Eyes Wide Open

THICH NHAT HANH





Meditation is not imitation, but creation. Meditators who only imitate their instructors can't go far. The same is true of cooking too. A good cook is someone with a creative spirit.You can enter meditation on the interdependence of all phenomena or meditation on the manifestation of all phenomena as interdependent through many different doors -observing your internal organs: blood, heart, intestines, lungs, liver, kidneys; or thousands of other means, including thoughts, feelings, images, poetry , dreams or a river, a star, a leaf and so on. A good practitioner uses meditation throughout daily life, not wasting a single event, to see deeply the nature of dependent co-arising.
Day-long practice is carried out in perfect concentration.With eyes open or closed, the nature of meditation is no other than samadhi. Discard the idea that you must close your eyes to look inside and open them to look outside. A thought is no more an inner object than a mountain an outer one.Both are objects of knowledge.Neither is inner or outer.
Great concentration is achieved when you are fully present, in profound communion with living reality . At these times, the distinction between subject and object disappears and you penetrate living reality with ease, are one with it, because you have set aside all tools for measuring knowledge, knowledge that Buddhism calls `erroneous knowledge'. This kind of meditation can help free us from the concepts of unitydiversity by dissolving the concept of `me'.

Bimaru states show the way in women empowerment

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Pip Developed States In Electing Female Panchayat Members

They may be some of the most backward states in the country, but when it comes to women empowerment these states have topped the charts and are well ahead of their more prosperous counterparts like Gujarat, Punjab, Goa, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.One of the parameters to judge women empower judge women empowerment is by knowing how many are functioning as elected representatives.
The government data on elected women representatives in Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) shows Jharkhand at the top with elected women representatives constituting more than 59%, followed by Rajasthan (58%), Uttarakhand (57%), Chhattisgarh (55%) and Bihar (52%).
In comparison, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, which incidentally have women chief ministers, have one of the lowest elected women representatives at 33% and 34% respectively. The situation is no different in other prosperous states like Punjab having 30% elected women representatives in PRIs, Goa-33% and Haryana-37%.
However, empowerment has failed to bring down infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates (MMR) which remain high in these states. Infant deaths per 1,000 live births is 39 in Jharkhand, in Rajasthan it is 52, Uttarakhand-36, Chhattisgarh-48 and Bihar-44 against the national average of 44.
Even on the maternal mortality front, these states continue to lag. In Jharkhand the MMR is 261 per 1,00,000 population against the national average of 212. The MMR for Rajasthan is 318, Uttarakhand-359, Chhattisgarh-269 and Bihar-261.
Despite the fact that 16 states have already reserved 50% of seats in PRIs, the total women representations in these panchayat bodies still remain at a low of 46% because of laggard states.There are 13.42 lakh total elected women representatives in PRIs.
The states that have reserved 50% quota for women in their PRIs are: Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tripura, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.
Though West Bengal, Sikkim, Tripura, Odisha and Maharashtra have all reserved 50% quota for women, their total elected women representatives in PRIs are below this figure.Daman & Diu is at the bottom of the list with only 29% elected women representatives.

Source: Times of India, 18-12-2015

US university launches APJ Abdul Kalam grant

The University of South Florida (USF) in the US has launched the President APJ Abdul Kalam Postgraduate Fellowship “to honour him and his vision” for Indian graduate students seeking to pursue a PhD degree in at least 14 subjects and disciplines.

Aanchal Bedi from HT Education spoke to Ralph C Wilcox, USF’s provost and executive vice-president.

Here’s an excerpt:

What is the purpose of your visit to India?

Our engagement with India has seen an upward swing in the past few years. The number of applications and enrolments from India have multiplied — from about 200 to 800 this year. During my visit, I met our Indian partners to take the relationship to the next level, interact with Indian students planning to study at USF and catch up with some of our alumni. There is one more purpose also, which is perhaps closest to my heart, ie to launch the President APJ Abdul Kalam Postgraduate Fellowship. We instituted this fellowship to honour him and his vision.

Tell us more about the fellowship.

The student award will be offered to an Indian graduate student seeking to pursue a PhD degree in the following subject and discipline at the university: applied anthropology, applied physics, business PhD programmes, cell biology, microbiology and molecular biology, chemistry, computer science and engineering, engineering, criminology, integrative biology, marine science and psychology.

The fellowship provides a tution fee waiver for up to four years, a stipend of $18,000 over the nine months of the fall and spring semesters ($2,000 per month) for up to four years. The provost’s office will pay a nine-month stipend for the first year with the department/college contributing a teaching/research assistantship for an additional three years. The total stipend amount will be payable by USF once the scholar is enrolled at the university for his/her first term. All other costs such as airfare, housing at USF, etc will be met by the awardee.

What are the new developments at USF that are specific to India?

The most recent ones would be our College of Engineering’s development of the “NEWgenerator” for India, which converts waste into nutrient fertilizers, renewable energy and clean water, providing a modular and self-sustaining machine that operates completely off-grid, requiring no water, power or sewer system.

Please tell us about significant recent/upcoming partnerships with Indian institutes as well as industry partnerships for research etc.

The collaborations already in place are in the areas of public health, management and engineering. Our partners include Delhi Technological University, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Manipal University, Government Medical College in Surat and several others.

Similarly, on one hand we have Indian students coming to study at USF each summer for the past six years, and on the other we have been sending American students to the Infosys campus in Mysore to learn from their faculty.

Last year, 15 USF students visited Arunachal Pradesh to engage with projects of the Research Institute of World’s Ancient Traditions, Cultures and Heritage (RIWATCH), which has been recognised by the United Nations as a Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development. We are planning a similar trip in 2016 as well.

Click here for details and online application forms. The deadline to apply is March 1, 2016.

Source | Hindustan Times | 16 December 2015

 

How deep is India’s poverty?

A recent World Bank (WB) report brought out poverty ratios across countries. According to these estimates, poverty in India in 2011-12 could be as low as 12.4 per cent if we use “modified mixed reference period” (MMRP), in which there are three recall periods depending on the nature of items. This contrasts with the Rangarajan committee estimates of 29.5 per cent. The poverty line (PL) used by the Rangarajan committee for India was around Rs 1,105 per capita per month. That translates to $2.44 per capita per day, in terms of purchasing power parity. As such, the WB’s PL of $1.90 per capita per day is only about 78 per cent of the PL used by the Rangarajan committee. The lower PL is the reason for the lower poverty ratio estimated by the WB. However, the WB report also talks about the depth of poverty in terms of person-equivalent headcounts. According to the report, the depth elasticity at the global level between 1990 and 2012 was 1.18. In other words, the reductions in traditional head count ratios were accompanied by even larger reductions in person-equivalent poverty ratios. This is true in the regions where the bulk of the poor reside, such as South Asia.

Here, we examine the depth of poverty in India in a different way — by looking at the poverty ratios using different cut-offs of the PL. The first issue is whether the poverty ratios with lowered PL cut-offs are declining as fast as those with raised PL cut-offs. The second issue is the location of the poor, that is, whether the poor are located much below the PL or around the PL.

One conclusion is that even if we raise the PL to 125 per cent of what it is, the reduction in the poverty ratio was 9 percentage points between 2009-10 and 2011-12 (Table 1). This is also true for the poverty ratio based on 115 per cent of the PL. In the case of 85 per cent and 75 per cent of the PL, the percentage point decline was lower than those with the raised PL. But if we adjust for base poverty ratio, its decline was faster for 85 per cent of the PL and 75 per cent of the PL as compared to those between the PL and 125 per cent of the PL.

Headcount ratio is often criticised on the ground that it does not measure the “depth” of poverty. It is seen, however, that more than 50 per cent of the poor lie between the PL and 75 per cent of the PL. This is true for both 2009-10 and 2011-12. In fact, 65 per cent of the rural poor and 61 per cent total poor lie between the PL and 75 per cent of the PL in 2011-12. It may also be noted that many of the non-poor also live just above the PL between 115 per cent of the PL and the PL or between 125 per cent of the PL and the PL.

Another point is that there is a negligible population below 50 per cent of the PL — less than 2 per cent in 2011-12.

We also looked at the poverty ratios with different cut-offs of PLs for two relatively poorer states — Bihar and Odisha — and two developed states —Tamil Nadu and Gujarat (Table 2). It provides interesting results. In Bihar and Odisha, the rate of decline in poverty is lower for the raised PL of 125 per cent and 115 per cent, as compared to the PL and the lower cut-offs of 85 of the PL and 75 per cent of the PL. The decline is even faster for these two states at lower cut-offs if we take into account the base poverty ratio. The raised PLs for Odisha reveal only a marginal decline for both 125 per cent of the PL and 115 per cent of the PL. In the case of Gujarat, the decline in percentage points is higher for the raised cut-offs compared to the lowered cut-offs. If we take into account the base effect, the rate of decline is higher for the lowered cut-offs. As far as Tamil Nadu is concerned, the decline in percentage points in poverty was higher for the raised PL compared to those of the lowered PLs. However, if we take the base effect, the rate of change is more or less similar.

As far as a concentration of poverty is concerned, it is clear that in all the four states the bulk of the poor lie between the PL and 75 per cent of the PL. In the case of two advanced states, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the concentration is even higher. In 2011-12, in Gujarat, 71.5 per cent of the poor were within these limits. In Tamil Nadu, the percentage of the poor falling within these limits is 63 per cent. The proportions are, however, much lower in the case of Bihar and Odisha. In both Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the percentage of the poor falling between these limits has increased between 2009-10 and 2011-12, indicating a faster decline in the depth of poverty.

There are three conclusions from the all-India and state-wise analysis. First, the rate of decline in poverty ratios for the lowered cut-off is similar or more than those for the PL or the raised PL. Second, poverty is concentrated around the PL. Third, the percentage of population below 50 per cent of the PL is negligible at both all-India and state levels.

The bunching of poverty around the poverty line in India renders the problem of reducing poverty more manageable. The pace and pattern of growth have a significant impact on reducing poverty ratios. But as we have repeatedly emphasised, policymakers must pursue a two-fold strategy of letting the economy grow fast and attacking poverty directly through poverty alleviation programmes.

Rangarajan is chairman, Madras School of Economics, Chennai and Dev is director, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.

Source: Indian Express, 17-12-2015

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Los Angeles International Business and Social Science Research Conference (LAIBSRC) 2016

Los Angeles International Business and Social Science Research Conference (LAIBSRC) 2016

LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH CONFERENCE (LAIBSRC) 2016

Dates: 5-7 March 2016

Venue: The Garland Hotel, 4222 Vineland Avenue, North Hollywood, California

Broad Conference Theme: Capacity Building in Research

Conference Web: http://aabl.com.au/la-conference/

Rural landholding almost halved over 20 years

The average rural Indian household is a marginal landowner, growing mainly cereals on a small patch of land and reliant on groundwater for irrigation, new official data show.

Over 80 per cent of rural households have marginal landholdings of less than one hectare (10,000 square metres) and just seven per cent own more than two hectares, data on household land ownership from the National Sample Survey Office show.

Tribal people are over-represented among the landless, Scheduled Castes among marginal land-owners, and forward castes among medium and large landholders, the data show.

Across the country, in every State, landholdings have decreased in size, almost halving in the last 20 years; in 1992, the average rural household was a small landholder with over one hectare of land, as compared with a marginal land-holder as of 2013 with 0.59 hectares of land.

Migration is relatively rare among agricultural households, but is highest among households with marginal landholdings unable to provide the family much income; over 75 per cent of all migrants come from marginal landowning households.

Among families with more land, far fewer have family members living away from home.

While the majority of Other Backward Castes (OBC) and forward caste rural households identify themselves as primarily self-employed in cultivation, the largest chunk of SC households in rural areas are engaged in wage labour or salaried employment.

India’s best-educated and most prosperous States — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh — had the highest proportions of rural households engaged in wage employment, while in poorer States like Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh, 60 per cent of rural households were dependent on cultivation.

Over half of land-holdings used for agriculture are being used to grow cereals, the data shows. Between 60 and 70 per cent of land under cultivation is being irrigated directly from groundwater sources like tubewells.

Keywords: Rural landholding, irrigation, National Sample Survey Office

Source: The Hindu, 17-12-2015

Language, power, nationalism

To understand Benedict Anderson’s influential work, it is important to follow the arc of his life and travels.

In 1981, Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children, in which the protagonist Saleem Sinai says: “A nation which had never previously existed, was about to win its freedom… It was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the satisfaction and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood.”

Two years later, three scholars of history and political science began a debate on nationalism. What did nationalism mean and how was it defined or constructed? The scholars were Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm. Anderson, Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government and Asian Studies at Cornell University, died on December 13 in Indonesia leaving behind a formidable academic legacy.

Imagined community

Anderson’s most influential work was Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), where, puzzled by the rise of nationalisms across the world, he sought to first explain what a nation was and then to trace the rise of different nationalisms. This book, in which he curiously echoed the argument made by Rushdie’s newly post-colonial protagonist mentioned above, has since been translated into 30 languages and is still required reading in most political science courses across the world.

Vasundhara Sirnate

Anderson argued that the nation was an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. He saw the advent of the nation as a product of print capitalism, where the invention of the printing press allowed overarching identity discourses to be published across various vernacular languages allowing for a sameness and diffusion of ideas linked to the nation. Nations, suggested Anderson, are much more than simple offshoots of different identities. He also moved the cradle of nationalism from Europe to the Americas and argued that elites in newly decolonised countries in Asia and Africa had perhaps borrowed some of these modular forms of nationalism to fashion their own.

For Anderson a nation was imagined, as it was an agreed upon dream or a “horizontal comradeship” shared by people who did not know each other and would not know each other and still shared the same concept of the nation despite the persistence of inequalities and exploitative relations between them. He wrote, “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

Critiques

A challenging critique of Anderson’s work came from Partha Chatterjee, who raised the question, “Whose imagined community?” In an eponymous essay published in 1996, Chatterjee challenged Anderson’s idea of modular forms of nationalism developed in the West as providing the mould for various anti-colonial nationalisms. Could all anti-colonial nationalism be reducible to mere borrowing? If so, then what exactly were these nations “imagining”? Chatterjee argued that in many colonised nations, an anti-colonial nationalism had already developed and remained within the non-colonised, traditional, inner domain where the coloniser had been able to assert little power. After a point, it was externalised or became public through novels and public schools and this articulation of nationalism, embedded in the distinctness of the traditional or the spiritual, became the foundation of many anti-colonial nationalisms. Such articulations of an “inner” nationalism were further found in popular novels like Ghare Bhaire (The Home and the World) by Rabindranath Tagore in 1916. For Chatterjee, the production of consent about the nation meant that subaltern narratives had to be suppressed and at the same time accommodated by the elite. So the Andersonian process was much more complicated in practice than the book claimed.

It is difficult to understand the motivations of Anderson’s influential work without examining his own ambulant life. He was the son of Irish-English parents and was born in Kunming in China in 1936. His family moved to California in 1941 and to Ireland in 1945 where one-half of the family constituted Republican supporters stressing on an Irish nationalism. After getting a B.A. in Classics at the University of Cambridge in 1957, he enrolled at Cornell University, where he subsequently earned a Ph.D in 1967 with a focus on Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia.

While his anti-imperialist thinking was already strengthened at Cambridge, Cornell provided to him a set of formidable research skills that led to him anonymously co-authoring a paper with Ruth McVey that argued that the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and Sukarno had little to do with the September 30, 1965 coup in Indonesia. After a bloodletting where six top generals of the army were killed in an attempt to crush the rebellion, General Suharto had to maintain order. McVey and Anderson wrote, “The actual originators of the coup are to be found not in Djakarta, but in Central Java, among middle-level Army officers in Semarang, at the Headquarters of the Seventh (Diponegoro) Territorial Division”. This paper, known now as the “Cornell Paper”, was ultimately published in 1966, and led to Anderson being banned from entering Indonesia until 1988.

A polyglot, he also studied the relationship between language and power, and among the books he subsequently published are Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990) and The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012).

(Vasundhara Sirnate is the Chief Coordinator of Research at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Washington DC.)

Keywords: academic scholar, Benedict Anderson, nationalism, Partha Chatterjee, book on nationalism, Imagined Communities- Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Source: The Hindu, 17-12-2015