📰 Cabinet nod for mobile services in 7,287 villages
Project will provide 4G in five States
•The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved provisioning of mobile services in over 7,000 uncovered villages across five States of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Odisha at an estimated cost of ₹6,466 crore.
•“The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has given its approval for provisioning of mobile services in uncovered villages of Aspirational Districts across five States,” an official release said.
•It added that the project envisages to provide 4G mobile services in the 7,287 uncovered villages of 44 Aspirational Districts in the five States at an estimated cost of ₹6,466 crore, including operational expenses for five years.
Funded by USOF
•The project will be funded by Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) and is targeted to be completed within 18 months after the signing of the agreement.
•“The work related to provision of 4G mobile services in identified uncovered villages will be awarded through open competitive bidding process as per extant USOF procedures,” it said.
India has always been the Maldives’ closest ally and trusted neighbour, Govt. says
•The Government of Maldives on Wednesday said it “strongly rejects attempts to spread false information” criticising its ties with India, its “closest ally and trusted neighbour”.
•A statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said allegations that bilateral cooperation between the Governments of Maldives and India undermines the national security and sovereignty of Maldives are “misguided” and “unsubstantiated”.
Solih’s policy
•The statement comes amid an ongoing social media campaign in the Maldives called ‘#Indiaout’. Maldivians critical of the Ibrahim Mohamed Solih administration’s ‘India first’ policy in international relations, have in the past vehemently opposed “any Indian military presence”, and the opening of an Indian consulate in its southern Addu atoll.
•However, according to the Maldivian Foreign Ministry, the anti-India sentiments are not widely prevalent in the Indian Ocean archipelago.
•“The Government firmly believes that these views are not the sentiments of the general public, but rather that of a small group of individuals with the objective of tarnishing the country’s long-standing cordial ties with India,” the Ministry statement said.
•“The cooperation and support provided by the Government of India, specifically on issues of maritime security, is aimed at strengthening the strategic partnership between the two countries and to ensure the safety and stability of the Indian Ocean region,” it said.
‘Direct benefits’
•It also added that Indian support in areas such as search and rescue capabilities, casualty evacuation, coastal surveillance, and maritime reconnaissance, “directly benefit” the Maldivian people.
•Further, the Maldives observed that addressing threats of trans-border terrorism, piracy, narco-trafficking, climate change, cyber security and human trafficking, requires the support and cooperation of all regional and international partners.
•“No one country alone can address these issues on its own,” the statement added.
India’s response
•The Ministry’s response appeared to reiterate President Solih’s own position in regard to his government’s ties with New Delhi. In an interview to The Hindu in January this year, Mr. Solih said the Maldives makes no apology for its close ties with India.
•Meanwhile, India’s recently appointed High Commissioner to the Maldives Munu Mahawar presented his credentials to President Solih on Wednesday. “The President and the High Commissioner expressed their desire for further cooperation and assistance in all efforts towards the mutual benefit of both nations,” a statement from the President’s office said.
📰 School enrolment fell during pandemic: Annual Status of Education Report
Yawning gap between States in access to online education, says the study.
•The percentage of rural children who were not enrolled in school doubled during the pandemic, with Government schools seeing an increase in enrolment at the expense of private schools, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021. Over a third of children enrolled in Classes 1 and 2 have never attended school in person.
•However, enrolment does not necessarily mean that learning took place. In a survey of over 76,000 households with children aged six to 14, ASER found that while 92% of children had textbooks for their grade, only a third had access to any other learning resources or support. With smartphone availability and access limited, online learning was restricted to a quarter of students, though there were major differences in the experience of students from different States. For instance, 91% of students from Kerala and almost 80% from Himachal Pradesh had online education, but only 10% from Bihar and 13% from West Bengal.
Phone survey
•Due to the pandemic, ASER’s 16th annual report was based on a phone survey assessing enrolment in schools and tuition classes, and access to devices and learning resources, rather than the organisation’s usual face-to-face survey which assesses learning outcomes and children’s competencies in reading and arithmetic skills.
•In 2018, only 2.5% of children were not enrolled in school.
Major shift
•In both the 2020 and 2021 surveys, that figure had jumped to 4.6%. Government school enrolment spiked significantly from 64.3% in 2018 to 70.3% in 2021, while private school enrolment dropped from 32.5% to 24.4% over the same period. “The shift to government school enrolment could be a result of financial distress, the closure of affordable private schools and the movement of migrants to rural areas,” said ASER Centre director Wilima Wadhwa.
•“Although it is not clear if this is a permanent phenomenon or will be reversed post the pandemic, it is important to ensure that government schools and teachers are equipped and given the necessary resources for this surge in enrolment,” she added.
•This is particularly true for Class 1 and 2 students, as 37% of those enrolled in government schools have never even stepped into a physical classroom before. “The habit of going to school, sitting in a classroom, and teaching in a classroom has been disrupted significantly. We need to ask if this disruption can be repaired simply by reopening schools,” said Madhav Chavan, president of Pratham, the educational NGO which is the parent organisation of ASER, emphasising that a “business as usual” approach could not be imposed.
Tuition classes
•During the pandemic, almost 40% of students took tuition classes, as many parents struggled to provide the learning support students were not receiving from closed schools. Although textbook distribution was a success story in most States, with 92% of students having the texts for their grade level, many students did not receive much else. Just over a third of students enrolled in closed government schools in 2021 received worksheets, phone messages or any other sort of learning activities or materials in the week of the survey.
•Smartphone access was a challenge in the delivery of online education. Although availability almost doubled to 68%, only a quarter of children even in homes with smartphones were able to access it whenever needed. In smartphone owning households, 26% of children had no access to the device at all, while 47% had only occasional access. “Going forward, there is a need for device libraries, so all children can have access to needed devices,” said Rukmini Banerji, Pratham CEO.
•About a quarter of children had access to some form of online education, whether content shared through WhatsApp or live classes, while over 20% listened to lessons broadcast on television and radio. About 65% of students did some type of traditional learning activity during the week of the survey, with engagement ranging from 44% in Jharkhand to almost 90% in Kerala.
•“As students return to school, it is important to start by assessing where they are, rather than teaching from where the curriculum thinks they should be. Teachers must be given the tools and agency to carry out such an assessment, so that no child is left stranded,” said Dr. Wadhwa.
📰 Transfer as punishment: On the flawed collegium system
The judiciary’s flawed collegium system bares its inherent weaknesses yet again
•The most obvious aspect of the functioning of the collegium system of judicial appointments and transfers is its opaqueness. Decisions that have no explanation, or can only be explained in terms of one’s own perception about the functioning of the judge affected by it, have become quite common. In the latest instance, Chief Justice of the Madras High Court Sanjib Banerjee has been abruptly transferred to head the Meghalaya High Court, the second such instance of the head of a court with a sanctioned complement of 75 judges being asked to take over a court with a strength of four. In September 2019, Justice Vijaya K. Tahilramani resigned after being shifted from Madras to the Meghalaya High Court at a time when she was the country’s senior-most Chief Justice. That one High Court is as important and prestigious as another is not in dispute. And equally acceptable is the premise that the Chief Justice of India is justly empowered to transfer the head of any High Court in the interest of the “better administration of justice”. However, it is not clear why a senior puisne judge in another High Court and due for elevation could not be accommodated there. High Court Chief Justices also play an important role in identifying judicial talent for appointments and streamlining administrative functions. It would be reasonable to expect that a serving Chief Justice is given a tenure long enough in a High Court to discharge these functions effectively. If a Chief Justice is not in line for an elevation to the Supreme Court, a legitimate question arises whether there was sufficient reason to transfer the incumbent.
•In Justice Banerjee’s case, the transfer has come within 10 months of his assuming office, raising the question whether he was being punished for some obscure reason. In the absence of any assigned reason, or even a known circumstance, there is bound to be speculation on whether his transfer has anything to do with his stern approach and stinging oral observations while seeking accountability from the Government and other institutions. The Memorandum of Procedure for judicial appointments and transfers says a proposal to transfer a High Court judge can only be initiated by the CJI, “whose opinion in this regard is determinative”. In addition, the views of “one or more knowledgeable Supreme Court judges” are taken. These views are considered by the five-member Collegium. This system was put in place as a safeguard against arbitrary transfers at the instance of the executive. However, recent developments suggest that it may not be enough to dispel the impression that a transfer is not exactly based on administrative needs or related to performance. Why any concern relating to a Chief Justice’s style of functioning or conduct should not have been quietly resolved by the CJI without resort to a drastic step such as transfer is not clear. Yet again, the flawed collegium system and its weaknesses are under adverse scrutiny.
📰 End the blame game: On Delhi’s pollution crisis
Concerted efforts are needed for a long-term solution to Delhi’s pollution crisis
•A familiar sequence of events unfolds in the National Capital Region before the advent of winter. The monsoon retreats, dries the air and the wind drops. The pollution from construction, industry, road transport, hitherto being masked through the year, becomes more visible. However, the period also coincides with a unique practice in northern India where farmers in Punjab, Haryana and eastern Uttar Pradesh, in a bid to hurriedly clear their fields of rice straw to make space for wheat, set fire to the chaff. This long-standing practice is now facing criticism because of its emerging link to Delhi’s noxious air quality. The stubble smoke carries over into Delhi through long-range wind transport. Finally, the third element during the season is Deepavali and the bursting of crackers. The season is also marked by more social gatherings such as weddings or related celebrations that again see a demand for crackers. While there is an official ban on crackers, except so-called ‘green crackers’ that are not widely available, the additional smoke from all of these add to the bad air, spiking air quality meters into the ‘very poor’ and ‘severe’ categories. This provokes a public outcry and concerns from the Supreme Court of India and a harried response from the Government that pushes for restrictions on free movement and construction. Invariably, the weather improves and all is forgiven.
•The recurrent tragedy of addressing the problem of air pollution in Delhi is that it invariably descends into a blame game. The Centre blames the Delhi government, because it belongs to a different political dispensation, which in turn quite conveniently blames farmers in Punjab. What is never addressed head-on is that the air pollution crisis is not a problem that can be solved overnight. The lockdown last year provided compelling evidence that taking vehicles off the road and a cessation in industrial and construction activity led to clearer skies. Source apportionment studies by various institutions have shown that the contribution of stubble burning varies significantly, from as low as 4% on some days in October-November to as much as 40%. But the running of power plants and construction are also necessary activities that cannot be shut at a moment’s notice. The move to ban the entry of trucks too is not any more effective than waiting for the wind to blow over, and has consequences for the economy. The way forward is to view winter air pollution as a natural disaster and target root causes. Road dust is the dominant source of particulate matter and the most significant impediment to clean air, and unfortunately the least amenable to an easy fix. The emphasis must be on concerted and consistent efforts, and not annual blame games.
📰 Wide fault lines within the Global Climate Risk Index
Effective methods to manage climate change are needed
•The address by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley at the 26th United Nations Conference of Parties, or COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, attracted global attention with her remark that failure to provide critical adaptation finance as well as measuring the extent of loss caused by climate change with respect to “lives and livelihoods” was immoral. This has again brought the complexity in measuring climate risk to the forefront.
•The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under the aegis of the United Nations, defines climate risk as the likelihood of unfavourable impacts occurring as a result of severe climate events interacting with vulnerable environmental, social, economic, political or cultural conditions. Quantitatively, it is the product of the probability of a climate event occurring and its adverse consequences.
•Recent discussions around climate risk assessment and management have been based on the “Global Climate Risk Index” (GCRI), published annually by GermanWatch, a non-profit organisation. The latest version of the GCRI, published in January 2021, ranked 180 countries based on the impact of extreme weather events and associated socio-economic data from 2000-2019. According to the publishing agency, the rankings are meant to forewarn countries about the possibility of more frequent and/or severe climate-related events in the future. This index uses historical data to provide insights on exposure to extreme events. It cannot be used for linear forecasts about future climate impact. There are deep fault lines in the methodology and interpretation of the country rankings. Recommendations based on this index should be generated with caution.
•First, the GCRI ranks countries based on four key indicators: number of deaths; number of deaths per 1,00,000 inhabitants; sum of losses in Purchasing Power Parity (in U.S. dollars); and losses per unit of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of these indicators, two are absolute while the other two are relative. However, the GCRI report does not provide a rationale for the selection of these macro indicators.
•Second, the index suffers from exclusion errors and selection bias. Composite indicators are better constructed using micro indicators instead of macro indicators, which measure loss because isolating the effect of the loss of elements on GDP is fraught with errors. Instead, a number of key micro indicators such as the total number of people injured, loss of livestock, loss of public and private infrastructure, crop loss and others are better candidates for assessing the composite loss resulting from climate change events. Third, the index accounts for information on weather-related events like storms, floods, temperature extremes and mass movements. However, it omits geological incidents like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or tsunamis, which may be potentially triggered by climate change and can have economic and humanitarian impact.
•Fourth, the ranking under the GCRI is done based on data collected by Munich Re’s NatCatService, which is not validated at the ground-level. The data gaps particularly with regard to economic losses are based on experience, the prevailing intellectual property of MunichRe and the market value of elements at risk that are at best approximate values of economic losses.
Delays in action and response
•Any discussion on measurement and management of climate risk is incomplete without accounting for issues of uncertainty, scale and delays between action and response to climate change. Therefore, climate change can at best be managed within a comprehensive risk assessment framework, which uses climate information to better cope with the impact of climate change.
•In this context, India’s latest module on the National Disaster Management Information System (NDMIS) captures damages and losses caused by disasters and monitors the targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. The NDMIS captures details on parameters like death, injury, affected population by categories as well as economic losses in social and infrastructure sectors due to weather and geological events on a daily basis. The data captured by the NDMIS includes all major climatic events.
•Deploying effective approaches and principles to foster collaboration among climate risk information users and providers, along with enabling the implementation of effective management actions, will allow India to leapfrog on the targets envisaged in the Sendai Framework.
📰 More a private sector primer than health-care pathway
A new NITI Aayog report defies accepted logic that universal health coverage entails a strong role for the Government
•The central government’s flagship health insurance scheme, the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), aims to extend hospitalisation cover of up to ₹5 lakh per family per annum to a poor and vulnerable population of nearly 50 crore people. Apart from AB-PMJAY and State-level government health insurance schemes, small segments of the Indian population are covered under social health insurance schemes and private health insurance. Covering the left out segment of the population, commonly termed the ‘missing middle’ sandwiched between the poor and the affluent, has been discussed by the Government recently. Towards this, NITI Aayog recently published a road map document entitled “Health Insurance for India’s Missing Middle”. However, to say the least, the report confounds all hopes and expectations of a credible pathway to universal health coverage (UHC) for India.
•The report proposes voluntary, contributory health insurance dispensed mainly by private commercial health insurers as the prime instrument for extending health insurance to the ‘missing middle’. Government subsidies, if any at all, will be reserved for the very poor within the ‘missing middle’ and only at a later stage of development of voluntary contributory insurance. This is a major swerve from the vision espoused by the high-level expert group on UHC a decade ago, which was sceptical about such a health insurance model as the instrument of UHC and advocated a largely tax-financed health system albeit with private sector participation.
In-patient care
•Those with even a rudimentary understanding of health policy would know that no country has ever achieved UHC by relying predominantly on private sources of financing health care. Evidence shows that in developing countries such as India, with a gargantuan informal sector, contributory health insurance is not the best way forward and can be replete with problems. But even when we look at international precedents of contributory social health insurance models, some very important traits stand out, for example, significant levels of government subsidy to schemes; not-for-profit mode of operation; and some important guarantees for health. The NITI report sweepingly ignores these fundamental precepts.
•For hospitalisation insurance, the report proposes a model similar to the Arogya Sanjeevani scheme, albeit with lower projected premiums of around ₹4,000-₹6,000 per family per annum (for a sum insured of ₹5 lakh for a family of five). There would be a standard benefit package for all, and the insured sum will be between ₹5,00,000 and ₹10,00,000. Insurance will be dispensed largely by commercial insurers who would compete among themselves.
•It is clear how this model is a little different from commercial private insurance, except for somewhat lower premiums. These low premiums are achieved by reducing administrative costs of insurers through an array of measures, including private use of government infrastructure, and possibly by switching to low-powered modes of physician payments.
•Most importantly, low premiums are not achieved on account of government subsidies or regulation. One can see how this model is vulnerable to nearly every vice that characterises conventional private insurance.
•For instance, consider countries such as Switzerland. Despite relying predominantly on private insurers and a competitive model of insurance, certain important checks and balances exist: benefits are etched in legislation; basic insurance is mandatory and not-for-profit; cream-skimming and risk-discrimination are prohibited. Such checks and balances are a long shot in the Indian scenario, neither have they been discussed in the NITI report.
•The report suggests enrolment in groups as a means to counter adverse selection. The prevailing per capita expenditure on hospital care is used to reflect affordability of hospital insurance, and thereby, a possible willingness to pay for insurance.
•Both these notions are likely to be far-fetched in practice, and the model is likely to be characterised by widespread adverse selection notwithstanding. It is important to remember that even free-of-cost government health insurance for the poor has little penetration in the country, despite a nearly two decade-long legacy. The possible destiny of contributory private health insurance with modestly lower premiums, for a target group that is not significantly well-off, is obvious.
Out-patient care
•An even more untenable case has been made with respect to out-patient department (OPD) care insurance coverage, which includes doctor consultations, diagnostics, medicines, etc. The report rightly acknowledges that OPD expenses comprise the largest share of out-of-pocket expenditure on health care, and concomitantly have a greater role in impoverishment of families due to health-care expenses. The report proposes an OPD insurance with an insured sum of ₹5,000 per family per annum, and again uses average per capita OPD spending to justify the ability to pay. However, the OPD insurance is envisaged on a subscription basis, which means that insured families would need to pay nearly the entire insured sum in advance to obtain the benefits. This is the last thing one would equate with UHC.
•Clearly, this route is unlikely to result in any significant reduction of out-of-pocket expenditure on OPD care, which beats the whole purpose of providing insurance. Any cost savings or benefits that accrue would be due to using low-powered physician payment modes and a more integrated and coordinated pathway of care. However, their contribution is likely to be nominal and at least be partly offset by the administrative costs involved in insurance. Individuals are likely to be largely indifferent to such an OPD insurance scheme, particularly if it restricts choice of health-care providers.
Wrong disposition
•The NITI report defies the universally accepted logic that UHC invariably entails a strong and overarching role for the Government in health care, particularly in developing countries. Rather than plot a pathway for UHC in India, the report is more about expanding the footprints and penetration of the private health insurance sector.
•Further, the report looks to attain the elusive UHC with few or no fiscal implications for the Government, which is an absurd idea by any stretch of the imagination. Such a disposition is highly dismaying in the aftermath of COVID-19. The National Health Policy 2017 envisaged increasing public health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025. Let us not contradict ourselves so early and at this crucial juncture of an unprecedented pandemic.
