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Editorials - 14-02-2022

The BJP’s formulation of social welfare politics melded with Hindutva faces a stress test in the elections

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is fighting the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections on two main planks: Hindutva and social welfare. These twin pillars of the BJP’s political mobilisation are often treated as separate categories, analytically. Hence, the deeper political and ideological crux of BJP’s welfare politics has largely been missed.

More than populism

However, a more careful analysis would reveal how the BJP’s particular brand of welfare politics is not merely electoral populism. Especially in U.P., the BJP’s welfare regime — centred on Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs) — has been designed as part of an ideological project that seeks to reshape the political identity of the welfare recipients and neutralise the basis on which a successful political challenge to Hindutva can be mounted.

In an influential work (https://bit.ly/3uN4U9t), the political scientist, Kanchan Chandra, had demonstrated the basis of the success of ethnic or caste-based parties, using the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a case study. The essence of Professor Chandra’s argument was that voters mainly do not vote for ethnic parties out of deep psychological attachments, but because they expect to receive greater government benefits from their co-ethnic representatives. Since government programmes were/have been marred by enormous bureaucratic discretion, inadequate information and poor transparency, voters found that the most reliable way to access welfare benefits was patronage transactions with their co-ethnic parties. Thus, she characterised India as a “patronage democracy”.

These patron-client relationships have been a central part of U.P.’s politics since the time of the Congress’s dominance, when government benefits were routed through the upper-caste controlled party machine. When backward caste parties — the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP — came to helm the State, the groups that were supportive were similarly mobilised through caste-based patronage networks. Caste thus became the most salient political identity, the arbiter of access to the State and hence the basis of political competition.

Direct cash transfers

The welfare regime instituted by the ‘double engine’ government of U.P. seeks to change all that by downgrading, if not eliminating, the role of caste networks in accessing most welfare benefits. And welfare benefits have been reconceptualised, to a large extent, as direct cash transfers. The middlemen have been replaced by a digital regime — the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar Mobile (JAM) triad — establishing a direct connection between the State and the welfare recipients.

At present, the U.P. government is directly passing money to the accounts of people on 36 schemes through direct bank transfer. This not only includes centrally sponsored schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman (PM Kisan) Nidhi (Yojana), Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, and Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY)/Ayushman Bharat, but also various allowances disbursed by the State government. A few months ago, the Yogi Adityanath government disbursed Rs. 1,100 to parents for purchasing school uniforms. In January, Rs. 1,000 were reportedly transferred to the accounts of 1.5 crore unorganised workers in the State. Even in tangible asset creation, such as houses and toilets, the Government’s role is limited to transferring money into the account of beneficiaries.

These cash handouts (along with an expanded and digitised provisioning of rations) have been described as having created a new political constituency for the BJP termed aslabarthi or ‘welfare recipients’. This would be a somewhat inaccurate interpretation. The political identity that the BJP seeks to nurture among these voters is still a Hindu political identity. What welfare provisions in a universal and programmatic manner do is to dilute the political salience of caste identity, clearing the way for a Hindutva discourse for the political transformation of backward castes and Dalits into Hindus. Thus, both welfare politics and Hindutva work in tandem in fashioning a singular political constituency of Hindu voters.

Patronage networks

Of course, none of this is to say that U.P. has reached some post-patronage utopia, let alone a post-caste one. Patronage networks are still well entrenched in the political economy of U.P., helping funnel a range of public goods such as government contracts in rural infrastructure. A study in 2018 of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) by researchers at Princeton University, had revealed that when Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) and district collectors shared a surname, a contractor with the same surname was more likely to be awarded a contract.

Still, the displacement of patronage networks from large swathes of welfare delivery is a qualitative change which is shaping the patterns of political mobilisation of the BJP in U.P. in four distinct ways.

First, the party has been weakened at the local level where MLAs and district party functionaries have lost their power as intercessors and mediators in the welfare delivery process. A centralised bureaucratic structure oversees these welfare schemes. The role of the local party machinery is merely to act as a marketing wing for these schemes, which are personally identified with Mr. Adityanath and Prime Minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi. Thus, the patron-client relationship at the ground level is dissolved in favour of building up the personas of the twin benevolent rulers at the top, backed by a massive advertising blitz, and under whose names the BJP seeks its votes.

Second, the BJP is less dependent on cultivating a spectrum of backward caste leadership to mobilise backward caste votes, than it was in the previous election when it had inducted a number of such leaders from other parties. Many of these leaders, such as Swami Prasad Maurya and Dharam Singh Saini, have now left the party complaining of having received little substantive power. The party believes it can weather this exodus as it has managed to create its own party base among these communities, fulfilling their material needs/welfare and psychological needs through Hindutva.

Neglect of public goods

Third, the flip side of lavish spending on cash transfers has materialised in an abject neglect of public goods such as education and health. While it is true that the state capacity in these sectors in U.P. was always quite poor, the dramatic collapse of the health-care sector during the second wave of COVID-19 did provide a political narrative to the Opposition. There is also little room left to expand the State sector to ameliorate the unemployment crisis, another hot-button issue of this election.

Fourth, the BJP’s welfare politics is on its weakest ground where the presence of bureaucratic interface and organised interests are unavoidable, such as in the farm sector. Big farmers still organise themselves into unions and get the best deal out of the Government. It is not a coincidence that these patronage networks were then the main targets of the farm reform laws, and it was also these sections that were at the forefront of the farmer protests. When the Prime Minister spoke last week in Parliament, he repeatedly mentioned small farmers, trying to bypass the big and organised farmers in his outreach. These small and marginal farmers are also the core beneficiaries of Narendra Modi’s flagship scheme towards the farming community — an annual Rs. 6,000 transfer through the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi.

Even as the BJP quite overtly indulges in elaborate caste strategies for electioneering, it maintains that it is the only party abovejativad or caste favouritism. It also tries to convince the subaltern castes that the cash transfers they have come to routinely expect are an outcome of the ‘double engine’ government in U.P., and therefore, might come to a stop under a new regime.

The ideological challenge that the BJP’s Hindutva faces in States such as U.P. is to hold down the resurgence of multiple political identities among the electorate. It is an enormous task, and thus social welfare politics has been melded with Hindutva for extra reinforcement. This is the ideological crux of the BJP’s welfare politics, whose effectiveness is being stress tested in the caste cauldron of the Uttar Pradesh elections.

Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi



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There is a need for a comprehensive review of labour inspection and the labour statistical system in India

It is a fact that while industrial accidents occur often, only major accidents — say in construction or in a hazardous industry — are reported (https://bit.ly/3gIPATg). Recently, the CRUSHED Report 2021 released by Safe in India (SII), reported in this daily (https://bit.ly/3BgbK8W), portrays a dismal picture concerning occupational safety and health in the auto sector. However, occupational safety and health (OSH) has not received due attention from law-makers and even trade unions in India. OSH is an existential human and labour right.

There are two primary requirements to ensure safe workplaces,viz. a strong monitoring (inspections) and comprehensive database to frame corrective actions and policies. It becomes important then to understand the statistical profile relating to industrial accidents in India and the quality of inspections.

Many shortcomings

Statistics concerning industrial accidents are produced by the Labour Bureau. It compiles and publishes data on industrial injuries relating only to a few sectors,viz. factories, mines, railways, docks and ports. But the data suffer from several shortcomings. It is inexplicable why the Labour Bureau has not considered expanding the scope of statistics on injuries by adding sectors such as plantations, construction, the service sector, etc.

Eventhe data it produces is not representative of the situation in India as several major States default in the provision of data to the Labour Bureau. For example, during 2013-14, several major States such as Delhi, Gujarat, Kerala, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal defaulted; then the all-India statistics was reduced to that extent. It is not surprising that the number of non-fatal injuries declined from an average of 21,370 during 2010-2015 to 5,811 during 2016-2019. Hence, we get a ridiculous statistic of average total injuries per factory at 0.02 (5,562/353,226) during 2017-2019 (https://bit.ly/3oKlJhs). However, it may be added here that the drop is far higher in the case of nonfatal injuries than for fatal ones.

Data on States

Since data reporting is volatile, we may get some idea of the shares of some of these States by looking at their shares in some years. In this article, data on industrial injuries published in the Indian Labour Statistics, by the Labour Bureau (various issues) has been used. Gujarat’s share for 2006 was 14.98% of total fatal and 25.70% of total nonfatal injuries; Kerala’s shares for 2005, respectively, were 2.94% and 6.73%; Tamil Nadu’s for 2005 shares, respectively, were 8.16% and 11.11%; Maharashtra’s shares for 2004 were 25.65% and 36.78% and for 2014, respectively, were 12.62% and 57%; Odisha’s shares for 2006 were 37.73% and 21.99%. Thus, considering the fact of fluctuations in injuries’ incidence, we can make a guarded statement that the reported figures for fatal injuries for all-India would be less by around 40%-50% and that for non-fatal injuries by at least 50%.

There is under-reporting

Even if States sent their data to the Labour Bureau, the States’ data are more likely to suffer from underreporting. As is well-known, under-reporting is more likely to be in case of non-fatal injuries than fatal ones for obvious reasons. The SSI’s report, among others, shows massive under-reporting of industrial injuries occurring in Haryana. Its report covering a segment of the auto sector in Gurugram and Faridabad showed that since 2017, on average 500 workers have received nonfatal injuries. The under-reporting of industrial injuries, unlike for strikes and lockouts, is a far more serious issue and cause for grave concern.

According to the Directorate General, Factory Advice and Labour Institutes (DGFASLI)’sStandard Reference Note for 2020 in 2019, the proportion of working in sanctioned posts for factory inspectors (employment rate) for India was 70.60% (https://bit.ly/3JqtHnW). But major States such as Maharashtra (38.93%), Gujarat (57.52%), Tamil Nadu (58.33%), and Bihar (47.62%) had poor employment rates of inspectors. In 2019, there was an inspector for every 487 registered factories: this reveals the heavy workload of inspectors. The inspector per 1,000 workers employed in factories is a meagre 0.04; put differently, there is an inspector for every 25,415 workers. The sheer inadequacy of the inspectorate system is telling.

Inspections, convictions

The proportion of registered factories inspected (inspection rates) for all-India declined from 36.23% during 2008-11 to 34.65% during 2012-2015 (Standard Reference Notes ; for various years; https://bit.ly/3GFyv7i) and further to 24.76%. While Kerala and Tamil Nadu had higher inspection rates at 63%-66%, Gujarat and Kerala had lower rates at 26%-30% and Haryana the lowest at 11.09% during 2008-2019. However, inspection rates declined in all five States. The decline over the three sub-periods noted above for Maharashtra (31% to 12%) and Haryana (14% to 7%) was much higher (50% and over) than for others. So, the factory inspectorates were inadequately equipped and worse, the inspection rates fell in almost all the States over the last 12 years.

While the pejorative term ‘inspector-raj’ is a crude exaggeration, there is some merit in the criticisms against the inspection system. Inspectors cannot feasibly inspect every factory, so they used their “discretion” to target the “easy” factories to demand compromising payments. Many of them belong to the powerful industry groups which have successfully lobbied against the inspection system. Otherwise, inspector-raj is a cultivated myth.

For all India, the conviction rates (percentage of convictions in total cases decided) for 2015-2019 stood at 61.39% and the average fine per conviction was Rs. 12,231 (not good enough to be a deterrent). However, the efficiency of the penal system is low as the percentage of decided cases out of total (cases pending at the beginning of the year plus those raised during the year) cases is a poor 15.74% during 2015-19. The SII’s findings are similar to these. Contrary to popular (even academic) opinion, during the four of five years of 2015-19, some imprisonments took place primarily in Tamil Nadu (an astonishing figure of 11,215 in 2017 and 45 in other three years; still higher rates), Chhattisgarh (17 in two years), Telangana (3 in 2016) and one each in Kerala and Punjab. But in Haryana or in other States, there were no imprisonments.

Points to note

Given the above statistical facts, two major issues are pertinent to legal and labour policy aspects. First, mindless liberalisation of the inspection system as has been effected during the last 20 years will not promote sound labour market governance. Second, simplifying the annual returns and self-certification systems weakens the already poorly placed labour statistical system regarding all variables — especially industrial injuries — thanks to low reporting by firms to State labour departments and the latter to the Labour Bureau. India has ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, the Labour Inspection Convention, 1947 (C081) and Labour Statistics Convention, 1985 (C160); and thus these defects violate the conventions. So against these tenets, the labour codes, especially the OSH Code, the inspection and the labour statistical systems should be reviewed as the Government is in the process of framing the Vision@2047 document for the Labour Ministry.

K.R. Shyam Sundar is Professor, HRM Area, XLRI, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand



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Instead of engaging in unnecessary conflicts, the Centre and the States have to strive to work in coordination

The proposed amendments to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) (Cadre) Rules of 1954 have triggered another round of conflict between the Centre and the States. The amendments proposed by the Department of Personnel and Training, Government of India, will take away the liberty of the States to deny consent for handing over civil servants for Central deputation. Further, if there are differences between the Centre and the States, the Centre’s decision will have to be accepted by the States within a specified time period. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana have objected to the amendments. The proposed changes are the latest examples in the evolution of the combative nature of federalism in India where the States and the Centre are always at loggerheads.

Shifting tides

The shift of Indian federalism from co-operative to combative has been one of the major changes in Indian polity since the Narendra Modi-led government assumed power at the Centre with a brute majority. The expression ‘combative federalism’ was used by former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat immediately after his government was dismissed under Article 356 of the Constitution by President’s proclamation. Immediately thereafter, the Centre started wielding power by interfering with the affairs of the States using the Governor’s office.

In 2016, when the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh decided to advance the Assembly elections, which led to political crisis in the State and then President’s Rule, the Supreme Court had to intervene and set right the constitutional crisis by holding that the Governor’s discretion did not extend to the powers conferred under Article 174. The Governor cannot not summon the House, determine its legislative agenda or address the legislative Assembly without consulting the Chief Minister or the Speaker, the Court said. In Goa, Karnataka and Maharashtra, we saw examples of the Governor acting beyond his constitutional brief by inviting parties and formations which did not have an adequate majority to form the governments. In Rajasthan, the Governor refused to summon a session as desired by the Council of Ministers. This again brought to light how the Centre interferes in State affairs.

The question of who should have control of the National Capital Territory of Delhi was resolved by the Supreme Court in 2018, but the dispute continues to linger in one form or the other before the courts. The Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that the power of the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi to differ from the Delhi government and make reference to the President is only with respect to exceptional matters like land, police and public order. However, the Supreme Court had to again remind the Delhi government and the Centre inAjit Mohan v. Legislative Assembly ,National Capital Territory of Delhi & Ors (2021) that for the system “to work well, the Central Government and the State Government have to walk hand in hand or at least walk side by side for better governance.”

Overt conflicts

Apart from more common occurrences of the Centre usurping States’ powers in the fields of legislation, overt conflicts and stalemates have surfaced in the areas of All-India Services and law and order. Such conflicts came to the fore when former West Bengal Chief Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay was summoned to Delhi immediately after Prime Minister Modi’s visit to West Bengal following Cyclone Yaas. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s reluctance to accede to the Centre’s demand and the subsequent disciplinary proceeding against Mr. Bandyopadhyay snowballed into a major litigation that is now pending before the Delhi High Court.

The deployment of central investigative agencies in the States, much to the displeasure of the States, has also caused trouble for our federal principles. The drama that unfolded with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)’s attempted arrest of Kolkata Commissioner of Police Rajeev Kumar without a warrant in early 2019 was only the beginning of a series of conflicts. The unfortunate death by suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput triggered a round of Mumbai Police-CBI disputes, as various FIRs were registered in Patna that were transferred to the CBI by the Bihar government. The resultant legal dispute was ultimately settled by the Supreme Court which directed the Mumbai Police to hand over the investigation to the CBI. The protracted investigations at the instance of Customs, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in issues arising from a gold-smuggling case in the Kerala saw a major State-Centre face-off, after the Customs, NIA and ED charge-sheeted the former Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister’s Office of Kerala. Soon thereafter, the Kerala government decided to take on the Centre by ordering a judicial inquiry against central investigating agencies and their overreach in the State. Kerala also witnessed another controversy surrounding Centre-State conflict when the CBI registered an FIR for alleged infractions of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. It said the State government had received foreign contributions from the United Arab Emirates for a housing project. There is no doubt that such investigations, purportedly for political reasons, into the functioning of the State governments have caused considerable dent in the federal architecture of the country. This is why various States have withdrawn the general consent for functioning of the CBI in their respective jurisdictions.

Collaborative federalism

Combative federalism is anathema to the Constitution which prescribes cooperation and collaboration between the Centre and the States. The Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held inGovernment of NCT of Delhi v. Union of India (2018) that the idea behind the concept of collaborative federalism is negotiation and coordination so that differences which may arise between the Centre and the State Governments in their respective pursuits of development can be ironed out. The Court said: “Union Government and the State governments should endeavour to address the common problems with the intention to arrive at a solution by showing statesmanship, combined action and sincere cooperation.” The Constituent Assembly, while framing our Constitution, never envisaged a situation where the Central and the State governments would stand in the way of each other. Encroachment by either of the constituent units is strictly prohibited and expressly held abhorrent by the Constitution. Rather than wasting time and energy in unnecessary conflicts, the Centre and the States have to strive to work in coordination in the best interests of the people.

Mukund P. Unny is an advocate practising in the Supreme Court



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While the government has already provided incentives for manufacturing, more needs to be done to make India self-reliant

The pandemic has brought to the fore the fragility of the global supply chain of semiconductor manufacturing. The situation is exacerbated by the overdependence of the world on East Asia for fab manufacturing, the rising price of silicon, and the China-U.S. trade war. No wonder, countries are scampering to safeguard their interests by introducing attractive packages to attract more chip manufacturing. The U.S. has announced a $50 billion package to create foundries there. Intel is adding two more foundries to its Arizona campus and also developing its own foundry business to compete with chip-makers such as TSMSC and UMC. TSMC, which controls 24% of the semiconductor supply chain, is setting up a $12 billion facility in Arizona. Japan and Germany have got TSMC to start specialty technology fabs in their respective countries.

It is timely, therefore, that India has approved a $10 billion package to incentivise the manufacturing of semiconductors in the country. The government has drawn out a list of incentives to get leading international manufacturers to set up their manufacturing unit in India either by themselves or with the help of a local partner. Considering the current geopolitical dynamics and the fact that semiconductors are at the core of fourth industrial revolution technologies, this is a welcome first step.

Fab manufacturing

Getting fab manufacturing will also build on India’s strength in design. We have the largest number of chip designers outside of the U.S. who are working on state-of-the-art systems and technologies. For example, Karnataka boasts of over 85 fabless chip design houses of various global companies. The strong expertise of our semiconductor design professionals in EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools provides solid ground to move towards manufacturing. To create the ecosystem for fab manufacturing, it is important to lock in the demand for semiconductors produced within the country. The total demand for semiconductors stands at $24 billion. This is expected to grow to $80-90 billion by 2030. However, this demand is for different categories of semiconductors used in various electronic devices and applications. Considering that initial manufacturing would be in mature tech, it would be ideal to enter into an agreement with the consumers of such semiconductors like automotive manufacturers to ensure that whatever is produced is consumed. Better still is to get established fab companies to come on their own as they bring with them their demand base.

Similar work needs to be done to develop raw material supply capabilities. The India Electronics and Semiconductor Association is exploring the opportunity to start supplying processed raw materials like minerals and gases to the fab and ATMP (Assembly. Testing, Marking, and Packaging) industry. This will give a fillip to the Indian gas, materials, and mines industry and also expand opportunities for semiconductor equipment, spares, and service industry.

Fab clustering, where key semiconductor supply chains and related businesses are in one place to create backward and forward linkages, would also play a key role in creating an ecosystem for the semiconductor industry. Such a site should be chosen purely on the ability of the location to act as a force multiplier for the development of such an ecosystem. It needs to ensure high-quality infrastructure along with uninterrupted power availability with more than 99.7% uptime, connected to two different grids to ensure redundancy. The availability of semiconductor grade Ultra Pure Water to the extent of 10 MLD per fab is also a key requirement. Additionally, a conducive environment needs to be created for women to work night shifts along with zero labour disputes.

Apart from incentivising more FDI in electronics to deepen our supply chains through incentive schemes, we need to focus on encouraging Indian manufacturers and start-ups to enter and master complex R&D and manufacturing verticals. We can then ensure that valuable Intellectual Property is created and owned by Indian companies. The semiconductor industry is changing fast as new-age technologies require innovation at the design, material, and process levels. Indian engineers have contributed immensely to this area in multinational companies. We must encourage them to set up their design start-ups with handsome government grants and tax incentives. Premier research institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science should also be asked to work aggressively on R&D in chip designing and manufacturing. Further, the government must focus on emerging technologies like LiDAR and Phased Array in which incumbents do not have a disproportionate advantage and the entry barrier is low. By working aggressively in new cutting-edge technologies, India can ensure that it becomes atmanirbhar.

Gunjan Krishna, IAS, is Commissioner, Industrial Development, Government of Karnataka. Views are personal



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The clash of egos between Siddaramaiah and D.K. Shivakumar is a cause of concern for the party

While former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president D.K. Shivakumar have often demonstrated unity in taking on the ruling BJP government, there is an undercurrent of one-upmanship between the two prominent Congress leaders to take control of the State party unit.

In January, the appointment of B.K. Hariprasad as the Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council was considered a “victory” for the Shivakumar camp. The former MP was a bitter critic of Mr. Siddaramaiah, who had backed another leader, C.M. Ibrahim, for the post. Mr. Ibrahim has since announced his decision to quit the party. Other appointments that were made subsequently were all viewed as attempts by the party high command to balance equations between the two camps.

This month, the show-cause notice issued to former MLA Ashok Pattan, a close confidante of Mr. Siddaramaiah and former chief whip, by the party’s disciplinary committee, has caused a stir. The notice was for Mr. Pattan’s alleged “anti-party activities” and “derogatory remarks” against Mr. Shivakumar. A video of Mr. Pattan complaining to Mr. Siddaramaiah over the KPCC chief’s style of functioning went viral. The notice did not mention Mr. Siddaramaiah, but it is seen as a dart aimed at him.

Now, the two leaders don’t seem to be on the same page on the hijab issue. While Mr. Shivakumar has cautiously stated that the party will function as per the constitutional framework, Mr. Siddaramaiah has attacked the State government for denying education to Muslim girls in the name of a dress code.

Mr. Shivakumar and Mr. Siddaramaiah also apparently had differences on the padayatra to Mekedatu, the proposed balancing reservoir in the Cauvery basin in Karnataka, during the third wave. While Mr. Shivakumar was keen on continuing the march, several senior leaders, including Mr. Siddaramaiah, are said to have forced him to stop in the light of the State High Court’s observations. Mr. Shivakumar insists that he will resume the padayatra once the third wave wanes.

Earlier, Mr. Siddaramaiah was also reportedly annoyed over the KPCC president’s “interference” in the mayoral polls in his home turf Mysuru. In the Mysuru City Corporation elections in March 2021, both took opposing stands. Mr. Siddaramaiah was apparently upset that the decision to cede the Mayor’s post to the JD(S) was taken without consulting him. At Mr. Shivakumar’s behest, Congress MLA Tanveer Sait was instrumental in forming an alliance with the JD(S) to keep the BJP out of power.

On the ground, Mr. Siddaramaiah seems to have an edge as a mass leader. The backward Kuruba community to which he belongs has a presence across the State, except in parts of the coastal belt. In many constituencies in North Karnataka, where the Lingayat community is dominant, the Kuruba community votes are significant.

Mr. Shivakumar hails from the politically dominant Vokkaliga community with a big presence in the southern parts. These are the places where the JD(S) too has a sizeable following. To the credit of Mr. Shivakumar’s organisational abilities, the Congress has improved its base as is evident in the recent elections to the Legislative Council from local bodies. But he is yet to fully shake off his image of being brash and autocratic.

In the run-up to the 2023 Assembly polls in Karnataka, with both leaders aspiring for the Chief Minister’s post, the clash of egos must be worrying for the Congress rank and file as well as the top brass.

nagesh.p@thehindu.co.in



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The Quad remains a group of friends who share many things, but not a common enemy

The Quad Ministerial meeting in Melbourne, meant to set the stage for a meeting by the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. later this year in Tokyo, ended with outcomes that showcased its “positive agenda” in the Indo-Pacific region. From plans to deliver more than a billion vaccine doses — India-made with U.S. funding and distributed through Japanese and Australian networks — and donate another 1.3 billion doses around the world; to prepare for an Indo-Pacific Clean Energy Supply Chain Forum to tackle climate change; to further a “Quad vision” for technology governances and safe and transparent 5G systems, and to launch humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, the Quad is, in the words of the joint statement issued, “more effective in delivering practical support to the region”. India was even able to insert a reference to fighting “cross-border” terrorism. The bonhomie between the Ministers shows a growing level of comfort with the principles behind the grouping of democratic countries, to support regional countries’ efforts to advance a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. That Quad members have thus far avoided institutionalising their grouping, and that they have not “militarised” it, is to their credit. In addition, despite Beijing’s sharp criticism of the grouping, Quad members chose not to name China directly as the joint statement spoke of ensuring a rules-based order and respect for sovereignty and building a region “free from coercion”.

However, while the grouping is strong on all these precepts, there are obvious differences in the practice of their vision for the Indo-Pacific region and the world in general. The situation in Myanmar was mentioned, but External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar made it clear that while India supports a restoration of democracy, it does not support western “national” sanctions. The meeting took place in the shadow of the growing Russia-NATO tensions over Ukraine, but it seemed evident that Mr. Jaishankar did not share U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s assessment of an imminent “invasion”. New Delhi chose not to join the decision by the U.S., Japan and Australia to tell their citizens to evacuate immediately from Ukraine; nor was any mention of the situation allowed into the joint statement. Mr. Jaishankar’s strong tone the next day at a press conference (dominated by questions on Russia), on China’s amassing of troops at the border with India was also a subtle reminder to Quad partners that while they may have similar concerns and share many core values, they do not have an identical world view, and the Quad remains very much a grouping that is “for something, not against somebody”.



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Flailing factory output trends suggestthe rebound in the economy is slow

Production levels in India’s industries appear to be hitting a roadblock amid what the Government has described in the Union Budget as an ‘overall, sharp rebound and recovery of the economy’ reflecting the ‘country’s strong resilience’. Factory output, as measured by the IIP, fell for the fourth straight month in December 2021 to a 10-month low of 0.4%, compared to the same month in 2020. While the Omicron variant had become a worry by then, its impact was limited to contact-intensive services sectors. From a nearly 13% year-on-year growth in August 2021, thanks to a low COVID-19 lockdown-hit base, the IIP growth has tapered off every passing month. By September 2020, most of the lockdown restrictions had been eased, so perhaps some labour force gaps and the shock to confidence and demand were the only hiccups for production managers. It was believed that those hiccups had been largely overcome after the deadly second wave receded in 2021. If that were indeed the case, industrial output should have seen a sharper pick-up in the last four months of 2021 than the mere 2.5% monthly average, particularly with festive season demand in play. That January’s GST collections hit a fresh record may suggest all is well, but tax revenues also get bumped up by inflation and quarterly filing options for smaller taxpayers. Moreover, GST revenues from imports of goods have been persistently rising faster than revenues from domestic transactions that include services imports. What makes the trend even harder to decipher is the volatility in month-on-month IIP numbers.

The Economic Survey for 2021-22 seemed to be describing a different landscape when it stated that a nascent private investment recovery is expected to accelerate as private consumption will increase and raise capacity utilisation levels. The RBI pegged capacity utilisation in the second quarter of 2021-22 at 68% and this may not have inched up much in the third quarter. Economists believe the IIP prints suggest that the Budget’s bet on a consumption- and investment-led recovery, is on a weak footing. Manufacturing actually shrank in December, with capital goods (reflecting investment activity) contracting by a sharp 4.6% from 2020 levels. Consumer durables saw a fourth consecutive month of contraction, while even non-durables tanked after a few months of insipid growth. With high commodity costs cramping producers, consumers still in cautious mode and the threat of a steep fuel price hike looming after March 10’s election results, the going is not likely to get smoother any time soon. That the central bank remains in growth-accommodative mode while the world is changing gears to tackle inflation, indicates its concern about the durability and quality of India’s recovery. The Government must reboot its rose-tinted assessment of the economy so that the ‘on-paper’ optimism is reflected in billowing factory chimneys.



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Simla: The residents of the upper areas of Simla went without tea this morning because water taps were frozen following snow blizzard last night. Simla and its surrounding areas experienced the heaviest snowfall of the season last night and the town remained covered under a thick blanket of snow measuring about 25 cm. till this morning. Vehicular traffic on the Kalka Simla Road remained disrupted till this evening. As a result the town remained without newspapers to-day. The Jakko Peak recorded over 55 cm. of snowfall. The entire areas of the Upper Mahasu had been cut off from the rest of the State because of a total breakdown of telegraphic communication system. Road traffic also remained suspended in that area as no vehicle could cover the snow-covered 50 kms. upto Kumarsen on the Hindustan Tibert Road. However, despite heavy snowfall two minor fires broke out in Bamoloe area and lower Bazar. Fire brigade vans had to wade through snow with great difficulty to reach the spots to extinguish fires. Reports of snowfall have also been received from interior of Himachal Pradesh. Heavy snowfall was reported from some area of Khansur and Lahaul Spitti district.



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IPL event

The Cambridge dictionary defines auction as ‘usually a public sale of goods or property where people make higher and higher bids... until the thing is sold to the person who will pay most’. Other dictionaries more or less have similar meanings. Cricketers now enjoy demi-god status and to line them up for an auction looks strange. No doubt IPL is also a platform capable of producing stars of the future. Perhaps more dignified terminology could be used to describe the whole exercise.

V. Subramanian,

Chennai

In print

Little things do matter a lot in life. When I was in my teens, I first visited Sabarimala which was considered to be a difficult journey. Just before I set out, my friend told me to take along a postcard — to write something on it and post from Sabarimala. The addressee was me! In those days, mail was cleared in Sabarimala either once or twice a week. So, when I received my own postcard a week later, I felt like a boy who had been rewarded with a bar of chocolate. An advocate once visited his daughter in the U.S. She wrote a postcard to him which said that she would be unhappy with the thought of his having to go back to India after a while. The advocate was so touched that he has ‘preserved’ the postcard. (‘Open’ Page, February 13).

V. Lakshmanan,

Tirupur, Tamil Nadu



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China’s quest for dominance, commercial interests and deepening diasporic links are bringing India and Australia closer

The gift of a cricket bat, signed by former Indian captain Virat Kohli, from the External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to his Australian counterpart Marise Payne last week might suggest ties between Delhi and Canberra are stuck with the cliches of “cricket, curry and Commonwealth”. But the story of India’s Australia ties today is anything but. If Delhi and Canberra found it hard to get along in the past, they have become highly valued partners for each other, thanks to unprecedented political commitment in both capitals to rapidly transform bilateral relations. If Cold War geopolitics divided India and Australia, the new strategic dynamic in Asia — driven by China’s quest for regional dominance — is pushing the two nations toward each other. Equally important is the new convergence of commercial interests and deepening diasporic links.

That the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Japanese foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi joined Jaishankar and Payne at the Melbourne cricket ground at the end of their talks in the Quadrilateral format may not have much political significance. Blinken and Hayashi, with no interest in cricket, were merely indulging their cricket-crazy partners in the Indo-Pacific. Fifteen years ago, Delhi and Canberra were deeply sceptical of the Quad framework proposed by Tokyo and backed by Washington. India and  Australia are now active champions of the forum. Delhi and Canberra, which were too deferential to Beijing in the past, are now ready to stand up to Chinese pressures. It was not too long ago that China dismissed the Quadrilateral forum as “sea foam” that is here now but gone the next moment. But as the Quad consolidated itself, Beijing’s tone has become harsher. As the Quad foreign ministers gathered in Melbourne, a spokesperson of the ministry of foreign affairs in Beijing attacked the group “as a tool to contain China” and called on its members to shed their “Cold War mentality”.

There is more, however, to the India-Australia relationship than the Quad and the Indo-Pacific geopolitics. Jaishankar and Payne reviewed the growing bilateral cooperation in a range of areas from tourism and critical minerals to defence and security cooperation. The two ministers also launched the first India-Australia cyber framework dialogue. Australia is raising its profile in the subcontinent as part of its effort to coordinate regional policies with India. Delhi, in turn, is leveraging its Canberra connection, to strengthen its outreach to the strategic South Pacific Islands. Jaishankar and Payne also welcomed the rapid progress in the trade talks between the two sides. In New Delhi, after his talks with the visiting Australian trade and tourism minister Dan Tehan, commerce minister Piyush Goyal announced that the two sides are pushing hard to conclude an early harvest trade deal within the next month. During his visit, Jaishankar spent time with representatives of the Indian diaspora that has rapidly grown to about 700,000 and is making major contributions to Australian society. During the Cold War, cricket, curry and Commonwealth were just not enough to overcome the geopolitical distance between Delhi and Canberra; today, they will not only become more salient, but also reinforce the deepening strategic partnership between India and Australia.



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Rahul Bajaj will be remembered as an industrialist who spoke his mind and adopted best practices of global industry

For many, Rahul Bajaj’s name was synonymous with the so-called Bombay Club industrialists, who sought a “level-playing field” against multinational companies after the 1991 reforms that slashed import tariffs and liberalised foreign investments. Bajaj Chetak and Bajaj Super scooters had a free run on Indian roads through the 1970s and 1980s, with multi-year waiting periods and the nearest lone competitor rival only in name. But Rahul Bajaj, who passed away on Saturday aged 83, wasn’t the usual protectionist industrialist thriving in a seller’s market. His vehicles were robust, met high production quality standards and appealed to consumers. For them, the Chetak was the ultimate “hamara” scooter on which the entire family could ride. Bajaj wanted to produce more, but the governments of those times denied capacity expansions on the most perverse socialist grounds — that his company was a monopoly. Bajaj also totally indigenised the production of the company’s scooters after an initial technical collaboration with Italy’s Piaggio, besides making it the world’s fourth-largest two-wheeler manufacturer by the early 1990s.

While his scooters symbolised ordinary middle-class aspirations of the Amol Palekar-Farooq Shaikh years, Bajaj should be equally credited for keeping his eyes on the road ahead. Bajaj Auto tied up with Kawasaki to manufacture motorcycles in the mid-1980s, along with Hero-Honda and TVS-Suzuki. It also launched a 50cc single-gear Bajaj Sunny in 1990, aimed at 16-18 year olds who couldn’t handle heavier scooters or bikes. It pained him, though, when his son Rajiv decided to exit the scooter section in 2009. In hindsight, the senior Bajaj may not have been entirely wrong. The erstwhile king of scooters couldn’t partake in the gearless scooter revolution led by the likes of Honda Activa and TVS Jupiter. These targeted individual buyers, particularly women, craving for mobility, unlike the earlier “family” scooter. Rajiv did, however, turn Bajaj Auto into India’s second-biggest and the world’s third-largest motorcycle manufacturer. The other son Sanjiv has made Bajaj Finserv into a leading financial services concern with a market capitalisation even exceeding Bajaj Auto’s.

Rahul Bajaj, at the end of the day, will be remembered as someone who spoke his mind — not only to his son, but also as a Bombay Club member to then finance minister Manmohan Singh and to the present home minister Amit Shah. When he told the latter of the need to create an environment where businessmen could “openly criticise” the government and still be appreciated, he was voicing a concern that few of his ilk dared express. It was a concern of a man who truly believed in “Make in India”, recognised the importance of adopting global industry best practices, and stuck to his knitting without diversifying into unrelated businesses.



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Mrs. Gandhi has ruled out the possibility of mid-term elections in any state. Elections will, however, be held in states where they are due, she told reporters in Bhopal.

Mrs Gandhi has ruled out the possibility of mid-term elections in any state. Elections will, however, be held in states where they are due, she told reporters in Bhopal. The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh was not being asked to step down nor were there plans for any leadership change in other states, she said. Radical improvement was called for in the judiciary and administration and the system of education to realise the goal of a socialist and egalitarian society. Whatever the form of government, there was a scope for better, she said when asked whether there were efforts to shift to the presidential system.

Court fee abolition

Union Law Minister Jagan Nath Kaushal has hinted at the possibility of court fees being abolished. Inaugurating a conference of the Uttar Pradesh Congress (I) Committee’s legal cell, said that a recommendation made to this effect by a panel constituted by his predecessor P Shiv Shankar had been sent to state governments for their approval. The minister said that it was his conviction that the “state had no right to tell a person who comes seeking justice to give money first”. A conference of law ministers will be called for the purpose, he said.

Foreigners’ issue

Leaders of the All Assam Students Union accused the Home Minister of “conveniently concealing” from the parliamentary consultative committee the policy decision made by the government on the issue of illegal migrants. Reacting sharply to the Home Minister’s statement that the government would honour the national commitment to refugees, the AASU general secretary Bhrigu Kumar Phukan that the External Affairs Minister had on April 4, 1966 categorically stated in the Lok Sabha that no person coming from East Pakistan after April 17, 1966 without valid travel documents would be given citizenship.



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Institutional development across states should be a priority area for equitable flow of subsidised credit

This budget has disappointed the farming sector. The government has increased the agricultural credit target to Rs 18 lakh crore for 2022-23 from Rs 16.5 lakh crore for the current fiscal, with an allocated subsidy of Rs 20,870 crore. The question, however, is: Is the huge credit and subsidy benefiting farmers on the ground?

The budget speech as well as the Economic Survey 2021-22 recommended that priority should be given to crop diversification and allied sectors including horticulture, organic farming, dairying and fishing to increase farmers income. But to enable small farmers to shift from wheat and paddy or improve their income through allied sectors, they must have access to institutional credit at reasonable rates of interest.

While the volume of credit has grown over the decades, its quality and impact on agriculture has deteriorated. Over the years, the growth rate in the agriculture sector has been falling: It was 6.8 per cent in 2016-17, whereas it is 3.9 per cent in 2021-22. Agricultural credit has become less efficient in delivering growth.

In the last 10 years, agriculture credit increased by 350 per cent, but it has not reached even 15 per cent of the 12.56 crore small and marginal farmers. Credit is critical for achieving higher farm output. Institutional credit will help delink farmers from non-institutional sources, where they are compelled to borrow at usurious rates of interest.

The RBI has asked if agricultural households with the lowest landholding (up to two hectares) get only about 15 per cent of the subsidised loan from institutional sources. The share is 79 per cent for households belonging to the highest size class of land possessed (above 2 hectares). As per the Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households by NSSO, the share of institutional loans increases with an increase in land possessed. Clearly, the bulk of subsidised agri-credit is grabbed by a handful of big farmers and agri-business companies.

A loose definition of agri-credit has led to the leakage of loans at subsidised rates to large agri-firms. For example, in 2017, 53 per cent of the agriculture credit that NABARD provided to Maharashtra was allocated to Mumbai metro city and suburbs, where there are no agriculturists, only agri-business.

One of the main reasons for this diversion is that subsidised credit disbursed at 4 per cent to 7 per cent rate interest is being refinanced to small farmers and in the open market at interest rates up to 24 per cent.

As chairman of the Working Group on Agriculture Production constituted in 2010 by the then prime minister Manmohan Singh, I had recommended strategies and action plans for increasing agriculture production and productivity, including long-term policies to ensure sustained growth. The report of the working group laid emphasis on the easy availability of institutional credit to farmers for future growth, recommending that “credit should be made available at not more than 4 per cent per annum rate of interest”. This was implemented by the UPA government throughout the country. However, in Haryana, the Congress government extended crop credit to farmers at a zero per cent rate of interest through state co-operatives.

I suggest the following changes in the agri-credit system. One, the flow of agricultural credit has not been uniform across states. Institutional development across states is a priority area for equitable flow of subsidised credit. Two, state governments should work in close coordination with the banking system for the promotion of more Joint Liability Groups (JLGs) as per NABARD guidelines to ensure that formal credit reaches financially-excluded farmers. Three, state governments should regularly monitor credit flow. Four, the rate of interest for long-term loans should be kept at 4 per cent. Five, a comprehensive list of all farm-related activities should be prepared by the banks in consultation with NABARD, agriculture experts, farmers and administration. Six, eligibility conditions/criteria for providing agriculture loans should be further simplified and liberalised. The repayment schedule should be according to the farmers’ capacity.

As chief minister of Haryana, I had amended the law to provide the recovery of the cooperative loans by leasing out the mortgaged land in place of selling, in the event of default by the farmer, with the mutual consent of cooperative society and the agriculturist. Not a single farmer was arrested in Haryana during my tenure for default in repayment of loans taken from cooperatives. The Haryana model on agri-credit introduced by a Congress government can be a blueprint for other states.

(The writer is former chief minister, Haryana)



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He would express opinions without mincing words, but gave the same freedom to his friends to differ from him

Rahul Bajaj passed away on February 12, 2022, after being unwell for some time. He was known the world over and, of course, in India for being a very successful, ethical, and philanthropic businessman.

Bajaj came from an illustrious business family that took part in our freedom struggle. He pursued his MBA from the prestigious Harvard University, married a lovely woman, Rupa, and had three wonderful children. He was the only member of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) who served as an extremely effective president for two terms; he will be remembered for being vocal and making each meeting interesting and fun. He was also a regular visitor to Davos and enjoyed participating in the forum. He was elected to the Rajya Sabha, and always went to the Central Hall to visit his friends whenever he was in Delhi.

Living in Pune, I had heard about Rahul and had met him on a few social occasions, but did not know him personally. It was when I became active in CII that I came to know him well. In 2002, when the Gujarat riots took place and I openly condemned the atrocities, Rahul took me aside at a party and said that I had done my bit and, for the sake of my company and family, I should not say any more and that he would write and speak about this cause. And he did keep his promise. This was one of the many occasions when I experienced his warmth and care.

Anyone who knew Rahul would know about his candour, how he was not afraid to speak his mind. Tact was not his strong point, but in the corporate world, where very few have the courage to go against the establishment, his frankness was a breath of fresh air.

Rahul invited me to be a member of the council of advisors of Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation that gives annual awards to outstanding individuals who follow Gandhian values. It was then that I realised the enormous philanthropic work done by this illustrious family. He took a very active interest in matters of the foundation and attended every meeting to select the awardees. He would meticulously plan the main award function in Mumbai each year. Being Rahul Bajaj, he could ask any dignitary to be the chief guest, whether it be a senior politician or a religious guru. I am not aware of anyone refusing his invitation.

I have in the past asked for his support for the NGOs I am involved with, and he has always been very generous. He found it difficult to show his soft side, but behind his loud talk and demeanour, there was a caring, warm heart. He was the founding trustee of the Ananta Aspen Centre and, along with Tarun Das, helped it to flourish as a great institution that encourages leadership. At Ananta Aspen, again, I was touched by his generosity in supporting the Young Leader’s Programme and the Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship.

Rahul was a fun-loving person with a great sense of humour. He would express opinions without mincing words, but gave the same freedom to his friends to differ from him, and sometimes he conceded defeat. If Rahul was in a meeting, you could be assured it would not be boring.

I recall an incident that is typical of my friend. I had invited him for a small sit-down lunch at my house. He was the first guest to arrive (he was never late for any event), and he asked me who all had been invited. When I mentioned a particular name, he said, “Don’t you know we are no longer friends?” I told him that I was not aware of this and now that I had invited both of them, he should behave himself and not make any rude comments. Rahul was civil as requested, but totally ignored him.

Rahul’s birthday falls on June 10 and I have fond memories of his birthday celebrations and the annual winter party at his house at Akurdi. Like me, he enjoyed dancing and we had a lot of fun.

I miss my friend. I will cherish these memories and pray that he is happy wherever he may be.

The writer is former chairperson of Thermax



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The issue needs public health & gender sensitive approach, as overcrowded prisons have felt devastating impact of the Omicron variant

During the pandemic, the mass incarceration of undertrials led to a humanitarian crisis in overcrowded prisons. Prison officials struggled to prevent mass contagion among inmates and staff, even as thousands fell ill and many died. Prisons instituted their own lockdown rules by quarantining “fresh” admissions, creating quarantine zones, suspending jail manuals and prohibiting visitors. There is no lockdown on the entry of more undertrial prisoners while their rate of exit from prisons has decreased since the onset of the pandemic.

Today, the devastating impact of the highly contagious Omicron variant in prisons is normalised by invoking lockdown curbs. Prisons have not completed vaccination programmes and conditions have worsened as occupancy rates increase. Court visits are suspended. Lawyers cannot visit their clients in person. Prison visits have stopped, even if families and visitors are vaccinated and follow Covid-appropriate behaviour.

Experts tell us that the main reason for “overcrowding” in our prisons is due to the mass incarceration of pre-trial prisoners. The penal policy of the state has not focussed on de-criminalisation. Instead, it has resulted in a shocking 31.8 per cent increase in the incarceration of the number of undertrial prisoners and increase in imprisonment of detenues by 40.1 per cent from 2015 to 2020 (as of December 31, 2020). Jail is the rule rather than the exception. The prison statistics of 2020 show that more than 70 per cent of such undertrial prisoners are from marginalised classes, castes, religions and genders.

In 2020, as the national lockdown was announced, the Supreme Court of India issued directions to set up high-powered committees (HPCs) in each state to decongest prisons. In Contagion of Covid-19 Virus in Prisons, the Supreme Court of India held that “the requirement of de­congestion is a matter concerning health and right to life of both the prison inmates and the police personnel working”. However, most HPCs did not adopt classification based on the right to life or health nor were these gender-sensitive.

Most HPCs treated decongestion as an administrative issue. One might even argue that the HPC classification adversely impacted bail outcomes and reduced the categories of release adopted by the barely functional undertrial review committees. The 2020 Prison Statistics report supports this analysis in two ways. First, it reveals that as compared to 2019, “the release of convicts has declined by 41.2 per cent and the release of undertrials has declined by 19.6 per cent” in 2020. Second, as compared to 2019, the number of undertrial prisoners increased by 11.7 per cent and the number of detenues increased by 11.4 per cent in 2020.

The pandemic saw the creation of new dockets which were mainly related to violations of “lockdown law” under section 188 of the IPC (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant). In 2019, there were 29,469 cases registered under this section. In 2020, this increased to a staggering 6,12,179 cases. Other laws were also used, including local laws, leading to 16,43,690 more cases being registered in 2020 as compared to 2019. No amnesty has been announced for these offences nor has the misuse of the “epidemic laws” seen judicial review.

As prisons instituted a lockdown on public accountability, the rates of custodial deaths have increased by 7.0 per cent in 2020. So-called unnatural deaths, which include suicides, accidents, and murders in prisons, increased by 18.1 per cent. There is no information on why 56 inmates died in 2020. These figures prove that the lockdown rules in prisons increase custodial violence and disease. These lockdown rules unfortunately are now normalised by the fiction that the HPCs will decongest and oversee the pandemic-induced crisis. Public interest appeals to the committees to adopt a public health and gender-sensitive classification to decongest the most overcrowded prisons in the country were rejected.

Take the example of the approach to incarcerating pregnant women in prisons. In May 2021, the Delhi HPC directed that pregnant undertrials or mothers with children will be released on interim bail for three months. While releasing pregnant women for three months, the HPC did not factor in which trimester each woman was in. If a woman was in labour or delivered a baby three months later, she was expected to surrender or go to court.

Pregnant undertrials who fell into the HPC’s exclusion clause, such as foreign national prisoners, were not released. Even though most foreign national prisoners are from the global south, the exclusion clause is not seen as a racist classification. The disaster law was not applied to prohibit such racial discrimination between different classes of pregnant women. Nor did the courts rule unequivocally that custodial childbirth and incarcerated pregnancy is a specific form of cruel and inhuman punishment that is inflicted on women in prisons. Or honour the UN’s Bangkok Rules which state that “non-custodial means should be preferred for pregnant women during the pre-trial phase”.

Surely it is high time that governments and courts adopt a public health and gender-sensitive approach to the question of mass incarceration of undertrial prisoners. The participation of prison watchdogs in bringing accountability to these dark custodial spaces must be restored. The decline in the rate of release of undertrials from prison and the increase in custodial deaths must be named as a humanitarian crisis. And the bureaucratic approach of the HPCs should be reviewed.

Courts must privilege prisoners’ experiences of “lockdown” prisons rather than pay lip service to dead letter reform. It is time to end the law’s attachment to inflicting cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment on pre-trial prisoners. The mass incarceration of pre-trial prisoners must be abolished. Surely institutionalised indifference to the cruel and inhuman conditions of custody must be abhorrent to any society.

(The writer is a sociologist based in Delhi. She has authored Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India)



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There is a need to rethink power and fertiliser subsidies and reorient MSP and procurement policies towards minimising GHG emissions

In the backdrop of the 2070 carbon neutrality target set by India at the CoP26 in Glasgow, the Union Budget for 2022-23 has listed “climate action” and “energy transition” as one of the four priorities for the Amrit Kaal. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a few announcements in this context, including an additional allocation of Rs 19,500 crore for solar PV modules. She also talked of co-firing of 5-7 per cent of biomass pellets in thermal power plants, “sovereign green bonds” and a “battery-swapping policy”. These are positive steps towards making the energy and transport sectors less polluting.

Her announcements on agriculture, however, were rather limited. Agriculture contributes 73 per cent of the country’s methane emissions. India has kept away from the recent EU-US pledge to slash methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, despite the country being the world’s third largest emitter of methane. The FM did talk of chemical-free natural farming in a 5-km wide corridor along the river Ganga, support for millets, and increased domestic production of oilseeds and kisan drones. These are welcome steps. But they do not assure us that the environmental damage already wrought by the sector can be undone. The damage is largely a result of the various kinds of subsidies — on urea, canal irrigation and power for irrigation — as well as the minimum support prices (MSP) and procurement policies concentrated on a few states and largely on two crops, rice, and wheat.

We also know that as of January 1, the stocks of wheat and rice in the country’s central pool were four times higher than the buffer stocking requirement. In fact, rice stocks with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) are seven times the buffer norms for rice. This is despite the record distribution of rice in the PDS and record exports of rice (17.7MMT) in 2020-21. The financial value of these excessive grain stocks is Rs 2.14 lakh crore, of which Rs 1.66 lakh crore is because of excess rice stocks — as per the economic cost of rice and wheat given by the FCI. Interestingly, the Economic Survey 2021-22 gives an economic cost of rice and wheat higher than that reported by FCI. If one uses the survey’s figures, the value of excess stocks jumps to Rs 2.56 lakh crore, with rice accounting for approximately Rs 2 lakh crore.

All this does not just reflect inefficient use of scarce capital, the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) embedded in these stocks is also large. As per the national GHG inventory, the agriculture sector emits 408 MMT of carbon-dioxide equivalent and rice cultivation is the third highest source (17.5 per cent) of GHG emissions in Indian agriculture after enteric fermentation (54.6 per cent) and fertiliser use (19 per cent). Paddy fields are anthropogenic sources of atmospheric nitrous oxide and methane, which have been reckoned as 273 and 80-83 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in driving temperature increase in 20 years’ (Sixth Assessment Report IPCC 2021). The amount of methane emitted from paddy fields of India is 3.396 teragram per year or 71.32 MMT carbon dioxide equivalent. Two important points need to be noted here: First, India does not report nitrous oxide emissions in its national GHG inventories. There is scientific evidence that intermittent flooding reduces water and methane emissions but increases nitrous oxide emissions. Thus, lowering of methane emissions through controlled irrigation does not necessarily mean net low emissions. Second, emissions due to burning rice residues, application of fertilisers, production of fertilisers for rice, energy operations like harvesting, pumps, processing, transportation are not accounted for in the GHG emissions in rice production.

A study by Vetter et al. (2017) used the Cool Farm Tool (CFT) model to estimate annual GHG emissions by crops from production to the farm gate. It reported emissions of 5.65 kg carbon dioxide equivalent of GHG per kg of rice. Moreover, paddy fields require about 4,000 cubic metres of water per tonne of rice for irrigation. Even if half of that percolates back to groundwater, excess stocks of 46 MMT of rice embed about 92 billion cubic meters of water as well as 260 MMT of carbon dioxide equivalent. According to the IMF, the world needs a carbon tax of $ 75 per tonne by 2030 to reduce emissions to a level consistent with a 2 degree Celsius warming target. India does not have an explicit carbon-price yet, but many countries have begun to implement carbon pricing. Sweden leads the pack with a carbon price as high as $137 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent while EU is at $50/tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent. It is high time for India to announce indicative carbon pricing and create a vibrant carbon market to incentivise green growth in Amrit Kaal.

The Economic Survey 2021-22 points out that the country is over-exploiting its ground water resource (see map), particularly in the northwest and some parts of south India. This is primarily due to paddy cultivation on 44 million hectares. This has helped India achieve food security, but it’s time now to save groundwater and the environment. This calls for revisiting policies to subsidise power and fertilisers, MSP and procurement and reorient them towards minimising GHG emissions. Farmer groups and the private sector can be mobilised to develop carbon markets in agriculture, both at the national and international levels, which can reward farmers in cash for switching from carbon-intensive crops such as rice to low-carbon-intensive crops or improving farming practices in rice systems to lower GHG emissions. Such a move towards “net-zero” agriculture will give India a “climate smart” agriculture in Amrit Kaal. And, if we can protect productivity levels with a low-carbon footprint, it will help India to access global markets too.

Gulati is Infosys Chair professor for agriculture and Singh is senior fellow at ICRIER



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India must shed naive optimism and halt China’s covert but steady haemorrhaging of Indian territory

One of the authors of the article is Ashok Hukku

Well before it recklessly triggered World War II, Germany had provided enough evidence of its hegemonic intent and disdain for international conventions. In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on return from the Munich conference with Hitler: “I believe it is peace for our time.” His gullibility was shown up a year later when Hitler, ordering the invasion of Poland, remarked: “Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich.”

India’s “Munich moment” came in 1962 with the egregious misreading of China’s intent by a naive political leadership, leading to a humiliating military defeat in the Sino-Indian war. On October 20, 1962, India’s 7th Infantry Brigade was overrun by the 11th Division of the People’s Liberation Army at Namka Chu. The Indian soldiers fought gallantly, often to the last man and the last bullet, but in vain. Similar actions took place elsewhere in NEFA (now Arunachal) and Ladakh. The rout lasted all the way up to November 20 when the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew 20 km behind the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

The LAC had been described by PM Zhou Enlai in 1959 as conforming to “the so-called McMahon Line in the east, and the line up to which each side exercises actual control in the west.” India did not agree with this definition but its failure to diplomatically contest and militarily defend this line gave China physical control of 38,000 sq km of the Aksai Chin plateau in 1962. Subsequently, China has claimed 84,000 sq km of Arunachal Pradesh as part of “Southern Tibet”.

There is probably no precedent where two belligerents after fighting a “border war” have left their disputed boundary undetermined and unmarked for 60 long years. Indian politicians and diplomats used to derive satisfaction from having de-linked the border issue from the rest of the Sino-Indian relationship and rejoiced as bilateral trade — though adversely balanced — zoomed past the $100-billion mark. But to a layman, it appeared that by neglecting to pursue a negotiated demarcation of the LAC, and by glossing over repeated territorial incursions as “differences of perception,” our security elite had played into China’s hands.

The government’s stand that “no Indian territory has been occupied by China”, seen in the light of the May 2020 sanguinary clash in Galwan, and the 22-month Sino-Indian military stand-off, has confused the citizens and raised many concerns. In Ladakh, if the Chinese have indeed not encroached on our territory, then why are our troops unable to access previously established “patrolling points” and what exactly are the “friction points” that find frequent mention in communiqués? In Arunachal, are the freshly-built Chinese enclaves and the towns re-named by them located in Indian territory? Finally, what has been the outcome of 22 meetings of the “special representatives” and why have military commanders failed to achieve “disengagement”, leave alone “de-escalation” in 14 meetings?

These conundrums indicate that from Jawaharlal Nehru’s desperate optimism, encapsulated in the “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai” nostrum, to PM Modi’s sustained engagement with Xi Jinping, Beijing has deviously managed to camouflage the true motivation behind its actions as well as its long-term intentions vis-à-vis India. New Delhi, on its part, has failed to evolve a strategy to counter China’s designs or even issue a White Paper to explain the dimensions of this challenge to Parliament and the public.

China, having amply demonstrated its penchant for “salami-slicing” territory, as well as its disdain for international law, leaves India with little room for complacency or for vainly hoping that so-called “legacy issues” will resolve themselves with time. It is, therefore, vital to deconstruct China’s elaborate charade and to halt the covert but steady haemorrhaging of Indian territory.

While jingoism has its place in politics, we must be realistic enough to understand that neither conquest nor re-conquest of territory is possible in a nuclearised South Asia. India’s Parliament and government should now accord utmost priority to establishing settled, viable and peaceful international boundaries all around. Only then will India be able to focus on nation-building and socio-economic development without interruption. A few pragmatic options offer themselves for resolving the Sino-Indian imbroglio.

First, India could exhume and revive the offer reportedly made by PM Zhou in 1960. Seeking strategic depth for Highway 219 that links Xinjiang with Tibet across Aksai Chin, Zhou had suggested negotiating a “quid pro quo” wherein China would recognise the McMahon Line in exchange for India making certain adjustments in the west. This would call for considerable political boldness and diplomatic adroitness.

A second option would be for India to bring sustained pressure to bear on China on the diplomatic, trade and psychological fronts and await results. At the same time, Indian forces must remain poised for swift direct action; seizing unoccupied territory and holding on to it as a bargaining chip. The surprise capture of tactical heights on the Kailash Range by our Special Forces brought severe psychological pressure on Beijing and must serve as a template. While skirmishes and physical confrontations may take place, it is considered most unlikely — for several reasons — that China would take on India in a major or even a limited conflict.

A third option lies in the maritime domain where opportunities exist, both for power-balancing via partnerships, as well as direct naval action. China’s economy and industry are overwhelmingly dependent on uninterrupted seaborne trade and energy. Thus, China’s Indian Ocean sea lanes constitute a “jugular vein” that India could threaten via trade warfare. In this context, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, suitably fortified and militarised, could become maritime bastions, dominating the Malacca Straits. Far more strategic advantage could accrue if India were to shed its political coyness and offer Port Blair as a logistic “watering hole” to selected friendly navies.

The last option would, obviously, be to maintain the status quo — with 50,000-60,000 troops deployed at high altitudes — and engage in sustained military/diplomatic parleys hoping for useful outcomes — with an unpredictable Chinese threat hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles.

Prakash is a former Indian naval chief and Hukku was a major general in the Indian army



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The stakes are high in the elections today to the Uttarakhand and Goa legislative assemblies along with the second phase of the Uttar Pradesh polls. Congress has much to gain and lose in Uttarakhand and Goa where it is pitted in direct fights with BJP. Of late, regional parties have been exasperated with Congress’s inability to defeat BJP, raising questions over GOP’s claims of leading the national opposition. With AAP also keenly in the fight in both states, Congress is also wary of the Arvind Kejriwal led outfit emerging as a political alternative.

A major difference this time in Uttarakhand was the strong Hindutva rhetoric that the BJP has employed to put the Congress campaign on the backfoot. Chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami’s promise of a Uniform Civil Code at the fag end of the campaign seemed strategically aimed to convince undecided voters. After 10 years of governing Goa and keenly missing Manohar Parrikar this time, BJP faces an uphill task. But having lost almost all its 2017 legislative contingent to BJP through desertions, Congress had the onerous job of convincing its voters that such a situation would not repeat.

UP Assembly polls live

In UP, the second phase encompassing parts of western UP and Rohilkhand is largely an extension of the first phase where the SP-RLD combine had offered stiff resistance to BJP. With the Muslim vote a key factor in many constituencies, SP will be hoping that BSP, Congress and AIMIM do not take away too many of these votes. Amid no dearth of local issues, the big question is whether the Hijab controversy will cast its shadow on this phase. Much is also riding on CM Yogi Adityanath, which may have prompted the unusual election-day television interview.



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Three decades ago, India’s capital market was a mess. Archaic practices and antiquated institutions created the conditions for a securities trading fraud. For the honest investor, it was a gamble all the way. Payment timelines could be suddenly extended and the circulation of bogus physical shares meant an additional risk. All of that began to change when the National Stock Exchange (NSE) started operations in 1994. It was a pan-India online stock exchange in both debt and equity, catapulting market infrastructure to another level. It was followed by a centralised clearing house to remove counterparty risk and a depository to digitalise share ownership.

India’s capital market journey in the 1990s was transformative. Market infrastructure and practices registered a quantum improvement. This is the context to locate yet another punishment announced by the regulator, Sebi, to NSE and two members of its founding team, Ravi Narain and Chitra Ramkrishna. A year ago, Sebi imposed a penalty on NSE and its two former heads in the co-location case, which undermined the integrity of the exchange as a neutral platform for brokers. Last week, another round of penalties and temporary bans in another case pointed to a serious breakdown of governance.

NSE is not just India’s largest exchange, its scale matches global leaders. In 2020, it was the world’s largest derivatives exchange in terms of contracts traded. It’s also highly profitable – net profit of Rs 3,573 crore on an income of Rs 6,202 crore in FY21 – with a dispersed shareholding. The primary issue in the latest problem is that Ramkrishna, NSE’s executive head between April 2013 and December 2016, sent out confidential information at a time when the exchange was looking to launch an IPO. Intertwined is the appointment of an ill-equipped consultant who was given substantial executive powers, which received board approval. And that a mysterious ‘guru’ received confidential details of NSE makes things murkier.

An efficient capital market is an essential need in a modern economy. Therefore, it’s important that there is a deeper investigation into what happened at NSE. If necessary, other enforcement agencies need to be brought in. There are consequences when governance breaks down on this scale. NSE’s IPO has been delayed because of the co-location problem, thereby delaying the exit of some early investors. Such incidents add to the cost of investing in India. A more detailed investigation and follow up regulatory action are needed to make India a more attractive location.



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Foreign minister S Jaishankar’s statement that China has violated written agreements by amassing forces along the LAC is right on the money. The 1993 Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the LAC enjoins both parties to refrain from using or threatening force against the other, keep their military forces at the border to a minimum, and strictly respect the LAC pending a final solution to the boundary question. China has flouted each one of these clauses and sought to unilaterally change the status quo along the border. Its forces continue to intrude upon Indian territory in eastern Ladakh and since the Galwan clashes of 2020 Beijing has kept the whole LAC active.

This is because China today is very different from what it was in 1993. Under Xi Jinping it no longer feels the need to hide its strength and bide its time, and is openly challenging the rules-based international order. This is precisely why platforms such as the Quad need to step up and push back against Beijing’s belligerence. In this regard, it’s welcome that the recent fourth Quad foreign ministers’ meeting in Melbourne saw the group reaffirm its commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. But Jaishankar qualified this by saying that the Quad was “for something, not against somebody”. Such caveats are no longer helpful. As last week’s US strategy paper says, China is combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological might to rewrite global rules.

Therefore, there should be no doubts that China presents the biggest systemic threat to the global order. And the only way China will change course is if there is concerted international pushback as well as costs for Beijing’s nefarious designs. With the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress later this year widely expected to hand Xi an unusual third term at the helm, a revisionist China is here to stay. For sake of peace and stability, Quad needs to be bolder and forcefully call China out for its destructive activities.



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By broadening the pool of retail investors in LIC's initial public offering (IPO), GoI could revive a stalled disinvestment programme that is affecting its fiscal space during a phase of heavy spending to ride out a global health crisis. There is a lot riding on LIC's market debut as capital markets turn turbulent.

The filing of papers for the listing of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) caps a couple of years of regulatory realignment. But it leaves a few questions unanswered for investors. How will LIC's business be affected when it redistributes policyholders' profits among shareholders? And how will shareholder scrutiny transform its management? Some of LIC's monopolistic protections like the sovereign guarantee to policyholders remain in place, while others such as the proportion of profits returned to them are being diluted. GoI is retaining LIC's unique business proposition to offset market-dictated profit redistribution. The value investors place on the insurer critically depends on how a financial ballast reacts to its new place in the market.

GoI has tweaked LIC's governance structure, but it still lags evolving market requirements. Its holdings, too, are optimised from the government's perspective, but the market will want to see them realigned to its expectations over time. LIC will have to eventually operate within rules framed by the insurance and stock market regulators. The insurer is the biggest channel for household savings into the stock market and it should ideally conform to the regulatory superstructure. GoI would do well to communicate a schedule for the migration. The insurer will, in turn, need to provide its shareholders a timeline for divestment of struggling assets such as IDBI Bank that were acquired at the behest of the government.

LIC's dominance of the insurance business will buy it time. But its monopolistic defences will erode. The biggest listing in India's history could offer GoI a validation of its privatisation drive and spur sales of other state-owned enterprises. By broadening the pool of retail investors in LIC's initial public offering (IPO), GoI could revive a stalled disinvestment programme that is affecting its fiscal space during a phase of heavy spending to ride out a global health crisis. There is a lot riding on LIC's market debut as capital markets turn turbulent.

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The pandemic is not over. There is a need to ensure universal vaccination at home and abroad. India needs to move quickly on its domestic rollout and ensure that it is stepping up supply for developing countries.

The Covid Subject Expert Committee's (SEC) recommendation on Monday to use Biological E's Corbevax for the 12-18 age group, pregnant women and lactating mothers is welcome, especially at a key time for Covid mitigation. This decision will help expand the vaccination drive and address vaccine hesitancy among expecting and new mothers. With the worst of the third wave now behind India, a full-fledged effort is on now to return to (post-Covid) normalcy. Schools are reopening, the economy is recovering, and to prevent being bowed under another surge, the pace of vaccination must be quickened. Increasing the number of vaccines in the mix will help.

Corbevax, which can play a critical role in expanding the beneficiary category, was given emergency use authorisation (EUA) in late December for the 18-plus segment. In June 2021, GoI had placed an advance order for 300 million vaccines. By end-February, it will receive 60 million vaccines. Ahead of the delivery, the SEC's advice to include it in the vaccination drive is good timing. Corbevax will then join Bharat Biotech's Covaxin, which has been authorised for use for the sub-18-year segment. Bharat Biotech produces 50-60 million doses a month. Covaxin is being administered to the adult population as a basic vaccine and booster. Limited supply required restricting the sub-18-year beneficiary group to 74 million between 15 and 18, and limiting boosters to frontline workers and senior citizens. Corbevax will allow for the inclusion of 65 million 12-15-year-olds, and expand the booster programme.

The pandemic is not over. There is a need to ensure universal vaccination at home and abroad. India needs to move quickly on its domestic rollout and ensure that it is stepping up supply for developing countries.

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The Union defence ministry told Parliament last week that the only film denied a “no objection certificate (NOC)” by the Army last year was a feature about a gay officer who is shown to fall in love with a Kashmiri man. In response to a question by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member Varun Gandhi, Union minister of state for defence Ajay Bhatt said that the armed forces couldn’t be depicted in a manner that brought “disrepute” to the country.

This is unfortunate. Plenty of movies, in Hindi and other languages, have been made where characters portraying soldiers are shown to be in romantic relationships with local residents of conflict regions. The only difference between those films and the current proposal by director Onir is that those features depicted heterosexual relationships. Moreover, the movie is based on a true story of an Army major, who has written extensively about his experience — therefore, the possibility of factual distortion is minimal.

India decriminalised homosexual relations four years ago. In its judgment, the Supreme Court said history owed an apology to the community. There is nothing disreputable about a homosexual relationship or a soldier who is gay. Yes, the armed forces have their internal discipline and security cannot be compromised, but as several countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, have shown, inclusivity of gender and sexual orientation doesn’t compromise national security. A gay soldier doesn’t show the Army in poor light, but its perceived intolerance of natural sexual orientations does. The force should reconsider its decision and give the proposal the consideration it deserves.

State polls enter a crucial phase - Hindustan Times
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Roughly 29 million voters spread across three states and 165 constituencies sealed the fate of 1,500 candidates in the biggest day of voting in the five-state election cycle on Monday. Much of the attention in this poll season is focused on India’s most politically crucial state, Uttar Pradesh, but in some ways, the single-phase electi-ons in Uttarakhand and Goa underline some trends about India’s electoral politics.

The states are witnessing a direct electoral battle between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is the incumbent party in both of the provinces, and the Congress. They are a reminder — along with Gujarat, which goes to the polls later this year, and four states (Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh) that vote next year — that despite powerful regional forces, the principal national adversary to the BJP remains the Congress. From now on, the two parties are locked in a direct contest in every state poll till 2024, and the victor of these fights will have an edge in the national election. Two, the results of elections in these two states will offer clues on how voters view parties and perceive anti-incumbency. In Uttarakhand, the BJP attempted to beat anti-incumbency by replacing its chief minister twice in the span of a year. In Goa, where 27 of the 40 legislators elected in 2017 have switched parties, it is yet unclear whether anti-incumbency sentiment is attached to the party or the candidate. The Congress, from which a majority of the defections occurred, has sought to counter this phenomena by nominating many fresh faces. These contrasting approaches underline different underst-andings of voter behaviour and the varying levels of control the two parties have on their leaders.

Three, despite their drastically different geographies, the mountainous Uttarakhand and the coastal Goa are united by the rising threat to their fragile ecological balance and increased vulnerability to the climate crisis. Yet, environmental protection is a major election issue neither in Uttarakhand — where cloudbursts, landslides and flash floods claim hundreds of lives and hundreds of crores of rupees in property damages — nor in Goa, where illegal mining, unsustainable tourism and untrammelled infrastructure development wreak havoc on its beaches, forests and land. Elections function as effective tools of accountability for most aspects of public life and policy, except — as appears in Goa and Uttarakhand — the environment.

Is it time to do away with the essential religious practices doctrine? - Hindustan Times
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The recent tensions over Ukraine present the real possibility of a dangerous conflagration in eastern Europe. But it also offers intriguing insights into the value and limitations of both hard power and soft power in international relations.

On the one hand, you have Russia, which is, without doubt, a major defence power. Russia spends over 4% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on its military, and continues to have a globally competitive defence industrial complex (of which India, among others, is a significant beneficiary). Moscow has also shown a willingness to exercise military power. The war in Georgia in 2008 was an ample demonstration of Russia’s use of force to achieve clear outcomes. Similarly, Russia’s intervention in Syria proved decisive in that country’s civil war. Its recent experiences serve as a useful reminder that what some in the West decry as 19th century strategic practices remain relevant.

On the other hand, you have a European Union (EU) that has primarily banked on soft power — the attraction of its economy, governance, ideology, and society — as a means to various ends. Europe has some of the world’s highest living standards, most livable cities, and generous social safety nets. The EU remains a superpower when it comes to setting international norms and standards. The European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) collectively boast 12 times the GDP of Russia. (The addition of the United States and Canada doubles that ratio.)

However, Europe has consistently underinvested in military and other forms of hard power since the end of the Cold War. Today, among the European members of NATO, only the United Kingdom, France, Poland, Romania, Greece, Croatia, and the Baltic States spend at least 2% of their GDPs on defence. This has contributed to Europe’s continuing reliance on the United States (US) for guaranteeing regional security.

The contrasting approaches of Russia and the EU are apparent in the ongoing stand-off. Russia has embarked on a major military build-up around Ukraine’s borders and has presented its demands diplomatically, while continuing to engage with Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and other capitals through a number of pre-existing institutions and dialogue formats. It is a further reminder, if one were needed, that the use or threat of use of military force still has strong coercive power. Advantage Moscow. Or so it would appear.

But the widespread notion of Russian leaders as hard-nosed realists and the Europeans as woolly-headed liberals belies the fact that the balance of power has shifted — not in Russia’s but in Europe’s favour. Today, a majority of Ukrainians (58%) — predominantly in western Ukraine — express a desire to join the EU over a customs union with Russia. This preference has nothing to do with Europe’s military prowess, but the economic opportunities and other benefits that European integration has to offer. In this regard, Russia’s smaller market, resource-dependent economy, and more limited financial clout offer little competition.

This discrepancy has implications well beyond Ukraine. Moscow’s ability to employ tools such as foreign aid, trade benefits, and technical assistance are far more limited than during the heyday of Soviet internationalism between the 1950s and 1980s. It is, therefore, little surprise that other actors are increasing their profiles in Russia’s traditional areas of influence, including militarily. Today, there are US soldiers in Lithuania, Turkish troops in Azerbaijan, and Chinese security forces in Tajikistan. Russia’s tactical boldness — not just in Europe but in West Asia and beyond — overshadows what in some ways resembles strategic retreat closer to home.

For India, there are cautionary lessons from both the European and Russian experiences. Europe suggests the folly of consistent under-investment in one’s military and the dangers of over-reliance on allies. For India, a continuing focus on improving national security and defence will remain paramount, particularly given its adverse regional security environment. This is not simply a question of increasing military expenditure, but also making viable investments in critical military technologies and defence production, forging instrumental international partnerships, updating training and doctrine, enhancing force posture and readiness, and ensuring networked command, control, and intelligence systems.

But equally, India could draw the right inferences from Russia’s predicament. Investments in military or hard power alone — absent complementary efforts in non-military domains — do not comprise a winning strategy over the long-run. A robust and resilient economy, investment in connectivity to present attractive forms of engagement in the periphery, and positive people-to-people ties in the neighbourhood remain critical to achieving strategic objectives. The ability to provide options when it comes to investment, market access, and defence trade and technology — as India’s “Neighbourhood First” approach is attempting — ought to remain a high priority in the years to come.

Dhruva Jaishankar is executive director, ORF AmericaThe views expressed are personal

Correct design can ensure CBDCs don’t destabilise banks - Hindustan Times
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The Budget confirmed that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is going to introduce a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in India this year. There is, however, a significant concern on whether CBDCs can potentially have a destabilising effect on the banking sector. In a recent interview, former RBI governor D Subbarao, while sceptical of it actually taking place, highlighted this as a pertinent issue for India. What is the nature of this concern and how can it be mitigated? The concern stems from the banking sector’s crucial role in financial intermediation. Banks borrow money in the form of deposits and use a portion of it to allocate credit to various parts of the economy, fuelling economic activity. They retain another portion in the form of reserves to preserve some liquidity to service their liabilities. Banks also facilitate payments, and even online digital payments using e-wallets require bank accounts.

In the current setup, central banks don’t perform these roles themselves because the commercial banks are considered more efficient at innovating and allocating resources. Central banks, instead, provide safety and finality to all transactions in the economy through cash and reserves. All digital payments are ultimately settled through interbank transfers of these reserves. This fosters trust in the financial system. Central banks also pursue monetary policy by charging interest rates on the reserves. Banks take their cue from this to set their borrowing and lending rates. When RBI offers a higher interest rate, banks may choose to keep the money with RBI than lend them, and vice versa, thereby impacting the overall supply of credit and money in the economy. This division of labour is called a two-tier architecture of monetary and payments system.

CBDCs could impair the stability of this system if people shift their funds from bank deposits to CBDCs on a large scale. This can happen if people want to shift to a safer form of digital money. Since CBDCs will have an implicit guarantee by RBI while bank deposits are only partially insured, this possibility cannot be ruled out. A shift can also happen if CBDCs are interest-bearing. Similar shifts occur now as well, during financial stress or uncertainty, leading to flight of deposits to cash. CBDCs could, however, accentuate such bank-runs much more, as they are far easier to access and use compared to cash.

The implications are serious. Banks would lose a cheap source of funds. They may hike interest rates to lure customers back or seek alternative sources, increasing their cost of funding. Banks’ overall balance sheet would also diminish since they must debit both the deposit accounts (liabilities) and their reserves with RBI (assets) simultaneously, so RBI can credit the amount into CBDC accounts maintained with RBI. This leads to disintermediation. It would not only reduce the overall volume of credit but also increase the cost of credit since banks may charge higher interest on loans to offset their increased funding costs.

Large scale shifts to CBDCs could be a problem for banking sectors with insolvency issues as well. This is due to the fact that while liquidity and insolvency are distinctly different problems, in practice, they are known to reinforce each other. Thus, if the Indian banking sector continues to have large non-performing assets, any disintermediation and liquidity constraints could reinforce this weakness, thereby leading to a solvency problem too. If CBDC holders transact directly through their individual accounts, then the banking sector’s role in providing payments services would also be reduced. Similarly, their role in monetary policy transmission will diminish, as central banks would directly deal with households and businesses.

How can these problems be controlled or minimised? Possible solutions may lie in designing CBDCs appropriately. CBDCs could be non-interest-bearing to avoid competing with deposits. Interest-bearing features are attractive primarily to impose negative interest rates. But as Subbarao notes, negative interest rates are not necessary for India, unlike for developed countries. Ceilings on CBDCs holdings and transactions could minimise the propensity to accentuate bank-runs. Central banks could reroute funds gained from CBDC deposits to banks to address disintermediation. This would, however, depend on whether they choose to do so, and whether banks can offer requisite security to receive these funds.

The institutional arrangements around CBDCs can also be designed to preserve the two-tier architecture mentioned here. This architecture is designed to leverage the relative advantages of the public and private sector. There are two alternatives possible here. First, a synthetic CBDC that allows banks and others to issue the payment instruments, representing their personal liabilities, and back the same with central bank reserves. This is, however, not considered a genuine CBDC as it is not a direct central bank liability such as cash. The other is a hybrid CBDC where the CBDC is a direct claim on the central bank, but the private sector continues to offer customer-facing services such as KYC (Know Your Customer). Banks would thus broadly continue to play their role of financial intermediation. Finally, any potential problem of solvency reinforced by liquidity constraints at banks due to CBDCs could be addressed by RBI and the government providing greater support.

Sabyasachi Kar is RBI Chair Professor, Institute of Economic Growth.

Priyadarshini D is an associate fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace India. The views are personal

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Why skilling must be a multi-sector joint effort - Hindustan Times
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India is poised to remain the fastest-growing economy of the world in coming years, and sustaining this high-growth economy is implicit upon the skilling outcome of its labour force. A centralised “one-shoe-fits-all” model has limitations in producing desired results within a timeframe.

After the New Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Policy launch in 2015, there was a quantum jump in the number of people getting skilled every year. The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), State Skill Development Mission (SSDM), Sector Skill Councils (SSC) and thousands of training centres are part of the robust skilling ecosystem that has evolved in the country.

With the launch of the Skill Acquisition and Knowledge Awareness for Livelihood Promotion (SANKALP) scheme in 2018, districts started preparing their skilling plans and mobilising resources for implementation. This changed paradigm is driven by the District Skill Committees (DSCs) through District Skill Development Plans (DSDPs). Through a competitive process, DSCs are preparing skill development plans, annually. In 2018, 237 districts participated in the exercise. In 2021, this number nearly doubled to 467. Headed by district collectors, DSCs comprise representatives of local industries too. DSCs hold consultative meetings to understand the demand and supply of skilled labour force in their districts. Local Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) also participate in this strategy-formulation exercise. Districts having the best DSDPs are awarded under the SANKALP scheme.

However, there is considerable scope of improvement. In a recent NITI Aayog study, strengths and weaknesses of the process were identified. There is a need to designate a dedicated district skill officer as the role demands intensive involvement. Formulation of skill development needs in-depth analysis of skill gaps not only in the district but also in the potential catchment area for employment.

The success of the skilling plan depends upon the employability of trainees, and hence industry linkages are vital. As many job opportunities are in the informal sector, consultations and field visits of DSCs with the informal sector need to be increased. A special focus on marginalised sections of the society is required, as is attention on in-migrant and out-migrant workers. Finally, well-defined and measurable key performance indicators of the skilling programmes need to be highlighted in DSDPs. So, while this decentralised approach has ushered in significant positive change, DSCs need to display greater ownership and improve stakeholder engagement. Skill committees at district, block and panchayat level need to debate and discuss with civil society while outlining skilling strategies for better outcomes. Special attention on migrant workers is needed while planning for skill development.

So far, skilling plans have mainly targetted employment through placements in the formal and informal sectors. However, translating the demographic dividend into economic growth requires capacity building for start-ups among the youth. The focus should be on promoting employment and entrepreneurship while planning strategies for skill development at the local level. Such strategies should aim to improve female labour force participation by unlocking the employment potential of the gig and care sector .

The overwhelming participation of districts in the formulation of DSDPs not only marks the beginning of a new era in decentralised planning, but also paves way for outcome-oriented participation in all development planning processes. So far, skill development has been perceived to be driven by the government only. The consultative approach of DSDPs is changing this perception. Skill development is now becoming a multi-stakeholder joint exercise, involving public, private and civil society members. Skilling plans at the district level have the potential to turbocharge the engine of the economy. Hence the competitive spirit of districts towards the planning and implementation process of skill development should be appreciated and encouraged further. This will make skilling an effective tool for empowering socially and economically vulnerable sections of the society, a beneficial contribution to the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav.

K Rajeswara Rao is special secretary, NITI Aayog and Rajesh Gupta is director, NITI Aayog The views expressed are personal

In Perspective | Online child safety and the dangers of false equivalence - Hindustan Times
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Last week, a committee of lawmakers approved a draft law to advance further in the United States (US) Senate. Called the EARN IT bill, it brings in additional obligations for tech companies, which can — if the law is enacted — be criminally liable for child pornography on their services.

On the surface, the law makes sense. Child pornography, or child sexual abuse material (CSAM), has found avenues to exist and proliferate, first with the arrival of the internet and then with social media, and particularly, encrypted communications.

But security technologists have compared the debate around online CSAM and the evolving argument on how to combat it to false equivalences and pedophrasty. (Lebanese-American commentator Nassim Taleb describes pedophrasty as a narrative tool in which potential harms to children are cited to diminish opposing arguments by playing to human parental instincts).

This is because, at the heart of it, the solutions being advocated to combat CSAM have to do with weakening or incentivising the weakening of end-to-end encryption, the bedrock of privacy online.

End-to-end encryption, or E2EE, is what ensures the messages we send over WhatsApp are not readable by even the company that owns the application, or how secure emails can allow scientists and government officials to exchange top secret information.

The anti-encryption narrative

The child abuse threat plugs into what is now a decades-old debate around law enforcement in the digital age. When distilled, the heart of the debate boils down to a question of which is more important: privacy or safety? In recent years, several countries – notably western countries and their allies – have made a case for encryption to be weakened.

&lt;strong&gt;&lt;u&gt;Five Eyes (plus India and Japan) 2020 joint statement&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: The most strident of these arguments was made in an October 2020 joint statement by countries that are part of the informal grouping called the Fives Eyes nations — the US, the United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia and New Zealand — with India and Japan as co-signatories. The statement disputed the criticism that weakening or tweaking end-to-end encryption will necessarily lead to risks to cyber security and privacy.

&lt;strong&gt;&lt;u&gt;The UK’s No Place to hide 2022 campaign&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: In January this year, the UK Home office funded a publicity blitz opposing ultra-secure messaging applications, particularly Facebook’s plans to enforce E2EE on its Messenger application. Launching the campaign, a spokesperson said E2EE will amount to “turning the lights off on the ability to identify child sex abusers online”, the BBC reported at the time.

&lt;strong&gt;&lt;u&gt;India’s 2021 IT Rules&lt;/u&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: In February, the government unveiled the new Information Technology rules for social media companies and online publishers. Among these was an obligation on communication services providers to allow for the identification of who sent a particular message for the first time — a feature that will not be possible within the design of E2EE. The rules have since been suspended by multiple high courts, and among the first legal challenges to it came from WhatsApp, which likened the rules to effectively putting all users under a surveillance mechanism. The rules themselves followed a 2020 report by a parliamentary committee that wanted encryption to be broken in order to combat CSAM abuses.

The EARN IT act, while not explicitly attacking encryption, will in effect incentivise companies to build mechanisms that are outside of the E2EE paradigm, online advocacy groups have said, while adding that it will do little to combat the actual problem it is intended to.

Is E2EE absolutely indispensable?

To understand the role of encryption today is to revisit the events of 2013, when US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a planet-scale digital surveillance dragnet run by the US and the UK, which pored over all unencrypted internet traffic. This dragnet at the time allowed these countries to spy on anyone, irrespective of whether or not they were a threat, to peak into their communications as well as access their devices.

Within months, tech companies responded to begin a shift to “encryption by default”. The HTTPS (or a closed padlock) that you see at the top of your browser while you read this article is a direct outcome of that push. HTTPS implies your connection to the Hindustan Times website is encrypted, meaning anyone intercepting your network traffic will not be able to determine what you are reading.

Since then, E2EE has helped protect liberties and allowed essential functions like e-commerce to be carried out with better security. These are functions that are arguably improved by the current paradigm of encryption in the global internet. And experts point out that in its absence, there is a threat not just to the individual but to national security.

E2EE and CSAM rise: A tenuous connection?

In response to the No Place to Hide campaign, the UK’s own data watchdog has said that encryption helps protect children more than it harms them. Stephen Bonner, the British Information Commissioner’s Office executive director for innovation and technology, told BBC that end-to-end encryption helped keep children safe online by not allowing "criminals and abusers to send them harmful content or access their pictures or location".

"The discussion on end-to-end encryption use is too unbalanced to make a wise and informed choice. There is too much focus on the costs without also weighing up the significant benefits," he said.

In “Analysing the National Security Implications of Weakening Encryption”, researchers at Indian policy thinktank Deepstrat framed the debate around E2EE not just as a matter of “security versus privacy”, but also one involving “security versus security”.

They account for the nature of modern devices and communication architectures, as well as the nature of cybersecurity threats.

Take some of the specific anti-encryption solutions to the CSAM problem that has been advocated recently. Client-side scanning, similar to what Apple attempted to do by scanning a fingerprint of images people store on their iPhones or Mac computers, will for example set the foundation for “China model” of surveillance, which can be theoretically tweaked to identify any content on anyone’s device.

Then there is the traceability requirement that India proposes. DeepStrat’s report identified its flaws as being “fundamentally against the nature of E2EE” and creating “architectural vulnerabilities that can be exploited by bad actors”. Another common idea, to create backdoors for law-enforcement agencies, poses a very significant risk that malicious hackers will find it and wield it, if not unaccounted state agents themselves in an abuse of power.

The risks are not merely theoretical: there is evidence and history. For example, in 2010, China-based hackers broke into Gmail, leveraging backdoors coded in to allow lawful interceptions. Prior to that, between 2004 and 2005, phones of the Greek prime minister and his aides were tapped when an unknown attacker found backdoors built by telecommunications company Ericsson to, again, allow for lawful interception.

“Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't,” wrote security expert Bruce Schneier, in a 2020 opinion piece for CNN.

Tinkering with E2EE, thus, requires an appreciation of all that is at stake. There have been instances where tech companies have aided law enforcement in taking more offensive measures against child sex abusers, such as the revelations in 2020 when it came to light that Facebook spent money and resource to develop hacking tools to help the FBI catch a notorious abuser.

Indeed, such examples are uncomfortably few and far in between, and the threat from CSAM large. It may be time to look at the problem beyond being that of E2EE alone but of efforts by tech companies and governments alike.

In Perspective takes a deep dive into current issues, the visible and invisible factors at play, and their implications for our future

The views expressed are personal

Climate and Us | Climate science is telling us that the tipping point is near - Hindustan Times
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If the latest science on climate crisis doesn’t scare us and push us to act, nothing will. Even before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group (WG) II report releases on February 28, scientists have set the tone. The report is going to unravel climate impacts that are horrifying and sad because it's now almost certain that humans have pushed natural ecosystems to the edge.

Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair IPCC WG II during a briefing last week about the forthcoming report said several ecosystems are likely to reach tipping points in a 1.5 degrees Celsius (C) warming scenario. Coral reefs at many locations are already beyond their tipping points. The projections are we're going to lose 70% to 90% of the surface they cover with global warming of 1.5 degrees C that goes up to 99% with global warming of 2 degrees C, Portner said.

The protection services of coral reefs and small-scale fisheries will be lost when coral reef ecosystems tip over. Other ecosystems are also starting to show signs of impact. Mostly during the hot periods of the year, in the tropical rainforest, especially in the Amazon, on the African side and the Boreal forests in Eurasia are being impacted by wildfires; heat extremes, drought and they are gradually losing the capacity to bind CO2. Most of these impacts will be irreversible in 1.5-degree warming overshoot.

The IPCC in a background note has said the report will document impacts and risks at different warming levels. The sixth assessment report will include new information on different types of risks under various warming levels, such as cascading, compounding, and transboundary risks; links between adaptation, solutions, and SDGs.

The report will highlight how adaptation can contribute to climate solutions, and it will also explore the potential of adaptation to meet various Sustainable Development Goals. It will emphasise connections between the natural world (ecosystems and biodiversity) and human communities (health, food, water, economy, infrastructure, and societal structures).

Though the IPCC has come forward to articulate and forewarn the collapse in climate and ecosystems are likely to see in the near term, possibly this decade, the political response has been lukewarm so far.

The world may have lost the opportunity to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees C over pre-industrial levels, the WG I report titled Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis released last August had warned. The report drafted by 234 scientists from 66 countries said that global warming of 1.5 degrees C relative to 1850-1900 levels would be definitely exceeded under intermediate, high and very high emission scenarios and will be “more likely than not to be exceeded” even when countries agree to switch to net-zero emissions by 2050. This would mean unliveable conditions over several parts of the world due to heat extremes and the increase in the frequency of extreme weather events like floods, forest fires, and droughts.

Glacial retreat in the Hindu Kush Himalayas; compounding effects of sea-level rise and intense tropical cyclones leading to flooding; an erratic monsoon; and intense heat stress are likely to impact India in recent years, the findings of the WG I report suggested.

With such a dire warning from IPCC, many experts had expected that the Glasgow Climate Change conference (COP26) in November would respond adequately to the crisis. But what transpired at Glasgow was bickering over climate finance; compensation for loss and damage and the language of fossil fuels in the Glasgow text.

The developed world tried to prevent any reference to historical emissions and responsibility and tried to impose uniform mitigation action by both developed and developing nations. They also side-lined any reference to developing a system of compensation for countries facing devastating losses to humans and ecosystems due to the climate crisis. Equity was far from focus during negotiations.

Will the IPCC WG II report help vulnerable countries and communities seek justice? Or will the global community rise up in a spirit of cooperation to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees C? Appears unlikely for now. It possibly depends on what market trends indicate about the future of renewable energy and the cost of pathways to achieve net-zero emissions.

A development in Uttarakhand has captured one more aspect of the climate crisis. That it is easy to blame climate crisis and extreme weather events for the loss of life and infrastructure but a lot of the blame should also go to governments failing to deliver on resilient, careful planning of infrastructure like roads. Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute, Imperial College, London; Emmanuel Raju, Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research; Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen; Emily Boyd, Lund University Centre for Sustainable Studies, Lund University wrote in the comment section of journal, Nature, that “Disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability. We must acknowledge the human-made components of both vulnerability and hazard and emphasize human agency in order to proactively reduce disaster impacts.”

Otto, a pioneer in climate impact attribution science also tweeted “Disasters are human-made, whether or not climate change is playing a role in the hazard. We need to put vulnerability and equity at the centre of proactive and engaging disaster laws and policies.”

The chairman of a panel set up by the Supreme court to oversee the widening of roads under the Char Dham Pariyojana has written to the top court saying he wanted to resign as the road ministry was ignoring the committee’s recommendations. In his letter dated January 27, the chairman of the high powered committee (HPC) for the Char Dham Pariyojana, Ravi Chopra, has said the Union ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) had ignored the panel’s recommendations regarding the road width.

In his latest letter to the Supreme Court, Chopra stated that the HPC’s directions and recommendations have been ignored by MoRTH in the past as well. “This experience does not inspire confidence that the response of MoRTH will be much different even in relation to the two Non-Defence roads. The Hon’ble Court has also permitted the respondents to seek legal relief for the widening of the Non-Defence highways. In the circumstances, I do not see any purpose in continuing to head the HPC or indeed, even to be a part of it,” the letter stated.

“I have long been aware that development in the Himalayas must be respectful of the sacred status that these mountains have in our country. Sustainable development demands approaches that are both geologically and ecologically sound. Such development also enhances disaster resilience and 2 hence national security, especially when climate challenges to slope stability are becoming far more unpredictable. As a member of the HPC, however, I saw at close quarters the desecration of the once impregnable Himalayas,” Chopra added in the letter. In an interview with HT, Chopra said the way MoRTH had carried out the road project led to forest loss, muck dumping in rivers and streams making them extremely vulnerable to severe floods and slope instability in the Himalayas due to hill cutting. He added that the Char Dham project had in fact made Uttarakhand more vulnerable to climate disasters. It's important to note that while the climate crisis is unleashing severe events, lack of political will and corruption are exacerbating risks.

From the climate crisis to air pollution, from questions of the development-environment tradeoffs to India’s voice in international negotiations on the environment, HT’s Jayashree Nandi brings her deep domain knowledge in a weekly column

The views expressed are personal

Digital infra: How can we realise Budget 2022’s ambition? - Hindustan Times

Yet another issue of the fundamental rights of individuals as opposed to the rights of the State has reached the Supreme Court. As is almost routine in our times, it concerns the minorities. It is a question of whether Article 25 (right to freedom of religion) allows the government some room to prohibit the wearing of a headscarf. The article reads: “Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.”

The straightforward reading of this is that individual rights must be given primacy. The young women say that covering their head is a religious practice for them and the Constitution guarantees them this as a Fundamental Right.

 

But the State, as it has always done, insists that it has the greater say in what individuals can and cannot do. One only hopes that the judiciary sees otherwise, but the record has not been good about this, and more often than not the justice system backs the State. For this reason, Indians have freedoms on paper that they cannot really exercise in reality. Even the Fundamental Rights, which are supposed to enjoy a high degree of freedom from encroachment by the State, are undermined regularly. For instance, Indians have the right to freedom of expression but the State has multiple laws which criminalise free speech. There is no real freedom of peaceful assembly or freedom of association and both have been criminalised as well.

 

Constitutionally, the freedom of occupation and practising any profession exists but when butchers moved court against cow slaughter laws, the Supreme Court admitted it had to take religious sentiments into consideration and curtailed their rights.

Again, Christians asked for and were given the right to propagate their religion (the subcontinent’s Muslims do not proselytise, but Christians do). But this right was taken away from them through various laws and today propagation is a crime.

The hijab issue has again brought what India is doing to its minorities to the notice of the world. The United States’ ambassador at large for international religious freedom tweeted on Friday that: “Religious freedom includes the ability to choose one’s religious attire. The Indian state of Karnataka should not determine permissibility of religious clothing. Hijab bans in schools violate religious freedom and stigmatise and marginalise women and girls.”

 

One hopes that this wise counsel is taken, but it is unlikely to be. The judiciary wants to determine whether the hijab is “essential religious practice” or not. It has previously told Indian Muslims, as part of the Ayodhya hearings, that mosques are not essential to their religion.

There is a political and social angle as well to the current matter, other than the religious one. I do not claim to speak for the young women but they are being bullied as part of a systematic campaign against Muslims in India. They are being blocked from praying at sites allocated to them by the government, are being blocked from cooking meat or sent to jail for selling bangles. The laws that have been passed against them on the issue of citizenship and in Jammu and Kashmir are all also recent. It is likely that the young women are standing up for more than just their own rights. They are standing up for their faith and their community and that is why that one young woman stood up to that ugly mob in those famous visuals that should shame all Indians, but will not.

 

So the question then is: if this is the motivation they are coming from, if they are asked to give up their scarves and hijab, what happens next. Already, the indication is clear. On Friday, CNN had a headline which said: “Hijab protests spread in India as girls refuse to be told what not to wear”. The women will continue to come wearing a headscarf and the State will then have to decide whether or not it wants to use force on them and whether it is sensible to deny them education and entry into examination halls.

It is not difficult to predict this and we have seen what happens when large numbers of citizens stand up to the laws that they think are unjust. The government has had to back down as it did in the matter of both the citizenship laws (which were passed but have not been implemented) and the farm laws, which were withdrawn. In both the instances, the courts were not sympathetic to the protesters, but that did not matter.

 

One suspects that something similar will happen here, and it is hard to see any other outcome except one in which the State again folds and lets the young women exercise their freedom.

I hope that this happens without friction and without a standoff. The best thing we can pray for is that the courts give a quick judgment in favour of fundamental rights so that the government can worry about other things than what it will not let young women wear.

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Visiting the Banaras Hindu University on February 4, 1916, Mahatma Gandhi in his address said: “I visited the Vishvanath temple last evening. If a stranger dropped from above on to this great temple, would he not be justified in condemning us? Is it right that the lanes of our sacred temples should be as dirty as they are? If even our temples are not models of cleanliness, what can our self-government be? We do not know elementary laws of cleanliness. We spit everywhere. The result is indescribable filth.”

In the hundred and six years since then, things have only worsened. We not only spit everywhere, we piss everywhere, we shit wherever and dump our garbage anywhere. India is easily the most dirty, unhygienic and filthy country in the world. Picking up from here, our Prime Minister had rightly launched the Swachh Bharat campaign in 2014 to clean up India.

 

He had announced an ambitious campaign to build home toilets for 12 million urban households, 25 million public toilets, and 30 million community toilets. In all, over 300 million will be helped with “solid waste management practices” and this is to be achieved by 2019 and will cost the nation Rs 62,009 crores. This is not a sum that we cannot afford. Has India become a cleaner, healthier and more hygienic nation, less offensive to sight and smell?  I don’t think so, and the Swachh Bharat campaign too has largely ended up as a failure.

 

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be lauded for flagging this as a major priority. But more than intentions, he must now look at ways to implement his plans. His ambitions were huge eight years ago.

He also hoped to build 100 smart cities with 24x7 drinking water, zero garbage disposal and total solid waste management with full-scale drainage and sewage systems.

The BJP’s manifesto did promise a hundred new cities. And rightly so, because new cities are imperative, as by 2050 India will almost double its present urban population by adding another 450 million. It is this urbanisation that will also be its major driver of economic growth. But we have not even begun it on paper.

 

The Andhra Pradesh government had estimated that a new capital will cost it Rs 1,00,000 crores. Projecting that, a hundred new cities with an average of a million people each will cost us Rs 100-120 lakh crores over the next 25-35 years. It’s a huge sum, but the begging, borrowing and scrimping has to start now.

But even if we find the money, where is the public administration to do it?
We now have a highly centralised system that is more suitable to the task of governing India than serving India. The structure of our public administration, with its preponderance at the national and state capitals, and with a tiny fraction left to interface with citizens at the local level, and even these not being answerable to citizens is at the root of our inability to transform this country.

 

When India became independent, Jawaharlal Nehru advocated disbanding the civil service inherited from the British Raj and he wanted a new system of public administration that will not just preserve order to facilitate extraction, but will drive change and equitable development. Sardar Patel, however, was against such a radical transformation of the government, and preferred India to be administered by an elite civil service such as the ICS.

This led to the creation of the IAS and the IPS as the main instruments of administration. But the system remained as before, a system to maintain control rather than transform. The consequences of this are still apparent.

 

The three levels of government together employ about 185 lakh persons. The Central government employs 34 lakhs, all the state governments put together employ another 72.18 lakhs, quasi-government agencies account for a further 58.14 lakhs, and at the local government level, a tier with the most interface with ordinary citizens, we have only 20.53 lakh employees. This simply means that we have five persons ordering us about, for every one supposedly serving us. What this translates into is that if you build toilets, you won’t have enough people to clean them. Ditto for sewage systems. As it is, garbage pickup is selective, tardy and the signs of failure can be seen in all our cities and villages.

 

It’s not that an attempt was not made to change this centralised system. In 1952, the government launched the Community Development Programme hoping to transform rural India with the participation of the people. This programme was formulated to provide an administrative framework through which the government would reach down to the district, tehsil/taluka and village levels.

All the districts of the country were divided into “Development Blocks”; and a Block Development Officer (BDO) was put in charge of each block. Below the BDO were appointed the workers called Village Level Workers (VLW), who were to initiate change in the villages.

 

Thousands of BDOs and VLWs were trained for the job of delivering an array of government programmes and to take the government down to the villages. But this highly ambitious and idealistic restructure of government didn’t exactly gel with the existing control mechanism of governance.

Before long, the two structures meshed and we were back to the old tried and tested system of government meant to rule India and not transform India.

The Prime Minister, however, has done well by impressing on people the need to keep their surroundings clean. While people must not litter and dispose them at conveniently appointed places, the job of lifting the garbage from there for disposal is that of the appropriate governmental tier. While people are expected not to defecate everywhere, the responsibility of providing sanitation is that of the State. Building toilets at public places and institutions and impressing on people to use them is laudable, but keeping them working and clean is the job of the State.

 

The condition of most public conveniences, including those at the Central Secretariat in New Delhi, will tell you that the government is not working.
In the time left for him, the Prime Minister should turn his focus on why the government fails to deliver services in India. Only then can he create a Swachh Bharat and a New India.

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In web ... from January 1, 2021