Books on Northeast India to be published by NCERT

Ministry of Human Resource Development has come up with a unique way to end the discord of the people staying in Northeast India. The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) would now prepare textbooks on the culture and life of the eight Northeastern states, which will be prescribed as supplementary reading for school students.
This was announced recently by Smriti Irani, the HRD Minister.

According to sources, the books, will take at least a year to be ready for publication, but the classes for which they would be prescribed are not yet decided.
The NCERT is an autonomous organisation under the Union HRD Ministry.  The NCERT advises the central and state governments on school education, especially matters related to school curriculum. Its textbooks are prescribed by all private schools affiliated to CBSE and government schools.
The idea behind this decision, as said earlier is social integration. There are many students from the Northeast, who study in the different parts of the country and complain of social discrimination and alienation. Therefore,  if youngsters read about their life and culture growing up, this problem could be alleviated to quite an extent.

digitalLearning View: Since many years, the people from Northeast India have complaint about not being a part of the country. This step by the government and NCERT would certainly help in developing a bond with the Northeastern states. Reading about the culture and beauty would also make the NE students feel proud of their rich heritage.

Source: Digital Learning, 25-04-2016

Building on the Paris Agreement

The 174 countries and the European Union that signed up to the Paris Climate Change Agreement in New York on April 22 have committed themselves to the decision that a range of actions must be undertaken to keep the rise in global average temperature well below 2° Celsius over pre-industrial levels. The debate on climate change shifted after the climate summit in Paris in December from whether scientific evidence is strong enough to warrant making aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, to how this should be achieved without hurting economic growth in developing countries such as India. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change accepts differentiated responsibility for developing nations, which are not responsible for the accumulated stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as opposed to rich countries that historically had the benefit of the unfettered use of fossil fuels. What makes carbon emissions particularly problematic, however, is that polluting local flows have a global effect over relatively short periods, and far-flung countries, such as small island nations, suffer the impact. India’s estimate of its share of global greenhouse gas emissions submitted to the UN for the Paris treaty is 4.10 per cent, but it faces a double jeopardy: of having to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to achieve growth, while preparing to adapt to the destructive effects of intense weather events, such as droughts and floods, linked to climate change.

After Paris, the challenge before India is to implement its pledge — to sharply cut emissions intensity of GDP by 2020. A small reduction was achieved between 2005 and 2010, and the effort now should be to maintain the trend. Energy, transport and infrastructure are key areas where sound national policies are needed. The doubling of the cess on coal in the Budget, and the general policy to keep fuel prices high using taxation are welcome, but they must translate into funding for green alternatives. It should be possible, for instance, to unlock middle class investments in renewable energy with an effective grid-connected rooftop solar subsidy programme. In the absence of strong backing from State governments to ensure net metering and transfer subsidies, progress in this area has been slow. New buildings should also be required to conform to energy efficiency codes in all States. The National Electric Mobility Mission Plan aims to put about seven million electric or hybrid vehicles on the road by 2020, but for this to happen, the creation of charging infrastructure and introduction of consumer incentives are vital; greening public transport bus fleets will give the Mission a face. Once the Paris Agreement is ratified, funding for such initiatives should come from the wealthy countries, which are required to raise at least $100 billion a year. The pact requires them to provide even higher levels of assistance. The success of the climate compact will ultimately depend on whether rich countries, including the U.S. — where a conservative President and Congress could reject it — fund innovation and open-source their green technologies to developing nations.

Keywords: Paris Climate Change Agreement, Paris agreement, UN Framework Convention, global warming summit, gas emissions, global greenhouse gas emissions

Source: The Hindu, 25-04-2016

Laws that make us human

aharashtra’s new social boycott law is an important step that must be applauded. It should also inspire work on a comprehensive anti-discrimination law on the lines of the Civil Rights enactments in the U.S. and U.K.

Early this month, the Maharashtra State Assembly enacted the Maharashtra Protection of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2016. As the title suggests, the purpose of this law is to prevent and punish the continuing community-driven practice of social boycotts. The Act provides 15 examples of “social boycott”, which include obstructing individuals from observing religious practices or customs, severing social or commercial ties, causing intra-community “discrimination”, expulsion from the community, and so on. Persons who directly engage in social boycott, instigate others to do so, or participate in the deliberations of any meeting organised with the purpose of imposing a boycott may be penalised under the law.

The focus of the Act is clear: it is directed against caste panchayats which often function as community-based parallel forums of justice, and whose diktats are invariably directed against recalcitrant individuals who have been deemed to transgress the bounds of caste or community morality. Interestingly, therefore, the Act specifically penalises causing discrimination among the members of a community on the basis of “morality, social acceptance, political inclination, [or] sexuality.”

First Act and its fall

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has correctly called the passage of the Act “historic”. Indeed, the Maharashtra law represents another chapter in a long-standing battle to secure individual freedom from the suffocating grasp of ascriptive communities, whether based on caste or religion. For instance, soon after Independence, in 1949, the State of Bombay passed a law called the Bombay Prevention of Excommunication Act, which outlawed the practice of excommunication within religious communities. The constitutionality of this Act was challenged by the “Dai”, or head, of the Dawoodi Bohra community, who argued that by curtailing his powers of excommunication, the law interfered with his religious freedom.

In 1962, a divided Supreme Court struck down the Act. The judges in the majority held that the practice of excommunication was an essential tool for maintaining community discipline and cohesiveness, and consequently, was protected by Article 26(b) of the Constitution, which guaranteed to all religious denominations the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion.

However, in a powerful dissenting opinion, Chief Justice B.P. Sinha observed that, on the contrary, the Excommunication Act fulfilled the constitutional mandate by seeking to guarantee “individual freedom to choose one’s way of life and to do away with all those undue and outmoded interferences with liberty of conscience, faith and belief… it is also aimed at ensuring human dignity”. Specifically linking the prohibition of excommunication with the constitutional directive for the abolition of untouchability (under Article 17 of the Constitution), he held that the purpose of the Act was to outlaw such practices of outcasting and social ostracism, which deprived the individual “of his human dignity and of his right to follow the dictates of his own conscience”.

The correctness of the majority opinion in the Dawoodi Bohra case has been questioned, and a petition to reconsider it has been pending in the Supreme Court since 1986. As the difference of opinion among the judges reveals, however, the issue is a fraught one. Undeniably, the Constitution guarantees religious freedom to communities, and also guarantees the freedom of association. At the same time, however, the Constitution also recognises that punitive community action can severely harm individual freedom, dignity, and access to basic public goods. For this reason, it curtails the power of groups in various ways. Apart from the prohibition of untouchability, the Constitution guarantees non-discriminatory access to “shops, public restaurants, hotels, and places of public entertainment” (Article 15(2)). In legal language, this is known as the “horizontal application of rights”: that is, the Constitution grants individuals rights not merely against the State, but also against other individuals (and groups).

Long struggle

Maharashtra’s social boycott law is best understood as one front in a long struggle to effectuate the Constitution’s guarantee against social exclusion, as expressed in Articles 15(2) and 17. The history of this struggle did not start with the Bombay Excommunication Act. It did not even start with the Constitution. As early as the mid-19th century, intra-community battles over access to public goods under the colonial state had begun. The historian Anupama Rao records an instance from 1856, where the Bombay government denied admission to a Christian Mahar convert into a public school on the ground that caste Hindus did not wish to “associate” with a Mahar student. After sustained protests lasting a few decades, towards the end of the 19th century, Dalit students were allowed to attend public schools, but were directed to sit separately in a verandah outside the classroom. They were also barred from accessing the common water supply.

The struggle intensified through the course of the early decades of the 20th century and reached its climax in the late 1920s, with B.R. Ambedkar’s famous Mahad satyagraha directed towards opening up access to community water tanks that had been barred to Dalits. Simultaneously, he also launched a movement for entry into public temples, basing his claims on the right to an equal standing within the community. As he famously argued, “the issue is not entry, but equality.”

It was at the same time that Ambedkar began to conceptualise legal solutions to the problem of community oppression. In his submissions to the Minorities Committee of the Round Table Conference, he identified social boycott as “the most formidable weapon in the hands of the orthodox classes with which they beat down any attempt on the part of the Depressed Classes to undertake any activity if it happens to be unpalatable to them”. He quoted the Starte Committee Report of 1928, which had observed that “[the social] boycott is often planned on such an extensive scale as to include the prevention of the Depressed Classes from using the commonly used paths and the stoppage of sale of the necessaries of life by the village Bania… cases have been by no means rare where a stringent boycott has been proclaimed simply because a Depressed Class man has put on the sacred thread, has bought a piece of land, has put on good clothes or ornaments, or has carried a marriage procession with the bridegroom on the horse through the public street.” Accordingly, Ambedkar proposed an anti-boycott law which would specifically prohibit the practice of social boycotts. Although the colonial government did not take him up on this, a few of Ambedkar’s proposals found their way into the post-Independence Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1955.

Threads of exclusion

The Maharashtra social boycott law, therefore, is an important step in the long-standing struggle for social inclusion. It is, however, only one step. As Ambedkar recognised, exclusion occurs along multiple axes: through boycott, through stigmatisation, and through segregation (the case of the school verandah).

In The Untouchables, he wrote about the practice of “territorial segregation and of a cordon sanitaire putting the impure people inside a barbed wire into a sort of a cage”. For this reason, as part of his proposed anti-boycott law, Ambedkar also proposed to bring within the definition of boycott, “refus[al] to let or use or occupy any house or land, or to deal with, work for hire, or do business with another person, or to render to him or receive from him any service”. Part of this was covered by Article 15(2) of the Constitution, in its guarantee of access to shops, which was understood by the framers to include non-discriminatory access to services. However, in recent years, religion-driven housing discrimination — which inevitably leads to segregation — has emerged as a serious problem, especially in urban areas.

With its focus on caste-panchayat driven community boycotts, the Maharashtra law leaves a significant area of discrimination untouched. To address this, a comprehensive anti-discrimination law is required, on the lines of the Civil Rights enactments in the United States and the United Kingdom. For now, however, the Maharashtra law is an important first step, that carries forward the judicially-aborted goals of the 1949 Excommunication Act, and the rarely-used Protection of Civil Rights Act. For this, the government of Devendra Fadnavis must be applauded. The devil, of course, will now lie in the implementation.

(Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer. His book, Offend, Shock or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution, was published in December 2015.)

Keywords: Maharashtra State Assembly, Bombay Prevention of Excommunication Act, Maharashtra Protection of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act of 2016, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1955

Source: The Hindu, 25-04-2016

Adversity as Opportunity

RASHMI SINGLA





We experience agony and pain when we come to face an emotional, social or financial upheaval over which we have no control. The word `agony' implies suffering that one goes through helplessly , maybe over a prolonged period of time. It could be a state of mental anguish in which we fear or question the uncertainty in our lives. We may feel like giving ourselves up to fate.What seems like suffering can be turned into a golden opportunity if dealt with intellect and patience. Dealing with all that causes suffering means to overcome obstacles in our path to progress. First, it means focusing on strengths and understanding our limitations better. Interacting with positive people helps. Walking in natural environs, spending time alone, reading quietly or listening to music engender positive thinking for it connects us to the whole; it opens our eyes to the interconnected nature of life and the concept of Brahmn starts making sense.
Another way to deal with suffering is by engaging yourself in community service as well as by learning skills to acquire knowledge and wisdom. Seek the company of the good and virtuous from whom you can learn and elevate your consciousness. In the presence of faith, miracles happen.
Positive thinking can turn adversity into opportunities for healing, forgiveness and for compassion. Then our deeds'll automatically be done with no fear of the future. Then the path of agony'll be changed to a path of progress and sorrow turns into eternal happiness.

Appropriating Ambedkar

While the Modi government moves him to the centre stage of national conversation, an effort is simultaneously underway to bring about a confluence of Left and Ambedkarite politics

The 125th birth anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (April 14) has occasioned commemoration, celebration and commentary over the past few days. Indian public life is filled with such anniversaries, but perhaps Ambedkar’s big birthday has attracted more attention than usual this year because at least four different political trends have converged upon him. Most noticeably, there is an aggressive bid to appropriate him on the part of the Hindu Right. Simultaneously, there is a newly awakened interest in him on the part of the parliamentary Left. Together with these two developments among mutually opposed political parties of the right and the left, there is the conflict over Ambedkar on university campuses such as that of the Hyderabad Central University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). In these academic settings, on the one hand, student politics has increasingly embraced the figure of Ambedkar, and on the other hand, government and university authorities have targeted student leaders, activists and campus groups who profess Ambedkarite and Dalit ideology, in order to brand them “seditious” and “anti-national”. This combination of contradictory trends in both national politics as well as the microcosm of the university campus is bewildering, and calls for careful analysis.

Ambedkar, right and left

The Modi government has sought to take over a number of modern political icons who do not have any historical connection with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or with Hindu right-wing ideology. This includes Mahatma Gandhi himself to begin with, Sardar Patel, and now Ambedkar. Rather than keep a distance from such figures who stood for ideas and values not just different from but also for the most part opposed to Hindutva, the Prime Minister and his party have adopted a strategy of appropriation as a means to neutralise the ideological threat posed by the legacy of such leaders. Gandhi and Patel hardly have any specific electoral constituency associated with them any longer, but in claiming Ambedkar as a hero for Hindus, the BJP also has an eye on Dalit votes.

Thus we have seen frequent sentimental references to Ambedkar in the PM’s speeches, expensive new museums being constructed in houses where Ambedkar lived in Delhi (Civil Lines) and London (Primrose Hill), and an eruption of Ambedkar signage, statuary and memorabilia in public spaces all across the country. This government has moved Ambedkar into the centre stage of the national conversation — at least in terms of superficial reminders and references, if not through actual policy and legislative reform — in a way that is quite unprecedented. More official attention and showy gestures of adulation can be expected in the coming months, since December 6, 2016 will also mark 60 years since Babasaheb’s death in 1956. (As anniversaries go, surely the BJP would prefer that December 6 be remembered as the day Ambedkar passed away rather than as the day the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya in 1992).

The Left, too, is not far behind. Senior communist leaders Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat, D. Raja and others have all recently spoken and written about Ambedkar’s commitment to equality, to the rights of Dalits and to social justice, and about his role in the making of India’s Constitution, with approval and newfound admiration. They have also criticised the BJP’s sudden love for Ambedkar, calling it politically expedient and motivated by a desire to tap into the Dalit vote (a charge that is not incorrect). Yet one wonders why the Left parties have allowed decades to pass before recognising their own natural affinities with Ambedkar, especially on questions of inequality, caste and class, reservations, labour, and Ambedkar’s scholarly interest in Karl Marx. The opportunities for debate and dialogue across the Left and Ambedkarite political traditions have existed, and been systematically wasted, since the 1930s (with brief exceptional interludes in Maharashtra in the 1970s and Karnataka in the 1980s). It may be a case today of too little, too late, or else it might be better late than never, for the Left to begin to engage with Ambedkar in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and ideologically daring.

But it is also interesting that both the Right and the Left are skating on thin ice in coming to grips with Ambedkar so long after the time when they really ought to have begun to take him seriously. And both may find, when (or if) they begin to read Ambedkar with a degree of fidelity to his ideas and respect for the actual text of his writings, that his positions on a range of significant issues — the caste system, minority identities, Brahminism, the Muslim question, religious conversion, working class politics, women’s rights — are in fact irreconcilable with their own. At the moment there are too many taboos, pieties and euphemisms in the handling of Ambedkar to permit a genuinely critical conversation between him and those eager to claim him on either end of the political spectrum. Everyone is too busy trying to recruit him into this or that political camp to acknowledge that he never belonged to the Left or Right, something he knew full well in his lifetime, even though it isolated him politically from his own historical context.

Babasaheb on campus

JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar’s rousing speech, soon after his release from jail in early March, made an elaborate reference to the solidarity that needs to be forged between Left-wing and Ambedkarite politics, calling them the “red” and the “blue” political traditions, and chanting both their slogans, ‘Lal Salaam!’ and ‘Jai Bhim!’, in a wonderful display of old-fashioned oratory that had the whole nation mesmerised for almost an hour on live television. To be fair, this is not entirely an original coinage by Mr. Kumar — on the contrary, it is a convergence that the Marx-Phule-Ambedkar strand of ideology in Maharashtra’s Dalit politics has long tried to popularise, and can be heard even today in the poetry, songs and speeches of local Maharashtrian activists such as Sheetal Sathe and Sachin Mali, associated with the radical Kabir Kala Manch that stands for the annihilation of caste. But Mr. Kumar brought it to the country’s attention in a big way, and put across the message in a vivid metaphor that people could relate to, a rhetorical-polemical accomplishment for which he deserves full credit.

Anyone who participated in the multiple marches, teach-ins and demonstrations that took place in Hyderabad, Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and elsewhere throughout January, February and March, following Rohith Vemula’s suicide and the arrest and subsequent release of JNU students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, will recall immediately the visually arresting sight of red and blue flags raised, waved and carried by thousands of citizens, and the soaring chants of a coming Left-Ambedkarite revolution that rang out on the streets, in the squares and on university campuses for the first three months of 2016. The novelty and the idealism of these mass protests were clear for all to see; but as a participant in many of these events in Delhi, I can testify that they were also marked by uncertainty and a lack of direction: Who is leading this inchoate Indian Spring? Does it have a clear agenda? Will it develop into a real political alternative in the future? Can a student-led movement, which is by definition transient (like students who enter and pass through the university), acquire a staying power of its own, or will it be subsumed under the banners of existing political parties and held hostage to their failures and limitations?

The bespectacled figure of Ambedkar, with his copy of the Constitution held to his side, stands silently over this moment of popular tumult, rising over a sea of red flags like a lighthouse. But that ship is yet to set sail. Meanwhile, the Modi government, its Ministry of Human Resource Development, its Department of Higher Education, its vice-chancellors at central universities, and the BJP leadership, are busy harassing, silencing, jailing and disciplining Dalit and backward caste students, attacking politically outspoken — and especially Left-wing and Ambedkarite — faculty, trying to dismantle reservations policy and indeed the public university itself as an institution, cutting the budget of the University Grants Commission, rolling back stipends and bursaries for research scholars, curbing intellectual freedom and the right to dissent, and cracking down on student politics, particularly on campus groups that identify themselves with Ambedkarite activism, in ways never before seen in the history of independent India. It’s remarkable how the same administration that apparently spares no expense in “celebrating” Ambedkar’s 125th anniversary also does not spare anyone who actually follows Ambedkar in struggling to create genuine liberty, equality and fraternity.

In a suicide note that may yet become the warrant for a new political formation at the confluence of the Indian Left and the Dalit movement as these have conventionally been understood, Rohith Vemula lamented the inability of caste society to treat a human being humanely. He wrote, unforgettably: “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust.” To Rohith’s memory and to Babasaheb on his birthday are dedicated these lines from the poem “America”, by Langston Hughes:

Knowing / There are stains / On the beauty of my democracy / I want to be clean. / I want to grovel no longer / In the mire. / I want to reach always / After stars.

Ananya Vajpeyi, the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (2012), is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Keywords: JNU row, Ambedkar, Left politics, Modi government, student politics, Rohith Veumula suicide, Hyderabad university

Source: The Hindu, 21-04-2016

Just 4 institutes account for a third of India’s research output

India has the best and the worst medical education in the world, according to a review of the world’s largest database of peer-reviewed literature.

Four medical colleges in India are among the top 10 global institutions that published the most research between 2004 and 2014, while around 60% of the country’s 579 medical institutions have published no research in a decade.

Only 25 (4.3%) institutions published more than 100 papers a year and, among them, accounted for 40.3% of India’s total research output of a little over 100,000 papers in the decade.

In comparison, the annual research output of t he Massachusetts General Hospital was more than 4,600 and the Mayo Clinic was 3,700. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, with more than 1,100 annual publications, ranked third.

“What’s most shocking is that 332 (57.3%) medical colleges had not a single publication during this period. The states with the largest number of private medical colleges did the worst, with more than 90% of the medical colleges in Karnataka and Kerala having no publication at all,” says study author Dr Samiran Nundy, dean, Ganga Ram Institute For Postgraduate Medical Education & Research (GRIPMER), which was ranked 11th in the list of institutions that published the most research.

India’s total research output — including original articles, reviews, case reports, and reports of conferences and symposia — was 101,034 papers between 2005 and 2014, according to the journal Current Medicine Research & Practice. All the institutions surveyed were either recognised by the Medical Council of India (MCI) or the National Board of Examinations, the two bodies that regulate medical education in India.

“To bring medical education across states at par, India needs to incentivise quality research, which is an indicator of an institute’s quality of education and clinical care. Research doesn’t affect promotions, which is based on seniority and clinical practice, or income. And with doctors running private clinics in many medical colleges in their free time, research suffers,” says Dr K Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India.

The few attempts to encourage relevant and applied research are not enough. The MCI’s 2015 guidelines require at least four research publications for the post of an associate professor and eight for the post of a professor.

Source: Hindustan Times, 21-04-2016

Earth day: Faiths groups take climate change seriously

Tomorrow is a day when many people in India and around the world will be thinking about the Earth and our environment.

For many Catholics, people of all faiths and none, April 22 is international Earth Day. It is also the day when heads of state and government representatives gather in New York to renew their vows to the Paris Agreement, which they signed last December as a pledge to end the fossil fuel era.

This should be a day to celebrate the world; however, the current state of our planet means we must rather bemoan its condition and act to rectify them.

Read | Earth’s internal heat driving Greenland’s ice to melt

Almost a year on from the Pope’s Encyclical, Laudato Si, which I invite everyone to read, how much has the world and India changed? Pope Francis wrote that, due to pollution and climate change, ‘our home is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth’. Step outside in India, and often you will be breathing some of the dirtiest city air on the planet. Talk a walk through our towns and villages, and you will see the foulness of our rivers.

Of course, there are reasons for optimism. The Paris Agreement on climate change has been signed. The government’s ambitious targets for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are noble, and worldwide renewable energy investments are increasing at an astonishing rate. With the cost of solar energy plummeting, the situation can only get better. And Delhi has recently trialed its car pollution-reduction scheme to great success.

Read | COP21 agreement: All you need to know about Paris climate change deal

This is simply not enough, however. A recent report stated that India has the world’s highest number of people without access to clean water – a staggering 76 million. Droughts are currently crippling several Indian states. Six of the world’s ten worst polluted cities are Indian — their citizens are breathing air that’s up to 15 times dirtier than what is considered healthy. Immorally, it is of course the poor who have contributed least to these problems that are worst impacted. For their sakes, the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, coupled with unabated and unplanned urbanisation, must cease soon as possible. Twenty-one countries have already proven that it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while keeping the economy growing — India could be among them, but is not.

Read | Paris climate deal: What the agreement means for India and the world

That is why, on April 18th, together with over 260 other faith leaders, I signed a declaration calling on heads of state to implement the Paris Agreement as soon as possible, and urging the swift phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies as part of a transition to using 100% renewable energy by 2050. Faith communities are already working hard to alleviate many of the world’s problems, but we can do even more by reducing emissions in homes, workplaces and centres of worship, and to divest from fossil fuels and invest in renewable sources of energy.

Together, people of all faiths and none, let us therefore strive to make this April 22nd a reminder of how humanity is abusing our planet, a gift from God.

Source: Hindustan Times, 21-04-2016