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Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Six-hour work days can increase productivity'
Rebecca Greenfield
BLOOMBERG


Study Shows Employees Get Sick Less, Work Harder
For about a year, nurses at the Svartedalens retirement ho me have worked six-hour days on an eight-hour salary. They're part of an experiment funded by the Swedish government to see if a shorter workday can increase productivity . The conclusion? It does.As with any cultural shift in the workplace, the six-hour day has to prove itself more than just humane. For any employer, in Sweden or elsewhere, an abridged workweek can't damage productivity if it's going to have a chance. A year's worth of data from the project, which compares staff at Svartedalens with a control group at a similar facility , showed that 68 nurses who worked six hour days took half as much sick time as those in the control group. And they were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two-week period, said Bengt Lorentzon, a researcher on the project.
“If the nurses are at work more time and are more healthy , this means that the continuity at the residence has increased,“ Lorentzon said. “That means higher quality (care).“ Less surprising was that the nurses were 20% happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time. This allowed them to do 64% more activities.
Svartedalens is part of a small but growing movement in Europe.Sweden has dabbled with shorter workdays before: From 1989 to 2005, home-care-services workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour work day , but it was abolished due to a lack of data proving its worth. The Svartedalens experiment is designed to avoid that problem: “This trial is very , very clean because it's just one homogenous group of workers,“ said Lorentzon. In Sweden's private sector, the practice is taking root in places such as Toyota service centers in Gothenburg. In the UK, a marketing agency adopted a staggered schedule to allow for re duced work hours while ensuring coverage; a survey last month found that six out of 10 bosses in that country agreed that cutting hours would improve productivity .
The key result --that productivity can increase with fewer hours worked--eliminates a major stumbling block to globalising the shorter work day .
While the Svartedalens experiment offers evidence that shorter hours improve productivity , nursing as an occupation may be more analogous to that of medical residents, rather than a desk job. The study equates productivity with quality of care, which doesn't necessarily translate to white-collar work.

Source: Times of India, 7-06-2016
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Monday, June 06, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents


Vol. 51, Issue No. 23, 04 Jun, 2016

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Death of a river is the death of an ecosystem


Do we really need to be told the obvious, by Leonardo da Vinci, no less, that “Water is the driving force in Nature”? “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water,” said the twentieth century English poet WH Auden, which may be closer to the bone. Indeed, we can go for longer without food than without water. Plans to protect air, water, women and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man. All these fights are one fight. All their solutions are interlinked. The death of a river is the death of an ecosystem.
In human terms the death of a river or a lake or a sea is as though somebody important in the family, somebody central to its well-being, has suddenly died. The absence of this key person pushes the remainder of the family below the poverty line – the line of loss and deprivation. If a parent dies, the children and remaining spouse must start all over again from minus. They have lost their advantages in several ways, if they had them to start with – they have lost their emotional confidence, their physical nurture, perhaps their financial security and certainly they have lost out on their overall well-being. That is the impact of a river dying, as if your father or mother suddenly died when you were very young, leaving you deprived forever. That is why our culture still mourns the disappearance of the Saraswati in ancient times. That is why we must fight for our rivers now, many of whom are half-dead. The pity and terror of it is they are being killed by our own indifference and greed or worse, by our inability to see that water is the pillar of our family and not an impersonal ‘substance’. Water contains us. As E.E. Cummings wrote, “For whatever we lose (of a you or a me)/Something of ourselves we find in the sea.”
Moreover, respecting water has everything to do with believing in God. If we believe in a Creator, then by abusing water, which is not only what most of our world is made but is also what we ourselves are mostly made of, we are guilty of a sin against Creation.
Respecting water also has everything to do with not believing in God. If we think we do not need a Mr or Ms Fixit God person but are absolute and ‘scientific’ masters of our destiny, we are guilty, by not respecting water, of destroying mankind. “Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it,” as Margaret Atwood writes in The Penelopiad.
One of the most powerful invocations of water was by Martin Luther King Jr in his fight for civil rights: “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Water not only sustains our physical life and its context, it also sustains our spiritual life. Some of the most deeply moving experiences of a person’s life are with water from a holy river or spring. The water from these places symbolises our spiritual healing while rain pouring down from the sky is considered the master healer, the well-spring of life and the antidote to poison. But in the end, it will not matter who said what. It’s when the well or the tap is dry that we realise the worth of water.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4-06-2016
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NGOs: An extension of the government, not an adversary

Those who question the government’s policies are targeted. It is a pattern,” said lawyer Indira Jaising after her NGO — Lawyers’ Collective — was barred from receiving foreign funds for six months and its licence suspended for alleged violation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) by the government last week. Ms Jaising is not the only one who thinks that the government is using the FCRA as a tool to silence dissenting voices; there are many others. In this case and several earlier cases — Greenpeace being a well-known one — the government’s timing of issuing strictures and its targets have been injudicious, to say the least. In the case of Greenpeace, the NGO’s employee was going to Britain to speak on tribal rights and mining; and in the Jaising case, she had just returned from a release function of a book on the 2002 Gujarat riots. The timing and choice of targets have led to the criticism that the Centre cannot stomach dissent. While no one holds any brief for corrupt NGOs, in both these cases, the motives are less than benign.
In fact, the Centre’s run-in with foreign-funded NGOs started in 2014. Last year, it proposed new rules that would require banks to report every transaction made by these organisations within 48 hours. Additionally, the NGOs will have to pledge that the money won’t be used for activities that go against national, public, security, strategic, scientific or economic interests — with the government retaining the right to interpret what these are.

Last week, Union Minister for Urban Development, Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, and Parliamentary Affairs Venkaiah Naidu wrote a piece in a national daily describing what kind of ‘activism’ the government will accept from NGOs. Saying that the government respects dissent and freedom of speech and expression but they are not absolute and are subject to reasonable restrictions, the minister said that NGOs must practise “evidence-based advocacy”. The minister, more than anyone else, knows that in many cases, especially when it comes to the rights of the people, “evidence-based advocacy” is not always possible. In Bastar, getting people to speak against the high-handedness of the security forces and government can be a challenge. Should NGOs not raise issues because there is no evidence, at least the type the government wants.

The Centre must realise that raising uncomfortable questions has its value. Moreover, NGOs can work as an extension of the government and help it in implementing social schemes effectively. Looking at them as adversaries will only lead to more tension and criticism.
Source: Hindustan Times, 5-06-2016

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The Virtues of Solitude
HUMRA QURAISHI


There's something about solitude... something so very special that can't really be described. You have to experience it, to realise what it is all about, which can only be felt and which can never really be described graphically .No words can describe the potential in solitude. Religious scriptures and philosophers hint at the benefits of spending time all by yourself, even setting aside a few days for `retreat'.Yet, in today's fast-paced world, all that -like taking time off for retreat and reflection -is not taken seriously enough.Actually , it boils down to the need to be left alone, to get wrapped up in your own thoughts and flow of emotions.
Solitude sets you in an introspective mood. It enables seeing and sensing aspects of life with a more dispassionate outlook. For, when you are alone, only then do you see a certain special perspective. For, in your aloneness your constant companion, that inner voice, takes charge. And like other supposed companions, it doesn't let you down nor does it let go of you. Just give importance to that inner voice and see the way it guides you, nudges you, enriches you.... Yes, you've got to be far away .Even if you can't move physically away -that is, seek refuge in remote places or sit all alone -then do so at the mental level. It's all in the mind. It can take you away from the daily disappointments and hurt into a world where there's less friction and turmoil. Savour Solitude. It might help you find answers... and be at peace within and without.


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Saturday, June 04, 2016

Citizens have right to safe water, say draft legislation

Groundwater will not be a free resource’.

The government has for the first time said that citizens had a right to safe water and laid out stringent rules on how corporations and large entities can extract groundwater in two separate pieces of draft legislation uploaded on the website of the Union Water Ministry and open for public comment.
The Bills —in a first — also propose fines ranging from Rs.5,000 to Rs. 5,00,000 depending on the level of infraction and who the perpetrators were. Groundwater wouldn’t also be a free resource and those who could pay for it ought to be doing so while ensuring that it was equitably available to all. The Bill doesn’t detail a mechanism but lays down broad principles.
To be sure, previous governments have also tried to enact legislation to ensure that groundwater— a fragile resource and 80% of India’s irrigation supply— is used judiciously. However, these didn’t account for the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution vesting powers to panchayats and municipalities in the management of water that includes groundwater and was rarely adopted by States.
More power to panchayats
The draft bills — the National Water Framework Bill and the Model Bill for the Conservation, Protection, Regulation and Management of Groundwater will be open for public comment until the month end, aim to decentralise water management and give more power to panchayats and gram sabhas to decide how water can be better used.
“What have we learned from Maharashtra [drought]? That in spite of spending so much on large dams it is among the least irrigated States,” Mihir Shah, Former Planning Commission member and Chair of the committee that drafted the Bills told The Hindu, “and that’s because the end users of water had little say.”
The most fundamental reform that the Bill sought to make was to do away with the “British Common Law” concept — as Mr. Shah described it — that he who owned the land could extract unlimited groundwater. According to the provisions of the proposed Bill, corporations and industries extracting groundwater now had to submit plans to ensure that water was used responsibly and that any possible contamination was remedied.
Funds for river clean-up
The NDA government has announced massive budget outlays to clean up rivers such as the Ganga as well embark on interlinking rivers to improve storage capabilities. The present legislation doesn’t attempt to decide if the States or the Centre ought to have the final say in developing or conserving water bodies.
The Bills also say that the top priority in the use of groundwater ought to be in meeting drinking, sanitation, food security, sustenance agriculture, the needs of women and only after that for industry.
There would also be an incentive for those who cultivate less water-intensive crops. There would also be groundwater security boards and groundwater protection zones that would be overseen by State bodies.
Source: The Hindu, 4-06-2016
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Suffer or Be Happy
SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV


If Creation is perfect, and the Creator has done such a good job, why is there so much suffering? It is such a perfect job that it gives you the opportunity to be whichever way you wish to be. If Creation had not given you this opportunity , then there would be no possibilities, there would be no such thing as liberation.So why create bondage and then liberation? Why couldn't you have just been liberated?
Then there would be no Creation. Only because there is Creation, now there is the possibility of going beyond that.
In other forms of life, there is not much possibility other than to survive, procreate and die one day . So there is no misery either. Their suffering is only physical. In pain, they do not know the kind of suffering that a human being knows.
As a human being, you know this suffering not because Creation gave the suffering to you. Creation just gave you the freedom to make whatever you wish to out of yourself. You're making suffering out of yourself, that is your choice.
There is no end to what a man would want to do to himself to enhance his own grandeur.But somewhere, every human being should be able to place a limit. Some self-restraint is required. Otherwise, your life becomes one of excess.
There is no joy in it; people will become totally frustrated and mentally broken. This is happening to the affluent classes of the world everywhere.Money should have brought well-being, but for most people, it is bringing terrible situations within themselves.

Source: Economic Times, 4-06-2016
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