Know Disaster to NO Disaster

Last fortnight we all were seeing the massive disaster and its immediate impact in the Abode of God which is known as Uttarakhand.  The Ganges river basin got massive flood which converted this beautiful valley into a bad memories for thousands of people who came there as pilgrims for Char Dham Yatra as well as a big question of survival in front of millions of local people. So many questions are rising on the preparedness for Char Dham Yatra in this disaster prone zone and post disaster risk reduction and relief work.  So many agencies are involved into disaster management planning and post disaster mitigation and now every agency is trying to pass the ball into another court to get the clean chit on its responsibilities.

But this is not the question of various agencies and their responsibilities; this is the biggest question on our attitude and sensitivity. Attitude towards this highly sensitive eco-zone and sensitivity towards humanity and responsibilities.  Were we really prepared for this kind of disaster??? Did we ever visualize that kind of massive destruction and its impact??? Let’s start discussion on the preparedness first.

Himalayas is very new range of mountains which is in the developing phase. Every year we are seeing the flash flood and massive landslide in Kedar Valley. Last year we saw a big flash flood in Ukhimath and Fata in Kedar Valley but we dint understand the issue in real terms. We have law that no one can do the construction within the 100 meter both the side of river bed but the administration continuously promoting these things. We can see a range of hotels, dharmshalas, lodges along with river bed in every Dham . We invited the disaster for massive destruction somehow. Not only the encroachment on river bed, but we can see the encroachment in rivers also. In Kedarnath, we can see the encroachment in river Mandakini also where we hijacked the eastern river flow for hotels and lodges and did the massive construction there and when river followed its old flow route, we are calling it natural disaster. Is the nature responsible for this or we??? This is creating the big debate that “is this natural disaster or manmade disaster??”

Char Dham Yatra which one of the famous Yatra in India and the biggest annual event of Uttarakhand in which millions of pilgrims participate from all over the country with few international pilgrims. This Yatra generally starts from the foot step of Himalayas that is Rishikesh.  There is no registration system for these pilgrims, no planning of private vehicle parking in hilly region, no track record of the pilgrims in hills. Have we ever thought on this issue? So many people are coming in Himalayan region and the majority of the people are not adoptable for this kind of climate but there is no information of these people and no communication from Government side for dos and don’ts.  They are coming into their own private vehicle, are they capable enough to drive in hills??? Are there enough parking spaces for such vehicle in Gauri Kund (the base camp of Kedarnath), Gangotri, Janki Chatti (base cam of Yamunotri) and Badrinath??? When we raise these questions, we don’t find the answers. These questions would help us to handle the post disaster quick relief. After the flood, the relatives of the pilgrims were not getting the information for their family members which created the panic among the society and resulted in lack of confidence for the administration which should not be there.   

Now we will talk the administration role in during disaster and post disaster events. 13^th June was the date when we got the huge rainfall in Uttarakhand. We could have measured the rain fall from that time and kept our eye open on each and every movement of weather. Did we notice the Chorabari Glacier and Gandhi Sarovar for their capacity??? Could we use the information from NASA and ISRO??? Did we have proper co-ordination with technical wing of weather forcasting department??? If we were getting continuous rainfall since 13^th June, should we not issue the advisory to the pilgrims at Kedarnath for early evacuation on 14^th or 15^th June? Should we not stop the Yatra at Rishikesh??? Should be not use the technology for the mass communication to reach out the local public??? This is raising the question on attitude and sensitivity of administration.

We got the information that people are missing from 15^th June onwards from Ram-Bada and Gauri-Kund which indicates that people got the negative impact from 15^th onwards. Where was the local administration at that time??? After the heavy rainfall should they not coordinate with other districts for the information of flood so that other lower areas as Srinagar, Dev-Prayag etc could have been safe after the high alert in upper part??? 

In totality we can analyse the problem into 3 major parts- 1. We could not visualize the problem ever. 2. We were not ready for Char Dham Yatra and its related preparedness. 3. We had a big lack of coordination and communication in post disaster event. 

Highlights of the Union Budget 2013-14

Highlights of the Union Budget 2013-14

• Finance Minister makes three promises: to women, youth and the poor. 
• Nirbhaya Fund to empower women and to keep them safe and secure. 
• Proposal to set up India’s first Women’s Bank as a public sector bank. 
• Rs. 1,000 crore for skill development of ten lakh youth to enhance their employability and productivity. 
• Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Scheme to be rolled out throughout the country during the term of UPA Government. 
• Fiscal Deficit for 2013-14 is pegged at 4.8 percent of GDP. The Revenue Deficit will be 3.3 percent for the same period. 
• Plan Expenditure placed at Rs. 5, 55,322 crore. It is 33.3 percent of the total expenditure while Non Plan Expenditure is estimated at Rs. 11, 09,975 crore. The plan expenditure in 2013-14 will be 29.4 percent more than the RE of the current year i.e. 2012-13. 
• Substantial rise in allocation to the social sector. Allocation for Rural Development Ministry raised by 46 percent to Rs. 80,194 crore. 
• The target for farm credit for 2013-14 has been set at Rs. 7, 00,000 crore against Rs. 5, 75,000 crore during the current year. 
• Rs. 10,000 crore earmarked for National Food Security towards the incremental cost. 
• Education gets Rs. 65,867 crore, an increase of 17 percent over RE for 2012-13. 
• ICDS gets Rs. 17,700 crore. This is 11.7 percent more than the current year. 
• Drinking water and sanitation will receive Rs. 15,260 crore. Rs. 1,400 crore is being provided for setting up water purification plants to cover arsenic and fluoride affected rural areas. 
• Health and Family Welfare Ministry has been allotted Rs. 37,330 crore. National Health Mission will get Rs. 21,239 crore which represents 24.3 percent over the RE. 
• The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) will receive Rs. 14,873 crore as against RE of Rs. 7,383 crore in the current year. 
• Defence has been allocated Rs. 2, 03,672 crore. 
• Rs. 3,511 crore has been earmarked to Minority Affairs Ministry, 60 percent higher than RE for 2012-13. 
• The Government will encourage Infrastructure Debt Fund (IDF) and allow some institutions to raise tax free bonds upto Rs. 50,000 crore which is 100 percent more than the current year. 
• India Infrastructure Finance Corporation (IIFC), in partnership with ADB will help infrastructure companies to access bond market to tap long term funds. 
• Income limit under Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme (RGESS) will be raised from Rs. 10 lakh to Rs. 12 lakh. 
• First home loan from a bank or housing finance corporation upto Rs. 25 lakh entitled to additional deduction of interest upto Rs. 1 lakh. 
• Proposal to launch Inflation Indexed Bonds or Inflation Indexed National Security Certificates to protect savings from inflation. 
• On oil and gas exploration policy, the Budget proposes to move from the present profit sharing mechanism to revenue sharing. Natural gas pricing policy will be reviewed. 
• On coal, the Budget proposes adoption of a policy of pooled pricing. 
• Benefits or preferences enjoyed by MSME to continue upto three years after they grow out of this category. 
• Refinancing capacity of SIDBI raised to Rs. 10,000 crore. 
• Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS) for textile to continue in 12th Plan with an investment target of Rs. 1, 51,000 crore. 
• Rs. 14,000 crore will be provided to public sector banks for capital infusion in 2013-14. 
• A grant of Rs. 100 crore each has been made to 4 institutions of excellence including Aligarh Muslim University, Banaras Hindu University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati and Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). 
• New taxes to yield Rs. 18,000 crore. 
• A surcharge of 10 percent on persons (other than companies) whose taxable income exceeds Rs.1 crore has been levied. 
• Tobacco products, SUVs and Mobile Phones to cost more. 
• Relief of Rs. 2000 for the tax payers in the first bracket of 2 to 5 lakhs. 
• Voluntary Compliance Encouragement Scheme’ launched for recovering service tax dues. 
• Rs. 9,000 crore earmarked as the first installment of balance of CST compensations to different States/UTs. 

Economic Survey 2012-13

Promises growth, employment and inclusion

The Economic Survey is promising in terms of growth prospects as the downturn seems to be more or less over and the economy is looking up. The economic growth prospects, widening role of private investments, strategies to fight inflation and focus on creating job opportunities, all are inspiring. The Indian economy is likely to grow between 6.1% - 6.7% in 2013-14 driven by its strong fundamentals. However, the survey underlines that the challenge for India is to make the key drivers and enablers of growth-be it infrastructure, the transportation sector, housing, or sustainable agriculture growth. The way out lies in shifting national spending from consumption to investment, increasing opportunities for savers to boost investment, job creation and removing structural bottlenecks to growth.

While India's recent slowdown is partly rooted in external causes, domestic causes are also important. Economic survey reveals that the Indian economy remained resilient to the global financial crisis in 2008-09 and achieved a growth rate of 8.6% and 9.3% respectively in 2009-10 and 2010-11. The strong post-financial-crisis stimulus led to stronger growth in 2009-10 and 2010-11. However, due to a combination of both external and domestic factors, the economy decelerated growing at 6.2% and an estimated 5% in 2011-12 and 2012-13 respectively. According to the Economic Survey 2012-13, the global economy is also likely to recover in 2013 and various government measures will help in improving the Indian economy’s outlook for 2013-14. The services sector has shown more resilience to worsening external conditions than agriculture and industry.

These are difficult times, but India has navigated such times before, and with good policies it will come through stronger. Slowdown is a wake-up call for increasing the pace of actions and reforms. The way out lies in shifting national spending from consumption to investment, removing the bottlenecks to investment, growth, and job creation, in part through structural reforms, combating inflation both through monetary and supply side measures, reducing the costs for borrowers of raising finances and increasing the opportunities for savers to get strong real investment returns—Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan, CEA, MoF

It is inspiring to note that owing to good production in food grains in recent years and remunerative MSPs, even states which were not traditionally procuring sufficient foodgrains like Bihar, MP, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal have all shown significant increase. The survey highlights the need for stable and consistent policies and rapid investment in infrastructure, related to food management, wholesale processing, storage, packaging and distribution/ retailing. FDI in retail allowed by the government can pave the way for investment in new technology and marketing of agricultural produce in India. Lower interest rates could act as a catalyst to boost business sentiments inducing investment in various critical sectors of the economy, going forward. At this juncture, the focus of the government should be to tackle inflation by reducing the fiscal impetus to demand, she added

The Chamber hails the Economic Survey which holds promises for India to capitalize on opportunities arising out of the “demographic dividend”. India has enormous potential to create jobs in not only the construction segment but also manufacturing and services sector which is critical to employment generation and inclusive growth.

Another consequence of the slowdown has been lower-than-targeted tax and non-tax revenues. With the subsidies bill, particularly that of petroleum products, increasing, the danger that fiscal targets would be breached substantially became very real in the current year. The government should address governance issues like sealing leakages in public welfare programmes which often fail to reach the targeted beneficiaries. Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) with the help of the Unique Identification Number (Aadhaar) can help plug some of these leakages. GST, if approved, would replace a number of state and central taxes, make India a national integrated market and bring more producers into tax net. By improving efficiency as well as revenues, it can substantially help the government finances. 

The strong post-financial-crisis fiscal and monetary stimulus in India led to spectacular growth in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. But with corporate and infrastructural investment not keeping pace, and food production constrained, the boost to consumption eventually led to higher inflation. And falling savings, partly as a result of government spending and partly as a result of high inflation, have led to a widening CAD. With slowdown in external demand and slag in net exports, India’s balance of payments is still under stress on the back of fluctuating foreign exchange reserves and extremely volatile rupee. This is a major cause of concern that needs to be addressed.

e2e: Empowerment through Enterprise

India has never ever followed the hardcore footsteps of capitalism rather stuck to the means of socialism. This is the land where Lord Buddha’s Middle Path has guided the mankind to sustainable local medium of livelihood in our society as well as connected to religion and age-old tradition. Similarly our problems and needs are very local too, where we do not look for a solution outside nation, but for certain that we might use their technology and resources finding special innovation for local solutions. 

The entrepreneurs, traders have lived in India since the Harappan civilization in 2500 BC. Down the decades we always have used agriculture for commercial purposes and adopted self-sustained society, and we have been known for as the great merchants in the whole world; however our greatest resource, our youth in the threshold of 21st century are in search of better livelihood and struggling for better means. 

Now it is the high time to peep into our roots again, as 65% of the Indian population is still residing in the villages. We need to rethink for the most suitable medium of livelihood for our youth. When we talk about job opportunities, do we really concern for the medium that how would these jobs be created in the future? 

I remember the famous character named Govardhan of great Hindi novel ‘Godan’ written by Munshi Premchand, who proceeds to city in search of his livelihood and got frustrated for the lack of job opportunities there. We find number of youth migrating to big cities and metros in search of jobs and they never find a satisfactory means of livelihood. It is also a major point to ponder whether money or the wealth is the only factor for satisfaction or is it the most basic need of people? 

In a research with Anil Jaggi, Rusen Kumar, Manoj Sharma and Deepak Kakkar, a group of youth under the banner of Yuva Prerna, an NGO, found that empowerment is most significant factor in the society; and it can be achieved through suitable means of livelihood. Thus the Yuva Prerna is focusing on the concept of ‘e2e: Empowerment through Enterprise’. There is an acute need to connect our youth with local resources with proper innovations and supports in terms of knowledge and technology. As per the concept developed by Yuva Prerna, there are exist three major and wide gap in our society among youth, i.e. lack of exposure or motivation, lack of support and lack of capabilities to execute.

Lack of exposure or motivation: Youngsters, residing in farthest rural remote areas, small towns or in semi-urban areas are often not exposed to the world and its opportunities; and because of being cynic towards our society they inculcate a pessimistic mentality and think that they would not be in a position to do so. This is just because of the lack of awareness, exposure and motivation. If the youth are provided with such environment where they can see execution of work by other youths, then certainly they would be motivated to do something similarly or start-up with their own innovative ideas. They need such exposure through the medium of various exposure visits, workshops and means of experiential learning. 

Lack of support: When youth are motivated and exposed to entrepreneurship environment, they also need mentoring support to channelize their energy in the required direction. They need guidance to initiate and capitalize on an idea for themselves, hence there arises a question that how to move forward to execute those ideas? It can be a big challenge thus they need experienced people from industry, academia, and government bodies to execute their ideas in the right directions. 

Lack of capabilities to execute: After obtaining proper exposure and guidance, the youths also require capabilities to execute their plans in terms of financial planning, where various required formalities, team building, employee’s retention, production planning and market linkages are taken into account. 

Yuva Prerna is ready to work on these three basic gaps through its 3 tier intervention in the society. These are Yuva Prerna Yatra, Prerna Tantra and Udhyamshala. 

The Yuva Prerna Yatra, will be a journey for social change selecting the highly motivated youth from urban and rural India, to an eye opening, awakening, motivating and inspirational regional spectrum. 

During this journey, participants will have face to face interactions with exceptional “Champions of Change”, “The Unsung Heroes”, who not only dared to dream but have translated their dreams into real enterprises by leveraging the local resources and bringing prosperity in the region. This will inspire the visiting team members to correlate these activities for their own area and will spur them on to create such enterprises on their own. 

The Prerna Tantra will be a network of mentors consisting of highly competent experts from industry, academia, management, financial institutions, who will provide supports to these youth to translate their dreams in to tangible realities. On the conclusion of the above said Yatra, the best business ideas in the field of agriculture, energy, tourism, skill development, education and Healthcare would be selected for further mentoring, support and promotion under Yuva Prerna Tantra. 

Similarly, the Udhyamshala would be a kind of master resource center for social entrepreneurship development, providing need based capacity building, trainings and planning exercises to these budding entrepreneurs by a team of experts and consultants. It will also help them with various researches, forward-backward linkages, strategy formulation, accounting, technology adaptation etc. 

Through this process young people would be able to start enterprises in their area with the innovative ideas, which also help them to exploit the local resources in better manner and have a good connection with them too. When these resources will connect with young people, the area will emerge as good means of livelihood and it would also be helpful in reducing the migration. 

People would now think for more sustainable business ideas and will help themselves to reach the stage of age old empowerment of India. This empowerment can only be possible through enterprises building process, and thus though the concept of e2e: Empowerment  through Enterprise 

2027 is CALLING

India, being a developing country, could certainly be traced as one of the fastest growing economies of the world. It has remained vaguely unaffected from the global incidents and economic drench that drew the countries of the world during 2008 slowdown/ global meltdown. Even in this period of economic deceleration, India has shown its strength in the form of big population, ever growing market and continued purchasing powers. Now, the whole world is looking forward to India as their favourite destination region for investments. And most certain that this global approach would facilitate to the socio-economic enhancement of youths in India, as 65% of the population here is below the age of 35 years.

Various surveys have depicted that India would become the YOUTH CAPITAL of the world by the year 2027. In 2027, majority of Indian population will be young in the world and young means more energetic and more enthusiasm for work. Surveys have also portrayed that India would enjoy the ‘demographic dividend’ which is a direct result from its young populace in India’s demography.

But there also arises a few questions with this notion of youth capital: Are we ready for the young people? Are we prepared to give them the proper purpose/mean/job for life? How we will convert this energy into the dividend?

India is having unutilized abundant resources in rural areas and country’s majority of the population resides in rural area. So to say, that there is a huge difference in Rural and Urban India. But there also is a wide gap between them. The this particular link between the two, is missing. There is a famous quote in the hilly areas of Uttarakhand that- Pahaad ki Jawaani aur Pahaad ka Paani kabhi uske kaam nahi aata (Youth of the hills and water of the hills never works for Hills). We need to connect our youth (Jawaani)with the resources (Paani) to excel and extort this demographic dividend. If we are not able to connect these two great resources, we will never become capable of providing the genuine purpose to our young generation, which inherit the potential for creating the path for the ‘demographic responsibility’ rather than ‘demographic dividend’.

If demographic responsibility is  achieved, it may amplify various other problems in the country which may be in the form of naxalism, increased crime rates, expansion of slums, unemployment, illiteracy, malnutrition and so on.

There are other questions that may concern to the country as: Here how we will connect these resources to our youth? How will we create the means/purpose for our youth? Will our youth be ready for these purposes? We need to think for such questions and make efforts to identify the solutions to these concerns as early as possible, as 2027 is calling.