india – Page 5 – Akshat Rathi

If India’s future lies in its cities where women hardly work, we must all worry

February 13, 2014February 12, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Nearly 400m people live in cities in India and during the next 40 years that number will more than double. Not only is the proportion of India’s total female population that is economically active among the lowest in the world, but urban areas do even worse. New analysis of data from the 2011 census shows only half as many urban women work as their rural counterparts.

Few states – including Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – do worse than India when it comes to women’s participation in the workforce. Others such as Somalia, Bahrain and Malaysia do much better. Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which are comparable emerging economies, India has the lowest female participation rate, with only 29% of women over the age of 15 working. As the chart below shows, even among the MINT countries – Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and Turkey – only Turkey has the same participation rate as India.

In mainly agricultural economies, urban women often find less work than rural ones. Half the working population in India is employed by the agricultural sector. But agriculture’s contribution to Indian economy has been steadily falling and is now less than half that of the services industry. This should have corresponded with rapid growth in numbers of working women in cities, but that hasn’t happened.

Economists have tried to understand this discrepancy. Some cite the problem to be India’s unemployment rate among the young, who make more than half of the population. But such joblessness should affect both men and women, and it also doesn’t explain the long-term trend of low women’s workforce participation rates. Others believe that younger people in cities are staying in education for longer. While that certainly contributes to the overall picture, it cannot explain the large difference between urban and rural figures.

Some discrepancy may arise because many women are involved in home-based work and are part of the informal sector, where their contribution tends to be under-reported. “Better enumeration will help, but measurement is not the only reason participation rates are so low in India, especially in urban areas,” Sher Verick, a senior fellow at the International Labour Organisation, said.

Patriarchy rules

According to Verick, the two main factors keeping women at home are social customs and very low education levels among women.

Breaking such customs is hard. Preet Rustagi, joint director of Institute for Human Development in Delhi, said: “To a certain extent, men control women’s lives. And women have internalised this as the norm. In such situations, the little work they do is the result of compulsion, such as when the household income is not enough, rather than choice.”

The power of social norms may be partially explained based on data from the city of Leicester in the UK, where one in four city-dwellers is of Indian background. According to a 2010 report by Sheffield Hallam University: “Economic activity rates among Indian women in Leicester are nine percentage points lower than for Indian women nationally.” In a large enough group of Indians, those social norms are more strongly held than when Indians are widely dispersed in the rest of the UK.

Although education levels have improved in recent decades, not as many educated women have found work.

“In India, there is a U-shaped relationship between education and participation of women in the workforce,” Verick said. “Illiterates participate more out of necessity. Women with a middle-level education (below graduate) have different aspirations and can afford to remain out of the workforce. Only better educated women have been ‘pulled’ into the labour force in response to better paid opportunities.”

Rustagi said a skills shortage among women is also to blame. “There is a large divide between what they can do and what jobs are on offer.” For instance, the lowest worker sex ratio is seen in construction, manufacturing and the retail trade, which are booming in cities.

The safety of women is also a concern in Indian cities, as was highlighted after the 2012 Delhi gang rape case. Better governance and improved policing ought to help, but urban India’s gender imbalance is a deeper cause for worry. The national average is 940 females per 1,000 males, but that drops to 912 for cities with a population larger than 1m. The imbalance is greater still in India’s biggest cities, with Delhi at 867 females per 1,000 males and Mumbai at 861.

The discrepancy in these figures may be partly explained by the mass migration of workers, mainly men, from rural to urban areas, according to Varsha Joshi, director of India’s census operations. But the drop is large enough that further investigation is needed to spot other reasons.

Empty promises

There are some positive signs. According to India’s National Sample Survey, the proportion of working women in urban areas has increased from 11.9% in 2001 to 15.4% in 2011. Rustagi said: “One of the fastest-growing sectors for urban working women has been domestic work. About 1.5m urban women were added to that sector in the last decade, which is more than one in ten jobs created for women in that time.”

But the areas that have shown the most significant growth, such as domestic work, tend to fall into the category of “informal” work – and under India’s labour laws, these workers have few workplace rights. This makes it harder for women to have sustainable jobs, let alone a career.

Indians go to the polls in April and, partly as a result of the focus of women’s issues, most parties have adopted promises about women’s empowerment as part of their campaigns, but none have spelt these promises out in any detail.

First published on The Conversation. Image credit: trinitycarefoundation

If you are cursing Arvind Kejriwal for throwing away a golden opportunity, you are wrong

February 2, 2014February 2, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

The Aam Aadmi Party has done the impossible. One month ago, the Facebook class of India loved them for showing what Indian politics really needs. Now they hate them for doing things that we won’t expect even corrupt politicians to do.

To understand this schizophrenia that the AAP has created among the educated middle class of India, we need to look at our own expectations. The success of Kejriwal in the Delhi elections, we thought, was the result of our disgust of the current political class. We hate those politicians who go after vote banks only so that they can fill up their own pockets with bribes. We wanted someone who could clean the muck and put worthy leaders in charge. Like Obama, he was the beacon of hope in a mess that had been decaying for decades.

As soon as he took up his place as Delhi’s chief minister, we expected Kejriwal to behave like a model chief minister—honest, sober and efficient. We wanted him to get things done. But unlike Obama who crushed the American dream after being re-elected, Kejriwal’s party members seem to be on track to crush our dreams within months of being in the government.

The law minister Somnath Bharti was accused of taking law into his own hands. The resident poet Kumar Vishwas was caught on camera making racial comments. And the leader Kejriwal was blamed to act un-statesmanlike when he resorted to protesting against his state’s police—something no chief minister had ever done before .

And yet, we must realise that Kejriwal is smart to know that pandering to our desires is impossible in the few months he has before national elections. He is partly right to blame the media for creating a hate campaign, for whom he has been a bonus. With Kejriwal, the media has one more top politician to poke beyond Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.

Kejriwal’s best strategy for the national elections is going to be the same strategy he had going into Delhi elections—try to get enough seats so that AAP can be a trouble-making opposition. And for achieving that goal, it would be best to stick to the principles that won him Delhi. Something that even the Congress and the BJP have admitted to learn lessons from. The principles were to provide the people an alternative to the current crop of filthy politicians.

Of course, national elections are going to be a whole different game. Delhi’s population is all urban, but India remains largely rural.

In the Delhi elections, AAP got 30% of the votes, slightly behind BJP’s 33% and slightly ahead Congress’s 25%. He won not because of the few votes from the Facebook class, but mostly because of the votes from the poor—the rickshaw drivers, the slum-dwellers and lower middle class (which can afford mobile phones but has no use for the internet).

He succeeded because he acted as he had done for many years before—like a revolutionary. While it would be foolish think that he does not enjoy the power of being a chief minister, I would like to believe him when he says that he does not want that power if he has to compromise on his ideals. The Congress can pull remove their unconditional support and he won’t be chief minister anymore.

At this point I should disclose that I do not support Kejriwal’s economic policies, at least the ones he has shown so far. But I’m willing to experiment with having a clean politician who improves the functioning of the government and exposes its predecessor’s wrongdoings, even if the immediate effect on people’s lives will not be beneficial.

Rise of the muffler man

I like Vir Sanghvi’s clarity of thoughts. That is why when he said, “Kejriwal has become no more than a media-blaming, vote-bank politician”, I entertained his well-laid arguments seriously. Sadly, the conclusion drawn is only partly right.

Yes Kejriwal blames the media, but he is no vote-bank politician. Sanghvi’s analysis fails because he is being short-sighted. He claims that giving free water and cutting electricity prices in Delhi will get Kejriwal votes at the national level.

Kejriwal got into politics to play the long game. He recognises that what few votes he can get at the national level will come from exposing the tainted politicians, offering a good alternative and listening to the vast majority of people. He is moving the debate away from pitting personalities against each other to talking about values and ideas.

Like in Delhi, there is no way that AAP can form a majority government at the national level this year. It would be lucky if it even played a small part in forming the government. Instead, the AAP is aiming for the election of 2019. In five years, the party will have matured and the country will have grown tired of Modi. That would be the time when AAP will be a serious alternative—something Indians have been wanting for decades.

Image credit: Kumar Vishwas (not original source)

Insulin pill may soon be a reality

December 27, 2013January 25, 2014 Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Daily jabs of insulin are a painful reality for many with diabetes. That may change if researchers who have successfully tested oral insulin in rats are able to replicate those results in humans.

Nearly 350m people worldwide suffer from diabetes and that number is predicted to grow to more than 500m by 2030. While the more common form, type-2 diabetes, does not always need insulin treatment, nearly quarter of all diabetes patients depend on insulin jabs. Oral insulin’s estimated annual sales could be somewhere between $8 billion and $17 billion.

The benefits of an insulin pill are more than just ease of taking the drug. The pill will mean that patients can start taking insulin earlier in the development of the disease, which could reduce some of the secondary complications, which can include blindness and impaired healing that leads to amputations.

The idea of oral insulin has been around since the 1930s, but the difficulties of making it seemed too big to overcome. First, insulin is a protein – when it comes in contact with stomach enzymes, it is quickly destroyed. Second, if insulin can pass through the stomach safely, it is too big a molecule (about 30 times the size of aspirin) to be absorbed into the bloodstream, where it needs to be in order to regulate blood-sugar levels.

Sanyog Jain at India’s National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research and his colleagues have been working on delivering insulin in the oral form for many years. Their first fully-successful attempt came in 2012, when they developed a formulation that successfully controlled blood-sugar level in rats. But the materials used were too expensive to consider commercialising the technology.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Biomacromolecules, they have found a cheaper and more reliable way of delivering insulin. They overcome the two main hurdles by, first, packing insulin in tiny sacs made of lipids (fats), and, second, attaching to it folic acid (vitamin B₉) to help improve its absorption into the bloodstream.

The lipids they use are cheap and have been successfully employed to deliver other drugs before. These help to protect insulin from being digested by stomach enzymes, which gets it to the small intestine. When the lipid-covered sacs enter the small intestine, special cells on its lining called microfold cells are attracted to the folic acid in them. The folic acid helps activate a transport mechanism that can let big molecules pass through into the blood. The amount of folic acid used in the formulation also seems to be in the safe region.

In rats, Jain’s formulation was as effective as injected insulin, although the relative amounts that entered the blood stream differed. However, it was better in one key aspect. Whereas the effects of an injection are quickly lost (in less than 6 to 8 hours), Jain’s formulation helped control blood-sugar level for more than 18 hours.

The most important part of the research comes after successful testing in animals – the formulation needs to be given to human volunteers. But, Jain said, “at a government institute like ours, we don’t have the sort of money needed for clinical trials.”

He may not have to wait for long, as big pharma companies have been searching for an insulin pill formulation for decades. Two of them, Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk and Israeli upstart Oramed are in a race to come up with a solution. Google’s venture capital arm, Google Ventures, recently invested $10m in Rani Therapeutics with the hope it will help develop oral insulin. Indian firm Biocon also does oral insulin research, and it recently signed an agreement with pharma giant Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Oramed is ahead, with their oral insulin product soon to enter phase-II clinical trials, which is the most advanced stage any oral insulin formulation has ever reached. Its chief scientist, Miriam Kidron, said of Jain’s research: “Most people have the same basic idea to develop an insulin pill, but its the little differences that will determine ultimate success.”

While Kidron did not reveal Oramed’s formulation, she said, “we attempted liposomal delivery before, just like Jain’s work, but we weren’t successful.” She warned that translating success from rats to humans is very difficult. And she is right – most drugs have a high cull-rate at each stage of their development. Even so, research like Jain’s give hope that an insulin pill may not remain a dream for long.

First published at The Conversation.