📰 There’s no one to fill Mahalanobis’s shoes
A top statistician is needed to frame data-based policies for welfare and development
•In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen argued that poor distribution of food, wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding were important reasons for the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, while Madhusree Mukerjee, in her 2010 book, Churchill’s Secret War , wrote of the role of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wartime Cabinet’s decisions and “denial policy” in exacerbating the famine.
Survey of the Bengal famine
•Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, India’s ‘Plan Man’ and the architect of the country’s statistical system, conducted a large-scale sample survey of Bengal’s famine-ravaged villages between July 1944 and February 1945 for causal analysis, and to assess the extent of the disaster and an estimate of the number of people affected. The planning, preparations, challenges and findings of the survey are documented in an article in Sankhyā , and in another article in The Asiatic Review , both published in 1946, among others. This survey provided very useful findings. It showed that one-fourth of the number of families (1.5 million people) who had owned rice land before the famine had either sold in full or in part their rice land or had mortgaged it. It also showed that the economic position of nearly four million people deteriorated during the famine. Economic differences became further accentuated during the famine. However, roughly 85% of the families maintained their status quo, showing that a large degree of economic inertia had persisted even under famine conditions.
•Bengal’s famine survey reminds us that we need estimates of the millions who will lose jobs or livelihoods and of the hundreds of millions whose economic conditions will deteriorate in today’s COVID-19-hit India. The extent of feasibility, success and problem of online access, for example, also needs to be properly estimated in this new dawn.
•Mahalanobis is perhaps more relevant today when the accuracy of different sorts of data — from economic data to COVID-19 data — is under the scanner. Starting from the first area sample in the whole world for jute forecast in 1934, Mahalanobis built up a strong and trustworthy statistical heritage in India through his tireless efforts over the years, supplemented by his efficiency, wisdom, leadership, innovative ideas and brilliance. Mahalanobis envisaged large-scale sample surveys as statistical engineering rather than pure theory of sampling. He was instrumental in establishing the National Sample Survey (NSS) in 1950 and the Central Statistical Organization in 1951.
Importance of accurate data
•Mahalanobis was very careful about data accuracy in his surveys. In Kautilya’s Arthashastra , there is mention of the need for cross-checking by an independent set of agents for data collection : “Spies under disguise of householders (Grihapatika, cultivators), who shall be deputed by the Collector-General for espionage, shall ascertain the validity of accounts (of Gopas, the village officers and Sthanikas, the district officers) regarding the fields, right of ownership and remission of taxes with regard to houses, and the caste and profession regarding families...” (Chapter XXXV). This, according to Mahalanobis, was the “striking feature in the Arthashastra ”. This might have prompted him to have an independent supervisory staff during the conduct of field operations by the NSS for collection of reliable data.
•Mahalanobis was “a physicist by training, a statistician by instinct and an economist by conviction”. His initial training in Physics might have made him conscious about errors in measurement and observation. Students even called him the Professor of Counting and Measurement, using the initials of his name. The desire to have built-in cross-checks and to get an estimate of errors in sampling led him to introduce the Inter-Penetrating Network of Subsamples, which is now considered as the curtain-raiser for re-sampling procedures like Bootstrap, a revolutionary concept of statistics indeed.
•However, even Mahalanobis could have faced hardship had he wished to conduct surveys now. First, even in pre-COVID-19 India, it’s widely reported that surveyors were facing tremendous resistance from people due to some sociopolitical reasons. None other than Pronab Sen, Chairman of the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics, and former Chief Statistician, expressed his concern that the survey system is already in “deep trouble”, and conducting household surveys with the Census as the frame would be “very tough” going ahead. The problem will intensify due to COVID-19. It was not easy to conduct surveys in famine-hit Bengal either. Through August 1944, 80 field workers were beset by malaria; half of them later dropped out of the project. However, conducting a survey in the age of contagion is understandably much harder.
Use of technology
•What would Mahalanobis have done in this situation? Would he have devised some instrument, like crop-cutting concentric circles, in addition to using masks and sanitisers and sending investigators for a socioeconomic survey? Or would he have used different sorts of secondary data instead? It’s difficult to guess. Who knows, he might have efficiently churned ‘big data’ for this — he could certainly have done a smarter job than most of the present-day big data analysts. Note that Mahalanobis never shied away from technology, whether in bringing statistical technology through volumes of Biometrika in his voyage from England, or even bringing computers to India. The Mahalanobis-led Indian Statistical Institute procured India’s first computer in 1956 and the second in 1959.
•At the end of his 1946 article in The Asiatic Review , Mahalanobis wrote: “Statistics are a minor detail, but they do help.” This is an eternal truth. What Mahalanobis didn’t spell out is that one needs a top statistician for listening to the heartbeats of data and for framing data-based policy decisions for human welfare and national development. And unfortunately, there’s no one to fill Mahalanobis’s shoes, even about half a century after his demise.
Specific policy measures can reverse the lockdown-created trauma and stop it from snowballing into chronic poverty
•For most regions across the country, the long lockdown has just got over. As the “unlocking” begins, it is becoming increasingly apparent how the Indian state had chosen its sides and revealed its elitist bias during one of the most stringently enforced lockdowns worldwide. Several news reports and surveys on the plight of India’s less-privileged workforce during the lockdown have highlighted the massive scale of falling incomes and loss of means of livelihood. Many have been pushed into various depths of poverty depending on how vulnerable their occupations were. Quantifying the likely scale of the poverty impacts of the lockdown, we use most recent workforce survey data on India to estimate what the lockdown-induced livelihood shock might have meant economically for different categories of workers. We suggest some potential policy measures to prevent the shocks from further snowballing into chronic poverty.
Pre-shock conundrum
•India’s poverty line has been a matter of contention for long for its unrealistically low thresholds leading to conservative poverty numbers. Irregular updating of official poverty lines and unavailability of data on consumption expenditure from National Sample Surveys in recent years have added to the ambiguity around poverty estimation in India. According to the household consumption expenditure reported in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), 2017-18 (which replaces the employment-unemployment surveys of the National Sample Survey Office) and applying State-specific poverty lines (used by the erstwhile Planning Commission in 2011 based on the Tendulkar Committee recommendations, adjusted with current price indices), about 42% or around 56 crore people were ‘officially’ poor before the lockdown was announced. Highlighting how closely packed people are towards the lower half of the consumption expenditure distribution, another 20 crore people were within a narrow band 20% above the poverty line. In most parts of the country, this amounts to a few hundred rupees over the poverty line threshold. A modest dip in earnings — and hence a fall in consumption spending — would push a majority of them into the vortex of poverty and hunger. Sucking up large or entire chunks of the modest incomes, the lockdown gave a shove.
A poverty deepening
•Our estimates from the PLFS data extrapolated for the year 2020 suggest that about an additional 40 crore people were pushed below the poverty line due to the lockdown. Around 12 crore of this lockdown-induced newly poor are in urban areas and another 28 crore people in rural areas. Those who were already poor are going to suffer a further worsening in their quality of life, a phenomenon known as poverty deepening. Before the lockdown, around 16% of the population had per capita consumption expenditure of about a third of the poverty line, managing their daily expenses with Rs. 30 per day or less. After the lockdown this could swell to more than 62 crore (47%) people pushed to such extreme poverty. A shock of such a scale to an overwhelming majority of Indians is unprecedented in the nation’s living memory.
Inadequate state responses
•At such a juncture, formal responses of the state have been mostly inadequate and poorly conceived. The second economic stimulus package announced by the Finance Minister exposes the class nature of the current political dispensation more than ever. A token increase of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) wage by Rs. 20 (Rs. 182 to Rs. 202) seems like a joke in the light of the overall magnitude of the crisis. Undoubtedly, a revamped, expanded NREGA needs to be made the fulcrum of the rural recharge. The demand for work is anticipated to increase by 25% with reverse migration-fuelled increase in rural labour supply.
•The revamped scheme would require providing 90 million workers guaranteed employment of 20 days of work/month for at least the next six months. This means an additional financial stimulus of Rs. 1.6-lakh crore.
•Universalisation of the Public Distribution System has been widely talked about but needs better equity focus in implementation. Recent experience of expanding food coupons to non-ration card holders in Delhi suggests that such measures are likely to exclude marginalised communities including Dalits and Muslims at the lowest strata of the work hierarchy.
•At the local level, this would mean identification of the most vulnerable and including them into the programme before expanding it to the relatively better-off. The exclusion errors of IT-based attempts to coverage have huge social costs in the form of accentuated hunger.
Stabilising urban economy
•Massive reverse migration flows out of the urban informal sector will force grinding halts and hiccups for the economy limping back towards normalcy in the post-lockdown scenarios. Given the magnitude of the destabilisation, an urban employment guarantee programme becomes a dire necessity to stabilise the urban economy. A ‘direct’ employment programme implemented through municipal corporations could be introduced to guarantee 20 days of work.
•This can be used to develop key social infrastructure in urban areas including slum development, drinking water supply, toilet construction, parks and common areas, urban afforestation and social forestry. Such facelift public works programmes can make a major difference in both the condition of public utilities and absorbing the spurt in demand for work in district towns and smaller cities in the traditional outmigration hotspots across the country. The wages could be fixed with 30% premium over prevalent MNREGA benchmark average wage in the State.
•An ‘indirect’ branch of this programme can be used to encourage a revival of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the most prominent clusters. This could include employer-contractor facilitated programmes to provide wage subsidy of an equivalent amount as in the direct programme to employers of urban SMEs, other business establishments and construction sector projects.
•The neo-liberal growth that we have experienced since the 1990s has been largely through breaking the back of the labouring class. The economy grew by paying less and less to workers and allowing surplus to accumulate in the hands of the owners of the means of production, with the expectation that this would be reinvested. The state worked systematically to let this model flourish. A series of policies made the labouring class increasingly vulnerable, weakening their collective bargaining power, pushing them away from their native towns out of desperation, forcing them to accept any wage that is offered to them, making them live in conditions which take away their sense of dignity, and curtailing any social security benefit that could help them survive in times of difficulties. If we do not alter the course of economic progress and reorient development programmes, the implications could be severe with increasing hunger-related deaths and destitution, leading to social unrest and crime.
📰 No more Sattankulams
India may not be able to put a complete end to police violence, but it can take steps to reduce its incidence
•The dust is slowly settling on the controversy surrounding the alleged torture of a father-son duo in police custody in Sattankulam, Thoothukudi district. The two men died in hospital. The case is being investigated by the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID). The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and the Director General of Police did not delay the decision to hand over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). This means that the state has nothing to hide from the families of the deceased or the general public.
The investigation
•The Madras High Court has shown remarkable sensitivity as it should in such horrific incidents. It was an innovative move by the court to ask revenue authorities to take control of the Sattankulam police station lest crucial evidence be destroyed or damaged. Of course, some may believe that the High Court’s action was unwarranted and will demoralise the police force. The revenue authorities have since withdrawn, and the investigation is wholly with the CB-CID.
•Coming so soon after the George Floyd incident in the U.S., the Sattankulam episode should shock our conscience. Police brutality is universal and internal cover-ups are common. There is informal trade unionism and a code of silence among the police, as in other professions, that militates against objective inquiries into police conduct. There is evidence of this in Sattankulam. In a report, the Judicial Magistrate of Kovilpatti submitted to the court that the Sattankulam police did not cooperate during the inquiry. The CCTV footage at the police station has been erased. There is no assurance that evidence has not already been tampered with.
•There is obvious discomfort among some policemen over a CBI probe. This should not degenerate into culpable obstruction of the investigation. This is a danger that can be averted if the police leadership demonstrates its resolve to punish even the slightest act of sabotage intended to help a few criminals masquerading as the police. The CBI will also not permit any police licentiousness. It is a welcome development that a few arrests have already been made in the case, including of the Inspector. If necessary, a few more may be effected to ferret out the truth.
•If it’s ultimately proved that the two victims were in fact tortured to death, attention then shifts to unraveling the motive. Any vendetta will have to be confirmed by the CBI when it takes over the investigation. If no motive is established, the case against the policemen will weaken. However, if there is clear evidence of the beatings of the victims, that evidence will speak for itself.
•Post-mortem reports reveal the injuries inflicted and the weapons used. Some unscrupulous policemen have the expertise to resort to bodily violence without leaving a trace of the methods/weapons used. Doctors conducting the post-mortem are often intimidated into giving false reports. The intensity of public furore in this incident is a guarantee against such unethical behaviour.
•Finally, I am concerned over the loss of image suffered by the Tamil Nadu Police. The tendency to paint the whole force with the same brush is inevitable. But the brutality here is so blatant that the public will realise that this was at worst an aberration on the part of a few policemen. This is no consolation, however. Whether the guilty are individual policemen or the entire force, it is a blot which the Tamil Nadu Police will have to live with for decades.
Reducing incidence of police violence
•Can such incidents can be prevented in the future? I am cynical about this. We will continue to witness random policemen misbehaviour. These are men who are inclined to indulge in brutality at the drop of a hat. The suggestion that every recruit should be subjected to a psychology test has little relevance as such a test may not always identify men with a disturbed mind. Many recruits become perpetrators after a few years in the field. Work pressure and unfair treatment by supervisors lead to gross misconduct and assaults on the unarmed and unprotected.
•Technology can help a little but its utility cannot be exaggerated. Body cameras, such as the ones used in the U.S. and the U.K., on beat policeman can ensure police restraint. India could experiment with such devices.
•The police culture of each country is different. A democratic government is no guarantee that the police will act in a civilised manner. In the U.S., for instance, there are many reports of abuses by policemen against non-whites.
•India cannot afford any more Sattankulams. We may not be able put a complete end to police violence, but we can reduce its incidence. A lot will depend on the leadership, which has a sacred duty to foster a culture of obedience to the law. The media has its task cut out to identify and highlight unethical leadership.
📰 India’s foreign relations and the course of history
As examples show, national interest is that which is based on the perception of the government of the day
•The Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public and undisguised reference to China’s expansionism in his address to Indian troops last week, on July 3 in Ladakh was so obvious that the Chinese lost no time in rejecting the allegation. As proof of China’s non-expansionism, their spokesman, denying the charge, said that China had signed boundary agreements with all but two of its neighbours; in a Tweet, the spokesperson said: “#China has demarcated boundary with 12 of its 14 neighboring countries through peaceful negotiations, turning land borders into bonds of friendly cooperation.”
Down memory lane
•Mr. Modi’s deliberate and no doubt well-thought-out speech does raise a question in one’s mind. Did he realise China’s expansionism only after what has happened in eastern Ladakh in recent weeks? Or, has he had such thoughts about China all along and decided to give expression to them only now? One can expect that Mr. Modi must have had the measure of China’s President Xi Jinping during his many meetings with him over the years.
•The Prime Minister’s talk of Chinese expansionism reminded me of what Mrs. Indira Gandhi told me more than once during the time I served in her Prime Minister’s Office. She said: “I can think of a time down the road in future when we might have normal, peaceful relations with Pakistan, but never with China because China basically is an expansionist power.” She distrusted China as she did other countries including the Soviet Union. She surely did not trust Pakistan. Perhaps her basic approach in foreign policy was that in international relations, there is no such thing as trust. U.S. President Ronald Reagan talked of ‘Trust, but verify”; Mrs. Gandhi’s approach seemed to be: “Verify and still not trust”.
Nehru, China and Kashmir
•Jawaharlal Nehru, on the other hand, had convinced himself that China will not attack India. His Defence Minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, likely played a big part in inclining Nehru towards this conviction. Regrettably, none of his advisers cautioned him against this miscalculation; most of them had no experience in foreign relations. Nehru was not guided by any ideological considerations. Yes, he dreamt of India, and him, playing a big role on the world stage and believed that China could be a partner in that endeavour. Even the present government sees India acting as “Vishwaguru”. Whatever his reasons, there is no doubt that his China policy was hugely faulty. It would be healthy for all of us admirers of Nehru — a rapidly dwindling tribe — including the Indian National Congress party, to acknowledge this. But Nehru did not commit any Himalayan blunder in Kashmir. When a ceasefire was called for in January 1949, it was not because he was pacifist by nature or that he trusted the United Nations or any other country to label Pakistan as aggressor and persuade it to vacate the aggression. By that time, he had seen enough of British duplicity and America’s leaving the lead on the Kashmir issue to the British. The reality on the ground was that the Indian Army was in no position to run over the whole of Jammu and Kashmir at that time. This has been definitively and conclusively brought out by respected scholars as well as in the official history of the war published by the Defence Ministry several years later, after thorough research and interviews with all the relevant players, including seniormost Indian military officers, at the time.
•Nor was Nehru influenced by any ideological bias. I do not know for a fact that he was a leftist. I do know that he believed strongly that in foreign policy, national interest was the only guiding principle. In his response to a letter Albert Einstein wrote to him a few weeks before Independence, Nehru described foreign policy as essentially “selfish”. He was also clear in his mind that India’s interest lay with the West. India needed technology and other assistance which he was convinced could be obtained only from America. The Soviets, he believed, were of no use in this matter. It was only after the Americans concluded the military agreement with Pakistan and started giving it massive quantities of arms that Nehru began looking to the Soviet Union. The mistakes and even the blunder over China that he committed were caused by wrong assessments and not due to any ideological factors.
Handling Pakistan
•Mrs. Gandhi has been similarly accused of being naive and too trusting when she allowed Pakistan’s 90,000 prisoners of war (POWs) to return to their country without getting anything in return. Nobody is mentioning what she could have asked as quid pro quo . Should she have asked Pakistan to vacate all the territory it had occupied in Jammu and Kashmir? And for how long should she have kept the POWs in our country, until Pakistan returned our territory? Again, at Simla, nobody could state with conviction if she really believed that Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would live up to his commitment, oral as it was, to transform the ceasefire line into an international border. And if Bhutto did give such promise — which Pakistan denies — and implemented it, would the Indian Parliament have accepted it? Today’s ruling party wants to reclaim (by what means has not been clarified) even Aksai Chin from China. It is nobody’s idea that India should give up its claims to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir or Aksai Chin; the question is only about reiterating the claims publicly and in a charged atmosphere. As they say, all foreign policy is essentially domestic policy and this is true of all governments everywhere and at all times.
•The purpose in mentioning all of the above is not to exonerate any of the previous generation of leadership. They must be held accountable for the mistakes or blunders they might have committed. They acted, in the prevailing circumstances, as best as they could, according to their perception of national interest. After all, national interest is that which the government of the day decides it is. One government might conclude that the civil nuclear deal with the United States served India’s national interest; some other government ruled by some other party or even the same party but at another time and in different circumstances may think otherwise. By the same token, Mr. Modi, in the conduct of India’s foreign policy, surely does not allow any extraneous considerations to influence his thinking, and is basing his approach by what he perceives as furthering our national interests. History will pronounce its analysis in due course.
📰 Before the next health crisis
We must urgently confront air pollution and global warming and strengthen health systems
•Stalking the efforts of the government and the private sector to revive the economy in the time of COVID-19 are two dangers to people’s health — air pollution and greenhouse gases — and a weak public health system. The respite from the air pollution that blankets Indian cities is transitory. India must heed scientists’ warnings tying health disasters to air pollution as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions causing global warming.
A noxious cocktail
•Strikingly, the avoided number of early deaths from dirty air quality in recent months in China is estimated to have exceeded the number of those who have died from COVID-19. In Europe, 11,000 air-pollution related deaths were estimated to have been averted since the start of lockdowns. There is an association between pollution levels in cities (despite the improvements during the pandemic) and COVID-19 infections and death rates, a link observed in New York City and the northern provinces of Italy. Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu, in the top tier of pollution concentration, have also seen high deaths and infections per thousand people.
•Of course, other factors too decide morbidity and mortality. COVID-19’s toll has differed considerably across States — Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for example, have a lower COVID-19 mortality rate. These States stand out with good healthcare systems.
•Globally some 9 million premature deaths a year are associated with air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5. Regrettably, 14 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in India. The air in Ghaziabad, Delhi, and Noida is particularly hazardous. Last year, a public health emergency was declared as post-Diwali New Delhi’s air quality index approached 500, the “severe plus emergency” category.
•Adding to this noxious cocktail are GHGs like carbon dioxide, causing global warming and damaging health. Despite the plunge during the lockdown, atmospheric carbon emissions are a record high because of past accumulation. Ranked as the world’s fifth most vulnerable country to climate change, India must respond to alerts on communicable diseases linked to GHGs. Global warming intensifies heat waves and worsens respiratory illnesses. Locust swarms in Jaipur and Gurugram have been linked to climate change. Evidence is also emerging on a link between global warming and the emergence of diseases. Mosquito-borne diseases in India have been connected to global warming through both increased rainfall and heat waves. Europe reported its first local transmissions of dengue in 2010.
Need for a new plan
•So, India must not scramble to return to bad old ways of boosting short-term growth at any cost but capitalise on the tantalising glimpse of a healthier and cleaner world. Spending on reducing air pollution and GHGs provides estimated health benefits of 1.4 to 2.5 times more than the cost of the actions. Delhi, set to overtake Tokyo as the most populous city by 2030, needs to deal with transport, responsible for two-fifth of the PM 2.5 in the skies. Reforms should encourage public transportation in place of the 10 million vehicles, expand electric vehicles, and provide inter-connectivity between the metro and buses.
•In managing health risks, emission reduction should be coupled with a stronger public health system. Right now, government spending on health is just 1.6% of GDP, low for a lower middle-income country. Most countries, including India, fail the test of readiness for health disasters, according to the 2019 Global Health Security Index. The cleaner air the country is still breathing during the pandemic should be a powerful motivation. Scientific warnings do not indicate the time and place of calamities but do call for confronting air pollution and global warming and strengthening health systems before the next health emergency that is surely going to happen.
