Innholdsfortegnelse for April 22, 2019 i India Today

People from the private sector and civil society should be appointed in decision-making roles in the bureaucracy Some of us here in Silicon Valley have been reflecting on a conundrum for a while—why is India, a country of immensely talented people, poor? Not just Indian scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, but even Indian politicians and bureaucrats are among the brightest in the world. So, why does India keep making self-goals when it comes to economic policy-making and implementation? India has had some spectacular successes which have transformed the country, while setting an example for the rest of the world. Like the Green Revolution, thanks to which India produces more than enough to feed its billion-plus population. Its space programme, with its high success rate, functioning at a fraction of the cost,…

In September 2014, the government launched the ‘Make in India’ programme to attract more investment into the country and make it a hub for manufacturing. The programme was also aimed at improving India’s rank on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index by eliminating unnecessary laws and regulations, easing bureaucratic processes and making the government more transparent, responsive and accountable. However, Make in India has not taken off. One of the reasons for this could be the slowdown in private sector investment, as investors turn cautious and find raising money tough from banks stressed with soaring non-performing assets (NPAs). India has moved up 23 places on the Ease of Doing Business rankings, to reach the 77th position in October 2018, doing well in six parameters, such as starting a…

The rural development ministry saw a steady increase in spending in the NDA regime; the BJP’s 2019 election manifesto, too, promises to invest Rs 25 lakh crore in rural development. Here’s a look at how the three flagship schemes of the Narendra Modi government, specifically addressing the needs of rural areas, fared in the past few years. PRADHAN MANTRI AWAS YOJANA (GRAMIN) The government made an ambitious announcement in June 2015, claiming that by 2022—the 75th year of independence—every Indian family will have a pucca house with a toilet, cooking gas, water and electricity supply. The scheme at the foundation of this promise is the PMAY, which provides subsidies for building low-cost houses in rural and urban areas. Through the scheme, the government plans to construct 29.5 million rural houses…

National Agriculture Market, eNAM Objective: Launched in April 2016, the electronic National Agriculture Market was aimed at linking existing Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) mandis (markets) in different states on a single electronic portal where agricultural commodities could be traded. It was to be a single-window platform for all APMC-related information and services. So far, 585 mandis across 16 states and 2 Union territories are registered on the portal. The total volume of trade this year up to February 28, 2019 was 2.2 lakh million tonnes with a value of Rs 604.72 crore. Outcome: It was intended as a significant advance in agricultural marketing and trade, but not all states have amended their APMC acts to be able to join eNAM. It is also inaccessible to small and marginal farmers…

Until February 14, the government was on the back foot as it had to answer for lack of jobs and agricultural distress. The suicide bomb attack on a CRPF convoy, which killed 40 troopers that day, changed all that. On February 26, air strikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror training camp in Balakot in Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa changed the political narrative—from economy to national security. This was reflected in the BJP’s election manifesto released on April 8. National security moved up as the prime agenda point, ahead of agriculture, as the party emphasised a “security doctrine guided by national security interest only”. The party’s manifesto emphasised how “the Prime Minister’s decisive leadership fundamentally altered India’s national security paradigm in the last five years”. The presidential tilt to the election means this line…

In the past five years, the Union human resource development ministry made quite a habit of being in the news for all the wrong reasons. It started with former HRD minister Smriti Irani’s controversial tenure and continued with current MoS for HRD Satyapal Singh dismissing Darwin’s theory of evolution and offering eminence status to the non-existent Jio University being planned by the Reliance group. Add to this the government’s failure to bring out the much-touted National Education Policy (some experts now see it as a futile exercise). But despite these negatives, there has been silent change in one key aspect of the education sector—a greater focus on enhancing the quality of education. The first step was the National Achievement Surveys for children—which proved how abysmal learning standards were—carried out by…

Namita Devidayal’s Sixth String of Vilayat Khan is in many ways an exercise in economy. Her respect for the Ustad is apparent, but it never crosses over to adoration. In the acknowledgment section of the biography, the journalist thanks Hidayat Husain Khan. It was he who had first persuaded her to write a book about his father, “promising he would not interfere, even if it made him uncomfortable”. Is this what Hidayat wanted, though? Wouldn’t the sitarist have preferred reverence over restraint? “My father had a sense of humour. The stories you hear of Indian classical musicians are all tales of practice and morality. I wanted him to be painted as who he was, not as some god who is inaccessible.” In a YouTube video, you can see a young…

At the end of a particularly prolonged encounter in north Kashmir’s Hajin town on March 22, army and police personnel recovered the remains of three persons—two Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants and a 12-year-old local schoolboy. Taken hostage before security forces closed in, little Atif Hussain Mir was being held to discourage them from launching a full-scale assault on the three-storey house in Mir Mohalla, where the captors—Ali and Hubaib—were holed up. Atif’s death is now fuelling unprecedented indignation against the LeT. It has now been revealed that Ali, a Pakistani and the older of the LeT men, was also behind six civilian killings in the area last year. The brutal murders had remained unsolved, with most locals refusing to speak up for fear of retribution. Young Atif’s tragic death seems to…

The Jammu and Kashmir government’s ban on civilian traffic along the 253-kilometre Udhampur-Baramulla section of National Highway 44 on Sundays and Wednesdays has fuelled public anger in the Valley. Although political leaders and candidates are allowed to travel on obtaining permits from specially appointed magistrates, the move is likely to discourage voters from attending election meetings. While National Conference (NC) leader Farooq Abdullah has damned the restrictions as “dictatorial”, PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) chief Mehbooba Mufti has said that the central government is trying to “smother Kashmiris and imprison people in their own land”. People’s Conference chief Sajad Lone has also warned that the move could lead to a “humanitarian disaster”, and the Congress has demanded immediate revocation of the ban. THE CAMPAIGNING IS UNLIKE ANYTHING WITNESSED SINCE BURHAN WANI’S…

As his helicopter lands on Nawada’s IIT Maidan, Tejashwi Yadav’s supporters quickly check if all the essentials are in place—water bottle on the table, a white towel on the chair and marigold garlands to greet their young leader. Tejashwi is an hour late. But his audience of some 2,500 people has been waiting patiently. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) candidate from Nawada, Vibha Devi, widely perceived to be a dummy candidate thrown into the electoral waters after her husband Raj Ballabh Yadav’s conviction in a rape case, lurks in the background as party supremo Lalu Prasad’s younger son takes the stage. He climbs on to the dais, waves to the crowd, and says: “I’m standing here for you.” He speaks for about 15 minutes, dwelling on themes likely to resonate…

There are a number of economic pitches Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have made in his election manifesto as he seeks a second term. In 2014, he positioned himself as the challenger and made the economy a key election issue. The BJP manifesto attacked the UPA government on price rise, jobs, corruption and black money. Modi presented a compelling vision of how he would steer India towards a better future while eschewing fiscal imprudence. Five years on, the BJP’s ‘Sankalp Patra 2019’ addresses economic issues such as the agrarian distress and jobs. It says new employment opportunities will be created by providing support to 22 major ‘champion’ sectors. It also talks about creating an ecosystem for entrepreneurship and launching a new scheme to provide collateral-free credit up to Rs 50…

Boosting the country’s infrastructure has been a big challenge for successive governments. Projects in the past have traditionally lagged for want of funds and efficient implementation. Although the Modi government may pride itself on some green shoots in this segment—notably roads and power—others like railways and telecom leave a lot to be desired. In roads, the government claims it has achieved 34 km of road construction a day in the past two years, compared to 11.3 km under the previous UPA regime. In power, the ambitious Ujwal DisCom Assurance Yojana, or UDAY, helped push a major portion of the Rs 3.2 lakh crore of accumulated debt of distribution companies (discoms) to the respective state governments’ books, paving the way for reform in operations and upgrade of power infrastructure. Meanwhile, last…

Under the Narendra Modi government, the primary driving force for any work in urban development appears to be ‘competition’. The Union ministry of housing and urban affairs has been at the forefront of attempts to instil a competitive spirit among cities and states—with rankings and grades on cleanliness, waste management and efforts to stop open defecation. Cities are vying with each other in cleanliness to rank among the top 10 in the country while the states are endeavouring to earn the open defecation-free (ODF) tag. The main platforms of these competitions, though, are the housing and urban affairs ministry’s flagship schemes, such as the Smart Cities Mission, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), Swachh Bharat Mission, the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY) and the Pradhan Mantri…

India’s internal security has, in the past two decades, faced a quadrangle of violence—in Jammu & Kashmir, Maoist insurgency, insurgents in the Northeast and cross-border terror attacks across mainland India. Five years into the Modi government, three of the threats have diminished substantially. On February 5, a Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) release indicated that only 90 districts reported Maoist violence in 2018, as compared to 223 in 2008. The last cross-border attack, says the release, which came out before the February 14 Pulwama bombing, was in Pathankot in 2016. Violence levels in six insurgency-affected Northeastern states have fallen despite several insurgent groups still being active. The last and deadliest threat, terrorism in J&K, continues to pose the greatest challenge to the MHA, which manages India’s internal security. Violence levels…

Performance has betrayed the Modi government’s promises in the health sector, even though it has sought to ring in reforms in the delivery of national healthcare programmes and revamp medical education and financing of healthcare to create a healthcare model that is accessible and affordable to the common man. An assessment of the government’s significant initiatives in health: National Health Policy, 2017 Objective: It proposes an increase in the health expenditure budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2025. Outcome: Even if attained, this will still only be half of what the World Health Organization recommends. Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana aka Ayushman Bharat Yojana Objective: An annual Rs 5 lakh insurance cover to some 100 million families. Outcome: The National Health Authority says over 27.4 million beneficiaries have…

on April 13, 1919, 50 soldiers, led by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, opened fire on a crowd of unarmed men, women and children at a garden in Amritsar. They fired for 10 minutes, discharging 1,650 bullets at the peaceful protesters in Jallianwala Bagh, who stood less than 150 feet away from their .303 rifles. Official accounts put the death toll at 379, but unofficial estimates say twice as many people died. The grim massacre was an inflection point in the history of colonial rule and, in some ways, marked the beginning of its end. A hundred years on, the massacre continues to inspire revulsion, even in the UK. It comes up in three new books (see Haunting the Hardback) and a Channel 4 documentary. The Punjab government will hold a…

On April 2, the core committee of the Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) decided that its founder, former chief minister Ajit Jogi, will not contest the Lok Sabha election. With this, the almost three-year-old JCC bowed out of the contest in all 11 Lok Sabha seats in the state, announcing that it would support the candidates fielded by the Bahujan Samaj Party, its alliance partner in the assembly election in December. Although the JCC and the BSP together won seven seats in the 90-member state assembly and a 12 per cent vote share in that election—not bad for a party that had barely two months to campaign after it was granted an election symbol—the party set up by Jogi is facing an identity crisis after the Congress won a three-fourths majority…

No other government in India’s recent history claims to have done so much for agriculture as the Narendra Modi-led NDA government. From doubling farm incomes by 2022, renaming the ministry of agriculture the agriculture and farmers’ welfare ministry, transferring Rs 6,000 per year directly into the bank accounts of small and marginal farmers, guaranteeing Minimum Support Price (MSP) with 50 per cent additional payment, issuing soil health cards, setting up eNAMs and GrAMs to revamping 99 big incomplete canal irrigation projects, the list of agricultural reforms the NDA government purports to have undertaken is long. Simultaneously, there has been record farm production of cereals, vegetables, fruits, milk and fish. Yet, the rural countryside is afflicted with economic distress, the rate of unemployment is high and cases of farmers’ suicides continue…

The BJP’s 2014 policy promised to ‘reboot and reorient foreign policy’. Five years later, an outcome-oriented foreign policy seems to be the government’s biggest achievement, even as the challenge of Pakistan and a rising China remains. HIGHS Reboot and reorientation of its foreign policy visibly led by a globe-trotting prime minister. PM Narendra Modi has visited 93 countries in nearly five years in office, as many as visited by former PM Manmohan Singh in a decade in office Major wins include outreach to the Arab world—Saudi Arabia and UAEand to Japan. Arms deals have been used to strengthen existing defence ties. India has signed or is in talks to seal defence deals worth $10 billion (Rs 70,000 crore) with its strategic partner Russia, braving US sanctions. Relations with the US…

Union minister of state for tourism (independent charge) K.J. Alphons has an impressive number for critics of the Modi government who go on about ‘jobless growth’—the sector created 13 million jobs in the past four years, he says. A 2017 report of the World Travel and Tourism Council says tourism contributed over 9 per cent to India’s GDP and provided 8 per cent of the country’s employment. The sector is also the third largest foreign exchange earner for India. And the minister reminds us that “the country climbed from rank #7 in 2017 to #3 in 2018 in the World Travel and Tourism Council’s power and performance index”. The irony here is that despite the jump in rankings, less than five per cent of foreign tourists to the Asia-Pacific region…

The year 2019 marks the beginning of a golden age for podcasts. Dave Zohrob, co-founder and CEO of Chartable, a podcast analytics firm, said so recently. Figures backed his claim. In the last year, an average of 575 new podcasts entered the global market every day, about one every three minutes. And when consulting firm PwC projected revenue growth at over 30 per cent between 2018 and 2022, the podcast ‘boom’ was audible. But with over 1.5 million listens a month, India , for its part, had already tuned in. “Given that we started from a really low base, the growth is really fast, but the overall numbers are still not huge,” says Amit Doshi, who started podcast network IVM in 2015, to bring the audio talk show format to…

In 2008, Criminal Justice first aired on BBC One. HBO then adapted the British originaltomake The Night Of in 2016. If you’ve seen any of these shows before, you could forgive Hotstar for its lacklustre Criminal Justice remake. It might look and feel like a cheap knock-off, but it does try hard to hit the same notes its forerunners once did. In The Night Of,forinstance, Naz Khan (Riz Ahmed) is seen driving his family’s cab to a party one night. Aditya Sharma (Vikrant Massey) does the same in his Criminal Justice. Like Naz, he picks up an upset yet brazen passenger. They somehow end up at her place and get drunk. She slips him some MDMA and they have sex. When Aditya wakes up, he can’t remember half the night.…