Comprehensive Current affairs 23 August 2020

 Focus on Editorials.

Editorials will be beneficial for UPSC mains.

Listen to the Weaver.

Context:

The Ministry of Textiles declared the terminationof the handloom, powerloom, wool, jute and silk boards causing widespread chatter, as if these bodies were the only saviours and protectors of these textiles for decades.

Set up by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and later headed by PupulJayakar, the All India Handicrafts & Handloom Board flourished when headed by these passionately committed women.

In 1990, the textile minister made himself the chairperson and nominated caste and political cronies, forgetting representation from Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast, and adding one token woman. 

Many subsequent regimes never held meetings. The Handloom Board never influenced policy, improved approaches or even removed a speck of dust.

Cooperative federalism:

A termite-ridden body cannot be renovated as some would wish. It has to be dismantled.

But demolitions must lead to building a better institution, not banish the voice of the weavers concerned.

It has to be replaced by a well-chosen modern, dynamic, autonomous and inclusive body of genuinely experienced and credible voices from the handloom-weaving chain, including spinners, weavers, dyers, designers, private and public craft institutions, e-market platform providers and experts.

The government must also learn to listen, hear dissent, discuss and engage with such bodies without lecturing, nominating or dominating — in short, there should be less government, more people.

State handloom boards (wherever they exist) are not enough as their outreach and vision are limited to the state and responses often depend on vote shares.

The Centre must be the receptacle for many senior weavers and experts who have national credibility, experience and vision.

A national view must be informed by national inputs: Cooperative federalism must mean a chain linking everyone.

New approach:

More significantly, the Handloom Day announcements at a video meeting by the minister and secretary, textiles laid out an entirely new approach to development.

For old hands in the field, these look like a strange mixture of the good, the bad, but are mostly foggy.

Under good, with caveats, would come Atmanirbhar Bharat, which involves the integration of plans with other ministries like Tourism.

Other ministries/departments such as the MEA/ICCR, culture, social justice, women & child welfare, minority affairs and KVIC should also be included.

All these ministries touch textiles and crafts and often, their functioning results in duplicating and overlapping rather than effectively integrating with the Ministry of Textiles.

The prime minister spoke of breaking ministry silos in 2014, but nothing is visible on the ground.

The Handloom Mark is emphasised, but methods for ensuring its purity are not clear. It should not go the way of bogus artisan cards which include tea sellers and traders.

National Institute of Fashion Technology students and faculty are to guide nine Weavers’ Service Centres. This is a good move for their resuscitation as many have potential.

Highlighting handloom pockets is a positive step, but there is a danger of seeking large “clusters”.

How will they be identified and what about important though small pockets of rare skills?

Will they fall between the cracks because “small is not beautiful” anymore?

Local to global:

Special promotional campaigns were announced. These are badly needed but not in the form of unimaginative, old-worldly advertisements.

Excellent India-centric graphic designer groups have done a much better job and should be promoted, rather than co-opted under the rigid government system.

Highly talented and committed professionals from the design community are kept out because they aren’t from NIFT, NID or otherwise “empanelled” repeatedly.

These groups did a yeoman job for promoting weavers during COVID-19. Their efforts should not go unnoticed.

Information technology is undoubtedly the new “king”, but if weavers have to avail of all knowledge from a special handloom portal, they need connectivity, computers and digital knowledge.

Only the corporate sector or government can rely on IT access for everything. “Maximum Governance, Minimum Government” is still a pipe dream.

If you seek government support in any manner, it can be a fly trap and become a “shun government” slogan for weavers and NGOs who have some self-respect.

Open-mindedness, less red tape, and inclusiveness are imperative. IT does not guarantee integrity or equality.

The worst of the announcements was the declaration of intent to sell handlooms at “the highest price at the highest level” and “not cheap cloth but most expensive cloth”. It sounded almost anti-Gandhian.

The prime minister’s call of “Local to Global” clearly indicates a bottom-up approach from production to marketing. This is the only way migrants will stay home.

Conclusion:

Local production for local markets is a brilliant strategy and needs encouragement. The poor man’s cloth has been taken over by powerlooms.

Selling expensive cloth to the wealthiest will shrink, not expand the market.

Instead, many levels of markets have to be targeted with different products for each segment.

Tailwind from villages.

Context:

As the COVID-19 pandemic courses on, India has now become the third country to have more than a million confirmed cases, together with the US and Brazil.

Even as the geographical dispersionincreases, COVID-19 remains largely an urban pandemic with large parts of rural India still mostly unscathed.

The naturally distanced and less mobile rural India seems to show a stark divergence to the densely-packed, most urbanised parts of the country, which have seen the worst outbreaks.

While the cities wrestlewith the health crisis, a number of factors are combining to boost rural India’s contribution to the revival of the overall economy.

Rural growth:

The government’s Rs 20-trillion economic package announced in May to mitigatethe downside impact of the COVID-19 crisis has largely focused on providing relief for the rural population and economy.

In addition to passing long-pending reforms such as easing norms with regard to the Essential Commodities Act, the government also announced a 10 per cent hike in minimum wages for MGNREGA, a 65 per cent rise in spending on public work schemes, and a six-month programme that will distribute free rations to around half of the households in the country.

Further, a strong start to the monsoon, along with high availability of water in reservoirs and large fiscal transfers, is helping improve rural growth prospects.

This confluence of factors shows up in the sowing activity at the beginning of the kharif planting cycle. As of July 17, the area sown had already crossed 66 per cent of overall arable area.

While the area under sowing is eventually likely to come closer to more realistic numbers, an early sowing cycle should ultimately boost income perceptions for the farming sector, which should eventually support rural consumer confidence.

Taken together, the organic farm growth and government measures are likely to raise the disposable income levels of rural households.

The combination of good production, better prices and large fiscal transfers may provide a material tailwindfor the rural economy.

 

With basic costs like spending on foodgrains being partly covered through fiscal transfers, rural savings have still risen, as evident from trends in Jan Dhan bank accounts.

Further, government-support programmes may lead to the movement of workers from urban to rural areas and provide for a cheaper alternative to farm labour during the peak season.

Double digit growth:

We estimate that the agriculture sector could register double-digit nominal GDP growth in FY20-21. That compares with a 2 per cent contraction we estimate for the overall economy.

This twin-speed recovery track is also well reflected in high-frequency indicators — sales of tractors, fertilisers, and two-wheelers are improving, while the typical urban signposts of demand, like automobile sales, aviation traffic and fuel consumption are lagging.

More importantly, this growth comes on the back of a third consecutive surplus monsoon, and amid relatively high food inflation.

However, a stronger rural sector will only be able to mitigate, not fully offset, the economic damage. The localised lockdowns continue to weigh on activity in the urban areas.

Ultimately, health care management and disease resolution will dictate the pace of the economy’s return to normal.

Conclusion:

A more robust recovery cycle in the farm sector to a certain extent actually increases the degree of policy freedom for the government and the RBI.

As rural incomes remain supportive on their own, the next phase of policy support can be more targeted towards the urban population, which has borne the bruntof the economic and the health crisis.

Supporting discretionary spending and incomes in urban areas will not lead to a faster economic recovery, but will help in improving fiscal finances.

This in turn should further boost the government’s ability to spend in a pro-cyclical manner, thus improving the chances of the Indian economy going back to levels seen before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Repair and mend.

Context:

Delhi has begun a long-overdue outreach to two important neighbours, Nepal and Bangladesh, with whom relations have been uneven in recent months.

PM and his Nepal counterpart spoke with each other in a prelude to Monday’s meeting between officials of both sides to discuss the territorial spat over the Lipulekh-Limpiyadhura-Kalapani tri junction.

Taken for granted:

Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla’s two-day visit to Dhaka came at a time when the Sheikh Hasina government is in talks with Beijing for a $1bn loan for a project on the river Teesta.

India has tended to take for granted neighbours with whom it has had traditionally good relations.

Even seasoned foreign policy hands in the MEA appear to have failed to anticipate that Nepal’s concerns about India’s new map last year would escalate, or that the CAA, 2019, would provoke problems with Bangladesh.

Down the years, the politics of the states on the borders has played an oversized role in setting, and skewing, India’s foreign policy towards neighbours.

Of late, though, the ideology and politics of the ruling party at the Centre has been a dominant force.

Extension of domestic ideology:

 

 

The ruling party at the Centre has sometimes sought to cast foreign policy in the region as an extension of the domestic ideological project.

For instance, in the case of the CAA in Assam and West Bengal, neighbours of Bangladesh on either side.

Or in the way Nepal is perceived, by virtue of its Hindu majority, almost as a feudatory state.

Bangladesh, on the other hand, must be watched with suspicion for who it might be pushing in over the border.

In the strategic community, too, there has been an impatience with the South Asian neighbours for not seeing it India’s way.

But the neighbours, which have their own vibrant democratic polities, have sized up India’s economic vulnerabilities and security pre-occupations, and are confidently leveraging the regional big power imbalance to serve their own interests.

Episodic:

Repairing these ties requires the recognition that each nation is an equal, irrespective of size, and has its own agency.

India must show a large-heartedness and generositythat has been missing for too long, replaced by a blunt transactionalism, in which each country is only a prize in an India vs China match.

The engagement has to be constant and continuous, not episodic or in reaction to a Chinese loan here or with an eye on an election in a particular state.

India and Nepal have had the most progressive relations in South Asia, with open borders and a free intermingling of people, almost European in vision and scope. India helped in the creation of Bangladesh.

Conclusion:

Delhi continues to have strong political and diplomatic relations with these countries. It must mind its own strengths, the deep people to people connections, and the shared histories of the region, to reset ties, not just with Kathmandu and Dhaka but across the region.

Delhi’s outreach to Kathmandu, Dhaka is welcome. Engagement with neighbours needs to be constant and large-hearted.

The marriage age misconception.

Context:

From the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day, the Prime Minister declared that the government is considering raising the legal age of marriage for girls, which is currently 18 years.

He said, “We have formed a committee to ensure that daughters are no longer suffering from malnutrition and they are married off at the right age.

As soon as the report is submitted, appropriate decisions will be taken about the age of marriage of daughters.”

The Committee in question is the task force set up on June 4, announced earlier by the Finance Minister in her Budget Speech.

It is widely understood (but not officially stated) that the task force is meant to produce a rationale for raising the minimum age of marriage for women to 21, thus bringing it on a par with that for men.

Since there is no obvious constituency that has been demanding such a change, the government seems to be motivated by the belief that simply raising the age of marriage is the best way to improve the health and nutritional status of mothers and their infants.

Because it flies in the face ofthe available evidence, we need to ask where this belief is coming from.

Population control:

One plausible source could be those who advocate for population control and who are influential and whose research is well-funded.

Consider, for example, an article published in the prestigious journal The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health.

This article analyses data on stuntingin children and thinness in mothers (as measures of under-nourishment) in the latest round of the National Family Health Survey 4 (2015-16).

The paper uses rigorous methods to chase a flawed hypothesis.

The authors examine the strength of the association between many different causal factors (the mother’s age at childbearing, her educational level, living conditions, health conditions, decision-making power, and so on) and the health status of mother and child.

As it turns out, the poverty of the mother plays the greatest role of all by far — both in relation to her undernourishment and that of her child, but this is not acknowledged.

The authors only concede that their cross-sectional design (using data from a single time period) “reduces causal inference.

For example, becoming pregnant early might lead to reduced education or wealth; however, a woman from a poor background and lower education might be more likely to become pregnant early.”

In other words, instead of early pregnancy causing malnourishment, they may both be the consequences of poverty.

Nutritional Programmes:

The stated concern of the study was to find ways to break the “intergenerational cycle of undernutrition”.

Surely the best way to go about breaking such a cycle would be to pick the factors that are playing the strongest role in perpetuating it.

In this case, it would be to address the poverty of the mother, which could be done in a myriadways.

Beginning with the most direct method of nutritional programmes for girls and women through a range of institutional mechanisms from Anganwadis to schools.

However, the authors choose to concentrate on delaying the age of pregnancy, even though this is the weakest link of all.

In fact, age only begins to have some real significance when pregnancies are delayed to ages of 25 and above, which is true of only a minuscule proportion of women in India.

The article is unusually generous in its use of the usual scholarly caveats, but leaves itself open to being co-opted by larger agendas driven by the doctrine that “over-population” is the root of all evil in poor countries.

Declining fertility rates:

It is unfortunate that such thinking is finding a home in the highest office of the Indian government.

India is home to the largest number of underage marriages in the world.

Perhaps he (or his advisers) were influenced by the many international reports making alarming predictions about future dystopiasthat would result if child marriage were not swiftly eliminated.

It is a pity that those who have the Prime Minister’s ear did not bother to seek the advice of our own demographers who have been studying the apparent link between early marriage and escalating fertility rates for decades.

As it turns out, India’s fertility rates have been declining to well below replacement levels in many States, including those with higher levels of child marriage

This could be the reason why those advocatingpopulation control have chosen to shift from fuelling fears about booming populations to expressing concern for the undernourishment of children.

Costless and effortless:

Perhaps there is a more cynicalreason at work. Raising the age at marriage by amending the law is costless and can be effortlessly achieved by legal fiat.

Why not claim that doing so will enhance the welfare of women and children, since addressing the true causes of the poor health and nutrition of mothers and children is too difficult a task?

The government will not incur any financial costs for raising the age of marriage of girls from 18 to 21 years.

But the change will leave the vast majority of Indian women who marry before they are 21 without the legal protections that the institution of marriage otherwise provides, and make their families criminalisable.

Those who ferventlybelieve that the minimum age of men and women should be the same in the name of gender equality can suggest that India follow global norms of 18 years for both.

Conclusion:

Given the present climate, it could even be that this move is partly prompted by a vague belief that child marriage is more prevalent among Muslims and helps them reproduce faster.

The evidence shows that this is not true, but such prejudices are inoculated.

In this context, it is interesting that the States with high mean ages at marriage of 25 years are erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Goa. Even Kerala (22 years) and Delhi (23 years) have significantly lower mean ages at marriage.

A losing proposition.

Context:

India has seen many versions of the ‘sons of the soil’ argument over decades.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister’s announcement that only those domiciled there would be eligible for government jobs in the State is not unique in that sense.

Nativism:

At the same time, it denotes a certain mainstreaming of nativism that more parties and States appear to be adopting.

Mr. Chouhan’s announcement was packaged as a promise to the youths of the State, but in reality, it is a sign of gloom.

Regional parties have always focused on local sentiments, but what is notable in recent years is the BJP and the Congress too jumping on the bandwagon.

The Congress in Madhya Pradesh is supporting the move, and in Maharashtra, it is part of the ruling coalition led by the Shiv Sena which is pushing measures to give priority to locals in employment in the private sector.

Similar moves from States such as Karnataka, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Telangana in recent years to introduce various types of domicile eligibility for job seekers, in private and government jobs, have either been abortedor had limited outcomes.

But measures that raise artificial barriers go against the grain of national integration, which includes market integration.

Exaggeration:

There are regional particularities to be considered, nevertheless. Some States require a certain proficiency in the local language to be employed in government jobs, which is for administrative reasons.

There are also restrictions on movement of people into tribal areas of India. These are exceptions provided in the legal and constitutional scheme of India to manage its remarkable diversity.

Inciting local passions in order to divert public attention from the real challenge of generating employment for the country’s swelling youth population falls in a different realm.

Migrant populations fulfil a market demand created by gaps in skills and preferences.

That is one reason why government orders and even laws of the past in several places that mandated quotas for locals in employment were not enforced.

The spectre of locals losing out to migrants is hugely exaggerated and often designed to beguilethe people.

In Gujarat, politicians including those of the ruling BJP continue to raise a hue and cryfor a domicile quota of 85% in the private sector workforce whereas the government data showed in 2017 that 92% of it was local already.

Conclusion:

India has a severe unemployment crisis and efforts that match the challenge are badly needed.

Nativism is not a part of the solution. In fact, it can aggravate the crisis by creating a hostile environment to investment, growth and employment generation.

Nativism is not a solution to India’s growing unemployment crisis.

Less taxing: On National Recruitment Agency

Context:

The Union Cabinet has decided to create a National Recruitment Agency to conduct a screening examination for non-gazetted jobs.

It also aims to eliminate the need for candidates to take separate examinations of the Railway Recruitment Board, Staff Selection Commission and Institute of Banking Personnel Selection.

Multiple Gains:

For some years now, the railways have been using contractual labour in projects and services, but the government system remains a major recruiter.

In March this year, Railways Minister told Parliament that four employment notifications for Group C employees in the Ministry were issued in 2019 for 1.43 lakh posts, besides a similar number selected the previous year.

Overall, the posts coming under the ambit of the proposed NRA would cover about 1.25 lakh jobs a year, which typically attract about 2.5 crore aspirants.

The gains from a single examination, when offered at the district level in the regional language, as opposed to a multiplicity of tests in far fewer locations are self-evident.

Candidates would no longer have to travel to urban centres at considerable expense and hardship to take an employment test.

Opportunities to improve performance, subject to age limits, and a three-year validity for scores are positive features.

Yet, the long-term relevance of such reforms will depend on the commitment of governments to raise the level of public employment and expand services to the public, both of which are low in India.

Wider access:

While announcing the proposal for the recruitment agency in her Budget speech earlier this year, Finance Minister said the NRA would be an independent, professional, specialist organisation.

There would also be an emphasis on creating advanced online testing infrastructure in 117 aspirational districts, many of which are in States with low social development indices.

These are laudableobjectives, but it is relevant to point out that as a share of the organised workforce, Central government employment appears to be declining.

New posts are sanctioned periodically, but a large number of vacancies remain unfilled.

With growing emphasis on transferring core railway services to the private sector, there may be fewer government jobs on offer in the future.

Moreover, jobs under the Centre, predominantly in the railways and defence sectors, constitute around 14% of public employment, with the rest falling within the purview of States. Reform must, therefore, have a wider reach to achieve scale.

It must be marked by well-defined procedures, wide publicity and open competition, besides virtual elimination of discretion.

Conclusion:

As a preliminary screening test, the NRA can potentially cut delays, which are a familiar feature with government, boost transparency and enable wider access. The entire process of candidate selection must be a model, raising the bar on speed, efficiency and integrity.

A standardized recruitment test is an advance, but more jobs are needed.