📰 Boon to ban: How the wheat export story changed in two months
What were the reasons for this sudden decision by the Government?
•The story so far: On May 13, the government effectively banned the export of wheat.
What happened?
•On March 25, to a supplementary question raised by Congress leader Anand Sharma in the Rajya Sabha regarding improving wheat exports, given that Russia and Ukraine the two large exporters of the commodity were in the middle of a war, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal answered that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants the flavour of India’s wheat to capture the entire world’s taste buds.
•The Minister said that “we are working on the track of increasing our wheat exports to the current importers. Agriculture Ministry is in dialogue with various countries for the process to be speeded up and expedited so that newer markets for wheat can be sought.”
•The efforts to increase wheat exports continued even as recently as May 12 when the Centre decided to send trade delegations to Morocco, Tunisia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Algeria and Lebanon to “explore possibilities of boosting wheat exports,” a PIB press release said.
•However, food security campaigners had insisted on a cautious approach from the start.
•Their reasons were two-fold. They argued that ensuring the stability of prices in India and the availability of grain for internal consumption should be the top two priorities for the Indian government than increasing exports. The increase in exports should not be done at the cost of domestic consumption, especially with the recent expansion of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana(PMGKAY) program, they cautioned.
Why were wheat exports banned?
•Eventually, the food security experts’ warnings came true.
•On May 4, the government revised down its wheat production estimates from 111.32 million tonnes (MT) to 105 MT for the crop year ending June. According to the Press Trust of India, 18 MT of wheat were procured till May 14 of the ongoing 2022-23 marketing year, much less than the 36.7 MT in the year-ago period.
•So, the decrease in production estimates and a considerable fall in wheat procurement raised concerns that domestic consumption may get impacted. Moreover, the local prices started to rise. In March, the wholesale inflation of wheat crossed the 14% mark, though it eased a bit to about 10% in April.
•In April, retail inflation of wheat flour accelerated to 9.59% from an already higher 7.77% in March. As of May 17, the average retail price of wheat flour was ₹33.05 per kg. The maximum price had touched ₹59/kg.
•Both these factors forced the government to ban wheat exports on May 13, two days after the decision to send delegates to nine countries to explore the option of enhancing exports was taken. The Centre relaxed its export ban order on Tuesday by allowing consignments that were registered in the Customs Department’s systems and handed over for examination on or prior to May 13. They have also allowed a consignment headed for Egypt.
What led to the decrease in production?
•The extreme temperatures recorded in March and April, across north India, were the reason behind the sudden turnaround of the government.
•For instance, across Punjab, between April 8 and 14, the maximum temperature was over 6°C higher than the usual, compared to the long period average. The actual maximum temperatures have been consistently hovering over the 40°C mark across the State in April. The extreme heat led to a marked decrease in wheat yields across north India. For instance, in Punjab, crop cutting experiments showed that the wheat productivity was below 18 quintals per acre this year, down from the average yield of 19.7 quintals per acre last year.
•Hence, the wheat arrivals in Punjab’s mandis were 20% lower in the first twenty days of the 2022 season compared to the same period in 2021. In the first twenty days, 73 lakh metric tonnes of wheat had reached the mandis in 2022, compared to the 92.4 lakh recorded in 2021.
While old museums are being modernised and upgraded, new ones are being established in India
•On the occasion of International Museum Day on May 18, the Ministry of Culture has made admissions to all museums under its ambit free of cost for a week. This not only makes our art and culture accessible to all, but also provides us an opportunity to propagate our civilisational heritage.
•The occasion also gives us an opportunity to look back at the progress that we have made in re-imagining our museums and cultural spaces. There has been a transformational shift in our perspectives of our heritage and this can be seen in our approach to preserve and promote it. First, there has been a shift from a museum-centric approach to a cultural spaces approach. Second, we have been able to build museums for specific purposes rather than rely on general purpose museums. And finally, we have looked at museums with a whole-of-government approach to ensure that museums provide a wholesome experience.
Cultural spaces approach
•India is one of the few continuously inhabited civilisational states that continues to thrive. Therefore, our art, culture and heritage are not just available for viewing in museums but can be witnessed in our day-to-day activities. The festivals we celebrate, the deities we worship, the food we eat, and the dance and music performances we appreciate are all a testimony to our civilisational ethos. Keeping this in mind, our approach has been to continuously integrate our culture into our lives rather than to position them in museums. So, when the Prime Minister brings back stolen heritage from other countries, there is an attempt to restore it to the place it was taken from rather than to have it languish in the warehouse of a museum. It is with this underlying philosophy that the recently retrieved idol of Goddess Annapurna was returned to its rightful place at Kashi Vishwanath temple, Varanasi. There is now a plan to continue repatriating heritage objects to their original locations, wherever feasible. Similarly, the attempt to embed art and our civilisational heritage in places such as the new Central Vista Project also builds on this approach to have cultural spaces that are contiguous and transcend standalone buildings.
Specific purpose museums
•In August 2013, in response to a question in Parliament on the government’s plan to establish a National Tribal Museum in the country, the government at that time responded that there was no such plan. Today, to recognise the role of over 200 tribal freedom fighters across India who participated in about 85 revolts and uprisings against colonial rule, 10 tribal freedom fighter museums are being set up across the country. On the occasion of the first Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas on November 15 last year, the Prime Minister launched the Birsa Munda museum in Ranchi.
•Similarly, last month on April 14, on the occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Pradhan Mantri Sangrahalaya. The museum is a tribute to every Prime Minister of India since independence and showcases the contributions they made and the challenges they faced in their tenure.
•In tribute to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Prime Minister inaugurated the Statue of Unity in October 2018, which also contains a museum that chronicles the various facets of Patel in great detail.
•These examples show the transformational journey that has been made in the last eight years. The strategic shift to specific theme-based museums, which have unique content and a definite purpose, also ensures that rich material is on display and the overall experience is wholesome. There have been several other attempts along these lines that are worth mentioning, such as the Biplobi Bharat museum in Kolkata, the arms and armour museum at the Red Fort, a gallery on Gautama Buddha in Delhi, and the museum on Jammu and Kashmir.
Whole-of-government approach
•India is home to over 1,000 museums representing a rich and diverse blend of the cultural, religious and scientific achievements that our civilisation has witnessed over the years. These museums do not just lie under the control of the Ministry of Culture. Other Ministries manage the Railway museums, the crafts and textiles museums, and the food museum, to name a few. Therefore, the government is taking a whole-of -government approach to provide a wholesome experience to all stakeholders. To achieve this, as an example, the 25 science cities, centres and museums under the National Council of Science Museums, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, are backed with a Memoranda of Understanding with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). This ensures that the spaces are being developed with expertise, fresh ideas and new thought. The use of digital technology to enhance user experience is not limited to the use of Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, but to widen public access through modernisation and digitisation of collections and exhibitions. This is now a work in progress and is visible in the museums that have been recently inaugurated such as the Pradhan Mantri Sangrahalaya.
•In all these efforts, there are challenges, but none of them are insurmountable. Breaking down silos to forge a whole-of-government approach in such a specialised domain requires new skills and perspectives and these are being developed. Human capacities and domain knowledge require continued upgradation, and the new Indian Institute of Heritage that is being set up as a world class university aims to address these challenges. There are also challenges in modernising our traditional museums from display spaces of past glory to making them more interactive, immersive experiences through technology interfaces, innovative curatorial skills and imaginative storytelling. Compared to new museums, successfully repurposing existing museum spaces needs more imaginative thinking and has a different set of challenges. The efforts in digitisation and reprography are painstaking processes that can take several years to complete.
•With this renewed mandate of modernisation, upgradation, and establishment of new museums, we are bringing our institutions closer to international standards of museology in the 21st century. As a firm step in this direction, the Ministry of Culture organised a first-of-its-kind Global Summit on ‘Reimagining Museums in India’ in February this year. The learnings from the summit are being incorporated to devise a blueprint for the development of new museums, nurture a renewal framework, and reinvigorate existing museums. It is said that there is nothing more important than an idea whose time has come. Re-imagining museums in India is such an idea.
📰 Improving cold chain systems
Robust cold chain systems are an investment in India’s future pandemic preparedness
•The pandemic has taught us a great deal. We have all become familiar with terms such as variants, waves, vaccine supply chains and quarantine. It has also encouraged an interest in preventive health technology, especially in vaccines. This interest is understandable, given that India accounts for the second highest caseload of COVID-19 globally. Once the vaccines were available, the nation had to take on the task of rolling out one of the largest vaccination drives in the world; this of course, is not new to India.
•India’s Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP), launched in 1985 to deliver routine immunisation, showcased its strengths in managing large-scale vaccine delivery. This programme targets close to 2.67 crore newborns and 2.9 crore pregnant women annually. To strengthen the programme’s outcomes, in 2014, Mission Indradhanush was introduced to achieve full immunisation coverage of all children and pregnant women at a rapid pace — a commendable initiative.
•But the pandemic reminded us that vaccines alone do not save lives, vaccination does. While we have, over the years, set up a strong service delivery network, the pandemic showed us that there were weak links in the chain, especially in the cold chain, which needs to be robust and seamless.
Cold chain management
•The success of any sustainable vaccination programme relies on many factors. A key factor is cold chain management because when this fails, the potency or effectiveness of the vaccine is wasted. Nearly half the vaccines distributed around the world go to waste, in large part due to a failure to properly control storage temperatures. In India, close to 20% of temperature-sensitive healthcare products arrive damaged or degraded because of broken or insufficient cold chains, including a quarter of vaccines. Wastage has cost implications and can delay the achievement of immunisation targets.
•Here, India has strong foundations to build upon. India’s UIP comprises upwards of 27,000 functional cold chain points of which 750 (3%) are located at the district level and above; the remaining 95% are located below the district level. The COVID-19 vaccination efforts relied on the cold chain infrastructure established under the UIP to cover 87 crore people with two doses of the vaccine and over 100 crore with at least a single dose. This effort was supported by the government’s cloud-based digital platform Co-WIN, which helps to facilitate registration, immunisations and appointments, and issues digital vaccine certificates, highlighting the benefits of digitisation.
•The Health Ministry has been digitising the vaccine supply chain network in recent years through the use of cloud technology, such as with the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN). Developed with support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and implemented by the UN Development Programme through a smartphone-based app, the platform digitises information on vaccine stocks and temperatures across the country. This supports healthcare workers in the last mile in supervising and maintaining the efficiency of the vaccine cold chain.
•The role played by supportive infrastructure for cold chain such as a regular supply of electricity cannot be underplayed. In this regard, there is a need to improve electrification, especially in the last mile, for which the potential of solar-driven technology must be explored to integrate sustainable development. For instance, in Chhattisgarh, 72% of the functioning health centres have been solarised to tackle the issue of regular power outages. This has significantly reduced disruption in service provision and increased the uptake of services.
Building back better and stronger
•COVID-19, which disrupted supply chains across countries and in India too, marks an inflection point in the trajectory of immunisation programmes. As we recover from the pandemic, there is an opportunity for us to pivot to newer mechanisms that can help develop unbroken and resilient cold chain systems and thus augment the immunisation landscape. Going forward, this will be the only way to ensure access to the last mile with life-saving vaccines, in time.
•As we reflect on the learnings from the pandemic, it is imperative that we look towards a future where the critical arteries that comprise the supply chain of immunisation facilities be strengthened. India has pioneered many approaches to ensure access to public health services at a scale never seen before. Robust cold chain systems are an investment in India’s future pandemic preparedness; by taking steps towards actionable policies that improve the cold chain, we have an opportunity to lead the way in building back better and stronger.
