📰 1.2 lakh people died in road accidents in 2020: NCRB
India saw 1.35 lakh cases of hit-and-run since 2018, the data show.
•India recorded 1.2 lakh cases of “deaths due to negligence relating to road accidents” in 2020, with 328 persons losing their lives every day on an average, despite the COVID-19 lockdown, according to government data.
•As many as 3.92 lakh lives have been lost in three years in deaths due to negligence related to road accidents, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) revealed in its annual ‘Crime India’ report for 2020. While 1.2 lakh deaths were recorded in 2020, the figures stood at 1.36 lakh in 2019 and 1.35 lakh in 2018, the data show.
•The country logged 1.35 lakh cases of “hit and run” since 2018, the report of the NCRB, which functions under the Union Home Ministry, showed. In 2020 alone, there were 41,196 cases of “hit and run”, while there were 47,504 such cases in 2019 and 47,028 in 2018, the report said. On an average, there were 112 cases of “hit and run” reported across the country every day in the past year, according to the data. The cases of causing “hurt” by rash or negligent driving on public way stood at 1.30 lakh in 2020.
Rail accidents
•Meanwhile, 52 cases of deaths due to negligence related to rail accidents were recorded across the country in 2020; 55 such cases in 2019 and 35 in 2018, the report showed.
•During 2020, India also logged 133 cases of “deaths due to medical negligence;” 201 such cases in 2019 and 218 in 2018, the NCRB said. There were 51 cases of “deaths due to negligence of civic bodies” in 2020, while there were 147 cases in 2019 and 40 in 2018, according to the report.
•Another 6,367 cases of “deaths due to other negligence” were reported across the country in 2020; 7,912 cases in 2019 and 8,687 in 2018, it showed.
•The NCRB stated in the report that the country remained under complete lockdown from March 25, 2020 till May 31, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the movement in public space was “very limited”. “The cases registered under crimes against women, children and senior citizens, theft, burglary, robbery and dacoity have therefore declined, whereas COVID-related enforcement has resulted in increase of cases registered under ‘disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant [Section 188 IPC]’, under ‘Other IPC Crimes’ and under ‘Other State Local Acts’,” it noted.
Social and emotional learning is not ‘fluff’; it is an important goal in education
•India’s National Education Policy (2020) mentions social and emotional learning (SEL) as an important facet of education. SEL is the process of learning to recognise and manage emotions and navigate social situations effectively. While the policy notes numeracy and literacy as its central aims, SEL should be an equally important goal as it supports skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.
What is SEL?
•SEL is foundational for human development, building healthy relationships, having self and social awareness, solving problems, making responsible decisions, and academic learning. Key elements of SEL include cultivating empathy and theory of mind. ‘Empathy’ is the ability to understand another person’s emotions and be aware of why they might be feeling those emotions from their perspective. ‘Theory of mind’ is the ability to understand others’ intentions, knowledge and beliefs and recognise that those might be different from your own. Research finds that students with greater social skills and emotional regulation are more likely to have success.
•While some people may perceive discussions surrounding SEL as “fluff”, it is, in fact, rooted in physiology. Neurobiologically, various brain regions such as the prefrontal and frontal cortices, amygdala, and superior temporal sulcus are involved in the cognitive mechanisms of SEL. Interestingly, scientists have proposed that the physiological and psychological factors of SEL are inherently linked. Brain systems that are responsible for basic human behaviour, such as getting hungry, may be reused for complex mechanisms involved in SEL. This can explain why the way we feel physically directly impacts our social-emotional evaluation of the world. Despite its importance to life, SEL is often added as a chapter in a larger curriculum rather than being integrated in it. To overcome this challenge, it is vital to consider that the learning process is a social and emotional experience.
•The pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges for SEL as school closures reduced opportunities for students to deepen social relationships and learn collaboratively in shared physical spaces. Conversely, remote learning “gave parents the opportunity to discover their childrens’ social and emotional lives,” notes Jim Eagen, the head of Synapse school in California, where SEL is a key strategic pillar of the school. Even with parental involvement, the challenge of an inadequate support system for SEL remains. So, how do we move forward?
A way forward
•Perhaps we can contextually adapt best practices from existing models. Synapse school seamlessly incorporates SEL into curricula through self-science classes, and places SEL centrally within the school culture. May Duong, director of SEL at Synapse, believes that SEL is instrumental in creating future change makers as “an authentic sense of belonging creates the context for learning.”
•How can we sustainably incorporate SEL into education across communities, cultures, and social strata? In reality, individuals from underprivileged backgrounds have faced immense learning losses over the last one and a half years. A starting point would be to consider insights from the Indian SEL framework: one, application of SEL practices should be based on students’ socioeconomic backgrounds; two, SEL strategies of caretakers and educators must align with one another; three, long-term success requires SEL to be based on scientific evidence.
•While policies provide guidelines, a big challenge in moving forward is unlearning old habits. The lockdowns provided an unintended reset which afforded an opportunity for positive change. As a sustainable development goal outlines, policymakers now have to ensure that future changes prioritise “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Importantly, the onus lies on all of us to make individual contributions that will drive systemic change.
📰 Holding transnational corporations accountable
Bilateral investment treaties can be harnessed in this effort
•The UN working group on ‘human rights, transnational corporations (TNCs) and other businesses’ has published a new report on human rights-compatible international investment agreements. It urges states to ensure that their bilateral investment treaties (BITs) are compatible with international human rights obligations. It emphasises investor obligations at the international level i.e., the accountability of TNCs in international law. Given the enormous power that TNCs wield, questions about their accountability have arisen often. There have been many instances where the misconduct of TNCs has come to light such as the corruption scandal involving Siemens in Germany.
Past efforts
•Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in 1975 in the UN General Assembly that the international community should articulate standards of conduct for TNCs. Subsequently, an audacious effort was made at the UN to develop a multilateral code of conduct on TNCs. However, due to differences between developed and developing countries, it was abandoned in 1992.
•An integral feature of the neoliberal project was to use international law to institutionalise the forces of economic globalisation, leading to the spread of BITs. These treaties promised protection to foreign investors under international law by bestowing rights on them and imposing obligations on states. This structural asymmetry in BITs, which confer rights on foreign investors but impose no obligations, relegated the demand for investor accountability.
•However, after the 2011 report of John Ruggie, UN Special Rapporteur on business and human rights, the issue of holding TNCs accountable gathered momentum again. In 2014, the UN Human Rights Council established an open-ended working group with the mandate to elaborate on an international legally binding instrument on TNCs and other businesses concerning human rights. Since then, efforts are being made towards developing a treaty and finding ways to make foreign corporations accountable. The latest UN report is a step in that direction.
•BITs can be harnessed to hold TNCs accountable under international law. The issue of fixing accountability of foreign investors came up in an international law case, Urbaser v. Argentina (2016). It involved a concessionaire that was looking after the supply of water and sewerage services in Argentina, in which Urbaser, a Spanish environment management company, was a shareholder. Argentina adopted emergency measures to ward off a financial crisis in 2001, which caused losses to the concessionaire, ultimately leading to its insolvency. Urbaser brought a claim against Argentina alleging breach of its rights guaranteed under the Argentina-Spain BIT. Argentina filed a counterclaim charging the investors for floundering in ensuring the required level of investment in the services provided and thus violating the international human right to water. The tribunal held that corporations can be subjects of international law and are under a duty not to engage in activities that harm or destroy human rights. However, as regards the question of whether the foreign investor was under an international law obligation to provide drinking water and sanitation, the tribunal held that only states have a positive obligation to meet the human right to water; corporations only have a negative obligation in this regard unless specific human rights obligations are imposed on the foreign investor as part of the BIT.
•The case played an important role in bringing human rights norms to the fore in BIT disputes. It also opened up the possibility of using BITs to hold TNCs accountable provided the treaty imposes positive obligations on foreign investors. In the last few years, states have started recalibrating their BITs by inserting provisions on investor accountability. However, these employ soft law language and are hortatory. They do not impose positive and binding obligations on foreign investors. They fall short of creating a framework to hold TNCs accountable under international law.
Lessons for India
•The recent UN report has important takeaways for India’s ongoing reforms in BITs. India’s new Model BIT of 2016 contains provisions on investor obligations. However, these exist as best endeavour clauses. They do not impose a binding obligation on the TNC. India should impose positive and binding obligations on foreign investors, not just for protecting human rights but also for imperative issues such as promoting public health. The Nigeria-Morocco BIT, which imposes binding obligations on foreign investors such as making it mandatory for them to conduct an environmental impact assessment of their investment, is a good example. These reforms would help in harnessing BITs to ensure the answerability of foreign investors and creating a binding international legal framework to hold TNCs to account.
📰 The relative income, subjective well-being connect
A key policy lesson would be to pursue a strategy of shared growth through remunerative employment
•“Well-being is attained little by little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself,” pronounced philosopher Zeno of Citium. While the centrality of the notion of well-being is hard to dispute, its measurement is far from straightforward. There are two distinct approaches to measurement of well-being: one is the conventional approach of measuring it in terms of objective criterion such as income/expenditure; and the second is the growing consensus around a measure of subjective well-being/SWB/life satisfaction/happiness that takes into account not just objective criteria such as income but also individual characteristics including age, gender, schooling, religion, caste, marital status, health, employment, social networks, and the overall economic and natural environment. The intuitive appeal of SWB measures is that these are influenced not just by objective criterion of income/expenditure but also by perceptions of individuals about their experiences of whether they are better-off, just the same or worse-off.
•In a previous OpEd article, Kulkarni et al. (“Money vs. happiness” – Subjective well-being and income are intricately linked, The Hindu, February 18, 2021), it was argued that subjective well-being varies with level of income but at a diminishing rate. Here, however, our focus is on whether relative income (i.e., relative to that of a reference group) matters more than the level of income and, in that case, whether a shift in policy is necessary to enhance SWB. Our analysis draws upon the two rounds of the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS), conducted by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland, covering the years 2005 and 2012. The data were released in 2015. Its salient features are: it is the only all-India panel survey; apart from the wide coverage of demographic, health, economic, and social variables, it asks a question on SWB. The question is: compared to seven years ago (2005), would you say your household is economically doing the same, better or worse today (2012)? Specifically, therefore, it is a measure of change in SWB, but for convenience of exposition we refer to it interchangeably as SWB, or, SWB outcomes. Admittedly, a broader coverage of both economic and social aspects (such as questions about the best possible life on a scale) would have been more helpful for comparisons with studies conducted using the Gallup World Poll.
•SWB and income/expenditure are positively related but at a diminishing rate. Besides, the association is weak and arguably transitory. These findings are not surprising. First, we find that the relative income effect (actual per capita income/expenditure as a fraction of the maximum in the primary sampling unit) is much larger. This is consistent with the relative income hypothesis formulated by Duesenberry (1949) and the famous Easterlin paradox (1973). This paradox states that at a point in time, SWB/happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time, happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow.
•Indeed, rank in the income distribution influences life satisfaction. As a society becomes richer, the average rank does not change and thus average life-satisfaction remains stable despite income growth. The relative income hypothesis cannot by itself explain why a permanent increase in an individual’s income has a transitory effect on his/her well-being, as relative standing would increase. However, the increase in relative standing can be offset by change in the reference group: with this increase, the new peers serve as a reference point, and the previous peers lose salience.
On material goods
•Second, individuals adapt to material goods, and these goods yield little joy for most individuals. Thus, increases in income, which are expected to raise well-being by raising consumption opportunities, may in fact have minor lasting effect because consumption of material goods has little effect on well-being above a certain level of consumption or because of hedonic adaptation. This has been questioned on the grounds that there is no income threshold at which SWB diverged. Instead, higher incomes are associated with both feeling better moment-to-moment and being more satisfied with life overall. While there may be some point beyond which money loses its power to improve well-being, the current view is that the threshold may be higher than previously thought.
Income changes
•We further analysed how relative income changed during 2005-2012. We classified relative income/expenditure into three intervals: 0-25%, >25-50% and above >50% in both 2005 and 2012. The cross-tabulation unravels sharp changes. Consider the first interval with lowest relative income, 0-25%, in 2005. About 40% remained in this interval, while about the same proportion experienced a sharp increase in relative income (by moving to the interval, >25-50%), and above a fifth a substantial increase (by moving into the interval, >50%). The next interval with higher relative income, (>25-50%), revealed a different pattern. While about 40% remained in this interval, more than a third ascended into the highest relative income interval, >50%, implying substantial narrowing of the income/expenditure disparity. However, a distressing feature was that well over one fourth experienced a marked increase of this disparity or lower relative income (i.e., by moving into the interval 0-25%). In the third interval, >50%, about 51 % remained in it, while about one third experienced a marked reduction in relative income (by moving into the lower interval, >25-50%) and a considerably lower proportion (over 16%) registered a sharp reduction (by moving into the highest relative income interval, 0-25%).
Going forward
•So, to recapitulate, the lower the relative income, the lower is SWB. What our analysis shows is that a large majority of those with lowest relative income experienced substantially higher relative incomes; also, a large majority of those in the next higher range (>25-50%) recorded significantly higher relative incomes; and, nearly half of those in the highest range of relative income (>50%) recorded lower relative incomes in 2012. During a period of steady growth of per capita income (just under 6% annually), the benefits in terms of higher relative income accrued largely to those in the lower intervals.
•In sum, the important policy lesson is that, instead of relentless pursuit of income growth, more attention must be given to a strategy of shared growth through remunerative employment in order to enhance well-being.
📰 A spike: On records and COVID-19 vaccination coverage
India must prioritise vaccines to States and districts that are at greatest infection risk
•India on September 17 administered a record 2.5 crore vaccine shots, which an ebullient Health Ministry said was the equivalent of the populations of the whole of Australia, two-thirds of Canada and five times that of New Zealand. The only other comparison would be China’s pace of vaccination — 2.47 crore shots on a single day. Thus, 2.5 crore means 62% Indian adults have now got at least one dose and one in five fully inoculated. Friday’s drive was part of a concerted push by BJP-ruled States to boost vaccination numbers as a birthday gift to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But to encourage a behavioural nudge when supply is abundant and demand is not commensurate — as in the U.S. — and have a marked supply shortage even as vaccine production continues — as in India — are two different things. Bharat Biotech was supposed to be supplying 6-7 crore doses a month from July-August and 10 crore doses a month from September, according to a Department of Biotechnology statement in April. This would mean at least 52 crore doses from July-December, of which 40 crore is to be supplied from September-December. Since the vaccination drive began, only nine crore doses of Covaxin have been administered as of last week — at least three crore short. Several cabinet Ministers, in summer, had boasted that India would inoculate its adult population (about 94 crore) by the year end. This will require over 185 crore doses, or close to one crore inoculations a day; India has now crossed the 80 crore mark. Before the birthday drive, India’s most recent seven-day average was 0.6-0.7 crore. Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, which saw among the highest vaccination spikes on September 17, delivered 6-10 times their previous seven-day average.
•India is once again on a downswing as far as daily coronavirus numbers go, but at close to 30,000 cases a day is nowhere near the all-time low of nearly 10,000 daily cases in February which preceded the catastrophic second wave. The globally most prevalent Delta variant may have already washed over large swathes of India, but waning immunity and the emergence of variants capable of immune escape are thriving too. With educational institutions set to open in a big way during the winter and crores of unvaccinated children vulnerable, the imperative should be to boost daily supplies. India is lucky that there is so far no discernible vaccine scepticism and hesitancy and it has only to really bother with producing and delivering the jab painlessly. Instead of positioning vaccine drives as opportunities to set vacuous records, the Centre must prioritise vaccines to States and districts that are at greatest infection risk and follow up with vaccine makers to speed up and make good on their commitments.
