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November 22, 2005 : Reviewed in the Hindu

July 17,2005 : No man's Children

May 05, 2005: Quoted in Education World

April 14, 2005: Reviewed in Business Standard

March 21, 2005: Reviewed in Outlook

November 22, 2005:Reviewed in the Hindu

Livelihood and urban public space
G. ANANTHAKRISHNAN

Explores the baffling contradictions of urban India through street livelihood

If denial of opportunity has been perfected into an art, arguably the most talented practitioners must be those wielding the plethora of vintage regulatory laws that govern the use of urban public spaces in the country. The enforcers of these laws have ensured that the image of the street is epitomised by the greased palm, heavy boot, swinging lathi and `raid raj', through successive generations.
The concerns of those who must make a living on the street drive Parth J. Shah and Naveen Mandava to explore the baffling contradictions of urban India; they study the phenomenon of thousands of street hawkers and traders providing a range of goods and services to the community and yet being treated as a negative offshoot of urbanisation.
The book that has resulted from their effort presents interesting vignettes of street life. It is a documentation of all too familiar petty corruption, excessive and archaic laws, indifference of governments to livelihood issues and the collective failure of class interests to bring about change.
The categories of the self-employed covered in the book range from hawkers and traders to cyclerickshaw and autorickshaw drivers, porters and others. It is no secret that all these activities involve the payment of bribes to authority. The book documents the bribe amounts paid to different wings of the government such as the police and the municipal authorities, the periodicity of payments and the underlying factors that promote `speed money', not the least of which is the maze of documentation required for all licenses and permits. The regulations and document forms are reproduced liberally in the book to drive home the point.
Approach to livelihood
It is in the discussion and interpretation of the data recorded in different cities, notably Delhi, that the authors move into contentious ground. Regulation, in their perception, is at the root of all that has gone wrong and there should be a paradigm shift in the approach to livelihood options pursued in the public space.
The market approach is arguably the best to untangle the mess, the book contends, since it dynamically responds to demand by increasing or reducing supply; by removing the caps on rickshaw permits (which are not enforced even now in any case) there would be greater opportunity for all and only so many rickshaws would exist as the market can support them.
Similarly, placing the street space under the control of ward committees formed by local traders and elected representatives of residents' associations with powers to lease public space would lead to equitable apportioning of the hawking area. Lastly, the book says, the concept of centralised planning of urban development should yield place to a different vision, one that gives greater opportunity for local factors — and private capital — to set priorities.
Shift in governance
The call for a shift in governance models is largely based on the venality of officialdom and its failure to recognise that restrictive legislation is shackling enterprise and opportunity. These are no doubt major challenges that are universally acknowledged. What the authors seem to miss in their anxiety to see change is the protective function of regulation, where it is adopted through democratic and transparent processes.
Enabling laws, consistent with globally acknowledged rights-based governance approaches, aid rather than retard growth since they make it possible for the weakest individual participant to approach legal and other forums and obtain redress regardless of his position within a particular group or class; such rights are not in conflict with the rights of others and can be asserted by all members of the class, such as hawkers, collectively.
The authors are on solid ground when they discuss the travails of the weaker sections that must contend with the unsympathetic attitude of authority. Their logic falters when they advocate an extraordinarily high dependence on market-based solutions for fundamental problems that concern the economically weaker sections and legitimately lie in the overall context of citizen welfare issues.

July 17,2005 : No man's Children

They come in droves into cities, running away from rural poverty and searching for a decent existence. A lot of them eventually end up as street vendors — selling vegetables, fruits, peanuts, plastic goods, clothes and food to the more fortunate city folks. Some are those who have lost their jobs after mills closed down, or factories down-sized or merged. All these people have dived straight into what is referred to as the “informal sector” of our economy. They come right up to our doorsteps, set up makeshift shops on neighbourhood pavements or start running rickshaws. After all, these jobs require less capital and few skills. In effect, they provide us “subsidised services” to us.

What do they get, in exchange? An almost daily brush with the municipal and law and order authorities for “encroaching” and becoming an “eyesore” in the globalisation-induced glitzy urban landscape. But can we wish them away by merely pushing them away from the superficial surface of the urban landscape? This book looks at these and other regulatory and licencing processes involved in street-vending or hawking in India, through case studies of porters, meat-sellers, shopkeepers, cycle and autorickshaw drivers and other household-based industries across the country. Liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG) has not made any difference to the daily lives of the working poor, it says. “For them, it has been all LPQ (licences, permits and quotas), says Parth J Shah in his introduction.

Long back, Manushi, a women’s organisation, had taken up the cause of hawkers. In 2001 and 2002, the then New Delhi Municipal Corporation chairman had gone in for daily clearance operations of hawkers in Connaught Place and Sarojini Nagar, key markets of Delhi, especially during Diwali and New Year. In no time, the New Delhi Traders Association filled up the space vacated by hawkers, bringing to the fore the nexus between rich shopkeepers and the municipal authorities. The hawkers, meanwhile, ran from pillar to post to get their stuff back or to hide them somewhere.

It is for reasons like this that the book questions, and rightly so, the whole process of urban space management in India, including the much tom-tommed Master Plans. “The best way to make the plans work is to allow them to rest in the hands of those for whom they are meant...,” it says.

The authors offer many suggestions to tackle the issue, like decentralisation, greater involvement of civil society and reliance on market institutions. Above all, it calls for giving the poor more economic freedom as it is “more important for those who are at the bottom-rung of the economic ladder”. The least that the government should do is not view the pursuit of livelihood by the poor as a “trade-off vis-a-vis the quality of life of urban resedents”. After all, this vast section of the population also contributes to our growing economy.

Overall, an interesting read for urban planners, as well as those urbanites and opinion-makers who consider hawkers as encroachers but dare not raise a shindy about entire unauthorised colonies that house the rich, like Sainik Farms in the Capital. Last, but not the least, the grey boxes on various Acts, the various nuggets of information, as well as photo reliefs give the book a lively look.
 

 May 05, 2005: Quoted in Education World

Growing crusade against corruption in education

Though in the somnolent groves of Indian academia it’s business as usual, of late horror statistics and media reportage of pervasive corruption within the education system is arousing indignation among right-thinking people across the country. Dilip Thakore reports

While it is debatable whether the snowballing movement against corruption in education originated in southern India and because of the charge led by Justice Venkatachala, a beneficial outcome is that individuals and organisations across the country are becoming aware of the issue and its profound ramifications. Early this year the Delhi-based Academic Foundation in association with the Centre for Civil Society published a path-breaking study Law, liberty and Livelihood — Making a Living on the Street authored by Dr. Parth J.Shah and Naveen Mandava which describes in harrowing detail the open, continuous and unchecked corruption which street vendors, pavement hawkers, railway porters and human-power (i.e non-automotive) rickshaw pullers suffer in India’s mean streets. One of the chapters in this extraordinary study is entitled: ‘Opening a school in Delhi: A Learning Experience’. It details the myriad rules, regulations and obstacles that educrats in the Delhi state and municipal governments have legislated right under the nose of Parliament and the Supreme Court of India to prevent the promotion of much needed primary and secondary schools by social entrepreneurs, philanthropists and non-government organisations in the national capital.

According to the authors of Law, Liberty and Livelihood, under the Delhi State Education Act, 1973 and related legislation, "opening a private (i.e financially independent) school in Delhi is a mind-numbing task; it involves a colossal amount of paper-work". Starting with getting an association of a group of individuals registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, or alternatively as a trust, every promoter of a school has to obtain ‘recognition’ from one of 12 zonal offices of the municipal corporation; obtain an essentiality certificate from the state government "to avoid proliferation of schools which could make existing schools redundant"; provide freeships or full scholarships to 25 percent of the enrolled students "belonging to the weaker sections" if land has been allotted at a concessional price by the state government; obtain a building safety and health certificate and fulfill eight other conditions relating to minimum land area, playgrounds, class sizes, number of classrooms, prescription of textbooks, provision of libraries etc. Significantly none of these strict conditionalities and stipulations are applicable to any of the 1,833 MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) schools. Moreover after a private school is operational it is subject to periodic audits by several of the 119 school inspectors of the MCD.

After detailing the case histories of two unidentified regularly ripped off private schools in the national capital territory, Shah and Mandava pronounce the following verdict: "... it requires Rs.15 lakh to open (sic) a primary school, Rs.25-30 lakh for a middle school, Rs.60-70 lakh for a secondary school, finally a whopping Rs.1-1.2 crore for a higher secondary school. Without catering to the illegal demands of the sarkari babus (government officials) it is next to impossible to run a private school. In other words, operating through a purely legitimate route is wishful thinking on the part of an applicant." What they could perhaps have also added is that no self-respecting, middle class parent is inclined to enroll his/her child in inevitably chaotic, dysfunctional government schools. And with private schools so difficult to promote, a massive capacity shortage has been artificially created resulting in a plethora of forced donations, capitation and admission fees rackets within established institutions.

It is a tribute to the public opinion and media management skills of the nation’s politicians and bureaucrats — the prime beneficiaries of flourishing licence-permit raj in education — that the growing national debate on corruption in education which hits the most vulnerable people in society the hardest, i.e children, ignores this root cause of corrupt practices in the education sector. The attention of most crusaders against corruption in education is focussed upon downstream graft which is the consequence rather than cause.

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April 14, 2005: Reviewed in Business Standard

Guaranteeing unemployment   Sunil Jain / New Delhi April 14, 2005

If the UPA is genuinely concerned about creating employment, this book is essential reading for its managers

SUNIL JAIN

While various politicians, especially those in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA), have been keen to guarantee jobs for the ‘aam aadmi’ in some form or the other over the years, either directly in the form of Mandal-style reservations/affirmative action or indirectly through unemployment insurance as in the UPA’s rural employment bill, each has steadfastly refused to see what was under their very nose.

Namely that it is economic growth that creates employment, and that if not enough jobs are being created (the so-called jobless growth argument you keep hearing), it is because of political roadblocks.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the Chinese experience knows, for instance, that it is the policy of hire and fire that has played a major role in that country’s spectacular economic growth and job creation—when industrialists know they are free to close down their units and retrench labour in the face of an economic slowdown, they are that much less hesitant to create fresh capacity as compared to a situation (as in India) where they have to keep the labour even if the business is no longer profitable.

Another political roadblock, as the World Bank’s surveys have helpfully pointed out, is that it takes 89 days to start off a business in India—why would anyone want to set up a factory and create jobs if it takes that long to do so, another 425 days to legally enforce a contract, and another 10 years to close down the same business if you find it’s not profitable?

What’s now been added to this school of knowledge, thanks to the efforts of Parth J Shah and Naveen Mandava of the Delhi-based Centre for Civil Society (CCS), is an entirely new dimension, that of how perverse government policy restricts employment possibilities for the poor, rickshaw pullers and street vendors.

Shah’s CCS did pioneering work when, in 2003, it came out with the Delhi Citizen Handbook, which exposed the rot in Delhi’s governance.

Law, Liberty and Livelihood, of course, is not in the same league as the Delhi handbook, since such work goes back to the mid-90s, when Madhu Kishwar and Manushi even petitioned the courts on the matter.

Whose work came first is a matter of some acrimony and a letter has been sent off to the organisation that has awarded CCS for its efforts, but this needn’t detain us in this review—what’s important for us is that Shah has, as in 2003, brought out the nature of the problem very evocatively and through well-chosen examples, using personal interviews as the means to gather information.

Fat-cat businessmen paying bribes is one thing, but did you know that a toy seller occupying three feet by four feet on a pavement pays around Rs 1,000 per month to the shopkeeper before whose shop he sets up his stall and another Rs 250 to the police, or that a clothes-seller occupying a seven by six space pays Rs 300 to the shopkeeper and Rs 1,000 to the police? Or that a mehendi-wallah with 2.25 square feet (that’s what 1.5 by 1.5 feet works out to) pays Rs 800 to the cops?

The idea is not to show that the police are corrupt (they’re also underpaid) or that they fleece the poor (we all know that), but that the laws are designed in such a way to almost ensure this happens, to ensure that fledgling businesses, if you can call them that, do not develop beyond a point—Shah has examples of a watch repair man who set up shop with an investment of Rs 1,000 around 13 years ago and has a business capital of only Rs 5,000 now, and of a hawker of diaries who began his work with an investment of Rs 3,000 six years ago and now has goods worth only Rs 3,500.

None of this, of course, is surprising when you consider some of the laws this report highlights. Delhi, for instance, has half a million rickshaw-pullers but the MCD has said the upper limit for licensing these is 99,000—naturally, then, the other four lakh are easy game for policemen to exploit. It gets worse.

Normally, you’d expect that as a business does well, you expand—so, in the case of the rickshaw trade, enterprising people would buy more than one rickshaw and hire drivers to ply them, in exactly the same manner that happens in the case of auto-rickshaws and taxies.

Well, Article 3(1) of the Cycle Rickshaw Bye-Laws of 1960 requires that the owner and driver of the cycle rickshaw must be the same person!

Makes a mockery, by the way, of the same law, which says that while no one will be given more than one licence (presumably to ensure no one gets rich out of the rickshaw business), the Commissioner has the power to grant more than one licence (subject to a maximum of five) to a widow or a handicapped person.

This may be a family business, but if the owner is unable to ply the rickshaw due to ill-health or whatever, the rickshaw must remain unutilised.

The Delhi Municipal Corporation Act of 1957 has another Rule 6, which governs sale of ice cream by hawking and says “the icecream salesman will not shout to attract customers nor will he sit or lie on the trolley at any time”, while the Mumbai “technical conditions” governing hawkers say “they should not hawk within 100 metres from any place of worship, holy shrine, educational institution and general hospital and within the periphery of 150 metres from any Municipal or other market”.

Other acts lay down the distance between water trolleys and how many animals each owner can get slaughtered in a day. If the government can’t guarantee jobs, as indeed it shouldn’t, at least people should be freed up to ply their own trade.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ March 21, 2005: Reviewed in Outlook

The Mean Streets

Has liberalisation helped the Indian poor? This collection of case studies is one of the strongest evidences that it hasn't.

PAROMITA SHASTRI


LAW, LIBERTY AND LIVELIHOOD—MAKING A LIVING ON THE STREETS
by Edited by Parth J. Shah, Naveen Mandava
Academic Foundation and CCS
Pages: 313 ; Rs 595

Has liberalisation helped the Indian poor? This collection of case studies is one of the strongest evidences that it hasn’t. Why? Simply because there has been no liberalisation in the areas where most of India’s poor mainly work and earn a living—on the street. Hawking, vending, setting up a small shop, driving a cycle- or an auto-rickshaw, railway portering, setting up a household industry, even starting the smallest school are activities fraught with danger and dehumanisation.

It takes 89 days of procedures to start a business in India, compared to 11 days in Pakistan and 7 in Singapore. The licence-permit-quota raj for the poor is still alive and kicking. Did you know over 80 per cent of Delhi’s cycle-rickshaws are illegal? That since it’s illegal for the puller to own a rickshaw he can’t pull, he must forever be poor?

There are more staggering examples. Economic freedom is more valuable for those at the bottom rung of the development ladder. Why doesn’t the state let the poor live and work? Why don’t we have laws that pass the Livelihood Freedom test? Surely questions that need to be honestly answered in the 15th year of reforms.

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