Caste, Higher Education, and Senthil's "Suicide"

The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee, a group of Hyderabad intellectuals and activists, cry out against caste-ism in higher education this blog. Their cause began with the death of Senthilkumar at the University of Hyderabad. Senthilkumar, or Senthil for short, was a dalit (untouchable) student at the University of Hyderabad and was studying to be a PhD in physics. He was the first person in his entire Panniandi community to enter higher education. His parents are pig-rearers in Tamil Nadu, an depended on him for their survival. He was awarded a non-NET fellowship at the University, which is specifically designed to not be performance-based aid. However, after failing his exam, the administration publicly ended his fellowship and posted his failure on the school notice-board. Without the fellowship, Senthilkumar would be unable to attend the University. His fellow dalit students organized massive protests against such treatment, and a committee reviewed his case and reaccepted his position in the fellowship. However, this re-admittance was not announced, and even Senthil was not aware of its findings.
On February 24th, 2008, Senthil’s body was found in his dorm room. The University claimed he died from cardiac arrest, but recently released the autopsy report, which sited poisoning as a possible cause of death, along with suicide. No investigation by the police or the University was made until Dr. Ravikumar, a well-known dalit activist and a member of the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, intervened. As of yet, there has been no progress in the case, and many members of the dalit community are understandably upset at this blatant caste bias.
The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee claims that “Senthil was yet another victim of the entrenched realities of caste discrimination that pervade academic spaces and practices in the university”. The “brahminical ordering of institutions of higher education” is a huge problem for modern India. While officially the caste system was banned over half a century ago, the system still pervades today. Schools all over the country, from elementary level to graduate schools, have been blocking dalit access to education through various means. Interviews, special academic requirements, and public pressure all are against an untouchable’s way in to education. In the Hyderabad University Physics program, there were four dalits. Two were dropped from the non-NET fellowship due to supervisor recommendations, and Senthil allegedly committed suicide.
The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee claims that there are still many elite institutions in the country that pride themselves on ‘purity’, meaning that they have only upper-caste members. Science, especially, is being blocked for dalits. Many upper-caste Indians believe that science is not for “the masses”, and that it “is an exclusive domain, and zealously guarded as such”. Caste prejudice in education comes in all forms: badgering of dalit students, hostel (dorm) accommodation, extracurricular activities, grades, classroom practices, and much more. And yet, nothing is being done. The SSC asks us—“How many more dropouts, humiliations, and deaths will we need before recognizing that institutions must be held accountable and the guilty punished?”

Education Push Yields Little for India's Poor

Somini Sengupta reports from Lahtora, a small village in West Bengal, on the abysmal state of government schooling in India. Sengupta visited a school in this impoverished rural area, one lacking in every aspect of modern education. Teachers who showed up, if at all, came late. The only teacher with a degree in the village never taught, but still was on the government payroll. The lucky students had rice sacks to sit on, while the others simply sat in the grass through the two hours of roll call. The head teacher, Rashid Hassan, had no idea which grades children were in. The children did not have materials provided for them and none of them were in a position to buy some themselves. Even the government’s new lunch program is failing. The program is for one hot meal a day for each student, and was designed specifically for poor areas such as Lahtora. In Hassan’s classroom, rice was piled in a corner, untouched. Hassan claimed that he could not serve it because it was unofficially given to the school. Sengupta reports that this might also be linked to the enormous problem of bribery in these small villages.
Education is a huge problem for India. 40% of India’s population is under the age of 18, and this should be a huge source of progress for the country. However, among the porrest 20 percent of Indian men, only half are literate, and not even two percent graduates from high school. In a survey of 16,000 villages in 2007, released Wednesday, found that “vast numbers of [children] could not read, write, or perform basic arithmetic”. 4 out of 10 fifth grade children cannot read at a second grade level, while 7 out of 10 of those children could not subtract. Sengupta argues that “if in the bast a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones, and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people – and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it”.

To see the new york times' picture slideshow of the Lahtora school, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/01/17/world/20080117india_index.html.

The War in Yugoslavia

One of the reoccurring words that survivors of the war in Yugoslavia repeat is “neighbors”. This is striking because they have been victim to horrible acts of violence committed by people they formerly lived, chatted, attended school, and considered friends. Many of the mass killings, tortures, and rapes were committed by one neighbor and inflicted on another. One man Joe Sacco interviewed told a story to him of an intense firefight in which he nearly died: “When the Serbs got as close as 50 meters, I recognized my neighbors…one of them had spent a lot of time with my youngest son, a lot of time at my house…doing homework with my son.” The ghastly acts of ethnic cleansing were not all committed by a few, soulless, powerful men. Instead, those men gave the orders that were carried out by ordinary people, people who bombed their own neighborhoods and cities and raped and murdered their formerly close friends.
In studying the war in Yugoslavia, I was shocked by this aspect of the conflict. Different accounts hold the same. One rape victim, speaking with Jeri Laber, recounted the story of her rapist, a doctor from her same hospital: “I would have expected him to be different from the others…I knew him for ten years…I saw him every day in the restaurant for hospital personnel. We talked, we were acquaintances, I never sensed any hostility. He was a golden guy, refined, polite.” Another victim echoed her confusion: “There were fifteen of them, I knew them all, they were neighbors.” Again, Laber writes, “’Yesterday we were friends,’ said a Muslim, a young man of twenty-four, describing how his wife was raped before his eyes by a Serb he knew. ‘I shake when I think of it. I can’t believe it happened…we knew these people; we knew them all. Overnight we became enemies. I don’t know why.”
How could this have happened? Neighbors and friends, on both sides of the conflict, overnight turned from peaceful acquaintances to sadistic rapists and killers. Some, such as Milovan Djilas, believe that it was the war conditions combined with inherent human nature: “The Serbs are no better or worse than other people…they just had more opportunities. For me this is a human phenomenon, not a nation one. There are elements of evil in every person, but the majority are able to control themselves.” Others blame Karadzic’s creation of mass-paranoia among Bosnia’s Serbian population. Sacco, summarizing Karadzic’s assertions, wrote, “Karadzic warned that Bosnia would go down a highway of hell” before relinquishing control of Bosnia to Muslims. Defenders of this argument claim that Karadzic and other Serb leaders convinced peaceful civilians that their ethnicity, their way of life, traditions, and family were under attack. They were led to believe that, unless they attacked first, they would be destroyed.
But would even this claim of mass hysteria result in the extreme brutality that occurred in the war?

Beyond Good Intentions

In her article “Beyond Good Intentions: Corporate Citizenship for a New Century”, Mary Robinson discusses possible routes to gaining corporate cooperation in non-binding environmental, human welfare, and other global common welfare issues. Robinson discusses why businesses can’t afford to wait until laws are passed. Issues such as human rights and the environment are too important for companies to ignore. And good intentions are not enough, either. “”It is vital that the business community focuses not only on policies of good corporate citizenship, but also their implementation in practice.” Skepticism is wide-spread about companies using their relatively miniscule contributions to non-profit organizations as “window dressing”, as actions without meaning or change in mentality or practice. Companies won’t have the responsibility to do it themselves. Robinson argues that governing bodies need to stimulate good practices and to stay away from regulation. When businesses are regulated, “society looses out on the power of business to innovate and establish new forms of behavior that are so desperately needed”, she argues.
Robinson proposes the United Nation’s Global Compact as a possible solution to this dilemma. She stresses that participation in this voluntary body “is not, and must not be, a mere public relations exercise”. The global compact is a necessary means of giving corporations social responsibility for their far-reaching actions.
Robinson also tackles the issue of complicity of corporations, specifically in the violations of the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. She argues that corporations aren’t held responsible for only direct involvement with violations. “When human rights violations occur in the context of a business operation, the company need not necessarily cause the harm directly for it to become implicated in the abuses.” Furthermore, she argues, “it has become increasingly clear that the moral dimension of corporate action­ – or inaction – has taken on significant importance”.

The World Bank's Error

In his article “Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality”, Robert Hunter Wade argues that it doesn’t. Wade agrees with Wolf (see post below), in that many of the world’s developing countries are making great increases in their economic growth rates. However, Wade states that “the most striking feature is not the trends but the size of the gaps, testimony to the failure of ‘catch-up’”. Wade believes that the wealth difference between the world’s richest and poorest countries is simply too large for the current rates of economic growth to change. Wade’s major criticism of proponents of the neo-liberal inequality-is-falling argument lies with the large margin of error in the World Bank’s statistical assessment of poverty. This error is quite large and, Wade argues, in favor of the neo-liberal argument.
First, Wade discusses the trouble of the level of the international poverty line. A percent change in the line results in a greater percent change in the number of people below it. For example, in China, a 10% increase in the international poverty line results in approximately a 20% increase in the poverty headcount. This disproportionate ratio between the percent change in the arbitrary line and the growth of the amount of people affected by policies based on this measure is unacceptable. Below is a map of countries where people are living on less than one dollar a day, according to the UN Development Report.
Second, the household surveys from which the World Bank statistics are based on lack reliability. These surveys are conducted by various organizations with many practices. There is no international template for the surveys. There are many standards with a multitude of exceptions and loopholes. Overall, the quality of these surveys is not at all consistent.
Third, the purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted figures are affecting the data. Wade calls PPPs “guess work” and argues that the process fro coming up with PPP figures “is based on guestimates form small, ad hoc price surveys in a few cities, adjusted by rules of thumb to take account of the huge price differences between urban and rural and between eastern and western regions”. This incongruity is particularly influential because both China and India use dubious PPP figures Thus, the largest proportion of population-weighted figures is in doubt.
Finally, the World Bank’s statistics on the number of people in extreme poverty from 1980 in comparison to 1998 is not valid. This “often-cited comparison” of the 1.4 billion in extreme poverty in 1980 to the 1.2 billion in 1998 is non-comparable because of a late 1990s change in World Bank methodology.
Wade believes that these for mistakes are sufficient enough to debase the legitimacy of the World Bank’s statistics.

Incensed About Inequality

Martin Wolf believes that inequality is falling because of globalization. The booming of the economies of some of the world’s most populated countries has resulted in the large rise in many people’s standard of living. In his “Incensed About Inequality,” Wolf uses statistical analysis to support his claim: “The incomes of poor developing countries, with more than half of the world’s population, grew substantially faster than those of the world’s richest countries”. He calls today’s phenomenon a “period of partial convergence”, where the rate of economic growth of countries, using gross domestic product (GDP) per heard, is greater for developing countries than for developed countries. The wealth gap is shrinking, Wolf continues, stating “rapid economic growth in poor countries with half the world’s population has powerful effects on the only sort of inequality which matters, that among individuals”. The weighting of GDP on population is a highly debated topic, and to see another point of view, read the blog above. Wolf, however, believes that the individuals of the world are overcoming inequality through choosing globalization: “they choose, however haltingly, the path of economic liberalization and international integration. This is the heart of the matter. All else is commentary”.
To evaluate his argument, Wolf uses the gini coefficient, a measure created by an Oxford-Rome University collaboration which weighs average income (at purchasing power parity) by population. The ratios between the gini coefficients of developing and developed countries are getting smaller, meaning that economic inequality is falling. Wolf weighs his gini coefficients by population because he believes “it is people who matter, not countries”. Individuals should be measured, as country inequality is an ineffective indicator. Wolf agrees: “global inequality among households, or individuals, peaked in the 1970s, whereupon it started to fall. This decline happened not because of greater equality within countries, but because of greater population-weighted equality among them”. Wolf, however, rightly admits that the unusually rapid growth of India and China in comparison to other countries’ growth could skew statistics which are population-based in favor of the falling inequality argument.
Wolf also has the World Bank on his side. He highlights three of the World Bank’s conclusions about inequality and globalization. First, the amount of people in extreme poverty (as defined by the world bank) has fallen, from 1.8 billion in 1987 to 1.17 billion in 1999, but with a noticeable maximum of 1.29 billion in 1990. Second, most people who live in extreme poverty live in East Asia, which is now experiencing the beginnings of economic growth. However, the third conclusion is more sobering: while the number of people in extreme poverty in south and East Asia, especially between 1990 and 1999, in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, the number increased steeply, from 217 million inn 1987 to 315 million in 1999.
Despite that statistic, Wolf still holds that inequality is falling. He points to other indicators which point toward the increase in standards of living and thus the falling of inequality. Life expectancy has been continually on the rise since 1970. Infant mortality rates have declined. Education (measured by literacy rates) has risen. Fertility rates have also declined – fertility rates are a well-known indicator of other standard of living factors. The number of people with chronic undernourishment (as defined by the United Nations) also fell substantially. Finally the percent of children aged 10 to 14 in the workforce has also fallen. All of these indicators are global trends which support Wolf’s thesis: world inequality is falling because of globalization.

The chart below is an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study on global inequality from 1820 to 1992. Notice that, although the large trend of global inequality is on the rise, at about 1980 the slope begins to downturn.

Why Today's International Trade is Unprecedented

In “The Global Economy: Organization, Governance, and Development”, author Gary Gereffi argues that while globalization of economic markets is a process that has been developing for centuries, today’s international trade has three aspects which represent a dramatic change in the nature of international trade.
The first new development is what Gereffi calls “Intraindustry trade in parts and components”. Across geographical boundaries, corporations have production networks. Gereffi uses Hummels, Rapaport, and Yi’s term “vertical specialization”, which means countries import parts of goods (or services) still in the development stages of production in order to export the final product. Much of today’s international trade deals in these unfinished goods in order to take advantage of every possible profit opportunity. This contrasts with the vertical integration mode of production, also known as the Fordist method, which keeps production within a corporation. However, the immense success of intraindustry trade in parts of goods has resulted in the decline of the vertical integration method. Gereffi argues that this decline highlights the “importance of coordinating exceptionally complex interfirm trading networks of parts and components as a new source of competitive advantage in the global economy.”
The second change in international trade is the emergence of a physically, geographically separated global value chain (GVC). The GVC is closely related to the global commodity chain (GCC, explained in greater detail in the post below), but the GVC takes into account policy’s effect on the relative value of separate steps of the GCC in political organizations. The GVC allows companies to make exact competitive analysis of their GCCs. Gereffi quotes Bill Kogut, who argues that “the challenge of global strategy formulation is to differentiate between the various kinds of economies, to specify which link and which factor captures the firm’s advantage, and to determine where the value-added chain would be broken across borders.” The GVCs , then, not only help companies determine what activities will capture more profit, but also where, as policies of different governments or political organizations can result in a competitive advantage in physically different locations. Thus, through applying the GVCs, companies can create the comparative advantage of low cost and/or product differentiation. This is why multidomestic industries, corporations which act as separate companies across political boundaries, are losing ground to global industries, which successfully use GVC to obtain a comparative advantage.
Finally, the production networks themselves have changed. In this section, Gereffi emphasizes a few key terms which apply to the “complex network relationships that make up the global economy”. The first is supply chain, which refers to the “input-output structure of value-adding activities”. In other words, a supply chain is the basic structure of events which begin with the raw materials and end with the final product. A GVC examines the supply chain in order to find areas to improve profitability at each step in production. International Production Networks is a term which Gereffi uses to describe the process which occurs when trans-national corporations (TNCs) lead the initiative in investments across political boundaries, which are then followed by countries themselves. Global Commodity Chains, or GCCs, is a way of looking at the supply chain, especially the internal structure of a corporation’s chain. Gereffi splits GCCs into producer- and buyer- driven chains. Analysis with GCCs comes with the setting up of international production networks. Finally, Global Value Chains, or GVCs, “emphasize the relative value of those economic activities which are required to bring a good or service from conception…to delivery to final consumers, and final disposal after use”. The GVC is so important because it takes into account all possibilities and their profit value for the corporation.