Curious Bends – India’s business-friendly budget, vanishing women farmers, a water-supply scare and more

1. For its ignorance of human capital, the 2015 Budget was a step back into the Third World

“Oddly, the recent Budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) junks these insights and goes back to the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, when growth and development sounded synonymous, physical capital was thought to be the key, and human capital took a back seat. Growth, we are told, is the overriding objective of economic policy — the rest will follow. And the key to growth is “infrastructure” — or rather, a certain kind of infrastructure that the corporate sector supports. Further, infrastructural investment has to be done mainly by the government. So, public investment in infrastructure (mainly roads and railways, à la Nehru) gets huge funds, and most other things get squeezed with the notable exception of defence. Health and education, in particular, receive unprecedented shock treatment.” (7 min read, thehindu.com)

+ The author, Jean Drèze, is a noted economist who conceptualised and drafted the first version of the NREGA.

2. Budget cuts by Modi could boost five water-borne diseases

“With India struggling with an old and continuing health crisis, there were hopes that healthcare spending would be boosted, but the healthcare budget was cut by 15%, as IndiaSpend reported. The National Rural Drinking Water Program (NRDWP) – launched in 2009 – was allocated Rs 11,000 crore in 2013-14. When it took charge in May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government cut funding to Rs 3,600 crore for a programme that aims to provide safe drinking water to 20,000 villages and hamlets across India.” (3 min read, scroll.in)

3. India’s science budget has done nothing more than keep pace with inflation

“”What we have in this budget is inflation-adjusted funds,” says Dheeraj Sanghi, a computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He says that Indian science departments need at least a 14–15% increase in funds each year. That would take into account the national rate of inflation, aspirations for high-quality research, and the need for more grants to fund research at the increasing number of elite centres in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) group, he says.” (4 min read, nature.com)

4. In the last few years, more than 93,000 springs have disappeared in Mongolia. This photo series explores the impact on its nomads.

“Korean photographer Daesung Lee’s remarkable series Futuristic Archaeology explores what the desertification of their home means for Mongolian nomads through a series of fantastically staged images. They feature landscapes-within-landscapes — barren, desert environments inlaid with decidedly greener ones. These incredible scenes aren’t digitally orchestrated: Lee actually printed out billboard-sized photographs and strung them up on site, using former nomads as models. Inside the smaller images, people ride horses, herd goats, and go about their lives fenced in by red rope barriers.” (3 min read, hyperallergic.com)

5. India’s women farmers work with little or no help from the men, and rarely count in discussions of agriculture

“When she gets home from work, Shyampati grazes the family’s buffalo and four goats for an hour, cuts fodder and brings it home. Before and after these tasks, she cooks for the family. Her daughter helps with the utensils and clothes. Shyampati’s profession varies, depending on the work she gets, and life for India’s rural multitaskers only gets more difficult. In visuals of Indian villages, in stories about rural India, in news clips about farmer suicides or about farmers coming together to demand their rights, women seldom feature.” (6 min read, indiaspend.com)

Chart of the week

“The report states that with more than half of India’s total area is facing high to extremely high stress, almost 600 million people are at higher risk of surface-water supply disruptions. Shrinking supply might have serious ramifications for the country’s agriculture sector which uses 90% of the available water. While the current situation looks quite grim, there is a possibility that it can get worse. Water supply is expected to fall 50% below demand by 2030.” Qz.com has the details.

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Caste, healthcare and statistics

In late November 2014, the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial calling for the end of casteism in India to mitigate the deteriorating health of the millions of rural poor, if nothing else. The central argument was that caste was hampering access to healthcare services. Caste has been blamed for hampering many things. As Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze write in An Uncertain Glory (2014), “… caste continues to be an important instrument of power in Indian society, even where the caste system has lost some of its earlier barbarity and brutality”.

To append healthcare to that list wasn’t a big leap because casteism in India has had a tendency to graduate access to the fundamental rights even. The editorial cites a lecture that the social activist Arundhati Roy gave last year, during which she mentions the example of a doctor who wouldn’t treat a patient because the latter is of a lower caste. At the same time, the appending had to be a controversial leap because it implies that those who are responsible for the ineffectual provision of healthcare services could in some way be ignoring – or even abetting – casteist practices.

Anyway, three responses to the editorial (whose links are available on the same page) provide some clarity on how caste contributes directly and indirectly to the country’s distinct health problems by interfering in unique ways with our class divisions, economic conditions and social inequalities. They can be broadly grouped as age, inheritance and wealth.

1. Age

The first letter argues that the health effects of caste are best diagnosed among older people, who have been exposed to poverty and the effects of caste for a lifetime. Citing this study (PDF), the correspondents write:

The study reported that several health measures, including self-rated overall general health, disability, and presence of a chronic disorder, are similar between scheduled tribes, scheduled castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras in people aged 18–49 years. However, people aged 50 years and older in scheduled tribes and castes were reported as having poorer self-rated health and generally higher levels of disability than those in less impoverished groups, which suggests that the longer the exposure to poverty, the greater the effect on the ageing process.

However, there is an obvious problem in assessing older people and attributing health concerns unique to their age to a single agent. Hindus, who comprise the religious majority in India, traditionally revere their elders. The young are openly expected to ensure that their elders’ economic security and social dignity are not significantly diminished once they retire from full-time employment. Such promises on the other hand are not prevalent in other religious groups. To be sure, that “longer exposure to poverty leads to more health drawbacks” is not entirely flawed but the intensity of its effects may be confounded by traditional values.

2. Inheritance

A paragraph from the second letter reads,

People should only marry within their caste, which can lead to consanguinity. This antiquated tradition has resulted in an unusually high prevalence of specific autosomal recessive diseases in specific community or caste populations, such as diabetes, hypertension, ischaemic heart disease, mental impairments, mental illness, spinocerebellar ataxia, thalassaemia, and sickle-cell diseases.

While increasing literacy rates, especially among the younger age groups, are likely to reduce caste gaps in literacy over this decade, caste seems to have left some population groups with an unenviable inheritance: of the effects of detrimental biological practices. One of the studies the letter’s authors cite provides a p-value of 0.01 for consanguinity being a determinant of diabetic retinopathy (that’s strong evidence). And inter/intra-caste marriages are a prominent feature among caste-based social groups.

3. Wealth

The author of the third piece of correspondence is disappointed that The Lancet saw fit to think dismal healthcare has anything to do with caste, and then adds that the principal determinant across all castes is economic status (on the basis of a 2010 IIPS study). In doing so, two aspects of the caste-healthcare association are thrown up. First, that casteism’s effects are most pronounced on the economic statuses of those victimized by its practice, and that is one way of understanding its effects on access to reliable healthcare. Second, that the statistical knife cuts the other way, too: how do you attribute an effect to caste when it could just as well be due to a failure of some other system?