the Speaking tree - Seeds and the Sacred

MARY ANN BURRIS





In Native American spirituality, seeds are the circle of life.The Three Sisters of corn, squash and beans were a gift from the Divine Creator, to be cherished and nurtured generation to generation. When we nurture them, they nurture us. It is a circle.In Buddhist teachings, each of us has the same 51 seeds in our soil, in our store of consciousness. These seeds include faith, energy , humility , wisdom, zeal, mindfulness and peacefulness. They also include greed, craving, pride, sloth, gloom and selfishness.
These seeds are in all of us as potentialities. Our mental formations, our characters, are shaped by the seeds that are nurtured in our lives. We can consciously attend to our healthy seeds, those connected to love. We can water our unhealthy seeds, those connected to fear. Our surroundings influence the seeds that are strong in us, but it is our spirit, our consciousness, that shapes our lives, that helps us know that we are One and to live each day in that knowing.
Seeds are connection, fertility. To destroy them is not only to damage ourselves, but to diminish the planet's storehouse. It is to harm those who crawl, who fly , who swim, who run, whose roots are still.What is needed, instead, is to recognise our wild relations, to respect all our relations.
Our surroundings influence the seeds that are strong in us, but it is our spirit, our consciousness, that shapes our lives, that helps us know that we are One and to live each day in that knowing.

Govt Set to Revamp Rural Skill Development Schemes

Ruchika Chitravanshi

New Delhi:





The Narendra Modi led NDA is revamping the skills programmes for rural India, plan ning to provide interest subsidy to make credit cheaper and remove a cap on spending under the Nation al Rural Livelihoods Mission.“We are going to move a cabinet proposal,“ said a rural develop ment ministry official. The cap currently pegged at 25% of total ex penditure, curbs spending on skills initiatives needed in rural India which has a large number of land less labourers. The move comes on the heels of the launch of Skills In dia, a national skills initiative.
Reorientation of some central schemes was also considered nec essary in the wake of recurrent ru ral distress due to the vagaries of nature. Provisional data of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census released in July released in July showed that a third of the 17.91 crore rural households is landless and depends on manual labour for income, highlighting the need to teach skills.
Currently , the Ajeevika Skills Guidelines issued by the rural development ministry in 2013 limits spending under NRLM on skills and placement through schemes such as the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojna at 25% of the total. The ministry also proposes an interest rate subvention scheme for 100 districts for cheaper credit availability to self-help groups.
“Interest rates for self-help groups can be brought down from 10% to 4% if the repayments are timely ,“ said a senior government official, adding that the expenditure department in the finance ministry had already approved the proposal.
The ministry sees the need to increase expenditure in the wake of the success of LIFE (Livelihoods in Full Employment), a programme under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which provides training facilities for activities ranging from beauty courses and masonry to horticulture and agriculture. Over 30 lakh workers have enrolled in the programme, opting for skill-sets they want to acquire for a livelihood.

MODI GOVT TO RESURRECT UPA INITIATIVE - Centre to Revive Tribal Council

Nidhi Sharma

New Delhi:





The Narendra Modi-led NDA government is all set to revive yet another initiative of its predecessor UPA. It is resurrecting the National Council for Tribal Welfare, an advisory and planning body similar to the erstwhile Planning Commission, after five years to give an impetus to tribal welfare programmes.NCTW was set up in 2010 by the Congress-led UPA government but the initiative never took off. The council remained only on paper. But now, with the Modi government's emphasis on tribal welfare programmes at both national and state levels, the council is being revived. Officials said the tribal affairs ministry has already prepared a note for reviving the council, as per which it will be chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and have as its members tribal affairs minister Jual Oram and chief ministers of all Schedule V and Schedule VI states that have sizeable tribal populations.
These states include Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Maharashtra, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. “The council is a mechanism needed for better monitoring and planning of tribal welfare schemes,“ said Arun Jha, secretary (tribal affairs).
With Modi heading the council, the ministry hopes that there will be better coordination with states to iron out issues on implementation of Forest Rights Act. One of the biggest challenges before the Centre has been implementation of the tribal sub-plan. Central ministries and states keep aside a certain percentage of total outlay under the sub-plan. This money has to be spent on targeted tribal welfare schemes.However, the ministry has found that year after year either this fund remains unutilised or is used under general schemes. For instance, tribal sub-plan money is spent on mid-day meal schemes but the exact number of tribal beneficiaries is never known. This does not serve the purpose of the sub-plan.

Why caste battle in TN never ends

M Kalyanaraman & Bosco Dominique

TNN





Today, nearly every caste group in the state has political strength and this accounts for the endless cycle of violence not witnessed anywhere else in the South

Parameswari and Suresh (names changed) work at large banks in Chennai and have known each other since they were classmates in a Vellore college. The two wanted to get married but Parameswari's parents, who live in a village near Vellore, have refused permission. They are vanniyars, categorized as OBCs, and the boy is a Dalit.The family's fears are understandable -over the last couple of years, Vanniyar-Dalit marriages have led to violence across northern Tamil Nadu. Chennai is just 200km away from Parameshwari's village but it is far removed from her family's realities.
Violent clashes between dalits and OBCs have been a feature of the southern districts for many decades. But since the late 1980s, when PMK chief S Ramadoss, a vanniyar leader, started a powerful campaign demanding separate quotas for his caste group, violence has become common in the north too.
In the past it took egregious instances of untouchability to set off a conflict -serving tea to Dalits in separate tumblers or refusing to let them use footwear for in stance. But today , violence is sparked off by inter-caste marriages and dalit demands to worship in temples.
Typically , Dalits would ask for the right to pull the village temple car (rath) during festivals. But, at Seshasamudram village in Villupuram, the Mariamman temple was for dalits, and the district administration had brokered an agreement between the Vanniyars and the Dalits on the route the car would take.
On the night of August 15, a dozen Dalit villagers were decorating the car for next day's procession when there was a sudden blackout. A mob descended on the dalit colony , launching a brutal attack. As the 80-odd Dalit families fled the colony , the mob got to work, burning down houses and vehicles. The temple car was torched and petrol bombs were lobbed into homes.
It took the police four hours to bring the situation under control. Over 70 persons were taken into custody and charged under various sections including prevention of atrocities on SCST act. “We never expected violence on this scale especially after we reached a consensus.Most Vanniyars are not against taking our temple car in procession but a few influential people were against it. They said the presiding deity can be taken in a bullock cart through public roads, not the temple car,“ says a dalit representative.
The violence has raised the political temperature in the state. A week after, the Dalits have still not returned home.Ramadoss has alleged that the police and district administration are biased against Vanniyars. Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, the party that represents the Dalit caste group in northern TN, has flayed the delay in providing compensation to those affected.
It is important to understand the tussle over the temple car. In Tamil Nadu, the temple is the centre of village -and community -life. Temple festivals are the most significant events in the village calendar and Dalits have been increasingly demanding that their right to worship and take part in common festivals be upheld.The dominant OBCs in the areas have often opposed this.
“This is the classic situation that Ambedkar described.The OBCs may be vociferous in their opposition to upper castes and brahmins, demanding quotas as under-privileged, but they need the Dalits under them so they feel superior,“ says C Lakshmanan, faculty at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
“That we have so many caste outfits with political strength is the reason for the violence that we don't see in other southern states,“ says Dalit scholar and VCK member D Ravikumar.

Aug 24 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

India's biggest religious congregation turns into testing ground for innovators

John Sarkar

New Delhi:





Tech companies are camping in Nashik Kumbh to study conditions of rapid urbanization and offering solutions that can help build smart cities

Around three crore pilgrims have gathered at the Kumbh Mela in Nashik this year, but sadhus and spectators aren't the only faces visible at the world's largest religious congregation. Innovators from organizations like MIT, Nokia, Wikipedia, the Tata Centre for Technology and Design, the IITs and Reliance Innovation Lab have started camping at the religious jamboree.They're viewing it as a unique opportunity ­ called the Kumbhathon ­ to work with a very large test group, study the stresses of rapid urbanization and create disruptive solutions in the domains of health, housing, food, payments and transportation.
Over 30 days, the Kumbh Mela has become for them a petri dish to test out frugal innovations that will one day power the smart cities of developing economies. “Our research team in Bangalore is looking forward to collaborating with MIT during the Kumbhathon in Nasik, to pilot innovations that will make a positive difference for rapidly growing communities,“ said Sophie Vandebroek, chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group to Kumbhathon members, “Researchers at Xerox are addressing a wide range of urban challenges using a combination of mobile sensing, crowdsourcing, and prescriptive analytics to create actionable insights for cities and their citizens.“
The Kumbhathon is a year-round project set up by these organizations to brainstorm and come up with solutions to address the challenges of Kumbh Mela. For instance, a 17-year-old has designed a foot mat that can count footsteps.
“It can be placed anywhere and can help in sensing crowd movement, thus preventing stampedes,“ said Darnish Singh Kalra, co-founder of Lucid Lane, a creative agency that is taking part in the event. Stampedes are a common occurrence at the melas with the 1954 edition witnessing around 1,000 deaths.
Similarly, Twitter and Facebook-savvy gurus like Swami Chidanand Saraswati, founder of Ganga Action Parivar, along with Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswatiji, secretary-general of Global In terfaith WASH Alliance, are working to support PM Narendra Modi's push for renewable energy . To make Kumbh clean and energyfriendly, the spiritual leaders are using their clout among devotees to promote the use of solar lamps sold by Urjakart, an Indian startup.
Mentored by tech companies, students too have hopped on to the Kumbh bandwagon with startup ideas. Two interesting apps developed by them for the mela are Epimetrics and Meditracker. While the former attempts to curb the spread of epidemics by digitizing doctors' logs across the city , the latter acts as a `911' service alerting medical personnel in case of any serious injuries.
Among other innovations playing a significant role at Kumbh is the concept of crowd steering using mobile towers, which is a real-time system that not only shows the density distribution of a large crowd but also tracks its flow, allowing people to be redirected away from saturated areas.There is also Annadan, an innovative supply chain that di verts food donated to temples to those who are hungry , thus reducing food wastage.

Less than 4 p.c. women become senior managers in India: report

A report released by management consultancy firm, McKinsey India, claimed that the representation of women in the senior management level in India is considerably less than the Asian average.

While in Asia, the average is around 11 per cent, in India only about four per cent of women make it to the highest echelons of the corporate world.

“In India, [in the corporate sector] the number of women at the entry level is 25 per cent and in the mid-level management it comes down to 16 per cent. In the senior level, it decreases further to four per cent,” said Sahana Sarma, the chief of McKinsey & Company, which prepared the report.

She was speaking at an event in the city on Thursday.

Ms. Sarma pointed out that in Asian countries there is a sharp drop in the number of women corporate executives when they enter the senior management level from the middle management level.

“In most of the Asian countries there is a 20-30 per cent drop [in number of women executives] at the senior management level,” she said.

As for the reason of such a sharp decrease in the senior management, Ms. Sarma said that the women were “most vulnerable at this point of their career” as they go through several changes such as marriage and maternity.

She also said that in a survey conducted by her organisation among women corporate employees in Asia, 43 per cent of them said their employers did not have the effective initiatives in place for promoting and developing women employees.

“Double burden”

Ms. Sarma also pointed out that the survey had revealed the “double burden syndrome” or the difficulty in facing the pressure of both family and society as another key reason for fewer women being in senior corporate posts. “The challenges are manifold and to tackle them more awareness and proper policy framing are needed,” she said.

Keywords: McKinsey India, women in senior posts, Sahana Sarma, double burden syndrom

Govt. considering Bill to ensure right to services

The Union government is considering a Bill to guarantee time-bound delivery of services, called the Right to Services Act, on the lines of the Acts already in place in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Union Law Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 10 suggesting such a Bill be prepared at the Central level.

Top sources in the government have confirmed that the Bill is now under the “active consideration” of the Personnel and Public Grievances Ministry.

“[The] government as a major service delivery agency does not enjoy a great reputation among citizens. People are generally unhappy about the government’s service delivery mechanism on account of delayed services, lack of accountability and transparency as well as poor quality of services delivered,” Mr. Gowda wrote in his letter.

He gave the example of Sakala, a service delivery programme in Karnataka launched when he was the Chief Minister and which covers 11 departments and 151 services routinely provided from a single portal.

Track work flow

Not only can one apply for services through the portal but also track the work flow; a system of fines has been put in place in case of a delay without reason.

The programme relies heavily on e-governance and e-tracking of service requests, delays and reasons for delay, something that the Modi government has been advocating for some time.

“This Bill would be important in curbing petty corruption in delivery of government services, some of it can be seen in the States where it has been implemented and also in places such as the passport office, where processes have been streamlined,” a top government official said.

“For the ordinary citizens the corruption one faces while applying for things like a driving licence or a scholarship for a student or ration card is the only interface with the government of the day. The efficacy of the government is reflected in the ease with which these services are rendered,” said the source.

The UPA government, too, had a similar Bill, called The Right of Citizens for Time-Bound Delivery of Goods and Services and Redressal of their Grievance Bill, 2011, which had been introduced in the Lok Sabha but it subsequently lapsed.

While Mr. Gowda has advocated the adoption of the Sakala model for enacting the Bill, there are several versions available in various States.

Sakala has the distinction of having won the Prime Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Public Administration. While officials did not specify when the draft would go to the Cabinet, it is considered an idea close to the Prime Minister’s heart.