RAJDEEP  SARDESAI

Newsman: Tracking India in the Modi Era by Rajdeep Sardesai ; Published by Rupa ; Pages  234 ; Price Rs.500/-

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Rajdeep Sardesai is an award-winning journalist and consulting editor with India Today television. He has excellent books to his credit---- 2014: The Election that Changed India and Democracy’s XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story.

Sardesai has won the prestigious Padma Shri for Journalism in 2008, the International Broadcasters Award for coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for 2007. He has also won the Asian Television Awards 2014 for Best News Presenter in Asia for the coverage of the 2014 general elections.

  The book under review is a  collection of essays  that portrays  the Modi years ‘objectively’. One cannot be indifferent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi .You either love him or you hate him.

 Rajdeep struggles  to walk the tightrope of “objectivity” and “autonomy. He seeks to present both sides of the story of Modi’s first four years as Prime Minister.

In his earlier book, the author candidly remarked: “My coverage of the (2002) riots (in Gujarat) ruptured my relationship with Modi.”

 Rajdeep  has appended a short note after the postscript in each essay. These notes seek to update and contextualise what Sardesai had felt at different points in time over the last four-and-a-half years. The essays are quite  reflective and do stand the test of time.

Two years ago, in October 2016, he wrote what has become more relevant today: “In the cacophony of 24x7 media, there has been a conscious strategy on the part of the government to drown out alternative voices, dub them as ‘Pakistani-ISI’ agents, or virtually force news organizations to engage in self-censorship in the guise of a ‘nation first’ storyline.”

 He is at his critical best when he holds forth on his own journalistic fraternity and examines the current state of the electronic media. In an article titled ‘Divided media cannot provide justice to Gauri Lankesh’, he writes perceptively: “Sadly, the media is being driven by an ominous ‘them’ versus ‘us’ binary pushed by a morally bankrupt political class: It’s a systematic campaign of bilious hate that reflects in a growing intolerance of contrarian opinion and a constant manufacturing of ‘enemies’ who must be targeted, if not in a TV studio, then on the social media, and finally, on the street. In this bitterly polarized atmosphere, the space for an independent interrogation of facts is shrinking rapidly.”

The articles in the book have been segregated on the basis of five broad categories accounting the rise of Narendra Modi, analysis of Indian political alliances and opposition strategies, interpretation of being anti-nationals or nationals, challenges in making of New India and state of media in our democracy. The author has extensively written his opinion on the challenges which lay ahead in making of New India, Rahul Gandhi’s less productive role in active politics, strong views on anti-nationalism and questioning adequacy of reforms implemented.

 Rajdeep covers several subjects  — from Jawaharlal Nehru to Babasaheb Ambedkar, the unrest in Kashmir to the floods in Tamil Nadu, cricket tournaments to water shortages, the “marketing” of “surgical strikes”, Lalit Modi, the Vyapam scandal in Madhya Pradesh and the “revolt” by senior judges in the Supreme Court.

Rajdeep Sardesai’s incisive analysis of contemporary events decodes the key questions of our times. From the day he was sworn in as prime minister in May 2014, Mr. Modi has dominated the news cycle, attracting admirers and critics in equal measure.

The articles cover some major decisions, their implications and the events that have affected India and every Indian. The language is lucid and simple. With the perspective of a journalist who has faced a lot for speaking against the government at times – Rajdeep, in very subtle ways has expressed his concerns.

  “Modi has never had an open press conference till date. He had one after the 2002 Gujarat riots, but he avoided any open, and free press conferences while he was the Chief Minister. Institutionally, there is a lack of access to information from our leaders, and we don’t seem to complain about it,” he has written.

Comparing Modi to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, he said that Modi is tech savvy and he communicates with the country through social media, while the latter showed much less regard for the abilities of technology but gave full freedom to the press during his term.

The rise of Narendra Modi has heralded one of the most exciting and contentious periods in Indian politics. Modi is a faster communicator with an instinct for artful messaging.The first swearing-in ceremony was well crafted and not held in the conventional Durbar Hall but in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan.From the day he was sworn in as prime minister in May 2014, Mr Modi has dominated the news cycle, attracting admirers and critics in equal measure. Rahul Gandhi and the Opposition too have slowly begun to find their voice even as the country is conflicted between a billion aspirations and rising mutinies.

The book offers sharp pen portraits of several politicians. One sample will suffice.

“Stepping into the political vacuum has been an Owaisi-like figure, someone with new claims to be a flag-bearer of his community’s identity in politics. With his oratorical skills—he is a Bar-at-law from London—Owaisi is seen to represent muslim identity with his aspirations being firmly rooted in religious beliefs. Dressed in a long sherwani  and an Islamic cap and with a clipped beard,Owaisi seeks to conform to the stereotype trapped by orthodoxy and the image of a fervent Islamist”

The book is compulsory reading for all students of Indian politics

P.P.Ramachandran.

27/10/2019.

ABHIJIT  BANERJEE

Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo ; Published by  Random House ; Pages 303 ; Price Rs.399/-

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Abhijit Banerjee, wife and fellow economist Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer were awarded last week the Nobel Prize in Economics for their efforts to alleviate global poverty. 

Banerjee is an MIT professor and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He is the author of five books and the co-editor of two. His most well-known work is the book under review “Poor Economics”, co-written with Duflo.

 The book bagged the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.The two economists teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Banerjee has written and edited numerous works with other notables  including Raghuram Rajan, and Gita Gopinath.

"Poor Economics" postulates an area that is found between purely market-based solutions to global poverty and "grand development plans." It avoids generalizations and formulaic thinking.

 The couple attempt to comprehend the thinking of the poor and how they arrive at conclusions on subjects like education, healthcare, savings, entrepreneurship, and other important issues. They recommend methods of observation, resorting to rigorous randomized controlled testing on five continents, and above all lending a ear to what the poor have to say. We encounter astonishing stands but based on a solid base of  commonsense,when viewed in the right perspective.

The authors set forth their moral purpose succinctly:       "To the extent that we know how to remedy poverty, there is no reason to tolerate the waste of lives and talent that poverty brings with it."

What sets them apart is the way they look at poverty. The authors write that the ‘urge to reduce the poor to a set of clichés has been with us for as long as there has been poverty: The poor appear, in social theory as much as in literature, by turns lazy or enterprising, noble or thievish, angry or passive, helpless or self-sufficient. It is no surprise that the policy stances that correspond to these views of the poor also tend to be captured in simple formulas: “Free markets for the poor,” “Make human rights substantial,” “Deal with conflict first,” “Give more money to the poorest,” “Foreign aid kills development,” and the like.

 To go beyond such ordinariness, Banerjee and Duflo engaged directly in field work among the poor in order to understand how they live, the choices they make and why they made them and how policies could be tweaked in little ways that made a difference.Instead of grand theories, their methods were local field work and experiments. Their preferred tool was Randomized Control Trials, a method modelled on clinical trials in medicine. In field experiments, people are randomly assigned to control groups and treatment groups. For example, to study the impact of a particular policy intervention the experiment would look at its impact on a group that has been exposed to the policy change, against another that hasn’t been so exposed.

An  important part of their work has been ensuring that the agency of the “beneficiaries” — usually, in developing countries like India, poorer individuals — is put at the centre of any policy design. This is a crucial way in which experimental results are often better than large scale data-based inference. The latter is run through with assumptions about individual and group behaviour that may be how economists assume the poor act, not how they actually do. For example, Duflo and Banerjee often point out that even income-constrained people who may not appear to be getting enough to eat will, if they are given more money, spend it on televisions or mobile phones rather than better-quality or more food. This is, they argue, not in fact that surprising: it merely shows that the desire for an escape from boredom is as much of a motivator as hunger. For well-off economists who have never truly been either bored or hungry, figuring out how people who are regularly both may be difficult in the abstract; but an RCT examining how extra money is spent helps solve that conundrum.

The Nobel Laureate in Economics Dr.Robert Solow wrote :

"Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo are allergic to grand generalizations about the secret of economic development. Instead they appeal to many local observations and experiments to explore how poor people in poor countries actually cope with their poverty: what they know, what they seem (or don't seem) to want, what they expect of themselves and others, and how they make the choices that they can make. Apparently there are plenty of small but meaningful victories to be won, some through private and some through public action, that together could add up to a large gains for the world's poor, and might even start a ball rolling. I was fascinated and convinced.”

The Nobel Committee highlighted how their “experiment-based approach has transformed development economics” over the past decades. They mentioned specifically how, as a result of one such study, “more than 5 million Indian children have benefited from programmes of remedial tutoring in schools”.

Duflo, born in 1972, is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences. 

It is impossible to disagree with another Nobel Laureate  Dr.Amartya Sen when he declared," A  marvellously insightful book by two outstanding researchers on the real nature of poverty"

PPR

20/10/2019.

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Tit--Bits.

It is a matter of joy that the two authors have given lectures in RBI's College of Agricultural Banking in Pune.

An affectionate memoir has been penned and published by Dr.G.Sreekumar,who resigned as  R D  of Jaipur Office of RBI.

  https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/view-a-recollection-of-abhijit-banerjees-college-roommate/articleshow/71585909.cms

MELINDA  GATES

The Moment  Of Lift by Melinda Gates ;  Published by Bluebird Books; Pages 273 ; Price Rs.599/-   

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All of us are aware that the richest and most benevolent couple in the world today is Bill Gates and Melinda Gates.Their Foundation has been munificent in helping the world's poor and downtrodden.

The book under review is the very first book from  Melinda Gates and it is a stirring call to action for women's empowerment.

Melinda Gates is co-chairperson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and her aim has been to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. She declares loud and clear “ If you want to lift a society up, invest in women.”

The lift-off analogy to define earthshaking change for the better comes from Melinda’s childhood. She was one of four children of a stay-at-home mom and an aerospace engineer dad who worked on the Apollo programme and grew up watching more than one lift-off, when the engines ignite, the earth shakes and the rocket takes off. The moment of lift is when the forces pushing us up overpower the forces pulling us down and that’s when we are free to fly. After getting her master’s degree, Melinda turned down a job offer from IMB, where she had worked for several summers, to take a job at a “smallish company called Microsoft”. She spent nine years there and eventually became the general manager of information products. “Today I work in philanthropy, spending most of my time searching for ways to improve people’s lives… and often worrying about people I will fail if I don’t get it right. I’m also the wife of Bill Gates. We got married on New Year’s Day in 1994. We have three children,” .

Melinda had the choice of having a career, of being a stay-at-home mom, of later being a mix of the two, and then getting back to a career because she had the opportunity to choose what she wanted to study, whom to marry, when and how many children to have, and when to quit her job because, as she puts it modestly, “We were in the fortunate position of not needing my income.”

Melinda traces her awakening to the link between women's empowerment and the health of societies. She shows some of the tremendous opportunities that exist right now to “turbo-charge" change. And she provides simple and effective ways through which each one of us can make a difference.

Convinced that all women should be free to decide whether and when to have children, Gates took her first step onto the global stage to make a stand for family planning. That step launched her into further efforts: to ensure women everywhere have access to every kind of job; to encourage men around the globe to share equally in the burdens of household work; to advocate for paid family leave for everyone; to eliminate gender bias in all its forms.

Throughout, Gates introduces us to her heroes in the movement towards equality, offers startling data, shares moving conversations she's had with women from all over the world—and shows how we can become part of it.

A personal statement of passionate conviction, this book tells of Gates' journey from a partner working behind the scenes to one of the world's foremost advocates for women, driven by the belief that no one should be excluded, all lives have equal value, and gender equity is the lever that lifts everything.

Melinda Gates is working harder than ever to make the world more equitable by empowering women and providing them with opportunities and services to end poverty.

Melinda Gates has played a big role in India. Her second visit to India was to Sonagachi in Kolkata .She ensconced herself on a mat on the terrace of a kuchcha home of a sex worker she met in Kolkata’s biggest red light area. She wanted to find out how her Foundation’s US$338 million HIV-prevention project called Avahan was empowering women, mostly female sex workers, to say no to unprotected sex and gender violence.

The lessons from her later trips to India are a part of Melinda’s growth from a co-chair working behind the scenes to becoming one of the world’s biggest champions of women’s rights.

Among the heroines is Ruchi, then 20, from Shivgarh in Uttar Pradesh, an upper-caste girl who defied community ridicule to save a low-caste newborn from dying of hypothermia by nestling him against her breasts after his family refused to do so fearing he was possessed by evil spirits.

There are several heart-wrenching accounts too, like Champa’s helplessness on being refused permission to get her two-year-old daughter Rani treated for acute malnutrition at the government’s free centre because she was needed at home to cook for her husband’s family. Rani was saved because the village health-workers got her treated while her mother stayed home to cook.

Melinda makes you twinge in pain when she writes “Beyond our conversations, what stuck me most about Gita and the other women I met was how much they wanted to touch and be touched. Nobody in the community touched a sex worker except to have sex with her. No matter what caste they are from, they are untouchable. For them, touching is acceptance.... a few of the women started singing the civil rights anthem ‘We shall overcome’ in Bengali-accented English, and I started to cry... For me, the contrast between their determination and their dire circumstances was both inspiring and heartbreaking.”

The book is full of honest personal accounts of what made her choose the road less travelled, including the tough decision to become a public advocate for family planning, a political and religious time bomb in many parts of the world.

Melinda Gates writes that her first major step as a public advocate was with their family planning initiatives. Through their work with vaccinations, they’d learned that when women were in charge of their reproductive health it allowed them to space pregnancies and control the number of children they had, resulting in healthier children and families. “It took us years to learn that contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created,”

The contraceptive battle marked “just the beginning” in her work for women. She realized that gender equity — getting girls to school, letting women run their own businesses — would be essential to lifting women up.

Of course, Melinda faced severe criticism from the Catholic Church for her espousing Contraceptives. They have called her “..former Catholic Melinda Gates” and “...so-called Catholic Melinda Gates.” Melinda declares,     “I feeI am following the higher teaching of the Church.”

Travelling and talking with women about family planning and contraceptives laid bare many more of the worst atrocities women face worldwide: Female genital cutting, child marriage, rape, domestic violence, unpaid labor, sex work. Gates’ stories of meeting these women are heartbreaking but necessary reading. Extreme poverty and isolation is devastating to women and makes it almost impossible for them to provide for and protect their children. As a result, the cycle of abuse and poverty continues.

She also openly acknowledges the head starts, good luck and privilege that has helped both her and Bill succeed. There is an authenticity to both Melinda and Bill’s need to learn more about the “why’s” and their wish for positive, peaceful change that resonates in every chapter.

We learn a lot about the education, work history and ethos of Melinda Gates whose voice is unique voice in the worldwide struggle for female empowerment. 

This book is for anyone struggling to find a place in the world and the strength to help others and transform oneself.

P.P.Ramachandran.

13/10/2019.

SURJIT BHALLA

Citizen Raj: Indian Elections 1952-2019 by Surjit S .Bhalla; Published by Westland; Pages 222 ; Price Rs 499/-

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Dr.Surjit Bhalla has been appointed as India’s Executive Director on the Board of the IMF-- a post held by ex- RBI Deputy Governor Dr.Subhir Gokarn. Dr.Bhalla holds a Ph.D in economics from Princeton University, a Masters in public and international affairs from Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and a BSEE degree from Purdue University.He is Chairman of Oxus Research & Investments and former member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council.He worked as Professor in Delhi School of Economics and worked at the Rand Corporation,the Brokings Institution, World Bank,Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. He is the author of several books.

The book under review is an authoritative analysis of the history of Indian elections, describing carefully the economic and political backdrop against which elections have been unfolding since 1952: the Congress partys studied hegemony for almost 70 years, when it was under the thumb of the Dynasts ; the disastrous collapse of the Janata Party in the 1970s; the eminently laudable economic reforms of 1991; the ascent of the BJP in the early 1980s, and most importantly, the way India saw the ascent to olympian heights of an ordinary politician from Gujarat--- a gentleman named Narendra Modi—an Indian version of “ From the Log Cabin to the White House.”.

Surjit Bhalla rightly issues a stern warning to BJP to take corrective action and steer clear of Cow Politics. The Opposition Bhalla declares has to veer away from an outdated social and economic narrative to become worthy of a nation which is fast discarding identity and caste politics to emerge as a modern middle-class economic power. Bhalla is ruthlessly frank and extends rapier-thrusts basing it on rigorous and in-depth research and data.

One can assess the acuracy of Bhallas prognostications . In the three elections in the mid-1990s, the BJ P averaged around 175 seats. During these years, the yield of the BJP vote was around 7.5 i.e., each one per cent vote brought the BJP around 7.5 seats (the same level as in 1989). This increased to 9.1 in 2014. One estimate of the extra seats that the BJP may have obtained in 2014 due to the Modi effect is obtained by assuming that the seat yield of the BJP remained at 7.5.Hence, with thirty-one per cent of the vote, the BJP should have secured 232 seats; hence, by obtaining 282 seats, the Modi seat effect in 2014 was fifty seats.

Even if the 2014 state elections are ignored, the average swing for the BJP in 2015--2018 (weighted by size of the state electorate) was a large 7.5 per cent; while for the Congress it was -0.7 per cent. In 2019, even a two per cent extra vote for the BJP will increase its seat share to 297 (an average historical yield of 7.5); just a one per cent swing will get them to 290. In other words, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario whereby the BJP gets close to the second magic figure of 300.

The book is timely, informative and bold. The book cleverly uses data and arrives at inferences shrewdly. His predictions have been proved to be accurate.The book cautioned readers that the BJP needed corrective action and to move away from cow politics, even as the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress party and the Alliance of Regional parties ned to move away from an outdated social and economic narrative.

Bhalla gives us a pre-view of opinion polls .He predicted a majority for BJP and about 60 for Congress using data science.

An acute analysis of Narendra Modi is provided by Bhalla. Modi became Chief Minister without ever having been an MLA. Second, he became Prime Minister without becoming a Member of Parliament. He also won his first State and National elections by huge margins. He won three consecutive elections in Gujarat2002--2007--2012. Narendra Modi’s stature has been established as one of the world’s successful politicians. His reign has spelled the end of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Congress days are ending as India had gone through a eighteen year phase when Dr.Manmohan Singh helped the Congess to attain some respectability. This was squandered away with the worst macro-management in the history of Indian economy over any given election period.The India National Congress has made a royal mess.

Undoubtedly Bhalla’s book is compulsory reading for all who are keen on India’s political and economic future no matter which party they belong to.

P.P.Ramachandran.

06/10/2019.