📰 Panel to study issues raised by #MeTooIndia
Ministry for Women and Child Development to constitute group of legal experts
•The government will set up a committee of judges and lawyers to examine the existing legal and institutional framework to deal with complaints of sexual harassment at the workplace, Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi announced on Friday.
Govt. silent
•The decision comes even as the government is yet to make a statement on allegations by several women journalists against Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar.
•“I believe in the pain and trauma behind every single complaint. Cases of sexual harassment at work must be dealt with a policy of zero tolerance. The Ministry will be setting up a committee of senior judicial & legal persons to examine all issues emanating from the #MeTooIndia movement,” Ms. Gandhi tweeted. The Minister said the expert committee will advise the Ministry to strengthen the existing framework. A Ministry spokesperson said a formal order on the constitution of the panel is expected in a day or two. “It takes a lot for women to come out like this. These cases have been elephants in the rooms for the last 25 years. The question here is how can they prove these after all these years... they have faced verbal assault, they have been touched, pinched, their clothes have been pulled,” Ms. Gandhi told the news agency PTI in an interview.
•“The first thing to do is naming and shaming these monsters. Naming and shaming will go a long way in lessening the pain these women have been carrying,” Ms. Gandhi said.
📰 Reading between the rankings
A university’s culture is its most valuable resource. Feeding a repressive culture bodes ill for India
•Two recent developments draw our attention to the state of India’s universities. The first is the release of the annual ranking of the world’s universities by the Times Higher Education (THE). The other is an announcement by the Prime Minister, as reported in the press, which has an even closer bearing on the future of higher education here.
The newcomers’ signal
•While university rankings are to be taken with a pinch of salt and should not elicit knee-jerk responses, that they are broadly indicative may be seen from the latest edition. The universities placed at the top all have breadth in the range of disciplines offered and have been recognised as centres of knowledge production for decades, if not for centuries. The ranking of India’s universities has some elements that were predictable and others that came as a surprise.
•Thus, while the Indian Institute of Science topped, as usual, the list of Indian institutions that made it to the global top one thousand, three very new ones improved their ranking considerably. These are IIT Indore, which finished ahead of most of its ‘founding five’ sisters, the JSS University, Mysuru and the Amrita University, Coimbatore.
•To get a definite idea of what contributed to the higher rankings of these universities we would need to study the indicators chosen by the THE, but that, though located in smaller cities, they could lead the three universities of Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai, set up in the mid-1800s and with a large number of students on their rolls, is surely of interest. We would be advised to not cling to the data that the said institutions are relatively new, leaving them more nimble, for the universities ranked highest by the THE are over eight centuries old. So it would seem that there is something these three institutions in question are doing which leaves them ahead of a very large number of much older Indian universities. It should prove useful to pursue this line of thought.
•Almost exactly at the time the THE rankings were released, there was held in Delhi the ‘Conference on Academic Leadership on Education for Resurgence’, jointly organised by University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education and the Indian Council for Social Science Research, among other institutions, and attended by over 350 Vice Chancellors and representatives of the universities. This is a powerful grouping indeed.
•Delivering the inaugural address, the Prime Minister announced that the government would make available ₹1 lakh crore for infrastructure in higher education by 2022. The Prime Minister is also reported to have emphasised the importance of the Indian Institutes of Management Bill of 2017 granting autonomy to the IIMs. He correctly pointed out that this meant that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) will no longer dictate their curricula. Somewhat earlier the government had announced a list of ‘institutions of eminence’, the idea underlying which was that they are now free to set their own rules and regulations. While the freeing of universities from external control and increasing their resource base is for the better, the question is whether these moves can by themselves raise higher education in India to the desirable global level.
•There are two aspects that need acknowledgement from a survey of the state of higher education in India. First, the rankings, though imperfect, suggest that Indian universities are lagging in their research output. This by itself should be worrying, but another aspect, namely the migration overseas even at the undergraduate level, suggests that not even the dissemination of knowledge here is considered good enough by Indians.
It’s not about money
•The estimated flow of income overseas due to fees paid to foreign universities is around $2 billion. Surely, resources cannot be the barrier to providing world-class teaching in India? University teachers are paid well enough and the availability of material is no longer a problem, with highly affordable Indian editions of the best international textbooks.
•The crucial factor is the absence of the norms internal to the Indian university that enable desirable outcomes with respect to teaching and research. Among these norms would be an expectation of excellence from both teachers and students and the assurance of autonomy to the former. This autonomy, it may be asserted, is to be expected not only in relation to external agencies such as the UGC or the MHRD but also within the university, including from peers. In fact, within the university the latter is all that counts.
•Many years ago the science administrator C.P. Snow spoke of the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and the sciences, respectively, that co-existed in British intellectual life. He had lamented the near-opacity of the contents of one culture to the inhabitants of the other, leaving them apart and the country poorer for it. Snow had, however, not bothered to examine the culture within the two cultures he had identified. Presumably he had not thought them particularly wanting. In India today we would be advised to reflect upon the culture that pervades the Indian university. Beneath the mushroom cloud of UGC regulations, governing everything from hours to assessment, there are no norms making for the attainment of excellence or the empowerment of faculty so that they deliver to their highest potential.
•On the other hand, one often encounters established practices that reward mediocrity and restrict autonomy of the faculty. It needs to be emphasised that this ‘culture’ is mostly owed to the university itself; it is not something that is imposed upon it.
•Two illustrations that follow aid in estimating the distance between Indian universities and universities elsewhere in the world in this regard. Even three decades ago it would have been possible for a young lecturer to offer a set of lectures at the university ranked the first globally by the THE without either the administration or his peers having any say in the matter, something that is less assured in India. Secondly, it is unlikely that in a leading world university there would, directly or indirectly, be an attempt to pressurise a teacher to change her assessment of a candidate’s performance. The autonomy of a teacher is both a value in itself and designed to contribute to the larger goal of excellence in the production and dissemination of knowledge. In India this value receives little recognition and its crystallisation is thwarted, irrespective of the ideological persuasion of the regime governing the university.
The invasion within
•It is not as if the idea of the university as a space of freedom and intellectual responsibility has received universal acceptance globally. However, the best regarded universities of the world today yet harbour some of the norms which ensure that they remain ahead. Culture may be difficult to measure but when its meaning is reduced to norms as the rules of the game, it is easy for us to see what is missing here.
•No amount of hand-wringing over India’s place in the world university rankings or pumping resources into infrastructure building can help if the culture is not conducive to creativity. Its culture is a university’s most valuable resource. Feeding a repressive culture bodes ill for the future of our universities and, therefore, India’s place in the world of knowledge. Rightly we rue the fact that Nalanda, an international university that had flourished in India over a millennium ago, was destroyed through foreign invasion. Today our universities may be being destroyed by our own short-sightedness.
📰 By extension: NRC for Tripura
An NRC for Tripura will risk creating new fault lines in the State
•Just three months after the final draft of the National Register of Citizens for Assam was released, the Supreme Court has tagged a petition seeking a similar process for Tripura. The petition now tagged to the Assam case was heard by a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, on Monday. The petitioners, a group of activists from Tripura, sought a process to identify illegal migrants and deport them from the State. They maintained that the influx amounted to “external aggression” and that they have turned the tribal people into a minority in their own native land. Much of the migration into Tripura occurred before the creation of Bangladesh. The petition takes recourse to the 1993 tripartite accord signed by the Government of India with the All Tripura Tribal Force that asked for the repatriation of all Bangladeshi nationals who had come to Tripura after March 25, 1971 and are not in possession of valid documents authorising their presence in the State. In fact, the petitioners go even further than the terms of the accord to demand that the cut-off date for the recognition of migrants should be July 1949, based on Article 6 of the Constitution. These demands must be contextualised in the light of the developments in Tripura over the last four decades. As early as in 1979, after years of struggle, the tribal people of the State had gained special autonomy provisions, the institution of the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council and recognition of their spoken language, among other assurances. Since then, the empowerment of the council and the protection of tribal rights have steadily eroded the significant tribal versus non-tribal differences that once existed in the State.
•Over the last three decades, multiple insurgent groups have ended violent struggles — either quelled by force of law or as a result of conceding vital demands for preserving the gains made by earlier tribal struggles. The judicial-bureaucratic process of hearing a petition to seek the deportation of long-settled migrants is fraught with problems, not dissimilar to those already being faced in Assam. The question of what awaits the four million people whose names did not figure in the final NRC draft, and have been given a second chance to prove their antecedents, still hangs in the balance. Notwithstanding the fact that the NRC process in Assam has an overall popular legitimacy across most political parties, there is no answer to how the deportation process could (or should) proceed. Embarking on any such bureaucratic exercise without considering its deep humanitarian impact will only create new fault lines — especially in a State like Tripura where there is no such unanimity of views on the NRC process. It will undo years of work to bring about a reconciliation between Bengali-speaking and tribal people. The Supreme Court should be cognisant of this while hearing the petition.
📰 As the rupee spins downwards
The government’s measures for arresting the rupee's slide have failed. The approach needs a rethink
•In the unenviable sequence of conceptually-flawed economic policies – to which also belong demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax’s (GST) rate structure and collection system — the latest is the government’s response to the rupee’s fast-paced depreciation.
•When the crude prices-current account deficit-rupee macroeconomic equation had started becoming unfavourable, the government’s early arguments focussed on external factors outside its control: oil prices, U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy, turmoil in the international currencies, etc. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), fighting a solitary battle, defended the rupee in the forex market by dipping into its $425 billion stockpile of reserves. Roughly $25 billion was spent between April and September. Yet, the rupee went from about 65 to a dollar to more than 71 to a dollar. The RBI intervened thereafter very selectively, probably recognising the futility of resisting the slide.
•The penny dropped then. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, accompanied by the ministry’s mandarins, chewed over the current macroeconomic stress at a meeting last month that went on for more than two hours. RBI Governor Urjit Patel’s advice was heard, not heeded. Afterwards, assorted measures aimed at slowing the depreciation were announced. They related to hedging risks, short-term borrowings, foreign portfolio investments norms, limits on foreign investments in corporate bonds and restrictions on ‘non-essential’ imports.
Jaitley’s reassurance
•Mr. Jaitley reassured markets that the fiscal correction target would be met without a cutback in capital expenditure. Yet, it did not change market expectations. All in all, the response measures could not turn the tide. The depreciation continues unabated. 75-to-a-dollar is within a hair’s breadth.
•That the measures failed is not surprising. When holding $400 billion in reserves has not arrested the depreciation, how can tinkering around for $8-10 billion in inflows stop it? A durable solution would be to attract stable, long-term capital, not hot money chasing arbitrage differentials.
•The move to raise the import tariffs on select ‘non-essentials’ confers protection on local industries with competitive disadvantage vis-a-via imports. But were the items really chosen through serious analysis of the current account deficit? Import duties were ratcheted up on washing machines, but only on those ‘less than 10 kg’. Can the government explain why it considers imports of washing machines ‘10 kg and more’ essential? This is socialist-era redux. The rupee’s tumble has brought out the controlling tendencies that were retired in the 1990s.
•Why have markets not bought the government’s reading of the macroeconomic situation?
•The government has defended its macroeconomic management as exemplary, saying that the rupee’s troubles are due to international developments beyond its control — rising U.S. interest rates and global crude prices. But these short-term difficulties have touched what are traditional vulnerabilities. The twin (fiscal and current account) deficits get stressed whenever crude prices surge or there is a dollar-investments sell-off. A bout of rupee volatility follows. The markets are readjusting their expectations of the twin deficits. The depreciation under way is confirmation that things have not changed, as is evident from the frequent use of stop-gap plugs rather than long-term fixes. In the four years since 2014, the NDA government has reduced the fiscal deficit by just one percentage point, despite the huge bonanza from the fuel taxes.
•The policy, as conceived, was to tax when crude prices are low, use the proceeds so raised to balance the fiscal books, and whenever prices rise, reduce the tax rates. Done right, it could mitigate retail prices volatility and fiscal imbalances. But the government dithered on expenditure reforms, and so its dependence on the fuel taxes has grown. For example, Mr. Jaitley’s maiden budget had proposed urea prices decontrol, although he did not mention it in the speech. The plan was aborted in 2015.
•A Finance Minister’s options narrow in an election year. Caught between voter and market expectations, Mr. Jaitley has decided to trim fuel tax rates, accepting a minor revenue loss for a cosmetic price relief. Plus, he ensured state-controlled oil marketers also cut retail prices and absorbed the losses. This has destroyed the discipline of deregulation being practised since 2010 for a trivial giveaway of ₹1 a litre. The reform reversed had held for the past eight years.
Central bank’s limits
•In this situation, the markets looked back to the RBI (in vain) for bringing a pause in the rupee’s slide. The burden of expectations tested the RBI’s commitment to the new monetary policy framework. Its mandate is to target inflation. Its exchange rate management duties are limited to subduing rupee volatility. In not hiking the policy interest rate last week, the RBI has remained duty-bound and within mandate.
•What the RBI can do, as it has in the past too, is to open special windows for the forex needs of crude oil importers. Taking this considerable source of demand-side pressures off the forex market could provide the rupee some relief.
📰 Overhaul GDP norms: MPs
Estimates Committee of Parliament says it does not reflect ground reality
•The current manner in which the GDP is measured needs an overhaul as it provides an incomplete estimation of economic activity, a report by the Estimates Committee of Parliament pointed out in a draft report reviewed byThe Hindu .
•The report of the committee headed by BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi could not be adopted on Thursday after protests from fellow BJP MPs. The current GDP and Gross Value Added measures have also been questioned by Opposition leaders and economists alike. The Opposition even accused the Narendra Modi government of fudging the figures.
•The committee noted that the GDP calculation does not measure the depletion of natural resources, a point several economists including former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian have pointed out.
•The report said the current measure of GDP did not incorporate the economic contributions of women in running households and maintaining accounts; nor did it have any measure of whether an increase in GDP resulted in an increase in happiness.
CEA’ view
•“The Chief Economic Adviser [Arvind Subramanian], in this context, has candidly expressed before the Committee that GDP, the most frequently used indicator for measuring growth of the economy, has many deficiencies and it has been elevated and given sanctity that, may be, it does not deserve,” it said.
•“The detailed examination [by the Committee] reveal that there are several inadequacies in the extant GDP measuring mechanism, most noticeable being depletion of natural resources not being taken into consideration while deriving GDP,” it added. “Whereas any rise in GDP growth requires utilisation of natural resources, their utilisation and depletion is not taken into account while measuring GDP.”
•The committee noted that while NITI Aayog had acknowledged that efforts must be made to ensure that GDP growth is combined with sustainability, it had so far not suggested any ways to achieve this. “The Committee, therefore, strongly recommends to evolve indicators/parameters to gauge the environmental resource decay and replenishment efforts made to compensate the loss and also to capture these aspects in measuring GDP and other economic parameters,” the report said.
•It highlighted that the current GDP measure, while accounting for increases in production, did not take into account other factors of economic activity such as the change in quality of the output due to improvements in technology, or how advances like artificial intelligence will impact employment.
•“Another factor which is not taken into account while arriving at GDP…is the tremendous work done by women in India as housewives which include keeping the household accounts, saving money, attending to the smallest of children to the oldest of the house, managing all day-to-day household chores like cooking,” the report said.
📰 Major mission to sequence genes of Indians planned
A group of Indian scientists and companies are involved with a 100k GenomeAsia project, led out of the National Technological University (NTU), Singapore, to sequence the whole genomes of 100k Asians, including 50,000 Indians.
•India is planning a major mission to sequence the genes of a “large” group of Indians — akin to projects in the United Kingdom, China, Japan and Australia — and use this to improve health as well as buck a global trend of designing ‘personalised medicine.’
•This was among the key decisions taken at the 1st Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (STIAC) in its first meeting on Tuesday.
•The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Department of Biotechnology would be closely associated with the project.
•Ever since the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in 2009 announced that it had sequenced the genome of an Indian, then making India one of six countries to achieve such a feat, several research labs have analysed genes from Indians for disease susceptibility. However, no compendium of genes that differentiate Indian populations from, say Caucasian or African genomes exist.
•A group of Indian scientists and companies are involved with a 100k GenomeAsia project, led out of the National Technological University (NTU), Singapore, to sequence the whole genomes of 100k Asians, including 50,000 Indians.
•“Our lifestyle, our environment and the genes we inherit all combine to make us what we are. The diversity of Indians and of our environment requires a large-scale study of human genomes, of our lifestyle in health and disease and the use of healthy — and disease — samples to understand the impact on health,” said a press statement from the STIAC.
•Principal Scientific Adviser and Chair of the Council, K. Vijay Raghavan, said the genome initiative will have to move at two different levels.
•“Sequencing genomes and linking to human health and disease as a research initiative, and doing this on a much larger scale, so it has a direct impact on public health. As the first level starts, the second will be put in place, speedily.”
•The Council acts as a coordinator between several ministries to work on projects and missions and is scheduled to meet once a month, he added.
•Key programmes, such as a Deep Ocean Mission, to facilitate ocean science and technologies to help with India’s strategic interests and an Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing missions were also discussed.
•Other participants at the meeting were the secretaries of the science and health ministries as well as Dr. V.K. Saraswat, former DG, DRDO; Dr. A.S. Kiran Kumar, former Chairman, ISRO; Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood, Professor, IISC, Bengaluru.
•Maj. Gen. Madhuri Kanitkar, Dean, Armed Forces Medical College, Pune; Prof. Sanghamitra Bandopadhyay, Director, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata; Manjul Bharghava, Professor, Princeton University, Subhash Kak, Professor, Oklahoma State University and Baba Kalyani, MD, Bharat Forge.
📰 C-section use doubled in India between 2005 and 2015: Lancet
The use of caesarean section increased from 9% of births in 2005-6 to 18.5% in 2015-16
•The number of babies born in India through caesarean section increased from 9% in 2005-6 to 18.5% in 2015-16, according to a series of three papers published in The Lancet journal, which also found that C-section use almost doubled worldwide between 2000 and 2015.
•While the surgery is still unavailable for many women and children in low-income countries and regions, the procedure is overused in many middle-and high-income settings, said researchers, including those from Ghent University in Belgium.
•In the 10 countries with the highest number of births in 2010-2015 period, there were large differences in caesarean section or C-section use between regions. For instance, differences between provinces in China ranged from 4% to 62%, and inter-state differences in India ranged from 7% to 49%.
•Globally, C-section use has increased by 3.7% each year between 2000-2015 — rising from 12% of live births (16 million of 131.9 million) in 2000, to 21% of live births (29.7 million of 140.6 million) in 2015, researchers said.
•In India, C-section use went up from 9% of births in 2005-6 to 18.5% in 2015-16, the research found.
•C-section is a life-saving intervention for women and newborns when complications occur, such as bleeding, foetal distress, hypertensive disease, and babies in abnormal position.
Risks involved
•However, the surgery is not without risk for mother and child, and is associated with complications in future births, researchers said. It is estimated that 10-15% of births medically require a C-section due to complications, suggesting that average C-section use should lie between these levels.
•In at least 15 countries, C-section use exceeds 40%, researchers said.
•The South Asia region has seen the most rapid increase in use (6.1% per year), with C-section being underused in 2000 but being overused by 2015 (increasing from 7.2% of births via C-section to 18.1%).
•Improvements have been slow across sub-Saharan Africa (around 2% per year), where C-section use has remained low, increasing from 3% to 4.1% of births in West and Central Africa, and from 4.6% to 6.2% in Eastern and Southern Africa.
•“Given the increasing use of C-section, even when medically not required, there is a crucial need to understand the health effects on women and children,” said Professor Jane Sandall from King’s College London.
