A crisis forces people to see the world in a different way because it ruptures the assumptions on which everyday life proceeds and so creates a doorway into a different kind of world, one in which people can improvise solutions inspired by generosity and empathy, goodwill and common endeavour, resilience and resourcefulness often lacking in normal times. That is a paraphrase of Rebecca Solnit’s account, in A Paradise Built in Hell, of the field of ‘disaster sociology’. The father of that field, which emerged from the study of the civilian experience of the Second World War, the American sociologist Charles Fritz, put it this way: ‘Disaster provides a societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalised patterns of behaviour and renders people amenable to social and personal change.’ Crisis creates a potent mixture of disruption of the status quo, freedom from convention and tight constraints, of time and resources, which drives radical improvisation. Doing things differently becomes the only and obvious solution.
“Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summon to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work.”
When that happens six factors come together. If we can understand this combination, we might have a chance of fostering the ‘can-do’ culture of crisis in normal times.
Crisis breeds innovation because it demands a sharper, shared clarity of purpose. That is true for societies as well as individuals. Amid all the chaos, a crisis can provide what corporate anthropologists Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen call The Moment of Clarity, when the point of what you are doing becomes clear: saving lives, caring for one another, putting food on the table. The trade-offs between competing claims on resources, which are normally hard to adjudicate and so slow down change, can be cut through with confidence about what really counts.
Outside a crisis it is much harder to create this sense of shared purpose. One way to do so is to frame a challenge as a crisis to garner greater commitment: just before COVID-19 emerged, campaigners had stopped talking about climate change and instead focused on the ‘climate emergency’. The need for shared purpose is one reason more governments are interested in mission-driven innovation, to mobilise collective effort to tackle big societal challenges. There are limits to how far this can be taken though: not everything can count as a crisis at the same time.
A crisis demands urgency because it can get out of hand, growing exponentially and outpacing normal responses, as the UK found to its cost by locking down later than many other countries. Crisis compresses timescales and forces people to work at speed, eliminating the steps in processes which add very little to outcomes. When time is short, we have to focus on what is really critical and not bother with the rest. That is how vaccines were developed and approved in record time. Elements in the process that are usually sequential, were carried out in parallel, compressing the time from initial prototype to approval from years to a few months.
A prime example is the way the UK’s highly praised RECOVERY programme was set up to test treatments for COVID-19 in real time in hospitals up and down the country. Normally it would take several months to set up a trial with 12,000 patients; in this crisis it took just two weeks.
Focus and urgency need to be combined to achieve results: governments should set clear, tight timescales for ‘mission-driven innovation’ to force teams to work in innovative ways. (But it is worth noting that one downside of a crisis is that it can drive out innovation which requires longer timescales and more diverse perspectives to unravel challenges and opportunities which are less obvious.)
In a crisis, one which engulfs the entire country, innovators have to find solutions that work at scale from the outset. They do not have the luxury of an extended period of prototyping to refine their solutions. Working fast to achieve scale shortcuts the innovation process, eliminating often lengthy processes of ideation, research and prototyping but also processes like ethics reviews. Instead, the emphasis has to be on what works fast, everywhere. That favours solutions which are simple and robust. (One downside of a crisis is that it can be bad for more fundamental, blue-sky research into more speculative solutions.)
Too often, public sector innovations get trapped on location: they do not spread beyond the local pockets in which they were developed. As a result, the public sector is rich in innovative solutions developed in one place which fail to scale more widely because there is no effective mechanism to achieve that.
That kind of defensive parochialism is much harder to justify in a crisis. People cannot afford to rest on their laurels; they need to show they are learning fast. Power is often centralised to mandate new solutions. Demand for and take-up of more effective solutions is driven by the scale of the need.
The need for urgency, focus and scale favours solutions which repurpose existing technologies rather than inventing things from scratch. That may be true of innovation in all settings, but crisis accentuates the advantages of repurposing and recombining what already works.
Giulio Quaggiotto, the UNDP’s innovation “guru” who is working with governments across Asia to support their responses to COVID-19, put it this way: ‘Having something to build upon really matters. Starting something from scratch during a crisis is difficult. Building on or repurposing what is already there is much more effective.’
An obvious example is the way South Korea and other Asian states drew on their experience with the SARS epidemic: that meant South Korea had thousands of epidemic intelligence officers to call upon. The Indian state of Kerala built its highly effective response on its community-based health and care system. Greece was quick to repurpose existing technologies to new ends, using a simple SMS system to regulate its lockdown. In Bangladesh, more than 11 million people have self-reported COVID-19 systems using a simple SMS system which is analysed in real time by artificial intelligence. That has allowed the authorities to spot ‘hot clusters’ of the virus 10 days earlier than they were able to at the start of the pandemic. More than 200,000 doctors and nurses went through an online training course to operate what Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor with UNDP and Member of the Prime Minister’s National Digital Task Force in Bangladesh, calls an ‘Uber pool system for doctors’.
The imperative to repurpose rather than invent explains why a crisis can lead to a sudden surge in usage of solutions that were developing only gradually in normal conditions. Indonesia has created a primary telemedicine system for 300 million people by working with a handful of startups which had been finding it hard to gain traction before the crisis. The crisis has accelerated the adoption of solutions that were developing only tentatively.
Recreating that collaborative spirit is hard outside of the conditions of crisis. The conflicts common to the public sector will likely resume as 2021 unfolds. Yet the crisis might yet create a longer lasting legacy of collaboration, not least if more governments recognise the power of mission-driven innovation to create a framework for collaborative innovation around a shared, critical challenge.
Governments and digital service providers may in future collaborate more to provide critical social infrastructures. In Bangladesh, Anir Chowdhury looks forward to a future in which the country has a digital basic income, combined with a mobile-first health system and an online distance learning platform for all children. None of that will be possible, however, without a partnership between government and mobile operators who will be entrusted with what will become vital public infrastructure. The mobile operators will want to know there is a sustainable business model: someone will have to pay.
Another place where a newfound spirit of collaboration may flourish will be in local government, where councils have learned that, in a crisis, the first and ongoing responders are in civil society. Local mutual aid, care networks and food systems might live on after the crisis, as a permanent complement to the local state.
The inherent uncertainty created by an unfolding crisis means it’s hard at the outset to say what will work. That means failure is almost inevitable and therefore more tolerable. In a crisis not everything will work first time around. As Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, puts it: you have to make 100 per cent decisions with only 50 per cent of the information. There is no option but to accept, embrace even, the radical uncertainty of the situation, and the creative, adaptive solutions that requires.
Bets have to be hedged in the knowledge that some experimental solutions have to be written off in pursuit of the one that works best. Failures are easier to write off in a fast-moving crisis.
Failure is easier to tolerate, however, so long as it leads to rapid learning and better solutions: perhaps after months of mounting criticism from the public, doctors and nurses, the UK Government has created a supply chain to provide hospitals and care homes with the PPE they need. Time will tell.
Whether all this leads to more intelligent, forgiving and thoughtful attitudes towards failure and experimentation in government remains to be seen. If it did, this would encourage innovation.
Having something to build upon really matters. Starting something from scratch during a crisis is difficult. Building on or repurposing what is already there is much more effective.
Giulio Quaggiotto, UNDP
There are plenty of reasons why it would be a mistake to model innovation policy on how we behave in a crisis. Many kinds of innovation are casualties of crisis. Serendipitous innovation is unlikely to thrive in a socially distanced world in which a visit to a café has to be pre-booked. In a crisis patient, blue-sky research often has to play second fiddle to urgent pragmatic problem-solving. A clear sense of shared focus can mobilise collective action to achieve a common goal, but a good deal of innovation comes from the plurality and diversity of values and vantage points in society. Getting government to focus on a single mission is not just difficult, it might be dangerous if less politically correct missions are neglected.
Yet a crisis like COVID-19 does show us how society can be rapidly reorganised around a different set of priorities. A profound economic and social shock provides a heightened sense of urgency and focus, which in turn creates a newfound willingness to collaborate among people and agencies used to fighting turf wars with one another. The need to work at speed and scale means that inventing things from scratch is out of the question; repurposing existing technologies, infrastructure and institutions is far more effective. All of this requires a tolerance of failure as solutions that are initially not good enough are discarded or improved.
Crisis is not a model for all kinds of innovation. Yet in these special conditions we become capable of turning what was thought impossible into everyday reality. Crisis reveals not just weaknesses but also strengths and capabilities; it creates huge costs but also unexpected dividends in all the new and different ways we find to organise ourselves that seemed out of the question just a few months ago.
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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.