Maternity benefits or jobs
Bina Aggarwal writes in her article for The Indian Express that will the government’s efforts to extend paid maternity leave in the formal sector benefit women, or cause a backlash from employers, further undermining Indian women’s job prospects? Is a trade-off inevitable or is there another path? And what about informal sector workers?
In India, where barely 6.5 per cent of women are in the formal sector, it will be disastrous if extended maternity leave further deters employers from hiring women. We need more jobs precisely in this sector, as more young educated women join the workforce. Already, we have falling female labour participation, especially due to inadequate jobs for women. Can we afford a further decline? What is the way out? I believe we need more comprehensive and gender-balanced measures.
In India, at the very least, childcare centres should be the joint responsibility of government and private employers. The latter should also try collective solutions. “Children are public goods”, as one feminist economist put it. It is surely a joint social responsibility (and not just the mother’s) to ensure that children do not turn out to be public bads!
India’s Social-Media Lynch Mobs
Shashi Tharoor, in his column for Project Syndicate writes that over the last decade, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has cultivated an army of cyber warriors to propagate its message of Hindu chauvinism and hyper-nationalism – and to launch vicious attacks on its opponents. Now, a BJP leader has become a victim of the party’s own monster.
This cyber army now amounts to a well-oiled machine with a formidable presence on Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, cyber cells of well-paid trolls, each operating multiple accounts, have been established in India and abroad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women – including journalists and political activists – are favorite targets of the BJP’s trolls, who not only question their morals and disparage their looks, but routinely issue rape threats.
Social media, by nature, rewards speed and sensationalism, not verification and caution. Even when the truth does come out, it rarely makes it as far as fast as the lie did. There is no easy solution: a wave of regulation could open the way for censorship of free expression on other media. But, now that one of the BJP’s own has become a victim of the monster the party created, maybe it will recognize that there is a problem.
Tharoor Is Right In His Comments On Hindu Pakistan
In his column for NDTV, Ashutosh says that Is Shashi Tharoor wrong in saying that the BJP is turning India into a Hindu Pakistan? Is he wrong in saying that the BJP will change the constitution? Should Shashi Tharoor regret his statement? Should Rahul Gandhi apologise for Shashi Tharoor? Will his statements be exploited by the BJP/RSS to polarise society on religious lines?
As a political activist, I fail to understand why there should be a hungama over his statements. India is a democratic society and Tharoor has every right to assess, analyse and offer his inference about the regime which is in power in India. He has not abused anybody like Hindutva forces do on a daily basis, he has simply drawn an analogy and spoken his mind. Shashi Tharoor is not only an active politician but a well-read man, an intellectual who has written many books in the past, the most recent on Hinduism.
In the last four years, India has taken a dangerous turn. Is it not true that since 2014, minorities are systematically targeted? Mob lynching of Muslims in the name of cow protection has become rampant.
Yes, the time has to come call a spade a spade. The effort is on to make India a theological state, the Hindu Rashtra. That project was designed in 1925 when the RSS was founded, it can be achieved only by suppressing all kinds of views and ideologies different from theirs, just like what happened in Pakistan and by trampling over the constitution of India. Tharoor, you are right.
Who’s watching the regulator?
UGC has outlived its use, says Sudhir Vohra in his column for The Indian Express, but so have councils that regulate professional education and practice. These, too, cry for reform. Last week, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) released its draft of the proposed Higher Education Commission of India Act (HECI).
While one of the objectives of this legislation is to replace the UGC Act — and that is, perhaps, a welcome move considering that the UGC had not really covered itself with glory since its inception — there are many other reforms which need to be done if the system is to be cleansed and made more relevant. Can the dozen odd professional councils that exist due to parliamentary statutes be allowed to perform their duties without being regulated by a super regulator? Have they been able to achieve the objectives of either maintaining standards of education or of professional conduct of their registered members?
The answer to these two is obvious. Most councils have reduced themselves into self-serving clubs, much like many of our other so-called autonomous organisations, and have forgotten that their original mandate was to serve the common public good, not the good of their own brethren.
Test the concrete, not the ingredients, nor the cement. Test whether the professional who emerges from an institution is worthy of being permitted to practise a profession. And that testing should be done by an independent separate body, not the HECI or the councils that regulate professional conduct, but another higher body that remains at arm’s length from both the educationists and the professional regulators. Separate the wheat from the chaff.