📰 Cartographic challenge
Pakistan’s new map is intended to provoke India, and internationalise the border disputes
•The Ministry of External Affairs has termed Pakistan’s announcement of a new political map, which asserts its claims on Jammu and Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek, and lays a new claim to Junagadh, as an exercise in “political absurdity”, and accused Pakistan of attempting a form of “territorial aggrandisement supported by cross-border terrorism”. Pakistan’s decision to issue the map, a tit-for-tat manoeuvre in return for India’s decision to reorganise Jammu and Kashmir a year ago, appears to reset several agreements with India that have been concretised over the past 70 years. The map the Imran Khan government unveiled lays claim to all of Jammu and Kashmir, thus far shown as disputed territory, draws a line demarcating Gilgit-Baltistan separately from the part of Kashmir under its control (Pakistan occupied Kashmir), and renames Jammu and Kashmir as “Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir”. The new map leaves the claim line with Ladakh unclear. While each of these acts is outrageous for New Delhi, it should also be questioned in Islamabad. Pakistan’s claim to all of Jammu and Kashmir, but not Ladakh, goes against its own commitment to adjudicate the future of all six parts of the erstwhile royal state of Jammu-Kashmir (Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan, PoK and Aksai Chin) with India. The claims to Siachen and Sir Creek, that have been the subject of several discussions between India and Pakistan, are also a regressive step. While both sides had reached an impasse on Siachen, the Sir Creek agreement had made considerable progress, and was reportedly even resolved, pending a political announcement in 2007. Either way, both were without doubt disputed areas, and Pakistan’s unilateral claim over them is not helpful or conducive to future resolution. Finally, the move on Junagadh, a former princely state whose accession to India was accepted by Pakistan, opens up a whole new dispute. While Junagadh was in contention at the time of Partition, the issue was successfully resolved after a referendum was conducted there in February 1948, in which an overwhelming 95% of the state’s residents voted to stay with India.
•As New Delhi considers its next moves on this provocation, it should be prepared for Pakistan taking all the issues it has raised with its new map to the international stage. Pakistan’s actions, while on completely bilateral matters, come in conjunction with map-related issues India faces today on two other fronts: with China at the Line of Actual Control on Ladakh, and with Nepal at Kalapani and Limpiyadhura (which Nepal’s government has also issued a new map about). It is surely no coincidence that all three countries objected to the map New Delhi had issued in November 2019, albeit for different reasons, and New Delhi must be well-prepared to deal with the three-pronged cartographic challenge it will face in the coming months.
Investment in research can translate into national development only through pursuit of post-academic research
•The Government of India is in the process of revisiting the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy. The policy will guide the agencies of the government mandated with funding research in higher education institutions and national laboratories. At this stage we need to ponder the question: what kind of research should be funded? That leads one to look at the nomenclature used by researchers for this purpose. Here it is pertinent to recall what William Shockley said in his Nobel lecture in 1956, that words like “pure, applied, unrestricted, fundamental, basic, academic, industrial, practical etc.” are being used frequently “in a derogatory sense, on the one hand to belittle practical objectives of producing something useful and, on the other hand, to brush off the possible long-range value of explorations into new areas where a useful outcome cannot be foreseen.”
Alternate frameworks
•Experts in science and technology studies have come up with alternate frameworks and terminology to provide a comprehensive picture and avoid any value judgement. One approach was proposed by NASA in the form of Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), a type of measurement system used to assess the maturity level of a particular technology. TRL-1 corresponds to observation of basic principles. Its result is publications. TRL-2 corresponds to formulation of technology at the level of concepts. Then the TRL framework advances to proof of concept, validation in a laboratory environment, followed by a relevant environment, and then to prototype demonstration, and ending with actual deployment. The framework uses terms as applicable to aerospace applications, but one can come up with alternate terms depending on the field of application, including health sciences where the term ‘translational research’ is commonly used. The number of levels can also be adjusted to suit the application.
•An alternative is to use the terminology ‘Academic Research (AR)’, and ‘Post-Academic Research (PAR)’. One can easily establish correspondence with the TRL framework, with AR corresponding to TRL-1 and the rest to higher levels. To provide some granularity, one can divide PAR into early-stage PAR, and late-stage PAR. Late-stage PAR has to be done by large laboratories (national or those supported by industry), while AR and early-stage PAR can be done at higher education institutions and large laboratories.
•Both AR and PAR generate knowledge which is necessary for national development. When examined from the perspective of national development, pursuit of AR alone, while necessary, is not sufficient. AR and PAR when pursued together and taken to their logical conclusion will result in a product or a process, or a better clinical practice, or a scientifically robust understanding of human health and disease, or provide inputs for a policy decision.
•It is often said that India’s investment in research is lower than that by advanced countries. Here two observations need consideration. First, countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report research statistics according to the Frascati Manual, which was first drafted in 1963, and has gone through five revisions since then. We cannot compare data with other countries without having correspondence between India’s data and data reported by others. Second, India has to decide where to increase investment: in AR or in PAR. Investment in research can translate into national development only through pursuit of PAR.
•This is not a call for abandoning AR, but a call to look for useful outcomes including via spin-offs and serendipity, and to prioritise research in areas that relate to national development.
•During my talks with academics on this topic, some observed that our industry has not reached a stage where they can absorb research being done by higher education institutions. This observation reveals that research being pursued is either not addressing national needs or is limited to AR. The lukewarm response of industry is a message for academia to orient its priorities to address national needs and engage in both AR and early-stage PAR and provide inputs necessary to raise the technology intensity of industry.
Pursuing AR and PAR
•One can cite several examples to illustrate how AR and PAR can be pursued together. A programme in high energy physics can be designed to pursue accelerator technology along with high energy physics. Research in electro-chemistry can be accompanied by development of battery technologies.
•Judging the growth of S&T based only on publications provides an incomplete picture. Why is it that industries that have high technology intensity, such as aircraft and spacecraft, medical, precision and optical instruments, and communication equipment, have a low presence in India? What should be done to increase value addition to raw materials in India? The answer lies in increasing the technology intensity of industry, which was identified as one of the goals of the STI policy issued in 2013. This needs reiteration and a mechanism should be devised to monitor progress with the objective of becoming an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’.
•The STI policy should emphasise PAR to ensure that investment in research results in economic growth. To motivate the research community to pursue at least early-stage PAR, the reward system needs significant reorientation. The current system for rewards relies heavily on bibliometric indicators despite the knowledge that publications alone do not lead to national development. The reward system in higher education institutions and national laboratories should be reoriented to promote PAR. Academics in higher education institutions pursuing AR should pursue early-stage PAR themselves, or team up with those who are keen to pursue PAR.
📰 An invisible humanitarian crisis in India
The state and the rich and middle classes remain indifferent as millions slip into chronic hunger and intense poverty
•India’s labouring poor have largely disappeared even from the inner pages of many newspapers and from television screens. It is as though, after the country has gradually unlocked and most migrants have returned home, the wrenching distress of mass hunger and sudden unemployment that racked their lives has somehow passed. The reality is entirely the reverse. The devastating impact of the unprecedented closure of the entire economy, which was already in recession, will endure for a long time. However, the immense suffering of the poor has been rendered invisible by the collective indifference of the state and the rich and middle classes.
Slipping deeper into want
•On the banks of the Yamuna, adjacent to the largest cremation ground in Delhi, is an embankment called Yamuna Pushta, home to 4,000 homeless men. In normal times, they survived by doing casual wage work, mostly in eateries or construction. Work was uncertain and always underpaid; still they managed to keep raw hunger at bay by eating food provided by religious food charities in gurdwaras, temples and dargahs. I met them recently. Their destitution and desperation were palpable. There is still no work, and shrines have still not adequately revived their food charities. The Delhi government has mostly ended its free cooked food distribution programme. At the peak of the programme, about 10 lakh people were being fed in over 1,000 centres. I was critical then of the indignity of forcing people to line up for hours each day for a ladle of food. But although it could have been organised with more compassion and respect, that was still a crucial public lifeline for people thrust suddenly into mass hunger. With that lifeline snapped, there is nothing except for some small private charities to shield them from the blistering winds of hunger.
•My comrades, including those working with homeless people in other cities, activists of the right to food campaign countrywide, and volunteers for food relief of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat, all report conditions of even more worrying precarity and deprivation from around the country. There are communities in the countryside — in forests, deserts, hills, river islands and Dalit ghettos — who even in normal times survived on the edge of hunger. They used to depend on remittances from migrants for their survival; today they have to feed the migrants who returned. Casual daily wage workers, weavers, artisans, home-based workers, rickshaw-pullers and street vendors have always lived precarious lives too. But they have slipped much deeper into want. And there are millions of new entrants into the ranks of the hungry, including laid-off employees of small enterprises and eateries, domestic workers, sex workers, workers in the gig economy, and even teachers in low-income private schools and those taking private tuitions.
•All of these workers, and tens of millions more, are bracing themselves for the ways that the dispossessed have learnt, from time immemorial, and that are hardwired into their DNA, to live with chronic hunger. The first is to eliminate nutritious but unaffordable portions of one’s diet, including dal, milk, vegetables, fruit, eggs and meat. Many families report that they are eating only coarse rice and roti with salt. The next step is to reduce food intake, cutting down on both the quantity eaten during each meal and the number of meals, teaching one’s body to endure with less and less. As households slide further down this steep slope, there are increasing numbers of nights when they have to sleep hungry. Children who could earlier depend on the school or preschool centre for at least one nutritious meal are now being sent out to work, including scrabbling through waste for anything which can be eaten or sold.
Public policy failures
•A number of global reports warn that hundreds of millions of people are being thrust into extreme poverty and hunger because of the economic impacts of the lockdown and the raging pandemic. A United Nations University paper (‘Precarity and the pandemic’, June 2020) estimates that 400 million new workers are at risk of slipping into extreme poverty, of less than $1.90 a day. What is even more worrying is that “the location of global poverty is likely to shift towards middle-income countries and South Asia and East Asia.” The impact could intensify because of “pre-existing conditions of fragmented or insufficient social protection systems” and could last for “years to come”. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, similarly estimated in a study published in early July that more than 250 million people are at risk of acute hunger. This impact, he believes, “will be long-lasting”. He is critical of governments which “rather than acknowledging how badly the efforts to ‘end po
verty’ have been faring, and how relentlessly the pandemic has exposed that fact... are doubling down on existing approaches that are clearly failing”. His angst about public policy failures to deal with the scale and depth of the humanitarian crisis is entirely justified. First, at senior levels of the Indian government, there is little acknowledgement of the depth of the crisis of hunger and the annihilation of livelihoods. To revive the economy and, in particular, MSMEs — the sector employing the most people outside agriculture — the Finance Minister relies mostly on credit rather than on fiscal transfers, unmindful that when both demand and production have crashed, credit will have few takers and can accomplish little.
•Second, governments also sought to revive the broken economy by excluding workers from regimes of labour rights protections, ostensibly for attracting capital investment. Instead of atoning for the immense distress of unprotected workers and mitigating future suffering by building sturdy legal walls for their protections, many State governments used the pandemic to further weaken the scant protections which the law currently provides informal workers. Some governments attempted to extend the workday to 12 hours, to suspend the protections of various labour laws for three years, and regulate the movement of workers across State borders.
Abandoned by the state
•Even prior to the pandemic, India slipped to the 102nd position in the Global Hunger Report of 2019 that ranked 117 countries. It had fallen behind its neighbours Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The economy was also stuttering, with unemployment at a 45-year high. In the midst of this smouldering crisis, the most stringent lockdown in the world was imposed, nearly halting both demand and supply overnight. As the COVID-19 infection spreads to States with the most broken public health systems, such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and with the homeless and the poor being excluded from highly privatised health facilities in cities, the problems of the poor will further exacerbate. As the virus ravages bodies enfeebled by hunger and distress, they remain abandoned by the state, with no reliable access to care.
•Through all of this, the political establishment, sections of the media and the middle class remain culpably indifferent, preoccupied instead with buying legislators and toppling governments; purchasing military aircraft; jailing dissenters; and divisive agendas like the triumphalist construction of a Ram temple at the site of a demolished medieval mosque. With millions slipping invisibly into chronic hunger and intense poverty, India is hurtling silently into its gravest humanitarian crisis in over half a century.
📰 Can the NEP fix access to universal education?
Is the NEP’s 10-year deadline, to make all children entering Grade 1 school-ready through Early Childhood Care and Education, practical?
•Leena Chandran Wadia (LCW):I think we have to be ready because every year that we lose, we lose some children. You know, at the time that their brain is developing fast and they can learn a lot, we must help them learn as much as possible. So that is a deadline we must try to meet.
•Anita Rampal (AR):Since April 1, 2010, we have a Right to Education Act making it a fundamental right of every child aged between 6 and 14 years to get free and compulsory education, in a neighbourhood school. This has been a fundamental right for the last 10 years. So there is no question of having a target of another 10 years. What this policy is doing is, it is very quietly, very problematically, going back on a fundamental right of a child, enacted by law.
With the NEP silent on last year’s draft proposal to expand the RTE Act’s scope to cover children from 3 to 18 years, can universal education be attained?
•LCW:So I saw that too. And I am a little surprised… but the document does say that it wants to achieve universalisation of education. So, we have to wait and see until the implementation plan comes on how they propose to deliver on what they claim they want to do, which is universalise education between 3 and 18 years… this move to actually bring children into sort of formal education fold at age three, had a timeline because there are lots of practical issues with the anganwadis and preschools. But it doesn’t take away from the rights embodied in the RTE Act, which begins at age 6, which we felt was too late.
•AR:It [NEP] is clearly trying to abandon that [RTE] Act. It says it is not going to have a regular schooling with well-qualified teachers. This policy is saying we will be allowing open schooling. This clubbing of three years of ECCE with Grade 1 and 2 of primary school and then calling this a ‘foundational literacy and numeracy mission’, it is so worrying because we know that an anganwadi [worker] is not professionally trained to be a teacher. Can we believe it that a national policy says children will become tutors for others in their classes? It is very clear that it is really trying to abandon its responsibility of even providing a good, professional teacher for the earliest years.
The policy says education is a public service, but also advocates philanthropic private participation…
•LCW:I would like to underline that all existing resources should be pressed into service to ensure that every child gets quality early childhood care. The anganwadi workers score a lot because they are actually, sort of, replacing the parents of the children. And so that is alright as a way to begin teaching the children… The NEP committee members were completely clear that the policy’s focus has to be that government education is of very high quality. This is the only way we will make sure every child, no matter where they are, are given education. It is very unlikely that the private sector is going to open schools in remote areas with less than 10 children. The only hope is to strengthen the government education system. But, of course, we are not going to stand in the way of private education. In the last 25 years, we have had nearly 50% private school education and nearly 70% of enrollment in higher education in private hands. The concern is there are too many players who are not of good quality. We have to find a way to weed them out. Everywhere in the world, it is usually philanthropy, private sector that participates in education. What we have in India is a lot of people under the umbrella of not for profit really working for profit... [To] filter them out, we have made some suggestions.
What about concerns on the proposal to create school complexes? The Kothari Commission recommended it.
•AR:Kothari Commission spoke about a ‘school complex’ to have a collaborative synergy between high or higher secondary schools, which normally are better resourced, and the smaller neighbourhood and primary schools, which actually then become feeder schools for the high school. That word is being used now in a completely different sense. Here we know the background… 14,000 schools in one State have been closed under the name of consolidation, saying that small schools are sub-optimal.
•So, schools which actually provide access in the proximity of the child, within the community; those have been closed or merged. NEP says we should have larger institutions, right up to higher education, have a college which has 2,500 students. So it is trying to make an economic argument of viability. This is playing with the child’s right. How can you expect that this will be considered as access?
The proposed 5+3+3+4 school structure has triggered apprehension that it could lead to exits at each stage…
•LCW:This is a pedagogical alignment, where we would like to assess students at Grade 3, 5 and 8 to make sure that they have attained the outcomes designed for them. This is an attempt to refocus attention on learning outcomes at different stages. In fact, we think there is also provision to make sure that the biggest dropouts that start to happen from beyond Grade 5 are halted.
The NEP advocates equitable and inclusive education but there is no mention of a common school curriculum. Even the proposal to impart education in the mother tongue is open-ended. Wouldn’t these broaden inequities?
•LCW:State governments have actually decided that teaching will happen in the regional language, which is, for instance, Kannada in Karnataka, ignoring that there are large swathes of areas on the borders of Maharashtra, where children speak Marathi; on the Andhra Pradesh border, where children speak Telugu, etc. It should be possible for a school in a certain community to teach students in the dominant language. But there is another problem as State governments transfer teachers. You hire somebody from Bengaluru and post them at the Maharashtra border and the children are listening to Kannada, which is a foreign language. So, when they don’t attain foundational literacy and numeracy, it is because they are also struggling with the language. The whole idea is to try to get State governments to allow local schools to teach in their own language by hiring local teachers. How far we will succeed remains to be seen, because education is [also] a State subject. As for the common school curriculum, the discussion about different boards was there [in the NEP committee]. There is an exodus towards CBSE boards in many States but that is partially because the State boards are quite weak. This policy has tried to strengthen SCERTs so that they can attend to children’s need to be educated within their own context and culture. We need to open up that opportunity so that children can relate to their real life through their education. That is the reason we have let the various boards be.
Will the thrust on vocational education weaken students academically, perpetuate hereditary occupations or lead to early exits?
•AR:The notion of vocational education as something which is only preparing you for vocations should not be pushed early in school. From the first Radhakrishnan Commission right down, our [Education] Commissions have said let’s not have different statuses for different kinds of programmes and instead give students a chance to study together. Our vocational education has no education in it. It is skill-based and based on hierarchy between knowledge for some and skill for the others depending on this constructed version of what is ‘ability’. This needs to be really questioned, because we already have many hierarchies within our system. This clubbing together of Grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 is extremely worrying and problematic because it says that you will be given vocational courses. Instead of sorting children out, give them a choice to be together and support them right through that. There will be a lot of dropping out, pushing them away into vocational courses or open school.
With such sweeping school reforms, is a National Testing Agency needed to assess students for university admissions?
•LCW:This was debated a lot. The policy is very clear about where we would like to go. So many things are being dismantled, so many new attitudes and mindsets need to be built. The interim is going to be very difficult and most parents are anxious about the handful of so-called good opportunities that they have a perception for, like IITs. And so there are insane levels of competition. We felt it is better that only the people who want to try for JEE, for example, need to study for that entrance exam. The rest in school can be liberated to experiment with so many other of their interests. Also, higher education institutions are going to have some autonomy in deciding who they admit, which again, makes parents nervous. So, if at least some percentage of scores can be used for admission through the NTA then there will be a sense that there is at least an attempt to provide a partial level-playing field till such time that some trust is built in the system. Instead of trying to examine every child through an exit exam in Grades 10 and 12, it is better to introduce an entrance exam.
Does the NEP’s broad categorisation of Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Group (SEDG), hamper equity?
•AR:I totally agree… disadvantage just doesn’t come from the air. It is historical, it is social. That is the way identities have been shaped with declarations of exclusion. Clubbing everyone under ‘SEDG’, shying away from saying ‘Dalit’ or ‘minority’ will not really get us to even acknowledge what the issue is. This is sort of glossing over it. We have to understand what ‘caste’ is. And what does it mean when we say that a child is from the Muslim community? How does a child fare within the system? How do the others look at this child? What are the backgrounds of this child? Trying to understand the diverse social realities, disadvantages and exclusion is key.
