📰 Gujarat, Tamil Nadu top performers under PM-JAY health scheme
States availed treatment worth nearly ₹7,901 crore.
•Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh have emerged as the top performing States with free secondary and tertiary treatment worth nearly ₹7,901 crore availed under the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), the flagship health assurance scheme of the Government in just over a year.
•“Half-a-crore hospital treatments have been provided and there are 9 hospital admissions every minute across India,’’ noted a senior health official.
•Launched last year, the scheme crossed the 50-lakh treatment mark this week with secondary and tertiary level treatments worth ₹7,901 crore being carried out across 32 States and Union Territories.
60% tertiary care
•“More than 60% of the amount spent has been on tertiary care. Cardiology, Orthopaedics, Radiation Oncology, Cardio-thoracic and Vascular Surgery, and Urology have emerged as the top tertiary specialities,’’ explained the health official.
“This water belongs to farmers of Haryana, Rajasthan and the country and we will get it,” he says.
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said India would put to use its share of water from the rivers flowing to Pakistan and ensure that every single drop is used for country's farmer. The work on this had started.
•Mr. Modi, who was addressing an election rally at Charkhi Dadri in Haryana, said the river waters that rightfully belonged to India had been flowing to Pakistan for the last 70 years. It would not happen any more.
•“For the last 70 years, the waters that belonged to India and farmers of Haryana were going to Pakistan. Modi will stop it and bring it to your households,” he said.
•“This water belongs to farmers of Haryana, Rajasthan and the country and we will get it.. Work towards realisation of this has been started and I am committed towards it. Modi will fight your battle,” he asserted.
Abrogation of Article 370
•Taking a dig at the Congress on the abrogation of Article 370, Mr. Modi said few Congress leaders were spreading rumours across the globe. “I want to tell them that they are free to abuse me... they can import abuses from Bangkok, Thailand or Vietnam and hurl at me, but they should stop backstabbing Hindustan,” he stated.
•The Congress and other Opposition parties, which were against the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A, should come out, if they have the courage, and announce that if they assumed power, the provisions granting special status to Jammu and Kashmir would be restored, he said.
•The writing was clear on the wall that the BJP would form the next government in Haryana. “It will be a dual Diwali this time. One, a ‘diya’ [earthen lamp] Diwali and the other a ‘kamal’ [lotus] Diwali. I would urge everyone that let this Diwali be dedicated to out daughters,” he said.
•If the villages of Haryana had not come forward, the ''Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao'' campaign would not have progressed the way it had, he noted.
•Chinese President Xi Jinping told him at the recent informal summit in Mahabalipuram, near Chennai, that he had watched Dangal movie. “When he told me that he had watched Dangal,, which exhibited excellent performance of daughters of India, I felt proud of Haryana,” he said.
•Mr. Modi alleged that Haryana was the hub of corruption during the Congress regime. “Congressmen built their empire in Delhi by exploiting farmers of Haryana. This was the reason that when action is taken against corruption, Congressmen feel restless.”
•Addressing another rally in Kurukshetra, Mr. Modi said the Kartarpur corridor project, which will connect the religious shrine of Sikhs was about to be completed in Punjab. “I am fortunate to get an opportunity to rectify the political and strategic failure that occurred seven decades ago,” he observed.
•While the entire country was happy when the country received the first Rafale fighter jet, the Congress party was unhappy, he said.
📰 Lynching, the scourge of new India
The word lynching is of foreign origin. But this does not mean that mob killings are alien to India
•In the years since Narendra Modi was elected in 2014, ugly mob hate has spilled onto the streets, trains and people’s homes. Fevered throngs surround, brutally assault and sometimes kill unarmed men, mostly Muslim. The crowds allege that the men had slaughtered cows, or were thieves; but sometimes their only crime — as when a child was stabbed to death on a crowded train near Delhi — is that they are visibly Muslim.
Living in denial
•We describe these mob killings as lynching. The initial response of the ruling establishment to criticism of this frightening rising graph of lynching during the Modi regime was one of denial. Both the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), claimed that these were simple failures of law and order, ordinary crimes which had ensued under every regime. Vested interests opposed to the leadership of Mr. Modi and the BJP imposed on these statistically insignificant, random and spontaneous crimes a pattern and called these an epidemic of lynching.
•However, this defence began to crumble as horrific lynch attacks continued to rock many parts of the country. The second rationalisation, which echoed in television studios each time stories of lynching briefly stirred our public conscience, was that these attacks occurred because Muslims continue to traffic and slaughter cows, callous to the sentiments of their Hindu neighbours. Hindus, according to this vindication, are understandably provoked. Not normally given to violence, they sometimes cross a line, which is regrettable but natural. Such violence will end only if Muslims and Christians learn to respect the sentiments of the majority Hindu community, and abjure from cow slaughter.
Flaws in the argument
•There were many obvious flaws in this argument: Hindus, including Dalits and Adivasis, in many parts of India eat beef; Hindu farmers give up their aged cattle for culling because it is no longer economically viable for them to feed unproductive cattle; Muslim dairy farmers are no less devoted to their cattle than Hindus; in the majority of lynch attacks (such as of Pehlu Khan) the animals are transported for dairying, and not for slaughter; and nothing explains the sudden outbreak of lynching in many corners of the country under the present ruling dispensation (98% of cow-related lynching since 2010 occurred after 2014).
•In his annual Dussehra address, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat felt compelled to provide more compelling explanations; therefore he spoke expansively about lynching. Because of the enormous influence which the RSS wields on BJP governments, the words of the RSS head must be held to close scrutiny.
•He made five main points. The first is that lynching is a foreign Biblical practice, alien to Indian traditions. The second is that Indians are culturally non-violent. The third is that the RSS has no role in these lynch attacks, and tries to prevent these. The fourth is that many ordinary crimes are wrongly portrayed as lynching. And last that the law should be strengthened, if necessary, to ensure those guilty of these crimes are punished. Let me consider each of these in turn.
•There indeed is no word for lynching in most Indian languages (except in Bengali — ganadholai — possibly because Kolkata for many years witnessed lynching of pick-pockets). But Mr. Bhagwat’s claim that lynching is a practice created by religions whose ‘sacred book is written outside India’ conforms to the customary RSS bigotry against Christian and Muslim religions, demonising their beliefs. The example he picks from the Bible in fact is one which seeks to teach love and compassion, not hate. Jesus tells a crowd bent on stoning an adulterous woman — ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’
Word origins
•The word lynching in fact originated in the United States in the mid-18th century. Historians believe that the term was first used by planter Charles Lynch to describe extra-judicial authority assumed by private individuals like him. It came to be applied over time to extra-judicial killings by crowds, most commonly of African-Americans in the late 19th century.
•Although the word lynching is of foreign origin, this does not mean that mob killings are alien to India. Single women have frequently been lynched through the centuries, branded as witches. Dalits have been lynched with enormous cruelty for millennia. Jhajjar, Khairlanji and Una are just three recent sites of ghastly lynching of Dalits. In recent years, Dalits have been lynched for growing a moustache, riding a horse, or building a two-storey home.
•Mr. Bhagwat’s claim that Indians are culturally non-violent and their culture promotes peaceful coexistence also does not stand up to historical or contemporary scrutiny. The example he offers, that disputes over water were settled amicably by adversaries through dialogue is a cruel joke, because many of the most gruesome lynch attacks on Dalits have occurred when they have simply sought a share of water, even today. It was to draw water from a public lake that B.R. Ambedkar had to wage a powerful public agitation.
Right’s connection
•But perhaps the most brazen untruth is Mr. Bhagwat’s contention that the RSS has nothing to do with lynch attacks, and contrarily prevent them. In more than 31 journeys to lynching sites with the Karwan e Mohabbat, I have found no lynching which is spontaneous, nor any in which anyone, least of all RSS members, have tried to prevent the lynching. The vigilantes make no secret of their adherence to hard-line violent Hindutva beliefs; and victims of lynching are most often Muslims who are sometimes forced to recite ‘Jai Shri Ram’. In a strict technical sense, their membership of the RSS cannot be proved, as there is no public record of the formal adherents of the RSS. Just as Nathuram Godse may not have been a formal member of the RSS at the time he assassinated Mahatma Gandhi; but this cannot obscure the reality that Godse and the vigilantes were driven by Hindu supremacist ideologies of the RSS.
•Mr. Bhagwat’s fourth claim that many lynchings are ordinary crimes are an older rationalisation, deliberately obscuring the character of lynching as hate crimes that target people because of their identity. It cannot be a coincidence that 86% of people killed in cow-related attacks are Muslim.
•The final avowal by Mr. Bhagwat of the need for tougher laws to bring lynch mobs to justice carries little credibility, because the majority of these attacks occur in BJP-ruled States, and existing laws are more than sufficient to secure justice against the attackers. Instead, almost without exception, police administrations in all these States exert to protect the killers, and criminalise the victims.
•Mr. Bhagwat, in these ways, relies on many old RSS tropes — demonising ‘foreign religions’ for advocating violence; characterising Indian culture as intrinsically peaceable; and releasing the RSS from responsibility in instigating, organising and valorising this violence; and State governments from failures to prevent lynching and ensuring justice.
•It is hardly surprising lynching survivors can draw no solace, security or healing from his declarations. His words are arid in compassion, displaying neither acknowledgement nor remorse. There seems no early end therefore to the long dark night of hate and fear that has been unleashed by lynching, the scourge of new India.
📰 IMF cuts World and India growth rates
The Index of Industrial Production for India was 1.1%, month on month, in September — its lowest since February 2013.
•The World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings kicked off on a somber note, with the IMF downgrading global growth in 2019 to 3%, the slowest since the global financial crisis. India’s growth projections have also been downgraded to 6.1% and 7.0% in 2019 and 2020 respectively, down by 1.2 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points relative to April projections, owing to weaker than expected domestic demand.
•Globally, rising trade barriers, heightened uncertainty around trade and geopolitics, idiosyncratic factors that have strained several emerging markets and structural factors such as advanced economies’ ageing population and low productivity growth were the causes behind a “synchronized slowdown” the IMF said in its 2019 World Economic Outlook (WEO) Global Manufacturing Downturn, Rising Trade Barriers report, released on Tuesday morning.
•“This is a serious climbdown from 3.8% in 2017,” the WEO said of the 2019 global growth projection. World output is projected to increase to a modest 3.4% in 2020 — still lower by 0.2% than the April projection. Unlike the slowdown this recovery is expected to be “precarious” and “not broad based” as per the IMF. Emerging economies will show increased growth — from 3.9% in 2019 to 4.6% in 2020, while advanced economies will slow to 1.7% in 2019 and 2020. The report called for defusing trade tensions, “reinvigorating” multilateral cooperation and “providing timely support to economic activity where needed”.
•“In the case of India there has been a negative impact on growth that’s come from financial vulnerabilities in the non-bank financial sector and the impact that’s had on consumer borrowing and borrowing of small and medium enterprises,” the IMF’s chief economist Gita Gopinath said at a press briefing on Tuesday.
•The projected growth in India’s case will be supported by lagged effects of monetary policy easing, cuts to corporate tax, measures to address environmental and corporate uncertainty, and government programs to boost rural consumption, as per the WEO.
•India’s growth rate in the April-June quarter had hit 5% , the lowest in six years, as per government data. Consumption, investment and exports were down. The World Bank too on Sunday had projected that India’s growth rate would fall to 6.0% from 6.9% in 2018.
•The Index of Industrial Production for India was 1.1%, month on month, in September — its lowest since February 2013.
•“Appropriate steps have been taken …there is still a lot more do be done, including cleaning up of the balance sheets of regular commercial banks. The premise (for India’s growth projections) is that these particular bottlenecks will clear up,” Ms Gopinath said on Tuesday.
•Faced with a slowdown in several sectors of the economy, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced a number of policy measures to support a recovery including slashing the corporate tax rate and a rollback of surcharges on foreign portfolio investors. This is expected to cost ₹1,45,000 crore a year — putting at risk the government’s ability to stick to its fiscal deficit target of 3.3% of GDP this year, a point Ms Gopinath alluded to at Tuesday’s briefing.
•“On the fiscal side for India there have been some recent measures including the corporate tax cut. There has not been anything announced about how that will be offset through revenues at this point,” Ms Gopinath said.
•The revenue projections look “optimistic” Ms. Gopinath said. “But it is important for India to keep the fiscal deficit in check.”
•The WEO recommended broad based structural reforms to strengthen confidence and address cyclical weakness. The report called for a “credible fiscal consolidation path” over the medium term to bring down elevated public debt, supported by measures to enhance the tax base and rationalize subsidy-spending.
•The report also recommended “reforms to hiring and dismissal regulations” to help incentivize job creation and “land reforms …to encourage and expedite infrastructure development.” It called for a strengthening of governance of public sector banks and greater efficiency of their credit allocation.
U.S. China Trade Truce should be “permanent and durable”
•The IMF projected the U.S. would grow at 2.4% and 2.1% in 2019 and 2020 respectively – marginally revised upwards by 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points respectively from April projections. The Federal Reserve’s rate cuts and a two year budget deal ( a bipartisan budget package agreed in August), offset the negative impact of trade-related uncertainties, the WEO report said.
•For China, growth was projected to grow at 6.1% and 5.8% in 2019 and 2020 (down from 6.3% and 6.1% April projections) due to escalating tariffs and weakening external demand.
•U.S.-China trade tensions were a recurring theme at Tuesday’s press briefing. The Trump administration had agreed a partial trade truce with China last Friday.
•“We look forward to hearing the details of the trade agreement when they play out,” Ms Gopinath told the press on Tuesday, adding that world output would be negatively impacted by 0.8% had the October 15 U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods gone through and if planned December tariffs go through.
•“We should emphasize that much of the negative impact comes from confidence effects which is why it is very important that these changes or the trade truce has a feature of being permanent and durable.”
📰 Another grim reminder: On IMF's GDP projections
Sharp cuts in growth forecast by the IMF and World Bank underline slowdown’s severity
•The IMF on Tuesday followed the World Bank in reducing its forecast for India’s economic growth in the current financial year. While the IMF cut its July projection for real GDP growth by a substantial 0.9 percentage point to 6.1%, the bank slashed the estimate by as much as 1.5 percentage points to 6%. These magnitudes of reduction underscore the severity of the ongoing slowdown and affirm the welter of grim data and predictions from other forecasters, both global and domestic. Interestingly, by the bank’s own admission, its forecast is more optimistic than the average estimate of 32 Indian respondents who were polled as part of its South Asian Economic Policy Network Survey: these economists expect growth to be 5.7% this fiscal. The only significant issue of debate is over the cause of the malaise, with the World Bank largely echoing what the Centre’s economic mandarins have been saying — that this is a cyclical slowdown, exacerbated by global influences. A view, however, that neither the Indian experts surveyed, nor Moody’s Investors Service, broadly concur with. While Moody’s pared its projection to 5.8%, ascribing the downturn partly to “long-lasting factors”, only 10% of the respondents in the network survey considered it a “purely cyclical” development and as many as 25% saw structural factors as being solely responsible. The importance of an accurate diagnosis cannot be overemphasised since policy interventions to address the malady must be targeted appropriately to ensure enduring outcomes.
•Crucially, the bank and the fund have flagged one area of structural weakness that could undermine any recovery if left unaddressed. Asserting that the weak financial sector is becoming a drag on momentum, with the country’s banks yet to regain vigour from the depressing burden of bad loans, the World Bank warned that non-banking financial companies’ significant share in total credit and their linkages with banks “pose broad-based contagion risks”. Financial sector reforms, the bank suggests, would not only help resolve the sectoral infirmities but would also help put India back on a rapid growth path. The World Bank has also highlighted another key concern. Observing that a sharper-than-expected slowdown in major economies such as the U.S. and Eurozone could have severe spillover impacts, the bank noted that India was vulnerable to being affected immediately and over a longer duration by real GDP shocks in these advanced economies. In the case of a Chinese GDP shock, the onset of the impact on India would likely be delayed but substantially more pronounced. And while the IMF has urged structural reforms in labour and land laws to boost job and infrastructure creation, everyone agrees that becalmed domestic consumption demand is the biggest drag on momentum. It may, therefore, make a lot of sense to heed Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee’s prescription and put more money in the hands of consumers, especially those in the rural hinterland, to reinvigorate demand.
📰 A cost-effective way to power generation
Creating generation assets with the lowest unit cost is linked to optimising plant capacities and using private investment
•India has been aggressively expanding its power generation capacity. Today’s installed capacity of 358 GW is about four times of what it was in 1997-98, which shows a doubling of capacity in each of the past two decades — or about 75 MW per day. By India’s historical standards, these are astonishing numbers indeed. In recent years, the major growth drivers have been renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, and investment from the private sector. The private sector accounts for almost half the installed generation capacity. For the last three years, growth in generation from renewables has been close to 25%. India aims to have a renewables capacity of 175 GW by 2022 and 500 GW by 2030. Solar and wind power plants would account for much of the targeted capacity from renewables. How can this be achieved?
Project size and cost
•Today, thermal generation capacity accounts for about two-thirds the installed generation capacity in the country. This shows that though there is increasing awareness about the environmental impact of fossil fuels, the reliance on thermal plants is unlikely to end any time soon. (Table 1 underlines the two major advantages that thermal power plants enjoy relative to solar and wind power plants). Thermal plant capacities are large and therefore targeted capacity additions can be achieved by constructing fewer such plants. On average, it would take 18 solar or wind projects to generate the same quantity of power as one thermal plant. For the same reason, switching from fossil fuel to renewables will remain challenging as the administrative overheads that would have to be incurred in setting up the multiple projects could significantly add to the cost.
•Not surprisingly, infrastructure projects have an inverse relationship between size and unit cost, indicating economies of scale. As the capacity of power plants increases, the average cost of power per MW reduces. The average cost per MW for a thermal plant is about 25% lower than that of a solar plant. In order to surmount the cost advantages that large thermal plants enjoy today, we must focus on developing larger solar and wind power plants that can also exploit similar economies of scale.
Project ownership
•The next point is that of ownership. Over the last two decades, 63% of the total planned generation capacity has come from the private sector. Private investment has been even more pronounced in renewables, accounting for almost 90% of investment in wind and solar projects. So has private investment helped?
•Table 2 has the answer. Private sector plants have an average cost per MW that is 12-34% lower for all categories except solar. Lower capacity cost has a direct impact on electricity tariffs. Electricity tariffs broadly consist of two components: fixed capacity costs and operation and maintenance costs, which include fuel expenses. In general, capacity costs account for more than 90% of the levelised cost of electricity, irrespective of the fuel type. If we are able to create additional capacity at lower cost, then it will play a big role in keeping electricity tariffs low. Private investment in the power sector has not only helped in augmenting capacity but has also helped in lowering cost.
Marginal capacity costs
•Even as total capacity in generation has been growing, the cost of installing additional capacity has fallen (Table 3). The reasons for the decline could be as follows: First, advances in technology have resulted in the construction of larger power plants. Compared to the 15-year period before 2013, power plants installed in the past six years have on average been significantly bigger, even twice as large in the case of hydel power. The economies of scale in power generation appear to have been dramatic. The second point could be the increasing share of private sector investment. The share of private sector in capacity creation has been 70% in the last decade as compared to 46% in the decade before that. And, as indicated previously, private sector capacity has lower costs.
•Falling marginal costs suggest that retiring some existing high-cost capacity plants with newer plants could be explored.
•With economic growth, the demand for power in India is only going to increase further. To put things in perspective, China added generation capacity that was equal to a third of India’s total installed capacity in 2018. As India continues to ramp up capacity, it is imperative to create generation assets with the lowest unit cost by optimising plant capacities and encouraging private sector investment. Declining marginal cost for capacity provides opportunities for replacing existing capacity with newer capacity that are more efficient. However, the challenge of replacing fossil fuel-fired plants with renewables prevails.
