Patient Revolution -- Chhattisgarh Health Care

A band of 60,000 voluntary healthcare workers were trained to counsel villagers and confront errant government doctors. The untold story of how they improved healthcare for 18 million people in the state, writes M Rajshekhar The word ‘Mitanin’ was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend

IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in the early throes of childbirth to the local primary health centre, is an uncommon sight. For Savitri Sahu, the woman who responded to the family’s late-night distress call and hailed the tractor, it was just another day at work. Now, Sahu didn’t just happen to be around. She was deliberately positioned there by the state under a voluntary healthcare worker program called Mitanin. Simply put, this is an institutionalised ‘good Samaritan’ program. Only the samaritans also double up as fierce activists. Mitanins like Sahu are trained by the government to respond to citizens’ demand and get healthcare from the state as a matter of right. The baby was born that very night. Yet another baby born in a clinic…one more small victory for the Chhattisgarh government. The state has managed to increase clinical births as opposed to the traditional home births from 10% to 38% since 2000. And, yet another statistic to prove that the Mitanin program is indeed taking the state’s healthcare services to the masses.
This birth was very different from typical deliveries in much of rural India. The family’s decision to take the mother to the hospital itself was a breakthrough. The doctor and support staff being present at that time of the night was another achievement. In fact, 500 of the 717 public health centres in Chhattisgarh now work 24X7. Next, the mother breast fed her baby within two hours of the birth to ensure that the baby gets colostrum, the first liquid that comes out as a mother begins breast feeding. Age-old custom in Chhattisgarh holds this as unhealthy, and also rules that mother and newborn should not be given water for the 24 hours after delivery. Mitanins like Sahu played an instrumental role in making all three happen.
For urban dwellers, even poorer ones, such births are hardly a miracle. But in the tribal-dominated Chhattisgarh, pockets of which have once seen almost one out of every five infants die, this birth is nothing short of a healthcare revolution. Infant mortality in the state is down from 95 per 1000 in 2000 to 44 per 1000 in 2009.
This revolution, which has impacted 18 million people in the state, has been possible only because both patients and doctors are now more responsive to health issues. The patient is willing to go to the health centre. And the doctor, unlike elsewhere, is actually available at the centre.

And the credit for making patients and doctors more responsive goes to Mitanins like Sahu. — there are 60,000 of them in the state. The word Mitanin was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend.
Each Mitanin has been trained by the government to perform two roles. First, work with villagers to bring about a behaviourial change and train them in preventive health practices. Second, play an activist role in helping villagers demand healthcare as nothing less than a fundamental right.
For example, feedback passed by the Mitanins back to the trainers has helped crack down on errant doctors. In fact, some criticise Mitanins for taking the activism a bit too far. Sahu says she and other Mitanins make it a point to be present when the PDS shop is giving out rations to ensure that all households get their full 35 kgs. Some bureaucrats are complaining, but this could also be seen as evidence that the Mitanin approach is working.
There is a reason the nation should take note of Chhatisgarh’s healthcare army. At a time when debate is raging on whether the Indian state can deliver social services well, the Mitanin programme illustrates that, with a little reform, the state can indeed deliver.
This is why two successive chief ministers have ignored political differences to back the Mitanin program. Former Congress chief minister Ajit Jogi started it 18 months before the state election of 2003. When he saw that the initial pilots were working, he wanted it steamrolled all across the state. But Jogi lost and the BJP’s Raman Singh took over. Worried that the BJP might discontinue what was a Congress programme, Shukla and T Sunderaraman, who had joined to head the SHRC, sought and got an appointment with the new CM to build a case to continue the program. Raman Singh interrupted the session mid way to say that Mitanin was working extremely well in the villages. He knew that it was doing a lot of good work. The program has since got his full backing.
ALOK Shukla remembers how horrifying the numbers were. Ninety five out of every 1000 children born in Chhattisgarh were dying — the second highest in all India. This was in 2000, when Shukla was the state’s health secretary. He has since become India’s deputy election commissioner. Sitting in his office at Nirvachan Sadan, he recalls that diarrhoea, malaria, leprosy and tuberculosis were huge problems. Ten of its 16 districts did not have a district hospital. The state had 146 blocks but just 114 community health centers (there should be one in each block). Its 3,818 health sub-centres, each with one auxillary nurse and midwife had to cover 18 million people across 54,000 hamlets.
Worse, the existing infrastructure was not fully used. For one, the clinics rarely had doctors or medical supplies. Two, as one of the villagers in Sarguja, a district in northern Chhattisgarh, said: “Villagers were apprehensive of the hospital. We did not know where to go, whom to talk to.” Three in Chhattisgarh, much of the state’s population lives in scattered forested habitations. Health workers found it hard to reach the villages, and villagers found it difficult to access the health centres.
These, says Shukla, are the larger realities of public health delivery. The treatment of diseases takes precedence over pre vention of diseases. And there is a strong urban bias: the availability of doctors, health infrastructure drop as one moves from cities to villages.
Now, community health workers are not a new concept. But, till Mitanin came along most such initiatives flopped.
In the first approach, doctors moved from cities to the hinterland to create an alternative to the public health system. They set up hospitals and trained locals to offer simple healthcare in their villages. These models, like the one started by Raj and Mabelle Arole in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, delivered very good results. For instance, between 1972 and 1992, the Aroles brought infant mortality down from 176/1000 to 20/1000. But such models, built around the charisma of their founders, have struggled to scale up. After all these years, Jamkhed covers only 60 villages directly, and 300 indirectly. Chhattisgargh has 20,000 villages.
Then, the health bureaucracy has been running its own CHW experiments to extend curative healthcare by grooming locals into quasi-paramedics and by getting them to bring more complicated cases to clinics. For instance, Madhya Pradesh’s Jan Swasthya Rakshak programme, launched in the nineties, trained local men at primary health centres for six months. The programme bombed. Most of the training was curative, creating an incentive for the men to make money from patients. They rapidly became quacks.
Mitanin chose a middle path. It was decided that only women could be Mitanins. They would be chosen at a hamlet level. Since hamlets are more homogenous than villages, this would reduce the likelihood of the Mitanin not entering the house of an upper/lower caste. To ensure local elite didn’t capture these positions, the women would not be paid for their work — having one woman per hamlet (about 40-60 households) also ensured the workload would not eat into her livelihood. To emphasise the public health role of the Mitanin, curative would play second fiddle to preventive and promotive healthcare. And the Mitanin would be selected by the community, not the health bureaucracy.
It was also decided to keep the Mitanin program out of the purview of the health department. A technical support group called SHRC, State Health Resource Centre, was set up instead. This accentuated the activist aspect
of the Mitanin and enabled her to challenge the government healthcare machinery. There was another reason for this. The Mitanin initiative called for skills the health department lacked — mobilising communities before choosing mitanins, collaborating with civil society groups for training, etc.
In May 2002, the first Mitanin pilot began in 14 of Chhattisgarh’s 146 blocks. This was scaled up to 40 more blocks in July 2003. By June 2004, there was a Mitanin in every one of Chhattisgarh’s all 54,000 hamlets.
This pursuit of scale has resulted in heated debates. For instance, in the programme’s emphasis on scaling up, purists feel the CHW model has been diluted. Arole, the co-founder of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed, feels Mitanin has struggled to find enough good trainers, and that the women have not been monitored regularly. “At Jamkhed,” he said, “women speak most freely in the evenings and the evaluators spend a night in the village. On the other hand, at Mitanin, the trainers visit once every two weeks and most of the time goes into collecting data.”
SUNDARARAMAN joined SHRC in October 2002, with a unique set of qualifications: he was a doctor, he had helped scale up the total literacy mission, and was known for his attention to details, all useful skills for someone who had to train lots of women about healthcare. “As one scales up,” he says, “there is a loss of motivated leadership. There is greater transmission loss in training. Also lost is the tradition of working with the local community.”
“So, what are the priniciples for reducing transmission loss? You have high voltage at the starting point, a clear channel for transmission, step-up boosters at different points, and you have to measure transmission at different points,” he adds.
He did two things. First, he reconceptualised some aspects of the programme. For instance, the women would be trained every four months for as long as the programme ran (the Jan Swasthya Rakshaks had been trained only for the first six months). To ensure trainers and managers did not forget the ground realities, it was decided that only people living at a block level would be hired to supervise the Mitanins, and that trainers would double as field coordinators. Second, he laid down elaborate, standardised processes for everything — selection, training, on-the-job support, skill development, motivation, supply of drugs, monitoring learning outcomes, the spirit of the programme.
On the whole, SHRC was the high-voltage starting point, churning out training programmes, monitoring implementation, etc. The adherence to processes reduced transmission loss. The multiple trainings were the step-up boosters. A set of process indicators (visits to newborns, number of village meetings held, etc) were used to measure transmission. (Sundararaman moved to Delhi to head the National Health Systems Resource Centre, a technical body advising the National Rural Health Mission, in 2007.)
Take training. SHRC had created books on child health, maternal health, etc. Trainers had to go through these line by line with the Mitanins. Says Sundararaman. “You are not allowed to give a speech on the book even if you can give a better speech. Whatever happens, the minimum gets conveyed.”
Or take the spirit of the programme. That was communicated through songs and kalajathas (skits) — an idea that came from their use by people movements to build and retain a sense of mutual solidarity. The songs, written in workshops by Chhattisgarhi folk singers and writers, paint a popular image of the Mitanin in the local idiom — ‘Sukh mein sabei saath, dukh mein Mitan’.
ONCE training began, Mitanins were told to refer patients to the government clinics. In the early days, villagers who went there found the clinics locked. The Mitanins reported these failed trips to trainers who passed the information on to block medical officers. Slowly, the doctors began coming on time. Similarly, the Mitanins also gradually forced the ANMs to adhere to their prescribed work schedules.
It is hard to quantify the precise contribution of Mitanin to indices like child mortality — there are too many other variables around poverty and disease at work. But the dramatic improvements in childcare practices and improvements in healthcare delivery by the state can be traced back to Mitanin’s emphasis on preventive care and activism.
That said, the rate of improvement in health indices is slowing. This suggests that the low-hanging improvement have been made. The question is whether a health programme can improve the state’s health numbers on its own. Says Arole, “Health is also about ensuring nutrition, clean water, a healthy local environment and education. We need to have a good implementation of all these programmes.” Mitanin on its own is not a panacea.

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=ETNEW&BaseHref=ETM/2010/06/01&PageLabel=14&EntityId=Ar01400&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T

The Hindu - "Panel sees male dominance behind banking crisis"

Macho culture has been blamed for the banking collapse, leading to the argument that boards need more women to prevent reckless decision-making.

There is a view that the banking crisis that sent Western economies tumbling two years ago may not have happened at all, or would have been less severe, if there had been more women at the top in the banking sector — the argument being that women are more cautious and risk averse and, therefore, more likely than men to challenge the sort of practices that caused the crisis.

Until now, this theory had been pushed mostly by women campaigners while men tended to snigger. But now even men seem to agree. A male-dominated parliamentary committee (13 men and one woman — an ironic comment on Westminster's own attitude to gender diversity) has blamed a macho culture and “potentially dangerous group think” for the collapse of several leading British banks arguing that boards need more women to prevent reckless decision-making.

In a report, highlighting the acute dearth of women at the top in Britain's financial sector, the Treasury Select Committee says that the prevailing male-driven high-risk mindset is not conducive to good “corporate governance”.

“Diversity at the top is one way to challenge potentially dangerous ‘group think',” it says citing some eye-popping statistics to underline deep-seated sexism in the City, London's famous global financial hub.

The committee found that gender-based wage disparity was the worst in the financial sector with full-time women workers earning 55 per cent less than their full-time male colleagues. The pay gap for bonuses and performance related pay was even higher at 80 per cent.

The MPs were scathing about the huge under-representation of women at the board level, especially in the FTSE-listed companies, with women executive directors accounting for only between one to two per cent in the 300-odd top firms. They noted that the number of women on FTSE-100 bank boards actually declined from 13 per cent in 2004 to nine per cent in 2009.

Testifying before the committee, Minister for Women and Equality Harriet Harman accused financial institutions of operating on the basis of an “old boy's network”.

“Too many British boardrooms are still no-go areas for women,” she said prompting the panel to warn City bosses that if they failed to act voluntarily to make boardrooms more diverse and inclusive the government might be forced to step in.

“We believe the lack of diversity on the boards of many, if not most, of our major financial institutions may have made effective challenge and scrutiny of executive decisions less effective,” it said implicitly acknowledging the view that if there had been more women in positions that offered them a chance to “challenge” and “scrutinise” decisions taken by their male colleagues the crisis may have been averted.

However, its chairman John McFall, a senior Labour MP, sought to soften the blow saying: “We are not saying that had women been in charge, the crisis wouldn't have happened, but we are highlighting the fact that women are poorly represented in the financial sector, particularly at senior level.”

Women's groups such as Women for Boards and the City Women's Network believe that positive discrimination, including women's quotas, are the only way to break the male monopoly of boardrooms.

“The City is a bastion of power, traditional male power, and they want to keep women out,” Sasha Roskoff of the women's rights group Object told one newspaper.

Sexist City
The City has always been notoriously sexist and it is reflected in the high number of sex-discrimination cases brought by women against their employers. Most top banks and financial institutions are said to be reluctant to hire women except as tokenism; and those who manage to sneak in anyway face humiliation on daily basis, according to anecdotal evidence. A former investment banker, who left her job in disgust, says that obscene comments, pornographic screen-savers and lewd gestures are common and when women complain they are advised to “learn to manage”.

“Over and over again I wasn't taken seriously,” she said in a newspaper interview claiming that her male colleagues refused to work with her and she was repeatedly overlooked for promotion. During a recruitment drive at one bank, a senior executive was reportedly heard saying that he wanted a “slim blonde”.

And it is not just the City where sexism is rife. Here is what Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, has to say about British Parliament: “We supposedly have ‘The Mother of all Parliaments', and yet we're 69th in the world for the percentage of women we have as part of that Parliament. Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates have more women in their parliaments. If we keep accruing women to Parliament at the same rate we are doing now, it would take 200 years to have equal representation. That's the same amount of time it would take a snail to walk the Great Wall of China.”

And, as we head for the press, the BBC is embroiled in another of those seasonal controversies about “sexism” at the Beebs after the editor of its flagship Today programme, Ceri Thomas, said that he did not have many women presenters on his staff because it was an “incredibly difficult place to work” for which they were not suited.

“The skill set that you need to work on the Today programme and the hide that you need, the thickness of it, is something else,” he said sparking a furious reaction from his female colleagues and listeners who pointed out that his remarks confirmed that the BBC was still largely male and middle-class — not to mention, of course, white and an Old Boys' network.

Oof!

http://www.thehindu.com/2010/04/07/stories/2010040754091100.htm

Goans dig deep to stay afloat

As lawmakers in mineral-rich Goa hotly debate the uncontrolled mining in the state's rural landscape, residents of a village near Panaji have changed their occupation from farmers to truck owners or mine workers to survive and thrive in the new scenario.

Tucked in the hillocks, the village, Soliem in North Goa's Sattari taluka, is home to 300-odd members of the `Gawade' community. This population from the economically weaker section had tilled their lands since ages.

"The offers (from mining firms) were tempting so we could not resist them. Anyway, farming had become an unviable proportion for us," Rama Gawade, in his 50s, said.

Soliem is amongst the many locales which have changed their profile from agro (mainly paddy) to mining economy. The village, surrounded by mines, is rich in iron ore, which is exported to several countries, including China.

Walk through the village, and cluster of houses and the noise of trucks attract your attention.

"The villagers are no longer farmers. Earlier almost all were dependent on farming to eke out their living. Now, they are truck owners or work on the mines," Ankush Gaonkar, the local sarpanch (village head), said.

"The village houses three mines. We have heard that permission for three more mining leases is pending with the government. At such a pace, entire village will have to be shifted," Sham Sakhalkar, a local, said.

The road connecting the village to the nearest town is dotted with heaps of mining rejects, many of which have turned into mini hillocks. The cashew plantation is disappearing and the paddy fields are getting barren with no one to till them.

It was not an easy task for the mining firms to percolate into the lives of the Gawda community listed among the `other backward classes'.

"There were initial protests. Around 100-odd people were detained when they resisted the truck moment in their village," Hanumant Parab, an anti-mining activist, said.

But nothing happened after that as the protests died down soon and it was business as usual, he said.

The mining biggies, including Sesa Goa, Chowgules and Keny Mines, have set their plants in and around Soliem with hundreds of trucks ferrying the ore from here to barges, which is later shifted to bigger ships.

Even though Soliem residents have given up their green lands to the mining firms, the people residing downstream Chirewal locality raised a banner of protest as the silt started accumulating in their betel-nut farms.

Memorandums were submitted to the Agriculture...

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/goansdigdeeptostayafloat/598642/

Mouse moves @ Snail Speed

Internet penetration is inching along. What is needed is a big policy push for broadband, say industry watchers..


Snail's pace — there could not be a better phrase to refer to the growth of Internet penetration in India. The former Information Technology minister, Dayananidhi Maran's target of 40 million Internet subscribers by 2010 set five years ago appears a dream. “We are no way near the target,” says an industry observer.

India has at present only 14 million Internet subscribers (not counting users accessing the Internet through mobile phone). In other words, the country added just 7 million subscribers in the last five years. “While we are adding nearly 10 million mobile connections a month, after ten years, we have just about 14 million Internet subscribers,” says an official of a leading Internet Service Provider (ISP).

For a country lauded as an information technology super power, we have a poor level of Internet penetration — just about 2 per cent of the population, for PCs at home connected to the Net, says Raju Vegesna, CEO, Sify Ltd, a Chennai-based ISP.

Consider the Internet penetration of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries of which India is a part. China, with a population of 1.33 billion, has over 20 per cent penetration. Brazil, with 191 million has 26 per cent penetration and Russia with a population of 143 million has 20 per cent penetration. And, more significantly, all of them have a penetration growth rate that is higher than India's. “We do not have free and open competition for Internet services by ISPs as well as telecom companies. This has resulted in the rapid decline of ISPs,” says Vegesna. Telecom policies are oriented towards large telecom companies as evident in the pricing of spectrum for WiMax services, which have also been conveniently clubbed with spectrum for mobile use, he adds.

Broadband push, globally
Broadband penetration is today accepted as a measure of the ability to compete economically and is known to accelerate growth. A recent World Bank study shows that for every 10 per cent growth in broadband penetration, the economy grows by 1.3 per cent. A study by the Boston Consulting Group and Telenor shows that for every 10 per cent growth in broadband penetration, GDP can grow by 1.55 to 2 per cent. Developed countries have initiated concerted efforts to accelerate growth in broadband penetration and download speeds, Vegesna says.

The US President, Barack Obama, has provided $7.2 billion to build high-speed access to homes and businesses in the US. Australia recently announced its National Broadband Initiative under the leadership of a Minister for Broadband whereby the country will spend A$47 billion to enable 100 mbps connectivity to every family and business in Australia, he says.

The Indian government has failed to make policy amendment keep pace with technology advancement. For fast proliferation of the Internet, the year 2004 was announced as ‘Broadband Year' but there has been no result; as against the target of 20 million by 2010 “we are still struggling to cross even 8 million,” feels Rajesh Chharia, Founder, Director and CEO of C J Online Pvt Ltd, a Ghaziabad-based ISP.

New applications such as Internet Telephony, Internet Protocol TV have been developed. But despite regulators' recommendation on allowing these applications to ISPs, policy makers have not taken a decision for the last two years. “We have to understand the Indian situation where 22 official languages are present and the Internet needs content in one's own language while application does not need any such thing and also the application can make rates much lower compared with existing voice rates,” he says.

Even as the government has liberalised the mobile sector, it should allow ISP application on broadband to private ISPs to increase Internet penetration, says Chharia, who is also president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI), which has 44 members. Poor Internet penetration is affecting all, including government service provider and consumers, he says.

Unbundle local loop
The total Internet users are 81 million, including those using cyber cafes against a total population of 1.1 billion people. The number of subscribers is at around 14 million. The low Internet penetration is because the government does not allow Unbundling of Local Loop — ISPs cannot utilise the huge last mile copper in the form of telephone lines that are already available to customer homes to provide broadband, says S.P. Srihari, Director and Chief Financial Officer, Zylog Systems Ltd, a Chennai-based ISP.

The government does not exempt duties on equipment procured by ISPs and is not allocating 700MHz spectrum for Broadband Wireless Access. Further, the government imposes a spectrum reserve fee of Rs 1,250 crore for WiMax spectrum auction. Most ISPs tend to restrict themselves to the dense urban areas due to the pressure to achieve return on investment, given the high cost of entry and operations, he says.

Ambivalence
Col H.S Bedi, CMD, Tulip Telecom, an ISP, says for a knowledge-based society to grow quickly and for various economic opportunities to become a reality, the spread of the Internet and broadband is now being given top priority.

India, however, has embraced the Internet with a degree of ambivalence. There is tremendous enthusiasm among the retail users and an estimated 60 per cent of users regularly access the Internet through cyber cafes. However, when it comes to high-speed broadband access, there is reluctance, and the rate of adoption has been slow.

India has an Internet penetration rate of only 3.5 per cent. But relatively small percentages in India are big numbers, compared with the rest of the world. With 40.7 million total users, the country already has the ninth most Internet users in the world and by 2012 will have the fourth most users.

Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, India will be ranked third in the list of countries with the most number of Internet users, surpassed only by China and the US. The report states that the number of people online around the world will grow more than 45 per cent to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, with Asian countries driving the growth.

Internet penetration is low in India due to two main reasons. First, more than 70 per cent of India's population resides in rural areas and has limited access to PCs. The socio-economic conditions and lack of education have led to a strong urban-rural divide, and, in turn, slow penetration of the Internet in India. Second, there has been a lack of infrastructure and availability of the Internet in the rural parts. Given the geographical diversity of India, last-mile connectivity has always been a challenge for telecom operators, says Col Bedi.

Neglect of rural areas
Amrita Choudhury, Director, Cyber Cafe Association of India, says the low Internet penetration can be attributed to these factors: high cost of PC and Internet bandwidth, low penetration and poor connectivity of the Internet in rural areas where more than 70 per cent of the country resides, lack of content in vernacular language (as only 140 million understand English out of whom only 80 million are English-literate), and most importantly, lack of people-oriented services such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).

Cyber cafés — through 1,80,000 Cyber Cafes, 50,000 CSCs and 11,000 e-Commerce Service Retailers in India — are the only solution, wherein the user is provided assisted service and pays only for actual usage. However the rules and regulations governing them have been discouraging their growth, she says.

K.K. Raman, Executive Director, KPMG, too feels that lack of infrastructure, accessibility and awareness are some of the main reasons for the low Internet penetration. More services should be provided to consumers that could bring business opportunity for multiple players.

Broadband, a National Priority
Small and medium businesses (in addition to large enterprises) should be empowered with broadband connectivity. Every student at school and university should have the opportunity to access content online for which broadband should not be looked as a licensing or spectrum issue, but as a national priority, says Vegesna of Sify.

According to Srihari of Zylog, the Government should allow ‘unbundling of local loop' so that other ISPs can ride on the last mile copper network of BSNL/MTNL to offer their own ADSL services. The other steps include subsidising the rollout of broadband infrastructure with the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund and allocating 700 Mhz spectrum for Rural Broadband Wireless Access. The private sector will play a dominant role in increasing Internet penetration and bring in the required technology and infrastructure. The government will help by subsidising the rollout with the help of the USO fund which has grown to over $5 billion now.

Private players should be given tax holidays to roll out in semi-urban to rural areas. Companies such as Zylog have created availability of broadband Internet access in over 52 towns of Tamil Nadu in the space of three months and at 1/10th the cost of WiMax or 1/100th the cost of 3G infrastructure, by using unlicensed spectrum, he claims.

For broadband to have reach across the country, service providers will have to look into various emerging technologies, mainly wireless.

All the available broadband technologies should be promoted by the Government. Some of the emerging technologies that are expected to make a huge impact in future are Wi-Fi, WiMax and 3G, says Col Bedi of Tulip Telecom.

raja@thehindu.co.in

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/ew/2010/03/22/stories/2010032250040100.htm

Reinventing Education - Sudhakar Ram

India’s size and variety are an ideal platform to try new models of education that would help us take the lead in the 21st century. Let’s dare to move ahead as the future of our children and country is at stake, says Sudhakar Ram.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that

the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

NOBODY can argue that the world has changed dramatically in recent years, and continues to change with amazing speed. Yet, we have not changed the basic approach to educating our children for the past 200 years.

Think about the changes our children will face before they retire from the working world in 60 years. Will our current approach to education be adequate to equip these children to face the emerging world? Can we continue with our assembly-line approach to teaching our children, rather than acknowledging and nurturing the unique gifts and talents that each one of them represents? Should education be restricted, primarily, to the first 20 years of our lives? Or should the focus shift to life-long learning?
Alvin Toffler, in ‘The Third Wave’, describes mass education as being built on the Industrial Age factory model to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects — the overt curriculum. Beneath it was the covert curriculum that was far more basic. It consisted of three courses — punctuality, obedience and repetitive work — the basic training requirements to produce reliable, productive factory workers. Will the 21st century world require just these capabilities?
Howard Gardner’s Project Zero at Harvard discovered that up to age four, almost all children are at genius level, in terms of the multiple frames of intelligence — spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, mathematical, intrapersonal, and linguistic. But by age 20, the genius level proportion of the tested population dropped to 2%. We are educating the intelligence out of our children. Instead, we need to nurture and develop the multiple frames of intelligence within our schools and colleges. We need to fuel imagination, which Einstein said is more important than knowledge.
The current system of education — both at the school and university level — assumes that a finite amount of ‘knowledge’ is available. The emphasis is on cramming as much of this knowledge as possible into the available years of education. But this paradigm does not work for the 21st century; the quantum of knowledge has become so vast that it would take several lifetimes even to master a single discipline. What we need is children learning how to learn and provide facilities for life-long, just-in-time learning.
In our era of super-specialiSation, we’re developing groups of people who understand their own fields extremely well, but tend to be challenged when it comes to communicating and integrating with groups in other disciplines. Everyday people tend to think we don’t have the ability — or even the right — to understand, let alone challenge, the specialists. In this quest for ‘know-how’ we are losing the ‘know-what’ — the meaning and purpose of life, the context for applying all this knowledge. Our rapid depletion of Earth’s resources may well be due to an emphasis on technology or know-how, rather than wisdom — deciding whether it is the right thing for us as humanity.
The challenges in India are even more acute. Of the 200+ million children of school going age, 35% drop out after primary school and another 50% after upper primary. Of the 20 million youth of graduating age, only around three million actually make it through college, and less than 500,000 are deemed employable. We have an urgent need to rethink education on many fronts.
FIRST, we need to nurture love for learning in primary schools. There are well-researched systems — like the Montessori Method — that are completely child-centred and make the learning process joyful and effective. Newer methods of teaching can combine video-based learning with teacher-facilitated games that develop the child’s natural talents. Primary schools should equip children with basic life skills — reading, writing, arithmetic, environmental science, health and hygiene and social/inter-personal skills.
Second, the focus of upper primary schools should be (a) to teach kids how to learn and (b) to support them discover their natural aptitude. It is critical to offer a good grounding in the scientific approach to learning. Learning should go beyond knowing facts and figures. Children need to be shown how to be selfaware, and to examine their own lives: their life stages, life purpose.
Third, high school curricula should focus more on building concrete skills and capabilities in multiple disciplines, rather than stressing exam results. For example, a team could take on the design, construction and installation of solar-based power systems in their own schools — addressing the technical, financial and social aspects of the project — under expert guidance. Another team could focus on reducing child abuse in their local area. In the process, teams would understand the theoretical constructs and develop the critical thinking skills needed.
Fourth, universities of the future should offer life-long learning modules that allow people to acquire knowledge just when they need it. Given the need for organisations to continually learn and evolve, we need to change work patterns to combine learning and working — for instance, by having a four-day work week with another day or two a week devoted to learning and experimenting with new ideas. University professors should be encouraged to pursue research in multiple disciplines and to act as facilitators in their students’ learning process. Practitioners from industry should be encouraged to act as guides and mentors to students taking on specific courses.
Education is a pressing problem across the globe. However, the challenges in India are so great that it presents us with the greatest opportunity to innovate. Our size and variety are an ideal platform to try many new models of education that would help us take the lead in the 21st century. It is up to us as parents and educators to make this shift happen. Let’s have the courage to move ahead — the future of our children and our country is at stake.
Long live the earth.

(The author is CMD of Mastek)

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Why Telangana Makes Sense

The creation of Telangana might trigger cries to make more new states. The best way to decide on such demands is to set up a group, like the states’ reorganisation panel, and have it thrash things out with everyone, says Abheek Barman

THE din and violence surrounding the government’s announcement that it’ll finally push to carve out the state of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh, has claimed a major victim: reason. Most arguments against carving out Telangana are emotive, charged with hysteria, coloured with political posturing.

The only remotely sensible argument against creating Telangana is that it could set off an avalanche of competing demands for more new states. But even that argument, as we shall see, holds little water and can be dealt with reasonably.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Over the last 60-odd years, successive governments have tinkered with state boundaries and carved out new states from older ones. The last three — Chhatisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarkhand — were created less than 10 years ago, in November 2000. India today has 28 states, compared to 14 shortly after it became a republic. So let’s stop behaving as if this is an unprecedented calamity that we’re suddenly faced with.

Folks who argue in favour of Telangana say that the region is backward, something that’s hard to refute. Districts like Nalgonda, Medak and Warangal are among the poorest in India. Glittering Hyderabad is located in Telangana, surrounded by these districts. Drive out from the city and it’ll take you less than an hour to reach some of India’s most backward areas.
Yet, this is also the place where a lot of India’s mineral wealth is concentrated. Miners like the Reddy brothers from the neighbouring state of Karnataka have huge operations in Telangana. One of their mining companies is now being investigated for — this is hard to believe — changing the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh to benefit their mining interests.
Lots of resources, yet very few benefits coming to people on the ground: that’s what proponents of Telangana argue. As a new state, they say, the government of Telangana will have the political and administrative drive to do better for voters. Instead of trying to refute this argument logically, people in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema, both wealthier than Telangana, are on a rampage. Burning state buses is no answer to an economic argument; it only leaves you with fewer buses.

For many years, Jawaharlal Nehru refused to pay heed to any claim for statehood based on linguistic or ethnic factors. His sole criterion was economic: would a new state be better off after independence? Would it be able to support itself better than before? Though Nehru’s blindness to language or ethnicity was, well, a handicap the economic arguments he so loved are very important. And most arguments for Telangana’s statehood are economic.

But are the assumptions of folks who want Telangana state realistic? Do people who live in newly carved out states do better than before? Nine years after the creation of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, there’s some reason to believe that, indeed, they do.

Among all the newly created states, Uttarkhand is probably an anomaly; it wanted to peel off from Uttar Pradesh because it felt that its parent was more backward than it was. So, it’s probably no surprise to know that by 2006-07, the average person in the hill state made Rs 27,800, nearly double the Rs 14,663 made by the average UP-wallah.

MOST of the stories coming out of Jharkhand are about Naxalism and the fabulous wealth allegedly salted away by former chief minister Madhu Koda. Yet some of Koda’s prosperity seems to haXve rubbed off on Jharkhand, where the average person’s income two years ago was Rs 20,177 again, nearly double the average Bihari’s Rs 10,570.

It’s the same story in Chhattisgarh, where the average income was nearly Rs 29,000, much more than the average Madhya Pradesh income of Rs 18,051 two years ago. People in smaller, newer states are better off than counterparts in their parent states.

Another argument against splitting existing states is that the new ones are slow to mobilise their own funds from taxes or cesses and depend heavily on central handouts. Ergo, to control New Delhi’s finances, it’s better to go slow on new states.

Sure, a state like Chhattisgarh might take time to get its taxation systems in place and need central handouts. But even a state like Haryana, carved out of Punjab in 1966, needs funds from New Delhi. Bengal, which has been partitioned several times, and therefore got smaller, is hardly self sufficient.

Indeed many ‘established’ states like Bengal and Bihar are still so slow to collect local revenues that matching funds from New Delhi often go unused. All states, big or small, old or new have similar powers to collect revenues. Their ability to do so doesn’t depend on when they were created or their size, but by the efficiency of their administration and the buoyancy of their economies.

The creation of Telangana might trigger cries to make more new states like Vidarbha and Gorkhaland, or split Uttar Pradesh into three. The best way to figure out what’s feasible, which demand merits attention and which doesn’t, is to set up a group, like the States’ Reorganisation Commission and have it thrash things out with everyone, and then take a call.

Finally, the Congress party which dominates this government, needs to be internally consistent in what it stands for. As long ago as 2001, the Congress Working Committee accepted the report of one of its study teams and decided that it was in favour of creating two new states: Telangana and Vidarbha. Then, the BJPled NDA government was in power and it mattered little what the Congress thought. But in 2004 after its election victory, the common minimum programme adopted by the first UPA coalition also agreed to work towards statehood for Telangana. In the hurly burly of coalition politics, it soon forgot this promise and lost an ally, the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti (TRS) two years later.

Today, instead of dithering, the government should signal clearly that it will work to create Telangana. And set up a group to examine the demands for other new states. Remember, the United Sates, with about one third our population, has 50 states, a number that’s only grown over time.

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Dragon Builds Rail-Web around India - Raghu Dayal

Maoist China believed power flowed from the barrel of the gun; today it believes power comes from farms and factories sustained by assured supply lines of energy, minerals and materials, supported, in turn, by adequate logistics and connectivity. It seems to demonstrate that industrial power is at the heart of economic power, and economic power at the heart of strategic power.

China has imparted to railways a unique dimension of diplomacy and statecraft. Since 1985, China has channelled large investments into the expansion and revitalisation of its railways to also serve as the new Euro-Asian continental bridge akin to the fabled silk road as much as a lifeline of its economic and military might. Asia to Africa to Latin America.

All around India, China shares land borders with five Saarc countries, looks over the Chicken’s Neck at a sixth, and has a long border with Myanmar. From Kunming in its Yunnan province, a network of road, rail and river links fork out to Sittwe in western Myanmar and Thilawa near Yangon on the Bay of Bengal.

China would have completed extensive rail links to Myanmar after it builds 232-km Lashio-Muse/Ruili rail line in that country. A Myanmar-Bangladesh rail link will help connect Kunming to Chittagong as well. China is contemplating, among various rail-related projects in Bangladesh, construction of the second Padma bridge and a 130-km rail line from Chittagong to Gundum on Myanmar-Bangladesh border.

China’s formidable presence in terms of rail and road projects in India’s north is uniquely typified by world’s highest 1,142-km Golmud-Lhasa rail line. There seems no stopping it to extend it first to Nyalam on the China-Nepal border, and finally to Kathmandu.

A feasibility study is already completed for a new 252-km line from Lhasa to Xigaze. A further 400-km rail link from Xigaze to Nyalam is listed in its rail network programme. Nyalam to Kathmandu will then involve just about 120 km of additional link to be built. The prospect of going by train from Rameshwaram to Beijing via Kathmandu and Lhasa does not appear all that far-fetched any more!

Likewise, on India’s eastern flank, Chinese rail and road connectivity speedily knits the south-east Asian land mass. The 5,380-km Singapore-Kunming rail line project pursued by Asean covers the route from Kunming through Laos to Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand that is being actively supported by China.

It is already connected by rail to Vietnam through the 195-km dual-gauge (1,435 mm/1,000 mm) line between Hanoi and Dong Dang. China’s comprehensive renovation of the Kunming-Hekou link and construction of 141-km Yuxi-Mengzi line support an early connection of the pan-Asian rail network.

It is busy not only speeding up construction of its own network between Kunming and Singapore but also helping close the gaps across the Asean railways, viz, between Thailand and Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, Laos and China, etc.

With the remaining gaps in the network, when bridged, traffic originating in Singapore or Indonesia would be able to join the main Chinese south-north trunk line that runs from Shenzhen to Erenhot on the border with Mongolia, or its east-west trunk line that runs from the port of Lianyungang on the coast of China to Druzba on the border with Kazakhstan.

Similar developments on India’s western flank have for long been ominous. China-built Gwadar port in Balochistan on Pakistan’s southwest coast close to the Straits of Hormuz will be the entry point for energy supplies to China, bypassing the Malacca Straits.

Gwadar is proposed to be linked through Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram to Kashgar (Kashi) which is connected to Xigaze, due to be rail-linked to Lhasa. There are reports of Gwadar being linked by an 800-km standard-gauge (1,435 mm) rail line in Pakistan via Dalbandin along Koh-I-Taftan (on Iranian border)-Spezand-Quetta-Chaman (on Afghan border) and extended to Kashi in China. When completed, it will isolate the broad gauge (1,676 mm) rail network in India while providing a through 1,435-mm network all across China.

China’s frenetic development of infrastructure in central Asian republics (CARs) signifies its long-term strategic and economic stakes in the region. Constituting a virtual bridge between China and Europe, Kazakhstan is keen on developing both a trans-Asian rail route via Iran as well as the Euro-Asian rail route, both enabling Beijing to provide connectivity between Asia-Pacific and Europe.

The former comprises a 10,500-km through rail link along Beijing-Almaty-Tashkent-Ashkabad-Tehran-Istanbul, and the latter between Hong Kong-Beijing-Almaty-Saratov-Kiev-Warsaw-Berlin-Brussels-London (13,000 km). The different rail gauges in China (1,435 mm) and CARs (1,520 mm) compel swapping of wagons and coach bodies at a trans-shipment yard China has built at Alataw.

The Maersk railway subsidiary, European Rail Shuttle, in conjunction with Trans Siberian Express Service and Tie Yang Transportation in China, offers regular block train services from China to the Czech Republic via Mongolia, Russia and Poland.

Another instance of China’s engagement in building rail lines in resource-rich CARs is its links to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Following the rail track between Tedzen (Turkmenistan) and Mashhad (Iran) at Sarakhs, a through rail link would be available from China through CARs to Europe via Turkey. Yet another transit route being considered is through Afghanistan and Pakistan along Ashkabad-Torghundi-Herat-Kandahar-Chaman-Quetta.

It is difficult not to infer that these mighty overtures from India’s northerly neighbour also aim at strategic encirclement and containment of India, creating a ring of anti-Indian influences. Asserting its ascent through ‘hard power’, for example, China has indulged in ongoing Yunnanisation of northern Myanmar.

Be it the road and rail links along and inside Pakistan, Myanmar or Vietnam, again, China is busy developing extensive multimodal connectivity all along the borders and inside the neighbouring countries for facilitating trade flows, energy supplies as well as large-scale movement of arms and armada, subserving its strategic global ambitions. This is real politik.

Against this, a complacent, smug and ‘argumentative’ India remains wrapped in its own bliss of ignorance and masterly inactivity, unable to take forward with good grace even fractional connectivity projects in Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan. There is tide in the affairs of nations as well as men and India is in danger of having missed it. Small openings of opportunity seized in time can help mend fences and build confidence in our smaller neighbours.

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