📰 Sexual crimes: SC places total bar on media disclosing victims' names, identity
Only Special Courts under POCSO can permit the disclosure of the identity of a minor victim, that too, only if such divulgence were in the interest of the child
•The Supreme Court on December 11 laid down an absolute bar on the media to publish or air the names or any material which may even remotely reveal the identity of victims of sexual crimes.
•“No person can print or publish in print, electronic, social media, etc. the name of the victim or even in a remote manner disclose any facts which can lead to the victim being identified and which should make her identity known to the public at large. The bar extends to anything which can even remotely be used to identify the victim,” a Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta laid down the rule in their judgment.
•The court held that the bar on disclosure under Section 228A(2) of the IPC was not confined to just the name of the victim but actually meant that the “identity of the victim should not be discernible from any matter published in the media”.
•“The intention of the lawmakers was that the victim of such offences should not be identifiable so that they do not face any hostile discrimination or harassment in the future,” Justice Gupta, who authored the verdict, observed.
•The apex court further held the name and identity of a victim who was either dead or of unsound mind should also not be disclosed even under the authorisation of the next of the kin. Any exception to this rule should be decided by the competent authority, the Sessions Judge.
•The court was not impressed by arguments that the identity of a dead victim of sexual crime should be revealed as it would become a “symbol of protest or treated as an iconic figure”.
•“All of us are fully aware that without disclosing her true identity ‘Nirbhaya’ became the most effective symbol of protest the country has ever known. If a campaign has to be started to protect the rights of the victim and mobilise public opinion it can be done so without disclosing her identity,” Justice Gupta reasoned.
•The Supreme Court barred the police from putting in public domain FIRs under Sections 376 to 376E (the range of sexual offences under IPC) and those under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
•The documents disclosing identity of a victim should be kept in a sealed cover. Authorities to which a victim’s identity was disclosed by an investigating agency or the court are duty bound to keep it a secret. A victim need not reveal her identity while filing an appeal in a criminal court, the judgment held.
•Only Special Courts under POCSO can permit the disclosure of the identity of a minor victim, that too, only if such divulgence were in the interest of the child.
•The court finally urged States and Union Territories to set up at least one ‘one-stop centre’ in every district within a year to support women affected by violence of any nature.
📰 Providing health for all
Japan and India are exchanging ideas and expertise in many projects to promote universal health coverage
•Today, on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Day, I wonder how many readers are aware of what UHC is. According to the World Health Organisation, UHC means “ensuring that everyone, everywhere can access essential quality health services without facing financial hardship”. It sounds basic, yet the basics often pose a major challenge. Japan has been leading the international efforts towards UHC, including its inclusion in the sustainable development goals and G20 agenda under our chairmanship next year, because health is one of our fundamental rights.
•India has taken the vital first step towards UHC through Ayushman Bharat. This challenge is reminiscent of the path that Japan took more than half a century ago. Japan created national health insurance coverage in 1961, when it was yet to take off economically. A major political decision was required to expand national health insurance and establish medical schools all over Japan. The implementation of UHC could only have been possible through an early and vast national investment, and through a comprehensive government effort, with the Ministries of Health, Finance and Education, as well as local governments, working together.
•This investment has paid off. UHC has increased the number of healthy people and healthy workers in Japan. It has contributed to the economic miracle of Japan. Moreover, UHC has ensured social equity by functioning as a mechanism for redistribution of incomes. Even in the remotest of places in Japan, you do not have to worry about healthcare. The peace of mind which UHC ensures to the Japanese is an indispensable ingredient of our overall well-being.
•We are also partnering with India in wide-ranging projects for better healthcare. Japan has previously worked with India to eradicate polio in India. Today, Japanese and Indian doctors are exchanging ideas and expertise at a research and control centre on diarrhoea established by Japan in Kolkata, and precious lives of newborns are being saved daily in a children’s hospital constructed in Chennai. In 17 cities across Tamil Nadu, urban healthcare systems are being strengthened with our cooperation.
•When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Japan at the end of October, India and Japan signed a new Memorandum of Cooperation on healthcare to pursue the synergies between Ayushman Bharat and Japan’s Asia Health and Wellbeing Initiative. We aim to pursue our cooperation in various fields, such as honing skills of doctors in surgery of trauma as well as providing technical training for Indian nurses studying in Japanese caregiving facilities. We hope these efforts will lead to a better health ecosystem and the promotion of UHC in India. Japan is also willing to learn from India. For instance, Ayurveda can bring a new dimension to Japan’s healthcare system. The path towards UHC is not short. But India has taken the first bold step, and Japan will march along with India on this path, sharing its lessons, as a friend.
📰 U.S. hearing on religious freedom in India postponed due to ‘overwhelming response’
We want to be able to accommodate more attendees and participants, says official
•A bipartisan hearing on religious freedom in India, scheduled for Wednesday, has been postponed due to an “overwhelming response” from stakeholders. The hearing, titled, Freedom of Religion or Belief in India: Rising Challenges & New Opportunities for U.S. Policy was announced on December 4 by its organisers, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan , independent federal government commission.
•The hearing had to be, “rescheduled for May 13th due to the overwhelming response we received. We want to be able to accommodate more attendees and participants,” Kellie Boyle, of Boyle Public Affairs and in charge of the USCIRF’s communications, told The Hindu via email on Monday.
•The 2018 USCIRF Annual Report placed India in Tier 2 which is a list of nations “in which the violations engaged in or tolerated by the government during 2017 are serious and characterised by at least one of the elements of the ‘systematic, ongoing, and egregious’ CPC [ country of particular concern or a Tier 1 country] standard.” India has been in this category as per the Commission since 2009. Other countries in the category for 2018 were Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, and Turkey.
•“…in 2017 actors tied to Hindu extremist groups regularly harassed, intimidated, and perpetrated violence against Hindu Dalits, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. Anti-conversion and anti-cow slaughter laws were routinely used to discriminate against religious minorities or as a pretext for extrajudicial violence…These and similar issues have continued in 2018,” USCIRF says on its website as part of the reasoning for holding a hearing, which will hear from “witnesses representing a broad array of perspectives” about India.
•“As the world’s largest democracy, India has claim to a noble tradition of interreligious harmony, Ahimsa, tolerance and pluralism that is being threatened today,” USCIRF Chair, Tenzin Dorjee, originally a Tibetan refugee from India said.
•Ms. Boyle said a new date had to be picked keeping the schedules of eight USCIRF commissioners in mind in addition to the scale of the response.
•“We just want to be as inclusive as possible in this process,” she said to The Hindu over the phone on Wednesday. Ms Boyle also confirmed that that “there was no consideration of the annual report [USCIRF’s report published each year on May 1] or India’s election when the hearing was postponed.”
📰 Shaktikanta Das appointed as RBI Governor
Former Economics Affairs Secretary was a vocal proponent of demonetisation
•A day after the sudden resignation of Governor Urjit Patel, the Modi administration on Tuesday appointed former bureaucrat Shaktikanta Das as the 25th Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) at a time when the government and the central bank are apparently locked in a tussle over several important issues.
•“The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved the appointment of Shri Shaktikanta Das, IAS Retd., former Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, as Governor, Reserve Bank of India for a period of three years,” read the notification issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) on Tuesday.
•A veteran bureaucrat who served as Secretary Revenue and subsequently Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance, Mr. Das is currently a member of the Fifteenth Finance Commission and represents India at the G-20 in a role of a sherpa. He is a 1980 batch IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre.
‘Enjoys govt. trust’
•“He is trusted by the top people in the government, hence his selection to head the central bank at such a crucial and delicate period,” a top source in the government told The Hindu.
•Insiders in the government said there was a strong view in the PMO and the Finance Ministry to put a retired bureaucrat in charge at the central bank instead of hiring career economists like Raghuram Rajan or his successor Urjit Patel.
•Those favouring a bureaucrat cited examples of Dr. D. Subbarao and Y.V. Reddy earlier.
📰 Never waste a good crisis
The situation created by Urjit Patel’s resignation should be used to push through much-needed reforms
•Among the quintessential traits of a central banker is to be unpredictable in action so that the markets can be kept guessing. Urjit Patel exhibited this quality in ample measure when he announced his decision to walk out of his job as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday.
•His resignation caught everyone by surprise, including the markets which had been lulled into believing that the spat between the central bank and the Centre had been amicably resolved. The rumours of him resigning, which were doing the rounds before the last meeting of the RBI central board three weeks ago, had died down. He had chaired the Monetary Policy Committee meeting just last week and also a meeting of the Board for Financial Supervision that discussed the issue of Prompt and Corrective Action on some banks.
Governance issue
•So, what went wrong suddenly? Given that Dr. Patel has not offered any clues in his resignation letter, we can only speculate. The one important issue that remained on the table after the November board meeting was of the central bank’s governance and autonomy. Interestingly, in the days following the meeting, there were reports of how the Centre was planning to push for board committees that would supervise specific areas of the central bank’s operations. Such a move would have compromised the Governor’s position and curtailed his operational freedom. Was this the proverbial last straw for Dr. Patel?
•We’ll never know unless he chooses to write about this in his memoirs. But it is disappointing that he chose the easier option of walking away over standing up and fighting for the institution. This is a battle between the government and the central bank, not between individuals representing the two sides. But sadly, Dr. Patel seems to have taken the Centre’s push as a personal affront.
•It is not as if RBI Governors have never had serious run-ins with the government before. But they were always handled quietly behind the scenes and the only way that the public ever got to know of these episodes was when RBI Governors wrote memoirs. This time was different though.
Ill-advised escalation
•In late October, Deputy Governor Viral Acharya made an explosive speech, which, in retrospect, was a needless escalation. In that speech, Dr. Acharya cautioned that governments that disregard the autonomy of central banks risk incurring the wrath of the markets. There are those who believe that the RBI had no option left after the Centre began consultations under Section 7 of the RBI Act, which empowers the Centre to direct the RBI to act as per its instructions. Yet, all that the speech achieved was to harden the Centre’s stance. It upset the delicate balance between the RBI and the Centre. Though, as the sovereign, it holds the ultimate authority, by convention the Centre has granted a certain autonomy to the RBI in its functioning.
•The main point of friction between the two — on monetary policy — was also addressed through the introduction of the Monetary Policy Committee two years ago by amending the RBI Act. In effect, an important thread in the relationship was institutionalised and the personal element was taken out, precisely to avoid situations such as the current one.
•It is true that the Centre has been more assertive in its relationship with the RBI in recent times, but it has some genuine grievances such as on the issue of providing liquidity for non-banking finance companies and a less stringent capital norms regime for banks. As the political executive, the Centre obviously feels that it is responsible for ensuring that there is no freeze in the credit markets. There is nothing wrong with that. The central bank, however, is more conservative. The last thing that it wants is to create another bad loans environment just as it is beginning to get out of an earlier mess. And there is nothing wrong with this either. The fact is that both sides were working with the right intentions and reasons, and given this, it should not have been impossible to find a middle road behind closed doors.
•Added to this is the Centre’s grouse that the RBI was found wanting in its supervision role. The Punjab National Bank fiasco and the IL&FS collapse both happened right under the nose of the RBI, which is supposed to have conducted regular inspections of both entities. Neutral observers have also pointed to these lapses.
•That said, the Centre deserves blame for pushing the Governor into a corner. It was probably too aggressive in pushing its ever-growing agenda. At last count, there were at least six issues that it had raised with the central bank for resolution, all of them profound. It may have pointed to the nuclear button of Section 7 but Dr. Patel has had the last laugh.
•His resignation has queered the pitch for the Centre, which is now scrambling for non-existent defences. The outgoing Governor’s resignation has trained the spotlight so sharply on the festering issues between the RBI and the Centre that it is extremely difficult for his successor, Shaktikanta Das, to act on any of them in favour of the latter, even if it is merited. Seen from this angle, the Centre has probably shot itself in its foot.
The road ahead
•The damage is now done, but what’s the road ahead? The crisis points to several reforms that are needed in the RBI and changes in its equation with the Centre. As former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan points out in his book, we need a clearer enunciation of the central bank’s responsibilities. The position of the RBI Governor in the government hierarchy is not defined clearly. “There is a danger in keeping the position ill-defined because the constant effort of the bureaucracy is to whittle down its power,” argues Dr. Rajan.
•Not just this, the personal element in decision-making in the RBI has to be taken out and replaced by an institutional mechanism, much like the MPC did in the case of monetary policy. The reference of the reserves sharing issue to a committee is one such idea where there will be little scope for the Governor to act on his own just as the government too cannot exert pressure on him.
•Never waste a good crisis, said Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff. After having created the crisis, the least that the Centre can now do is to use it to reform the system.
📰 Water traces found on asteroid Bennu
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe found hydrogen and oxygen molecules embedded on its rocky surface
•NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has discovered ingredients for water on a nearby skyscraper-sized asteroid, a rocky acorn-shaped object that may hold clues to the origins of life on the earth, scientists said on Monday.
•OSIRIS-REx, which flew last week within a scant 19 km of the asteroid Bennu some 2.25 million km from the earth, found traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules — part of the recipe for water and thus the potential for life — embedded in the asteroid’s rocky surface.
•The probe, on a mission to return samples from the asteroid to the earth for study, was launched in 2016. Bennu orbits the Sun at roughly the same distance as the earth.
•There is concern among scientists about the possibility of Bennu impacting the earth late in the 22nd century.
•“We have found the water-rich minerals from the early solar system,” planetary scientist Dante Lauretta from the University of Arizona, who is also OSIRIS-REx mission’s principal investigator, said.
•Asteroids are among the leftover debris from the solar system’s formation some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe asteroids and comets crashing into early earth may have delivered organic compounds and water that seeded the planet for life, and atomic-level analysis of samples from Bennu could provide key evidence to support that hypothesis.
Sample collection
•“When samples of this material are returned by the mission to the earth in 2023, scientists will receive a treasure trove of new information about the history and evolution of our solar system,” Amy Simon, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.
•“We’re really trying to understand the role that these carbon-rich asteroids played in delivering water to the earth and making it habitable,” Ms. Lauretta added.
•OSIRIS-REx will pass later this month just 1.9 km from Bennu, entering the asteroid’s gravitational pull and analysing its terrain. From there, the spacecraft will begin to gradually tighten its orbit around the asteroid, spiralling to within 2 meters of its surface so its robot arm can snatch a sample of Bennu by July 2020. The spacecraft will later fly back to the earth, jettisoning a capsule bearing the asteroid specimen in September 2023.
