Definitions are important for poverty measurement

 We must take note of a discrepancy between what India’s government advocates and what the World Bank reports, as it makes a big difference to our poverty count

The most important agreement with some expert analyses of our paper (Bhalla-Bhasin-Virmani, Pandemic, Poverty and Inequality: Evidence from India, IMF Working Paper, April 2022) is on the need to raise the poverty line, possibly a 68 % rise in real terms (from PPP $1.9 per person per day to $3.2 pppd). The present line, in current rupee terms, is approximately ₹52 and we have recommended that it be raised to around ₹88. For a poor family of five individuals, this would mean a household income of ₹1.6 lakh a year. With this poverty line, approximately a fifth of the population will be poor, the ‘right’ definition of relative poverty for a lower middle income economy. Note that poverty reduction is an intrinsic product of economic growth. In 2004, the poverty line was raised by the Indian government (Tendulkar committee) by 18% and this was accepted as a worthy step by all.

Among the substantive points raised in our paper was a simple point about measurement. Somewhat disappointingly, not a single expert, friendly or otherwise, has noted this discrepancy between what India’s government supports and advocates, and what the World Bank reports in its published Povcal reports on the world and individual country reports (hereafter World Bank).

It is a simple matter of definition, on which there should be no disagreement. The facts are as follows.

There are three different definitions of National Sample Survey (NSS) based per capita consumption. The differences have to do with the recall period of consumption for three broad categories, and there is convergence in the academic and policy community (and the World Bank) on the appropriateness of each recall period. The ‘right’ recall period is also supported by common-sense justification of memory and accuracy. For perishables (vegetables and fruits), accuracy is enhanced with a recall period of 7 days. For periodic consumption (e.g. toothpaste, club fees, visits to the doctor, etc), a 30-day recall is considered appropriate; and for durables (e.g. clothing, cars, carpets, furniture, etc), a 365 recall period is deemed proper.

Prior to the 1983 NSS report on consumption, all items were tabulated under a 30-day “Uniform Recall Period" (URP). Starting in 1983, the NSS added the Mixed Reference Period (MRP) with the addition of a 365-day recall period for “durables". And after some experimentation and validation in the NSS surveys of 1999-00, 2009-10 and 2011-12, the NSS organization officially converged to the MMRP (Modified Mixed Recall Period) method. The difference between MMRP and MRP is the addition of a 7-day recall documentation of answers to questions pertaining to the consumption of fruits and vegetables.

It also bears emphasis to note that the Tendulkar committee rejected the URP in favour of MRP in the 2009-10 survey; and post 2011-12 (e.g. 2017-18 and onwards), the MRP was officially junked in favour of MMRP. Somewhat bafflingly, the World Bank, the unofficial ‘gold standard’ of poverty measurement, continues to present Indian poverty estimates for 2011-12 and beyond on the basis of the ‘junked’ and old (pre-1983) method of measuring consumption, and therefore poverty. It is very likely that for no other country does the World Bank not use the official method of measurement, and for no other country does it use a 45 year old outdated method (the last exclusive URP survey was in 1977-78).

It wouldn’t matter if it did not matter. But it does. MRP estimates of extreme poverty are about 3 percentage points lower than URP, and MMRP estimates are about 10 percentage points lower. In 2011-12, for India, it meant that the World Bank was wrongly classifying a 100 million Indian individuals as extremely poor. The World Bank has the slogan that it dreams of a world free of poverty. The practice of using the URP method for India, a country with more than a fifth of the developing world’s population, prolongs the nightmare of a world not free of absolute poverty.

Given the huge importance of the recall period in generating representative estimates of poverty, it is puzzling to note the advocacy and recommendation by World Bank authors Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide (Poverty in India has Declined over the Last Decade but not as Much as Previously Thought, World Bank Working Paper, April 2022) to use the CMIE Consumer Pyramid Household Survey which has a 4-month (120-day recall) period for all consumption items!

Not all poverty estimates are created equal. It is unfortunate that in India, a one- question consumption estimate, as in 2017-18 onwards labour force surveys conducted by the NSS (the PLFS surveys) is seen to have equal validity as a 33 question-based estimate (pre-2017-18 NSS labour force surveys). Or a 120-month recall period consumption (as in CMIE) for considerably less consumption items has equal validity as 30-day recall questions for more detailed consumption estimation; or a 30-day recall period is preferred by the World Bank for India, when other official and equally detailed estimates are available (as in the 2009-10 and 2011-12 MMRP surveys). For their estimates of non-survey year poverty (note that most countries have at least a 3-4 year gap between national surveys), the World Bank has to rely on a base-year estimate of consumption and national account growth rates for intervening years. This is exactly what we do, with the critical difference that we use the 2011-12 base year MMRP estimate, not the 10% lower 2011-12 URP estimate. Why should the base-year reflect an unofficial lower estimate of consumption is a question not answered by our critics, or by the World Bank.

Surjit S. Bhalla is executive director, IMF, representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan

Source. Mintepaper, 3/05/22

Vaishnavi Manivannan, An Indian-Origin Student Residing In Oman Established WiResearch, An Organization That Strives To Eliminate The Gender Biases For Women In Scientific Research

 New Delhi: Although there has been progress made towards gender equality, gender barriers within the field of academia, especially in scientific research.

Vaishnavi Manivannan, an Indian-origin student residing in Muscat, Oman is the founder of WiResearch (Women In Research), an organization that strives to eliminate the gender biases for women in scientific research and makes research more plausible to conduct and accessible for girls from under-resourced regions of the world.

Through several of her research internships and projects, a pattern that Vaishnavi had observed is a small percentage of female researchers across all establishments. She traced this problem back to high school.

Vaishnavi says, “with not enough female role models and inspiration, young female students tend to step back from indulging in scientific research projects. In order to tackle this problem, I wanted to create a global youth platform that can offer all the resources one would need to conduct research.”

Till date, this organization has garnered over 500 individuals from over 7 countries to help more than 1000 girls get started with research! With the help of local sponsors, grants, donations and even support from the United Nations, WiResearch has raised ₹ 10.8 lakh (10k USD+).

Manivannan, who is in Grade 11 at ABA Oman International School, also interviews under-represented female researchers from universities. Till date, she has interviewed professors from IIT, IISc and Sultan Qaboos University.

For more on Vaishnavi’s organization, go to wi-research.org!

Source: indiaeducationdiary.in, 3/05/22

Quasi-federalism

 

Conscious effort on the part of the framers of the Constitution to ensure flexibility and accommodate diversity renders India’s federalism an original form

The contemporary discourse on federalism in India is moving on a discursive note across multiple dimensions, be it economic, political and cultural, to the extent that one is compelled to regard India to be at an inflection point vis-a-vis Centre-State relations owing to increasing asymmetry. Professor Shawn Rosenberg has argued that without an active and committed citizenry a democracy can devour itself and, in this context, it is worth engaging with India’s federal ethos and the associated asymmetries.

Federal, quasi federal or hybrid?

India consciously adopted a version of federalism that made the Union government and State governments interdependent on each other (latter more vis-a-vis the former) thereby violating the primal characteristic of a federal constitution i.e., autonomous spheres of authority for Union and State governments. Similar other constitutional features include the size and composition of the Rajya Sabha akin to that of the Lok Sabha thereby favouring larger States; Article 3 of the Indian Constitution which allows the Union to alter the boundaries of a State without the latter’s consent, emergency powers, and concurrent list subjects of the Seventh Schedule wherein the Union possesses more authority than the State barring a few exceptions. India’s centralised federal structure was not marked by the process of ‘coming together’ but was an outcome of ‘holding together’ and ‘putting together’.

Ambedkar called India’s federation a Union as it was indestructible which is why the Constitution does not contain words related to federalism. He also said that India’s Constitution holds requisite flexibility to be federal and unitary on a need basis. While the Supreme Court of India held that federalism was a part of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution in the S.R. Bommai vs Union of India case (1994), the Court also held that the Indian variant of federalism upholds a strong centre in the Kuldip Nayar vs Union of India case (2006).

Professor Louise Tillin argues that a conscious effort on the part of the framers of the Constitution to ensure flexibility and accommodate diversity renders India’s federalism an original form which is neither conventional nor reductive.

The reasons for a centralised federal structure

It is worth noting that the Indian National Congress (INC) vehemently opposed the discretionary powers of the provincial governors in the run-up to the 1937 elections and advocated in favour of autonomy. However, following the governance experience, in 1939, Nehru argued otherwise. Therefore, contextualising the choice of the framers of the Constitution provides a much needed insight on the past, thereby helping one understand the present and imagine the future of India’s federal ethos. Tillin presents at least four reasons that informed India’s choice of a centralised federal structure.

First was the partition of India and the concomitant concerns. Anticipating the Muslim League’s participation in the Constituent Assembly debates following the Cabinet Mission plan in 1946, the Objectives Resolution introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru in the Assembly were inclined towards a decentralised federal structure wherein States would wield residuary powers. Further, in his presidential address at the 44th session of the INC, J.B. Kripalani too spoke in favour of maximum autonomy to the States and regarded centralisation to be at odds with liberty. However, after the Partition a revised stand was unanimously taken by the Union Powers Committee of the Constituent Assembly, in favour of a strong Union with residuary powers and weaker States, to safeguard the integrity of the nation.

The second reason pivoted around the reconstitution of social relations in a highly hierarchical and discriminatory society towards forging a national civic identity as argued by Professor Katharine Adeney instead of immediate caste and linguistic identities. Dr. Madhav Khosla shows that Nehru and Ambedkar believed that a centralised federal structure would unsettle prevalent trends of social dominance, help fight poverty better and therefore yield liberating outcomes. The third reason concerns the objective of building a welfare state. Drawing from existing literature, Tillin shows that in a decentralised federal setup, redistributive policies could be structurally thwarted by organised (small and dominant) groups. Instead, a centralised federal set-up can prevent such issues and further a universal rights-based system.

The final reason involved the alleviation of inter-regional economic inequality. The cotton mill industry in Bombay, and the jute mill industry in the Bengal region were subject to a ‘race to the bottom’ or rampant cost cutting practices. The Bengal region saw workers’ rights and safety nets being thwarted by Anglo-Scottish mill owners. The Bombay region had an empowered working class — thanks to the trade unionists — thereby affecting the business interests of mill owners owing to race to the bottom practices in the adjacent cotton belt region mills.

Provincial interventions seemed to exacerbate inequalities. India’s membership in the International Labour Organization, the Nehru Report (1928), and the Bombay Plan (1944) pushed for a centralised system to foster socio-economic rights and safeguards for the working and entrepreneurial classes.

The present and the future

While the aforementioned reasons make a case for a centralised federal set-up, the structure’s effectiveness is solely dependent on the intent and objectives a government aims to achieve. For instance, Tillin observed that linguistic reorganisation would not have been possible if India followed a rigid or conventional federal system. In other words, the current form of federalism in the Indian context is largely a function of the intent of the government of the day and the objectives it seeks to achieve. The majoritarian tendencies prevalent today are subverting the unique and indigenised set-up into an asymmetrical one. Inter alia, delayed disbursal of resources and tax proceeds, bias towards electorally unfavourable States, evasion of accountability, blurring spheres of authority, weakening institutions, proliferation of fissiparous political ideologies all signal towards the diminishing of India’s plurality or regionalisation of the nation — a process that is highly antithetical to the forging of a supra-local and secular national identity that preserves and promotes pluralism.

While it would be safe to argue that our federal set-up is a conscious choice, its furthering or undoing, will depend on the collective will of the citizenry and the representatives they vote to power.

Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a doctoral researcher at King’s India Institute, King’s College London.

Source: The Hindu, 3/05/22

Assam Polytechnic PAT 2022 registration process begins; check details

 Assam Polytechnic PAT 2022: The Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) has started the registration process for the Assam Polytechnic Admission Test (PAT). The application window will remain open till June 10. Interested candidates can apply on the official website — dte.assam.gov.in or patassam.online. 

As per the official notice, the date of admission test is expected to be July 17, 2022. The exact date for the test will be announced three weeks in advance.

Step 1: Visit the official website of the DTE — dte.assam.gov.in.

Step 2: Click on the registration link on the homepage.

Step 3: Fill up the application form with all the required details.

Step 4: Upload photograph and scanned signature.

Step 5: Click submit to save the application form for future. 

Eligibility criteria

Education qualification: Candidates must pass the HSLC or class 10 final examination in one sitting both theory and practical with mathematics and science as compulsory subjects. They must have secured at least 40 per cent marks in the exam. 

Age limit: Candidate’s age should be 20 years and 6 months as of December 31, 2022 (general, OBC). Age relaxation of three years is given for SC / ST / OBC category. 

Application fees: The applicant will have to pay Rs. 500, using SBI debit card/ credit card/ net banking. 

Source: Indian Express, 3/05/22

Why age is three different numbers in South Korea, and what its govt is doing about it

 You may or may not believe that ‘age is just a number’, but in South Korea, age is three numbers. The country has three valid ways to determine a person’s age, something the new government, under President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol, is trying to change.

We explain the different methods for calculating age prevalent in South Korea, why age is particularly significant in South Korean society, and why the need for a change was felt.

The three methods

The first method is the international method, when a baby is born aged zero and grows a year older on each birthday. This method has been used to determine a person’s age for most legal and administrative purposes since 1962.

The second is the ‘Korean age’, the method most popularly used in society, where a baby is born aged one, and turns a year older on January 1, regardless of its date of birth. Thus, a child born on December 31, 2021 will have turned two years old by January 2, 2022.

The third method is the ‘year age’, where a baby is born zero years old, and turns a year older every January 1. This method is again used for some legal and official purposes, most notably for compulsory military conscription, to determine when a child can start school, and to determine when a juvenile needs legal protection from abuse.

Thus, South Koreans can have three perfectly valid ages, with more dramatic diversions from the international age for those born later in the year. For example, the band BTS’ star Kim Tae-hyung, or V, born on December 30, 1995, is 26, 27 and 28 years of age.

What the new government has said

Adopting the international age system for all purposes was one of the campaign promises of the now President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol. After winning the elections, his transition committee in April announced they would amend laws to bring this about.

The Korea Herald quoted Rep. Lee Yong-ho of Yoon’s People Power Party, in charge of the political, legal and public services at the transition committee, as saying, “If we stick to the international age system, we will no longer see the social and economic costs associated with all the confusion and inconvenience arising from the age gap… There would be much less confusion if we could have the same idea of what it means to be how old we actually are.”

The government plans to amend the country’s Civil Code by next year, and then look at other laws that wilThis is not the first time efforts have been made to standardise age in South Korea. In 2019 and 2021, two lawmakers had proposed Bills to bring this about, but the legislation did not clear the National Assembly. This time, the People Power Party will not bring a new Bill, but amend existing laws.

Why different methods?

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact history of how these methods came into use, some say the traditional ways of determining age take into account the time spent in the womb. Others say the unique method came about as ancient counting systems in this part of Asia did not have the concept of zero.

While similar methods of calculating age existed in China, Japan, Vietnam, etc., gradually, all the countries moved to the international system. North Korea adopted the international system in 1985, but with a difference – it follows its own calendar, based on the birth of national founder and president-for-life Kim Il Sung.

Problems caused by multiple systems

In the hierarchical society of South Korea where deference to elders is an important social rule, confusion over age can cause practical, administrative, as well as etiquette problems.l need to be changed to incorporate the revised age criterion. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the age system led to confusion this January over who was eligible for vaccines and who was required to produce vaccination certificates.

Earlier, a wage dispute complaint reached the Korean Supreme Court, which ruled in the favour of using international age “when the company officially communicates to them its plan involving setting extra wages”, The Korea Herald reported.

Parents of children born later in the year fear their toddlers will face trouble in school. As a result, some cheat about the birth date during admission, while some plan pregnancies so the child is born earlier in the year. “They worry about the possibility that their babies may be at a disadvantage at daycare centres because of their relatively small size,” Hwang Ju-hong, the lawmaker who had introduced a Bill to use international ages in official documents in 2019, had then been quoted by The Guardian as saying.

Age also determines how you address someone in Korean, much like in many Indian languages (for eg., the tu, tum and aap of Hindi), and the wrong address can be seen as a major disrespect. According to a BBC article, age and seniority can also determine, in official settings, “who takes notes in a meeting, who calls to make a reservation for the team dinner and who distributes the spoons and chopsticks once you’re in the restaurant.”

The BBC quoted Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Korean language and linguistics at the University of Oxford, as saying, “The number one factor when determining which speech style to use is age. This is why people are always asking each other their age. Not because they’re necessarily interested in how old you are, but because they really need to find the suitable form of speech style.”

Opposition to the move

With increased exposure to the Western world, many South Koreans would like to adopt the international age system. According to a survey published in January by Hankook Research, seven out of 10 adult respondents wanted the change. However, there are others who say a part of Korean tradition should not be thrown overboard, and that the year age system fosters a sense of community among the people born in the same year.

“Unifying the age calculation so it falls in line with the international age system would mean breaking with traditional ideas of time based on the lunar calendar,” Jang Yoo-seung, a senior researcher at Dankook University’s Oriental Studies Research Centre, had told The Guardian in 2019.

Source: Indian Express, 3/05/22

How to imagine and work towards a future

 It is an uncertain world and the threats that emerge nowadays seem to be entirely unforeseen. First, there was the Covid pandemic, then the war in Europe. What can a society do to ensure its well-being in such uncertain times? Fortunately, humans have the ability to imagine a future and plan for it.

A future for society is the product of its collective imagination. It is generated through large numbers of people sharing ideas over long periods. It is, therefore, a matter of some wonderment that in India there is so little public discussion on what might be the shape of our future. Isn’t it important that we foster an ability to imagine possible futures for our country?

Imagining different futures also means planning for them. We cannot know precisely what crises are in store for us. But we can certainly strengthen knowledge resources and develop the ability to mine those resources for possible solutions as and when the need arises.

As things stand, building up knowledge capital is a task that, even today, is seen in India as a costly exercise that doesn’t bring immediate profit. For some decades now, there have been two perverse attitudes that obstruct the creation and expansion of knowledge. One is the extreme belief, nurtured by those educated in modern institutions, that there is a political angle to all knowledge. The other is an obstinate commitment to demanding immediate, visible profit from everything. Both attitudes are harmful to any creation or dissemination of knowledge.

An obsession with immediate returns has consequences for everything; from public policy to technology development to social development and economic growth. It is one reason why India, despite a large presence in IT services, has had little to show by way of independent innovation. Even something as basic as creating a system for online payment of GST and income tax has been fairly difficult for Indians to develop.

It is unreasonable to expect individuals to plan several decades ahead for a collective goal. That is the mandate of social institutions. Institutions in India seem to work on a limited-time horizon. Recently, a vice-chancellor from one of the top Indian universities presented a five-year plan in a talk at Cambridge University. The university told the official that they were used to plans looking 30 years ahead. A short-term approach at the institutional level has serious social costs.

It was a series of short-term actions that led to the coal crisis some years ago. In 2014, when the Supreme Court cancelled the allotment of 204 blocks, which had been allotted since 1993, on the grounds of non-transparent processes, there was a major crisis. The coal ministry devised a transparent online bidding procedure for auctioning the blocks rather successfully. The auctions not only met the demands of industry but also generated revenue for the government. The point is that well-structured rules and regulations are needed all the time not only for the regular business of government but across sectors. Devising those rules and regulations in a fair manner after considering the views of all stakeholders, is a sunk cost. Revising rules regularly to match changed realities is also a sunk cost. Following proper scientific methods, whether in science labs or in business or in government is a sunk cost. Yet social investment in good rules and regulations, documentation, building up knowledge capital, remains very low in India.

The ability to imagine a future means a degree of comfort with sunk costs. Most of the technologies that we depend on today, whether the internet, mobile phone, electric cars, batteries or penicillin, took decades to develop; even centuries. A model of the electric car, for instance, was developed even before the petrol engine, but it wasn’t practical to use. What is practicable at what point in time depends entirely on circumstances.

For societies to refuse to invest in innovation for the future would be self-defeating. Such societies would have nothing to fall back upon in moments of crisis.

Written by Meeta Rajivlochan 

Source: Indian Express, 4/05/22

Quote of the Day May 2, 2022

 

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
Robert Heinlein

“प्रेम एक ऐसी स्थिति है जिसमें आपकी स्वयं की खुशी के लिए दूसरे व्यक्ति की खुशी अनिवार्य होती है।”
राबर्ट हेन्लेन