A DECADE OF MGNREGA

This

week, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) completes a decade of existence. The Act came into force on 2 February 2006 covering only the 200 poorest districts of the country and was expanded to cover all rural areas of the country from April 2008. This is the largest programme of its nature for providing employment in rural areas anywhere in the world.

In the short span of 10 years that the Act has been in existence, it has generated 19.86 billion person-days of employment benefitting 276 million workers, with more than half the jobs going to women workers and almost a third to members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. These numbers are staggering by themselves but what is relatively less known is the impact of MGNREGA on several other aspects of the rural economy, such as wages, agricultural productivity and gender empowerment. While most critics lament the quality of assets created under MGNREGA, there is now increasing evidence based on rigorous studies, which suggest that not only has the asset quality been better than comparable government programmes, they are also used more by the community. An anthology of research studies on MGNREGA (MGNREGA Sameeksha) was brought out by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2012 and a follow-up by the current government last year.

However, a proper evaluation of the impact of MGNREGA has to go beyond the standard metrics of programme evaluation. The achievements of the programme in terms of its impact on rural demand, political participation, women’s empowerment and improvement in rural infrastructure are hard to quantify, but are visible to anyone who has been tracking developments in rural India. And it is these that have been crucial in sustaining the demand for the programme, despite efforts to downsize it. While these were important drivers of the buoyancy in rural economy during the UPA regime, MGNREGA has emerged as an important intervention by the current National Democratic Alliance government during a period of severe distress in the rural economy.

However, the improvement in performance of the MGNREGA in the latter half of last year has come too late. Even with the improvements, the current year’s performance indicators are much less than the performance of the programme in 2009-10 or in 2010-11. The UPA, which to its credit legislated the Act, has also been responsible for the programme losing steam after 2010. Not only was there a cutback in funds available for MGNREGA, there were attempts to change the nature of the programme from essentially demand-driven to supply-driven.

The result was a sharp decline in employment generated, which fell from 2.84 billion person-days in 2009-10 to 1.66 billion persondays in 2014-15. This was also the case with the average number of days of employment provided, which fell from 54 person-days per household in 2009-10 to just 40 person-days per household in 2014-15. Whereas seven million households completed 100 days of employment in 2009-10, it was down to only 2.5 million in 2014-15.

This was largely a result of a decline in funds made available to MGNREGA, which fell not only in nominal terms after 2009-10, but also in real terms, by more than half by 2013-14 compared with the peak years of 2009-10. This happened at a time when the wage rates in rural areas were increasing at more than 5% per annum since 2009-10. To add to the problems, the administrative reforms in MGNREGA were designed to keep the poor and vulnerable out of the programme, with insistence on technological quick-fixes. The net result of these financial and administrative measures was a decline in participation in the programme, a classic case of discouraged worker syndrome.

However, the relevance of MGNREGA in rural areas goes beyond its success in creating public employment and its impact on wages. MGNREGA has played a much larger role in revitalizing the labour market in rural areas. Not only has it led to the creation of a class of workers who are using the MGNREGA as a safety net, but these workers are also able to use it as a bargaining tool for extraction of higher wages. There is consensus that it did play a role in the acceleration in wage rate growth after 2008, directly through upward pressure on wages and tightening of the supply of casual labour to the market and indirectly through the pressure on the state governments to increase minimum wages. Although to a lesser extent, there is also evidence that it did lead to a slowdown in rural-urban migration along with contributing to an increase in agricultural productivity through the creation of rural infrastructure.

While the attempt of the current government to revive the MGNREGA is welcome, it is difficult to attribute it to any change in perception towards the scheme. Not only have the last two budgets of the NDA government failed to increase the budget for MGNREGA, there was hardly any effort to address the issues of delay in wage payments or improving the financial flow to the lowest functionaries until late last year. However, better late than never. The rebound in demand for work from MGNREGA is a clear indicator of the need of MGNREGA. More so in a situation of rural distress, where the rural economy has not only suffered back-to-back droughts but the decline in agricultural commodity prices has led to declining agricultural incomes. The fact that wages in rural areas have been stagnant in real terms since November 2013 has also contributed to the rural distress. Given the severe stress in the rural economy, reviving MGNREGA will not only require strengthening the administrative structure of the programme but also financial support to make it truly demand-based. This budget is not just an opportunity to reverse the years of neglect by financial infusion in MGNREGA, it may also be the only opportunity to revive the rural economy.

Himanshu is an associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and visiting fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.

Source: Mint, 3-02-2016

Alphabet world’s most valuable firm

Google

parent Alphabet Inc. is now the world’s most valuable company, stealing the crown from Silicon Valley rival Apple Inc. after reporting higher profit and sales fueled by a booming advertising business that’s supporting ambitious new projects.

Alphabet’s shares jumped 4.2% as the US market opened on Tuesday, pushing its market capitalization to $542.2 billion. The Web company had been inching closer to the iPhone maker in recent weeks as investors lost confidence in Apple’s smartphone business and wagered that Alphabet has a clearer path to growth. Apple first passed oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. to become the world’s most valuable company in 2011.

By changing its name and structure last year, Alphabet chief executive officer Larry Page has put the focus on the company’s main Web business while giving more insight into investments in new areas such as artificial intelligence, self- driving cars, health technology and fast Internet access. Even though Apple has also been building expertise in cars and AI, the secretive company has kept much of that under wraps. With iPhone sales slowing and China’s growth engine sputtering, Apple is on pace to post its first revenue decline in 15 years. Alphabet sales are estimated to climb 16% this year.

“Alphabet’s core business looks very healthy,” Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co., said. “That’s going to build investors’ confidence about the other bets they’ve been making.”

The shares of Mountain View, California-based Alphabet rose to $784.77, an all-time high, before slipping slightly to $777.01 at 9:36am in New York. Apple fell along with most other technology stocks, shedding 0.6% to $95.83. That gives the iPhone maker a market value of $530.6 billion.

Alphabet’s fourth-quarter revenue, excluding sales passed on to partners, rose 19% to $17.3 billion. That exceeded analysts’ average projection for $16.9 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, before certain items, was $8.67 a share, beating the prediction for $8.08. The health of Google’s main business and investor confidence in the company’s ability to innovate has helped to more than double the stock price since 2012. While Apple generates more than triple the revenue and profit of Google, investors focus more on future prospects than past performance. It’s a market truism that’s particularly acute in the technology industry, where new breakthroughs can rapidly undercut previously reliable business models. Apple and Alphabet’s ascendance to halftrillion-dollar-plus valuations illustrates the premium investors put on US technology companies. Five of the nine most valuable companies in the world are from the industry—Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.

Alphabet’s new ranking is also a milestone for co-founders Page and Sergey Brin, who started the company as students at Stanford University in 1998 as a tool to more easily search the Internet. The duo still controls the company through a preferred stock structure, are now among the richest people in the world.

Apple and Alphabet’s business models represent opposite approaches to selling technology tools and products. Apple releases a small number of premium-priced products that connect to a slate of services such as iTunes and the App Store, while Alphabet relies on its free services that bring in enough users to let it profit from selling a huge quantity of advertising. The two companies had a cooperative relationship for many years, and for mer G oogle CEO Er ic Schmidt sat on Apple’s board. The alliance turned into a rivalry after Google released the smartphone software Android, which Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said copied Apple’s designs, leading to multibillion-dollar patent lawsuits around the world.

Now Page and Brin are spending more of their time making sure that Alphabet will be able to out-innovate rivals, while leaving the day-to-day running of its main business to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai has devoted resources to buffing up ad products, introducing new formats while improving the delivery and accuracy of targeted marketing spots. That helped to boost total clicks on ads by 31% in the latest period, even as the average price for an ads on Google’s websites fell 16%.

Still, Google’s newer divisions are expensive: Alphabet’s “Other Bets” category had an operating loss of $3.57 billion for 2015, while revenue—mainly from the Nest smart thermostat, Fiber fast-Internet access and health technology—was just $448 million. At the same time, overall expenses were kept under control, making up 36% of revenue, compared with 37% a year earlier. Fourth-quarter net income rose to $4.92 billion from $4.68 billion a year earlier.

For what it’s worth, neither Alphabet nor Apple will be in the running for world’s most valuable company by market value should Saudi Arabia decide to sell shares in the state-owned Saudi Aramco oil company. It’s estimated that enterprise could be worth in excess of $2.5 trillion if publicly held.

Source: Mint, 3-02-3016

The annihilation by caste

The controversy over whether Rohith Vemula was a Dalit or not is a red herring, a disgraceful attempt to discredit his politics.

Even as we come to terms with the death of Rohith Vemula, we are witness to the unprecedented churning that he set in motion even as he left — educating, agitating, organising in death as in life.

From all his writing and his associations, there is no doubt whatsoever that Rohith identified himself as a Dalit son of a Dalit mother; as a Dalit Ambedkarite scholar and organiser; and as a co-traveller encountering the oppressions, discrimination and exclusion experienced by his Dalit compatriots on the university campus and outside. For those uneasy with his erudition, his performance, and his total identification with the Dalit identity, there had to be some way to discredit his politics in death.

Searching for this crucial flaw was even more important because what Rohith’s treatment amounts to, resulting in his death, comes within the meaning of caste atrocity, under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and has grave implications for those named in the FIR registered after his death. Whether or not Rohith named people in his suicide note is not material at this point. What is important to consider is whether the chain of events leading to his death gives reason to presume the possibility of discrimination based on caste coming within the meaning of atrocity and leading to his death by suicide.

Read: Rohith and the real anti-nationals

Caste as the core

There is no dispute about the facts. Contrary to what Ministers Smriti Irani or Sushma Swaraj might assert, this entire issue has to do with discrimination based on caste — the struggles of the Ambedkar Students Association; Rohith’s political and personal struggles; the institutionalised discrimination that Dalit students have been subjected to at the University of Hyderabad; curricular and co-curricular neglect of the social basis of discrimination in institutions of higher education; constant and disproportionate punitive action against Dalit students; their academic neglect and isolation; the simultaneous stigmatisation of “reserved” candidates and the vilification of Dalit students like Rohith who qualify in the open category but persist in identifying themselves as Dalit; the unusual and excessive interest of the Union government in the criminalisation of Dalit student activists who organise as Dalits on campuses; and most importantly, the institutionalised humiliation of Dalits in academia. Ministerial ignorance cannot be excused.

Dalit or not?

Officers and reporters have ferreted out his father and paternal family in an overzealous attempt to roll back the demand that this is a Dalit issue. The old patriarchal argument that since his father was Vaddera, he was Vaddera, negates Dalit women’s struggles in a caste order. In this case, it obliterates the experience of struggle against bondage, violence and humiliation of two generations, Radhika Vemula and her children — their fortitude and determination to defeat the oppressions of caste at all costs. And when they are on the threshold of an unimaginable victory, we witness, yet again, annihilation by caste. An injustice compounded and bolstered by the institutional and political denial of discrimination or atrocity.

Read: The clarity of a suicide note

There is no need to labour the point about whether the actions that led to Rohith’s suicide prima facie attract the provisions of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act. All that is needed at this point is to understand whether the act of suicide by a Dalit points to abetment by a non-Dalit. A complaint may be registered invoking the Act if this fact is established. If the police refuse, the court can intervene. Rohith has a non-Dalit father and a Dalit mother. While there has been a long line of cases in the various high courts and the Supreme Court on this question, the most recent one, decided by the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court consisting of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana Prakash Desai, is the law. In Rameshbhai Dabhai Naika vs State Of Gujarat & Ors. (decided on January 18, 2012), the question before the Supreme Court was “what would be the status of a person, one of whose parents belongs to the scheduled castes/scheduled tribes and the other comes from the upper castes” (para 1).

The concluding paragraph of the judgment is self-explanatory: “In an inter-caste marriage [i.e., a marriage between an SC/ST person and a non SC/ST person] the determination of the caste of the offspring is essentially a question of fact to be decided on the basis of the facts adduced in each case. It is open to the child of such marriage to lead evidence to show that he/she was brought up by the mother who belonged to the scheduled caste/scheduled tribe” (para 43). Did his father’s non-Dalit status give him an “advantageous start in life” or did he suffer “the deprivations, indignities, humilities and handicaps like any other member of the community to which his/her mother belonged?” Additionally, was he treated like a member of the community to which his mother belonged not only by that community but by people outside the community as well?

Read: Ancient prejudice, modern inequality

Rohith suffered the exclusions, humiliation and discrimination along with other Dalit students on the campus and in the wider community. Yet, he refused to allow caste to break or confine him — and that was his most poignant struggle. The most important aspect of this struggle — its defining feature — was that it carried forward the tenacious struggles for a life with dignity for her children by Radhika Vemula, who pointed her children to the stars daring them to dream. In a moment of utter collective regret, irreparable loss and grief, this family points the way to the annihilation of caste.

(Kalpana Kannabiran is Professor and Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad.)

Keywords: Educational institutions, higher education, Rohith Vemula, Dalit scholar suicide, caste discrimination, MHRD, University of Hyderabad

Source: The Hindu, 3-02-2016

Two Indian institutions among best small varsities

Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati has been ranked 14th globally, followed by Savitribai Phule Pune University in 18th place. Small universities are defined by having fewer than 5,000 students and teach and research across more than four disciplines from arts/humanities, medicine/clinical, engineering/technology, physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences. Only 20 small universities in the world are world-class (included in the Top 800 World University Rankings), according to the ranking.

California Institute of Technology, US, has been ranked number one on the list followed by two French institutions – École Normale Supérieure and École Polytechnique in the second and third place, respectively.

Phil Baty, Times Higher Education rankings editor, says: “When it comes to universities, size matters. For some students big is best, but for others, a small university is the right option. Small universities can potentially offer students a more intimate environment, with more support and attention from lecturers, and – let’s be honest – more of a chance for students to spend time with the star professors who in bigger universities may simply be too busy. The smaller university can also offer a greater sense of collegiality and community, where students are less likely to get lost in the crowd.”

Commenting on Indian institutions, Baty says, “India’s institutions are well represented in the World’s Best Small Universities Ranking 2016. Alongside Caltech, they demonstrate the world-class offering available at smaller institutions, no matter their ­location.”

Source-Hindustan Times, 3-02-2016

Death at My Doorstep

KHUSHWANT SINGH





We do not talk of death lightly -it is regarded as tasteless, ill-mannered and depressing.But death is an essential fact of life that makes no exceptions: it comes to kings as well as beggars, to the rich and poor, to saints as well as sinners, the aged and the young. It is best to prepare yourself for it and when it comes, welcome it with a smile on your lips.Being a rationalist, I do not accept irrational, unproven theories of life-death-rebirth in different forms as an unending process till our beings mingle with God and we attain nirvana. I do not accept the belief that while the body perishes, the soul survives. I do not know what the soul looks like; neither I, nor anyone has seen it. Nor do I accept the Hebrew, Christian and Islamic belief in the Day of Judgement -heaven and hell.
I have never subscribed to the belief that nothing bad should be said about the dead.If people were evil in their lifetimes, death does not convert them into saints. Such falsehoods may be condoned when inscribed on tombstones but not in obituaries that should be without bias, and truthful.
Memento mori -remember you must die. Without brooding over it, be prepared for it.The poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib put it beautifully , “Age travels at a galloping pace Who knows where it will stop? We do not have the reins in our hands We do not have our feet in the stirrups.“

 How About Celebrating The Small Joys?

Pulkit Sharma





We often desperately wait for splendid moments, big festivals, and huge victories in order to be ebullient. People may spend days, months, years and even a whole lifetime in the hope of experiencing staggering joy . For a majority, happiness does not exist in the present but seems to be distantly encapsulated in an idealised future. No wonder that almost everyone finds life to be encumbered with relentless misery and pain. But joy can be found easily provided we change our mental attitude.Firstly, we often believe that bliss is dependent on ideal external circumstances and if we can manage to reach there we will be ecstatic. But the truth is that external reality rarely fulfils our wishful fantasies. In order to be joyful, a dependence on external circumstances is likely to make us frustrated. Happiness can only be found within by focussing on deeper goals and making deeper connections with everyone around us.
Secondly , we erroneously think that till the time we continue to have problems we cannot be happy . But happiness is a matter of choice; we can choose to rise above all the pain and difficulty by enlarging ourselves. With practice, we can inspire our mind to be ecstatic by focussing on positive aspects of our selves and the world around us.
Thirdly , we ridiculously equate happiness with materialism and its big, grand and larger-than-life entities. The fact is that materialism only gives us excitement and a sense of short-lived achievement but not happiness. A recent research published in the journal Psychological Science found that big money impairs the ability of people to savour everyday positive emotions and experiences, and therefore paradoxically tends to make them unhappy .
Let us face it, big joys are hard to come by and involve a lot of effort and huge costs. If we were to just sit and wait for those isolated peak moments we will end up creating room for a lot of negativity and misery in our lives. In order to be positive, we must find joy in small things. This can be done easily by opening ourselves emotionally to abundant goodness that life offers every day and cultivating gratitude for it.
Sri Aurobindo reasoned that our inability to experience the full delight of existence derives from the mind's hedonistic currents of pain and pleasure. On the contrary , for the universal soul, all things and their experience carry rasa, the essence of delight.Because we ignore this essence and just focus on how things affect our hedonistic currents, we are cut off from abundant joy .
The Mother emphasised that all of us potentially carry the inner sun.Because we strongly identify with our separateness and do not regard ourselves as fluid and malleable, we are unable to transform. Once we overcome this faulty identification, the inner sun of divine laughter will manifest within and its radiance will dissolve all sorrows.
Whether it is basking in the warmth of the sun, listening to a soothing melody , having a heart-warming conversation with someone close, seeing small children explore the world, getting some support when we are in need, feeling inspired by an ideal, helping others go about their lives and doing run-of-the-mill tasks creatively ­ there is a lot that life offers us.
All we need to do is to overcome our sense of separateness and hedonism so that we can get connected to the cosmos and experience bliss in all its manifestations. This will enable us to be continuously nourished by the small joys we have in abundance.
(The writer is a clinical psychologist.)

Wanted: Ambedkar 2.0

Sagarika Ghose





The Dalit leadership has failed young Ambedkarites like Rohith Vemula

The politically correct felicitations of B R Ambedkar on his 125th birth anniversary were rendered somewhat meaningless by the suicide of Hy derabad Central University student Rohith Vemula. Netas descended in quick succession on HCU. From Rahul Gandhi to Chirag Paswan, Mayawati to Arvind Kejriwal, there were familiar expressions of sympathy but little evidence of just how the political class intends to address the core issue of realising the Ambedkarite vision for 21st century India. Particularly heartless were the utterances of Union ministers who questioned Rohith's caste without an ounce of empathy , even as they've been busily trying to appropriate Ambedkar.When Ambedkar is only a political token, how can his modern progressive vision ever be realised? By challenging Rohith's caste status, BJP might save its minister Bandaru Dattatreya from the SCST Act but it hardly provides for a political reach-out to those who now see Rohit as a symbol of a brutally unequal order. Nor can this be Rahul Gandhi's Belchi moment: having treated its Dalit leaders as marginal representatives for decades, it will require more than a one night vigil to convince Dalit groups that Congress is willing to share power.
The Paswans and Mayawatis may have benefitted from their caste status, but their politics has revolved around selfaggrandisement, hardly the radical change in the power structure that Ambedkar envisioned, nor the idea that political power was to be sought for the larger goal of social equality . Perhaps reservation in constituencies plays a part here; forever imprisoned in the reserved trap, a competitive Dalit leadership of intellect and stature has not emerged.
Ambedkar believed a political democracy that does not work towards an egalitarian society was meaningless. In Annihilation of Caste, he provided a trenchant critique of “enlightened high caste reformers who did not have the courage to agitate against caste“. For Ambed kar, upper caste leadership of Dalits was abhorrent, he rejected both Hinduism and the caste system as well as the claims of any upper castes to represent Dalits.
But his legatees in the post-Independence era, from Paswan to Mayawati to Ramdas Athavale, have rushed to form alliances with different mainstream upper caste political parties, enamoured as they are of political power for its own sake. Ambedkar's urgent mission of creating a Dalit counter-narrative to caste, to Hinduism and to the dominant forms of Indian culture, to mount a full scale socioeconomic transformation of Indian society , has been forgotten by those who act in his name.
The fiery Athavale and his Republican Party of India have sought favours from whoever has been in power. Ram Vilas Paswan holds the distinction of being in virtually every cabinet since the United Front government of the mid-1990s. For a while it looked as if Kanshi Ram and Mayawati would break out of the deadening cycle of mainstream politics particularly in their BAMCEF years. A BAMCEF bulletin declared in 1976: “Educated persons from oppressed communities are trapped in government services ... their cowardice, selfishness, inherent timidity and lack of desire of social service to their own creed ... makes them useless.“ But BAMCEF failed at an intellectual awakening. Kanshi Ram and Mayawati set up BSP in 1984 and unleashed a political revolution in UP.
Yet BSP not only created its own power elite but today has become almost unrecognisable from any other political party , particularly after Mayawati declared her mission was Sarvajan Samaj.While this made political sense, ideologically the Ambedkarite mission was somewhat betrayed. Educated Dalits may have formed entrepreneurs' groups and pressed for change in the private sector. But in the public realm, the Dalits today lack their version of an Asaduddin Owaisi. Love him or hate him, Owaisi is emerging as the political voice of the Indian Muslim, by offering a robust and reasoned counternarrative (unlike his more outrageous brother) on debates ranging from terrorism to the Uniform Civil Code. Where is a similarly argumentative Dalit leader offering a genuine alternative template?
As the scholar Kancha Ilaiah writes: “The tragedy is every young Dalit intellectual's ambition is to be a civil servant ... an administrative slave of Hindu Brahmanism ...the Dalit community has not produced a powerful socio-spiritual philosopher.“
In Homo Hierarchicus, Louis Dumont argued that the caste system is a system of ideas in which the Dalit by his very existence violates the brahmanical obsession with personal hygiene and purity . While the menstruating woman or the bereaved can escape their pollution, the Dalit is “unclean“ from birth. Reservations have created a Dalit middle class, but what about the mission to smash the “purity“ versus “pollution“ system of ideas altogether? When Ambedkar burnt the Manusmriti, launched a movement to drink water from tanks, he took his place with Jyotirao Phule and E V Ramaswami Naicker who had not just anti-Brahmin, but anti-caste and anti-birth based social hierarchy in their overarching agenda of action.
Where is such a Dalit leader today?
Rewriting the Purusa Sukta, a hymn that places castes in a hierarchy of the Divine's Being's body parts, was a demand once voiced by Dalit intellectuals as a crucial first step in a spiritual renaissance of Hinduism; they believed this would make Hinduism more modern and egalitarian.But there is no Dalit political leader who is able to frontally challenge the idea of Dalitness in caste Hindu minds. The Dalit Panthers of the 70s have faded away , their radical poetry either co-opted or forgotten.Youth like Rohith Vemula search for answers, try in vain to make sense of the discrimination they face, yet the modern Dalit leadership continues to fail them.

Source: Times of India, 3-02-2016