Wednesday, February 03, 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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