Press Clipping -10
188. When the levee breaks
189. Farmers’ suicide rates soar above the rest
190. Builder profits soar as master plans proliferate in Gurgaon
191. Your data, going on sale soon
192. Women in search of a community
193. Poverty has increased during period of economic growth, says economist
194. World listens to ‘Iron Lady of Jharkhand’ in the Big Apple
195. New York launches bike share service
196. U.S. agency snooping on phone records of "millions"
197. ‘26 per cent doctors suffering from mobile phone blues’
May 19, 2013 15:37 IST
When the levee breaks
The HinduDespite spending nearly Rs. 270 crore on farm equipment, a temporary shortage in working capital has meant that most of Karuturi's tractors are sitting idle. Photo: Aman Sethi
Last August, Ojulu sat smoking a cigarette outside his thatch-roofed hut in Pino village when a rising tide of water seeped through the reed fence. “The water came in the morning,” Ojulu said, “And stayed for a month.”
As Ojulu and his neighbours scrambled to higher ground the Baro river swirled through the village, gathering in force until it breached a series of dykes, built by Bangalore-based Karuturi Global, and swamped the company’s vast 100,000-hectare farm. “Karuturi blocked the natural route of the water [with the dyke], so the water came into our village,” Ojulu said. “Karuturi was the cause of the flood.”
Karuturi contested this account. The Ethiopian government says an investigation into the causes of the deluge is underway, but the flood threatens to sink a headline agricultural project that supporters see as the path to a modern, food-sufficient Ethiopia, but detractors characterise as an exploitative, neo-colonial land-grab.
In January 2008, Karuturi Global was trading at Rs. 39 on the NSE; the company had a flourishing floriculture business headquartered out of Kenya and hoped to use their land in Gambella to become one of the largest food producers in the world. This Friday, the stock closed at Rs. 3.15. The company is saddled with Rs. 753 crore of debt and re-scheduled a $55 million foreign currency bond at a time when global financial markets have tightened and European flower demand has contracted.
Karuturi’s defence
In recent years, the Ethiopian government has announced its intention to lease millions of hectares of land for export-oriented commercial plantations. Indian companies like Karuturi and Shapoorji Pallonji responded by committing to invest $4.4 billion in Ethiopia, with 40 percent earmarked for agriculture.
Karuturi’s farm is a rectangular strip of land along the floodplain of the Baro river near the South Sudan border. In 2011, a flash flood destroyed Karuturi’s first crop and caused Rs. 39 crores of damage and Rs. 70 crore in lost revenue, according to the company’s financial reports. The company responded by building dykes that allegedly diverted floodwaters into nearby villages, including Ojulu’s.
“Eighty per cent of land in our concession is a flood plain. There is little data available of past flooding and rainfall,” said Ram Karuturi, Karuturi Global’s Chairman, adding the company was developing a flood-management plan and was growing a large crop of flood-resistant jute this year. Mr. Karuturi said the company was concerned about the cascading effects of the dykes on neighbouring villages, but said an investigation by the Ministry of Water Resources proved the company was not responsible for the flood.
The persistent inundation has stymied Karuturi’s ambitious plans of clearing and developing the entire 100,000-hectare plot in two years, as stipulated by the contract signed with the government. In January 2012, the company claimed it would cultivate nearly 60,000 ha of land over two seasons, but ultimately planted corn on only 5000 ha of land, or 5 per cent of their lease area. The limited harvest translated into limited revenues, further hobbling the project.
Two months ago, 92 Ethiopian workers filed a complaint with the Department of Labour and Social Welfare. “Workers complained their salaries were delayed by up to 20 days and said the company did not provide identity cards, safety equipment, medical treatment or proper residence,” said Labour Inspector Beyane Assefa.
The department found workers living in cramped metal shacks without proper ventilation and is investigating allegations that employee pensions deducted from workers salaries by the company were not deposited with the relevant government department.
“I think we live in a prison,” said a Karuturi machine operator, who said that the Indian management was disrespectful to Ethiopian staff. After investing almost Rs. 1000 crore in the project, with Rs. 270 crore spent on farm equipment alone, workers said the company was so short of cash that they didn’t have diesel for their tractors. Instead of developing their own lands, workers said, the company was leasing out their equipment to other investors in Gambella.
Mr. Karuturi said Ethiopian operations had been temporarily short of working capital due to a management transition that was now complete. Any administrative lapses concerning worker safety would be immediately rectified, he said.
The company has also fallen foul of the local administration over Karuturi’s federal contract. In 2008, the company was originally granted 300,000 hectare by the regional government. Two years later, the federal government —citing a change in land policy — revised the contract to 100,000 ha for 50 years. Karuturi pays 20 Birr (Rs. 60) per hectare per year as land tax, the same rate as a subsistence farmer, while newer investors pay 111 Birr per hectare. A dispute over the land demarcation and federal tax holiday, officials claim, means the company has not paid any land tax at all for two years.
“We are in deficit… The big tax source in this woreda (administrative centre) is land tax,” said Oman Olay, a local administrator, explaining that the tax dispute with Karuturi has severely affected their budget, adding “the big problem is shortage of salaries, even capital to maintain schools is a big challenge.”
Mr. Oman said that Karuturi had promised to send local children to Nairobi to further their studies, to build a school, and to donate 500 quintals of grain to the community flooded by their dykes, but did not fulfill their promises. The company has, however, provided a generator and fuel to the local school.
Mr. Karuturi said the company paid its tax every year during the contractually agreed period. The local administration had asked for its tax early this year to tide over a deficit, a request the company could not meet. The federal government, by contrast, has supported Karuturi in its tax dispute.
“Karuturi is one of the pioneers of investment in Gambella, or even the nation. If they have any challenge, our ministries are there to resolve whatever problems they may have,” said Shiferaw Teklemariam, Ethiopia’s Minister of Federal Affairs.
'Villagisation' and the rights question
The Ethiopian government’s unstinting support for Karuturi has both helped and hindered the project. Rights groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Oakland Institute have attacked Karuturi as the most visible symbol of a violent government campaign to move 45,000 rural households into consolidated communes and to lease these lands to commercial farmers like Karuturi.
The Ethiopian government has denied any link between commercial agriculture and the “Commune Centre Development Plan”, or ‘villagisation’. Government officials say the region has amongst the lowest population densities in the country, and the commercial farms are on empty land. No villages have been displaced to make way for Mr. Karuturi’s farm and the company is not involved in any land grab.
Shiferaw Teklemariam, Ethiopia’s Minister of Federal Affairs said villagisation would provide schools, clinics and drinking water to Gambella’s population of shifting agriculturalists and pastoralists by relocating them into fixed settlements.
Approximately 35,000 households have been villagised thus far. A visit to sites around Gambella revealed villages struggling with makeshift infrastructure. Most settlements had at least one tube well and some sort of school or clinic, but were unable to farm as the land provided by the government was thickly forested and hence uncultivable. Villagers note that the ‘empty land’ given to investors is vital for a community that relies on forests and grasslands for grazing animals, hunting and foraging.
There was no overt violence in the process, villagers said, but local officials sometimes intimidated them. Some said they moved because they heard reports of violence elsewhere.
“Nobody fears the government, what the government says is to the advantage of all,” said an old woman obliquely, as if explaining the nature of power in a patriarchal society, “Since the government is like a father, you can accept whatever he says.”
The villagisation process seems less a corporate conspiracy, and more a state-building project. “Most states…are younger than the societies they purport to administer,” notes anthropologist James Scott in Seeing like a state. “States therefore confront patterns of settlement, social-relations and production… that have evolved largely independent of state plans.”
The state’s tendency is to recast these myriad patterns of life into a static legible population that can be educated, immunized and deployed into the formal economy in the guise of development.
Yet, Gambella’s geography and proximity to Sudanese borders and the migratory arcs of itinerant pastoralists restrict the ambitions of both state and capital. On an overcast day this month, the scrublands not far from the river shook with the sudden appearance of a band of Bororo Fulani cattle herders from Sudan fleeing both Murle cattle raiders from South Sudan and federal soldiers from Ethiopia.
“We travel in search of pasture for our cattle,” said Ali Barka Hassan, “When the flood comes in Gambella, we return to our lands in Sudan.” Ultimately everyone must set their clock by the river — the farmer, the herder, the soldier, and commercial investors like Karuturi.
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May 18, 2013 04:37 IST
Farmers’ suicide rates soar above the rest
Suicide rates among Indian farmers were a chilling 47 per cent higher than they were for the rest of the population in 2011. In some of the States worst hit by the agrarian crisis, they were well over 100 per cent higher. The new Census 2011 data reveal a shrinking farmer population. And it is on this reduced base that the farm suicides now occur.
Apply the new Census totals to the suicide data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the results are grim. Sample: A farmer in Andhra Pradesh is three times more likely to commit suicide than anyone else in the country, excluding farmers. And twice as likely to do so when compared to non-farmers in his own State. The odds are not much better in Maharashtra, which remained the worst State for such suicides across a decade.
“The picture remains dismal,” says Prof. K. Nagaraj, an economist at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. Prof. Nagaraj's 2008 study on farm suicides in India remains the most important one on the subject. “The intensity of farm suicides shows no real decline,” he says. “Nor do the numbers show a major fall. They remain concentrated in the farming heartlands of five key States. The crisis there continues. And the adjusted farmers’ suicide rate for 2011 is in fact slightly higher than it was in 2001.” And that’s after heavy data fudging at the State level.
Five States account for two-thirds of all farm suicides in the country, as NCRB data show. These are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The share of these ‘Big 5’ in total farm suicides was higher in 2011 than it was in 2001. At the same time, the new Census data show that four of these States have far fewer farmers than they did a decade ago. Only Maharashtra reports an increase in their numbers.
Nationwide, the farmers’ suicide rate (FSR) was 16.3 per 100,000 farmers in 2011. That’s a lot higher than 11.1, which is the rate for the rest of the population. And slightly higher than the FSR of 15.8 in 2001.
In Maharashtra, for instance, the rate is 29.1 suicides per 100,000 farmers (‘Main cultivators’). Which is over 160 per cent higher than that for all Indians excluding farmers. Such gaps exist in other States, too. In as many as 16 of 22 major States, the farm suicide rate was higher than the rate among the rest of the population (RRP) in 2011.
The data for 2011 are badly skewed, with States like Chhattisgarh declaring ‘zero’ farm suicides that year. The same State reported an increase in total suicides that same year. But claimed that not one of these was a farmer. What happens if we take the average number of farm suicides reported by the State in three years before 2011? Then Chhattisgarh’s FSR is more than 350 per cent higher than the rate among the rest of the country’s population.
In 1995, the ‘Big 5’ accounted for over half of all farm suicides in India. In 2011, they logged over two-thirds of them. Given this concentration, even the dismal all-India figures tend to make things seem less terrible than they are.
Ten States show a higher farm suicide rate in 2011 than in 2001. That includes the major farming zones of Punjab and Haryana. The average farm suicide rate in the ‘Big 5’ is slightly up, despite a decline in Karnataka. And also a fall in Maharashtra. The latter has the worst record of any State. At least 53,818 farmers’ suicides since 1995. So how come it shows a lower FSR now?
Well, because Census 2011 tells us the State has added 1.2 million farmers (‘main cultivators’) since 2001. That’s against a nationwide decline of 7.7 million in the same years. So Maharashtra’s farm suicide rate shows a fall. Yet, its farm suicide numbers have not gone down by much. And a farmer in this State is two-and-a-half times more likely to kill himself than anyone else in the country, other than farmers.
Karnataka, in 2011, saw a lot less of farm suicides than it did a decade ago. And so, despite having fewer farmers than it did in 2001, the State shows a lower FSR. Yet, even the ‘lower’ farm suicide rates in both Maharashtra and Karnataka are way above the rate for the rest of the country.
These figures are obtained by applying the new farm population totals of Census 2011 to farm suicide numbers of the NCRB. The Census records cultivators. The police count suicides. In listing suicides, the State governments and police tend to count only those with a title to land as farmers.
“Large numbers of farm suicides still occur,” says Prof. Nagaraj. “Only that seems not to be recognised, officially and politically. Is the ‘conspiracy of silence’ back in action?” A disturbing trend has gained ground with Chhattisgarh’s declaration of ‘zero’ farm suicides. (That’s despite having had 4,700 in 36 months before the ‘zero’ declaration). Puducherry has followed suit. Others will doubtless do the same. Punjab and Haryana have in several years claimed ‘zero’ women farmers’ suicides. (Though media and study reports in the same years suggest otherwise). This trend must at some point fatally corrupt the data.
At least 270,940 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995, NCRB records show. This occurred at an annual average of 14,462 in six years, from 1995 to 2000. And at a yearly average of 16,743 in 11 years between 2001 and 2011. That is around 46 farmers’ suicides each day, on average. Or nearly one every half-hour since 2001.
May 27, 2013 00:55 IST
Builder profits soar as master plans proliferate in Gurgaon
Inside information may well have helped realtors make big land purchases in key sectors prior to change in land use
Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who has made a staggering 54,000 acres of land available for residential, commercial and industrial use through the notification of three successive master plans for Gurgaon in a span of six years, has often been criticised for customising the land development policies of this fast-growing Delhi suburb for realtors. However, fresh evidence with The Hindu suggests that inside information about crucial changes in land use may have played just as important a role in the remarkable land-to-gold story of many real estate companies.
The downside of the State government’s favourable attitude towards a large group of roughly 400 builders — many of them first-generation entrants in the profession — is that all other stakeholders have found their interests squeezed. Farmers have been unable to cash in on the land boom, while first-generation middle class homeowners have been deprived of affordable housing and basic amenities.
Hooda’s master plan
In most urban areas, a master plan is usually designed for a 10 to 20-year period. The State administration released its first draft Master Plan 2021 on July 11, 2006. The final master plan, notified on February 5, 2007 reflected a dramatic shift from the draft plan, with the land use of as many as 11 sectors changed from public and semi-public/ public utility/ open space/ industrial to residential and commercial. The government did not offer any explanation for the substantial overhaul of this draft plan in the final master plan.
Within four years, on October 4, 2010, the draft Master Plan 2025 was released and eventually notified on May 24, 2011. Between MP2021 and MP2025, the State government converted sectors 63A and 67A, accounting for roughly 500 acres of agricultural land, to residential land use.
In a little over a year, on November 15, 2012, the draft Master Plan 2031 was released and finally notified on September 4, 2012 after the conversion of roughly 2,200 acres of Special Economic Zone (SEZ) land into residential/commercial use, and parts of sector 115 accounting for roughly 81.57 acres — which was earlier earmarked for public and semi-public use — to commercial use.
The State governments’ explanation for rushing into MP2031 was that, “The scenario regarding setting up of SEZs has undergone sea change since notification of these plans and virtually there are no more takers for SEZs now. Even the already notified SEZs are not being implemented and resultantly, the landowners of such land were demanding replanning of their land so that they are able to utilise the same for some other purpose.” The government went ahead and cancelled the notification of the entire 25,000 acres earmarked for SEZs. But instead of allowing the original landowners to benefit, it permitted failed SEZ developers to obtain licences to develop industrial colonies on the same land. Overall, despite its stated mandate to increase industrial development, land allocated for industrial use was actually reduced by 2020 acres in MP2031.
The SEZ land issue remains controversial. Despite the State government’s projection that SEZs would create five lakh jobs, with a guarantee that at least one member of each family that gives up its land for the project would be given employment, farmers remained unconvinced and unwilling to cooperate. This led to forcible possession of their land by the State with the intervention of the Haryana police force. Litigation involving hundreds of acres is pending in the Punjab and Haryana High Court since 2007.
Inside information?
Even before the draft Master Plan of 2021, builders were actively engaged in purchasing land from farmers. There was an over 30-fold surge in the purchase of land after Mr. Hooda took office in May 2005. Information pertaining to just five builders — Ramprastha, Chintel, DLF, Bestech and M3M — reflects an over Rs. 40,000 crore escalation in the value of roughly 1,000 acres of land through MP2021 alone.
The Hindu has in its possession the sale deeds of properties purchased between the draft MP 2021 and the final MP2021, which reveal that builders like Ramprastha and Bestech, Jubilant Software Services, Nayef Estate, Maria Bella Builders, Sagar Dutt Builders, NCC Urban Infra Ltd, Excellent Advertising & Marketing, Generous Realtors, ALM Infotech, Akina Builders & Developers and others were buying land in just those sectors — 37C, 37D, 95, and 107 — in which land use was eventually changed from SEZ/public & semi-public/industrial use to residential use in the final Master Plan.
Ramprastha Builders, for example, purchased roughly 500 acres of land at an average rate of Rs 1 crore/acre in sectors 37D and 95 through its subsidiary firms Ramprastha Infotech, Ramprastha Towers, Ramprastha Greens and others, precisely in those areas which were later changed into residential use in MP2021. The value of this huge acreage immediately escalated 10 times upon notification of the Plan, jumping further to roughly Rs. 40 crore/acre, after these were licensed in phases into plotted and group housing projects from 2008 — an overall escalation of roughly Rs. 19,500 crore. For some reason, Ramprastha’s director, Arvind Walia, purchased land in Hayatpur in his own name, later selling these properties to his own company at a substantially discounted rate of Rs. 27 lakh/acre.
Though the benefit was directed at Ramprastha, the Department of Town & Country Planning (TCP), Haryana, justified the move to convert selective parts of SEZ land to residential as being prompted “primarily on the report received from HSIIDC,” after which “Sector 37C proposed in the Draft DP-2021 as industrial was re-designated as residential zone in Final DP 2021 … and … Sector 37D which formed part of SEZ in the Draft DP 2021 was carved out as residential zone.” Despite no benefit accruing to either HSIIDC or farmers/landowners, the Department, in an email response to a written questionnaire, further attributed the move to the fact that, “around 38 objections were also received from the villagers of Garauli Khurd, Basai, Mohammedpur Jharsa and Harsaru for either excluding their abadi areas from industrial/SEZ zone or for designating their land under residential land use zone.” DP, or Development Plan, is the term the TCP uses for Master Plan.
In some cases, for builders like M3M, DLF, Jubilant Software, Bestech, and the Chintel Group, which had already purchased land in Sectors 88, 91, 107 and 114, before it was designated for public & semi-public use in the draft MP 2021, the land use for their property holdings alone and not the entire sector (except for sector 88 whose land use was converted in total) was later changed to residential/commercial in the final MP2021. Bestech, which was licensed roughly 33 acres of commercial land in sector 88, became the beneficiary of a 50-fold escalation in land value from its average purchase price of Rs 1 crore/acre. DLF, with the largest landholding of roughly 150 acres in sectors 91/92 and M3M — which held the maximum holding in sector 107 (of which 19 acres has already been licensed) — went on to attract similar escalations.
On July 14, 2009, a meeting of State government officials held under the chairmanship of Mr Hooda, cleared the increase of sector density across Haryana from 80 PPA (Person Per Acre) to 100 PPA and from 100 PPA to 120 PPA, a move that was additionally of special benefit to realtors.
Soon after, the State administration felt the need for yet another Master Plan 2025, justifying the move as the need to provide for additional road links between Delhi and Gurgaon, storm water drains and SEZs. Apart from this, sector 63A was specially carved out of agricultural areas for residential use, of which the biggest contiguous stretch of 100.262 acres, was licensed to Anant Raj Industries for a plotted colony. The value of this land escalated 20 times after the notification of MP2025.
In MP2031, roughly 2,200 acres of land across new sectors — 36A, 36B, 88A, 88B, 89A, 89B, 95A, 95B, 99A and some parts of 88 — designated for the Reliance SEZ, and sector 115, which fell under public & semi-public use, were converted to residential/commercial use. The key beneficiaries of this move were the Ramprastha Group, Vatika Group, Pareena Group, Chintel Group and India Bulls, mainly through its subsidiary firms Corus and Hasta. However, the Haryana government has claimed that its “primary reason for initiating revision of the Final Development Plan of 2025 AD” was to accommodate demands from farmers for replanning of their land on already notified SEZs. On cue, land values appreciated 30 to 40-fold. Pareena Infrastructure, (in the name of Monex Infrastructure Pvt Ltd) which was the first to obtain a licence for 10.59 acres in sector 99A on March 12, 2013, is a telling example, presently selling its residential apartments at Rs. 5,000/sq ft, translating to a value of well over Rs. 40 crore/acre.
Pareena Infrastructure started selling its apartments in Sector 99A even before obtaining its license and subsequent approval of building plans. Receipt of any payment against sale/transfer of flats/plots is liable for suspension of licence. However, despite the evidence, TCP, Haryana says that investigation of a complaint regarding Pareena concluded that “the matter relates to Sector 99 Gurgaon … and not against any project in Sector 99A,” while conceding that “any attempt to advertise the sale of plots/flats without obtaining a license is considered an offence under Section 7 of the Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act, 1975, and Penal action under Section 10 can be initiated against the offending parties in all such cases.”
The Chintel Group — owned by Ashok Solomon — which owns roughly 500 acres of prime land in sectors 106, 108, 109, 114, and 115, was not just a key beneficiary of MP2021, but also of MP2031, which changed the land use of half the public and semi-public zone in sector 115 to commercial, on the pretext that “it will fetch revenue to Government exchequer being its proximity to Delhi.” The value of this land immediately jumped 70-fold. The sector plan reveals that the Chintel Group will be the only builder to obtain a licence for commercial development in sector 115, as it owns 50 per cent of the converted land (81.57 acres), with the remaining 50 per cent under litigation, ensuring that there can be no other beneficiaries. TCP Haryana further admitted in its reply that the limited revenue through statutory fees and charges is still to accrue to the State exchequer, since even a single licence is yet to be given.
Act ignored
Further to the advantage of the benefiting builders, Mr. Hooda has additionally frowned upon an important safeguard designed to ensure that housing remains affordable for consumers and arrest the use of black money in real estate. The bilateral agreement between the State government and coloniser under the Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act 1975, states that in case the net profit of the owner/coloniser exceeds 15 per cent of the total project cost of development of a colony after making provisions of statutory taxes after completion of the project period, “the surplus amount shall either be deposited within two months in the State government treasury by the owner or he shall spend this money on further amenities/facilities in his colony for the benefit of the residents therein.”
However, on March 17, 2010, the minutes of a meeting held under the chairmanship of Mr. Hooda, conclude that “the 15 per cent profitability clause should be done away with,” while acknowledging that “the government should impose some levy while doing away with the clause,” since developers cannot be allowed “undue enrichment without sharing part of the profit with the government.” As per the norms, any coloniser can seek exemption from the 15 per cent profitability ceiling by opting to deposit Infrastructure Augmentation Charges. Both levies are only applicable after grant of Completion Certificate under Rule 16, but are bypassed by not applying for the Completion Certificate in the first place. The minutes itself admit: “as none of the colonisers has been granted final Completion Certificate till date, no exercise has been done by the Department to compute this profit in a single case.”
So while it is the builders and the State government’s responsibility to ensure that consumers occupy a property only after the builder has obtained a completion certificate (for group housing, commercial and IT developments), the State administration itself admits to almost a blanket violation of this provision despite the fact that this can attract cancellation of the licence.
Gurgaon’s residents are litigating against builders for non-provision of basic amenities like “maintenance and upkeep of all roads, open spaces, public parks, public health services.” These amenities are mandatory under the Bilateral Agreement between builders and the government “for five years from the date of issue of Completion Certificate under rule-16 unless earlier relieved of this responsibility,” after which all such amenities have to be transferred to the government or local authority free of cost.
May 21, 2013 00:43 IST
Your data, going on sale soon
Information being collected for the unique identification project will be sold back to the government through specially created, privatised, for profit utilities
Technology has created the potential to record, collate, converge, retrieve, mine, share, profile and otherwise conjure with data. Data is the new property. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), with its push to enrol the whole Indian resident population, signals the emergence of an information infrastructure facilitated by the government — it finances the “start up,” and uses its authority to coerce people to get on to the database, and then handed over to corporate interests when it reaches a “steady state.”
Allowing private entry
The UIDAI was set up by an executive notification dated January 28, 2009. The Planning Commission was the nodal agency “for providing logistics, planning and budgetary support” and to “provide initial office and IT infrastructure.” As part of its “role and responsibilities,” the UIDAI was to “issue necessary instructions to agencies that undertake creation of databases, to ensure standardisation of data elements that are collected and digitised and enable collation and correlation with UID [Unique Identification Number/Aadhaar] and its partner databases.” It was to “take necessary steps to ensure collation of NPR [National Population Register] with UID”. And, the UIDAI “shall own and operate” the UID database.
When the state holds data it collects in its transactions with its residents, it holds the data in a fiduciary capacity. It does not own the data.
The framework for ownership of data was set out by the Nandan Nilekani-chaired Technology Advisory Group for Unique Projects (TAG-UP), which gave its report in January 2011. While the Nilekani committee directly addressed five projects — Goods and Services Tax Network, Tax Information Network, Expenditure Information Network, National Treasury Management Agency and the New Pension System — it recommended that the suggested framework “be more generally applicable to the complex IT-intensive systems which are increasingly coming to prominence in the craft of Indian public administration.”
As understood by TAG-UP, the government has two major tasks: policymaking and implementation. Implementation is weak, and rather than spend time finding correctives, the committee found in this an opportunity for private business interests. So, TAG-UP suggested the setting up of National Information Utilities (NIUs).
“NIUs would be private companies with a public purpose: profit-making, not profit maximising.” The government would have “strategic control,” that is, it would be focused on how it would achieve the objectives and outcomes, leaving the NIU “flexible” in its functioning. Total private ownership should be at least 51 per cent. The government should have at least 26 per cent shares. Once it reaches steady state, the government would be a “paying customer.” As a paying customer, “the government would be free to take its business to another NIU”; though, given the “large upfront sunk-cost, economies of scale, and network externalities from a surrounding ecosystem (and what this means is not explained any further), NIUs are ... essentially set up as natural monopolies.” To get a buy-in from the bureaucracy, “in-service officers” are to be deployed in the NIUs and are to be given an allowance of 30 per cent of their remuneration.
Government as customer
“Once the rollout is completed,” the Nilekani committee blithely states, “the government’s role shifts to that of a customer.”
In sum, what emerges from the TAG-UP report is this: governmental data and databases are to be privatised through the creation of NIUs which will then “own” the data. NIUs will be natural monopolies. NIUs will use the data and the database for profit-making and not profit-maximising, and the definition of these terms are indeterminate.
Government will support the NIUs through funding them till they reach a steady state, and by doing what is needed to gather the data and create the database using governmental authority. Once the NIU reaches steady state, the government will reappear as the customer of the NIU. Government officers will be deployed in NIUs and be paid 30 per cent over their salaries, which, even if the report does not say it explicitly, is expected to forge loyalties and vested interests. The notion of holding citizens’ data in a fiduciary capacity cedes place to the vesting of ownership over citizens’ data in an entity which will then have the government as their customer.
This notion of private companies owning our data has not been discussed with state governments, nor with people from whom information is being collected.
Unexplained
We might have treated the TAG-UP report as another report without a future; except, in the Budget presented by Mr. Pranab Mukherjee as Finance Minister in March 2012, he announced that the “GSTN (Goods and Sales Tax Network) will be set up as a National Information Utility.” The NIU was not explained to Parliament, and no one seems to have raised any questions about what it is.
There is disturbing evidence that the UIDAI provided the basis for the NIU. The report is littered with references to the UIDAI, and suggests that the way the UIDAI has been functioning is a model for the NIU. The Biometrics Standards Committee set up by the UIDAI in September 2009 and which gave its report in December 2009 declared that the UIDAI intended to “create a platform to first collect identity details of residents, and subsequently perform identity authentication services that can be used by government and commercial service providers.” The “UIDAI Strategy Overview,” in April 2010, estimated that it would generate Rs.288.15 crore in annual revenue through address and biometric authentication once it reaches a steady state, where authentication services for new mobile connections, PAN cards, gas connections, passports, LIC policies, credit cards, bank accounts and airline check-in, would net this profit. Till then, it is to be funded by the government. Once that stage is reached, it will be a private, profit-making entity and the government, like other commercial service providers, will become its customer.
Data for a price
Mr. Nilekani calls it “open architecture”; that is, applications can be thought up as the business grows; there are no limits or contours within which it should be used. He has repeatedly described the UID as a unique number, which will be universal and ubiquitous; the latter two indicate that, despite being marketed as voluntary, all activities and services are intended to be made dependent on the UID for all persons, ensuring steady business for the enterprise. The UID enrolment form has a column for “information sharing consent.” This will allow the UIDAI to part with the data, both demographic and biometric, for a price. This explains why there has been so little enthusiasm for a law on the subject. A Bill was introduced in Parliament close to two years after the project was started. When the Parliamentary Standing Committee rejected the Bill and the project in December 2011, the law was consigned to oblivion.
The UIDAI will be a business entity, governed by the Companies Act; not bound by a law that will recognise the fiduciary role of the state, and which will facilitate, and not penalise, a citizen for not having an identity document or number.
The 2009 notification that set up the UIDAI says that the UIDAI is to “take necessary steps to ensure collation of NPR with UID.” Registering in the NPR is compulsory under the Citizenship Act and the Citizenship Rules of 2003. Although biometrics is not within the mandate of the NPR, they have also been collected in the process of building up the NPR database. So, the data mandated to be given to the NPR is being handed over to the UIDAI to become the property of the UIDAI, and we don’t even know it!
(Usha Ramanathan is an independent law researcher and has been following the policy and practices of the UIDAI since 2009.)
May 21, 2013 11:37 IST
Women in search of a community
Women Writing Violence
The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries: Shreerekha Subramanian;
Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B 1/I-1, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area,
Mathura Road, New Delhi-110044. Rs. 750.
In Women Writing Violence, Shreerekha Subramanian provides an intense and close reading of a few literary texts which are indisputably feminist novels. In these she sets out to make a case for defining women and their experience of violence and loss as one that makes them members of an invisible but definitely existing community. This community of women is ranged against the fact of the patriarchal influence of the nation-state caught often in various transitional stages of the shift towards the making of a post-colonial society and a fraught, tentative modernity. With this aim in mind the case for the viewing of women’s stories of loss, refuge and repair is persuasively made with the texts examined against a matrix of sociology, women’s studies, feminism, and cultural theory and less as literature.
In the introduction the author does well to separate the divergent ways in which the meaning of “communal” is received in the West and in South Asia. In the former it is taken to mean a sharing and supporting of each other within a group. In the latter, it is in the contemporary discourse on democracy, taken to denote a racist or non-secular attitude. Examining the idea of shared communities in feminist novels it is apparent that there is a pattern in the things that happen to women. The more intriguing and sometimes disquieting patterns are those that emerge from the distinctive ways that they respond to the brutal crises that visit them. The larger ideas of the dispossessed and their voices offering resistance and thereby making for an alternate community are examined.
Failure of community
The decision to cite Recitatif, the only short story by Toni Morrison, in the introduction is an inspired one. The story follows two girls, Roberta and Twyla who meet in an orphanage as 8 year-olds and again after seven or eight years. We are never told of their race and are expected to understand the ambiguities of their narrative destiny cleared of racial codes. Subramanian points out that the two “wrestle with communication, and in effect community” and goes on to describe the novel as “a partial atonement for the failure of community”. Later the themes of a sundered even blighted community are replayed in Morrison’s novel Paradise. Here, an embattled breakaway group of women refugees hopeful of establishing a community on the outskirts of a new town is annihilated by a group of African American men who consider even their marginal presence a threat to their new identity as free men. The irony of those seeking freedom punishing others like themselves is searing. Interspersed into the narrative and its embedded interiority are motifs taken from the African American belief systems of loss, death and exile. Subramanian locates the marginalised women and their specific failure to become a community when she quotes radical feminist Rajeswari Sunder Rajan who refers to “the general unease between the state, communities and the female self”.
The novels identified make for grim, even bleak reading. Morrison’s Paradise reminds us that even the deeply humanist notion of community comes wired with the awareness of otherness and is used to exclude and marginalise. Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones follows Amabelle Desir’s survival of the massacre of Haitians in 1937 upon the orders of Rafael Trujillo the Dominican president of 30 years.
In her reading of the South Asian novels read in Hindi which include Pakistani writer Tahmina Durrani’s Kufr, Mridula Garg’s Kathgulab and Mahasweta Devi’s Hazaar Charasi Ki Ma, Amita Pritam’s Pinjar and Mohandas Nemishrai’sAaj Bazaar Band Hai, there is a fleeting respite from the incessant cross references and invocation of cultural theories that have characterised the previous chapters and the approach briefly becomes more descriptive and intimate. The descriptions of everyday trauma visited upon the lives of ordinary lives of women as well as the accounts of kidnapped women like Poroo in Pritam’s rich and textured novel Pinjar have a refreshing immediacy and freedom. For the most part though, the book comes packed with the kind of turgid theorising and political reading that governs most academic departments in universities. If the book was intended for a wider readership and not just the academic seminar a more modulated reading and response to the texts as literature was required. The book is full of too many sentences such as this: “women novelists creatively resist the law of the father by contradicting and eliding the symbolic order. To quote Cixous, they steal languages...”
Stimulating as some of these insights are their weight can wear down even the most resolute reader.
(Devina Dutt is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes on arts and culture)
May 20, 2013 14:25 IST
Poverty has increased during period of economic growth, says economist
Prabhat Patnaik.
India’s economic boom in the first decade of the 21 Century coincided with an increase in the magnitude of poverty, economist Prabhat Patnaik said here on Saturday.
“There has been a period of positive growth as far as the GDP is concerned. But during this period , there has been an increase in magnitude of absolute poverty,” he said. “While the Planning Commission insists that proportion of population below the poverty line has gone down, that is not the case by its own definition of urban and rural poverty.”
He was delivering the keynote address at the convention on “Strengthening public health - medical system for the people” organised by the Tamil Nadu Health Development Association.
Citing the Planning Commission’s definition of poverty - people getting less than 2,100 calories per day in urban areas and those getting below 2,200 calories per day in rural areas - as the yardstick, Mr. Patnaik said the percentage points had in fact increased in the period of “high growth rate”.
The section with access to less than 2,100 calories was 60 per cent of the urban poor in 1973-74. It was 58.5 per cent in 1983-84, 57 in 1993-94, but in 2004-05, it went up to 64 per cent. And according to the latest National Sample Survey in 2009-10, it was as high as 73 per cent.
Likewise the percentage of rural people below the poverty line, which was 56 per cent in 1973-74, went up to 56 per cent in 1983-84, 58.5 per cent in 1993-94, and 69.5 per cent in 2004-05. By 2009-10, it went up to 76 per cent.
He said the annual per capita food consumption by Indians stood at close to 160 kg per person, only marginally up from 140 kg per person at the turn of independence in 1947 and even lower from the 200 kg per person at the stroke of the 20th century. Usually, big economic growth in the West coincided with people having access to more food grains than before.
The annual per capita consumption of food grains, including direct and indirect (food processing), in the US is currently around 900 kg.
Mr. Patnaik said neo-liberal policies, apart from aiding corporates at the cost of the peasantry and petty producers of the country, was giving rise to the growth of what Karl Marx termed lumpenproletariat - a class of workers that is not politically active and is away from the mainstream and is exploited by fascist forces.
Any alternative economic strategy for the country to reform the current scenario must take into account the welfare of the peasantry and the petty producers.
A resolution was adopted at the meeting calling for an increase in the Union budget allocation for public health. Against the 12th Plan projection of 1.58 per cent of GDP towards health, the convention called for allocation of five per cent of the GDP.
Even the common minimum programme of the UPA had promised three per cent of the GDP for health, it pointed out.
May 25, 2013 18:10 IST
World listens to ‘Iron Lady of Jharkhand’ in the Big Apple
Jharkhand adivasi rights activist Dayamani Barla receives the Ellen L. Lutz Indigenous Rights Award from Suzanne Benally, executive director of Cultural Survival, an indigenous peoples’ rights organisation.Photo: Narayan Lakshman
Dayamani Barla was presented with the first ever Ellen L. Lutz Indigenous Rights Award by Cultural Survival, an indigenous peoples’ rights organisation
The Big Apple is renowned as the home of investment banks, glitzy fashion shows and other 21st-century tributes to prodigious wealth accumulation. But on Thursday it played host to a powerful symbol of Indian adivasis’ struggle against oppression, Jharkhand activist and journalist Dayamani Barla.
On a rainy and blustering evening in Manhattan, Ms. Barla, who has been described as the “Iron Lady of Jharkhand” for her fearless opposition to the infringement of adivasi rights was presented with the first ever Ellen L. Lutz Indigenous Rights Award by Cultural Survival, an indigenous peoples’ rights organisation.
After an eloquent address at the reception in her honour at New York’s National Museum of the American Indian, Ms. Barla told The Hindu that she doubted whether this international recognition would make a difference to the situation in Jharkhand, but added that those who opposed the adivasis’ struggle to preserve “jal, jungle, jameen” may now have pause to consider why the U.S. had thus honoured their cause.
The self-made scribe, who rose from humble beginnings to become the voice of the Munda tribe and other deprived communities, has reason to worry about the situation back home. In all Ms. Barla is said to have nine cases foisted on her by the government and people associated with the award indicated that she had faced obstacles in leaving Jharkhand for this event in the U.S.
On October 18 last year, she was jailed for two months for demanding job cards for the rural poor in Angada block under the NREGA scheme, a charge that stemmed from a 2006 case against her.
Although she got bail two days later, she was immediately re-arrested in relation to two other cases, where she was accused of disrupting law and order during a protest. Keeping up her journalistic mission, she wrote from her jail cell that the “looters of the state have become well-wishers in the eyes of the government.”
On that occasion Nagri residents and activists stepped up the demand for her release and prominent intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, signed a petition “strongly condemning [her] unjust incarceration... and demand that the false cases against her be dropped and that she be released immediately.”
Terry Odendahl of Global Greengrants Fund, who nominated Ms. Barla for the award, reflected on the Jharkhand police’s attempts to silence her protests when she said, “Dayamani’s jailing was a reminder to civil rights activists across the nation of the unfriendly role the Jharkhand state is taking towards drivers of democratic change.”
Ms. Barla’s determination to keep the forces of India’s modern capitalist machine from eating into adivasi land clearly caught the eye of the award selection committee, which picked her out of a group of nearly 60 nominees.
Alongside her colleagues from the Adivasi Moolvasi Astitva Raksha Manch, Ms. Barla in 2008, succeeded in preventing global steel and mining industry behemoth ArcelorMittal, from proceeding with the establishment of a $8.79 billion steel plant based on the proposed seizure of 12,000 acres of land and the displacement of 40 villages, not to mention the likely ecosystem and indigenous livelihoods damage.
In an article written at the time she was quoted saying, “We will not allow the ArcelorMittal Company to enter into the villages because one cannot be rehabilitated once displaced. The lands which we cultivate belong to our ancestors; therefore we will not leave it.”
Since 2010, she has also led numerous protests in Nagri village, nearly 16 km from Ranchi, against the Jharkhand government’s efforts to acquire over 200 acres of farmland to set up IIM, IIT and National Law School campuses.
On Thursday, a captivated audience of human rights lawyers, academics, and members of indigenous communities from across the world listened as Ms. Barla said that in the span of 12 years, the Jharkhand government had signed 104 MoUs with corporate, 98 per cent of which were mining interests with a strong demand for natural resources in the region.
“If the government gives land for mining to all companies, Jharkhand will lose its environment and the land will become infertile,” Ms. Barla explained, adding that in 10 years, the population of displaced people would increase four-fold, permanently destroying indigenous habitats and livelihoods.
NEW YORK, May 29, 2013
New York launches bike share service
Ten months behind schedule, New York City has launched what aims to be one of the world’s biggest bike share programmes, following in the path already taken by Paris, Montreal, London and Barcelona.
New Yorkers will now be able to move around on the 6,000 blue “Citi Bikes” distributed among 333 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn — the first phase of a network that is supposed to grow to 10,000 bikes at 600 stations.
Light traffic because of the Memorial Day holiday made for ideal conditions to try out the new subscription-based service on quiet city streets.
About 14,000 New Yorkers have paid an annual $103 fee entitling them to unlimited rides of 45 minutes. Daily and weekly plans will be available as well from June 2.
Alex Nash, who pedalled into Union Square on his first “Citi bike” ride at 8:30 am, said he was delighted by the experience despite some glitches. “To start with, it was a little bit difficult to put it back. I couldn’t get a new one. But it’s great. I love it,” said the software engineer.
He said he wants to use the bike share programme every day to get around Manhattan.
The roll-out, which has caused changes in traffic patterns and in the urban landscape, has caused some grumbling among New Yorkers who have seen parking places disappear and complain the bike racks look ugly.
And there is raging debate over the risks posed by a higher degree of road sharing among cars and bikes in a city not known for patience.
The initiative operates under the same basic scheme adopted in other cities with bike share programmes, with users offered daily, weekly and annual plans at varying rates for unlimited 30 to 45 minute rides. There is a charge for rides that last longer.
The programme was supposed to have begun in July 2012 but it was postponed twice, initially for logistical reasons, and later because some equipment suffered flood damage during Superstorm Sandy in October. — AF
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June 6, 2013 23:13 IST
U.S. agency snooping on phone records of "millions"
APIn this file photo an employee of a Verizon store holds up an Apple iPhone 4G, in Beachwood, Ohio. Britain's “The Guardian” newspaper says the NSA is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a secret court order.
Armed with a judge-approved surveillance licence since April 25, the U.S. National Security Agency has been secretly snooping on the telephone records of millions of customers of telecom giant Verizon, British newspaper The Guardianhas revealed.
Less than two months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court in Washington issued an order authorising Obama administration officials to obtain from Verizon “on an ongoing, daily basis,” all “telephony metadata” for both calls within the U.S. and for those between the U.S. and other countries.
The FISA Court also required the details of the surveillance activity to be kept secret, and The Guardian reported that the NSA, White House, Justice Department and Verizon declined to comment on the story before it went to press.
Though the “metadata” procured by Verizon does not include actual voice records of the conversation spied upon and only pertains to “call envelope” items such as originating and terminating numbers, call duration, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity number, and communication routing information, freedom of information advocates were alarmed at the sheer scale of the alleged government intrusion into private citizens’ lives.
Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “It’s a programme in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents. It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.”
Meanwhile Attorney-General Eric Holder, who recently faced questions over a similar phone records surveillance of the Associated Press news agency, said in a Congressional hearing that the DOJ had “made tremendous progress in protecting the safety, and the sacred rights, of the American people,” and that members of Congress had been “fully briefed” on the NSA spying programme.
One of the journalists behind the Guardian scoop, Glenn Greenwald, said there had been earlier hints of deepening concern over President Barack Obama’s apparent willingness to pursue surveillance activities on a similar scale to his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Mr. Greenwald in particular cited the remarks of two U.S. Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who have for roughly two years “been stridently advising the public that the U.S. government is relying on secret legal interpretations to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be stunned to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.”
June 6, 2013 10:09 IST
‘26 per cent doctors suffering from mobile phone blues’
With 26 per cent Delhi doctors suffering from severe mobile phone-induced anxiety, a survey conducted by non-government organisation Heart Care Foundation of India has recommended electronic curfew for about half-an-hour each day. “Everybody should have 30 minutes of electronic curfew before they sleep. Use mobile only when mobile. Once the battery is discharged, call it a day for mobile use,” noted the survey, which has been released on the occasion of World Environment Day.
The survey, that was conducted among 25 nurses of one hospital, 25 office staff of one public company, 25 media desk executives of one electronic TV media house and 87 family physicians from all across Delhi, has warned that the prolonged use of mobile phone can cause neck pain, dry eyes, computer vision syndrome, anxiety (ringxiety), phobias (nomophobia) and insomnia.
“The results were disturbing,” said K. K. Aggarwal of Heart Care Foundation. The survey found that 10 per cent office staff, 20 per cent nurses and 60 per cent media house desk executives and 31 per cent family physicians used smart phones.
“On an average, nurses recharged their phone battery twice a day; media desk executives and doctors did it three times in a day. Sixty-one per cent doctors find someone to call as soon as they leave their office or as soon as their flight lands. Seventy per cent family physicians keep their cell phone with them constantly. Even at home they keep it in their pocket or right next to them. Forty-three per cent of them fiddle with their cell phone whenever they have downtime (even when they are not on the phone or they only have a very few minutes to kill),” noted the survey.
It was also found that 33 per cent feel anxious about their cell phone, especially when they are unable to use it (meeting, plane, class, church), 28 per cent of them are uncomfortable and fidgety when they are not using their cell phone and seven per cent family physicians feel the need to talk on the phone almost all the time.
“Sixty-three per cent of family physicians sleep with their cell phone under the pillow or on a night stand right next to the bed. This number is 20-50 per cent for nurses, office staff and media desk executives,” said Dr. Aggarwal.
The survey, which was released at the Indian Medical Association office in the city, noted that among those who participated in the study 25 per cent family physicians sometimes believed their phone was ringing, but when they answered it or listened longer they found that it wasn’t ringing at all (phantom ringing).
“Fifteen per cent family physicians reported feeling stressed when they received their cell phone bill and then experienced shock once they actually saw the amount. Twenty-two per cent family physicians reported being unable to resist special offers on the latest cell phone models,” noted the study.
IMA’s Dr. Narendra Saini said: “Mobile phones were also found to be a cause of disturbed sleep. It was also found that 90 per cent nurses and 50 per cent operation theatre technicians were taking calls during surgery. Ten per cent doctors, 20 per cent nurses and 50 per cent technicians would check their messages (SMS) even during surgery.”
Speaking about the various ill-effects of cell phone abuse, he added: “We have found that overuse of the thumb to operate a mobile device may lead to ‘BlackBerry thumb’. The thumb lacks the dexterity that the other four fingers have and the symptoms in the case include aching and throbbing pain in the thumb or sometimes other fingers and in the wrist.”
