Only 33% of Muslims work, lowest among all religions

Subodh Varma





Buddhists Are Highest At 43%

Muslims have the lowest share of working people -about 33% -among all religious communities in India. This is lower than the nationwide average work participation rate of 40%.The figure for Jains and Sikhs stands at 36% each. Buddhists, comprising mostly Dalits who embraced Buddhism in the 20th century , have a high working population share at 43%. For Hindus, the figure is 41%. Drawn from the Census 2011 data, the statistics show a faith-based profile of India's 482 million strong workforce.The figures haven't changed much from the 2001 Census, indicating a stasis in the economic status of communities.
The key reason behind low work participation rates in some communities seems to be the low work participation of women. Women's participation is just 15% for Muslims and Sikhs, and even lower at 12% among Jains. Among Hindus, there are 27% working women, while it is 31% for Christians and 33% for Buddhists. Several smaller faiths fall under `Other Religions'. These are mostly tribal communities from peninsular India and the northeastern states. Their work participation rates are markedly different from other communities. Nearly 48% of members of this section work, more than any of the country's six major religious communities. Women's work participation is also highest in tribal communities, at nearly 44%.
Census data also provides a picture of how many are engaged in what kind of work. For the country , 55% of workforce is in agriculture, as cultivators or as agricultural workers. The Census classifies all occupations in industry and services as `Other', a convention since British times. This makes up 41% of all workers.Only 13% of Jains are involved in agriculture, the lowest for any community .
While 41% of Muslims and Christians work in agriculture, this goes up to 47% among Sikhs and to 54% for Buddhists. The highest share of workers involved in agriculture is among Hindus, at 57%.
The Jain community is predominantly working in industry and services. Muslims too are largely concen trated in these sectors as are Christians. Muslims are also notably more involved in the `Household Industry' category which is mainly artisanal work like carpentry , black-smithing etc.
Among tribal communities classified under `Other Religions', over 80% of their members are working in agriculture, indicating their poor economic status.

Source: Times of India, 4-01-2016

New Year Postcard-1: A new beginning in school

Dear Prime Minister

For the last 20 years, I have been a teacher at a government school in Dadri. A resident of Jarcha village in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, I never saw my district make the headlines until last year.

In 2015, the lynching incident in Bisara village was a wake-up call not just for Dadri but for the entire country. I am 57 years old and in my lifetime, I have not witnessed a more shameful incident here where Muslims and Hindus have lived in harmony for decades. The incident was shameful enough but the manner in which it has been used for political interests is even worse. Not just one district but the entire country has been shamed.

I don’t know what really happened, whether or not a cow was slaughtered — what I know I have learnt from media reports. But even if they (Akhlaq and his son Daanish) had killed a cow, no one has the right to take the law into their own hands. The Indian Constitution applies to everyone. If such an incident did take place, a case should have been registered against them by the police. All I know is, we need to uphold the basic values of humanity and brotherhood. No religion — mazhab, deen, dharma — speaks of bringing an end to brotherhood. When brotherhood ends, so does humanity. One of the most critical tenets of Islam stresses the importance of brotherhood.

As headmaster of the government-run Junior High School in Khangoda village, Dadri and a teacher for two decades, I feel that the only way in which we can combat these attempts to tear apart the social fabric of our country is through education. Our children need to be taught the values of communal harmony, brotherhood and tolerance. After the incident in Bisara, we talked of these values to our pupils.

I hope that we do not witness or hear about such an incident in 2016.

Pradhan Mantriji, another serious concern, which has crippled schools like ours in rural areas, is a lack of facilities and resources. Against a student strength of 64, my school currently has just two teachers, including me. While I teach science and mathematics to children of Classes VI to VIII, I am also the headmaster of the school. Most of my time goes in administrative work and I get only an hour or so each day to teach.

Government schools have an acute shortage of staff. There have been times when my school has operated with just one teacher. In rural areas, the government should provide more facilities to students and teachers. Most teachers don’t want to work in schools in rural areas, which lack basic facilities of transportation and housing.

Our primary goal should be to provide education to as many children as possible. However, government teachers are regularly given other work like election duty and drawing up voters’ lists. Education has taken a backseat. The government should spend more on education. We should perform our duties for which we draw salaries from the government. We need more facilities: Classrooms, labs, vocational courses.

The state, the administration should encourage village folk to send their children to school. Around 80 per cent do enrol their children but they don’t care whether or not their children attend school. Often, we have to visit the students’ homes to ensure that they do not drop out.

With the implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, there has been progress in the enrolment ratio. Almost 90 per cent of children are enrolled in schools now. However, the issue of drop-outs is still serious. We need more awareness campaigns by the government to ensure that children don’t drop out of school.

I hope more parents are encouraged to send their children to school and that the standard of education in government schools is raised so that parents admit their children to them instead of private schools. Many parents, especially from the poorer sections, struggle to make ends meet in order to send their children to private schools. These private schools are run like businesses — poor people cannot get their wards enrolled in them.

Even in this modern age, there are no schools for girls, especially in areas with a large Muslim population. In Jarcha, there is not even a higher secondary or inter-college institution for boys. Girls face more problems — there are no decent transport facilities for them. I urge you, please let minorities have better access to education in the coming year.

In the next year, I hope the government helps set up “vikas samitis” in villages. These committees should have representatives from all communities as well as women representatives. They should meet at least once a month to discuss social issues and devise way to maintain communal harmony.

I am a teacher, first and last. My main goal is ilm (knowledge): Taleem lena aur taleem dena (to nurture and to be nurtured) is of primary importance. There is no greater gift than that of learning.

Even if a single child is successful in life, the teacher’s life’s goal has been fulfilled.

From Dadri

Source: Indian Express, 1-1-2016

$50 million loan to fund education of minorities

The Union government and the World Bank signed a $50-million credit agreement for a project aimed at helping young people from minority communities complete their education and improve their employment opportunities.

“The Nai Manzil Scheme is designed as an integrated education and training programme that provides youth from minority communities skills needed for different tasks in a rapidly changing world. Interventions under this project will support the Nai Manzil Scheme in improving the employability and performance of minority youth in the labour market,” Raj Kumar, Joint Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, said.

The agreement was signed by Mr. Kumar and Michael Haney, the World Bank’s Operations Adviser in India.

“India’s demographic dividend can be harnessed only if all young people from all sections of society are equipped with the education and skills needed to make them productive members of the economy,” Mr. Haney said.

Around 20 per cent of those between 17 and 35 years of age from minority groups such as Muslims, Parsees, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and Sikhs are out of the labour force, according to the World Bank.

Keywords: World Bank, Nai Manzil Scheme

Source: The Hindu, 1-1-2016

Labour’s love lost

At a public event during his recent visit to India, French economist Thomas Piketty drew attention to the “hypocrisy” of the Indian elite in the way it wanted to pursue capitalist development — obsessed with growth, but indifferent to welfare. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more evident than in the debate over labour reforms.

The prevailing wisdom is as follows: India has too many antiquated labour laws which hamper growth and investment. The need of the hour is a brisk pruning of this unruly thicket of pieces of legislation into a handful of elegant laws that make it easy for companies to hire and fire as they wish, and pay whatever salaries they can get away with. Once such laws are in place, foreign investment will flood into India, manufacturing will shoot up, and millions of Indians will find employment and “make in India” happily ever after.

From an industrial relations perspective, turning this corporate dream into reality requires two things: one, trade unions must be neutralised; two, contractualisation (temping/casual labour) must become the legal norm rather than illegal supplement for regular work.

Both these are effectively a reality in today’s India. But our legislative framework militates against it, leaving the capitalist class vulnerable to being challenged by the working classes on legal grounds. It is in this context that the incident of July 18, 2012 at Maruti’s Manesar plant assumes historic significance, for India’s working class as well as for the investor class.

The context

Since Independence, trade unions in India have mostly fought modest and pragmatic battles for outcomes such as higher wages and better working conditions. But this changed in the 1990s. Gurgaon-based labour activist Shyambir points out that after liberalisation, most strikes by workers have been not for wage hikes but for the right to form a union.

The right to collective bargaining is enshrined in our Constitution. Article 19(1)(c) grants all citizens the right to form a union. On top of it, we also have a Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 that prohibits employment of contract workers for core industrial work. And yet, the Indian state has either stood by or actively colluded while employers tried every tactic, including illegal termination, to prevent union formation, and kept hiring temporary workers for regular jobs.

In the National Capital Region’s Okhla-Faridabad-Noida-Gurgaon-Manesar industrial belt, it is common to find workers toiling on 12- to 16-hour shifts for as little as Rs.9,000 a month, for years together. It raises a fundamental question: whose interests have the labour laws served all these years? Evidence suggests that it is not the labouring classes.

And yet, oddly enough, the clarion call for labour reforms is coming not from the working classes but from the corporate class. One reason for this could be that with global capitalism yet to recover from the shock delivered in 2008, the only way out of the crisis is to tighten the screws on labour to extract more value.

In such a scenario, who wants a labour class feeling empowered to fight for its entitlements? From this perspective, the Manesar conflagration was a decisive event that has, at least for now, beaten back labour and put capital firmly in control in an age-old conflict.

The background

To quickly summarise the incident of July 18, 2012: an outbreak of rioting at the Manesar plant left one HR executive dead and 40 others injured. The police arrested 147 Maruti workers and slapped murder charges on all of them. The dominant narrative about this event is one of labour militancy gone wild, holding it responsible for the loss of life and property.

What has not attracted critical scrutiny is the final outcome of the larger conflict between labour and management of which this incident was the culmination: the termination, in one go, of 546 permanent workers and 1,800 temporary workers. Such a mass retrenchment would be unthinkable in the normal run of things. Were we to ask who gained the most from this sorry episode, the answer is definitely not the worker.

The provenance of this incident goes back more than a year, to June 2011. That’s when Maruti workers began agitating for their right to an independent union. After several months of struggle, the Maruti Suzuki Workers’ Union (MSWU) was formed in early 2012. Now, the MSWU in early 2012 was a different animal from the kind of unions Indian managements were used to dealing with. It derived its power from something unprecedented in the short history of labour struggles in post-liberalisation India: a strategic unity between permanent and temporary workers. It was too dangerous a threat, one that no management would brook.

According to Shyambir, “After its formation in March 2012, right up to the incident of July 18, the main agenda of MSWU was regularisation of temporary workers. They wanted pay parity for permanent and temporary workers. Their slogan of ‘Same Work, Same Pay’ made them hugely popular.”

Given that around 80 per cent of industrial workers in the Gurgaon-Manesar belt are hyper-exploited contract labour, this union may have made a big impact on labour mobilisations had it been allowed to flourish. With the purge of 2,300 workers that followed July 18, 2012, the threat was snuffed out.

The present scenario

By October 2012, within three months of the July clash, Maruti had set up a new system of “company temps” in place of the earlier system of hiring temporary workers through contractors. Under this regime, the temporary worker will work for six months. Then he is laid off for five months, after which he may be recalled for another six months.

Both corporate commentators and labour activists have termed this a master stroke. While the former see in this a replicable model to pre-empt labour unrest, the latter consider it a move designed to prevent unity between permanent and temporary workers by regularly churning the latter.

In September 2015, Maruti announced a salary hike of Rs.16,800, spread over three years, for permanent workers. When temporary workers agitated for a similar revision, unlike in early 2012, the permanent workers did not back them. If breaking the unity between permanent and temporary workers was the mission, it had been accomplished.

Maruti, for its part, has presented its system of “company temps” as a superior alternative. When contacted by The Hindu, a management source said that “the new system is superior to the contract system since it is a direct recruitment by the company. No contractor is involved, and company temps enjoy all benefits like canteen food, uniform, PF, ESI bonus, etc.”

Not surprisingly, there has been a persistent corporate chorus demanding a labour regime that allows companies to freely hire temporary workers even for core operations. And the Modi government is eager to deliver.

The labour reforms on the anvil essentially boil down to two things: make it impossible to form a truly independent trade union; make it legal to keep temporary workers permanently temporary, while paying them a subsistence wage.

With the central trade unions seemingly uninterested in putting up a fight on core labour issues, independent trade unions nipped in the bud, and contract labour effectively legal, the only potential challenge that labour now poses to capital is mobilisation based on unity between permanent and contract workers. This was the weapon Maruti workers had assembled at the Manesar factory in 2012. It’s the reason why they needed to be made an example of, so that India’s working classes won’t dare to attempt such experiments in the future.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: labour, reforms, central trade unions, contract labour, temporary workers

Source: The Hindu, 1-1-2015

Much Work Ahead for A Happy New Year





Politics, policy have to innovate to improve matters

If winter comes, can spring be far behind, asked the poet.In business, regrettably , there is no guarantee of the automatic inevitability of warmth succeeding chill that attends on seasons. Yes, Asian economies did survive the financial crisis of the late 1990s, in which economies and companies paid the price of excessive borrowing. But some corporate giants went under, never to recover: once-mighty Daewoo, for example. The rate at which big Indian companies are selling off their producing assets to pay off accumulated interest on borrowings for projects that are yet to be completed suggests that we cannot rule out such a scenario in India either. Yet, it is not inevitable. Politics and policy can intervene to check the rot.Politics has to shed the partisan pursuit of one-upmanship that has become its hallmark in the year that has gone by . Even if the ruling side and the Opposition hate each other, both share a common responsibility to look after the collective good. If that calls for cooperation on vital matters, cooperate they must.
The initiative has to come from the go vernment, which has to abandon the campaign mode of taunting and harassing the Opposition at every given opportunity within the country and outside. The Opposition must reciprocate and work with the government on vital legislation, such as the bankruptcy code and the goods and services tax. Hostility and confrontation must give way to engagement and accommodation. The economy will pay the price for failure on this count.
Roads and Railways lead the charge in reviving investment in the economy . More power to them. At the same time, resolute action is required to complete stalled but viable projects, after disengaging them from their debtcrippled promoters. This process will entail both forcing promoters and their lenders to take haircuts and bailing them out with fresh financing. Fear of being labelled suit-boot-ki-sarkar should not hold policy's hand from taking the needed corrective action. If solutions fail to materialise, politics would venture outside the mainstream. And winter would prolong.

Source: Economic Times, 1-1-2016

Everything Is The Same, Yet So Different

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar





There is infinite spontaneity and creativity unfolding every moment in Nature. Every day the sun rises but every sunrise is uniquely beautiful. This is true of our experiences as we go through life as well ­ everything is the same and yet everything is different. One more year comes to an end and yet another year begins.Change is a constant factor in the universe; despite this, certain changes leave a permanent impression on the human psyche. Whether positive or negative, these impressions rule our life.To be free from them and act from there is true awakening. These moments of awakening have not left anyone's life untouched, although they occur frequently for some and rarely for others.
Revising events of the past every once in a while has two benefits: One, it reinforces your understanding and wisdom and second, it releases unwanted traits, which influence your thinking and behaviour subconsciously .Looking back, the fear and anxiety that has gripped our world in the past few months is due to terrorism. Asia, Africa, Europe and even America have suffered on this account to a great extent. Under the circumstances, it is imperative for us not to let these memories colour our thinking and lead us down the path of paranoia and prejudice.
Often, when a challenge or crisis arises in society , we have a tendency to slip into a cave and say , “It is not my problem.Someone else should solve it.“
In the current global scenario, we are left with no choice but to take responsibility for the whole planet. In the Middle Ages, when there was a problem in one part of the world, the other part did not even know about it. Today , with technology , the comfort zone and conflict zone are not very far apart.
Our part of the world, the Indian subcontinent also, is not unaffected by developments in other parts of the world. The last year saw a huge boogieman created out of the issue of intolerance. I would say India is too complacent and does need more intolerance but towards inequality, injustice and corruption. Both tolerance and intolerance when misplaced are equally bad. Tolerance need not be complacency and intolerance need not be aggression.
Any issue or conflict becomes much easier to deal with and solve, when we are willing to stretch our hand first.Earlier this year, we were able to reach out to Colombia's biggest rebel group, which resulted in a ceasefire, ending a 50-year-old conflict with their government.
This is the era of unprecedented interdependence. We need to come out of our isolated shells and become a part of something bigger and more beautiful, both individually and globally . The love and warmth that everybody carries within just needs the right environment to be brought out. Coming together in spirit itself creates an atmosphere of celebration.
Life is a very fine balance of learning and unlearning, of being involved and being detached. Finding this delicate balance keeps the freshness alive and that is the Art of Living. When you move in life with a big vision, your connection with Nature is re-established. Though situations are the same, you are ever fresh and different. You no longer watch Nature's spontaneity unfolding from a distance; you become an expression of it.
Wish you all lots of happiness and enthusiasm in this New Year!

Wish YOU A Very Happy New Year

Dear Reader

My best wishes for you,
Great start for Jan,
Love for Feb,
peace for March,
No worries for April,
fun for May,
Joy for June to Nov,
Happiness for Dec.
Have a lucky and wonderful 2016

A new year is like a blank book. The pen is in your hands. It is your chance to write a beautiful story for yourself.

Another year of success and happiness has passed. With every New Year, come greater challenges and obstacles in life. I wish you courage, hope and faith to overcome all the hurdles you face. May you have a great year and a wonderful time ahead, God bless you. Happy New Year 2016!!!

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.

From:

            TISS Guwahati Campus Library 

Bibhuti Kumar Singh