The COVID-19 pandemic is widely seen as a potential turning point after which almost everything could be different.
Margaret MacMillan, the eminent historian, has compared this crisis to the French and Russian revolutions – points at which the river of history changed course.
And it’s almost certain that as a result of this crisis there will be big changes: expectations of the state’s ability to look after its citizens will be higher; the public and financial markets may be more accepting of government borrowing; government will be expected to manage the labour market to provide a minimum level of security for vulnerable workers. It will be a far cry from the free-market, small state policies of the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet it is far from obvious that this crisis, even one that is deep and severe, will lead to a turning point of the kind that MacMillan suggests.
The most recent example of a crisis whose bark was worse than its bite was the financial crash of 2008. Many predicted it would be a turning point given the deep dysfunctions in financial capitalism it laid bare. Yet through a combination of quantitative easing, financial support for the banks and re-regulation, the financial system recovered. The wider economic recovery created millions of jobs (albeit many low paid and insecure), profits rose and stock markets went on an extraordinary bull run. What could have been a turning point ended up being a period of extreme turbulence that people were happy to have left behind. The financial institutions at the heart of the crisis were too important, powerful and entrenched to be fundamentally disrupted.
COVID-19 might prove similar if we emerge from the pandemic with as much continuity as change. Many systems, including banking, financial markets and food production, have carried on working much as they ever did. There is pent-up desire to get back to activities once regarded as normal: eating out; socialising with friends; weddings; holidays; visits to the cinema, concerts, festivals and football matches.
A crisis only becomes a turning point when it becomes a ‘critical juncture’ – one of those rare moments when institutions, norms and rules are unfixed, new possibilities for future development open up, new ideas gain currency and social and political forces emerge to take them forward. The choices made in those moments can have lasting effects on how society develops. The US New Deal in response to the Great Depression and the creation of the British welfare state after the Second World War were both critical junctures.
The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio’s Decameron (‘Il decameron’). Etching by L. Sabatelli. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection
The Black Death created a critical juncture in the 14th century because the death toll produced such a labour shortage that the status quo could not be restored. Peasants in some parts of Western Europe were able to shake the foundations of the feudal order, winning greater economic and political freedoms. In much of Eastern Europe however, landowners responded by becoming more authoritarian, imposing an intensified serfdom. The two parts of Europe developed in very different ways thereafter. Western European societies became more broadly based, inclusive and productive; Eastern European economies became even more extractive and unequal, ruled over by an implacable feudal elite.
That story told by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail explains the role of the plague this way: “The Black Death is a vivid example of a critical juncture, a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society. A critical juncture is a double-edged sword that can cause a sharp turn in the trajectory of a nation.” But as the Black Death showed, that turn could go in any number of directions depending on the way the forces at play amplify what can be small differences in the institutions of different societies.
A critical juncture is a relatively short period of time when a broader than normal range of options is open to society. The choices made between those options, by people and organisations with the power to make the choices, will have a significant, long-term impact on how society develops. Is what we are going through now what the philosopher Gershom Scholem called a ‘plastic hour’ when obdurate systems resistant to change suddenly have no option but to open up?
A crisis can create transformative change in four ways. All four are at work in the COVID-19 crisis. It remains to be seen whether these four will make this a critical juncture.
A crisis can rapidly accelerate changes already underway as society suddenly goes much faster along the path it was already on.
The most obvious example of acceleration is the rapid spread of digital services, not only for shopping but also for work and public services. The British government has been able to channel furlough payments to millions of employees and loans to thousands of businesses, thanks to digital service platforms that have been a decade in their development. The crisis has propelled a step change in digital services around the world. Indonesia is just one place where a mobile phone based primary health care system has been scaled rapidly. What was once niche has become mainstream.
The acceleration of digitalisation will have knock-on effects. Home will become even more important for people as a place from which to work and shop. That may change the geography, patterns and routines of work: suburbs and small towns with good internet connections may become more attractive. By accelerating digitalisation, societies will have different options for how they organise themselves. Looking back, historians may pinpoint the crisis as the time when the potential of digital services to radically transform where and how we work were made real.
A crisis can also create a dead end. The path comes to an abrupt halt; in the worst case, it goes over a cliff. That shock forces people to change how they work and live, as old models are no longer viable. Even if it’s not obvious what new models will take their place it is clear that people need to explore and experiment to find them. Historians will look back and identify this crisis as the moment when some old systems finally ran out of road.
For some industries, the dead end has been looming: high streets and the retailers still on them. The crisis has merely brought forward the end. In other cases, the discontinuity has been much more sudden and shocking because it was so unexpected. Entire industries that had viable business models have been brought to their knees by the need for social distancing: among them hospitality and tourism, cultural and creative industries which depend on live performance for audiences. Some of these industries may snap back into shape once effective vaccines have been distributed widely enough and people can eat in restaurants, gather for weddings, board planes and go to concerts. Yet, even so, the crisis will leave lasting scars. Some of the theatres and restaurants that have closed will not reopen. Some consumers jolted out of old habits may permanently revise their behaviour, especially in the light of climate change, which might mean people flying less. In many poor communities high streets could become deserted.
Like the pits, steel works, car factories and docks that closed in the midst of deep recession, never to reopen, at least some of the restaurants, shops and cultural venues closed by COVID-19 may never return. The geography of that impact is likely to be highly uneven.
What do you do when you reach an unexpected dead end? You trace your steps to take forks in the road you previously ignored. That may be what will happen if the crisis brings about a flight from large cities and less commuting, in favour of suburbs and provincial towns where local services, high streets and spaces, like libraries and parks, might fill up again, bringing with it a provincial renaissance.
When society accelerates along one path, while another comes to an abrupt dead end, then society’s arc of development shifts. A crisis then becomes a turning point.
A crisis becomes a turning point when society changes the path it is on. Critical junctures are forks in the road, or, more radical still, a leap to a completely different path, which comes about in part through conscious, deliberate, collective choice.
Regional economies often have to go through such shifts, according to Bjorn Asheim, one of Europe’s leading scholars of regional economic development. Regional economies have a strong tendency to extend the path they are already on, refining existing knowledge and reinforcing existing relationships, serving existing markets with familiar products. However, to create new opportunities for growth, regional economies have to leap to a new path – Asheim calls it a long jump – which requires exploring new markets, engaging with unfamiliar knowledge and making new relationships. Out of all of that a new way forward emerges. Long jumping is a risky business. The shock of a crisis may yet force us to become long jumpers, to find a new path.
The most obvious example of such a long jump is the remaking of our approach to work. Enforced and prolonged distance working is making many employees and employers reassess the importance of having everyone in the office all of the time – or even having an office at all. Home is becoming a workplace for many more people. Many offices, and so the services that cluster around them, will never be the same. Organisations and management hierarchies will be reshaped; people may even be forced to rethink what an organisation is.
At the same time as opening up these opportunities to work differently, many people will find some forms of work much harder to sustain: the frontline staff who have continued throughout the pandemic; the people laid off from jobs in hospitality. Just as digitalisation and automation accelerates, eliminating many routine jobs, so job creation will slow in sectors such as hospitality and services (where it was such an economic lifesaver after 2008). The consequent rise in unemployment among low-skilled workers will likely force the government to sustain a more activist approach to managing the labour market, quite possibly borrowing from European welfare systems that subsidise wages to keep people in jobs for as long as possible.
New models of work will emerge from the crisis and, with that, perhaps a new social safety net offering workers a job guarantee and a measure of security married to flexibility. Ideas for reshaping the labour market figure prominently in the policy platform Joe Biden’s campaigned on in the US presidential election, including a higher minimum wage; three million new jobs in education, childcare and elderly care, with better pay and benefits. Democrats are pushing for more universal benefits for sick pay and family leave. Experiments with universal basic income are becoming practical realities in some places.
What started as a health crisis could leave its lasting mark by creating a new way for society to organise work, one which would have seemed a pipe dream even in 2019. That would be a turning point: a shift onto a new path.
The final option is that the crisis might create so many opportunities for change, on so many different fronts, that rather than creating a clear turning point – a choice between one path and another – it becomes more akin to a large roundabout, with many different exits as society spins around searching for a way out. That may be the best description of the state we are in now, a kind of vortex in which everything moves very fast but stays roughly in the same place because for the moment at least we are going round in circles.
The possibilities are endless. Crisis could lead to: the spread of digitalisation of public and private services; a new economic role in managing work for a larger state with a more relaxed approach to borrowing; a reformed system of social care, in the wake of the toll on older people and their carers; something like a universal work and income guarantee for young people; new alliances between local government and mutual aid groups in civil society; a digitally enabled primary health system, including track and trace technology as standard; a new society-wide commitment to tackle structural racial inequality; a recovery with a Green New Deal at its heart; a return to normality circa 2019. Precisely because it reaches so deep and wide, this crisis may create so many different possibilities that nothing as coherent as a single ‘turning point’ emerges. Instead different parts of society take different exits scattering in different directions pursuing fractured experimentation.
That fragmentation may be the most plausible outcome because there are as yet no clear political and economic actors with enough support to take society in one direction or another. The nationalist and populist wave may have reached its peak. Everyday radicalism, experimenting with new policies, organisations and institutions, may be rising. New coalitions may be forming on the horizon as we embark on a green transition. But as yet there is nothing coherent enough to take society in a definitive direction. It will depend on what coalitions form around which programmes in the next year or so.
These are the four ways in which a crisis can generate lasting, potentially transformative change: accelerator, dead-end, turning point and roundabout. This crisis clearly has the potential to be a critical juncture but that depends on which exit we take from the roundabout. And that will depend on who gets to tell the story of the crisis, how we make sense of it all.
That is the conclusion Mark Blyth comes to in his study of such moments in Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Political Change in the Twentieth Century. According to Blyth, a professor of international political science at Brown University in the US, a crisis becomes a turning point when its story gets told in a certain way which determines what an adequate response looks like.
The first is whether the crisis is seen as an external threat or an internal challenge. Those in power, seeking to justify their actions, will want to present COVID-19 primarily as a global pandemic: an external threat of unprecedented scale. Their challengers will have to persuade people it was also an internal challenge, exposing deep seated weaknesses and failings. Perhaps Joe Biden’s victory also marks a tilt in favour of the latter account.
The second contrast is whether we are all in this together or whether the crisis has exposed and deepened structural social inequalities that need to be tackled. Do we bask in the warm glow of collective goodwill or face the hard and costly reality of inequality?
The alternative narrative is more difficult to convey. The pandemic exposes the limits of individualism; responding to it depends on solidarity and fellow feeling. One person’s health depends on the health of others. Yet that will not yield an agenda for reform unless we also address the growing evidence that we are not in this together, that the economic and health burdens are unequally shared across class, race and age. The post-war welfare state emerged from the fellow feeling of the war but also a recognition of the unequal burdens, carried by older people and women. It was both an expression of solidarity and a critique of unacceptable inequality.
Challengers will need to get this balance right to create a credible narrative. The uneven impact of the economic crisis, the unemployment and business closures that will follow the end of the pandemic, could provide the basis for such a narrative.
Milton Friedman, the intellectual inspiration for the free market policies of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher once wrote: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around. That I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
The problem is not a lack of ideas. Many of the ideas that might provide the ingredients for a critical juncture are lying around: a version of universal basic income, combined with a Green New Deal, greater local and deliberative democracy and more responsible corporations to create an economy organised around an ethic of care, regeneration and stewardship rather than money, profits and growth.
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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.
Agroforestry is an intentional integration of trees on farmland.
Globally, it is practised by 1.2 billion people on 10 per cent area of total agricultural lands (over 1 billion hectares).
It is widely popular as ‘a low hanging fruit’ due to its multifarious tangible and intangible benefits.
The net carbon sequestered in agroforestry is 11.35 tonnes of carbon per ha
A panacea for global issues such as climate change, land degradation, pollution and food security, agroforestry is highlighted as a key strategy to fulfil several targets:
In 2017, a New York Times bestseller Project Drawdown published by 200 scientists around the world with a goal of reversing climate change, came up with the most plausible 100 solutions to slash–down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Out of these 100 solutions, 11 strategies were highlighted under the umbrella of agroforestry such as:-
Nowadays, tree-based farming in India is considered a silver bullet to cure all issues.
It was promoted under the Green India mission of 2001, six out of eight missions under the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and National Agroforestry and Bamboo Mission (NABM), 2017 to bring a third of the geographical area under tree cover and offsetting GHG emissions.
These long-term attempts by the Government of India have helped enhance the agroforestry area to 13.75 million hectares.
The net carbon sequestered in agroforestry is 11.35 tonnes of carbon per ha and carbon sequestration potential is 0.35 tonnes of carbon per ha per year at the country level, according to the Central Agroforestry Research Institute, Jhansi.
India will reduce an additional 2.5-3 billion tonnes of CO2 by increasing tree cover. This extra tree cover could be achieved through agroforestry systems because of their ability to withstand minimum inputs under extreme situations.
Here are some examples which portray the role of agroforestry in achieving at least nine out of the 17 SDGs through sustainable food production, ecosystem services and economic benefits:
SDG 1 — No Poverty: Almost 736 million people still live in extreme poverty. Diversification through integrating trees in agriculture unlocks the treasure to provide multifunctional benefits.
Studies carried out in 2003 in the arid regions of India reported a 10-15 per cent increase in crop yield with Prosopis cineraria (khejari). Adoption of agroforestry increases income & production by reducing the cost of input & production.
SDG 2 — Zero hunger: Tree-based systems provide food and monetary returns. Traditional agroforestry systems like Prosopis cineraria and Madhuca longifolia (Mahua) provide edible returns during drought years known as “lifeline to the poor people”.
Studies showed that 26-50 per cent of households involved in tree products collection and selling act as a coping strategy to deal with hunger.
SDG 3 — Good health and well-being: Human wellbeing and health are depicted through the extent of healthy ecosystems and services they provide.
Agroforestry contributes increased access to diverse nutritious food, supply of medicine, clean air and reduces heat stress.
Vegetative buffers can filter airstreams of particulates by removing dust, gas, microbial constituents and heavy metals.
SDG 5 — Gender equality: Throughout the world around 3 billion people depend on firewood for cooking.
In this, women are the main collectors and it brings drudgery and health issues.
A study from India stated that almost 374 hours per year are spent by women for collection of firewood. Growing trees nearby provides easy access to firewood and diverts time to productive purposes.
SDG 6 — Clean Water and Sanitation: Water is probably the most vital resource for our survival. The inherent capacity of trees offers hydrological regulation as evapotranspiration recharges atmospheric moisture for rainfall; enhanced soil infiltration recharges groundwater; obstructs sediment flow; rainwater filtration by accumulation of heavy metals.
An extensive study in 35 nations published in 2017 concluded that 30 per cent of tree cover in watersheds resulted in improved sanitisation and reduced diarrheal disease.
SDG 7 — Affordable & Clean Energy: Wood fuels are the only source of energy to billions of poverty-stricken people.
Though trees are substitutes of natural forests, modern technologies in the form of biofuels, ethanol, electricity generation and dendro-biomass sources are truly affordable and clean.
Ideal agroforestry models possess fast-growing, high coppicing, higher calorific value and short rotation (2-3 years) characteristics and provide biomass of 200-400 tonnes per ha.
SDG 12 — Responsible consumption and production: The production of agricultural and wood-based commodities on a sustainable basis without depleting natural resources and as low as external inputs (chemical fertilisers and pesticides) to reduce the ecological footprints.
SDG 13 — Climate action: Globally, agricultural production accounts for up to 24 per cent of GHG emissions from around 22.2 million square km of agricultural area, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
A 2016 study depicted that conversion of agricultural land to agroforestry sequesters about 27.2± 13.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent per ha per year after establishment of systems.
Trees on farmland mitigate 109.34 million tonnes CO2 equivalent annually from 15.31 million ha, according to a 2017 report. This may offset a third of the total GHG emissions from the agriculture sector of India.
SDG 15 — Life on Land: Agroforestry ‘mimics the forest ecosystem’ to contribute conservation of flora and faunas, creating corridors, buffers to existing reserves and multi-functional landscapes.
Delivery of ecosystem services of trees regulates life on land. A one-hectare area of homegardens in Kerala was found to have 992 trees from 66 species belonging to 31 families, a recent study showed.
The report of the World Agroforestry Centre highlighted those 22 countries that have registered agroforestry as a key strategy in achieving their unconditional national contributions.
Recently, the Government of India has allocated significant financial support for promotion of agroforestry at grassroot level to make the Indian economy as carbon neutral. This makes agroforestry a low-hanging fruit to achieve the global goals.