Volume 51 Issue 3, September 2021
Friday, November 26, 2021
Population: A promise rather than a problem
India’s population boom is over. Headcount stability is assured. For the first time on record, the country’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1, as assessed. According to data crunched from findings of the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) and released on Wednesday, the average number of children per woman has fallen from 2.2 found by the survey of 2015-16 to 2.0 in 2019-20, slipping into a zone that would leave us with fewer people overall if sustained. For a country that is both proud of and alarmed by its own multitudes, this is momentous news, regardless of bright or dismal views on the value of our being a billion plus. In academia, the gloom of Malthus’s crystal ball has long been lifted by the ingenuity of human enterprise in staying ahead of a doomsday scenario on this front. Yet, anxiety over how populous we are has prevailed for decades and even prodded policy along. Our TFR estimate of 2.0 is drawn from a study with a sample large enough to reflect reality, and even if we allow for some margin of error, a major bulge of demography that endured for a century can now be consigned to history. And yesterday’s battles should not detain us.
The fieldwork for India’s official health report was done almost entirely before the covid pandemic. It shows both gains and losses, with a slide-back on anaemia a cause for worry. But it is the fertility finding that stands out. Not just for a long trend about to snap, but also the controversy that efforts at population control often whip up. Our two-child norm of ‘family planning’ was always advisory in nature, unlike China’s strict one-child policy that it had to reverse after its TFR slumped just as its demography began to drive its economy. But the Emergency in India saw a wave of forced sterilizations, a scandal whose effects have lingered in the suspicion that state-led vaccination drives arouse—think polio or covid—among some citizens. That was back in the misguided 1970s. Attempts at setting limits for offspring, however, have outlived that gloomy era of population pessimism: Uttar Pradesh recently sought to use selective state employment and welfare provisions as an instrument to cap the size of families. While UP has had a relatively high TFR, it too has seen it slide from 2.7% in 2015-16 to 2.4% in 2019-20, as per NFHS-5 data. At this pace, its state-level rate will go below 2.1 in a few years. The uproar that followed UP’s policy announcement was justified not by this trend, though, but by a matter of principle.
Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, adopted on 26 November 1949, grants us all the fundamental right to personal liberty. While exceptions exist under the law, how many children an individual opts for is a self-evident personal choice and any conception of liberty must cover reproductive autonomy. Regardless of how deliberate a couple’s decisions on having kids are, few other life choices are so intimate that it is hard to see why the state should meddle with family size at all. Any post-Malthusian reading of economics holds population as an asset and not liability, as creators of value and not mouths to feed, and so a common cause can’t be cited for intervention. Families have been shrinking on their own anyway, with diverse socio-economic factors at play, and the emergence of our economy could see us clubbed in the same bracket as countries that have fallen short of people. Ironies rarely get richer.
Source: Mintepaper, 25/11/21
ISB launches its flagship pre-incubation programme for aspiring entrepreneurs
The programme’s first cohort is opening 25 seats for the early idea stage and aspiring entrepreneurs. Application intake will be open till December 31, 2021, and the cohort is scheduled to commence in February 2022.
The Indian School of Business (ISB) DLabs has launched its pre-incubation programme – ‘ISPROUTE’. ISB DLabs has started its programme free of cost and will engage top-class mentors and industry experts to guide and support participants in the early stages of starting up.
The programme’s first cohort is opening 25 seats for the early idea stage and aspiring entrepreneurs. Interested candidates can check the details at isbdlabs.org/en/startups/i-sproute.html.
ISB DLabs is inviting participants to join the pre-incubation program. Application intake will be open till December 31, 2021, and the cohort is scheduled to commence in February 2022. Application is open for – students, working professionals, and aspiring entrepreneurs; individuals with early-stage ideas (with or without a prototype); sector agnostic – tech & non-tech, high impact ideas.
Programme offerings would include master class sessions with industry experts and ISB faculty; grants and fundraising support; knowledge and mentoring support; networking opportunities through events and other relevant forums; value-added services to help build and scale products and services.
Saumya Kumar, Director, I-Venture @ ISB and CEO, DLabs said, “The programme is designed to offer interactive capacity building modules with expert mentorship and handholding support while aspiring entrepreneurs run structured experiments to validate their ideas and refine business strategies. It is a platform of action-oriented opportunity to transform ideas to POC and to come up with MVP”.
Source: Indian Express, 26/11/21
Why the link between mental health and death penalty deserves greater attention
Vikram Patel writes: Courts need to ensure a more searching inquiry into the lives of death row prisoners, particularly the mitigating factors which help humanise the perpetrator, creating the possibility of compassion in passing judgement.
There are many reasons why the death penalty should have no place in any society, not least because it violates the fundamental right to life. The argument that it may deter violent crime is countered by the observations that murder rates declined in ten out of eleven countries which had abolished capital punishment in recent years. The most egregious aspect of the death penalty is the widespread evidence of miscarriage of justice which occurs even in the most robust judicial systems, leading to the real threat of an irreversible punishment being inflicted on an innocent person.
India has a chequered history with the death penalty. For many years, until the execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004 for the rape and murder of a minor girl, the country was a de facto abolitionist state. Since then, nearly 500 prisoners have been sentenced to death row, nine individuals have been executed since 2014, and there has been a legislative expansion of the death penalty, in particular for crimes of sexual violence.
Against this background, the release of the Deathworthy report last month on the relationship between being sentenced to death and mental health, calls upon our society to revisit its ambivalent stance on the death penalty. The report is the result of NLU Delhi’s Project 39A, under the guidance of mental health professionals from NIMHANS, Bangalore. The study involved the interview of 88 death row prisoners and their families. Its findings can be summarised in two broad ways: First, what are the origins of the violent behaviours which led to the criminal acts and second, how might living on death row affect the mental health of the prisoner.
Adverse childhood experiences are the most important determinants of poor educational attainment, violent behaviours and mental health problems. This association has been demonstrated in diverse contexts and has a clearly defined biological mechanism. The lack of nurturing environments and the exposure to toxic stress, that is, when a child experiences intense, frequent or prolonged adversity such as emotional abuse or neglect, directly impacts the development of a healthy brain architecture which is most sensitive to environmental influences in the early years of life. These influences lead to a range of psychological difficulties in young adulthood, such as impulsivity and low frustration tolerance, which are precursors to violent behaviour and antisocial acts.
The Deathworthy report provides empirical evidence that a high proportion of death row prisoners have been exposed to adverse childhood experiences. More than half the prisoners had experienced verbal and physical abuse as children, and the vast majority had experienced parental neglect and grown up in a “disturbed family environment”. Seventy-three prisoners had experienced at least three adverse childhood experiences and 56 prisoners had experienced at least three traumatic experiences, such as a serious accident or a life-threatening injury. In short, this was an extremely vulnerable group of persons who had been exposed to many risk factors which could explain the increased likelihood of poor mental health and violent behaviour.
The second observation is, perhaps, less surprising: Two-thirds of the prisoners were diagnosed with a current episode of mental illness, in particular depression. About half were assessed to be at “risk” of suicide. Undoubtedly, this suffering is the direct consequence of living with the fear of an imminent, violent death. More shockingly, a significant number of prisoners had evidence of cognitive impairment, often due to head injuries. Nine of these individuals were found to have an intellectual disability. This implies that these individuals had deficits in mental functioning which are well-recognised for influencing the capabilities to make responsible decisions and observe social norms. Yet, in none of their cases was their disability brought to the attention of the courts.
From a narrow legal lens, the report indicates the need for courts to ensure a more searching inquiry into the lives of death row prisoners, particularly the mitigating factors which help humanise the perpetrator, generating empathy and understanding for what is undeniably a horrific act of violence, and creating the possibility of compassion in passing judgement. Even if trauma, cognitive impairment and adverse childhood experiences have not found their rightful place in our legal lexicon, they do hold relevance in determining whether a person is so blameworthy as to be sentenced to death. The report also raises the question of whether the harrowing mental suffering consequent to the death penalty is in itself a violation of the rights of even the most despised members of our society. In the case of intellectual disability, the choice of action is even more stark: The imposition of the death sentence on persons with intellectual disability is prohibited under international law, and jurisprudence in India must align at least with this basic principle.
Ultimately, the Deathworthy report provides a sobering, if not entirely unsurprising picture of the devastating disadvantages experienced by death row prisoners which may have played a critical role in mediating their violent acts and the mental health-related pain and suffering consequent to living on death row. Together, these two observations provide compelling evidence to drive the final nail into the coffin of this form of punishment, by far the cruellest act a state can inflict on a citizen. Indeed, the death penalty is counter to the judgement of the Supreme Court which, in 2014, declared mental illness grounds for commuting a sentence of death. If there is an indictment to be made, then it has to be of our society which causes so many children to be exposed to toxic levels of deprivation and the failures of child and adolescent mental health services to detect and intervene early in the trajectory of mental health problems.
Written by Vikram Patel
The writer is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Re-imagining India’s Health System
Source: Indian Express, 26/11/21
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Quote of the Day November 25, 2021
“The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people.”
Napoleon
“दुनिया बहुत कष्ट सहती है। बुरे लोगों की हिंसा के कारण नहीं, बल्कि अच्छे लोग के मौन के कारण।”
नेपोलियन
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