A complex and sensitive question!

In a pluralistic society like India, where diverse cultural and religious beliefs coexist, it’s essential to strike a balance between respecting these values and upholding universal human rights. Here are some thoughts on how cultural and religious values can influence laws and policies:

Respect for cultural and religious diversity:

1. Recognition of diversity: Acknowledge the diverse cultural and religious heritage of India’s population, recognizing the importance of preserving and promoting each community’s unique identity.
2. Inclusive decision-making: Involve representatives from various cultural and religious backgrounds in decision-making processes to ensure that their concerns are heard and addressed.
3. Cultural sensitivity: Be mindful of the cultural and religious nuances of different communities when crafting laws and policies, avoiding blanket solutions that may disproportionately affect certain groups.

Protection of universal human rights:

1. Upholding fundamental rights: Ensure that all laws and policies respect and uphold the fundamental human rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution, such as freedom of expression, equality, and dignity.
2. Human rights-based approach: Analyze laws and policies through a human rights lens, considering their impact on marginalized or vulnerable groups, including women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals.
3. Redressal mechanisms: Establish effective redressal mechanisms to address grievances related to cultural or religious discrimination, ensuring that individuals have access to justice and protection.

Conflict resolution:

1. Dialogue and consultation: Engage in open dialogue and consultation with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to address conflicts between cultural or religious values and human rights.
2. Mediation and arbitration: Utilize mediation and arbitration mechanisms to resolve disputes amicably, ensuring that all parties are heard and respected.
3. Legal safeguards: Enact laws that provide legal safeguards against discrimination, hate crimes, and other forms of harm resulting from conflicts between cultural or religious values.

Best practices:

1. Human rights education: Incorporate human rights education into school curricula to promote empathy, understanding, and respect for diversity.
2. Community engagement: Foster community engagement programs that promote interfaith dialogue, understanding, and cooperation.
3. Monitoring and evaluation: Regularly monitor and evaluate the impact of laws and policies on cultural, religious, and human rights issues, making adjustments as needed.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. Compassion literally means “to suffer together or co-suffering.” It is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering. Buddhism teaches the practice of compassion, called karuna. Compassion and empathy are fundamentally different but are closely related i.e. :

• Empathy is the feeling of awareness towards other people’s emotions and an attempt to understand how they feel while compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help. So, empathy precedes compassion.
• Empathy is putting oneself in someone else’ shoes to understand what they are going through, but compassion spurs one to action. For example: empathetic people may cry with the person experiencing a loss or if something unfortunate happens but a compassionate person would rather do something to alleviate/reduce the other person’s suffering.
• While empathy is a very internal feeling, compassion moves outwards as it compels us to dive into another person’s environment and offer help, without concern for ourselves or the cost involved.

Importance of having compassion towards weaker section in administration:

• Civil servants are the agents of change. Compassion is ranked as one of the great virtues for civil servants which has bearing upon the functioning of the administration and society. Compassion drives the civil servant to help people and ensure the welfare of people.
• Compassionate people often have other positive traits like generosity, kindness, and understanding. Compassion makes a civil servant lead with not only head but also heart. It gives rise to active desire to alleviate the sufferings of others.
• Compassion ensures a people-centric, humane, accommodative administration. It makes administration sensitive and responsive to the needs of every citizen, thus contributes to efficient service delivery.
• Compassion helps in getting a better understanding of ground realities and grass root problems and hence helps in better planning. It also establishes mutual trust and coordination between society and administration.
• A civil servant with virtues of compassion will make him help the needy and weaker sections of society even if he may have to deal with external pressure. It helps civil servants to earn the trust of the public, which enhances his confidence, gives a sense of satisfaction, and energy to work harder.

The very purpose of a ‘civil servant, is to cater and serve the people to the hest of their abilities, Without a compassionate attitude, neither the civil servant, nor the section of society that they work for, would be happy. Thus, civil servants must have compassion for an effective, efficient administration and better implementation of the laws, schemes and government programmes.

Skill development is a key strategy to realise India’s potential of demographic advantage of having one of the youngest workforce (an average age of 29 years in comparison to the advanced economies) for iniproving its competitiveness and growth. Also, by 2027, India is expected to have the world’s largest workforce. In this context, India needs to focus on skill development as:

• In India 70 per cent of the labour force reside in rural areas and depend on low productive agricultural activity where there is huge underemployment leading to low level of productivity.
• The lack of access to good education and training keeps the vulnerable and the marginalized sections into the vicious circle of low skills; low productive employment and poverty. As per the latest ICE360° Survey, the proportion of formally skilled workers in India is extremely low at 4.69% of total workforce, as compared to other countries like China (24%), Germany (80%) etc.
• With low skill levels the profile of the enterprises is such that nearly 95 per cent of the units are micro in size engaging less than 5 workers. This inhibits the growth of the enterprises to medium and large scale leading to poor productivity and efficiency losses.
• With the emergence of new technologies like artificial intelligence and data analytics, there is need for skilling, reskilling and upskilling of persons to participate in the global knowledge economy. Rather, India can become a global source for skilled manpower for other ageing nations

In this context, the government has launched various schemes and programmes to push skill development in India. Skill India is the flagship campaign initiative launched by the Government in 2015 to train over 40 crore Indians in different industry-related jobs. Other measures include:

• Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY): It enables a large number of Indian youth to take up industry-relevant skill training that can help them secure a better livelihood.
• Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY): It involves partner organisations who form a part of the skilling ecosystem with special focus on rural youth who are between the ages of 15 and 35 and are from poor families.
• Pradhan Mantri Yuva Yojana: It will provide entrepreneurship education and training to over 7 lakh students in 5 years (till 2020-21) through different institutions.
• National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS): It aims to promote apprenticeship training and incentivize employers who wish to engage apprentices.
• The Green Skill Development Programme (GSDP): It is an initiative for skill development in the environment and forest sector to enable India’s youth to get gainful employment and/or self-employment.

As per WTO, India’s GDP level can be increased further by 3%-5% till 2035, if it focuses on skill development and training. India’s demographic advantage is predicted to peak at around 2041, thus, India has a narrow timeframe to harness its demographic dividend and overcome its skill shortages.

According to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2019 report, malnutrition was the primary reason behind 69 percent of deaths of children below the age of five in India. Further the report mentioned that every second child in India (<5 years) is affected by some form of malnutrition. This includes stunting with 35 percent of the children, wasting with 17 percent and 2 percent overweight. Among adults, 23% of women and 20% of men are considered undernourished in India. On the other hand, 21% of women and 19% of men are overweight or obese.

Reasons for prevalence of malnutrition in India

• Insufficient access to food: Though food grains yields in India have increased over the last two decades, people’s access to food grains have not increased proportionally due to population growth, poverty and inequality, and food wastage.
• Poverty: Poor families tend to select low-quality food that costs less impacting their nutrition profile.
• Infectious diseases: Poor sanitation practices and lack of access to quality healthcare facilities are the major causes for spread of infectious diseases such as measles, diarrhoea that make the children tend to lose their ability to absorb nutrients, leading to undernutrition.
• Maternal Health: One in five women are underweight in India. Women who are themselves undernourished or have a pregnancy at an early age, are at a greater risk of delivering low birth- weight babies, who are nutritionally disadvantaged right at birth.
• Socio-cultural factors: In most of the poor households, women and preschool children especially girls receive less food than the economically active male members. Rapid succession of pregnancies adversely affects the nutritional status of the mother.

To address the issue of malnutrition, the government has come up with a National Nutritional strategy that aims to reduce all forms of malnutrition by 2030, with a focus on the most vulnerable and critical age groups. National Nutrition Mission is an important component of the strategy. The mission aims to reduce stunting, under-nutrition, anemia (among young children, women and adolescent girls) and reduce low birth weight by 2%, 2%, 3% and 2% per annum respectively by 2022 and strive to achieve reduction in stunting from 38.4% (NFHS-4) to 25% by 2022 (Mission 25 by 2022). Broad contours of the approach adopted by the mission include:

• Inter-sectoral convergence for better service delivery: Ministry of Women and Child which ensures the convergence of various programmes Anganwadi Services, Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), Scheme for Adolescent Girls, Janani Suraksha Yojana (ISY), National Health Mission (NHM), Swachh-Bharat Mission, Public Distribution System (PDS) and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
• Use of Information Communication technology (ICT): For real time growth monitoring and tracking of women and children. Also Community Mobilization and Behaviour Change & Communication, awareness Advocacy and Information Education Communication will be done.
• Intensified health and nutrition services for the first 1000 days: The 1,000 days from the start of pregnancy until the child’s second birthday offer a unique window of opportunity to shape healthier and more prosperous futures. The right nutrition during this 1,000 day window can have an enormous impact on a child’s ability to grow, learn, and rise out of poverty.
• Jan Andolan: The mission is envisaged to become a public movement by educating people on nutritional aspects and strengthening human resources.

An effective implementation of the strategy and the mission would help reduce the burden of malnutrition in India.

Implementing policies to improve employee engagement and capacity in a remote work environment requires a strategic approach. Here are some policies that can help:

1. Flexible work arrangements: Offer flexible scheduling, flexible work hours, and compressed workweeks to accommodate employees’ diverse needs and improve work-life balance.
2. Regular check-ins: Hold regular virtual meetings, one-on-ones, and team meetings to maintain open communication, address concerns, and provide feedback.
3. Clear expectations: Establish clear goals, objectives, and expectations for remote workers, ensuring they understand their responsibilities and performance metrics.
4. Training and development: Provide virtual training sessions, workshops, and webinars to enhance skills, knowledge, and capacity-building.
5. Communication channels: Establish multiple communication channels (e.g., video conferencing tools, instant messaging apps, email) to facilitate collaboration and information sharing.
6. Virtual team-building activities: Organize virtual team-building activities, such as virtual happy hours, team lunches, or volunteer opportunities, to foster camaraderie and social connections.
7. Performance monitoring: Implement regular performance monitoring and feedback mechanisms to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and provide coaching.
8. Employee recognition and rewards: Recognize and reward remote employees’ achievements through virtual awards, bonuses, or other incentives.
9. Employee well-being: Prioritize employee well-being by providing access to mental health resources, wellness programs, or employee assistance programs (EAPs).
10. Manager training: Train managers on effective remote management skills, including communication, trust-building, and performance management.
11. IT infrastructure: Invest in reliable IT infrastructure, including high-speed internet connectivity, secure networks, and necessary software tools.
12. Virtual onboarding: Develop a comprehensive virtual onboarding process for new remote employees to ensure a smooth transition into the organization.
13. Flexible workspaces: Allow remote employees to choose their own workspaces or provide flexible workspace options (e.g., co-working spaces) to promote comfort and productivity.
14. Boundary setting: Encourage remote employees to set clear boundaries between work and personal life to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
15. Feedback mechanisms: Establish mechanisms for remote employees to provide feedback on the remote work experience, suggestions for improvement, and concerns.