Prema Gopalan: A Tribute

Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 : Prema Gopalan, Executive Director of Swayam Shikshan Prayog received the Award of Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 from Prof. Klaus Martin Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum at the SEOY 2019 Award Ceremony held at Delhi on October 3 2019, awarded by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and Jubilant Bhartia Foundation. She was also one of the 40 awardees who have received the award for Social Innovation Driving Change and Transforming Society at the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit (SDI) held in New York on Sept 23, 2019  https://www.sspindia.org/awardsandrecognition/ 

'Social Entrepreneur of the Year' India 2008, Finalist Prema Gopalan Nov 24, 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6ntLf-9X0 
Founded by Prema Gopalan in 1994, Swayam Shiskshan Prayog (SSP) is building networks of rural social businesses that are co-created by private corporations and women survivors of disasters such as the 2004 Asian Tsunami and the Latur and Gujarat earthquakes (of 1993 and 2001 respectively). With the facilitation of SSP, networks of rural women entrepreneurs have launched retail businesses in renewable home energy products, home groceries and health funds in partnership with BP (previously known as British Petroleum), LIC and others.

Rural Community Leaders Combatting Climate Change  https://vimeo.com/227254208 Swayam Shikshan Prayog, an Indian NGO, trains rural women in entrepreneurship and builds their capacities for marketing clean-energy projects in their communities. Currently, an active network of 1,100 women entrepreneurs is working across 8 districts in India. The women provide a complete ‘ecosystem’ approach as clean-technology users, educators, providers and supporters in their communities, which helps make it easier for people to adopt energy-efficient technologies and products that address climate change.

SSP functions as an “umbrella” organization, a consortium of four social enterprises to execute its activities on-ground. These social enterprises collaborate to form an enabling ecosystem for women entrepreneurs.

Through our entities, SSP builds women-led rural markets at three levels:
• We make women part of the rural economy through business-coaching.
• We extend monetary support to rural women foraying into entrepreneurship.
• We create a network of these women entrepreneurs to scale their operations through strategic partnerships between corporate and local women entrepreneurs.

Our entities function independently as sustainable enterprises, managed by CEOs at the helm of business development and operations.

Supporters of the Three Farm Laws? Statistics ?

'Silent Majority' Supported the Three Farm Laws: SC-Appointed Committee Report https://thewire.in/agriculture/farm-laws-supreme-court-committee-report-released Anil Ghanwant, one of the three members of the committee, made the report public on Monday.

Statiscally, an overwhelming 85.7% of the farmer organisations the committee directly interacted with lent support to the three controversial farm laws. 

Out of the 266 farmer organisations to whom invitations were sent, the committee could directly interact with only 73 organisations. The report claims that out of these 73 organisations, 61 organisations (85.7%) representing over 3.3 crore farmers fully supported the laws. Four farmers’ organisations, representing 51 lakh farmers (13.3%), did not support the Act. Another seven farmer organisations, representing 3.6 lakh farmers (1%) supported the Acts with some suggestions for modifications. Further, Ghanwat said the 40 unions, which had organised agitations against the laws under the banner of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), did not make any submission despite repeated requests.

Ghanwat said the 40 unions, which had organised agitations against the laws under the banner of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), did not make any submission despite repeated requests. However, their concerns, as ascertained from media reports and interactions with Government, have been kept in mind by the Committee, while formulating its recommendations,” the report reads, according to the Indian Express.

Comment: But their concerns where not included in the headline,  of the same story.. So going by Ghamwat's stat of 266 farmers who were contacted on 61 organisation came back with a support for the three laws..  means that more than two thirds of farmers organisations boycotted the questionnaire. The report then has an online opinion poll, which asks leading questions.. and of course they say that two third support the black laws. They ignore that fact that while the black laws may enable some thing, it disables and makes difficult hitherto beneficial provisions. It pretends that the only way to be more free and give more options to the farmers is to allow all kinds of elements, like corporates to have a role.. It ignores the responsibility of the State to facilitate good cooperative systems.....

'73 में से 61 किसान संगठन कानून के साथ', SC की बनाई Committee ने किया बड़ा दावा | 5 Ki Baat  Mar 22, 2022
एक साल तक देश की राजधानी की सीमाओं पर कृषि कानूनों के खिलाफ किसान आंदोलन चला. फिर ठीक चुनावों से पहले कानून रद्द कर दिए गए. एक साल तक इन कानूनों की समीक्षा के लिए सुप्रीम कोर्ट की बनाई कमेटी कि रिपोर्ट अदालत के पास रही. उसे ना तो सार्वजनिक किया गया, ना उस पर कोई कार्रवाई हुई.

'जब आंदोलनकारी संगठनों से बात नहीं की गई, तो ये संगठन कौन थे?': किसान नेता Yogendra Yadav 
Mar 22, 2022

सुप्रीम कोर्ट (Supreme Court) की कमेटी और उसके रिपोर्ट पर सवाल खड़े करते हुए किसान नेता योगेंद्र यादव (Yogendra Yadav) ने NDTV से कहा कि, 'सबसे बड़ा सवाल ये है कि आंदोलनकारी संगठनों से बात नहीं की गई. ऐसे में ये 73 संगठन कौन थे, जिनसे बात की गई? कम से कम इस बात से पर्दा तो उठा.'

Comments: AA.. Avik Saha's talk on the report of the committee, I listened to. (In English). He said the committee has gone beyond it's mandate from the Supreme court and made 2 recommendations. 1) Cut down procurement for MSP and 2) Dismantle the PDS and give DBT to ration card holders. If true, these two measures will seriously damage food security.

Merit v/s reservations SC judgement

Why the Supreme Court now thinks it was wrong to claim that reservations undermine the idea of merit  Umang Poddar Jan 27, 2022   https://scroll.in/article/1015729/why-the-supreme-court-now-thinks-it-was-wrong-to-claim-that-reservations-undermine-the-idea-of-merit 
The Supreme Court recently upheld 27% OBC reservations in the All India Quota seats of NEET UG and PG Exams.     the court said that although many want to draw a binary between merit and reservation to say that “reservation is antithetical to establishing meritocracy”, merit “cannot be separated” from existing inequalities in society. The court said that even the drafters of the Constitution recognised this and wanted the idea of social justice to be taken into account while promising equality of opportunity. Finally, it said that backwardness does not disappear merely because a candidate has graduated. While graduation may provide certain “social and economic mobility”, that does not create “parity between forward classes and backward classes”.

Full text of judgement available at:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/13PU9PuLGdk3mqrsBNeSoCvgZ5UDlno77/view ( courtesy the print.in )

Interrogating the false merit-reservation binary https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/interrogating-the-false-merit-reservation-binary/article38379295.ece Yogendra Yadav Prannv Dhawan February 05, 2022 00:02 IST
 February 05, 2022 
The Supreme Court’s recent order advances an interpretation that is consistent with the ideals of equality, social justice

The Supreme Court of India’s recent ruling on an all India quota deserves closer attention for a reason other than its impact on post graduate medical admissions.

WESTERN STRATEGIC THINKERS WHO HAD WARNED OF UKRAINIAN CONFLICT

A Criminal Comedy of Suicidal Errors

WESTERN STRATEGIC THINKERS WHO HAD WARNED OF UKRAINIAN CONFLICT (a compilation by @RnaudBertrand) https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592 

Read more ...

Poverty, Hunger and Disability: The Missing Link

Poverty, Hunger and Disability: The Missing Link  

Webinar organised by Disability & Development Consortium 9th Feb 2022

Video Report:  Each Talk presented seperately 

Disability & Development Consortium sets the tone  https://youtu.be/_tX4epzOJG4 

Moderator: Akhil Paul, Sense International India;  Welcome: Ms. Kiran Patidar; Keynote 1: B. Venkatesh; Keynote 2: Arman Ali

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Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society

Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society - Webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmA1rIFKBGU  Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung India Jan 27, 2022  Rajni Bakshi , (Journalist/Writer), Kanchi Kohli, (Senior Researcher @Centre for Policy Research), Dolly Kikon, (Anthropologist @University of Melbourne)

Dossier - Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society, bringing together different approaches and perspectives to infrastructure development in India.  https://in.boell.org/en/investigating-infrastructure-ecology-sustainability-and-society 

Project potential and sustainability is in question. In the public debate are the extreme and unviable forms of infrastructure financing with a dependence on controversial models such as public-private partnerships. Then, there is a critique of the enormous scale and the extreme ‘kind’ of capitalist production and consumption promoted by ‘big-infra’ as ‘race to the bottom’. The elitist top-down politics in the planning and governance of massive projects has been known to sideline democratic local processes. There is fear of regulatory dismantling and harmonization of policies and of technological ‘lock-ins’. Not in adequate focus, and thus increasingly given short shrift are land, livelihoods, environmental and social impacts. Local concerns over these now plague India’s infrastructure landscape resulting in project disruptions and disputes.

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For an alternative paradigm of development https://in.boell.org/en/2019/02/25/alternative-paradigm-development  By Rajni Bakshi  25 February 2019 In terms of tangible steps forward, perhaps, the most notable one is to make regeneration of local economies the cornerstone of Sarvodaya.

The emerging discourse on ‘Degrowth’ calls for a new framework in which the emphasis shifts from gross domestic product (GDP) to that which generates actual social, material and ecological well-being. It also prioritises the values of sufficiency and subsistence rather than equating development with the fulfilment of endless wants.

Degrowth or re-growth has broadly five dimensions:

Development is equated with actual well-being, not just throughput of materials

Steady-state economics are prioritised, instead of systems in which growth is a survival imperative

The aim is to foster a solidarity economy through sharing and cooperation so that the same resources can serve far more people

Consumption is reconfigured to make more judicious use of resources with social pressure and laws to discourage or prevent business models based on planned obsolescence. Instead products are designed to last and be reused.

Value is redefined so that the value of anything is not just what it is worth to a potential buyer in monetary terms, but rather in terms of the actual well-being it generates immediately as well as in the long term.

‘Indianisation’ of country’s legal system

CJI N V Ramana calls for ‘Indianisation’ of country’s legal system  https://indianexpress.com/article/india/justice-system-colonial-not-suited-for-indian-population-says-cji-7517470/

“When I say Indianisation, I mean the need to adapt to the practical realities of our society and localise our justice delivery systems. For example, parties from a rural place fighting a family dispute are usually made to feel out of place in the court. They do not understand the arguments or pleadings which are mostly in English, a language alien to them. These days, judgments have become lengthy, which further complicates the position of litigants. For the parties to understand the implications of a judgment, they are forced to spend more money” .

The CJI stated that it is the duty of lawyers and judges to create an environment that is comforting for the litigants and other stakeholders. “We must not forget that the focal point of any justice delivery system is ‘the litigant-the justice seeker’,” he said, adding that “in this light, usage of alternate dispute mechanism such as mediation and conciliation would go a long way in reducing the friction between parties and would save resources. This also reduces the pendency and requirement for having lengthy arguments with lengthy judgments”.

Comment: Beyond pious words, the SC can easily lay down guidelines for recording and storing at the Panchyat level including some minimum information on the data and documents, oral testimony at any alternative dispute mechanism including Khaps.  This will help litigants to approah the higher courts if needed, at the same time record their receipt of the verdicts.

Indian Judiciary: Chalenges of Future

CJI: Executive’s tendency to ignore court orders a worry    Dhananjay Mahapatra / TNN / Dec 27, 2021,

unless there is cooperation and assistance from both the executive and legislature, justice to people cannot be ensured by the judiciary single-handedly.

 “A popular majority is not a defence for arbitrary actions taken by a government. Every action is mandatorily required to comply with the Constitution. If the judiciary does not have the power of judicial review, then the functioning of democracy in this country would be unthinkable.”

“Courts do not have the power of the purse or the sword. Court orders are only good when they get executed. The executive needs to assist and cooperate for the rule of law to prevail in the nation. However, there appears to be a growing tendency to disregard, and even disrespect court orders by the executive,” the CJI said.

“There is a need to liberate the institution of public prosecutors. Total independence must be granted to them and to make them answerable only to the courts. Historically, prosecutors in India have been under the control of the government. Hence it is not a surprise that they do not act independently. They do nothing to prevent frivolous and non-deserving cases from reaching the courts,” he said.

Full lecture: https://www.youtube.com/embed/5f15_-vtz4E?start=1565&end=3185 &

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5f15_-vtz4E?start=4058&end=17549  

Comment.

Farmers, Economists & Democracy

Farmers, Economists & Democracy ||| Parakala Prabhakar Dec 22, 2021

There is an insidious project underway with regard to the now repealed Farm Laws. The ruling party, an influential section of our economists, a large and vocal section of the urban middle class, and the mainstream media are stealthily, but effectively, pushing a narrative. In this Episode Dr Parakala interrogates this narrative and shows that the farm laws are merely aimed at accelerating market dynamics in the sector without addressing the core issues that plague the agriculture sector in the country. And shows how this narrative's understanding of agriculture merely as an economic sector, the peasant as only an economic actor and food as nothing but a tradable a commodity is completely flawed.