Leaders meeting in Davos must take concrete action to reverse rising inequality – and finally put the poorest 99% first

As we enter another year of global uncertainty, government and business leaders are heading to the World Economic Forum in Davos as its own Global Risk report (pdf) identifies growing inequality for the second year as one of the biggest potential challenges the world is facing.

The Occupy protests that took place in cities from London to Lagos demonstrated the strength of public outrage at the increasing wealth and power of the richest 1%, compared with the dire straits in which the poorest 99% find themselves following a crisis not of their making.

To stem the rising tide of inequality, the world now needs bold solutions more than ever. Oxfam’s pre-Davos briefing, The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all, attempts to kickstart the debate.

The claim that the richest 1% have everything while the poorest 99% have next to nothing is not just hot air. In the US, the share of national income going to the wealthiest 1% has doubled since 1980 to 20%. For the top 0.01%, it has quadrupled to levels never seen before. A report published by Oxfam last year found that the UK is rapidly returning to Dickensian levels of inequality.

Rather than reversing the process, the financial crisis has accelerated it. While public spending is being cut, the luxury goods market has registered double-digit growth every year since the crisis hit.

Inequality of income and wealth are not good for anyone. The consolidation of wealth and capital in so few hands is economically inefficient because it depresses demand, a point made famous by Henry Ford. It is also socially divisive. If you are born poor in a very unequal society, you are much more likely to end your life in poverty. I recently heard a leading Washington economist talk passionately (and off the record) about the “lie” that is telling a poor Indian they too can become a Mumbai millionaire if they just “work hard”.

And extreme wealth and inequality pose a moral dilemma. As Mahatma Gandhi said: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”

Read full article in The Guardian.

In 2010, nearly 830 million people around the world lived in slums, up from 777 million in the year 2000,according to the United Nations.

The New York Times describes Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, as a “cliché of Indian misery,” with approximately 1 million slum dwellers living on 8 percent of the land in the western city of Mumbai. Although Dharavi lacks sufficient infrastructure to provide sewerage, water, electricity, or housing for residents, this dense community in the heart of India’s financial capital has a thriving informal economy with an annual economic output of up to US$1 billion.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development observes that “slum dwellers may be at the bottom of the urban heap, but most are better off than their rural counterparts.” Urban centers, both in India and around the world, offer economic opportunities that rural areas do not. For this reason, some migrants voluntarily move to slums in hopes of learning new skills, setting up businesses, and sending their children to school.

One important way to mitigate hunger in Indian cities is by enabling the urban poor to grow their own food on local land. Urban farming is a growing trend within middle-class Indian communities, some of whom practice rooftop gardening and community farming. Although densely populated slums pose challenges for urban agriculture, non-developed land (i.e., dumping grounds) can sometimes be converted into open space for gardening. Such was the case with a former dump site in Mumbai’s Ambedkar Nagar slum, which is now a community garden.

Pockets of slum dwellers throughout India practice urban agriculture in an effort to increase community food security. In the city of Cuttack, slum dwellers rely on organic farming to grow the vegetables needed to meet their dietary requirements, and are even able to sell the surplus to local markets. Local fruit and vegetable production in and around urban Delhi allow poor communities to access cheap, healthy food, which would otherwise be too expensive.

Read the full article on Nourishing the Planet.

In 2008, Aarti Naik had dropped out of 10th grade at her Bombay Municipal Corporation school in Mulund West, Mumbai, and faced a bleak future of a lifetime as a servant.

“My family condition was very poor,” Naik told India-West by telephone from Mumbai. “My BMC class was one teacher with 18 students and I could not understand English or maths.”

“My father did not allow me to attend outside classes because they were too expensive,” said Naik from the home she shares with her family, a small, one-room abode with a communal toilet shared by 250 people and water available only in the afternoon.

Naik started to craft women’s chains for a living, earning Rs. 9 a day. Her fellow laborers were young women, also high-school dropouts. “I thought in my mind what conditions I was facing, all the girls here were also facing.”

“Slum parents are not aware of education for their children, especially girl children,” said Naik, who is 24. “My friends and I dropped out and we had no guidance for what we would do next,” she said, adding that several of her friends started working as housemaids.

But Naik had a different vision: she started a small, informal school for six girls tutoring them to attain basic literacy. She initially encountered great difficulty from parents who failed to see the value of her classes.

A social worker fortuitously then suggested that Naik apply for Ashoka’s Youth Venture Changemaker Fellowship. Naik received the fellowship and created Sakhi for the Education of Girls, which now provides an education to 30 girls from her slum, ages 6 to 13. Once the girls successfully complete their Sakhi education, they are equipped with training to further continue their education or begin employment.

Naik is next hoping to expand the program to 100 girls in neighboring slums.

Read full story at India West.

Any organisation working for a social, cultural, economic, educational or religious cause is termed as a Non-Government Organisation (NGO). NGOs have made favourable indents to needy sections of Indian society at par with a constantly changing socio-economic climate and are viewed as vehicles of legitimisation of civil society. NGOs have reached out to all sections of society including women, children, pavement dwellers, unorganised workers, youth, slum-dwellers and landless labourers.

An NGO can be formed under various legal identities:

• Society registered under Societies Registration Act, 1860. This is the most common form of non-profit organisations in India. A Society is formed when people come together to do something with some common purpose, which is legal and useful for others. A society should generally not get into profit making activities.
• Trust (Formed under the Trust deed and registered with Income Tax Authority.) The three parties (settlor, trustee and beneficiary of trust) are linked by a trust deed which documents the relationship inter se and vis-a-vis the trust property. Trusts are commonly classified as private / family and public trusts. The main difference between a private and public trust is that while the beneficiary of a private trust is one or a few individual (mostly family members of the donor), the beneficiary of a public trust is the general public. For the purposes of forming an NGO ensuring public benefit a public trust can be formed. There are two statutes relevant to functioning of Trusts in India: The Indian Trusts Act, 1882; and Charitable and Religious Trusts Act, 1920. Public trusts are however governed by general law, though the principles forming the basis of the Indian Trusts Act can be applied in the case
• Limited company incorporated under section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956. A Non-Profit Company can be formed for any non-profit activity. It is identical to an ordinary company in all respects except that it is not established for profit and commercial gain. It is also called a Section 25 Company and is a voluntary association of people, registered under the Indian Companies Act, 1956. The accountability aspect of a non-profit company because of statutory disclosure requirements is a relevant advantage of a company’s operational transparency and ability to invoke and maintain public faith.

The objectives of a non-profit company can be including promotion of commerce, art, science, religion, charity or any other useful object. Profits are applied for promoting only the objects of the company and no dividend is paid to its members. (Section 25 (1) (a) and (b) of the Companies Act, 1956).

A non-profit company may be public or private. If the non-profit company is a private company a minimum of only two members are required to form it. However, if the non-profit from is for a public purpose, then a minimum of seven are needed. A ‘Section 25 company’ and is eligible for certain exemption from provisions of law and concessional rate of fees etc.

Source: Mumbai Mirror

More children are surviving to their fifth birthday than ever before, but the world is not on course to get the death toll down to the level envisaged in the millennium development goals by 2015, according to a new report from Unicef.

There has been considerable progress, said the children’s emergency fund in its progress report, Committing to Child Survival: a promise renewed (pdf). In 1990, there were 12 million deaths of young children, but the latest figures (from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation) show that deaths had fallen by nearly half, to 6.9 million, by 2011.

Geeta Rao Gupta, deputy executive director of Unicef, said: “The story of child mortality is one of significant progress and unfinished business as well.” Satisfaction in the gains had to be tempered by the reality that 19,000 children still die every day from largely preventable causes. “We must give new energy to the global momentum to reduce under-five deaths.”

Executive director Anthony Lake said there were proven, affordable interventions. “These lives could be saved with vaccines, adequate nutrition, and basic medical and maternal care,” he said. “The world has the technology and knowhow to do so. The challenge is to make these available to every child.”

Poor countries have been able to bring down their death rates as well as the richer ones, Unicef pointed out. Between 1990 and 2011, nine low-income countries – Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Niger and Rwanda – reduced their under-five mortality rate by 60% or more.

Middle-income countries such as Brazil, Mongolia and Turkey, and high-income countries such as Oman and Portugal, have also made great progress, cutting deaths by more than two-thirds over the same period.

The highest concentration of deaths is in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, where 82% of all under-five deaths occurred in 2011. The proportion has grown steadily from 68% in 1990, as other countries have made faster progress. One in nine children in sub-Saharan Africa does not reach his or her fifth birthday.

“The growing breach between the rest of the world and sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia underscores the inequities that remain in child survival,” says the report. It goes on to point out that those inequities can exist within countries. “In 2011, about half of global under-five deaths occurred in just five countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo, Pakistan and China. Four of these [all but DRC] are populous middle-income countries.”

Source: The Guardian

India is home to a billion people, all of us needing a roof over our heads. Having a home, a space to possess as we like, the reassurance that we have somewhere to return to, every day, is a state of existence that many of us take for granted. But, for millions of people, it remains an aspiration and a reality that is beyond their grasp.

With India’s slum population at nearly 100 million (and estimated to grow by about 2 million every year), we are in the middle of a huge urban housing crisis. While slum dwellers form a substantial part of the population of India’s biggest cities, they typically occupy a disproportionate amount of space; in Mumbai, for example, around 12 million slum dwellers — constituting more than half the city’s total population — live on only 6% of the city’s land.

Not owning the home you live in makes you vulnerable to exploitation. For India’s poorest citizens, it often translates to being evicted from their homes and thrown out on the streets, not being able to find safe and sanitary alternatives, losing jobs because their commute is too long or their previous livelihoods have disappeared, inability to access essential services and provisions as they are unable to prove their residency, uprooting their families, and children having to drop out of school.

But the solution to housing the poor, is not merely building more homes. In Mumbai, for instance, slum dwellers and developers have been locked in battle for years, stalling a slum redevelopment plan designed to provide new, affordable and quality housing for the city’s slum population. Under the controversial scheme, developers can buy land for commercial development provided they build free houses for slum dwellers. However, slum residents are entitled to the free housing only if they have lived in the area since before 1995, or, in some cases before 2000. This means almost 70% of slum dwellers in the city are ineligible for a free home.

Read the full article by Aditi Seshadri at DNA

By Dr Girish Ingle

Cancer affects children throughout the world. It is estimated that every year about 1,60,000 children are diagnosed with cancer globally. Around 80% of these are from developing countries. Unfortunately, these children do not get effective treatment due to difficulty in accessing specialised cancer care services. Therefore the disease is often detected at later stages and, in some cases, not at all. As a result, there is high mortality among children with cancer despite the fact that 85% of childhood cancers are treatable and curable if detected in early stages.

Today, medical and health systems have advanced in many aspects, so it is possible a defeated, sickly child turn into a smiling healthy one with just a few months of treatment. Sadly, in India, only 15-20% children with cancer are able to receive the treatment. The lack of treatment is mainly due to lack of diagnosis and access to treatment.

A fatal triad of inaccessibility: cancer, financial burden of treatment and poverty

The treatment for cancer is very expensive. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, around  6-8%  of  India’s population  does not  seek  care  due  to financial  reasons.  Apart from the burden of direct cost of treatment, there is huge indirect cost involved. For example, cancer care hospitals are located far away from the patient’s home and some families end up travelling more than 1000 kilometres to the city.

Migration to a new city makes it difficult for families to find living space and overcome language barriers. This temporary migration causes a loss of livelihood of the parents which makes them more vulnerable to comply with treatment. To maintain a family back at home with nobody to take care of the siblings of the children undergoing treatment, and also to sustain a life with psychological and financial stress in a entirely new city is a big challenge for families to continue the treatment, which lasts for at least 6 months. Under these circumstances, families leave the treatment in halfway and return to their hometown with the untreated child. This not only proves fatal for the child die but also push the family in impoverishment and below poverty line.

Around 24%  of all hospitalised cases  get  impoverished  each  year  (Peters  et  al,  2002).  World Development  Report  (2004),  stated that medical  care  remains  the  third  biggest cause  of impoverishment  in India and  each  year  an  additional  3.7%  of  the population  is  impoverished  due  to  medical  causes  (van  Doorslaer,  2006).  Dev and Ravi  (2008), in their study shows  that  the  total poverty  ratio  in  India increases  from  28  to  36  percent  (for  year  2004-05)  if  private  expenditures  on education and health are included.

The question is, why does this situation occur? Why don’t these children get treatment? Why is their constitutional ‘Right to Life’ being denied? The answer lies in the inability of the healthcare services in India to meet the demands of the population. Health is a state subject and the state must ensure access of treatment to every individual however, the state is unable and not equipped to provide the healthcare to these cancer children. The reason being is a paucity of the equipped healthcare facilities and specialized Paediatric Oncologists in country.

The Government of India has started a National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP) and established 27 regional cancer care centres throughout country. But this number is very little compare to the needs and density of the population in India and exists only in big cities. Mumbai has 7 medical colleges. The diagnosis and treatment of cancer is centralized in certain hospitals. There is only one such hospital in Mumbai which is totally dedicated to treat the cancers including childhood cancers. This particular hospital is catering to the patients not only from Mumbai or Maharashtra state but to the patients from all over the country. As a result the patient load is too high and thus the patients have to wait a long time till their turn comes. This becomes an impediment in their healthcare. Other hospitals, which are run by profit-making and non-for-profit agencies are not affordable to the patients. Very often, parents are not aware of such facilities. Lack of social security schemes and their poor implementation also contributes to the non-diagnosis and non-treatment of childhood cancers. The Rajeev Gandhi Jeevandayi Yojana is a 100% state-run scheme that provides free super specialty surgical treatment for cancer and other ailments to people who fall below the poverty line or are economically backward, but most patients do not use this scheme, because they are illiterate and ignorant of it.

NCCP: A futile commitment

The National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP), which envisaged early detection and prevention of cancers, has been unsuccessful due to its poor implementation and poor referral at peripheral healthcare centres. Lack of organised screening programmes for childhood cancers in the country and focus of cancer centres only on opportunistic screening services is responsible for the late detection, late diagnosis and treatment and increased mortality and morbidity in cancer patients. NCCP in its single form will not be able to make changes in current situation. There is an urgent need of creating holistic approach through multisectoral engagement.

The Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) also advocates for a commitment to be the ‘voice of cancer’ in making a cancer as a public health agenda by involving different health disciplines (research, clinical services, health promotion, cancer survivors, pharmaceutical industry, etc) and sectors outside of health (e.g., World Bank, World Economic Forum, private sector, development agencies, World Trade Organization) to deal with this public health scourge.

Even though cancer is not included in the United Nations health agenda of ‘Millennium Development Goal’ (MDG), approximately 70% of the world’s cancers patients will be in the developing countries by the year 2020 (WHO). There are also very close linkages between poverty, cancer and achievement of MDG. If the disease is not controlled at early stage then it will have huge implications on achievement of MDGs.

Therefore, it is imperative for the state and other stakeholders to form an agenda to tackle the issue of childhood cancer on the global agenda. A strong preventive healthcare system, early detection and strong referrals, and excellence centres for multidisciplinary treatment, rehabilitation and research in childhood cancers, are what we need. This will ensure universal access to all children diagnosed with cancer.

Dr Girish Ingle is the Head of the Health Department at Mumbai Smiles

Reservation is a distracting word in India.

In all the discussion since the Supreme Court upheld the guidelines of the Right to Education Act about a month ago, maximum debate has centred around one clause, the one that earmarks 25% of seats in private schools for economically weaker sections.

Yes, the reservations will have huge repercussions on students and families all round, among the rich and the poor, and yes, there will be stories of discrimination, endurance, and maybe even some success.

But the fact remains that a majority of students in India still attend public schools. While there’s no denying private school enrolment is increasing (the Annual Status of Education Report 2011 says it has gone from 18.7% in 2006 to 25.6% in 2011), there are still about 75% of students in India attending public schools.

The reservation debate has distracted attention from a disturbing fact: that the government sees private schools as an alternate to state schooling. By stipulating that private schools reserve 25% seats for poor students, the government is not only accommodating more people enrolling in private schools, but also shrugging off at least part of the responsibility for free and compulsory education. There wouldn’t be a need to allot 25% of seats in private schools to the poor if there were enough seats in public schools. And parents wouldn’t want to enroll their children in private schools, if they were getting the kind of education they deserve in public schools.

Read the full article by Aditi Seshadri at DNA

Rakesh Shukla examines the recent Supreme Court judgment on the Right to Education, which clarified that the obligation on un-aided non-minority schools to admit 25% children from disadvantaged groups is a reasonable restriction on the fundamental right to carry on a business or occupation

The Supreme Court in a recent ruling has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. The legislation had been challenged in a slew of petitions from commercial schools as well as alternative schools. The judgment is reported as Society for Un-aided Private Schools of Rajasthan versus Union of India, 2012(4) SCALE 272.

A look at the legal framework is necessary in order to appreciate the context of the adjudication on the validity of the Act. The Constitution of India guarantees certain fundamental rights like life, liberty and equality. These rights are justiciable and courts can be approached in case of violation. There are certain directive principles laid down which, though not enforceable in court, are fundamental in governance of the country and in making laws.

The initial promise was to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to 14 years within 10 years of the commencement of the Constitution, as enunciated in Article 45 of the Directive Principles. As often happens with good intentions, the promise remained a dream for half-a-century. In the early-’90s the Supreme Court declared that the right to education is a part of the fundamental right to life guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution. At the time, the declaration was reported with much fanfare; but nothing changed at the ground level.

Read the full article in InfoChange