No winners in the man-animal conflict

With about 3,900 tigers remaining in the wild, they need us now more than ever

A six-year-old tigress suspected of having killed 13 people over the past two years in the hills of central India was shot dead by hunters under controversial circumstances last week. While the killing of the mother of two nine-month-old cubs triggered celebrations by villagers in the area stalked by the big cat, wildlife activists were furious – and with good reason. The latest incident in the man-animal conflict, which comes just days after another tigress (Sundari in Odisha) was blamed for killing a woman whose post-mortem report was inconclusive, shows that we need to get better at dealing with such cases.

The hunter who fired the bullet that killed tigress Avni said he did so in self-defence after a tranquiliser dart failed to stop her from charging at him. A question being asked is: Should the wildlife officials not have foreseen such a circumstance? Experts feel a well-planned operation would have taken the possibility into account, ensuring safety structures to guard against this. While there is little doubt in Avni’s case that the tigress was responsible for human killings, we need to consider the larger debate surrounding the intensifying conflict between humans and wild animals.

Animal rights activists argue such big cats should not be called ‘man-eaters’ because they don’t trespass into human habitats to kill people — it’s the other way around. The World Wildlife Fund says tigers are mostly solitary and have large territories. The wild animal, however, is facing dogged pressures from retaliatory killings and poaching amid habitat loss to humans. Killing is the easy option. The world has lost 95% of its wild tigers since the 20th century began. With only about 3,900 tigers remaining in the wild, they need us now more than ever.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/11/2018

Sahaja Is The Key

Sahaja means spontaneous or innate. In the Ramcharitmanas, Parvati blesses Sita with the promise of a husband who would be dark, handsome and sahaja. In Bengal, a cult began after poet Chandidas emphasised sahaja in life. The cult, however, narrowed the importance of sahaja, so that Chandidas had to cry out: Sahaja, sahaja, everyone speaks of sahaja,/ But who knows what sahaja means? The cosmos may be thought of as a system of macro dynamics. Components in the cosmos, including individual human beings, represent systems of micro dynamics. This relates to will. There is personal will of an individual, and the Cosmic Will at large. The personal will may either align itself to the Cosmic Will, or it may act counter to it, resulting in, correspondingly, peace or strife in life. Sahaja is to joyously subject the personal will to the Cosmic Will. Sahaja is not idleness. Idleness is desire-driven: It is willful resistance to the natural course of life; it is not to be doing what should be done. Sahaja is the opposite of this. It is to do what has to be done, without the interference of personal will and desire. Excited by the ego, we often turn impatient. Sahaja is guided by patience. It involves never striving to hurry up events or achievements in life. A tiny seed sprouts and gradually grows into a tree full of blossoms and fruits. Did the tree contrive its growth or hurry it up? Its growth was sahaja. So it is with all other components in the cosmos. So must it be with man.

Source: Economic Times, 5/11/2018

A Matter of Dignity

As the number of its elderly increases, India needs strategies to deal with dementia.

The 2018 WHO dementia plan focuses on the urgent need for a multi-phased approach and a multi-sectoral policy response to address the needs of people with dementia, their carers and families. The rapid increase in ageing population across countries requires national strategies to deal with age-related diseases — dementia care is becoming a significant issue.

Data from many parts of the world reveals age as a risk factor for dementia — though the debilitating condition, is not an inevitable consequence of ageing. Dementia is a form of cognitive impairment that affects memory and other cognitive abilities and significantly interferes with a person’s ability to perform daily activities. According to the WHO, it affects 50 million people worldwide; a number that is projected to increase to 82 million by 2030 and 152 million by 2050. According to some estimates, one person gets affected by dementia every three seconds.

Studies have revealed how the stigma attached to the disease leads to the social isolation of patients, their families and careers. Research has thrown light on the deterioration in the quality of their lives. There is an urgent need to treat dementia as a public health concern by raising awareness on all aspects of the disease including risk reduction, diagnosis, treatment, research, care and support for patients and care givers. The efforts of the Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India (ARDSI) and the initiatives of the Ministry of Health, based on directives of the WHO’s Global Dementia Action Plan, are directed towards that end.

Studies that draw on interactions with people affected by dementia, their families, and caregivers indicate that several of the needs of such people — social, economic or those related to health — remain unfulfilled. For instance, leave concessions at work, adaptable housing environments, adequate diagnostic facilities, treatment options,

care provisions and risk reduction measures for people with dementia are not in place. Many require psychological support, biomedical facilities, appropriate medications, counselling services and end of life care. But these are not available. The complexity of needs cutting across health, economic and social sector requires attention and policy responses.

Over a year ago, the World Health Assembly in Geneva adopted the Global Action Plan on the Public Health Response to Dementia 2017-2025. India endorsed the plan, confirming its commitment to improving the lives of people with dementia, their carers and families. The country’s commitment to Sustainable Development Goals — especially with respect to Goal 3 that deals with good health and well being — and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities should push it into formulating a strategy to deal with this debilitating condition. Such a plan should incorporate public awareness campaigns and research.

As the percentage of aged people in the country increases, improving the lives of people with dementia and their families and carers must become a national priority. These programmes could be aligned with existing policies and care models.

The writer is a sociologist, gerontologist and social scientist who specialises on health issues

Source: Indian Express, 2/11/2018

What's 'indifference principle' in Economics

This refers to the proposition that unless people are special in some way, nothing can make them happier than the next best alternative. So, when they have to choose between two different choices, people prefer one over another until a point when they turn indifferent to both. This happens when the marginal utility that they derive from the initial choice drops gradually until it equals the utility derived from the alternative. A child, for instance, might prefer chocolates to ice cream until he has had too many chocolates. The indifference principle was proposed by American economist Steven Landsburg in his 1993 book The Armchair Economist.

Source: The Hindu, 2/11/2018

Winning the neighbourhood

India has displayed an ample supply of national self-confidence and pride in recent years. But the self-confidence has not translated into good public policy.

When it comes to trade relations with its immediate neighbours, India is strikingly different from other regionally-dominant major countries. Despite being the region’s largest and fastest growing economy, India absorbs as little as 1.7 per cent of Bangladesh’s exports, and accounts for only 14 per cent of its imports. Economist Ashok V Desai, who has pointed this out recently (The Telegraph, October 16), contrasts India’s trade profile with that of other regionally dominant countries such as the US vis-à-vis Canada and Mexico, the European Union vis-à-vis Poland and the Netherlands, and South Africa vis-à-vis Namibia and Mozambique. In order for India to achieve a similar trading position as those countries, Desai would like to see India take the initiative to free the movement of goods and people between India and Bangladesh. It not only makes eminent economic sense, he believes, it is quite practical. After all, India treats Bangladeshis as foreigners and has an “extremely costly infrastructure to prevent illegal immigration” from there. But Indian policy vis-à-vis another regional neighbour is not as economically dysfunctional: Nepalis are treated as “permissible aliens”.

How has the legal status of Nepalis and Bangladeshis come to be so different in post-colonial India? One would not necessarily have predicted this from past history. It hardly needs to be stated that the ties between present-day Bangladesh (eastern Bengal) and India in British colonial times were closer than those between India and Nepal. After all, both were part of the same political entity. Moreover, the district of Sylhet in Bangladesh was a part of the province of Assam; and for a brief period from 1905 to 1911, Eastern Bengal and Assam constituted a single province. But Nepal was not a part of British India. However, like the neighbouring Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan and Sikkim, it was part of Britain’s informal empire.

During the British colonial period, migration across this entire region — whether from Bengal to Assam or from Nepal to India — was not only unrestricted, it was actively encouraged. Thus the ethnic Nepali population of Darjeeling district in West Bengal, Sikkim, parts of Northeast India as well as Bhutan is a legacy of the informal empire.

Decolonisation created a new territorial order in the region and it tried to bring a period of extraordinary mobility to an end. The illegality regimes created by newly-independent countries made the status of many people in the region — most importantly in India — suddenly more vulnerable.

There is nothing predetermined about the fact that the legal status of Nepalis in post-colonial India would be different from that of Bangladeshis. Ethnic Nepalis have had to struggle for this status; and in certain parts of India, they continue to feel quite vulnerable. Indeed, ethnic Nepali political mobilisation in the entire transnational region has been an effort to assert citizenship rights in response to a growing sense of post-colonial vulnerability. After all, nearly 1, 00,000 ethnic Nepalis of Bhutan or the Lhotshampas — southern Bhutanese in the Dzongkha language — were expelled from Bhutan in the 1990s.

Ethnic Nepalis form the social basis of the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling. Indeed, the use of the term Gorkha is itself a way of making claims to Indian citizenship, since it avoids confusion between citizens of Nepal and ethnic Nepali citizens of independent India inherent in the term Nepali.

But what are the chances of India making policies vis-à-vis Bangladeshis that are in India’s economic interest? The expectation that the NRC process would lead to a resolution of Assam’s long-festering citizenship crisis has now faded. The confrontational atmosphere building in Assam around the Citizenship Amendment Bill has eerie similarities with the Assam of the early 1980s. A group of Mumbai-based activists now describes the NRC updating process as the NRC crisis since it has led to 30 suicides so far.

Whatever else one can say about the Citizenship Amendment Bill, it is hard to argue that it will promote greater economic integration between India and Bangladesh. The distinction between Hindus and Muslims in India’s citizenship laws that the bill will introduce — albeit through the backdoor — would only make the situation worse for “Bangladeshis in Bangalore”, who in economist Desai’s words, “are treated as illegal immigrants and hounded”.

The proposed bill may turn out to be the beginning of a major shift in India’s refugee policy. Its closest international analogue may be the Cold-War era refugee policy of the US. From 1952 to 1980, the Cold War shaped the very definition of a refugee in US law. A refugee was defined as a person fleeing “from a Communist-dominated country or area”. Cubans became the biggest beneficiary of this policy because of the island nation’s proximity to the US.

Not unlike India’s Citizenship Amendment Bill, Cuban immigrants according to the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 could not be treated as illegal in the US. They qualified for US residency within a year of being in the US and were eligible for citizenship five years later, no matter how they entered the country. Since they were admitted for humanitarian reasons — allegedly for fleeing communist oppression — Cubans quickly became a significant immigrant group in the US. Within a decade after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Cuban population in the US grew by six-fold.

If the proposed amendment to India’s citizenship law is passed, it could stimulate a similar wave of emigration of Hindus from Bangladesh, perhaps from Pakistan and Afghanistan as well. The proposed amendment will, of course, limit refugee status and the road to citizenship, to those already in the country. But the history of immigration from the communist countries to the US during the Cold War suggests that signals are always very important in pushing modern emigration.

Former BJP leader Jaswant Singh, known for his strategic thinking, once said that “in considering the totality of national security, economic security is the pivot: Its vitality, growth and dynamism becomes the principal security imperative”. If one follows his insight, Desai’s recommendations should be very high on the ruling party’s policy agenda. But unfortunately, while the BJP-led government proclaims a foreign policy of “neighbourhood first”, the ruling party is also presided over by a president who talks of Bangladeshis as “termites” that are “eating the grain that should go to our poor and they are taking our jobs”.

The major reason why India cannot make the “vitality, growth and dynamism” of its economy a priority in its policy-making has to do with the country’s internal weaknesses and the ideological predilections of its ruling elite. India does not have the domestic political constituencies to back the kind of policies that Desai proposes. Nor is there willingness on the part of the ruling elites to invest in creating potential constituencies to make its immigration and refugee policies compatible with India’s economic aspirations.

India in recent years has displayed an ample supply of national self-confidence, pride, and perhaps even some hubris. Unfortunately, there is no straight-line between self-confidence and good public policy.

Source: Indian Express, 2/11/2018

Partnerships and alliances are the new mechanisms for savings lives

While donors and governments with the capacity to provide resources at a global scale can replenish these ‘Global Health Funds’, domestic donors can partner with their respective governments to set up similar mechanisms to multiply the impact that they can have working alone. These partnerships are essential if we want to create a world in which where you live does not determine whether you live.

The world’s progress in improving health and development related outcomes for people everywhere is one of the greatest success stories of the past 20 years. Two decades ago, the infectious diseases that killed or harmed millions often went unchecked. Children born in poor countries were only vaccinated against a handful of the same diseases as children born in wealthier countries. There was no access to life-saving drugs such as antiretrovirals to treat HIV. But if we look closely at the trajectory of healthcare, we realise that since the 1990s, we have nearly halved the number of women who die in childbirth and halved the number of children who die before the age of five.

There are many reasons for these gains. As countries have grown wealthier, they have increasingly invested in their own healthcare systems, helping more of their citizens to live longer and better lives. Aid programmes from donor countries channelled either through their own agencies or UN organisations such as the WHO and UNICEF, have helped fill critical gaps. Large global charities such as CARE and Save the Children have raised funds from government and individual donors and with those funds have run large programmes in many poorer regions of the world.

An additional important reason the world has made such large gains in improving global health in the last two decades is the emergence of the ‘Global Health Funds’. These new and powerful mechanisms have made it possible for donor governments and United Nations agencies to partner with large private donors and civil society organisations (CSOs) to create very large pools of funds and technical capability to tackle some of the most pressing issues that poor countries face. In these funds, organisations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have contributed significantly, by way of money, deep expertise, and as catalysts, alongside other private and sovereign donors, allowing each one to multiply the impact they could have had if they had acted alone.

The ‘Global Health Funds’ currently comprise the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI); the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi); the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund); and the Global Financing Facility (GFF) and have had a remarkable impact:

In 1988, there were an estimated 350,000 cases of wild polio every year, killing or paralysing its victims. In 2017, there were just 22, with a large and complex country such as India having entirely eradicated the disease, due to the joint efforts of domestic governments, CSOs, and GPEI.

In 2000, 30 million children in poor countries were not being immunised, leading to millions of unnecessary deaths. Since then, Gavi has supported the introduction of 380 routine vaccines into the health systems of vulnerable countries and helped to immunise 690 million children, preventing 10 million future deaths.

Since the creation of the Global Fund, deaths related to AIDS and TB have fallen by a third, and malaria by half.GFF’s ‘In Support of Every Woman Every Child’ is today tackling the more than five million maternal, newborn, and child deaths that still occur among the world’s poorest people each year.These spectacular gains made in human health need to be sustained and accelerated. Polio is only endemic in three countries, but until we get to zero, all countries will be at risk of polio re-emerging. Following the historic progress of reductions in malaria cases and deaths, we are on the verge of a resurgence that could see millions more at risk. And, despite more children being immunised worldwide than ever before with the highest level of routine coverage in history, increasing coverage rates with children in the world’s poorest countries continues to be a challenge.

To address these ongoing concerns, a massive replenishment effort for these funds is under way. As large philanthropists emerge both at global and domestic levels, these new forms of partnerships and alliances offer a powerful way forward. While donors and governments with the capacity to provide resources at a global scale can replenish these ‘Global Health Funds’, domestic donors can partner with their respective governments to set up similar mechanisms to multiply the impact that they can have working alone. These partnerships are essential if we want to create a world in which where you live does not determine whether you live.

Joe Cerrell and Nachiket Mor are both employees of the Gates Foundation. Joe Cerrell is Managing Director of the Gates Foundation’s Donor Government Relations team working across Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and Nachiket Mor is Country Director for India.

Source: Hindustan Times, 1/11/2018

Difference With T’ai Chi

T’ai Chi can reinstate the flow of chi. Put simply, chi is that which gives life. In terms of the body, chi is the difference between life and death. To use a Biblical reference, it is that which God breathed into the dust to produce Adam. It is the life-energy people try desperately to hold on to when they think they are dying. A strong life force makes a human being totally alive, alert and present; a weak life force results in sluggishness and fatigue. The concept of ‘life force’ is found in most ancient cultures of the world. It is particularly evident in Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures, where the world is perceived not purely in terms of physical matter, but also in terms of invisible energy. In India, it is called prana; in China, chi; and in Japan, ki. In some Native American tribes, it is called the Great Spirit. For all these cultures, and others as well, the idea of a life force is central to their forms of medicine and healing. For example, acupuncture is based on balancing and enhancing chi to bring the body into a state of health. At its highest level, acupuncture involves injecting chi at the right time and place and in the right amount to reinstate its natural flow in the patient. Unbalanced chi causes you to become emotionally agitated and distressed. Balanced chi causes your emotions to become smooth and more satisfying. Spiritual chi makes it more possible for us to personally enter into higher states of consciousness that lie at the heart of religious experience

Source: Economic Times, 2/11/2018