Measuring progress: The lessons of NFHS-5 must be used to improve social development indices
Context: The findings from 5th National Family Health Survey(NFHS) suggests various improvements in India.
The data from 5th National Family Health Survey(NFHS):
- Importance of the NFHS Data: A periodic assessment of health and social development indicators is crucial for any country that is still clawing its way towards achieving ideal standards in the Human Development Index.
- Improvements this year: While the results of the NFHS are usually mixed, and improvements in certain sectors ride along with stagnation and deterioration in other sectors, this year, there have been radical improvements in maternal and child health, sex ratio and population control.
- The Survey: This massive exercise that covered, this year, over six lakh households across the country, aims at providing data that will help shape the policies in a manner that will correct deficiencies, and ensure equitable access to services, particularly those with impact on social determinants that improve the quality of life.
Various improvements:
- More Institutional births in India: A greater proportion of births than ever before is now happening in institutions, more children in the 12-23 months age group have received their vaccinations.
- Replacement ratio of TFR: India has achieved a total fertility rate(TFR) of 2.0, dropping further from the figure of 2.2 during NFHS-4, indicating that India has contained the population explosion.
- Achievements of various Policies: some even coercive, as in the case of the family planning sector, seem to have borne fruit, years after they were implemented.
- Sex Ratio at birth: While gender ratio has, for the first time, recorded more women per 1,000 men, gender ratio at birth in the last five years still underlines the persistence of a deep-rooted son preference, one that has to be countered, through policy and law.
Data still worrisome:
- Childhood nutrition: only marginal gains in say, wasting and severe wasting, are deemed insufficient, and require renewed corrective efforts.
- The Impact of Pandemic: The impact of the pandemic may also be noted. The disruption it caused to services such as balanced nutrition for children must be acknowledged.
- Lifestyle Problems: Having measured blood sugar and hypertension in the population for the first time, NFHS-5 highlighted the looming threat from lifestyle diseases.
Way Forward:
- Need for building resilient and fortified systems capable of delivering in the most trying circumstances.
- State-level indices are also released, to provide comparisons, but also to allow States to launch course correction, or to be inspired by success stories in other regions.
- Inputs on marriage and fertility, family planning, access to education and health services are provided by the NFHS, arguably second only to the exhaustive data that the decennial population census throws up.
- Recognise State data: as a matrix to work on, to improve the development indicators further.
- Centre too must not treat it as a mere stocktaking exercise, but harness the opportunities the NFHS provides for launching reform or re-assessing certain policies without using it as a political tool in a federal set up.
Is the crypto asset boom sustainable? The current monetary system is flawed, which is why cryptocurrencies have grown on a massive scale
Context: After the Supreme Court’s decision last year overturning the Reserve Bank of India’s 2018 order banning financial institutions from enabling cryptocurrency transactions, there has been a huge rush of retail investors into cryptocurrencies.
Risks in Cryptocurrencies:
- Policy Risks: For example, the Centre announced that it will introduce a bill in the upcoming winter session of Parliament seeking to ban private cryptocurrencies, albeit with a few exceptions.
- Bubble: They neither offer direct use value nor possess significant exchange value. It possesses no significant fundamental value to sustain their current high prices.
Advantages of Cyrpto-currencies:
- Hedge against Inflation: Traditionally, gold has been one of the options for investors to not only hedge against inflation, but also against the risk that is inherent in any financial system. Now, cryptocurrency is another such asset that allows people to invest outside the traditional financial system. But, it is not regulated and its value fluctuates, probably more than gold.
- Advantage of Technology: mathematically designed blockchain network with finite supply.
- There are systems and processes that can be developed around the blockchain network, such as decentralised finance systems.
- For example, when you transfer money to your friend in the U.S., there are significant charges that you incur if you go via any major bank in India. It’s a friction that can be eliminated by the use of technology.
- Great potential to reform financial record-keeping and keeping track of asset transactions.
- Better than other assets: The primary problem with the current monetary set-up is that when the government starts printing more money, the value of your money gets wiped out due to high inflation. You can’t do that with Bitcoin. So, cryptocurrencies give you a better hedge against inflation compared to gold by better ensuring limited supply.
- Even better than Gold: It has been a great asset in the past, but the supply of gold is not mathematically designed.
- Independent of system: The reason why Bitcoin became prominent was that the value of fiat currencies was being eroded systematically. Right from 2008, due to quantitative easing, money supply was increasing and every time the government turned on the money-printing machine, the value of the money that you saved went down. So, people started looking for better alternatives where one cannot create money at their own will and potentially wipe out your savings. The fundamental value of Bitcoin is that it is a great store of wealth.
Disadvantage:
- It is only a Hedge: We do not expect people to walk into a store and directly use cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Cryptocurrencies still have to be converted into some actual currency that can be used.
- Not a fiat currency: Governments do not accept taxes in Bitcoin or Ethereum. So, the word currency is a misnomer. But what gives cryptocurrencies as assets an advantage over cash or fiat money is the fact that they exist outside the purview of the government.
- Policy Risk: When people see that the value of a particular asset can be wiped out overnight by a government diktat, that is enough to create some amount of distress trust in the good.
- Cryptocurrencies may not have immediate use in terms of going into a store and buying something but they are basically a hedge against any system-wide action that can wipe out the value of any particular asset. Right now there are more than 20,000 businesses that are accepting Bitcoin. People can buy a bunch of digital products using Bitcoin. If you move to certain countries, you can transact in fractional values of Bitcoin.
- It might not be a Store of value.
Crypto Ban:
- Arguments Against Banning:
- It’s wrong to ban any asset unless there are compelling reasons.
- You are basically going to create an underground market. And people will continue to invest in crypto assets. It will be hard to regulate. It would probably increase the penalty cost and more risk-averse investors would be dissuaded from investing.
- Technical advantages: Government can use for financial record-keeping. It’s antithetical to say that the government will ban the private crypto network and come up with its own crypto network because the whole idea of a crypto network is having a decentralised record-keeping system.
- Ensuring Monetary discipline: Private currencies could have a beneficial effect in disciplining the central bank. Governments cannot just willy-nilly keep increasing the money supply since people will then always have the option to shift to other payment instruments.
- Arguments for banning:
- P2P transactions for illegal online market places. Its use in illegal online marketplaces that deal with drugs and child pornography is well-documented.
- They thrive outside the realm of authority and regulation. These are neither issued by a central authority nor a central validating agency for transactions.
- Threat to official currency and monetary system: If cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are going to challenge fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange, they would essentially be challenging the authority of the government to print and spend.
- Speculative risks: It is highly volatile.
Way forward:
- Cryptocurrencies have grown at such a massive scale. The adoption of cryptocurrencies has been one of the fastest for anything in technology ever in human recorded history.
- There are massive pitfalls in how the current monetary set-up is managed. Every time there is a problem, the solution is to print massive amounts of money, and every time the government prints money, it creates irreparable damage to people, especially at the bottom end of the society.
- There is always more demand among governments to spend than the supply of funds available. And in order to satiate that demand, more money is printed. If people understood this economic concept they would be demonstrating on the streets.
- Case for Regulation: Government should build a proper regulatory framework and allow investment because it’s like any other asset.
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SOURCE: https://www.thehindu.com/
