.

Keywords: Issac Newton, Newton's notebook, Cambridge University, Earth’s tallest trees

8% GDP growth helped reduce poverty: UN report

United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has said the 8 per cent GDP growth in India from 2004 to 2011 led to a sharp decline in poverty from 41.6 per cent to 32.7 per cent and achieved the first Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set for 2015 of reducing poverty by half.

In a report — India and the MDGs — UN ESCAP said other MDGs achieved include gender parity in primary school enrolment, maternal mortality reduction by three-fourths and control of spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. India also achieved MDGs related to increased forest cover, halved the proportion of population without access to drinking water.

The MDGs that India has missed are universal primary school enrolment and completion and universal youth literacy by 2015, empowering women through wage employment and political participation, reducing child and infant mortality and improving access to adequate sanitation to open defecation, the report says.

“Over 270 million people in India in 2012 still remained trapped in extreme poverty making the post-2015 goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 challenging, but feasible.”

UN under-secretary general and executive secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia Shamshad Akhtar said at the release of the report: “Over the years, the MDGs have pushed governments around the world to mainstream poverty reduction, gender parity, education and health and such basic needs as water and sanitation in their development agenda.”

Keywords: Poverty, Millennium Development Goals

Feb 06 2015 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

`Developed Economies can Learn from India's Global IP Strategy'

Soma Das & Dilasha Seth

New Delhi





Developed economies can learn a few lessons from the way India is going about creating a comprehensive global intellectual property rights strategy, said the International Trademark Association or INTA, a New York-based international grouping of 5,900 trademark owners that says its members contribute over $10 trillion to global GDP annually.“Our countries have a lot to learn from the growing economies. While we (INTA) are based in the US and I am half French and half Spanish, none of the three countries have an IPR strategy like the one India is developing now. Having a new global comprehensive strategy is something that some of (these) countries are lacking,” said Etienne Sanz de Acedo, CEO of INTA.
This comes at a time when the US government and many American companies have been critical of India’s intellectual rights policies, particularly those relating to patents. While de Acedo declined to comment on India’s patent policies, INTA has told the government in its submission on draft IP policy that “trademark rights and other intellectual property rights should be ‘balanced’ both in overall national policies (for instance, health policy) and in their enforcement as they pertain to related rights (for instance, traditional knowledge) and the goal of protecting consumers”.
Pushing for global harmoniza tion of trademark practices, the body has urged India to join the Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks, which establishes common standards for procedural aspects of trademark registration and licensing. The brandowners body met the government-constituted IPR think tank on Thursday to give feedback on India's draft IP strategy.
In its comments, reviewed by ET, the grouping says there is an “urgent need” for incorporating the concept of “statutory damage” in the India’s existing laws that should be significant enough to deter the violation of IP rights. This basically means that the sum to be awarded in case of intellectual property infringements should be mandated in the law rather than depending on a new calculation every time a violation occurs. “In India, like in most other countries, damages sometimes are not sufficient and frequently arrive too late. Many judges believe as long as the infringement is stopped they have resolved the issue. But by the time a decision is pronounced, after having gone through a multilayered judiciary, the infringer has been able to take full advantage of the delay, sometimes by counterfeiting,” said J Scott Evans, president, INTA, and associate general counsel of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
He added that it is very difficult for judges to understand the economic dynamics of damages, particularly at a time when technology is changing the world and its practices so rapidly.

Feb 06 2015 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Cashless Ecosystem on India's Agenda

Jayadevan PK & Richa Maheshwari

Bengaluru:





National Payment Corp is building single interface platform for payment mechanisms

Apple Pay may not be launching in India any time soon, but India is planning a major push to unify different payment mechanisms to create a cashless ecosystem in the country .The National Payment Corporation of India, an organisation for all retail payments supported by India's largest banks, is building a single interface platform for all transactions. The umbrella organisation wants to create a unified backbone and a set of application programming interfaces for others to build payment solutions on, according to a draft proposal it released on Thursday .
“It's taking an interoperable platform approach to where Apple Pay went in a proprietary way ,“ said Pramod Varma, chief architect at the Unique Identification Authority of India.
The idea is to build a software layer over existing payment systems like credit or debit cards, electronic payments over banking platforms and mobile payment systems that third-party service providers can plug in and enable peer-to -peer transactions between virtual account holders.
“We are already connected to most banks in India and now we are talking about creating agility in payment systems,“ said N Rajendran, CTO, NPCI.
Users will be able to initiate transactions using smartphones, transfer money to virtualised accounts without having to remember account numbers or passwords. This platform will bring together financial institutions, merchants and other payment enablers like wallets and gateways.
If things go as planned, the NPCI is likely to run a pilot by mid 2015.
“The goal is noble but I'm not sure how efficient it is going to be if one entity is going to control the whole ecosystem,“ said a payment company executive, who requested anonymity .