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Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Moderation is the Way


Moderation is defined as avoidance of extremes, whether it is your reactions to any stimuli or an action initiated by you. Reaction: When emotions get triggered, our first response is to act on impulse; we find it difficult to exercise control over these impulses, causing irreparable damage to relationships. Reactions are of three kinds: › Insignificant: When an action of the opponent is of minor intensity or insignificant, a minor reaction will be classified as a balanced reaction, but if the action is insignificant and the reaction is major, then it loses its parity. › Intermediate: When the action is not very offensive but it cannot be disregarded, it demands appropriate reaction, but if the reaction borders the extremes, it is a potential danger. › Significant: If the action is significant (very offensive), then the reaction tends to be stronger. If your reaction is fiercer than the action, then the situation can take on mammoth proportions. If it is minor, then again it has the potential of becoming baggage. While reacting to any negative action, we are on the same plane as the trigger point. Exercising moderation does not only restrict itself to reactions or impulses; it encompasses our whole life, every action that we undertake or every emotion that we feel — eating, socialising, exercising, sleeping, resting, spending, saving or anything else that we do should all be within moderate limits. This is one of the keys to successful living.

Source: Economic Times, 25/09/2018

Monday, September 24, 2018

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 53, Issue No. 38, 22 Sep, 2018

Editorials

From 50 Years Ago

Law and Society

Commentary

Book Reviews

Perspectives

Market Power And Competition Policy

Special Articles

Current Statistics

Discussion

Letters

What is lemon law in economics?


Also known as lemon socialism, this refers to any form of government intervention in the market economy in order to help in the survival of struggling firms. These businesses, which would normally not be able to survive in a free market without any government intervention in their favour, thus turn out to be the beneficiaries of government policy. Such government intervention in favour of inefficient firms in the marketplace can be brought about in various ways — through the use of subsidies, bailouts, or discriminatory regulations that favour select firms in the market. Lemon laws are considered to be harmful to economic growth as they breed inefficiency.

Source: The Hindu, 24/09/2018

New health paradigm

Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana will ease burden on poor, be a catalyst for more changes in health sector.

Ayushman Bharat is a far-reaching initiative aimed at ensuring holistic healthcare services. Its first component of expansion of services with elements of promotive and preventive healthcare under comprehensive primary health through health and wellness centres was launched on April 14 from Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district. Since then, 2,287 health and wellness centres have come up around the country.
Its second component, the health assurance mission addressing concerns of catastrophic expenditure by vulnerable families for secondary and tertiary care, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), will be unveiled on September 23.
It will provide a cover of Rs 5 lakh per family per year for inpatient care to 10.74 crore families at the bottom of the pyramid. This translates into more than 50 crore people, around 40 per cent of India’s population. The health conditions and surgical procedures, covered free, are encompassed in over 1,350 packages that include practically all secondary and tertiary conditions requiring hospitalisation, barring a few such as organ transplantation. The services will be provided by empanelled public and private hospitals.
Unlike private insurance schemes, PMJAY does not exclude a person on account of pre-existing illnesses. The size of the family is no bar. There is also no need for formal enrolment; families that are listed with defined deprivation criteria on the Socio Economic and Caste Census database are automatically enrolled. All that is required is a proof of identity, which could be Aadhaar or any other government-issued identity card.

All but a few states have agreed to be a part of the PMJAY. Most have chosen to run the scheme in the trust mode, which means that the state health agencies will directly implement the mission. A strong fraud control mechanism has been conceived. An audit system has been put in place. Thousands of Ayushman Mitras are being trained. At each facility, one of them will receive the beneficiary, check her eligibility and facilitate in-patient care. A system for patient feedback and grievance redressal is also in place. The system will be cashless and largely paperless.
The Yojana will be implemented in concord with state-level schemes, if they exist. An autonomous and empowered National Health Agency (NHA) has been established with corresponding state level health agencies (SHAs). A plethora of guidelines on every aspect of the scheme has been developed and pre-tested. A robust IT system has been put in place. An efficient claims management system is functional with payments to be made within two weeks.
One unique feature of the PMJAY is its national portability once fully operational. If a beneficiary from Jharkhand falls sick in Uttar Pradesh (UP), she is entitled to receive treatment in any of the empanelled hospitals in UP. Her home state will make the requisite payment for the services availed.
The service package rates are based on an extensive exercise to determine market-discovered estimates. The rates of all state schemes as well as the CGHS system were carefully studied. The cost of packages is modelled on quality care in a general ward. On the base rates, states can add upto 10 per cent as required. The base rates can further be augmented by 10 to 15 per cent each if the hospital is accredited, if it is located in one of the 115 aspirational districts or is running a specialty education course. If a state’s existing scheme has a higher rate for a specific package compared to the PMJAY, the former will apply.
PMJAY will herald a new era in healthcare for four reasons. First, it will dramatically improve provision of healthcare for the poor. It is now possible for a construction worker with an injured knee to have an implant for free, a rickshaw-puller with a heart attack to undergo a stent procedure and a farmer’s wife to receive full treatment for breast cancer.
Second, the PMAJAY will be a catalyst for transformation. It will be an enabler of quality, affordability and accountability in the health system. The empanelled hospitals have been tasked to follow the treatment guidelines. Patient outcomes will be monitored. Another impact of the PMJAY will be rationalisation of the cost of care in the private sector. With an increase in demand created, it is expected that private sector will move from a low volume-high return paradigm to a high volume-fair return (and higher net profit) model.
The earnings of public hospitals under PMJAY will be available for their upgradation and also for incentivising the provider teams as these funds will be deposited with the Rogi Kalyan Samitis. Up to 30 per cent of the overall public spending on the scheme may return to public sector institutions.
Third, the PMJAY is a poverty-reducing measure. Each year, six to seven crore people, above the poverty line, fall below it because of health-related expenses. PMJAY would reduce this number significantly. More than a third of the out-of-pocket expenditure (around Rs 5,000 per household) is due to inpatient hospitalisations. One out of eight families have to incur health expenditure of more than 25 per cent of the usual household expenditure each year. PMJAY will ease this burden on the poor.
Fourth, the scheme will create lakhs of jobs for professionals and non-professionals — especially women. It will give a boost to the health technology industry.
The implementation of a mission of this size, ambition and complexity is hugely challenging. High uptake, quality care, beneficiary satisfaction, efficient operations and fraud-controlled systems are the key metrices of its success. With highly competent and dedicated teams at the NHA and SHAs, backed by the highest political will and the goodwill of the people, the PMJAY is poised to deliver on its promise. There is also willingness to learn, improve and reform.
Source: Indian Express, 22/09/2018

The law of happiness

Nations that ensure the rule of law are also home to happy people. Policy-making must strive for the larger satisfaction of the people with public institutions they have to regularly approach

Happiness has come to be accepted as a goal of public policy. And this discourse has given a fillip to a new narrative where the interconnections between law, governance and happiness are being searched. Why do these connections matter? Experiences from several nations confirm that the countries with higher GDP and higher per capita income are not necessarily the happiest countries and there exists a link between the state of happiness and rule of law.
The World Happiness Report (WHR) 2018, which ranked 156 countries, placed India at the 133rd place on the index of global happiness. While India’s performance on this can be attributed to several factors, there’s no denying the fact that there is an intrinsic relationship between law and people’s happiness. The WHRs, over the years, confirmed that people tend to have poor mental health, a low score of subjective well-being and poor perception about the governance and law and order, despite high income levels.
The curious question in this discourse is how the law is linked with happiness. In an environment in which laws are gradually becoming reactive, regulatory and penalising, this question needs some probing.
Jeremy Bentham said the object of the law should be the maximum happiness of the maximum number. Going by popular perceptions, laws and legal regimes are the distributors of unhappiness in many ways. We have about 3.3 crore cases pending in various courts in the country. How does unhappiness emanate from these cases? Each case is not a mere number — it involves tension, anxiety and deprivation to all those associated with it. A group of people — family members, relatives, friends and others of the parties involved — are necessarily affected because of such cases. If we presume that there are about 20 persons in each case belonging to one or the other parties, we get a number of about 64 crore. Interestingly, none of them would be in a state of happiness on account of being linked to the case. Inevitably, the criminal justice administration for these people is a source of unhappiness.
Moreover, not more than 30 per cent people approach the courts in India. There is a visible decline in civil litigation, which suggests that a large number of people in the country are living with unresolved conflicts. This too dents the state of happiness in general.
Criminal justice has far-reaching consequences for the lives of people — it brings difficulties when it does not act, it causes turbulence when it does. Millions of accused, victims, suspects, witnesses and others have poignant tales about the actions and inactions of the criminal justice administration. The satisfaction level of people is far too low in this country when it comes to the police and courts.
The relationship between crime and happiness offers some interesting insights. Vesna Nikolic, a noted victimologist, says that making people happy is the best crime prevention. Do happy people become victims less often than unhappy people, and if so, why? Do happy people commit crimes, or do people commit crimes in order to achieve happiness? The connection between crime and happiness is understandable from the experience of Bhutan, which introduced Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a measure of good governance. The data show that a great majority of the Bhutanese population are happy (of whom 41 per cent are extremely happy), and only 4 per cent reported being victimised by crime over the last 12 months. Further, the crime rate in Bhutan is extremely low. A negative correlation between crime/victimisation and happiness is observed.
The World Reports on Happiness in selected countries and their crime and victimisation data present remarkable trends. The impact of criminal victimisation on happiness is often negative. Analysis from six nations, namely, Finland, Denmark, Philippines, South Africa, India and Sri Lanka shows that at least one of the four crime variables share an inverse relation with the happiness score of the respective nation. This leads to the conclusion that individuals living in nations with high crime rates are less happy and satisfied than individuals living in nations with a comparatively lower crime rate.
Does rule of law make you happy? The countries scoring high on the Rule of Law Index, a measure used by the World Justice Project, are those who are higher on the index of happiness as well. Among these countries are Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Austria. The fact that happiness ought to be part of the agenda to improve rule of law, and vice versa, is a new thrust in the emerging policy discourse in many jurisdictions. The institutionalisation of a happiness framework as a measure of achievement for policy goals is now being debated. Madhya Pradesh has set up a Happiness Department to achieve such objectives.
It is probably time to change the narrative — to shift the discourse of policy making towards the larger satisfaction of the people with the public institutions they have to regularly approach for various purposes.
The ideologies promoted by the government also have an effect on the overall satisfaction of the people. Besides poverty, unemployment and other issues of sustenance, the outlook of the government on religion, gender, sexuality, etc. also determine the contentment of the governed. For example, in India, increasing incidents of cow vigilantism, communal and gender bigotry, ultimately make the society intolerant and dissatisfied. It is, perhaps, time to turn the narrative of law, policy and development, towards building a happier society.
Source: Indian Express, 24/09/2018
Ego Prevents You From Accepting Your Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. But if you perceive your mistake in the right way, despair can never arise. The reason for your sadness and despair is that you actually do not want to accept your mistake, but are compelled to do so. When you are caught red-handed and have to reluctantly admit it, you feel sad, depressed and you develop complexes. This occurs when you intend to defend your ego and not honestly own up. Your suffering is not because you did what you shouldn’t have done, but because the image you have created gets tainted. He who honestly accepts his mistake so that he can uproot it would never go into depression or inferiority. You ask for atonement for a wrongdoing and you perform it, too. But the next time you get a wrong desire, you feel, ‘let me fulfil it and later I shall ask for atonement and cleanse myself.’ Your focus remains on the deed and not on the impurity latent in your intention. Thus by falsely repenting and taking atonement, you try saving your image but not move towards transformation. There is no regret for your faulty state. You try covering up the mistake. In the name of repentance, you try defending your ego. If the list of your mistakes becomes long, your ego feels hurt and you think, ‘Am I really so bad that I became angry? I am not, it’s just that such a situation arose and I happened to act like that.’ You repent and become the ‘good’ person you think you are. This so-called repentance does not transform you but makes arrangement for you to stay the way you are. You keep repeating the same mistake but do not bring any change in your inner state. Ouspensky in his book ‘Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’ writes about Ivan Osokin who goes to a mendicant and says, ‘On the whole I am a good person. Yet mistakes have been committed. Walking through an unknown path, I fell in a pit. I am not the kind who would fall, but the path was unfamiliar, there was darkness of the night and a pit. May be someone pushed and I fell in the pit. If I get to relive the past and walk again, I want to prove that I would never fall in the pit.’ The mendicant said, ‘I make you 12 years younger.’ Osokin said, ‘You see, in 12 years I will become another person. I was wishing I could get another chance so I don’t repeat the mistakes I had committed in ignorance.’ Osokin returns to the mendicant after 12 years and confesses, ‘I seek forgiveness. The mistakes I had committed in the past were not because the path was not known. The mistakes were mine alone; because I have repeated the same mistakes. I have realised that I have been living exactly the way I had lived in the past.’ The mendicant said, ‘I knew it will recur. Because the mistakes are not in the action but in the intention.’ Not just Osokin but you too live a strange life; you live your life in exactly the same way as you have been living. Even as you age, you keep repeating the same mistakes, because the doer remains untransformed. You do the same things you did in the past and so you remain the same as you were. Life gives you many chances. But you cheat yourself by blaming the circumstances.

Source: Times of India, 24/09/2018 

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship

Volume 23, Issue 02 (June 2018)