24 August, 2018: “The main agenda of the conference is to stimulate discussion on policy issues with diverse perspectives among academics, policy makers, practitioners, and others who have a stake in the process. Debate, deliberations and discussions are an integral part of the democratic process and this conference aims to provide a platform for the same”, said Professor Hema Swaminathan, Chair, Centre for Public Policy (CPP) at IIM Bangalore & Area Chair, in her opening remarks at the XIII International Conference on Public Policy and Management, organized by IIMB’s Centre for Public Policy, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, on Thursday (Aug 23).
The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Inclusion and Exclusion: Policy and Practice’. The three-day event includes keynote speeches, panel discussions and round table conferences around many socially and economically relevant topics and will bring together policy makers, academics, consultants, members of NGOs and subject experts from different disciplines.
Extending a warm welcome to the participants of the conference, Professor G Raghuram, Director, IIMB, explained the rationale of hosting the conference in Delhi. “The Centre for Public Policy has been in the domain of policy making for many years and holding the conference in Delhi would ensure better visibility for the research and policy work of CPP,” he said. While elaborating on the conference’s theme, he pointed out that along with social inclusion, it was necessary for policy makers and researchers to make India’s infrastructure sector inclusive. He spoke of ‘Operation Flood’ led by Dr Verghese Kurien as an example of how masses were uplifted from poverty by providing ‘inclusive infrastructure’ in the dairy sector. Prof. Raghuram observed that the research in various infrastructure sectors in India was lacking owing to non-availability of data. “In India, infrastructure in the transportation sector was administered by various ministries. I believe there is a need for a single ministry, which could look into all the issues relating to infrastructure in the transportation sector,” said Prof. Raghuram.
Dr. Amita Baviskar, Professor, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, while delivering the keynote address on ‘Consumer Citizenship and Social Inclusion’, discussed how alternate world visions have been shrinking in the past decade, which in turn has diminished collective imagination.
Dr. Baviskar went on to explain how fast-rising consumption of industrial food seems to be a story of the commodification of diets by multinational corporations. She concluded her talk by drawing attention to the ongoing politics of social inclusion and exclusion in India based on the choice of food items.
Is India on Path to Universal Healthcare? Potential and Pitfalls
This session was intended to capture the broad perspectives on various issues, particularly on different elements of the health system. “We need to look at today’s healthcare from two major perspectives. The first one is Universal Health Coverage (UHC), a point which is driven by SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), particularly SDG 3.8 on health which has set a specific target on global health coverage. Second, it is the explosion in inequality with respect to access to health,” said Prof. Gita Sen, Public Health Foundation of India, Bangalore.
Elaborating on the first aspect – Universal Health Coverage, Prof. Sen remarked, “We need to ask few important questions, like, whether the current approach is going to be similar to the older ways as proposed in the Alma Ata conference, where primary healthcare alone had a central role to play? The context has changed significantly now. Things are clearly different in comparison with shortly after the Alma Ata declaration.
In her presentation, Dr. Rama Baru, JNU, New Delhi, focused on the inclusiveness of healthcare interventionsm, particularly universal healthcare. She said that universal healthcare has reduced to a mere insurance policy, where there is no mention of outpatient care and regulation of healthcare providers, in both public and private sectors. However, she believed that the insurance policy could act as a lever for regulations.
Dr. Srinidhi V, PHFI, mainly focused on the relationship between health equity and quality of service being provided. He said that in today’s context, the important questions are not limited to the availability of healthcare alone, but extend to its quality and equity. “In the current scenario, where medical care is more skewed towards allopathic treatment and clinical approaches for doctors and nurses, primary care may be neglected under the UHC framework,” said Dr Srinidhi. He found a trade-off between clinical care and interpersonal care amongst the doctors, for which he blamed the protocol of medical education.
Dr. VR Muraleedharan, IIT Madras spoke about an experiment he conducted in three blocks in Tamil Nadu to understand the implementation of universal healthcare and its possible benefits. The important results of this study are: fall in dependence on private providers for outpatient care; proximity of healthcare infrastructure matters; fall in out-of-pocket expenditure; lowered government expenditure due to efficiency; patients saving money on drugs due to good state-driven procurement system.
Maritime Policy: Towards Ease of Doing Business
Prof. G Raghuram carried forward the discussion on two major issues – coastal shipping and container segment. He remarked, “The question of inclusion is: who gets to do infrastructure? With the introduction of cabotage policy, should we restrict to Indian players or open to everyone? How can academics engage more effectively? The sync between policy formulation and research is way lower than desired levels. A major impediment to policy making is data.”
Sanjay Bandopadhyaya, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Shipping, Government of India, gave a brief account of the government’s initiatives in coastal shipping and container segment. “There is a 25% growth in container volumes since the cabotage rules were relaxed. Transshipment using India containers is still very low. Efforts are on to improve multi-modal infrastructure; dry ports are set up at four different locations to improve access to remote locations. Direct Port Delivery (DPD) and Direct Port Export (DPE) improved efficiencies”. He added that three major initiatives of government are: added infrastructure capacity, improved efficiency and relaxed regulatory regime.
Taking the discussion forward, Prof. Ganesh Radhakrishnan, Jindal Global Business School, said: “Regulatory arbitrage is captured by non-major ports. Instead of removing tariffs, there will be simple weighted average in line with shipping market cycle. PPP terminals are not significantly different from public sector ports. Port efficiency is generally low.”
Prof. Saurabh Chandra, IIM Indore shared his thoughts on shipping focused on the automotive industry. According to him, the key question is whether coastal shipping is viable. He added that the major cost involved is ship hiring cost.
P. Raveendran, Chennai Port Trust pointed out that the usage of connectivity depends on the type of commodity being handled. He highlighted the initiatives of railways in improving connectivity.
Contemporary Issues in Education Policy
Prof. Soham Sahoo, CPP, IIM Bangalore presented a paper on ‘Gender Segregation in Education and its Implications for Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from India’. He started with a question: is there a gender-based education segregation prevailing at the school level at the post-secondary level? “School enrolment has increased in recent times and the gender gap in enrolment is vanishing. But the gender gap may manifest in other ways, for example, the choice of streams for girls and boys may be different. At the same time, the labour force participation rates of women is not proportionately growing with the enrolment rates in schools and there is a gender gap in earning,” remarked Prof. Sahoo.
Dr Nishant Chadha, IDF, New Delhi said his paper was inspired by the idea that at least some part of the population seems to be spending a lot of money on the education of their children. “It raises a lot of questions, where does this money come from? How does this affect the budgetary allocation of the household? We can also think about the form of investment. Is this investment substituting for something else?” asked Dr. Chadha.
The research by Prof. Tridip Ray, ISI, New Delhi uses the cohort between and across district variations in exposure to identify the effect of the availability of loans on the number of years of education. The results show a positive and statistically significant robust effect of loans on the number of years of education and the probability of enrolment in higher education, and this effect is more pronounced in disadvantaged sections of society.
Diversity and Inclusion at Institutes of Higher Education
The discussion was on the following issues:
How to deal with caste discrimination? Are we patronizing or are we creating inclusion?
Even before reaching higher education institutions, there is a lot of segregation happening at the school level. How to tackle the skill gap which already exists among students even before the students enter the higher educational institutions?
How much is the industry receptive to diversity, once the students are out of the campus?
“One of the biggest challenges is pre-market discrimination. Damage is already done before the students enter higher education institutions due to structural barriers such as unequal access to resources and opportunities, varied socio-economic circumstances, etc. One possible solution to deal with discrimination is to make preparatory courses/remedial teaching mandatory for all,” said Prof. Ashwini Deshpande, Delhi School of Economics.
Dheeraj Singh, independent consultant, said: “A reimagination of inclusion and diversity in higher education institutions is required for these to stay relevant and to turn the people who are not considered assets into true assets.”
24 August, 2018: “The main agenda of the conference is to stimulate discussion on policy issues with diverse perspectives among academics, policy makers, practitioners, and others who have a stake in the process. Debate, deliberations and discussions are an integral part of the democratic process and this conference aims to provide a platform for the same”, said Professor Hema Swaminathan, Chair, Centre for Public Policy (CPP) at IIM Bangalore & Area Chair, in her opening remarks at the XIII International Conference on Public Policy and Management, organized by IIMB’s Centre for Public Policy, at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, on Thursday (Aug 23).
The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Inclusion and Exclusion: Policy and Practice’. The three-day event includes keynote speeches, panel discussions and round table conferences around many socially and economically relevant topics and will bring together policy makers, academics, consultants, members of NGOs and subject experts from different disciplines.
Extending a warm welcome to the participants of the conference, Professor G Raghuram, Director, IIMB, explained the rationale of hosting the conference in Delhi. “The Centre for Public Policy has been in the domain of policy making for many years and holding the conference in Delhi would ensure better visibility for the research and policy work of CPP,” he said. While elaborating on the conference’s theme, he pointed out that along with social inclusion, it was necessary for policy makers and researchers to make India’s infrastructure sector inclusive. He spoke of ‘Operation Flood’ led by Dr Verghese Kurien as an example of how masses were uplifted from poverty by providing ‘inclusive infrastructure’ in the dairy sector. Prof. Raghuram observed that the research in various infrastructure sectors in India was lacking owing to non-availability of data. “In India, infrastructure in the transportation sector was administered by various ministries. I believe there is a need for a single ministry, which could look into all the issues relating to infrastructure in the transportation sector,” said Prof. Raghuram.
Dr. Amita Baviskar, Professor, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, while delivering the keynote address on ‘Consumer Citizenship and Social Inclusion’, discussed how alternate world visions have been shrinking in the past decade, which in turn has diminished collective imagination.
Dr. Baviskar went on to explain how fast-rising consumption of industrial food seems to be a story of the commodification of diets by multinational corporations. She concluded her talk by drawing attention to the ongoing politics of social inclusion and exclusion in India based on the choice of food items.
Is India on Path to Universal Healthcare? Potential and Pitfalls
This session was intended to capture the broad perspectives on various issues, particularly on different elements of the health system. “We need to look at today’s healthcare from two major perspectives. The first one is Universal Health Coverage (UHC), a point which is driven by SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), particularly SDG 3.8 on health which has set a specific target on global health coverage. Second, it is the explosion in inequality with respect to access to health,” said Prof. Gita Sen, Public Health Foundation of India, Bangalore.
Elaborating on the first aspect – Universal Health Coverage, Prof. Sen remarked, “We need to ask few important questions, like, whether the current approach is going to be similar to the older ways as proposed in the Alma Ata conference, where primary healthcare alone had a central role to play? The context has changed significantly now. Things are clearly different in comparison with shortly after the Alma Ata declaration.
In her presentation, Dr. Rama Baru, JNU, New Delhi, focused on the inclusiveness of healthcare interventionsm, particularly universal healthcare. She said that universal healthcare has reduced to a mere insurance policy, where there is no mention of outpatient care and regulation of healthcare providers, in both public and private sectors. However, she believed that the insurance policy could act as a lever for regulations.
Dr. Srinidhi V, PHFI, mainly focused on the relationship between health equity and quality of service being provided. He said that in today’s context, the important questions are not limited to the availability of healthcare alone, but extend to its quality and equity. “In the current scenario, where medical care is more skewed towards allopathic treatment and clinical approaches for doctors and nurses, primary care may be neglected under the UHC framework,” said Dr Srinidhi. He found a trade-off between clinical care and interpersonal care amongst the doctors, for which he blamed the protocol of medical education.
Dr. VR Muraleedharan, IIT Madras spoke about an experiment he conducted in three blocks in Tamil Nadu to understand the implementation of universal healthcare and its possible benefits. The important results of this study are: fall in dependence on private providers for outpatient care; proximity of healthcare infrastructure matters; fall in out-of-pocket expenditure; lowered government expenditure due to efficiency; patients saving money on drugs due to good state-driven procurement system.
Maritime Policy: Towards Ease of Doing Business
Prof. G Raghuram carried forward the discussion on two major issues – coastal shipping and container segment. He remarked, “The question of inclusion is: who gets to do infrastructure? With the introduction of cabotage policy, should we restrict to Indian players or open to everyone? How can academics engage more effectively? The sync between policy formulation and research is way lower than desired levels. A major impediment to policy making is data.”
Sanjay Bandopadhyaya, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Shipping, Government of India, gave a brief account of the government’s initiatives in coastal shipping and container segment. “There is a 25% growth in container volumes since the cabotage rules were relaxed. Transshipment using India containers is still very low. Efforts are on to improve multi-modal infrastructure; dry ports are set up at four different locations to improve access to remote locations. Direct Port Delivery (DPD) and Direct Port Export (DPE) improved efficiencies”. He added that three major initiatives of government are: added infrastructure capacity, improved efficiency and relaxed regulatory regime.
Taking the discussion forward, Prof. Ganesh Radhakrishnan, Jindal Global Business School, said: “Regulatory arbitrage is captured by non-major ports. Instead of removing tariffs, there will be simple weighted average in line with shipping market cycle. PPP terminals are not significantly different from public sector ports. Port efficiency is generally low.”
Prof. Saurabh Chandra, IIM Indore shared his thoughts on shipping focused on the automotive industry. According to him, the key question is whether coastal shipping is viable. He added that the major cost involved is ship hiring cost.
P. Raveendran, Chennai Port Trust pointed out that the usage of connectivity depends on the type of commodity being handled. He highlighted the initiatives of railways in improving connectivity.
Contemporary Issues in Education Policy
Prof. Soham Sahoo, CPP, IIM Bangalore presented a paper on ‘Gender Segregation in Education and its Implications for Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from India’. He started with a question: is there a gender-based education segregation prevailing at the school level at the post-secondary level? “School enrolment has increased in recent times and the gender gap in enrolment is vanishing. But the gender gap may manifest in other ways, for example, the choice of streams for girls and boys may be different. At the same time, the labour force participation rates of women is not proportionately growing with the enrolment rates in schools and there is a gender gap in earning,” remarked Prof. Sahoo.
Dr Nishant Chadha, IDF, New Delhi said his paper was inspired by the idea that at least some part of the population seems to be spending a lot of money on the education of their children. “It raises a lot of questions, where does this money come from? How does this affect the budgetary allocation of the household? We can also think about the form of investment. Is this investment substituting for something else?” asked Dr. Chadha.
The research by Prof. Tridip Ray, ISI, New Delhi uses the cohort between and across district variations in exposure to identify the effect of the availability of loans on the number of years of education. The results show a positive and statistically significant robust effect of loans on the number of years of education and the probability of enrolment in higher education, and this effect is more pronounced in disadvantaged sections of society.
Diversity and Inclusion at Institutes of Higher Education
The discussion was on the following issues:
How to deal with caste discrimination? Are we patronizing or are we creating inclusion?
Even before reaching higher education institutions, there is a lot of segregation happening at the school level. How to tackle the skill gap which already exists among students even before the students enter the higher educational institutions?
How much is the industry receptive to diversity, once the students are out of the campus?
“One of the biggest challenges is pre-market discrimination. Damage is already done before the students enter higher education institutions due to structural barriers such as unequal access to resources and opportunities, varied socio-economic circumstances, etc. One possible solution to deal with discrimination is to make preparatory courses/remedial teaching mandatory for all,” said Prof. Ashwini Deshpande, Delhi School of Economics.
Dheeraj Singh, independent consultant, said: “A reimagination of inclusion and diversity in higher education institutions is required for these to stay relevant and to turn the people who are not considered assets into true assets.”