📰 Govt to reimburse Nipah bills
Free ration for 2,550 families under observation
•The State government will reimburse the medical bills of all those undergoing treatment for Nipah virus in Kozhikode and Malappuram districts. The government will also provide free ration kits to 2,400 families in Kozhikode and 150 families in Malappuram that are under observation for the virus.
•This was announced by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan at an all-party meeting convened in the context of the virus outbreak. The medical bills will be reimbursed on the basis of the District Collector’s reports. The ration kit includes essential commodities such as 10 kg of Kuruva rice, 1 kg sugar, 500 gm green gram, 1 kg salt, toor dal, turmeric power, chilli powder, coriander powder, and tea. Educational institutions in these two districts would reopen only on June 12, Mr. Vijayan said.
•The high alert will continue till the month-end even though the situation is under control. Mr. Vijayan said the joint effort of political parties, media, and social organisations was commendable. Health Minister K.K. Shylaja, Labour and Excise Minister T.P. Ramakrishnan, doctors, and paramedical staff were complimented for their service.
•Leader of the Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said the government’s approach in getting the cooperation of every section was commendable and the Opposition appreciated the steps taken by the government. Ms. Shylaja said an expert team would be stationed in Kozhikode till the month-end.
📰 Governance and the Governor
Misuse of the office by some is not a justification for removing it altogether. We need proper checks
•The article, “Do we need the office of the Governor?” (Editorial page, May 24, 2018), raises important questions about a constitutional post which has come under fire. While the developments in Karnataka over governmentformation after the Assembly election results are the peg for this, calls to do away with this often maligned position are hardly new.
An overseer
•Under the constitutional scheme, the Governor’s mandate is substantial. From being tasked with overseeing government formation, to reporting on the breakdown of constitutional machinery in a State, to maintaining the chain of command between the Centre and the State, he can also reserve his assent to Bills passed by the State Legislature and promulgate ordinances if the need arises. Further, under Article 355, the Governor, being the Central authority in a State, acts as an overseer in this regard.
•There are numerous examples of the Governor’s position being abused, usually at the behest of the ruling party at the Centre. The root lies in the process of appointment itself. The post has been reduced to becoming a retirement package for politicians for being politically faithful to the government of the day. Consequently, a candidate wedded to a political ideology could find it difficult to adjust to the requirements of a constitutionally mandated neutral seat. This could result in bias, as appears to have happened in Karnataka.
•A possible solution would be not to nominate career politicians and choose “eminent persons” from other walks of life. Both the Sarkaria and M.M. Punchhi Commissions seem to hint at this. But this could also lead to the creation of sycophants within the intelligentsia, an equally worrisome prospect. On the other hand, there are instances of politicians who have risen above partisan politics, and performed their role with dignity and without fear or favour. In this one can think of former President Pranab Mukherjee, former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, and former West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi.
•One has to consider the verdict of the Supreme Court in B.P. Singhal v. Union of India, on interpreting Article 156 of the Constitution and the arbitrary removal of Governors before the expiration of their tenure. This judgment is crucial since a fixed tenure for Governors could go quite far in encouraging neutrality and fairness in the discharge of their duties, unmindful of the dispensation at the Centre.
•Undoubtedly, the most crucial issue relates to the exercise of gubernatorial discretion. The Governor has the task of inviting the leader of the largest party/alliance, post-election, to form the government; overseeing the dismissal of the government in case of a breakdown of the Constitution in the State; and, through his report, recommending the imposition of President’s rule. There are examples of the last two having been frequently misused to dismiss “belligerent” State governments, but this has been checked substantially by the Supreme Court through S.R. Bommai v. Union of India. Following the Sarkaria Commission’s recommendations, the Court underlined that the breakdown of constitutional machinery implied a virtual impossibility, and not mere difficulty, in carrying out governance in a State. It said that while the subjective satisfaction of the President regarding such a breakdown was beyond judicial scrutiny, the material on which such satisfaction was based could certainly be analysed by the judiciary, including the Governor’s report. It reserved the power to declare this report mala fide and restore the dismissed government. The same idea can be extended in case of the Governor’s discretion in inviting a party to form the government.
•Since the Bommai verdict allows the Supreme Court to investigate claims of mala fide in the Governor’s report, a similar extension to cover mala fide in the invitation process could be a potential solution.
Important link
•In India, the balance in power is tilted towards the Union. The importance of the Governor’s position arises not from the exceptional circumstances that necessitate the use of his discretion, but as a crucial link within this federal structure in maintaining effective communication between the Centre and a State. As a figurehead who ensures the continuance of governance in the State, even in times of constitutional crises, his role is often that of a neutral arbiter in disputes settled informally within the various strata of government, and as the conscience keeper of the community.
•In the current political climate — examples being Goa, Manipur and Karnataka — it may seem natural to suggest that the post of the Governor has outlived its utility. These occurrences are but instances in a long chain of events stretching back decades, all of which point to the need to ensure proper checks and balances to streamline the functioning of this office. However, misuse of a position of power should not serve as a justification for removing the office altogether, unless such a position has totally lost its relevance. Rather, these debates on limitations on the power of constitutional functionaries should be allowed unimpeded to ensure the organic development of our polity.
📰 Checking crimes against Dalits
What has been the impact of the SC/ST Act?
•Recently, the Supreme Court banned the immediate arrest of a person accused of insulting or injuring someone belonging to a Scheduled Caste or a Schedule Tribe. Critics and activists have argued that this amounts to a dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (POA Act), 1989. What has been the impact of the POA Act, especially on violent crimes against Dalits?
•A 2017 paper by Peter Mayer, “The better angels of their natures?”, published in Studies in Indian Politics, argues that “contrary to popular understanding, murder, rape and arson against Dalits have declined significantly since a peak in the early 1990s.” The highest rates of Dalit homicide are seen in the northern States (Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan) and in Gujarat in the west. Even here, the rates have been declining. In the southern States, the homicide rates are very low (as is the case with Maharashtra, Odisha and West Bengal). These trends are true for other major crimes against Dalits too.
•Mayer tests out various hypotheses. Is this due to increasing Dalit literacy? He does not find a statistically significant correlation between literacy and reducing crime rates. Higher political mobilisation? A look at parliamentary ascendancy of Dalit Chief Ministers in States suggests that this does not entirely explain the decline either. Cleavages in the party system and party competition also do not explain this. The hypothesis that greater party competition allows for Dalits to have a say in government and would deter high homicide rates does not hold as those rates do not vary across two-party or multi-party systems significantly.
•Mayer, however, finds a significant correlation between crime rates against Dalits and overall murder rates across States. The decline in overall rates of interpersonal violence has impacted crimes against Dalits as well, he argues. The decrease in overall crime rates is due to a better economy which has fostered “gentle commerce”, and a more responsive state that acts upon the agency of the Dalits, which is seen in higher reporting of crimes against them.
•Mayer concludes that even if Dalits haven’t achieved equality in a caste-stratified India, they have achieved significant steps towards empowerment which has minimised their routine humiliation through various crimes committed against them.
📰 Be agents of change, President tells Governors
Says people of a State look at their offices as fount of values
•Inaugurating the two-day long Governors’ Conference at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Monday, President Ram Nath Kovind told Governors that people of a State look at their offices as the “fount of ideals and values” and asked them to be agents of change.
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who spoke at the inaugural session, asked Governors to use their public experience to ensure that people benefit from the flagships schemes of the Central government and asked them to visit some of the villages that have been electrified for the first time. “The institution of Governor has a pivotal role to play within the federal structure and constitutional framework of our country,” Prime Minister Modi was quoted as saying in an official statement.
•In his opening remarks, President Kovind said, “The people of the State view the office of the Governor and the Raj Bhavan as a fount of ideals and values.” In the backdrop of the government formation efforts recently in Karnataka, when the Congress and Janata Dal Secular had accused Governor Vajubhai Bala as partisan, President Kovind’s remarks are significant.
•The President said a Governor is not only an important link in the federal structure of the country but also “a mentor and a guide to the State governments” in preparing a roadmap for development of 100 million tribals and other marginalised sections.
•“As Governors, you can help in shaping of a road map for the betterment of lives of our fellow citizens, who have not benefited as much as expected from our development journey,” he said.
•The President also urged Governors to serve as “guardians to India’s youth” in their role of Chancellors of universities. He said that nearly 94% of the students enrolled in higher education study in universities under the purview of the State government. “It is for you to inspire State universities to maintain discipline and integrity,” he said.
•President Kovind also sought suggestions from Governors on the celebrations for the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Beginning October 2, this year, the Centre has decided to celebrate it over a 24-month period.
•Prime Minister Modi suggested that universities could be focal point for such celebrations.
•The Prime Minister also urged Governors with a substantial tribal population to ensure that they benefit from government programmes on education, sports and financial inclusion.
•Mr. Modi also mentioned some key themes of development such as National Nutrition Mission, rural electrification and development parameters in ‘aspirational districts’ and the move towards Gram Swaraj Abhiyan from April 14, right now being implemented across 16,000 village, focussing on seven key schemes.
📰 Centre to start measuring ‘green GDP’ of States
Figures will be used to calculate land acquisition costs, climate mitigation funds
•India’s environmental diversity and riches are universally recognised but have never been quantified. Starting this year, the government will begin a five-year exercise to compute district-level data of the country’s environmental wealth. The numbers will eventually be used to calculate every State’s ‘green’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The metric will help with a range of policy decisions, such as compensation to be paid during land acquisition, calculation of funds required for climate mitigation, and so on.
•“This is the first time such a national environment survey is being undertaken,” said Anandi Subramanian, Senior Economic Adviser, Union Environment Ministry.
•A pilot project is set to begin this September in 54 districts. Land will be demarcated into “grids” with about 15-20 grids per district. These will capture the diversity in the State’s geography, farmland, wildlife, and emissions pattern, and will be used to compute a value, she added.
•“If, for instance, there’s a no-go zone, we need to calculate what its economic impact is,” she told The Hindu on the sidelines of a conference to mark World Environment Day on June 5.
•Ms. Subramanian didn’t specify the budget for the exercise but said that the funds for the pilot project “were already available.”
•Much of the data required for the inventory would be sourced from datasets that already exist with other government ministries.
•The government has also launched a ‘green skilling’ programme under which youth, particularly school dropouts, would be trained in a range of ‘green jobs’— as operators of scientific instruments used to measure environmental quality, as field staff in nature parks, and as tourist guides. Some of the labour required for the survey would also be sourced from the green-skilled workforce.
📰 Supreme court backs MCI norms for medical colleges
‘Need to follow basic minimum standards’
•Medical colleges need not be given a second chance to rectify their defects if they do not bother even to follow the “basic minimum standards of medical education,” the Supreme Court held.
Regulation 8 (3) (1) (a)
•In a recent judgment, a Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and M.M. Shantangoudar interpreted Regulation 8 (3) (1) (a) of the Establishment of Medical Colleges Regulations of 1999.
•Regulation 8 (3) (1) provides that a medical college, which failed the Medical Council of India (MCI) inspection, should be given an opportunity to redeem itself and seek a re-inspection.
•But even to seek this re-inspection, the errant college should satisfy certain minimum standards. This means that the college cannot afford to have more than 30% deficiency in faculty or residents and the bed occupancy should not be less than 50%
•The court held that this “prescription of standards for availing an opportunity to seek re-inspection is not ultra vires” of Regulation 8 or the Indian Medical Council Act.
Centre’s endorsement
•The Centre had firmly endorsed the MCI’s view by submitting that “institutions which do not satisfy the minimum infrastructure and faculty cannot to be given an opportunity to rectify their defects.”
•Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh, for the government, said the standards fixed by the MCI were the “bare minimum” and had to be strictly complied with.
•“Any lenience shown by this court in providing an opportunity to such institutions to rectify the defects will have a cascading effect in the succeeding years and would result in colleges continuing to function with deficiencies as well as producing half baked and poor quality doctors,” the judgment court records Mr. Singh’s submissions.
•The apex court judgment said “medical education must be taken very seriously and when an expert body certifies that the facilities in a medical college are inadequate, it is not for the courts to interfere with the assessment, except for very cogent jurisdictional reasons such as mala fides of the inspection team, perversity in the inspection, jurisdictional error on the part of the MCI, etc.”
•The judgment came on an appeal filed by the MCI against a Bombay High Court decision favouring Vedantaa Institute of Academic Excellence Private Limited and Vedantaa Institute of Medical Sciences, both respondents in the apex court. The MCI’s earlier inspection report had found “large scale deficiencies.”
•The apex court concluded that both respondents were not entitled to claim another inspection.
📰 Ban proposed on obscene depiction of women on Net
The IRW Act provides for punishment of up to two years in jail for an offence committed for the first time and imprisonment of six months to five years for a second conviction.
•The Ministry of Women and Child Development has proposed to ban obscene depiction of women on the Internet and on SMS/MMS by amending the Indecent Representation of Women Act, 1986.
•The Ministry has also suggested that stricter punishments be awarded for such crimes on par with those recommended under the IT Act, 2008.
•“The Ministry has proposed amendment in definition of the term to include digital form or electronic form or hoardings, or through SMS, MMS, etc.,” according to an official statement released on Monday.
•The Act in its current form defines an advertisement as any notice, circular, label, wrapper or other document, visible representation made by means of any light, sound, smoke or gas. It seeks to prohibit indecent representation of women through advertisements, publications, writings, paintings, figures, among others.
Central authority
•It has also proposed setting up a central authority under the National Commission of Women, which will include representatives from Advertising Standards Council of India, Press Council of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and one member with experience of working on women’s issues.
•The IRW Act provides for punishment of up to two years in jail for an offence committed for the first time and imprisonment of six months to five years for a second conviction.
•Sections 67 and 67A of the IT Act lay down a punishment of three to five years for circulating obscene material and five to seven years for circulating sexually explicit material, respectively.
•“Since the enactment of the Act, technological revolution has resulted in the development of new forms of communication, such as internet, multi-media messaging, cable television, over-the-top (OTT) services and applications e.g. Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Chat On, Snapchat, Instagram etc. Keeping in mind these technological advancements, it has been decided to widen the scope of the law,” the statement added.
•In 2012, the UPA government introduced an amendment Bill to update the law but it never saw the light of the say after it was referred to the Parliament Standing Committee.
📰 To be an environmental world power
Cross-border environmentalism is crucial for South Asia, but India is not inclined to take the lead
•Ecological ruin is on a gallop across South Asia, with life and livelihood of nearly a quarter of the world’s population affected. Yet, our polities are able to neither fathom nor address the degradation. The distress is paramount in the northern half of the subcontinent, roping in the swathe from the Brahmaputra basin to the Indus-Ganga plain.
•Within each country, with politics dancing to the tune of populist consumerism, nature is without a guardian. The erosion of civility in geopolitics keeps South Asian societies apart when people should be joining hands across borders to save our common ground.
•Because wildlife, disease vectors, aerosols and river flows do not respect national boundaries, the environmental trends must perforce be discussed at the regional inter-country level. As the largest nation-state of our region, and the biggest polluter whose population is the most vulnerable, India needs to be alert to the dangerous drift.
•China has been resolutely tackling air pollution and promoting clean energy. But while Beijing’s centralised governance mandates environmentalism-by-decree, the subcontinental realities demand civic participation for sustainability to work. Unfortunately, despite being a vast democracy where people power should be in the driving seat, the Indian state not only neglects its own realm, it does not take the lead on cross-border environmentalism.
•Thus, Bihar is helping destroy the Chure/Siwalik range of Nepal to feed the construction industry’s demand for boulders and conglomerate, even though this hurts Bihar itself through greater floods, desertification and aquifer depletion. Air pollution is strangling the denizens of Lahore, New Delhi,Kathmandu and Dhaka alike, but there is no collaboration. Wildlife corridors across States, provinces and countries are becoming constricted by the day, but we look the other way.
•The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has chosen India to be the ‘host country’ to mark World Environment Day today. But when will New Delhi rise to connect the dots between representative democracy and ecological sanity?
Rivers into sewers
•Truth be told, the environment ministry is invariably the least empowered in the major countries of South Asia, without clout vis-à-vis line ministries, and unable to coordinate the ecological response. Governments were content once to regard environmental protection as synonymous with wildlife protection. Today they stand unprepared when the challenges have greatly multiplied and deepened.
•There is distress across the ecological spectrum, but one need only study the rivers and the atmosphere to track the inaction of governments and our weakened activism. On water, the subcontinent is running out of the resource due to the demands of industrialisation and urbanisation, and continuation of the colonial-era irrigation model based on flooding the fields.
•The economic and demographic forces are arrayed against the rivers and their right-of-way. In the hills, the Ganga in Uttarakhand and the Teesta of Sikkim are representative of rivers that have been converted into dry boulder tracts by ‘cascades’ of run-of-river hydroelectric schemes. The same fate now threatens the rivers of Nepal and India’s Northeast, while the tributaries of the Indus were ‘done in’ decades ago through water diversion.
•Everywhere, natural drainage is destroyed by highways and railway tracks elevated above the flood line, and bunds encircling towns and cities. Reduced flows and urban/industrial effluents have converted our great rivers into sewers. We refuse to consider drip irrigation as a solution just as we fail to acknowledge that the rivers are made to carry hundreds of tonnes of plastics daily into the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
•While underground aquifers are exploited to exhaustion, the popular ‘river-training’ prescription imprisons our rivers within embankments, according to the inherited Western engineering canon that does not factor in the natural silt carried by rivers of the Himalaya. The would-be high-dam builders have not adequately studied the phenomenon of Himalayan cloudbursts, nor do they find it necessary to address the question: how do you de-silt a deep reservoir when it fills up with sand and mud?
•Sadly, activists in Bihar and elsewhere who propose the ecologically sound ethos of ‘living with the flood’ have been relegated to the media backwater. They need to be heard, for the Ganga plains are densely populated for the very reason that the natural meanderings of rivers spread the largesse of loess across the land — silt that is now locked away between dykes.
Ground fog, brown cloud
•As the UNEP will be the first to insist, climate change is introducing massive disturbances to South Asia, most notably from the rise of sea levels. The entire Indian Ocean coastline will be affected, but the hardest hit will be the densely populated deltas where the Indus, the Irrawaddy and the Ganga-Brahmaputra meet the sea.
•The climate change discourse has not evolved enough to address the tens of millions of ‘climate refugees’ who will en masse move inland, paying scarce heed to national boundaries in the search for survival. To understand this imminent phenomenon, one may recall what the Farakka Barrage did to livelihoods in downstream Bangladesh, causing the flood of ‘undocumented aliens’ in India.
•The retreat of the Himalayan glaciers is jeopardising the perennial nature of our rivers and climate scientists are now zeroing in on the ‘atmospheric brown cloud’ to explain the excessive melting of snows in the central Himalaya. This high altitude haze covers the Indo-Gangetic plains for much of the dry season and penetrates deep into the high valleys.
•This cloud is made up of ‘black carbon’ containing soot and smog sent up by stubble burning, wood fires, smokestacks and fossil fuel exhaust, as well as dust kicked up by winter agriculture, vehicles and wind. It rises up over the plains and some of it settles on Himalayan snow and ice, which absorb heat and melt that much faster. It is no longer anecdotal that the icefalls of the Himalaya could before long transform into waterfalls.
•Like the ‘brown cloud’, the policy-makers are yet to consider the seet lahar, the ground-hugging fog that engulfs the subcontinent’s northern plains for ever-extended periods in winter, a result of the spread of canal irrigation and simultaneous increase in the presence of particulate matter in the air. This inattention to the indescribable distress of millions of the poorest and shelter-less of the plains is hard to comprehend.
A new kind of Chipko
•When environmental impact assessments have become a ritualistic farce in each country and governments react with great prejudice against environmental activists, it is little wonder that the Chipko Movement of Uttarakhand is erased from memory. Today, environmental activists all over tend to be lampooned in the media and social media as anti-national, anti-development saboteurs.
•Meanwhile, the task of preserving the forests and landscapes has mostly been relegated to the indigenous communities. You will have the Adivasi communities of the Deccan organising to save ancestral forests, and the indigenous Lepcha fighting against the odds to protect the upper reaches of the Teesta. The urban middle class is not visible in environmentalism, other than in ‘beautification projects’.
•Perhaps we have been foolhardy in waiting for another Chipko to emerge, and the changed times may require new approaches. Tomorrow’s activists must work to quantify the economic losses of environmental destruction and get local institutions to act on their ownership of natural resources. The activists must harness information technology so as to engage with the public and to override political frontiers, and they must creatively use the power of the market itself to counter non-sustainable interventions.
•As we have seen, the highs of environmental movements are invariably followed by lows, and so to exit the cycle what is needed is an “environmental system” inbuilt into the infrastructure of state and society. Work towards ecological sustainability must go beyond ritual, with the path seeming to lie in the empowerment of local government all over. Elected representatives in cities and districts must be challenged to emerge as the bulwark of environmentalism even as the provincial and national governments are asked to rise to their regulatory responsibilities.
•When ‘organic environmentalism’ rises from the grassroots and makes state authority accountable, South Asia and its peoples will be protected. At that point, no force will be able to stop activism across the frontiers and South Asia will begin to tackle pollution and dislocation as one.
📰 Farm friction: on the malaise in agriculture
The government must move purposefully to address the systemic malaise in agriculture
•Since June 1, many farmers are on an unusual 10-day ‘strike’ to draw the government’s attention to distress in the fields. A federation of 130 farmer bodies has decided to stop supplies of vegetables and dairy produce to major cities and hold a dharna on 30 national highways, without blocking vehicular passage. Prices of vegetables and fruits are inching up in urban centres given the supply shock created by this ‘Gaon Bandh’; in cities like Mumbai fishermen have joined the cause. The farmers’ demands are not new — enhancement of the minimum support price regime for crops in line with the M.S. Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations, higher prices for milk procurement and loan waivers to offset low or negative returns on investment. Leaving out vegetables, food prices rose by just 0.55% in the first four months of 2018 — almost a fourth of the average 2% rise recorded in the same months between 2014 and 2016. There is a supply glut, and with a good monsoon expected, a healthy output could put additional pressure on prices. But this stir, which ends with a Bharat Bandh call on June 10, is not about the immediate crisis faced by specific sections of farmers (such as the cash-strapped sugarcane-growers for whom a cess is being considered under the GST regime). It is a culmination of multiple attempts made over a year to red-flag the systemic malaise in agriculture.
•On June 6, 2017, some farmers were killed in police firing in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, during an agitation for better crop prices. There have been agitations across the country since then, including in Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra (where thousands of farmers walked nearly 200 km to the State capital in March). The current stir also derives from lack of tangible action on assurances made earlier and imperceptible movement on the Centre’s grand promises such as doubling farm incomes and raising MSPs. That the general elections are just a year away adds a political sub-text to the protest. Rural distress has dented the BJP’s electoral performance in recent months. Too much of the structural reform agenda to free agricultural markets from the grip of government rules and intermediaries remains pending. There has been dithering even on simple things like strengthening the food processing sector. Take one instance — 100% FDI was allowed in the food retail business in 2016, but little money has come in as retailers want permission to stock a few non-food items like soaps and shampoos for customers. The minister in charge had promised this over a year ago, but nothing happened. Blaming the agitators is easy; policy responses are where the heavy lifting is needed.
📰 Available, accessible, but not stable
India should prepare a third generation right to food legislation to address failings in food security
•The right to food is a well established principle of international human rights law. It has evolved to include an obligation for state parties to respect, protect, and fulfil their citizens’ right to food security. Our current understanding of food security includes the four dimensions of access, availability, utilisation and stability. As a state party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, India has the obligation to ensure the right to be free from hunger and the right to adequate food.
From availability to access
•Broadly speaking, attitudes towards food security in India can be divided into two generations subsequent to Independence. While the demarcation is far from exact, it indicates how the importance given to different elements of food security altered over time.
•The years post-Independence were turbulent for India. Memories of the Bengal famine remained fresh and fears of a food shortage were rampant. Hunger was thought to be a function of inadequate food production. In 1974, the World Food Conference defined food security primarily in terms of production — as the “availability at all times of adequate world food supplies.”
•It is arguable that the framing of food security in quantitative terms sparked India’s determination to initiate the Green Revolution to boost food production. While the programme achieved dramatic increases in rice and wheat production in some parts of the country, its devastating environmental impact has also rightly been critiqued.
•Two occurrences over the 1980s and 1990s set the stage for what we understand as food security in India today. The first was when the Supreme Court dramatically expanded the ambit of rights that citizens could claim against the state. While no explicit ‘right to food’ could be made out, there was an increased mention of food as being among a cluster of basic rights integral to human dignity. The second was a shift of the frame from the problem of availability to the problem of access.
•The 1980s and 1990s saw an increasing acknowledgement that India’s focus on increasing food supplies was falling short of actually ameliorating hunger. Even as the data showed that India had transformed from a food deficit nation to a food surplus one, seminal research by Amartya Sen and others revealed that hunger and food security were tied to the issue of access — that is, in spite of ample quantities of grain, and a variety of government efforts such as the Public Distribution System, people were dying of starvation because they were unable to physically or financially (or both) reach this food. This view of food security was mirrored at an international level too. In 1996, the World Food Summit stated that food security was achieved “when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food.”
•This focus on access culminated in India in a 2001 case brought by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, in which the Supreme Court evolved a right to food and read it into the right to life provisions of the Constitution. Following that, a host of court orders and directions ultimately resulted in the 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), which has been lauded for guaranteeing a quantitative “right to food” to all Indians. However, the NFSA suffers from serious lacunae in its drafting, which severely undermine its stated objective of giving legal form to the right to food in India.
Assessing the Food Security Act
•The NFSA surprisingly does not guarantee a universal right to food. Instead, it limits the right to food to those identified on the basis of certain criteria. It then goes on to further restrict the right to 75% of the Indian population. It also specifies that a claim under the Act would not be available in times of “war, flood, drought, fire, cyclone or earthquake” (notably, it is within the Central government’s remit to declare whether such an occassion has arisen). Given that a right to food becomes most valuable in exactly these circumstances, it is questionable whether the Act is effective in guaranteeing the right that it is meant to.
•Another problematic aspect of the NFSA is its embrace of certain objectives that are to be “progressively realised”. These provisions include agrarian reforms, public health and sanitation, and decentralised procurement, but they make no mention of the need to reconsider fundamental assumptions about our agricultural systems and look at food security in a more comprehensive manner. It is arguable that the rubric of “progressive realisation” actually retards food security reform in the country. This is because some of the elements mentioned under this head are already incorporated in laws and policies at the State and national levels. Demarcating them as obligations to be realised “progressively” will lead to counter-intuitive results where the States will simply refrain from doing any more than what the NFSA explicitly requires them to do.
•Worryingly, the framing of the NFSA as being the final word on government commitments to provide food security to citizens might instead have the result of limiting the courts with respect to how far citizen entitlements can be extended. This fear was borne out in the recent Swaraj Abhiyan cases that address the impact of government failures in tackling consecutive drought years in India. While the court took a strong stance in ordering the executive to implement the provisions of the NFSA, it was reluctant to go beyond the provisions of the NFSA in terms of what it could order the government to give citizens. Given that the NFSA predominantly mentions just rice and wheat, and that too for only some citizens, this has worrying implications.
•Finally, while the NFSA addresses issues of access, availability and, even tangentially, utilisation, it is largely silent on the issue of stability of food supplies — a startling omission given India’s vulnerability to climate change impacts, to name one impending threat to food security.
•Thus there is a need to frame a “third generation” food security law and recognise and mainstream issues including increasing natural disasters and climate adaptation. Such a framework would robustly address the challenges facing the country’s food security across all four dimensions and make a coordinated effort to resolve them instead of the piecemeal efforts that have characterised such attempts so far.
•Food security brings together diverse issues such as inequality, food diversity, indigenous rights and environmental justice. Given the current crises in India, it is time we prepare a third generation right to food legislation that recognises that a climate-as-usual scenario no longer exists. Such a legislation would ideally be rooted in the principle of a right to food security in its true spirit and not merely as a sound bite.
📰 The rot in rehabilitation
Whether in Chennai, Delhi or Mumbai, why we need to rethink our approach to building 'slum-free cities'
•Another season of evictions has begun in Chennai. As temperatures soar in the city, thousands of families living along the Cooum river watch bulldozers reduce to rubble their homes, painstakingly built over decades.
•Over 4,000 homes were demolished to “restore” the Cooum in 2017. Scores of once-buzzing neighbourhoods, with their schools, youth clubs, community halls, and shrines, are now wastelands of debris. Their buried histories will soon be overwritten by landscaped parks with fountains or bicycle tracks, going by national trends in urban riverfront development. Contemporary eco-restoration projects are everywhere dislodging ecologies of low-income settlement and urban livelihoods, whether on the Yamuna in Delhi, the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad or the Musi in Hyderabad. River rejuvenation has emerged as among the most exclusionary interventions in our urban development landscape, sparking large-scale human tragedy.
Rehoused and excluded
•Where do the people go? The more fortunate, who can prove eligibility, are rehoused in vast ghettos that have sprung up on India’s metropolitan peripheries, shaping a new urban geography of apartheid. These resettlement colonies have high concentrations of Dalits, Other Backward Classes and indigent Muslims whose disconnection from the urban mainstream has earned them the label of “a new urban untouchability”.
•In Chennai, families evicted from the banks of the Cooum were moved to resettlement colonies in Perumbakkam and Gudapakkam outside the city, where the government has built thousands of multi-storied tenements. In official accounts, they have been rehoused in “integrated townships” with all the basic amenities.
•However, the reality is starkly different. Behind the façades of the new buildings, a third-rate quality of construction and services emerges. Residents point to leaking roofs, crumbling plaster, and broken pipes. Although families were moved to Gudapakkam over a year ago, street lights have not been provided, compromising the safety of women and girls. The settlement is 35 km from the city, but nothing has been done to ease the commute of workers and students. Government childcare centres (anganwadis) are absent. All this has blocked women from rejoining the workforce. In Perumbakkam, where 10,000 families live, a small primary school has functioned for over two years from residential tenements, violating the Right to Education Act. Only teachers use the indoor toilets, while children are forced to use the open spaces behind the school. By Integrated Child Development Services norms, the settlement should have 62 anganwadis. Only seven have been established. There are only two ration shops where there should be 10.
•These are not simply teething problems. Chennai’s older resettlement colonies, Kannagi Nagar and Semmencheri, built in the early 2000s, have seen some improvement over time, yet discrimination remains inscribed in every line of their structures and systems. In Semmencheri, 6,500 families have been housed since 2006 in units measuring 150 sft. Residents report that water, supplied through public taps, is erratic and contains worms. Drainpipes are broken and sewage stagnates in some areas. Classrooms in the primary school are too few and too small, teachers are indifferent, and the quality of the food is poor. The Primary Health Centre, built six years after resettlement, has three of five sanctioned doctors, all trainees with little experience. So, patients are redirected elsewhere for even slightly complicated complaints and for all first deliveries. The term “sub-standard settlements”, used to refer to slums, is ironically apt for these state-built colonies ostensibly intended to improve living conditions for slum-dwellers.
Social problems
•But physical conditions are only the tip of the iceberg. Delhi’s Bawana, Mumbai’s Mahul, and even Chennai’s Kannagi Nagar, now regarded as the queen of resettlement sites, are fearful places for parents of young children. Young boys are routinely chased, rounded up, beaten and incarcerated by the police under pressure to control crime. Rates of child marriage in Kannagi Nagar are high, as parents see marriage as the only way to protect daughters from sexual assault. Numerous instances of trafficking and kidnapping of girls are reported. The sale and abuse of drugs and alcohol, and the incidence of domestic abuse, theft, suicides and murders are much higher than in other parts of the city. Senior police officials and local school authorities confess helplessness. They ascribe these problems to broken livelihoods, economic stress and indebtedness, and to the effects of crowding lakhs of low-income residents from hundreds of city slums into a single substandard settlement.
•Resettlement colonies are simmering sites of discontent and despair. The rot in resettlement models must provoke a rethinking of this approach to building “slum-free cities”.
📰 Protect the great and small
States should have the final say in what is important for protection in the Schedule lists of the Wildlife Act
•As the Centre gathers inputs from the States on proposed amendments to the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the Act’s clunky Schedule lists, which do not seem to grasp the immensity of the country’s biodiversity, have been largely ignored in consultations.
•Over the years, the Wildlife Act has expanded the number of species given varying degrees of protection under its six Schedules: 184 animals in 1972 to over 909 entries of taxa of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants now. What has remained unchanged is the power of inclusion and exclusion, which lies with the Centre. The Schedule lists are critical as they determine anti-poaching regulations and even habitat protection, in part because diverting forest lands is difficult in areas where better-protected species are found.
•Ignoring, for now, the taxonomists’ nightmare of misspelt species names and seemingly random nomenclature employed, the lists continue to keep out scientific research that can match species to appropriate protection. Inconsistencies abound: Crimson rose, a colourful butterfly that is widely found in south India, remains as protected as the tiger, while the poorly understood, near-threatened striped hyena is in Schedule III along with “least concern” species of wild pig or barking deer. A majority of the 659 species of Indian endangered fish do not find mention; only an estimated quarter of the butterfly species have been represented; and 128 species of bats, including fruit bats, are considered vermin despite their significant role as pollinators.
•Even if the errors are addressed, do we need a pan-India list? What is endemic may not be rare, what is widespread elsewhere may be locally endangered, and what is endangered in one area may be a pest elsewhere. Shouldn’t States have the final say in what is important for protection within their myriad landscapes? Take, for instance, the dilemma of ecologists in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, where the British introduced deer and elephants over a century ago. The two protected species (Schedules III and I, respectively) have caused large-scale degradation of native vegetation and threaten other native animals and plants. Duly ranked in conservation value, local habitat loss, cultural significance, population decline, and constantly updated through local research, a multi-parameter list would be a far greater reflection of India’s biodiversity than a single Central legislation can ever hope to be.
•The process of inclusion can spawn environment movements around species hitherto under the shadows of the great mammals. This may be the fastest way to protect the critically endangered amboli toad, which is unlisted currently, or even get the Indian flying fox, considered an extension of the divine in southern villages, out of the vermin list.
📰 NPAs increasing, IBA tells panel
Seeks extension of the deadline for compliance with Basel III norms
•With non-performing assets (NPA) increasing and banks’ capital positions not improving despite the additional capital infused by the government in public sector banks, the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) told the Standing Committee on Finance that one way forward could be an extension of the deadline by which Indian banks have to comply with the Basel III norms.
•The data provided by the IBA on Monday showed that the ratio of gross NPAs to gross advances — basically a metric of bad loans — had grown from 2.36% by March 2011 to 4.11% in March 2014, and grew further to 10.41% by December 2017, the latest period for which data is available.
Quality review
•However, the IBA said this growth was also due to the Asset Quality Review conducted by the Reserve Bank of India, which revealed a lot of loans as NPAs, which were earlier classified as standard assets.
•That said, the association admitted that the NPA problem was getting worse.
•“After the recapitalisation announcement [by the government], in the subsequent quarters also the NPAs have increased,” the IBA said.
•“NPA is one of the major concerns for the banking system around the globe and the Indian banking system is not an exception to this universal phenomenon.”
•Among the ways forward to tackle this issue, along with the issue of shortage of capital with banks, was “extending the time frame for full implementation of Basel III” from the current deadline of March 2019, and “a realistic assessment of capital requirement of PSBs and need for further infusion of capital by promoters/owners.”
•The Basel III norms are international standards that lay strict requirements on banks’ equity and capital ratios.
•The RBI has been implementing the norms in a phased manner from April 2013, and they have to be fully implemented by March 31, 2019.
•The IBA also called for periodic visits to the borrowers’ business units for the verification of stocks, and the plant and machinery along with the “proper scrutiny of the quarterly financial statements and projections received from the borrower.”
•Another major issue it raised was the strain put on banks’ resources by the fast pace of technological advancement.
📰 News Analysis: In S-400 deal, U.S. is the elephant in the room
Officials remain cautious on future of deal for the advanced missile system amid warnings from Washington
•India’s ambitions to procure the Russian-developed S-400 Triumf long-range air-defence system has landed New Delhi right in the middle of global strategic complexities.
•The S-400 is a complex military system comprising several radars, command post, different types of missiles and launchers that can track several dozen incoming objects simultaneously from hundreds of kilometres away, launch counter-missiles within seconds and shoot them down with great efficiency.
•Given its advanced capabilities, the weapon system has added a new strategic angle to ongoing stand-offs around the world — in Syria, between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and in China and its neighbourhood.
•As the Defence Ministry prepares to present the procurement proposal for the S-400 systems before the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), officials are divided on whether New Delhi will push the deal through in the face of possible U.S. sanctions and warnings that it will adversely affect transfer of U.S. military technology.
•Government sources said New Delhi and Moscow have concluded the negotiations and the CCS note for a $5.5-billion deal is being drafted. However, one Indian Air Force source said he was not sure if New Delhi would defy Washington and sign up for the missile system. “Ideally, the deal should be ready for the annual summit between the PM and President Putin” in October, a senior official said.
•Douglas Barrie, Senior Fellow for Military Aerospace at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told The Hindu that concerns over the system were partly technical and partly political.
•“The S-400 (SA-21 Growler), when properly operated, is a potent medium-to-long-range surface-to-air missile system. To be most effective, however, it needs to be integrated with other air defence systems and components — such as radars — operated by the purchasing country. This however, presents problems if some of these have been bought from the U.S. or potentially other Western states, where the required levels of integration will not be possible because of security concerns,” Mr. Barrie said.
•Frank O’Donnell, of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and the Stimson Center’s South Asia program, however, said New Delhi was unlikely to be deterred from completing this purchase by the threat of U.S. sanctions.
•“Indeed, Washington will likely soon withdraw this threat and quietly acquiesce to the purchase once Indian diplomats have the opportunity to explain to their U.S. counterparts how the S-400 acquisition supports the U.S.-India shared goal of enhancing regional capabilities to deter Chinese aggression,” Mr. O’Donnell said.
•In recent days, senior U.S. functionaries have made clear their stand on India’s proposal. Congressman Mac Thornberry, Chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, said in New Delhi last week that there was a “lot of concern in the U.S., in both the Administration and [U.S.] Congress over the S-400 system.”
•Congressman Harry Cueller of House Appropriations Committee pointed out that India wants more technology sharing and co-production with the U.S. “The issue is: if we provide more technology and India buys the S-400, it raises concerns... it is about a third party and how they could access some of the technologies. We do have some concerns which we have conveyed at different levels in the Government,” he said.
•It is not just in India-U.S.-Russia relations that S-400 has become a contentious issue. It emerged last week that Saudi Arabia has threatened military action if its neighbour Qatar goes ahead with the proposal to acquire S-400 from Russia.
•The threat is part of communication between King Salman and the French President, according Le Monde newspaper. Qatar already under various sanctions by other Gulf states, because of its alleged funding of terrorism.
•S-400 deployment in the Syrian theatre and Turkey’s move to acquire them have all added new dimensions to the already complex global scenario.
📰 AAI to embark on study to assess capacity at 48 airports
Move part of strategic plan to cope with 636 million footfalls forecast for 2026-27
•With the rise in demand for air travel in the country expected to choke several key airports over the next few years, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) is set to embark on a study to assess the capacity at 48 of its airports.
•The AAI is in the process of selecting a consultant to conduct the survey, for which it had invited bids on June 1. The deadline to submit the initial bids ends on July 10. All the airports together handled a total of 309 million passengers in 2017-2018, while the current capacity of all these airports is 334 million. AAI has forecast a demand of approximately 636 million passengers by 2026-2027. “AAI is contemplating [an assessment of] the existing capacity of the terminal building at the airports … to initiate in advance the strategic action to cope with the forecast traffic, so as to provide required infrastructure and services to its stakeholders at all times,” said the tender document.
Target airports
•The airports where the study needs to be carried out include Ahmedabad, Pune and Goa, which handle between 5 million and 10 million passengers per annum.
•The airports at Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram and Bhubaneshwar too require to be studied, among others.
•According to a report by aviation think-tank CAPA, India needs to invest up to $45 billion on additional capacity to handle 500-600 million air passengers by 2030.
📰 A call to wage a war on plastic
With the theme “Beat Plastic Pollution”, India will be hosting UN World Environment Day 2018 on June 5
•For more than 25 years, Ram Nath has lived on the banks of the Yamuna River under a 19th-century iron bridge. Each morning, the wiry man walks a few steps from his makeshift hut and enters the black, sludgy waters of one of India’s most polluted rivers. He is fishing for trash. “This is the only work we have,” said the 40-year-old, sorting through a pile of plastic bottles, bags, and cast-off electronics.
•India, which hosts UN World Environment Day on June 5, can use all the help it can get. This year’s theme is “Beat Plastic Pollution.”
•With more than 15 million people, New Delhi and its surrounding cities produce an estimated 17,000 tons of trash dailyThat requires immense dumps, hills of stinking trash that measure up to 50 meters tall. “All these products which we use because of convenience take many hundreds of years” to even partially decompose, said Chitra Mukherjee, an environmental expert.
•Ms. Mukherjee, who has spent years creating localised efforts to curb plastic pollution credits the Central government for making waste management and pollution a more serious issue. “It is a collaborative effort between not only bureaucrats, but researchers and environmentalists,” she said.
Paper straw
•Some restaurants in New Delhi are doing away with plastic straws and replacing them with paper straws. That’s largely because of Aditya Mukarji, a student who launched his campaign after seeing a video of two veterinarians trying to remove a plastic straw from a turtle’s nose. “People listen more to children bringing up environmental concerns,” said Mukarji, who has helped replace more than 500,000 plastic straws at restaurants and hotels.
•If nothing else, India hosting the World Environment Day has made environmental protection a hot topic at least briefly in a country where trash is everywhere. Tuesday will see numerous official environmental gatherings across India, clean up campaigns along the Yamuna and mall food courts agreeing to forgo plastic plateware for one day.
•The hope is that everything doesn’t go back to normal on Wednesday.
