Demystifying Racism in India

                                             *Dr. Saumitra Mohan

                It has been more than 67 years since we became independent and it is presumed that the state-nation called India should have by now become a nation-state. But the fact remains that things are far from hunky dory. The fissiparous tendencies fanned by the revisionist forces a la extremists, naxalites, separatists and terrorists continue to work at their prime agendum of balkanizing our beloved country. But much to the chagrin of all the Cassandras and prophets of doom like Selig S Harrison, India as a country has held its ground. While Harrison had declared in the wake of our independence that India would soon fall apart in multiple states (read countries), Pakistan has often vowed to bleed India through thousand cuts. We, however, continue to grow stronger by the day and continue to exist as a country even though many of our time twins in Latin America, Africa and Asia have fallen by the wayside or present the picture of a failed state. And these countries include some of those in South Asia including Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

            But yes, having said this we can’t be all complacent and sit on our laurels. As they say, if you sit on your laurels they run the danger of falling flat sooner or later. So, we definitely have a lot of ground to cover, more so in light of very disturbing and disconcerting developments in recent times. While one can definitely deal with an identified enemy within and without the border, it is really difficult to nail those living amongst us and masquerading as citizens. There are some citizens who, intentionally or unintentionally, are weakening the evolution of nationalist tendencies in the country. The nationalist feeling, the so-called ‘we feeling’ that Benedict Anderson once visualised as a desideratum for his ‘imagined community’ to constitute a strong, well-bonded nation-state still appears elusive if we look around and cognize some of the developments in our civil society.

One of such disturbing developments is the alleged ‘racist behaviour’ among Indians against some of our fellow citizens. The fatal attack on Nido Tania, a young boy from Arunachal Pradesh in a South Delhi market in February this year resulting in his untimely death later, suspicious death of a young Manipuri woman in her flat in South Delhi’s Munirka, the assault on two Nagaland youths in Gurgaon and merciless beating of a Manipuri student leader in Bangalore for not speaking Kannada are some of the recent instances of violence against our fellow citizens from the North East.

The Central Government is said to have taken a series of measures to ensure safety of citizens from North Eastern states in New Delhi and elsewhere. They include regular police patrolling of colonies where people from North Eastern states live, starting exclusive helpline for them, race and gender sensitization programmes and speedy disposal of such cases. Today, we also have a Minister of State (Independent Charge) for the North East Region in former Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General V K Singh. The reinforced attention and concerted measures have been taken following the death of Nido Tania early this year to ensure the safety of people from the region in the National Capital Region.

Earlier in 2012, in an attempt to prevent racial discrimination against people from North East, Indian Government had asked all the states and union territories to book anyone who commits an act of atrocity or crime against people from the region under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. A predominant majority of people from the North East have the protection of this central legislation available to them by dint of their belonging to one or the other tribe as scheduled in the this Act. A person found guilty for non-bailable offences under this Act can be imprisoned for five years.

As per a study, an estimated two lakh people from the North East have migrated to Delhi between 2005 and 2013 as also have many times more people from the other provinces of India. According to the Union Home Ministry, crimes against the people from the North Eastern states have reportedly gone up by 270 per cent during the past three years. The Home Ministry data also confirm that crimes against people from the North Eastern states increased from 27 in 2011 to 73 in 2013. The crimes that witnessed the highest increase were in keeping with the national pattern though and inter alia included molestation, rape and hurt. While molestation increased by 177 per cent during the period, rape cases increased from one in 2011 to 17 in 2013.

 The data give credence to observations by the Government appointed M P Bezbaruah Committee that ‘people from the North Eastern states are racially discriminated against in Delhi’. The 11-member Committee, formed in the wake of the dastardly attack on Arunachal Pradesh student Nido Tania earlier this year, submitted its report to the Government recently where it held that 86 per cent of the North Eastern Indians living in Delhi have faced some sort of racial discrimination. The Committee in its report has stated that people from the North Eastern states faced more problems in Delhi than in other metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. It also said that over two-thirds of women from North-East had reported that they faced harassment and discrimination in Delhi.

The Committee in its 82-page report, inter alia, has recommended the institution of fast track courts and special police squads, integrating each and every aspect of the North East into the consciousness of people outside the region through educational interventions, increasing social media outreach and legal awareness campaigns, having earmarked residential facilities to address the accommodation problem faced by North East people, holding regular national and international events in the North East to create greater harmony and better understanding, making such offences with racial overtones into cognizable and non-bailable offences and expediting disposal of such cases.

Many citizens from the North-East India have complained that they have been stereotyped by such characterizations as ‘Chinky’, ‘Hakka’, ‘Nepali’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Chow Mein’ by people in Delhi, with reference to their facial features, particularly the appearance of their eyes. For the distinct style including sartorial and tonsorial, tradition, culture, music, dance and more distinct facial features, they are said to become easy preys to outrageous remarks and alleged racial attacks. In 2007, the North East Support Centre and Helpline (NESC&H) was started with the determined object of increasing awareness of prejudices and attacks against people from the North East. The Centre (NESC&H) was launched with the express purpose to provide assistance to those from the North Eastern community who face various forms of alleged discrimination.

In the wake of back-to-back alleged racial attacks on people from North East in Delhi and elsewhere, the influential North East Students’ Organisation (NESO) has rightly demanded the curricular changes by inclusion of the history, geography and cultures of the people of North East in our school syllabi. ‘In major cities in India, people from the North East are often mistaken for foreigners by some people. They have to be educated. The only way we can educate them is by incorporating the history, geography and cultures of the people of North East in the school syllabi,’ NESO Chairman Samuel Jyrwa opined recently. ‘No law, no matter how stringent it is, can stop the racial attacks. The problem is in the mindset and it has to change. The problem is also about people’s ignorance that there is an India beyond West Bengal’, he said.

While the alleged racial discrimination against the North Eastern Indians is a reality, the fact remains that there have been similar reports or incidents of alleged xenophobic attacks and discrimination against Indian citizens of other regions in North East. It is a common knowledge that the migrant workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa or Uttar Pradesh have been subject to a growing degree of xenophobia, racial discrimination, prejudices and violence in the North East. In 2000 and 2003, anti-Bihari violence in North-East led to the deaths of up to 200 people and reportedly generated around 10,000 internally displaced refugees. There have been a number of racial attacks against the Bihari community in North-East states like Assam, Manipur and Nagaland including massacres as carried out by the militant groups.

On 18^th Jan, 2014, five youths from Bihar were shot dead after being pulled out from a bus by the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) militants in Assam’s Kokrajhar district. Three others, also from Bihar, were injured in the same incident. In 2007, thousands of Hindi-speaking labourers fled from Assam after a series of massacres and bomb attacks. Overall, 98 non-locals were killed in Assam during 2007 disturbances. In March-April 2008, a banned Meitei outfit killed 16 non-locals in Manipur. Purbottar Hindustani Sammelan (PHS) has alleged that anti-social elements in Assam have been carrying out a continuous hate campaign against the Hindi speakers in the region. In 2009, altogether nine Hindi speakers were killed in Assam and Manipur, after the attackers set ablaze around 70 houses.

In 2010, Hindi, Bengali and Nepali speakers were killed by the NDFB militants in Assam. Maharashtra has similarly experienced hate campaigns from time to time against people from Hindi speaking states or from South India. But such alleged racial discrimination or harassment is not confined to Indians in states outside their own, but also against people from other nationalities including those from Africa either because of their colour or their features. As a society, we still have not learnt to treat with dignity some of our fellow citizens from amongst us as usually done with the downtrodden Dalits and women.

India is one of the top ten linguistically and culturally diverse countries. We have proudly cherished and celebrated our ‘unity in diversity’. Instead of the ‘Melting Pot Model’ which tries to forcibly amalgamate and assimilate all cultures and sub-cultures into one overarching identity, India has consciously opted for the ‘Salad Bowl Model’ to ensure that all cultures retain their distinct individuality while also being an inalienable part of the larger Indian civilisational entity. It is to this effect that the Constitution of India guarantees some basic fundamental rights to citizens including ‘prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth’ vide Article 15 or ‘protection of certain rights including the right to move freely throughout the territory of India and to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India’ vide Article 19.

But, as mentioned above, we are still to build a cohesive nation-state and our nation-building process is far from complete. Indian nationalism remains a building under construction. The so-called racial assaults on Indians in different parts of the country are more of a reflection of a sick mentality and criminal mindset than anything else. Don’t we see such instances of xenophobic and racial offences even in the liberal Western countries including the countries of North America and Europe which include USA, UK, Canada, France and Germany?

In a statement in Lok Sabha – Minister of State for Home, Kiren Rijiju rightly maintained that ‘it is not a fact that people from North Eastern states are being ill-treated in different states of India including Delhi’ and that attacks against them were ‘random’ in nature. One also feels that these discriminatory instances and experiences are more of aberrations and exceptions than part of a generalized mindset on the part of the people of the regions under news. More or less Indians are quite liberal and devoid of any habitual racial behaviour. While the above mentioned offences and crimes against North East people are a reality, it is also true that for every crime committed against the North East people in Delhi, similar and more number of crimes were committed against the people from the so-called mainland India if the data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) are to be believed.

Delhi not only has reported the highest rate of violent crimes in the country, but has also been found to be more prone to violence than any other state. The NCRB statistics say that around 54.4 per cent (10,733 to be precise) cases registered in Delhi are violent crimes. In 2013, Delhi reported 1,441 rapes making it the city with the highest number of rapes. The burglary incidents rose from 449 in 2013 to 4,447 till March, 2014. The motor vehicle theft cases rose from 2,893 in 2013 to 4447 in March, 2014. Reports of crimes against women in India such as rape, dowry deaths, molestation, kidnapping, sexual harassment, trafficking and cruelty by relatives increased by 26.7 per cent in 2013 as per NCRB statistics. There were, in all, 309,546 crimes against women reported to the police in 2013 against 244,270 in 2012. Police attribute the astronomical rise in these crimes to greater public awareness and better reporting/registration of crimes.

Most of the offences and crimes, as mentioned above, were never part of an institutionalised cultural outlook but manifestation of criminal behaviour on the part of some deviant Indians including militants as also borne out through investigations. A good number of these offences and crimes were later found to have been executed either with the criminal intention of looting or were instances of group clashes. As one can definitely not stigmatize the entire people of North East for violent and murderous attacks by militants on people from outside the region, likewise the people of Delhi or Maharashtra in general can’t be disgraced.

The alleged spurt in crimes against North East Indians has simultaneously seen a secular rise in crimes against all classes of citizens. If there has been racial stereotyping of North East Indians, there has been similar stereotyping for a person from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Bihar, Punjab, Gujarat, West Bengal, Rajasthan or Haryana as also typified by the jokes in circulation. So, it can’t be argued that only North East Indians have been targeted. The criminals have secularly targeted all classes of citizens.  The above incidents are deviant behaviour on part of a section of our society and should be dealt with strongly and swiftly. The various recommendations of the Bezbaruah Committee should also be given a serious thought for pre-empting recurrence of such episodes in future.

            Against this background, what are also needed, apart from strong policing and exemplary punitive measures against such offences, are more institutionalized inter-cultural exchanges and interactions, culture sensitization exercises including inclusion of specific chapters in school syllabus for inculcation of healthy, eclectic and cosmopolitan mindset and attitude vis-a-vis people from diverse cultures and regions, not to speak of encouraging more inter-caste, inter-regional and inter-faith marriages. We definitely need to outgrow these archaic, anachronistic, pathological, and abhorrent leftovers from our past and build a broader consensus to ensure the emergence of a more tolerant and progressive India from the womb of our nation-building process. The sooner we complete our odyssey from being the state-nation to a nation-state, the better.

*The views expressed are those of the author and don’t reflect that of the Government.

Smart Vs Decent Cities: Some Reflections

                                                              Dr. Saumitra Mohan

The latest Union budget has promised building 100 smart cities across the country for the neo middle class. The term ‘Smart City’ encompasses a vision of an urban lebensraum which is ecologically friendly, technologically integrated and meticulously planned. Such a city relies more on the use of information technology to improve overall efficiency. 

The smart cities are supposed to leverage data gathered from smart sensors through a smart grid to create a city which is livable, workable and sustainable. All the data collected from sensors - electricity, gas, water, traffic and other government analytics – are to be carefully compiled and integrated into a smart grid and then fed into computers with a focus on making the city as efficient as possible. This would allow the authorities to have real time information about these cities. This also allows the computers to attempt ‘perfect operations’, such as balancing demand and supply on electricty networks, synchronising traffic signals for peak-hour usages and for optimizing energy networks.

The Union Finance Minister, during his budget speech, rightly mentioned that ‘unless new cities are developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of peiople, the existing cities would soon become unlivable.’ He informed about the government’s plan to build satellite towns near existing urban areas on the smart city template, to upgrade existing mid-sized cities and to build settlements along industrial corridors. Rs 7,060 crores have primarily been earmarked for the purpose which amounts to a little over Rs. 70 crore per city. The Rs. 7,060 crore corpus is said to be merely the seed money to get the ‘Smart City’ project going. More funds have been promised to be allocated once things have moved forward.

While the ‘Smart City’ initiative is really laudable, cynics have pointed to the deplorable condition of Indian cities. They have questioned the ‘Smart City’ initiative when the state of affairs in our extant urban settlements continue to be pathetic. When we have failed to provide even the bare minimum urban amenities for the citizens, the ‘Smart City’ venture may turn out to be a pre-mature baby. They feel that instead of building futuristic cities, it would be more than advisable to first focus on ensuring the basic minimum services like proper disposal of solid and liquid waste, improvement of traffic and parking system, better sanitation and hygiene including well-planned drainage system, availability of safe potable water and most importantly, better inculcation of civic sense among the hoi polloi.

The fact remains that the state of these facilities remain pathetic even in our grade ‘A’ and ‘B’ cities including the metropolises, not to speak of medium and smaller cities. Clogged, overflowing drains and heaps of stinking garbage are an everyday sight. We still have not been able to ensure a proper drainage system in most of our cities. It is these clogged drains which generally give rise to massive water logging problem in our cities with massive possibilites of outbreak of water-borne diseases as they finally end up contaminating our water table due to uncontrolled leaching and seepage.

The practice of open urination and defecation in different parts of our cities does not help the situation. After all, who can forget the outbreak of plague in 1994 in Surat resulting in the deaths of many people. More than anything, Surat brought a negative publicity to the entire country which became a greater cause of concern. Surprisingly, the same Surat within a year turned out to be the cleanest cities in the country. And mind you, the authorities did not have to undertake any high-falutin initiatives but to focus on bare minimum things. This is what we need to do while visualizing our ‘Smart Cities’.

So, we emergently need to ensure a proper system of solid and lidquid waste management including house to house garbage collection, a planned network of well-connected drainage system, availability of a network of paid and free public conveniences, arrangements of scientific slaughter houses for ensuring availability of hygienically processed animal protein, clean streets as well as ensuring sale of covered food/street food stuffs. The latter should be coupled with a regime for selling the same by the hawkers e.g. making it mandatory for the street food vendors to sell their stuffs only wearing gloves and head-caps to preempt contamination. There should be a corresponding provision for enforcing these sanitation and hygiene norms among the people who should be penalized for violating the same as is the practise in most of the advanced countries. The wanton throwing of garbage at public places, open urination/defecation or spitting should be made punishable offences. Use of plastic bags for day-to-day purposes should be discouraged as far as possible and practicable as it is one of the important factors playing havoc with our drainage system.

Again, unavailability of parking spaces in our cities lead to private and public vehicles being parked on the roads itself, leading to traffic snarls and inconvenience. Hence, there is not only an urgent need to do a customized traffic planning for each city including provisioning of notified parking spaces but there is also a need to enforce traffic discipline among the people. The latter should include strict compliance with the traffic rules, zero tolerance for unauthorized parking or placement of household/shop stuffs on public space, roads, streets and footpaths. Construction of decent footpaths and public parks/community halls for recreational and utilitarian purposes should also be a priority for the authorities. The National Policy on Urban Street Vendors 2009 should be strictly enforced for bringing about a semblance of sanity on our roads and streets. This would also ensure the pedestrians’ right to safe and free movement. Availability of better and safer means of mass rapid transport system (MRTS) is also a desideraturm.

Given the increasing menace of extremism, it is high time that we have a strong system of city surveillance system to protect and secure the lives of our citizens, more so in light of increasing urban crimes and terror activities. Proper street lighting shall definitely prove quite helpful here. The entire towns should be duly divided in identifiable zones with public display of layout maps and proper road/street signages for citizens’ convenience and for better policing. Identification of water aquifers and identification of highly fire-prone areas should also be a priority with proper awareness regarding disaster management regime for all the stakeholders. Enforcement of building rules also demands serious attention of the municipal authorities. There should be an emergency planning for all the old and ramshackle buildings as well as fire-prone areas.

Besides, intelligent effort should be made for natural beautification of our cities. All the municipal authorities should come out with their citizen charters and ensure mandatory compliance with the same. Online deposition of municipal taxes and single window system for getting licenses/permits and various services should be made functional immediately. A strong public grievance system should be an inalienable part of the overall planning. While one knows that finances would be a major hurdle while trying to realise these goals, but with intelligent planning and smart execution, the municipal authorities can actually generate more revenues than they might need for the purpose. It is good to know that both the central and state governments are already synergizing their urban planning to be on the same page. If these concerns are factored into the ‘Smart City’ project, then we can actually ensure bare minimum services to our citizens in pursuance to a uniform template. Our ‘smart cities’ should first guarrantee bare minimum amenities for ensuring a decent standard of living to our citizens.

The views expressed here are personal and don’t reflect those of the Government.

Teleportation Could Soon Be A Reality

Saumitra Mohan

As a kid, I always enjoyed watching those TV Sci-fi serials ‘Star Trek’, ‘Doctor Who’ or ‘The Fly’ where the characters would travel millions of miles in a jiffy via teleportation. And today, when I ruminate over the various mundane problems, teleportation can just do the trick. Those traffic snarls, road rages, vehicular pollution or even the human desire to work from his/her home or visiting all the beautiful and exciting places in the world, I think teleportation does hold a key to many of our problems.

            And Lady Luck really seems to be smiling on us as scientists across the world are busy trying to make it a reality. Teleportation may be just as easy as scanning our body down to the subatomic level, annihilating all our favourite parts at point A and then transmitting all the scanned data to point B, where an intelligent machine reassembles us in a fraction of a second. Just visualise dematerializing from your drawing room and materializing the next moment in Los Angeles or Switzerland at will for a morning walk or commuting everyday to your office in Washington from the home in Lucknow or Kolkata.

A group of scientists at the California Institute of Technology is said to have successfully teleported a photon over a distance of one metre in 1998. They could transport an atom three metres with 100% accuracy. Another group in Australia bettered this in 2004, by teleporting a whole stream of photons, in the form of a laser beam, from one side of their laboratory to the other. They are said to have done it by using pairs of particles, through ‘quantum entanglement’ method.

Basically, two photons were so ‘entangled’ that they shared the same information. Thereafter, one of them was sent via cable to another point. Then, laser was used to change the data on one of the photons, which were copied to the other one immediately – due to the entanglement effect. The original photon was eventually destroyed, leaving only the copy behind. At the end, the original photon was gone, and only copy existed in another place.

The ‘quantum entanglement’ technology enables someone holding a particle to send, instantaneously, a chunk of information to someone else holding the other particle. Because of the weird quantum connection, the information goes from one person to the other without physically passing between them. Quantum teleportation is a process by which quantum information (e.g. the exact state of an atom or photon) can be transmitted exactly from one location to another, with the help of classical communication. Because it depends on classical communication, which can proceed no faster than the speed of light, it cannot be used for superluminal transportation.

For beaming a solid object from one to another place, we need to turn the solid matter of the particle (paper clip, person or whatever) into information which is then sent to a destination via electrical cable, or transmitting the same in the form of radio waves. Then, the signal is received and processed to create an exact copy at the other end. As now it is both here and there, we need to destroy the original object so it isn’t at the earlier location anymore; it’s here instead.

            As we know, all solid objects are made of atoms, and in order to copy or teleport an entire object, there is first the need to have all the information about every atom in the object. An ordinary steel paperclip contains around one thousand billion trillion iron and carbon atoms, structured into a simple, cage-like formation. The human body, however, contains around seven thousand trillion-trillion atoms – seven billion times more than a paperclip. There are multiple types of atom including hydrogen, oxygen, calcium, sulphur et al in a human body, and they are ordered in infinitely more complex ways than the simple, replicating cage-like structure of the paperclip.

Every atom in a human body is a set of data. The individual, like Captain Kirk, is nothing but a huge collection of those data sets. Extracting all the information from Captain Kirk’s body requires knowing the physical state of every atom, which would require total disintegration. Every time Kirk steps into the transporter, he is committing suicide and then getting reborn at the other end. Second, the amount of information required to re-create him is staggering as mentioned above. Nobody knows how to collect and transmit that much information. Slightest disturbance during the process of reassembling can ruin quantum entanglement thereby inherently scrambling the information. This only means suicide at one end without rebirth at the other. Processing so much information would be practically impossible. Any slip-up and we may end up with our leg sticking out of our head, or our organs jutting inside out.

Physicists like Charles Bennett suggest that even if we can’t do it now, teleporting an atom is theoretically possible. Star Trek-style ‘beaming up’ of people through space could become a reality sometime in near future. Nothing in the laws of physics fundamentally forbids the teleportation of large objects, including humans. If we believe that we are nothing more than a collection of atoms strung together in a particular way, then in principle it should be possible to teleport ourselves from one place to another. If realised for humans, this amazing technology would make it possible to travel vast distances without physically crossing the space between. Global transportation will become instantaneous as will be interplanetary travel.

As and when it happens, many of our problems would just disappear. We would no longer have to worry about increased vehicular pollution, or irritating traffic jams or an unfavourable posting away from our home. We can attend a meeting in Washington the very next moment after having breakfast at our Kolkata or Lucknow home; could be back home immediately after the meeting, have a cup of tea with the spouse and can together take a walk by the Nile thereafter in the evening. We could be back again for the family dinner in time at Kolkata or Lucknow or Jhumaritilaiya as the case may be. After all, who ever thought of having a face-to-face conversation with our near and dear ones physically sitting thousands of miles away? If human ingenuity could realise its dreams of flying or mobile telephony, teleportation should definitely not appear that far-fetched. Mind you, many of scientific inventions and discoveries were unimaginable at one point of time to our forebears.

NREGA IS DEAD. LONG LIVE NREGA

Saumitra Mohan

The Union Ministry of Rural Development Minister is said to be working on a proposal to bring about some far-reaching changes into the flagship rural employment scheme namely Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). One of the proposals aims to tilt the ratio of expenditure in favour of materials, which, as alleged by some, will likely result in contactors coming in through the backdoor. Increasing the material component of funds from 40 per cent to 49 per cent and decreasing the wage component accordingly, as proposed, would mean reliance on ‘ghost conractors’ with resultant corruption. Another fall-out of this development would be that the more vulnerable unskilled workers would lose out to the skilled ones in a contactor-based system.

 As things stand now, the contractors and use of machineries have been consciously barred in NREGS to keep it focused on its basic purpose of providing rural employment to the needy households while also focussing on some critical sectors like water conservation and harvesting, soil conservation, watershed development, drought-proofing, flood-proofing and undertaking social forestry in a big way. As a result, the countryside has not only seen creation of millions of working persondays for the rural households, but has also seen huge creation of permanent assets.

 MGNREGS by ensuring a socio-economic safety net through direct cash transfer to hundreds of thousands of rural households in India has worked wonders. This scheme is a much better mutant of a rural employment programme than many of its previous avatars given the latitude and scope it provides to the thousands of programme officers across the country. The scheme made significant progress in its outreach and effectiveness through the subsequent grafting of transparency and accountability norms. However, the carping Cassandras have been expressing serious doubts about the suggested moves to water down the obtaining norms including the universal entitlement of every agrestic household to rightfully demand work when needed.

It is believed that ‘Aadhaar’-based cash transfers to the rural poor and underprivileged would do a lot more to provide a safety net than bringing in contractors via backdoor as the same would mean less scope for manual work for the needy thereby compromising their ‘right to work’ as promised in the National Rural Employment Guarrantee Act (NREGA). Brought out through a parliamentary legislation, this social welfare Act envisages an economic safety net for the rural poor during the lean season by promising a hundred days’ work through a calendar year. Though there is nothing sacrosanct about any scheme including NREGA, but observers agree that MGNRES definitely was an improvement over all its predecessors.

If changes in society or technology allow a more effective way to deliver a particular social entitlement to the people, they should definitely be used. Even MGNREGS has used direct cash transfers to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries to minimise leakages. But the fact remains that the leakages have only been minimized and not completely eliminated. Jean Dreze, an advocate of NREGA, has rightly termed the transition to bank payments of NREGA wages as a ‘major breakthrough.’ Now, with the new ‘Jan Dhan Yojana’ promising a no-frill, zero-balance bank account for every Indian accompanied by a life insurance worth Rs. one lakh within a year, the MGNREGS wage transfers shall get a further impetus.

India’s poor have often been short-changed by the way our social welfare and subsidy programmes are structured. The most vulnerable section of society is at the mercy of bureaucratic despotism or lopsided power dynamics in thousands of Gram Panchayats where extension of a deserved government entitlement or benefit is often politically aligned. Hence, richer and relatively well-administered states make the most of these programmes by extracting a bigger share of the developmental pie even if the need is greater elsewhere. Cash transfer does provide a way to cleave through these societal dynamics. The evidence has been there for everyone to appreciate in NREGA when it transitioned from cash payment to bank accounts for paying the wages.

As per a report, total outgo towards subsidies in India is approximately 4.25 trillion rupees – around 4 per cent of our GDP. If leakages could actually be curtailed by plugging the extant programmatic loopholes to ensure a more efficient transfer of entitled wages to the intended beneficiaries, it will trigger radical social changes. Clinical targeting of various benefits including those of NREGA would mean huge multiplier effects for the rural economy. An efficient and effective delivery mechanism should allow the people to choose from a smorgasbord of socio-economic opportunities available through various government programmes and schemes instead of remaining passive objects of patronage. Once people are freed from the tyranny of whimsical discretions of the bureaucracy and political class, they will become more enlightened and empowered. This would reduce poverty, deepen democracy and improve the overall governance at all levels.

Overriding objections raised by senior officials and experts, the Rural Development Ministry is reported to have already ordered the restructuring of the job guarantee scheme (MGNREGS) which is likely to change the fundamentals of this flagship scheme. MGNREGS, as a demand-driven scheme, has provided work to one in three rural households during the last decade. Ministry documents obtained under the Right to Information Act show as to how arguments were advanced against diluting MGNREGS as the same run contrary to the ‘spirit of the Act’. They are said to have pointed to an assumed reduction of up to 40 per cent in persondays provided through MGNREGS as a result of reducing the wage component of the total funds allocated for the scheme. The objection was reportedly overruled as the proposed move is supposed to be ‘reflective of the view of the legislature’. The proposed change may soon become operational.

The RTI activists Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and many others including economists, women’s’ activists, lawyers and former bureaucrats, as part of People’s Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) have recently written to the Prime Minister protesting against attempts to dilute MGNREGS. The allegedly wilful starving of the MGNREGS by cutting down on release of funds to the states was described as a blatant attempt to abrogate a fundamental right of the people by economists like Prabhat Patnaik and Abhijit Sen.

Abhijit Sen, a former Planning Commission Member, also revealed that the creation of assets under MGNREGS was nine times more than the earlier Jawahar Rozgar Yojana although spending in both the schemes as a proportion of GDP was almost the same. The said RTI reply has revealed that the Union Rural Development Ministry owed a whopping Rs 6000 crores as an March 31, 2014, the bulk of which was delayed wages. The Ministry is alleged to be releasing funds in driblets and most of it is getting used up in settling pending wages and other liabilities. These liabilities have since further accumulated and increased thereby resulting in virtual stoppage of NREGA works across the country.

Many panchayati raj institution (PRI) members have pointed to the difficulties being faced by them as a result of choking of MGNREGS. The Gram Panchayats across the country have utilised NREGA funds to not only give work to rural poor as and when demanded, but also for improvement of rural infrastructures in the countryside thereby leading to overall improvement in the quality of life there, not to speak of the macroeconomic Keynesian implications of the same for the economy as a whole. There are many positive stories regarding NREGA creating opportunities for the rural poor to ensure basic entitlements for themselves and their children.

Activists of PAEG have strongly condemned the proposal regarding restricting MGNREGS to certain selected and short-listed regions where need for such job-guarantee works are needed more and have called it a death knell for the job guarantee scheme. Critics have already questioned the grounds and parameters for selecting these Blocks from across the country and have questioned the move because of its potential to compromise the ‘right to work’ as enshrined in the Constitution. The fact remains that as of now NREGA is a dead scheme. But given the grounds it has broken in rural employment over all its previous avatars, one would wish its continuance in one or the other form.

*The views expressed here are the personal views of the author and don’t reflect those of the government.

            Lateral Entry into Civil Service: A Timely Move

Saumitra Mohan

The federal democratic system in India since our independence has been governed by the elected Executive popularly known as the Council of Minister headed by the Prime Minister as primus inter pares. This elected Executive changes every quinquennium depending which political party gets first past the post at the hustings. The winner is bestowed the responsibility to run the country as per the arrangements specified in the Constitution of India. However, to ensure systemic continuity there remains in place an impersonal, permanent Executive aka the complex hierarchical bureaucratic structure, the famed steel-frame of India.

            Notwithstanding the eventful vicissitudes of fortune as Indian democracy has experienced over the years, if the country has seen peaceful transitions from one government to another, the credit, inter alia, has to go to India’s often-maligned steel-frame, howsoever rusted it is alleged to be. This stereotypical Weberian institution, predicated on rational and predictable rules, has duly and ably ensured the sustenance of the often doddering and toddling baby steps of Indian democracy. And Indian bureaucracy usually has its recruits selected through one of the toughest recruitment examinations in the world as conducted by the Union Public Service Commission. The Indian civil service remains pretty ensconced in the system to provide the critical support and facilitation to the elected Executive in governing the country.

However, lately this hoary leviathan (read bureaucracy) has been under fire. Trenchant vitriolic attacks have been mounted by the critics for its conservatism and status-quoist approach to the various protean governance issues as facing our polity. It has been argued that Indian civil service has been failing and flailing in its duty to transmogrify itself to suit the developmental demands of this young nation. The civil service, which has so far rendered yeoman service to the country through its thick and thin, suddenly appears a villain of the piece in the face of these criticisms.

One needs to appreciate that Indian bureaucracy or any bureaucracy for that matter is genetically programmed to be status-quoist as wilful chopping and changing with a governance system invites undesirable instability which could be simply dangerous for a complex, plural democracy like India with multilayered societal diversities. We can’t afford to ignore the examples from Latin America, Africa, East and South East Asia where such experiments have often resulted in balkanization and failure of the governance system in those countries.

            Given the multiple constraints in a complex, plural society like ours, Indian civil service has definitely delivered though observers feel that it has started showing signs of fatigue and does requires a face-lifting to customize it to suit the changing times. And it is with this in view that the extant Central government is toying with sundry ideas to effect the desired reforms in our civil service to bring it in synchrony with time. One such reform, which reportedly is on the anvil, is lateral entry into the Indian civil service. The Centre is believed to be actively working to institutionalise lateral entry from academia and the private sector into some senior government positions.

This is posited to be a long overdue reform with far-reaching implications. The critics feel that to change the way bureaucracy works, it has become imperative to move from a closed to a more open system for recruiting Indian’s future administrators. The bureaucratic glasnost is believed to be one of the prerequisites for enhancing quality of the quotidian governance in our country. In the past also, there have been suggestions by the government-constituted Expert Groups to institutionalise lateral entry into various critical positions requiring esoteric and specialized knowledge. But, such suggestions have often been pigeon-holed and not followed up in right earnest. However, with its commitment to good governance, the present federal government has been exploring various ways to enhance efficiency and effectiveness for better delivery of sundry public services and benefits. Ergo, in all likelihood, on this occasion, the government may see this important reform through to its logical end.

Lateral entry, though, has always existed in the chequered history of independent India’s civil services. Nandan Nilekeni, the former Infosys official was drafted to oversee the ‘Aadhaar’ scheme which has the potential to transform India’s social welfare sector, is an illustrious recent example. Another illustrious example is Raghuram Rajan, the present Governor of Reserve Bank of India, a position usually occupied by career bureaucrats. The practice, however, has been ad hoc in nature and marked by dilettantism. Given the strong umbilical linkage between governance and prosperity amid growing complexities in the society, Western countries like UK, USA, Australia, Holland and Belgium have already thrown open specific government positions to qualified personnel from all walks. It has been found to be a better way to attract apposite talents for the job.

A judicious combination of domain knowledge and relevant expertise is a critical requirement in governance. It is felt by many that these attributes are often not present in a cadre of generalists. Moreover, the increasing penchant for politically correct recruitment through reserved quotas also restricts scope for merit in critical areas requiring definite skills and competences. The second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) also envisaged a shift from a career-based approach to a post-based approach for the top tier of government jobs. ARC felt that civil servants ought to compete with domain experts from outside the regular civil service for senior positions.

An important dimension of this reform is to enable genuine competition by setting up an independent authority to supervise the proposed recruitment process. Without an independent authority with well-laid out norms, there is a chance that lateral entry may turn out to be an excuse for a back-door entry of the ‘spoils-system’ to recruit politically-aligned persons which will further subvert the system thereby defeating the whole purpose behind the move.

The proposed lateral process of recruitment is also believed to be a move to prise open the alleged stranglehold the IAS lobby has on key appointments. While the move is definitely welcome, it should be ensured that the same does not become a change for the sake of change. After all, a system which has delivered over the years can’t be jettisoned overnight. The baby should definitely not be thrown with the bathwater. One has to be very watchful while bringing in such far-reaching systemic changes. After all, Nandan Nilekeni has also been gasping for breath in the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) with the ‘Aadhaar’ initiative going nowhere.

Such changes will only be skin-deep if other factors remain unaddressed including insulating the civil service from political interference. Besides, while allowing lateral entry, the members of Indian civil service should also be allowed to move out, do a stint in the private sector and come back to rejoin the civil service as per a pre-laid out protocol. Private sector enterprises also need to benefit from the rich and varied experiences that civil servants have. For sure, a change of this nature will not be easy as there is bound to be stiff resistance from within the babudom (read Indian civil service). The government, however, ought to push ahead with this paradigm shift in Indian governance as the national interest is always greater than the interest of a few though the proposal does need a more broad-based discussion with all the relevant stakeholders.

*The views expressed here are personal views of the author and don’t reflect those of the government.