It's a secret bill

It's a secret bill

Source: By K.N. Bhat: The Asian Age

The collegium system fabricated by the Supreme Court through a judicial decision for appointment of judges to the higher judiciary has been operational since 1993. The near unanimous view of the legal fraternity is that the contraption, whereby appointment and the transfer of judges are decided by a forum of the Chief Justice of India and the four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court, has failed in selecting right kind of people to high judicial offices. Outsiders complain that the system lacks transparency -no one except the five justices involved know why someone has been chosen to be a Supreme Court or a high court judge and why someone else has been rejected.

The Judicial Appointments Commission Bill, reportedly finalised by Kapil Sibal, the Union law minister, and approved by the government is intended to replace the collegium. Presently, like the collegium's business, the bill is also a mystery. The little that is known about it is only through an official note handed out to the media.

Mr Sibal's impressive looking commission seems just a means to dislodge the collegium; hence its composition is only of cosmetic value, not of substance. The real design, one fears, is to restore the power of appointment to the executive, a hark back to the days when political patronage prevailed.

The clue that points to this motive is having the law secretary as the convener of the commission. The bill gives no place for the Leader of the Opposition in the main commission -it only gives him a voice in the matter of selection of two eminent persons from the public. Maybe, this omission is deliberate -a red herring -only to be yielded at the appropriate time as a bargain.

The convener would, naturally, initiate the process of appointment to the higher judiciary. He would place some names on the table of this august body consisting of three Supreme Court judges -there appears to be no requirement of the senior-most judges but the Chief Justice and any two judges, a representative of the Prime Minister and two “eminent personalities“ who need not be jurists or lawyers.

The commission collectively has the unenviable power only to approve or reject either a Tweedledum or a Tweedledee shortlisted by the law secretary, i.e. by the government. In the absence of an opportunity to look at the bill, one is justified in being cynical about the whole exercise. The well-meaning public wants neither the faulty collegium to continue nor do they want a restoration of the rejected executive system of the past -they cry for a neutral body with power and means to select good judges, and to keep a vigil over the judiciary.

The Constitution has to be amended to create this high-powered body and, in effect, to nullify a 1992 judgment of a nine judge bench of the Supreme Court. In that context it may be worth examining whether to confer on that body some more powers, like placing a judge under suspension. At present no authority has the power to suspend a high court or a Supreme Court judge, even if s/he is caught accepting bribe red-handed. The only remedy is to move Parliament for the recommendation to remove the judge, a long-drawn process which, has proven to be ineffective.

Transferring tainted judges to another high court makes no sense. While amending the Constitution, it would be prudent to confer upon the commission -better to name it as a National Judicial Commission -the authority to exercise powers under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, like recommending the removal of judges, thus avoiding multiplicity of bodies.

It has also been found necessary during the last 60 odd years of our Republic that a high ranking body should be empowered to call for explanation from an earring judge and for provision of “in-camera“proceedings in cases involving judges. Many of the ills of the judiciary sought to be regulated through new measures, like the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, could be referred to a body like the National Judicial Commission with the power to delegate as prescribed by rules.

It is necessary for such a commission to have a permanent secretariat insulated from the executive and high-ranking officers with proven expertise in management technique for identifying good candidates for appointment well in advance of vacancies and to keep a talent bank from which the commission would pick names for consideration and appointment.

One of the reforms that a previous law minister, Veerappa Moily, wanted to bring in but could not was rising the retirement age of high court judges (presently 62) to the level of that of a Supreme Court judge -presently 65 -or of both to 70. The purpose of this amendment was to protect their independence.

At present, high court judges try to attract the attention of the collegium members of the Supreme Court to secure three years of extra service. If the retirement age is the same, many of the judges of the high court may not be anxious to occupy a chair in the Supreme Court. This would also help the chief justices of the high courts to have a long enough tenure which, at present, is mostly a few months.

A long-felt lacuna has been that the independence of the judges of the higher judiciary is eroded on account of temptation of post-retirement offices. With the raising of the age of retirement, there must be a total ban on retired judges being re-employed. Tribunals, which are to be manned presently by retired judges, should hereafter be open only to sitting judges. Our judiciary needs a comprehensive, systemic treatment starting with the establishment of the All-India Judicial Service.

It is a matter of common knowledge that carrying out constitutional amendments is difficult on account of the composition of our Parliament. However, presenting a wholesome set of amendments relating to the judiciary may facilitate achieving the elusive consensus.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8919-29-august-2013.html

The poverty story

The poverty story

Source: Devaki Nandan Mandal: The Statesman

The country’s GDP growth has plummeted to a decade’s low in the last fiscal. In terms of the world index, India was ranked at number 168, according to the CIA World Fact Book. Signs of recovery are not visible. Rather, macro-economic fundamentals are extremely weak. Inflation, fiscal deficit, and current account deficit are the major areas of concern. The rupee has weakened considerably against the dollar, and this poses a headache to importers. The scenario is reminiscent of pre-reform 1991.

The polity is fractured and bleeding. Divisive forces have resumed their activities ever since the announcement of a separate state of Telangana. The coalition partners are divided, there have been serial scams, and the leadership issue in the post-election UPA has resulted in a deficit in governance. Opinion polls conducted recently by the national television channels have made the Congress jittery about its prospects in the next Lok Sabha election.

Amidst this gloomy scenario comes the announcement of the Planning Commission on the number of people living below the poverty line. The estimates show that the poverty ratio has fallen from 37 per cent in 2004-05 to 22 per cent in 2011-12. This has raised 138 million people above extreme poverty. In 2012, there were 269.3 million people (rural: 216.5; urban: 52.8) living below the poverty line, out of a total population of 1.2 billion.

This further illustrates a significant decrease from nearly two decades ago. In 1994, there were 403.7 million people or 45.3 per cent of the population in poverty. The commission’s figures suggest that the annual rate of decline in the poverty count accelerated to 2.18 per cent for 2004-05 and 2011-12 from an annual drop of 0.74 per cent between 1993-94 and 2004-2005.

The Planning Commission’s findings are based on the methodology recommended in 2005 by a panel of experts headed by the economist, the late Suresh Tendulkar. The methodology defines poverty in terms of consumption or spending power of an individual during a certain period. Only those spending up to Rs 27 a day in rural areas and Rs 33 in urban areas would be counted as living in poverty. Thus, for a family of five, the all-India poverty level in terms of consumption expenditure would amount to about Rs 4080 per month in rural areas and Rs 5,000 per month in urban areas.

The Tendulkar calibration is roughly equal to the World Bank’s poverty line, which is based on the purchasing power parity (PPP) for $ 1.25. The PPP compares the amount of currency needed to buy the same item in different countries. The yardstick is used by the UN and in over 180 countries. The extent of decline ~ from 37 per cent to 22 per cent over the past seven years ~ has ignited debate throughout the country. There is no denying that the Planning Commission’s poverty line has been set at an absurdly low level which conceals the true scale of poverty in India. The spending has been calculated at a level that is much too low.

Considering the cost of food, rent and essential commodities, it is impossible to make even the bare purchase of food.  The average cost of one kg of rice sold through PDS at subsidized rates is currently around Rs 18. Mr NC Saxena, who monitors the food programme on behalf of the Supreme Court, feels that the estimates of numbers living in poverty are meaningless in the present economic situation. He concedes that consumption among the weakest sections of society has increased significantly over the past decade.

This may be music to the ears of the mandarins of the Planning Commission. With the Congress-led UPA government in deep trouble, one wonders if Yojana Bhavan is engaged in a rescue act. This can be a convenient propaganda plank for the government in the next general election. Besides, more people in the poverty bracket would mean a larger financial burden on the government which it may not be in a position to bear. A lower poverty line allows the government to target welfare policies for the perceived benefit of the weakest sections. The timing of the announcement is bound to raise eyebrows.

The Planning Commission’s statement says that the data from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey (2011-12) of household consumer expenditure is now available. But the government could have waited for the recommendations of another panel headed by C Rangarajan, Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister.

The panel was set up in June 2012 to review the methodology used for estimating poverty after widespread criticism over how the poverty line had been set by the government on the basis of the recommendations of the Tendulkar committee. Here again, the political calculation carried weight since the Rangarajan committee’s report is expected only by July 2014.

Did the commission want to keep the number of poor artificially low? If so, then why? The answer has to be found in the ethos of our politicians and their chosen planners. They do not like to be reminded about the ground realities. They are more interested in India’s new-found place in the comity of nations and refuse to accept inconvenient truths.

Besides, we have learnt to live with racism of a peculiarly inverted kind. Even if it is true that India is still mired in poverty, the so-called “patriots” are against a public discourse on the subject. They are against what they call “India bashing”.  It bears recall that even Satyajit Ray was not spared on the floor of Parliament for his all-time classic, Pather Panchali, because of its portrayal of poverty. Hygienic sanitation facilities do not exist in large parts of rural India.

The UN estimates that 5,00,000 Indians die every year for lack of clean water. Beyond definitions and calibration of poverty lies the fact of the matter ~ little or nothing has been done to alleviate poverty.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8891-27-august-2013.html

Bharat Shining

Bharat Shining

Source: By Rajesh Shukla: The Financial Express

It is, by now, well known that poverty levels have been falling much more sharply in rural India as compared to urban India. This is largely a function of the fact that there are more poor people in rural India, and the more numbers there are around the poverty line—that is, households who earn just a little less than the poverty line—the faster poverty ratios will fall. Between 1993 and 2004-05, while urban poverty ratios fell 0.55 percentage points per year, those in rural areas fell 0.75 percentage points. Between 2004-05 and 2009-10, this difference accelerated and, while urban poverty levels fell 0.96 percentage points, rural poverty levels fell 1.6 percentage points. In the next two years, the difference rose dramatically and while urban poverty levels fell 1.7 percentage points, rural poverty levels fell more than two-and-a-half times faster, by 4.2 percentage points.

While it is commonly believed poverty levels fell faster due to a better monsoon—2009-10 was a drought year—this is only part of the explanation. The real explanation lies in the dramatic change in the number and proportion of rural households who are no longer dependent upon agriculture and the impact this has had on household expenditures.

In 2004-05, of the 150 million households in rural India, nearly 62% were dependent upon agriculture in one form or another; they were either cultivating their own land or were working as agriculture labourers. These households were spending R32,635 per year in 2004-05 and R68,750 in 2011-12, based on the National Sample Survey data for each year. This was not a small achievement and while 45.2% of such households were below the poverty line in 2004-05, just 28.2% were below the poverty line in 2011-12.

By far the greater change has been that in occupation patterns. While 38.3% of households were in the non-farm sector in rural areas in 2004-05, this rose dramatically to 44.7% in 2011-12—an increase of nearly 20 million households and 110 million people in a short span of just 7 years and incredible by any stretch of the imagination. For this group, annual household expenditure rose from R36,082 in 2004-05 to R74,020 in 2011-12. Given the 7.6% higher expenditure levels for the segment, the shift was more than enough to get a larger number people out from under the poverty line—the “distance-to-poverty-line” is lower in rural areas.

What are these households working on if not on agriculture? It is worth keeping in mind, while 96% of households engaged in agriculture in India are to be found in rural areas, over 45% of households working in the industrial sector are also to be found here. The figure is a higher 56% in the case of ‘traditional services’ and a reasonably high 44% for ‘modern services’.

With households moving away from agriculture—there was a fall of 2.5 million households who worked as agricultural labour between 2004-05 and 2011-12—wages have risen in the sector and that is a big reason why poverty levels have fallen even for those still dependent upon agriculture.

The much bigger shift has been the over 40% increase in the number of households engaged in ‘casual labour’, either in public works like MGNREGA but more likely in industrial or service sector areas. How much higher the earnings here are can be seen from the fact that while 38.3% of households engaged in ‘agriculture labour’ are poor, the figure is a lower 33.5% for casual labour.

For the salaried class, where there has been a jump of over 55%, household expenditure are even higher. Even in 2004-05, just 21.2% of the households in this category were below the poverty line versus 34.1% for agriculturist households, 62.8% for agriculture labour and 41.8% for the entire rural sector. By 2011-12, just 13.1% of such households were below the poverty line in comparison with 22.9% for agriculturist households, 38.3% for agriculture labour households and 25.7% for the entire rural sector.

When you look at the disaggregated data in terms of education levels, they show what is intuitively obvious, that those with a higher education tend to be less poor. While increasing agriculture productivity is obviously a good thing to reduce poverty levels, a far greater kick will be got from increasing the penetration of industry and modern services.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8906-28-august-2013.html

Threats to secular polity

Threats to secular polity

Source: by Kuldip Nayar: The Tribune

PARTITION of the Indian subcontinent is 66 years old. On August 14, 1947, the states of India and Pakistan came into being in the wake of division. Even today they have not settled down as neighbours, much less as friends. Borders are bristling with troops and clashes are inevitable. A few days ago, five men from the Indian army were killed. The Pakistan army may not be directly involved. But it helps the jihadis and even the Taliban in their plan to destablise India. It looks the Pakistan army is not interested in conciliation between Islamabad and New Delhi. One incident or the other always takes place before the talks between the countries begin.

What surprises me is that no front-rank politician, historian or any other person of eminence has given me a cogent reason, much less a convincing one, to explain why the two communities, Hindus and Muslims, separated after having lived together for more than a thousand years.

The radicals may claim that they maintained peace because they were the rulers. Yet the fact is that Hindus and Muslims had developed a composite culture which recognised the mingling of two civilizations and which had overcome the pulls of polarisation. Social contacts were regular and festivals of the two communities were celebrated jointly.

Still it did not take the articulators of religious identity to tear the fabric apart from the thirties. Was pluralism only a cover to hide differences? And in reality, the two communities had never occupied the common ground and had remained distant from each other?

Had this been the case, why the exchange of population was ruled out when the separation was contemplated? Even Muslims on their own did not raise any objection that those left behind in India would number more than the ones in the Muslim homeland, Pakistan. Hindus left Pakistan and Muslims from Punjab and a few other cities in the north. It was a forced eviction.

The shadowy demand for vivisection was in the background for a long time. But it never swept Muslims off their feet until the thirties when the idea of a two-nation theory was propounded. The Muslim League in which Qaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah infused life won hands down. While in the 1937 elections, the League won 57 out of the 248 Muslim seats in 11 provinces. A decade later in 1946, it won all over India: 116 seats out of 119 in Bengal, 43 out of 50 in Bihar, 54 out of 61 in UP, 34 out of 34 in Sind and so on. The League failed to get a majority only in the mountainous North West Frontier Province where the Congress Party (Red Shirts) won.

It is useless to debate the birth of Pakistan, which is getting more and more radical and Talibanised. But there are liberal Hindu and Muslim leaders in the two countries and other parts of the world to question the people of the two communities parting company after having shared a common way of living and following the same tradition for centuries.

A top Congress leader, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, warned that the Muslims in UP, Bihar and Madras would “awake and discover overnight that they have become aliens and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they will be left to the mercies of what would then become an unadulterated Hindu Raj.” Jawaharlal Nehru said that the splitting up of India did not solve the problem of "two nation" for there were Hindus and Muslims all over the place. Humayun Kabir, Azad's private secretary, told me that Azad thought the Congress leader (Nehru was then 58 years old and Sardar Patel 72) accepted partition because they had grown too tired; too old to continue the agitation against the British and wanted to devote the rest of their lives to build an India of their dreams. The Muslim community dubbed Azad a “Hindus' show boy.”

It was an avalanche of migration. Humanity was on the move on both sides. None expected it, none wanted it but none could help it. The two countries blamed each other as they tried to grapple with this and other chaotic problems of partition after the first few heady days.

The refugees carried with them to the country they went not only bitterness and vengeful thoughts but also stories of atrocities in the villages where they had lived peacefully with other communities for centuries. If partition was on the basis of religion, these instances only furrowed it deep.

I personally felt the privations of partition only when I crossed the border penniless. I was not alone. This happened to most Hindus and Muslims who were confident of returning to their own homes once things settled down. But it did not happen that way.

How come that the same people from UP and Bihar, a bastion of the Muslim League, looked with disdain the ideology of secularism till the formation of Pakistan? Today, they swear by secularism. How do they justify the two contrary stands before their children or grandchildren? Secularism is the anti-thesis of separation. If it is not the conviction of the community, it is for it to introspect. Many Hindus are becoming prey to the same anti-national approach.

I thought that the religious phobia was over after the British left and Pakistan was constituted. But I did not reckon with the separatists working within the Hindu community. The BJP is the Muslim League of pre-partition days. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has become the biggest exponent of Hindutva.

The religious approach divided the subcontinent. The same thesis, articulated by the BJP, is destroying national unity. Imagine Modi, who blessed the killing of Muslims as the Gujarat Chief Minister, becoming India's Prime Minister! It means the battle for a secular polity has to be fought all over again. There is no alternative to it because the aggressiveness of the majority can turn into fascism. People thinking in terms of democracy and pluralism cannot sit idle at this juncture.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8736-16-august-2013.html

Hungry India

Hungry India

Source: By Jaydev Jana: The Statesman

The first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind. Food is the moral right of all who are born into the world” ~ Norman Borlaug

Food security and the right to food are the two major political and social issues in India today. A democratic government cannot afford to ignore the public outcry. The country’s success in preventing a famine in the period since 1947 can be attributed to the inherent force of democracy. But its overall record in fighting hunger and malnutrition seems to be quite terrible. Hunger is endemic and the poor response of the government is also well-documented. And it is a cruel irony that widespread hunger is reported in parallel with abundant foodgrain. Food rights in the absence of storage facilities, and yet the people don’t get their share. India is among the 29 countries with the highest level of endemic hunger, malnourished children and poorly fed women. As Amartya Sen has written in Poverty and Famines: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough to eat.”

Endemic hunger works silently. Contrary to the image of protruding bellies, sunken faces, peeling skin and receding hairline, it is not easily visible. While famine appears with climatic swiftness, hunger persists in rural as well as urban households and arouses our consciousness only when there is a troubling media report of starvation death.  It has been estimated that the number of hungry people in India today is more than what the country’s entire population was in 1947. Indeed, ours is a hungry country despite a booming economy and the expenditure amounting to crores on subsidising foodgrain and other social welfare programmes.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) presents an incisive survey. It is a multi-dimensional statistical tool, adopted and developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), comprising three equally important indices ~ the proportion of people undernourished, child mortality, and the proportion of underweight children. In the 2012 list of 79 countries, India was ranked 65th ~ behind China which ranked second, Pakistan 57th and Sri Lanka 37th. This apart, the India State Hunger Index (ISHI) 2008 revealed that the extent of hunger varies from state to state. As per ISHI, not a single state is either low or moderate in terms of its index score and 12 of the 17 states surveyed fall in the ‘alarming’ category. Madhya Pradesh has been placed in the ‘extremely alarming’ category.

In 2007, the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) came out with another revealing report on food scarcity in households in as many as 17 states.  The households were classified into three categories: (1) those with adequate food throughout the year; (2) those that make do with inadequate food during certain months of the year; and (3) those with inadequate food throughout the year. West Bengal had the highest percentage of households (10.6 per cent) that did not get enough food to eat during some months of the year. The second in the scale was Odisha. Surprisingly, Bihar (2 per cent) and Jharkhand (0.6 per cent) fared better than West Bengal. Among the category of households that were hungry throughout the year, Assam topped the list with 3.6 per cent. Odisha and West Bengal jointly occupied the second position, each having 1.3 per cent starving rural households at any time of the year. Seasonal starvation in rural Bengal peaked during February and March and the worst sufferers were agricultural labourers (23.3 per cent) and non-agricultural workers (8.9 per cent).

India’s performance in eradicating undernutrition seems to be abysmal, with the levels of child undernutrition exceptionally high. Had the malnourished in India formed a country, it would have been the world’s fifth largest ~ almost the size of Indonesia.  According to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (FAO, IFAD and WFP), India has the largest number of undernourished people in the world ~ 217 million (17.5% of its population) as of 2012. In January 2011, the Prime Minister released the much publicised Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) survey report with the lament: “The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame.”

There is enough evidence to indicate that more people die of malnutrition than from famines. Hunger affects the normal functioning and development of the body and results in ailments that drastically reduce the body’s ability to resist infections.  Malnutrition can even affect the child’s concentration in school. It impairs an adult’s performance in the workplace. Hunger thus traps individuals and households in a vicious cycle of health problems and a diminishing capacity to learn and work. It can turn out to be a killer in due course of time. The consequences of malnutrition transcend generations; stunted mothers are likely to have underweight children. These damaging effects extend to communities and economics affecting the development potential of nations. An FAO study of developing countries over 30 years found that if countries with high rates of undernourishment had increased food intake to an adequate level, their economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP), would have risen by 45 per cent. The loss in labour productivity due to hunger can reduce the per capita GDP by 6 to 10 per cent, according to a UN task force on hunger.

To make India hunger-free, the UPA-II government has promulgated an Ordinance to implement the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). The government claims that the Bill marks a shift from a welfare-based to a right-based approach. Yet the narrow definition of food security assumes that the individual is a passive recipient of a dole... and not a claimant of entitlement. The Bill suffers from the one-size-fits-all approach. Its predetermined entitlements seem to be based on the assumption that the same level of hunger is prevailing across the country. This is contrary to reality. The selection of the target groups is central to the implementation of the ‘quasi-universal’ bill, but the stakeholders are clueless as to how to identify beneficiaries under the NFSB so that they could fit into the eligibility criteria for 67 per cent of the population and all hungry individuals could be covered. Moreover, the existing Public Distribution System (PDS) has been selected as the delivery mechanism. This is the most serious flaw. Institutional corruption is so deeply entrenched that mere revamp and reform can hardly make the system free from corruption.

The key issue is to make foodgrain available to the needy. The delivery mechanism should be left to the respective states.  The presently centralised PDS needs to be de-centralised. Such a system rests on the principle of localised procurement, storage and distribution, and the involvement of local communities. It would make truly participatory. If the Bill is to be effective, the target groups will have to be identified and data collected on hunger and malnutrition.

There is a proverb that “a hungry man is an angry man”. It would be useful to recall Mahatma Gandhi’s statement ~ “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” The National Food Security Bill provides a chance to launch a frontal attack on endemic hunger and to realise the Mahatma’s wish that the “God of bread” should be present in every household. We cannot miss the opportunity.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8750-17-august-2013.html

To Much ado about nothing

To Much ado about nothing

Source: By Bhaskar Dutta: The Telegraph

The recent debate on the extent of poverty in India has been generating a lot of heat, but very little light. The debate was sparked off by the latest poverty estimates released by the Planning Commission. These show quite a dramatic fall in the level of poverty. The number of people below the poverty line — the threshold level of per capita expenditure below which a person is deemed poor — has declined from 37 per cent to 22 per cent in the seven years between 2004- 05 and 2011- 12. This would, undoubtedly, be the fastest rate of decline in poverty in India.

Members of the Opposition parties as well as others are up in arms, arguing that there is little basis for the claim that the incidence of poverty has gone down. In particular, their criticism has focused on the fact that the poverty line, set at Rs 33 per person per day in urban areas, is absurdly low." Who can live on so little money?" they ask. Not surprisingly, Congress politicians have responded with some ridiculous statements. An official spokesman claimed that Rs 12 was enough for a hearty meal in Mumbai. This was trumped by another who said that even Rs 5 was enough for the same purpose in Delhi. The media had a rollicking time going round dhabas in Mumbai and Delhi, demonstrating the preposterous nature of these figures.

So, is the poverty line set at too low a figure? Should it be set higher? These questions themselves are somewhat ill- framed because there is no objective way in which a poverty line can be specified. If the reader tries to find the answer to "what is the poverty line?" on the internet, the typical answer will be that it is the level of income required for a socially minimally acceptable level of living. This is; of course, completely subjective since it is impossible to pin down what is a minimal acceptable level of living.

Sometimes, some objective basis is sought to be given to the specification of the poverty line by using a calorie norm. Nutrition experts recommend minimum calorie norms required for sustenance, these norms depending on age, sex and activity levels of individuals.

The age, sex and occupation structure of rural and urban populations can then be used to determine the average calorie norm for rural and urban areas. For instance, a task force appointed by the Planning Commission in 1979 recommended the figures of 2,400 and 2,100 calories per day for rural and urban areas. National Sample Survey data on household consumption expenditure in 1973- 74 were used to calculate the monetary equivalents of these calorie requirements. So, the data showed that on an average, those spending approximately Rs 49 per person per month in 1973- 74 satisfied the calorie norm. The corresponding figure was roughly Rs 56.50 in urban areas. These then became the rural and urban poverty lines for 1973- 74. These figures are then inflated by appropriate consumer price index numbers for urban and rural India to derive the poverty lines for later years.

Another committee with the late Suresh Tendulkar as chairman was appointed in 2009 to suggest modifications. The committee stated its desire to move away from a caloriebased norm. However, it kept the 2004- 05 urban poverty line unchanged, although this was based on the earlier calorie norm, but increased the rural poverty line. This has come to be called the Tendulkar poverty line and forms the basis for the latest poverty estimates of the Planning Commission. This line was Rs 16 per person per day in 2004- 05. This was comparable to the World Bank specification of one- dollar- a day benchmark when differences in purchasing power across countries were taken into account.

The calculation of the number of people spending less than the poverty line is purely mechanical. So there is no question that there has been a sharp decrease in poverty between 2004- 05 and 2011 if the Tendulkar poverty line is used. Critics who feel that the poverty line should be much higher in 2011 ( and hence the level of poverty higher too) must, of course, concede that consistency requires that the poverty line should also have been set higher in 2004- 05. In other words, the only way to measure inter- temporal trends in the incidence of poverty is to use a common poverty line in real terms. Of course, the threshold level in nominal terms will change because of inflation. But, if a higher poverty line was used for 2004- 05, then the base figure of poverty would also have been higher, and so we would have almost certainly observed a similar rate of decrease in poverty during the seven years.

So, the entire debate about the " correct" level of the poverty line has been quite meaningless. In fact, this is particularly true if there is an attempt to base the poverty line on a calorie norm. Naturally, consumption baskets change when relative prices change over time. Hence, even when a household has an income level which is sufficient to allow it to consume the required calories, it may choose not to do so.

Moreover, even poor households spend small fractions of their total expenditures on tobacco, alcohol and perhaps even on an occasional egg. This expenditure may not give them the required level of calories but it surely gives them satisfaction.

Where do we then go from here? Since any specification of a poverty line is essentially arbitrary, a better picture of changes in the living conditions of the poor must move away from counting the number of persons with expenditures below any threshold.

Instead, it is better to focus on changes in mean expenditures of the bottom deciles. Have the mean expenditures of the bottom 20 per cent, 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the population in terms of per capita expenditure increased or decreased between 2004- 05 and 2011- 12? If the living conditions of all these deciles improved, then surely the incidence of income poverty has gone down.

Given the large reduction in the incidence of poverty reported by the Planning Commission, it is very likely that all deciles of the population have recorded some increase in living standards. Of course, this is entirely consistent with an increase in inequality simply because the proportional increase in expenditure of the highest deciles may have been significantly greater than that of the bottom deciles. Perhaps the poor care only about improvements in their own absolute standard of living and are less concerned about relative inequality.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8862-25-august-2013.html

Saving Parliament

Saving Parliament

Source: by Kuldip Nayar: The Tribune

PARLIAMENT is a temple of democracy. Members are its “pujaris” (priests). Their purity affects the temple's purity. If members defile it, the reputation of the temple goes down in the eyes of the people. They begin to doubt the belief it projects. Something similar is happening in Indian Parliament, which has lost its lustre and does not evoke the confidence it once did. All types of ills are attributed to it. The same temple, citadel of faith, has become a laughing stock.

Still the fact remains that power resides in Parliament. It is because the two Houses, the Lok Sabha elected directly by the people, and the Rajya Sabha indirectly, legislate for the country. Both have lessened in esteem due to the lowering of integrity of many MPs. A rough estimate is that 30 per cent of them are involved in one or the other court cases. The nation's happy experience is that the Supreme Court has intervened when the cases have got aggravated or when MPs have been found wanting.

In recent days, the Supreme Court has once again come to the rescue of the nation to set things right. In a landmark judgment, the court has said that the representatives in Parliament and state legislatures will stand disqualified as soon as they are convicted by a trial court. One hopes this applies to heinous crimes only.

The provision in the Representation of the People's Act has been declared ultra virus because it allowed a convicted member to stay till his final appeal is dealt with up to a period of three months. This has been misused and enabled a delinquent member to continue for years by approaching different courts. The fodder scandal case against former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad is at the trial court stage even after 17 years. Shibu Shoren has become the Chief Minister of Jharkhand even after having been convicted and sentenced in a murder case.

Therefore, all that matters to a member of Parliament or the state legislature is to remain in the House regardless of his conviction in a court of law. Power in politics being such a driving force, morality and ethics do not matter. Likewise, the British Upper House of Parliament, the House of Lords, is thinking in terms of penalising convicted members by debarring them from the House. Among those affected is one NRI who falsely claimed 50,000 pounds in expenses and was punished with a three-month suspension.

Even after the Indian Supreme Court's judgment, the conscience of the convicted MPs and MLAs has not irked them. Instead, all political parties have come together to undo the Supreme Court's verdict. A Constitution amendment is sought to be passed to lay down that a member cannot be disqualified until there is a court of appeal open to him. This attitude should have touched at least the thinking MPs, but they are quiet lest they should embarrass the party they belong to, or the convicted members with whom they sit.

The protest against the proposed Constitution amendment is wide and strange. People are naturally appalled because Parliament goes down further in their eyes. Already, the daily adjournments and the squabbles have raised the question: Why Parliament? Each day costs Rs. 2.8 lakh. Urgent Bills are pending because they have become a point of political controversy. Parties do not seem to realise that the people's disillusionment in some neighbouring countries has killed democratic governance.

One is not sure whether the Constitution amendment would be upheld by the Supreme Court. Article 14 guarantees equality before law. MPs cannot gang up to thwart the equality which the Supreme Court has enunciated. The Constitution debars any person from contesting elections if he has been convicted. How is a convicted MP or MLA different? It's but natural that they should also be disqualified. Article 14 also forms a part of the basic structure of the Constitution. It has already been accepted following a Supreme Court judgment that the basic structure cannot be changed by Parliament. If the proposed amendment is passed, it might be thrown out by the Supreme Court on the ground that Article 14 forms part of the basic structure.

In reality, the judiciary and Parliament are on a war path. Fortunately, the government has deferred the Bill on the appointment of judges. The government wants to have a leeway. The court has gone through the phase when the judiciary and the government openly fought over the appointment of judges. Now a collegium system has come to be followed. The four senior judges of a High Court constitute the collegium and decide who will be elevated to the Bench. The same procedure is for the Supreme Court judges. This arrangement has never been to the liking of the government because it gives little room for any patronage which the executive has in mind. If the Bill, which the government contemplates is thrown out by the judiciary, then what happens?

The Supreme Court may again intervene. The government is to amend the Right to Information (RTI) Act to exempt political parties from transparency. The proposed Bill insulates political parties from an order by the Central Information Commission which declared them as public bodies and accountable for financial benefits.

True, the elected representatives of the people are the final authority. But what is the remedy when every segment of the democratic apparatus has been politicised? Power politics has come to dictate the various steps. Because of this, Parliament ceases to be the temple of democracy in the real term. On paper, it will continue to remain so.

Maybe, this fact will urge parliamentarians to rise to the standards expected from them. They are the ones who can retrieve democracy from the lack of confidence in which it is stuck. The convicted members should take the initiative and voluntarily resign the moment they are convicted by a trial court. It is their moral responsibility.

Courtesy: http://www.ksgindia.com/study-material/today-s-editorial/8875-26-august-2013.html

The inclusive growth mantra

The inclusive growth mantra

Source: By Arunabha Bagchi: The Statesman

Remember garibi hatao, the slogan coined by Indira Gandhi during the 1971 election campaign with great success? In 2013, our Planning Commission proudly claimed that we now have “only” 22 per cent of Indians with the dubious distinction of being extremely poor! The criteria used to measure extreme poverty by the Planning Commission have caused embarrassment even among some diehard Congress leaders. The slogan used instead by Indira Gandhi’s grandson and his cohorts to counter the “Namo-nia” fever is “inclusive growth”. This change is significant in two respects. First, the slogan changed from Hindi to English, the language “young Indians want”. Second, the slogan of 1971 was very easy to understand, while the current slogan is tantalisingly vague.  One can even follow the current debate, however unseemly, between Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen on growth versus inclusion. The propaganda of “inclusive growth” remains, however, as elusive as ever.

In 1971, the dominant theme of economic development was still dictated by the post Second World War consensus based on Keynesianism, neo-classical growth model of Robert Solow (Nobel Prize: 1987) and the (Simon) Kuznets (Nobel Prize: 1971) curve. For laymen like me, this means that government spending in infrastructure development is necessary to facilitate private investment for industrialisation, that per-capita income between countries would eventually converge despite huge initial differences and that, although distribution of income in a country tends to deteriorate in the initial phase of growth, this inequality gets reduced as the growth receives sufficient momentum.

By early seventies it was apparent that there was no sign of convergence of per capita GDP between rich and poor nations. Furthermore, even in those poor countries that witnessed significant growth, income inequality only got worse. This led the World Bank to endorse the policy of active redistribution of income to reduce inequality within a country. Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize: 1998) did never disapprove of this policy prescription.

This development got a fatal blow with the rise of Thatcherism from the late seventies in the West. The prevalent view then was influenced by neoliberalism of Friedrich August von Hayek (Nobel Prize: 1974) and monetarism of Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize: 1976).

Again, in simple language this means that any state intervention in the economy causes more harm to the citizen than good, and controlling the money supply to reduce inflation should be the only policy goal of any government. Interestingly, development experts of international institutions soon started to sing the same tune and the Washington Consensus (WC) was born. The sole focus was on freeing up the market by abolishing government intervention on wages and prices, relaxing labor laws to fire employees with relative ease, dismantling trade barrier and allowing free flow of capital. This has come to be known as globalisation and the “market” became sacrosanct. Jagdish Bhagwati became arguably the most influential and articulate proponent of this phenomenon.

Continental Europe could not be swayed by this Anglo-Saxon myopia, but poor countries of Africa, Latin America and newly freed former socialist-block countries were forced to swallow this bitter pill by IMF and the World Bank.

Practical results of this policy were contrary to the prevailing wisdom. Financial crisis erupted from one continent to the other during the nineties and had to be contained by ad-hoc measures. The “trickle down” effect of the policy was hardly visible. Most devastating for the neoliberals was the experience of countries that grew rapidly during that period.

The historical experience of Japan, followed by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and the recent experiences of Malaysia, Thailand and China, show that all these countries grew by rejecting policy prescriptions of the WC and using state controlled capitalism, protectionism and other anti-free market measures. Finally, studies showed the human cost of the financial crises, with disproportionate share of the burden falling on the very poor and no noticeable improvement in poverty of the countries following the IMF/World Bank guidelines.

The destabilising effect of the WC and pressure from emerging economies with their increasing clout forced the World Bank to shift its policy somewhat to redistributive justice for the poor. Fear of spontaneous popular revolt in poorer countries, somewhat akin to the Arab Spring witnessed later, also contributed to this change of emphasis. The final outcome was the report, published by a Bank-sponsored Commission on Growth and Development, entitled The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained and Inclusive Development, and the new development slogan of “Inclusive Growth” was born.

The most dramatic paragraph in that report reads as follows: “In recent decades governments were advised to ‘stabilise, privatise and liberalise.’ There is merit in what lies behind this injunction ... But we believe this prescription defines the role of government too narrowly. Just because governments are sometimes clumsy and sometimes errant, does not mean they should be written out of the script. On the contrary, as the economy grows and develops, active, pragmatic governments have crucial roles to play.” In practical terms, the changes in policy prescriptions were largely cosmetic, except for recommending hand-outs to help the extremely poor to reduce absolute poverty. Expanding opportunities for the poor was frequently mentioned, but there was no mention of reducing relative poverty or income inequality.

How does India come into this picture? After Independence we started the novel experiment of socialist-style planning in a capitalist economy with democratic governance. If successful, this would be the role model for countries slowly emerging from colonial exploitation. Unfortunately, we got the worst of both economic systems: bureaucratic socialism with crony capitalism aided and abetted by our unscrupulous politicians.

During my Presidency College days in the mid-sixties, we once invited Ashok Mitra, ICS, to give a lecture in the Spartan one room residence of Father Fallon. Mr Mitra told us in jest that, as the Registrar General of India during the 1961 census, he compiled a list of all marital relations among the top bureaucrats, big businessmen and important politicians in our country. The present corruption scandals reflect this unholy nexus that has only grown much bigger with the passage of time.