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Simple and straightforward Wide discontent |
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A different perspective on malnutrition
Of evaluation work and wheat harvest
Haryana misses the Buddha moment
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Simple and straightforward Wearing
a colourful turban and speaking spontaneously with enthusiasm, Narendra Modi's Independence-Day performance was in sharp contrast to that of Dr Manmohan Singh, who used to read his address from behind a bullet-proof glass shield. Modi has a down-to-earth approach and keeps his message simple for the lay man; Manmohan's speeches were dry but more substantive. Modi avoided big talk - the kind done in the past on the sombre occasion - and was aware of it: “You may wonder what kind of PM talks of toilets and cleanliness from the ramparts of the Red Fort”. Modi’s ability to relate with people at large makes his simple, even if unconventional, idea of cleanliness look meaningful. The PM said as an “outsider” he was shocked to find “governments inside the government… Departments are fighting each other, suing each other in the Supreme Court. How can they move the country forward?” This is one tangle he seems to be sorting out. He suggested India should go digital and adopt e-governance. Though he skipped the pre-poll issues of price rise, corruption, black money and ignored growing public disenchantment with his “achhe-din” promise, he focused on manufacturing and tourism, which create employment. He talked of a nationwide drive for cleanliness to promote tourism and asked parliamentarians and corporates to build model villages and toilets. Instead of setting any time-bound agenda for himself, Modi outlined work for others. But it will be his slogan “Come, make in India” that will test his government's success. It is not enough to say “Sell anywhere in the world but make it here”; the government must create a positive environment for this to happen. As the Planning Commission has outlived its relevance, Modi announced its burial but did not provide sufficient details about the alternative, which should be widely discussed before its launch. While Modi's call for a 10-year moratorium on communal violence is welcome, his silence over attempts of fringe elements in the RSS and the BJP to arouse communal passions in the country is deafening. The Prime Minister's word will carry weight if his action matches his speech.
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Wide discontent Tens
of thousands of protesters in Pakistan’s capital are a visible testament to the discontent against the Nawaz Sharif government. Both, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party leader Imran Khan and Pakistan Awami Tehrik (PAT) chief Tahirul Qadri, have effectively channelled this dissatisfaction into a movement that has now spread to Islamabad. While there was a clash between PTI workers and supporters of the Prime Minister's party, Pakistan Muslim League (N), at Gujranwala, the situation was promptly controlled and violence has been eschewed since. On its part, the government showed flexibility by not blocking the entry of the protesters as planned earlier and allowed them to march into Islamabad. Imran Khan maintains that Nawaz Sharif won by rigging the elections, and thus he wants the latter to be ousted as Prime Minister. Tahirul Qadri is presenting himself as an anti-corruption campaigner. The two leaders have not announced any common agenda, and may not be able to work together in the long run. The government gives more credibility to Imran Khan and has opened negotiations with him, but without any visible results. Meanwhile, the position of Paksitan's powerful army remains unclear, although it has had run-ins with the present elected government over various issues, including the trial of Gen Pervez Musharraf, on the charge of treason. The notion that the army is supporting the protesters because of Nawaz Sharif's insistence on continuing his trial and not allowing the General to leave Pakistan can't be dismissed easily. It does not seem likely that Pakistan's Prime Minister will oblige the protesters by resigning, and there is a feeling that a compromise is being worked out. However, once massive protests are unleashed, these can sometimes assume a form that had not been planned originally. For this reason, the world will wait to see how Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will deal with this potent challenge to his government.
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Thought for the Day
What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action. —
Meister Eckhart
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The day’s news Aug.14
— British ships ready for action. German fleet awaiting orders. Attacks to be simultaneous on land and sea. Times' military correspondent says it is inadvisable for Allies to take the offensive early. Russia is reported to be ready with 180,000 men. A number of foodships have arrived at Hull. German attack on Aland and the bombardment of Tiban are denied by Russian sources. Germans are reported to be holding Liege in strength, but ready to make a hurried retreat. Transportation of French troops to Belgian territory is complete. Aug.15 — German march on Antwerp is officially denied. Germans advancing on Gaint, St. Trond and Hassalt. The French troops are advancing on Gembloux in force. Cannonade heard from Bost and Hongaerde on Saturday afternoon - beginning of a great battle. Aug. 16 — French have defeated Bavarian Army Corps at Ahri Court and Ciery on the borders of Lorraine. An artillery duel occurred at Dinant and the French drove the
Germans. Experts are warning against undue exultation. French Government Communique says that no definite result can be expected for a week or possibly more. Diet report says Germans are advancing towards Aerschot. Germans stretch from Liege to Mu'-hanson. The French began the offensive in force along the line from
Sarrebourg to Luneville on Friday and continued on Saturday.
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A different perspective on malnutrition In fact, malnutrition and under-nourishment are maladies that reduce the economic potential of individuals. In India, nutrition insecurity and micro-nutrient deficiency are the most widespread health problems, especially in case of children and lactating mothers. They are the cause of nearly 40 per cent of the children's deaths annually, and impact the health of the mother, leading to nearly 60,000 deaths during child-birth annually. It is now established that if a child does not get proper nutrition in the first thousand days of life, then the child is stunted, resulting in poor cognitive and memory capacity, higher incidence of disease in later years and less ability to work efficiently. The damage, once caused during the early years of growth, can never be repaired. Nearly one-third of the Indian population suffers from vitamin and mineral deficit. More than half of the pre-school children and their mothers suffer from vitamin A deficiency, and nearly 70 per cent suffer from anaemia. Micro-nutrients in a daily diet of about 70 per cent of the Indian population are reported to be less than 50 per cent of the standard requirement. Mineral deficiency significantly contributes to child mortality, stunted growth and several other health issues in the later life. To address the problem of deficiency of micro-nutrition and malnutrition, one of the solutions is the fortification of food items and the other is a higher consumption of whole food grains. Examples of whole grains that contain high levels of dietary fibre include wheat, rice, barley, oats and rye. Though the traditional Indian diet was composed of high fibre diets, the modern and more westernised Indian diet of fast foods is low in dietary fibre. Dietary fibre reduces the risk of obesity by giving a feeling of fullness, reduces blood sugar levels (diabetes) by delaying the release of food sugar and preventing insulin spikes, helps in prevention of colon cancer and reducing the risk of heart disease by lowering blood cholesterol levels. India has the highest rate of heart disease in the world; it is estimated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that by 2020 heart disease will be the cause of over 40 per cent deaths in India as compared to only 28 per cent in 2005. Thus, India is set to be the heart disease capital of the world. The Indian population also lacks omega-3 fatty acids in their diet which are essential for proper growth and development, and appropriate functioning of the brain and eye development. Lack of omega-3 fatty acids in the diet can cause an early onset of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson’s, and other mental disorders. Omega-3 fatty acids available in seafood, walnuts, soy, spinach, and canola oil are well known to prevent the risk of heart disease as well as to lower the risk of diabetes and obesity. Our brain needs a constant supply of energy from food. A study in the UK has established that breakfast can contribute significantly in providing energy and nutrients to children. A healthy breakfast plays an important role in improving the health of a child. As evidenced from research, people who regularly have breakfast tend to have a healthier body weight. Moreover, children who eat breakfast in the morning perform better in school. In India nearly 25 per cent of the population skips breakfast and generally these are the school-going children and females. The government could consider a breakfast policy for the school-going children in addition to the mid-day meal scheme, which is successfully operational across the country. Besides good nutrition, clean water is also essential for maintaining proper health. India is doing better than many other countries in the world when it comes to clean drinking water. But there is a further scope to improve safe drinking water facilities in the country, especially in the rural areas and schools. On the other hand, proper sanitation is still a major issue, especially in rural India, that has a great impact on health. There is substantial evidence to support that an improvement in sanitation is accompanied by a 30 per cent reduction in child mortality, according to the UNDP. Pit toilets reduce the incidence of diarrhea by 50 per cent and flush toilets by 70 per cent. With nearly 65 per cent population in the rural areas and 12 per cent in the urban areas resorting to open defecation, the probability of faecal-oral transmission route of diseases is significant. There is a logical case for public policy support in terms of subsidies and community investments in the sanitation policy of the government. A beginning of “Swacchh Bharat” can be made by providing better sanitation facilities in schools, especially in the rural areas. To ensure healthy Indians, it may be helpful if the government could revisit the food policy of India. Instead of focusing only on paddy and wheat, it may be useful to also consider oats, rye, flax or linseed and canola oil under the MSP, and supplied under the public distribution scheme. It would be useful for the children and future generations, if a provision for a breakfast scheme, especially for school-going children is considered in addition to the mid-day meal scheme. And finally, clean drinking water and better sanitation facilities should be made essential in schools in the rural areas. Charan Singh is the RBI Chair Professor of Economics, IIM, Bangalore.
Cheema is a Professor, Department of Biochemistry, Memorial University, St. John's, Canada
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Of evaluation work and wheat harvest Wheat
harvesting in India is done in April and is it by coincidence that the evaluation of scripts of students studying in various colleges and universities too starts in the same month? There is, of course, one major difference-a farmer takes utmost care that his sickle should not miss the mark, while the academician's eye is at the target of "evaluating" fifty scripts in a time which can be contracted at will. There are champion "harvesters" who claim that testing/feeling a single grain will show whether the whole pulse has been cooked and think it a mere wastage of time to go through the rot. They may be right, for generally speaking, good attempts are uniformly good while poor ones uniformly poor. Yet, there can be and, in fact, are instances where a student tries to conceal his ignorance by just filling space. It is here that our "champions" fall prey and give medals to jaded horses. There used to be a time when the approval of standard of marking of a sub-examiner by a Head Examiner was mandatory and at any point of time, a telegram could be received "Stop marking-letter follows" like a bolt from the blue. Now the Head Examiner and all the sub-examiners are seated around the same table and any intervention by him is looked upon as infringement. Thus the HE has been rendered as just a signing machine unless he is ready to earn the criticism/wrath of his junior colleagues who feel uneasy and harassed, whenever he requests them to revise the score of a particular candidate. Who has the time to do so? When gross injustice seems to be dispensed, a HE is compelled to make use of his discretion to revise the score. What sort of evaluation can you expect from a sub-examiner who has never taught a class and now sits in judgment? A lecturer who had apparently never taught B.A.III once asked me, "Yaar, was Duncan murdered by Lady Macbeth?" And I could not help laughing in my sleeves when I found him carrying a help book by his side! Once there was a general discussion about the script of a very “brilliant” candidate who had been awarded 41 marks out of 50. My curiosity led me to go through it and I found that the candidate had committed three spelling mistakes in précis-writing, messed up the use of ‘their’ & ‘there’; used ‘s’ with verb with a plural subject in the Present Indefinite tense and had written too long a title. Yet he had managed to get away with 9 marks out of 10. It is perhaps because of such things that the scores awarded by different universities have lost credibility and an era of entrance tests has been ushered in. I had to intervene on some occasions when I revised the score of a student from 35 to 64 and from 64 to 40. If a SE devotes 5 minutes per script, he can complete the task of evaluating 50 scripts in four hours at a stretch. It entails a lot of concentration, tremendous strain on eyes and on the back, and at the end of it, he earns merely Rs.400. Yet each task cannot be weighed in terms of monetary gain! It is after all a labour of love!
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Haryana misses the Buddha moment
Land of sojourns and sermons Buddha and Ananda, his disciple, travelled through Haryana several times via the ancient trade route of Mathura-Taxila and went up to Gandhara. Several Buddhist scholars say that Haryana Government should identify the places where Buddha gave the sermons and promote these places under the Buddhist pilgrimage in the same manner as Bihar, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh are doing. Buddhism is presently the fastest-growing religion in the world, for its quest to bring about peace and harmony in the universe. The discourses delivered by the Buddha in Haryana are of great significance to the followers of Buddhism, apart from Maha Sati Patthana Sutta, Magandkiya Sutta, Ananjsapay Sutta and Mahanidan Sutta were delivered here. After the death of Buddha, different ruling dynasties also patronised Buddhism in Haryana, from Emperor Asoka to emperor Harshvardhana in the 7th century A.D. According to Madhav Acharya, former Director, Haryana State Archaeology Department, “The present village Sugh in district Yamunanagar is one of the sites which finds mention in the ancient Buddhist chronicles about the visit of Buddha and the archaeological evidence also supports the fact”.
The confluence of rivers “A monastic complex”, according to Dr Sanjay Kumar Manjul, Archaeologist, the Archaeological Survey of India, “The excavations in Adi Badari in district Yamunanagar has revealed remains of many Buddhist stupas and monasteries spread along an area of one km. It is on the confluence of rivers Som and Saraswati. The stupas found here date back between 1,500 and 1,800 years while the monasteries are of a later period, between 800 and 1,000 years old. A set of 13 teeth and a few pieces of bones, found buried under this stupa, tell us that this was an ancient and rare sharirika stupa. A group of British monks was shocked on visiting this monastery. To them, a rare ancient monastery like the one at Adi Badri, with a beautiful idol of Buddha and a few cells, big enough to accommodate a single person, were probably meant for meditation. While the monks visiting the sites from other countries feel committed to promote this monastery internationally, there is little support shown by the state. Devender Handa, one of the senior Indologists and an archaeologist from the region, who had discovered two ancient stupas in the state; at village Chaneti and Asandh, says, “Chaneti stupa is one of oldest stupas in north India and was built initially by Emperor Asoka. This stupa is around 8 metres high and has a diameter of 20 metres.” The present form of the stupa was renovated around 2,000 years ago by a Kushana ruler. Last year, a group of Tibetan pilgrims installed holy flags all around the stupa and performed the traditional Tibetan order of rituals and rites. The locals from the village Chaneti participated and supported the pilgrims, hoping, visits to stupa will change the fate of the village. Even a private body like INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) that looks after selected heritage sites in the country is of the view that little effort is being made for the promotion of this rare ancient stupa by the state government. Handa says, the stupa was built around 2,000 years ago. The vastness of this stupa can be calculated from the fact that after such wear and tear, it is still more than 25 metres high. When you climb atop, it offers a panoramic view of the entire village. It is built of hard bricks and is perhaps the only stupa that resembles the Dhamek stupa of Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh.
The Buddha in Kurukshetra Kurukshetra does not claim association with Lord Krishna alone, inside the premises of Kurukshetra University the presence of an ancient Buddhist stupa and a monastery makes it a city relevant to the Buddhists. Located on a huge mound, near Brahmsarovar, the stupa was built around the 7th Century AD during emperor Harshvardhana's reign. Under this monastery, one can clearly see another ancient brick structure which is believed to be built during the rule of Kushanas. If excavated, this mound can provide significant information related to Buddhism in the region. Kurukshetra, the holy city where the Bhagavadagita was written, can add additional value to its spiritual past of the location where the Maha Sati Patthana Sutta was written can be ascertained, the Sutta is as significant for the Buddhists as the Bhagavadagita is for the Hindus.
Ancient trade route The majority of the Buddhist sites in Haryana have not been listed under the protected monuments of national importance by the state or Central archaeological preservation and protection agencies. They are waiting for a saviour. In the past, several Buddhist monasteries and stupas flourished in almost all the ancient cities on the old trade-routes that passed through Haryana like Topra Kalan, Adi Badri, Sugh, Kurukshetra, Asandh, Agroha and Kokarakot. Buddhism continued to exist in Haryana till the 7th Century as a major religion. But due to changed political and socio-economic conditions, it collapsed and with it came the fall of Buddhist monuments. The remains found at several ancient sites have been losing their historical value and are on the verge of extinction in the state due to culpable neglect on the part of all concerned. Jayanta Sanyal, INTACH Convener, Haryana, says, growing illegal encroachment is posing grave danger to the ancient sites and the lack of proper security and awareness about the sites among the local masses make them more vulnerable to encroachment. Migrant labourers, looking for some kind of shelter often turn these sites of great historical relevance into their abode. The isolated sites offer a hide out for unscrupulous elements. The Buddhist Forum, an NGO, working for the protection of these sites filed RTI, seeking information on how different government departments have been working to look after the Buddhist heritage sites in the last 21 years. The information received was very disturbing. The state departments have failed miserably in taking care of these sites. Haryana state department invested Rs 81,60,249 on the upkeep of these sites and ASI , Chandigarh, stated that no specific records of Buddhist sites/monuments were available in their office records. The ASI does not have exhaustive and specific information in a single consolidated form in their office records on Buddhist sites. Little effort has been made to promote tourism, conferences, provide drinking water, toilets and lighting on the ancient sites by the Central and State Archaeological Departments. The future of the ancient Buddhist sites now lies in the hands of common people, who should come forward to preserve them for future generations. The writer is a Buddhist researcher and a
member of Buddhist Forum
Buddha is smiling
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The
The
Evaluation work should hold no parallel to harvesting but for the striking similarities like the break-neck speed, the rustle of hay and of pages being turned over, the big piles of scripts and of the sheaves of golden grain and finally the accompanying gossip which speak volumes about their being identical exercises. 
The
Around 2500 years ago, the Buddha started delivering his sermons from Sarnath, now in Uttar Pradesh, and gave one of the most important sermons of his lifetime Maha Sati Patthana Sutta in what is now Haryana. Strangely, since its creation in 1966, Haryana did not recognise the importance and potential of this site to promote it under pilgrimage tourism, whereas it created tourist places of repute at places with almost no historical background, especially on the National Highway. Almost every year, close to 5,000 people from different parts of India and the world come to participate in the Vipassana course in Haryana, to honour the fact that the Buddha delivered his important sermons on this land, a fact that has been overlooked by the government. 
In the village of Agroha, Hisar, an ancient Buddhist monastery and stupa have been discovered during excavations. These Buddhist monuments found here were built 1,500 years back. The magnificent stupa here has a rectangular base, while the upper portion has been given a dome-like shape. From the top of the stupa, a deep pit was created to keep Buddha’s relics, which is clearly visible. There is a pathway around it for circumambulation, a monastery constructed of hard bricks has also been excavated in this place. Historians believe, this monastery was demolished and modified many times over.