In 100 days, sowing the seeds of a New Assam

It is often said, well begun is half done. Ever since our government assumed office in Assam in early May, we have endeavoured to live up to people’s expectations and deliver to them, the Assam of their dreams. While 100 days may be too short a period to bring about transformative change, especially in governance, the seeds have been sown and will bear fruits shortly.

Building on Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s philosophy of “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas”, we aim to ensure citizen-friendly governance in the state. Continuous engagement with citizens is an essential part of participatory governance. Case in point: The positive response to our government’s call for affluent people to surrender their ration cards. This appeal was made to ensure that those who need these benefits can avail them.

Our government was formed amid the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. To tackle this, Team Assam, led by Covid warriors, dedicated its entire effort under the guidance of the PM. We adopted the test, treat, trace, and vaccinate strategy. We have also made preparations to minimise the impact of a possible third wave.

With the tireless efforts of health workers, we brought the positivity rate down from 9.13% to 0.73%, installed oxygen generation plants with a total capacity of 13.56 MT, nearly doubled the number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in state medical college hospitals from 793 to 1,308, and administered over 14.8 million doses of the vaccine..

We recognise the long-term loss caused by Covid-19, particularly to children who lost their parents in the pandemic. We announced the chief minister’s Shishu Seva Scheme under which the state will provide these children with monthly support until the age of 24.

In these 100 days, we have taken firms steps to defeat several other ills that confront our society, threaten our civilisational heritage, and undermine our future.

A drug-free society is essential for a prosperous Assam. In 100 days, Assam Police made great strides in demolishing the infrastructure that facilitated the supply of drugs and narcotics. Working under the guidance of Union home minister Amit Shah, we seized drugs worth ₹183 crore, and arrested 1,760 people. We will continue to fight the drug menace with an iron fist and achieve our mission of drug-free Assam..

As mentioned in our election manifesto, the protection of cattle — revered in our culture — is a top priority. Delivering on our poll promise, we passed the Assam Cattle Preservation Act, 2021. With this, we intend to stop the illegal trade and transit of cattle through Assam, which was rampant over the years. Further, we led encroachment drives to clear illegal settlements built around our temples and namghars (prayer houses).

When I see files that come to my desk for approval, I prioritise those which reflect unfulfilled aspirations of our people. And in these 100 days , we have tried to shake status quo to ensure speedier outcome. People have voted for us with great expectations and we have to race against time to deliver them. For instance, in my various interactions with people, I came across heart wrenching stories of women being exploited by micro finance lenders for not able to repay small amounts of money. This was unacceptable and had to stop; our government cannot be a silent bystander to such injustice. We made a promise during the election to provide relief to small borrowers. To effect this, we notified the Assam Microfinance Incentive and Relief Scheme in 100 days by bringing all stakeholders on board..

For us our Sankalp Patra (the Bharatiya Janata Party manifesto) is a sacred document. In the past 100 days, we either delivered on these promises or are working hard towards realising them. For instance, we have increased financial assistance under the Assam Orunodoi scheme from ₹830 to ₹1,000 per month and added 638,000 new beneficiaries. We increased the wages of tea garden workers from ₹167 to ₹205 in the Brahmaputra Valley, and from ₹145 to ₹183 in the Barak Valley, with retrospective effect from February 2021. Deen Dayal Upadhaya’s clarion call of “Antyodaya” is the foundational premise of our policies and we will continue to focus on the last person in the queue...

Assam’s ace boxer, Lovlina Borgohain’s historic feat at the Tokyo Olympics was the proudest moment for every Assamese. We celebrated the occasion with great fervour by working towards ensuring that many more Lovlinas represent India at the 2024 Olympics..

To ensure that the next five years are a glorious era in Assam’s history, we used the first 100 days to lay the foundation of transformative change. Under the maxim of “minimum government and maximum governance”, we delegated more powers to district deputy commissioners to fast-track Jal Jeevan Mission targets, allot land for industries and expedite flood relief work.

In this short period, Assam became the first state to pass the Model Tenancy Act to provide a framework for resolving disputes between tenants and landlords. Assam has also become the second state to have an Ethanol Policy. For the first time, we created a consolidated database of all government-owned land within 100 days.

In the past, governments at the Centre and in the Northeast had left inter-State borders un-demarcated and ambiguous. Over the past 100 days, we made sufficient progress to put an end to these decades-old legacy disputes, particularly with Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram.

With the BJP at the Centre and in the state, the double engine of growth is gaining momentum in Assam. Along with our colleagues in the central government, we are speeding up the implementation of key central schemes such as Jal Jeevan Mission, PM Awas Yojana, and PM Kisan.

. Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri...

Amusement affect of affirmation..

Rudra rudra maharudhra Shiv Shankar pralayankar.

In 100 days, sowing the seeds of a New Assam.. Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe..

It is often said, well begun is half done. Ever since our government assumed office in Assam in early May, we have endeavoured to live up to people’s expectations and deliver to them, the Assam of their dreams. While 100 days may be too short a period to bring about transformative change, especially in governance, the seeds have been sown and will bear fruits shortly.

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe...

Building on Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s philosophy of “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas”, we aim to ensure citizen-friendly governance in the state. Continuous engagement with citizens is an essential part of participatory governance. Case in point: The positive response to our government’s call for affluent people to surrender their ration cards. This appeal was made to ensure that those who need these benefits can avail them.

Our government was formed amid the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. To tackle this, Team Assam, led by Covid warriors, dedicated its entire effort under the guidance of the PM. We adopted the test, treat, trace, and vaccinate strategy. We have also made preparations to minimise the impact of a possible third wave...

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With the tireless efforts of health workers, we brought the positivity rate down from 9.13% to 0.73%, installed oxygen generation plants with a total capacity of 13.56 MT, nearly doubled the number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in state medical college hospitals from 793 to 1,308, and administered over 14.8 million doses of the vaccine.

We recognise the long-term loss caused by Covid-19, particularly to children who lost their parents in the pandemic. We announced the chief minister’s Shishu Seva Scheme under which the state will provide these children with monthly support until the age of 24..

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe

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Overcoming the partition of the minds. Shri Radhe Shri Krishna

Three major partitions happened in the world in the second half of the 1940s. Germany was partitioned into the Eastern and Western blocs in 1945, followed by India into Hindustan and Pakistan in 1947. Finally, Israel was created by partitioning Palestine in 1948.

Germany’s partition was temporary. The Berlin Wall, constructed in the early 1960s to accord permanence to it, was dismantled by the Germans in less than three decades. The country was reunified in 1989..

But in India and Palestine, partition was a terrible affair, leading to a full-scale war in Israel and mass migration accompanied by mind-numbing violence in India..

More than a million were murdered, while many millions more had to endure a treacherous migration across the hastily created border, often on foot. Hundreds of thousands could not make it, as they were waylaid and butchered..

Those horrors are difficult to forget. Historian William Dalrymple, in an article in New Yorker, quotes from a book by Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, about the brutality of the period: “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”.

The Partition of India was a meaningless and reckless act. Mahatma Gandhi opposed it saying: “Vivisect me before vivisecting the nation”. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel vowed to fight till the end to reject it. Rajendra Prasad conclusively proved its irrationality in a thoroughly argued 1946-book, India Divided..

Across the border, for Saadat Hasan Manto, the famed author, it was all sheer madness. Those women raped, with bulged stomachs, distressed him. “Where should those bellies belong to — Hindustan or Pakistan?” Manto questioned in innocent grief. His dark satire on Partition-time madness, Toba Tek Singh, ends with his eponymous hero Tek Singh seen stranded on no-man’s land between the newly created India and Pakistan. “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh”, Manto provocatively demurs...

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe..

Partition was not inevitable even until the early 1940s. But then, the British were in a hurry to leave. Louis Mountbatten arrived in India in March 1947 with the mandate to free the country before June 1948. After meeting Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “a psychopathic case”, Mountbatten decided not to wait for that long. In June, he unilaterally declared that the British would partition India and leave in less than three months..

India has an unemployment crisis. And it predates Covid-19. Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe

Covid-19 worsened what was already a joblessness crisis in early 2020. The National Statistical Office (NSO) began conducting annual labour force surveys in 2017-18, which hitherto had been undertaken every five years. NSO just released its third annual survey (2019-20), which covers the period until June 30, 2020.

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe.

In 2017-18, NSO reported that unemployment reached a 45-year high, and youth unemployment tripled between 2011-12 and 2017-18 to over 18%. Thereafter, poor management resulted in economic growth slowing up to March 2020 — compounded by the pandemic and its economic aftermath..

What the new data reveals is that the situation remains grim. At first sight, the slight rise over the three years from 2017-18 in the labour force participation rate (LFPR) and workforce participation rates (WPR) (which are measured as a share of those of working age — 15 years and over) may be seen as a positive development...

However, India’s LFPR at 40.9% (2019-20, a rise from 38.1% two years earlier) is miles short of the world average of 60.8% in 2019 (which fell to 58.6% in 2020). But a rise in WPR and LFPR at a time when India’s economy was slowing over 2017-18 to 2019-20, needs to be explained....

What we have seen in 2019-20 is that while male LFPR and WPR have remained roughly the same, it is females who are searching for, even finding, work. There is little change in male LFPR or WPR over these three years....

There are, possibly, two forces pushing up LFPR and WPR of women. The first is a wider phenomenon: Girls are being educated at various levels. From 2010 and 2015, the enrolment rate at the secondary level (classes 9-10) shot up from 58% to 85%, and this happened with gender parity..

Most states began to incentivise girls’ secondary schooling in 2010, by offering girls who finished class 8 and continued to class 9 and 10 a scholarship or a bicycle so that they could come to school. These girls then had better chances of getting urban jobs. So, female work participation, having fallen for decades, is now finally turning upwards — as it happens in most countries when women’s education levels improve...

Most states began to incentivise girls’ secondary schooling in 2010, by offering girls who finished class 8 and continued to class 9 and 10 a scholarship or a bicycle so that they could come to school. These girls then had better chances of getting urban jobs. So, female work participation, having fallen for decades, is now finally turning upwards — as it happens in most countries when women’s education levels improve.

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First, the 2019-20 data shows that the share of agriculture in the total workforce, which was consistently declining for two decades, has stopped falling, and, in fact, has increased, as the reverse migration from cities in 2020 showed. The increasing share of agriculture in the workforce is a retrogressive step in a developing economy attempting a structural transformation. At the same time, the share of manufacturing in employment, which fell between 2011-12 and 2017-18, fell in 2019-20 again. The share of construction in employment also fell.

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Second, women dropped out of regular work, and became self-employed. This was driven by distress, and is demonstrated by the fact that the share of women who are unpaid family helpers in the household increased sharply from 2018-19 to 2019-20. That means women were engaged in economic activity (that shows up in an increase in WPR/LFPR), but it is unpaid work..

Third, precarity and informality increased from 2018-19 to 2019-20, reversing an ever so slight trend that had set in between 2011-12 and 2017-18, that the share of regular workers who had no social security was falling. Those in regular work without any social security increased from 49.6% of all non-farm regular workers to 54.2% between 2018-19 to 2019-20.

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Fourth, for all types of work, the average number of hours worked in a week fell sharply in the April-June 2020 quarter, when the economy contracted by 23.7%. Naturally, earnings fell for all households.

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Thus, on every reasonable measure of the quality of work, there was a perceptible decline.

Finally, if anyone still thinks that the fall in the unemployment rate between 2018-19 to 2019-20 from 5.8% to 4.8% is a positive development, think again. By the current weekly status, which is close to the international standard for measuring unemployment, there is no improvement in the unemployment rate between 2017-18 (8.9%) to 2018-19 (8.8%) to 2019-20 (8.8%). These rates remain the worst in the last 48 years since measurement began...

From a pandemic to an endemic, India’s vaccine drive enables a way out Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe.

That number, 50% of all adults (those over the age of 18 years) in the country, is significant for several reasons. The most important one, I believe, is that it marks the first major marker or milestone in the transformation of the coronavirus disease pandemic into an endemic.

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe..

Not everyone agrees. After all, at the milestone, a maximum of 15% of India’s adult population is likely to have received both shots of the vaccine, and data shows that people need to be fully vaccinated to prevent serious illness and death when it comes to the Delta strain of the Sars-CoV-2 virus. There is no arguing with that research — even if countries currently seeing waves on account of the Delta variant were not ravaged by it, much like India was, in April and May.

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Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe...

But it would still be extremely short-sighted to not recognise the 470-million-with-at-least-one-shot number for what it is. It is a way out, the beginning of the end, and it comes not a moment too soon.

But it would still be extremely short-sighted to not recognise the 470-million-with-at-least-one-shot number for what it is. It is a way out, the beginning of the end, and it comes not a moment too soon.

As I write this, the seven-day average of daily new Covid-19 cases in India has touched a 149-day low. There is enough reason to remain vigilant — the surge that Kerala witnessed, presumably caused by the Delta variant (we don’t know for sure because we haven’t sequenced enough genomes) can happen in some other parts of the country; and Maharashtra is already beginning to see an increase in infections caused by the Delta-plus variant. But there is also enough reason for everyone to start planning for what will likely be.

That simply involves understanding the meaning of the transformation of Covid-19 from a pandemic to an endemic. This has implications for national, state and local policymakers, administrators and public health workers. And it has implications for how we work, learn, travel, and play.

Mathematically, it simply means understanding that while there is going to be the constant presence of the virus that causes the coronavirus disease, this needs to be treated as a baseline (or usual prevalence of the virus). Seen that way, it immediately becomes clear that there has to be a shift in response in terms of both management and behaviour.

Is it too soon to start treating Covid-19 as an endemic disease? Perhaps, but it is definitely not too soon to start planning what its eventual, inevitable, and imminent transformation to an endemic means. There is still the question of people under the age of 18, but the immediate focus needs to be those in the 12-18 age group (there are 145 million people in this segment). As for younger children, there is nothing to suggest that they are any more vulnerable to serious illness and death than they were during the first wave of the disease (very low). There is also enough research to show that a high proportion of fully vaccinated adults helps reduce even asymptomatic infections among young people who are not vaccinated...

There is also the question of booster shots. But at this time, the only people who should even be considered for this in India are the most vulnerable (and there is enough medical science to identify them, starting with those who have had organ transplants).

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Those managing India’s vaccine drive have always been a step or two behind the curve. But a reading of the infection and vaccination trajectories indicates that they need to start planning now for a future of endemic Covid-19.

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