📰 Two C-130J aircraft arrive at Bengal IAF station
Part of eastern squadron and not linked to Doklam: officials
•While the standoff with China continues in Doklam, the Air Force Station at Panagarh in Bardhaman district of West Bengal has got its first set of the U.S.-made C-130J Super Hercules multi-skilled transport aircraft.
•Two of these aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin have arrived recently, while the station — named after Marshal of Air Force Arjan Singh — is awaiting the arrival of four more within a month. The six medium-lift capability C-130Js will complete the first squadron of such aircraft in eastern India.
•Senior Defence Ministry officials did not want to connect the arrival of the aircraft with the Doklam standoff, and described it as the “fruition of an old plan”.
•The giant aircraft are described as one of the finest transport aircraft which can perform many duties simultaneously. The fuel-efficient aircraft can carry up to 40 tonnes; can move faster; and provide between crew comfort than the Ilyushin-76 (IL-76), a Russian-made aircraft the Air Force had been using for a long time. While the IL-76 could also carry 40 tonnes, it was a “fuel guzzler”, a senior Army official said.
•The C-130Js will be used by the Special Forces and a division of the Mountain Strike Corps, recently raised by the Army. The Corps has two divisions, instead of the usual three, with a strength of 80,000 personnel. One of the divisions will be stationed at the Panagarh station once it is fully raised. The first squadron of C-130Js was stationed at the Hindon airbase in Ghaziabad and performed its first landing exercise in 2013 at the Daulat Beg Oldi military base in Ladakh, adjacent to the Chinese border.
‘Fruition of old plan’
•“When the first batch of six C-130Js came to the country, it was envisaged that a second squadron would also come. This is the fruition of an old plan,” a senior Defence Ministry official said.
•The C-130Js can land on unpaved surfaces, para-drop special forces, and move faster fast with equipment and goods. It can return quickly to the base to dispatch the next team. Its movement and manoeuvrability is perhaps the reason the U.S. forces used the transport aircraft extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan.
📰 Doval holds talks with Chinese counterpart
Expectations of de-escalation of crisis
•National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on Thursday held talks with Chinese State Councillor Yang Jichei, covering “bilateral issues and major problems,” signalling that the stand-off in Doklam between Chinese and Indian troops in the Sikkim sector was likely on the agenda.
•Referring to the three NSAs of the BRICS countries, who are in the Chinese capital, the official Xinhua news agency said: “[Mr.] Yang also separately exchanged views with the three senior representatives on bilateral relations, international and regional issues and multilateral affairs, and set forth China’s position on bilateral issues and major problems.”
•Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar, speaking in the Rajya Sabha, highlighted the agreement reached in June in Astana between the countries to intensify “development partnership” and “people-to-people contact,” even as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said India had not discriminated against Chinese companies.
•Mr. Akbar, responding to a question regarding China’s recent denial of visa to a group of journalists to Tibet and the remedial measures being taken to defuse the Doklam stand-off, said the two countries had agreed to work together.
•Ms. Swaraj maintained that despite commitment to improve bilateral ties, India had not hesitated to protest whenever differences arose with China about issues like stapled visas for Indian citizens from Arunachal or the visit of Dalai Lama to Tawang. She, however, maintained that India remained open to Chinese companies. “There is no policy to deny China [business opportunities],” she said to a question.
📰 SC for panels to examine dowry cases
Set up ‘family welfare committees’ in all districts under NALSA, says Bench
•Committees of social workers, homemakers, retired persons and other upstanding citizens will form the vanguard against frivolous complaints of dowry harassment in their localities.
•They will sift the genuine cases from the trivial ones. No suspect shall be arrested in a dowry case immediately after a complaint is registered.
•Police and the courts will have to wait for the committee’s inquiry report. The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the setting up of ‘family welfare committees’ in all districts under the aegis of the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA).
Much abuse
•A Bench of Justices A.K. Goel and U.U. Lalit said Section 498A (dowry harassment) of the IPC had come under much abuse. Dowry complaints were being filed in the heat of the moment over trivial issues.
•The three-member family welfare committees will be set up by the district legal services authorities. Members can be appointed from para legal volunteers, social workers, retired persons, “wives of working officers” and other citizens.
•Every complaint received by the police and the Magistrate will be passed on to the local committee, which will enquire into the genuineness of the complaint and file a report with the police official or Magistrate concerned within a month. The committee can directly get in touch with the parties involved, but the members will not be called as witnesses in case there is a trial.
•Till the report of the committee is received, no arrest should normally be effected, the court said.
•Trial judges should close Section 498A cases based on matrimonial disputes once parties reached a settlement. In fact, bail should be given the same day, the court directed.
📰 Privacy built into Aadhaar Act, says UIDAI
It was responding to concerns raised by Supreme Court Bench about personal data landing in the hands of private players
•“Privacy is non-negotiable, confidentiality is non-negotiable under the Aadhaar Act,” the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the nodal agency implementing the Aadhaar scheme, has said in the Supreme Court.
•Additional Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the UIDAI, made this emphatic claim on Thursday when apprehensions were raised by a nine-judge Bench that personal data collected during Aadhaar enrolment might make its way into the hands of private players, for whom such details would transform into “vital commercial information”.
•The court was, in turn, responding to a submission by Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal, appearing for the Centre, that citizens could not claim informational privacy when the state asks for data for a legitimate purpose such as Aadhaar. “There is no denying that it [Aadhaar] is a social welfare scheme, but you [the government] must first concede that the state is obliged to put a robust personal data protection mechanism in place,” Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said.
•“There may be a billion Aadhaar card holders. I don’t want the state to pass on my personal information to some 2,000 service providers who will send me WhatsApp messages offering cosmetics and air conditioners ... That is our area of concern. Personal details turn into vital commercial information for service providers. Have you got a robust protection mechanism,” Justice Chandrachud asked.
Fundamental right
•Justice S.A. Bobde wondered whether the Aadhaar Act of 2016 itself had any provisions to protect privacy. Mr. Venugopal then pointed to Section 28 of the statute dealing with “security and confidentiality of information”. It was in the State’s legitimate interest to keep personal data secure as this would make Aadhaar acceptable to one and all, he submitted.
•“So does this mean you do recognise privacy as a fundamental right?” Justice Bobde persisted.
•Here, Justice Rohinton F. Nariman observed that the government had dedicated an entire chapter in the 2016 Act to the protection of privacy and security. “So is this not a statutory recognition of privacy as a fundamental right,” he asked Mr. Venugopal.
•“A law [Aadhaar Act] may specifically provide for the protection of privacy because privacy is not recognised as a fundamental right,” said Mr. Venugopal, turning the judge’s question on its head.
•Justice Chandrachud said informational privacy was the most “vexed” portion of the ongoing debate as parts of personal data were already in the public domain. To this, Mr. Venugopal said informational privacy can never be a part of fundamental rights. There was no informational privacy against compelling state interests and public utility, for which the state can ask for fingerprints. But again, individuals can refuse if the information sought was totally irrelevant,” he said.
📰 Panel seeks details on AI divestment
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport set to meet government officials on Friday
•A Parliamentary Standing Committee has sought details from the government on its strategic disinvestment plans for national carrier Air India.
•The department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, chaired by Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Mukul Roy, is set to meet the Central government officials on Friday.
Hearing views
•“To hear the views of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (Ministry of Finance) and Air India on Disinvestment of Air India,” the agenda of the meeting said.
•The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on June 28 gave its in-principle approval for the strategic disinvestment of Air India and its subsidiaries.
•The CCEA also set up a group of ministers under Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to examine the modalities of the national carrier’s stake sale. The Ministerial group will decide upon the “treatment of unsustainable debt of Air India, hiving off of certain assets to shell company, de-merger and strategic disinvestment of three profit-making subsidiaries, quantum of disinvestment and the universe of bidders.”
•Hours after the Union Cabinet gave its nod for Air India’s strategic disinvestment, India’s largest low-cost carrier IndiGo expressed interest in acquiring the flag carrier’s airline business, mainly related to its international operations. Tata Sons were also said to be reportedly in talks with the government to seek more details about the national carrier’s strategic disinvestment.
‘Fragile finances’
•Minister of State Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday that the decision to divest a stake in Air India was based on government think-tank NITI Aayog’s recommendations in May this year.
•“In its recommendations, the Aayog had given the rationale for the disinvestment of Air India and has attributed the main reason as fragile finances of the company. AI has been incurring continuous losses and has huge accumulated losses,” Mr. Sinha said in a written reply.
•“Further, NITI Aayog in its report on Air India says that further support to an unviable non-priority company in a matured and competitive aviation sector would not be the best use of scarce financial resources of the Government,” Mr. Sinha added.
Sliding market share
•Mr. Sinha said in the Lok Sabha on Thursday that Air India’s market share on domestic routes had declined to 14.2% in 2016-17, from 17.9% in 2014-15. Air India had accumulated total debt of Rs. 48,876 crore till March 31, 2017. The carrier has been reporting continuous losses due to its high debt with its net loss at Rs. 3,728 crore in 2016-17, compared with Rs. 3,836 crore in 2015-16.
📰 ‘Good prospects for India-U.K. auto trade’
High tariff regime retarding sales of British luxury cars in India, says SMMT chief
•Britain and India have the potential to expand post-Brexit trade in the auto sector, the head of the body representing British manufacturers said, as exports of U.K.-made cars to India rose 8.3% in the first half of the year, while those of Indian-made cars to the U.K. almost doubled. The 8.3% rise in sales of U.K. cars was driven by increased demand for British-made luxury cars, while the number of India-built cars rose by 48.6%.
•Mike Hawes, the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), said that there were many opportunities for growth in areas such as in the development of autonomous, connected vehicles, as well as in the Indian after-market segment. “The U.K. currently has a negligible part of that market in India, but we have a lot of expertise and there are a lot of products that could be developed,” he said in an interview to this paper in London.
•“We want to develop those relations, but obviously it had to be mutual.” However, he added that the prospect of increasing sales of British-made luxury cars, for which there was great demand in India, remained limited with high tariff regimes still in place and expressed reservations about the potential for changing this. “One would hope so but history would suggest its going to be incredibly difficult,” he said.
•His comments came as the SMMT said U.K. car production fell 2.9% in the first half of 2017, as demand in Britain declined, which it attributed to the current uncertainty around the Brexit negotiations. The industry is also lowering its ambition of producing 2 million cars a year by 2020.
•“The U.K. automotive industry is in particularly challenging times in terms of production, new cars sales and level of investment,” said Mr. Hawes.
Interim arrangements
•The SMMT has been pushing for interim arrangements that maintain access to the single market and customs union to avoid a cliff-edge situation. ‘We are totally integrated with the European automotive industry — the future relationship we have is fundamental to our continued success. We need to maintain the barrier free trade that we currently enjoy,” he said, adding that reverting to WTO termswould be disruptive to the supply chain.
📰 Public health, private players?
Private providers will be able to cherry-pick the lucrative districts where patients have a higher paying capacity
•The NITI Aayog has recently unveiled a grand plan to effectively privatise district hospitals in Tier-I and Tier-II towns. It has developed what it calls a “model concessionaire agreement” for provision of healthcare services for cardiac and pulmonary (lung) diseases and cancers. It is proposed that public facilities in district hospitals would be outsourced to private providers. They would be free to charge full treatment costs from patients not covered by government schemes (such as the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana) and the providers would be reimbursed by the government for treating patients referred by the government
Red-carpet treatment
•Private providers will be able to cherry-pick the most lucrative districts where patients have a higher paying capacity. The scheme also provides for an escrow account that would offset the risk to private providers posed by possible delays in reimbursement by the government. Providers would also secure access to public facilities such as ambulance services, blood banks and mortuaries. Clearly no effort has been spared to roll out the red carpet and ensure that private companies are able to freeload on public assets.
•What are the implications for accessible healthcare services? First, the proposal implies that most patients would have to pay for care even in public facilities. The promise that patients covered by government health insurance schemes would access care free of cost needs to be seen in the context of recent surveys which show that just 12-13% of people are covered by public-funded insurance.
•Second, the proposal is designed to further worsen inequity in access to healthcare services. Private providers will concentrate on better-off districts, leaving the poor and remote districts for the public sector to manage. This will further weaken the ability of public hospitals to attract and retain trained doctors and other health workers.
•Third, the scheme will expose thousands of patients to unethical practices by private providers, compromises in quality and rationality of services and additional ‘top-up services’. A specific section in the document on ‘risk management’ is primarily concerned about risks of private providers, with very little about robust mechanisms to protect patients from unethical practices.
•Fourth, outsourcing of hospital care to private providers inevitably becomes increasingly unsustainable over time as they ratchet up demands on reimbursements and fees. The proposal to hive off hospital care to the private sector is justified by the argument that public services are not financed adequately and face an acute shortage of trained human resources.
•The simple remedy could be to significantly enhance investment in public healthcare services, including in the training of health workers. The government’s singular resistance to follow such a path is linked to its ideological moorings, which find virtue in private enterprise and view public services as inherently inefficient. This scepticism regarding public services needs to be tempered by the experience that success stories of public health, in diverse settings such as the U.K., France, Cuba, Thailand and Sri Lanka, are all related to public systems.
•The NITI Aayog’s proposal involves the handing over of public assets to for-profit companies, and represents a clear abdication of duty by the government. The NITI Aayog describes itself as a ‘think tank’, unlike the Planning Commission of yore.
•It is understood that the scheme will be piloted in a couple of districts, presumably in Bharatiya Janata Party-governed States. Health care is primarily a State subject and State governments must first question the legitimacy of a supposed think tank to pronounce public policy.
📰 What’s at stake in Hyderabad
India must counter Japan’s U.S.-style pressure at the RCEP talks and ensure affordable generic medicines
•Leaked texts are like leaked gases — you may never find the one responsible for it, but the mayhem caused by its release is hard to contain. Unsurprisingly, all public discussions on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are centred around leaked documents. As India negotiates the RCEP — a free trade agreement that looks remarkably similar to the now failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) but for the absence of the chief protagonist and dissenter, the United States — Japan now appears to be playing the role that the United States is known for: policing the intellectual property (IP) regimes of its trading partners. Unlike the TPP, where India and China were not parties, the RCEP will open two of the world’s fastest-growing economies to new standards of IP protection with some unforeseen consequences.
IP, investment and RCEP
•One of the conditions that have been put forth both in the TPP as well as the RCEP is the formation of an Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism and to include IP as an investment. Treating IP as an investment would allow private companies to raise investment disputes against the host country whenever they feel that the legal regime does not favour them. These disputes could be initiated by MNCs and especially the pharmaceutical industries that have until now had their hands tied in front of the Indian laws and the judiciary. Japan’s insistence on the inclusion of this clause comes as no surprise as it is the third-largest RCEP investor country. Countries like India and China, which will be the destinations for the investments, should include safeguards against these measures.
•The IP chapter in RCEP is at risk of including provisions far stricter than those mandated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The leaked IP chapter shows that both Japan and South Korea are mounting pressure to implement a TRIPS-plus regime in IP. Adhering to TRIPS-plus standards would be detrimental to developing countries that have benefited from generic competition and lower-priced medicines through the use of the flexibilities in TRIPS such as stricter patentability criteria and the absence of data exclusivity provisions. The few IP reforms discussed in the RCEP include data exclusivity, patent term extension, and much more lenient criteria for patentability.
•This would mean delay in the entry of generic versions of medicines, extension of patent monopoly for a longer time, and exclusivity for drugs that should not be patented if strict patentability criteria were to be applied. The RCEP negotiations on these fronts spearheaded by Japan appear to be an extension of the arm-twisting that developing countries like India have been repeatedly subject to by the U.S. as reflected in the most recent Special 301 Report released by the U.S. Trade Representative.
•The strong MNC lobby growing in Japan, especially on the pharmaceutical side, is a reason for its insistence on stricter IP rules. An example of this is the drug patented by Otsuka for the treatment of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB).
•The company has been strategically withholding the registration of the patent in India, thereby preventing a generic version of the drug from being manufactured. In the event that a provision of data exclusivity is passed, the millions of TB patients in India would have to buy the high-priced drugs, which would have no cheaper generic alternative.
MFN clause
•The WTO has a most-favoured-nation (MFN) clause that obliges the concessions offered to the MFN to be offered to others. In essence, if India has an agreement with Japan (through the RCEP), India will be obliged to offer the same concessions to the U.S. as well as the other members of the WTO. The negotiating pattern reflects the reality of international law making. It is evident that developed countries are using FTAs to expand the existing standards of IP.
•At the 19th round of the RCEP negotiations currently on in Hyderabad, India must resist Japan’s U.S.-style pressure in this regard. Developing countries like India which have taken the leadership in instituting and using balanced intellectual property protection for pharmaceuticals should not only proudly protect their laws in the RCEP negotiations, they should also encourage other countries to adopt and use similar measures that ensure generic competition. The international trading system is not an end in itself and instead of adopting U.S. style lobbying on behalf of multinational companies in the RCEP negotiations, Japan would do well to recall its international commitments on health care and sustainable development and support developing countries in the region in their quest to ensure sustainable access to affordable medicines.
