📰 ‘More women got maternity benefit’
Total beneficiaries under PMMVY is more than the indicative target, says Irani
•The number of beneficiaries who enrolled for the maternity benefit programme, called Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), exceeded the government’s target of 51.7 lakh per year in each of the last three years, Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani told Parliament on Wednesday.
•“The total number of beneficiaries enrolled during each of the last three financial years under the PMMVY is more than the indicative target,” the Minister said in the Rajya Sabha in response to a question from Trinamool Congress member Sushmita Dev. The reply did not provide the exact number of enrolments.
•The PMMVY scheme was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address to the nation on December 31, 2016. It provides a benefit of Rs. 5,000 in three instalments to a woman for her first living child upon meeting certain conditions. This is meant as partial compensation for loss of wage during her pregnancy so that she can get proper nutrition.
•The scheme is only for those women who are not employed by the Central or State governments or a Public Sector Undertaking and don’t receive similar benefits under any law. It is clubbed with the Janani Suraksha Yojana scheme which provides nearly Rs. 1,000 for institutional births so that altogether mothers get Rs. 6,000 in maternity benefit.
•The scheme has been criticised for under-funding and failing to cater to all targeted beneficiaries. Activists also call the scheme illegal as it violates the National Food Security Act, 2013 under which all mothers, and not just mothers of the first living child, should get a maternity benefit of Rs. 6,000.
📰 ‘Over 40% of teaching posts in IITs are vacant’
Education Ministry data also highlights poor representation of faculty from reserved categories
•Over 40% of teaching posts in all 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are vacant, according to data provided by the Ministry of Education in the Lok Sabha to a question raised by Congress member Shashi Tharoor.
•According to the data, while 6,511 teaching faculty are working in the IITs, 4,370 posts are vacant..
•The data once again highlighted the poor representation of faculty from reserved categories. Only 12% of the 6,511 teaching staff are from Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), Other Backward Classes and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS). The Ministry did not provide category-wise break down of the faculty strength. However, an earlier reply submitted in December 2021 showed that there were only 32 faculty members from ST, 183 from SC, and 462 from OBC communities.
•As per the reservation policies, the SCs, STs, OBCs, and the EWS should be provided a reservation of 7.5%, 15%, 27% and 10% respectively. This would mean that ideally at least 59.5% of the faculty must be from reserved categories.
•Among the older and bigger IITs, IIT (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad had 57.2% of posts vacant, followed by 53.4% in IIT Kharagpur. IIT Delhi was the exception with just 9.4% of the posts vacant. However, the institution had one of the lowest representation of faculty from reserved categories (6.5%). IIT Bombay had the poorest representation with just 3.8% of its 693 faculty members from reserved categories.
Recruitment drive
•Mr. Tharoor’s questions were about the vacancies, student to faculty ratio and the measures being taken to fill the vacancies. The Ministry, in its reply, pointed to the ongoing special recruitment drive under “mission mode” from September 2021 to September 2022 to fill the vacancies under the reserved categories.
•However, the special recruitment drive has already come under criticism as the problems posed by the flexible cadre structure in IITs have not been addressed. As per the flexible cadre structure, the sanctioned faculty strength is not fixed at each category, viz. Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Professors but only at the overall level. Until recently, IITs were implementing reservation only at the level of Assistant Professor.
•Rajesh Paswan, convener of the Delhi-based Joint Forum for Academic and Social Justice (JFASJ), an organisation fighting for the implementation of reservation policies in higher education institutions, said the present numbers on faculty from reserved categories itself were misleading. “Until the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers' Cadre) Act came into force, IITs were hardly implementing reservation. Hence many of the faculty members must have been recruited under general category,” he said.
📰 ‘Vote for DMK will bring growth, development to Madurai’
Wherever women are given opportunities, society has benefited: Palanivel Thiaga Rajan
•“Your vote for the DMK and its allies in the urban local bodies elections would bring phenomenal growth and development to the temple city,” said Finance Minister and Madurai Central Assembly Constituency MLA Palanivel Thiaga Rajan here on Wednesday.
•Speaking for DMK candidate Indrani Ponvasanth (Ward 57) at Arapalayam Manthai Thidal, he said wherever women were given equal opportunities, society had benefited in many spheres. Though the delimitation exercise of the wards in Madurai Corporation had not been done as planned by the AIADMK government, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin decided to go ahead with the urban local bodies polls as it would benefit people in a big way, he said, adding women were contesting in 13 of the 16 wards in Madurai Central Assembly Constituency. “I am happy about that,” Mr. Thiaga Rajan said.
•At few other gatherings, Mr. Thiaga Rajan said the people had elected him twice as MLA.
•He said he was adjudged the best MLA while in the Opposition for his meticulous interactions and disbursing government assistance to the needy.
•Having been given an important portfolio of Finance by the Chief Minister, Mr. Thiaga Rajan said, he would do his best for the common man. He also thanked the people for electing as Maduai MP Su. Venkatesan, who had been fighting hard against the BJP government to safeguard the State’s rights.
•The Minister further said the Chief Minister had allotted Rs. 25 crore for Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple ‘kumbabishekam’ and Rs. 500 crore for the integrated drinking water and sewage project in Madurai city. The newly elected council under the leadership of the DMK would be transparent in administration and deliver on all its promises, he added.
📰 Quad Ministers set to meet in Australia
Jaishankar will join other Foreign Ministers to discuss cooperation on vaccines, tech and security
•External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar will begin a visit to Australia on Thursday and attend a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Quad (India, Australia, United States, Japan), which is expected to discuss cooperation on vaccines, technology and regional security issues including related to China.
•The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said Friday’s Quad meeting, during Mr. Jaishankar’s first visit to Australia as EAM, will see the four ministers “exchange views on regional strategic issues given their shared vision of a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region.” “The Ministers will review ongoing Quad cooperation and build on the positive and constructive agenda announced by the Leaders at the two Summits in 2021, to address contemporary challenges such as the COVID pandemic, supply chains, critical technologies, climate change, infrastructure, etc.,” the MEA said.
•Mr. Jaishankar will also hold a dialogue with his Australian counterpart Marise Payne. The visit will be followed by a trip to the Philippines on February 13. India and the Philippines last month signed a landmark $375 million deal for the supply of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. The MEA said the visits would “impart further momentum to bilateral relations with our key partners in the Indo-Pacific, Australia, and the Philippines, which is also a leading member of ASEAN.”
•While the MEA statement did not mention China, U.S. officials said ahead of the meeting that the Quad would discuss “challenges that China poses”. “The Quad is an informal grouping of likeminded democracies who share many interests, principles, and values vis-à-vis the kind of region that we want to live in – a region based on a rules-based order in which all countries big and small follow the rules, a region in which disputes are resolved peacefully, and in which countries have the freedom to make their own sovereign choices,” Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink said, adding that the four Foreign Ministers “will discuss challenges to that order and to those values” and “part of that discussion will relate to the challenges that China poses to those values and to that rules-based order in a number of sectors”.
‘Cold war mindset’
•China reacted sharply to that statement on Wednesday, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian saying the U.S. “despite its ruined democratic brand still forces other countries to accept its democratic standards and cobbles together cliques by drawing the ideological line”. Of the Quad, he said China “hopes the U.S. and other countries concerned will grasp the trend of the times, adopt a proper mindset and discard the Cold War mentality” and “contribute more to regional peace, stability and prosperity instead of putting a strain on the relations between regional countries”.
•The Quad Foreign Ministers meet is expected to lay the groundwork for the second Quad leaders summit likely to take place this summer. In September last year, the four leaders, meeting in Washington for the first time, laid out an ambitious agenda for the grouping, from cooperating on vaccines to regional infrastructure and critical technologies such as 5G.
•The four countries pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses globally and produce at least 1 billion doses by the end of 2022. In March last year, the four countries also set up a new critical and emerging technologies group focusing on 5G, technical standards and technology supply chains. Also in the works is a joint initiative to “identify vulnerabilities” and “bolster supply-chain security” for semiconductors.
📰 It’s time to take a relook at privatisation
Simply pursuing this path while utilising such proceeds for loan write-offs or populist giveaways will not do
•India’s fiscal deficit (for the Centre) in FY22 is expected to be 6.8% of the GDP, or in layman’s terms about Rs. 15.06 lakh crore. When considering the debts of States as well, this jumps to about 12.7% of the GDP (as of FY21). In comparison, the budgetary outlay for MGNREGA in FY22 was Rs. 73,000 crore, while the Ministry of Defence was allocated Rs. 4.78 lakh crore for FY22. Every year, the shortfall grows wider.
The reality of privitisation
•There is consensus that privatisation is the panacea. Policymakers often cite the private sector’s ability to grow faster. This may not always be true — studies indicate that the gap in growth (and service) between public sector undertakings (PSUs) with autonomy and private firms is not significant. One study highlighted that the famed British privatisation initiative of British Airways, British Gas, and the Railways led to no systemic difference in performance (T.T. Ram Mohan, February 2021); even now, private British trains can be significantly delayed by “leaves on the line”. Evidence on performance after privatisation is even more mixed in developing countries. Of course, there are examples like VSNL and Hindustan Zinc, but growth post-privatisation is often due to multiple factors (for example, better funding under a private promoter versus a starved government budget, a better business cycle). Sometimes, the difference in a PSU’s performance (and ability to generate tax revenue) is simply government apathy.
•Privatisation as a revenue source has also offered paltry returns. As a state, we have sought to hock our generational wealth in PSUs for the past two decades, with limited success. The Disinvestment Commission, under the Ministry of Industries, was set up in 1996 to provide inputs on which firms to privatise in over a five-10-year period. However, this Commission was dissolved in 1999. A separate Department of Disinvestment was set up under the Ministry of Finance and later upgraded to a full-fledged Ministry in 2001. It was downgraded back to a department in 2004.
•Beyond the institutional set-up, privatisation as a policy has also singularly failed to raise significant funds – actual receipts from disinvestment have always fallen significantly short of targets. For example, in FY11, Rs. 22,846 crore was raised against a target of Rs. 40,000 crore; by FY20, Rs. 50,304 crore was raised against a target of Rs. 1 lakh crore (PRS India, 2021). In total, between FY11 and FY21, about Rs. 5 lakh crore was raised (that is, about 33% of just FY22’s projected fiscal deficit (PRS India, 2021) – some of this, notably through stake sale to other PSUs. Given social and institutional constraints, India’s ability to privatise firms will continue to be slow in the future (for example, BPCL’s long-awaited journey). Clearly, this is a lever that is unlikely to raise significant revenue. Perhaps it is time to consider other options.
•Going forward, outright privatisation (as opposed to stake sale) may not necessarily make sense. Air India aside, a recently held auction of about 21 oil and gas blocks had only three firms participating, of which two were PSUs; 18 blocks ended up with just a single bid. An additional push to privatise 12 rail route clusters attracted interest in just three routes, with only two bidders (again, one of which was a PSU). Meanwhile, in a market on the edge, with interest rate hikes coming, this may also not be the right time.
•There is also the challenge of valuation – for example, about 65% of about 300 national highway projects have been recording significant toll collection growth (>15%, since they have been in operation); any valuations of such assets will need to ensure they capture potential growth in toll revenue, as NHAI’s highway expansion bears fruit and the economy recovers. Instead, the Maruti model is instructive – the government had a joint venture with the Suzuki Corporation, but ceded control, despite Suzuki having only 26% shareholding, in return for a push by Suzuki for greater exports from India and manufacture of global models in India. Exits from Maruti were conducted in small tranches, ensuring a better valuation for the government. Empirical evidence highlights that stake sales are considered a preferred route (about 67% of all PSU sales in about 108 countries between 1977 and 2000 were conducted via this route), as it gives time to ensure price discovery, allowing improved performance to raise valuations over time,
•Beyond revenue raising, there are serious social consequences with privatisation. PSUs have been significant generators of employment in the past, with multiplier effects – there were about 348 CPSUs in existence in 2018, with a total investment of Rs. 16.4 trillion (Srivastava, Vinay K., March 2021) and about 10.3 lakh employees in Central Public Sector Enterprises (in 2019). A push for privatisation is a push for mass layoffs, in a period of low job creation.
•Greater concentration of public assets in select private hands is also a medium-term concern. In India, about 70% of all profits generated in the corporate sector in FY20 were with just 20 firms (in comparison, the situation in FY93 was about 15%). Across sectors, a whiff of oligopoly is emerging – cigarettes continue to be dominated by a single player (with ~77% market share in FY21), paints has one entity with ~40% in FY21, airports now has a new operator with about six airports plus a 74% stake in Mumbai’s international airport, while telecom has just three players left. Such concentration, mixed with privatisation of public assets, is likely to lead to higher usage fees (already being seeing in telecom) and inflation, coupled with a loss of strategic control.
Selective PHU reform
•Perhaps, another avenue of selective PSU reform could be considered. In China, for the past few decades, growth has been led by corporatised PSUs, all of them held under a holding company (SASAC), which promotes better governance, appoints leadership and executes mergers and acquisitions. Such PSUs that have scaled up are market leaders. In Singapore, the Ministry of Finance focuses on policymaking, while Temasek (the holding firm) is focused on corporatising and expanding its PSUs (for example, Singtel, PSA, Singapore Power, Singapore Airlines) towards a global scale. A PSU with greater autonomy, with the government retaining control via a holding firm, can also be subject to the right incentives (T.T. Ram Mohan, February 2021). Surely, Indian PSUs could aspire to be as large and efficient as the Chinese ones.
•The time has come to take a relook at privatisation. Simply pursuing this path, while utilising such proceeds for loan write-offs or populist giveaways in the election cycle will not do. A hunt for immediate revenue should not overshadow the long-term interest of the ordinary Indian.
