THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 02 March
GDP figures suspect: Cong
•The Congress on Wednesday labelled the GDP numbers put out by the government as “highly suspect” and said they could dent India’s global credibility. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, however, defended the numbers, saying that they belied the claims that demonetisation would have a strong adverse effect on the economy.
•Accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley of “misleading” the public, Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma said the GDP numbers released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) have not factored in the adverse impact of demonetisation, including losses in jobs and production.
•The government should address the real problems and stop its ‘propagandists’ from ‘premature celebrations and misplaced euphoria’, Mr. Sharma said.
•He charged that the PM and the Finance Minister “remain in denial to further their narrow political agenda for short-term benefits and are not addressing the real issues.”
•However, Mr. Jaitley on Wednesday said the GDP figures released by the CSO on Tuesday which showed that the economy grew at a relatively strong 7% in the third quarter of the financial year, had taken the effect of demonetisation into account.
•“Third quarter was substantially impacted by demonetisation. It admittedly had led to a squeeze of currency,” Mr. Jaitley told reporters. “The GDP number belies exaggerated claims by many that the rural sector was in distress and shows that agriculture growth was at a record high.”
•“Remonetisation is up substantially, and its combination with economic resilience has shown some signs of a return of growth,” Mr Jaitley said. “Therefore I do expect that in the future quarters, this figure itself will grow further.”
•The CSO said in its second advance estimates that the full-year’s GDP growth rate would remain unchanged at 7.1% from its earlier estimate made in January.
•Within the Q3 numbers, the manufacturing sector grew 8.3%, faster than the 6.9% registered in Q2. The agriculture sector witnessed a growth of 6% in Q3 compared with 3.8% in Q2.
•At the same time, even the mining and quarrying sector saw a rebound, with growth accelerating to 7.5% from a contraction of 1.3% in Q2.
•What is surprising, according to economists, was that private final consumption expenditure (PFCE), a proxy for private spending, was shown to have grown far faster in Q3 (which included the months immediately following demonetisation) than was estimated for the entire year. While PFCE witnessed a growth rate of 10% in Q3, the CSO estimates a growth rate of 7.2% for the full year.
•Breaking his silence on the murder of Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the country was united in condemning it.
•Clubbing the violence against Indians with the racial attacks on blacks and Jews, he said: “As we mark the conclusion of our celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains.
•“Recent threats targeting Jewish community centres and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”
•“I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart,” he said in his first address to the U.S. Congress.
•The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on Wednesday successfully carried out a test of an interceptor missile, further validating the reliability of the under-development, two-layered Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) in shooting down enemy missiles.
•Defence sources said the endo-atmospheric missile, which can intercept missiles at ranges of 15-30 km, was launched at 10.15 a.m. from the Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast in response to an incoming ‘enemy’ missile which was launched from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) in Chandipur.
•The missile intercepted the incoming missile at an altitude of 15 km scoring a direct hit, a source said.
•Last month, the DRDO carried out a successful test of the exo-atmospheric interceptor missile destroying the target outside the earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of over 85 km.
•Research Centre Imarat (RCI) of the DRDO which had played a role in the development of all strategic missiles has speared the design and development of the BMD programme.
Two missiles
•The BMD consists of two interceptor missiles, the Prithvi Defence Vehicle (PDV) for exo-atmospheric ranges and the Advanced Area Defence (AAD) missile for endo-atmosphere or lower altitudes.
•The BMD is critical to protect the country from the long-range ballistic missiles proliferating in the neighbourhood. DRDO expects to have shield ready for deployment by 2022.
•A picture, they say, is worth a hundred words. Two pictures related to Kerala, though separated by decades and differing in content, speak to us strongly of how we may secure its future. Thus, a photo in a leading Malayalam newspaper shows the Chief Minister of the State meeting the Prime Minister of India. An amiable Pinarayi Vijayan is seen extending flowers to Narendra Modi, who accepts it betraying no emotion. The power equation is astutely conveyed by the caption “Ariyetra…” meaning “How much rice…” in Malayalam. The Chief Minister was in the national capital in January seeking a greater allocation of rice to the State. Then there is a painting by Anjolie Ela Menon. Titled ‘Malabar’, it is a canvas smeared with green paint bearing no detail. Presumably it was the artist’s impression of the paddy-filled landscape of Kerala when she first encountered it decades ago. How is it possible that a State once identified by the wealth of its agriculture has been brought to the sorry state whereby its Chief Minister must travel to Delhi to ensure that his people are properly fed? It can only reflect the failure of public policy.
Changed agrarian scenario
•In the early seventies, following the boom in the Arabian Gulf region, the State saw a new form of emigration. While Kerala had long witnessed the migration of the educated for want of opportunities domestically, for the first time there was a significant outflow of manual labour, some of it from agriculture. While it was only the men who migrated, the higher incomes transformed the households socially, and the women too withdrew from the labour market. This hit paddy cultivation most as, in an age-old sexual division of labour, women were disproportionately represented in the planting and harvesting of paddy. The sector began to face severe labour shortage. Naturally, the wage rose and the cultivation of paddy was no longer viable as cheaper rice came in from the rest of India.
•The rise in the wage may not have had the impact it did if the ownership of land was vested with the tiller. The temptations of migration overseas may have been held at bay had the tiller also owned the land. But the latter was not the case despite the much-vaunted land reforms of the State. In abolishing tenancy the land reforms had extinguished the traditional landlords but did not inevitably transfer land to those who actually laboured on the field. This is reflected in the current agitation for land by the Adivasi community.
Stunted land reforms
•Kerala is rare among the world’s economies, barring Zimbabwe, where agricultural production actually declined after land reforms. Land reforms in China after Mao led to a surge in food production, which in turn led to its rise to global prominence. In theory, one form of reorganisation possible even at this stage in Kerala is for those in ownership of land but not wishing to cultivate to lease it out. But leasing was made unlawful by the land reform Act.
•At the time of its legislation, tenancy had been a symbol of the exploitation of the peasantry who were held down by the possibility of eviction at will. But now, close to half a century later, when the economic position of owners of small parcels of land pales beside the owners of urban property in the State, to hold on to an archaic law for its symbolic value is mere sentimentality. It is unimaginative of a public policy to not remove all barriers to the leasing of land so that smaller portions can be pooled to form larger operational holdings and paddy production becomes viable again. It is interesting that the law discourages tenancy as unlawful but is sanguine about the alienation of agricultural land to other purposes. Actually, there is legislation meant to address this but its implementation is hostage to party politics at the village level, and the alienation of Kerala’s precious agricultural land continues.
•It is quite extraordinary that public policy in Kerala has not addressed the problem of a declining production of its staple food, a trend in evidence for nearly half a century by now. At the time of Mr. Vijayan’s trip to Delhi, an editorial in another leading Malayalam daily reported that the State produced only one-eighth of its consumption requirement. This figure needs to be vetted, but surely the situation may be judged to be critical if a region were unable to produce even half of it?
A leaf out of Delhi’s book
•An obvious question emerging from the Chief Minister’s much-publicised visit to Delhi is why Kerala cannot jettison its dependent status. At least here Kerala’s political leadership may take a leaf out of the record of the Central government. In the mid-sixties, smarting under Lyndon Johnson’s directive that food be sent to India “by the shipload” so that she may be “kept on a short leash”, Indira Gandhi moved frenetically to increase food production in India. The Green Revolution followed and, despite its negative ecological fallout, India has never looked back. Earlier Nehru had cautioned his fellow citizens how India could not live permanently on “handouts” from the rich countries and needed to grow her own food. There is a lesson in this for those in charge of public policy in Kerala.
•If the State is to remain an autonomous entity, it must reduce all forms of one-way dependence, even vis-à-vis the Indian Union. A far firmer base of food production would be one aspect of this. In a world of creeping climate change, the global supply of food is set to shrink.
•There is a factor other than the legal architecture discouraging the leasing of land that works against agricultural prosperity. This is the natural environment, which in Kerala today is less hospitable to agriculture of any kind, let alone paddy cultivation. This has come about due to the depletion of groundwater and sand mining of the riverbeds to provide material for luxury house construction. There has also been the alienation of agricultural land already referred to. Land need not be turned into real estate to lose its fertility. Using fallow paddy fields as ‘exhibition’ grounds or for shopping festivals, even when the structures made are temporary, could degrade the land permanently. Kerala needs a land use policy that conserves every bit of its natural capital. As part of this, the State could consider acquiring all unused paddy land and making it available to the Adivasis on long-term lease. This would ensure its preservation, saving Kerala from the hardship that is assured if the present situation of more plastic than grain clogging the rice paddies continues.
•Kerala needs a new politics if its economy is to adjust to the emerging scenario of rising food prices and a shrinking Gulf economy which is sure to impact livelihoods. Public policy is likely to adapt only if political parties are pressurised by a citizenry alerted to the limits to distributivism. An instance of how this can work is the return of paddy cultivation to vast tracts of the Aranmula Puncha, an iconic agricultural landscape in central Kerala, after citizen action prevented its diversion to build an airport. The regeneration has been made possible by active support from the government machinery. When such synergy is replicated across the State, its future Chief Ministers need not travel to Delhi seeking food.
Trolled into silence
•Gurmehar Kaur, the 20-year-old student from Delhi University who started a social media campaign in opposition to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, has been trolled into silence, and has reportedly left Delhi due to rape and death threats. She is not the first youngster to be at the receiving end of the binary of the nationalist/anti-national.
•Progressive politics
•Ms. Kaur’s politics, similar to vast sections of the student community across the country, is aimed at questioning the narrowing of freedom of speech and expression, aided by the state in conjunction with a society that harbours an increasingly majoritarian attitude. Rohith Vemula of the University of Hyderabad could be demeaned for being a Dalit. Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), with their Muslim identity, could be slotted as traitorous, and their fellow comrade Anirban Bhattacharya could be projected as a menace for being a follower of left-wing ideology.
•It was harder to slot Ms. Kaur with such ease. She is a student at one of the most elite colleges of Delhi University, Lady Shri Ram College (as opposed to JNU, much reviled in the popular imagination as the hub of ‘anti-national’ activity). She belongs to one of India’s most celebrated and prosperous minority communities, the Sikhs. Most significantly, her father, Capt. Mandeep Singh of the Indian Army, lost his life battling militants in Jammu and Kashmir in 1999.
•Ms. Kaur has disrupted the narrative of the dying soldier that is brought out by the right wing at the drop of a hat to shut down dissent. The fact that sections of the Army veterans and relatives of those who died on the battlefield in Kargil have come out in her support reflects that there is some discomfort within the Army too over its facile politicisation.
•Patterns of abuse
•Ms. Kaur’s abusers used two distinct reactions. The first was what has become a standard issue response to the articulation of progressive views by women — sexual harassment. Rape threats and death threats flew thick and wild. The second was to shame her for using her father, the soldier’s death as a plank for contrived morality. The strategies were used in combination, becoming a textbook case of the militarised society with heightened levels of gender-based violence.
•When celebrities such as cricketer Virender Sehwag and actor Randeep Hooda jumped into the fray, they did so in the face of a very real intimidation that Ms. Kaur was facing, unwittingly providing the cue for hundreds of trolls to move in swiftly with a barrage of abuse and threats. Their cavalier intervention, as also tweets and subsequent comments by Kiren Rijiju, the Union Minister of State for Home, show that the reality that a young woman could possibly have agency and think independently, without any assistance whatsoever from male members of society, has entirely bypassed our leaders and icons of sport and entertainment.
•Other types of politics have also played out wherein representatives within the government used the Delhi University brouhaha and student violence to push further the agenda of curbs on freedom of speech and expression.
•Identity politics
•The incident has also stoked regional identity politics, with some prominent voices supporting Ms. Kaur remarking with condescension on the brawny, sexist Haryanvi in the context of Sehwag and Hooda, and wrestlers Geeta Phogat, Babita Kumari and Yogeshwar Dutt, all belonging to Haryana, reacting with hostility. The space of social media is admittedly a free-for-all. But progressive-minded people using stereotypes constitutes a weak defence and poor strategy. By that logic, the harassment of Ms. Kaur would also end up constituting ‘free speech’, which it is not.
•It took a while for apologies to be tendered to Ms. Kaur by some of the personalities who contributed to her painful experience. Nonetheless, she has been vilified for lacking courage for withdrawing herself from the campaign, regardless of the actual grit she has displayed till this point. The Union Home Minister’s attempt at defusing the situation — by referring to her as a daughter who requires protection — continues to infantilise and patronise, in keeping with the attitude of a nanny state.
How is biodiversity — the vast variety of plants and animals on earth — useful?
•At a recent, unique conference organised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican involving nature and social scientists, the focus was on the slender thread by which 90% of humanity’s food security hangs — which is, just 103 varieties of plants that are regularly cultivated. At the same time, there is detailed knowledge of only a fifth of all estimated plant species that exist. Yet, vast areas of earth are being deforested before the rest can even be studied. A similar lack of full understanding of how plants, animals and the environment interact, with consequences for humans, underscores the need for restraint, scientists say.
What is the threat to the world’s biodiversity?
•The real possibility that half of all wildlife will disappear permanently by the turn of the century worries scientists, who say human beings have not taken into account the irreplaceable services like water, food, medicines, flood control and pollution abatement that nature provides them. This is in contrast to other types of accepted accounting, such as determining poverty lines, direct environmental losses and climate change impact. As the planet’s population continues to grow, and resource consumption rises, the rate of species loss is accelerating.
•Major threats to biodiversity are clearing of land for agriculture and urbanisation, spread of alien species, pests, and disease-causing organisms, unsustainable hunting and gathering of animals, and climate change. As scientist Paul R. Ehrlich describes it, a single species is determining the fate of all others.
•But have there not been past extinctions?
•There have been five mass extinctions so far in Earth’s geological history, with a more than 75% loss of estimated species. The earliest, the Ordovician, about 440 million years ago, was followed by the Devonian (365 million years), Permian (245 million), Triassic (210 million), Cretaceous (65 million). What differentiates the current fate of plants and animals from those is the relentless human pressure on nature.
What can be done?
•Conservationists like Prof. Ehrlich, who view a surging population coupled with consumption as the primary threat, advocate more women’s education to reduce the birth rate. Sustainable practices like cutting fossil fuel use, accounting for the value of ecological systems, sparing wild areas from resource extraction, expanding urban agriculture, and preserving species in sanctuaries are ways forward.
The Congress strength in the new Lok Sabha continued to stand at 278 to-day [March 1]. One of the two results announced to-day [March 1] went in favour of the All-Party Hill Leaders Conference of Assam. The other seat was annexed by the C.P.I. So far the results for 511 seats have been announced. The results of elections to nine more seats remain to be announced and one member will be nominated to represent NEFA. Prof. G.G. Swell, sitting member, was declared elected to-day [March 1] from the Autonomous District (S.T.) Parliamentary constituency as APHLC nominee, defeating his Congress rival, Mr. B.G. Nomomin by nearly 42,000 votes. Mr. Dhireswar Kalita (C.P.I.) was to-day [March 1] declared elected to the Gauhati Lok Sabha seat defeating five opponents including the sitting Congress member. This is the first time the Communist Party won a Lok Sabha seat in Assam.
•India has a “very strong voice” within the World Bank group due to its active participation in the international financial institution’s meetings and decisions, and the Bank is in talks with the government to further strengthen this partnership, according to World Bank Chief Executive Officer Kristalina Georgieva.
•In an interview to The Hindu , Ms. Georgieva said even as the Bank was undertaking internal reforms on decision-making and governance, “India’s voice on the (World Bank) Boards of directors and governors is very strong. It is very active in the meetings, due to which it has learnt a lot from the Bank and the Bank has learnt a lot from India.”
•Ms. Georgieva, who arrived in India on February 27 on her first official visit here, said the Bank’s focus areas in the country included financial inclusion, renewable energy, smart cities, sustainable water resource management, skill development, sanitation and cleaning the river Ganga.
•On the Indus Waters Treaty, Ms. Georgieva said, “a constructive engagement is taking place. We have seen there is good progress.” India, Pakistan and the World Bank are signatories to the Treaty and are in discussions on resolving disagreements the two countries have over India’s construction of two hydroelectric power plants, the Bank had said. “The Treaty has served the two countries very well and has survived difficult moments. It has benefited the countries,” Ms. Georgieva said. However, she added that water resource management today is very different when compared to the times when the Treaty was signed (in the year 1960) due to the huge rise in population and the increase in the water requirement for energy and agriculture. Water sharing is a major issue not just between India and Pakistan, but in many parts across the world, she said, adding that the Bank is working on better strategies to make best use of water resources.
•Ms. Georgieva, who met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and RBI Governor Urjit Patel, said among the topics of discussion was finding ways to help raise more funds through rupee-denominated bonds issued outside India – also known as ‘masala bonds’. The masala bond was first issued by the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. The talks were also on better handling exchange rate fluctuations given the uncertainties in the world economy.
