📰 Privatise all political parties
After all, India is the fastest growing political market in the world
•The NITI Aayog chief recently made a brilliant suggestion that, I am sorry to say, has been widely unappreciated. Instead of gratitude for expressing a bold idea, his comments provoked outrage. Everyone apparently thought he wanted to sell India’s family jewels to the cheapest crony capitalist.
A magic passport
•Nothing could be closer to the truth. The outrage is as misplaced as a fish on a bicycle. Or a prime minister on a rock. People were worried that the family jewels in question could end up with someone like Nirav Modi, a famous jeweller with a magical passport that keeps working no matter how many times it’s revoked. According to my sources in the MEA, the passport is immune to revocation because of its special powers derived from the Tesseract.
•There is only one way to definitively kill Nirav Modi’s passport: the MEA must get one of its agents in London to steal it, and on the next available Amavasya, at the stroke of midnight, soak it in a vat of organic urine sourced from a cow bred on a pure Panchatattva diet containing the correct proportions of Prithvi, Jal, Vayu, Agni and Aakash. Then it must persuade one of the Avengers, preferably either the Hulk or Thor, to perform a yajna where each page of the passport is torn one by one, coated thickly with clarified Gowardhan ghee, and dropped into the sacrificial fire while three MEA officials with the rank of Joint Secretary and above chant shlokas from the Niravathiruttupaya Samhita. Only then will the passport stay dead. I know this is a tough and complicated challenge. But then, so is getting people to voluntarily starve to death unless their fingerprints match the preferred rangoli pattern of an artificial intelligence. And we’re managing that quite well, aren’t we?
The one big bang reform we need
•Coming back to the NITI Aayog chief, all he said was that India should hand over its schools, colleges and jails to the private sector — something long overdue. If at all he must be criticised, it should be for stopping short of advocating the one truly big bang reform that can transform India’s fortunes forever: privatisation of all political parties.
•Frankly, I am surprised that I am the first private intellectual to publicly propose this idea, given that it has been staring us in the face, neck and shoulders for quite some time. Thanks to electoral bonds and last year’s amendments to the Finance Act, today any money bag anywhere in the world can anonymously invest any amount in the Indian political market through the BOOT model — Build up a politician, Own him, Operate him, and Transfer black money abroad.
•What the whole world knows but few Indians recognise is that India is the fastest growing political market in the world. Political parties spent a total of ₹10,000 crore in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls — more than double the ₹4,500 crore that was spent in the 2004 elections. If you thought that was a lot, they spent in the 2014 parliamentary elections three times what they did in 2009, burning up an estimated ₹30,000 crore.
•Clearly, electoral politics, along with the allied industries of tax evasion, black money generation, and money laundering, is one of the best performing sectors in the Indian economy. Since elections these days take place round the year, our much maligned political parties are actually the country’s biggest job creators, with millions of people finding year-round employment as social media trolls, fake video producers, WhatsApp admins, lynch mob coordinators, offence-takers, rally audiences, cash dispensers, alcohol distributors, etc.
•If we want to preserve these jobs and create millions more, in addition to encouraging FDI in Indian political parties, we must also allow foreign political parties, such as Trump’s Republicans, for instance, to contest in Indian elections. Just as a company’s biggest shareholder becomes its chairman and managing director, similarly the biggest investor in a winning party, regardless of his nationality, should be allowed to become the Prime Minister of India. Imagine an election where the prime ministerial candidates are Modiji, Trumpji, Zuckerbergji and Sequoiaji! It would be worth its weight in Nirav Modi (I mean the branded diamonds, not Nirav bhai) just for the TRPs it would generate.
•All said and done, privatising political parties, though a major reform, is still only the first step. The ultimate goal must be to privatise the state itself. Our passports should start saying ‘India Inc.’ instead of Republic of India. But in order to make it happen, the Indian government should first hire a top consulting firm, say, a McKinsey or a PwC, and ask them to review the Constitution from the perspective of ease of doing business. Their recommendations can then be converted into amendments that will suitably update the Constitution into a more market-compatible version. In the unlikely event of there being too much opposition to these constitutional amendments, they can always be passed as money bills — after all, politics is all about the money.
📰 Why we need a Constitution
Constitutions are needed not only to limit wielders of existing power but to empower those traditionally deprived of it
•The recent judgment by the Supreme Court clarifying the respective jurisdictions of Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor and its elected representatives and specifying the limits of their powers once again underlies how fortunate we are to have the Constitution. Why should gratitude be expressed for living under a constitutional democracy? Why do we need a Constitution?
•Since an individual’s own personal power is severely limited, nothing valuable can be attained without the collective effort of individuals. A boulder cannot move a centimetre if one individual pushes it, but when pushed by dozens it goes places. Most human goods — health, education, infrastructure, peace and harmony, economic growth, leisure and enjoyment, art and literature, narratives of self-understanding and collective heritage — are realised by assembling power. However, once constituted, this indispensable collective power to do or achieve things can be used not to realise the collective good but for one’s own exclusive advantage, to secure things only for oneself. This can be done by forcing others to do what they would not otherwise do, to get them to act against their will, for one’s own benefit.
Checking tyranny
•It is a feature, particularly of modern societies, that this public or collective power is largely vested in the state relatively separate from society. It follows that state power meant for everyone’s good can be used by some over other members of society, to benefit just a few of its functionaries and their friends. Since the formation of states, therefore, humans have felt the need to not only garner collective power but also limit it, so that it is not exercised whimsically, arbitrarily, for self-aggrandisement and against the basic interests of the people. This is the key reason why we have a Constitution, which is not just any odd assortment of law and institutions but a framework of ground rules that acts as a bulwark against the tyrannical use of state power to dominate and oppress others.
•In short, constitutions strive for a delicate balance to ensure that the collective power of society invested in the state is neither dissipated or fragmented to become ineffective (for this results in lawlessness and anarchy detrimental to the realisation of the good life), nor so tightly organised and untrammelled that it takes away our freedoms, becomes oppressive. The potential to abuse public power is inherent in the very exercise of it, an ever present possibility in all states. Thus, the earliest constitutions of the world developed to check the tyranny of our rulers.
•This idea of the Constitution presupposes an unbridgeable distance between people and the state; a powerless people who need the help of constitutional law to control state power. But what if people themselves wield state power? What if the power of the state comes from an originary power that resides in the demos, the people? State power might be limited not by some higher law but by the power of the people. Democracy, it might be argued, can function as an alternative to constitutions. When then have a Constitution?
•This is an attractive but flawed idea. It is flawed because in practice, democratic power never really resides in all the people but largely, at the very least, in a temporarily constituted majority. Sometimes these majorities can even become permanent. Here, the tyranny of a ruler is replaced by the tyranny of the majority group. If so, we need constitutions to check the tyranny of a majoritarian, democratic state. This entails that very important issues pertaining to minority groups be freed from the contingencies of majority will, taken out of the decision-making arena of electoral democracies and made more or less non-negotiable. This is the point behind rights — rights of individuals and minorities must not be trumped by majority preferences. This is the second reason why we need constitutions, or constitutional democracies.
Prevent self-harm
•But constitutions are required for a third reason: to protect everyone against human vulnerability in general. It is important not to forget that human beings are fallible, that they sometimes forget what is really good for them; they yield to temptations that bring them pleasure now but pain later. It is not unknown for people to act in the heat of the moment (out of anger, fear or intense hatred) only to rue the consequences of the decision later. Electing a person with strong authoritarian traits, for example. By providing a framework of law culled over years from collective experience and wisdom, constitutions prevent people from succumbing to currently fashionable whims and fancies, anticipating and redressing the excessively mercurial character of everyday politics. The guardians of India’s Constitution have ensured that destabilising swings of legislative moods generated by ephemeral passion or myopia do not alter its basic structure.
Enable power to do good
•India provides a particularly instructive case of another valuable function of constitutions: to provide a moral framework for profound, non-violent social transformations. Of course, this is Ambedkar’s great contribution. But Nehru was equally eloquent: “The Constituent Assembly is a nation on the move, throwing away the shell of its past political and possibly social structure, and fashioning for itself a new garment of its own making.” The Indian Constitution was designed to break the shackles of traditional social hierarchies and to usher in a new era of freedom, equality and justice. Thus, by disenabling states from doing certain things, constitutions enable them to do other, important things. Once restrained, public power can be deployed to achieve the good life. Thus, constitutions are needed not only to limit wielders of existing power but to empower those traditionally deprived of it, to give vulnerable people the power to help realise an inclusive, collective good.
📰 Nothing but lies: Fake videos, rumour set off the lynch mobs
Over 20 people have died in mob attacks triggered by fake news, and experts say social media should deploy technology to stop the mischief
•A promotional video on child safety made by an advertising agency in Karachi triggered violence 900 km away in Maharashtra’s Dhule, and led to the lynching of five people from a nomadic community on July 1.
•The video, spliced and edited to trigger panic about “child lifters” on the prowl, spread on WhatsApp and other social media platforms like wildfire. Its victims were from the Gosavi nomadic community that derives sustenance by seeking alms. They were intercepted by villagers in Dhule’s Rainpada hamlet on suspicion of being child abductors and bludgeoned to death.
•In Malegaon, a team led by Additional Superintendent of Police, Harssh A Poddar rescued five people from being lynched by a mob. The community had seen videos from Pakistan, Bangalore and Chennai, all aimed instigating violence.
•“There are quite a few videos doing the rounds. One is from Pakistan, which is actually an edited video of a child being lifted from Karachi, and it is being attributed to India. Another one claims organs are being harvested from children. There is one from Bangalore where a woman is seen wearing a burka and walking away with a child,” Mr. Poddar said.
•Those arrested for indulging in such acts invariably had a minor crime record, he added.
•“We arrested 16 people in Malegaon for trying to kill five people who were suspected to be child-lifters, and most of them had minor crime records previously. They take the excuse of a crowd for the violence,” he said.
•Secunder Kermani, BBC’s Pakistan correspondent who traced the advertising agency that made the video in Karachi said it was filmed a few years ago. “The advertising agency said they made the video pro bono to promote child safety in Pakistan. The actors were mainly all employees of the agency. They had no idea that the videos had been linked with the lynchings in India. They were heartbroken,” Mr. Kermani said.
•Videos of alleged child abduction spiralling on social media platforms like WhatsApp have led to the murder of more than 20 people across India in the past two months. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky who served as a professor at Ohio State University and the co-founder of Pro-Truth Pledge, an initiative to promote truthfulness, said, “lynchings in India are the most violent and deadly episodes of fake news-inspired violence.”
•Those arrested for indulging in such acts invariably had a minor crime record, he added.
•“We arrested 16 people in Malegaon for trying to kill five people who were suspected to be child-lifters, and most of them had minor crime records previously. They take the excuse of a crowd for the violence,” he said.
•Secunder Kermani, BBC’s Pakistan correspondent who traced the advertising agency that made the video in Karachi said it was filmed a few years ago. “The advertising agency said they made the video pro bono to promote child safety in Pakistan. The actors were mainly all employees of the agency. They had no idea that the videos had been linked with the lynchings in India. They were heartbroken,” Mr. Kermani said.
•Videos of alleged child abduction spiralling on social media platforms like WhatsApp have led to the murder of more than 20 people across India in the past two months. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky who served as a professor at Ohio State University and the co-founder of Pro-Truth Pledge, an initiative to promote truthfulness, said, “lynchings in India are the most violent and deadly episodes of fake news-inspired violence.”
•But there were plenty of others in developing countries like Brazil,and also in developed countries: In the U.S., a gunman shot at a pizza parlour, provoked by fake news.
•WhatsApp and its owner Facebook could do many things to stop such incidents, he said. “One example is looking for certain keywords in messages sent on WhatsApp and warning people that they might be getting misinformation.”
•Waking up to the danger, the Home Ministry asked the States and Union territories (UTs) to check incidents of mob lynching fuelled by rumours of child-lifting on social media.
•The government directed WhatsApp to immediately take steps to prevent the spread of “irresponsible and explosive messages.”
•In the past, it has asked the U.S. to bring pressure on social media giants to install servers in India, but the proposal was turned down.
Post counter-videos
•Dr. Tsipursky said if the servers are in the country where the government is located, It would help in that “more control can be imposed by a government on social media giants.”
•Mr. Poddar said while one method to check fake news was to post counter-videos clarifying the actual position, the other was to register the offences.
•“A couple of days back, a video of a child that was allegedly kidnapped surfaced. It was found that the child knew the man in the video, and had lied that he had been kidnapped because the man had asked the child to repay some borrowed money.
•“The video looked convincing. The word got around that police is registering cases in [genuine] offences and no violence was reported in the past four-five days in Malegaon,” he said.
•“At the heart of this problem is a lack of media literacy, with people believing rumours rather than credible media sources. The government needs to invest much more resources into education, of children and adults alike, in media literacy. Likewise, the government needs to push social media giants to work hard on fighting misinformation, and hold them accountable for taking meaningful steps. Finally, the government can get social media giants to trace the source of fake news stories, and hold their perpetrators accountable for the consequences,” Dr. Tsipursky said.
📰 IMA forms committee for emotional well-being of doctors
Study shows stress and depression on the rise among doctors; they have a significantly higher suicide rate than the general population
•The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has formed the national IMA committee for emotional health and well-being of medical students and doctors — “Doctor Know Thyself”.
•IMA national president Ravi Wankhedkar explained that doctors are becoming an endangered species.
•“In the last few years, the stress of students and practising doctors has taken a serious turn. Students of medical colleges in India experience the highest level of stress than students in any other country. At the tender age of 18, the students are under tremendous pressure to understand, grasp, assimilate and utilise information about the complex human body and mind as well as the endless list of diseases that affect it.”
•He added that they have to learn the skills necessary to treat the patients and perform their duties diligently under challenging circumstances.
•“The stress levels only increase with post-graduation entrance exams and the arduous years of residency in overcrowded hospitals with overworked doctors. Doctors are surrounded day and night by disease, distress, dangerous infections, demands from patients and death. This often leads to burn-outs, depression, mental health challenges and even suicides,” he said.
Public health priority
•Reports of World Health Organisation states, suicides is recognised as a public health priority. Annually more than 8 lakh people with disturbed mental health commit suicide. Undetected, under-treated or untreated depression underlies most suicide attempts, which is preventable. Suicide is the second-most leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults (age group 15 to 29 years).
•In India, neuropsychiatric disorders contribute to 11.6% of the global mental health disease burden. Medical students and doctors have a significantly higher suicide rate than the general population.
Numerous issues
•“Practising doctors are facing numerous issues in their daily routine. Government red tapes, government apathy towards healthcare sector, undue expectations of people leading to violence are making doctors’ lives miserable. While the IMA fights for the cause of fraternity, addressing the mental health of our doctors and medical students becomes most important,” said R.N. Tandon secretary general, IMA.
•“A holistic approach to preventive and promotive care would go a long way in improving emotional well-being among doctors. Creating awareness and interventions will help bring down the suicide rates. Professional support systems, helplines and counselling centres will be promoted by the IMA to help students and doctors. The unique IMA mission for emotional healing and mental health of practising doctors and students shall create positive mindsets by reducing stress levels among medicos,” said Nilima Kadambi, chairperson of the IMA committee.
📰 Narendra Modi government’s farm policies off target: study
Report says it’s consumers who benefit from them more than farmers
•Despite the general perception that Indian farmers are beneficiaries of major subsidies, a new report says the overall effect of policy interventions between 2014 and 2016 is, in fact, a 6% annual reduction of gross farm revenues. Consumers, on the other hand, pay an average 25% less for commodities as a result of policy interventions.
•According to researchers at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — an intergovernmental body of 36 developed countries — and the Indian think tank ICRIER, who analysed policies that affected the agricultural sector over the two-year period, government interventions were more consumer-centric than producer-centric.
Many curbs
•The report “Agriculture Policies in India”, which was released this week, points out that Indian farmers face regulations and restrictions — both in the domestic market and also when they attempt to export their produce — which often lead to producer prices that are lower than comparable international levels. The researchers argue that “despite large subsidies for fertilizers, power and irrigation, which offset somewhat the price-depressing effect of market interventions, the overall effect of policy intervention over the 2014-16 period is a 6% annual reduction of gross farm revenues.”
•While consumers have benefited from the government’s efforts to keep prices low, a poorly targeted, inefficient and wasteful public distribution system means that malnutrition and food insecurity continue to persist, says the report.
•The report has several suggestions for policymakers, including reform of market regulations, strengthening initiatives such as eNAM and allowing private players to play a larger role in the sector.
Regulatory ecosystem
•It also recommends a strengthening of the regulatory environment governing land issues, strengthening access to credit, especially long-term loans, and developing collective-action groundwater and watershed management and correcting measures — including electricity pricing — which incentivise the overuse of water. With regard to the PDS, the report suggests gradual reduction and a move towards cash transfers and allowing the private sector to manage remaining stock operations.
•To make trade work for Indian agriculture, import tariffs must be reduced and export restrictions relaxed to create a more stable and predictable market environment.
📰 In Telangana, fighting fake news
•For four months now, Telangana has been using all hands, government machinery, village heads, folk musicians and so forth, to fight back against the spread of rumours and fake news that have taken lives.
What happened?
•Three persons were killed in attacks triggered by rumours about gangs of cannibals, child-lifters and organ harvesters over the past few months. That the death toll is lower has a lot to do with how the government moved quickly to stop fake news being spread through videos and WhatsApp. Over the past couple of months, across the length and breadth of the country, mobs have beaten to death people they suspect — almost always without basis — of plotting to kidnap children to harvest their organs. Last Sunday, five persons were lynched in Dhule district of Maharashtra on suspicion of being child-lifters.
What steps did Telangana take?
•First off the block was Director-General of Police Mahender Reddy who tweeted on May 22, urging the people not to believe in social media rumours on kidnappers and burglars.
•“The news is totally false,” he said, asking the people to call the police in an emergency. The tweet came after a few villagers attacked a 45-year-old man while he was with his friend. The man succumbed to his injuries in Hyderabad. The two men were from a different village and were passing through when they were encountered by angry villagers who did not let them speak and thrashed them. On May 26, a driver was lynched on the outskirts of the city. On the same night, a transgender was lynched. She had come to Hyderabad, along with two others, from a neighbouring village for alms that are liberally given during Ramzan.
•Police officials have adopted both modern and age-old methods to fight rumour-mongering. For example, Rema Rajeshwari, Superintendent of Police in Gadwal district, roped in village drummers to spread the word. In Hyderabad, officials have erected flex boards in regional languages at railway stations, bus stops and city junctions to stop the rumour mills. Police officials have even roped in religious leaders to alert them to fake news. But instead of limiting it to a one-off awareness campaign, the police are conducting regular meetings in villages which are more vulnerable. The citizen-engagement programme is in its fourth month in some places where police officials have been assigned areas for creating awareness.
•Along with these proactive steps, more than a dozen young men have been picked up for spreading rumours on WhatsApp groups. A few ‘social media journalists’ have also fallen into the police dragnet after they forwarded messages. Senior police officials have taken to social media to spread multi-lingual messages against fake news.
Why are migrants vulnerable?
•Some of the videos being shared are extremely gruesome. One of the videos that went viral is from Karachi in Pakistan, meant to show how easily children can be kidnapped. Other fake news forwards doing the rounds spoke about the gangs being unfamiliar with the local language. This has made many individuals in Telangana particularly vulnerable as a large number of workers and migrants have moved into the booming metropolis of Hyderabad and its surrounding areas.
Will the rumours stop?
•A behaviour psychiatrist from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences says this is mob psychology at play rather than hysteria or mass or group hysteria. “Responsibility is diffused in a mob. This empowers the participants in a big way, leading them to behave irresponsibly. It takes very strong action to dissuade the mob,” says Dr. M. Manjula of NIMHANS. “Only a sustained awareness campaign over a long period of time can stop this rumourmongering as it involves children, and people are very sensitive and attached to children.” So, in a sense, the Telangana administration and police are on the right path.
📰 A vigil over neonatal sepsis
Researchers, in India and abroad, are taking up a joint study
•Antimicrobial resistance has become a global health challenge, making easily treatable infections difficult to treat. The problem has not spared vulnerable population groups either such as newborn babies who need urgent treatment in conditions such as neonatal sepsis.
•Sepsis can be potentially life threatening, particularly for newborns, as their immune systems are not fully developed.
•Given the rise in bacterial resistance, hospitalised infants are at high risk of developing drug-resistant hospital-acquired infections. The susceptibility of newborns to sepsis is compounded, as diagnosing serious bacterial infections in them is challenging — symptoms are difficult to detect.
•In order to gather more data and acquire insights into the problem, researchers from India and 10 countries have joined hands to conduct an observational study in hospitals and neonatal units.
•In India, the study will be conducted at Lady Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi, King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai and Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry. Research will also be conducted in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Greece, Italy, Kenya, South Africa, Thailand, Vietnam and Uganda.
•The study focusses on collecting clinical information on babies with significant clinical sepsis. It will investigate how neonatal sepsis is managed currently so that this insight can be used as a basis for evaluating future interventions in neonates. Outcomes of interest will include mortality, antibiotic use and duration of antimicrobial therapy.
•Researchers from all the participating countries met in India this week to understand sepsis in newborns and current antibiotic prescribing practices. It is part of an initiative launched by the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP).
Focus on antibiotics
•“This study would be helpful as the burden of infectious disease is high though it has declined in the recent past. Development of new drugs is not the only solution we are looking for. We are focussing on better use of existing antibiotics also,” Dr. Manica Balasegaram, Director, GARDP, . says.
•Nearly 40% of the global burden of sepsis-related neonatal deaths is in South Asia — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
•Every year, in India alone, around 56,500 neonatal deaths are attributable to sepsis caused by anti-microbial resistance to drugs.
•Sepsis in the neonatal period (first 28 days of an infant’s life) is the most common cause of deaths among neonates around the world. Of all the deaths that occur among children under the age of five years, 44% (almost half) occur in the first 28 days of an infant’s life. In 2015, it was estimated that 214,000 deaths among these newborns were attributable to drug-resistant infections globally. — India Science Wire
