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Rohini Nilekani, Ravi Venkatesan and Friends: Reimagining Abundance

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Ravi Venkatesan (Founder, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship) and Nipun Mehtra (Founder, ServiceSpace). Joining them is Brinda Govindan (a teacher at San Francisco State University), Shaalini Srinivasan (co-editor of MovedbyLove), and Jordyn Alexandra (a teacher in Salt Lake City). They discuss how to respond with compassion while living in the times of COVID-19 and how we can explore Gandhian ideas of love and nonviolence, now more than ever. Awakin Talks is a series of webinars to explore a wide array of compassionate responses to our world today.

Today we are eight and half weeks into the COVID-19 crisis and I cannot help but feel that while all of us have recognised our interdependence, we have also let millions of Indians down. Post-partition India has never seen so many refugees on the road, looking to go home. As a country, we have a huge debt to make sure that they reach home safely, which is something similar to what Gandhi was concerned with, in his last year of life. Which is why I think it is a great time to reflect on what Gandhi would have done, and on how we can incorporate his lessons into our lives and work today.

The Responsibility of Wealth

Throughout my life, my grandparents have deeply inspired me, and this is especially true for my paternal grandparents. Athya, my grandmother, was feisty and fiercely independent. Despite the fact that she came from extreme wealth and had lived in the royal palaces of Gwalior, she gave it all up when she came to live in my grandfather’s humble home. She actually devoted herself to austerity towards the end of her life, and stuck by it even when her children became wealthy again. Then there was Babasaheb, my grandfather, who was among the first people to leave Belgaum and answer Gandhi’s clarion call in 1917. He was on the first train out, and stayed with Kasthurbaji for many months. In fact my aunt was born when Babasaheb was in Champaran, and it is through her that we have heard hundreds of stories about my grandparents.

When Nandan and I came into unprecedented, unimagined wealth in the mid-90s, I was thrown into the deepest personal crisis of my life. Until then, I was middle class, well-read, and leaning a little towards the political left. I used to think that wealth is bad, and that if you have it, you must have done something wrong. Which is why when I found myself on the other side of this fence, I began to wonder what I was going to do. It has taken me years to unpack this, to understand the responsibility of wealth, and my journey doing so isn’t complete even now. It’s important to understand the kind of wealth that today’s capitalist structures allow. The wealth people are coming into isn’t gradual – people around the world are becoming multi-millionaires overnight, and this really skews our understanding of societies and how they must be.

When thinking about how I would use this wealth for my personal life, I found thinking about Gandhi very helpful. Doing so helped me realise that it is simpler to think of myself as a trustee of wealth, and to see it as an opportunity rather than a burden. Using him as my framework I began to think about how I can give forward, share, and how I can hold onto the idea for a better society. With this as my foundation, my philanthropy started in earnest 30 years ago. I started building portfolios and working with amazing civil society organisations on issues of justice, environment, gender, independent media etc. While doing so, I began to think of the economy because it is an integral part of our society.

Here again, I began to think about Gandhi. Today we are seeing two crises unfold simultaneously – the pandemic and climate change. India has been hit by devastating cyclones in Orissa and West Bengal, and Bangladesh has been hit by one of the worst cyclones in the last hundred years. With these twin crises, we have absolutely no choice but to restructure the economy, and we need to do so from a place of genuine openness to the structures of the global economy.

Cultivating a Mindset of Abundance

COVID-19 has helped many of us who are privileged – we are doing our own cleaning, mopping, and taking out the waste – and are therefore understanding the dignity of labor. This in turn has allowed us to dwell on the simple pleasures of life and re-assign value to things that we didn’t before. If you expand on this idea, I’ve been thinking about whether the elite can learn to switch from the mindset of frugality, which makes us afraid and want to hoard, to a mindset of abundance.

We have all had a chance to experience abundance, be it in the form of fresh air or our roadside gardens blooming, we have experienced the purity and diversity of the natural world. If we dwell on this abundance, what kind of world could we shape? If we realise there is an abundance of people and energy, and if we could make that abundance effective, what would the economy look like? Instead of exponentially consuming the earth’s resources, could we align ourselves better to nature’s linear production ability? That’s a question I think Gandhi would have loved to dwell on. Shaalini Srinivasan mentions honouring the subtle and invisible capitals that we have around us in abundance, be it nature, time, or community, which is an important aspect for us to consider. As she explains, wealth and money, which is what we most commonly equate with capital, breeds a lot of scarcity in our hearts and minds. Especially in these times when business units are being shut down and the salaries of employees have been cut down by half or more.

But there are a multitude of other forms of capital. For example, a lesser talked about form that is abundant in Auroville, where Shaalini lives and works, is nature. She recounts that during the pandemic, one of stewards of a farm began sharing seeds and saplings with people, along with natural farming methods, and helped anyone who was interested learn more. All this was done with the aim of creating abundance for the long term. Similarly, she asks us to look at time as a form of capital. That too has been available in abundance during this pandemic, and since Shaalini’s community is made up of volunteers, many people offered their time in service. Be it in the form of helping with essential services (cleaning, sanitising etc), delivering groceries to the eldery, or segregating community waste, people used the time they had to work with and for each other.

Yet another form of capital that she highlights is that of community, and again this has grown in abundance during the pandemic. In the absence of being caught up with their individual lives, people have come together to clean the gardens, sweep the pathways, and engage with each other more often, which has resulted in deeper relationships being formed. Lastly, Shaalini talks about spiritual capital, which has been the guiding force in Auroville for the past 52 years. As a result, during this time many people have come together in silence, have prayed for the world, and have even gone online to chant the Gita and reflect on it. In essence, Shaalini reiterates that looking at the different forms of capital we have available to us allows us to feel the abundance, and as a result, to feel grateful as well.

The Need For Good Entrepreneurs

When talking about the economy and the need to invest in good entrepreneurs, Ravi Venkatesan mentions being drawn to the work of Ned Phelps, a Nobel Prize winner and Economics professor at Columbia. His work explored why some nations find themselves on a path to incredible prosperity. Why did this happen in Britain in the 18th century? Why did that mantle of prosperity then move to America and why is America now losing it? To answer this Phelps talks about the central importance of values in society. He goes back to the Age of Enlightenment, when values began to change in Western Europe. Suddenly things like individualism, self-determination, creativity, imagination, risk-taking, and exploration, became more important. As a result, we saw this amazing flowering of human endeavour and the renaissance. Great explorers like Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Cook, and Cortés started exploring the world, and the industrial revolution began in Britain.

Importantly, all the greatest inventions, right from the steam engine to the locomotive to the automated loom, were not inventions by the elite, but by ordinary people, who began thinking and tinkering with things. As Ravi notes, this has a huge relevance for India, where we’re struggling to find economic dynamism. We had a giant problem of employment, even before COVID-19, and this was the motivation for Ravi’s endeavour, the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), which aims to create millions of new enterprises, at least half of which are women-owned. As he explains, if you want a good crop, you need good seeds, soil, and climate. Similarly, if we want a good economy, we need good entrepreneurs and inventors. GAME’s aim is to work with government businesses in areas like Punjab, Shillong, and Karnataka, to create more fertile conditions for entrepreneurs, in terms of better infrastructure and connections.

Finally, we need to change our value systems. We need to create environments in local setups where risk-taking and failure is okay. As Ravi puts it, entrepreneurship is just a Trojan horse for something much more important, and that is societal leadership. The things that you need to be a successful entrepreneur are exactly the same as the things you need to be a leader in the world – a sense of self-determination, ambition, resourcefulness, tenacity, and the ability to sell your ideas to others who become followers. The hope therefore is not only to encourage successful small enterprises that grow and flourish, but also to begin to tackle problems in communities and thereby change society.

One way that Ravi does this through GAME is by putting the would-be entrepreneur at the center. As he explains, the trick is to not tell the entrepreneur where the best opportunities are, or what problems they should be solving, but instead to leave it to the imagination of the young person while being encouraging of their ideas and journey. The approach here, as he explains, is to find individuals, encourage them to dream, think, solve problems, and find small ways to make it possible for them to do so. So, while you could help them connect to a customer or make introductions at a bank, the real heavy lifting is done by the entrepreneur themselves. And by following this structure, the pyramid is inverted, with the top spot now being occupied by the individual themselves.

Distributing the Ability to Solve

Over the years a lot of my work has been about retaining a dynamic balance between Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkaar. Samaaj, or society, is the foundation, and the markets and state were developed to serve society’s larger interest. However, this order has become very convoluted. Instead of being citizens first, we are sometimes subjects of the state or consumers of the market first. This is a big threat to us as people and as communities. To fix it, the Samaaj sector must take it upon itself to ensure that it remains the foundation, and thereby keeps the markets and the state accountable to the larger public good.

Another aspect I’ve been working on is changing how we think of the people we serve as the last mile, be it through consumer goods or state services. What we need to do instead is look at them as the beginning, the first mile, and build accordingly. One thing the Bazaar sector can do in this regard is distribute the ability to solve. For this, our team has come up with something we call societal platform thinking, the core value of which is the need to create more agency, across the spectrum. To this end, distributing the ability to solve, instead of pushing one or two solutions down a pipeline, will enable us to see the abundance that Shalini was speaking about.

A societal platform does this by creating open-shared public digital goods. For example, when we co-founded Pratham Books in 2004, we wanted to put a book in every child’s hand. We also knew that there was an abundance of writers and storytellers in this country. So what we did was, we found the storytellers, writers, illustrators, translators, etc. and put their work on a Creative Commons platform. In this way it involved the market, the state, and society. Similarly, at EkStep we have used societal platform thinking to unlock the potential of 13 million teachers in India to co-create and share content. Never before have we seen such an accumulation of power, even in the oil industries or other natural resource industries. This makes it all the more important for us to unlock and distribute capital of all forms. As Ravi points out, the problems we are trying to solve are very complex, and require collaboration between all three sectors. No one sector, be it the private sector or the government, can do it alone.

Another factor we need to consider is whether this distribution of power is possible within the existing paradigm. Based on his experience working with and looking into the state, business, and entrepreneurship, Ravi doesn’t think it is. As he explains, in India, like in many other parts of the world, the state has become extremely predatory on businesses. There are too many rules and regulations to comply with, in addition to the millions of agents who are rent-seeking and trying to collect money for every possible deviation. In this way, instead of the state empowering businesses, it has actually become a parasite on these businesses, both big and large. Therefore he goes on to say that if we cannot make the shift to a place where the state is serving the citizen, and serving businesses and helping them flourish, the distribution of power is never going to happen.

Imagining a Post-COVID-19 World

When thinking about the world post-COVID-19, there are many people who say they want to go back to the way things were, which they considered normal. But as Ravi points out, those times were anything but normal. We had accepted and institutionalised things like inequity and the exploitation of nature, and we were living in unsustainable ways. Given this, we now have a chance to reimagine a very different way to live and operate. Here, he asks us to go back to what Gandhi used to say, which is ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ While we may not be able to get others to make changes in their lives, as individuals we can make different choices ourselves. Once we begin to do so, others will emulate it and we can potentially create a movement.

Gandhi also said, “There cannot be a system so good that the individuals in it need not be good.” I think this is one of the most important things to understand as we design for this new world. It’s a joyful responsibility to really seize this COVID-19 moment and use it to design a good society and the world that we crave. I think it’s possible. We are connected by a pandemic, by climate change, and the threads that bind us have become visible. Now is the time for us to spin a marvelous new conversation with our future.

As we try to reshape our own selves and the world, in a similar way to people saying “Occupy Wall Street”, we should occupy the heart, and with the heart, make movements towards the head and the hand to serve people, as Gandhi did. Now is the time for personal action making ripples out into the universe. Ravi echoes this sentiment when he says that the world today is very much at a tipping point, and we have the opportunity to nudge it towards something amazing. At the same time we also have the risk of regressing, and whether the world tips this way or that doesn’t depend on others, but on our collective action. To sum up, Ravi quotes the famous words of Hillel the Elder, “If not now, when? And if not you, who?”

Closing Address | Beyond #Charcha2020: India’s Priorities

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani’s conversation with Ashish Dhawan and Sanjay Pugalia about the next steps for India’s resurgence from the current crisis. The session was part of #Charcha2020, which brought together 100+ hours of insights and knowledge shared across events by leading businessmen, policymakers, academicians, philanthropists, community leaders, and changemakers. [A summary can be read at The Quint.]

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us realise how crucial it is to have a Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar continuum that is balanced and works for the good of everyone. However, when this crisis emerged, it was civil society organisations and their representatives that were the first responders on the ground. They are always the closest to citizens and it was very clear that they had the trust of the community. For a sector that has been under so much stress over the last few years, both due to unnecessary government action and the withdrawal of certain kinds of philanthropic flexible capital, to be clearly winning back the trust of both society and the state is extremely heartening.

We have also seen new voluntary energy coming into the sector, which was much needed. I remember my mentors and some of the most inspiring leaders in the social sector like Vijay Mahajan, Deep Joshi, and Al Fernandes coming together during the 1967 famine when they went out as volunteers. They then stayed on in the sector, giving up other lucrative careers because they saw that they were needed. So I see this as an opportunity for many young people to come in with the kind of volunteer energy that Gandhi inspired, which would be a much needed boost for this sector.

Building a More Resilient Sector

We have learnt a lot of lessons during this time, and a word that keeps coming up in conversations is ‘resilience.’ I’ve been thinking about how we can move towards resilience, because if change is going to be the only constant, clearly we have to figure out how to adapt and create a much more resilient social sector, and indeed a resilient society. I think we also need to take this moment to address something that we, as a sector, don’t often focus on – the emotional and mental well-being of the people in the sector itself. We often forget that stressors on people in the sector can mean that they are not mentally and emotionally equipped to problem solve and respond in the way they otherwise would have. At this moment, our organisations need to pause and look at the kinds of resources available, to enable all of us to also take care of ourselves before we can help others. Organisations need to open up that dialogue now.

Before mentioning the mid-term and long-term issues that we will need to keep in mind going forward, I’d like to address a few structural issues in the sector that perhaps prevent us from being the best that we could be. Change has come in a way we couldn’t predict and the future is going to look very different, therefore we also need to think very differently about how we operate.

I think the sector has issues of competitiveness that we need to address. We need to move from the mindset of ‘or’ to the mindset of ‘and’, and we need to do it fast in order to collaborate and pool resources as never before. It’s alright to have our own ideologies, but when they become blinkers and allow us to assume that we are adequately representing the people we are working on behalf of, I think it leads to problems because there’s much more diversity on the ground than we think. So moving into an open and listening mode, even more acutely than before, is something we all need to think about now. Finally, we all have ambition, but sometimes our ambition can be unhealthy. We may fall into the trap of wanting to scale our organisations instead of scaling the mission. We need to have an internal dialogue now, even as catastrophe is at our door because without it, the sector won’t be able to respond in the best way it can.

Right now we are seeing, more sharply than ever before, how the philanthropist sector can push for change in the Samaaj, Bazaar, and Sarkaar. Across the globe, governments are expanding their authority to respond to this pandemic, so we have to think about how we are going to work with the Sarkaar. In some sense, we are going to have to find common ground with the Sarkaar, even as it plans to roll back labour laws and environmental regulation. How can we re-gear society to retain the human rights dimensions of our work, and work with the state so that we are ready for the next crisis?

There is also going to be less philanthropic capital coming into the sector. Of course we can hope this won’t be the case, but the reality is that the economy is shrinking and organisations and individuals might feel less generous when they have a mindset of scarcity. So how are we going to use the resources we have more effectively? This brings us to the framework of responsibility, responsiveness, and resilience. Over the last few decades, the social sector has taken on the responsibility of creating a regime of rights, policies, and laws together with the state. This has enabled amazing things to happen in this country and has led us towards a more prosperous future.

It’s also going to be a challenging time financially because so many budgets are being cut, understandably so, because COVID-19 needs resources at this point in time. But what does it mean for sustainability of this sector, asks Ashish. How will these nonprofits survive? In many cases, founders have taken salary cuts because they care about their organisation and mission. While governments in the US and UK are extending loans to nonprofits, in India there wasn’t any mention of the nonprofit sector that’s really facing hardship right now, while doing frontline work during this pandemic. So there’s a crisis part of this, where people working in a sector that does such hard work for such little money, are only left with three to four months of cash balance to survive. We need to have a conversation amongst the funders and the ecosystem about a sort of protection on the balance sheet, so that if you’re faced with hardship, it doesn’t leave you in such a vulnerable position. As of now, the sector is not well-positioned to survive a crisis like this. So we need to find ways to build some buffers in and structurally set some norms.

Now is the time to redefine the social sector’s responsibility. For example, if we look at NREGA, which enabled so many people to survive in times of distress in rural India, it is now being refashioned for many more things. But is that the right framework, or do we need something else? We need to rethink our responsibility in this regime of rights and policies. In terms of responsiveness, many new institutions were set up in India in the last few decades that were looking at the effectiveness of the state in responding to the regime of rights and laws. To uphold the rule of law, think tanks and other institutions were formed to look at how we can help the state be more effective. This kind of work is going to have to expand, as well as collaborate with the bazaar, because as the state expands its authority, the Samaaj and Bazaar need to realign themselves to work together. Both the markets and the Samaaj have a common interest in upholding the rule of law. So we need to find new pathways to enable system responsiveness.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves what is resilience? If change is always constant, we need to be able to adapt. While we should keep traditional wisdom in mind, we must also bring science, data, and analytics. We need to utilize technology frameworks and really think about how we are going to engage in creating a digital civil society. It’s inevitable that our world will be much more digital post-COVID-19, so the civil sector needs to be vigilant but not technophobic about what is to come. We do need a digital presence to be enabled to achieve our mission and vision, at the kind of scale and with the kind of new social restraints that are going to be forced upon us. So we must re-imagine this through what our team calls ‘societal platform thinking,’ i.e. how we can use digital public goods to distribute the ability to solve, reduce the friction to collaborate, and distribute agency. This is the kind of thing that will build resilience.

One example of this is the DIKSHA platform that the government has set up which enables teachers to keep learning and reach more students and parents when schools are closed. Another example is the ECHO platform, which is doing guided mentoring for lakhs of healthcare professionals at a time when they desperately need help. It’s by thinking digital, thinking systems, and thinking collaboration, that will help us build the resilience that we need so much. Although many of us begin our work from the heart, we now need to combine the head and heart. We have seen terrible things happening to our fellow citizens. But we need to remember why we are in this sector in the first place – in order to create a good and just society – and we must hold on to that empathetic energy now more than ever.

Reexamining Our Relationship with the State

According to Ashish Dhawan, if it were not for our civil society sector, we would be faced with an even larger crisis right now. Although the government has big programs in place like its Jan Dhan Yojna, in times like these many of the gaps are exposed. A recent survey by Azim Premji University showed that despite all the efforts that we have made, the last mile is still broken. People aren’t getting money or access to food from the government, and so civil society is stepping in to fill that void. To him, the government really needs to think about how to rectify this going forward. This might look like massive programs around education and health, as well as a foundational literacy mission coming out of this crisis.
Ashish suggests launching a national health mission going forward. While many of us are concerned about fixing the economy, we also need to fix other sectors as well. We should be demanding similar things to address the massive challenges that we’ll be facing, and really accelerate our progress on many of these social indicators. For this to happen, the government must change its mindset, because it’ll be strapped for cash and needs to look at civil society as a partner. To him, the government hasn’t embraced the sector whole-heartedly, but this moment can be an opportunity. There is proven evidence in the sector that actors are doing successful work in states and districts, so the time has come to collaborate on a bigger scale. We need to reset the relationship between the government and civil society.

We need to start thinking about the last mile as the first mile, because that’s where the problems reside. At the first mile, the government is quite willing for the civil society sector to participate because they know that for the last few steps, the social sector is the best at bridging the gap. However, when people start challenging certain ways of the state expanding and retracting through environmental or labor legislations, that’s when things get difficult between the sector and the state. For many in the social sector, there is a great role for agitation, to stand outside the gates and really bring peoples’ conscience out.

But there’s also a huge role in between, to work with the government at various levels because the government is not a monolith and there are always going to be bureaucrats who are sympathetic. There’s always going to be some department of government that is willing to listen or some politicians who will understand. We need to find those champions and work with them. We have to assume that many things are done with good intentions. We also know the road to hell can be paved with those same good intentions, but it is for us to learn new forms of collaboration. There’s no easy way out, and we don’t want to walk away from the negotiating table. We have to be able to sit across from each other, because governments know they need the social sector’s innovation, ideas, and demonstration on the ground. As Ashish argues, the centre, the states, and the civil society really needs to come together to work on this, through bigger and bolder reforms to help the people who really need them.

This crisis has given us an opportunity to reexamine the ways we have built our society, our cities, our world. With the migrant crisis and the question of whether they will return to cities, this is the time for us to to think very radically about what they will come back to. We need to use the momentum now that people have realised that our cities cannot run without the plumbers, electricians, masons, and sanitation workers among others, to now ask ourselves how we can address the reasons they left. This is a real chance for civil society, research institutions, and academic institutions to come and suggest a rapid reform of the urban sector to be more welcoming to migrants.

A Technology-Enabled Future
Our interest in all our work is to make sure that we remain technology-enabled rather than technology-led, because technology is just a tool, it’s not the end goal. But we must really exploit all the potential of that technology to achieve our goals. We do that by holding certain philosophies and values which we make public, and then design technology for that. There will always be some unintended consequences. But if we put the philosophy out front and design based on that philosophy, instead of creating monopolies and gated walls, we can create open systems which allow data to flow in multiple directions. This allows for transparency and observability from different directions, as well as participation and co-creation. That’s my understanding of the benefits of open, digital public goods.

However, we must be careful not to increase the digital divide. Everybody deserves access to digital and to smartphone technologies. With that, we can do all kinds of things to bridge the digital and physical world. In EkStep, we are working with the government to be able to use digital to allow people to do more physical. But at the scale at which we need to work, even if it means telling parents how to help children at home, we need to reach them digitally so they can do things physically. I think this has become an extremely important thing for the social sector to engage with. Ashish argues that we don’t have to be at the cutting edge in order to use technology for impact. What’s more important is to contextualise it and make it relevant for the situation and the problem at hand. How do we use existing tools that anybody can pick off the shelf and design something that will be effective?

In addition to leveraging high tech strategies, Ashish points out that low-tech solutions like text messaging features to stay in touch with parents during the crisis, will also be helpful in problem solving. Even now, we are seeing that teachers are forming more WhatsApp groups. It’s more possible for teacher training to move online now. In this way, we can come up with new models and new infrastructure because these teacher groups have already been formed. There are also groups being formed between teachers, schools, and parents, which never existed before. So through this crisis, some crucial infrastructure is also being built, and we must think about how to leverage this. Earlier, we never thought about the home as an environment that we could impact. Now, we’re thinking about it much more as we’re forced to reach people at home. Whether through tele-medicine, some form of interactive radio, an app on the phone, text messaging, etc. we are finding ways to reach them. So perhaps we will see some innovative ways of thinking about things coming out of this as well.

In terms of reaching people at a grassroot level, especially women, I think we are going to have to create new forms of support. We already have self-help groups across the country, which gave women in isolated settings a lot of support. We need to think along those lines now and co-create a way to support women in this new crisis. In terms of micro-entrepreneurship for women, there’s been a lot of concern about the reducing labor participation of women. The social issues behind that have not yet been fully understood. So I think there is scope for the social sector to go into that and enable the re-gigging of women’s participation in the labor force in a safe way and with dignity.

Leveraging the System

Now is the time for philanthropists to be more flexible and generous in our funding and roll back some of the reporting requirements and outcome-based reporting that was mandated on which many social sector organisations spend up to one third of their time. We know that impact is not always measurable, and we need to be a little nuanced about that, especially now. Outcome funding should not crowd out the current needs of the nonprofit sector.

We have to face the fact that there will be a financial crunch that many nonprofits will face. Even if some people step up through generosity, retail funding grows, and many Indians are very generous, it still won’t be enough for nonprofits to do business as usual. We are going to have to figure out how organisations can stretch the rupee and rethink priorities. While there are no quick answers, this is where I think focusing on sharing competencies and assets across nonprofits will help. Some of us are working on processes to do that, like listing your assets, publishing them, and learning from others. It means moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. What do we have that we can share, build on, and re-purpose?

In the larger scheme of things, philanthropic funding is a drop in the bucket compared to what the government spends, Ashish notes. The real question we should be asking is, “How can we make a bigger impact?” For example, with an organisation like Pratham, what are some of the things which were really high leverage? One is ASER, which didn’t cost a lot of money but really holds a mirror to education in the country. All of us look at the data and know there’s a learning crisis. It’s such an important public good which uses a small amount of money. Secondly, even though programs scaled and then shrunk, they went to different states and tried different things, which were then picked up by other nonprofits, so they were able to spread that public good.

The social sector needs to learn the art of acupressure. Where are those points at which you press where you will get the whole system’s leverage? I think we have to dive deeply and think about that, so that we get more ‘bang for our buck’ as they say in the corporate sector. This is where frameworks like societal platform thinking comes in, where discoverability, shareability of assets, and a continuous learning journey, ensures that we make the most out of what we have. And even if our other resources are reduced, empathy and volunteer energy are always free and expanding on this will prepare us for resilience in the long term.

This pandemic has also taught us about the importance of decentralisation. While I agree that some things need to come from the center, we know that the best response is a response in context. For us to effectively respond in context at the local level, we need decentralisation of power and flexibility. I would say that the promise of the 74th Amendment has not been met. Ashish mentions that China’s development offers something to learn. In China, the devolution of power goes down to the county level. There are 3,000 counties in China, about a quarter of the size of an Indian district in terms of population. The party chief who runs the county actually is on metrics and has a lot of authority and funding available at their discretion, and that’s what makes China successful. It’s not just the devolution, but the accountability, metrics, and outcomes orientation.

This is the time for us to step up to ensure that the balance between Samaaj, Bazaar and Sarkaar is retained. We have to be vigilant, but we must be ready to collaborate, we have to be creative and innovative. Never before has the importance of the social sector been so visible. Let us use that opportunity to help forge a good society. This is the time, this is the opportunity, and I hope we can work together to do that.

The Missing Half – How to Bring Men to the Gender Conversation?

This is an edited version of a panel discussion titled ‘The Missing Half – How to Bring Men to the Gender Conversation?’ Devyani Srinivasan, an independent researcher assisting Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, participated along with Ravi Verma, Director of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) Asia; Sujata Khandekar, Executive Director of CORO India; Gary Barker, Founder and CEO of Promundo; and Harish Sadani, Co-founder and Chief Functionary of Men Against Violence and Abuse (MAVA). The panel was organised by The/Nudge Foundation during #Charcha2020, and anchored by Dalberg Advisors.

In her introduction to the panel topic, Dayoung Lee from Dalberg narrated a story that exposed some of the sector’s miscalculations when it comes to issues of gender. While researching in Chhattisgarh with her team, Lee’s mandate was to design an app for providing maternal and child health information to rural women. They were carrying out prototyping sessions, largely with pregnant women and young mothers until the women asked, “Why are you only talking to us? Can you make this thing useful for our husbands also because we want them to know this information, as well?” Lee’s team had not planned to engage men in these discussions, assuming that this information will be most useful for the women and that the return on investment was going to be higher if they targeted women for this type of information.

But recent research has really shown that this kind of “low hanging fruit” mentality has really led the development community to only exacerbate centuries-old gender norms in patriarchy such as women’s role as caregivers and men’s role as breadwinners. And so Lee and her team went back to talk to the men, and also came up with ways to engage them better. Promoting gender equality has been about providing more resources and opportunities to women and girls, building their confidence, helping them stand up and advocate for themselves. But if men are such a big part of the problem, why aren’t they also a part of the solution? How do we bring in men and boys into the gender conversation?

Reframing the Gender Conversation

Gary Barker’s work took him to Brazil in the early ’90s to coordinate a study with UNICEF on girls who were being sexually exploited. While working with government social workers and interviewing girls he realised that if they actually want to stop the flow of men paying for sex with underage girls, they had to look at what it was that’s driving it, what allows them to do this, and why so many of their friends watching don’t say anything. Gary also points to the way that gender seeps into language. He kept thinking about how in Brazilian Portuguese the expression of violence against women and sexual exploitation of girls sounded like it was missing words. Then he realised that it’s missing words in English as well, because violence against women is men’s violence against women; the sexual exploitation of girls is men’s sexual exploitation of girls in large part. We forget that there’s an object or a subject in that sentence. With the simple idea that gender equality needs men and men need gender equality, he founded Promundo.

Sujata Khandekar ran into a similar problem while working on violence against women in low-income communities of Mumbai. CORO was providing counseling, training, creating, awareness, legal aid, etc. but there was still no reduction in the violence. They realised that it was not enough to work with women alone, because quite often the violence against women increased when they started speaking for themselves, as a backlash because men now felt threatened. Rather than working with the patterns and instances, they worked on the mental models that are creating, perpetuating, endorsing, justifying violence. They began questioning how we can challenge and change social norms that perpetuate, endorse, and justify violence against women. The role of men became very crucial because they have to be brought in communication, as part of the solution.

With Nilekani Philanthropies, our work with our portfolio of organisations that engage young men and boys on gender equality is really driven by Rohini’s belief that programs that work on women’s empowerment are never really going to achieve their full potential unless they also work with men. The other side of this is that those programs also need to address men’s fears and men’s needs for them to be sustainable. We’re learning from the organisations all the time, so even within our portfolio, there are three different approaches in terms of how organisations are thinking about benefits to men. With the #MeToo movement and the Nirbhaya case, we’ve had a lot of moments where violence and inequality against women have been highlighted, but those are also incidents that have been quite polarizing. Unless we start to see men as part of the solution and not only part of the problem, Deyvani Srinivasan suggests that we are actually going to see increasing violence and polarization in society.

Ravi Verma points to the fact that we need to reframe our entire discussion on gender. When ICRW carried out a major national survey in India in 2002, it revealed interesting results. Many women justified violence that was happening within households and were even party to it, pointing to the larger patriarchal structure that seems to go beyond men and women. During that time, Ravi remembers that campaigns against HIV were focusing on men to reduce the HIV infection rate. From this time, he began to bring the idea of gender transformation in the discourse on women’s empowerment and men’s engagement. To him, discussions around engaging men must include an element of questioning the construct of gender. It doesn’t have to be equated only with women, but rather asking how we address the structures, institutions, and larger norms that sustain particular gender relations which impact both women and men? The idea is to enable questioning of the structural parameters that make men, and women fall in line with certain expectations.

Challenges and Approaches

Over the past 13 years of his experience working with young men and adolescent boys, Harish Sadani notes that in order to create a safe space for men in their 20s and 30s, you need a lot of perseverance. You need to have conversations where they feel they can open up without being judged or labeled, and can talk about their vulnerabilities and anxieties. When you talk about gendered relationships, you need to talk about sexuality. Today, Harish argues that raising a boy is more difficult than it was 15 years ago. The age of adolescence or puberty is declining. While young girls get information about menstruation from other women in her family, however limited that dialogue is, at least it means they have someone who tries to address how their body is changing.

But when it comes to boys, there is no guarantee that family members will talk to him about what happens to the body and the physical and psychological changes he will experience as he grows up. 95% of young men have pornography as one of their primary sources of information about sexuality. As these boys grow up, their testosterone levels are at the highest level and if they are not guided properly and resort to violence or offensive behavior, we label them criminals. But the problem is that they don’t have an alternative. We have never responded to the unmet needs of countless young boys in India.There are also multiple inequalities that intersect with their experiences as young men. Religion is one example. Hinduism is 5,000 years old, which means 5,000-year-old beliefs about how men should be controlling women are still being reinforced, says Harish. So there are several challenges to face.

As Devyani mentions, one of the key questions is what boys and men would consider as benefits to themselves from engaging in this work? One approach that Nilekani Philanthropies has invested in, involves trying to get boys and men to participate in a kind of activism for spreading gender equality and gender awareness. The idea is that they can take on active roles in spreading the message and generating awareness. The theory of change behind that approach is that men and boys can also gain skills that are transferable, like communication skills, critical thinking, and problem solving, but in the process they are also sensitised to gender issues as well.

The second approach takes the perspective that gender norms and gender identities are damaging for men as well as women. Gender norms are damaging or at least restricting for boys and men, so the ability to challenge those norms and embrace other masculine identities, would benefit them as well. The third approach, which is the approach of some of the organisations that are new to our portfolio, is an intersectional approach. It takes into consideration the contexts of the young boys, who may come from lower castes or are in situations where they might have an abusive parent. So this approach uses intersectionality to build empathy among boys and men, to help them relate to situations where they’ve been dominated, oppressed, or violated, and link that to women’s experiences.

But if we want to engage men and boys, and address this issue of raising the ability to question power and entitlement, then it has to begin very early in life, says Ravi. This is one of the approaches that he advocates for – engaging children from 10-16 years old, so that we saturate the interventions at that age. These interventions also need to be situated within the institutions because a lot of what boys and girls begin to learn and internalise are sustained and nurtured by the institutions within which they study, play, and interact with their peers. There are many institutions within which boys are made to believe that they can enjoy certain entitlements or carry certain expectations. So Ravi suggests that we need to work within those structured institutional spaces.

His third point is that we need to find ways to bring a kind of a convergence because there has to be some way to connect institutional programs with community-based programs. This means that there have to be some kind of change agents or people who would anchor these change processes on a sustained basis. Within schools and institutions, for example, we need to work with teachers or mentors so that they remain there and continue to engage in these difficult conversations. This would not be a project-specific piece of work that they’re doing, but a kind of transformation that they themselves are going through. They have to change the pedagogy. They need to change the learning and teaching styles in a way that will be engaging, inclusive, and participatory, and they need to be ready to face difficult questions from children without being perturbed by them. If we work with three principles, Ravi hopes that perhaps this will raise and challenge some of those difficult issues that men and boys take for granted.

Making the Invisible Visible

Gary notes that much of this work is difficult because the world is structured to make certain things invisible to men. He uses a metaphor of men as fish in a fishbowl, who don’t perceive the water around them. If you ask a fish, “How’s the water?” a fish is likely to say, “What water?” Gendered norms are so enmeshed with our world that it is difficult to bring awareness to people. If we really want to achieve the change that we’re after, Gary argues that we’ve got to change the system. As an example of what that could look like, he mentions working with Brazil’s Ministry of Health to create a men’s prenatal health protocol. So rather than just working in group education to convince men they should be part of prenatal visits, they said, “Let’s make that system inviting to him.” There’s a chair for him to sit during the consultation, people expect him to attend appointments and make his own sessions to talk about family planning, to do STI tests, etc.

Gary also points to the fact that conditional cash transfers or micro-credit programs around the world focused on women. We continue to send a message that we don’t think men are very responsible at the household level. But the design of these programs are actually antagonistic to their goals. Instead, in Colombia, the National Cash Transfer program has included a small condition that says ‘We want men here to support their female partners by entering the paid workforce or doing part of the care work.’”

A common problem on the ground is that often no men want to participate. There’s no low-hanging fruit when it comes to engaging men, says Gary. However, if we’re able to create a safe space, there is at least a third of the men, a quarter of the men, or sometimes half of the men who are already on our side. But we’ve not been brave enough or creative enough to find the ways to engage them, to change the rules and say, “We know that you can be called into this.” Part of this work is to accept that deep discomfort that we have to say, “Yes, we need you to be part of this, but this is not just you being a champion who comes in and says, ‘Oh I’m going to be the good guy and I’ll fix things.” We need to create a world that leaves men with no choice but to be part of the movement for gender equality.

The current pandemic has brought up certain things in terms of human dynamics, according to Sujata. A major factor is that the vulnerabilities of all people have become very evident and there is a feeling that we are in the same boat. This has been a difficult time, especially for men who have the baggage of being a breadwinner at a time when many people will or have already lost their livelihoods. There are so many uncertainties, which have made them more vulnerable. There is also a realisation of mutuality and connectedness. So this could be a starting point for difficult conversations, where everyone’s vulnerabilities and connections are now exposed.

Settlers Unsettled: How can Bengaluru Retain its Dynamic Workforce?

Bangalore is a city of migrants. But we do not know yet how many of them have left the city in the wake of the pandemic. With the lockdown partially lifted, many more may want to return home. There are indications that they may not wish to hurry back. The idea of home has never seemed so important to them as now. So that leaves a big question for this city of Bengaluru, which depends on its migrants for many day-to-day operations to keep it humming. What will Bengaluru look like in the interim? Which services will be affected? How will the city cope? Also, how have we treated the migrants in this crisis? What has the government done? What have been the experiences of the migrants; what would they want in the future? Will this shock treatment the city faces help us change our attitude and our dealings with migrants? Will we be more welcoming? Will we respect their rights Rohini Nilekani moderates a panel featuring Gayathri Vasudevan, Manish Sabharwal, Ramani Sastri and Divya Ravindranath.

This is an edited version of a panel discussion moderated by Rohini Nilekani, on the consequences of the pandemic on Bengaluru’s workforce. The panel featured Gayathri Vasudevan, Manish Sabharwal, Ramani Sastri, and Divya Ravindranath.

I am a migrant to Bangalore, a city which is now my own. My husband Nandan was born here, but I only got here in 1984 and fell in love with it right away. I was born in manic Mumbai, so to come to a city of trees and gardens where people strolled about in a relaxed sort of way was novel and marvelous. When I started my work here as a journalist, I used to take bus number 20 from Jayanagar to St. Marks Road where my office was. But soon after that, the city began to change and people started arriving from around the country. Older residents resented people like us from the IT sector, who had taken their pensioners’ paradise and turned it into a struggling mess.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s I got the opportunity to work with several organisations including the Akshara Foundation, and through that work I met people living in slums and tenements who were not as lucky as I was. So while we understand that migrants can come from all classes, castes, and walks of life, we need to focus on those who are more vulnerable. Cities in India depend on migrants, and their narratives often make up the best and the biggest chunk of Bangalore’s history. In the past few months, the vulnerable migrant has haunted India, awakened our conscience, and brought our attention to their suffering as they try to get home. The inadequate and sometimes inhumane response of the state has filled our minds.

In Bangalore, we don’t have accurate data on how many migrants have left the city in the wake of the pandemic, and how many more will leave once the lockdown is properly lifted. States are now crafting new policies to retain and attract investment, which will create more opportunities for people in their own states, so there may be a new dynamic of labour availability. On the other hand, many migrants are desperate to return and get their jobs back, because despite the emotional security at home, they need financial security. As of now, we don’t know if deepening rural distress will result in new migrants coming to the cities as well. So how can we fashion the city to be more welcoming of its migrants so that we can be part of a flourishing economy and society?

Employers and the State Need to Provide Solutions

We need to consider the public infrastructure and policies that we will need. As Gayathri notes, our everyday lives will not work without migrants. Many people had not realised exactly how important they were in our lives, which meant that we didn’t bother with their working and living conditions. They were in our neighborhoods, but they were invisible. With the mass migration now, Gayathri predicts that the country is going to see a worker surplus and worker deficit areas, and Bangalore may be a worker deficit area. How we have treated workers is going to reflect in the numbers who decide to come back. Manish disagrees on this. According to his estimations, maybe one million out of the 40 million migrants in the labour force will go home. So he doesn’t think there’s going to be a shortage of labour since most companies are at 25% capacity utilisation, which will slowly increase going forward. India doesn’t have a jobs problem but a wages problem, he argues.

The question now becomes how do we bring workers back? Divya reminds us that it is unviable for workers to live in a city when there are no wages and no employment. People want to go home because they feel like there is some support structure there, so how do we ensure that these structures are maintained in the cities so that they don’t feel like they have to leave? It will be very difficult for workers to come back, especially after this experience which is going to also have an emotional and mental impact. We need to also start thinking about solutions, which must be a combination of responses from employers as well as the state. Wages must be something that enables them to sustain themselves in the city where costs are higher. Safe working and living conditions are important as well. We often think of migrants as male workers, but many are female, so we need to keep their needs in mind, like access to health care resources, childcare facilities, etc. These are the things that workers want from their employers and from the state.

We also need to start thinking about a range of housing options, says Divya. There are short-term migrants, semi-permanent migrants, and seasonal migrants, in addition to people who move permanently. These vulnerable groups come just for a few months, and then return to do agriculture in the village. So we need to have housing arrangements for all these workers. We also need to realise there are various kinds of sectors, and workers have specific needs in each of these sectors. For example, garment workers live in clusters whereas construction workers are the most mobile because they move from site to site. One of the main issues is that migrants are still considered to be outsiders, despite having lived in the city for generations. They live in informal settlements that are unrecognised by the city, and they are completely disconnected from any services that the state provides. By now, they should not be feeling like migrants but as part of our city. They should be able to have housing here, vote here, and make legitimate demands of the state and their employers.

Investing in Skilling Workers

Ramani explains the industry perspective on migrant workers, where contracting companies provide accommodations and invest in ensuring healthy and hygienic conditions for workers. During the pandemic, he states that project sites now have doctors checking workers every three day and providing information sessions about what COVID-19 is and what the symptoms are. Companies have also endeavoured to provide grains as well as cash, but because workers come through a labour contractor, it is difficult to keep track and ensure that the workers are being treated well. Ramani suggests that we need labour law reforms or better laws that ensure workers’ welfare. Another issue he points to is the need for investment in skilling workers, so that they can advance in sectors and find better employment.

Gayathri agrees that one of the biggest issues now is the lack of skilled workers. There is nobody who is working in the vocation who actually knows the vocation. We need to democratise skilling. Vocational education has been monopolised by a very narrow definition of how it has to be.

Today, we have engineers and doctors who have added to that group. We have a lot of colleges that are producing significantly good graduates. But if we look at the lower segment of work that is there, skill is still a problem. India has 6 lakh gram panchayats out of which 2.5 lakh are absolutely unviable. But we do have 7,000 census towns which could possibly be at a population of one lakh. So if we’re able to actually develop 7,000 census towns, that could be revolutionary. Bangalore is not Bangalore alone, so could we move to Hosur, Anekal, Jigani? The continuum that we’re able to create is very important as we move forward.

In terms of larger companies taking care of its workers, Bangalore is made up of small builders, neighborhood construction sites or restaurants. We were neither policy-wise ready nor did we have the foresight to ensure better working and living conditions for these workers in the event of something like a pandemic. Gayathri hopes that the focus on occupational safety and health will go up tremendously. As soon as the middle class fears for itself, it will wake up to doing things better for everyone.

Rethinking India’s Labour Laws

India has 63 million enterprises, and only one million of them pay social security, Manish points out. Only 19,500 have a paid up capital of more than 10 crores, and it’s important to recognise that wages depend on productivity of enterprises. We don’t need 63 million enterprises. The US economy is eight times India’s and it only has 23 million enterprises. So many of these are not self-employment, they are self-exploitation, and our labour is handicapped without capital. Indian labour laws have 17 definitions of wages, 22 definitions of workers, and 19 definitions of enterprise. It’s impossible to comply with 100% of India’s labour laws without violating 10% of them.

The other issue is that 90% of India is informally employed, which means that labour laws are irrelevant and the labour aristocracy is the only one getting the help. Our current system is not working. That doesn’t mean there should be some non-negotiables like health and safety, portable social security, and realistic minimum wages. We need to formalise the Indian labour force, a challenging task when there are 63 million enterprises to hold accountable. So labour laws are an important part of the reform program. We need calibrated labour laws which don’t encourage the treating of labour as a disease and automate.

On the one hand, there is so much regulation in India that we don’t even understand. I often say that every time you wake up in India, you have already broken three laws because we have so many complex laws. So we also need to acknowledge the difficulties that employers face in being able to adhere to the laws and regulations while also ensuring their workers’ needs are met.

To Manish, reform happens when problem, opportunity, and timing come together. India can’t be run from Delhi. It’s important for labour laws and land markets to be handed over to chief ministers. The lack of competition among states is one of the reasons why employers find it hard to have a factory with 100,000 people in India. There’s not a single factory in India with 100,000 people. There are more than 100 in China, because we would just never risk having 100,000 people in the same place.

Seeing Workers As Human Beings

If we want to start envisaging a better city for our workers, we cannot afford to disconnect them from food systems and basic public infrastructure. The kind of work they do is often extremely taxing, both physically and mentally, but we don’t think of them as people beyond requirements of just wages. We need to start thinking about them as people who have other needs like all of us. None of these can be done either by the state or the employer alone, it has to be a good mix of both. In the corporate sector, people talk about improving work conditions because that’s necessary for better productivity. But we never hold labourers to the same standards. The state also has to think about ways to let people enjoy the city. Migrants may move for income, but they’re also coming because the city is a space of aspiration, and they want to be here. We have to think about workers in all these terms rather than just bodies that are going to be labouring day in and out.

We also need to understand that most of the workers in the informal sector also belong to communities with high rates of malnutrition, anaemia, etc. One of the questions Divya asks is how are workers going to work long hours without all the other supportive infrastructure. Through her field work at various construction sites for over four years, Divya notes that the situation is very bad in terms of health outcomes. So while we focus on productivity, we need to keep this reality in mind as well.

There’s also the issue of caste that plays a role in this, because most of the construction sector workers will either belong to the OBC caste or be Dalits. Depending on the sector, there will be certain caste distinctions. And we are seeing how that plays out, even with the kind of response the state has given in the last few weeks, Divya notes. The fact that international migrants were brought in special planes but no transport was arranged for interstate workers makes it impossible to ignore the caste and class issue.

Additionally, public infrastructure for women and sanitation is an issue for everybody. Gayathri suggests that perhaps it is time for the state to define what health infrastructure entails in more broad terms, she argues. So a health infrastructure could include electricity and water, which you cannot run hospitals and clinics without. We need to divide this between what the state needs to provide and what an employer needs to provide. Gayathria remembers a Bangalore where children would play on the roads, cycling up to Vidhana Soudha easily. She lives in Jayanagar now and notes that Tilak Nagar and Padarayanapura are containment zones. This just shows us that the city grew in a manner which was not acceptable to its health. She feels that the last two decades were about mobility, but this next decade is about health infrastructure.

The Future of Our Cities

In terms of whether migrants will return to cities, Manish is positive. He argues that for them, employment is as important as it is to the employer. So the labour will come back. If we look at the last 20 years in Bangalore, from March to June, about 30% of migrant labourers go back to the fields. This time it is maybe 10% more. But he is confident that they will come back because there is nothing to hold them back in their hometown. The problem with the lockdown is that only certain people can work from home. People who do physical labour can’t. The lockdown doesn’t work as a one-size-fits-all model, and we need to allow for that.

The key is to ensure better housing and working conditions for all, says Divya. We know that many safety measures, for example, are not followed at all. There are no child care facilities on site, even though many migrant workers move with their children. From her experiences in the field, at the construction sites, she notes several sanitation issues as well. Access to healthcare is another huge problem. A large number of workers suffer from TB, and increasingly many workers have multiple comorbidities because NCDs are on the rise. So we need to be able to give them access to better health care services. For this to happen, we need a good public health infrastructure and COVID-19 has taught us that if we don’t have that in place, we’re going to run into huge problems in the future. They also need for better access to food systems. For example, the Public Distribution System has to be portable. Many migrants are not able to access it when they’re in the city, and their families need it back home. We need to be able to experiment with different things, but to make the PDS portable is absolutely crucial at this stage.

In addition to vocational training and access to health care, water and sanitation are crucial now, says Ramani. We also need to create clusters with social infrastructure, and even if it is state-funded and rented. In terms of public health, all the developers have been requested to insure at least all the workers who are working for them.

Manish argues that entrepreneurs cannot substitute the state. What the state needs to do is formalise, urbanise, industrialise, financialise and skill. Only 55% of our labour force works in farms. Additionally, we need to skill and work on education simultaneously. When we think of the children of migrant labourers in Bangalore, their non-access to education is truly frightening because they are coming from various places and can’t study in their own languages. We also have to urbanise better. This doesn’t mean more people migrating to Delhi, Bombay, or Bangalore. We need 200 cities and more than a million people.

Unless we open up and learn from this pandemic, we are not going to get very far. We need to ensure lasting changes In terms of health, COVID-19 has taught us that we’re all interlinked, and we need everybody to be healthy so that we can be healthy. The fate of migrant workers and the fate of Bangalore are tied together, and we have to co-create the kind of governance we need, both for ourselves and all our migrants who are going to be coming in and who are already here.

Resilience, Hope: India in the Time of COVID-19 & Climate Change

This is an edited version of Rohini Nilekani in conversation with Jairam Ramesh (former Minister for Environment and Forests) and Navroz Dubash (Professor at the Centre for Policy Research). Moderated by Barkha Dutt, New Worlds is a three-part digital series by the India Climate Collaborative to discuss resilience and recovery in the face of our two planetary challenges: COVID-19 and climate change.

One may wonder why we are talking about climate change during this pandemic. One is very specific and tied to a particular virus, while the other is a systemic threat. However, what ties them together is the fact that they are rooted in the same thing – our illusion of control over nature. The way we think our lives are insulated is the same manner in which we think we can manage our way out of climate change, when in reality there is scientific information that tells us otherwise.

The second commonality is that both COVID-19 and climate change affect the poor and vulnerable populations the most. One thing we have learned from this pandemic is that we are not a resilient society, we do not have systems in place to take care of the poorest when faced with something like this. And climate change is nothing but a series of shocks – be it heatwaves, violent weather events, a decline in crop yields or disruptions to our water system. As Navroz Dubash puts it, we are facing a world that is going to be shock-ridden, and we don’t have systems of resilience in place.

As a result of the last 45 days, we are starkly reminded of how much the community trusts the civil society sector. We have been pushing the civil society sector back for the last few years, but during the pandemic we saw how they were the first responders. Civil society has the last mile-connect to citizens and they understand the context on the ground, because of which they are able to provide good, quick feedback loops. So their role has become extremely visible to the state and the center.

What we can take from this experience is that we need to build up the capacity of the civil society sector to create resilience, and we have to start now. Here, the philanthropic community has an important role to play, because while we have been responding immediately, we need to also start looking at the impact on livelihoods. It’s time now for civil society and philanthropy to move into a mid-term strategy, and that is all about developing resilience.

The False Dichotomy Between Economy and Environment

As Jairam Ramesh explains it, both COVID-19 and climate change are examples of a loss or disturbance of ecological balance. Both have public health consequences as well. With climate change, that looks like pollution, chemical contamination, land degradation, etc. As a result, we need to start looking at climate change from a public health perspective. While we know that the economic damage as a result of COVID-19 has been horrendous, if we prioritise the economy at the cost of the environment, it will push us towards a disaster. There is already a marked tendency towards relaxing post-lockdown. We are talking about relaxing labour laws, land laws, and there are proposals in front of the government to relax environmental laws as well.

Navroz echoes this statement and builds on it to say that thinking that we need to set aside all kinds of environmental constraints to jumpstart the economy is actually a false dichotomy. There are several things that we can do that would be good from the point of view of lifting the lockdown as well as from an environmental viewpoint. For example, the power sector has already seen a decline in demand, the plants are losing money, and generation companies are going bankrupt. As a result, we have an opportunity to reimagine this sector. If we shut down the older and more polluting plants, it would create space for newer players using renewable energy to make a profit. This in turn, would be good for both, the economy and job market, as well as for the environment.

Now is the time for us to be creative in how we think about the intersections between the economy and the environment, because going back to a model that pits one against the other, is deeply problematic. And since, just like with COVID-19, it is the poor that are often the greatest victims of pollution, if we were to focus on the economy and set aside the environment, we would be jumpstarting the economy at the cost of India’s most vulnerable.

Invest in Governance and Civil Society

This pandemic has taught us all a lot, myself included. It’s taught us about the societies that we live in and the governance systems that we are experiencing. Additionally, in terms of philanthropy, COVID-19 has made some of us pledge to deploy more generous and flexible capital, and to build and sustain trust networks. We want to give our partners the freedom of choice to respond to what’s happening on the ground. So while the pandemic has taught us mindfulness at an individual level, it has also made us think about what we can do at a philanthropy level, to ensure that civil society has the power to be more resilient.

In that sense, this moment has really taught us that we need a more judicious balance between centralisation and decentralisation. Rather than pushing solutions or diktats down the pipeline, we need to focus on what we can do to distribute the ability to solve. This is something that we are trying – we call the approach ‘societal platform thinking.’ Through it, our teams are working across sectors to make sure that people have what they need to build agency.

Jairam notes the role of programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in building the resilience of local communities. MNREGA works to create assets, through water conservation, land improvement, etc., that lead to climate resilience. And as he points out, this is done in tandem with civil society and has been a success in a number of states like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. WIth this in mind he asks, if we know that civil society’s capacity to build local resilience exceeds the capacity and capability of the government, how can we rediscover the virtues of civil society working in tandem with local governments?

Building on the point of government programmes and working in collaboration with civil society, I would like to note two very large and ambitious government programmes which have been announced – the Atal Bhujal Yojana and the Jal Shakti Abhiyan for drinking water and for ground water management. Here my foundation, Arghyam, is trying to be closely involved. As a nonprofit we know that communities have a good sense of their water resources. What we need to do is build their capacity to separate and segregate their good water resources for drinking. In essence, we have to go local, by giving people the knowledge, the training, and the tools they need, such as water quality testing kits. This doesn’t cost much money and if the government and civil society work together we can push the water agenda out this summer.

This pandemic has highlighted the fact that our governance system has failed. The public distribution system (PDS) has failed to reach many people. So while social order has been maintained, it has been done at the cost of a lot of disrespect to people. Navroz connects this failure again, to the lack of systematic resilience we have. We don’t have institutions and governance that can protect the poorest in India, and so we need to think about systems change. We need to demand a society that can handle these disruptions in ways that are more kind, fair, and in a way that safeguards the poorest.

Overall, when looking at both this pandemic and climate change, it is clear that we need more effective governance. And while I’m the first to say that as citizens we can’t be automatic consumers of good governance, we need to co-create it, it is also true that the state has to respond much more effectively so that the public can follow. To enable citizens to be able to do their duties better, to change their habits, we need public infrastructure, which is not something we currently have.

Imaging a New Future

When looking at solutions and the road ahead, our path is clear. We have laws to protect the environment and we need to enforce them. We have institutions that were created to enforce the laws, and we need to strengthen those institutions. The solutions are staring us in the face. We already have laws, standards, regulations, institutions – what we need to do is respect them. As Jairam bluntly puts it, the Ministry of Environment and Forests is meant to protect the environment and forests. It is not there to liberalise environmental and forest laws, so that we can have more environmental destruction and deforestation.

We also need to look at the Bazaar or the market sector. Tomorrow’s successful company is going to be about sustainability. We have seen enough surveys that tell us that the companies that are balancing environmental concerns with their bottom line are succeeding and developing at a rapid pace, which highlights that it isn’t an either/or situation. Of course there are fast profits to be made by ignoring societal labor and environmental laws, but at the same time, there are also smarter companies that have already launched. And it is these smarter companies that need to help small businesses. They must use their CSR to help create common goods like shared effluent treatment plants. They need to think about their CSR in a way that goes beyond how it has been designed today. For this, I think there are genuine opportunities available. People want to do better and the state has to help enable them. In the same way, the business sector has to help its smaller units be smarter. This is what the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and The Associated Chambers of Commerce of India (ASSOCHAM) is for. I look forward to them starting this process soon.

We can’t pollute our way to prosperity. We need to be talking about green jobs, and looking not just at financial stability but also ecological stability. With this in mind, Jairam highlights that we have an opportunity for a Green New Deal. Why shouldn’t we be looking at a green revival? Why don’t we talk about a green stimulus? These are opportunities for revisiting some of the issues that have bedeviled us. Every crisis creates an opportunity. In 1991, there was a crisis, and that was an opportunity for economic reform. In 2020, we have another economic crisis as well as a social crisis, and it has given us an opportunity for ecological reform and for bringing ecology into the mainstream of governance.

It is worth taking a pause and thinking about the scale of change that we have seen in the last 45 days, and all the things that have suddenly become possible. Doing so will show us that so far, we have only been limited by our imagination. As Navroz says, we don’t usually think that we can get the world to change very much, and then suddenly that is no longer the case. The virus has got people talking about things that were unimaginable, talking about ways in which they are changing their personal behaviours, reflecting on living in the moment, and thinking about how to shift things that we previously thought were really hard to shift. We must use this moment to re-imagine. To try to think about what a more progressive life looks like, and what we can do to build towards it.

Home Work: Imagining a New Deal with Domestic Workers

This is an edited version of a panel discussion on “Home Work: Imagining a New Deal with Domestic Workers” with Geeta Menon, Amita Baviskar, Alok Prasanna, and Vikram Rai, in conversation with Rohini Nilekani. The event was hosted by the Bangalore International Centre.

Globally, one out of every 25 women is employed as a domestic labourer. In Bangalore, there are four lakh domestic workers, and in India, the number is closer to four million. These workers are employed to do care work in the house, and as a consequence of this they are often a part of the household’s most intimate spaces. Perhaps one of the most complicated relationships in the world of labour, the imbalance of power between employers and the employees is exacerbated in countries like India, where neither party is fully aware of the rights and laws around domestic work and the right to wages, leave, and other entitlements. While domestic workers often don’t have a written contract, the state has also failed to make provisions for them in terms of a pension scheme or any entitlements.

In the absence of this information, employers often find navigating their relationship with domestic workers very tricky. How much should they pay and for what service? Is there any flexibility? How much leave is fair? Not to mention the softer aspects of the relationship and how domestic help should be treated. Should they eat the same food as their employers and sit at the same table? Should they share the same bathrooms? We need to speak more openly about what is wrong and needs to change.

With the country on lockdown during the pandemic, we have been given an opportunity to think about what our future will look like. Will we start doing our own housework and perhaps buying more labour-saving devices like vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, as the West has done? Alternatively, perhaps we will value our domestic workers more, and refashion our contracts with them in a positive manner.

Defining the Law, the Worker, and the Workplace

As Alok mentions, laws cannot substitute organisation. We cannot put the onus of the law on the individual worker to go out and access the institution, whether it’s the labour office, judiciary, or tribunal, because they do not have organisational support to assist them. We need to think about how workers are going to access and enforce those laws. Laws like NREGA, while well intentioned, have never really thought about the enforcement aspect of it — they just assume that organisations working in the same area will help workers. Instead, we should look at whether we can give these organisations a role in lawmaking, and ask for help in realising these rights. For example, because we have welfare legislation, there’s a law covering informal sector workers. However, these things are very distant for domestic workers when we don’t even have a basic definition of who domestic workers are. Without a legal definition, how can we tailor solutions for this particular set of workers?

Our current labour laws imagine men as workers — the term used for the longest time in our labour laws is ‘workman’, referring to someone who is going to work in a factory or industrial establishment outside his home. The imagination of the law is built on a certain social understanding of who is a worker. So when we talk about laws being needed, we need to think about how those laws follow downstream from an organisation which can help women take advantage of them in the first place. Alok points out that we also need laws to be local. While there is a common understanding of who a domestic worker is, if we hear from them directly we can see that their work conditions are very different. They all do very different kinds of work in very different households. So the legislation has to be something that addresses local concerns.

When thinking about the law and domestic help, Alok also mentions C189, which is an international labour organisation convention (2011) that has been adopted by India, and talks about household employment, workforce, and so on. There are two broad kinds of models of domestic workers. The first is a full-time, live-in worker. These are people living and working with their employers, and are entitled to their rights. However in India, we think that they are to be ”treated as part of the family” and that never happens. The second kind of domestic workers are those who prefer to work in different houses during the course of the day, and as such are in need of protection as well.

Now in these two broad models, there are differences. Many live-in workers tend to come from outside the state — another problem the law does not acknowledge. We don’t know how many domestic workers there are. So before we create a definition of who a domestic worker is, we need to conduct a survey of some sort, to find out how many people fall within this net in the first place. After that we can try and figure out what the legal protections are that can be offered to them.

However, when it comes to domestic workers not only do we have problems with worker definition, but also with workplace definition. Geeta mentions that during lockdown, the concept of working from home does not apply to domestic workers because they work in somebody else’s house, which is still not recognised as a workplace in the law. On the one hand, some basic work has to be done to reach common definitions and make the laws more robust, and on the other hand we also need intermediary organisations that can act as a bridge between the individual who is affected and the legal system itself. This is especially tricky in the case of domestic workers because, unlike in a factory where there may be trade unions, they are alone in an employer’s house. If they are being abused, made to work too hard, or paid too little, even if they know their rights, they are still inside a family home and cannot be agitationist.

These women are devalued as people in their place of work. What they are looking for is respect, recognition, and social security. Although they are part of the large sector of the informal workers, they are last in the hierarchy of work. Geeta argues that policies that don’t take workers’ voices into consideration and instead frames laws for them, will inevitably fail. When helping these workers assert their rights in somebody’s home, the most helpful thing has been teaching them the art of negotiation. We need to talk to them about their rights and how to demand them, in order to create a shift in power.

Domestic Workers During COVID-19

In the first month of lockdown, many domestic workers shared that despite the fact that their employers had visited other countries, they weren’t informed of the same or even asked to get screened. Only in April were they told to stay home from work. The advisory from the labor department to the RWAs was focussed on sanitisation, hygiene, and maintaining the security and safety of the employers. There was nothing in the advisory about whether domestic workers needed to be brought into work and how they could be protected. Geeta further points out that as lockdowns are being lifted, many employers are not hiring domestic workers back, citing safety concerns. In some apartments, they’ve been asked to stay off the lawns and use separate lifts.

To fully understand the role of domestic workers during COVID, it might be helpful to bring in the two phases of lockdown that Vikram referred to. According to him, the first phase was when the lockdown came in. Here, things were easier because the guidelines were prescriptive. Everybody had to stay home, so there wasn’t much room for confusion. However during the second phase, when the relaxation measures came into force, many posed uncomfortable questions about domestic workers. There was a lack of clarity on the guidelines surrounding letting domestic workers back into people’s homes. Between the residents, RWAs and the government, domestic workers’ voices were being left out of the equation. Vikram’s term for domestic help is ‘invisible essentials’, since they are so invisible in our lives, though they keep us going on a day-to-day basis. Going forward, how do we make these workers more visible and make their essentiality relevant? Are employers willing to change, pay fair wages, give more leave, be less discriminatory, and think about the safety of these domestic workers, instead of only their own?

An interesting approach here is the health insurance programme for domestic workers that Vikram and his team are launching. Their programme, MADHURA, is an attempt to build ownership between domestic workers and their employers, to be participants and collaborators in their health. However, one of the major challenges to this will be how reliant domestic workers are on private households. If something happens inside the private homes, most RWAs do not have the right to investigate. In order for things to change, this needs to be addressed. RWAs need to think about how they can inspire a sense of responsibility and compassion within their residents.

Gender, Caste, and Domestic Work

When people picture a modern middle class Indian family, they imagine a nuclear family with a husband and wife at the center of it. But Asmita argues that they don’t acknowledge the third person in the household — the maid. Domestic workers allow middle class women to go out of the home to work. With the lockdown, many men and women now realised that they had to do that work. In a way, the invisible became visible and people realised just how hard it is to do this work, day after day. This new reality is forcing us to address the unequal gender division of labor.

Indian women are still expected to perform two sets of duties. One is the traditional role of the homemaker, and the other expectation is that she will also be a wage earner and work outside the home. The only way that middle class women can reconcile these two tasks is by hiring another woman. There are any number of studies that tell us that in most countries, the gender division of labor continues to be deeply unequal. Even women who work outside the home, do more domestic chores than men. Despite having appliances, it’s usually women loading dishwashers or putting dirty clothes into the washing machine.

Perhaps this pandemic will force people to confront the issue. However, as Amita highlights, this is difficult because our cultural norms are still based on the idea that a woman will carry out these chores. For example, the idea of someone staying in the kitchen and cooking hot food to be served is ingrained in our recipes. We need to think about our expectations of a good wife or mother, and whether there is a different way to negotiate having the things we love while not depending on their labour for it. In other countries where domestic workers are employed — and with global inequality rising, their numbers have been increasing — they are generally treated better than they are in India. This is a consequence of the caste system, which is an ingrained part of our lives.

Due to a history of making certain communities do jobs that were considered unclean, we now blame them for being unclean by association. During the pandemic, this has resulted in the idea that domestic workers might infect people if they are allowed into the households they work in. Now more than ever before, we need to examine our practices and the ways in which we discriminate against people, and consider how they are part of the larger struggle for gender justice, social justice, and the fight against caste discrimination.

The Employer-Worker Relationship

Even today, there are many feudal elements in the modern relationship between the employer and the domestic worker in India. Older generations accept this status quo, however, younger workers are demanding more professional and contractual employment. They are more aspirational and will impact the sector in a big way. Domestic workers are part of the informal economy, which forms 93 percent of India’s workforce. And for most people in the informal economy, as labour sociologists like Jan Breman have pointed out, the transition from a feudal set of arrangements in the village to new forms of contractual work, has thrown them from the frying pan into the fire in some ways.

As Amita explains, in the feudal system people were humiliated and crushed, but there was a belief that your patron or yajman would take care of you in bad times. Today, the working class has to find their own jobs, but the relationships of trust and security between employer and employee does not exist anymore. This leaves workers in a position of having to bargain, even though they have little bargaining power and no social capital. Unfortunately, this is going to increase due to the pandemic. The economy has plunged into confusion and many are going to be out of jobs and therefore less bargaining power.

This is a time where laws protecting workers are crucial. Even though domestic workers are in the informal sector, they do form communities and work in solidarity, to complain against abuse or unfairness. As Geeta says, one way employers can begin to be a part of these solidarities is by understanding the long history of injustice these workers have faced, and thinking about what they can do now. For example, employers should not use this virus as an excuse to not pay workers, even if they have had their own salaries cut back. There are always compromises and negotiations that can be made.

We need to treat domestic workers with dignity and learn to use language that increases their agency. The reason we take pride in our work is because that work is rewarding for us, we are paid well and respected. If we can make domestic work equally well paid and a source of dignity and pride, then people would do the work as well as they could possibly do it. We need to consider how we like to be treated in our workplaces, and whether we can use that lens to help our domestic workers.

Keep the Change: Can Bengaluru Sustain the Lessons of the Pandemic

This is an edited version of a panel discussion moderated by Rohini Nilekani, on the city’s hope for a new normal post COVID-19. The focus is on what we have learnt from the pandemic, why it is worth preserving and, most importantly, how that good can be preserved, post lock down. The panel included Nitin Pai, Veena Srinivasan, Manu Chandra, Tara Chacko and Ravichandar.

The past few months have been horrific for millions of people around the world and in our own city, Bengaluru. We all know what the pandemic and the lockdown has inflicted on people, especially the poor migrants, labourers, the elderly, and the vulnerable. Until we have some hope of a cure or a vaccine, this anxiety will continue. Some of us have to bear this burden more than others, which means that those of us who are privileged have to reach into our hearts and our pockets and help others as much as we can.

However, during the past few weeks, people here in the city have experienced many positive and sometimes unexpected changes. For example, all of us are experiencing the difference in air quality. We have seen pictures of the Vrishabhavathi flowing clean and clear. Nature is replenishing itself. Even in our homes, we have had chances to learn many new things about ourselves. We have rediscovered how to bond with our families, begun to work as a team, and have acquired new respect for all those around us who we took for granted. Some of us have learned to work from home. Almost all of us, rich and poor, have reduced our consumption of material things and have begun to relook at what consumption even means. Many of us have reached deep into our communities to help, bond, and be inspired by our interconnectedness, because clearly we are all in this together. So the world is different and our gaze is fresh in many ways.

I hope we can focus on the positive changes that we have experienced, and perhaps think about how we can sustain these positive changes. How can we stop ourselves from going back to business as usual as soon as the lockdown is lifted? How can we remember to be grateful? How can we remember to reduce our imprint on the earth? How can we continue to be inspired by our mutual dependencies?

A New Paradigm For the City

Nobody thought that Bengaluru could go back to how it used to look in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with few cars on the streets and rivers clean and clear. Veena Srinivasan points out that there has been a huge impact of the industrial shutdown in regards to our rivers. At the Byramangala reservoir, which is where the Vrishabhavathi flows into, we have started seeing dramatically substantial improvements in the water quality. It has meant almost a five-fold decrease in the Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), which is a way to quantify the quality of the water. So clearly the story of clean water is not just hearsay. It shows up in the data and tells us exactly how much damage industrial activity has affected our water quality. Data on air quality is equally dramatic. The reports show about 65% to 70% improvement in the air quality indices.

However, we have not changed our economy or the policies that would replace ecologically destructive production. Moreover, we have no policies that would prevent mass unemployment if we suddenly changed the structure of our economy, as Veena rightly points out. So the concern is that when lockdown ends, we may go back to how things used to be. But there are a few lessons we could use. One of them is to rethink the nature of how we regulate. In the past few years, the pollution control board has maintained that everything that we were measuring in the rivers was historical legacy pollution, and that there was no current pollution. That argument is now moot, and we should be demanding a complete restructuring of how we look at pollution control. The second lesson is about our levels of consumption. Many people are talking about how much more they’ve enjoyed cooking at home and spending time with their family. So there is definitely a shift from materials to experiences, and reexamining our priorities.

From the perspective that V Ravichandar gives us, the learnings during this time have fundamentally been about the right to health and safety. The lockdown has been the biggest manifestation of this. What was invisible became visible through the migrant crisis, when we saw the mass of humanity on our roads. Suddenly we had 30% to 40% of our cities’ population, who form the bottom of the pyramid, out on the streets. Their life has always been difficult, but now even more so. When we hear of certain neighbourhoods being sealed off, suddenly we are now worrying if we have any domestic workers who live in those areas that are now coming on our radar. Going forward, there may be a greater concern for how the marginalised live and the conditions there, which could drive potential change.

What we should take away from this is that we need to work towards widespread prosperity for all, and equitable development going forward. In order for this to happen, as Ravichandar argues, the poor and marginalised need to be at the centre of the city planning. We need to plan our cities in a manner that works for all citizens and not just for a segment of the citizens. We also need a localised plan, to plan what’s good for Bangalore, and not just follow global models. Currently our model of land use, zonal regulations, and transit-oriented development are dysfunctional and have been failing us over the years.

The woes of the poor are compounded. There is no land title or tenure, and we don’t have the concept of social rental housing which accentuates the problem. So we need to rethink our master plans to be inclusive, dynamic, spatial, and strategic. The new work from home model is the ultimate integration of the home and the workplace. We need to figure out how to make this happen for all, including the underprivileged and domestic workers. From a master planning point of view, we need to think of mixed-use and mixed-income groups and plan across income groups living in the city.

Ravichandar notes that when the lockdown is lifted, public transport might suffer and there might be more private vehicle purchase and usage, which will bring back all the effects of carbon emission, pollution, etc. We need to adopt a better framework to address mobility for the most vulnerable. If physical distancing requires six feet, we need more space for walkers and cyclists. All the frontline heroes who have been working during this period don’t necessarily drive to work. So we need to find ways to have public transport at least functioning at 30% utilisation. And we need more public open spaces. In 1995 CDP, open spaces were 25%. In the 2031 master plan, open spaces are down to 4%. Ravichandar predicts that as our work will move further online, people will want to spend more time with friends and family in public spaces, so we need to be prepared to create those spaces.

In terms of governance, the one state that worked very well was Kerala. This is because they have a strong decentralised local government and institutions that people trust. Even in Bangalore, the ward health officers have been on the frontlines, sealing places and testing the people. But the current system is dysfunctional in terms of the city being under the state. We need governance reform, deep decentralisation, and appropriate integration. This virus has taught us about exponential growth. To address this exponential growth, we have taken one of the most radical decisions in our life — a complete lockdown of the country. If that is the case for this virus, why can’t we do transformational thinking in terms of a new paradigm to demand a better city for all?

Working On the Gig Economy

For Nitin Pai, the gig economy is something we should be extremely concerned about. The job losses are serious, with 140 million people losing their jobs in the last two months. From a survey conducted by Pai’s daughter and colleagues, about 20% of people have suffered some loss of income in the family, 45% have found an increase in their workload, including school work, and 36% found that the workload has somewhat reduced. 38% have also found that their health outcomes have become better, and their physical exercise remains the same. 66% said they prefer offline interactions. These are kids who want to go back to school and people who want to go back to their offline world. They’ve realised the value of the non-digital world. The last question in the survey was, “Are you optimistic about the future?” and 54% of the respondents said yes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the world into the information age with a shock. Although technology has been available for the last 15 years, the model of work still involved employees gathering together. But now you don’t have to be in the same place at the same time, which will have profound consequences going forward. Perhaps the biggest one will be a decrease in traffic. Now we have the option of holding meetings across the city, prevailing over the divisions created by traffic. According to Pai, this is something we need to preserve. As we get back to normal, how much of this Zoom world can we continue? Not all companies need to work 24/7 in the office, and there are certain days, times, or types of employees who can work from home. This would mean a reduction in traffic, which means there would be staggered traffic and more road space available for other things.

Looking forward, many more people are going to form a part of the gig economy. What this pandemic has taught us, Pai notes, is that we need to find some ways to provide social security to these people. This can’t be provided through the traditional provident fund method. Instead we need to find ways using Aadhaar, UPI, and the others, wherein there is an account which has multiple inputs. So the employer and customer can both put money into their account. For example, Zomato today takes tips and gives them to the delivery person. Could we use a similar model for people to pay into the accounts of people who are delivering products? The movement towards social security for the gig economy is something that we have to strengthen as we continue.

Mental Health and Consumption Patterns

People are eating a lot more responsibly than they were earlier, notes Manu Chandra, with less takeaway options for people. Since the supply chain logistics were hit badly for the first 25 days, there was no choice but to start relying on what was available locally. On the other end of the spectrum, the privileged were also seeing a change in the way they were consuming. High-end grocery stores saw an uptake of between 30% to 60% almost immediately. So consumption patterns have changed, and that gives people in the food business some insight into how they must model their businesses going forward. Will people be able to overcome the trust deficit that exists in going out into busy spaces with a lot of bodies?

Social distancing is not the easiest thing to do when running a restaurant — it’s actually the antithesis of running a restaurant in many ways because it is a social outing. People around the world are talking about contactless dining, which takes the romanticism out of going out, but may create a new breed of highly-trained and motivated individuals running these commercial establishments. According to Manu, PE-funded companies were making food cheaper and cheaper because they were burning “cash”, leading to a very strange consumption pattern. With the pandemic, we’re already seeing that changing, with news reports about how some of these aggregators are gonna eliminate this counting entirely, and food will start costing what it actually should cost. This will have tremendous health benefits as well. We have been eating food with such a high glycemic index, that diabetes and poor health is only a natural outcome of it. Post COVID-19, many brands, cottage industries, and MSMEs, which were involved in creating outstanding food stuffs have now come to the fore, as opposed to the big super markets and Amazon.

Unfortunately, for farmers, the lockdown hit when the rabi crop was ready to harvest. The losses incurred were so tremendous that irrespective of a bailout package, it’s going to be a long time before they can recover. Perhaps the positive aspect to note is the fact that the monopolies of the APMCs may find a break so that farmers can sell directly and have more choice. We will be valuing directly grown produce delivered to us. The organisations that have been working proactively to connect the farmer and the consumer directly might see a second wind, and we may be at the receiving end of good quality produce.

We also need to be aware of the impact of the COVID-19 on the mental health of people. The WHO has warned us that there’s going to be a huge increase in the number of people who have symptoms of depression and anxiety. At the same time, it’s important to realise that there’s been a lot of psychological research on resilience, to understand how people adapt in adverse situations and why some emerge even stronger through adversity. Tara Chacko quotes Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor from a concentration camp and psychiatrist from Vienna, who talks about our ability to hope and find meaning in life despite its inexplicable pain. He called it our human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive or constructive.

Through a dipstick survey Tara undertook, talking to various psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, she notes a few trends. In terms of our relationship patterns, the time that we are spending together now is unprecedented. 95% of respondents talked about how the pre-COVID time was rushed and limited. Now we’re seeing that kids are enjoying the 24/7 time that they have with their parents. Some parents shared how they were horrified at some of the behaviour patterns or habits of their children, like the amount of time they spend on digital platforms rather than physical activities.

Transitioning to being hands-on parents 24/7 was not easy, and many people are relearning their parenting skills. They are now enjoying time together and bonding in a way that they’ve never done before. It’s also through this time together that children are opening up to their parents and talking about things that matter to them. Even with extended families, people are using Zoom to connect with family and friends during lockdown. However we also have to keep in mind that staying together in a confined space with the same people over a prolonged period of time can be quite challenging. It also means that we have started paying attention to the needs and issues of those within and outside our families. The other shift that can be noticed is in family roles. There is a slight shift being seen in the participation and sharing of household responsibilities. With the lack of domestic workers, it’s time to renegotiate roles within the family, and getting all the members involved and feeling responsible for the home. We are redefining our needs and learning to live with what we need and not what we want.

Co-Creating a Better Future

The kind of future that we end up with depends on the various paths that will emerge out of this crisis. We’re not out of this crisis yet, as Nitin notes, this is just the first lockdown. We will probably have a series of relaxations and tightenings, each of which will have economic effects in various parts of the country. Since India is a large country, politics is driven at a national level in terms of electoral composition by states other than Karnataka. In that sense, Karnataka will be a price-taker and a policy-taker rather than a policy maker. The kind of future Bengaluru and Karnataka will end up with will depend on the politics and economics that arises out of the crisis in other parts of India which have greater electoral influence in New Delhi.
If we have a greater emphasis on decentralised management for pandemics, i.e. if precautions were applied at the ward level, municipal level, panchayat, and district level, we would be able to create structures of governance that are bottom-up. This means that the rules that apply in South Bengaluru, for example, might not necessarily be the same in Jaunpur district, UP. Pai notes that if we can create the idea that local level governance is important, as a result of managing this COVID crisis, we’ll be creating a psychology that prioritises the local. So we need to begin taking steps towards real local-level governance.

Ravichandar argues that we also need a modified game theory, working on the scions and convincing younger people across the political dynasties to become mayors of cities. Historically, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and Vallabhbhai Patel, all started in city life and municipal leadership before going to state and national. A state government will only give more power to cities if they believe that their kith and kin can actually rule the city. Ravichandar’s suggestion is to make that case to the political establishment because we need a reinvestment in local politics, and citizens who feel like they can hold local agencies accountable.

Perhaps we can use the example of this lockdown to connect us back to the larger discussion of climate change. The argument about climate change has always been centred around not being able to sacrifice the economy. However, as Veena points out, with COVID-19 we saw the threat of imminent death and were willing to sacrifice the economy to avoid it. This may give us the opportunity to relook at how we address the threat of climate change and whether we can move to a low carbon, local, decentralised, soft pathway in order to avoid the millions of deaths that will happen in 30 to 40 years. We will also be seeing a general overall shift in supply chains, according to Nitin. Global supply chains will shift out of China into other countries, and national supply chains will move from national to state, while state supply chains will focus on the regional and the local.

If we look at history, there are moments when even the elite begin to understand their connection to everything else, and start to make changes that have ripple effects that benefit those who did not have a voice before. This is what I’m hoping will emerge from the pandemic. We have been allowed to exercise our empathy muscle in these past few weeks, and I think it’s important to continue to do so. We can’t forget how connected we all are, and how to be politically and socially conscious about what’s happening to others while we are ensconced in our own safe homes. As Tara mentions, as human beings, we are motivated by things that give us joy and in a large part this comes from helping other people. With the responses during this pandemic, we have seen that many people have been doing this in small ways, without wanting any credit or fanfare. There is a self-satisfaction that they get from this, which comes from feeling a sense of connectedness with people. That is what we must try to sustain, creating long-lasting changes in our perceptions and habits.

We need to understand that we cannot just consume good governance, we have to co-create it. Hopefully the outcome of this pandemic will be a shift in thinking towards that goal. Clean air and water, better health, de-congested cities, and reimagining public spaces helps not just the elite, but everybody in the city. Right now, many of us feel tremendous gratitude for what we have, and recognise that we are all in this together. On my end, I personally would like to intensify my philanthropy, using a new lens and more empathy. We are going to see many changes in how we deal with our staff and employees, how we understand social welfare and health practices. If we can understand and identify the positive changes, perhaps we can then commit to sustaining them.

Community Cares: A City Responds

This is an edited version of a conversation about the community response to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, moderated by Rohini Nilekani. Panelists include Anshu Gupta, Nalini Sekhar and Kuldeep Dantewadia.

The times we are living in, and the reality of COVID-19, means that we are being called on to do things in new ways and focus on the opportunities that this provides. The pandemic has allowed us to face some of our deepest fears, but also access our ability for hope. Both fear and hope are constantly battling in our hearts and minds, but I would like to focus on hope. We are now able to see exactly how interdependent we all are and how interdependent the entire world is, especially in the last few years. This has been a wake-up call for a lot of us. Although we have been able to secede from public infrastructure, electricity, water, transport, schools; it takes something like a pandemic to make us realise that we are all connected, whether we like it or not. Now we have to find ways to be creatively engaged. I believe Bangalore is at the forefront of innovation in these matters, whether it has to do with culture, technology, or even philanthropy. We’re seeing this in real time, with the response of this city and the philanthropy of ordinary citizens. I hope that by talking about some of the work people have been doing and how they have responded to the pandemic, it will give us all an opportunity to contribute, connect, and understand how we can get past this crisis sooner rather than later.

A Loss of Trust

As Anshu Gupta points out, this pandemic is different from any other disaster we have experienced before. Unlike a tsunami or earthquake, which hits within a few seconds or days and then is done, the effects of the disease are still unfolding. The impact is therefore much deeper. The second phase will hit us after we are able to overcome the virus, and that is the economic fallout because of the disease. We are seeing how economic inequality is playing out even now, with the mass migration of daily wage workers in India. As Anshu mentions, it’s a testament to how little trust we have in each other, that workers didn’t think twice about having to walk with their families for hundreds of kilometers because they didn’t believe people would help them. It’s a very painful fact to face, that our government, institutions, organisations, or even regular citizens, were not able to give other people this basic security. While organisations like Goonj, who have been working in this space for two decades, knew that there would be some amount of migration, that it would become a crisis of these proportions was unexpected.

This loss of trust is something that we, as a society, need to reflect on. Goonj has access to 1000+ people across India, and a large number of them are daily wage workers. Anshu mentions how, just the reassurance that their families would be provided with food was enough to dissuade them from going back to their villages. She argues that it is time for the government and corporates to step up and be there for the people who work for them.

As of now, Anshu rightly points out, we need to be able to access the rural areas and villages to see how to provide resources to these communities, so that it’s not a case of forced migration. Through their work, Goonj has been able to build pipelines, a grid across the country of community-based organisations and community workers who will be crucial in the logistics of material management. Within a week, Goonj has been able to reach those deep pockets of about 12 states, because that network has already been built. Right now, the immediate needs of these communities are in terms of dry ration to cook food, and small sanitary items like soap and sanitary pads. Since there is such a large influx of people going back to their villages, those areas might not have enough resources to sustain a larger population. So local procurement of large scale materials like tarpaulin, etc. is also crucial, which is why Goonj is asking not for materials, but for money to be able to procure materials for those specific regions.

With Hasiru Dala, Nalini Shekar has been working with waste pickers in Bangalore and other cities in Karnataka for years, but this crisis has resulted in a shift in focus for them as well. Nalini’s experience of the consequences of demonetisation on lower income families ensured that the organisation got into action immediately. As soon as dals and other staples started getting expensive, they realised they needed to procure rations for at least one month. Initially Nalini believed they would only have to provide for those who didn’t have ration cards or permanent housing, but it has become a much larger matter. So several organisations have come together to form a group called With Bengaluru, to support the migrant workers. What they have realised over the last 10 days, is that there are many workers who have migrated from north Karnataka because of the floods. They were able to borrow money and move south, however disaster has now struck again.

Although Nalini has been working with people below the poverty line very closely, she also notes that this is very different from any other calamity. There’s despair and fear among people who don’t know if they will be alive or safe from one day to the next. Parents who have left their children back in north Karnataka with their families are now worried about whether they will be able to go back or not. At least, by providing them with ration, they feel like someone is looking out for their interests. With Bengaluru is helping a lot of these people, and the community has really come together to pitch in. Nalini mentions some of the setbacks, like the APMC yards that were closed which meant that people were not able to procure a lot of material in the beginning, or their worry that the RMC yard was an unhygienic place for volunteers to pack ration kits. However, St. Joseph’s College has given their facility for volunteers and staff to use. Nasiru Dala reached 3500 people, and With Bengaluru aims at reaching 12000 people.

As organisations are engaged in this work, they are also learning what missteps to avoid. Nalini mentions the example of receiving a shipment of wheat flour which South Indians don’t use in their cooking. At a distressful time, where there is a lot of uncertainty and less resources available, the fear is that changing people’s diets might result in other health issues. So the goal is to match what people usually eat, based on their regional diets. Another suggestion is to contribute in cash, as Nalini explains that the restriction of movement means that the logistics of dropping and picking up food is extremely complicated and involves both parties to have pass permits to travel freely. The goal is to centralise certain activities, while at the same time having local centres where citizens may be asked to buy items from their local grocers to donate to 10-15 people in the area. Organisations are attempting to do both, as citizens come forward to donate.

Shifting Mindsets

As we are organising and pulling together as part of the Samaaj, we also need to consider how the Bazaar and Sarkaar sectors can contribute in the short and medium-term. Anshu argues that the larger impact of all of this will be on rural India, where people are migrating in the thousands. People who are on the roads or stuck at the borders are ultimately going to settle down for some time in their villages, until business comes back to normal. So while feeding migrant labourers in cities is important, corporates and the government need to also pay attention to the effect this will have on rural India. Today we have to think of the entire country as our backyard. All of India has to be looked at as a whole and we have to focus on where people are going, because their idea of home and opportunity has suddenly shifted. Our mindset has to shift as well.

We are also looking at a collapse in terms of our systems of waste management in the city. Nalini mentions that recycling has stopped, which means that waste pickers, scrap dealers, and our dry waste collection centres have no work. It will take months for them to come back, so we need to look at long-term strategies of working with the government. The other issue this has made clear is that simply providing people with a livelihood is not enough. We need to have social security for citizens. Through the last 10 years of working in this space, Nalini says she has realised that very few waste pickers had ration cards. So the government needs to consider how waste pickers and other migrant labourers might have access to social security even if they travel to the city from other regions, as they are the intra-economy of the city.

The social distancing orders and the reality of the lockdown means that the idea of space has shifted as well. We are now all living in close quarters which means that some people may be suffering more during these times, with no way to access support systems outside of their homes. With the increase of domestic violence cases, Nalini suggests starting a helpline and going over safety plans with women. This kind of violence is not just limited between to partners but extends to all kinds of family violence, between parents and children or in-laws and women or men. Nalini notes that we will see an uptick in these cases, and organisations like Hasiru Dala will need to start addressing them soon.

With Reap Benefit, Kuldeep Dantewada runs an innovative platform to allow citizens to solve their own problems. With the onset of this pandemic, Kuldeep and his team identified certain areas where there was a dearth of public information. They began by putting a technology platform in place in order to break the information barrier, by crowdsourcing test centres, first respondents, etc. The next step was to enable citizens to report whether places were practising social distancing or not, so that the government would be able to recognise hotspots and invest their manpower to bring more awareness in those areas. When people started reaching out to say that they didn’t have passes but needed certain things, they were able to set up a hyper-local mapping and matching system, wherein the last mile delivery can be taken care of. Through that exercise, more helpful data has emerged, like maps for construction sites in the country which can be used to identify areas with migrant labourers who may need help. This combination of technology and local community forms Reap Benefit’s larger approach.

I think we are also seeing, with the Solve Ninjas of Reap Benefit as well as in general, that many young people in the country have the energy, motivation, and skill to pull us through this. They have idealism and they are also the digital generation, so we can use technology as a backbone for all the social outreach that we have to do. Earlier, in the social sector we used to say, “We must do high-tech with high-touch.” Now we are going to have to say, “We have to do high-tech with low-touch,” because of social distancing norms. So that gives us another opportunity to be creatively engaged.

The Power of the Local

Technology has become a key factor in being able to optimise resources as well as allowing a public-facing technology so that people are kept informed and up-to-date. This means that donations are happening online, but also that organisations have to follow-up with information about what they are doing with that money. As Kuldeep mentions, trust can be built with radical transparency from the Samaaj, Sarkaar, and Bazaar, and that is where technology can be incredibly useful. The other thing we are learning is how to decentralise capacity, using technological platforms. When we talk about authority, we are talking about a centralised system of knowledge and information. But this will always mean that the system is fragile. What this experience is teaching us is how to use technology to decentralise capacity, with honesty and transparency. This is the time for us to demonstrate the power of the local. The phrase ‘Think Global, Act Local,’ means to act in context and build community, and that is crucial right now, despite social distancing.

Online donations are also a question of apportioning resources, and with the PM CARES Fund as well as local NGOs asking for help, it’s important to think through the question of how people can optimise their giving. Anshu mentions that this is the time for the voluntary sector to shine. People from the social sector across the country and the world are putting themselves and their families at risk in order to help others. We also need to think about the overall healthcare issues, even outside of COVID-19. What this disaster brings to light is the fact that we have ignored the government health care systems, government hospitals, government schools, and the social sector for far too long. On the Samaaj’s part, Kuldeep recommends that once this disease subsides, we should give our time to the people in our locality, community, or neighbourhood, who have been affected, in addition to the financial donations we may give now.

There is also a need for a bridge between the government and its citizens, and this is where civil society leaders come in. Organisations like Indus Action, which Kuldeep is working with, are creating more transparency around people getting entitlements or receiving schemes. As he points out, if civil society can play an assistant role in terms of demand and supply, and allow citizens to get involved, that will allow for more transparency as well as efficiency. In the philanthropy sector, we are trying to create data-based impact analytics, so that people who are giving forward also feel connected to the results. I think this is going to be very important to design in the coming weeks.

As of now, our government carries a huge responsibility, in terms of assisting civil society organisations. Anshu argues that although the government has reached out, they need to be more supportive. Local governments need to reach out to the civil society sector proactively, because many of the civil society leaders and institutions have greater field experience and community experience than many of the officers and other leaders they may turn to. The reality is that over the last few years, we have seen a serious downsizing of civil society organisations. In times of crisis, this is dangerous because the Sarkaar and its last outputs are still not close enough to reach every citizen. The Bazaar cannot reach the last mile either. It’s only civil society organisations that are rooted in those communities and in those contexts, who will be able to reach citizens.

This is a good time to remember then, how important civil society organisations are to our nation, and to its future. We need to work collectively to tackle this disaster, which means that the government needs to reach out to organisations, as well as revive the institutions in rural India because they are the last mile delivery people.

We need to remember that our work here is a marathon, not a sprint. This lockdown could last for longer than we may predict right now, so we need to pace ourselves. We must have patience, and think about how to keep giving in the long-term. The consequences of this difficult time are going to be felt long after the virus is under control. So we need to assist each other, as a nation, knowing that we are all in this together

IPSMF | Panel Discussion on ‘The Future of News Media & The Role Of Independent Media’

This is an edited version of the IPSMF Panel Discussion on The Future of News Media & The Role Of Independent Media on October 25, 2019, at BIC, Bengaluru, moderated by Rohini Nilekani.

The panellists included Anya Schiffrin, Professor, Columbia University; Govind Ethiraj, Founder, IndiaSpend; Jagannathan R, Editorial Director, Swarajya; Seema Singh, Founding Editor, The Ken; Shekhar Gupta, Founder, The Print; and Siddharth Varadarajan, Founding Editor, The Wire.

Journalism in India is going through a complex and difficult time, in terms of the shifting digital landscape, public trust in the media, and an increasingly antagonistic relationship with the state. So it bears thinking about the question of how the media and journalists can survive and adapt, without compromising their integrity.

One of the issues with mainstream journalism today, as R. Jagannathan points out, is that it stays away from certain topics or questions and has become a part of the establishment in many ways. However, with experienced journalists stepping away or defecting from mainstream media to start online platforms dedicated to reporting responsibly and deeply about issues that are ignored, the business models for media houses are being disrupted.

The Business of Journalism

Funding from sources like IPSMF have given publications like IndiaSpend, The Print, and many others, the ability to address areas that are not being covered by mainstream media including expanding regional language sections and coverage of issues in the Northeast and tribal communities. However, the goal for most of these publications is to depend less on this kind of seed money and instead shift to a subscriber model, where readers pay for online news.

This challenge to mainstream reporting is a consequence, as Siddharth Varadarajan notes, of a collective distaste and disenchantment with what big media has become in India. There is a link between the decline in editorial standards and change in editorial priorities, and the dominant business model that drives these media organisations. Varadarajan is hopefully that the future is one where readers fund and support the publications that deserve their trust, and that there is a public willingness to give money for this cause. However, the question then becomes whether this kind of model will be sustainable or whether big philanthropy or big government will have to spend to keep the media sector alive.

While reader support might cover a certain percentage of the cost, Google and Facebook eat into many publications’ advertising revenue. The draw of the subscription model for Seema Singh at The Ken, is that it allows them the independence to ask tough questions. People do see merit in this and The Ken is steadily growing year-on-year, despite being a niche platform. It’s this definition of their audience, Singh says, that allows a deeper engagement with the readers and makes journalists accountable to them. Patronage has also allowed them to take their journalism to students and NGOs, so that their work is more widespread despite the subscription barrier. Most crucially, this business model allows reporters at The Ken to take 15 days on each story, investigating and writing a first draft, which no mainstream publication could afford to do on a regular basis.Places like IndiaSpend, with a more B2B product and think tank elements, are able to market their own original research. It has one of the highest number of original citations of any media organisation, not just by other journalists but also in the world of academia and policy research. By tying up with comedians, for example, who are launching a Netflix-grade production on fact checking, there are a lot of opportunities in the B2B space in terms of revenue, along with the earnings from people who republish their articles.

Advertisers are also changing the game, in terms of the kind of reach they are willing to pay for, which does not solely depend on numbers anymore. Shekhar Gupta believes that these commercial models will change, and that the future of digital news media lies in its potential for targeted advertising. Companies are realising that they need not reach millions of people to sell a particular product or idea. There is value in reaching people through a platform that they trust, at less than 1% of the cost of big media houses. So as online platforms build reader loyalty and are known for their accuracy and lack of bias, garnering a readership that believes in the work they do, advertisers will recognise this and start turning towards those platforms.

The challenge of overcoming subscription fatigue then becomes a real one, if readers are going to have to subscribe and check on multiple platforms for news. Especially when the cost of newspapers is negligible and Indian readers are not used to paying for print products. Varadarajan argues that readers will pay if they see value, not necessarily “value for money” but in the form of a media organization that represents the kind of values that they believe in or subscribe to. This is where the digital media space has the opportunity, because big media has a tendency to avoid asking important questions. For example, Varadarajan notes that no major newspaper or news channel reported anything about the son of the Home Minister becoming Secretary of the BCCI while his father has been railing against dynasticism for decades. So when online publications do address things like this, readers notice. On the other hand, the government also notices.

As Varadarajan mentions, the atmosphere in the country’s media circles is one of fear – of censorship and regulations that clamp down on the freedom of the press. He points to this fear as one of the reasons why companies or individuals are also reluctant to advertise or sponsor places that speak out about government policies or big businesses. An example is the recent regulations on FDI in digital media, which was presented as a great reform, however approval will only be granted on a case-by-case basis. This means that government-friendly media companies might have a much better chance of their approval coming through than ones who question and cover the news in an unbiased way.

The Fear Factor

Napoleon Bonaparte said that four hostile newspapers are to be feared more than a thousand bayonets. We know that there are going to be cases where public interest and the government interest diverge, so it’s a tricky question of how journalists are able to make that separation, especially given the factor of deep fear and uncertainty in 2019.

Of course, as Ethiraj notes, it’s not always a sense of critiquing the government as it is critiquing a system that isn’t working for the people. IndiaSpend is concerned with data gaps, and it is those gaps that imply a certain amount of withholding or lack of information from the government, so the pursuit of those gaps may perhaps ruffle some feathers. For example, Ethiraj points to certain aspects of crime that have not been addressed in the NCRB report such as hate crimes, while there is a section for ‘anti-national’ crime. The solution here would either be to use technology to address those gaps, or find alternate sources that fill in the information. This information might not necessarily be what people want to hear, but that makes reporting it perhaps more important. Ethiraj confesses an assumption that many others have also been guilty of, that India’s democracy and the freedom of press will continue to be as it always was. However this has changed, not just in India but in other countries as well, and the media is now internalising it and beginning the process of coming up with solutions to respond to this.

Given the current political climate, Paul Graham writes that in order to get people to read or subscribe, journalists must now pick a side rather than relying on any kind of ‘neutral’ journalism. The key here, as Singh explains, is to back those stances and viewpoints with facts. We all have human biases and there is always the potential of fact-checking errors, which is why it’s important to have honest media platforms that are also able to hold each other accountable. Being neutral, Jagannathan argues, is never going to get us to the truth.

But Anya Schiffrin states that whether journalists take a strong position or stick to the ‘he said, she said’ method of reporting, there’s no one solution that will be effective for society right now. That’s because we’re facing a global problem of polarisation and a deep distrust of the media. Journalists often feel as if this is their responsibility to correct, however solutions such as going to communities, engaging with readers, and being very transparent about their processes are expensive and hard to scale. She points to a sort of counter-speech argument, that if journalists can just keep up with good quality, reliable information, audiences will learn to seek it out. But the reality is that there are so many entrants and so many options, that it is incredibly difficult to be heard and trusted through this throng of voices.

Trusting the Media

In India, as Varadarajan mentions, we are losing the ability to have a discussion with differing viewpoints. He gives the example of news channels with a ‘Ravan’ type discussion model of 10 heads with the anchor in the middle, shouting arguments at each other. What journalism needs to do is have these conversations without lowering the level of public discussion, but instead, these displays have perhaps meant a dip in the respect and trust people place in news organisations. It is also because of a few big marquee broadsheet dailies engaging in corrupt practices and paid news, which has been fairly well-documented now. So public trust is low, and as a consequence of this, attacks on the media are responded to with a kind of social apathy, if not social sanction, argues Varadarajan. This creates a really dangerous environment for journalists, in a country where we know journalists’ deaths are already quite high.

What journalists need to keep in mind is that the news does not have to be what they want it to be. Shaping the facts to suit what you want to say is not what good journalism is about, and it’s the editor’s job to be able to see through those arguments and maintain a commitment to the truth, despite their personal feelings or biases. There are certain stories, like the Rafale scandal, where Gupta knew that they could report it and gain a lot of traction, but held back because they could not adequately verify the facts. In this way, digital platforms still function under the principles of conventional journalism.

Even so, public trust in Indian media is low, and lower today than it has ever been in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is also the increased difficulty in speaking truth to power. During the Emergency, unfortunately, the Indian media was supposed to have genuflected more than it needed to. It’s easy to wonder whether something similar is happening now.

As both Schiffrin and Varadarajan mention, investigative journalism is successful when there are public institutions that are able to respond to it. However, the situation at present is that a large number of institutions whose job it is to respond to information that comes in the public domain do not wish to respond, and discharge their constitutional duty. This is perhaps a bigger worry, since the media leading without the other institutions backing it actually exposes the media even more.

As Gupta says, we’re seeing an emergence of right wing alpha males, like Trump, Putin, Abe, Xi Jinping, Modi, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Orban, and Boris Johnson. All these figures have realised that the biggest pressure you can put on journalists is to deny them access. It is something that film stars had figured out first, then cricket stars followed suit. The attitude is “If you write a line against me, I’ll never speak with you,” and now the government has started following this as well. Sources for information are clamping down, and many civil servants who would usually answer phone calls, or hold meetings in their offices, are now refusing to talk to journalists. Especially with digital media, the government views these freedoms as a wild animal that they need to control through laws and regulations. I was also reading Krishna Kumar in EPW, who said, “In the chamber of echoes we are in, silence alone can speak.” Just yesterday, in Kashmir, the newspapers ran blank front pages. It’s a powerful move as well, because censorship and control is not just about what people write, but what people are made to leave out. As Jagannathan states, we talk a lot about freedom of press in Delhi or other metro cities, but the real threats to media freedom in India are in the state capitals where journalists have been killed for as little as filing an RTI application.

Social Media and the Future of Journalism

Today, we see world leaders like Trump or Modi communicating directly to the public via social media platforms, and the next generation also referring directly to Facebook or Instagram for updates rather than news platforms. In a way, this explosion of information is a good thing, Jagannathan says, for the simple reason that the news is not just a top down institution anymore but that there is a kind of democratisation that has happened.

However, Ethiraj argues that it also poses new problems. We are in an era of manufactured truth, and one of the biggest challenges that we are already facing stems from the danger of misinformation. This affects everyone, including individuals, brands, products, and services because people have stopped believing the message that is given to them, whether it comes through a media platform or social media. It’s becoming a disease that we have to address and if we don’t, a lot of work that journalists have put into creating public trust will be infructuous.

On the other hand, Varadarajan is hopeful about the next generation using Instagram or Snapchat to consume news, because of their levels of interest and engagement with deep and serious stories. As publications like The Wire move to distributing content through social media, they are seeing positive reflections from their readers, especially younger ones. Gupta agrees, saying that young people are curious, intelligent, and will not buy into propaganda very easily. Regardless of where they get their information from, they are able to separate the truth from the sensational with far more ease than older generations.

Joseph Pulitzer said, “The power to mold the future of the republic, will be in the hands of journalists of the future generation and in the hands of this generation.” We are certainly seeing this in practice now, more than ever before.

Public Texts @ IIHS | The Urban Treeverse | Harini Nagendra, Seema Mundoli and Rohini Nilekani

Harini Nagendra, Seema Mundoli and Rohini Nilekani in conversation about the book, Cities and Canopies (Penguin, 2019). They discuss trees as memory keepers of cities.