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Embed: 01-3-16 -- PR-18 / Interview / Vasundhara / S. Naryan / Ruchi Gupta / Yamini / PR 17 / PR-16 / Rajgopal / PR-15

Railway Budget 2016-17

Indian Railways' Joint Venture Model with States, a Welcome Step: B.S. Sudhir Chandra

S. Rajendran

The Indian Railways, the world’s fourth largest railway network covering virtually all parts of the country and providing the vast population with one of the cheapest modes of transport, faces challenging times. In this wide ranging interview, former Member of the Railway Board, B.S. Sudhir Chandra points out the various challenges faced by the railways. Sudhir Chandra has served the railways for a span of nearly four decades — rising from the position of a probationary officer in 1965 to a Member of the Railway Board in 2002. During his career in the Indian Railways he held several important assignments in Construction, Open Line and General Management Departments. He also worked with the Zambian Railways for five years and was trained in Japan, Germany and the U.S. After superannuation in 2003, he served as advisor and thereafter as Director of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited. Excerpts from an interview with S.Rajendran:

Policy Report No. 18

Modern Day Slavery: A Study of Tribals and Dalits as Bonded Labour in Brick Kilns

Ajita Banerjie

Scholars have analysed bonded labour in South Asia as a result of poverty, social exclusion, and the failure of state mechanism to act against the practice and its underlying causes. The chronically poor, predominantly drawn from the Scheduled Castes and minority groups are often those who are enslaved under this oppressive system.

The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy's latest Report examines the conditions of migrant labour from rural areas of four States – Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar, and analyses the causes behind the persistence of bonded labour even 40 years after it was abolished. Based on interviews of labourers, brick kiln owners, civil society members, lawyers and government officials it brings out the issues of unorganised labour in India, and how industries disregard labour protection and welfare. The Report, authored by Ajita Banerjie suggests the manner in which bonded labour should be contextualised in the discussion to improve labour standards.

Interview

No Consistency in Delhi’s Approach to Kashmir: A.S. Dulat

Saptarshi Bhattacharya and Vasundhara Sirnate

Kashmir remains India’s unsolved puzzle for over six decades. Its history has thrown up strange paradoxes and challenges for policy makers in New Delhi. In his book Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, Amarjit Singh Dulat, who headed India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) between 1999 and 2000, delves into these paradoxes and attempts to make sense of them. He spent two of the three decades as an intelligence services officer engaging with Kashmiris in various capacities. He tells Saptarshi Bhattacharya and Vasundhara Sirnate that Kashmir is a complex problem, for which the solution lies in dialogue and political will. Excerpts from an interview held in Chennai during the Lit for Life 2016, in January, organised by The Hindu:

JNU Arrest: Not Just a Crackdown, It's a War on Democracy

Vasundhara Sirnate

Is the current tension between the students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the Indian government unique? In this article, Vasundhara Sirnate argues that states across the world have always been nervous about student movements with good reason. Students possess great capacity for social mobilisation and progressive thought that often goes against the status quo. She draws comparisons between student movements in India and in the U.S., and suggests that in the final assessment students have often won. The crisis in JNU is driven by an anxious government that wants to suppress any counter-opinion and counter-ideology.

Dispelling Budgetary Gloom

S. Narayan

Ahead of the Union Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is presented with a few challenges. Plan allocation is down and several centrally-sponsored schemes stopped. Non-performing assets of public sector banks are at an all-time high while rural demand is low. Exports and private investments have not contributed much to the growth. Former Union Finance and Economic Affairs Secretary S. Narayan says Jaitley’s Budget this year should focus more on fiscal and monetary management initiatives and look to revive rural demand, pump up small and medium enterprises and push export, besides improving the investment climate.

Rajasthan and Haryana Panchayat Amendments strike at the heart of Universal Adult Suffrage

Ruchi Gupta

The right to vote and the right to contest are central to the concept of citizenship in an electoral democracy. Individuals can be disqualified from contesting elections on grounds of personal culpability. However, debarring "classes of people" because they do not meet some arbitrary qualifications militates against the very concept of democracy, especially where the disqualifications are a consequence of inadequate State capacity, says Ruchi Gupta.

Jallikattu as a Spectacle of Patriarchy

Yamini Narayanan

Jallikattu has become a contentious issue wherein cattle protection and rights are interwoven with human identity politics in India. In this article, Yamini Narayanan writes that the bull-subjugation competition, which has been promoted as a celebration of cattle during the Pongal festivities in Tamil Nadu, is in reality only an extension of one of the most enduring oppressions — speciesism.

Policy Report No. 17

Narratives of Dalit Inclusion and Exclusion in Formulating and Implementing the Forest Rights Act, 2006

Arpitha Kodiveri

This Report traces the narratives of inclusion and exclusion of Dalit forest-dwelling communities in the process of formulating and implementing the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA). The process of formulating the FRA saw the creation of a new category of beneficiaries called ‘Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ (OTFDs), which includes Dalit forest-dwelling communities. This Report documents the politics and priorities that paved the way for such a classification to emerge. It lays the foundation for a theory of evidentiary bias, which forms the legal basis of exclusion of Dalit forest-dwelling communities and OTFDs, as they are required to provide 75 years of evidence to claim their tenure rights despite not being in a position to access such evidence.

The Report explores the strategies of resistance adopted by Dalit forest-dwelling communities in overcoming this evidentiary barrier by exploring the different scripts of resistance developed by communities in Chitrakoot and Sonbhadra in Uttar Pradesh, and Kandhamal in Odisha. The Report concludes by unpacking the relationship between untouchability, caste bias and the implementation of the FRA.

Policy Report No. 16

The Plight of Kashmiri Half-Widows

Deya Bhattacharya

This report examines transitional justice in Kashmir from the perspective of a unique category of women. The insurgency in Kashmir that began in 1989 brought forth the category of ‘half-widows’. Half-widows are the wives of the disappeared men in Kashmir, who are uncertain about the status and whereabouts of their husbands. However, since this category does not have the legitimacy of the law, and is born out of the identity of the disappeared man, it is not justiciable in a court of law. This makes it almost impossible to include women’s rights into the transitional justice paradigm within Kashmir. This Report, therefore, documents the experiences of these women vis-à-vis the reparations structure that was developed following the conflict.

The Report uses the experiences of these women to indicate how during the course of transitional justice mechanisms, the experiences and needs of women are noticeably missing or silenced by the general discourse of accounting for the past. This study is an attempt to bridge two disciplines — women’s rights and transitional justice — though it seems immensely problematic in Kashmir because of how incomplete or even exclusionary the disciplines seem to become when attempted to stitch together during conflict.

Uprooted From Democracy: Rajbala v. State of Haryana

Rajgopal Saikumar

The recent verdict by the Supreme Court of India, upholding an amendment by the Haryana government to prescribe minimum educational qualifications to contest local body elections runs against the grain of democracy. Rajgopal Saikumar points out the flaw in prioritising policies over more basic rights such as voting and participating in the democratic process.

Policy Report No. 15

Enabling Reporting of Rape in India: An Exploratory Study

Nithya Nagarathinam

This Report is an exploratory work seeking to answer the question ‘What enables reporting of rape in India?’ Under-reporting of rape is often attributed to social norms that stigmatise female sexuality, to the point that there is a guarded silence and secrecy around it even when subjected to violence. This view on under-reporting places the blame on the victim, as if she makes a choice in not reporting rape, constrained by the influence of an abstract force of patriarchy. What I found was that social stigma becomes irrelevant the moment the incident of rape becomes public knowledge and hence cannot dis-incentivise the victim for reporting. In fact, the victim is motivated to prosecute and seek justice, if only for her own vindication.

What come into play then are institutional barriers arising out of the extrapolation of social norms into the State. This Report examines these institutional factors located and operating within socio-cultural constructs of rape and female sexuality to identify enabling forces that can overcome barriers to reporting of rape. The first part of the Report analyses rape statistics in India to identify regional patterns at the State and district levels. The second part was conducted through interviews of victims, police officers, advocates, women’s organisations, activists and State officials.

The Arena

Prof. B.K. Chandrashekar
It is over two decades since the historic Babri Masjid was demolished to construct of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. While the leaders and workers of the BJP and the Sangh parivar built up a frenzy resulting in the demolition, it was evident that the focus was to gain a political advantage and promote Hindutva. Prof. B.K. Chandrashekar, who had served as Karnataka's Minister for Education, Chairman of the Karnataka Legislative Council, and as professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, places the 1992 demolition in political perspective. Excerpts from an interview with S. Rajendran:

Publications

Policy Report No. 14

Youth Activism and Democratic Politics in India’s Northeast: 2014 Election in Perspective

Kaustubh Deka

This Report attempts to understand how the youth in the northeastern region of India look at the electoral and political processes. The region, comprising eight States, has had a turbulent political history and has since been a sensitive area for policymakers in the country. There were, since India’s independence, several volatile social and political movements spread across the eight States. In many of these movements, students and youth have been the driving force. The biggest example of such a movement and its impact on the politics of the State is the All Assam Students Union (AASU). After six years of struggle against alleged illegal immigration, it signed an accord with the Union Government in 1985, called the Assam Accord, formed a political party Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), and came to power through the electoral process twice.

Resources

Address by President Pranab Mukherjee to the Joint Session of Parliament - February 23, 2016

Full text of the address by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, to the joint session of Parliament on February 23, 2016. The President's Address marked the start of the Budget session of Parliament. Source: Office of the President of India.

Events

Alan Rusbridger, former Editor-in-Chief, The Guardian, and N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi and Sons Ltd., at a public lecture organised by The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy in Chennai on Tuesday. Photo: R. Ravindran

‘Sensitive media drives good policy’

Politicians need public discussion to act on climate change: Alan Rusbridger.

Politicians would not be able to make hard choices on an issue such as climate change, if the media fails to build public opinion on this extraordinarily important challenge facing the world, said Alan Rusbridger, former Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News and Media on Tuesday.

Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India

"Refugees complement the population, they do not compete with it"

"All major migrations are a great human tragedy," said M.K. Narayanan, former Governor of West Bengal, former National Security Advisor to the Indian government and erstwhile director of the Intelligence Bureau, at a public conversation on the ‘Future of Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India’, held at the Music Academy in Chennai on November 4. Recalling his days in Calcutta (now Kolkata) when Mujib Nagar (the provisional government of Bangladesh during its liberation struggle) was being run from there, he said that he was privy to the great human crisis of over a million refugees coming in and living in abysmal conditions. "Fortunately, there was a change in government and it was possible for them to go back very soon thereafter. The problem or the tragedy of the Sri Lankan refugees is that they have now been refugees – at least many of them have been refugees – for 30 years," he said.

While most of them would like to go back provided they have security, a few problems could arise on the question of providing across the border citizenship to those who would want to stay back. He said that there were people in many countries who wanted to be Indian citizens. It was not easy but in the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, "it should be possible to think of this".

This event, organised by The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, a policy resource centre from the publishers of The Hindu, was held to glean greater insights into the state of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees currently residing in India and what lies ahead for them. The speakers at the event included S.C. Chandrahasan, Chief Functionary of the Organisation for Eelam Refugees Rehabilitation (OfERR), N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi & Sons Ltd., and R.K. Radhakrishnan, Senior Deputy Editor of Frontline.

    "Our agenda for the next year is, therefore, to ‘Transform India’ in this direction. My Budget proposals are, therefore, built on this transformative agenda with nine distinct pillars.

    OPINION » LEAD

    The Finance Minister’s prescriptions are a classic case of being unable to see the wood for the trees, be it on the tax proposals, the rural outreach or the bank bailout.



    The numbers don’t add up, nor are the ideas visionary. Hardly anything to be self-congratulatory about



    CONTROVERSY

    Highly inflammable
    T. S. SUBRAMANIAN

    Farmers in seven Tamil Nadu districts are up in arms against a natural gas pipeline that will run through agricultural land.


    BBC Radio 4 series

    Incarnations - a BBC Radio 4 series by Prof. Sunil Khilnani - which examines the lives and afterlives of 50 incredible Indian people and embarks on whirlwind journey from ancient India to the 21st century.


    EU-THC Essay Contest

    Seven winners of the #MyClimateMyFuture essay and photo competition were felicitated in a ceremony held today at New Delhi. The winners 'voiced out' their impressions about the dramatic effects of climate change in India, need for clean development agenda and measures that are being or could be taken to tackle the impact in words as well as photographs.