Noble intentions: On the PM Vishwakarma scheme for traditional workers

 The PM Vishwakarma scheme approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday to help traditional craftspeople and artisans can provide an economic boost to these professionals. Announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Independence Day speech, the scheme, with an outlay of ₹13,000 crore, provides loans of up to a total of ₹3 lakh (in two tranches) at a concessional interest rate of 5%. It covers individuals from 18 trades such as cobblers, toy makers, laundrymen, barbers, masons and coir weavers. The government expects about five lakh families to be covered in the first year and 30 lakh families to benefit from the scheme over five years. But the scheme can help craftspeople and artisans only to the extent of freeing them from the difficulties they now face in accessing affordable credit from the formal banking system. However, the support extended to these struggling artisanal communities could come with its own risks in the way of unintended consequences. The challenges they face are far deeper than just the availability of cheap credit. By far the biggest of these that traditional art and craft professionals face is either the lack of patronage for their goods and services in the wider marketplace, or in the case  of other trades, a skewed undervaluation of their economic output.

Crucially, the lack of access to formal credit may simply be a symptom rather than the cause of the underlying problem these communities face. No government scheme can help these communities in the long run unless it helps them overcome the fundamental problem of a lack of economic viability for their output. More seriously, if the scheme fails to open up new markets and simply extends loans to these communities in the name of promoting their welfare, it runs the risk of leaving not only the intended beneficiaries but also their families deeper in debt. Also, by laying stress on the intergenerational nature of knowledge dissemination in these communities, the scheme could end up leaving the next generation willy-nilly stuck for perpetuity in these traditional low-paying trades, many of which are practised in a caste straitjacket. The Vishwakarma scheme includes skilling programmes that offer a nominal stipend as well as financial help to purchase modern tools. Ultimately, the success of this well-intentioned scheme will hinge on its implementation, an area where the government would do well to rope in professionals with the know-how and entrepreneurial flair to help the craftspeople and artisans upgrade their offerings to cater to new markets and tap fresh opportunities.

HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA...

A necessary brake: On altered weather patterns and infrastructure development HARE KRISHNA

 Being an El Niño year, the expectation was that north India would see a sparse monsoon. However, the pendulum has swung the other way. July saw record rainfall in many parts of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand and the rare sight of the Yamuna nearly spilling into the Red Fort in Delhi. At least 150 were killed and losses worth ₹10,000 crore were reported by Himachal Pradesh alone. The worst, however, was yet to come as the week saw multiple floods in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand that have claimed at least 60 lives since Sunday. A series of landslides has crumbled buildings and blocked highways. The immediate explanation for the landslides is the unexpectedly copious rainfall that these States have received and that these in turn are due to a surfeit of Western Disturbances (WD). These are tropical storms that originate in the Mediterranean region and normally bring winter rainfall to north India. However, right from the beginning of this year, the WD have been erratic. There were too few of them in December and January and their absence was cause for the hottest February recorded in India in at least a century. However, the WD appear to be overcompensating for their absence, with several of them incident over north India in the last two months — a time when they normally should not be around. While a combination of WD and monsoon can be dismissed as ‘freak’ weather, climate scientists have been warning of the increasing probability of such high-risk events. The awry WD are in part due to a warming Arctic that causes the polar jet stream, which carries moisture, to deviate from its regular path and bring the disturbances to north India during the monsoon.

It is in the context of these altered weather patterns that warnings by scientists and environmentalists of the perils of wanton construction in the Himalayas must be factored in. The ongoing Char Dham road building project has led to large-scale altering of the mountains with significant chunks carved away, rendering them vulnerable to upheaval. As recent fears of land subsidence in Joshimath, Uttarakhand demonstrated, ill-thought construction and haphazard building practices have magnified the risk to residents who live in these regions. While State governments tend to search for short-term solutions such as demanding compensation from the Centre for ‘disaster relief’, it is time that more serious thought is given to the nature of infrastructure development and, if need be, restrictions imposed in the larger interest of minimising hazards and maintaining stability.

Fighting stereotypes: On the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes

 In the quest for equal rights for all, the Supreme Court of India has taken an important step by releasing guidelines to take on harmful gender stereotypes that perpetuate inequalities. Laying down a set of dos and don’ts for judicial decision-making and writing, the Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes helps judges identify language that promotes archaic and “incorrect ideas”, about women in particular, and offers alternative words and phrases. Instead of “affair”, it will be de rigueur to say a “relationship outside of marriage”; similarly, for “adulteress”, the preferred usage is a “woman who has engaged in sexual relations outside of marriage”. A host of derogatory and seemingly mild adjectives have been dropped too while referring to women. For instance, it is no longer “chaste” woman, “dutiful” wife, “housewife”; a plain “woman”, “wife” and “homemaker” will do. Men have not been forgotten either, with the Court striking down words such as “effeminate” (when used pejoratively), and “faggot”, with the directive, “accurately describe the individual’s sexual orientation (e.g. homosexual or bisexual)”. Pointing out that stereotypes — “a set idea that people have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong” — leads to exclusion and discrimination, it identifies common presumptions about the way sexual harassment, assault, rape and other violent crimes are viewed, skewed against women.

One of the stereotypes the Court shatters is women who do not wear traditional clothes and smoke or drink are asking for trouble, and drives home the important point of consent. It also firmly asserts that women who are sexually assaulted may not be able to immediately report the traumatic incident. Courts should take social realities and other challenges facing women seriously, it says. It is wrong, the Court adds, to assume women are “overly emotional, illogical, and cannot take decisions”. It is also a stereotypical presumption that all women want to have children, says the handbook, and points out, “deciding to become a parent is an individual choice”. These possibilities, to be able to choose what to do in life, are still frustratingly out of reach for most of India’s women. In a largely patriarchal society, girls are often forced to pick marriage as a way out to avoid social stigma, and not education and a career. Even if things are changing, the pace is slow. To achieve gender equality, fundamental changes need to be made to shun all stereotypes. That women are more nurturing and better suited to care for others, and should do all household chores are simply wrong notions. The handbook may be a guide for judges and lawyers, but it could also be a catalyst for change right down to the societal level.

Material consideration: On the LK-99 ‘superconductor’ episode

 The scientific community is now confident that the material known as LK-99 is not a room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor, bringing to a swift close an exciting episode launched by a group of South Korean researchers. There has been no formal conclusion to match the formal announcement that this material could transport an electric current with no resistance in ambient conditions. But the South Koreans and the independent scientists who worked to verify the claim published their findings as preprint papers that were free to read. LK-99’s seemingly simple composition and availability of instructions to synthesise it prompted scientists outside academia to test the material as well. The pace of developments was exhilarating, but there was soon hype and misinformation. While some reports indicated that the South Korean group had submitted manuscripts explaining their claim to a journal, concerns that the preprint papers were not worth reacting to until the journal had responded missed the point: efforts to validate the claim constituted a better, more organic peer-review process together with attempts by scientists across the world (including India) to replicate the claim in their laboratories. It soon became clear that there were two reasons why the material was no superconductor. First, as conventional superconductors inside a weak magnetic field are cooled to induce a superconducting state, they expel the field from their bulk at and under the transition temperature. So, a magnet near the superconductor will be pushed away during the transition. The South Korean group had shared a video in which LK-99 appeared to half-repel a magnet. But independent researchers found that the material was an insulator whose impurities could be magnetised, leading to the half-repulsion seen in the video. Second, the South Koreans reported that the electrical resistivity of LK-99 dropped sharply at around 104° Celsius, a potential sign of superconductivity. But scientists observed the drop if the material contained copper sulphide as an impurity; copper sulphide undergoes a phase transition at that temperature, distorting the resistivity.

Now, the burden of proof is back on the South Korean group. The online diffusion of information and data in this episode achieved something the world seldom has: near-real-time and crowd-organised documentation, collaboration rather than competition, and closure. Participating in open science can lead to more good science but also, in the presence of bad-faith actors, to misunderstanding and confusion. The LK-99 episode suggests that the compunctions with the latter should not hold back the former.

BE HUMBLE BE POLITE BE PASSIONATE

 Jo hai so hai’ -- it is what it is War, murder, theft have been going on for thousands of years and will continue for as long as the human race exists. Knowing and realising this, the yogi withdraws the focus from the transient things of the world. Yogis realise the inherent futility of having an opinion on things that have no bearing whatsoever on their immediate circumstances, or life. They look upon the world from the stable perch of Ishwar Srishti. As Ashtavakra Gita verse 7:5 says, ‘I am pure consciousness, and the world is like a magician's show. What is there to take up or reject?’  

Where there is no aversion or attraction, there is peace.

A powerful expression of the futility of all earthly, human endeavour can be found in the opening lines of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It makes the importance of having ‘academic distance’ in life all the more apparent:

Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
 and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
 and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Goverdhan Parikrama