📰 Union Cabinet clears Ken-Betwa river interlinking project
Water-starved districts of U.P. and M.P. to benefit from ₹44,605-crore scheme, says Government.
•The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the funding and implementation of the Ken-Betwa river interlinking project at a cost of ₹44,605 crore at the 2020-21 price level. The Centre would fund ₹39,317 crore for the project, with ₹36,290 crore as a grant and ₹3,027 crore as a loan.
•The project involves transferring of water from the Ken river to the Betwa river through the construction of Daudhan dam and a canal linking the two rivers, the Lower Orr Project, Kotha Barrage and the Bina Complex Multipurpose Project. The project is slated to irrigate 10.62 lakh hectares annually, provide drinking water supply to 62 lakh people and generate 103 MW of hydropower and 27 MW of solar power. The project is proposed to be ready in eight years.
•“The project will be of immense benefit to the water-starved Bundelkhand region, spread across Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. This project will provide enormous benefits to the districts of Panna, Tikamgarh, Chhatarpur, Sagar, Damoh, Datia, Vidisha, Shivpuri and Raisen of Madhya Pradesh and Banda, Mahoba, Jhansi and Lalitpur of Uttar Pradesh,” a statement noted.
•“The project is expected to boost socio-economic prosperity in the backward Bundelkhand region on account of increased agricultural activities and employment generation. It would also help in arresting distress migration from this region,” it said.
Many hurdles
•Several obstacles have dogged the project. For one, the project will partly submerge the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh and affect the habitat of vultures and jackals. After years of protests, it was finally cleared by the apex wildlife regulator, the National Board for Wildlife, in 2016.
•Then Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh could not agree on how water would be shared, particularly in the non-monsoonal months. They reached an agreement in March. The original project was conceived in two distinct phases but now they are learnt to be combined.
•In a “normal” year, Madhya Pradesh would use 2,350 MCM (million cubic metre) of water and Uttar Pradesh, 1,700 MCM. From November-May, the non-monsoon period, Madhya Pradesh would get 1,834 MCM and Uttar Pradesh 750 MCM. A sticking point was that Uttar Pradesh had demanded nearly 900 MCM and Madhya Pradesh was prepared to release only 700 MCM.
•A new body — the Ken Betwa Link Project Authority — will execute the project and is in the process of obtaining forest clearance for constructing the Daudhan dam.
📰 The need for a robust civil registration system
Establishing reliable, real-time mortality surveillance is an essential element of pandemic preparedness
•As the COVID-19 pandemic advances into its third year with varied intensity, the world waits with bated breath to learn about the impact of the Omicron variant. Fortunately, South Africa has established an efficient rapid mortality surveillance system which would alert us with the earliest evidence of such impact, if any. It is also reassuring that lessons from previous pandemic waves in India have resulted in an early scrambling of critical response preparedness activities. Nevertheless, despite pronouncements of ICU bed availability and oxygen supply by several States combined with personal protection through vaccination, the threat of individual susceptibility to the new variant from immune escape and underlying morbidity remains. Hence, any proof of lethality (or lack thereof) of this variant from South Africa could only serve as background information, underscoring the need for similar early warning mortality surveillance activities in India.
No reliable estimate
•Mortality data are essential for pandemic management from both clinical and public health perspectives to guide patient care, protection of vulnerable population groups, and resource mobilisation and allocation. In all countries, data from COVID-19 mortality surveillance systems are limited on account of inadequate access to ante-mortem testing and inconsistent cause attribution. Hence, pandemic impact is now evaluated through estimation of excess mortality (additional deaths observed during the pandemic period in comparison with those recorded in previous calendar years). For adequate response, such evaluation needs reliable baseline pre-pandemic mortality measures, near-complete death reporting during the pandemic, and real-time data compilation and release at weekly or monthly intervals. For South Africa, the National Population Register serves as a useful data source, with weekly updates of deaths by sex, age, date of death, and place of registration. Shortcomings in completeness and timeliness of reporting exist, but the mortality surveillance team has established procedures to correct for such biases to report excess mortality estimates at the national and provincial level in near to real-time.
•For India, excess mortality estimates are based on epidemiological models, some of which include analyses of month-wise death registration data released by several States. However, these estimation exercises were hampered by uncertainty in baseline pre-pandemic mortality levels, potential under-registration in 2021, and the likelihood for the data to include some delayed registrations. All these likely data biases were statistically accounted for by different analysts through varying methods and assumptions, resulting in national excess mortality estimates ranging from 2.8 million to 5.2 million deaths between April 2020 and June 2021. On the other hand, the national COVID-19 surveillance programme death toll for this period was about 4,30,000, considered to be a gross under-count. This 10-fold variation in estimates of COVID-19 mortality in India is clearly not helpful, and the absence of a reliable estimate constitutes a major impediment to our understanding of the magnitude of pandemic mortality, both at the national and global level.
Encouraging trends
•Nevertheless, several recent developments have created prospects for improved estimation of excess mortality in 2020/2021, as well as for ongoing mortality surveillance and measurement programmes in India. First, the Civil Registration System (CRS) Report for 2019 indicates high levels of registration completeness across India. These data have now been corrected for under-reporting to compute reliable pre-pandemic mortality estimates by sex, age and location, as a baseline for evaluating pandemic impact. Next, the prompt release of information on registered deaths by some States in 2021 (summarised in COVID-19 mortality data reports by The Hindu) indicates that efficient mechanisms for data compilation are functional in these States. Indeed, the Registrar General of India (RGI) had issued a circular in November 2017 which requires District and State Registrars to submit summary monthly returns of births and deaths registered within their jurisdiction. The circular also declares that “the vital rates generated through the CRS are exact and real data certified by registering authority, and therefore legally admissible, and prevail over any other estimates that may be done for proxy purposes due to the lack of data”. It is likely that the prompt release of registration data following the second wave would have been facilitated by these instructions. Third, the pandemic has evoked considerable media and public attention to epidemiological data including mortality, which led to the flurry of data reports to meet this demand. There is now a general expectation of continued public attention to such health data in times to come.
The road ahead
•While the quick data release in 2021 augurs well for future availability, CRS data for 2020 and provisional data reports for 2021 should be released at the earliest, at least to an internal team of analysts. Local statistical capacity must also be established at State registration offices for data quality evaluation, adjustments for data bias, and basic trend and forecast analysis. Data dissemination protocols need to be standardised using a template for compilations of deaths tabulated by sex, broad age groups, month of death occurrence, and district of usual residence. The CRS death reporting forms include these variables, hence enabling such detailed tabulations each month. A lag period in death reporting across registration units and districts is anticipated, but updated counts in subsequent months are widely accepted in regard to pandemic surveillance. Information on deaths recorded in the national Sample Registration System and other household surveys could be used to estimate completeness of CRS data using record linkage methods. It should be feasible for State Registrars to direct such operations, with resources and technical support from local public health/academic institutions. Of course, subsequent detailed analysis of annual data complying with the standard data validation protocols implemented by the RGI would still be necessary for the annual CRS report. But the availability of provisional near real-time surveillance reports would enhance monitoring of the mortality impact of this and future epidemics.
•In principle, mortality estimates developed from adjustments to empirical data are by design locally relevant and therefore more acceptable than modelled estimates. Even in routine times, there has been an undue dependence on epidemiological models to estimate mortality for India, as observed from various recent disease burden estimations. Analysis of recent CRS data has exposed the brittle nature of the outputs from these models. Moreover, the identified gaps in CRS data by location, sex and age from detailed analyses can help guide interventions to improve data quality for the future. In the current environment, establishing reliable, real-time mortality surveillance is an essential element of pandemic preparedness, and urgent steps to build on recent developments in this aspect would advance the cause of evidence-based health policy to deal with the pandemic in India.
📰 Russia, a legacy relationship with limitations
The India-Russia relationship stands deeply strained by larger geopolitical realities, but there is scope for improved ties
• The Russian President Vladimir Putin’s short visit to New Delhi and the inaugural 2+2 meeting between India and Russia — which is India’s fourth such engagement with another country — will help improve Moscow-New Delhi ties, currently fraying under the pressure of larger global power shifts. Of all the diplomatic balancing acts India has to play in this milieu of geopolitical uncertainty, the one with Russia is the most significant. And yet, let the ongoing flurry of activity between Moscow and New Delhi not blind us to the global forces that will pose formidable challenges for the partnership.
There are constraints
•Russia, no doubt, is a friend in need to India; but Moscow’s friendship comes with limitations. Not only would the realities of the global balance of power shrink the robustness of the relationship over time, but, more crucially perhaps, a legacy relationship based on limited interaction might eventually lose the warmth given that there is little organic, people-to-people content to the relationship.
•To put it bluntly, unless the bilateral ties can move beyond arms sale/purchase, the phase of stasis will kick in sooner rather than later in India-Russia relations. Consider for instance, the India-Russia bilateral trade is around U.S.$10 billion, far lower than India’s trade with China and the United States, China’s trade with the U.S. and Russia, and even the U.S.’s trade with Russia. The Soviet-era cultural and people-to-people contacts have almost entirely evaporated. Arms sales alone won’t a relationship make.
•Today, the India-Russia relationship stands deeply strained by the larger geopolitical realities which neither of them is completely in control of. The quadrilateral dynamics among India, China, the U.S. and Russia have different implications of varying degrees for all four states in this relationship, in particular for India.
The dynamics
•Let us use the concept of primary and secondary antagonisms to understand the dynamics of this quad better. To a great extent, if not entirely, the dynamics of this six-way relationship, at the apex, is a function of the U.S.-China rivalry. In this six-way matrix, China-U.S. antagonism is the first order relationship and the U.S.-Russia, China-Russia and Russia-India are the second order relationships. While the second order relationships in this quad are, to a great extent, a product of the primary antagonism, the second tier relationships also have their own unique dynamics and implications.
•For instance, India-China, a second order relationship in this quad, is both a product of the primary antagonism between the U.S. and China as well as a result of the regional geopolitical rivalry between India and China.
•Even though China remains its primary antagonism, Washington has not yet succeeded in divorcing its less challenging second order antagonism (rivalry with Moscow) from it. Washington’s parallel rivalries with China and Russia (albeit to a lesser extent) have complicated matters for New Delhi.
•What appears to be a near certainty in the medium to longer term is that the dynamics of the quadrilateral relationship, in particular India’s tense relations with China, will go on to complicate India’s time-tested partnership with Russia, a process that has already started.
•Even though Beijing has not aggressively attempted to damage India-Russia relations, there is little doubt that China will attempt to drive a wedge between New Delhi and Moscow since isolating India in the larger Asian region suits Beijing’s larger game plan.
A few scenarios
•It gets more complicated if we were to examine the various potential scenarios in this quadrilateral relationship. For instance, the extent of Chinese aggression towards India will play a role in determining India’s relationship with Russia. Consider this. An aggressive China will push India towards the U.S., and even though Russia would be understanding towards India’s rationale behind such a pro-U.S. tilt in the medium term, India’s relationship with the U.S. will invariably create hurdles in India-Russia relations in the longer term. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s warning to India should be read in that context: “We expressed our serious concern to our Indian friends over the U.S. activity there (Asia-Pacific region) under the slogan of so-called Indo-Pacific strategies and the creation of closed bloc-type structures”.
•Put differently, the more aggressive Beijing gets towards New Delhi, the more India would grow closer to Washington and Moscow. However, while Moscow would appreciate a close partnership with New Delhi, it may not be when it comes to a growing India-U.S. partnership. More so, if Moscow has to choose between Beijing and New Delhi, it would choose Beijing just as New Delhi would choose Washington over Moscow if it comes to that.
•This also implies that an aggressive China may also help increase India-Russia relations in the short to medium term, something we may already be witnessing. Recall Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s visit to Moscow in June 2020 soon after the stand-off between Indian and Chinese troops on the Line of Actual Control to procure more weapons systems, among other things.
•In the meantime, the seemingly unresolvable first order antagonism (the U.S. versus China) also provides space for geopolitical hedges in the second order partnerships/antagonisms, i.e., India-Russia and even Russia-U.S. For instance, Russia’s dormant concerns about China’s rising influence in its traditional periphery, and Moscow’s relations with India in the broader context of Central and West Asia and the western Indian Ocean could prompt Moscow to maintain a certain degree of, albeit limited, geopolitical hedge vis-à-vis Beijing. India’s desire for a robust relationship with Russia will be more appreciated by the U.S. due to the Chinese aggression against India and the U.S.’s systemic and first order rivalry with Beijing. More so, once the reality of the rise of China becomes a concern for Moscow, it could potentially open conversations with Washington to create a balance vis-à-vis Beijing which suits Indian interests.
•At the same time, however, if there is a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia or a reduction in the war of words between the U.S. and China, this may or may not have a direct and substantive impact on Sino-Indian relations since the strains in Sino-Indian relations are not just a product of global balance of power but, more fundamentally, a result of India-China dynamics in the Southern Asian region. Put differently, no matter what the state of global geopolitics is, the essential (adversarial) nature of India-China relations is unlikely to undergo a fundamental transformation. For New Delhi, the principal antagonism is China. Therefore, New Delhi must exploit strategies and partnerships that can help address the China challenge more effectively. This means that India has to carefully balance its growing partnership with the U.S. with its somewhat delicate relationship with Russia.
Potential for cooperation
•Let us return to the India-Russia ties and examine the potential for cooperation between the two sides. In a sense, the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul and India’s relationship with Moscow have helped New Delhi to adopt more flexible strategies vis-à-vis Afghanistan as well as the broader region. Given the close relationship that New Delhi enjoyed with Washington, American presence in Kabul had, in a way, limited India’s options as New Delhi was broadly encouraged to follow U.S. policy in the region. With the Americans gone, India can openly cooperate with Moscow and even Tehran, especially if the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) renegotiations succeed, and engage Afghanistan and the Central Asian region with their help.
•If New Delhi plays its cards well, it can use Moscow to gain more geopolitical heft in the region — while the U.S. provided New Delhi status quo in the region, Moscow could provide India with more direct opportunities. Of course, New Delhi would need to be prepared for adverse reactions from Beijing and Islamabad.
•Yet another area of cooperation between Moscow and New Delhi is the Indian Ocean Region, especially the western Indian Ocean where Russia has been expanding its influence and India has significant interests.
•For New Delhi, located in an unstable and virtually friendless neighbourhood, friendship with Russia is important notwithstanding the structural limits to such a friendship. It will, therefore, take a great deal of diplomatic agility from New Delhi to stay the course and improve the relationship with Moscow amidst high-stakes geopolitical contestations.
📰 Low tobacco tax, poor health
The absence of an increase in tax on tobacco products post-GST has impacted revenue and could worsen public health
•In India, 28.6% of adults above 15 years and 8.5% of students aged 13-15 years use tobacco in some form or the other. This makes the country the second largest consumer of tobacco in the world. Tobacco use is known to be a major risk factor for several non-communicable diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic lung diseases. India also bears an annual economic burden of over ₹1,77,340 crore on account of tobacco use. Yet, there has been no major increase in taxation of tobacco products to discourage the consumption of tobacco in the past four years since the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2017 except for a small increase in the national calamity contingent duty (NCCD) in the 2020-21 Union Budget which only had the effect of increasing the average price of cigarettes by about 5%.
A worrying trend
•The absence of an increase in tax means more profits for the tobacco industry and more tax revenue foregone for the government — revenue that could have easily been utilised during the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been a 3% real decline in GST revenues from tobacco products in each of the past two financial years. The average annual tax revenue collection from all tobacco products (based on the past three years), including excise duty, NCCD, GST, and compensation cess, is about ₹53,750 crore.
•Excise taxes on many tobacco products used to be regularly raised in the annual Union Budgets before the GST. Similarly, several State governments used to regularly raise value-added tax (VAT) on tobacco products. During the five years before the introduction of the GST, most State governments had moved from having a low VAT regime on tobacco products to having a high VAT regime. The 17.3% relative reduction in the prevalence of tobacco use among adults that India experienced between 2009-10 and 2016-17, as shown by the Global Adult Tobacco Survey, could be partly attributed to this as well. International literature recognises tax increase as one of the most cost-effective ways of regulating the consumption of tobacco.
•The lack of tax increases in post-GST years might mean that some current smokers smoke more now and some non-smokers have started smoking. This could potentially lead to a reversal of the declining trend in prevalence. This might jeopardise India’s commitment to achieving 30% tobacco use prevalence reduction by 2025 as envisaged in the National Health Policy of 2017 by the Government of India. The lack of tax increase means that the tax burden on tobacco products (tax as a percentage of the retail price) decreases. The tax burden on bidis, cigarettes, and smokeless tobacco, on average, stands at 22%, 53%, and 64% in 2021, while the World Health Organization has been recommending a uniform tax burden of at least 75% for each tobacco product.
•Given that the vast majority of tobacco taxation today is in the form of GST and compensation cess and their revision requires consensus within the GST Council, tobacco taxation has not seen any increase whatsoever under the GST since 2017. In other words, the tobacco industry has been virtually enjoying four years without extended tax on tobacco products, since the introduction of the GST. This has made tobacco products more affordable post-GST as shown in recent literature from India. This is highly detrimental to public health.
•Meanwhile, the share of central excise duties including NCCD in the total tobacco taxes decreased from 54% to 8% for cigarettes, 17% to 1% for bidis, and 59% to 11% for smokeless tobacco products, on average, from 2017 (pre-GST) to 2021 (post-GST). Several countries in the world have high excise taxes along with GST or sales tax and they are continuously being revised. Yet, the excise duty on tobacco in India continues to remain extremely low.
A considerate view of public health
•The Union government should take a considerate view of public health and significantly increase excise taxes — either basic excise duty or NCCD — on all tobacco products. The upcoming Union Budget gives a perfect opportunity for this. The Budget should fix an excise tax of at least ₹1 per stick of bidis while aiming for a significant increase in the excise tax of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products. Taxation should achieve a significant reduction in the affordability of tobacco products to reduce tobacco use prevalence and facilitate India’s march towards sustainable development goals.
📰 High LPG prices are scorching the air pollution fight
Reinstating subsidies on LPG refills for low-income households can help reverse families going back to polluting fuels
•The sustained rise in the price of LPG cylinders has been burning a hole in many a household budget for more than a year now. The price of LPG refills has risen by more than 50% to over ₹900 per cylinder in November this year compared to around ₹600 over the past year. With no refill subsidies in place since May 2020, there is genuine concern about many households now slipping back to using polluting solid fuels for cooking, such as firewood and dung cakes.
A start
•Solid fuel use for cooking is the leading contributor to air pollution and related premature deaths in India, estimated to be around over 600,000 every year, as per the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. To tackle this issue head-on, the Government of India has taken several measures to improve access to clean cooking energy. For instance, under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana scheme, the Government distributed more than 80 million subsidised LPG connections. But how far have we managed to dissuade households from biomass? What more do we need to do as a country to move the needle further?
•Sizing up India’s LPG revolution. Good news first. As per the India Residential Energy Survey (IRES) 2020, conducted by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy, LPG has now replaced biomass as the most common cooking fuel in India. Nearly 85% of Indian homes have an LPG connection and 71% use it as their primary cooking fuel, compared to only 30% a decade back. This reversal of trends could be attributed to the success of the Ujjwala, consumption-linked subsidies and gradual strengthening of the LPG distributorship. Needless to say, this would have significantly influenced the sector’s contribution to air pollution.
•However, the battle is only half won. Around 30% of Indian households continue to rely on biomass as their primary cooking fuel, mainly due to high LPG prices. Another 24% stack LPG with biomass. The practice of biomass usage is predominantly concentrated in rural areas, particularly among States such as Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal. Urban slums are also critical hotspots where the use of biomass for cooking is widely prevalent. Easy availability of free biomass and lack of home delivery of LPG refills further reduce the efficacy of LPG as a reliable and affordable proposition.
Reinstate subsidies
•To sustain the country’s momentum on clean cooking energy access and thereby, cleaner air for all, we propose three key steps.
•First, reinstate the subsidies on LPG refill for low-income households. At the current refill prices, an average Indian household would have to spend around 10% of its monthly expense on LPG to meet all its cooking energy needs.
•According to a CEEW study, this is just double the actual share of reported expenses on cooking energy (as of March 2020). In fact, nearly half of all Indian households will have to at least double their cooking energy expense to completely switch to LPG at current prices. Given the loss of incomes and livelihoods during the novel coronavirus pandemic, the ability of households to afford LPG on a regular basis has taken a further hit. Thus, resuming subsidies would be critical to support LPG use in many households. Our estimates suggest that an effective price of ₹450 per LPG refill could ensure that the average share of actual household expenditure on cooking energy matches the pre-pandemic levels. The Government could take this into account as it reconsiders resuming LPG subsidy.
•The Government can also explore diverse approaches to identify beneficiaries. This may include limiting the subsidy provision to seven to eight LPG refills annually and excluding well-to-do households using robust indicators. For instance, lowering the income-based exclusion limit for LPG subsidy to ₹2,50,000 a year from ₹10 lakh a year or excluding families owning a non-commercial four-wheeler vehicle can significantly reduce the number of eligible beneficiaries. At the bare minimum, subsidy must be resumed for the households granted LPG connections under the Ujjwala scheme.
Availability and biomass
•Second, boost timely availability of LPG for all consumers. Only half the rural LPG users receive home delivery of LPG refills, while the rest have to travel about five kilometres one way to procure a cylinder. Gaps in the doorstep delivery of LPG cylinders are also present in urban pockets, particularly in slum areas. This is a major factor behind the use of biomass among urban slum households. There is a need to strengthen the LPG supply chain and enforce timely service delivery, particularly in States with a large number of Ujjwala connections and slum population. This must be complemented by higher incentives for rural distributors, who have to otherwise service a low but distributed demand at similar commissions. Looping in self-help groups could also help aggregate demand and create jobs in distant areas.
•Third, create a new market for locally available biomass. The Government needs to pilot initiatives focused on promoting the use of locally available biomass in decentralised processing units that manufacture briquettes and pellets for industrial and commercial establishments. For instance, the National Thermal Power Corporation recently invited applications to supply biomass pellets to fire their power stations. The Government can incentivise entrepreneurs to participate in such activities. Similarly, households can be incentivised to supply locally available biomass (including crop stubble or dung cakes) to Compressed Bio-Gas (CBG) production plants being set up under the Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT) scheme. Such measures would help enhance local income and livelihood opportunities, in turn encouraging rural families to use LPG on a regular basis.
•In August, the Prime Minister launched the Ujjwala 2.0 scheme to distribute 10 million additional free LPG connections to poorer households. It shows the Government’s commitment towards promoting clean cooking energy access. But ensuring affordability and timely availability of LPG cylinders for refills would be a must to wean households away from polluting biomass and reap the benefits of the investments made in the Ujjwala scheme over the past five years. Such efforts would go a long way in improving the health and well-being of our citizens.
