Comments by "Rutvik" (@rutvikrs) on "'Want free condoms too?' — Bihar IAS officer's reply to girl's request for sanitary pads" video.

@perambu3441 fact check: It was not a state government decision, it was a municipality decision. Neither of them are good policy choices. If a neta's kid is getting away with a crime, should we protest to free poor people imprisoned for the same crime or should we protest for the neta kid to be imprisoned under common law? 🤦
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@abijithp92 goverment cannot keep funding every need. Bihar needs basic things, not a facility that even first world countries and oil monarchs don't provide.
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That is not how you run a government. This insane idea of "copying best practices" is counterintutive. There are far bigger priorities than pink tax and menstrual health when there is a capacity and governance deficit.
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@abijithp92 "can't the government provide sanitary pads for 20-30 bucks?"
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@sajeevramakrishnan1408 for someone who has been shouting at the top of his lungs and writing papers on this topic for a decade, this is disheartening to hear. 1. Education is not a primary investment. It's a secondary investment. It does not assure outcomes like trade and industry does. Our country is overproducing and overinvesting into a specific stream of education when there is a literacy crisis among the educated in the developed states, let alone Bihar. 2. Bihar's issue is governance deficit not a lack of educated women. 3. Subsidised sanitary pads are a facility not even developed nations or oil monarchies provide. There are bigger priorities and this is not one of them.
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@rampageskull5534 Aside from her choice of hyperbole, I am with the official on this one. She is correct in principle.
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Did you practice that dialogue in front of the mirror after closing the door?
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@sunnywynn56 to govern. It is not a club membership that offers more than you pay.
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Her anger was justified. Her choice of words for the hyperbole was not. Watch the video in 0.75x speed. The kid heckled her thrice.
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Kaustubh, why is there an inability to discern the ideal and the practical in this hyperbolic statement?
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Who will pay for all these things? For fucks sake, just look at the numbers we are dealing with. Direct tax base of less than 5% but we want facilities of countries which have 50-80% DTB and a source of national income/trust fund. 👌 While i don't condone the tone and verbiage of the officer, the principle and the anger behind rejecting the demand is absolutely on point.
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@antiidiottaskforce if someone keeps heckling and not allowing her to complete the statement, you are supposed to remain patient? FoS does not include heckling. 0:33 0:42 0:52 1:00 1:14 1:25 1:29
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@Jasmine Kujur kya uneducated comment hai yaar. Dusron ko gawar bulati ho and you can't discern between a loan and a recurring expense.
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@Jasmine Kujur ek aur gawar comment. 1. India has produced latex products since the mid 60s and exports internationally and earns from it. Because of the production excess, price has dropped, there are no supply chain issues and govt can even give it out for free. 2. India started manufacturing sanitary napkins only in 2006. That too by the private sector, Jayashree industries. Even today, we import 60-70% of the finished product from China despite having the raw material. 3. The way forward should be to replicate the success in homegrown industries like latex and pharmaceuticals by having production linked incentives. This will increase supply locally, drop the price to as low as ₹10 per unit, create jobs and business internationally. 4. Instead of an analytical approach we take the emotional route, outrage and force govt to buy the finished product from outside at ₹30-₹50 per unit. We have announced atleast 15 programs at state and center which shut down whenever there were logistics issues or import constraints. Read what happened to the 2011 policy.
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@prashantpallav5760 1. I don't condone her tone and verbiage but on principle. And she got angry exactly at 0:35 when the girl attempted to interject her reply when she attempted to infuse the role of legislative into her kitty. If someone keeps pestering you with the same point when you have demonstrated it's impracticality, it's human nature to strike back at subordinates and people without expertise. 2. Kerala model is the absolute worst thing to replicate when your state has a governance deficit let alone a fiscal one. As someone who worked in academia and consulting(economics), the model is nothing but metric gaming. Name 3 sustainable things Kerala has done well.
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@Jasmine Kujur I am writing this during breaks at work. It takes me max 15 minutes to write this. I have not added any references to make this "2 ghante ka research". Please don't add adjectives like logical, educated and rational if you can't stand details.
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@arjunraj762 the government already provides free education, free uniforms and shoes, textbooks, school supplies, health check ups, anganwadi services, devices during lockdown, what's one more huh? Infact let's dilute the quality of everything offered including education and subsidise some more.
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The officer was right on principle. Her choice of hyperbole was not. The kid kept heckling her and she got angry.
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@sajeevramakrishnan1408 the answers do not lie in democracy or making education an electoral issue. I will cover in point 2. 1. I authored and headed a study for a multinational consulting firm in 2011 on the education system(not in public domain). Nothing has changed. I want to be specific when I say "literacy crisis among the educated". Literacy is the ability to count, write, read, communicate and function in society. We found the majority of the graduates(age profile:15-20) in upper class/caste metropolitan middle income families do not know how to write a formal letter, lack public speaking skills, read a 200 page book cover to cover or even open a bank account by themselves. Just to be clear, I am talking about the 5% income tax paying class not rural kids. This is the state of our education system. Will increasing the number of underprivileged into this funnel help them or harm then? 2. No democracy due to structural implication is good at generating width markers sustainably by itself but can create depth markers.(A government can fund research to create a hundred patent holders(depth) but it is not good at applying the patents to create a product(say iPhone) and distribute it to millions without the private sector). Where the government takes part in width markers, it is prone to inefficiency, exclusion and failure in the long run(PDS, healthcare and any function of welfare state). Any politics played on this issue will lead to a welfare burden. The remedy lies in govt stepping back on width markers for the private sector(logistics in Indian PDS is handled by the private sector) and civic society (UIDAI/Aadhar is a government body manned by civic society) or at the very least offer total autonomy to the function(IITs). India has to focus on enabling rather than implementation and focus on the median rather than the outliers. It should focus on getting low level industrial work like ceramics, plastics and assembly into the country. This job can be manned by people without an education. Japan, Korea and China started with these sectors and moved up the value chain over time. That will allow us to buy 10-15 years and significant capital/revenue to create specialization.
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@warriorclan2671 then reverse LPG. Why do you celebrate it and MMS then? Go read some papers on how the Indian welfare system was broken down as a result of LPG. Let's get into another balance of payment crisis.
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@Abhi-tb5ww and emotions should guide policy?
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Scotland took the policy choice after becoming a first world nation. 🤦
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India has limited resources, menstrual health is way down list because our issues are as fundamental as basic nutrition, access to facilities/ resources and state capacity.
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With due respect, what was impressive about the girls argument? The heckling or the lack of knowledge?
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India cannot afford these policies.
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@onwritersbehalf 1. Please point to the comment where I used the word free. 2. Indian politics has a habit of making policies that last only 1-2 years. They make good PR and get recycled every 5 years. Subsidised menstrual healthcare has been announced multiple times and close down each and every single time due to procurement issues (not corruption but supply chain constraints and availability) 3. Knowing one's capacity to implement policies is just as important. It will be far better if there is a production linked incentive for the raw material(it's currently being imported from China) with the condition that the manufacturing units will supply a fixed amount to government schemes or agree for a time bound price cap(say 15 rupees) goes a longer way than these 18 month schemes. But yes, the far simpler solution is to wax a rhetoric about how a person or a class does not understand the problems of women while repeating historical mistakes.
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@Subh8081 The government should stop these schemes and hand them to the Civic society/CSR as tax exemptions/slab write-offs. The issue with this class of schemes has always been procurement. Read a bit about what transpired with the 2011 policy or the various state government policies.
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@SV-xv8eu It's funny you mention this. A colleague of mine is working on paper on how TN lost 3 decades of economic progress.
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@SV-xv8eu Karnataka overtook TN in GSDP per capita without resorting to these schemes.
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@AjayKumar-uk4sp I am not a Bengali. Also Seedhe character assassination. I am "professionally trained" but you are educated(a dog whistle for ideological purity) but you can't contest on facts. Toh apna education dikha do. Put me to my place. Shastrarth kar lenge.
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@the_mind33 did we watch the same video? Wasn't the official heckled when she was answering her? 0:33 and 1:14
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@debopamghatak9875 that is what the real world, finance reports and economists would say. State is not a club membership that gives you more than you pay for.
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"aRE aRe you saying Wahmen don't deserve the right to preserve health?" - some Wahmenist after reading this.
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@JustMe54328 why are you addressing a point I never made?
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@Ashish-yo8ci Bihar's issue is lack of state capacity not lost productivity or lack of female education. 🤦
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@srabontibandyopadhyay5052 i am not doubting the gravity of the crisis, just asking how the country can include this to the preexisting welfare burden. If costs can be cut, then the private sector would have jumped on the opportunity.
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Personally, I empathise with her anger. She would get this "advice" 20 times a year by academia, school them with statistics and then a kid comes up with the same suggestion.
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@mother.95 maybe we did not watch the same video. What happened at 0:35?
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🤦 1. She is talking about dependence not expenditure. 2. When did she say "go to Pakistan"?
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@slyunreachable Your response has no relation to the two questions I raised.
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@debopamghatak9875 1. 0:35 is when she got angry, she preempted a reply with "oh but they spent this amount on xxx, we are only asking for half of it" bs. 2. I am an economist myself. There isn't a consensus, there is a battle between 2 camps which I can go into if needed. 3. Identifying a need for the poor does not correlate a premise for govt action. I provided a free service to an NGO which provides chappals for free in municipal dumps and people living near mining activity. We arrived at an estimate of 35K deaths per year due to infections. I'd rather have the government build a dozen hospitals every year rather than provide 1 crore chappals a year.
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It's precisely because she is an IAS and woman that she understood the implications of the program.
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@debopamghatak9875 1. I doubt we watched the same video. Please tell me if I translated this correctly. Hindi is not my native language. 0:58 girl: I am asking the facility for kids poorer than me 1:04 officer: government is already providing a lot of facilities for poor students. The idea of dependence is wrong, this thought of being dependant(gets interrupted) 1:14 girl(interrupts): but the government does a good job of turning up to ask for our votes 1:19 officer: then don't vote. Turn into Pakistan.(alluding to death of democracy) it's your own government. 2. Let me simplify it for you. A trillema is a situation where you can choose 2 out of 3 but the third suffers. You cannot prioritise all 3. Ex: In manufacturing it's known as Iron triangle: fast-good-cheap. Fast and good will not be cheap. Good and cheap will not be fast. Fast and cheap will not be good. For the welfare state it is fighting inflation-Welfare-Capacity expansion. You have the rare growth school like me(welfare capex); welfarist school(inflation welfare) and market school(inflation capex). Growth school is almost impossible in a democracy as inflation will lose you power like Vajpayee. So the battle is between the other two. 3. At no point am I saying menstrual healthcare is not an issue. Just that it cannot be sustainably funded by the government. There are far bigger issues like nutrition as India is the most stunted nation, literacy crisis among graduates and masters students and lack of state capacity.
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@_mumon_6095 read your comment again. Your choice of words questioned the logic and did not seek an answer. Since you are asking now, there are two reasons broadly: 1. High impact priorities. Nutrition quality and state capacity are higher on the list for example. 2. Fiscally unviable when the state is already in a financial crisis.
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@sunnywynn56 if spending money that does not exist is selfishness, aren't we all a bit selfish?
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@srabontibandyopadhyay5052 I am making the opposite case. Zero enabling policies for the next 2 decades at both center and state. No laptops(frivolous), cycles(moderate need) or menstrual pads(regular need) till we sort out state capacity and basic welfare.
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@sajeevramakrishnan1408 Indians have a tendency to rush into compatibilist positions without realising they are fundamentally competing against each other. Welfare is coming at the cost of developing a market. We developed a Pharma industry by funding the rich people of that day. We could have simply bought medicines from outside and subsidised them for immediate consumption. This is what happened with sanitary napkins till 2018 policy.
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@_mumon_6095 with a 12 year career in economic consulting and academia.
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