Category Archives: Sustainability

220 Years Ago Today, Congress Banned US Vessels from Supplying Slaves to Other Countries

However, slavery was not banned in the US until 1862, 68 years later! It’s unfortunate that while the Congress of 1794 was enlightened enough to ban the spread of slavery, they were not progressive enough (or should I say benevolent enough) to ban slavery outright. The sad truth is that the forefathers of the robber barons new that cheap labour was the key to building their empire, and didn’t want to ban slavery as the cheapest labour was free labour.

And the lust for cheap labour continues until this day. The abolition of slavery didn’t do much to increase the average person’s quality of life as there were no minimum wage law until 1933 and no minimum wage law between 1935 and 1938 (as the first law was struck down by the Supreme Court). As a result, only those lucky enough to be protected by the unions in the mid-to-late 19th century had any guarantee of a decent wage until the minimum wage act came into force.

And what happened when the minimum wage reached its highest purchasing power ever in 1968? The new robber barons of the 1970’s started to look abroad for cheaper labour and by the early 1980’s, the biggest organizations were starting to outsource to China, Vietnam, and other low-cost locales. (And when those locales got expensive, outsourcing spread to other locales like India, Malaysia, and the Philippines and a blind-eye was turned when the supply chain used child labour.)

The lesson here is that 220 years ago the Congress of the United States embarked along the right path with a very ethical decision to ban US ships from supplying slaves to other nations, but didn’t follow up with an across-the-board ban on slavery. As a result, slavery endured for three more generations and gave the US a black eye from a historical human rights perspectives that it need not have gotten. Similar tardiness with respect to unions’ rights legislation, minimum wage laws, equal rights laws, and child labour laws have also resulted in black eyes either for the nation or some of its biggest corporations that spread its image around the world.

There’s no need for any of this, especially today when your organization can control its fate and its image (and have a positive effect on the image of its country). It’s time for you to put an end to “just do as I say, don’t do as I do” in your supply chain and take proactive efforts to make sure you’re socially responsible across the board and across the supply chain. Stand up and make the US a leader in global human and worker rights initiatives. Show the emerging markets what they have to achieve if they truly want to be a first world super-power. It’s not just about GDP.

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 03 – Accountability & Corruption

According to Transparency International, in 2013, India ranks 94th out of 177 countries, with a score of 36, on the Corruption Perceptions Index which measures the perceived corruption in the public sector. In other words, while there are 83 countries that are perceived as more corrupt, there are 93 countries that are less corrupt. In comparison, the US is 19th with a score of 73, Canada and Australia tie for 9th with a score of 81, and New Zealand is seen as the least corrupt country with a score of 91. In other words, corruption is still quite bad. In comparison, China is 80th with a score of 40 and Brazil is 72nd with a score of 42. Corruption has become such an endemic feature of Indian administration and commercial life that in some parts of the country nothing moves in the intended direction until the palm of the deliverer is greased. (Dreze and Sen, An Uncertain Glory)

In addition, Bribery is a huge problem. In back to back studies in 2005 and 2008, Transparency International found that, despite efforts to curb the practice and corruption, the number of people who had first-hand experience with (and had to pay) bribes only dropped from 62% to 40%. In other words, 2 out of every 5 Indians had to fork over bribes to get a basic service that they were entitled to (such as getting a birth certificate or a passport) from a public official. Corruption is so bad that a NGO (non-governmental organization) by the name of 5th Pillar distributed over 1.3 Million zero rupee notes (modelled after the 50 rupee notes) between 2007 and 2011 in an effort to fight corruption.

Zero Rupees

As clearly stated by the Accountability Initiative, spawned by the Center for Policy Research, Dharam, Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, there is surprisingly little regular, reliable and most importantly, accessible information on the implementation of service delivery programs in India today. And that’s being politically correct to the nth degree. Dreze and Sen are more accurate when they state that, in An Uncertain Glory, particular to India is the combination of insistence — for entirely plausible reasons — on having a large public sector, combined with a fairly comprehensive neglect of accountability in operating this large sector.

The issue of accountability is particularly important when discussing the many infrastructure issues in India. The neglect of both physical infrastructure (such as power, roads, water, sanitation, etc.) and social infrastructure (education, health care, opportunity for employment, etc.) is extremely widespread. One of the biggest examples failure of public accountability is the crippling power blackout of July, 2012 which plunged half of the country into darkness and earned India the reputation of the blackout nation. This is a prime example of the lack of accountability as even the central guardians of the Indian power strategy at the highest level face little pressure to get things right and are not tasked to take responsibility for the terrible state of power planning in India (where double digit percentages of the power generated is stolen and where significant amounts of generated power is wasted). Consider the story of the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and the Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar power plant in Uttar Pradesh as recounted by Dreze and Sen. When one of the authors visited the NTPC headquarters on a campus near the plant, he found that a large number of air conditioners were switched on full blas throughout the day, even in the deserted lobby of the guest house. Just outside the boundary walls of the campus, people from the Dom community, working as ‘sweepers’ for the NTPC for twenty five years, live in shacks without any electricity. When asked why they tolerate the situation, they said they feared they would lose their jobs if they complained about their predicament.

It is the lack of accountability that allows corruption, and bribery, to continue to flourish. Corruption flourishes in informational darkness. Until there is more transparency, information accessibility, and accountability in India, it will continue to flourish. This lack of accountability combined with a general belief that certain kinds of bribery and corruption are standard behaviour that is to be expected is posing huge problems for India and limiting its progress. If there was less corruption, there would not only be more accountability, but more money available to address some of the serious physical and social infrastructure problems that we addressed in previous posts.

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 04 – Behavioural and Social Norms & Castes

As we have demonstrated in the last 9 posts, India has some serious challenges ahead of it. And despite the severity of the challenges like education, health care, and even sanitation, it has even bigger challenges still. The first of these, that we will address in this post, is the social norms.

The first challenge is with the general populace. For example, as Dreze & Sen chronicled in An Uncertain Glory, if asked, due to the fact that there is a model (if not an effective one) for bringing public health care to the rural areas and a growing private industry where you can presumably get what you need when you need it (if you can pay for it), most Indians believe they have reasonable access to health care. Given the considerable number of deaths from infection, the very high citizen to physician ratio, and the average number of people each health care center needs to serve, this is not the case. Secondly, due to the lack of progress on education, and the fact that 10 years after the first PROBE study there is still a significant lack of teaching days, there is obviously an opinion that the education being received by the average Indian child is adequate, which is a perception that is far from reality. There should not only be an uproar about the lack of teachers in some districts (as one per school clearly is not enough given the size of India’s population), but also an uproar that these highly paid individuals are absent 20%+ of the time!

The second challenge is with the government. The government doesn’t want to tackle tough issues, and certainly doesn’t want to take any steps that might cause a considerable backlash from any group of a significant size. Plus, if you look at the relative spending on health care and education in India versus other BRIC countries (Source: World Bank), total spending in India on health care (including the private sector) is a mere 3.9% versus 5.2% in China and 8.9% in Brazil, largely due to the fact that the public sector spend on health care is 1.2% of GDP compared to China’s 2.7% of GDP. If you look at Education, India spends a mere 3.1% (Source: Wikipedia) compared to China’s 3.9% (Source: Xinhuanet) and Brazil’s 5.1%. India is not adequately spending to address it’s most fundamental problems.

Government spending in India for 2013 is estimated at 302 Billion USD while revenues are projected to be 210 Billion USD. While that’s not a lot considering that India has over 1.2 Billion people, it’s still enough to do something. So where is the Indian Government spending its money? If you look at the Budget at a Glance as posted on the Government of India Site, over 1/3rd (37%) of the non-capital non-plan expenditures, which constitute almost 60% of projected expenditures, are going to interest payments and prepayment premium (370,684 crore of 992,908). The next biggest category (at 23%) is subsidies (231,084 crore of 992,908). The third biggest category (at 12%) is defence services (116,931 crore of 992,908). Grants make up 8%, pensions 7%, and the police make up 4%. The budget is rounded out by economic services at 2.4%, general services at 2.3%, and social services at a whopping 2.3%. (Taking us to 98.5% of the budget.) The remaining categories consisting of the postal deficit, the NDRF (National Disaster Relief Fund), union territory expenditures, and foreign government grants collectively amount to about 1.5%. Of the plan expenditures, all of the non-capital expenditures (27%) go towards the central plan and central assistance. In other-words, relatively speaking, India is spending too much on servicing its debt, paying its pensions, and defending its country and not nearly enough on education, health-care, and other economic assistance to lift the majority of its population out of near-poverty — a population it needs educated and healthy to take on China.

The third is with the media. As per Dreze & Sen’s An Uncertain Glory, among more than five thousand articles published on the editorial pages of India’s leading English-medium dailies during the last six months of 2012, less than 1% of the total editorial space was dedicated to health-related matters, and that was with a very broad definition of “health-related matter”. As we will discuss in more detail in a future post, the media really needs to spend more time on critical issues like health care, sanitation, and education.

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 05 – Sanitation

Sanitation in India is a major problem. The fact that India is 13th among a list of the 16 countries outside of sub-saharan Africa that are poorer than it in the rankings does not do the severity of the problem justice. As we noted in our post on Poverty, in India, 55% of households practice open defecation. In comparison, in Bangladesh, which has half of the GDP of India per capita, only 8.4% of the population practices open defecation.

Moreover, only 88% of the population has access to an improved (clean) water source (for drinking). In rural areas, the statistic is even worse — 84% (compared to 96% in urban areas). That’s 16% of the population without even access to clean water. For an emerging country, this is a disgrace. In China, a country with three times the land area, the statistics are 98% and 85% (and 91% overall). Why is it so bad? Well, for starters, as of 2010, only two cities in India — Thiruvananthapuram and Kota — get a continuous water supply (which is a situation that needs to change).

This is a huge problem. Even worse than the health care situation. When you get right down to it, if more people had access to sanitary conditions, communicable diseases and infections, which account for a percentage of deaths that is (at least) 20 times the percentage of deaths that communicable diseases and infections should account for, wouldn’t be so widespread. (People can’t die from a communicable disease or infection they don’t get, and the number one way to stop the spread of communicable diseases and infection is better sanitary conditions and sanitary practices.) With respect to diarrhoea, 88% of deaths occur because of unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

Sewerage, where available, is usually in a bad state. In Delhi, for example, the sewerage network has lacked maintenance over the years and overflow of raw sewage in open drains is common, due to blockage, settlements and inadequate pumping capacities. The capacity of the 17 existing wastewater treatment plants in Delhi is only enough to process about 50% of the waste water produced. Across India, the most recent estimate (in 2003) was that only 27% of India’s wastewater was being treated, with the remainder flowing into rivers, canals, groundwater or the sea. Abysmal!

Just how bad is the situation? Consider this passage from Wikipedia:

For example, the sacred Ganges river is infested with diseases and in some places the Ganges becomes black and septic. Corpses, of semi-cremated adults or enshrouded babies, drift slowly by. NewsWeek describes Delhi’s sacred Yamuna River as “a putrid ribbon of black sludge” where the concentration of fecal bacteria is 10,000 times the recommended safe maximum despite a 15-year program to address the problem. Cholera epidemics are not unknown.

Plus, the continuing depletion of ground water tables and the continuing deterioration of ground water quality are threatening the sustainability of both urban and rural water supply in many parts of India. India can’t afford to pollute any more of its water supply and needs to get waste water treatment under control rapidly. Otherwise, health care problems are just going to get worse, and the repercussions will be substantial.

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 06 – Health Care

As per our post on poverty, health care is a substantial problem in India. Not only does India have the 9th lowest life expectancy among the 16 countries outside of sub-saharan Africa that are poorer than it is, but is also has the 10th lowest infant and under-5 mortality rates and the second worst proportion of children under 5 who are undernourished! Then, as per our last post on education and opportunity, at leaset 93% of the workforce has no health insurance in a country leaning heavily towards privatized health care.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost 40% of all deaths in India are still due to infections! (Source: Health and Health Care in India by UCL) The majority of the remainder are due to non-communicable conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory disorders, and cancers. (Compared to the developed world which manages most chronic respiratory disorders and some of the cardiovascular diseases so well that the patients often die from other causes.) In comparison, the only type of death due to infections to break the top 10 in Canada is death due to influenza and pneumonia which strike down 1.6% of the population to grab the 9th spot. In other words, the number of deaths in India due to easily treatable infections is at least 20 times higher than it should be!

India currently spends about 1.2% of GDP on publicly funded healthcare, an amount considerably less than most other comparable countries. In comparison, health care spending clocks in at 5.1% of GDP in China and Russia and 9% in Brazil! (Total spending on health care, including all private spend, is about 4%, but the private spending is mainly by the rich.) Due to this limited funding, and the substantially insufficient funding allocated to the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) (as outlined in our post on Poverty), 400 Million to 600 Million of the poorest Indians do not get access to the essential medicines they need. When you also consider that India is now the worlds 3rd largest producer of medicine by volume, the absurdity of the situation really comes into the spotlight.

And progress is slow. Even if the extension of the Government’s National Common Minimum Programme, announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the country’s 66th Independence Day achieves its goal and provides access to free public health care to over half of the population by 2017 (as opposed to the fifth who currently have access) via the country’s 160,000 sub-centers, 23,000 primary health care centers, 5,000 community health centers, 1,000 sub-district hospitals, and 600 district hospitals, that will still leave hundreds of millions of Indians without access to even the most basic of health care services. (Furthermore, the proposal that the Federal Government would directly fund 75% of the relatively limited cost of extending the generic medicines supply to the public health service doesn’t go far enough. At least one third of the population cannot afford to pay even 25% of the cost of generic medicine, which, as it is produced in India, represents relatively little cost to the Government.)

And even though 160,000 sub-centers might sound-impressive, the requirements for a sub-center is one Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) and one Male Health Worker. That’s it. Not even a full nurse. You only find those in Primary Health Centers, Community Health Centers, and Hospitals. In addition, the primary health centers (PHC) also tend to be minimally staffed. They are only required to have one medical officer (doctor) who is supported by an average of 14 paramedical and administrative staff, in total, and, at current numbers, support a population base of 50,000 people! Furthermore, a community health center, which has to serve approximately 200,000 people on average, typically only has four medical specialists (a surgeon, general physician, gynaecologist, and paediatrician). Plus, per capita, the number of physicians is quite low. Right now, India clocks in at roughly 6.5 per 10,000 people (and many of the doctors are in the hospitals), while Canada has 20.7 and the United States has 24.2. (Source, KFF) Also, while India has roughly 1,600 hospitals to serve 1,237 Million people, the United States has almost 6,000 to serve 314 Million people. In other words, there are 15 times as many people per hospital in India as there are in the United States. (770,000 citizens per hospital in India vs 52,000 per hospital in the United States)

Health Care is a huge problem and one that desperately needs to be solved. After all, if your population is not healthy, how can you expect to give it a good education if it’s worrying about being well enough to study? And if you cannot educate it, how can you ready it to take advantage of any opportunity that may give it the hope of lifting itself out of poverty, something which must be done to increase the tax base enough to build the required infrastructure to support the fierce competition of today’s global economy?