 Welcome to Dispatches from India, a show by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the major stories from across the country, what Indians are talking about and the impact it will have on politics, economy and society. First we get into our News This Week section. Among the most bizarre stories to come out of the economic reportage in India over the past few weeks is centred on the Mumbai-based National Stock Exchange, the largest derivatives exchange in the world. A seemingly straightforward case of former managing director, MD, and Chief Executive Officer, CEO Chitra Ramakrishna, misusing her office, progressed into the realm of the surreal as details emerged with sustained media coverage. Senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha breaks down the sordid mess. It happens to be not just India's biggest stock exchange, it happens to be the world's biggest stock exchange for derivative instruments that is financial instruments that derive their value from other financial instruments. Recently, India's market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, came up with a report, pertinent to events that took place five or six years ago wherein the Chief Executive and Managing Director of the Stock Exchange has been accused of various kinds of acts of nepotism in favouring one of her close associates who was given a handsome remuneration. But the most unusual and even bizarre aspect, this lady claimed that she was getting advice from an unnamed guru who sat somewhere in the Himalayas in, you know, some sort of a spiritual guru who seemed to know very well all the intricacies of the financial markets and here she was sharing information with clearly classified information about human resources, development practices, matters pertaining to complex issues, algorithms for national stock exchange. Now the scandal is about how particular players were favoured by giving them information a little before the others. Fractions of second before but that enabled them to avail of opportunities, arbitrage opportunities and thereby make huge profits. Now this lady is being investigated, her name is Chitra Ram Krishna, she is being investigated rather belatedly by India's law enforcing agencies like the Income Tax Department, like the Enforcement Directorate and her associate, his name is Anand Subramanian, he too is being investigated. Now this entire scandal is raising more questions than providing answers and many believe there are enough ingredients in this plot to make a film worthy of Bollywood, Mumbai's film industry which is the world's largest film industry. The details are who this guru is and finally what action will be taken. Both policy and narrative in India have shifted dramatically towards neoliberal economics over the past 30 years or so. Successive governments have employed a policy approach that has devalued public sector undertakings or PSUs, once considered the bedrock of India's economy. The speed at which the government plans to dismember and divest from public sector companies has intensified. Several PSUs have been sold, either wholly or in part, as neoliberal and right-wing governments have tom-tommed ideas like small government, the benefits of privatization and trickle-down economics. The result? The poor can no longer afford to purchase basic goods or avail of services. Senior journalist Anindya Chakravarti believes that there is an urgent need for Indian policy makers to revitalize the public sector. He explains why. India needs another Nehru and what do I mean by that? I do not mean another Nehru Gandhi but I mean a prime minister who believes in the public sector, in the positive powers of the public sector and how it can help an economy. And why am I saying that? That is because currently India's massive economic problems cannot be solved by private enterprise. India's private sector caters to the top 10% and bears the top 20% of people. That is what it produces for, whether it is goods or services, except for a small a few things like telecom where it's become affordable for the poor because of pricing wars between big companies who want to become monopolies. So if you leave that out, overall the bulk of India's private sector production is for the top 20% and that is how it is bound to be because 80% of Indians cannot afford what India's private sector produces. Anything that is bought by the poor is largely essential and some kind of services like education, they want their children educated, they have to spend on health because they fall ill. If you leave these two out, more or less the only thing they spend on is food. The bottom 20% can barely spend on food, they will not survive unless they are given subsidized food. Above that the next 30% barely have enough to spend on anything beyond essentials and if they have anything in their hand, you know what they buy? They buy cheap Chinese goods which have flooded the Indian market. And this is not what I am saying. A recent group of ministers said this exact same thing, the Chinese goods have completely taken over and had for a long time whether it's for the poor by batteries, torches, chargers, even footwear like shoes, clothes, everything that is coming in. The cheap products are Chinese products, sometimes fake Chinese products because Indian companies are great at producing things for the affluent middle class but not for the poor because there's nothing, no margin, no profit in products for the poor. So how doesn't that be solved? That can be solved with the Nehruvianism 2.0. Why am I saying 2.0? Because the original form of Nehruvian socialism. I'm saying socialism in inverted commas, care courts, why? Because I don't believe it was socialism. It was state capitalism. That capitalism was aimed at building heavy industry, in creating infrastructure, in creating capital, in capital investments so that India could become self-sufficient in future production. It did manage to do that, right? Whether it is steel, whether cement, coal, lot of things India has become self-sufficient because the public sector created the conditions through government spending, through planning to do that. Now we need a second stage and we need the second stage for consumer products that the poor can buy. Next we get into our in focus section where we take a deeper look at some of the burning issues in the country. A series of protests are currently being led by scheme workers in the country. They are frontline workers providing basic health and childcare facilities to a majority of countries working class. Around 6 million women are currently employed as scheme workers in India. For the past two years, during the COVID pandemic, these workers provided door-to-door services to rural households while being given no insurance or social security. More than 200 scheme workers lost their lives during this time. The terms and conditions of their employment remained at the pleasure of the government and all continued to work on minimal wage. Those who provide midday meals to students in government schools get paid around $13 a month, community health workers get $26 and childcare workers get around $60 per month. Despite the risk and longer hours of work during the pandemic, some have not even benefited from revised salaries in as long as a decade. AR Sindhu, General Secretary of the All India Federation of Anganmani workers and helpers, has this to say on this critical issue. The government of India has cut down the budget allocation for these schemes and the price rise also has caused a huge anger among the workers. And this has created a series of struggles throughout the country and there was two national nationwide joint strike of the scheme workers during these last two years. Now there are in Haryana, around 40,000 Anganwadi workers have been on indefinite strikes since 8th of December. It's almost 80 days and then the Asha workers are also on the streets in Haryana and in Gujarat. There is struggle going on in Andhra Pradesh. There is strike going on in Himachal Pradesh. There is strike of Anganwadi workers going on in the various places of the country. But the attitude of the government, instead of talking to the struggling workers and the trade unions, the government is resorting to severe repression. In Haryana, around 150 workers have been retrained and there are around 400 false cases charged against them. And even the Haryana government has charged invoked ESMA, the Essentials Service Maintenance Act against Asha workers and they have been arrested and house arrested at their homes. So this kind of attitude is going on. But in spite of that, there has been huge struggles and during this period also through struggles, the scheme workers could achieve some things, some risk and health facilities like that also during this period. And this is a huge issue of this and their care work of India has been subsidized by the scheme workers. So this issue has been taken out by the federal trade unions and this is one of the major demands of the upcoming All India General Strike on 28th and 29th of March. The scheme workers are also gearing up for the strike and also on 8th of March this year, the International Women's Day, the PITU has decided to observe it as a Working Women's Action Day. One of the major demands is the demand of recognition of the scheme workers' work and the payment of minimum wages and social security. So in the forthcoming days, this will be one of the major issue of the country of the nutrition and health care of the people and the recognition of the scheme workers as workers and minimum wages and social security. And finally this month marks two years since the religious violence in India's capital New Delhi in which members of the minority Muslim community were the worst sufferers. The violence was the result of the religious polarization that has intensified since the current government took power in 2014. Many Indians were shocked that such violence could take place in the capital city whose law and order is managed by the central government itself. In the aftermath of this violence, the prosecution focused on activists and students who had been staging peaceful protests in the months before. Journalist Pragyas Singh explores the reasons for the violence and what happened after. To understand the religious riots that broke out in February 2020, we need to go back to the previous year and a controversial law that was passed that year. In December 2019, the Indian government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act. That dealt with providing citizenship for refugees from other countries. The controversial aspect about this law was that religion was made a factor in granting citizenship of India for the first time ever. For many people across the country, this was an ominous step. They were worried that it could become a precedent considering the right-wing government's ideology. The law was widely termed as anti-minority and condemned. Protests broke out across the country. In the same month, protests largely led by Muslim women in the capital city Delhi erupted against this law. By January 2020, the protests had intensified and were receiving support from students and activists and concerned citizens. The Bharatiya Janta Party, which is in power at the center, used this movement to gain political mileage. Its leaders delivered hate speeches in which they termed the Muslim women and other protesters as anti-Indian. And they also sought to mobilize the majority Hindu community against them. After one such violent speech by a prominent BJP leader, violence erupted in a primarily working class neighborhood of northeast Delhi on 23rd February 2020. Most of the 51 victims of this violence were Muslims. Scores of homes were destroyed or looted. In response to the violence, the police, overseen by the federal government, arrested a number of students and activists under draconian laws that charged them with breaching national security. Two years on, many of these protesters and activists whose role in the riots is unclear or evidently absent are still in prison. The courts have released many on bail. In one case, the court criticized the prosecution for being lazy, indolent and callous regarding these investigations. But the cases still drag on. Activists are demanding that those who triggered the violence or participated in it must be arrested instead of those young men and women or activists who protested peacefully against a divisive law.