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GM insect-resistant Bt cotton boosted India’s crop yields? Differing Experts

India was the world’s leading cotton and textile producer for millenniums. In the 1990s the traditional ‘desi’ variety of cotton was upstaged by imported hybrid cotton varities in the hopes of increased production and profits. They soon became vulnerable to pests and resulted in increased use of fertilisers and pesticides, thus increasing the production costs. The failure of hubrid cotton led to the introduction of Bt cotton in 2002 as India’s first genetically modified crop. GM crops have been strongly opposed by increasing believers of traditional agriculture and scientists, possibly for very good reasons. India’s cotton production has quadrupled by 2010 and proponents of GM crops have attributed this to Bt cotton. This has been hotly contested. The recent assertion in favour of Bt cotton by Dr Ramesh Chander of Niti Aayog, early this year, has come under scathing criticism in an article by Professor Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Dr. Hans R.Herren, and Dr. Peter E.Kenmore as also by Sujatha Byravan. The claims by the advocates of GM crops and Bt cotton were questioned in a well-researched article early this year by scientists K R Kranthi and G D Stone. This article counters their arguements.

– TPF
This article was originally posted on the non-profit GeneticLiteracyProject.org website.

Authors: Cameron English, Jon Entine, and Matin Qaim

Was the introduction of transgenic (GMO) cotton seeds to India in 2002 the beginning of the renaissance of the country’s then struggling cotton industry? Or was it a non-event, hyped by biotechnology advocates, especially agro-businesses, to bolster the case for a technology struggling for public acceptance?

After years of farmers losing crops to tobacco budworms, cotton bollworms and pink bollworms, costing billions of dollars a year in losses, Monsanto developed insect-resistant Bt cotton in the early 1990s. The engineered crop has become widespread since its commercial release in China and the United States in 1996, followed by its introduction to India in 2002.

Within just a few years, India’s troubled cotton industry had done a 180, emerging as one of the world’s largest producers of GMO cotton, as exports boomed, helping to fuel India’s rapid rise as an emerging nation. But not everyone accepts this version of events. Agricultural biotechnology critics maintain that the success of Bt cotton was more smoke and mirrors than science, a story deceptively promoted by the beleaguered agricultural biotechnology industry and its supporters

Competing research conclusions

The Bt cotton debate was reignited this year following the publication of contrasting scholarly analyses, one challenging the success narrative and several others defending it. The latest volley of criticism was launched in March when Indian entomologist K. R. Kranthi and Washington University anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone wrote a scathing analysis of Bt cotton success claims in Nature Plants, an article widely disseminated by the global media. Reviewing 20 years of data, the authors claimed that the dramatic success of India’s first (and only) GMO crop was largely hype, and may have even been a failure. According to Stone in a press release put out by Washington University in St. Louis:

Yields in all crops [in India] jumped in 2003, but the increase was especially large in cotton,” Stone said. “But Bt cotton had virtually no effect on the rise in cotton yields because it accounted for less than 5% of India’s cotton crop at the time.
Now farmers in India are spending more on seeds, more on fertilizer and more on insecticides …. Our conclusion is that Bt cotton’s primary impact on agriculture will be its role in making farming more capital-intensive — rather than any enduring agronomic benefits.

That led to a rebuke by long-time scholars in the field. In early May, four scientists at the South East Asia Biotechnology Center in New Dehli weighed in with their own take down in the open access Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Publication bioRxiv, concluding:

This study [Kranthi and Stone] conspicuously ignores positive shifts that occurred with Bt adoption at reduced real cost of production in all states resulting in large welfare benefits netting out increased cost of cultivation. [The fallacy] associated with increasing yield trends even before [the] introduction of Bt cotton as claimed by Kranthi and Stone does not stand [up to] scrutiny of increasing yield trends from 2002-03 to 2009-10, with some years showing significant yield dips due to drought [only] to bounce back …. in 2017-18. The ignorance of drought impact tends to attribute the yield reduction entirely [to] the failure of Bt technology.

In June, GLP published a detailed critique by plant geneticist Deepak Pental, who wrote:

The article’s authors claim to have carried out ‘a new analysis of unprecedented scope, time depth and detail’ on cotton cultivation in India to find the real reasons behind the doubling of yields between 2000 and 2006, followed by yield stagnation. While the avowed goal of the analysis is to set the record right on the contribution of the Bt trait to cotton cultivation in India, the real purpose of the report is to cast doubts on the utility of GE technologies.

Most recently, a number of scientists who have crunched the data responded sharply to the Stone-Kranthi hypothesis in letters published in Nature Plants. One of the most prominent is Ian Plewis, an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester in England, who has written extensively on debunked claims that the introduction of Bt cotton led to a surge in farmer suicides in India. Last year, he analyzed much of the same data cited by Stone and Kranthi in a paper in the Review of Agrarian Studies, arriving at a much more nuanced conclusion.

The conclusions from these analyses are mixed. The more expensive Bt hybrid seeds have lowered insecticide costs in all three States, but only in Rajasthan did yields increase. An important message of this paper is that conclusions about the effectiveness of Bt cotton are more nuanced than many researchers and commentators recognise. The paper does not refute the assertions about the success of Bt cotton, but it does show that the benefits are not evenly distributed across India.

In a letter to the journal, Plewis challenged Kranthi’s and Stone’s methodology.

Kranthi and Stone do not present state-wide analyses of insecticide use, relying instead on unpublished market research data for India as a whole. Their assertion that farmers are spending more on insecticide than they were before the introduction of Bt is not supported by my analyses which are based on publicly available data and show that the technology reduced the proportion of farmers’ costs going to insecticides in all three states.
Kranthi and Stone make some important points but their approach prevents them from reaching soundly based assessments of the long-term impacts of Bt cotton on Indian farmers in different states.

Other critics were equally challenging of their data. In a letter originally published in Nature Plants, agricultural economist Matin Qaim, who has been writing about the impacts of Bt cotton in India since its introduction, jumped into the fray:

Kranthi and Stone’s attempt to analyze long-term effects of Bt cotton is laudable, as the effects of the technology can change over time due to evolving pest populations and other dynamics. However, their claim that Bt contributed little to the yield increases observed in India between 2002 and 2008 is unconvincing ….

Strong arguments on both sides. What do the facts say? Let’s separate the cotton from the sharp ends of the boll.

What is Bt cotton?

Bt seeds produce over 200 different Bt toxins, each harmful to different insects. Bt cotton is an insect-resistant transgenic crop (GMO) designed to combat many destructive insects, most notably the bollworm. It was created by genetically altering the cotton genome to express a natural, non-pathogenic microbial protein from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that is found in the soil. Bt in its natural and transgenic forms has been extensively evaluated and found to be safe to all higher animals tested. Bt has been used as an insecticide in organic farming since the middle of the 20th century.

Bollworm resistance to Bt cotton problematic for farmers worldwide.

Traditionally, pesticides have been used to combat the cotton bollworm. However, in developing nations like India, the expense of using large amounts of pesticide is often too high for marginal farmers. Bt cotton was developed with the intention of reducing the amount of pesticide needed for cotton cultivation, thereby reducing production costs for farmers, environmental impact, and the pesticide exposure of applicators, often women and children.

Numerous independent studies have attributed anywhere from 14-30% of the cotton yield increase in India to the cultivation of Bt seeds. Five years after the introduction of Bt cotton, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and visiting fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi would write in the Wall Street Journal about India’s recently flagging cotton production: “By 2007-08, India became the largest producer of cotton with the largest acreage under Bt cotton in the world, pushing China into second place.” Many scientists and news organizations cited the surge in production of Indian cotton as one of the clearest GMO success stories.

After its introduction, within a decade, Bt cotton accounted for more than 95% of all cotton cultivation in India, as yields increased.

During that same period marking a 55% rise in yields, overall use of insecticides remained below absolute levels from 2003, while per- hectare usage dropped precipitously.

Source: KR Kranthi (December 2016), News reports from Reuters, Financial Express

Stone’s critique and pink bollworm resistance

Despite its initial success, Bt cotton seed is more costly than non-transgenic (but lower yielding) varieties, making it a target for some critics who are skeptical of crop biotechnology. One of those longtime skeptics is Washington University professor Stone. Stone is part of a cohort of scholars and activists, including Indian-philosopher Vandana Shiva, which fervently believes that the Indian Green Revolution that dramatically reduced hunger and is credited with saving more than a billion lives was a failure.

As far back as 2012, Stone challenged a plethora of studies generally supporting the view behind the success of India’s Bt cotton crops and the resurrection of the nation’s once-threatened cotton industry. Stone looked at the data from a cultural anthropology perspective and saw more hype than substance. Writing in his influential paper in 2012, “Constructing Facts: Bt Cotton Narratives in India,” Stone maintained, “We simply cannot say how Bt seed has affected cotton production in India.” The “triumph narrative” of Bt cotton in India, he claimed, “flows mainly from economists and the biotech industry (and its academic allies)” in “industry-journal authentication systems” (peer-reviewed journals), which “serve the interests of their constituent parties.” The arrangement is a “cosy alliance between GM manufacturers and ostensibly independent researchers,” he added.

Problems emerged in 2017, as the pink bollworm ravaged cotton crops in India, suggesting the pest had developed resistance. A January 2018 study released by Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) showed how the proportion of pink bollworm on green bolls of Bt cotton plants in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh rose from 5.71 percent in 2010 to 73.82 percent in 2017. GMO-skeptic Stone tweeted a link to a scathing article in Bloomberg, sarcastically asking why GMO supporters seemed to be ignoring the Bt’s failure in India.

As reporter Mark Lynas noted in an analysis for the Cornell Alliance for Science, the debate is nuanced than either pro or anti factions often maintain. The Bloomberg report did notice that similar problems have not turned up in Australia and China, where Bt cotton is grown, suggesting the resistance may be unique to conditions in India. Lynas interviewed Ronald Herring, author of numerous peer-reviewed papers on the impacts of Bt cotton in India. He acknowledged the reality of the problem, but suggested the issue was murky. The problem could be linked to a variety of issues, including the use of counterfeit Bt seeds, which are rampant in India, or the fact that many financially-pressed Indian farmers abandoned the recommended rotations of a second crop, which can be less profitable than the cash-crop cotton.

Bt cotton has had an up and down history in India. From 2002 to 2009, cotton production, productivity and acreage grew steadily. Soon, the pink bollworm began developing resistance. Studies between 2013 and 2015 of Indian Council of Agricultural Research and CICR concluded that pink bollworm had developed resistance to Bollgard-II. Insecticide use shot up to levels not seen in a decade.

Vijay Paranjape, the associate director of the USAID-funded Bt brinjal project in Bangladesh, and an expert in Bt cotton in India, told Lynas that the problem was largely focused in one region, Vidarbha. “[T]here is some pattern to it that could be due to [poor] agronomic practices being followed,” in that area. In other words, the facts are complicated.

Another Bt expert, Srinivasan Ramasamy, then a visiting scientist at Cornell University, told Lynas: “I don’t agree that Bt cotton has failed in India.” Ramasamy, he said, pointed out that Bt cotton “was developed against three different bollworms — Helicoverpa armigera, Earias spp. and Pectinophora gossypiella” (the latter is pink bollworm).

Bt cotton effectively reduced these bollworms, except the pink bollworm, that too in Maharashtra only. If the other two species remained as a major threat, the pesticide use might have been several-folds higher than the current use. Hence, Bt cotton has contributed to pesticide reduction.

Stone’s disputations and Qaim’s response

This nuanced history of course is often not reflected in the commentaries, or even academic studies, by supporters of GMO crops. Setbacks are often portrayed by hardened critics as absolute failures.

Jump to 2020, and Stone, joined by K. R. Kranthi, the former director of India’s Central Institute for Cotton Research and now the head of a technical division at the Washington-based International Cotton Advisory Committee, reemerged as a sharp critic of Bt cotton—though the success narrative appears even stronger now. Since 2012, water usage has dropped sharply in Indian while Bt cotton yields have continued to climb, and are at or near historic highs, up more than 150% since the early 2000s.

Despite these numbers, Kranthi and Stone argued that “the largest production gains came prior to widespread [Bt] seed adoption and must be viewed in line with changes in fertilization practices and other pest population dynamics.” They also cited the pink bollworm’s evolved resistance to Bt insecticide and the threat posed by other pests that are impervious to the insecticidal power of Bt cotton.

Qaim found these arguments lacking, however. Building on previous scholarship, the agricultural economist explains that, when other relevant factors are accounted for, Bt cotton did indeed boost crop yields in India. Here are his conclusions:

The agronomic and socioeconomic effects of insect-resistant Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton in India have long been debated. In their recent Perspective article, Kranthi and Stone [1] used 20 years of data to analyze associations between the adoption of Bt cotton, crop yields and insecticide use, claiming that Bt technology had little yield effects and did not produce any enduring benefits.

Here, I argue that the methods used by Kranthi and Stone are not suitable to make statements about causal effects, so their conclusions are misleading. As earlier studies showed [2–7], Bt cotton has contributed to sizeable yield gains and important benefits for cotton farmers and the environment. Kranthi and Stone’s attempt to analyze long-term effects of Bt cotton is laudable, as the effects of the technology can change over time due to evolving pest populations and other dynamics.

However, their claim that Bt contributed little to the yield increases observed in India between 2002 and 2008 is unconvincing, as this part of their analysis looks at the same time period that was also analyzed previously by other authors with more precise microlevel data and better methodologies [7,8]. Kranthi and Stone use simple graphical analysis to compare time trends for Bt adoption, fertilizer use and yield at national and state levels.

Comparing the graphs, they find a stronger correspondence between the fertilizer and yield trends than between the Bt adoption and yield trends. Thus, they conclude that the observed yield increases were primarily due to the higher use of fertilizer and other inputs, and not to Bt technology. The problem is that such a simple graphical comparison of time trends is inappropriate to analyze causal effects. Crop yields may increase because of more fertilizer or because of better pest control through the adoption of insect-resistant Bt varieties. It is also possible that some farmers decided to use more fertilizer because of Bt adoption. Many other factors, such as changes in irrigation, other inputs and technologies, agronomic practices, training of farmers or simple weather fluctuations may also affect cotton yields and broader socioeconomic benefits.

In principle, Kranthi and Stone acknowledge these complexities but they do nothing to control for any of the confounding factors. Previous studies used microlevel data and more sophisticated statistical techniques to control for confounding factors and possible bias, hence leading to more reliable effect estimates. Kathage and Qaim [7] used panel data collected between 2002 and 2008 from over 500 randomly selected cotton farms in four states of India. They used statistical differencing techniques and controlled for the use of fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, agronomic practices and many other factors, including location and time trends, to deal with selection bias and cultivation bias.

Results showed that—after controlling for all other factors—Bt adoption had increased cotton yields by 24%, farmers’ profits by 50% and farm household living standards by 18%, with no indication that the benefits were fading during the 2002–2008 period. The same data also revealed that chemical insecticide quantities declined by more than 40% through Bt adop-tion, with the largest reductions in the most toxic active ingredients previously sprayed to control the American bollworm [9–11].

There are not many other examples from India or elsewhere where a single technology has caused agronomic, economic and environmental benefits in a similar magnitude.Against this background, Kranthi and Stone’s statement that “the surge in yields has been uncritically attributed to Bt seed” is not correct. Of course, there are other factors that contributed to the observed doubling of yields between 2002 and 2008 but the 24% estimate by Kathage and Qaim is the net effect of Bt technology after controlling for other factors [7]. Using longer-term data but inap-propriate methodologies to challenge earlier results, as Kranthi and Stone do in their article, is not convincing. Bt cotton has increased yields through better pest control and has benefited adopting farm-ers in India and several other developing countries [12–14].

References

1. Kranthi, K. R. & Stone, G. D. Long-term impacts of Bt cotton in India. Nat. Plants6, 188–196 (2020).

2. Datta, S. et al. India needs genetic modification technology in agriculture. Curr. Sci.117, 390–394 (2019).

3. Qaim, M. The economics of genetically modified crops. Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ.1, 665–693 (2009). Bt cotton, yields and farmers’ benefitsMatin Qaim ✉arising from K. R. Kranthi and G. D. Stone Nature Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-0615-5 (2020)–70–50–30–1010305070Cotton yieldInsecticidequantityCotton profitFarm householdliving standardBt effect (%)Fig. 1 |Net effects of Bt cotton adoption in India (2002–2008). Mean percentage effects are shown with standard error bars. Results are based on plot-level and household-level panel data collected in four rounds between 2002 and 2008. Net effects of Bt cotton were estimated with panel data regression models and differencing techniques to control for observed and unobserved confounding factors 7,9,11 Nature Plants| www.nature.com/natureplants matters arisingNature PlaNts

4. Crost, B., Shankar, B., Bennett, R. & Morse, S. Bias from farmer self-selection in genetically modified crop productivity estimates: evidence from Indian data. J. Agric. Econ.58, 24–36 (2007).

5. Qaim, M., Subramanian, A., Naik, G. & Zilberman, D. Adoption of Bt cotton and impact variability: insights from India. Rev. Agric. Econ.28, 48–58 (2006).

6. Subramanian, A. & Qaim, M. The impact of Bt cotton on poor households in rural India. J. Dev. Stud.46, 295–311 (2010).

7. Kathage, J. & Qaim, M. Economic impacts and impact dynamics of Bt(Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton in India. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA109, 11652–11656 (2012).

8. Krishna, V., Qaim, M. & Zilberman, D. Transgenic crops, production risk and agrobiodiversity. Eur. Rev. Agric. Econ.43, 137–164 (2016).

9. Krishna, V. V. & Qaim, M. Bt cotton and sustainability of pesticide reductions in India. Agric. Syst.107, 47–55 (2012).

10. Veettil, P. C., Krishna, V. V. & Qaim, M. Ecosystem impacts of pesticide reductions through Bt cotton adoption. Aust. J. Agric. Resour. Econ.61, 115–134 (2017).

11. Kouser, S. & Qaim, M. Impact of Bt cotton on pesticide poisoning in smallholder agriculture: a panel data analysis. Ecol. Econ.70, 2105–2113 (2011).

12. Ali, A. & Abdulai, A. The adoption of genetically modified cotton and poverty reduction in Pakistan. J. Agric. Econ.61, 175–192 (2010).

13. Qiao, F. Fifteen years of Bt cotton in China: the economic impact and its dynamics. Wo r l d D e v.70, 177–185 (2015).

14. Qaim, M. Role of new plant breeding technologies for food security and sustainable agricultural development. Appl. Econ. Perspect. Policy42, 129–150 (2020)

Matin Qaim is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at the University of Goettingen in Germany. Visit his website. Follow Matin on Twitter @MatinQaim

The letter was originally published in Nature Plants and has been republished here with permission. Nature Plants can be found on Twitter @NaturePlants

Cameron English is a Science writer and the Managing Editor at Genetic Literacy Project.

Jon Entine is a renowned journalist, author, though-leader and the Founder and Executive Director of the Genetic Literacy Project.

This article is republished from the Genetic Literacy project under the Creative Commons 4.0

Image Credit: GLP and India Times

November 3, 2020
Is MGNREGA a Sustainable Employment Option for Migrants?

Covid-19 certainly has kindled a renewed focus on healthcare systems, sanitation, and most importantly, employment in the rural areas of the country. The pandemic has thrown light on the huge inadequacies and challenges of our healthcare structure that the government and the citizens had not foreseen. Millions of skilled and unskilled migrants moved across the country in droves to their hometowns in the absence of income and work and means to sustain their life. Around 30 Million (3 Crore) or 15-20% of the total urban workforce left for their hometowns, accounting for the largest ever reverse migration trend in the country, exclusive of intra-state migration. The World Bank in its report mentioned that a whopping number of 40 million internal migrants were harshly affected by the lockdown. Now that the country is just a few steps from opening up in full, concerns about workers moving back in search of work remain in the air. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which has a mixed track record in sustaining the livelihood of people in distress by providing guaranteed employment and considerate wages might be the only way out for the worst of the worst-affected. But, will the scheme be a viable and sustainable employment option for the days and years to come? This article aims to answer the question of efficiency, significance, and sustainability of MGNREGA in rural employment in the country.

What is MGNREGA?

MGNREGA, the world’s largest guarantee work programme, is the legitimised pioneer of the fundamental ‘Right to Work’. The scheme does that by providing a time-bound guarantee of work for 100 days a year, with considerate fixed wages. Workers under the scheme are assigned to agriculture and related capacity building projects thus ensuring sustainable development for all, as advocated by Gandhi. The scheme has reasonable success stories to its credit, all across the country. A study by Parida (2016) at Odisha proves that MGNREGA has played an important role in the agricultural off-season by providing work to the needy, the poor, and the socially marginalised communities. In various villages in Sikkim, families under MGNREGA were more self-reliant and less dependent on government programmes for a livelihood, according to the results of an evaluation conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (2017).

The Ministry of Finance announced Rs. 40,000 crore fund allocation to MGNREGA on the onset of the fourth phase of lockdown in May, while under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, the government plans in creating jobs for 300 Crore persons, and the national average wages of workers also saw an increase from Rs. 182 per day per person to Rs. 202, with effect from April 1st, 2020. All of these might come off as a huge sigh of relief to the worst affected, but in many states, the scheme wage rates are lower than the minimum wages in the respective states. So, this increase in wages does not hold huge significance in reality.

Unemployment and Work Allocation Concerns

Reverse Migration Trends and Unemployment: Unemployment has always been a perennial problem for a developing country like India, especially in times of crisis. The unemployment rate of the country reached an all-time high of close to 24% in April, while the rate of unemployment is expected to reach 8-8.5% in 2020-21, which may increase owing to the reverse migration trends. According to the Former Chief Statistician of India, rural unemployment is now a double-edged sword, given the impact of different migration trends. The reverse migration trends have altered the demand-supply dynamics in rural India significantly. Areas that previously had negative net migration rates are now expected to experience labour surplus, while the locations that may need workers might lack supply. The trends in reverse migration and its impact on local employment in states are visible, with Uttarakhand topping the charts in both the number of reverse migrants and the unemployment rate at around 22.3% as of September. The state is followed by Tripura at 17.4% and Bihar at 11.9%. Thus a strong correlation can be inferred between the amount of reverse migration and the unemployment rate in a given state.

Putting together numbers of short-term and long-term vulnerable workers gives us a total of about 13 Crore (130 million) workers, who are deeply affected by the Covid-19 crisis.

Another trend that is recognisable from literature is that migration is no longer a one-way street. Seasonal and circular migration continues to grow and take various forms (Conell et.al., 1976). Amongst these, vulnerable circular migrants are termed as the most distressed section of migrants, which include both Short-term seasonal and long-term occupationally vulnerable workers. Srivastava (2020) has estimated the number of 5.9 crore short-duration circular migrant workers in the year 2017-18. In the same study, vulnerable long-term circular migrants have been identified at 6.9 crores in the same period. Putting together numbers of short-term and long-term vulnerable workers gives us a total of about 13 Crore (130 million) workers, who are deeply affected by the Covid-19 crisis.

Work Allocation Concerns: Besides, The Taskforce for Eliminating Poverty constituted by Niti Aayog in the year 2015 (Occasional Paper,2016) has noted that most beneficiaries under the MGNREGS have been on an average get only 50 days of work. This shows that the scheme requires a better mechanism that recommends better targeting of the poorest of the poor and gets them guaranteed work for 100 days. Additionally, if 50-60% of the migrant workers in urban India (2018 above) return to their home destinations, then the scheme has to accommodate between 5.5 – 6.6 crore new workers, which will add 50 – 60% weight on people to be accommodated under the scheme. This exerts additional pressure on the already drying up state funds, which means catering to the huge number of migrants might not be economically sustainable for a long period.

Wages and Work Efficiency under MGNREGA

The wage rate in MGNREGA has been a huge concern for policymakers across India. While the recent increase in wages seemed quite positive at the onset, the wage hike is lesser than the minimum wage rate in certain states. Wage rates in the year 2019 seemed to be on the same trajectory, with the MGNREGA wage hike being lesser than the minimum wages in 33 states. Long payment delays also with meager wages add to the burden on workers under the scheme. Another important loophole in the scheme is the availability of work for such a huge number of workers seeking work under the scheme. In most cases, work is inadequate for such a huge number of workers. The standing committee report on rural development for the year 2012-13 also mentioned a significant decline in annual work completion rates (%). According to the report, work completion rates have taken a deep plunge consecutively in the years after 2011, with work completion rates of 20.25% for the year 2012, and 15.02% for the year ending 2013. Such dismal performances also throw light on the lack of productive allocation of work under the scheme. All of these certainly are results of the weakening of the act.

CONCLUSION

While MGNREGA fails in addressing a lot of important issues, COVID-19 certainly allows it to fit the dynamic changes in employment and work conditions. Making amendments to the act can be the only way out if the act needs to be sustainable in the long term. MGNREGA gives a rights-based framework to migrants seeking skilled and unskilled labour opportunities but lacks in giving enough benefits to the workers. Work under the scheme should be allocated efficiently, as per the project needs. While COVID-19 put a halt to a lot of existing projects, a lot of new projects are on the anvil. Catering to the needs arising on account of the pandemic including sanitation infrastructure building projects and infrastructure and rehabilitation projects can help the scheme diversify its project base, thus increasing employment opportunities to the migrants. Agriculture, the only positive contributor to the GDP of the country should be taken advantage of in the situation. A strong work evaluation setup should be made sure of, that would efficiently track work completion records thus giving opportunities for workers to complete the incomplete projects. This will yield benefits in both completion of a project and increased workdays and consequently increased wages for a worker.

Cash-based transactions can be a game-changer in this scenario. Instead of reliance on Aadhar, the unbanked should be remunerated regularly by the means of cash.

Need for Cash-Based Wage Transfer: While cash crunch and plunging aggregate demand are looming over the country’s economy, MGNREGA can be used as a tool to put money in the hands of the needy. The propensity to consume of a rural worker is way higher than that of an urban employee. Cash-based transactions can be a game-changer in this scenario. Instead of reliance on Aadhar, the unbanked should be remunerated regularly by the means of cash. Bank and Post office ways of remunerating workers surely did have an impact on corruption, but irregular payments and lack of access to formal banking systems are a common testimony among the migrants. Reverse migration is also the beginning of people bringing themselves into the formal cycle of work, with their enrolment under MGNREGA. Tapping the untapped potential and better engagement and benefits to workers under the scheme will largely increase its base and efficiency. If states learn from their past mistakes and amend the working system of the act, then surely it may do wonders in rural employment in the country.

Image Credit; The Quint

October 31, 2020
The Gated Republic: India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions

Book Review

The Gated Republic: India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions
Author: Shankkar Aiyar
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Date: 01 September 2020

India has always been statist. All its political parties are Statist in one way or the other; from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, the State has been thought of as the most important player in economic and social affairs. However, even with all this undue importance, the Indian State has failed to deliver even basic goods to its citizens in more than seventy years since independence. Political journalist and author Shankkar Aiyar analyses these government failures and explores the private solutions offered for such problems in his new book The Gated Republic: India’s Public Policy Failures and Private Solutions.

Without engaging in the debate on how small or big a government should be, the author asserts that providing basic amenities is a moral obligation of the State to its citizens. The basic amenities namely Water, Health, Education, Power and Security are the titles of the chapters where he analyses issues surrounding each one of them individually. The issues are well researched, and every argument is substantiated with facts, so much so that one might find the sheer number of facts overwhelming.

Shankkar Aiyar, however, does not stop with just facts, he gives us anecdotal stories on how failed government policies affect real people. And disproportionately such affected people are poor. Aiyar argues that this is because ‘those who can find solutions- where they find them and when they can pay for them- have already migrated to private solutions. Two conclusions can be deduced from this analysis. One, the poor are left out without even basic amenities of life, thereby increasing inequality. And two, the people who can pay for private solutions are ‘paying for services they have already been taxed for’. Either way, the author argues that the government has let down its citizenry.

The fact that there is a rationed hourly quota for water in Mawsynram, the region of the highest rainfall in India and that even after seventy-three years after independence, less than 50% of class V students can read class II level text is a testament to the magnitude of the failures of the government.

The State is, however, not ignorant of these issues. ‘Every decade saw a new committee’ and Aiyar lists out all of them from various sectors, sometimes even from the British period. In public policy, it is said that what gets measured gets managed but even with so many committees, there have not been desirable improvements. The fact that there is a rationed hourly quota for water in Mawsynram, the region of the highest rainfall in India and that even after seventy-three years after independence, less than 50% of class V students can read class II level text is a testament to the magnitude of the failures of the government. It is not that the government is not doing anything, but this dire situation is the result of sloth-like bureaucracy and something Aiyar calls the ‘announcement approach’ of the politicians. Aiyar argues that successive governments have stopped themselves with lucrative announcements and rebranding of old schemes with new slogans instead of rectifying ill-thought-out policies. For example, he talks about the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Program (ARWSP) which was introduced in 1973. Through the years it has gone through different transitions from being included in the twenty point program during the emergency to Technology Mission on Drinking Water in 1986, Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission in 1992, becoming a separate Department of Drinking Water under Ministry of Rural Development in 1999, morphing into the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation in 2010 and finally becoming Drinking Water and Sanitation Ministry in 2011. Now the ministry is renamed as the Ministry of Jal Shakthi. Even after all these measures, clean piped water is still a distant dream to many Indians.

In a democracy, incompetent policies and politicians should be punished in the polls but Aiyar argues that there is a ‘divorce of authority from accountability’. He does not dwell too deep into why such a gap between government failures and electoral politics exists because the question, although imminent to understand this state of affairs, is beyond the scope of the book. However, he points out at various places in the book where such a gap exists and how ‘normal’ it has come to be. For example, the use of tanker lorries by the governments to ferry and provide water to its citizens is a shift from the actual problem of the lack of capacity to provide piped water. And the fact that water tankers are a ‘normal’ in reality is a testament to how public policy failures are divorced from electoral politics.

Although people have not kept the State accountable, they have come up with solutions to address government failures on their own. There is an opinion echoed by many others that in India that problems are solved not by the government but despite the government. Aiyar explores so many places where the above statement holds. We get to know about ‘Bisleri’, the first bottled water and how its name evolved, the story of Apollo group of hospitals, many budget private schools and teaching fellowships, the ubiquity of inverters, private security firms who grossly outnumber police force 83:17 and so on. Each private solution is the result of incompetent government services and inefficient public policies. Aiyar dives deep into how the solutions came to be and how it has helped normal people. Take, for example, the power sector. Even though India is the world’s third-largest electricity producer, not every household has electricity. And inverters, diesel and battery, have made a huge impact on households. So much so that, in 2011, the sixty-eighth National Sample Survey (NSS) report created a new entry for inverters in household consumption of goods and services. Aiyar discusses many other problems and their private solutions in the book.

What is interesting is that people, even poor people, prefer private solutions though it is costlier. For example, the author points out that about ‘78% of rural and 81% of urban Indians’ preferred private hospitals. This shows a lack of faith in government services. These are the symptoms of decades of ill-thought-out public policies that do not address the root cause of the issue.

What is even more interesting is that now, these private solutions are rebranded as government initiatives. The Adoption of water purifiers and dispensers in government offices and public places is an example of such rebranding. More recently, NEET coaching classes by government schools in Tamilnadu can also be boxed into that category. While both measures are desirable, they are only short-time fixes that address the symptoms of government failure. Through these measures, the author argues that the tragedy of the issue is lost, and the irony is ignored.

the book paints a rather gloomy picture of the state of affairs where people are exiting from government services for private solutions. Although this ‘exodus’ is natural for rich people, abject government failures are pushing everyone into private solutions irrespective of affordability.

To summarize, the book paints a rather gloomy picture of the state of affairs where people are exiting from government services for private solutions. Although this ‘exodus’ is natural for rich people, abject government failures are pushing everyone into private solutions irrespective of affordability. The book argues that people are assembling themselves into gated communities where these failures of government policies are taken care of by private solutions. The author has accomplished what he has set out to do- to show us in a platter, the sorry state of public policies and the many failures that it begot. It remains for the civil servants, politicians and the voting citizens on what their line of action will be.

October 29, 2020
Comparing School Education in India and Singapore

Introduction

The United Nations has recognised the right to education as a basic human right, and in most countries, education is compulsory up to a certain age. In India education is primarily provides education in India by private schools, which run independently of the government, and public schools administered and funded by the government at three levels; central, state and local. Under the Indian Constitution, education is a fundamental right to children aged 6 to 14, however, there is no law in place that makes education compulsory. India has a literacy rate of 74.04%, and according to the world bank, Indian schools face challenges in primary enrollment, quality of teachers and application-based learning. Comparatively, Singapore has a literacy rate of 98.3% where education is primarily in the public sector and is fully controlled by the government. Under the Laws of Singapore, every child needs to complete at least 6 years of education, not doing so is a punishable offence. Though the education system in Singapore can be competitive, it ensures every child is well rounded and balanced and can apply their learnings critically. Through this paper, I will explore the fundamental difference between the education system in India and Singapore.

Singapore has evolved from a third world into a first world country within 10 years, and one of the main attributes to this rapid growth has been education. The Singapore education system is one of the most advanced systems in the world.

Importance of Education in Development

Singapore has evolved from a third world into a first world country within 10 years, and one of the main attributes to this rapid growth has been education. The Singapore education system is one of the most advanced systems in the world. The country consistently ranks at the top of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial test of 15-year-olds in dozens of countries, in the main three categories of maths, reading and science. Singapore also has very strict penalties for breaking the law. According to the Compulsory Education Act of 2000, all Singaporean students must attend 6 years of compulsory education, and it imposes a $5000 fine per year for failure to do so. According to the law, all local Singaporean students must attend schools run by the government to maintain equal education opportunities for all. Private schools in Singapore are predominantly for foreign students, while government schools are for the citizens, this incentivises the government to invest in public schools, which improves the overall quality of education.

According to the Compulsory Education Act of 2000, all Singaporean students must attend 6 years of compulsory education, and it imposes a $5000 fine per year for failure to do so.

India has a child labour rate of 3.9%, and yet there is no law in place that makes education compulsory. The Indian parliament passed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2009 (9 years after Singapore), wherein it’s a constitutional right for all children to attend school from ages 6 to 14, however, is not a law with penalties if not complied to. The lack of enforcement of education is one of the principal reasons India’s literacy rate, especially among women (65.5%), is so low. Local students can attend either public or private schools, however, government schools are usually considered predominantly for marginalized sections of the community. Hence, there is a lack of funding for public schools, which lacks in both quantity and quality. In 2018/19 India spent roughly 2% of its total GDP on education, which was US $72 billion, from a GDP of US $2.7 trillion, additionally one must take into consideration the high levels of corruption experienced in India. Comparatively, Singapore spent US $13 billion, which was 3.2% of its total GDP of US $372 billion, mostly spent on infrastructure development and updating the curriculum.

Teachers: Quality, Training, Accountability, and Creativity

The process of hiring teachers varies drastically in the two countries. Singapore has many regulations to hire teachers, for example, to become a primary school teacher one needs to be a graduate, with additional special teaching training given by the government. Subsequently, the government monitors their performances closely and continuously. The government also ensures that the teacher-student ratio is better than 1:20, to provide customised care and attention to each student. Teachers have strict rules on behaviour and etiquette, from the language they use to the style of teaching they adopt, the government monitors all teacher-student interactions. It also provides regular training to ensure they learn new skills to share with their students. A study by the Singapore Management University claims that the quality of teaching and teacher’s pay has a direct correlation. Thus, school teachers in Singapore are well paid where the average annual salary of a teacher is anywhere between US $31,539 to US $56,543. According to Imperial college, paying teachers more means more educated and talented people would want to become teachers, which improves the quality of education.

According to the Indian NGO, Child’s Rights and You (CRY), the checks and surveys by the government to monitor the quality of education are very irregular, and teachers rarely face any consequences.

India has no special requirements for becoming a government school teacher apart from having a graduate degree. The average teacher to student ratio in Indian government schools is 1:40, which is significantly higher than the recommended ratio suggested by the UN. According to the UN, the maximum teacher to pupil ratio should be around 1:30, to give each child the care and attention they need. According to the Indian NGO, Child’s Rights and You (CRY), the checks and surveys by the government to monitor the quality of education are very irregular, and teachers rarely face any consequences. The cases of child abuse by teachers i.e. hitting or sexual assault are reducing but the numbers are still quite high, because of lack of teacher accountability. This proves to be a major setback for government schools, since one of the principal reasons families do not send their kids to public schools is the fear of child abuse. Last, the average yearly salary of a teacher is anywhere between US $5,400 to US $7440, which is considerably low and can lead to teachers being frustrated and uninterested in the job. According to ‘The Hindu’, teachers being underpaid is one of the leading factors to the lack of quality in public education in India. Through this, it is clear why Singapore has a more advanced education system, not only is it well funded but also well monitored, the government ensures quality education for each child by investing in good teachers.

Curriculum and Pedagogy

According to Child physiology research by the University of California, which is more important than the curriculum itself, is the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given. Singapore has moulded its curriculum to allow students to explore their interests through research-based projects and activities, rather than a strict textbook method of teaching. According to the Psychology department in UCL, project and research-based learning stimulates cognitive skills and boosts creativity and the ability for children to innovate, which is a much more effective way of education rather than traditional textbook-based learning. The government invests largely in labs and other technology to enable application-based learning to develop analytical skills in students, which is then paired with classroom theory-based learning. Singapore achieves application-based learning firstly through a flexible yet focused curriculum, wherein students may choose matters that interest them and are given a range of options on how they want to be tested. Second, through Pedagogy, which is most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, and to the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by the social, political and psychological development of learners. Examples would be where students and teachers produce work and learning together. The teacher becomes more of a mentor or coach helping students achieve the learning goal. Students also work together and use each other’s skills and expertise to accomplish a set of learning tasks. This enables students to feel like they are more involved in their education, which makes them more interested and invested in what they are learning and hence is one of the most effective methods of education. Lastly, by prioritising quality over quantity, which means that education is pedagogically and developmentally sound and educates the student in becoming an active and productive member of society. Quality education is not one that is measured purely by a test score or by how many words per minute a 5-year-old can read, but rather how many words it can understand. It involves critical thinking, learning to work with others independently and learning to face the realities of life applying the knowledge learnt in their academic life. Singapore does not require its students to take many subjects and activities, but rather focuses on a high standard of teaching and engagement, thus creating a more productive society.

The fundamental difference between the Singaporean and Indian education system is creativity, while the creativity of children is barely given any importance in the Indian education system, Singapore cultivates the creative ability of its students.

However, India has a system more focused on theory-based learning, rather than using the practical application. According to the Center for Child Research Singapore, the education system in India does not prepare most young adults for employability because of the lack of ability to critically think and solve unfamiliar problems. The system gives a disproportionate amount of importance to rote learning rather than creativity. The Indian education system hasn’t been updated in several years and thus seems extremely backward. The fundamental difference between the Singaporean and Indian education system is creativity, while the creativity of children is barely given any importance in the Indian education system, Singapore cultivates the creative ability of its students. According to former Singaporean Prime minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore could transition from the third world to a first world country within 10 years because of creativity. This creativity shows in new businesses, in groundbreaking policies, and even in city planning. Singapore is constantly innovating and adapting to better their standards of living, and research-based learning is extremely essential to produce an innovative community. The Indian system does not pay adequate attention to pedagogy, since there is a very rigid curriculum set in place with little room for students to mould according to their interests. Lastly, there is a lack of investment for technology-based learning which can help improve application and research-based teaching. For example, Singapore ensures laptops are available in all classrooms for research, they also use a cloud computing system with all the assignments and textbooks available for students to access even if they are unable to attend school.

Education for Children with Special Needs

Singapore has also invested in a speech to text option for blind students and ones who have any learning disabilities such as ADHD. Through these investments, every student has an equal opportunity to learn.

Students with special needs often need more care and attention than the average student. Singapore ensures every school has a set of teachers specially trained to assist children with learning disabilities. However, Singapore still does not have enough public schools specialised for special needs students. According to the World Bank, 71% of children with autism still attend mainstream schools. Research has shown that mainstream schools are frequently neither fully educated nor equipped to deal with the needs of an autistic child and give them the support. There are over 2,500 schools for children with special needs in India some are run or supported by the government, while many are run by registered NGOs or private institutions. However, there are only 20 special needs schools in Singapore which offer different programmes that cater to distinct disability groups of children. However, Singapore has increased investment in building more schools and opportunities in the workplace for people with special needs or any learning disabilities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, one can argue that it is unfair to compare a city (Singapore) to a country like India, since Singapore is way smaller and has a higher GDP per capita. However, the comparison is mainly based on the methods of education. Through this paper, we understood the difference in teaching methods, which India could easily adopt by updating the curriculum. By updating the Indian system to enable kids to be more creative and research-oriented, India will produce generations of critical thinking and productive workforce that would eventually boost the Indian economy and the nation.

Feature Image Credit: akshayapatrafoundation from pixabay
Image Credit: A Singapore classroom www.todayonline.com

October 29, 2020
Nationalism Today: A Threat to Democracy and Multilateralism?

The idea of ‘nationalism’ and a sense of cohesive national identity has existed perhaps longer than the system of modern nation-states came to be. Except for a few, every empire, kingdom, and the territorial state tried to legitimise and conceptualise its authority in the minds of its citizens through ideology. A phenomenon that recurs throughout history, nationalism has only recently taken on the connotations it holds today: a malignant force that separates and divides rather than unites and deteriorates rather than improves.

A phenomenon that recurs throughout history, nationalism has only recently taken on the connotations it holds today: a malignant force that separates and divides rather than unites and deteriorates rather than improves.

In the contemporary context, this phenomenon presents across the world and appears to be accelerated by the current global pandemic. If one begins their survey at the Westernmost end, it is easy to witness this wave all over: in the United States, ahead of the elections, with Trump’s white supremacist, protectionist agenda underlined by anti-immigration measures; further in Europe, the rise of nationalist parties in Italy and Spain; Russia’s stifling of dissent and opposition under the mandate of national security, Viktor Orban’s rule by decree-law in Hungary to take over complete control in the Covid-19 backdrop- and further east, India’s and China’s majoritarian movements reflecting minority suppression and territorial aggression respectively.

Considering these developments, the looming health crisis appears to be the catalyst for the rise of this aggressive, exclusionary brand of nationalism, or as observers have called it, hyper-nationalism. But looking beyond the surface one can discern the vast backdrop of a competitive international system that allowed these movements to become the popular political tool of the time.

The past decades were characterised by some major changes in the international order; most importantly, the transition from a unipolar world under American hegemony to an emerging multipolar polar one with the rise of Asian powers and a Russia hoping to regain its superpower status. Economic ebbs and falls, the climate crisis, and a shift from multilateralism and globalism was the backdrop against which China grew as a rule-maker in the international system. China’s rapid rise as a global power gives the spectre of a possible bipolar world.

Akin to the Cold War, wherein ideological systems competed, this decade in the post-COVID-19 world is also marked by alliances, power clusters, challenges to the globalised economy, and the visible fragility of the liberal democracy. While nations like the US prompt the liberal world to identify China as the face of the abstract systemic threat to the framework of democracy, liberalism and multilateral cooperation, the real danger may lie elsewhere. Besides coronavirus and the human tragedy, it evoked, the endemic threat to the norms and values of the democratic order is most likely internal and to be found in the political weaponry of modern democracy.

What does nationalism mean as a value? To a nation-state, creating a sense of allegiance to the nation-state is extremely important and vital to its survival. Nationalism may be a force of resistance against oppressive authorities, or toward self-determination. The Irish and Indian national movements against colonisation, for instance, were nationalistic struggles that established self-governance in these countries and were spearheaded by the people themselves. However, nationalism may also manifest as state-led, systemic, and top-down approach under the authority of a populist leader who commands the support of many. An example is Mussolini’s fascist movement in Italy, prompted by the poverty and economic downfall of the interwar period.

Triggered (although not caused) by extreme crises like the pandemic, this kind of nationalism uses a nationwide problem to appropriate control and stir political unrest.

What we see in the world today is ostensibly the latter: aggressive, top-down nationalism where individuals and groups have little organic agency or innovation. Triggered (although not caused) by extreme crises like the pandemic, this kind of nationalism uses a nationwide problem to appropriate control and stir political unrest. These forms of control may involve excessive use of the police apparatus to restrict movement, a suspension of electoral or democratic processes and accountability mechanisms, or the use of the pandemic to enforce identity politics against minorities. In India, the police crackdown on the Shaheen Bagh riots in January 2020, a series of protests against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, is an example along with the United States’ successive episodes of racially motivated police brutality against African Americans. In Hungary, Orban has been pushing towards a regionalist, Christian, Central European community at the expense of minorities and immigrants (while heavily militarising Budapest in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic).

This causality, somewhere in the 21st century, seems to have weathered down and given way to monolithic ideas of territoriality, authority, centralisation, and capitalism, propelled especially by the role of contemporary social media.

Nationalism has historically been espoused with democratic revolution and civil rights movements. In the French Revolution, the Irish Independence movements, and the colonial liberation movements of many other colonies, nationalist movements allowed a people to unite for a secular, democratic cause: self-determination. Even as of the late 20th century, nationalism served to demolish imperialism, colonialism, and dictatorships giving rise to civil rights, suffrage, labour rights, and even the welfare states. This causality, somewhere in the 21st century, seems to have weathered down and given way to monolithic ideas of territoriality, authority, centralisation, and capitalism, propelled especially by the role of contemporary social media. The question that we must ask is this: Is the current flavour of nationalism serving any advantage to strengthening the democratic apparatus? Does it help make our leaders accountable, our parties representative, and our economies more resilient to face unexpected crises?

Image credit: vocal.media

October 24, 2020
International Institutions in post-Covid Era
Pandemic exposes inadequacies in the 21st century world

At the Munich Security Conference 2020, the Indian External Affairs Minister stated that multilateralism has weakened, and attributed it to the inadequacy of international institutions, established seventy-five years ago, to cope with the challenges of 21^st century. This was just before the coronavirus became a global pandemic. Today, among other aspects of society that are challenged by the pandemic, its impact on the world has exposed the inability of international organizations to develop a globally cooperative strategy. The September edition of the UNSC meeting held regarding the coronavirus pandemic saw the United States, China, and Russia fight bitterly over responsibility and responsiveness to the pandemic. Instead of building constructive solutions to face the challenge each country focused on accusing others. Similarly, although the Covid-19 global response pledging event secured 7.4 billion euros, their origins (whether new or retargeting of approved grants), method of fund application, proposed call for global research sharing platforms are either ambiguous or not yet set up. Hence, although international organizations have promoted dialogue, the jury is still out on their efforts towards alleviating the crisis or cushioning its impact. The pandemic thus leads to questions about their effectiveness and what post-covid international institutions might look like.

Given the manner in which various nation-states represent, contribute to, and run international organizations it is definitive that the nature of international institutions is susceptible to change.

Institutionalism and International Organisations

International Organisations such as the United Nations and its predecessor the League of Nations mark the variety of multilateralism brought to life based on the theory of institutionalism. Institutionalism originated from the thought that if humans are fundamentally good but act otherwise it is because of anarchy in the international system, and through institutions fostering international cooperation anarchy can be countered to promote the fundamental good in human nature. The final goal of institutionalism stood to promote supranational organizations. However, there have been drawbacks in bringing practicality to this theory. These institutions are built on belief (an individual external factor to the institution itself brought by participants) and power in international institutions is extended when states surrender part of their sovereignty. The changes and differences in individual beliefs cause significant changes in institutions in both the way they operate and the consequences of their operations. Given the manner in which various nation-states represent, contribute to, and run international organizations it is definitive that the nature of international institutions is susceptible to change. Hence, better international coordination and responses to the past crisis such as the 2008 financial crisis, controlling the Ebola breakout in West Africa were also a result of the leftist individual beliefs of participants. However, with global politics inclining towards the right, with waves of hyper-nationalism sweeping across nations, efforts towards multilateralism have taken a back seat. Stephen Walt maintained that the pandemic will reinforce nationalism as the world retreats from hyper-globalization to reduce future vulnerabilities and will create a world that is ‘less open, less prosperous, and less free’. The pandemic has put the world on a trajectory towards the right with politicians becoming more authoritative, and thus multilateralism will see significant changes in the post-covid era.

Rise of narrow Nationalism and Right Wing Politics

Despite the rise of right-wing politics globally, the benefits of multilateralism cannot be foregone. Multilateralism in international institutions in past crises followed a model wherein the United States took the lead across various organizations and coordinated the world towards a united response. Since such leadership has been replaced with great power politics, multilateralism has taken an operational role instead of a supervisory role. The main difference between the two roles is that the latter had better potential to progress as a supranational organization while the former traverses as a platform offering supporting services to different countries. Examples of this are efforts led by NATO to use their airlifting capabilities to move vital medical equipment and food supplies, and WHO’s initiative to share guidelines and important research to countries who then took individual decisions. In the current trajectory, these changes in institutional consequences can lead towards three possibilities in the future of multilateralism:

At the risk of sounding highly pessimistic, the institutional belief in multilateralism is likely to see a steep decline and sovereignty surrendered to international organizations will erode. The role of the UN and its organs may change focus on global data collection, analysis, and politically motivated discussions from the current (weakening) narrative of progress, development, conflict prevention, and resolution.
- As Robert Kaplan argues, Coronavirus has become the watershed movement segregating the upcoming era as Globalisation 2.0 with the rise of autocracies, social and class divides, and new emerging global divisions. This image of globalization 2.0 can be used to reflect on what the next era of multilateralism will be. In the continuing trajectory with no clear international leadership, international institutions would reduce to becoming a platform of dialogue in great power politics with the initiative and effectiveness of resolutions substantially watered down. At the risk of sounding highly pessimistic, the institutional belief in multilateralism is likely to see a steep decline and sovereignty surrendered to international organizations will erode. The role of the UN and its organs may change focus on global data collection, analysis, and politically motivated discussions from the current (weakening) narrative of progress, development, conflict prevention, and resolution. For instance, the pandemic-induced embargo on the movement of people would in turn catalyse the degeneration of organs such as the UNHCR as the dialogue focuses on data collection and blame allocation instead of refugee crisis management. The international political narrative will shift from globalism to regionalism for effective conflict resolution.
- As US-China rivalry hampers effective policymaking, relatively smaller powers will lead the narrative in these institutions. The foundations for this possibility are already evident. The United Kingdom and other European countries have been increasingly calling for global summits to promote multilateralism. Their efforts can be theorized to be an enmeshment strategy similar to that used by small states in ASEAN. The objective of this strategy is to alleviate the high risks of major powers directly competing by creating interdependence (if not directly between the great powers) among the various actors in the system through increased multilateral participation to an extent that great powers are tied down in this system and their interests are intertwined such that conflict would become costly. Thus smaller powers prevent the complete breakdown of international organizations by continuing to promote dialogue and ensure the persistence of multilateralism, albeit weaker, but prevent the division into two great-power blocs as with the first scenario. This approach where smaller states remain neutral to great power influences would in turn result in the latter’s effort to win over small states characterized by the exploitation of the cold war by small states. Although the US has so far managed to step away from this, with the oncoming elections it is likely that a change in administration would enable the enmeshment strategy to prevent an extreme global division.
- Taking an optimistic view, the pandemic may catalyse the trajectory towards Ikenberry’s Multilateralism 3.0 where power in the institutions is more reflective of present-day world powers. Given the shift in American foreign policy and lack of initiative, the pandemic could become an important shaper for other Asian powers to get higher representation to balance China’s rise. Although this demonstrates an idealistic situation far from the rightist trajectory, Ikenberry concedes to the fact that in the short-run countries will be nationalistic but in the long run, democracies will break out from the authoritarian, nationalistic regimes to promote a pragmatic and protective internationalism. Ikenberry makes this interpretation based on the enlightenment world leaders had following the destruction and suffering from the world wars. Hence, the pandemic marks the starting point for the butterfly effect which will lead to wartime-like geopolitics, followed by enlightenment to build stronger international institutions with representations reflective of the new world order and better capable of dealing with issues the current institutions struggle to resolve.
Conclusion

Although international cooperation would be the sensible means to navigate through the pandemic and other crisis induced by the pandemic, due to factors external to the institution, such as domestically controlled participant change – multilateralism will see considerable weakening. Among the three possibilities identified for the future of international institutions, only time can tell which path the world will take. However, a combination of the second possibility in the short run progressing to the third over the long run is the most optimistic option to work upon for a better pathway to navigate through this crisis.

Image: Pixabay
October 22, 2020

Forecasting Unemployment Rate during the Pandemic

Forecasting
Forecasting, in simpler terms, is a process of predicting future values of a variable based on past data and other variables that are related to the variable being forecasted. For example, values of future demand for tickets for a particular airline company depend on past sales and the price of its tickets.
Time-series data is used for forecasting purposes. According to Wikipedia ‘A time series is a series of data points indexed in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus, it is a sequence of discrete-time data.’ An example of time series data for monthly airline passengers is given below:

Figure 1

More technically, it is modelled through a stochastic process, Y(t). In a time series data, we are interested in estimating values for Y(t+h) using the information available at time t.
Unemployment rate
Unemployment is the proportion of people in the labour force who are willing and able to work but are unable to find work. It is an indicator of the health of the economy because it provides a timely measure of the state of labour market and hence, overall economic activities. In wake of the impact of Covid-19 on economic activities throughout the world, unemployment rate analysis and forecasts have become paramount in assessing economic conditions.
In India, unemployment rates have been on the higher end in recent times. According to data released by Statistics Ministry, unemployment rate for FY18 was 6.1%, the highest in 45 years. It is no co-incidence that GDP rates have also been declining successively for the past few years. The shock that Covid-19 has given to the economy has only worsened our situation. The unemployment rate rose to 27.1% as a whopping 121.5 million were forced out of work.

Figure 2

Source: CMIE
Methodology
The data used to forecast unemployment rates was sourced from CMIE website, which surveys over 43,000 households to generate monthly estimates since January 2016. The data has 56 monthly observations ranging from January 2016 to August 2020, data before 2016 was not available.
Four popular econometric forecasting models (ARIMA, Naïve, Exponential Smoothing, Holt’s winter method) were used and the best performing model was chosen to forecast unemployment till December 2020.
The forecasting models were programmed in R. The relevant codes are available upon request with the author. The Dicky-Fuller test and the Chow test for structural breaks were conducted using STATA, results of which are presented further in the article.
Before beginning the analysis, I believe that the limitations of the analysis should be mentioned:

The sample size of 56 observations is not sufficient for a thorough analysis, ideally the sample size should have been 2-3 times larger than the available data. Smaller sample sizes lead to skewed forecasting results which are prone to errors.
The unemployment data from CMIE is an estimate and is a secondary source. In India, primary data is only collected once in 3-4 years, thus the forecasting results are only as good as the source of the data.
This is a univariate analysis, an Okun’s law based analysis of Unemployment rate as a function of GDP (output) and past trends would have been more suitable. However, since GDP data is only available quarterly and there are only 56 monthly observations available, it would have rendered the analysis insignificant with only 19 quarterly observations.
Forecasting being based on past trends, is prone to errors. The negative shock provided by Covid-19 to the economies worldwide has made it all the more difficult to forecast. A Bloomberg study analysed over 3,200 forecasts by IMF since 1999 and found that over 93% of the forecasts underestimated or overestimated the results with a mean error of 2 percentage points.

Checking the stationarity of data
In order to model build a model, we need to make sure that the series is stationary. For intuitively checking the stationarity, I plotted the data over time as indicated in Figure 2 above. I also plotted the correlograms (autocorrelations versus time lags) as shown in Figure 8 and 9 in appendix. The plot of data over time indicate varying mean, variance and covariance. The ACF and PACF plot show that autocorrelations function are persistent indefinitely.
We perform the Augmented Dickey Fuller test at 2 lags. Result of the ADF test is shown in Table 1 below. The test statistic is insignificant at 5 per cent and the p-value is 0.1709, which is more than the accepted benchmark of 0.05. We fail to reject the null hypothesis of non-stationarity. We conclude that our series is non-stationary.

Dicky-Fuller test on raw data

Table 1

		—– Interpolated Dickey-Fuller —–
	Test statistic	1% critical value	5% critical value	10%critical value
Z(t)	-2.303	-3.576	-2.928	-2.599

MacKinnon approximate p-value for Z(t) = 0.1709

Converting the non-stationary series into stationary

In order to transform the non-stationary series into stationary, we use differencing method (computing difference between consecutive observations).
We plot the data over time, ACF and PACF again as shown in Figure 5 below and figure 10 and 11 in appendix, respectively. From the figures, we can intuitively say that the transformed series is stationary. Further, we used Augmented Dickey-Fuller tests to ascertain the stationary of our series. Table 2 shows the result of the ADF test. The test statistic is significant at 1,5 and 10 per cent levels and the p-value is less than 0.05. We reject the null hypothesis of non-stationarity of our series. The tests confirm that the series is stationary.

Dicky-Fuller test on first difference data

Table 2

		—– Interpolated Dickey-Fuller —–
	Test statistic	1% critical value	5% critical value	10%critical value
Z(t)	-5.035	-3.576	-2.928	-2.599

MacKinnon approximate p-value for Z(t) = 0.0000

Figure 3

Naïve model
Naïve models are the simplest of forecasting models and provide a benchmark against which other more sophisticated models can be compared. Thus, a Naïve model serves as an ideal model to start any comparative analysis with. In a naive model, the forecasted values are simply the values of the last observation. It is given by
y^{^}_t₊_h_|_t=y_t.
Forecast results from Naïve method are presented below in figure 4 and table1.

Figure 4

Table 1

	Point forecast	Lo 80	High 80	Low 95	High 95
Sept	8.35	4.861900	11.83810	3.0154109	13.68459
Oct	8.35	3.417081	13.28292	0.8057517	15.89425
Nov	8.35	2.308433	14.39157	-0.8897794	17.58978
Dec	8.35	1.373799	15.32620	-2.3191783	19.01918

Box-Jenkins Approach

Identification of ARIMA (p, d, q) model

The data was split into training and testing dataset in 80:20 ratio. The training data was used for estimating the model, while the model was tested on the remaining 20 percent data. This is done in order to forecast the future values of the time series data.
p, d and q in (p, d, q) stand for number of lags, difference and moving average respectively.
The model best fitting the data was (0,1,3) as its Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) was the lowest amongst all the possible combinations of the order of the ARIMA model.
The residuals from Arima model were found to be normally distributed, with a mean of 0.09 and zero correlation. This causes a bias in the estimates. To solve the problem of bias, we will add 0.09 to all forecasts. The ACF and line graph of residuals is attached in the appendix.
After identification and estimation, several diagnostic tests were conducted to check if there were any uncaptured information in the model. Results of the diagnostics tests have been omitted from the article in interest of length.

Forecasting

The model that has been constructed was used to forecast unemployment rates for the next four months. The results are presented below in figure 5 and table 2.

Figure 5

Table 2

	Point forecast	Lo 80	High 80	Low 95	High 95
Sept	9.04	5.978858	11.93987	4.401073	13.51765
Oct	9.77	5.183039	14.1951	2.797671	16.58054
Nov	10.3	5.364191	15.06267	2.797157	17.62971
Dec	10.3	5.280182	15.14668	2.668678	17.75819

Exponential Smoothing method
It is one of the most popular classic forecasting models. It gives more weight to recent values and works best for short term forecasts when there is no trend or seasonality in dataset. The model is given by:
Ŷ_(t+h|t) = ⍺y_(t) + ⍺(1-⍺)y_(t-1) + ⍺(1-⍺)²y_(t-2) + …
with 0<⍺<1
As observed in the model, recent time periods have more weightage in the model and the weightage keeps decreasing exponentially as we go further back in time.
The ⍺ is the smoothing factor here whose value was chosen to be 0.9 since it had the lowest RMSE among all other values.
The forecast results are presented below:

Figure 6

Table 3

	Point forecast	Lo 80	High 80	Low 95	High 95
Sept	8.30	4.739288	11.87260	2.8512134	13.76068
Oct	8.30	3.507498	13.10439	0.9673541	15.64454
Nov	8.30	2.532806	14.07908	-0.5233096	17.13520
Dec	8.30	1.700403	14.91149	-1.7963595	18.40825

Holt Winters’ method
The simple exponential function cannot be used effectively for data with trends. Holt-Winters’ exponential smoothing method is a better suited model for data with trends. This model contains a forecast equation and two smoothing equations. The linear model is given by:
y_t+h= l_t + hb_t
l_t= αy_t + (1-α)l_t-1
b_t = β(l_t-l_t-1)+ (1-β)b_t-1
where, l_t is the level (smoothed value).
h is the number of steps ahead.
b_t is the weighted average of the trend.
Just like the simple exponential smoothing method, l_tshows that it is a weighted average of y_t
The α is the smoothing factor here whose value was chosen to be 0.99 and the β value 0.0025 since they had the lowest RMSE among all other values.
The forecast results are presented below:

Figure 7

Table 4

	Point forecast	Lo 80	High 80	Low 95	High 95
Sept	8.34	4.749288	11.9326	2.84121	13.84
Oct	8.33	3.24	13.4243	0.54541	16.11977
Nov	8.32	2.0800	14.5678	-1.2253	17.87316
Dec	8.31	1.0963	15.53419	-2.725103	19.35565

Evaluation
To compare the models the two parameters chosen are:

Root mean square error (RMSE)
Mean absolute error (MAE)

MAE is a measure of mean error in a set of observations/predictions. RMSE is the square root of the mean of squared differences between prediction and actual observation. RMSE is more useful when large errors are not desirable and MAE is useful otherwise.
RMSE and MAE statistics for all the models are presented below:

	Naive	ARIMA	Exp Smoothing	Holt Winters’
RMSE	2.72	2.24	2.73	2.7
MAE	1.05	1.034	1.06	1.05

From the table it is clear that ARIMA/Box Jenkins method has both the lowest RMSE and MAE among the models under consideration while Exponential smoothing method has the highest MAE and RMSE among all.
Therefore, the unemployment rate forecasts as per the Box Jenkins method for the next four months are:

Sept	9.04
Oct	9.77
Nov	10.3
Dec	10.3

The way ahead?

The unemployment rate is expected to rise in the coming months. This is a bad sign for an economy that is already suffering.
With GDP forecasts getting lower and lower for the current financial year, the govt needs to act quick to mitigate the potential damage.
It is impossible to correctly ascertain the total impact of covid-19 on the economy and the range of the impact, but it is safe to say that we will be seeing the effects for a long time to come in some form or other.
We might see more and more people slip into poverty, depression, increased domestic violence and with potentially long term impact on human development parameters like child mal-nutrition, enrolment rates etc among other things.

Some possible solutions

Expansionary monetary policy: It is a common tool of dealing with high unemployment rate in the short term. Under expansionary monetary policy, the central bank reduces the rate of interest on which it lends money to the banks, subsequently the banks lower their rates which leads to a higher amount of loans being taken by business owners. This extra capital helps businesses to hire more workers and expand production, which in turn reduces unemployment rate.
Expansionary fiscal policy: Under expansionary fiscal policy the government increases its spending, particularly in the infra-structure sector. It spends more money to build dams, roads, bridges, highways etc. This increased spending leads to an increase in employment as these projects require labour.
Expand the scope of NREGS to urban areas permanently and a higher minimum wage for all : NREGS has proved to be really effective in alleviating poverty, improving quality of life and decreasing unemployment rate in rural areas. Given the unprecedented circumstances, the govt can consider expanding its scope to urban areas, so that it could provide employment to the millions of unemployed workers there. This increase in expenditure could also help the govt revive consumer demand, which is essential if we want to help the GDP get back on track.
A stimulus package aimed at putting money into the hands of the poor :

The govt should also consider providing at least a one-time transfer of funds to people just like the US govt did. Such a transfer of putting money directly into the hands of the poor is the most effective way of reviving consumer demand in the economy and many economists around the world have been calling for such a plan to be implemented. There is no better way of increasing consumer expenditure other than putting money into the hands of cash-starved people.

Appendix:

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

October 21, 2020

Understanding the Syrian Civil War through Galtung’s Conflict Theory

Introduction

As the founder of the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies, Johan Vincent Galtung has outspokenly advocated for a world without nuclear weapons and has placed the focus of his research on scientific terminologies and methods to understand and deal with conflicts. Having coined the term “peace research”, Galtung has devoted much of his time in formulating the influential and unique ‘transcend approach’, wherein the focus is on peace, rather than security. He has advocated for a model that is holistic and is based on deep understanding and dialogue with one party at a time.

Having coined the term “peace research”, Galtung has devoted much of his time in formulating the influential and unique ‘transcend approach’, wherein the focus is on peace, rather than security.

The underlying cause of any violence, according to Galtung, is an unresolved conflict, one that has not been transformed or transcended, due to the existence of incompatible goals. If the goals are among the four basic needs of survival, well-being, identity, or freedom, the conflict is then concluded to be deep, and most difficult to resolve if left unattended. It is important to remember that a conflict does not progress linearly, but rather goes around in a circle, through a cycle of non-violence, to violence, then to post-violence, and likely back to violence again if it fails to be resolved.

The escalation of a conflict to a violent level is largely a result of disequilibrium among the actors or parties involved, leading to polarization and dehumanization of the Other, and finally reflected in their aggression, the output of which is violence. What follows violence is traumatization, and consequently acts of revenge (Galtung, 2010), leading the cycle of conflict back to its first level.

Galtung’s Notion of Conflict

Johan Galtung, in his book, ‘Peace by Peaceful Means (1996)’, defined conflict as a “triadic construct” (pg.71), consisting of three important factors – Attitudes, Behaviour, and Contradictions.

While both, Attitudes (A) and Contradiction (B), reflect the latent, subconscious level of conflict, Behaviour (B), on the other hand, is always manifest and reflects how people consciously act when confronted with contradictions and hostile attitudes and assumptions. Behaviour may thus be seen as an act of violence, both physical and verbal.

Attitudes and assumptions may include the person’s perceptions about an actor or an institution; his/her emotions – how s/he feels about the actor/institution involved; and what s/he wants or expects from the given actor/institution. Thus, attitudes may include sexist beliefs about women or discriminatory attitudes towards minorities.

Contradictions, on the other hand, refer to the content of the conflict, the incompatibility between the goals. It may include a territorial dispute between two or more actors over a single piece of territory, as in the case of Israel and Palestine, or as in the case of multiple parties laying claim to the same group of islets in the South China Sea. In the case of structural or indirect conflict, the contradictions may refer to the disequilibrium in the positions of parties involved, as in the case of inequality between different classes.

A conflict, according to Galtung, could start from any of the three points of the triangle. It could start from point (A), wherein the actor’s hostile attitude could be in disharmony with those of other actors, leading to contradiction, and later reflected in violent behaviour. A conflict may also start from point (B), where the actors involved may develop capacities or inclination towards negative/aggressive behaviour, which may get stimulated when a contradiction comes along.

Galtung further divides the conflicts into actor/direct conflicts and structural/ indirect conflicts. The main point of departure between the two lies in their categorization into manifest, and latent levels. In a direct conflict, both attitudes and contradictions are manifest, that is, they are conscious and overt, the actor being aware of them at all times.

However, the same does not apply when one takes into account the structural or indirect conflicts. Here, both attitudes and contradictions are latent, that is, they are subconscious and the actor is unaware of them. This is not to say that the contradictions or the incompatibilities are non-existent, rather only that the actor involved finds himself/herself completely unaware of such contradictions.

Types of Violence

While stating that the two types of violence – Direct and Structural, are to be considered as the starting point of any strategy for a peaceful resolution, Galtung also defined a third category of violence, namely, the Cultural Violence.

Direct violence is an event that is often quick and visible, reflecting the capabilities and intentions of actors to engage in a conflict. It includes a victim and a perpetrator and can be seen explicitly in societies. Structural violence, on the other hand, is a process that is slow and often invisible. It refers to the injustice and inequality built into the structural institutions of the society. It is reflective of a position “higher up or lower down in a hierarchy of exploitation-repression-alienation” (Galtung 2012, pg.12), where the parties involved are determined either to keep the hierarchy intact or to completely obliterate it.

An example of structural violence, as seen from a top-down approach would include colonial aspirations of the European nations. In the case of India and the British empire, the aggression from top existed in the form of material exploitation at the hands of the latter. It became visible once the natives demonstrated their will to oppose colonialism and break the hierarchy of exploitation. The same holds for the Indian caste system, wherein the structural violence, in the form of exploitation and marginalization, has remained intact because of the capability of those higher up, namely the Brahmins, to maintain the disequilibrium in positions between themselves and the communities they perceive to be lower than them.

The Indian caste system, wherein the structural violence, in the form of exploitation and marginalization, has remained intact because of the capability of those higher up, namely the Brahmins, to maintain the disequilibrium in positions between themselves and the communities they perceive to be lower than them.

Cultural violence refers to those “aspects of culture that can be used to legitimize or justify both, structural and direct violence” (Galtung: 1990, pg.291). It renders the use of violence as acceptable in society and makes it okay for actors to use violence without making them feel guilty. In a brilliant example, Galtung talks about how the internalization of culture makes it morally easier for actors to employ violence, such as in the interpretation in case of murder on behalf of one’s country being seen as right (Galtung: 1990, pg.292). In the case of direct and structural violence faced by immigrants, it is the culture that allows for such violence to be tolerated. The cultural violence, in this case, justifies the indirect and direct violence by dehumanizing the immigrants and portraying them as thugs or aliens. It allows societies to tolerate policies of forced child-separation while continuing to deny them equitable means of living.

Escalation of conflicts into violence

Violence is most often an outcome of deprivation of needs. The more basic and non-negotiable the needs, the likelier chance there is for aggression to come into existence. While classifying the basic needs into four broad categories of survival, welfare, freedom, and identity, Galtung warns his readers against prioritizing any one need over the others. To put survival above freedom and identity, would result in repression and alienation (Galtung, 1985), failing to end structural and cultural violence.

When the goal of an actor (A) is incompatible with that of an actor (B), such that it obstructs the attainment of the goal by the actor (B), the pursuit of such goals would then most likely result in frustration among both actors, the consequence of which would be a polarisation of the two extremes. Polarisation would imply a zero-sum game, where the scope of transcendence is low, and the likely outcome is a position of no compromise. Because the contradiction in goals is absolute, the victory of the actor (A) would thus necessarily imply the loss of actor (B).

Polarisation, accompanied by the dehumanization of the Other, may galvanize into hostility and hatred, manifesting itself into aggressive behaviour, finally resulting in escalation. The conflict, however, does not stop at violence. What follows violence, is traumatization of the victims harmed by violence, breeding acts of revenge (Galtung 2010, pg.16).

In an actor conflict, the polarization between the two sides can almost immediately lead to direct violence. This is because actor (A), who has incompatible goals with actor (B), can easily identify the object/ subject of obstruction of attainment of its goals. Therefore, what follows is violent behaviour by actor (A) towards actor (B).

On the other hand, in a structural conflict, polarisation may result in acute disequilibrium between rank positions of members in a society. However, Galtung in his essay on the “Structural Theory of Aggression” argues that violence is unlikely to occur unless all methods of maintaining equilibrium have been tried and unless culture facilitates violence wherein those lower down are constantly reminded of their position and their consequent mistreatment (Galtung 1964, pg.99).

A system of injustice or inequity which refuses to break the hierarchy of oppression and exploitation would likely result in frustration, the outburst of which would be reflected in the form of violence. The often-visible Naxalite violence in India can be seen as a result of deep-rooted structural violence, wherein the parties involved have suffered exploitation and marginalization due to unequal economic development and inequitable distribution of resources for years.

the genocide that took place against the members of the Rohingya community in Myanmar is a crude example of direct violence.

On the other hand, the genocide that took place against the members of the Rohingya community in Myanmar is a crude example of direct violence. They claimed to have been living in the State since the 9th century but were eventually labelled as Bangladeshi Immigrants. Years of discrimination (structural violence) and hatred (attitudes, assumptions/ cultural violence) led to their ethnic cleansing (direct violence). They were murdered, raped, and evicted from their homeland. It only took one law, which rendered them stateless, for the majority of Myanmar to consider them as sub-humans, and readily accept the atrocities committed against them.

Syrian Conflict through Galtung’s Conflict Theory

The civil war in Syria is, unfortunately, an example of one of the bloodiest conflicts of this century. The war is often seen as a result of the outburst of pro-democracy protests in 2011, under the appellation of the Arab Spring.

However, when approached from Galtung’s conflict theory, the conflict can be divided into three categories of violence. First, what we have been witnessing is the horror of direct violence in Syria, as a consequence of years of repression, facilitated by the government’s violent response towards the peaceful protesters in 2011. Second, the structural violence in the form of decades of economic restraints and systemic corruption, which exacerbated the existing poverty and inequality amongst the citizens. Further, four years of drought between 2006 and 2011, and the consequent failed economic policies forced 2 million to 3 million Syrians into abject poverty (Polk, 2013). The dwindling Syrian economy and infrastructure finally led to the deprivation of the basic need of welfare and threatened their need for survival, resulting in frustration. Third is the cultural violence that has helped in sustaining the ongoing violence, in the form of distortion, denial, and dehumanization of the victims of violence has helped Assad and his foreign allies in continuing the mass murder of Syrians. Here, the sanitization of language is of key importance, where the attempts of distortion of reality often end up in changing the moral colour of violence, as argued by Galtung, wherein violence from being unacceptable starts to be tolerated without question.

Direct Violence in Syria

Syrians have been victims of decades-long political repression, in the form of restrictions on freedom of speech and expression, torture and enforced disappearances. The political institutions have historically been unstable, with three military coups taking places in 1949 alone followed by one more in 1954, in addition to the Ba’athist-led coups of 1963 and 1966. The Syrian security forces (Mukhabarat) are known to have detained citizens without proper warrants even before 2010, many of whom have reportedly been tortured in prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2010). In their attempts to keep the hierarchy of power relations intact, the centralised institutions are known to clamp down on any public demonstrations, with frequent arrests and employment of state violence.

several actors are involved in perpetrating the more visible, direct violence, and it is clear that the Syrian conflict cannot be looked at as a conflict solely between the state and armed rebellion groups.

In 2011, fifteen school-going children, all under the age of seventeen, were reportedly arrested and tortured for writing anti-graffiti on a wall, leading to the protests of 2011. The government responded by opening fire on the peaceful protestors, killing four civilians (Macleod, 2011). More than 400,000 people have died because of the Syrian conflict since 2011, with 5 million seeking refuge abroad and over 6 million displaced internally (World Bank). This section identifies several actors involved in perpetrating the more visible, direct violence, and contends that the Syrian conflict cannot be looked at as a conflict solely between the state and armed rebellion groups. It would also be myopic to look at the conflict entirely from the perspective of sectarian divisions, given that each rebellion group has a different motive, and is being backed by several different actors.

While soldiers supporting the Syrian president and the opposition armed groups continue to remain prominent actors, recent years have seen the rise of Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and their affiliated members. The war has also seen a large-scale presence of two categories of foreign actors – those supporting the Syrian regime (Iran, and Russia), and those who continue to be the key rebel supporters (US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia). All of these actors have their motives and intentions of being engaged in the war. While Iran sees Syria as its primary ally and a transit point for Hezbollah, Russia thinks of Syria as its last remaining stronghold. The United States and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, are driven by their intentions to maintain the regional balance of power away from the Iranian axis of influence. Meanwhile, Turkey continues to battle the spill-over effect of the thousands of Syrian refugees who continue to cross over the border to Turkey.

The anti-government groups based in Ghouta, including Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Rahmane, have killed and mutilated hundreds of civilians in indiscriminate attacks on Damascus. These armed groups have also regularly arrested and tortured civilians in Douma, including members of religious minority groups. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Al-Qaeda affiliate present in Idlib, has carried out arrests and kidnappings that targeted local political opponents and journalists, while also continuously interfering with humanitarian access and aid distribution in areas under its control (CSIS).

Cultural Violence in Syria

The cultural violence in Syria, like elsewhere, is most often perpetrated in the form of sanitization of language, where years of structural violence are termed as mere discrimination, and where civilians are seen as mere targets to be killed. A few years ago, in an attempt of distorting reality, the Russian media described a Syrian documentary on Helmet volunteers in Aleppo as a “thinly disguised Al Qaeda promotional vehicle” (Hamad, 2018). Such attempts of distortion aim at normalizing even the most brutal violence. In the case of Russia, these attempts help in legitimizing its airstrikes, even when the number of civilians that have been killed in these strikes surpass the number of the ISIS members it sought to target. According to a report, approximately four thousand civilians have been killed by Russian airstrikes as opposed to 2758 ISIS members (Armstrong & Richter, 2016).

Additionally, cultural violence in the form of ideology and religion has helped to sustain violence in the region. Religion, here, has acted as a form of cultural violence, where the fight is between the ‘Chosen’ and the ‘Unchosen’. In Syria, this fight has taken the form of sectarian divisions between the minority Alawi community and the majority Sunni population. The legitimisation of violence at the hands of the state is rooted in its fight against ‘extremism’, which depends upon the promulgation of the narrative that all rebel forces have the same ulterior motive -of building an intolerant Islamic caliphate. State’s reliance on its alleged effort to curb extremism has allowed its forces to justify the use of heavy artillery, the bombardment of residential places, and the subsequent massacres. Another factor that helps explain the sustenance of violence, is its normalization – where violence is seen as natural, and a part of everyday life. Decades of repression in Syria have helped to normalize torture, and rampant arrests and restrictions.

Structural Violence in Syria

While countries continue to witness the horrors of visible atrocities and war crimes, the underlying layers of structural violence continue to buttress the egregious brutality which is often more direct, and physical. Although the war is often seen as a result of the outburst of pro-democracy protests in 2011, a close examination of the country’s socio-economic structures would enable one to get a detailed insight into the underlying layers of frustration caused due to large-scale poverty, inequality, and marginalisation.

One would also find that the relatively peaceful structure, which existed before the protests of 2011, was held intact largely due to the existence of single-party dominance, where one actor (Hafez al-Assad, and later Bashar al-Assad) held all power and authority, while those existing in lower ranks of society continued to lack resources, as well as opportunities to challenge the dominant power. The injustice and inequality built into the structural institutions of the Syrian society can be referred to, what has been called as the ‘structural violence’, by Johan Galtung. The violence, here, is reflective of a position “higher up or lower down in a hierarchy of exploitation-repression-alienation”, where the parties involved are determined either to keep the hierarchy intact or to completely obliterate it.

In the case of Syria, the deprivation of the most basic and non-negotiable needs, which threatened the citizens’ need for survival, has been the primary cause for aggression to come into existence. The factors that, thus, led to the conflict in Syria can be seen rooted in years of repression, poverty, and lack of representative institutions, which manifested in the form of protests, or the Arab Spring of 2011. The Syrian economic crisis has existed long before the commencement of the civil war. Since the beginning of the economic crisis, Syria’s institutional structures have failed to meet the rising needs and rights of its population. In the 1980s, the country was trapped in a downward spiral of a fiscal crisis, as a result of large-scale drought, and due to both, domestic and external factors. The crisis led to high food deficit, and an increase in the cost of living, leading to a rise in patronage networks which provided small circles of elites with profitable businesses. These networks became increasingly popular in real estate and land management, leaving out large sectors of Syria underdeveloped. While the country witnessed a decreasing overall debt and a noticeable rise in the GDP in the 2000s, large sections of the population were excluded from benefitting from these growth rates due to differences in wage rates and declining job opportunities. Increasing inequality was reflected in a paper published by the UNDP, which claimed that 65.6% of all labour in Syria belonged to the informal sector in 2010, with Aleppo and Idlib ranking first with over 75% of their workforce belonging to the informal sector (UNDP, 2018).

Years of conflict have exacerbated the economic crisis, pushing both the state and its citizens, into chaos, with more than 80 per cent of the Syrian population living below the poverty line, with an unemployment rate of at least 55 per cent in 2018.

Additionally, the oil revenues fell from more than 14% of GDP in the early 2000s to about 4% in 2010 due to depleting reserves. According to a report, overall poverty in Syria in 2007 impacted 33.6% of the population, of which 12.3% were estimated to be living under extreme poverty. Noting the degree of inequality in Syria in 1997, the report found out that the lower 20% of the population had a share of only 8% in expenditure, while the richest 20% of the population share about 41% of the expenditure (Abu-Ismail, Abdel-Gadir & El-Laithy). Moreover, the widely disputed region of North-Eastern Syria witnessed highest levels of inequality in 2007, in addition to deprivation of living standards, and worst levels of illiteracy, and access to safe water, just four years before the outbreak of the civil war. The unequal access to resources was also starkly reflected in the housing situation of the country before the war, where over 40% of the population lived under informal housing conditions, – through squatting, or on lands obtained without legal contracts (Goulden, 2011).

Years of conflict have exacerbated the economic crisis, pushing both the state and its citizens, into chaos, with more than 80 per cent of the Syrian population living below the poverty line, with an unemployment rate of at least 55 per cent in 2018. With most of the business networks now being controlled by the selected few elites, the population at large continues to suffer the brunt of both structural, and direct violence.

Conclusion

This paper has attempted to explain the theory of conflict, as proposed by Johan Galtung. In doing so, it has referred to six primary sources of the author. It has taken into account Galtung’s two triangles of conflict. First, the attitudes-behaviour-contradiction triangle, which seeks to explain the notion of conflict, and demonstrates how a conflict consists of all three, with attitudes and contradictions existing at the latent level, manifesting themselves into violent behaviour which is conscious and visible. The second triangle divides violence into three broad categories of direct violence, structural violence, and cultural violence, and demonstrates how the latter two facilitate and bring about direct violence. This paper has also attempted to employ Galtung’s theory of conflict to explain the civil war in Syria, where it has identified the three categories of violence and has tried to apply the theory into practice. The conflict, which started with citizens demanding their basic needs and rights has been sustained over the years by the involvement of foreign states, and increased state brutality which has been responded to by an increasingly similar, if not equal, force by the rebellion groups. The country, now, witnesses itself entangled in a cycle of conflict, where the war has led to steep economic deterioration, political repression, and physical violence, which in turn has led to further widespread cataclysm.

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Massari, P. (2013, September 10). Religion and Conflict in Syria. Retrieved July 26, 2020, from https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2013/09/10/religion-and-conflict-syria
World Bank. (n.d.). The World Bank In Syrian Arab Republic. Retrieved September 30, 2020, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/syria/overview

Image: Adobe Stock

October 14, 2020
A third aircraft carrier for India: Budget versus necessity

Category: Defence Policy, Military Power & Modernisation

Title: A Third Aircraft Carrier for India: Budget vs necessity

Author: M Matheswaran 02.06.2020

The Indian military is undergoing what may be its most significant reorganisation since India’s independence, with considerable implications for its future strategic posture. One important issue that has been brought to the fore is the role of the Indian Navy as a regional power projection force built around three aircraft carriers. The government’s decision on this issue will have significant implications for the region.

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October 13, 2020
Vietnam: Economic Prospects in Post Second Wave Covid-19

The global community is into the ninth month of the COVID-19 pandemic and international efforts to develop a vaccine are at advanced stages. Meanwhile in Russia over 250 Moscow residents received a dose of Sputnik V[i] and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced that the vaccine will be ready by November this year.[ii]Similarly, many American, British, European, and Indian companies are developing the vaccine which is at different levels of trials. While the above progress is very encouraging, the global COVID-19 infections continue to rise and as on 13 October, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the total confirmed cases of COVID-19 were 37,601,848 people including 1,077,799 deaths.[iii] The top four countries with the highest infections were the US, India, Brazil and Russia.

Vietnam’s COVID response since 23 January 2020, when the first case was detected, has been noteworthy. It successfully contained the spread of the virus by instituting local quarantine measures in early stages, declaring a state of emergency in February, and banning flights to and from China. For the next two months, Vietnam maintained strict COVID related measures including national lockdown and it was only in late April that some restrictions were removed in localities if they had contained the virus; but non-essential public services remained suspended. The opening up continued slowly with the resumption of flights to select destinations and cross-border travel restrictions were lifted. Meanwhile, Vietnam registered to buy a Russian Covid-19 vaccine as also developing vaccine on its own.

In August, the second largest COVID-19 outbreak (after Danang) was reported in Quang Nam Province. The ‘second wave’ has now been successfully controlled.

However, in July, Danang, a tourist hotspot, reported several new cases and a massive evacuation of nearly 80,000 tourists was undertaken. In August, the second largest COVID-19 outbreak (after Danang) was reported in Quang Nam Province. The ‘second wave’ has now been successfully controlled. As of 15 September, in Vietnam (total population 95,540,000) there were 1063 cases; 35 deaths; 261,004 tests had been conducted, and 11cases per million was recorded.[iv]

Vietnam’s economic outlook in the ‘post-COVID Second Wave’ is a mixed bag of opportunities and challenges. There are at least four issues which merit attention. First, the Vietnamese economy, like any other global economies, suffered due to the pandemic. The 2020 first-half growth was about 1.8% compared with 7% in 2019 (year-on-year), but the Vietnamese economy has shown enormous resilience when compared with major global economies who have recorded negative growth. This is due to the proficient handling of the pandemic and the country is now on a quick and steady recovery path. The HSBC has revised Vietnam’s 2020 growth forecast from 1.6% to 3.0%.[v]

It is also important to mention that the Vietnamese government has offered attractive incentives to multinational investors to help them “move up the value chain” and build supply chains in the country.

Second, there are clear signs that Vietnam continues to be an attractive destination for foreign investments. This trend is not only due to global conglomerates moving out of China and seeking new destinations with attractive options for setting up of their businesses, but Vietnamese handing of the pandemic has provided them enormous business confidence in the country. According to the Ministry of Planning and Investment, total foreign investment in the first half was worth US$18.47 billion.[vi] Japanese (Panasonic), South Korean (LG Electronics), US (Foxconn; Apple) and the European (Heineken) companies moved to Vietnam. It is also important to mention that the Vietnamese government has offered attractive incentives to multinational investors to help them “move up the value chain” and build supply chains in the country.

Third, is about renewable energy. Vietnam’s current energy generation mix is skewed towards coal (18,516 MW) and hydrocarbons (8,978 MW). Notwithstanding the COVID-19, the country’s average electricity consumption per day during the first few months of 2020 was 615 million KWh, an increase of 7.5 per cent compared with 2019.[vii] It is estimated that “Vietnam’s energy demand will increase by over 10 per cent by the end of 2020, followed by an eight per cent growth per year in 2021 to 2030.” The “government wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by eight per cent by 2030” for which investments in renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind would have to be made,

Fourth, is about immersion in Industry 4.0 technologies. There are now clear trends of widespread digital transformation across the globe and is impacting every aspect of the industry from commercial operations, technology management, use in fintech to support banking and financial services, new business models through analytics, and human resource management. These technologies can potentially boost productivity and improve Vietnam’s GDP. For that innovative national policies for growth are needed. Also, the human resource would require ‘up-skilling, reskilling and retooling’ to embrace these technologies. The industry leaders too have to recognize the importance of educating themselves and using new technologies as also adopting innovative models for their operations.

Vietnam should build upon its successes of handling the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘build back better’ by offering long-term stimulus for investments and accord high priority to zero-carbon technologies to spur inclusive and resilient growth.

Finally, Vietnam should build upon its successes of handling the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘build back better’ by offering long-term stimulus for investments and accord high priority to zero-carbon technologies to spur inclusive and resilient growth. It must adopt strategies for investments in technologies, products and services as also create new jobs tailored for Industry 4.0.

Notes

[i] “Russia Covid-19 vaccine: Over 250 people in Moscow get inoculated, says report”, https://www.livemint.com/news/world/russia-covid-19-vaccine-over-250-people-in-moscow-get-inoculated-says-report-11600085464168.html (accessed 16 September 2020).
[ii] “China coronavirus vaccine may be ready for public in November: Official”, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-coronavirus-vaccine-may-be-ready-for-public-in-november-official/story-1DzVCBrdOwleJXxuw0wvyI.html (accessed 16 September 2020).
[iii] “WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard”, https://covid19.who.int/?gclid=CjwKCAjwzIH7BRAbEiwAoDxxTlG5T6XZYiHVHBesW5cmAa9DKUytaVgH01haDH10TpmFA3OP-2s_phoCk9sQAvD_BwE (accessed 16 September 2020).
[iv] “Southeast Asia Covid-19 Tracker”, https://www.csis.org/programs/southeast-asia-program/southeast-asia-covid-19-tracker-0#National%20Responses (accessed 16 September 2020).
[v] “Vietnam’s positive growth in Q2 defies market expectations: HSBC”, http://hanoitimes.vn/vietnam-positive-growth-in-q2-defies-market-expectations-hsbc-313035.html (accessed 16 September 2020).
[vi] “Vietnam expects imminent new wave of foreign investment”, https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30392781?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=internal_referral (accessed 15 September 2020).
[vii] “Assessing Vietnam’s Economic Prospects for Foreign Investors After COVID-19”, https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/assessing-vietnams-economic-prospects-foreign-investors-after-covid-19.html/ (accessed 15 September 2020).

Image: Ho chi-min City

October 13, 2020

Blog

Competing research conclusions

What is Bt cotton?

Stone’s critique and pink bollworm resistance

Stone’s disputations and Qaim’s response

References

1. Kranthi, K. R. & Stone, G. D. Long-term impacts of Bt cotton in India. Nat. Plants6, 188–196 (2020).

2. Datta, S. et al. India needs genetic modification technology in agriculture. Curr. Sci.117, 390–394 (2019).

4. Crost, B., Shankar, B., Bennett, R. & Morse, S. Bias from farmer self-selection in genetically modified crop productivity estimates: evidence from Indian data. J. Agric. Econ.58, 24–36 (2007).

5. Qaim, M., Subramanian, A., Naik, G. & Zilberman, D. Adoption of Bt cotton and impact variability: insights from India. Rev. Agric. Econ.28, 48–58 (2006).

6. Subramanian, A. & Qaim, M. The impact of Bt cotton on poor households in rural India. J. Dev. Stud.46, 295–311 (2010).

7. Kathage, J. & Qaim, M. Economic impacts and impact dynamics of Bt(Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton in India. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA109, 11652–11656 (2012).

8. Krishna, V., Qaim, M. & Zilberman, D. Transgenic crops, production risk and agrobiodiversity. Eur. Rev. Agric. Econ.43, 137–164 (2016).

9. Krishna, V. V. & Qaim, M. Bt cotton and sustainability of pesticide reductions in India. Agric. Syst.107, 47–55 (2012).

10. Veettil, P. C., Krishna, V. V. & Qaim, M. Ecosystem impacts of pesticide reductions through Bt cotton adoption. Aust. J. Agric. Resour. Econ.61, 115–134 (2017).

11. Kouser, S. & Qaim, M. Impact of Bt cotton on pesticide poisoning in smallholder agriculture: a panel data analysis. Ecol. Econ.70, 2105–2113 (2011).

12. Ali, A. & Abdulai, A. The adoption of genetically modified cotton and poverty reduction in Pakistan. J. Agric. Econ.61, 175–192 (2010).

13. Qiao, F. Fifteen years of Bt cotton in China: the economic impact and its dynamics. Wo r l d D e v.70, 177–185 (2015).

14. Qaim, M. Role of new plant breeding technologies for food security and sustainable agricultural development. Appl. Econ. Perspect. Policy42, 129–150 (2020)

Matin Qaim is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at the University of Goettingen in Germany. Visit his website. Follow Matin on Twitter @MatinQaim

The letter was originally published in Nature Plants and has been republished here with permission. Nature Plants can be found on Twitter @NaturePlants

Cameron English is a Science writer and the Managing Editor at Genetic Literacy Project.

Jon Entine is a renowned journalist, author, though-leader and the Founder and Executive Director of the Genetic Literacy Project.

This article is republished from the Genetic Literacy project under the Creative Commons 4.0

References