India celebrated its 75th Independence day with great fanfare, flag flying, feasts, and festivals at home and abroad. It is indeed a great moment to review and to reflect on the occasion and also guide the nation going forward to meet the aspirations of all the people of India. India has accomplished a great deal in the last 75 years. However, a great deal still needs to be performed to deliver the essence of Independence on equality, equity, freedom, inclusion, and creating opportunities for most people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Undertakings needing clarity
The Prime Minister in his celebrated speech from Red Fort outlined five pledges to focus on: Making India a developed nation by 2047; removing all traces of colonisation; taking pride in our roots and heritage; unity and integrity; and sense of duty among citizens.
These great pledges need much more clarity and a broader national conversation to socialise and institutionalise for implementation.
First, what kind of a developed nation do we want to be? Do we want a nation with high GDP and a few ultra-rich, like in some western countries, with high inequality, exclusion, poverty, hunger, injustice, violence, and unrest? Or do we want a developed nation with distributed wealth, with peace, prosperity, inclusion, happiness, and equal opportunities for all? Do we want a developed nation for a selected few or for all? This requires laser-like focus on the Constitution, democracy, diversity, freedom, equality, equity, and justice. Do we want clean air, potable water, and adequate energy first? This will require understanding and the implications of independent, autonomous institutions, engaged civil society, decentralised development, and a scientific mindset.
Second, removing all traces of colonisation can only happen if we treat those who are weaker well and abolish scavenging, child labour, the caste system, and male and high caste dominance in our system.
Third, while taking pride in our roots and heritage, we must let go of past prejudices and privileges to look at the future prospects for everyone.
Fourth, unity, and integrity are essential for peace and progress. Still, they will demand a deeper understanding and tolerance of religion, race, caste, customs, language, social status, etc.
Finally, the sense of duty among citizens will require discipline, character, values, morals, ethics, and selfless sacrifice to serve and help others.
A charged environment
Unfortunately, in the present toxic and tense environment, with its polarised politics, top-down governance, command and controlled organisations, lack of open and honest conversation, a managed and manipulated media, high on Hindutva, a marginalisation of Muslims and minorities, a renaming of cities, a rewriting of history and a lot more, it is difficult to implement the Prime Minister’s pledges. In addition, when the global trend is to predominantly value power and profit, it is hard to get a leader’s attention to real issues related to people and the planet. Today, what is good for the planet and the people is not on the agenda of global leaders. So, what are the kind of pledges we need to help achieve the Prime Minister’s agenda in this environment?
A much-needed conversation
I suggest we have a conversation on the following five pledges to help build an India of the future.
I will treat every fellow human being with respect, dignity, and love irrespective of their religion, race, caste, colour, custom, carrier, gender, language, or residence. I will study and follow the United Nations human rights charter in language and in spirit and offer all possible help and support to my fellow human beings to make their life safe, secure, and better.
I will work hard to protect the Indian Constitution to safeguard the nation’s democracy, freedom, diversity, inclusion, equality, justice, etc., through independent and autonomous institutions, an engaged and active civil society, a rational mindset, and an available legal system.
I will be a good citizen and practise truth and not lies, trust and not mistrust, and love and not hate. I will live by ethical and moral standards — not engage in corruption, tax evasion, crime, hate, violence, drugs, cheating, lies, abuse, personal attacks, vendetta, misinformation, etc. I will not get engaged in taking revenge and will learn to practise anger management, forgiveness and reconciliation. I will respect women, the girl child and the young and protect their interests.
Think of public service
I will devote a few hours a week to public service at no cost in my local community to ensure cleanliness, provide basic needs, feed the hungry, educate and take care of children and the elderly, provide health services, develop skills, play sports, entertain, plant trees, provide mentorship, provide legal services, oral hygiene, transport, fix equipment, run the local library, read stories, etc. I will find my own ways to help others without outside support.
I will practise and promote Gandhian ideas of non-violence at home, in the family, in schools, streets, in the neighbourhood, the community, the village, and the city. I will not use verbal abuse and anger that hurt fellow human beings. In the process, I will develop a rational, logical, and scientific mindset that values facts and not fiction and data and not dogma — the mindset that can carry on meaningful dialogue with respect for the other’s opinion and different viewpoints without arguments, anger, insult, and hate; the mindset that can recognise differences through effective communication, collaboration, cooperation, and co-creation.
Needed, a mass movement
To take these pledges and follow them is a tall order. However, unless there are enough people in the country at various levels in government, business, civil society, the defence services, the judiciary, the media, the fields of science and technology, education, health, agriculture, labour, art and craft, and the minorities, women, the youth, etc. who believe, practise and promote these pledges, it would be challenging to turn the tide and build an inclusive nation for all that our founding fathers, freedom fighters, and we would be proud of. I have great confidence in Indian history, heritage, civilisation, and wisdom of the Indian people to bring diverse groups with courage, commitment, and conviction together to promote democracy, freedom, inclusion, and development for all the people of India.
I am taking this pledge. Are you willing to join me?
Sam Pitroda, a telecom/IT engineer, innovator, entrepreneur, global thinker and policy maker was adviser to Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh on technology missions, innovations and digital India with a rank of a Cabinet Minister
Consumption is an important element of human civilisation. The success of modern economies is dependent on, and measured a great deal by, the level and nature of consumption. From the hunter-gatherers whose consumption was survival-centric to the millennials for whom consumption is about fulfilling aspirations, the nature of consumerism has seen tremendous shifts.
Changes in consumption
The notion of consumption has changed and today, several streams of thoughts co-exist. The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes famously showed his contempt for material things by living in a barrel. Since the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle class in developed countries has led to a growth in consumption. While on the one hand, the acquisition and display of material wealth are acceptable and even appreciated by a large section of society, another stream of thought advocates minimalism. The COVID-19 pandemic brought shifts in consumer behaviour. Lockdowns brought more people into the e-commerce fold. Due to the economic impact of the pandemic, the world witnessed a shrinkage of demand. But post-pandemic recovery and suppressed consumerism is now leading to ‘revenge shopping’.
Modern-day consumerism is not only about wanting more but also wanting it fast. We are in an age of ‘hyper lapse consumerism’ — there is a clamour to be the fastest to reach the consumer. The ubiquitous growth of the Internet and the rise of e-commerce have fuelled hyper lapse consumerism, which refers not only to the kinds of products being sold but also to the ease with which consumers order them and the speed at which such products are delivered. According to a study by Invesp, 56% of online consumers between the age of 18 and 34 years expect the goods they have ordered to be delivered on the same day, whereas 61% want their packages even faster — within 1-3 hours of placing an order.
After e-commerce companies made delivery their core competence by putting boots on the ground and even drones in the sky, the competition to deliver faster and better is shaping consumer behaviour and industry patterns. Recently in India we saw food and grocery delivery companies announcing 10-minute deliveries for consumers in select cities. This is being done by strengthening the hyper-local logistical network, leveraging predictive algorithms, process optimisation and, in some cases, providing incentives and disincentives for delivery partners. When the 10-minute delivery plan was announced, policymakers and experts raised concerns that delivery professionals might resort to reckless driving and put themselves and others at risk in their rush to stick to timelines. Indiscriminate work pressure can lead to fatigue, mental health issues and other health issues among delivery professionals. In an industry which offers little to no social security for gig workers, this could have serious consequences. A NITI Aayog report, ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’, suggests extending social security for gig and platform workers, including paid sick leave, health access and insurance, and occupational disease and work accident insurance.
Hyper lapse consumerism is not without its benefits. According to NITI Aayog, in 2020-21, about 7.7 million workers were engaged in the gig economy, accounting for 1.5% of the total workforce in India. This is expected to grow to 23.5 million workers by 2029-30, making up for 4.1% of the total livelihood in India. According to a report titled ‘Unlocking the Potential of the Gig Economy in India’, by Boston Consulting Group and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, India’s burgeoning gig economy has the potential to provide up to 90 million jobs in the non-farm economy alone, generate over $250 billion in the volume of work and contribute 1.25% to the country’s GDP in the long term.
At the core of the gig economy growth are behavioural shifts among consumers. Along with being fast, shopping has become more impersonal. The local kirana store owners have paved the way for ‘delivery buddies’ and OTPs. Many people don’t buy groceries on a monthly basis any more; they buy them in a more piecemeal fashion. Often, they prefer getting meals delivered at home instead of going out.
The way forward
Going ahead, there are two paths. Either we continue with hyper lapse consumerism or shift back to a more laid-back delivery model. In the rush to come up with better value propositions for the customer, businesses often tend to ignore the social, ethical, environmental and personal costs of business decisions. These decisions get influenced by, and further influence, consumer needs and behaviour. While advertising serves a positive purpose by educating consumers, much attention has been focused on the question of whether advertising is manipulative.
However, putting the onus entirely on either businesses or on consumers would be unjust. For businesses, the pursuit of valuation, revenue, profits, and the pursuit of equity, social good, good health and environment need not always be mutually exclusive. For consumers too, the pursuit of convenience and amusement should not make them ignorant towards the hardships of many. Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of George Orwell’s1984 and Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World in the foreword of his bookAmusing Ourselves to Death . In1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain, whereas, inBrave New World , they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
While much has been written about the regulatory and technical aspects of 10-minute delivery, we must also analyse it from an ethical, social and behavioural perspective. Both consumers and businesses should be mindful of the wide-ranging consequences of their actions, and 360-degree analysis of business decisions must be undertaken for the larger good. After all, technology gives us leverage to solve many problems, but only wisdom can tell us which problems are worth solving.
Divya Singh Rathore and Pratyush Prabhakar are public policy professionals. Their Twitter handles are @_divyarathore and @pratyushpbk
Recently, Chamal, who drives a battery-operated vehicle in the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens in Kandy, told this journalist that the common man in Sri Lanka greatly values India’s support, especially as it comes during a turbulent phase in the island nation’s economic history.
In Wellawaya in Uva Province, a self-effacing Sinhalese farmer was busy harvesting his paddy crop raised during the Yala cultivation season (May to August). He interrupted the translator to say that he has received normal yield this time thanks to “the supply of chemical fertilizers from India.” In the preceding Maha season (September to March), this small-scale farmer had suffered 50% crop loss on account of the Sri Lankan government’s decision to abruptly migrate to organic farming.
Similarly, Nesamalar, who runs a tea shop in Nuwara Eliya of Central Province, said Sri Lankans are aware that India cannot constantly provide generous assistance, but still expect their neighbour to give new loans.
A veteran government official in Colombo pointed out that even “certain fringe groups,” known for their anti-India rhetoric, stayed silent when the rest of Sri Lankan society was “tremendously appreciative” of what India did.
Greater engagement
These accounts illustrate how Sri Lankans feel about India’s response to the country’s economic crisis. India has provided assistance of nearly $4 billion to its neighbour. However, there is a strong case for greater Indian engagement with Sri Lanka, which is still struggling to tackle the crisis. Such engagement need not be confined to liberal loans; it could also include sharing technical expertise or knowledge, or helping the country upgrade skills in different areas of economic activity.
According to a cross-section of people in Sri Lanka, agriculture and allied activities are the priority areas where India can make a difference. For instance, Sri Lanka imports a considerable quantity of milk powder. On average, Colombo annually imports dairy products worth $315 million. Even though this accounts for about 1.5% of its total imports, Sri Lanka’s self-sufficiency in dairy production would not only have saved precious foreign exchange, but also reduced despondency among the people during the peak of the crisis. India can help Sri Lanka develop its dairy sector. Given Sri Lanka’s natural conditions, including an average annual rainfall of around 185 cm, its enormous potential in dairy development remains untapped. Leaving the rather unsuccessful joint venture project of about 20 years ago with the National Dairy Development Board of India behind, India and Sri Lanka should start afresh in the sector.
Likewise, the poultry sector, which is also in a state of crisis, deserves special treatment because it is unable to come to terms with rising input costs and shortages in animal and veterinary medicines. The domestic production of maize, which is largely used as the primary ingredient in domestic poultry feed, is still insufficient to fulfil the demand. This has compelled feed producers to fall back on high-cost alternatives. In this area, through its host of agricultural universities, India can share its knowledge on ways to increase both production and productivity. Agricultural machinery is another area where Sri Lanka needs a helping hand.
Considering how the problem on the energy front exploded into a major political crisis in Sri Lanka, India’s participation in energy projects will be desirable. But this can become a reality only if Sri Lanka’s leadership shows the political will to work with India. Even though provisional approvals were recently issued for the Adani Group’s wind power projects of over $500 million in the Northern Province, India would not like the Sampur experience repeated. In 2016, a 500-MW coal-fired power project in Sampur was scuttled even after getting environmental clearance.
Despite providing employment to a large proportion of the population and playing a key role in economic output, Sri Lanka’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have not achieved their potential for various reasons, one of which is the low adoption of technology, according to the 2021 annual report of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. Even though India has to go a long way in digitising operations of its MSMEs, its programmes including the ‘Digital MSME’ and ‘RAMP’ (Raising and Accelerating MSME Performance) can provide leads to the MSME sector.
School education is another area where India’s presence could be more felt. India can expand its scheme of establishing smart classrooms and modern computer labs to cover all those institutions teaching children of hill country Tamils, the most underprivileged section in Sri Lankan society. Indian universities can consider setting up satellite campuses in Sri Lanka. A collaborative project can be conceived for training second and third rung employees of the public sector.
And on the culture front, India can arrange for greater numbers of Buddhist monks to visit places of religious importance here.
Helping is in India’s interest too
The wish list can go on. There is enormous scope for India to engage in a constructive way with its southern neighbour, which is known for performing better than most other economies in Asia. India can ensure that the proposed development programme is equitably distributed in coverage. Needless to say, the Northern and Eastern Provinces, where the Tamil and Muslim ethnic minorities live, and which were badly hit by the civil war, should be given special attention as their contribution to Sri Lanka’s GDP is hardly 10%. This ought to be improved.
Sri Lanka’s political class and civil society, which would have observed closely the efficacy of the country’s constructive engagement with India in recent months, should facilitate the success of the programme instead of allowing themselves to be carried away by the anti-India rhetoric of a few groups. Given the history of bilateral ties, instances such as the Hambantota controversy are bound to arise. But what should not be glossed over is that a politically and economically stable Sri Lanka will be in India’s interest too.
T. Ramakrishnan visited Sri Lanka earlier this month on the invitation of the Sri Lanka Deputy High Commission in Chennai together with the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau
The hype around the Pegasus case (of allegations that the personal communication devices of a range of people in India, including journalists, civil society activists and politicians were targeted illegally using the Israeli-made spyware) and the misplaced hope in the Supreme Court of India (which had appointed a committee to probe the allegations) that the probe outcome would be decisive have now been deflated. There is something terribly amiss which will unfold over time, to reveal that the Centre and the States operate like a police state when it comes to surveillance. Corporations have and carry out the same level of surveillance, completely unfettered by the law. We perhaps placed too much hope in the central government and the Supreme Court. The Court did not have the courage to force the Government to disclose its intrusive activities. “None of your business” was the message sent out by the Union government. Perhaps setting up the committee itself was an exercise in futility.
As far back as 1986, in the Wiretap Act in the United States, the law prohibited private agencies from engaging in surveillance. When government seeks permission to do surveillance it must apply to a Federal Court, and only when there is “no other option”. Thirty-six years later, in India, corporate houses snoop on activists and competitors at will and collect huge dossiers on “persons of interest”.
In 1997, in Ireland, the Report on Privacy was released with its focus on private parties and it recommended the recognition of a new statutory tort. The report complained of the legal vacuum created by new technology outpacing laws and said that this was a classic case for law reform. Spying by governments was the new threat on the horizon.
The Patriot Act 2001 (or Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) enacted to counter international terrorism also required court approval. Much before this, the 11-member United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The court was a reaction to political spying. In the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a civil liberties protection officer was appointed to report to Congress.
Checks and balances
Here are some other examples.
The New South Wales Law Reform Commission, 2005 established the office of the privacy commissioner with inspectors to investigate complaints.
The United Nations contributed to the development of a legal framework evolving the “no secret” rules. For a government to say that it needed to do surveillance in “national interest” was not good enough at all. As the European Court of Human Rights held, “a secret surveillance system can undermine or even destroy democracy under the cloak of defending it”. Court warrants were required to obtain information, the intrusion was to be supervised by independent bodies, records of all surveillance were to be meticulously kept, and notices were to be given to those under surveillance. The principle of maximum disclosure would govern surveillance law. Journalists were recognised as being particularly vulnerable.
The Venice Commission Report, 2015 categorically stated that the right to privacy framework was not good enough in the evolving context of long-term societal harm. Independent control and oversight was necessary which included control over the executive, parliamentary oversight, judicial review and oversight of expert bodies. These reforms that took place in Europe seven years ago have yet to reach Indian shores.
Practice 6 of the UN Good Practices on Oversight Institutions includes the setting up of a civilian independent institution. Practice 7 empowers this institution to carry out an investigation and have unhindered access to information. Practice 9 empowers individuals to complain to a court.
The Indian scene is murky
In India, authorities authorise 9,000 interception orders every month, and these orders are not issued by courts but by police officers. Facial recognition technology that is found to be violative of human rights in several countries is routinely resorted to in India, with hardly any protest. Both the European Union and the United States stopped facial recognition sometime ago. The Citizen Lab, a digital surveillance research agency based in Canada, published a report (“Planet Blue Coat: Mapping Global Censorship and Surveillance Tools”) saying “Blue Coat devices are being used around the world ... we found these appliances in India”. The report talks about a software “PacketShaper” — “we discovered PacketShaper installations in India”.
According to another report by Citizen Lab, a surveillance software called “FinFisher” has been found on servers in India. The report says “FinFisher is a line of remote intrusion software whose products are marketed exclusively to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. FinFisher has gained notoriety because it has been used in targeted attacks against human rights campaigners in countries with questionable human rights records. We have found command and control servers for FinSpy in India”. The UN General Assembly “Report of the Special Rapporteur” 2013 has said, “[The] Government of India is proposing to install a centralised monitoring system that will route all communications to the central government allowing security agencies to bypass the service provider [,] thus taking surveillance out of the realm of judicial authorisation and eliminating accountability on the part of the State”. In 2013,The Guardian published a news article placing India at fifth position among countries where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered.
In 2014, the Delhi police issued a tender inviting technology companies to supply Internet monitoring equipment; 26 Indian and foreign companies expressed interest. In 2014, the Centre for Internet and Society, India, published a report titled “The Surveillance Industry in India”, which describes the activities of ClearTrail technologies (an Indian company) and the company’s “mass monitoring, Deep Packet inspection”.
More reports
There is more.
In 2015, a leading private television channel published an article titled “UPA was client of controversial Italian Spyware firm”. In the same year, a leading business daily published an article, “Why Indian Intelligence uses small companies for spying technology”. In 2016, another leading English daily published an article that described the setting up of the National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC). In 2018, the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee submitted a report to the Government which stated that “much intelligence gathering does not happen under the remit of the law, there is little meaningful oversight and there is a vacuum in checks and balances to prevent the untrammelled rise of a surveillance society”. In 2019, a news and opinion website quoted a former Home Secretary as saying that he was aware that the Israeli tech firm, NSO, had sold spy software to private firms and individuals in the country.
Instead of wasting time inspecting mobile phones and coming up with hardly any conclusion, the Supreme Court of India could do well to follow the extensive precedents developed abroad and enable binding orders that severely curtail the unlawful surveillance going on in India by the Government and private parties alike.
Colin Gonsalves is a senior advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India. The views expressed are personal
The Congress’s ‘Azadi Gaurav Yatra’ in August in Chhattisgarh, which was primarily a counter-narrative to the BJP’s ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign, stood out in terms of its scope as well as timing (the party is seeking a fresh mandate in the State next year).
The issue of aggressive nationalism has traditionally had limited appeal in State politics. However, the Congress believes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi could assume a central role in the BJP’s 2023 election campaign, and will likely use national and emotive issues. There were reportedly discussions on the party’s need to be more aggressive on nationalism in the ‘Chintan Shivir’ in Udaipur too. This was followed by the Azadi Gaurav Yatra; the Bharat Jodo Yatra starts next month.
The party concedes that the BJP has an edge on the issue of nationalism, but it also feels that core BJP voters do not identify with anyone apart from Mr. Modi in the party. Such outreach programmes, a Congress worker said, will help dispel the many “myths created around historical figures such as V.D. Savarkar, K.B. Hedgewar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay and reclaim the freedom fighter legacy of the Congress.” Additionally, the party is also attempting to “wrest back the BJP’s claims on Congress icons such as Sardar Patel”.
The Congress participates in ‘August Kranti Diwas’ in the run-up to Independence Day every year and celebrates icons such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. In addition, in 2019, the Bhupesh Baghel government organised a padayatra to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi. Mr. Baghel then questioned the BJP’s brand of “proactive nationalism,” contrasting it with Gandhi’s “inclusive nationalism.”
During the Azadi Gaurav Yatra, Congress leaders included the contributions made by different social groups in Chhattisgarh in the Independence movement. This was an attempt to assimilate local sentiments with the Congress’s legacy at a time when the BJP’s programme mainly focused on displaying flags. For its part, the BJP took its flag campaign to some of the remotest parts of the State, such as the households of the Pahadi Korwa, a particularly vulnerable tribal group. Congress leaders and workers told people that the party had organised similar events on the 25th and the 50th anniversary of Independence unlike the BJP. Mohan Markam, president of the Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee, sent the tricolour to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat urging him to hoist it at the RSS’ headquarters in Nagpur, where, the party claimed, the flag had not been hoisted for 52 years.
But the Azadi Gaurav Yatra was more than nationalism. It was organised in every Assembly constituency. Prominent leaders, including 71 sitting MLAs, led the campaign in their respective areas. They divided the 75-km route into smaller padayatras to be covered each day. In the few constituencies where it did not have an MLA, the party fielded those who had contested the 2018 elections. It used this opportunity to tell the people not only about the connect it had with the freedom struggle, but also to gauge their mood and take its initiatives to every nook and corner. In the process, the party also oiled its organisational machinery in all the constituencies, getting block- and booth-level workers to engage actively. Despite the differences between Mr. Baghel and senior Cabinet minister T.S. Singh Deo that play out in the public domain from time to time, the party presented a united face.
The party claims that it has nipped in the bud the Opposition’s plans to whip up emotions on nationalism. However, newer challenges await the Congress as the BJP is regrouping quickly, making organisational changes, exploring new caste equations and organising street protests.
shubhomoy.s@thehindu.co.in
Sometimes, only a thin line separates use of power from its misuse. Political calculations, not medical sense or public interest, went into the setting up of the inquiry commission probing the circumstances that led to the death of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in December 2016. In order to ease the process of re-integrating himself with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) after a period of isolation, former Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam laid a precondition for his coming back to the fold — a probe into Jayalalithaa’s death. The AIADMK’s Edappadi K. Palaniswami found it easy to acquiesce as the purported antagonist — V.K. Sasikala, Jayalalithaa’s aide — was a common enemy. Thus, the A. Arumughaswamy Commission of Inquiry (CoI) was constituted in September 2017. The first sign of trouble in this post mortem deconstruction was when Apollo Hospitals, where Jayalalithaa was treated until her death, claimed the CoI was seeking to fix criminal intent on the part of the hospital. The hospital approached the Madras High Court pleading that the CoI was not qualified to inquire into the correctness of treatment meted out, and went on to suggest, as it did to the CoI in 2018, that a medical board be constituted to assist the judge, but it was rejected. The Supreme Court stayed the proceedings before the CoI in April 2019. In 2021, the Supreme Court favoured the constitution of a medical panel from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, to advise the CoI. This panel submitted its report earlier this month, agreeing with the hospital’s submission that Jayalalithaa had suffered a matrix of diseases, for which she was given correct and appropriate treatment, and averred with the final diagnosis.
After umpteen extensions, the CoI finally submitted its report on August 27. It has recommended that the government conduct an inquiry into the role of a few persons, including Sasikala, who did not depose in person before it. Interestingly, the man who was responsible for the CoI, Mr. Panneerselvam too delayed his deposition until March this year, and remained largely non-committal even when he appeared. Evidently, the political advantage the commission provided for the AIADMK had ceased to be relevant. In the interregnum, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam has taken over the reins of the State. To now flog this issue beyond death would be sorely lacking in sagacity, and mark a new low in politicking. The government will do well to put this non-issue to rest once and for all. No political mileage can be squeezed from this report by anyone.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message, in a tweet on Monday evening, expressing condolences to the victims of the flooding in Pakistan, is a welcome gesture, especially after weeks of silence over what has been one of the worst natural disasters in the neighbourhood in recent times. More than 1,100 people have died, and over 33 million people have been affected, as officials say one-third of the country is under water, and estimate about $10 billion in damage to homes, roads and infrastructure. The floods have also affected standing crops, and as the waters recede, fears of disease as well as food shortages are expected to rise. In addition, the worry that the devastating floods have been caused due to climate change is a worry for all of South Asia, one of the world’s regions most vulnerable to global warming. On Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres launched a global appeal for aid to Pakistan, that he said had been hit by a “monsoon on steroids”, indicating unnatural climate patterns. Countries such as the U.K., the U.S., China, the UAE, Qatar and Turkey have already dispatched aid to Pakistan, and many others have promised help, while the IMF announced a $1.1 billion bailout tranche on Tuesday, as part of ongoing negotiations with the country that is already steeped in an economic crisis. Given that the crisis will only deepen at this point, Pakistan Finance Minister Miftah Ismail also said on Monday that he may propose lifting the trade ban imposed on India after the Jammu-Kashmir reorganisation in 2019, so as to import Indian vegetables and essential commodities. Thus far, Islamabad has only made exceptions for pharmaceutical imports from India during the COVID-19 pandemic, and India’s humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.
Despite the poor state of India-Pakistan ties, both New Delhi and Islamabad must put aside their domestic considerations, and seize the moment to help those stranded in the flooding as best they can. India cannot pride itself as being the “first responder” in the neighbourhood — as it has been for Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Afghanistan — if it fails to see the suffering right at its land boundary with Pakistan. It would be churlish and short-sighted of Pakistan to reject an opportunity to lift the trade ban with India that has only hurt its own interests, and to give up a source of affordable supplies at a time of such calamity. And it would be both tragic and ridiculous if the enmity between the two countries would not allow them to work together at a time such as this, even as their governments allow their cricket teams to play each other for financial considerations. Significantly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif are due to travel to Uzbekistan in September for the SCO summit. While a more lasting dialogue, that has been suspended between the two countries for nearly a decade over the terrorism issue, is unlikely, the leaders must find the time to discuss ways to mitigate the catastrophe at hand.
New Delhi, August 30: A Bill to take away the special privileges of the ICS and IP officers was introduced in the Lok Sabha to-day by Mr. Ram Niwas Mirdha, Minister of State for Home Affairs. The former “Secretary of State Service Officers (conditions of service) Bill” seeks to bring the conditions of service of these officers on a par with those of the IAS and IPS cadres respectively, except so far as pay scales and pension rates are concerned. When this Bill becomes law, Government will get the power to order compulsory retirement “in public interest” of ICS and IP officers also. Further, such officers will not be entitled to claim that their pension should be paid in pound sterling or that it should be paid outside India. These officers will continue to draw pay or pension at the old rates which are higher than those for IAS or IPS officers. The Bill says that Government do not, as a matter of policy, favour adverse changes in the conditions of service of Government servants as regards pay or pension rates.The special privileges of the ICS and IP officers had been guaranteed and made inviolable by Article 314 of the Constitution. This article was deleted by the Constitution (28th amendment) Bill adopted in the budget session this year. Entitled “the former Secertary of State Service Officers (conditions of service) Bill, 1972,” the legislation fixes the retirement age of the ICS members at 58, with powers to the Government to retire him earlier at 50 or on completing 30 years of service.
Paris, Aug. 30: A semi-official statement coinciding with the arrival of German delegates says that in the event of Germany refusing pledges demanded by France the only solution in conformity with the Peace Treaty would be refusal of moratorium and the declaration of Germany’s default. It further declares that in the event of inconceivable adoption of moratorium without pledges it would give liberty of action to France who is unable to abandon the position taken up in London. At a meeting of the Repatriation Commission at which the U.S. is semi-officially represented, the German delegate Sehroeder spoke at length on the position in Germany and explained the German proposal for guaranteeing deliveries of timber and coal by private contracts and a deposit of 50 million gold marks from Beichabaaka reserves in the city in occupied territory.
By all accounts, Varun Nath was mildly inconvenienced for a few minutes. At around 7 am on August 30, Nath was stuck in a lift in his posh Gurgaon highrise for 3-4 minutes. When the lift operator, accompanied by a security guard got him out, he proceeded to slap them both. The CCTV footage that caught him in the act does not have sound. But it appears from the video that while his victims were trying to speak, Nath’s first response was the violence of the entitled. Earlier this month, Bhavya Roy was caught on camera, with audio, abusing security guards at a Noida condominium. Unfortunately, both incidents are not infrequent. What has changed is that with the ubiquity of the camera — CCTVs, cellphones — the entitlement and casual violence that marks Indian society is now there for all to see.
Is the camera, then, so often seen as an instrument of “Big Brother”, a way to bring to light daily injustices that are otherwise ignored? It is easy to imagine how — given the relative privilege and power of the residents of a high-rise vis-a-vis the staff — incidents like the ones involving Roy and Nath would be brushed under the carpet had it not been for the “viral videos”. Yet, as with all era-defining technology, the assessment of mass surveillance and recording needs a nuanced approach.
It is easy to get swayed by the current of justifiable outrage at the reprehensible behaviour displayed in the videos. Yet, outrage alone is not enough to fix an unequal society and an ineffective criminal justice system. That requires an honest conversation about class, caste and the forms of violence used to police their boundaries. And the camera, as much as it is a tool for shining a light on dark places, can also be used to breach the boundaries of personal space and tell stories without context. The abusive behaviour in Gurgaon and Noida are instances of the former. But, the hidden camera — or the colony and office CCTV — can be used to great detriment too.
There are indications that India will join the growing number of countries and international bodies that have responded to Pakistan’s appeal for help to deal with the ravages of the worst floods to hit the country in more than a decade. According to a report in this newspaper, discussions are underway at the highest levels on extending assistance to the beleaguered nation. In the past, too, the humanitarian impulse to reach out to a neighbour in crisis has moved Delhi and Islamabad to keep their geopolitical rivalry in abeyance. Pakistan provided assistance after the Gujarat earthquake of 2001. India did likewise when large swathes of Pakistan were flooded in 2010. The cooperation between the two countries during the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 even precipitated conversations about a collaborative disaster relief mechanism. Unfortunately, however, there has been little headway on that count, though the two countries did put down the cudgels again during the Kashmir floods of 2014.
Pakistan has experienced an unusually wet monsoon this year. The season began in June, a month earlier than usual, after a nearly two-month-long drought. In August, the country received more than three times the normal rainfall. Though scientists can’t yet affirm the extent to which the catastrophe has been aggravated because of climate change, there is near unanimity that the deluge bears the imprint of a global-warming-induced extreme weather event. Swollen rivers cause more havoc because drainage systems in cities have not received adequate attention from the country’s planners. In several parts of Pakistan, embankments that have not been repaired for years have been swept away.
The similarities between the calamity confronting Pakistan today and India’s recent experiences with weather vagaries are striking. This shouldn’t be surprising. The two countries have shared colonial legacies in urban planning and flood management. The same southwest monsoon that brings the bulk of India’s annual rainfall causes rain in Pakistan as well. The melting glaciers in the Himalayas do not respect borders. The ecological continuities in the Subcontinent make the case for regional cooperation on climate-related matters compelling. India and Pakistan do come together during negotiations at the UNFCCC fora — they are a part of an informal coalition that often asks for more financial action from developed countries to check climate change. But the outlook of South Asian governments towards forces of nature seems to be frozen in an era when the place of river and mountain systems in diplomacy is determined by economic and political considerations. The Subcontinent could learn from ASEAN’s initiative to draft a State of Climate Report on the eve of COP-26 last year — it outlines opportunities for cooperation and collaboration in the region for combating climate challenges. Data sharing mechanisms on river flows, flood alert systems, even a common renewable energy-dominated electricity grid, could substantially reduce the climate vulnerability of people in South Asia.
After contracting in 2020-21, the Indian economy rebounded sharply in 2021-22, ending the year 1.5 per cent above its pre-pandemic level. This year the Reserve Bank of India expects it to grow at 7.2 per cent, making India one of the fastest growing economies in the world during this period. But the recovery from the pandemic lows has been anything but even. Beyond the headline numbers, there are indicators of the unabated pain stemming from the pandemic and the continuing distress in parts of the economy.
One possible indication of the scale of the distress comes from data on households/individuals who have worked under MGNREGA. In 2019-20, the year prior to the pandemic, 7.88 crore individuals worked under the scheme. In 2020-21, the first year of the pandemic, this number rose to 11.19 crore. While in the subsequent year it dipped to 10.62 crore, the number of individuals working under the scheme remained considerably higher than in the pre-pandemic period. In fact, so far this year, 6.29 crore individuals have already worked under the scheme as compared to 6.21 crore in the entire year of 2014-15. This growing reliance on MGNREGA likely indicates that other more remunerative employment opportunities remain limited. Another pointer to the economic distress at the lower end of the income distribution scale comes from the National Crime Records Bureau report — there has been a rise in suicides by daily wage earners and in 2021, daily wage earners accounted for a fourth of suicides in the country. As this paper has also reported, in 2021-22 over 2.3 crore life insurance policies were surrendered way ahead of their maturity by policy holders — this was more than thrice the number of policies surrendered the previous year. Other indicators point to subdued household purchasing power. As per data from SIAM, in 2021-22, sales of two-wheelers were lower than their 2019-20 levels by almost a quarter. Similarly, as per CRISIL, sales of cars priced below Rs 10 lakh grew by a mere 7 per cent in 2021-22, while those priced above Rs 10 lakh (the premium segment) grew by 38 per cent.
The bigger picture that emerges is one of pain at the lower and middle levels of income distribution. As policymakers navigate the tumultuous global macroeconomic environment, they must be mindful of the highly uneven nature of the recovery, and take measures to address the distress of the most vulnerable.
Written by C P John
Mikhail Gorbachev is no more. Often labelled as the destroyer of the Soviet Union and a villain in the communist movement, Gorbachev passed away after living in post-Soviet Russia for three decades.
Gorbachev was born to a poor peasant family: He recalled his granddad Andrey and maternal granddad Panteley toiling hard in their wheat field and often eating boiled frogs for dinner. He had worked with his father Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev on the combined harvester for five years. In the 1930s, during the Stalin era, the poor peasants had received land from the state and were happier than before. The poor peasant boy Gorbachev could tread the corridors of higher education in Moscow and rose to the high echelons of the Soviet communist party. He was elected the general secretary of CPSU in 1985.
In the post-Soviet era, everyone discussing the plight of Russia and its Soviet sisters often asked the question of whether the Soviet Union collapsed due to the democratic drugs injected by Gorbachev during his tenure as the GS of the CPSU. To an interviewer who recalled writer Solzhenitsyn accusing Gorbachev of causing the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said: “Well without glasnost he (Solzhenitsyn) would still be living in exile in Vermont chopping wood.”
True, it is not the democratic drug that killed the Soviet Union; but the predecessors who hadn’t been applying it were responsible for its inevitable death. In the first interview after stepping out of the Kremlin walls, Gorbachev was asked if he still called himself a socialist and whether he thought socialism was still a credible project. His answer was: “It is not socialism that has been defeated, but Stalinism disguised as socialism. What has been defeated is a model that levelled everything down and ruled out innovation. I feel that what I participate in is, on the contrary, a collective search for justice, freedom and democracy. Mankind will continue that search, as do movements professing a wide variety of ideals”. He told the same correspondent that the thought and moral authority of people like Andrei Sakharov, the dissident scientist, was very important to him.
At the historical 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, Gorbachev put forward his ideology of peace and argued for global disarmament. He thought the race for weapons was the major reason for nations putting aside pro-people projects. In 1988, he expanded this idea in his speech to the United Nations: “Only together can we put an end to the era of wars. Our common goal must be cooperation, joint creativity, joint development.”
Gorbachev had a special interest in the security and peace of Europe. He stuck to the principles of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe signed in 1990, which laid the foundation for peace architecture immediately after the end of the Cold War. But, he could understand that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the designs of NATO to expand into the European contours will destroy the peace in Europe forever. In 2009, speaking at the Council of Europe, he said, the worst blunder was the decision to expand NATO and turn it into “‘guarantor of security not only in Europe but beyond its borders”.
Gorbachev criticised President Vladimir Putin for his new totalitarian advances and his adherence to the conservative 19th-century religious philosopher Konstantin Leontiev and Ivan Ilyin, who became a fascist during his years in exile.
As he feared, the expansion of NATO ended in the Ukraine-Russia war. Gorbachev had warned the Soviet polity about the threat of environmental destruction caused by human interventions in pursuit of ever-increasing profits. At the time of his departure, the whole world is paying for it.
However, Gorbachev abandoned the communist ethos and could not address the new progressive thinking radicals across the world. Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s legacy is misjudged as a tragedy; it’s a tragedy he could have averted.
Chou En-Lai is said to have replied to President Richard Nixon’s question of how he assessed the French Revolution that it was too soon to judge. It is too early to attempt any final assessment about Gorbachev’s historic political interventions.
The writer is general secretary, the Communist Marxist Party
In his new book, Leadership, Henry Kissinger writes that “leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: The first, between the past and the future; the second between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.” Quintessentially, the leaders “must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp of direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down a strategy.”
The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy was that his strategies of statecraft lost that equilibrium, which was most essential during a period of transition when values and institutions were losing their relevance and consensus was lacking on what constituted a worthy future, and society was unwilling or unprepared to tolerate sacrifices as a way station to a more fulfilling future. While Gorbachev had a realistic assessment of the Soviet society based on its history, mores and capacities, he failed to elicit in his people a wish to walk alongside him. He was no doubt a courageous personality, fired up by a sense of destiny to transcend the “routine”. But the equilibrium was lost in his determination of which inheritances from the past should be preserved, and which adapted or discarded. Simply put, he failed to sculpt the future and give life to his vision using the materials available in the present.
To be kind, Gorbachev had to navigate within a narrow margin, furrowing his revolutionary pathway between the relative certainties of the past and the uncertainties of a future veiled in mist. Kissinger counsels that in such moments, leaders must take “step by step, must fit means to ends and purpose to circumstance if they are to reach their destinations”. Gorbachev utterly failed in that respect. He was not only a man in a hurry but relished the sheer headiness of it, goaded in no small measure by his acolytes in the West who were only too well aware of his susceptibility to flattery and were determined to breach the citadel that Joseph Stalin built. The country paid heavily for Gorbachev’s “hubris”.
Nonetheless, Gorbachev’s legacy in restructuring his country’s society and economy and reviving the spirit of Khrushchev’s short-lived attempt to deliver openness (glasnost) cannot be minimised. The consequent upheaval caused great sufferings to the people and an overall paralysis of power and will. But fundamentally, he was a Soviet apparatchik who rose in the party apparatus steadily and advanced his career in the usual way by making use of his position as Stavropol party chief to rub shoulders with the party elite from Moscow. Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss, Mikhail Suslov, the hardline ideologist, and Leonid Brezhnev, a man of great vanities, saw potential in Gorbachev, each for his own reasons.
Within six months of taking over as the party secretary in Moscow, Gorbachev overhauled the politburo, replaced 41 per cent of the voting members of the 27th party Congress and forced into retirement top military officers and thousands of bureaucrats. Perestroika and glasnost became his catch phrases. Gorbachev’s intention at the beginning would have been to work with the party, through the party, to reform the Soviet system. However, early enough, he possibly concluded that communism could no longer be the ruling force in Soviet life.
This meant taking on the mammoth bloc of over 18 million party and state officials who were stakeholders in the status quo. His zigzagging between the revival of Marxism and the ruthless dismantling of the political structure that provided the pillars for communist rule was all too apparent. He even toyed with the idea of a multi-party system. Similarly, he tried to pull a reluctant nation towards a market economy with shock therapy aimed at opening up the economy to private enterprise, removing subsidies, instituting market-driven pricing and even creating a currency of value.
The nation was unprepared to follow him, and, inevitably, a hiatus developed between his promise and performance, which coalesced with the seething disaffection already existing in society. The disconnect between the public and the ruling elite got further aggravated. By 1990, four years into power, perestroika was widely seen to have failed and things had spun out of Gorbachev’s hands.
To be sure, the West exploited Gorbachev’s plight. President Reagan’s strategy to increase American military spending was predicated on the logic that, eventually, the Soviet Union would be forced into bankruptcy and the communist system would collapse. With the help of Saudi Arabia, Reagan made the price of oil drop to $8 per barrel that drastically reduced the Soviet income, forcing Gorbachev to cut back on bankrolling allies that eventually led him to unilaterally disband the Warsaw Pact (much against the advice of Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand).
One thing led to another and on the basis of a verbal assurance from the US, Gorbachev relented on the unification of Germany. It is absolutely staggering that such an intelligent and erudite mind weaned on history and dialectics would end up the way Gorbachev did. He passes into history as an epic tragic hero of Sophoclean proportion.
Of course, the West lionised him as a hero of our times. But in reality, Russia was never allowed to enter the “common European home” that he fantasised; his disarmament vision was abandoned by the US; the promise to him that NATO would never expand eastward “by an inch” was never kept.
Ironically, within two-three years of the collapse of the USSR, Washington began mooting an expansion of NATO in anticipation of the need to contain a vengeful Russia regaining great power status. And the first Chechen war over secession began by 1994, which, according to President Putin, was a US project with a long-term agenda to dismember Russia. Clearly, mixed feelings about Gorbachev in the Russian mind can be put in perspective. His legacy is seen as years of upheaval, national humiliation, loss of global stature and ultimately, hardly anything of enduring value on the positive side.
Gorbachev’s best obituaries are sure to originate from the West for whom his legacy is about the disbandment of the CPSU and the dismantling of the Soviet state. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth state assets were transferred to the West in the upheaval that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
What is the religion-state relationship under our constitution? What kind of freedom of religion has the constitution guaranteed? What is the history of Ganesh Chaturthi? Why should faith communities, rather than the state, come forward to resolve such disputes? These are some of the issues at the heart of the Idgah controversy.
Freedom of religion can be best described as the relationship between religion and the individual from which the state is completely excluded. The state is expected to maintain a principled distance from all religions. Moreover, the state won’t align itself with any particular religion, particularly the majority religion, nor pursue any religious tasks of its own. To the framers of our constitution for a multi-religious society like ours, the state’s neutrality in religious matters was the mechanism to regulate inter-group behaviour.
Unfortunately, the Indian state, rather than withdrawing from religion, has been playing a central role in religious matters in the name of “public order”. To further their narrow political ends, political parties too have been using religious idioms in their election campaigns. Even in the latest controversy, the Karnataka government did not demonstrate the desired neutrality. The matter unnecessarily went to the high court and Supreme Court.
Inter-religious disputes are best resolved by the faith communities themselves. It would have been much better if the organisers of Ganesh Chaturthi had entered into a dialogue with the Waqf Board and involved liberal Muslims in the deliberations. Ideally, in the spirit of tolerance and accommodation, the Muslim management should have come forward and helped the organisation of the Ganpati festival. Such an action on the part of Idgah committee would have created an atmosphere of amity and harmony.
The state’s active involvement in support of one community’s demand in order to garner a few votes is short-sighted strategy. Coercion and use of state power in such contentious matters not only goes against the neutrality principle but also undermines the lofty ideal of “fraternity” mentioned in the preamble of our constitution.
The visionary framers of the constitution, in their wisdom, made the freedom of religion the most restricted fundamental right — it is not only subject to public order, morality and health but also subject to all other fundamental rights. The right to profess, practise and propagate certainly includes the right to take out religious processions as we rejected in the Constituent Assembly the suggestion by Naziruddin Ahmad to insert the word “privately” in Article 25. Accordingly, religion is in the public square.
Ganesh Chaturthi had also played a major role in our freedom struggle. In fact, initially, the Hindu cultural revival in the 19th century and the freedom movement were intertwined.
The Hindu reassertion of rituals, pujas and processions did help mass mobilisation against the colonial government and ignited feelings of pride in the Hindus’ own spiritual heritage. In subsequent decades, some of these religious processions by Hindus as well as Muslims led to communal disturbances. In Pune, until 1894, Hindus used to enthusiastically participate in Muharram processions; in fact, they used to out-number Shia-Muslims. Hindu musicians were stopped from playing music before tabuts and Hindu girls were prevented from singing marsiyas(poetry commemorating Imam Husain’s Karbala martyrdom). Subsequently, Hindus were told not to celebrate an alien religion and Ganpati was organised on a much bigger scale.
One Marathi pamphlet said it in so many words — “by celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi festival with more and more pomp and by entertaining a pride for his own religion and Gods, every Hindu should give up fondness for an alien religion”. As a matter of fact, Ganesh Chaturthi as a festival used to be celebrated in a “quasi-public” way from the time of the Peshwas. It was fundamentally for the kinship group. By the 1890s, Ganpati celebrations were revived in a big way. The festival was not only deliberately modelled as a mirror image of Muharram but was also unfortunately politicised. But in 1895, to the disappointment of communalists, Hindus, in big numbers, returned to Moharram processions.
We must celebrate all festivals together in the spirit of harmony and brotherhood. The controversy over the 2.5 acres of the Idgah maidan in Bengaluru has revived memories of 1894. Till 1983, Ganesh Chaturthi used to be celebrated on the Idgah but then, just as in 1894 Muharram and the Ganpati festival fell on the same day, the Ganpati festival and Bakrid fell on the same day, leading to communal clashes.
The Waqf Board has been asserting its claim over this land for some 200 years. The claim was not denied by the state government in the Supreme Court and therefore the three-judge bench led by Justice Indira Banerjee ordered maintenance of status quo. On August 6, 2022, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) said that the Waqf Board has not registered the Idgah in its name in spite of having Eid prayers there since 1965. Karnataka High Court stayed the BBMP order on July 25 and permitted the use of Idgah not only for Eid prayers but also as a playground on Independence Day and Republic Day.
The BJP government within 24 hours moved the divisional bench and got the right to take the decision on the applications seeking use of the Idgah for Ganesh Chaturthi. The Waqf Board challenged this order in the apex court. When on August 30 a two-judge bench differed on this issue, CJI Justice UU Lalit immediately constituted a three-judge bench that eventually ordered maintenance of status quo.
The Waqf Board may have got a temporary legal relief but the task before the nation is to permanently kill the virus of communalism. A Muslim initiative to permit Ganpati pooja at Idgah would have been the fitting reply to those who want to take political advantage of people’s religious sentiments. Let there be peace between religions and fraternity between communities. Let the governments not deviate from the constitutional idea of absolute neutrality. Elections may be won or lost, but India as a multi-cultural nation must always win.
The writer is a constitutional law expert.
Professor Abhijit Sen, economist and former faculty at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) in Jawaharlal Nehru University passed away on August 29 due to a sudden heart attack. Primarily a teacher, he was also involved in policy-making in various roles for more than a decade — as a member of the Planning Commission (2004-14), the 14th finance commission and chairperson of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Price (CACP), among several other positions that he held during his almost two decades of involvement with policy making. But even during his leave of absence to advise the government on policy issues, he continued teaching and supervising research scholars at CESP throughout the three decades that he was associated with the centre. He remained a quintessential teacher-at-large for several students at JNU and elsewhere, bureaucrats, journalists, activists and anyone else who was willing to learn. It was not unusual for him to pick up a marker/chalk and start teaching in formal meetings or during informal get-togethers.
Sen was primarily an agricultural economist, starting from his seminal PhD thesis submitted at Cambridge University on the ‘Agrarian Constraint to Economic Development’. His basic proposition that agricultural problems remain the primary constraint to growth, based on a careful analysis of the post-Independence economic growth of the first three decades, remains relevant even today. His thesis argued that the root of the agrarian problem lies in the structure of Indian agriculture and increasing input intensity or institutional mechanisms such as share-cropping are unlikely to take care of the problems of surplus labour and poverty in agriculture. The nature of the agriculture problem is unlikely to be resolved without state intervention given the existing agrarian structure. For Sen, the resolution of the agrarian problem was not just key to overall growth but also necessary to take care of the problem of mass poverty.
Sen’s understanding of Indian agricultural problems based on his subsequent work on agriculture only confirmed his belief in the necessity of state intervention, something that he tried during his stint at the CACP and later through the High-Level Committee on Long Term Grain Policy, 2001. He argued for remunerative prices to farmers along with universalising the Public Distribution System (PDS), a belief he held and argued for during the debate on the National Food Security Act (2013). As a member of the Planning Commission, he argued for expanding the coverage of the PDS under the NFSA to make it near-universal, if not fully universal.
For him, the role of public policy was not just to achieve growth but also improve the lives of the poor. This belief came not just from his analysis of poverty trends in India, a subject that he deeply engaged with, but also from his profound engagement with policy and the role of the state. Sen’s contributions to the measurement of poverty and underlying data on consumption expenditure are recognised in India as well as globally. In particular, his contribution to the first ‘Great Indian Poverty Debate’ on some of the methodological issues not only forced the government to abandon the controversial estimates of poverty for 1999-2000 but also helped in further refinement of the methodology of data collection on consumption expenditure. He also contributed to the Tendulkar Committee report on poverty lines.
Sen’s firmness on various issues in policy circles and academic debates was perceived differently from different ideological perspectives. But his belief and firmness also came from his ideological commitment to facts based on hard data. It was this belief in dispassionately engaging with data that earned him praise and respect from various ideological quarters, despite divergences in approach. He also did not have biases about the sources of data. For him, facts came in different forms. Despite his ease with large-scale data, he was equally comfortable with and willing to engage with primary data coming from village surveys or through his interaction with activists. He was willing to let go of his own beliefs and ideas if the facts contradicted them and revise his opinion. It was this humility that endeared Sen to students as well as fellow policymakers and bureaucrats. His openness also helped him appreciate students, academics and activists from other disciplines.
The hunger to learn also meant that Sen published much less than he could have. It was not laziness but his quest for the complete story and understanding of all aspects of an issue which made him a less prolific writer than many of his contemporaries. He never wrote a book and published little but he would always encourage young researchers to publish and guided them with whatever knowledge, data and information he had. He had many more unfinished and unpublished papers than the ones he published. His desktop never shut down — even when he was unwell during the last two years, he continued working on his Excel files. He had much more to contribute, especially during the current period when his wisdom and knowledge are needed to make sense of what is happening to poverty, inequality, employment, state finance and many other issues on which he remained the authoritative voice for many.
The writer is Associate Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU
So much has changed in India since Independence, and even from when I entered the world of sports. In athletics and sports like boxing, there has been tremendous growth. Our sportspersons are doing an excellent job. In this regard, the recent performance in the Commonwealth Games held in Birmingham, UK, has been particularly encouraging. I congratulate all the athletes who took part in it. This momentum should be built on — first for the more challenging upcoming competitions like the World Athletics Championship, the Asian Games and, of course, the Olympics and also keeping the longer term in mind.
In the next 25 years, I hope to see us shine even brighter on the field and in the ring. In sports, success is measurable — we must aim to get more and more medals. All our athletes are doing better but what is most heartening to me is how young women and girls are bringing glory to the country. In many instances, they are outshining the men!
Over the years, especially in the last decade or so, the kind of support and facilities available to Indian athletes has improved by leaps. Gone are the days when talented athletes were unable to get exposure or were forced to train in facilities and with equipment that were not up to global standards. Now, there is both the budget and the support for athletes to do their best. Under the Target Olympic Podium (TOP) scheme, instituted by the current NDA government in 2014, for example, considerable funds were invested in nurturing athletes. In the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, this provided them a boost.
Now, I see more and more youngsters and children getting passionate about sports. This passion can be turned into concrete results.
One way in which sports will get a big boost in the country in the years to come is if India is able to host the Olympic Games sooner rather than later. This will almost certainly lead to the creation of more sports infrastructure, provide a boost to the economy and perhaps most importantly, expand the events in which India can be a medal competitor. More athletes in diverse sports will get a chance at least at the qualifier level. And, if there is strategic focus, training and dedication, the number of medal hopefuls and winners will surely increase.
Finally, for India@100, there is a message I would like to give to all young people — particularly to the young women and girls of India. There are many ways to find success and build an identity. But, if you have the talent and the dedication, there is something unique about achieving sporting success at the highest level.
A politician, businessman, doctor, engineer, any other professional — all these people can achieve a lot. But a sportsperson can achieve success in the spirit of pure competition. On the field, track, mat or in the ring, the only thing that matters is merit, fitness and hard work. No one can take your talent away from you. A sportsperson, when they achieve the highest honours, stands on a podium and holds the flag of India high for all the world to see. That is a feeling that is almost indescribable, as is the pride one feels at that moment.
By the time India turns 100, I want more and more young women, and men, from this country to have that amazing feeling.
The writer is a six-time winner at the World Boxing Championship and Olympic, Commonwealth Games and Asian Game medallist. This article is part of an ongoing series, which began on August 15, by women who have made a mark, across sectors
India’s GDP in the April-June quarter grew 13.5% to Rs 36.85 lakh crore, a growth rate that is 2.7 percentage points lower than the Reserve Bank of India’s forecast. A small part of the underperformance in the growth rate is on account of an upward revision in the previous year’s GDP number.
The three takeaways from the data are that on the production side, all sectors except contact services such as hotels and trade have crossed the pre-pandemic level. Consequently, the GDP is also above the pre-pandemic level. The economy has come out of shock induced by the outbreak of Covid-19, but the recovery in contact intensive sectors is still lagging.
The manufacturing sector in the April-June quarter of 2022-23 grew just 4.8% to Rs 6.05 lakh crore. It’s underwhelming and the likely cause is the damaging fallout of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which is slowing down global economic momentum.
One of the bright spots of the GDP data is the performance of private consumption which at Rs 22.07 lakh crore in the April-June quarter is well above the level recorded in the corresponding pre-pandemic period. However, there are unfavourable factors building up such as an increase in the price of crude oil over the last few days. The Indian basket of crude has increased over 10% in a couple of weeks to hit $102/barrel on August 30.
In all, it’s a mixed performance. The next couple of months could be tricky as the global slowdown takes effect even as oil prices remain elevated. It’s a challenging period for both RBI and the union government’s economic policy makers.
Visuals of waterlogged roads in Bengaluru and neighbouring Ramanagara have gone viral on social media, an indication that people everywhere are growing increasingly anxious about extreme weather events irrespective of geographical proximity to them. This is why the floods in Pakistan that have overrun a large part of that country has struck a chord in India. Everyone now recognises the harsh reality that in the age of climate change no one is safe.
The chaotic manner in which our urban centres have come up adds to our vulnerabilities. In Bengaluru, for instance numerous lakes have been filled up for construction. Rivers flowing through cities like Mumbai and Chennai and their adjoining wetlands and mangroves have faced encroachment. Robust stormwater drainages will have to be built with natural drainage systems getting depleted. Away from cities, hilly areas are also living dangerously. Road building, quarries and construction activities in hilly terrain continues unabated.
The Covid pandemic allowed the Union government to invoke the Disaster Management Act at a national level. The DMA requires district officials to identify potential threats at the local levels and pursue mitigating actions. Leaving this to the discretion of officials isn’t enough. A nationwide action plan is needed to help India address the damage that floods and extremely heavy rainfall can cause. The South Asian landmass is particularly vulnerable. India has set itself great economic goals. Preparing for climate emergencies is necessary if we are to insulate the economy from sudden shocks, which are going to happen all too frequently.
PM Modi has offered to help flood-devastated Pakistan and this is exactly what GoI should do. Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex is up to no good, but the people of Pakistan need help. Large swathes of northern, southern and southwestern parts of Pakistan are inundated. The death toll, already over 1,100, is climbing, more than 33 million people have been affected and early estimates put the damage in excess of $10 billion. All of this has compelled the UN to issue a flash appeal for $160 million to help Pakistan cope with the disaster. Worse, the natural calamity comes at a particularly trying time for Pakistan. After the fall of the Imran Khan government earlier this year, the new Shehbaz Sharif dispensation is yet to find its feet. Imran has been pushing for fresh elections, and political instability is growing. Pakistan’s economic troubles continue to pile up with high energy prices straining its import capacity and annual inflation hitting 24.9% in July. On Monday, IMF approved a long-awaited tranche of $1.1 billion in bailout funds for Pakistan. But this will mean little when 45% of the country’s cotton crop – a key input for Pakistan’s textile sector which makes up 60% of its exports – has been washed away.
Given this dire situation, India should seriously consider offering more than generous assistance to Pakistan. Reportedly, discussions are already underway. Pakistan’s finance minister has said Islamabad is considering importing vegetables from India through the land route. New Delhi shouldn’t hesitate. India has sent humanitarian aid to Afghanistan overland via Pakistan this year. True, it was Pakistan that had cut off all trade ties with India to protest the 2019 nullification of Article 370 vis-à-vis Jammu & Kashmir. But all that shouldn’t matter in this crisis. Sending medicines, food and temporary shelters – the typical requirements of victims of natural calamities – should be prioritised.
A genuine and substantial help from India will also be a good strategic move. For one, Pakistan’s response will tell India where the Sharif government and the generals stand in terms of need-based cooperation. Second, with China’s BRI projects in Pakistan running into trouble and Islamabad also trying to rebalance with the US, perhaps a small space is there for India to try and re-establish some negotiations with Pakistan. First, though, let’s help Pakistan.
With 2021 logging the highest ever count of road fatalities – 1.56 lakh deaths – the awful prospect of these senselessly tragic deaths repeating in greater numbers in coming years looms large. The grim number suggests governments at all levels aren’t doing enough. Two-wheelers accounted for 44.5% of deaths, up from 35% in 2018, and pedestrian deaths have doubled since then to 12% of deaths. While the NCRB report blames over-speeding for 60% deaths and dangerous/careless driving for 26% deaths, the latest Union ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) road accidents report is more nuanced.
MoRTH’s numbers show a staggering 70% of two-wheeler travellers killed in 2020 weren’t wearing helmets, and that 84% of car travellers who died weren’t wearing seatbelts. The Motor Vehicles Act amended in 2019 has made seat belts and helmets compulsory. But enforcement is lax. Equally importantly, a 2020 IIT Delhi study on road safety has suggested more focus on street and highway design and enforcement rather than the current overwhelming focus on motor vehicle safety.
Predictable and uniform design of medians, intersections, lanes, shoulders and pedestrian paths are absent in most urban centres. Most highways still lack enough safe crossing facilities for motorists and pedestrians while illegal openings in medians are a constant nightmare. Techniques like rumble strips aren’t employed adequately. There are a few governance innovations. In February, Tamil Nadu claimed a 70% drop in fatalities – although road accidents didn’t go down – in January against the same period in 2019 following a scheme offering Rs 1 lakh accident cover to ensure private and public medical care within the golden hour. And let’s recognise that careful driving and courteousness to other road users aren’t an Indian habit in general. We can start with us.
Mikhail Gorbachev's life was bookended by Stalinism. In the middle was his attempt to nix it. When he was born in 1931, Joseph Stalin's 'collectivisation' had already led up to the Great Famine of 1930-33.
By the Great Terror of 1937, the tone for life in the Soviet Union was set. When Gorbachev died on Tuesday, a Stalinist in Russia seeking to regain 'lost glory' - for which he blames Gorbachev squarely - continued his invasion of an old Soviet republic.
Hindsight, a funny mirror, portrays Gorbachev as the man who 'suddenly dismantled' a global power and counterpole to a superpower. But, in 1985, when he took over from the 73-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, the country was already well on the low road to penury, not helped by a bleeding war in Afghanistan.
Chernenko's predecessor, Yuri Andropov, as KGB chief in 1968, had shared classified data on the conditions of Soviet society with him. So, the 54-year-old already knew there was only one way for his country not to implode: by opening up (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika).
What followed was a free election in 1989 - not seen since the one after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks threw out - which accelerated the unfurling. Gorbachev had overestimated his ability to control a project that almost none in the leadership agreed with.
A little after Gorbachev visited India in 1986 and 1988, and after signing a landmark deal in 1987 with Ronald Reagan to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles, back home, asset-stripping was already on.
By Boxing Day 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. As was the Cold War. Gorbachev's plan was an open, socialist society with ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries free of Stalinism in its various formats. In that, he failed. But not for lack of trying.
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The economy grew 13.5% in Q1 2022-23, considerably slower than the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) forecast of 16.2%. Growth was driven by contact-intensive services, which faced Covid restrictions in the same quarter a year ago, and stepped-up government capex.
Agriculture surprised on the upside, growing twice as fast as a year ago despite an intense summer that was expected to hurt yields. Manufacturing snapped out of a contraction in the previous three months.
Demand revived in consumption, whose share climbed 5.9 percentage points to reach 59.9% of GDP, while investment demand rose by a more modest 1.9 percentage points to 34.7%. Exports held their share, but elevated energy prices swelled imports, which gained 5.3 percentage points. Government expenditure declined in terms of GDP share, which points to tighter control also reflecting in the fiscal deficit numbers.
This is the last quarter during which the beneficial low base effect on account of last year's lockdowns will be available. RBI expects GDP growth to decelerate sharply to 6.2% in the current quarter, and further to 4.1% and 4% in the subsequent ones. Downside risks to its growth projection have materialised in the first quarter, which is likely to influence its interest rate trajectory.
Inflation, too, is trending below forecast, although at 7.1%, projected for the current quarter, it remains well beyond the RBI's tolerance level. Shaktikanta Das anticipates a two-year pathway for retail inflation to reach the target 4%. Higher borrowing costs will affect both consumption and investment demand, especially the latter as the tap tightens on cheap international credit. As long as oil prices remain elevated, demand revival will be dampened by imports.
Policymaking should now be informed by the prospects of a protracted phase of high interest rates as the economy slows. Fiscal headroom has been squeezed by higher energy prices and elevated government debt levels. Gradual monetary tightening, though, risks allowing inflation to become entrenched as demand recovers.
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Whichever way one looks at it, the 13.5% growth in India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the April-June quarter is disappointing. Absent context, the number is high and the fastest pace of growth in four quarters; but factor in the base-effect (the first quarter of last year saw India being roiled by the Delta variant of the coronavirus), and estimates — including the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s 16.2% — and it is evident that something didn’t really go to script. Still worse, the buoyant 4.5% growth that agriculture showed in the quarter seems removed from the reality of lower output on account of an unseasonally warm March, and it is likely the number could be revised down the line. Indeed, factoring the 13.5% into RBI’s growth projections for 2022-23, leaving growth in other quarters untouched, results in a sub-7% number (6.7%). The government said after the numbers that India is still poised to grow at 7-7.5% this year.
So, what explains the number? Should we be worried? And what should the policy response be? It is a fact that GDP for the quarter marks a 3.8% growth over the corresponding quarter of 2019-20 (pre-pandemic). But it is also a fact that in the first quarter of 2021-22, the economy contracted 8.5% when compared to the corresponding quarter of 2019-20. This supports arguments that there has been real growth, but belies arguments that claim there was no base effect on account of last year’s number. Two factors may have contributed to the lower-than-expected number: One, the travails of the country’s informal sector (which has significantly lagged behind the formal sector, in terms of its recovery trajectory); and two, a rise of 1.3% in the government’s final consumption expenditure.
It is clear that the economy, while on the growth path, still needs a fiscal push — especially because the monetary policy stance has changed with RBI increasing interest rates to combat inflation. The good news in the numbers, though, is that both fixed capital formation and private final consumption expenditure numbers look healthy. Seen along with high frequency data, this suggests that the economy will continue to expand — perhaps not as rapidly as previously expected, but still at a significant rate. With inflation already having peaked, and with geopolitical headwinds on the horizon, the GDP numbers point to the need for a nuanced and balanced policy response, both on the fiscal side and the monetary one.
As on Tuesday, there were over 770 million people across India between 18 and 60 who were due for their precaution (or booster) dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. But government data shows that only 12% of this cohort has taken the third shot. This statistic isn’t encouraging even for people who have been eligible for boosters the longest (three categories of people – those above 60, health care and frontline workers – were deemed at highest risk and thus were the first ones allowed to take a third shot). Even among the 168 million eligible people in these groups, booster coverage is merely 35%.
Nearly nine months into India’s booster programme, these numbers highlight the persistent uphill challenge in expanding coverage. With 98% of India’s adults having received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 92% having received two shots, the reluctance appears only to be for boosters – posing a unique challenge for policy makers.
A possible solution to this hurdle also appears to be visible in statistics. Of the 157 million booster shots administered across India till Tuesday evening, nearly two-thirds have come in just the past month-and-a-half. This is because on July 15, the government launched Covid Vaccination Amrit Mahotsava — a campaign to give an impetus to boosters. Special drives conducted to give free booster shots at railways and bus stations, schools, colleges and workplaces appear to have propelled numbers – suggesting that free shots indeed encouraged more people, if not all.
So, the clearest way to tackle complacency appears to be to keep boosters free and reach out to people and inform them about the very clear science around them. Pushing boosters now will not only save lives today, but also in the months to come with new variants and waves looming on the horizon.
In a recent lecture in Raipur on August 27, Union home minister Amit Shah said that the government was strengthening central probe agencies, including the National Investigation Agency (NIA), whose units would be established in every state by 2024. The following day, on another occasion in Gandhinagar, he said that the government will provide portable forensic units to all districts to improve the conviction rate for crimes and standardise the investigation process.
These statements are laudable. There is no doubt that the NIA has been doing commendable work in the recent past, especially in Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast, where it has taken effective action against separatist and insurgent elements. There are, however, two central agencies that are in urgent need of reforms: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB).
The CBI was set up by the Government of India through a resolution passed on April 1, 1963, and it derives its power to investigate from the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946. It is an anomalous arrangement. In 1978, the LP Singh committee recommended enacting “a comprehensive central legislation to remove the deficiency of not having a central investigative agency with a self-sufficient statutory charter of duties and functions”. Several parliamentary committees have since emphasised the need “to strengthen CBI in terms of legal mandate, infrastructure and resources.” It is high time that the CBI is given an appropriate legislative basis.
The IB was established through an administrative order on December 23, 1887. This organisation also needs a statutory or constitutional basis. It has given a good account of itself, but it is also a fact that intelligence agencies, both at the state and central levels, are misused by the party in power to perpetuate its authority. There must be safeguards to prevent the misuse of intelligence for political purposes. In the United States (US), there are congressional committees to scrutinise the operations of intelligence organisations. The United Kingdom (UK) has the Intelligence Services Act, 1994, which ensures parliamentary oversight over intelligence. In India, Manish Tewari, Member of Parliament (MP), introduced the Intelligence Services (Powers and Regulation) Bill 2011, to place the IB, Research and Analysis Wing and the National Technical Research Organisation on a proper legal footing, and suggested the setting up of the National Intelligence and Security Oversight Committee. It was a template that could have been worked upon and adopted, but the private member’s bill was not successful and lapsed in 2012. The matter is yet to be resurrected.
Forensics are essential for any thorough investigation. There are 530 forensic science laboratories in the country. Of these, 32 are main laboratories, 80 are regional laboratories, and the remaining 418 are mobile units. The numbers may sound impressive, but looking at the size of the country and the number of cases registered annually, these labs cannot cope with the huge demand.
The Centre set up the National Forensic Sciences University in 2020, the first of its kind in the world, to meet the requirements of forensic experts in the country. The home minister’s idea of having mobile forensic units in all districts is welcome, but it might take another four or five years before all of them get this facility. Besides, we have only one university training personnel in forensics, and it will need a couple of more such institutions to meet the total requirement of forensic experts.
In this context, it would be desirable that investigators and their supervisory officers have a certain level of proficiency in law, computer science, and forensics to improve the quality of investigations and secure a higher percentage of convictions.
This could be achieved either by extending the training period or making it mandatory that within five years of joining the service, officers must acquire the prescribed proficiency in these disciplines.
It is encouraging that the government is gradually trying to improve the criminal justice system, but these reforms are likely to be peripheral. They will certainly improve the operational efficiency of the police, but to a limited extent. Police is a state subject under the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution; systemic and far-reaching reforms are possible only if the states are also on board. The central government can incentivise reforms and introduce the Supreme Court-mandated directions at least in states where it is the ruling party, either on its own or in alliance with other parties. Insulating investigating agencies from external pressures should be the most important feature of these reforms. That will guarantee fairness in investigations and be a major step towards establishing the rule of law in the country.
Shortly after he took office in 2014, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi enunciated the concept of SMART police — police that would be strict and sensitive, modern and mobile, alert and accountable, reliable and responsive, techno-savvy and trained. There were great expectations. The dream, unfortunately, remains unfulfilled. At his last Independence Day speech, the PM called for erasing all the vestiges of colonialism. Yet, tragically, when it comes to policing, we continue to be saddled by colonial modes of thinking and operation.
Prakash Singh is a former director general of police of Assam and Uttar Pradesh, and director general, Border Security Force
The views expressed are personal
In the last 75 years, India has witnessed several policy reforms being stalled or delayed due to competitive politics. The case of Delhi’s new excise policy, launched in 2021, however, is a rare example of competitive politics leading to the rollback of progressive reform, reinstating a policy regime that promotes the sale of illicit liquor and leading to a loss of ₹1,300 crore to the state exchequer.
To understand the genesis of Delhi’s new excise policy, one must understand the conditions under which the illicit sale of liquor flourishes. The first is when there is a complete prohibition on the sale of liquor, such as in Gujarat, or a partial ban by creating conditions preventing the legal sale of liquor in large parts of a state. The pre-2021 excise regime in Delhi was synonymous with partial prohibition: 134 wards — half of the Capital — had either none or one liquor shop, while some wards had as many as 27.
The second is a regressive tax regime, which creates incentives for illegal sales. Delhi’s old excise policy collected meagre annual licence fees of ₹8 lakh per liquor shop but imposed heavy excise fees on the sale of liquor, sometimes up to 300%. This created a big incentive to engage in the sale of non-duty paid liquor, which is a safety threat and leads to revenue loss.
The third is a policy regime dominated by sales through government-run shops. The majority of the liquor shops in Delhi were run by government corporations that pushed particular brands and offered an undignified store experience. As a result, consumers preferred buying from shops outside Delhi or through illegal channels.
Having inherited this regressive excise regime in 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government cracked down on the illicit sale of liquor. Since 2015, it has closed 3,977 illegal liquor shops. In addition, thousands of liquor bottles were seized yearly; 1.3 million bottles were seized between 2015 and 2017. But it was clear that a long-term solution lay in transitioning to a new, progressive excise regime.
Delhi’s new excise policy addressed all the flaws listed above.
First, it was premised on the principle that there should be an equitable distribution of liquor shops across the city while keeping the total to the existing number (849). Second, it rolled out a progressive tax regime by subsuming excise fees into licence fees and ensuring retail players bid for licences and paid their taxes upfront based on anticipated sales. This step eliminated any illegal sales. Finally, it marked an exit of government-run liquor shops, letting the private sector run shops and offer a modern retail experience.
The success of Delhi’s new policy could be gauged from the fact that the prices for retail licences jumped from ₹8 lakh per annum to ₹8 crore, and the total collections from the new policy, based on competitive bidding for licences, were projected to rise from an average of ₹6,000 crore per annum to ₹9,500 crore. The policy was welcomed by stakeholders and even held up as a model excise policy. That is before the politics took over.
Delhi’s new excise policy was drafted after public consultation, cleared by the Cabinet, vetted twice, and approved by Delhi’s lieutenant-governor (L-G) before it was notified. However, after the bidding for licences concluded and 48 hours before the rollout of the new regime in mid-November 2021, the then L-G, acting suo motu and without any consultation with the Delhi government, changed a crucial criterion in the policy. The change prohibited retail shops from opening in non-conforming areas of Delhi. This step made the new policy even more regressive than the old one, which allowed shops to open in non-conforming areas with the L-G’s approval.
This last-minute change in the Delhi excise policy re-imposed partial prohibition in many parts of the city, limiting the number of shops that could be legally opened and the licence fees due to the government. To make matters worse, the policy rollout, starting mid-November 2021, was met with stiff political opposition from some Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, who did not allow many private retail shops to open even in conforming areas under the pretext that too many liquor shops were opening in Delhi. This happened even though, on a per capita basis, Delhi has a provision of one shop for every 22,700 people, a far cry from Noida (1:1,400), Bengaluru (1:1,700), and Gurugram (1:4,200), all in BJP-ruled states.
As a result, the number of retail shops that could open in Delhi by July was 468 — leading to a revenue loss of ₹1,300 crore. The ones that did open also faced continuous threats from local authorities, forcing many private owners to announce their exit. Faced with plummeting excise revenues and a Gujarat-like prohibition scenario in Delhi, the Delhi government was forced to revert to the old policy for six months as an interim measure.
Come September, Delhi will revert to the flawed old excise regime. The city’s residents must remember that the promise of a transparent excise regime was snatched away by competitive politics that undermined reform, even if it meant promoting the sale of illegal liquor and hurting state revenues — a politics of self-destruction.
Jasmine Shah is vice-chairperson, Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi
The views expressed are personal
On June 20, Benazir Heena received a notice “of pronouncement of the third and final talaq” from her husband. Under Talaq-e-Hasan method of divorce a man can divorce his wife by pronouncing talaq once every month over three menstrual cycles. On May 2, nine days after receiving the first notice, Heena filed public interest litigation in the Supreme Court (SC), seeking a ban on Talaq-e-Hasan. However, on Monday, the SC (which is hearing two separate pleas against Talaq-e-Hasan) said that the court’s primary focus is to provide relief to women before deciding on the constitutional validity of this form of divorce. On August 16, the SC held: “Prima Facie, this [Talaq-e-Hasan] is not so improper. Women also have an option. Khula [The right to end a marriage given to women] is there.”
The SC made triple talaq illegal in August 2017. This was followed by the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019. While these steps have led to a dip in the number of triple talaq cases, it has led men to resort to other unilateral methods of divorce, such as Talaq-e-Hasan, without making any efforts for reconciliation. Despite the excitement over the 2019 Act’s passage, the law does not provide for a just and fair divorce for women. The solution lies in reforming the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, which deals with marriage, succession, inheritance, and charities among Muslims.
In addition, we need a Muslim code bill, similar to the Hindu code bills, which abolished customary practices in favour of a common law code. This is important because Muslim women are entitled to the same legal protection extended to other communities but have been denied, thanks to the stranglehold of conservatism and politics.
Reforming family laws is not easy. Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar championed the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) but it was viewed as an onslaught on our culture by Right-leaning members of the Constituent Assembly. Their opposition forced Nehru to drop the UCC. In 1952, he succeeded in introducing the Hindu code bills, which passed as separate pieces of legislation in 1955-56.
Unfortunately, for Indian Muslims, a similar code is nowhere in sight. The conservative ulemas have always been against reforms and raise the bogey of “Islam in danger” whenever gender justice is demanded. They say “Islam gave rights to women 1,400 years ago”, but oppose any move towards translating these rights into reality. Consequently, Muslims are governed by the 1937 Act. This is inadequate.
The Act merely states that Muslims will be governed by Shariat (Islamic law), and is silent on essential matters like age of marriage, divorce procedure, guardianship and custody of children, halala and polygamy (currently under scrutiny by the SC), inheritance, and women’s share in property. In addition, it is silent on the mandatory affirmative traditions such as consent, meher, and nikahnama. In the absence of codified laws, misinterpretations and distortions by conservative ulema dominate practices in marriage and family matters, leaving scope for arbitrary and misogynistic norms and practices such as unilateral talaq, halala, and child marriage. This leads to violation of women’s rights despite Quranic injunctions of gender justice and the constitutional promise of gender equality. Recently, the Delhi high court upheld the validity of a Muslim marriage where the bride was only 16, basing its verdict on the understanding that in Islam puberty is the age of marriage.
Moreover, the dominance of conservative ulema has led to a common sense that men are superior to women. It is easy for a husband to divorce his wife without any consultation with her. Contrary to this, most women find it difficult to exercise their right to khula. Earlier, Muslim personal law could not be reformed, thanks to the politics of secularism. We have not forgotten the Shah Bano episode of 1985-86.
Even though the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government supported the abolition of triple talaq, a full-scale reform remains a far cry. Already there is heightened politicisation of the UCC which is posed as anti-minority.
Thanks to this lack of commitment to gender equality, Muslim women remain caught up between patriarchy within the community and politics in the larger context. The voices of reform that arose in the last one and half decades, such as the women-led movement against triple talaq, cannot survive in an atmosphere of hate, religious polarisation, and aggravated communalism.
Zakia Soman is co-founder Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, and a women’s rights activist The views expressed are personal
As personalities go, Abhijit Sen was more eccentric scientist than professor of economics. That he sported a long Dumbledore-like beard, smoked Charms and drank Old Monk was just one part of it. There was hardly a student at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, the economics department at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) where Sen taught for more than three decades, who has not heard crazy stories about him.
There are many. He once asked his PhD student why was not attending his MA lectures and roaming around in the department during the day. During an MPhil viva of one of his students, he apparently got bored, rolled the examiner’s report into a telescope and started looking at everyone through it. Not only had he taught all courses at the department – professional economists will realize how difficult this is – he apparently taught an entire microeconomics course without taking his hands out of his pockets (read without using the blackboard). If one succeeded in getting him to agree to address a post-dinner talk in the university, one had to stand guard in front of his house, or put in a request to Professor Jayati Ghosh, his wife, to make sure that he did not wander off somewhere at the time.
Whether or not these stories are true is beside the point. But all of us (this author studied economics at CESP) were more than willing to believe them. The reason was simple. Abhijit Sen was pretty much an enigma to the otherwise deeply partisan academic ecosystem at JNU. It was a place where, as naïve students, we would happily judge people by their stated ideologies rather than the merit of their work. Yet, Abhijit Sen, who couldn’t be pigeonholed was a revered figure.
That he was a JNU ‘radical’ who had had multiple stints in policymaking including the coveted position of being a Planning Commission member even after the Left parted ways with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was only part of the reason. In fact, even his first stint in the Planning Commission was not just at the behest of the Left. As Sen told A K Bhattacharya of the Business Standard over dinner in 2013, both the Prime Minister’s office and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) asked Sen to take up that position when it was offered to him in 2004.
When in university, it was his intellect rather than the position of a Planning Commission member which mesmerized everyone. He was known to come up with the sharpest observations and questions during PhD presentations or conferences. To be sure, his official letterhead was perhaps useful for JNU students in getting letters of recommendation from a Planning Commission member for their passports to be made under the Tatkal quota.
Students are always known to make a big deal of their teachers and JNU is perhaps a few notches ahead of its peers in evoking such partisanship. Hence, the question: how should one see the legacy of Abhijit Sen in the discipline of economics in India? He was hardly a prolific writer. Like his student Himanshu wrote in the Indian Express, his body of unpublished work is far greater than what he published. His perfectionist streak was a major impediment here. His multiple policy stints also meant that he had to take a lot of time off from teaching. So is his legacy to be measured by the impressive policy-making positions and awards in his CV? There is a better answer to this question.
Abhijit Sen’s legacy in the field of economics is unique for he was an equal opportunity dissenter par excellence. His ideas in economics and policymaking were always informed by facts rather than dogma or notions of political correctness. And he was so good at dissenting with what he saw as wrong ideas of both the left and the right that neither side was willing to let go of his engagement. Abhijit Sen weighing in on an economic argument was perhaps the best and most honest peer review one could get.
Lest one gets confused, Abhijit Sen was not just a commentator on other people’s ideas. At a very early stage in his economics career, he had demonstrated original insight into one of the most debated and vexed questions of Indian economics. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge – its summary findings were published in a two-part paper called Market failure and control of labour power: towards an explanation of 'structure' and change in Indian agriculture in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1981 – challenged established notions of both the left and right about Indian agriculture being driven solely by pre-capitalist or market relations. While landlords did exploit peasants working on their farms, the former also struggled to supervise the latter’s work, unleashing significant dynamics including mechanization in the process, he argued. Sen’s concluding sentences in the paper are as relevant today as they were four decades ago.
“But the main result of that section is nonetheless a cautionary one for Marxist analysis—the adverse effects of sharecropping etc. might have been historical in the sense that they have already, and perhaps irreversibly, affected the composition of rural society in a way detrimental to growth. The present problem of fragmentation and pauperization in many parts of India, although the outcome of a history of such arrangements, need not be resolved simply by getting rid of these arrangements. The more critical need in these regions today is perhaps for land consolidation and public investment”, he wrote at a time when the utopia about both the Green Revolution and the political promise of land reforms for the Left — the Left Front government had captured power in West Bengal just four years previously — was very strong.
The policymaker Abhijit Sen would never leave the dissenting trajectory the doctoral student Abhijit Sen undertook. Months after joining the Planning Commission in 2004, he along with his student Himanshu wrote another two-part paper called Poverty and Inequality in India in the Economic and Political Weekly. The paper questioned claims of a sharp reduction in poverty in the first decade after economic reforms and attributed the difference between their and official poverty numbers to the methodology of data collection and analysis. This paper is one of the pillars of the Great Indian Poverty Debate and its insights went into the subsequent measurement of poverty in India.
As if the dissent against the official poverty numbers was not enough, he also refused to accept the theory of poverty reaching astronomical levels by Utsa Patnaik, an eminent Marxist economist and a senior colleague from his own economics department (necessary disclosure: she was also this author’s research supervisor). In fact, Sen’s take on poverty and calorie adequacy always questioned the Left’s rhetoric in India. Yet, he was the best ally the left and people’s movements had within the sanitized walls of Yojna Bhawan.
Sen, in a way, preempted many of the ideas which the United Progressive Alliance took up during its term. As the Chairman of the Committee on Long Term Grain Policy, he recommended near universalization of the Public Distribution System (PDS) and asked for issue prices to be brought down to revive offtake from the PDS. This report was submitted in 2002 when India was facing the bizarre situation of overflowing granaries and very high undernutrition levels. The report also had the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that the Food Corporation of India was facing serious trouble and mismanagement and made various suggestions to overcome them. Similarly, while it recommended that the C2 cost measure (it also includes the imputed value of rent of land) be used to fix Minimum Support Prices – this continues to be the main demand of farmers’ organisations to date – he also made it clear that the procurement should be made less geographically skewed even if it meant withdrawing from high procurement regions.
How did Sen manage to maintain this kind of objectivity in his reasoning? The best answer to this question comes from The Report of the Expert Committee on the Impact of Futures Trading on Agricultural Commodity Prices. Sen was the chairman of this committee which submitted its report at the peak of the 2008 global food price spike. The report itself was inconclusive on the role of futures trading on agricultural prices due to a lack of substantive proof. “The period during which futures trading has been in operation is too short to discriminate adequately between the effect of opening up of futures markets and what might simply be the normal cyclical adjustment”, it said.
However, Sen penned a long supplementary note to the report which is a must-read for anyone who wants to apply textbook economic wisdom to solving real-world problems in a third-world country.
“Both the literature on futures trading and empirical facts analysed in this report suggest that there are inherent difficulties if futures markets are introduced for commodities where the government actively attempts to influence prices and is also a large player in physical trade. Although in the longer run there are possible benefits from combining futures-based options with MSP operations as suggested in the Report, it is clearly necessary in the immediate inflationary situation that there be a clear statement of the government’s intent to maintain and expand the current system of public procurement and PDS in order to ensure remunerative prices to farmers and affordable prices to consumers. In this context, combining prudence with the benefit of doubt, the best course of action would be to identify those commodities where there is possibility of futures trading affecting expectations that may influence inflation in essential commodities and insulate these from futures”, it said.
Once again, Sen’s position was a simultaneous dissent from the positions of both the left and the right. A careful reading of the supplementary note suggests that Sen had the unique gift of breaking down any argument into first principles and was also extremely punctilious about following Sherlock Holmes’s warning against theorizing before one had data. This is exactly why he was one of the biggest champions of maintaining the sanctity of India’s statistical institutions. Two anecdotes come to my mind.
The first time we heard Abhijit Sen’s name in our MA classroom was when Jayati Ghosh was talking about NSS data and a first-generation student from Rajasthan told her that in his village people often give wrong responses to the NSS surveyors. Jayati’s first reaction was, “Oh my God, Manik (as Abhijit Sen was known informally) has spent his entire life trying to make sense of those data sets. He will be heartbroken if he hears this”. That India’s data collection needs to become better is a widely accepted criticism. Abhijit Sen was always invested in this problem.
The last time I spoke with Abhijit Sen (over the telephone) was when the government decided to scrap the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) report for 2017-18 on November 15, 2019. In the one-and-half decades I had known him, I had never seen him so worked up. He was shouting and kept repeating that this was completely unacceptable. “There have been controversies regarding CES data in the past and I have been part of these controversies, but never has data been withheld and a report being junked… In fact, the best way to resolve such controversies is to release the data transparently and let everybody who is familiar with such numbers, look at it”, he said.
There will not be an Abhijit Sen to create a controversy around the CES data when it is finally released. But his life and work should be an inspiration that the best controversies are those driven by objective intellectual dissent rather than an agenda which is driven by dogma. Of course, this is easier said than done and this is exactly why it will be very difficult to fill the void left by Professor Abhijit Sen.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India
The views expressed are personal
Not since King George V ended the reign of Calcutta (now Kolkata) as the capital of India in 1911 has anyone articulated an idea equally wonderful, and potentially momentous, as Assam Chief Minister Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who yesterday, during a Twitter dog-fight with his Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal, suggested that India consider ending the monopoly of New Delhi as the sole capital of the country.
“…I am of the view that we should work on curing the disease of disparity and not mock poor states. Can we have five Capitals of India, one in every zone?” Sarma said in his tweet, (no sic, edited for grammatical accuracy). Sarma argued further that this idea of his would ensure a single city government, like Delhi, would not have huge wealth at its disposal at the cost of others, especially the oft-neglected North East. Salute, Sarma – it is a capital idea.
India not only should build five capitals, one for each region, but also build those based on themes and schematically and structurally divide the government across domains, and functions.
For example, the entire infrastructure of the highest judiciary, the Supreme Court, and all its functionaries need not be located in the same place where the Parliament functions, or executive is based. The Supreme Court could and all its officers could be shifted from Delhi to salubrious environs of the North East, where the entire country’s justice seekers, petitioners, lawyers, would be forced to travel, visit and stay in India’s judicial capital. Benefits everyone.
Similarly, a new capital in the south, even a completely greenfield new city, built to world-class and future standards, with only solar power and electric vehicles, could attract not just a set of ministries to work, but possibly be a trillion dollar megacity of the future – drawing the best of service industries like software, pure science research and education, and finance.
Some of the military headquarters could, given the new theatre command system, ensure the three wings of the forces leave Delhi for different parts, with locations chosen for logistics.
A new capital in the west could also, for example, be the education capital of India; and build a global city for education, housing the best of today and tomorrow. Similarly, a capital in the north, say Uttar Pradesh, or Himachal, could also coincide with the healthcare epicentre of the continent, and beyond, besides locating several strategic government functions and a set of ministries, and PSUs.
Such a distributed government would not only end urban congestion travails of Delhi, with its accompanying ills, like pollution and traffic deadlocks, but also help improve standards of living, distribute development that comes with the location of government’s seat of power in a physical location, but also help a sustainable investment into building newer cities of the future.
It would be easy for India to ensure crores of people, especially youth, find new jobs by creating new economic growth engines and sustainable living zones in different parts.
Sarma has proposed, we second; and hopefully, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will grant.
Cardinals are called princes of the Catholic Church though Pope Francis reminded them at an ordination ceremony a few years ago that Jesus would not call them so. It’s an opportunity to serve the people, like him, the Pontiff told the new entrants to the rarefied world in the Church.
It would not make a big difference to a world which has very little idea about the Indian caste system when Dr Antony Poola, Archbishop of Hyderabad, is anointed Cardinal by Pope Francis. But for Indians, it is a big first, for he is a Dalit, and the first Dalit Cardinal. With his elevation, Dr Antony will be a one among the 226 serving Cardinals and will be a member of the 132-member College of Cardinals which will elect a new Pope. Cardinals aged below 80 are part of this exclusive club. At present, there are six Indian Cardinals, including Archbishop Filipe Neri Antonio Sebastiao do Rosario Ferrao of Goa and Daman who was made one along with Dr Anthony; five have voting rights in the papal election.
The survival of the Catholic Church for more than 20 centuries is due to its ability to understand and even foresee the changes that visit humanity in its long march through time. The elections of a Polish Pope in the last quarter of the last century and the choice of an Argentine as Pope a few years ago were signals of that agility. At the same time, today’s Church is not the one which instituted Inquisitions and burnt scientists to death; it now asks for forgiveness for its sins.
The Catholic Church recognises no caste system and Dr Anthony may not be representing the Dalits in the Church de jure. But, de facto, he belongs to a section of people who were kept off the mainstream in one of the oldest human civilisations; and he will now be part of the global leadership of one of the oldest institutions. That makes his elevation all the more significant.
A restaurant named Freebie was established with great fanfare at the end of the galaxy. It had a wide menu, delectable cuisine and great service; and, above all, was its billing policy – you eat, and your grandchild pays the bill. It took off with great gusto, patrons loving everything about it. No matter how much you consume, you pay nothing – they were told.
The restaurant closed within a day when customers, no matter how much they consumed, received bills at checkout time, far higher than what they could have possibly had to pay. Reason: these were the bills of their grandparents.
There is no such thing as a freebie. It only means a service someone else has to pay for. In India, like in most other countries, that person who must eventually pay is the taxpayer; or, if it is a more vicious a charade, a hidden tax called forced inflation, then it is, again, all of us.
Most people who game the system want to pay less and get more; and hope that a silent majority will end up paying for most of it, without complaining, or better, without even realising it. The Freebie restaurant model is of course the driving engine of every government in the world, and the philosophy is revered as a welfare state, development model, socialism, or rob Paul to pay Peter model.
A mythical moral champion of it, a kind of modern day father of all nations on earth, is Robin Hood, the fabled British rogue, who looted the rich to feed the poor. Every government and economic model is a variation on how smartly it can project the good it is doing for the poor, giving them things they need or want but cannot afford, (in exchange for that paltry useless vote once in a while), and in turn, bring to power many people, who can get away enjoying a lot, without having to pay anything at all.
A reasonable fair consensus must be that everyone must agree on a smart, sustainable and fair welfare schema, which will ensure the poor and downtrodden have a minimum viable and dignified life, with a shot of a hope to better their lives. No one should get what they absolutely don’t need, or have a cheaper alternative for, and no one, should ever, get anything free if they can otherwise afford it.
Thus, the definition of a freebie depends as much on potential beneficiary as the scheme, its positive long-term impact, or short-term necessity in crucial terms, and the negative cost a society or country would have to bear if it does not offer welfare.
Ending Freebies for the Undeserving
Anyone who is comfortable in life and gets anything from the government free of cost or at a subsidy is enjoying a freebie. Like bungalows for politicians. Why should a Chief Minister, a minister, an MP or an MLA have a bungalow instead of, say, a flat in a skyscraper? Imagine the disinvestment if we sold most of Lutyens Delhi and moved all ministers, MPs, diplomats, and officials to a few blocks of apartments and used the money to remove the loans of all farmers?
It is more vicious because the beneficiaries sign the policy themselves, while we are helplessly forced to pay and watch. Why should they have convoys of cars? Why should they get free power connections or telephone bills?
Ditto officials. All-India Services, especially the IAS, is a big freebie. Bungalows, cars, travel, foreign travel, higher education abroad, educational tours, everything is a freebie. End them, and make them pay. Why should retired officers of judiciary or IAS get free land from the government to build a house? It is a freebie. Make them pay or take them back. Why should a retired officer get a servant or a secretary or a driver for a lifetime? It is a freebie; stop them. Why should they move on toll-gate roads without paying a toll? It is a freebie. Make them pay.
Why must nonprofits be allowed free land, or buildings, or tax benefits? Or government funds. If they are serving people well, let them raise voluntary donations. End all public funding to NGOs. That is a terrible freebie.
In short, no taxpayer or anyone earning more than, say, Rs 75,000 a month, should ever get a freebie.
Wastage versus Welfare
An investment into the primary education and primary health of people, all people, except the very rich who don’t need it, is good welfare. Build the best schools, hire good teachers, feed the children at government schools and ensure every Indian of the future is educated to a good school-level competency.
After that, the gamut of free or subsidised higher education in a freebie. A government can mimic a parent, a poor one, here. A parent would go out of the way to give education to a child, but stops at that school level, post which the students must be enabled to take low interest loans and pay for themselves.
All healthcare — vaccines, basic health check-ups, and life threatening surgeries — must be provided for; many good schemes exist in the country but a lot more needs to be done.
A national goal of housing and subsidised food for the poor is a must, too. The PDS can never be termed a freebie and a decent home for the poor must be our collective mission.
Free electricity, free water, free or heavily subsidised LPG or cooking gas are not welfare schemes, people must, beyond a basic minimum block, be made to pay.
A single subsidised cylinder per month, and subsidised power for the first 200 odd units must be the maximum permissible welfare expenditure a government or a party must be allowed.
Free laptops, free mobile phones, free TVs, free cycles or motorcycles, free clothes, free travel, free education abroad are all irresponsible and unsustainable freebies that have no place.
These put fiscal pressures on government budgets, which then become a route to forced inflationary hidden-taxes.
Ad hoc cash awards to sportspersons, artists and other social achievers, except those in the military or the police, who have served valiantly or laid down their lives, is a freebie. Making movies tax-free on discretion is a freebie. Free land for business to come and invest is a freebie.
Smaller Government
Citizens of India are told to live a life where they are reconciled that they cannot have what they cannot afford, except a big government.
We cannot have world-class roads or universities but our bureaucrats and politicians have a world-class lifestyle. And in their standards of life, we are better off than even the western world, where judges drive their own cars and PMs and ministers take a ride on metro trains.
If it is a freebie, it must immediately go.