New States to be carved out

Now that BJP is with  full  majority  in UP time has come  to  reorganise  Uttar  Pradesh.
In order to  achieve better  governance this reorganisation  has to  be  carried  out  for  few other  states  as well.

1. Uttar  Pradesh  needs to  be  divided  in four parts. Eastern  UP, Western  UP, middle that is Avadh and Bundelkhand.

2. Maharashtra needs to  be  divided  in Vidarbha headquartered  at Nagpur Maharashtra with  Pune  as its capital and Mumbai as a Union Territory.

3. Tamilnadu should be  divided in upper  Tamilnadu with Chennai  as capital and southern  Tamilnadu with Coimbatore  as its   capital.

4. Karñataka should be likewise divided  in Northern  and Southern Karñataka. This  will  pave way for quicker  development of North Karñataka.

5. Gujarat is stretched out. Surat and Jamnagar are so  wide apart that they  can rarely identify  with  each  other.  The geography  of the two ends is also quite different. Division of  the  state will  be  beneficial.

6. Now we come  to  Rajasthan.  Not being familiar with  it  in much  detail, I  have no suggestions to offer.

Vision for Training and Development in India

Vision for Training and Development in India

Y N Kaushal

Potential for Training

•        India’s Population is above 125 crore.

•        If we restrict ourselves to working people, the number is about 50 crore. (Govt. of India figures)

•        In organized sector, in well performing and forward looking companies and organizations, every person is now getting training of one week every year. This includes Central Government. (One week is interpreted differently from 5 days to 7 days.)   

•        In medium and small companies, NGOs and state government the intensity of training is poor.

•        In unorganized sector, it is non-existent.

•        Unorganized sector is large. 6% working people are employed, 94% are self-employed, semi-employed or unemployed. This composition is not likely to change much over coming decade.

Our Vision

•        We believe that we need to achieve seven days’ training for every person every year. This includes unorganized sector and farm sector as well.

•        This means 50x7 crore participant days of training every year.

•        If each training group has 25 participants, this means 14 crore training days.

•        One trainer can normally provide 140 days training in a year.

•        Hence we need 10 lakh direct trainers in India who can provide classroom training.

•        We also need to make master craftsmen as on-the-job trainers and coaches. My guess is that this number would be 20 lakh persons.

•        The task in front of the sector skill council is to develop training skills amongst these 30 lakh trainers and coaches over say next 10 years and assess them and certify.

Challenges in achieving T&D Vision and suggested directions

1. Availability of Trainers: Good quality trainers are in short supply. While everyone who can make a presentation, believes that he/she is a good trainer, this is indicative of poor understanding of the role of a trainer.  
2. Result Oriented Training (Quality): Quality of Training needs large improvement. Large part of training is seen as imparting knowledge. Focus of training has to be competency improvement and consequently performance improvement. More trainers have to be trained to use experiential learning methods. 
3. Making Training affordable: High quality training is costly as it is in short supply. Low cost training suffers from poor quality. To popularize training, we need to make high quality training available at affordable cost.
4. Legislative measures: Training is antidote to obsolescence. Regular and relevant training keeps a person employable and creator of economic value. Hence, we need to have an Act of Parliament making regular training mandatory for every employed person as Provident Fund is mandatory for every employee.
5. Fiscal Measures: To encourage expenditure on training, every employer should be allowed to deduct 1.5 times of the expenditure on training. Every self-employed person should likewise be allowed to deduct 2 times the expenditure on training for self and associates.  
6. Content development: There is need for development of model content for training programmes. Course packs, exercises and videos need to be developed in various Indian Languages.  
7. Creating Training and Personal Development Culture in society. Creating an eco-system in the country that all components of T&D grow well. 

Revised version published on 6 September 2016.

Sports Future Directions

Olympics have closed. Today's newspapers are full of praise for our medal winners. These sports persons richly deserve the accolades that are being showered on them.

However for deciding our long term sports policy we have to move away from the medal mania.

The vision for Indian Sports should be linked to physical fitness and consequently mental wellbeing of our people. Medals in competitive games will be a natural outcome. Our greater focus should be on non-competitive part of the Sports.

Vision is to create a sports culture in the country.

We should aim to achieve 5 hours of sports activity for every person every week.

Benefits will be in terms of better health, lower sickness, reduced expenses on medical care, longevity, lower absenteeism and improved productivity. Indirectly it will also reduce crime rate as more people are occupied.

We need investment in sports facilities. Currently we find a large number of sports facilities are with educational institutions - schools, colleges and universities. It leads to good utilization but not full utilization. These institutions should be mandated to offer their sports facilities to the neighbouring citizens for a reasonable charge for about 12 hours a week after drawing a schedule.
There would be good demand for swimming pools, tennis courts, badminton courts,  TT rooms, squash courts and billiards etc.

Private investment in sports is lopsided. In NCR Region, I find more number of Golf courses are made rather than football and cricket fields. I have nothing against golf. But over investment in Golf drives out space for other sports. Golf is seen as a sports for rich and old people. They should also get their share. But need is to have a balance between needs of all categories.

There is need for making the town planning rules more explicit by mandating private developers to provide for children's play grounds, young persons' facilities like cricket/ football grounds, volleyball and basketball courts etc.

First written on August 23, 2016.

Public Housing, not affordable housing

Public Housing, not affordable housing.

I laud the goal of Housing for All by 2022 as announced by PM Shri Narendra Modi. Many persons have taken it to mean that for the poor persons, we need to construct affordable housing. Given the wages for a large section of poor persons in India, any housing is not affordable for owning.

Take a person who is earning minimum wages of Rs 9000 per month. He spends about Rs 1500 for a room in Delhi in the poorer part of City. Given the other expenditure, this person has no way to squeeze out another 1500 to be able to afford an EMI of Rs 3000 per month. So even if we give a house for Rs 3 lakh, neither this person can afford to add the initial sum of say Rs 50000, nor can he service the loan. We need to remember that not all the persons get minimum wages.  

About 40 % of the population falls in this category. They can't even afford the "affordable houses."

For improving the life of these people we need to provide them with public housing at subsidized or affordable rents. Therefore, need is to construct a large number of government or Municipal houses and give a basic level of living to these people. And that is Public Housing. It needs to be extended to villages also. Because a clean and pucca house means less disease, better safety from the extreme cold /heat and better development of all the family members.  

What is termed as affordable housing is for Lower middle class. Even here we need to be cautious in developing policy in such a way that the subprime crisis of US in 2008 is not repeated in India in the year 2020 or 2025. This segment will need some calibrated support. Middle class and higher segments can be on their own. They can buy what they think they can afford. Free market will be the best solution albeit with better regulation for fair deal for customers.

If we do not pursue the above line, we will continue to have slums in cities.

 

Dated: 24 December 2015

Vision for Milk 2

India is the largest milk producing nation in the world. In 2013-14, our milk production was 132.4 million tonnes.

Do we produce enough milk for our people? 

In 2011-12, the availability of milk was 290 gm per person per day. (Data taken from NDDB website.)

This means not even one glass of milk for the individual. (Capacity of a steel tumbler is about 400 cc.)

We need to provide about 900 gm of milk per person per day.

If we keep the target of achieving this level in 10 years, we require growth rate of about 15 % year on year in quantitative terms.

Are we prepared for this? Is this doable? 

Increasing milk production is not easy. Following actions are required:

1. Increase the number of milch cattles. (It has a lead time. It can't happen overnight.)

2. Increase milk yield from each milch cattle. (Requires better animal feed. Different breed of cattle.)

3. Avoid wastages.  

Let us look at option 1 of increasing the cattle stock.  Each cow gives birth to only one calf at a time. We can expect only one calf per year. Over the life of a cow, she would produce 3 to 4 calves. Half of them are male. They can be used as draught animals. Other half are females.  These will give milk.

Roughly over five years,  one cow adds one and a half cows to the animal stock. But the mother cow gets old and dies. So the increase is possible to about 9 % only per year.  

Second task of increasing yield from each milk cattle requires good animal husbandry practices. In order to achieve this we require strengthening the institutional framework. I propose that we should create one agriculture university in each district which has a veterinary hospital attached to it. The other departments will focus on the crops of that area. Initially this may be opened as a college attached to a nearby university. But vision should be to develop each one into a university over a period of 10 years or so. 

These universities would be supported by Indian Council of Agriculture Research.  Some of the research labs of ICAR can be the kernel for the new Universities. These may be central universities.  While others can be State Universities. 

Parliamentary Reforms

I will focus on number of parliamentarians.  We began with 544 members of Lok Sabha in 1949 when we hada population of 37 crores. Now we have the population of 125 crore and number of LS Members continues to be same.  We  need  to increase this number to about 2500 effectively having one Lok Sabha member for every 5 lakh population. Out of this 5 lakh, there would be about 2.5 lakh adults and rest will be children. This is a manageable number.  Right now Parliamentarians are far disconnected from their constituents.

This may mean structural changes in the parliament building,  which is long overdue.  Central Hall can be  modified to accomodate the larger numbers.  Seating has to change.

Right now there is  so much emphasis on spoken word only. Each seat should be equipped with a computer screen in front, where the speech and the issue being debated is displayed. Option of translation to any of the scheduled languages should be made available.

ATM Network: Key to financial inclusion 3

ATM Network should be viewed as  the basic infrastructure that Financial sector needs. Model of Bank owned and operated ATMs was sought to be supplemented by white ATMs. Policy changes announced by RBI had created high expectations two years ago.  However the growth of third party white ATMs is slow.

 

Big banks have the resources to create their own network and they have also established it in urban areas.  In fact in my locality in New Delhi there are more than 10 ATMs of different banks. Looks like wastage of precious resources. In many small towns you find no ATM.

 

Medium sized banks have limited network.  Cooperative Banking sector does not have financial resources to create a good network. Second key difficulty they face is poor competency in Information Technology.

 

I propose that the task of creating ATM Network should be taken up by RBI. A wholly owned company can be formed to establish and run the ATM Network. Let us call it Indian ATM Network Company (IANC).

 

IANC will act as backbone of Banking Sector and facilitate its development much in the same manner as a Highway Network would facilitate growth of economy. 

Advantages of IANC will be

 

1. High quality network
2. Currency notes come from RBI. And go in the hands of people directly.  Banks do not handle that much currency. 
3. RBI can implement many changes in payment systems directly.
4. Old currency notes collected by Currency Chests maintained by different banks also come into the network. RBI gets a checkpoint to detect the forged currency closer to the ground.
5. Cooperative Banking Sector will very quickly transform into modern age banking.
6. ATMs are created at locations where the economic viability may be long term. 
7. Duplication of ATMs is avoided.

 

After the sector has matured,  this company may be made free standing from government control by selling its equity to Banks and subsequently to public.