📰 SC verdict to affect ban on slaughter
•The landmark judgment declaring right to privacy a fundamental right would have “some bearing” in matters relating to slaughter of cows, bulls and bullocks in Maharashtra, the Supreme Court said on Friday.
•The Bombay High Court had on May 6 last year struck down Sections 5(D) and 9(B) of the Maharashtra Animals Preservation (Amendment) Act, 1995.
•While Section 5(D) criminalises possession of flesh of cows, bulls or bullocks, slaughtered outside Maharashtra, Section 9(B) imposed burden on the accused to prove that meat or flesh possessed by him/her does not belong to these animals. The State government had filed an appeal in the top court.
•The SC observed this while hearing a batch of appeals filed against the HC verdict decriminalising the possession of beef in case of animals slaughtered outside the state.
Right to eat
•A Bench comprising Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan was told by senior advocate Indira Jaising, representing some of the petitioners, that after yesterday’s privacy verdict by a nine-judge constitution Bench, the right to eat food of one’s choice was now protected under privacy.
•Senior advocate C.U. Singh also told the apex court that the privacy judgement would have to be looked into while deciding the issue. “Yes, that judgement will have some bearing in these matters,” the Bench observed. The Supreme Court had yesterday said “nobody would like to be told what to eat or how to dress” while ruling that these activities come under the realm of right to privacy.
📰 Political freedoms necessary, rules SC
Says right to dissent is important
•A free environment for exercising political freedoms such as the right to dissent is necessary to end the malaise of corruption and diversion of funds and welfare benefits that re meant for the poor, the Supreme Court said in its privacy judgment on Thursday.
•“Government leaders in authoritarian states” who choke citizens’ political freedoms find themselves often ill-prepared to resolve national crises.
•This is because lack of free flow of information and criticism has crippled the ability of the leadership to introspect on their actions and self-correct, the apex court added.
Enabling atmosphere
•An enabling atmosphere for citizens to dissent and scrutinise government measures add to the vibrancy of democracy.
•In the judgment often quoting from Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said: “His [Mr. Sen] analysis reveals that the political immunity enjoyed by government leaders in authoritarian states prevents effective measures being taken in critical situations like famine.”
•The court was replying to the Centre’s argument that privacy of a few should be sacrificed at the altar of government’s drive to end corruption and money-laundering. Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal had argued in the context of Aadhaar.
•Mr. Venugopal said Aadhaar aids the economic right of the poor to get their wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Empolyment Guarantee Scheme, shelter and food. Only a few elite are concerned about the collection and use of biometric details for Aadhaar.
•For the poor, Aadhaar is a god-send.
Transparent systems
•But Justice Chandrachud, in his judgment, “The conditions necessary for realising or fulfilling socio-economic rights do not postulate the subversion of political freedom. The reason for this is simple. Capture of social welfare benefits can be obviated only when political systems are transparent and when there is a free flow of information. Opacity ensures to the benefit of those who monopolise scarce economic resources.”
•On the other hand, conditions where civil and political freedoms flourish ensure that governmental policies are subjected to critique and assessment, he added.
•It is this scrutiny which sub-serves the purpose of ensuring that socio-economic benefits actually permeate to the under-privileged for whom they are meant.
Assertion of rights
•“Conditions of freedom and a vibrant assertion of civil and political rights promote a constant review of the justness of socio-economic programmes and of their effectiveness in addressing deprivation and want. Scrutiny of public affairs is founded upon the existence of freedom. Hence civil and political rights and socio-economic rights are complementary and not mutually exclusive.”
📰 MPs fret over trade deficit with ASEAN
Parliamentary panel urges that India should seek better market access for its products and services
•The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce has questioned the government for suggesting that the country’s increasing trade deficit with ASEAN nations is due to imports of essential commodities and has strongly recommended that India seek better market access for its products and services with the 10-nation bloc.
•The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) comprises of Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam.
•India has suffered a trade deficit in respect of five ASEAN members — Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei and Lao PDR — over 2015-16 and 2016-17, with the biggest deficit emerging in trade with Indonesia, the committee has noted.
Indonesia tariffs
•“Under the existing trade agreement, Indonesia has committed a tariff elimination on 50.1% of its items which is the least in comparison to other ASEAN member States,” the committee said in its report on Indo-ASEAN trade issues released on Friday. “The least tariff elimination by Indonesia has resulted in biggest trade deficit from India amongst all ASEAN member States.”
•The committee chaired by BJP MP Bhupender Yadav has said India must seek better market access for goods where India has an edge over ASEAN nations, like leather goods and pharmaceuticals, to improve the trade balance. The committee stressed that its examination of the Indo-ASEAN trade dynamics assumed significance given that this year marks 25 years of the formal partnership.
•The Ministry of Commerce apprised the panel that the imports of essential commodities — coal, petroleum and edible oils — from ASEAN constitute a significant percentage of India’s imports and that ‘if these essential commodities are excluded, India will have a better or positive balance of trade position.’
•Taking a strong exception to this stance, the committee held that ‘if this approach or argument is subscribed, then there was no need for the trade agreement with ASEAN.’
•“The import of essential commodities will continue with or without the trade agreements. The better market access in terms of higher export has not materialised and this is a matter of concern. The Committee would like to impress on the Department that various trade instruments/agreements must aim towards better market access,” it asserted.
•As per official data, among the ‘essential commodities’ cited by the government, imports of coal fell by 2.5% in 2016-17 from a year earlier, while vegetable oil imports grew by 3.7% to touch $6.19 billion in 2016-17. Crude petroleum imports rose by almost 50% in 2016-17, but exports of petroleum products (India’s top export product to the ASEAN bloc) surged 58.4%.
•Among the other top 10 commodities imported from ASEAN, consumer electronics grew at the highest pace in 2016-17 (18.33%), followed by ships and boats (12.82%), electronic components (11.72%) and telecom instruments (9.17%). India’s second-largest export commodity to ASEAN — buffalo meat — saw a 4.92% increase in 2016-17 to reach $2.78 billion.
Fourth-largest partner
•ASEAN is India’s fourth largest trading partner with total trade in 2016-17 at $71.69 billion, constituting almost 11% of India’s overall global trade of $660.6 billion. Total exports to ASEAN in 2016-17 stood at $31.07 billion, while imports were $40.63 billion, creating an adverse trade balance of $9.56 billion.
•The committee also found that while exports of agricultural products from India faced high import tariffs and barriers, leading to a sharp drop in trade, India’s food processing sector had raised concerns about the ‘near absence of quality norms’ for import of cheap processed food products from ASEAN countries.
Processed food imports
•“The Committee recommends the Department to look into cheap import of poor quality processed food products. It desires that appropriate quality norms may be fixed for import of such products from ASEAN as well as other regions of the world,” its report said.
•Similar concerns have been raised by the committee about the imposition of safeguards and non-tariff barriers by ASEAN nations on exports of India’s textiles and pharmaceuticals, while demanding that the government must ensure reciprocity in the reduction of tariffs in products like steel.
•It has also sought efforts to improve India’s access to services trade in ASEAN, with a focus on increasing the footprint of Indian banks and financial institutions in the region.
📰 Claims on Bt cotton need to be probed, says panel
‘Picture painted by govt. agencies far removed from truth’
•Reigniting the debate on GM crops, a Parliamentary panel headed by Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury in a report released on Friday said the government agencies have portrayed “a rosy picture” on Bt Cotton which is far removed from the truth.
•The report of the Standing Committee on Science and Technology claimed that the government cited only overall cotton output and not the average yield in area. “India’s cotton yields increased by 69% in the five years (2000-2005) when Bt Cotton was less than 6% of total cotton area, but by only 10% in the 10 years from 2005-2015 when Bt Cotton grew to 94% of the total cotton area,” the report noted.
•The “duality of the claims about the increase in yield of cotton” needs further examination, the committee said.
•It slammed the government for its “casual” approach to the need for a scientific study of GM crop impact on health.
•“Can you imagine they did not think it fit to carry out any study on impact of GM crops on human or animal health. All the studies that the government have been quoting are done in other countries growing GM crops,” Standing Committee Chairperson Renuka Chowdhury said.
•The committee noted that 20 years after introduction of GM crops in 1996, only six countries continue to account for over 90 % of all GM crop area globally including U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Canada, China and India. “If GM technology was so good then why would all the countries not embrace it?” Ms. Chowdhury asked.
•The Ministry of Agriculture conceded to the committee that herbicide-tolerant gene may escape through pollen into nearby farm and fields, to another GM or non-GM crop. “So if we allow GM crops in the midst of our indigenous crops there is no way contamination can be stopped, which means that we could lose the competitive edge of some of our unique products,” Ms. Chowdhury added.
•Finally, unless bio-safety and socio-economic desirability studies are done through a participatory, independent and transparent process, the committee has recommended that no GM crop should be introduced.
📰 China may attend Science Ministers’ meet in Chennai
India invites neighbouring country amid Doklam standoff
•Despite the border tension, China is among the countries invited by India to a Science and Technology Ministers’ conclave to be held in Chennai next month.
•The Science Ministers of Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia are among the others invited to the meeting that will discuss how science and technology can address the common challenges in these countries.
Showcases feat
•The conclave is part of the India International Science Festival (IISF), a three-year-old mela of students and scientists, that showcases contemporary and historical achievements of Indian science. It is organised by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak-linked Vijnana Bharti and the Ministry of Science and Technology.
•“This year, for the first time, we are having such a ministers’ conclave and invited the Science and Technology Ministers from neighbouring countries, including Pakistan and China...,” Jayakumar A., secretary, Vijnana Bharti, told The Hindu . The Hindu could not establish whether the countries have confirmed participation. An email and calls to Arabinda Mitra, head of the Department of Science and Technology’s bilateral science cooperation division, weren’t returned.
•The latest edition of the IISF will be held at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras; Anna University; and the National Institute of Ocean Technology.
•The IISF is largely a platform for science-and-technology-themed exhibitions.
•At the first IISF held at the IIT-Delhi, students congregated to set a ‘Guinness world record’ for the world’s “largest science lesson”.
📰 Mother Teresa’s universe of grace
For her, behind each case of leprosy was a person who had suffered abject misery and humiliation
•In my long association of 23 years, some of the most enduring images that I have of Mother (now Saint) Teresa concerned her compassion for those afflicted by leprosy but cured of the disease, who still carried its ravages in their destroyed limbs and lives. Leprosy is a word that most people continue to dread. Yet this was St. Teresa’s special constituency within her world of abject poverty and destitution. To this day the Sisters and Brothers of the Missionaries of Charity continue to touch, feed, treat and offer succour to them just as their founder had done in her days.
Leprosy is back
•Most of us are not aware that we continue to face a rising leprosy problem in our midst. In India the disease stood formally eliminated as a public health problem in 2005, when the caseload dropped to one case per 10,000 population, a target set by the World Health Organisation. Unfortunately, with this achievement dropped funding for critical medicines that were still needed to combat the remnants of the disease. The work done by the National Leprosy Eradication Programme (NLEP) has begun to erode as new cases have emerged. Late last year, a sustained campaign was conducted by the NLEP in as many as 149 districts in 19 States. This was the result of an astounding 127,326 new cases detected in 2016.
A life behind each case
•For Mother Teresa, leprosy was not a matter of ‘cases’. Behind each ‘case’ was a human being who had suffered the misery of abject humiliation, not merely by society at large but most often by their own families. This would occur when the telltale signs of leprosy could no longer be hidden. By then, the disease had destroyed the nervous system. Fingers and feet could no longer feel pain or heat or cold. They became susceptible to injury. Eventually hands became stumps and the telltale bandages would give them away. The irony was (and remains) that the dread of the disease caused people to hide the early signs until it became too late to avoid deformity. Even those who may have been lucky to find a cure in city hospitals would continue to be shunned. The average city jhuggi cluster will seldom admit even the leprosy-cured in its midst: they must live as complete outcasts in their own ghettoes under the shadow of their own special stigma.
•It was for them that Mother Teresa knocked on the doors of the Delhi government in 1975 to plead for some land where she could build a shelter for them: proper dormitories and a small hospital to provide for reconstructive surgery. She was as good as her word. She fittingly named her Delhi ashram after Mahatma Gandhi, whom she once told me she wished she had met. She visited here almost each time she came to Delhi. I mostly accompanied her as she mingled with the residents listening to their sorrow, their little joys and often their anger, directed not at her but at the cruelty of a world that had abandoned them.
•One afternoon a woman reached out to her from her cot. She had hidden the early signs of leprosy. When they manifested themselves, her two sons threw her out of her house. Somehow someone brought her to this shelter. Through tears she repeatedly asked Mother Teresa whether her sons would visit her on Diwali, barely a few weeks away. Mother said she would pray that they’d come. As we left the hall, Mother told me that the lady had been a teacher in a renowned girls’ school. Her family had abandoned her to her fate. They would never come. She died soon after, I suspect not from leprosy, but from a broken heart.
The handloom centre
•To this day the handloom saris worn by the Missionaries of Charity sisters are woven by former leprosy patients at a weaving centre set up by Mother Teresa in a leprosy colony near the industrial town of Titagarh near Kolkata. Over the years, the leprosy-stricken, driven further and further away from Kolkata, had no choice but to built their huts on the edge of this town, along the railway lines. Over 500 families had found refuge here. When Mother Teresa learned of this, she arrived and helped them with shramdan, to build dormitories, a hospital and a weaving centre. Today the centre is a hive of activity as dozens of men and women produce the distinctive white saris with three blue stripes for which the Missionaries of Charity hold the copyright.
•I sometimes encounter criticism of Mother Teresa but to all those who do so I would ask one question: how many of us actually bend down to help those in need with our own hands? How many of us offer succour to these unfortunate brethren? Like Baba Amte, St. Teresa — her birth anniversary falls today — spent her life in actually living Swami Vivekananda’s concept of ‘Daridra Narayan’, in the service of god through service to the poor, destitute and marginalised.
📰 Target Section 377
The SC has laid the foundation to decriminalise consensual gay sex
•Same-gender sex remains a crime in the country due to a flagrant judicial mistake committed by the Supreme Court in 2013. The time has come to undo it. Ever since the constitutional validity of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was upheld in Suresh Kumar Koushal (2013), the correctness of the retrograde verdict has come under doubt twice. The latest criticism from the court is strident and explicit. While declaring that the right to privacy is a fundamental right and an inherent component of human liberty and dignity, the nine-judge Bench has observed that the rationale behind the Koushal judgment is flawed and unsustainable. It has said the rights of LGBT persons are real rights founded on sound constitutional doctrine and not “so-called rights” as the earlier Bench had described them disdainfully. The astounding claim made in Koushal that there was no need to challenge Section 377 because the LGBT community constitutes only a minuscule minority has been completely discredited. It was unreasonable to advance the view that constitutional protection is available to a group based on its size. Yet, in a show of uncharacteristic reticence and contrary to the history of the evolution of constitutional jurisprudence, the earlier Bench had suggested that the provision can be diluted only through the legislative route. This week’s ruling on privacy rights contains a clear enunciation of the constitutional basis for protection of rights based on sexual orientation.
•Transgenders, even though insignificant in numbers, are entitled to human rights, another Bench had observed in National Legal Services Authority (2014), in a subtle hit at the “minuscule minority” formulation in Koushal . At another point, it said Section 377 had been an instrument of harassment and abuse, something the earlier judgment had refused to accept. Significantly, it advocated the adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles — norms on gender identity and sexual orientation adopted by human rights experts in 2006 in Indonesia. A key principle is that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity must end. By commending this norm, the court has located sexual orientation not only as a freedom flowing from the right to privacy, but as demanding of non-discriminatory treatment. Both these verdicts correctly refrained from ruling on the validity of Section 377, as it was not the primary question before them. However, it is quite apparent that a strong body of constitutional jurisprudence is now available to target Section 377, as and when a five-judge Bench takes up the reconsideration of Koushal . By the latest verdict, sexual orientation is an aspect of the right to privacy and an inalienable part of human dignity, freedom, and personal liberty. Under the 2014 reasoning, it is relatable to both dignity and equality. Read together, they have laid the foundation for restoring the Delhi High Court judgment of 2010 in Naz Foundation , which read down Section 377 to decriminalise consensual sex among adults irrespective of gender.
