Author: cprindia

By Yamini Aiyar

“At the current time, there is a severe learning crisis in India, where children are enrolled in primary school but are failing to attain even basic skills such as foundational literacy and numeracy.” This one sentence in the recently released Draft National Education Policy, 2019 (NEP) encapsulates the most critical challenge India facing education policy in India today. The NEP clearly articulates the goal for the new government: “ensuring every child in grade 5 and beyond has achieved foundational literacy and numeracy”.  Adopting this goal and ensuring universal acquisition of foundational skills in mission mode is the new government’s primary challenge.

Understanding the problem

India’s learning crisis is a widely acknowledged fact. Since 2005, the Annual Survey of Education Rural (ASER) has served as a repeated reminder that barely 50 per cent of students in Standard 5 in India can read a Standard 2 text. Several other studies including the government’s own, recently conducted National Assessment Survey (NAS) 2017, point to low levels of learning. According to NAS, the proportion of Standard 5 students who scored more than 75 per cent in Mathematics ranged from 12% to 40 % in18 major states in country. The range for Standard 8 students was between 2% and 23 %.

But underlying these low levels of learning is an even bigger crisis. Learning gaps emerge in the early years of schooling and learning profiles – the relationship between years of schooling and measures of student mastery – are flat. In other words, if a child falls behind expected learning levels in early years of schooling, sitting in classrooms, year after year and progressing to higher grades, does not ensure that the child catches up. Drawing on a series of rigorous studies of learning profiles in India, Economists Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty estimate that even with the simplest skills like reading a simple passage, 4 out of 5 children who go into a grade not able to read will finish the grade still unable to read¹. Even as children struggle to basics, the curriculum and associated textbooks are designed in the expectation that children have acquired grade-level skills and can progress onwards. Pritchett and Beatty refer to the phenomenon as the “negative consequence of an overambitious curriculum”.

Moreover, several studies highlight that there are wide variations in student learning levels within a classroom. In the 2018 ASER survey, in the average standard 3 classroom in Himachal Pradesh 15.5% students could read words but not sentences; another 24% could read a standard 1 text while 47.4% could read a standard 2 text². The result is a significant divergence between rates of learning and curriculum expectations. A recent study by Muralidharan and Singh of 5000 students spanning grades 1-8 in four districts of Rajasthan finds that the average rate of learning progress across grades is substantially lower (about half) than envisaged in the syllabus and curricula. As a result, the vast majority of students struggle to cope and in the process learn very little³.

This learning crisis has persisted even as India has made significant gains in achieving the goal of universal elementary education through the expansion of schooling infrastructure. As the NEP states “India now has near universal enrolment of children in primary schools. Gender parity has been achieved and the most disadvantaged groups have access to primary schools.” The harsh reality is this: Schooling is not Learning.

Against this background the focused, goal oriented push for achieving foundational literacy and numeracy in elementary schools strikes at the heart of the problem. As the NEP emphasizes, “the rest of the Policy will be largely irrelevant for such a large portion of our students if this most basic learning (reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is not first achieved”.

Moving from Policy to Action 

The NEP offers important starting point to develop a mission mode, goal oriented approach to improving foundational skills in India. It also offers a fairly detailed set of powerful policy ideas from re-designing curriculum, to national tutors program, teacher training and community participation. But achieving this goal is not just about policy direction. Rather it is about shifting mind-sets and changing institutional culture. This can only be achieved through a fundamental re-haul of how elementary education is financed and governed.

The reality is that in its current architecture, the education system is designed and incentivized to cohere around the goal of schooling inputs (enrollment, access, infrastructure) rather than learning. All planning, financing and decision-making systems are aligned to this goal. To illustrate, annual plans, targets and budgets are delinked from the articulation of learning goals. Rather they are based on infrastructure goals determined through U-DISE (Unified District Information on School Education), a specifically created data-base on critical education indicators, except learning. Recent efforts to measure learning outcomes at the district level such as the National Assessment Survey, are not integrated in to the planning and budgeting cycle. As a result, plans have little to do with learning needs and interventions specific to improving learning outcomes command a relatively money. In 2018-19, quality specific interventions accounted for a mere19% of the total Government of India budget for elementary education (Accountability Initiative, 2019)⁴.

Schooling goals inevitably privilege hierarchical, top-down delivery systems that seek to demand accountable through easily verifiable, logistical targets (# classrooms built, #teacher qualifications). This is precisely what has happened to our classrooms. Easy to measure metrics, ‘syllabus completion’ and ‘pass percentages’ have held our classrooms hostage. The result has been a deeply centralised education system that in which central government determined priorities, rather than school/ student specific learning needs are privileged, leaving the entire education bureaucracy busy collecting information and monitoring targets relevant to New Delhi rather than schools and children.

Shifting this schooling culture is not a simple matter of changing syllabus and textbooks, introducing new pedagogy and improving training. Rather it requires a complete re-haul of the organizational structure and associated incentive systems in which education stakeholders from bureaucrats to teachers and parents are embedded. Education architecture needs to move towards a bottom-up, decentralized delivery system, which privileges the classroom and it’s specific learning needs. This will make the implementation of NEP specific recommendations a reality. The path to this transition to a decentralized system can be achieved through three key reforms.

Financing Education 

Despite being on the concurrent list, elementary education financing is disproportionately dependent on Government of India programs. This is because the bulk of State’s use the bulk of their own finances (up to 90% in some cases) toward payment of wages and liabilities. Government of India schemes (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan now renamed Samagra Shiksha) are thus the only source of funds available to states for non-wage expenditure. These schemes privilege an extremely centralized, on-size fit all, schooling focused planning, budgeting and decision-making system. States, in this architecture, have little room for orienting spending to their specific learning needs.

From tied line item funding to block grants

The first step toward shifting to an education system that prioritizes foundational learning is to re-haul the Government of India (GoI) financing system. This can be achieved by putting States in the drivers seat, and providing them with flexible financing aligned to the achievement of clearly articulated learning goals. Specifically, the government should create a new funding window for foundational learning that funds states two untied grants.

The first untied grant an annual grant for states to meet school infrastructure requirements. The RTE mandates that all states meet a set of infrastructure and teacher norms. States should estimate their infrastructure requirements over a three-year period, which the centre can fund annually.

The second grant should be a formula-based, untied learning grant financed over a 3-5 year period. Funding through this window should be based on a long-term learning strategy articulated by state governments and linked to clearly articulated annual learning goals. Since this is an untied grant, the centre will no longer need to busy itself with negotiating line-item expenditure. Rather, it can focus on providing technical support and guidance to states.

Shifting from an annual to 3 year planning and funding cycle

In the current annual government financial and administrative cycle, it takes a minimum of 6 months – usually till November (well in to the school year) for money to move and new programs to be implemented. This is a result of long administrative processes linked to getting plans and projects approved, procuring materials and finally ensuring funds reach their final destination. Studies by the Centre for Policy Research’s Accountability Initiative (PAISA) point out that the bulk of money usually reaches schools and districts mid way (and often at the end) of the annual financial year. Consequently, programs have a late start and an early end, to meet end of year financial needs. This needs to change. The planning cycle needs to move away from an annual cycle to a 3 year cycle (with annual financial approvals) so states, districts and schools can plan better and ensure continuity in implementation.

Improving the assessment system

To institutionalize a culture of accountability and ensure that states have available and utilize regular, reliable data on learning outcomes, a significant effort will need to be made to improve the quality of data collection on learning related indicators. An important start has been made through the restructured National Assessment Survey implemented in 2017 and the NITI Aayog’s School Education Quality Index. However , there are several gaps. The current tools are linked to the achievement of grade level competencies. However, to be useful what they need to capture are gaps in foundational literacy and numeracy and how far students are from these basic skills. Data is analysed on the basis of grade level outcomes rather than specific foundational learning outcomes. Absent this critical data point, states are unable to determine the level at which to orient their learning levels.  For assessments to be useful in addressing the learning crisis, they need to be aligned to foundational learning skills and not grade level learning outcomes. Further, the quality of data collection improved. The NEP has recommended setting up a Central Education Statistics Division. This recommendation must be implemented urgently.

Moving beyond states to districts and schools

An education system decentralized to states is simply too large to effectively respond to the diversity of learning needs in school and classrooms. In recognition of this, education policy has, on paper, made the district the unit of planning. However, traditionally, districts have little flexibility in making plans or control over budget. If the education system has to genuinely move toward a focus on classrooms and students, this has to change. Just like states, districts too ought to articulate learning goals over a 3-5 year period and have the flexibility to develop plans to meet these goals. To incentivize districts, GoI and States could create a learning improvement fund that interested districts could compete for⁵. However, doing this will require a massive capacity building effort by the state and center to empower districts to make plans. An interesting parallel is the Kerala People’s Plan of 1996 in which the state planning board launched a yearlong campaign to work with the Panchayati Raj system to develop the first ever people’s plan. The Central government could create a small capacity building fund for states to develop a similar plan campaign. Of course, an effort such as this must not be restricted to districts and should be extended to schools and parent led school committee’s as well.

Teaching at the Right Level

Indi’s learning crisis has two challenges. The first is to ensure that students entering the school system do not fall behind in the first place. An important suggestion in the NEP, that must be implemented is to integrate pre-school learning with the formal elementary school system. Further reforms relate to curricula and teacher recruitment, training and performance management will likely help redress problems encountered within schools.

However, the second and arguably greater challenge relates to students already in school, many of whom desperately need to catch up. For this cohort of students, there is today a significant body of evidence that suggests the efforts to match classroom instruction to student learning level (rather than the traditional age-grade matrix) or “teaching at the right level” implemented in mission mode can result in significant and relatively speedy gains in foundational learning levels. Many state governments and even individual districts today are beginning to experiment with implementing versions of teaching at the right level (TARL) in their schools. These efforts need to be supported and scaled both with technical and financial resources. To do this, it is proposed to create a specific FLN fund and technical partners at the Government of India level that districts can draw on to implement TARL initiative in mission mode. This could be linked to the Niti Aayog’s aspirational districts program to ensure high level buy in and institutional convergence at the GoI level. Effort to assess foundational learning levels, using ASER like tools are already underway. These now need to be scaled.

From Assessments to Learning and doing

One of the most damaging consequences of a centralized, schooling focused implementation system is that it has undermined the professional roles of teachers and school level administrators, casting them as passive rule followers, collecting data and implementing orders from the top. It isn’t uncommon for teachers in schools to describe themselves as mere clerks in an administrative system, taking them away from their primary teaching responsibilities. This view is reinforced by the fact that the career ladder for teachers – as they move to becoming head masters, cluster and block level officers and finally district education officers – is primarily about more administration rather than supporting teaching – learning. Recognizing this problem, the NEP pushes for reducing administrative work and improve teacher training and support infrastructure.

But these reforms will only work if they are accompanied by significant cultural shift in how education reforms are debated and implemented. This shift must place teachers and frontline officers at the center of attempt to reshape classroom pedagogy. Consider this. In the last three years, significant efforts have been underway to move the needle on measuring learning outcomes. These include the NAS and SEQI referred to earlier. However, none of these assessments are geared toward the teacher or frontline administrators – particularly the cluster resource center coordinators and block resource persons charged with providing mentoring and academic support to teachers. These assessments thus merely function as tools for monitoring performance rather than diagnostic tools that can aid teachers and their pedagogical support structure, to motivate teachers and assist them in improving teaching practices. For teachers and frontline administrators, this merely reinforces the view that they are no more than disempowered cogs in the wheel expected to follow orders and complete administrative tasks.

Yet, evidence from a number of experiments, most recently in Uttar Pradesh⁶ where teachers are using mobile apps to review and track progress on student outcomes on a regular basis, suggests that the most effective way of moving the needle on teacher motivation and re-asserting their primary professional identity as teachers charged with imparting learning to students, is by empowering them with data and enabling them to use this data in their classrooms. It also ensures that academic support staff have the tools to engage in a meaningful discussion with teachers on how to improve learning in schools. Building on these experiments to use technology and empower teachers with student assessment data in meaningful ways can go a long way in addressing this challenge. Shifting the needle on learning outcomes assessment away from being a mere tool in the hands of the central and state governments to becoming a diagnostic tool that teachers can and should use is an urgent and arguably most important reform that must be institutionalized if India is too move toward the goal of universal acquisition of foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the next five years.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
• Clearing Our Air of Pollution: A Road Map for the Next Five Years by Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash

¹ https://www.cgdev.org/publication/negative-consequences-overambitious-cu…

² http://www.asercentre.org/Keywords/p/337.html and https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/learning-levels-will-not-improve-…

³ https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/learning-levels-will-not-improve-…

⁴ https://accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/pdf_files/SS%202019-2…

⁵ See also https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/improving-children…

⁶ https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/human-development/a-quiet-revolution…

A number of major cities (Mumbai, Chennai, Sao Paolo, Hanoi, HCM City, Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta etc.) of the world have been hit hard over the past few years with severe flooding events. How can policy makers ensure improved disaster preparedness in the future continues to be a key concern.

The talk (full video above) explores options for forward-looking operational assistance to policy makers and technical specialists in the rapidly expanding cities and towns of the developing world on how best to manage the risk of floods.

It takes a strategic approach, in which appropriate risk management measures are assessed, selected and integrated in a process that both informs and involves the full range of stakeholders. The speakers Abhas Jha and Kamal Kishore are senior experts in this field.

Access the question and answer session that followed the presentation here.

More details about the talk can be accessed at the dedicated event listing here.

Listen to Akhila Sivadas (above) talk about activism on sanitation, focusing on interventions by Mahila Pragati Manch, a community based organisation in Delhi, which advocated for basic sanitation services for the Jhuggi Jhopri slum clusters of the city with decision makers, not only catching the attention of those in power but also sensitising them. Sivadas is a founder member of Centre For Advocacy and Research (CFAR).

By Yamini Aiyar and Partha Mukhopadhyay

The PM-KISAN (Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi) scheme announced this January and expanded in this government’s first cabinet meeting, is the first major union government income support scheme. States, notably Telangana and Odisha, have introduced such schemes earlier. How should PM-KISAN be taken forward?

The move to cash

Direct benefit transfers, cash transfers and income support schemes have been both discussed and implemented at the national and regional levels in the last few years.

Direct benefit transfers involve replacing generalised subsidies with traceable targeted cash, e.g., the PMUY’s transfer of a subsidy per cylinder of LPG to a designated bank account, vis-à-vis the earlier subsidy per cylinder, leading to a low price for all.

Cash transfers can be of three main types. The first is (i) replacement for in-kind transfers, e.g., school vouchers or food stamps instead of public education or public distribution of foodgrain – such cash can only be spent on specific items of expenditure.  The second is (ii) conditional cash transfers, where use is unrestricted, but its receipt is conditional on observable actions by the household, e.g., sending children to school, getting them vaccinated, etc. or characteristics of the individual, e.g., old age pensions. The third type, i.e., (iii) an unconditional transfer of cash, is an income support scheme.

Objectives of PM-KISAN

An individual can receive income support for a variety of reasons.¹ PM-KISAN could have two objectives (i) to compensate for inefficient capital markets, e.g., enable timely purchase of agricultural inputs without high cost borrowing, and (ii) as a supposedly more efficient anti-poverty measure. These are feasible objectives to focus on. In the first case, the transfer amount would depend on agricultural expenditures involved. With the second, the choice is between trying to compress the income distribution, by targeting larger support to the bottom of the distribution and a less informationally demanding “rising tide lifts all boats” design – which appears to be PM-KISAN’s choice – and possibly justification for the relatively small transfer, compared to state schemes.

Quasi-universality – minimal targeting

The advantage of keeping the income support low, i.e., not very large in relation to rural income in the bottom quintile, is that the number of beneficiaries can be large – and the scheme quasi universal. It also reduces the incentive of excluded households to try and game the system and become beneficiaries. PM KISAN’s amount of Rs. 6000 per family in three instalments is about ten percent of family expenditure for the bottom rural quintile.

However, this amount, especially in three instalments, may be ineffective in easing borrowing constraints for farm inputs and PM-KISAN should thus be seen as primarily an anti-poverty tool.

It is instructive to compare PM-KISAN with Odisha’s KALIA scheme.

First, like KALIA, PM KISAN’s transfer is invariant with respect to landholding – which imparts a certain progressive character to the transfer, unlike Telangana’s Ryuthu Bandhu.

Second, if it is implemented the way it is in Odisha, it may not exclude many households. Many agricultural labour households, who are the largest group of poor likely to be excluded if the scheme only targeted farmers, can still be beneficiaries if even those with tiny amounts of landholding are included, as in KALIA. However, it is not clear how the beneficiary selection, which is a state function, is occurring and will occur in PM-KISAN.

The share of landless households – those with less than 20 square metres of land – varies considerably across states. While, in 2013, it was 5.4% in Odisha (considerably less than the national average of 7.4%) it was more than 20% in Uttarakhand, 15% in Andhra Pradesh, more than 12% in Gujarat and Maharashtra and more than 10% in Karnataka. Will these households be included in PM-KISAN? The answer is not clear. That said, it is also possible that many of these landless households are non-agricultural workers living in rural areas – not landless labourers.

To ensure that the landless are included, in addition to the transfer to farmers, KALIA also has a support scheme for those engaged in non-farm work.  Its design is somewhat restrictive, but it includes a limited number of livelihood activities for which support is provided.

Beneficiary Database

Operationally, the use of exclusion instead of inclusion criteria is preferable, but the underlying database used for implementation is of major importance. The quality of the database would depend on the extent of information available to the enumerators and how frequently it can be updated – both of which point to the local government as the preferred locus of implementation, a coordinated instead of centralised data repository. This does run the risk of over inclusion, but if the income support is not excessive and the exclusion criteria are clear and designed to only exclude the upper tier of local elites, this risk should not be very large.

The extent of targeting is both a matter of design and of implementation: what criteria and who chooses? In Odisha, the list of beneficiaries was prepared at the local level and was then pruned at upper bureaucratic levels, using a variety of secondary databases relating to land ownership and employment (government employees were excluded). It claims it was able to exclude large farmers, because it had previously built a land records database and a foodgrain procurement database that required land ownership data to prevent round-tripping sales. In the latter database, the incentive is to show a higher amount of land, so that the household is able to sell a higher amount of food grain to the procurement agency. Linking the two databases created a list of large landowners, who could be excluded. This shows the importance of existing state capacity and prior action in successfully implementing new income support schemes. In states where such groundwork has not been laid, PM KISAN could have catalysed the building of that capacity, and improved on the use of the databases used for the initial implementation of PM-KISAN.

However, in the PM-KISAN scheme, such databases are now no longer needed, since the landholding ceiling has been removed and there is only an exclusion criteria related to employment. One hopes that at least one collateral benefit of the PM-KISAN scheme will be a verified database of state government employees (the excluded category).

A pertinent question to ask would be whether the trade-off – reduced administrative costs and minimal targeting errors of exclusion by expanding the scheme to larger landowners, vis-à-vis an increase in the amount for the original beneficiaries – is worth it for a primarily anti-poverty scheme.

Financing of PM-KISAN

PM-KISAN could be financed by repurposing funds from existing schemes or through new revenue.

MGNREGS: Does PM-KISAN make MGNREGS, which despite its initial scepticism, has continued to receive support from government, redundant? Should the MGNREGS budget be diverted to PM-KISAN? A major advantage of the design of MGNREGS is that it is well targeted, due to self-targeting. A beneficiary is required to perform relatively unpleasant work for relatively little money – as such, those who have other opportunities for employment will choose not to seek benefits under MGNREGS. It thus targets agricultural labour households, more than cultivators, and is complementary to PM-KISAN; though agricultural labour households could also receive income support from PM-KISAN, as explained earlier, if farmers with micro-holdings are included in the list of beneficiaries.

Another collateral benefit is that the MGNREGS wage can act as minimum wage support for the broader workforce. For this to be effective, workers must be reasonably sure of obtaining employment through MGNREGS. In India, where a large number of rural residents are not land owners or land leasers, but farm and non-farm labour, e.g., in brick kilns, etc., this wage support function of MGNREGS can help many beyond its direct beneficiaries. A wage floor can lead to more political support for MGNREGS, from labour, but it can also lead to determined opposition from employers, especially if productivity gains (e.g., from efficiency wages) do not result from an increase in wages.

However, this self-targeting feature is not costless. If the beneficiary has to give up other work to benefit from MGNREGS, the net benefit to the beneficiary is reduced. In addition, there is material cost, since employment is generated by building an asset, like a pond or a road, which needs material beyond labour. In return, one gets an asset – but is it a durable quality asset, necessary in its context?

While previously, many MGNREGS assets were public assets, a large majority of them are now built on individual farms of small or SC/ST farmers, e.g. farm ponds, livestock sheds or houses.² There is thus, a strong incentive to monitor quality. This also means that there may be considerable overlap with the beneficiaries of PM-KISAN. In that respect, MGNREGS and PM-KISAN are complementary in a different sense – in that it may improve use of the infrastructure built on individual farms through MGNREGS and, potentially, raise local demand for agricultural labour.

The case for replacing MGNREGS with PM-KISAN is therefore weak. 

However, in order to fully leverage the complementarity to MGNREGS some inter-linked steps need to be taken to improve MGNREGS implementation. Key amongst these are:

a) Matching budget provisions to demand: While, in the last five years, the government significantly enhanced MGNREGS allocations, these were still not sufficient to meet pending liabilities, i.e., additional expenditure incurred by States over and above budgetary allocations. According to data analysed by Centre for Policy Research’s Accountability Initiative, this amount rose from Rs. 724 crore in FY 2014-15 to Rs. 5,932 crore FY 2018-19 (till December 2018).

b) Paying Wages on Time: An important consequence of pending liabilities is delayed wages – a long-standing problem which is worsening.³ Recent changes in payment mechanisms – ostensibly to reduce corruption, including linking payments with Aadhaar — have served to exacerbate this problem (Dreze, 2017). The primary delay occurs after administrative paper work is completed, when funds are to travel to the State government account and onward to beneficiaries.⁴

c) Linking wage payments to state minimum wages and rural inflation: Another consequence is stagnant wages. Since 2017, MGNREGS wage hikes have been 2.7% in 2017 and 2.9% in 2018 (Indian Express, 2018). Moreover, according to CPR’s Accountability Initiative’s analysis more than half the states in 2016-17 paid an average wage that was less than the notified wage rate. We think that the government should reconsider its decision to accept the recommendations of the Nagesh Singh committee delinking MGNREGS wages from state minimum wages.

Taken together, thes weakens the ability of the MGNREGS wage to act as wage support for the broader workforce – a benefit that goes beyond the direct beneficiaries. Unless work is available on demand and wages are paid on time, the wage floor is rendered ineffective.

d) Strengthening the role of Gram Panchayats in asset creation:  Early in its previous term, the government sought to ensure that assets created were durable and effective. The primary approach was to emphasise “convergence” by linking assets created under MGREGS to other asset creation programs. Prominent amongst these are rural housing and sanitation schemes.

While, in principle convergence is likely to improve overall efficiency, in the specific context of MGNREGS, this has served to undermine the legally mandated role of gram panchayats. The design of MNREGS is a unique opportunity to alter the implementation architecture for rural service delivery by devolving 50% of the funds to Gram Panchayats. A critical role envisaged for them was to prepare a shelf of works linking assets to be created under the MGNREGS to locally relevant needs — likely to create better assets than a plan prepared in New Delhi and state capitals. Early studies on the quality of assets created under MGNERGS attest to this fact.  However, convergence undermines this role. The emphasis on convergence ought to give way to the harder task of building Panchayat capability – including basic human resources – to develop shelves of work, including assets needed to improve infrastructure on local SC/ST and small farmer lands. This becomes even more salient as rural housing and sanitation is saturated and the need for infrastructure to improve agricultural productivity remains.

Fertiliser and Electricity Subsidies: The case for enhancing PM-KISAN by reorienting fertiliser and perhaps even electricity subsidies is stronger.  The amounts involved are larger, the subsidies are regressive (in that larger farmers get more), and environmentally damaging: the overuse of chemical fertilizer harms the soil and subsidised electricity leads to overuse of groundwater. By one calculation⁵ eliminating the fertiliser and power subsidy in Punjab in 2013 could have financed an annual transfer of about ₹92,000 to every cultivator or ₹50,000 to every agricultural worker. PM-KISAN can be used to transform fertilizer and electricity subsidies into a size-independent cash transfer, which will not only make them progressive, but leave the small farmer better off than before. It will also improve environmental sustainability by spurring growth of reduced-chemical agriculture.

Additional Taxes: The final option is to finance PM-KISAN by using revenue from increased tax efficiency or higher rates. One may want to use this sparingly given the other demands on the budget.

Safety Net, Not Springboard

Providing a safety net is just one function for government. In a rapidly growing and aspirational country like ours, we need to also think about reliable springboards to enable rural children and youth access the potential of the modern non-farm economy. PM-KISAN is a safety net, it is not designed to be a springboard. This still requires large investments in public education and health and it is here that the technology of cash transfers may prove counter-productive.

Income support can occasionally deliver a large bang for the buck, e.g., by easing cash constraints, it can lead to less indebtedness and better price realisations by obviating the need to enter into buy back arrangements at low pre-set prices. It can also encourage diversification of incomes, by enabling investment in non-farm activities and increase household savings by reducing essential expenditure (e.g., by enabling households to buy more from PDS when stocks are available). It can also allow investment in better education for children. Many of these effects are seen in SEWA’s Madhya Pradesh cash transfer experiment. Additionally, if fertiliser subsidies are converted into equivalent cash transfers, the savings from low chemical agriculture (as demonstrated in Andhra Pradesh’s Rythu Sadhikara Samstha) could again lead to higher levels of household capital accumulation. But, these collateral benefits are not the primary objective of cash transfers.

Moreover, full participation in the modern economy is beyond this. It needs a focus on learning and educational attainment, for which early childhood health and nutrition is critical. A move from free public health care to subsidising broad based tertiary health insurance is essentially a use of public resources for private delivery. Even if it is more efficient, its use for early childhood and primary care is limited. Similarly, school vouchers, right to education mandates on private schools, etc. all tend to absolve the government of its obligation to provide education. This is an entirely untested strategy. Evaluations so far, do not indicate that privately provided education is better; at best, it achieves the same poor outcomes at less cost. No country has managed to have a broad based education for their citizens based on private schools, as we appear to want to do.

Beyond safety nets, if we wish to build a reliable springboard for our children and youth, we will need to build consensus on making resources available and on the mechanisms of delivering high quality basic services such as health and education, safe water supply, etc.  Here, cash is not always king.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad
• Multiply Urban ‘Growth Engines’, Encourage Migration to Reboot Economy by Mukta Naik
• Schooling is not Learning by Yamini Aiyar
• Clearing Our Air of Pollution: A Road Map for the Next Five Years by Santosh Harish, Shibani Ghosh and Navroz K Dubash
• Protecting Water while Providing Water to All: Need for Enabling Legislations by Philippe Cullet
• Interstate River Water Governance: Shift focus from conflict resolution to enabling cooperation by Srinivas Chokkakula
• Managing India-China Relations in a Changing Neighbourhood by Zorawar Daulet Singh
• Beyond Poles and Wires: How to Keep the Electrons Flowing? by Ashwini K Swain and Navroz K Dubash
• Regulatory Reforms to Address Environmental Non-Compliance by Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli
• The Numbers Game: Suggestions for Improving School Education Data by Kiran Bhatty
• Safe and Dignified Sanitation Work: India’s Foremost Sanitation Challenge by Arkaja Singh and Shubhagato Dasgupta
• Safeguarding the Fragile Ecology of the Himalayas by Shyam Saran
• Female Labour Force Participation: Asking Better Questions by Neelanjan Sircar
• Towards ‘Cooperative’ Social Policy Financing in India by Avani Kapur
• Understanding Land Conflict in India and Suggestions for Reform by Namita Wahi
• Regulating New Technologies: Three Central Principles by Ananth Padmanabhan
• Back-end First: A National Agenda for India’s Agricultural Markets by Mekhala Krishnamurthy
• Big Potential, Big Risk: Underachieving Indian Capitalism and the Middle Income Trap by Noopur Sen and Michael Walton
• In Need of Structural Repairs: The Social Justice Project by D Shyam Babu

What is the significance of India’s ratification of the Paris Agreement?

India’s ratification takes the Paris Agreement within a hair’s breadth of its entry into force. The Paris Agreement enters into force thirty days after 55 states representing 55% of total global greenhouse gas emissions ratify it. 61 states, including the US, China and Brazil, have ratified the Agreement. India’s ratification will take the emissions coverage to 51.89%. The EU, expected to ratify shortly, with its 12.08% emissions share will take the Paris Agreement past the threshold for entry into force.

In this context, India’s ratification of the Paris Agreement signals its active participation in and support for the implementation of a finely balanced and hard-won international agreement to address climate change, an agreement India helped shape and secure in Paris last December. As a highly vulnerable country, by some accounts second only to Bangladesh in the extent of its vulnerability to climate impacts, India stands to benefit from the implementation of the Paris Agreement. India’s ratification is also a product of strategic considerations. It will help cement relationships with key allies, such as other BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa and China), and with vulnerable countries including the small island developing states, and least developed countries. It will also strengthen India-US ties, given the Paris Agreement has been high on President Obama’s agenda. Further, as a Party to the Agreement, India will have both obligations as well as entitlements, and it will have the opportunity to fundamentally shape rules under development in the post-Paris negotiations (see below).

Why is entry into force of the Paris Agreement so important, and why is the international community keen to have the Agreement enter into force even before the ink is dry on the Agreement?

There are at least two reasons why entry into force of the Paris Agreement is important and needs to happen soon. First, international political attention is fickle. The unparalleled political momentum and goodwill generated in the lead up to Paris has to be harnessed before it dissipates. And, while UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who propelled climate change to the top of his agenda, is still in office.  31 countries ratified the Paris Agreement at last month’s high-level event convened in New York by the Secretary-General, taking the Paris Agreement past the first threshold of 55 countries.

Second, early entry into force is more likely to Trump-proof the Paris Agreement. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for the US Presidential race, has threatened to ‘renegotiate’ the Paris Agreement, should he be elected. The Paris Agreement, painstakingly crafted after years of contentious negotiations, cannot be allowed to become yet another casualty of the American electoral process. If the Paris Agreement enters into force before the US elections, it would be insulated from the vicissitudes of American electoral politics for four years. The Paris Agreement only permits a state to withdraw three years after the Agreement enters into force for that state, and the withdrawal takes effect a year later. If the EU completes its ratification process by October 7, as it is expected to do, the Paris Agreement will enter into force before the next conference of Parties (November 7) and the US elections (November 8), thus placing the Paris Agreement on a firmer footing, come hell or high water, Brexit or Trump.

What is the significance of the declaration accompanying India’s ratification?

India’s ratification of the Paris Agreement is accompanied by the following declaration:

‘The Government of India declares its understanding that, as per its national laws; keeping in view its development agenda, particularly the eradication of poverty and provision of basic needs for all its citizens, coupled with its commitment to following the low carbon path to progress, and on the assumption of unencumbered availability of cleaner sources of energy and technologies and financial resources from around the world; and based on a fair and ambitious assessment of global commitment to combating climate change, it is ratifying the Paris Agreement.’

Some media reportage has suggested that elements of this declaration might function as a ‘caveat’ or ‘condition’ of India’s ratification. However, this cannot be. The Paris Agreement does not permit reservations (Article 27).  A reservation seeks to exclude or modify the legal effect of certain provisions of the treaty. In other words, a state entering a reservation seeks to make its acceptance conditional. India cannot enter a declaration that is in effect a reservation (a disguised reservation). India can, however, introduce an ‘interpretative declaration’, which presents its understanding and interpretation of particular provisions, reinforces the importance of certain provisions, or provides a narrative context for the Agreement. Such an interpretative declaration will be an element in the interpretation of the Paris Agreement, but it will not exclude or modify the legal effect of the Agreement in relation to India. India’s declaration forms one such element in the interpretation of the Paris Agreement.

In any case, the flexibility that India seeks with this declaration can be achieved through the Paris Agreement. Many of the elements highlighted in the declaration – national laws, development agenda, access to cleaner energy sources – form part of India’s ‘national circumstances,’ which is a notion firmly embedded in the Paris Agreement. This is in evidence in the ‘nationally determined’ nature of contributions from Parties, as well as the fact that the Agreement for the most part contains legally binding obligations of conduct rather than result. In addition, the context for implementation of the ‘well below 2°C’/ 1.5°C temperature goal, as well as the net zero goal contained in the Paris Agreement, is sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty (Articles 2 and 4). There are also numerous references to equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances, in the Paris Agreement, including in the overarching ‘purpose’ of the Agreement.

Other elements of the declaration presented by India – ‘availability of cleaner sources of energy and technologies and financial resources’ and ‘fair and ambitious assessment of global commitment to combating climate change’ – are addressed in the global stocktake (Article 14). The global stocktake, to be conducted every five years, the first in 2023, is intended to assess collective progress towards long-term goals. The stocktake assesses not just mitigation actions but also adaptation and support (finance, technology and capacity building) actions taken by states. The stocktake will provide a clear picture of ‘global commitment to combatting climate change.’ The stocktake is to be conducted in the light of equity, as yet undefined. India can help define and operationalise the notion of ‘equity’ in the global stocktake.

Indeed, if India engages meaningfully in the post-Paris negotiations, it can address all the concerns underpinning its declaration – recognition of national circumstances, eradication of poverty, provision of basic needs, equity, support and global commitment. The negotiations in the coming years are therefore critical.

What legal obligations will India be subject to under the Paris Agreement?

The Paris Agreement is a mix of obligations, recommendations and expectations. India, among others, is obliged to submit national contributions every five years. India’s contribution pledges to reduce the emissions intensity of India’s GDP by 33-35% from 2005 levels by 2030, increase the share of non-fossil-fuel-based electricity to 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity, and to significantly increase India’s forest and tree cover. Every successive contribution is expected to reflect ‘progression’ and ‘highest possible ambition’, and must go further than this initial contribution. The Paris Agreement is unclear on how progression and ambition is to be measured, and by whom. In practice, this may be self-determined. Nevertheless, India needs to consider not just how it will meet its current contribution but also how it can deepen this contribution in future. India’s current and future contributions, as those of others, will be subject to peer and civil society scrutiny, in some respects more demanding than formal international processes. These contributions need to be set in a long-term low GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions strategy, one that India is yet to craft but must be designed in the context of its energy and development needs and policies.

In deference to the different national circumstances of states, the Paris Agreement does not oblige India to achieve its national contribution. Parties are legally bound, however, to prepare, maintain and communicate contributions, as well as to take domestic mitigation measures (Article 4.2) to achieve these contributions. Parties are also legally bound to provide the information necessary to track progress in achieving their contributions. The information will be subject to a ‘technical expert review’ and a ‘multilateral consideration of progress’. India will need to generate credible information on its climate actions that can stand the test of such processes. It will also need to ensure that the transparency framework pays due attention to the capacity constraints and flexibility needs of developing countries in producing such information. To balance the focus on mitigation actions, the transparency framework also extends to the provision by developed country Parties of financial and other support to developing countries. India will need to ensure that sufficient light is cast on finances available to developing countries, so that mitigation expectations do not outstrip available resources.

Once the drum roll towards entry into force recedes, Parties will be left with a legal framework, much of which is yet to be fleshed out. The post-Paris negotiations have crucial gap filling work to do. Ratification by key Parties and entry into force will accelerate the pace of these rule-making processes, and bring a greater sense of moment to them. India should ensure that transparency and other processes adequately recognise its needs and constraints, and that equity is operationalised through the Paris rulebook. As one of the nations that brought the Paris Agreement into force, it can do so with greater moral authority than ever.

Watch the full video of the workshop (above), where Rachna Mehra talks about the socialist pattern of planning, which inspired Nehru, and consequently influenced urban planning in the city of Faridabad after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

In this talk, Mehra discusses the role of the state in envisaging an ‘ideal citizen’ by applying non-indigenous modes of planning, such as Clarence Perry’s ‘neighbourhood unit’, among other ideas. In particular, she looks at the dislocation and resettlement of the North West Frontier Refugees in Faridabad post partition, and how the city evolved into the ‘industrial state’ it is seen as today.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here, and.more information about the talk can be found on the event page.

How do large-scale development interventions induce cultural change? Watch the video (above) analysing this in the context of Jeevika, a World Bank-assisted poverty alleviation project targeted at women in Bihar.

In the first phase, the project substantially increased women’s autonomy and agency via a concerted effort to provide material and symbolic resources for disadvantaged women, and by creating new women-centred institutional structures. However, the expanded phase of the project was not as effective, and this presentation explores the reasons behind it.

Watch the full video (above) of author Harish Narasappa in conversation about his new book, ‘Rule of Law in India: A Quest for Reason’ with Ritin Rai.

The book envisages, inter alia, participatory lawmaking, just and certain laws, a bouquet of human rights, certainty and equality in the application of law, accountability to law, an impartial and non-arbitrary government, and an accessible and fair dispute resolution mechanism. This work’s primary goal is to understand and explain the obvious dichotomy that exists between theory and practice in India’s rule of law structure.

It discusses the contours of the rule of law in India, the values and aspirations in its evolution, and its meaning as understood by the various institutions, identifying reason as the primary element in the rule of law mechanism. It later examines the institutional, political, and social challenges to the concepts of equality and certainty, through which it evaluates the status of the rule of law in India.

Harish Narasappa is the founding partner of Samvad Partners, a pan-India law firm and co-founder of DAKSH, an NGO (Non Governmental Organisation). Ritin Rai practices independently in the courts and tribunals in New Delhi, with a focus on commercial and corporate disputes.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

The Parliamentary Committee, which is probing the government’s decision to demonetise high value notes, recently raised a number of questions before the RBI governor Urijit Patel, and has summoned him later this month. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court case challenging the notes ban, including its legality among other issues, is ongoing.

Against this backdrop, in the eighth episode (above) of CPR’s podcast ThoughtSpace, in-house legal expert and Fellow Dr Namita Wahi deconstructs the legality of demonetisation. Dr Wahi had earlier written about this issue in an article in ‘Economic Times’ here.

This is the third podcast  in a series on this subject, where the previous episodes explored economic fallouts and shared coping mechanisms of informal workers, and can be accessed at the dedicated playlist here.