THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 20 March
Delhi traffic situation alarming: panel
•A Parliamentary panel has described the traffic situation in the national capital as “alarming” and said that the Delhi Police has “failed” to improve it.
•The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs has observed that a large number of vehicles get registered in Delhi everyday and the roundabouts at various crossroads, instead of traffic signals, caused congestion.
•“The committee feels that the Delhi traffic congestion has become quite alarming and the Delhi Police has failed to implement any significant measure to improve the situation,” the panel has said.
•In its report submitted to the Parliament, the panel headed by former Home and Finance Minister P Chidambaram has taken note of the choked roads in Delhi which make evacuation of “protected persons” difficult during a traffic congestion.
•The committee has recommended that the Delhi Police needs to prepare a meticulous traffic management plan and allocate adequate funds to address the issue.
•“Urgent measures should be taken for managing the city traffic in a better way such as construction of more arterial roads and parking bays, declaring some roads as one-way, coming up with effective emergency evacuation measures for protected persons and stringent measures against traffic violators,” the panel has recommended.
Sparrows nearing extinction due to lack of emotional connect: conservationist
•The house sparrow that was declared the ‘State Bird of Delhi’ in 2012 is edging towards extinction due to the lack of an emotional connect, says conservationist Mohammed Dilawar.
•Mr. Dilawar, who started the practice of observing March 20 as World Sparrow Day in 2010, said that “mindless urbanisation” was leading to a loss of the birds’ natural habitats.
They need a human touch
•“Common sparrows are going extinct because of mindless urbanisation. They are losing not just their natural habitats but also the essential human touch they need and thrive upon.
•“The current generation is so much surrounded by technology that they have forgotten about nature. The indifference caused by a lack of emotional connect has pushed these birds to the edge of extinction,” Mr. Dilawar, who also founded Nature Forever Society for India (NFSI), a non-profit organization to conserve house sparrows, told PTI.
•World Sparrow Day, an initiative by NFSI, is now celebrated annually across 50 countries.
Other factors
•The conservationist also attributed the depleting population of sparrows to the increased use of packed food, insecticides in farming, and changing lifestyles, resulting in an inadequate availability of food for the birds.
•“Earlier women used to clean grain outside their houses and sparrows would have plenty of food from there. Also the severe use of insecticides in farming is killing sparrows’ primary food source in insects and grains,” Mr. Dilawar has said.
•According to him, sparrows are also rendered homeless due to the “matchbox-styled” architecture that makes it difficult for the birds to locate pockets to build nests.
No cavities, no home
•“Unlike pigeons that can make nests on ledges, sparrows need cavities to build their nests. Since the new matchbox style buildings don’t have cavities, sparrows are now homeless,” he says.
•Founded in 2005, NFSI works actively to spread awareness for bird conservation, besides distributing bird feeders and nest boxes to solve to some extent the scarcity of food and nests.
•With summer approaching, Mr. Dilawar suggested people should hang wooden bird nests in balconies and put out a pot of water for the winged visitors.
•To track the number of sparrows in the area, the institution also observed a three-day ‘Great Sparrow Count’ starting March 18, during which birdwatchers uploaded bird counts in their respective localities on to a common database.
Parents can evict abusive adult children from their house: HC
•Children who abuse their parents while staying with them in their house can be evicted from the property, the Delhi High Court has ruled.
•Justice Manmohan, in his ruling, specified that the house need not be self-acquired or owned by the parents.
•“As long as parents have legal possession of the property, they can evict their abusive adult children,” the court said, adding that even the “courts have repeatedly acknowledged the right of senior citizens or parents to live peacefully and with dignity“.
•This is a major improvisation in a 2007 law that had left it to State governments to frame rules to protect the life and property of senior citizens.
•The court’s verdict came after it heard an appeal filed by an alcoholic former policeman and his brother, challenging a Maintenance Tribunal’s October 2015 order to evict the two from the residence where their elderly and ailing parents lived.
•The brothers had contended that the Tribunal had exceeded its jurisdiction in passing the eviction order as there was no claim for maintenance and the relief was granted only on the allegations of physical assault, maltreatment, harassment and forceful ouster of their parents from the property.
•The alcoholic, whose services were terminated from the Delhi Police, had said that even in cases of parental abuse, no eviction order could be passed under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007.
Air Force likely to get 123 LCA Tejas by 2024-25
•If the present development and capacity enhancement plans go as per schedule, the Indian Air Force will have 123 indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas fighter jets in its fleet by 2024-25.
•To enable this Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is in the process of setting up a new assembly line and is also involving the private sector in a big way, said the Chief Managing Director (CMD) of the public sector aerospace major T. Suvarna Raju in a conversation with The Hindu.
•The IAF has placed orders for 40 jets in two batches of which the first 20 are in the Initial Operational Configuration (IOC) while the remaining 20 are in the Final Operational Configuration (FOC). Last July the IAF for operationalised the first Tejas squadron ‘45 flying daggers’ with three aircraft. Two more aircraft will join the squadron shortly.
•Last November the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) had given initial clearance for 83 aircraft in the Mk-1A configuration with specific improvements sought by the IAF.
•Mr. Raju said that about 45 improvements have been implemented in the 1A and HAL has already floated a tender for the Advanced Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar and Self-Protection Jammer (SPJ).
•On the timeline for the development of the 1A, Mr. Raju said that the tender would be opened by March end after which technical evaluation and commercial negotiations would be held. “We will be able to prove it on the 1A by 2018 and start producing by 2019,” he observed.
•Apart from the development, the induction is also delayed by the low production rate of eight aircraft per year. The government has recently given sanction for setting another assembly to increase production rate to 16 per year.
•“The IAF will get Mk-1A in 2019 by that time our capacity will also go up to 16 aircraft per year,” Mr. Raju added.
•To increase the production of the aircraft HAL has outsourced major parts of the jet. “We are trying to be an integrator rather than a manufacturer, he said.
•The IAF is in urgent need of new fighters and the LCAs will replace the Mig fighters that are currently being phased out. IAF is scheduled to phase out all 11 squadrons of Mig-21 and Mig-27 fighters by 2024 on completion of their technical life.
•On the issue of spares and supports which has been an area of constant concern from the services, Mr. Raju said they have now signed long term supply contracts with their vendors and stated that the availability of all platforms manufactured by HAL has now gone “above 65 percent.”
New Wi-Fi system to offer super-fast connectivity
•Scientists have developed a new wireless Internet based on infrared rays that is reportedly 100 times faster than existing Wi-Fi networks.
•The wireless network developed by researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands not only has a huge capacity — more than 40 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) — but does away with the need to share Wi-Fi as every device gets its own ray of light.
•The wireless data comes from a few central ‘light antennas’, which can be mounted on the ceiling, that are able to precisely direct the rays of light supplied by an optical fibre.
•The antennas contain a pair of gratings that radiate light rays of different wavelengths at different angles (‘passive diffraction gratings’).
•Changing the light wavelengths also changes the direction of the ray of light. A safe infrared wavelength is used that does not reach the retina in the eye.
•If a user is walking about and a smartphone or tablet moves out of the light antenna’s direction, then another light antenna takes over, researchers said.
Tracks precise location
•The network tracks the precise location of every wireless device using its radio signal transmitted in the return direction, they said.
•Different devices are assigned different wavelengths by the same light antenna and so do not have to share capacity.
•Current Wi-Fi uses radio signals with a frequency of 2.5 or five gigahertz. The new system uses infrared light with wavelengths of 1,500 nanometres and higher. Researchers managed to achieve a speed of 42.8 Gbit/s over a distance of 2.5 metres. The team said that even with the best Wi-Fi systems currenly available, users would not get more than 300 Megabit/s in total, which is some hundred times less than the speed per ray of light achieved by the new system.
•The system has so far used the light rays only to download; uploads are still done using radio signals since in most applications much less capacity is needed for uploading.
Last gasp tasks
•At its twelfth meeting last Friday, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council cleared all the requisite State and Central-level legislative measures to implement the indirect tax regime. The State and Union Territories’ GST bills were approved along with necessary corrections to the three other GST Bills the Council had cleared previously — for Central GST, Integrated GST and compensation to States through a cess. This paves the way for State Assemblies and Parliament to ratify these laws quickly in order to meet the proposed July 1 rollout date for the system. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said the Union Cabinet will soon take up the four laws that the Centre has to steer through Parliament, while the respective State governments will take up the State GST law. Separately, officers from the States and the Centre are expected to finalise, by this weekend, drafts for four pending regulations out of a total of nine, that lay down the administrative procedures and processes to be followed by taxpayers under the GST regime. The Council will meet again on March 31 to consider those drafts. This will give the Centre enough buffer to make the transition to the new system.
•Though industry has indicated that it needs at least three months to prepare for the GST once it sees the fine print, one major action will still be pending on April 1. That action — the fitment of thousands of commodities and services into the five GST rate slabs (zero, 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%) — could prove to be among the trickiest for the Council. The rate fitment process, unlike legislative nuances, is more susceptible to lobbying not just from different sections of industry, but also States that would like a favourable tax treatment for products and services they excel in. For instance, the GST Council has now approved a ceiling on the cess that could be imposed over and above the highest GST rate of 28% on pan masala, chewing tobacco and cigarettes, luxury cars and aerated drinks. For all such ‘sin goods’, the cess ceiling has been set higher under the GST than the level necessary to maintain the present level of taxation. But beedis have been kept out of the cess net altogether in order to avoid friction with States that could delay the broader reform. Despite such pulls and pressures, in a best-case scenario the rate-setting process should take at least a fortnight and the Council could meet some time in April to approve the rates. Giving lakhs of enterprises just about two months to switch to the GST regime, with all its implications for supply chains, pricing strategies and accounting systems, could lead to a messy start. The Centre must keep its mind open on pushing forward the rollout by a month or so, while industry should rise above heckling over rates and invest more lobbying energy on bigger worries, such as the GST’s penal anti-profiteering clauses.
The heckler’s veto
•The plight of artist M.F. Husain and of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the forced exile from writing for Perumal Murugan, and the pulping of the earlier biography of the former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, J. Jayalalithaa, written by Vaasanthi are some of the cases where the threat to freedom of expression came from powerful sections who could use their proximity to administrative power and the lacunae in our judicial systems with a sense of entitlement and impunity.
Upholding freedom of expression
•There are a number of Supreme Court judgments that have interpreted Article 19 of our Constitution, including the section dealing with ‘reasonable restrictions’, in a manner that upholds the principles of freedom of expression. Justice Krishna Iyer questioned in the Periyar Ramayana case the overzealousness of State governments: “The possible invocation of powers under Section 99A of the Code of Criminal Procedure by various state governments on several occasions induces us to enter a caveat. Basic unity amidst diversity notwithstanding, India is a land of cultural contrarieties, coexistence of many religions and anti-religions, rationalism and bigotry, primitive cults and materialist doctrines. The compulsions of history and geography and the assault of modern science on retreating forces of medieval ways — a mosaic like tapestry of lovely and un-lovely strands — have made large and liberal tolerance of mutual criticism. Even though expressed in intemperate diction, a necessity of life. Governments, we are
confident, will not act in hubris, but will weigh these hard facts of our society while putting into operation the harsher directives for forfeiture.”
•Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, nearly a decade before his elevation as a Supreme Court judge, delivered in the M.F. Husain case a very sobering judgment: “A liberal tolerance of a different point of view causes no damage. It means only a greater self-restraint. Diversity in expression of views whether in writings, paintings or visual media encourages debate. A debate should never be shut out. ‘I am right’ does not necessarily imply ‘You are wrong’. Our culture breeds tolerance — both in thought and in actions.”
•The relationship between a free press and a vibrant democracy has been studied in detail. The broad consensus is that when the enabling environment for free speech gets vitiated, it undermines the redeeming features of democracy. The lower courts in India, barring some notable exceptions, in contravention to the legal position taken by the apex court have repeatedly endorsed the heckler’s veto. Is there a procedure that enables all the lower court judges to be familiar with some of the defining pronouncements of the higher courts?
Granting an ex parte injunction
•The heckler’s veto, according to legal scholars, is a process by which socially powerful groups can shut down critical or inconvenient speech by threatening public disorder or disturbance. One of the ways in which the lower courts encourage the heckler’s veto is by granting an ex parte injunction against publication or broadcast of news. For instance, there are about 45 cases of ex parte injunctions against news media organisations in Karnataka alone.
•Though these are called interim injunctions, in reality they do become a prior restraint, which is not permissible under the Supreme Court judgment in the R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994) case. Early this year, the first bench led by the Chief Justice of India, J.S. Khehar, made it clear that pre-broadcast or pre-publication censorship is not the business of the court and that all grievances against objectionable content will be dealt with in accordance with the law of the land after its publication.
•I would like to share the operative part of a recent injunction to bring out the sweeping nature of this exercise that denies people vital, credible information. One of the courts in Karnataka, in a hold-all judgment against 27 news media organisations, both print and television, said: “Hence defendants 2 to 28 are hereby restrained by order of temporary injunction from telecasting or publishing any defamatory and malicious visuals or report in their news channels/newspapers about any subsidiaries run by Plaintiff including Plaintiff pertaining to the project namely _____ in any manner till next date of hearing”. The time has come for the Supreme Court to issue some guidelines to the lower courts to refrain them from being an echo chamber for the heckler’s veto.
Doubts raised over second IFSC’s viability
•The Commerce Department has asked the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) to comment on the feasibility of having more than one International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in India.
•It has also sought comments from the DEA on the viability of the Maharashtra government’s proposal for an IFSC in Mumbai.
•If the IFSC, proposed to be set up at the Bandra Kurla Complex in the country’s financial capital, gets all the required clearances, it will be the second such centre in India following the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) in Gandhinagar.
Nodal agency
•The DEA, in the Finance Ministry, is the nodal agency for formulation and monitoring of economic policies at the macro-level such as the ones relating to the functioning of the financial services sector in the country like banking, insurance and capital markets, including stock exchanges.
•IFSC-related matters fall within the jurisdiction of financial sector regulators such as the Reserve Bank of India, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority and Securities and Exchange Board of India as well as the Finance Ministry.
•The Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act is pertinent in this case as IFSC is set up in a SEZ, and therefore, the Commerce Department has a crucial role here as it is the nodal body at the Centre for SEZ-related matters.
•The SEZ Act merely states that the Centre can approve only one IFSC in a SEZ, and does not bar more than one IFSC in the country.
•Citing examples in other countries, the Commerce Department, however, has said even advanced nations have been finding it difficult to develop more than one major international financial centre in their respective territory.
•It added that therefore, India, which is yet to have full capital account convertibility, may find it even tougher to make more than one IFSC viable. In its initial proposal, the Maharashtra government (and the concerned body, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) had sought a relaxation of the minimum land norm of 50 hectares of contiguous and vacant land because what could be made available then for the proposed Mumbai IFSC was only 32 hectares of such land.
•The State government sought the Centre’s nod to ease the land norms by considering the built-up area instead of contiguous and vacant land. The State wanted the Mumbai IFSC to be a multi-services SEZ like the GIFT City.
Revised proposal
•However, as the Centre had expressed reluctance to grant the Mumbai IFSC a ‘special exemption’ from the land norm, Maharashtra then sent a revised proposal stating that it is in possession of about 52 hectares for the IFSC. This included 32-33 hectares of commercial land as well as 19-20 hectares of ‘non-developable’ green area, official sources said.
•According to the state government, once approved, the Mumbai IFSC would potentially generate employment for 1.3 lakh people and attract investments to the tune of ₹12,014 crore within ten years.
•The Commerce Department has now asked the Maharashtra government and the Development Commissioner (DC) of the Santacruz Electronic Export Processing Zone to explain and clarify the term ‘non-developable.’
•The department wants to know whether it will include area falling under the Coastal Regulation Zone, where there are curbs on construction, development and industries, and therefore could attract objections from agencies in charge of environment and pollution.
•The Maharashtra government had proposed that the Mumbai IFSC can even enter into collaborations with the GIFT City International Financial Services Centre as Mumbai has the advantage of being the country’s de facto financial capital.
