Did a Harvard study really praise Adityanath’s handling of the migrant crisis in UP?

Did a Harvard study really praise Adityanath’s handling of the migrant crisis in UP?

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Last week, a number of media outlets reported on a study by Harvard University praising the Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government for dealing with the migrant crisis during the first few months of nationwide locks in India. However, the reports do not contain the names of the author (or authors), nor do they contain any details about the study.

A joint study of the study by FactChecker and BOEM revealed that the news reports were highly misleading – the study was conducted by a Gurgaon Institute known as the Institute for Competitiveness, and not by Harvard University.

While the Institute for Competitiveness is a subsidiary of Harvard Business School’s network for microeconomics of competitiveness, Harvard had no involvement in the study. The Institute for Competitiveness Studies also did not praise the UP government’s handling of the crisis; rather, it analyzed the handling of the government led by Yogi Adityanath and made observations and suggestions on what had been done and what could be improved.

BOEM and FactChecker spoke to Amit Kapoor, honorary chair of the Institute for Competitiveness, who rejected the allegations that it was a ‘Harvard study’ and in any case praised the UP government’s efforts.

“Our institute is a subsidiary of the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, and we did not attribute the study to Harvard anywhere in the report,” Kapoor said. “It is therefore inaccurate to refer to a study by a subsidiary of the microeconomics of competitiveness as a ‘Harvard study’ ‘.

“The study is only a documentation of UP’s efforts using an analytical framework,” he added. “Since it is not a comparative study, it can not be said to price any entity.”

Migrating crisis

On March 25, the Indian government ordered a nationwide exclusion, initially for 21 days, but eventually extended it to May 31. The shutdown was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hours before it took effect – causing great panic in the country and eventually striking businesses and factories almost immediately. This led to an immediate loss of jobs for daily wage earners across the country, most of whom were migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

As a result, many workers and their families tried to return to their villages to support themselves, sometimes thousands of miles away, mostly on foot – with a number of deaths due to starvation, fatigue, police brutality and suicide. This event has been referred to as a migrant workers crisis or simply as a migrant crisis.

What the media reported

The government’s handles and various media have praised the allegation of a ‘Harvard’ study praising the handling of the migrant crisis.

Newspapers like Hindustan Times, MensXP, the Free Personnel and the Jagran also carried it below their own lines. They call a spokesperson for the UP government to make the claims and call the handling of the crisis by the state government as ‘adroit’ and ‘effective’.

Times Now and Swarajya a byline carried by the news agency IANS, which also tweeted the story earlier – with the labeling of Harvard University. The BJP leader, Vineet Goenka, also shared the demand while calling on the AAP-led government of Delhi because it did not take care of migrant workers leaving for UP.

Find the archive of IANS’s tweets here.

Not a Harvard study

BOEM and FactChecker has called on Navneet Sehgal, an IAS official and additional secretary general of the UP government, to comment on the matter. Although he did not want to discuss the matter with us, he instructed one of his team members to give us a copy of the study.

The study shows that it was conducted by the Institute for Competitiveness, which is part of an affiliated network of the Harvard Business School called Microeconomics of Competitiveness and not by Harvard University itself.

Microeconomics of Competitiveness is a course platform designed by Michael Porter at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. A network subsidiary with microeconomics of competitiveness has access to teaching materials, curriculum, notes, recorded lectures and lecture notes.

There are 121 institutions that are part of this network from 2019, and the Institute for Competitiveness is one of four such institutes in India.

Kapoor also said that the Harvard Business School is not mentioned in the report, and that the logo is not included in any way. “We did not use the Harvard Business School logo in the report,” he said. ‘This is the logo of the affiliated network for microeconomics of competitiveness, of which we are a part. However, the logo will be removed to create the correct messages. The study was also not disclosed by us in the public domain. ”

Which study to name?

Commenting on the methodology behind the study, Kapoor said: ‘In the study, we assessed UP’s Covid efforts on three parameters: migrant support, health infrastructure and livelihoods. The study is a documentation of UP’s efforts since the start of the pandemic, and is an attempt to provide knowledge in the future for similar crises. ”

When we went through the report, we found several comments on the UP government’s handling of the crisis.

Transport

The report states that a total of 35,288,227 migrants have returned to the state of Uttar Pradesh since March 24, 2020. Of these, 99.54% have withdrawn from other states in the country, while the other 0.54% have returned from other countries.

The majority of UP migrants live in Maharashtra (35.91%) and Gujarat (20.42%), followed by neighboring Delhi (9.23%), Haryana (7.68%) and Punjab (8.52%). . Of 35,28,227 migrants, 16,129 returned to the state from other countries between March 24, 2020 and July 3, 2020. Of these, 14,517 (90%) came from Nepal, while the rest came from various parts of the world, including Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, among others.

Although efforts have been made to return migrant workers by Shramik trains and other means of transport, ground reports during the closure period have also revealed serious situations where employees return to UP. Here are some cases of numbness shown by the Uttar Pradesh authorities and officials towards migrant workers during the crisis:

  • At least 25 migrant workers died after a truck crashed into the truck on the morning of May 16, 2020. The incident took place around 03:30 in Auraiya, Uttar Pradesh. Search the report here.
  • A group of migrant workers in Bareilly had to squat on a road and then spray with chlorine-mixed water. Search the report here.
  • Buses were only provided after the migrant workers started walking long distances back home. The provision of buses by Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi has also sparked a political dispute between the BJP-led UP government and Congress. Search the report here.

Healthcare system

According to the report, Uttar Pradesh has only 10 health centers per population, the seventh lowest in the country. Similarly, when it comes to the number of hospital beds and state doctors (per population), UP falls in the bottom five states of the country.

The study concluded on page 70, saying: “Although the Uttar Pradesh government has taken steps to build economic opportunities for them closer to home by using existing schemes, as well as by signing new MoUs, it is important to develop a long-term development plan .. The plan must be based on existing strengths of the state as well as the skills range of the workforce ”.

While the study investigates how the UP government handled the crisis, it did not praise the praise of the government’s crisis.

This article first appeared on FactChecker.in, a publication of the non-profit IndiaSpend data-driven and public interest journalism.

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