At 33rd position, IIT-Bombay top Indian institute in QS ranking of Asian varsities

Not far below its counterpart in Mumbai, IIT Delhi bagged the 40th rank while IIT Madras was placed at the 48th position. A host of Indian institutions figured in the top 100 slots but none made it to the top 30.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay emerged as the top Indian educational institution in the latest QS rankings for Asian universities released on Wednesday, securing the 33rd position.

Not far below its counterpart in Mumbai, IIT Delhi bagged the 40th rank while IIT Madras was placed at the 48th position. A host of Indian institutions figured in the top 100 slots but none made it to the top 30.

IIT Bombay was the top-ranked Indian institution in last year’s QS rankings for Asian varsities too, when it bagged the 34th position. IIT Delhi was at the 40th position last year as well.

The National University of Singapore emerged at pole position this year. The University of Hong Kong secured second place while the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore stood third.

The prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, bagged the 50th position. IIT Kharagpur was placed 53rd and IIT Kanpur in the 61st position. IIT Roorkee was placed 86th and IIT Guwahati in the 107th position. Delhi University bagged the highest rank among Indian varsities at 62. The University of Hyderabad secured the 106th position and the University of Calcutta stood at 134th position.

The ranking body, QS, had only recently released its first-ever list for top Indian universities. IIT Bombay had topped that list as well, earning highest scores on academic and employer reputatioin indicators. IISc Bangalore was placed second on that list, which otherwise was dominated by the IITs.

For the Asia Rankings, QS said it had used 11 indicators including employer reputation, academic reputation, faculty-student ratio, international research network, staff with PhDs and international faculty.

Former University Grants Commission (UGC) member V S Chauhan said: “IITs have a good research output and their funding is robust, which is why they consistently do better. But I believe there are several universities which will come up, especially with increased autonomy. The way towards the future is focusing more on foreign collaboration as well as research. I, however, believe Indian universities will benefit in more investment in infrastructure.”.

Source: 24/10/2018

What has India achieved by rejecting the Human Capital Index?

Rather than acknowledge reality and raise questions that elevate the debate on how to develop and measure human capital, the government’s summary rejection has exposed its own small-mindedness and lack of political imagination

On October 11, the World Bank released the first ‘Human Capital Index’ (HCI). The index is designed to place the spotlight on human capital as the key driver of sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Human capital is defined as productivity measured against a benchmark of complete education and full health. Drawing on five key indicators, including under five mortality rates, quality and quantity of education, adult survival rates and quality of stunting, the index attempts to capture the amount of human capital a child born today could expect to attain by the age of 18.

The HCI awards India the dubious distinction of 115th position out of 157 countries ranked. India beats Pakistan, which ranked 134. But the rest of our neighbourhood, poorer in terms of GDP, has inched ahead. Bangladesh is at 106; Mynamar at 107; and Nepal at 102. I suppose we can take some comfort in knowing it’s a close fight. Sri Lanka tops the charts at 72.

India has summarily rejected HCI. In a statement issued by the ministry of finance, the government expressed “serious reservations about the advisability and utility of the exercise”. Arguing that there are “serious methodological weaknesses”, the government announced, therefore, that it has chosen to “ignore the HCI and will continue to undertake its path-breaking programme for human capital development”.

India is well within its rights to ask difficult questions and critique HCI. Indeed these are global debates that must be had and we should worry if other countries are not asking hard questions of the World Bank. However, in refusing to engage in a dialogue and debating the scale of India’s challenge (frankly, the ranking merely exposes a well-known reality) the government, has achieved little — except to expose its own failings. The tone and tenor of the government’s position and the failure to acknowledge the scale of the challenge India faces offers an important insight into the government’s current mindset and policy focus. This doesn’t bode well for India’s future.

The language adopted to reject the ranking reveals a lack of the political imagination needed to tackle these grand challenges. The HCI, the finance ministry’s statement argues, is flawed because it doesn’t reflect recent initiatives of this government. It goes on to list a medley of schemes that find regular mention in election rallies as key welfare achievements of the National Democratic Alliance — Ujjwala, Swachh Bharat Mission, Aadhaar, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, Ayushman Bharat and the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan. But this medley offers little in terms of a vision or strategy for human capital development.

Early in its tenure, the Modi government made a careful attempt to craft a new narrative of welfare and human development as “empowerment” in opposition to its predecessor, the UPA’s “entitlement” approach. But it never clearly articulated a pathway to empowerment, choosing instead to focus on announcing schemes without joining the dots.

Crucially, the two key pillars of “empowerment” — quality education and health — remained mostly invisible from the NDA’s welfare politics, until the grand announcement of Ayushman Bharat.

On education, this government’s singular achievement, reflected in the finance ministry’s statement, is the launch of the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan — an administrative coupling of two existing schemes that dealt with elementary and secondary education. There is little here that is different from the past. And certainly has nothing on the real education challenge — improving learning outcomes.

And while Ayushman Bharat is ambitious in scale, given the challenges of implementing a large health insurance scheme in a low-capacity state like India, it remains unclear what impact this might have on the quality of care a patient receives.

The root of the problem lies in the fact that like its predecessor, which rejected the global PISA rankings on learning outcomes, the NDA believes that a business as usual, scheme driven approach that measures progress against inputs and processes — access to cash, schools, hospital, toilets — rather than outcomes — learning quality, stunting rates — is the route to human capital development. This is the reason offered for conveniently accepting the World Bank’s Ease of Business (whose methodology raises as many, if not more, questions than the HCI) where India shows progress — because it measures inputs. It is also why the United Nations’ equally damning, Human Development Index is more acceptable to India.

Yet all the evidence, including the governments’ own data, highlight that business as usual will not lead to change. Rather than acknowledge reality and raise questions that elevate the debate on how to develop and measure human capital, the government’s summary rejection has exposed its own lack of political imagination. Quibbling with the World Bank is not going to ensure that India implements “path-breaking programmes for human development”. This needs a bold, new political imagination.

Yamini Aiyar is president and chief executive, Centre for Policy Research

Source: Hindustan Times, 24/10/2018

The community’s health can drive great economic and social progress

The Global Conference on Primary Health Care approaches health care in a fresh manner

The Alma Alta Declaration put “health for all” centre stage as a fundamental right in 1978, with 134 countries committed to making primary health care the mainstay to achieve universal health coverage. In a tectonic shift from the existing disease-focused hospital-based treatment approach, it redefined health as physical and mental well-being of the community and essential for social and economic progress.

Over the next three decades, the declaration was dismissed as idealistic and unrealistic and the focus shifted to selective, targeted deliverables that offered low-cost and quantifiable solutions to the most common causes of death. Instead of strengthening primary healthcare, policies and public health budgets went almost exclusively to controlling communicable diseases and programmes on ‘GOBI’ (growth monitoring, oral rehydration, breastfeeding, and immunisation), and later, ‘GOBI-FFF’ (GOBI plus food supplementation, female literacy, and family planning). India, too, got on the targeted programmes bandwagon with the major chunk of its health budget going to reproductive and child health and family planning.

There is now a steady and growing support among public health experts to end this approach to health care. The Sustainable Development Goals on good health and well-being also call for making modern health care equitable and accessible to all by investing in community-based care, health centres, hospitals, and population-based interventions for prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and management.

Though people in most parts of the world enjoy better health than ever before, most countries still struggle to provide primary health care. Disease-specific policies, an unregulated private sector, overinvestment in specialised hospitals for curative treatment, and an acute workforce shortage has widened the gap in access to quality health care between the rich and the poor. Epidemics and outbreaks caused by new emerging infectious diseases, such as HIV, Ebola and influenza, further burdened the public health infrastructure in many countries already struggling to meet the growing load of non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancers and mental health diseases.

Half the world’s population still has no access to essential health services, even though 80-90% of their health needs across a lifetime can be provided by primary health care services, which range from maternity and child care, to disease prevention through vaccination, management of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and supporting care of ageing populations, who live longer but often less healthy lives because they have more than one disease.

This week, 1,200 decision-makers and influencers, including heads of state, ministers of health, finance, education, and social welfare, not-for-profits and health professionals will meet at the Global Conference on Primary Health Care in Astana, Kazakhstan, which is co-hosting the meet with the World Health Organisation and Unicef. As in the rest of the world, much has changed in Kazakhstan since 1978. Kazakhstan is independent of the Soviet Union, Alma Ata has been renamed Almaty, and the country’s capital has shifted to Astana, best known for its glittering, sci-fi skyline that appears to have magically sprung up in Steppe wilderness. What is now being resurrected in this futuristic city is the need to rejuvenate and revitalise people-centric primary health care using newer tools, such as technology.

India, which was one of the participants in the Alma Ata conference, has made a start with the launch of health and wellness centres under Ayushman Bharat that offer health promotion, disease prevention and management, treatment of simple fever, infections and pain, and early diagnosis and timely referrals to hospitals at the community level. These will be staffed by a new cadre of technologically enabled community health officers (CHOs) trained as mid-level providers, who will work with support from auxiliary nurse midwives, community workers (Asha), and male health workers to ensure everybody in a population of around 5,000 people gets free basic medicine, diagnosis and treatment.

Around 80% of India’s 1.04 million registered doctors of modern medicine (allopathy) work is in cities, which is home to 31% of the country’s population. The rural population is heavily dependent on the public health sector, where the allopathic doctor-patient ratio is 1:11,082, against the WHO-recommended ratio of 1:1,000. These CHOs will help meet the shortfall of doctors in rural and underserved areas and strengthen health sub-centres at the village level to free up doctors for tertiary care and substantially reduce people’s out-of-pocket health spending.

Strong primary health care, rooted in community participation, builds resilience against new and existing diseases and helps governments to respond to evolving health needs, demographics, environmental challenges, and emergencies to improve outcomes and well-being at lower costs.

sanchitasharma@htlive.com

Source: Hindustan Times, 24/10/2018

Learning New Lessons

In life, all of us face certain situations or challenges that are tough, almost impossible to resolve. Sometimes, in spite of our best, most sincere, honest and repeated efforts, we seem to make no progress or headway, in a situation or a relationship. We break our heads, we overthink, we seek advice from friends and family, we explore more and more options for resolution, we move heaven and earth, and yet, the challenge seems to remain the same. Is it possible that some situations, circumstances, relationships or challenges are not meant for resolution, not meant to be solved, set right or to become harmonious? Is it possible that these situations have been placed in our lives only for the purposes of our learning? We are born on this planet with a much lower consciousness than when we leave it. That change or rise in consciousness is brought about by learning lessons. The purpose of this life on earth, among other things, is also our spiritual evolution. But invariably what we do, or rather what we are conditioned to do, is to try and solve the problems, instead of trying to look for lessons in them. We miss the whole point, the raison d’être, of the problem. We rarely think, “Oh, this problem, which is seemingly unsolvable, might be here for my learning, not for a solution.” If we could realise, especially after we have made multiple attempts that this is a situation not amenable to resolution, but is something else, then we might be receptive to looking at it, from a point of view of learning something

Source: Economic Times, 25/10/2018

The Indian Economic & Social History Review

Table of Contents

Volume 55 Issue 4, October–December 2018

Previous Issue

Table of Contents (PDF)

Articles

‘On the Colonization of India’ (1829): Public meetings, debates and later disputes Rosinka Chaudhuri First Published September 24, 2018; pp. 463–489 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Contested lands and contentious lines: Land acquisition for the railways in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Delhi Devika Shankar First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 491–513 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Psychiatrists and psychiatry in late colonial India Shilpi Rajpal First Published October 3, 2018; pp. 515–548 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Social histories of exclusion and moments of resistance: The case of Muslim Julaha weavers in colonial United Provinces Santosh Kumar Rai First Published September 28, 2018; pp. 549–574 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book Reviews

Book review: Ishita Banerjee-Dube, A History of Modern India, Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy and Thomas R. Trautmann, India: A Brief History of a Civilization Blessy C. Abraham First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 575–578 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book review: Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire Kyle Gardner First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 578–581 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book review: Johann Mathew, Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea Chhaya Goswami First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 581–584 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book review: Udaya Kumar, Writing the First Person: Literature, History, and Autobiography in Modern Kerala Kiran Keshavamurthy First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 584–586 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book review: Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics Deven M. Patel, Kyle Gardner First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 586–590 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Book review: Sudeshna Guha, Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts Swadhin Sen First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 590–592 Abstract Preview |  |  |

Index to Volume LV

Index to Volume LV First Published October 23, 2018; pp. 593–594 Abstract |  |  |

Ripe for prison reform

Political will is crucial to reform India’s criminal justice system

In an acknowledgment that the more than a century-old system of prisons in India needs repair, the Supreme Court, late last month, formed a committee on prison reforms. Headed by former Supreme Court judge, Justice Amitava Roy, it is to look into the entire gamut of reforms to the prison system. But this is not the first time that such a body is being set up, examples being the Justice A.N. Mulla committee and the Justice Krishna Iyer committee on women prisoners (both in the 1980s).

While marginal reforms have taken place, these have not been enough to ensure that prison conditions are in tune with human rights norms.

Punish or reform?

The terms of reference for the new committee are omnibus and seem ambitious. One must also not forget that its formation comes at a time when controversy surrounds the Tamil Nadu government’s recommendation that the seven convicts in the assassination, in 1991, of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi be released. The plea of the petitioners is that however heinous the crime, the penalty imposed — they have served 27 years — was beyond endurance.

This is the crux of the debate: incarceration in any form is uncivilised, especially when it is so long-drawn-out, and when the objective of criminal punishment should be one of reform rather than wreaking vengeance on a perpetrator of crime. The Hammurabi Code, it is argued, is no longer acceptable. In my view, any exercise to improve prison conditions — though not directly related to a plea for mercy, such as convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi case — must not ignore this axiom.

There is a divide here. Significantly, those pleading for clemency in this case are outnumbered, which is reflective of popular sentiment that a gruesome crime needs to be dealt with severely. It is also about the unresolved conflict in attitudes about incarceration — punishment or reform — which also explains the halfway jail reforms agenda seen in many countries.

So how do we render conditions within prisons less harsh and more humane? There are those who believe that if you keep improving prison conditions, there is likely to be an attendant impact on the incidence of crime. This accounts for the reluctance of many criminal justice administrators to employ or enlarge non-prison alternatives such as community service.

The offshoot of all this is growing numbers of prisoners and the woeful incapacity of governments to build more and larger prisons. The question often asked by governments is, in these days of extreme fiscal stress, why should state resources be diverted to a ‘negative exercise, whose benefits are dubious’? This is why jail officials are often asked to ‘somehow manage’ with existing modest facilities.

Packed to the gills

The data on prison overcrowding are frightening. Except in parts of Europe, where crime is still low or at acceptable levels, overcrowding is rampant.

In the U.S., for example, which has a humongous crime problem, complicated by gun violence and a strident racist overtone in combating crime, the prison system is creaking under the stress of numbers. At any time, it is estimated, there are more than two million prisoners in state and federal prisons. In the U.K., the latest available data (July 2018) show a current prison population of approximately 92,500.

In India, the publication, Prison Statistics India, brought out by the National Crime Records Bureau will provide food for thought for the Justice Roy Committee. In 2015, there were nearly 4.2 lakh inmates in 1,401 facilities, with an average occupancy rate of 114% in most. About 67% of total inmates were undertrials, a commentary on the speed and efficiency of India’s criminal justice system.

There is an obvious poverty of ideas in justice administration. While public officials and social workers are agreed upon the need to reduce overcrowding, there is hardly any convergence on how to go about this delicate exercise. There is also an obvious fear of backlash against any move to decriminalise what is now prohibited by statutes.

Handling white collar crimes

There is a popular view that in order to reduce prison populations, proven non-violent offenders could be dealt with differently. But it is frustrating that no consensus has evolved across the world on this relatively uncomplicated issue.

White collar crime has assumed monstrous proportions but there is no reason why we should continue to lock up offenders instead of merely depriving them of their illegal gains. Devising swift processes of attachment of properties and freezing of bank accounts are alternatives to a jail term. There are legal impediments here, but these can be overcome by ensuring a certain fairness in the system, of the state taking over illegally acquired wealth. The argument that not all gains made by an economic offender are open is not convincing enough to opt for incarceration over punitive material penalties. In India, progress has been made in freezing ‘benami’ holdings of major offenders even though it may not be a 100% effective step of cleaning up. But these are the first steps towards making economic crimes unaffordable and unattractive for the average offender.

On prison officials

Another complaint against prisons is the brutality and venality of prison officials, again common across the world. A solution will be a point to ponder over for the Justice Roy Committee.

Finally, improving prison conditions has no political leverage. Just as humane prisons do not win votes, the bad ones do not lose votes for any political party. As long as there are no stakes here for lawmakers, one can hardly hope for model prisons, where inmates are accommodated with due regard to their basic human needs and are handled with dignity.

R.K. Raghavan is a former CBI Director

Source: The Hindu, 23/10/18

An agenda for energy

India needs to bring structural changes, reset targets, influence global policy and choices.

You need energy to grow. This is as true for economies as it is for humans. Whether it is the use of machines in a factory, appliances like washing machines and refrigerators in households that help save time on chores, or automobiles to move people and goods faster, energy is needed to grow output. Even the use of materials like metals, plastics, chemicals, bricks and cement, without which a decent quality of life is now hard to imagine, means use of more energy: The production of steel accounts for nearly 9 per cent of India’s total energy needs, and brick-making is the second largest industrial use of energy. Put simply, an un-electrified house with mud walls and a thatched roof only needs manual energy to build, but a brick-and-cement house needs much more. Energy consumption per person for a country is correlated to its average output per person.

Higher productivity also needs denser energy. Grass, for example, has lower energy density than cooking gas: Cooking a bowl of rice by burning straws would take a lot more time than by using a gas cylinder. While traditional societies across the world all relied on biomass (that is, sources like firewood and crop residue, which are less-dense), their growth in productivity was associated with a move to denser fuels: Imagine running a car directly with coal or wheat-straw. It is said that the transition of the fuel for ships from the less-dense coal to the higher-density oil contributed to the success of the British navy in the First World War. In the early 1990s, biomass was 30 per cent of China’s energy, but is only 5 per cent now. India’s ratio currently is 30 per cent, but should start to fall as household electrification picks up, and government policy raises the penetration of cooking gas cylinders.

So, the Indian economy’s energy needs will rise with growth, and demand for denser energy sources will grow even faster. Between 2000 and 2015, when India’s output (as measured by GDP) grew at 7 per cent a year, its energy demand grew at 4.5 per cent a year, implying that efficiency of energy use improved at about 2.5 per cent annually. The problem was that the annual growth in domestic production of energy was only 3 per cent, and imports therefore had to grow at 8.5 per cent to meet the demand. The share of energy needs met through imports rose from 21 per cent in 2000 to 36 per cent by 2015. If similar trends persist, we estimate that nearly half of the demand in 2040 would be met by imports. The main constraint in India is the lack of reserves of oil, gas and metallurgical coal (used for steel-making), but poor management of what India does have is also a reason.

Importing large amounts of energy is by itself not a problem (except possibly for security reasons — one can imagine the problems of this vulnerability in times of war). But how does one pay for it? The energy import bill this year is already at a record high of $125 billion, despite energy prices being half of what they were at the peak a decade back: Volume growth has more than offset the price decline. Three years from now, even if the recent surge in prices reverses, the value of energy imports would be nearly $40 billion higher than this year. By 2040, even with minimal price growth, the import bill could be $660 billion. As a share of national income, this will most likely be a manageably low number, but the constraint would be in getting that quantum of dollars.

The recent troubles for the currency have originated from slowing foreign capital inflows coinciding with rising energy prices: Capital inflows as a share of GDP this year have fallen to 2002 levels, and paying for imports has become a struggle. Only part of this decline is cyclical: That is, it may pick up over time without any policy level changes; the rest may need policy changes. The necessary dollars can also come from exports, but export growth has slowed too, particularly for services: A decade back, rapid growth in these had prevented the external balances from deteriorating during the oil price spike.

The fact that India may struggle to pay for the energy it needs to grow the economy at even 7 per cent a year is concerning, and challenges the widely held view that 8 per cent growth is just around the corner. Structural changes on several fronts may be necessary to overcome these hurdles: Improve capital inflows, grow domestic energy production, increase energy efficiency, and also accelerate the transition to more domestic sources of energy.

Of high priority should be freeing up energy pricing, not just in electricity but also coal and gas. Controlled and distorted pricing drives inefficiency in usage, and also inhibits a supply response at times like now, when rupee depreciation has made domestic energy so much cheaper than imported energy. The legal monopoly of Coal India on merchant mining of coal was unwound a few years back, but no licences have been issued yet to private enterprises. The country also needs to collectively move away from carting its low-grade coal over hundreds of kilometres instead of moving power, which is cheaper, easier and less wasteful: This would need national-level planning.

The ambition on solar and wind power may need to be reset substantially upwards: Even if solar and wind capacity reaches 650 Gigawatts by 2040 (a nine-fold increase from now), they would only be able to cater to 4 per cent of India’s energy needs that year. Given the scale of required capacity, self-sufficiency in such equipment should also be sought. Further, given the natural fluctuations in output from renewable sources, the grid would need to be re-planned/architected. India also needs to accelerate electrification of various energy-guzzlers. Electric vehicles are expected to be just 6 per cent of cars globally by 2030: This may be too slow for Indian requirements.

India is expected to drive almost a fourth of global energy demand in the next two decades. Not only should it be pulling its weight on global forums and influence global policy and choices (something that is beginning to happen), there needs to be significant investment in India-specific solutions: The country’s medium-term growth potential could otherwise be at risk.

Source: Indian Express, 23/10/2018