📰 Deserted wives, children entitled to alimony from date of application: Supreme Court
Apex court lays down guidelines for matrimonial cases.
•The Supreme Court on November 4 held that deserted wives and children are entitled to alimony/maintenance from the husbands from the date they apply for it in a court of law.
•In a significant judgment by a Bench of Justices Indu Malhotra and R. Subhash Reddy, the top court said women deserted by husbands were left in dire straits, often reduced to destitution, for lack of means to sustain themselves and their children.
•The 67-page judgment by Justice Malhotra laid down uniform and comprehensive guidelines for family courts, magistrates and lower courts to follow while hearing the applications filed by women seeking maintenance from their estranged husbands.
•The court said despite a plethora of maintenance laws, women were left empty-handed for years, struggling to make ends meet after a bad marriage.
Deprived of sustenance
•“The view that maintenance ought to be granted from the date when the application was made is based on the rationale that the primary object of maintenance laws is to protect a deserted wife and dependent children from destitution and vagrancy. If maintenance is not paid from the date of application, the party seeking maintenance would be deprived of sustenance, owing to the time taken for disposal of the application, which often runs into several years,” Justice Malhotra wrote.
•Usually maintenance cases have to be settled in 60 days, but they take years in reality owing to legal loopholes.
•To ensure that judicial orders for grant of maintenance are duly enforced by husbands, The court said a violation would lead to punishments such as civil detention and even attachment of the property of the latter. “The order or decree of maintenance may be enforced like a decree of a civil court, through the provisions which are available for enforcing a money decree,” Justice Malhotra wrote.
•“The plea of the husband that he does not possess any source of income ipso facto does not absolve him of his moral duty to maintain his wife, if he is able-bodied and has educational qualifications,” the court declared.
•Both the applicant wife and the respondent husband have to disclose their assets and liabilities in a maintenance case. Any earlier case filed or pending under any other law should also be revealed in court.
Education expenses
•The expenses of the children, including their education, basic needs and other vocational activities, should be factored in by courts while calculating the alimony. “Education expenses of the children must be normally borne by the father. If the wife is working and earning sufficiently, the expenses may be shared proportionately between the parties,” Justice Malhotra observed.Other factors such as “spiralling inflation rates and high costs of living” should be considered, but the wife should receive an alimony which fit the standard of life she was used to in the matrimonial home.
Permanent alimony
•The court opined it would not be equitable to order a husband to pay his wife permanent alimony for the rest of her life, considering the fact that in contemporary society marriages do not last for a reasonable length of time. Anyway, the court said, the duration of a marriage should be accounted for while determining the permanent alimony.
•The judgment was based on a matrimonial plea from Maharashtra on the question of payment of maintenance by a man to his wife and son under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The case had been dragging on for years.
•“Section 125 of the CrPC was conceived to ameliorate the agony, anguish, financial suffering of a woman who had left her matrimonial home, so that some suitable arrangements could be made to enable her to sustain herself and the children,” Justice Malhotra noted.
•The judgment reiterated that Section 125 of the CrPC would include couples living together for years within its ambit.
•“Strict proof of marriage should not be a pre-condition for grant of maintenance under Section 125 of the CrPC,” the court said.
ECI’s power to ensure a clean campaign should not be unduly abridged
•The Supreme Court’s stay on the revocation of the status of former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath as a ‘star campaigner’ for the Congress brings to the fore the power of the Election Commission of India and its role in ensuring a clean campaign. Chief Justice S.A. Bobde appeared convinced that the ECI has no such power, and ordered a stay on its order. Mr. Nath earned the ECI’s rebuke after a distasteful personal remark about a BJP woman candidate while campaigning for a by-election to the Madhya Pradesh Assembly recently. The Commission’s order dated October 30 said it was revoking his status as a leader of a political party (star campaigner). Section 77 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which relates to a candidate’s election expenditure, does leave it to the political party itself to decide who its “leaders” are and allows every party to submit a list of such ‘star campaigners’ to the election authorities. However, it should be noted that the ‘star campaigner’ status comes with a clear privilege: the expenditure incurred on the campaign done by those from the list of star campaigners is not included in the expenditure of the candidate concerned. In effect, an order of the ECI revoking the star status is actually a withdrawal of the right to campaign without incurring electoral expenditure on the candidates’ account.
•It stands to reason that the ECI, in exercise of its general and plenary power of control and direction over elections, ought to have the power to revoke the status of a campaigner, if there is an apparent breach of campaign norms or the Model Code of Conduct. After all, the star status ensures that some leaders can charter helicopters and travel extensively to cover more territory and constituencies without breaching any individual candidate’s spending limit. The ECI has cited the clause in the MCC that bars candidates from resorting to “criticism of all aspects of the private life, not connected with the public activities” of other leaders and party workers. Even though the model code is not statutory, it has been generally recognised that the election watchdog should have some means of enforcing its norms. In past orders, the ECI has cited the Supreme Court’s observation that when laws are absent, the ECI can invoke its residuary power to meet an infinite variety of situations that cannot be foreseen by lawmarkers. It is indeed debatable whether the ECI has been exercising its powers in an even-handed way in recent years. However, it is equally important that the ECI’s power to enforce poll norms and clean campaigns is not unduly abridged.
📰 Is linguistic nationalism on the wane?
There is a need to look beyond just symbolic, customary offerings to effectively revive Kannada
•At this time each year, there are raucous street celebrations of Rajyotsava in Karnataka, a commemoration of the day when the reorganised State came into being in 1956 (though it was known as Mysore until 1973). The red and yellow Karnataka flags fly high, street corners blast off iconic Kannada songs (‘naaniruvude nimagagi! naadiruvudu namagagi....’, among others) and people have the day off to participate in programmes around the city. Celebrations continue for the whole month, in which both the State and society are involved. This year, Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa declared that neither the token day nor month is good enough, and a whole year instead will be dedicated to the promotion of Kannada. But he does no more than echo the laments of the last three decades, which the Kannada Development Authority, set up in 1994, has done little to redress.
•This year, the spirit of Rajyotsava is definitely muted. The health terror that stalks our streets accounts only for a part of this lacklustre celebration, which is barely visible and audible. Apart from the Kannada press, English newspapers appear to have given the day a miss. A few red and yellow flags adorned the square in which Reverend Kittel’s statue stands in the heart of the city, an inconspicuous reminder of the missionary role in systematising Kannada grammar and producing a dictionary. A small posse of autorickshaws with flags attempts to infuse some spirit into the event, a 360-foot ‘Kannada bavuta’ is lifted high, but gigantism does not make up for the customary gaiety of the street corner — dominated by men of course — that is definitely missing.
•Instead, there is the annual hand-wringing about the urgency of building a robust contemporary language out of an undoubtedly well-established and hoary literary one, to keep up with science, and now the digital world. Clearly, the fight to declare Kannada as a classical language in 2008 did little to achieve this connect. Even the Kannada University, established in 1991, draws its formidable strength and influence from literary, folklore and cultural studies, rather than human and natural sciences.
Several distractions
•Are we then witnessing the exhaustion of regional and linguistic nationalism as political capital? There is a good reason to think so. Distractions abound, not the least of which are the worries posed by a severely damaged economy and two by-elections that are possibly going to change the fate of the current government.
•Events in the past year briefly raised spirits and the fervent hope that Karnataka will not become the Uttar Pradesh of the south. The calls for a Claims Commissioner in riots cases, for a law against ‘love jihad’, and for a branch of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Bengaluru since it has become a “terrorism hub”, are withering that hope.
•The prolonged and creative anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests, in different locations, built new and unusual publics; the more recent farmers’ agitation against both the State’s new land reform Act, and the Central Acts transforming the marketing of agricultural produce, which allied with Dalit and other civil society groups, were another silver lining. Now all that has taken second place against the gathering force of the demand for reservations within reservations. Not a day passes when one or the other caste or sub-caste — led by one or another mathadeesharu (head of matha) — raises the demand for (and in some rare cases, against) proportional representation in reservations.
•Gone too is the electrifying and unifying presence of a Rajkumar, whose formidable star power rallied the Kannada people — and not just in his famous Mayura (1975) song. He changed the fate of the Gokak Chaluvali, a movement that sought first language status for Kannada in schools, in 1982. Even Rajkumar’s kidnapping by the brigand Veerappan in 2000 mobilised mass empathy and support for the actor, if not the language.
•Today, Gandhinagar’s ‘sandalwood’, as the centre of the Kannada film industry is ironically called, is in disarray, buffeted by the challenges of the box office and emerging OTT platforms, weak and hackneyed story lines (contrast contemporary Kannada cinema with its old-style villains and heroes, and the vibrant experiments being undertaken in Malayalam and Tamil cinema), and now a full-fledged drug scandal, in which many actors and associates are being clapped in irons.
Class divide
•Kannada remains a beleaguered language in the State capital, Bengaluru, to which people from the entire country have flocked for jobs, education and opportunity. But it is not just the recent migrant over whom the language is unable to exert its hegemony. Its inferiorised status in everyday life stems from the long-held belief that the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the city has freed middle-class migrants of any obligation of learning the local language (the working-class migrant can afford no such luxury). Thus, Bengaluru must be the only city in the country where people thrive as academics, business people, journalists, teachers, and salespersons, without acquiring even a smattering of Kannada. “How come you read Kannada!” is the oddly rhetorical question that many, including friends for decades, ask when they spot a book or newspaper in the language in my house, asserting its furtive presence in the middle-class home. No government action or programme can compensate for this profound diffidence.
•Bengaluru also must be the only city in the country where the local (again largely working-class) takes pride in speaking several languages, including those of most of its immigrants. It is the only Indian city — and I have lived in many — where even those who know the language feel offended if you spoke to them in Kannada, doing their best to reply in English.
•Grievously damaged by the widespread desire for, and market in, English, and the inability to counter that tsunami with just a few ritual offerings per year, hopes of Kannada gaining self-confidence, even dominance, will be realised only when it sheds some of its addictions to symbolism alone.
•The Karnataka Rakshana Vedike (and other Kannada organisations and even Opposition leaders) have taken umbrage at the significant absence of the Karnataka flag at the official functions on November 1 — to them, this is a sign of federal courtesies being violated.
•But is this, or the long-lasting damage that the GST fiasco has foisted on States, the more alarming sign of federal protocols being undermined? Is it better jobs for all, refurbished and reliable health care, and improved primary education, that States should take pride in, or symbolic bike rallies, that will rebuild some of the developmental achievements for which Karnataka was once justly known?
📰 Fixing the rules of the economy
The fundamentals of the game have to change as they currently favour wealthy investors and not workers and tiny enterprises
•India has an incomes crisis: incomes of people in the lower half of the pyramid are too low. The solutions economists propose are: free up markets, improve productivity, and apply technology. These fundamentals of economics must be re-examined when applied to human work.
Three solutions
•Economists say markets should be freed up for agricultural products so that farmers can get higher prices; and freed up for labour to attract investments. Without adequate incomes, people cannot be a good market for businesses. In fact, it is the inadequate growth of incomes that has caused a slump in investments. Ironically, the purpose of freeing up markets for labour is to reduce the burden of wage costs on investors just when wages and the size of markets must be increased.
•Human rights must prevail over economic considerations. Good markets enable smooth transactions between buyers and sellers of commodities. However, humans are not commodities, like agricultural produce and minerals are. Humans must not be put up for sale to the highest bidders which was the practice in slave markets. Human rights activists fought a long, hard battle to abolish the abhorrent idea that humans can be considered as commodities in markets.
•Improvement of ‘productivity’ is key to economic progress. Productivity is a ratio of an input in the denominator and an output in the numerator. The larger the output that is produced with a unit of input, the higher the productivity of the system. Economists generally use labour productivity as a universal measure of the productivity of an economy. The number of people in the system (the country/the economy) is the denominator, and the gross domestic product the people produce is the numerator. Companies also measure their productivity similarly, by dividing the total output of the enterprise by the numbers of workers employed.
•Companies can apply two broad strategies for improving their productivity. They can take the managerially more difficult route of increasing the total output of the factory while maintaining the number of workers. This may require adding more machines and technology to supplement the capacity of workers to increase total output. This is a good strategy for capital-rich enterprises and countries.
•Alternatively, employers can enhance their workers’ skills and create a culture of continuous improvement in the factory, whereby workers and managers cooperate to improve the capability of their system, and squeeze more output from limited capital resources. This is the strategy of ‘total quality management’, with which Japanese companies reduced their costs and improved the quality of their products in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming the most competitive enterprises in the world. The Japanese companies had lifetime employment contracts with their workers. They invested in their workers; and the workers — the companies’ ‘appreciating assets’ — grew their capabilities as well as contributed to the improvement of the total productivity of their enterprises.
•Humans are the only ‘appreciating assets’ an enterprise has. They can improve their own abilities. The values of machines and buildings depreciate over time, as any accountant knows. Whereas human beings develop when they are treated with respect, and are provided with environments to learn.
•The lazy management strategy for improving productivity is to reduce the denominator, i.e. the number of workers. Hire them when times are good, and fire them when the company cannot compete any more. Governments of countries cannot apply the ‘hire and fire’ strategy to improve a nation’s productivity that companies can. A company can fire people it is not able to use productively any more. They are off the company’s accounts. The company’s owners hope someone else will take care of them. Such ‘used and discarded workers’ are no longer their responsibility.
•However, if a country is not productive, in terms of GDP per unit of population, its government does not have the luxury of firing citizens. Where will they go? Who will take care of them? In desperation, they may try to migrate to other countries, which are reluctant to have them because they will have to provide them with productive jobs when there are not enough jobs for their own citizens.
•For capital-scarce and human resource-abundant countries, such as many developing countries, the correct ratio of productivity is output per unit of capital. This must be the driver of business as well as national strategies. This was the strategy of ‘Japan Inc.’ to make Japan an industrial powerhouse. This was E.F. Schumacher’s insight also.
•Schumacher, best known for his seminal idea ‘small is beautiful’ (and his book with the same title), was an economist ahead of his time. He understood where capitalism powered with technology would be heading. In his essay, ‘Industrialisation through Intermediate Technology’, published by the journal Resurgence in 1966, he wrote: “If we define the level of technology in terms of ‘equipment cost per work-place’, we can call the indigenous technology of a typical developing country (symbolically speaking) a £1-technology, while that of the modern West could be called a £1,000-technology. The current attempt of the ‘developing ‘countries, supported by foreign aid, to infiltrate the £1,000-technology into their economies inevitably kills off the £1-technolgy at an alarming rate, destroying traditional workplaces at a much faster rate than modern workplaces can be created and producing the ‘dual economy’ with its attendant evils of mass unemployment and mass migration”. Schumacher had warned there was a malaise brewing beneath the drive to ‘Westernise’ and ‘technologise’ economies. The harsh lockdown of the economy in India to prevent the spread of COVID-19 caused the malaise to spill out for everyone to see.
The social contract
•A good job implies a contract between workers and society. Workers provide the economy with the products and services it needs. In return, society and the economy must create conditions whereby workers are treated with dignity and can earn adequate incomes. Good jobs require good contracts between workers and their employers. Therefore, the government, to discharge its responsibility to create a good society for all citizens, and not only for investors, must regulate contracts between those who engage people to do work for their enterprises, even in the gig economy.
•The economist Dani Rodrik, an authority on industrial policy and international trade, advocates reforms that will induce firms to employ more numbers of less skilled workers. He says, to increase productivity of firms, “too often they [governments] subsidise labour-replacing, capital-intensive technologies, rather than pushing innovation in socially more beneficial directions to augment rather than replace less skilled workers.”
•A turbo-charged, financial globalisation has made life very easy for migrant capital, while making the lives of migrant workers more precarious. The power to fix the rules of the game has become concentrated with wealthy investors and large multinational corporations. The rules do not favour workers and tiny enterprises because they have too little power. Large enterprises employ fewer people within their own organisations; therefore, labour unions have lost their traditional support bases. The power balance must shift. Small enterprises and workers must combine into larger associations, in new forms, using technology, to tilt reforms towards their needs and their rights.
📰 The financial capacity of States is being weakened
Through various means the Union government has substantially reduced the fiscal resource capacity of the States
•State governments drive a majority of the country’s development programmes. Greater numbers of people depend on these programmes for their livelihood, development, welfare and security. Varied economic growth and income levels across States confirm the primacy of State governments in the economic sphere as well. States need resources to deliver these responsibilities and aspirations. Unfortunately, the financial capacity of the States is structurally being weakened.
•The ability of the States to expand revenue has been constrained since the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime was adopted. The Centre’s resource mobilisation space vis-a-vis that of the States is now far greater. While both face a very challenging fiscal environment, the Centre, instead of finding mutually beneficial solutions, has repeatedly opted to undermine the current and future fiscal capacities of the States. It has systematically cut the share of States in taxes raised by the Union government (devolutions), it has reduced the pool of funds to be shared with the States by shifting from taxes to cesses and surcharges, and it is needlessly thrusting measly options to overcome the GST shortfall.
Declining devolution
•Finance Commissions recommend the share of States in the taxes raised by the Union government. Their recommendations are normally adhered to. But the current Union government has discarded this constitutional obligation. Prior to 2014, devolution of funds to the States were consistently and cumulatively more than 13th Finance Commission’s projections. The year 2014-15 commenced with a shock: actual devolution was 14% less than the Finance Commission’s projection. Subsequent devolutions have been consistently less every year, ending the period 2019-20 with a whopping -37%. Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, the States got ₹7,97,549 crore less than what was projected by the Finance Commission. This is an undeniable and substantial reduction of the fiscal resource capacity of the States.
Shrinking the divisible pool
•Various cesses and surcharges levied by the Union government are retained fully by it. They do not go into the divisible pool. This allows the Centre to raise revenues, yet not share them with the States. Hence, the Union government imposes or increases cesses and surcharges instead of taxes wherever possible and, in some cases, even replaces taxes with cesses and surcharges. When taxes are replaced with cesses and surcharges, as has been done repeatedly by this government in the case of petrol and diesel, the consumer pays the same price. But the Union government keeps more of that revenue and reduces the size of the divisible pool. As a result, the States lose out on their share. Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, cesses and surcharges soared from 9.3% to 15% of the gross tax revenue of the Union government. This systematic rise ensures that the revenue that is fully retained by the Union government increases at the cost of the revenue that is shared with the States. In 2019-20 alone, the Union government expected ₹3,69,111 crore from cesses and surcharges. This will not be shared with the States. This government has exploited this route to reduce the size of the divisible pool.
GST shortfall
•Shortfalls have been persistent and growing from the inception of GST. Compensations have been paid from the GST cess revenue. GST cesses are levied on luxury or sin goods on top of the GST. Such cesses have justification independent of compensation needs. These are, and will be, levied irrespective of compensation needs. GST compensation will end with 2021-22. But cesses will continue.
•During 2019-20, the cess collected was ₹95,444 crore. With the abnormal exception of this year, the years ahead will generate similar or more cess revenue. This assured cess revenue, within the GST, can meet any contingency needs, even of an “act of God”, without burdening the Centre or the State governments. Hence, many States have been insisting outside and inside the GST Council that the Union government should borrow this year’s GST shortfall in full and release it to the States. The Union government will not have to pay a rupee of this debt or interest. The entire loan can be repaid out of the assured cess revenue that will continue to accrue beyond 2022. Of the nearly ₹3 lakh crore GST shortfall to the States, the Centre will only compensate ₹1.8 lakh crore. The States will not get the remaining ₹1.2 lakh crore this year. This cut is being imposed for no reason. In fact, it flies against the need of the hour to revive the economy. Governments ought to spend money this year to stimulate demand.
•Apart from the streams discussed above, Central grants are also likely to drop significantly this year. For instance,₹31,570 crore was allocated as annual grants to Karnataka. Actual grants may be down to ₹17,372 crore.
•Due to the combined effect of cutbacks in devolution, the shrinking divisible pool, failure to pay full GST compensation this year and fall in Central grants, the States may experience a fall of 20%-25% in their revenues this year. To overcome such extreme blows to their finances and discharge their welfare and development responsibilities, the States are now forced to resort to colossal borrowings. Repayment burden will overwhelm State budgets for several years. As we peer into the years ahead, after paying loans and interest, salaries and pensions, and establishment expenses, what will really be available for development and welfare? The fall in funds for development and welfare programmes will adversely impact the livelihoods of crores of Indians. The economic growth potential cannot be fully realised. Adverse consequences will be felt in per capita income, human resource development and poverty. This is a negative sum game.
•States are at the forefront of development and generation of opportunities and growth. Strong States lead to a stronger India. The systematic weakening of States serves neither federalism nor national interest.
