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Thursday, May 05, 2016

Selfless Labour


We work for our livelihood, to provide for our family and contribute to society . Vedic scriptures tell us that the purpose of life is moksha, or liberation from the cycle of birth and death. The Bhagwad Gita recommends four yogas -karma, action or work; raja, meditation; jnana, knowledge; and bhakti, devotion -as paths to achieve this goal. Of these, karma yoga is the most practical.The classification of the varnas is based on an individual's nature and character, which is believed to be formed by the three gunas of prakriti, or modes of material nature. However, over time, the varnashrama system was perverted and duties came to be assigned according to varnas subdivided into castes on a hereditary basis.
In today's competitive world, finding a profession based on one's svadharma is not the norm. The tendency is to work for the highest remuneration, or to do whatever work one gets in this era of growing unemployment, even if it is incompatible with one's nature and disposition. So, whatever work one is doing can be accepted as svadharma.
The Gita says that all occupations are equally good, be they of a sanyasi or householder, of a judge or sweeper, and when performed to the best of one's ability and without attachment, help in advancing on the spiritual path. Generally , we work for personal gain or satisfaction, which is a selfish motive. Selfish actions dissipate moral energy and do not promote spiritual development. Karma yoga is a system of ethics focused on unselfish action.
A Conscious Approach To Self-Realisation


Anyone who has dared to undertake a transcendental journey would acknowledge the constant resistance their mind put up in the form of contradictory and degenerating thoughts.These thoughts can destroy years of hard work in one go. In those moments one feels like a hapless cork floating in the ocean, getting tossed and engulfed by waves in multiple directions. A large majority lives in the illusion that once their consciousness is able to go beyond the mind things will automatically fall into place. But this rarely happens because till the time we are ruled by thoughts we cannot rise above the mundane as various forms and manifestations of cravings bind us.In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali emphasises that the essence of yoga is to be able to control the character of thought. Our body , mind and its contents and the external environment are aspects of Prakriti, the seen, while Purusha, the seer, is absolute consciousness. When the mind is controlled it could connect with and reflect absolute consciousness or Purusha. According to Patanjali, the sole aim of life is to gain this Self-knowledge.Therefore, we need to develop ways of systematically working with our thought processes so that the mind is able to shift its identification from Prakriti to Purusha.
The Mother of Auroville advanced several techniques of Integral Yoga through which one can undertake this difficult journey . According to her, negative thoughts come from various parts of our being that are not evolved and also from several external sources. Every day , many forces, vibrations and movements enter our mind and movements enter our mind and when they see a corresponding ambience within they fuse together as a powerful entity. This thought-entity then seeks to realise itself, sabotaging our growth-oriented parts. To put an end to this passivity, we need to discipline our mind so that it can think in a unified manner and start aspiring from a higher plane.
At all times, we must endeavour to find in ourselves the light of truth and the divine will, so that we can think power fully, constructively and harmoniously . Often we submissively give in to negative thoughts by telling ourselves that we are too weak and that nothing is in our control. We don't realise that no impediment can stand in the way of motivation and perseverance.Just like we train our body to move and act robustly in the physical realm, we need to train our mind to develop strength and discretion in the psychological space. We need to look at each negative thought consciously and put all our focus on what we would like to materialise instead. While doing this we should call on our highest aspiration and seek divine will to get manifested. Like a storyteller, we need to add details that suit this objective and edit out those that don't and then make a cohesive narrative in our mind. We should go over this narrative repeatedly as if one is listening to one's favourite story . When we reach this point, this narrative automatically develops powerful wings and glides into the cosmos in order to realise itself.
It is often believed that to attain the state of absolute consciousness, the mind needs to be stilled in seclusion and meditation. But according to the Mother, the mind can also reach a transcendental state by rigorously working on itself in the light of its highest aspiration and the divine will.Then the mind starts performing its original function of reflecting and working in service of the truth. That way , conscious thinking becomes a powerful tool for Self-realisation.

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents


Vol. 51, Issue No. 18, 30 Apr, 2016

Editorials

50 Years of EPW

Commentary

Book Reviews

Perspectives

Review of Women's Studies

Special Articles

Economic Notes

Discussion

Current Statistics

Postscript

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Letters

Web Exclusives

Reports From the States

Most States have below 'normal' water storage in reservoirs

Important reservoirs in three of five regions in the country now have less water in storage compared to what they had on an average during the last ten years at this time of the year.
The latest bulletin of the Central Water Commission based on the data available on April 28, reveals that only Tripura, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh have reservoir storage levels that are better than 'normal', a term that denotes the average level of the last 10 years. The Commission's bulletin includes data on the storage status of 91 important reservoirs in the country that the Commission monitors.
The Western region, which includes Gujarat and Maharashtra, and the Southern region, which includes Andhra Pradesh Telangana, two combined projects in both these States, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, seem particularly hard-hit.
Reservoirs in the Western region have a live storage of 18 per cent compared to the ten-year average of 35 per cent. The figures are 13 and 23 per cent respectively for the Southern region and 21 and 31 per cent respectively for the Northern region, which includes Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan. The Central region, which includes Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Eastern region, which includes Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and Tripura have levels that are normal or better than normal.
All the regions have less water in storage than what they had at the corresponding point in time last year.
Reservoirs in the Telengana-Andhra region are the worst off with a deficit of 82 per cent, followed by Uttarakhand, with 75 per cent, and Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, with 61 per cent each.
Most reservoirs in Maharashtra have witnessed a drop of 50 per cent or more in storage levels when compared to the ten year average.
In the other hard-hit regions - Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand and as well as two combined projects in Andhra and Telengana - all reservoirs have recorded a decline in storage of more than 50 percent, except one.
Other States too that do not have as dismal a storage position also have reservoirs that have witnessed a more than 50 decline compared to the 'normal' numbers.
And in contrast, some of the deficit States have seen an improvement in the situation over the past week. Marginal improvements were seen in the position of Punjab, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, for instance.
The total live storage capacity of all 91 reservoirs is 21 per cent, which is 64 percent of the storage this time last year and 77 percent of the decadal average.
Source: The Hindu, 2-05-2016

Everybody loves a good quota

Unless there is a procedure for notification of groups moving out of the reserved category, demands for reservation by groups like the Jats, Gujjars and Patidars will continue

I sometimes feel sorry for the governments of Gujarat, Haryana and Rajasthan, which are plagued by demands for reservation from powerful and aggressive communities. Patidars, Jats and Gujjars feel that communities that first managed to board the reservation train are uniting to keep them out. State governments would be perfectly happy to include them in the reserved category if they were not worried about the electoral backlash. Other Backward Classes (OBC) classification for Jats brings a similar demand from Rajputs; Scheduled Tribes (ST) classification for Gujjars brings about protests from the powerful Meena community unwilling to share the ST classification. Gujarat seems to have found a novel way to address these demands: be so inclusive that hardly anyone is left to protest. A 10 per cent quota for the economically backward among upper castes— that is, those with family incomes of less than Rs.6 lakh per annum (p.a.) — spreads the net so wide that the excluded group is minuscule.
Data on income

Since income data are hard to come by, let us look at three different sources of data to derive estimates of those with incomes above Rs.6 lakh p.a. First, data on income tax filers in 2012-13 show that only 13 per cent of individual returns have incomes higher than Rs.5.5 lakh p.a.; once we take into account people who do not file the returns at all, this forms about 3.5 per cent of total individuals in the country aged 18 and above. Since incomes may be hidden on tax returns, we must look to alternative data. The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) collects information on consumption expenditure, not incomes. If we apply household savings rate of about 25 per cent, a Rs.6 lakh income p.a. cut-off would result in a cut-off of about Rs.4.5 lakh consumption. NSSO data (2011-12) show that less than 1 per cent of the population falls in this category. A third source of data is the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) of 2011-12, organised by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland. It collects data for both income and expenditure. It shows that less than 2 per cent of the population had household consumption of Rs.4.5 lakh p.a. and about 2.5 per cent had incomes of Rs.6 lakh p.a. in 2011-12. This suggests that whatever statistics we use, a Rs.6 lakh p.a. cut-off will exclude less than 5 per cent of the population from being eligible for reservations if the Gujarat example is followed nationwide.
These statistics should calm the passions around this new wrinkle in the battle for reservation in Gujarat. Appeasement tactics used by the Gujarat government are mostly ineffective; they will neither reduce options for middle-income Indians nor will they really expand benefits for the poor among forward castes.
Can we devise a narrower band that might really benefit the poor among groups currently ineligible for reservations? Here, our spectacular failure in identifying the poor for issuing Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards gives us reason to be wary. The IHDS survey found that in 2011-12, only 50 per cent of the poor had a BPL card while nearly a third of the non-poor had BPL cards. Almost all observers agree that identifying the poor is a difficult task resulting in errors of both inclusion and exclusion. This is particularly the case when incomes are growing rapidly and a household that is poor in one year may well climb out of poverty the following year. So focussing on just the poor among the general category may be more difficult than we anticipate.
Moreover, the demands for expansion of reservation have little to do with the poor among the so-called “general” category. Most of these demands are emerging from angry young men — many of them with college education — among agriculturalist communities that have historically held considerable political clout (for instance, the Navnirman movement of the 1970s, which the Gujarat government is acutely aware of).
Future of reservation
In order to get out of this quagmire, we need to think of the immediate concerns of educated youth and the broader future of reservation in India. What fuels the anger of young men from agricultural communities? As they see it, investing in education has got them only minor monetary benefits. With massive growth in private and distance education programmes of questionable quality, most college graduates today lack the skills for high-paying private sector jobs. They may well be qualified for lower-level clerical or support positions, but for these jobs’ salaries are far lower in the private sector than the public sector. The ratio of government salary to private sector salary for a college graduate has consistently increased; the IHDS data show that in 2004-05, a college graduate earned 62 paisa in the private sector for each rupee in the public sector; by 2011-12 it had dropped to 57 paisa. With implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission, this difference will grow. Not surprisingly, competition for government jobs is fierce. As Prabhat Mittal, Secretary, Government of Uttar Pradesh, noted, in 2015 nearly 2.3 million applications were received for 368 low-ranking positions in the State government. Is it surprising that frustrated young men try to beat this insane competition by demanding inclusion in the reserved category? If government salaries were more on a par with the salaries of the private sector, it is possible that this strident demand may subside. If current initiatives for increasing employability and creating more manufacturing jobs succeed, this will also reduce the pressure.
A longer-term solution, however, requires re-evaluation of the fundamental nature of India’s reservation regime. Affirmative action to make space for communities that have historically been subject to discrimination fits well with the Indian ethos of creating a level playing field and is part of the Indian Constitution. But the patchwork implementation, particularly for the OBC classification that is currently in place, makes little sense and leaves room for powerful lobbies to unite around demands for inclusion.
One of the ways of dismantling the quota raj is to ensure that the reserved category certificate is not a currency that is hoarded by groups who no longer need it. This involves periodic recertification into the reserved category. Unfortunately, the current system has an established, if imperfect, procedure for notification of new groups into the reserved category but not for moving groups out of the reserved category. A first step towards establishing such a process may be to ensure that we collect data on caste/tribe affiliation along with data on basic demographic and housing characteristics in the 2021 population census. This would allow us to move past the exclusive reliance on the 1931 census and obtain information on the current socio-economic conditions of all castes and communities in India.
Frankly, I have never understood the resistance from the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (ORGI) for collecting caste data in national population census. If the colonial census could do this in 1931, why can’t we do it today? Collecting data on thousands of castes is difficult, but it is by no means impossible. Perhaps, the collection of data on caste is a hot potato that the ORGI hopes someone else will handle. But surely national interest demands that this caution be put aside to develop a long-term solution to an issue that has gained such visibility. While we are destined for periodic eruptions of demand for reservations by groups like the Jats, without timely and accurate data we have no way of developing a rational system for responding to these demands.
Sonalde Desai is Senior Fellow, NCAER, and Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland. Views are personal.
Source: The Hindu, 03-05-2016
Wheel of Existence


Pythagoras' is the first experiment in creating a synthesis.Twenty-five centuries have passed since then. There have been great mystics like the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Zarathustra. There have been great scientists like Newton, Edison and Einstein. But it is difficult to find a man at home with both worlds. Pythagoras is a class unto himself. The synthesis was needed then as it is needed today because the world is again at the same point. The world moves in a wheel motion.Samsara in Sanskrit means `the world', it also means the wheel. The wheel is big: one circle is completed in 25 centuries. Twenty-five centuries before Pythagoras, Atlantis came to an end because of man's own scientific growth. Without wisdom, scientific growth is dangerous. Now the wheel has come to the same point.
Uprooted, life loses meaning as values disappear. Everything seems pointless. Chaotic times can either be a great curse, as it happened in Atlantis, or can prove to be a quantum leap in human growth. It depends on how we use them. It is only in such great times of chaos that great stars are born.
Ordinary people, the majority, live in unconsciousness; so they can't see even a few steps ahead. If we can create a great momentum for meditation, for the inward journey , for tranquillity , stillness and love, humanity will be born anew. Only a few people will achieve enlightenment. Here and there, once in a while, a person will become alert and aware and divine.
Well-educated moms have half the no. of kids that illiterates do: Census data


With more girls reaching higher levels of education, the average number of children born to them after they get married is falling, Census 2011 data released on Friday shows. India had nearly 340 million married women and the average number of children was 3.3, down from 3.8 in 2001and 4.3 in 1991.But hidden in this average figure is a wide range between an illiterate mother and a welleducated one. Mothers who were deprived of education in their early life and have remained illiterate had 3.8 children on average. At the other extreme, mothers with a graduate degree or above had just 1.9 children. That's half the number of children compared to illiterate mothers.
The average number of children is calculated by counting the number of children ever born to women in the 45-49 age group, which is the end of their reproductive age and thus represents the total children they can have.
While the spread of education is widening with each passing year, school drop out rates are still unconscionably high among girls. An idea of this is gained from enrolment data for 2014-15 put out under the District Information System for Education (DISE), which shows that there were around 13 million girls enrolled in Class 1 but the number went down by 58% to 5.4 million in Class 12. With this kind of massive dropout, it will take many years for the overall fertility rates to decline substantially more. Census data shows that between the two ex tremes of illiterate and graduate+ mothers, there is a continuum ­ as the educational level increases, the average number of children goes down. Mothers who have not studied beyond class 8 (middle school) have three children on an average, those who dropped out between middle and high school had 2.8 children and those who had studied between class 10 and graduation restricted their children to 2.3.
The rates of decline between 1991 and 2001 were 14% for mothers who studied up to middle school but between 2001 and 2011 this decline was more at 18%. It was a similar situation for other educational levels.
Is it just education of mothers that is causing this decline? Experts say that it is a key factor but accompanied by a set of other circum stances that go with mothers' education. More educated women are likely to be from better income households and are also likely to be married to more educated men.So, according to them everything put together is helping.
The Census data also shows that there are still nearly 96 million illiterate married women who are in the child bearing age, that is, 15-49 years. And there also are about 16 million married women in the same age group that have not studied beyond primary level. Presumably, they are yet untouched by the wider trend of having less children.


Source: The Times of India, 3-05-2016