The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 16th Dec’19 | PDF Download

‘Maternity scheme exclusionary, need benefits for all’ Several clauses and lengthy documentation excludes single women and young brides, say activists

• Three years after a pan-India maternity benefit programme promising ₹6,000 to new mothers was first announced, the chorus on its many exclusions is growing louder leading to a demand for a scheme that is truly universal.
• The many clauses introduced into the long and tedious documentation work totalling 32 pages has led to single women and young brides being left out of its purview, say activists working at the grassroots level.
• The Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a televised address to the nation on December 31, 2016. Five month’s later when the Union Cabinet approved the scheme, it decided to give a benefit of ₹5,000 to pregnant and lactating mothers for the birth of the first child. This would be disbursed in three installments upon meeting several conditionalities — registration of pregnancy, at least one ante-natal check-up, registration of child birth and vaccinations.
• The remaining cash incentive of up to ₹1,000 is to be given under a separate scheme called the Janani Suraksha Yojana so that on an “average” women get a total sum of ₹6,000. The objective is to compensate women for wage loss due to child birth.

‘Hefty bribe’

• Sunita Singh who works for the Uttar Pradesh Chapter of the Right to Food Campaign says women have to pay a hefty bribe during the application process. “In U.P. there is a fee for everything. In Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s district of Gorakhpur this is as high as ₹500, which women have to pay with each of the three forms.”
• The lengthy documentation work includes filling up six documents totaling 32 pages — an application form to be filled for each of the three installments, an application for linking the Aadhaar card with bank account, another one for linking the Aadhaar card with post office account and a feedback form.
• Applicants have to also submit at least nine other documents for verification — Aadhaar card (or enrolment slip when there is no card), an identity proof, voter ID card (as age proof) of the mother and her husband; ration card (for husband’s address), copy of bank passbook and maternal and child protection (MCP) card.
• “Is this scheme SUPPORTIVE OR EXCLUSIONARY and punitive. Eligible beneficiaries have to jump through several hoops to claim their entitlement. Moreover, this is a woman’s right under the National Food Security Act, 2013, why then insist on the husband’s identity proof,” said Jashodhara Dasgupta, Feminist Policy Collective. She added that the documentation work is likely to result in many women living on the margins, such as sex workers, women in custody, migrant and those living in post-conflict situations unable to claim benefits even though they are most in need of monetary compensation.
• Vande Bharat Express , also known as Train 18, is an Indian semihigh speed intercity electric multiple unit.
• It was designed and built by Integral Coach Factory (ICF) Chennai under the Indian government’s Make in India initiative over a span of 18 months.
• The unit cost of the first rake was given as ₹100 crore (US$14 million), though the unit cost is expected to go down with subsequent production. At the original price, it is estimated to be 40% less costly than a similar train imported from Europe. The train was launched on 15 February 2019, by which date a second unit will have been produced and readied for service. The service was named ‘Vande Bharat Express’ on 27 January 2019

Train 18 employs a regenerative braking system.

• After October, ICF will make one train every alternate month till March 2020 and one rake every month from April 2020.”According to the Ministry of Railways earlier this year, Modern Coach Factory (MCF), Raebareli which has been a shining example of ‘Make in India’, will also manufacture more Vande Bharat Express train sets in the coming months.
• Indian Railways and ICF are also planning the development of Train 20, another semi-high speed train that will replace the Rajdhani Express. The line is supposed to be unveiled in 2020.
• Indian Railways plans to order 40 train sets of Train 18 by 2022 with modified cabin crash guard made out of aluminium
• The threat of a military clash in the Mediterranean has drawn nearer following talks in which Turkey has underlined its willingness to send troops to Libya to defend the country’s UN-recognized government.
• Such a move would risk a direct military confrontation with General Khalifa Haftar, the eastern Libyan military warlord who is thought to be planning a decisive assault on the government of national accord in Tripoli, or GNA. Either the UAE or Egypt, which are supporting Haftar’s forces, might also become involved.
• Turkey, already at loggerheads with the US Congress and EU on multiple fronts, last week signed a military co-operation agreement with GNA that enables it to request troops from Turkey. The agreement, sent to the Turkish parliament on Saturday, provides for a so-called quick reaction force for police and military in Libya, as well as enhanced cooperation on intelligence and defence.
• Turkish support for the GNA government led by Fayez al Serraj has until now been limited to drones and armaments, and it would be a major escalation to send ground troops to defend Tripoli
• The outburst against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, or CAB, (now an Act, or CAA) in the Northeast has left many outside the region confounded.
• Unlike the objections to the CAA everywhere else in the country — which is about the discriminatory and seeming Islam-phobia attributes of the new law — they are bewildered that in the Northeast, CAB is seen as a threat to survival.
• This inability of those outside the Northeast to see what the Northeast sees betrays to an extent an ignorance and an insensitivity to a stark reality small marginalized communities there face. ‘Population anxiety’

Population anxiety’

• The truth is, going by UNESCO’s definition of endangered languages, all of the 200 and more languages spoken in the Northeast, with the exception of Assamese and Bengali, are in the vulnerable category. Even in the case of Assamese, though it is the language of the majority in the State with about 15 million speakers (Census 2011), they are still a tiny minority when the larger region of Bangladesh, Bengal and Assam is considered. Bengali speakers in Assam total about 9 million (Census 2011); however, neighbouring Bangladesh alone has 164 million speakers of the same language. The fear in Assam of being overwhelmed by an unceasing influx of people from Bangladesh therefore is nothing beyond legitimacy. This is a peculiar situation often described as “a majority with a minority complex”; its consequences have resurfaced in the region time and again, yet few take cognizance of it, perpetuating the phenomenon.
• In Bhutan in the 1980s, when a lakh or so Nepali migrants were evicted from the country, and even in the current Rohingya crisis, it is this same and largely ignored “population anxiety” that lies at its roots

Issue of marginalization

• Bertil Lintner, Swiss journalist and author who has been very closely associated with the region, has pointed out in a recent interview that the Rohingya crisis is nowhere near the popularly projected binary of Muslim versus Buddhist. The ethnic Rakhines, numbering about two million in the Rakhine state — shared with the Rohingya — were the ones feeling the pressure of a continuing population influx from Bangladesh, expanding the Rohingya population. That the Myanmar government favoured the Rakhines was always obvious but it may be noted that the crisis was precipitated when a previously unheard-of militant organization, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, made a coordinated attack on 30 Myanmar police camps in August 2017.
• This major incident prompted the Myanmar government to begin its brutal ethnic cleansing campaign.
• Even now, says Mr. Lintner, the presence of seven lakh Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh close to the Chittagong Hill Tract, is making small ethnic Buddhist communities such as the Chakmas and Marmas uneasy: they could become marginalized if the refugees were to be resettled among them. These are tragedies that are indeed multi-layered but often only one is made visible.
• Language and survival
• A closer look at the UNESCO classification of endangered languages will illuminate further the Northeast’s reaction to the CAA.
• If a language is vulnerable because of the small size of the number of speakers, it becomes more so if the language is spoken only in certain domains — for instance at home, but not at schools and offices, etc. It becomes definitely endangered if parents speak the language and children only know the language but do not speak it as mother tongue. It becomes critically endangered if the grandparents’ generation speak the language, parents know it but do not use it, and children do not know it any more.
• Extinct languages are those languages which no longer have any speakers. In the UNESCO list, several languages in the Northeast have already become extinct; many more are critically endangered. As Ganesh N. Devy, cultural activist and the man behind the People’s Linguistic Survey of India campaign, has said in an interview, when a language dies, a world view dies with it.
• Under the circumstances, the response of the Northeast to the CAA, is not merely tribal xenophobia as many have portrayed it to be with patronizing condescension, but a desperate survival throe.
• Nari Rustomji, a bureaucrat known for his love of the region and who served there during India’s troubled decades of Partition, sensed this mood with empathy. In his book, Imperilled Frontiers: India’s North-eastern Borderlands, he observed that migration at a pace the host communities can absorb without detriment to their own social organisms is unlikely to cause problems. Indeed, the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Northeast show that migrants and their integration have always been a part of the historical reality of the region. Large scale and rapid influxes, therefore, are the problem.
• Provoked and compelled by the imperial ambition of Burmese Konbaung ruler, King Bagyidaw, whose army invaded and occupied Assam and Manipur starting 1819, the British intervened and took over Assam (which then was virtually the entire Northeast with the exception of Tripura and Manipur) and formally annexed it in 1826 after the signing of the Treaty of Yandabo to make it a part of its Bengal province. Manipur was left as a protectorate state.
• As Assam was at the time unfamiliar with British colonial administration and education, educated Hindu Bengalis from neighbouring Sylhet became the favoured agents to fill the colonial bureaucracy and carry forward the colonial project. It is from this position of power, that Hindu Bengalis dominated Assam’s political as well as cultural spheres, at one point even having Bengali declared the official language of Assam on the plea the latter is a dialect of the former. This was predicted to ultimately provoke a reaction from the Assamese middle class as it came of age. There was also the Muslim Bengali peasantry which migrated to Assam, but those who arrived before politics in India began polarizing on religious lines, found it much easier to assimilate and adopt the Assamese identity.

Bitter link with the past

• When Assam was separated from Bengal and made a separate chief commissioner’s province in 1874 and then in 1912 after Curzon’s 1905 partition of Bengal was withdrawn, a reluctant Sylhet which felt it was better off as part of Bengal, came to be affiliated with the new province.
• At the time of Partition, the equation changed and Sylhet’s chance of remaining with India was for it to be treated as a part of Assam. The then Assamese leadership refused this as Assam would then have become Bengali majority. Sylhet had to face a referendum separately and by a thin Muslim majority was awarded to Pakistan.
• The current migration issue is also a consequence of this bitter politics of antagonism of the past. Nobody is perfectly innocent or guilty in this sordid drama, and the way forward has to be on the path of truth and reconciliation that Nelson Mandela showed.

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