Note :- This is a write up by Ramachandra Guha (The writer of India after Gandhi and Gandhi before India among other things)
There is an article that was written on Rajaji and Gandhi, but Rajaji was a disciple of Gandhi and their thoughts are mostly congruent. However Rajaji and Nehru’s relationship makes it more interesting and gives us insights into the minds of the finest leaders of our previous generations.
Caution:- People usually get sentimental when there is a comparison between leaders and usually are drawn in to sides. However, there is no leader in the world without follies. And as the old saying goes ” Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”. The caution is not to get sentimental.
Nehru and Rajaji were comrades rather than companions. They were separated by upbringing; one was an aristocrat educated at Harrow and Cambridge, the other a self-made man from small-town South India. They were separated also by a thousand miles of peninsula.
Rajaji was unquestionably the most intelligent of Gandhi’s close disciples, Nehru arguably the most humane, and Patel the most disciplined and practical. The pity is that they could never function together except for a very brief while. The relationship between Nehru and Patel has attracted much attention.
During the freedom movement, Nehru and Rajaji were comrades rather than companions. They were separated by upbringing; one was an aristocrat educated at Harrow and Cambridge, the other a self-made man from small-town South India. They were separated also by a thousand miles of peninsula.
In terms of ideology too there were differences: Nehru was more inclined to militant socialist views, Rajaji more oriented towards accommodation with the adversary. But they were united by a shared ideal—the freedom of India—and a shared devotion to the Mahatma. (It was Rajaji whom Gandhi first designated as his successor, later changing his mind in favour of Nehru.)
They met at Congress meetings, but did not seem to have been especially intimate. Still, the Tamilian had impressed Nehru enough to have him write in his autobiography of how Rajaji’s ‘brilliant intellect, selfless character, and penetrating powers of analysis have been a tremendous asset to our cause’.
It was from 1946 that the two men began to work more closely together. In the next eight years, while Nehru was Prime Minister in New Delhi, Rajaji was, successively, a Minister in the Interim Government, Governor of Bengal, Governor-General of India, Minister in the Central Government, and Chief Minister of Madras State. In all these jobs he had direct and regular dealings with Nehru.
But official business drew them closer at the personal level too. The two men shared a cultivated interest in literature and the arts: it was only to Rajaji, and to no other Congressman, that Nehru could write recommending a recent book on the British character by the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer or praise the beauty of the folk traditions of India.
After a visit to the north-east, the Prime Minister wrote to his Southern colleague about the ‘most lovely handloom weaving’ he had seen there. He confessed to being ‘astonished at the artistry of these so-called tribal people. I think it will be disastrous from many points of view to allow such an industry to fade away’. ‘Altogether my visit to these north-eastern areas has been most exhilarating’, wrote Nehru to Rajaji: ‘I wish they were better known by our people elsewhere in India. We could profit much by that contact’.
Reading the correspondence between these two men, I was deeply moved by the nobility of their vision for a free India. In different ways they both took heed of the message of the Mahatma’s message, working to reconcile competing points of views and alternative cultural or religious traditions. Particularly memorable was a handwritten letter of Nehru’s dated 30 July 1947, and it read:
My dear Rajaji,
This is to remind you that you have to approach Shanmukham Chetty—this must be done soon.
I have seen Ambedkar and he has agreed…
Yours
Jawaharlal.
This brief note requires some explanation. R. K. Shanmukham Chetty was a businessman in the South widely admired as being one of the best financial minds in India. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, was a brilliant legal scholar. But both had been lifelong enemies of the Congress. Now, a mere two weeks before the political freedom Rajaji and Nehru had spent years in prison for, they were approaching these old adversaries to join the first Cabinet of free India.
It was a gesture remarkable in its wisdom and in its generosity. In the event, but only after overcoming the hostility of the other Congressmen, Chetty became Finance Minister; Ambedkar, Minister for Law.
In 1950, Nehru hoped to be able to make Rajaji the first President of the Republic, but Patel and the Congress Old Guard thwarted him. Later in the year Rajaji joined the Cabinet, as Minister without Portfolio.
After Patel’s death in December 1950 he was asked to take over the crucial job of Home Minister. Not long afterwards, Rajaji left the Cabinet and returned to Madras. The ostensible reason was tiredness, but he seems also to have felt that he was not being consulted enough.
Anyway, his leaving Delhi was a tragedy, for Jawaharlal Nehru as well as for India. For, as Walter Crocker perceptively remarked in his study of Nehru, after the death of Patel the Prime Minister ‘needed the support of an equal. He needed, too, the criticism of an equal’. Now Rajaji was as close to Gandhi, had sacrificed as much in the freedom movement, and was a man of conspicuous integrity besides. He was indeed ‘the intellectual and moral equal of Nehru’. Had a way been found to retain Rajaji in Delhi, this would have, says Crocker, ‘ended the situation prevailing in which no one could, or would, stand up to the Prime Minister; the situation whereby he was surrounded by men all of whom owed to him their jobs, whether as Cabinet Ministers or as officials’.
In October 1951, after Rajaji had left Nehru’s Cabinet to return to Madras, the Prime Minister sounded him out on the job of Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and, when he refused, asked Lord Mountbatten to try and persuade him.
Mountbatten duly wrote to Rajaji, and in exchange got a blistering reply: ‘My career is truly remarkable in its zigzag…. Cabinet Minister, Governor without power, Governor General when the Constitution was to be wound up, Minister without Portfolio, Home Minister and… now the proposition is Acting High Commissioner in U. K.! Finally I must one day cheerfully accept a senior clerk’s place somewhere and raise that job to its proper and honoured importance’.
The job Rajaji did accept a few months later was that of Chief Minister of Madras. He stayed in that post until April 1954, when his party indicated that they wanted K. Kamaraj to replace him. Now Rajaji entered what neither his astrologer nor his own foresight had anticipated for him, namely, retirement from politics. He settled down in a small house to spend his days, he said, reading and writing.
But, in the end, philosophy and literature proved an inadequate substitute for public affairs. He was moved to comment from time to time on the nuclear arms race between Russia and America, with regard to which he took a line not dissimilar to that of Nehru. Then, when the Second Five Year Plan committed the Government of India to a socialist model of economics, he began commenting on domestic affairs too. Here, however, he came to be increasingly at odds with Nehru.
Consider now an article published by Rajaji in May 1958 under the title ‘Wanted: Independent Thinking’. This examined the ‘present discontent about the Congress’ from the perspective of one who ‘has spent the best part of his life-time serving the organization and who owes many honours and kindnesses to it’.
He worried that ‘as a result of tacit submission on the part of the people of emancipated India, a few good persons at the top, enjoying prestige and power, are acting like guardians of docile children rather than as leaders in a parliamentary democracy’.
‘The long reign of popular favourites, without any significant opposition’, wrote Rajaji, is ‘probably the main cause for the collapse of independent thinking’ in India. But a healthy democracy required ‘an Opposition that thinks differently and does not just want more of the same, a group of vigorously thinking citizens which aims at the general welfare, and not one that in order to get more votes from the so-called have-nots, offers more to them than the party in power has given, an Opposition that appeals to reason…’. Such an Opposition, even if it did not succeed in ousting the ruling party, might yet control and humanize it.
A year later, and touching eighty, Rajaji chose a public meeting in Bangalore to launch an all-out attack on the ‘megalomaniac’ economic and foreign policies of the Prime Minister. This was followed by the formation in Madras of a new political party, the Swatantra Party.
Rajaji also sharply attacked the ‘megalomania that vitiates the present development policies’. What India needed, said he, ‘is not just big projects, but useful and fruitful projects… Big dams are good, but more essential are thousands of small projects which could be and would be executed by the enthusiasm of the local people because they directly and immediately improve their lives’. Speaking more generally, ‘the role of the Government should be that of a catalyst in stimulating economic development while individual initiative and enterprise are given fullest play’.
In September 1952, when Rajaji and Nehru were still friends, the American journalist and pioneering Gandhi biographer Louis Fischer wrote to him of his belief that ‘some straight talk to the power that is [Nehru], would do a lot of good, for I doubt whether time cures certain diseases…. You are the one man who… could appeal to his mind…’
At that time, of course, Rajaji was in the Congress; but now, seven years later, Nehru did not take well to these criticisms from a colleague-turned-adversary. Sometimes he affected a cavalier attitude—when asked at a press conference about his differences with Rajaji, he answered: ‘He likes the Old Testament. I like the New Testament’.
This was spoken in June 1959, but as the months went by the mood turned very sour indeed. In December 1961 Nehru told a group of newsmen that Rajaji ‘stands on a mountain peak by himself. Nobody understands him, nor does he understand anybody. We need not consider him in this connection. All his policies in regard to India, if I may say so, are bad—bad economics, bad sense, and bad temper’. Eighteen months later Nehru claimed that the party Rajaji had started, Swatantra, was ‘a mixture of the rottenest ideas imaginable’.
Sensitive observers mourned and worried about the gulf between the two. In May 1959, his biographer Monica Felton told Rajaji that ‘if I were the mother of you and the Prime Minister, I would bang your two heads together and tell you to stop arguing and to settle down and run things together’.
Walter Crocker thought their differences real, but by no means irreconcilable. Both loved freedom, both were deeply moral beings, and both were passionately committed to social and religious tolerance. Yet they fell out. ‘Here was great drama’, writes Crocker: ‘Two figures of Shakespearean scale in contest. And the drama was tragedy, for the contest was needless. Both men were required by India in the two crucial decades following Independence; and both men shared the blame, though perhaps not in equal measure, that there had been fission, not fusion, between them’.
The assessment of Nehru’s own sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, was not dissimilar to this. As she wrote to Rajaji in June 1964: ‘It seemed such a bad thing that two men like yourself and Bhai who had contributed so much individually and jointly to our beloved India should be apart at a time of national crisis. But the moment passed and now it is too late’.
This was written weeks after the death of Nehru. That event had occasioned a brief obituary published by Rajaji in Swarajya:
Eleven years younger than me, eleven times more important to the nation, eleven hundred times more beloved of the nation, Sri Nehru has suddenly departed from our midst and I remain alive to hear the sad news from Delhi—and bear the shock….
The old guard-room is completely empty now… I have been fighting Sri Nehru all these ten years over what I consider faults in public policies. But I knew all along that he alone could get them corrected. No one else would dare do it, and he is gone, leaving me weaker than before in my fight. But fighting apart, a beloved friend is gone, the most civilized person among us all. Not many among us are civilized yet.
God save our people.
These words might serve as an epitaph to the relationship between these two remarkable men. Or one might choose instead the story of Edwina Mountbatten’s visit to Madras in early 1953. Told about the visit, Rajaji drew up a punishing programme, where Lady Mountbatten would have to visit Corporation slums, meet social workers, open a high school, have tea with Army wives, see the temples at Mahabalipuram and dine at the Raj Bhavan.
When this schedule was sent back to Delhi, it provoked this panic-striken telegram from the Prime Minister: ‘Programme sent by Mary Clubwalla for Edwina’s visit to Madras is rather heavy. She has not been very fit. There is no mention in programme of her visit to you. This is main purpose of her going to Madras’.
This, read intelligently, might even be the most generous compliment ever paid by Nehru to a fellow Indian. If Edwina is to have stimulating conversation in India, he is saying to Rajaji, and if it is to be with someone other than myself, then it must only be with you.
RAJAJI AND THE BOMB
Mahatma Gandhi once remarked that the atom bomb was ‘the greatest sin known to science’. After India exploded a nuclear device in May 1998, and the nation swirled around itself in hysteria, it took a contemporary Gandhian to remember what the master had said.
Thus, the first dissenting article in the national press was written by the veteran architect Laurie Baker, who recalled the three tests an invention of science had to pass in a country such as ours. These were: Is it non-violent? Is it eco-friendly? Is it poverty-reducing? The answers, in the case at hand, were No, No, and No.
India is now a certifiable nuclear power. This would have displeased Gandhi, and also displeased C. Rajagopalachari, the Gandhian who, in his lifetime, mounted the most sustained campaign against nuclear weapons. In 1945, after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he quipped: ‘All this while we knew only of the chemist’s bombs. Now we know of bombs made by physicists.’
A decade later his tone was deadly serious. Rajmohan Gandhi quotes from a letter written by Rajaji to the New York Times at the end of 1954, in which he urged each party in the Cold War not to ‘wait for the other’, but to unilaterally ‘throw all the atomic bombs in the deep Antarctic and begin a new world free from fear’.
In 1959, in a piece directed against nuclear tests, Rajaji wrote in disgust of ‘politicians and technicians who do not believe in co-existence and mutual trust, but are convinced, and have been doing their best to educate the people to believe, that the best defence of national existence is to make it clear that they have terrible weapons of retaliation.
And this is naturally associated with a policy of armament manufacture to achieve that retaliatory strength and purpose’. He was speaking, of course, of America and Russia, then, but he could as well have been speaking of India and Pakistan, now.
Rajaji thought the making of atom bombs was the product of hubris, with man now believing he ‘had the rights and privileges of the sun or even of the Lord God himself.’ It was, he remarked, ‘an unfortunate day when science lifted the curtain of fundamental matter and trespassed into the greenroom of creation’.
Rajaji made a distinction between a ‘free science’ which honestly documented the radiation effects of nuclear tests, and a ‘hired science’ which tried to doctor its results. These tests, he said, were ‘a wholly illegitimate attack on the health of the present and future generations of the uninvolved millions, who have not yet written off their rights in favour of the nuclear pugilists’.
Rajaji’s campaign against nuclear arms culminated in a journey he made to the United Kingdom and the United States in 1962, at the head of a three member delegation travelling under the auspices of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. (The other members were R. R. Diwakar and B. Shiva Rao.)
Rajaji was already eighty-three, and this, believe it or not, was his first trip to the West. In America he met with, among others, Henry Kissinger; Robert Oppenheimer (the man who had led the Los Alamos team that made the atom bomb, but had later thrown his hat into the peace camp); and the Representatives to the United Nations of Soviet Union and the United States. Rajaji also spoke at several universities and at the prestigious Council for Foreign Relations in New York. All through, he pursued his case against the Bomb with (to quote his biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi) ‘the energy of a 40-year-old’.
The highlight of the trip was a meeting with John F. Kennedy, who gave the delegation twenty-five minutes, but was so charmed by Rajaji that in the end they chatted for over an hour. Later, Kennedy told an aide that ‘seldom have I heard a case presented with such precision, clarity and elegance of language’. He added that the interview had ‘a civilizing quality about it’.
The diplomat B. K. Nehru, who was present, later recalled how ‘the secretaries who came in with slips of paper reminding the President of his appointments were shooed away’. Kennedy, it appears, was ‘fascinated’ by Rajaji’.
But Rajaji wasn’t entirely sure that the President was convinced. A week later, the journalist Vincent Shean met him in New York, and sought to gift him a stamp of Mahatma Gandhi just issued by the U. S. Postal Department. ‘You keep it’, said Rajaji to Shean, ‘and use it in a letter to Kennedy asking for the renunciation of the atomic bomb’.
After the delegation’s return to India, B. Shiva Rao wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru of the impact its leader had made. When Rajaji spoke at the Council of Foreign Relations, the leader of the American delegation to the U. N. Disarmament Conference in Geneva told Shiva Rao: ‘Why don’t you send this man to represent India at Geneva?’
Altogether, Rajaji had made ‘a deep impression on all the persons he saw in the U. S. A. and England’. He would, Shiva Rao told the Prime Minister, ‘make an admirable representative for India… in Geneva’. He was ‘extremely able and dignified in his presentation of the case for nuclear disarmament’. Were he indeed to be sent as the Government’s representative to the talks, it would aid India in playing ‘a constructive part in bringing about phased disarmament…’
The suggestion was well meant, and well merited. But by this time Nehru and Rajaji were in rival political parties. True, they agreed on the Bomb, but the older man’s attacks on his economic and social policies the Prime Minister found hard to forgive. ‘Rajaji is undoubtedly a person of high ability’, replied Nehru to Shiva Rao, ‘and we all have respect and affection for him. But I doubt very much if he will at all suit or fit in with the Disarmament Conference at Geneva which consists of senior officials. Also, unfortunately, he disagrees with almost everything in the domestic or international sphere for which some of us stand’. Partisan considerations would not allow India to send its best man to Geneva.
Strikingly, Rajaji was against atomic power as well as atomic weapons. When, in 1954, the Times of India insisted that nuclear energy was vital to a ‘power-starved’ India, Rajaji drew their attention to the ‘terrible character of the risks necessarily attached’ to this industry.
Its process of production ‘totally disregards the rights of those that do not in any way benefit from the enterprises’. Moreover, ‘the general public is almost entirely ignorant of all that the new power source involves. It is not like coal or oil but comparable to a hypothetical case of using the thunderbolt to cook our breakfast’.
This was characteristically acute, as well as prescient, for it took another two or three decades before science, and society, made a proper acquaintance with the risks and costs of nuclear power.
The anti-nuclear movement in India has witnessed the not always comfortable co-existence of Gandhians and Communists. However, after 1998, it has been more-or-less captured by the Left who, on the one hand, do not question the dangers of nuclear energy and, on the other, seem to think that nuclear weapons are somehow safe if placed in the hands of Red regimes.
Rajaji’s work has a more general relevance to questions of scientific ethics and nationalist military rivalry, but it also has a more specific relevance, to the ethics of the anti-nuclear movement. He once expressed his wish to ‘rescue the peace movement from the clutches of the Communist Party’. It is a task that remains unfinished.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.
Heat wave is a condition of air temperature which becomes fatal to human body when exposed. Often times, it is defined based on the temperature thresholds over a region in terms of actual temperature or its departure from normal.
Heat wave is considered if maximum temperature of a station reaches at least 400C or more for Plains and at least 300C or more for Hilly regions.
a) Based on Departure from Normal
Heat Wave: Departure from normal is 4.50C to 6.40C
Severe Heat Wave: Departure from normal is >6.40C
b) Based on Actual Maximum Temperature
Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥ 450C
Severe Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥470C
If above criteria met at least in 2 stations in a Meteorological sub-division for at least two consecutive days and it declared on the second day
It is occurring mainly during March to June and in some rare cases even in July. The peak month of the heat wave over India is May.
Heat wave generally occurs over plains of northwest India, Central, East & north Peninsular India during March to June.
It covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra & Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telengana.
Sometimes it occurs over Tamilnadu & Kerala also.
Heat waves adversely affect human and animal lives.
However, maximum temperatures more than 45°C observed mainly over Rajasthan and Vidarbha region in month of May.
a. Transportation / Prevalence of hot dry air over a region (There should be a region of warm dry air and appropriate flow pattern for transporting hot air over the region).
b. Absence of moisture in the upper atmosphere (As the presence of moisture restricts the temperature rise).
c. The sky should be practically cloudless (To allow maximum insulation over the region).
d. Large amplitude anti-cyclonic flow over the area.
Heat waves generally develop over Northwest India and spread gradually eastwards & southwards but not westwards (since the prevailing winds during the season are westerly to northwesterly).
The health impacts of Heat Waves typically involve dehydration, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and/or heat stroke. The signs and symptoms are as follows:
1. Heat Cramps: Ederna (swelling) and Syncope (Fainting) generally accompanied by fever below 39*C i.e.102*F.
2. Heat Exhaustion: Fatigue, weakness, dizziness, headache, nausea, vomiting, muscle cramps and sweating.
3. Heat Stoke: Body temperatures of 40*C i.e. 104*F or more along with delirium, seizures or coma. This is a potential fatal condition.
Norman Borlaug and MS Swaminathan in a wheat field in north India in March 1964
Political independence does not have much meaning without economic independence.
One of the important indicators of economic independence is self-sufficiency in food grain production.
The overall food grain scenario in India has undergone a drastic transformation in the last 75 years.
India was a food-deficit country on the eve of Independence. It had to import foodgrains to feed its people.
The situation became more acute during the 1960s. The imported food had to be sent to households within the shortest possible time.
The situation was referred to as ‘ship to mouth’.
Presently, Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns are overflowing with food grain stocks and the Union government is unable to ensure remunerative price to the farmers for their produce.
This transformation, however, was not smooth.
In the 1960s, it was disgraceful, but unavoidable for the Prime Minister of India to go to foreign countries with a begging bowl.
To avoid such situations, the government motivated agricultural scientists to make India self-sufficient in food grain production.
As a result, high-yield varieties (HYV) were developed. The combination of seeds, water and fertiliser gave a boost to food grain production in the country which is generally referred to as the Green Revolution.
The impact of the Green Revolution, however, was confined to a few areas like Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh in the north and (unified) Andhra Pradesh in the south.
Most of the remaining areas were deficit in food grain production.
Therefore the Union government had to procure food grain from surplus states to distribute it among deficit ones.
At the time, farmers in the surplus states viewed procurement as a tax as they were prevented from selling their surplus foodgrains at high prices in the deficit states.
As production of food grains increased, there was decentralisation of procurement. State governments were permitted to procure grain to meet their requirement.
The distribution of food grains was left to the concerned state governments.
Kerala, for instance, was totally a deficit state and had to adopt a distribution policy which was almost universal in nature.
Some states adopted a vigorous public distribution system (PDS) policy.
It is not out of place to narrate an interesting incident regarding food grain distribution in Andhra Pradesh. The Government of Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s implemented a highly subsidised rice scheme under which poor households were given five kilograms of rice per person per month, subject to a ceiling of 25 kilograms at Rs 2 per kg. The state government required two million tonnes of rice to implement the scheme. But it received only on one million tonne from the Union government.
The state government had to purchase another million tonne of rice from rice millers in the state at a negotiated price, which was higher than the procurement price offered by the Centre, but lower than the open market price.
A large number of studies have revealed that many poor households have been excluded from the PDS network, while many undeserving households have managed to get benefits from it.
Various policy measures have been implemented to streamline PDS. A revamped PDS was introduced in 1992 to make food grain easily accessible to people in tribal and hilly areas, by providing relatively higher subsidies.
Targeted PDS was launched in 1997 to focus on households below the poverty line (BPL).
Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) was introduced to cover the poorest of the poor.
Annapoorna Scheme was introduced in 2001 to distribute 10 kg of food grains free of cost to destitutes above the age of 65 years.
In 2013, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed by Parliament to expand and legalise the entitlement.
Conventionally, a card holder has to go to a particular fair price shop (FPS) and that particular shop has to be open when s/he visits it. Stock must be available in the shop. The card holder should also have sufficient time to stand in the queue to purchase his quota. The card holder has to put with rough treatment at the hands of a FPS dealer.
These problems do not exist once ration cards become smart cards. A card holder can go to any shop which is open and has available stocks. In short, the scheme has become card holder-friendly and curbed the monopoly power of the FPS dealer. Some states other than Chhattisgarh are also trying to introduce such a scheme on an experimental basis.
More recently, the Government of India has introduced a scheme called ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ which enables migrant labourers to purchase rations from the place where they reside. In August 2021, it was operational in 34 states and Union territories.
The intentions of the scheme are good but there are some hurdles in its implementation which need to be addressed. These problems arise on account of variation in:
It is not clear whether a migrant labourer gets items provided in his/her native state or those in the state s/he has migrated to and what prices will s/he be able to purchase them.
The Centre must learn lessons from the experiences of different countries in order to make PDS sustainable in the long-run.
For instance, Sri Lanka recently shifted to organic manure from chemical fertiliser without required planning. Consequently, it had to face an acute food shortage due to a shortage of organic manure.
Some analysts have cautioned against excessive dependence on chemical fertiliser.
Phosphorus is an important input in the production of chemical fertiliser and about 70-80 per cent of known resources of phosphorus are available only in Morocco.
There is possibility that Morocco may manipulate the price of phosphorus.
Providing excessive subsidies and unemployment relief may make people dependent, as in the case of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
It is better to teach a person how to catch a fish rather than give free fish to him / her.
Hence, the government should give the right amount of subsidy to deserving people.
The government has to increase livestock as in the case of Uruguay to make the food basket broad-based and nutritious. It has to see to it that the organic content in the soil is adequate, in order to make cultivation environmentally-friendly and sustainable in the long-run.
In short, India has transformed from a food-deficit state to a food-surplus one 75 years after independence. However, the government must adopt environmental-friendly measures to sustain this achievement.