Towards protecting women

In the absence of whole-hearted steps to implement the provisions effectively, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 is falling short of expectations.

The Delhi High Court ruled recently that a woman can also be held liable under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005. This the court did on the basis of the interpretation that ‘relatives' included not only male but also female members of a family. The absence of such a provision, it felt, could encourage men to instigate women members of a family to commit violence.

[caption id="attachment_547" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="In this file photo women take part in a procession demanding effective implementation of the Domestic Violence Act. "][/caption]

The Act came about in response to decade-long pressure from international organisations and activists in India. But five years later, despite noble intentions, it remains an unviable proposition. Little thinking has gone into understanding the context in which spousal abuse overwhelmingly occurs in India. The ground realities have been ignored and the implementation aspects left woolly and unprovided for.

A senior lawyer in the Supreme Court, K.K. Rai, who is conversant with matrimonial cases, says: “The law just does not take into account the realities of the joint family system where female members of the family heap both physical and emotional aggression against a woman. We need guidelines and mechanisms which ensure continuance of the joint family ethos, yet cushion the woman against violence.”

Whereas domestic violence takes place in all social, economic and cultural settings worldwide, in India the difference is that families are conditioned to tolerate, allow, even rationalise domestic violence. Most of the violence takes place inside homes which should offer the woman maximum security. The 2005 law focusses on the prohibition of marital aggression, the issue of protection and maintenance orders against husbands and partners who abuse a woman emotionally, physically or economically. This sounds fine on paper, but a one-size-fits-all approach ignores women who need such protection the most.

The National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS) shows that the prevalence of violence increases sharply in the absence of education and reduces by half in the case of women who have acquired 10 years of schooling. Both physical and sexual violence are highest among women in the poorest wealth quintile, and it declines steadily with increasing wealth. Given the scarcity of resources, the legislation should have initially focussed on the conditions in which illiterate and uneducated women reside in joint families. Instead, it has painted the subject with one broad brush, seeking to rely on the efficiency of the courts to decide such matters within 60 days.

Administratively, the Act requires each State government to appoint protection officers, register service providers and notify medical facilities for the implementation of the Act. While the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the Ministry of Home Affairs have issued advisories to State governments, with the exception of West Bengal and Delhi no State is known to have appointed independent protection officers even five years hence. Most States have fobbed off the requirement by giving “additional” responsibility to existing functionaries. Rajasthan, a high-prevalence State for domestic violence, has entrusted the already overburdened anganwadi workers who are striving to ensure the supply of nutrition to infants, children and lactating mothers, with the responsibility.

In Delhi where at least an attempt has been made to recruit independent protection officers, Yasmin Khan, a member of the State Women's Commission, laments that it is just not possible to appoint dedicated staff on a salary of Rs. 15,000 a month. “How can a newly recruited MSW [degree-holder], even if she agrees to join, visit homes, draw up reports, seek protection orders from magistrates, create and maintain legal documentation and pursue court directions when she has no help, no transport, no office and no training?”

Tabling figures regarding protection orders issued so far, Parliament was recently given information only in respect of a handful of States and Union Territories. Even here, nothing is known about what the majority of them are doing. The numbers, which have not crossed four figures in five years, are too sparse to inspire confidence. Looking to the findings of country-wide surveys that have shown that over 40 per cent of all married women had experienced physical or sexual violence, the Act does not touch even the fringe of the problem.

The experience of Rajasthan is vividly described by Kavita Srivastava, who represents the People's Union for Civil Liberties and who has been pursuing women's causes. According to her, while the protection officers are in acute need of legal training, the magistrates before whom the cases are presented also need orientation. She feels that scant regard is paid to the 60-day limit, and domestic violence matters are treated in a most routine manner — thus defeating the purpose for which the Act was made. Every case decided against the husband automatically goes up in appeal, and it becomes an unending story. Lawyers get busy converting practically all domestic violence cases into maintenance matters, in the process missing the point of preventing immediate assault and violence against the woman. In some instances, magistrates have issued contempt orders against the very protection officers who stand as a bridge between the woman and her aggressor. In such a climate, how can women expect immediate and sustained protection?

Unlike in the U.K. and the U.S., domestic violence has not been on the radar of the political executive, politicians in general, the police or the media in India. Such cases would seem to lack the sensationalism or ghoulish appeal of murder or rape cases. Repeated surveys have shown that in Indian society, both men and women believe that domestic violence can be tolerated in certain circumstances. These include being rude to the in-laws, not caring for children, preparing food badly or going out of the house without permission. If the vast majority of people accept that this is cause enough for domestic violence, it is doubtful if even the most rigorous protection officer would ever succeed in making inroads into a battered wife's household, leave alone haul up the husband before a district court.

The 2005 Act is impractical and consequently non-implementable in favour of those that need protection the most. Looking at the size of the country and the problem, it would be better to have a law that targets the poorest and the most uneducated and illiterate among women to start with, at least until the mechanisms to implement this nuclear family-lawyer dominated law are in place, if that is what the legislature wants. Until then, the plight of the poorest women — both rural and urban — who get repeatedly thrown out of their homes in the dead of night should be confronted. In the full knowledge of neighbours, thousands of the really poor and uneducated are repeatedly subjected to slapping, kicking, being dragged by their hair; twisted by the arm, forced to have sexual intercourse, even threatened with knives and household implements, as NFHS-3 surveys have vividly shown.

There is no use having a law that is meant for the whole country when there is no one to implement it. Until full-time and properly oriented protection officers are recruited — which seems to be an unattainable target now — a more practical way would be to prescribe summary disposal of cases through weekly courts organised at the tehsil or ward level. The protection officer's responsibility should be confined to giving a report before a mobile magistrate citing two witnesses from the neighbourhood. For every case where a protection order is issued, the protection officer and the witnesses should be compensated in recognition of having successfully brought forward the case for intervention. At the village level, the panchayats as well as the health, education and social welfare fieldworkers and non-governmental organisations could be permitted to voluntarily take on the role of protection officials, to be compensated for every case that ends in favour of a battered woman.

The U.K. took several years to train its police, its health workers and its judicial magistrates on handling the domestic violence law. Such a process has hardly happened in India. The mindset of those who deal which domestic violence has first to be changed before the law can subserve the interests of those for whom it was primarily intended. Until then, it is essential to protect those who have no voice and whose situation is well known to the entire neighbourhood. If the National Rural Health Mission's Accredited Social Health Activists can be compensated for accompanying a pregnant woman to hospital, why not those who accompany a battered woman and present her case before a magistrate? A separate section in the law that addresses the special needs of the most vulnerable would help change the focus of the Domestic Violence Act in their favour.

My mother is 101

Lilla Wagle Dhume is the oldest civil servant who worked for the Government of India. On her birthday today, her daughter Shailaja Chandra remembers her for her determination more than anything else Lilla Wagle Dhume turns 101 today. Many people have asked me the secret of her longevity and what she did to live that long. “You must write about it,” they all tell me. This then is not a perfect picture of a saintly woman. Rather, flashbacks from six decades of daughterhood. Despite a distinguished lineage — her grandfather was among the first graduates of Bombay University and her father was the first Indian Accountant General — she became fatherless at a very young age forcing her to find her own way in life. Today Mrs Dhume is the oldest civil servant that worked for the Government of India; the oldest Cambridge educated woman Professor of English; and the oldest living Principal of Lady Shri Ram College. For someone born in 1908 those are enormous achievements indeed. But today I remember my mother for her determination more than anything else. My earliest memories are of a vibrant, incredibly energetic woman who laughed a lot. Well-heeled in stylish brogues and matching leather bags, she looked comfortable sprinting into the ladies compartment of Bombay’s suburban trains on her way to deliver lectures to MA classes at top colleges in Bombay University. Her rendition of Shakespeare and Milton in mellifluous diction and intonation held her classes spell-bound for 13 long years. This was as recounted to me by top Ministers, civil servants, cricketers and lawyers who had been her students in Mumbai. In 1952 my father deposited my brother and me to live with my mother in Delhi. I was seven. My mother had left Bombay a year earlier having taken the courageous step of joining the civil service as a post-independence emergency recruit. We lived in a hutment in Kota house where we romped with scores of other children while my mother, far from feeling neglected, learnt to drive, to play Canasta and Mahjong. She was also one of the first owners of the new Fiat in which she drove herself to the Home Ministry every day. She stood out as something special in the early 50’s when educated women hardly worked, being content to be mere appendages of their husbands. Despite attending office all day and experiencing the travails of running a house in the days when the Primus stove cooked and heated our bath water, my mother still made the time to take us to plays, air displays, ice-skating shows and the matinee on Sunday afternoons. Grilled chicken sandwiches at Kwality’s and a drive to Tuglaquabad completed the outings. We were certainly not neglected, although I remember being constantly “poor-thinged” by stay-at-home mothers in the neighbourhood, which annoyed my mother no end. But I also remember what a strict disciplinarian my mother could be when it came to finishing things on time. Mealtimes were mealtimes. Getting into a night suit and brushing one’s teeth were enforced with military precision and I recall many a tight slap for not completing my homework and fibbing that none had been assigned. Later when I joined Miranda House, where I had the time of my life savouring the heady pleasures of performing on stage, I remember seeing a shining black Fiat outside the Principal’s office. My mother had taken leave from office and driven down to ask the Principal to end my forays into histrionics which were begetting third division marks. I hated my mother’s domination. Later I often wondered where I would have ended up had she not disciplined me, undaunted by my sulks and tantrums. She has always been deeply spiritual. Not a day has gone by when she has not lit the evening diya and recited aarti, her resonant voice now a mere wisp of what it once was. Visits to the Ramakrishna Mission, the Sai Baba Temple, and Thursday pujas were her passion. Readings from the Bhagwad Gita — mostly in Marathi — were essential to her life, no matter the pressures of running my household and managing my children. She spent hours translating Marathi spiritual books into English, for no one’s reading but her own. I now have crates full of those books and jottings, neatly covered in brown paper. In all honesty I cannot think of a single person who would read, imbibe and respect those books as she did. Something about her stupendous willpower. Within seven days of my father’s sudden death in 1962 she was back in office. The bad news had come abruptly through a terse trunk call from Bombay on a Diwali morning. She was suddenly left alone in the world with two teenagers yet to find their moorings, little wealth and no props. But it was her example and strong work ethic that was the best example and which became a passport into the Foreign Service for my brother and the IAS for me. She played no role in that: never pitying herself or goading us to sit for the examinations; her personal example did more than a thousand words could have. But the joy of seeing her children on track was short lived. A spinal tumour left her unexpectedly paralysed in a Bombay hospital when she visited me over Christmas vacation. She was then the very popular Principal of Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and as she signed her resignation letter from the hospital bed I saw quiet tears but no remorse or rancour. I continued to watch her inert form every day, a crumpled shadow of her former self. After nearly five months in that motionless state, movement began slowly returning to her toes and then her feet. A year of intense physiotherapy followed, when sheer determination forced life back to those wasted muscles. Visiting friends and relatives and even hospital nurses stared at her like the dead coming back to life. Over several weeks she forced herself to sit, stand, walk and finally, on returning to Delhi one year later, to actually drive her Fiat once more. When I got married, she became a member of my family and accompanied us to Manipur, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, even Swansea in Wales, making and keeping more friends than I did. She brought up my children with all the affection and care she was capable of. In more than a score years to follow she gave me the opportunity to stay as late in office as I needed to, to travel, to learn golf, and teach my children swimming by ridding me of the quotidian drudgery of domesticity that has grounded so many female careers. But once again an accident followed by fresh hospitalisation left her with a shortened leg that confined the rest of her life to a wheelchair. For the last 22 years I have heard no protest or complaint from her; not once. Instead she has used her captivity to read, to knit for my children, to write letters all over the world in flawless English and perfect handwriting and to telephone friends and relatives every day, chatting about anything from household hints to regional recipes. A combative game of Scrabble would absorb her for hours as she plied her opponent — anyone of her six grandchildren — with samosas and gulab jamuns from Bengali Market, pots of tea and vignettes about her life as it was more than half a century ago. With each passing year she lost something precious but it brought nothing more than a short-lived grimace to her smiling face. I remember the day when she could no longer hold a pen, sadly putting an end to one of her greatest joys: writing. The serial exodus of her beloved grandchildren to the land of no return, USA, created a void that for the first time showed the vulnerability she felt inside. Then, imperceptibly at first, came the blurring of vision making television more and more invisible. Yet even today she strains to watch Tendulkar score a century and perks up when Karan Thapar punctures arrogance. The maturing Shobhaa De — her one-time colleague’s daughter — still provokes a comment or two from her, as do some others. With each passing year the shock of becoming increasingly dependent on support systems and care-givers would have devastated stronger men and women. But not Lilla Dhume who has clasped life thus long because she did three things differently: first she sought and found solace in spirituality. Second, the capacity to find joy in the small pleasures of daily life — a telephone chat, a good cup of tea, a new recipe — were savoured until they became second nature. Most important of all she developed the capacity to bear no bitterness, no malice, no envy, all the while encouraging me to think the same way. Today, when we celebrate her 101st birthday, what will I be thinking of? Of course my love for my mother, but more importantly I salute her as the longest living icon of women’s emancipation, one who actually showed the world what will-power can single-handedly achieve in a man’s world, at a time when few women went to college and even fewer sustained careers. Lilla Wagle Dhume, has borne herself beyond the promise of her age, and has done, in the words of Shakespeare, “in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion.”

Needed, culture of ethics

Societal pressure forces us to exhibit success by society’s standards. It’s time we shun corrupt practices and realise that ethical principles lead to responsible business


I have often wondered why there exists a compulsive need in our society to display oneself and one’s family as always being on top of the world. Why is it necessary to make known, howsoever subtly that one has achieved more than one’s peers? Why is there a societal need to conceal failures — lost jobs, broken marriages, wayward children, financial difficulties, and career and post-retirement frustrations? Why is there a societal obligation and an internal pressure to conform, to compare, to judge and to comment on the performance of others, while suppressing what is murky in one’s own world?

Increasingly the world is looking for ways of admitting the truth, be it in viewing relationships at the level of the individual or the relationship of large multinationals with their clients. That being so, there is a need to think differently about so-called successes and achievements and to take a look at how efforts are being made elsewhere to face the truth and build a climate of trust.

Recently I was asked by a French television company that had been conducting thousands of interviews around the world to participate in an impromptu interview. First I saw the preview. It could be a farmer in Cambodia, a scarfed Sudanese student, a French grandfather or a Swiss fisherman. All the interviews were recorded straight into the camera and the questions were extremely basic but actually seeking answers to what people across the world were asking to be told. Because no one had ever asked these questions of me and because I was certain none of my friends and acquaintances would ever see the photo exhibition, I found myself opening up to a complete stranger and the camera.

The questions went like this: What is your earliest memory? What does family mean to you? Which was the happiest day in your life? Which was the saddest day in your life? What is the meaning of love for you? Did you feel inferior to your husband when you were working? Did you feel superior? Is there someone you have never forgiven in life? Do you feel that your life has been happier than your parents’?

The idea of such video-based interviews was to capture what people actually thought and how they responded when asked personal questions when the mask was down. Unexpectedly I found myself answering what I would never have admitted, face to face. Because all of us are conditioned to fall into stereo-types and wear a mask of contentedness before the outside world; because there is societal pressure to exhibit success by society’s standards of success. And because I knew I was not being judged by viewers across the globe, and there was little likelihood that anyone in India would ever see my responses, I spoke from the heart and truthfully.

And soon thereafter another unrelated but relevant experience came my way. I was a part of a conference on Re-Introducing Integrity and Trust in Business held at the Asian Plateau at Panchgani. Again I heard a constant plea to shun the mask that businesses don in the quest for winning the battle to lose the war. The managing director of Siemens, Mr Armin Bruck and Mr JJ Irani from the House of Tata shared the dilemmas that had beset their companies and laid bare examples of how success pegged to unethical practices was ultimately a disgrace to the company and no success at all. Attended by participants from Japan and a few other countries the underlying theme stressed the need to stop judging success by man-made standards and instead nurture more trustful relationships. Because in the ultimate analysis ethical principles lead to responsible business — companies that respect not just shareholders but a wider world of stakeholders. In the long run, adherence to principles was shown to have earned respect and better business.

The conference highlighted how in 75 countries covering over 2,50,000 employees, the strength of ethical culture was being reassessed. ‘Tone at the top’ openness of communication, whether unethical behaviour was addressed quickly and fairly, comfort levels in speaking up had become the new benchmarks to judge the integrity quotient of companies-not cutting corners for quick profit making.

In this it was important to understand what misconduct in business included. Harassment, inappropriate behaviour, fraud, stealing company property, accounting irregularities and business information violations were higher across Asia than overall in the world. On the other hand Asian countries fared better than the rest of the world when it came to aspects like avoiding conflict of interest, following health and safety policies, avoiding alcohol and drug abuse and insider trading. So there were cultural differences in attitudes to conducting business which ultimately stood rooted in individual behaviour.

It is evident that there is now an effort both at the individual and collective level to respect frankness and truth over subterfuge. It will take decades if not centuries for this ethos to percolate into politics. But in everyday life it is possible to salute honesty and integrity when we see it. Only then can these attributes get the nourishment they need to grow and spread.

Make babus accountable

The current system of endless procedural delay in deciding whether a Government employee has violated rules or indulged in corrupt practices ensures that the guilty are never punished. Often honest employees are needlessly harassed. We need a new system

If anything infuriates citizens, it is the absence of accountability among Government employees. Confronted with examples of this almost everyday, it is assumed that corruption within the system allows wrong-doers to get away. The real reason is because the disciplinary rules that govern the conduct of Government servants require impossibly long and cumbersome procedures to be observed, in the name of natural justice, leaving loopholes galore. The result: Not even a fraction of those that deserve punishments ever get penalised; instead a number of honest officers get stigmatised by remaining under investigation for years together. A simple, sensible and fair system of dealing with misconduct is badly needed.

The second Administrative Reforms Commission lamented that “dilatory disciplinary proceedings make a mockery of any attempt to instill discipline and accountability”. But the Commission instead of suggesting a workable alternative capable of immediate adoption grandiloquently recommended the repeal of Article 311 of the Constitution; also adding a new legislation under Article 309 to its wish-list.

First the history: Sardar Patel independent India’s first Home Minister favoured giving civil servants protection to enable them to be frank and impartial. So Article 311(which embargoes the dismissal, removal or reduction in rank of a Government employee without enquiry) came into being and has remained in the Constitution ever since. The ARC felt that the protection given by the offending Article had bred a false sense of security and given excessive protection to Government servants. Hence the recommendation that Article 311 be repealed — a step which was not attempted even during Emergency when the Article was amended to provide for specific situations when an enquiry could be dispensed with.

The recommendation to repeal Article 311 is just hot air. First there is the implausibility of Opposition parties ever unifying to pass a constitutional amendment and that when it is clearly anti-sarkari mulaazim. Second, the amendment process would require the co-operation of State Governments in respect of the All-India services which will never come. Third, the possibility that the repeal of Article 311 might be seen as an attempt to alter the basic structure of the Constitution (shades of Keshavanand Bharti) cannot be ruled out. Besides it is no one’s case that an enquiry should not be held at all. That would be untenable in a democracy and would straightaway militate against the principles of natural justice.

Instead, the ARC should have suggested urgent modification in the existing disciplinary rules. These rules notified in 1965 draw their authority from Article 309 of the Constitution and not Article 311. It is there that change is needed. If there is one thing that terrifies Government employees it is the fear of getting caught in the web of a vigilance enquiry — a predicament which by itself is worse than being penalised. It suspends the official’s chances of getting promoted or posted in a position of significance for years together — decades in several cases. The situation has a catastrophic effect on the social standing of the officer, distresses his family, and worst of all, it deters him and numerous others from displaying any initiative — ‘better safe than sorry’ as the saying goes.

But the more dangerous fallout of the vigilance enquiry phobia is the proliferation of the committee culture. Files and decisions move higher and higher up the hierarchy and in the process the purchase of essential equipment critically needed for defence, infrastructure needs, and health gets deferred, often causing irretrievable harm to our preparedness on vital fronts.

An overhaul of the CCS CCA Rules 1965 is, therefore, urgently required. Since the Rules draw their strength from Article 309 of the Constitution and not Article 311, the modifications can be effected straightaway through an executive order; as neither Parliament nor State Governments can or will impede the process.

All enquiries should start with the issue of a written chargesheet, and proceed to the consideration of the charged officer’s response before an interview board, (this is the system in the UK and has been mentioned by ARC also.) The present judicial kind of enquiry should only be preferred if at the end of the meeting the interview panel feels that the facts and officer’s defence points to something serious, which could result in dismissal, removal from service or reduction in rank.

For all other cases, the finding of the panel on the culpability of the officer or his exoneration as also the quantum of punishment to be meted out should be final — allowing one appeal where the appellate authority would have powers to mitigate, but also to enhance the punishment, if warranted.

By bringing in a new set of disciplinary rules under Article 309, the Government can change the way its officers perform. It would boost the morale of honest officers and restore lost initiative. Prompt punishment if given to a few will immediately instill a fear of wrong-doing and a respect for discipline-attributes which have become anachronisms in our feudal systems. When the upright can be dangled as criminals while culpable courtiers can get rewarded, where is the encouragement to demonstrate probity in public life?

Going against the grain

As the Alumni Association of Miranda House chose to honour three of its former students, new generations continue to graduate as indomitable women with minds of their own, unshackled from the stereotype of ‘Indian womanhood’ that the founder sought to mould

Last week the Alumni Association of Miranda House chose to award three of its former students, resurrecting two of them from the 1960s and one from the 1970s. This article recapitulates a few earthy gems that shone before a hall packed with faculty, students and alumni of Miranda House.

But first a little background about Miranda House. This college for women was the dream-child of Sir Maurice Gwyer, Delhi University’s first Vice Chancellor. The then principal recalled three reasons Sir Maurice gave for naming the college Miranda: First, Carmen Miranda was his favourite actress; second, his daughter’s name was Miranda; third, Shakespeare’s Miranda would be a good example for the young women passing out from the college. Miranda is the lone female character in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest the very embodiment of purity and goodness, undefiled by the (male) world outside.

This year the youngest recipient of the Alumnae Award was Anita Pratap the first Indian woman to become a television journalist with CNN and an intrepid war reporter. Dressed in a closely fitted silk jacket in flaming red she dazzled onlookers — as far removed from pictures of the virtuous Miranda as was conceivable.

Anita began by describing hostel life in Miranda House where she roomed in close vicinity to the feisty film director (to be) — Mira Nair whom she described as a compelling senior, her flashing eyes commandeering complete obeisance from the hoi polloi of female undergraduates. The intensity of a single look made her targets cower and scamper from sight, so overpowering was her personality even then. Recounted Anita Pratap, “One night Mira sent for me. I was scared stiff” she continued, “but there being no alternative I lugged myself to the drama queen’s room not knowing what to expect. Mira was reclining on the bed in Begum like splendour as she beckoned me with two raised fingers to come and sit by her.”

Mira leaned over and asked, “Do you like boys?”

“I don’t know,” the 16-year-old Anita replied. She recalled then what Mira had sighed in response: “I like girls.”

The audience exploded as Anita’s eyes glinted with mischief and mirth. (How, now Sir Maurice?)

Ms Indira Rajaraman, one of India’s leading economists and the only woman member of the present Finance Commission (and perhaps its one dozen predecessor Commissions too,) stood behind the podium next, dressed in a non-designer sari, no make-up but still looking as she had some 45 years earlier — the same earnest, thoughtful face and the same soft, but blunt way of talking complete sense. In her speech she decried the fact that men (in office) spent so much time doing absolutely nothing, obsessed with cricket scores and similar trivia. She spoke passionately about hurdles that women encountered in a chauvinistic world where men’s attitudes had changed not a jot.

Her daily experience of 18 years as one sardine packed in the front half of the Karnataka State Transport bus while commuting to IIM-Bangalore where she was a faculty member, had exposed her to the throbbing realities of a world of illiterate, peasant women and their brood of bawling infants; but it was there that she imbibed lessons about the strength of togetherness and compassion, something her pristine education had never prepared her for.

As first among the speakers I regaled the audience with my status as Miranda’s Prima Donna on stage and how from bagging one leading role to another, I found myself in the dream role of the goddess Hera in a hilarious comedy titled The Rape of the Belt. I recounted how as I ascended the dais from one end of the stage, I scrutinised a gangly youth seated on Zeus’ throne at the other end. His gloomy face and long legs and ‘pap’ white pants made him look even gawkier. I tossed my long, thick plait behind me and asked my female co-star snootily, “Who is that ugly fellow? I have never seen him in Stephen’s before.” With similar disdain she replied, “He’s some guy from Kirorimal yaar — his name is Amitabh Bachchan.”

That brought the roof down but even more so when I told them that after three rehearsals, I was yanked off the stage when my mother confronted the principal with my third division marks in the terminal examination. Alas there was no option but to renew reciting Paradise Lost.

Drawing on experiences from my long career in public administration I encouraged the students not to equate a career in the civil services with babugiri or boredom. Working on a scale in public service could open opportunities to improve not just hundreds, but millions of lives. Given perseverance, stable domestic arrangements and a little luck, success was assured, no matter what people who could never clear the civil service examinations might say.

Sir Maurice Gwyer’s Victorian ideal of the perfect female figurine inside a gilded box was shattered long ago. New generations of Mirandians continue to graduate as indomitable women with minds of their own, unshackled from the fixed stereotype of ‘Indian womanhood’ that Gwyer sought to mould.

Needed, helping hands

Instead of creating a sub-caste of rural doctors that will willy-nilly opt for the allurement of urban medical practice sooner than later and abandon the rural populace, the licentiate system of creating a cadre of non-doctors authorised to conduct limited professional practice must be revived

The Medical Council of India has recently decided to address the glaring shortage of doctors in rural India. As early as 1996 the Central Council for Health and Family Welfare, had unanimously decided to make rural medical service compulsory for new doctors. For 14 long years every Health Minister has repeated this aspiration, only to have the idea trounced by MCI as ‘unfeasible’. The council has consistently argued that doctors cannot function in the absence of “proper infrastructure”. Hence the recent decision of MCI to confront the shortage of rural medical manpower by creating a new stream of doctors drawn from rural areas, for rural areas comes as a surprise.

According to reports, these doctors would undergo a four-year course as against the five-and-half-a-year degree course prescribed for MBBS graduates. District hospitals would be used for medical training and the entrance eligibility of candidates would hinge upon continuous residence in a rural area. This way MCI hopes to catch 12th pass science students from rural secondary schools and convert them into ‘basic doctors’ and keep them rooted there. Is this fair? Is there an option?

There are 6,00,000 villages in the country, tens of thousands of which are located at a distance of more than 10 km from a Primary Health Centre and devoid of traversable roads. The amalgamation of GIS maps and census data portrayed on the website of the National Population Stabilisation Fund shows how PHC’s established in more than 300 districts out of 620 districts remain clustered in privileged talukas, even as interminable lists of villages with populations running into hundreds of thousands remain without reachable medical cover. In the foreseeable future it is unlikely that new PHCs would get established to cover the gigantic gaps that exist in the spatial distribution of rural health facilities, particularly in the Hindi belt states. It is even more improbable that new doctors moulded from the rural hinterland would agree to cater to such remote areas for long before the lure of urban practice entices them.

President of MCI Dr Ketan Desai is sanguine that “such doctors would not be interested in learning about kidney transplants and angioplasties and would instead concentrate on local diseases and basic health problems of villages.” The inequity of sculpting a second class set of doctors only for rural areas does not seem to have struck the council. As to how overworked, poorly staffed, undeveloped district hospitals that cater to thousands of patients and exist as such in more than half the districts of the country can become training ground for doctors remains doubtful. Training imparted in this milieu can hardly convey the essentials of anatomy, pathology, microbiology and pharmacology which are essential to secure grounding in medicine.

It would have been far more practical to have revived the idea of licentiates a system that was very much in practice in India, before it was abhorred by Sir Joseph Bhore in 1946, who despite strong dissension from several Indian members of his committee abolished the scheme forever. The Western medicine doctors that came into being then became the only source of medical care.

The revival of the licentiate system — preparing a cadre of non-doctors authorised to conduct limited professional practice — was recommended by the National Health Policy 2002 and later by a Task Force on Medical Education in 2007. Nurse practitioners, and medical assistants handle patients in rural areas in Canada, parts of the US and the UK even today. Policymakers in India have not considered this alternative seriously because they are influenced hugely by what the MCI and the Indian Medical Association think and want. The licentiate idea is an anathema to the MCI and the IMA, because both the bodies are strongly political and the only way to maintain and expand the constituency of voting doctors is to keep medical practice confined to doctors. Witness the brouhaha created each time there is a move to involve even the five-and-a-half-year degree holders of Indian medicine.

The way the health infrastructure is clustered in more than half the districts in India, the needs of people living there would continue to be disregarded if a workable alternative is not found. Were licentiates to be re-introduced, they would be akin to diploma holders on the engineering side. They would be eminently suited to give the first line of medical advice, provide basic treatment and to make referrals. They would have no claim to be called doctors but would function as a strong bridge, particularly if the advantages of telemedicine and mobile phones are used imaginatively. Looking at the scale of deprivation that exists in rural areas, there is an urgent need to establish a separate council to regulate the education and practice of such licentiates.

Before Joseph Bhore, two thirds of the practitioners in India were licentiates. We need to reconstruct that bridge instead of creating a sub-caste of rural doctors that will willy-nilly opt for the allurement of urban medical practice sooner than later, leaving the rural populace where they are.

The elite’s naïveté

It is not enough to berate politicians and blame them for all our problems. The solution lies in engaging senior leaders in serious debates and force them to take a public stand on a slew of reforms. Then hold them to their commitment and make them accountable

A spate of editorials and articles has been warning us against spearheading hate campaigns against politicians. Mr S Gurumurthy writing for the New Indian Express admonished channels for championing ‘Page 3’ protesters as representatives of public reaction. He cautioned against targeting politicians as a class thereby shifting accountability from those directly answerable for the 26/11 intelligence and security failures. Second, by demanding Army rule the very foundation on which democracy rests is being questioned — a dangerous trend indeed.

In a similar vein Mr Shekhar Gupta ran a leader in which he cautioned the upper crust (of which he admits being a part) that only because it has successfully managed its own private health care, schooling, electricity, water and what not, to think carefully before attempting to manage law and order which is an altogether different story. He harks back to South Africa where the Whites despite being armed with automatic weapons and the authority to shoot (Blacks) at sight, only ended up becoming detainees in their own homes.

Mr Vir Sanghvi was more direct when he said that he was appalled by the emerging rubbish from the ‘Frangipani-Vetro set’ — “don’t pay taxes; give up democracy; hand the country over to the Army; refuse to vote”.

There is near universal unhappiness with the ‘Page 3’ chatteratti having been given an outsized platform to expose their naïveté and elitist solidarity. Until the shootout of 26/11 this mollycoddled set had enjoyed charmed lives which they constantly remind the world they had earned or inherited and are now free to enjoy. They had pretty much escaped contact with human bodies in smelly polyester glued together in suburban trains — the obvious targets for terror attacks. It was inconceivable that pristine Taj and Oberoi snuggling next to the Arabian Sea would ever become targets, leave alone harbour terrorist desperados. Butchery inside those aristocratic interiors that had hosted the most memorable weddings, celebrations and rendezvous was unthinkable. Therefore, when the attacks did occur in those seemingly impregnable social fortresses, the rich and famous sprang back like injured leopards using the idiot box to bare their teeth.

In the ensuing public purging of emotion, the extent of ignorance about basic tenets of the Constitution of India became shockingly clear. Complex issues involved in fighting terrorism in a federal system of Government were ignored as the English-speaking glitterati ranted on. Without an iota of understanding about the nature of the Indian polity, the seeds of unrest were scattered over impressionable viewers. The result? Digression from the core concerns of fixing responsibility and extracting a commitment on drastic reforms that have long been overdue.

So what can now be done? To begin with hasten investigation, identify and punish those that despite having access to information (which could have made the difference between life and death) fiddled away. Today after more than a fortnight there is no news on that front. Apologising is just not enough. It is expected that security concerns must be placed above buddy rights and visible punishment meted out not just to vindicate those who need not have died but because this alone would ensure that things are better if this happens again.

At the same time democracy must be strengthened rather than scrapped. Unless we improve the quality of our leadership, lapses in governance such as those that marked the debacle in Mumbai will not end. At the same time, all politicians must not be clubbed with a handful of jerks whose conduct has been crass. By overplaying the misdeeds and individual shenanigans of a few, the electoral system should not be castigated unfairly. That is India’s biggest USP and no one — least of all ignoramuses — should be allowed to belittle it. Maximum concentration should be placed on removing the root cause of bad governance not on dumping the political process itself.

With Lok Sabha elections upon us, this is also an opportunity for the voters to demand change. Should MPs that represent only 20 to 30 per cent of voter share and often half that be considered as having the mandate to represent over a million people in a constituency? Should coalition politics be allowed to hold governance to ransom? The existing provisions of the Constitution and election laws have catapulted most parliamentarians where they are today. As direct beneficiaries of such a system they will hardly be persuaded to bring change. Incumbent Governments can do it if political parties reach an understanding, but who is to motivate them?

Since all political parties are bothered about how they look on television and get reported in print, instead of giving space to the enervated voices and predictable arguments of party spokesmen, why not engage senior party leaders in serious debates and force them to take a public stand on a slew of reforms? Let the public see what each party stands for on vital issues that impact negatively on elections, governance and security. Ask the leader of every important party to explain his party’s stand on specific reforms. We need leaders of political parties, including regional ones to be publicly confronted with the urgency with which change is needed. On handling internal security, on financing elections, on letting party MPs vote on critical national issues by conscience, on prescribing minimum standards of education for candidates and a minimum threshold of voter representation to get elected.

The tipping point has come. Monday’s assembly results have demolished all forecasts. There is evidence now that people want good governance. Sheila Dikshit has won not simply because of her personal warmth, but because the effect of what she was doing was visible with each passing day. Voters did not want progress to be disrupted. Uma Bharati, despite her formidable record as a vote-getter, lost because her ideas and passion for cows do not denote progress.

Both women’s agendas were well-known. One won, another lost. In both cases the voter knew in advance what the aspirants intended to do on things that affected them. Today only TV channels have the power to extract commitments from political leaders on major issues displayed on millions of screens. The time to confront the leaders is now.

The burden of youth

The outlook for India’s youth is not as rosy as it is assumed. The population explosion and denying young women their right to decide on matters that impact their lives will only bring in more problems, not solutions…

Raise the topic of population and expect the following reactions: India will have the last laugh because its population is youthful and would continue to be so for decades more. Or, there is the Nandan Nilekeni idea which is fast becoming popular with optimistic urbanites — that a second hump of opportunity might miraculously emerge from the laggard Hindi belt States.

This oversimplification can cost us dearly. The demographic dividend argument is used in the West to signify the proportion of working people compared to retirees. In India, the so called dividend is actually represented by a disproportionately high number of young people who for the most part would be incapable of staying rooted to the school system and thereby end up uneducated and unemployable. In short, a burden on society.

Among them, girls will continue to have early pregnancies and their underweight infants will have poor chances of survival. For those that live, the cycle of malnutrition, stunting and wasting will be perpetrated and inequities will grow. Across the country, the regional and intra-State disparity would widen and resources for health and education would get sucked up or scattered before they can get to those in the greatest need. This is a recipe for disaster.

A development issue

Governments need to recognise that population is not merely a health issue but an overarching development issue. Concrete measures are urgently needed to enforce the prevention of Child Marriage 2006 Act and to make marriage registration compulsory. Incentives are needed to push up the woman’s age at first birth and to make birth spacing attractive. Instead of honing in on a broad category called Below Poverty Line (BPL) it would make sense to target the lowest wealth quintile where fertility rates are disturbingly high.

Alok Ranjan Chaurasia and S. Gulati in “India the State of Population 2007” have divided the country into three groups. In the first group there are the Hindi belt States and some north-eastern states like Manipur and Meghalaya. Together they will account for more than half the population growth in the country by 2026. In these States, lowering fertility will be very difficult as the majority of couples use no contraception. Among the poorest families in these States, the “wanted fertility” factor, when parents want larger families as insurance against old age and to provide additional hands for work, is as high as 40 per cent of the total fertility. A “techno-medical model” of family planning as Chaurasia and Gulati call it, with a focus on female sterilisation will quite simply not work, because many couples actually want more children.

In the rest of the population of these States, including poorer families who do not want more children, a huge unmet demand for contraception exists. By present indications, the goal of two children per woman set for the country by 2010 will not even be achieved in the next two decades by these States. The New York Times mocked India’s “paradox of a proud democracy”, describing the persistence of child hunger and galloping malnutrition levels as worse than sub-Saharan African countries. Given this scenario, nothing can succeed unless the numbers become manageable. And waiting for trickle-down to happen, much less miracles to emerge from the sheer weight of a youthful population is being completely unrealistic.

In the second group, Gulati et al include States like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Gujarat, Haryana and Orissa, which have achieved or are about to achieve the two child goal. But even today these states measure the success of the family planning programme by sterilisation of women, usually undertaken after the demographic damage has been done. A stricter enforcement of the legal age of marriage and much greater stress on spacing methods, in the initial childbearing years, would be infinitely more advantageous than concentrating on sterilising women that have already produced several children. Gujarat has trained some 5,000 ANM’s in inserting IUDs using Zoey models. This has liberated women by acquiring a 10-year protection against pregnancy. With more than 5,00,000 successful insertions done on village women, Gujarat’s Public Health Commissioner Amarjit Singh recites his mantra, “women use this IUD but only if they feel comfortable.”

The third group of States comprises Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu. These States will account for hardly 15 per cent of the population growth by 2026 and have all achieved replacement levels of fertility with two children per woman. But here we may be in for some surprises. According to the Registrar General of India (SRS data 2006) Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have higher marital fertility among 15 to 19-year-olds than Rajasthan or even Bihar. Two more south Indian States, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, have nearly twice the proportion of children born to pre-20-year-olds compared to Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. West Bengal is another surprise, being exceptionally prolific when it comes to childbirth among 15+ teenagers. This is best illustrated with an example:

Take Andhra Pradesh. Were all births under age 20 to be eliminated, the marital fertility would be reduced by 40 per cent each year, which would translate to over 20 million averted births in one generation of 60 years. But in the absence of efforts to push up the age at first birth, the reproductive process is starting too early and is propelling the population momentum, despite the average number of children being two or less than two per woman.

The Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 was hardly implemented with any seriousness. That appears to be the fate of the new Prevention of Child Marriage Act 2006 also, which has made little dent on the States. Neither family nor society will raise a finger against early marriages, which are invariably followed by the first childbirth within a year. Something else is badly needed to slow the pace of the population momentum.

Remedial steps

First, there should be a Compulsory Registration of Marriage Act with an office of Registrar General of Marriages to coordinate and monitor implementation of the Act countrywide. State Planning Boards should be presented with an annual picture of marriage registrations done and the median age of rural girls at the time of marriage. This information should be disaggregated and published throughout the State to give an idea of registrations done and gaps that continue. The birth of the first child after 19 needs to be incentivised and targeted to lowest wealth quintile, which is not the same thing as the entire BPL stock. The wanted fertility syndrome needs to be countered with state supported insurance for children lost, and employment guarantees for those that live. Concentrating on the lowest wealth quintile in every block, would make a lot of sense, as otherwise the richer among the poor would drain away whatever benefits might accrue.

India’s young population, far from being a boon, is a potential calamity. The births of children in quick succession when the girl is less than 20 is providing an unhealthy impetus to the population momentum besides denying women the right to decide what impacts their lives the most. Only if the economic consequences of the population momentum are understood, would governments take notice. Unfortunately that day is nowhere in sight.

A CM who performs

What makes Sheila Dikshit different from others? For starters, she doesn’t allow bureaucrats to spin circles around her. Labyrinthine explanations cut no ice, making it impossible for babus to suck her into the vortex of red tape that they whisk up in a jiffy After Ms Sheila Dikshit’s recent victory, countless people asked me what it was like to work with her. How does her style differ from others? What was so special about her? Is she efficient? How does she manage the bureaucracy? A few nuggets might help create pictures, albeit completely unrelated to the third-time coronation of somebody labelled as ‘Aunty No 1’. When I first took over as Delhi Chief Secretary in 2002, Ms Dikshit had already been Chief Minister for four years. By then she had seen two Chief Secretaries — both men. I was acutely aware of the universal belief that two women can never get along and whatever might happen, was eager to explode that myth. Unexpectedly, her first instruction was to ask me to run the Government “like a thrifty housewife”. After decades of working with political stalwarts and managing mega projects and programmes I felt punctured like a flat tyre. Over time I realised that for Ms Sheila thrift did not mean frugality.

A Satish Gujral painting or exotic cuisines were easily indulged in the name of State elegance. But electricity conservation, recycled waste, running crusades against plastic bags, a partiality for ethnic weaves and an equal loathing for synthetic kitsch were her personal passions — something one has never witnessed in any Minister of Energy, Environment or Textiles, despite all the tall talk about preserving the planet. That made Ms Sheila a real person with feelings and taste-not just a marionette playing a part, mouthing predictable clichés. Ms Sheila’s second priority after I joined was to locate a professional housekeeper. She mentioned this to me thrice in my first two days and again I had misgivings about abandoning the regatta of Bharat Sarkar. But the IAS is accustomed to working with worse idiosyncrasies so I began the hunt. Luckily, I discovered a battleship, somewhat unsuitably attired in pink chiffon and pearls, but reputed to have given a facelift to UPSC’s dingy interiors. Without much ado I appointed her and sent her packing to take orders from the Chief Minister directly. Ms Dikshit did not think it infra dig to deal with housekeeping morning, afternoon and evening. Not until the brass planters in the Y-shaped Player’s building began to gleam, fresh flowers appeared in hallways, bundles of Government files disappeared from windowsills and brooms, swabs and phenyl bottles found unseen shelter, did the gasping housekeeper get time to breathe.
The touch of class shone everywhere, with visiting dignitaries bowled over after each visit. Ms Dikshit’s ability to put humour and pleasantness above business is legendary. Most Ministers are too preoccupied with their own importance to spare anything but a frozen smile. Most bureaucrats only bother about people worth bothering about, with little space for random hilarity. The Chief Minister’s morning telephone calls to me transmitted complaints but not until she had wished me a cheery good morning, and cracked a joke did she embark upon the litany of woes she had personally heard. By then she had already instructed the heads of the concerned organisations directly. But in madam’s management handbook supervision was the Chief Secretary’s business, not hers. The astonishing thing was that so many people — mostly very ordinary public — actually managed to get through to her. The pesky private secretaries adept at blocking telephone calls (ubiquitous at all levels of bureaucracy and a contagious disease with Ministers,) did not exist in Sheiladom. Her backstage management was superb, fortified by the watchful eyes of a powerful sister-daughter and in-law brigade and a hand-picked set of unpretentious back-room players. Meetings, functions, catastrophes may come and go but messages were always relayed. As she hurtled between the length and breadth of the city in her modest Ambassador, the call back would come, brief as the exchange might last. During interdepartmental conclaves she deposited the monkey squarely back on the shoulders of bureaucrats, particularly the perpetrators of blame games. Labyrinthine explanations cut no ice with her, making it impossible to suck her into the vortex of red tape that all bureaucrats whisk up in a jiffy. It made no difference to her opinion of an officer whether she saw his face once a week, once a month or never. Erudite economic theories did not hold her attention. Slow, inefficient and even lazy officers were given second and third chances but those who deliberately complicated things were replaced, even if the move looked like a reward. They were never rehabilitated thereafter, (although the smiles and hugs continued as before.) The Secretariat lobby, the driveway of her small house (then) at Mathura Road, a staircase, a lift, alighting from the car, saying goodbye in the porch were all places where she listened to officers at all levels and gave the nod they awaited. No single officer, leave alone a coterie could prevent an officer from directly interacting with the Chief Minister. Hierarchy levels, IAS and non-IAS did not matter to her if work was getting done. These lessons went beyond the ken of her political foes, including some astute bosses that longed to clip her wings. Like her, hate her, in the end Ms Sheila Dikshit has had her day.

While putting an end to urban slums is a priority, there are fundamental issues that deserve our immediate attention…

While putting an end to urban slums is a priority, there are fundamental issues that deserve our immediate attention…

The Central Government is all set to provide Rs. 200,000 crore to assist the States to end urban slums. But long before all that fructifies, there remains an urgent need not to delay the basics. This article appraises the performance of the metros in attending to four fundamentals: promoting birth control, immunisation, literacy and sanitation.

In Mumbai, every second person is today a slum dweller. In Kolkata, the same slum dwellers have led a slum life for the past 30 years. In Delhi, migration has added so overwhelmingly to the city’s growth that it has far surpassed its natural growth. That trend appears to be reversing of late, but not because of any decline in migration. It is because Delhi has the worst track record of reducing slum fertility. All other metros have successfully equalised the fertility rate of slum women with the rest of the urban women. Fertility levels for all metro women are presently comparable with European levels of fertility which is truly remarkable. But in Delhi the disparity remains enormous. Delhi’s slum fertility is higher than the State of Orissa.

Vicious cycle

But reducing average fertility is by no means the end of the story. With the exception of Chennai, a substantial proportion of slum women in all metros continue to produce four or more children which mean that they either disregard family planning or cannot access it. With the tools to prevent unwanted births so close at hand, it is brutal that thousands of women still undergo a cycle of repeated unwanted births. This needs to be tackled on a war footing if women are to be relieved from this yoke. It primarily calls for enumerating all women and reaching out to them. The second factor which possibly has the greatest impact on the quality of motherhood and mother care is, without doubt, literacy. Unacceptably high levels of illiteracy persist as a proportion of the slum population in the metros; a disgrace, because metros do not have a paucity of teachers and the target groups can be identified easily. Wiping out illiteracy from the slums can only be achieved by constantly identifying old-timers and new-comers and organising special late night classes, rewarding high attendance and achievement, through a guarantee of wage jobs.

Immunisation of children is the third critical obligation which has been given perfunctory treatment by all the metros except, again, Chennai. According to NFHS-3, the disparity between the immunisation cover extended to infants and toddlers in the slums and children in the rest of the city is glaring. Surprisingly in Chennai, slum children’s immunisation has exceeded that of non-slum children, which shows what concentrated attention can achieve. Delhi and Hyderabad fall far behind as hardly half the slum children were found fully immunised. With widespread availability of medical and ancillary staff, full immunisation cover should become non-negotiable for India’s capital as well as high-tech Hyderabad.

Crucial element

Added to these three basics, access to sanitation is all-important. Slum sanitation in Chennai appears to be the worst among the metros which diminishes the city’s glow greatly. If it is a sampling error or some other reason, it requires investigation. With the exception of Hyderabad, in other metros three quarters of the slum dwellers do not have even rudimentary toilet facilities. No guesses for where the muck goes.

On Republic Day each year community toilets are assembled on all roads converging on to India Gate, where lakhs of parade watchers congregate. Separate entry and exits are provided for men and women. This kind of alternative should be tried in large slums as the structures occupy little space and are moveable. Raising and managing them with a fee for service should be licensed to operate as a community venture.

Slummification is a natural process of urban development. If economic pulls from the cities make more sense to the poor, they will respond to the pulls, howsoever deep the quagmire they sink into. New York, Boston and large parts of Great Britain housed enormous slums during the 19th and a large part of the 20th century. Despite similar efforts to move the ghettos into the hinterland, ultimately, only economic growth made people give up slum life. For at least the next 20 years we should be prepared for massive migration into the cities as a part of urbanisation.

Instead of quibbling about notified and non-notified slums, old and new arrivals, there is a need for multi-sectoral project teams with full responsibility for attending to an identified number of families housed in each slum sprawl. The identification of new arrivals should be incentivised so that they can be immediately included in the basic package. Urban poverty can be greatly reduced by promoting literacy, liberating women through birth control and by giving confidence that their children will be healthy. Also by showing zero tolerance for open defecation by promoting innovations and alternatives that are sustainable.

While ending slums is a worthy goal, improving the lives of the people who live in them ought to be the more pressing priority.

harge of the nurse brigade

What happens when Florence Nightingales clash with the babus

OVERNIGHT,a first-time MP was appointed Minister with independent charge for Human Health. The nurses union had been staging a dharna for weeks in a tent at the main gate of Nirman Bhavan. This dharna was staged annually to air grievances. In the daytime, a contingent of nurses in camel-coloured salwar uniforms would take turns in guarding the tent. The previous year’s agitation had been about their refusal to wear white uniforms. A woman High Court judge, after hearing the matter for months, concluded that white uniforms were in the interest of patient care. But the nurses had forced the government to accede to their preference for the camel-coloured uniforms.
So accustomed was the Ministry to their strikes and their clout that no officer was willing to cross swords with them. They shouted their wants, led by a virago who had brought the government to its knees many a time. On that fateful day, the new Minister, sporting a Clark Gable moustache and a safari suit, screeched to a halt beside the tent. Having been briefed by his escort that these were Florence Nightingales, his heart bled for the ministering angels. He leapt out of his car, sprang into their tent, and settled down to confabulate with them. He introduced himself as the Health Minister and asked them what the problem was. The nurses moaned about how the Ministry had mistreated them and how its officers had been harassing them over a paltry increment. The Minister asked how much money was involved.
“Not even a couple of hundred rupees per nurse per month, sir.” The Minister held independent charge for Health for the entire country. Perched at the very pinnacle of the Bharat sarkar, he thought, if he could not give the poor women such a trifling raise then what was the point of being a Union Minister?
So accustomed was the Ministry to their strikes and their clout that no officer was willing to cross swords with them. They shouted their wants, led by a virago who had brought the government to its knees many a time.

He came bounding up the stairs, thunderstruck with the glory of single handedly doing the right thing by these deprived women. He sent for me and everyone else dealing with “paramedical services” and announced his decision. “I have decided to give them what they want. It is such a small amount and you should not grudge them this paltry increase,” he said.
In the taut, condescending tone officers use for first-time Ministers, I told him what I had told his six predecessors: “Sir, this cannot be done without the approval of the Finance Ministry. If you give them an increase, relativities involving the entire gamut of medical staff would get disturbed. Doctors, paramedics down to karamcharis would also demand a hike. That would amount to a virtual Pay Commission for the health sector and the Finance Ministry will never agree.”
This spiel had worked on the others but this time the reply was: “Oh, bha bha bha, what is it to you, Ma? You must feel for these women, Ma. I have given them my word, Ma. You people have troubled them for too long. Women, Ma. You should feel for them, Ma.”
There were wooden faces in the phalanx of officials behind me. Although new to government, the Minister could tell from our hostile faces his order was not going to be obeyed. He must do what none had ever done. He must change the system.
As the seniormost officer (the Health Secretary was on a foreign jaunt), I felt bound to warn the Minister that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. More important, an escape route had to be found at once. “Sir, the nurses union has a long history of belligerence. Any move will open a Pandora’s box of fresh issues. If you have given any assurance, you should immediately attribute everything to a language misunderstanding. You can blame your officers, if need be. But this avalanche of demands would be impossible to contain, once started,” I said.
Hardly had I uttered those words, a bevy of nurses poured into the room with flowers, sweets and trailed by television cameramen. The Minister leapt up, patted the nurses in brotherly fashion, accepted their bouquets and was garlanded with roses by the nurses’ union president.
The evening news gave full marks to the Minister for this historic “samjhautha”, overruling his pesky babus and displaying such compassion for the poor nurses. At 10 am the next day, the RAX (the inter-ministerial hotline between Ministers and senior officers) rang. The Cabinet Secretary himself was on the line. “Bhai, yeh sab kya kar diya apne? You know perfectly well you cannot do this without the approval of the Finance Ministry. Why could you not advise your Minister? Gaddar machega. Go immediately to the Expenditure Secretary and sort it out.”
I was reminded by the Cabinet Secretary of earlier instances of such inexcusable incompetence. All eyes in the room bored through me. A waiter sidled up to me, asking,‘Chai ya coffee?’

Irushed to the Ministry of Finance. The Expenditure Secretary knew perfectly well what had happened but feigned ignorance and enjoyed listening to the story and observing my discomfiture. He was a past master at overturning the best proposals unless they came with an “ishara” (signal) from above. He took delight in rejecting laboriously argued requests by hectoring about financial recklessness and shortsightedness. And here was the perpetrator of such acts of profligacy standing before him in person. He was ready to chew me up but when the phone buzzed he decided to pass me on to smaller fry in the Finance Ministry. “You’d better sort it out with the Joint Secretary,” he ordered. I ferreted my way to the room of one of the most difficult officers in the Finance Ministry – thoroughly trained by none other than the mountainous office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.
“This cannot be tolerated, Madam,” said he, enjoying an opportunity to talk down to a typical woman officer (all rhetoric and no substance) and IAS to boot. “You should have stopped the Minister. This is unheard-of. The Finance Ministry cannot agree to such an absurd proposal and you, Madam, will be squarely responsible for the fallout.” He rolled his tongue in contempt as he clapped another dose of paan bahar into his mouth.
I returned to the Health Ministry, grinding my teeth at the sheer injustice of it all. Hardly had I entered my office when the nurses’ union president stormed in. “Who are you to try and stop the Minister from taking a just decision?” she said. She threatened a strike and told me that 10,000 nurses in Delhi would join it if I did not issue orders. The afternoon news bulletin announced the lightning strike by Delhi nurses. I went to the Minister’s office and told him what the Cabinet Secretary and Finance Ministry had said and the crisis we were in. “What should we do, Ma?” he beamed back.
SINCE he was on good terms with the Prime Minister, I suggested, he could alert the latter at once because no one in between was going to do anything and a nurses’ strike could bring health services to a halt. “Request the PM to set up a committee,” I said. The Minister pounced on the idea and spoke to someone on the RAX, asking whether he could drop in. Sirens screeching, we went to Yojana Bhavan, to the room of the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission.
I was asked to state the case. I poured forth whatever I knew about the long history of strikes that the Ministry had witnessed over the years. I mentioned how many times efforts had been made to give all kinds of allowances to every member of the medical fraternity but how anything done in isolation would most certainly lead to a slew of strikes which we could ill afford. I warned that in the past the strikes had invariably gone in favour of the employees and in view of the impending strike, it might be prudent to persuade the Finance Ministry to part with something straightaway rather than wait for it to snowball into sympathy strikes from the entire medical and para-medical cadres. Silence followed my monologue. Then, the vice-head of India’s biggest policymaking empire placed the fingertips of both hands together and pronounced: “You have two alternatives. You can be firm or not be firm.” He rose, signifying that the meeting was over. The Minister thanked him profusely. “I don’t know how to thank you, sir. We will do just as you say, sir.”
In the taut, condescending tone officers use for first-time Ministers, I told him what I had told his six predecessors: ‘Sir, this cannot be done without the approval of the Finance Ministry.’

By the time we reached the Health Ministry, news had come in that the PMO had appointed a Punjabi political stalwart from Delhi to negotiate with the nurses union. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief because at last the matter was going to be handled politically. Someone in the PMO had had a brainwave and suggested negotiations between two Punjabis, biradari connections being more durable than cement.
At 4 pm, the emissary strode beaming down the corridors of the Health Ministry accompanied by cameras and a gaggle of women journos. In the vanguard came a team of officers from the Ministry of Finance and the Department of Personnel. Whoever had thought of this ploy had really thought it through. The condescending Joint Secretary from the Finance Ministry was there, smiling away. Another surprise was the arrival of a battleship from the Department of Personnel famed for her toughness in handling union negotiations. She too had been dispatched to defuse the tension and “protect Government’s interest”. Obviously someone high up in the hierarchy had understood that it was better to find a face-saving solution than have a strike on hand.
BUT if the powers that be had thought that the loquacious negotiator could soften his female namesake in “assi-tussi” Punjabi, they were hugely mistaken. The lady turned out to be a no-nonsense negotiator. She had lost no time in bringing 27 government hospitals to a halt throughout the city. BBC and CNN had already relayed pictures of hapless patients lying unattended, ventilator wires snapped, and injection trays lying unused.
Behind the scenes, an ebullient young woman Director gave the Punjabi political envoy a brilliant smile with an equally brilliant idea scribbled on a scrap of paper. Of course she had neither consulted Mr Woodenhead from Finance nor Battleship from Personnel. A first time entrant to the Ministry, she was acutely aware of the fact that proximity to political stalwarts did more to push careers than following systems and procedures. The envoy accepted her advice gratefully and entered the conference room from a side door, clasping the scrap of paper to his chest. Handpicked as he was to conduct negotiations with the nurses, surely he was not expected to consult anyone. In full view of television cameras and a packed conference room, he gushed forth into the microphones in an avalanche of three languages.
As he beamed before the cameras, the nurses clapped and thumped the table. The adrenalin shot up in the negotiator’s veins, making him blind and deaf to what the emissaries from the bastions of Finance and Personnel were cautioning at full volume. What the interlocutor had announced amounted to an increase of 50 per cent over what the nurses had been seeking. His jaw dropped when they pointed out sternly that what he had just announced was simply not feasible and he had no power to make such pronouncements. The ensuing melee turned into a free-for-all between the nurses and bureaucrats. The plenipotentiary crumpled the scrap of paper and slipped away from the scene, ruing the day he got entangled with the Ministry of Human Health.
News of the debacle reached the PMO and we were duly summoned before the Prime Minister at 6 pm. My heart was in my mouth by then and my only thought was that I would be lucky to keep my present job, knowing full well that chances of becoming a Secretary were now doomed.
The gathering before the Prime Minister was 15-strong. The Cabinet Secretary was already there, warbling nonstop, speaking so fast that it was impossible to know whose side he was on. It sounded as though he was annoyed and sympathetic at the same time. The Secretary-General of Human Health Services was in cahoots with the nurses, slumped in the second row, making himself as unobtrusive as possible. The Prime Minister was calmly helping himself to vadas and chutney proffered by gloved waiters who sashayed around, balancing silver trays.
The main trouble-shooter on behalf of the Prime Minister ordered me to start the briefing. I did so, skipping any mention of how the situation had arisen. As soon as I finished, the bureaucrats swooped. What a sorry pass the Government had been brought to because of rank ineptitude, they said. I was reminded by the Cabinet Secretary of earlier instances of such inexcusable incompetence. All eyes in the room bored through me. A waiter sidled up to me, asking, “Chai ya coffee?”
The Prime Minister wiped his chin and said, “Resolve the matter quickly.” The tea party was over. As we shuffled into the foyer, I wondered to myself what I could have done differently.
The nurses managed to extract 100 per cent more than what they had been asking for from the great Indian bureaucracy. The Secretary-General of Human Health Services, the lone representative of the medical profession, licked his lips in the knowledge that the doctors would be the next to get the bonanza – and effortlessly at that.
The next morning, the Human Health Minister, back from his constituency, sent for me. Grinning broadly, he said, “What did I tell you, Ma? Take it from me, your Women’s Reservation Bill will never be passed. These men don’t want it, whatever they may say. You are a woman. Only women can feel for other women. You must feel for ‘sisters’. When you have the chance, help them, Ma.”

We the women of India

It is futile to debate the physical and mental strength of women in our country. Those are issues long settled. What we need to discuss is how the abilities of women can be harnessed in a way that their voices begin to matter and they cannot be fobbed off by tokenism

Last Sunday’s ‘We the People’ show on a television news channel dealt with women’s right to full equality in the armed forces, including active combat. Practical difficulties like being confined inside a battle tank or ill treated as PoWs were brushed aside by fiery champions of complete gender equality.

But combat in uniform is not the only way of registering prowess, independence and capability. Much as we decry Ms Mayawati or Ms Mamata Banerjee, perhaps they are the sturdiest examples of women power. Even if the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister inherited the mantle from her mentor Kanshi Ram, she was neither his daughter nor a close family member. She was born in a Dalit family and her father was a clerk. She worked as a schoolteacher in JJ Colony in Delhi and joined full-time politics only at the age of 30. Despite this background she became the Chief Minister of India’s most populous State for the fourth time in 2007. Whatever depths she may have stooped to conquer, neither physical stamina nor questions about her mental agility prevented her from trouncing the most powerful, moneyed and formidable among her opponents.

Another extraordinary example is Ms Banerjee. She started her political career as a virtual nonentity and yet in the 1984 general election she became India’s youngest parliamentarian, defeating the renowned Communist candidate Somnath Chatterjee. Ever since, she has held the South Kolkata seat in five general elections and has recently succeeded in wobbling CPI(M)’s complacency, besides bringing the house of Tata’s to tears. Whatever be her methods, she has displayed how a woman could pull off what no man has yet succeeded in doing — challenging CPI(M)’s iron grip over West Bengal. Significantly, neither Ms Mayawati nor Ms Banerjee has been launched by lineage, stardom or personal wealth — factors which are largely responsible for women’s political success.

That brings us to women professionals. Indra Nooyi was born into an ordinary Tamil family. A convent education, a chemistry degree and an IIM Calcutta MBA gave her the same openings as hundreds of others. While an education at Yale and consulting jobs must have added substance, they were not extraordinary enough to explain her meteoric rise to become the head of Pepsi within seven years. She is listed among Time’s 100 most influential people in the world and Forbes put her down as the third most powerful woman. While immense credit has to go to an environment which rewarded competence, regardless of roots or gender, Ms Nooyi’s own achievements have been nothing short of extraordinary. Unquestionably she must have displayed supreme combative skills in the corporate world of cut-throat players. It is that quality that needs close watch particularly as Ms Nooyi’s brilliant smile gives nothing away.

Let us consider women doctors and women lawyers: As a bureaucrat in the health sector I had the benefit of dealing with the largest cross-section of doctors, super specialists and clinicians for over 15 years. When it came to competence and skills, men and women medicos were regarded as equally competent. But invariably, women, having opted for softer specialities like obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics and dermatology, found themselves overshadowed by high-profile super specialists from cardiology and orthopaedics, who advised Government behind the scenes. Prime ministerial knees and hearts have occupied the best brains and time of specialists at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. At one point an endicrinologist influenced the health policy of India simply because he was treating the then Prime Minister for diabetes.

Women doctors, for opting for certain career options, are automatically relegated to the somewhat routine area of delivering babies or tending to the female reproductive cycle. Critical as these areas are, they shut opportunities to gain in relevance, a prerequisite for being taken seriously.

Let us come to lawyers. One never hears of a woman lawyer being made the Solicitor General of India or taking on prestigious cases dealing with the Constitution or white-collar crime. When Mr AR Antulay, himself a barrister-at-law, set up a high-powered committee as Health Minister, he put together a galaxy of jurists and lawyers featuring 12 legal luminaries. Among them there was only one woman lawyer, more seen than heard.

During hearings in the Supreme Court I had occasion to sit behind the three different Solicitor Generals who defended the Health Ministry at different points of time against private medical colleges. At those hearings the courtrooms were packed to capacity as each matter had important constitutional and federal ramifications. Notably women lawyers were not present. By selecting to work in important but niche areas of the legal profession, women have side-lined themselves from the all important process of having a hand and a say in determining state policy.

It is not the physical or mental strength of women that needs debate. It is how their abilities can be channelled in a way that their voice begins to matter and they cannot be fobbed off by tokenism. Instead of espousing the role of permanent protesters for women’s rights to be taken seriously, women have first to stir themselves and select the most decisive roles within their chosen careers. The battle field is not the only arena to determine female combat worthiness or competence.

Sugar-coated lie

Sugar-coated lie

The so-called ‘demographic dividend’ is so much bunkum and no more. Limited access to education and healthcare among young men and women has left them with no awareness about family planning and HIV/AIDS. A demographic disaster is in the making

An excellent report by the International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai, has demolished the ‘demographic dividend’ theory; one which has been urban India’s euphoric rejoinder to stave off any concerns about the questionable social health of Indian youth. The report points in no uncertain terms to a demographic disaster taking place, having “squandered” the potential that could have given that dividend.

Titled A Profile of Youth in India the report is a State-wide study and systematically captures the urban-rural split, as well as the male-female disparities in education and reproductive health among adolescents and the youth — a huge segment of India’s population. The report has to be taken seriously because it was published by a Government organisation under the aegis of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The image of an exuberant youth, educated and resilient, has been shattered through this report. Here are some of the highlights:

A significant proportion of the youth were found to have received little education. Many were illiterate and several were burdened with onerous familial responsibilities. The enormous lack of education that prevailed among the female and rural youth left no opportunity for them to contribute to development or the tremendous challenge of nation building. A third of the females and only two out of every five men were found to have completed 10 years of schooling. Only two out of five adolescents were found actually attending school, leaving the rest of them destined to join the ranks of the uneducated and unemployable. One out of five teenage girls possessed no education, with one in three Muslim girls falling into this category.

The report found every third adolescent girl to be married. The element of gauna was found to be fractional, so negating the theory that child marriages were only symbolic. Early marriages consummated well before the legal minimum age of marriage had negated efforts to reach the goals of the national youth policy.

Limited use of contraception for spacing, and an over-reliance on traditional methods persisted after decades of chasing the family planning programme. Among the youth the unmet need for family planning soared. What did these young, married women know? Not even a fifth of the 20 to 24year-olds knew about the fertile days within the menstrual cycle; adolescent girls knew far less. Knowledge among boys was virtually non-existent. Yet the rhythm method continued to be the most preferred form of family planning despite knowledge about the menstrual cycle being so poor. For all the work that the State AIDS Societies claimed to have done, and all the money that they had exhausted, only 20 per cent of the female youth had comprehensive knowledge about the routes of transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS infection. In several States only half such women had even heard
about AIDS.

Undernutrition and anaemia continued to be very high among adolescents and the youth, doubling health risks for pregnant and breast-feeding women, as well as their infants. Large-scale use of tobacco and alcohol prevailed among very young adolescents with negative health fallouts over a lifetime. A high prevalence of domestic violence existed and the social norms inherited by the youth still justified wife beating.

Obviously, several Government programmes despite incremental improvements are haemorrhaging badly at places. The claims made by the National Literacy Mission, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the ICDS programmes are clearly either coloured or false. Unfortunately, the report has no silver lining. The report has not spared either the outcomes of the family planning programme or the national AIDS control programme. At one level it is highly satisfactory that the present dispensation believes in transparency and has not pushed these facts under the carpet. On the other, it is disheartening to find that there are no outcries from the State Governments that ought to have either felt ashamed of their failure or combative if they did not subscribe to the findings. Instead a climate of ‘business as usual’ prevails and one can wager that none of the people in charge of youth affairs, woman and child development, education, literacy, or the prevention of AIDS and premature marriages have looked at the report.

Clearly, all the hard work is not reaching the most vulnerable people of this country. There is absolutely no case for more Government; we need smarter Government. While that exploration should take priority, for starters, the demographic dividend theory should be dumped publicly, because it is just a sugar-coated lie.