Cybercafés, as the name suggests, combined the experience of a café with access to the cyber world. A start was made with small-scale traditional cafés run by entrepreneurs where a small number of internet-connected computers were available for an access fee. The first such outfit, Coffee Day Cyber Café, was launched in 1995 in Bangalore. As the technology evolved, internet service providers teamed with large companies to launch fancy internet lounges fitted with large-screen, high-speed PCs connected to a local area network and broadband. People could check email, browse the internet and even play games in such places. Since the cybercafé model was at a high cost, it was unsuitable for semi-urban, suburban and rural areas. In these places, people were more familiar with STD PCOs and also video game parlours. In urban slums, small towns and villages, cybercafés drew their inspiration from the PCO model and came to be known as internet kiosks. Enterprising entrepreneurs simply added a couple of desktop computers to their PCOs or photocopy shops and connected the PCs to service providers to offer low-speed internet. Usually, such shops were located near railway stations, bus stations, local courts, government offices, educational institutions and village bazaars. The internet kiosk took a more definite shape with the intervention of government agencies, social entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who looked at the idea as a means to bridge the so-called digital divide. The internet kiosks could do more than just be the STD PCO for the internet. They were used to book train tickets, check examination results, download forms for college admissions, send job applications and so on. With little help and training for kiosk owners, these kiosks became a means to connect rural people with day-to-day government services and entitlements and introduce them to useful information resources available on the World Wide Web. Voluntary agencies went a step further. The M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) launched Village Knowledge Centres in the villages of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry in 1998. The centres, manned by trained village youths, provided information such as farming tips, weather updates, news about governmental schemes, such as loans and so on, by accessing relevant content on the internet. In 1999, dozens of ‘facilitation booths’ were established in villages in the Warna taluka of Kolhapur district in Maharashtra. In these booths, people could access information about employment and agricultural schemes, get automated assistance in completing applications for ration cards, birth and death certificates and so on, information on bus and railway services, medical facilities and water supply details. The Gyandoot project in Madhya Pradesh, launched in 2000, was designed as an interface between the district administration and people. Information kiosks were established in gram panchayat offices as well as existing private telephone booths where people could access information and services like grain prices in mandis (markets), income certificates, caste certificates, landholders’ passbooks, the public grievance redressal system, employment news and forms for various government schemes. The state government in Andhra Pradesh launched APOnline and E-Seva booths to facilitate payment of bills, and access to government schemes and services. Similar projects based on the internet kiosk concept were then launched in many parts of the country. Over the years, different variants of the internet kiosk have helped millions of Indians benefit from online services without owning a PC or subscribing to an internet service. These kiosks became their first interface with information and communication technologies. The penetration of mobile telephony has improved a great deal but broadband connectivity has remained low. Due to low digital literacy and knowledge of the English language, people still need assistance for accessing online services such as getting a passport or booking a railway ticket or seeking an appointment with a specialist in a government hospital. For them, internet kiosks continue to be of critical help despite improvements in broadband connectivity and access to smartphones.
Key People Dr M.S. Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of India’s Green Revolution, was the brain behind the concept of the Village Knowledge Centre – which was a value-added version of a plain vanilla cybercafé. He argued that people in rural areas would benefit from the internet only when they could access information relevant and useful to them. Surveys conducted in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry villages showed that people were interested in getting information about various government schemes, such as crop insurance and so on, as well as weather updates. Women wanted to access health-related information and also wanted to upgrade their skills. At the knowledge centres, information downloaded from various sources was provided to users; in addition, they could access information from a database created for them in Tamil. V. Balaji and Subbiah Arunachalam were project leads. The idea, according to the two, demonstrated that information and communication technologies can contribute to improving the quality of life of the poor. That is why it found takers in many Indian states as well as many developing countries in Asia and Africa. 45. Simputer ‘This is computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it, then used Steve Jobs for his ad campaign,’ wrote the New York Times in December 2001 about the Simputer, arguably one of the most significant pieces of hardware developed by Indian scientists and engineers. The portable internet access device was placed in the same league as other developments of 2001, such as Apple’s PowerBook G4 and Microsoft’s Windows XP. At the turn of the century, when the internet penetration had just started spreading and online applications began surfacing, concerns about the digital divide became apparent. To access the internet and services being offered there, one needed a computer, laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA). Such devices were unaffordable for billions of people in the developing world, creating a divide between the haves and have nots. In addition to the high cost that made PCs and digital devices out of bounds for people in countries like India, their use also required computer literacy and knowledge of the English language. Even if these devices were to become cheaper, they would have been of little use for people not conversant with the use of English language keyboards. The challenge of bridging the digital divide was twofold – ensuring affordability as well as ease of use and relevant applications. The Simputer, a novel handheld device developed by Indian scientists in 2001, addressed these challenges. Priced at `9,000, it was the cheapest handheld device then, and could be accessed by multiple users – it was multilingual and had applications relevant for rural people. ‘Simputer’ was the short name for ‘Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual People’s Computer’. The Simputer incorporated several innovative features, which later became popular in mobile devices. All digital devices like laptops and palmtops till then had some kind of special input–output mechanisms like a keyboard for inputs and a display screen for output. The speech-based interface was available in a limited way and in the English language only. In contrast, the Simputer had no keyboard but a specially developed speech engine in Indian languages. It used the Information Mark-up Language Interface (IMLI) – not the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) – as the primary interface that allowed viewing of information as well as the running of applications in Indian languages. The output could also be in spoken language, meaning the device could read aloud the text in regional languages. In this way, people with little or no literacy level could also use the Simputer without using a keyboard. For those who could read and write, it had a special feature – the ability to write on any screen (image, web page, PDF) on the Simputer.
A smart card interface in the device made its use possible by multiple users with the personal data of users residing on their cards (which acted like portable storage). It also had a USB master connector. The device pioneered the use of an accelerometer that could sense movement or vibration. Its use in mobile phones became common several years later. The biggest USP of the device was that it was based on open-source Linux software, the first handheld device to do so globally. This facilitated the development of a diverse set of applications The Simputer ran on normal batteries. All these features made the device ideal for rugged conditions and diverse applications like e-governance, education, micro banking, health and so on. The device attracted global attention in technology circles and the technology was adapted in several developing countries. In India, its production was taken up by Bharat Electronics Limited and it was exported to several developing countries. The advent of smartphones made Simputer obsolete, but many of the technologies used for the first time in it became commonplace in mobile phones. For example, the use of an accelerometer to sense motion and vibration that Simputer deployed for the first time found its way in Apple’s iPhone six years later. Its other feature – the ability to write on a phone with a stylus – became the USP of Samsung Galaxy phones a few years later. The concept of apps so popular on smartphones was used in the Simputer for the first time. It had more than 100 ‘apps’ – seven years before the first smartphone came to the market. Key People The Simputer was a result of over two years of effort by a group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, making it one of the first successful start-ups to germinate in an academic institution. In 1998, Bangalore hosted an international seminar on IT as part of the Bangalore IT.Com exposition. It adopted the ‘Bangalore Declaration on Information Technology for Developing Countries’ that pointed to the need for a simple and affordable device for all citizens to access IT irrespective of gender, language, location and literacy levels. Some computer science professionals and others from IISc who attended the conference decided to work on such a device. They formed a non-profit body, Simputer Trust, in November 1999 intending to develop IT technologies for people who had not been reached by modern means of communication. The first target was to develop a device that was rugged, sharable and met the demands of communication, education and entertainment. Vijay Chandru, Swami Manohar, V. Vinay and Ramesh Hariharan from the Computer Science and Automation Department of IISc formed the core team of Simputer. This team worked with Vinay Deshpande, Shashank Garg and Mark Mathais of Encore Software in Bangalore. 46. Missed Call Marketing In January 2016, during his monthly radio talk, ‘Mann Ki Baat’, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a new mobile phone number and asked his followers to give a ‘missed call’ if they wanted to listen to the recording of his talk. Within days, the number received nearly two million calls. In 2019, his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a membership drive and asked people to give a ‘missed call’ on a designated number if they wanted to become a member of the party. In January 2020, the party launched another public campaign to garner support for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which had attracted widespread criticism. All one had to do to express one’s support was to give a ‘missed call’ to the mobile number the party had announced. Within a week, the party claimed, it had received 5.2 million missed calls on the number. These are just a few examples of what has come to be known as ‘missed call marketing’ in which people have to dial
a given number from their mobile phones and hang up. The called party or the marketer can either call back or send the caller the required information. The phenomenon of missed calls that first surfaced in the late 1990s, as a cost-minimizing strategy for mobile phone consumers starved of talk time, has become a mainstream marketing technique being used by governments, political parties, multinational companies and consumer firms. In telecom jargon, when you call a number and the called party does not take the call (for whatever reason), it is considered a missed call. The caller’s number and other details like the time of calling get recorded on the phone. If the called party wishes, he or she can call back. In the marketing jargon, the missed call occurs when you call a mobile phone and intentionally hang up soon after it beeps. This type of missed call is intentional and is meant to convey a message without the recipient saying a word, and it is free for the caller. In the early years of mobile telephony, the call charges were very high and subscribers used pre-paid service packages with a limited number of calling minutes. Therefore, it was to save calling minutes that people devised innovative calling methods like missed calls. This technique was used to convey pre-determined messages like ‘call me back’, ‘I have reached’, ‘I have arrived to pick you up’, ‘I am done with my work’ and so on, within one’s family, friends or colleagues, without incurring any talking minutes or sending a text message. The missed call also became a favourite means of communication between employers and their staff, such as drivers and domestic workers who had phones but with limited talk time. In such cases, missed calls thus became a substitute for a ‘collect call’ where the called party pays. A missed call is repurposing of existing technology in social and cultural contexts, rather than altering the technology or inventing a new one. The missed call technique became popular as a marketing and advertising technique, leveraging on the billion- plus subscriber base for mobile telephones. It is a particularly attractive way to reach the sizeable number of people who still use a feature phone or low-end smartphones. Non-governmental organizations, social and health activists, multinational companies, hospitals, banks, e-commerce firms and government departments are all using it in different ways to reach out to their respective target audiences. For example, Hindustan Lever runs an on-demand entertainment and marketing radio channel called ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’. Those giving a missed call are called back with pre-recorded audio programmes interspersed with marketing messages. The missed call has spawned business opportunities for many start-ups and marketing firms. It hit global headlines when micro-blogging company, Twitter, acquired an Indian missed call start-up called ZipDial, for 30 million dollars in 2015. 47. Online Matchmaking It is often said that marriages are made in the heavens and solemnized on the earth. In India, however, it is not this simple an affair, especially in traditional settings where the ‘arranged marriage’ is still the norm. Many young Indians are opting to choose their life partners, but an overwhelming number still depend on their parents to find a match. In such cases, a marriage is not just a matter of individual choice of a boy and a girl but is seen as the coming together of their families as well. The process of the ‘arranged marriage’ is complex and regulated by several factors ranging from caste and eating habits to the educational and economic status of the two sides. Finding a so-called right match for one’s children is an arduous task for average Indian parents. The traditional way of finding a suitable boy or girl is through one’s social networks and mediators like distant relatives and other referrals. People also opt for matrimonial advertisements in newspapers, marriage bureaus or community organizations that hold parichay sammelans (informal get-togethers of eligible youngsters).
This traditional system of matchmaking was disrupted with the arrival of online platforms for matrimony at the turn of the century. Matrimonial websites eliminated mediators and extended the arena of matchmaking beyond one’s social circle of acquaintances and limitations of newspaper classifieds. This was done while retaining some of the features – and biases – of the traditional system. Online matrimony websites combine the benefits of digital technology and the internet with traditional preferences. Prospective brides and grooms register on these websites and create their profiles (with details of their social, educational, economic status). Algorithms deployed by matrimonial websites then find the right matches based on preferences (using them as filters) mentioned in profiles. The information is shared among whoever is matching, and contact details are shared for telephonic interviews (and video chats), or face-to-face meetings among willing parties. Since the websites have profiles from all over India and even other countries, the choices one can get are much greater than what is possible through traditional networks and marriage bureaus. The idea has caught on and matrimonial websites claim that they have made millions of matches in the past two decades. Given the diverse choices of people, matrimonial websites have gone into the niche mode to cater to choices based on region, religion, caste, profession, income level and place of residence (separate ones are available for non-resident Indians in the Gulf countries, Europe, North America, among other places). Some of these websites have also gone in for their physical presence in the form of stores in many cities, to supplement their online offerings. They have also diversified into all marriage-related services such as venues, wedding photography and catering. With over 35 million members, Shaadi.com claims to be the world’s largest online matchmaking service. Despite criticism that matrimonial websites are perpetuating traditional biases like caste and gotra and occasional cases of fraud, they have been able to open up new choices in the marriage market for millions of Indians. Online matrimony sites also predate dating platforms, which became popular in the 2000s with offerings like match.com and dating apps like Tinder. To introduce a technological intervention into a deeply traditional institution like marriage and to sell matchmaking like organized retail was indeed a breakthrough innovation. Key People The trend of matrimonial websites was pioneered by Shaadi. com and BharatMatrimony.com, both of which started as entrepreneurial ventures based on personal experiences of their respective founders in the mid-1990s. Anupam Mittal, who was studying for a management degree in America, was accosted by a marriage broker during one of his trips home. This gave him the idea of an online matchmaking platform as the internet was just becoming popular in India. Mittal started in 1997 with sagaai. com (sagaai is Hindi for engagement) and graduated to Shaadi. com in 2001. The matchmaking is based on as many as twenty-three factors or attributes for a prospective partner such as education, religion, age, height, work area and caste. However, it has been seen that caste does not matter for about 35 per cent of users. Around the same time as Mittal, another Indian techie in America – Murugavel Janakiraman – launched a community website that also had a section for matrimonial classifieds for Indians living there. The matrimonial page became very popular, and Janakiraman himself found a partner online. This triggered the thought of a full-fledged matrimonial website, resulting in BharatMatrimony.com and its fifteen variants catering to different language regions in south India and also ‘Elite Matrimony’ to cater to celebrity and rich clients. 48. Chota Recharge
India is the second-largest market for mobile phones in the world, after China. In December 2019, the total subscriber base for mobile phones was 1.15 billion, of which over 500 million subscribers were in rural areas. The sector has witnessed a huge growth since mobile phone services were introduced in four metro cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata – in 1995. The total number of mobile phone subscribers in 2000 was about one million. One of the main reasons for the slow growth in initial years was high call charges – `16 per minute – and charges even for incoming calls. This positioned the mobile phone service as something meant for professionals or business people. The call rates gradually came down to about `8 per minute in five years, but even then mobile phones were out of bounds for average Indians, particularly those in rural areas of the urban middle classes. Making a call of two to three minutes could equal half a day’s wage for a labourer. When pre- paid services were introduced, the recharge packages started at `300 or so. Ownership of a mobile phone became aspirational, but few could afford it. The situation changed after the turn of the century, with regulatory reforms, such as charges only for outgoing calls as well as greater competition in the market. The turning point in call charges came in 2003 when one minute of talk time fell to below `2, eventually going down to 50 paise. Service providers took several innovative measures to make inroads into new markets in urban areas and also into towns and villages. In addition to rolling out infrastructures like towers and base stations, companies introduced attractive pre-paid subscriptions and bundled handsets with a subscription. All this meant one could walk into a shop and walk out with a fully functional phone in half an hour. The recharge coupons, and SIM cards, were made available everywhere, at neighbourhood grocery shops, medical stores, milk vendors and so on. Such franchisees, acting as the ‘point of presence’ for telecom companies, also informally handled problems of subscribers just like customer relations executives do in a formal set-up. Phones and services were sold like any other ‘fast-moving consumer goods’ (FMCG). What proved to be a game-changer was making recharging of pre-paid connections easy and simple with ‘chota recharge’ or micro recharge coupons for as low as `5. The micro recharge – as against a monthly recharge of `200 or `300 – made mobile phones affordable even for a daily wage earner like a vegetable seller, rickshaw puller or farm worker. Chota recharge, along with other factors like low call charges, cheaper handsets from China, simplified tariff plans and easy pre-paid registration, helped telecom providers acquire new, first-time customers and expand the market to towns and villages. Advertising and promotional campaigns focused on why mobile phones could and should be used by everyone. When data services became popular and the number of smartphone users jumped, service providers came up with microdata packs for as low as `16 for 1 GB data bundled with talk time. The idea was pioneered by Airtel and Hutch (later it became Vodafone), but it soon spread to all the service providers including the state-owned telecom companies, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL). 49. Traditional Knowledge Digital Database The battle of Haldighati was fought in the sixteenth century in a mountain pass in Rajasthan that had turmeric- coloured soil, a battle that has been an essential part of school history lessons for several decades. In the late twentieth century, Haldighati once again caught the public attention when India won a major patent battle with America over turmeric. Dr. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, an eminent chemical engineer and director general of
the CSIR, who led the effort to revoke the contentious patents, earned the moniker of ‘warrior of Haldighati’. Out of this conflict emerged a massive exercise to create a unique database of India’s traditional knowledge to prevent its unlawful use in Western countries. Turmeric is not just one of the most used spices in the Indian kitchen but is also part of several home remedies, just like other commonly used spices. Pepper, turmeric, cinnamon and sesame seeds and herbs like tulsi, coriander and neem are often used for a range of health benefits. For ages, they have been the favourite grandma cures for everything from coughs and colds to aches, and are also used in different Indian systems of medicine. In recent decades, these medicinal plants and herbs have attracted the attention of Western consumers as they are considered safer than modern medicines. Multinational companies see a huge market potential of herbal formulations. In the 1990s, as the new patent regimes came into force, Western companies started filing for patents based on the medicinal properties of Indian herbs, including neem, tulsi and turmeric in patent offices of America and Europe. Though properties of Indian medicinal plants were known (and thus were obvious), patent offices did not reject claims because they did not have access to documentary proofs about the properties of Indian herbs. In the absence of such proof, many claims were considered novel. In 1995, researchers from the University of Mississippi Medical Center filed six patent claims covering oral and topical use of turmeric powder to heal surgical wounds and ulcers. Following an uproar over this and similar patent applications, CSIR challenged the applications and got them re-examined, which resulted, finally, in them being revoked in 1998. Indian authorities presented documentary proof from traditional Indian texts to show that the patent granted was not novel and that the medicinal property for which the patent had been claimed was already known (thus it was ‘prior art’). Later, patents relating to neem were also challenged and got revoked. The turmeric patent was the first case in which a patent based on the traditional knowledge of a developing country was challenged and then revoked by the US Patent and Trademark Office. It was not possible to contest all such claims in different patent offices due to cost and time considerations. This led to an innovative solution to prevent such patents at the application stage itself – a database of traditional knowledge. If this was made available to all patent offices, they could check the information whenever any application was filed for a patent on Indian traditional knowledge. The database, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), paved the way for the development of ‘Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification’ in the patent process. The TKDL was developed by the CSIR in collaboration with the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy (AYUSH) and the controller general of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks. The job was executed by interdisciplinary teams of traditional medicine experts, patent examiners, IT engineers, data scientists, translators and technical officers. All traditional medicinal knowledge existed in Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil etc. The language and format barriers were overcome by scientifically converting and structuring all available knowledge contained in ancient texts of Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Yoga systems into five modern languages – English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. The database covers 335,000 medicinal formulations based on information culled out from 359 ancient books and texts. The database has 30 million pages classified into subgroups and it has also been incorporated into the International Patent Classification used by patent examiners. This helps patent examiners to search prior art in patent applications based on the traditional knowledge. The project was initiated in 2001, and the first CD containing information on the first set of 500 formulations was released in 2003. Agreements were signed with
different patent offices to let them access the TKDL with safeguards to prevent disclosure of information to third parties. In 2009, access was given to the European Patent Office and then to other patent offices. The TKDL has helped India prevent patenting – and commercialization – of traditional Indian knowledge in medicine. Within ten years of the database becoming accessible to international patent offices, over 220 patent applications from pharma companies of the USA, Britain, China, Spain, Italy and other countries have either been set aside, withdrawn or amended based on evidence from the TKDL. India has also been filing pre-grant oppositions at patent officers, citing prior art evidence from the TKDL. The database is proving to be a deterrent against biopiracy and several countries with rich traditional knowledge have got inspired by India to take proactive measures to prevent undue exploitation of their knowledge. Key People Dr Mashelkar led the teams that contested and won the patent cases relating to turmeric, neem and basmati, and then got CSIR to develop the TKDL as an institutional mechanism to prevent such patents in future. For him, the turmeric patent fight was not for financial gains but to ‘uphold national pride’ and dispel the notion that India was not capable of protecting its traditional knowledge. He then took up the issue of protecting traditional knowledge to the international patent forum – the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – in his capacity as the chairman of the Standing Committee on Information Technology. Mashelkar proposed that India’s strength in IT could be used to protect traditional knowledge from patents. This thinking led to the development of an approach paper on a digital database of traditional knowledge by V.K. Gupta who was working as technical director at the National Informatics Centre. An interdisciplinary task force under the chairmanship of Gupta gave shape to the idea of the TKDL. It was decided to implement the project through the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR), a laboratory of CSIR. References Agrawal, Binod C., Subhash Raghunath Joshi, and Arbind K. Sinha (eds). Communication Research for Development: The ISRO Experience. Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1986. Bali, Kalika, Ramesh Hariharan, Swami Manohar, V. Vinay, and K.S. Vivek. ‘Language technology solutions in Simputer: An overview’. In Language Engineering Conference, 2002, Proceedings. IEEE, 2002, 189–96. Bhatnagar, Subash and Robert Schware. ‘Information and communication technology in rural development’. Case Studies from India, World Bank Institute, 2000. Chawla, P. Cheena. ‘The Birth of TKDL and Beyond’. CSIR News, June 2010.
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Governance, Public Utilities and Law Governing a country the size of India is a formidable challenge, given its diverse languages, cultures, literacy levels, climate and terrain as well as other factors. The first major challenge surfaced early on when elections to the Parliament and state assemblies were to be held. Such an exercise had never been undertaken in the past. The election machinery addressed the challenge with innovations such as the use of symbols (as most voters were illiterate) and indelible ink to prevent impersonation. Decades later, another innovation – the electronic voting machine (EVM) – was deployed to do away with paper ballots and ensure faster result declaration. India took to e-governance even before the term was coined. Government-led innovations such as the computerized passenger reservation system of the Indian Railways and the Bhoomi land record computerization are prime examples of this. They demonstrated how high technology can be applied to benefit millions of people and create new interfaces between public utilities and consumers. Social audits of government programmes is another innovation that brought accountability to governance. The biggest reformative step to bring accountability and transparency was the Right to Information (RTI) law which grew out of a people’s movement. Another innovation resulting from the community was the employment guarantee scheme. In the field of law, Lok Adalats helped address the pendency of cases, while the tool of public interest litigation (PIL) made the judiciary more responsive to the plight of the common man and helped deliver justice to millions of people. A major technologybased innovation impinging on the lives of a vast majority of the population is the Unique Identification (UID) or Aadhaar along with applications such as the Direct Benefit Transfer and financial inclusion.
50. Indelible Ink and Other Ideas Free India’s first general election held in 1952 was described as an ‘experiment in democracy’. India had just come out of colonial rule and adopted a new Constitution that guaranteed universal adult franchise, a bold move, considering that countries in the West had done so in stages. Provincial elections under British rule were held on communal lines. India was a large country and the vast majority of the electorate was illiterate and poor. The first election was an experiment, in the literal sense as well. Everything – from preparing electoral rolls to designing ballot boxes – was done for the first time and from scratch. The sheer number of voters – 176 million – spread over the length and breadth of the country posed a great logistic challenge. The newly established Election Commission of India (ECI) had to train lakhs of officers and workers for the operation. Elections were being held for about 5,000 seats for the Lok Sabha and state assemblies together. Help was sought from the armed forces to reach out to voters in farflung areas and border regions. In some regions, new bridges had to be built to reach voters. Mock exercises were held across the country to educate poll officials and voters as well as to test the preparedness of the system to carry out the largest ever democratic exercise in the world. The ECI devised innovative ways to conduct the election. The first challenge was making people aware of contesting candidates in different constituencies, given the fact that 85 per cent of the electorate could not read or write. For this reason, pictorial symbols were designed and allocated to different political parties. This was to help voters identify candidates of their choice by the symbols such as bullock cart, lamp, banyan tree, among others. Another innovation was the use of multiple ballot boxes, one for each contesting candidate, with election symbols pasted on these boxes using a special adhesive. The third innovation was the use of special indelible ink, to prevent voters from voting more than once. Preventing impersonation was also a legal requirement under the election law. The use of a semi-permanent mark became necessary in the absence of proper identification documents for voters. While the ballot boxes and papers have been replaced with electronic voting machines, the deep purple mark on the left forefinger of voters remains a familiar sight in Indian elections to date. The use of indelible ink to mark voters had been tried in some polling booths in provincial assembly elections and some other countries, but its first large-scale use was in the 1952 elections. The ink formulation was developed by scientists of the CSIR before India’s Independence. The composition of the ink was improved upon in accordance with specifications of the ECI, after Independence, in the chemical sciences division of the newly established National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in New Delhi. The ink contains silver nitrate which reacts with the human skin in the presence of light, imparting a colour (depending on the dye used). Purple was chosen after careful consideration of various factors to avoid coloured marks left by henna and alta (red dye), used in some parts of the country, and colours associated with political parties. The time taken for the ink to dry was also a key factor while making changes in the formula. In the 1950s, some political parties challenged the reliability of the ink and even suggested the use of smallpox vaccinations (which leaves marks) instead. But the ink proved its versatility and became an essential component of the election system. NPL’s ink division which also supplied security ink for postal and judicial stamping passed on the technology to the Mysore Paints and Varnish Limited, a government undertaking in 1962 for commercial manufacturing, and the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) patented the technology to prevent its use in the private sector. The Mysore company exports indelible ink to twenty-eight
countries, including Turkey, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Malaysia, for use in their election processes. The ink was also used by some banks during the currency demonetization in 2016. Key People Sukumar Sen, a senior Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer who was made the first chief election commissioner in 1950, was responsible for the conduct of the general elections. Historian Ramachandra Guha has described Sen as the ‘unsung hero of Indian democracy’ for conducting the elections smoothly and it was Sen himself who identified indelible ink as one of the four key components for the successful holding of the first-ever general elections in free India. Dr Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, an eminent organic chemist working with CSIR in the 1940s, is credited with developing the first composition of indelible ink. It was first used in some provincial elections and Dr Siddiqui further improved the staining power of the ink based on the feedback he received from the election officials on its effectiveness. The next phase of the development took place at NPL where a separate ink division was established under the guidance of Dr M.K. Goel, while CSIR director-general, Dr Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who was also an adviser to Prime Minister Nehru, oversaw the work. Meanwhile, Dr Siddiqui migrated to Pakistan to establish a CSIR-like body at the request of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. 51. Electronic Voting Machines India is the world’s largest democracy, by numbers. Every five years, elections are held to elect members of Lok Sabha – the lower house of Parliament – and the party winning a majority of seats gets to elect the prime minister. In the same way, elections are held in state assemblies. The ECI, an independent constitutional body, handles the task of holding elections, which requires immense organization, given the size and diversity of the country that makes every election exercise massive and complex. The first general election was held in 1952 with paper ballots. Multiple ballot boxes were used, one for each party, each ballot box marked with a party’s symbol. All that the voter had to do was to drop a ballot paper into the box of his or her choice. The system was later changed to a common ballot box and one ballot paper with symbols and names of all the contesting candidates printed on it. Voters had to stamp the symbol of the candidate of their choice and drop the ballot in a common ballot box. The use of paper ballot papers and boxes posed logistic challenges in the conduct of elections. Huge financial resources and manpower were required for printing paper ballots, to transport boxes and paper ballots to polling booths, and supervise their movement to counting centres at the end of polling. The counting of paper ballots took time, resulting in long delays in the declaration of results. Wrong stamping on ballot papers also resulted in a big number of invalid votes. ‘Booth capturing’ and other fraudulent means were reported many a time. All these problems have been addressed with one technological intervention – the EVM. These machines replaced paper ballot and steel boxes nationwide, for the first time, in the general elections of 2004 after decades of experimentation and pilot projects. Since then EVMs have become an integral part of the electoral process in India.
The ECI first proposed the use of electronic voting devices in 1977, intending to avoid the recurring expenditure of printing of ballot papers, their storage and transport as well as the manpower and time needed in the counting process. The prototype of an EVM was developed in 1979 at the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), a public sector unit based in Hyderabad. After mock testing and pilot trials, it was used for the first time in a limited number of polling booths in the Parur assembly by-election in Kerala in 1982, followed by elections in ten constituencies spread over eight states during 1982-83. But the large-scale deployment of EVMs in the assembly and Parliament elections had to wait longer until all political parties got convinced about the efficacy of the machines. EVMs also had to be given legal status, considering that some political and technical groups also questioned the ECI’s claims that it was fully tamper-proof, reliable and secure. The machines were used in forty-six parliamentary constituencies spread over seventeen states and union territories during the elections in 1999. Based on the feedback from these elections and the general acceptability of the technology, EVMs were rolled out nationwide in 2004 elections, fully eliminating the use of paper ballots. As the number of machines needed was huge, another public sector unit, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), was authorized to manufacture them. An EVM consists of a control unit and a ballot unit. By pressing a button on the control unit, the returning officer authorizes one vote from a particular ballot unit. The ballot unit has names and symbols of all contesting candidates (just like a physical ballot paper used to have) and a button against each of them. The voter has to press the button against the symbol/name of the preferred candidate. This choice is transmitted back to the control unit, where it is stored. Then the data from the control unit is accessed during the counting process. Typically, a ballot unit has space for sixteen candidates. If there are more, extra units can be linked. In 2013, an additional feature – the voter verified paper audit trail unit (VVPAT) – was added to the ballot unit. It displays the name and symbol of the chosen candidate for seven seconds for the voter to make sure the machine has recorded his or her choice correctly. Though electronic voting systems have been used in other countries as well, the Indian EVM has been designed for tough conditions. It has a basic set of programming instructions hardwired into the circuit board and the units are not connected to a network, so they are not prone to hacking. The machine is low-cost, simpler in design, portable, lightweight, can withstand extreme temperatures and also operate on batteries. These machines can be stored for a long time without any climate control. Despite claims of manipulation of EVMs after every election by losing candidates, the machine has gained wide acceptance not only in India, but in several other developing countries as a low-cost solution for the election process. Key People Shyamlal Shakdher, the chief election commissioner of India during 1977–82, is widely credited with the idea of introducing EVMs in India. In the 1970s, the ills of the electoral process, such as tampering of ballot papers and booth capturing, were a subject of intense political discourse and writ petitions in various courts. Shakdher had introduced an Electronic Vote Recording System in the Parliament during his term as the secretary-general of the Lok Sabha. On a visit to ECIL as the CEC in February 1977, he threw up a challenge to R&D engineers to find a solution. ECIL formed a task force on the ‘automation of general elections’. At first, it suggested a punched-card based system to record voting data, similar to the data entry system of mainframe computers. These cards could later be sorted into card readers and results declared quickly.
The card-based system was too technology-heavy and would not have withstood legal scrutiny. T.N. Swamy, who was technical manager and group leader in the data products section of the Instruments Group at ECIL, then developed an ‘electronic voting instrument’. A couple of prototypes later, design iterations and testing in mock elections, the machine was shown to leaders of political parties. It was demonstrated to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 29 August 1980, and she gave the go-ahead. In January 1981, BEL also submitted a design and it was approved in June 1981. The two teams developed the design and software codes independently but the external interface and functions of the two machines were similar. S. Rangarajan led the development team at BEL. T.N. Seshan, who became the CEC in 1990, pushed the introduction of EVMs as part of the drive to clean up the electoral system. 52. Computerized Passenger Railway Reservations The Indian Railways is one of the oldest and largest rail networks in the world. It is also one of the most complex with several types of trains, coach types, classes, concessions and quotas. The network consisting of 13,000 trains (and over 7,000 stations) moves 23 million passengers every day. Booking a berth or seat on a long-distance train was a herculean task till the mid-1980s. The entire process was a manual and long-drawn- out affair, with passengers required to queue up in front of train-specific ticket windows. If a berth was not available in a particular train, one had to go and wait in front of the window meant for an alternative train. Booking clerks had to maintain several registers and stock 80 to 100 types of card tickets. At the end of every shift, they had to account for every card. Such record-keeping took a lot of time, and also left room for petty corruption. Now booking a berth or seat on any of the passenger trains is as simple as booking a movie ticket. It does not require one to go to the booking office at all. The change was a result of the computerization of passenger railway reservations in the 1980s. This was done at a time when personal computers were yet to proliferate and mobile devices and the internet were still not available. Yet, computerization of the reservation system was executed and it benefited millions of passengers. The change occurred in multiple stages – in the first stage in 1984, the manual reservation system was replaced with an indigenously developed software-based system called CONCERT (Country-wide Network of Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing) was first introduced in major stations that handled the bulk of long-distance traffic. The stations were also networked and gradually, more locations were connected and backed up with data centres. The networking enabled people to reserve a berth on any train, between any pair of stations for any date and class. Though people still had to visit booking offices, they could book through universal terminals instead of the earlier system of train-specific windows. As commercial internet services became available, the reservation system was connected with the internet in 2002 and passengers could book their tickets themselves, although printed tickets were delivered to their homes. In the third stage, the e-ticketing system became operational in 2005 in which passengers could not only book their tickets but also print them. In 2020, more people booked tickets online than over-the-counter. The system is the world’s largest online reservation application and the biggest such service offered by a public utility. Though the Railways was among the early public utilities that had begun using large mainframe computers for operational purposes in the 1960s itself, the use of computers for passenger reservation was not a priority area. The top management of the Railways did not see it necessary to invest in the passenger system as it would not have any returns. The proposal for computerization, when it was mooted in the 1980s, was opposed by the Railway Board. The Railways was not equipped to develop computerization and it did not want to involve an external agency in this task as it considered reservation system a core activity of the Railways. Ultimately, the software was developed by an external agency – the Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC), which was a
public sector unit then – and handed over to a newly established unit of the Railways, called the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS). The idea was to have a flexible and creative working environment for software professionals, free from the rules and regulations of the Railways. The computerization of the passenger reservation system and transformation of a public utility service through technology, despite the lack of basic infrastructure like roads and electricity in many parts of India, was a unique idea. It triggered similar projects in other utilities like the two national airlines, banks and public transport system in states. Though the word e-governance was yet to be coined then, the passenger reservation system remains the biggest example of e-governance anywhere in the world in terms of its reach and impacts. Key People While work had begun on the computerization of freight operations in 1983, using computers for passenger reservation was not a priority for the Railways. Still, the Directorate of Operations Information System had got ready a plan for the computerization of the passenger reservation system. Frustrated by objections raised by finance and other officials, the head of the information systems group, N.C. Gupta, decided to break rules and approached the deputy minister for the Railways, Mallikarjun Goud. He argued that passenger reservation was something that brought the Railways into the public eye. There were long queues, people talked of corruption and they had to come from far-off places to Delhi just to get a reservation. Gupta convinced the minister, who bypassed officials and got the project approved by the Railway Board. CMC had already developed a prototype for the passenger system on its own. The interest in the passenger system was triggered under strange circumstances. Once Prem Prakash Gupta, managing director of CMC, was on a visit to the company’s R&D centre in Hyderabad. His sister had to travel to Bombay, so he went to the station to book a ticket. There he had to stand in the reservation queue for as long as four hours. The next day, after his arduous experience, Gupta declared to his R&D team that CMC would develop software to computerize the passenger reservation. When the Railway Board approved the passenger reservation computerization project, CMC rightfully demanded that the contract be awarded to it. The software development team at CMC was led by Ramesh Jhunjhunwala, head of the R&D in CMC. He took care to involve the workers’ union very early in the project and incorporated suggestions from booking clerks, which ensured there was no opposition to the introduction of computers in the Railways. 53. Bhoomi Land is a valuable asset for individual citizens as well as governments. Its value depends on so many factors – location, use, category and so on. In rural areas, agricultural land in a fertile area can be more valuable than a piece of land in a dry region. Land ownership, particularly in rural areas, is an indicator of one’s economic status and has historically been a source of power for landholders. For governments, the land is a source of revenue. All this makes keeping records of land a crucial matter for individuals communities and governments. Since it is an immovable asset, one needs proof of ownership or a clear title for any transaction. Ownership can be established with several types of documents – sale deeds, purchase deeds, inheritance records, revenue records. Lack of clear titles or discrepancies in papers leads to litigation and exploitation of poor landholders by the rich.
Typically, land records are maintained in the revenue department and other government agencies. From colonial times, land records have been maintained manually and in registers, files and other paper records. Accessing these records and making a change (called mutation in official jargon) in them is a long-drawn-out process, and often a source of petty corruption. This was the situation till the 1990s. Then came Bhoomi – a novel computerization project undertaken in Karnataka that transformed land record-keeping in the state, and has inspired similar projects in several states across the country. The project, completed in 2002, involved digitizing all 20 million land records maintained by the land revenue department through 9,000 functionaries known as village accountants. It facilitated easy maintenance and prompt updating of land records and made land records tamper-proof (access to the database was through biometric identification of officials). All manual records were withdrawn in a phased manner and the village accountants were barred from issuing copies of manual records. Records were generated by specially developed Bhoomi software and printouts given to landholders. For a change of ownership through sale or inheritance, farmers could file applications for mutations at operator-assisted counters at Bhoomi centres. Initially, taluka-level databases operated in the stand-alone mode but were eventually connected via satellite to a centralized database. Digitized records of Rights, Tenancy and Crops (RTC) were made available through dedicated Bhoomi kiosks established in taluka, subdistrict and district levels, for a nominal fee of `15. This was transformational because the process of getting an RTC which took several weeks was now a matter of a few minutes. All middlemen and chances of corruption got eliminated. An RTC is required not just for the purchase or sale of land, but is necessary for farmers to access loans, subsidies and crop insurance services. In the next phase, Bhoomi has been made fully accessible via the internet. With just a survey number, one can not only view the land record in full but also download it by paying just `15. Despite the complexity of the project and opposition from vested interests, Bhoomi was executed successfully and became a role model for other states. In 2020, computerization of land records had been completed in over 90 per cent of revenue villages in the country, under the Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (formerly National Land Records Modernization Programme). Key People The Bhoomi project was executed by the Department of Revenue, Karnataka, with the software developed by the Bangalore centre of the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The then state chief minister, S.M. Krishna, is credited with providing political support for the project, which was critical, given the sensitive nature of land records in rural areas and the opposition from vested interests. Krishna wrote to all district collectors, asking them to ensure that village functionaries cooperated in the implementation of the project and validated all the records once digitized so that errors could be corrected. Rajeev Chawla, a civil servant in the state Revenue Department, played a critical role in the implementation of the project. In 1998, the state’s chief secretary, B.K. Bhattacharya, handpicked Chawla, an electrical engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur who later joined the civil service, for the task of computerization of land records and posted him as joint secretary in the Department of Revenue. The task was humongous – some 20 million records with several fields of information totalling one billion data fields. Digitizing all this data using the government machinery would have taken decades as the prevailing pace of work had demonstrated. So, Chawla decided to outsource the task. About 1,200 data entry operators were hired, trained and all the records digitized within eighteen months. Chawla conceived training programmes for district officials to handle the new system, and also conducted awareness programmes to win the support of village accountants who used to handle manual
records. As secretary of e-governance subsequently, Chawla established Bhoomi kiosks, telecentres and also introduced the use of Simputers for the collection of crop data. 54. Lok Adalats India has an elaborate judicial system consisting of civil and criminal courts at the district level, state high courts and the Supreme Court at the apex levels, in addition to dozens of special courts and tribunals. Yet the pendency of cases is huge – a total of 3.2 crore cases of which about 9 lakh cases related to civil matters. About 60 per cent of all cases are pending for periods between one to ten years. Delays in settling cases cause a lot of hardship to people, and results in huge legal expenses and loss of working days for those fighting cases. In many instances, the poor have no resources to access an appropriate judicial forum for settling disputes. To provide some relief to the poor, an alternative disputes settlement mechanism emerged in the 1980s in the form of a system of informal courts called the Lok Adalats (people’s courts). The system provides a ‘point of access’ justice system to people in remote and rural areas, as well as cities. These informal courts are empowered to settle disputes and cases either pending in a court of law or at the pre- litigation stage, through mediation and amicable compromise. The decision given by a Lok Adalat is equivalent to a decree of a civil court and cannot be challenged in any other court, as laid down in the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 under which these Adalats function. Cases pending in regular courts can also be transferred to Lok Adalats with the consent of the parties involved. There is no court fee to be paid, and it is not mandatory to hire lawyers. Cases are heard and settled by members of the Lok Adalats, who may be sitting or retired judges, social workers and those interested in para-legal services. These Adalats work at the taluka, district, state and central levels. Usually, they handle matters such as family and matrimonial disputes, labour disputes, land acquisition cases, bank recovery cases, pension, municipal matters and so on. Special Lok Adalats are organized periodically to handle disputes relating to public utilities like electricity, transport, telephone, housing and so on. In some states, mobile Lok Adalats are organized, which travel to different places and settle cases. The idea of an informal, community-based adjudication system has existed in some form or the other for ages. It was also proposed at the time of Independence so that petty disputes could be settled informally before they reached formal courts. The idea of the Nyay Panchayat was incorporated in the Constitution but these bodies were not given any powers and became defunct in a few years. A committee was formed in 1949, under the chairmanship of former Supreme Court judge, N.H. Bhagwati, to explore how legal aid could be provided to the poor. It recommended that it was the government’s responsibility to provide legal advice to the needy. Subsequently, several reports of the Law Commission gave similar recommendations, based on which legal aid schemes were formulated in some states. In 1976, the idea of an informal court system was proposed in the Report on National Juridicare which was led by former Supreme Court judge, Justice Prafullachandra Natwarlal Bhagwati. Then another government committee explicitly proposed conciliation and informal dispute resolutions in legal aid schemes. All these developments helped crystallize the framework of Lok Adalats and the enactment of enabling legislation in 1987. Since then, over 15 lakh Lok Adalats have been organized and over 8.25 crore cases settled.
Key People Upendra Baxi, a prominent legal scholar and researcher, did a pioneering study of a Lok Adalat working in Gujarat in 1976. The dispute settlement mechanism was functional at the Anand Niketan Ashram, established by Harivallabh Parikh in 1949 at Rangpur Kawant near Vadodara. The ashram was involved in several activities for rural development and upliftment of the poor, mainly tribal people. Parikh was a Gandhian and Sarvodaya leader. He had earned the confidence of the Adivasis, over the years, by fighting for their cause especially exploitation by moneylenders, forest officials and the police. In some cases, the offenders apologized and disputes were settled by Parikh. In four decades, the Lok Adalat of Rangpur settled several thousand such intra- village and intervillage disputes relating to land, crops, promiscuous behaviour, animals, witchcraft, divorce and other matters. People had to file a written complaint with the Adalat, and Parikh would call both the parties and appoint arbitrators from both sides and would settle the case. Subsequently, village councils were formed to hear cases at the village level, and only unresolved cases were sent to Rangpur which then acted like a ‘high court’. Baxi wrote a detailed report on the Rangpur Adalat and noted that there was ‘undoubted potential of the non- state legal systems for achieving development goals’. Baxi’s report and the report on juridicare by Justice P.N. Bhagwati came out around the same time. These reports propelled the Gujarat government to hold Lok Adalats as part of its legal aid programme. Soon the idea spread to other states also. Justice Bhagwati and Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer helped in giving the final shape to the Lok Adalat framework and spreading the idea throughout the country. The National Legal Services Authority, established under the 1987 Act, is responsible for the functioning of the system. 55. Employment Guarantee Giving employment to the poor in rural areas during droughts and famines was in vogue in India during the colonial period. The practice of public relief work involved carrying out public works such as the construction of roads, digging irrigation tanks and wells so that people could be employed. The idea was to provide immediate relief to the poor in times of distress when finding other work for them would be difficult. After India’s Independence, the idea was incorporated in several anti-poverty schemes such as the Rural Manpower Programme. But none of these programmes gave assured employment to the rural poor. It was only later, in 1972, that the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) introduced in Maharashtra, broke from past practices and gave a new direction to anti-poverty initiatives, becoming the first rights-based law in Maharashtra in 1979. As the name suggests, it guaranteed the rural poor employment for a fixed number of days during a year – the first time that a government operationalized the ‘right to work’ enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Though Maharashtra is industrially well developed and has high employment rates, many rural areas in the state face recurring droughts and agricultural stress. To address this challenge, a government-funded employment scheme for the poor was introduced on an experimental basis in some drought-affected areas. The objective was to protect vulnerable groups and also create public assets that can reduce the effects of droughts. In 1972, the EGS was adopted throughout the state, but implementation was slow as people opted for immediate relief provided under many centrally sponsored schemes. The Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act was passed in 1977 and finally came into effect in 1979. The law assured ‘manual employment to all able-bodied adults of
villages and C class municipal towns of the state who are willing to work on public works within a radius of 8 km’. The EGS template was used in Rajasthan, where the people’s movement led to the demand for employment as drought relief towards the end of the 1990s. The result was a rural employment scheme called the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana in 2000. The Maharashtra scheme then served as a model for the enactment of a central law – the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) – in 2005. It was renamed later as the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA (MGNREGA). The law guarantees up to 100 days of work a year on demand to every rural household willing to do unskilled manual work. Within a year of its implementation, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme resulted in the generation of one billion person-days of employment in the country. The number rose to 2.35 billion person-days of employment during 2016–17 and the scheme was being implemented in 685 districts across the country. The EGS concept has been hailed as one of the most successful poverty alleviation programmes in the world. Though MGNREGA started as a ‘right to work’ scheme, development economist Jean Dreze sees it as ‘the single most important instrument that supposedly guarantees an array of associated rights or entitlements of a worker’. These entitlements include the right to a job card; the right to demand and receive work within 15 days; the right to unemployment allowance; the right to plan and prepare a shelf of projects; the right to obtain work within a radius of 5 km; the right to worksite facilities; the right to notified wage rate; the right to receive wages within 15 days; the right to compensation for delay in payment of wages and the right to conduct concurrent social audits and social audit of all MGNREGA expenditure. Despite its shortcomings and other unintended fallout, the EGS in Maharashtra led to a ‘reduction in the intensity of poverty and increased the food security of many households, according to studies done at the end of twenty years of its implementation. The scheme at the national level is being implemented with several new features and in convergence with other programmes such as soil and water conservation, afforestation, fodder development, climate resilience and drought-proofing. A 2013 study found that public works executed under MGNREGA are generating multiple environmental and socioeconomic benefits such as maintaining or enhancing groundwater levels, improving the storage capacity of waterbodies and improving irrigation. All these, in turn, are leading to increased crop production, increased employment generation and reduced migration. The use of new information technologies such as mobile phones and geo-tagging of works has brought greater transparency and accountability. At the same time, linking MGNREGA cards with Aadhaar has led to concerns over exclusion and denial of employment. Key People The idea of a public employment scheme for landless agricultural labourers originated in 1965. V.S. Page, a Gandhian leader and chairman of the Maharashtra Legislative Council, began experimenting with the idea of employment guarantee in some villages in Tasgaon block in the Sangli district. Initially, the project was known as the Page Scheme. By 1970, the idea had caught on and had expanded to eleven districts in the state. Page joined hands with intellectuals like V.M. Dandekar, like-minded activists and people’s groups under the umbrella of the Dushkal Nivaran and Nirmulan Samiti (Drought Relief and Eradication Committee) in 1971.
In Rajasthan in the 1990s, it was the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), under the leadership of Aruna Roy, that demanded the right to work through an employment guarantee scheme in the state. The idea of the EGS got into the national discourse because of petitions in the Supreme Court and directives of the court. In 2001, the Congress president Sonia Gandhi wrote to chief ministers of Congress-ruled states to initiate the EGS scheme and also included it in the party’s manifesto for the 2004 general elections. As chairman of the National Advisory Council, formed after the party returned to power at the centre, Sonia Gandhi pushed the idea of a national employment guarantee programme and the MGNREGA remained the government’s flagship welfare scheme for the next decade. The ministers for rural development – first Raghuvansh Prasad Singh and then Jairam Ramesh – vigorously set the programme rolling, despite opposition from some quarters. 56. Public Interest Litigation The Constitution, adopted in November 1949, sought to establish India as a ‘sovereign socialist, secular, democratic republic’, offering all its citizens justice, liberty and equality. At the core of the Constitution were the provisions of fundamental rights and the directive principles of state policy. It also provided for an independent judiciary to protect the fundamental rights of citizens. The three-tier system of the Indian judiciary – the lower courts, high courts in provinces (states) and the Supreme Court at the top – was a legacy of colonial rule. Justice was delivered based on the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence system. Under this system, the traditional role of a court is that of adjudication based on procedural technicalities like locus standi and res judicata. Indian courts followed the adversarial system of litigation – in which lawyers representing two sides argue their respective cases or positions and the judge makes the final decision – a court being more like a neutral umpire between two parties caught in a dispute. This role of the Indian judiciary was redefined three decades after the Indian Constitution was adopted, through a dramatic event that created ripples in the placid world of judiciary. The turning point was what came to be known as a public interest litigation (PIL) and which eventually led to a new era of remedial jurisprudence. On 8 and 9 January 1979, two articles appeared in the Indian Express about the appalling condition of undertrials in the prisons of Bihar. The articles were written by K.F. Rustamji, a decorated police officer and a member of the National Police Commission, after a visit to several jails in the state. He highlighted how thousands of people awaiting trials were languishing in jails for years, even for simple offences like ticketless travel. Even witnesses and victims of crimes like rape were locked up in jails, on flimsy grounds of ‘protection’ or ease of their availability during the trial. He also pointed out that young children and women prisoners were often sexually assaulted. The articles enraged a Supreme Court lawyer, Kapila Hingorani, and her lawyer husband Nirmal Hingorani, and the two decided to file a habeas corpus petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution. The court registry objected, saying Hingorani was not authorized by any prisoner nor was she a friend or relative of a prisoner. But when Hingorani insisted, the registry placed the petition before the court. The judge, Justice P.N. Bhagwati, accepted the petition, triggering a chain of action including the release of 40,000 undertrial prisoners from jails in Bihar, restoring their fundamental right to life and liberty. The case, known as Hussainara Khatoon vs the State of Bihar, provided a template for PILs. A PIL differs in many ways from the traditional system jurisprudence followed until 1979. It lacks a dispute or lis; is non- adversarial but is collaborative, involving the court as well; the nature of parties involved is amorphous; the court can go beyond what is pleaded or evidence placed before it. Above all, the principle of locus standi is relaxed, meaning any person or a group of persons can file a PIL. Such petitions can be filed based on newspaper reports or letters received by the court and the court can initiate suo moto action. The court can even
order an enquiry and gathering of relevant evidence if needed. All these tenets of a PIL are opposite to the Anglo-Saxon system which requires the presence of a dispute and an aggrieved party to initiate judicial proceedings, and the burden of proof is on the party making the allegation. The undertrials case opened up the floodgates of PILs in the 1980s. Dozens of them were filed by lawyers, journalists, academics and social activists concerning violation of the fundamental rights of disadvantaged groups – prisoners, the mentally challenged, child labour, bonded labour, pavement dwellers as well as women harassed for dowry. The courts responded with remedial action and relief through directives to the government and state agencies. During the 1990s, the scope of PILs got expanded to cover environmental degradation, non- implementation of pollution control laws, corruption, sexual harassment at the workplace, the right to education, sex determination and so on. More and more petitions were filed by organized groups and specialized non- government organizations (NGOs). Such PILs also entered the arena of policy matters which is a responsibility of the government. In some cases, courts also went into the monitoring of its orders and judgements. In the third phase, after 2000, individuals started filing PILs on any matter – even trivial – leading to courts getting annoyed and many PILs being dubbed as ‘publicity interest litigation’. Nonetheless, PIL remains an important tool to enforce the rights of citizens and has made the Indian judiciary more responsive to the common man. The Indian model of PIL has been emulated in various jurisdictions globally. Key People The PIL concept was pioneered by the Hingorani couple – Kapila and Nirmal – who filed the habeas corpus petition based on a newspaper article in 1979, and the judge – Justice P.N. Bhagwati (1921–2017) – who entertained their petition in the Supreme Court. The Hingoranis were working as senior advocates in the apex court at that time, while Justice Bhagwati had already championed the cause of providing legal aid to the poor. As the Hussainara case came into prominence, Kapila Hingorani (1927–2013) received a letter from a lawyer in Bhagalpur in September 1980 about the police blinding suspected criminals by pouring acid into their eyes. Based on the letter, Kapila filed a petition in the court, which deputed its registrar to visit the jail in Bhagalpur. He found that thirty-three prisoners had been blinded by policemen using needles and acid and when the barbaric case became public, it shook the nation. A series of actions followed. In this case, the court had turned investigator and became an investigative PIL. Kapila Hingorani was born in Nairobi and educated in the UK. She began practising in the Supreme Court in 1961. Nirmal Hingorani (1921–2015) was born in Sind and studied law in Karachi where he also practised law till 1952. After migrating to India, he started practising at the Supreme Court and appeared in landmark cases such as those about bank nationalization and privy purses. The Hingorani couple fought nearly 100 PILs, providing relief to millions of people and leading to a change of law in many cases. These petitions include the inhuman treatment of mentally ill patients in Ranchi Mental Hospital; starvation deaths, rehabilitation of leprosy patients, employment of children in carpet industries, sexual exploitation of tribal girls in public sector units and people suffering from goitre due to lack of iodized salt. 57. Cyclone Warning
Laila, Nilam, Leher, Hudhud, Phani, Sidr, Rashmi, Thane, Aila, Roanu, Titli, Phailan, Ockhi, Gaja, Bulbul, Fanoos, Nisha – this is not a list of names of characters appearing in some fantasy tale or residents of an imaginary land. These are names of some of the tropical cyclones that have hit the Indian coastline since the turn of the new millennium. The practice of naming tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea began only in 2004. Before this, cyclones were referred to by the place of destruction in the media and were given code names in official records. That’s why the list does not include two of the most devastating cyclones to have hit the Indian coast in the last half a century – the Diviseema Cyclone of 1977 and the Super Cyclone that hit the Orissa coast in 1999. Both these cyclones have proved to be landmarks in India’s journey in disaster prediction and management. In November 1977, Diviseema, a small island on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, was hit by a severe cyclone, accompanied by a storm surge and surface wind speeds up to 250 kilometres per hour, killing over 15,000 people and rendering nearly two million people homeless. Since the disaster occurred during the paddy season, it destroyed crops and also left thousands of cattle dead. Though the government described it as the ‘fury of nature’, it turned out that it was as much a man-made disaster. The cyclone forecast system was rudimentary – all that the forecasters could see was the eye of the storm on radars but they had no means to predict the path it would take or guess the place and time of its landfall. The height, direction and time of approach of the storm surge also could not be predicted because there was no instrumentation set-up on the Indian coast to collect such data regularly. Two decades later, in October 1999, a super cyclone with a wind speed of 252 kilometres per hour hit the Orissa coast, causing rain and storm surges, leaving more than 10,000 people dead. The cyclone forecasting between 1977 and 1999 had improved a great deal. Still the duration of the forecast was just forty-eight hours and it was not precise enough. Neither did the response from the state government match the warning issued two days in advance. That’s why the human toll in 1999 was still comparable to the 1977 cyclone. However, when an equally ferocious severe cyclone – Phailin – hit the Orissa coast in 2013, with wind speeds touching 220 kilometres per hour, only twenty-one deaths were reported. A massive 1.2 million people were moved to safer places but evacuation was confined to a much smaller belt – 180 kilometres – compared to 500 kilometres in 1999. This made Phailin a turning point in disaster management, with the international media and the UN praising India for this miracle. The turnaround between 1999 and 2013 appeared dramatic but it was a result of a series of technological changes and administrative reforms initiated during the intervening period. Strategies were devised to address factors responsible for high death tolls in earlier cyclones, such as the lack of a dependable and sophisticated early warning system, poor mitigation planning and meagre preparedness that lead to great human loss. The cyclone prediction and forecast earlier was subjective, without numerical models and adequate observational tools such as Doppler radars. With the availability of data from two Indian satellites – INSAT 3D and INSAT 3DR – it became possible to get satellite images every fifteen minutes. Another Indian satellite for ocean monitoring, Scatsat, gives data about wind speed at the sea surface. In addition, observational tools, such as automatic weather stations on the coastline, buoys in the sea and onboard ships were also deployed. Improved supercomputing capacity helped in faster analysis of data which was then assimilated into multiple global weather models. All this enabled the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to advance the forecast period from two days to four days. The next advancement was that the margin of error in forecasting the cyclone track could be reduced from 141 kilometres during 2006–10 to 97 kilometres during 2011–15. Similarly, the error in the forecasting point of landfall was reduced from 99 kilometres to 56 kilometres during the same periods. These are substantial gains that directly affect evacuation plans and other steps needed to minimize the loss of life and displacement.
Improving accuracy and the lead time of a forecast alone can’t save lives. The forecast and early warnings must reach decision-makers and the administration well in time. The administration, in turn, should disseminate the same to all its wings up to the district level, so that they can initiate action such as moving people to safer places and getting evacuation organized. For all this, one needs standard operating procedures, training, resources and implementation machinery. Political and administrative leadership is needed to ensure that measures are taken, and these actions have to be a round-the-year activity, with dozens of central, state, district and community level organizations participating in the exercise in a coordinated manner. After the 1999 cyclone, Orissa was the first state to have established a state-level disaster management authority as part of a disaster planning exercise. At the national level, the Disaster Management Act came into force in 2005, paving the way for setting up disaster management bodies at national, state and district levels as well as the National Disaster Relief Force. Technological enhancements in cyclone warning, combined with disaster preparedness on the ground, saved thousands of lives. Key Players Phailin in 2013 was followed by other severe cyclones on the Orissa coast, such as Hudhud, Vardha and Fani. The loss of human life in all these cyclones remained in two digits. Fani, which hit the coast on 3 May 2019, occurred during summer which is not the cyclone season and was only the third such one in 150 years. The success in accurate warnings and evacuation of people in time has made Orissa and India a global model of cyclone preparedness, as evidenced by the United Nations’ recognition of the leadership of Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for developing an effective response system in the state. From 2000 onwards, Patnaik made the state observe 29 October as Disaster Preparedness Day and began developing infrastructure such as building cyclone shelters, roads and bridges, which are necessary for large- scale evacuation. During the Phailin cyclonic storm, Patnaik declared ‘zero human casualty’ as the goal of the operation. Over the years, the state began close coordination with IMD on one hand, and at-risk communities and NGOs on the ground. In IMD, teams of scientists such as those led by Dr Mrutyunjay Mahapatra and those at other institutions such as the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, played a key role in making India a global leader in disaster risk reduction. 58. Right to Information Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had famously remarked in 1986 that only 15 paise out of every rupee spent by the central government on rural development reached the poor. He used this piece of statistics to deploy computers at the district level to monitor the implementation of central government schemes. However, this addressed only part of the problem – government spending on various schemes and public works do not yield desired results because of leakage in the pipeline, such as corruption, use of inferior material and so on. It applies to the whole range of public works – construction of a village road or construction of a check dam to large projects involving thousands of crores. One of the main factors responsible for the situation till two decades back was the lack of transparency in the execution of public works and implementation of government schemes, and in governance processes from the panchayat to the national level. Even basic information like the cost of projects, timelines for implementation, officials responsible, among other factors, was shrouded under the cloak of
official secrecy. The result was a lack of accountability and great scope for corrupt practices. This has been remedied to a great extent by a unique law that grants citizens the Right to Information (RTI). The concept of the right to information has been around for a long time as an extension of the fundamental right of speech and expression as enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and as espoused in judicial pronouncements from time to time. But it was not available as a practical tool in the hands of ordinary citizens to seek transparency and accountability from the government. This happened only with the RTI Act coming into being nationally in 2005. The right to information framework which evolved in India during the 1990s, culminating in the Act, is vastly different from the freedom of information concept prevalent in Western democracies such as the USA and those in Western Europe. The RTI Act in India is a result of a grassroots movement that saw the right to information as critical for the livelihood of the poor. Due to a lack of transparency and accountability at the lowest levels of governance, people were being denied rightful wages as well as benefits of development schemes. For example, when the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan intervened and organized villagers to seek legal wages, the villagers were told that they had not done the work as per records. Asked to show the records and muster rolls, officials refused to do so, saying government records are secret and could not be shown. This is when it became clear how important was the access to government records to prevent corruption, ensure minimum wages and see that public works were implemented. Thus began a long struggle for a legally granted and enforceable right to information, not only in Rajasthan but in the entire country. The movement was marked by stiff opposition from political interests, bureaucracy and other vested interests. Rajasthan first enacted a state law in 2000. This was followed by the Freedom of Information Act at the national level in 2002, but it could not be implemented for various reasons. The law was repealed in 2005 and replaced with the RTI Act. The law provides a practical regime for citizens to access information that is under the control of public authorities at various levels, intending to enhance transparency and reduce corruption. The right grants access to information, documents, records and even notes written on files, in addition to a right to inspect material being used in government-funded infrastructure works such as roads and dams. Under this Act, separate machinery has been created to provide information, such as public information officers in all government departments and independent, non-judicial information commissions at the central and state levels for appeals against non- compliance. There is also provision for penalties for refusal to provide information. Despite resistance and reluctance from government officials, the Act has been successful in inducing a sense of accountability and has helped reduce corruption. Civil society organizations and media have used the provisions of the RTI Act to bring to light several important stories. A new category of social activists and whistle blowers, known as RTI activists, sprung up in the country. Many of them have faced threats and murderous assaults from vested interests who fear getting exposed. During 2018–19, over 12 lakh RTI applications were filed all over the country. Key People The RTI Act grew out of the movement that the MKSS started in Rajasthan in the 1990s. The organization was founded by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, on 1 May 1990. The three had been working in drought- prone districts of Ajmer, Bhilwara, Pali and Rajsamand in central Rajasthan since 1977. People in this region worked in famine relief and other works funded by the government, but were not getting minimum wages or full wages for the work they did. MKSS organized agitations, strikes and dharnas against the practice and demanded to inspect muster rolls. When they finally succeeded in getting access to these rolls, it revealed ‘ghost’ entries
and large-scale discrepancies in actual wages paid. Roy also organized public hearings to expose corruption, and in some cases, bribe amounts were publicly returned after such exposures. MKSS prepared a model act and sought systemic access to information. At the national level, it catalysed the formation of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). The group, working with P.B. Sawant, chairman of the Press Council of India, prepared a draft bill. Roy, a former officer of the IAS, had quit government service in 1975 to join the Social Work and Research Centre at Tilonia in Ajmer district, founded by her husband Sanjit Roy (known as Bunker Roy). Here she met Shankar Singh and Dey and started working on a poverty alleviation project at Devdungri in Rajasthan. Later, as a member of the National Advisory Council, Roy played a critical role in drafting the central RTI Act and getting it implemented in its formative years. 59. Social Audits In July 2018, the nation was shocked to learn about widespread sexual abuse of girls and poor living conditions in shelter homes in Bihar. The details of abuse and mismanagement of shelter homes of girls, the elderly and juveniles got exposed as a result of a social audit conducted by independent persons from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. The institute was tasked with conducting a social audit of 110 government-run or supported shelter institutions in 38 districts. The irregularities were then investigated by the CBI. Following the Bihar episode, the Delhi government requested TISS to conduct a similar audit of eighty-three shelter homes being run by the state government and voluntary agencies in the state. These incidents brought into focus the concept of social audits of government-run schemes and programmes. Social auditing is a process through which the public can hold government departments and agencies accountable for the projects, schemes and programmes they run. This is done by reviewing official records, interacting with beneficiaries and examining if the money spent is resulting in benefits to people. If it is a public utility, social audits can examine issues like access to as well as the quality and reach of services being offered. As opposed to financial and performance audits conducted by the Comptroller General of Audits (CAG) and other internal audits done by government officials, a social audit is conducted by independent, non-official persons or institutions of eminence. The idea of social audits in the government emerged in 1992 with the Ministry of Communications constituting a Social Audit Panel to ‘bring about improvements in operations of telecom and postal services’ and to ‘enlarge their scope of contribution to the national endeavour’. The six-member panel, under the chairmanship of P.N. Bhagwati, retired Chief Justice of India, held a series of open houses all over the country to hear out people’s ideas and suggestions on the functioning of the two services. Officials from the ministry, as well as the respective postal and telecom circle, would be present in all such interactions of the panel with the general public. Officials were required to respond with explanations and remedial action on the spot, if possible. Reports were also submitted to the minister if any policy change or amendment to the law were needed to implement suggestions. The social audit panel thus acted as a bridge between the government and the people and supplemented the existing mechanism for redressing grievances. Following the success of the experiment, the Ministry of Environment and Forests formed a similar social audit panel in 1995. Among the states, Kerala became the first to introduce formally the concept of social audits in local bodies in 1994. This followed the 73rd amendment of the Constitution relating to Panchayat Raj Institutions recognizing people’s participation in development and the decision-making process at the local self-government level. The state government introduced social audits for local bodies under the Kerala Panchayat Raj Act of 1994 as
regular practices for making them accountable to the public. In Rajasthan, the state government agreed to do the same as a result of the right to education agitation run by the MKSS. The first social audit of works done under the employment guarantee scheme was held in Dungarpur in Rajasthan by the Rozgar Soochana Abhiyan in April 2006. Since then, civil society organizations, along with local administrative officials, have conducted many social audits all across the country to maintain public pressure for accountability and transparency in the implementation of the MGNREGA. In the private sector, the Tata Iron and Steel Company pioneered social audits in 1979. The company appointed a social audit panel headed by S.P. Kotwal, former judge of the Bombay High Court to see how far the company was meeting its social and moral obligations, including environmental concerns in Jamshedpur where Tata Steel is located. Tata was the first Indian company to follow recommendations made by Justice Rajinder Sachar in 1978 regarding ‘social responsibility of business and corporate social accounting’ for the joint-stock companies covered under the Companies Act, 1956. Key People The concept of social audits for government ministries and programmes was first mooted by Dr N. Bhaskara Rao, social scientist and founder of the Centre for Media Studies, in the early 1980s. Inspired by the social audit panel of Tata Steel set up by Rustomji Homusji Mody (Russi Mody), Rao wrote a proposal for setting up similar panels for government departments and sent it to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The proposal for independent monitoring of government schemes was co-authored by Dr Margaret Khalakdina, K.B. Kothari, Dr K.G. Krishnamurthy and Dr Mira Aghi. Rao pursued the idea with successive prime ministers as well, but it received government attention only in 1992. Rajesh Pilot, who was the minister for communications, took it up in 1992 and when he was shifted to the Ministry of Environment, he implemented the same there. The social audit panels in both the ministries had Rao as the national convenor and included public figures like Khushwant Singh and retired civil servants such as B.G. Deshmukh, R. Rajamani and Abid Hussain. 60. Unique Identification (UID)/Aadhaar For the identification of residents and citizens of a country, governments issue several identification documents. These include voter identification cards, social security numbers, passports, birth certificates, income tax cards (permanent account number or PAN, in India) and identity cards that allow people to access government services as such as subsidized foodgrains under the Public Distribution System. But none of them can be considered as unique identifiers. For instance, only those eligible to vote are issued voter IDs, while those who do not pay tax do not need a PAN. If the birth registration system is not efficient, all births don’t get registered and only those wishing to travel abroad need to get a passport. Then there is the problem of forgery. One could get a passport made on fake identity or get multiple PAN cards or even inflate the number of family members in a ration card. Most of such identities are part of separate databases specifically created for a service or purpose, leaving room for tampering as well as multiple identities. At least, this was the case in India until the turn of the century. Service providers had to enforce their systems for the identification of users or beneficiaries. Banks developed a system of ‘Know Your Customer’ while some government agencies started using smart cards for programmes like the employment guarantee to prevent misuse or leakage of government subsidies. In 2009, it was estimated that 16–41 per cent of foodgrains meant for families Below the Poverty Line (BPL) were being diverted. In Karnataka, it was joked that the number of BPL ration cards in circulation was more than the state’s population.
Some organizations introduced the biometric system – using fingerprints or the iris – for the identification of employees. When the Municipal Corporation of Delhi introduced a biometric-based attendance system, it discovered that it had over 22,000 ‘ghost employees’ who were being paid salaries totalling `17 crore every month. The idea of unique identification for every Indian changed the situation dramatically. It was not an identification card valid for one organization or smart card meant for one service, but just a number that related to personal identity features or fingerprint and iris patterns, which could be used for access to multiple services wherever personal identity was needed. It was a powerful idea, never attempted before anywhere in the world on such a scale. On 29 September 2010, Ranjana Sadashiv Sonawane – a resident of Tembhli village in the Nandurbar district of Maharashtra – was issued the first UID or Aadhaar number. Since then, 1.2 billion (95 per cent of adult Indians) have been enrolled and allotted unique identification numbers corresponding to their biometric data, making it the largest application of biometric technology in the world. The motivation behind the project was to bring transparency and trust in governance, particularly in the distribution of subsidies to the poor. Benefits of welfare programmes were not reaching to those for whom they were meant, in the absence of a reliable verification system. This absence of proof resulted in denial of food subsidies, health, education and banking services to marginalized communities. Biometric identification was first used in 2006 in Andhra Pradesh to disburse payments under the MGNREGA, but it was based on smart cards. Around the same time, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had spoken of a ‘smart integrated ID card’ to serve as a unique ID for banking and financial services and setting up of an authority like the Social Security Administration (SSA) of the US. Earlier, expert committees formed after the Kargil war had recommended the creation of a national identity card for security purposes, starting with border areas. The idea of a pan-Indian digital identity system based on biometric data in the form of a number – not a card – was first articulated by software billionaire Nandan Nilekani in his 2008 book titled Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. Suggesting interlinking of government schemes and departments using common technology and process platform, he wrote: ‘Such a “national grid” would require, as a first and critical step, unique and universal ID for each citizen. Creating a national register of citizens, assigning them a unique ID and linking them across a set of national databases such as PAN and passport, can have farreaching effects in delivering public services better and targeting services more accurately.’ He also suggested that this can be implemented with the help of private players such as telecom and financial companies. When the government decided to develop such an identity system, it invited Nilekani to lead the effort. He left Infosys in 2009 to become chairman of the UID Authority of India, holding the rank of a cabinet minister. The authority’s mandate was to issue unique identity numbers based on biometrics to all residents of India. It rolled out the nationwide enrolment of such numbers for biometric-based authentication ‘anytime, anywhere’, from 2010 onwards. Aadhaar faced several hiccups and controversies since 2010. The first related to its overlap with Census 2011 and preparation of the National Population Register (NPR), both initiated by the Registrar General under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The controversy was settled when both parties accepted that Aadhaar was meant for real-time identification while the census was a more comprehensive exercise that captured socioeconomic data as well. As regards NPR, it was decided that since UID was collecting biometric data of all residents including citizens, biometric data should not be collected for NPR. The end purpose of the two exercises was also different – one was for national security and the other for transparency and accountability in welfare services as well as financial inclusion.
The second set of concerns related to the protection of data and privacy of individuals, and also compulsory linking of Aadhaar with bank accounts and mobile numbers. The criticism also focused on denial of subsidies and access to welfare schemes to people not having an Aadhaar number, difficulties in capturing biometric data of people engaged in manual labour and those with disabilities, failure in authentication due to poor telecom connectivity in remote regions, and misuse of biometric data by private service provider. In September 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that Aadhaar was voluntary and its use could not be mandated by any government agency to provide services to citizens. Critics also argued that while UIDIA held biometric and basic demographic data to be used for benefit transfer, future governments could well use the same information to profile citizens by tracking all electronically recorded transactions done using Aadhaar. Key Players When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 chose to appoint someone from the corporate sector to head an ambitious project, it did not surprise many as Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys Technologies, was already a champion of the idea. He was the poster boy of the Indian software industry, which had flourished, particularly after the economic liberalization policies implemented by Singh as the finance minister. Nilekani insisted that he be given the rank of a cabinet minister to enable him to navigate through anticipated interdepartmental turf wars. He also convinced the government to let private sector technology companies play a role in developing the technology platform and implementing the same. As chairman of UIDAI, Nilekani enlisted support for state chief ministers and built bridges within the central government. He appointed senior officials, such as Ram Sewak Sharma, with degrees from IIT and University of California and experience in implementing IT projects in Bihar and Jharkhand as director-general of the authority. The speed with which Nilekani implemented the project was noteworthy. The first Aadhaar number was issued in September 2010, and the number rose to 100 million within a year. 61. Jan Dhan Yojana Banking is considered an essential part of modern life. Millions of Indians receive and send funds worth billions of rupees every day, as a matter of routine. Banks give loans for buying a home, automobile or for the education of children and provide credit to farmers. This was not so at the time of the Independence. Having a bank account was considered a status symbol. Banking was mainly seen as something meant for rich traders, industrialists, manufacturing companies and stock brokers. The total number of bank branches all over the country in 1947 was 4,723, most of them located in big metros and trading centres. Banks and banking companies, owned by privately controlled stock trading companies and big industrial houses, were indifferent to the needs of rural areas. The scenario somewhat changed with the nationalization of fourteen private banks in 1969 (and another six in 1980), and the introduction of new ideas like social banking and lending for agriculture and small industries which were categorized as priority sectors. The number of bank branches in rural areas increased substantially – yet, a bulk of Indians remained unbanked. As of 2011, just about 58 per cent of households were availing of banking services. Despite the expansion of the banking network in rural areas, a bulk of the population could not get access to banking services. The idea of financial inclusion was largely focused on delivering credit through microfinance channels, banks and statepromoted self-help groups. The scenario changed dramatically with the opening of 1.5 crore bank accounts on a single day (28 August 2014) in what was billed as the world’s largest-ever financial inclusion exercise called Pradhan Mantri Jan
Dhan Yojana. The Guinness Book of World Records acknowledged it as a record: ‘The most bank accounts opened in one week as a part of financial inclusion campaign is 18,096,130 and was achieved by banks in India from 23 to 29 August 2014.’ In March 2020, the number of total bank accounts opened under this scheme stood at 38 crores. Of them, 29 crore account holders had a debit card (RuPay card) as well. The scheme was a combined result of using information technologies (linking mobile phones and Aadhaar numbers) and accelerated implementation of the National Mission for Financial Inclusion, which was launched for achieving universal banking. For this scheme, six lakh villages in the country were grouped into 1.6 lakh subservice areas, with an area comprising 1,000 to 1,500 households. The Jan Dhan scheme built upon the concept of Business Correspondents (BCs), an innovation introduced in 2008 by the Reserve Bank of India as part of the financial inclusion programme. These individuals act as a bridge between a bank branch and account holders to solve the problem of lastmile connectivity in rural areas. Usually, BCs are retired bank or government officials and ex-servicemen residing in that particular area and are affiliated to a base branch of a bank. In the Jan Dhan scheme, BCs were deployed to provide access to banking services in about 1.3 lakh subservice areas. The remaining 30,000 areas were covered through bank branches. The number of BCs of scheduled commercial banks in rural areas was 5.15 lakh in March 2018. BCs were also empowered to provide banking services using an interoperable Aadhaar-enabled Payment System. The accounts opened under the scheme are no-frills zero-balance accounts but come bundled with accident insurance cover of one lakh rupees and an overdraft facility of `5,000. Government subsidies and other benefits, such as pensions, are supposed to be deposited directly in the bank accounts of the poor. The use of the ‘direct benefit transfer’ mode has helped in weeding out fake or duplicate beneficiaries and plug leakages in dozens of welfare schemes. Payment Innovations The financial inclusion drive was accompanied by innovative ways for financial transactions by using mobile phones. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched a novel payment system called the National Unified USSD Platform (NUUP) in November 2012. Also known as the ‘*99#’ service, it enabled users of feature phones to access banking services through dialling and text messaging. It does not require a smartphone or a mobile app for carrying out financial transactions. USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) technology is built for GSM phones for exchanging texts. For smart phones, NPCI in April 2016 came up with an app called Universal Payment Interface (UPI) that enabled immediate money transfer through mobile devices round the clock and merchant payments. It is basically a unique identification for a bank account that can be used for sending and receiving funds using a smartphone. All one needs to know is the receiver’s UPI ID for making a transaction, eliminating the need for knowing the bank account number or IFSC of the receiver. Most Indian banks support UPI and there are third- party UPI apps like PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm. The government launched its own UPI app – BHIM or Bharat Interface for Money – to boost digital transactions after the demonetization in November 2016. Since then, UPI has revolutionized the micropayment system in the country with millions of transactions being performed every day. UPI was developed at NPCI in collaboration with the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks Association. Technical help came from iSpirit – an industry platform to support software technology start-ups – in the form of Application Programming Interface or APIs (software that enables an app to create an interface with another
app). A software engineer, Nikhil Kumar, who was volunteering for iSpirit, developed the BHIM app in December 2016, which became an instant success after demonetization. As adviser (innovations and public policy) for NPCI, Nandan Nilekani catalysed the government agency’s interface with industry and entrepreneurs through iSpirit. References Agarwal, Anurag K. ‘Role of alternative dispute resolution methods in development of society: Lok adalat in India’. IIMA Working Paper, 2005. Aiyar, Yamini, and Salimah Samji. ‘Transparency and accountability in NREGA: A case study of Andhra Pradesh’. Working Paper No. 1, Accountability Initiative, New Delhi, 2009. Baxi, Upendra. From Takrar to Karar: The Lok Adalat at Rangpur: A Preliminary Study. New Delhi: Institute of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies, 1976. Bhatnagar, Subhash. E-government: From Vision to Implementation-A Practical Guide with Case Studies. New Delhi: SAGE, 2004. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. ‘Oral history interview with Rajeev Chawla: Innovations for successful societies’. Princeton University, 2010, www.princeton.edu/successfulsocieties (accessed 16 November 2021). Dev, S. Mahendra, ‘India’s (Maharashtra) Employment Guarantee Scheme: Lessons from long experience’. In Joachim von Braun (ed.), Employment for Poverty Reduction and Food Security. Washington: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1995, 108–43. Deva, Surya. ‘Public interest litigation in India: A critical review’. Civil Justice Quarterly, 28 (1), 2008: 19– 40. Dreze, Jean. ‘Employment guarantee and the right to work’. In R. Khera (ed.), The Battle for Employment Guarantee. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, 3–20. Guha, Ramachandra. ‘Democracy’s biggest gamble: India’s first free elections in 1952’. World Policy Journal, 19 (1), 2002: 95–103.
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Education Higher education and research were among the priority areas in the nation-building project launched immediately after India attained Independence. The country needed a technical workforce that could be readily deployed in a range of industrial and economic activities. This led to a frenzy of institution-building for higher education in engineering, management, design, architecture, agriculture, statistics and so on. Each institution was built innovatively, incorporating the latest and the best in the world in terms of faculty, course design, pedagogy, governance and so on. Top minds from the government, industry, international agencies and foreign universities together participated in conceptualizing, building and running these institutions in the initial decades. Further, the alumni of these institutes have played a critical role in making India a leader in several sectors. Two novel ideas stand out from the 1980s – residential schools for tribal children and a literacy campaign implemented with the help of civil society. In the second wave of institution-building in the new century came new science universities in the form of the Indian Institutes for Science Education and Research and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), along with the expansion of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). New ideas in science popularization and science education too have changed respective landscapes. India’s leading position in the knowledge economy in the twenty-first century has much to do with the investments made in creating and nurturing key institutions in the mid-twentieth century.
62. Indian Institutes of Technology ‘The United States imports oil from Saudi Arabia, cars from Japan, TVs from Korea and whisky from Scotland. So, what do we import from India? We import people, really smart people. The smartest, the most successful, the most influential Indians who migrated to the US seem to share a common credential. They are graduates of the IITs. (When you) put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in India. IIT is dedicated to producing world-class chemical, electrical and computer engineers with a curriculum that may be the most rigorous in the world.’ This is how Lesley Stahl, co-host of the highly popular television show on CBS, 60 Minutes, introduced IITs to American audiences on 19 June 2003. The statement captures the global status and brand value of IITs – arguably the most famous higher education institutions India has built. Half a century earlier, India had no such institution which had a global name recall as IITs have achieved in the twenty-first century. Engineering education was abysmal during the British period – India had just forty-six engineering colleges with a total intake of 2,500, none of which had postgraduation courses in engineering. These colleges produced civil engineers and overseers suitable for building roads, canals, railway lines and other such networks. In the 1940s, America was an important destination for Indian students studying abroad, but Independent India needed engineers in modern disciplines who could take up large projects for the government and industry. This thinking led to the establishment of new institutes of technical education. In 2019, the country had twenty-three IITs, one each in practically all the states, with a total intake of over 11,000 annually. The idea originated in the report of a committee on higher technical education set up under the chairmanship of Nalini Ranjan Sarkar in 1946. The panel was formed at the instance of Sir Jogendra Singh, a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and Sir Ardeshir Dalal, who headed the Department of Planning and Development. After reviewing the status of engineering education in India and the West, the panel recommended the establishment of four technical institutes on the lines of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Post-Independence, Prime Minister Nehru pursued the implementation of the Sarkar report, which was also endorsed by the education commission headed by Dr S. Radhakrishnan. As a result of all these efforts, the first IIT was established at Hijli, in the building of a former detention camp, in Kharagpur, West Bengal, in May 1950. It began as the ‘Eastern Higher Technical Institute’ and was subsequently renamed the Indian Institute of Technology. It was accorded the status of an institute of national importance and an autonomous university in 1956. The special status was meant to protect IITs from political and administrative interference other universities are usually subjected to. Kharagpur was followed by IITs at Madras, Kanpur and Bombay. Within a decade, India had built five world-class engineering institutes from scratch. The College of Engineering in New Delhi was transformed into an IIT in 1963. IITs were conceived as unique institutions of higher technical education to make India self-reliant. They followed a carefully structured science-based engineering curriculum, as opposed to a vocational approach to engineering followed earlier. Another unique feature was the autonomy of functioning as a key prerequisite for pursuing excellence, as envisaged in the Sarkar report. To develop them in line with the best in the contemporary world, Nehru enlisted support – technical, academic and financial – from leading institutions and international bodies. IIT Kanpur was established with direct help from a consortium of nine Ivy League institutes led by MIT under the Kanpur Indo-American Program (KIAP). The Soviet Union, under the umbrella of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), provided support to IIT
Bombay, West Germany to IIT Madras and the United Kingdom to IIT Delhi. The first one at Kharagpur had no specific foreign patron but was supported by the US, the UK and the USSR through UNESCO. While the IITs were established to make India self-reliant in engineering and technology, over the years these institutes became synonymous with the phenomenon of the ‘brain drain’. This was because a large number of IIT graduates go to America for higher studies and employment or are recruited by multinational companies to work in their global locations. The phenomenon became rampant because suitable jobs were not available for IIT graduates in the Indian industry and entrepreneurial ventures were difficult to start in the 1960s and 1970s. IITs effectively became isolated islands of academic excellence and accelerated the process of brain drain. The founders of IIT Kanpur, as one commentator put it, intended to create an Indian MIT, not merely an MIT in India. The situation got corrected to some extent in the post-liberalization period when the Indian technology industry grew with help from Indian engineers in America, who by then, had reached top positions in technology companies in the Silicon Valley or had turned angel investors. They became ambassadors of the skills of Indian engineers. Many of them returned to work in India or convinced companies they worked for to do business in India. This phenomenon came to be known as ‘brain circulation’. The 1990s also saw launch of engineering universities focused on IT – the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), as recommended by the Task Force on IT in 1998. Some of the famous IITians include Vinod Khosla (SunMicrosystems), Padmasree Warrior (Motorola and later Cisco Systems), Arun Netravali (Bell Labs), Gururaj Deshpande (Sycamore Networks), Arun Sarin (Vodafone), Victor Menezes (Citigroup), Raghuram Rajan (IMF and RBI), Sundar Pichai (Google), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhatia (Olacabs). Key Players While several people played a role in shaping and grooming IITs in their formative years, it was Sir Ardeshir Dalal, head of the Department of Planning and Development, who conceptualized the idea. He believed that technology, not capital, was crucial for India’s progress and the country needed institutions like MIT. In his career that spanned diverse sectors – industry, government and science – Dalal held several key positions. In 1941, he became president of the Indian Science Congress and helped catalyse the birth of the CSIR. He also persuaded the American government to give doctoral fellowships to Indians under the Technology Cooperation Mission – a move that helped the IITs in early years. The first IIT was established at Kharagpur due to the efforts of Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, the then chief minister of West Bengal. Dr Humayun Kabir, an academic scholar and poet, who was education secretary and later became the minister for scientific research and cultural affairs, played an important role in the setting up of the IITs. Being in charge of the culture portfolio, he convinced UNESCO to assist in establishing IIT Kharagpur, while technical assistance for IIT Bombay came from the USSR via UNESCO. Kabir was also the first chairman of the IIT Council which was supposed to ‘coordinate activities of the four IITs and lay down policies in matters of common interest’. G.K. Chandiramani, a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Education and later its secretary, negotiated collaboration deals with Russia, Germany and the USA for different IITs.
If Sir Ardeshir conceptualized the idea and Dr Kabir implemented it, it was under the academic leadership of Dr Purushottam Kashinath Kelkar that the IITs took shape on the ground. Kelkar is known for his pioneering efforts in shaping IIT Kanpur as its director for the first ten years. He wanted to develop an engineering curriculum based on science, humanities and social sciences, with faculty engaged in both teaching and research. When an exploratory team from MIT came to India at the invitation of Nehru, they found that Kelkar’s ideas matched theirs and the team recommended a cooperation programme involving top American institutions for developing IIT Kanpur. Kelkar worked closely with Dr Norman C. Dahl who led the KIAP. Kelkar was also instrumental in shaping IIT Bombay – as a member of the India-UNESCO Mission which visited the USSR in 1955, he was involved in its planning and was appointed as the chief planning officer and deputy director. He returned to IIT Bombay as director in 1970 after a ten-year tenure in Kanpur. 63. Indian Institutes of Management The first decade of Independent India saw an upsurge in industrial and economic activity, with the establishment of several industries such as iron and steel, fertilizers, chemicals, heavy machinery, pharmaceuticals and chemicals as well as large projects for the construction of dams, power plants and irrigation projects. Several technical and engineering institutions were founded to meet the requirement of trained technical, engineering, administrative professionals. Still, many projects were getting delayed, facing cost and time overruns and were facing other problems, resulting in inefficiencies. All this pointed to the need for professional managers. India lacked full-fledged management institutes or courses and just a few universities offered vocational courses in commerce. Most of the private sector industry was structured around a century-old ‘managing agency’ system that allowed a handful of people in a managing agency to control multiple companies in diverse fields. The house of Tatas was the only one to have a management cadre and called it the Tata Administrative Service (TAS). It was felt that commerce colleges were not sufficient to meet the needs of rapid industrialization. In 1954, the All India Council for Technical Education formed a Board of Management Studies to develop a system for management education and training as well as organize courses and hold examinations. In 1955, the board suggested starting management studies in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras. The government thinking was to develop management institutes on the lines of IITs. Between 1953 and 1957, seven universities or technological institutes started part-time, postgraduate diploma programmes in Business Administration and Industrial Organization. The central government established the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) in Hyderabad to train government officials. Around this time, the Ford Foundation offered to help establish a management school in India. It suggested that such an institute should work as an autonomous body and not under any university. The suggestion was accepted by the Planning Commission. As a result, the first set of IIMs came up at Calcutta and Ahmedabad in 1961, with direct technical help from the MIT’s Sloan School of Business and the Harvard Business School, respectively. Faculty from these business schools helped develop curriculum, appoint directors and faculty members and initiate systems of teaching and research. They followed the management institute model rather than the business-school model, with a focus on case-based teaching, vocational training and trimester format. From two in 1961, the number of IIMs rose to twenty in 2019, with a total intake of 10,000 in different courses. The total number of management courses in the country is estimated to be over 4,000 with a total intake of 350,000.
IIMs stand apart and are valued because of their unique structure. They were started as public–private partnerships (PPP) rather than as government-funded institutes. IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) was a result of a tripartite arrangement between the central government, state government and industrial partners. This gave it real autonomy and freedom from rules that governed universities and state-funded bodies. IIMA had a genuine participative, decentralized and transparent governance system. The faculty, for instance, participated in the selection of students and new faculty members, faculty promotions and in developing academic programmes as well as taking financial decisions. Another unique feature of IIMs was the emphasis on research and consultancy, along with teaching. Over the years, the IIMs have produced an array of students and faculty who went on to serve the government, public sector, banks and financial institutions and private corporations in India and globally. These institutes have largely remained free of political and government interference. Like the IITs, the management institutes attracted criticism in the formative years for being elitist and pro-private sector. The criticism was valid, to some extent, in the 1960s when many IIM graduates headed to the West since companies in India were yet to professionalize management systems. A number of them were employed in fledgling computer and software companies in India. The IIMs contributed to national development through centres specifically established for effective management of agriculture and rural development, developmental administration, population control, energy, health and education. Subsequently, the IIM faculty contributed to capacity-building in infrastructure, energy, microfinance, transport, cooperatives, electoral reforms and grassroots innovations. IIMA also collaborated with the National Academy of Administration at Mussoorie for several years in training programmes for IAS probationers. Key Players More famous as the father of India’s space research programme, Vikram Sarabhai was an institution-builder credited with founding a range of institutions in Ahmedabad like the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) and Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association (ATIRA). When in 1959, the Ford Foundation recommended setting up an Indian management institute, Bombay was the first choice for its location. However, the state government was slow in responding to the idea. Sensing the opportunity, Sarabhai lobbied for the new institute to be set up in Ahmedabad, roping in Gujarat Chief Minister Jivraj Mehta and businessman-philanthropist Kasturbhai Lalbhai to contribute to this effort. Lalbhai was co-founder of the Ahmedabad Education Society (AES) and had worked with Sarabhai in setting up ATIRA in 1947. Sarabhai crafted a tripartite partnership involving the central government, the government of Gujarat and Ahmedabad’s industry represented by the IIMA Society. He also involved the Ford Foundation and Harvard Business School (HBS) as key stakeholders. It was at the instance of Sarabhai and Lalbhai that American architect Louis Kahn was contracted to design the redbrick building that became an iconic piece of architecture. Kahn was assisted by B.V. Doshi, then a budding architect, who later achieved international fame for his architectural brilliance. As the first (part-time) director of IIMA, Sarabhai insisted that every faculty member would undertake teaching, research, consulting and case writing. He held an honorary position, while his associate, Kamla Chowdhry, was closely involved in the implementation of the project as professor and coordinator of programmes. Sarabhai wanted Chowdhry to take over as the first full-time director but the Board of Governors and members of the faculty opposed the proposal. The IIM at Calcutta was a result of collaboration between Humayun Kabir
(minister for scientific research and cultural affairs) and his close friend, Dr B.C. Roy, then chief minister of West Bengal – the same duo who had worked to develop IIT Kharagpur. Ravi Matthai, who had earlier worked in industry and had taught at IIM Calcutta, was chosen as the first full- time director of IIMA in August 1965. He was just thirty-eight then. He is credited with laying down the foundations of many of the institutional processes such as faculty governance, academic freedom and autonomy and self-regulation. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, he established a computing centre at IIMA under J.G. Krishnayya who had recruited Narayana Murthy, the future global business leader, from IIT Kanpur as a systems analyst, among others. 64. All India Institute of Medical Sciences The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi is perhaps among the best-known health institution in India. It is the largest teaching hospital providing high-quality medical graduation and postgraduation education, besides being the foremost centre for medical research in the country. It is a unique model that combines medical education, training, research and patient services. The institute was established through a special law passed in Parliament in 1956, according to it the status of a university with full autonomy. None of the medical schools and research centres functioning in the country at the time of Independence had such autonomy, and none conducted clinical research and teaching under one roof. AIIMS was supposed to be the first one of its kind in the Southeast Asia region. It was part of the larger post-Independence drive to develop institutions of higher education in engineering, management and medicine based on international standards. Like many such initiatives of this period, AIIMS too was based on the recommendations of the Health Survey and Development Committee (known as the Bhore Committee, after its first chairman, Sir Joseph Bhore) formed by the government in 1943 as part of the post-war reconstruction activity. In its report submitted in 1946, the panel recommended setting up of a Medical Research Council and an All India Medical Institute as a specialized centre for high-quality postgraduation in medicine. A.V. Hill, secretary of the Royal Society, in his report on organizing science in India also spoke of the need for a medical institute, and noted that ‘the All-India Medical Centre would intend to produce the future leaders of Indian medicine and public health, the teachers and research workers’. Prime Minister Nehru, who was a founder member of a regional cooperation programme called the Colombo Plan, roped in the New Zealand government for technical and financial help to develop AIIMS, which started functioning in 1956 as a statutory body. The Rockefeller Foundation was also a partner in this endeavour. To give the institute powers and functions of a university and the necessary freedom to appoint faculty and develop its research programmes, it was decided to keep it outside the purview of the regulatory mechanism of the Medical Council of India (MCI) and also the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). However, the decision to make the union health minister the head of the governing body led to several controversies in later decades. Over the years, the institute has contributed immensely to medical research, leading to the formulation of new health programmes at the national level or changes in existing ones based on new evidence emerging from research. These areas include fertility, nutrition, iodine deficiency, communicable diseases, vector-borne
diseases, cardiovascular ailments, mental health and trauma care. One of the earliest research programmes was the Comprehensive Rural Health Services Project in Ballabhgarh in Haryana. Its objective was to demonstrate a model healthcare delivery system for rural India and train medical students in primary healthcare. Insights from this project led to several changes in policies. The first cardiac catheterization laboratory for clinical studies in India was established in AIIMS in the 1960s. The institute also pioneered organ transplantation with the first successful heart transplantation done in 1994. During 2018–19, over 23 lakh people visited outpatient wings at AIIMS, while 1.39 lakh were admitted as inpatients and 1.84 lakh surgeries were performed. The idea of AIIMS has now spread throughout India. Six new AIIMS have come up at Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Raipur, Rishikesh and Jodhpur, while sixteen more were in the pipeline at the end of 2021. Key People The troika of Nehru, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Dr B.B. Diskshit was responsible for shaping up AIIMS and nurturing in the initial period. Kaur, who was a member of the royal family of Kapurthala and a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, was India’s first health minister. Dr Dikshit was the first director of the institute. As the force behind developing the institute as a premier body for medical education, training and research by garnering support from international donors, Kaur personally invited distinguished doctors and medical teachers to join the institute, such as Professor Sujay Bijay Roy, who was teaching in America and was asked to start the Department of Cardiology. It was her idea to pay high salaries to faculty members and provide them housing on the campus to ensure close relations among teachers and students. Faculty members were barred from private practice. The first director of the institute, Dr Bhalchandra Babaji Dikshit (1902–77), developed a curriculum taking into account contemporary developments in medical education while keeping the same relevant to Indian conditions and needs. He inspired many Indian medical scientists working in different parts of the world to return to India and help build the institute in its formative years. 65. National Institute of Design In the modern world, design is considered an essential element of all human activity, particularly industrial and economic growth. Design is not something meant only for making consumer products aesthetically pleasing and functional, but it plays a critical role in improving the quality of life of people and making corporations competitive. As India set itself on the path of rapid industrialization and economic development as a newly independent nation in the 1950s, the need for industrial and product design was also realized. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave design education the same importance as higher education in engineering, medicine and management. He saw design as ‘a catalyst for change, newness and creativity for Indians’. This approach led to the foundation of the National Institute of Design (NID) in 1961 as a unique centre for design practice, education and research. Over the decades, NID became the nucleus of all activities related to developments in modern design in India. Being the first design institute in the global south, it emerged as a model for using design for development in several developing countries around the world.
The spadework for an Indian design institute had begun in the mid-1950s when feverish institution development was underway in different sectors. In 1957, the government invited eminent American designers, Charles Eames and Ray Eames, to advise the government on ways to promote design activity, particularly to help small-scale industries and traditional Indian crafts. The Eames visited many places and met several people across the country, after which they submitted a brief report called the India Report in 1958. Among its recommendations was the need for a national design institute, and a blueprint for training and research activities it should take up. The report specifically underlined the criticality of such an institute being free from bureaucratic hurdles. NID was thus established in 1961 in Ahmedabad which symbolized a harmonious blend of traditional Indian art and architecture with modernity. It was established as an autonomous body that was not under the Ministry of Education but was attached to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry so that it could serve the needs of the Indian industry. This was in line with the recommendations of the India Report, which had emphasized that India should develop its model of design education and not copy others. The institute provides advanced training, research and service in product design, visual communication, architecture, structure and planning and related fields. NID followed the methodology of ‘learning through doing’ which was pioneered by the Bauhaus design school in Germany in the early twentieth century. The primary task of NID is design education but it utilizes professional practice as a means of educating budding designers. That’s why it works for industry and the government in product design, visual communication and other areas. In the formative years, the institute took advantage of leading designers from the West who were in Ahmedabad as visiting and resident faculty, including from the design school at Ulm in Germany. The visiting faculty included Louis Kahn, Ivan Chermayeff, Armin Hofmann, George Nakashima, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. NID professionals designed the logos of Doordarshan, Indian Airlines, Operation Flood, the State Bank of India, the Trade Fair Authority of India, the Electronics Corporation of India Limited, and made the Devanagari script suitable for modern typewriting, typesetting and typecasting. NID also worked to design a safe paddy thresher, medical equipment and a kerosene stove called Nutan. In the 1970s, the institute worked with the United Nations and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design to develop a design education framework for developing countries guided by the ‘design for development’ approach. Till then design was mostly construed to be fine art, patternmaking or engineering design. The new approach of utilizing design as a tool for development triggered industrial design activity in several developing countries. India now has over 100 design schools as well as the National Design Council and the National Design Policy that seek to develop India as a global design destination. Key People Several people played a role in establishing and nurturing NID. The process was set in motion in 1955 by Pupul Jayakar, founder of the Indian Handlooms and Handicrafts Export Council, and a champion of Indian crafts. She happened to meet designer Charles Eames during an exhibition on Indian textiles and ornamental arts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At that time, she was involved in discussions on establishing an institute of design in India and to impel progress further, she requested the Ford Foundation in India to invite Eames to India. Both Charles and Ray Eames visited India and met several craftspeople, architects, scientists, industrialists, educators and writers. They synthesized their findings in the India Report which suggested that India needed
problem-solving design consciousness and design education as a bridge between tradition and modernity. When Ahmedabad was chosen for setting up NID, industrialist Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai played a pivotal role in developing the educational philosophy and attracting international faculty. Gautam Sarabhai himself undertook recruitment trips across Europe and to the US. Indian faculty members, such as Dashrath Patel and H. Kumar Vyas, shaped the institute’s unique international outlook while blending it with the Indian ethos. 66. Total Literacy Campaign Literacy is not just one’s ability to read and write alphabets or count numbers but is a powerful tool of communication that can empower people. It has the power to open up doors of information, knowledge and development. That’s why literacy is often seen as a solution to address social and economic conditions, including poverty, and as a fundamental right of people. It is also a key indicator of a nation’s development status. At the time of India’s Independence, only 12.2 per cent of Indians were literate. The high level of illiteracy was a major challenge for the political leadership of the newly independent nation. In the first decade after Independence, the focus was on inculcating social education among the masses. When efforts to introduce new agricultural technologies got intensified in the 1960s, the need arose for functional literacy as well as basic training in new farm technologies. Literacy programmes focused on adult education and innovative ideas such as night schools were introduced. A new National Adult Education Programme was launched in 1978 to cover about 100 million illiterates in the age group of fifteen to thirty-five years. The idea was to impart literacy in ten months at designated adult literacy centres. As a result, the general literacy rate climbed up to 41 per cent in 1981. Literacy was once again emphasized in the National Policy on Education of 1986, but this time the objective was promoting adult education as ‘a means for reducing economic, social and gender disparities’. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi included eradication of illiteracy as one of the technology missions, on par with those on drinking water, immunization and oilseeds production. The National Literacy Mission (NLM), launched in May 1988, recognized literacy not as alphabetical and functional literacy alone but as something essential for providing ‘access to information, communication, modernization and a wide range of skills’. Till then, adult education programmes followed the ‘centre’ approach in which adult education centres were established and learners were supposed to be taught there. The NLM adopted an innovative approach of the Total Literacy Campaign (TLC), which aimed at creating a demand for literacy in a defined geographical area like a village, panchayat and district and then fulfilling that demand with creative methods. In this way, TLC sought to turn a government programme into a people’s movement. NLM borrowed the idea of TLC which was pioneered in the Ernakulam district of Kerala by the people’s science movement, Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishath (KSSP). The organization, which had been working for inculcating a scientific outlook and improving literacy in the state, collaborated with the district administration to undertake a literacy campaign in 1988. The strategy was to mobilize people and generate the demand for literacy. This was done through kalajathas (cultural caravans) consisting of a padayatra, street theatre and songs. Modern audiovisual, as well as folk culture and oral forms, were used to create a favourable climate for literacy. The messages centred around literacy as a weapon against poverty, bondage, deprivation and exploitation. The exercise was targeted at both literate as well as non-literate people with the idea of motivating the literate to act as potential instructors and the non-literate to attain literacy. That’s how TLC involved all sections of the society and made it a people’s movement. Meticulous planning, preparation of instruction modules and training of instructors was undertaken. The overall programme management was handled by the district literacy committee, which included government officials as well as civil society
representatives. Thousands of volunteers and instructors were involved in the exercise. That’s how Ernakulam became India’s first district to become fully literate. The same model was then deployed across Kerala, which became India’s first fully literate state. NLM then approached KSSP to scale up the Ernakulam model of TLC nationwide. KSSP suggested a pan-India jatha for mass mobilization for literacy, modelled after the Bharat Jan Vigyan Jatha that had been formed as a federation of people’s science organizations after the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. For the literacy campaign, it was given a nationally appealing name – the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Jatha – and a new non-government body called Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS) was conceptualized. BGVS believed that people are capable of perceiving and internalizing messages central to their lives, provided these messages are conveyed through culture-specific imageries, idioms, songs, theatre, folk tales, among other means. For this, thousands of writers, artists, playwrights, actors and students from different states were brought together to write, sing, dance and perform in creative ways. The idea was to help unlettered people correlate livelihood issues and barriers to development with illiteracy. The main slogan of this jatha was ‘science and literacy for national integration and self- reliance’. The BGVJ went around the country for forty-four days – from 2 October 1990, to 14 November 1990 – covering one lakh out of six lakh villages spread over 300 districts (out 460 districts then). The script for each performance was designed in the respective regional language through workshops at the national and state levels. The success of TLC, which helped India reach 74 per cent literacy by 2011, was followed by several new post-literacy and continuing education initiatives. Mothers who became literate wanted their children to go to schools, which contributed to engineering the demand for primary education and catalysing new programmes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education. In many districts, higher levels of literacy and the jatha impact resulted in social actions such as agitations by women against country liquor and the freeing of bonded labour. Key People A great example of a programme involving the active participation of both the government and civil society is the TLC. It was also the first time the government engineered a people’s movement with help of grassroots organizations. Anil Bordia, who was the education secretary leading the NLM, was aware of the work done by KSSP in the field of literacy in Kerala and wanted the Ernakulam model to be scaled up. The idea was discussed between Sam Pitroda, technology adviser to the prime minister, and Dr M.P Parameswaran, a senior functionary of KSSP. Parameswaran had already gained national prominence for the role he had played in the movement to stop the Silent Valley power project in Kerala and the nationwide jatha after the Bhopal disaster. He proposed the idea of BGVS to involve several other people’s science organizations in the exercise. Dr Malcolm S. Adiseshiah, an eminent educationist and economist, served as president of BGVS, while several scientists, educationists, social and educational activists were drafted as members. 67. Navodaya Vidyalaya The state of school education in India was very poor when the country became free. Literacy rates were low, dropout rates in schools were high and vast differences existed in urban and rural areas in terms of quality and enrolment at every level of school education. A large number of children in rural areas did not attend school. The number of girls and students belonging to weaker sections of the society attending schools was even lower. The learning outcomes too were poor. The share of funds allocated to schooling in Five Year plans in the first
two decades of the education was abysmal. The National Policy on Education announced in 1986, sought to address these issues and correct the imbalance between rural and urban areas. One of the innovations the policy introduced was that of model residential schools in rural areas to ensure equity, social justice and excellence in school education. Named as Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, these schools sought to break away from the mould of typical government schools. These were residential, co-educational schools especially targeting children from scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, providing them quality education. In Navodaya schools, rural children are selected for enrolment through an entrance test and provided schooling up to the twelfth class. Seats are reserved for children from SC and ST communities in proportion to their population in a particular district. Onethird of the seats are reserved for girl students and 3 per cent of the seats are for disabled children. The objective is to provide all-round education comparable to the best in the residential education system. All needs of the children – textbooks, note books, uniform – are provided free or at subsidized rates. The medium of instruction up to the eighth class is the mother tongue or regional language and thereafter, English for maths and science and Hindi for social science. Students then appear for tenth and twelfth class examinations of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The overall objective is to provide good quality modern education, including components of culture, values, awareness of the environment, adventure activities and physical education. The schools are governed through a specially created agency, the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti and its regional offices across the country. It is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Human Resources Development. Among the novel features of Navodaya schools is the exchange programme wherein 30 per cent of students in the ninth class go to a linked or partner Navodaya school in another state on exchange. Such exchanges usually take place between linguistically different regions. Most exchanges take place between Hindi and non-Hindi speaking regions. The idea behind these exchanges is to expose children to different languages and cultures and thus inculcate the spirit of unity in diversity. Navodaya schools are also supposed to be pace-setting schools in their respective districts. They serve as a focal point for improving the quality of school education through training of teachers and experience sharing with other government schools in their area. Over the years, the network of Navodaya schools has spread all over the country – in 2019, 661 Navodaya schools covered all the districts in India. Thousands of children have passed out of these schools and made successful careers in civil services, medicine, engineering, medicine, sports and so on. In 2019, over 4,450 students qualified for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains, 966 students for JEE advance and 12,654 students for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) medical entrance test. Many of them get admitted to prestigious institutions of higher learning like the IISc. Several students from Navodaya schools get admissions to international universities every year. 68. Birla Industrial and Technological Museum Science museums, science centres and planetariums play a critical role in the communication of science and scientific ideas to the general public, particularly young children. India has the world’s largest network of science museums and centres in the world, which attract a massive 15 million visitors every year. The network consists of over fifty science museums and centres working at national, regional and subregional levels. There is an equal number of planetariums in the government and private sectors. At the time of Independence, India did not have any science museum or planetarium. A museum of science and technology, established by a private
sector industrial house in 1954, triggered the science museum movement and similar ventures by the government, resulting in the vast network of science museums and planetariums in later decades. The museum in question was the Birla Museum established on the campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Rajasthan. It was the first such effort to depict developments in industry and technology to school children as well as the general public, and also the first one in an educational campus. It was established fully with private funds. In parallel, the central government too, was planning a similar museum in the national capital. A beginning was made in 1956 with a small science museum and a planetarium on the campus of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), mainly with equipment gifted by foreign agencies. During a conference of UNESCO held in India, planetarium manufacturer, Zeiss, donated a planetarium instrument to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who passed it on to NPL. Around the same time, Dr B.C. Roy, chief minister of West Bengal also proposed setting up a science museum in Kolkata, inspired by the one in Pilani. Roy discussed the idea with Ghanshyam Das Birla, who was the brain behind the museum in Pilani. Birla offered to donate his heritage property in Kolkata – the Birla Park and the land surrounding it for the venture. The property once belonged to the Tagores. The Birla Park thus became the site for the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum (BITM) opened in 1959. It was a national institute run under the CSIR though it bore the name of the Birlas. The Birlas also established India’s first public planetarium in the city – the M.P. Birla Planetarium in 1962. This led to similar ventures in cities across India, both by the Birlas and the government. To begin with, BITM had galleries on the metallurgy of iron and steel and copper; petroleum; electricity; nuclear physics; electronics; television; optics and miscellaneous. The activities and displays at all these museums were heavily influenced by the European model – the Deutsches Museum at Munich and the Science Museum at London. In the 1960s, the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum (VITM) opened in Bangalore. A shift in science museum philosophy occurred in the 1970s, from ‘seeing-and-reading’ displays to ‘doing’ or activity centres. The shift was inspired by the Exploratorium in San Francisco and got reflected in the Nehru Science Centre which opened in Mumbai in 1985. In 1978, BITM became the nucleus for the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), an autonomous society established under the Ministry of Culture. The idea was to promote science centres and museums all over the county to boost non-formal education in science and the spirit of scientific temper. Since then, the council has established science centres at national, regional and district levels as well as ‘science cities’. These centres also reach out to students in remote and tribal areas through ‘mobile science exhibitions’ mounted in special buses, a concept pioneered by BITM. All these efforts have helped in not just arousing curiosity among children but also created a demand for science education. Key People
BITM was a result of a unique collaboration between the central, state governments and an industrialist. Dr B.C. Roy wanted to replicate in Calcutta what he had seen in science museums in Germany. He managed to interest G.D. Birla, who had already established a science museum in his home town in Rajasthan. Together, they convinced PM Nehru to take the idea to fruition. Roy personally supervised the setting up of the museum. Saroj Ghosh, who joined BITM as a technical officer and was curator-in-charge, introduced innovative outreach programmes, including a mobile science museum and ‘museobus’ which could go to the villages to display items. As the first director-general of NCSM, Ghosh expanded the chain of science museums and science centres that encouraged interactive and participatory activities. 69. Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research Investing in higher education in a big way soon after Independence, the government established national institutes of excellence for engineering, management, medicine, design and agriculture education. The country already had universities teaching science and centres like the IISc for higher studies and research in basic sciences. In addition, teaching-cum-research centres like TIFR and the Indian Statistical Institute also trained high-quality scientists and researchers. Over the years, as the scientific infrastructure grew, a need was felt for more scientists and researchers. The science departments in universities could not fulfil this need for various reasons, while the supply of engineering talent was steady from the IITs, IIITs and regional engineering colleges (later upgraded to be National Institutes of Technology). Moreover, bright students were opting for engineering courses at the IITs and not for science programmes. In response to this felt need emerged the idea of new science universities which could churn out well rounded and high-quality graduates, postgraduates, PhDs and researchers in various disciplines of basic science. The idea took shape with the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) at Pune in 2006. This was followed by IISERs at Mohali, Bhopal, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, Tirupati and Berhampur. The objective of the IISERs was to boost the quality of education and research in basic science and promote interdisciplinary studies. The academic model of the IISERs is novel, combining the best features of IITs as well as the university system. It promotes science teaching and research in a multidisciplinary manner, with the addition of humanities courses too. The five-year Bachelor of Science (BSc)–Master’s in Science (MSc) dual degree model allows students to learn mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology in the first two years. In the next two years, they master a major subject of their choice and spend the final year on research. In between, students have to undertake research internships during summer breaks. At the end of five years, the dual course churns out young scientists trained in multidisciplinary areas of scientific research. Each IISER produces about 1,000 MSc degree holders and about 1,000 PhDs. This turnout has been adding a critical mass to the scientific manpower pool of the country. Faculty members teach and conduct research simultaneously, and their research output has been exemplary both in terms of papers published in top journals as well as patents. Key People IISERs were established following the recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister, headed by Professor C.N.R. Rao. The idea of a five-year integrated science course leading to the MSc
degree was first mooted in 1995. A group of scientists and academics led by Pune-based radio astronomer Professor Govind Swarup proposed setting up an autonomous Advanced Centre for Science and Technology attached to the University of Pune. But the idea could not take a shape for various reasons till 2004 when the central government decided to set up not one but several Centres for Excellence in Basic Sciences. Eventually, the advisory council headed by Rao recommended setting up IISERs in its report submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in March 2005. Krishna Ganesh, convenor of the committee for preparing a blueprint for IISER Pune, was appointed as its first director and served there till 2017 after which he took over as the first director of IISER, Tirupati. 70. Foldscopes A microscope is part of every school lab and its advanced versions are used for teaching biology and chemistry at the college level as well as for scientific research. It is an expensive instrument and has to be shared by all students in a class. On the other hand, origami – the age-old art of using paper to make simple forms like boats and planes – is something every schoolgoing child loves and is inexpensive. Just imagine using the same origami to make an inexpensive microscope that every child could afford. That’s what a Foldscope is – a paper microscope that children can assemble on their own and use to see microorganisms and human cells that are invisible to the naked eye. The Foldscope kit costs just one dollar or less than `100. The frugal innovation is not only changing the teaching of science in Indian schools but is also being used as an affordable research tool to study plant diseases and diagnose human diseases. It can also be attached to a mobile phone to see magnified images of microscopic objects on the phone screen. A Foldscope combines principles of optical design with origami and can be assembled from a flat sheet of paper in ten minutes. It can provide magnification of 140X and imaging resolution of 2 micron (one micron or micrometre is a millionth of a meter). The paper microscope does not need any external power supply and is so robust that it remains intact even after getting dropped from a height or stepped on by someone. It is small enough to be carried in a pocket, like a pencil or a pen, while a conventional microscope weighs two to three kilograms. In addition to foldable paper, the primary components of a Foldscope include a spherical ball lens, lens-holder apertures, an LED with diffuser or condenser lens, a battery, and an electrical switch. For viewing a sample through the microscope, all one has to do is insert the sample on a slide, turn on the LED and just view the sample by panning and focusing with thumbs. Unlike a traditional microscope, the sample in a Foldscope is at a fixed location while the optics and illumination stages are moved in sync. The sample can be viewed by placing the microscope close to one’s eyes. Simple thumb movements such as pulling or pushing together paper end help achieve focusing and panning. By dismantling the cost barrier, the Foldscope has provided new opportunities for science teaching in schools across the world. Since 2010 when the invention was made, over one million units of Foldscope have been shipped across the world. In India, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in 2015 took up a project to make Foldscopes available in science colleges and also train school teachers to popularize them. Several grassroots organizations and individuals engaged in ‘citizen science’ have introduced Foldscopes in remote areas and among tribal children. The portable microscope has become a popular tool among scientists looking for affordable diagnostics and other applications. Variants of the Foldscope have been used as a cost-effective diagnostic tool for organisms that cause neglected tropical diseases – Giardia lamblia, Leishmania donovani, Trypanosoma cruzi (Chagas parasite), Escherichia coli and Bacillus cereus. Since it can be coupled with a smartphone, the Foldscope is emerging as a choice for telemedicine applications in rural areas.
Key People The Foldscope was invented by Manu Prakash, a bioengineer and one of his PhD students, James S. Cybulski, at the Prakash Lab at Stanford University. Prakash, a graduate of the IIT Kanpur, was inspired to develop the inexpensive microscope during one of his visits to India in 2010 when at a health centre, he saw the iconic picture of Mahatma Gandhi looking through a microscope, observing the bacteria that causes leprosy. Prakash found striking the image of Gandhi sitting cross-legged in his khadi attire with an expensive scientific instrument that may have otherwise been difficult to use in the hot and humid climate in India. The contrast in the picture made him think about how scientific instruments could be made simple and frugal so that people in developing countries could use them effortlessly. It put Prakash on the path of developing low-cost instruments which people could use anywhere, by using cutting edge technology to bring down the cost. 71. Happiness Curriculum India has been consistently ranked among the bottom ten countries in the global ranking of the happiest countries, listed in the World Happiness Report published every year. While one can argue about the methodology used or parameters measured for arriving at the ranking, the survey is a reflection of how people feel about their well-being. It includes parameters relating to social, urban and natural environments that affect the happiness of people. It recognizes that happiness is not synonymous with economic prosperity. The happiness of people is as important as a nation’s gross domestic product or GDP. Bhutan has institutionalized the idea in the form of the Gross Happiness Product or GNP. In urban areas, children live in stressful environments where their upbringing is conditioned by factors like social comparisons, pressure for overachievement, and so on. The stress of the educational system – homework, examinations, tests, grading – is additional. All this, many a time, can lead to low self-esteem, lack of sense of identity and insecurity among children. Value education has been part of the school curriculum for long but its ‘teaching’ lacks creativity and is not specifically designed to relieve stress. With this realization in mind, the Delhi government in 2018 introduced a ‘happiness curriculum’ for school children. The happiness curriculum seeks to ‘guide the attention of students towards exploring, experiencing and expressing happiness in not just the momentary but deeper and sustainable forms’ and is designed to enable them to ‘comprehend happiness within the self, relationships and society’. The specific objectives of the curriculum are to develop self-awareness and mindfulness; inculcate critical thinking and inquiry; develop skills to communicate effectively and creatively; understand expectations in relationships and develop empathy to ensure healthy relationships with family, peers and teachers. Children should be able to apply life skills to deal with stressful and conflicting situations around them. The happiness syllabus consists of three modules – exploring happiness through learning and awareness; experiencing happiness in relationships through feelings; and happiness through active participation. Specific activities have been suggested under the three modules for classes starting from nursery to the eighth class. For every level, age-appropriate mindfulness activities, thought-provoking stories, reflective activities and self-expression have been prescribed. The activities include joyful exercises, indoor games, active enquiry, reflective conversations, storytelling, guided practices for mindfulness, group discussion, role-play, individuals and group presentations, rapport building and teamwork. The happiness curriculum was launched by Nobel Laureate Dalai Lama in July 2018. It covers about 800,000 children in schools run by the Delhi government. Several other states have shown interest in developing a
similar curriculum. Some government hospitals are also trying out ‘happiness therapy’ to promote social bonding between doctors and patients as well as to reduce pain apprehension and anxiety among patients. The happiness class hit international headlines when Melania Trump, wife of Donald Trump, the then president of the USA, visited a Delhi school to experience it in February 2020. Key People The happiness curriculum was introduced in government schools as a part of the education reforms rolled out after the Aam Aadmi Party was voted to power in 2015. Almost 25 per cent of the state’s budget was allocated for education, resulting in substantial improvements in school buildings, the addition of libraries, laboratories and sports facilities as well as teacher training. While all this enhanced the quality of education in government schools, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal wanted to do something that would make children better human beings. This challenge set his deputy, Manish Sisodia, who was also the education minister, thinking. He had already introduced Jeevan Vidya (life skills) workshops and Vipassana (a kind of meditation) training for teachers. But there was no such activity for children. Happiness classes were the answer. He thought of this idea while he was in a ten-day-long Vipassana camp, cut off from the world. He then involved the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) which has a ‘Cell for Human Values and Transformative Leaning’ to work on the idea. A core team of about twenty teachers, experts from the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET) and child psychologists developed the content for the happiness class. References Balaram, Singanapalli. ‘Design in India: The importance of the Ahmedabad declaration’. Design Issues, 25 (4), 2009: 54–79. Bassett, Ross. ‘Aligning India in the Cold War era: Indian technical elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and computing in India and the United States’. Technology and Culture, 50 (4), 2009: 783–810. Chakraborty, Anwesha, Usha Raman, and Poojraj Thirumal. ‘Tracing science communication in Independent India’. Communicating Science: A Global Perspective: ANU Press, 371, 2020. Cybulski, James S., James Clements, and Manu Prakash. ‘Foldscope: origami-based paper microscope.’ PLOS ONE, 9 (6), 2014, e98781. Kavadi, Shirish N. ‘Autonomy for medical institutes in India: A view from history’. National Medical Journal of India, 30 (4), 2017: 230. Khare, Avinash. ‘IISERs: New initiative towards excellence in science’. Current Science, 110 (5), 2016: 763– 65.
Mishra, Lakshmidhar. ‘National literacy mission: Genesis and the first decade’. In Two Decades of the National Literacy Mission, Indian Adult Education Association, 2012. Nambissan, Geetha B, and Poonam Batra. ‘Equity and excellence: Issues in Indian education’. Social Scientist, 17 (9/10), 1989: 56–73. NITI Aayog, Evaluation study of Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti. 2015. Parameswaran, M.P. (ed.). Science for Social Education: A Reader. Thrissur: Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, 2013. Pylee, M.V. ‘Management education in India’. Management Science, 13 (10), 1967: C-207. Ram Mohan, T.T. Brick By Red Brick: Ravi Matthai and the Making of IIM Ahmedabad. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2011. Saldhanha, Denzil. ‘Cooperation between government and NGO: A case study of Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti’. In Two Decades of the National Literacy Mission, Indian Adult Education Association, 2012. Sisodia, Manish, Shiksha: My Experiments as an Education Minister. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2019. State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and Directorate of Education. ‘Happiness Curriculum’. Delhi, 2019. Sthanapati, Jayanta. ‘Mobile Science Exhibition in India: 1965–2014’. Journal of the Department of Museology, University of Calcutta, 11: 40–62. Swarup, Govind. ‘Genesis of IISERs’. Current Science, 109 (5), 2015: 841. Varadarajan, S. ‘50 Years of the National Institute of Design 1961–2011’. Journal of Design History, 28 (4), 2015. Venugopal, P. ‘The first successful heart transplant in India’. National
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