Railway Budget 2016-17

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

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.