Why PM Modi’s address is historic

Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi has gone beyond expectations. His address to the nation on May 12 will perhaps mark the day when India embarked on the path of converting a global crisis into an opportunity to accelerate its economic transition and build on the solid foundations laid in the first term of this government. This will involve eliminating poverty, improving equity, and raising the living standards of the population in line with their aspirations. It promises to be historical.

The PM announced a package of ₹20 lakh crore or nearly 10% of GDP to trigger economic growth in the post-coronavirus disease (Covid-19)-induced pandemic period to protect the interests of those affected by the extended lockdown, which was critical in the face of the pernicious virus. In doing so, he has overcome conservative impulses within the establishment and laid the ground for a paradigm shift. It is clear that we cannot continue to operate within self-imposed fiscal constraints. Across the world, these are being discarded in response to the deteriorating economic situation. Fiscal prudence has to be understood in a dynamic perspective. It can be achieved by reversing the slackening economic growth rate, rather than through a continued reduction in public expenditure in response to declining revenues. That would be the certain path to a vicious downward growth spiral from which it would take years to rebuild the economy.

But the unexpectedly large fiscal stimulus package is only one of the components of the PM’s address on May 12. For me, the promise to undertake bold structural reforms and jettison the incremental approach holds an even bigger promise for India to regain its growth momentum. Without these bold reforms in areas such as land, labour, liquidity and laws, the fiscal stimulus risked being wasted in a one-off consumption hike, whose growth impulse would taper off quickly. With bold structural reforms, the proposed increase in public expenditure will help attract fresh private investment to build new production capacities, raise productivity by absorbing frontier technologies and promote equity through higher efficiency in the delivery of public services. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-governed states have taken the lead by introducing a slew of labour market reforms that will give flexibility to investors to tailor their workforce in line with changes in seasonal demand and output.

These bold reforms will also underpin the PM’s call for a self-reliant India, but one which is not self-centred and protectionist. He made it clear in his address that India will continue to participate even more aggressively in global value chains on the basis of greater competitiveness of its domestic firms and industries. This will call for encouraging local production, building local brands, improving logistics and lowering energy costs for domestic companies. This will enable them to achieve economies of scale and technological sophistication for successfully competing in global markets.

The PM’s emphasis on India’s continued engagement with global trends in commerce, finance and technology is surely an effective and decisive response to those raising fears of India turning protectionist. Self-reliance with continued participation in global markets and value chains will be the mantra going forward.

His call for promoting local products so that they become global brands and capture a share of international markets is timely. As new capacities are created locally, the support from the consumer will propel them to achieve global qualities and scale. The domestic market, though large and growing, is still not enough to afford global scales of production and economies of scale.

India’s software industry came of age and achieved global scales and competitiveness with the Y2K phenomenon, mentioned by the PM in his address. Duties on hardware imports were reduced and software companies were supported to achieve this breakthrough. Similarly, India’s readymade garments industry achieved its present scale and competitiveness only through catering to global demand. It should be evident by now that Indian consumers are a discerning lot who are acutely price and quality conscious. The bold reforms emphasised by the PM in his address will help Indian firms to meet the demands of the local consumers while gaining share in global markets.

We should not lose sight of the fact that the challenge has just begun. There is a difficult road ahead of us with the global economy showing signs of a perilous downward slide which could well be as steep as in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The pandemic’s full impact on the global and domestic economy is still not fully known. In the coming days, we have to constantly be on guard, looking out for emerging risks and opportunities, and responding with agility and focus on these emerging trends. We have started a paradigm shift, which will take us in the direction of becoming a global player by focusing on our strengths and rooting our policies in our own ground realities. We will thus actualise the PM’s call for converting this crisis into an opportunity.

Securing Aarogya Setu

Securing Aarogya Setu

The Aarogya Setu application was born out of a need to bring a 21st century technology-based solution to an unprecedented problem. India is not alone in deciding to leverage the ubiquitous smartphone for tracking outbreaks, a strategy that fundamentally involves a compromise with privacy. But it is the only democracy which has, without the requisite legal architecture in place, made the app almost mandatory for mobility and to resume work. This compromise is evidence of how the Sars-Cov-2 has upended conventional disease containment efforts, with a higher degree of government supervision, and even control, over the lives of citizens than usual. But it is crucial that this necessity does not lead to a lasting change in how we approach privacy. By design, the app goes a step further than most such tools developed around the world. It tracks where people have been, instead of merely determining who they were in close contact with. While such functionality can theoretically help identify disease hotspots, it will need to be corroborated with the exactness of physical contact tracing.

The other concern stems from the nature of computer programmes. They are prone to vulnerabilities, particularly in early iterations. This was proved by a French programmer who demonstrated the possibility of accessing parts of the Aarogya Setu app that store a person’s contact records. Common cybersecurity and hacking techniques have proven capable of reverse engineering such data to dig out information that was meant to be hidden. What the researcher demonstrated was the penultimate step before someone can be traced without the need to break into a government database. An increasing number of countries are discovering flaws — in design or code — and are going back to the drawing board. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service is considering abandoning its version of a centralised contact-tracing app, where data is sent to government servers, to switch to the decentralised platform being developed by Apple and Google, where data is matched on phones.

As the approaches around such tools evolve, India must look at the experiences and experiments in other countries. One of the main demands by privacy as well as cybersecurity experts around the world is to throw open the code behind these contact-tracing applications so that they can be audited for design and programming flaws. At the very least, the developers of Aarogya Setu must consider doing this, since it will not only be a step toward transparency but also help quash bugs. After all, the current gold standard of such tools, Singapore’s Trace Together, is an open-source programme. Beyond this, India must seriously contemplate a legal design around the app, which strikes a balance between disease containment and privacy.

Women: The invisible face of hunger

Sunita Haldar lives in a village in Fulia district of West Bengal. Her husband migrated to Kerala and she supports herself and her three small children by working in a weaving shed. Now, there are no orders and she and the children are getting by on one meal a day.

Sayidabano stitches garments for a contractor in Ahmedabad and gets paid on a piece-rate basis. Her husband died of tuberculosis five years ago. Her eldest son is 15 years old and she wants to give him an education so that he can earn well and support the family. But now, she has no work and her savings are over. She depends on her neighbours for rations.

Multiply these pen portraits of struggle and deprivation a million times, and one gets to see the invisible face of hunger. And that is the face of a woman. The coronavirus disease (Covid-19) lockdown has revealed the precarious lives of a large number of people. Migrants, mostly men in cities, are the visible face of hunger and despair we see every day in the media. The women left behind in the villages, while their menfolk migrate, are equally deprived of food and cash. In normal times, these women continue to work, while the men are away. They look after their own small farms, manage their cattle and other livestock; they are agricultural labourers or small manufacturers doing weaving, garment-making or embroidery; they are domestic servants or provide other services like child care.

Then suddenly, abruptly, came the lockdown. And women found themselves without any means of support. The remittances stopped as the migrants grappled with their difficult situations in cities. At the same time, women’s own incomes collapsed. Women who grow vegetables found that they have no way to take them to market; all manufacturing came to a halt, labour was no more in demand; and although the government has mandated the starting of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, this has hardly happened yet anywhere.

The slums and mohallas of urban India hide equally hungry women and children. Perhaps the most affected are the women who are the sole earners in their families. These are widows or those whose husbands or fathers cannot earn due to illness, or sometimes due to addictions. They work as domestic help, street vendors, construction labour, ragpickers or engage in small manufacturing in their homes and bring in money to support their children and the elderly in the family. Even in normal times, they are on the edge of survival. Now with their work gone, hunger stalks their homes.

Governments have instituted systems by which grains are widely available for families with ration cards. For those without cards, many state governments have systems for filling up documents using the Aadhaar card or other local documents of proof, through which families can access grains. However, a certain percentage, usually the most vulnerable, are outside the zone of this security net. Sometimes, it is due to not having a ration card or even an Aadhaar card; often it is due to the problems in distribution. The central government had announced various cash transfers including ~500 into women’s Jan Dhan accounts. But here too, many fall through the net. In a study done by Dalberg, a global consulting firm, in mid-April among the 18,000 of the poorest, the Indian below poverty line families, it was found that 45% had not received free rations. And over 70% had not received cash payments into their Jan Dhan accounts.

This is not all. Other stresses crowd in. Since money is tight, and the period of lockdown uncertain, there are often quarrels in the house about how to budget and on which items. Women usually bear the brunt of these arguments, and face both mental and physical violence.

There is, however, a group of invisible people who are ready to reach out to these hungry families. Within every community, there are those who do their best to ensure that others receive food.

Many of the volunteers are women like Sarabjit Kaur, a widow who lives in a village in Patiala district with her son. She is primarily a domestic worker, but also cooks for weddings and events and works as agricultural labour to make ends meet. As soon as she heard about the impending lockdown, she identified all vulnerable families in her community immediately and conveyed this information to the local non-governmental organisations and political leaders. These families received ration kits on a priority basis.

There are countless such Sarabjit Kaurs throughout the country, and they should be recognised and asked to become part of the government’s distribution system, so that food can reach the last woman.

Om namo shivai

Om namo pitai

Om namo ganesh

100 Percent Love - A Moral Short Story

A boy and a girl were playing together. The boy had a collection of marbles. The girl has some sweets with her. The boy told the girl that he would give her all his marbles in exchange for the sweets with her. The girl agreed.

The boy kept the most beautiful and the biggest marbles with him and gave her the remaining marbles. The girl gave him all her sweets as she promised. That night the girl slept peacefully. But the boy could not sleep as he kept wondering if the girl has hidden some sweets from him the way he had hidden the best marbles from her.

Moral of the Story :

If you do not give 100 percent in a relationship, you will always kept doubting if the other person has given her / his hundred percent. This is applicable for any relationship like love, employee – employer, friendship, family, countries, etc…