People’s manifesto

Author(s): Jitendra   @jitendrachoube1  

Apr 15, 2014 | From the print edition

Political parties reverse trend, seek people’s suggestions to draft manifesto

Civil society in Odisha holds

public consultation for a national manifesto (Photo: Subhasis Das)

CALL IT the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) effect or the restlessness of the electorate, political parties are scrambling to involve people in drafting their manifestos for the upcoming general elections. In the past too, many civil society groups have led extensive campaigns for their issues to be included in the manifestos, but without much success. This time around, the parties are not only much more receptive but are even engaging such groups proactively.

Political parties argue that the trend was inevitable. They need to address the expectations of a restive young population, they say. Analysts see it as victory of people who have been campaigning for a similar space.

The task of drafting the manifesto, invariably assigned to a close group of party leaders earlier, has suddenly become a critical part of the parties’ campaign strategy. It now straddles virtual as well as traditional spaces. The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for instance, have adopted an new and extensive system to crowd-source their manifestos. Whether it is the spectacle of top party leaders holding discussions with targeted vote-bank or the novel mechanism to seek web-based feedback, manifesto drafting committees have become the most happening component of the campaign.

Rajendra Prasad Gupta, member of the core committee to draft BJP’s manifesto, admits the difference between 2009 and 2014. “In 2009, we did not brainstorm like we do now. We have tried to reach every group and accommodate its view. The effort is much broader than in the past,” says Gupta.

“This time, our consultations are extensive due to the large presence of social media and aware citizen groups. We are using an exclusive website apart from the social media to seek people’s view. This is besides obtaining feedback from various professional bodies, industry associations, students, farmers and NRIs,” he says. In a first, during the BJP’s national executive meeting in Delhi in January, party president Rajnath Singh asked the cadre to involve people in drafting a manifesto for each of the 543 parliamentary constituencies.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi personally supervises people’s involvement in drafting party’s manifesto. As one of his key advisers says, “The party has been seeking feedback for its manifesto since 2012.” Recently, the Congress launched its manifesto drafting process as a campaign called ‘Your Voice, Our Pledge’. “So far, the manifesto had been prepared in closed rooms. I am trying to make it an open process,” Gandhi told fishers on Versova Beach in Mumbai, on March 6.

Like the BJP, Congress has created a separate website to receive inputs for its manifesto. The party’s student wing has launched another website to seek focused views of the youth and students. The party has mass circulated e-mails seeking feedback. The manifesto committee has received 10,000 responses. At the state level, the party’s outreach has covered panchayats to obtain responses on its trump card welfare schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

Rules of the game changed with the spectacular debut of AAP in the Delhi Assembly polls late last year. Its idea of releasing a manifesto for each constituency, based on feedback of the electorate, resulted in massive outreach for the just-born party. National parties are largely adopting the AAP model for the parliamentary elections. Interestingly, AAP itself is not issuing constituency-wise manifestos due to lack of human resources. The party, however, claims that its seven-month public outreach for Delhi elections has resulted in evolving a people-led policy framework. “That policy

document is now converted into manifesto for the general elections,” says Aatishi Marlena, member of AAP manifesto committee.

The Election Commission of India (ECI), too, has stepped in. In February, it brought manifestos within the ambit of the model code of conduct, setting clear guidelines for what can be put in it. The poll panel has debarred parties from making tall promises without laying down their “rationale”. The ECI order states, “Trust of voters should be sought only on those promises which are possible to be fulfilled.”

The new trend has cheered up groups which are seeking political commitment for their causes. “Civil society’s consistent efforts to make political parties sensitive to development issues have made democracy more meaningful,” says Amitabh Behar, convener of Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (keep your promise campaign), a national association of more than 600 civil society groups. The campaign, one of the largest in the world, has been leading the people’s manifesto movement since the general elections in 2004.

This year, the campaign has consulted 0.4 million people spread across 204 constituencies of 24 states in 3,724 public meetings for drafting a national people’s manifesto for the consideration of the parties (see ‘Reaching out’). In four months, meetings were held at the village, panchayat and constituency levels to make the exercise all-inclusive. Separate meetings were held with the youth, women, Dalit groups, persons with disabilities and marginalised sections. The manifesto was given to every sitting and aspirant parliamentarian during public meetings in every constituency. It was sent to parliamentarians who did not at tend the meetings.

In early March, the manifesto was handed over to the Congress, BJP, Communist Party of India (Marxist) and AAP. “During the 2009 elections, national parties just acknowledged our feedback even though we could find a few of our suggestions in their manifestos. This time the response and acceptability is high,” says Behar.

There is a significant disconnect between the manifestos prepared by the civil society at the constituency level and the manifestos of political parties. “The people’s manifesto campaign will bridge this gap,” he says. This time political parties agree, too. For instance, the Congress manifesto is expected to promise a brand new rural employment programme based on people’s feedback.

Also, the extensive village-level outreach will be very valuable for sensing people’s mood. In the 24 states that the people’s manifesto campaign covered, there is a strong demand for making basic entitlements like food and education universal. This means the Congress trump card of the right to food security may show result.

But as A K Singh of the people’s manifesto campaign in Jharkhand says, “This time consultation by parties is extensive so it will be interesting to see the impact on the final manifestos.”

What nation wants  

North: Universal food security, social security Act, common school system, effective public healthcare system, land to the landless

East: Strict implementation of Right to Education Act on children up to 18 years, support self-help groups, house to the homeless, strong local governance

West: Transparency in public work, public health centre in every panchayat, pension to all vulnerable groups

South: SC-ST reservation in private sector, transparency in public work

Tribal areas: Solution to land acquisition and displacement problems, implementation of PESA and FRA, rights over natural resources

CommentsExcellent post.

Here are some People's Policies for prosperity to be included in Political Parties Election Manifesto:

There are millions of acres of waste land in the country. In this vast land care-free growth plants like Agave and Opuntia can be grown. Both are CAM Plants and regenerative. Biofuel,Biogas and subsequent power

generation as decentralised power utilising local resources and resourcefulness is the need of the hour. About 10 acres of waste land can be given on lease to Unemployed youth and 10 such youth can form a CO-OPERATIVE. This way vast wasteland can be brought under use and provides employment in rural areas.

More than energy generation energy conservation yields immediate results.Enormous wastage of power occurs in Agricultural pump sets which are old. These are inefficient. A scheme can be chalked out to replace the old electric pumpsets with more efficient ones. A 5 HP Electric motor costs about Rs 20,000. A subsidy of Rs 15,000 can be provided to each Farmer. When for a Solar Pump which costs Rs 6 lakhs,subsidy of Rs 5 lakhs provided,Rs 15,000 is peanuts. On the other hand the electricity saved from Advanced electric pump sets will find use in lighting,computers ,industry etc. as Electricity is a High Grade Energy.

In the Schools and Colleges Occupational Skills can be taught. NCC/NSS should be made compulsory in Private Educational Institutes also.

Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),IndiaE-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com2 April 2014

Desperately seeking skills & jobs

Author(s): Latha Jishnu   @ljishnu   , Alok Gupta   @alok227   , Soma Basu   @sbasu_in  

Apr 15, 2014 | From the print edition

India has a youth bulge in its population, accounting for the largest number of young working age people in the world. This demographic dividend can be a tremendous force for economic growth if India can ride the wave. But to do so, 500 million young people need to be schooled and skilled. To make them productive, the government also needs to create 100 million jobs very quickly. If not, the consequences could be catastrophic, finds Latha Jishnu who has tracked the massive skilling mission under way. From Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Alok Gupta and Soma Basu report on what these populous states are doing to harness the energy of their vast youth population

NAHID Ali, 25, and his brother Wasim, 22, are knocking at the doors of a hole-in-the-wall enterprise in a New Delhi suburb that supplies security guards to shops. The brothers are from Moradabad, an industrial-commercial town in western Uttar Pradesh that’s synonymous with its brass handicrafts.

Both are graduates of a college affiliated to Rohilkhand University, the elder with a science degree and the younger with a degree in the humanities.

There is an air of forlornness about the two young men as they prepare to take up the mind-numbing job of security guards at a fancy retail showroom in Gurgaon, the commercial city abutting the capital. “I don’t care. We have tried everything and I don’t mind doing this as long as my family back home doesn’t know,” says Nahid, who clearly has reached the end of his tether. It is six years since he got his bachelor’s degree in zoology and botany and he hasn’t even made it as an office assistant. He and Wasim have been told they do not even have the soft skills needed to peddle the furniture in the posh shop where they will now work as guards. Wasim’s brooding look is a silent comment on the compromise he has been forced to make for a salary that will just about keep the wolf from the door. What Wasim and six million others have realised is that a security guard’s job is about the easiest option since it’s one of the few booming sectors of the economy (see ‘Six million and counting’).

Six million and counting 

Photo: Chinky ShuklaSUKHPAL Singh, 26, from Sayalpur village of Tilher block in Uttar Pradesh counts himself lucky. He is a commerce graduate who has joined the ranks of the six million-odd security guards who sit or stand in a catatonic state outside banks, offices, malls and private homes. Depending on which company one works for, guards can be paid as little as Rs 7,000 a month or get a handsome package of Rs 25,000 if well trained and well turned out by the top flight security companies. It’s a Rs 30,000-crore industry of which just about a third is in the formal

sector. Singh says his main concern is not boredom, but his wages which are barely enough to meet his needs.

There is nothing unique about the circumstances of the Ali brothers. An estimated five million graduates are churned out every year by the hundreds of thousands of teaching shops across the country that provide neither a solid education nor any special skills to these young people. Graduates working as peons in offices and postgraduates carrying head loads as construction labour are not exactly new. Such stories are routine in India where securing decent jobs has always been difficult for the hordes that pass out from these colleges looking for white collar jobs. What is new and unnerving now is the overwhelming numbers of young people looking for employment on account of the changing demographics of the country.

A couple of significant statistics stand out in this new demographic profile. Nearly half the population, 48.6 per cent to be precise, of the total 1.21 billion is below 24 years, according to the 2011 census. What India is experiencing is a pronounced youth bulge with around 232 million people in the 15-24

age bracket, up from 190 million in 2001. The median age is 25 compared with 40 for most of the developed economies. Constituting a fifth of the total population, the 15-24 years cohort is the youngest slab in the working age population (WAP) which includes people between 15 and 59 years. It is the WAP segment that has been exciting discussion at home and abroad because with as much as 62.5 per cent of the population in the working age, there is the possibility of India reaping a huge demographic dividend.

The Centre has set an ambitious

target of imparting vocational training to 530 million people by 2022

But a caveat is in order here. Not everyone of WAP will be in the job market. According to the Institute of Human Development in Delhi, the overall labour force participation is just 56 per cent of WAP, a low figure compared to nearly 64 per cent for the rest of the world. This is largely because women participation is a dismal 31 per cent, among the lowest in the world and the second lowest in South Asia after Pakistan.

More people aged 15-24 years are likely to continue education, much more than the 26 per cent who do now, according to one analysis, while others think that more women in the same cohort are likely to join the workforce after their numbers dropped to an all-time low in the recent past. Whatever the calculations, India will need to create at least 100 million new jobs in less than a decade. In talking about the demographic dividend, the Economic Survey 2013 is candid enough to say that a larger workforce will translate into more workers only if there are productive jobs for them. The survey is not certain that enough jobs can be created to make the most of the demographic dividend. (see ‘Where are the jobs?’)

Source: Institute for Human Development computed from unit level data of NSSO

68th roundWhat exactly is a demographic dividend and why is there such a buzz over what this will do for India’s growth prospects? A demographic dividend occurs when the high fertility rates begin to decline and ratio of dependents—that is the young (below 14 years) and the old (over 60)—to the working population is significantly lower. This helps to funnel savings and investments into the economy and gives a huge boost to the per capita income. This is what happened in all the miracle economies of East Asia such as Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand which posted a huge growth starting in the 1960s. Economists say these countries experienced a demographic dividend that added a fantastic two per cent to their annual per capita income growth.

Can India, too, pull off such a feat? It has set itself a humongous target of skilling a mind-boggling 530 million people by 2022, of which 380 million are the responsibility of 23 government ministries. The remaining 150 million will be trained by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), a public–private partnership between the government and industry. States, too, have set up skill development missions whose goals depend to a large extent on Central government funding. But the odds clearly are daunting.

To start with, the current workforce is largely illiterate (see ‘A poor report card’) with just over 18 per cent having completed secondary school because of high dropout rates. And for those who drop out, the prospects are bleak. Very few youngsters are able to start their working lives with any formal or informal vocational training because the vocational training system can train just three million youths, whereas industry requires about 13 million annually. As for the 8.8 per cent of the workforce who are graduates, their employability is dismally low.

Every survey of manpower has revealed dismaying rates of employability of even the educated young. A National Employability Report 2013 by Aspiring Minds, a talent assessment consultancy, found that 47 per cent of the 60,000 graduates it tested were not employable in any sector. Worse, less than three per cent of commerce graduates were fit to do accounting jobs. Such bad news

has been piling up steadily. The latest, a January 2014 survey, The India Skills Report, by talent outsourcing and assessment companies PeopleStrong and Wheebox in conjunction with industry body CII, found that just about a third of the 100,000 students were skilled enough to secure jobs. Those with a degree in the humanities fared worse, with less than a fifth being employable.

Vote bank politics

A combination of these factors has resulted in a strange paradox. India has the largest labour force in the world and yet it is in throes of an acute shortage of skilled and trained people in the manufacturing and service industries and even in agriculture. Industry claims it is saddled with the highest in-service employee training costs worldwide that undermines its cost-competitiveness. The state of vocational education is dismal with outdated curriculum, outdated equipment and poorly trained teachers, all adding up to a system that needs a complete overhaul.

 

Wheeling out history 

Photo: Soma BasuWHEN Abhilash Sharma, son of a teashop owner, decided to get a BA degree in history he had no idea how it would shape his life. After his father died of a heart attack, the shop had to be sold and Abhilash had to fend for his family. Graduates are dime a dozen and Abhilash couldn’t even find a teacher’s job in his native Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh. He tried being a tourist guide in Lucknow but was chased away by the “registered” guides. Then in 2010, he managed to get two cycles being distributed by a political leader and exchanged them for a rickshaw. So now Abhilash, 28, is a guide on wheels and makes Rs 500-700 a day, but he is yet to overcome his own bitter history.

Electoral calculations and vote bank politics are playing havoc with the prospects of the youth in the Hindi heartland where the youth bulge is set to expand in coming decades. In Uttar Pradesh, the government of Akhilesh Yadav has turned the desolate employment exchanges into youth hotspots by offering not jobs but an allowance of Rs 1,000 per month to every jobless youth registered at an exchange in the state. The dole adds a recurring burden of Rs 2,000 crore annually to the Uttar Pradesh exchequer already groaning under the Rs 200,000 crore debt left by the previous government. In fact, all parties have made promises of a dole, the BJP having dangled an offer of Rs 2,000 a month for every unemployed youth if voted to power.

Till March 31, 2013, 1.261 million people had been paid the monthly allowance but since 300,000 more applications have been submitted, payments have petered out. Doles clearly are not sustainable for a cash-strapped government, and with wiser counsel prevailing, the state is now focusing on job-oriented training to as many as 4.4 million over the next three-and-a-half years. The state will be spending Rs 4,200 crore on skilling the labour force, says Vikas Gothawal, special secretary and director of UP Skill Development Mission. But he admits that these figures are way below what is needed in the state.

The problem across the country is colossal. Every year 12.8 million new jobseekers are entering the workforce, illiterate and unskilled for the most part. It’s not as if governments were unaware of the impending crisis. The 11th Plan document had noted that 80 per cent of new entrants to workforce

have no opportunity for skill training. Although over 12 million new jobseekers were entering the workforce every year, the training capacity is for just 3.1 million per annum or an insignificant 2 per cent. Compare this with the developed world: skill training extends to 96 per cent of the workforce in South Korea, 75 per cent in Germany and 80 per cent in Japan. And there is another vital difference between India and these economies: the bulk of the labour force in India, about 93 per cent, works in the unorganised sector and has no formal training.

Take the case of Bihar where the absence of formal training is egregious. A 2013 study on skill development commissioned by the state government has found that of the 40 million young people in the age group of 15-29 years, only 0.3 per cent were receiving formal vocational training at the time of the survey, while another 0.2 per cent said they had at some time received formal training. For the rest, 1-2 per cent reported they had been through some kind of non-formal vocational training. The only thing that appears to work for the young in Bihar is the garage-style training shops that dot the hinterland, run by ustads (reputed teachers) who have worked in oil-rich West Asian countries and most commonly provide training as welders, electricians and fitters.

Although policymakers have been talking of the coming demographic dividend since the late 1990s, it is clearly an issue that has not kept them awake at night despite the immensity of the problem. While the NDA government of the BJP did nothing during its tenure, the UPA administration got into the act only in its second term. A policy on skill development was formulated only in 2009, some eight months after the Prime Minister’s National Council on Skill Development was constituted in July 2008 along with a National Skill Development Coordination Board headed by the deputy chairperson of the Planning Commission.

Heavy expenditure, ineffective outcome

But matters appear to have been moving too slowly for the government’s comfort. In January 2011, it appointed S Ramadorai, former CEO of leading software company TCS who continues to be its non-executive vice-chairperson, as adviser to the prime minister for the National Skill Development Council, with the rank of a Cabinet minister.

 

We are looking at a scary scenario because it is not easy managing such a massive exercise— SANTOSH MEHROTRA, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, INSTITUTE OF APPLIED MANPOWER RESEARCH

It also committed Rs 1,745 crore to the joint venture NSDC. It is not clear what kind of funding is coming from the private sector which has put in 51 per cent of the Rs 10-crore equity capital of the corporation, the rest being contributed by the government. The private equity partners comprise the three apex business chambers—CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM—and seven industry-specific associations, each of them holding a 5.1 per cent stake. More recently, the finance ministry announced two tranches of Rs 1,000 crore each for the STAR (Standard Train Assess and Reward) scheme in August last year. This scheme, on an average, will provide a monetary reward of Rs 10,000 to students who undergo skills training and qualify after assessment by an independent agency appointed by the relevant sector skill council.

The STAR scheme is one of the largest outcome-based, incentive-driven skill development schemes and has been scaled up to enrol over 360,000 candidates. “We are working with all the stakeholders to bridge the gap between candidates trained, certified and rewarded by scaling up our pool of assessors,” explains Dilip Chenoy, CEO and managing director of NSDC. To date, Rs 6.5 crore has been disbursed to 6,490 candidates and NSDC is trying to get more banks to participate in the scheme.

Although there is no consolidated figure of the spending on vocational training, a Planning Commission source estimates that the Central ministries together spend around Rs 23,000 crore currently while the states’ expenditure is another Rs 7,000 crore. This is a considerable sum which produces just about 5 million vocationally trained people. “This is a very ineffective system. For 500 million are we going to increase the spending by 10 or 100 times?” asks Santosh Mehrotra, director-general of the Institute of Applied Manpower Research, Delhi.

A consequence of the sudden push on skill development has been a scramble for numbers. With more Central ministries being pressed into the drive—traditionally, only the ministries of labour and human resources development have been engaged in training—and states, too, pushing ahead with their own missions.

We are just three years old. But we have laid the groundwork for an exponential growth in skill creation—DILIP CHENOY, CEO AND MD, NATIONAL SKILL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

 

Close watchers of the unfolding scenario say the chaos is being compounded by multiple training providers registering with multiple ministries across different states, thus leading to an artificial pumping up of the figures. According to Mukti Sharma, chairman of Gram Tarang, the skilling ecosystem is passing through “irrational exuberance resulting in outcome hallucination and numbers deception”. Gram Tarang, one of the earliest partners of NSDC, provides skill training in some of the poorest districts of Odisha which are listed as being in the grip of the Maoists. His contention is that none of the claims made by the different agencies is being monitored or audited.

It was to bring some coherence into the sector that in June 2013, the government decided on another organisational shake-up. It set up the National Skill Development Agency (NSDA) as an autonomous body to coordinate the skill development efforts of the government and the private sector and to ensure that national targets are met. NSDA subsumed all of the earlier institutions barring NSDC, but with Ramadorai continuing to head both organisations.

What has been achieved so far? With just nine years left to meet the targets, it does seem like Mission Impossible. NSDC, which has a target of skilling 150 million people by 2022, has been able to skill just 1.35 million youths in the past 3.5 years. Although it promises an exponential growth in the next few years it is difficult to see how it can ramp up its output to at least 16.6 million every year for the next nine years. By its own admission it has created capacity to skill just 75 million over the next decade.

India has the world’s largest

labour force and yet service and manufacturing industries are facing acute shortage of skilled people

This is woefully short of the target but as Chenoy points out: “We are just three years old. But we have created the quality framework and occupation standards for different job roles, across 17 sectors. More are in process. This would lead to standardisation and ensure quality of vocational training programmes across the country.” It has developed National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF), a quality assurance framework, and also set up 29 Sector Skill Councils which lay down occupational standards according to levels of knowledge, skills and aptitude. This has cleared the huge confusion across states as to what constitutes skills in different trades and occupations.

As for the government, it has a sharper peak to scale. Together, 23 ministries and departments have to ramp up their training programmes to meet a target of skilling 350 million people by 2022. That is about 39 million each year. Their combined capacity for vocational training, however, is just 8.7 million a year. No one is clear as to how the vast numbers are to be met and it is likely there will be some fudging of figures. For instance, the Ministry of Agriculture, which had set itself a target of skilling 1.2 million during 2013-14 financial year, is already claiming it has exceeded the target and skilled over 1.56 million at the end of January. No details have been forthcoming.

One figure alone is enough to explain how nearly impossible the skills target is. To meet the 500 million figures the country requires 45,000 trainees to be certified and graduated every day for the next 10 years! Currently, there are less than 50,000 trainers.

Limited window of opportunity

Naturally there is a lot of scepticism if even a quarter of the numbers can be achieved. “We are at the midpoint of our demographic dividend. This window of opportunity is available to India only till 2040,” points out Mehrotra. A demographic dividend of this nature comes but once in the lifetime of a nation, and the economist believes India has not been moving fast enough to reap the benefits, unlike China which rode the wave of its demographic dividend.

The government, he says, has done nothing in the vocational education (VE) space in the past five years. While the 11th plan stressed the need to take vocational courses to schools, just 10,000 schools have introduced it. More important, it has done little to modernise and expand the network of industrial training institutes (ITIs), which are the backbone of the VE system. Government ITIs have increased to just over 2,200, while there has been a boom in private sector institutes which have quadrupled to over 8,000. “Who is regulating these private institutes? Is industry satisfied with their quality?” he demands.

Since PPPs were thought to be the best way to tone up ailing ITIs, the government had entered into an agreement to upgrade 1,396 ITIs. The total cost of this exercise was estimated at Rs 3,550 crore. But, according to CII sources, only 310 ITIs have come under the scheme, and “about 200 of these are doing well while the rest are in

poor shape”. What appears to be working better is the upgradation of 500 ITIs into “Centres of Excellence” with the World Bank funding to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore, part of the costs being shared between the Centre and the states.

Manish Sabherwal, chairperson of TeamLease, one of the top recruitment and training companies, thinks it is a mixed bag on the skilling drive. “More has been done in the past five years than in the previous 20 years,” he says, “but we need to move faster. If we are to reap the demographic

dividend we need to be ready for an influx of at least 10 million into the workforce every month for the next 20 years and that is a tall order. For this we need to prepare, repair, and match.”

If India wants to reap the

demographic dividend, it needs to be ready for an influx of 1 million joining the workforce every month for the next 20 years

Sabherwal was part of the prime minister’s National Council on Skill Development and is upset that the government has “failed to pluck even the low hanging fruit” to refashion the skills and jobs landscape. One such would have been an amendment of the Apprentice Act, which is rigid and burdensome and has stifled the growth of formal apprentices. There has been no movement on the amendment Bill, which was introduced in Parliament in 2006. “To understand the importance of this,” says Sabherwal, look at countries where apprentices flourish. China has 20 million formal apprentices, Japan 10 million and Germany 3 million. India has just 300,000.”

Worrying social fallout

So, if the country’s skilling mission hasn’t made a dent on the problem what is the prognosis? “If we are not able to provide a proper education and jobs it will lead to frustration and social unrest,” warns Alakh N Sharma, director of the Institute of Human Development, Delhi. “Just think of what will happen in the next 10 years. There’s going to be an explosion”.

As aspirations of the youth rise, the lack of any employment may lead to increasing urban crimes and violence, according to the available social science research. In fact, there has been a tendency to ascribe the increasing rise in urban violence, particularly against women, to the lack of employment among the perpetrators.

Craig Jeffrey, professor of development geography at the University of Oxford who has been mapping the lives of unemployed youth in Meerut, believes the social fallout will be complex. Known for his book Timepass in which he maps the lives of the educated unemployed in the Uttar Pradesh town, Jeffrey told Down To Earth that it is “nonsense” to stereotype responses to youth unemployment.

“On the one hand, there is the prospect of lots of unemployed youth moving into semi-legal and sometimes “predatory” (corrupt) activity within the informal economy, for example running tutorial institutes and fake degree colleges and therefore becoming complicit in the reproduction of the system that created them as educated unemployed youth.” On the other hand, “educated unemployed youth are often involved in positive action, for example as whistleblowers with respect to corruption, social entrepreneurs, and ‘motivators’ in their local communities”.

In either case there is much to worry about if instead of a demographic dividend the youth bulge becomes a liability.

Missing link

While the government has recently started pumping in money for its skilling mission, experts fear it might do little good as the country faces an acute shortage of qualified trainers

Women’s participation in India’s

labour TARANG workforce is a dismal 31 per cent, the lowest in South Asia after Pakistan

Kamran Alam has worked in Saudi Arabia for nearly six years as a quality officer at a company called Metal Service. On Cinema Road in Bihar’s Gopalganj district, he has started a training institute to provide skills to unemployed youths of Gopalganj and Siwan districts.

The nameless institute–everyone refers to it as Kamran ustaad’s school–employs retired technical professionals who have returned from gulf countries to impart skills of welder, fabricators, mason, electricians and quality control.

In these basic training centres, lectures are held in dingy classrooms lit by candles or battery-operated lamps in power-starved localities. There are no girl students, no toilets; water is provided in earthen pots. Posters of organisations and companies that will give certificate after the completion of the course are plastered on the walls. In Bihar’s boondocks, this is as good as it gets. Young school leavers cannot hope to get better training because the government’s Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) are for the most part fossilised. In all there are 55 ITIs and as many private Industrial Training Centres in the state.

For the 80-odd students who are ready to overlook the severe infrastructure constraints to flock to Kamran ustaad’s dimly lit training centre, it has an unbeatable USP: it helps them to find jobs in oil-rich West Asian countries. Junaid Ahmed, 20, one of the students, says, “Ustaad’s practical education will help me gain employment in Saudi Arabia. I will then send riyals home to my parents like my uncle does.”

Kamran claims that nearly all his best skilled students are waiting for their passports. “Once they get the passport, they will easily get a job in one of the companies in the Gulf,” he says.

According to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Bihar is the third largest state in the country with emigrant workforce of 50,227 persons working overseas. A major part of this workforce is in gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, UAE and Kuwait. Nearly, 70 per cent of this workforce is from Siwan and Gopalganj. RBI statistics show that Siwan and Gopalganj bring in foreign remittances of nearly Rs 120 crore annually.

Jugad technology for employment

More than 60 technical institutes that run in two-or-three rooms are handled by professionals who are either retired or on a sabbatical.

Ali Imam, who teaches electrical fittings, says it doesn’t matter that the institute has no machinery or equipment of its own. Students get a description of the kind of machinery they would be expected to work on and told how to run them. “Oil companies are the prime employers in West Asia and these companies have the kind of sophisticated equipment that government- or privately-owned institutes can never afford,” says he.

In training and selection for employment, there is no involvement of government, except to provide passport. A visit to the Siwan ITI proves the point that students prefer ustaad-style training centres.

Rajkumar Thakur, principal of the ITI, confesses that 20 per cent of the seats lie vacant in the institute. On account of the poor interest, the ITI is planning to close the dressmaking course that was recently started in the women’s wing. But on the plus side, it managed to get its first campus placements when Tata Motors hired 39 of its students this year.

Girls, who have been missing in large numbers from the workforce in Bihar, are now taking to technical education, but in a trickle. In the Patna ITI, Neha Kumari and Puja Kumari are the only two girls in the swarm of boys. Coming from extremely poor families, Neha and Puja have their own compulsions for joining the instrumentation course. “We know that the placement here is poor, but our parents can’t afford to send us to other states for technical education,” says Puja. But job opportunities are opening up selectively. For instance, girls attending Raymond’s Tailoring Centre are getting instant placement. Sanna Praveen and Afsana Praveen, who graduated last month, say they already have four placement offers.

India needs five million trainers to make its skilling mission a success. We don’t even have 50,000. They are talking nonsense when they say 500 million can be skilled by 2022—MUKTI MISHRA, CHAIRPERSON, GRAM TARANG

 

In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, too, things are looking up for ITIs as companies begin to take a hand in the machinery course and training that these institutes offer. The state has about 328 polytechnic institutes, in addition to the 1,590 ITIs and a host of smaller vocational training centres. Even if the entire capacities of the private sector are included, Uttar Pradesh’s training can only cater to 400,000 youths. “This is less than a quarter of the demand which is roughly for 2 million seats. That’s why our young people go to private institutes,” says Vikas Gothawal, special secretary and director of the UP Skill Development Mission.

But all this will make no difference because a crucial part of the scheme is missing: qualified vocational education trainers. Mukti Mishra, chairperson of Gram Tarang, one of the earliest NGO partners of the NSDC, says India needs five million trainers to make its skilling mission a success. “We don’t even have 50,000. They are talking nonsense when they say 500 million can be skilled by 2022.”

Mishra ’s organisation now runs vocational centres in the backward and leftwing extremism-affected districts of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. To date Gram Tarang has trained over 40,000 young men and women from the socially and economically challenged sections of society and has managed to place 80 per cent of them, he claims. One of the success stories of Gram Tarang is that of Pratima Haro, a tribal girl from Odisha’s Sambalpur district, who worked as farm labour before joining the industrial stitching course at Gram Tarang’s Employability Training Services, the vocational wing of Centurion University of Technology and Management in Paralakhemundi in Odisha’s Gajapati district. Pratima, who was quickly picked up by a Chennai-based garment manufacturer, counts herself lucky although the wages are a pittance.

The issue that is worrying everyone, as it does Mishra, is the “desperate shortage of trainers”. Mishra thinks institutional capacity is not being built into the skilling mission, which he describes as “a fabulous concept that ignores certain ground realities”. He also insists that skill development should be institutionalised and not corporatised. Mishra says small vocational training centres such as his are being bullied by big corporate partners who are laying down rules that suit them, and NSDC, inadvertently, is allowing them a free run.

The bigger problem, though, is awareness. In villages, NGOs that run skilling centres have to undertake systematic mobilisation campaigns to bring in the students. “One cannot sit in a metropolis and expect to mobilise rural youth through an advertisement or two. It requires leg work and strenuous effort to convince parents and opinion leaders in villages to allow their children to acquire a skill and migrate to the cities.”

This is the big challenge as most of the jobs are in the industrial belts and require young people to relocate to distant states. Quite often young people, specially girls, throw up their jobs and return to homes, unable to take the loneliness of life in a different setting. Besides, the wages are a pittance. Girls from Odisha’s tribal belt working as sewing machine operators in Bengaluru’s garment factories earn around Rs 7,000 a month, leaving them little money to send back home. Acquiring skills appears to be a small part of the struggle for the young. Getting decent work with decent pay is the hardest bit.

Where are the jobs?

The rising graph of unemployment among educated youth will be one of the major challenges to India’s growth

In a decade or so, 40 per cent of

all girls will be matriculates, substantially adding to a cohort of educated youths who are being denied job opportunities

The big question mark is over jobs. India’s ability to make the most of its favourable demographics will depend as much on skilling the people as creating job opportunities for the additional millions who will be swelling the labour force by 2022. Converting growth into employment has not been India’s strong point and it is here that the challenge will be particularly tough.

The recently released “The India Labour and Employment Report 2014” by the Institute for Human Development (IHD) has some useful pointers to what lies ahead. It says that although overall unemployment is low, at a ridiculous 3 per cent, the problem of youth unemployment, particularly that of educated youth, has become a major concern. About 30 per cent of the total unemployed in 2011-12 were graduates and above, up from 21 per cent in 2004-05. It computed the rate of unemployment among graduates, and surprisingly among the technically trained at around 18 per cent.

But this is not an India phenomenon alone. The world over joblessness is growing and more young people are becoming idle than ever before. According to estimates by the OECD, around 26 million youths in the 15-24 age group in developed countries are NEET, that is, not in employment, education or training. It says the rate of youth unemployment has shot up by 30 per cent since 2007. But estimates of worldwide unemployment among the young by other organisations are more dismaying. The ILO puts the figure of the idle young at 75 million while World Bank surveys show that close to 262 million young people in emerging economies are hunting for jobs.

Increasing joblessness among the educated in India is a serious worry. This will haunt us in the future— ALAKH N SHARMA, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

 

Economist Alakh N Sharma, director of IHD, warns that rising graph of unemployment among the educated in India is a serious worry. “This will haunt us in the future,” says Sharma, who points to a more problematic issue: unemployment among educated women in some states is as high as 55 per cent. In a decade or so, 40 per cent of all girls will be matriculates, adding to a cohort of educated youths who are being denied job opportunities.

Since school enrolment has become universal, the larger numbers of the educated youth will pose a multitude of problems. They won’t want to work in the farms or under MGNREGS and this force will have huge implications for resource allocations, for transport, for the environment. The youth bulge has to be factored in carefully into all development plans, says the lead author of the IHD report.

And there is an alarming forecast from credit rating agency Crisil. It says due to insufficient employment creation in industry and services sectors, more workers will become locked in low-wage agricultural jobs. “We estimate that 12 million people will join the agriculture workforce by 2018-19, compared with a decline of 37 million in agriculture employment between 2004-05 and 2011-12.”

One consequence of the lack of decent job opportunities is that the young have been pushed into partial or disguised unemployment. Even those who believe they are skilled, such as Arun Kumar. The 25-year-old from Warangal in Andhra Pradesh is a commerce graduate with a diploma in marketing from a management institute. After the company he was working for folded up, Kumar has taken up a variety of jobs, from cold calling to peddling products at petrol stations. “The work is poorly paid and dead end,” says a hugely frustrated Kumar, who is not sure if the economic recovery will make it worth his while to study further and seek employment later. But for him, the bad news is that jobs in India grew by just 2.2 per cent between 2010 and 2012.

An ILO report, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2013: A generation at risk, highlights the major challenges regarding the quality of available work for young people in countries such as India. “In developing economies where labour market institutions, including social protection, are weak, large numbers of young people continue to face a future of irregular employment and informality. Young

workers often receive below-average wages and are engaged in work for which they are either overqualified or underqualified,” it says.

The key issue is whether there will be decent jobs for the young of India. Job data culled from the NSSO report for 2011-12 released in February shows that since 2000s employment in trade, hotels and restaurants rose from 36 million to 53 million. But these were low paying jobs even during a period of high economic growth. Between 2004-05 and 2011-12 when GDP growth peaked to 8.5 per cent per annum, employment grew by just 0.5 per cent annually. About 92 per cent of India’s 470 million workers are informal workers, forced to take up jobs that are tenuous, are poorly paid and offer no social security.

The main reason for India’s lopsided labour market is that the manufacturing sector, which accounts for just 16 per cent of the GDP, does not offer the bulk of employment as in other growing economies such as China’s. When Chinese economic policies drew a chunk of labour away from agriculture they were placed in manufacturing jobs. In India, 37 million have left agriculture but have failed to find a cushion in industrial jobs. Besides, the service sector, which contributes the bulk of the GDP (58 per cent), provides only 26 per cent of the employment. India’s growth and employment have been skewed by its unusual model of development. While China and the tiger economies of East Asia were focused on expanding their manufacturing sector, India concentrated on the service sector. As economist Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, has been pointing out India’s growth pattern has been the opposite of what theory would predict. “Instead of being determined by a comparative advantage in labour-intensive manufacturing, employing its enormous pool of unskilled labour, India’s trade has focused on skill-intensive exports to the US, particularly of IT and software services.”

While acknowledging that this has shackled growth, government is now pinning its hopes on the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) to spur growth through the manufacturing and double employment potential in seven years. DMIC is envisaged as the backbone for creating a global manufacturing and investment destination. But until that happens the outlook on employment remains grim. Sharma explains that the service sector has a lower multiplier effect than manufacturing where job creation results in less inequality. But there have been plus points, too, which augur well. The biggest positive has been the growth in real wages of over 3 per cent per year on average between 1983 and 2012. Labour productivity, too, has also shown an increase.

By 2030, India’s workforce will be larger than that of China’s and most of the new entrants will be in the urban areas. Sharma says, “This calls for planned urban growth and effective labour market policies. Failure to do so can be disastrous.”

Comments

Excellent article.Vocational education (education based on occupation or employment), also known ascareer and technical education (CTE) or technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is education that prepares people for specific trades, crafts and careers at various levels from a trade, a craft, technician, or a professional position in engineering,accountancy, nursing, medicine, architecture, pharmacy, law etc. Craft vocations are usually based on manual or practical activities, traditionally non-academic, related to a specific trade, occupation, or vocation. It is sometimes referred to as technical education as the trainee directly develops expertise in a particular group of techniques.Vocational education may be classified as teaching procedural knowledge. This can be contrasted with declarative knowledge, as used in education in a usually broader scientific field, which might concentrate on theory and abstract conceptual knowledge, characteristic of tertiary education. Vocational education can be at the secondary, post-secondary level,further education level and can interact with the apprenticeship system. Increasingly, vocational education can be recognised in terms of recognition of prior learning and partial academic credit towards tertiary education (e.g., at a university) as credit; however, it is rarely considered in its own form to fall under the traditional definition of higher education.Vocational education is related to the age-old apprenticeship system of learning. Apprenticeships are

designed for many levels of work from manual trades to high knowledge work.Our school education system offers combinations of courses in the higher secondary level such that a student by choosing these groups can pursue engineering or medicine, even though these two streams call for entirely different aptitudes. The ideal higher secondary system would orient the student towards evaluating their aptitude and choosing to pursue one of the two streams. This would ensure that the chosen stream matches their aptitude. This is not happening now.In the absence of proper orientation in the system, parents and their wards follow an inappropriate procedure while selecting their branch of study in the college. During counselling, we notice that the selection of a branch of study is based on the following: (1) The most sought-after branch in counselling, (2) The branch having good job opportunities as seen by the previous year placements, (3) Parental pressure and (4) Peer pressure.This is not the right practice. The correct way will be to spend some time assessing one’s interest for a particular branch and check if it matches well with the aptitude one has and the chosen branch of study.It is because of such practices that we face problems of employability and dissatisfaction in existing jobs, which can lead to high turnover rates, low productivity and increase in the stress level of employees.India produces 50 lakh graduates every year. Experts say with poor English language skills, computer training and

analytical ability, making the cut from the classroom to the boardroom is not easy.According to Labour Bureau’s “Third Annual Employment & Unemployment Survey 2012-13” released on (November 29, 13), unemployment rate amongst illiterate youth is lower than educated youth. A comparison with the earlier report by labour bureau shows that the unemployment level has increased during 2012-2013 over 2011-2012. 

While unemployment rate among illiterate youth is lowest with 3.7 per cent for the age group 15-29 years at all India level in 2012-2013, the unemployment rate in the same category was reported at 1.2 per cent in 2011-2012 report. 

Similarly, the unemployment amongst the graduate youth that happened to be at 19.4 per cent in 2011-2012 increased to 32 per cent during 2012-2013. 

As stated in the report, the unemployment rate amongst the educated youths reportedly increased with increase in their education level. (Amongst all age groups viz. 15-24 years, 18-29 years and 15-29 years) 

The Labour Bureau survey further shows that every one person out of three persons who is holding a graduation degree and above in the age group 15-29 years is found to be unemployed. 

The need of the hour is practical training at all levels of Higher education.Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India2 April 2014

How central Indian tribes are coping with climate change impacts

Author(s): Aparna Pallavi  @AparnaPallavi1 

Date:Jan 10, 2014

Faced with crop losses because of erratic rainfall and extreme weather, tribal farmers of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh turn to bewar and penda forms of cultivation that keeps them nourished all times of the year, but government agencies are bent on rooting out these farm practices

Tribal farmers say penda and

bewar involve no cost or loan, are less laborious, give an assured crop from land considered inferior, and yield more

nutritious and varied food than conventional cultivation (Photos by Aparna Pallavi)

Hariaro Bai Deoria should have been a worried person this year—an untimely spell of rain late last October flattened her paddy crop, and her family would have been facing the prospect of a year without food. Surprisingly, the matriarch aged 65 is not that worried. “I still have enough grain left from last year’s bewar to last us six months. And we got a good crop this year, too.”

Hariaro Bai is referring to a form of shift cultivation that has been outlawed under the Indian Forest Act of 1927, but continues to play an important role in providing food security to the Baiga tribals living in the Mandla and Dindori districts of Madhya Pradesh. A similar form of cultivation calledpenda is practised by the primitive Madia tribe in the hills of Bhamragadh in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra. Despite their illegal status, bewar andpenda cultivation practices continue to thrive among these tribes because they involve no cost or loan, are less laborious, give an assured crop from land considered inferior, and yield more nutritious and varied food than conventional cultivation. Bewar cultivation is also practised by a significant proportion of the tribal population in Chhattisgarh.

In recent years, tribal farmers who had converted to conventional agriculture are returning to bewar and penda cultivation in the face of increasingly erratic rainfall patterns and crop losses as climate change makes its presence felt. This cultivation is much more resilient to environmental stress, and gives an assured yield in both low and excess rainfall conditions.

Activists working with tribal communities say that government agencies are mostly either ignorant about these practices or are against them without any proper scientific evidence to support such censure. Madhya Pradesh’s State Climate Action Plan, for instance, calls for policies to manage climate risks for sustainable productivity; the state also has a millet cultivation project, but no government agency has taken steps to study or protect this singularly low-risk cultivation practice that has the potential to meet the food-security needs of  a large tribal population in the state. In Maharastra, which does not even have a climate plan, government agencies are not even aware that such a practice exists, says Ajay Dolke, of non-profit Srujan in Nagpur.

All weather, assured yields

This year, heavy spells of rains and a prolonged monsoon have caused crop damage across the country, but a visit to the bewar plots of the Baigas in Madhya Pradesh shows all signs of a bumper crop harvest. “This was a great year for kutki (little millet), our main bewar crop,” says Lamtibai Rathuria of village Chapwar in Dindori district who has a 2 acre (0.8 hectare) plot, pointing to the heavy heads of the plants bent with grain. “The paddy is gone, but the bewar is safe.”

The situation is the same in village Bhangadi in the Bhamragadh hills in Maharashtra. Mangru Karme Pungati, a Madia tribe farmer who grows both paddy and penda crops, informs that about half the village’s paddy crop was lost because of erratic rains. “It is our kohla (Madia term forkutki) that will keep us alive this year,” he says.

A mix of millets, corn, legumes and vegetables are grown in a single plot by tribal

farmers practising shift cultivationLamtibai explains how differently bewarand paddy respond to weather conditions: “If there is less rain, the paddy wilts, but the bewar gives a moderate yield. If there is excess rain, the paddy gets pests but the bewargives a bumper yield. If it rains at harvest time, water accumulates in the paddy farms and the grains rot. But since the bewar plots are on steep slopes, rainwater drains off and crop damage is very little.”

The only danger to bewar crops is sudden, heavy rainfall at the very start of the season because the seeds get washed away, explains Itwari Dewadia of village Talaidabra in Dindori district.  “But if there is gentle rain for the first week or so, the plants get properly rooted.

After that rainfall is no worry.”

In recent years, there have been repeated instances of monsoons starting late with sudden heavy showers; many villages lost their bewar seeds. Communities have adapted by setting up stronger seed networks between villages. “A decade or so back, if all farmers in a village lost their seeds,

they would give up. But now, we arrange to get seeds from other villages so that we can at least continue this cultivation the following year,” says Itwari. Non-profits like Mandla-based Nirmaan have also lent a helping hand in forming these seed networks.

Bewar crops avert starvation

Bewar comprises mixed cultivation. Baigas grow as many as eight to 10 varieties of millets, corn and five varieties of legumes in a single plot. Madias grow five to six millets, apart from three to four varieties of legumes. Indian sorrel, which provides greens as well as oilseeds, and several varieties of vegetables are also grown (see 'Security, variety, nutrition'). This mixed cultivation not only prevents pest attacks, but also protects against total crop loss.

It works in two ways. Baigas, who have highly developed methods of rainfall prediction (see 'Baiga weather science') alter the mix of crops according to expected rainfall. “This year we sowed more dongar kutkiand kaang (foxtail millet) rather than other millets, because these thrive in high rainfall,” says Tiharu Dhondia of village Garjan Beeja in Anuppur district, “When less rain is expected, we sow more mandia (finger millet),salhar (pearl millet variety) and jowar (sorghum).”

Madias do not have traditional knowledge of weather prediction, but they have arrived at a mix that works in all rainfall conditions. “We plant about 50 per cent kohla, and the remaining four millets make up the remaining 50 per cent,” says Pandu Samru Jetti of village Bhangadi. “With change in rainfall, the yields of individual crops rise and fall, but the overall yield remains stable.”

Tribals feel that bewar is vital for their survival.  Says Rama Chaitu Durwa of Binagunda village in the Bhamragadh hills where paddy cultivation was started only about four years back, “We are still only learning how to cultivate paddy. It will be years before we develop the skills. Also, we cannot eat paddy all year. We need our penda grain, which we like.”

“We can live without paddy, but without bewar we will starve,” says Lamtibai. “Paddy gives only grain—bewar gives grain, vegetables and legumes—everything we need.”

Absence of scientific research; fallacies abound

Surprisingly, while government agencies have gone to much trouble to root out this form of cultivation, no agency in either state has ever taken the trouble to actually undertake scientific study of its merits. Both O P Dube, principal scientist at the Regional Agriculture Research Station at Dindori, and G R Tidke, principal scientist at the Gadchiroli Krishi Vigyan Kendra, admit that while their organisations are opposed to this farming practice, there is no proper research work to back this stand. State policy on the subject appears to be driven by a predetermined mindset rather than facts. “There is no government decision and there are no projects undertaken to study this practice,”

says Tidke. “Anyway we are concerned with the masses, not little pockets,” he adds. Dube says that his organisation does not approve the principle of leaving land fallow. “We need to maximise yields, and that can only be done by taking two crops on all agricultural land each year,” he says.

The result is that there is a huge amount of misleading information doing the rounds in official circles regarding bewar and penda cultivation. The most popular myth is that this cultivation destroys forests, borne out by the misnomer “slash and burn cultivation”.

Tribal farmers trash this myth. “We only fell and burn the undergrowth, not big trees,” says elderly Gunthia Dewadia of Talaidabra village. “Felling large trees is very hard work, and burning them also burns the soil and makes it unfit for cultivation,” he says. Also, there is no reason to fell large trees as most families have three designated plots of land for cultivation, which they cultivate in a cycle for three years at a time, says Naresh Biswas, Mandla-based researcher from the non-profit Nirman, who has researched bewar cultivation for more than a decade. “After six years of being left fallow, these land parcels only have shrubs and young saplings.”

A second myth is that bewar cultivation, which is carried out in steep slopes, causes soil damage through erosion, but the fact is that this cultivation is till free, and hence far less intrusive than conventional agriculture. “We do not plough the land because that will loosen the soil and the crops will collapse,” says Itwari of village Talaidabra in Dindori district. “We just burn the undergrowth and sow seeds in the fertile layer of ash.” This kind of cultivation, says he, requires very low labour and hardly any equipment. “We do not need even hal bail (bullocks and plough)—a sickle, an axe and a khanti (crow-bar like tool) are enough.”

Climate change, revival, innovation

Another important government-sponsored myth about shifting cultivation is that most tribals have given it up long ago as outdated. Farmers disagree. Not only are bewar and penda cultivation practice thriving in the hilly parts of Central India, there is an active process of innovation on to adapt to changing circumstances.

What is more, faced with repeated losses in conventional cultivation of paddy and soybean, and the high cost of labour and inputs, farmers are returning to these methods. In Bhamragadh, the cost of labour for paddy cultivation is eating into the Madias’ precious bamboo felling wages—their only source of cash. Raju Chimma in Laheri village, whose parents gave up penda cultivation after migrating from Chhattisgarh, is trying to learn these skills now. “In the past five years, I lost three paddy crops because of erratic rains,” he explains. His young neighbour, Suresh Kudami, whose father-in-law took a Rs 25,000 loan for paddy, is planning to resurrect his abandoned penda plot next year. “My brother has already started cultivation on his share of the plot,” says he.

Tribal people say bewar and penda grains can be stored for years without spoiling

and that the surpluses in good years gives them a safety net for the lean onesIn Mandla in Madhya Pradesh, Gond tribals, who have no recent history of practising bewar cultivation, now want to take it up says Hiralal Sarote of Nirman. “Farmers from several villages have requested for seeds and guidance for starting cultivation on about 50 acres (one acre equals 0.4 hectare) next year,” he says. Ramratan Kulaste, sarpanch of village Benitola village in Mandla district, said he will start bewarcultivation on five acres next year. “I was amazed at the production in bewarplots I visited,” says he. “My village has a lot of hill slopes without much forest cover which are lying fallow. I hope others will also want to start cultivation.”

This process is also intricately tied up with give-and-take of innovation between communities. In Bowna village in Dindori district, farmers had converted their bewar land to commercial pigeon-pea cultivation about a decade back. But in the last two years, they have switched back to bewarwith seeds from Nirman. “We plant a mix of arhar (pigeon pea) and bewarseeds for food and cash,” says Ramlal Rathuria, resident of Bowna village. “Our paddy crops are failing almost every alternate year, and market food is costly and inferior.” On the flip side, many villages are adopting Bowna’s technique to increase the pigeon-pea content of thebewars to earn some cash income without risking their food security.

Similarly, with shrinking land holdings, communities are innovating to reduce the phenomenon of land being left fallow. In Chapwar village in Dindori district, elderly Ramla Khohadia has just one bewar plot. Unable to shift, he cultivates high-biomass cash crops like ramteela (niger seed) on his land on alternate years. “In the next year, I burn the biomass and plantbewar crops,” says he. “The yield is good, and I get enough food for 18 months. Many people with less land are now resorting to this technique.”

“If government agencies had bothered to study this cultivation instead of turning away from it, they could have helped with the adaptation process,” says Biswas of non-profit Nirman. “Their apathy is forcing communities to struggle with their own limited resources.”

Insecure rights

Bewar and penda cultivation is carried out entirely in forests, and so the land do not have status of agricultural land. To complicate matters, no government department in either state has tried to get any estimate of the area of land involved or population dependent on it.

Non-profits, however, estimate that both could be considerable. Bewar is being practised in a major way by about 50-60 villages in Anuppur and Dindori districts of Madhya Pradesh and penda in about 30 villages in Bhamragadh in Maharashtra. “At least six villages in the Aboojh Maad area, part of which is in Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district, are totally dependent on penda, and the rest get most of their food from it,” says Ajay Dolke of non-profit Srujan, which works among Madias. “It is also practised on a smaller scale in nearly all 109 villages in Bhamragadh. It is very likely also practiced in Madia-dominated tehsils like Etpalli and Sironcha in Gadchiroli district.” Apart from this, the Pahadi Korwa tribe in Chhattisgarh also depends on bewar for most of their food needs, informs Biswas.

Meanwhile, lack of status and estimates contribute to land insecurity forbewar farmers. Forest Rights Act (FRA), which has had a limited success at best in giving land rights to forest dwellers in general, has not succeeded at all when it comes to these land parcels. In Dindori and Anuppur, applications under FRA for fallow land were rejected on grounds of there being no evidence of cultivation. In Bhamragadh, the administration on its own gave FRA claims on paddy land in several villages, with strict admonition to abandon penda cultivation. “They are not willing to hear of claims on penda land,” says Rama Chaitu Durwa of village Binagunda who got five acres (two hectare) under FRA.

Tribals have also faced persecution for practising bewar. In Talaidabra, people were beaten up and arrested for bewar cultivation in 2005, and live in fear ever since. In Chapwar, Lamtibai and her family have lived in fear the whole of this crop season. “Forest officials were threatening to destroy our crop,” says she.

Tribals are now turning to the habitat rights clause in the FRA to ensure rights on this land. In Bhamragadh, an application to this effect was filed collectively by all 109 villages in April this year. Says Dolke of Srujan who facilitated the process, “The livelihood process of the Madias is a complex one involving different cultivation techniques, hunting and gathering. They can’t survive without habitat rights which give communities a comprehensive right over the entire resource base, not just cultivated plots.” In Dindori, the non-profit National Institute for Women, Child and Youth Development (NIWCYD) is preparing the 55 Baiga villages known as Baiga Chak to apply for habitat rights.

As the world reels under the impact of climate change and increased food security concerns, cultivation practices like bewar and penda could very well hold the key to food security for the forest-dwelling poor of central India. Activists say it is time government agencies starts studying and supporting them instead of driving them to extinction. 

Baiga weather science 

Baiga tribals have quite a well-developed system for rainfall prediction, according to which they alter the timing and composition of their crops. In bewar cultivation, sowing has to be done just before the first gentle showers of early monsoon. This makes accurate prediction of these first showers crucial. Baigas in Dindori district do it with the help of a local tuber known as baichandi kanda. “We plant it in our badi(vegetable garden) in summer, and when it sends its first shoots up through the ground, we know that rains will be here in a week or 10 days,” says elderly Nankibai Dhondia of village Garjanbeeja. “That is the signal for us to start burning the undergrowth to prepare for sowing.”

Another signal for the coming monsoon is the peepul tree. “When the tree has shed all its old leaves and the process of sprouting new leaves is complete, we know that rains are about two-three weeks away,” says Nankibai. These two nature signals taken together usually give a sufficiently accurate estimate, says she.

The proportion of different millets to be sown in the bewar is decided through weather prediction too. “In late summer,” says Taini Sarjamia of Bhalu Khodra village in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, “A tiny insect called ghunghuti appears in droves in the open spaces. When there are too many of those, they get in our eyes. That is when we know that it will be a heavy rainfall year, and plant more kutki.”

 

 

Security, variety, nutrition 

The Baigas of Madhya Pradesh sow a mixture of eight to 10 millet varieties in their bewar plots. These include several varieties of kutki(little millet), two of kaang (foxtail millet), salhar (pearl millet variety),jowar (sorghum), mandia (finger millet) and sama kodai (barnyard millet). Kodai (kodo millet) is sown separately on tilled land. Purpuri(amaranthus) serves for both grain and green vegetable, while amadi(Indian sorrel) provides green leaves, oilseeds and flowers for sherbet in summer. Legumes include arahar (pigeon pea) for both food and cash and moong (green gram), urad (black gram), kurthi (horse gram), and rawans and jhunjhru (cow pea varieties). A variety of vegetables including cucumber, beans, local tomatoes and brinjals are also sown as part of the mix.

Madias in Maharashtra sow lesser number of millets, but a larger variety of beans. They also grow pumpkins and other vines within thependa plot. This mixed crop not only gives them a varied and nutritious diet but also protects local agro-biodiversity. Bewar grain has added advantages, inform farmers. For one, they are more filling. “Six to seven quintals of bewar millets last my family for the

whole year,” says Lamtibai Rathuria of village Chapwar. “But a similar quantity of dhaan (paddy) gets eaten up in four to five months.” Secondly, grains like kodo and kutki can be stored for many years without spoiling. Kodo, say farmers, stays good for more than 50 years, while kutki can last up to 30. “We can store our surpluses in good years for as long as we want, and they form a safety net for the lean ones,” says Lamtibai.

CommentsLocal ingenuity. Let Scientists look into such practices.Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India2 April 2014

Climate change: IPCC report warns of looming food crisis

Author(s): Arnab Pratim Dutta  @soulmoksha 

Date:Mar 31, 2014

The report—Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability—says erratic and extreme weather, like severe droughts, floods and heat waves will affect food production across the world

Even at just 1°C of warming there

are negative impacts for major crops like wheat, rice and corn; for India and China, the prediction is that stress on staple

wheat crop would increase (Photo: Pradip Saha)

Growing food could become harder which could lead to a food crisis says the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The apex body on climate change science released its report on March 31, 2014 in Yokohama Japan. It paints a very disturbing picture for the years to come. This report—Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability—has been prepared by the Working Group II of the IPCC and details the impacts of climate change that have already occurred, the future risks from a changing climate, and scope of reducing these risks.

Food production will be affected because of environmental stresses resulting from climate change, the report warns. Erratic and extreme weather, like severe droughts, floods and heat waves will affect food production across the world.

“Global temperature increases of ~4°C or more above late-20th-century levels, combined with increasing food demand, would pose large risks to food security globally and regionally,” the report says.

The report finds that even at just 1°C of warming there are negative impacts for major crops like wheat, rice and corn," says Lidy Nacpil, director of Jubilee South APMDD, a campaign group in the Philippines and a member of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.

For India and China, the prediction is that the stress on staple wheat crop would increase negatively, affecting the overall food security of the continent. There is consensus that post 2030, the overall food production will decrease, but certain regions could also see a small rise in food production.

Water stress, floods

There will be extreme stress on water, says the new report. Factors such as erratic precipitation, runoff from shrinking glaciers and thawing permafrost are changing hydrological systems and “affecting water resources both in terms of quantity and quality,” says the new report. Water, both on the surface and underground, will reduce significantly with increasing green house gas concentration, leading to higher tension among competing users. 

As earth gets warmer, impacts of it will begin to aggravate the world's eco-system. In a business as usual (BAU) scenario, there is a high probability that global temperatures will exceed 4°C. With every degree of warming, adapting to change will become harder. People, especially in the poor countries, will face heightened risk of submergence from riverine flooding. Those living on the coasts will find themselves losing territory to seawaters. Those dependent on marine environment will also find it difficult as ocean acidification will alter the marine ecosystem.

Impacts on human health, risks of extinction

Climate change will also affect human health, says the report. “Throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions, especially in developing countries with low income, as compared to a baseline without climate change,” it says. Casualty from heat waves and fires will increase. Food unavailability will lead to malnutrition. There will higher occurrence of vector-borne diseases. The only positive aspect to emerge out of the report is on cold-related mortality. The report also says that “a large fraction of both terrestrial and freshwater species face increased extinction risk under projected climate change during and beyond the 21st century, especially as climate change interacts with other stressors, such as habitat modification, over-exploitation,

pollution, and invasive species”. While some species can adapt to a warmer planet, they may not be able to do it sufficiently fast to avoid extinction.

Economic losses

The economic loss from global warming is hard to calculate because of a number of factors and is often disputed, notes the report. However, the report notes that anything between 0.2 to 2 per cent loss to annual global income can be forecast in case there is a 2°C increase in temperature increase. There is not enough scientific literature to predict losses arising from temperature increase beyond 3°C, says the report.

“We live in an era of man-made climate change,” says Vicente Barros, co-chair of Working Group II. “In many cases, we are not prepared for climate-related risks that we already face. Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future.”

CommentsThere is enough for anybody's need but not for everybody's Greed - Mahatma Gandhiji.Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India2 April 2014