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The Daily Janchetna

Year11, Issue:5, Friday, Nov.6,2020.

. Message of the Day .

This is, indeed, the sternest reality of human life that an individual has no assent in his birth. He is an outcome of the fulfillment of emotional needs and future planning of his parents. His will does not prevail even in his bringing up. Cultural background of the family, availability of resources and prevailing social environment are the major contributors in his bringing up. And once, he becomes an adult, he is supposed to toil hard to earn livelihood for his survival and follow the norms set by the society throughout his life. The society denies him even of the right to end his life. He is liable to be punished for the attempt to commit suicide. In simple words, he is a hapless victim of different forces at different levels of life from his birth to death and has to dance, willingly or unwillingly, to the tune of the society.

. History of the Day .

On June 12, as the National Assembly (known as the National Constituent Assembly during its work on a constitution) continued to meet at Versailles, fear and violence consumed the capital. Though enthusiastic about the recent breakdown of royal power, Parisians grew panicked as rumors of an impending military coup began to circulate. A popular insurgency culminated on July 14 when rioters stormed the Bastille fortress in an attempt to secure gunpowder and weapons; many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.

. Today’s History .

6th November

Important Events:

2010 — Siddhartha Shankar Ray passed away.

1985 — Sanjeev Kumar, Hindi film actor, passed away . 

Mahatma Gandhi arrested In South Africa

The shy 23-year-old Indian lawyer who landed in the South African port city of Durban in 1893 was unsure of what the future held for him, and there was little in his personality to suggest that he had the leadership skills to lead a mass movement. Yet, more than 20 years later, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India, he was a fully-formed leader, supremely confident about his moral philosophy, and ready to take his country down the road to freedom.

All his ideals that became buzzwords during the Indian freedom struggle —satyagraha, non-violence, truth—were first practised and perfected in South Africa.

When Gandhi was arrested in South Africa for leading a miners’ march, it was one of the several struggles and protest movements that he launched there.

Early on, in what is now a well-known incident, he was forcibly removed from a carriage meant exclusively for whites, on June 7, 1893, on a train in Pietermaritzburg, for disobeying race-segregation laws. Sitting in the waiting room, shivering in the bitter cold, not knowing where his luggage was, he weighed his options: “Two courses were open to me. I might either free myself from the contract with Messrs Dada Abdulla on the ground that circumstances had come to my knowledge which had not been disclosed to me before, and run back to India. Or I might bear all hardships and fulfil my engagement . . .,” he later wrote. “Sleep was out of the question. Doubt took possession of my mind. Late at night, I came to the conclusion that to run back to India would be cowardly. I must accomplish what I had undertaken.”

Though at that point of time his goals were narrowly focused on his firm’s court cases, this first-hand experience of racial discrimination and his determination to “bear all hardships” and not “run back” foreshadowed his later involvement in anti-discrimination campaigns.

He helped establish the Natal Indian Congress in 1894. Barely three years after he arrived in South Africa, Gandhi had become a political leader and community organiser, a pivot around which Indians who lacked political rights began to rally. In 1903, he launched the newspaper Indian Opinion to express his goals and opinions. It was perhaps here that he first articulated his views on ‘passive resistance’ or satyagraha.

In the early 1900s, segregation affected where Indians could stay or find employment, and they were also compelled to pay a £3 poll tax. The Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance that was introduced some years later required all Indians in the Transvaal to carry a pass, among other repressive measures. Gandhi led some 3,000 Indians in protest against this Act, in what was known as the 1906 satyagraha campaign, and marks the beginning of his passive-resistance movement.

He was later quoted as saying: “My people were excited . . . I had then to choose between allying myself to violence or finding out some other method . . . and it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrading and let them put us in jail if they liked. Thus came into being the moral equivalent of war.”

The Indian community largely followed Gandhi’s plan, and the struggle against the Act continued for over six years. During this period, thousands of Indians were put in jail and brutally suppressed though they only followed non-violent forms of resistance. The South African regime later sought to reach a comprise with Gandhi.

To protest a tax imposed on former indentured labourers, Gandhi led a march of mine workers on November 6, 1913. He was arrested. On securing bail, he rejoined the march and was again arrested. But eventually, Gandhi’s side won. The Indian Relief Bill was dropped.

Leading Indians in South Africa to protest against injustice was, however, only part of Gandhi’s learning curve. He also realised how diverse the Indian community in South Africa was, and the importance of creating spaces that were open to all people, irrespective of religion, caste or creed. These experiences provided him a template for the long struggle that lay ahead in India.

As historian Ramachandra Guha writes in his 2013 book Gandhi before India: “Many years later, reflecting on his South African experience, Gandhi remembered that the

residents of Phoenix and Tolstoy farms were, in religious terms, Hindus of different castes, Sunnis and Shias, Protestants and Catholics, Parsis and Jews. The professions they had previously practised included architecture, journalism, the law and trade. They now submerged their faiths and their qualifications in the common work of printing, gardening, carpentry and house-building. And so, as Gandhi recalled, the ‘practice of truth and non-violence melted religious differences, and we learnt to see beauty in each religion’.”  

South Africa was thus a great laboratory for Gandhi and his experiments with truth. The young man who went to South Africa to try his luck as a lawyer, ended up learning the art of satyagraha, and returned to his own land a mahatma.

. Current .

India's quest for skills

A couple of years ago, in a moment of heroic idealism, I volunteered to teach algebra to Class VIII students in a neighbourhood school, a few yards away from where I live, in Colaba, Mumbai. A sizeable proportion of the children in the class were sons and daughters of fishermen working off the nearby Sasoon Docks.

 My lasting memory of this brief episode (alas, work-related travel put an end to my attempt at heroic idealism) was the raw talent of these children and their eagerness to learn.

If any of them had been born into middle class families such as mine they would have been the front runners for IITs and IIMs.

Regrettably, many of my students get pulled out of school to start earning money to support their families in jobs such as delivery boys or maids.

None of this would come as a revelation to anyone. You are merely recounting all that we all know, is likely to be the reaction.

And in the next breath, we are likely to hear a recommendation that the real solution to such issues is to have a vocational education system.

Train these children in some skills that will let them earn a decent living because what is the point of them pushing on and earning a three-year college degree -- they still won't be able to earn a living.

Except that a decade or so of attempting to do skill-building programmes with most states and the central government naming dedicated departments and ministers tasked with skill-building, there doesn't seem to be much to show.

Committees have met and drawn up lists of skill-based jobs that will be in demand in the future, curricula have been drawn up to impart such skills.

Many companies such as Siemens and L&T have been making valiant efforts, but compared to the scale at which India need such skill training such efforts don't seem to make a dent: Many millions of Indian kids are streaming out of middle and high school, and the efforts so far is at best in the thousands.

I checked the other day with a group of deep-thinking people who have been making valiant efforts in this field. One of them told me something that is still ringing in my head.

'Doing things with your hands and being praised when you do a good job, for example, of fixing a broken window, starts from childhood in countries like Germany," he said. Children grow up in a culture where such skills are admired and praised even among white-collar middle class parents.

Such a culture in society is the key to vocational education and skill-based jobs being valued.

In India, for some inexplicable reason, societal aspiration is for 'office jobs', jobs where you sit at a desk and work with pen and paper, or its modern variant, a computer keyboard.

The social dynamics of a country can never be divorced from the goings-on within the educational system. I got a first-hand experience of this when I immersed myself in studying the functioning of polytechnics in eastern India.

Indian polytechnics are often criticised for not producing graduates with in-depth skills and I realised why: Social pressure from parents of children who could not gain entrance to engineering colleges resulted in a quota for polytechnic students to enter engineering colleges laterally.

This resulted in polytechnics changing their curricula to mimic that of engineering colleges so that polytechnic students when they entered engineering colleges through this lateral entry scheme would be able to cope.

This, of course, results in no time being available for the one who continue on in polytechnics to have any skill-based courses.

Kathleen Thelen, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, in her book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, describes the processes at work in society in Germany, where a flourishing vocational education system exists, and England, where no vocational education system has taken root in spite of valiant efforts like what is going on in India now.

Britain's chronic undersupply of training goes back to what economists call 'free-rider' problem: In a country where skilled people are in short supply, if one firm has a high-quality skill training programme, others will pinch their employees and thus get a 'free ride'.

Britain thus got into a vicious circle in which dearth of skills in the economy encouraged firms to pursue product strategies premised on low skills, which in turn discouraged investments in skills, and so on, she says.

Ms Thelen quotes the sociologist Gary Becker as saying that skills are of two types: 'Specific skills', which are specific to a firm, and 'general skills', which are transportable across companies and employers.

When companies do skill training they will have little incentive to impart 'general skills'. 'Specific skills', on the other hand, are completely non-transportable and have value only for that particular firm.

You can now also see why depending on companies to impart skills training may not solve the economy-wide skill-deficit problem. In liberal market economies, says Ms Thelen, there are high incentives for young people to acquire skills that are generally marketable rather than acquiring skills that are industry or firm specific.

Even whether new technologies get developed has a link to society and social structure.

A large domestic market, and absence of a skill-development regime, has historically driven American businesses to standardise their products and search for skill-displacing technologies.

It is happening even today.

. Informative .

'CAG report ruined lives,

destroyed reputations'

'As someone who had the opportunity of cross examining Vinod Rai, extensively over three days as part of the Joint Parliamentary Committee, many of us included I had concluded at that point of time that this report rests on the foundation of sand.'

Manish Tewari, information and broadcasting minister in the United Progressive Alliance government and a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee that examined matters relating to allocation and pricing of telecom licences and spectrum, tells Aditi Phadnis that the implications of the 2G spectrum judgment are huge.

How should we see the 2G spectrum judgment?

The clear conclusion of the trial court is that the decision-making process wasn't actuated by any kind of mala fides or any kind of pecuniary benefit to any of the accused.

But the Supreme Court has already thrown out the allocation of licences in an earlier order based on procedural infirmities...

The Supreme Court, in its judgment in 2012, came to a conclusion based upon the principle that auction is the best way to allocate natural resources.

With great respect to the Supreme Court, that may not be the correct position. And, in the light of the trial court judgment, maybe some of the Supreme Court's orders may require a revisit.

So, you are saying that evidence assessed by the trial court is more valid and compelling than what the Supreme Court used to reach its decision?

These are two different aspects.

The policy of giving spectrum at administered prices to private players was put in place in 1994, in pursuance of the telecom policy which was articulated at the time.

This policy of giving spectrum at administered prices was implemented by P V Narasimha Rao's government, then by H D Deve Gowda's government, then by Inder Kumar Gujral's government, then by Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government for six years, and subsequently by Dr Manmohan Singh's government for eight long years.

It was a consequence of giving spectrum at administered prices that saw the kind of exponential increase in teledensity that India has today -- along with the lowest tariff in the world, which makes telephony and especially mobile telephony affordable to a common person.

In 2013, the Supreme Court in its wisdom decided to rest the entire allocation of natural resources on the principal that auction would possibly be the best way of alienating the state largesse.

Subsequently the auctions took place, both under the UPA and the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) governments, and today you have a situation where the telecom sector is stressed, telecom operators are going to the government cap in hand asking for a bailout and the estimation of the bailout amounts to an estimated Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh crore.

And the rationale being given is that if the telecom sector is not bailed out, the banks would be stressed and all those loans that were given out to bid for spectrum auction would turn into non-performing assets.

This, then, raises the fundamental question that is it the job of the State only to maximise its own revenue? Or look to the larger question of public welfare?

And since the trial court has found there is no criminality involved in the allocation of spectrum at administered prices, possibly this judgment of the Supreme Court may require a revisit -- and it has happened in the past when the Supreme Court has revisited its own judgments.

A lot of people did very well by the whole so-called telecom scam. Many of them got jobs, some got awards... How should we see this?

Well, first and foremost, the then comptroller and auditor general Vinod Rai needs to offer an unequivocal apology to the country for that 'Manohar Kahani' which unfortunately goes by the term that carries a lot a gravitas -- the CAG report -- where he alleged a loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore.

That is what started the whole 2G circus rolling.

Over the past seven years, people's lives have been ruined, reputations have been destroyed, India's image has been besmirched, the economy which survived the great economic meltdown was derailed -- all, as a consequence of this completely ill-conceived report.

As someone who has had the opportunity of cross examining Vinod Rai, extensively over three days as part of the Joint Parliamentary Committee, many of us included I had concluded at that point of time that this report rests on the foundation of sand.

Ultimately, the JPC report tabled in January 2014, actually testified to that reality.

Now you have a criminal court which has also held that there was no criminality in either the grant of licences or allocation of spectrum.

So, under those circumstances, it is imperative that all the reports which were given by Vinod Rai during his tenure as CAG be revisited and everything be re-audited -- because it is very clear that they were actuated by mala fide.(Contd.)

. Health Tips .

Eating Fruit on Empty Stomach

Cancer patients shouldn't die..

This will open your eyes ! Read to the end and then send it on to all on your e-list. I just did !

Dr Stephen Mak treats terminal ill cancer patients by an "un-orthodox" way and many patients recovered.

Before he used solar energy to clear the illnesses of his patients, he believes on natural healing in the body against illnesses.

See his article below.

"It is one of the strategies to heal cancer. As of late, my success rate in curing cancer is about 80%."

"Cancer patients shouldn't die.

The cure for cancer is already found - *its in the way we eat fruits."

"It is whether you believe it or not."

"I am sorry for the hundreds of cancer patients who die under the conventional treatments."

Drinking COLD water or drinks after a meal = CANCER

Can you believe this ?

For those who like to drink cold water or cold drinks, this article is applicable to you.

It is nice to have a cup of cold water or cold drinks after a meal.

However, the cold water or drinks will solidify the oily stuff that you have just eaten.

It will slow down the digestion.

Once this 'sludge' reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food.

It will line the intestine.

Very soon, this will turn into FATS and lead to CANCER !

It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know the better chance we could survive.

A cardiologist says:

if everyone who gets this msg & share it to other people you can be sure that you'll save at least one life.

So let’s do it!