THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 08 March
CAG to undertake audit of demonetisation fallout
•The Comptroller and Auditor General of India will soon begin an audit of various aspects of demonetisation announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8 last year.
•By this measure, the Centre had withdrawn ₹1,000 and ₹500 notes from circulation.
•“Demonetisation per se is a banking and money supply issue and as such, outside the CAG’s audit jurisdiction. But the CAG is well within its rights to seek audit of fiscal impact of demonetisation, largely its impact on tax revenues. That way the issue gets linked with the public exchequer,” CAG Shashi Kant Sharma told The Hindu.
•He pointed out that there are other linkages of demonetisation with the public exchequer that will also be covered by the audit. This would be “expenditure on printing of notes, RBI dividend to the Consolidated Fund, etc.” the CAG said.
•The huge amount of data generated by banks and the Income-Tax Department in the wake of demonetisation would also be covered, he added.
•“This banking transaction data and the follow-up by the Revenue Department can also be subjected to CAG audit. Audit can look into various risks, such as errors and omissions in identifying the potential tax evaders, failures to pursue the identified suspects, selective and arbitrary pursuance of leads and consequences thereof. Many of these issues will be covered in our audits which we propose to take up in the coming days,” Mr. Sharma said.
•The CAG said he had conveyed to the government his stand on the recent move of the GST Council to delete section 65 of the preliminary draft that authorised CAG to audit GST (Goods and Services Tax).
Socialism missing from religion: SC
•The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed concern at the threat of “musclemen” taking over charge of religious assets and properties.
•“Everywhere with temple and church properties there is a problem ... there is a problem of musclemen taking over temple and church property,” Justice Arun Mishra remarked orally.
Oral observation
•The judge made the oral observation while heading a Bench, also comprising Justice Amitava Roy.
•He made the observation while hearing a dispute between two factions of a church in Kerala.
•Justice Mishra said the aspect of socialism was missing from religion. “The respect for the poor in religion is lost with the properties going into the hands of musclemen,” Justice Mishra remarked orally.
•Justice Mishra reminisced how Christianity gained respect by giving respect to the poor and the needy.
‘Money may be problem’
•“It is a religion based on the concept of giving respect to the poor,” the judge said. He said money flowing in from “everywhere” and invested in religion might be “the problem or the only problem.”
•At one point, the court asked the warring factions to reach a settlement as the decision was “purely with the church and not the court.”
•“Everywhere with temple and church properties there is a problem ... there is a problem of musclemen taking over temple and church property,” Justice Arun Mishra remarked orally.
Oral observation
•The judge made the oral observation while heading a Bench, also comprising Justice Amitava Roy.
•He made the observation while hearing a dispute between two factions of a church in Kerala.
•Justice Mishra said the aspect of socialism was missing from religion. “The respect for the poor in religion is lost with the properties going into the hands of musclemen,” Justice Mishra remarked orally.
•Justice Mishra reminisced how Christianity gained respect by giving respect to the poor and the needy.
‘Money may be problem’
•“It is a religion based on the concept of giving respect to the poor,” the judge said. He said money flowing in from “everywhere” and invested in religion might be “the problem or the only problem.”
•At one point, the court asked the warring factions to reach a settlement as the decision was “purely with the church and not the court.”
Supreme Court opens surrogacy window for singles
•Producer-director Karan Johar, who became father to twins through surrogacy three days ago, may not be one of the last among single men and women in India who can do so.
•The draft Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016, which is being examined by the Parliamentary Standing Committee, expressly allows only infertile and legally-wedded Indian couples to have children through surrogacy.
•On Tuesday, in what may turn out to be a positive outcome for single men and women who wish to be parents, a Supreme Court Bench led by Justice Ranjan Gogoi allowed a representation to be made before the parliamentary committee to consider including a “specific provision” in the Bill so as to facilitate single persons also to embrace parenthood through surrogacy.
•The representation will be forwarded to the office of the Solicitor-General of India, who will formally hand it over to the legislative panel for consideration.
•“There is no specific provision about single parents in the Bill, but the Bill also does not specifically prohibit them,” senior advocate Shekhar Napahade, for a petitioner, submitted.
Bunch of petitions
•The Supreme Court is hearing a bunch of petitions on banning commercial surrogacy and the treatment of babies as a “commodity.”
•Mr. Naphade submitted how unmarried celebrities in India have been increasingly opting for surrogacy.
•He further suggested that there should be a separate register maintained for surrogate children and sensitised staff should conduct inspections on the ground in such cases. The Bench responded that it would consider the prayer if Mr. Naphade would file a proper application.
Overseas Indians
•However, the Bench did not seem inclined when another lawyer suggested that the draft Bill should also permit overseas Indians to have surrogacy from India in view of a natural inclination to have children of the same “genetic make.”
•“How can we go on dictating to the law-making powers like this? Let the law come and if you are aggrieved about the law, then come to us,” Justice Gogoi reacted.
“Altruistic surrogacy”
•The draft Bill does not cover categories other than married Indian couples, like single women or men, gay or lesbian couples, etc. The window for “altruistic surrogacy” is only open for childless Indian married couple. The Bill also does not allow married couple, who have children, adopted or surrogate or biological, to have children via surrogacy.
•The stated objective of the new Bill is to constitute a National Surrogacy Board, State Surrogacy Board and appointment of authorities for regulation of practice and process of surrogacy. In short, the law is meant to end commercial surrogacy or, as the Supreme Court had once in 2009, termed “fertility tourism” in the country.
•The Supreme Court had initially intervened some years ago on a petition filed by German couple Jan Balaz and Susane Lohle, who wanted Indian citizenship for their surrogate twins born of a Gujarati woman.
No economy for women
•According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), India and Pakistan have the lowest rates of women’s labour force participation in Asia, in sharp contrast to Nepal, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that have the highest, with richer nations like Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia falling in between. Moreover, even this low rate of labour force participation seems to be declining. The National Sample Survey found that while in 1999-2000, 25.9% of all women worked, by 2011-12 this proportion had dropped to 21.9%. This is in stark contrast to worldwide trends. Of the 185 nations that are part of the ILO database, since the 1990s, 114 countries have recorded an increase in the proportion of women in the workforce, and only 41 recorded declines, with India leading the pack. So what does this tell us about India’s growth story?
The importance of access
•A heartening explanation could be that with rising incomes, women have the opportunity to escape harsh labour in farms and on construction sites, and focus on their families. But a more pessimistic and possibly realistic explanation might be that with declining farm sizes, rising mechanisation, and consequently dwindling labour demands in agriculture, women are being forced out of the workforce. If true, this has serious implications for future policy.
•Research has shown that when women have access to more work opportunities, they gladly take them. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS), jointly organised by researchers from the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, finds that the provision of work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has brought more rural women into wage labour. Among MGNREGA workers in 2011-12, a whopping 45% were not in wage labour before the scheme was initiated.
•Moreover, the provision of MGNREGA work has far greater impact on women’s paid work than that of men. Increased availability of wage work also enhances women’s control over household decision-making.
•Since NREGA work by itself cannot be expected to provide consistent stable employment for women, it is imperative to explore other avenues. From a policy perspective, two main challenges have to be addressed for augmenting women’s workforce participation rates. First, in view of shrinking farm work, we need to create opportunities for women to move from agricultural to non-agricultural manual work. Second, we must foster a work environment that allows more women, especially urban and educated women, to take up salaried jobs.
•In her research, Lei Lei, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, finds that in villages where roads were constructed between the first (2004-05) and second (2011-12) waves of IHDS, both men and women were more likely to undertake non-agricultural work but this effect was greater for women. Such work has a cascading effect as construction of concrete roads also improves transportation services such as buses, which, in turn, could facilitate movement of the rural workforce, especially women, into non-agricultural work in neighbouring villages and towns.
•At the other end of the employment spectrum, however, there is a need to make it possible for educated women to continue to work even while raising families. In a context where women continue to bear the major share of household work and childcare, the prevalence of a rigid work environment in India and the dearth of family-friendly work institutions create impediments to women’s access to white-collar jobs in the formal sector. Second, long distances between the home and the workplace increase both commuting time and work burdens, leaving workers with even less time for family duties.
•Another aspect of the skewed work-family equation for women in India is the demand for investing in children’s education over professional achievement. Research by Alaka Basu, a sociologist at Cornell University, and Sonalde Desai (co-author of this article) highlights the contrast between the reasons for fertility decline in the West, where it was fuelled by the desire for self-fulfilment among both men and women, and in India, where small families have emanated from the desire to promote future achievements of children by focusing on their education rather than on better employment prospects for the parents. This has led to urban and educated Indian women dropping out of the labour pool in contradistinction to their counterparts in Japan and Korea, for example, who have instead opted out of marriage, resulting in a dip in fertility rates in the latter countries to barely 1.3 child(ren) per couple. Neither of these, however, seems an optimal outcome for society. The only way this conundrum can be addressed is by encouraging workplaces to become more responsive to family needs and to promote sharing of household responsibilities between both genders — something that Scandinavian countries have emphasised.
Sharing the burden
•Few organisations are willing to consider challenges involved in generating a work-life balance. Even before the influx of global firms in India, work structures in Indian companies and even the government were highly inflexible. Over the past two decades, these demands have grown. With rising global competition, Indian firms have chosen to follow the American model with demands for extended work hours as well as attendance on Saturdays and Sundays. This creates a time bind for both men and women where something must give.
•An interesting repercussion of this work dynamic is reflected in a recent study titled ‘Millennial Careers: 2020 Vision’, by ManpowerGroup, conducted across 25 countries and encompassing 19,000 working millennials and 1,500 hiring managers. The study found that young workers in India worked 52 hours per week as against, say, 42 hours by their counterparts in Canada. Work-family balance requires increased participation by men in household chores and caring for children. However, workplace inflexibility makes for difficult choices, involving trade-offs betweeln investing in careers of husbands vis-à-vis those of wives, often resulting in women taking a back seat and at times even dropping out of the workforce.
•The Economic Survey 2016-17 expressed concern that the demographic dividend is already receding, reducing the opportunity for the Indian economy to catch up with its East Asian counterparts. However, the numeric consequences of reducing obstacles to women’s full economic participation far exceed the demographic advantages of having a larger pool of young workers. It is thus high time to talk of the gender dividend rather than the demographic dividend.
How to tame our forest fires
•Come March every year, the print media is filled with reports of fires in the dry deciduous forests of India, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha. This year has been no different. The death of Murigeppa Tammangol, a forest guard who served in Bandipur Tiger Reserve in Karnataka, in a forest fire last month, is a sombre reminder of the danger posed by forest fires to our front-line forest staff.
•Fighting fires with minimal equipment in challenging terrain is a thankless task that poses grave risks. It is perhaps time to ask whether a strict no-fire policy is relevant in ecological and societal contexts, rather than raise ineffective questions about how forest fires can be controlled or prevented through technology.
•The bulk of forest fires in India occurs in the tropical dry forests of our country, an umbrella category encompassing scrub, savanna grassland, dry and moist-deciduous forests. Almost 70% of forests in India are composed of these types.
•Recent research on the ecology and bio-geographical origin of these forests indicates that fire occurrence and light availability are important factors that maintain the ecosystem. However, forest management still suffers from a colonial hangover intent on keeping production forestry systems free from fire in order to prevent the loss of 'stock'. It is no surprise, therefore, that even today, the aftermath of a forest fire is accompanied by reports of how trees in hundreds of acres have been 'destroyed'. Field ecological research, on the other hand, indicates that many tree species distinct to dry forests have co-evolved with fires and have developed fire-resistance features like thick, spongy bark, and can re-sprout from rootstock in response to fire.
Blanket ban woes
•The roots of our current fire crisis lie squarely in the blanket implementation of a no-fire forest policy. This 'one-size-fits-all' approach of fire protection is perhaps incompatible with the ecology of India’s tropical dry forests. For example, the fires in Bandipur Tiger Reserve were immensely difficult to control because of ample fuel supplied by the alien invasive species Lantana camara. Recent ethnographic and empirical research from the neighbouring Biligiri Rangaswamy Tiger Reserve indicates that a no-fire policy was likely responsible for the spread of Lantana in the first place.
•Additionally, frequent, low-intensity forest fires possibly prevented the proliferation of Lantana in the past, a time when fires were not yet anathema for forest managers. Tribal elders of the area predict that future forest fires will be difficult to control unless Lantana biomass is physically reduced first.
•Are frequent, small forest fires preferable to infrequent, catastrophic fires? Forest-dwellers of the area clearly seem to favour the former. Findings from conventional scientific studies also support these insights from indigenous knowledge, and indicate that early dry season fires burn less hot, and are far less detrimental to vegetation than peak dry season fires which burn much hotter.
•Who has the power to wield fire in India’s tropical dry forests? The answer exposes the fault lines among contesting groups of stakeholders. Forest dwellers set fire to forests to clear walking paths, to collect non-timber forest products like gooseberry and mahua flowers, and to encourage the fresh growth of grass for their livestock, and sometimes as a part of ritual practice.
•Agriculturists set fire to hill forests so that the fertilising ash from fire washes down to their fields with the monsoon rains. For the forest dweller, therefore, fires have cultural and livelihood significance. The forest department, on the other hand, has historically prevented fire in order to protect timber stocks, and initiated a system of fire-lines around valuable timber ‘compartments’ or coupes. By burning the fire-lines before the onset of summer, forest fires, if they occurred, could be confined to a few compartments. More recently however, fire has been used as a management tool to increase the density of herbivores in tropical dry forests.
•The logic for this kind of burning is also related to the creation of fresh grass, but this time for consumption by wild herbivores rather than by cattle. In a centralised, top-down hierarchical system, these two broad ways of wielding fire are clearly incompatible. By enacting legislation that made the setting of forest fires an offence, the forest department gradually legitimised one world view of forests as timber and wildlife production systems and ignored other world views that envisioned forests as cultural and livelihood spaces.
•Instead of viewing forest fires as being purely destructive in nature, forest managers should perhaps expand their world view and be more inclusive to information from ecological and local knowledge systems that view fires as being both rejuvenating and revitalising.
You can switch from EPF to NPS
•More than eight crore members of the Employees’ Provident Fund, can now opt to move their retirement savings to the National Pension System overseen by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) – over two years after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had promised such an alternative for employees in the Budget for 2015-16.
•The PFRDA notified the procedure for EPF members to transfer their investments to the National Pension System or NPS on Tuesday.
•Terming members of EPF and Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (which provides medical care to organised sector workers) as “hostages, rather than clients”, the finance minister had said such workers’ incomes suffer due to high statutory deductions towards EPF and ESIC.
•He had promised to provide employees the option to leave the EPF and opt for the NPS and had also said that employees below a certain level of monthly income could decide if they wanted to stop their own contributions to the EPF. In all, 24% of an employee’s salary is diverted to the EPF as a mandatory retirement saving scheme.
Active NPS account
•According to the rules, the subscriber looking to transfer funds from EPF to NPS must have an active NPS Tier-I account, which can be opened either through the employer where NPS is implemented or online through eNPS on the NPS Trust website.
•The amount transferred from a recognised Provident Fund or superannuation fund to NPS would not be treated as income of the current year and hence, would not be taxable.
•“Further, the transferred recognised Provident Fund/Superannuation Fund will not be treated as contribution of the current year by employee/employer and accordingly the subscriber would not make Income Tax claim of contribution for this transferred amount,” the notification clarified.
•While the return on EPF savings this year is expected to be 8.65%, the NPS offers multiple asset allocation options and fund managers for its members to choose from, with varying rates of returns.
•The subscriber, either a government or private sector employee, must approach the concerned PF office where their money resides, through her or his employer and request to transfer their savings to an NPS account.
•“The recognised Provident Fund/Superannuation Fund Trust may initiate transfer of the Fund as per the provisions of the Trust Deed read with the provisions of the Income Tax Act, 1961,” the PFRDA said.
•In the case of a government employee, the recognised Provident Fund or the superannuation fund can issue the cheque or draft in the name of: the Nodal Office Name<>Employee Name<> Permanent Retirement Account Number (PRAN).
•In case of a subscriber currently employed in the private sector, the cheque or draft can be made in the name of: Name of Points of Presence, Collection Account-NPS Trust<>Subscriber Name<>PRAN.
Meeting set to review postal imports
•The Finance Ministry will convene an inter-ministerial meeting next week to review a surge in postal imports of consumer goods through e-commerce as well as related security issues following seizures of high-altitude drones, bullion and fake currency in such parcels.
•The meeting comes in the wake of the concern expressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi over public grievances received by the PMO on issues relating to the import of goods through the postal network and courier services.
Boosting security
•Ahead of the meeting, the Central Board of Excise & Customs (CBEC) has already begun the process of a “holistic review” of norms covering imports and exports through post to address these concerns and help in taking remedial actions, government sources, who did not wish to be identified, told The Hindu.
•The measures include a move to tighten security by upgrading x-ray machines for non-intrusive scanning of mail parcels, they said. These steps will have an impact on the procedures for clearance of goods imported through post, they said.
•The meeting will also aim to address inadequacies in data capture as the availability of comprehensive figures on imports by post and courier, facilitated by the e-commerce route, is currently lacking, the sources said. While some data is being captured by manual mode, it is not as reliable as information compiled through the CBEC’s electronic data interchange system.
•A recent PayPal-Ipsos report showed that shoppers from India spent about ₹58,370 crore in 2016 while shopping online from international websites (mainly sites of U.S., Chinese and British firms). Still, given the irritants that include prolonged delivery time, high customs duties and transactions in foreign currencies, websites offering products that were not available in India, and those promising free delivery and transactions in local currency saw better sales.
•To ensure the implementation of more corrective legal, procedural and infrastructural measures, the CBEC – which will make a detailed presentation at the meeting on the issues relating to laws, procedures and infrastructure surrounding postal imports – has sought suggestions from other ministries/departments including the Directorate General of Foreign Trade in the Commerce & Industry ministry as well as the Department of Posts in the Communications ministry.
•The Centre has also sought comments from stakeholders including e-commerce and courier firms. Several measures covering imports and exports via post have already been proposed in the Finance Bill 2017, including amendments in the Customs Act, 1962, to include Foreign Post Office and International Courier Terminal in the definition of a Customs Station, as well as to define Foreign Post Office and International Courier Terminal.
•The proposed amendments to the Customs Act also seek to empower the CBEC to notify Foreign Post Offices and International Courier Terminals as well as to make regulations to provide for the form and manner in which an entry may be made in respect of goods imported or to be exported by post.
•Besides, the Finance Bill 2017 proposes amendments in the Customs Tariff Act, 1975, to cover goods imported through courier service as well as personal imports by courier, sea, or land.
•The developments assume significance in the context of promotion of exports and imports via the e-commerce route. As part of a mid-term review of the Foreign Trade Policy 2015–20, the Commerce ministry will meet stakeholders to address exporters’ concerns about certain “restrictions”.
