Girls emerge as preferred choice for adoption

NEW DELHI PTI





Girls are the preferred choice for people opting for adoption in comparison to male children in the country, even as the government struggles to improve skewed sex-ratio.In the past three years, 7,439 girls were taken up for adoption as against 5,167 boys. According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2,846 girls were adopted in 2012-13 against 1,848 boys. In 2013-14, it was 2,293 girls and 1,631 boys. Year 2014-15 saw 2,300 girls finding home, while 1,688 boys were adopted. “There has been an increase in the demand for girl child for adoptions. It is very encouraging to know that more and more people are coming to adopt girls,” a senior official of Central Adoption Resource Authority said.
The number of children with disabilities or special needs placed in inter-country adoption was 170, 242 and 214 during 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15 respectively.
According to the revised adoption guidelines that came into effect from August 1, 2015, the process was brought under a new system called `CARINGS', bringing all child-care institutions of the country on one platform.
The Ministry also recently relaxed rules for adoption for certain categories of parents including those who have lost their child to sickness or accident and those want to adopt children with special needs.
However, child sex ratio, which shows the number of girls per 1000 boys between the ages 0-6, is 918 according to 2011 census. Officials said the Centre's Beti Bacho Beti Padhao initiative has shown significant improvement in many states.

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 11-01-2016

Simplicity and Depth

ARUP MITRA





Simplicity brings one closer to the truth. But lack of simplicity introduces deviations because the biases of a complicated mind are too many , blocking progress towards truth. Simplicity enables one to acquire knowledge easily; but depth of understanding and realisation is required. Otherwise, the knowledge remains superfluous.We often look at phenomena with a preconceived view or add imaginative components instead of observing them as they are. Such distortions influence our next thought process, taking us away from reality .Also, we tend to add something to our observations to make it sound more interesting.
Ultimate knowledge is so simple; it is there everywhere. But it has been made so complex unnecessarily . In order to retain this natural simplicity in us, we need to avoid absorbing unnecessary details revolving around us. We need to observe silence in order to enhance depth. Too many words only create confusion and produce vibrations that disturb both the speaker and the listener.
Solitude, quietness and introspection enhance our depth and take us away from complexity towards simplicity . On a daily basis, one can start practising by moving away to a corner, keeping silence. Slowly , the duration can be stretched and a time will come when eternal silence will start echoing in the midst of thundering sounds all around. That is when one has acquired the ability to cut oneself off from all distractions. The understanding that then develops comes from the depth of one's existence.

True Dharma Transcends All Things Material

Acharya Mahapragya





The sky keeps changing hues.Some changes are perceptible and others are smaller changes. A cloud moves a bit, the wind blows, the sun's rays get sharper, and then dark clouds fill the sky, it rains, it shines, it stands dark against twinkling stars and a bright moon. In a single day we see the sky changing so much.
Man too changes so many forms from morning to night ... now happy , now hopeful, now low, now depressed, now loud, now quiet, now overcome by emotion, now lost in thought and so on.If one could maintain a diary of every emotion, thought process, one diary would easily fill up.
Everything is constantly changing.Not just our moods and manner but look at fortunes ­ Lakshmi as we call it.Fortune is now here, now somewhere else. Youth is ephemeral ... someone who was very beautiful and young once may be haggard and old today . Every thing about life is constantly changing; it is chanchal. What is nischal or eternal?
Dharma is eternal. I will not try translating dharma; it is more than religion, it defines your being. Now if we ask which dharma, we get into a fix. And then if we start naming it as Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islam, Christian, Jewish and so on, we will get stuck.
That which cannot be got from matter or from money , that is called dharma. That is also veetaragatha or detachment. In fact, veetaragatha is more than detachment. It is healthy disinterest in the material world, not shunning it. Veetaragatha cannot be bought. When this attitude of disinterest in the material world increases, attachments will reduce and we can start living truly . We will then not be measuring our world through desire.
Once, a couple, deeply into meditation and spiritual pursuits, was walking from village to village when the husband found a heap of gold coins and ornaments on the road. How did it come there, he wondered.He quickly threw some mud on it so that his wife, who was following at some distance, did not see it and get attracted to it.
The wife caught up with him and asked, “What is that heap?“ He mumbled something inaudible. “I know it is gold. Why do you hide it? It is you who has to evolve, not me.If you did not value it, you would not have covered it or feared that I would be tempted,“ said the wife.
So the first step towards veetaragatha is to know what to value and how much value to ascribe to what. How much value to ascribe to people, to material things and how to differentiate between them? Only the one who has the right attitude can pass by a heap of gems without being tempted. At this point we can venture to understand dharma. Once we know the value of consciousness, matter will cease to matter.
This understanding comes with an awakened chetna or consciousness.
An evolved philosopher said there are only three precious gems. They are water, grain and sweet speech. The first maintains life, the second sustains it and the third is essential to keep relationships. I wish to add a fourth: the breath. But for the breath, we would not be here to talk of values.
They make dharma which is nischal and leads you towards healthy disinterest in the material and towards purity of soul and therefore automatically towards nonviolence. Let us think along these lines to bring balance between consumption and restraint, between nomenclatures and true dharma.

THE AGE OF EMAIL STRESS

If

its followers were a country, it would be twice as populous as China. These 2.5 billion people give an hour every day to their faith—email. As with all things Internet related, email gained adherents at a prodigious rate. The first email message was sent in 1971, but widespread use began only by 1995.

In 30 years, email went from being a revolutionary replacement for the postal department—what we now call snail mail—to being a replacement, sometimes, for speech.

“Now we know that emails are often exchanged between people sitting in the same building—or even in the same room!” says a new study called “You’ve Got Mail!” from the Future Work Centre, a UK research institute. After surveying 2,000 users in the UK—the findings are not likely to be particularly different elsewhere—they have some disquieting explanations as to what email is doing to its users.

The problem is the “bad habits” that email users develop: leaving email on all day (62%) and sending emails automatically to inboxes (50%), which is what most people I know do—oh, yes, myself included.

This unceasing deluge is sparked by a desire to be in control. You know, to avoid the shock when your phone tells you 50 emails are pending. To avoid such stressful situations, you check your email—in the morning and late at night—and believe you are staying ahead. But the Future Work Centre study showed that these habits instead cause more stress and make your life more difficult.

This is primarily about work. Of the 196.3 billion emails sent every day in 2014, 55% were work-related, according to a 2014 study from the Radicati group, a US technology market-research firm.

“Email remains the most pervasive form of communication in the business world, while other technologies such as social networking, instant messaging (IM), mobile IM, and others are also taking hold, email remains the most ubiquitous form of business communication,” the Radicati study said.

However, consumer—or non-business—email traffic is slowing, presumably moving to social networking sites, instant messaging, mobile IM, and SMS/ text messaging.

With its ubiquity in the lives of the globalized business elite, email has become different things for different people, acknowledges the UK study, pointing to other research that has thrown up conflicting results. So, email volume is a predictor of stress and, sometimes, it isn’t. Frequently checking your email can reduce stress, but it can also spark it. Filing your email in neat folders is linked to higher productivity— and lower efficiency.

What this adds up to is that the effects of email use on people is likely to vary.

“Our research shows that email is a double-edged sword,” said Richard McKinnon, a Future of Work researcher, quoted on the website Eurekalert.org, while addressing the British Psychological Society this week. “Whilst it can be a valuable communication tool, it’s clear that it’s a source of stress, of frustration for many of us. The people who reported it being most useful to them also reported the highest levels of email pressure! But the habits we develop, the emotional reactions we have to messages and the unwritten organizational etiquette around email, combine into a toxic source of stress which could be negatively impacting our productivity and well-being.”

Here are some of the stressors. Email has no clear norms with regard to language, familiarity and speed of response, and no “non-verbal” cues, such as body language, so the potential for misunderstandings, misinterpretations—and stress—abounds.

Unlike face-to-face communication or phone calls, email does not allow selfcorrection “in the moment”, which means another email must be sent. The feeling of email overload, as some studies have noted, can result in physical stress and emotional exhaustion.

Finally, email can be a distraction, taking away time from other important activities, from eating to intimacy.

A sidelight that McKinnon and his team stumbled on during their research was that the feeling of being pressured by email was significantly higher among users of Mac operating systems, when compared to Windows; more among iOS (iPhone) users when compared to Android, Windows or BlackBerry.

Users of Windows smartphones reported the lowest levels of perceived email pressure. Why? “At this stage, we don’t know,” said the study.

So, what can you do about email stress? The researchers recommend:

* To the early morning/late night checkers—put your phone away; do you really need to check your email?

* How about planning your day and prioritizing your work, before the priorities of others flood your inbox?

* Consider turning off ‘push notifications’ and/or turning off your email app for portions of the day, and take control of when you receive email.

There’s no harm trying. You have nothing to lose but your stress.

Samar Halarnkar is editor of Indiaspend.org, a data-driven, publicinterest journalism, non-profit organization. He also writes the column Our Daily Bread in Mint Lounge.

Source: www.livemint.com/frontiermail

The problem with smart cities

Urban administrations and the private sector must join hands for the Special Purpose Vehicle model to work

By 15 December, 85 cities out of the total 98 included under the Smart Cities Mission had submitted their respective Smart City Plans to the ministry of urban development. Hopefully, the remaining cities will follow suit shortly. The stage is ready for this ambitious mission that aims to make Indian cities sustainable and competitive.

The journey so far has a few lessons and concerns that need attention. Apart from criticism on the quality of proposals and public participation, there were indications of a few cities hesitant to submit their proposals. One of the main reasons for the apathy of urban local bodies of some cities pertains to the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which is to be mandatorily constituted for the implementation of their respective Smart City Plans. SPVs with private investments have been increasingly encouraged as an efficient mechanism for infrastructure projects. This would be ideally seen as an attractive option for urban local bodies struggling to meet investment requirement. Then why have these local bodies been so disapproving of the smart city SPVs? According to media reports, the local bodies of Greater Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Kochi and Nashik have indicated that the essence of ‘local self-governance’ will be defeated with specific focus on private sector driven SPVs.

An SPV is a legal entity created for a specific purpose, which can theoretically be shut down after the specified purpose has been achieved. The major advantage of an SPV is that it allows investors to limit their risks and maximize profits, and bypass cumbersome legal and regulatory issues. In India, SPVs have come to dominate the infrastructure landscape. A prominent example of this would be road construction, operations and maintenance. In certain other cases, like metro rail projects, the private-public partnership efficiencies are yet to be realized.

One of the reasons for setting up SPVs in smart cities is to ensure objective and efficient decision making, independent of municipal councils, which are subject to local politics. The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) guidelines mandate an equal share of equity contribution by the state government and urban local body, thereby making them the majority shareholders. Nevertheless, urban local bodies are disturbed by the idea of an SPV bypassing the elected municipal council as proposed in the SCM guidelines (4.1.1 and 4.1.2). It threatens to chip away at the notion of decentralized and democratic decision making. A demonstration of this contestation was noted when the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation mandated that there would be no private sector participation, and the mayor would have veto power over the SPV’s decisions. Although the central government may not honour this resolution, it signals that empowering an SPV will not be easy.

Currently, according to the SCM guidelines, cities are required to create an SPV once they have been selected. However, in the absence of clarity on specific projects and assured revenue streams, it would be very difficult for private companies to participate. This, combined with a lack of management control, may reduce the attractiveness of SPVs for private investors.

The SCM guidelines also stipulate that government funding can only be used for projects that have public benefit outcomes. What are the criteria to decide the degree of public benefit of projects? Such distinction could lead to a tiered hierarchy of projects based on a user’s ability and willingness to pay in the context of cities with a significant percentage of urban poor.

Finally, there is the issue of convergence at city level. There are cities that are covered under more than one such flagship programme. For example, Varanasi is included under both SCM and the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY). The manner in which a smart city SPV interacts with the implementing agency for HRIDAY, and how two projects under the two separate programmes complement each other, is yet to be seen.

Clearly, there are issues regarding SPVs which need to be clarified. An important first step would be to build safeguards to protect the democratic nature of governance structures. There is merit in understanding the mindset behind some of the caveats voiced by unhappy urban local bodies. A robust governance structure, which allows for sharing of power and financial resources between urban local bodies and the private sector stakeholders, would go a long way towards assuaging fears.

The second important aspect would be for the government to clarify the financial nature of SPVs and how the private sector can contribute effectively. The nature of the asset and price sensitivity of citizens towards that asset could be used as a factor in deciding issues of charging user-fee.

Critical issues of capacity and skill building for local bodies need to be addressed in parallel. Matters related to intellectual property rights, open standards and technology transfer should be enshrined at the highest level of government since it is difficult for individual urban local bodies to negotiate with private parties. The current SCM guidelines do not cover these aspects.

Only when these issues are addressed can SPVs be truly successful.

Source: http://epaper.livemint.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

How economics went from theory to data

One

of the most striking things about attending the annual meeting of the American Economic Association after a long absence is that economics is now really all about the data. Daniel S. Hamermesh of the University of Texas documented this shift in a 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Literature. In 1963, 1973 and 1983, the majority of the articles published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and Quarterly Review of Economics, three of the field’s most influential journals, were works of theory—with theory’s dominance peaking in 1980. By 2011, theory’s share was down to 27.9%.

One cause seems pretty clear. The biggest shift towards empirical work occurred between 1983 and 1993, and it was between 1983 and 1993 that personal computers became commonplace. That made crunching data much easier for economics professors; the subsequent rise of the Internet and digitization of much that was once analog in the economy opened up a huge new array of data for them to crunch.

In Hamermesh’s taxonomy, borrowed data means “ready-made … government-provided … macroeconomic time series or … large household surveys”, while own data means that the authors of the article created the data set—even if the source was government records, as it was with Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez’s famous work on top incomes. The continued rise in empirical research since 1993 has been entirely in this latter category. Economics has also seen the advent of experimental work, most of it taking place in campus “labs” where students and other subjects participate in market-related games and exercises.

Disillusionment with theory has also been an issue. From the late 1930s through the 1970s, economics was full of excitement about grand mathematical models that seemed to explain everything about the world. Then some things happened that the grand models—particularly the macroeconomic ones— didn’t explain very well, while a new generation of theorists took things in increasingly narrow and convoluted directions. The goal was often to make the theories more realistic, but the result, as Hamermesh puts it, was that: “Economic theory may have become so abstruse that editors of the leading general journals, recognizing that very few of their readers could comprehend the theory, have cut back on publishing work of this type.”

Piketty, who was a promising young theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1990s, wrote in the introduction to Capital in the 21st Century that he decided to move back to France in part because economists are less respected there and thus must “set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything”. Then he went looking for some data to crunch.

Still, the data can’t tell us everything. Economics in the US had an earlier empirical heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, led by Wesley Clair Mitchell, a Columbia University economist and co-founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was the NBER that pioneered the systematic collection of macroeconomic data in the US, and Mitchell believed that if he could only gather enough data, the secrets of the economy—and in particular the business cycle—would organically reveal themselves.

They didn’t, and Mitchell was mostly flummoxed by the Great Depression. In a famous takedown of a 1946 book on business cycles by Mitchell and his successor as head of NBER, Arthur F. Burns (who went on to be a markedly unsuccessful Federal Reserve chairman in the 1970s), physicist-turned-economic-theorist Tjalling Koopmans complained that: “The movements of economic variables are studied as if they were the eruptions of a mysterious volcano whose boiling caldron [sic] can never be penetrated.”

Today’s economic empiricists aren’t nearly that theory-shy. I heard lots of potential explanations this week for the trends and correlations found in the data. But they were usually offered in tentative tones. Thanks to the empirical boom, economists know more than ever before. But they seem to be learning that they are still awfully far from knowing everything.

Source: http://epaper.livemint.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

NDA has failed on reforms, says Amartya Sen

However, the NDA government had done more than the UPA government in removing ineffective subsidies. There was more to be done.'

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said that the NDA government had been slow to move on key reforms and even failed to deliver on the reforms it had promised, thus hampering the successful functioning of a market economy.

Professor Sen said the reforms were essential for continued fast growth and development. However, Professor Sen told The Hindu in an interview that the NDA government had done more than the UPA government in removing ineffective subsidies. There was more to be done, he added.

Professor Sen also argued that, at a time when around half of India doesn’t have access to schools, focusing on the controversial Free Basics programme by Facebook is a mistake. Excerpts:

Where do you think the discipline of economics is headed? Do you see it going in a direction you approve of?

I think there are many changes taking place and a number of them one must approve of. There are a number of changes linking theory with empirical observations, that’s a positive thing. There is much greater interest in not seeing analytical mathematical economics as a separate discipline from normal non-mathematical reasoning because we have to put them together. I am in favour of all of them. There is always an amount of what I would describe as hi-tech circus, where you do trapeze jumping, in any subject and that is true of economics also.

But I think the important thing to recognise is that there are many lessons from traditional economics which have not been sufficIently well absorbed in policy making, for example, in India. And I will put my focus on that because there are lesson that traditional mainstream economic reasoning offers which we have not made good use of, and even though we need the subject itself to evolve -- that is certainly needed -- but even without that there are many understandings that are very important for thinking about the future of an economy which are not getting the kind of attention they ought to get.

What would the lessons be for India?

The three big lessons that economics offers have not been fully appreciated. One is the lesson that you need a successful market economy for continued fast growth and development. That is being absorbed but even now I have to say that the Modi government has been too slow with the reforms and has not carried out the reforms they promised they will.

Secondly, while the market economy does well for industries and agriculture, by and large, with a few exceptions, it does not do well for education and healthcare. There you need the government to come in in a big way, a point that was made by Adam Smith in 1776. And that has been neglected and not much has happened on that. The UPA government was an under-performer and the Modi government is even more of a disaster.

The third point is the issue of asymmetric information: the fact that quite often the buyers don’t know what the seller is selling. This is a very important part in the understanding of any market economy, and which is why the idea that you could privatise healthcare at a basic level without first providing public health is something that has not been possible in any country in the world and it will not be possible in India.

India is the only country which is trying to get universally educated and universal healthcare through the private sector. Japan, US, Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Hong Kong, Singapore, whether they are politically right or politically left, they all saw the importance of the state in making education and healthcare widely spread and universal.

So you don’t think that this excessive reliance on empiricism is getting in the way of theoretical economics?

You can make a fetish of empiricism and you can make a fetish of pure theory. But I think the main thing is to recognise that economics is ultimately an empirical subject and the theory is about the empirical reality in the world, which is about how the world functions but also about how the world ought to function, what are the demands of good policy. And these you might think are not matters of discussion but they are because we have certain views on them, we have certain ways of judging whether an economy is doing well or not and we could on the basis of reasoning arrive at some agreement as to whether the economy is doing well or not doing well, if you are open to reasoning.

I think those things require both empirical data and scrutiny as well as a very close examination of the information we have on one side as well as understanding and critical acceptability of the theories that allow us to interpret the data and also take a view on what could in fact be done for making the shape of the economy better.

Do you still think that the Keynesian approach to economics is still relevant today?

Well, it’s relevant to many countries in the world, if by Keynesian you mean general theory. I think the insights of Keynesian economics were badly neglected in Europe and also somewhat neglected in the Republican-dominated Congress, but not ignored by the Federal Reserve system.

But Europe neglected it very much indeed by just going in for balancing budgets at a time when it just made no sense. People forget that when they get into a situation that the ratio of public debt to national income rose as far high as 70 per cent under Gordon Brown, but they forget it was 220 per cent when the National Health Service was started. So I think they are making a shibboleth out of a kind of concocted number. A ratio of A to B is a mistake and that is one of the lessons Keynes taught us.

Now, we (India) may have made many mistakes, but neither the UPA government nor the present policies under Raghuram Rajan could be accused of ignoring these facts. I think the insights have been fairly well absorbed in India.

We’re nearing on two years of the Modi government. At the end of the first year you had said that Modi’s idea of development was more on the corporate and institutional side than on individual development…

I’m not sure I quite said that. I thought that the idea that development is only a matter of successful planning of financial investment rather than building up the capability of human beings through education, healthcare and social security, I was grumbling about that. Now, that wasn’t only at the end of the first year, it was also at the beginning of the first year. That was their policy and it still is. Education and healthcare were badly neglected by the previous UPA government and it is even more badly neglected by the Modi government now.

So that feeling has been reinforced now?

Yes, reinforced in that I see no reason to revise that judgement.

Schemes like Skill India, Jan Dhan Yojana and the various insurance schemes which are linked to making the lives of the individuals better, how would you rate those?

The basic thing that ails the Indian people is lack of education, lack of healthcare and lack of social security. And no matter how extraordinarily innovative-sounding, and I say innovative-sounding rather than innovative, these new schemes may be, of this kind of insurance or that kind of insurance, it is not going to take away from the fact that with an unhealthy, uneducated labour force, it is very difficult to generate income from them and very difficult for solidly-shared development growth at a high level to continue.

The government has carried out Direct Benefits Transfers in LPG subsidies and in MGNREGA wages. Do you think that is a system that works and should it be extended to the rest of the PDS?

Well, the LPG subsidy removal is something I have been recommending again and again in my last book, that you should remove all LPG subsidies. They haven’t done that yet. They ought to do all of it. There is still subsidised electricity, where parts of India don’t even have a power connection, but those who have it get it at a subsidised price, which I don’t think is a very good idea. These have to be changed.

But the Modi government under Jaitley has done more in removing these subsidies than the UPA government did.

MGNREGA is a much more complicated story and they were very critical of it before but they seem to have embraced it now.

But the direct transfer of subsidies to bank accounts, is that sustainable and workable?

Well, it has some positive things and some negative things. For example, if there is a gender bias. If you send the subsidy to the family, then the people more likely to benefit are the boys rather than the girls. And if you did it with a more on-kind transfer, that’s unlikely to happen.

So there are positive and negative elements in it. I can see why it is attractive and I also see what the limitations of that are.

What do you think about the government’s Odd-Even rule?

(laughs) My thoughts are not great on that.

And what do you think about Facebook’s Free Basics?

You know, in a country where half the population doesn’t have a school to go to, to concentrate on the internet is a bit of a mistake.

Keywords: Amartya Sen, NDA government, Narendra Modi, subsidies, economic reforms, LPG subsidy removal, Free Basics

Source: The Hindu, 8-01-2015