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Friday, January 18, 2019

Happiness & Evolution


In a riverbed were two trees. One was the mighty banyan tree and the other was a reed. “You are spineless; look at me. Not only am I tall and stand erect, I also give shade to the weary,” it would often say to the reed. In the rainy season came a flash flood that uprooted the banyan tree. The reed, however, survived as it simply bent with the current and when the floods receded, it became erect again. This is a story of the strength of humility. Another lesson the story contains is that it is only those systems that come in equilibrium with the surroundings that survive. Evolution of natural systems normally takes place via branching when the system goes far from equilibrium or “becomes unwieldy”, and is governed by laws of non-linear thermodynamics. The branch that comes into equilibrium with the surrounding forces, survives and prospers. Most times we are unhappy because of conflict within the self or with surroundings. To resolve the conflict or come “in equilibrium”, we should be able to sense our surroundings. The first mechanism for happiness is, therefore, to become acutely aware of the surroundings and corresponding forces. This means developing a sensitive mind and increasing one’s awareness. Both these are produced by making our minds powerful through Yoga. A powerful mind is a great information processor and, hence, can process signals and information from surroundings efficiently. Without awareness, the interaction with the forces is only a one-way affair, that is, we are controlled by them.

Source: Economic Times, 18/01/2019

Public policy making course introduced in IIT-Delhi

The school, which is presently recruiting its first batch of faculty, will offer courses in areas such as internet, digital information and society, industry and economy, energy and environment, agriculture, food and water, among others.

The Indian Institution of Technology in Delhi (IIT-D) on Wednesday announced it has introduced courses in public policy making at undergraduate, post graduate and research level at its recently established school for public policy. This is the first time when the institution will work in the field of public policy making.
The school, which is presently recruiting its first batch of faculty, will offer courses in areas such as internet, digital information and society, industry and economy, energy and environment, agriculture, food and water, among others. “The IIT-D is already working on thousands of research projects. We are planning to integrate it with public policy making. We are planning to start some elective courses and short duration programmes in policy making for undergraduate students and also some full time programmes for post graduates from next academic session (2020-21). Meanwhile, some Ph D students will start working in the area from this year only,” said Ambuj Sagar, head of the school for public policy.
The institution is aiming to make the school a “hub” for public policy research. “We were thinking about starting something like this that can make a more significant and direct social impact. The academic efforts of the school are expected to help not only the policy makers of the government agencies but also entities such as philanthropy, foundation and business enterprises,” Sagar said.
IIT-D director Ramagopal Rao said the school for policy making is “essential” in the present times. “As an academic institution, IIT-D offers an intellectually independent and value neutral location for engaging with multiple and diverse prospective and bring together stakeholders as well as engage with policy makers,” he said.
The institution has collaborated with TATA trust, which is already working in the field, for the purpose. “The trust has a long history of working in the field of public research and policy making in the country. The collaboration will help us making the school world class hub for research in public policy making,” Rao said.
Source: Hindustan Times, 17/01/2019

India, the world’s fastest growing major economy, must develop sustainably

India must focus on sustainable urbanisation, green industrialisation, and inclusion of the rural economy.

India is now the world’s fastest growing major economy. This is worth celebrating although there is a long road to catch up. In nominal terms, the US economy is still seven times as large as India’s. China’s GDP was 140% larger than India’s in 1998. Twenty years later, its faster growth rates have ensured that China’s economy is now 370% larger. But the nature of growth also matters: how sustainable, how equitable, how inclusive. Can India become not just the world’s fastest growing economy, but also the fastest growing inspiration?
China has enjoyed an investment-driven growth surge for four decades. In recent years, it has invested heavily in green infrastructure such as renewables and high-speed railways. In parallel, local governments have recently approved more than 100 new coal-fired power plants adding to a glut in thermal power capacity. A World Resources Institute report found that, during 2014-17, most of China’s cross-border loans and investments in energy and transportation via the Belt and Road Initiative were also linked to fossil fuels. China’s very high investment rates (44% of GDP in 2017)—a lot of black with shades of green—might not last long. It is certainly financially unsustainable for other developing countries.
With its new-found pole position, India has an opportunity to grow differently: green industrialisation, sustainable urbanisation, and inclusion of the rural economy. First, researchers at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) find that industrial development and a smaller carbon footprint need not be contradictions. It would mean using lower carbon energy sources for heavy industries, such as more efficient allocation of premium resources like natural gas, renewables-derived hydrogen for steel and ammonia, or refuse-derived fuels for cement. Two million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) account for 45% of industrial value addition and 40% of the workforce. Our survey of 429 MSMEs in eight states found that they needed practical training, working capital loans and policy signals to nudge them towards resource efficiency and to tap opportunities in a circular economy of converting waste into wealth.
Secondly, with 34% of the population living in cities, urban India is already the world’s second largest country. Hundreds of millions more will move to India’s cities. For a country on the move, only 10 cities have metro rail and 15 more have metro construction in the pipeline. Much more investment is needed for improved mobility via public transport and equitable connectivity.
Quality of life matters. As a hot country, our air-conditioning, refrigeration and cold chain demand will grow eight-fold by 2038. India can leverage its draft Cooling Action Plan to drive technology choices that use less-polluting refrigerants and more efficient equipment. Moreover, if we did not confront air and water quality as matters of public health and economic productivity, our cities will not be liveable and will lose out on investment.
As demand for built infrastructure rises, climate change and extreme weather events will make our fast-growing cities more vulnerable. Sustainable urbanisation means being proactive in designing cities by anticipating non-linear climate risks.
Urbanisation notwithstanding, we cannot drive a democratic, sustainable growth model without including the majority of the population still in rural areas. Even there, sustainability can be a driver. This, of course, includes agriculture. Experiments with natural farming are now gaining scale. Andhra Pradesh plans to shift all 6 million farmers to natural farming by 2024. Nationwide, there is a plan to deploy 2.75 million solar-based irrigation pumps, both standalone and grid-connected. These would be sustainable only if combined with efficiency in water use, paying attention to groundwater levels and switching to higher value crops. The non-farm sector offers another multi-billion dollar opportunity for sustainability. By CEEW’s estimates, for 14 non-farm income-generating activities, there is a potential market of $13 billion to use clean energy-based applications.
India’s experiments with sustainability need to internalise that India cannot be governed top-down. It can only be governed bottom-up, through an enabling mechanism that has equity at its core. If sustainability is seen to be an imposition, there will be backlash. Instead, if clean technologies improved delivery of essential services (energy, water, housing, mobility, healthcare) and if inclusive and innovative financing helped to invest in resilient infrastructure in towns and villages, then India would become an inspirational example, an alternative model to which many other countries could aspire. The celebration should not be about whether we are growing faster than China. The introspection should be about whether we are growing differently.
Arunabha Ghosh is CEO, Council on Energy, Environment and Water
Source: Hindustan Times, 18/01/2019

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Decoding patterns of lion, tiger and leopard attacks on humans


Lion attacks led to more human fatalities than by other species, says study

A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology reveals that lion attacks led to more human fatalities, persisted for a longer time and extended over larger areas than tiger or leopard attacks.
The study analysed 908 attacks on humans by these species in India, Nepal, and Tanzania. Researchers said very little is known about the pattern of such attacks and studies like these provide a range of perspectives.
Time and space
“We have attempted to understand the spread of these attacks in terms of time and space. Each spread was different. For example, leopard attacks in Maharashtra occurred in agricultural villages, while those in Himachal Pradesh were frequent in rain-fed croplands,” said Vidya Athreya, a research associate at the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the authors of the study.
The study also revealed that lion and tiger attacks were disproportionately located in residential woodlands habitat with 10–100 people per sq km, and lions also attacked more people in areas with recent loss of tree cover.
Titled ‘Species-specific spatiotemporal patterns of leopard, lion and tiger attacks on humans’, the study was initiated by lion expert Craig Packer and ecologist Nicholas M. Fountain-Jones. It analysed 319 lion attacks in southern Tanzania between 1989 and 2008 that were spread over an area of 42,500 sq km; 67 leopard attacks between 1993 and 2003 in Maharashtra spread over an area of 4,100 sq km and 329 leopard attacks between 2004 and 2014 in Himachal Pradesh spread over an area of 19,100 sq km.
‘Warning people’
The tiger attacks were studied in India and Nepal — 94 attacks over an area of 2,400 sq km in Maharashtra between 2005 and 2010; and 88 in 2,300 sq km around the Chitwan National Park in Nepal between 1979 and 2006.
“Our analysis reveals the typical spatiotemporal patterns of past lion, leopard, and tiger attacks on humans. In future, this technique could be used by relevant agencies to warn local people of risks from further attacks within a certain time and distance following an initial incident by each species,” the study stated, adding that the approach can also help identify areas requiring management interventions to address such threats.
According to researcher Shweta Shivakumar, who covered the Himachal Pradesh aspect of the study, the data on the attacks were obtained from the forest department. “We further interviewed the people and also visited the spot of the attack,” said Ms. Shivakumar, adding that a space-time scan was carried out by feeding GPS location, date, time and other details of the attacks.
“The findings could provide valuable information to agencies for concentrated conservation efforts in future,” she said.
Source: The Hindu, 17/01/2019

Manipur shows the way


Its anti-lynching law breaks important ground in attempting to control hate crimes and ensure police action 

Six months have passed since the Supreme Court — anguished by what it described as ‘horrific acts of mobocracy’ — issued a slew of directions to the Union and State governments to protect India’s ‘pluralist social fabric’ from mob violence. The court felt compelled to act in the shadow of four years of surging hate violence targeting religious and caste minorities. It also urged Parliament to consider passing a law to combat mob hate crime.
The Union and most State governments have done little to comply with the directions of India’s highest court. But Manipur became the first to pass a remarkable law against lynching, late last year. It did this after a single horrific video-taped lynching of a Muslim youth with an MBA degree stirred the public conscience.
Comprehensive in definition
The Manipur law closely follows the Supreme Court’s prescriptions, creating a nodal officer to control such crimes in every State, special courts and enhanced punishments. But its weighty significance lies in that it breaks new ground in some critical matters concerning hate violence in India, and shows the way in which the Union and other governments need to move if they are serious about combating hate crimes.
Its definition of lynching is comprehensive, covering many forms of hate crimes. These are “any act or series of acts of violence or aiding, abetting such act/acts thereof, whether spontaneous or planned, by a mob on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, language, dietary practices, sexual orientation, political affiliation, ethnicity or any other related grounds .…”
The law, however, excludes from its provisions solitary hate crimes. For the law to apply instead it requires that these hate crimes are undertaken by mobs (defined as a group of two or more individuals, assembled with a common intention of lynching), thereby excluding from its provisions solitary hate crimes. When we look back at the last four years, the majority of hate crimes were indeed by mobs of attackers and onlookers, but we also saw solitary hate murders, such as of the Bengali migrant Mohammad Afrazul in Rajasthan. This restriction of numbers is arbitrary, since the essence of what distinguishes these kinds of crimes is not the numbers of attackers but the motivation of hate behind the crimes; therefore, provisions of this law should apply to all hate crimes, not just lynching, regardless of the numbers of persons who participate.
On the public official
The most substantial and worthy contribution of the law is that it is the first in the country dealing with the protection and rights of vulnerable populations which creates a new crime of dereliction of duty of public officials. It lays down that “any police officer directly in charge of maintaining law and order in an area, omits to exercise lawful authority vested in them under the law, without reasonable cause, and thereby fails to prevent lynching shall be guilty of dereliction of duty” and will be liable “to punishment of imprisonment of one year, which may extend to three years, and with fine that may extend to fifty thousand rupees”.
Equally pathbreaking is that it removes the protection that is otherwise extended to public officials charged with any offence committed while acting in their discharge of official duty. At present, no court can take cognisance of such an offence except with the previous sanction of the State government. The Manipur law means that now no prior sanction is required to register crimes against public officials who fail in their duties to prevent hate crimes such as lynching.
In almost every incident of hate crime that the Karwan e Mohabbat, a campaign of solidarity for victims of such crimes, has investigated, the police acted brazenly in ways that would have been deemed crimes by public officials if a law such as the Manipur law had been in force. They arrived late deliberately, or watched even as the crimes were under way without restraining the mobs; they delayed taking those injured to hospital and on occasion even ill-treated them, ensuring their death; and after the hate crimes, they tended to register criminal cases against the victims and to defend the accused.
If police officers knew that they could be punished for these crimes (which would also put them at risk of losing their jobs), it is very unlikely that they would have acted in this way. They would have prevented, or stopped in their tracks, these hate crimes, and protected the victims.
I would also include in the crimes of dereliction of duty deliberately protecting criminals during investigation after the hate crime. I would also, most importantly, incorporate command responsibility, so that officials and also those who have directed them to betray their constitutional duties are criminally liable..
The second momentous contribution of the Manipur law is that it does away with the requirement of prior state sanction before acting on a hate crime. All hate crimes today should attract Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, which is related to fostering enmity between people on the basis of religion, race, language and so on. But registering this crime requires prior permission of the State government, and most governments use this power to shield perpetrators of hate crimes who are politically and ideologically aligned to the ruling establishment. The Manipur law does away with this requirement, which would make acting against hate crimes far more effective and non-partisan.
The third substantial feature is that it clearly lays down the duty and responsibility of the State government to make arrangements for the protection of victims and witnesses against any kind of intimidation, coercion, inducement, violence or threats of violence. It also prescribes the duty of State officials to prevent a hostile environment against people of the community who have been lynched, which includes economic and social boycott, and humiliation through excluding them from public services such as education, health and transport, threats and evictions.
Rehabilitation
The last substantial contribution of the law is requiring the state to formulate a scheme for relief camps and rehabilitation in case of displacement of victims, and death compensation. Again, in most cases of lynching, we have found that States have only criminalised the victims, never supported the survivors who live not just in loss and fear, but also in penury.
But the law needs to prescribe a much more expansive framework of mandatory gender-sensitive reparation on an atonement model, requiring the state to ensure that the victim of hate violence is assisted to achieve material conditions that are better than what they were before the violence, and that women, the elderly and children are supported regularly with monthly pensions over time.
Even with these caveats, the Manipur government has broken new ground, being the first government in the country to hold public officials criminally accountable if they fail to prevent hate crimes. If emulated by the Union and other State governments, such a sterling law could substantially prevent hate attacks, ensure public officials are faithful to their constitutional responsibilities and victims, and that their families and communities are assured of protection and justice.
This is the India we must claim — of safety, fairness and fraternity.
Harsh Mander, a human rights worker, writer and teacher, convenes the Karwan e Mohabbat

Source: The Hindu, 17/01/2019

Policy must tackle not just dissatisfaction of large farmers, but distress of most vulnerable

To address farmers' woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach.

The two main policy interventions repeatedly discussed in recent months to tackle farmer distress — loan waivers and minimum support prices (MSP) — treat all farmers (large/small, male/female) alike. But farmers are heterogeneous. They differ especially by income, land owned and gender. And farmer dissatisfaction is not the same as farmer distress. Better-off farmers are dissatisfied but politically vocal; poor farmers are distressed and many kill themselves in silence. It is the truly distressed we need to reach, but our policies only address the dissatisfied.
First, take loan waivers. Today, most economists agree that waivers are a bad idea: They deplete state finances, undermine bank culture, and barely reach 20-25 per cent farmers who have access to institutional credit, but not the marginal farmers or labourers who depend on moneylenders, or get no credit at all. Having a bank debt is not, in itself, a sign of distress. Farming, like other businesses, needs loans, and access to formal credit signifies credit worthiness. It is the marginal and small farmers who depend mainly on private lenders, and whose loans don’t get waived, who are in distress.
Second, raising MSPs will help surplus producing farmers, but not net buyers of farm produce — marginal farmers, farm labourers and urban consumers. A 2015 IIM-A report on Marketed and Marketable Surplus found that marginal farmers (up to one hectare land) contributed only 5 per cent of marketed surplus rice and 4 per cent of wheat, even in the major rice and wheat surplus states. And they sold only 39 per cent and 25 per cent of their marketed rice and wheat to government agencies, compared with the 70 per cent and 90 per cent sold by large farmers. Further, the Shanta Kumar Committee reports that only 6 per cent of farmers gained from selling these crops to any procurement agency.
Third, the policy of direct transfers to farmers also ignores the inequality between farmers. Telangana gave Rs 9,900/ha/season to all landowning farmers. Hence, the very large landowners gained — not only from owning large tracts, but in both seasons, since with irrigation they can cultivate in both kharif and rabi seasons; while pure-tenants and labourers got nothing. Nor did women farmers get anything, few of whom own land. Odisha recently announced that it will pay both farmers and labourers, but like Telangana, it will pay per household and not per person. Both states thus ignore women’s claims, and also the substantial evidence that it is income in a mother’s hands that greatly improves child nutrition and education, rather than income only in the father’s hands.
In fact, neither state has recognised intra-household inequalities, or paid heed to the large proportion of women farmers who are either principal cultivators or de-facto responsible for farms with male out-migration. Both categories are growing: Women farmers directly operating holdings, for example, grew from 12.8 per cent in 2010-11 to 13.9 per cent in 2015-16 (agricultural censuses). And in 2010, women farmers constituted 15 per cent of farmer suicides in five major states.
In NSSO’s Situation Analysis Survey, when 50,000 farmers across India were asked if they liked farming, 40 per cent said they did not. This included both better-off and poor farmers, and both men and women. As discussed in my article (‘The seeds of discontent,’ IE January 15, 2017), the better-off farmers, with more land, credit and education have high aspirations and are deeply dissatisfied, not in the least by the lack of formal sector jobs for themselves and their children. The poorer farmers are distressed given poor returns from agriculture. Women fall in both categories.
To address these woes, we need a multi-pronged strategy of income support, government investment, and institutional innovations, and not a one-size-fits-all approach. First, to overcome immediate distress, direct transfers are preferable to loan waivers, but transfers should be limited to smallholders (those owning 2 ha or less), pure-tenants and agricultural labourers. And the funds should go to women in the family for best results.
Second, to reduce the long-term distress of poor farmers, agricultural investment in priority areas is imperative. Topping my list is irrigation, water conservation, and storage for surplus produce. Even 70 years after Independence, only 44 per cent of our irrigable area is irrigated. This must increase, but not via groundwater mining, which is unsustainable. Consider Punjab’s massive groundwater depletion. After the state introduced free electricity for irrigation in 1997, canal irrigated land declined by 40 per cent between 1997-2002, while groundwater extraction rose sharply, as did the area under paddy. Now, Punjab’s water table is falling by 2.3 ft/yr or more, with no penalties for overdrawing. In contrast, Gujarat’s success in agriculture (9.6 per cent growth rate between 1999-2009) lay particularly in rainwater harvesting. This needs replication wherever possible. Also, water use efficiency by farmers is essential: Low-cost techniques of drip irrigation could be one method.
Third, some 70 per cent of farmers cultivate one hectare or less, in scattered plots. This is non-viable. Andrew Foster and Mark Rosenzweig, in their 2011 report, ‘Are Indian farms too small?’, find that as farm size in India increases from very small to eight ha, profits/ha rise substantially. So why don’t we encourage land and labour pooling? In my research on Kerala, I compared women’s group farms using leased land with individual family farms (95 per cent of which were male managed), in Thrissur and Alappuzha. The annual average value of output was 1.8 times greater and annual average profits were five times higher on group farms, which did especially well in commercial crops such as bananas and vegetables, despite depending on leased land. Groups helped increase farm size, brought scale economies, saved on hired labour, improved credit access and enhanced bargaining power in input and output markets. Institutional reform has long been a blind spot in India’s farm policy. It needs to be an integral part of schemes to help poor farmers (both men and women). Groups can also reduce farmer isolation and the likelihood of suicides.
Fourth, dietary changes require more focus on non-foodgrains for food security, including vegetables which are more profitable and inland fisheries, a key source of protein. Finally, both to overcome farmer distress and farmer dissatisfaction, creating jobs for farmers’ children in their vicinity, not in cities, is essential, through ancillary industries, food processing, SMEs, and so on. This would provide much needed supplementary income for farmers in distress. Doubling farmers’ incomes does not need doubling farm incomes. It needs increasing their incomes from both farm and non-farm sources.
Source: Indian Express, 17/01/2019

Skill deficit

The dots between poor learning outcomes and unemployment need to be joined. ASER report should lead to such an endeavour.




Like its previous editions, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 raises several worrying questions. The report prepared by the NGO Pratham shows that poor learning outcomes remain the Achilles’ heel of the country’s primary and secondary education system. Only 50 per cent of students in Class V can read a Class II-level text, reveals the study that was released on Tuesday. School-going children are also struggling with basic arithmetic skills. More than 56 per cent of children enrolled in Class VIII cannot solve a three-digit by one-digit division problem correctly.
There is some consolation, though. The report card on foundational skills, though dismal, shows marginal improvement over ASER’s evaluation in 2012. The proportion of students in Class VIII who can read a Class II text has increased by a little more than 3 per cent from that in 2012. The proportion of children in Class V who can do basic division has gone up from 24.9 per cent in 2012 to 27.9 per cent in 2018. A noteworthy aspect about these factoids is that government schools have been the harbinger of change. It’s even more heartening that in this respect, states hitherto considered as outliers in educational accomplishment, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh for example, have not lagged behind the more advanced states like Kerala and Karnataka. The ASER report, however, issues a caveat: “Though the declining trend in learning outcomes of government schools seems to have been arrested and even reversed, it’s important to remember that we are talking about foundational abilities.” This note of caution is well-taken. Nevertheless, the salience of state-run or funded schools in improving learning outcomes cannot be overstated. As the ASER study itself points out, about 70 per cent of school-going children in rural India attend a government-run school.
However, the government cannot afford to look at education as business-as-usual. Some of the recent problems in the economy have raised important questions for the sector. The rural distress and clamour for quotas, for example, underline the fact that people in rural India lack the technical skills that would enable them to find a job outside the farm sector. Last year’s ASER report had revealed that only “28 per cent had used the internet and 26 per cent had used computers in the last week, while 59 per cent had never used a computer and 64 per cent had never used internet”. The revelations in this year’s report are even more grim. For example, it points out that one out of four children in rural India leaves Class VIII without basic reading skills and over half of them cannot solve a basic division problem. It’s high time that the government joins the dots between the predicaments it faces in the economy and the malaise in the educational sector.
Source: Indian Express, 17/01./2019