Editorial
4
BY AMARTYA SEN he skill of doing research, the hard preparation needed for doing new and original work — going beyond the old established knowledge, and indeed the courage to think in novel and daring lines — are all immensely helped by good and exciting teaching. For me, this began at home. My grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, who taught at Santiniketan, could excite my interest in Sanskrit studies, including heretical texts in Sanskrit, which still inspire my engagement in that wonderful language, as I pick up a book in Sanskrit today. Sanskrit, we have to remember, is not only the language in which the Hindu and many of the Buddhist texts came; it is also the vehicle, among many other radical thoughts, of comprehensive doubts about the supernatural expressed in the Lokayata texts, and also the medium in which the questioning of class and caste and legitimacy of power would be expressed with spectacular eloquence by Shudraka in his profound play, “Mricchakatikam” (“The Little Clay Cart”). It was great for me to be taught at a very early age the distinction between a great language as a general vehicle of thought and the specific ideas — religious or sceptical — that may be expressed in that language. That distinction remains important today.
Voting from abroad T
T
he Union government has agreed, “in letter and spirit”, to implement the Supreme Court direction and the Election Commission’s recommendation to allow Non-Resident Indians to vote from overseas through postal ballots. Given the large NRI community dispersed globally, this move will undoubtedly have an impact on the country’s electoral politics in significant ways. Parliament passed the Representation of the People (Amendment) Act in 2010 to introduce Section 20A that enables a person who is a citizen of India, and is away from her ordinary residence in India for employment, education or other reasons, to be eligible to be registered as a voter in the constituency mentioned in her Indian passport: before that amendment, only “ordinary residents” could cast their vote. Although the 2010 amendment intended to include NRI participation in national politics, Section 20A had required NRIs to be physically present in their respective constituencies at the time of elections. Making it impractical for voters, this requirement defeated the intention of the legislature. A petition was filed in the Supreme Court praying that Section 20A of the Act be read down so as to allow NRIs to vote from abroad without having to be present in India. The petition argued that the provision was in violation of Article 14 of the Constitution to the extent that it impliedly treated persons on a different footing based on economic classifications. The Supreme Court and the government agreed with this contention without hesitation. The traditional argument against such external voting has been that only citizens who are present in the territory and affected by the consequences of their vote should be entitled to vote. As per this argument, since NRIs lacked sound knowledge about domestic conditions, they would be irresponsible in their electoral choices. But this argument is fast being disproved by empirical evidence. With the rapid increase in cross-border migrations, the concept of nationhood and political membership is increasingly being decoupled from territorial locations. India’s move towards enabling voting from overseas is an instance of a larger global trend towards increased citizen participation. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organisation, lists different voting methods that can be employed, such as “personal voting”, where voters can cast their vote at diplomatic missions abroad; “postal ballot method”, where votes are sent by regular post; “proxy vote” and “electronic voting”. From amongst these alternatives, the government has decided to employ the postal ballot route that the electoral system already uses for absentee-voters on official duty.
NEW DELHI | FRIDAY | JAN 16, 2015
Learning from one another
SAADDA HAQ Friday | January 16, 2015
SAADDA HAQ
I also have to acknowledge my debt to my other teachers — in Santiniketan, at Presidency College, and at Trinity College in Cambridge — in helping me to find my way. I am delighted that the Infosys Foundation has initiated a new scheme for the training of rural teachers of mathematics and science. Since our school education is the basis of all our education — no matter how “high” our higher education maybe — the fruits of investment in good school education can be extraordinarily high.
Narayana Murthy, who like me grew up in a family of teachers, knows that with visionary insight. Wider role of teaching I also want to say a few things about the wider role of teaching — in linking different nations and different cultures together. Teaching is not just a matter of instruction given by teachers to their individual students. The
from the Greeks and the Romans and the Babylonians. There is no shame in learning from others, and then putting what we have learned to good use, and going on to create new knowledge, new understanding, and thrillingly novel ideas and results. Indians of course were teaching other Indians. Perhaps the most powerful mathematician of ancient India, Brahmagupta,
other continued over centuries, involving — in addition to Aryabhata and Brahmagupta — Varahamihira and Bhaskara, among many others.
Greece and Rome and Baghdad, from where Indians themselves had learned many things.
And just as Indian mathematicians learned something from Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, they also taught some brilliantly new ideas to mathematicians elsewhere in the world. For example, Yi Xing [IHsing], who lived in China
Let me end with an example. The history of the term “sine” in Trigonometry illustrates how we learn from each other. That trigonometric idea was well developed by Aryabhata, who called it jya-ardha, and sometimes shortened it to jya. The Arab mathematicians, using Aryabhata’s idea, called it “jiba,” which is phonetically close. But jiba is a meaningless sound in Arabic, but jaib, which has the same consonants, is a good Arabic word, and since the Arabic script does not specify vowels, the later generation of Arab mathematicians used the term jaib, which means a bay or a cove. Then in 1150, when the Italian mathematician, Gherardo of Cremona, translated the word into Latin, he used the Latin word “sinus,” which means a bay or a cove in Latin. And it is from this — the Latin sinus — that the modern trigonometric terms “sine” is derived. In this one word we see the interconnection of three mathematical traditions — Indian, Arabic and European.
Indians of course were teaching other Indians. Perhaps the most powerful mathematician of ancient India, Brahmagupta, would not have been able to do such dazzling work without his having been influenced by the ideas of his own teachers, in particular Aryabhata, the pioneering leader of the Indian school of mathematics. progress of science and of knowledge depends in general on the learning that one nation, one group of people, derives from what has been achieved by other nations and other groups of people. For example, the golden age of Indian mathematics, which changed the face of mathematics in the world, was roughly from the fifth to the 12th century, and its beginning was directly inspired by what we Indians were learning from work done in Babylon, Greece and Rome. To be sure, there was an Indian tradition of analytical thinking going back much further, on which the stellar outbursts of mathematical work in India from around the fifth century drew, but we learned a lot about theorems and proofs and rigorous mathematical reasoning
would not have been able to do such dazzling work without his having been influenced by the ideas of his own teachers, in particular Aryabhata, the pioneering leader of the Indian school of mathematics. Alberuni, the Iranian mathematician, who spent many years in India from the end of the 10th to the early years of the 11th century (and helped to make Arab mathematicians learn even more from Indian mathematics than they were already doing) thought that Brahmagupta was perhaps the finest mathematician and astronomer in India, and possibly in the world, and yet (argued Alberuni), Brahmagupta could be so productive only by standing on the shoulders of the great Aryabhata, who was not only an extraordinary scientist and mathematician, but also a superb teacher. Learning from each
between the seventh and the eighth century, and who was, as Joseph Needham describes him, probably the finest Chinese mathematician of his time, knew all the relevant Indian texts. The Chinese mathematicians as well as the pioneering Arab mathematicians, including Al Khwarazmi (from whose name the term “algorithm” is derived), all knew Sanskrit and the Sanskritic literature in maths. What we are admiring here is not Indian mathematics done in splendid isolation (that rarely occurs anywhere in the world), but mathematics done with a huge role of international and interregional exchange of ideas. Indian research was deeply influenced by the knowledge of foreign works on the subject, and in turn, Indian maths influenced mathematical work even in those countries, including
Interconnections of traditions
Teaching and learning are activities that link people together. Even as we celebrate science and research, we have to recognise the role of teaching and that of learning from each other — from our teachers, from our colleagues, from our students, from our friends, and from our fellow human beings. There is something extraordinarily great in these interconnections. (Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. This is an extract from his remarks at the Infosys Science Prize ceremony held in Kolkata on January 5, 2015.)
When amendment amounts to nullification
BY RAMASWAMY R. IYER his article will not go into the question of the propriety of the ordinance route to legislation in this case, but will try to present a broad-brush picture of what the ordinance does to The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013, hereafter LARR Act 2013.
T
The general industry view, accepted by the present government, is that the LARR Act 2013 was a radical and draconian law which will bring industrial development to a halt. That view led to the conclusion that the Act needed to be urgently amended drastically. It is therefore necessary to take a brief look at the history of the Act. Attempt at fair resolution The inter-ministerial debate on a national displacement/rehabilitation policy and on the related issue of a need to overhaul the colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894 began in the 1980s and continued over nearly three decades under successive governments. In parallel, there were conferences and debates in civil society too. The attempt to find a generally acceptable compromise which would reconcile the conflicting interests of industry and farmers/landowners continued intermittently. Eventually this resulted in the LARR Act 2013. This was generally considered a wellmeant attempt at a fair resolution of a difficult and almost intractable conflict, though it continued to be criticised by both sides to the conflict. The point to note is that the LARR Act 2013 was not a hasty doctrinaire, ill-considered piece of legislation, but the final outcome of almost three decades of debate and consultation within government, among political parties and between state and civil society. The Bharatiya Janata Party (National Democratic Alliance) was a party to the passing of the 2013 Act. Barely a year later, with little experience of its working, that Act is now regarded as wholly retrograde, unacceptable and in need of root-andbranch “reform”. This arises out of industry’s impatient desire for the
easy acquisition of land for its projects, and the centrality of industry in the present government’s view of “development”. It is not being argued that the con-
tated, supported and actually brought about by the state using its sovereign powers. It is curious that those who argue for reducing the role of the state and “deregulating” industry want the state to take land away from
solely a question of money? The acquisition of land means not merely loss of land and homestead, but also loss of livelihoods, loss of a community and cultural continuities, loss of a way of life. This is bound to be a
“development” to be synonymous with industrial projects. Acquisition by the state
Let us turn to eminent domain, which means the sovereign right of
The inter-ministerial debate on a national displacement/rehabilitation policy and on the related issue of a need to overhaul the colonial Land Acquisition Act 1894 began in the 1980s and continued over nearly three decades under successive governments. In parallel, there were conferences and debates in civil society too. The attempt to find a generally acceptable compromise which would reconcile the conflicting interests of industry and farmers/landowners continued intermittently. Eventually this resulted in the LARR Act 2013. This was generally considered a well-meant attempt at a fair resolution of a difficult and almost intractable conflict, though it continued to be criticised by both sides to the conflict. cerns expressed by industry and by commentators sympathetic to it should not be considered, or that the government’s desire to accelerate industrial projects is illegitimate. However, given those concerns, the government could have reopened the debate, held wide-ranging consultations all over the country, and tried to arrive at a fresh compromise between conflicting interests. Instead, it has wholly accepted one perception of the conflict, and sought to undo the compromise embodied in the 2013 Act without a review. Apart from the merits of the ordinance, this is an authoritarian, partisan and undemocratic procedure.
farmers and give it to industry.
Losing a way of life
Should the process of diversion of land from agricultural use to industrial use be in fact easy? Should there not be some salutary difficulty here? First, there is the question of food security. The transfer of land from agriculture to other use cannot and should not be prevented, but some consideration of what the unregulated transfer of land away from agriculture implies for the food security of the country seems necessary. LARR 2013 ruled out the acquisition of multi-cropped agricultural land. That provision has been criticised, but it showed a certain concern that was legitimate. That concern has disappeared in the present ordinance.
It has been argued that development necessarily entails the transfer of land from agriculture to industry, but this is something that happens over a period of time. It does not follow that this must be actively facili-
A second justification for a degree of difficulty in land acquisition is the protection of the interests of the landowner. No doubt the ordinance retains the generous compensation provisions of the 2013 Act, but is it
traumatic experience. The Social Impact Assessment (SIA) provisions of the 2013 Act would have brought to notice the wider social and cultural implications of the acquisition of land, but that Act itself had exempted irrigation projects from this requirement, and now SIA has been virtually dropped in the amendment ordinance, considering the very large number of cases to which it will not apply. The role of the state should surely be not merely to facilitate the availability of land for industry but also to minimise pain to the landowners (who are also citizens), protect their fundamental and human rights and ensure justice to them. Should the state use its sovereign powers only to make things easy for industry? Any such impression, if it gains ground, would unwittingly lend weight to criticisms (doubtless wrong) of the present government as pro-industry and anti-farmer, and as holding
the state to override private property. In the intermittent debate during the years from the 1980s to 2013, this was a prominent issue. It was felt by many that the continued use of the old colonial Act of 1894 for the acquisition of land was unfortunate, and that there was no case at all for the state to exercise its sovereign power to take over private property and give it to companies in the private sector for “projects” regarded by the state as serving a “public purpose”. While this was not the universal view, there was a strong body of opinion in favour of limiting acquisition by the state for private entities. The 2013 Act met this partially by limiting the acquisition by the state to 20 per cent in the case of a private company and 30 per cent in that of a public-private partnership (PPP) project, if the owners’ consent for the transfer of 80 per cent in the case of the former and 70 per cent in that of the latter had been obtained. This meant that the view of the communi-
ty as a whole on the transfer of land had a certain weight. This safeguard virtually disappears in the ordinance because it will not apply in most cases. Apart from the virtual dropping of community consent, this change also means the return of the eminent domain of the state in full strength. This again is a non-democratic, authoritarian stance. By way of a digression it may be added that property rights are presumably sacrosanct in capitalism, but evidently this does not apply to a farmer’s right to his or her land. The property of an industrialist is inviolable, and nationalisation is socialism and therefore anathema; but the acquisition of land from a farmer — which corresponds to nationalisation in the industrial sector — is evidently good capitalism! One has to ask: after the amendment what is left of the Act? If we consider the huge exemption list (Section 10A introduced by the ordinance), and the concomitant disappearance of the SIA and the 80 per cent/70 per cent consent provision in most cases, it becomes clear that the Act has become purely ornamental. What the ordinance does is not to amend the 2013 Act, but virtually repeal it. Having done so, the ordinance sanctimoniously brings acquisitions under a number of other Acts within the purview of the amended Act and claims much credit for this. The Congress Party says that the coverage of those Acts was already foreseen in the 2013 Act. That response misses the point, which is that there is not much virtue in first rendering the Act toothless and then bringing other Acts within its purview. This is disingenuous, to say the least. One can only hope that the ordinance will be withdrawn or lapse for want of parliamentary support to the needed legislation. Alas, the hope is not very robust. (Ramaswamy R. Iyer is a former Secretary, Water Resources, Government of India.)
Our team will publish your thoughts send us your articles at news.saaddahaq@gmail.com