Traditional Pathriya System

The chopping off of the palms of two migrant workers is a wake-up call

The gruesome incident of the chopping off of the palms of two migrant labourers of Kalahandi district of western Odisha by the labour contractor mafia in December 2013 should serve as a wake-up call. The incident highlights the ruthless extent to which the mafia can go to meet its ends and brings home the fact that more than 60 years after Independence, the poorest in our country still remain woefully unprotected.

The incident took place after the workers, who had taken an advance from a labour contractor to work in the brick kilns of Hyderabad, got into a dispute with him regarding the payment and place of work. When the dispute could not be resolved, two of them had to pay this terrible price. Gruesome as it is in itself, the incident is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a sordid modern day version of human trafficking and the slave trade, exploiting the most vulnerable and robbing them of their dignity. Yes, the police have arrested some of those responsible and the administration has further taken action to stop migrants from going out. Unless more fundamental steps are taken, the impact of such punitive action is more than likely to be undone by the migrants themselves, who see no choice but to hit the migration trail.

Distress-induced

The Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput (KBK) region of western Odisha has long been known for all the wrong reasons — starvation deaths, drought, famines, poverty and distress, and, over the past six years or so, Maoism. With unproductive landholdings and very few means of sustenance, the rural poor are plunged into crisis every year. Their only option is to migrate to other States in search of work. Among the most favoured destinations for them are the brick kilns firing the construction boom in cities such as Hyderabad. A well-entrenched chain of labour contractors and middlemen, starting from dons based in Andhra Pradesh and going down to touts located in the interior villages of the KBK districts, organise the trafficking of labour from these villages to the cities. Every year, after the 60-day paddy crop is harvested around the beginning of September, comes the festival of nuakhai, meaning “eating new rice,” an old tradition of western Odisha. Poor families take an advance from the labour contractors at this time. Soon after, men, women and children start migrating in large numbers to pay off this advance by offering their labour to the contractors. A documentary produced by the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on MGNREGA movingly depicts the lives, journeys and choices of these families. They live on brick kiln sites in makeshift shanties, braving the harsh weather with no protection. With no toilets and no sources of drinking water, these sites are hotbeds of misery and disease. Sexual exploitation of women is rampant. On the journey, travelling with their belongings and children in overcrowded trains, people lose life and limb. Attempts to escape from the work site can meet with instant and ruthless reprisal as the two migrants found out. Children are preferred in the brickmaking industry because they are short, so while filling brickmaking frames with mud, they need not bend down like adults. Also, when freshly made bricks are piled up, there is no space for an adult to walk and overturn the bricks for drying. Children can walk on top of the bricks and overturn them without causing damage. So, the labour is contracted according to the traditional pathariya system, where pathariya is a work unit comprising a man, a woman and one or two children. And, in the process, every law of the land is violated to keep India shining.

A study carried out in Nuapada district of western Odisha, at the request of the district authorities some years ago, concluded that the out-migration is distress-induced. That this needed to be established may look ridiculous at first sight. But the significance of this conclusion cannot be underlined enough, for sadly, in government circles, an unwritten code prohibits acceptance of the distress nature of this migration. The logic is deadly simple — if this migration is accepted as distress-induced, the responsibility rests with the administration to stop it. The study further estimated that more than half the rural population in the district is migrant, with more than one-third of these migrants being women and about 13 per cent being children. This human trafficking fetches the touts, middlemen and mafia dons huge profits, with the turnover of the migration industry of western Odisha estimated to be more than Rs.500 crore per annum. An industry of this size cannot exist, let alone thrive, without the patronage of the powerful. And it is widely known in the area that political vested interests, cutting across party lines, are firmly behind this organised racket. No wonder then, that the study on Nuapada was dead before arrival! A look at the way migrant labour is forced to live at migration sites, however, should permanently put to rest any notion that these people will prefer to migrate if they actually have a choice. The point is that they migrate because they do not have a choice. And the tragedy is that being prisoners of circumstance, they too have started believing that this is indeed a choice they are making.

Toward sustainable livelihoods

But the work of several civil society organisations acting in close connect with these migrant families in Nuapada and Bolangir districts shows that given an alternative these people will never go back to “Hyderabad,” a synonym in their eyes of what can go terribly wrong with their lives. Such work also holds out the promise of the change that can be made to happen if the administration decides to muster the requisite will. These organisations have mobilised the rural poor to form MGNREGA wage-seeker committees. These committees try to ensure that MGNREGA plans are made according to priorities that the village community decides, that work is opened on time and wage payments are not delayed. Working closely with selected gram panchayats, these organisations have helped to create assets for sustainable livelihoods of the poor. The results, though on a small scale, are there for all to see. Farm ponds made at a modest cost of Rs.30,000 or so, have provided protective irrigation to the paddy crop and stopped distress migration for several hundred families, in some cases, reversing a trend which has been going on for two or three generations. Enterprising farmers have topped up this public investment with private investment and use the water remaining in the farm ponds after the harvest of the paddy crop for fish-farming and growing vegetables in their backyards. In some cases, community water harvesting structures have helped to give protective irrigation to several hundred acres of paddy fields downstream. Assured employment and timely wages have given workers the confidence that they can break the stranglehold of the contractors. The documentary referred to earlier, and screened in Bolangir and Nuapada districts in several village and panchayat meetings, helped to sensitise the administration and panchayat leaders to the fragile existence of these migrants. Officers with fire in their belly resolved to work hand-in-hand with civil society to leverage MGNREGA so as to stem this migration. In May 2013, the Odisha Panchayati Raj Department, after meetings with these migrant families, announced that the job guarantee would be extended to 150 days per family in the districts of Bolangir and Nuapada. Micro-plans for 150 villages were made with the support of civil society. But, tragically, the officers who had shown the courage to take on the mafia were soon transferred, giving credence to the belief that “big brother” is still all powerful.

But as these examples show, a lot can be done, with the requisite political and administrative will and imaginative partnerships with civil society. The State government needs to ensure that there are dedicated human resources to execute well-made MGNREGA and rural livelihood plans. A provision for this has been made through the Cluster Facilitation Teams provided for under MGNREGA 2.0. Without this capacity in place, extending the job guarantee beyond 100 days is unlikely to go very far. It further needs to work in mission mode for ensuring outcomes, for if employment opportunities or wage payments are delayed, the migrants will go back to the migration route. In its efforts, the government should partner with civil society to achieve better quality of outcomes. All this requires that the distress nature of this migration is first accepted. And that, in line with the recent Supreme Court ruling, officers are provided a minimum security of tenure so that the best of them may be chosen for the task of reconstructing rural Odisha.

(Pramathesh Ambasta is convener, National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on MGNREGA.)

Unfettered mass surveillance doesn't bode well for democracy

India has no requirements of transparency whether in the form of disclosing the quantum of interception or in the form of notification to people whose communication was intercepted

The Gujarat telephone tapping controversy is just one of many kinds of abuse that surveillance systems enable. If a relatively primitive surveillance system can be misused so flagrantly despite safeguards that the government claims are adequate, imagine what is to come with the Central Monitoring System (CMS) and Netra in place.

News reports indicate Netra — a “NEtwork TRaffic Analysis system” — will intercept and examine communication over the Internet for keywords like “attack,” “bomb,” “blast” or “kill.” While phone tapping and the CMS monitor specific targets, Netra is vast and indiscriminate. It appears to be the Indian government’s first attempt at mass surveillance rather than surveillance of predetermined targets. It will scan tweets, status updates, emails, chat transcripts and even voice traffic over the Internet (including from platforms like Skype and Google Talk) in addition to scanning blogs and more public parts of the Internet. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden said of mass-surveillance dragnets that “they were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”

So far, our jurisprudence has dealt with only targeted surveillance; and even that in a woefully inadequate manner. This article discusses the slow evolution of the right to privacy in India, highlighting the context and manner in which it is protected. It then discusses international jurisprudence to demonstrate how the right to privacy might be protected more effectively.

Privacy and the Constitution

A proposal to include the right to privacy in the Constitution was rejected by the Constituent Assembly with very little debate. Separately, a proposal to give citizens an explicit fundamental right against unreasonable governmental search and seizure was also put before the Constituent Assembly. This proposal was supported by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. If accepted, it would have included within our Constitution the principles from which the United States derives its protection against state surveillance. However, the proposed amendment was rejected by the Constituent Assembly.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has gradually been reading the right to privacy into the fundamental rights explicitly listed in the Constitution. After its initial reluctance to affirm the right to privacy in the 1954 case of M.P. Sharma vs. Satish Chandra, the court came around to the view that other rights and liberties guaranteed in the Constitution would be seriously affected if the right to privacy was not protected. In Kharak Singh vs. The State of U.P., the court recognised “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” and declared that their right against unreasonable searches and seizures was not to be violated. The right to privacy here was conceived around the home, and unauthorised intrusions into homes were seen as interference with the right to personal liberty.

If the Kharak Singh judgment was progressive in its recognition of the right to privacy, it was conservative about the circumstances in which the right applies. The majority of judges held that shadowing a person could not be seen to interfere with that person’s liberty. Dissenting with the majority, Justice Subba Rao maintained that broad surveillance powers put innocent citizens at risk, and that the right to privacy is an integral part of personal liberty. He recognised that when a person is shadowed, her movements will be constricted, and will certainly not be free movements. His dissenting judgment showed remarkable foresight and his reasoning is consistent with what is now a universally acknowledged principle that there is a “chilling effect” on expression and action when people think that they are being watched.

The right to privacy as defined by the Supreme Court now extends beyond government intrusion into private homes. After Govind vs. State of M.P., and Dist. Registrar and Collector of Hyderabad vs. Canara Bank, this right is seen to protect persons and not places. Any inroads into this right for surveillance of communication must be for permissible reasons and according to just, fair and reasonable procedure. State action in violation of this procedure is open to a constitutional challenge.

Our meagre procedural safeguards against phone tapping were introduced in PUCL vs. Union of India (1997) after the Supreme Court was confronted with extensive, undocumented phone tapping by the government. The apex court found itself compelled to lay down what it saw as bare minimum safeguards, consisting mostly of proper record-keeping and internal executive oversight by senior officers such as the home secretary, the cabinet secretary, the law secretary and the telecommunications secretary. These safeguards are of little use since they are opaque and rely solely on members of the executive to review surveillance requests.

Right and safeguards

There is a difference between targeted surveillance in which reasons have to be given for surveillance of particular people, and the mass-surveillance which Netra sets up. The question of mass surveillance and its attendant safeguards has been considered by the European Court of Human Rights in Liberty and Others vs. the United Kingdom. Drawing upon its own past jurisprudence, the European Court insisted on reasonable procedural safeguards. It stated quite clearly that there are significant risks of arbitrariness when executive power is exercised in secret and that the law should be sufficiently clear to give citizens an adequate indication of the circumstances in which interception might take place. Additionally, the extent of discretion conferred and the manner of its exercise must be clear enough to protect individuals from arbitrary interference. The principles laid down by the European Court in relation to phone-tapping also require that the nature of the offences which may give rise to an interception order, the procedure to be followed for examining, using and storing the data obtained, the precautions to be taken when communicating the data to other parties, and the circumstances in which recordings may or must be erased or the tapes destroyed be made clear.

Opaque and ineffective

Our safeguards apply only to targeted surveillance, and require written requests to be provided and reviewed before telephone tapping or Internet interception is carried out. CMS makes the process of tapping more prone to misuse by the state, by making it even more opaque: if the state can intercept communication directly, without making requests to a private telecommunication service provider, then it is one less layer of scrutiny through which the abuse of power can reach the public. There is no one to ask whether the requisite paperwork is in place or to notice a dramatic increase in interception requests.

India has no requirements of transparency whether in the form of disclosing the quantum of interception taking place each year, or in the form of subsequent notification to people whose communication was intercepted. It does not even have external oversight in the form of an independent regulatory body or the judiciary to ensure that no abuse of surveillance systems takes place. Given these structural flaws, the Amit Shah controversy is just the beginning of what is to come. Unfettered mass surveillance does not bode well for democracy.

(Chinmayi Arun is research director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, and fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.)

Significance of emeregence of AAP

The AAP’s success in Delhi could possibly be emulated in similar urban pockets elsewhere, where civic concerns and a compact urban community could enable it to attract the different urban classes

Having graduated from a political movement to a party in government relatively quickly, in the small but significant State of Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is now poised to address its next challenge — that of attaining national relevance. The party’s success in Delhi had much to do with some unique factors related to the capital city such as the extensive media coverage it received during the phase of its agitations for a Lokpal. But it was the party’s strategy to move away from a single-issue movement (anti-corruption) with an element of anti-politics to a “populist” political organisation articulating real life issues of the ordinary citizens like inflated power bills and the inequitable distribution of water, that catapulted it to centre stage. It transited from being a civil society organisation committed to the realisation of the Lokpal to a political party seeking to implement the vision of Lokniti (decentralised, communitarian democracy).

Support base

By seeking to mobilise the urban poor on issues related to livelihood and welfare, the party was able to build a multi-class support base, which included many sections of the urban salariat and the lower middle classes. The party’s calling card remains its stress on being anti-establishment, but its source of support among the poor is linked to expectations of better welfare delivery and empowerment.

It is this mandate from the poor which has forced the AAP to form a government with the support of the very party that it has been stridently opposed to. The decision to accept support from the Congress has certainly dismayed a number of its adherents who identified the latter with malfeasance and as the “primary enemy” for the party, but for the poor, the AAP’s ability to make a difference by being in government outweighs such tactical concerns. The AAP’s garnering of support from Delhi’s urban poor — except among Muslims who preferred to back the Congress possibly as a bulwark against a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — was without recourse to narrow identitarian politics or patronage based on caste, religion or region.

The urban poor — drawn from the working classes in the informal sector, small traders, hawkers, migrants, etc. — were also drawn to the emphasis on anti-corruption by the AAP as meaning better and direct welfare services and opportunities without having to rely upon unscrupulous middlemen. The urban poor identified the AAP as being different from the BJP and the Congress, who were seen as parties which had cultivated these middlemen and patrons. The support from the urban poor is reflected in the electoral performance of the AAP in the various slum clusters of the capital city. Conversely, in areas of Delhi which have a greater number of rural households and in the “urban villages” where such politics of patronage and caste-community identity have a long history, the AAP’s primary political message did not find as many takers.

The AAP’s success in Delhi could possibly be emulated in similar urban pockets elsewhere, where civic concerns and a compact urban community could enable it to attract the different urban classes. But the party would certainly encounter a more difficult challenge as an upstart in most places of the country which are predominantly rural or semi-urban.

National challenges

Since the 1990s, the federalisation of India’s polity has followed a course set by three distinct and significant phenomena. These include the dominance of Other Backward Classes and related caste identity politics following implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations; an effective presence of the Hindutva right wing forces following the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, and the maturation of neo-liberal “developmentalism” following extensive economic liberalisation and globalisation. These phenomena have introduced various State-level dynamics and changed India’s political party system. The AAP has emerged as a political player by addressing a constituency that has been discomfited with the nature of the developmental process which has spawned corruption, crony capitalism and a new elite. But, there are other constituencies — particularly in rural India — which still see the need for patronage and identity assertion as a way out for the enhancement of their livelihoods. It is doubtful whether the AAP’s message can make an immediate political impact here.

Social democratic space

Evidently, the AAP expects that its performance in government in Delhi and an adoption of a more comprehensive political and organisational strategy elsewhere would pay dividends in overcoming this challenge. For now, much focus is on the contiguous States bordering Delhi such as Haryana, and urban centres like Mumbai and Bangalore. Elsewhere, the party has sought to engage with and draw in groups from social movements in various States such as Tamil Nadu and Odisha to expand its political reach beyond readily available support bases in urban pockets. This strategy should keep it in good stead, but the immediate nature of the political party system should compel it to seek more allies beyond the civil society. Engagement and issue-based alliances with other political forces which have a similar anti-establishment message, such as the Left parties, would help the AAP in spreading its message more effectively.

This is more so because there is a social democratic space in India’s national political spectrum that remains virtually deserted. The Congress historically played this role of a social democratic party, acting as a “transmission belt,” as political scientist Rajni Kothari called it, between the government and the people and having a distinct ideological world view. The withering away of India’s grand old party and its reduction into a corporatist party, dominated by special interests and one that seeks to practise social democracy more as instrumentalism and out of political compulsion rather than purpose, is not lost on many.

The mainstream Left had once succeeded in occupying that space in States like Kerala and West Bengal where it translated its radical rhetoric into purposive welfarism. However, the ideological transformation of the Left from a radical, social democratic force in the 1970-80s to just another variant of “developmentalism” (most pronounced in West Bengal) has led to its political decline. Moreover, the left parties could not expand their areas of influence beyond three States due to their lack of political imagination in attempting to win over the many discontents with the present status quo across the country. The regional parties, since the 1990s, have also metamorphosed into corporatist entities themselves despite emerging initially as voices for backward sections that were not represented in the establishment.

Need for a vision

If the AAP constructs a well developed vision on matters of political economy and even international affairs, it would be able to occupy that vacant, social democratic space in conjunction with other like-minded parties. At a limited level, its emphasis on decentralised and participative models of democracy, if put into practice, could bring about better social audits of welfare services and delivery and could enhance the institutions of social democracy that are already in place. Presently, the AAP has relied on an ad hoc approach to constructing an overall vision on economic or strategic matters, with an emphasis primarily on political decentralisation. It has perhaps done so to limit any internal differences between a largely left-of-centre leadership and an activist base drawn from the middle classes. But the sooner it comes up with a thoroughgoing vision that places it as a firmly secular, social democratic party and one that suitably addresses the uniqueness of India’s diverse political economy, the better it would be for the party to increase its support base and influence. In other words, the AAP has to come up with clear views on how it seeks to tackle issues related to the concentration of wealth, crony capitalism, “jobless growth,” crisis of the peasant economy, etc. It must also delineate its views on more purposive ways of “identity recognition,” and eliminating hierarchies and discriminations based on caste, gender and ethnicity.

The AAP’s rise as an anti-establishment force and the opening up of a social democratic space in India’s polity is not unrelated to global trends. In much of the developing world, a similar process had emerged in recent decades, as an outcome of the discontent with what is broadly defined as neoliberalism. If in Latin America this took the form of a “pink tide” against the elite, the anti-establishment emphasis sought to open up new spaces for democracy in the Arab world. These developments and the national challenges the party faces make it all the more imperative for the AAP to have a larger world view than it currently has.

(Srinivasan Ramani is senior assistant editor with the Economic and Political Weekly.)

Stress Interview

Braving the inevitable - The Hindu

Finish the task right away - The Hindu

Finish the task right away - The Hindu

Iran hopes to execute n-deal within month - The Hindu

Iran hopes to execute n-deal within month - The Hindu