Infographic: Literacy in India

Upon tasking himself with creating an infographic on primary education in India, Akshan Ish found that while India’s literacy rate is steadily growing, and the country boasts of having one of the largest workforces in the world by 2020, the education system fails to equip students with fundamental skills at the elmentary level – leaving a huge chunk incompetent to contribute to the fast growing economy.

In this post, InPEC has also included Akshan’s background notes, which gives the reader a look into the process of infographic design.

By Akshan Ish, 19th December, 2012

The designer’s background notes:

Education is one of the most complex systems to deal with. I say this with conviction because I’m working on a project related to student evaluation in schools. Documentation in progress, here. India is one of the fastest developing countries, part of the G20, and is poised at a very crucial stage. We enjoy the benefit of what is called a ‘demographic dividend’–where most of our population is young and able to join the workforce. But due to a shaky education system, a major portion of India’s population is found incompetent even with fundamental skills. Literacy rates are increasing across India, currently at 74%; but as I found out after digging out the data, that literacy doesn’t necessarily mean that one can read or write.

I started off with the OECD report on Improving Access and Quality in the Indian Education System, which provided an overview of the scenario. It gave country comparisons and I was quite disappointed to see that India comes under the category of Low Education Development Index (EDI), ranked 102 in the world. Further probing into the reports from various sources, mainly the Annual Status of Education Report (2011), showed me why. India’s Educational Deficit stems from the fact that primary schooling is very weak. I found that although enrollment rates were high at the primary level, only about 40% of those students make it secondary school, and only 12% go on to college. Class absenteeism, high pupil-teacher ratio, low involvement of parents, multi-grade classes and gender disparities are a few of the reasons why.

What intrigued me the most was that 75% of the students who moved from one grade to another could not read their previous grade’s textbooks. And another 75% of these who moved on to the next grade, would not be able to do so in another year of schooling. This means that one in three students finishes primary schooling without being able to read a grade 2 textbook; but is termed literate since she is being schooled. And to make matters worse, these learning rates have been declining in most states across India, even after the Right to Education Act was passed in 2009. The objectives of which are to provide free and compulsory education to all children between the ages of six and fourteen. It might seem that the focus shifted from quality to quantity after the act was implemented; but that is only a thought.

There was just so much going on in the data, and so many factors like caste, gender, mother’s education, region, religion and economic burden that came into play that I could not possibly visualize the entire thing. I had to narrow down to something. I wanted to explore a form of storytelling with this infographic, so I thought it would be interesting if I could portray the story of India through a six year old girl’s journey. What are the odds that she will finish schooling? Where is she most likely to study? What are the different factors affecting her learning?

The infograhic itself is in a web-scroll format (heavily influenced by the New York Times visualizations). I have tried to keep it as simple as possible–enabling the reader to move from one section to another like in a book or a story, so as to give the reader an overview of the current Indian Education scenario, moving on to quality of learning and then the factors affecting learning.

[I have learned] to strip down the issue at hand to its core and then build on it from there. I have also become much more careful with the visuals I use now. People do not question a visual like they would question a piece of written text. The visual is like automatic truth that is assimilated subconsciously.

Akshan Ish is a computer science engineer and currently a graphic design student at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India.

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Discovery of India – Chapter 2: Election Freebies, Women and the Mid Day Meal Scheme

InPEC brings to you the “Discovery of India” log of Karthik Radhakrishnan, an engineering graduate student from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as he travels through India. This chapter describes the tale of a village in Tamil Nadu which is hit by floods every year and the residents do not have adequate means to get by.

Chapter 1 is available here.

Place : Thalainayar (Nagappatinam District, Tamil Nadu)

Date : 22nd July, 2013

By Karthik Radhakrishnan, 29th July, 2013

Thalainayar is a Town Panchayat in the district of Nagappatinam (For people who remember the Tsunami of 2004, Nagappatinam district had the maximum number of casualties in Tamil Nadu.) This is a story of a tiny village in this Panchayat, Santhantheru, whose residents have no food, no drinking water and absolutely no money. This village gets flooded for three months every year and the residents are put up in a nearby school, where close to a hundred families live together with inadequate food and space. The floods take away both the lives and livelihood of these poor people who rely totally on agriculture for their food.

“Once a year, our village gets flooded. The houses get washed away, there will be snakes moving around and dead bodies floating around us. We will not have time for anything, we just pick up our children and swim to the nearby school where they would put us up for three months.” – says Lakshmi, a resident. The normalcy with which these words were uttered is quite haunting and their situation, almost unimaginable.

Most of the agricultural activities in this part of Tamil Nadu are rain-fed, but it seldom rains. When it does rain, the rain water and sea water together displace the entire village. The village does not have any irrigation facilities and laying bores is meaningless because the groundwater is mostly salty. There has been very little farming in the past ten years and as a direct consequence, there has been very little money as well for the past ten years. To add salt to their wounds, the village has been converted from Village Panchayat to Town Panchayat (because of the growing size and population) which implies that they don’t get the benefits of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and hence, no alternate source of income. Just to put things into perspective, the average annual income of a family here is Rs. 10,000 (that’s around $166.66, less than a dollar a day!).
Although households do not have food or water, each house has a color television, owing to election freebies offered by politicians in the state. Lakshmi makes a very valid point when she asks ”What’s the point of a TV? Can we eat it?” Typically, a family runs on the very little money the woman makes. In spite of the lack of funds, the men drink alcohol with whatever money they earn. “Once they see the money, they forget that they have families and that they have to bring home some money. Their priority is to drink, with even the little they make” say Shanthi, who has quite visibly been affected by an alcoholic husband. It is not much of a surprise that the political parties buy votes with a few bottles of liquor in rural Tamil Nadu. Democracy is neatly mixed, bottled and sold.

There is a Women’s support group present in Thalainayar, whose main job is to provide loans for women and help in improving their living condition. “We provide awareness to women about hygiene and provide loans up to Rs.6,000 for women to help them build toilets in their houses.” says K. Dhanabagyam, a field agent in this organization for almost ten years. Just when you think there is some hope left in this village, she says “We charge an interest of 26 per cent on these loans.” TWENTY SIX PERCENT! These villagers have no means of livelihood, meanwhile this organization is sucking the blood out of them. When asked why they charge so much (banks offer loans at 6%-10% interest), she says, “With us, there is not much hassle and no waiting time.” Lets call a spade a spade, this is merely a business, not a support group. They do not provide awareness on health or usage of sanitary pads or equality. Just out of curiosity, I asked the women of Santhanatheru if they think they are equal to men. There was a long pause, some giggling and then, a subdued response, “Men and women here live in peace.”

In spite of all the difficulties, the people have made sure that their kids go to school. The village school has classes only upto eighth grade, but they are determined to send the kids to the nearby town for further studies. A few people have managed to send their kids to college as well and try to make a living out of the little money their kids send from the cities. The “Midday Meal Scheme” is quite successful here and is keeping the kids at school. In the wake of recent controversies surrounding the meal program, this particular village and its people (especially the teachers) have made sure that the safety of the students is their top priority.

The privileged masses of India are not aware of the difficulties faced by the bottom 22%. We read about “them” in the newspapers and see “them” on television. For us, “they” are merely a statistic. But to see these guys in flesh and blood and hear their problems is an extremely moving (even haunting) experience. The villagers are quite convinced that we will never understand their problems. Maybe we never will. But let us at least start trying?

Karthik Radhakrishnan is a Structural Engineering Graduate from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is originally from Chennai, India. He is in particular interested in the rural affairs of India with a focus on farmer suicides, children’s education and women empowerment. Email : karthik.radhakrishnan87@gmail.com

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The Merit Delusion – Caste and Affirmative Action in India

In this article, Satish Chandra questions the accepted definition of “merit” in the caste-based reservations debate in India.

Editor’s note: SC/ST stands for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes while OBC stands for Other Backwards Castes. These government caste-groupings are determined by the degree of the lack of socio-economic progress as determined and decided by the government. Studies reveal that SC/STs are on average far poorer, are discriminated against, and lack access to opportunity outside of government mandated reservations when compared to the ‘General’ castes. OBCs are on average better off than SC/STs but worse off than ‘General’ castes. Of course, there are genuine concerns over these government classification of castes, which don’t always accurately reflect the socio-economic conditions of those castes. However, that is a different debate for a different time.

Before reading the article, it would be a good idea to watch the following documentary on caste and untouchability, called India Untouched. It dispels the myth that caste-based discrimination is a thing of the past in India, by capturing – on camera – instances of such discrimination taking place to this day. Alternately, please watch this playlist of very short videos by Video Vounteers.

By Satish Chandra, 2nd August, 2013

Reservations for socially and economically backward castes in academic institutions and government jobs (affirmative action) are a highly contentious issue in India, although mostly for all the wrong reasons. One of those is an argument that reservations dilute merit. Consider this “joke” that was email-forward fodder years ago and is now doing the rounds on social networks. It is good example of how badly caste issues are understood.

The joke – complete with its grammatical errors – is as follows:

“I think we should have job reservations in all the fields. I completely support the Prime Minister and all the politicians for promoting this. Let’s start the reservation with our cricket team. We should have 10 percent reservation for Muslims. 30 percent for OBC, SC /ST like that. Cricket rules should be modified accordingly. The boundary circle should be reduced for an SC/ST player. The four hit by an OBC player should be considered as a six and a six hit by an OBC player should be counted as 8 runs. An OBC player scoring 60 runs should be declared as a century (100 runs). We should influence International Cricket Council and make rules so that the pace bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar (a Pakistani fast bowler) should not bowl fast balls to our OBC player. Bowlers should bowl maximum speed of 80 kilometer per hour to an OBC player. Any delivery above this speed should be made illegal.

Also we should have reservation in Olympics. In the 100 meters race, an OBC player should be given a gold medal if he runs 80 meters.

There can be reservation in Government jobs also. Let’s recruit SC/ST and OBC pilots for aircrafts which are carrying the ministers and politicians (that can really help the country.. )

Ensure that only SC/ST and OBC doctors do the operations for the ministers and other politicians. (Another way of saving the country..)

Let’s be creative and think of ways and means to guide India forward… Let’s show the world that India is a great country. Let’s be proud of being an Indian..

May the good breed of politicians like Arjun Singh (a former minister who enforced reservations in educational institutions in his domain) long live…”

There is an implied assertion in the “joke” – that a person who avails seats reserved for backward castes lacks merit, whereas a person who doesn’t avail it, has merit. But what is this merit that everyone talks about? It is the idea that traits like intelligence and assiduousness are what that determine how successful one should be in their life. It is the central dogma that people like me grew up with. The argument is that if you lack merit and still find yourself in quality institutions, you are a hack; a parasite on society. Profusion of such unmerited people is the reason why India is backward.

On its own, the idea of merit sounds reasonable. However, what gives rise to absurd “jokes”, such as the one above, and what leads to the delusional beliefs about reservations are two things – (a) What the source of merit is, and (b) Which practices in society are labeled as merit based and which are not.

The Source of Merit

Where does merit come from? Is it inborn?

On an average, groups of humans are capable of the same things even when you account for factors like race or gender. There will always be exceptional individuals, but there is nothing to suggest that such individuals can only come from one particular group. History also shows that particular groups at different times have dominated others in terms of intellectual achievements, but this has been so because of the differences in environment and opportunities.

Merit, thus, is not a function of one group’s inherent superiority over others. It is grossly inaccurate to say that merit is inborn into particular groups. Given the right opportunities, any group of people can go on to achieve remarkable things.

This fact, however, falls on closed eyes on people who continue to spew bigoted jokes on the lower castes. Educated India has not given up on archaic notions of inborn merit. Social prejudices linger in people’s minds, often in the form of casteism itself.

The caste system started out on the backs of the argument that a person’s gunas (abilities) and karma determine their caste. In the absence of a system which constantly adjudicates gunas and karma and reassigns a person’s caste, caste took the only course left – it became based on birth. However, in spite of this, people continued to believe that it is a person’s gunas and karma determines caste, not birth. (Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste touches upon this)

How then, did people reconcile with the ground reality that caste was and is determined by birth? A part of the solution was to make karma count over multiple lives. The belief was that bad karma in the previous lives was making people born into a lower castes. The other part was the belief that upper castes tend to have an inborn inclination for certain gunas and the lower castes towards a lack of those gunas; that the intellectual achievements of the upper castes are due to their knack for it.

Today, unless someone convinces themselves of this idea, there’s no way he or she can sleep at night believing that the caste system is the best way to organize society, and that the lower castes deserve to be in the position they are in.

The idea of merit in the “joke” parallels these ideas of gunas. Take, for instance, how SC/ST/OBC doctors are made fun of. The “joke” is that such doctors lack merit and hence don’t have the skill to practice medicine. Politicians are at the receiving end of this joke: since politicians are responsible for the existence of reservations, they should get a taste of their policies by dying at the hands doctors who lack merit. What is ignored, however, is the fact that even though backward castes may have secured places in the medical college via reservations, once they get in, they have to pass the same exams that everyone else has to. It is only then will they get an M.B.B.S. certificate.

And yet, the assumption is that SC/ST/OBCs don’t have the gunas that are necessary for being a good doctor. Once a lower caste without gunas, always a lower caste lacking these gunas. The possibility that people learn given the opportunity doesn’t even enter the picture. Such assumptions about merit is just good old fashioned casteism brought to you in a different bottle.

Of course, such ideas about merit aren’t unique to the caste system. At a lower level, they can be seen as arising from fundamental attribution error, and also from a belief in a just world.

Merit in practice

Often, merit has little to do with how successful one is in their life. Consider these cases:

Buying your way through college: Since independence, the rich, who usually belonged to the upper castes, were able to either buy seats in private colleges in India or send their children to other countries such as the United States (when compared to Indian standards of living, this costs a lot of money, even with scholarships). Even though there are plenty of doctors who bought their way into medical colleges, there is a conspicuous absence of jokes about their competency. Not that there ought to be jokes about this; my argument is that merit is not always inborn: people have the potential to learn given the opportunity.

Hiring practices in the private sector: The gold standard of meritocracy – as opposed to ingrained incompetency of the public sector – is the supposed hiring practices of the private sector. (As an aside, the word “meritocracy” was originally meant to be sarcastic). If merit were paramount, companies would publicly advertise for a position and vet as many candidates as they can to get the best merit. But most companies do such things as a last resort – or if there is a mass hiring taking place. The preferred method of hiring for the most part is by referrals, where they restrict themselves to a smaller pool of talent. Sure, even after a referral the candidate has to go through an interview, but the interview process itself is subjective, and anyone who has conducted them knows that candidates who aren’t the best fit do get through. These are often cases of nepotism, which is rampant in the private sector.

How then, does the private sector manage to produce goods and render services with reasonable efficiency? Again, the answer lies in the fact that people learn. A person might not have sufficient merit at hiring time but given the opportunity, but can learn over time and become better at the jobs.

Business ownership: Businesses are typically inherited. There are no entrance examinations to determine who has the best merit to run a business. Some of the biggest businesses in India are run by people who weren’t chosen on merit, but because their parents started the business. Business deals and partnerships too mostly happen by tapping private networks, and not on the basis of merit.

On the one hand we know that merit – in the form of skill – can be acquired given the right opportunities and on the other we also know that merit in the real world doesn’t work in the ideal way. Despite that, there is a lot vitriol directed towards reservations – the kind that is not seen in the cases we examined above. Indeed, it is common to hear rhetorical questions such as, ‘Would you fly in a plane piloted by a reserved category person?’, but not, ‘Would you fly in a plane piloted by someone who was rich enough to buy a seat in the training school?’

A good part of the scorn originates from caste prejudices in the Indian society and a serious lack of effort to prevent acquisition of such prejudices from early on, such as being taught about them in schools. This has led to a very lopsided discourse on the topic of reservations. Despite there being evidence that they work, they’re portrayed as one of the evils plaguing India, without leaving any room for a nuanced discussion.

Satish Chandra would like to thank Sunil for his input.

Epilogue by the Editor:

Although this article was not about the nature of reservations, a short note on it is in order: this article doesn’t claim that the current system of reservations is perfect. There is room for improvement or both identification and targeting of the affirmative action.

Additionally, a popular argument by a few is that reservations ought to be based on income or poverty, not caste. However, there are two key reasons why this falls short: one, both identification and targeting by caste (keeping in mind socio-economic conditions) is less inaccurate and more practical than by income. Two, more importantly, caste based discrimination doesn’t just arise from income inequality. Backward castes are socially discriminated, as shown in the documentaries linked above. The poor among the backward castes are less equal than the poor of other castes. This, of course, isn’t an argument against welfare for the poor of other castes: affirmative action isn’t exclusive to any one cohort.

However, as previously stated, this is a different debate, for a different time.

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Where is Bosnia and Herzegovina going?

In this article, the author explores the nature of protests taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

By Alejandro Marx, 26th November, 2013

The year 2013 has seen major protests around the world, including in Turkey, Brazil Romania and the ongoing ones in Bulgaria. The common thread that these protests have had was that they questioned the role of their elected representatives. Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has also seen protests, although they haven’t been adequately covered by the international media.

BiH experienced from June 6 2013 a succession of protests in Sarajevo, which later spread to other cities of BiH. The protests were a result of the frustration with the complex working of the State of BiH, created after the 1992-1995 Civil War. BiH is divided into two major entities, Republika Srpska (the Serb entity) and the Bosnian Federation (the Croat and Bosniak entity), plus the Brcko District with is under the control of the both mayor entities. Both entities have their own parliaments. On the national level, the Parliamentary Assembly, with its two chambers (the House of Representatives and the House of Peoples), represents the ethnic groups. Decisions are taken on the basis of an agreement between each of the 3 ethnicities. An ethnic group which considers that a law is against its vital interests can veto it.

The International Community is still importantly involved in the country. The Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR) oversees the application of the civilian aspect of the Dayton Peace Agreement. It is has considerable power in BiH and can dismiss elected and non-elected BiH officials who obstruct the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. The EUFOR ALTHEA oversees the military implementation of the Agreement. The European Union (EU) is negotiating with BiH, its membership in the European organisation. The Balkans is the next process of enlargement for the EU. The recent membership of Croatia in July 2013 has now put BiH on the border of the EU.

Despite progress in the application of BiH for a Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the European Commission has not given its green light to its implementation, due to the continuous ban on BiH citizens who are not members of the three constituent people (Croat, Bosniak, Serb) from standing as candidates for the BiH Presidency and the House of Peoples. Despite a ruling in 2009 by the European Court of Human Rights (Case of Sejdic and Finci vs Bosnia and Herzegovina).

A protest for the weakest members of BiH society

The reason for the protests in BiH were the continuing absence of new ID law for new-borns since the decision by the Bosnia’s Constitutional Court to abolish in February the Law on Personal Numbers, on the ground of the disagreement on the names of several municipalities in the country which have changed since the 1992-1995 Conflict in BiH. Despite discussions at the State Parliament, MPs from both the Bosnian Federation and the Republika Srpska did not agree on how to reformulate the law on IDs, making impossible for the children born after February to receive ID numbers, stopping them from obtaining passports and health care cards.

The impossibility to obtain a passport for children stopped a couple from taking their daughter, Belmina Ibrisevic, to Germany to receive a bone marrow transplant. The child became the symbol of newborns unable to receive ID numbers. Despite, the decision by the Council of Ministers on June 5 to adopt a temporary measure, valid during 180 days, to issue ID numbers, protesters converged to and blocked the Parliamentary Assembly, on June 6 2013, in Sarajevo to call for a permanent resolution of this issue.

Politicians of the Srpska Republika’s Serbian Democratic Party, one of the two major ruling Serbian parties in BiH, claimed that the protests were staged against them, thus implying a ethnic motivation of the protest. The protesters denied this. Parliamentarians of the 3 constituent peoples were blocked inside the parliament buildings, in addition to foreign investors who were invited to attend a conference.

The protests continued in the following days with protesters coming from the both entities which make BiH. The protests took place also in other cities of the country, showing that it was truly a movement of the general population of BiH, not a particular ethnic group. The protesters also called on Valentin Inzko, the current Head of the OHR to impose a solution. Inzko declined in an interview, on June 14 2013, to take position, saying that BiH parliamentarians must be responsible for their actions. The protest could have turned violent after the announcement that Berina Hamidovic, another sick baby delayed to travel abroad to be operated, had died. The demonstrators reacted by organising a silent commemoration in front of the parliament on June 16 2013. This only made the statement of the protesters more powerful. The Parliament finally gave up resisting the protesters and voted a new ID law, under urgent procedure. However, this law was later vetoed, on July 23 by Bosniak MPs, on the base that their vital ethnic interest was endangered by the urgent procedure used for the vote. On November 5 2013, the Parliament of BiH finally voted changes to the Law on Personal Numbers, finally giving to newborns citizens the possibility of receiving passports and health care cards.

Which future and which meaning?

The failure of the protesters to end the grip of ethnic leaders in BiH is a huge disappointment. Again, issues affecting the daily lives of citizens have been a tool by politicians to bargain and maintain their power in the country. This is the irony of BiH. The politics of ethnicity which were supposed to create a workable democracy in the country, while avoiding its fragmentation, have revealed themselves to be unworkable.

2013 has shown that the political elites of BiH could not be pressured by their population. However, the ethnic basis for politics may soon change. On October 1rst, a census has been launched. It is the first census since the war in BiH. It is seen as potentially changing the current ethnic demographic of the country. Interestingly, it is possible that 35% of the population may declared itself as ethnic Bosnian-Herzegovinian, in opposition to the 3 ethnic groups in the parliament. However, Bosniak NGOs have declared, prior to the publication of Census results, that 54% of the respondents declared themselves as Bosniak. Many citizens are also wishing for a change of the entity and State system. The ethnic groups have very different views. A survey carried out in 2013 by the researcher Roland Kostic shows that a majority of Bosniaks wish for a more centralised BiHState, a majority of the Serb Community prefers independence of the Republika Srpska from BiH, while a Croatian majority wants secession from the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to create a Croatian autonomous entity inside of BiH.

Belmina Ibrisevic, the baby unable to be treated abroad finally died on October 15 2013 in a hospital in Germany. A protest took place at the front of the BiH Parliament where a mock tomb with a black blanket was unveiled.

The fact that the population could not force the politicians to change the ID law also shows that relations between the population and the State will continue to be conflictive and uncoordinated. It has revealed that the International Community is insensitive to the plight of the BiH people. The Office of the High Representative in BiH used the responsibility of BiH parliamentarians to not support the protesters and maybe save Berina Hamidovic and Belmina Ibrisevic. The insensitiveness of BiH parliamentarians and representatives of the International Community is also a reminder of a wider crisis that democracies are living today with the silence of politicians to protests against austerity measures in Europe and the political infighting during the Shutdown debate in the USA.

Alejandro Marx is a former Junior Analyst of the European Union Institute for Security Studies. He previously worked for various agencies of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

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The First World-Problem(s)

Rehyphenating the priorities of the developed and developing worlds.

By Arvind Iyer, 8th January 2014

Background : The Three Worlds theories of the early postcolonial era that might have served to usefully map the sharply polar geopolitics of the time, continue to circumscribe policy imagination as well as commentary in a manner that limits the genuine planet-wide globalizing of best-practices discovered in any of the erstwhile ‘worlds’. The narratives of newly liberated nations making their unique trysts with destiny or the ‘nationalizing’ of ideology as in socialism with Chinese characteristics are far from timeless or timely at this juncture when wars for self-determination are receding into history, thus precluding preoccupations with self-definition, or assertion of identity, or characterization of doctrines. This article treats an increasingly dominant strain of middle-class political attitudes and aspirations in emerging India as a case study of sorts to illustrate how policy pragmatism and catholicity rather than policy puritanism and conservatism maybe both enabled and necessitated in a world where the problems India shares with America are as pressing as the problems endemic to ‘Chindia’ or the BRIC bloc.

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Is wealth inequality in America as vividly revealed in this viral video, a first-world problem or one of the first world-problem(s)? A question cued by the video is : What is more salient in determining whether a person is suffering in poverty: their position in the ‘first’ or ‘third’ world, or their position in a percentile graph of income wherever they are in the world? One might step back far enough to engage in an exercise of Socratic definition of what ‘poverty’ is, and for that matter, what ‘suffering’ is, but even before going there fully, we may start with examining to what extent are ‘sights and sounds’ of suffering and poverty a reliable basis for working definitions. What our working definitions or archetypes are, will determine what experiences we will recognize as suffering, and also circumscribe our response to the same, and we shall consider both these aspects in turn.

The economist Ashok Desai, in his 1999 book “The Price of Onions” explains how a key difference in how the American middle class and the Indian middle class consumed (at least in the pre-liberalization era) was that Indians ‘purchased goods in less finished form’ than the Americans. His example was that of Indians purchasing whole grain and taking it to a local flour-mill or chakki whereas Americans would purchase their flour packaged by say, Cargill Foods (That illustration is, tellingly, now dated.). Consumption of ‘finished goods’ was to Desai not always a useful marker of affluence or even purchasing power, especially during cross-cultural comparisons. Likewise, the ‘image’ of poverty of an unclad human maybe an instance of attribute substitution where tropical rural attire may be considered the rags of poverty. Like any other heuristic, it works in the ‘ecological niche’ it arose in, but can mislead when misapplied to say, the homeless in the US who are often hoodie-clad than unclad, or to the agrarian countryside in India itself where moneylenders and those who are beholden to them dress nearly alike.

An urban slum or shanty town seems more obviously poor to even someone who grew up in India, than the pucca houses where Vidarbha farmers who committed suicide lived. None of this is to suggest ignoring familiar symptoms of deprivation, but only a reminder to be mindful that there will always be symptoms that are unfamiliar to us. If only minimalist clothing was simply a sartorial choice in India…if only! Instead, preventable deaths during cold waves continue year after year in Northern India, outstripping civil-society efforts like Goonj Rahat Winters to supply warm clothing to those in need. I once had a connecting flight via Incheon International Airport at Seoul while flying to India from the US for the winter holiday break, and the airport was completely snowed under. I couldn’t help noticing how that didn’t delay the flight nor inflicted the sort of toll a less harsh winter inflicts in India. Famines don’t occur in democracies, Amartya Sen observes, but eradicating preventable winter mortality seems to ask for more than political democracy.

That brings us to the question of what are the institutional changes needed for a proper and sustained response to suffering besides emergency humanitarian interventions. Trains famously ran on time in India during the Emergency, and flights running on schedule in South Korea even during blizzards is credited by some to the disciplining authoritarian legacy of Park Chung-hee. The popularity of the view that ‘democracy gets in the way of what is good for the people’ is attested to by the fact that a celebrity like Rajnikanth (whose influence was a king-making campaigner was evident during a Tamil Nadu state election in 1996) names Lee Kuan Yew as his political role model with his devotees nodding vigorously, endorsing in effect a preference for life in a Bonsai showcase. Whatever the original intent of Tao Te Ching Chapter 3 was, it is now seen as the blueprint of the ‘post-Tiananmen deal’ where the function of the state is to provide material prosperity and guarantee stability even at the cost of civil liberties, by benevolently sparing the people political unrest as it were, and denying them the freedom to go wrong or do wrong.

The undisguised paternalism of the post-Tiananmen deal and the manufactured consent of the Washington Consensus, seem to have lent themselves to an uncanny mix with a The-forefathers-knew-best Indian revivalism, with a generation of Indians brandishing the rhetorical device of a ‘starving voter’ to declare that the only real emancipation is economic and the only real empowerment is an increase in purchasing power. Pressed further to reconcile wannabe Americanism and China-envy with their civilizational pride, these cheerleaders of homegrown neoliberalism respond almost in feature-length with their conception of an ‘Indian Dream’ which they claim will have the same production-value of the American dream but will be free of single-parent households and mid-career burnouts which their ‘rooted’ and ‘holistic’ lifestyle would preclude. Their cheerleading of political freedom and economic freedom is vigorous and their enthusiasm becomes tempered only when talk arises of ‘social freedom’ as it were, or even ‘social justice’, since social conservatism is seen as an indispensable insurance against that American nightmare : the single teen-parent household, which to Indian sensibilities is more a spectacle of suffering than a poor but close-knit family in the Indian countryside. An outright comparison of well-being of a dysfunctional first-world family and a deprived but undivided Indian family is obviously prone to the moral hazard which the fallacy of relative privation poses. However, a juxtaposition of these family portraits may occasion a useful reminder of the limitations of viewing human beings simply as ‘mouths to be fed’ or as ‘producers’ or ‘consumers’, views that we are likely to lapse into if our purview is restricted to just the ‘third world’ or ‘first world’. Prof. Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, widely considered one of the drivers of the conceptual broadening from GDP to HDI, offers a framework that is less limiting of the imagination, and therefore potentially yielding more empowering policy-making, than currently dominant worldviews of numbered worlds and the current world order of bread-and-circuses allow.

Endnote: Instead of wistfully missing joint-family portraits, perhaps we can try to take a fuller view of joint family-portrait(s) of the sort a photo-essay like Peter Menzel’s “What the World Eats” puts together. Lessons on how to make the picture better, comprehensively better according to the menu of Prof. Nussbaum, which involves not just filling the table but also filling the chairs, may involve not just a tutorial by the superpowers to the rest, but genuine turn-taking in a conversation that is not between ‘worlds apart’ but amid ‘worlds together’.

Arvind Iyer is a doctoral student researcher at the University of Southern California working in the broad areas of Computational Neuroscience and biological visual processing. His interests include science popularization, continuing education, secular philanthropy and freethought blogging. He is originally from Mumbai, India.

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Fear and Loathing in the Magic Valley of Malana, India’s Cannabis Country

Satellite mapping by the authorities forces India’s famous cannabis growers deeper into the bush.

By Shweta Desai, 10th January 2014 (Republished with permission)

Deep in India’s Himalayas, in the remote and isolated Kullu Valley of Himachal Pradesh, is the quiet village of Malana. When autumn arrives each year, Malana is enveloped in what was once a hopeful air brought on by the new harvest, as lanky cannabis trees bloom wild in panoramic fields and against scattered houses. Farmers and villagers begin cultivating in late September, rubbing the buds of fully bloomed plants between their palms to extract the brown hashish resin known mystically as Malana’s crème. Today this time of year carries with it the dark pall of police interference.

Malana’s crème has a notorious legacy in international stoner culture. It has won the Best Hashish title twice, in 1994 and 1996, at High Times magazine’s Cannabis Cup. Marijuanaphiles the world over have since made this region a popular weed-tourist destination, branded in travel and ganja-hunting literature as the exotic and alluring “Malana and the Magic Valley.” It was inevitable that the farmers would start to realize the global potential of their plants—and that the cops would take any and all measures to prevent these rural agriculturalists from increasing production. The most effective tool in authorities’ arsenal is satellite technology, but the farmers have found a workaround.

Malana is perched on a treacherous cliff, and until recently the only way to reach it was by foot. This helped marijuana farmers avoid the close monitoring of local and national police. But new roads connecting the village with surrounding towns and cities have resulted in a harsh reality for farmer-businessmen ambitious with their valuable crop. Because of these recently paved roads, cops are now able to respond quickly to intel provided by satellite Global Positioning Systems (GPS). They have destroyed Malana’s visible, free-range hemp crops three times in each of the last three years, prosecuting villagers—this year there have been 42 cases—who were growing crops on their private land. Repeated offenses can lead to cancellation of land ownership. This approach by the authorities has prompted citizens to cultivate cannabis in large tracts of government forest, making it difficult to prove ownership.

“The plant was here long before the police came—or the foreigners, the road, the electricity,” says 22-year-old Shanta, a grower. “Even before this bhang [cannabis] became the famous Malana crème. Why are we being made criminals?”

Perhaps the most interesting question is not why, but how.

“With the GPS system we can spot the exact locations of the crops,” says Vinod Dhawan, superintendent of police in the Kullu District. “These places are videographed and marked once the crop is destructed to ensure the villagers don’t come back for cultivation.” With Western customers, comes Western-like authoritarian overreach.

Satellite images procured by the Narcotics Control Bureau—the country’s main drug enforcing agency—have identified 52 independent regions in the districts of Kullu, Mandi, Chamba, Kangra, Sirmour and Shimla, including an estimated 2,500 villages, where cannabis cultivation is a major source of livelihood. The police can act only when they have some information, of course, but the percentage of crop destruction stands at around 40 percent of Malana’s annual take. It’s not a tenable business model for farmers with no other income, so they’ve taken their farms elsewhere.

“We go deep in the forests, where the police cannot see the farms,” says Shanta, who treks five hours each day from Malana into the forests to reach his cannabis farms.

“It takes an expertise of a mountain climber and at least eight hours for the police to climb the high peaks where these farms are,” says superintendent Dhawan. “With the production of cannabis in the valley taking place between September and November, it is practically impossible for us to eradicate cannabis 100 percent in two months time.’’ With little incentive and a tiny budget, the police are fighting an uphill battle.

High yield coupled with cheap labor makes India’s retail prices among the lowest in the world based on quality. The popularity of Malana’s hashish is now intrinsically attached to the livelihood of the villagers, with the majority of the 2,000 or so inhabitants involved in cannabis farming in one way or another. But the production and cultivation of cannabis in India was not always prohibited. Its consumption even today is widely accepted in both religious and social settings. In fact, the government used to set up weed retail shops during holidays like Holi, a festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil.

But growing international pressure in the 1960s, largely led by the United States of America’s war on drugs, led India to codify recreational drugs like weed with harder ones like cocaine and heroine under the Indian Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985. Conviction under the law for cultivation or sale of any of these carries a prison term of no fewer than 10 years.

Historically, Malana’s villagers used the indigenous plant’s strong fibers to make shoes and its seeds to brew hash oil for cooking. It remains integral as a religious offering to the presiding local deity, Jamlu Devta. It is only recently that the locals have started to truly understand the financial value of their treasure. The cultivation of the crème is a full-fledged trade industry—one unlike any other the people have.

“The police say it’s a drug,” Shanta says. “That it is dangerous. But this is just a plant—a naturally grown one. We don’t know why this is dangerous.”

According to the “World Drug Report 2012″ from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, India has over the course of the last decade become one of the major global sources of hash, along with Morocco, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon. The reported cannabis cultivation in India stands at 10,539 acres, which is low in comparison with Afghanistan (59,305 acres), Mexico (40,772 acres) and Morocco (23,227 acres).

Villagers say of the 1 million pounds of cannabis and 500,000 pounds of hashish produced in India, a meager 330 pounds comes from the Malana village. The rest, they claim, is from surrounding villages, and even Nepal. Though tasked with cracking down on cannabis production and preventing its circulation in the cities, the police are aware of the sociological difficulties of playing by the book.

“Cannabis is a social and cultural issue,” says Dhawan. “We take all the possible action, but we cannot fight this menace by registering offenses against the local villagers and putting them behind bars all the time. We cannot make these people from Malana orphans.”

Filmmaker Amlan Dutta, a vocal supporter of legalization of cannabis in India, agrees with Dhavan.

“The harsh reality is that hashish has become a means of livelihood,” says Dutta. “However, cannabis farming for social and cultural reasons should not be criminalized.”

In his award-winning documentary BOM: One Day Ahead of Democracy, Dutta highlights the transition in Malana due to development and the struggle for sustenance under the growing police intimidation. Decriminalization of cannabis, he says, would relieve the drug enforcing agencies from the added burden of destroying cannabis plantation and registering criminal offenses against the villagers. It would also allow people from Malana to grow cannabis legally as in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, where the Indian government provides production licenses for medicinal and research purposes.

In the last few years, Dutta initiated the BOM BOM trust with like-minded supporters to retain Malana’s self-sufficient, weed-heavy economy. The trust offers vocational training in sheep rearing, wool production, jam making, honey collection and the creation of alternate products from cannabis like hemp oil and hemp paper. It also sponsors students from Malana for higher education in Kullu valley.

“The villagers know that their sustenance is on something which is illegal,” Dutta says. “So it has become a criminal community. If we can reduce their dependency on hashish production in any way and legalize the cannabis cultivation, we still can save Malana.”

Shweta Desai has a Masters in International Relations and has previously worked as a journalist and as a research analyst, working on resource based conflicts in Middle East and on development trends in Vietnam and Thailand.

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