📰 Indian forces to carry out exercise with U.K.
Joint Army training on at Chaubatia
•India’s armed forces are scheduled to carry out an exercise with the U.K.’s Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group later this month as it heads back home after its maiden operational deployment in the Indian Ocean.
•In another development, the second meeting of the India-U.K. Joint Working Group (JWG) on cyber capacity-building was held on Thursday through videoconferencing.
•Separately, the Army said, the sixth edition of the India-U.K. joint company-level military training, Exercise Ajeya Warrior, had commenced at Chaubatia, Uttarakhand, and would culminate on October 20.
•On the naval exercise, a defence official observed that it was scheduled to be held in October third week, for which the modalities were being worked out. The triservice components were being finalised.
•U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is likely to visit India coinciding with the exercise, it has been learnt.
•In July, India and the U.K. participated in a two-day bilateral Passage Exercise (PASSEX) with the Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group (CSG-21), led by HMS Queen Elizabeth, in the Bay of Bengal as the carrier was passing through.
•India and the U.K. are also in talks for a bilateral logistics support agreement.
•As part of training, both the Armies would familiarise with each other’s weapons, equipment, tactics, techniques and procedures for carrying out joint military operations, the Army noted in a statement.
📰 India, Nepal to conduct joint patrols for controlling trans-border crime
Meeting held between heads of Sashastra Seema Bal and the neighbouring country’s Armed Police Force
•The border guarding forces of India and Nepal will conduct regular joint patrolling along the border to control trans-border crimes, smuggling of arms, human trafficking and other areas of concern, a statement by the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) said on Thursday.
•SSB, a central armed police force, secures the Nepal and Bhutan borders. The fifth annual coordination meeting between the Director General, SSB and Inspector General, Armed Police Force, Nepal concluded on Thursday. The Indian delegation was led by Kumar Rajesh Chandra and the Nepal delegation was led by Shailendra Khanal, IG, APF.
•“The meeting deliberated on the security scenario on the India-Nepal border and decided to take further measures for enhancing coordination and cooperation between the two border guarding forces,” the SSB said. It said that the the help desk established by both the APF and the SSB at transit points of the border would continue to facilitate the movement of citizens.
📰 Literature Nobel goes to novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah
The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout Abdulrazak Gurnah's work
•Tanzanian-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience, won the Nobel Literature Prize on October 7.
•Mr. Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but who arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.
•The Swedish Academy said Mr. Gurnah was honoured "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".
•"His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world," the Nobel Foundation added.
•Mr. Gurnah has published 10 novels and a number of short stories.
•He is best known for his 1994 breakthrough novel Paradise, set in colonial East Africa during World War I, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
•The theme of the refugee's disruption runs throughout his work.
•Born in 1948, Mr. Gurnah fled Zanzibar in 1968 following the revolution which led to oppression and the persecution of citizens of Arab origin.
•He began writing as a 21-year-old in England. Although Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool.
•In an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2004, Mr. Gurnah said he hadn't planned to be a writer when he was living in Zanzibar, but once in England he felt overwhelmed by the sense of 'a life left behind'.
•"If one way of seeing distance as helpful to the writer pictures him or her as a closed world, another argument suggests displacement is necessary, that the writer produces work of value in isolation because he or she is then free from responsibilities and intimacies that mute and dilute the truth," he wrote.
•Mr. Gurnah has until his recent retirement been Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in Canterbury, focusing principally on writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Salman Rushdie.
•The Nobel Prize comes with a medal and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million).
•In 2020, the award went to U.S. poet Louise Gluck.
Western dominance
•Ahead of the October 7 announcement, Nobel watchers had suggested the Swedish Academy could choose to give the nod to a writer from Asia or Africa, following a pledge to make the prize more diverse.
•It has crowned mainly Westerners in its 120-year existence.
•Glaringly, 102 men have won and only 16 women.
•The Academy long insisted its laureates were chosen on literary merit alone, and that it did not take nationality into account.
•But after a #MeToo scandal that rocked the Academy — prompting it to postpone the 2018 prize for a year — the body said it would adjust its criteria towards more geographic and gender diversity.
•"Previously, we had a more Eurocentric perspective of literature, and now we are looking all over the world," the head of the Nobel committee, Anders Olsson, said in 2019.
•Two women have since got the nod: Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk clinched the delayed 2018 prize, and little-known Ms. Gluck won in 2020.
•Sandwiched between them in 2019 was Austrian writer Peter Handke — a hotly contested pick due to his support of Serbia's former president Slobodan Milosevic, who died while on trial for genocide in 2006.
•But at the end of the day, "literary merit" is still "the absolute and the only criterion" for the Academy, Mr. Olsson reiterated in an interview with The New Republic published this week.
•The Nobel season continues on October 8 in Oslo with the Peace Prize, followed next October 11 by the Economics Prize.
📰 Killing the chills: On the malaria vaccine
The malaria vaccine must see speedy implementation from the lab to the field
•The triumphs of science are best appreciated when they make human lives easier or safer, or simply, offer hope. The first ever World Health Organization (WHO)-approved anti-malaria vaccine must count among those triumphs. The approval marks a milestone in a timeline that records a long and laborious process to grapple with malaria, and somehow make it less of a killer. The vaccine that WHO has approved — RTS,S — has been used in pilot programme participants (children and infants) in Africa from 2015 after it got a nod for this specific use from the European Medicines Agency. This triumph comes at a time of great scientific endeavour, yes, but also notably at a time when it was feared that the progress against malaria was flagging. With this vaccine, which will significantly reduce the severity of cases and prevent deaths, hope has sprung anew that humankind might retard in its tracks a pathogen that has stalked sub-Saharan Africa and several other parts of the world for years now. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom rightly termed it as a historic moment, achieving a breakthrough not only for malaria control but also child health and science itself. The malaria vaccine, RTS,S, which has been in the making for nearly 30 years, acts against P. falciparum, believed to be the most deadly malaria parasite globally. As per WHO, in 2019, nearly half the world’s population was at risk of malaria, while most cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. There were an estimated 229 million cases in 2019, and malaria deaths stood at 4,09,000, with the WHO African region carrying a disproportionate burden — 94% of cases and deaths. Children under five are the most vulnerable group affected by malaria; in 2019, they accounted for about two thirds of all malaria deaths.
•WHO said it was making a recommendation for use based on the key findings of pilot projects implemented in child health clinics in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi over two years. Data and insights gathered from these studies showed that the vaccine was not only feasible to introduce but that it also improves health and saves lives. Remarkably, it facilitated equitable access to malaria prevention, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping reach even hitherto unreached populations. While further steps are taken to manufacture, fund and roll out the vaccine to nations affected by malaria, maintaining equity of access is key. Dr. Tedros emphasised in his press conference that as the work towards providing vaccination continues, nations may, by no means, relinquish their routine malaria prevention activities, including providing insecticide-treated bed nets. While the world now has a way to kill the rigors — the chills characteristic of the infection — the next step should be speedy and meticulous implementation of the scientific miracle from the lab to the field.
📰 Handling complexity: On 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics
The Physics Nobel winners have developed tools to get a handle on complex systems
•Bringing to a close speculation about the winner of the Physics Nobel prize this year, the Nobel committee decided to award a trio of researchers. One half went to Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, U.S., and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, for their work in climate science. In the long line of researchers who estimated the warming of the atmosphere due to gases in it, Syukuro Manabe’s modelling, in collaboration with others — and over decades — is a classic work that showed, even in the 1960s, that the atmosphere would undergo another 2.3° C warming with the doubling of carbon dioxide content. Klaus Hasselmann identified a way of treating the random noise-like variations of the weather, devising a method to generate useful “signals” on the scale of the climate. Of interest was the way these models could show the effect of human activities on the climate. The other half of the prize, to Giorgio Parisi from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, is for developing a method to sensibly study complex condensed matter systems called “spin glasses” — an outstanding feat in both mathematical and physical innovation. The idea to break what is called “replica symmetry”, seen in a spin glass, in a consistent manner, which was his contribution, led to a method to study one of the simplest models of a genuinely complex system. His work has helped solve problems in mathematics, biology and neuroscience; for instance, how memory is stored in networks of nerve cells.
•What ties together the seemingly disparate works — the climate science work by Syukuro and Hasselmann on the one hand and theoretical condensed matter physics work by Parisi on the other — is that both describe complex physical systems. Physics is often thought of as a science of simple systems, and it is mostly celebrated and sometimes chided for this. Even rocket science, which inspires awe for its grandeur and accuracy, is mostly the study of so-called simple systems. Complexity arises when there are many, many interacting pieces in the system, with each moving in an independent way. The deceptively easy-looking problem of water rushing out of a tap is notoriously difficult to understand as to when it makes a transition from simple streamlined flow to a complex turbulent flow. The Nobel winners this year have handled such complex systems and developed tools to get meaningful, quantitative results out of them. Notable in this is the climate scientists’ work, which makes it obvious where science stands on the issue of global warming and estimates the human fingerprint on climate change. With the COP26 summit drawing close, the Nobel committee’s decision only underscores the need to take this into account.
📰 Seeding a data revolution in Indian agriculture
But technology fixes and agri-business investments alone will not be enough to improve farmers’ livelihoods
•In June this year, two significant documents relating to the Indian agriculture sector were released. The first is a consultation paper on the India Digital Ecosystem of Agriculture (IDEA) from the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW) and the second on Indian Agriculture: Ripe for Disruption from a private organisation, Bain and Company. The first talks about a digital revolution in the agriculture sector and later predicts a revolutionary investment growth in agri-logistics, offtake, and agri-input delivery by 2025; these are, surprisingly, highly complementary. The fact is that every segment of present-day life is data-hungry. The MoA&FW report describes creating data to fuel the growth predicted by Bain and Company.
The forecast
•The Bain report is a data-based prediction on agri-business scenarios, anchored to the agricultural set-up at present and predicting its future trajectories in another 20 years. It includes targeting the production of alternative proteins, and food cell-based food/ingredients and initiating ocean farming, etc. The report has a ‘today forward– future back approach’ and predicts a drastic investment opportunity development by 2025. The agriculture sector (currently worth $370 billion), is estimated to receive an additional $35 billion investment. The two enabling conditions for such investment opportunities are the changes in the regulatory framework, especially recent changes in the Farm Acts and digital disruption. The report argues that benefiting from the huge investments into the agri-ecosystem, doubling farmers’ income targets can be achieved in near future.
The idea of integration
•The IDEA-consulting paper is based on the Task Force and Working Group report constituted by the MoA&FW to design the blueprint of “digital agriculture” — which is similar to the digital disruption mentioned in the Bain report. Eventually, the farmer and the improvement of farmers’ livelihood is the aim of the IDEA concept and it is proposed to happen through tight integration of agri-tech innovation and the agriculture industry ecosystem to farming and food systems. To be precise, the IDEA concept profounds the creation of second enabling conditions (which is described in the Bain report). The IDEA principles explicitly talk about openness of data, which means open to businesses and farmers, indicating the kind of integration it aims at.
•Value-added innovative services by agri-tech industries and start-ups are an integral part of the IDEA architecture. Beyond the architecture, these services listed in the document (to be available on the platform) are equally important data for farmers and businesses. The Indian agriculture sector in future will encompass farm to fork and pave the way for a single national market with a national platform with better connection between producer and consumers. Through their work, the management experts, Parijat Jain, Prashant Sarin and Shalabh Singawne (the authors of the Bain report) have depicted the agriculture reforms announced by the union government as a game-changer in the agriculture sector.
A thread of digital disruption
•The IT industry has opposition to IDEA mainly due to the ethics of creating a Unique Farmer ID based on one’s Aadhaar number and also the potential for data misuse. Beyond the news coverage about the prospects of achieving the goal of Doubling Farmers Income on which the present government has almost lost its hope, the Bain report has not been widely discussed — at least in the public domain. The assumptions used by authors of the Bain report, especially for its ‘future back approach’, need more or less focusing on widespread food production in controlled environments. No doubt, the emission, energy, and other resource footprints and sustainability issues around these techniques must be carefully studied to confirm the projected trajectory (which is not a part of the report). However, the report has convincingly demonstrated the business opportunity available in supply chains between farm to Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandi and mandi to the customer, which can be realised with the support of digital disruption and the latest agriculture reforms.
•Both these reports heavily rely on digital disruption to improve farmers’ livelihoods, without discussing how much farmers will be prepared to benefit from these newly emerging business environments. Hinting that the Union government is serious about this digital support to the agriculture sector — the Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Narendra Singh Tomar, has emphasised the significance of the farmer’s database being prepared and has sought the support of States.
An unconvincing ‘how’
•However, the fact is that a majority of small and marginal farmers are not technology-savvy. That most of them are under-educated for capacity building is ignored amidst these ambitious developments. The Bain report relies on the general assumption that more investments into the agriculture sector will benefit farmers; ‘but how’ has not been convincingly answered. Similarly, how the technology fix will help resolve all the nine issues of Indian agriculture listed at the beginning of the report is unclear in the IDEA concept. Together, the two reports look forward to benefiting from the recent agriculture legislature changes without perceiving the capacity-building required at a farmer’s end. Politically, these two reports ignore the protest of farmers against the reforms without considering it as a barrier or risk factor resulting in a repealing of these new farm laws.
Focus on the farmer
•While agreeing on the fact that a data revolution is inevitable in the agriculture sector, given its socio-political complexities, we cannot just count on technology fixes and agri-business investments for improving farmers’ livelihoods. There need to be immense efforts to improve the capacities of the farmers in India – at least until the educated young farmers replace the existing under-educated small and medium farmers. This capacity building can be done through a mixed approach – preferably building the capacities of individual farmers or coping with the new situation by establishing support systems, through FPOs and other farmers associations where technical support is available for farmers. Considering the size of the agriculture sector of the country this is not going to be an easy task but would need a separate programme across the country with considerable investment.
📰 Will a bad bank fix India’s broken banking system?
A bad bank can help in debt recovery but it is no substitute to fresh capital infusion
•Last month, the Union government set up the National Asset Reconstruction Company Limited (NARCL) under the Companies Act. It thus delivered on its promise to set up a ‘bad bank’ to clean up the balance sheets of commercial banks. Under the new set up, the NARCL will take over loans worth almost ₹2 lakh crore from the books of commercial banks at a mutually agreed price. The NARCL will pay 15% of the price of these loans upfront in cash to banks and then issue security receipts in lieu of the remaining amount. The NARCL will then try to resolve these bad loans in a time-bound manner with help from the India Debt Resolution Company Limited (IDRCL). In case the IDRCL is unable to sell these bad loans at a satisfactory price to make good on the security receipts, the Centre will step in and fund the gap, but within a budget limit of ₹30,600 crore. In a conversation moderated by Prashanth Perumal J., Ajit Ranade and C.P. Chandrasekhar discusss the bad bank proposal. Edited excerpts:
What is the need to bail out banks? Why not let banks recognise their losses and let insolvent banks fail?
•Ajit Ranade: First of all, this is a one-time, time-bound effort. The bad bank has been set up to remove bad assets from the balance sheets of banks and free up capital which will allow bank lending to grow. Credit growth is important for economic growth, and bank balance sheets are constrained by the presence of bad assets. So, one of the main objectives of the bad bank is to remove these assets from the balance sheets of existing banks and consolidate them within a bad bank. Meanwhile, the resolution and recovery process can continue. The proposed design of the bad bank separates the trustee part of the NARCL, where the assets will sit, from the the IDRCL, which will engage in the recovery and turnaround of bad assets. So, it’s a twin structure working to free existing banking capital to enable higher credit growth.
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: There are many reasons to bail out banks but two in particular are crucial. One is the fact that there are depositors involved here. If you allow banks to fail, depositors who operated under the presumption that the regulatory framework would protect their money would be undermined. Historically, we’ve found that central banks try to actually save banks, either by bailing them out or by amalgamating them with stronger banks, in order to be able to protect depositors. Two, there is a systemic problem. If a bank fails, and there is a sort of contagion effect, you could actually have systemic problems. Banks are the core of the settlements system and the credit pipe and allowing them to go down would be a problem. And finally, there is also the option of getting banks to write off these bad assets and then the government can recapitalise them. But that would deal a significant blow to the government’s finances.
•Isn’t there the risk of moral hazard linked with bailouts, which makes banks more complacent?
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: You need to compare the risk to the system itself — the impact that bank failures would have on depositors and the social and political implications of it — with the moral hazard of bailing out banks. The more important problem is the systemic risk. But second, here we have a system in which banks are predominantly publicly owned. So, the problem is, in some sense, the result of the state allowing the use of banks for certain purposes.
Why do you think the government has opted for a bad bank over directly infusing capital into banks?
•Ajit Ranade: These so-called bad loans have been completely 100% provisioned. However, the manpower of these banks is still spent on recovery and supervision. Now, it’s important that these loans be moved to a separate entity which is exclusively focused on recovery, so that the bank can then focus on its core business, which is business development, giving new loans, credit growth, etc. And it is not an exclusive ‘either... or’ for banks. For their growth, banks will need to be infused with additional capital to achieve the credit growth needed to get to 7-8% GDP growth. So, the government will continue to pour more capital into banks, while bad loans will be moved to a separate entity.
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: I think we have to see this in the context of accumulated bad debt of banks being addressed over a period of time through various mechanisms. First, we had the Lok Adalats, then the debt recovery tribunal, and then the SARFAESI (Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest) Act, which is supposed to give creditors much more power to be able to recover debt. Then we had the IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code). The understanding till recently was that the IBC would allow quick resolution, and the haircut that the banks would have to take would be relatively small. If you have a government that is committed to a conservative fiscal stance, then to think of going through a process in which these large amounts of accumulated debt will be cleared, which is essentially a process of partial write-off and recapitalisation, cannot be sustained if the haircuts are large. When IBC started, it appeared as if you’re going to get a pretty high rate of recovery. As we moved along, the rate of recovery began to decline quite sharply. So, the point is, by adopting a bad bank mechanism, the government seems to think it will be in a position to paper over this contradiction — the need to resolve the bad loan problem and its unwillingness to allocate significant amounts from its Budget.
What is the need for a public bad bank when India already has a number of private asset reconstruction companies (ARCs)?
•Ajit Ranade: What the NARCL is doing is providing an asset resolution platform, which is for the banks and by the banks. There have been some 28-odd private ARCs, which have perhaps not performed. Under the bad bank, asset acquisition and trusteeship has been segregated from asset resolution. The primary purpose of the IDRCL is resolution through specialists who can salvage some value. Even if they can recover only 25%, that’s more than what the current record shows. The IDRCL will actually have incentive to resolve debts efficiently because of the profit-sharing arrangement. So, the incentives are aligned.
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: The government has said that of the ₹2 lakh crore, it will be in a position to cover only as much as ₹30,600 crore. So, you’re going to be in a situation where the banks are still going to carry the burden and take a hit to their profitability. On the other hand, if you look at those who defaulted, a large number of them being big corporates, they are going to walk away with their debts resolved at steep discounts. Banks might be left with perhaps not new losses, but with losses nevertheless, which have already been provided for, whereas those who defaulted would be let off in terms of their assets not being seized in significant measure.
•Ajit Ranade: These are two different things. One is to go after the defaulters and the other is to recover the asset and salvage value from it. Corporates are not going to go scot-free. If there is an established criminal negligence or criminal activity, there is a separate process for that. Moreover, the bad bank is focusing the energies of banking personnel. The bad bank is not to be seen as a recurring thing wherein balances will keep moving from the existing banking balance sheets into this structure. If that happens, you are inviting the tendency of what we call moral hazard, as then there is no effort from the bank per se to try and recover.
Do you think the bad bank, which is essentially owned by the troubled banks themselves, will have a different incentive structure to efficiently resolve loans?
•Ajit Ranade: The staffing, the pay scale, etc. in the IDRCL will be different. For example, when the State Bank of India (SBI) runs an asset management company, the AMC employees are not on the same pay scale as the SBI. So, we have to recognise that the incentives, pay structure, staffing, talent, and ultimately governance... that’s what’s going to matter.
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: There is a lack of clarity about certain things. One is the discount which is going to be negotiated between the NARCL and the banks. Once the bad debt is moved on to the books of NARCL, it will be handed over to the IDRCL. Now, as in the case of private ARCs in the past, both these entities would also be charging a managerial fee. So, they’re going to cover a large part of their costs through the managerial fee charged to manage and dispose of these assets. What is going to be the incentive to try and get the maximum price possible from these bad loans is not really clear.
•Ajit Ranade: The difference is that in the case of the existing ARCs, there is no guarantee for the value that will be recovered from the security receipt. So, typically, the average purchase price of bad loans by existing ARCs is something like 36%, but there is no backing for the security receipts; these receipts may end up being of zero value. The actual recovery could be just one-fourth of the 36%, which is 9%. In the new structure, the average purchase price will be lower, but the security receipts for the remainder of the value will be covered by the government up to ₹30,600 crore. That in itself changes the incentives.
Does the bad bank proposal actually address the root causes of the banking crisis or is this just a temporary band aid?
•Ajit Ranade: The fact is that over the last few years, the NPA ratio has been mounting and we’ve tried many things. We now need to bring the problem to manageable proportions. In that sense, the bad bank is taking a small chunk out of the overall NPAs. But NPAs will continue to grow. Bad loans are a function of business cycles — during down cycles, the bad loan ratio increases, but in up cycles, the bad loan ratio comes down. The idea is to keep it within manageable proportions.
•C.P. Chandrasekhar: There is a structural issue involved here. As opposed to the 1980s and 1990s, an overwhelming share of defaulted debt in this round has been corporate debt. Why did this come about? Earlier, financing capital-intensive projects was seen as something which had to happen through the government’s budget or through development finance institutions specialised in development finance. There was also the idea that you could finance these investments through long-term capital available through an active bond market, which India does not have to a significant extent. The government decided that it cannot mobilise the resources to finance investments and decided to get financial institutions to set up commercial banks. Therefore, the burden of financing these investments was transferred by the state to the public banks. And banks are not supposed to do too much of this because there are significant liquidity and maturity mismatches. So, we got this problem because we have put the burden of finance of a certain kind on banks, which should not have been put on banks, which sometimes gets concealed by focusing on some frauds here and there.
📰 Stronger at the grassroots
It is imperative to make disaster resilience an inherent part of community culture
•The Panchayati Raj, first adopted by Nagaur in Rajasthan on October 2, 1959, has expanded vastly. There are now 2,60,512 Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) represented by about 31 lakh elected members across India. This system of local self-governance, where people in the villages participate in the decision-making process, is the backbone of democracy. The People’s Plan Campaign and Vibrant Gram Sabha Dashboard, rolled out this year, aspire to strengthen the Panchayati Raj system by making gram sabhas more vibrant.
A bottom-up approach
•Unlike other disasters like earthquakes, COVID-19 is an unusual crisis as it is long-drawn and affects people everywhere. When the traditional top-down disaster response system was compromised during the bad months of the pandemic, it was PRIs that played a remarkable role. They helped reduce risks, responded swiftly and thus helped people recover quickly. The PRIs provided essential leadership at the local level. They performed both regulatory and welfare functions. For instance, during the nationwide lockdown, PRIs set up containment zones, arranged transport, identified buildings for quarantining people and provisioned food for the incoming migrants. Moreover, effective implementation of welfare schemes like MGNREGA and the National Rural Livelihood Mission quickened the pace of recovery while ensuring support to the vulnerable population.
•Gram sabhas act as a sounding board for diverse ideas and opinions. They provide a platform to build consensus and make resolutions in the community’s interest. During the pandemic,, gram sabhas resolved to adhere to COVID-19 norms. In addition, regular engagement with frontline workers like ASHA workers and Anganwadi workers through committees bridged the trust gap between the community and the officials.
•By representing diverse communities, PRIs mobilise them effectively. During the COVID-19 crisis, they organised community-based surveillance systems involving village elders, the youth and self-help groups (SHGs) to keep a strict vigil in quarantine centres and monitor symptoms in households. More recently, their role in mobilising citizens for COVID-19 vaccination is exemplary.
Building capacity
•The Yokohama strategy during the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in May 1994 emphasised that it is important to focus on disaster prevention, mitigation and preparedness rather than disaster response alone, to reduce vulnerability. In this respect, certain initiatives can be taken to build the capacity of PRIs. One, it is crucial to include disaster management chapters in Panchayat Raj Acts and make disaster planning and spending part of Panchayati Raj development plans and local-level committees. This will ensure citizen-centric mapping and planning of resources. Various insurance products customised to local needs will build financial resilience of the community.
•Two, conducting regular location-specific training programmes for the community and organising platforms for sharing best practices will strengthen individual and institutional capacities. Assigning roles to individual members and providing them with the necessary skills can make such programmes more meaningful.
•Three, since the community is usually the first responder in case of a disaster, community-based disaster management plans would help. These would provide a strategy for resource utilisation and maintenance during a disaster. Such plans should tap the traditional wisdom of local communities which will complement modern practices. Moreover, financial contributions from the community should be encouraged through the establishment of community disaster funds in all gram panchayats. It is imperative to make disaster resilience an inherent part of the community culture now more than ever.
