THE HINDU
Table of Contents
Can the NEP
fix access to universal education?
An
invisible humanitarian crisis in India
Academic
research is necessary, but not sufficient
Straying
into troubled waters
Imprisoned
fishermen in both India and Pakistan need to be released and their boats
returned
Jatin Desai
Along the coastal areas of Porbandar, Mangrol,
Veraval in Gujarat and the Union Territory of Diu on India’s western coast are
hundreds of families whose lives have been torn asunder, the men of their
households missing with only stray hopes of their return, women and children
struggling to make ends meet and see another sunrise. The men are currently in
jail in Pakistan, their families barely aware of their health and welfare.
Their only ‘crime’ was that they were doing their work in the waters between
India and Pakistan. These are fishermen who inadvertently crossed the invisible
line in the water between the countries.
As fishermen do not get ample fish on the
Gujarat side, they have no option but to go farther and farther out into the
sea. As they fish in mid-sea, they end up in waters controlled by Pakistan and
are arrested for inadvertently entering into that country.
India and Pakistan exchanged lists of
prisoners on July 1 as per which 270 Indian fishermen and 54 civilian prisoners
are in Pakistan’s prisons. India has 97 Pakistani fishermen and 265 civilian
prisoners in its jails. In more friendly or less antagonistic circumstances,
they would have been released after a formal procedure to check that they were
really fishermen and not spies, but, in these times of suspicion, the value of
their lives lies at the altar of bilateral relations. Consequently, their
families suffer. On average, these men would have spent one-and-a-half years in
prisons. Uncertainty hangs over them like the proverbial Damocles’s sword,
given that in their prison cells, they have little knowledge of when they will
be released and repatriated.
The 2008 proposal
This is not a new problem; it has dragged on
for years together, without a resolution in sight. To address this issue, in
2008, India and Pakistan had formed a judicial committee consisting of four
retired judges from each country. The committee used to visit prisons of the
other country specifically to meet the prisoners, examine consular access,
status of their cases, delay in release and repatriation, their health
condition, and so on. It unanimously suggested release and repatriation of
fishermen and a few women prisoners. The governments of both countries praised
their work but did not implement the recommendations. The last meeting was held
in October 2013. Five years later, there was a move to revive the panel. India
nominated its four members but Pakistan did not. It is yet to take a step in
that direction. Islamabad must do so urgently and call a meeting, given that
the last meeting was held in India.
Returning their boats
Further, when fishermen are arrested, their
boats are also confiscated. Their release means little till they get back
possession of their boats from the other country. Both the countries should
release those boats which can sail with some repair work. It is also time that
the two countries now consider adopting a ‘no-arrest policy’ in the case of
fishermen.
In the coastal villages of both the countries,
when men are imprisoned in the other country, women bear the brunt of the load,
while somehow holding their families together. The pain is the same on both
sides of the border. There are many examples across villages where the children
of the arrested fishermen have lost their childhoods. As the COVID-19 pandemic
wreaks havoc in both countries, there are growing concerns for the health of
the arrested fishermen among their families. There is hardly any communication
between the two except for some stray letters which are delayed. The families
have no definite way to know that their loved ones are safe from the virus. For
the arrested fishermen, it is an issue of survival. For India and Pakistan
celebrating their Independence Days this month, it should become a humanitarian
issue and an appropriate occasion to release and repatriate fishermen. Let the
fishermen too have their freedoms back.
Jatin Desai is with the Pakistan-India Peoples’s Forum for Peace
and Democracy
Can
the NEP fix access to universal education?
There
are concerns that the policy abandons the state’s commitments under the RTE Act
The new National Education Policy (NEP),
approved by the Union Cabinet last week, seeks to align itself with the
Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality
education for all in the next 20 years. The policy has brought into its ambit
children in the age group of 3 to 18 years. Leena Chandran Wadia and Anita
Rampal share their thoughts in a discussion moderated by D. Suresh Kumar.
Excerpts:
Is the NEP’s 10-year deadline, to make all
children entering Grade 1 school-ready through Early Childhood Care and
Education, practical?
Leena Chandran Wadia (LCW): I think we have to
be ready because every year that we lose, we lose some children. You know, at
the time that their brain is developing fast and they can learn a lot, we must
help them learn as much as possible. So that is a deadline we must try to meet.
Anita Rampal (AR): Since April 1, 2010, we
have a Right to Education Act making it a fundamental right of every child aged
between 6 and 14 years to get free and compulsory education, in a neighbourhood
school. This has been a fundamental right for the last 10 years. So there is no
question of having a target of another 10 years. What this policy is doing is,
it is very quietly, very problematically, going back on a fundamental right of
a child, enacted by law.
With the NEP silent on last year’s draft
proposal to expand the RTE Act’s scope to cover children from 3 to 18 years,
can universal education be attained?
LCW: So I saw that too. And I am a little
surprised… but the document does say that it wants to achieve universalisation
of education. So, we have to wait and see until the implementation plan comes
on how they propose to deliver on what they claim they want to do, which is
universalise education between 3 and 18 years… this move to actually bring
children into sort of formal education fold at age three, had a timeline
because there are lots of practical issues with the anganwadis and preschools.
But it doesn’t take away from the rights embodied in the RTE Act, which begins
at age 6, which we felt was too late.
AR: It [NEP] is clearly trying to abandon that
[RTE] Act. It says it is not going to have a regular schooling with
well-qualified teachers. This policy is saying we will be allowing open
schooling. This clubbing of three years of ECCE with Grade 1 and 2 of primary
school and then calling this a ‘foundational literacy and numeracy mission’, it
is so worrying because we know that an anganwadi [worker] is not professionally
trained to be a teacher. Can we believe it that a national policy says children
will become tutors for others in their classes? It is very clear that it is
really trying to abandon its responsibility of even providing a good,
professional teacher for the earliest years.
The policy says education is a public service,
but also advocates philanthropic private participation…
LCW: I would like to underline that all
existing resources should be pressed into service to ensure that every child
gets quality early childhood care. The anganwadi workers score a lot because
they are actually, sort of, replacing the parents of the children. And so that
is alright as a way to begin teaching the children… The NEP committee members
were completely clear that the policy’s focus has to be that government
education is of very high quality. This is the only way we will make sure every
child, no matter where they are, are given education. It is very unlikely that
the private sector is going to open schools in remote areas with less than 10
children. The only hope is to strengthen the government education system. But,
of course, we are not going to stand in the way of private education. In the
last 25 years, we have had nearly 50% private school education and nearly 70%
of enrollment in higher education in private hands. The concern is there are
too many players who are not of good quality. We have to find a way to weed
them out. Everywhere in the world, it is usually philanthropy, private sector
that participates in education. What we have in India is a lot of people under
the umbrella of not for profit really working for profit... [To] filter them
out, we have made some suggestions.
What about concerns on the proposal to create
school complexes? The Kothari Commission recommended it.
AR: Kothari Commission spoke about a ‘school
complex’ to have a collaborative synergy between high or higher secondary
schools, which normally are better resourced, and the smaller neighbourhood and
primary schools, which actually then become feeder schools for the high school.
That word is being used now in a completely different sense. Here we know the
background… 14,000 schools in one State have been closed under the name of
consolidation, saying that small schools are sub-optimal.
So, schools which actually provide access in
the proximity of the child, within the community; those have been closed or
merged. NEP says we should have larger institutions, right up to higher
education, have a college which has 2,500 students. So it is trying to make an
economic argument of viability. This is playing with the child’s right. How can
you expect that this will be considered as access?
The proposed 5+3+3+4 school structure has
triggered apprehension that it could lead to exits at each stage…
LCW: This is a pedagogical alignment, where we
would like to assess students at Grade 3, 5 and 8 to make sure that they have
attained the outcomes designed for them. This is an attempt to refocus
attention on learning outcomes at different stages. In fact, we think there is
also provision to make sure that the biggest dropouts that start to happen from
beyond Grade 5 are halted.
The NEP advocates equitable and inclusive
education but there is no mention of a common school curriculum. Even the
proposal to impart education in the mother tongue is open-ended. Wouldn’t these
broaden inequities?
LCW: State governments have actually decided
that teaching will happen in the regional language, which is, for instance,
Kannada in Karnataka, ignoring that there are large swathes of areas on the
borders of Maharashtra, where children speak Marathi; on the Andhra Pradesh
border, where children speak Telugu, etc. It should be possible for a school in
a certain community to teach students in the dominant language. But there is
another problem as State governments transfer teachers. You hire somebody from
Bengaluru and post them at the Maharashtra border and the children are
listening to Kannada, which is a foreign language. So, when they don’t attain
foundational literacy and numeracy, it is because they are also struggling with
the language. The whole idea is to try to get State governments to allow local
schools to teach in their own language by hiring local teachers. How far we
will succeed remains to be seen, because education is [also] a State subject.
As for the common school curriculum, the discussion about different boards was
there [in the NEP committee]. There is an exodus towards CBSE boards in many
States but that is partially because the State boards are quite weak. This
policy has tried to strengthen SCERTs so that they can attend to children’s
need to be educated within their own context and culture. We need to open up
that opportunity so that children can relate to their real life through their
education. That is the reason we have let the various boards be.
Will the thrust on vocational education weaken
students academically, perpetuate hereditary occupations or lead to early
exits?
AR: The notion of vocational education as
something which is only preparing you for vocations should not be pushed early
in school. From the first Radhakrishnan Commission right down, our [Education]
Commissions have said let’s not have different statuses for different kinds of
programmes and instead give students a chance to study together. Our vocational
education has no education in it. It is skill-based and based on hierarchy
between knowledge for some and skill for the others depending on this
constructed version of what is ‘ability’. This needs to be really questioned,
because we already have many hierarchies within our system. This clubbing
together of Grades 9, 10, 11 and 12 is extremely worrying and problematic
because it says that you will be given vocational courses. Instead of sorting
children out, give them a choice to be together and support them right through
that. There will be a lot of dropping out, pushing them away into vocational
courses or open school.
With such sweeping school reforms, is a
National Testing Agency needed to assess students for university admissions?
LCW: This was debated a lot. The policy is
very clear about where we would like to go. So many things are being
dismantled, so many new attitudes and mindsets need to be built. The interim is
going to be very difficult and most parents are anxious about the handful of
so-called good opportunities that they have a perception for, like IITs. And so
there are insane levels of competition. We felt it is better that only the
people who want to try for JEE, for example, need to study for that entrance
exam. The rest in school can be liberated to experiment with so many other of
their interests. Also, higher education institutions are going to have some
autonomy in deciding who they admit, which again, makes parents nervous. So, if
at least some percentage of scores can be used for admission through the NTA
then there will be a sense that there is at least an attempt to provide a
partial level-playing field till such time that some trust is built in the
system. Instead of trying to examine every child through an exit exam in Grades
10 and 12, it is better to introduce an entrance exam.
Does the NEP’s broad categorisation of
Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Group (SEDG), hamper equity?
AR: I totally agree… disadvantage just doesn’t come from the
air. It is historical, it is social. That is the way identities have been
shaped with declarations of exclusion. Clubbing everyone under ‘SEDG’, shying
away from saying ‘Dalit’ or ‘minority’ will not really get us to even
acknowledge what the issue is. This is sort of glossing over it. We have to
understand what ‘caste’ is. And what does it mean when we say that a child is
from the Muslim community? How does a child fare within the system? How do the
others look at this child? What are the backgrounds of this child? Trying to
understand the diverse social realities, disadvantages and exclusion is key.
An
invisible humanitarian crisis in India
The
state and the rich and middle classes remain indifferent as millions slip into
chronic hunger and intense poverty
India’s labouring poor have largely
disappeared even from the inner pages of many newspapers and from television
screens. It is as though, after the country has gradually unlocked and most
migrants have returned home, the wrenching distress of mass hunger and sudden
unemployment that racked their lives has somehow passed. The reality is
entirely the reverse. The devastating impact of the unprecedented closure of
the entire economy, which was already in recession, will endure for a long
time. However, the immense suffering of the poor has been rendered invisible by
the collective indifference of the state and the rich and middle classes.
Slipping deeper into want
On the banks of the Yamuna, adjacent to the
largest cremation ground in Delhi, is an embankment called Yamuna Pushta, home
to 4,000 homeless men. In normal times, they survived by doing casual wage
work, mostly in eateries or construction. Work was uncertain and always
underpaid; still they managed to keep raw hunger at bay by eating food provided
by religious food charities in gurdwaras, temples and dargahs. I met them
recently. Their destitution and desperation were palpable. There is still no
work, and shrines have still not adequately revived their food charities. The
Delhi government has mostly ended its free cooked food distribution programme.
At the peak of the programme, about 10 lakh people were being fed in over 1,000
centres. I was critical then of the indignity of forcing people to line up for
hours each day for a ladle of food. But although it could have been organised
with more compassion and respect, that was still a crucial public lifeline for
people thrust suddenly into mass hunger. With that lifeline snapped, there is
nothing except for some small private charities to shield them from the
blistering winds of hunger.
My comrades, including those working with
homeless people in other cities, activists of the right to food campaign
countrywide, and volunteers for food relief of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat, all
report conditions of even more worrying precarity and deprivation from around
the country. There are communities in the countryside — in forests, deserts,
hills, river islands and Dalit ghettos — who even in normal times survived on
the edge of hunger. They used to depend on remittances from migrants for their
survival; today they have to feed the migrants who returned. Casual daily wage
workers, weavers, artisans, home-based workers, rickshaw-pullers and street
vendors have always lived precarious lives too. But they have slipped much
deeper into want. And there are millions of new entrants into the ranks of the
hungry, including laid-off employees of small enterprises and eateries,
domestic workers, sex workers, workers in the gig economy, and even teachers in
low-income private schools and those taking private tuitions.
All of these workers, and tens of millions
more, are bracing themselves for the ways that the dispossessed have learnt,
from time immemorial, and that are hardwired into their DNA, to live with
chronic hunger. The first is to eliminate nutritious but unaffordable portions
of one’s diet, including dal, milk, vegetables, fruit, eggs and meat. Many
families report that they are eating only coarse rice and roti with salt. The
next step is to reduce food intake, cutting down on both the quantity eaten
during each meal and the number of meals, teaching one’s body to endure with
less and less. As households slide further down this steep slope, there are
increasing numbers of nights when they have to sleep hungry. Children who could
earlier depend on the school or preschool centre for at least one nutritious
meal are now being sent out to work, including scrabbling through waste for
anything which can be eaten or sold.
Public policy failures
A number of global reports warn that hundreds
of millions of people are being thrust into extreme poverty and hunger because
of the economic impacts of the lockdown and the raging pandemic. A United
Nations University paper (‘Precarity and the pandemic’, June 2020) estimates
that 400 million new workers are at risk of slipping into extreme poverty, of
less than $1.90 a day. What is even more worrying is that “the location of
global poverty is likely to shift towards middle-income countries and South
Asia and East Asia.” The impact could intensify because of “pre-existing
conditions of fragmented or insufficient social protection systems” and could
last for “years to come”. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights, Philip Alston, similarly estimated in a study published in early
July that more than 250 million people are at risk of acute hunger. This
impact, he believes, “will be long-lasting”. He is critical of governments
which “rather than acknowledging how badly the efforts to ‘end poverty’ have
been faring, and how relentlessly the pandemic has exposed that fact... are
doubling down on existing approaches that are clearly failing”. His angst about
public policy failures to deal with the scale and depth of the humanitarian
crisis is entirely justified. First, at senior levels of the Indian government,
there is little acknowledgement of the depth of the crisis of hunger and the
annihilation of livelihoods. To revive the economy and, in particular, MSMEs —
the sector employing the most people outside agriculture — the Finance Minister
relies mostly on credit rather than on fiscal transfers, unmindful that when both
demand and production have crashed, credit will have few takers and can
accomplish little.
Second, governments also sought to revive the
broken economy by excluding workers from regimes of labour rights protections,
ostensibly for attracting capital investment. Instead of atoning for the
immense distress of unprotected workers and mitigating future suffering by
building sturdy legal walls for their protections, many State governments used
the pandemic to further weaken the scant protections which the law currently
provides informal workers. Some governments attempted to extend the workday to
12 hours, to suspend the protections of various labour laws for three years,
and regulate the movement of workers across State borders.
Abandoned by the state
Even prior to the pandemic, India slipped to
the 102nd position in the Global Hunger Report of 2019 that ranked 117
countries. It had fallen behind its neighbours Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The economy was also stuttering, with unemployment at a 45-year high. In the
midst of this smouldering crisis, the most stringent lockdown in the world was
imposed, nearly halting both demand and supply overnight. As the COVID-19
infection spreads to States with the most broken public health systems, such as
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and with the homeless and the poor being excluded from
highly privatised health facilities in cities, the problems of the poor will
further exacerbate. As the virus ravages bodies enfeebled by hunger and
distress, they remain abandoned by the state, with no reliable access to care.
Through all of this, the political
establishment, sections of the media and the middle class remain culpably
indifferent, preoccupied instead with buying legislators and toppling
governments; purchasing military aircraft; jailing dissenters; and divisive
agendas like the triumphalist construction of a Ram temple at the site of a
demolished medieval mosque. With millions slipping invisibly into chronic
hunger and intense poverty, India is hurtling silently into its gravest
humanitarian crisis in over half a century.
Harsh Mander is a human rights worker, writer, teacher, and
author of several books including ‘Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea
of India’
Academic
research is necessary, but not sufficient
Investment
in research can translate into national development only through pursuit of
post-academic research
The Government of India is in the process of
revisiting the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy. The policy will
guide the agencies of the government mandated with funding research in higher
education institutions and national laboratories. At this stage we need to
ponder the question: what kind of research should be funded? That leads one to
look at the nomenclature used by researchers for this purpose. Here it is
pertinent to recall what William Shockley said in his Nobel lecture in 1956,
that words like “pure, applied, unrestricted, fundamental, basic, academic,
industrial, practical etc.” are being used frequently “in a derogatory sense,
on the one hand to belittle practical objectives of producing something useful
and, on the other hand, to brush off the possible long-range value of
explorations into new areas where a useful outcome cannot be foreseen.”
Alternate frameworks
Experts in science and technology studies have
come up with alternate frameworks and terminology to provide a comprehensive
picture and avoid any value judgement. One approach was proposed by NASA in the
form of Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), a type of measurement system used to
assess the maturity level of a particular technology. TRL-1 corresponds to
observation of basic principles. Its result is publications. TRL-2 corresponds
to formulation of technology at the level of concepts. Then the TRL framework
advances to proof of concept, validation in a laboratory environment, followed
by a relevant environment, and then to prototype demonstration, and ending with
actual deployment. The framework uses terms as applicable to aerospace
applications, but one can come up with alternate terms depending on the field
of application, including health sciences where the term ‘translational
research’ is commonly used. The number of levels can also be adjusted to suit
the application.
An alternative is to use the terminology ‘Academic
Research (AR)’, and ‘Post-Academic Research (PAR)’. One can easily establish
correspondence with the TRL framework, with AR corresponding to TRL-1 and the
rest to higher levels. To provide some granularity, one can divide PAR into
early-stage PAR, and late-stage PAR. Late-stage PAR has to be done by large
laboratories (national or those supported by industry), while AR and
early-stage PAR can be done at higher education institutions and large
laboratories.
Both AR and PAR generate knowledge which is
necessary for national development. When examined from the perspective of
national development, pursuit of AR alone, while necessary, is not sufficient.
AR and PAR when pursued together and taken to their logical conclusion will
result in a product or a process, or a better clinical practice, or a
scientifically robust understanding of human health and disease, or provide
inputs for a policy decision.
It is often said that India’s investment in
research is lower than that by advanced countries. Here two observations need
consideration. First, countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) report research statistics according to the
Frascati Manual, which was first drafted in 1963, and has gone through five
revisions since then. We cannot compare data with other countries without
having correspondence between India’s data and data reported by others. Second,
India has to decide where to increase investment: in AR or in PAR. Investment
in research can translate into national development only through pursuit of
PAR.
This is not a call for abandoning AR, but a
call to look for useful outcomes including via spin-offs and serendipity, and
to prioritise research in areas that relate to national development.
During my talks with academics on this topic,
some observed that our industry has not reached a stage where they can absorb
research being done by higher education institutions. This observation reveals
that research being pursued is either not addressing national needs or is
limited to AR. The lukewarm response of industry is a message for academia to
orient its priorities to address national needs and engage in both AR and
early-stage PAR and provide inputs necessary to raise the technology intensity
of industry.
Pursuing AR and PAR
One can cite several examples to illustrate
how AR and PAR can be pursued together. A programme in high energy physics can
be designed to pursue accelerator technology along with high energy physics.
Research in electro-chemistry can be accompanied by development of battery
technologies.
Judging the growth of S&T based only on
publications provides an incomplete picture. Why is it that industries that
have high technology intensity, such as aircraft and spacecraft, medical,
precision and optical instruments, and communication equipment, have a low
presence in India? What should be done to increase value addition to raw
materials in India? The answer lies in increasing the technology intensity of
industry, which was identified as one of the goals of the STI policy issued in
2013. This needs reiteration and a mechanism should be devised to monitor
progress with the objective of becoming an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’.
The STI policy should emphasise PAR to ensure
that investment in research results in economic growth. To motivate the
research community to pursue at least early-stage PAR, the reward system needs
significant reorientation. The current system for rewards relies heavily on
bibliometric indicators despite the knowledge that publications alone do not
lead to national development. The reward system in higher education
institutions and national laboratories should be reoriented to promote PAR.
Academics in higher education institutions pursuing AR should pursue
early-stage PAR themselves, or team up with those who are keen to pursue PAR.
In short, academic research is necessary, but
not sufficient.
R.B. Grover is Emeritus Professor, Homi Bhabha National
Institute, and Member, Atomic Energy Commission
Cartographic
challenge
Pakistan’s
new map is intended to provoke India, and internationalise the border disputes
The Ministry of External Affairs has termed
Pakistan’s announcement of a new political map, which asserts its claims on
Jammu and Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek, and lays a new claim to Junagadh, as
an exercise in “political absurdity”, and accused Pakistan of attempting a form
of “territorial aggrandisement supported by cross-border terrorism”. Pakistan’s
decision to issue the map, a tit-for-tat manoeuvre in return for India’s
decision to reorganise Jammu and Kashmir a year ago, appears to reset several
agreements with India that have been concretised over the past 70 years. The
map the Imran Khan government unveiled lays claim to all of Jammu and Kashmir,
thus far shown as disputed territory, draws a line demarcating Gilgit-Baltistan
separately from the part of Kashmir under its control (Pakistan occupied
Kashmir), and renames Jammu and Kashmir as “Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and
Kashmir”. The new map leaves the claim line with Ladakh unclear. While each of
these acts is outrageous for New Delhi, it should also be questioned in
Islamabad. Pakistan’s claim to all of Jammu and Kashmir, but not Ladakh, goes
against its own commitment to adjudicate the future of all six parts of the
erstwhile royal state of Jammu-Kashmir (Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh,
Gilgit-Baltistan, PoK and Aksai Chin) with India. The claims to Siachen and Sir
Creek, that have been the subject of several discussions between India and
Pakistan, are also a regressive step. While both sides had reached an impasse
on Siachen, the Sir Creek agreement had made considerable progress, and was
reportedly even resolved, pending a political announcement in 2007. Either way,
both were without doubt disputed areas, and Pakistan’s unilateral claim over
them is not helpful or conducive to future resolution. Finally, the move on
Junagadh, a former princely state whose accession to India was accepted by
Pakistan, opens up a whole new dispute. While Junagadh was in contention at the
time of Partition, the issue was successfully resolved after a referendum was
conducted there in February 1948, in which an overwhelming 95% of the state’s
residents voted to stay with India.
As New Delhi considers its next moves on this provocation, it
should be prepared for Pakistan taking all the issues it has raised with its
new map to the international stage. Pakistan’s actions, while on completely
bilateral matters, come in conjunction with map-related issues India faces
today on two other fronts: with China at the Line of Actual Control on Ladakh,
and with Nepal at Kalapani and Limpiyadhura (which Nepal’s government has also
issued a new map about). It is surely no coincidence that all three countries
objected to the map New Delhi had issued in November 2019, albeit for different
reasons, and New Delhi must be well-prepared to deal with the three-pronged
cartographic challenge it will face in the coming months.
THE END
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