📰 Only 5.4% of houses under Centre’s flagship scheme reached completion so far this year
Advent of pandemic caused long delays at every stage, says Rural Development Ministry
•Less than 6% of houses sanctioned under the Centre’s flagship rural housing scheme in 2020-21 have reached completion so far this year, with COVID-19 stalling progress, the Rural Development Ministry told a Parliamentary Standing Committee last month. However, some States such as Odisha and Jharkhand used the scheme to provide employment opportunities for migrant workers who returned to their villages during the crisis.
•With a little over a year to go to achieve its goal of “Housing for All”, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Gramin has only completed 55% of its construction target, although money has been sanctioned for almost 85% of beneficiaries. Of the 2.28 crore houses to be built for the rural poor under the Yojana, less than 1.27 crore had been completed by January 28, 2021, according to the Committee’s report presented to the Lok Sabha earlier this month. Another 61 lakh are under construction.
•The PMAY-G was launched in April 2016 and aims to provide a pucca house with basic amenities to all rural families who are homeless or living in kutcha or dilapidated houses by the end of March 2022.
•According to data provided by the Ministry in 2019, it takes an average of 114 days to construct a house under the scheme. However, the advent of the pandemic caused long delays at every stage.
•Implementation was “affected at the ground level due to unavailability of construction materials, labour, delay in inspection of stages of house construction etc,” the Ministry told the Committee. Although the nationwide lockdown in March 2020 brought work to a complete standstill, the Ministry issued an advisory to all States to start house construction activities from April 20, 2020, while adhering to safety protocols such as mask wearing and distancing.
•“Front loading of work of construction of PMAY-G houses and engagement of migrant workers in house construction activities in the rural areas was done. The initiative helped in creation of jobs for migrant workers involved in masonry and labour work in the rural sector and thereby ensuring regular income to the workers during COVID-19 crisis,” the Ministry said.
•Going by the Ministry’s data, some States which are the source of large migrant worker populations took advantage of their extra work force. Odisha completed construction of 10.5% of its 2020-21 target and began work on at least 85% of those for which money was sanctioned this year. Jharkhand completed 7.25% of the target and started work on more than 91% of houses sanctioned this year.
•A number of other States such as Assam, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka did not see completed construction of even a single house sanctioned during the year.
•Nationwide, the Ministry’s target was to sanction 63 lakh houses this year. Only 34 lakh were actually sanctioned, and only 1.9 lakh of those had reached completion at the end of January. Almost 19 lakh houses reached the lintel level while six lakh reached the later stages of construction with roofs ready to be added, the data presented to the Committee showed.
They are to be sent by the police within 48 hours of accident
•The Supreme Court has directed police stations to send accident information reports to Motor Accident Claims Tribunals and insurers within 48 hours of a road accident.
•“The jurisdictional police station shall report the accident under Section 158(6) of the Motor Vehicle Act (Section 159 post 2019 amendment) to the tribunal and insurer within first 48 hours either over email or a dedicated website,” the Supreme Court directed.
•This is part of a set of eight directions issued by the court to prevent delays in disbursement of compensations to victims. These directions should be uniformly practised by the police, motor accident claims tribunals and insurers across the country.
•A Bench of Justices S.K. Kaul and R. Subhash Reddy ordered the Centre to launch a national online platform, which could be operated and accessed across the country for submission of accident reports, claims and responses to claims, etc. This would end the distress felt by victims when accidents happened in places other than their native State.
•The recent order came on a suggestion from Narasimha Vijayaraghavan and advocate Vipin Nair, who highlighted the independent online platforms already in existence in Tamil Nadu and Delhi for the purpose.
•However, the court said every State having its own online system would hamper efficient adjudication of claims.
•Additional Solicitor General Jayant Sud, for the Centre, said the government would discuss and report back to the court a deadline for the implementation of the national online platform. The court scheduled a hearing on May 4 for passing further directions in this regard.
📰 Diversity and inclusivity
IIM Bangalore’s policies offer key insights into providing equitable opportunities to all
•India has a diverse population. Unfortunately, certain social structures have prevented thousands of individuals from realising their potential, and the country from benefiting from their skills and talent. The government has tried to remedy this situation through constitutional and statutory provisions for reservation quotas, but as organisations the world over have realised, such efforts to enhance equity and diversity need to be matched by a steely resolve to facilitate genuine inclusion.
•The experience at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) with respect to students with disability is instructive in this regard. The institute admitted students with disabilities even before the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 was introduced. But it soon realised that there is much more to inclusivity.
•In a push towards greater inclusivity, in 2009, with generous support from Mphasis, IIMB set up a dedicated Office of Disability Services to act as a nodal support point for students with disability, in an effort to study the individual needs of each student and provide the required accommodations proactively.
Modified approach
•Inclusivity also means rethinking the conventional notions of fairness in examinations. Giving a student with serious visual impairment an examination paper based on graphs is an unfair evaluation of her understanding of the fundamental concepts an institute may wish to impart. To that extent, sensitisation workshops with faculty (now a regular feature) have changed the approach to the entire evaluation process.
•The IIMB’s efforts have been recognised by the prestigious NCPEDP-Mphasis Universal Design Award for pioneering work in promoting accessibility and universal design and ensuring a life of equality and dignity for students with disabilities.
•But apart from just disability, the institute is committed to all forms of diversity and inclusivity — IIM Bangalore has a good record in both complying with government-mandated admission quotas for SC, ST, and OBC candidates to the flagship two-year postgraduate programme in management leading to an MBA degree, and in facilitating the placement of all graduates in good roles.
Other dimensions
•Today, IIMB is applying the same integrated approach that it followed for students with disability to other dimensions of diversity. One such challenge — the recruitment of faculty within certain categories — was identified in recent reports of The Hindu. To this effect, the institute is balancing the addressal of two laws — the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act 2019 and the Indian Institutes of Management Act, 2017. The latter recognises IIMs as Institutions of National Importance which must aspire for global standards.
•While the institute has been successful in hiring four excellent faculty members from the SC and ST categories over the last year, there is a serious shortage of qualified candidates from reserved categories in certain areas and disciplines, which impedes hiring efforts. While an obvious step is to focus on the admission of high-potential students from reserved categories to doctoral programmes, alumni discussions reveal that doctoral studies are often not the first preference for students of merit from these communities. Their priority is to rapidly ascend the ladder of economic stability, for which a reliable pathway is the MBA degree.
•Given this insight, IIMB launched the N.S. Ramaswamy Pre-doctoral Programme in 2019. This internally-funded academic and mentoring initiative selects around 10 candidates from under-privileged categories every year and helps them prepare for admission to doctoral studies.
•As a globally-ranked institution committed to excellence in management and entrepreneurship, IIMB continues to strive for a multi-dimensional and integrated approach to diversity and inclusion.
📰 Indian history and distorted narratives
The latest policy document on undergraduate education presents an incomplete and ill-judged view
•The University Grants Commission (UGC) document on Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework (LOCF), 2021 for undergraduate education in history begins with the declaration: “History, as we all know, is a vital source to obtain knowledge about a nation’s soul”. The document seeks to create a student body that will compete globally and be aware of its glorious past — one that will reclaim its history as it takes its rightful place in the new global order. It argues that a “new narrative” about the nation needs to emerge through a dialogue between the past and the present.
•The document is a policy directive to mould undergraduate history education to these ends. However, a critical examination of the curriculum reveals that it falls short of its own stated goals.
The idea of Bharat
•The LOCF makes an argument for inculcating “national pride”. The first paper of the course is titled the ‘Idea of Bharat’ and seeks to study the “primitive life and cultural status of the people of ancient India”. The five units of the course cover the concept of Bharatvarsha; Indian knowledge traditions, art and culture; dharma, philosophy and ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’; science, environment and medical sciences; and Indian economic traditions.
•The course sits separate from the paper on ancient India (from the earliest time to 550 CE) while exploring ancient philosophical, cultural and material traditions under the umbrella of the term Bharat.
•The course presents Bharatvarsha as an “eternal” concept, as an originary moment of the nation that lies in its ancient past. If one places this course within the entirety of the curriculum framework, it appears as a period untouched by invasions — be it Kushan or Sunga people of the early historical period, Timur and Babur of the medieval times, or the British in the modern period. It suggests an origin to the nation that is in a pristine ancient past.
•In this schema, Bharat is an exclusionary concept with little space for land and people south of the Vindhyas, or from the east and the northeast. Further, it communicates no sense that this nation has a history as Bharat, Hindustan, or India, that as a nation it was crafted into being through the struggle of its people. Instead, it reads the nation into a deep past and renders it into a narrative stuck in the stasis of an autochthonous origin. Across the curriculum, changes in history are mapped through the rise and fall of empires, kings and royal dynasties and acts of violence and movement of armies. There is a preoccupation with violence as a motive force of change, whether it is through the examination of the Aryan invasions or the invasions by Timur and Babur.
•The curriculum cleaves closely to the categories and modes of history-writing effectively utilised by colonial historians. Terms like the ‘Aryan Age’, ‘Hindu society’, and ‘Muslim rulers’ were deployed in colonial historiography to delineate periods as well as causation in Indian history. These were used to pose a contrast between the secular, modern Europe and the backward ‘oriental’ states, with their irrational adherence to religion. By bringing these terms back into use, the curriculum undoes the work of generations of historians to challenge colonial frames of history-writing and foreground socioeconomic and political processes.
•The paper on medieval and early modern India (History of India, 1206-1707) best demonstrates the ideological bias in the LOCF. It treats the “Hindu society” and the “Muslim society” as discrete entities in the medieval past, replicating the understanding that these communities existed as separate nations, an understanding that last had valence in the run-up to the partition of India.
•Further, it presents a history of only north India. In contrast, existing history syllabi currently followed in universities across India have been studying the processes of sociocultural, economic and political changes in different regions like Odisha, the peninsular India, and the Rajputana, Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal regions, among others. But this latest curriculum framework ignores the rich work in regional history and introduces some regions in the syllabus simply as political formations.
Pedagogical issues
•Inherent in the LOCF is a pedagogical critique of current forms of history education. It forcefully argues that young minds are not “empty vessels” to be filled with “static narratives”. Young minds, it declaims, must be participants in knowledge production. This would make history an attractive area of study. However, the pedagogy suggested in the course outlines and recommended readings would achieve just the opposite.
•The introduction of primary material in the classroom — parts of historical texts, archaeological artefacts, coins, visits to monuments and museums — bring the subject alive for students. Engagement with these allows students to parse historical analysis and make their own judgments. However, the readings prescribed in the curriculum do not contain a single reference to primary archives for history-writing. Further, the suggested readings are devoid of some of the most important works in different areas of history-writing. Readings in history, or any academic discipline for that matter, are central to building the discipline. We look at older writings and follow the evolution of historiographical understanding through critiques and the new questions posed. To develop critical thinking, students must be encouraged to read divergent opinions and engage with different ideological hues of historians. A curriculum framework that does not encourage this only provides faulty foundations for disciplinary education.
•This curriculum framework, quite egregiously, omits some of the finest writings in Indian history. Instead, a bulk of suggested readings span from the 1900s to, at best, 1980s, with a heavy dependence on the work of Indologists. The omissions seem deliberate and ideologically motivated. Most importantly, rather than enabling students to critically engage with diverse schools of historiography and reaching their own conclusions, it seeks to curtail the resource base available to them.
•What are the challenges facing a young student in the 21st century? Climate disaster, democracy, freedom of speech and movement, equity in rights and social justice are issues that must be considered. This curriculum, with its colonial underpinnings, is inadequate in preparing students of the 21st century. New modes of thinking about Big Data, digital mapping and visualisations, critical study of the environment, health and society are all missing from this curriculum.
•Seen in its entirety, the LOCF is determined to project into the past majoritarian and divisive conceptions of contemporary Indian politics. It is limited and narrow in its understanding of processes of historical change, out of touch with the current state of research in the discipline of history, and dated in its pedagogy. In 2021, this curriculum framework seeks to make history education a space for passive rote-learning of ideas that had their heyday in 1921.
📰 Polarisation in times of dispossession
It is democratic struggle within Sri Lanka, rather than advocacy in Geneva, that will put an end to this dangerous trajectory
•The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva has passed another resolution on Sri Lanka, as war-time accountability continues to haunt the state for over a decade. Sri Lanka’s prospects in Geneva swing according to geopolitical interests at any given time — reflecting a vote this time with 22 in favour, 11 against and 14 abstaining. Yet, Sri Lanka could not have tried harder to shoot itself in the foot by repressing minorities domestically and actively alienating external powers.
•In 2015, a resolution was co-sponsored by Sri Lanka and unanimously adopted with overwhelming international support. Indeed, Sri Lanka in the following years was even considered an exception by some for its attempts at reconciliation when the world at large was getting increasingly polarised, as Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump would show us. However, instead of building on that experience, the Rajapaksa government withdrew from that resolution, soon after rising to power, in a show of unilateral arrogance.
•Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s increasing economic dependence on China has offended India and many Western countries, with the latter pushing for greater scrutiny of the deteriorating human rights situation. The Tamil and Muslim minorities have also turned to Geneva as the space to engage the government has shrunk with growing authoritarian rule. As geopolitical rivalries exacerbate external relations, what will come of the recent moves in Geneva for the long-suffering people, and particularly the minority communities under constant attack by the state and its majoritarian allies?
Mounting Islamophobia
•The tremendous physical destruction, economic setbacks and the abominable loss of human life and suffering of Tamils during the protracted war have not got the necessary reckoning within the country. Rather, the nationalists across the ethnic divide play with heightened rhetoric of “war heroes” and “war victims” as sound bites for international consumption. Year after year, in the lead up to and during the sessions in Geneva, the Sinhala and Tamil nationalists either claim to save war heroes from international prosecution or find justice for war victims.
•Replaying the rhetoric of the war and its legacy has been paralleled by mounting Islamophobic attacks over the last decade. The Easter terror attacks in April 2019 by an Islamist radical group and the backlash that followed, including violent attacks on Muslims, culminated in the election of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in November that year. While the minorities voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Rajapaksa, a tremendous swing in the Sinhala constituencies ensured his thumping victory. During the parliamentary elections in August 2020, the minorities were subdued as fear had eclipsed the communities, and the minority vote was fragmented, with some even supporting coalition partners of the majoritarian regime. The rulers consolidated further power by passing the 20th Amendment, with a comfortable two-thirds in Parliament, and giving unfettered powers to the executive.
•The regime’s show of force soon after was apparent in blatantly discriminatory measures such as the forced cremation of COVID-19 victims, which was a blow to Muslims’ burial rights. However, heaping power has not translated to clear or coherent policymaking as evident from the government’s thoughtless economic policies, the awful dilly-dallying before permitting burials of pandemic victims and more recently with the burqa ban proposal. The all-powerful government may have the numbers in the legislature but stands exposed for its instability and weakness.
Economic woes
•Underneath the heightened rhetoric in Sri Lanka about Geneva in recent weeks is a devastating economic crisis that has been ravaging the everyday lives of the people. Sri Lanka’s woes are a consequence of liberalising trade and capital flows over four decades ago. Its dependence on imports, and looming external debt payments, both without adequate foreign earnings, have pushed the economy over the cliff into a depression. Keeping Sri Lanka at boiling point, particularly with talk of external and internal enemies, has been one strategy to deflect the people’s attention from their economic distress. Those in power forget how the citizenry has time and again galvanised resistance when bread and butter concerns hit the roof. Furthermore, time is ticking, where the country is for the first time in danger of defaulting on its external debt, even as the grandstanding chauvinist ideologues in government are in denial.
•In this context, with escalating attacks on the land rights of minorities, an unprecedented protest march from Pottuvil in the south-east to Polihandy in the north mobilised sections of the minorities in early February. The Tamil nationalist mobilisation was joined by Muslim communities in the east, and drew support from up-country Tamils centred in the plantations. This six-day-long march amidst the COVID-19 situation reflected the desperation of the minority communities.
•The organisation of the march and its conclusion have triggered questions about its inclusivity and the attempts by hard-line Tamil diaspora groups to hijack it. But it has also compelled many to reflect on how and why minorities should forge an alliance. Furthermore, can such an alliance include sections of the Sinhala community to redirect the country on a plural and democratic path? Or will this initiative also end as mere theatrics for consumption in Geneva?
Tragic history
•Sri Lanka’s tragic political history is in many ways a consequence of the failures of its political elite, and their rank opportunism and nationalist world view. They could have negotiated a solution long before Sri Lanka got embroiled in armed conflict. International engagement and solutions have only aggravated national crisis from the time of the Indian Peace Keeping debacle in the late 1980s to the failed Norwegian peace process of mid-2000s that eventually led to the cataclysmic end of the war in 2009. Moreover, the golden opportunity soon after the war to address the ethnic problem was squandered by the Rajapaksa regime due to its hubris, and eventually paid with regime change in 2015. The current Rajapaksa leadership and its core base are again polarising Sri Lanka, undermining possibilities for a plural and democratic future for the country.
•In this context, India’s vote at the Council was closely watched, given New Delhi’s frustration with Colombo, particularly after it reneged on the East Container Terminal project at the Colombo Port, and the impending Tamil Nadu elections. India abstaining on the resolution was considered a betrayal by the narrow Tamil nationalist lobby, whose nonsensical campaign seeks to move Sri Lanka’s justice question from Geneva to the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless, India in its oral intervention did insist that Provincial Council elections should be held and openly expressed its “support to the Tamils of Sri Lanka for equality, justice, dignity and peace.” Sadly, India under the Modi regime can neither claim to be a beacon of devolution as it undermines the powers of its own States nor does it have the credibility to call out Sri Lanka on Muslim rights, given its own despicable attacks on Muslims.
•The resolution has been forthright in highlighting the ongoing human rights abuses and places the spotlight on the state of democracy in Sri Lanka. With the economy in free fall, protests by indebted women, disgruntled farmers, and citizens aghast at the government’s destructive environment policy are beginning to question their rulers. Such resistance, from both working people and the minorities whom the regime repeatedly scapegoats, is invaluable in the face of authoritarian repression pregnant with fascist tendencies. It is democratic struggle within Sri Lanka, rather than advocacy in Geneva, that will put an end to this dangerous trajectory of polarisation and dispossession.
