India economy: Seven years of Modi in seven charts
By Nikhil Inamdar and Aparna Alluri BBC News, Delhi
Published
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Narendra Modi stormed India's political stage with grand promises - of more jobs, prosperity and less red tape.
His thumping mandate - in 2014 and again in 2019 - raised hopes of big bang reforms.
But his economic record, in the seven years he's been prime minister, has proved lacklustre. And the pandemic battered what was an already under-par performance.
Here's how Asia's third-largest economy has fared under Mr Modi, in seven charts.
Mr Modi's avowed GDP target - a $5 trillion (£3.6 trillion) economy by 2025, or roughly $3 trillion after adjusting for inflation - is a pipe dream now.
Independent pre-Covid estimates for 2025 had touched $2.6 trillion at best. The pandemic has shaved off another $200-300bn.
Rising inflation, driven by global oil prices, is also a big concern, economist Ajit Ranade said.
But Covid is not solely responsible.
India's GDP - at a high of 7-8% when Mr Modi took office - had fallen to its lowest in a decade - 3.1% - by the fourth quarter of 2019-20.
"India's biggest challenge has been a slowdown in investments since 2011-12," said Mahesh Vyas, CEO of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). "Then, since 2016, we have suffered too many economic shocks in quick succession."
The currency ban, GST and intermittent lockdowns all reduced employment, he added.
Unemployment climbed to a 45-year high - 6.1% - in 2017-18, according to the last official count. And it has nearly doubled since then, according to household surveys by CMIE, a widely-used proxy for labour market data.
More than 25 million people have lost their jobs since the start of 2021. And more than 75 million Indians have plunged back into poverty, including a third of India's 100 million-strong middle class, setting back half a decade of gains, according to estimates by Pew Research.
Mr Modi's government has also created far short of the 20 million jobs the economy needs every year, Mr Ranade said. India has been adding only around 4.3 million jobs a year for the last decade.
India is not making or exporting enough
'Make in India' - Mr Modi's high-octane flagship initiative - was supposed to turn India into a global manufacturing powerhouse by cutting red tape and drawing investment for export hubs.
The goal: manufacturing would account for 25% of GDP. Seven years on, it's share is stagnant at 15%. Worse, manufacturing jobs went down by half in the last five years, according to the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis.
Exports have been stuck at around $300bn for nearly a decade.
Under Mr Modi, India has steadily lost market share to smaller rivals such as Bangladesh, whose remarkable growth has hinged on exports, largely fuelled by the labour-intensive garments industry.
Mr Modi has also hiked tariffs and turned increasingly protectionist in recent years - in tandem with his rallying cry for "self-reliance".
Infrastructure building is a rare bright spot
Mr Modi's government has been laying 36km (22 miles) of highways a day on average, compared to his predecessor's daily count of 8-11km, said Vinayak Chatterjee, co-founder of infrastructure firm Feedback Infra.
Installed renewables capacity - solar and wind - has doubled in five years. Currently at about 100 gigawatts, India is on track to achieve its 2023 target of 175 gigawatts.
Economists also largely welcomed Mr Modi's populist signature schemes - millions of new toilets to reduce open defecation, housing loans, subsidised cooking gas and piped water for the poor.
But many of the toilets aren't used or have no running water, and rising fuel prices have undone the benefit of the subsidy.
And the increased spending with no matching income from taxes or exports has economists worrying about India's ballooning fiscal deficit.
More people have joined the formal economy
This is Mr Modi's other big achievement.
India has leapfrogged towards becoming a global leader in digital payments, thanks to a government-backed payment system. Mr Modi's Jan Dhan scheme has enabled millions of unbanked poor families to enter the formal economy with "no-frills" bank accounts.
Accounts and deposits have risen - a good sign, although reports suggest many of these accounts lie unused.
But economists say this is a huge step in the right direction, especially since it allows the direct transfer of cash benefits, cutting out middlemen.
Healthcare spending is dismal
"Like previous governments, this one has continued to neglect healthcare. India has among the lowest levels of public spending on healthcare in the world," economist Reetika Khera said.
Experts say the emphasis is on tertiary care at the expense of preventive or primary care.
"This is hurtling us towards a US-style health system which is expensive and has poorer health outcomes in spite of that," Ms Khera added.
"It was long awaited but more resources need to go into it," said public health expert Dr Srinath Reddy. India needs to use Covid as a wake-up call to invest heavily in strengthening primary healthcare, he added.
Too many still work in farming
Farming employs more than half of India's working-age population but contributes too little to GDP.
Mr Modi, who had promised to double farm incomes, insists that's not true.
But experts say piecemeal reforms will achieve little - the government instead needs to spend to make farming more affordable and profitable, economist Professor R Ramakumar said.
"Demonetisation destroyed the supply chains, some irreparably, and GST led to a rise in input prices in 2017. The government has also done very little to alleviate the pain of 2020 [Covid lockdowns]," he added.
Mr Ranade said the solution partly lies outside farming: "Agriculture will do well when other sectors are able to absorb the surplus labour."
But that will only happen when India sees a revival in private investment - now at a 16-year low, according to CMIE - and possibly the biggest economic challenge Mr Modi faces.
How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.
Recording Yugoslav bards, Milman Parry established epic’s oral origins.Illustration by Julie Benbassat
The Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years. Here you are in the twenty-first century, contemplating a painting made in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, which portrays a philosopher who lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C., looking at a poet thought to have lived in the eighth century B.C. Tradition abolishes time, making us all contemporaries.
Yet the painting hints that Homer doesn’t quite belong in the same dimension of reality occupied by you, Aristotle, and Rembrandt. Aristotle is portrayed realistically in the dress of Rembrandt’s time—sumptuous white shirt, simple black apron, and broad-brimmed hat. (It wasn’t until the twentieth century that art historians determined that the figure was Aristotle; earlier identifications included a contemporary of Rembrandt’s, the writer Pieter Cornelisz Hooft.) In other words, Aristotle is a human being like us, albeit an extraordinary one. Homer, however, is a white marble bust—a work of art within a work of art.
It’s a reminder that, even for Aristotle, Homer was more a legend than a man. In his Poetics, the philosopher credits the poet with inventing epic, drama, and comedy. “It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully,” he writes with evident ambivalence. Herodotus, known as the first historian, saw Homer, along with the poet Hesiod, as having invented Greek mythology, calling them the first to “give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms.”
When it comes to things like when and where Homer lived, however, the earliest sources are already unreliable. According to tradition, the poet was blind and was born on the island of Chios, where a guild of rhapsodes—reciters of epic poetry—later became known as the Homeridae, “children of Homer,” and claimed to be his direct descendants. But there is no evidence for any of these assertions, and some ancient biographies of Homer are obviously fanciful.
Herodotus writes that Homer lived “four hundred years before my time,” which would put him in the ninth century B.C., but adds that this is “my own opinion,” with no real proof behind it. Other ancient sources give dates from 1100 to 800 B.C., placing Homer in what historians now call Greece’s Dark Ages, when the kingdoms we read about in the Iliad had collapsed and city-states like Athens and Sparta had not yet arisen. This was long before the development of the literate, urban civilization we think of as “ancient Greece.” There are no written records of this period, a fact that suggests the Greeks of Homer’s time were illiterate. Ultimately, the only evidence that such a person as Homer ever lived is the existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves. Surely someone had to have written them, and, as far back as we can see, that person was called Homer.
But in the nineteenth century classicists began to subject the Iliad and the Odyssey to the same kind of critical analysis that was casting new light on the historical origins of the Bible. Tradition held that the five books of Moses were written by their namesake, but research was suggesting that they were a composite of several sources stitched together long after the time they were ostensibly written. A similar debate—known as the Homeric Question—roiled classical scholarship. Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer, or were they composites of shorter poems by various people, woven together to form the epics we know? So-called “unitarians” argued that only a single author, with a powerfully imaginative mind, could have produced such monumental poems. “Analysts,” on the other hand, worked on separating the epics into their supposed original components by closely scrutinizing the language and the narrative.
Among those who waded into the debate was William Gladstone, the four-time Prime Minister of Britain, who published his three-volume “Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age” in 1858, during a brief stint out of office. Gladstone believed that the Homeric Question had been conclusively settled in favor of the traditional, unitarian view. The poems, he wrote, were “genuine gifts not only of a remote antiquity but of a designing mind.” And Homer, “to whom that mind belonged, has been justly declared by the verdict of all ages to be the patriarch of poets.” As it turned out, the verdict was premature.
We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. Earlier scholars had advanced this as a hypothesis, but it was Parry who demonstrated it beyond a reasonable doubt.
When he published his landmark papers, Parry was just thirty years old. Born in Oakland, California, where his father ran an unsuccessful drugstore, he visited Greece only once, for two months. But, as Robert Kanigel shows in the new biography “Hearing Homer’s Song” (Knopf), Parry, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, had been seized by Homer, in much the same way that the deities in the Iliad seize their favorite humans. In that era of American public education, even someone from Parry’s background could master Latin in high school and Greek in college, where the language “became his deep and abiding love,” his sister later recalled. “I think it was the sheer beauty and grandeur of spoken Greek—and the great delight the Greeks found in simply being alive—that attracted him.”
Parry’s career as a classicist lasted about fifteen years, from the first Greek courses he took until his sudden death, in 1935, at the age of thirty-three. He published no books and only a few papers. His most important research, undertaken in the last years of his life, involved travelling to remote areas of Yugoslavia to make recordings of local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier. These recordings revolutionized the understanding of oral literature, but when Parry died no one had yet listened to them; they were just a pile of thirty-five hundred aluminum disks sitting in a Harvard storage room.
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The significance of Parry’s work might never have become widely known if it weren’t for another scholar, Albert Lord, who accompanied Parry to Yugoslavia as a research assistant. Lord devoted the rest of his life to preserving and building on his teacher’s research, above all in his classic book on oral poetry, “The Singer of Tales” (1960). As Kanigel writes, for classicists, Parry and Lord are as indivisible as Watson and Crick, the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA.
Parry was an unlikely candidate for the task of abolishing Homer, who had been revered as the West’s first great poet for almost three thousand years. But, as great as Parry’s accomplishment was, it’s not obvious that biography is the best genre for taking stock of it. Because he died almost a century ago, there is no one alive for Kanigel to interview, no new sources to unearth. To compensate, he leans on descriptions of the places Parry lived—Oakland at the turn of the century, or Paris in the nineteen-twenties, when he studied for his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Kanigel also devotes much attention to Parry’s marriage, helped by an interview that his widow, Marian, recorded in 1981. The only revelation here, though, is that the Parrys weren’t very close; they married only because Marian got pregnant, when she was twenty-four and Milman twenty-one. “That’s the beginning of the baby and the end of me,” she remembered him saying. They had a son and a daughter.
The Parrys’ marriage is primarily of interest because of the manner of Milman’s death. Late in 1935, he took a sudden leave of absence from Harvard to go to California, where Marian was helping her mother deal with a financial crisis. After spending time in the Bay Area, the Parrys headed south to visit Milman’s sister, in San Diego. They were staying overnight in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles when Milman, rummaging through his suitcase, discharged a loaded pistol he had packed, shooting himself in the heart.
Naturally, such a shocking death provoked rumor and conjecture about suicide or murder, which Kanigel duly reviews. But nothing in Milman’s life suggested that he was suicidal or that Marian had a motive for killing him. The policemen called to the scene didn’t hesitate to declare the death accidental, and the Parrys’ children later wrote that, given “Milman Parry’s character and the specific circumstances of his death,” an accident was the only reasonable explanation.
Certainly Parry doesn’t seem to have been the kind of man to inspire murderous passions. One of his Harvard colleagues recalled, “He had no enemies so far as I know and few friends. Not that he rejected friendship; he did not need it. He had had his idea and he had deliberately prepared himself to follow it up, and this was his life.” It is Parry’s consuming idea that is the real subject of “Hearing Homer’s Song.”
Even in antiquity, there were some clues that the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey might be a complicated affair. The Greek historian Plutarch, who lived in the first century A.D., wrote that the epics owed their existence as complete poems to Lycurgus, an early ruler of Sparta, who encountered them during his travels in Asia Minor:
When he saw that the political and disciplinary lessons contained in them were worthy of no less serious attention than the incentives to pleasure and license which they supplied, he eagerly copied and compiled them in order to take them home with him. For these epics already had a certain faint reputation among the Greeks, and a few were in possession of certain portions of them, as the poems were carried here and there by chance; but Lycurgus was the very first to make them really known.
Lycurgus was renowned in antiquity for creating the harsh institutions that made Sparta Spartan, such as military training for boys and common mess halls for adult men. Little of this is certain, however. The classicist Gregory Nagy has written, in his book “Homeric Questions” (1996), that “it was a common practice to attribute any major achievement of society, even if this achievement may have been realized only through a lengthy period of social evolution, to the episodic and personal accomplishment of a culture hero.” In other words, a Spartan way of life that gradually took shape was retroactively attributed to a single lawgiver, whose name gave it an almost divine authority. But it’s entirely possible that no such person as Lycurgus ever existed.
Could the same be true of Homer? The story about Lycurgus implies that until he came along the Iliad and the Odyssey existed only as fragmentary tales told in various parts of the Hellenic world. In Athens, a similar feat of reconstruction was attributed to a different ruler, Peisistratus, a well-attested historical figure who lived in the sixth century B.C. He was said to be “the first person ever to arrange the books of Homer, previously scattered about, in the order that we have today.” He also instituted a quadrennial competition, the Great Panathenaea, in which the epics were recited in their entirety by a relay of rhapsodes.
Nagy observes that many cultures tell stories about an ancient text reduced to scattered fragments, then gathered together to reconstitute the lost original. The national epic of Persia, the Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”), is known to have been written by the poet Ferdowsi, at the end of the tenth century A.D. But in the text Ferdowsi claims that the story was once lost and then reassembled out of fragments by a group of wise men. A story like this, Nagy argues, should be seen not as a literal account of historical events but “as a myth that happens to account for a historical process”: a cluster of tales told in various ways in various places is collected and edited into a single, authoritative version, which is then projected back into the distant past.
In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf published a book, “Prolegomena to Homer,” arguing that the Iliad and the Odyssey could not have been composed all at once in the form we know them now. “I find it impossible to accept the belief to which we have become accustomed: that these two works of a single genius burst forth suddenly from the darkness in all their brilliance, just as they are, with both the splendor of their parts and the many great virtues of the connected whole,” he wrote. He believed that the epics were edited together out of shorter poems that were composed and transmitted orally during the centuries before literacy came to Greece. In the poems themselves, Wolf noted, no one ever reads or writes.
This argument appealed to the new spirit of nationalism in Germany, where a generation of thinkers reacted against the triumphal universalism of the French Revolution by stressing the differences that make nations and cultures unique. If Homer never existed, then the Iliad and the Odyssey could be read as direct expressions of the Greek spirit.
Because there’s no reliable external evidence about how the Homeric epics were composed, the text itself had to be coaxed into telling its story. The same is true of the Hebrew Bible, but in that case it’s clear that we are dealing with a collection of books by different authors: they narrate events that took place centuries apart and are written in a wide range of styles, from dry chronicle to visionary verse. The Iliad and the Odyssey, in contrast, could plausibly be the work of a single poet. They use the same verse form throughout—dactylic hexameter, in which every line contains six groups of syllables. One of the most prominent features of Homeric poetry is the use of epithets, fixed descriptions that are applied to people and things again and again: “white-armed Hera,” “swift-footed Achilles,” “wine-dark sea.” This gives the effect of a single poetic style sustained at great length—the Iliad is almost sixteen thousand lines, the Odyssey more than twelve thousand. And, though the epics contain many episodes and characters, each employs a highly focussed narrative framework: the Iliad concentrates on the final year of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey tells of one man’s journey home after the war ends.
Still, a close reading of each epic reveals inconsistencies that would be hard to explain if either or both had been written by a single author. Robert Fagles observes, in the introduction to his 1990 translation of the Iliad, that the poem’s Greeks and Trojans fight with weapons made of bronze, the alloy of copper and tin used in the Near East until about 1200 B.C. The Iron Age is evidently only just beginning, since iron is rare and precious: in the funeral games that Achilles stages for his friend Patroclus, in Book XXIII, he offers as a prize “an ingot big enough to keep the winner in iron / for five wheeling years.” Yet in Book IV the Trojan archer Pandarus is described as using iron arrowheads. As Fagles notes, “Arrowheads are not things you expect to get back once you have shot them.” The detail suggests that this part of the epic comes from a time when iron had become so common that archers could afford to throw it away.
Another sign, apparent to experts like Fagles and Parry, though invisible to those of us who read Homer in translation, is that Homer’s Greek is an amalgam of dialects from various regions and eras. It includes words and grammatical forms that were already puzzling Athenians in the fifth century B.C., when students had to read Homer in school. As Fagles puts it, Homer’s Greek “is not a language that anyone ever spoke.” So how did the Iliad and the Odyssey come to be written in it?
Parry’s stroke of genius was to realize that the answer to this question was hidden in plain sight, in the two most obvious features of Homeric poetry—the meter and the epithets. In his doctoral thesis, Parry showed that these features were directly connected, in a way no one had noticed in millennia of reading. His argument rests on the fact that Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language, where the forms of words and names vary according to their grammatical function: Achilles is Achilleus when he’s the subject of a verb, Achillea when he’s the direct object. These forms have different metrical values, meaning that when they appear in a line of poetry the syllables around them have to be different, too, in order to preserve the pattern of the hexameter.
Parry, Kanigel writes, showed that “for each hero, god, or goddess, in each grammatical case, in each position in the hexametric line, there was normally only a single epithet that went with it.” Homer didn’t call the Achaeans “strong-greaved” in one place and “hairy-headed” in another because he thought those adjectives were particularly apt at that moment in the story. Rather, he had a supply of ready-made epithets in different metrical patterns that could be slotted in depending on the needs of the verse, like Tetris blocks. As Parry wrote in one of his papers, “The Homeric language is the work of the Homeric verse,” not the other way around.
In his doctoral thesis, Parry demonstrated these patterns with extensive tables and charts. He wasn’t yet ready to take the step of explaining why the epics were composed this way. But, to anyone steeped in the academic wrangling over the Homeric Question, the implications were clear. In a review of Parry’s work, his thesis adviser, the French linguist Antoine Meillet, wrote that “these poems were intended to be recited and that they were based on ancient oral semi-improvisations.”
After all, if Homer was a writer sitting at a desk with a reed pen and a piece of papyrus, there was no reason that he had to make his lines from prefabricated elements. He could have filled out the verses any way he liked. But, if the epic was being improvised on the spot by an oral performer, the epithets would have been indispensable, allowing the singer to keep the meter going while he thought about what to say next. This was especially true if the singer could not read or write, and so had no original text to consult and memorize. As Parry wrote, “In a society where there is no reading and writing, the poet, as we know from the study of such peoples in our own time, always makes his verse out of formulas. He can do it in no other way.”
It was this theory that took Parry to Yugoslavia, where a living tradition of oral poetry still existed. Kanigel’s chapters on his two trips—a short, unsatisfying one in 1933, followed by a long and fruitful one in 1934-35—form the most absorbing part of “Hearing Homer’s Song,” just as the trips were the most interesting experience of Parry’s life. With the help of an interpreter, Nikola Vujnović, Parry would go from village to village and inquire at the tavern about the best local guslar—a bard who accompanied his recitation with a gusle, a single-stringed instrument made of maple wood, horsehair, and sheep or rabbit skin.
Using a purpose-built recording machine with two turntables, Parry could record continuously for hours as the guslar went through his repertoire of tales. These usually had to do with the adventures of legendary Balkan heroes who would not have seemed out of place among Achilles and Hector. “The Captivity of Dulić Ibrahim,” which Parry recorded in several versions by different singers, tells of a Muslim hero, Dulić Ibrahim, whose true love is betrothed to another while he is imprisoned by a Christian prince. When the prince, impressed by the depth of Dulić’s grief, frees him, Dulić makes his way home to win the woman back. As Kanigel points out, the story has some remarkable parallels with the Odyssey, though there is no suggestion of direct influence. When Dulić returns, he defeats “thirty captains and . . . twenty dukes” in combat, much as Odysseus slays the hundred and eight suitors who have been plaguing his abandoned wife, Penelope. Dulić is recognized by his beloved horse, just as Odysseus is recognized by his faithful dog, Argos.
No wonder Parry believed that in Yugoslavia he had made contact with the wellspring of epic. Some of the recordings he made, and others made later by Lord, are available for streaming on the Harvard Library Web site. It’s not just the scratchiness that makes them sound ancient; the drone of the gusle and the minor-key speak-singing feel primeval, from a time before poetry and music diverged. “I like to think,” Lord wrote, that in these songs “one is hearing the Odyssey, or ancient songs like it, still alive on the lips of men, ever new, yet ever the same.”
Parry’s research showed that, in an oral-performance tradition, it makes no sense to speak of a poem as having an authentic, original text. He found that, when he asked a guslar to perform the same poem on consecutive days, the transcripts could be dramatically different, with lines and whole episodes appearing or disappearing. With the guslar he considered the most gifted, a man in his sixties named Avdo Međedović, Parry tried an experiment: he had Međedović listen to a tale he’d never heard before, performed by a singer from another village, and then asked him to repeat it. After one hearing, Međedović not only could retell the whole thing but made it three times longer, and, in Lord’s recollection, much better: “The ornamentation and richness accumulated, and the human touches of character imparted a depth of feeling that had been missing.”
Since Wolf, the Homeric Question had posed a choice between opposites: an individual poet of genius or a series of anonymous folksingers. Through close textual analysis, Parry settled the debate in favor of the latter. In discovering Međedović, however, he glimpsed how the binary might be overcome. Among the generations of ancient Greek bards who told stories about the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus, there must have been one or a few who were geniuses themselves—who could hear the formulaic old stories and transform them into epics so vivid and dramatic that people would keep them alive for thousands of years. We don’t know anything about those great storytellers, just as we don’t know the names of most of the architects and masons who created the Gothic cathedrals. But we might as well call them Homer. ♦
హైదరాబాద్, *🌏 కరోనా ఉద్ధృతి నేపథ్యంలో ఈ ఏడాది కూడా ఆన్లైన్లోనే తరగతులు నిర్వహించాలని కేంద్రం రాష్ర్టాలకు సూచించింది. ఈ మేరకు కేంద్ర విద్యాశాఖ కొవిడ్ యాక్షన్ప్లాన్తోపాటు, రోడ్మ్యాప్ను ఖరారు చేసింది. ఇందుకు తగిన ఏర్పాట్లను రాష్ర్టాలు చేసుకోవాలని ఆదేశించింది. రేడియో, టీవీ, యాప్లు, పోర్టళ్లు, ఈ లైబ్రరీలు, వాట్సాప్, లౌడ్స్పీకర్లలో పాఠ్యాంశాల ప్రసారం తదితర విధానాలను అమలుచేయవచ్చని సూచించింది. నూతన విద్యా సంవత్సరాన్ని మూడు దశల్లో కొనసాగించనున్నట్టు కేంద్ర విద్యాశాఖ పేర్కొంది. అవి నిర్వహణ దశ (మెయింటనెన్స్ ఫేజ్), పునరుద్ధరణ దశ (రీస్టోర్ ఫేజ్), అభివృద్ధి దశ (గ్రోత్ ఫేజ్). ఈ దశల్లో చేపట్టాల్సిన కార్యక్రమాల ప్రణాళికను కూడా కేంద్రం ప్రకటించింది. అయితే రాష్ర్టాలు తమ అవసరాలు, ఏర్పాట్లను బట్టి ప్రత్యేకంగా రోడ్మ్యాప్ను సిద్ధం చేసుకోవచ్చని తెలిపింది. ఆన్లైన్, డిజిటల్ క్లాసుల నిర్వహణతో పాటు, డ్రాపౌట్లు, పాఠ్యపుస్తకాల వివరాలను అందజేయాలని ఆదేశించింది. 2030 నాటికి ప్రీప్రైమరీ నుంచి సీనియర్ సెకండరీ వరకు 100శాతం గ్రాస్ ఎన్రోల్మెంట్ రేషియో (జీఈఆర్) లక్ష్యంగా నిర్దేశించుకోవాలని, ఈ దిశలో డ్రాపౌట్ల సంఖ్యను గణనీయంగా నివారించాలని పేర్కొన్నది.*
*మూడు ఫేజ్లివే..🔰*
*💫మెయింటనెన్స్ ఫేజ్లో మే-జూలై మాసాల్లో మధ్యాహ్న భోజనం అమలు, ఎస్ఎస్ఏ నిధుల కేటాయింపు, మొబైల్యాప్లు అందుబాటులోకి తేవడం, టీచర్లకు శిక్షణ, విద్యార్థుల నమోదు, సర్వే, డ్రాపౌట్ల నివారణ, వీక్లీప్లాన్ల రూపకల్పన.*
*🍥రీస్టోర్ ఫేజ్లో భాగంగా నవంబర్లో నేషనల్ అచీవ్మెంట్ సర్వే, రాష్ట్రస్థాయిలో స్టూడెంట్ రిజిస్టర్ తయారీ, మూల్యాంకన విధానంలో మార్పులు చేపట్టాలి. బిడ్జికోర్సులను రూపొందించి, స్వల్పకాలిక శిక్షణనివ్వాలి.*
*💫విద్యార్థుల శారీరక, మానసిక ఆరోగ్యం మెరుగుదలకు చర్యలు చేపట్టాలి. డిజిటల్ తరగతుల నిర్వహణకు కంటెట్ తయారీలో నిమగ్నమవ్వాలి.*
*🛍️గ్రోత్ ఫేజ్లో భాగంగా యాక్షన్ ప్లాన్లపై సమీక్ష, మార్పులు చేర్పులు. పాఠశాల, జిల్లా, రాష్ట్రస్థాయిలో విద్యార్థుల సామర్థ్య పరీక్ష.*
*💫తెలంగాణ విధానానికి కితాబు*
*🍥పలు రాష్ర్టాల్లో అమలుచేస్తున్న ఉత్తమ విధానాలను సైతం కేంద్రం రోడ్మ్యాప్లో ఉదహరించింది. దీంట్లో తెలంగాణలో అత్యంత వేగంగా డిజిటల్ పాఠాలను తయారుచేసి, అమలు చేస్తున్న విధానం సైతం చోటు చేసుకున్నది. టీవీ పాఠాలు రూపొందించేందుకు ప్రత్యేకంగా నిపుణులతో కూడిన బృందాలను ఏర్పాటు చేయడం, వారికి శిక్షణనివ్వడం, టీవీల్లో ప్రసారం చేయడం బాగున్నట్లు కితాబిచ్చింది.*
*💫నాగాలాండ్లో తరగతులవారీగా రికార్డు చేసిన పాఠ్యాంశాలను డీవీడీలు, పెన్డ్రైలలో లోడ్చేసి విద్యార్థులకు ఉచితంగా అందజేశారు.*
*🍥మహారాష్ట్రలోని పలు జిల్లాల్లో ‘డొనేట్ ఏ డివైజ్’ క్యాంపెయిన్తో 4,500 మంది విద్యార్థులకు సెల్ఫోన్లు, ల్యాప్టాప్లు, ట్యాబ్లు, కంప్యూటర్లు సమకూర్చారు.*
*📻మధ్యప్రదేశ్లో రేడియోపాఠాలు అమలుచేశారు. పలు స్లాట్లలో ఎఫ్ఎం రేడియోలు, జాతీయ రేడియోల ద్వారా ప్రసారం చేశారు. ఇదే రాష్ట్రంలో 50వేల పైచిలుకు వాట్సాప్ గ్రూపుల ద్వారా బోధన కొనసాగించారు.*
*🍥గుజరాత్, మహరాష్ట్రల్లోని కొన్ని జిల్లాల్లో బహిరంగ ప్రదేశాల్లో లౌడ్స్పీకర్ల ద్వారా కథలు, పద్యాలను వినేలా ఏర్పాట్లు చేశారు.*
*🌻కేరళలో ఎమ్మెల్యేలు, స్థానిక ప్రజాప్రతినిధులు అక్కడి ఉన్నత పాఠశాలల్లోని విద్యార్థులందరికీ డిజిటల్ డివైజ్లను సమకూరుస్తున్నారు.*
*🍥హర్యానాలో ‘శిక్షామిత్’్ర పేరుతో డిజిటల్ తరగతులు కొనసాగే సమయాల్లో తల్లిదండ్రులు, చుట్టుపక్కలవారు, స్నేహితులు సెల్ఫోన్లు సమకూర్చి, తరగతులు పూర్తికాగానే తిరిగి తీసుకునే కార్యక్రమాన్ని చేపట్టారు.*
Exploring the history behind some of the most common units of measurement.
Photo by: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Why are there 5,280 feet in a mile, and why are nautical miles different from the statute miles we use on land? Why do we buy milk and gasoline by the gallon? Where does the abbreviation "lb" come from? Let's take a look at the origins of a few units of measure we use every day.
The Mile
The basic concept of the mile originated in Roman times. The Romans used a unit of distance called the mille passum, which literally translated into "a thousand paces." Since each pace was considered to be five Roman feet—which were a bit shorter than our modern feet—the mile ended up being 5,000 Roman feet, or roughly 4,850 of our modern feet.
If the mile originated with 5,000 Roman feet, how did we end up with a mile that is 5,280 feet? Blame the furlong. The furlong wasn't always just an arcane unit of measure that horseracing fans gabbed about; it once had significance as the length of the furrow a team of oxen could plow in a day. In 1592, Parliament set about determining the length of the mile and decided that each one should be made up of eight furlongs. Since a furlong was 660 feet, we ended up with a 5,280-foot mile.
The Nautical Mile
So if the statute mile is the result of Roman influences and plowing oxen, where did the nautical mile get its start? Strap on your high school geometry helmet for this one. Each nautical mile originally referred to one minute of arc along a meridian around the Earth. Think of a meridian around the Earth as being made up of 360 degrees, and each of those degrees consists of 60 minutes of arc. Each of these minutes of arc is then 1/21,600th of the distance around the earth. Thus, a nautical mile is 6,076 feet.
The Acre
Like the mile, the acre owes its existence to the concept of the furlong. Remember that a furlong was considered to be the length of a furrow a team of oxen could plow in one day without resting. An acre—which gets its name from an Old English word meaning "open field"—was originally the amount of land that a single farmer with a single ox could plow in one day. Over time, the old Saxon inhabitants of England established that this area was equivalent to a long, thin strip of land one furlong in length and one chain—an old unit of length equivalent to 66 feet—wide. That's how we ended up with an acre that's equivalent to 43,560 square feet.
The Foot
As the name implies, scholars think that the foot was actually based on the length of the human foot. The Romans had a unit of measure called a pes that was made up of twelve smaller units called unciae. The Roman pes was a smidge shorter than our foot—it came in at around 11.6 inches—and similar Old English units based on the length of people's feet were also a bit shorter than our 12-inch foot. The 12-inch foot didn't become a common unit of measurement until the reign of Henry I of England during the early 12th century, which has led some scholars to believe it was standardized to correspond to the 12-inch foot of the king.
The Gallon
The gallon we use for our liquids comes from the Roman word galeta, which meant "a pailful." There have been a number of very different gallon units over the years, but the gallon we use in the United States is probably based on what was once known as the "wine gallon" or Queen Anne's gallon, which was named for the reigning monarch when it was standardized in 1707. The wine gallon corresponded to a vessel that was designed to hold exactly eight troy pounds of wine.
The Pound
Like several other units, the pound has Roman roots. It's descended from a roman unit called the libra. That explains the "lb" abbreviation for the pound, and the word "pound" itself comes from the Latin pondo, for "weight." The avoirdupois pounds we use today have been around since the early 14th century, when English merchants invented the measurement in order to sell goods by weight rather than volume. They based their new unit of measure as being equivalent to 7000 grains, an existing unit, and then divided each 7000-grain avoirdupois pound into 16 ounces.
Horsepower
Early 18th-century steam engine entrepreneurs needed a way to express how powerful their machines were, and the industrious James Watt hit on a funny idea for comparing engines to horses. Watt studied horses and found that the average harnessed equine worker could lift 550 pounds at a clip of roughly one foot per second, which equated to 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute.
Not all scholars believe that Watt arrived at his measurement so scientifically, though. One common story claims that Watt actually did his early tests with ponies, not horses. He found that ponies could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work per minute and figured that horses were half again stronger than ponies, so he got the ballpark figure of 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute.
‘Walking into a cafeteria, it would be filled with students frolicking and chatting with sticky notes, journals and laptops sprawled about with steaming cups of coffee.’
A university town can be a state, city or just a neighborhood where the academic institution is the most distinctive feature and it’s dominated by the student population. These towns are known by the universities that are there and the local residents are generally the students and people who are employed in these institutions. The primary economic activities and institutions too revolve around the university structure such as having budgeted restaurants, libraries, printing shops, student housing and societies, etc.
In Europe, university towns are categorized by the presence of an ancient university. These are few notable university towns across the globe:
1. Delft, Netherlands
Also known as the ‘water city’, Delft is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands that has water canals passing throughout the city. While walking through the city one can get acquainted with the tree-lined picturesque bridges and canals, monumental buildings and impressive buildings. Being a university town, Delft University serves as the landmark of the city people resonate with.
The streets of the city are a reflection of the student life with the new roads running parallel to the canals as people cycle and walk by. The sidewalks are also littered with outdoor cafes that are filled with students throughout the day.
Oxford, also known as the ‘City of dreaming spires’, a term coined by poet Mathew Arnold, has long served as an inspiration to artists, writers, students and dreamers. The city is known for its university with world-class infrastructure along with the Victorian streets and sprawling pre, post-war estates.
Housing the second oldest university in the world that is still functioning, Oxford is a young city with one-third of its population under the age of thirty and hence the streets are filled with theatres, pubs and restaurants creating a vibrant and cosmopolitan community. The city is an amalgamation of history, modernity and knowledge. C.S. Lewis wrote in his poem about Oxford:
Uppsala is accredited as a 15th-century university town as it houses one of the oldest universities in Sweden i.e. Uppsala University. The city also has one of the largest, historic Scandinavian churches i.e. Uppsala cathedral along with a number of museums, hospitals and universities.
Gustavianum is the oldest building of the university which was built in 1622 and has been renovated over time. It’s still functioning as a part of the university along with a university museum which also houses relics that represent the history of the university and the town.
Once a barren hill with trees located at the rocky hinterland of the Malabar coast, the area was developed as a town by the coming up of various university campuses. The university town today boasts of more than 20 colleges with about 25,000 students coming in every year. It not only has a number of student hostels and cafeterias but also lakes and green pockets. It’s also surrounded by a number of small intimate beaches which are mostly frequented by students of the town for recreational purposes.
A city etched in history, it’s interesting to see how the coming up of various universities have today made this city as a university town where various historic buildings now house student functions; from the King’s College Chapel to dining halls located in old gothic buildings to student residences in turrets of Caius and Gonville, etc.
River Cam which runs through the city is a great source of water transport which allows one to traverse through various universities and colleges the river runs through or encircles.
Being a university town, Berkeley is one of the most socially liberal cities in the United States. Berkeley was open land with farms and ranches until the construction of the University of California began which led to the coming up of residences, markets in the vicinity and gradually it developed into a city. Being a university town, Berkeley is quite quintessential with hiking trails, galleries, museums and gardens.
It provides for both indoor and outdoor spaces for recreational activities allowing for the city to grow.
Princeton is a culturally and historically rich town and is ranked 15th in the list of 100 best places to live in the U.S. Despite being a university town, there is a strong sense of community in the residents of all the age groups. Along with the young population who are students many old people also come and settle in the town due to its liveliness and various amenities and facilities.
Valparaiso, a UNESCO world heritage city is synonymous with its funicular railways, cobbled streets and hills. The city is known as being a university town due to the presence of huge university campuses but at the same time, the city has been developed in a way that allowed for the economy to grow based on these institutions. The city allows for students to traverse freely on the roads, stopping by at cafes or going all the way up to the upper city using the railways. The charm of the city lies in the enigma it provides to explore and meander.
The strong presence of educational institutes in Madison has had a significant impact on its demographics, culture and economy. The various university campuses are sprawled in the city which further extends out in the form of public libraries and parks. Located on an isthmus, surrounded by four lakes, the city always provides for picturesque views along with a multitude of recreational activities.
Being a university town, there are a number of car-free zones and eco-friendly commutes that encourage people to walk and cycle within the city.
The small college town is home to the state’s first university i.e. University of Georgia which was founded in 1785. The city is known as the ‘Live Music Central’ as it has a number of outdoor venues for music and performing arts. As the first college building was set up using logs, the town started to grow adjacent to the building.
The city is also known for the number of start-up companies and businesses which have been started by the young population of the city who are essentially alumni of the universities. The city also boasts of abundant jobs, transportations, lower living costs and communal spaces.
Parul Kakkar అనే ఈ గుజరాతీ కవయిత్రి మీద భక్తుల దాడి మొదలైంది.ఏకంగా 28000 abusive కామెంట్లతో పాటు బూతులు 50 ఏళ్ళ తనపై రేప్ కు పాల్పడతామంటూ బెదిరింపులూ..గృహిణి అయిన పారుల్ కొన్నేళ్లుగా కవిత్వం రాస్తున్నారు.కొడుకు ఫేస్బుక్ ను పరిచయం చేయడంతో తన కవితలకు ప్రాచుర్యం లభించింది.ఆధ్యాత్మిక గేయాలు..శ్రీ కృష్ణుని మీద భక్తి గీతాలతో గుజరాత్ లో మంచి పేరు తెచ్చుకున్నారు.
అయితే ఇప్పుడు గుజరాత్ లోని ఒక శ్మశాన వాటికలో శవాల వేడికి కూలిపోయిన పైకప్పు , గంగానది లో తేలియాడుతున్న శవాలను చూసి మనస్తాపానికి గురైన పారుల్ 14 పంక్తుల కవిత రాశారు. " శబ్ వాహిని గంగా " పేరుతో రాసిన ఈ కవితలో " బట్టలు లేని రాజు " అని రాయడం భక్తులకు కోపం తెప్పించింది.ఆమెను దేశద్రోహి అనీ దాడులు చేస్తామని భయపెడ్తున్నారు
ఈ కవిత ఆరు భాషల్లోకి అనువాదమై లక్షల షేర్ ల తో వైరల్ అవ్వడం వాళ్ళకు మింగుడుపడడం లేదు.పారుల్ ను అపర సరస్వతి అని కొనియాడిన rss పత్రిక ' సాధనా ' కూడా ఆమె కవిత్వం పై విమర్శలు గుప్పిస్తోంది. ఫెస్బుక్ నుండి ఆమె కవితను డిలీట్ చెయ్యమని మంత్రుల స్థాయినుండి ఫోన్లు వచ్చాయి.ఆమె పబ్లిక్ అకౌంట్ ను ప్రయివేట్ చేసుకున్నారు.అయితే గుజరాతీ రచయిత మండలి ఆమెకు అండగా ఉన్నారు.స్టాండ్ విత్ పారుల్ పేరుతో ట్వీట్ చేస్తున్నారు.
పారుల్ కవిత తెలుగులో , ఆలూరు రాఘవశర్మ గారి అనువాదం.
గంగా శవవాహిని
-పరుల్ కక్కర్ (గుజరాతీ కవయిత్రి)
అనువాదం : రాఘవశర్మ
భయపడకు..ఆనందపడిపో..
ఒకే గొంతుతో శవాలు మాట్లాడుతాయి
ఓ రాజా..నీ రామ రాజ్యంలో శవాలు గంగానదిలో ప్రవహించడం చూశాం
ఓ రాజా..అడవి అంతా బూడిదయ్యింది,
ఆనవాళ్ళు లేవు, అంతా శ్మశానమైపోయింది,
ఓ రాజా..బతికించే వాళ్ళు లేరు,
శవాలను మోసేవాళ్ళూ కనిపించడం లేదు,
ధుఃఖితులు మాత్రం మిగిలారు
అంతా కోల్పోయి మిగిలాం
మాటలు లేక బరువెక్కిన మా హృదయాలు శోకగీతాలైనాయి
ప్రతి ఇంటిలో మృత్యుదేవత ఎగిసిపడుతూ తాండవమాడుతోంది
ఓ రాజా..నీ రామ రాజ్యంలో శవ గంగా ప్రవాహమైంది
ఓ రాజా..కరిగిపోతున్న పొగగొట్టాలు కదిలిపోతున్నాయి, వైరస్ మమ్మల్ని కబళించేస్తోంది
ఓ రాజా.. మా గాజులు పగిలిపోయాయి, భారమైన మా హృదయాలు ముక్కలయ్యాయి
అతను ఫిడేలు వాయిస్తున్నప్పుడు మా నగరం కాలిపోతోంది
బిల్లా రంగాల బరిసెలు రక్తదప్పిక గొన్నాయి
ఓ రాజా..నీ రామ రాజ్యంలో శవ గంగా ప్రవాహమైంది
ఓ రాజా..నీవు మెరిసిపోతున్నట్టు, మండుతున్న కొలిమి లాగా నీ దుస్తులు తళుక్కుమనడం లేదు
ఓ రాజా..ఈ నగరమంతా చివరిగా నీ ముఖాన్ని చూస్తున్నాయి
ఇక పరిమితులు, మినహాయింపులు లేవు నీ దమ్ము చూపించు,
రా..బయిటికి రా.. గట్టిగా చెప్పు, పెద్దగా అరువు,
దిగంబర రాజు అవిటివాడు, బలహీనుడు
ఇక నీవు ఏ మాత్రం మంచివాడిగా ఉండలేనని చెప్పు
కోపంతో ఊగిపోతున్న నగరం మంటలు ఎగిసిపడుతూ ఆకాశాన్ని తాకుతున్నాయి,
ఓ రాజా.. నీ రామరాజ్యంలో శవగంగా ప్రవాహాన్ని చూశావా?
India might be heading towards a "serious livelihood crisis" as the situation seems to be worse this time for the working class amid the COVID crisis and local restrictions by states already add up to something close to a nationwide lockdown, according to noted economist Jean Dreze.
In an interview to PTI, he also said the government's target to make India a USD 5 trillion economy by 2024-25 was never a "feasible target" and was just to pander to the "super-power ambitions" of the Indian elite.
About the impact of the second wave of COVID on the Indian economy, the eminent economist said the situation today is not very different from what it was around this time last year as far as working people are concerned.
"The economic consequences of local lockdowns may not be as destructive as those of a national lockdown. But in some respects, things are worse this time for the working class," he opined.
Further, the eminent economist said the fear of infection is more widespread and that will make it hard to revive economic activity.
"Despite mass vaccination, there is a serious possibility that intermittent crises will continue for a long time, perhaps years.
"Compared with last year, many people have depleted savings and larger debts. Those who borrowed their way through last year's crisis may not be able to do it again this time," he observed.
Dreze also pointed out that last year there was a relief package and today relief measures are not even being discussed.
"On top of all this, local lockdowns may give way to a national lockdown relatively soon. In fact, they already add up to something close to a country-wide lockdown.
"In short, we are heading towards a serious livelihood crisis," he said.
On how the government could have missed seeing the second COVID-19 wave coming, Dreze said the Indian government has been in denial all along.
"Remember, the government refused to admit about any 'community transmission' of COVID for a long time, even as recorded cases were counted in millions.
"When an early analysis of official data exposed the collapse of health services, the government retracted the data," he said.
He pointed out that misleading statistics have been routinely invoked to reassure the public that all is well. "Denying a crisis is the surest way to make it worse. We are now paying the price of this complacency"
India has been reporting more than three lakh new COVID cases daily in recent weeks and the death toll due to the infection is also rising.
Noting that India is also paying the price of a long history of neglect of the health sector, especially public health, Dreze said nothing is more important than health for the quality of life, yet public expenditure on health in India has hovered around a measly 1 per cent of GDP for decades.
When asked about the sort of relief measures that could be put in place to deal with possible livelihood crisis, he said as a starter, the central government could replay the 2020 relief package.
"But it is important to go beyond that, and to consolidate the social security system on a durable basis," the eminent economist said, adding that ad-hoc, short-term relief measures tend to breed confusion, corruption and waste.
Dreze, who was also part of the National Advisory Council (NAC) that had advised the previous UPA government, said much can be done within the framework of existing social security schemes and laws such as the public distribution system, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the National Social Assistance Programme, and the Integrated Child Development Services.
He also noted it would be easy to provide supplementary food rations to all ration-card holders for much longer than the proposed two months, and also to expand the coverage of the public distribution system.
"Going beyond existing schemes, I think that a well-designed, inclusive cash-transfer programme would be useful," Dreze opined.
According to him, if intermittent crises are going to continue for years, which is very possible, it would really help to have a well-functioning system of cash relief that can be activated whenever the need arises.
"Turning India into a USD 5 trillion economy by 2024-25 was never a feasible target, and it is a useless target in any case. The function of this target is to pander to the super-power ambitions of the Indian elite," the Belgian-born Indian economist said. In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisioned to make India a USD 5 trillion economy and global power house by 2024-25.
According to Dreze, even if we accept GDP as a valid development indicator, the standard approach is to look at GDP at its per capita terms.
"But then India looks like one of the poorer countries in the world, which it is. Looking at aggregate GDP, which is naturally quite large because of India's large population, creates an illusion of prosperity and power," he argued.
Dreze pointed out that actually it is not entirely an illusion because if the government's interest is in power on the world stage rather than in the living conditions of the people, then, yes, aggregate GDP would matter.
"For instance, it would enable you maintain a large army. But this has nothing to do with development," he observed.
