Students promoting digital economy to earn extra credits

Bengaluru TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Students participating in PM's movement for a cashless economy will be rewarded with extra credits from December 12.Following a directive from Union HRD minister, University Grants Commission (UGC) has sent a circular to higher educational institutions, asking them to encourage students to join the Centre's cashless campaign by educating the common man on different modes of digital payments.
As part of HRD mini stry's Vittiya Saksharta Abhiyan, students will have to share their experiences on using digital platforms whi le guiding new users. The effort will be to create cashless campuses. Directors of all institutions will have to ensure that credits are given to student volunteers of Vittiya Saksharta Abhiyan.
Making an appeal to students, Union minister of state for HRD Mahendra Nath Pandey told TOI in Lucknow: “India has 7.5 crore students. If we are able to mobilise two crore youth to train shopkeepers and those from older generation make payments online, we will make a difference in going digital and boosting our economy .“

Source: Times of India, 7-12-2016

600 univs set to go cashless to use UGC funds

Deepika Burli

Bengaluru:





Universities across the country may now have to resort to cashless means like bank transfers, cheques and credit debit cards while making use of periodic funds from University Grants Commission (UGC).In a directive to the 600odd universities which come under it, UGC has proposed that they may make use of the current system of demand drafts only on rare occasions. The commission said the move was in order to bring in accountability , transparency and seamlessness in the process of transfer of grants. The commission said it has virtually made payments cashless and decreased the interface between stakeholders and employees of the organisation. The commission typically disburses grants through its flagship Public Financial Management System (PFMS). Each university is required to register by filling up details on the portal to ensure funds reach them from the commission as scheduled.
“The Commission had introduced disbursement of grants through the PFMS and to ensure timely disposal of fellowships and scholarships, the UGC has been vigorously following the policy of their disposal through direct benefit transfer which also uses the PFMS transfer,“ stated the circular.
“Going cashless is an excellent move and it increases accountability and transparency in the system,“ said Ninge Gowda, registrar (administration) of Bangalore University .

Source: Times of India, 7-12-2016





Why India needs a new Constitution

The current Constitution gives the government near omnipotent powers that are not consistent with a free society

India is unreasonably poor. The 2015 International Monetary Fund ranking of countries places India at the 140th position with an annual per capita gross domestic product of only $1,600. For China the figures are 73rd and $8,000. India had the potential to be at least a middle-income country with negligible poverty by the turn of the century. Why has India failed to realize that potential despite the fact that Indians are as capable of creating wealth as any other people.

A country would have reason to be poor if it suffered adverse conditions such as periodic devastating natural disasters, protracted civil strife and foreign wars, or insufficient human and natural resource endowment—none of which is true for India. Assuming that the gods are not maliciously inclined towards India, we can rule out divine decree as the cause of India’s poverty.

That leaves us with economic policy as a proximate cause. Centuries of economic history teaches us that bad policies fail to produce economic growth. The claim here is that India’s lack of progress is due to the Constitution since that determines the nature of the government, which in turn dictates those policies.

India’s Constitution has the dubious distinction of being the largest in the world and consequently unreadable, and largely unread. It gives the government enormous powers to intervene in the economy, to enact laws that discriminate among citizens based on attributes such as religion and caste, restricts freedom of speech, and limits the right to property. In short, it allows deliberate political and economic exploitation.

Undue government interference in the economy politicizes the economy, which in turn leads to the corruption of politics. By contrast, the US Constitution is short, guarantees the freedom of speech, protects property rights, prohibits discrimination among citizens, and limits the power of the government.

The most salient distinction between the US and Indian Constitutions lies in the relationship between the people and the government the Constitutions define. The US Constitution places the people as the principal and the government as its agent. This is evidenced in the limits that the Constitution imposes on the government. The Indian Constitution places the government as the master and people as its servants—as can be expected of an essentially colonial government. Like the British government before it, post-1947 Indian governments took on the role of the master and imposed limits on the economic and civic freedoms of Indians.

India is a functioning democracy with routine peaceful transfer of power following elections. Each election raises the hope that with different political leaders, governance would improve. Sadly, regardless of which party or leaders are in power, the policies hardly change.

Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan wrote, “It is folly to think that ‘better men’ elected to office will help us much, that ‘better policy’ will turn things around here. We need, and must have, basic constitutional reform, which must, of course, be preceded by basic constitutional discourse and discussion.”

Constitutions provide the structure of rules and constraints within which political decisions are made. Very large constitutions encoding a vast set of rules point to a “low trust” society. India is not inherently a low trust society but it became so because of the adversarial relationship between the government and the people, established by the British and continued post independence.

The British government was not popularly chosen but was imposed by force on an unwilling population. The laws, rules, regulations were all designed to have comprehensive, oppressive control over the people. There cannot be a relationship of trust between oppressor and oppressed. The seeds of mistrust sowed by the colonial British Raj have led to a paternalistic government which treats citizens as irresponsible, immature children.

The Constitution’s colonial origins give the government near omnipotent powers that are not consistent with a free society. It allows the government to interfere and restrict economic and civic freedoms. India needs a new Constitution that constrains governmental power and restricts it to the proper role of the government in a free society, namely to protect life, liberty and property of the citizens. The new Constitution must prohibit discrimination and must guarantee that all laws follow a generality norm that apply equally to all regardless of sex, religion, group affiliation or origin.

The legitimacy of the government of a free society depends on the consent of the governed. Consent by the people even in principle is meaningless if the Constitution is a mysterious document revered by all but understood by few. The new Constitution must be readable and be read by all. Therefore it must be in plain language and not in legalese.

For India’s trajectory to change towards prosperity that has been denied to it for so long, India needs a new Constitution that rolls back the power of the state and vests power in its people where it rightfully belongs in a constitutional republic.

Published as part of a series on the book in India: Past, Present and Future published recently by Centre for Civil Society. The book is a collection of essays written in honour of the late S.V. Raju.

Source: Mintepaper, 6-12-2016

Democracy, direct to home

The subordination of political parties to populist leaders has cast a shadow on democracy. A representative party system is infinitely preferable to personalised forms of power

Delivering his third Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modihad remarked that he deliberately stayed away from populist measures that deplete exchequers and opted for a culture of governance. His referent point was, obviously, strategies that politicians employ to garner votes. In political theory, however, the term populism originates from the Latin term populous or ‘people’. If we take the political theory of populism as our cue, the Prime Minister appears quite a populist.

Let me hasten to add that in democratic contexts populists are not anti-democratic. On the contrary they claim to be true democrats, obsessed with rescuing democracy from the clutches of incompetent and venal elites. This class, it is alleged, has betrayed the confidence of citizens, and derailed the political system. Arvind Kejriwal does so directly and abrasively. Prime Minister Modi mockingly dismisses the Opposition. Both represent themselves as preferable alternatives to corrupt and non-performing elites. The second rescue operation launched by these leaders is to free popular sovereignty from the mediations of liberal democracy, and relocate the concept in ‘the people’. By appealing to ‘the people’ over the heads of democratic institutions deemed ineffectual and dishonest, populist leaders forge a personal constituency that they can confide in, admonish, and instruct.

Need for checks and balances

The problem is that ‘people’ is not a homogenous unit. The category is divided and hierarchised along the lines of class, caste, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preferences. More significantly, ‘people’ are organised into majorities and minorities, and majorities — as our history tells us — can seriously impair the basic rights of minorities. For this precise reason, liberal democrats fear the ‘brute power’ of majorities and try to curtail the power of elected majorities through constitutions, legislation, judiciaries, and, more importantly, the institutionalisation of a system of checks and balances.

Notably, democracy is not only about a party that has won the largest number of seats taking over state power. It is about protecting the basic rights of all individuals, and, in particular, the rights of vulnerable minorities against depredations of majorities. This is secured through the establishment of procedures and institutions. That is why democratic governance is complex, time-consuming, and demanding. Each proposal has to go through several stages of scrutiny, including debates in the public sphere on the virtues or otherwise of the proposition on offer, before it is transformed into law. The insertion of layers of intermediary institutions that range from elected assemblies to civil society organisations, between citizens and the state, safeguards ordinary citizens against abuses of power.

The populist’s penchant

It is precisely the complicated procedural and institutional aspect of democracy that populist leaders are impatient with. They would rather reach out directly to citizens. There is, of course, nothing wrong with reaching out to people. The problem is that populist leaders show scant respect for the give and take of arguments during processes of decision-making. This can breed ominous outcomes: witness the sharp and painful crisis that followed demonetisation. The eminent statesman of ancient Athens, Pericles, had warned against decisions that do not take the consequences of a particular action into consideration. But populists defy laborious and cumbersome processes involving critique of, reflection on, and modification of proposed policy. They would rather take shortcuts and evoke naïve and simplistic notions of direct democracy. Direct democracy is, however, the ultimate illusion.

Let us not forget that in ancient Athens, participation in direct democracy was confined to property- and slave-owning males, provided they were born in the city-state. The rest were consigned to the lowly category of subjects. In complex societies, direct democracy simply does not work; it slides easily into populism and, worse, into the cult of the leader. Democracy is diminished.

Democracy is doubly diminished when the complexities of public opinion are simplified through the mechanism of snap referendums through the social media. Citizens have the right to debate on the pros and cons of ‘this’ or ‘that’ law, unearth hidden dimensions of issues, highlight grey areas, and propose alternatives. Snap polls that demand a simple answer — yes or no — in effect depoliticise the deliberative capacity of citizens and undermine their competence to skilfully debate all sides of an issue. It is precisely this aspect of deliberative democracy that populists avoid when they ask for instant referendums.

What history tells us

The proposition that populism harms democracy has been amply borne out by our history. Recollect Indira Gandhi, popularly known as the first populist leader in independent India. Taking over the reins of the Congress in adverse circumstances, she set out to consolidate her status. Regional leaders, who till then had wielded considerable influence in the party through a network of ‘big men’, were rendered irrelevant through the Kamaraj Plan, and by the 1969 split in the party. The announcement of radical programmes such as the abolition of privy purses of former princes and nationalisation of banks endeared Mrs. Gandhi to the political public. More significantly, she fashioned a nationwide constituency by detaching parliamentary elections from State Assembly elections. This enabled her to speak directly to citizens, and dispense with the mediation of regional satraps.

Mrs. Gandhi’s charisma, style and oratory gripped popular imagination. But the process of securing acclaim carried heavy costs. Concentration of power in the person of the Prime Minister spectacularly subverted democratic norms. Her call for a committed judiciary and a committed bureaucracy compromised the autonomy of both institutions. The Supreme Court undercut its own status as an impartial institution by supporting the Emergency declared by Mrs. Gandhi’s government.

More significantly, personalisation of power irreversibly damaged the Congress. Till the 1960s, the party was known as one that could skilfully reconcile diverse interests within the organisation. It had perfected the art of compromise. This changed after Mrs. Gandhi’s accession to power. The party was reduced to a group of courtiers paying ritual obeisance to a supreme leader. The Congress is today a pale shadow of what it used to be. Once it was a dynamic party that could mobilise millions, today the fate of the party is tied to the fate of the Gandhi family.

After Mrs. Gandhi, it is Mr. Modi who has caught the imagination of Indians across caste and class. He speaks directly and powerfully to them through the radio, social media, and televised speeches. We, of course, cannot respond to his suggestions. Most of his ministers do not utter a sentence except in his praise, his initiative, his courage, his imagination, and his expertise. What on earth has happened to the norm of collective responsibility, and to the status of the Prime Minister as the ‘first among equals’ in a parliamentary democracy? The BJP has till now privileged ideology and principles over individual leaders. Today the party hangs on to the coat-tails of the Prime Minister.

The BJP is not alone in this. The subordination of regional political parties to populist leaders has cast a shadow on the party system and on democracy. Parties mediate between leaders and citizens because they represent the interests of their constituency. Today parties have become practically irrelevant because the image of the leader looms large over them. This is a serious setback for democracy. A representative party system is infinitely preferable to personalised forms of power. It is time party organisations asserted their identity and control over leaders. Otherwise history will repeat itself not as ‘farce’, but as ‘tragedy’.

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science at Delhi University.

Source: The Hindu, 2-12-2016

The nowhere people

People migrating due to environmental disasters should be accorded ‘refugee’ status in international law

An increasing number of people globally are facing displacement due to droughts, famines, rising sea levels and other natural disasters caused by climate change. This class of migrants has been labelled as ‘environmental refugees’ in popular literature. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an international body reviewing trends of internal displacement, an estimated 24 million people are being displaced annually by natural disasters since 2008. This crisis will make almost half a billion people worldwide “environmental refugees” by the end of the century.

The UN Refugee Convention (1951) grants certain rights to people fleeing persecution because of race, religion, nationality, affiliation to a particular social group, or political opinion. The rights they are entitled to follow principles of non-discrimination, non-penalisation, and non-refoulement. However, people migrating due to environmental disasters have no such recognition of their ‘refugee’ status in international law, leaving them without any basic rights of rehabilitation and compensation. In September 2015, in the run-up to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris, New Zealand reportedly refused a man and his family asylum. Ioane Teitiota from Kiribati, who had sought it on the grounds of being an ‘environmental refugee’, lost his appeal before the New Zealand Supreme Court, which rejected the argument that he faced persecution because of climate change, since no such category is listed under the UN Refugee Convention. He was deported to his native island, which regularly witnesses environmental problems including storm surges, flooding and water contamination.

The Paris let-down

The Paris Agreement presented a unique opportunity to set the record straight by addressing the challenge of increasing environmental refugees. Before the negotiations commenced, numerous demands were made to incorporate ways to tackle climate migration in the final agreement. These included recognising the threat posed by climate change to livelihoods and human safety, and environmental refugees or migrants affected by climate change; providing technical and capacity building support to national and local initiatives tackling such displacement; and developing suitable policies to manage loss and damage by addressing climate change-induced displacement. However, the Paris Agreement falls considerably short of these expectations. While some hail this agreement for alluding to the rights of ‘migrants’ in its Preamble, it is an anaemic attempt at appreciating the gravity of this crisis. There is also little follow-up in the text of the agreement to address this problem.

The agreement, in Paragraph 50 of the Loss and Damage section, creates a task force to build upon existing work and develop recommendations for addressing climate migration. But this is meaningless for two main reasons — first, the recommendations of the task force have no binding authority; and second, no details are provided on its functions, operations, funding and other aspects. This ambiguity further erodes confidence in the realistic capability of this task force to effectively tackle climate migration.

The way forward

Almost one year after the Paris Agreement, its significance in displaying collective political will to take meaningful action against climate change cannot be undermined. However, this should not excuse its deficiencies in addressing a burgeoning population of environmental refugees.

The draft of the Paris Agreement discussed before COP 21 provided for a Climate Change Displacement Coordination Facility. This facility was intended to target organised migration and planned relocation of displaced persons, securing emergency relief, and arranging compensation for those displaced — actions more meaningful than those of the task force in the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, this coordination facility did not make it to the final text of the agreement, but it may be worthwhile to reconsider its establishment.

While such a coordination facility can provide short-term support to relocate migrants and rehabilitate them in safer regions, a permanent solution requires an international treaty framework that recognises ‘environmental refugees’ and the obligations of nation states in accommodating them within their territories. We are already witnessing a world that is reactionary towards political refugees. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are two events that testify to the underlying paranoia towards immigrants. Ignoring environmental refugees or their status under international law keeps them in legal limbo and endangers their survival.

This scenario can be averted by either expanding the ambit of the existing UN Refugee Convention to include climate migration, or by creating an independent treaty framework addressing the challenges of climate change-induced migration comprehensively. It is also pertinent to mention that while India, the U.S., and China have all ratified the Paris Agreement, there is little discussion on steps to be taken by the three largest emitters of greenhouse gases. The absence of such discourse is ironic given that the three countries are predicted to suffer tremendously from climate change-induced migration, resulting in large-scale displacement of their own populations. Therefore, it should be in their collective interest to lead efforts on finding an international resolution to this problem before the ensuing harm becomes irreparable.

Ameen Jauhar is a Research Fellow at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, New Delhi. Views are personal.

Source: The Hindu, 6-12-2016

You Don't Belong Here

NIRANJAN S MEHTA





In a temple at Delphi, in Greece, spiritual seekers meditate before a stone tablet with the words `Know Thyself ' inscribed on it.This message was given by Socrates to seekers of truth more than 2,000 years ago. The same message has been given in different words in different cultures by philosophers like Adi Shankara, Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Rajchandra: Ask yourself, “Who am I?“ Others have said: “Know the knower.“The journey begins from the place where you are to the place where you have always been.You have to experience your presence and know that you are the master of your mind, senses and body . In Gurdjieff 's words, “Life is real, only then, when I am.“ Ultimately , the mind has to merge into its source, which is pure consciousness.
Once you begin to separate from your false identities like your body , thoughts, desires and external happenings, you realise that bliss is the result of the suspension of mental activities. Anxiety results from desires and expectations. Awareness has to be created so that the mind does not slip back to its old habits.
What would be needed to remain steadfast in abiding calm and undisturbed bliss? The answer can be found in the practice of meditation. Meditation should not be a time-bound action but a permanent state of total awareness and being. In this state, the past, present and future have contracted themselves into a single moment. In the words of the Mother, “To know is good; to live is better and to be that is perfection.“

Tedious Teaching and Other Bore-Outs





Boredom never had good press and is now getting sued as a mortal affliction

Many in India will be keenly watching what happens later this month to the case of the Indian-origin British lawyer who has sued his alma mater Oxford University for £1 million for “boring“ teaching that apparently resulted in his getting a second-class degree, leading to a second-class career.After all, pedagogy in India is not generally regarded as scintillating and attributing underperforming careers to tedious teaching would be temptingly plausible for India's aggrieved. Indeed, even the specifics of the lawyer's complaint are eerily familiar: that four of the seven teachers in the faculty were on leave during his crucial final year, leading to “deficient“ and “negligent“ teaching by the remaining staff. Now that a teacher has been fired from her job in Scotland for boring her students with insipid and repetitive lessons, the writing may be on the blackboard for ennui-evoking educators.However, the effect of “bore-out“ (a low-voltage burnout) on the workforce cannot be ignored either, considering a Frenchman has sued his former employer this year for turning him into a “professional zombie“ with mindless work, and a recent study of UK civil servants has ostensibly shown that people can indeed be “bored to death“. The latter could, of course, explain non-performance in many government departments here too.

Source: Economic Times, 6-12-2016