Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Vimal Chudasama, the Congress MLA from Somnath constituency, was evicted from Gujarat Assembly by Speaker Rajendra Trivedi for coming to the House wearing a T-shirt. Chudasama, who was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a black t-shirt, with the words, ‘free spirit’ on it, responded that he had won votes campaigning in this attire. His party too opposed the Speaker’s decision arguing that there were no rules regarding how a legislator should dress in the Assembly. Nonetheless, the Speaker refused to budge, stating, “Because you are an MLA, you cannot come to the House in any manner, in any clothes. This is not a playground. You are not on a vacation. There is a protocol of uniform.”

It is true that there are no rules with regard to the attire of a political leader in Parliament or any Assembly. However, it is also a fact that clothing has always been a matter of political statement. Who can forget the furore when Mahatma Gandhi walked into Buckingham Palace to meet King George V in a dhoti and shawl? It was a strategic act by Gandhi to identify with the poorest of Indians. But directives regarding who wears what has come up on several occasions in the Indian past, including those imposed by Gandhi himself. What politicians must wear was also briefly discussed in the Constituent Assembly.

In medieval India’s Mughal domains, the ruling elite had insisted on the adoption of Mughal styles of clothing by all officials in the government. Social anthropologist Emma Tarlo in her book, ‘Clothing matters: Dress and identity in India’ notes: “This had forced many elite Indians into Mughal dress in the public sphere. As a strategy of resistance, most Hindus used to remove their foreign apparel before entering their own homes, thereby distinguishing their imposed identity from their chosen identity.”

This was not the case with the British though, who preferred to look and dress differently from the local populace. “In their dress and demeanor they constantly symbolised their separateness from their Indian superiors, equals and inferiors,” writes anthropologist Bernard Cohn in his article, ‘Cloths, clothes and colonialism: India in the nineteenth century’. In 1830, a legislation was introduced banning all members of the East India Company from wearing Indian clothes in public functions. English writer Aldous Huxley had observed the British dependence on clothing rituals in the following words: “It is as though the integrity of the British Empire depended in some directly magical way upon the donning of black jackets and hard boiled shirts” — as cited in Tarlo’s book.

Often these rules of sartorial choices were deemed rather uncomfortable by most British who found the climate in India unsuitable for garments like kid or suede gloves.

The British obsession with their clothes was driven more by the fact that a certain section of the Indian population, particularly the educated elite, had taken a liking towards European dress and manners. This was further linked to the problem that the British did not want Indians to adopt European fashion but wanted them to buy and wear British manufactured textiles. For the British, the dress of the Indians posed an ethical dilemma. “On the one hand they felt their duty to civilise barbaric natives and rescue them from their own primitiveness,” writes Tarlo. “But on the other hand the British did not want the natives to become too civilised.”

Tarlo narrates an incident from the life of the Bengali poet, writer and dramatist, Michael Madhusudan Dutta that best illustrates the British policy towards Indian dressing. Dutta was sent to Bishop’s College in Calcutta where he was given a Western education and developed European tastes as desired by the British. Yet he was discouraged from wearing the same uniform as his college mates did. Dutta devised a plan to trick the British. He appeared in an elaborate Indian outfit of white silk with a colourful turban and shawl. Embarrassed by the choice of clothing, the college authorities allowed Dutta to wear the regular uniform.

With the birth of the 20th century and the waves of nationalism brought by it, a new form of order was brought upon how Indians ought to dress. The Indian nationalist critique of the British government’s policies leading to the impoverishment of India formed the basis of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal starting in 1903. As the movement progressed, there was an increasing amount of discussion and propaganda to encourage Indian weavers and to revive the hand spinning of cotton thread. These ideas were essentially developed and formalised by Gandhi.

“Gandhi continually articulated and elaborated on the theme that Indian people would only be free from European domination, both politically and economically, when the masses took to spinning, weaving and wearing homespun cloth, khadi,” writes Cohn. He notes that during the non-cooperation movement of the 1920s, the wearing of khadi, and particularly the cap which went on to be referred to as the ‘Gandhi cap’ became an act of political resistance.

The movement did have the desired impact on the British. In March 1921, Gandhi reported that several European employers had banned the donning of white khadi caps in office. A month later, in Allahabad, the collector forbade government employees from wearing them. Similar action was also taken in Simla. Khadi, Gandhi argued, had the potential to bring the Raj to its knees.

It was not easy though to convince people to adopt khadi. Most, and especially the elite, had come to equate foreign cloth to bring civilised. Gandhi therefore insisted on the moral obligation to take to Khadi. In an act of building psychological pressure, he emphasised on the transformative quality of the cloth. “The mere act of wearing khadi was so virtuous in itself that it could purify the wearer, whereas foreign cloth was so intrinsically vile that contact with it was physically and mentally defiling,” explains Tarlo. His speeches on the virtues of khadi were so stirring that there were numerous episodes of people stripping themselves off their foreign garments and burning them.

So sure was Gandhi of Khadi’s ability to transform India that when after Independence people were tempted to give up on the cloth, he wrote that Khadi represented a choice of life based on non-violence and that people mistook it to be a mere strategy to attain Independence.

What to wear in an Independent India

The moral obligation and national consciousness attached to Khadi did not die down after Independence. After fighting for freedom under the Khadi banner, politicians found it difficult to turn away from it. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru chalked out for himself a non-western look stitched out of khadi: tight pyjamas teamed up with long sherwani and what is now famous as the ‘nehru jacket’. “Concerned by the post-independence sartorial confusion around him, Nehru wrote an official note on dress, advising those in higher grades of government office to steer clear of European clothes, which ‘marked them out as a privileged, denationalised and out-of-date class, and to adopt such clothes as would take them closer to the people’,” writes Tarlo.

Nehru’s commitment to a non-European look was passed on to his daughter Indira Gandhi who also would be seen in public mostly in handloom cotton sarees. Rajiv Gandhi too favoured khadi after he entered office in 1984.

The debate over what to wear did come up in the constituent assembly debates as well. On April 29, 1947, Rohini Kumar suggested a ban on discrimination against dress worn by any nationality. “Even today when we are on the threshold of independence there are hotels which do not welcome people dressed in Indian style,” he said. “I am not afraid of the future, because I believe that when India is independent such restrictions would disappear. But what I am afraid of is a reprisal or a revenge taken against such European minded people and people in European dress may not be allowed to come into hotels. For that reason particularly I want that this amendment should be accepted by this House.”

On November 17, 1949 B Das suggested that a national dress must be specified: “I hate to see officials still moving about in ties and collars. Our association with the Commonwealth does not entitle anybody to put on foreign dress. They should be debarred from doing it. Parliament should debar by legislation. Nobody in the employment of the State should wear foreign dress.”

It was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel whose response came to be agreed upon by most parliamentarians of an Independent India. “Such things as dress cannot be put in the fundamental rights,” he said responding to Chaudhury. “If the world at large should read such provisions in our fundamental rights, then they would naturally conclude that we do not even know how to treat our nationals and how to treat our fellow beings.”

Written by Adrija Roychowdhury

Source: Indian Express, 19/03/21

Jobless growth: the pandemic has revealed India’s crisis of unemployment

COVID-19 infections are once again on the rise with daily infections crossing 60,000 per day last week. This is considerably higher compared to the reported infections during the same period last year when the numbers were less than 500 per day. What is obvious is that the pandemic is far from over despite the availability of vaccines. However, unlike last year, the response this time has been muted with no nationwide lockdown. One of the reasons for the differing responses is the lesson from the unintended consequences on the economy of the strict lockdown last year. While aggregate estimates on the growth rate of GDP showed a sharp contraction in economic activity (the economy shrunk by 24 per cent in the April-June quarter of 2020) the impact on lives and livelihoods is still unfolding even though the sharp contractionary phase seems behind us.

The extent of the loss of lives and livelihoods is becoming clear only now, with detailed data from the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) — the latest round of which is for the April-June quarter of 2020. This is the first official report on the estimates for the quarter, which witnessed the worst impact with the lockdown in force until the middle of May. Visuals of thousands of migrants walking back to their villages are still fresh in the mind. While many have returned to urban areas in the absence of jobs in rural areas, many did not. The PLFS, which captures the employment-unemployment situation in urban areas, provides some clues to what happened.

The estimates from PLFS are broadly in line with estimates available from other privately conducted surveys, notably the unemployment surveys of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). According to the PLFS April-June 2020 round, the urban unemployment rate for the population above the age of 15 was 20.8 per cent, which is close to the monthly average for the same quarter from CMIE at 19.9 per cent. The CMIE data, however, does suggest a sharp decline in June compared to April and May. Similar to the CMIE data, the PLFS data also shows a sharp rise in the unemployment rate which more than doubled compared to the unemployment rate in the preceding quarter of January-March 2020 at 9.1 per cent and 8.8 per cent in the same quarter (April-June) of 2019. While one in five persons above the age of 15 was unemployed during April-June 2020, the unemployment rate among the 15-29-year-olds was 34.7 per cent — every third person in the 15-29 age group was unemployed during the same period.

These are staggering numbers, but not surprising. While the lockdown certainly contributed to the worsening of the employment situation, particularly in urban areas, the fact that the economy was already going through severe distress as far as jobs are concerned is no longer surprising. Between 2016-17 and 2019-20, growth decelerated to 4 per cent, less than half the 8.3 per cent rate in 2016-17. The fact that the economy has not been creating jobs predates the economic shocks of demonetisation and the hasty roll-out of GST. The PLFS data from earlier rounds have already shown the extent of the rise in unemployment compared to the employment-unemployment surveys of 2011-12. The unemployment rates in urban areas for all categories increased by almost three times between 2011-12 and 2017-18. On an internationally comparable basis, the unemployment rate among the 15-24-year-olds in 2017-18 was 28.5 per cent, which makes the youth unemployment rate in India amongst the highest in the world, excluding small countries and conflict-ridden countries. Since then, it has only worsened or remained at that level.

The worsening situation is partly a result of the long-term neglect of the employment issue in policy circles. It is also a result of policy decisions such as demonetisation and GST implementation, which affected the informal/unorganised sector adversely. It is these enterprises in the unorganised sector that are the drivers of employment creation. Since 2016-17, most of these sectors have suffered as a result of policy choices. The decline in the number of workers by 15 million between 2011-12 and 2017-18 is only a partial reflection of the jobs crisis. The decline in jobs was accompanied by a decline in the quality of employment, with an increase in precarious jobs and a decline in access to social security for a majority of workers. The deceleration in the growth rate of economic activities also meant that real wages of casual workers in rural areas by January 2021 have declined compared to two years ago. Regular salaried workers were already suffering from a decline in real wages at 1.7 per cent per annum between 2011-12 and 2017-18. More recent data after the pandemic is not available but sectoral surveys do suggest that the decline in real earnings of regular salaried workers has continued. The lockdown only aggravated an already fragile employment situation.

Since the PLFS is also a longitudinal panel data, it is possible to examine what happened to different categories of households during the April-June 2020 quarter compared to the pre-lockdown January-March 2020 quarter. While the lockdown affected all workers, the most vulnerable were casual wage workers. Among casual wage workers employed during the January-March quarter, 50 per cent joined the ranks of unemployed and another 10 per cent exited the labour force. Only one out of three casual workers in urban areas could hold on to their job with another 5 per cent moving into the self-employed category. The regular salaried workers fared better but even among them 10 per cent lost jobs and another 5 per cent moved out of the labour force. Among those who were fortunate to retain their jobs, most suffered declines in earnings.

More recent data from the PLFS is awaited, but estimates from the CMIE data suggest that the unemployment rate has fallen 7 per cent for the 15 and above age population in recent months. While this may suggest that the economy is returning to the pre-pandemic levels, the rate is still very high. This level of unemployment is not just a symptom of the “jobless” model of economic growth that has been followed in the last two decades, but is also a recipe for political and social instability. The pandemic and the subsequent crisis in the employment-unemployment situation has only highlighted the fragile situation of the labour market. The real crisis of unemployment and jobless growth is a bigger pandemic that is unlikely to be resolved with the current model of economic growth which prioritises capital over labour.

Written by HIMANSHU

his article first appeared in the print edition on March 29, 2021 under the title ‘A bigger pandemic’. The writer teaches economics at JNU

Friday, March 12, 2021

Quote of the Day March 12, 2021

“No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.”
Oscar Wilde

“कोई भी वस्तु इतनी सुंदर नहीं होती कि कुछ परिस्थितियों में वह असुंदर न दिखे।”
ऑस्कर वाइल्ड

Fugaku: World’s most Powerful Supercomputer

The Japanese scientific research institute called RIKEN and Fujitsu started developing the “Fugaku” six years ago. It is the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Now this supercomputer is fully ready and developed in Japan and is now available for the research use.

Highlights

This supercomputer has been developed with the aim of making the device core of the computing infrastructure of Japan. Then the supercomputer was tested for the particular projects in order to combat COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. Now the Fugaku is fully open and available for shared use. The Research Organization for the Information Science and Technology (RIST) of Japan has selected some 74 projects which will use this supercomputer in the financial year 2021. RIST has also proposed for the development of the new projects in several categories and has invited the researchers who are interested to apply for the same.

About Fugaku

It is a key national technology that has been developed with the goal to achieve research results which ultimately will help in building a long-lived and healthy society, better energy use and disaster mitigation. It also aims to establish the government’s vision of making “ultra-smart Society 5.0”. The supercomputer has topped the top500 list, which is a “Supercomputer benchmark index”, for the second year in line. The computer comprises of 100 times the application performance of K supercomputer. It has been developed to implement the high-resolution, large-scale and long-duration simulation. Fugaku has been named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji. It started development in the year 2014 as the successor to the K computer. It is built with the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor.

Current Affairs – March 12, 2021

India

PM launches kindle version of Swami Chidbhavanandaji’s Bhagavad Gita

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the kindle version of Swami Chidbhavanandaji’s Bhagavad Gita on March 11, 2021. The Prime Minister lauded the efforts to bring out e-book version as this would connect more youngsters with the noble thoughts of the Gita.

Brahma Kumaris’ Chief Dadi Hriday Mohini dies at 93 in Mumbai

Spiritual organisation Brahma Kumaris’ chief administrator Dadi Hriday Mohini died on March 11, 2021 in Mumbai. She was 93. After the death of its former chief Dadi Janki a year ago, Dadi Mohini was appointed as the chief administrator of the organisation.

ISRO, JAXA join hands for air quality monitoring using satellite data

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have decided to join hands to take up activities on rice crop area and air quality monitoring using satellite data.

Economy & Corporate

PLI scheme for pharmaceuticals approved by Chemicals & Fertilizers Ministry

Chemicals and Fertilizers Ministry has accorded approval for Promotion of Domestic Manufacturing of critical Key Starting Materials, Drug Intermediates and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients under Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme. The Scheme will benefit domestic manufacturers, help in creating employment and is expected to contribute to the availability of a wider range of affordable medicines for consumers.

3000 HP Cape Gauge locomotive flagged off for export to Mozambique

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on March 10, 2021 flagged off a 3000 HP Cape Gauge locomotive indigenously developed by the Banaras Locomotive Works to be exported to Mozambique. Indian Railways is exporting the first batch of two locomotives as part of a total order of six 3000 HP Cape Gauge locomotives and 90 stainless steel passenger coaches to Mozambique.

CAIT launches vendor onboarding mobile app for ‘Bharat e Market’

Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) on March 11, 2021 launched a vendor onboarding mobile app for its upcoming e-commerce portal ‘Bharat e Market’. The app will enable businesses and service providers to register on the portal and create their own “e-dukaan”. It is ‘purely Indian’ Bharat e Market portal and will comply with all the rules & regulations of the country.

ICAR allowed trials to evaluate drone spraying solution on sugarcane crop

Ministry of Civil Aviation and Directorate General of Civil Aviation have granted a conditional exemption to ICAR – Indian Institute of Sugarcane Research (IISR), Lucknow for conducting the trials to evaluate drone spraying solution for controlling pest and diseases of sugarcane crop using drones. The exemption is valid until November 30, 2021.

World

PM, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman speak over phone

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke over phone on March 11, 2021 during which the PM expressed his desire to further expand bilateral trade and investment, and highlighted the opportunities that the Indian economy offers to Saudi investors.

Followers