📰 Navy takes delivery of Scorpene submarine
•Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Ltd. (MDL) of Mumbai on Thursday handed over the first of the Scorpene submarines, Kalvari , to the Navy. This is the Navy’s first new conventional submarine in two decades.
•“The state-of-the-art technology utilised in the Scorpene has ensured superior stealth features such as advanced acoustic silencing techniques, low-radiated noise levels, hydro-dynamically optimised shape and the ability to launch a crippling attack on the enemy using precision guided weapons,” MDL said.
•MDL is constructing six Scorpene submarines with technology transfer from Naval Group, formerly DCNS of France.
📰 SC allows two minor rape survivors to abort foetuses
They had both passed the 20th week of pregnancy
•The Supreme Court on Thursday permitted two minor rape survivors to medically terminate their pregnancies on the advice of the medical boards which examined them.
•The victims, a 13-year-old girl from Delhi and a 17-year-old from Bengaluru, had separately approached the apex court for permission to abort their pregnancies. They had both passed the 20th week of pregnancy, until which the law allows abortion.
Board of doctors
•The 13-year-old was examined by a board of doctors from AIIMS, while the court ordered a medical team from the Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute to examine the other victim.
•Both medical teams had given opinions in favour of medical termination of the pregnancies. The 13-year-old was in her 23rd week of pregnancy and the Bengaluru-based victim in her 24th week.
•The Bench, comprising Justices Amitava Roy and A.M. Khanwilkar, directed preservation of the terminated foetuses for DNA sampling during the investigation in both the cases.
•The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971 does not allow abortion if the pregnancy has crossed 20 weeks. Under the 1971 law, an exception to the 20-week cap can be made if a registered medical practitioner certifies to a court that the continued pregnancy is life-threatening for either the mother or the baby. This was meant to be a safeguard against female foeticide.
Chandigarh case
•The court had recently denied permission to a 10-year-old rape survivor from Chandigarh to abort her foetus. Shortly after the court’s denial, the girl gave birth. The apex court awarded Rs. 10 lakh compensation to the girl.
•Senior advocate Indira Jaising who is intervening in the Supreme Court in the issue, had argued that the delay in offering urgent medical help to such abused women and children have led to untold suffering for them.
•For a 10-year-old, pregnancy is indeed a ‘life-threatening’ situation warranting immediate medical intervention under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971, the senior advocate had argued.
Medical boards
•Recently, the Centre had written to the States and the Union Territories about the court’s suggestion to appoint permanent medical boards to provide rape survivors urgent access to medical care and to consider their requests for abortion.
•The recent privacy judgment of a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court has observed that the right to reproductive choice of a woman is part of her fundamental right to privacy.
📰 Leg-up for PM’s pet housing project
•People purchasing a low-end house from a private developer will be eligible for financial help under the ‘Housing For All’ policy of the Narendra Modi government, Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri announced on Thursday.
•Unveiling the new public-private partnership (PPP) for affordable housing, Mr. Puri said that it will help in meeting the housing requirements for all targets.
Risk assignment
•“This policy seeks to assign risks among the government, developers, and financial institutions, to those who can manage them the best, besides leveraging under-utilised and unutilised private and public lands towards meeting the Housing for All target by 2022,” he said.
•Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) or Housing For All has been moving at a rather sluggish pace. The government was to construct 12 lakh houses under PMAY by 2017-18, but only 1.49 lakh houses have been constructed till last year. The Centre now seeks to construct 26 lakh houses in 2018-19, 26 lakh in 2019-20, 30 lakh in 2020-21 and 29.80 lakh in the 2021-22 period.
•Eligible buyers can get Central assistance of about Rs. 2.50 lakh per house as interest subsidy on bank loans. And if they do not avail any loan, they can get upto Rs. 1.50 lakh.
•The policy gives eight PPP options for developers to invest in. “Out of these eight, we are talking, six models will utilise government lands,” Mr. Puri said. It is now time for private developers to seize the investment opportunities, he added.
📰 Cabinet to soon take up $5 bn convention centre project
Note on approval, SPV formation to be considered
•The Union Cabinet will soon take up the proposal for a “$5 billion-worth world-class and state-of-the-art” Exhibition-cum-Convention Centre (ECC) in the national capital — billed as the largest such facility in Asia when completed by 2021.
•By this month-end, the Cabinet will consider for discussion a “note on approval of the project and formation of a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to implement the same,” official sources told The Hindu . Part of the $100 billion Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) project, it would be developed on Public-Private Partnership model using viability gap funding of the Centre, if required.
•“The SPV will be a 100% subsidiary of DMIC Development Corporation,” the sources said.
•“The SPV will be given the rights to activities, including sub-leasing of land parcels, sub-contracting project components, granting long term concessions to private developers as well as fixing lease rentals.
•The project became necessary as “India lacked an integrated world class facility that can meet the requirements of global ECC operators in terms of space, project facilities and transportation linkages,” the Centre had said.
MICE market
•Though the size of the global Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions (MICE) market is about $280 billion and that of Asian MICE market about $60 billion, India did not benefit due to lack of world class ECCs, it said.
📰 Is the Sardar Sarovar Dam boon or bane?
There is as yet no credible assessment of the costs, benefits and impact of the project
•To assess whether the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) is a boon or bane, we need to have a credible assessment of all the costs, benefits and impacts once the project is completed.
•First, the project is still incomplete (even after downscaling the canal network by about 18,000 km), as per Gujarat government figures, with over 30,000 km of canals yet to be completed; the Garudeshwar Dam downstream from the SSP is still under construction (without any social and environment impact assessment). Second, there is as yet no credible assessment of the costs, benefits and impacts of the project. But let us take an overview of the key issues.
Not going to plan
•The basic justification offered for the SSP by the Gujarat government from the time of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal in the 1970s was that there is no alternative to SSP waters for the drought-prone areas of Kutch, Saurashtra and north Gujarat. Funnily, all the incomplete canal network of the project is in these very regions, while in the water-rich and politically-socially-economically powerful central Gujarat region (excluding the eastern tribal belt) the canal network was completed long ago and the people have been enjoying full use of the water, way beyond their share in the original SSP plans. So, the SSP’s basic objective is far from achieved.
•Social and environmental impacts have gone far beyond what was estimated at the outset when the project was cleared in the late 1980s. Rehabilitation of even the submergence-affected population is about 80% incomplete, but the Prime Minister, on September 17, 2017, his birthday, declared the project complete! One of the most glaring aspects of this episode is that even the highest judiciary of the country could not assure that the displaced population got a just rehabilitation as required by law.
•There are many other dimensions of the impacts of the project. For example, the 150-km stretch of the Narmada downstream from the dam is now dry most of the year and the claim of 600 cusecs (cubic feet per second) being released not immediately downstream but several kilometres from the dam is not supported by any clinching evidence. In any case, that quantum was not the result of any participatory assessment, and is not sufficient to stop even salinity ingress, as was seen in the last several years. The livelihood of at least 10,000 families depending on the Narmada estuary stands destroyed, without any one talking about any rehabilitation or compensation. Similarly, there is no rehabilitation for all the other categories of people displaced by the dam.
Independent review a must
•Incidentally, the Sardar Sarovar reservoir could not be filled, and even the extent to which it was filled (up to a maximum of 129.68 m against the full reservoir level of 138.68 m) was possible only by stopping all power generation at the River Bed Power House for almost two monsoon months, and by reducing power generation at the upstream Indira Sagar and Omkareshwar dams by over 95% and depleting the meagre water storage.
•The best way to know if the project is a boon or bane would be through an independent review of the project. Such reviews happened at least twice, one set up by the World Bank, another by the Government of India. In both cases, the outcome was the same: the project in its current form should not go ahead. That answer was available about 25 years ago.
📰 Taper timetable
The conclusion of quantitative easing in the U.S. could affect investment flows into India
•Quantitative easing has concluded in the world’s largest economy — at least for now. Almost nine years after the U.S. Federal Reserve started its unprecedented programme of liquidity infusion through the purchase of asset-backed and Treasury securities in the wake of the global financial crisis, Fed Chair Janet Yellen announced on Wednesday that starting next month the central bank would begin the normalisation of its balance sheet. To their credit, Ms. Yellen and her colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee have walked the talk on their June decision to unwind the mammoth $4.5 trillion balance sheet. Most crucially, they have done it in a manner that precludes the risk of a ‘taper tantrum’ similar to that in 2013 — when Chairman Ben Bernanke had hinted at starting to turn off the tap — by setting out a slow, long-drawn and well-calibrated timetable to shrink the Fed’s holdings. The asset wind-down will begin with monthly reductions of a modest $10 billion in the three months through December. That amount will gradually increase in quarterly increments of $10 billion so as to reach, in October 2018, a monthly cap of $50 billion. It will continue at this level till such time the Committee concludes that the size of the central bank’s asset holdings is optimal for the effective conduct of monetary policy. Interestingly, Ms. Yellen, who asserted that the balance sheet was not intended to be an “active” policy tool in normal times, especially now that economic activity had strengthened, also placed a caveat. The Fed, she said, “would be prepared to resume reinvestments” if the economic outlook were to deteriorate so significantly as to warrant “sizeable” interest rate cuts.
•Not that Ms. Yellen sees the healthy expansion undergirded by household spending weakening, the damage from the recent hurricanes that have battered coastal regions in the U.S. south notwithstanding. The FOMC has, in fact, marginally raised its median projection for U.S. real GDP growth in 2017 to 2.4%, from the 2.2% estimated in June, and signalled that it is on course to raise the federal funds rate one more time this year after leaving interest rates unchanged for now. However, the one element in the Fed’s policy calculus that eludes, in Ms. Yellen’s words, a more perfect “understanding” is the lower-than-anticipated trajectory of inflation. Given that monetary authorities in the U.S. are focussed on reflating the economy by supporting “further strengthening” in the labour market through an accommodative stance, the central bank has to remain vigilant in warding off any let-up in expansionary momentum. For Indian policymakers, there are both positive and not-so-welcome cues. While the ongoing moderate expansion in the U.S. bodes well for the country’s struggling exporters, the end of easy money conditions could augur a slowdown in investment inflows from abroad and resultant pressure on the current account deficit. The Reserve Bank of India, though, should welcome the clarity in messaging from its U.S. counterpart.
📰 Turn the page to a new chapter
Consider negotiating the Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation between China and India
•In September, Xiamen city of China not only hosted the BRICS Summit, but also witnessed an especially important meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This was the first after the Dong Lang (Doklam) stand-off. As Chinese Ambassador to India, I had the privilege of participating in the meeting. I felt that it sent a critical message of reconciliation and cooperation to the world in a timely manner.
Surpassing expectations
•The outcomes were beyond expectations. Both leaders agreed to start a new chapter. An important consensus has been reached to enhance mutual trust, focus on cooperation, and manage differences. Both leaders also agreed to conduct closer high-level exchanges, revitalise a series of dialogues and mechanisms, as well as promote youth and educational cooperation.
•President Xi emphasised that we should be each other’s development opportunities rather than be threats to each other — “dragon and elephant should dance together”. PM Modi shared the same idea and believes that the political effects of “making one plus one eleven” can be achieved in China-India relations.
•The meeting was originally scheduled for half an hour but lasted for an hour and 25 minutes. This shows that both sides are willing to devote enough time to conducting a comprehensive and in-depth exchange of views. President Xi said thatDangal’s success has increased the affinity of the Chinese to the people of India, while PM Modi also highly praised the great success ofWhere Has the Time Gone, a film named after a speech by President Xi and which was co-produced by artists from the five BRICS member states.
Common aspirations
•In the one year since I assumed my new responsibility in India, I have witnessed ups and downs in China-India relations. Now I am in a better position to understand the common aspirations and potential of our two countries for cooperation and development. These understandings are based on the following aspects.
•First, economic and trade cooperation are gaining momentum. Last year, the trade volume between China and India exceeded $70 billion. China has been for many years the largest trading partner of India. More than 500 Chinese companies have invested and started business in India with a total investment of over $5 billion. Many Indian enterprises of IT, pharmacy and consultancy have entered the Chinese market. For instance, there are more than a hundred Indian software engineers living in the Sino-India Software Industry Park in Linyi city, Shandong province.
•Second, people-to-people exchanges are thriving. Mutual visits between our two countries have exceeded one million. Practising yoga, drinking Darjeeling black tea, and watching Bollywood movies have become fashionable among the Chinese youth. Yunnan Minzu University has established the India-China Yoga College. We are also working to hold the Annual Indian Tourism Conference in Yunnan province.
•Third, local exchanges are booming. China and India have established 14 pairs of sister cities and provinces. PM Modi made frequent visits to Guangdong province when he was the Chief Minister of Gujarat. I also visited many Indian States and was encouraged by their enthusiasm for cooperation with China. I coordinated the attendance of Assam representatives at the Hangzhou International Tea Expo, and helped the Kerala government introduce rubber dam from China.
•Fourth, our two countries have maintained close high-level communications. Home town diplomacy initiated by President Xi and PM Modi has become a much-told story. Both leaders have met more than a dozen times on bilateral and multilateral occasions.
•Now, China’s economy is stable and our reform has entered a crucial stage. India is also accelerating its reform. Make in India, Digital India, Startup India and other initiatives have yielded outcomes. Significant measures like the GST Act have been implemented. Faced with similar development objectives and common challenges such as “anti-globalisation” and trade protectionism, China and India should work together.
•I believe that China and India should work towards the same direction and jointly implement the Xiamen consensus reached by our leaders. We should work towards a sound and healthy bilateral relationship by focussing on cooperation, narrowing and resolving differences. Just like Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, both sides should make sure that China-India relations do not derail, confront, or go out of control, and make the Himalayan region a new highland for Asia’s development.
•Both sides should set long-term goals for the development of our bilateral relations. We can consider negotiating the Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness and Friendly Cooperation between China and India, restarting the negotiations of China-India Free Trade Agreement, striving for early harvests on boundary issues, and actively exploring the strategic synergy between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s ‘Act East Policy’.
•Both sides should appropriately manage differences, get under control the problems left over by history such as issues related to boundary and the Dalai Lama, while finding solutions to new problems.
•Luo Zhaohui is Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to India
📰 Solving the Afghan riddle
The U.S. has clearly identified the root cause of the Afghan problem; India has always been a part of the solution
•Afghanistan, counterterrorism and defence ties are expected to be the prime issues on the table during James Mattis’s visit to India next week. The U.S. Defence Secretary’s trip will happen barely a month after President Donald Trump announced the latest U.S. policy on Afghanistan on August 21, a blueprint that has been welcomed in Kabul and criticised in Islamabad.
•Mr. Trump’s policy envisages more pressure on Pakistan, no early U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, robust military action on counterterrorism and a greater role for India. It is for the first time that a U.S. President has been publicly so critical of Pakistan. In 2009, President Barack Obama had spoken of Pakistan’s lack of action, but not so strongly and harshly as his successor. Sharp words on Pakistan have been said at different levels by earlier U.S. administrations too. They were also codified in the form of conditions in various assistance laws, including the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill. The important issue today is how the U.S. strategy differs from the past in terms of addressing concerns regarding Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, particularly in view of a shift in Pakistan’s strategic priority towards China.
•The situation in Afghanistan continues to be fragile. Though the Taliban has made some gains, it is not a cohesive movement and has divisions within it. At the same time it has to be understood that since 1747, Afghanistan’s territorial borders have remained unchanged unlike its neighbours Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics.
India-Afghanistan ties
•Indo-Afghan relations are unique. Just after Independence, on January 4, 1950, India signed a Treaty of Friendship with Afghanistan which also permitted opening of consulates in each other’s country. Interestingly, not standing on protocol, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru signed this agreement with the Afghan Ambassador in India to indicate the importance New Delhi attached to its relations with Kabul. More recently, in October 2011, India was the first country Afghanistan signed a strategic partnership agreement with.
•The basic tenets of India’s aims, policy and approach towards Afghanistan in respect of bilateral and regional cooperation remain unchanged. India has always wanted a democratic, stable and strong Afghanistan able to decide its own future.
•India has a close strategic partnership with Afghanistan covering a broad spectrum of areas which include political, security, trade and economic cooperation as well as capacity development. India’s assistance in the defence sector has been modest and based on specific requests by the government of Afghanistan. The cumulative level of committed Indian assistance to Afghanistan amounts to $2 billion. New Delhi is always ready for more intensive bilateral relations. It has been at the forefront in respect of assistance for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and can be expected to do more in different sectors. Surveys conducted by various Afghan and foreign news agencies over the years show that the Afghan people ranked Indian assistance as the most suitable because of the positive role India played in the development programme of Afghanistan. Furthermore India is considered as non-threatening with its democratic traditions upheld as a model. The Afghans also appreciate that India had never interfered in their internal affairs.
•Speedy augmentation, training and supply of equipment for the Afghan National Security Forces is important to enable Afghanistan to protect its interests and maintain peace in the country. The Afghans want more help, for instance, at present for their air force. India could assist Afghanistan in training as per their requirement and supplying much-needed spare parts and such equipment as is possible without deployment of Indian troops in Afghanistan.
•Asia is a region of energy and resources stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and Central Asia to Siberia and Russia’s Far East. The energy basket needs to be exploited for the benefit of Afghanistan and the surrounding region. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline is one example. SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) should help in encouraging regional economic cooperation between Afghanistan and its neighbours. Expeditious action on completion of the Chabahar port will help in increasing Afghanistan’s contacts with India and the outside world.
No outside interference
•It is essential that there is no outside interference in Afghanistan. To enable this, the infrastructure of terrorism has to be dismantled. It is important to deny sanctuary and support to the Taliban’s Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network, as terrorism and insurgency cannot end without action taken against them. For any effective counterterrorism policy, all major terrorist groups operating in the area should be considered a single group. President Trump has stated in his policy statement that “Pakistan gives safe haven to agents of chaos, violence and terror”. The elimination of terror outfits will bring peace to Afghanistan.
•Simultaneously, it is also imperative to redouble counter-narcotics efforts as Afghanistan remains the world’s largest producer of opium accounting for 90% of the world’s supply. Success in this field will have a positive effect on its neighbours.
•India is in favour of a reconciliation process which has overall Afghan support and is based on internationally accepted redlines. India supports the Afghan quest for peace and reconciliation. Indeed peace and reconciliation were embedded in the very first international compact on Afghanistan, in the text of the Bonn Agreement of December 2001. Renunciation of violence will help this process. For regional security there must be closer involvement of regional powers in international efforts to ensure non-interference and a stable Afghanistan; this also requires involvement of the Central Asian Republics, which border Afghanistan. It is important for India to coordinate its efforts with those of Russia and Iran to ensure success. The U.S. will benefit in helping this to happen.
India-Pakistan relations
•Unfair attempts have been made now and then to link the Afghan issue with India-Pakistan relations. There is no connection. A study of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations since 1947 will reveal that their relations have always been thorny and replete with problems except during the brief Taliban era. Even during that period there were differences on issues like the Durand Line. Neither have India-Pakistan relations, good or bad, impacted on Pakistan-Afghanistan relations. India and Afghanistan have never exploited their friendly bilateral relations to harm Pakistan. This is clear from three things: (a) In both the 1965 and 1971 wars, Afghanistan was non-committal and did not support India; (b) On the Kashmir issue, Afghanistan has not publicly supported India; (c) Similarly, India has not entered the debate on the Durand Line.
•Some instances in the last three decades also reflect the same viewpoint. Neither India nor India-Pakistan relations were responsible for the situation which prevailed in Afghanistan following the departure of the Soviet troops which threw the country back to medieval times and brought the Taliban to power and Al Qaeda/Osama bin Laden in the region. No extremist group — the Taliban, Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba — is based in India or has any Indian connection. The U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden and the recourse to drone attacks in Afghanistan were due to the situation prevailing there, which had nothing to do with India or India-Pakistan relations. Again when Pakistan decided to shift over 100,000 of its security forces from its eastern border with India to its western border with Afghanistan in 2010, India did not exploit the situation. India, in fact, has always been a part of the solution. To blame India-Pakistan relations for the situation in Afghanistan is neither fair nor just. The root cause of the Afghan problem has been clearly stated in President Trump’s policy statement of August 21 and also mentioned in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 19. Now Afghanistan, and the region, await to see how it is implemented.
📰 Update for the online era
For tighter provisions against ‘indecent’ portrayal of women
•Women, especially journalists, have been the targets of misogynist trolls on social media. Often hiding behind the cloak of anonymity the Internet offers, the trolls heap online abuse upon women with an independent point of view, and issue threats and conduct hate campaigns against them.
•A 31-year-old law, The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, has largely proved ineffective in curbing this onslaught on the Internet. Though the Act was passed to prohibit indecent representation of women through advertisements or in publications, writings, paintings, figures or in any other manner, it pertains only to the print media.
•In 2012, an amendment Bill was introduced in Parliament to update the law and make punishment stringent; it is still pending. The statement of objects and reasons of the Bill record the need for the amendments in the 1986 law. It says “technological revolution has resulted in development of new forms of communication, such as, internet and satellite based communication, multi-media messaging, cable television, etc. It has, thus, become necessary to widen the scope of the Act so as to cover the above forms of media.”
•The government acknowledges that the law has to be more effective; stringent punishment which acts as deterrent also becomes essential. It has also been felt that the power to enter any premises and conduct search and seizure of any material, if there is reason to believe that an offence under the Act has been committed, should be made more effective and the officers conducting such searches given sufficient protection while carrying out their duties.
•The Bill defines the ‘indecent representation of women’ to mean the depiction of the figure or form or body or any part thereof, of a woman in such a way as to have the effect of being indecent or derogatory to or denigrating women, or in a way likely to deprave, corrupt or injure public morality.
•It amends the definitions of ‘advertisement’ and ‘distribution’ and also defines ‘electronic form’ of material. It prohibits the publication or distribution of any material, by any means, which contains indecent representation of women in any form.
•The proposed law pushes for an increase in the maximum imprisonment from two years to three years and fine from Rs. 2,000 to a minimum Rs. 50,000, which may be extended to Rs. 1 lakh for the first offence. Subsequent offences would invite punishment of a maximum five to seven years and fine up to Rs. 5 lakh. The Bill wants a police officer not less than the rank of inspector to investigate offences under the Act.
