📰 MP bypolls: SC stays ECI order revoking ‘star campaigner’ status of Kamal Nath
‘Who gives you the power to determine who is the leader of the party... We are staying this order. You have no power”, CJI tells ECI
•The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the October 30 order of the Election Commission of India (ECI) revoking the ‘star campaigner’ status of former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath.
•Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sharad A. Bobde, heading a three-judge Bench, said the Commission had no power to determine who should be ‘star campaigner’ of a political party.
•“Who gives you the power to determine who is the leader of the party... We are staying this order. You have no power”, Chief Justice Bobde told the ECI, represented by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi.
‘Petition is infructuous’
•Mr. Dwivedi said Mr. Nath’s petition against the October 30 order was already infructuous as the campaigning for bypolls to 28 Assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh was already over and polling is on November 2.
•“Never mind, we will examine this case closely... You have no power”, Chief Justice Bobde said.
•On October 30, the ECI found Mr. Nath guilty of violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) in place for the by-elections.
•The ECI revoked his name on the basis of a complaint from the BJP that Mr. Nath derogatorily referred to its candidate, Imarti Devi, as an “item” during a campaign rally at Dabra in Gwalior district.
‘It’s party’s prerogative’
•Mr. Nath, represented by senior advocate Kapil Sibal and advocates Varun K. Chopra and Gurtejpal Singh, said it was the prerogative of his party and not the ECI to remove his name as a ‘star campaigner’.
•“Section 77(1) of the Representation of People Act, 1951 read with Guidelines for Star Campaigners issued by the Election Commission, from time to time, makes selection/revocation of ‘star campaigners’ the sole prerogative of the political party”, the petition said.
•Mr. Nath said the “honour, dignity and safety of women have been one of the paramount pillars of his work as a Chief Minister, Union Minister and Member of Parliament since 1980 onwards”.
•There was not a single allegation of misconduct or ill-tempered remark against women attributed to him, he stated.
•He urged the court to frame “appropriate guidelines for speeches during campaigning by star campaigners/ campaigners, keeping in mind the right to freedom of speech and expression and concept of democratic elections”.
•The revocation of his name from the ‘star campaigner’ list impeded “the principle of free and fair and level playing field in elections”, he said.
BJP’s complaint
•The petition explained how the ECI first issued notice on October 21 to Mr. Nath on a complaint by the BJP submitted on October 18 for violating the MCC at the Dabra rally.
•Mr. Nath replied on October 22 that the remarks were “completely misunderstood without context and highlighted that there was no malice or intent to disrespect on his part”. He said he had regretted the remark and issued a clarification the very next day.
•On October 26, the ECI held that he violated its code of conduct advisory and “advised him to not use such words or statements during the period of Model Code of Conduct”.
•However, on October 30, the ECI revoked his ‘star campaigner’ status from the list submitted by the Indian National Congress on October 19.
•Reacting to the Supreme Court's observation, the Election Commission said it will file a reply at the earliest. "Hon'ble Supreme Court is supreme. EC has been given an opportunity to file a reply in the matter, which shall be filed at the earliest," it said.
Antibody prevalence data derived from serosurveys must be interpreted with caution and correction factors
•The theory behind population-based serological surveys (seroprevalence surveys or serosurveys) to detect the prevalence of antibodies against COVID-19 is robust. Their purpose is to measure the proportion of a population already infected, as evidenced by antibody positivity. When applied on a national scale, a random sample of the entire population is tested. Then, the data are extrapolated to the whole population.
•‘Random’, according to the dictionary, means something without a deliberate order. In biostatistics, it means each individual has an equal probability of getting selected. Statisticians stratify the population and select a random sample from all strata so that the prevalence figure obtained is representative of the whole population. The result of random sample serosurveys can be confidently extrapolated to obtain national-level prevalence of antibodies.
What antibody tests say
•Unfortunately there are problems with the antibody tests. Antibodies are the footprints of the host’s response to virus infection. Their presence in the blood-serum confirms past infection. However, test results for antibodies throw up surprises. Antibody prevalence data derived from serosurveys must be interpreted with caution and correction factors.
•The virus carries several antigens, both on the surface and internally. The body responds to all of them. Four antigens selected to detect antibodies are spike protein (S1, S2), receptor-binding domain (RBD) and nucleocapsid (N). An antibody against each antigen has its own time of appearance, duration in blood and rate of decay over time. Moreover, detection of antibodies does not correlate well with the protective virus-neutralising function of immunity. Testing for virus-neutralising antibodies is not an option, since handling the virus is risky for lab personnel. It is prohibited in clinical labs and restricted to selected research labs.
•Recent publications in The Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine say that in people with asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infections, these antibody levels decline over time, reaching 50% of the initial levels by about 36 days and become undetectable by 60 days after proven infection. Such asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases constitute more than 80% of those infected with the virus. In a study on exposure-prone healthcare workers in Tennessee, nearly half the subjects with S2 antibodies became negative in two months. If both S2 and RBD antibodies are detected, the results correlate better with the neutralising function. Also, one or the other may persist longer. However, available test kits use only one antigen.
•The Indian Council of Medical Research conducted two serosurveys: May 11-June 4 and August 17-September 22. The first survey measured S1 antibody and the second survey used another antigen, rendering inter-survey comparison problematic.
•The latent period between infection and the appearance of a detectable antibody is about four weeks. Therefore, the results of the first serosurvey pertain predominantly to the antibody status of subjects from April 13 to May 7. Those who got infected after May 7 would have been eclipsed in the study. So the result is an underestimate of the true value. The seroprevalence was 0.73% and that was extrapolated to about 30%-35% of the population having antibodies when India saw the epidemic peak in mid-September.
•Since infections were very few before April 13, the results of the first serosurvey were reasonably time-appropriate and the extrapolation close to the true situation. A study by the Department of Science and Technology concluded that at the peak time, the proportion of the population with antibodies was 28%, close to the published estimate of 30%-35%.
•The second serosurvey gave 7.1% prevalence for those immune between July 20 and August 25. For the sake of simplifying calculations, we assign August 4, the midpoint of this time interval to represent the second survey results. Subjects who were antibody positive by August 4 would have contracted the infection a month earlier by July 4. The result is not time-appropriate as at least 50% of those infected two months earlier by June 4 (representing the midpoint between April 20 and June 25) would have become antibody negative. This was the time when infections were rapidly rising. In short, the result is a gross underestimate of the true level of those with antibodies. Taking 50% as the correction factor, prevalence was 14.2% on August 4.
•From August 4 to September 16, (the day of the peak) new cases increased from 51,282 to 97,859 by a factor of 1.9. So, the estimated proportion of the population infected at the peak could have been 14.2 X 1.9=27 %.
Cautious interpretation
•Evidently, serosurvey results have to be cautiously interpreted to arrive at the true level of prevalence of antibodies. If taken at face value, serosurvey results grossly underestimate true prevalence, except in the very early phase of the epidemic when infected people two months earlier were very few.
•Misinterpreting serosurvey results has serious consequences for understanding the epidemic profile. What is in store for India? Several countries have second or even third waves of infection. Will India face such waves? If the peak coincided with 27%-35% prevalence, the epidemic is likely to evolve as endemic after another 30% are infected in the post-peak phase of the epidemic. The predicted herd immunity level needed to end the epidemic was 60%, for a normal epidemic curve with peak at its halfway mark. For a normal epidemic curve, the cumulative number of people infected before the peak will be equal to the number who will be infected after the peak because the curve is bell-shaped. That means we did not manage to flatten the curve and further waves are unlikely. However, the speed with which people will get infected in various localities depends on human behaviour. Pre-peak there was fear and people practised social distancing and wore masks. Post-peak, many have no fear and are more relaxed about good practices to prevent infection. Major festivals are approaching. Unless care is taken, they may enhance transmission frequency, giving rise to local outbreaks and infection waves, but they are unlikely to disturb the downward slope of the national epidemic curve because half of the herd immunity level required to end the epidemic was already reached by mid-September.
•Governments must continuously exhort citizens not to let their guard down, not only for the safety of those who celebrate, but also, more importantly, their family members, particularly senior citizens. People can celebrate festivals but governments must enforce strict norms regarding crowding, especially inside buildings.
📰 Reinforcing RBI’s accountability
It must abide by the law and apprise the Centre of why it failed to control inflation
•Popular narrative suggests that the Central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a low tolerance for inflation. But this may not be very accurate. In each of the last three quarters, average inflation has not only exceeded the target, but has persisted above the upper tolerance limit set by the Centre.
•Inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 6.7% in the January-March quarter, 6.6% in the April-June quarter (based on imputed data) and 6.9% in the July-September quarter. At 5.8%, the average inflation rate for the October-December 2019 quarter was also within a hair’s breadth of the upper tolerance limit.
•The inflation target, notified in August 2016, is 4%. The upper tolerance level was set at 6% and the lower tolerance level at 2%. Average inflation overshooting the upper tolerance level or remaining below the lower tolerance level for any three consecutive quarters constitutes a failure to achieve the inflation target. In such an event, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is required to send a report to the Centre, stating the reasons for the failure to achieve the inflation target, the remedial actions it proposes to initiate, and an estimate of the time-period within which it expects to achieve the inflation target through the corrective steps proposed. Through amendments passed by Parliament in 2016, these new provisions were written into the RBI Act. They are aimed at ensuring enhanced transparency and accountability of the central bank and are a key feature of the inflation-targeting regime agreed upon between the RBI and Finance Ministry.
Data limitations
•For a while now, a determined lobby, with elements both within and outside government, has been injecting confusion into the discourse on the desirability of persisting with the inflation-targeting regime. This is probably because high inflation makes all that is measured in nominal terms appear rosier — like business revenues and profits, or tax collection figures in the Finance Ministry’s budget arithmetic.
•The minutes of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting after its August policy review suggest that the RBI’s defence for the breach of the 4% inflation target and 6% upper tolerance limit was the handicap of data limitations. The normal data collection exercise of the National Statistics Office was disrupted during the lockdown imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The publication of the CPI had to be suspended for the months of April and May. The CPI for these two months was imputed using proxies for several of the index’s components, as field visits for collecting the requisite price data were put off, leading the MPC to conclude that the improvised prints ought to be regarded as a break in the CPI series for the purpose of monetary policy decisions.
Accommodative range
•However, the break that the MPC referred to is not visible in the inflation data. The data for the last four quarters — 5.8%, 6.7%, 6.6%, 6.9% — appears continuous. The average inflation for the April-June quarter, at 6.6%, looks reasonable, despite the imputations, probably because, as the RBI’s October Monetary Policy Report notes, once the COVID-19-related restrictions were lifted and non-essential activities partially restored, data collection resumed, allowing for the provisional index for June to be compiled. Prices could be collected from 1,030 urban markets and 998 villages, that accounted for 88% of the total sample. Even so, the justification of data complications, which is a rather weak one, it has been reported, is likely to be made the basis for exempting the RBI from complying with the requirement of writing to the Finance Ministry, explaining why inflation missed both the target and the upper tolerance limit. This is inexcusable.
•The range around the inflation target that the Ministry provided to the RBI is for accommodating constraints and challenges like data limitations. The press statement that the Finance Ministry had issued at the time of setting the target makes this quite clear. The whole point of the range around the target, the statement emphasised, is that it “accommodates data limitations, projection errors, short-run supply gaps and fluctuations in the agriculture production”. The last factor is an important one for CPI inflation, as food articles constitute about 46% of the CPI basket.
•The range, according to the Ministry’s statement, allows for unanticipated short-term shocks to be accommodated, even while nudging public inflation expectations to the target at the centre of the range, to which the monetary policy ought to return the economy over the medium term.
•It is hard to imagine what could be gained by letting the RBI side-step the institutional mechanism provided under the RBI Act for explaining the challenges it is up against in meeting the inflation target and what needs to be done to manage them. Why should the RBI not be made to explain what it plans to do to control inflation? The central bank should be allowed to state expressly what support by way of government policy it needs to meet the inflation target. This can only strengthen the RBI’s hand; it should not let go of the opportunity to reinforce the MPC framework. Transparency can enable more informed decision-making within the government, greater public scrutiny of the RBI’s performance, and an improved inflation-targeting regime. To slack off on it would be to compromise with the credibility, transparency and predictability of monetary policy.
📰 The nutrition fallout of school closures
COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem of child hunger and malnutrition
•As many as 116 million children — actually, 116 million hungry children – is the number of children we are looking at when we consider the indefinite school closure in India. The largest school-feeding programme in the world, that has undoubtedly played an extremely significant role in increasing nutrition and learning among schoolgoing children, has been one of the casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic.
•The flagship report of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020, released by the Food and Agriculture Organization in partnership with other UN organisations, painted a worrying picture, including the impact of COVID-19 on closure of schools and school meals. A real-time monitoring tool estimated that as of April 2020, the peak of school closures, 369 million children globally were losing out on school meals, a bulk of whom were in India.
Pressing issue
•The recent Global Hunger Index (GHI) report for 2020 ranks India at 94 out of 107 countries and in the category ‘serious’, behind our neighbours Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The index is a combination of indicators of undernutrition in the population and wasting (low weight for height), stunting (low height for age), and mortality in children below five years of age. We are already far out in terms of achieving the ‘Zero Hunger’ goal, and in the absence of urgent measures to address the problemboth through necessary administrative measures and their effective delivery, the situation will only worsen. To place the urgency in context, a report by the International Labour Organization and the UNICEF, on COVID-19 and child labour, cautions that unless school services and social security are universally strengthened, there is a risk that some children may not even return to schools when they reopen.
•A mid-day meal in India should provide 450 Kcal of energy, a minimum of 12 grams of proteins, including adequate quantities of micronutrients like iron, folic acid, Vitamin-A, etc., according to the mid-day meal scheme (MDMS) guidelines, 2006. This is approximately one-third of the nutritional requirement of the child, with all school-going children from classes I to VIII in government and government-aided schools being eligible. However, many research reports, and even the Joint Review Mission of MDMS, 2015-16 noted that many children reach school on an empty stomach, making the school’s mid-day meal a major source of nutrition for children, particularly those from vulnerable communities. Further, these reports highlight the importance of innovative strategies to improving nutrition quality and food diversity under the MDM. This was insisted upon by NITI Aayog and the World Food Programme in their report on Food and Nutrition Security in India (2019). Many state governments, like Tamil Nadu (a pioneering state in MDMS) and Puducherry introduced innovations to convert MDMS into a Nutritious Meal Programme.
•In orders in March and April 2020, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and closure of schools, the Government of India announced that the usual hot-cooked mid-day meal or an equivalent food security allowance/dry ration would be provided to all eligible school-going children even during vacation, to ensure that their immunity and nutrition is not compromised. Nearly three months into this decision, States were still struggling to implement this.
•According to the Food Corporation of India’s (FCI) food grain bulletin, the offtake of grains under MDMS from FCI during April and May, 2020 was 221.312 thousand tonnes. This was 60 thousand tonnes, or 22%, lower than the corresponding offtake during April and May, 2019 (281.932 thousand tonnes). There were 23 States and Union Territories that reported a decline in the grain offtake from FCI in April-May 2020, compared with corresponding months in 2019. The State of Bihar, for instance, which lifted 44.585 thousand tonnes in April and May 2019, had no offtake during these two months in 2020.
•Data and media reports indicate that dry ration distributions in lieu of school meals are irregular . Further, since the distribution of dry ration started only in late May, a few experts — like Dipa Sinha of Ambedkar University — advocating on children’s issues are calling for immediate distribution of the April quota, to which the children are entitled.
•The other worrying angle to the lack of school meals and functioning schools is the fact that there are reports of children engaging in labour to supplement the fall in family incomes in vulnerable households. In July this year, the Madras High Court also took cognisance of the issue and asked the Tamil Nadu government to respond on the subject of how, with schools closed, the nutritional needs of children were being fulfilled. While many State governments have now initiated dry rations provisionin lieu of school meals, there are still challenges for this to be fulfilledin ensuring last-mile delivery.Ensuring functioning of MDMS during the pandemic period, where children are under threat of nutrition and food insecurity, must be high priority. Serving hot meals, at the children’s homes or even at the centre, may have challenges in the present scenario. Even States like Tamil Nadu, with a relatively good infrastructure for the MDMS, are unable to serve the mandated ‘hot cooked meal’ during the lockdown for multiple reasons.
Innovative strategies
•Local smallholder farmers’ involvement in school feeding is suggested by experts, such as Basanta Kumar Kar, who has been at the helm of many nutrition initiatives. He suggests a livelihood model that links local smallholder farmers with the mid-day meal system for the supply of cereals, vegetables, and eggs, while meeting protein and hidden hunger needs, which could diversify production and farming systems, transform rural livelihoods and the local economy, and fulfill the ‘Atmanirbhar Poshan’ (nutritional self-sufficiency) agenda. The COVID-19 crisis has also brought home the need for such decentralised models and local supply chains.
•There are also new initiatives such as the School Nutrition (Kitchen) Garden under MDMS to provide fresh vegetables for mid-day meals. Besides ensuring these are functional, what can be done, in addition, is provide hot meals can be provided to eligible children with a plan to prepare and distribute the meal in the school mid-day meal centre. This is similar to free urban canteens or community kitchens for the elderly and others in distress in States like Odisha. Also, adequate awareness about of the availability of the scheme is needed. Thirdly, locally produced vegetables and fruits may be added to the MDMS, also providing an income to local farmers. Besides, distribution of eggs where feasible (and where a State provision is already there) can be carried out. Most of all, the missed mid-day meal entitlement for April may be provided to children as dry ration with retrospective effect.
•Across the country and the world, innovative learning methods are being adopted to ensure children’s education outcomes. The GHI report calls for effective delivery of social protection programmes. With continuing uncertainty regarding the reopening of schools, innovation is similarly required to ensure that not just food, but nutrition is delivered regularly to millions of children. For many of them, that one hot-cooked meal was probably the best meal of the day.
📰 Education, the nation and the States
The National Education Policy 2020 underestimates the problem of reconciling the three systems of education in India
•Towards the end of a recent webinar on the National Education Policy 2020, a retired civil servant asked a question. Referring to Centre-State relations and roles in education, he asked whether the new policy gives the Centre a predatory role. The use of the word ‘predatory’ felt a bit sharp in the context of education, but the intention obviously was to ascertain whether the new policy observes federal courtesy. Even the 1986 policy didn’t fully acknowledge the variety prevailing in provincial practices and the legacies those practices are rooted in. The trend has been to assume that a national system will evolve and iron out provincial variations. That is a strange assumption. For education to fulfil its social role, it must respond to the specific milieu in which the young are growing up. India has sufficient experience of attempts made from the national level to influence systemic realities on the ground. There is a considerable history of strong recommendations made by national commissions and of provincial recalcitrance. States have their own social worlds to deal with, and they often prefer to carry on with the ways they became familiar with in colonial days. A prime example is the continuation of intermediate or junior colleges in several States more than half a century after the Kothari Commission gave its much acclaimed report.
Evolution in the provinces
•Historically, the system of education evolved in the provinces. One hundred years ago, the Central Advisory Board of Education was created to co-ordinate regional responses to common issues. The ‘advisory’ character of this administrative mechanism meant that the Board served mainly as a discussion forum. The Constitution, in its original draft, treated the States as the appropriate sphere for dealing with education. But unlike some other federal countries, India chose to have a Ministry of Education at the Centre. Its role was not merely decorative or confined to coordination among differing State perspectives and practices; rather, the Centre was expected to articulate aims and standards, or to pave the road to nation-building and development. Soon after independence, a more substantial sphere of the Centre’s activities in education emerged in the shape of advanced institutions in professional fields and schools specifically meant for the children of civil servants transferable across India. Such institutions received higher investment than the States could afford. The same can be said for national-level resource institutions which guided policy and encouraged new practices.
•Thus, concurrency was already a reality before the 1976 amendment formally included it in the Constitution. What it might mean after the Emergency was an open question. A decade later, when the national policy was drafted under a youthful leader, it emphasised national concerns and perspective without specifically referring to provincial practices that indicated strong divergence. Engagement with the States remained a function of the Planning Commission. In the meantime, a burgeoning private sector had begun to push both public policy and popular perceptions of education. The force of this push can be measured from the difference between the 1986 policy and its own action programme published six years later. Throughout the 1990s, those in charge of education remained hesitant to explain publicly how exactly liberalisation would apply to this traditionally public responsibility. The rapidly expanding and globalising urban middle class had already begun to secede from the public system, posing the awkward question of why education cannot be sold if there are willing buyers. Systemic chaos grew, leaving the policy behind.
Three systems
•India now has three systems. To call them sectors would be an understatement. There is a Central system, running an exam board that has an all-India reach through affiliation with English-medium private schools catering to regional elites. Two school chains run by the Centre are part of this system. The Central system also includes advanced professional institutes and universities that have access to greater per capita funding than what their counterparts run by the States can afford. These latter ones belong to the second system which also features provincial secondary boards affiliating schools teaching in State languages. The third system is based on purely private investment. Internationally accredited school boards and globally connected private universities are part of this third system. These institutions represent a new level of freedom from state norms.
•An explicit attempt was made under the Right to Education (RTE) Act to bridge the first two systems. The RTE is a parliamentary law, providing a set of standards for elementary education and a call to private schools to provide for social justice via the quota route. In higher education, such an attempt to balance private autonomy with an obligation to provide social justice is yet to be made in any palpable sense. Accreditation norms and recognition procedures create a semblance of public accountability. Coordination among the three systems has proved unmanageable, even in purely functional terms. The least we might expect would be a reliable mechanism to reconcile the marking standards of different Boards and universities. Far harder is the coordination required in adherence to social responsibilities in a period of rapid economic change. Inequalities have become sharper with the rise in overall prosperity. Education must mediate between different social strata divided by caste and economic status. The recent attempt made by Tamil Nadu to create a modest quota in NEET for students who attended government schools points towards an endemic problem exacerbated by centralisation.
Social vision
•The new policy document underestimates the problem of reconciling the three systems. The architect of many of our national-level institutions, the late J.P. Naik, used to say that we must ask what kind of human being and society we want before we draft a policy in education. Apart from that philosophical question, we also need a systemic vision: both for recovery from institutional decay and for future progress. Functional uniformity is unlikely to offer any real solution. That is what the new policy seems to favour. In higher education, it proposes nationally codified and administered measures to oversee institutional transformation across State capitals and district towns. The assumption is that old structures will melt like wax under the heat of an empowered vision. The idea of a monolithic regulatory architecture to control a system that is privatising at a rapid pace suggests a tempting impulse rather than a considered plan. Sufficient indication has existed for many years now that economic policy favours greater private enterprise in higher education. How to reconcile this push with the necessity of equitable public education is a nagging question. Similar is the question of autonomy; it cannot be interpreted in financial terms alone. The many different ways in which the States have maintained their colleges and universities cannot all be regarded as signs of a dysfunctional or failing system. If failure is the criterion for choice of remedy, gradations of failure will have to be determined first and their causes studied before remedial steps are contemplated. To accept that one size does not fit all, and then to push every foot into a chosen shoe takes self-contradictory parlance to a new level.
•At the school level too, the new policy proposes a post-RTE structural shift, ignoring the fact that the RTE itself has not yet been fully implemented. It is useful to recall that the RTE was drafted with prolonged involvement with the States, not mere consultation. The consensus for such a law was no less difficult to create than the formulation of its content. A vital role was played by the highest judiciary in pushing the polity towards recognising children’s right to be at school rather than at work. This was a historic social turn towards greater parity between sharply unequal strata. It might not have been accomplished if the Centre had not played an assertive role. Further progress of this role called for continued financial support for the implementation of RTE and policy guidance for the proper use of this support so that regional disparities diminish.
