📰 Health above faith: On cancellation of Kanwar Yatra
SC lays down salutary principle that right to life must override religious sentiments
•It does not require any higher wisdom to know that there is considerable risk to public health during massive religious gatherings in the midst of a pandemic. Yet, it took some prodding by the Supreme Court for Uttar Pradesh to cancel the annual Kanwar Yatra. The yatra, in which Kanwarias, devotees of Shiva, make a pilgrimage to collect water from the Ganga, was not held last year due to COVID-19. This year, it was scheduled to start on July 25. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath appeared keen that the pilgrimage be held this year, and had convened a meeting on July 9 to discuss preparations and security arrangements, along with putting measures in place to avoid the spread of COVID-19 infection. However, the Court was perturbed by reports of the plan to conduct the yatra, resulting in the initiation of suo motu proceedings. Disagreeing with even the idea of a ‘symbolic yatra’ in deference to religious sentiment, the Court had reiterated a principle that is being observed in most places: the idea that the health of the public and their right to life are paramount. “All other sentiments, albeit religious, are subservient to this most basic fundamental right,” the Court had observed on July 16, while giving the State government time till July 19 to call off the gatherings on its own. The Uttarakhand government had earlier cancelled the yatra in its territory, rightly heeding warnings by experts that such large gatherings posed a major risk, amidst fears and expectations of a third wave. Uttar Pradesh was helped by the various Kanwar Sanghs that offered to avoid taking out the yatra this year too.
•Despite the fact that the organisation of the Kumbh Mela earlier this year was seen as responsible for a surge in infections in the run-up to the disastrous second wave that overpowered the country’s health system for weeks, there are sections that believe that rituals and gatherings associated with religious faith must be allowed with some restrictions. There may be a case for relaxations aimed at economic revival and restoration of normality in most parts of the country, but there really is none when it comes to choosing between religious rights and the right to life and safety. The easing of lockdown restrictions for three days in Kerala to help people celebrate Bakrid is a case in point. It has attracted justified criticism, as any relaxation after a long spell of severe curbs will have to be based on a scientific assessment of the number of daily infections, the rate of positivity and signs of abatement. Kerala is one of the States whose daily numbers are causing concern, and the easing of restrictions defies logic and flies in the face of science. The State government will be hard pressed to explain its decision to the top court, which will quite rightly demand much more than a routine clarification that the relaxations were accompanied by instructions for maintaining the COVID-19 protocol.
If schools revert to business as usual, India has to be prepared to confront a disaster in educational outcomes
•Since school closure has led to a great loss of nutrition and schooling for the poorest sections of our society, there is some urgency in the calls we hear to reopen schools. However, the important question remains this: if schools were to reopen tomorrow, are we prepared for their resumption? Will it be merely business as usual?
The disruption
•In what has been perhaps an educational disruption in history without parallel since the mass education system took root in India, schools have been closed for 16 months now, with no clarity on or a timeline for their resumption as yet. The country has promoted online classes and e-connectivity as the solution, perhaps inevitably so, since physical contact between teachers and children has not been possible. The focus has been on secondary and higher secondary education, with most States ensuring some form or other of online classes for this segment. However, due to a lack of connectivity as well as a lack of access to e-devices, only a fraction of children even in this age group has had online education of any kind. When it comes to children in the primary and upper primary classes, even such access has been limited to a minuscule fraction. Children of the poor, studying in government schools, have been especially disadvantaged in this regard.
•Further aggravating the situation is the quality of online education — it is largely abysmal. As most studies show, the percentage of teachers in the country capable of handling digital platforms for pedagogic purposes is very small. The educational material provided by them has also been mere reproduction of what is used in a physical classroom. Hence, even where online classes have taken place regularly — as in the case of urban schools, with students largely from middle and high income groups — the teaching-learning processes have by and large been poor.
•As has been well documented by now, all this has resulted in what commentators have termed nutrition loss and learning loss. Worldwide, many studies in the last year have documented a loss of learning in children. In the Netherlands, despite a short lockdown, equitable school funding, and excellent broadband access, researchers found that among eight to 11 year olds, “students made little or no progress while learning from home” and that “learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes” (https://bit.ly/3hORC5N). A large multi-State study in the United States records that the pandemic “has also prompted some students to leave the public school system altogether”.
•According to a study by the Azim Premji Foundation in January 2021, covering more than 16,000 children in the age group six to 11 years, and across five States, 92% of children on average have lost at least one specific language ability from the previous year across all classes; the figure is 82% when it comes to mathematical ability.
•A question that looms large in the minds of teachers, parents and especially the children, is a basic one: will a child, who was in Class four in March 2020, and did not get to attend a single class during the academic year 2020-2021, be admitted into Class six now in (say) August 2021? In areas where this means admission to a different school, is this automatic? In some States this has already been addressed and answered this year. Age-appropriate enrolment, as guaranteed under the Right to Education Act, is being uniformly implemented. But this has not been ensured across India, with many States not taking up enrolment for this year as yet.
•Even assuming that enrolment is not an issue, if we return to the child in the illustration above, as the child enrols into Class six, will she start with Class five textbooks, or Class six textbooks, or some new “bridge” material?
•This is, of course, a decision to be taken by the State government, but what is the rationale to be used? And what are the implications?
International experience
•‘One way of addressing the learning crisis might be to repeat the entire academic year. The government in Kenya has decided to do just this’. Some countries, such as the Philippines, allow extended time for classes on resumption, both in duration of school hours and more calendar days of interaction. ‘Another approach is to reduce and synthesize the curriculum so that students are able to focus on a few subjects and learn them well’. This is followed, for instance, by the State of Ontario in Canada.
•One-to-one tutoring for the most disadvantaged learners has been taken up in many countries. Among the most prestigious such programmes is the National Tutoring Programme in the United Kingdom for which the government has announced funding to the tune of £350 million. Ghana has also announced a national programme of tutoring. There are several such programmes in different States in the U.S. In Italy, university students are volunteering to conduct one-one-one classes for middle school children from poor immigrant backgrounds.
•Accelerated education programmes or “bridge courses”, which condense several months (or even years of schooling) into a few weeks or months, are another option. This concept has been taken up in several countries.
•One strong voice emerging from all these experiences is: “Acceleration, not remediation”. The advice is to go with exposure to age-level grade-level content, and plug the holes where necessary. Many educators warn against a deficit model that starts with measuring “loss” and tries to “fill the void”, before returning to the “normal”. Such models tend to ignore the complexity of psychological preparedness in children, and reduce learning to a single dimension of achievement, which invariably works against children in low-resource contexts.
•Some have even asserted that “... there is no such thing as learning loss”, and that students have learned a great deal about life, home economy, health and much else during the pandemic that cannot be measured by standardised tests; that learning should begin with acknowledging this and building on such informal learning.
•In the words of Tony Cotton, a renowned mathematics educator from the U.K., “The curriculum should not be seen as a fixed list of content that must all be covered before the learner can leave school. If the curriculum can be seen as a map, as a landscape, there is always plenty of time to explore.”
The agenda ahead
•Given the state of preparedness of our education system, and based on what we have seen during the last year, it is hard to see our schools taking up a curriculum based on where the children are, in terms of what they have learnt from life during the novel coronavirus pandemic. The most likely event is that schools will simply revert to business as usual, with a reduced syllabus, and no change whatsoever in the overall curriculum or pedagogy, and racing through the syllabus to “catch up”. Children who cannot keep up would simply be left behind. This would be a great disaster. It is very likely that children from the poorest sections will be the ones who are affected the most, by having to race in accelerated learning programmes with no support at home. Teachers, without preparation for handling such a new context, can only fall back on covering the syllabus, leading to the alienation of already marginalised students.
•What we need now is nothing less than a national rejuvenation programme for elementary education. The school system cannot do what is needed by itself. We need a vast body of volunteers engaging in small groups with children from the most disadvantaged sections, working in tandem with schools, which will need to focus on safety measures and average performance. It is critical that we should not reduce education to foundational literacy and numeracy, but treat children as they are, study the experiences they bring, and address their nutritional, emotional and intellectual well-being as a whole. This requires a flexible curriculum rooted in local reality, working with physical material, and pedagogy based on sound principles of psychology of learning.
•The country has already shown during the pandemic that it lacks the capability to re-imagine examinations, whether it be at the secondary school level, or at university. Now, with the education of small children, a similar lack of imagination in curriculum and pedagogy will be splendidly ironic: without ourselves learning any lesson from the pandemic, we would be demanding that the children learn their lessons.
📰 Making India a sporting nation
India can compete better in the international arena if different States are developed as centres of excellence for different sports
•Two econometricians, Bernard A.B. and Busse M.R., in a paper in The Review of Economics and Statistics (February 2004) tried to establish that “total GDP is the best predictor of the national Olympic performance”. They also claimed that host countries are “likely to win an additional 1.8% of the medals beyond what would be predicted by their GDP alone”. Since then, many studies have attempted to understand the factors that influence most the ability of a nation to win medals at the Olympics. One such work after the Rio Olympics showed that medals per hundred billion of dollars (based on purchasing power parity data of 2015) are highest in some Caribbean nations and lowest in some Asian and African nations. These results negate to a considerable extent the hypothesis that total GDP is the best predictor of the performance of a nation at the Olympics.
Factors that determine performance
•There are many factors which are important in determining the performance of a nation in various sports. Beyond a threshold level, the average standard of living in a nation and the country’s population size may be important determinants for its performance at the Olympics. The size of total GDP is hardly important in countries like India where a sizable segment is fighting hunger. A person of poor health can never be a good sportsperson. In countries where there are high levels of stunted growth, malnutrition and anaemia, we cannot expect good athletes. Thus, South Asian countries and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t fit in the econometric models built on total GDP.
•Genetic factors are also no less important. The U.S., Australia and the Netherlands are powerhouses in swimming, but not China. Perhaps, taller people have an advantage in swimming or basketball but height is not important in shooting or gymnastics. China excels in shooting along with the U.S. and Germany. East Asian nations do better at table tennis than Western nations. Russia, East European nations and Central Asian countries do well in amateur boxing whereas China and Central Asians countries do better in weightlifting and wrestling.
•Mobilising resources in world-class training provides an edge to sportspersons. Such infrastructure makes the U.S. the superpower in athletics and gymnastics, Germany in equestrian, and the U.K. in diving, sailing and cycling. For poor nations, creating such infrastructure is a luxury.
•During colonial rule, India got some exposure to international sporting events earlier than many Asian and African nations. The Calcutta Football League, for example, is the oldest football league in Asia. Durand Cup is the oldest existing football tournament in Asia. This exposure gave India an edge over other ‘Third World’ nations in the 1950s and early 1960s. Resources in India were spread thinly across sports disciplines. As more and more nations started coming into the international sports arena, India’s relative position started declining from the 1970s.
•Asian countries such as Kazakhstan, Singapore and Malaysia may stand below India in the medal’s tally at the Asian Games, but are ahead of it at the Olympics. This is primarily because India is moderately good at many sports but not good enough to be the best at any of them. In contrast, Jamaica does well at the Olympics in sprinting and Kenya gets medals in long-distance running. They perform better than India though they are not great sporting nations. In recent years, India has shown promise in shooting, amateur boxing, wrestling, gymnastics and badminton. We need to concentrate more on sports where the physical build of an average Indian will not stand as a disadvantage.
One State, one sport
•States need to be integrated in a bigger way in India’s sports policy. Can we not develop different States as centres of excellence for different sports? People of different States have different food habits and build. It’s not impossible to develop training infrastructure for different sports in different parts of the country depending on the inclination of people of that area and their habits and build. Unless we start grooming our children, who show potential, for international sports, India can hardly succeed at the Olympics. Individual talent alone cannot take us ahead. The policy of “One State, One Sport” can be a game-changer in India.
•India’s best performance at the Olympics was in London (2012) where it won two silver medals and four bronzes and ranked 56th in the medal’s tally. At the Rio Olympics (2016), with one silver and one bronze, India’s rank came down to 67. Whatever the predictions of the econometricians, if India can find a place in the top 50 sporting nations in the medal’s tally of the rescheduled Summer Olympics at Tokyo commencing on July 23, that will be good enough to boost the nation’s morale.
📰 A more humane police force
Political will is an essential component in bringing about any major reform in the Indian police force
•While improvements in pay scale and promotions are necessary aspects of police reforms, little has been spoken about reforms needed at the psychological level. Why do citizens fear going to a police station or dealing with the lower ranks of the police force?
Custody-related deaths
•The answer lies in numbers. Between April 1 and November 30, 2015, 25,357 cases were registered under police category which included 111 deaths in police custody, 330 cases of custodial torture and 24,916 in others. These numbers were shared by the former Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju, in the Lok Sabha in response to a question. In comparison, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, from 1989-90 to 2010-11, the deaths in police custody and custody-related operations were 700. In the U.K., England and Wales, the total deaths in police custody or following contact with the police (1990 to 2015) was 1,542. In the U.S., according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of state prisoners’ deaths between 2001 and 2007 was 21,936 although one could argue that an unaccounted number of political prisoners from the U.S. disappear into privately maintained black holes called the supermax prisons both on and off U.S. soil. However, not considering the different time periods, an off-hand comparison would show that custody-related deaths in India are more than the sum total of the countries mentioned.
•One question on the minds of the common people is: how can a human being inflict so much pain on another without the slightest remorse? Two famous experiments provide an explanation. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, people who had applied to be a part of the experiment were randomly divided into two groups: prison guards and prisoners. Under duress, the participants who played the role of prison guards started exploiting and torturing the participants playing the role of prisoners. Milgrim’s experiment on obedience to authority showed that people obey if they are coerced. A staggering 65% of the participants applied the maximum level of pain on the “victim” while the remaining 35% remained in a range. Only a minuscule number refused to inflict any pain even under coercion. The results of Milgrim’s experiment were shown to be true even in variations of the experiment.
Behaviour with the citizenry
•In the Indian police force, the lower ranks of police personnel are often verbally abused by their superiors. Many are not considered as individuals, are not shown compassion by the senior ranks, and work in inhuman conditions. While the alleged excesses of the police cannot be justified, it is important to look at how the treatment meted to police constables has affected the interaction of the police with the public. Many policemen deal with citizens in the manner that they do only because their work environments are not harmonious. Their relationship with their superior officers is stressful and sycophantic. There is no concept of welfare and this manifests in their improper behaviour with the citizenry.
•Several committees have made several recommendations on the issue of reforms for a healthy police system. The Supreme Court of India was forced to intervene as neither the Central government nor the State governments acted upon those recommendations. It is clear that the problem is with the political apparatus considering the history of the Police Act. The Police Act of 1861 was legislated by the British right after the revolt of 1857 to bring in efficient administration of police in the country and to prevent any future revolts. This meant that the police were to always comply with those in power. Considering the results of the privatisation of the prison system and militarisation of the police system in the U.S., it would be disastrous to even consider this as a solution in India. Thus, political will is seen as an essential component in bringing about any major reform in the Indian police force.
📰 Surveillance reform is the need of the hour
The proposed legislation related to the personal data protection of citizens fails to consider surveillance
•It is worth asking why the government would need to hack phones and install spyware when existing laws already offer impunity for surveillance. This unsettling query arises on the basis of reports emerging from a collaborative investigation by journalists from around the world, including from India’s The Wire, titled the ‘Pegasus Project’. Reports say that over “300 verified Indian mobile telephone numbers, including those used by ministers, opposition leaders, journalists, the legal community, businessmen, government officials, scientists, rights activists and others”, were targeted using spyware made by the Israeli firm, NSO Group.
Threat to press freedom
•Subsequent reporting showed that the Pegasus spyware had been used to target 37 phones, of which 10 belonged to Indians. Amnesty International’s Security Lab was then able to confirm that Pegasus was used to compromise the phones of former journalist of The Indian Express Sushant Singh, former editor of the Economic and Political Weekly Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, former Outlook journalist S.N.M. Abdi, and The Wire’s two founding editors Siddharth Varadarajan and M.K. Venu.
•These revelations highlight a disturbing trend with regard to the use of hacking software against dissidents and adversaries. In 2019, similar allegations were made about the use of Pegasus against journalists and human rights activists. Most of them were situated in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh as the hack targeted lawyers related to the Bhima Koregaon case and Dalit activists, respectively. However, despite repeated calls for investigations, the relevant State governments failed to do so.
•A significant number of Indians reportedly affected by Pegasus this time are again journalists. This is not surprising since the World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders has ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in 2021. What is shocking, however, is that the press requires (and in democracies is afforded) greater protections on speech and privacy. Privacy and free speech are what enable good reporting. They protect journalists against threats of private and governmental reprisals against legitimate reporting. This has been recognised in Supreme Court decisions. In the absence of privacy, the safety of journalists, especially those whose work criticises the government, and the personal safety of their sources is jeopardised. Such a lack of privacy, therefore, creates an aura of distrust around these journalists and effectively buries their credibility.
Problematic provisions
•The government, in its purported undated and unsigned response, relied on existing provisions of law under the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 and the Information Technology (IT) Act of 2000. Even without the use of Pegasus or any other hacking software and surveillance, these provisions are problematic and offer the government total opacity in respect of its interception and monitoring activities. While the provisions of the Telegraph Act relate to telephone conversations, the IT Act relates to all communications undertaken using a computer resource. Section 69 of the IT Act and the Interception Rules of 2009 are even more opaque than the Telegraph Act, and offer even weaker protections to the surveilled. No provision, however, allows the government to hack the phones of any individual since hacking of computer resources, including mobile phones and apps, is a criminal offence under the IT Act. Nonetheless, surveillance itself, whether under a provision of law or without it, is a gross violation of the fundamental rights of citizens.
•The very existence of a surveillance system impacts the right to privacy and the exercise of freedom of speech and personal liberty under Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution, respectively. It prevents people from reading and exchanging unorthodox, controversial or provocative ideas. Regardless of whether a citizen knows that their email is being read by the government, the perceived danger, founded on reasonable suspicion that this may happen, itself impacts their ability to express, receive and discuss such ideas.
•There is also no scope for an individual subjected to surveillance to approach a court of law prior to or during or subsequent to acts of surveillance since the system itself is covert. In the absence of parliamentary or judicial oversight, electronic surveillance gives the executive the power to influence both the subject of surveillance and all classes of individuals, resulting in a chilling effect on free speech. Constitutional functionaries such as a sitting judge of the Supreme Court have reportedly been surveilled under Pegasus without any checks outside the executive wing of government. Vesting such disproportionate power with one wing of the government threatens the separation of powers of the government. In response to a Right to Information (RTI) request in 2013, the Central government had revealed that 7,500 to 9,000 orders for interception of telephones are issued by it every month. However, RTI requests for such information are now denied citing threats to national security and to the physical safety of persons.
•The government, in its purported response, stated that any surveillance which takes place happens through a “due process of law”. However, the existing provisions are insufficient to protect against the spread of authoritarianism since they allow the executive to exercise a disproportionate amount of power. Such surveillance, when carried out entirely by the executive, curtails Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution (empowering the Supreme Court and High Courts, respectively, to issue certain writs) as it happens in secret. Thus, the affected person is unable to show a breach of their rights. This violates not only the ideals of due process and the separation of powers but also goes against the requirement of procedural safeguards as mandated in K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd) v. Union of India (2017).
Role of judiciary
•Thus, in order to satisfy the ideal of “due process of law”, to maintain an effective separation of powers and to fulfill the requirements of procedural safeguards and natural justice, there needs to be oversight from another branch of the government. Only the judiciary can be competent to decide whether specific instances of surveillance are proportionate, whether less onerous alternatives are available, and to balance the necessity of the government’s objectives with the rights of the impacted individuals. The need for judicial oversight over surveillance systems in general, and judicial investigation into the Pegasus hacking in particular, is also essential because the leaked database of targeted numbers contained the phone number of a sitting Supreme Court judge, which further calls into question the independence of the judiciary in India.
•Surveillance reform is the need of the hour in India. Not only are existing protections weak but the proposed legislation related to the personal data protection of Indian citizens fails to consider surveillance while also providing wide exemptions to government authorities. When spyware is expensive and interception is inefficient, the individuals surveilled will be shortlisted by priority and perceived threat level to the existing regime. But as spyware becomes more affordable and interception becomes more efficient, there will no longer be a need to shortlist individuals. Everyone will be potentially subject to state-sponsored mass surveillance. The only solution is immediate and far-reaching surveillance reform.
