Quote of the Day

“You have to dream before your dreams can come true.”

‐ Abdul Kalam

“सपने पूरे होंगे लेकिन आप सपने देखना शुरू तो करें।”

‐ अब्दुल कलाम

The disenfranchised migrants

In India, where internal migration is a hard reality, a significant number of migrants are unable to vote

The idea of ‘one nation, one election’ is back in the public discourse and has invoked varied responses. Amidst the discussion on elections, one issue that hasn’t received much attention pertains to the fate of the migrant voters. Internal migration is a hard reality in India and in every election, a significant number of voters are rendered disenfranchised on account of residing outside their constituency. The idea of simultaneous elections is likely to deprive migrant voters of their political agency at both Central and State levels.

Setting time aside from their busy campaigns, both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah reached Ahmedabad to cast their votes. After exercising his franchise, Mr. Modi said, “I feel blessed to have exercised my franchise in this biggest festival of democracy.” In contrast, a migrant from Bihar residing in Chennai said: “When I was working in Delhi, it was not much of an issue for me to go to my home town to cast my vote. Now that I am working in Chennai, that option is not open for me any more. Thus, I am not voting this time.”

According to the 2011 census, 45.36 crore Indians are internal migrants — now settled in a place different from that of their registered residence. Among them, 5.1 crore migrants moved only for economic reasons. Our general elections have earned the distinction of being the biggest festival of democracy because they have the highest number of registered voters. The 2019 Lok Sabha elections clocked a turnout of 67.11% — approximately 60 crore of the 90 crore eligible citizens voted. Of the more than 30 crore voters where weren’t able to vote, migrant workers constituted a major proportion. Hence, at least a third of our electorate continues to be on the margins when it comes to participating in the general elections.

The promise of adult franchise

India’s ‘stellar’ democratic record is primarily attributed to the right of every adult individual to become a stakeholder in the political process through the exercise of her right to vote, without any discrimination. However, over time, the practical difficulties of conducting multiple elections as well as a lack of political and bureaucratic will have exposed the chinks in the election process itself, particularly, when it comes to giving this right to the huge number of internal migrants.

In a country where internal migration is a reality — those moving to a different place include the daily wage earners as well as the white-collar workers, not to mention the students moving to a different location —such exclusion is baffling to say the least.

The current legal regime regulating voting poses a cruel dilemma before a migrant who is forced to choose between earning her livelihood and exercising her right to vote. Clearly, the regime is out of sync with the economic reality of the nation, where there is a high degree of internal mobility If the degree and range of electoral participation is a key metric to assess the democratic nature, so long as the representation of electorate continues to be skewed in this manner, the country has a long way to go before it assumes the title of the ‘most representative and inclusive democracy’.

An argument raised against the inclusion of internal migrants is that after leaving their home constituency, migrants discontinue their ‘real’ association. When weighed against the proactive measures to grant voting rights to non-resident Indians or external migrants from India, this argument ceases to hold sway. The government has already introduced an amendment to the Representation of the People Act, 1951 to allow proxy voting for overseas voters but no such provisions are in place for the internal migrants.

Logistical issues?

The Election Commission of India (EC) has time and again cited logistical issues as the principal reason for not supporting the inclusion of internal migrants. Clearly, such a view is constitutionally, legally and ethically on shaky grounds. The ECI must be more proactive in extending the right to vote to internal migrants. This can also help infuse a sense of belongingness and political responsibility in the migrant electors.

Extending the right to vote to internal migrants has the potential to alter the nature of our elections and provide the much-needed credibility, uniformity and representativeness to the electoral process, and surely this is where solutions that are offered by Information Technology have huge potential.

We need to ensure that the universal adult franchise provided by the framers of the Constitution does not remain a pious declaration of intent. The ultimate aim was to empower each and every citizen to become a stakeholder in the progress of the nation. Hence, there needs to be a constant review of the inclusive character of our electoral processes in India. Given the significance of this section of voters like every other section, the idea of ‘one nation, one election’ must be deliberated upon in such a way that it empowers the migrant populations.

S. Irudaya Rajan is a professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala; Prashant Singh is an advocate at the Supreme Court of India

Source: The Hindu, 30/08/2019

IIT Guwahati develops artifical intelligence chatbot to support EEE students

The chatbot would help students find their class schedule, tutorial schedule, and examination queries via a AI-based chat window.

In a bid to promote learning through Artificial Intelligence (AI), a team of postgraduate students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, along with their faculty members are developing an Artificial Intelligence-enabled chatbot named “ALBELA” to teach and support first year students of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE).

“We have been working on its development since last 7 months with a team of dedicated 7 research scholars of the department. Earlier we did the trial runs of the chatbot, and started using from this academic session onwards.

“The response from the students has been overwhelming and we hope that this will become the new normal in near future. Prof. Rohit Sinha, Head EEE Department, and the team IBM have extended their continuous support for this activity,” Praveen Kumar, Professor, Department of EEE, IIT Guwahati, said in a statement.

The chatbot would help students find their class schedule, tutorial schedule, and examination queries via a AI-based chat window. Students at times may hesitate to approach an instructor regarding their queries, but with this chat-based system students can clear their doubts, both technical and non-technical, according to the institution.

“The team is developing the analytical problem solving skill. It will be helpful for the students to learn how to solve analytical problems related to the course. Within next one year, we will extend it to biomedical signal processing, electrical machine courses, said Samarendra Dandapat, Professor, Department of EEE at IIT Guwahati.

Source: Hindustan Times, 3/09/2019

The difficulty of being a teacher in today’s time

It’s not easy being a teacher in the 21st century when the Internet has comppletely transformed the learning process for everyone

It’s not easy being a student today. The expectations of growing into a professional well-capable of handling a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) workspace is insurmountable. For all our good intentions, we can’t really stop our students from feeling that pressure. But if you think about it, being a teacher in a VUCA world is not any easier. The 21st century is all about equipping oneself with skills that will enable us to easily adapt to all the challenges this VUCA world throws at us. And to prepare our students to be able to handle all of that complexity, we must first prepare our teachers. Our teachers are the only hope for us to prepare the students for the 21st century. Our aspiration is to develop the gems of tomorrow, today with our teachers.

So, how do we prepare ourselves to be 21st century teachers, for the millennial generation of students? A generation that’s characterised by their dwindling attention span and their rising tech-dependence? The simplest way to do that is, meeting them where they are most comfortable.

The days of monological teaching are on the decline as learners respond better to collaborative and engaging interplay. . Let’s explore five key roles a 21st century teacher must take on to be able to achieve that.

An Adaptive Mentor

‘One size fits all’ no longer holds true. Mass personalisation is the keyword in the current education industry. According to the ‘multiple intelligence theory’ propounded by Howard Gardner, there are eight different kinds of intelligence. It is not necessary that each child in a class will exhibit the same level of competency in each of these eight kinds! One might be spatially more intelligent, while another might show linguistic expertise. A 21st century teacher must be adaptive enough to meet each child at their space of intelligence and take it up from there. But it does not end there. A teacher must also be adaptive enough to embrace the changing dynamics of education. Instead of depending solely on textbooks, a teacher should be able to infuse lessons with new and fresh ideas. Talking about steam engines does not cut it anymore, because this generation of students will never be able to identify with it. Instead, how about discussing electronic vehicles, since that’s much more immediate and contextually relevant for today’s students?

Try the flipped classroom method, where students do the actual learning at home, and the classroom is used as a safe space to engage in discussions, provocations of minds.

A Digital Dabbler

No, it does not mean that teachers need to be tech-nerds. But a little bit of technological know-how can go a long way in establishing deeper bonds with students. In an age when entire campuses are making the shift to digital, a teacher who shuns technology will only succeed in alienating the students. 21st century teachers also need to be able to differentiate between bad addiction and good addiction. Screen-addiction is something that bothers every parent today. As a 21st century teacher, one has the power to channel that screen-addiction into an addiction for learning. Leveraging the wonders of the technological world to kindle a child’s curiosity to go above and beyond classroom learning is where a 21st century teacher must excel.

To push learning beyond the classroom walls, encourage your students to join global communities on social media. Be it a photography community or a cyber-security one, a global learning ground exposes them to varied cultures, languages and politics.

An Enabler of Experiences

The current buzzword is ‘experiential.’ A virtual tour of the Amazonian forest will have a bigger impact than a written paragraph about it. Young minds need stimulating experiences to retain concepts better and longer. It follows naturally that mentors have to plan lessons where they engage the senses, and organize practical demonstrations. Being hands-on is a key skill that teachers of the 21st century must demonstrate. Another side of the coin is activity-based learning. If you are thinking excursions and field-trips, you are on the right track. But a 21st century teacher will go beyond and make sure that students are not just learning, but also applying that knowledge, analysing it and finally interpreting it to create new concepts.

Instead of asking them what they want to become when they grow up, take them on a picnic and encourage them to approach random people (of course, under your supervision) and ask them about their professions. They can quiz people on the pros and cons of their jobs, about how they made their career decisions and what factors influenced those decisions. This way, they will develop a better understanding of various career options.

There’s no denying that students today learn more from the internet than from textbooks. In such a situation, a 21st century teacher should be ever-ready to be left stumped by their ingenuous queries. You see, children today have access to more information than a teacher can wrap her/his head around. Thus, a 21st century teacher needs to be a learner, who learns alongside the students. And not just alongside, but also from the students. A teacher has gone from a sage on the stage to a guide by the side. It’s now time to take on the role of a learner in the pit.

Come up with a topic that’s in the syllabus and encourage your students to research the topic by going on the internet, while you do the same. Share notes and build a project together. This will also help them learn to differentiate between authentic information and misinformation, because the internet is full of it.

Educators all over the world have been harping on how important it is to let students take the lead of their learning. That way, students own their learning. How can a 21st century teacher make that happen? By giving them a chance to take pride in their learning. With collaborative learning and sharing platforms becoming the norm, it is super easy today for students to share their work with peers and also the world over. When ‘practise assignments’ travel beyond the teachers’ desks and takes on a concrete shape as their very own creation, students learn to take pride in their learning.

Instead of asking them to write an essay, ask them to write a blog, add pictures, polls, opinions etc. Instead of asking them, ‘How do plants produce their food?,’ ask them to make a ‘how-to’ video on the same topic. So that, once the lesson has been learnt, their assignments do not just end up in a waste paper basket, but they can share it online and take pride in their creation.

To conclude, a 21st century educator is an aware global mentor, who provides a safe and encouraging space for young minds to ask questions and helps them make use of the right channels to look for the answers. It’s time we all come to terms with the fact that with information being available at the click of a button, the teacher’s job is no more about dispensing information. A 21st century teacher is all about preparing students to consume and interpret the readily-available information effectively, to best suit the generation’s collective interest.

The author is Global Head, TCS iON

source: Hindustan Times, 4/09/2019

Rethinking Social Security 

Social security has to be a whole lot more than writing cheques for beneficiaries

The government is preparing a new code on social security, as part of its mammoth overhaul of the country’s labour laws to condense them into four codes. The codes on occupational safety and wages have come to light and are more amalgamation of extant laws than articulation of new principles to suit emerging reality. The code on social security offers a chance for fresh thinking. Should the code cover only the organised sector workers or those who toil in the unorganised sector, too? If the latter, why not extend the coverage to all of society? In reality, selective coverage will be meaningless. Every citizen should be eligible for social security, for social security to yield meaningful social cohesion and dignity. No Aping the West The conventional notion of social security is that the government would make periodic payments to look after people in their old age, ill-health/ disability and indigence. This idea should itself change. Social security should conceptually change from writing a cheque for the beneficiary to institutional arrangements to care for beneficiaries, including by enabling them to look after themselves, to a large extent. The write-a-cheque model of social security is a legacy from the rich world at the optimal phase of its demographic transition, when the working population was numerous enough and earning enough to generate the taxes to pay for the care of those not working. This model is ill-suited for less well-off India with growing life expectancy, increasing urbanisation and resultant migration, in a context of radical shifts in the nature of production and of work. Urbanisation radically changes society’s requirements. Housing for all, for example, has different meanings under a static ratio of urban-torural folk and under a progressive shift to urbanisation, with people migrating from village to town. Someone might have a home in the village, but needs a place to stay in the city where he goes to work. Housing for all will not meet this requirement. What an urbanising society needs is a plentiful supply of affordable rental accommodation. Similarly, social security under urbanisation will be different from social society in a static society. For example, should the beneficiary unit be the family or the individual? What is considered a family in a traditional society could be spatially distributed in an urbanising society, dependent parents staying back in the village while the earning members work in different cities. Social security would have to target the individual rather than the family
How to pay for social security for the entire population is a big question. But how much is to be paid for would depend on how social security is conceptualised. Who are the elderly, and what are they capable of ? If anyone who crosses the age of 60 is seen as a doddering dependent incapable of doing anything productive or earning anything, the social security bill would be an order of magnitude larger than if those over 60 are recognised as people capable of contributing to society but on a flexible schedule and at varying levels of intensity of work during their hours of work. Old people’s homes are probably ill-suited for anyone but invalids. Ideally, elders and younger families should live together in close proximity in a framework of community living. Elders could take care of preschoolers and schoolkids after school hours. They could tutor them in math and science, recount folklore and myths that constitute tradition and provide emergency response in case of accidents. In return, young members of the community could take care of the seniors in various ways, running errands, as companions and emergency responders. Tap Seniors’ Capability Teenagers could accumulate social work points for the voluntary work they do in looking after the elderly who are housebound, and these points could count towards college admissions or their own eligibility for volunteer service when they need it. Social security should keep the accounts. Work is changing, with technology liberating many kinds of work from geographic location, rendering some others redundant and yet others amenable to being divided up into bits to be performed by independent so-called gig workers. Retired schoolteachers in India could help teenagers struggling with their homework in South Africa or North Carolina. A software engineer in Kolkata could collaborate with his former classmate in Salem to deliver a tool outsourced by a Bengaluru-based company. Social security should include worker retraining, not just unemployment allowance. It should help/mandate gig workers buy insurance and save for old age, perhaps by automatically deducting a fraction of the payments received into their bank accounts into insurance/pension accounts, say, in the National Pension System. Social security should help elders deploy their skills to match the demand anywhere in the world. Comprehensive healthcare and a quality education system would plug into social security, improving worklife earnings and enhancing the earning capacity of the next generation. It would be useful to rethink social security in holistic, if unconventional, terms.

Source: Economic Times, 4/09/2019

Only 22% deaths in India medically certified; below 10% in some states

Only 22% of the registered deaths in the country are medically certified, with the proportion dipping below 10% even in some states generally regarded as developed. Among those medically certified, diseases of the circulatory system are not only the biggest killers but the fastest growing. Deaths caused by complications due to diabetes are also emerging as a significant chunk, shows data on causes of death released by the office of the Registrar General of India. Interestingly, more male deaths are medically certified, accounting for 61.9% of all medically certified deaths in the country. Med certification of deaths up from 13% to 22% in 27 yrs It seems more males are admitted to hospital during the last moments of life as compared to females, notes the report on medical certification of cause of death (MCCD). This could be because of property being mostly in the name of men and death certificates being crucial for inheritance. According to the report, progress in the implementation of medical certification of deaths has been slow, rising from 12.7% to 22% over the last 27 years. It has so far been implemented in only certain hospitals, generally in urban areas which are selected by the Chief Registrar of Births & Deaths and the coverage is not uniform across states. Out of an estimated 70 lakh deaths in 2017, over 60 lakh were registered, but just over 14.1 lakh were medically certified. Amongst bigger states, the highest level of medical certification of cause of death was in Tamil Nadu (43.3%) followed by Maharashtra (38.9%) and Karnataka (30.4%). Of those medically certified, deaths due to diseases of the circulatory system have seen the highest jump of 9.7 percentage points and this category of diseases now accounts for over 34% of deaths. The data reveals that, since 2000, diseases of the circulatory system such as heart diseases have not only been the top-most killer, but their share in total deaths has been steadily increasing. Ischemic heart disease alone accounted for over 10% of all medically certified deaths. Similarly, while endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases were the seventh leading cause of deaths (5.3%), diabetes mellitus alone under this category constituted 4.6% of medically certified deaths. Within infectious and parasitic diseases, which were the second leading cause of death (10.4%), septicemia alone accounted for 4.6%. Theaccounting for 9.2% of deaths and cancers accounting for 6.4%. Death of infants during birth accounts for 5.8%, including those due to slow fetal growth and fetal malnutrition. Given the low level of certification, it is possible that the data may not accurately mirror the actual picture of how many die from which disease, but the broad patterns are unlikely to be significantly different category on infectious diseases is followed by respiratory diseases.

Source: Times of India, 4/09/2019

If it is not tackled in time, land degradation can trigger conflict

The government must take the warning on desertification seriously because land has synergistic benefits for biodiversity and creating carbon sink

The 14th session of the Conference of Parties (COP14) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification began in New Delhi on Monday. The meeting, which is being attended by 196 countries, will discuss several global challenges, including drought, land tenure, ecosystem restoration, climate change, health and sand and dust storms among others. The COP 14 comes at a critical time for the world. In August, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on climate change and land said the land surface temperature has increased by 1.53 degree C since the pre-industrial period, and called for addressing land degradation to help mitigate climate change because of large reserves of carbon in the soil.

Out of the 196 participating nations, 122 countries, including India, have agreed to become land degradation neutral (LDN) by 2030. But this will not be easy. Nearly 30% of India’s land area has been degraded through deforestation, over-cultivation, soil erosion and depletion of wetlands, says a 2016 study by Space Applications Centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The annual economic loss due to degraded land and change in land use in India was valued at Rs 3.17 lakh crore ($46.90 billion) in 2014-15, which was 2.5% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014-15, according to a 2018 study done by The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI), a Delhi-based think tank. The government needs to speed up reclamation as the cost of land degradation will outstrip the cost of reclamation in 2030, the report warned.

But at a time when India needs to take up the anti-desertification drive, there seems to be some doubt about India’s LDN target. On August 27, environment minister Prakash Javadekar quoted a lower LDN target (5 million hectares) when the original target was 30 million hectares. The Indian government must take the warning on desertification seriously because land, as Indian Institute of Science’s N H Ravindranath told Hindustan Times, has synergistic benefits for biodiversity and creating carbon sinks. Additionally, loss of land will lead to reduced agricultural output and spark a water crisis. However, what must worry the government more is the strong link that exists between desertification and the creation of a number of social and economic stressors. Populations that lack resiliency to these stressors — who usually happen to be poor — may choose to migrate, seek other means of production or become dependent on others for subsistence. These responses to a worsening environment, experts warn, can make social-political conflict more likely.

Source: Hindustan Times, 2/09/2019