Rebooting the system for a skills upgrade

There needs to be a road map to rescue private Industrial Training Institutes from their weak state

Small shops, basements, tin sheds and godowns. These are not random workplaces but places where private Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) are running in the country. Disturbing facts such as these come from the report of the Standing Committee on Labour (2017-18) headed by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Kirit Somaiya, on the “Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and Skill Development Initiative Scheme” of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE). It was submitted to Parliament few months ago.

Explaining the scale-up

The ITIs were initiated in the 1950s. In a span of 60 years, until 2007, around 1,896 public and 2,000 private ITIs were set up. However, in a 10-year period from 2007, more than 9,000 additional private ITIs were accredited.

What explains this huge private sector scale-up? The committee says that it is not efficiency but a disregard for norms and standards. However, the ITIs are not alone. The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) today has more than 6,000 private training centres. Since it has short-term courses and its centres open and close frequently, it is all the more prone to a dilution of standards. Private training partners have mushroomed at the rate of five a day (mostly with government support) and it is clear that the government has been unable to regulate private institutions for quality. Private sector engagement in skill development has been taken up by standalone private training partners and not employers. The latter could have made the system demand-driven. Meanwhile, the lack of a regulator for skill development, with teeth, has led to poor quality affiliation, assessment and certification.

The Somaiya committee report is scathing in its tone and specific in details. It outlines instances of responsibility outsourcing, no oversight, connivance and an ownership tussle between the Central and State governments.

Private-ITI accreditation troubles started when the Quality Council of India (QCI), a private body, was hired due to “high workload of affiliation and shortage of [government] staff”. The QCI did not follow accreditation norms created by the National Council for Vocational Training (NCVT) and it appears that neither scale nor standard was achieved, but only speed. ‘Speed’ now risks the future of 13.8 lakh students (on an average, 206 students per ITI) studying in these substandard ITIs, which can be closed any time.

The ITIs have a unique functioning set-up. While they were formed under the government’s Craftsman Training Scheme scheme, their day-to-day administration, finances and admissions are with State governments. The NCVT performs an advisory role. The ITIs often run into issues with no one to take ownership. A case in point is the examination process — the question paper is prepared by the NCVT, but administered and evaluated by instructors of the State Councils for VT. The NCVT is just a stamp with no role in actually assessing quality. How can quality outcomes be expected without quality assessments?

The parliamentary committee has shed light on the ITIs. If the same exercise were extended to other skill development schemes, the picture would be grimmer. There are 183 cases pending in High Courts on non-compliance of norms by the ITIs. However, the short-term training programmes of the Ministry evade any scrutiny and action. For example, the Standard Training Assessment and Reward scheme spent ₹850 crore in 2013-14 with no norms for quality. There were no Aadhaar checks, attendance requirements and batch size limitations. Private training operators have made a profit with no court cases.

The report also reinforces disturbing findings of a national survey by the research institute (NILERD) of the Planning Commission in 2011 about private ITIs: they offered training in less than five trades (in government ITIs it is less than 10); had fewer classrooms and workshops for practice; and their teachers were very poorly paid.

A starting point

So what can we do systemically? A good point to start would be the Sharda Prasad Committee recommendations.

We need better oversight, with a national board for all skill development programmes. The core work (accreditation, assessment, certification and course standards) cannot be outsourced. Like every other education board (such as the CBSE), a board is required in vocational training that is accountable. Since we have the NCVT as a legacy, it should be used as a kernel to constitute the board. We should also have a mandatory rating system for the ITIs that is published periodically. A ranking of the ITIs on several parameters such as the one done by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council in tertiary education can be replicated.

There should be one system, with one law and one national vocational education and training system. The silos in which vocational training happens in India is unfortunate. We need to create a unified national vocational system where the ITIs, NSDC private vocational trainers and vocational education in schools, and the other Central ministries conducting training gel seamlessly and can learn from, and work with each other. A unified legal framework can facilitate such a unification. The absence of a law has only weakened regulation and monitoring. What we need is a national vocational act that replaces all scattered regulations — recommended in the 12th Five Year Plan.

Micro-institutional reforms

The ITIs have many internal issues such as staffing and salaries that need attention, as the NILERD nationwide survey in 2011 had found. There is also a critical need to reskill ITI teachers and maintain the student-teacher ratio. Since technology obsolescence is a continuous challenge, financial support envisaged through the NSDC should be extended to the ITIs.

The primary reason for hiring the QCI and the mess that followed was this: “huge workload of affiliation and shortage of staff”. This is true even today. It is unlikely that without fixing this, the QCI mistake will not be repeated. There has been a tremendous push by the government for private sector talent in government; perhaps it is worth considering talent from the open market to fill up higher posts in skill development.

Institutional reforms such as moving the office of the Directorate General of Employment (the arm that has all data on employment) from the Ministry of Labour to the MSDE would help. It would also complement the Directorate General of Training already under MSDE.

Employers and financing

This is the last but perennial challenge. Given the scale of our demographic challenge, a belief that financing from corporate social responsibility, multilateral organisations such as the World Bank, and the government will meet the financial needs for skill development is wishful thinking.

The only way to mobilise adequate resources the right way is to do skills training, and have equipment and tools that keep pace with changing needs and ensure that employers have skin in the game. This is possible through a reimbursable industry contribution (RIC) — a 1-2% payroll tax that will be reimbursed when employers train using public/private infrastructure and provide data. RIC, which is implemented in 62 other countries, was recommended in the 12th Plan and is an idea whose time has come. An estimate by the first author of this article indicated that such a tax would generate ₹17, 000 crore per annum for skilling in India — which is several multiples of State/Union governments’ current annual budget for skilling.

Finally, while there is so much talk of skills for the future and the impact of artificial intelligence and automation, data show that 13.8 lakh students in the ITIs are suffering due to poor institutional accreditation. Placement in NSDC training has been less than 15%. Maybe if we take care of the present, we will be better prepared for the future.

Santosh Mehrotra is Professor of Economics, Centre for Labour, Jawaharlal Nehru University, a member of the Prasad Expert Committee on Sector Skill Councils, and a lead author of the National Skills Qualification Framework. Ashutosh Pratap works on skills and jobs issues and has worked with the Expert Committee

Source: The Hindu, 7/08/2018

Results, Not Excuses

Your life isn’t going to get better by chance, but by the choice, your choice. Whatever your plan is, just know that nothing else will satisfy you. Today, wherever you stand in the race, desiring health, happiness, money, peace of mind and/or true expression, you earlier decisions and efforts have briefed your current position.

But in this extraordinary world, most people fail to achieve the desired targets, because of one big reason that is the lack of the most desirable aspect to success: faith in self. All winners share a common attitude, they believe in themselves, even in those times when nobody else did, that made the difference

Faith can turn your failure upside down. Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence, faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequence. You only have to decide upon what is it you want out of your life and then stay with it, never deviating your course, no matter what, how long it takes, or how rough the road or weather is, until you have accomplished it. Achievers achieve, no matter what. Success is not the special skill but ultimately your will.

Don’t postpone your life, be in the driver’s seat now, look at the world of opportunities, size it up, make a decision, and make things happen. In order to succeed you need courage more than the fear of failure. Think of delivering results, not excuses. It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent. Be the CEO of your life. God wants us to bite off more than we can chew, to live by faith and not by sight.

Economic Times, 7/08/2018

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 53, Issue No. 31, 04 Aug, 2018

Editorials

From the Editor’s Desk

Who Is Accountable for Starvation Deaths?

Comment

Imran Khan and His Naya Pakistan

S Akbar Zaidi

Margin Speak

The New Normal in Modi’s ‘New India’

Anand Teltumbde

Commentary

‘Pathological Normalcy’ and Mob Violence

Abhay Shukla

Uncertainty in Climate Science - Extreme Weather Events in India

Hans Nicolai Adam, Lyla Mehta, Shilpi Srivastava

Indian Foreign Policy - Changing Requirements and India’s Response

Kishan S Rana

Obituary

Exhausting the Limits of the Possible - Vineet Kohli (1979–2018)

R Ramakumar

Book Reviews

Misreading Afghanistan’s Crypto-coloniality

M Jamil Hanifi

Overburdened Police Force - Shortcomings of India’s Internal Security

Chris Ogden

Perspectives

Will UDAY Brighten Up Rajasthan’s Finances?

Pinaki Chakraborty, Manish Gupta, Lekha Chakraborty

Special Articles

Figure of the Halalkhore - Caste and Stigmatised Labour in Colonial Bombay

Shireen Mirza

Child Height in India - Facts and Interpretations from the NFHS-4, 2015–16

Diane Coffey, Dean Spears

Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme - A Strategy for Adapting to Climate Change

Anshu Ogra

Discussion

What Does CORE’s The Economy Offer Students and Teachers?

Rahul De

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Postscript

Onstage and Offstage - Dance of the Brokpa

Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati

‘Bel Patri’ - A Naming Ceremony

Smriti Ravindra

A Biographic Smokescreen

N S Gundur

Last Lines

Letters

Who Is a Legitimate Citizen?

Arup Kumar Sen

Greening Fiscal Federalism

Naini Jayaseelan

Few Enemies, Many Friends

Amitabha Bhattacharya

A fundamental error

The Srikrishna report on data protection misinterprets the Supreme Court’s right to privacy judgment

Anniversaries can be reasons to celebrate the present or reminisce about our past. When we do the latter, it is a call to memory, often signifying an unfulfilled promise and a preference for nostalgia. August 24 will mark the first anniversary of the unanimous affirmation of the right to privacy by a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court. The court imposed upon the government a clear obligation to make a law safeguarding a person’s informational privacy, commonly referred to as data protection. The right to privacy judgment, which had six separate opinions that converge into a unanimous decision, noted in the words of Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice S.K. Kaul that the Union government had tasked a committee headed by Justice B.N. Srikrishna to formulate such a law in July last year. This committee has produced a set of recommendations that run into 213 pages, and a draft law titled the “The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018” running into 112 sections. Despite being formed within the ambit of, and even being bound by, the Right to Privacy judgment, the recommendations do not only undermine the legal principles within it but also re-interpret them.

Two key points

While this claim may seem provocative, it is based on a reading of the privacy judgment. First, it expressly stated the primacy of the individual as the beneficiary of fundamental rights. Second, it rejected the argument that the right to privacy dissolves in the face of amorphous collective notions of economic development. The priorities of the Srikrishna committee stray from these two basic points. Its report, titled “A Free and Fair Digital Economy: Protecting Privacy, Empowering Indians”, keeps to the apparent pecking order that its title signals: the common good and the economy come first and individuals second. In justifying this framework, the report runs into tremendous difficulties as it attempts to put together a regulatory agenda that reconciles the expansion of the digital economy and state control with the principles of the right to privacy judgment.

These difficulties reveal themselves in a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of constitutional law. These are made all the more difficult to follow by the heavy use of jargon and a reliance on foreign and academic authorities, which are often cited without proper context. The trouble begins with the report’s conception of the state. The state’s purpose under the Constitution, says the report, is “based on two planks”. First and foremost, “the state is a facilitator of human progress” and is “commanded” by the Directive Principles of State Policy “to serve the common good”. Here, Fundamental Rights, which help protect against a state “prone to excess”, come “second”. This ignores the very structure of the Constitution in which the chapter guaranteeing enforceable Fundamental Rights stands on its own, preceding the one setting out unenforceable Directive Principles of State Policy.

In doing the so, the report attempts to open the right to privacy to allow the state the most convenient means by which to realise its regulatory agenda. Enabling the government’s convenience is not an objective laid out by the right to privacy judgment. Constitutional guarantees of rights do not automatically bend even to the pursuit of constitutionally legitimate aims. Instead, a rigorous three-part test set out in the right to privacy judgment makes clear that it is for the government to measure and justify its actions at every point that it seeks to make inroads into our privacy.

To justify its priorities, the report proceeds on the premise that upends the historical consensus of what Constitutions and rights exist to do: protect every citizen of the republic against incursions into the vast repository of freedoms that exist naturally. The report says that “to see the individual as an atomised unit, standing apart from the collective, neither flows from our constitutional framework nor accurately grasps the true nature of rights litigations. Rights (of which the right to privacy is an example) are not deontological categories that protect interests of atomised individuals.” Then, it proceeds to conclude, “Thus the construction of a right itself is not because it translates into an individual good, be it autonomy, speech, etc. but because such good creates a collective culture where certain reasons for state action are unacceptable.” Much of this language is inscrutable to even the legally trained mind.

To the extent that its import can be made out, the argument seems to be a strained, convoluted and ultimately unconvincing attempt to re-litigate the case of the government in the right to privacy issue. To the report’s view that the individual ought not to be the spotlighted while making a law, the right to privacy judgment is in stark contrast. In Justice S.A. Bobde’s words, “Constitutions like our own are means by which individuals – the Preambular ‘people of India’ – create ‘the state’, a new entity to serve their interests and be accountable to them.” Moreover, in Justice Chandrachud’s words: “The individual is the focal point of the Constitution because it is in the realisation of individual rights that the collective well being of the community is determined.”

Too much jargon

It is the report’s approach to rights that is perhaps of most concern for the health of our democracy. Its statement that rights are not “deontological categories” is both unnecessarily complicated in its wording and patently untrue in its content. By using language like this, the report, already a technical document published only in English, alienates ordinary Indians from engaging with a subject of real significance to each of us. Our fundamental rights, whether to speech, equality or practice our religion or profession, are all essential facets that make life worth living and are held up by the right to privacy with regard to information about us. In stating that rights are not things which are essential in themselves is an unacceptable position to take under our Constitution. In fact, in the right to privacy judgment, Justice J. Chelameswar approves of the principle that liberty — which is the family to which the right to privacy belongs — is valuable in a democracy not only as a means but as an end in itself.

Reframing the right

It is not often that nine judges of the Supreme Court assemble and pronounce a unanimous judgment without dissent. The promise of such a holding becomes more critical when it concerns the liberty of individuals and an attempt to correct an imbalance of power which exists against them. This is why the right to privacy judgment was celebrated last year. It signified hope that things could get better, that values of freedom, autonomy and dignity would be realised. However, the Srikrishna Report shows that the danger to a high constitutional principle may more often be that it is disregarded, rather than that it is disobeyed. By re-framing and re-interpreting the right to privacy, the report entrenches the positions of the two entities which already wield the most power over ordinary Indians: corporations and the government. As time passes, we will have many opportunities to look back to the day when the Supreme Court declared the fundamental right to privacy. When we do, we should feel relief rather than regret.

Apar Gupta and Ujwala Uppaluri are practising advocates in New Delhi

Source: The Hindu, 1/08/18

Citizenship and compassion

Can India manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy?

The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution that governance and politics are full of ironies and paradoxes and that the best of intentions might lead to the worst consequences. Inherent in it is the banalisation of evil that can take place when suffering on a large scale gets reduced to a cost-benefit scenario. Democratic India rarely had experiences of detention camps, except during the India-Pakistan wars, and in 1962 when Indians of Chinese origin were unfairly detained in camps. The last episode, a stain on the Indian conscience, is forgotten or swept aside. Today, the statistic of four million names off the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) is reduced to an everyday problem of management. This routinisation of violence is deeply worrying.

Surveillance state

There is another piece of cynicism that one needs to be cautious of. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is adept at projecting a mastery of electoral frames and governance to maximise electoral output. It took the normalcy of a governance project and turned it into a panopticon, classifying citizens through a system of surveillance, creating a sense of sovereignty where the bureaucrat plays god, deciding who is in and who is out. With 40 lakh names off the final draft of the NRC, it has made a play for the majoritarian vote. The party will dwell on the claim that it took the bull by the horns, updating the citizens’ register, a challenge the Congress was not up to.

ALSO READ

One register to count them all — how the NRC fares

 

The politics of citizens’ registers underlines the problem of migratory politics, refracted through the layered memories of many historical events. It began in the colonial era when the British attempted to import labour for the plantations. Major displacements like Partition and the Bangladesh war added to a huge “illegal” population. “Legality” is determined through certificates. Legitimacy is a stamped paper. But the question one asks is, what happens to the ones who have grown roots, who have brought land in the area? Do they not count with the stroke of a pen? In fact, it forces one to open up the question of who is a citizen? Is citizenship based on land, residence, identity, cultural roots, language, ethnicity? Or is it a formal certificate, a clerical endorsement that makes one a citizen? Informal economies operate according to parallel rules, with residents getting regularised over time and obtaining the entitlements of citizenship after decades of stay. Here, the temporariness of the migrant is something that haunts her. Vulnerable though she is, she also becomes prey to electoral politics of corrupt politicians seeking instant constituencies.

A leader’s summary

The very scale of the exercise, the suggestion that 40 lakh people must do more to prove their claim to citizenship, gives it a technocratic air. The sense of history and memory is lost. As West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee suggested, the label ‘infiltrator’ already implicates you in a paranoid world, where the other is perpetually suspect. Ms. Banerjee attempted to introduce a notion of sanity by observing that while there may be a minuscule number of people who are infiltrators from across the border, among the 40 lakh people who don’t find their names on the NRC are those who crossed over decades back, compelled by historical reasons, and they cannot be considered infiltrators. She made three quick points. First, infiltrators and refugees are different categories, to be coped with differently. Second, time and history are crucial for comprehending such a colossal event. To reduce it to one moment is mindless. Third, by introducing such measures, it is the BJP that is playing the infiltrator, penetrating into citizens’ lives, probing what they eat, what they wear and what they do. The BJP, in treating Assam as an enclosure, is also panopticon-ising our world, increasing the level of surveillance and control over our lives.

The point Ms. Banerjee is making is fundamental. In this tussle between nation-state and an open democracy, the enclosure and the panopticon as mediums of control are at odds with the idea of the commons and the hospitality of the community. Technocratic solutions cannot hide the absence of human and historical understanding. She might be dismissed as a rabble rouser, but it is she who is pointing out that the BJP is playing on the anxieties of people, rousing old hates between Bengal and Assam. To hide behind the abstractions of sovereignty and security and, officialising parochialism is the logic of the BJP game.

The handling and management of large populations create a problem of ethics. Assam raises the question of both triage and exterminism. Once one plays out the census game, makes a few concessions, one almost feels that the remainder are dispensable. The dispensability and disposability of large populations confronts India on a large scale. One cannot handle such situations merely through law. One needs generosity, hospitality and compassion. One needs to understand that once our civics accepts the detention centre and the internment camp as routine, we are creating gulags of the mind, where one can begin with an ordinary act of classification and erase a people. Indian democracy has to face the genocidal prospect inherent both in its technocratic sense of governance and in the anxieties that electoralism creates.

The populist frame

In fact, it is BJP president Amit Shah who gives away the game as his party adopts a tough stand. He claims that the BJP is fighting for the security of the people. The shift from citizenship to a preoccupation with security unfolds a different paradigm of thought. Nation-state and citizenship as encompassing entities offer different ideas of order and control. Security is a panopticon-ising notion, while citizenship is a caring, even protective, one. Security operates on the grids of surveillance, scrutiny and separation. Citizenship is a more hospitable notion of initiating the other into a system. The norms of the paradigm are different. Mr. Shah’s response was a giveaway because it puts the idea of security within a populist framework, where demographic and cultural anxiety becomes the raw material for emerging vote banks. A register which began as a routine, even clinical exercise now acquires a Machiavellian shadow. Suspicion and anxiety magnify as rumour becomes epidemic. One hopes the register does not create an Orwellian situation where some are more equal than others.

This point becomes clearer when we read that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants a similar NRC exercise in West Bengal and other States. Rather than seeing wider conspiracy theories, it is the inner contradictions of the exercise that we shall consider.

The Assam model?

Maybe one has to go back and look at our Constitution and reread notions of the border, the very idea of citizenship. We need to go beyond hard definitions and look at the penumbra of these concepts. A citizen may be defined in terms of certain properties. But the question is, how humane or plural is such a definition? Can we manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? These are the questions Assam raises but our policy-makers do not discuss. How do we create a more hospitable, affable theory of citizenship where marginal groups survive, where nomads and other fluid groups are allowed to follow their life lines? Can we think of a nation-state with permeable borders and a fluid sense of citizenship which makes life more hopeful for the refugee? These are questions not for the distant future, but challenges this decade will have to overcome. We have to rethink the Assam in us.

Shiv Visvanathan is an academic associated with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination

Source: The Hindu, 6/08/2018

Are You Awake?

Krishna says to Arjuna, “Be awake. Be a true yogi. Awaken yourself !” Was Arjuna literally sleeping? No! This awakening that Vasudeva talks about is “waking up of consciousness”. To be awake is to be aware. Awareness about who you are and what is the purpose of your birth.

Awakening is enlightenment that the Buddha attained. What was he awakened from? He was sleeping on the bed of unconquerable desires, unwholesome thoughts and short-lived materialism. A false ego was what he was dwelling in. Awakening made him realise the real essence of his existence and that only happened when he shed desires. Being awake is seeing the true Buddha-nature in self with open eyes.

Krishna tells Arjuna that desires cause suffering. A true yogi is aware of this and overcomes his ‘dukkha’. Thus, one should raise his consciousness to higher realms and get attuned to divine energy so that his suffering can come to an end. To be awake is to see the world from divine eyes.

How does one become awake? Meditation increases the vibration that connects to the Supreme. Slowly and gradually, awareness rises up as the third eye of wisdom opens up. The knowledge of who you are, descends, and illumination happens. The additional aspect is of kundalini awakening that is necessary for enlightenment. Prince Charming (divine energy) comes down and kisses the Sleeping Beauty (kundalini energy), rousing her awake, and with consciousness, moves up the spine and enlightenment is accelerated.

Source: Economic Times, 6/08/18

India ranks 56th in early initiation of breastfeeding, say UNICEF, WHO

Only two in five newborns are breastfed within first hour of life across the world

A new report released by UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has ranked Sri Lanka at the top of the list of countries with early initiation of breastfeeding.

India ranks 56th among the 76 countries that were analysed. The report, released ahead of World Breastfeeding Week (August 1 to 7), says that only two in five newborns are breastfed within the first hour of life across the world.

“Whether delivery takes place in a hut in a village or a hospital in a major city, putting newborns to the breast within the first hour after birth gives them the best chance to survive, grow and develop to their full potential,” says the report, which emphasises on exclusive breastfeeding.

Countries like Kazakhsthan, Rwanda, Bhutan and Uruguay have fared much better than India, making it into the top 10. Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Montenegro are at the bottom.

Speaking to The Hindu, Gayatri Singh, UNICEF’s childhood development specialist, said various aspects contribute to early initiation of breastfeeding. “Generally, the focus is only on the mothers. However, we have to target the mother-in-law, the husband and the service providers as well to ensure that early initiation does take place,” Ms. Singh said. She said the data for India was taken from the fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4).

Though nearly 80% births are institutional deliveries in India, there are missed opportunities of early initiation of breastfeeding due to low awareness among healthcare staff. “The early initiation period has doubled as compared to NFHS 3. But more progress can be made by capitalising on opportunities and creating awareness at the community level,” Ms. Singh said.

Breastfeeding in the first hour of life is significantly important for survival. The first feed, or colostrum, is termed as the baby’s first vaccine and is extremely rich in nutrients and antibodies. Continuous and exclusive breastfeeding thereafter is also important.

Source: The Hindu, 2-08-18