SACW | 9 Jan 2005

[sacw]

South Asia Citizens Wire   | 9 Jan.,  2005
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Indonesia:  'Good Muslims' survived Tsunami 
claim the fundamentalists (John Aglionby)
[2] Pakistan:  Bang, bang, hang, hang (Asma Jahangir)
[3] Bangladesh: Concern over bigots' threat on Dr Kamal Hossain
[4] India: "poor need a radical package" - 
Amartya Sen interviewed (Siddharth Varadarajan)
+ collection of articles re the need for an 
employment guarantee law in India available via 
'LNSA'
[5] Upcoming events :
Performance/exhibit by Bangalore Artists @ Lok 
Rahs festival (Lahore, 23-29 Jan 2005)


--------------

[1]

The Guardian
January 8, 2005

GOOD MUSLIMS SURVIVED, SAY MILITANTS
Radical group gives warning to foreigners
John Aglionby in Banda Aceh

Salman al-Farizi is in no doubt about why Aceh 
was struck by a magnitude 9 earthquake and 
tsunami. It was no freak of nature, according to 
the Aceh commander of Laskar Mujahidin, one of 
Indonesia's most radical Islamist groups.

"The Acehnese had betrayed Allah," he told the 
Guardian in a military tent that serves as the 
detachment's kitchen-cum-mosque at Banda Aceh 
airport. "They were not true to their faith. 
Allah had given the Acehnese Islamic law and they 
did not implement it."

As part of Aceh's 2002 autonomy package, Jakarta 
implemented Islamic law in the province. But its 
implementation has been extremely patchy. Those 
people who survived were clearly the good 
Muslims, Mr Farizi explained.

"Allah always looks after his faithful 
followers," he said. "We are here partly to help 
the survivors spread the true word of Allah."

"We" comprises 102 members of Laskar Mujahidin, a 
group created by Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, who is 
believed to have also founded the al-Qaida-linked 
Jemaah Islamiyah and is on trial for terrorism. 
The team, based in central Java, has five 
elements to its mission: medical assistance, 
evacuating refugees, clearing corpses, running a 
public kitchen and Islamic preaching, which is 
clearly its priority.

"It is crucial that the survivors, and indeed all 
Muslims, understand that this was a warning from 
Allah," Mr Farizi said. "If they don't be come 
true Muslims then they will be struck down."

Mr Farizi, has no problems with the American, 
Australian, and other "non-believers" descending 
on Aceh. "As long as they stick to humanitarian 
work I am happy they are here," he said. "But if 
they stray into other areas - whether it be 
political or immoral activity - then we will take 
action."

So far there have been no reports of 
"transgressions". "But we are monitoring these 
foreigners constantly and are compiling data on 
them," he said, declining to expand on what 
action his team might take.

While the threat cannot be ignored, visiting 
troops and aid workers should have little to 
worry about because virtually no indigenous 
Acehnese hold militant attitudes.

The theme of the first sermon preached since the 
disaster inside the Baiturrahman mosque, which 
survived the wave, was far more indicative of 
Acehnese Islam. It was a call for Muslims to 
engage in inner reflection and ask for 
"forgiveness, patience and thanks that we are 
still alive".


______


[2]

The News International
January 7, 2004

BANG, BANG, HANG, HANG

In our judicial system there is no uniformity of 
age under which a child cannot be awarded 
punishment. Young children are being chastised in 
the name of law and awarded punishments, which 
those with a strong backing can easily evade

Asma Jahangir

The end of 2004 has seen some renewed vigour in 
the judiciary of Pakistan. After eight years of 
partial slumber the judicial machinery stirred 
itself to grant bail to Mr. Asif Ali Zardari. On 
another note they were quite shrill in expressing 
their distaste for lavish meals served at wedding 
parties and called for total austerity. The ban 
is a relief for hundreds of people who can 
ill-afford the luxury of splashing "shoras" at 
their children's weddings. The dispute, however, 
before the Supreme Court, was not about serving 
lavish meals. The choice before them was to 
either allow one dish to be served or to limit it 
to soft drinks or soups. That too sufficiently 
irked the Supreme Court to seal the fate of 
gluttons in the name of Islam. And so, eating or 
serving food at weddings has been added to the 
long list of sins by declaring it un-Islamic. 
This reformist role of the judiciary remains 
controversial and selective. A recent judgment of 
the Full Bench of the Lahore High Court has out 
rightly rejected these reformist tendencies. 
While striking down the Juvenile Justice System 
Ordinance the Court mocked at legal reforms that 
may be disregarded or flaunted with impunity. It 
attempted to reason that "one quantum leap" or 
"one stroke of pen" cannot be expected to alter 
the peculiar socio-legal culture of Pakistan. 
Hence the message is to sit and wait rather than 
use any legal tool to improve the situation.

The Juvenile Judgment (as it is popularly known) 
has struck down the entire Ordinance on Juvenile 
Justice System on the basis that it did not 
appear to be the finest example of legislative 
draftsmanship and was inconsistent with the 
provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing the 
right to life and equal treatment before the law. 
Another ground for declaring it unconstitutional 
was the unrepresentative nature of the Ordinance. 
It was, according to the judgment, promulgated in 
the absence of any public debate or parliamentary 
discussion.

The Juvenile Justice System Ordinance 2000, 
consolidated all previous laws related to 
children involved in the criminal legal system - 
either as accused or as victims. It extended 
internationally recognised criteria of rights to 
children under the ages of eighteen. In a 
long-winded judgment the honourable court 
concluded that separate trials, concessions of 
bail during trial and the imposition of death 
penalty for children was violative of the 
Constitution of Pakistan. They vehemently 
disputed that a child in Pakistan can be defined 
as a person under the age of eighteen, especially 
in connection with the imposition of capital 
punishment. In their opinion a child in Pakistan 
gained wisdom earlier than those in the developed 
world. The reasoning adopted by the honourable 
Court is worthy of being reproduced. It says:

"The stages and standards pertaining to attaining 
of maturity by young persons in different parts 
of the world are different and the stages and 
standards in that regard acceptable in one part 
of the world may not be strictly relevant to 
other parts of the world. Such attainment of 
maturity of understanding is dependent upon 
social, economic, climatic and dietary factors 
and we have every reason to understand that a 
child in our part of the world starts 
understanding the nature and consequences of his 
conduct sooner than a child in the West. Growing 
up in close proximity and interaction with adults 
due to social and economic conditions, doing odd 
jobs and getting employed at a relatively young 
age due to general poverty, hot climate and 
exotic and spicy food all contribute towards a 
speedy physical growth and an accelerated 
maturity of understanding of a child in our 
society."

To take this line of reasoning to its logical end 
would lead us to conclude that an unfortunate 
child who is deprived of social, economic and 
political rights deserves the death penalty, 
while those who have the advantage of education, 
eating McDonalds and enjoying fine weather are 
less brutalised and therefore more innocent in 
the eyes of the law. In addition the Court is 
misled into believing that physical maturity has 
a nexus to mental development. A mistake 
propounded by the provisions of the Hadood 
Ordinances.

The Juvenile Judgment vehemently predicts that 
the trend towards abolition of capital punishment 
in the Western world would prove to be a passing 
phase. This appears to be wishful thinking and 
simply not based on any facts. The trend remains 
towards abolition of death penalty throughout the 
world. Eighty countries have abolished death 
penalty for all crimes by law, twenty-three have 
abolished it in practice and fifteen have 
abolished capital punishment for all ordinary 
crimes. In comparison there remain 78 retenionist 
countries around the world at the present moment. 
As far as death penalty of children is concerned 
there is virtual consensus that a child below the 
age of eighteen cannot be executed. Since 1990 to 
2003, eight countries executed 38 children. 
Pakistan, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, 
Iran, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United States and 
Yemen remain the only violators in this regard. 
It is true that International law is not binding 
on Member States of the United Nations but once a 
country ratifies a Convention it is morally bound 
to respect it. Pakistan was one of the six 
initiators to the convention on the Rights of the 
Child and has ratified it. The Convention 
specifically prohibits capital punishment for 
children under the age of eighteen.

Throughout the Juvenile Judgment the Court has 
expressed its unease with defining a child as a 
person below the age of eighteen for the purposes 
of criminal liability. This disapproval appears 
to have been reached on the premise that research 
in this matter was lacking and arbitrary. The 
Court ruled that the law giver had no basis on 
which to fix eighteen years as the age limit in 
the Ordinance. It simply glosses over the fact 
that this cut-off date was gradually raised 
through sustained dialogue amongst the 
International community. In Pakistan too the age 
was gradually raised. For example in Punjab it 
was previously fifteen years in a similar law. 
The pivotal law point, however, remains whether 
the courts or the law making authority have the 
right to determine the age factor. Courts may 
strike down a law if it discriminates but not 
because the judges disagree with it or because 
there was lack of research on the issue. The 
judiciary has even less capacity than the 
legislature to undertake research and generate 
debate on crucial social issues.

There may be a few contradictions in the Juvenile 
Ordinance but the contradictions in the Juvenile 
Judgment surpass these. After having sermoned on 
the undemocratic law making process of the 
Juvenile Ordinance, the honorable judges lament 
that it also contradicts the age factor 
prescribed in the Hadood Ordinances. Surely they 
had not failed to recall that the Hadood 
Ordinances were not only promulgated by a 
dictator but also remain highly controversial. 
The Hadood laws usurp rights rather than advance 
them. . The much favoured Hadood Ordinances 
measure adulthood on the basis of puberty for the 
purposes of determining criminal liability. Thus 
a female child ordinarily would reach legal 
adulthood earlier than a male child. A mentally 
challenged puberty is presumed to have the same 
level of understanding of criminal liability as 
an adult. Yet in the eyes of the Juvenile 
judgment these laws seemed more rational than the 
Juvenile Justice Ordinance.

In conclusion the Court simply observed that the 
protection afforded to children under the 
previous laws were sufficient. This is totally 
misleading on many counts. The Pakistan Penal 
Code or The Criminal Procedure Code does not 
extend to the tribal areas of the NWFP or 
Balochistan. Each Province has its own 
legislation extending varying degrees of rights 
to children. More importantly there is no 
uniformity of age under which a child cannot be 
awarded capital punishment. Every province has a 
different age limit for the imposition of capital 
punishment regrettably the Court also based their 
judgment on flawed arguments regarding the 
deterrent nature of the capital punishment and on 
the concepts of the right of the victim. 
Scientific studies have consistently failed to 
find convincing evidence that the death penalty 
deters crime more effectively than other 
punishments. A study updated by the United 
Nations in 1996 concluded that empirical research 
gives no positive support to the deterrence 
hypothesis. The victim and society has a right to 
ensure that the perpetrators of a crime are 
brought to justice but it is not their right to 
insist on death penalty of a child. The key issue 
is to ensure that no one has impunity. In 
Pakistan a hardened adult murderer can even 
escape conviction if the victim or his/her heirs 
forgive the offender. Throughout the Juvenile 
Judgment the honourable judges have complained 
that the Juvenile Ordinance has created havoc in 
the administration of criminal justice system. 
Hanging a few children, while those with muscle 
can get away by paying a few hundred bucks can 
hardly save an already decaying system. Logic 
would dictate that in a malfunctioning legal 
system at least children be spared the death 
penalty which is irreversible.

During the course of reasoning the honourable 
Lahore High Court has also noted that the 
Juvenile Ordinance is virtually meaningless in 
protecting children from the severity of 
sentence. In their observation courts invariably 
give a lenient sentence to child offenders. 
Special laws protecting the rights of vulnerable 
people are not about charitable discretion of the 
judiciary but about rights that the State must 
guarantee to its child citizens. In Pakistan 
children as young as twelve have been awarded 
capital punishment. One young man, Sher Ali, was 
executed in November 2001 for a murder committed 
when he was 13 years old. At this present moment 
9-year-old Nadeem is undergoing a sentence of 273 
years of imprisonment in Faisalabad jail. And 
these are only a few examples.

On the one hand the Juvenile Judgment argues that 
lesser sentencing would encourage adults in 
exploiting children in committing crimes 
therefore the Ordinance was impractical but on 
the other hand it claims that courts do in fact 
take a lenient view towards the sentencing of 
children. Thus the temptation of criminal minded 
adults to use children in crimes is not linked to 
the Juvenile Ordinance but to a faulty 
investigation system, which is unable to identify 
the authors of a crime.

There is yet another fallacy that seems to have 
guided our honourable judges in getting alarmed 
by the effects of the Ordinance. The panic was 
high enough for the court to rule that the "evil" 
should be nipped in the "bud". According to the 
figures they quote from a local newspaper the 
crime rate of murder committed by children is 
reported to have risen. These figures do not, at 
least, correspond with those available with the 
Prison Department of the Punjab. None of these 
figures are officially authenticated and 
therefore it was even more important for the 
Court to secure official records before basing 
their findings on disputed figures. According to 
the figures available with the Punjab Prison, 596 
children were accused of murder in 2003 as 
against 1098 in 2002. Again the figures of the 
Punjab Prison department show that children 
account for around 5% of the prison population 
accused of murder. If that is indeed the case 
then the panic and alarm raised by the honourable 
court about the rising crimes alluded to children 
was not only misplaced but also unjustified.

According to the Juvenile Judgment the Ordinance 
has promoted corruption in society. They rightly 
point out that alleged child offenders manage to 
procure false birth, medical, marriage and school 
certificates to escape death penalty. In the 
first place any age limit to death penalty will 
prompt unscrupulous elements of society to play 
foul with the law and the courts. Secondly should 
such corruption be checked or should we as a 
society give up on eliminating perjury and 
instead axe children to death?

The learned and honourable judges of the Juvenile 
Judgment have quoted some famous jurists in 
support of their sound reasoning in striking down 
a law that they describe as "absurd". "Law", they 
quote, "may be blind but the Judge is not". They 
also observed that, "the law sometimes is called 
an ass but the Judge should, as far as it is 
possible, try not to become one". The litigants 
can only hope and pray for a clearer vision of 
the law and its custodians.

The writer is an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.


______



[3]

The Daily Star
January 09, 2005

CONCERN OVER BIGOTS' THREAT ON DR KAMAL
Staff Correspondent
Two political parties yesterday expressed their 
deep concern over the threats issued by Islamic 
bigots against Dr Kamal Hossain because of his 
pleads in court against the ban on Ahmadiyya 
publications.

Bangladesh Samajtantrik Dal central conveynor 
Khalequzzaman said in a statement that Dr Kamal 
Hossain performed his democratic responsibility 
by taking a stance in favour of the Ahmadiyyas. 
He called for an arrest of the religious 
extremists acting under the banner of the 
International Khatme Nobuwat Movement of 
Bangladesh who threatened Dr Kamal and demanded 
that he be declared a non-Muslim.

Rashed Khan Menon, president of the Workers Party 
of Bangladesh, and General Secretary Bimol Biswas 
said in a joint statement that religious 
extremists are now able to show their extreme 
power by threatening a progressive minded person 
like Dr Kamal Hossain because the BNP-Jamaat 
government has patronised them.

They called upon all sections of society to 
resist religious extremism for the nation's 
greater interest.


______


[4]

The Hindu
Jan 09, 2005

INDIA'S POOR NEED A RADICAL PACKAGE: AMARTYA SEN

IF THE Manmohan Singh Government is serious about 
ending the chronic under-nutrition that so many 
poor Indians suffer from, it needs to think 
seriously about the public provision of basic 
healthcare, nutritional support for children and 
income sup port for the unemployed poor, says 
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in an 
exclusive interview to Siddharth Varadarajan of 
The Hindu.


Siddharth Varadarajan: If one looks at the social 
policy commitments of the UPA Government - for 
example on education and employment - health 
seems to have something of a low priority. You 
have been involved in a recent study on the state 
of healthcare in rural areas. Based on those 
findings, what do you feel the Government's 
approach to health services should be?

Amartya Sen: We need a radical change in the way 
health delivery in the public sector occurs. 
India spends a lower percentage of GDP on public 
health than almost any other country, including 
those of similar income levels. The neglect here 
is massive, particularly because this has led to 
both the substandard delivery of public health 
and the development of an immensely exploitative 
private enterprise in healthcare that survives on 
the deficiencies - and sometimes absence - of 
public health attention.

What we found in the Pratichi Trust survey in 
West Bengal but also much more sharply in 
Jharkhand - and based on other information we 
have, the picture seems fairly widespread - is 
that when patients go to many of the primary 
health centres, they find no one there. 
Sometimes, when they find someone, they will be 
referred to private doctors. Also, the medical 
system in the public sector offers no 
diagnostics, even of basic illnesses like malaria 
or TB. Patients are usually told to go to private 
practitioners for testing. Sometimes the testing 
isn't very good and, in any case, the economic 
cost could be ruinous.

On top of that, the care that is often provided 
by the private sector comes from quacks. We found 
an incredible proportion of quacks in Jharkhand, 
particularly, but a significant proportion even 
in West Bengal, who provide almost no serious 
medical attention and instead give saline 
injections for malaria, which is not really known 
anywhere in the world as a cure.

These are modern quacks, not ojhas?

Modern quacks. There are ojhas too, who are at 
least cheaper. The modern quacks are no more 
effective than the ojhas and are very expensive. 
So they have the effect of making the illnesses 
linger while whatever meagre economic assets the 
poorer families have may be lost in the process. 
This is a dreadful situation. There are many 
areas where more privatisation might make sense - 
hotels, tourism, a number of industries - but 
this is not one of them. And the high private 
share in the provision of healthcare in rural 
areas is a major deficiency of the Indian system.

Private medical treatment can work quite well 
when, as in Kerala, the public health sector 
provides a minimum care for all. On the basis of 
that, you can then get special care on a private 
system. But that's quite different from relying 
primarily on a private health system, especially 
when the patient has no idea who is a quack ...

Is the poor state of public healthcare the result 
of systematic low investment over the years, bad 
monitoring, or "corruption," as the critics of 
public provision are fond of saying?

There are three different deficiencies here. 
First, there is an awfully inadequate amount of 
investment, so that the amount of public 
resources going in to providing healthcare for 
all is extraordinarily little.

Secondly, the monitoring of the performance of 
public health centres is often totally absent or 
thoroughly defective. Thus, the absenteeism of 
doctors is quite high and the incidence of 
doctors trying to recommend that patients go and 
see them in their capacity as private 
practitioners is distressingly high. Third, there 
is no way the Government helps patients diagnose 
who is a quack and who is not. That requires a 
monitoring not just of the public health service 
but of medical services as a whole.

All three things act together to ruin the rural 
poor who, from their meagre resources, must spend 
whatever they can to deal with that which is of 
greatest importance to them - namely their 
health. And they get hit both by the continuation 
of illness and economic ruination. Corruption is 
there in the sense that a doctor in a public 
health service asks patients to go to himself or 
a friend in private care, instead of providing 
treatment.

Accepting a salary and not being at the job is 
also a type of corruption. But to see the problem 
primarily as a penalty of corruption would be to 
lose the precise story in the health sector 
deficiency in a more general story of corruption.

We ought to clearly point out the defect of 
under-investment in public health care, the 
under-monitoring of public health delivery, and 
the lack of diagnosing of medically trained 
personnel compared with quacks. These three 
things together produce the dreadful situation in 
which we are.

If you look at the priority of political parties 
nationally, the NDA wanted more super-speciality 
hospitals like AIIMS and the public health 
priority seems to be on the building of large, 
grand hospitals at the cutting edge of medical 
technology. You seem to be suggesting the 
priority has to be at the level of basic care.

Given the economic inequalities in the country, 
you will get a tremendously unequal delivery of 
medical attention. There is no way of escaping 
it. There are a lot of rich people in the country 
and there is no way you can prevent them from 
having state-of-the-art medical attention within 
India if they can pay for it. There is no way you 
can say it's all right to buy a yacht or a villa 
but not medical treatment. But what you can do is 
to rely on the private sector precisely for that 
because these are people who are wealthy or 
fairly well off, and it's a question of their 
being able to get medial treatment of a very 
specialised kind which may not be available to 
others, on the basis of their high income. I 
don't like the system - I see that as an 
inescapable necessity - but if this is done by 
the private sector, at least it is not a drain on 
the public sector.

I think public sector resources have to provide 
basic medical care for all, basic medicine, basic 
diagnosis, blood and urine tests, x-rays and so 
on, which go with the normal practice of 
medicine, and providing treatment for well known 
ailments and doing the best that the doctors can 
to help the patient, without going into an 
extremely expensive system of medical care.

In some ways we have gone particularly wrong 
here. Rather than the public sector providing 
basic coverage to all Indian residents, you end 
up in a situation where a large proportion of the 
population remains under-protected by the public 
health sector.

On the other side, there is always an attempt to 
use public money to expand the cutting edge of 
medical treatment. Now, I have nothing against 
the cutting edge of medical treatment. Indeed, I 
would not be alive today but for the fact when I 
had cancer at the age of 18, I could get 
radiation in Calcutta that cured me, that was 52 
years ago, so I take it I am cured now! I did pay 
for it, it was in a hospital in Calcutta, and 
indeed my father could just about afford it. So I 
have nothing at all against getting this type of 
treatment, and indeed, hopefully cancer treatment 
of a standard kind should be available for all, 
and if you look at the costs of that, they are 
within an affordable budget.

I think specialised health care, including 
sophisticated medicine and surgery, should be 
available. But quite often what happens is that 
one is trying to go at the very extreme cutting 
edge of medicine. When that happens for AIDS, it 
makes a lot of sense since there are a great many 
patients involved. But generally, the idea that 
first, basic healthcare should be covered by the 
public sector and second, that if rich people 
want to have specialised services, they should be 
able to access this through the private sector - 
seems to me a kind of compromise that the Indian 
political economy would tend to regard as quite 
natural. It's the kind of system that exists in 
Britain ...

Are you then advocating a dramatic increase in 
budgetary outlays on health at the Central level?

I am advocating that if it is part of a broader 
package. My difficulty in dealing with some of 
the debates that are going on today is that you 
cannot separate one of the elements of a 
composite package and say that this is our 
priority. Well, there are a number of things that 
have to be done, and if you look at the health 
sector, yes, I would strongly recommend that we 
spend a lot more on public healthcare. But along 
with that, we have to introduce a better 
monitoring system for the delivery of public 
health services, and we also have to introduce a 
system of weeding out quackery.

I think the combination of quackery and crookery 
which takes place in the form of private medicine 
in some of the poorest areas of India and which 
mainly has the effect of making poor people part 
with whatever little money they have, rather than 
providing a cure, is something which has to stop. 
So if one just puts in more money, without making 
any other change, we would be caught in a very 
sticky ground, but we have to do these things 
together, and yes, along with the other changes, 
there is a case for a very dramatic increase in 
public health expenditure.

Another possible component of a broad package for 
social policy would be the role of mid-day meals 
in providing nutrition to pupils in schools. Most 
State Governments have introduced cooked mid-day 
meals in primary schools during the last two 
years. What are your impressions of this 
initiative?

I am very encouraged. Obviously we haven't yet 
had a chance of studying this programme 
systematically yet in those parts of India that 
have just introduced it, but we have a number of 
separate pieces of evidence on the basis of which 
we can construct a plausible story. First, there 
are areas like Tamil Nadu where mid-day meals 
have been provided for a long time and we do know 
what the favourable impact has been. Last year, a 
survey initiated by the Centre for Equity Studies 
found encouraging results in three other States.

In the area of the country where the Pratichi 
Trust has studied the introduction of this 
scheme, namely West Bengal, the reports are also 
extremely positive.

It's important to recognise what we expect of the 
mid-day meal. I would say there are five things. 
And they are all equally important.

First, India has a higher level of 
under-nourishment than almost any other part of 
the world with the possible exception of our 
neighbours in South Asia. It's not often 
recognised that the regular level of 
under-nourishment in India is higher than that of 
sub-Saharan Africa, where about 20-40 per cent of 
children are chronically undernourished in terms 
of criteria like weight for age and other 
anthropometric criteria. In India, the figure is 
40-60 per cent, a very high proportion indeed. 
Our level of anaemia is much higher, our level of 
maternal under-nourishment is much higher. 
Providing meals in schools is one good means of 
dealing with this vast problem of chronic 
under-nourishment.

Second, it increases the attractiveness of 
schools, from the point of view of attendance, 
because of the fact that while we often have much 
higher enrolment ratios than before, the 
attendance levels have remained systematically 
lower because of a lot of dropouts. So you can 
achieve higher attendance and lower dropouts by 
making it attractive for the kids to come to 
school.

Third, the imparting of education is badly 
affected by under-nutrition. In the context of my 
forthcoming book, The Argumentative Indian, I was 
looking at a discussion in the Chandogya 
Upanishad where Shvetaketu's father is giving him 
an education. At one stage Shvetaketu decides not 
to eat. After 15 days, when his father says, can 
you follow me, he says, no I cannot. And the 
father says that is because your intelligence 
doesn't work if you are starved. If you eat now, 
you will be able to understand what I am telling 
you.

This points to the elementary fact that 
under-nourished children don't find it easy to 
learn, and the attention deficit and ability to 
comprehend is a serious problem. Fourthly, there 
is the problem of teacher absenteeism in a number 
of schools in India. As long as the teachers are 
just providing education and students go and find 
no teacher, they know in some sense their 
long-run future is being affected. But it is 
dramatically different if they go and find there 
is no teacher to unlock the store on the basis of 
which the cook will cook the meal. It deprives 
people immediately. So the pressure to be present 
is much stronger, the monitoring becomes much 
easier also because there is a genuine interest 
on the part of students to make sure the entire 
teaching staff - teachers and cooks - are present 
every day, and it has had this effect of 
increasing the regularity with which schooling 
and education takes place. Fifth, and this is 
very dialectical, one of the objections had come 
from `upper' caste parents who did not want their 
children to have meals with `lower' caste 
children. While this has often been seen as a 
criticism of the mid-day meal scheme, the fact is 
that the other side of the story is very 
positive. If one actually insists on providing 
meals of this kind, the system adjusts. People 
get used to eating together, get used to eating 
food cooked by someone whose caste you do not 
know, I think that is a positive thing from the 
point of view of cohesion of society.

In all these respects, the results are positive. 
These are early days and we'll do a fuller study 
in the summer of 2005 but for the moment what we 
have seen is very positive. There are problems - 
the nature of food is quite elementary - it might 
be fine for kids who have no food at all, but not 
for the richer kids, but if you take the rough 
with the smooth, there is no question that it is 
having the effects desired. And attendance has 
increased. In the villages we studied in West 
Bengal, there was 60 per cent attendance in the 
pre-mid-day meal days, now it is 70 per cent, and 
seems to be going up continuously.

So this is one of the very positive things happening in India.

Does it surprise you that despite such an obvious 
rationale for this scheme - and positive 
political payoffs for parties and politicians - 
the implementation of mid-day meals required so 
much pressure from activists and the Supreme 
Court?

Yes, it did surprise me. The Pratichi Trust was 
set up with my Nobel money in 1999 and right from 
the beginning, this has been one of our strong 
demands. Jean Dreze and I had written about it 
before as well, and it seemed to us that the 
rationale for it was extremely clear and simple. 
Most political leaders want to do things that 
will make them popular, and this certainly would. 
I think the fear here was of three kinds. Some 
people thought too much time may be taken in 
cooking and eating and that this would take time 
away from education. Now the fact is that the 
time taken in education was small anyway because 
of the absenteeism of teacher and student, but 
when the meal is well organised, it need not take 
any time off from teaching.

Second, it was feared that there would be an 
`upper' caste opposition, and this has happened, 
and these people are quite vocal. So given the 
power structure in rural areas, it was felt 
mid-day meals would be a bit of an uphill battle.

Third was the question of finance. As it happens, 
most of the States are pretty bankrupt, 
especially after the Fifth Pay Commission award, 
and the States would have found it quite 
difficult to pay for it, though a number of 
States had. But the Supreme Court judgment, 
combined with the present Government's commitment 
to Central support for mid-day meals, has 
certainly removed that barrier.

Could one make a case that the success in 
providing mid-day meals through the public 
education system could lead the way to a broader 
revival of public provision of social services - 
in education, health, and even income support?

I think that's exactly right. The need for 
radical thinking on this is very strong in India 
now. I think the health services, including 
nutritional arrangements, suffer badly from 
reasons that have to be investigated along with 
the problem of educational under-performance and 
under-attendance. In fact, I would go further. 
Even the much debated question of Employment 
Guarantee, to a great extent, has to be 
integrated with the issue of child 
under-nourishment because what the school meals 
do in providing publicly supplied food in schools 
and thereby reducing under-nourishment can be 
supplemented by private income generated by 
employment, especially of very poor people who 
are ready to work for a low wage.

The removal of massive under-nourishment in India 
requires a combination of health initiatives, 
nutrition interventions such as mid-day meals, 
and the creation of extra income, particularly 
for those whose families are hungry because they 
have no work.

So we have to think of these things as a package, 
and that is one of the reasons why I felt 
slightly hesitant about the way the debate has 
unfolded about the Employment Guarantee - that to 
some extent it is being seen as a 
stand-on-its-own scheme when it is really a 
bigger package that requires talking about many 
things together.

As an economist, I don't dismiss the argument 
that the budgetary implications have to be looked 
at. Fiscal responsibility isn't a dirty word for 
me, one has to look at that. But one has to see 
what the objectives really are and how they link 
with each of these schemes, and since I'm very 
ambitious, I really do think the time has come 
for us to make a dramatic change, in public 
health delivery requiring a lot of money. So one 
has to look at the financial implications 
together.

I think in any way of looking at the financial 
implications, the manifest gigantic problems in 
India - the biggest child under-nourishment in 
the world, very defective public health delivery 
system along with an utterly exploitative private 
health care arrangement, and consistently 
under-performing schooling system, all these have 
to be thought through together and put through 
together. And with the new Government at the 
moment, I think this is a very good moment to do 
just this. And I get the impression that there is 
at the very highest level a great deal of 
sympathy for talking of this kind of 
comprehensive approach to the deprivations in 
India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has himself 
made strong statements on this.

If you link these issues in the way you have just 
done - education, health and the notion of some 
kind of private income through a well designed 
employment guarantee mechanism - this too could 
become a strong political asset for any party in 
the same way as mid-day meals.

Absolutely. I think politically this could be 
very useful for the parties. I am not a 
politician myself so I am seeing it mainly as an 
economist and social activist and from that point 
of view the case is strong but you are right, 
this is something which has a political payoff. I 
know our Prime Minister well since his days as a 
student and as a colleague; his commitment comes 
not from strategic political reasons but from a 
commitment to removing the basic deficiencies.

Whether your suggestions are followed through or 
not, isn't the sea change that has taken place in 
the political terrain in India amazing? This time 
last year, the topic of discussion everywhere was 
the mandir controversy, etc. Now, the whole 
country is discussing employment and other basic 
issues.

In my book, The Argumentative Indian, which was 
written a year ago in the time you mentioned, I 
discuss how one of the penalties of the sectarian 
politics we have was not only that secularism had 
been threatened and the minorities' lives have 
been made less secure, but also it has deflected 
discussion from the constructive agenda which we 
could have taken up.

o o o o o


[For more information on the subject, see 
collection of articles re the need for an 
effective employment guarantee law in India 
available at  'Labour Notes South Asia' (A five 
year old archive and mailing list).
URL: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/lnsa/   ]


India: Employment as a social responsibility
by Jean Dreze (November 22, 2004)

Indian Job Law Can Sharply Cut Poverty This Decade
by Santosh Mehrotra (December 18, 2004)

India: Employment Guarantee Bill Tabled - Public Not Amused
by People's Action for the Employment Guarantee Act (21 December 2004)

India: National Rural Employment Guarantee Act - A Historic Opportunity
by Mihir Shah (December 22, 2004)

India: Manmohan's first litmus test
by Praful Bidwai (December 23, 2004)

India: UPA Betrays Its Biggest Promise
by Praful Bidwai (December 27, 2004)

India: Guaranteeing employment
by Amit Bhaduri (December 27, 2004)

India: Unemployment guarantee bill
by Jean Drèze (December 31, 2004)

India: Not everybody loves a good drought
by Aruna Roy, Reetika Khera  (January 2, 2005)

India: Guaranteeing employment: a palliative?
by T N Srinivasan  (January 3, 2005)

India: Need for a universal EGS
by Prabhat Patnaik (January 5, 2005)


______


[5]

The Hindu
Jan 09, 2005


'TO REOPEN THE GATES OF FRIENDSHIP'

ARTISTS FROM Bangalore will be performing and 
exhibiting their works at Punjab Lok Rahs, a 
festival of Punjabi culture, to be held in Lahore 
from January 23 to 29.

It will be the first such visit to Pakistan by a group from Bangalore.

According to artist John Devaraj of Artists 
United, Bangalore, the visit is "to reopen the 
gates of friendship and build bridges of trust" 
with the people of Pakistan.

The theme for the journey is "From Bangalore to 
Lahore: One Ore, One Heart," Mr. Devaraj says.

Artists United is a body of artists for a cause. 
Artists United says that it is trying to 
communicate the dreams, joys, struggles and 
aspirations of the people through dance, theatre 
and music to create a better and beautiful world. 
"It has been for us a dream and a mission to be 
able to go to Pakistan, as a continuous effort to 
show our generous and open hearts to the people 
there and build harmony between conflicting 
communities. We want to dispel false notions of 
hatred and differences,'' Mr. Devaraj says.

The artists will present a mime titled "Festival of Lions" in Lahore.

The artists will also conduct theatre and 
photography workshops along with Pakistani 
students. They will be carrying with them letters 
by the people, including students, of Bangalore 
to their counterparts in Lahore. A campaign to 
collect these letters will be launched on Sunday 
at the entrance to Bombay Stores on Mahatma 
Gandhi Road in Bangalore by the Bangalore Police 
Commissioner, S. Mariswamy.

Some of the letters collected express sentiments 
such as "As they say, distances make hearts grow 
fonder. Though boundaries keep us apart, we will 
always be there to share our joys and sorrows 
with you."

The artists have this to say, "Thus far history 
has favoured those who ruled and oppressed 
others. But we want to speak about the courage of 
the lions, the people...through dance and mime. 
Stories about contemporary issues such as 
communalism and suicides by peasants. Both the 
cult of violence and the heritage of peace.''


By K. Satyamurty

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