1. India’s migrant workers need better policies

GS-2: Government Policies and Interventions for Development in various sectors and Issues arising out of their Design and Implementation.

 

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CONTEXT

1. NITI Aayog’s well-intentioned draft report fails to address the policy distortions at the root of migrant workers’ issues that cannot be overlooked.

 

NITI AAYOG’S UMBRELLA POLICY:

1. The lockdown-induced suffering of millions of migrants raised awareness regarding their magnitude, vulnerability, and role in the economy. It is now encouraging that the Niti Aayog, on the request of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, has prepared an umbrella policy document for migrant labourers, including informal sector workers.
2. Niti Aayog undertook the responsibility of drafting this policy since it required inter-sectoral and inter-ministerial coordination.

 

 

SO, WHAT IS IN THIS DRAFT POLICY?

1. The draft policy makes significant strides in providing a perspective on recognising the magnitude and role of migrant workers, their problems and vulnerabilities, and the role and responsibilities of various stakeholders in addressing these.
2. It states that a sound policy must be viewed from a “human rights, property rights, economic, social development, and foreign policy lens”.
3. It reiterates that a rights-based and labour rights perspective built around the core issue of dignity of labour must be a guiding principle of policy, which should lead to the fulfilment of ILO commitments and the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 8.8 on the protection of labour rights and providing a safe and secure working environment for all workers, particularly migrants.
4. The document states that the migrant exodus led to an appreciation of their magnitude as well as role in the economy (which it estimates at 10 per cent of GDP), but finds that the data has failed to capture the growth in their numbers, particularly the numbers of circular migrants.
5. It describes the many sources of vulnerabilities of migrant labourers, ranging from their invisibility and political and social exclusion to informal work arrangements, exploitation and denial of labour rights, lack of collective voice, exclusion from social protection arrangements, formal skills, health, education, and housing.
6. Following from this, it identifies portability of social protection, voting rights, right to the city (the collective ownership and participation of citizens in cities they have helped build) and health, education and housing facilities as key issues to be dealt with.
7. It also reflects on the need for pro-poor development and provision of livelihoods in the source areas.
8. It further proposes a governance structure with the Ministry of Labour as the nodal ministry and a dedicated unit under it which will act as a focal point for inter-ministerial and Centre-state coordination.

 

WHO ARE THE STAKEHOLDERS?

1. Its recommendations on the above issues are addressed to various stakeholders which includes central ministries, state and local governments, community based organisations (CBOs), employers, trade unions, and multi-lateral organisations.
2. It further proposes a governance structure with the Ministry of Labour as the nodal ministry and a dedicated unit under it which will act as a focal point for inter-ministerial and Centre-state coordination.

 

SHORTFALLS OF THIS POLICY:

1. The National Commission for Rural Labour argued way back in 1991 that unequal development was the main cause of labour migration. In the last three decades, disparities in development and inequalities have grown ceaselessly and the report falls short of acknowledging this.
2. Similarly, while the report correctly pinpoints the exclusion of migrants by urban local governments in the provision of basic entitlements, it fails to acknowledge the root cause of the lopsided urban development strategy. Increasingly, the urban strategy has catered to the upper class marginalising the poor, particularly the migrants.
3. The report also makes a false dichotomy between approaches which rely on cash transfers. This has led the report to brush aside the migrants’ and informal workers’ right to social security. Social security is acknowledged as a universal human right in international covenants to which India is a signatory and is given due place in the Constitution.
4. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) also recommended a universal registration system and issuance of smart social security cards, but its recommendations have unfortunately remained a dead letter.
5. The fundamental weakness of the report is its approach towards labour rights and labour policy. By putting grievance and legal redressal above regulation and enforcement on which it remains silent, the report puts the cart before the horse.
6. A perusal of the new labour Codes show that they accentuate the very problems — informality, precarity, the role of contractors and the lack of organisation — which the report itself describes. Further, the codes have tilted the balance firmly in favour of capital, increasing precarity, liberalising the role of contractors, weakening the bargaining power of labour, and further weakening an already debilitated enforcement system.

 

CONCLUSION:

1. In essence, the draft policy framework identifies the problems but fails to address the policy distortions which lie at their root.

 

2. India’s new digital rules are bad news for democracy

GS-2: Government Policies and Interventions for Development in various sectors and Issues arising out of their Design and Implementation.

 

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CONTEXT:

1. The new rules expand the government’s already considerable control over digital entities and will likely affect freedom of expression and privacy as it shuts down its internet far more frequently than any other democracy in the world.

 

THE DIGITAL INDIA DREAM IS DEFINITELY NOT A CAKEWALK:

1. India’s broadband speed is now among the slowest in the world and internet penetration is below 50 per cent, with a stark digital divide becoming clearer in a world forced online by COVID-19.
2. Also, technical infrastructure is not the only limitation. Problems also come from the government’s incessant wielding of internet-shutdown powers to constrict and damage internet freedom.

 

BURNING CASES OF SHUTDOWNS IN THE COUNTRY:

1. The data compiled by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), compiled that internet shutdowns have jumped from three in 2012 to 132 in 2020. Since 2016, every year India has resorted to internet shutdowns more than any other country worldwide, for two official reasons — public safety and public order.
2. In 2017, the government amended the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 to specify that the law now allowed “the temporary suspension of telecom services”.
3. In 2019, internet shutdowns were used to complicate communication among protesters against the Citizenship Amendment Bill — even though their demonstrations were legal and peaceful.
4. In January, access was restricted seven times on the main sites of the ongoing farmers’ protests.
5. In the aftermath of the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5, 2019, the government suspended internet access in Jammu and Kashmir. While some connections were restored, social media and high speed internet were not, for security reasons - Limited 2G connectivity to a few “whitelisted” websites was restored on January 25, 2020, and 4G was restored as late as February 5. This lack of connectivity has had devastating effects on the economy, health and education, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown.
6. The Supreme Court’s ruling that the “freedom of internet access is a fundamental right” did not make the rounds around the country.

 

Further, Top10VPN, which monitors global internet access, describes India as being the most restrictive of its citizens’ access to the internet, ahead of authoritarian regimes like Belarus, Myanmar, and Azerbaijan. It also estimated that internet shutdowns in 2020 cost India the equivalent of around Rs 2 crore per hour.

 

WHAT DOES INDIA STAND?

Freedom House — the US-based non-profit that conducts research on democracy and human rights — asserts that India’s freedom of expression has declined severely and consistently for three straight years, pointing to internet shutdowns alongside the digital targeting of government critics and the promotion of disinformation by political leaders.

 

NEW SET OF RULES:

1. Social media is a case in point. On February 25, the government issued a notification outlining a new set of rules intended to regulate digital firms, including social-media platforms and streaming companies. Among other actions, these rules require firms to preserve user data for six months (double the previous requirement); comply with government orders to trace the origin of social media content (including on broad grounds like “public order”); respond within 15 days to any person complaining against content hosted by the provider and allow users to “voluntarily” verify their accounts, introducing worries about companies making such verification de facto mandatory. Indeed, this requires firms to offer a voluntary service for users to “verify” their accounts (like Twitter does with the blue-tick).
2. This provision also exists in Section 28(3) of the Personal Data Protection Bill as tabled in December 2019. This may imply the collection of personal user data. As with Aadhaar, although beginning as a voluntary mechanism, social-media firms may make it increasingly necessary for viewers, opening the door to increasing control over user behaviour.
3. The new rules also stipulate that OTT and digital-news outfits must register details of their company and accounts with the government, sparking concerns about press freedom. The rules also introduce a criminal penalty, noting that failing to comply can result in prosecution under the IT Act and the Indian Penal Code, and empower the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to immediately block content if it is deemed that “no delay is acceptable”.

 

CRITICISMS:

1. The Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital-rights non-profit, has lambasted the new regulations as being “anti-democratic and unconstitutional”.
2. They characterise the expansion of the IT Act’s scope to include news media and OTT platforms as being an executive amendment of a parliamentary act, and thus impermissible under the Constitution.
3. They also criticise a new ethics code that firms must abide by, particularly a clause warning firms to “exercise due caution and discretion” when featuring issues related to race or religion, an overly broad rule that can encourage self-censorship.
4. The rules also outline the creation of a three-tiered “self-regulating” grievance-redressal system for firms to ensure adherence to the ethics code. But in truth, the system is overseen entirely by officials of a wide range of government ministries, effectively granting judicial powers to the executive.
5. These rules, by ramping up the liability of digital firms for the content that they host or produce, will likely have a severe impact on free expression and privacy (ARTICLE 19) , contributing to the rapidly shrinking space for dissent in India today.
6. Frequent shutdowns ruin livelihoods and put the lives of medical patients at risk by making the communication of critical health data impossible.

 

WAY FORWARD:

1. The country needs to invest in connectivity. As the number of internet users continues to swell, the value creation offered by the digital-services industry promises a huge economic windfall, because a more connected population is more empowered and has greater access to knowledge, skills and commerce. As such, wide internet access can be a major boost for a country’s standard of living

 

3. No classroom is monolingual. Our education policies must reflect this.

GS-2: Social justice

 

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CONTEXT:

1. The NEP 2020 fails to propose and uphold a multilingual approach to education.

WHAT IS THE PROPOSAL?

1. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 uses terms such as home language, mother tongue, local language, regional language with slashes and succumbs to hedges such as “preferably” or “wherever possible” in the context of using it.

 

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

1. It is a persistent refusal to confront reality, outline clear objectives and propose appropriate curricular and pedagogical hints that we falter again and again on the language front — therefore in education in general.
2.  Merely quoting UNESCO’s 1953 declaration on the use of mother tongue for the conceptual clarity and cognitive growth of students will not do since India is a diverse country. The issue is that we are not dealing with “a language” in any context.

 

GROWTH OF ENGLISH EDUCATION IN INDIA:

1. One should not be surprised that all committees and commissions since the colonial times, including the often critiqued Elphinstone’s Minute of 1824, Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 and Wood’s Despatch of 1854 recognised the importance of using the mother tongue in education, always noting though that there was no way they could dream of teaching a nation as big as India in English.
2. However, they did misunderstand and minimise the importance of “vernaculars” and laid the foundations of English medium western education for the elite.

 

TWO IMPORTANT DERELICTIONS:

We have consistently failed to recognise two facts:

1. One, no classroom is monolingual and
2. Two, people learn only those languages they need to learn for instrumental or integrative reasons. The three language formula, born out of a consensus among chief ministers of different states, has been a failure because it does not pay any attention to the second fact. For example: Many people from south India do learn Hindi when they see jobs or increments coming their way. Students in North India invariably choose Sanskrit as the third language — it ensures high marks without much work. There will be very few school graduates in North India who can use Sanskrit with any significant level of proficiency.

 

THE TRUTH:

1. All classrooms are multilingual in the sense that children arrive in schools not with “a language” but with a “verbal repertoire”. This constitutes the theoretical foundations of construing language as multilinguality that forms the essence of being human.
2. One is often told that this may be true of urban metropolises like Delhi or Kolkata but but Udaipur, for example, a small town, in addition to having Hindi has Mewari, Marwari, Wagdi, Gujarati and there is constant inter-language fluidity among others.
3. Also, one must note that variability is not just lexical. Also, there may be variations of style, idiom and folk songs and stories that are often socio-culturally rooted.
4. Languages travel freely across each other — fluid multilinguality is the language of the students.

 

CONCLUSION:

We need to recognise that multilinguality constitutes the backbone of what we call “mother tongue” and the education enterprise cannot be successful unless we allow the voice of every child to find a space in classroom processes. Multilinguality can also be used as a classroom resource to invite students to engage in scientific inquiry.