Of the Women's reservation bill

This evening I was caught by one of those rare fancies that led me to look into the Constituent Assembly Debates for Laughs and entertainment. Now this is not in the very least to suggest that I do not have other sources. My roommate, Rishabh Gupta has started an excellent web comic site called Villains are people too. Replete with movie references and witty situations it is a must visit especially if you are a person of taste in these matters. (Pompousness ends here) Seriously, Gupta is coming up with some good shit. And he's published one submission of mine :).

But coming back to more worrying behavior on my part, that of reading constituent assembly debates for fun (for a break from mugging up teachings of the various schools of jurisprudence more like), I at least can offer some post facto justification that I found something interesting for my pains. And when I have found something interesting I bring it here (The name of the blog may have changed. The spirit remains the same). This "interesting thing" has to do with a hot topic namely the The Constitution (108th Amendment) Bill.

Shrimati Hansa Mehta speaking in the constituent assembly on the issue of representation for women (What you thought it was a new issue?) was of the opinion that only very few women had been able to make it to the top. She said there were some like Sarojini Naidu but one swallow does not a summer make (Heheh... I'm trying to read a pun into it. Sarojini Naidu is a Nightingale not a swallow. Though both are passerine birds). She listed out the problems faced by women and said "In spite of all these, we have never asked for privileges. The women's organisation to which I have the honour to belong has never asked for reserved seats, for quotas, or for separate electorates. What we have asked for is social justice, economic justice, and political justice."

A few months later as part of the same assembly Mrs. Renuka Ray spoke in support of a system of territorial representation without reservation saying

"We are particularly opposed to the reservation of seats for women. Ever since the start of the Womens' Movement in this country, women have been fundamentally opposed to special privileges and reservations "

She also provides some insight into the history of women's reservation. She said

"Before the 1935 Act (this is the Government of India Act I guess) came in, the representaives of India's women made it very clear that they were against the reservation of seats or any special privileges for women. They made this clear through the All India Women's Conference. Our representatives, the three women who have evidence before the Joint Parliamentary Committee, made it clear in unequivocal terms-(I may say that Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was one of the three women)-that we did not want reservation, but in spite of our protests, and in direct contravention to our desires, reservation of seats was brought into the 1935 Act. "

"With these words, Sir, I should like to support this clause which has done away once and for all with reservation of seats for women, which we consider to be an impediment to oru growth and an insult to our very intelligence and capacity"

.The last line reminds me of a message on a T shirt I saw somewhere "women who wish to be equal to men, lack ambition". Whatever it might be, Renuka Ray and Hansa Mehta were talking in the belief that over the course of a few years women would get to participate is numbers as great as the men without the need for any special provision. This however has not been true. Feeling a bit lazy now to go over the objections of the Yadav troika to the bill and why I feel that such objections are frivolous.

But if there is one group we can learn about gender equality from it is the Naxals. They reportedly have large women cadres and the women officers outnumber the men. Wonder how they do it. No way of finding out for now :)

Rant about latest instance of strange reporting in Times of India

The main heading on the front page of today's Times of India (Bangalore edition) pissed me off no end and hence this rant. The piece brings up some grisly statistics (40,000 people killed in road accidents in 2007, 1.5 Lakh injured, of whom only a small fraction were able to benefit from insurance. A large number of this was due to the vehicle not having insurance at all and an equally large number because of claims not settled by the insurance companies. Shocking data indeed. Here is where Times of India puts an unconventional spin on it. The headline expresses remarkable sympathy for the insurance companies by saying

Highway accidents bleed insurance cos

Rs 4,000 Crore Paid Out Every Year In Compensation

Instances of wrong selection of data to be produced and unfair use of revealed data abound.

First they come up with some random estimate that merely Rs. 15 lakhs were collected from the vehicles on whose behalf payments were made. I call it random because it seems so far fetched. They themselves fix the premium to be between 600 (for private cars) to 1500(for commercial vehicles). Something tells me there are some categories for which there are premiums lower than this also but let us take 600 to be mean. To earn 15 lakhs in premium at this rate the insurers need 2500 subscribers. If 4000 crores is paid out on behalf of these subscribers then it comes to an astonishing 1.6 crores in claims against each subscriber claimed against. I cannot accept 1.6 crores to be the average motor vehicle insurance payout in this country. For this I can't give any reason or data to back up but I have never heard of a settled claim higher than a couple of lakhs (the key word here is settled, there have been higher claims of course).

Anyway, the way the insurance business works, isn't it a given that the amount the insurers make from from people who do end up in accidents is less than what they pay them but is compensated for by the money they make from their other subscribers?

Again I regret my inability to produce data to support this but from what I know the average insurance payout is in anycase dismally small compared to most other countries (not just OECD types, even the moderately developed Sri Lanka and Brazil types)

India is a very very huge country by all standards. Media should not try to confuse or scare people with huge numbers. Especially when they are hiding huger numbers which would definitely dwarf the numbers they are using. For example the number of automobiles in India, the number of insured vehicles and the revenue these companies earned from all insured vehicles.*

I submitted to my university a research paper on Motor Vehicles Insurance as part of the Insurance Law course. I cannot say it was of great academic merit but I made a couple of common sense observations there. One that there should be a some common fund to which all vehicle owners contribute (by means of taxes of course) which will be used to compensate victims where the offending vehicle is not insured. I pointed out the existence of such a system in UK and the reason behind it is simple. In all the road accidents I've seen or heard of, never had the victim a chance of first ensuring that the oncoming maniac driver had third party insurance.

I like to keep the dark side of my life (the academic side) away from this blog. But Times of India forced me into this.

I'm never one to make random allegations unless they are nagging me real bad. Here goes one - Is it possible, that some newspersons are tweaking press releases by PR agencies working for insurance companies so as to make them look all victimized?

I normally don't invest this much energy into criticizing some random news paper piece. But it is a boring afternoon and this was on the front page and so glaring.



* The automobile industry in India is immense, producing 23 lakh automobiles in 2008 alone. Now if only 30% of these vehicles (6,90,000) are insured, as he says 70% aren't, at 600 Rs. (These are just four wheels and above. So Rs. 600 is the lowest possible logical average.) That is still a whopping Rs. 41,40,00,000. Why didn't this figure come up in the whole piece?

Interesting posts on other blogs

This is my last couple of months on the Legal Services Clinic, NLSIU and it marks the end of four years on the committee. This hasn't hit me completely yet. I shall use this opportunity to pimp the LSC blog though. Do check out the latest post (here, if you didn't click on it two lines ago). It is not a LLP report like most other posts. It's by me, but that's not the reason I put up this link under interesting posts.

I had a good laugh for more reasons than one when I read this post by none other than the very influential Krugman. I'll put up the punchline here

So Citigroup is profitable because investors think it’s failing, while Morgan Stanley is losing money because investors think it will survive. I am not making this up.