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Why Pundalikrao Ukarde Does Not Want To Raise Cows Anymore

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Two cows and two calves in the stable near farmer Pundalikrao Ukarde’s house in Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district, Maharashtra. “About a decade ago, we owned more than 10 cows and buffaloes. Now, we just have two cows,” Ukarde said. (Photo: Poorvi Kulkarni)

 

In this second of our two-part series on why small farmers in Maharashtra are upset with the new restrictions on cattle trade for slaughter, we visit two cultivators in Aurangabad and Latur to understand the place of livestock in the agrarian cycle

 

In Karmad village of Aurangabad taluka and district, Pundalikrao Ukarde is sowing black gram in his field with a pair of bullocks to help him plough the soil.

 

Pundalikrao sowing black gram

Punadlikrao Ukarde ploughs his field with the help of bullocks and releases seeds through the seed-drill. It takes three hours for Ukarde to till half an acre of his one-acre black gram field in Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district, Maharashtra.

 

He is 61 but the hard work doesn’t appear to exhaust him. He has just tilled one row when his indigenous seed-drill, which ploughs the soil and also releases seeds into it, breaks.

 

Ukarde unscrews the tool and in about 15 minutes ties up the discs, tightens the screws and fixes the tilling rods upright. He works another three hours. “This is a crucial time. You won’t find anybody in the village idle,” he said.

 

Farmer Pundalikrao Ukarde fixing the seed-drill with the help of his son Shivkumar. The drill broke while he was sowing seeds on one-acre black gram field in Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district, Maharashtra. “This is a crucial time. You won’t find anybody in the village idle,” Ukarde said. After all this effort, once the crop is ready in 5-6 months, he will earn an average of about Rs 100 per-acre yield.

 

After all this effort, once the crop is ready in 5-6 months, he will earn an average of about Rs 100 per-acre yield. In the kharif season, Ukarde cultivates cotton, black and green gram over three acres of his five-acre land. On the remaining two acres, he grows vegetables and pomegranates.

 

Cost Of Production Of Cotton On One Acre Of Land

cotton

Source: As estimated by Punalikrao Ukarde, former deputy sarpanch of Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district

 

Once Ukarde has accounted for the cost of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, water, equipment and labour costs and deducted that from the price per quintal he will earn from selling cotton and green and black gram on his three-acre farm, he has about Rs 1,000 left in hand per year. This includes the income from wheat and jowar that he cultivates on the same patch of land in the rabi season.

 

Ukarde

Left to right:A sack of black gram seeds, kept for sowing, mixed with fertiliser diammonium phosphate (DAP) on farmer Pundalikrao Ukarde’s one-acre black gram field; farmer Pundalikrao Ukarde and his wife Kantabai outside their house in Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district, Maharashtra.

 

“How do we take care of our health, our children’s education and all other living expenses with this amount?” asked Ukarde whose family of seven depends entirely on agriculture for income.

 

There was a time he earned much more from selling the milk from his stable of more than 10 cows and buffaloes. The manure from the livestock was used to enrich the fields. Today, Ukarde’s cattle shed is mostly empty. He has just two indigenous cows that yield about 1-2 litres a day, just enough for the family.

 

Most people in the village had at least six buffaloes through the 1990s and early 2000s, he recalled. The village also ran a dairy cooperative – Jay Bajrang Sahakar Tattva Milk Dairy Society – that supplied around 450 litre of milk every day.

 

However, over the years, the government barely raised the procurement price for milk just as it didn’t for crops, pointed out Ukarde who headed the cooperative society for seven years.

 

Finally, the cooperative society started incurring losses and had to be sold off to a private company because of the losses it incurred.

 

“Even those in the village who supplied milk are now buying packaged milk for themselves,” he said.

 

Successive droughts not only failed crops, but also destroyed the self-sustaining economy of the village.

 

An 8,000,000 litre-capacity pond that Ukarde got constructed near his farm has not filled in the past three years.

 

Farm pond constructed seven years ago by the Ukardes at a cost of Rs. 1.6 lakh. Owing to drought, it hasn't filled in the past three years.

A 8,000,000 litre farm pond that Punadlikrao Ukarde got constructed seven years ago near his field in Karmad village, Aurangabad taluka and district, Maharashtra. “The pond hasn’t filled in the past 2-3 years because of drought. We have had to buy tanker water to water our crops,” he said.

 

“The well too had run dry and there was not enough water to even drink for us. We had to buy tanker water to water our crops,” he said.

 

With some water storage infrastructure, he had switched to growing pomegranate on one acre seven years ago.

 

An acre can grow 200 trees and each tree gives about 20 kgs of pomegranate. “Pomegranate is the only profitable crop which has helped us sustain in the occupation of agriculture. It is because of this decision that I have been able to save Rs 1 lakh,” he said.

 

“But the crop requires a lot of water. And, in times of drought, with less water in wells and pond, the cost for pomegranate farming increases a lot. Apart from drought, natural disasters like hailstorm and even pests cause unwarranted losses”.

 

Amidst such duress, it was a common practice to keep only productive animals and sell them off once they got old. “We are willing to leave all our cattle in their homes in the cities. They can take care of them as they want,” Ukarde retorted when asked about the government’s new rules on cattle sale.

 

As he struggled to fix his spectacle lens into its broken frame, Ukarde said he hoped for a day when farmers would get just prices for their produce. “It doesn’t matter if it is the BJP or Congress or Shiv Sena or NCP in the government. Aamhaala aamchyaa ghaamaacha daam milala pahije (We must get the price of our sweat),” he said.

 

Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had recently stated that “cow protection” — and thus curbs on cattle sale for slaughter — is key to averting agrarian distress and farmer suicides. But it is clear from how livestock is actually used by farmers like Ukarde that in a drought crisis of the kind Marathwada repeatedly sees, farmers cannot afford to stick to the terms of the new cattle market regulations.

 

As IndiaSpend discovered during its travels in interior Marathwada, these regulations – and the red tape they stipulate — have resulted in the slowing down of trade in the once-busy small animal markets of Marathwada. Both farmers and traders are now staying away from these markets.

 

Neelkanth Chimandare, 65, a farmer from Patilwada, a hamlet off the bustling Hali-Handarguli village in Latur district pointed out that most small agriculturists hardly have any resources to maintain unproductive cattle.

 

He estimated that a bull consumes a minimum of 50 litres of water and 20 kg of fodder a day. This needs an acre of land to raise fodder for four-five animals.

 

“Many do not have resources to grow fodder or jowar (the husk of which is also fed to cattle). They have to buy it from others,” Chimandare said.

 

He is exasperated by questions about how much it costs him to feed his cattle. They are like his children, he said. “We don’t measure the feed we give our cattle. It is only the gaushalas (cow shelter camps) and other cattle-breeding units that have stipulated fixed amounts of water and fodder,” he said.

 

Chimandare, who owns two bullocks, said that despite mechanisation, they are still useful for farming. “Tractors can only be used for tilling before sowing, but sometimes they are not available on rent. And, for ploughing after plants are some days old, only bulls can be used to loosen the soil,” he said.

 

(Kulkarni is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist, who has worked with Haqdarshak–a social enterprise, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan–a non-party people’s political organisation and Hindustan Times–a newspaper.)

 

Series concluded. You can read the first part here.

 

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India’s Decadal Population Growth 17.64% Compared To Pakistan’s 24.78%

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India’s decadal (2001-2011) population growth was 17.64%, lower compared to Pakistan (24.78%) but higher than China (5.43%), according to Census 2011 data.

 

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Source: census.gov.in
Census Notes: For China, USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan population are as per the preliminary/provisional Census figures provided in the respective government websites. Source for other countries: World Populations Prospects 2008 updated in May 2010 by United Nations Population Division. The estimates are medium variant. For comparability with Census 2000 figures, the population of Japan before adjustment has been considered. The percent decadal changes for China, Indonesia and Brazil have been adjusted to take care of the change in reference dates of two consecutive censuses of 2000 and 2010.

 

India’s population (1,210.2 million) is almost equal to the combined population (1,214.3 million) of the USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh & Japan, according to the Census report.

 

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Source: census.gov.in
Census Notes: For China, USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan population are as per the preliminary/provisional Census figures provided in the respective government websites. Source for other countries: World Populations Prospects 2008 updated in May 2010 by United Nations Population Division. The estimates are medium variant. For comparability with Census 2000 figures, the population of Japan before adjustment has been considered. The percent decadal changes for China, Indonesia and Brazil have been adjusted to take care of the change in reference dates of two consecutive censuses of 2000 and 2010.

 

The United Nation observes World Population Day on July 11 every year. Approximately 83 million people are added to the world population every year.

 

(Mallapur is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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2,736 Stone-Pelting Incidents in J&K Over Year To March 2017

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As many as 2,736 stone-pelting incidents were reported over a year ending March 2017, according to this reply to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) on April 11, 2017, the latest data available.

 

The killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani on July 8, 2016, sparked clashes and mass unrest in Kashmir valley. Stone-pelting incidents peaked in July at 837, following Wani’s death, and dropped to 17 incidents in January 2017.

 

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Source: Lok Sabha

 

Between January 1, 2010, and May 18, 2017, as many as 6,897 law and order incidents (which involved stone-pelting) have taken place in Jammu & Kashmir, as against 1,970 insurgency-related incidents, IndiaSpend reported on May 30, 2017.

 

(Mallapur is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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As 7 Hindu Pilgrims Die, 164% Rise In Terror-Related Civilian Deaths in J&K Over A Year

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A man rides his bicycle past a poster of Burhan Wani, a commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen militant group, during restrictions on the occasion of Wani’s death anniversary, in Srinagar July 8, 2017.

 

The killing of seven Hindu pilgrims in southern Kashmir enroute from the holy cave of Amarnath is the latest bloody statistic in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), which has witnessed a 45% rise in terrorism-related deaths–and 164% increase in civilian deaths alone–over the year ending June 30, 2017 according to an IndiaSpend analysis of data from the South Asian Terrorism Portal, run by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, a nonprofit.

 

Unidentified terrorists reportedly opened fire on a police vehicle at around 8 pm on July 10. When police retaliated, the terrorists fired indiscriminately, and a bus full of pilgrims returning from Amarnath was caught in the crossfire, according to the police. Others said there was no crossfire and the pilgrims were targets, with later reports saying the bus was attacked twice in three minutes.

 

The Kashmir Police blamed the Laskhar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terror group, for the attack, alleging it was masterminded by Pakistani terrorist Abu Ismail.  LeT spokesperson Abdullah Ghaznavi, however,  denied the charges and blamed “Indian agencies” for the “highly reprehensible act”, the deadliest on Amarnath pilgrims in 15 years.

 

 

Kashmiris, including separatists, were quick to condemn the attack.

 

 

Widespread criticism of the terrorists in Kashmir drew a reaction from India’s home minister, Rajnath Singh.

 

 

Over 18 years, 52 pilgrims killed in five attacks

 

Over the past 18 years, at least 52 Amarnath pilgrims have been killed in five terrorist attacks. The deadliest attack was mounted by LeT terrorists on August 1, 2000. That attack left 21 pilgrims dead in Pahalgam.

 

Source: News Reports

 

The latest attack comes hours after a curfew and social-media ban was lifted in the Kashmir Valley after  restrictions were imposed in anticipation of a possible attack to mark the death anniversary of Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani.

 

Wani was gunned down by security forces a little over a year ago on July 8, 2016. What followed were violent protests, several months of curfew and an overall deterioration in J&K’s security situation.

 

Death toll of security forces, civilians up in 1 year

 

The number of security personnel killed in terrorist violence has nearly doubled from 51 in the year preceding Wani’s death to 98 in the following year, according to an analysis of data compiled by SATP.

 

The SATP compiles data on fatalities due to terrorism from media reports. The data are provisional and compiled as on July 10, 2017.

 

On July 8, 2017, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa paid tributes to Wani on his first death anniversary. Sharif said Wani’s death “infused a new spirit in the struggle for freedom” in the Kashmir Valley.

 

 

Source:South Asia Terrorism Portal

 

The 45% increase in deaths of civilians, security personnel and terrorists from 216 in 2015-16 to 313 in 2016-17 is the highest year-on-year percentage increase over the past five years.

 

Civilian deaths have increased 164%, as we said, from 14 in 2015-16 to 37 in 2016-17 while terrorist deaths have risen 18% during this period to 178 in 2016-17.

 

There has been a 42% increase in terrorism-related deaths in J&K since the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government (BJP) came to power in May 2014, compared with the last three years of the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA-II), IndiaSpend reported on May 27, 2017.

 

India has had successes against terrorism – both on the security and diplomatic front.

 

On May 27, 2017, Wani’s successor Sabzar Bhat was killed in an anti-terrorist operation by security forces.

 

On June 27, 2017, United States designated Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin a “global terrorist,” ahead of Modi’s meeting with American President Donald Trump in Washington, DC.

 

Salahuddin also leads the United Jihad Council, an umbrella organisation for anti-India terrorist organisations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, known to operate out of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.

 

Salahuddin has openly admitted to carrying out attacks against India, including on an Indian Air Force base in Pathankot, Punjab, on January 2, 2016.

 

(Sethi is a Mumbai-based freelance writer and defence analyst.)

 

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Coal’s Share in India’s Commercial Energy Production To Be Over 66% In 2022

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Prospects for coal-generated electricity are receding globally, yet India remains one of the last countries to use the oldest and dirtiest energy source, although construction of new coal-fired power plants is faltering.

 

Coal is the mainstay of India’s energy production with 75% electricity produced from coal in 2014. Despite India’s commitments to limit emissions and use renewables increasingly for electricity production, coal’s share in India’s commercial energy production is projected to remain over 66% in 2021-22 as it has been since 2000.

 

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Source: Niti Aayog

 

(Patil is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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Benefits Of Ending Child Marriage, Early Birth = India’s Annual Higher Education Budget

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Over the next seven years, India could save $5 billion (Rs 33,500 crore) in healthcare and related costs if it eliminates child marriage and early childbirth, according to a new report by the World Bank and International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), a global research institute.

 

For perspective, this is equivalent to the country’s 2017-18 higher education budget of Rs 33,329 crore.

 

Globally, $17 billion (Rs 1.14 lakh crore) could be saved across 18 countries by 2030–of which India accounts for $10 billion (62%) due to its large population, said the report. Eliminating early marriage and births reduces population growth, which in turn reduces pressure on government budgets; lower population growth across 106 countries from ending child marriage could save up to $566 billion per year in 2030.

 

Child brides face violence, abuse and exposure to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, are more likely to drop out of school and give birth as adolescents. Adolescent pregnancy can lead to several health problems–anaemia, malaria, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, postpartum haemorrhage and mental disorders–according to the World Health Organization.

 

The proportion of girls marrying before legal age increased from 1.78% in 2001 to 2.45% in 2011 in urban India and declined from 2.75% to 2.43% in rural India over the same period; 70 districts spread across 13 states reported “high incidence” of underage marriages, which account for 21% of the country’s child marriages, IndiaSpend reported on June 9, 2017.

 

Nearly 17 million Indian children between the ages of 10 and 19 are married, with six million children born to them and they form 47% of India’s population that is currently married, IndiaSpend reported on March 9, 2015. Of these married children, 76%, or 12.7 million, are girls, reinforcing the fact that girls are significantly more disadvantaged.

 

The World Bank-ICRW study adds an economic dimension to the problem, which could be an incentive for India and other countries to work harder to eliminate child marriage and early childbirth.

 

Source: Economic Impacts of Child Marriage: Global Synthesis Report

Note: *Projections; For a list of the 17 countries please refer to the report.

 

In the first few years after the elimination of child marriage and early child births, no impact is estimated on the size of new cohorts entering school, the study said. Eventually, there is a reduction of the size of the cohorts, increasing over time, which can potentially lead to education savings.

 

As many as 280,000 married girls in the age group of 15 to 19 have already given birth to four children, which is an increase of 65% from 170,000 in 2001, IndiaSpend reported on May 10, 2016.

 

 

Ending child marriage “could entail a cost for households and governments assuming that some of the girls who delay marriage are also able to pursue their education further”, the study noted. “If girls who do not marry as children pursue their education further, this would entail costs for both families (out-of-pocket and opportunity costs) and governments (given that many girls would attend public secondary schools). These additional costs would offset some of the benefits.”

 

As many as 1,403 women have never attended any educational institution for every 1,000 men who have not done so and this ratio increases sharply from the age of 17 till the 30-34 year age-group where it is 2,009—which means for every man who has never attended an educational institution, there are two women who haven’t, IndiaSpend reported on November 28, 2015.

 

Source: Census 2011

 

In developing countries, girls with less access to quality education are more likely to marry early, argued Quentin Wodon, an advisor with the World Bank’s education department, in this May 2014 article.

 

However, the study said that while economic costs should not be the sole rationale for investment decisions related to child marriage, they are an important consideration. “The lack of adequate investments in many countries to end child marriage is likely due in part to the fact that the economic case for ending the practice has not yet been made forcefully,” the study said.

 

(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

 

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Education Gender Gap Increases With Level of Education

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In 2014, a greater proportion of women in India were illiterate as compared to men, and a lower proportion of women were educated at every level than men, with the gender gap greatest in secondary school, according to data from the National Sample Survey Organisation.

 

About 13% of men had completed primary education, 16.3% had completed secondary education, 8.4% were graduates and 2.4% had studied post graduation. In comparison, 12% women had completed primary school, 11.8% completed secondary school, 5.3% were graduates, and 1.7% had studied post graduation.

 

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Source: National Sample Survey Report 2014

 

(Shah is a reporter/writer with IndiaSpend.)

 

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More Public Money For Education In 6 Large, Poor States, But Little Progress In Learning

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Even though six of India’s least developed states in India–among eight high focus states in government jargon–spent more on education per elementary school student in 2014-2015 when compared to 2011-2012, learning outcomes of students did not improve, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of expenditure data and learning outcomes. The six states are Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Uttarakhand.

 

Education expenditure per student includes both students in government schools and in government-aided schools. Data for the ninth high focus state, Assam, is not included for per student expenditure.

 

By 2030, India will have the world’s largest working age population–1.03 billion. More than half (55.8%) of India’s child population between the ages of six and 13 years lives in nine of the least developed states in India–Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, MP, Rajasthan, UP and Uttarakhand–according to data from Ministry of Human Resource Development, and will make up the majority of India’s crucial workforce.

 

In 2014-2015, over 77 million students–equivalent to the population of Thailand–were enrolled in school in nine high focus states.

 

Poor education–less than 18% of students in Grade III in Bihar, Uttarakhand and MP, less than 30% in Assam, less than 25% in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, and less than 21% in Odisha could read words, according to a 2016 citizen-led survey, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). Poor education could hold these children back from being productive and efficient, negatively impacting India’s growth and development of its population.

 

Until now states have focused more on physical infrastructure and enrollment as seen from government data on these indicators.

 

6 States Spent More Per Student In 2014-2015, But Learning Levels Did Not Improve

Source: Trends in Public Expenditure on Elementary Education in India

NOTE: *Including students in government and aided schools; Expenditure for Assam is not available

 

Rajasthan increased per student expenditure by 40% between 2011-12 and 2014-2015, but less than 20% of students of Std. III in Rajasthan could read words in 2016, compared to 34% students in 2012. In UP, where per student expenditure increased 25%, the proportion of students who could read words decreased from 27.1% in 2012 to 15.7% in 2016.

 

Two high focus states–Bihar and Odisha–reduced spending per student by 10% and 3% respectively between 2014-2015 and 2011-2012.

 

States have concentrated on infra, enrolment, not education quality

 

Until now, the government’s emphasis in the education sector appears to have been on physical infrastructure such as availability of drinking water and the use of toilets, and on measures to increase student enrollment.

 

For instance, Bihar’s gross enrollment ratio (GER) in primary school (students enrolled in school irrespective of their age as a proportion of the total primary-age child population) increased from 59.8% in 2011-12 to 98.07% in 2014-15, according to data from the Unified District Information System on Education (U-DISE).

 

The net enrolment ratio (students of the right age enrolled in upper primary as a proportion of all upper-primary school-age students) grew in Bihar from 52.7% in 2011-12 to 87.63% in 2014-15.

 

States Have Emphasised On Getting Children To School, Reflected In Increase In Enrollment

Source: Trends in Public Expenditure on Elementary Education in India

NOTE: The Net Enrolment Ratio refers to students who were enrolled in school as a proportion of all students of that age group

 

In Bihar, physical infrastructure such as the proportion of schools with toilets increased from 51.2% in 2012 to 70.6% in 2016. In Chhattisgarh, schools with drinking water facilities increased from 79.2% in 2012 to 85% of schools in 2016.

 

Other than in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, dropouts reduced in all high focus states between 2012 and 2016.

 

School Infrastructure Has Improved Between 2012 And 2016

Source: Trends in Public Expenditure on Elementary Education in India

 

An excessive focus on outputs has resulted in assessing physical infrastructure creation, provision of teaching and learning materials, appointment of teachers, etc. rather than monitoring the learning process to see how many children have learned what, according to a 2008 study on public expenditure on education in India.

 

“We have looked at the education sector and we believe that we have been able to get the child to the school. The effort now would be to impart quality education to the child,” Anil Swarup, , secretary of India’s department of school education and literacy, told Indiaspend in a recent interview.

 

Niti Ayog, the government think tank, is in the process of formulating a School Education Quality Index, the aim of which is to “shift the focus of States from inputs towards outcomes, provide objective benchmarks for continuous annual improvements, encourage state-led innovations to improve quality and facilitate sharing of best practices,” according to a 2016 government press release.

 

Spending hasn’t addressed absenteeism, teacher training

 

GER in primary school has been almost 100% since 2011-12.

 

But surveys find that absenteeism in school is high–not all enrolled students regularly attend school–which could impact learning. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, where spending per student increased 40% between 2011 and 2014, about 55.8% students were present on the day of the survey in 2016, little change from the 56.7% present in school in 2012.

 

Further, only 51.2% government teachers were professionally trained in Assam in 2014-2015, data show, even though the state spent the highest proportion of its social sector budget (24.7%) of all high focus states on education.

 

In contrast, 88.2% government school teachers were professionally trained in Mizoram, a neighbouring state which spent 17.4% of total expenditure on education in 2014-15.

 

Increase In Spending Has Not Translated To Better Teachers, Attendance

Source: Trends in Public Expenditure on Elementary Education in India

 

Less developed states receive more assistance from the central government

 

High focus states receive a greater share of resources under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the government’s flagship scheme for elementary education which aims to provide universal education to children between the ages of 6 to 14 years.

 

Uttar Pradesh received 26% of the total SSA funds in 2016-17, while it accounted for 14% of total elementary enrolment in government schools in 2015. Maharashtra, which accounted for 5% of elementary school students in 2015, received 3% of SSA funds.

 

SSA funds might not be utilised optimally, according to an analysis by Accountability Initiative, a New Delhi-based advocacy. For instance, Bihar has allocated 80% of its SSA funds to ‘teachers’ in 2016-17, up from 70% in 2015-16 but 57% of government teachers were professionally trained in that year, while 34% teacher posts were vacant in 2016, according to government data.

 

“High focus states allocate large amount to social sector to improve their indicators, but in reality they spend a small amount as compared to what is allocated,” Avani Kapur, a senior researcher at Accountability Initiative told IndiaSpend. “Hence it is necessary to consider actual accounts in order to know the proper outcomes.”

 

For instance, though Bihar allocated 21.4% of its total social sector budget on education, it spent 17.5% in 2014-2015.

 

India’s education policy must be thoroughly revised to put in place better accountability and monitoring mechanisms to exploit the gains of increase in fiscal outlays on education, The Mint reported on January 27, 2017.

 

Some states have reduced education spending

 

Though Assam, Chhattisgarh, MP and UP, increased money spent on education as a proportion of the total social sector budget, learning continued to lag behind more developed states such as Maharashtra and Kerala.

 

Further, even though the quality of education hasn’t improved, some of these states have shifted their focus from education. Spending on education as a proportion of total social sector spending fell in five of these states–Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand–even as learning outcomes declined between 2010 and 2016, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of Reserve Bank of India study of state budgets 2017.

 

Source: Trends in Public Expenditure on Elementary Education in India

 

Mixed evidence on the effect of public spending on learning

 

Increased expenditure on elementary education had a positive impact on enrolment rates, but at a diminishing rate, which means that the  positive impact of a rupee is lower with every additional rupee, according to a 2014 research paper by Runu Bhakta from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research. “Moreover, public expenditure on elementary education has greater impact on enrolment as compared to dropout rates,” said the study, which analyzed data between 2003 and 2011.

 

Similarly, greater public spending on primary and secondary education had a positive impact on widely used measures of education attainment such as gross secondary enrolment and persistence through grade four, across 50 developing countries, according to this 1999 working paper by researchers at the International Monetary Fund.

 

Increasing public spending on primary education is likely to be more effective in raising primary education attainment in countries with good governance, according to a 2007 research paper by researchers from  World Bank, United States which looked at 91 countries.

 

(Rao is an intern with IndiaSpend.)

 

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India’s Ambitious New Energy Policy Draft Tries To Bridge Dreams And Reality

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  • By 2040, India’s electricity demand will rise 4.5 times over 2012 levels.  While clean energy (like renewables, nuclear and hydro) may account for 13.5% of electricity produced by 2040 (from 3.7% in 2012), the share of coal, oil and natural gas may fall by just two percentage points to 78%.
  • Greater efficiency and technology can cut energy demand in 2040 by 16.6%; up to 90% of this reduction is possible in transport, industry and construction. New buildings codes could cut energy use by 50% in new construction.
  • If most Indian vehicles were electric by 2030, pollution levels in cities could drop 80-90%, and India could save $100 billion, a sum over two times larger than the current defence budget

 

These are some of the projections made by India’s new draft National Energy Policy (NEP), released by the government’s think tank, Niti Aayog, in June 2017. The policy closed for public comments on July 14, 2017.

 

The NEP focuses on four major objectives: Affordable energy access for all;  reducing dependence on fossil-fuel imports; becoming a low carbon economy through  growth in renewable energy; and sustaining economic growth.

 

Strategies to achieve these include privatising coal production and letting the market set prices for coal, removing subsidies on electricity and providing direct benefits to people vulnerable to price rise and letting competition among different resources (both fossil fuel and renewables) decide the energy mix of the country, not policy interventions.

 

However, while the NEP recommends several ambitious changes to the way coal is produced and distributed, an IndiaSpend analysis showed that the plan projects, at its highest, a doubling of coal-fired capacity by 2040, which is not supported by other projections made about coal by other government documents, such as the draft National Electricity Plan (produced by the Central Electricity Authority in 2016), which said India would not require any more coal capacity addition until at least 2027.

 

What will 2040 look like?

 

By 2040, India’s population is predicted to increase to 1.6 billion, and the rate of urbanisation (projected average rate of change of the size of the urban population over a given period of time) of this population will be 47%. The share of manufacturing in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will double from its current levels to 30%. As of 2017, nearly 25% of the population is still without access to electricity and 40% without access to clean cooking fuel.

 

Source: Draft National Energy Policy, 2017

NOTE: Figures for 2022 & 2040 are projections; Projections for various energy scenarios were done through an energy modelling exercise called the India Energy Security Scenarios (IESS), 2047, which was used to project likely energy demand in the country every five years up to 2040. The IESS makes several assumptions, such as the spread of energy efficiency programmes, consumers changing their energy consumption behaviour and growth in GDP, but these results may change if the models used to predict them do.

 

Under the “ambitious scenario”, energy demand in 2040 could be brought down by 2628 terawatt hours (more than twice the amount of electricity that the country generated in 2012: 1050 terawatt hours), which is a 16.6% reduction over the “default scenario” (business as usual), through improved energy efficiency and technological advancements. Over 90% of this reduction could come from innovation and increased efficiency in the transport, industry and construction sectors.

 

Over three years to 2015, the government said it achieved energy savings equal to 1.25% of India’s total energy supply and encouraged investment worth more than Rs 24,000 crore in energy efficiency technologies, the market for which is growing.

 

To achieve greater energy efficiency in the construction sector, the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) 2017 was launched in March, prescribing energy performance standards for new commercial buildings. The government has estimated that adoption of the ECBC 2017 for all new commercial constructions will bring down energy use by 50%, translating to energy savings of about 300 billion units by 2030 and a peak demand reduction of over 15 GW (gigawatt)  in a year, according to this government press release.  A reduction in peak demand can significantly reduce CO2 emissions, as the oldest and dirtiest power plants are often fired up to supplement power requirements during peak hours.

 

In the transport sector, the NEP assumes a shift towards rail-based mass transport systems and electric vehicles. If most of India’s vehicles were powered by electricity by 2030, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision, not only would it reduce energy demand, but also save the exchequer $100 billion (about Rs 6.5 lakh crore) every year, while reduce pollution levels in cities by 80-90%, according to this March 2017  government press release. For perspective, $100 billion is over twice India’s defence budget for 2017-18,  or over 10 times the amount India invested in renewables in 2016.

 

Source: Draft National Energy Policy, 2017

NOTE: Figures for 2022 & 2040 are projections; Projections for various energy scenarios were done through an energy modelling exercise called the India Energy Security Scenarios (IESS), 2047, which was used to project likely energy demand in the country every five years up to 2040. The IESS makes several assumptions, such as the spread of energy efficiency programmes, consumers changing their energy consumption behaviour and growth in GDP, but these results may change if the models used to predict them do.

 

The two pathways,  “business as usual” and “ambitious”, are based on two factors: A transition towards cleaner sources of energy and more domestic resources (like coal) for increased energy security, assuming that the government’s target of adding 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022 is met; and continued addition of renewables post 2022, even if there are no targets set.

 

In 2012, coal, oil and natural gas provided over 80% of India’s primary energy supply, while renewable and clean energy sources provided 3.7% of supply. Under the “ambitious” pathway, the proportion of renewable and clean energy in supply would increase to 7.3% in 2022, and 13.5% in 2040. At the same time, the contribution of the fossil fuels would remain over 80% in 2022, but reduce to 78% by 2040.

 

Of the fossil fuels, the share of coal in India’s commercial primary energy supply was 55% in 2015-16 and is expected to remain high at 48-54% in 2040. Imports contributed 25% of the coal supply in 2015-16, the NEP said.

 

“Cutting fossil fuel consumption would promote the twin goals of sustainability and security. Hence the policy lays heavy emphasis on decarbonisation through the twin interventions of energy efficiency and renewable energy,” it added.

 

Let there be competition: Privatising coal and letting markets decide prices

 

“The present coal regime in India continues to be a historical relic, while most other sectors of the economy have evolved to adopt free market principles,” the NEP said, making it “essential that we move away from this opaque coal economy and introduce greater competition in it”.

 

Coal production has remained the state’s prerogative in India since Independence. The NEP recommended that state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL)–producing 84% of India’s coal, and feeding 98 out of 101 coal-based thermal power plants in India–be privatised, and its various arms be allowed to compete with each other in the market. This will improve coal production and distribution, the NEP said. This means that different energy sources, whether fossil fuels or renewables, could gain a larger share in the future energy mix based on prices that are decided by the market.

 

“Linking pricing of coal, other fuels, and electricity on market principles will prevent wasteful use of resources and allow a level playing field for clean energy alternatives,” Vibhuti Garg, researcher at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a non-profit policy research organisation based in Canada, told IndiaSpend.

 

This would allow power-generation companies to price electricity on unsubsidised, genuine costs, and consumers could be compensated for any price rise via direct benefit transfers (DBT).

 

“This will improve financial performance of electricity distribution companies by reducing the revenue gap,  and setting tariffs at cost-reflective levels will remove market distortions,” Garg said.

 

How effective the direct benefit transfers are, depends on how well they are designed, according to Garg. Some questions that need to be answered for successful transfers include picking the optimal amount to be transferred, deciding who will receive the benefit (it could be a family, an individual or even every electricity meter), and where it should be transferred, for example special bank accounts, she added.

 

However, with most people, especially politicians, opposed to hikes in electricity tariffs, as IndiaSpend reported on April 13, 2017, subsidy reforms are a tough sell.

 

Coal’s uncertain future in India’s energy mix

 

“The electricity markets of the world including India are being shaken by the falling costs and rising efficiency of renewable technology,” the NEP states, adding that “once the costs of supporting technologies such as battery storage (already falling at the rate of 10% per year) make the cost of variable renewable power viable, coal based power will phase out. This makes the task of projecting the demand for coal difficult”.

 

Despite the uncertainty over addition of new coal-based thermal capacity, the prospects for which are falling worldwide, as IndiaSpend reported on April 29, 2017, the NEP projects that coal-based generation capacity will rise from almost 195 GW (by June 2017) to anywhere between 330 to 441 GW by 2040, which at its highest will be over two times the current capacity.

 

This projected expansion is not supported by other policy documents like the draft National Electricity Plan released by the Central Electricity Authority in December 2016, which stated that India does not plan on expanding its coal-fired capacity at least until 2027, while taking into account about 50 GW of installations currently under different stages of construction and likely to yield results in the future.

 

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Source: Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Draft National Electricity Plan 2016

NOTE: India currently has 50 GW of coal under construction, and this expansion in shown in the 2022 figures. But no additional new coal power stations will be needed before 2027.

 

“The continuing rapid growth in renewable energy in India, combined with sustained reductions in coal imports and a slowdown in coal development—with coal-fired ultra-mega power projects cancelled—is a strong indication that the low carbon transformation of India’s energy supply sector is gathering momentum,” according to this 2017 analysis by Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis produced by three research organisations tracking climate action since 2009.

 

One of the reasons the increase in capacity is necessary, the NEP suggested, is to make investments being made in coal production viable. CIL, now the world’s largest coal producer, is making investments worth  $1 billion/year to augment its capacity and reach a target (which might be unnecessary) of 1 billion tonnes/year.

 

Given that the cost of renewable energy is dropping and that in 2016-17, renewable installations overtook conventional ones for the first time, it would be better to let different sources compete in the market and that no “administrative directions” be provided for future investments, the NEP proposed.

 

CIL itself is uncertain of its position in the coming years. In a tender that it put out this year, the company said it wanted to “assess the long term vision up to 2030 for the coal sector in India, which takes into account the environmental factors such as reduction of carbon footprint, non-abatement of global warming…,” and that “the potential for performance of the sector needs to be assessed in light of multiple changes in the energy sector”.

 

(Patil is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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73% Indians Trust Government Compared To 30% Americans

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About 73% Indians have shown confidence in their government in 2016 as against 30% Americans, according to the Government At A Glance 2017 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, a forum to help governments foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability.)

 

For India, the confidence level in government has actually declined from 82% in 2007, data show.

 

India was ranked second among 44 countries after Switzerland and Indonesia with 80% trusting their governments.

 

The listing covered 35 OECD countries and nine non-OECD economies.

 

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Source: OECD

Note: China did not figure under this indicator.

 

Countries like Canada (62%), Germany (55%), South Africa (48%), United Kingdom (41%), Japan (36%), United States (30%) and Brazil (26%) were ranked below India. The index did not list China under ‘confidence in national government’ indicator.

 

Greece was positioned at the bottom of the list with only 13% people trusting the government.

 

“Levels of trust in government are influenced by whether citizens consider the government as reliable, responsive and fair as well as capable of protecting citizens from risks and delivering public services effectively,” the report said.

 

(Mallapur is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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UP’s Slaughterhouse Crackdown: Butchers, Farmers, Traders Hit, Big Businesses Gain

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Unable to get a good price, most of the farmers at Tirwa cattle market in central Uttar Pradesh decide to take their animals back home, hoping that prices will stabilise in some time.

 

Kanpur/Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): Mohammad Shafiq took solace from the large grain container placed in a corner of the room. “This will last six to nine months. At least we won’t starve now,” he said.

 

The 52-year-old, who lives with his family in a small hutment in a graveyard in Kanpur’s Idgah Colony, used to procure meat from the nearby government slaughterhouse and sell it by the roadside.

 

In March 2017, the newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh (UP) ordered action against slaughterhouses and meat-sellers operating without valid licences and violating environmental and health rules.

 

Across the state, numerous shops and slaughterhouses, including government-run abattoirs, were sealed, leading to severe shortage of meat and affecting the livelihoods of thousands like Shafiq who made a living by using common government abattoirs for a small fee. Essentially, failure of municipal administrations to upgrade these facilities had destroyed the vast unorganized meat industry, and hundreds of thousands of ancillary jobs.

 

UP’s Slaughterhouse Crackdown: Butchers, Farmers, Traders Hit, Big Businesses Gain

 

For a while, Shafiq went back to his ancestral village with his wife and kids. There, he worked as a farm-hand even though his left hand does not function properly. “It was wheat harvesting season. I had never done that work before but with my kids’ support, I managed somehow and got 500kg grain in return,” he told IndiaSpend on a muggy June evening.

 

Now back in Kanpur, Shafiq hawks churan (tangy powder), tamarind and jamun around town. “Earlier my elder son used to do this work, but he suffers from night blindness. I thought I can put in more hours than him. He has now taken to buying and selling scrap. I make Rs 200-250 a day while he manages between Rs 75-125,” Shafiq said.

 

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Mohammad Shafiq sells churan (tangy powder) in Kanpur, central Uttar Pradesh. Till three months ago, he used to sell meat that he bought from a government abattoir in Kanpur and earned a profit of Rs 500 every day within three hours. With the closure of the slaughter house, Shafiq now hawks his wares till evening and makes Rs 200-250.

 

From meat-selling, Shafiq used to earn Rs 400-500 within three hours. “The meat, fresh from the slaughterhouse, would sell quickly. We don’t have refrigeration, so I would only buy as much as I could sell easily. Any leftovers, the family would use,” he said.

 

‘Illegal’ slaughterhouses: Past governments ignored issue

 

The Prevention and Control of Pollution (Uniform Consent Procedure) Rules of 1999 list slaughterhouses under the ‘red’ heavily-polluting category with potential to adversely impact public health.

 

In UP, as in the rest of the country, a range of agencies regulate slaughterhouses. Foremost among these is the state-level pollution regulator, the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB), which gives permission (“no-objection certificate”) for setting up a slaughterhouse after getting a go-ahead from the top district administrator, the District Magistrate (DM). The DM conducts a site inspection to assess compliance with various parameters, including law and order, before granting permission. Once a slaughterhouse is set up, the UPPCB monitors its functioning to ensure pollution control measures are in place.

 

If the facility is for export, approval is also required from the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA). Slaughterhouses must also follow the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Slaughter House) Rules, 2001, as well as obtain a license from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to ensure all animal-derived food is healthy.

 

Many slaughterhouses have been accused of violating norms, and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) is hearing a string of petitions seeking their upgradation or closure. In May 2015, hearing one such petition, the NGT ordered all slaughterhouses running without requisite permits in UP to be shut.

 

When the new BJP government assumed office in UP in March this year, it began to take action on the NGT order.

 

Both private and government-run slaughterhouses were shut, having failed to upgrade despite the 2015 NGT order, a previous Supreme Court order and reminders by the UPPCB.

 

In this partial list of 129 industrial units failing to install anti-pollution devices in 2015, 44 were slaughterhouses, 39 of which were run by municipal bodies and nagar panchayats while another was run by the Lucknow Cantonment Board. All four of capital city Lucknow’s slaughterhouses were found not to have proper treatment facilities.

 

According to the Uttar Pradesh Municipal Corporation Act, 1959, the construction and maintenance of public markets and slaughterhouses is an obligatory duty of the local corporation. The Allahabad High Court upheld this in an ongoing case regarding operation of slaughterhouses.

 

An amount of Rs 12.5 crore was sanctioned on January 3, 2017, for the modernisation of the slaughterhouse at Lucknow’s Moti Jheel, but the project got stuck when the model code of conduct for assembly elections came into force the very next day.

 

A similar situation prevails in other cities and towns except Agra, where the municipal corporation runs a modern abattoir.

 

“The responsibility of previous governments is greater than the current government. They failed to modernise the slaughterhouses for a very long time preparing the ground for the present crisis,” said Irfan Ahmad, the vice-president of the Jamiat-ul-Quresh, an organisation of slaughterhouse owners and meat and beef suppliers in Kanpur.

 

A comparison of the earnings and expenditures of the Lucknow and Agra municipal corporations shows how the state capital lost precious revenue by failing to modernise its slaughterhouse.

 

The Agra Municipal Corporation earned Rs 4.26 crore in 2014-15 from leasing out its modern slaughterhouse to a private contractor. The contractor uses the facility for export purposes and also allows individual butchers to use it for a fee of Rs 385 per buffalo. The Lucknow Municipal Corporation, in contrast, was able to charge  Rs 10 as fee for slaughtering of goat/sheep and Rs 25 for buffalo, making Rs 25.33 lakh in all. Spending Rs 44.87 lakh on staff salaries, it reported a loss of over Rs 19 lakh.

 

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Source: Budget documents of Lucknow and Agra municipal corporations

Lucknow: Lucknow Nagar Nigam Budget 2016-17 , Lucknow Nagar Nigam Budget 2015-16

Agra: Nagar Nigam Agra Budget 2016-17, Nagar Nigam Agra Budget 2015-16

 

A crackdown with wide reverberations

 

UP, India’s top meat producer in 2012-13, has felt the reverberations far and wide.

 

Of the 77 APEDA-approved slaughterhouses in India, 44 are in UP. In addition to these, municipal corporations and nagar panchayats (city councils) run numerous abattoirs to meet the domestic meat requirement.

 

UP has a famous, long-standing non-vegetarian culinary tradition, and as per the 2011-12 consumer expenditure survey of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), an average UP household  reported consuming 0.17 kg of buffalo meat every month, as against the all-India average of 0.10 kg.

 

Some 30.6% of UP households reported they consumed non-vegetarian food, while 7.95% households reported they consumed beef or buffalo meat. The all-India average was 4.5%.

 

Beef And Buffalo Meat Consumption
Quantity (Per 30 days) Incidence (Per 1,000 households)
Uttar Pradesh 0.17 kg 7.95
All India 0.1 kg 4.5

Source: Household Consumption of Various Goods and Services in India 2011-12 NSS) 68th Round

 

While India registered a 3.33% decline in livestock population during 2007-12, UP saw a 14% growth, indicating the economy’s dependence on livestock and allied businesses, IndiaSpend reported on March 29, 2017.

 

Source: Animal Husbandry Department, Uttar Pradesh

NOTE: *Including meat processing plants

 

Livelihoods lost

 

Kanpur’s Bakar Mandi slaughterhouse, from where Shafiq used to buy meat, was one of many government facilities which had not been modernised despite repeated reminders from the UPPCB.

 

Butchers would pay a small fee (Rs 25 for buffalo, Rs 10 for goat) to use the facility at night and the meat would be put on sale around the city by early morning.

 

“I support modernisation, but the government should have made an alternative arrangement before closing it down. A gradual phase-out would have helped everyone,” Shafiq said.

 

Danish Qureshi, 25, of Rampur town was similarly rendered jobless. He now drives a rented e-rickshaw for hire, although he considers meat-selling his family business. “My father had a licence issued by the Municipal Corporation 45 years back. I used to get it renewed every year,” he said, “Why didn’t anybody tell us we were doing business illegally?”

 

His bigger complaint is that the government is not helping butchers secure bank loans to upgrade their shops, a prerequisite to get FSSAI licenses. “Most of us have little by way of savings,” he said, adding, “Those with money have renovated their shops, but they form just one per cent of the butcher community in Rampur.”

 

Farmers, associated trades take a hit

 

At the Sunday cattle market in Tirwa village, about 15 km from Kannauj city in central UP, very few transactions were taking place as farmers were not getting the price they were quoting.

 

This was largely due to enforcement of the NGT order. The more recent central government ban on sale of cattle for slaughter in cattle markets–currently on hold following a Supreme Court order–is yet to be implemented on the ground.

 

“Last year it was notebandi, and this year it is meat bandi that has reduced demand,” said Arjun Singh, a farmer from Achanakapur village. He was seeking Rs 50,000 for a young female buffalo, but was getting offers of Rs 32,000.

 

Since the slaughterhouse crackdown, farmers are unable to fetch good prices even for milch cattle because buyers are worried they will be unable to resell.

 

“What if a buffalo is unable to breed? No other farmer would touch it. Should we keep spending on its fodder or sell it to a slaughterhouse? Why can’t the government understand this simple logic?” asked a farmer at a cattle market in Chaubepur village near Kanpur.

 

Brajal Kumar Dwivedi, a young farmer from Jaisinghpura village, wanted to sell a mother-calf buffalo pair for Rs 90,000. He was getting offers of up to Rs 70,000. “I bought it last year for Rs 80,000 from Sakipur mandi, had it fed and impregnated, and am still unable to get the price I paid,” he said. Engaged to be married, Dwivedi needed money for his wedding but said he would wait a few weeks for prices to stabilise, and would sell milk to the local dairy until then.

 

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Brajal Kumar Dwivedi of Jaisinghpura village in Kannauj district of central Uttar Pradesh wanted to sell a mother-calf buffalo pair for Rs 90,000, but he did not get offers beyond Rs 70,000. He bought the buffalo last year for Rs 80,000, fed it, had it impregnated but cannot get the right price, as demand falls. Engaged to be married, Dwivedi hoped to raise money for his wedding. He has now decided to wait for a few weeks, hoping that prices stabilise.

 

Jaddunath Singh of Kithwa village was not so lucky–he had to sell a buffalo at a Rs 11,000 loss because he needed money for the treatment of his hospitalised father-in-law.

 

Those providing ancillary services are also affected. Rajendra Singh, who lets out vehicles to transport animals, was staring at another dull day. “Most farmers are taking their animals back on the vehicles they came on. Only a buyer would hire a vehicle here, but not many deals have come through. This has been the case for the last three months,” he said.

 

The Pechbagh hide market in Kanpur, the largest in India for buffalo skin, has also seen trade decline over the last couple of years–particularly since the 2015 mob lynching of a Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, and his son, who were suspected of stealing and slaughtering a stolen cow calf, in Dadri in eastern UP.

 

“Fear of cow vigilantes who beat up transporters even if they are transporting only buffalo skins has scared away suppliers,” said Akhtar Hussein Akhtar, a godown owner at Pechbagh and an office-bearer of the local Hide Merchants’ Association.

 

Akhtar explained that large, mechanised slaughterhouses sell hides directly to big tanneries, and only those engaged in skinning dead animals sell to merchants in Pechbagh. “[Earlier] most of the supply came from government abattoirs while weekly supply from villages filled the gap.

 

Now whatever raw material we are getting is from villages and that too of animals who die of natural causes, not slaughtered ones,” he said, adding that supply has gone down from 10,000 hides per month to 500. “We have also reduced our employee strength from eight workers to just one now,” he said.

 

According to the Hide Merchants’ Association, around 40,000 people are directly engaged in this trade. Membership of the association has reduced by half in the last few years as many have turned their godowns into garment shops.

 

Big businesses benefit

 

According to the All India Meat and Livestock Exporters’ Association, UP’s meat industry employs nearly 2.5 million people. But there’s a stark difference between the formal market consisting mostly of wealthy exporters and the informal community of butchers, meat suppliers and those trading in animal byproducts. While the former own mechanised, well-equipped slaughterhouses that usually have the requisite permits, the informal market is dependent on government-run abattoirs, most of which have now been shut down for failing to comply with rules.

 

The crackdown has therefore skewed the market in favor of big companies, which have thus far been engaged in export of buffalo meat. “Big companies are making tidy profits as the cattle market has tanked due to no demand from butchers. On the other hand, shortage of meat in the market has caused its price to increase. So, the companies can buy animals at a low price and sell meat at a premium,” Dharmendra Malik, general secretary of the UP branch of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), told IndiaSpend.

 

 

To combat the meat shortage, the Kanpur DM arranged a meeting of meat-sellers and private companies operating from Unnao, a leather and chemicals hub 15 km from Kanpur. “We are granting no-objection certificates  for meat shops to operate on the condition that they source meat from these companies,” Dr A.K. Singh, the veterinary officer at Kanpur Municipal Corporation, told IndiaSpend.

 

Similar arrangements have been made in other cities, including Bareilly, Moradabad, Aligarh and Muzaffarnagar. The price of buffalo meat has gone up from Rs 150 per kg before the clampdown to Rs 200 now.

 

Businesses are happy to tap the market not open to them earlier. “People are not very keen on the frozen meat we supply as they are used to getting raw and fresh meat from the city abattoirs. But that option is not available now. We are currently supplying 3-4 tonnes of buffalo meat per day to Kanpur and hope to scale it up to 30-35 tonnes,” Abhishek Arora, owner of AOV Exports Limited, told IndiaSpend.

 

Butchers, however, are unhappy at being compelled to buy from large companies. “Around a fourth of our earnings come from selling of waste material from slaughter. Entering into an agreement with the company means to let go of this profit. We would rather close down than hand over our business to the companies,” said Shahabuddin Qureshi, the general secretary of Qureshi Foundation, an association of butchers and meat-sellers in Lucknow.

 

A way forward?

 

Many said an ideal solution would be to set up an alternative slaughtering site away from habitation until the government abattoirs are modernised. “When an animal is slaughtered, around 20 people get work. There are the meat sellers, those who trade in animal skin, those selling bones and hooves, and then there are people who process the fat for sale to soap factories,” said Ahmad of Jamiat-ul-Quresh. “Now the meat sellers with licenced shops are the only ones able to do some business. All others have been rendered jobless.”

 

Meanwhile, illegal slaughter continues in Lucknow, clandestinely and at a smaller scale. “The animal waste which was earlier generated at one place and picked up by the municipal corporation, is now polluting densely populated areas without any proper disposal,” Qureshi asked. “What purpose has been solved with the closure of the government-run abattoirs?”

 

As workers struggle to reorganise their lives after the mass closure of slaughterhouses, the failure of past and present governments to organise a trade that employed hundreds of thousands is largely overlooked.

 

“The clampdown was much needed in view of the health and environment concerns associated with ill-equipped slaughterhouses,” said Kamna Pandey, former member of the Animal Welfare Board of India, based in Lucknow, “In fact, I don’t agree with the argument that the action needed to be in phases. But the government should have also been proactive in constructing modern slaughterhouses to avoid public loss.”

 

(Moudgil is an independent journalist and founder editor of GoI Monitor, a web magazine on development.)

 

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Overworked, Underpaid, Abused: Inside The World Of India’s Domestic Workers

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In the decade after liberalisation, there was a nearly 120% rise in the number of domestic workers in India from 7.4 lakh in 1991 to 16.2 lakh workers by 2001, says author Tripti Lahiri quoting census data in her recently released book, Maid In India. Women constitute over two-thirds of the workforce in this unorganised sector, which also includes chauffeurs and security guards, according to Lahiri’s analysis.

 

Female domestic workers usually come from India’s least-developed regions, such as Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Assam. Their journeys are cross-country and transnational, as they seek work as servants in affluent homes. They are, often barely of legal working age, their wages less than the minimum fixed by the government. Their employers range from India’s elite to its nouveau riche, many of who still believe in the traditional divide between servants and masters. Abuse, mental, physical or sexual, of these women is not uncommon. One such dispute between a family and their Muslim domestic worker led to a riot-like situation in a gated community in Noida on Wednesday, July 12.

 

This is the world of Maid in India.

 

Through anecdotal evidence, Lahiri charts the sector’s trajectory and details the business of brokers and agents and exposes the workers’ limited access to justice and formalization. She also draws from her own personal experiences of engaging domestic help.

 

“We eat first, they later; we sit on chairs and they on the floor; we call them by their names and they address us by titles,” she writes.

 

Currently based in Hong Kong, Lahiri is the Asia bureau chief of Quartz, a digital media news organisation. She has worked for the Wall Street Journal in Delhi and was the founding editor of the Journal’s India Real Time blog. In 2012, she won the Ramnath Goenka award for civic journalism. She has written about industrial disasters in Bangladesh and India’s struggle to combat violence against women. She has a masters in journalism and Latin American studies from New York University, is fluent in Spanish and says her Italian is rusty. This is her first book.

 

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Tripti Lahiri, author of Maid In India.

 

In an interview with IndiaSpend, Lahiri discusses the lives and times of India’s maids.

 

Q: “India has always had servants in some form or the other,” you write. What have been the trends over the last century in the sector?

 

There have been huge declines and then upswings in the number of domestic workers in India over the last 100 years. In 1931, the Census classified 2.7 million people as “servants.” By 1971, the Census found just around 67,000 people doing that work. A lot of that had to do with changes like the departure of a large class of people able to hire help—British colonial administrators, for example—and the fact that in the first decades after independence people weren’t so well-off and almost all women who stayed home did their own work.

 

But suddenly, between 1991 and 2001 there was a 120% increase in the numbers of domestic help.* It’s true that India has seen a stagnation, even a shrinking, in female labor participation rates long-term. But because of the immense growth of the population, even with that apparent stagnancy, the absolute numbers of women working outside the home have gone up.

 

The Census shows the numbers of female workers aged 15-59 went up 17% between 2001 and 2011. In cities, it went up over 70% from around 14.7 million in 2001 to 25 million in 2011. That trend is driving a demand for help. Again, more people are prosperous, so even when women in affluent households stay home, those homes can still afford—and want to—hire help.

 

Q: Indian women do about 15 times more housework than Indian men, as per the 2014 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report you have quoted. Indian women do about 35 hours of housekeeping chores a week while Indian men do two — the worst country ratio. What does this tell you about the country’s domestic-service sector?

 

For me, those numbers really highlighted the difference between women and men in India, and the amount of time that women spend waiting upon men. In the period in the 2000s when official statistics noted the numbers of women in the workforce fell, other official studies found that women were doing more unpaid housework. That means if you move out of the paid workforce, you take on more unpaid work at home, which is just considered a part of normal familial duties. Whether you are a professional domestic worker, a housewife, or a white-collar professional, chances are that you are doing a whole lot more cleaning, cooking and childcare than your equivalent Indian man.

 

One thing that I didn’t end up including in the book is how the normalcy of women and girls doing a lot of housework at home can shape court decisions. Sometimes there are complaints registered with police that a family is keeping a child worker, and in those cases there might actually be a family relationship, admittedly a distant one. In two rulings I looked at, the amount of housework those girls were doing was not the decisive factor in courts deciding whether they were maids or family members, because, as one court noted, it’s common for young women to do a lot of housework for family members. Instead it was the lack of school enrollment that led to a court ruling in one case that a young girl was a maid, and not a family member.

 

In the other case, where school attendance records showed the girl was actually going to school regularly, the court ruled that she was being treated as a bonafide family member although she also did a lot of housework. But the idea that a woman should serve her family in this way is being questioned in some legal cases, for example in divorce petitions. In several of these that I looked at, the women seeking a divorce say that their in-laws fired the domestic help and gave all the work to them after their marriage, citing this as evidence that they were not treated as true family members.

 

Q: More people are educated today than in the 1980s. In 1981 the literacy rate was 43.5% — as of 2011 it was 74.04%. The trend is particularly pronounced for women as the number of female literates has jumped from 29.76% in 1981 to 65.46% in 2011. Despite this, why is the domestic service sector growing at an accelerated pace?

 

I think this has to do with the same trends that I mentioned earlier, relating to greater urban affluence and more women working in cities. There are also more young women enrolled in school than ever before. If they go on to college and work in the future, they are also likely to want to hire domestic help.

 

Q: Startups and other organisations, such as Babajobs, The Maids Company and Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), attempt to bring these informal workers into the formal space, but your book tells us the formalisation process has not been as successful as it might have been. What are the obstacles to formalizing domestic labour?

 

I should note that I didn’t speak with Babajobs or SEWA for the book. But from The Maids Company interviews and other workers I spoke to, I’d say there are two big obstacles. What people think they should pay is really set by what people around them are paying–basically by the microeconomy they live in. So it can be really hard to convince people to pay more and if they agree to pay a lot more than their peers, they might end up expecting a lot more in return and being less flexible with their workers. Conversely, even though workers might be open to banding together and demanding that wages be a certain level, they can’t control an influx of migrants willing to undercut them and work for less. But if there were more states with a law specifying a minimum wage for these workers, it would help, except for workers who are already earning a lot higher that those rates.

 

Q: In your research how often did you find maids approaching the courts for justice against abuse? What are the challenges they face?

 

I didn’t research FIRs and looked mainly at judgements in certain kinds of cases, so I don’t have a good sense of the big picture. Anecdotally I’d say that it’s certainly not a first-resort option for women who aren’t able to collect pay or who are facing other problems. I’d also say there’s a real feeling that the employers are “big people,” and it’s going to be difficult to get police to take their complaints seriously. Most often women want to leave a bad situation, rather than file a complaint.

 

Q: What did your research tell you about the social mobility of this class of labourers?

 

There definitely is mobility but it can take more than one generation to happen. So the child of a young woman who comes to the city as a “24-hour” worker is probably not going to jump into the white-collared classes. But the child of a woman who has been working in Delhi for decades might well be able to. I met a woman in her 50s who started out as a cleaner in her teens and was a housekeeper in central Delhi when we met; her son worked at a top think-tank and to my mind, is part of the Indian elite. I also think the child of someone like Santosh Srivastava whom I interviewed, a child domestic worker who became a cook and then became a placement agent, is going to go to college. I don’t know if she’ll become a white-collar professional but she has a good shot.

 

Q: In September 2014, the Delhi government’s labour department issued executive directions for the regulation of private placement agencies providing domestic labour in the National Capital Region (NCR). How effective has this been in curbing exploitation?

 

These rules didn’t become law, and I don’t think they are really being applied yet.

 

Q: Why did you focus your research on the Delhi-NCR region?

 

India is a really varied country and people’s relations with the help are pretty different, west to east, north to south. But Delhi/NCR is the capital, where its wealthiest and most powerful reside, which is why it seemed to me that looking at how well Delhi handles this relationship was really important, and maybe was a proxy for how India as a whole handles inequality and class. It’s also a city that I know well, and where I was living when I was working on the book, so I could spend more time with workers whose jobs were in Delhi.

 

Q: Which regions of India serve as the main sources of domestic labour and why?

 

The reasons that some states are “maid-sending” regions and others are not is down to the weakness of the economies of those areas. In the same way that there are multitudes of micro-economies in the capital, the country is a collection of pretty different economies—compare the minimum wages of Maharashtra and Jharkhand. It wouldn’t be unfair to compare the wealth of Delhi and its pull on the people of Jharkhand or other eastern states to the dynamic between the United States and Mexico in the 1990s and early 2000s. For the same reason, you might hear people say that there are no Punjabi maids because the state is too rich. That’s not entirely true. But because the state is wealthier, their domestic workers are of a more advanced level: they have the knowledge and the connections to find work in Singapore, rather than Delhi. But that’s a topic for another book.

 

* Domestic work has increased 222% since 1999-2000 according to this 2011 report of The Task Force On Domestic Workers. The statistics on domestic workers vary from 4.75 million (employment and unemployment National Sample Survey 61st round, 2004-05) to 6.4 million (Census 2001).

 

(Saldanha is an assistant editor with IndiaSpend.)

 

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19 Indians Die Daily In Drink-Driving Mishaps. Here’s How That Can Change

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India’s daily drink-driving death toll of 19 could be reduced if police checking is made unpredictable to drivers who currently know where to expect checks, a new collaborative study between American researchers and the Rajasthan police has found.

 

The findings are particularly relevant in the backdrop of an April 2017 Supreme Court judgement that prohibited the sale of liquor on national highways. The move was criticised as judicial overreach.

 

Conducted over two years in 2010 and 2011 and released in May 2017, the study’s main solution: Setting up checkpoints at random in areas with the potential for violations rather than regular checkpoints because drivers tend to know this and change their routes.

 

Researchers from the Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research unit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US, partnered with the Rajasthan state police to implement and evaluate an anti-drink driving program. They found that night accidents in an area covered by a particular police station reduced by 17%, and deaths by 25% over a two-month crackdown and six following weeks.

 

In 2015, 501,423 road accidents were reported in India, of which 16,298 (3.2%) were attributed to driving under the influence of alcohol, according to the latest available data from the ministry of road transport & highways (MORTH).  The data further reveal that 6,755 people died and 18,813 injured in drink-driving accidents in 2015.

 

There were nine road accidents that killed three people every 10 minutes in 2015, an increase of 9% over four years, IndiaSpend reported on January 9, 2017 based on National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data.

 

Source: Ministry of Road Transport and Highways 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010

 

The J-PAL study’s findings hold significance as drink-driving causes more deaths on an average than any other error on the driver’s part. The 2015 MORTH report classifies accidents in terms of driver’s responsibilities. Intake of alcohol caused one death per 2.4 accidents, followed by overtaking on hill roads (one death per 2.9 accidents) and improper passing (one death per 3.06 accidents).

 

Drink driving deadliest cause of accidents but likely to underestimated

 

While drink-driving accidents accounted for only 1.5% of all accidents, according to NCRB data, they were the deadliest, having a higher fatality rate than other causes, according to this analysis in  the Indian Express on April 5, 2017. As many as 42% of victims of drink-driving accidents died, compared to accidents caused by over-speeding (30%), reckless driving (33%), and weather conditions (36%).

 

However, these figures may not be accurate.

 

“Accidents caused by drink-driving is likely to be an underestimate,” Daniel Keniston, co-author of the study and assistant professor at Yale University, told IndiaSpend. “If the police arrive late at the scene of the accident it is difficult to determine whether alcohol was involved.”

 

In absolute terms, overspeeding claimed 64,633 lives, more than any other cause.

 

Source: Ministry of Road Transport and Highways 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010

 

Of 183 police stations across 10 districts in Rajasthan, 123 were randomly chosen for the study. These stations formed the treatment group (called “treatment stations”), the remaining police stations formed the comparison group and did not receive specific instructions or additional resources to for enforcement.

 

J-PAL researchers employed a “selective breath checkpoint methodology”, which involved the following:

 

Frequency of roadblocks: To examine the relationship between policing intensity and criminal behavior, treatment stations were randomly assigned to carry out a roadblock, either one, two, or three nights per week. Roadblocks were always between 7 pm and 10 pm.

 

Location of the roadblocks: To test the effectiveness of surprise checkpoints at random locations compared to fixed checkpoints, police stations were randomly assigned to hold their roadblocks at either the best location to apprehend drunk drivers, as selected by the local chief of police, on the same day every week; or one of three best locations for catching drunk drivers, again as chosen by the local chief of police, with each night’s location chosen at random.

 

Over the two years of the study, researchers used administrative data, court records, data collected from breathalysers and surveys of random checkpoints to gather information on road accidents, deaths and police performance.

 

The results were clear: Only the police stations with checkpoints rotated around the best three locations showed significant decreases in night-time deaths and accidents. When breathalyser checks were conducted at one location only, within a couple of days most of drivers switched to alternative routes, which then reported as many road accidents or deaths.

 

Information got out fast. Drivers also found out when checking stopped, although relatively more slowly when the checking was at random.

 

The study also found that dedicated drink-driving checking units from the district reserve police–considered “punishment” postings, in unofficial police parlance–did better than local police when told that a good performance would improve their transfer chances.

 

“We found that the special enforcement teams performed better on every parameter compared to the team from the local police station,” said Keniston. “They were 28.4% more likely to show up to perform a sobriety checkpoint and 24.7% more likely to arrive on time if they did show up. Furthermore, the dedicated teams caught and sent more drunken drivers to court to pay the penalty.”

 

Two factors may explain this performance.

 

“First, the special teams faced stronger incentives,” said Keniston. “Because they were monitored more closely, their performance could lead more directly to positive recognition from senior officers. Second, the special teams may have been more focused on their work, and less prone to the distractions and burdens of other police duties.”

 

(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)

 

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India Eliminated Leprosy 12 Years Ago, 79,000 New Cases In 6 Months Of 2016

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Leprosy may have left the public discourse but it is still prevalent in India: in six months from April to September 2016, 79,000 leprosy cases were detected, according to National Health Profile, 2017.

 

Leprosy is a slow progressive disease that damages the skin and the nervous system. Caused due to infection by Mycobacterium leprae, it leads to skin lesions, disfigurement and loss of sensation in limbs.

 

Uttar Pradesh had the most number of cases (13,423) but it was the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli that has the highest prevalence of 7.93 per 10,000, which means nearly 8 people in 10,000 have leprosy.

 

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Source: National Health Profile,2017

 

India had eliminated leprosy in 2005, with prevalence rate of less than 1 per 10,000, but it still had world’s leprosy burden in 2015. It currently has a prevalence rate of 0.81 per 10,000.

 

Bihar (1.3), Chhattisgarh (3.54), Goa (1.1), Jharkhand (1.23), West Bengal (1.13), Odisha (1.9), Chandigarh (1.25), Delhi (1.26) and Dadra Nagar Haveli (7.93) have higher than 1 case per 10,000 showing that the disease has not been eliminated from all states.

 

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Source: National Health Profile,2017

 

There were 105,564 cases of leprosy under treatment while 59,356 were discharged as cured till September 2016.

 

(Yadavar is principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

 

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India’s Demographic Dividend: 64.4% Youth, 27.3% Children In 2015

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India has a big youth population with about 64.4% of its total population between the ages of 15 and 59 years in 2015, according to data from the sample registration survey of India (SRS) statistical report.

 

Children between the ages of 0 and 14 years made up 27.3% of the population–the future demographic dividend of the country, while 8.3% of the popn were above the age of 60 years.

 

Urban and rural areas had very similar population composition. But youth made up a greater share of the urban population (67.7%) than the rural areas (62.9%).

 

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Source: Sample Registration Survey of India statistical report 2015

Note: Total percentage may not add to 100 on account of rounding in broad age group

 

(Shah is a reporter/writer with IndiaSpend.)

 

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C-Section Rates Reveal The Need For Smarter Indian Healthcare Policy

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In 2011-12, more than 50% of deliveries in nine of 10 Telangana districts were caesarean section deliveries (C-sections), according to an analysis of district-level health data. In comparison, none of the districts in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar had C-section rates of more than 25%.

 

C-section is a specialised procedure that is needed to deal with complicated delivery cases. The healthy rates of C-section should range from 10% to 15%, according to this April 2015 World Health Organization estimate, while a December 2015 study led by Ariadne Labs, a joint center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,  suggested that optimal C-section rate could be as high as 19%. The procedure brings risk of infection and can cause complications in future pregnancies, so it should be used only when medically necessary.

 

At the national level, while India lies near the healthy range, around 8.5% as per WHO data ,it is deceptive of the underlying inequalities and variations.

 

In many districts in India, the C-section rate is either too low or too high, according to the analysis we conducted at Evidence for Policy Design of district-level estimates for C-section rates across the country–in both public and private healthcare institutions—from the District Level Household Survey Round 4 and the Annual Health Survey.

 

 

Source: District Level Household Survey Round 4, Annual Health Survey

 

What is driving high C-section rates?

 

Higher than necessary C-section rates can be presented as a case of “market failure”, an economic term used to describe cases where allocation of goods or services is not efficient.

 

In this case, market failure could arise due to “information asymmetry”–doctors generally know more about the treatments than the patients. Combine that with potential incentives for doctors to provide expensive treatments, and you are looking at a healthcare market that is inclined to over-treat.

 

In private facilities, where incentives for over-treatment are potentially higher, C-section rates were higher than 20% in nearly 85% of the districts in the country. In public institutions, C-sections rates were more varied.

 

 

Source: District Level Household Survey Round 4, Annual Health Survey

 

In several districts in south India, we found high rates of caesarean deliveries even in public institutions. For instance, C-section rates in public institutions were higher than 20% in all the districts of Telangana, which is a rare example of extremely high C-section deliveries overall.

 

C-section rates proxy of healthcare system performance

 

India spent 1.4% of its gross domestic product on public healthcare in 2014. In comparison, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 advanced economies, spent an average of 7.7%. Low spending could be one reason behind the poor health outcomes in India compared to other countries.

 

The answer to this is not a blanket approach of investing in healthcare facilities and personnel. The outcome budget of the ministry of health & family welfare follows this as a solution with an overarching emphasis on quantity: the underlying assumption being that more public health facilities would lead to increased access to public facilities, which would be followed by more people accessing public facilities, and eventually better health outcomes.

 

There is a need to indulge in preliminary diagnostics to determine site-specific needs and strategies. One way to approach a diagnosis of India’s ailing public healthcare system is to identify cases where outcomes vary widely. The extent to which C-section is available and availed by women is a good proxy of the performance of the healthcare system.

 

Challenges in the low C-section districts are quite different from those with very high rates, and the healthcare policy should reflect such differences. For districts with low rates, there is a possible case for greater investments in public healthcare infrastructure and facilities, and more qualified medical personnel.

 

It is not clear if this approach would be appropriate for some of the regions with high C-section rates. For one, it ignores the critical role of the private sector, which is the more dominant health service provider in India.

 

Across India, for treatment of most ailments, citizens prefer private healthcare service providers approximately 70% of the time, an analysis of National Sample Survey Round 71 data shows. When asked why they chose a private facility over a public facility, the dominant response was the quality of facilities, which is not satisfactory in public institutions.

 

More appropriate solutions for these areas could be to invest more in quality of care rather than quantity, and to design regulatory frameworks to ensure that healthcare institutions–both public and private–are held more accountable.

 

There is a need to better understand the landscape before indulging in target-oriented policy design and solutions. While there are data to understand the problems–that are different in different regions of the country–there is a need for more information to decipher the underlying factors driving these differences.

 

For instance, there are not enough data that can help us gauge quality of care, without which we do not have a clear sense of what drives perception of quality. Building on that, we will need more robust evidence on what works in different contexts.

Cross-country and cross-region lessons in attempts to improve overall quality of healthcare can serve as preliminary evidence to determine the direction in which investments in the health sector in India. Only then can we be sure that we get the most out of our limited resources.

 

(Mittal is a Senior Research Associate for EPoD India at IFMR, a joint initiative by Evidence for Policy Design at Harvard Kennedy School and the Institute for Financial Management and Research. Singh is a former Research and Training Manager for EPoD India at IFMR and current Project Manager at International Food Policy Research Institute.)

 

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In 5 Years To 2015-16, Real Farm Income/Cultivator Up 0.44% Annually

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In five years to 2015-16, inflation-adjusted farm income per cultivator grew at only 0.44% a year, according to this March 2017 policy paper by National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog. Since 1993-94, it has risen 108.5% to Rs 44,027 in 2015-16 in real terms, the paper reveals.

 

Data for the number of cultivators is available only up to 2011-12. Figures for later years have been estimated by assuming that people will continue to leave agriculture at the same rate as between 2004-05 and 2011-12.

 

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Source: NITI Aayog

 

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Source: NITI Aayog

 

In 2011-12, 64% of the rural workforce was engaged in agriculture, according to the NITI Aayog’s estimates based on data from Central Statistical Office and National Sample Survey Organisation.

 

Between 2004-05 and 2011-12, the number of people employed in agriculture in rural areas fell at an annual rate of 2.04% or by 34 million. At this rate, the rural workforce in agriculture is expected to come down to 55% by 2022-23, according to the NITI Aayog’s analysis.

 

In five years to 2015-16, prices received by farmers for their produce are estimated to have risen by 6.88% even as prices they paid for buying goods and services, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labour, went up by 10.52%, according to the NITI Aayog  paper.

 

In 29 years to 2011-12, farm income per cultivator has remained stagnant around 32-33% of a non-farm worker’s income, according to NITI Aayog’s analysis.

 

Farm income per cultivator was 34% of those working in the non-farm sector in 1983-84. This slipped to 33% a decade later and dropped further to 24.5% in 2004-05. It has increased again to around the 1983-84 level at 32% in 2011-12.

 

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Source: NITI Aayog

 

(Vivek is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)

 

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20,000+ Agitations In Tamil Nadu In 2015, No Police Casualties

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Tamil Nadu recorded the highest number of agitations in 2015 (20,450) but reported no police casualties while West Bengal reported three police deaths and 641 injured in 3,089 recorded agitations, according to this 2016 report by the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPRD), a division of the home ministry.

 

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Source: Bureau Of Police Research & Development

 

As many as 34 civilians and 10 police personnel were killed while 572 civilians and 1,623 policemen were injured in 109,423 agitations recorded in 2015.

 

Odisha recorded 5,616 agitations but neighbouring states, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, recorded zero and three incidents, respectively.

 

States and union territories like Goa, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli did not witness any agitations in 2015.

 

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Source: Bureau Of Police Research & Development

 

(Abraham is an intern with IndiaSpend.)

 

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Why India Needs To Count Its Broken Toilets

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In 2016, as many as 96.5% of rural elementary government schools in India had toilets, but more than one in four toilets (27.79%) were dysfunctional or locked, according to data collected for the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a citizen-led survey on the status of elementary education in rural India. About 68.7% of schools had working toilet facilities for students.

 

In 2016, the ASER survey was conducted in 589 out of 619 rural Indian districts, and surveyors visited 17,473 schools. ASER has been collecting data on water and sanitation infrastructure in schools since 2009.

 

The proportion of schools with toilets increased 7.43 percentage points from 2010 to 2016. Functional toilets have increased 21.45 percentage points in the same period. But the rate of progress is now slowing, and government agencies do not collect data on useable toilets– that is if existing facilities are working and useable.

 

India’s National Sample Survey, the District Information System for Education (DISE), and the Census, which are the main sources of data on water and sanitation-related indicators, do not measure the usability of sanitation infrastructure.

 

The working and usage of sanitation facilities is ignored because of an overemphasis on the availability of this infrastructure. In states where the gap between availability and functionality is massive–a common occurrence in north-eastern and central states–focusing only on availability of toilets can be misleading to policy makers and analysts.

 

For instance, if only availability is considered, 95.82% of government elementary schools in rural Uttar Pradesh in 2014, and 95.35% in 2016 were observed to have toilets for students. But if we look at the functionality of these toilets, we find that only 54.92% of schools were reported to have working toilets in 2014 and 54.83% in 2016.

 

Source: Annual Status of Education Report

 

The percentage of schools with toilet facilities, in terms of availability has been reported in the high nineties for the past few years, which lines up with the vision of universal sanitation in schools. According to this data, India now seems to be tackling a “last-mile problem” i.e. India only needs to make a little more effort to get to 100% availability of toilets in schools.

 

But this encourages complacence about water and sanitation in India. When we look at data on working toilets, we realize that India is far from achieving near perfect, universal sanitation in schools.

 

For instance, in Mizoram, slightly more than one in two schools (54.88%) were found to have dysfunctional or locked toilets. A similar situation was observed in Manipur (47.19%), Meghalaya (45.74%), and Nagaland (45.24%).

 

If we consider merely the availability of toilets, no red flags would be raised regarding these schools, despite the fact that students would continue to lack access to working toilets.

 

This gap between usability and availability is also observed in states that have better development indicators. In Kerala, 100% of schools had a toilet, but 18% were found to be unusable in 2016. Further, access to working toilets reduced over time. In 2014, fewer toilets were unusable (15.2%) in Kerala schools.

 

Why stop at reporting availability of toilets when evidence suggests that a lot of these toilets are unusable? The implementation of sanitation policies and the impact these policies have on student wellbeing will be best measured when we emphasize usability of toilets. In the context of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan–Gramin (Clean India Campaign–Rural) and Swachh Bharat Swachh Vidyalaya, (Clean India Clean School) measuring usability of sanitation infrastructure becomes even more important. Broken toilets do not bring us any closer to realizing the vision of Swachh Bharat (Clean India).

 

Falling rates of improvement in sanitation

 

While a growth in the percentage of schools with working sanitation provisions has been reported over time, this improvement is slowing across most states in India, even as sanitation has been at the forefront of India’s political discourse, and funding for sanitation policies has increased significantly in the past few years.

 

In Assam, for example, the proportion of schools with working toilets increased by 20% between 2010 and 2012, 6% between 2012 and 2014, and 3% between 2014 and 2016. Ideally, the rate of improvement should be increasing over time, if not remain consistent, with an increase in funds. Functional toilets are overall low (33% in 2010, 53% in 2012, 59% in 2014, and 62% in 2016) so the slowing rate of improvement cannot be attributed to the last remaining remote or difficult to access regions.

 

In Tamil Nadu (with 79.4% of schools with useable toilets in 2016), the reported percentage of schools with working toilets increased by 23% between 2010 and 2012, 12% between 2012 and 2014, and decreased by 0.41% between 2014 and 2016. In Uttar Pradesh, the proportion of schools with working toilets increased by 6% between 2010 and 2012, by 2% between 2012 and 2014, and remained stable between 2014 and 2016.

 

Source: Annual Status of Education Report

 

Gender disparity in working sanitation facilities

One of the reasons for high dropout rates and non-enrolment for girls in rural India could be the lack of toilets in schools, and thus it is worrying that improvement in working sanitation facilities for girls has also slowed down.

 

In Maharashtra, a relatively well-off state, the recorded percentage of schools with toilets for girls increased by 10% between 2010 and 2012, 6% between 2012 and 2014, and 4% between 2014 and 2016. In 2016, 62.5% of schools in Maharashtra were reported to have a working toilet for girls.

 

Secondly, data show that a lower proportion of schools have working toilets for girls than they have for boys, which means that girls do not enjoy the same level of access to working sanitation facilities as boys do. This has been calculated by comparing the proportion of schools that were found to have a working girl’s toilet with the proportion of schools that had a working toilet.

 

Source: Annual Status of Education Report

 

In Maharashtra, 68% of schools had a working toilet compared to 62.5% of working toilets for girls. Similarly, in West Bengal, the difference between the recorded percentage of schools with toilets and the recorded percentage of schools with toilets for girls was 14.8% in 2012, 24% in 2014, 14.7% in 2016.

 

It is only when we look beyond availability of toilets, and take into account the large gap between usability and availability of sanitation infrastructure in India, that we can make more nuanced arguments about indicators like rates of improvement in sanitation and gender parity, and make better policy to meet these challenges.

 

(Bhattacharyya leads the water and sanitation activities of ASER Centre. Gangwar is an undergraduate student of political science and economics at Ashoka University, Haryana, and recently interned with the ASER Centre.)

 

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India Skips 6 Of 16 Key WHO Recommendations on TB

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India does not implement six out of the 16 key World Health Organisation (WHO)- recommended tuberculosis (TB) control policies in diagnosis, patient care and treatment, a new global report has found.

 

Four other policies that are a part of the national policy are not being fully implemented.

 

These were the findings of the third edition of ‘Out of Step’, a report published by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Stop TB Partnership. The study reviews TB policies and practices in 29 countries which account for 82% of the global TB burden.

 

Government sources told IndiaSpend that India may implement three of the neglected recommendations by 2017 end.

 

India has the highest burden of TB in the world, with over 2.8 million patients reported in 2015. Although TB is preventable and treatable, it remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease. In 2015 alone, TB killed 1.8 million people.

 

India still prefers sputum smear test, cheap but outdated

 

Diagnosis and drug-resistant treatment are the two critical areas where the Indian national tuberculosis policy has yet to align with WHO recommendations.

 

India still has not made Xpert MTB/RIF the initial test for TB in adults and children. This is a rapid molecular test to diagnose TB and test for resistance to first-line drugs to deal with the disease.

 

Sputum smear microscopy still remains the primary detection test. It is inexpensive and easy to conduct but not the most sensitive test available for TB. Further, in HIV positive patients it has a poor rate of detection of TB as discussed in a later section.

 

“The benefit of GeneXpert (the brand name for Xpert MTB/RIF) outweighs the cost,” said Dr Nerges Mistry, director, Foundation of Medical Research, Mumbai. “The cost of detecting multidrug-resistant TB (MDR TB) late is much more than the cost incurred in conducting the test.”

 

The government seemed to be underplaying the threat of MDR TB, she added. “Even though the government says the incidence of MDR TB is 1.8% in new TB cases and 18-20% in retreatment cases, many studies show that it is as high as 18-20% and 28-30% respectively,” she said.

 

Source: Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme, The Tuberculosis Cascade of Care in India’s Public Sector: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis, PLoS Medicine

NOTE: Government does not report new smear-negative TB cases; **includes patients who completed treatment and patients who were cured; *TB Patients who did not relapse after one year of completing treatment

 

“GeneXpert as a diagnostic test has been validated universally. Although the RNTCP has added one GeneXpert per district in the country, the utilisation rates still remain low overall” said Stobdan Kalon, MSF India’s medical coordinator.

 

Not enough to detect drug-resistant TB

 

Two of the strongest, first-line TB drugs in the market are rifampicin and isoniazid. Patients who are resistant to the first usually do not respond to the second drug either. But in India, most rifampicin-resistant patients are not put through the first-line drug susceptibility test (DST) that could diagnose isoniazid resistance as well.

 

Patients who are resistant to both these drugs are said to have multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. A DST could thus help customise treatment for such patients.

 

India had 130,000 multi-drug resistant TB patients in 2015, the highest in the world. Yet there are just 67 labs offering DST across the country. As a result, TB patients waste years being treated with drugs that don’t work for them, suffer from side-effects, waste money and also increase chances of spreading the infection.

 

New, more effective, drugs not easily available

 

India’s national TB policy does not reflect the shorter, WHO-recommended nine-month MDR TB regimen, says the report. Patients with MDR TB are currently on a 24-month treatment but this might change by the end of 2017.

 

“The shorter MDR-TB regimen will be scaled up across the country by end of 2017 for all RR-TB (rifampicin resistant) patients,” according to the National Strategic Plan for Tuberculosis Elimination 2017-2025 published in February 2017 by the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP), India’s national TB control programme.

 

After a span of over 40 years, two new TB drugs—Janssen’s Bedaquiline and Otsuka’s Delamanid — came into use. Bedaquiline was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2012 and Delamanid, by the European Medicines Agency in 2014.

 

Even though the WHO had released its policy on the usage of Delamanid for treating extensive drug resistant (XDR) TB cases in 2015, it is not part of India’s national TB control efforts. There are new reports that Otsuka is planning to approach Drug Controller General of India for approval.

 

However, India has included Bedaquiline in the national TB control programme, under “conditional access”, available at six locations to 600 patients who fit the criteria.

 

Access to the drug is still not easy. In January 2017, a 18-year-old XDR TB patient from Patna being treated at a Delhi hospital had to move the Delhi High Court for access to Bedaquiline. She was denied the drug in Delhi since she was not living in the city.

 

HIV/AIDS patients lack access to advanced diagnostic technique

 

HIV not only increases the risk of TB but also its morbidity and mortality. HIV positive patients with latent TB are 26 times more likely to get active TB. In 2015, 40,000 HIV-positive people died due to TB.

 

However, it is not easy to detect TB in HIV patients — in 50% of cases, HIV TB patients are smear negative. WHO recommends TB LAM, a urine test that can rapidly detect cases of TB in HIV positive patients, especially those who are seriously ill or living with low CD4 count (cells that are killed by HIV and shows the progression of disease).

 

India also does not use TB LAM to diagnose TB in persons living with HIV/AIDS with CD4 count less than 100 µL or who are seriously ill, reported Out of Step.

 

No pediatric fixed drug combination yet for children

 

Every year over 1 million children are detected with TB and 140,000 die of it. Drug doses for children and adults differ and WHO had recommended a fixed dosed combination of drugs for children in 2012. But in its absence, children are given adult medicines that are crushed or cut, with the danger of improper dosage.

 

Yet, India doesn’t implement pediatric fixed drug combinations as standard of care in all parts of the country even though it is a part of the national guidelines, said the ‘Out of Step’ report.

 

Sunil Khaparde, deputy director general of India’s Central TB division refused to comment on the report. “It is not necessary for the government to respond to every report brought out by nonprofits,” he said.

 

Another doctor working in the TB division, who was not authorized to speak to media and hence remains unnamed, said that India is already going to roll out three of the six unimplemented recommendations.

 

“Shorter course for MDR TB will be rolled out by the year end. Xpert MTB/RIF is currently used to diagnose pediatric tuberculosis patients, cases of extra-pulmonary TB and those living in slums,” he said. Fixed drug combinations for pediatric tuberculosis patients are already being rolled in five states, he said.

 

(Yadavar is principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

 

Update: A quote in this story about TrueNAAT has been modified on the request of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

 

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

 
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