Monday, May 09, 2016
Inequality in India is far worse than believed
It’s of Latin American rather than East Asian proportions. That is a problem
The inequality problem has to be understood properly if it has to be dealt with successfully
In his landmark budget speech in 1992, Manmohan Singh had said that the eventual aim of economic reforms was to encourage the growth of industries that use labour intensively, create jobs in the productive sectors of the economy and reduce income inequalities. He was clearly inspired by the success that many Asian countries had in the previous decades in pushing up average incomes without making inequality worse.
New data released in recent weeks shows that inequality in India is of Latin American rather than East Asian proportions. In its Asian regional economic outlook released last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has put out new data that shows how the two most successful Asian economies after 1990—China and India—have seen inequality rise in tandem with economic growth. This is in sharp contrast to what happened in countries such as South Korea or Taiwan in earlier decades. The multilateral lender has based its analysis on the Gini coefficient, a standard measure used by economists to measure inequality.
The IMF estimates that the Gini coefficient for India has gone up from 45 in 1990 to 51 in 2013. China has done even worse. Its Gini coefficient has climbed from 33 to 53 in the same period. The IMF inequality estimates are very similar to the results from a new global study by the LIS Data Centre in Luxembourg, which has recently said that India has a Gini coefficient of 50. These numbers are far higher than the official estimates of inequality that are mistakenly based on consumption rather than income.
The inequality problem has to be understood properly if it has to be dealt with successfully. Too much of the Indian debate is dominated by either angry ideological battles or vacuous moralizing. There are several possible explanations for growing income inequality—from the nature of technological progress to the lack of opportunities due to the caste system, to ineffective government spending programmes and lack of infrastructure that connects people in the interiors to markets.
One important ingredient in this debate goes back to a link Singh made in his 1992 budget speech—the need for greater job creation in the modern sectors of the economy. This has been one of the few distinct failures amid the overall success of the economic reforms. The failure to create enough factory and office jobs has stymied the overdue shift of people from low productivity to high productivity work.
Inequality in India has two extra facets that deserve attention. First, there is difference in productivity growth between the urban and rural areas. Second, there is the income gap within the cities between those who have been able to connect to the global economy and those who have not. One practical illustration of this is the millions of farmers who remain trapped in a stagnant agricultural sector. Those who have managed to escape tend to eke out a living in tiny enterprises that have no access to formal credit, growing markets, technology or modern management, as the new Economic Census released by the government last month so starkly highlighted.
The countries of East Asia managed to evade this trap through labour-intensive industrialization that moved millions of poor people from farms to modern factories. The troublesome question is whether India can replicate this Lewisian transition at a time when robotics is changing the nature of industrial work.
The global picture is more pleasing to the eye. Global inequality has actually decreased since millions of Indians and Chinese began joining the global middle class from 1990 onwards. Lower global inequality is paradoxically a result of higher inequality in India and China.
Very high levels of inequality are bad in themselves. Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik has also argued that widening inequality can weaken public support for economic reforms, and thus encourage governments to choose populist policies. That is precisely what we saw with Manmohan Singh Ver 2.0—the prime minister of the two United Progressive Alliance governments rather than the finance minister of the P.V. Narasimha Rao government.
This is a lesson that the economic strategists around Narendra Modi should be sensitive to.
Source: Mintepaper, 9-05-2016
Conserving the last drop
The way forward may be to not rely only on dams, interlinked rivers, and borewell drilling — but to supplant these with effective water conservation, storage and groundwater recharge
For the past one week, The Hindu has explored the multi-faceted crisis of water scarcity that has gripped India this summer, through a daily series titled ‘Last Drop’. The series sought to give our readers a comprehensive understanding of six critical themes underpinning the scarcity question.
For each theme the series outlined the contours of the crisis at a national level; it also supplied grassroots context, telling compelling stories from villages across the country, to illustrate the hard realities that millions of water-starved rural poor live with daily.
The series kicked off with a close look at the frenzied pace of borewell drilling that can be found across many parts of India, from the suburban neighbourhoods of Hyderabad to the parched dry lands of Latur.
Land of 90,000 borewells
In the first article of the series (“Drilling for their lives”, May 3), we visited the heartland of Marathwada, which is in some ways the epicentre of the 2016 drought. There we discovered a land of 90,000 borewells, a number so breathtaking that it even defied calculations of the official well-enumerators of the area. It had also driven the water table 1,300 feet into the ground in some parts.
In the first article of the series (“Drilling for their lives”, May 3), we visited the heartland of Marathwada, which is in some ways the epicentre of the 2016 drought. There we discovered a land of 90,000 borewells, a number so breathtaking that it even defied calculations of the official well-enumerators of the area. It had also driven the water table 1,300 feet into the ground in some parts.
We next visited the heartland of the Deccan plateau in Telangana (“Telangana’s tanker economy”, May 4), where a severe deficit of rainfall has pushed distressed households into the arms of the private water tanker economy.
At this early stage in the series, it was becoming increasingly evident that to avoid suffering the worst effects of the water-scarce months, a bridge had to be built between flood and drought, in the words of Professor S. Janakarajan, Professorial Consultant at the Madras Institute of Development Studies and President, South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies.
In our goal to provide our readers with a 360 degree view of water problems in India, we shifted our gaze from quantity to quality concerns, and nowhere in the country were water quality issues more starkly exemplified than in a small pocket of northwestern Tamil Nadu, in the districts of Krishnagiri and Dharmapuri (“Drinking water, sipping poison”, May 5). This region has been seriously afflicted by fluoride-contaminated groundwater, with sometimes catastrophic health consequences for the population. Our report shone a light upon the unusually high prevalence of kidney disease, renal failure, epileptic seizures, and mental retardation among the people here, notwithstanding a major Japan-financed fluorosis mitigation project.
Delving further into some of the solutions that the Indian government has come up with over the years to stave off periodic droughts, the ‘Last Drop’ series re-examined the logic and potential pitfalls associated with big dams and the proposal to interlink major rivers (“Interlinking: An idea with flaws, May 7”).
In the Mettur region of Tamil Nadu, we unearthed a curious paradox of poverty amidst plenty, in the currency of water (“Scarcity in Mettur’s vicinity”, May 6). At the heart of this conundrum was the ever-prevalent problem of wasted runoff, or water that is improperly channelled and fails to efficiently recharge groundwater levels.
The failure to upgrade water storage capacity can be traced back to inadequate policy attention towards de-silting dams, tanks and canals, and also on repair and maintenance to plug leaks along the way.
Problem in policy
Policy is also to blame in some parts of the country, for deeper, systemic failures with regards to water scarcity. For example, in Maharashtra, endemic corruption has beset large-scale construction deals, and drought expert P. Sainath explained that Rs. 1,18,000 crore was spent in that State over 12 years, and yet only 18 per cent of gross cropped area was under irrigation.
Policy is also to blame in some parts of the country, for deeper, systemic failures with regards to water scarcity. For example, in Maharashtra, endemic corruption has beset large-scale construction deals, and drought expert P. Sainath explained that Rs. 1,18,000 crore was spent in that State over 12 years, and yet only 18 per cent of gross cropped area was under irrigation.
Similarly, Maharashtra and parts of the Deccan peninsula exemplify the distorting effects of crop subsidies and a skewed agricultural produce market that rewards farmers who cultivate unsuitably water-intensive crops such as sugarcane and other cash crops.
Yet policy is also shaping the very fundamentals of river-based irrigation and drinking water systems, especially through the mega project of interlinking the key river basins across the country. This proposal has found enthusiastic supporters in the present government. But as our article on its flaws explained, there are several monumental consequences that it will have to reckon with. These include the risk that it could displace nearly 1.5 million people due to the submergence of 27.66 lakh hectares of land.
If such risks are rigorously managed, then there could be tangible benefits in terms of 35 million additional hectares of irrigation, the generation of 34,000 additional megawatts of power, and “incidental benefits” of flood control, navigation, fisheries, salinity and pollution control, according to the Central government.
If India is to boldly march into a water-secure future that it builds for itself, then it must also glance backward to learn how our ancestors invested meticulously in conserving water, harvesting rainfall and allowing these savings to nurture the aquifer and water table.
Rounding off the ‘Last Drop’ series, we therefore invited our readers to join us on a delectable journey through time for a glimpse into how the ancient bawari system, or stepwells, of Rajasthan promoted a sustainable, community-focused approach towards water conservation (“Conservation: Lessons from ancient India”, May 8).
Indeed the way forward may be for India to not rely only on large dams, interlinked rivers, and borewell drilling, but also supplant these extraction-focussed projects with more effective and widespread water conservation, storage and groundwater recharge.
Establishing this harmony between water extraction and restoration could help us avoid a bleak future ravaged by endless cycles of floods and droughts.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
Source: The Hindu, 9-05-2016
Poverty and the death row
Opposition to the death penalty is often rooted in arguments about its irreversibility, its essential cruelty, the possibility of error and the false sense of justice in doing unto convicted murderers what they had done to their victims. In the Indian context, politics surrounding the prisoners’ ethnic origin or linguistic affinity is often the basis for pleas for clemency. Rarely is a more compelling reason invoked: the possibility of an offender’s economic background, educational level, social status or religious identity working against his interests in legal proceedings. A report released on Friday by the National Law University, Delhi, on the working of the death penalty in India provides validation and proof for something that those familiar with administration of justice knew all along: that most of those sentenced to death in the country are poor and uneducated; and many belong to religious minorities. In addition, a revealing number is that as many as 241 out of 385 death row convicts were first-time offenders. Some may have been juveniles when they committed capital offences, but lacked the documentation to prove their age. Against the salutary principle that those too young and too old be spared the death sentence, 54 death row convicts whose age was available were between 18 and 21 at the time of the offence, and seven had crossed 60 years of age. An average prisoner awaiting execution is likely to be from a religious minority, a Dalit caste, a backward class, or from an economically vulnerable family, and is unlikely to have finished secondary schooling.
The late President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, had once said a study by his office into the background of convicts seeking mercy showed “a social and economic bias”. He digressed from his prepared text during a public lecture to ask, “Why are so many poor people on death row?” The link between socio-economic standing and access to competent legal counsel and effective representation is quite strong. A question of concern that arises is whether these statistics indicate systemic bias or institutionalised prejudice. It is not uncommon that legal grounds unavailable to the vulnerable are invoked in favour of the influential. A recent instance is that of four prisoners from a political party who were sentenced to death for burning a bus during a protest and killing three women students. The court, while commuting their sentence, invoked the ‘doctrine of diminished responsibility’ and reasoned that those gripped by mob frenzy were not fully cognisant of the situation around them. While invoking any ground to commute a death sentence to life is welcome, the impression is inescapable that such relief often comes at a very late stage and only to those with the means to pursue legal remedies till the very end. When a judicial system that is seen as favouring the influential resorts to capital punishment, it will be vulnerable to the charge of socio-economic bias. Law and society, therefore, will be better served if the death penalty itself is abolished. These statistics must reinforce the larger moral argument against the state taking the life of a human being — any human being — as punishment.
Source: The Hindu, 9-05-2016
The Power of Prayer
MURALI KRISHNA
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Prayer is an earnest hope or a wish, a request for help or expression of thanks made to God.Among all the means of salvation recommended by Jesus Christ in the Gospel, the first place is given to prayer. It is said that our prayers are so dear to God that he appointed angels to present them to him as soon as we express them.We learn by reading and med itating, but we obtain the grace to do it by prayer. Gayatri Mantra originated with the creation of the earth. Lord Brahma, creator, got this mantra by a divine voice. It is said that because of this that Brahma got the power of creation. The Gayatri Mantra says, “Oh God! Thou art the giver of life, remover of pain and sorrow, the bestower of happiness. Oh! Creator of the universe, may we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light, may thou guide our intellect in the right direction.“
Yasin Sherif is a favourite prayer of Muslims. This particular surah is devoted to the Holy Prophet and the revelation that he brought. The abbreviated letters Yasin are usually construed as a title of the Holy Prophet, but it is not permissible to be dogmatic about the meaning of the abbreviated letter. This surah is considered to be `the heart of the Quran' as it concerns the central figure in the teaching of Islam and the central doctrine of revelation and the hereafter.
The prayer of a humble soul penetrates the heavens and presents itself before the throne of God and departs not without God's looking on it and hearing it. Families that pray together stay together.
Yasin Sherif is a favourite prayer of Muslims. This particular surah is devoted to the Holy Prophet and the revelation that he brought. The abbreviated letters Yasin are usually construed as a title of the Holy Prophet, but it is not permissible to be dogmatic about the meaning of the abbreviated letter. This surah is considered to be `the heart of the Quran' as it concerns the central figure in the teaching of Islam and the central doctrine of revelation and the hereafter.
The prayer of a humble soul penetrates the heavens and presents itself before the throne of God and departs not without God's looking on it and hearing it. Families that pray together stay together.
Singing Bhajans Is Not A Waste Of Time
Satsang: Mata Amritanandamayi
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Is there any benefit to be gained from singing bhajans (devotional songs), praying and doing japa (mantra chanting)? Can't that time be spent doing work that will be of some use?Many people sing romantic songs.How does one respond to people who ask, “What's the use of doing that? Can't that time be spent doing something useful instead?“ Only one who has experienced something knows whether it is beneficial or not. People enjoy listening to ordinary songs. Similarly , when devotees listen to bhajans, they forget everything else and become absorbed in the bhajans. Worldly emotions and relationships are typically the subject of ordinary songs, and listeners relish the mood behind these songs. But when bhajans and prayers are sung, both the singers and the audience experience peace of mind.
Disco music arouses emotional vibra tions. Listening to romantic songs evokes the mood between lover and beloved as well as related emotions and thoughts.Bhajans remind us of our relationship with God. Here, divine qualities are awakened instead of emotions. Bhajans impart peace to singer and listener alike.
Amma is not criticising other types of songs. Some people derive pleasure from them. There are many kinds of people in the world. Different people like different things. Everything is important at some level. Amma does not reject anything.
God-realisation is not the onl aim of singing bhajans. It offers other advantages, too. Bhajans and prayers awaken positive vibrations in oneself and in the environment. Friendship with everyone is the spirit behind bhajans and prayers.Through prayer, the devotee begins contemplating. A child repeats a word 10 times and thus memorises the word. In the same way , when one sings bhajans and reiterates divine qualities, these qualities take root in the heart, creating an awakening in life.
Bhajans impart joy and provide respite to the mind. In order to gain the most from bhajans, one must feel, “I am nothing. You are everything.“ This is true prayer. How ever, such an attitude does not dawn easily . Only when inner wisdom dawns will that attitude flower fully. But one need not just wait until then. One can cultivate the right attitude and move ahead.Never forget that all our power is from God. Even our breath is not under our control. One might say , “Here I come,“ before walking down the stairs. But even before completing that sentence, that person might collapse from a heart attack and die. We have heard of such instances.Therefore, we must cultivate the attitude of being merely an instrument in His hands. We must not sing bhajans or pray just for the sake of fulfilling our desires. At present, many consider prayer a means to fulfil their selfish desires. Instead, we must strive to awaken noble qualities and positive vibrations through prayer. If we are interested only in gratifying our senses, the incidence of rapes, thefts and murders will increase in society . Love and devotion for God help people tread the path of righteousness. It is a practical way of maintaining harmony in society .
Prayers borne of positive thoughts create positive vibrations; prayers arising from negative thoughts create negative vibrations. The kind of vibrations that prayer radiates depends on the kind of thoughts of the person praying. When one prays for the destruction of one's enemy , one's filled with thoughts of anger. The world then receives angry vibrations from this person. The attitude behind the prayer determines the vibrations that the world receives from the one who prays.
Disco music arouses emotional vibra tions. Listening to romantic songs evokes the mood between lover and beloved as well as related emotions and thoughts.Bhajans remind us of our relationship with God. Here, divine qualities are awakened instead of emotions. Bhajans impart peace to singer and listener alike.
Amma is not criticising other types of songs. Some people derive pleasure from them. There are many kinds of people in the world. Different people like different things. Everything is important at some level. Amma does not reject anything.
God-realisation is not the onl aim of singing bhajans. It offers other advantages, too. Bhajans and prayers awaken positive vibrations in oneself and in the environment. Friendship with everyone is the spirit behind bhajans and prayers.Through prayer, the devotee begins contemplating. A child repeats a word 10 times and thus memorises the word. In the same way , when one sings bhajans and reiterates divine qualities, these qualities take root in the heart, creating an awakening in life.
Bhajans impart joy and provide respite to the mind. In order to gain the most from bhajans, one must feel, “I am nothing. You are everything.“ This is true prayer. How ever, such an attitude does not dawn easily . Only when inner wisdom dawns will that attitude flower fully. But one need not just wait until then. One can cultivate the right attitude and move ahead.Never forget that all our power is from God. Even our breath is not under our control. One might say , “Here I come,“ before walking down the stairs. But even before completing that sentence, that person might collapse from a heart attack and die. We have heard of such instances.Therefore, we must cultivate the attitude of being merely an instrument in His hands. We must not sing bhajans or pray just for the sake of fulfilling our desires. At present, many consider prayer a means to fulfil their selfish desires. Instead, we must strive to awaken noble qualities and positive vibrations through prayer. If we are interested only in gratifying our senses, the incidence of rapes, thefts and murders will increase in society . Love and devotion for God help people tread the path of righteousness. It is a practical way of maintaining harmony in society .
Prayers borne of positive thoughts create positive vibrations; prayers arising from negative thoughts create negative vibrations. The kind of vibrations that prayer radiates depends on the kind of thoughts of the person praying. When one prays for the destruction of one's enemy , one's filled with thoughts of anger. The world then receives angry vibrations from this person. The attitude behind the prayer determines the vibrations that the world receives from the one who prays.
Saturday, May 07, 2016
Humility & Tolerance
CHAITANYA CHARAN DAS
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To experience ceaseless spiritual happiness, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu advocated, “Being humbler than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree and offering all respects to others and expecting none in return, chanting the holy names of the Lord constantly .“ He explained that we are spiritual beings, eternal loving children of God.We can find lasting happiness -not in acquiring material positions and possessions, but in reviving our innate love of God. Humility and tolerance, virtues essential for achieving endless bliss, are also valuable assets for living peacefully and successfully in this world.
Pride, the opposite of humility, makes us crave for honour from others as our source of happiness. When a proud person is disrespected, his lack of freedom becomes appallingly obvious; he is forced by pride to lose his prudence and explode with words and actions, often hurting the other person and even himself far beyond what the situation warrants.Humility , on the contrary , brings freedom from the craving for external honour.
Tolerance too is an underutilised power. A relative behaves unreasonably , a colleague speaks impolitely , a power cut upsets our plans, another vehicle cuts across our path -such daily situations offer rich premiums for the tolerant. Lack of tolerance makes us a victim of our circumstances, whereas tolerance brings the freedom to choose an intelligent response and stay fixed in our values and goals, irrespective of our circumstances.
Pride, the opposite of humility, makes us crave for honour from others as our source of happiness. When a proud person is disrespected, his lack of freedom becomes appallingly obvious; he is forced by pride to lose his prudence and explode with words and actions, often hurting the other person and even himself far beyond what the situation warrants.Humility , on the contrary , brings freedom from the craving for external honour.
Tolerance too is an underutilised power. A relative behaves unreasonably , a colleague speaks impolitely , a power cut upsets our plans, another vehicle cuts across our path -such daily situations offer rich premiums for the tolerant. Lack of tolerance makes us a victim of our circumstances, whereas tolerance brings the freedom to choose an intelligent response and stay fixed in our values and goals, irrespective of our circumstances.
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