Why do Indigenous Communities Continue to Practice Shifting Cultivation?

Shifting cultivation continues to be a predominant agricultural practice in many parts of India, despite state discouragement and multipronged efforts to wean indigenous communities away from it. Their land, due to remoteness, poor access to markets and undulating terrain, leaves them with few alternatives.

In northeast India, a 2018 report released by the Indian government revealed that an area of 8500 square kilometres is still being used to practice shifting cultivation (SC) – an agricultural system practiced for centuries.

The process consists of cultivating land temporarily and then abandoning it – usually for a period of one to two decades so the soil recuperates its fertility and reverts to its natural state. Because it involves the felling of trees for temporary cultivation, it is blamed for deforestation, soil erosion and loss of biodiversity, all contributors to global climate change.

However, contrary to this popular notion held by state officials and other agencies, the practice does provide a sustainable means of livelihood and food security to the communities that practice it. The problem lies in both its commercialisation and production pressures arising from a human-population increase, leading to a reduction in fallow length – the period between two cultivation phases.

In a book called Shifting cultivation policies: Balancing environmental and social sustainability (2017), an outline of the role of government and local institutions in regulating shifting cultivation over time has been described. Interventions aimed at stopping shifting cultivation go as far back as pre-British rule when the Ahoms from upper Burma ruled over Assam state. The rulers discouraged the practice and instead introduced alternatives such as wet-rice farming. Additionally, between 1827 and 1947, in the early colonial period of British rule, shifting cultivation was seen as primitive and efforts were made to ban the practice and wean farmers away from it.

In 2011 a New Land Use Policy aimed at transforming SC in northeast India was implemented by the state government of Mizoram. Multiple efforts to discourage farmers continue to this present day.

Considering all these government policies, schemes, and interventions aimed at discouraging the practice over the last century, a burning question emerges: why, after so many years of attempts at termination and control, do these indigenous communities persist in practicing SC? A recent study published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics set out to investigate just that.

Based on a survey of 500 people drawn from 52 villages, representing six districts in northeast India; Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, they highlighted key findings on the impacts of transformative adaptation, specifically the socio-economic and environmental impacts of shifting away from SC towards other uses. This adaptation is considered necessary to mitigate the adverse impacts of global climate change, seeking to reduce the risk it poses. However, such transformative changes, such as the increased dominance of settled agriculture, for example, could have unintended consequences, such as the erosion of their rich cultural traditions.

The found attachment takes three forms: traditional or institutional social bonding (attachment to the local community and traditions), economic bonding (attachment to the form of livelihood and the place) and nature bonding (attachment to the natural landscape). The fourth dimension analysed was the lack of any worthwhile alternative.

Social bonding was found to be the most important factor, understandably so given it is a collective exercise that requires cooperative behaviour. It also allows them to sustain their rich cultural traditions. It is strengthened through culturally imbibed practices such as festivals that are observed throughout the agricultural cycle.

Karthik Teegalapalli, a researcher at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, studies shifting cultivation and spent months studying the Adi tribe in Central Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India, where families cultivate together in large patches. He discovered a barter system when it came to managing the land.

“Since SC is an arduous form of cultivation, families band together during clearing and burning of the fields, and also during sowing and harvesting,” he said. “Each hillslope and cultivated patch has a long history that every farming household in the village is aware of.”

Lack of suitable alternatives was the second most important factor. As Dileep Kumar Pandey, the study’s lead author and an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Central Agricultural University (Manipur), Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh said: “At times, SC is the only potential option available to ensure the food and nutrition security of the indigenous people.” If alternatives were offered, they would consider giving up SC.

Because of the relatively inaccessible mountainous and hilly locations, access to markets is difficult and therefore indigenous communities derive a higher sense of economic security from SC, explaining the third most important factor – economic bonding. Also, settled agriculture requires an initial investment and regular purchase of chemical weed and pesticides.

Finally, nature bonding is the fourth most important dimension – forests are sacred to those who practice SC and the diversity of crops strongly links with food security. SC differs not only from state to state in the northeast but village to village and among families too. Teegalapalli says current systems have adapted to the locations and access available to them: “The more remote locations have continued to practice SC as they always have with minor modifications, whereas communities closer to urban centres have completely modified their practice and undertake it almost completely for monetary outputs,” he says.

The dense forests supply them with everything they need to survive, including timber to build homes, food, and medicines, increasing the probability they can earn livelihoods and survive. “SC is not only a land-use system but a way of life, hence, the people cling on to this,” said Pandey. “To safeguard sustainability, optimise ecosystem-based approaches and socio-ecological system frameworks, harmonisation of cultural ecosystem services and human wellbeing would be essential so as to ensure positive outcomes of management interventions on SC.”

In other words, planning for better adaptation needs to satisfy the less tangible needs and aspirations of these communities, allowing them to sustain their rich cultural traditions.

Suresh Babu, head of capacity strengthening at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), believes COVID-19 has allowed SC to be seen with a fresh perspective, particularly in terms of boosting food security and agriculture for the communities who practice it. He says, “the ecological aspects of SC are key for the preservation of indigenous crops and cultivars grown by native populations for centuries.” Its characteristics are “useful in the context of addressing climate change and other uncertainties.” These, however, require “strong institutional support” and “collective action institutions to be nurtured amongst them.”

Recently, the government has announced shifting cultivation may soon receive legal backing. A comprehensive policy is being written, spearheaded by government think tank NITI Aayog, aimed at supporting the practice and ensuring cultivators have access to credit and benefits such as subsidies. This plan includes defining the land used for SC as agricultural land, something Teegalapalli sees as “a welcome move” as long as it is carefully implemented.

Aimee Gabay is an intern at Mongabay and studies journalism in London

Source: The Wire, 24/06/2020

Daulat Beg Oldie: A strategic post named after the spot where a sultan died

Daulat Beg Oldie is a name hard to forget. A quick examination of the etymology reveals the rather exotic origins of the name, translated from Turkic as ‘the spot where the rich man died’.

In 2000, when India’s Border Roads Organisation (BRO) began the construction of 255-km-long Darbuk-Shyokh-Daulat Beg Oldie (DSDBO) all-weather road, the idea was to connect Leh, the capital of Ladakh to Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO), an Indian military base, located at the Northernmost tip of India in the Karakoram mountains. In the past month, the road has come at the forefront of the India-China stand-off. Daulat Beg Oldie is a name hard to forget. A quick examination of the etymology reveals the rather exotic origins of the name, translated from Turkic as ‘the spot where the rich man died’.

The 19th century British medical officer, Henry Walter Bellew, who worked in Afghanistan and wrote extensively on his explorations of the region, translated the name ‘Daulat Beg Oldie’ as the place where ‘the Lord of the state died’.

Both the etymologies, however, are indicative of the same person: Sultan Said Khan, the 16th century ruler of Yarkent Khanate. The Yarkent Khanate was a state in Central Asia existing between 1514 and 1705 CE, with its seat of government being situated at Yarkand, in Xinjiang, China. At its peak, the Yarkent Khanate ruled over large parts of Central Asia from Xinjiang. Khan who was the descendant of MongIn 1531, Khan commissioned his general Mirza Haider to invade Ladakh as a prelude to his larger plan of conquering Lhasa in Tibet. While Haider was busy confronting the ruler of Ladakh, Khan himself decided to march down with a large force. However, as the ruler’s health took a turn for the worse, the expedition of Lhasa was entrusted to Haider, while he hurried back home. However, Khan died on his way back to Yarkand, at the spot that went on to be named after him as ‘Daulat Beg Oldie’.ol emperor Genghis Khan, was the first ruler of the state.

Describing Khan’s expedition in Ladakh, historians Iqtidar A. Khan and Irfan Habib wrote in the book ‘History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Development in Contrast: from the Sixteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Century’: “It was, apparently, designed to clear the route linking Kashmir with Yarkand and create a social base for Chaghatayid rule in the valley, where the majority of the population were Sunni Muslims.” They added: “Said Khan’s death during the march back from Ladakh to Yarkand in 1533 and the subsequent disturbances in Kashgar, however, did not allow sufficient time for this scheme to come to fruition.”

The memory of Khan’s ambitions, however, has been retained in the spot that has over the years acquired strategic importance for India. Less than 10 kilometers west of the LAC at Aksai Chin, a military outpost was created at DBO after the Chinese occupation at Aksai Chin during the Sino-Indian war of 1962. In July 1962, a few months before the Sino-Indian conflict, an airfield was commissioned at DBO. Located at an elevation of 16,614 feet above seal level, it is the highest airfield in the world.

Source: Indian Express, 26/06/20

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