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.
