Panel Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies

Insider-Outsider-Insider

Rohini Nilekani moderates a discussion on delivering large-scale transformational programs, impact on the ground, and the implementation of such programmes in a large and diverse country like India. The discussion draws on the learnings from the Swachh Bharat Mission, the world’s largest successful behaviour change programme, which drew over 55 crore rural Indians out of open defecation. The discussion covers “Method in the Madness: Insights from the career of an insider-outsider-insider”, the memoir of Parameswaran Iyer recently published by HarperCollins. In the book, he reflects on the unique path he has tread – from cracking the prestigious Indian Administrative Service to becoming a globe-trotting World Bank technocrat, to playing the role of a coach to his professional tennis-playing children, to finally returning to India and implementing the Swachh Bharat Mission.

This is an edited version of a discussion on delivering large-scale transformational programs, impact on the ground, and the implementation of such programmes in India, moderated by Rohini Nilekani. The discussion draws on the learnings from the Swachh Bharat Mission which drew over 55 crore rural Indians out of open defecation, and “Method in the Madness: Insights from the Career of an Insider-Outsider-Insider”, the memoir of Parameswaran Iyer published by HarperCollins. In addition to Parameswaran Iyer, the other speakers were LK Atheeq and Sunil Yajaman.

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Fair But Not Equal

In his memoir, Parameswaran Iyer is able to share his insights which come from a long career and the experiences he has had both in the government, outside of the government, and as a road manager and tennis coach to his daughter, Tara. He says the book may be particularly helpful for young professionals and people embarking on a career. His own experiences with the Swachh Bharat story is included with insights into how to deliver large-sale programs and what happens when implementing them on the ground. Along with the lessons he has learnt and some of the mistakes he’s made, Param also includes practical pro tips that he picked up from different people.

One of them is from his daughter’s tennis coach, Vesa Ponkka, who said, “I treat everyone fairly, but not equally.” The reasoning behind this was that out of the 30 aspiring tennis players that he was training, the coach would watch to see the degree of effort that the children were putting in. Depending on this, he would give more time to the ones who were putting in more effort. He gave all of them an equal opportunity to train but he also saw who had more potential and motivation to excel and paid attention to them. Param believes that this applies everywhere – in the public sector and the private sector, we should treat everyone fairly and give everyone a chance, but people who put in more effort and who do better need to be given more time and should be appreciated and recognised. He applied this principle in the ministry as well as the states, so states that were doing better in Swachh Bharat got more attention, technical assistance, and more funds.

There were many forks in the road for Param and one of the things he learnt early on was to seize the moment. Things will change and disruptions will occur, so it’s important to be able to examine the opportunities and not let anything pass us by. Another crucial aspect of learning for him was the experiences he was able to get in different sectors and with different organisations. The IAS gives you a unique opportunity to experience different sectors and kinds of jobs. In order to have a competitive advantage, it’s important to get a kind of broad area specialisation as well as in-depth knowledge. When Tara decided that she wanted to play professional tennis, that was an opportunity that couldn’t be postponed and so Param decided to give up his job at the World Bank and become her road manager. He says that the two years that he spent travelling with his son and daughter was absolutely unique and something he’ll never regret. After they both went back to college, Param decided to get back to the government and joined the Mayawati government in UP.

Sunil Yajaman has known Param for 25 years and remembers meeting him and Tara in Delhi while he was the national coach with the All India Tennis Association. Although Tara was very talented, she had an injury which made a further tennis career unlikely. However, there are so many more like her who may benefit from more public support and better infrastructure from the government in India. Sunil is currently the Joint Secretary of the Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association and confirms that this is a big problem with sports in the country. In the US or Europe, every school has a wonderful infrastructure and community courts that the government has built. If every district can have two tennis courts, badminton courts, a cricket ground, and a football ground, we could see a lot more rising sports stars, he says. Missions like Khelo India are attempting to decentralise this idea and create sports infrastructure at the local level. Param points out that we also need to develop world-class coaches who understand the game and make it a career worth having. Along with the infrastructure and coaches, we also need more encouragement for sports other than cricket. It’s worth investing in all sports and getting kids from a very young age to participate will produce a lot of champions.

Insider-Outsider

In governance, we have seen how Presidents bring in their people, who may go back into the corporate sector and then return later. In terms of this revolving door method and bringing more expertise into government, Param argues that it’s important to open up to lateral entrants and bring in new expertise but also allow IAS officers and civil servants to get more exposure outside themselves. It should be a two-way street where they should be able to work in the private sector as well as at international organisations, of course with some ground rules in case of a conflict of interest. Param thinks that this movement in and out of the government, will actually bring in a lot of new ideas. As an outsider and insider, he believes that he was able to leverage his knowledge, contacts, and understanding of what works in districts and states to make a difference. Therefore, in state subjects like sanitation and water, it’s important to have people who have worked in the state and who understand the system as well as bringing in people laterally who can share their expertise.

It will not be easy to shift this culture, especially when there is apprehension and resentment from the civil service officers who have been working in districts and states, and do have years of experience. Any change will always result in some level of apprehension. However, civil servants are also starting to think about specialising themselves and developing expertise in one particular sector so that they would be the natural selection when missions like Swachh Bharat arise. LK Atheeq, who has been implementing the Swachh Bharat programme alongside Param since 2018, notes that criticism for outsiders among the civil service is short-lived as long as the right person is chosen and they start delivering results.

It also behoves the person who comes from outside to leave their arrogance at the door, create a collegiate atmosphere, and respect the knowledge of the civil servants around them. So it also depends on the behavior of the person who comes in at that lateral level. In his memoir, Param describes how he created this space for others, allowed them to innovate, and brought in a culture of collaboration. The Swachh Bharat Mission was his biggest challenge – one of the largest programs of its kind in the world and with a very short deadline to stop open defecation throughout the country. During his meeting with the Prime Minister, Param recalls the last thing the Prime Minister told him, which was “Jaiye aur Bharat ko swachh banaiye.” It was a large mission to undertake.

A Massive Challenge

The Prime Minister made a very bold announcement on 15th August 2014, that in five years, on the 150th birth-anniversary of Gandhiji, the country will be open defecation free. There were 600 million people in India who were practicing open defecation who made up 60% of the world’s one billion open defecators. If India didn’t solve this problem, then Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 wouldn’t have been achieved. The scale was huge and although a lot of work had happened in sanitation over the last 70 years, the issue never received that level of political leadership, says Param. It was a massive challenge and with five years to achieve it, the central issue was in changing behavior all the way down to the village level. Of course, a lot of toilets had to be built as well. More than 100 million toilets were built, but the focus was on behavior change. 550 million people in rural India had to change their behavior, and the sanitation coverage had to grow from 39% to close to 100% in a short period of time.

It was young officers like Atheeq who took up this challenge and proved to be the backbone of this program. In UP, Param says, the formula for success is PM, CM, DM, and the VM i.e. the Village Mukhiya, the Sarpanch. These are the people who made this a success, along with the Development Administration at the grassroots level, the leadership and innovation of the young collectors, and the CEOs in Karnataka and other states. So the team of Swachh Bharat was at the scale of 700 collectors, chief executive officers, school children, 250,000 Sarpanches, etc. Scale had to be dealt with and in a short period of time, a lot of energy was brought in at the local level. At the government level, it was about travelling, motivating, and encouraging friendly competition, with backing of the Prime Minister. This was his flagship program so Param made sure that they leveraged the Prime Minister’s leadership at a political, administrative, and local level.

There have been valid criticisms of the mission, especially in terms of the 98% success rate that the government has confirmed versus the ground reality for many families in rural India. Param agrees that in sanitation, there will always be gaps and the country is not open defecation free, but they have begun working on a new program and hope to sustainably build capacity in communication. The process of verifying the success rate was based on people self-declaring that they were open defecation free – every village sat in an open meeting and decided whether they were at a point to declare it for themselves. There was a process of verification done through independent large-scale surveys. Interestingly, in areas where there was much more community cohesion, it became a matter of pride. There was a Gaurav Yatra in one village when they declared themselves open defecation free.

Part of Param’s job was to reach out to the critics and hear what they had to say. One of these people was Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who claimed that building toilets was being prioritised over behavioral changes. When Param met him and asked how we could make that shift, he suggested focusing on village-level motivators, which the Prime Minister named Swachhagrahis. Pratap said, “If you can have one village motivator on average per village who are trained in community approaches to sanitation, then you’ve got a compelling story to tell because you’ve got boots on the ground. People directly interacting with the community can convince them why it is important to have a toilet. The whole community is affected and it’s got economic and health benefits.” So they put in more effort to create and train local Swachhagrahis. It was an honest effort and although there were some gaps, Param argues that overall he is quite confident that the results were robust.

The issue of caste and manual scavenging is difficult to ignore when it comes to sanitation in India. We still have manual scavenging, even though our laws abolish it. In rural India this is less of an issue, says Param. One of the things they ensured was that all members of the community, irrespective of caste, were included in the conversation. When they did the village mapping, they tried to ensure coverage for all bastis – Bihar for example mandated that unless the Dalit basti was covered first, they wouldn’t proceed to other places. Param points out that he entered the toilet pit himself, precisely to break this stigma. Twin-pit technology also helps with this issue. The idea is that one pit works while the other is closed, and when one fills up you divert to the second pit and wait for a year and a half until the compost is safe and pathogen-free. At the village level, this was an inclusive process where everyone was drawn in and unless all households had access to a toilet, the village could not declare itself open defecation free. Param argues that the issue of caste was therefore addressed through community cohesion and the entire village being included in the open defecation free movement. In urban contexts, with the manual evacuation of septic tanks, there is more awareness and a push to replace this with mechanical evacuation.

Failures and Successes

From this experience, Param has learnt the value of the four P’s – political leadership, public financing, partnerships, and people’s participation. The government invested $20 billion in a public good like sanitation, they had partnerships with NGOs and grassroots organisations, and at the bottom line, it had to be a people’s movement. They had a critical window open with both political leadership and financing, and it would have been a wasted opportunity if they had not delivered on this program, he says.

To Atheeq, there were certainly some pitfalls that would occur with any mission-driven project of this scale. If you’re focusing on results and targets, there is an incentive for people to cook figures at the ground level, he says. But there are also issues of certain serious constraints. Space and water are two big constraints. Many politicians and journalists have asked what the point of toilets is when there is no water available. We have also found that in villages in Karnataka, there are still gaps in coverage where people don’t have enough space to build a toilet or put in the pits. There continue to be issues and we have to continue to work towards it, he says. The cultural idea of going out into an open field instead of a constrained space still carries a lot of meaning for people, especially in the rural areas. But the younger generation and women have understood that toilets are important not just for privacy, dignity, and security, but also in terms of health. The men and the older generations are not yet changing their habits, therefore the campaign for a behaviour change has to be a continuous one. With the campaign that was started in 2003 based on the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank, the goal was to instill the idea that building toilets is not enough, people need to have open defecation free status. This is crucial, says Atheeq, because even if 10% of the village defecates, the pathogens travel through the entire village and therefore we’re not achieving any results.

Changing the behaviour of 500 million people sounded like an impossible challenge but Param learnt that you need to deal with scale with scale, and began involving school children. When he visited East Champaran, where Gandhiji started the Indigo movement 100 years ago, school girls from the Turkaulia Block were marching in the streets and saying, “Mujhe shauchalay chahiye.” They demanded it. School children began putting pressure on their teachers and parents, and that mobilisation of school kids was a huge factor in bringing about behaviour change. Another method which conventionally has not worked is community-led total sanitation. It hadn’t worked in the past because there was no political leadership. However, when the Prime Minister put his weight behind the program, states knew that resources were coming and it was a powerful push which made all the difference, says Param. One solution that they have found for the space issue is to build a series of toilets on public land. They mark them as private toilets with the keys handed over to a single family so that they can use it. The maintenance of community toilets is a challenge because unless there is a mechanism for proper maintenance and the Gram Panchayats take responsibility for maintaining those toilets, it does not make sense to build them.

The pandemic has put the spotlight on health and the need to increase public expenditure in the sector. It was Rahm Emanuel who said, “Never let a crisis go to waste” and Param believes that this is an opportunity to refocus on health in India. Not only do we need to increase the expenditure, we have to also utilise it more effectively. Better systems and better capacity has to be created. Fortunately, India is well-positioned for this, he says, since we have the best electoral system in the world and the capacity to roll out vaccinations better than anyone else. In many ways, water sanitation and hygiene has served as a kind of pre-vaccine vaccine during the pandemic. Handwashing with soap is now being internalised by many, and the pandemic will certainly help us reframe our priorities regarding health.

Finally Param notes that when we talk about success and failure, he has learnt to “treat those two imposters just the same” as Rudyard Kipling advises in his poem, ‘If’. There will be failures and successes, and we must take them both in our stride. Win or lose, we should continue to enjoy the game.

Innovation in Public Spaces: Bengaluru and the Republic of Zoom

Covid-19 was in many ways the Chief Transformation Officer to a digital world. It has been no different in the public spaces for discussions, theatre, museums, galleries, films, music and more. Many Bengaluru Public Institutions innovated during the pandemic period to stay relevant and connected.

This is an edited version of a panel discussion moderated by Rohini Nilekani on Innovation in Public Spaces : Bengaluru and the Republic of Zoom, a BIC Streams event. Covid-19 impacted the mission and traditional operating model of many institutions. Speakers discussed how organisations dealt with the new reality and pivoted to an online world. They included Arundhati Nag from Ranga Shankara, Jahnavi Phalkey from Science Gallery Bengaluru, Abhishek Poddar from Museum of Art and Photography, and Ravichandar Bangalore International Centre.

The pandemic has shrunk our social spaces, restricting our lives in many ways. We’re not able to go out to restaurants, cinemas, performing arts spaces, museums, and so much more. But we have used this opportunity to innovate new spaces within our virtual world. But we must first acknowledge what many of us already know – our cultural and creative spaces have been among the most badly hit during the pandemic in terms of employment and livelihoods. Data from OECD countries show a loss of up to 5% of employment, which is a huge number compared to other affected sectors. It’s difficult to measure the cultural economy since it remains hidden and therefore not counted, but the impact has been immense during this time. And yet, we have been able to come together while being at a distance.

There’s a new kind of culturalization of the society and the economy, and we need to also consider the other impacts of this. In 1973, Mark Granovetter, a sociology professor at Stanford University, published a very interesting paper called ‘The Strength of Weak Ties.’ In it, he refers to one of Harvard’s long-term studies on happiness, which states that the most important thing for stable, long-term happiness is the social ties we have with our family and friends. Granovetter proposes that quantity matters as much as quality, and if we don’t meet people who we normally meet in our day-to-day life like the vegetable vendor, college professor, the person next to you at a conference, or a stranger sitting next to you in a cinema hall, it will affect your happiness as well. These shrinking social networks impact our wellbeing more than we realise. He makes a compelling argument that the pandemic has impacted all of these things, and we should remember to go out of our way to improve the strength of our weak ties.

The pandemic has resulted in us putting art and culture on the backburner, to focus on ensuring that everyone has adequate food, rations, and living spaces. Art was reduced to the sort of cosmetic idea that it is not necessary, but good to have. Whereas actually, we desperately need our art and culture to be revived because art is what makes meaning in our lives. Culture is what allows us to make sense of the world. And we really need to get that back in a meaningful way, however new that way may be.

Shifting to the Virtual

Ravichandar describes the many challenges for organisations who had to pivot to a digital-only presence in March. His team at BIC soon got proficient in Zoom, Vimeo, and podcasting within this period. They also managed to safeguard the BIC office staff’s salaries, despite the fact that their sustainability model was under threat and they were going into a deficit. Over 270 days, they managed to organise 255 events, showing that the move to digital and virtual was not only possible, but successful for them.

Abhishek Poddar also started seeing the value of digital spaces when they launched MAP virtually. Instead of having people travel to BIC in person, they now had an audience from 30 countries logging in to their events, which made them realise the potential of the digital space. He guesses that their physical launch would have been for 200 people whereas their digital presence has been viewed up to 40,000 times. It made them realise that having a museum in one city means a much more limited audience. This gave rise to their Museums without Borders project, where they have collaborated with more than 15 museums including the British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. Abhishek acknowledges that the pandemic couldn’t have hit them at a worse time, however their team, advisors, and patrons provided support and ideas to innovate. When they started planning the launch, their aim was to reach 5,000 people. In reality, invitations went out to over a million people.

But in order for a digital space to be engaging for audiences, time and money must be invested in the technology behind it. For MAP, Abhishek worked with a company called Xarpie as well as a lighting director, sound director, and a videographer. With the help of this team, they were able to create MAP as a digital space, 3D scanning each artwork so that viewers could look at it from any angle. On the other hand, Jahnavi Phalkey notes that the more high-tech things become, the likelier it is that it might be inaccessible to audiences who might not be able to view it on high-tech computers or smartphones. So while you expand and engage your audience with better tech, you also need to make sure that you’re not losing people at home.

Jahnavi also had to launch Science Gallery’s third exhibition, PHYTOPIA virtually. They didn’t have a very strong IT team and realised that the platform that hosted their website had certain limitations. The other issue was how to include hands-on experiences and intimate conversations with mediators in a digital space. So their challenge with PHYTOPIA was how to bring the world of plants into people’s homes as well as how to bring the warmth of human interaction and the kind of conversations and collaborations that would otherwise happen between artists and scholars across the world. But like MAP, their audiences and colleagues from museums across the world were ready to support them and their groundbreaking work. Jahnavi proposes that the future is hybrid and that the expansion into the virtual world means an expansion in audiences. She hopes to leverage that to become a different kind of institution, which is strongly rooted in the local but engages with the global. This experience has enhanced their ambition and ability to do things differently, and these innovations are here to stay.

What Gets Lost in the Digital

All the world’s a stage is acquiring a completely new meaning now, however there is a downside to all this. Arundhati Nag mentions that this may be especially true for the theatre sector, which has not been able to switch over to the digital world as easily as others. How does live performance go digital and still maintain human contact and intimacy? While this is still a challenge, she is learning from the work that Jahnavi and Abhishek have done with their institutions, which are both fairly new but have launched with a global platform in mind. It opens up the idea of connectivity with the world, and India is so beautifully poised with its variety and antiquity of performance art practices.

What is lost in the virtual is the magic that happens during a live performance. Fifteen minutes into a performance, everybody’s heart is beating at the same pace, says Arundhati. How can that ever happen with us beaming ourselves out on screens? Theater is one of the few performance practices that presents blood, sweat, and tears, right in front of you, she argues. Cinema blows everything up 100 times and television compresses it. Theater is the only space where you see what is real. So this is a challenge to humanity. Theater is a medium that must be kept alive and we need to build a network of theaters. We need to re-purpose our public spaces, connect further with real art and artists, and make their lives viable, because otherwise we will lose their art. The Theyyam artist who doesn’t have food to eat because he is from a lower caste and at the bottom of the economic rung, is actually a repository of such fine art. So we really need to look at the economic part of sustainable art. The future may be hybrid, but we cannot lose our performing arts because those experiences just cannot be replaced.

Abhishek agrees, noting that we couldn’t have gotten through the last nine months if not for the arts. The amount of arts, theater, music, and opera that has been consumed and the exhibitions that people have seen, hit record numbers during the pandemic, even though it was all virtual. So we have undeniable proof that art is something that sustains us. But seeing art in person, as opposed to printed in a book or on a screen, is a vastly different experience. Reproductions will always be second best, and he hopes that technology never reaches that point where we would not need the physical at all.

As a theatre practitioner, says Arundhati, we survive on this invisible connection between what the playwright has given us and what we deliver to our audiences. We become the medium. To not be able to project our voices and actually perform for audiences has been like a death blow for all artists. She says that artists have come to Ranga Shankara weeping. So it’s been an immensely difficult time for many people, especially artists. Ranga Shankara is trying to offset this by providing a free platform where artists can come and sing or play the flute or perform. Abhishek agrees, remembering a conversation with Marina Abramovic and Nikhil Chopra, where they described the sense of emptiness in performing over Zoom, once the audience logs off and the artist is left alone, in front of a screen.

What is also lost, for Jahnavi, is the visible wonder in people’s eyes when you do a hands-on workshop or interactive exhibit which just doesn’t come through in online sessions. There is no way to gauge whether you have impacted your audience. People are working on how to improve the digital experience so that it doesn’t feel so disconnected, but we have to acknowledge that this is not the last pandemic, so we need to allow technology to augment our experiences then. We have to innovate ourselves out of this and human beings are tremendously ingenious, so I believe we can do it.

The Importance of Sustainability

Art institutions cannot operate in their own silos anymore, says Arundhati. As of now, they don’t have any kind of association that can represent their interests whether it’s at the state level or at the central government level. The sector is unorganised, whereas the kind of employment that this sector creates is almost equal to the organised sector. Nationally, the number of people engaged in the creative arts is huge. But we need to start thinking of how to communicate and organise ourselves better. Arundhati gives the example of the transgender community, where some initiatives involved calling them to paint a mural and giving them some money in return. But what we really need to do is create a sustained training program for people from marginalised communities that actually provide them with employment. Otherwise their engagement in the arts will continue to be marginal because they are struggling to survive. Creating livelihoods is a priority and integrating them in a public place like Ranga Shankara has become important to Arundhati.

Ravichandar notes the importance of sustainability and of legacy spaces surviving. The pandemic threatened this greatly because the financial models that artistic spaces depended on such as renting out to other organisations, was suddenly gone. So the challenge is two-fold – one is keeping the creative arts alive and the second for legacy spaces is how to stay relevant in a pandemic where entering a theater means risking your life. For the BIC, their focus is on a membership model, which has meant that they are now losing money per month and are now looking for scope in other revenue models.

Abhishek suggests a mix of revenue models are needed, including an increase in philanthropy, CSR, retail philanthropy, etc. He also believes a corpus is needed in order to ensure that the arts survive. People are used to consuming art and culture free of cost, but we now have to ask ourselves, “How important is it for us?” and then find the right amount to pay. In terms of MAP’s revenue model, he mentions that since the museum was launched digitally, they are now launching a digital membership which expands their income from visitors and will hopefully help them to be sustainable.

For nonprofit organisations like Ranga Shankara, Arundhati mentions that the priority is to sustain a social fabric and so their sustainability is also socially linked. It’s only by keeping their prices low that they can be accessible to communities. She points out that in 16 years they have not raised their prices much and people can still rent their space for Rs 2,500, which is why theatre is flourishing in the city with 400 performances a year at Ranga Shankara. The pandemic has hit them particularly hard, and during the past nine months that Ranga Shankara has been closed, they received no support from the government. A group of 14 institutions that came together to submit an application to the Chief Minister and got their electricity bills waived for six months. She hopes to get them waived further for at least another six months to a year because they will only be able to open at half capacity. So revenues are slashed completely and Arundhati hopes that the government needs to take cognizance of this. Otherwise, they will have to look to CSR and the corporate sector for money. Jahnavi also hopes that the state will step in to ensure that art and culture remains a common, public good. In places like Germany and the UK, the state provides stipends and funds for artists and cultural spaces to survive, and we need to ensure that this happens here as well.

Art, however, doesn’t always have to be monetised and Ranga Shankara’s RS Connect program exemplifies that. By taking out the transactional relationship between art and society, they hope to make people realise the value of art. People can come and listen to poetry readings, music, or watch an artist paint. So it’s not just about buying a ticket and watching a play, it’s about engaging with the way people make art. They also have a psychiatrist who conducts free counselling sessions for people, which is another way that art can also help society. Theatre is a counsellor of sorts, but since we have had no theatre over these past few months, a psychiatrist has been coming to Ranga Shankara so people can talk about their problems. What we need right now, says Arundhati, is to create art. But in the digital age, this requires marketing strategies and professionals who can do what artists may not be trained to do, in terms of videography, etc. It’s just a matter of money, so we need the kind of funding that allows for a digital division to help bring art to the virtual world. As we develop more digital pedagogies, perhaps we will see a whole new stream of livelihoods and people offering services across creative and cultural spaces to help enhance the digital experience and keep livelihoods of these communities sustainable.

Towards An Inclusive Future

We think that human beings don’t take to change very easily. But the past few months have shown that this is not true. We have all changed and learned, regardless of where we were in the world. And now, as we get back to the normal world, what should we keep in mind and how should we re-imagine the public sphere? Jahnavi believes that we will return to a hybrid world, not only because we now know the various possibilities, but also because there will be other pandemics or crises and they will be here sooner than we expect. So it’s not only about what kind of world we return to, but how we do that. For her, it’s about managing technology in a manner such that we are not leaving people out, but bringing them in. In the physical realm, we also need to work out how to occupy space and similarly manage that divide such that the digital and the physical complement each other and allow us to create something that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Collaboration will also be much more important than it ever has been, says Abhishek. Audiences are now much bigger than what was initially imagined, so going forward in order to be relevant to a diverse audience, we need to be truly inclusive. This is especially true for communities who are underserved and underprivileged. So how do we ensure that spaces are accessible to people who are differently abled, for example? Abhishek hopes that more artistic and cultural spaces will be able to diversify and be inclusive to all their audience members now.

Arundhati mentions the importance of creating a space not just for art practice, but one where people feel like they belong. To her, theater is a mirror of society and therefore it really needs to become a space where people come to regain their trust in humanity. Theater should be talking about the plight of farmers and questioning what is going on in the country – these are questions that art must address. Somewhere along the line, art has abdicated its responsibility and it’s no longer safe to speak the truth. So we need theatre spaces and public spaces in general, to become places where people feel safe, and we must do that by speaking truth and building trust.

With schools closed, Arundhati notes that children have been left out and will be adversely affected by this pandemic. She wonders about the kinds of memories they will have of this time, and the residual factor that is going to continue when they become adults. It’s a question that all art institutions need to address – how are we going to touch the lives of children who have been adversely affected by the pandemic? The digital divide is a huge barrier in terms of accessibility and inclusion. As Abhishek mentions, MAP was not able to work with government schools that did not have Zoom or computers, and so an entire section of society was left out because they didn’t have the means to access these tools. There are also senior citizens who have been affected and isolated because they may not possess the kind of digital literacy necessary during this time. Ravichandar also argues that the creative artists community has really been abandoned and so we must think differently about how to provide them with spaces and earning potential.

For many custodians of public spaces, the value of their work and trusteeship has increased tenfold, says Ravichandar. When audiences return, there will be a whole host of mental health issues that they will be facing and art and culture will provide the balm that they need. The pandemic has shown the importance of public spaces and when the vaccine is finally rolled out, these places will come alive again because this is where we are able to share and recognise our collective humanity. We need more public spaces that are truly inclusive and democratic. Ravichandar believes that the responsibility of artistic institutions now is to take this on and create the kind of spaces that people really need right now. Art and culture extends beyond language, and it needs real space to thrive. The future is not as far away as it appears and we will come out of this pandemic with renewed support in the coming years.

Building a Social Muscle via Mediation

This is an edited version of the CAMP IDEX mediation webinar on ‘Building a social muscle and finding common ground.’ Adversarial behaviours dominate our lives, but the culture of collaboration is growing. Justice Kurian Joseph, Sriram Panchu and Rohini Nilekani discuss how mediation can help society find common ground in this session, moderated by Krishna Udayasankar,

I have been very lucky in my life, to be an active member of civil society and a philanthropist, as well as having a ringside seat to the corporate and government sector thanks to my husband, Nandan. Through these experiences, I was able to see that, at the core of it, all three sectors of Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar, seemed to have similar societal goals but there was a lot of friction between them because of their different approaches. This was especially true when it came to civil society and the Bazaar sector, and the Samaaj and Bazaar sector. But whether one is at the World Social Forum or the World Economic Forum, eventually people were talking about how humanity can live together and be sustainable and equitable. The problem is that there are many different paths to those goals and not enough conversations happening across the divides.

This realisation is what inspired me to start my show and my book. There were a lot of positive responses from that, and the people I spoke to were more than happy to have that dialogue. It’s just that nobody had actually made the dialogue happen, so I saw a great need for intermediary organisations to come together and provide platforms for civil public discourse. With the rise of social media and deepening political polarisation, the need for bringing sectors and players together seems to be more urgent than ever. So I set up a philanthropic portfolio around the idea of Uncommon Ground which asks whether we can have safe shared spaces to talk through our differences.

The Purpose of Law

As Justice Joseph mentions, from his experiences as a lawyer and judge, opposing parties may have discussions but that does not necessarily mean that they are fruitful. Instead, we need more dialogue between people and for mediation to alleviate mistrust, wrong notions, and misunderstandings, if we are to move forward as a peaceful society. The purpose of the justice system is the resolution of disputes and settlement of grievances. So we need to create a more balanced atmosphere in our courts, at least between lawyers. Outside the courts, we need to see mediation as a proselytizing process for the justice delivery system to take on, Justice Joseph argues. For example, we could look to the interior system where the village head calls for people, hears both sides, and helps them to bring about peace. Those situations allow for better dialogue between parties. Facilitated dialogue between people also meant less communal problems and inter-community disputes because there were people to guide them and bridge misunderstandings.

Courts however, take a very orthodox position and judges only see their role in terms of deciding the law. But what is the purpose of law? The law is meant to create order in society and to prevent disorder. If we can achieve this by resolving disputes and finding a solution for grievances, what can be more just than that, asks Justice Joseph. We need to differentiate between the idea of law and the idea of justice. Sriram Panchu agrees, noting how every court now has a mediation center where judges routinely refer cases. It’s where a different kind of pathway to resolution is being practiced, with trained lawyers who mediate those cases. So India’s legal system has beautifully intertwined mediation and litigation. With thousands of mediators resolving lakhs of cases, the concept has successfully taken root here.

Panchu notes that it is increasingly necessary for courts to get involved in public disputes, as with the Ayodhya case. He says that this is happening because rather than reaching across divides, politicians today thrive on divides. Therefore, there is a huge vacuum in the institutional space for those who must push for creating a common ground. This is the role of the courts now, because when a dispute goes to court, the court is in a great position to initiate mediation and to administer, monitor, and oversee it. The court cannot mandate that people should come to an agreement in a public dispute, but it can certainly facilitate the process by appointing good mediators whom all parties trust and providing the aura of confidentiality in mediation. That’s extremely valuable, says Panchu, because you can’t have mediation with the press reporting on it every evening, especially given the temperament of some of our news anchors.

Ayodhya was a good example of the court mandating its confidentiality and everybody respecting it. It was such a highly contentious dispute with wide implications, spanning history, politics, law, mythology, and a current communal living intersection between past, present, and future. In Panchu’s opinion, it was a tremendous testament to the judicial wisdom of leadership, statesmanship, and court directed mediation. Regardless of the final resolution, what mediation did was bring the two communities together to acknowledge that this issue needs to be resolved. This can’t continue to cause tension between Hindus and Muslims in India. People wanted a resolution which would benefit both communities and they wanted to ensure that this would never happen again. To Panchu, this speaks volumes about the social fabric of the country.

A New Curriculum for This Century

What has become clear nowadays is that political polarisation has entered every sphere of our lives, including our home life. It’s difficult sometimes to even have conversations within families without taking a staked position and saying, “I think like this, therefore I must be right and you must be wrong.” This kind of a culture is not good for any society. So how do we build a kind of curriculum for this century? Although we don’t know quite how to get there, we can all agree that in order to do so we must reduce the friction to collaborate. We have to reduce the divides between us because the kind of problems that we’re facing, even right now with the pandemic, are global problems that affect us all intensely and personally. The only way out seems to be cooperation, but we are losing the art of cooperation.

So we need to start building a societal muscle and begin talking across divides, understanding the source of conflicts and being able to put ourselves in the other side’s shoes. If that could become a new public culture, a new curriculum for young people to learn from and practise their societal muscle with, then we’d have a better chance of facing any other crises the future has in store. This is what I mean by societal muscle, and it’s the work that myself and many others are now concerning ourselves with.
At the end of the day, we want a society that is less litigious, but that means that we need equity at the table where the dialogue is taking place. So when we design this new curriculum and when we’re talking about building a societal muscle, the first step requires us to accept that we are all equal and our goal is not a win for just one side, but for a reduction in conflict that benefits everyone. An example of this happening successfully is when we supported the water conflict resolution forum. They had done a lot of work in the Cauvery basin with farmers between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. They worked in the Kerala and Orissa water basins and made several strides in setting politics aside so people could come together and agree to share water. So we have to offer more opportunities like this across society in a structured manner.

In Panchu’s words, good mediations and settlements don’t result in either party settling for less, but actually settling for more. When you expose parties to their true perspective, the long-term interest, and the lack of good alternatives to settlement, then they come to realise that a settlement is in everyone’s best interest. Often, what impedes justice from being carried out is that the involved parties such as politicians may be benefiting from the dispute itself. If the voice of the commons was activated and people had the agency and ability to speak for their own interests, settlements would come about in a more harmonious way. All governments and all politicians react to pressure. If they see mounting public opinion, they won’t go against it. Panchu points out that building societal muscle is so crucial, in order to give people back their power, voice, and agency.

A Culture of Mediation

Justice Joseph recalls a particular legislation from 10 years ago called the Gram Nyayalaya Act. It was meant to take the courts to the villages and allow people to experience justice in an informal but constitutional way. Unfortunately, the Gram Nyayalayas got converted into Magistrate or Munsiff Courts in all the states. But the aim was to include elected people in trying to resolve disputes in a panchayat. It’s still an untested concept and needs initiative from the courts, but we need something like this to address problems at a grassroot level.

We must develop a culture of community mediation, says Justice Joseph. India is facing many problems because fruitful intra-community and inter-community dialogue is not taking place. These disputes are often volatile in the Indian context because people are very religious and feel strongly about their beliefs. So we need to develop an inter-community dialogue culture and create common platforms for the same. Panchu agrees with the need to focus on the importance of dialogue especially when it involves public disputes. Opening up dialogue eases tensions, changes people’s perspectives, and gets both sides engaged in finding solutions rather than hammering away at each other. So how can we take significant public disputes and find ways of opening up this dialogue through talks, lectures, writing, sponsored studies, monographs, and TV programmes? And can we actually give participants a top-level panel of possible mediators to engage with them?

This country is blessed because it has a powerful constitution, we simply need to bring those values back to the forefront, argues Panchu. We all have private religions, but we have only one public religion and that’s the constitution. So in our public space, that’s the religion we must anchor our spirit with and those values are what will keep this country united. We need to return power to the people, giving them a voice and agency that is anchored in constitutional values.

There seems to be an intent for conflict resolution between communities, corporations, states, and all other aspects of society. But just our intent is not enough. We now need to sharpen the grammar and language of that intent so that we have a toolkit with which to practice that intent. This is the idea of uncommon ground – how can we allow children to do role playing and place them in situations where they understand the highest justice that they can achieve requires all of society? Can we all participate in this prevention reduction, creating a new public culture for future generations? Places like RWAs seem to be the right place to initiate this kind of curriculum building and public culture building. Another place ripe for this kind of work is where there are common pool resources that would allow people to benefit if everyone works together and cooperates in terms of use or extraction. We need to encourage the realisation, especially in the coming generations, that the less conflict there is in society, the more easily all of us succeed.

ASER 2020 Wave 1 Report Release

This is an edited version of a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Madhav Chavan and featuring Mr. Ashish Dhawan from Central Square Foundation, Rohini Nilekani from Arghyam, and Vineet Nayar from Sampark Foundation.

The ASER 2020 survey is particularly important because it is not only concerned with learning outcomes, but also the process of learning. To me, the results allow us to hear the heartbeat of a nation desperate to keep its children learning at all costs. It’s what resilience sounds like. As a nation, we have to take stock of the digital divide and do whatever we can to address it. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that this is an urgent need for India. This pandemic will not be the last crisis we will face, and probably not even the last pandemic, so schools may not be as stable as they have been for all these decades. So we have to do something for the children left behind because the future of education will be a combination of the physical and virtual.

The good news is that this report has confirmed what we knew to be true – that education is too important to be left to educators alone. We saw this in real time, as the Samaaj came together from parents, siblings, cousins, and communities helping children learn. 70% of schools said that communities had come forward to help, which is fantastic news for our school systems. It’s clear that the aspiration for education is internalised, and now we have data demonstrating that parents have the will and motivation to help their children learn. We have a fantastic opportunity now, to build their skills to engage with their children, which can be done through many creative ways.

The dream that we are all waiting for, after 25 years of Pratham, is that we will finally have a generation of children who are not first-generation school goers. The ASER survey shows us that this is the moment we’ve been waiting to capitalise on. The digital age is here to stay, so it’s no use being technophobic. We have to make technology work for us and for our children, and now we must develop a digital pedagogy. This doesn’t mean that children should stick to screens all the time, but that we open our minds to the possibilities that digital allows us – giving access to children anywhere and at any time, who may not otherwise have access to learning. It’s a call to action to develop a digital pedagogy, and that’s different from just a textbook being shown on the screen. It’s as different as a light bulb versus a thousand candles. There are so many exciting opportunities here and we can unleash a lot of creativity now.

As Anish Dhawan points out, this year has been a terrible one for children being left behind due to the pandemic. It’s a difficult situation and we may also think about how to create an accelerated learning program, and remediate children as they get back to school when schools are reopened. The survey tells us how deep the digital divide runs, with only a third of children accessing some material other than their textbook. Anish proposes WhatsApp as a viable medium, given that there are 400 million WhatsApp users in India and the household penetration of smartphones and WhatsApp is quite significant. As parents are getting more involved in children’s learning, we need to think about developing a home-based curriculum as well. The positives are that fathers are as involved as mothers and elder siblings, and so we need to harness this going forward.

Smartphone penetration can also be harnessed to help teachers. Anish mentions examples like TeacherApp, an organisation that created 75 courses for teachers. Over a million teachers have taken more than five courses each now and many states are embedding this. So there could be a blended way to do teacher professional development, create professional learning communities, and make resources available to teachers. Now that we have databases of parents, and many teachers are now connected with parents, Anish suggests also considering how to keep parents engaged and involved, whether it’s through text message, WhatsApp, or IVRS on an ongoing basis. In terms of platforms like DIKSHA, quality content is getting created or stimulated in vernacular languages right now. For example, Anish mentions a project he worked with Google, Tic Tac Learn, which quickly got 7 million viewers per month on YouTube and 2 million on DIKSHA, proving that there are very real opportunities now.

Vineet Nayar notes the good news from the survey – 36% mobile penetration has gone up to 62% in one year. This means that the penetration of the mobile revolution, which has been accelerating, is continuing to accelerate despite COVID. The government also reached 80% of textbooks to schools, which is phenomenal especially because the sample size of 52,000 households is not small and this is across all 30 states. However, there is a concern that if 62% have access to mobile but only 33% got some learning material, that means that the quality of learning material is perhaps not good enough. The other issue is that 67% say they have access to WhatsApp but they don’t say they got any learning material from it.

Vineet disagrees with Anish in the potential for WhatsApp in this regard. WhatsApp may be a good attempt to try and expand reach, but a one-way communication of distributing content doesn’t result in learning. This is also true of broadcast media which only saw 20% learning although the government put a lot of resources into it. Just broadcasting content, whether through Doordarshan or digital platforms, is not going to result in learning outcomes. Learning means engagement, and we need to develop technology where we engage in a two-way process that replicates the classroom as much as possible. Larger trends according to Vineet will see a drop in girls’ enrollments, migration from private to government schools, and urban school children moving to rural schools. As populations migrate from metro cities to rural schools, it will have a further negative impact on learning outcomes.

What this phone-based survey has shown is that we need a way to monitor children’s learning outcomes, working with state governments and thinking of how to do this in an efficient way. Ashish mentions that although state governments and nonprofits did their best, there are also a lot of lessons learned. By compiling their best practices we can create a plan, for which this data is incredibly helpful. He proposes creating a structured, home-based curriculum, where parents are more involved and there’s a link between the school teachers and parents. Reimagining teaching and teacher professional development seem like the two biggest opportunities. And structured learning apps for children like Chimple can be developed, which Ashish believes will improve learning outcomes. Although Sampark Foundation is working in six states, Vineet says that they need to reach more children as fast as possible, especially in states that are not doing well according to the data. He believes that we need to be more hungry, more unhappy, and more dissatisfied, to make the investments that are required and can be adopted by state governments to improve the lives of children.

ASER has always been a portal into a national conversation. It took so long after the first ASER, for people to understand the problem of learning outcomes and start doing something about it. People went through a journey, from opposition, to acceptance, and finally to action. We may see the same thing now, with children out of school and the kind of learning loss that is taking place. So we have to come together as a society to stem that loss and strengthen the children for the next academic year. All that will happen, but in the meantime, let’s focus on the opportunity that we have. Let’s use this data to begin a robust conversation on blended learning, using digital and the home, using things out of school and in school together. We have to reach every child, and I see this as a serious opportunity for inclusion and for the Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar to work together.

This survey also shows something great – teachers have been using this time to acquire new digital skills and to learn themselves. There have been 640 million learning sessions on DIKSHA and they have continued to grow at a very rapid pace over the last six months. 2 million teachers have been trained just using the DIKSHA platform of the government. There is content on that platform in 30+ Indian languages. We need to develop a digital pedagogy and come together better, but this the start of a journey and it can be a great journey to fulfill Pratham’s goal of every child in school and learning well.

Rohini Nilekani’s Comments at Launch of the #DigitalDecade to Strengthen Public Institutions

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s comments at an online event hosted by New America. The discussion was on the margins of the 2020 UN General Assembly to launch a #DigitalDecade to develop open source technology solutions that will strengthen public institutions in countries worldwide.

We have reached a tipping point when it comes to digital public platforms and that’s marvelous news. And I believe that societal platforms are the most critical thing to focus on in these times, because when we forget to do that, I really believe that the markets and the state become far too powerful. If we want to really move towards our goals of equity and sustainability, then we have to design for the inclusion of all those in whose name the state and markets function, right? So, we call this effort Societal Platform Thinking and it has design principles and core values to guide us, and we really intend to empower the first mile, not the last mile – we call it the first mile, where the problem manifests and we aim to restore agency.

So, we all know that societal problems are large, complex, and dynamic and that any effort to address them has to be anchored in the creative collaboration between society, state, and markets. But how do you reduce this natural friction to collaborate? How can you create platforms that allow for contextual problem-solving? How can these be designed in a way that is unified but not uniform, so that we can support rich diversity at scale? And that’s what keeps our teams awake at night.

To solve these complex problems, maybe we don’t need a single platform, but an ecosystem of platforms that play different roles. So some can act as context-independent foundations, like mobile, cloud, or GPS. And this is the digital public goods infrastructure that we are talking about, that allows everyone a unified platform to engage with. The second layer is the context-aware layer, which allows the co-creation of tools that build trust. That allows all actors to work together with a shared understanding of processes. And the third layer is the context-intensive layer and it’s very domain-intensive because it allows people to actually deploy and amplify solutions in specific sectors, whichever they may be, livelihoods, or water, or education.

To us, Societal Platform Thinking is a kind of wrap-around that allows all these platforms to work together to actually serve society. So, let me give you a very quick example in education, which we all know is highly complex, and that while we try to keep the child at the center, a host of people and institutions are required to help children learn and to keep them learning, right? So the team used all our new thinking to help India’s union government build a national education platform that they wanted to call DIKSHA. This educational infrastructure also creates a bridge between the familiar physical world of the textbook and the classroom, and bridges it to the emerging digital world. So for example, through this effort, India’s state governments had printed QR codes in 600 million textbooks in about 16 languages in the past year, and teachers are creating digital content on this platform that links to the static chapters in the textbook and makes students get any time access to learning.

And just see where that led us recently. When the pandemic forced schools and colleges to shut down, the education system had to go online. It was extremely urgent to stem the loss of learning to 320 million children in India. And surprisingly, teachers, parents, and children seem to adapt and shift very quickly to this platform. And just look at the statistics. 1.2 million teachers trained, 175 million learning sessions done, on this government platform, just in these past few months. And a lot of innovation has also gone into making sure that those who don’t have access to digital devices can also participate, and we call that online for offline. That is the power that public institutions can pull together in this digital age. But to achieve this, we really believe that every actor, and every institution has to hold one core value that we, as a team, hold very dear – to restore agency. Because we all know that talent and innovation is everywhere, we have to unleash it so that more people can become part of the solution instead of remaining part of the problem.

The point is, after all, digital platforms are just digital platforms! But what makes it play well for society is the power of intent. And even the power of intent is not enough, we also have to deploy the grammar of that intent. That’s why we think what we call Societal Platform Thinking (but it is just one way, many other people are doing similar things) is critical, because it incorporates the design principles shown here, that allow people to appreciate that grammar of intent and to use that grammar to create their own language, their own poetry, their own prose, if you will, to fulfill their societal missions. As a team, we are very excited with this approach and the potential of this digital age. We are eager and impatient to collaborate with everybody, and what’s happening here is music to our ears. So let’s just get together and make digital technology work harder to service society.

Childhood Interrupted

This is an edited version of BIC Streams session titled ‘Childhood Interrupted’, a discussion that looks at the impact of the pandemic on children, especially between ages 8 to 18. Hosted by Rohini Nilekani, the participants included Dr. Shekhar Seshadri, professor of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NIMHANS; Kavita Gupta, founder of Neev Academy; Deepika Mogilishetty, a legal activist and core team member at EkStep Foundation; and Vishal Talreja, co-founder of Dream A Dream.

We have 320 million children in India and this pandemic has impacted every aspect of their lives. For millions of those with socio-economic disadvantages, the repercussions are going to be much worse. For example, with all the school closures, 95 million children who avail of midday meals have lost that very critical source of nutrition. In terms of online learning, an Oxfam survey found that 85% of rural households in five states are struggling with the digital mediums of education. Finally, there is the psychological impact – in just 11 days in March, Childline India received 92,000 distress calls from children expressing many anxieties.

There have been several studies on the impact of past epidemics and disasters on children globally, and they’re not very encouraging. There’s a range of issues that emerge – social, emotional, educational, and much more. For example, some research on earlier outbreaks, such as Ebola, showed significant impact on children’s mental health. One qualitative study of children who experienced the Ebola outbreak, found that they were expressing the stigma and fear of the disease through the pictures they were drawing. This is something we need to be very aware of in India, because not only do we already have a heinous caste system, we have created more social outcasts during this time without seriously discussing the negative repercussions of this.

Even short-lived events such as earthquakes can have a lasting impact on children, including unborn children. Scholars who studied the effect of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan concluded that children living close to the fault line were significantly shorter four years later if they were in utero or under the age of three. The authors of the study tell us that the two million children born in India during the lockdown, and the millions more who are under the age of three, may be subject to severe health deprivation which could affect them all their lives. They also suggest that school-going children will suffer in terms of their learning. In a NIMHANS study of Indian children who were proximate but not directly affected by the 2004 tsunami, one-third of them reported a loss in concentration, decreased sleep, and anxiety about the future. During the COVID-19 pandemic too, these kinds of studies are now ongoing.

Reports from Italy, Spain, and China show significant emotional and behavioural changes during quarantine or lockdown in children and adolescents. Younger children become clingier or regress in their behaviour and older children become more anxious, angry, restless, or withdrawn. Children subjected to quarantine have more likelihood of developing acute stress disorder, adjustment disorder, and grief. Those who were quarantined showed four times higher scores of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compared to those not under lockdown. Even short outbreaks like SARS have shown children to have long-lasting trauma, so we can only imagine the extent of the impact of a long, drawn-out pandemic like this one.

The authors of the study on the earthquake in Pakistan do suggest that governments begin to track some indicators immediately, so that losses can be known and quickly mitigated. Society as a whole can prevent harm to children, but we must acknowledge and understand the potential impact and create effective nationwide programs to stem the loss. For example, one study showed that children who were part of a Vitamin A trial when a typhoon struck in Bangladesh, were fully protected in terms of their height losses. Post-tsunami, so much aid came to the way of children who were directly impacted, that they were not only able to fully catch up with others, but they even outgrew children who lived further away. So there are plenty of creative opportunities for us as parents, grandparents, teachers, educators, healthcare practitioners, and just as caring adults to nurture this generation of children. It is an important issue to us as a nation as well, because the future of India will be shaped by a generation coming of age at the time of this pandemic, so we need much more discourse on how to support them.

Coping With Ambiguous Loss

As Shekhar Seshadari points out, children are losing a lot right now. They are experiencing a loss of routine, structure, predictability, learning spaces, opportunities, peer interaction, social spaces, and play. This will all have a significant developmental impact. We need to consider what this pandemic is doing in terms of interruptions in child development, especially for children who have special needs, whose parents have suffered loss of livelihood, who have had to migrate back to their villages, etc. We also need to look at what happens post-pandemic, in terms of the economy and the financial fallout, and how it’s going to affect family structures. The ecology of our lives have changed, and this generates a loss of developmental experiences, while also exacerbating pre-existing concerns and anxieties. Coupled with that, there are new worries about the reality of the pandemic and the misinformation and anxieties around whether friends or family members are infected, hospitalised, or pass away, how long this will continue, and worries about examinations and what the future holds. Shekhar argues that this is based on a primary psychological construct called, the ‘intolerance of uncertainty.’ Most anxiety is based on an intolerance of uncertainty, and children’s psyche responds differently than adults’, through simple first-level responses. Dr. Pauline Boss calls it ‘ambiguous loss’ – when we can’t pinpoint the loss, we find different coping mechanisms to deal with it.

What we know now, thanks to neuroscience research, is that early experiences of adversity in children can have lifelong impact, says Vishal Talreja. Experiences of neglect, lack of emotional love and care, abuse, violence, or a pandemic of this nature, may prevent children from achieving developmental milestones. The pandemic has amplified a lot of those experiences of adversity for children coming from some kind of marginalisation. In his experience reaching out to communities after the lockdown was announced, Vishal notes the high levels of uncertainty and anxiety, in many cases caused by misinformation. Fears of their family members dying caused a tremendous amount of distress for children. There was also heightened abuse and violence, since schools provide a safe space for many children. Living in cramped communities, they see sickness and death every day, which also causes distress.

Studies also tell us that there’s a heightened gendered impact, since girls have had to take on adult roles in homes including taking care of parents who may have lost incomes and livelihood opportunities. When the migrant crisis happened many children were distressed because they felt the lack of support from the system and from the cities they lived in. So in addition to the loss of learning, there is also a lot of trauma that children have experienced, argues Vishal. The last six months have been ones of sustained trauma for many families. There has also been heightened impact on minority communities, especially young people from Muslim families who felt that they were being held responsible for the pandemic.

Learning Losses and Digital Classrooms

It’s said that schools are the miniature of the nation’s future but with schools closed for such a long time, our future looks uncertain. Not only is distance-learning a cause for disruptions, Kavita Gupta also points out that there is a learning loss on assessments and exams scores. In studies conducted in the US, home-schooled children score 20% to 25% lower than children who are learning face-to-face. Even in large systems like in Australia where distance-learning has a 100-year legacy, when children enter school, they enter at about 20% lower than other children. There also are benefits of distance-learning which are measurable. In situations where intrinsic motivation is high and relationships at home are strong, distance-learning actually can be more successful, however this may not be true or possible for many families. With educators having to teach as many as 50 students on one screen or on a WhatsApp call, it’s difficult to assess and engage with each child. This lack of engagement and social interaction is what causes the greatest amount of loss, according to Kavita. There’s often social isolation and screen fatigue that sets in, no matter how well-organised and motivated they are. For children who don’t have a strong support system at home, they face many challenges including how to self-organise and do things on their own.

Alongside the disruptions, new possibilities are also playing out. Deepika Mogilishetty mentions that different sorts of relationships and conversations are developing now, between educators, parents, and institutions. But children are feeling stuck, confined to certain spaces and confined to their screens. In terms of examinations, many students aren’t able to access the assistance they otherwise would have, in terms of tuition classes, etc. With increased adult scrutiny there also isn’t any way for them to be a bit naughty, play hooky, and conspire with their friends. They have no option but to take on adult-like behaviours like scheduling and calendaring things since classes are online, as well as the children who have to do domestic work or take on other roles in the house. Adolescent boys who were struggling in school are dropping out now and juvenile crime rates, particularly Kerala and Bihar, reflect this.

People like Ken Robinson have talked about what schools are doing to creativity, says Kavita, where they’re more concerned with the ‘what to learn’ rather than the ‘how to learn’. Even outside of the scope of the school system, what we’re seeing in society is an increase in social isolation, a culture of indifference, and a low tolerance for failure. Sherry Turkle, an MIT Scholar and author, calls the coming generation the Alone Together generation, and that’s never been more obvious than right now. With digital classrooms, children opt out of the classroom by saying their video isn’t working, or they can be physically present but mentally absent. Even though they are in school, many children don’t develop relationships and because of that, they are not really learning or performing to their potential. So how can we deal with that? How do we empower children and give them agency on their learning? How do we become clearer about the outcomes? We need to start doing things differently, by empowering children and creating social groups for learning.

One of the strategies Kavita mentions is longer cycle planning on the side of the teachers, through Hyperdocs where teachers’ planning is made visible to children. In case there’s a power outage or videos and WhatsApp calls get cut off, children have an idea of the outcomes expected and can take their learning further themselves until they can connect back. In terms of learning loss, the gaps are larger for younger children who need the physical environment to develop cognitive skills associated with a motor region of the brain. That’s something our school systems will need to catch up on once things resume.

Innovating to Mitigate Losses

So how do we, as parents, teachers, or just caring adults mitigate these kinds of losses? For Shekhar, the solution is to create a national initiative to ensure children’s protection. His project, fortunately received approval from the ministry just before COVID-19 hit India, serves as an integrated resource on child protection, mental health, and psychosocial care. They are already working to support frontline workers, equipping them with first line responses for children with anxiety, and conducting simple mental health interventions. They are also providing simple materials that any service provider or parent can use to assist children across socio-economic classes. We need to think about how to repurpose education, parenting, and organisations so that communities can come together, while maintaining social distancing, to have some time in the day that serves as a break and a kind of healing space, says Vishal. COVID-19 has ruptured our existing world, but we need to see this altered environment as an inflection point where new structural scaffolding can be erected.

Deepika explains that EkStep has built up the digital infrastructure for learning which is currently being used by the government as the school education platform, DIKSHA. But when the pandemic hit and schools shut down, they had to navigate how to scale infrastructure for the nation to enable access anytime and anywhere, with whatever children had access to. Therefore, the thought process is centred around the idea of coherent access, resulting in governments across the country creating time tables and streaming learning content on television. The same content is also available on the DIKSHA platform, in case students want to come back to it later. From March onwards, they have also seen over 400 million learning sessions across the country. So something shifted when accessibility opened up from school to anytime and anywhere. Very often, children may not get access to devices until late in the evening, when one parent who has access to a smart phone is able to provide it to them. In spite of constraints like this, there has been a shift in attitude, mindset, acceptance – that we will learn, no matter what comes our way.

There’s a lot of innovation in this regard, not just from EkStep but from communities as well. In Bangalore, a group called Gubbachi learning centers, had physical learning centers and worked with communities to bridge children who were unable to go to regular schools. But with the pandemic, those school centers have disappeared along with the families who have returned to their home states. So today, they make learning happen by sending worksheets over WhatsApp and then following up with calls. State governments like Karnataka, with their Vidyagama program, are also printing out and delivering learning materials with the help of community workers. There has also been a rise in informal community learning spaces, where small groups of children get together to learn, while maintaining social distancing. Parents of families who have been staying safe get together and create learning pods or bubbles to restore social interaction for children. Organisations are getting involved, working particularly with children of frontline workers, health care workers, and police personnel, since children from those communities may be neglected because their parents are out working. Studies tell us that we need to pay attention to long-term loss as well as immediate loss – if adults, school systems, and institutions try to jump back to normal and ignore this pandemic, that may also affect learning outcomes for years to come. Deepika suggests that we need to consider ideas like a reduction in syllabus and how to use digital infrastructures to level everyone up to the same place.

While it’s been heartening to see how quickly the education system was able to move content online, we also need to move interventions online. We must transfer those caring, empathetic learning spaces for children in the presence of a caring adult, using art, play, nature and ecology, to an online format. Vishal and his team’s solution for this was moving towards interventions that are contextual to the current challenge and using art and play as mediums to design interventions for children who are going through trauma and adversity.

Teachers are going through their own set of traumas and anxieties as well, especially in the affordable schools market where teachers are experiencing loss of jobs and may not have received salaries for several months. So teachers need help making sense of their own trauma before being able to help their students. In these situations, storytelling is a very strong medium, which is also in use in the happiness curriculum work that Vishal does with the Delhi government. Parents can give a missed call to the number and receive a message with a story which the whole family can sit together to listen to and discuss. The goal is to create community spaces for meaningful social interaction. We need to be thinking about how we, as a society, are going to build new narratives for our children, to help them come together and move forward.

An Opportunity to Build Resilience

What we’re seeing today from parents is a lot of anxiety, says Vishal, and solutions coming from a place of anxiety are not going to work for our children. We need to pause and come to terms with the trauma that we have all been experiencing in the last six months, before we begin to think about solutions. We need to start changing our approach to the situation. For example, one of the key mindset shifts that we’re talking about is learning loss. But if we look at it differently, this is one of the most important life lessons that children will experience. How are we helping our children make sense of this new reality that they are living in now, which might actually continue if the climate crisis continues? Instead of looking at this just in terms of academic learning loss, Vishal suggests expanding our thinking and creating spaces for children where they can talk about what they’re going through and process their feelings during this difficult time. Many organisations have set up mental health helplines for children, to give them the space to talk about their distress. It’s not necessary to provide solutions, but rather listen, validate, and acknowledge how they feel.

Resilience is always called upon in the context of adversity, says Shekhar. Although children’s resilience is based on their innate temperament, it is also triggered by their exposure to adverse childhood experiences and how a child experiences their caretakers and peers dealing with conflict. Unfortunately, parents’ and teachers’ relationships with children are often based on a culture of instruction, expectation, and obedience, rather than a culture of conversations. Shekhar suggests that we need to bring conversation back into our relationships with children, communicate what your concerns might be, and truly hear their responses. We need to bring in more openness and transparency, and rebuild trust between the generations.

In addition to transparency, Vishal also argues that we need to invest in an adolescent agency, life skills, and the capacities to respond to the complexities of life. Over the course of this pandemic, we’ve seen many young people who have become volunteers with the government and in their communities, they have thought of solutions, set up camps and parent pods, and have taken on the income earning needs of the family and supported their own parents’ mental health crisis. So we need to trust adolescents because they have agency, skills, and the capacities to deal with ambiguity, possibly better than adults, because they’re still building those faculties. If we can re-purpose education from old notions of academics to notions of life skills and social-emotional learning capacities, then when crises emerge, adolescents will have much better capacities to respond.

While learning loss is a reality, children out of school environments are also experiencing a loss of relationships and interactions. Kavita notes that parents can help stem this in two ways – play and reading. Play can happen at different ages whether it’s physical play, board games, creating videos, etc. Play has many definitions because it’s a big part of relationship building. Reading is also something which truly builds empathy and contemplation, and quiets the mind. Once the distance learning is done, Kavita suggests leaving the devices at the door and creating the space for reading. Pandemics like this have an unequal impact on the most vulnerable and so Shekhar asks us to reassess our systems going forward and seek out innovation and pedagogies that might bridge these inequities. If we look at our public health system, it is focused on infectious diseases and rightly so, but the anxiety and uncertainty that COVID-19 has generated is also an epidemic. There are also other ongoing epidemics such as domestic violence and child abuse, all of which are coming into sharp focus now.

This pandemic is forcing us all to learn, as human beings but also as systems. It’s an opportunity to renew, learn, and push new ideas like critical thinking and social-emotional learning. We must intentionally create new narratives that are filled with kindness and empathy. In terms of our children, we need to repurpose social spaces and re-establish a culture of conversations with them. Our consciousness is nothing but stories, says Shekhar. So we need to build these narratives with a special focus on children’s social and emotional growth. Children are natural learners, they will learn anyway but it is their social and emotional world that is of paramount importance. So we need to encourage a culture of conversation in the home and outside, so that children are not afraid to speak up, to be heard, and allow them agency. We have a long journey ahead of us, and we need to replenish ourselves so that we can help children replenish themselves.

Covid Cured: Recording the Recovery

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Anshu Gupta, and Theja Ram about how they coped with COVID-19 and what they learnt about the disease, the health care system, and society in the pandemic.

As of September 5, approximately 27 million people were confirmed to have been infected by COVID-19 globally, and there were around 880,000 deaths reported. In India there were 4.1 million people officially known to have been infected, with 70,000 deaths. To put these numbers in context, we had a crude death rate of 7.3 per thousand people.

When it comes to COVID-19, India’s case fatality rate stands at around 1.7 percent, compared with around 3.3 percent in the rest of the world. Of course, the numbers here are rising steadily and experts say we have not peaked yet as the disease is currently spreading more into the rural hinterland. In fact on September 5, we set a new global record of 90,000 cases in one day.

As it stands, we have a lot of work to do to contain this pandemic. Each death so far has been a tragedy, and family members no doubt are still grieving. But perhaps we need to put the situation in perspective. India is currently reporting about 50 deaths per million, while the USA, Spain, and others have 500-600 deaths per million. These numbers can change, of course, and we must assume some under-reporting on cases and deaths. We must also keep in mind that perhaps our lower death rate may be because we are such a young country, with half our population below 25 years of age, and this disease disproportionately affects older people and spares the young. However, it’s clear that our situation could have been a lot worse.

While the picture is far from complete, we also know much more about the virus and the disease it causes than we did in March. This does not mean we can be careless, in fact, it is quite the opposite. We must use the knowledge we have to act more responsibly. It is now clear that the virus will be contained if people take sensible precautions such as wearing a mask in public spaces. There is currently no evidence that you can get COVID-19 by eating or handling food, so simple hygienic practices will suffice to protect from transmission. What is also clearly established without reasonable doubt is that this virus spreads through airborne transmission.

Therefore, based on what we know, masks, hand-washing, and physical distancing are the three pillars for containing the virus, provided they are willingly and universally adopted. The fourth pillar is to try to be in well-ventilated spaces, even in the home. In addition, we know that exercise and nutrition always play a big part in maintaining good health and boosting immunity. But we must not forget the millions of people who are unable to sustainably maintain these simple protocols because of where they live or how they work, and this is why good therapies and safe vaccines are going to be absolutely critical in India. The good news is that there are currently dozens of vaccines in trial around the world. Never before has the scientific community, the state, and the market, stepped up so quickly to respond to a global public health emergency.

Today there are promises being made that at least one vaccine will pass the finishing line before the end of this year. While we will have to wait and see how accurate that is, one thing is certain – India will be able to quickly manufacture millions of doses of any vaccine, both for indigenous use for our people and for export to other countries. As my husband Nandan pointed out recently, we have to quickly plan for an efficient and equitable way of ensuring that the 1.3 billion people in India will be able to quickly take advantage of a good vaccine to protect themselves.

We are now six months into the pandemic, and it’s a good time to put some of our fears and our hopes into perspective. Can we discard some of our irrational fears? Can we recommit to personal responsibility? Can we throw off some of the new suspicions we have acquired of our neighbours and workers?

Understanding Our Fears

Earlier this year there was a lot of uncertainty about the virus and how it impacts health, because of which our fears were at an all time high. Especially for people who were living with senior citizens, or who were immuno-compromised themselves, there was a lot of doubt and anxiety. This is what concerned Theja Ram when her father, a senior citizen (64 years old), contracted COVID-19 in July. At the time of his infection Theja was writing an article about the death rates among people who have respiratory tract infections, which is the same kind of infection her father had. This only amplified their fears.

As a primary contact of her father’s, Theja got herself tested as well. As a cancer patient who had just met her father the day before she tested positive, Theja was doubly anxious. As Theja says, for both her father and herself, their biggest fear was whether they had already developed symptoms and got tested too late. According to her, her doctors tried to calm her by reminding her that she was young, so she needn’t worry about herself. Still, she talked to a counsellor who helped her calm her anxieties and get through it.

As a scientist, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw wasn’t as worried when she contracted COVID-19. Kiran says that for her, the symptoms resembled the flu, a mild fever and a cold, but because she lives with her 89-year-old mother and her 71-year-old husband, who is also a cancer patient, she decided not to take a chance and got her whole household tested. In addition, she immediately quarantined herself in one part of the house. When her test results came positive, Kiran wasn’t surprised, but she also wasn’t worried because her results showed that she had a moderate virus load, her SpO2 was good, she didn’t have difficulty breathing, and was in pretty good health. However, as a wife, a mother, and a daughter, Kiran says she was very worried – she didn’t want her loved ones to catch the virus, but being in quarantine herself, there was little she could do for them.

On the other hand, from the day he caught the virus to the day he tested negative, Anshu Gupta had to spend almost 26 days in isolation. In his experience, those days were full of unpredictable health side effects, including fluctuations in fever, severe gastroenteritis, and high blood pressure. For him, something that stood out during this time was the fear from his neighbours and community. Towards the end of May, when he caught the virus, the hospitals weren’t all open, and he had been advised to stay at home. But at the time, the fear of the virus was at an all time high and he noticed changes in how people around him were behaving. His neighbours wouldn’t allow the family to open their gate, and when his water filtration stopped working, their local shopkeeper sent them bottled water, with an additional INR150 charge per bottle as security. The shopkeeper has since refused to take back the bottles and return the money, even after a month of Anshu being COVID-free.

For Anshu though, his stint with the virus was two-fold, In July, he contracted it again, and this time it was much worse. On July 23, he began to experience a stomach ache, which was diagnosed as a severe acute case of pancreatitis. His liver, kidney, pancreas, were all affected. Anshu believes this was an after effect of COVID, but hasn’t found a doctor that will say that. Instead, doctors blame these side effects on drinking too much or having stones in the gall-blader.

According to Anshu, a lot of his fears were for his team. The Goonj team was placed across the country, working with migrants in remote parts, and like everyone else at the time, they had limited knowledge of the virus. Many people working in the social sector didn’t have the kind of insurance that would make them feel secure about their families, and didn’t have access to PPE suits. In addition, they had to redefine how they interacted with the communities they were working with – previously hugging people and shaking hands was the norm, but now they were creating systems to ensure physical distancing.

In an effort to deal with this, Anshu and his team created special WhatsApp groups where people talked to each other, shared pictures from the field, processed together and learned from each other. For example, people would share photos and others would point out things that needed to be corrected, like masks that were too thin or didn’t cover their noses. The group also spoke a lot about immunity, and measures people could take to maintain it. This, he says, is something all of us can do – create ways to support each other and learn from each other using science as a backing.

The Need for Increased, Affordable Testing

Based on her experience with COVID, Kiran says there is a need, first and foremost, for people to be able to get tested on demand. This is a public health emergency, and the government ought to be able to provide testing. The government also has to come up with a model based on antigen testing, antibody testing, and RT-PCR testing. It needs to have systems for pool testing and individual testing, because we need to know what the caseload looks like in every part of our city and state, so that we can predict where the next outbreak will be and where herd immunity is being built.

When talking about the importance of getting test results back in a timely manner, Kiran refers to an experiment that Bill Gates proposed for America, where he said, “Can we introduce a rule that says that if you don’t get your test results within two days, you get it for free?” If India were to follow this idea, we would get the private sector and all other testing labs to send test results on time. With this in mind, Kiran says that her recommendations to the government would be to make testing-on-demand available, to make tests free for people who have symptoms, and implement pooled testing as well.

Additionally, Kiran talks about the need for more effective tracking of the virus. As she explains, there are two phases of the virus. Most people experience only phase one, which is when your body develops the antibodies and T-cells required to fight it, and it goes away. But at least five percent of people experience what Anshu did, which is when the virus behaves like an autoimmune disease and starts attacking your own cells and organs. Given this, what we need today are systems that measure these things, and doctors to monitor them. Because even though everyone won’t need it, for those who do, it can be life threatening.

According to Anshu, as a country we need to be doing much more to make this virus manageable. For example, he talks about the affordability of getting tested. Today it costs more than INR 4,000 to get it done in some states, and that makes it unaffordable for most people, especially given that if one member of the family has symptoms, everyone needs to get tested. Many people are also afraid to go to hospitals to get tested because they believe their chances of contracting the virus are higher in those spaces. In his experience, even though he had access to a private hospital and doctors, the process to get tested was still very complicated. But what happens to the migrants he was working with before he contracted the virus? There’s no testing facility for them on the road, there’s no subsidy by the state for them to get tested, and each of them will come in contact with so many more people.

As a journalist, Theja has heard stories of how hospitals in India are severely understaffed and don’t have the resources to give patients the kind of care they need. She was fortunate enough to be treated in a private hospital where that wasn’t the case. To her, one thing that government hospitals need to do is ramp up their facilities. To begin with, they need to hire professionals who can handle the patients that are coming in, they need to increase their elements of hygiene, and they need more manpower because their doctors and staff are already overworked.

As someone who had previously been getting radiation treatment for her cancer, Theja did have medical insurance, which helped offset the total amount she had to pay. Despite this, her bill for COVID-related care crossed INR 2 lakh. With this in mind, she says it’s of the utmost importance that people get COVID insurance, regardless of whether they have regular insurance. Getting it can be hugely beneficial to people who don’t have immediate cash on hand, or don’t have the resources to get a loan, should they fall ill. According to her, a lot of insurance companies today have separate COVID-19 insurance, and once you have it, it’s fairly easy to claim it.

Living With COVID-19

As Kiran says, today society has a big role to play in keeping themselves and each other safe. It’s up to us to make sure we don’t infect anybody else in case we have it. So we need to make sure that we wear masks, maintain social distancing, and keep our hands clean. Globally, there is a lot of understanding of how non-linear this disease is, she says. There’s a much better understanding of what needs to be done, and people are learning how to handle patients much better than before. This is what we have to prepare for, because according to leading voices in biotech, a vaccine will not be launched before April 2021.

As Anshu points out, we also need to ensure that we are not paranoid. Checking your levels every half an hour is not necessary. As someone who had COVID, lived in a closed house, and didn’t spread the disease to anybody else in his family, Anshu emphasises the need to follow precautions, especially the wearing of masks. We need to take this virus seriously, but we shouldn’t be scared of it.

Kiran echoes this when she says that instead of getting paranoid, we should focus on getting better at treating this disease. What we need to aim for, is getting the mortality rate close to zero. For this, the government needs to take steps to manage it better, because what we need now is a collective effort towards tackling COVID-19.

As far as self isolating and staying at home goes, Theja acknowledges that being cooped up at home is not the answer. Referring to her own example, she says that working from home and following physical distancing norms isn’t a guarantee that you won’t get the virus. You can be perfectly healthy at home, but you do need health supervision, for which there are a lot of tele-health facilities, along with packages at hospitals aimed at providing supervision at home. With this in mind, Kiran recommends that people keep a helpline in mind, which connects them to a medical professional who can advise you if you have symptoms.

Importantly, Theja says that people need to stop stigmatising those who have got the disease. Referring to her father’s experience, she says that neighbours treat you as though you’re untouchable, and even after you have recovered, people walk away from you if they see you outside. This causes a lot of distress to the people who have gotten the virus. As Theja explains, we need to understand that people who got COVID-19 need to be sympathised with, not stigmatised.

Looking Forward

According to Kiran, we need to decentralise the management of this virus and delegate it right down to the taluk level. We have an army of healthcare workers, like ASHA workers who have been doing a phenomenal job of contact tracing. We know that the number of people affected by COVID-19 will keep increasing, but if we can reach a stage where there are more people who have recovered, and less who are dying, that will be a measure of managing this virus a lot better.

According to Anshu, as a country we need to understand that as of today, there is no “post-COVID” world because we are going to be living with COVID for a while. Importantly, he points out that this particular virus has been used in the country to spread communal hatred. This is extremely problematic because now more than ever, we need to stand with each other. We should be thinking about how we can help if our neighbour has COVID-19. They might need us to reach out through a phone call or some food dropped off at their doorstep. These are things we can do for each other even if we are afraid. As he says, we need to build support so that people know that they are not fighting this virus in isolation.

When talking about his learnings from the pandemic, Anshu mentions the importance of having patience and being cautious while fighting the virus. There is no need to panic or to call five different doctors and get five different sets of advice, as doing so will lead to more confusion and panic. Lastly, he says that he learned that it was important to keep busy, eat good food, and stay in contact with people through conversations or social media. We should listen to what our bodies are telling us and not exert ourselves too much.

Rohini’s address at “Building India’s Digital Highways: The Potential of Open Digital Ecosystems

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s talk on Open Digital Ecosystems.

Globally, as well as in India, we are seeing more people realising that we need to create enabling infrastructure if we really want to address some of society’s most critical and complex problems. We need to reduce the friction to collaborate between all the actors that are needed to solve societal problems, i.e. Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. The problems that we are facing today are constantly evolving and sometimes their solutions lead to other problems. So we need to envision a more holistic and systemic framework to solve them.

Over the last few years we have witnessed the convergence of many technologies leading to breakthrough thinking. Perhaps the 21st century will result in the creation of shared public infrastructure that reduces the friction to collaborate. I think that this would have to have a digital backbone, but one that ensures that these ecosystems of collaboration will not be technology led, but technology-enabled. For the last several years Nandan and I, along with many of our colleagues, have been working on some of these very complex challenges, including education, water, financial inclusion, etc. Through our experiences, we have abstracted some of the philosophical underpinnings of what we are trying to achieve – we call it ‘societal platform thinking’.

While there may be many digital platforms that are trying to address societal problems, there still needs to be a horizontal underpinning of values that ensure that the technologies and frameworks deployed actually achieve certain clear societal goals, such as universal access and inclusion. They need to be able to restore agency to everybody, so that they can be a part of the solution and not remain part of the problem.

We have the technology, but that technology has to be used to design for inclusion, creative collaboration, and solutions that can be co-created, not simply to ensure cookie-cutter impact at scale. When I co-founded Pratham Books in 2004, although technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now, we understood that if we wanted to put a book in every child’s hand, we couldn’t only rely on the current ecosystem of publishers to deliver goods. We had to unlock the potential of the community, in this nation of storytellers.

We wanted to increase the number of writers, illustrators, translators, and editors, so that we could expand the idea of books and create technology-enabled stories that could reach every child in India, as well as children in other countries. To do so, we used some of the main principles that form societal platform thinking – instead of pushing one solution down the pipeline, we tried to distribute the ability to solve.
Once we understood that there are storytellers everywhere, suddenly what seemed like a scarce resource of writers and publishers, broke open to allow everyone to participate in creating public goods for all. After 15 years, Pratham Books has been able to give millions of children access to books, through online as well as physical copies. This is how we can design for intuition, by using online and offline together, involving and enmeshing the community as part of the solution. By using today’s digital infrastructure, we can redesign a sort of collaborative approach to solving complex societal problems.

In addition to this, we need to consider how these new digital ecosystems might be governed. We can think about this in three layers. One is the creation of a basic, shared, open, public digital infrastructure which would form the backbone of the framework. On top of that, there’s another layer of co-creation where distributing the ability to solve comes in. We should be able to add more nodes where people discover each other and work together to solve the problem that the platform is set up for. Finally, there’s the amplification network, which is spread out through various ways online and offline, so that other people can start building on and expanding at scale what the shared digital infrastructure has allowed the co-creators to do.
It’s important to note that when I say co-creators, I don’t just mean the experts. It could be almost anybody. For example, with our DIKSHA platform, although we are focussing on empowering teachers, we understand that that same shared public infrastructure also allows parents, grandparents, older siblings, and anyone else who is around the child to get involved. So we can use the power of this technology to unleash the agency of everybody around the child.

There is still a huge digital divide in India that we have to find a way to bridge. We know that the future is digital, so we must enable every single person to have access to some kind of digital device, even if it’s a shared device. That is the unfinished business of both the state and the market. We must create a digitally-enabled civil society as well. Civil society needs to come into this digital age without resisting it, because there are many issues that are going to come up in terms of privacy, access, and the undesirable consequences that technology can unleash. So we need a civil society that is willing to tackle those problems head-on, and become part of the solution on the digital platforms themselves. That remains an unfinished task, even as we are all trying to build out these open digital ecosystems.

This ecosystem of platforms are developing exciting 21st century ways of addressing complex societal problems. However, the most important element is the philosophical thinking, the societal platform thinking, with its core values of distributing agency, distributing the ability to solve, and making sure there is a contextual resolution of problems. We don’t need technology structures that are uniform, we need ones that are unified and allow many people to come together and do what they do best, whether it is the Samaaj, Bazaar or Sarkaar.

The most exciting thing about these new, open digital ecosystems, is that unlike closed market ecosystems, these are public goods. They are meant for the participation of people in an appropriate and contextual way. Underlying all this is the fact that these are Samaaj-based platforms that invite all of Samaaj to participate in. Hopefully, this will help us really solve some of the most complex issues that we have been facing and the challenges we will have to tackle in the future.

Grey Matters – Conversations with Women Leaders Defying Ageism in the Pandemic

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Arundhati Nag, Geetha Narayanan, Nirupama Menon Rao, and Rekha Menon on defying agism in the pandemic. In this session on BIC Streams: Grey Matters, these iconic Bengaluru women, now in their 60’s or more address issues of ageism, sexism, and the uncharted future. As leaders in their respective fields, the conversation is a thought provoking look at their personal journeys during these challenging times.

In the months since the COVID-19 pandemic started, it often feels like time has frozen. And yet the societal permafrost seems to be melting and all kinds of strange things are emerging from it. We’re seeing neighbours suspecting neighbours, and people treating older people very differently than they used to, thinking of them as more fragile and vulnerable. It’s created a kind of dissonance for older people who perhaps do not see themselves in the way that society does now.

However, this time has also allowed us a period of deep reflection and a sense of gratitude. It’s given us a chance to pause and renew ourselves. It’s difficult to imagine that we’d be in the position that we are, even in December last year, but now that it’s happening, I think we’re actually discovering a lot of resilience – in ourselves and hopefully in our professions as well. The future will look very different, certainly, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be for the worst. With Nirupama Rao, former ambassador to the US and China; Arundhati Nag, who single-handedly has helped to keep local arts and culture in Bengaluru thriving through Ranga Shankara; Geetha Narayanan, co-founder of Aditi Mallya School and Srishti Institute; and Rekha Menon, Chairman of Accenture India, we have a cross-section of women’s leadership in Bengaluru.

Lockdown Experiences

When the nation-wide lockdown was announced in March, Geetha Narayanan felt disbelief that something like this could be taking place. It also meant a frantic search for where she and her husband had kept their wills, passwords, and documents in case the worst happened. She remembers how they experienced a chaotic dissonance which showed both their vulnerability and lack of preparedness for personal isolation and coping independently. She felt a sense of denial, anger, and loss for what this pandemic has robbed from us.

Nirupama Menon Rao had a slightly different reaction when she came back to Bengaluru after recording her music album in Sri Lanka. The four hour notice to adjust to the new normal took her by surprise, however she says she’s always engaged with solitude and found solace by concentrating on her music. But when the Galwan Valley incident took place, she was inundated with requests for interviews and webinars, showing how you can’t really escape the world thanks to technology and innovation.

For Rekha Menon, it’s been a dichotomous experience, filled with uncertainty and pain and what was happening in the world and gratitude for what she had. Her work was frenetic, ensuring that her staff was safe and making quick decisions so that they could continue to meet client commitments while adhering to the rapidly evolving government guidelines which were different in every state. She had to stay agile and responsive, while also making sure that her staff felt motivated and engaged while working in a very different virtual environment.

Simultaneously, she was working on collaborations with the government, building AI-based chatbots to help with information dissemination and had taken on the vice-chair role at NASSCOM to support the policy regulatory changes that were needed for remote working and the economic consequences of the pandemic and lockdown. On the personal front, she hit the pause button, prioritising her family’s safety over holidays and weddings. Over these last few months, Rekha has learnt three key things – to focus on the essentials, letting go of everything else; the need and importance of community; and the resourcefulness and resilience of the human spirit.

Arundhati Nag finds that she can’t separate herself from her industry because so much of what she does defines who she is. From the age of 16, she has dreamt of working in theatre and her biggest dream was to be able to build a theatre and hand it over to the community. She thought she had seen almost everything that theatre had to offer, but the pandemic changed everything. Arundhati argues that the very basic premise of the art has been challenged by this pandemic, i.e. interacting with another person. All you need is one person in the audience to have a performance, and now we’ve been deprived of that. So it took her some time to come to terms with this new reality, where Ranga Shankara is closed for months. For her, the lockdown has brought her face-to-face with many absences, presences, and strengths. It’s been a time to reckon with the past, and consider how to move forward and how to harness art to do so. This is going to be a challenging time for many young people in theatre and the performing arts in India because it almost seems like they cannot dream. So it becomes our responsibility to give them back their dreams, says Arundhati.

Redesigning for the Digital Revolution

Geetha argues that just like art, education is going through tremendous trauma right now. She argues that we are seeing a simplistic, one-dimensional solution for what is a monumental problem. She describes a photo of her 7-year-old grandson with his head down on the keyboard because he has six hours of Zoom classes a day. The sector is trying to fill the space with something that comes from another era, another technology, another knowledge system, cutting and pasting onto this, just to survive as institutions. It’s not something that is going to be solved easily, unless people start introspecting on what exactly we want to do in education, especially in this year of a pandemic. Most people are hoping that this will be a short-term problem. But Geetha thinks the changes in all our lives might be more permanent and that things are not going to return to business as usual. We are now in this space of re-imagining our world, so we need to ask what the education sector should look like in the next 50 years. We need to put that kind of scale to education and understand that the current normal, just being cut and pasted with technology, is not the answer.

It also highlights our lack of investment in the sector despite the work that so many people across the country have been doing. We haven’t been able to solve issues of inequity, Geetha argues. People are now trying to sell their gold jewelry so they can buy a smartphone, in order for their children to have access to classes. It shows that we have not even begun to address what the sectoral issues are in education. But she does think that the human imagination will rise up to the occasion and people will start looking at small success models around the world and around India, to make education more locally relevant and accessible. We need to ensure that the future for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren is one that is equitable and fair. In her own experience, including design education, Geetha suggests that we look for models that are timeless and will endure. The Henry Ford conveyor belt kind of educational model was sparked by the industrial revolution. Now the digital revolution is here, and so we need to reengineer how we learn. With design education, we have to start understanding it as co-created and collaborative, not just serving industries.

The pandemic is more than a health and economic crisis, it’s also a societal crisis, according to Rekha. We have no roadmaps anymore, so many businesses have to re-imagine social contracts because the same digital technology that is creating innovative opportunities will also leave people behind. We need to be using innovative technologies to democratise the reach to the underserved with new models, so there’s a big opportunity there. In terms of her own sector, IT, they had already gone digital well ahead of the curve. So business resilience and growth happened for the sector because they were already there. However, Rekha feels that the pandemic has changed how we see the future of the workplace and we will be looking at a very different model, based on health and social distancing or the community needs of people. But she is hopeful for the opportunities it provides as well, like the ability to tap into talent anywhere in the country rather than just the metros. Women can have the option of flexibility to work from home, which may even bring more women into the workforce. Meanwhile, we must focus on skilling, Rekha suggests, because the kinds of jobs are changing and with it, we need a continuous skill-building of our workforce to ensure resilience. We can’t afford to work isolatedly now, and organisations will need to collaborate with society, the government, and policymakers, to figure out new, innovative solutions.

Diplomacy During the Pandemic

The world of diplomacy has also gone through some turbulence, even before the pandemic. Diplomacy has become even trickier, with the potential of vaccines being manufactured in different countries. For Nirupama, who saw the height of the Cold War, China’s rise and contention with the US seems familiar. The US allowed China the space and opportunity to develop and integrate themselves at least economically with the rest of the world, on the presumption that China would democratise. But the Chinese political system has not evolved that way, which has evoked a great deal of antagonism in the US. So people now talk of a new Cold War and we must consider how diplomacy will be defined by this, especially for a country like India.

India is a rising power in this part of the world, and we have aspirations to become a global leading power, says Nirupama. Our economy is already a front-ranking economy in terms of purchasing power. And it was well on its way to being so in actual terms, at least until two years ago. Now the pandemic has created this topsy-turvy world that is especially troubling because of the uncertainty. Even in times of war or a natural cataclysm, the crisis is finite. But today, the uncertainty that confronts us is causing a great deal of disruption. So what is going to happen to diplomacy after the pandemic? India has had a very difficult relationship with China, now compounded by the situation in Ladakh. This is going to create a lot of commitments and assumptions as far as India is concerned.

Diplomacy is about creating middle ground in whatever we do – an alternative to war and conflict. There are so many reports of the Chinese taking away our territory, and clearly a change in the status quo. But at the same time, we do not want open conflict with China because of the impact it will have on our economy and the huge business relationship we’ve built up with China. We live in a networked world today, so we cannot completely disrupt all these connections made in the past few decades. So this is the dilemma that is facing all of us, in India and the world at large. Coming out of this crisis, we are going to have a bipolar situation where the US and China are confronting themselves in a situation of multi-polarity because there are so many poles of influence. And that’s not bad for countries like us because it gives us room to maneuver and align our interests case by case. There is scope for us to promote not only the internal balancing that we need but also the external balancing that we need.

The Need for More Women Leaders

Diplomacy is not a field where machismo is beneficial, rather you need pragmatism, consistency, and precision and these are the qualities that we see in our women leaders, says Nirupama. Today we have many more women diplomats in the field and India has also increased the quotient of women in the Foreign Service. In terms of diplomacy, strategic communication is so important, change is in the air, and we cannot follow the traditional bureaucratic approach of going by precedent. We need to now be able to deal with the unfamiliar and the uncertain.

Rekha agrees, stating that we need more women leaders. We don’t have enough of them in the corporate sector, and that’s not a reflection on whether they’re better or worse but because of inequality. Right now, leaders have been called upon to rise to the challenge and display perhaps more feminine qualities like compassion and caring. We need to lead with humility and take feedback into consideration. As Geetha mentions, we’ve seen great leadership in education and design. Sometimes we associate masculinity in leadership with efficiency and not effectiveness. The softer parts of management or the softer parts of administration are decried as being too soft or feminine and we end up with a language of managerialism, where the efficient administrator is valued. Geetha argues that things are actually not quite as quantifiable in that way. We have it in all of us to be leaders, we just need to dare.

Indian society, post-independence, placed a lot of pressure on making the male child the bureaucrat, the successful engineer, the professional, or in short, the doctor, says Arundhati. All these courses and jobs were what the male child aspired to become and could become because of the way matrimony was designed. But because of this, there was a very large liberal arts area which was left free for women to enter into. And we reaped the benefit of that 20 years later. At one point of time, if you looked at the art sector in India, every important post was occupied by a woman, whether it was the head of the National School of Drama, Prithvi Theater, Ranga Shankara, etc. Importantly, when these women came into leadership, they did not exclude the men.

Arundhati thinks that what happened in the art sector is something worth emulating in others. When Amal Allana headed the National School of Drama, it did not mean that Amal brought only women into the picture. She really helped nurture a whole lot of people across the country. While Arundhati says she has benefited from that gap, there were times when she still faced sexism. “Being a woman, if I put my foot down and I said, “No, this has got to be like this,” I was called, obstinate and arrogant. Whereas, if a man says the same things, they’re called efficient,” she says. So she had to figure out ways to manipulate situations, knowing that things will be difficult because of her gender.

The arts sector is going through a particularly challenging time now, especially in India where we haven’t codified, preserved, and documented enough. India is the richest country as far as performance practices goes and all the soft skills like languages, cultural wisdom, etc. should not be lost. So we are sitting at an extremely important juncture in the history of mankind, and we need support now more than ever. Without it, the sector does not have the economic capacity to fund the kind of activity that will actually preserve this wisdom. We need the evangelists to come in and other sectors to wake up and fund excellence in our society, Arundhati argues. We’ve seen a lot of nepotism and support going into feudalistic Bollywood structures, which really doesn’t exist in theatre. So perhaps now the IITs, IIMs, and corporates can hire artisan residencies, making it a kind of corporate responsibility. We need to come up with these kinds of measures fast, otherwise many artists, weavers, craftspeople, and actors are going to become daily labourers, taking MGNREGA money.

We are, after all, a nation of storytellers, artists, and craftsmen, but we sometimes forget how important art and culture is to help us make sense of the chaos, to help us through grief and uncertainty, and to make some meaning of our lives. And we will need art now, more than ever before. Arundhati mentions the Theyyam artists in Kerala who are Harijans and are starving right now, along with the Yakshagana artists and Koodiyattam artists. These are old performance practices, some of them are 2000 years old, and we can’t afford to let these artists just fall through the cracks. It’s crucial to preserve our heritage and this pandemic is a wake up call.

The Challenges of Sexism and Ageism

We are realising how much stress the work from home policy brings for women, especially in terms of the domestic violence cases that have risen in the last five months. Women have to confront the burden of the home, family, and work. As Rekha points out, women have always had to deliver on both the work and home fronts, which puts a lot of stress on them. There are also many mental health issues that are coming to the fore in addition to domestic violence. Arundhati has been working on plans to repurpose the ground floor of Ranga Shankara and reach out to people in the immediate vicinity to attend counseling sessions by psychiatrists. The goal is for Ranga Shankara to become a space that is about well-being.

Geetha notes the additional problem of women who are working from home while also having to do domestic work and ensure their children’s school from home takes place. The online schooling system definitely needs a parent on hand because you cannot leave a child unsupervised on the internet. Schools are also expecting that kind of cooperation from parents. If you have more than one child, you may have a shortage of devices as well. So the feedback she’s hearing from working women is the increase in stress and requests for institutions to help manage things at home. At this moment, women are having an incredibly hard time.

In addition to being a woman, there is the ageism that people are facing, especially now. If we think about the idea of triage, if a young person and an old person are in a hospital and the hospital doesn’t have enough resources, age is considered a reason to save one life over the other. In a way, older people have become disposable to a certain extent. We need to confront this issue, especially in India, which will have 300 million people over the age of 65 by 2050.

Ageism is a very invisible kind of prejudice, according to Rekha, and being an older woman makes it doubly hard. On the other hand, studies have shown that younger men feel less threatened by older women bosses than older men bosses, because they find that they’re either more compassionate or caring. We need to recognise that there’s a lot of value and wisdom that older people can bring, so we need to create structures that work so that both the young and old can participate, because they both have things to bring to the table.

Geetha doesn’t feel old – at 70, she has spent 50 years as a classroom teacher and gets annoyed when people ask her when she’s going to stop working. Teaching is what she is passionate about, and so she’s still working, giving, and creating. As the number of people who are older increases, we are going to have to start thinking about ageism and the way it plays out in the workplace. Although our bodies may be failing, our minds and energy are still working fine, and we still have the passion that we brought to our work when we were young, says Geetha. Nirupama agrees, stating that the lockdown has made her feel like she’s experienced a sort of rebirth because people have been seeking her insights and opinion on foreign policy over the last few months. To her, technology has become an aid and a source of support. The isolation aspect of retirement has faded into the background now. Without the issue of travel, anybody can reach out to you from any corner of the Earth. In the midst of solitude and isolation, this new connectedness has also grown.

But these issues are ones that we cannot afford to ignore. When we look around, we realise that women who live longer than men actually don’t look after their health, because they were looking after the family’s, don’t have property of their own, and may not have been financially independent, face a double whammy as they get older. So we need to think about these issues with compassion and empathy, and give it the consideration it deserves. As we get older, we begin to think about mortality, but now the pandemic has come and forced all of us to come to terms with ours. However, we’ve also had the chance to renew ourselves, to rethink and reflect on how we’re living our lives. I think the journey forward is clear – we will have to take things in our stride and flourish despite the challenges ahead.