📰 Amid boycott, Rajya Sabha passes 7 Bills
Crucial legislation cleared in House
•Amid a boycott of House proceedings by many Opposition parties, Rajya Sabha passed seven key Bills in three-and-a-half hours on Tuesday.
•Most of the Opposition, including the Congress, Left parties, the Trinamool Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Nationalist Congress Party, decided to boycott proceedings for the remainder of the session in protest against the suspension of eight MPs.
•The first Bill passed was the Indian Institutes of Information Technology Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2020 that seeks to declare five Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) set up under the public-private partnership mode in Surat, Bhopal, Bhagalpur, Agartala, and Raichur as institutions of national importance.
•The next Bill to be moved by Minister of State for Consumer Affairs Danve Raosaheb Dadarao was the Essential Commodities (Amend- ment) Bill, 2020.
•Mr. Dadarao said the Ordinance was promulgated in the midst of the lockdown so that farmers had a way of selling their crops.
Banking regulations
•The Banking Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2020, which was moved by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, was also passed in the Upper House. Ms. Sitharaman said the Bill was important as there have been many banks and cooperative societies that have had problems in the past year and a half.
•The fourth Bill that was passed was the Companies (Amendment) Bill which amended 13 sections and added one chapter.
•The fifth Bill that was cleared was the National Forensic Sciences University Bill, 2020. Minister of Strte for Home G. Kishan Reddy said the Gujarat Forensic Sciences University is being upgraded to a national university. The House also passed the Rashtriya Raksha University Bill, 2020 to upgrade the Gandhinagar police training university to a national university. The seventh Bill — the Taxation and Other Laws (Relaxation and Amendment of Certain Provisions) Bill, 2020 — was returned by Rajya Sabha.
📰 Lok Sabha clears 3 labour Bills
Opposition parties stage a walkout; Union Minister terms legislation ‘historic’
•The Lok Sabha on Tuesday cleared three labour Bills amalgamating laws on social security, occupational safety and industrial relations which would usher in changes including allowing companies with less than 300 workers to hire and fire without prior approval and provide gig and platform workers social security.
•The Industrial Relations Code, 2020; the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020; and the Code of Social Security, 2020, were passed by voice vote after a debate in the Lok Sabha, and in the absence of the Opposition, who staged a walkout. Minister for Labour and Employment Santosh Gangwar termed the Bills “historic” and ones that would usher in long required reform in industry and labour. Referring to the Social Security Code Bill, the Minister said, “After 70 years of Independence, 50 crore workers, including the unorganised sector, will be brought into some kind of social security net.”
•Among the 13 Acts subsumed under the Occupational Safety Code, 2020, is the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation and Employment and Conditions of Service) Act of 1979, which came under the spotlight during the COVID-19 lockdown when many migrant workers found themselves without any recourse to wages or services from employers. The new Bill covers contract and directly hired inter-State workers.
Inter-State migrants
•On the issue of inter-State migrants, BJP MPs, Manoj Tiwari and Nishikant Dubey said the nomenclature for referring to them as “migrant labour” be changed and the labour be respected. “Industry requires capital, labour and market. If capital from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are not referred as ‘migrant capital’ then why refer as such to the labour?” asked Mr. Dubey.
•In the absence of the Opposition, amendments proposed by these members was not taken up and the Bills were passed. These will be tabled in the Rajya Sabha next Monday.
📰 Labour scheme in Tibet has echoes of Xinjiang
Moves risk a ‘loss of cultural heritage’ in the politically sensitive region, says report
•China is forcing Tibetan farmers and herders into labour programmes similar to those used in troubled Xinjiang, a U.S. research institute alleged on Tuesday.
•The moves risk a “loss of cultural heritage” in the politically sensitive region, the group’s report warned.
•Authorities in Tibet, a predominantly Buddhist area, have touted the scheme — which puts rural workers to task in factories — as a tool for poverty alleviation. They say this is in line with President Xi Jinping’s goal of eradicating extreme poverty by the end of 2020.
•But researchers at the Jamestown Foundation said “militarised vocational training” is also a form of ideological indoctrination and assimilation towards ethnic Tibetans, who make up 90% of the remote border region’s population.
•It said more than 500,000 rural labourers — mainly herders and subsistence farmers — were trained in the first seven months of 2020, with each county assigned quotas. It didn’t cite any comparable figures for previous years.
•The training schemes aim to instil “work discipline, Chinese language and work ethics”, according to a 2019 Chinese government action plan quoted in the report.
‘Eliminate lazy people’
•A 2018 report by the Nagqu city government also states that the purpose of the labour transfer scheme is to “effectively eliminate lazy people”.
•Companies that fulfil the hiring quota for workers are offered up to 500,000 yuan (about $75,000), the report said, while herders and farmers are also encouraged by the scheme to hand over their livestock and land to large state-run cooperatives.
•“In the context of Beijing’s increasingly assimilatory ethnic minority policy, it is likely that these policies will promote a long-term loss of linguistic, cultural and spiritual heritage,” wrote the report’s author Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the U.S.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
•The report claims there are similarities with labour schemes in the troubled Xinjiang region. The scale of the Tibetan work scheme is still dwarfed by that of Xinjiang — which trained an average of 1.29 million workers each year between 2014 and 2019, according to a government white paper released last week.
📰 E-learning in India, a case of bad education
In poorly performing educational systems as in the country, online learning may not usher in a revolution
•Equality of opportunity to all is one of the basic principles of our Constitution. From an educational point of view, John Dewey, American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, strongly argued that “[A]n environment in which some are limited will always in reaction create conditions that prevent the full development even of those who fancy they enjoy complete freedom for unhindered growth.” Another point he makes equally strongly is that for good education, one must lead the child’s current interests and abilities organically to logically organised human knowledge. This second point is an indicator of the quality of education.
The key issues
•Our education system was never very efficient even in the best of times. The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered it extremely biased and faulty. The main thrust of providing learning opportunities while schools are shut is online teaching. There are several sets of guidelines and plans issues by the government, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) for this purpose. The Internet space is teeming with learning schemes, teaching videos, sites and portals for learning opportunities. The content of all government sites and schemes is primarily the NCERT-issued Alternative Academic Calendar (https://bit.ly/3kE5nCN), videos of teaching, digital editions of textbooks, and links to other such material.
•There are three pertinent issues in this whole effort of online education and schemes that need serious consideration. One, an exacerbation of inequality; two, the pedagogical issues leading to bad quality education; and three, an unwarranted thrust on online education, post-COVID-19.
Exacerbation of inequality
•It is worth repeating a truism that calamities, be they natural or man-made, affect the underprivileged the hardest; COVID-19 is no exception. The plight of millions of migrant labourers, many of who walked thousands of kilometres right in the beginning of the lockdown, proved the point adequately. A similar but less noticed deprivation is being visited to children of the same people, which may push the next generation in a direction of even greater comparative disadvantage.
•In our society there is no large movement that may generate any hope of an improved situation in terms of equality and social justice. Therefore, any positive change that might come about will be a cumulative result of the development of capabilities and grit in individuals. The COVID-19 shutdown has affected this opportunity for the poor even harder than their counterparts from well-to-do sections of society. The government began plans for students with no online access only by the end of August. The plans themselves were the usual glib talk always served to the poor. These plans assume semi-literate or illiterate parents teaching children, community involvement, mobile pools, and so on. Anyone with an understanding of rural India will immediately note these to be imaginary. As a result, whatever online or digital education is available is for students with only online access. Thus, digital India may become even more unequal and divided than it already is.
•Even if one takes it as an emergency measure (that ‘something is better than nothing’) and also accept ‘for some is better than no one’ despite it being against the principle of equal opportunity, the quality of online teaching-learning leaves much to be desired. The NCERT declares in its Learning Enhancement Guidelines (https://bit.ly/3iWdxWD), or LEG that 60-70% students, teachers and parents consider learning satisfactory. However, its survey asks a single question on the feeling of students using the criteria of ‘joyful to burdensome’. The happiness or otherwise of the student while learning is, of course, important, but it says nothing about the quantum and depth of learning.
•Listening to lectures on the mobile phone, copying from the board where the teacher is writing, frequent disconnections and/or having blurred video/audio can hardly and organically connect the child’s present understanding with the logically organised bodies of human knowledge.
No focus on concepts
•If one sees videos of teaching mathematics, science, history, and the English language, one can hardly avoid noticing problems with them. In the science and mathematics videos, in particular, there are many misconceptions and ambiguities. The emphasis is more on ‘tricks’ to remember for success in an examination than laying the stress on conceptual understanding.
•The government of Delhi also uses videos by the Khan Academy (“a nonprofit with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere”). Many American educators have questioned the quality of teaching and have pointed out inadequate or plainly wrong concepts, particularly in mathematics. To quote an article in The Washington Post , “Khan Academy: The revolution that isn’t” (July 23, 2012 – https://wapo.st/3mJU4dV): “teachers... are concerned that... the guy who’s delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world... considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere ‘nitpicking’.”
•The secondary students are in a better position still because of their relative independence in learning and possible self-discipline. The beginners in the lower primary can get nothing at all from this mode of teaching. An example of assumptions in the NCERT’s planning in LEG can be instructive; it is glibly pronounced that “for a child in grade I, the learning outcome — associates words with pictures — can be easily taught with the use of resources available from or at home such as newspapers, food packets, things at home, TV programmes, nature, etc. All that will be needed is guidance to the parents.” Well, if it were all that simple, then why are our children not learning to read and write? Education does not happen in chance encounters with print. As Michael Joseph Oakeshott who also wrote on education would say, it requires well-connected, regular efforts that are incrementally building to help the child focus his attention and to provoke him to distinguish and to discriminate, and develop a habit of staying on task. And this requires help from someone who knows the child as well as understands the objective of education. Food packets and newspapers in the hands of even ‘guided’ semi-literate parents will be good enough to present a plan on paper, but will be completely useless for the child’s learning.
The thrust, post-COVID-19
•IT has been presented as a harbinger of a revolution in education for more than three decades now. However, all reliable studies seem to indicate that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the classroom helps in already well functioning systems, and either has no benefits or negative impact in poorly performing systems. That does not indicate much hope from IT in our education system.
•The NCERT’s LEG states that “COVID-19 has created a situation which demands transformation in school education... the transaction mechanisms in school education may go through a drastic change. Therefore, even if the pandemic will get over, its traces will be there and school education needs to remodel itself....” It recommends that “alternative modes of education for the whole academic session including Internet-based, radio, podcast, community radio, IVRS, TV DTH Channels, etc.” should be developed. This transformation of schools in the current understanding of pedagogy, suitability of learning material and quality of learning provided through IT will further devastate the already inadequate system of school education in the country. Of course, IT can be used in a balanced manner where it can help; but it should not be seen as a silver bullet to remedy all ills in the education system.
Institutional environment
•The importance of an institutional environment cannot be overemphasised when one thinks of online teaching. Even when the institutions function sub-optimally, students themselves create an environment that supports their growth morally, socially and intellectually in conversations and interactions with each other. The online mode of teaching completely forecloses this opportunity.
•In conclusion,our democracy and public education system have, as usual, left the neediest in the lurch and are providing bad education to those who matter.
📰 A new world order
The permanent members of the UNSC must support the reform process of the UN
•At a special session marking 75 years of the United Nations on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for reform of its “outdated structures”, pointing out that in the absence of comprehensive changes, the world body today faces a “crisis of confidence”. While the words appear harsh given the occasion, they can hardly be faulted. India has been at the forefront of demanding reform in the UN, particularly its principal organ, the Security Council, for decades, staking its claim as one of the world’s largest economies and most populous countries, with a track record in promoting a rules-based international order, and contributing to peacekeeping through UN forces. The UN was born in the crisis of the World War era, and the realities of that time can hardly be compared to the present. The UNSC’s permanent, veto-carrying members, chosen by virtue of being “winners” of World War II — the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and later China — can hardly claim adequate representation of the world’s leadership today. The UNSC does not include a permanent member from the African, Australian and South American continents, and the pillars of the multilateral order, such as the G-4 group of Brazil, India, Germany and Japan, have been ignored for long. Other, more representative options exist, and that has been the crux of the battle for change. Also, there is a deep polarisation within the UN’s membership, so decisions are either not taken, or not heeded. Frequent divisions within the UNSC P-5 end up blocking key decisions. These issues are underlined in a year where the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to a standstill; yet, the UN, the UNSC, and WHO have failed to play an effective role in helping nations deal with the spread.
•For India, what has been most frustrating is that despite the dysfunctional power balance that prevails, the UN’s reform process, held through Inter Governmental Negotiations (IGN) has not made progress over decades, despite commitments. The UN has chosen to “rollover” the discussions of the IGN, which are looking at five major issues: enlarging the Security Council, categories of membership, the question of the veto that five Permanent members of the UNSC wield, regional representation, and redistributing the Security Council-General Assembly power balance. It is some comfort that the UN’s 75th anniversary declaration passed by all member countries this week pledges to “upgrade the United Nations” with a commitment to “instil new life in the discussions on the reform of the Security Council”. Those words can only be realised if the UNSC’s permanent members recognise the deep peril the UN faces and support the reform process, an act that will require looking beyond their own interests for the greater good of the world and its peace-building architecture.
