📰 Graffiti taking its toll on prehistoric rock paintings
Defacement continues unchecked at Pandavulagutta
•Like many important monuments across India, the prehistoric rock paintings in Telangana’s Jayashankar Bhupalpally district are prey to confessions of undying love and names etched for posterity.
•“Increasing defacement, including instances of scraped graffiti and smeared oil paints, are a cause for grave concern at the millennia-old rock paintings of Pandavulagutta, which trace the evolution of human knowledge,” laments D. Kanna Babu, Superintending Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai.
•Pandavulagutta is home to painted rock shelters dating to 10000 BC-8000 BC, an 8th century inscription of the Rashtrakuta period, and painted frescoes from the 12th century Kakatiya empire.
•The pre-historic rock paintings resemble those at Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh, with flora, fauna and human figures seen in red ochre.
•The Kakatiya artists, on the other hand, painted scenes from the Mahabharata and of the elephant-headed Ganesha.
•“Paintings from three different time periods have coexisted admirably down the ages, but they have not been protected or preserved since their discovery in 1990. They have been damaged because they are easily accessible to the public,” says Mr. Babu, who visited Pandavulagutta as part of a detailed temple survey project.
•“If something drastic is not done to stop it, the defacement will destroy the original paintings rendered with natural colours.”
•For instance, figures of magnificent beauty in a mural frieze, set against a background of thick lime plaster that projects them as if in an open-air theatre, have been ruined by graffiti, with the frescoes scraped from the plaster and the storytelling disrupted.
•“No preventive measures have been taken so far by any responsible agency.
•“The State government should install railings to protect and preserve the paintings,” Mr. D. Kanna Babu added.
📰 The classroom as the instructor’s castle
The autonomy of the teacher has been cramped, and it reflects in the state of higher education
•Some months ago, a global leader of the IT industry set sections of India’s corporate-sector elite aflutter with the comment that Indians are not creative. It is possible to disagree with the criterion Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computer, had adopted while at the same time agreeing with some of his observations. He had predicted that Indians are unlikely to create world-leading IT companies because they lack the creativity to do so and argued that this has to do with the education system.
•While building global IT giants may have more to do with an appetite for growing a business rather than anything else, Mr. Wozniak’s assessment of India’s education system is sharp. He traced the lack of creativity to an education system that rewarded studiousness over independent thought. He also managed an anthropological take when he identified the ‘MBA and the Merc’ as the mark of success in India’s corporate world. For good measure he likened this to the culture of Singapore, but here he may have missed a trick. The per capita income of Singaporeans is quite close to that of Americans. And that country has achieved much of what it set out to do when it struck off on its own, which was to turn a swampy colonial port into a prosperous city state proudly independent of world powers. Also, it has a national leadership more educated and responsible than what the U.S. has currently. Singapore’s orderly society may not be everybody’s cup of tea but its history suggests one way we could identify the creativity of a people as a whole. That is, a people are truly creative when they are able to collectively surmount the challenges that their country faces.
Crisis in higher education
•Actually, what India is experiencing in higher education today is far worse than merely the production of studious but creativity-challenged youth. There is abetment of a toxic productivity whereby our universities churn out youth with a poor grasp of the subject matter that they are expected to know and an even poorer understanding of the challenges that India today faces, for which they alone can provide the solutions. This is particularly troubling as public expenditure on education in India favours higher education far more than elsewhere in the world when schooling is severely neglected by comparison. In addition, this is a sector so micro-managed that it answers to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s description of the Indian economy in the 1990s as “over regulated and under governed” better than the economy itself. So, neither funding nor neglect can be blamed for the lack of vitality in India’s institutions of higher education.
•Universities are embedded in society and cannot be expected to naturally rise above them. Close to 50 years ago, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had spoken of a ‘crisis in Indian education’ pointing to how India’s educational policy had been shaped by the aspiration of its middle class. Creativity is unlikely to have been a part of it. However, it is precisely to ensure that there is no sectional capture of public institutions intended to serve a larger purpose that we have public regulators. While there is more than one regulator for the higher education sector in India, for sheer reach the University Grants Commission (UGC) is unmatched. To say that it has a major responsibility in the state of affairs that we are experiencing in higher education would be an understatement. The government would be advised to follow email discussions of UGC regulations circulating on the Internet right now to garner a sense of how wide the resentment against the body is.
Journal publication
•The bone of contention is the basis on which the regulator identifies ‘recognised’ journals, publication in which alone earns credit for faculty. Having drawn up such a list a couple of years ago, the Commission appears to have now backtracked. Possibly stung by the claim that an astonishingly high percentage of the journals on its original list are of dubious distinction — the term for which is ‘predatory’ in that they either solicit articles to be published for a fee or follow no clear refereeing procedure — the UGC has suddenly trimmed the list. This has led to questions of the criterion that has been used.
•While predatory journals are not a uniquely Indian problem, the problem appears to be more grave here, and has possibly been aggravated by the UGC’s policy of soliciting recommendations for inclusion of journals in its approved list. The whole process has led to a severe diminishing of credibility for one of the most crucial regulators of the country.
•To believe that the problem of dubious journals on the UGC’s whitelist is the sole issue awaiting resolution in the university would be naive. This is actually quite recent and just another manifestation of the unaccountable regulation that has had a vandalising effect on the higher education space in the country. A small set of actionable points, not every one of them the responsibility of the UGC, would be as follows.
Revise the API
•The problem of predatory journals emerged after the UGC introduced a quantitative scoring system leading to an Academic Performance Indicator (API) in which publishing is a part. The activities approved for toting up a teacher’s API are many, extending beyond teaching and research. This has led to a form of academic entrepreneurship that has very likely demoralised the less entrepreneurial, who are often the more academic and therefore more deserving of being in the university to start with. For this reason, the contents of the API must be revised to include only teaching and research, thus also saving scarce administrative resources. Teaching input can be partly measured by the number of courses taught, but research assessment should avoid the quantitative metric. Instead it should be judged by committees that have reputed and recognisably independent subject experts on it. This is not foolproof but, in the context of the email discussion now on among India’s academics, superior to a discredited list of approved journals.
•Next, compulsory attendance, which goes against the spirit of learning, must be replaced by credit for classroom participation.
•Third, introduce student evaluation of courses to be made public. It needs emphasis that this is meant to be an ‘evaluation’ and not some ‘feedback’ to be contemplated upon by the lecturer at leisure. However, it is important to see the process in perspective. Course evaluation is meant to instil in studentsboth a sense of confidence that their view is being solicited and a sense of responsibility in wielding authority early on. It can effectively check truancy among faculty but there should be vigilance against its misuse.
•Fourth, the UGC should remove all experience-related considerations to career advancement. The present system leaves the able to stagnate during their best years and the undeserving to believe that time served grants entitlement to promotion. There must be a drastic reduction in the number of hours faculty have to teach. While this may not be much in the research institutes and the Central universities, in India’s colleges the teaching load is not merely taxing to the point of lowering productivity but leaves teachers no time to address the burgeoning literature in their disciplines.
•Finally, once courses are evaluated by students, the classroom should revert to being the instructor’s castle. A pincer movement of corporate interest and political pressure combined with regulatory overdrive have cramped the autonomy of the teacher. The state of higher education in India today partly reflects this.
📰 Had ‘extremely productive’ talks with Putin, says Modi
PM flags special strategic partnership at informal summit
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said he had “extremely productive” discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and they reviewed the complete range of India-Russia relations as well as other global subjects during their first ever informal summit in this Black Sea coastal city.
•Mr. Modi said friendship between India and Russia had stood the test of time, and the ties would continue to scale new heights.
•The Prime Minister said the seeds of the ‘strategic partnership’, sown by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President Putin, had now grown into a “special privileged strategic partnership”, which is a “very big achievement” in itself.
•In his opening remarks, Mr. Modi also thanked Russia for playing a major role in ensuring India’s permanent membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. “We are working together on International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and BRICS,” Mr. Modi said.
•“You have added a new aspect of informal summit in the bilateral relationship which I think is a great occasion and creates trust,” the Prime Minister said.
•“The Monday talks were very intense,” Russia’s official Tass news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.
•Russian President Putin and Prime Minister Modi paid special attention to the economic talks, he said.
•“We discussed the whole spectrum of our particularly privileged strategic partnership, paid special attention to the economy, noted the steady growth of trade turnover,” the Minister said.
•Ahead of their summit, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Putin will discuss Russia-India military cooperation with Mr. Modi, amidst U.S. sanctions on Russia.
•Earlier, official sources said the possible impact of the U.S. sanctions against Russia under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) on Indo-Russia defence cooperation might also figure during the talks between Mr. Modi and Mr. Putin.
•The CAATSA is a U.S. federal law that imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
•It includes sanctions against countries that engage in significant transactions with Russia’s defence and intelligence sectors.
•India is not going to allow its defence engagement with Russia to be dictated by any other country, the sources said, adding New Delhi has been lobbying with the Trump administration on the issue.
•India could face U.S. sanctions for purchasing high value military defence items, in particular state-of-the-art S-400 Triumf missile defence system, from Russia under the act.
•Welcoming Prime Minister Modi to Sochi, Mr. Putin said his visit would give a fresh impetus to bilateral ties. “We are delighted to see you, Mr Prime Minister, and consider you personally as a big friend of our country.We are very glad to be able to have this meeting,” the Russian President said.
•Later, President Putin hosted a lunch in the honour of Prime Minister Modi and the two leaders also took a boat ride from Bocharev Creek to Olympic Park in Russia’s Sochi.
📰 On the great Asian highway
India and China must forge an understanding to cooperate on regional connectivity projects
•One of the key non-military issues that does not just bedevil India-Chinarelations but also significantly affects many countries in the region is the inability of the two Asian giants to communicate, cooperate and coordinate on matters of regional trade and connectivity which could have benefited all. On that note, one hopes that the stand taken by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on declining to endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) at the just concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Foreign Ministers’ meeting is more of a strategic bargaining position, and not an instance of obstinate negative regionalism that has been plaguing the region for long.
The BBIN way
•Looking into South Asia, where most multi-country connectivity initiatives are usually deemed to be mere talk shops, one recent positive development has been the trial run, on April 23, of a Bangladesh-Nepal bus service through India under the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) motor vehicles agreement. It shows that the ambition of establishing physical connectivity among the smaller states of South Asia through India can eventually be realised and break the usual political gridlock that characterises the region. Although Bhutan failed to ratify the agreement due to opposition from its parliament, instead of halting progress, the country asked other stakeholders to move ahead and expressed hope of joining the initiative if and once it gets clearance from the parliament. Bhutan’s positive go-ahead not only demonstrated the immense potential to be realised through simple cooperation but also showed that it is possible to implement pragmatic plans even when all members are not able to participate at the same time.
•Poor connectivity is the major reason why intra-regional trade is among the lowest in South Asia. South Asia, with its 1.8 billion population, is only capable of conducting around 5% intraregional trade as connectivity remains a constant barrier. Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) continue to plague the region and addressing infrastructure deficits can do away with 80% of the NTBs. In addition to enhancing trade, connectivity can significantly improve people-to-people interaction leading to better understanding, greater tolerance\ and closer diplomatic relations in the region.
•States in South and Southeast Asia are involved in multiple regional initiatives led by India and China but are unable to get the benefit due to their slow progress. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation remains moribund with little hope of it becoming functional in the near future. The Bay of Bengal too remains among the least integrated regions in spite of having immense potential of enhancing trade through utilisation of its ports and waterways. The India-led Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) involving Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, has made little progress. Serving as a funnel to the Malacca Straits, one of the world’s busiest waterways, the Bay of Bengal has now become one of the most important strategic hotspots for global trade and all countries in BIMSTEC are losing out due to this prolonged period of dormancy. In all this time, the organisation has only had meetings, negotiations and leaders’ summit and stalled free trade agreement negotiations. However, there has been some progress through the establishment of the BIMSTEC Energy Centre and a task force on Trans Power Exchange and Development Projects, which was established to develop a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of the BIMSTEC Grid Interconnection.
•On the other hand, China is leading its own regional ambition with its BRI. A portion of the Maritime Silk Route crosses the Bay of Bengal and involves Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Both China and India are pursuing regional initiatives on their own which could lead to benefit for all involved states. Regional agendas could have been pursued efficiently if the initiatives were complementary rather than competing. If the BRI, BIMSTEC and BBIN were developed through coordination and consultation, led by the two Asian giants, the projects under the schemes could have been implemented more efficiently. With the minimum required cooperation in pursuing regional initiatives, India and China can significantly enhance trade, investment and connectivity in the region. This would not only would be a win-win for the two giants but also enormously benefit smaller countries.
Make good in Qingdao
•As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet again, after the Wuhan informal summit, in June for the SCO summit in Qingdao, China, they have an opportunity to forge a pragmatic understanding on the efficacy of regional initiatives through greater communication, enhanced cooperation and better coordination. In the end, slow moving regional projects end up hurting most the resource-constrained citizenry of the region who are deprived from the benefits emanating from well-thought-out and carefully strategised regional connectivity projects. Caught in the quagmire of continental, regional and sub-regional geopolitics, the smaller states are losing out and having to pay the price of missed economic opportunities as the two Asian giants shake hands but seldom see eye to eye even on matters of common economic and strategic interests. Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi must seize the chance to change this.
📰 What’s in an election?
The significance of democracy does not lie just in the act of voting somebody to power, but in the way that power is exercised by those elected
•What do elections have to do with democracy? There seems to be a strong belief that a democratic society is defined by its elections. The principle of one person, one vote (with some conditions) is seen as a defining principle of democracy.This principle has become so dominant that it has successfully reduced the idea of democracy to a ritual of casting votes. As a consequence, participation in democracy, instead of being a dynamic and continuous process, has been reduced to one act of voting, that too once in a few years.
•By reducing democracy to this singular act, we have managed to build a society that is fundamentally undemocratic in character. Many have commented on the fact that the parties which speak for democracy have little democratic ethos within them. All the political parties are dominated by families or friends or, as is often the case now, business partners. Nepotism and exclusion are the basic working principles of our political parties. The latest drama in Karnataka manifests well all the problems of our democracy.
Significance of voting
•But what can democracy be other than enabling elections? To understand this, we have to first understand the significance of voting. What do we do when we cast our vote for one person or the other? Today when voting has become a business transaction where the voters are ‘compensated’ for their votes, what does voting really mean? And what does it actually accomplish?
•The process of voting is extremely important. But its importance is not because it is about choice. Very often, we tend to mistake democracy with choice — the ability to choose between different candidates. The significance of democracy does not lie in the act of voting somebody to power but only in the way that power is exercised by those elected. Elections are a means of making sure that those who have power are accountable in some way and that they exercise that power in a democratic manner. The focus on elections as a sign of democracy is a classic instance of the means overtaking the ends. Elections are only a means towards the goal of controlling those who wield power, but instead they have become the end in themselves.
•Thus, the essence of democracy is not really about the freedom to choose or the freedom to exert choice. Rather, it is primarily about how the elected wields power. The incorrect association of democracy with choice has even led to the absurd claim that the free-market economy reflects democracy. What has happened in India is that given the emphasis on choice as being equivalent to democracy, we end up choosing people who then govern most undemocratically.
•So what then is the meaning of an election? What are we electing somebody for? We do not elect a person in order to give him or her the right to govern per se. Elections are important only because they are based on the fundamental principle that all of us have an equal claim to the public goods in the society we belong to. This is equivalent to saying that all of us belong to a society equally and have an equal say in its governance as well as its wealth. A public park is public only because the park is ‘owned’ by all of us in equal measure. This means that the poorest person in a society has an equal share in the public wealth as much as the richest person has, in principle. When we vote somebody to power, we are not giving that person ‘power’ to do what s/he wants but we are merely choosing a person to take care of the ‘public wealth’ that belongs equally to all of us. Electing someone is merely choosing a representative to take care of our share of the public domain, and nothing more than that. The true act of democracy lies in how this job is done by this elected representative.
•This is the principle of trusteeship that was so forcefully articulated by Gandhi and which even influenced businessmen like J.R.D. Tata. The elected representatives are merely trustees on our behalf and it is a primary duty of the trustee to make sure that they do not destroy what they are trustees of. This is the only meaningful implication of democracy, and it is precisely this character of democracy that has been completely destroyed in viewing elections as the essential act of democracy.
About good governance
•The idea of good governance also follows from this. What the elected representatives are supposed to do is to ‘govern’ only in so far as they are true to their task of governing on our behalf. To govern on our behalf is merely to take decisions and implement them so as to protect the common public goods that we all have an equal share in. But, most often, instead of being trustees, our elected representatives take our share of the public wealth for their personal gain.
•The lack of a true sense of democracy in politics influences every other aspect of our society. Few of our institutions imbibe a sense of democratic functioning in this true sense. Private institutions anyway have little pretence of democracy since the private, by definition, has little sense of the shared trusteeship of the public. But we can demand some ethical conduct from the private because even the private needs a stable public space to be available for its existence. But whether in politics or in institutions which claim to be democratic, the demand is for much more than mere rituals of choice. That can only happen when it is power that is democratised, and not choice alone. While all of us recognise that sharing power democratically is difficult even in small organisations, let alone the government, we should also be aware that as long as the intentions of the person wielding power is that of a trustee, then there at least exists the potential to be democratic.
Recipe for alienation
•The people who vote belong to the political process only at the moment they vote. Once they finish voting, they no longer have any place in the democratic process. Any process that does this has no hope of truly being democratic. This is what has led to the deep sense of political alienation among the people. It is this political alienation which often leads to cultural alienation, which in turn leads to right-wing movements. If we want to get rid of most of the problems we are facing today, the first step is to make the political process truly democratic and inclusive. I am only echoing here what the common people have understood so well about elections today — that they really have very little to do with the ideal of democracy!
📰 Kerala may seek WHO help to battle Nipah
Third major outbreak in India: NCDC
•A day after it was confirmed that the Nipah virus infection had caused the death of three members of a family in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, a team from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has termed the incidence the “third major outbreak in the country.”
•One more person died of suspected infection of the virus on Monday. The laboratory result of another person who died on Sunday has confirmed the presence of the virus. The State government is considering seeking the help of the World Health Organisation. A team of experts of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences is expected to visit the district on Tuesday.
•After inspecting Sooppikkada village from where the deceased hailed, NCDC Director Sujeet Kumar Singh told the media that the infection and the subsequent deaths were “a little unusual” and “a cause for concern.” He said the outbreaks reported in two places in West Bengal were linked to Bangladesh, where it had been reported earlier. However, that was not the case in Kerala. Dr. Singh said there was panic in the village and many residents had left.
•The illness was transmitted from animals to humans and bats were the carriers. Detailed tests would have to be conducted, in coordination with the Animal Husbandry Ministry. Only then could the complete cycle of infection be understood. Circumstantial evidence indicated that the deaths were among family members, the first level of contact, and healthcare workers who had got in touch with them. Secondary contacts were under observation, he said.
📰 Camera traps record rare black panther in Odisha
Footage from Garjanpahad Reserve Forest
•The wildlife wing of Odisha’s forest and Environment Department have recorded the presence of black panthers in a forest in Sundargarh district. The photographs make Odisha the ninth State in India where the elusive and rare big cat has been seen.
•“Black panther or melanistic leopard is a colour variant of the Indian leopard and the footage of this animal has been captured repeatedly by cameras installed in Garjanpahad Reserve Forest of Hemgir Range of Sundargarh Forest Division,” said Sandeep Tripathi, Odisha’s Chief Wildlife Warden, on Monday. It was the first ever footage of black panther in the forests of Odisha, he said.
•Camera traps were deployed under the guidance of Arun Kumar Mishra, Divisional Forest Officer of Sundargarh, and Bhakta Rath and Nimain Palei, researchers with the Chief Wildlife Warden since December 2015. The cameras was installed in 2015 after villagers and tribal people reported having seen the animal, the officer said.
•“The leopards’ skins vary in colour and the jet black melanistic form is called black panther. It is as shy as a normal leopard and very difficult to detect. It is mostly found in densely forested areas of southern India,” he said.
•The reserve forest where the footage of the black panther has been recorded is spread across the Hemgir and Gopalpur Range, covering an area of 5947.47 ha and 4090.65 ha respectively. Although the presence of black panther was reported 26 years ago, no scientific or pictorial records could establish the claim.
•Black panthers have also been reported from Kerala (Periyar Tiger Reserve), Karnataka (Bhadra Tiger Reserve, Dandeli-Anshi Tiger Reserve and Kabini Wildlife Sanctuary), Chhattisgarh (Achanakmar Tiger Reserve), Maharashtra (Satara), Goa (Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary), Tamil Nadu (Mudumalai Tiger Reserve), Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
📰 Miles to go for the new bankruptcy code
The new bankruptcy code yields its first success, but many wrinkles remain
•Good news has finally started to roll out of the refurbished bankruptcy courts. Tata Steel acquired 73% stake in the bankrupt firm Bhushan Steel for about ₹35,000 crore last week, making it the first major resolution of a bankruptcy case under the new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). Bhushan Steel was one among the 12 major accounts referred to the National Company Law Tribunal at the behest of the Reserve Bank of India last year to ease the burden of bad loans on banks. The proceeds from the acquisition will go towards settling almost two-thirds of the total outstanding liabilities of over ₹56,000 crore that Bhushan Steel owes banks. While it may be unwise to read too much into a single case, the Bhushan Steel resolution is nevertheless an encouraging sign for banks because they typically manage to recover only about 25% of their money from defaulters. In fact, between April 2014 and September 2017, the bad loan recovery rate of public sector banks was as low as 11%, with non-performing assets worth ₹2.41 lakh crore written off from their books. The Finance Ministry now expects banks to recover more than ₹1 lakh crore from the resolution of the other cases referred by the RBI to the NCLT. If the banks do indeed recover funds of this scale, it would considerably reduce the burden on taxpayers, who would otherwise have to foot the bill for any recapitalisation of banks. Even more important, speedy resolution would free valuable assets to be used for wealth-creation.
•The resolution of one high-profile case, however, should not deflect attention from the many challenges still plaguing the bankruptcy resolution process. The IBC, as the government itself has admitted, remains a work in progress. This is a welcome piece of legislation to the extent that it subsumes a plethora of laws that confused creditors; instead it now offers a more streamlined way to deal with troubled assets. But issues such as the proposed eligibility criteria for bidders have left it bogged down and suppressed its capacity to help out creditors efficiently. Also, the strict time limit for the resolution process as mandated by the IBC is an area that has drawn much attention, and it merits further review in order to balance the twin objectives of speedy resolution and maximising recovery for the lenders. To its credit, the government has been willing to hear out suggestions. It would do well to implement the recommendations of the Insolvency Law Committee which, among other things, has vouched for relaxed bidder eligibility criteria. Going forward, amendments to the bankruptcy code should primarily be driven by the goal of maximising the sale price of stressed assets. This requires a robust market for stressed assets that is free from all kinds of entry barriers.
📰 The Meghalaya example
As the first State to pass a social audit law, its experience is instructive on how to increase awareness of entitlements
•Nearly 300 people, mostly women, gathered in a community hall on a sunny afternoon in Iewshillong village, Meghalaya waiting for the “social audit meeting” to begin. They wondered what the ‘social audit’, that had unfolded in their village over the past five days, was going to amount to.
Talking it over
•When the distribution register of foodgrains under the National Food Security Act was read out, there was an uneasy silence. One woman raised her hand to say that the dealer had been charging her more than what was recorded. The dealer, the wife of the village headman, reminded people that they had agreed to pay more to make up for transportation losses. When the whole hall erupted in cheers of unanimous support for the dealer and disapproval for her act of apparent disloyalty in saying what she did, she stood and softly said on the mike, “I am not complaining. I am only stating the truth”. The soft voice of Margaret Shabong was the loudest affirmation of what social audits stood for — speaking truth to power. Her individual act of stating the truth led to an administrative decision of preventing rollover of transportation costs of foodgrains to the citizen. The village eventually applauded her, as she spoke again and stood her ground, and a mature deliberative democracy demonstrated its potential in a remote Khasi village.
•In April 2017, Meghalaya became the first State in the country to pass a social audit legislation, the Meghalaya Community Participation and Public Services Social Audit Act. This Act mandated social audits across 21 schemes and 11 departments.
•Later in the year, the Meghalaya government decided to pilot social audits in a campaign mode to unpack the modalities that would have to be institutionalised across the State for meeting the mandate of the legislation. Eighteeen villages representing Garo, Khasi and Jaintia Hills were selected for the pilot. The process began in the third week of November 2017, and culminated with public hearings in 18 villages, including Iewshillong.
•The Meghalaya exercise demonstrated how social audits can be developed as an ongoing process through which citizens participate in the planning, implementation and monitoring of the programme. Meghalaya is a Sixth Schedule Area, so the audits had to be built on traditional tribal institutions, leveraging their inherent strengths and facilitating their engagement with contemporary democratic practices. The audits were deliberately positioned to be a platform for sharing information about schemes, and enhancing awareness amongst people about their entitlements; detecting beneficiaries who were eligible, but had been left out; recording people’s testimonies; identifying priorities for inputs for planning; registering of grievances; and pinpointing systemic shortcomings. The critical requirement of recording financial and procedural irregularities and deviations between fact and record remained a core part of the exercise.
•The audits helped identify and bring about evidence-based policy changes. More than 21 issues were identified based on pilots alone that needed a change in policy, in the interest of the community. For instance, several instances of local discretion in drawing up pension beneficiary lists for the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) and the Chief Minister Pension Programme were recorded, because the CM pension provided twice as much remuneration as the NSAP. At a culmination meeting, the government announced parity between the two schemes, benefiting thousands of pensioners.
Citizen oversight
•In India today, there is a growing acknowledgement of social audits as a credible means of institutionalising citizen oversight. There is therefore an urgent need to come up with a working protocol for facilitating social audits across a range of interventions. The experience of Meghalaya has taught us how social audit is intrinsically related to processes of community participation and grievance redress. The Meghalaya pilots have also helped formulate a practical framework through which that can be done. Draft rules were prepared on the basis of consultation.
•By passing and rolling out a social audit law, Meghalaya has made a breakthrough in the framework of accountability to the people. Social audit is much more than just a tool of “good governance”. Knowing the reluctance of most government establishments to share power or become accountable, this initiative is unlikely to spread or become robust, unless driven by citizens groups. Civil society needs to shape the social audit campaign, be a watchdog, and staunchly protect the independence of the process. Social audits must become part of the demand for effective legislation for the whole country.
📰 Wages for looking
The ban on ‘Nokku Kooli’ is being greeted with scepticism in Kerala
•“Your Majesty, please give me a sarkari job, any job,” the shrewd young man pleaded with the king. “I will work without pay. I only need a job title and a flag.”
•The kind king gave him the title Thira Nokki, or “Watcher of the Waves”, and an impressive red flag with the king’s insignia stitched on it. “Go to the seafront at sunrise every day and just look at the waves until sundown,” the king commanded.
•With the king’s flag in hand and a threatening look in his eyes, the young man waved down every boat that passed by. Unnerved by the flag, every boatman paid him a bribe. The bribe later came to be called Nokku Kooli, or wages for looking.
•It was perhaps from this folk tale about power dynamics and corruption that the modern Malayalam term Nokku Kooli emerged. It signifies the obnoxious practice in Kerala of extorting money from hapless employers, shopkeepers or households by loading-and-unloading workers. Though abhorred by every citizen, it has survived for decades with the support of the political class.
•According to one definition, ‘Nokku Kooli is a euphemism for extortion by organised labour unions whereby wages are paid to trade union activists to allow common householders, investors, or builders to unload belongings or materials using machines or their own labour. This happens with the tacit support of political parties including those in government’. A wag put it this way: “Three things are certain about life in Kerala — death, the hartal and the Nokku Kooli.”
•In Kerala, home to 33 million rights-conscious people, it is important to understand that Nokku Kooli is a key source of income for low-rung union bosses. It knows no barriers of power, influence, name, fame or station.
•A month ago, an actor had to cough up ₹25,000 to head-load workers belonging to various trade unions. This was for just looking on while a group of workers employed by the actor’s building contractor unloaded granite slabs. The unions had initially demanded ₹1 lakh. Tenants in Kerala, scared of Nokku Kooli thugs, usually move house past midnight, in phases. Nokku Kooki is often blamed for the industrial backwardness of Kerala.
•Now, the CPI (M)-led Pinarayi Vijayan government has banned the practice, beginning May 1. No legal framework has been put in place, although the government is considering making Nokku Kooli a non-bailable offence.
•Members of the CITU, the trade union wing of Mr. Vijayan’s party, are widely considered to be the most aggressive practitioners of Nokku Kooli, despite public disapproval by the union and the party.
•The people of Kerala have taken the ban with a bucket of salt. Last year, despite a ban on bandhs, bandhs were renamed hartals; Kerala had the largest number of hartals in the country. Most people believe the ban on Nokku Kooli will go the way of the ban on the bandh.
📰 Now, a memory transplant
A ground-breaking experiment on how memory works
•Scientists have transferred a memory from one sea snail to another, in a ground-breaking experiment that changes how we think about memory. The findings have been published in the journal, eNeuro. Where memory resides in the brain is a key question in neuroscience research. Till now, scientists believed that the seat of memory was in the synapses, or connections, between neurons. But there was some evidence that it may lie within the Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) inside a neuron, a molecule that helps turn genes on and off. To explore this idea, a team of the University of California in Los Angeles turned to a type of sea snail (Aplysia californica). These snails have tubular structures on their backs, called siphons, which they retract during unpleasant sensations. Typically, this retraction, or siphon-reflex, lasts a few seconds. But in a snail that has been shocked repeatedly, the reflex lasts much longer, a sign that the snail has a memory of the shocks.
•For the experiment, the team gave the snails pulses of shocks over a period of two days. These snails began retracting their siphons for over 55 seconds, compared with naive snails, which did so for only 2 seconds. Next, they extracted RNA from the shocked snails, and injected it into the naive ones. When they now shocked the naive snails, the animals retracted their siphons for around 38 seconds, suggesting that they had gained a new memory. One way in which the RNA could be ferrying memory is by switching genes on and off, through a process called DNA methylation. Here, the RNA adds chemicals, called methyl groups, to the DNA molecule, thus interfering with the DNA’s ability to produce proteins. This interference switches genes on or off, influencing memory in turn.
•To test this idea, the scientists cultured neurons from the shocked and naive snails in a mixture of haemolymph and other nutrients. Next, they drenched the naive neurons with RNA from the shocked snails. When they shocked these neurons, they found that the pattern in which the neurons fired matched that of shocked snails.
•The team also injected naive snails with a chemical that inhibits DNA methylation. When they transferred shocked RNA to such snails, they found that the naive snails did not acquire the new memory. This confirmed that DNA methylation was the mechanism by which RNA was ferrying memories around. The findings challenge a widely held idea that memories are formed at neuron synapses. If replicated, the research could eventually lead to therapies for memory disorders.
📰 China launches relay satellite to explore far side of moon
It must make adjustments to its orbit, including using lunar gravity to its advantage
•China launched a relay satellite on Monday as part of a groundbreaking programme to be the first to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon later this year. The satellite, lofted into space aboard a Long March-4C rocket, will facilitate communication between controllers on Earth and the Chang’e 4 mission, the China National Space Administration said on its website.
•China hopes to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the moon’s far side, also known as the dark side because it faces away from the earth and is comparatively unknown. The satellite, named Queqiao, or “Magpie Bridge,” after an ancient Chinese folk tale, was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the space administration said.
Multiple challenges
•The launch is a “key step,” but the satellite’s mission must still overcome challenges, including making multiple adjustments to its orbit, “braking” near the moon and using lunar gravity to its advantage, project manager Zhang Lihua was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.
•According to the administration and website space.com, Queqiao was expected to arrive shortly at the Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, a gravitationally stable spot located 64,000 km beyond the far side of the moon. Without such a communications relay link, spacecraft on the far side would have to “send their signals through the moon’s rocky bulk,” space.com said.
•China previously landed its Jade Rabbit rover on the moon and plans to land its Chang’e 5 probe there next year.
•China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, making it only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so and has put a pair of space stations into orbit. Upcoming missions include the launch of the 20-ton core module for the still orbiting Tiangong 2 station, along with components for a 60-ton station that is due to come online in 2022 and a Mars rover planned for mid 2020s.
