Friday, November 09, 2018
In Economics, what is internal labour market?
his refers to the administrative system within a company which determines the internal allocation and pricing of labour. In the internal labour market, the competition for vacant roles within the company is limited to the pool of labour that is already part of the company. People from outside the company are not allowed to compete for vacant positions. So a company with an internal labour market that is looking to fill a senior management role, for instance, will look to hire people who have already performed in junior roles within the company. This is in contrast to the external labour market where anyone is free to apply and get chosen for a position.
Source: The Hindu, 8/11/2018
Consent in a man’s world
The routines, stratagems, denials and traps in Indian workplaces still make easy mobility and maintaining dignity difficult even for the most talented young female journalists
“If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experience of life, or turn to people, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.” Sigmund Freud ends his essay, ‘On Femininity’, with these lines. They are a somewhat testy but frank acknowledgement of the limitations of even his own vast research on the subject. Today, we could do with some of that humility.
In the decades since Freud wrote this, a new world order has risen and mutated. During the 1960s and ’70s, when this writer was living in the US, feminism was all about raising consciousness. That meant various women collectives getting together regularly outside of family circles, and sharing stories about their lives, like members of the Alcoholics Anonymous. At these meetings, after some hesitation, women emerged from being in denial and swapped intimate stories about relationships, work, life goals and sexuality. Tears flowed as they articulated the pain they felt, about the lack of protective nets they needed as young confused girls, the broken trust resulting in deep dilemmas they faced as daughters, wives, mothers. It was through these first-hand narrations that women realised their individual failures were not personal failures but stemmed from their gender being perceived as rooted in sex: Men defined themselves in law and life as aggressive and powerful and women as the receptacles for their sexual urges and producers of their legitimate offspring.
Now, digital media has acquired a life of its own and become a public space that allows various marginalised groups to share their hitherto unpublicised insights about the power structures and hierarchies that exclude them but act as their authorised spokespersons. Of course, riding the great tidal wave of an open-ended show-and-tell has both a good and bad side to it. But it is because of this free space that, for the first time in India, working women are able to tell the world what it has actually been like to be at the receiving end of all those sexist jokes, misogyny, porn and rape or near-rape.
It is entirely understandable that most of the first stories came from the media. Given the sheer mass of women in media today and their rise to positions of power, it makes sense that women reporters feel comfortable enough to blow the whistle, some after more than a decade, and discuss their harassment with clinical precision — with dates, times and places. Their tales are universal and reveal that the real problem is not that Indian men treat women badly (although they often do), but that at the workplace it remains a male prerogative to decide who to treat badly, how and how often, and what should be a suitable “punishment” for those who deny them sexual favours.
The late Justice Leila Seth, who was on the committee that gave us the revised law against sexual harassment and rape, has observed in her book Talking of Justice: People’s Rights in Modern India: “The approach generally taken with gender equality is that women are different from men because they are weaker and more subordinate and consequently need protection… the protectionist approach actually reinforces the difference and perpetuates it.” The tales of sexual harassment — as they unfurl and multiply — prove her words. They reveal how in a work environment dominated by an extremely powerful near-tyrannical boss, the supposed power of a young female trainee to say “no” is actually the obfuscation of her actual lack of power to stop him without losing both her job and her reputation and maybe the possibility of getting another job. The routines, stratagems, denials and traps in Indian workplaces, laid bare by the young women’s testimonies before us, are what still makes easy mobility and maintaining their dignity well-nigh impossible even for the most talented young female journalists.
Men in India, when they challenge a woman’s rape charge in court, will try to feed the still-pervasive belief that women fabricate rape charges after consenting to sex. According to them, women distort the experience. Men seldom consider the reality of sex as anything beyond their own experience of it. But as many stories that have surfaced of late reveal, in the mind of male sexual predators, sex actually represents and enforces the ultimate subordination of women to men. No wonder, then, they claim they thought her resistance or disinclination was a deliberate spur to more ardent love-making.
Surely, in some cases, there may be incentives to lie. But the deeper problem is the frequent legal assumption that a single objective state of affairs existed. And it must be determined by evidence. Lawyers representing the perpetrator thus often go on to divide women into spheres of consent, according to the indices of their relationship to men. From the extent to which the perpetrator knows the victim and they have had sex, her consent is inferred. The inference is: Our client does not rape women he does not know. And if he knows them and has consensual sex with them, how can he be held guilty? Men will mostly define rape in terms, where force and sexual desire are a total package. Here, the law’s problem becomes distinguishing rape from acts misconstrued by the victim as “mere sexual violation” in specific cases. Is it any wonder, then, that most raped women feel that the revised law against rape under such circumstances remains virtually unenforceable as applied to them?
Law is a society’s text, its rational soul. Our courts have recently introduced commendable changes by amending some laws and de-recognising a few colonial ones. Should they now really wish to reflect upon the issue of the sexual exploitation of women, they must acknowledge how much the legitimacy of much of our laws has been derived by force and at women’s expense.
Source: Indian Express, 9/11/2018
Mapping the growth of digital learning in India
In a country as diverse as India, along with overcoming the infrastructure barrier, there needs to be a focus on overcoming the barriers of language and content.
The education divide in India with respect to quality and accessibility has existed for far too long. The Indian education system has remained more or less the same, since last 150 years. It is difficult for the existing physical infrastructure to meet the learning needs of the burgeoning population of our country which will touch 1.5B by 2030 and 1.7B by 2050 (equal to the population of China and USA combined). Digital is gaining acceptance across numerous sectors and it is only right that the education sector too reaps benefits of this digital transformation.
In a country as diverse as India, along with overcoming the infrastructure barrier, there needs to be a focus on overcoming the barriers of language and content. It is impossible to have great teachers in each and every village/district in India. Similarly, the best teachers should not be restricted to certain institutes of the world. This is where e-learning comes in. It can level the playing field for all students. Students, in both rural and urban areas, can get access to the best learning resources, learn at their own pace and in the comfort of their own homes. Another key advantage with e-learning is that it is much easier to design courses with the latest online reference material than publishing crores of books. With the significant rise in internet penetration and the drop in the prices of smartphones in India, access to online learning resources will soon become ubiquitous.
Today, whether it is finding a new word on Google, or watching a photography video, without realising it, we are already using the internet to constantly learn. A major chunk of learning is already happening on the internet, with the government’s push we can expect it to grow to exponential levels.
The launch of the second phase of the Digital India campaign with a renewed focus on education is a welcome step towards the faster development of the education sector. Online education is also receiving its due importance in the New Education Policy drafted by the Kasturirangan Committee. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) under the government’s SWAYAM initiative have the tremendous potential to make higher education accessible to India’s youth, that forms more than 50% of our population.
The government’s push for e-learning reinforces the efforts of online education providers to empower both learners and educators, create more engaging learning experiences and foster personal development. With the push, students will also realise that the accessibility to great teachers can take their learning to the next level.
Going forward, the e-learning space will witness new developments with respect to unconventional methods of learning. Availability of unique courses across categories will encourage students to expand the breadth of the content they consume. Gamification will ensure that the learning process is more interactive and fulfilling. Students will be able to set goals, measure their progress and celebrate their learning achievements. Live online interaction between the students and educators can offer personalised learning that will benefit students in remote areas as well as overcrowded schools. The role of AI and technology in all of this will be huge. AI Bots can act as Study Assistants, that will accompany you along your learning journey. It will know your strengths and weakness inside out and will even recommend what you should read on a given day to maximise your learning outcomes.
The future of e-learning in India is promising. Location, language and financial resources will no longer be a barrier to a great education.
Source: Hindustan Times, 8/11/2018
Go for an“inclusive growth dividend” in India
We propose a more modest beginning towards using income transfers to mitigating extreme poverty in India. Specifically, we propose an “Inclusive Growth Dividend” (IGD) pegged at 1% of GDP/capita
India spends substantial amounts on welfare programmes but delivers them inefficiently. After accounting for administrative costs, leakage, and targeting errors, even official government documents estimate that a considerable fraction of fiscal outlays on government-implemented programmes do not reach the intended beneficiaries.
As a result, several leading economists have suggested that India should adopt a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as its main anti-poverty strategy, replacing existing welfare schemes with direct income transfers into bank accounts of beneficiaries (or their mothers, in the case of children). Such an approach, they argue, could yield a UBI worth between 3.5% and 10% of GDP, depending on which programs were replaced, and nearly eliminate extreme poverty in India.
This approach has several attractive features. It would eliminate targeting costs and errors of exclusion (since the programme is universal), reduce administrative costs and leakage, and directly reduce poverty. Several studies from around the world have shown that income transfers have yielded a variety of positive impacts in the lives of the poor with no evidence of increased spending on temptation goods like alcohol or tobacco. This idea of a UBI gained policy prominence in the 2017 Economic Survey, which discussed its merits extensively. Yet little has been done since to try it out in India. One reason is that it is very difficult politically to replace existing schemes – even the inefficient ones – leaving limited fiscal space for a UBI.
We propose a more modest beginning towards using income transfers to mitigating extreme poverty in India. Specifically, we propose an “Inclusive Growth Dividend” (IGD) pegged at one per cent of GDP/capita. At current income levels, this translates to Rs 100 a month per person. If we start with pilots in the 100 poorest blocks in India (covering ~2.5 crore people), the cost would be Rs 3,000 crores/year. This can easily be financed from the Rs 65,000 crores of savings reported by the Government from using Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) in welfare programmes.
A modest IGD can deliver several benefits. First, it minimises the risks to the poor by supplementing rather than substituting away existing benefits. Given implementation challenges that we have observed in our own research, we do not consider it prudent to replace existing welfare programs with DBT by fiat. The first goal of an IGD would simply be to demonstrate the government’s capacity to credibly and consistently deliver an income supplement to all citizens, even in the poorest areas.
Second, the amount is meaningful for the poorest households but too small to reduce incentives to work. While global evidence has consistently found that unconditional transfers do not reduce work, UBI critics in India continue to voice this concern. Indeed, we prefer the term IGD to UBI as “basic income” connotes an amount that is enough to live on. An IGD would instead be one component of people’s income which reaches all citizens and grows equally for all with the country’s growth. It would thus be a powerful practical and symbolic commitment to universally shared prosperity.
Third, global evidence suggests that an IGD can promote female empowerment. A mother with two children would receive Rs 300/month -- a considerable amount when the flagship national maternity benefits scheme provides Rs 500/month for only 12 months and for only the first pregnancy.
Fourth, an IGD would promote the government’s goal of universal effective financial inclusion. While millions of bank accounts have been created under the Paradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yajana and other schemes, a substantial fraction have no balances or are inactive. A regular monthly transfer can catalyse the use of these accounts as a vehicle for savings, build household comfort with interacting with the formal financial system, and improve supply-side incentives for creating last-mile cash access solutions.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, building the infrastructure to deliver an IGD can improve the accountability of other government programs by making cash transfers an attainable benchmark against which they can be evaluated. The hypothetical question of “should we do a programme or simply give the money directly to intended program beneficiaries” would become a very real one. In many cases beneficiaries themselves can exercise this choice (as we discussed in our previous column on the PDS).
In other words, income transfers would become a low-implementation cost “index fund” for development spending and in-kind programmes and subsidies would need to demonstrate that their targeting, administrative and implementation costs deliver more value than their cost. Over time, programs that deliver less value than their cost could be replaced with income transfers while those that deliver more value can be retained.
The Jan-Dhan, Aadhar, Mobile (JAM) infrastructure is making it easier to deliver income support to Indians at scale, but this potential has not yet been realised. An IGD pilot (financed by central/state governments, foundations, or a combination) covering all citizens in some of India’s poorest blocks provides a fiscally and practically feasible way of testing this potential.
Karthik Muralidharan is Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at UC San DiegoPaul Niehaus is Associate Professor of Economics at UC San DiegoSandip Sukhtankar is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia
Source: Hindustan Times, 6/11/2018
Liberation for All
Who pursues the spiritual path and why? In the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna says that ‘only one out of thousands of men tries to attain me; and from amongst those who try to attain me, only a rare person really understands (realises) me’. Sant Jnaneshwar, in his commentary on the Gita, says that Arjuna asked why do only some engage in spiritual pursuit while others do not, and Krishna replied, “This yogabhyas is indeed one that leads to moksha. But then, even an ordinary thing cannot be achieved without qualification.” The Gita specifically mentions that the less privileged are also are entitled to pursue the path of liberation through bhakti. Krishna clearly indicates that varna is not inherited as a family legacy, but is decided by every individual’s makeup and actual occupation undertaken by him. The Gita refers to the different categories of people in terms of their occupation in worldly life. In olden days, those engaged in laborious occupations did not have the facility or environment conducive to pursuit of spiritual practice. Yet, Krishna assures that even they can attain Self-realisation by being God-conscious. A guru was pestered by a disciple to show him God. Finally, one day, the guru took the disciple to the river and forced the disciple’s head under water till the disciple started to get breathless. Then he let the disciple come up above water. When the disciple asked the guru why he did that, the guru answered that the disciple would see God when he would be as desperate for Him as he was for air when under water
Source: Economic Times, 9/11/2018
Percentage of desi women pilots twice that of world’s
India not only has the highest percentage of women airline pilots in the world, but the percentage of women pilots in India is more than double the global average, according to latest data released by International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA+21). According to the latest statistics, the percentage of women airline pilots in the world stands around 5.4%. In India, the percentage of women pilots currently is 12.4 %. India employs a total of 8,797 pilots of which 1,092 are women and 385 of these are female captains, according to ISA+21. Globally, the total number of airline pilots is over 1.5 lakh of which only 8,061 are women and 2,190 are women captains. TOI was the first to report that the percentage of female pilots in India was way above the global average. In a report carried on September 11, 2006, TOI had quoted ISA+21 data which said that the global percentage of women pilots was 5.9%. Back then, the percentage of women airline pilots in India was 11%, which still was double the global average. Delhi-based regional carrier Zoom employs the highest percentage of women pilots in the world, at 30%. IndiGo has the second highest percentage of women pilots at nearly 13.9%. Of the 2,689 pilots that it employs, 351 are women. Of the 1,867 pilots in Jet Airways, 231 are women (12.4%). SpiceJet has 853 pilots of which 113 are women (13.2%), while Air India has 1,710 pilots of which 217 are women pilots (12.7%). IndiGo and Jet Airways are the only two carriers in the world, other than some USbased carriers, where the number of female captains is currently in three digits. IndiGo has 118 women commanders and Jet Airways 100. However the percentage of women pilots in US-based carriers is just above global average. An IndiGo spokesperson said, “In the past five years, the number of women pilots has increased from 80 to over 330. We have women pilots flying as trainers and some are in managerial positions as well. Two of our women pilots have been nominated as flight operations inspectors with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).’’ The official added: “IndiGo is the only airline to have crèches, which enable both women and men to strike a balance between their early parenthood responsibilities and professional obligations.
Source: Times Of India, 9/11/2018
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