Measuring well-being

In the preface to his magisterial 2013 book The Great Escape, Angus Deaton thanks his teachers. “Richard Stone was perhaps my most profound influence,” Deaton writes, “from him I learned about measurement — how little we can say without it and how important it is to get it right.” Important, indeed. And difficult — but well worth doing. On Monday afternoon, the Nobel committee recognised the importance of measurement when they awarded Angus Deaton the 2015 Nobel prize in economics. We know what it feels like to owe much to a special teacher. Deaton passed Stone’s lesson on to his own students, including us. Deaton’s career has been wide-ranging. Most recently, he has helped the world understand its ongoing, incomplete, but nonetheless dramatic great escape from poverty and early death. When Deaton was born in Scotland, around 6 per cent of babies there died before their first birthday; today, this infant mortality is under half of 1 per cent. But over 4 per cent of babies born in India still die in their first year, and the infant mortality rate among the many babies born in the states of the northern plains exceeds that of Scotland 69 years ago. Fully 8 per cent of children die in infancy who are born in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, where we have worked since 2011 and where the population is 85 per cent as large as Scotland’s today. One important part of Deaton’s research over the last decades has focused on poverty and well-being in India. In this work, he has been resolutely empirical: He focuses on what the data can tell us, and what they sometimes cannot. The paradoxes of development in India have been fertile ground for Deaton’s data-minded approach. India is a place where good things do not always come together, and where conventional development stories are often inverted. Despite rapid economic growth, and significant but slower improvements in poverty, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in sub-Saharan Africa, who are poorer. As Indian households have become richer over the past decades, they have eaten fewer and fewer calories, on average — a puzzle seemingly at odds with the basic rules of household economics. In some of his most recent work, Deaton has shown that poor people in Africa, where health outcomes are very bad, do not tend to see improving health as a policy priority — a puzzle that may be reflected in Delhi’s apathy to its lethal air pollution. Such paradoxes, Deaton taught us, are opportunities to learn something important. This all adds up to a central message of Deaton’s work: Becoming richer is not necessarily the same thing as becoming better-off. This, too, is an important lesson for India, where infant mortality and other basic measures of human development are considerably worse than what other countries with similar levels of GDP per capita experience. Indeed, India’s “excess” neonatal mortality — above what its per capita GDP would predict in international comparison — is greater than total neonatal mortality in China. Deaton was working on what is now called “evidence-based policy” before it was a hot topic: In the 1990s, he published definitive work helping researchers sort out how to use household surveys to measure consumption in poverty. But notice what he includes in “evidence”: Careful, statistical descriptions based on survey data designed to be informative about populations. Deaton reminds economists — and, still, us — that there is no substitute for such careful thinking. Nor is there a substitute for usefully designed, representative survey data. Perhaps such data were part of what drew Deaton’s focus to India. India historically had a long tradition of outstanding sample surveys, which Deaton has drawn upon again and again to teach India and the world about the well-being of individuals in the country that represents a large fraction of any international statistic. Some of our own work built upon Deaton’s surprising observation that GDP is uncorrelated with height across developing countries, in Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data. But Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate, has never written a paper about the height of people in India using data collected since 2005. We are sure that he would love to, and that it would teach the world important things about well-being in India, but no new DHS has been released for India in the past decade. The government has not collected it. Yet, in this same time period, Bangladesh has released two DHSs. The meagre health and nutrition data that are eventually released in today’s India, such as the Rapid Survey of Children, are often made publicly available only as summary statistics of averages, not household-level data; Deaton helped economists realise that such aggregated numbers overlook inequality and obscure details of household behaviour. India has slowly transformed from a world leader in the availability of survey data to a place where meaningful statistics simply are not available. These days, nobody really knows the height of India’s children, or how much babies weigh when they are born, or what fraction of people in rural India defecate in the open. The dimming of the historical light of Indian statistics matters for the world: One-fifth of all humans are born here. As Deaton’s most recent work in development reminds us, development economics has political implications. Credible, independent data are critical not only for research, but for democracy. As Deaton noted in his Princeton University press conference on Monday afternoon, government choices not to collect or release data often reflect vested interests. Deaton’s work shows that useful measurement of well-being in India is not only possible — it is practical and informative. It is indispensable. As we congratulate Deaton on this deserved honour, we should remember that somewhere an economics student in India is now beginning a career in which she could make Nobel-worthy contributions to the well-being of the next generation of Indians. India should make sure that she has the data she will need to do this work. She, too, can say little without measurement. The writers are economists visiting at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi and at Princeton University -

Source: Indian Express, 14-10-2015

Render sedition unconstitutional

Sedition, defined as “incitement to violence” or “disorder”, is a legislation meant to suppress the voice of Indian people and has no place in a 21st century democracy. The Supreme Court, being the protector of the fundamental rights of the citizens needs to declare the law unconstitutionalSince the governments and its agencies have strictly gone by the text of Section 124A though the Supreme Court itself did not apply these principles to the speech of Kedarnath, the law declared in Kedarnath has lost its potencyIndependent India’s governments seem to have found great relief in having a provision on sedition. Amendments made to Article 19 of the Constitution imposing curbs and validating them on the ground of “reasonable restrictions”, indicate just that

Some trigger-happy State governments in India start shooting from the hip the moment they see an article or a cartoon or hear a speech very critical of the government or Ministers or politicians in power.‘Sedition’ is an offence incorporated into the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which they have found handy to silence or discipline critics. This nineteenth century law, enacted to silence the Indian people by the colonial rulers, has been retained by the democratic government in free India. Not only that, it has perhaps been used more often by free India’s governments than the colonial government did during the 77 years of its presence in the Penal Code. Sedition was not a part of the original Indian Penal Code(IPC) enacted in 1860 and was introduced in 1870.

P. D. T. Achary

Independent India’s governments seem to have found great relief in having a provision on sedition in the penal statute. A spate of litigations in the fifties and sixties, and the amendments made to Article 19 of the Constitution — widening the scope of penal legislation and validating them on the ground of reasonable restrictions — indicate just that. During the past four years, we have again witnessed frequent invocation of sedition to deal with free speech and expression.

State intolerance to freedoms

Recently, the Gujarat government booked a Patel leader under sedition for sending messages containing “offensive language against the Prime Minister, the State Chief Minister and Amit Shah, the President of BJP”. These cases are indicative of a high level of intolerance being displayed by governments towards the basic freedom enjoyed by citizens. Democracy has no meaning without these freedoms and sedition as interpreted and applied by the police is a negation of it.

Section 124A of the IPC defines sedition and says: (i) whoever by words either spoken or written or by signs or by visible representation or otherwise brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, the government established by law; or (ii) whoever by the above means excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law, has committed the offence of sedition. The punishment prescribed varies from imprisonment up to three years to life imprisonment, with fine or without it. The first explanation says that disaffection includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity. Explanations 2 and 3 in effect say that disapprobation of the measures or administrative action etc. of the government to obtain their alteration by lawful means is not an offence.

The caveat however, is that there should be no attempt to excite hatred or contempt or disaffection. In other words, even if the impugned speech or article or cartoon seeks to obtain the alteration of the wrong governmental decisions, if they excite hatred, contempt or disaffection towards the government, the author of the speech and others are liable to be charged with sedition and punished.

History of sedition

The history of the offence of sedition in the IPC is one of conflicts in judicial interpretations. In the pre-Independence era, a number of landmark cases on sedition were decided by the Federal Court as well as the Privy Council. These two high judicial bodies had taken diametrically opposite positions on the meaning and scope of sedition as a penal offence. The Federal Court in Niharendu Dutt Majumdar Vs. King Emperor (1942) FCR 48, held that “public disorder or the reasonable anticipation or likelihood of public disorder is the gist of the offence”. These judges were of the view that sedition implies resistance or lawlessness in some form. In all these cases the point that has been emphasised is that if there is no incitement to violence, there is no sedition.

On the other hand, the Privy Council was of the view that acts like incitement to violence and insurrection are immaterial while deciding the culpability of a person charged with sedition. It said that since the IPC defines the offence of sedition, unlike the English Law, which doesn’t define it, one needs to go by that definition only. Queen Empress Vs. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1897) was the first case wherein the law on sedition under Section 124A in the IPC was explained. Strachey J. stated the law in the following terms;

“The offence consists in exciting or attempting to excite in others certain bad feelings towards the government. It is not the exciting or attempting to excite mutiny or rebellion or any sort of actual disturbance, great or small. Whether any disturbance or outbreak was caused by these articles is absolutely immaterial.”

In King Emperor V. Sadashiv Narayan Bhalerao (1947) , the Privy Council not only reiterated the law on sedition enunciated in the Tilak case, but also held that the Federal Court’s statement of law in theNiharendu Majumdar case was wrong. The Privy Council overruled the decision of the Federal Court and held that excitement of feelings of enmity to the government is sufficient to make one guilty under Section 124A of the Code.

Now, let us look at the decisions of the Supreme Court of independent India on sedition. The Constitution bench of the Supreme Court explained the amplitude of sedition for the first time in 1962 in the case of Kedarnath Vs. State of Bihar (1962). Quite interestingly the court adopted the view of the Federal Court of India that the gist of the offence of sedition is “incitement to violence” or the “tendency or the intention to create public disorder”. So, as per the Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, a person can be charged with sedition only if there is incitement to violence in his speech or writing or an intention to create disorder.

Kedarnath decision

The occasion for this decision was an appeal by a person named Kedarnath Singh of Bihar who was punished by the trial court for making a speech, a punishment upheld by the High Court. A few lines of his speech are worth quoting:

“To-day the dogs of CID are loitering around Barauni. Many official dogs are sitting even in this meeting. The people of India drove out the Britishers from this country and elected these Congressgoondas to the gaddi…. When we drove out the Britishers, we shall strike and turn out these Congressgoondas as well… They have today established a rule of lathis and bullets in the country…. We believe in [a] revolution, which will come and in the flames of which, the capitalists, zamindars and the Congress leaders of India… will be reduced to ashes and on their ashes will be established a Government of the poor and downtrodden people of India.”

It can be seen from this speech that there is no “incitement to violence” or “disorder” which alone, according to the Supreme Court, formed the basis of a charge of sedition. Therein lies the contradiction in this landmark judgment. In fact, the issue before the court was whether Section 124A was violative of Article 19(1)(a) relating to freedom of speech and expression. If the view of the Privy Council on sedition was to be adopted, then Section 124A would have had to be struck down as violative of Article 19(1)(a). The Supreme Court did not want to do that, so, it adopted the strict principles of English Law on sedition which were laid down in the Niharendu case in 1942. But the court upheld the punishment of Kedarnath who did not incite anyone to resort to violence and overthrow the government.

Sedition defined under Section 124A of the IPC is a colonial law meant to suppress the voice of Indian people. That is why the Indian law on sedition was different from the English law. Despite the strict construction adopted by the Supreme Court, the law enforcement agencies have always used it against artists, public men, intellectuals, et al for criticising the governments. In fact the Supreme Court itself did not apply these strict principles to the speech of Kedarnath and his conviction. The government and its agencies have, in reality, followed the law enunciated by the Privy Council and not by the Supreme Court in Kedarnath. The governments in free India continue to use it for the very purpose for which the colonial government used it.

Therefore, since the governments and its agencies have strictly gone by the text of Section 124A though the Supreme Court itself did not apply these principles to the speech of Kedarnath, the law declared inKedarnath has lost its potency. The Supreme Court, being the protector of the fundamental rights of the citizens may step in now and declare Section 124A unconstitutional. India of the 21st century does not require a law used by the colonial government to suppress India’s voice.

(P .D.T. Achary is a constitutional expert and former Secretary General of the Lok Sabha)

Keywords: Sedition, Indian Penal Code, Aseem Trivedi, Kedarnath Singh

Source: The Hindu, 14-10-2015

Centre must hold consultations for a uniform civil code

The Supreme Court nudge on Monday to the central government, asking it to take a quick decision on the uniform civil code, is in accordance with the Constitution’s Directive Principles of State Policy (Article 44).

So far, the BJP is the only major party that has made a demand for this. But there are other sides to the issue. When the Constitution came into force, separate electorates were done away with in pursuance of the goal of equality among all Indians.

However, the Constitution has enough safeguards for the protection of religious and linguistic minorities and their religious and cultural rights. Keeping that in view, successive governments steered clear of this sensitive subject.

The matter does not concern the largest minority, the Muslims, alone. There are other communities that have their own civil laws and customs such as those relating to marriage, divorce, succession, adoption and maintenance.

This has a long history. Ever since large parts of what is now India (and Bangladesh, Pakistan and Myanmar) came under the rubric ‘British Indian Empire’, the new rulers were content with establishing an administrative structure and legislative institutions while carefully leaving civil-religious practices, apart from cases like ‘Sati’, of various faiths aside. This policy served the colonial rulers well in the sense that they could exploit the differences between communities and keep them apart. After Independence, there had been fitful talk of establishing a uniform civil code.

But the matter received the nation’s serious attention when the Supreme Court in 1985 ordered the payment of alimony to a divorced Muslim woman on a petition filed by her. This led to an outcry from the Islamic orthodoxy, leading to the enactment of the Muslim Women’s Bill, which protected the rights of divorce. But, over the past 20 years or more, there have been several court judgments favouring the payment of alimony to Muslim women, the latest of which was in April 2015, when the Supreme Court said divorced Muslim women were within their rights to get maintenance from their former husbands under the Criminal Procedure Code, which gave the same facility to children and parents also. Similarly, last year the Delhi High Court had rejected a Muslim man’s plea that he could not be forced to pay maintenance to his former wife under the domestic violence law on the grounds that it did not apply to the Muslims.

After the Supreme Court’s prodding, the government is duty-bound to act on it. But the issue is politically fraught. Hence the first step for the government should be to begin discussions with people of all shades of opinion on the subject. Already there are advocacy groups of various religious communities that are rooting for a uniform civil code.

Source: Hindustan Times, 14-10-2015

Oxford University sets up new centre on religious relics

Are religious relics imbued with miraculous powers? This may be the belief among many Christians, but a new centre at the University of Oxford will now use scientific methods to assess their authenticity and learn more about their history.

Ancient Christian relics are objects that survive from ancient times, often associated with a saint’s body or their belongings, and usually kept as objects of historical interest or spiritual devotion. The centre was launched on Tuesday, a university release said.

For the first time, a large team of researchers will use radiocarbon dating, genetics and theology to learn more about the origin and movement of religious relics that have been attributed to specific individuals.

The release added that researchers will use the latest scientific methods, such as higher precision radiocarbon dating that can pinpoint chronologies; DNA analysis that establishes common ancestries and the probable geographic origin of an individual; and historical and material evidence to identify objects of special interest and set scientific data in their proper context.

Oxford researchers have previously used the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit to date the Shroud of Turin, regarded by some as the burial cloth of Christ. Three university labs were involved and between them concluded that the cloth was manufactured between 1260 and 1390.

Thomas Higham, deputy director of the Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said: “It’s the first time that scholars from many different disciplines have collaborated in the ongoing study of ancient religious relics”.

“We will not be able to say with 100% certainty that they belong to a particular individual who is celebrated as a saint. Nevertheless, through gathering a body of evidence we will be able to say whether or not the remains originate from the same time and place as the attributed saint”.

Georges Kazan of the School of Archaeology said: “The Christian belief that relics were imbued with miraculous powers, granting benefits both in this world and the next, resulted in widespread demand and circulation, particularly in The Middle Ages”.

He added: “Scientific analysis has now shown that a number of relics attributed to specific saints are counterfeit or misidentified, but others may be of the time and place where a particular “holy” person lived.”

Source: Hindustan Times, 14-10-2015

NITI Aaayog Cuts No of Divisions to 15

Yogima Sharma

New Delhi





NITI Aayog has halved the number of divisions in the organisation to 15, a move aimed at rationalisation that comes after the premier think tank reduced its staff by 60%.An official notification dated October 6 shows that the Aayog will have only 15 verticals created by merging some of the less important divisions, doing away with those where there was little work and renaming others to reflect the focus areas of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.
The Aayog had last month done away with a large number of employees of its predecessor, the decades old Planning Commission, to bring down the overall strength of the institution to less than 500.
Most of the officials that ET spoke to said on the condition of anonymity that the institution is only doing the assignments given to it from time to time mostly by the Prime Minister's Office.
Since there is no day-today work assigned to the Aayog, there is no need of dedicated divisions for all sectors, they said.
“The work area of the Aayog is vast but there is no concrete routine work that we are required to per form. So far we have been only assisting the subgroups and the task forces on some subjects and once that gets over there will not be much work,“ said a senior government official at the Aayog, requesting not to be identified.
As per the notification, a dedicated division of poverty estimation and data analysis has been set up while skill development has been added to education and labour, which have been merged into one division.
Likewise, infrastructure division, which was the most popular division during the previous government's tenure, has been merged with transport and tourism while land resources has been added to agriculture division.
Citing the example of the three sub-groups set up under the governing council of the Aayog, another official said that since work has been completed on all of them the officials concerned are waiting to get some fresh assignment to be delivered in a timebound manner.
A third official of the Aayog said that despite the focus on cooperative federalism most of the states and almost all central ministries are not heeding the advice of the Aayog, making it difficult for the institution to deliver on time.

Source: Economic Times, 14-10-2015

Integral Yoga Path

SUDIP TALUKDAR





Integral yoga, or the yoga of self-perfection, synthesises the collective potential of traditional disciplines like bhakti, gyan and karma yogas, to reorient human nature into bringing the supramental, or the highest octave of consciousness, down to the earth plane.Integral yoga, which is more comprehensive in its sweep, aims at the total perfection of not one but all parts of the being. It directs the flow of consciousness from soul downwards into the lower levels, rather than begin from the bottom up, purifying as it descends.
Integral yoga strips successive layers of the body and mind of every vestige of inertia, falsehood and lower nature, down to the very innards of its tiniest cell, in order to unclog channels for the descent of divine consciousness. Once empowered, it taps into and co-opts nature to hasten ongoing evolution of (divinised) beings.
Every voluntary or involuntary effort, activity or drive to better individual or community life is yoga. As a sentient being, man is capable of cooperating with the inexorable evolutionary movement and bring about desired changes in a compressed time frame, which would have taken aeons.
The key is integral yoga with a threefold approach: intense aspiration for the Divine, rejection of all that is inimical to the path and total surrender or opening oneself to the Divine.It perceives Godhead as the fundamental unity permeating every atom, or the centrality of the spirit underlying nature, growth, life, material and nonmaterial phenomena.

Nobel Lessons





To really improve its welfare policy, India needs improved data and accountability

The winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics, Angus Deaton, has had a long professional association with India. It is unlikely that any of the recent prize winners has as strong an India connection. And various lessons from his work are quite relevant to Indian public policy today , for example the lesson about measurement being the key to enforcing accountability . Deaton was a pioneer in devising ways to measure consumption, which led to a better understanding of poverty and ways to fight it. India, unfortunately , falls short when it comes to measurement.For a political system which sees all political parties promise to spend large sums on welfare measures, there is a poverty of information on outcomes. This issue has bothered Deaton as underlying causes of change in India are often a `puzzle'. For example, inadequate and disjointed data on malnutrition make it difficult to reach a satisfactory conclusion on the extent of progress made over the years even after having substantial sums to deal with it.
The Narendra Modi government has accepted the relevance of measu rement in driving change in areas such as ease of doing business. There fore, it is surprising that the efficacy of government spending on various programmes seems unimportant.If the government has to make good its promise on maximum governance, it has make its spending priorities more accountable.
Two other lessons from Deaton's work are relevant to policy making in India. He has been sceptical about the extraordinary claims of new approaches to designing superior schemes to combat poverty , particularly the use of randomised controlled trials. A healthy dose of scepticism is a necessary ingredient in policy making as it limits the possibility of making a wrong choice. At the same time, Deaton has been open to taking strong stands be it on the efficacy of cash transfers or the possibility of long-term harm to recipients of foreign aid. For an Indian audience, the Nobel is a welcome development as his work has been of particular relevance to our challenges.We spend over Rs 3 trillion annually on subsidies and welfare measures but make slow progress in poverty reduction, with almost a third of the population still poor. India's fight against poverty , however, has benefitted from Deaton's body of work and will continue to gain from his relentless drive to understand the way things work.

Source: Times of India, 14-10-2015