Your daily dose of headlines:

Agriculture: The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in conjunction with academic institutions will begin providing district-specific agro-weather advisories to assist farmers in better managing their crops.

Basic Rights: Amnesty International has called the administration of the death penalty in India as being caprcious and arbitrary. The report claims that no real guideline exists upon review of Supreme Court cases.

Government: The Bangalore state government has established a Truth and Accountability Commission to give businessmen the opportunity to root out corruption occuring in business deals.

Here is the daily dose of headlines:

• Water supply: In Chennai, city officials have made it mandatory that buildings connected to the main water supply install meters to measure consumption.
• Government transparency: The Central Information Commission (CIC) will now require political parties to make their income tax returns available to the public. Sending the exact opposite message, the Lok Sabha may put forth measures to make it more difficult for the common citizen to access records relating to parliamentary proceedings. Moreover, the Chief Justice stated that the Supreme Court’s proceedings fall outside the ambit of the recently passed Right to Information act.
• Education: The creamy layer of OBC quotas will likely reflect preexisting norms used for central government employment. Along these lines, children, organized by NGOs, knocked on parliament’s door to deliver a petition addressed to the PM reminding him about the right to education for all.

• Food Shortage Crisis: Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said that the country has sufficient food to feed the people and that prices should reflect that soon. Sending conflicting signals, PM Singh may call a meeting with Chief Ministers on controlling prices. Shockingly, another article highlighted the extremely high amount of crops wasted annually — RS 55,600 Cr!
• Education and Quotas: Fresh off the recent Supreme Court case, the IIT’s have agreed on a plan to accept the 27% quota over three years. With regard to IIT’s, 3 new institutions are slated to open up this year.
• Civil Society, Peace and Rights: A roundtable has been called to increase democratic participation and wrest power away from the military actors in this area. In a related article, Muslims across India have held various forums for public discourse denouncing terrorism and voicing its incompatibility with Islam. In Mumbai, the High Court recognized the right for indigent and poor people to have legal counsel by dismissing the sentence against a man convicted for murder.
• Environment: Environmental groups have begun pressuring the World Bank to delay implementation of a new coal power plant. Also, in Kashmir the Wildlife Trust of India has developed ways to minimize human encroachment on native bears and also encourage greater conservation by residents. Also, five Indian coastal cities have joined Greenpeace’s efforts to call atention to global warming and the climate crisis.
• Health: Global perception of HIV/AIDS victims in the workplace appears to be improving. Along similar lines, the Government of India modified its drug policy focusing on prices and access.

• Clearly Reservations in India is making big news after the landmark Supreme Court Judgement on reservations. Atanu Dey has a great (but long) analysis of reservations in the Indian Education System (Part 1 of a multi-part series). If you want to learn more, I also recommend this for a detailed history of affirmative-action in India

• Doug from India Development Blog reports that IFMR Trust, BISWA, and Grameen Capital India Complete First of Its Kind Microfinance Loan Portfolio Restructuring. The complete post here
• In what seems like a fairly progressive move, The TamilNadu Governments is establishing a special welfare board for transgender individuals [via Chennai Online]. Of course, a Tamil Language cable TV channel recently launched Ippadikku Rose (Yours, Rose) the first TV show in the country to be hosted by a transgender individual.

Education is an issue that is overtaking the Indian news in the past week with the court ruling on the OBC quota in the higher education system. However, primary education is also in dire need of attention. Supreme Court judges recognize the importance of primary education and have put forth a variety of proposals:

Provision of financial incentive to low-income parents so that they can send their children to school.
Criminally penalise those who receive financial incentive yet do not send their wards to school.
Penalise employers who preclude children from attending schools.
Penalty should include imprisonment.

Justice Dalveer Bhandari observed that monetary fines and a patchwork of laws will not suffice in tackling the issue, and suggested an increase in the education budget along with the more comprehensive proposals listed above. However, universal primary education requires not only increased budgets and legislation, but also resources to implement the goal on the ground and mechanisms to enforce the legislation. If the government is able to pass comprehensive legislation, that is only the first, albeit necessary, step.

• India-Africa relations: India and Africa continue to take steps to improve cooperation over shared desires to have a seat on the UN Security Council.
• Health Technology: The first artificial heart transplant in all of Asia was conducted in Bangalore.
• Voting Technology: Bangalore’s state voting machines will now have the ability to vote using Braille for blind voters.
• Quotas: The Supreme Court is slated to decide on a law that would establish a 27% OBC quota in central educational institutions. Reaching our limits on this subject, we have another story on quotas. In Maharashtra, a workers union is demanding an 80% quota for Marathi-speaking locals in the private sector.
• Higher education: A previously planned joint endeavor between Japan and IIT-Bihar has fell through.

Update: A recent Times of India article discusses the actual effectiveness of the Public Interest Litigation provision and its current troubles. You can read the article here.

An NGO called Cancer Patient Aids Association (CPAA) has embarked on a campaign to mandate compulsory licensing for 20 different drugs used to treat cancer sufferers. These drugs include those manufactured by some of the largest pharma companies in the world, like Pfizer, Roche, and GSK. CPAA is an experience advocate for affordable medicines, and are building off of the momentum of their success from last year. The Economic Times of India reports:

CPAA was one of the healthcare groups in the forefront of the successful legal battle against Novartis’ Glivec last year. While the NGO plans to first approach the health ministry for invoking the CL provision, it is ready to go the Supreme Court if the government rejects to the demand.

Instead of taking a piecemeal approach of individual clients which is inefficient and cost prohibitive for most people, the NGO aims to take on the entire industry in one coordinated attack to require that pharma companies allow generics to produce these pills in India. The generic manufacturers would then pay royalties to the original pharma companies.

In order to achieve this strategy, the organization has framed their argument to say that the current high prices of these drugs is a violation to a constitutional right to life for the patients.

“There is no point in fighting patent cases for individual drugs. How many patents will we fight against? It is just unaffordable for patients to pay lakhs of rupees for these drugs, in addition to paying for other treatment and medicines. It’s an emergency situation when thousands of cancer patients are being denied their constitutional right to life. Hence, the government can invoke CL in the public interest, “ CPAA president Y K Sapru said.

This approach is interesting, because in India, such public interest litigation can be invoked by the Court itself and does not require that a specific party come to bar.

“Under the Indian Patent Act, all life-saving and essential drugs which are patented and expensive can be granted CL if it they are unavailable, unaffordable, for government’s use and for public non-commercial use. It is wrong to say that it can be granted only for extreme national urgency or in the case of emergency, “ MSF’s access campaigner in India, Leena Menghaney said.

[Source: NGO Post]

The answer, in terms of nutritional value for children, should be obvious.  However, in terms of government policy, the question is much more complicated.  Even policy-makers responsible for implementing the Mid-day Meal Scheme don’t seem to have any definite answers.  Why?  First, let me rewind.

In response to dwindling school enrollment rates and rising rates of malnutrition in children, the Indian government devised the Mid-day Meal Scheme, which is supposed to provide daily, nutritious cooked meals for attending students.  The government attests to the scheme’s effectiveness to date:

The government claims over 90% enrolment through the introduction of the midday meal scheme. [Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development], M. Fatmi said that, of these, 82.5% were in government schools. He added that since the launch of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, all out-of-school children in the 6-14 age-group had been brought into the fold of elementary education from the figure of 32 million in 2001-02.  

Despite these gains, however, problems persist.  A recent controversy in Madhya Pradesh regarding corruption paints a dismal scenario:

Regularity in serving mid-day meals is a major issue here. At some places there is shortage of food material, while at others the local PDS shop is not making food supplies available. At many places, suitable cooks are not available. In Rampur village of Kharwahi block in district Satna, children were not getting mid-day meals from January 2007. Similar is the situation in Kakarwaha, Binagar, and Suklai village of Tikamgarh and in Kot village of Athner block in Bhind district.

There’s more. At some places, there are allegations that teachers themselves earn money by selling mid-day meal supplies in the market, alleges Sachin Jain of Vikas Samvad, an NGO that has a substantive record of involvement in the state.

Now, that brings us back to our original question.  In response to rising inefficiency, corruption, and lack of fiscal, managerial, and human resources, the government has recently proposed that cooked meals be replaced with packaged food, i.e. biscuits.  They argue that packaged food will eliminate problems associated with the labour-intensive process of cooking food, and ensure that more children actually receive food as promised by the program.  I argue this is great for Parle, but bad for children.  Click “Read More” to find out why.

The objective of the Mid-day meal scheme is to provide children with nutritious food.  According to research, however, not only is packaged food less nutritious, but also more costly per unit:

A review of available evidence showed the value of cooked meals over dry rations or biscuits. Several studies have indicated that not only is the quality variable but the nutritional impact of dry snacks is also questionable. A fresh meal offers a better range of nutrients and is less costly in terms of per rupee nutrient yield, compared to packaged food.

Packaged food, therefore, should be served as supplementary to cooked meals, not as a substitute.  If, in accordance with the below 2001 Supreme Court ruling, policy-makers can find packaged food that is as inexpensive and nutritious as cooked food, the question is a more straightforward one. 

Every child [is] entitled to a cooked meal that has 300 calories and 8-12 gm of protein per day for a minimum of 200 days a year. Malnourished children [are] entitled to 600 calories and 16-20 gm of protein.

As things stand, however, our children deserve more than biscuits for lunch.  Rather than lowering the nutritional value of meals and raising prices, the government should be working with local government institutions, local NGOs, and community leaders to better implement the existing programme.  Or, as stated in a comment to this post, the government should build innovative partnerships with the private sector that capitalize on resources, distribution networks, and cutting-edge nutritional research in order to provide underprivileged children with the nutritious food they deserve to do well in school. 

• There is currently an ideological debate brewing in Bombay regarding the preservation of ancient structures versus urban modernization.  The building in question is the 139-year Crawford Market in Bombay, which is facing the threat of demolition by RNA Corp., a leading Bombay construction firm that hopes to replace the building with a high-rise.
• The Supreme Court of Delhi has established a five-person special investigation team (SIT) to re-investigate the post-Godhra communal riots.  The re-investigation was spurred by the National Human Rights Commission after newfound knowledge from the Tehelka sting operation, which alleged that state functionaries such as Narendra Modi abetted the post-Godhra riots. 
• Yahoo! Inc. and Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, are partnering up to support cloud computing research.  According to the article, “this effort is the first of its kind in terms of the size and scale of the machine, and the first in making available a supercomputer to academic institutions in India.”
• According to a recently released WHO report, India houses 20% of the world’s multiple drug resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) patients.  The report also reveals that India carries over one-third of the burden of TB globally.  Source: Howrah News Service