India needs a new rural-centric development model | Opinion

Go back to Gandhi, Kalam, and Deshmukh; use technology, create jobs; issue self-reliant village bonds

Migration has accelerated exponentially over the last decade in India. Current estimates of the total number of migrant workers range from 72 million to 110 million. India has the second-largest migrant worker population in the world, second only to China. One in four workers in India is essentially a migrant. The lack of authentic data on their numbers, their living and working conditions and perpetual uncertainty in their livelihood prospects have been brought in to sharp focus with the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the best effort of both the central and state governments, the mass movement of nearly 10 million migrant workers has brought into sharp relief the urgent need to shift to a new paradigm of economic development and urbanisation in which migration under economic distress or due to the lack of amenities is brought down. This can be done if we can convert the Covid-19 crisis into an opportunity to rethink and reimagine our development model. Fortunately for us, an alternative model that minimises migration is available in the works of Mahatma Gandhi, the late president APJ Abdul Kalam and social activist and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideologue Nanaji Deshmukh.

The aspiration for self-reliant development at the village level began with the Gandhian model of swaraj. From the time of his return from South Africa, Gandhi immersed himself in village movements in Champaran (1917), Sevagram (1920) and Wardha (1938). He visualised a comprehensive programme of constructive work, which included economic self-reliance, social equality and a decentralised political system at the village level.

For Gandhi, the model of self-reliant villages was the basis of a free democracy. He declared, “My idea of village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity.” His was not a model of a closed economy and a village economy perpetuating itself at the lower levels of income, but one in which local populations could be employed locally but with rising incomes and higher productivity. It is not well known that in his quest for technological improvement, Gandhi had put out an advertisement for a better version of the charkha in British and Indian newspapers in 1929, and even offered a handsome reward of Rs 1 lakh for it (about ~2.5 crore today).

Kalam, the missile man, had his own model called Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA). His vision was to develop rural India through a cluster development system where 50-100 villages with common competencies and/or mutual markets could be horizontally or vertically integrated as PURA complexes. These villages would be linked through “four connectivities” — physical, electronic, knowledge and economic. The goal was to provide income and quality of life opportunities to all within PURA complex. While some rural-rural migration would be acceptable, rural to urban migration would be minimised. He envisioned 7,000 PURA complexes at the cost of Rs 130 crore per unit built through public-private partnerships.

Deshmukh called for self-reliant villages based on a model of integral humanism where harmony was also a pivotal force. In his work across 500 villages in India, especially in the Chitrakoot area, the successful implementation of the model called not just for zero unemployment and no one below the poverty line, but also zero internal legal disputes and no widow being denied remarriage. In Deshmukh’s model, the collective social consciousness that promoted collective well-being was considered to be a cornerstone to next-generation rural development.

Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi implemented the model of rurban development when he was chief minister of Gujarat. This was sought to be replicated at the pan-India level through the launch of the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission in 2014. The model follows a cluster development design to create social, health, education and economic infrastructure across villages.

In order to make 650,000-plus villages and 800 million citizens self-reliant, technology will have to play a critical role. We need to create a rural knowledge platform through active collaboration between the public and private sector. This will provide the expertise to take cutting edge technology deeper into villages and generate employment. Today, the Internet and artificial intelligence are being used extensively around the world to facilitate sustainable agriculture. Large-scale and real-time data collected from farming practices and collated with global price and production numbers can be used to offer more profitable choices to our farmers.

In a survey of urban migrant workers, 84% of them reported that their primary source of livelihood in their villages was casual work. Only 11% stated that agriculture was their primary source of income. This indicates that there is a need to create jobs in rural areas far beyond just augmentation of agriculture. In fact, agriculture itself will shed jobs with the addition of technology.

To finance this ambitious re-engineering of our development model, Atmanirbhar Village bonds could be issued to raise resources. Part of the mandated priority sector lending by scheduled commercial banks could be used to finance these bonds. We need to prioritise self-reliant village projects to be funded from such lending. We need to create a fresh curriculum in engineering, medical colleges and business schools to train the workforce to operate in villages.

The capacity of India’s youth to innovate needs to be unleashed in villages. India needs to build the nation, village upwards and not city downwards. We need to eliminate the division between Bharat and India. This can be achieved bringing Gandhi’s and Kalam’s ideas of developing a rurban India to the centre of the development model.

Rajiv Kumar is vice-chairman, NITI Aayog

Srijan Pal Singh is CEO, Dr Kalam Centre, Delhi

The views expressed are personal

Source: Hindustan Times, 24/06/20

Quote of the Day

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

‐ Leo Tolstoy

“हर व्यक्ति दुनिया को बदलने की सोचता है, लेकिन कोई भी व्यक्ति स्वयं को बदलने की नहीं सोचता।”

‐ लियो टॉलस्यटाय

UK report calls for four-year post-study visas to attract more Indian students

Under the current rules, the UK is set to open up a new “Graduate” visa route, commonly referred to as a post-study visa, for the 2020-21 intake to UK universities.

A new report released in London on Monday has called on the UK government to double its post-study visa offer to four years, a move it predicts could lead to a near doubling of Indian students choosing UK universities by 2024.

“Universities Open to the World: How to put the bounce back in Global Britain”, prepared by former UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson for the Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Harvard Kennedy School, warns that an anticipated 50-75 per cent drop in international students as a result of the coronavirus pandemic would expose “real vulnerabilities” in the country’s higher education sector.

An expansion of the ability to work at the end of a degree course and to include Indians in the low-risk student visa category of countries, akin to China, would prove particularly attractive to Indian students – a group which has registered a strong hike in numbers choosing UK universities in recent months.

“For students in India, this offer would be a total game-changer. It would be sensational for the ability of our universities to go and market British higher education in India,” said Jo Johnson, the younger brother of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“The increase that I am proposing to the post-study work visa will be of particular appeal to students from India, who are very sensitive to whether or not they have an ability to stay on in the country after they graduate to put to use the skills they have acquired in higher education and earn a bit of money to help them pay the pretty considerable fees that our universities charge them,” he said, adding that the UK prime minister has always been a “strong supporter” of international students and is therefore likely to take the report’s proposals into consideration.

The former member of parliament from the Conservative Party, who resigned from politics last year, has been a long-term supporter of competitive post-study visa offers to keep the UK in line with other higher education destinations such as Australia and Canada.

“The issue is that the world has not stood still. Coronavirus is significantly going to reduce the number of international students that are globally mobile this coming year and probably following years as well,” he explains.

“We propose to double the number of students from India and increase significantly students from other key countries such as Nigeria and Malaysia to rebalance the mix. We don’t want an over-dependence on students from one particular country,” said Johnson, in reference to the current majority of international students in the UK mainly from China.

His report highlights that the UK is well-positioned to capitalise on an “unmet demand from India”, which registered an impressive 136 per cent hike in student visa numbers in the year ending March 2020.

It stresses the need for the UK to go further and also streamline visa processes and remove a perceived “hostile bureaucracy” around Britain’s university offering.

“The Home Office’s continued exclusion of India from its low-risk Tier 4 visa list, which denotes countries from which student visa applications are streamlined, has understandably provoked deep unhappiness,” the report notes.

Under the current rules, the UK is set to open up a new “Graduate” visa route, commonly referred to as a post-study visa, for the 2020-21 intake to UK universities.

It will offer international students from countries like India the chance to switch onto a skilled work visa after two years if they find a job which meets the skill requirements of the route.

The Graduate visa is designed for overseas students to be able to work or look for work after completing their course.

The new report wants this expanded further amid concerns raised by UK universities of the adverse impact of the worldwide coronavirus lockdown, which is expected to hit the number of higher fee-paying international students taking up courses at UK universities.

Source: Indian Express, 16/06/2020

A Flaw in the NIRF Rankings – and a Fix

The Ministry of Human Resource Development released the fifth edition of the National Institutional Ranking Framework on June 11. Since 2017, when the first edition was introduced, engineering institutions have dominated the list. This year, seven of the top 10 places are occupied by the IITs. And in all five instalments, IIT Madras has never been dislodged from the top spot in the engineering rankings. Strangely, the other international ranking exercises, the Shanghai ARWU, the Times Higher Education and the Quacquarelli Symonds rankings, have rarely given IIT-M the topIIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi now rank ahead of IIT Madras. Note the presence of Jadavpur University ahead of IIT Kanpur, and the presence of Vellore Institute of Technology ahead of IIT (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad and IIT Guwahati. This is because the multiplied-score procedure recognises the fact that Jadavpur University and Vellore Institute of Technology leverage lower teaching and learning resources to produce relatively higher outcomes (research and graduation) than many privileged IITs. The NIRF score in its current form is unable to make this distinction. 

However, the ranking’s methods have a serious flaw (apart from the other well-known flaws that visit all ranking exercises). It builds a single score from five categories: teaching, learning and resources (TLR), research and professional practices (RPP), graduation outcomes (GO), outreach and inclusivity, and perception. These five broad heads are built up from various sub-heads, and a complex weighting and addition scheme is used to obtain the overall rating score, which can take a maximum value of 100. The institutions are finally rank-ordered based on these scores.If a ranking is really required, we can obtain a score obtained by multiplying the quality score and the output score. 

The flaw is that in a university system, TLR is technically ‘input’ and RPP and GO are ‘output’, and the NIRF adds the input and output scores to obtain the final score. This violates the basic principle of performance analyses: that performance is based on the input score and that quality is based on the ratio of output to the input. (Note that outreach and inclusivity and perception relate neither to academic nor research excellence but these are added as well.)

What happens when the NIRF scores are recomputed without adding the input and output? Let’s use an alternative two-dimensional paradigm, where the input is the ‘teaching, learning and resources’ (TLR) score, and the output is the sum of the ‘research and professional practices’ (RPP) and the ‘graduation outcomes’ (GO) scores. First, I normalise the values using the totals for RPP, GO and TLR for the top 100 engineering institutions in the NIRF 2020 list, then calculate the performance and quality scores.

Gangan Prathap is an aeronautical engineer and former scientist at the National Aeronautical Laboratory, Bangalore and former VC of Cochin University of Science and Technology. He is currently a professor at the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram.

Source: The Wire: 14/06/2020

UGC’s New Ethics Course for PhD Students Is Welcome but Not Good Enough

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has announced a new mandatory course for PhD students to familiarise them with ethical issues relevant to conducting and publishing research. In the long term, the course presumably aims to reduce the prevalence of research misconduct, for which India has developed an unenviable reputation.

The coursework the UGC has specified is to be completed before registration, and spans six units with 30 hours of teaching and which are all together worth two credits. It will cover topics such as (but not limited to) scientific conduct, publication ethics, open access publishing and research metrics.

There are many reasons why the Indian scientific community has a poor reputation when it comes to research quality. One of them is that most scientists and students are not very fluent in English, the de facto language of research worldwide, and are inclined to repeat what others have said when they can’t say it themselves. Another is that the education system – aside from notable exceptions at the level of some universities – has downplayed the importance of not plagiarising or not cherry-picking data.

Further, and to echo R. Prasad, science editor at The Hindu, the course is welcome to the extent that it addresses data fabrication and falsification but disappointing because it doesn’t extend to image manipulation.

In 2019, The Hindu reported that a string of papers published by Indian scientists had been flagged on a research discussion platform for including images that had been modified and/or copied from other sources in order to support a result when in fact they didn’t. The scientists that authored these papers, and who were thus responsible for the manipulation, hailed from prestigious national and state-level institutions as well as less prominent places, suggesting that the problem wasn’t affected by access to resources or better working environments but was likely more systemic in nature.

That many of these scientists also hold senior positions in their respective organisations, ergo the image manipulation was intentional and not inadvertent, supports the same conclusion. For example, in 2017, it emerged that V. Ramakrishnan, the director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, had published 50 papers from 1984 to 2014 that contained plagiarised text – a charge that Ramakrishnan rejected.

While some people, including administrators and research funders, may only just be waking up to the true extent of the problem, Retraction Watch‘s searchable database of retracted papers suggests Indian scientists have been manipulating images for decades. Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant, has also unearthed numerous papers on Twitter and the evaluation platform with problematic images and which had Indian authors.

The course is also limited because it doesn’t discuss, at least on the face of it, the consequences of engaging in unethical practices. Then again, if the corresponding sanctions exist, all institutes must implement them and uniformly so. Currently, very few researchers at various institutes have been appropriately punished for their transgressions, contributing to the widespread idea that, in India, you can plagiarise and flourish. It’s possible that simply ensuring intentional errors will be caught and dealt with, irrespective of who committed them and their stature within an institution, could significantly mitigate the extent of the problem. And if scientific institutions can make a habit of it, the UGC or any other body may have fewer reasons to interfere.

Thus, Prasad writes, “If UGC is serious about teaching research and publication ethics, it should make scientific conduct and publication ethics into two separate courses with sufficient teaching hours or devote more time to teach research ethics and necessarily include image preparation as part of the course.”

But if the course is going to be administered in its current form, then the UGC at least has to commit to two things: first, quantify the problem and maintain the numbers on record, and second, check whether the course achieved its intended outcomes, such as by reducing the number of cases of misconduct, once every five years and modify the course as necessary.

Source: The Wire, 10/01/2020

ICMR Policy Document Accused of Plagiarism

ICMR now says 'issue of plagiarism is not relevant' as document is 'not in public domain' – a claim not backed by facts.

New Delhi: The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body responsible for guiding the country’s biomedical response to the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of plagiarism, with a new policy document published by it lifting as much as 37% of its content from unattributed sources– a portion considered substantial by all standards.

But for the seriousness of the charge, it only joins a pile of concerns about the ICMR’s ethical conduct since March, when India’s COVID-19 outbreak turned serious.

A complaint was lodged anonymously with the Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on June 12, and a copy was shared with The Wire as well as with a secretary at the health ministry, the Directorate General of Health Services and the director-general ICMR.

The document – called ICMR’s Disabilities Guidance Document in short – appears to have lifted multiple passages from previously published work, including research papers, information websites like those of the WHO and from institutional websites like those of NIMHANS and AIIMS.

Its preparation was supervised by Raman R. Gangakhedkar, the chief epidemiologist at ICMR. It was conceived, “edited and compiled” by scientists Ravinder Singh, Sumit Aggarwal and Heena Tabassum. It was published sometime last month.

According to a ‘similarity report’ compiled using an online tool called iThenticate, the document had plagiarised 9,046 words in all – amounting to 37% of the text – in 106 different chunks. The biggest chunk is of 1,193 words from the WHO website.

As it happens, Harsh Vardhan was elected the chairman of the World Health Assembly’s executive board in May. The assembly is the international forum through which the WHO’s members govern the WHO.

The complaint asked that Vardhan initiate a probe if the charge of plagiarism was borne out, even as the complainant pointed to specific structural provisions that might help.

“To ensure the image of ICMR does not get tarnished, secretary of Department of Health Research and director general of ICMR set up a Research Integrity Unit in the division of human resource development, ICMR headquarters, New Delhi, in 2019,” the complainant wrote.

ICMR also requires all institutes in its purview to have a research integrity officer (RIO), whose job it is to ensure all official documents, including research papers, originating from each institute to be free of research misconduct. This typically takes the form of an undertaking that the authors of each document have to sign.

Whether this practice has the desired effect is hard to say, considering numerous government academic institutes in India have been embroiled in multiple plagiarism and misconduct controversies. For example, a year ago this month, the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research, Lucknow, came under the scanner after 130 papers published by its researchers were found to have used spurious images to hold up the results of research. The institute is a laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The complainant in the present case also noted the gravity of the situation considering ICMR is responsible for ensuring other institutes whose conduct it oversees don’t plagiarise content themselves.

“ICMR is a body framing national ethical guidelines in research. It is their responsibility to act on their own plagiarism to send a consistent message to researchers and policymakers, that as the premier research institute of this country they will hold themselves to the same standards that they expect of other researchers,” the complainant’s note stated.

The complaint also reminded minister Vardhan that “the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations 2018, in clause 12.2, prescribes penalties in case of plagiarism in academic and research publications.”

These rules stipulate that documents that “plagiarism in academic and research publications” to the extent of 10-40% warrant the withdrawal of the manuscript.

Finally, the complainant asked for exemplary punishment against confirmed offenders and for the respective institutes they are affiliated with to initiate independent action.

Dr Aggarwal, one of the scientists who conceived, edited and compiled the report, is a member of the ICMR’s research group on operational research under the National Task Force (OR-NTF) on COVID-19. On June 16, a preprint paper coauthored by Dr Aggarwal, as well as Narendra Kumar Arora, the chairperson of the OR-NTF, was involved in a different controversy. The study described in the paper suggested India’s COVID-19 case load would only peak in late 2020. But while many of the paper’s authors are affiliated with ICMR and the paper also acknowledged funding from the body, ICMR itself said it hadn’t funded the study and distanced itself from the conclusions.

Anant Bhan, a bioethics expert, had said, “If ICMR say they did not fund the study, and the authors claim it was funded by ICMR, and ICMR claims its scientist who is a co-author was not aware of the manuscript, this is a gross publication ethics issue. So who is right?”

A rights activist said ICMR should urgently refrain from questionable practices, especially when it could simply have attributed the content it copied in the report to their original sources.

Incidentally, this report was the subject of discussion among disability rights activists last month. While they were impressed at first with the volume of work, their concerns eventually came to focus on the fact that none of the persons involved in drafting the report was from the disability sector.

Sangeeta Sharma, a professor and head of paediatrics at the National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases, New Delhi, noted that the OR-NTF – which recommended the report – needed to “include persons with disability for fairness and equality of justice”.

Emails to the offices of the health minister, the ministry secretary, the ICMR director general and the Directorate General of Health Services hadn’t elicited a reply at the time of publishing. The article will be updated if and when they do.

Source: https://thewire.in/government/icmr-policy-document-plagiarism-disability-rights

Digital media is redefining modes of political communication and mass contact

As India enters a technology-driven world, changes in the country’s political discourse are natural and communication between parties and people will become simpler.

Public participation is the bedrock of a successful and vibrant democracy. Debates, discussions and a healthy exchange of ideas go a long way in strengthening the foundations of democratic systems. Countries across the globe took to newer modes of public communication even as their democracies kept evolving. With the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, science and knowledge found the fuel to spread from one corner of the world to the other. These printing presses also played a major role in the Renaissance that swept through Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The first experiment with public gatherings to take political ideas to people happened when the 19th century was drawing to a close. William Ewart Gladstone, who got elected as Britain’s prime minister in 1892, had made public gatherings the medium to communicate his political ideas. Around the same time, leaders in America too were engaged in similar experiments.

During India’s freedom struggle, the trend of using newspapers and magazines for communication picked up. Post-Independence, political parties continued to use them to further their political discourse. In fact, newspapers and magazines became a tool for politicians to convey their ideas to the masses.

Around the same time, radio emerged as a medium that not only provided a platform for political debates but also helped to spread social awareness even in distant villages. Radio programmes on farming, women empowerment and other indigenous issues were received well by people.

The entry of television triggered a huge transformation. The presence of visuals was television’s biggest advantage. It is for this reason that TV has remained a medium for debates between political parties.

The advent of new mediums, however, has in no way rendered the old modes of communication redundant. Even in this era of social media, print, radio and television remain relevant in several ways. Programmes such as “Kaun Banega Mukhyamantri’ and political exit polls keep people glued to television. Radio continues to be widely popular among the urban youth. Newspapers have undergone changes to meet the requirements of changing times.

The digital mode of communication is now the most effective mode of communication. Tweets and Facebook posts are sources of information even for the so-called mainstream communication channels. However, the discussions happening on these platforms seldom result in ideas that last.

The situation emerging from the coronavirus pandemic signals changes in the ways of public communication and mass contact. With social distancing norms becoming mandatory amid the growing need for public communication, media has emerged as a powerful platform. Since India is a multi-party democracy, political parties are expected to keep channels of communication open even during difficult situations.

Home Minister Amit Shah’s Bihar jansamvad rally has introduced us to a new experience of digital communication. The digitally-held rally saw the participation of crores of people. The experiment was also important as it allowed such a huge programme to be organised with such little resources and so little time. Because a large number of people turn up at public rallies, a lot of resources are spent in managing the logistics. And it is only natural for the public to join public communication programmes with enthusiasm.

The success of these digital innovations in public communication has opened the doors for its increased use in the times to come. This has also been possible because of the growing penetration of digital technology in India’s rural areas. There is no doubt it will aid in strengthening public participation in India’s democracy.

As India enters a technology-driven world, changes in the country’s political discourse are natural and communication between parties and people will become simpler. It is also possible that the use of banners, posters and pamphlets will reduce in the near future and there is likely to be greater acceptance of campaigning through digital means. The country is, without a doubt, entering a new phase of political public communication.

This article first appeared in the print edition on June 24, 2020 under the title “The New Public Sphere”. The writer is general secretary, BJP, and Rajya Sabha MP

Source: Indian Express, 24/06/2020