- Thursday, February 27, 2025
Huge support poured in from the academic, doctor and research community for demographer and scholar KS James after his claim that several people in India still do not have access to lavatories.
By: Shubham Ghosh
IN an incident that earned the Narendra Modi government criticism, a professor in India has allegedly been suspended for challenging a claim by the prime minister that all people in India have access to a lavatory.
However, KS James, a demographer and scholar, has not found him alone in the fight.
Hundreds of leading academics from the country have signed a petition supporting him. The letter, written by the Indian Academic Freedom Network, has accused the government of making him a “scapegoat for findings which question the official narrative”, The Times UK reported.
James came up with a study recently claiming that nearly one in five Indians still do not have access to a working lavatory even PM Modi had asserted four years ago to have provided one for every home, the report added.
That year, the Indian prime minister had announced India as open-defecation free on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of the iconic leader Mahatma Gandhi.
James’s counter claims soon saw him landing in trouble as he was suspended from the post of the director of the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, since releasing the National Family Health Survey, the Times report added.
The scholar was notified about his removal through email in July with no reason cited. James was “devastated” at the news, his friends said, according to the report.
The Indian health ministry said alleged irregularities in recruitment and promotions justified the action against the scholar, who is also a visiting fellow at prestigious western institutes such as Harvard University, London School of Economics and the University of Southampton.
Sources in the ministry also said in unattributed remarks to the Press Trust of India that the accused professor was also being probed for “data manipulation” and “leaking data to foreign entities”.
The allegations did not impress James’s colleagues and campaigners who claimed the professor has been targeted for political reasons. They came out in large numbers in his support and in two days, the letter was signed by over 800 academics, researchers and doctors, the Times report added.
There were even signatories from countries such as the US, Britain and France.
“We believe that, in suspending James, a person of impeccable personal and academic integrity, the government is trying to make him a scapegoat for findings that question the official narrative on some issue,” the letter said.
It also urged the health ministry to immediately reinstate James before India’s data credibility suffers a serious damage.
When Modi first became the prime minister in 2014, he rued the fact that many Indians still did not have access to modern facilities and vowed to set up a lavatory for every house. Millions of lavatories were subsequently made and Modi was praised for the feat. In 2019, the year he won his second term as the prime minister, Modi announced that all Indians now have a lavatory to access.
James, however, contradicted this. His data, gathered from the national survey of 600,000 households, suggested that 19 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion population or 226 million people, still do not have lavatories to use.
The letter in support of the professor said both independent research and data gathering was important for good policy-making in India as well as its reputation. The signatories said they did not want India’s credibility to be doubted internationally because of questionable data.
Ravi Srivastava, a retired professor who is among the letter’s signatories, told The Times that he had never seen such a big support flowing swiftly for his colleague. He also trashed claims that James had “leaked” information.
“Academics are always sharing information with peers around the world, for feedback before it’s published in peer-reviewed journals,” Srivastava was quoted as saying by the news outlet.
“They’ve accused [James] of attending a China-based webinar but we attend global webinars all the time.”
“The Modi government is sending out a clear signal to independent researchers. Do not contradict our claims. Do not question the official narrative,” he added.
Senior opposition leader and parliamentarian Jairam Ramesh said James was suspended owing to “political considerations”. He said the Modi government cannot work with professionals and scholars who fail to “meet the test of ideological purity”, The Times report added.
