Dalit capitalism’s moment has arrived

When Dalits in prosperous states start agitating against occupations such as clearing garbage and tanning, India’s mask of social harmony starts to slip. Dalits facing physical violence are speaking up, as with a young Dalit boy attacked recently in Bhavra village, 40 km from Ahmedabad, because his family had decided to boycott the work of lifting dead carcasses. They are increasingly asking for basic rights — the right to land, the right to public goods and spaces like water and temples, and the right to social acceptance. Other Dalits in Saharanpur’s Usand village in Uttar Pradesh have taken to sleeping in the forest, given the concerns about physical safety. Municipal corporations around India are suddenly starting to run out of willing Dalit workers to sweep the floors and remove carcasses. Social justice, an age-old topic, is the new third rail.At an individual level, Dalits continue to remain significantly poorer than other social classes — 36% of the rural Dalits are classified as poor while just 13% of the SC men are engaged in regular salaried work, despite public-sector affirmative programmes.

The government can help nudge social behaviour and institutions to encourage Dalit empowerment. Consider education. According to the 11th Five-Year Plan, dropout rates continue to be high — 74% of the Dalit boys and 71% of the Dalit girls usually drop out of primary and secondary school.

Incentive schemes, such as free textbooks or free hostel accommodation in universities for students from underprivileged households, can go a long way in overcoming the barriers of poverty and discrimination. Offering such students access to the minimum facilities (a bed, a table, a chair, etc) can help make education more inclusive and incentive-focused.There are only a few Dalit entrepreneurs in India, with most Dalits still employed in their traditional occupations. Such individuals would also lack access to social enablers — only 12% of the Dalit households have access to 2-3 contacts in the formal sector, compared to 26% amongst the forward castes. Given the discrimination, a history of landlessness, social pressure and little, if any, relevant sub-caste networks, Dalit businesses are few and far between.

Enabling the launch of more social impact funds focused on Dalit entrepreneurs (e.g.: Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry) can help solve financing issues, with a special focus on fiscal incentives and infrastructure support.

The growth of grassroots cooperatives/institutions for developing traditional crafts presents a solution. The Urmul Marusthali Bunkar Vikas (UMBV) has provided 120 Dalit weavers of the Meghwal community with sustainable livelihood through their traditional crafts, stopping migration and keeping local skills alive.

We need to make it easier for Dalit businesses to flourish. The Dalit presence in businesses has stagnated — 9.9% in 1990 and 9.8% in 2005. Since 1989, the National Scheduled Castes Finance and Development Corporation has disbursed an average of $484 per borrower to over 900,000 Dalits. The empowerment of small and medium enterprises, through incentives for struggling entrepreneurs, remains the right way to bolster SC/ST entrepreneurship. An expansion of the Public Procurement Policy’s mandate of 20% from SME businesses, as part of the Stand Up India campaign, could bolster Dalit suppliers. Dalit capitalism’s moment has arrived.

Fair land distribution corrects unequal social constructs and power equations by providing equal access to productive economic units. Land reforms (tenancy, land ceiling, consolidation of holdings and intermediary abolition) have produced mixed results, especially where land distributed remains on ‘paper’ — land distributed is not land owned for many Dalits. Physical occupation of lands needs to be ensured, through social audits at the gram sabha level, under the guidance of a Special Expert Committee under the SC Commission, supported through awareness generation through camps.

We need to recognise the need for land reform as well to induce equity for Dalits in agriculture. The government of Andhra Pradesh has launched a crash programme since 1969 to assign government waste land to the landless poor people, particularly the Dalits. Over 113,972 acres was distributed to 43,000 beneficiaries under the Bhoodanland programme.

Our society is marching from feudalism to post-modernism, in less than a generation; and yet outdated attitudes remain. While the media continues to highlight the plight of the Dalits, one must stand vigilant against reducing such livelihood issues to a by-line. We’ve spent the last half-century pitting our castes against each other, in politics and in the job market. Leaving such islands of inequity, in India’s journey towards development will only give rise to social turmoil. For Dalits, equity and social acceptance must go hand in hand.

Source: Hindustan Times, 29-08-2016

A saint who was more of a mother: Remembering Blessed Teresa

A transparent, white plastic box, placed on Mother Teresa’s tomb at Mother House in Kolkata is nearly filled to the brim with little pieces of paper. As the time for the Friday Mass draws near, more visitors start scribbling hurriedly on the slips of blank paper kept near the box and dropping them inside. “Those coming to Mother House write their intentions (or wishes) on paper and put them inside this box for Mother’s blessings. During the special mass on Fridays, the day Mother passed away, we ask the priest to bless all the intentions and pray for them,” explains one of the nuns.

The founder of the Missionaries of Charity will be canonised at the Vatican on September 4. But the nun who stepped out of Loreto in 1948, and made it her life’s mission to work for the “poorest of the poor” around the world has for years been revered as a ‘saint’ by the people whose lives she touched. Sister Bernadette, 78, of Loreto Calcutta remembers a chance meeting with Mother Teresa at the Kolkata airport years ago. “People at the airport kept coming to her and asking for her blessing. She had a paper and she would write God bless you and sign her name on it. She said, ‘you see this, I am putting them in God’s hands’,” remembers the nun.

The Simple Joys of Life

Those who knew her well, lived and worked with her, remember the person behind the public face. “She had a great sense of humour. She would always be joking and when she found something funny, she would place both hands on her hips and bend double with laughter,” remembers former chief election commissioner of India and Mother Teresa’s biographer Navin B Chawla.

A nun of the Loreto order, 82-year-old Sister Eithne, recalls that same spirit in one of her meetings with Mother Teresa. “I remember meeting her here in this house (Loreto House, Kolkata). She came to meet the community, her old friends. What I remember about that meeting is that there was great laughter and fun,” she says.While her avowed mission remained to care for the destitute, everyone around her felt enriched by her love. “She always had time for everybody,” says Father Dominic Gomes, vicar-general of the archdiocese of Calcutta. “After I was ordained, I was asked by the Church to go for my higher studies to Rome. I needed a passport. I made so many rounds of different offices and nothing was working out,” he remembers. “One day I was at Mother House and Mother noticed that I looked very sad, and she asked me what was the matter. I told her I had been trying to get my passport made for the past three months without any success. She immediately said give all your documents to me. To my surprise, the next day I had my passport.”

Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity remember how their superior cared for them the same way that a mother would. Sister Tarcisia, who joined St Teresa’s primary school in Kolkata as a six-year-old when Mother Teresa was the in-charge, talks of her “motherly” affection. “She knew that my health was not strong, so whenever there was some heavy work to be done, moving a table for instance, she would push me out of the way.” This from a woman who her biographer recalls as being habitually unmindful of her own health. “ She often chose to ignore the advice of Dr Bardhan, her long-standing cardiologist in Calcutta,” remembers Chawla. “Mother Teresa needed a pacemaker at some point of her life and she was forbidden by the doctor to even go down the stairs. One day I was with her and there was a telephone call. And she said I am going to Bangladesh. There’s a cyclone there, I have got to go. I reminded her of her doctor’s orders and she said I will tell him later,” says Chawla.There are as many anecdotes about Mother Teresa, as the number of people who came into contact with her. Father Felix Raj, principal of the St Xavier’s College in Kolkata remembers her great love for students. Photographer Raghu Rai talks about how she could be tough when needed, but would change if she found reason in what was being said. Recalling his first meeting with her, sometime in the 1970s, he says, “Even at that time, the Missionaries of Charity were quite strict about giving access to photographers and journalists.” When Rai happened to see three nuns in prayer through the movement of a half curtain behind Mother Teresa, he started taking their photos. On being questioned by Mother Teresa as to what he was doing, Rai answered, “Mother, there are these sisters praying and they look like angels.” “How you melted, Mother, and accepted that moment,” he recalls.

Chawla talks of her immense will and how she would go to any length for her work. In one of his initial meetings with Mother, when he was secretary to the Lieutenant Governor (LG) of Delhi, he remembers that she had come to ask for land to build a facility for the leprosy-affected in the city. “I asked her how much land she needed and she looked at me and said five acres. Then we went to see the LG and she told him in detail about the plight of these people and the LG was so moved he was nearly in tears. He also asked her how much land she required and she looked at me with an impish smile and said ten acres! Because she had won him over she got 11 acres. And I saw this in country after country, situation after situation. If Mother Teresa could cajole anything out of anyone for her poor, she had no hesitation in doing so,” he says.The Nay Sayers

This very attitude of her, however, in indiscriminately accepting help for her mission has been used by her critics against her, the most vocal of whom had been British journalist Christopher Hitchens. In a documentary titled Hell’s Angel - Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Hitchens questioned Mother Teresa’s meetings and closeness with certain political heads of states and business tycoons of questionable repute and in some cases her acceptance of funds or trophies from them. Notable among these were Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier and American activist and businessman Charles Keating. Hitchens’ allegations are echoed by Indian rationalist Sanal Edamaruku, who wrote in an article, “Mother Teresa did not serve the poor in Calcutta, she served the rich in the West. She helped them to overcome their bad conscience by taking billions of dollars from them,” and felt that Mother had given a bad name to Calcutta by portraying it as a city of hopelessness and death. Chawla admits that in all likelihood, she did meet Michelle Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier’s wife. “It was true of Mother Teresa that whoever could do her work, she would go there and try and get work done for her poor. I did ask her once how is it that you take money from these dubious people. And she said how is it different from the thousands who come to feed the poor in all my homes. I don’t look into their antecedents. Whoever they may be they have a right to give in charity and I have no right to judge them. God wiThat Cult Following

Hitchens traced the root of Mother’s global popularity and adulation to journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s devotional representation of her in the book Something Beautiful for God. But he and those he interviewed in Hell’s Angel accused Mother Teresa of “admiring the strength of the powerful almost as highly as she recommends resignation of the poor”. He gave the example of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, an industrial disaster in India, when Mother Teresa’s advice to the victims had been to “forgive” the multinational company responsible for it. Writer and journalist Mihir Bose whom Hitchens interviewed in the film felt Mother Teresa “ accepted implicitly that there’s nothing you can do for the poor except take them off the streets and look after them. You cannot change their attitude, you cannot make them feel that they have an ability or the means to improve and change their lives”. Father Felix Raj answers the accusation. “People have criticised Mother and said instead of giving a fish why don’t you teach these people how to fish. She answered, ‘okay fine I am capable of giving a fish but why don’t you start teaching others how to fish. Then both of us participate in the mission’,” he says.ll judge them,” he says.Foreign physicians who visited the Missionaries of Charity homes in Calcutta have written of poor medical care given to the people there, including a lack of distinction between curable and incurable diseases, no use of pain relief medication and lack of proper sterilisation of medical tools, including needles. It is an allegation also voiced by writer and former volunteer at Missionaries of Charity, Mary Loudon, in Hell’s Angel. But Mother Teresa’s supporters explain it as their lack of understanding of her mission. “I think they are giving the best possible treatment wherever it is. It is true that when the sisters feel no medical care will help... what is the need of shifting him to the hospital when he may die on the way. At that moment you try to help the person, not shift him to a medical facility,” says Father Felix Raj.

Less easy to justify is her religious non-acceptance of abortion and birth control measures and here even Chawla admits that he disagreed with her views. So deeply religious herself, did she ever try to convert anyone to her faith, another criticism levelled against her? “She has not converted even one in terms of religion. But she has converted all, including me, her conversion is the conversion of the heart,” says Father Felix Raj. Chawla explains that Mother never felt the need to convert the destitute because for her every suffering person she picked up from the street was her God.For herself and her sisters though, prayer and devotion to Jesus was sacrosanct. Stepping out of the comfort of Loreto House into the Calcutta of 1948, a city torn by post-partition strife and recovering from the famine of 1943, needed some courage. “In the beginning there was no money, even for food. And she had to feed the 12 women who joined her order. She would beg for rice and sprinkle some salt on it. And then she would pray and someone would send vegetables. In the early days she strengthened her capacity to pray,” says Chawla.

Rai remembers her words to the authorities during the refugee crisis when people started arriving to Calcutta across the borders from Bangladesh. “My sisters will put up with everything; they will spend all their time, and do their duty, but they will have to come back every evening for their prayers to rejuvenate their spiritual energies,” Mother had said to the officer in charge of relief operations.

Talking of the first time that he met Mother way back in 1975, Chawla, talks of her trademark white sari with the blue border, which she chose over a nun’s habit in 1948. “She was bent over, even then, and when she turned, I noticed that her sari, which was clean and shining, was darned in several places,” he says. For Mother Teresa, that sari was more than a garment. It was a promise from Jesus that “your sari will become holy because it will be my symbol”.

Source: Hindustan Times, 29-08-2016

Surrogacy regulation is long overdue

A comprehensive law to regulate surrogacy has been long overdue. Over the years, India has become a global hub for the practice of women being contracted to carry others’ babies, usually for a payment. While estimates of the size of the surrogacy market vary wildly, it is one in which the woman carrying an embryo has been in a grey zone, with uncertain legal and compensatory protection. The Union Cabinet has taken the first step towards regulation by approving the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, but it has many problematic provisions. The proposed law, in line with the practice in several other countries, says commercial surrogacy will be prohibited. However, in order that “altruistic surrogacy” is available for the benefit of infertile couples who are presumably desperate for a child that is genetically theirs, the Bill allows Indian couples, who must have been married for five years without a child, to take the help of surrogates, but without any payment. Only close relatives can be ‘surrogate mothers’, and once in a lifetime. Yet, it bars foreigners, homosexual couples, unmarried couples and single people from taking the help of an altruistic surrogate — leaving it open to questions about discrimination and inequality.

It is far from evident that the ban on commercial surrogacy has been thought through for its practical and ethical dimensions. In fact, it is not clear if the ban and the allowance for altruistic surrogacy are meant to make an ideological point or to actually confront the ground situation. While surrogacy has been legal since 2002, enumerating the surrogate mother’s rights and protecting her bodily integrity has been a challenge as the fertility industry mostly remains unregulated. The rights of children born thus too have remained unclear, highlighted dramatically in the case of Baby Manji Yamada, whose Japanese ‘parents’ divorced in the course of the surrogate pregnancy. Such a dilemma of statelessness has been sought to be prevented with the bar on foreigners. But given India’s failure to administer the ban on organ donations and sex determination tests, it is anybody’s guess how effective the ban on commercial surrogacy will be. The sex determination ban is a principled one, for it underlines intolerance for gender discrimination. The question is whether surrogacy is as big an evil as female foeticide. If it indeed is — and the jury is still out on this — why not ban surrogacy altogether? How does it suddenly become acceptable if the surrogate mother is a relative and uncompensated, besides probably being coerced, as women often are in intra-family decision-making? These are questions that will remain even if the Bill is passed.

Keywords: Surrogacy Regulation Bill

Source: The Hindu, 27-08-2016

Citizenship without bias

The new citizenship legislation should include refugees from persecuted minorities of all denominations who have made India their home

On July 19, 2016, the government introduced a Bill to amend certain provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The Bill has now been referred to the joint select committee of Parliament. The object of the proposed Bill is to enable Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who have fled to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh without valid travel documents, or those whose valid documents have expired in recent years, to acquire Indian citizenship by the process of naturalisation. Under the Bill, such persons shall not be treated as illegal immigrants for the purpose of the Citizenship Act. In another amendment, the aggregate period of residential qualification for the process of citizenship by naturalisation of such persons is proposed to be reduced from 11 years to six years. A large number of people who would otherwise be illegal immigrants can now heave a sigh of relief if the Bill goes through as they would be eligible to become citizens of the country.

Not inclusive enough

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, owes its genesis to the assurance given by the Prime Minister that Hindus from these three countries who have sought asylum in India would be conferred Indian citizenship. But since singling out Hindus alone could be discriminatory, the Bill has extended the right to acquire citizenship to other religious minorities living in the three countries.

V. Suryanarayan, Geeta Ramaseshan

The Bill, when passed, would be of immense benefit to the Chakmas and Hajongs of Bangladesh displaced because of the construction of the Kaptai Dam who have been refugees for nearly 65 years. The Supreme Court in Committee for C.R. of C.A.P. v. State of Arunachal Pradesh directed the Government of India and Arunachal Pradesh to grant citizenship to eligible persons from these communities and to protect their life and liberty and further prohibited discrimination against them.

Though India has not enacted a national refugee law, the three principles underlying India’s treatment of refugees was spelt out in Parliament by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959 with reference to Tibetan refugees. They include: refugees will be accorded a humane welcome; the refugee issue is a bilateral issue; and the refugees should return to their homeland once normalcy returns there.

The proposed Bill recognises and protects the rights of refugees and represents a welcome change in India’s refugee policy. But it would have been appropriate if the Bill had used the term “persecuted minorities” instead of listing out non-Muslim minorities in three countries. To give an example, the Ahmadiyyas are not considered Muslims in Pakistan and are subject to many acts of discrimination. Other groups include members of the Rohingyas, who being Muslims are subjected to discrimination in Myanmar and have fled to India. Such a gesture would also have been in conformity with the spirit of religious and linguistic rights of minorities guaranteed under our Constitution. Unfortunately the Bill does not take note of the refugees in India from among the Muslim community who have fled due to persecution and singles them out on the basis of religion, thereby being discriminatory.

The case of the Malaiha Tamils

Yet another disappointing feature of the Bill is that it does not provide citizenship to the people of Indian origin from Sri Lanka who fled to Tamil Nadu as refugees following the communal holocaust in July 1983. The Indian Tamils, or Malaiha (hill country) Tamils as they like to be called, are descendants of indentured workers who were taken by the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries to provide the much-needed labour for the development of tea plantations. The British gave an assurance that the Indian workers would enjoy the same rights and privileges accorded to the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils. But soon after independence, by a legislative enactment the Indian Tamils were discriminated and rendered stateless. In the protracted negotiations that took place between New Delhi and Colombo on the thorny issue of stateless people, Nehru maintained that except for those who voluntarily opted for Indian citizenship, the rest were the responsibility of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Sri Lanka, on the other hand, argued that only those who fulfilled the strict qualifications prescribed for citizenship would be conferred citizenship, and the rest were India’s responsibility.

Nehru’s principled stance was abandoned by Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi when they entered into two agreements with Colombo in 1964 and 1974, respectively. New Delhi agreed to take back 6,00,000 people of Indian origin with their natural increase as Indian citizens, while Sri Lanka agreed to give citizenship to 3,75,000 with their natural increase. The wishes of the Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka were not ascertained. To the ruling elite in Colombo and New Delhi the people of Indian origin became an embarrassing set of statistics. Important national leaders — C. Rajagopalachari, K. Kamaraj, V.K. Krishna Menon, P. Ramamurthy and C.N. Annadurai — opposed the agreement as inhuman, but their views were brushed aside by the Central government in order to befriend the Government of Sri Lanka.

The ethnic fratricide in 1977, 1981 and 1983, which affected the plantation areas, convinced many people of Indian origin that they could not live amicably with the Sinhalese. They never subscribed to the demand for a separate state of Tamil Eelam; in fact, the hill country was relatively tranquil during the protracted ethnic conflict. Even then, they were subjected to vicious attacks by some lumpen sections of the Sinhalese population. They sold all their belongings, came to India as refugees, with the hope of acquiring Indian citizenship and permanently settling down here.

A point of no return

According to informed sources, there are nearly 30,000 Malaiha Tamils in the refugee camps scattered throughout Tamil Nadu. They have absolutely no moorings in Sri Lanka. Their children have intermarried with the local people and are well integrated into Tamil society. The young have availed of educational facilities, but are unable to get jobs commensurate to their qualifications because they are not Indian citizens. The refugees in Kottapattu camp, near Tiruchi, with whom we interacted, told us: “Come what may, we will not go back to Sri Lanka.”

All these refugees qualify for Indian citizenship by registration under Article 5 of the Citizenship Act of 1955. However their plea for citizenship has been negated citing a Central government circular that Sri Lankan refugees are not entitled for Indian citizenship. In a communication dated November 21, 2007 to the Special Commissioner for Rehabilitation, the Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu mentioned that there are strict instructions from the Government of India “not to entertain applications of Sri Lankan refugees for the grant of Indian citizenship”. We submit, in the light of recent developments, the above-mentioned circular of the Central government must be immediately withdrawn.

The tragedy of the Malaiha Tamils, a majority of whom are Dalits, must be underlined.

Immigrants, even those who are termed illegal, are entitled to equal protection before the law and the various rights that flow from Article 21. This was stressed by the Supreme Court in National Human Rights Commission v. State of Arunachal Pradesh while addressing the rights of Chakma refugees. If such immigrants are granted citizenship, the natural progression would mean that they enjoy the benefits of rights guaranteed under Article 19 besides others such as access to the public distribution system, right to participate in the political process, right to secure employment and other rights all of which currently are inaccessible to them. The Bill recognises this in its objects and reasons by referring to the denial of opportunities and advantages to such persons. The Bill therefore should not restrict itself to minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh but should include refugees from persecuted minorities of all denominations who have made India their home.

V. Suryanarayan is founding Director and former Senior Professor, Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras; Geeta Ramaseshan is an advocate at the Madras High Court.

Keywords: citizenship legislation, Indian citizens, illegal immigrants, refugees

Source: The Hindu, 27/08/2016

Get Back to the Basics

K S RAM





Development is a much-abused word -it is used almost always to refer to material development, excluding the spiritual or holistic aspects. In our zeal to quantify development and express it in empirical terms, we seem to expect that the graph should ideally move only upward. Hence our obsession with rising GDP , production, sales, profits and salaries.Development is equated with a culture of `more'. This is so at all levels: personal, national and global. Mahatma Gandhi might have called this a migration from a need-based economic order to a greed-based one.
The goal of development, according to Indian thought, is moksha, or liberation. In life, the manifestation of such development is in your movement towards being a jivanmukta, a free-in-life person. The four purusharthas, or pursuits recognised and sanctioned by Hindu thought, are: dharma, kama, artha, and moksha.Moksha, of course, comes in the end, as a supreme finale.The other three pursuits are not sequential: they do not come one after another: they run concurrent.
Once the road map to development is clear, all doubts resolve by themselves. Kama and artha are valid insofar as they are moderated and guided by dharma. Dharma renders development sustainable and holistic. A culture of more -in Gandhi's terminology , a world order based on greed -is ultra vires to dharma. It leads a person astray from the road to sustainable development. What is true of an individual is equally true of the nation and the world.

Getting Ready For 'A Whole New Life'

Lucia Giovannini





Breathing is a perfect bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. It is one of the few bodily functions that we can consciously react to. If we want, we can speed up our breathing, slow it down, amplify it or deepen it. But it continues to work even when we don't worry about it. In this moment, as you are reading and your attention is elsewhere, your breathing continues to exist.In other words, it is the only function that we cannot survive without for more than a few minutes. We can fast for days, even a month or more; we can go without drinking for about three days; we can go without sleep for over 24 hours without having any brain damage but we cannot go without breathing for more than three minutes!
Breathing comes first
Seventy-five per cent of the toxins in our body are released by breathing. Recent studies have demonstrated that patients with heart disease and myocardial infarction who learn deep breathing significantly improve their long-term health.
Deep breathing is a full invigorating massage of the internal organs and abdominal muscles and is shown to be helpful in many cases of hypertension and anxiety .
In his handbook, on how to achieve excellent health, the celebrated author and doctor, Andrew Weil, puts breathing in first place affirming, “The only and most efficient technique for relaxation that I know is the conscious regulation of breathing. By simply focusing attention on breathing, and not doing anything to change it, you are on your way to relaxation.“
Breathtaking moments
On the contrary , the first reaction we have when confronted with something or someone we fear is to hold our breath.It's an ancient unconscious reaction that we've inherited from our hunter ancestors, a reaction that we can still see today in the actions of animals. Think about a wild animal sniffing danger. Its first reaction is to hold its breath and then decide whether to fake its own death, to escape, or to attack.
We, too, when confronted with the challenges of life, tend to hold our breath. By doing this, the rate of carbon dioxide in our blood increases causing a numbness of our senses which allows us to forget our fear. But we don't live in the forest any more. We don't have to defend ourselves from tigers with saber-like teeth like our ancestors did.The dangers we face now are more or less emotional. Now we try to defend ourselves from what we perceive as verbal aggression, existential disaster, from the sense of inadequacy and from the fear of being judged. And every single time that a similar thought arises, we automatically hold our breath. You don't believe it? The next time you drive too quickly past a police car, notice how you breathe.
Get transformed
The risk is to get used to holding our breathing capacities at a minimum, as if we had to continually protect ourselves from danger. By doing this, we constantly live with the sensation of not having enough. Do you think you don't have enough time, money , love, friends and so on? Do your cells need oxygen?
It is only when we finally start breathing again and modify our breathing patterns that transformation can begin. (A Whole New Life: Discover the power of positive transformation; Hay House publisher, India.)

Industry must lead the way in skilling India

Govt initiatives such as Skill India can only be a part of the solution

Up to a third of the skills considered important today could change as soon as 2020

The chasm between India’s demographic bulge and the employment opportunities required to absorb it has been a staple in any debate about economic growth, and rightly so. The destabilizing political and social effects of a large unemployed population and the productivity loss from under- or poorly manned industries are anathema to any developing nation. Increasing levels of technology integration in production and business processes complicate the picture further. The National Democratic Alliance government has focused on a core aspect of the employment issue with the Skill India drive. But it will need to navigate an increasingly complicated landscape.

Recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development puts the skills shortage in India—measured as a percentage of firms with ten or more employees that have difficulty finding qualified employees—at 61%, among the highest ratios. This is not surprising. The Labour Bureau Report 2014 had pegged the skilled workforce in India at a dismal 2%. To its credit, the United Progressive Alliance administration had attempted a structured approach to the problem with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC)—a public-private partnership aimed at funding forprofit vocational training initiatives, now part of the Narendra Modi government’s skilling initiative.

But the NSDC’s performance to date has left much to be desired. It has a laundry list of problems: the need to coordinate with multiple ministries all running their own programmes creating bureaucratic sclerosis, funding tussles, issues of perception with job-seekers looking down on vocational training and job-creators unwilling to fork out a premium for skilled workers and poor hit rate as far as post-skilling employment goes. Unsurprisingly, the NSDC managed to train just 3.3 million people in 2014 and aimed for 6 million last year, when the 2022 target is 150 million.

The Modi government has built on its predecessor’s efforts with the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship’s flagship scheme, implemented by the NSDC. The momentum it is giving to the issue is commendable. But it should keep this in mind: skilling and upskilling efforts must be industry-led. The PMKVY’s various provisions and the triple-layer decision-making structure at the coordinating National Skill Development Mission pose the risk of a top-down approach that cannot anticipate or respond to shifts in demand and global conditions as effectively as the market can.

This is especially true in the context of employability-enhancing skills at a time when technology is rapidly changing their nature. A World Economic Forum report posits that up to a third of the skills considered important today will have changed as soon as 2020. Greater automation and machine intelligence integration is likely to hit the manufacturing sector—the great hope for boosting employment—hard over the next decade or two.

This is not to suggest that the government step back entirely. But it would do well to think outside the box. For instance, voucher programmes that give individuals the freedom to join training programmes of their choice—with the latter receiving government funding by redeeming the vouchers—improve outcomes via market mechanisms and have been found to work in countries as diverse as Austria and Kenya. The government must also create an economic environment that incentivizes industry players to step up. Labour reforms are key here. Paying a premium for workers from as yet fledgling skilling programmes is a risk when a deep pool of cheaper, unskilled labour is available. If employers are to take the risk—their unwillingness to do is currently a key problem—they must have the freedom to make appropriate adjustments in order to minimize and, if necessary, walk back the risk.

It’s also worth remembering that skilling programmes are the end point of employability creation, not the beginning. The education system is the primary incubator—and in India, it is sadly lacking. By some estimates, barely 40% of Indian graduates are employable. This is predictable when education models have few options or weightage given to skills and knowledge relevant in today’s market; nor is there sufficient interaction and integration between educational institutions and industry to facilitate internships, mentoring initiatives and feedback loops.

Skilling India is a mammoth task. The coming years will see substantial productivity increases, but also significant worker dislocation. Central government initiatives make for good messaging—but they are only one part of the solution.

Source: Mint epaper, 24-08-2016