Welcome to Seshadri Kumar's Web Home

Sunday, 25 October 2020

How Religious Intolerance in Hinduism is Different from Religious Intolerance in Christianity and Islam

Abstract

Islam and Christianity have fought and oppressed other religions and their followers, including each other, for millenia, because of a religious imperative to do so. However, Hindu scriptures have no exhortation for the faithful to oppress other religions and their followers. The current anti-Muslim feeling in India has its roots in history, not in scripture. It is therefore easier to remove this feeling — if only Indians show a willingness to look at the present and the future, and stop living in the past.

Internal and External Enemies

All religions have nasty teachings in their scriptures in addition to anything that may be good in them.

The main difference between Hinduism and either Christianity or Islam is that Hinduism is a very old religion. So when the majority of Hindu holy books were written, there were no competing religions in the same geography. The only exception seems to be Zoroastrianism, because their holy book, the Avesta, talks about the “devas” as antagonists and even specifically names Indra and Sarva (Rudra). Likewise, the Vedic “Asura,” or demon, is considered to be an equivalence of the Avestan “Ahura” – the Zoroastrian God is Ahura Mazda.

But in the subcontinental mass of India, there really was no competition to the Vedic religion except ancient Dravidian gods, and all these deities seem to have been assimilated into “Hinduism” and their followers made “Hindu” in the course of time. By the time Islam and Christianity came to India, the majority of Hindu texts had already been cast in stone for centuries, although you can find exceptions like the Bhavishya Purana which makes references to Queen Victoria's London.

The more recent hatred of Muslims in Hindu-dominated India, which is a standard feature of Hindu social behavior in the middle and upper-middle classes today, does not come from scripture, but from a desire for vengeance against centuries of Muslim rule and oppression in the distant past.

But what Hinduism lacked in external enemies to hate and discriminate against in its scripture, it made up for by hating internal enemies. Thus, Hinduism invented the caste system, which discriminated against the lower caste Shudras and the still lower outcasts, today called Dalits. That Hindus of the past were exceptionally creative can be seen from the fact that no other civilization in the world was able to create such an ingeniously evil system to control people in perpetuity as the caste system of the Hindus.

Judaism

Islam and Christianity both came up in the backdrop of an already existing and dominant religion, Judaism. The Old Testament is taken from the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, the holy book of the Jews. It contains as explicit an intolerance as one will ever see in a religious book. The God of the Jews does not hesitate to kill or brutally punish those who do not believe in Him. To help His favorites, the Israelites, He kills the firstborn of every family in Egypt. And no mention of intolerance in the Old Testament would be complete without citing the First and Second Commandments:

I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.

And we should also point out that the seed of religious intolerance was certainly laid by the Old Testament when God says in Deuteronomy, 12:3:

And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

Christianity and Islam both took inspiration from this directive.

Christianity

It is pertinent to point out that all three religions of the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, share the Old Testament. Therefore, Christianity had to fight for adherents with Judaism to convert Jews and prove that Christianity was the superior religion. The hatred of Christians for the Jews also comes from the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew who claimed something that was considered heretical to Jews — that he, Jesus, was the son of God — and so was crucified by the other Jews for his heresy.

Christianity accepts the Old Testament, but adds a new Testament based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Christianity claims that only those who believe in Jesus as the son of God will be saved in the afterlife. Therefore, to “save” others' souls, Christians regularly used to convert people at the point of a sword and kill those who refused. Both the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of Jesus contain plenty of highly intolerant verses. For instance, in the Gospel according to Matthew (12:30), we read that

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

And in the Gospel according to Mark (16:16), we read that

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Again, in the Gospel according to John (3:36), we read that

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.

One can see the effect of verses like these on a true believer. If, for example, one believes that “whoever is not with me is against me,” then which true Christian would allow anti-Christian forces to live? They must convert to Christianity or die. A verse like John 3:36 is almost an inducement to kill:

He that believeth not the Son shall not see life.

The practical realization of this intolerance probably reached its zenith with the establishment of the Inquisition by the Catholic Church.

Fortunately, in the last five hundred years, Christians have become civilized and tolerant. They no longer try to convert people by force, and do not act on all the intolerant passages in their Bible. Most modern western Christian states have accepted religious tolerance and the separation of Church and State as foundational principles.

Christian states are becoming more and more tolerant with time. While blasphemy is still actually a crime on the books of many Christian-majority countries, not many have actually been charged with the crime, and many countries have actually removed these obsolete laws recently — for instance Australia (at the Federal level, 1995), Canada (2018), Denmark (2017), the Netherlands (2014), Malta (2016), New Zealand (2019), and Norway (2015).

Islam

Islam came 600 years after Christianity, and therefore it had to compete against both Judaism and Christianity for followers. Therefore, as Judaism and Christianity before it had done, Islam also asserted that “its” God was the only true God:

Ya ilaha il-Allah, Mohammadur rasoolullah

There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.

This is the shahada, or testimony, that every Muslim is required to accept. Like Christianity before it, Islam’s scriptures have plenty of intolerance towards those who do not accept the God of Muhammad, including outright murder. As an example, Surah al-Anfal, 8:12 and 8:13, say:

Remember, O Prophet, when your Lord revealed to the angels, “I am with you. So make the believers stand firm. I will cast horror into the hearts of the disbelievers. So strike their necks and strike their fingertips.”

This is because they defied Allah and His Messenger. And whoever defies Allah and His Messenger, then know that Allah is surely severe in punishment.

But, unlike Christianity, Islam has never gone through a phase of separating Church from State. This is because Islam is not just a way of praying to God or conceptualizing the creation of the Universe. Islam is also a way of life. Muslims considers two things to be sacred to them: the Quran, which they consider the direct, revealed word of God to the Prophet Muhammad, and the Hadith, which are recorded testimonies of Muhammad during his lifetime. The Quran is considered to be absolute and unchallenged; the Hadith is sacred but subject to interpretation. The distinction is something like the Hindu distinction between shruti (directly revealed wisdom from God) and smriti (that which is remembered). The Hadith is the reason why there are many schools of Islam. Based on the Quran and the Hadith, Muslims have a “divine law,” or Sharia, that encompasses every aspect of a person’s life. The Sharia covers what kind of clothes people should wear (hence the hijab and burka); how people should deal in finances, contracts, agriculture, witnesses, marriage, and divorce; permissible food and drink; inheritance, medicines, and apostasy; to name just a few.

A true Muslim must follow the Sharia. This is what makes it almost impossible to achieve separation of Church and State in Islamic-majority countries. Many laws of the Sharia are incompatible with modern views of justice. For example, the punishment for stealing in the Sharia is cutting off the criminal’s hands, and for adultery it is stoning the adulterers to death. The penalty for apostasy (leaving the faith) and blasphemy (disrespecting the faith) in the Sharia is death, and indeed there are a few Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Brunei which actually enforce the death penalty for blasphemy.

Because Islamic law covers the sacred as well as the profane, it is impossible to be a devout Muslim and also achieve official separation of Church and State. So what has happened with Christianity over the past 500 years seems almost impossible in Islam. This makes the eradication of religious intolerance very difficult.

This does not mean that all Muslim-majority states, or all Muslims, are intolerant. Indonesia is an example of a state with more than 200 million people, with more than 86% Muslims, that is quite tolerant. In fact, the Hindu epic Ramayana is one of the national epics of Indonesia. And yet, one could go to jail in Indonesia for 5 years for “deliberately, in public, expressing feelings of hostility, hatred, or contempt against religions with the purpose of preventing others from adhering to any religion,” or “disgracing a religion.”

So Islam has a problem with tolerance. That explains why, despite the large number of peaceful Muslims, we find, once in a while, somebody who cannot handle criticism or mocking of Islam, and responds violently, as happened with the Chechen Muslim who killed Samuel Paty, the French teacher, for discussing cartoons disrespectful of the Prophet. Such violence has to be punished with utmost severity, and nobody should justify such violence.

Hinduism

Hindus are not handicapped by their religion in this aspect. Hindu holy texts have nothing about Muslims or Christians, mainly because Hindu texts were written so long ago that there were no Muslims or Christians then. So there are no words in any sacred texts telling Hindus to go and kill “disbelievers,” as the Quran does.

So why do Hindus commit hate crimes against Muslims in India? Clearly, there is no religious sanction for this violence. This violence has its roots in Indian history. Hindus kill Muslims and try to disenfranchise them because of the treatment Hindus received at the hands of Muslim emperors such as Aurangzeb, 400 years ago, and earlier. There is no reason why Hindus must kill Muslims in revenge for actions done 400 years ago, at least if religious scripture were to be the guide.

In other words, a Hindu is, unlike a Muslim who kills for religious reasons in accordance with his holy book, not killing for scriptural reasons. He or she is killing to fulfil a vendetta.

And so it is easier to stop this.

And this is exactly what the founding fathers of India, such as Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Ambedkar, tried to do. They created a secular country that would be governed by the rule of secular, not religious law. They thought that since Hindu holy books did not teach hate against any religion, they could start with a clean slate and create a secular republic. That with Hinduism as the dominant religion, it is possible to achieve a separation of Church and State.

Of course, the Hindu holy books did actively talk about discriminating against the Shudras and Dalits, and also discriminated against women, and so the Constitution was written to safeguard the separation of Church and State and offer explicit protections for women and lower castes.

For about 40 years after Independence, this secular system worked quite well. Then, beginning in the late 1980s, Hindus started imitating the intolerance of Islam and Christian scripture, with the Rath Yatras of LK Advani, calling for the demolition of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. This movement had its culmination in November 2019, when the Supreme Court of India awarded the land on which the mosque had stood (it had been demolished by Hindu right-wing thugs in 1992) to Hindus to build a temple instead.

Hindus have also started converting people of other faiths to Hinduism. Such conversion does not exist in Hindu scriptures because, again, when these texts were written, there were no other religions. You had to be born Hindu to be a Hindu. There was no other way.

And finally, Hindus have been demanding for some time that the Indian Constitution should be changed from its current description of India as a secular country to that of a Hindu republic. This looks increasingly likely to happen.

Concluding Thoughts

Christianity and Islam are monotheistic religions that have religious intolerance built into them in their very scriptures.

Christian-majority countries have gradually been becoming more and more liberal in the last 500 years, and not taking the intolerance in their scripture as literally as they used to.

Muslim-majority countries have not, in general, been able to rid themselves of the intolerance that flows from their religion, because their social law is so closely tied to their religious texts. This makes it difficult for a Muslim-majority state to be secular.

Hindus in India have a choice to make. They can imitate Muslim-majority countries and tie their laws closer to religion, or they can follow the example of Christian-majority countries and become more and more liberal.

In this context, it is important to remind ourselves that Hinduism has no religious discrimination written into its scriptures, but has been developing a social religious intolerance for the past 30 years, which appears to be peaking now. The roots of this intolerance are not religious; they are historical.

And because these roots are historical, it is easier to uproot this intolerance, because this intolerance is not the word of God. The reason this intolerance continues in India is that many Hindus continue to live in the past instead of living in the present and looking at the future. It is my hope that some day, the Hindus of India will stop living in the past and start living harmoniously in the present, with a view to a bright future.

All it requires is the will of humans - not the sanction of God.

Friday, 31 July 2020

Why Emphasizing Local Languages in the NEP is a Mistake

Abstract

The New Education Policy (NEP) that was unveiled by the Modi Sarkar a couple of days ago has a disastrous, retrograde step that is bound to fail miserably. This misstep is the recommendation that all primary and some secondary education for all students in India be done in the local language rather than English. This is a problem because it puts migrants at a serious disadvantage because they do not know the local language. It is also a mistake because the world is moving towards greater adoption of English, and primary education in a different language forces a person to constantly translate between that language and English, thereby making him or her inefficient. The NEP threatens to create a nation of English “haves” and “have-nots.” English is the language of science, technology, and finance, among many things, and poor proficiency in English dooms a person in India to a low standard of living. The government should have left the adoption of English or of vernacular languages to market forces and not tampered with it for ideological reasons.

India needs a common language to communicate, and that common language should and eventually will be English. The present attempt by the government is a pathetic effort to stem the advance of the inevitable, and is doomed to fail because people at the grassroots see English as their ticket to a better life, regardless of what RSS and BJP politicians believe.

The Modi Sarkar’s New Education Policy (NEP)

The Modi government has come out with a “New Education Policy.” One of the key features of this policy is that it recommends that all children should be taught in their mother tongue for the first five years of schooling, and preferably the first eight. This contrasts with the current setup in which many parents opt to educate their children in the English medium. Mr. K. Kasturirangan, the chairman of the committee that created the NEP, has said that there is no imposition of the language policy. But one cannot help but worry about the pressure that will be exerted on schools by the government to comply with these guidelines. Since there is no explicit mandate to change the education system completely, English medium schools will still exist as they do now, especially in the private sector. But there will be pressure on publicly funded or partially funded schools to comply with the “recommendations” of the NEP. This is the main cause of worry.

What exactly does the NEP say about languages?

Wherever possible, the medium of instruction, until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be the home language/mother-tongue/local language. Thereafter, the home/local language shall continue to be taught as a language wherever possible. This will be followed by both public and private schools.

The logic that has been explained for this change is that children learn most naturally and effortlessly in their “mother tongue,” especially when what is being taught them is the description of the immediate world around them, which they can communicate with their parents in the language which the parents are most comfortable in and in topics that the parents know very well, since these are not specialized subjects — animals, birds, places, customs, human relations, and the like. It is thus argued that basic concepts are most easily understood when communicated in the “mother tongue” that both the parents and the child are most familiar with.

Why This is a Problem

This is good logic if we are indeed talking about the mother tongue. But what happens when a child from a Tamil-speaking family has settled in Maharashtra or Karnataka, where the local language is not Tamil but Marathi or Kannada? The central assumption in this policy is that all people who live in a particular state will have the same mother tongue. The NEP glibly uses the phrasing “home language/mother tongue/local language.” But these three things are not equivalent. The local language need not be the mother tongue of the child. And that is where the problem arises.

Given that there are unlikely to be Tamil medium schools in, say, a Maharashtra or a West Bengal or Odisha, what will a Tamil speaking child have to undergo? They will teach all the basic knowledge of the world in Marathi to a child who does not speak the language at home. As a result, this child will fall behind in his or her acquisition of knowledge.

And this is hardly an unlikely scenario. Our country has plenty of migrant workers, both at the lower end (e.g., construction workers) as well as the higher end (e.g., software engineers). People move across the length and breadth of this country in search of job opportunities. What is worse, people move a lot between jobs. So one year, I might be working in Karnataka, and the next year, I might be working in Maharashtra. So now my child will have to change her learning from Kannada to Marathi — and neither is her mother tongue. I cannot keep learning new languages as I change jobs and move cities to try to help my child in school.

Is the intent of the NEP to restrict job mobility?

My Personal Experience

I grew up in Mumbai, even though my mother tongue is Tamil. My father was a highly educated University Professor. Hence, at home the languages for communication were mostly Tamil (with my mother) and English (with my father). Mumbai is very cosmopolitan, and so the influence of the state language, Marathi, is not (at least was not) as strong in Mumbai as it is in the rest of Maharashtra. Most people in Mumbai speak what is known as Bambaiyya, a dialect of Hindi with lots of Marathi influence (such as “apuN” for “I”, inspired by “aapaN” from Marathi). As a child, I mostly learned to speak Bambaiyya.

Nobody among my schoolmates spoke Marathi. The school was an English medium school, and we studied English as the first language, Hindi as the second language, and Marathi as the third language. This was a consequence of the three-language formula that was introduced in the 1960s: English, Hindi, and the local language of the state for any English medium school.

I learned Hindi reasonably well because there was so much reinforcement. When I used to go to the market to buy anything, inevitably I would talk in Bambaiyya. I used to watch Hindi movies and listen to Hindi songs. But given that no one around me actually spoke Marathi — a situation made worse by local demographics of the suburb in Mumbai I was living in, known as Matunga, in which 80% of the population were actually Tamil-speakers, the rest being Gujarati (the situation has been reversed today) — with no Marathi speakers except the maids who cleaned our homes, it was actually very difficult to absorb the Marathi I was learning in school. I had no parent to help me with my Marathi homework, no friends to chat in Marathi. Because of my resulting incompetence in the language, I gradually grew to detest it as an imposition.

As a result, I did quite poorly in Marathi, even though I learned it for 4 years – from Vth standard to VIIIth. In our IXth standard, the school gave us the option of Sanskrit for the third language as an alternative to Marathi. Sanskrit, unlike Marathi, was also a high scoring subject in the Xth board exams. I jumped at the chance to ditch Marathi, given how miserable I was with that subject. It also helped that the teacher who taught us Sanskrit was a great teacher. I still have a love of Sanskrit from those two years learning it in school.

Because my father was well-educated in English, I did very well in school, where the medium of education was English. I shudder to think how I would have done if Marathi had been the medium of instruction. I would probably have dropped out and become a criminal selling drugs for D company in Mumbai instead of having this wonderful educated professional life I am leading today. Such are the dramatic consequences of the choices we make as a nation.

Why English Medium Education is of Paramount Importance

Some will argue with me that exactly the reverse problem is true for a native Marathi speaker in Maharashtra if she goes to an English medium school. This is certainly true. If the child has no one at home to help her with her English-based homework, she will fall behind and not learn the concepts that the school is trying to teach her.

So what is the solution here? One has to think of what the final goals of a school education are: self-awareness, community awareness, awareness about health, science, society, the nation, its history, and the world. In addition, school is the stepping stone to college and a professional life. The most lucrative jobs in the world today are in the technological space. Of course, not everyone is going to make it to those jobs. Many will drop out of schools even before what we know today as the Xth standard (I am using these terms even though the NEP has changed them, for the sake of discussion.) If you are going to end up doing manual labour as a class D employee in the government, you may not benefit by learning to communicate in English. But if you even want a peon’s job in today’s India, a good working knowledge of English is a huge advantage.

Most of science and technology, and even most of the financial system, is based on English. You not only need English to understand how to connect your router to the network or to assemble that car; you also need it to understand what are stocks, bonds, debentures, derivatives, and the like. The entire world of finance is a western invention, as are the entire worlds of science and technology.

The only thing that a local language education will give you is an ability to appreciate literature in your mother tongue. Given that most people simply do not read anything in today’s world, whether in English or in any Indian language, this benefit is dubious at best. And there are negligibly few jobs in classical Tamil or Hindi poetry.

I am not downplaying the humanities. I love the humanities, and I love languages (today). But we must focus on what will benefit children in their future. There are only 24 hours in a day, and children have to prioritize their time. They can certainly learn languages, including their mother tongue, as a hobby. Knowledge of culture does not need to be school-fed. I am a connoisseur of Indian classical music — I even sing and play it to a degree — but I am not classically trained. I have learned classical music out of sheer interest. Children of tomorrow can learn their mother tongues in detail out of interest. And anyway, they will learn that language as a second or a third language. That's more exposure than I ever got to Indian classical music — and I still learned it.

Lost in Translation

There is an important handicap that students who are primarily schooled in their mother tongue face when they finally get to the workforce and have to communicate in English in their professions: they are constantly translating.

So, when they have to say something in English, first they compose the sentence in their native tongue, and then they translate it to English. The result of this is sentences like “Today office is there?” — which is wrong construction, but this happens because the speaker directly translated from an Indian language like Hindi, in which you would say, “Aaj office hai kya?” The correct construction would be “Is the office working today?” But because our speaker is translating from a construction first made in Hindi, the result is incorrect English. This has consequences for the person in their professional lives. Like it or not, the world runs on English knowledge, not any of the local languages of India, and it is only going to get worse for those stuck in the vernacular groove.

Similarly, when a person educated in a language other than English during their primary years reads something, they first translate what they read into their local language and then understand what it means. The result is that whenever they have to read anything written in English, it takes them twice as long to understand what they read, and this makes them inefficient.

Someone whose medium of education was English all along will have a competitive advantage over someone who was educated in a vernacular medium during their primary years because of this.

Some friends of mine will counter this claim of mine. They will tell me that they did study in a vernacular medium in the early years of their lives but switched to English medium later, and have done well in their lives. But they discount the effect of privilege. These are people born into upper middle-class homes, where there is a very nice support structure. You have educated parents who can help you when you get stuck in the transition from Hindi or Marathi or Tamil to English. Most lower class children in India have no support structure — they are completely dependent on the school system for their education.

My proficiency in English has helped me tremendously in my career. I would not wish anything else for my child. It is true that I cannot read the Tirukkural, a classic in my native tongue, Tamil — but I anyway would not have been able to do that even under the NEP, given that I grew up in Maharashtra. I cannot even read Hindi very comfortably. I can read a Hindi newspaper with some difficulty, because it takes me time to process the words and translate them into my true “mother tongue,” which is now English. Whenever I read something in Hindi, I experience what students who have studied only in Hindi or Marathi will experience when they read something in English. It is painful.

But I rarely have to read Hindi unless I want to. In contrast, those in professions in today’s world have to constantly read English everywhere. Want to fix a machine? The instructions are all in English. Want to assemble a circuit? English. Want to read a scientific paper? English. You cannot get away from it.

The Advantage of Privilege

In my case, for the sake of my child, I will ensure she is educated in English, so she will have a competitive advantage. Thankfully, the NEP is not yet mandatory, and so the government will not force private schools to abandon English medium education. They will not do that for a very practical reason — the children and grandchildren of most politicians, including those who have introduced this NEP, go to English medium schools.

So I am safe. But what about the poor, who have to go to government schools in which the new NEP will be implemented?

They will grow up as English illiterates. They will struggle to read a newspaper in English, struggle to read a manual at their workplace written in English. One of the problems I have seen time and time again is how many of my colleagues in India will happily do good work in engineering, but shudder in fear when it comes time to document that work and write a report. It is like Chinese water torture for many, and so they keep procrastinating until the boss orders them to finish the report. And then they write a shoddy report of some excellent work. That does not impress.

So what the NEP will end up doing is create a world of English “haves” and “have-nots.” Those with the means to send their children to expensive private schools will reap the benefits of an English education. The vast majority of Indians will end up learning Marathi, Odia, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, etc., etc., and will be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to competing in the global marketplace. When they go to interview for a job at even a call centre, they will be rejected because of their halting English.

This will simply widen the gap between the rich and the poor in India, and increase the income inequality. But that may not be such a bad thing, given that there are very few jobs for people anyway, thanks to economic mismanagement by the Modi Sarkar. If you cut down the pool of qualified candidates, there might be better balance between supply and demand, and that will increase the salary for the “haves.”

The rest can go flip pakodas for a living or sing in suburban trains with a plate for the coins. And continue to sing Modi’s praises for bringing “Acche Din” to them.

What About Other Countries?

One of the common responses from RSS and BJP sympathizers is to point to developed countries whose native tongues are not English. They say, for example, that “In Germany, doesn’t everyone speak German? In France, doesn’t everyone speak French? In Japan, doesn’t everyone speak Japanese? Why should we speak English in India? They even write scientific articles in those countries in German/French/etc. So why should we not communicate in Indian languages in India?”

That was definitely true in the past. But over the past 30-40 years, English has gradually become the lingua franca of the entire world. A recent survey conducted on 55 countries on the use of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) revealed the following, on average, across these countries:

Nearly 53% of all public primary schools used EMI
Nearly 71% of all public secondary schools used EMI
Over 87% of all private primary schools used EMI
Over 87% of all private secondary schools used EMI
Over 78% of all public universities used EMI
Nearly 91% of all private universities used EMI

The list of countries in this survey included Germany, China, Japan, India, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Note that apart from India, every one of the aforementioned countries have a single dominant language — and yet, these countries teach the majority of their children in English.

In another study of EMI in higher education published by researchers from Oxford University in 2018, the following findings were listed:

The percentage of English-Taught Programs (ETPs) in higher education programs in Europe grew from 725 in 2002 to 2389 in 2007 to 8089 in 2014. That’s more than a 1000% increase in 12 years.
At the Masters’ level in Europe, the number of ETPs grew from 560 in 2002 to 1500 in 2008 to 3543 in 2010 and to 3701 in October 2011. That’s more than a 500% increase in 9 years.
In 2001, China instituted a policy that mandated that, within 3 years, EMI should be used for 5-10% of undergraduate education in top-tier universities.
In 2006, the President of South Korea’s Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced his globalization project, according to which EMI programmes were to be increased by 10% every year until all classes at all levels (Bachelors, Masters, Doctoral) were taught entirely through English. This was followed by a wider adoption of English across all South Korean higher education institutions.

It is clear that the rest of the world is rapidly moving towards greater adoption of English as a medium of instruction. The Indian government’s step, therefore, is clearly retrograde.

What is the Solution?

I have identified the problems. Some would demand, and fairly so, that I provide a solution as well. So here goes.

The current English education system is a disaster in India. People are desperate to get their children educated in English, because they know this is the only way up in life. And “schools” have mushroomed to teach them in English, to take advantage of this growing trend.

However, most of the teachers who are teaching English have very poor knowledge of English themselves. And hence, most kids who go to these schools are none the wiser in their command of English. Worse, they do not even grasp the basic concepts that they are supposed to learn in their formative years.

The reason, of course, is that most of the English teachers have themselves studied in vernacular media, and themselves translate to and from their native tongue. How can they effectively teach English?

But these are growing pains. There is a massive movement all over India by parents who want English medium education for their children. This is the first generation of new English teachers, and that is why the results are so poor.

As the movement grows, there will be more and more private schools (often with low budgets) that parents can afford and where their children will learn English from progressively better English speakers.

Over a few decades, the quality of English education will improve, whether or not the state intervenes. The market will take care of the problems. When there is an urgent imperative, solutions will arise in a market economy. Already there are huge numbers of English speaking schools all over north India.

In fact, the puzzling thing about the NEP is that the drive to a vernacular medium of instruction has not arisen from the grassroots. It has its roots in the RSS and BJP ideologies. These parties are fundamentally opposed to an English education for the mass of Indians (but they will send their own children to English medium schools, in a stunning display of hypocrisy). There is no clamour from the grassroots of India to get a vernacular medium education.

And therefore, the push towards local languages in the NEP will be a failure. It will result in massive dropouts from public schools. There will be a huge rise in private schools that teach in English. The number of schools that teach in local languages will fall as they close down because of lack of enrollment. For ideological reasons, these schools will be kept open by the government, but fewer and fewer students will patronize them. Poor students and their families will prefer to pay money to get an English-medium education than to study in the vernacular for free. And if the government tries to make the move to a vernacular education mandatory, they will have a national revolt on their hands.

A policy that is rooted in an unpopular ideology and not in practicality is bound to fail. Indians will not be denied their right to progress.

In 2014, a certain Chief Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi said in an election speech that “The government has no business to be in business.” Well, PM Modi should listen to CM Modi and not get into the business of education. Let the market sort out what people want. Let people decide the education they wish to give their children based on what they think the opportunities are, not based on some archaic RSS ideology.

English as India’s National Language

India’s greatest weakness is its multiplicity of languages. It creates inefficiency in communication. Therefore, we need a national language. But that language cannot be imposed. It must evolve of its own accord. The only language that can evolve to be the national language is the one that is in sync with the rest of the world: English.

Hindi is a worthless language for practical purposes, and so are all other Indian languages. It is already clear which language is going to rule the world, and most other countries have seen the light. Those who prefer to live in the darkness will be consumed by it.

We can and should study Indian languages to preserve our culture and understand our roots. But our language for all practical communication, including for communicating within Parliament, should and one day will be English. Once the current generation of illiterate politicians dies out, that change will become much easier. As Max Planck once said about science, change, here too, will happen one funeral at a time.

Politicians can either try to enable this evolution of English as the national language, or they will be swept away by the desire for this change that comes from the grassroots. Anybody who tries to impede the progress of the common people will get their just desserts in the hustings.

The present move by the government to institute the NEP is yet another pathetic attempt to try to stem the inevitable tide of English. Other countries have already seen the light. It is unfortunate, but not at all surprising, that this government is trying to swim against the global tide and is taking a retrograde step. After all, it was this very PM who stood up in front of an August assembly of internationally-renowned scientists a few years ago and talked about how India had discovered plastic surgery and stem cell therapy thousands of years ago, thereby making India the laughingstock of the world. And it is MPs from the same party who are claiming that the cure to the coronavirus pandemic is the consumption of cow urine. Yet another retrograde step is but to be expected.

Sunday, 14 June 2020

Narendra Modi, The Anti-National

Abstract

Yesterday, June 13, 2020, the government of Nepal passed a resolution declaring areas which India considers part of its territory to be the territory of Nepal. The resolution was passed unanimously in Nepal's Parliament.

This action by Nepal is unprecedented and indicates that India today has zero influence in Nepal. It also shows that Nepal has firmly gone over to the Chinese camp. This has very dangerous consequences for India in the years ahead.

The root cause of this disastrous deterioration in Indo-Nepal ties is a selfish decision by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in 2015, where he put his own interests and the interests of his party, the BJP, above the interests of the nation in an abortive bid to win a state election in Bihar.

Given the harm that these selfish actions of Mr. Modi have already caused the nation, and the harm that they are virtually guaranteed to cause in the future, it would be fair to call Mr. Modi an anti-national.

Hitting Rock Bottom

The Modi Sarkar's greatest “achievement” (thus far) in foreign affairs is the headline of all newspapers in India today: Nepal has officially released a new map of Nepal that includes areas that India claims as its own.

Nepal has, for decades, from the time Nehru was our first PM, been India's closest ally. The fact that it is largely a Hindu country also worked in favor of this relationship.

From time to time, New Delhi has arm-twisted Kathmandu over the decades since Independence, due to it being the big brother in this relationship, but the relationship continued to be strong despite these small irritants.

But the Modi government has succeeded in completely alienating our closest neighbor and pushing them into China's arms. This is a bonus the Chinese would never have dreamt of — one that popped into its lap without even trying.

Yesterday's Nepalese Parliament vote — which is the strongest signal Nepal can send India — was unanimous.

And that means only one thing.

India does not have a friend left in Nepal.

Congratulations, Mr. Modi.

For this deterioration in relations is directly the result of this incompetent and irresponsible PM's attempt to use foreign relations as a tool to win domestic elections, without any concern for the long-term ramifications of one's actions on the country.

The Nepal Blockade and the Bihar State Election of 2015

What happened, you ask? You may not recall, so let me tell you a five-year old, true story.

There is an ethnic minority group called the Madhesis who live in the region straddling the Nepal-Bihar border. In September 2015, after years of political turmoil, Nepal drew up a new Constitution. This was a secular (Nepal was previously a Hindu nation) Constitution and a Federal one. The Constitution also reframed the borders of the provinces. One of the controversial rules of the new Constitution was the rule regarding citizenship. If a Nepali man married a non-Nepali, his children would automatically get Nepalese citizenship. But if a Nepalese woman were to marry a non-Nepalese, her children would not get Nepalese citizenship until the husband first became a Nepalese citizen. These rules mattered to the Madhesis because there would be intermarriage from both sides of the border among the community.

Concerns over issues like these, plus over the definition of the Nepali Madhesi state in the Eastern Terai (plains) region, which the Madhesis felt was unfair to them, caused a lot of anger among the Madhesis over the new Constitution. There was concern that the Madhesis did not have adequate representation in the new Constitution.

Many of these were also unhappy with the move to make Nepal a secular country and wanted it to go back to being a Hindu state. There were protests and violence by the Madhesis in response to the new Constitution. There were also other ethnic groups that were unhappy with the new Constitution.

Many of these concerns were valid. But what must be remembered is that this was an internal matter of Nepal.

In December 2015, there was also a state election in Bihar, which the BJP was very keen to win. The same Madhesi community exists in Bihar too, and the Modi government was keen to get its votes.

After the new Constitution was promulgated, the Madhesis decided to block the border in protest, and in this it was backed by the Indian government. The anxiousness of the Modi government to support the Madhesis was prompted by anxiety over comments by Lalu Prasad of the RJD in an election rally, in which he criticized the government of Nepal for its policies and vowed to defend the Madhesis of Bihar, with whom the people of Bihar had “roti-beti” relations (i.e., intermarriage). The BJP did not want to be seen as any less fervent in support for the Madhesis, so allegedly, they used the instruments of international trade and policy to try to influence a state election and supported the blockade by not allowing trucks carrying fuel and food to a landlocked country.

The blockade started in September 2015 and ended only in February 2016. The Nepalese had to withstand the harsh and cold winter of 2015-2016 without fuel and food.

As can be imagined after an experience like that, India does not have a single friend left in Nepal. Imagine if the 8-week COVID-19 shutdown in India was not imposed by an Indian government but forced on Indians by a foreign government. The Indian government, of course, not surprisingly, claims it never imposed any blockade on Nepal, that Indian trucks were voluntarily refusing to enter Nepal because of fear of violence, but Nepalese media have countered this narrative by saying that there was violence even before September 2015 and that did not stop the trucks from coming in.

In late January 2016, the Nepalese government amended the Constitution to make some concessions to the Madhesis. Even though the Madhesis said that these didn't go far enough, the blockade miraculously went away and trucks started rolling into Nepal in February.

A relevant detail is that, by this time, the elections in Bihar were over, with the BJP getting badly drubbed at the polls. The government was aware of how unpopular India had become in Nepal and how China had tried to airlift fuel to Kathmandu.

Enter the Dragon

The blockade had zero effect on the BJP's prospects in the election in Bihar. They came third, behind the RJD and the JDU.

But it had huge ramifications in Nepal. In the last four years, Nepal has signed several agreements with China, including fuel and food supply agreements, agreements for creating a railway system in Nepal, and a plan to connect China with Nepal by rail by 2022.

And today's news is the last nail in the coffin of the “special relationship” between India and Nepal.

Once the rail link with China is complete in 2022, Nepal will be firmly in China's orbit. In 2017, Nepal signed up to become part of China's Belt Road Initiative. The railways within Nepal will be built as part of the BRI.

By now, we all know the endgame of the BRI. We have seen it in Sri Lanka, Kenya, and many other countries. Nepal is a poor country and has no way to pay back the Chinese for their generosity in building all this infrastructure.

So how can they pay the Chinese back? Maybe give them some land in return.

Maybe a few military bases within Nepal.

Welcome to India's new nightmare. India is already living in daily fear of China grabbing our territory at their will — as they just did in Ladakh, with the Modi government just watching helplessly. We are already worried about Chinese incursions in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. Now add the entire, long, Indo-Nepal border to this — facing Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. This is no longer some forgettable north-east state (for most Indians). This is the Hindi heartland.

Welcome (again!) to RSS incompetence.

From Nehru's time until even recently, the Nepalese government would never take any major decisions without consulting New Delhi. But yesterday, Nepal demonstrated that India has zero influence in Nepal today.

If incompetence were the only reason for the mess we are in today, it would perhaps be forgivable. But the main reason for this decline in our relations with Nepal is that Modi put his personal interest above the interest of India and took an action in September 2015 that he would have known would cause incalculable harm to the country even though he himself hoped to benefit from that action politically. Some may correctly point out that this is not the first time that India has blockaded Nepal. India did so in 1989, causing immense harm to the Nepalese and their economy. But China was not yet a superpower in 1989, and so India could get away with it.

Had the PM consulted the veteran bureaucrats in the Ministry of External Affairs, they would have undoubtedly counseled against such an action in the changed circumstances of 2015. But it is unrealistic to expect this PM to ever consult any experts. Also, the bureaucrats in the MEA are sworn to protect the interests of the country. In this case, however, the PM’s motive was not the well-being of the country. It was the well-being of his party. And himself.

What do you call a person who prioritizes his interests above those of the nation and who acts in such a way that he benefits personally and the nation loses as a result of his actions?

An Anti-National.

Sunday, 29 March 2020

Asleep at the Wheel – The Looming Coronavirus Catastrophe in India

Abstract

India, under a lockdown since March 25, is finally facing the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, over the last four months, the Modi government, preoccupied with political priorities, has let valuable time slip out of its hands. Instead of carefully preparing for a disaster as the country has never before seen, by stocking up on face masks, gloves, sanitizers, ventilators, and the like, in the long available time from November 2019 to March 2020, the government has belatedly woken up from its slumber and is frantically trying to acquire these essential items at the eleventh hour, when it is practically impossible to get them at short notice. The government also did not open up the supply of Covid-19 tests beyond a single Gujarat-based vendor for the longest time, and has rejected the applications of several Indian test manufacturers, with the net result that the medical establishment in India is woefully short of Covid-19 tests.

The PM’s knee-jerk lockdown of the country, a last-minute, desperate move to stem the spread of the virus, without adequate preparation of the public, has also caused untold hardship for the tens of millions of migrant workers on the strength of whom the economy runs, as they have been forced to trek it home for hundreds of miles without food, water, or transportation. To cap it all, a woefully inadequate and poorly thought-out financial package will do little to compensate those who are living on the edge, who will be without any money for the duration of the lockdown, and who will probably be reduced to penury or death by starvation.

And, despite all this suffering, it is unclear, given India’s huge population density, how much the lockdown will actually help in slowing down the spread of the virus, even if a lockdown is the only option at this late stage, given the presence of extremely high-density clusters like slums in India.

Nero Fiddling While Rome Was Burning

The ongoing tragedy of migrant workers in India, where tens of crores (100s of millions) of people are walking hundreds of kilometers to get from urban centres, where they have no work and no food, to their villages in states far away, is a prime example of how this government has mismanaged the Covid-19 pandemic in India.

The situation is analogous to that other great tragedy of recent years, Demonetization, where another draconian measure was imposed on the people with no warning and no consultation with experts, causing incalculable suffering.

The same incompetence and indifference to human suffering is on display again in this government.

Many people had been urging the government to take the Coronavirus pandemic more seriously and many had asked for a complete lockdown well before Modi first imposed his one-day lockdown, on 22^nd March and, finally, the 3 week lockdown, on 25^th. Prominent among these was the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who had been arguing for stronger measures as far back as 12^thFebruary in a now widely-shared post on Twitter. The counter-point to that was a post from the PM on 19^th February, talking about how he loved eating “litti-chokha,” a popular dish from Bihar.

Mr. Modi was sleeping on the pandemic. He had higher priorities to deal with, such as continuing the months-long curfew in Jammu and Kashmir, rebuilding the Ayodhya temple, creating the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), toppling state governments ruled by opposition parties, preparing for the introduction of the Uniform Civil Code, demonizing the Shaheen Bagh anti-CAA protest, and other political moves much closer to the heart of the ruling BJP party and its parent RSS. Health issues were not a priority.

Exodus

When the PM finally woke up, it was a bit late. Experts had told him that the virus was about to hit stage 3, the stage of community transmission, unless he did something fast. So, in what appears to have become a pattern with him, without much warning, he locked down the nation.

The result? Daily wage workers who could not support themselves in big urban clusters with no daily pay had no choice but to go back home. All transport has been shut down – buses, taxis, autos, trains. So what do these millions of day labourers do? They walk. With their wives and children. For hundreds of kilometers, without food or water. Many migrant workers, at the time of writing, are still desperately trying to go back home, with no transport option, waiting for promised buses to take them home. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for images and videos. State governments are doing their best to cope with the crisis, but no state government can provide emergency transportation to tens of millions of workers all wanting to go home at the same time after they have been blindsided by the Central government.

The migrant workers who were desperately trying to go home were even accosted by policemen who made them crawl on their knees, made them do sit-ups, and inflicted other illegal punishments as per their whim — for not obeying the lockdown — without a shred of empathy for their situation. The Indian police has a well-deserved reputation for sadism, and they again proved their character in this time of need for poor people.

Even before all this, as soon as wind of the impending lockdown came, people scrambled into buses and trains to take the next possible trip back to their hometowns. There was mass panic. If social distancing was the goal, then the sight of buses and trains packed like sardines was the very antithesis of this. But of course, one could argue that this was inevitable whenever a lockdown was announced. People will leave urban centres and go home. So we can consider that the lockdown did not begin on the 25^th of March in India, but on the 27^th or 28^th. Given the progress of the epidemic so far, this was extremely unfortunate, and will undoubtedly result in a huge spike in cases in a couple of weeks.

The exodus started even before the full lockdown of the country on March 25^th. There was first the one-day lockdown on March 22^nd, which people correctly guessed was a harbinger of the full-fledged lockdown. In addition, several states, such as Karnataka, had their own lockdowns which had come into force before the national lockdown. And there were measures taken even before those lockdowns, such as the notice sent by the Bangalore Municipal Corporation saying that it was not safe for people to stay in PG (Paying Guest) accommodations unless the PGs were following strict hygiene rules — which everyone knew they were not. All these actions, while necessary to contain the epidemic, also increased panic

Assume 50 long distance trains in those last few panic-filled days, each jam-packed with about 1500 passengers (that's a total of 75,000 people, which might be a gross under-estimate), spending 30 hours in close proximity to each other, and you have the perfect recipe for multiplication of cases for a highly contagious infection. For context, it is useful to know that the replication number, R0, which is a measure of how many people one infected person will infect in turn, is 2.38-3.28 for Covid-19, as opposed to 1.5 for Swine Flu. Add to this the hundreds of packed buses. So maybe a total of one lakh (100,000) travellers, traveling anywhere between 10 and 40 hours with others in cramped quarters and zero social distancing.

Now these people have gone back to their towns and villages and infected everyone around them, both during their journey home and after their return to their villages and towns.

We are staring at a human catastrophe in India. China, Italy, Spain, France, and the USA will soon be forgotten. We might just lose the older generation in India, given that the mortality rate of the virus for older people is nearly 15%.

For comparison, think of the event said to be responsible for the explosion of the virus in Italy and Spain - a football match between an Italian and a Spanish side on February 19, attended by about 40,000 spectators. At least all of them were in one place. Our carriers are now spread all over the country.

Inadequate Guidance About the Nature of the Lockdown

In his speech on the 25^th of March, Modi assured Indians that essential services would not be interrupted by the lockdown. But it was not clear from his speech how that would be possible, because he emphasized multiple times in the speech that no one was, under any circumstances, to leave the home. He left no room for exceptions in his speech. And people take what he says very seriously. His repeated exhortations to all Indians not to cross the invisible “Laxman rekha” (trans.“a line that must not be crossed”) drawn around their homes scared everyone and gave people the implicit message that no one should leave their homes, no matter what.

While Mr. Modi did say that essential services would not be disrupted, the strong emphasis on not leaving the home confused local law and order people, who were not sure whether citizens were allowed to walk on the streets or travel in their vehicles to go to grocery or medical stores and whether people should be allowed to deliver milk, vegetables, medicines, or groceries.

The result was that policemen started beating up people who even had legitimate reasons to be on the road. People who moved around to deliver milk, groceries, or medicines were beaten up by cops. Even today, on the 28^th, supply of essentials to the public is not properly in place. Even middle-class families are scared of going to shops to buy essentials, worrying about cops stopping them. Apps like BigBasket have stopped delivering food.

The situation is even more dire for poor families, who do not have any means of transport, and who will have to walk to get food and milk. Worse, they do not have money and cannot get it.

Inadequate Financial Help to Affected People

The government came out with what it called a Rs. 1.7 lakh crore (US $22 billion) relief package for the poor. What did it involve? Among other things, 5 kg of rice or wheat free to each person below the poverty line. But there are two problems with this scheme. One is the difficulty for poor people to go to the nearest ration shop, in the absence of any transport whatsoever. The other is the need for Aadhar (national ID) verification. This is a freebie, so shops have to ensure that nobody uses the benefit more than once. And so they will demand that people verify their identity using their fingerprints. Now we all know the problems with Aadhar. Often the fingerprints do not match (especially for older people), and often, in rural areas, internet connectivity is not very good. So if either of this is a problem for you, then you will not get your extra 5 kg, even if you somehow made it to the ration shop. The side-effect of all this is that the ration shops will have huge stocks of free grain which they will then divert and sell at full price. This is corruption enhancement at taxpayer expense.

The finance minister made the ludicrous statement that to help the poor, the government will give Rs. 500 (about $7) per month to each of 200 million women through their Jan Dhan bank accounts. How bad can tokenism be? You are trying to compensate a person for the lack of livelihood. Many of these daily-wage labourers earn around Rs. 300 a day. And you want to compensate them for the loss of employment for a month by paying them Rs. 500 a month? All this just to be able to tell the world that you have done something? This is, frankly, insulting to the poor. Another similar offering was a one-time, ex-gratia payment of Rs. 1000 to 30 million poor senior citizens, widows, and disabled people. It is too little to mean anything to anyone. And probably the amount of paperwork needed to collect it, along with the ban on transport, will mean very few actually take advantage of even this meagre payout.

Mismanagement of the Medical Aspects

With movement completely prohibited and no way for people without private transport to get anywhere, the numbers of new victims of the virus will not be known properly in the future. Even in normal times, Indians were reluctant to go to the hospital for any flu-like illness. With no way to go to the hospital, and fear of being beaten up, many will simply not report cases until it is too late. We may know about the progress of the Coronavirus epidemic in the future in India only from the deaths because of the lockdown.

The US, the most prosperous country in the world, with a highly developed healthcare system, is already breaking down with inadequate masks even for its doctors and inadequate ventilators for its patients. In Italy, hospitals have run out of room for their patients and temporary shelters are being set up outside hospitals.

With India's extremely poor health infrastructure, what horrors await us?

It might be instructive to look at what the government has done insofar as preparing for this pandemic is concerned, inasmuch as any preparation has been done. Let us first understand what we actually know about this virus from the experience of other countries.

How does this virus kill? It attacks the respiratory system. The patient finds it difficult to breathe. Thick mucus is secreted in the airways and collects in the lungs. This makes it harder and harder for the patient to breathe. The patient tries to cough to remove the fluid in his or her lungs. Because the patient’s lungs are filling with fluid rather than air, there is severe shortness of breath. The patient literally suffocates to death. What happens is that the virus leads to pneumonia that triggers acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which leads to death.

This is why the virus spreads through throat and nasal secretions. Those in close proximity to a patient or a passive carrier (one who has the virus but exhibits no symptoms) can get it from their nose and throat secretions, as when they cough or sneeze. If these nasal or throat secretions are left on surfaces, as might happen when a person covers their mouth while sneezing and then touches a railing, then anyone who touches the same railing and then touches their mouth or nose might get infected.

These facts tell us how to address the problems of transmission and treatment. Transmission is through aerial droplets from infected people. Therefore, the first line of defence for any medical professional who deals with Covid-19 patients is a face mask that can prevent the virus from reaching his or her nose or mouth. Similarly, so that a healthcare worker does not touch an infected droplet, he or she needs to use gloves while handling a patient.

Secondly, once a patient does get the virus, the key to the patient’s survival is to prevent pneumonia and ARDS. When a patient’s airways are blocked with fluid, he or she has difficulty getting enough oxygen, and so the solution is to have ventilators so that the patient can be given oxygen to survive.

What is India’s supply of face masks, gloves and ventilators, especially for medical professionals? Has the government secured enough of these items and prioritized them for the safety of medical professionals? There is no evidence to indicate that it has. In fact, it was only on March 20^th that the government even banned the export of face masks. There has been no attempt to secure face masks for the medical establishment in India in the likely scenario that the number of cases could exponentially rise. In fact, when the epidemic was raging in China, Indian manufacturers were eyeing a bonanza in exports to China, and the government seemed unconcerned that masks that might one day be vitally necessary were being exported to China. This is where alertness in a government is necessary, especially towards an impending national disaster.

What about ventilators? According to an article in The Print, India has about 40,000 ventilators, but this is expected to be woefully inadequate – when the infection goes through the roof, we may need about 100 times as many ventilators. What has the government done about this? Until very recently, nothing. As with everything else concerning Corona virus, the government woke up to the threat only now. On 27^th March, there was an announcement that Bharat Electronics (BEL) will be producing 30,000 ventilators. The company was only approached by the government on March 26th. The government also announced that it will be procuring another 10,000 ventilators from another (unspecified) PSU. Keep in mind that nothing has started; the production line has to be set up and manufacturing started, and all this could take a few months.

A private company, Skanray, has said that it will ramp up production and manufacture 100,000 ventilators in two months. This announcement was made just a few days ago. The problem is compounded by the fact that ventilator manufacturers import many of their parts, and most parts are not available today because other countries have imposed export restrictions on these components as they are battling with the virus themselves. This was, therefore, something that BEL should have been tasked with developing a month ago so that the indigenous technology was already available by the time the number of cases started rising. Another company, AgVa, a startup, has been approached by the government, again recently, and the company has said it will be able to provide 5000 ventilators by April 15. Looking at these numbers, it is clear that we are going to be woefully short of our needs when the situation escalates.

Let us look at gloves. As in the case of masks, Indian companies were happily exporting gloves to China in February, and the government was not concerned in the least. A Business Today report dated February 6 mentioned that although the government had enquired about the production capacity of Indian glove manufacturers, it had not asked them to ramp up production. On March 18, in a reply in the Lok Sabha, the government said that it had provided 15 tonnes of medical supplies to China worth Rs. 2.11 crores. As the report said, “Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said the medical supplies included one lakh surgical masks, five lakh pairs of surgical gloves, 75 pieces of infusion pumps, 30 pieces of enteral feeding pumps, 21 pieces of defibrillator and 4,000 pieces of N-95 masks.” Even on March 18, the government had not realized the seriousness of the situation. The government was trying to express solidarity with China, without realizing that within a month, India itself would desperately be needing those same supplies. And now, gloves are in extremely short supply all over the world as Malaysia, which manufactures 60% of the world supply of gloves, is under a shutdown.

All in all, this is a very sad and dangerous state of affairs. The central government seems to have woken up to the reality of the virus only a few days before PM Modi’s “Janata Curfew” call on March 22^nd, and seems to have started consulting experts and thinking about the problem only after that. Even an order on March 13^th including masks and sanitizers in the Essential Commodities Act was done thinking not about how we might need it for the fight in the hospitals and clinics against the Coronavirus epidemic, but rather to reduce prices for consumers who might want to buy these goods.

And this was despite the fact that on March 3^rd, the World Health Organization gave a warning to all countries that there was a looming shortage of medical equipment, and advised governments all over the world to increase production of such equipment by 40%. Modi obviously did not get the memo, even though it was reported in all the papers. Even before this, on January 30^th, the WHO declared the Coronavirus pandemic a global health emergency. But at the time, the PM and his government were not concerned about anything other than winning the 2020 Delhi assembly elections, which they lost nevertheless. A government's outcomes are directly proportional to its efforts.

What about tests? The government had, until recently, only permitted one company to provide it with tests for Covid-19. Which is this company? It is an Gujarat-based company called CoSara Diagnostics Private Limited, a US-India collaboration of US-based Co-Diagnostics, Inc. (CODX) and Synbiotics, Ltd., a division of the Ambalal Sarabhai group. A report in the Huffington Post said in this regard,

Earlier this month, at a public event in Utah, Co-Diagnostics Inc.’s head of business development, Joe Featherstone, said the company had devised the test in just seven days using advanced computer algorithms rather than the standard process of trial and error, which takes several weeks. Its India manufacturing partner, Synbiotics Ltd, has a track record of manufacturing anti-fungal medication, but no previous experience in making diagnostic kits.

An inspection of the company financials of CoSara and its American parent, CODX, suggests that the COVID-19 test would be CODX’s first ever commercially scaled diagnostic product and India, most likely, its first major market.

While the government has very recently (report dated March 27^th) allowed more companies to sell Covid-19 tests, most of them are from China, USA, Poland, and Germany. Only one Indian company, MyLab, was allowed to sell its kits in India. Kits made by thirteen other Indian companies were rejected by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR). This at a time when most countries, such as the US, recognize that one of the major problems is the lack of availability of test kits.

There is a reason why it is important to focus on masks, gloves, ventilators, and the like in terms of the needs of healthcare professionals rather than the common people. This is because when the cases start shooting up and patients start filling up hospital wards, the pressure will be on doctors, nurses, and other medical staff. They will need masks and gloves in abundance to treat the patients. These will run out very fast. They will need test kits to determine who has the virus and who has recovered. They will need ventilators to keep critically-ill patients alive. And if doctors and nurses do not have adequate personal protection equipment (PPE) such as masks and gloves, they will be exposing themselves to the virus. If that happens, many of them may simply not report for work rather than risk their lives. As it is, even with masks and gloves, the virus is infecting many medical professionals worldwide. To treat Coronavirus patients without PPE is to commit suicide.

How Bad is the Situation?

To understand how dangerous the spread of the virus in India was, I plotted the data of the number of cases in India versus the number of days on March 24, 2020, using data from covid19india.org, a crowdfunded initiative. The data was current until March 24. I have not updated this data since then, because once the lockdown is in force, it is my belief that reporting of illnesses will go down because of the inhibitory effect of the lockdown – no autos, buses, or taxis for a person to go visit his or her doctor if he is unwell. I expect a temporary reduction in the number of cases reported, and so I believe the data is only accurate up to March 24.

By plotting the data on a logarithmic scale, it can be seen that the relationship between the number of cases and time is exponential. What this means is that the infection has entered its exponential phase. From the data, it can be seen that the number of cases doubles in roughly 3.5 days. A simple extrapolation tells us that if the number of cases continues to multiply at this rate, we might be looking at more than 50,000 cases by 15^th April. The lockdown that is in place now should have a mitigating effect but, as has been seen in other countries, the effects of the transmission that has already taken place (as in the long bus and train journeys prior to the shutdown in India) will have a huge effect, and so cases will continue to rise for a significant period of time. A prime example of this is Spain, which imposed a complete lockdown on March 14^th; however, as of the date of writing (28^th March), deaths in Spain continue to skyrocket. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect that the number of cases and deaths in India, too, will keep rising even though a lockdown is in place.

Whether it will reach the 22 million cases by 15^th May that the chart shows depends partly on the discipline of Indians to maintain lockdown conditions for an extended period of time — again, given Spain’s experience, it is doubtful that the situation will resolve itself in 3 weeks of lockdown. One would expect the number of cases and deaths to continue rising even after April 15, but hopefully they will not reach the numbers that the extrapolation in the graph, which is based on no mitigation efforts such as social distancing, suggests.

Having said that, an important difference between India and Italy or Spain is the population density. While middle- and upper-class Indians live in comfortable homes that are well-separated and can therefore be socially distanced, most of India’s urban poor live in staggeringly crowded places, such as the famous Dharavi slum in Mumbai. People here have no option to socially distance. Often ten people live together in a 10 ft x 10 ft dwelling, and these dwellings are right next to each other, with just 6 feet distance between two rows of homes. If a single person gets infected in a slum like Dharavi, it is hard to see how the entire slum will not be infected. With so many infected people, and without room for them in hospitals, how long before the entire population is infected? Therefore, whether social distancing can be truly effective in slowing down the exponential rate of growth in a country with such densely populated clusters remains to be seen.

Was all this unavoidable? NO.

What would a more prepared and competent leader do?

What Could Have Been Done

The Coronavirus epidemic started in November 2019. That is why it is known as Covid-19, not Covid-20. The Indian government had a head start of four months before things became critical, as they did after March 15^th. But the current government and its leader were too busy dividing the country to think of saving it.

One criticism I often encounter when criticizing the government is, “all this is fine, but what else could they have done? Why don’t you tell us what you would have done better?” So, let us look at some of the things the government could have done, well before mid-March, that would have left our country a lot safer and with a lot less pain:

Place a restriction on the export of medical supplies, such as gloves, masks, and sanitizers.
Ask the major players in India's textile industry to start manufacturing masks.
Ask manufacturers to ramp up production of gloves.
Ask major Indian manufacturing establishments to start producing ventilators.
Arrange for more testing kits and approve more Indian companies that could manufacture Covid-19 test kits.
Impose a lockdown a month before it was actually imposed.
Inform the country two weeks in advance that the country is headed towards a lockdown, and assure them that there is no immediate danger, but that if there were no lockdown, it would get dangerous. This would allow migrant workers to take transport to their native places in an orderly way, and all this would have been done a long time before the virus had spread so much. This would have avoided any suffering.
Make it clear down the chain, from centre to state to city to town to village, that essential services are exempt from the lockdown; that no one is to harass delivery folks of medicines, groceries, milk, and the like.
Ensure that home delivery of all essentials would be fully operational at the time of the lockdown, by talking to the heads of various organizations that do home delivery, well before announcing the lockdown.
Two weeks before the lockdown, ask all daily wage labourers and other vulnerable groups to go to government offices and get a Rs. 5000 handout to sustain them for the next two months. Tell them also to pick up their 5 kg of free rice or wheat from the ration shops before it is officially unsafe to do so because of social distancing concerns.

Now that would have been a meaningful, well-thought-out response rather than the harebrained, knee-jerk, last-minute response from the government. But that would have required the government to fully think through all these possibilities well in advance of the crisis. With this government, that is like asking for the moon.

What we got instead was five minutes of cacophony at 5 pm on March 22^nd by a middle class that was delighted that they could feel good about themselves with just five minutes of empty symbolism. If Mr. Modi really did care about the medical fraternity, he should have provided the tools they are now going to need to fight this disease, not organize a silly and immature spectacle. As things stand, our poor doctors, nurses, interns, wardboys, and other medical professionals are woefully ill-equipped to handle a killer disease, and will be putting their own lives at risk, thanks to a government that has been asleep at the wheel.

Sunday, 25 October 2020

How Religious Intolerance in Hinduism is Different from Religious Intolerance in Christianity and Islam

Friday, 31 July 2020

Why Emphasizing Local Languages in the NEP is a Mistake

Sunday, 14 June 2020

Narendra Modi, The Anti-National

Sunday, 29 March 2020

Asleep at the Wheel – The Looming Coronavirus Catastrophe in India

My Blog List