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Broken hearts
Maximum dirty |
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Open-and-shut case
Rise of ‘princelings’ in China
An innovative senior JCO
Job schemes must address women more
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Broken hearts
The loss of the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in a school in central Connecticut, USA, has shocked the world. US President Barack Obama was understandably, although uncharacteristically, moved to tears as he offered his condolences to the families of the Americans who had lost their loved ones. The killing of the children by a young man, who later shot himself, is as inexplicable as other such mass murders in which an individual inflicts such horrendous damage to the very society he is part of. President Obama rightly said that the victims “had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” He also paid a tribute to their fallen teachers. Even as Americans come to terms with the tragedy, they cannot but reflect on other such mass killings — be in a “school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theatre in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago,” as President Obama put it. Crimes in which guns are used to kill a large number of people are taking place with distressing frequency, but little has been done to curb the most important aspect of this problem, controlling access to guns. Many people are shocked to learn that guns can be bought freely in many parts of the US, not just handguns, but even assault rifles of the kind used by paramilitary forces. President Obama held his press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room which honours a former White House press secretary who was shot and disabled in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. His message spoke of the need to “come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” However, despite such intentions, the jury is still out on whether this tragedy would give the American political system the strength it needs to realise that if you allow guns into people’s hands, they would use them. And when they do use guns, innocent people, even children, can die, as they did at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. |
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Maximum dirty
Thousands run away from their claustrophobic small town life to the dream city of India, Mumbai. They bring along with them their diseases, dreams, riches, poverty, ignorance, skill — all to maximise them in the only Indian city that promises both success and freedom. So Mumbai becomes a city that maximises everything: best to worst. It breeds the richest men and women of India as well as the poorest. It is a city that generates highest revenue figures and has the largest underbelly that breeds crime and corruption. And yet it sells dreams! Therefore, the news that Mumbai was ranked among the dirtiest and most difficult to get around cities in the world must have hurt the Mumbaikars. The city of high exigencies would not take this heightened status awarded to it. For, dirty and unfriendly it may be, the city also has its strong points that no tourist would bother to take note of. The business capital of the country has taken many upheavals in its stride. Its municipal corporation may be napping over issues of sanitation and hygiene, its people carry a golden heart, as was evident during the worst flooding of the city in 2005, or after serial train blasts in 2006 or the 26/11 attacks. The city springs back to its normal life, unfailingly. TripAdvisor’s Cities Survey, that scanned through 40 cities of the world, taking into account opinions of about 75,000 tourists, has found the city worst on two accounts: clean streets and ease of getting around. The city that houses 15 million people, where 20,925 persons live per square kilometre, is bound to create a sense of loss and chaos. One can get a perspective by the fact that in much crowded Delhi 11,297 persons live per square kilometre and 9,252, in Chandigarh. The government has approved a McKinsey-drafted document titled ‘Vision Mumbai,’ aiming to turn Mumbai into “a world-class city by 2013.” Right now, the city would do better by getting rid of the tag of being among the dirtiest cities in the world. |
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Open-and-shut case
Over
the past few years the Punjab Government announced the opening of
primary schools in nearly every village. It seemed good at the time,
but it now appears the enthusiasm had not taken into account the
resources available or the demand — and therefore viability — for
a school in a particular area. It has now been decided that schools with less than 20 students will be shut down. There are around 2,000 such schools. In the short term, that makes sense. There is no point deploying one or more teacher and taking up infrastructure to serve very few students. However, what needs examination — case by case — is why there are such few students in those schools. In areas served by certain schools, the population may be too less, and therefore only a few students. But in most cases the reason is parents’ preference for private schools, which are perceived to impart better education. This is an irony, as private primary schools in rural areas often have very little land and infrastructure, besides under-qualified and underpaid teachers, as compared to government schools. Despite major recruitments in the past few years, an acute shortage of teachers still persists in government schools. There is also irrational deployment of the available teachers. The motivation level of teachers in public sector employment has remained questionable too. Poor parents sending their children to private schools is, thus, not a matter of choice, but lack of it. The answer is to keep up the expansion of the government school network, but not without the full complement of staff and the required infrastructure. If the country has to give quality education to the masses, it has to be in the public sector. Private schools can provide quality only at costs that are prohibitive for the poor. Worldwide, schooling has largely been the responsibility of governments. With the Right to Education Act failing to meet the goals it was to achieve in three years, introspection by the state as well as Central governments is called for. |
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It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art. — Oscar Wilde |
Rise of ‘princelings’ in China
The ascension to the hot seat of the Communist Party of China by Xi Jinping, who moved into the shoes of Hu Jintao as the general secretary at the 18th national congress (November 8-14) in Beijing, signifies a stronger hold of ‘red bureaucracy’ which gets increasingly hyphenated from the Marxist temper and practice. A phenomenal “embourgeoisment” in the entire hierarchical order of the CPC is under way. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was in the factional camp of Deng Xiaoping, who assigned him the task of setting up China’s first “special economic zone” in Shenzhen. Xi belongs to the new stratum of “princelings” comprising “a powerful section of China’s new bourgeoisie, notorious for their ruthless accumulation of wealth through the plunder of state assets, often in collusion with Western corporations and banks’, quipped well-known Sinologist and a senior functionary of Socialist International John Chan. He ridiculed the jamboree as an “oligarchic gathering” and lambasted the media-hyped 10 years of “golden decade” under Hu and outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao as a period “golden for the country’s capitalists”. There was no dollar billionaire in China in 2002 against 271 billionaires in 2011, next only to the US. ‘Princelings’ in the middle kingdom are devoted to “attracting business and introducing capital” and help the super-wealthy elite emerge powerfully. The nouveau riche had a prominent presence at the Great Hall, the venue of the Congress with 30 delegates, all billionaires, including Sanny group supremo Liang Wengen . “The top 70 in the Chinese People’s Political Congress were even richer at US$100 billion. It is fair to assume that they all didn’t come by that money honestly”, quipped corporate research-analyst Steve Wang in the Hong Kong based Asia Sentinel. Official communist parties in India such as the CPI(M), the CPI and the CPI(M-L) Liberation are against SEZs , but silent on hundreds of them in China . The word ‘class struggle’ disappeared from the Constitution of the CPC at the 16th Congress (2002) . “The principal contradiction in Chinese society is one between the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and the low level of production., ” states the explanatory note in the resolution on amendment to the party constitution. Queerly enough, such fundamental issues are skipped by these parties which are committed to ‘class struggle’ and anti-imperialism .Hu’s socialism at the primary stage isn’t at daggers drawn with neo-liberal finance capital . The CPC’s basic line, he bluntly said in his lengthy 16,000 word-plus report, is an endeavour of all ethnic groups in a concerted, self-reliant and pioneering effort to turn China into a prosperous, strong, democratic and culturally advanced modern socialist country by realising the modernisation of industry, agriculture, national defence and technology”. For a Marxist, this is wholly platitudinous. About the official CPs, the less said the better. They can’t ask from the Chinese ‘comrades’ why a few hundred millionaires and capitalists are card-holding members. The 492 word message of greetings from the CPI (M) to the 18th Congress reflects the mendicant mindset of mandarins at the A K Gopalan Bhavan, national HQ of the party. “The CPI(M) is confident that the deliberations of the 18th congress of the CPC will facilitate the further growth and consolidation of socialism in China, upholding the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”. The elitist AKG Bhavan won’t ask why ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘US imperialism’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’ disappeared from the lexicon of the
CPC. Among the first five messages read out at the congress was from the Kuomintang Party of Taiwan – the party that massacred tens of thousands of Chinese communists and sympathisers in 1927 under the rabid anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek The connotation ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics, a hybrid of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, has a disconnect with the tradition of struggle against imperialism. The very concept of international solidarity of working class was pushed into the recycle bin by the elitist CPC leadership several decades ago. Working people are oppressed in an unchecked manner. Long working hours (over 12 hours) for tens of thousands of internally migrant workers (280 million, the largest the world over) and ghetto-life are a manifest syndrome of neo-oligarchy, introduced by the CPC and the advent of ‘princelings’ is its derivative. Externally, China’s exports are at incredibly low prices, rendering hundreds of workers jobless or under-employed. Peter J Taylor, emeritus professor at Loughborough University, Leicester, UK, termed this phenomenon as ‘labour imperialism’ in a paper “Thesis on Labour Imperialism: How Communist China Used Capitalist Globalisation to Create the Last Great Modern Imperialism”. The Chinese model of socialism is not sustainable, thinks Professor Minqi Li, a former CPC member who was thrown out for participation in the Tiananmen stir and now close to the Monthly Review group. Already signs of decline are visible. The property market bubble, inflation, increasing corruption and the like are symptoms. The ‘socialist market economy’ endorses thoughts of Marx’s adversary Eugen Duhring than that of Marx and Engels. The market “is coercive”, aptly said Ellen Meiksons Wood, a former MR editor. Better late than never. Liberation, monthly organ of the CPI(M-L) Liberation, in its latest issue called ‘the market-driven socialist construction’ as an ‘oxymoron’ and described the model ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as a path that ‘entailed spectacular capitalist growth along a somewhat neo-liberal trajectory inexorably accompanied by rampant corruption, growing social, regional and gender disparities, as well as cultural degeneration, environmental degradation and many other evils’. However, the CPC cannot be accused of fundamental deviation from Maoism or Mao Zedong Thought as Mao never called for abolition of capitalism. In his On New Democracy (1940), he categorically envisioned a republic that “will neither confiscate capitalist private property in general nor forbid the development of such capitalist production as does not “dominate the livelihood of the people”. |
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An innovative senior JCO
Irregulars (Scindehorsemen) are known to be inquisitive and innovative by nature. They can stand up to imponderables with a searching mind and come up with strange solutions, literally somewhat like a magician popping freebies out of the proverbial hat. It was in the early 60s when there were three stalwarts, Raghu Pannu (Maj Gen R.S. Pannu), Nirbhai (Major Nirbhai Singh) and Gaeky (Col A.R.D. Gaekwar), commanding respectively A, B and C squadrons. One by one each was being put through annual squadron training exercises in the area of the Duladdhi sand dunes near the regimental location at Nabha. It was the month of June and summer was at its peak; temperature in the afternoon touching 45 degrees Celsius or so under shade. It was a terrible time to be in the open with Shermans, rehearsing tank battle drills. It was the turn of B Squadron to be out on exercise, when its innovative squadron senior JCO could not countenance his squadron commander, Major Nirbhai Singh, suffering the summer heat. He observed for a couple of days Nirbhai’s plight in the afternoon, gulping down ice-cooled glasses full of lime-sodas, sitting under a lone kikar tree and occasionally sipping beer to somewhat drug himself to ignore the heat and at the same time shifting his camp stool every now and then in keeping with the shifting kikar shade. One afternoon, the squadron senior JCO, ably supported by his Squadron Quarter Master Duffadar, came up with a very thoughtful design to provide cool environs to his squadron commander. The senior JCO surreptitiously arranged from a nearby village a sturdy charpoy, capable of withstanding the weight of his 6’ tall, well-built squadron commander. Four robust 30-foot long ropes were tied at the four corner-legs of the charpoy. The aim was to lower a charpoy with Nirbhai on board into a 20-30 feet shallow well, keeping the charpoy just above the water level to ‘cool’ him for the better part of the muggy afternoon. The lowering of the charpoy with a dummy on board was rehearsed a number of times, involving eight men holding fast the four ropes tied to the charpoy, with two men to each rope and the senior JCO controlling the process of lowering this improvised contraption with a pre-planned set of hand signals, ensuring all the while a balanced and smooth descent. The experiment was successful. And it was ritually put descending into the well for the afternoon siesta. Nirbhai was thus, hopefully, to be relieved from the summer agony, kind courtesy his innovative senior JCO. This state of ‘blissful comfort’ was rudely interrupted one fateful afternoon when one of the ropes gave way and a sleepy Squadron Commander suddenly found himself hanging mere inches above a stagnant bit of water in the well. A hurried emergency ‘recovery operation’ ended the worthy Squadron Commander’s worst fears of an uncalled for mid-siesta ‘dunking’. Needless to say, the innovative senior JCO had very suddenly discovered that he had some other pressing ‘engagements’ elsewhere and was not seen for the rest of the
day! |
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Job schemes must address women more
A
compensation of Rs 53 crore was recovered during the last one month in Andhra Pradesh for delaying payment to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Of this, Rs 35 crore was recovered from government functionaries while banks were made to cough up Rs 18 crore. Unless the penalty clauses enshrined in the Act are strictly enforced, the “guarantee” of work becomes a mockery. It is causing disillusionment among workers, especially women who have to light the “chulha” every evening and do not have the cushion to take delayed payments, which often run into months. Now into its seventh year of implementation, MGNREGA is projected as a flagship programme of the UPA government and flaunted at international platforms as being the biggest employment programme run by any state in the world. At the same time there is a vocal section which cites loopholes in its implementation causing low participation as proof that it has outlived its utility and should be scaled down. The veracity of such a belief and the real reasons for the low participation, especially of women, was critically analysed and the gender-responsiveness of MGNREGA at the ground level was reviewed at a national consultation in Lucknow on “Claiming their space — women's participation in MGNREGA”. Speaking at the consultation organised by the Gender at Work and UN Women, National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy said a weak political will was responsible for the violation of the provisions of the “guarantee”. Capturing demand Pointing out that MGNREGA was a demand-driven programme, Roy said if the government failed to accurately capture demand at the ground level, it would contribute to a dangerous picture of the MGNREGA outliving its utility. MGNREGA is a significant tool for women empowerment as it not only provides 33 per cent provision for women, but also pays women equal wages in a sector where they are paid lower wages and are exploited, given the semi-feudal environment. It also provides for various enabling factors, including the provision of crèches at worksites, providing job opportunities near their homes and bank accounts in their names (or jointly). The fact that women are systematically being edged out has huge ramifications to their larger struggle for claiming their space in the public realm. As per the 2012 indicators, women's share in MGNREGA has reached 55 per cent at the national level. But this piece of statistics fails to capture the real picture as women participation is a whopping 92.85 per cent in Kerala and as low as between 18 and 20 per cent in Uttar Pradesh. Jean Dreze, economist and honorary professor at Delhi School of Economics and Allahabad University, pointed out that the word “household” had no place in an entitlement-based law like MGNREGA and recommended that job cards be given separately in the name of individual men and women. Several innovative methods of capturing demand emerged during the consultation. Principal Secretary Rural Development Rajiv Kumar said he would take up Aruna Roy's suggestion of holding special camps to capture demand. He promised to look into best practices in other states in order to take the women participation level in UP to at least 33 per cent by March 2013. Andhra model Among best practices is the Andhra Pradesh model where demand is captured every Saturday and a government order (GO) assures automatic unemployment allowance to those who do not get work within the stipulated timeframe despite enrollment. The UP Adviser to the Supreme Court on Right to Food, Arundhati Dhuru, shared the social, political and cultural context responsible for the low participation of women in Uttar Pradesh. The innovative practices initiated in four pilot projects developed to increase participation of Dalit and Muslim women in UP were also showed, which brought out the fact that if structural and ideological barriers that prevent women from entering the workforce on equal terms are addressed, women do come forward to participate in large numbers. It included the training of Dalit women as worksite supervisors (mates) in Lalitpur in Bundelkhand where women were now no longer harassed for coming without their partners. The innovative practice included all-women worksites in Chitrakoot where Dalit women were involved from planning, getting work plan sanctioned to supervising the implementation of building a large pond under the new Scheduled of Rates (SOR). After drafting a pro-woman SOR under pressure from women activists, the UP Government virtually derailed its own initiative by limiting the SOR to women-only worksite, rather than applying it to all worksites where women were working. The pilot project at Jalaun in Bundelkhand increased Dalit women's engagement with panchayats. The fourth pilot project was undertaken in Varanasi, the only one outside Bundelkhand, which helped include participation of Musahar and Muslim women. To ensure increased women participation in MGNREGA, Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh said he would soon write to all state governments to ensure that 50 per cent of the mates on MGNREGA worksites were women. He also promised to prepare an action taken report within a month on the resolutions that emerged.
National Consultation recommendations
Job cards All types of single women (unmarried, abandoned, widowed) can have their own job cards as per the operational guidelines. The states will be sent a reminder and will be asked to implement it. Female share Union Minister for Rural Development would issue a letter to all states to ensure that at least half of the mates should be women. Wage delay Issue a notification to ensure that when MGNREGA wages are delayed, labourers are given compensation. The Centre will explore the possibility of replicating the Andhra Pradesh model where labourers are automatically given compensation when wages are delayed. To start with, compensation will be given in cases where the delays are recorded, starting with Jaunpur and Sitapur. Flow of funds A failure to do so, either at the level of the Centre or the state should not result in workers being penalised by not getting work or in a delay in their payments. Each step in the flow of funds process will be made available online — when were documents (UC, social audit reports, etc.) received from the district; how long did it take for the Centre to process these; when was feedback sent back to the district; how long did it take to respond to these queries; and when the money was credited into the districts accounts, etc. Capture true demand Work towards awareness generation and keep all channels of recording demand open (not just limiting it to online capture). Take cue from the Andhra Pradesh model on automatic unemployment allowance. Grievance redress Helplines will be reinstated. If there is any MGNREGA violence, the state government will initiate a social audit in that gram panchayat. Skill ladder Enhance skills of women from workers to mates to gram rozgar sewaks to even data operators. Gender audit Social audit to include provisions to specifically include gender indicators. Pilot projects Civil society organisations have successfully implemented pilot projects that have increased awareness, participation and leadership of women (particularly among Dalits, Mushasaars, tribals and Muslims), including positive discrimination and reservation for women, skill development and capacity building and by addressing issues of equity through women's collectives. These need to be upscaled in order to be mainstreamed. Schedule of Rates Schedule of Rates (SOR) to be reviewed (through time and motion studies) to be responsive to gender, age and disability. The revised SOR should be applied universally. Financial inclusion Individual job cards and bank accounts in the names of women, so they access and control the money they earn and can decide how it is to be spent. Convergence Important for integration of the provision of childcare facilities, training panchayat presidents and women ward members. National Rural Livelihood Mission link: It is needed for transferring the use and control of resources generated through MGNREGA work. Women & Child Development: Essential for the construction of aanganwadi centres under MGNREGA and expansion of childcare service. Annual follow-up: To keep track on the issue of women's participation in and access to
MGNREGA. |
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