From The HIndu

July 8, 2014

 On the mythology of social policy

JEAN DRÈZE

India is among the world champions of social underspending. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one

Few people today remember the letter written on August 7, 2013 by Mr. Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this letter, available on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) website, Mr. Modi criticised the National Food Security Act (more precisely, the Ordinance) for providing too little. He felt “pained to note that the food security ordinance does not assure an individual of having two meals a day,” and pointed out that “[the] proposed entitlement of 5 kg per month per person … is hardly 20 per cent of his [sic] daily calorie requirements.” Similar sentiments were expressed in Parliament on August 27, 2013, during the Lok Sabha debate on food security, when one BJP speaker after another criticised the Act for being measly and restrictive — “half baked” as Ms. Sushma Swaraj put it.

Facts and fiction

One reason why these and related facts tend to be forgotten is that they are at odds with the mythology of social policy cultivated by some sections of the media. This mythology involves a number of fallacies. First, India is in danger of becoming a nanny state, with lavish and unsustainable levels of social spending. Second, social spending is largely a waste — unproductive “handouts” that don’t even reach the poor due to corruption and inefficiency. Third, this wasteful extravaganza is the work of a bunch of old-fashioned Nehruvian socialists and assorted jholawalas who led the country down the garden path during the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) years. Fourth, the electorate has rejected this entire approach — people want growth, not entitlements. Fifth, the BJP-led government is all set to reverse these follies and rollback the welfare state.

These five claims have acquired an aura of plausibility by sheer repetition, yet they have no factual basis. Let us examine them one by one.

The idea that social spending in India is too high would be amusing if it were not so harmful. According to the latest World Development Indicators (WDI) data, public spending on health and education is just 4.7 per cent of GDP in India, compared with 7 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, 7.2 per cent in East Asia, 8.5 per cent in Latin America and 13.3 per cent in OECD countries. Even the corresponding figure for “least developed countries,” 6.4 per cent, is much higher than India’s. The WDI database does not include social security spending, but the recent Asia Development Bank report on social protection in Asia suggests that India is also an outlier in that respect, with only 1.7 per cent of GDP being spent on social support compared with an average of 3.4 per cent for Asia’s lower-middle income countries, 5.4 per cent in China, 10.2 per cent in Asia’s high-income countries and a cool 19.2 per cent in Japan. If anything, India is among the world champions of social underspending. The view that social spending is a waste has no factual basis either. The critical importance of mass education for economic development and the quality of life is one of the most robust findings of economic research. From Kerala to Bangladesh, simple public health interventions have brought down mortality and fertility rates. India’s midday meal programme has well-documented effects on school attendance, child nutrition and even pupil achievements. Social security pensions, meagre as they are, bring some relief in the harsh lives of millions of widowed, elderly or disabled persons. The Public Distribution System has become an invaluable source of economic security for poor households, not just in showcase States like Tamil Nadu but even in States like Bihar and Jharkhand where it used to be non-functional. Of course, there is some waste in the social sector, just as there is much waste in (say) universities. In both cases, the lesson is not to dismantle the system but to improve it — there is plenty of evidence that this can be done.

UPA’s ‘handouts’



The expansion of public services and social support in India, such as it is, has little to do with any nostalgia of Nehruvian socialism. It is a natural development in a country with a modicum of democracy. A similar expansion, on a much larger scale, happened during the 20th century in all industrialised democracies (with the partial exception of the United States). It also happened in communist countries, for different reasons. Many developing countries, especially in Latin America and East Asia, have gone through a similar transition in recent decades. So have Indian States where the underprivileged have some sort of political voice, such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Many other States, including Gujarat, are now learning from these experiences at varying speed.

Did the UPA lose the recent election because voters were fed up with “handouts”? This is an odd idea in many ways, starting with the fact that there were few handouts to be fed up with. The UPA did launch the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA is not exactly a “handout”), but that was in 2005, and if anything, it helped rather than hindered the UPA in the 2009 election. After that, there were no major social policy initiatives on the part of the UPA, except for the National Food Security Act which is yet to be implemented. By 2014, the UPA-II government had little to claim credit for, and plenty to be blamed for — scams, ineptitude, food inflation, the “direct benefit transfer” fiasco and more. Meanwhile, the BJP had the three things that really matter in an election (money, organisation and rhetoric) — is it a surprise that three voters out of 10 decided to give it a chance?

The expansion of public services and social support in India, such as it is, has little to do with any nostalgia of Nehruvian socialism. It is a natural development in a country with a modicum of democracy

Coming to the fifth claim, there is little evidence that a rollback of social programmes is part of the BJP’s core agenda. As mentioned earlier, many BJP leaders (including Mr. Modi as well as the new Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley) have vociferously demanded a more ambitious National Food Security Act. Some of this is posturing of course, but the BJP’s willingness to support food security initiatives is already well demonstrated in Chhattisgarh. Nothing prevents it from doing the same at the national level. Similar remarks apply to the National Employment Guarantee Act: some BJP-led State governments did a relatively good job of implementing it, and the late Gopinath Munde clearly expressed his support for the Act as soon as he was appointed Minister for Rural Development.

Possible backlash

Having said this, there are also ominous signs of a possible backlash against these and other social programmes. Some overenthusiastic advisers of the new government have already put forward explicit proposals to wind up the Employment Guarantee Act and the Food Security Act within 10 years, along with accelerated privatisation of health and education services. As if on cue, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje recently sent a letter to the Prime Minister questioning the need for an Employment Guarantee Act. The corporate sector also tends to be hostile to social spending, if only because it means higher taxes, or higher interest rates, or fewer handouts (“incentives” as they are called) for business. Corporate lobbies, already influential under the UPA government (remember the person who said that the Congress was his dukaan?) are all the more gung-ho now that their man, Mr. Modi, is at the helm. Even a casual reading of recent editorials in the business media suggests that they have high expectations of devastating “reforms” in the social sector. That is what the mythology of social policy is really about.

This is not to deny the need for constructive reform in health, education and social security. If one thing has been learnt in the last 10 years, it is the possibility of improving public services, whether by expanding the right to information, or introducing eggs in school meals, or computerising the Public Distribution System, or ensuring a reliable supply of free drugs at primary health centres. But these small steps always begin with an appreciation of the fundamental importance of social support in poor people’s lives.

The forthcoming budget is an opportunity for the new government to clarify its stand on these issues. Without enlightened social policies, growth mania is unlikely to deliver more under the new government than it did under the previous one.

(Jean Drèze is visiting professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.)

Greenpeace India fears charity crackdown under Narendra Modi

Foreign-funded charities accuse PM of scare tactics as national intelligence agency submits anti-NGO report to government

Maseeh Rahman in Delhi 

theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 July 2014 11.01 BST

Emma Gibson, a Greenpeace campaigner from Kent who participated in the Kingsnorth power station protest in 2009, has been worried she could be deported from India ever since an intelligence report accusing several foreign-funded NGOs of stalling major infrastructure projects was leaked this month.

The intelligence bureau (IB) report was submitted to Narendra Modi days after he took over as prime minister. Modi won last month’s general election on an aggressive development plank. He had risen to national prominence due to his encouragement of big business in his home state, Gujarat, where he acquired the image of a strong, no-nonsense leader.

Although Modi has made no comment, the anti-NGO report by the national intelligence agency listing dozens of organisations and individuals was circulated to several ministries, and raised the spectre of a general crackdown on these organisations.

Gibson’s name is on one of the lists, but there has been no midnight knock. She returned to the UK of her own accord on Sunday. Greenpeace India, however, has been singled out for action. Although it is a registered charity permitted to receive donations from abroad, Greenpeace India must now seek the home ministry’s permission before it accepts donations from two sources – its parent international body and the US-based Climate Works Foundation.

“Greenpeace India has clarified that most of its funds (61%) come from 300,00 individual Indian donors, and the rest almost entirely from Greenpeace International,” Gibson said. “The IB report is riddled with inaccuracies. It called me a cyber security expert, which is laughable. The report is designed to cause huge damage, but much more than Greenpeace, it’s the smaller NGOs that are absolutely terrified.”

Official hostility toward NGOs campaigning on environmental, land rights or anti-nuclear issues is not new. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, openly complained that foreign-funded NGOs were blocking the expansion of nuclear power and the introduction of genetically modified products. But it is Modi’s image as a muscular leader that has raised fears of a clampdown.

“The government is adopting scare tactics,” said Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights. “It wants to ensure that nobody comes in the way of big projects.”

The authorities, it appears, are taking no chances – even foreign academics and researchers who have been working for decades to help India’s poor and dispossessed have come under suspicion.

A day after the intelligence report on NGOs hit the headlines, a British academic from Birkbeck College, London, arriving in Hyderabad to attend a conference organised by the International Federation of Ageing, was turned away at the airport.

Penny Vera-Senso, a social anthropologist researching poverty and ageing in India since 1990, was given no reason for the ban on her entry, but was told she could not apply for a new visa until 2016.

She was last in India in March, when she attended a Right to Food convention in Gujarat and put up a photographic exhibition on old people at work.

“Penny has a passion for old people, and has done a lot of good work to show that the aged can also contribute to the Indian economy,” Harsh Mander, head of the Centre for Equity Studies in Delhi, said. “The Right to Food convention was a very big one, and some speakers criticised the Gujarat model of development, which an intelligence official might have construed as anti-national activity. Penny’s presence was obviously noticed at the meeting. But her work is very focused on poverty and ageing, so this is nothing but plain intimidation.”

The intelligence report damning NGOs appears equally slipshod. It claims that “people-centric” campaigns organised by NGOs blocked projects in seven sectors – nuclear power, uranium mining, thermal and hydroelectric power, farm biotechnology, extractive industries, and mega industrial projects. The objective was to keep India in “a state of underdevelopment”.

The report then goes on to make the unsupported claim that India’s annual GDP growth rate fell by 2-3% because of NGO campaigns between 2011 and 2013. It does not assess the impact of grassroots campaigns in relation to other factors that impacted the political economy – the policy paralysis in government, the corruption and mismanagement, and some keen judicial scrutiny.

NGOs have also had some major failures. Despite significant local support, for instance, the agitation to stop the nuclear power project in Kudunkulam, southern Tamil Nadu, state failed. Across the peninsula, in Maharashtra, another nuclear power project has failed to take off due to opposition not so much from NGOs but from a political party, the Shiv Sena, which is part of Modi’s government in Delhi.

But NGOs are clearly worried. The anti-nuclear campaigner Achin Vinaik said: “We are fearful that this is a kind of witchhunt with longer term implications to repress all kinds of popular struggles.”

From The Hindu,  June 25, 2014

 Remains of the hate

FRANCES HARRISON

Many Sri Lankans do not recognise the extremist Bodu Bala Sena as embodying Buddhist values at all, but they are increasingly unwilling to speak out about their opposition to it

Sri Lanka has just experienced the worst communal violence in decades but you wouldn’t always know it from the behaviour of its politicians. Six members of the main Opposition party went on a fact-finding mission to look into the well-being of the animals in Dehiwala Zoo, in particular the deaths of lions and hippopotamuses. No matter that four humans had just died, 80 injured and hundreds of properties including at least 17 mosques attacked, leaving thousands homeless. A few days earlier, Muslims living near the zoo had been planning to evacuate after wild rumours spread that their houses could also be attacked by the extreme Sinhala chauvinist group, the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Brigade).

In denial

Denial has reached surreal proportions in the paradise island. After the media announced a curfew for the troubled areas on Sunday evening there was complete silence on radio, TV, mainstream news websites and even the hyperactive SMS news subscription sites, known for sending out texts every time the Sri Lankan cricket team scores a six. The websites and social media channels of all government institutions just went strangely silent, including those of the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Defence and the Sri Lankan Army site.

“It was literally nothing. It was bizarre. It was unprecedented as a response. It was no response,” says Sanjana Hattotuwa who runs the citizen journalism site, ‘Groundviews,’ in Colombo, who was literally begging the government to react to events. There were a couple of tweets from the President and that was all for three days as the anti-Muslim violence inflamed by the Buddhist monks of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) continued to simmer. The Rajapaksa brothers said nothing publicly and when the President returned home from Bolivia on the fourth day, he just made a few statements about the need for reconstruction after visiting the area. He also presided over the inauguration of a Buddhist Advisory Council and spoke of the need “to protect Buddhism” from threats and then told a visiting delegation of Buddhists that it was only those who couldn’t bear to see the island at peace who spread false information abroad.

The government says it will investigate but resists calls to ban or prosecute the BBS for inciting racial and religious hatred. There are reports that Muslims who went to police stations to report incidents have themselves been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the violence. The only punitive action seems to have come from Facebook, which took the BBS page offline after a flood of complaints.

Sri Lankans have been asking why there has been nothing from their own government addressing the grief of thousands of Muslim survivors now sheltering in schools and mosques while there were swift messages of condolence and concern from the U.S. Embassy, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the U.N., Canada, the European Union and religious and diaspora groups.

“This is a community that’s devastated,” says Mr. Hattotuwa, “not just in terms of bricks and mortar but utterly traumatised and now they’re being asked to return to homes that don’t exist. The fear is of a degree I have not encountered before. People talk to you in hushed tones and it’s palpable.”

Many Sri Lankans do not recognise the extremist BBS as embodying Buddhist values at all, but they are increasingly unwilling to speak out about their opposition to it. Recent reports of an attack on a monk who had been critical of the BBS sent shock waves through Sinhala communities; local media initially quoted the police as saying the cleric had been kidnapped and left bound and naked by a river after an attempt to circumcise him with a knife. In a country that holds the Buddhist clergy in the highest respect it was extraordinary that obscene comments appeared on Facebook attacking the monk for being too soft on Muslims, saying he deserved the brutal treatment. Subsequently the police said the monk had confessed that he had staged the attack and self-inflicted his wounds. The monk is to be charged with filing a false complaint to the police.

Element of paranoia

Few want to challenge the BBS because they know it has been nurtured and protected by those in power and therefore had impunity for its actions. The Rajapaksa brothers have openly attended their functions, allowed them to have airtime on television and constantly echo the BBS rhetoric about the need to protect Buddhism under threat. Indeed a cabinet minister, Champika Ranawaka, was filmed warning that the Muslim population was expanding so rapidly that they would soon take over the country — repeating the refrain of the BBS. This paranoia about Muslim population growth is also shared by Myanmar’s 969 Movement whose leader dubs himself the Buddhist bin Laden and recently befriended the leader of the BBS in Sri Lanka.

On social media, Sri Lankans have repeatedly noted the similarity of recent events to 1983, when the President of the day also remained silent during the pogrom against Tamils — the turning point in the civil war which sparked an exodus of Tamils abroad. The scale might be different this time but there were other parallels. Muslims complained that the mob had local knowledge and generally targeted only Muslim-owned properties and that the police and the paramilitary Special Task Force on several occasions stood by and allowed the attacks to happen. Instead local people credited the Army with finally bringing the situation under control. A few politicians have been asking why the Sri Lankan government allowed the BBS to hold a rally in Aluthgama in the first place and then move through the Muslim quarters when it was so clearly provocative given recent tensions there. Some Muslim groups had actually written to the authorities warning that there could be riots and begging them not to allow the gathering. When so many students, trade union activists and families of the disappeared are denied the right to hold peaceful protests it does seem extraordinary that the BBS was allowed to bus in hundreds of supporters.

Some commentators have suggested that this is all about whipping up nationalist sentiment before the next elections; others that it is about deflecting attention from the U.N. inquiry into Sri Lankan war crimes. One theory is that the plan is to instigate a violent Muslim reaction that could be portrayed as an Islamic terror threat and used to woo back western support, while at the same time not alienating the Buddhist hardline at home. Already there has been talk by government ministers of al-Qaeda infiltration into Sri Lanka and attempts to blame Muslims for attacking Sinhalese. Extraordinarily, an official government communiqué to the U.N. Human Rights Council on the issue failed to mention the BBS at all, and took for granted as fact that there had been a Muslim attack on a Buddhist monk, when that has yet to be established.

Attacking the messenger

A handful of brave professional and citizen journalists were responsible for the bulk of the news coming out and they now feel very exposed. They are being attacked in the state media as “vultures” and “trained agents” of subversion, while some reporters received death threats or were physically attacked when trying to do their job. The site ‘Groundviews’ and others did their best to sift, filter and corroborate news, erring on the side of caution for example if the meta data of a photograph caused concern. They constantly had to deny rumours and misinformation, calming panic and calling for calm. “Social media was the only coverage,” says Mr. Hattotuwa, “It was self correcting if there were flaws, but it was mostly in English.”

What has shocked many is how easy it had been to provoke the fears of the Sinhala majority and how deep the racism against Muslims now runs, especially among the young. Sinhala language comment pages online are awash with vitriol. ‘Groundviews’ has been monitoring 35 Facebook fan pages and found the hate speech against Muslims has increased exponentially.

Of course it’s not clear if the venom spewed out on cyberspace actually translates into violent acts in the real world. The bulk of the users are very young Sinhalese, many attending the leading schools of Colombo. Much of what is online in Sinhala chat pages is offensive.

“It’s the stuff of nightmares, the glimpse into hate, the sheer bile is mind-boggling,” says Mr. Hattotuwa, adding, “we need to coin a word to describe how bad it is.”

(A former BBC correspondent in Colombo, Frances Harrison is the author of Still Counting the Dead, Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War.)