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Tag: nonfiction

#DidYouKnow These Facts about the Animals in the Himalayan Region?

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What do we really know of the intimate-and intense-moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference and desire that occur between human and non-human animals?

Whether it is through the study of the affect and ethics of ritual animal sacrifice, analysis of the right-wing political project of cow protection, or examination of villagers’ talk about bears who abduct women and have sex with them, in the book Animal Intimacies, Radhika Govindrajan illustrates that multispecies relatedness relies on both difference and ineffable affinity between animals.

Here are some intriguing facts about the diverse animal life in Himalayan region!

Pahari (literally, “of the mountain”) animals, were related to pahari people by virtue of their shared subjection and relatedness to pahari devi-dyavta. Thus, a pahari goat would understand the need for his own ritual sacrifice to a local deity in a way that a goat from the plains simply could not.

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A pahari leopard’s predation on people could, in some cases, be explained by the fact that he or she was acting on a deity’s instructions to punish recalcitrant human devotees.

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Villagers claimed a kinship with pahari monkeys on the grounds that they had both experienced displacement from their homes by outsiders. To be related as paharis, then, was to be related through a shared history of neglect and exclusion.

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An experimental pig who escaped confinement at the IVRI in the 1960s, and made her refuge in the surrounding forest is believed by villagers to be an ancestor of the wild boar who swarm these forests today.

Built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Animal Intimacies explores the number of ways that human and animal interact to cultivate relationships as interconnected, related beings.

 

Breathtaking Words From Book Stalwarts!

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Do you live, breathe and eat books? Then this World Book Day, rediscover your favourite reads and go on a literary sojourn over the weekend!

Here are some phenomenal quotes that all book lovers will live by!

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” – Oscar Wilde
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” – Roald Dahl

Jaya Prada: the Multilingual Celebrity – an excerpt from ‘Democracy on the Road’

Posted on by Penguin India

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth.

In this excerpt from his book, Democracy On The Road, Ruchir Sharma talks about Jaya Prada’s election contest against Noor Bano in the 2009 elections.

We found yet another spin on the byzantine turns of Indian alliance politics unfolding in the city of Rampur, best known for its Mughlai cuisine, lilting poetry and Rampuri chakus—the long knives once favoured by small-time villains in Hindi movies. As we often do we arranged a meeting with the DM, the district magistrate, and outside his office I noticed a wooden board listing all the previous DMs of Rampur.

The list ran long, implying that the tenure of any one DM was quite short—likely because state governments come and go so quickly, and each new ruling party brings its own roster of local officials. I asked the DM about this and he said with a wry smile that Hinduism recognizes four sequential stages of life, from Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (retired) and finally Sannyasa (renunciation). But the life of a district magistrate bounces between these stages in no apparent order, and they ‘can never be sure which will come next’.

In Rampur, Congress candidate Noor Bano, a scion of Rampur’s royal family, was plotting her comeback against the former film star Jaya Prada, whose rootless career symbolized the fluid loyalties of Indian politics. We met Jaya Prada in a luxury suite at The Modipur Hotel, itself a classically Indian mash-up of garishly colourful decoration and gold-plated religion, with miniatures of Hindu gods dotting the makeshift dining-room temple where Jaya Prada prayed.

Jaya Prada had been a coveted ally not for her Hindu piety or her caste but for her multilingual celebrity: she was the rare actress who had starred in both Telugu and Hindi films. After appearing in more than 300 movies over three decades, she became a favourite of Chandrababu Naidu and later a member of parliament representing his Telugu Desam Party in the Rajya Sabha.

Then she not only switched parties, she switched to a new state and a capital city nearly 1500 kilometres away. After falling out with Naidu she had left his party in 2004 and accepted an invitation to join Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in UP. Milling about Jaya Prada’s expansive hotel suite in Rampur we found a mix of her relatives and their kids, Samajwadi Party functionaries and Muslim clerics—all moving around carefully so as not to knock over the Hindu statuettes.

Asked how her transition across state, party and religious lines had gone so far, Jaya Prada smiled and said, ‘AP+UP=JP’, or Andhra Pradesh plus Uttar Pradesh equals Jaya Prada, the kind of formula that could describe the hybrid backgrounds of many itinerant Indian politicians.

There were, however, signs of strife. Some Samajwadi Party members appeared to be secretly manoeuvring to tar Jaya Prada as an immoral ex-starlet, apparently as punishment for showing insufficient respect to their local party boss, the Muslim leader Azam Khan. Though Jaya Prada carried herself with cinematic aplomb, her optimistic glow did crack once—when she described these machinations against her.

She was particularly upset about photos that had surfaced online, doctored to show her in compromising poses. Leaving the interview we made our way past Bollywood movie star and Rajya Sabha member Jaya Bachchan, who had flown in to campaign for Jaya Prada and appeared quite angry that a bunch of journalists had kept her waiting.

Next we went to see the Congress stalwart whom Jaya Prada unseated back in 2004, Noor Bano, and found her dressed sari-tosandals all in pure white, but dark with resentment at losing her Lok Sabha seat to this film industry interloper from Andhra Pradesh.

Bano, seventy, pitched herself as the opposite of a ‘shifty’ ex-actress: as a daughter of Rampur royalty, she was not a migrant politician and could be relied on to remain true to the locals. Whatever progress the Rampur area had enjoyed of late had nothing to do with Jaya Prada or the Samajwadi Party, Noor said. It was all the work of the national government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which had done so much for farmers and the poor.

The most uplifting thing about the Jaya Prada versus Noor Bano battle was that it pitted two women against each other, in a country where women had been rising in politics but at a painfully slow rate. The number of women in the Lok Sabha had risen from just nineteen in 1977 to fifty-nine here in 2009, and we had seen how the constant struggle to command respect in a male-dominated political culture had left many prominent female leaders battle-hardened and suspicious, including supremos like Jayalalithaa and Mayawati. The one clear thing about the Rampur contest was that a woman would win, and be beaten by a woman.

Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

 

Do Better with Less – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

The world faces a stark challenge: meeting the needs of over 7 billion people without bankrupting the planet. India, with its large population and limited resources, is at the very epicentre of this challenge.

Packed with over fifty case studies, Do Better with Less: Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Growth by the bestselling authors of Jugaad Innovation offers six proven principles that Indian entrepreneurs and businesses can use to co-create frugal solutions in education, energy, healthcare, food and finance that are highly relevant to India and the world.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

In 1999, Jean-Marie Hurtiger, a senior manager at Renault, a French carmaker, was given what seemed like an almost impossible task. His boss, Louis Schweitzer, then Renault’s CEO, wanted him to create a modern, reliable and comfortable car that would retail at $6,000.

Two years earlier, Schweitzer had visited Russia where, to his dismay, he had discovered that the Lada—a locally made car priced at $6,000—was selling fast, while Renault’s fancier cars—twice as expensive as the Lada—had few buyers. As Schweitzer recalls: ‘Seeing those antiquated cars, I found it unacceptable that technical progress should stop you from making a good car for $6,000. I drew up a list of specifications in three words—modern, reliable and affordable—and added that everything else was negotiable.’

Schweitzer instructed Hurtiger, an engineer by training, with international management experience, to build a $6,000 car that matched these specifications.

Technically, Hurtiger could engineer a stripped-down version of a car for that price. But, like the Lada, this car would be clunky and uncomfortable, and customers would question its safety. Renault had a reputation for elegance and quality to protect; launching a shoddy product would be a form of brand suicide. Hurtiger therefore realized that what his boss was asking him to do was not just create a cheaper car,
but one that married high quality and affordability.

This ‘more for less’ proposition was at odds with Hurtiger’s long experience. R&D engineers in the West are taught to push the frontiers of automobile technology by adding features to existing products. Indeed, Western car companies invest billions in R&D to create increasingly more sophisticated products in order to differentiate their brands from do better with less competitors’ and charge customers more for the privilege. Schweitzer’s ‘more for less’ proposition seemed to flout the conventional ‘more for more’ business model that had proven so lucrative in consumption driven Western economies over the previous five decades.

Both Hurtiger and Schweitzer recognized that they would first have to change the way Renault employees think. Creating a $6,000 car required not just a new business model, but a new mental model. This would amount to an immense cultural shift in a company that was over 100 years old and for decades had designed high-quality cars—some for the premium market—primarily for Western middle-class consumers. All Renault’s French engineers had grown up in a resource-rich and relatively stable economy with a ‘bigger is better’ R&D philosophy. Schweitzer and Hurtiger needed a new breed of engineers, with a different outlook, who could innovate under severe constraints and turn adversity into opportunity.

Do Better with Less is India’s guide to claiming global leadership in frugal innovation.

Bite-sized wisdom from Sadhguru

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A motley bouquet, the articles that comprise Flowers on the Path offer insights from Sadhguru that spark you with their incisive clarity, delight you with humour, or even render you in profound stillness within.

Whether the subject covers social issues and worldly affairs, individual challenges, or dimensions of the beyond, Sadhguru’s ability to delve to the root and look at life in all its totality is evident.

 

Health Is Wholeness

 

Life Afresh With Children

 

 Rising Beyond Religion

 

Mind: The Dumping Ground

 

Dynamic Stillness, Static Stagnation

 

The Snakes and Ladders of Comfort

 

Spiritual Allergy

 

Choosing Your Destiny

 

What We Are Not

Front cover of Flowers on the Path
Flowers on the Path || Sadhguru

As a flower can confound you with its brilliance and beauty, so too does each article in Flowers On The Path  hold the possibility to confuse you out of your conclusions, and pave the way towards true knowing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Wagner on New Discoveries while Writing ‘Jallianwala Bagh’

Posted on by Penguin India

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the Indo-British encounter, and it had a profound impact on the colonial relationship between the two countries.

In Kim Wagner’s Jallianwala Bagh, which takes the perspectives of ordinary people into account, the event and its aftermath are strikingly detailed. Wagner argues that General Dyer’s order to open fire at Jallianwala Bagh was an act of fear and its consequences for the Indian freedom struggle were profound. Situating the massacre within the ‘deep’ context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.

In this piece by the author, he talks about his learnings while writing and researching for the book.

As I was writing the book about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, one of the things that struck me was the abiding belief in the benevolence of the British Raj on the part of the local residents of Amritsar. Above the entrance to the memorial there is today a sign that says: ‘A Landmark in Our struggle for Freedom’, and the events of April 1919 are often referred to as a key moment in the independence movement that came to its fruition in 1947. In this narrative, the hundreds of civilians who were massacred by General Dyer, were martyrs to the cause of an independent India and it is as such that they are today commemorated. The interesting thing is that no-one in Punjab in 1919 even thought of independence.

Indian nationalists at the time, such as Drs Kitchlew and Satyapal, were thinking exclusively in terms of dominion-status within the British Empire – similarly to Australia or Canada. Despite the socio-economic dislocation and hardship caused by the First World War, the global flu pandemic, high food-prices and failed crops, the disappointment of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and the anger caused by the Rowlatt Act, the population of Amritsar never lost their faith in the Sarkar, or British Government.

As locals sought to petition the authorities for the release of their two leaders who had been deported on 10 April, they did so using the terms Ma Bap – the traditional supplication entailed by the line ‘You, My Lord, are my mother and father!’ After the confrontation turned violent and stones were thrown at the military pickets, who responded with indiscriminate shooting, people were shocked that the British would open fire on ‘innocent’ people. That is also why crowds twice sought to cross the railway bridges leading from the old city of Amritsar and into the Civil Lines, and twice were fired at.

As late as 13 April, local residents maintained their faith in the British Government whom they believed would ultimately act in a benevolent and righteous manner. Shortly before Dyer arrived at Jallianwala Bagh with his strike-force, a British airplane flew over the city and when people in the crowd became restless, the Satyagraha activists, who had organised the meeting, reassured them: ‘We need not fear anything. The Sarkar is our father and mother: why should Government kills its own children.’ While Dyer mistakenly believed that he was facing an armed crowd of rebels, and therefore opened fire to prevent a second ‘Mutiny’, people in the crowd did not see themselves as engaging in anything unlawful. The ban on public meetings had not been widely disseminated in the city and there was widespread confusion as to the actual nature of the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh, which furthermore coincided with the festival of Baisakhi.

The massacre, and its aftermath, brutally disabused Indians as to the true nature of British oppression and it was from April onwards, as a result of what had occurred, that people more generally began to think of independence. Before any details of what had occurred in Amritsar reached beyond Punjab, the poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore famously returned his knighthood at the end of May 1919, stating that: ‘The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India.’ It was not, however, till the following year that Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement and finally took up the cause of independence.

The Amritsar Massacre has since been recognised as a crucial watershed in the history of British India, and the in the freedom struggle, yet it is important to remember that this was far from evident to the people involved at the time. It was not till 1947 that the events of 1919 could be seen as the beginning of the end of British rule in India.

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When it comes to British contemporary perceptions of the ma

Of Marxists and Mamata – an excerpt from Ruchir Sharma’s ‘Democracy on the Road’

Posted on by Penguin India

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth.

Here is an excerpt from Ruchir Sharma’s book, Democracy on the Road that talks about the power packed campaign led by Mamata Banerjee in May 2011.

Leading the opposition charge was Mamata Banerjee, a Bengali Brahmin who split from the Congress to form her own party in 1998 and had been railing against Marxist ‘tyranny’ for years, mostly to no avail. The Tata conflict, and a second deadly government attempt to acquire agricultural land in and around Nandigram in the district of Purba Medinipur, had given Mamata’s campaign against Marxist rule new momentum and credibility.

We saw Mamata for the first time at a rally in Kolkata, where she sprang out of the helicopter and race-walked past party supporters, a big boss in a diminutive frame, dressed austerely in a white sari with a blue border. Her bearing broadcast immediately that she had no time for the usual campaign greetings; she was a one-woman dynamo running a lifelong crusade, eager to topple communism yesterday.

A poet herself, Mamata promised not only to restore English instruction but also to bring back the poetry of Bengal greats such as Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, and the stories of Bengal heroes like ‘Binoy, Badal and Dinesh’, which the Marxists had expunged as too bourgeois, and replaced with party-approved literature. While English is an aspirational language all over India, perhaps only in Bengal could a politician campaign on promises to restore local poetry to the school curriculum.

She promised that under her All India Trinamool Congress (TMC)—the ‘party of the marginalized’—things would be different. Bengal would have modern schools, colleges and health clinics, with no proof of party loyalty required for access. Non-party members would no longer have to travel out of state for medical treatment. Her campaign slogan promised ‘poriborton’, the Bengali spin on ‘parivartan’ or change. As interesting as what Mamata said was what she didn’t say. Neither the Congress nor the BJP had cracked 7 per cent of the vote in recent Bengal elections, and they hardly bore mention in Mamata’s speech. The caste and religious undercurrents that drive much of Indian politics barely surfaced either, since Bengal was divided mainly between Marxist party members and everyone else. Tapping popular frustration with thirty-four years of Marxist rule, Mamata’s party won in resounding fashion, taking 184 of the 294 state assembly seats, and she became the new chief minister. The Marxists finished a distant second….

Economic growth had picked up at least moderately since the communists departed. Infant mortality was falling. Construction was booming all over the capital, spilling into the outskirts. Amit Mitra, state finance minister under Mamata, told us investment was flowing into cement and fertilizer plants, small- and medium-size companies were growing rapidly and that Tata had begun to expand again in the state.

When Mamata came to power in 2011, she had fired police officials who did not toe her party line, and harassed critics who posted mocking cartoons of her on social media. She was seen as erratic, volatile, an autocrat who brooked no challenge within her own party. Mamata’s writ still ran large, but she was settling down and opening up, as the Marxists fell into disarray. During the last campaign, Mamata had refused to meet us because some of our companions had ties to leading Marxists in Delhi, but this time she called them up to the stage before a Kolkata rally and greeted them warmly.

As Mamata went on the offensive there were flashes of the old paranoia, and over the course of the campaign she would attack everyone from Modi and the media to the Election Commission and the security apparatus for conspiring against her. Her crowds lapped it up. As soon as her Kolkata rally ended and Mamata made it past her security cordon, she was mobbed by supporters, young and old, who wanted to kiss her hand, touch her feet, or receive her blessings.

Over this five-week campaign, Mamata would claim to walk 1000 kilometres in the sweltering heat of April and May to address more than 160 meetings, and while the numbers were implausible, her energy and her centrality to the TMC were not in question. The joke in Kolkata was that ‘there is only one post in the TMC and Mamata holds it. Everyone else is a lamppost.’ She was running a highly centralized government in which her word was the only one that really mattered, yet she was delivering enough to ordinary people to win them over. Many said Mamata had executed on her promises to improve roads and electricity. She had offered subsidies to bring down the price of wheat, vegetables and rice, which were selling for a few rupees per kilo. She had also given free bicycles to girls as an incentive and means to get to school, and offered wedding subsidies to young women.

In the end the TMC won easily. After five straight terms under Marxist party leaders, Bengal may simply not have been ready to throw out Mamata after one. Her personal charisma prevailed over the imploding Marxists and their opportunistic alliance with the Congress. She had mellowed, growing open enough to industry to win business support, remaining generous enough with the public purse to win votes from the poor.

Mamata was also riding the growing wave of voter support for single leaders, whose unmarried status seemed to confirm their claims of all-in devotion to public service. Among India’s twenty one most populous states, there were no unmarried chief ministers in 1988, but by 2016 there were seven, including Mamata, seemingly lifted by growing voter distaste for nepotism inside political parties, and the corruption that flows naturally from running parties as a family business. Mamata had in fact remained far more ascetic in her personal tastes than many other supremos. Even as chief minister she lived in her small ancestral home in the Kolkata neighbourhood of Kalighat. Passing by the home we were stunned to see it in a state of decay with a dilapidated grey tiled roof and rotting bamboo shafts—a stark contrast to the sandstone palaces Mayawati had built for herself in UP. Mamata’s image as a single leader with no taste for diamonds had made her largely impervious to the corruption charges that so often topple Indian governments, and helped her secure this second term.

Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

The Great Disappointment of the ‘Modifesto’: Ten Facts Proving that ‘Achche Din’ Remain a Distant Dream

Posted on by Penguin India

As the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government completes its current term ahead of the General Elections 2019, it is time to evaluate its performance, specifically in terms of its management of the economy.

Salman Anees Soz—international development expert, economic and political commentator and consultant at the World Bank, conducts a critical assessment of five years of the brand of economics Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed, often referred to as ‘Modinomics’. The Great Disappointment takes a look at the rhetoric of the 2014 ‘Modifesto’ that actively denied the achievements of previous governments and announced that a government led by Narendra Modi would match their cumulative performance within its first term.

Brought into power with the biggest political mandate in almost three decades, did the NDA government succeed in gainfully transforming India’s economic trajectory or did it squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity?

A realistic look at GDP growth under Modinomics is not very promising

The 2016–17 survey notes that ‘GDP growth slipped from 7.7 per cent in the first half of 2016–17 to 6.5 per cent in the second half. Quarterly real GDP growth also shows a deceleration in the third and fourth quarters relative to the first two quarters. The slowdown in these indicators predated demonetization but intensified in the post-demonetization period.’ What that survey could not have predicted is that in the following quarter, economic activity slowed and the growth rate slumped to 5.7 per cent, the slowest pace in three years.

The much-touted tax reform failed to hold up structurally

Early on, the GST’s technology infrastructure could not keep up with the volume of transactions, and the government once again seemed unprepared for the scale of reform. It was demonetization redux and gave another major opportunity to the government’s critics to paint it as incompetent. Yashwant Sinha said that the GST ‘would make a fine Harvard University case study of everything that was wrong with the rollout of a tax reform’.

The agricultural crisis worsened in the last five years

Agricultural exports declined from US$42 billion in 2013– 14 to US$38 billion in 2017–18. They were lower in the intervening period. Agricultural imports went up by about 50 per cent during this time Interestingly, investment in agriculture (measured by gross capital formation as a share of agricultural GDP) fell from 17.7 per cent in 2013–14 to 15.5 per cent in 2016–17.

While the decline in global crude oil prices caused a reduction in fiscal deficit, oil prices for consumers in India are higher than ever

An analysis by the Mint newspaper showed that ‘almost the entire reduction of about 0.6% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in India’s fiscal deficit between FY14 and FY16 could be attributed to the sharp fall in crude prices’.  The current account balance improved. The government liberalized diesel prices sooner than anticipated on account of this sharp decline. However, instead of passing on the benefits of lower crude prices to consumers, the government retained much of the gain through progressively higher excise duties on petroleum products.

In many cases, the Modi government allegedly simply renamed its predecessor’s schemes

According to an analysis by the Quint, an online news site, the Modi government renamed nineteen out of twenty three schemes started by its predecessor, the UPA government. For example, the famous Jan Dhan Yojana is the new name of an existing scheme Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account (BSBDA). Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was originally Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan while the RGGVY (rural electrification) became DDUGJY.

One of the most touted ‘benefits’ of demonetization has evidently not materialized

There is no concrete evidence to indicate that demonetization led to a significant decline in terrorism. In fact, Prasenjit Bose, an economist, found that ‘total fatalities in terrorism-related violence in India have hardly seen any significant decline in 2017 (data till August 2017) compared to the two previous years, with violence in Jammu and Kashmir actually witnessing an escalation’.

Demonetisation has not shown a drastic increase in either direct tax collection or in the number of taxpayers

 Wilson quotes CBDT (Central Board of Direct Taxes) data to show that ‘there was an 11.6% growth in the number of income taxpayers in 2013–14, without any demonetisation. It then fell to 8.3% and 7.5% in next two years but increased to 12.7% in 2016–17 but again fell to 6.9% in 2017–18. So, the trend shows that there was no dramatic increase in the number of taxpayers.’ Wilson also notes that growth in direct taxes was much higher during the UPA’s ten years (average 20.2 per cent) as opposed to the Modi government’s four-year average growth of only 12 per cent.

Modi’s pitch to India’s youth was clear—if they voted for him, he would get them a job. Unfortunately, ground realities present a depressing picture

Total employment fell from 48.04 crores in 2013–14 to 46.76 crore in 2015–16. The failure to create jobs is becoming the biggest political challenge for the Modi government. There are constant reports in the media about the challenging jobs situation in India. The government’s response has been to latch on to questionable data on job creation to argue that India does not have an employment problem.

 The Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) scheme, the centrepiece of Skill India, has had negative reviews

The Sharada Prasad Committee, set up by the skill development ministry to review the performance of various sector skill councils, came out with negative reviews of the PMKVY. The committee noted that ‘no evaluation was conducted of PMKVY 2015 to find out the outcomes of the scheme and whether it was serving the twin purpose of providing employment to youth and meeting the skill needs of the industry before launching such an ambitious scheme’. In various stakeholder consultations, the committee reported that ‘all of them said in one voice that the targets allocated to them were very high and without regard to any sectoral requirement. Everybody was chasing numbers without providing employment to the youth or meeting sectoral industry needs.’

 The figures used to tout India’s GDP growth have come under the scanner after a suspicious change in methodology

India’s GDP data has been under the scanner ever since the CSO changed the methodology for calculating economic output in 2014–15. Most analysts were surprised after the publication of the new GDP series. Even the government’s chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, and the then Governor of the RBI, Raghuram Rajan, cast doubt on the new CSO data. According to the Economist, investors  ‘roundly disbelieve India’s growth figures’.

 

Grab your copy of The Great Disappointment today!

 

 

 

Spring has Sprung! Books to read this April

Posted on by Penguin India

Spring, a lovely reminder of how beautiful change can be! So try a new book, a new author: something out of the ordinary. As nature changes around you, bring a change within yourself by giving your mind and soul a new type of narrative to look forward to.

Penguin presents a new list of books this April. Take a look!

Journeys: Pages from My Diaries

Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan’s personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work.

 

Rajneeti: A Biography of Rajnath Singh

A two-term President, Singh saw the elevation of Narendra Modi as the partys PM candidate and delivered BJPs biggest elections victory in 2014. Since then, as Indias Home Minister, he has ushered in a new phase in the countrys security where both internal and external threats have been minimised. Drawing from a vast amount of research and in-depth interviews, Gautam Chintamanis engaging narrative reveals for the first-time a politician who never shied away from doing the right thing.

 

 

The City and the Sea

Called the novelist of the newsroom, Raj Kamal Jha cleaves open India’s tragedy of violence against women with a powerful story about our complicity in the culture that supports it. This is a book about masculinity – damaging and toxic and yet enduring and entrenched – that begs the question: What kind of men are our boys growing up to be?

 

Re-forming India: The Nation Today

India’s social and political landscape has, in recent times, witnessed many significant transformations. This book offers a wide-ranging review of how India has, over the last few years, fared on the most critical dimensions of our collective life-politics, economy, governance, development, culture and society.

 

Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction

In this journey of sadness and self-reflection, Ib tranforms into an ordinary man from an ordinary boy and along the way, tries to figure out life and understand himself. In this audacious debut that is insightful, original and deeply disturbing, Roshan Ali’s play of language is nothing less than masterful.

 

Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells

After his first year in Japan, almost thirty years ago, Iyer gave us a springtime romance for the ages, The Lady and the Monk; now, half a lifetime later, he shows us a more seasoned place-and observer-looking for what lasts in a life that feels ever more fragile.

 

Carpenters and Kings

Carpenters and Kings is a tale of Christianity, and equally, a glimpse of the India which has always existed: a multicultural land where every faith has found a home through the centuries.

 

Siyasi Muslims: A story of political Islams in India

We seldom debate to find pragmatic answers to these queries. Examining the everydayness of Muslims in contemporary India, Hilal Ahmed offers an evocative story of politics and Islam in India, which goes beyond the given narratives of Muslim victimhood and Islamic separation.

 

The Travel Gods Must be Crazy: Wacky Encounters in exotic lands

Punctuating her droll stories with breathtaking descriptions and stunning photographs, Sudha invites readers on an unexpected and altogether memorable tour around the world!

 

The Tiger and the Ruby: A Journey to the Other Side of British India

In 1841, Nigel Halleck left Britain as a clerk in the East India Company. He served in the colonial administration for eight years before leaving his post, eventually disappearing in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, never to be heard from again.
A century-and-a-half later, Kief Hillsbery, Nigel’s nephew many times removed, sets out to unravel the mystery.

 

The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi

In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy exposes some uncomfortable, controversial, and even surprising truths about the political thought and career of India’s most famous and most revered figure. In doing so she makes the case for why Ambedkar’s revolutionary intellectual achievements must be resurrected, not only in India but throughout the world.

 

The Lost Decade (2008-2018): How the India Growth Story Devolved into Growth Without a Story

India is not the star it was in 2008 and in effect, the ‘India growth story’ has devolved into ‘growth without a story’. The Lost Decade tells the story of the slide and examines the political context in which the Indian economy failed to recover lost momentum.

 

Once Upon a Curfew

It is 1974. Indu has inherited a flat from her grandmother and wants to turn it into a library for women. Her parents think this will keep her suitably occupied till she marries her fiancé, Rajat, who’s away studying in London.
When the Emergency is declared, Indu’s life turns upside down. Rana finds himself in trouble, while Rajat decides it’s time to visit India and settle down. As the Emergency pervades their lives, Indu must decide not only who but what kind of life she will choose.

 

Dare Eat That

From using sign language to haggle over ant eggs in Bangkok to being hungry enough to eat a horse in Luxembourg, from finding out the perfect eel to barbecue to discovering the best place to source emu eggs in India, Dare Eat That explores their journey to eat every species on earth, at least once!

 

House of Stars

Kabir follows the most beautiful girl he has ever seen into a mall. But there are gunshots and screams as terrorists storm inside after fleeing an operation gone wrong. Kabir and Diya find themselves trapped, along with other hostages. The terrorists make their demands and announce that until they are met, one person will die every hour. The situation begins to spiral out of control.  Held hostage by fate, looking death in the face, it could be Kabir and Diya’s last chance at love.

 

The Secrets We Keep

Rahul, an intelligence officer on a secret mission, is undercover at a major’s house. In the process, he falls in love with the major’s daughter, Akriti, unknowingly putting her in danger. To protect her, Rahul decides to hide her at his parents’ house. However, estranged from his family for years, he must first make amends with them.

 

Mahadev

A little girl asks who Shiva is and it is the beginning of a family journey through stories and incidents across the expanse of Shivbhumi-all the way from the mystical Mount Kailash to the fabled Ocean of Milk and the netherworld. Writing in the Harikatha style of traditional storytelling, Renuka Narayanan builds a unique narrative to draw the reader into the loving, giving world of Mahadev.

 

Where Will Man Take Us?: The bold story of the human technology is creating

This is a new world we are walking into. And the man who began this journey won’t be the man who ends this journey. Where Will Man Take Us? explores the changes technology is bringing about in us-as a society and as a species. What will the next generation turn into, what will it be like, how will the new Adam and Eve live and love?

 

Do Better with Less: Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Growth

Packed with over fifty case studies, Do Better with Less offers six proven principles that Indian entrepreneurs and businesses can use to co-create frugal solutions in education, energy, healthcare, food and finance that are highly relevant to India and the world.
This book is India’s guide to claiming global leadership in frugal innovation.

 

Dawood’s Mentor

In Dawood’s Mentor, Dawood meets Khalid and they eventually forge an unlikely friendship. Together they defeat, crush and neutralize every mafia gang in Mumbai. Khalid lays the foundation for the D-Gang as Dawood goes on to establish a crime syndicate like no other and becomes India’s most wanted criminal.

5 Things You Need to Know About GST’s Impact on the Common Man

Posted on by Penguin India

On 1 July 2017, Goods and Services Tax (GST) became a reality. The government hailed it as the biggest tax reform of independent India which would herald a new freedom for the nation and unify it with ‘One Nation One Tax’. Some of the claims made by the government were that GST would bring about ease of doing business; increase tax collection; lower inflation; increase GDP growth by 1-2 per cent; and check the black economy.  More than a year later, we have more questions than answers.
Why did the economy slow down? Is the government likely to collect more taxes? Why have prices continued to rise? Why has Malaysia withdrawn GST?

It turns out that problems with GST are both transitional and structural. To correct for these there have been a few hundred notifications and orders from the government which have added to the confusion.
In Ground Scorching Tax, well-known economist and India’s leading expert on the black economy, Arun Kumar systematically and lucidly explains the reality behind GST, demystifying this complex tax for ordinary citizens.

Known for not pulling any punches, the author explains why GST is truly a ‘ground scorching tax’ and  a double-edged sword for the common man, why it will increase inequality across sectors and regions, why it will hurt small businesses – everything the government does not want you to know.

He also proposes an alternative which will convert this tax into a `Ground Nourishing Tax’.

Read on to learn how the common man is affected by the ‘Ground Scorching Tax’

The unorganized sector employs the vast majority of the workforce so the setback caused to this sector by the GST renders a large number of people unemployed and lowers the overall real wage rate

GST and digitization accelerate this ongoing process of marginalization of the unorganized sectors. As pointed out in the previous section, marketization marginalizes the weak in the market—it favours the large over the small businesses. While in economic terms this may seem to be ‘efficient’ with growth being fuelled by the large scale sector, it leads to growing inequality which has political and social implications. Since it is the unorganized sector that employs the vast majority of the work force, any setback to this sector leads to growing under employment and crisis in the lives of these people. With the growth of the organized sector, while wage rate may rise, employment available declines since the large and medium sectors are far more automated than the small sectors. Thus, the overall wage received by workers would fall. The purchasing power of those employed in the unorganized sectors and of workers as a whole would decline. (p. 186)

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Small businesses are financially affected by not being able to receive or offer Input Tax Credit.

The concern for the small suppliers led to their being exempted from registration under GST. So, suppliers with turnover of up to Rs 20 lakh have been exempted. But they will not be able to get input credit (ITC) and if they sell to any other business they cannot offer ITC. A very big disadvantage indeed. Similarly, those with a turnover between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 1 crore will fall under the Composition Scheme and will neither get ITC nor be able to offer ITC. They would also not be able to make inter-state sales. Further, the tax that they should have paid under GST but did not pay since they are exempt will have to be paid by the business purchasing from them. This is the reverse charge mechanism (RCM). Thus, the purchasers’ cost would go up. (Pp. 103-4)

(Subsequently, due to changes announced, units with turnover up to Rs.40 lakh are exempt from registration and the limit for Composition Scheme has been raised to Rs.1.5 crore)

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Some of the GST rates are higher than the rate they were paying under the earlier system which has increased prices and expenses for the common man

The GST rate on goods and services have been fixed close to the rate they were already paying under the old regime. So, if some good was being taxed at the rate of say, 15 per cent then it was moved largely to 18 per cent under GST. Most services were at the rate of 15 per cent and that has increased to 18 per cent. This has proved to be inflationary. (p. 104)

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Since indirect taxes are applied on goods and services consumed, they affect all sections of society unlike direct taxes which are collected from those who are well off and can afford to pay it. Indirect taxes are also regressive as they typically result in the impoverished sections paying a greater proportion of their income then the well off. The overwhelming focus on GST and indirect taxes as opposed to direct taxes is antithetical to the interests of the common man.

It was argued that indirect taxes are stagflationary while direct taxes are the opposite and hence more desirable. Thus, it would have been more desirable for the nation to collect more of direct taxes than indirect taxes. In 2005, the UPA I government had also talked of the need to introduce the direct tax code (DTC) to reform direct taxes. However, little headway has been made in that direction. The emphasis has been on GST and collecting more of indirect taxes—indicating a political bias. It was also shown that indirect taxes tend to be regressive while the direct taxes can be progressive. Thus going for more collection of indirect taxes increases the regressive component of India’s tax system. It also does not put greater pressure to tackle the black economy and collect more of direct taxes. Again this benefits the elite sections of society. They can continue to earn large sums of incomes through the black economy on which they do not have to pay taxes. (p. 172)

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 The local bodies have been deprived of their sources of revenue from taxation under the new regime.

As some of the important sources of revenue of local bodies (like Octroi and entertainment tax) have been absorbed in GST, they needed to be also provided with independent source of revenue. This has not happened. There is no mention of devolution to the local bodies. It is not clear whether the Centre or the states are to pass on a share of the resource. (p.190)

In Ground Scorching Tax, well-known economist Arun Kumar explains the reality behind GST.

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