📰 Protection from imports is time bound: NITI Aayog
India will respect multilateral trading frameworks
•Any tariff protection to promote local manufacturing in India will come with an in-built sunset clause, NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar said on Friday, asserting that the country’s self-reliance mission must not be equated to it becoming a ‘protectionist’ and closed economy.
•The government is set to extend the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, medical devices and electronics announced under the AtmaNirbhar Bharat package to six more sectors, he said.
•“We will pursue self-reliance; we will want to give our domestic entrepreneurs the best situations to go forward. We will, while attracting FDI, also repose our faith and trust in those who have already invested in India. We want to recognise them by giving them much better logistics, infrastructure and more flexibility in the use of land and labour,” he said.
•Explaining the rationale for the PLI schemes that, he said, will soon become valid for ‘nine to 10’ sectors from four at present, Mr. Kumar said this is meant to incentivise investors already in the country to put up globally comparable capacities in scale and competitiveness.
•He emphasised that India’s efforts towards self-reliance were not dissimilar to what other nations are doing to insulate themselves from global supply chain shocks and revive the economy.
‘In global context’
•“But it will be done in a global context. It will be done with India remaining open and trying to regain its share in global and regional production chains, it will be done with respect to rule-bound multilateral trading orders. It will not imply in any sense any form of isolation, closed economy or protectionism,” he said.
•Mr. Kumar added that the country will do its best to increase the share of trade in its gross domestic product (GDP).
•“If there is any support given to domestic enterprises, it will all be targeted towards creating globally competitive capacities and any support that we give them through tariffs would have an in-built sunset clause. I wanted to emphasise India’s commitment to a global economy with open order,” Mr. Kumar said in an address to the Confederation of Asia-Pacific Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
•The government recently barred the import of several products, ranging from split air-conditioners to certain types of TVs while imposing higher import duties or curbs on other items.
As per the extant law, bonus dues are barred only in case of employees dismissed for fraud, violent conduct and theft or sabotage.
•Those indulging in sexual harassment of any form could run the risk of losing out on bonus dues from their employers, thanks to a provision in the Code on Wages that the government is currently framing rules for.
•Among other things, the Code on Wages lays down norms for annual bonus dues that accrue to employees, replacing the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965. The new Code, expected to become operational once the government notifies the rules, includes ‘conviction for sexual harassment’ as a ground for denying bonus payouts to employees.
•As per the extant law, bonus dues are barred only in case of employees dismissed for fraud, violent conduct and theft or sabotage.
•“This is a brilliant nudge to get people to be on their best behaviour in the workplace,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and executive vice-president of Teamlease Services Limited.
•“The prospect of losing one’s benefits may make employees more careful of their conduct and they should be made aware of this provision. Money is important to everyone, after all, so this serves as an additional deterrent apart from the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) law of 2013,” she said.
•As per the POSH law guidelines, firms are required to form an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) to inquire into complaints of sexual harassment at the workplace. The Committee is required to make recommendations to employers on the action required pursuant to its inquiry in such complaints.
•“If the ICC upholds a complaint, it could be construed as a conviction,” Ms Chakraborty said, adding that the ICC has the powers to decide if someone is guilty and report it further to the police, though not all sexual harassment cases translate into a police case.
•Calling this a step forward towards creating seriousness towards instances of sexual harassment, Anshul Jain, partner at PwC told The Hindu: “The rules under the Code on Wages should clarify whether the conviction would cover cases of outcomes of the investigation by the Internal Complaints Committee arriving at a conclusion to pay compensation to the victim or not.”
•Interestingly, while the other disqualification triggers for withholding bonus dues, like theft and violent conduct are explicitly restricted to actions on an employer's premises of the employer, the trigger referring to conviction under sexual harassment doesn’t include such a condition about the location of the incident.
•“At this point, it is not clear if sexual harassment incidents or related crimes against women outside the workplace could lead to dismissal of employees with loss of bonus payments. But yes, harassing a co-worker irrespective of where it is done, should come under this provision's purview,” said a labour law consultant, requesting anonymity.
•“Notwithstanding anything contained in this Code, an employee shall be disqualified from receiving bonus under this Code, if he is dismissed from service for –– fraud; or riotous or violent behaviour while on the premises of the establishment; or theft, misappropriation or sabotage of any property of the establishment; or conviction for sexual harassment,” section 29 of the Code on Wages states.
•The minimum bonus payable under the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 is 8.33% of the salary or wage earned by the employee during the accounting year subject to a maximum of 20% of such salary or wage and is applicable to all employees earning a salary of upto Rs 21,000 a month. The salary and bonus payment limits are yet to be notified under the Code on Wages.
•Under the POSH Act, sexual harassment includes any one or more of the following unwelcome acts or behavior (whether directly or by implication) — physical contact and advances; a demand or request for sexual favours; making sexually coloured remarks; showing pornography; or any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of sexual nature.
📰 As prices soar, NAFED to import onions
Overseas buying by private traders to touch 32,000 tonnes by Diwali
•The central cooperative NAFED will soon begin importing onions in a bid to tame soaring prices, Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Piyush Goyal said on Friday. The government is already facilitating import of the kitchen staple by private traders, with 7,000 tonnes of the bulb already having arrived in the country, and another 25,000 tonnes expected to arrive before Diwali.
•In the week since the Centre imposed stock limits, invoking the provisions of the newly amended Essential Commodities Act, the all-India average retail price of onions has continued to rise, increasing by ₹10 to almost ₹66 per kg, although Mr. Goyal emphasised that prices have largely remained stable over the last three days. Apart from imports, he expressed the hope that the expected arrival of the new kharif crop next month would also help to cool down prices.
Dwindling buffer
•Although NAFED had created a buffer stock of one lakh tonnes from the rabi crop, from which it has been releasing stock into retail markets directly and through State governments, it has already disposed of 40%, and another 25% is expected to be lost to damp and rot. The Central cooperative agency will soon commence import of onions as well, Mr. Goyal told journalists.
•Onions are already being bought from Egypt, Afghanistan and Turkey by private traders at market rates, with the Directorate General of Foreign Trade facilitating import by waiving quarantine and fumigation requirements. Onion exports were banned last month, and exports of onion seeds were also prohibited on Thursday.
•With regard to the other staple, potatoes, where all-India retail average prices are hovering around the ₹42 per kg mark, Mr. Goyal said that 30,000 tonnes have been imported from Bhutan. Import duties have been cut from 30% to 10% until the end of January.
Paddy procurement
•In his first press conference after taking charge of the Ministry, Mr. Goyal said record paddy procurement was expected this year, with a projected increase of 18% from last year. He pointed to this as proof that government procurement at minimum support prices would not be affected by the new agriculture reform laws, and dismissed ongoing farmers protests against these laws, as “a last-ditch, vain effort by certain vested interests and political parties in one State.”
•With regard to NAFED’s scheme to procure apples from Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Goyal claimed that the scheme had managed to reach only 1% of its 13 lakh tonne target last year because “J&K farmers had got a better price in the market, so they had no need for procurement”.
•Nevertheless, NAFED has set an ambitious target of 12 lakh tonnes this year as well, as a “backstop measure”, so that farmers can sell to the Central agency if they fail to get a good price from the market, he said.
•Mr. Goyal confirmed that a proposal to transfer the Bureau of Indian Standards from the Consumer Affairs Ministry to the Commerce Ministry was “under deliberation”. Earlier, Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan had not been keen on such a proposal. However, Mr. Goyal is now responsible for both ministries.
📰 Science of monsoons: On need for better forecast
India needs better science to prepare more effective disaster management plans
•The southwest monsoon 2020 has officially drawn to an end with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declaring a withdrawal of the associated winds and rainfall pattern from India on Wednesday. The over 8% surplus this year has surpassed the IMD’s estimates. For the first time since 2010, India got more than 100% of its long period average (LPA) of 88 cm in consecutive years. Last year the country saw record rainfall of 110% of the LPA, the highest in a quarter century. India has never got over 105% of the LPA in consecutive years in at least 30 years, according to records available since 1988 on the IMD website. Meteorologists often speak of two or three decade ‘epochs’ of rainfall variation. Since 2000, India was in a low patch with several drought years and had barely a handful of above normal or excess rainfall. In that light, the two years of a munificent monsoon could signal a possible return to a rainy epoch. While it could mean more rain, it also implies floods, overflowing dams, landslides and loss of lives. Moreover, surplus rains are not evenly distributed in time and space. Therefore, much like there are attempts to improve flood forecast warnings — especially the short-term ones — there ought to be commensurate efforts by authorities and infrastructure agencies to prepare for the environmental and ecological impact of excess rain. This year the IMD undertook a long-due revision of the onset and withdrawal dates of the monsoon in India. By this reckoning, the monsoon’s normal withdrawal date was October 15. Historically, this has always been a statistical average and the actual withdrawal is usually within a few days of this. However, this year the withdrawal has been extremely delayed. Factoring in these changes must become a key part of a State and city’s disaster management preparedness.
•The southwest monsoon’s withdrawal also heralds the advent of north-easterly winds that bring in the northeast monsoon to parts of peninsular Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. While significant to the agriculture there, the northeast monsoon contributes 10%-12% of India’s annual rainfall, against the southwest monsoon’s 75%-80%. That, and its limited geographic spread has meant that the northeast monsoon is not showered with as much research attention. However, studies show that northeast monsoon rainfall displays significant variation and climate models are fairly inaccurate in their forecasts of its unfolding over the subcontinent. There have been significant investments in super computing infrastructure to simulate weather as well as to tune forecasts to go beyond just giving rainfall estimates and factor in the potential damage of floods and cyclones. Building on these, scientists must also put in more effort and design research programmes that better analyse the vagaries of the northeast monsoon. Along with more understanding of how climate is changing locally, India needs better science to prepare more effective disaster management plans and improve resilience in a warming world.
📰 Time for a ‘sponge cities’ mission in India
The idea needs traction at a time when discussion on urban flooding only reduces the problem to simple dichotomies
•Unpredictable nature, unbridled avarice and untrammelled urbanisation are back in currency, this time, in the wake of torrential rains in the third week of October in Hyderabad. Over 50 people died. Hundreds of riverbed hutments were flushed away. Thousands of homes remain submerged two weeks after the flood. The scale of destruction has been unprecedented. This experience is not unique to the city of Hyderabad but something that cities across India have been experiencing in recent years. Barely five years ago, it was Chennai that saw a massive flood costing much damage and lives; Gurugram over the past few years comes to a complete standstill during the monsoon months, and for Mumbai, the monsoon has become synonymous with flooding and enormous damages.
The case of Hyderabad
•Almost 10 years ago, scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, built climate change adaptation tools for Hyderabad. However, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority of that time did not use it. Such tools are held in trust by many civil society organisations across the country in many of our cities. Anticipating significant increases in rainfall, they offered tools to build solutions. So what was it that really brought us down to our knees?
•Our persistence in using these cliched expressions year after year also restitutes a profoundly disabling account of the world. After all, what can one do against such trans-historic forces? Let us examine these claims closely.
•The first is unprecedented rainfall. On September 21, 2016, breaking a 16-year record, Hyderabad received 16 cm of rain in a single day; in September 2017, the city witnessed a 450% increase compared to the average rainfall it receives during this month; in September 2019, the rainfall was the highest in 100 years, while in October it was in 62% in excess. The rainfall received in 2020 has been the highest for the month of October in a century. Every year, the rains bring something unprecedented with them. But our constant, unwavering attention to the rainfall levels draws our attention away from our inability to manage the city’s drainage systems. The floods of October 2020 occurred because we did not discharge the water in time. And when we did discharge the water, we did it in a sudden, uncontrolled manner. To put it bluntly, first our sluices did not open and then our bunds breached.
•The second is antiquated infrastructure. Hyderabad’s century-old drainage system (developed in the 1920s) covered only a small part of the core city. In the last 20 years, the city has grown at least four times its original built-up area.
•But the areas that suffered from the floods of 1908, 2001, and 2005 have not been hit by the 2020 floods. The narrative of antiquated infrastructure conceals the fact that the city has grown rapidly, and into areas where there was no drainage infrastructure to begin with. And as the city grew beyond its original limits, not much was done to address the absence of adequate drainage systems.
Communities are left out
•Government pronouncements, media representations and public protests have all focused repeatedly on factors which by their very description fall outside our capacity to influence. So what is to be done? The manner in which we talk about recurring floods in the city often reduces the problem to simple dichotomies of public versus private property and individual conduct versus faceless governmental action. This means that we neglect the issues of incremental land use change, particularly of those commons which provide us with necessary ecological support — wetlands. This framing also disavows the role of local communities in managing local ecosystems — people with traditional rights for fishing and farming. This is a lesson that has been learnt by others around the world. We need to start paying attention to the management of our wetlands by involving local communities. The risk is going to increase year after year with changing rainfall patterns and a problem of urban terrain which is incapable of absorbing, holding and discharging water.
Making cities permeable
•Urban floods of this scale cannot be contained by the municipal authorities alone. Nor can they be dealt with by the State government. They cannot be managed without concerted and focused investments of energy and resources. Such investments can only be done in a mission mode organisation with active participation of civil society organisations at the metropolitan scale. In Hyderabad, this can be done by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority, but all metropolitan areas have similar organisations with constitutional mandates via the metropolitan planning committee. So what should the mission objectives be?
•We need a mission that mitigates flood risk and provides a pathway to water security. The most promising idea across the world at this time appears to be the idea of “sponge cities”. The idea of a sponge city is to make cities more permeable so as to hold and use the water which falls upon it. Sponge cities absorb the rain water, which is then naturally filtered by the soil and allowed to reach urban aquifers. This allows for the extraction of water from the ground through urban or peri-urban wells. This water can be treated easily and used for city water supply. In built form, this implies contiguous open green spaces, interconnected waterways, and channels and ponds across neighbourhoods that can naturally detain and filter water. It implies support for urban ecosystems, bio-diversity and newer cultural and recreational opportunities, These can all be delivered effectively through an urban mission along the lines of the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), National Heritage City
Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY) and Smart Cities Mission. On a top priority, such a mission should address the following.
•The first subject is wetland policy. In most of our lakes, the shallow ends, which often lie beyond the full tank level, have disappeared. These shallow ends are best characterised as wetlands; sometimes owned by private individuals, other times existing as ecological commons. Regardless of ownership, land use on even this small scale needs to be regulated by development control.
Watersheds, terrain alteration
•Watershed management and emergency drainage plan is next. This should be clearly enunciated in policy and law. Urban watersheds are micro ecological drainage systems, shaped by contours of terrain.
•Detailed documentation of these must be held by agencies which are not bound by municipal jurisdictions; instead, we need to consider natural boundaries such as watersheds instead of governance boundaries like electoral wards for shaping a drainage plan. The Metropolitan Development Authorities, National Disaster Management Authority, State revenue and irrigation departments along with municipal corporations should be involved in such work together.
•Ban against terrain alteration is third. Lasting irreversible damage has been done to the city by builders, property owners, and public agencies by flattening terrain and altering drainage routes.
•Without doubt, terrain alteration needs to be strictly regulated and a ban on any further alteration of terrain needs to be introduced. Our cities are becoming increasingly impervious to water, not just because of increasing built up but also because of the nature of materials used (hard, non-porous construction material that makes the soil impervious). To improve the city’s capacity to absorb water, new porous materials and technologies must be encouraged or mandated across scales. Examples of these technologies are bioswales and retention systems, permeable material for roads and pavement, drainage systems which allow storm water to trickle into the ground, green roofs and harvesting systems in buildings. These not only reduce run-off and the load on infrastructure, but also help keep water in the city for later use.
Stop the blame, start action
•Acknowledging the role of different actors for the city can create a practical space to begin this work. Doing so will not just help control recurring floods but also respond to other fault lines, provide for water security, more green spaces, and will make the city resilient and sustainable. The constant search for a scapegoat to blame, while a few people try what they can, limits our capacities and only creates cycles of devastation.
•We must not allow nature, human conduct, and urbanisation to be mystified and rendered as trans-historic villains. We can learn to live with nature, we can regulate human conduct through the state and we can strategically design where we build. We need to urgently rebuild our cities such that they have the sponginess to absorb and release water without causing so much misery and so much damage to the most vulnerable of our citizens, as we have seen.
