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Human Development for Development of India

- Choose between human development and economic growth, what would you choose?
- A wrong choice can alter the developmental future of the nation.
- Many nations have argued that it is necessary to raise economic resources through growth in order to fund human development.
- Those that have done this have become victims of low growth.
- In a malicious self-sustaining cycle, the unskilled labour has pushed them further into a hapless downward spiral.
- By examining the priorities that India has, we can predict the future.
- Human development allows us to increase the choices we have in our hands.
- Budget 2017-18 reveals the trend.
- The government had allocated Rs 79,686 crore for education.
- As a percentage of the total budget, it doesn’t look particularly healthy. In 1999, India spent 4.4% of GDP on education.
- This has slowly shrunk to between 3.5 and 4.0% across the last decade. Last year, the figure was 3.7%.

Compare this to other countries such as Brazil which have improved spends from 3.9% in 2005 to 5.3% in 2013, China that has gone from 2.8% in 2005 to 4.3% in 2013.
It is evident that India is falling behind other nations. It may not have the skilled workforce required to fuel economic growth.
There is a need to address the issues around skilling with great urgency.
One of them is the National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015, a framework for skilling India at scale and with speed without sacrificing standards and ensuring the initiative remains a sustainable endeavour.
The policy is linked to demand centres, is aligned with existing educational infrastructure, focussed on building qualified trainers, and developing innovations in the skill development space.
The real need is to bring the service sector (financial services, transportation, hospitality, tourism, education, facilities management, real estate etc) under the lens of human development.
Services have become the growth propellant of the nation, drawing foreign investments, contributing to exports and providing employment on a significant scale.
The sector is responsible for 55.65% of India’s Gross Value Added and employed 28.6% of the population.
Net service exports stood at $18.7 billion in Q1 2018-19.
Despite the growth in services, here is the paradox: Employers can’t fill in positions due to the lack of the right skills.
The number of young people entering the labour market is on the increase; 60% of India’s population is already in the working age group.
According to the National Higher Education Commission, the average age of the population by 2020 will be 29 years (against 40 for the US, 46 for Europe and 47 for Japan).
But industries are unable to find appropriately skilled manpower.
Something is going wrong, otherwise 48% of Indian employers would not be worried that there is a talent shortage.
That is why industry leaders are exploring new models to find and employ talent.
The developments suggest that India must turn around its human development story.
There is a desperate need for a pool of skilled talent to take advantage of the services opportunity.
In addition, India can export its skilled workforce to meet the needs in other parts of the world that are also headed for a skills deficit.

FBI help proved crucial in tracing 26/11 attackers’ boat to Pak.

FBI helped India connect Al Fauz, the small boat used by the terrorists in the 26/11 Mumbai attack, to Pakistan.

An intelligence official, since retired, who supervised the investigations in 2008-09, told The Hindu that the FBI sent one of its agents to the headquarters of Yamaha Motor in Japan to seek help in tracing the person who purchased the engine.
“The Yamaha official in Japan told the FBI that it was possible to trace the number even if it had been erased or damaged. They were told about a cavity at the bottom of an encase containing the cylinders, which when opened would have the unique number engraved on the side. The conspirators didn’t know about this number. The FBI shared this information with us and our engineers were able to retrieve the number; the engine was then traced to a Karachi shop,” said the official.

30 killed in Mandya accident

As many as 30 persons were killed when a private bus they were travelling in plunged into the Visvesvaraya Canal, near Pandavapura in Karnataka’s district, on Saturday.
Among the dead were eight men, 13 women and nine children, the police said.
The bus accident occurred at 12.20 p.m. between Kanaganamaradi and Kurahatti Gate.
The passengers were trapped in the bus which fell on its left, making the doors inaccessible, the police said. However, Sagar, 11, and Girish, 23, managed to escape through the windows. The driver Shivanna is said to have jumped out.
Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy rushed to the spot with Ministers C.S. Puttaraju and D.C. Thammanna.

Odisha now has a lexicon for rare tribal languages

In what is seen as a significant step to keep vanishing tribal languages in circulation, the Odisha government has come out with lexicons of 21 such languages.
The bilingual tribal dictionaries will be used in multilingual education (MLE) initiated by the State government at the elementary level in tribaldominated districts.
Odisha has a unique place on the tribal map of India for having the maximum number of Scheduled Tribe communities.
The State is home to 62 different tribal communities, including 13 particularly vulnerable tribal groups. • These tribes speak 21 languages and 74 dialects. Of the 21 tribal languages, seven have their own scripts. However, Odia is used as the medium of communication in the dictionaries.

Water flow in Ganga ‘woefully inadequate’

Former Union Water Resources Secretary Shashi Shekhar has said that “minimum flow” in the Ganga notified by the government on October 9 is “woefully inadequate.”
While the government has promised to reduce pollution in the Ganga by 70% by March 2019, environmentalists say that this relies on setting up sewage plants rather than ensuring that the natural flow of the river isn’t blocked.
The blocks in the river hobble its propensity to clean itself.
Among the sharpest critics of the government’s approach — led by the National Mission for Clean Ganga — was the late G.D. Agrawal, a seer and formerly a scientist, who’d undertaken a fast since June. His key demands were to stop all under-construction dams in the upper reaches of the Ganga, and modify the design of existing ones to ensure that flow in the lower reaches was at least 50% of the monthly average flow. He died on October 11.
The Centre is in talks with experts from Germany, Laos, Austria and Egypt, among others, to evolve a Ganga River Basin Management Plan.

A deadly disease, but leprosy colonies still face stigma, shortage of funds

Like in most of the 800-odd leprosy colonies scattered across the country, most patients are in their 40s or even older, diagnosed at a time when they were few effective cures for the disease.
While the disease itself may be dying out in the colonies, a lingering, centuries-long stigma still leads to discrimination of the sort that Ms. Nargame has faced.
In fact, experts say that the World Health Organisation’s declaration of the elimination of leprosy as a publichealth concern in India in 2005 may have reduced attention and funds, making life more difficult for about 2,00, 000 people living in the colonies, the vast majority of whom do not have the disease.
Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is a bacterial disease which affects the skin and nerves which can lead to physical deformity and disability if left untreated.
Despite a centuries-long stigma, it is not hereditary, it is completely curable, and is only mildly infectious – more than 85% of cases are non-infectious and over 95% of the population has a natural immunity to the disease.

High intestinal parasite levels in bonnet macaques

Bonnet macaques living near people have more intestinal parasites than those living in forests, shows a study recently published in PLOS ONE.
So monkeying around by relocating such commensal macaques could spread parasites to wild macaques and other forest species, suggest scientists.
Just like big cats or jumbos, monkeys too are sometimes relocated to forests from human-dominated areas. Yet does this measure — aimed at reducing human–wildlife conflict — hold dangers?
Almost all macaque groups had at least one endoparasite in them.
They found that the amount of food that an urban macaque group availed from human-dominated areas determined the number of endoparasite taxa and levels of endoparasites in them.
Macaque groups that accessed such food from dumps and other areas had more species of endoparasites.
Immature macaques had the highest levels of endoparasites.
Endoparasite levels across seasons revealed that the parasites persisted in the monkeys every month. The species richness of endoparasites was highest in summer.