Tuesday, July 07, 2015
In Democracy's Name, Release Health Data
Withholding health stats amounts to censorship
It is a matter of shame that India stands accused of censoring data on petty political grounds. The last two issues of The Economist have brought out results from the Rapid Survey on Children, a survey of children's health carried out in India over 2013 and 2014 jointly by the government of India and the UN agency for children, Unicef.The government released some data last October but has been sitting on the rest. The Economist got hold of the data and has published its findings, first on immunisation and then on malnourishment. The survey results show remarkable progress over the previous decade on immunisation and malnutrition for the country as a whole.Why should the government act coy about the proportion of malnourished Indian children falling from 42.5% to 30%? Because it does not suit Prime Minister Narendra Modi, says The Economist.For one, such progress on the health front in a decade in which the country was run by the Congress-led UPA would pick holes in the narrative pop ularised by Modi and the BJP in the run-up to the 2014 elections, that the country had gone to rack and ruin under the UPA. For another, the data show that Gujarat, the state Modi ran as chief minister over this period and held up by him as a model of sound development, has fared poorly on both boosting immunisation and on reducing malnutrition. Worse, much poorer Bihar, run by political rival Nitish Kumar whom Modi has to take on in state elections later this year, made more progress than Gujarat has. Unicef does not find any serious flaws with the survey method or data. There is no reason to withhold the data from the Indian public.
Health statistics are not a vital state secret. Withholding data that do not suit the political agenda of the government of the day amounts to censorship. Censorship is not acceptable in a democracy . That the government resorts to such censorship only points to an authoritarian bent of mind, revealed also by the reported monitoring of media outlets to document favourableunfavourable coverage. India needs more, not less, democracy .
Health statistics are not a vital state secret. Withholding data that do not suit the political agenda of the government of the day amounts to censorship. Censorship is not acceptable in a democracy . That the government resorts to such censorship only points to an authoritarian bent of mind, revealed also by the reported monitoring of media outlets to document favourableunfavourable coverage. India needs more, not less, democracy .
Vedanta - Yoga of Synthesis
SWAMI SIVANANDA
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The mind has three defects, namely , impurity , tossing and veil of ignorance. The impurities could be removed by the practice of Karma Yoga and selfless service; the tossing by devotion and chanting; ignorance by the practice of Jnana Yoga, that is, inquiry , analysis, service and meditation. Then Self-realisation is possible.Action, emotion and intelligence are linked to this body .They should work in perfect harmony , in unison. The Yoga of Synthesis alone will develop the head, heart and hand, and lead one to perfection. To become harmoniously balanced in all directions is the ideal of religion and of yoga.
To behold one's Self in all beings is jnana, wisdom; to love the Self is bh akti, devotion; to serve the Self is karma, action. When the jnana yogi attains wis dom, he is en dowed with devotion and selfless activity .
Karma Yoga is spontaneous expression of his spiritual nature, as he sees the one Self in all. With perfection in devotion, the practitioner is possessed of wisdom and activity . For him, Karma Yoga is a spontaneous expression of his divine nature, as he beholds the One everywhere. The karma yogi attains wisdom and devotion when his actions are selfless.Through Yoga, the Self can be seen, loved and served.
Follow one yoga as the basic and combine other yogas. A little practice of Hatha Yoga -asanas and pranayamas -will give you good health; Raja Yoga will steady your mind; upasana and Karma Yoga will purify your heart and prepare you for the practice of vedanta. Sankirtan will relax your mind and inspire you. Meditation will take you to liberation.
To behold one's Self in all beings is jnana, wisdom; to love the Self is bh akti, devotion; to serve the Self is karma, action. When the jnana yogi attains wis dom, he is en dowed with devotion and selfless activity .
Karma Yoga is spontaneous expression of his spiritual nature, as he sees the one Self in all. With perfection in devotion, the practitioner is possessed of wisdom and activity . For him, Karma Yoga is a spontaneous expression of his divine nature, as he beholds the One everywhere. The karma yogi attains wisdom and devotion when his actions are selfless.Through Yoga, the Self can be seen, loved and served.
Follow one yoga as the basic and combine other yogas. A little practice of Hatha Yoga -asanas and pranayamas -will give you good health; Raja Yoga will steady your mind; upasana and Karma Yoga will purify your heart and prepare you for the practice of vedanta. Sankirtan will relax your mind and inspire you. Meditation will take you to liberation.
the speaking tree - When Egoistic, Selfish Leaders Ignore The Law
Sonal Srivastava
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Duryodhana was a good man. He was called Suyodhana, a great warrior.The 6th century CE epic poem Kiratarjunia, by poet Bharavi, extols Duryodhana's virtues. The poem starts with a spy being sent to Hastinapur by Yudhishtira to gauge public opinion against Duryodhana. The spy returns with stories of good governance from Duryodhana's kingdom.He reports, “Because of the virtues of that Kubera-like one whose fame has spread widely, who is compassionate and relieves distress, who brings about prosperity to all, the earth is made to flow and yields riches of her own.“ The spy says that: “Arrogance gone, Duryodhana always honestly shows off his servants as his dear friends, his friends (as) deserving respect equal to his brothers and his brothers as having the status of king conferred upon them.“ He also speaks of Duryodhana's great valour and right conduct.
Like Duryodhana, Ravana, too, was an able administrator, a vedic scholar, an ardent devotee of Shiva and a gifted musician. He was an affable ruler who administered a prosperous Lanka.
Despite their talent as capable administrators, Duryodhana and Ravana ended up being villains of their respective epics.Both were eventually killed by the heroes, the Pandava brothers and Sri Rama.Ravana was killed by Rama, who had will ingly gone into exile, relinquishing all rights to the kingdom, complying with his stepmother Kaikeyi's wishes. Duryodhana was hit below the belt by Bhima, against the rules of personal battle, yet the Pandavas were considered upholders of dharma with Sri Krishna on their side.
Why was it that despite good governance and public popularity, both these able characters are remembered as the great villains of Indic mythology? Their stories are quoted to discourage people from adharma and ignorance, while the Pandavas, Krishna and Rama are synonymous with exemplary personal conduct.
Duryodhana's capability as an able administrator is all but forgotten.However, Indic mythology exemplifies Ram Rajya established by Rama, the Maryada Purusha, in Ayodhya as a model of good governance. Is it because of Rama's selflessness in going into exile to keep the promise his father Dasharatha gave to Kaikeyi? Rama respected public opinion and even put his wife on trial, when public opinion turned against her.
Our epic villains are there to contextualise adharma, as examples of what not to do, when you are in power. They remind policy makers that public opinion has to be respected at all times and ego should not come in the way of following raj dharma, in doing what is right reater good of the people, even if for the greater good of the people, even if it means sharing property or giving space to other people's points of view.
Both Duryodhana and Ravana were hemmed in by their ego and lack of respect for other people's views and their right to life and property. Duryodhana wanted to keep entire Hastinapur to himself, while Ravana ignored Vibhishana's sound advice of releasing Sita and avoiding battle with Rama.
Duryodhana and Ravana became victims of their ego and pride, and did what they thought was the right thing to do. They became the `doers', who followed their will and imposed it on other people, too. They forgot that there were powerful forces beyond their control and that righteousness finds its way in the end. They ignored what the Supreme Consciousness in the form Rama and Krishna, was trying to tell them to follow the natural order of things selflessly .
Krishna says in the Gita, “Under the influence of false ego one thinks himself to be the doer of activities, while in reality all activities are carried out by nature as a natural process.“
Like Duryodhana, Ravana, too, was an able administrator, a vedic scholar, an ardent devotee of Shiva and a gifted musician. He was an affable ruler who administered a prosperous Lanka.
Despite their talent as capable administrators, Duryodhana and Ravana ended up being villains of their respective epics.Both were eventually killed by the heroes, the Pandava brothers and Sri Rama.Ravana was killed by Rama, who had will ingly gone into exile, relinquishing all rights to the kingdom, complying with his stepmother Kaikeyi's wishes. Duryodhana was hit below the belt by Bhima, against the rules of personal battle, yet the Pandavas were considered upholders of dharma with Sri Krishna on their side.
Why was it that despite good governance and public popularity, both these able characters are remembered as the great villains of Indic mythology? Their stories are quoted to discourage people from adharma and ignorance, while the Pandavas, Krishna and Rama are synonymous with exemplary personal conduct.
Duryodhana's capability as an able administrator is all but forgotten.However, Indic mythology exemplifies Ram Rajya established by Rama, the Maryada Purusha, in Ayodhya as a model of good governance. Is it because of Rama's selflessness in going into exile to keep the promise his father Dasharatha gave to Kaikeyi? Rama respected public opinion and even put his wife on trial, when public opinion turned against her.
Our epic villains are there to contextualise adharma, as examples of what not to do, when you are in power. They remind policy makers that public opinion has to be respected at all times and ego should not come in the way of following raj dharma, in doing what is right reater good of the people, even if for the greater good of the people, even if it means sharing property or giving space to other people's points of view.
Both Duryodhana and Ravana were hemmed in by their ego and lack of respect for other people's views and their right to life and property. Duryodhana wanted to keep entire Hastinapur to himself, while Ravana ignored Vibhishana's sound advice of releasing Sita and avoiding battle with Rama.
Duryodhana and Ravana became victims of their ego and pride, and did what they thought was the right thing to do. They became the `doers', who followed their will and imposed it on other people, too. They forgot that there were powerful forces beyond their control and that righteousness finds its way in the end. They ignored what the Supreme Consciousness in the form Rama and Krishna, was trying to tell them to follow the natural order of things selflessly .
Krishna says in the Gita, “Under the influence of false ego one thinks himself to be the doer of activities, while in reality all activities are carried out by nature as a natural process.“
Adoptions in India finally see a rise
Himanshi Dhawan
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New Delhi:
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`Thanks To Awareness Campaigns'
For the first time in three years, adoption of children has seen a slight increase with 1,368 children finding new homes in the quarter between JanuaryMarch 2015. This is significant as adoptions have been declining every year since 2012-2013, despite the fact that India has one of the largest population of children who are abandoned, deserted or in institutional care.The number is still a fraction, admit child rights activists, considering that there are an estimated 50,000 orphan children who require homes.
According to the latest data available with the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) 1,410 children were adopted in April-June 2012. However, the numbers have continued to dip since then hitting an all-time low of 946 children adopted between July-Sept 2014.
CARA faces a peculiar situation. Despite the high number of children who need care and protection, it has currently only about 1,200 children available for adoption as against a demand of nearly 10,000 parents. Of this 9,000 are Indian, while the rest are non-resident Indians or foreigners.
An awareness campaign and a concerted effort to cut down red-tape in the process of adoption can be credited for the recent spike in numbers. “We have been working with state adoption agencies to match children with the parents. We have also managed to now put 95% of our database online which has also helped,“ said CARA secretary Veerendra Mishra.
In February this year, WCD minister Maneka Gandhi had pulled up adoption agencies for the “idleness and deliberate lying“ and said the adoption rate of 800 to 1,000 per year in India was “shameful.“
She added that she wanted 15,000 children to be adopted per year failing which the worst performing adoption agencies will be shut down immediately .
For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com
According to the latest data available with the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) 1,410 children were adopted in April-June 2012. However, the numbers have continued to dip since then hitting an all-time low of 946 children adopted between July-Sept 2014.
CARA faces a peculiar situation. Despite the high number of children who need care and protection, it has currently only about 1,200 children available for adoption as against a demand of nearly 10,000 parents. Of this 9,000 are Indian, while the rest are non-resident Indians or foreigners.
An awareness campaign and a concerted effort to cut down red-tape in the process of adoption can be credited for the recent spike in numbers. “We have been working with state adoption agencies to match children with the parents. We have also managed to now put 95% of our database online which has also helped,“ said CARA secretary Veerendra Mishra.
In February this year, WCD minister Maneka Gandhi had pulled up adoption agencies for the “idleness and deliberate lying“ and said the adoption rate of 800 to 1,000 per year in India was “shameful.“
She added that she wanted 15,000 children to be adopted per year failing which the worst performing adoption agencies will be shut down immediately .
For the full report, log on to http:www.timesofindia.com
Why everyone loves ‘good governance’
Democracy without politics and citizenship without rights are the twin pillars of ‘good governance’.
India is in the throes of a fierce passion for governance. Not just any governance but ‘maximum governance’; preferably in a combo with ‘minimum government’. We are the only country in the world that officially celebrates Christmas as ‘Good Governance Day’. Nobody speaks of the need for a good government anymore – only good governance.
Behind this mass enthusiasm for the virtues of ‘good governance’ is none other than the prime minister himself. His own website says so: “It is due to Narendra Modi that governance has become the talking point all over the country; from the conversations teenagers have over a cup of coffee to heated debated in newsrooms.”
While the degree to which adolescents obsess about good governance may be a matter of debate, there is no doubt that it occupies pride of place in the publicity spiels of theModi regime — so much so that it’s now a truism that the Modi mandate of the 2014 polls is “a mandate for good governance” (http://tinyurl.com/pwyotg2)
But what exactly does ‘good governance’ mean? According to Mr. Modi, “good governance is putting people at the centre of the development process”.
Well, if that is what it is, then some obvious questions pop up, such as: Is it good governance to eliminate the need for people’s consent in land acquisition, as the NDA’s land bill amendments want to do?
Mr. Modi has also said that good governance must be ‘pro-people’ and ‘pro-active’. If so, then is pro-actively cutting public expenditure on health and education, as has been done in this year’s budget, good governance? Or, for that matter, is the dilution of the rights of industrial workers, which is what the proposed labour reforms seek to do, good governance?
The short answer to all these questions is a resounding yes. For the long answer, we need to visit the history of the concept of governance itself, and how it has come to occupy such a central place in development discourse.
A brief history of ‘governance’
The term ‘governance’ was first used — in the sense in which it is deployed today — by the World Bank in a 1989 report on African economies. Trying to account for the failure of its Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the World Bank put the blame on a “crisis of governance.”
But ‘crisis of governance’ doesn’t convey much unless one defines ‘governance’. The World Bank initially defined it simply as “the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs”. This early definition is quite indicative of the animating logic and future discursive career of governance: it is silent on the legitimacy or otherwise of the political power in question. So whether the Bank’s client was a democracy or a dictatorship didn’t matter. What mattered for governance is that efficient management must trump politics. Efficient management, just to be clear, means the withdrawal of the state in favour of the market.
Over the years, the World Bank expanded its ‘governance’ model to include elements of a liberal democracy, such as a legal framework for enforcement of contracts, accountability, etc. At the same time, it brokered a marriage between governance and development. Nations deemed to be in need of ‘development’ could now be told that the only way to get ‘development’ is through ‘governance’ — that is, by embracing the free market.
But for this, it was necessary to first create a demand for good governance. That meant identifying the markers of ‘bad governance’. Unfortunately, what constitutes ‘bad governance’ in the neo-liberal text book — an activist state trying to even out socio-economic disparities through distributive justice — is rather popular among the masses, especially the poor. In an electoral democracy, a direct attack on welfare was never going to resonate beyond the rich and middle-classes, as successive governments in India have found to their cost.
Corruption and governance
Enter corruption, the godfather of good governance. ‘Corruption’ is not an ahistorical, value-neutral descriptor. Even in the short span of India’s post-independence history, it has been deployed in different ways in the service of different political agendas. Matthew Jenkins, a historian of corruption, has written about how, for instance, in JP Narayan’s movement for ‘total revolution’ in the 1970s, corruption denoted something very different from what it did in the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption agitation of 2011.
For Narayan, corruption was a moral evil. As Jenkins puts it, Narayan “viewed the capitalist system itself as corrupt”. He cites Narayan’s famous quote that “wealth cannot be amassed except by exploitation.” But the anti-corruption discourse that grew around the Hazare movement did not share Narayan’s reservations about the corrupting influences of the profit motive. Corruption as a morally charged idea had disappeared altogether. What replaced it was a narrow, technical idea of corruption as bribery, which went well with the economistic notion of man as a rational agent who responds to incentives.
Overnight, the entire political class, the bureaucracy, and social infrastructure (such as the public distribution system, for instance), began to be deemed as hotbeds of corruption and held solely responsible for the state’s failures to deliver the benefits of economic growth. Conversely, any government engaged in the delivery of socially critical economic goods was held to be offering incentives for corruption.
In other words, it is not neo-liberal economic polices but corruption that is to blame for the benefits of economic growth not trickling down — or not trickling down enough — to the masses.
Now that corruption had been identified as the biggest hurdle to economic development, the stage was set for its antidote: good governance. This trajectory – of aspirations first raised and then betrayed by economic reforms, leading to mass discontent, which zeroes in on corruption as the problem, with good governance presented as the solution – is very evident in recent Indian history. But it is by no means unique to India. As Jenkins points out, the “international anti-corruption consensus” has been a powerful vehicle for manoeuvring recalcitrant nations onto the neo-liberal track.
With the UPA II regime showing no signs of progress on the second wave of economic reforms, the demon of corruption was summoned to boot it out. And in its place, we now have the NDA, which is good governance incarnate, and invested with the mandate to roll out the next phase of reforms that its predecessor could not.
Elements of good governance
So, what’s definitely out is welfare expenditure, for not only is it a bad idea economically, it also represents what everyone hates – corruption. Also out is political interference in policy-making – which can lead to distortions to please vote banks. Major policy measures shall be decided by unelected experts, who don’t have to worry about winning the next election.
What’s in are accountability, transparency, empowerment, and citizen participation – all of which are key elements of Mr. Modi’s ‘good governance’ agenda. On the face of it, these don’t seem like bad ideas. But like development, they all have a dual meaning – one in the context of social transformation, another in the neo-liberal vision of good governance.
So if we take, for instance, accountability, good governance doesn’t mean accountability to the people – it is about accountability to business and to investors, who are risking their money with expectations in return.
Similarly, transparency doesn’t necessarily mean that the state should render its decision-making transparent to its citizens — if that were the case, a regime going gaga over good governance wouldn’t have kept the post of Chief Information Commissioner vacant for nine months. Again, the transparency in question is with regard to business, especially foreign investors, who are tired of trying to find their way through the intricate webs of political patronage (also known as corruption) and often lose out to domestic capital, which enjoys a cultural advantage (so-called crony capitalism).
As for empowerment, the good governance version of it, which imagines the state giving power to the disempowered, say, through technology (e-governance, m-governance), is a cruel joke on the original meaning of the term.
In human history, there has never been an instance of a powerful political group voluntarily giving up its power. Which is why real empowerment is always an outcome of political confrontation and struggle – the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and all other rights-based movements are examples of attempts to empower people through the institution of legally enforceable rights. The good governance model of empowerment is allergic to any rights-based empowerment. It conceives of empowerment in individualistic-consumerist rather than collective terms. It offers little scope, for instance, to remedy the social disempowerment caused by caste.
Finally, we come to citizen participation. In social movements, citizenship was a powerful tool for obtaining political and economic rights for the marginalised, such as refugees, or the displaced. But in the good governance model, citizenship essentially means ‘market citizenship’ – the individual’s acquisition of the legal and other paraphernalia required for accessing the market.
Participation means participation in the market – as a wage-earner, consumer, producer. It could also mean participation in the limited domain of project implementation, which serves the purpose of conferring a sheen of democratic legitimacy on development projects decided and designed by an elite. It certainly does not mean participation in the sense of political contestation – of having a say on the model of development to be adopted.
To sum up, good governance is today a major discursive tool enabling the global transition of democracies to a form of government that some academics have labelled “soft authoritarianism”. A more accurate description would be “authoritarianism with a democratic face”.
Good governance entails the substitution of politics – which is what democracy is all about — with management. It seeks to insulate policy-making from the chaotic pressures of democracy.
So what kind of a government does good governance mandate? Given that there is only one model of development possible in the good governance framework – market-led development – a government that upholds good governance will have to cease being a guarantor of the citizens’ socio-economic rights. It would instead function as a facilitator and enabler of the market, which would deliver these goods and services to those who can afford them.
As for those who can’t afford them, if they behave well, they might get the carrot of cash/credit, which is essential to function as a market citizen. If they misbehave, the stick of repression is an ever-present threat. Democracy without politics, and citizenship without rights — these are the twin pillars of good governance as it’s advocated today. The beauty of it is that everyone seems to love it.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
Rural realities
New data for rural households revealed by the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) represent a grim reminder of the state of rural India. In over 90 per cent of households, the main earning member makes less than Rs. 10,000 a month. Over half the households are landless and a similar share of them rely on casual manual labour for the larger part of their income. Just 20 per cent of households own any kind of a motor vehicle. These numbers should come as a reality check for those who talk of India’s unbridled growth, and arrival on the global stage as a superpower. The countryside remains unable to find jobs that can pull families out of poverty. Agriculture remains at subsistence levels, with low mechanisation, limited irrigation facilities and little access to credit. Just over 3 per cent of rural households have a family member who is a graduate, so skilled jobs are going to be hard to get. Female-headed households, and Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households are the worst off. The eastern and central States of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha have the poorest indicators. Even in the developed southern States of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, family incomes are low and dependence on casual manual labour is high. Meanwhile, early results from the urban SECC suggest that levels of deprivation, while lower in cities, are still shockingly high.
What the government chooses to do with the data is as yet unclear. While commissioning the SECC, the UPA government had spoken of creating flexibility to enable States to draw up their own combinations of indicators to create tailor-made definitions of poverty. The Narendra Modi government is yet to make its intentions clear on the SECC, especially with regard to the thorny issue of where to draw the line. Instead of a fresh round of unseemly wrangling over precisely where to set India’s poverty line, the government would be well-advised to expand and universalise its social protection schemes, and leave some space for States to innovate. It would also be wise for the government to release caste-wise information on socio-economic indicators collected by the SECC but not yet put in the public domain. Those numbers would allow, for the first time since 1931, for the relative socio-economic status of various caste groups to be compared while framing policies of affirmative action. This government stands accused of suppressing vital new information on the status of malnutrition among children, contained in a survey commissioned by the previous government through UNICEF. It should not make a habit of suppressing inconvenient data. The Indian public might hotly contest some of these numbers, particularly those relating to caste, but even angry debates represent a democratic right that must not be curtailed.
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