📰 Ensure State panels for women are set up: SC
Centre to file affidavit on action plan for widows
•The Supreme Court has asked the Centre if state commissions for women (SCW) actually exist.
•The top court raised the question as it dealt with the issue of precarious conditions faced by destitute widows living in Vrindavan and other places across the country.
•The court, which is hearing a matter pertaining to the condition of such widows, told the Centre that if SCWs did not exist in the States, then the State governments concerned should be asked to ensure setting up of such panels. “The Solicitor General should also inform us whether the SCW is actually existing in all the States and if not, then a communication to the State governments must be sent to ensure that these SCWs are in place in accordance with the statute,” a Bench headed by Justice M.B. Lokur said.
•The Centre told the Bench, which also comprised Justices S. Abdul Nazeer and Deepak Gupta, that it would furnish an affidavit on the agreed action plan, which contains several steps required to be taken to improve the situation of the destitute widows.
•The court asked the Centre to do the needful within six weeks and fixed the matter for hearing on December 6.
‘No access to justice’
•In August, the top court had said that the ostracised destitute widows belong to the “socially disadvantaged class” of society and were not treated with the dignity they deserve in the shelter homes in Vrindavan and elsewhere. It had equated them with socially underprivileged groups who have no real access to justice, are voiceless and needed to be empowered.
📰 Govt. may have to foot bill for rail safety fund
As earnings fall, Railways knocks on Finance Ministry’s door
•The Ministry of Railways may ask the Finance Ministry to fund its share of the railway safety fund this year as the public utility is staring at an earnings shortfall of at least Rs. 10,000 crore in 2017-18, sources said.
•With earnings deficit, the Ministry of Railways may find it difficult to contribute its share towards the newly- constituted Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Rosh (RRSK) – a dedicated fund for critical safety-related works, a Ministry official said on the condition of anonymity.
Earnings shortfall
•The Indian Railways’ income stood at Rs. 80,519 crore till September compared with Rs. 76,405 crore till September last year. However, the actual income was 8.45% lower than the targeted earnings till September this year. The Railways had set a target of earning Rs. 1.88 lakh crore in 2017-18 against Rs. 1.65 lakh crore in 2016-17.
•“We are looking at an earnings deficit of at least Rs. 10,000 crore by the end of this financial year. We may demand Finance Ministry to fund the entire amount towards RRSK for current financial year in the pre-budget meeting next month,” the Ministry official said. The Finance Ministry is scheduled to meet the officials of the Ministry of Railway on November 10 for pre-budget discussions to finalise the revised estimates for 2017-18 and budget estimates for 2018-19.
Safety fund
•Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced the setting up a special safety fund with a corpus of more than Rs. 1 lakh crore over a period of five years in Budget 2017-18. According to the plan, while the Finance Ministry would contribute Rs. 15,000 crore annually towards the fund, the Ministry of Railways would fund the balance Rs. 5,000 crore every year.
•In the first six months of the current financial year, the Indian Railways had utilised a quarter of the safety fund as it had spent Rs. 5,031 crore from the RRSK. Although the Railways’ passenger and goods earnings had increased 4.5% and 8.4% respectively till September this year compared with the last year, its sundry earnings had declined sharply by 35.7% during this period.
•Income from non-fare revenues, including land lease, advertising, PSU dividends and catering department, form part of the sundry earnings.
•Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal had said in an interview to The Hindu last month that the utility was willing to spend unlimited funds on safety which would be a top priority for him. “In my working, there is no budget for safety. Whatever (fund) is required we will spend,” Mr. Goyal had said.
•Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry advised the Ministry of Railways to prioritise deploying RRSK funds on areas that reduce chances of human error and ensure training of safety staff.
📰 In a foreign policy haze
The U.S. Secretary of State arrives in Delhi for his first official visit amid mixed signals from Washington
•In an ambitious statement ahead of his visit to India this week, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set the course for India-U.S. relations going ahead, mapping convergences in connectivity, trade and economics and counter-terrorism cooperation. He said the “most profound transformation” was their growing strategic convergence, and agreed that “the world’s two greatest democracies should have the two greatest militaries.”
•His comments were welcomed in New Delhi, especially as they contained several broadsides on China’s actions in the Indo-Pacific and on its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which India has fiercely opposed. He also displayed a keen understanding of India’s strengths as a “diverse, dynamic, and pluralistic” democracy.
Hold the enthusiasm
•Despite Mr. Tillerson’s effusive words, however, it may be necessary to curb any enthusiasm until the U.S. policy compass itself is more settled, given that the policies of the Trump administration have thus far defied a clear reading. Worse, they have sent out confusing signals, with policy, public statements, and Twitter bursts often contradicting each other. A case in point was the Coleman hostage release story last week, that led to a slew of statements on the U.S.’s relationship with Pakistan.
•Just days before U.S. Defence Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford had told a Senate armed service committee that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has proven links to terror groups and suggested the partnership with Pakistan was all but over. After the release, President Donald Trump tweeted that he was beginning to “develop a much better relationship with Pakistan and its leaders”. Shortly after, his Chief of Staff John Kelly referred to Pakistan as a “great partner”, while Mr. Tillerson said Pakistan was critical to regional stability.
•Yet, reports that the raid by Pakistan had come not through intelligence cooperation but coercion — a team of Navy Seals had threatened to go in, Zero Dark Thirty-style, if Pakistani forces didn’t rescue the five-member Coleman family before they were transferred across the border with Afghanistan — called into question these fulsome words of praise.
•Even more confusing were the actions. As U.S. forces resumed drone strikes in the Af-Pak region, their big kill was Omar Khalid Khorasani, the leader of the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, which targets Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. rejoined the Pakistani-led Quadrilateral Coordination Group along with Afghanistan and China, that seeks to bring the Afghan Taliban to the table for talks, a group that’s carried out deadly attacks across Afghanistan just last week. As a result, it may seem that the U.S.’s South Asia policy has mixed up its carrots and sticks in the Af-Pak region.
The Pakistan line
•For India, it is disappointing that Washington has not been similarly pro-active in condemning the Pakistan government’s decision to drop terrorism charges and paving the way for 26/11 mastermind and Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed’s release from detention, while it is hoped that Mr. Tillerson will make those statements in Islamabad. Instead, Mr. Tillerson appears to be keen on brokering dialogue between India and Pakistan, saying that he hopes to “ease tensions along their border.”
•Some of the confusion in public statements clearly stems from the ‘disconnect’ in Washington, with the White House, the U.S. military establishment, and the State Department on different pages. It is no secret that Mr. Trump, Mr. Tillerson and other decision makers have often been at odds over policies on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Qatar, climate change, etc. In an interview last week Mr. Tillerson admitted to the differences, and even that he was often informed of presidential policy by tweet.
•“I wake up the next morning, the President’s got a tweet out there,” Mr. Tillerson told The New York Times , a circumstance that saw the U.S. President praise Saudi Arabia for its moves to isolate Qatar, even as Mr. Tillerson travelled there to play the part of neutral mediator. Similarly, during American talks with North Korea, Mr. Trump all but scuttled Mr. Tillerson’s efforts with a tweet that said he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man”.
•Several American media outlets have confirmed that Mr. Tillerson wanted to resign in July, and called Mr. Trump a “moron”, and even as he headed out to West Asia and South Asia, at least one national daily speculated that he would quit within the week. While the U.S.’s internal politics should not, normally, concern others, the fact is that this level of instability and incoherence in foreign policy is unprecedented.
•The contradiction in U.S. policies is even more significant for India, as the two policies announced by Mr. Trump for the region, his South Asia policy for Afghanistan and his policy on Iran, are at odds with each other.
•According to Mr. Trump’s Iran strategy, announced on October 13, the U.S. will increase sanctions on Iran to ensure it can no longer “finance terror”, while refusing to certify its nuclear programme as required. Theoretically, this may not mean much to India. Practically, it will have a three-fold effect. To begin with, trade with Iran, which is already constrained by previous U.S. sanctions and diktats, will be very hard to enlarge. At present only a couple of Indian banks and almost no European banks can be used for non-oil trade, and Mr. Trump’s statement will ensure few others will venture to do so. Indian oil imports from Iran have also been decreasing, mainly due to American pressure.
The Chabahar question
•Second, if Iran is unable to conduct more trade, it will have less incentive to focus on the new Chabahar port over the pre-existing trade through Bandar Abbas. This would certainly impact India’s plans for connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asia.
•It also remains to be seen whether the Trump administration would countenance Indian investment in Chabahar, the development of the railways through to Zahedan, and regular trade through Iran in order to increase assistance to Afghanistan, as the U.S.’s South Asia policy encourages, given the tough language it has employed in its Iran strategy. What guarantees would there be that Mr. Trump, who is willing to overturn the Iran nuclear deal, would not expect friendly countries like India to follow suit in helping ‘squeeze’ Iran?
•As Mr. Tillerson touches down in Delhi for his first visit to the region as Secretary of State, New Delhi must prepare for the challenges ahead with this wobbly compass in hand.
•The government has a multi-fold challenge before it, to address its concerns on all these issues, while keeping the focus on the India-U.S. bilateral relationship, which is largely more beneficial for India. This will be yet more complicated as Delhi hosts Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on the same day that Mr. Tillerson arrives, and the talks could give the appearance of a trilateral. As Mr. Tillerson travels to Delhi from Islamabad, he will also carry the Pakistan perspective to his talks, a scenario of ‘hyphenation’ India had previously worked hard to avoid. In the absence of a clearer path ahead for the Trump administration, New Delhi should proceed with caution, before being drawn into the larger strategic web that the U.S. wishes to weave, both in the Af-Pak and Indo-Pacific regions.
📰 It’s time to make deep emission cuts
The prospect of limiting global warming through ‘negative emissions’ is bleak
•Human activities, the collective choices we have made to deploy fossil fuels and change land uses, are responsible for the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and associated global warming. In 2016, the earth’s temperature was 1.3°C warmer than in pre-industrial times — as warm as in the Eemian interglacial period some 125,000 years ago — when sea levels were 6-9 metres higher than they are today. More dishearteningly, even if countries take the action they promised at the Paris climate change conference in 2015, the world would be about 3°C warmer by 2100, well above the 2°C temperature guardrail to avoid dangerous climate change.
Negative emissions
•Clearly, the current pattern of increasing emissions (which reportedly grew at the rate of 2.6% per year during 2000-2015) needs a rapid phase down. But the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that the earth can stay below 2°C. Closer examination reveals that many of the integrated assessment models used to study future scenarios and emissions assume that the world would somehow make use of significant amounts of ‘negative emissions’. These are ways to remove carbon dioxidefrom the atmosphere, or even change the earth’s radiation balance through geoengineering. These negative emissions in the models are used in addition to increasing use of renewables and improving the efficiency of energy services.
•Some of the approaches that could remove or absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are better agricultural practices that leave carbon in the ground, use of biochar, undertaking afforestation and reforestation. One method that is widely discussed is bioenergy for fuel in combination with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This involves the use of plants as fuel. The released carbon dioxide is then captured and safely stored indefinitely. However, due to competition for land for food and other purposes, and due to technological limitations, this approach is believed to be inappropriate for extensive use.
•Other methods to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and increase carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans are also being explored, but their long-term implications are not clear. Some scientists have been discussing the possibility of injecting cooling aerosols at a large scale in the atmosphere, but these geoengineering technologies pose huge risks and are also not long-term solutions.
•Many scientists have voiced concern about over-reliance on BECCS and other large-scale engineering strategies, noting that these reflect political expedience rather than knowledge.
•If BECCS and other approaches for negative emissions fail, we are likely to see a 4°C increase in global temperatures. In their recent Climate Policy article, Alice Larkin and her colleagues estimate that the cost optimisation models being used for these analyses are overly optimistic about negative emissions in the future.
•These models also fail to consider equity dimensions and social and technological barriers. As a result, they pose a severe risk to society, especially to the poorest countries, which will experience the worst impacts of climate change. The irony is that these poor countries have emitted the least amount of GHGs.
•There is also fear that policymakers do not fully recognise that widespread deployment of negative emissions is a central assumption in many climate models and the scenarios that are now being advocated to keep to a 2°C rise. A society that places most of its eggs in the negative emissions basket will likely face catastrophic choices. Negative emissions also create a moral hazard problem, where we expect (future) others to bail us out while we continue to lead profligate lives.
•This situation complicates an already immense problem and implies that near-term reductions in GHG emissions should receive more and immediate attention. If negative emissions become feasible in future, they could help the world stay on course in reducing warming, but this cannot be assumed while we are running short of the carbon space available to dodge dangerous climate change.
Peak emissions
•Another critical scientific finding is that even if global emissions were to go down to zero by 2050 through some Herculean feat, there would be considerable amount of warming that the world is already locked into. The adverse effects of these would be severe and difficult to adapt to. This is already in evidence all over the world with several seasons of intense storms, droughts, floods, fires and their aftermath, meaning that any further delay in reducing emissions would put at risk many more lives, livelihoods and investments for decades to come.
•According to Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, the elephant in the room is that economic growth as usual cannot be reconciled with climate impacts, especially as Earth continues to warm. Scientists, they urge, need to speak openly and freely about the dangers of climate change without leaning on euphemisms. Climatologist James Hansen has also brought up the dangers of scientific reticence in the past, particularly in the context of sea level rise.
•Policies therefore need to support practices that successfully keep carbon in the ground, prevent deforestation, support agricultural practice that sequesters carbon and promote sustainable land use practices that reduce emissions. We also need a carbon tax — various models for these have been discussed. ‘Lifestyle’ and other consumption activities that may have hitherto been outside the radar of climate policy because they disturb the status quo or are difficult would have to be considered. Policies should nudge especially the more prosperous communities towards less carbon intensive lifestyles, either through taxes or incentives or both. Otherwise, today’s largely policies would merely shift current problems on to the shoulders of future generations.
📰 ‘Why exempt CBI from RTI Act?’
Notification aimed at scuttling appeal for documents in Bofors case: petitioner
•A plea has been filed in the Supreme Court for an early hearing of a petition challenging a 2011 government notification, which includes the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the list of “intelligence and security organisations” exempted from disclosing information to the public under the Right to Information Act.
•Counsel Ajay Agrawal, in his petition, said the June 9, 2011 notification including the CBI in the Second Schedule of the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 was arbitrary, especially when the organisation was only an investigating agency and not a security or intelligence organisation.
•The fresh application, filed earlier this month, for an advanced hearing in the case alleged that the notification was “solely to scuttle the RTI appeal pending before the Chief Information Commissioner, New Delhi, in regard to the Bofors-Quattrocchi case in which order was passed by the Central Information Commission directing the CBI to provide the requisite papers to the petitioner [Mr. Agrawal]”.
•Mr. Agrawal, who has been pursuing the Bofors payoff case for years, contended that “by issuing the notification and placing the CBI in the Second Schedule, the government appears to be claiming absolute secrecy for the CBI without the sanction of the law.”
•“The RTI Act was a promise to the citizens by Parliament for transparency and accountability ... It is incumbent on the government to provide the reasons for constricting the citizen’s fundamental right to information,” the petition contended.
‘Deep impact’
•“Such an administrative decision has a profound impact on the citizens of India inasmuch as it restricts their fundamental right to information ... By this method the government could keep adding organisations to the Second Schedule, which do not meet the express criteria laid down in Section 24(2) of the RTI Act and ultimately render the RTI Act ineffective,” the application said.
•This case had been transferred from the Delhi High Court to the apex court following the government’s claim of multiplicity of such petitions in several High Courts.
📰 ‘Labour will take an ethical approach to foreign policy’
Spokesperson says party will raise concerns on human rights
•A Labour government would raise concerns about human rights including those relating to the situation in Kashmir with India, as part of an ethical approach to foreign policy that treated human rights and trade developments as “inseparable parts of the same conversation”, the Labour Party’s spokesperson on foreign affairs Emily Thornberry said on Friday.
•Human rights and sustainable development would be “fully embedded” as part of any trade negotiations with countries Britain sought to develop relations with in the wake of Brexit, Ms. Thornberry told a gathering of the Indian Journalists Association in .
•Ms. Thornberry also urged the need for a more realistic approach to Britain’s trade talks with India, arguing that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s optimism appeared misplaced, particularly as the two countries had failed to move forward much on a number of issues with the backing of 27 EU nations as part of the EU-India free trade talks. She also noted that Britain’s stance on the movement of people had been the “fly in the ointment” of the EU-India FTA.
•She also argued that recent developments on the global stage — including the Trump administration’s relinquishment of global leadership on issues such as climate change—provided India an opportunity to show international leadership in an area “it has never been so badly needed in”.
•Acknowledging Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s past criticisms of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she said that he regularly met with people who were not “natural allies. “He will always criticise where he thinks criticism should be leveled...” she said.
•She said the Labour party’s concerns around Kashmir came from a concern about human rights.
•She added that the issue of Kashmir had to be settled by India and Pakistan “coming together with both being prepared to compromise and expend a bit of political capital”.
