Genetically modified (GM) seeds have emerged as a powerful new technology promising high productivity and lower use of fertilizers, weedicides and pesticides in the last one to two decades and have gained increasing acceptance among farmers around the world.
They are likely to play increasingly important role in addressing many of the current problems in agriculture. The most important and so far the only example of this technology in India has been Bt cotton.
Adoption of Bt cotton in India started in year 2002 and the area under it expanded rapidly reaching 11.6 million hectares or 95% of the total cotton acreage by 2014. The peak yield prior to the introduction of Bt cotton, reached in 1996-97, was 265 kg/ha. But the yields declined steadily thereafter, reaching 186 kg/ha in 2001-02.
After Bt cottonseeds were introduced in 2002, yields rose continuously and touched a new peak of 532 kg/ha in 2013-14. Cotton farmers in the three largest cotton-growing states, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat in that order, experienced large gains. It is a fair assertion that the success in cotton has made an important contribution to the success of agriculture in general in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.
Between 2001 and 2010, Bt cotton helped reduce the use of insecticides by more than fifty per cent.
It has been argued that credit for the rise in the yields cannot be given to Bt cottonseeds since increases in yields predate their spread. Until 2005-06, Bt cotton had come to cover only a little more than one-tenth of the total cotton acreage. This is too small to account for the rise in yield from 186 kg/ha in 2001-02 to 362 kg/ha in 2005-06.
While partially valid, this argument misses two points.
First, when Bt cotton was introduced, cotton yields had been rapidly declining. Even if it may not account for the bulk of the rise in yields to 362 kg/ha by 2005-06, Bt cotton played a critical role in reversing the trend and surely contributed to the rise in the yield on the margin.
Second, Bt cotton spread rapidly from 2006-07 onwards. In 2006-07, nearly two-fifths of cotton acreage had come under Bt cotton and the share rose to 95% in 2014. This spread demonstrates that farmers saw a significant opportunity in Bt cotton even as the productivity of the existing varieties may have been simultaneously rising.
More importantly, with the trend growth rate under the conventional varieties in the prior decades being much lower, it is inconceivable that yields under those varieties could have reached as high as 499 kg/ha.
The success of Bt cotton in India and many more GM seeds elsewhere in the world testifies to the potential of GM technology in giving a major boost to productivity in agriculture. Nevertheless, GM seeds and technologies have remained controversial in India and other countries.
Thirteen years have passed since the introduction of Bt cotton and no scientific evidence of detrimental effects on either Bt cotton users or other crops located in the vicinity of Bt cotton farmers has been produced. But India has not introduced any new GM seeds.
In 2010, after all of the relevant official bodies had cleared Bt brinjal, the environment ministry blocked its introduction. Many traditional varieties of brinjal require the application of pesticides every third or fourth day, which results in significant pesticide residue on it when it reaches the consumer. Bt Brinjal would have considerably alleviated this problem by mitigating the need for pesticide use.
A serious adverse effect of the publicity and actions against GM technology has been the loss of interest on the part of students and researchers to opt for biotechnology. The success of Bt cotton had given new impetus to the study of this field at postgraduate and doctoral levels in the State Agricultural Universities and ICAR institutions. But the Supreme Court decision to implement a moratorium on field trials for 10 years on all GM research has had a chilling effect on the study of biotechnology. This too needs to be rectified.
Objections to GM technologies are based on the twin fears that they may harm humans consuming the resulting produce and they may have adverse effects on biodiversity. But no compelling evidence supporting either of these fears has emerged more than two decades after the original introduction of GM foods in 1994.
On the contrary, GM technology has proven useful in curtailing the use of pesticide and insecticide in combating pests and diseases.
In the Indian context, it also offers the prospects of making crops tolerant to drought, salinity and other abiotic stresses. The fortification of grains and edible oils with vitamin A and modified fatty acid profile are some examples of upstream benefits to consumers.
The United States has reaped these benefited for at least one and half decades. Recently, even India has been importing and consuming canola oil made from GM rapeseed with no adverse health effects reported to-date. A consultation was held with scientists, farmers and a journalist.
Scientists uniformly argued that with proper regulation GM technologies were safe and promised to significantly raise productivity in a variety of crops. Farmers uniformly protested being deprived of a technology that promised to give them higher yields and therefore better lives to their children. They specifically noted the necessity of frequent doses of pesticides to preserve the conventional brinjal varieties from catching insects.
The journalist offered arguments against the technologies but they did not persuade the scientists and farmers present during the consultation. A public letter by two scientists addressed to Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog also noted, “World’s leading scientific bodies like the US National Academy of Sciences, the UK’s Royal Society, the German Risk Assessment Agency, the European Academy of Science, the Canadian Royal Society, the New Zealand Royal Society, and India’s seven science academies have declared GM crops safe. Innumerable scientific associations and regulatory bodies have all concluded that GM crops are safe and economically beneficial, based on hundreds of independent economic assessment studies published in the best scientific publications that undergo rigorous peer review.”
As a part of its strategy to bring a Second Green Revolution, India must return to permitting proven and well-tested GM technologies with adequate safeguards. Additionally, India urgently needs technological breakthrough in oilseeds and pulses. Our dependence on imports for meeting domestic demand for edible oils has risen to 70 per cent.
Even if India doubles its current level of oilseed production, the import dependence will remain at 40 per cent level. The situation is worse in pulses. Per capita intake and availability of pulses in the country has declined to two third since early 1960s. During the 50 years between 1964-65 and 2014-15, per capita production of pulses declined from 25 kg to 13.6 kg. Even imports, which constitute about one fifth of domestic demand, have failed to arrest decline in the availability of pulses in the country.
It will be worthwhile to explore the possibility of GM technology in raising oilseeds and pulses output as conventional technologies have not helped in raising output to keep pace with country’s requirements. It should not be forgotten that high yielding varieties of seeds had been the key to the first Green Revolution.
Recognizing the general sensitivity to permitting multinationals to sell GM seeds, it may be prudent for the government to proceed with domestically sourced GM seeds only.
Luckily, Indian scientists and institutions have been active and successful in this area. A large number of India sourced candidates for field trials and eventual commercialization already exist.
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On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.