Tuesday, November 01, 2016

New Ranking Shows States Competing for Investors'

New Delhi:

Our Bureau

ASSESSMENT OF STATE IMPLEMENTATION OF BUSINESS REFORMS 2015-16This year, 15 states have implemented more than 75% of the reforms: Sitharaman

India will broaden its reform drive for next year's state rankings on the ease of doing business, commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Monday.With Andhra Pradesh and Telangana sharing the top spot in the `Assessment of State Implementation of Business Reforms 2015-16', the minister said low-income states have shown the biggest improvements, implementing 70%-90% of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion's (DIPP) business reforms agenda.
“Not a single state had implemented more than 75% of all the reforms last year. This year, 15 states have implemented more than 75% of the reforms,“ Sitharaman said.
The assessment studies how 32 states and Union Territories implemented DIPP's 340-point Business Reform Action Plan between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016.
Business reforms undertaken by the states include single window systems for regulatory and fiscal incentive approvals, VAT e-registration, professional tax and online payment.
States have also made provisions for e-summons, created capacity in district and commercial courts and implemented automated solutions for environmental and pollution-related applications.
The high-performing states in the second edition of the ranking include Telangana (13th to first spot), Haryana (14th to sixth spot) and Uttarakhand (23rd to ninth spot).
The national implementation average of reforms stood at 48.93% compared to 32% last year. Last year, only seven states had implemented more than 50% of the reforms.
“States have been competing and healthily to make sure each of them is a performer and a haven for investors,“ the minister said.
Sitharaman however highlighted the need to provide more sup port to the north-eastern states and Jammu and Kashmir in taking forward the reform agenda.
The states and Union Territories that implemented less than 2% of the reforms agenda this year included Chandigarh, Sikkim, Puducherry, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has put 12 states in the category of `Leaders' for implementing 90-100% of the reforms.
DIPP received evidence of implementation of 7,124 reforms by 32 states and Union Territories that was also reviewed by a World Bank team.
While Gujarat slipped from first spot to third this year, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh maintained their fourth and fifth ranks this year. DIPP will release a detailed report of the reforms in November.
DIPP maintained real-time rankings of states through an online dashboard to ensure transparency. The government now plans to introduce a feedback mechanism on the ranking in line with the global report.

Source: Economic Times, 1-11-2016

Air pollution behind 1 in 10 under-5 deaths'

New Delhi:

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

A report by the United Nations Children's agency , Unicef, released on Monday has confirmed the worst fears of people living in polluted areas -that bad air is contributing to death of many children even before they celebrate their fifth birthday.Outdoor and indoor pollution, the agency noted, are directly linked to respiratory diseases that account for almost one in 10 under-five deaths, making air pollution one of the leading dangers to children's health. “Children are more susceptible than adults to air pollution as their lungs, brains and immune systems are still developing and their respiratory tracks are more permeable. Young children also breathe faster than adults, and take in more air relative to their body weight,“ Unicef stated.
According to the UN agency, which used satellite imagery to assess the impact of toxic air on children, around two billion children live in areas where outdoor air pollution, caused by factors such as vehicle emissions, heavy use of fossil fuels, dust and burning of waste, exceeds minimum air quality guidelines set by the World Health Organisation.
South Asia has the largest number of children living in these areas, at 620 million, with Africa following at 520 million children. The East Asia and Pacific region has 450 million children living in areas that exceed guideline limits. The findings come a week ahead of the COP 22 in Morocco, where Unicef is calling on world leaders to take urgent action to cut air pollution.
“Air pollution is a major contributing factor in the de aths of around 600,000 children under five every year and it threatens the lives and futures of millions more every day ,“ said Unicef executive director Anthony Lake. In Delhi, experts fear, the health impact of air pollution could be higher due to heavy density of particulate matter. The Capital has been held as one of the world's most polluted cities by global bodies, including WHO.

Source: Times of India, 1-11-2016

Monday, October 31, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 51, Issue No. 43, 22 Oct, 2016

Editorials

In the Name of Women

Kashmir's Lonely Struggle

Comment

Bob Dylan--Lyrics as Poetry

Law & Society

‘Right to Choose’ as a Fundamental Right

Alok Prasanna Kumar

Strategic Affairs

Belt and Road Initiative

Atul Bhardwaj

Commentary

Book Reviews

Modi: From Gujarat to Delhi

Arvind Krishnaswamy

Classical Economics, Marx, Marginalism, and Keynes

Alex M Thomas

Insight

Wages of Communal Violence in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli

Harsh Mander, Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal, Rajanya Bose

Special Articles

'Only What Does Not Fit In Can Be True': De-professionalisation and Academia in Relation to Adorno and Tagore

Rosinka Chaudhuri

Converting Urban Cooperative Banks into Commercial Banks

Vijay K Khanna, K Ramesha

Determinants of Recovery of Stressed Assets in India

Rekha Misra, Rajmal, Radheshyam Verma

Discussion

Brexit Offers No Particular Spoils for India

Babak Moussavi

Current Statistics

Postscript

Roadside Blues

Shobhit Mahajan

The Wonder Years

Chitvan Singh Dhillon

Last Lines

Letters

A True Teacher and Comrade

Ramesh Kamble

War Is No Solution

Suleiman Khurshid, Ranabir Samaddar, Sushil Khanna, Prabir Sinharoy

Appointments/programmes/announcements

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Web Exclusives

Telangana Chief Minister Makes Cornwallis Turn in His Grave

Kingshuk Nag

Continued Absence of Najeeb Ahmad—Letter to the Editor

Ayesha Kidwai, Mohan Rao, Veena Hariharan, Janaki Nair, Pradip Dutta, Avinash Kumar, Rajat Datta, Udaya Kumar, G. Arunima, Bishnupriya Paul and 70 others

‘Ban’ on Reporting From Kerala Courts

N P Rajendran

Ignorance that isn’t bliss

Without awareness of our ignorance, we are condemned to stay ignorant, no matter how much information we collect. The Internet enables this more than anything else in the past

We have been brought up with the hubristic and misleading belief that knowledge makes us truly human. It doesn’t, on its own. What makes us truly human is our knowledge of our ignorance. We seem to be on the verge of forgetting this in our Internet age, with its misleading surfeit of ‘knowledge’ — as the brasher ‘new atheists’, opinionated trolls, Hindutva radicals, Islamist ideologues, Trump die-hards, climate change deniers, and many others prove.

All complex beings have knowledge of different sorts. Birds can navigate their way thousands of miles in the sky and many species of fish can do so in the ocean. Squirrels know when to hoard and where to dig. Many birds and animals know when to seek each other and when to run: the small bird doing its dentistry in the lion’s or the crocodile’s jaws, the large fish being cleansed of parasites by a sea bird.

These are all kinds of knowledge, and some are beyond the capacity of human beings. We explain away our species deficiency by talking of instincts and so on, but the fact remains that we are still talking of ways of knowing.

Knowledge of ignorance

One can argue that at least all complex organisms think in some way or the other. Birds do, animals do. Some animals, apes for instance, may think more like us than some other animals. Eduardo Kohn even argues in his book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human that forests “think”. Perhaps plants too. But birds and animals definitely have knowledge of things — where to nest, how to build, where to dig, how to stash for the winter, when to run, when to bluff, and so on.

No, it is not knowledge that distinguishes human beings from other complex organisms. What we have and what they do not seem to have is knowledge of ignorance. Human beings do not just know what they know; they also have a fairly good idea of what they do not know. Non-human beings too know what they know, but there is nothing to indicate that they are aware of what they do not know.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are? Thus runs the nursery rhyme. What it conveys is not just wonder, which all complex beings have, but also knowledge-ignorance. A dog looking up at something twinkling would wonder too, as wondering grows from simple curiosity. But only the child can wonder about that twinkling as what is known to be a star and as stars we remain vastly ignorant of.

It can be argued that the truly educated are distinguished not by the extent of their knowledge, but by a greater and more nuanced awareness of their areas of ignorance. Actually, the two go hand in hand: true knowledge comes only with awareness of one’s ignorance, which is something that neither Internet trolls nor religious fundamentalists have fully understood. It is knowledge of ignorance that makes us truly human, and it is this that I am afraid we are forgetting with the rise of the so-called information society.

Now, information is not the same as knowledge, but there can be no knowledge without information. As such, there is an unspoken myth that individually and collectively we have more knowledge of things and ourselves now than ever in the past. After all, we have the Internet, cyber-linked libraries, 24-hour TV, whatnot.

Interestingly, what unites all Internet trolls — whether they are Hindutva fanatics screaming about how every scientific discovery has taken place in ‘Vedic’ India, Islamists claiming that their version of Islam is the most perfect system ever, Trump supporters insinuating about conspiracies and rigging — is the fact that they surf only for information that confirms their ‘knowledge’ and does not challenge their ‘ignorance’. The availability of information is not sufficient. It is outright misleading when we are convinced of our own knowledge, and not willing to challenge it.

Without awareness of our ignorance, we are condemned to stay ignorant — no matter how much information we collect. The Internet enables this more than anything else in the past, as it enables a solitary, selective, isolated, hidden, unabashed-of-ignorance search for ‘information’, and its instantaneous, too-fast dissemination.

Books and the Internet

You might claim that so did books to some extent: after all, one could read books in isolation, shut up in a room. This is true, but only if one confined oneself to a narrow book and its strict acolytes: something that fundamentalists — religious or political — have done and still do. The Nazi reading only Mein Kampf and Nazi commentaries is no different from the religious fanatic reading only one sacred text and its ‘true’ commentaries. In this sense, we are not faced with an entirely new danger.

But there is a difference. The moment one starts reading books in general, one is forced to encounter opinions and information that do not necessarily fit one’s world view. It seems easier to avoid such encounters on the Internet. Moreover, in a world of books, knowledge was by definition beyond any set of covers, any fixed reading. Knowledge in that sense was always partly elusive. This seems to have disappeared with the rise of cyber culture because the myth has arisen that all knowledge is now at our fingertips. All we need is the right search machine.

This is reflected not only in our tendency to Google medical treatments but also in the inanity of many cyber reviews, where reputed classics and complex books are dismissed with a line like “I found it boring”. It is reflected, above all, in the screams of Internet trolls, all of them seeking and disseminating only ‘information’ that suits them.

Can there be any knowledge without a humble awareness of ignorance?

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.

Keywords: Books, knowledge, education, ignorance, internet, internet trolls

Source: The Hindu, 31-10-2016

Still seriously hungry and poor

Economic growth alone is not enough to achieve key Sustainable Development Goals. It must translate into jobs for the poor and marginalised

India is the fastest growing large economy in the world today. Despite this, one in every five Indians is poor. Multilateral agencies as well as governments are playing an active role in understanding problems relating to poverty and hunger and finding solutions to them. But these challenges are pervasive and weeding them out will require clear evidence-based data-driven solutions.

Goal 1 and 2 of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envision eradicating poverty and ending hunger by 2030. A brief look at the statistics tells us the extent of the problem. An astounding 767 million people in the world are poor while the those who do not have enough to eat are estimated to be close to 800 million.

Poverty is a multidimensional concept, which involves reduction in choices to pursue freedom. So is hunger. Two recent reports try to clear the haze on measurement and yield some pertinent insights on poverty and hunger. These are the the Global Hunger Index (GHI) of the International Food Policy Research Institute and the Pathways to Reducing Poverty and Sharing Prosperity in India (PRPSPI) of the World Bank.

Improvement but not enough

The GHI tries to capture the hunger level across countries. The index is constructed using four component indicators: percentage of undernourished in the population, percentage of wasting in children under five years old, percentage of stunting in children under five years, and under-five mortality rates. The index has been calculated since 2006 and the oldest back calculations on the index go back to 1992. The overall methodology is similar to development of other composite indices like the Human Development Index. The overall scale of the index is from zero to 100 where 100 represents ‘absolute hunger’ and zero represents ‘zero hunger’. Countries and regions are also classified in terms of the level of hunger. Those falling in the <= 9.9 category are classified as having a ‘low’ level of hunger, those in the 10.0-19.9 category are ‘moderate’, those in the 20-34.9 bracket are ‘serious’, those between 35 and 49.9 are classified as ‘alarming’, and those <50 are ‘extremely alarming’.

There are some pertinent points in this year’s global hunger report. First, developing countries have a major stake in reducing hunger levels. Overall hunger has come down by 29 per cent since 2000 in these countries. Second, there are distinct regions, the ones with the highest GHI scores, which can help in fulfilling the SDGs. On the 2016 index, Africa south of the Sahara and South Asia have the highest GHI scores (30.1 and 29.0, respectively). Thus they are placed in the ‘alarming’ category on the GHI. Third, India is placed at a dismal 97th rank among the 118 countries considered for the index. The country has improved its score from 46.4 in 1992 to 28.5 at present, which is considerable, but its overall level continues to be ‘serious’ on the index.

Decline in poverty

Related to hunger is poverty, which has been one of the most critical issues in international economic development. PRPSPI, the World Bank Group report, looks at India’s development experience. Four main points emerge.

First, the report notes that poverty in India has declined considerably from 1994 to 2013. Over the commensurate time frame, those below India’s official poverty line have reduced from 45 per cent to 22 per cent. This means that 133 million people have been lifted out of poverty. Despite this the report notes that India’s growth has not been very inclusive. It is because roughly two-thirds of the countries’ inclusive growth performance is better than India’s in the 2005-2012 period.

Second, some population groups in India are substantially worse off than other groups. These include the Scheduled Tribes (STs), 43 per cent of whom were below the poverty line in 2012, and the Scheduled Castes, 29 per cent of whom were below the poverty line. Poverty also seems entrenched among the STs, with the pace of poverty reduction slower than that witnessed in other groups between 2005 and 2012.

Third, poverty seems to be present in certain geographical locations. The top States for poverty in absolute terms in India are Uttar Pradesh (60 million poor), Bihar (36 million) and Madhya Pradesh (24 million). The top seven States account for roughly 62 per cent of India’s poor. Also important is the rural-urban divide in poverty. Almost one in five Indians is poor and out of every five poor people, four live in rural areas. Also, the poverty rate is just 7 per cent in big cities with a population of more than 1 million.

Growth and redistribution

Finally poverty has a bearing on choices and the well-being of individuals in a society. The poor also own fewer assets and spend more on food, fuel, and light. This reduces the percentage they have for spending on critical things like education and health, and it makes them prone to a vicious poverty trap. Another important insight is that for poverty levels to go down, the States will have to grow faster. The States which have lagged behind on growth rates are also the ones where there are low GSDP (gross state domestic product) per capita and in turn higher levels of poverty. Thus both growth and redistribution are necessary for poverty alleviation.

Over the next decade and a half, the goal of citizens and policymakers in India should be improvement in Goals 1 and 2 of SDGs. Growth alone will not be enough but must get translated into jobs for the poor and marginalised for it to become truly inclusive. This will not be easy considering the pressure that automation and newer technologies are putting on jobs and employment. Newer skills will hold the key for translating growth into jobs over the coming decade.

Amit Kapoor is Chair, Institute for Competitiveness and Editor of Thinkers. Sankalp Sharma is senior researcher at the Institute for Competitiveness, India. The views expressed are personal.

Keywords: Poverty, poverty line, sustainable growth

Source: The Hindu, 31-10-2016

UGC asks universities to provide PhD programmes in AYUSH disciplines

Students will now be able to pursue PhD in traditional medicine courses after the University Grants Commission (UGC) asked all central universities to start a doctorate degree programmes under AYUSH disciplines.

On June 24, AYUSH ministry had written a letter to the UGC requesting it to issue an advisory to educational institutions on the same. AYUSH has announced PhD programmes in AYUSH disciplines from the concerned research council.

The research councils in the field of Ayurvedic Sciences, Homoeopathy, Yoga and Naturopathy among others also conduct clinical and basic research studies and they want to extend research opportunities through PhD fellowship programme for the development of AYUSH.

UGC has asked all central universities to set up a system for enrolment of candidates in the PhD programme and providing them an opportunity to avail fellowship from the concerned research council. The councils will sponsor 200 candidates: 125 postgraduate of Ayush and 75 of science and technology streams for pursuing PhD on Ayush research topics.

Source: Hindustan Times, 28-10-2016

When ‘the Earth Laughs in Flowers’: A tribute to Monika Ghurde

Last year in Delhi, I hitched a ride with a friend to a poetry reading. He stopped en route to pick up another friend – a visitor from Goa, he said.

In the dark, I could barely see the petite woman who joined us. But as she entered, the car was suffused with a heady fragrance. While I am no perfume connoisseur, even I could tell this was exceptional. If I didn’t feel obliged to play nit-picking poet about my choice of adjective, I’d have termed it breathtaking. The word today is ironic.

“What perfume is that?” I remember asking.

“One that I made,” said a soft voice from the backseat. And I turned around to see a woman with an utterly radiant smile. That was my first encounter with Monika Ghurde. There are many reasons why I haven’t forgotten it.

It is not often that one meets someone who looks, quite simply, as lovely as their perfume. Monika did. She had the luminosity of a woman who has come into her own, whose laughter is not the easy giggle of youth, not the practiced smile of the social networker, but the hard-won, reclaimed mirth of a born-again, self-possessed adult.

It somehow seemed appropriate that I should meet her after inhaling her perfume. It felt like that first olfactory encounter gave me access – a password, as it were -- to the person she was.

Poetry is the most distilled verbal art I know. When you meet someone who has read your poetry with any degree of immersion, it feels like you both have a shortcut to a deeper, more authentic self. If the perfumer’s art is the ultimate in distillation, it is not surprising that I felt I had, in some way, accessed Monika’s happiest, truest version of herself.

In the next half hour, I sensed several things about her: refinement, warmth, curiosity, generosity, a disarming simplicity. Monika was not a woman on the make. That, for me, was the loveliest thing about her.

We spent the rest of the evening with each other. In a noisy bar, surrounded by people we didn’t really know, we talked about our histories with Mumbai, our love of Goa, her vocation as a perfumer, my poetry. The details are hazy. But by the end of the evening, Monika Ghurde was a friend.

As someone who believes friendship takes years of shared experience, I am surprised by my own use of the word. And yet, I’d use it again. She suggested meeting the next day. I couldn’t make it, but I knew that Monika and I would find ways to be in touch.

There comes a time when some people use their life experiences to subtract superfluous identities, and become who they fundamentally are. For me, that was the scent of Monika – the scent of naturalness. She didn’t talk of her achievements or her antecedents. She didn’t drop names. She simply seemed happy in her own skin. And so, I knew her without really knowing very much about her. The ‘about’ seemed irrelevant. I wanted to be in touch with Monika because of Monika.

In fact, the only antecedents we discussed were floral. I remember asking her about raat ki rani, my favourite fragrance. She told me it belonged either to the family of jasmine or the Persian tuberose – a detail I have never forgotten.

I met her again last December at a literary festival in Goa. We spent time on the lawns of the Goa International Centre, with fellow writer, Mahesh Rao. I have a photo she sent of that evening of the three of us, arms entwined. She is in the centre in a cream sari, laughing her warm infectious laugh.

‘Breathtaking’ was the first adjective I associated with her. If medical evidence were given the last word, that would also be the last. For her breath, we are told, was taken from her – brutally.

But facts are for newspapers. The truth about Monika Ghurde is different. And I hold fast to that truth: that the fragrance of crushed flowers lingers a long time after the horror and the prurient public gaze subsides, long after the last news reports are done and dusted. That is the strength of vulnerability. That is the strength of flowers.

What is the point of a perfume or a poem, really? None at all. Except that our lives are hugely impoverished without them. And precisely because there is no single point, they are not so easily erased.

There are no easy goodbyes, Monika. But the earth laughs in flowers, the poet Emerson told us. When we’re done with grieving, my radiant friend, we’ll join you in those places of enchanted distillation you knew how to delight in. We’ll join you in the laughter.

(This is one of several women-authored pieces published this weekend in tribute to Monika Ghurde.)

Source: Hindustan Times, 30-10-2016

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