Author: cprindia

Watch the full video (above) of a panel discussion on political mobilisation through social media, where the panelists discuss how social media has contributed to the political and social discourse since its emergence a little over a decade ago.

The panelists comprised:

• Dhruv Arora, Digital and Strategic Communications Manager, Centre for Policy Research: Setting the context: how social media technology propagates binaries and drives political discourse
• Parag Mohanty, Political Consultant: How political parties in India collect and use digital data for campaigning 
• Bhanu Joshi, Research Associate, Centre for Policy Research: Campaign and political outcomes – notes from the field (from recent state elections in India)
• Anshul Tewari: Founder, Youth ki Awaaz: The rise of fake news in India – its impact on political discourse and potential solutions
• Apar Gupta: Lawyer and trustee, Internet Freedom Foundation: Regulation of social media, data privacy, and free speech
• Tamseel Hussain: Public Engagement and Communications Consultant: Way forward: mobilising millennials and generation Z (13 to 17 years) through social media

The discussion was moderated by Richa Bansal, Director of Communications, Centre for Policy Research.

Listen to the full talk by guest speaker Geetha Nambissan on how private actors are attempting to change education policy in India by promoting low-cost, unregulated schools as a cost-efficient, high-quality and equitable solution for education of the poor. This attempt to develop a model that delivers ‘high quality’ education at the lowest of costs, yet ensuring profits, has serious implications for social justice in education for the poor, argues Prof Nambissan.

To access the full paper by Prof Nambissan, visit the dedicated page.

The notion that a monolithic idea of ‘nonalignment’ shaped India’s foreign policy since its inception is a popular view. In his new book Power and Diplomacy: India’s Foreign Policies During The Cold War, Zorawar Daulet Singh challenges conventional wisdom by unveiling another layer of India’s strategic culture. In a richly detailed narrative using new archival material, the author not only reconstructs the worldviews and strategies that underlay geopolitics during the Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi years, he also illuminates the significant transformation in Indian statecraft as policymakers redefined some of their fundamental precepts on India’s role in in the subcontinent and beyond. His contention is that those exertions of Indian policymakers are equally apposite and relevant today.

Whether it is about crafting a sustainable set of equations with competing great powers, formulating an intelligent Pakistan policy, managing India’s ties with its smaller neighbours, dealing with China’s rise and Sino-American tensions, or developing a sustainable Indian role in Asia, Power and Diplomacy strikes at the heart of contemporary debates on India’s unfolding foreign policies.

Reviews of the book can be found below:

• Sandeep Dixit: ‘Foreign policy model in the Cold War era’, The Tribune:

‘The alternative explanations for each of the foreign policy events and the Indian reaction are the book’s most tantalisingly portions, making Zorawar, the Yuval Noah Hariri of Indian foreign policy during the Cold War years, because of his dissection of every possible motive.’

• Ambassador Shyam Saran: ‘Eyes On Offshore Lights’, Outlook:

‘It is not often that a young scholar of international relations takes the plunge to offer original insights, based on extensive research, on the evolution of India’s foreign policy, with particular reference to the Cold War period. In Power and Diplomacy, Zorawar Daulet Singh has not hesitated to question the analysis and assessments of prominent Indian and foreign scholars and has come up with some persuasive interpretations. He deserves commendation…’

• Ambassador Skand Ranjan Tayal: The Indian Foreign Affairs Journal:

‘This work would be valuable to strategic analysts for studying the contours of India’s foreign policy choices in the Cold War period. It would be a useful input for practitioners and experts grappling with India’s possible response to the Cold War-II emerging between USA and China right on India’s periphery.’

• Anita Inder Singh: ‘The two faces of nonalignment’, Business Standard:

‘The author throws light on the ways in which the competing ideas of Indian officials, their reactions to regional and world events — and the personalities of both prime ministers — shaped India’s diplomacy.’

• Constantino Xavier: Seminar:

‘Power and Diplomacy is a piece of outstanding historical and evidence-based scholarship that makes a timely contribution to today’s policy debates on the direction and degree of India’s multiple alignments.‘

• Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta: India Today:

‘The book throws new light on India’s foreign policy, including a full account of the internal debates on policy options within the foreign policy establishment.’

• Suhasini Haidar: The Hindu:

‘Power and Diplomacy is an enriching (read) for the serious student of foreign policy.’

• Ambassador Kishan S Rana: Gateway House:

​‘Power and Diplomacy is an intellectual tour de force, impressive on many counts.’

• Anindya Jyoti Majumdar: Telegraph India:

​‘…an interesting read in the evolution of India’s foreign policy.’

• Lydia Kulik: World Affairs

‘Daulet Singh adds depth to the otherwise oversimplified description of Indian foreign policy as a procession from Jawaharlal Nehru’s idealism to Indira Gandhi’s realism‘.

• Sumit Ganguly: The Journal of Asian Studies

‘It is a carefully researched, cogently argued, and well-organised work.’

Carnegie India hosted a discussion on the book featuring Zorawar Daulet Singh, Suhasini Haidar, Srinath Raghavan and Rudra Chaudhuri. Details of the discussion can be accessed here.

More information about the book can be found here.

An excerpt of the book was featured in ThePrint. It can be read here.

Listen to the full audio of the talk (above) by AbdouMaliq Simone where he uses three stories to explain ideas of precarity, collectivity and inhabitation in today’s cities.

Using examples of particular forms of built environments from Jakarta, Simone discusses how these stories are told and constructed in cities. He also speaks about new forms of ‘collective life’ emerging in the midst of inequality and messiness of urban life, and what these imply for the cities.

More information about the talk can be found on the event page.

In early December, the nations of the world will meet in Paris to finalise the much anticipated renewal of the global climate agreement. The Climate Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research is organising a roundtable discussion on 20 November, in the build up to Paris, to examine India’s domestic interests and the resultant strategic implications for our negotiating approach to the Paris Agreement.

The discussion will be organised into two interactive panel discussions:

• The first panel titled “Understanding Development-Climate Linkages: What are India’s Interests?“ will address the following questions: How does India’s INDC articulate the linkage between development and climate mitigation and adaptation? In particular, to what extent are there positive complementarities between the two and to what extent are there trade-offs?

• The second panel titled “Leverage Up or Leverage Down? Exploring Elements of a Negotiating Approach”, will address the following questions: Should India seek to ‘leverage up’ the Paris Agreement to strengthen the top-down elements, and can we do so while ensuring our interests as a developing country with energy needs are met? Or should we be prepared to ‘leverage down’ the agreement, preserving space to use fossil fuels, but at the risk of weakening the global agreement?

Details of the event and the panelists can be found here.

Please visit “Toward A Robust Development Focused INDC For India” for more details and list of publications

The focus of education policymakers on outcomes, especially learning outcomes, is steadily rising. Accountability Initiative’s blog series captures this change in the field of assessments in India’s public education system.

• 13 November 2017 was a landmark day for India’s education sector as the largest ever learning assessment survey of students, formally known as the National Achievement Survey (NAS), was rolled out in around 700 districts of the country. Conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), NAS 2017 covered a sample of nearly 3.6 million children from 120,000 schools spread across all districts of India. Sample coverage of this magnitude made it the largest ever sample survey conducted by the Indian government till date. Know why NAS 2017 was so important and the potential it has to move beyond being just a policy tool to also becoming a tool for accountability.
• The other major highlight of 2017 was the scrapping of the No Detention Policy (NDP) and the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) by the CBSE. The No Detention Policy (NDP) saw light of day when the Right to Education Act (2009) was implemented. Under Section 16 of the Act, schools were prohibited from detaining or expelling any student up to standard 8. Moreover, schools were required to remove the oft dreaded end term examinations. The end term examination pattern was to be replaced with a new pattern of testing called Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE). Under this, schools were to test students periodically throughout the year, using a mix of written and activity-based assessments, on what they were actually learning. Yet the transition was anything but smooth for the following reasons.
• Also in 2017, the Right to Education Act, 2009 was amended to include a new landmark provision- learning outcomes (LOs). These aim at improving the quality of school education and increasing accountability in the teaching system. If implemented well, learning outcomes could mark a paradigm shift in India’s approach towards teaching and assessments and play an important role in the way India’s students learn in the years to come. The next blog discusses the importance of learning outcomes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
• In all, recent policy changes clearly demonstrate that debates around what are the best means to teach and assess students are far from settled. This, however, does not take away from the urgency of introducing critical reforms in assessment patterns, accountability structures in the education department, improving capacity and addressing resource gaps in order to implement the RTE Act in both letter and spirit. Without these reforms, there is a real danger of reducing LOs to just another marker in report cards, upholding the status quo vis a vis teaching-learning and assessments. Know more here. 

“Large parts of the world, irrespective of their level of economic development, are at the cusp of severe environmental crises.   In these regions, the operations of extractive projects such as large scale plantations, mining and industrial development have negated or worsened the economic, social and physical well-being of communities in their neighbourhoods and beyond. Their robust national and regional laws and institutions for the protection and governance of the environment and natural resources have remained on paper and the non-compliance by governments and corporations has had profound effects on community livelihoods, health, access to land and quality of life.

CPR-Namati’s Practice Guide for Environment Justice Paralegals is a step in the direction of closing this environmental enforcement gap. The guide provides a methodology for community mobilisers, activists and citizens groups to shift their attention from stating the problem to getting grievances addressed by environmental institutions. The guide is based on four years of work done by the paralegals of CPR-Namati Environment Justice Program to assist affected communities file complaints and seek remedies in over 150 cases of non-compliance in India. The full guide can be accessed here.

We hope that this guide will help local organisations and community groups to address environmental conflicts and seek useful remedies for affected people.

For more EJ paralegal tools, please see Groundtruthing methodology note, report on Groundtruthing of Environmental Violations in Sarguja, Chhattisgarh, report on the Community-Led Ground Truthing of Environmental Violations in Mundra, Kutch, and the Handbook on Legal and Administrative Remedies for Community Level Environment Justice Practitioners.

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR-Lokniti-CSDS Discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’ as part of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ series. The discussion featured Sanjay Kumar, Yashwant Deshmukh and Pradeep Bhandari and was moderated by Rahul Verma.

With elections only a few months away and the campaign trail heating up, the discussion aimed to de-mystify the process of election polling and seat forecasting in India. The panel brought together psephologists and pollsters who broke down exactly what goes into making an election poll – from sample size to poll design to actual analysis.

Sanjay Kumar is Director of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Yashwant Deshmukh is the Founder-Director of CVoter International. Pradeep Bhandari is the Founder-CEO of Jan Ki Baat. Rahul Verma is a Fellow at CPR.

This was the first panel organised as part of the discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’. The video of the second panel can be accessed here.

Rahul Verma wrote a chapter titled ‘Elections, Exit Polls and the Electronic Media’ in the book, ‘The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India’s Elections’ edited by S Y Quraishi. The chapter discusses the typology of election-related surveys, reviews the status of opinion polls from a historical perspective, and addresses some of the criticisms leveled against election surveys.

About the Series:

This panel discussion was jointly hosted by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Lokniti-CSDS, and it is the first in a series of events in the run-up to 2019 elections. This collaborative series between the two research institutions – ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ – aims to make academic research more accessible to the general public.

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR-Lokniti-CSDS Discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’ as part of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ series. The discussion featured Rajdeep Sardesai, Surjit S Bhalla and Saurabh Dwivedi and was moderated by Rahul Verma.

With elections only a few months away and the campaign trail heating up, the discussion aimed to de-mystify the process of election polling and seat forecasting in India. The panel brought together journalists from TV, print and online media to discuss the intricacies involved behind the consumption of poll numbers on their platforms and their dissemination.

Rajdeep Sardesai is Consulting Editor at the India Today Group. Surjit S Bhalla is Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, and Consulting Editor, Network 18. Saurabh Dwivedi is Editor at The Lallantop. Rahul Verma is a Fellow at CPR.

About the Series:

This panel discussion was jointly hosted by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Lokniti-CSDS, and it is the first in a series of events in the run-up to 2019 elections.  This collaborative series between the two research institutions – ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ – aims to make academic research more accessible to the general public.

This was the second panel organised as part of the discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’. The video of the first panel can be accessed here.

Context: What is the research about?

In Delhi, as in many other Indian cities, millions of men, women and children who live in slums and informal settlements have to daily confront the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These sanitation inequalities impact the health and socioeconomic status of women and girls more because of their greater social vulnerability to sexual violence, as well as the role played by biology in their need for privacy, safety and cleanliness.

• Who or what is responsible for such socioeconomic consequences of the lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in Indian cities, which perpetuate gender inequalities?
• How do issues like gender-based violence impact the everyday lives of women and girls living in slums in particular?

This project report examines these issues using the notion of infrastructural violence and then examines the harms and suffering caused by a lack of sanitation infrastructure in two long-established localities in Delhi: Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari. The study was an ethnographic research carried out over months of extensive interviews and case studies.

What is infrastructural violence?

One approach to understanding the harms inflicted when urban sanitation infrastructures malfunction is to use the concept of infrastructural violence that seeks to identify the political economy underlying the socio-spatial production of suffering in contemporary cities.

This research report focuses on the notion of passive exclusion of women and girls from sanitation infrastructures. When women and girls from slum communities are forced to enter dangerous spaces daily to satisfy their biological needs due to their physical exclusion from sanitation infrastructure (due to various reasons like safety, cost, social norms), they are often exposed to gendered, caste and class-based forms of both physical and emotional violence, which can produce immediate and lifelong multiple harms, sufferings and exclusions.

Who were the participants?

The women and girls who participated in this survey ranged in age from 17 to 60 years. There were five women in the 20-24 age group, eight women in the 25-29 age group, three in the 55-59 age group, two each in the 15-19, 45-49 and 55-59 age groups, and one in the 60-65 age group, which provided a good diversity of experiences.

20 were married, nine were single and two were widowed. They were residents of Kusumpur Pahari, an urban village in south Delhi, and JJC (Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters) pockets of Mangolpuri, which is a resettlement colony in West Delhi.

What were the findings?

• Research findings on how private and community toilets are used in Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari highlight the frequent inaccuracy of statistics collected in household surveys. Persons conducting such surveys generally presume that if a household has a toilet facility there is no need for further questions on other sanitation activities. But as this research’s survey has shown, some members of households with private toilets still use community toilet complexes (CTCs) or open defecation (OD) sites often due to issues such as lack of water in the case of Kusumpur Pahari, or the inconvenient location within a household for an elderly woman.
• For participants from households who use CTCs every day, the patterns of usage are determined by the opening hours. When CTCs are closed during the day, or after 10 pm, residents are left with no choice but OD.
• Design flaws like half-doors or open roofs also dissuade women from using a toilet block due to the fear of being seen.

The research survey and interviews have identified three types of harms caused by this irregular access to sanitation infrastructure:

• Gender-based violence and harassment experienced when going to a CTC or OD site – the greatest numbers of incidents of harassment and violence took place at OD sites (14 responses) followed by CTCs (nine responses). Nine women said they experienced some form of violence or harassment nearly every day.
• Psychosocial stresses – these relate to the fear, stress and shame that women suffer because of the harassment, teasing and intimidation they experience when going about their daily sanitation activities. Some examples of psychosocial stressors that came out of the study include-

1. Fear of being bitten by snakes, dogs and other animals in forest defecation sites in Kusumpur Pahari;
2. Fear of injury when defecating on slopes and hillsides, on roadside or in drains;
3. Fear of sexual assault or rape;
4. Stress of not being able to report incidences of harassment or violence due to bringing shame on themselves and their household, or facing revenge from perpetrators;
5. Stress of having to ‘control’ body functions.

• Economic impacts on individuals and households – economic harms are caused by a lack of adequate sanitation facilities in two ways: i) first, there is ‘lost’ time incurred in having to often walk for 10-20 minutes to reach a CTC, wait in a queue and then return home. Nearly half the participants in this survey who use a CTC said that it took 6 to 15 minutes to walk each way, while another 37 percent said they took 16 to 30 minutes to walk each way; ii) the second economic impact is the cost of fees for the use of a CTC. High user charges were given as a reason for not using a CTC by 23 per cent of participants, which means their only option was OD.

Who is responsible?

This research report therefore argues that ‘passive’ sanitation infrastructural violence occurs in cities such as Delhi because of two factors.

• The first is the lack of political will at all levels of the Indian state to take a systematic approach to the planning, implementation and maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. In the case of CTCs, the failure of urban local bodies and agencies to take responsibility for designing toilets that satisfy women’s biological and socio-cultural needs, along with a lack of regular cleaning, maintenance and water supply, frequently rendered them unfit for use.
• The second is the continuing lack of analysis of gender as a process (based on unequal power relations) in the policy, design and location of public and community toilets. Merely building more toilets to achieve targets set by governments will never solve urban India’s sanitation poverty if they continue to remain unused due to degradation and the lack of safety for women and girls.

Suggestions for future urban policy:

Based on the results, comments and suggestions collected by this research project, certain suggestions are made for addressing the harms and suffering experienced by women residents of informal settlements.

1. Local urban authorities must develop effective maintenance regimes for CTCs before building them and this includes providing a reliable water supply. Clean and well-maintained CTCs will encourage use and reduce OD prevalence;
2. Local women must be allowed to participate in the decision-making process about the design and location of new CTCs in their neighbourhood;
3. CTCs must be open 24 hours a day to prevent the continuation of OD practices;
4. There must be increased lighting along the roads and pathways leading to CTCs so as to improve safety for women and girls at night;
5. There is a need to consider having more than one caretaker per toilet block. This would help to reduce incidents of violence and harassment and could prevent the theft of taps and locks and other forms of vandalism at CTCs.

The full report can be accessed here.