Followers

Tuesday, November 06, 2018

No respite from poverty for Muslims


Government intervention is required to improve educational and economic indicators

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) labour force survey reports that the economic condition of Muslims does not show any signs of improvement despite India being the fastest-growing large economy. An analysis of the data on economic and educational indicators for various religious groups reveals that Muslims are facing a vicious circle of poverty.
Lowest education levels
The NSSO’s 68th round (2011-12) provides estimates of education levels and job market indicators across major religious communities in India. The educational attainment of Muslims is the least among all these communities. In urban areas, the number of male Muslim postgraduates is as low as 15 per 1,000. This number is about four times lower than that of other communities, including Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. The situation is similar for Muslim women. The number of male graduates among Muslims is 71 per 1,000, less than even half the number of graduates (per 1,000) in other communities. Similarly, the number of Muslims educated up to the secondary and higher secondary levels is 162 and 90 per 1,000 persons, respectively, again the least among all the communities.
Poor achievement at higher levels of education is partly a reflection of sinilarly low levels of school education or of illiteracy. Around half the Muslim population over 15 years is either illiterate or has only primary or middle school education. The number of illiterate people is highest among Muslims (190 per 1,000), followed by Hindus (84), Sikhs (79) and Christians (57). The number of persons (over 15 years) who have obtained just primary or middle school education among Muslims is 257 and 198 (per 1,000 persons), respectively. Thus, as compared to other communities, the distribution of the Muslim population is least at the higher levels of education and highest at the lower levels of education.
Likewise, the current attendance rate among Muslims is least across all age groups. The number of Muslim males of 5-14 years in urban areas attending educational institutions is 869 per 1,000 persons, which is the least among all religious groups. It is higher among Christians (981), followed by Sikhs (971), though it is lower among Hindus (955), possibly because Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have lower rates. The gaps in the current attendance rates of Muslims and those of other religious groups are increasingly pronounced at higher age groups.
That Muslims have the lowest attendance rates and educational attainment, especially in higher education, can be explained by their income level and higher costs for post-secondary education. According to the NSSO survey, the average per capita consumption expenditure (used as an indicator of income) among Muslims is just Rs. 32.66 per day, which is the least among all religious groups. It is highest among Sikhs (Rs. 55.30), followed by Christians (Rs. 51.43) and Hindus (Rs. 37.50). As per the 71st NSSO survey on education (2014), the average course fee for college degrees in technical courses in government and private unaided institutions was Rs. 25,783 and Rs. 64,442, respectively. That is too high for Muslims to afford, given their per capita income.
Although children up to age 14 have a right to free and compulsory education, the average course fee per student for upper primary education is still Rs. 508 for the academic session. While the course fee is the same for all religious groups, its burden is highest among Muslims due to their per capita income. The course fee for upper primary education accounts for 8.5% of the yearly per capita spending for Muslims, followed by Hindus (7.4%), Christians (5.4%) and Sikhs (5.03%). The higher burden of the cost of education among Muslims, relative to their incomes, could be one of the factors responsible for their lowest attendance rates.
The high level of illiteracy among Muslims and the low levels of general education ensure that they are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty. The lack of higher education is adversely affecting their job indicators. The dynamics of labour markets are largely a function of the degrees of knowledge and skills. For example, the labour force participation rate (LFPR), defined as the number of persons either employed or seeking jobs, is significantly linked to the desire for work, which in turn is dependent upon educational attainment. Similarly, the quality of employment is strongly linked to levels of education and skills. Therefore, if a community is lagging in education, it risks being trapped in a vicious circle of poverty. This is a situation that is difficult to break out of without government intervention.
The signs of Indian Muslims being caught in a vicious circle of poverty are visible in terms of their low consumption expenditure and poor job market indicators, including LFPR, employment status, and worker population ratio. The NSSO data show that LFPR among Muslims is 342 and 337 (per 1,000) in urban and rural areas, respectively, the least among all the religious communities. This implies that only 342 persons per 1,000 persons of working age among Muslims in urban areas are employed or available for work. Similarly, the LFPR among Muslim women is worse than that among women of other communities. Given that Muslims live predominantly in urban areas (unlike other poorer communities like SCs/STs), where work outside the home could be available, this low LFPR is likely explained by their low levels of education.
Likewise, the worker population ratio (WPR), defined as the number of persons employed per 1,000 persons, is lowest among Muslims, both in rural and urban areas. Further, among urban males, the number of Muslims employed in regular jobs is only 288 per 1,000 employed persons, while the corresponding figure among urban Muslim females is merely 249, which is the lowest among all other communities. The number of regular employees per 1,000 employed persons is higher among Christians (494 among urban males and 647 among urban females), followed by Hindus (463 and 439), and Sikhs (418 and 482). Similarly, the proportion of households with their major source of income from regular salaried jobs is the lowest among Muslims.
What could be done
The Central and State governments could take concerted steps to help Indian Muslims escape this vicious circle of poverty. One way to improve their situation is to provide a special incentive and subsidy system for higher education. That will ensure that schoolgoing students continue to higher levels of schooling and higher education. Similarly, students who don’t wish to continue in general academic education must have access to vocational education from Class 9 onwards.
Irfan Ahmad Sofi is Assistant Professor of Economics, BGSB University, Rajouri (irfan.sofi@bgsbu.ac.in). Santosh Mehrotra is Professor and Chairperson, Centre for Labour, JNU (santoshmeh@gmail.com)
Source: The Hindu, 6/11/2018
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Indian students bag US award for developing innovative app to check air quality index levels

A team of Delhi-based engineering college students has won a competition by US’ prestigious Marconi Society for developing an innovative mobile application that estimates the quality of air in one’s neighbourhood by analysing the images taken by a smartphone camera.

A team of Delhi-based engineering college students has won a competition by US’ prestigious Marconi Society for developing an innovative mobile application that estimates the quality of air in one’s neighbourhood by analysing the images taken by a smartphone camera.
The application developed by Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna of Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering won the top spot in the contest organised in India under the Celestini Program, supported by the Marconi Society, according to an official release issued by the Mountain View, California-based Marconi Society.
The Celestini Program, named for the hill in Italy where Guglielmo Marconi conducted his first wireless transmission experiments, is run by winners of the Society’s annual Young Scholar Awards, who work with technical undergraduate students in developing countries, to use technology to create social and economic transformation in their communities, it said.
The winning team, which won USD 1,500 for their solution, developed an inexpensive, portable and real-time air quality analytics application: Air Cognizer. In this, a user uploads an image taken outdoors with half of the image covering the sky region.
“Using image processing techniques, features are extracted and the machine learning model estimates the Air Quality Index (AQI) levels for the user’s location. The machine learning model is deployed on smartphones using Tensorflow Lite and Machine Learning (ML) Kit from Google,” the release said.
An Android app of the same name is available at Google Play. “Air Cognizer is simple to use and free -- and will prove to be very useful for citizens in cities like Delhi, where air pollution is particularly acute now,” the Marconi Society said.
In India, the Celestini Program was started in 2017 in partnership with IIT-Delhi by Aakanksha Chowdhery, an ML Engineer with Google AI, who was selected as a Marconi Young Scholar in 2012 for her work in high-speed last-mile internet connectivity.
The other IIT-Delhi partners include Prof Brejesh Lall and Dr Prerana Mukherjee.
So far, 14 students have been hosted in India under this programme. In 2018, the second year of the Program in India, three teams from over 100 applicants were selected to work during the summer at IIT-Delhi on problems related to air pollution and road safety in New Delhi, the release said.
The second prize went to the team of Divyam Madaan and Radhika Dua, from UIET Chandigarh, Punjab University.
They created a website that forecast air pollution levels in Delhi over the next 24 hours using advanced machine learning techniques such as Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to predict the major pollutant and its cause (for example, road traffic, industry emissions, or agricultural wastes) in every location based on historical data.
The website prototyped by the students updates in real-time using Google Cloud platform and Cloud ML engine.
The team that secured the third spot was also from Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering. It included Sidharth Talia, Nikunj Agarwal and Samarjeet Kaur. They prototyped a low-latency platform to transmit vehicle-to-vehicle alerts about potential road safety hazards or collisions using computer vision techniques on Raspberry Pi and Xbee radio modules.
Source: Hindustan Times, 5/11/2018
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How climate change can affect national security

As predicted, parts of the earth would become too hot to sustain life and the rising sea levels would submerge islands and low-lying coastal areas of various countries. Resultantly, the rising seas, droughts, food and water shortages will trigger large scale relocation of people both within their countries as also trans-international borders.

The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released at Inchon, South Korea, has said that to avoid far-reaching effects of global climate change, the international community must act with greater urgency. As per its assessment, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052, if it continues to rise at the current rate. The planet has already warmed up by about one degree Celsius as compared to the pre-industrial age temperatures and every 0.5 degree Celsius rise in warming, portends dire consequences. The report has also underscored India’s vulnerability.
As predicted, parts of the earth would become too hot to sustain life and the rising sea levels would submerge islands and low-lying coastal areas of various countries. As a result, the rising seas, droughts, food and water shortages will trigger large scale relocation of people both within their countries as also across international borders. These movements will drive intrastate and interstate instability and future conflicts.
While the issue is being dealt with by the signatory nations to the Paris Agreement through comprehensive strategies, militaries all over the world, will have to innovate, adapt and transform to remain ready and relevant to fulfil their national security mandates in an environment beset by the perils of climate change. In the Indian context, melting of glaciers, flash floods, encroaching seas, cyclones, rising temperatures in the deserts and plains, forest fires and higher water levels in the riverine terrain will necessitate a conscious re-examination of the ways we fulfil our constitutional obligations. Our military’s peacetime locations, operational deployments, equipment profile, organisational structures, logistic sustenance, tactics, operational art and war fighting strategies will have to be revisited. Internal security management architecture, too, would require sprucing up. Since transformation in large organisations is a time consuming process, we need to act fast to think through the challenge with collective wisdom and draw up necessary road maps.
The policymakers will have to be mindful of the littoral surrounding the Bay of Bengal, which is among the most vulnerable regions of the world and can be the source of regional instability. As per the assessment of some subject matter experts, additional global warming will submerge the coastal areas in Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Indian states of West Bengal, Orissa and parts of Andhra Pradesh thus setting off large scale migration of the so called climate refugees towards India. As per Muniruzzaman, the chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on climate change, the number of such refugees could well be around 20 million. Preventing their entry via our land borders and the coastline will be a huge challenge for the security forces. It will require a review of the border and coastline management resources along with the rules of engagement, which will require revision in the backdrop of our national policy in the 2030s. This policy will have to strike a balance between our national security interests and the humanitarian obligations.
We should strengthen the regional collaborative mechanisms as part of our national strategy on climate change. The defence cooperation between the militaries of the region should focus on creating joint parallel command structures to facilitate a synergised response in the wake of a natural or a man made calamity. These mechanisms should also be effectively interfaced with the UN agencies and other non-governmental organisations operating in the region. As an emerging great power, India should be seen leading this initiative.
We could consider raising additional ecological Territorial Army battalions with the retired military personnel to undertake the much needed afforestation in areas that have been plundered over the years by some unscrupulous elements of our society. Moreover, the retired military engineers could also be co-opted in the climate geo-engineering initiatives, when launched to remove carbon dioxide from the air and limiting the sunlight reaching the planet surface.

The IPCC report will certainly raise the awareness levels of the international community on the stark reality of climate change. Hopefully it will also urge President Trump to further tone down his obdurate stance on the issue. Incidentally, the United States had ranked second among 20 countries that were identified as major emitters of carbon dioxide by the International Energy Agency in 2015. Political will is the key to successful implementation of the Paris Agreement, which aims at ensuring the temperature levels remain below 1.5 degree Celsius. Since time is running out, all nations must remain focused in fulfilling their commitment to climate change goals.
Source: Hindustan Times, 5/11/2018
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Kali Puja and Diwali

The autumn festival, or Sharodotsab, ends with Kali Puja and Diwali centring around worship of Mother Goddess Kali and Lakshmi. Durga is the goddess of protection and progression; Kali is the goddess of destruction, the other side of the cycle of creation concerning cosmic law of constant transformation. Kali is the first of 10 incarnations of Durga. Depicted with a fierce face, Kali is regarded as a more aggressive form of Durga. Kali is believed to destroy evil and egoism and fights for justice. Kali was born from Durga’s forehead to save heaven and earth from cruel demons. Being the cosmic energy and element behind creation, Kali took no colour and remained black. She remained naked but on finding cosmic consciousness, existence and bliss embodied and lying behind creation in the form of Shiva, she stuck out her tongue, remembering that even omnipotence is just an essential property of the ultimate Absolute. Kali Puja is celebrated on amavasya, no moon night, coinciding with Diwali, the festival of light. Diwali signifies inner and outer illumination. In north India, it marks the day of the return of Rama after defeating Ravana, a symbol of evil. It is also associated with Goddess Lakshmi as she emerged from the sea — according to the mythical tale of the ‘samudra manthan’, meaning ‘churning of the ocean’. The celebration commemorates Rama’s final return home from exile and welcome with a glittering row of lights radiating from every household. It also coincides with the Pandavas’ return from the forest.

Source: Economic Times, 6/11/2018
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Monday, November 05, 2018

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 53, Issue No. 44, 03 Nov, 2018

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In psychology, what is illusion of control?


This refers to a form of cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate the extent of their control over external events. It often leads people to believe that they can influence things or events that are actually well beyond their direct influence. The phenomenon is named after a 1975 paper by American psychologist Ellen Langer. The illusion of control is prevalent among gamblers who believe that certain tricks or repeated routines can influence the outcome of bets even though bets are simply chance events influenced mostly just by luck. It can lead to overoptimism about the future and disappointment.

Source: The Hindu, 5/11/2018
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Failing to lead by example


Kerala’s success in education is hard to reconcile with the palpable tension that the Sabarimala verdict has caused

Politics alone cannot explain the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Sabarimala case. This is because for the rest of India, Kerala has served as a model of progress guided by a long-sustained pursuit of welfare policies, especially in health and education. Kerala also has a history of social movements that mobilised people to let go of the grip of custom and ritual. Some of these movements were aimed specifically at propagating reason and knowledge. If the regime of modernity got a fair test anywhere in South Asia, surely it was in Kerala.
A patriarchal ethos
These common impressions are hard to reconcile with the discomfort and palpable tension that the Sabarimala verdict has caused. Conflict and the threat of violence can, and perhaps, should be attributed to political rivalry and administrative ineptitude. But there seems to be a wider unease with the verdict.
In a phone-in programme of the Hindi service of the BBC, a senior woman journalist, who knows Kerala socially, said that the verdict is ahead of the times, that it will take one or two more generations for people to accept the entry of women of all ages in the Sabarimala temple. That sober prognosis left me wondering about the value and meaning of Kerala’s achievement in public literacy and children’s education. Was it wrong to imagine that the spread of education would cause a deep enough dent in all forms of gender inequality? Persistence of dowry certainly suggests that. So does the acceptance of misogynist humour I have myself witnessed in the middle of serious discussion.
Apart from its failure to dilute a patriarchal ethos, education has also performed rather poorly in widening the space available for dialogue between contending positions. This is one reason why both the state and society are finding it difficult to appreciate a civic solution to a faith-related practice.
Promise of education
Education tends to arouse many expectations, both in the individual and the social mind. First, there are economic expectations. They are so strong that the educated do not mind enduring long stretches of unemployment. Equally complex is the political expectation association with education. It is widely believed that education nourishes democratic values and behaviours. But historical evidence suggests that education can nurture democracy as well as dictatorship. It depends on what is taught and how. If schools and colleges are intellectually exciting places, and if the curriculum encourages critical inquiry, we can expect education to strengthen democracy. If schooling stifles curiosity by regimenting the body and the mind at an early age, education can nourish authoritarianism.
Similarly, if language and literature are taught to train young minds for participation in open-ended dialogue, we can expect education to sustain an ethos where freedom to differ without fear is guaranteed and dissent is tolerated. The opposite may happen if language and literature are marginalised in the curriculum or subjected to mechanical testing and other means of oppression. Similar things can be said about the teaching of the subjects that constitute the social sciences. They can either be used for indoctrination or to encourage reflection.
Subject to regime change
The question why education has not improved Kerala’s capacity to sustain a culture of dialogue is not difficult to answer. Education did spread widely, but efforts to reform its inner world — curriculum and pedagogy — remained weak and somewhat confused. Significant initiatives were taken more than once, but the financial and intellectual resources deployed for this task were inadequate. Also, the effort remained subject to regime change. In teacher training, one had expected that Kerala would make a breakthrough by investing significant academic resources in this unfortunate area. That did not happen. Bridges between universities and schools remained half-built. As in other States, progress of education in Kerala remained confined mainly to expansion of the system. That too did not proceed coherently. Social and economic divisions got entrenched within the system of education. Successive governments remained indifferent to this trend and to the need to create a provincial policy.
Hailed as a model, Kerala has disappointed. Apart from failing to create an ethos where dialogue and deliberation are conveniently possible, Kerala’s progress on the gender front has also remained unimpressive. The grip of early socialisation into deep-set notions of womanhood has stayed tight. One consequence of this grip is the perpetuation of deeply negative beliefs about the physical aspect of maturation. At this level, gender disparity deserves to be understood as a far more complex cultural phenomenon than merely a matter of unequal opportunities. Education can influence gender roles and their relations by creating new predispositions in early childhood. This is a tough area for reform. It has remained on the margins of education, both in terms of funding and status as a policy sector. Few would admit that they do not fully understand it or its significance.
Moreover, not everyone believes/wants education to disturb established social patterns. In fact, many people feel unsure about the introduction of critical pedagogy in schools. Why Kerala disappoints us today is because it had fostered the hope of being different. It probably is, but not to the extent one had assumed. Its system of education is just as bureaucratised and compartmentalised as anywhere else. Complacent attitudes also block vision and direction. A common meaning of progress now is to secede from the local board and join the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or its private counterpart. Kerala set the benchmark for total literacy and implementation of the Right to Education Act. Looking ahead, Kerala could have sorted out the tenacious points of confusion such as the crucial role of language, both in children’s growth and in enhancing society’s capacity for dialogue. The social incoherence one sees in Kerala gains strength from poor teaching of language and related fields of knowledge.
The Sabarimala prism
It is true of many other parts of India, but Kerala’s case hurts because a sound basis for putting in place a sophistical system of education existed there. Had its early advantages been used with greater focus and commitment, we might have witnessed a somewhat smoother transition in Sabarimala.
Krishna Kumar is a former director of the NCERT
Source: The Hindu, 5/11/2018
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