📰 Fewer TB deaths in India: WHO
12% decline from last year, says report
•Death from tuberculosis in India saw a 12% decline from last year even as the number of new cases saw a 5% increase, according to a report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Monday.
•With 1.7 million new cases in 2016, India continued to be the largest contributor to the global burden with up to a quarter of the 6.3 million new cases of TB (up from 6.1 million in 2015).
•In spite of this year’s dip, India accounts for about 32% of the number of people worldwide who succumbed to the disease.
Rise in cases
•Sunil Khaparde, who leads India’s tuberculosis-control programme, said the rise in cases was due to greater surveillance and the dip in mortality from 480,000 to 423,000 in 2016, due to improved drug management.
•“Since last year, we’ve scaled up the use of molecular diagnostic tests to detect the infection…even on detection of drug-resistant TB there’s been an improvement,” he told The Hindu.
•Globally, the TB mortality rate is falling at about 3% per year. TB incidence is falling at about 2% per year and 16% of TB cases die from the disease, according to the WHO.
•“Overall, the latest picture is one of a still high burden of disease, and progress that is not fast enough to reach targets or to make major headway in closing persistent gaps,” the agency added in a summary to the report.
•The government has committed to achieve a ‘90-90-90 target’ by 2035 (90% reductions in incidence, mortality and catastrophic health expenditures due to TB).
•This is premised on improved diagnostics, shorter treatment courses, a better vaccine and comprehensive preventive strategies.
•In 2016, the WHO said that India had many more deaths and incidence of the disease than had been estimated over the years.
📰 Climate change taking a toll on global health: Lancet
Rural labour productivity falls by 5.3% since 2000
•New research published by The Lancet medical journal states that on an average there has been a 5.3% fall in productivity for rural labour estimated globally since 2000, as a result of rising temperatures around the world. In 2016, this took more than 9,20,000 people globally out of the workforce, with 4,18,000 of them in India alone.
•The Lancet report talks of the various ways climate change has started affecting the health of people across the planet. Doctors, academics and policy makers have contributed to the analysis and jointly authored the first report of “The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change”. Partners behind the research include the World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO), University College London and Tsinghua University.
•A statement issued the group said, “The findings show that climate change is affecting the health of all populations, today. These impacts are disproportionately felt by communities least responsible for climate change and those who are the most vulnerable in society.”
•China, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia are the countries that have registered the highest number of deaths linked to air pollution.
•Anthony Costello, co-chair of the Lancet Countdown and a director at WHO, said, “The outlook is challenging, but we still have an opportunity to turn a looming medical emergency into the most significant advance for public health this century. We need urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The health and economic benefits on offer are huge. The cost of inaction will be counted in preventable loss of life, on a large scale.”
Anthropogenic effect
•The research builds on the work of the 2015 Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, which concluded that anthropogenic climate change threatens to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health.
•The report said that over one billion people globally will be faced with a need to migrate within 90 years, due to a rise in sea level caused by ice shelf collapse, unless action is taken.
•The research found that 87% of a random sample of global cities are in breach of WHO air pollution guidelines.
•The world has seen a 46% global increase in weather related disasters since 2000, the reported pointed out. The total value of economic losses resulting from climate-related extreme weather events was estimated at $129 billion in 2016.
•Christiana Figueres, chair of the Lancet Countdown’s high-level advisory board and former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “The report lays bare the impact that climate change is having on our health today. It also shows that tackling climate change directly, unequivocally and immediately improves global health. It’s as simple as that.’’
📰 Five-judge statute Bench to decide on Aadhaar validity
SC issues notice to Centre on plea challenging mandatory linkage with mobiles
•The Supreme Court on Monday decided to constitute a five-judge Constitution Bench to hear petitions from November against the validity of the Aadhaar scheme.
•A Bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra took the step after Attorney General K.K. Venugopal said falsehoods had been spread about Aadhaar linking.
•A separate Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan, meanwhile, issued notice to the government on a petition filed by advocate Raghav Tankha, challenging the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with mobile numbers. Mr. Tankha said the linkage was “orchestrated by the Union of India in tandem with private telecom service providers” in violation of the fundamental right to privacy.
Urgent mentioning
•In an urgent mentioning made before Chief Justice Misra’s Bench in the post-lunch session after Justice Sikri’s Bench issued notice on Aadhaar-mobile linking, Mr. Venugopal said a Constitution Bench may be set up to decide, once and for all, the various Aadhaar challenges pending before the court since 2014 instead of passing any interim orders. The government however did not mention anything about its proposal last week to extend the date for the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with mobile phones, bank accounts and various welfare schemes from December 31, 2017 to March 31, 2018.
•Mr. Venugopal had last week conveyed to the court the decision of the government to extend the time during an urgent mentioning in the Supreme Court by petitioners who have challenged both the validity of the Aadhaar scheme and the law passed subsequently in 2016.
•The decision to set up a five-judge Bench comes despite Justice Rohinton Nariman’s separate judgment in the nine-judge Bench declaring privacy as a fundamental right.
•Justice Nariman’s judgment had directed the Aadhaar petitions to be posted for hearing before the ‘original’ three-judge Bench.
•This ‘original’ Bench led by Justice J. Chelameswar had referred the petitions for hearing before a five-judge Bench, which found it necessary to first decide whether privacy was a fundamental right or not before hearing the Aadhaar petitions.
Historic judgment
•It had referred the legal question to a nine-judge Bench, which came out with the historic judgment in favour of the common man’s fundamental right to privacy against state intrusions.
📰 Law panel moots life term for torture
Asks Centre to ratify UN convention
•Recommending life in jail for public servants convicted of torture, the Law Commission on Monday said the government should ratify a United Nations convention to tide over difficulties in getting extradited criminals from foreign countries due to the absence of a law preventing harsh treatment by authorities.
•The panel also said that in case the government decided to ratify the UN convention on torture and other inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, a Bill should be introduced in Parliament to amend various laws to prevent torture by government officials.
•The draft Prevention of Torture Bill, 2017 proposed “stringent punishment” to perpetrators to curb the menace of torture and to have a deterrent effect on acts of torture.
•The punishment could extend up to life imprisonment and include a fine.
•The report submitted to the Law Ministry said the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973, and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, require amendments to accommodate provisions regarding compensation and burden of proof.
Compensation favoured
•It recommended an amendment to Section 357B to incorporate payment of compensation, in addition to the payment of fine provided in the Indian Penal Code.
•The report, now in the public domain, said the Indian Evidence Act required the insertion of a new Section 114B.
📰 Of bureaucracy and emotions
If the bureaucracy is not empathetic towards those who are slow to respond, it will be very damaging
•Eleven-year-old Santoshi Kumari died of starvation in Jharkhand’s Simdega district this month. Her ration card was not Aadhaar card-linked, preventing her from receiving any food ration from the Public Distribution System (PDS) for several weeks. Many of us cringed on reading the news. The resulting politicisation of the debate and the cacophony of who is at fault reminds us again of the hopelessness in public discourse.
•A fresh, young mind has been left baffled by this. Why did the PDS dealer not give some food to a dying girl? How difficult can it be? An ‘old’ mind understands. If the paperwork isn’t right, what can the dealer do?
Thinking like a catalogue
•Our society runs on paperwork. Bureaucracy came into being after the birth of scripts in ancient civilisation. When a large amount of administrative data was created, a system was needed to retrieve the stored knowledge, which gave rise to archiving, cataloguing and classifying. More than writing, it was this method of retrieval that led to efficiency. Archaeologists discover new scripts every decade, but what sets the Sumerians, Chinese and Egyptians apart were their investments in building ways of cataloguing, says historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens.
•In our brains, data are organised freely. In libraries, banks and offices, we need librarians, clerks and accountants to organise data. In time, this leads people to be reprogrammed to start thinking like machines, reading and retrieving data, rather than thinking like humans. Modern debates of objectivity make our obsession with paperwork even more brutal. Discretion and free thought are peripheral while forms and filing cabinets become central.
‘Cabinetisation’ of the world
•All this took a strong hold rather late in history. With economies growing, this transformation was inevitable. In his book Cubed, Nikil Saval gives us a fascinating account of how all-purpose clerks, who ran most organisations in the U.S. until the late 19th century, were transformed under the spell of a specialisation drive, largely influenced by the ideas of Frederick Taylor. In his book, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber writes of how the bureaucracy encourages cultivating helpless stupidity in both state and people. Ken Loach’s recent film, I, Daniel Blake, tells a horrific tale of a helpless plumber trying in vain to work through the bureaucracy to get welfare benefits. The Taipei Biennial 2016 expressed how bureaucracies have informed the imagination.
•As opaque pieces of paper with signatures and seals take hold of our world, pain becomes linear and voiceless. Yet, this has worked out rather efficiently in the West. Societies run by clocks, computer commands and as queues waiting for their numbers to be displayed on the board. Regardless of the horrors, the trading of emotions for the order and regularity of bureaucratic life has paid off in the rich countries. The question is this: why hasn’t it worked in poor societies? And how can it?
•Bureaucracy is new in developing countries. And we must realise that institutionally, people are not “bureaucracy-receptive”. In his monograph, Danes Are Like That, anthropologist G. Prakash Reddy writes of his experience of living in a tiny Danish village called Hvilsager in the early 1990s. There, he was struck by the individuality and insularity of people’s lives. He writes: “Coming as I do from India, and born and brought up in a village, I am used to seeing people… The doors of all the houses were closed and created a doubt in me, as to whether this village had any people at all.”
•The Indian villager accesses the state through a local leader. Everyone knows everyone else and independent bureaucracy cannot be executed in the web of interdependent informal relationships among the stakeholders. When the state creates a new bureaucratic framework that trumps local networks (on which informal societies such as India are built), citizens become confused and find themselves at a loss to negotiate their space. Here is an example. Many of our grandparents prefer to go to the bank rather than call customer care. Any new conduit of relationships makes them recede.
The traditional link
•Societies carry a historical burden of norms and customs. Mostly informal in nature, these institutions cannot be changed overnight. New laws and regulations introduced in any society must recognise the informal social norms society is predicated upon. In societies such as India, citizen-state interaction is historically built on patronage and personal relations; bureaucratic forms of engagement are recent. The ‘modern’ forms of citizen-state engagement through the bureaucracy do not go well with ‘traditional’ citizens. Western societies that are individualised, are prepared to function bureaucratically, and can successfully build independent regulatory bodies. But collectivist societies like India cannot, and may be should not, try this. Therefore, shouldn’t we build a framework for emotional bureaucracies to emerge?
•In diverse societies, bureaucracies have to be contextual, and therefore emotional. They must be designed for everyone, and not just for the urban elites. Regulations force people to change their behaviour and dynamics instantly. If the bureaucracy is not empathetic to those who are slow in responding, it will be hugely damaging to society as a whole. It will leave so many of us distressed, some of us dead, and even worse, most of us devoid of compassion.
📰 Hits and misses
Tracking the progress of nations on sustainable development goals
•The meeting of the UN high-level political forum on sustainable development(HLPF) took place in New York from July 10-19 to discuss the progress made on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda. Forty-three member nations presented their report cards in the form of voluntary national reviews (VNRs). Around 5,000 people participated — half of them from civil society and private entities. Eighty ministers from various countries, holding diverse portfolios such as external affairs, planning and budget, also attended. Before the meeting, the governments undertook long consultations to prepare their reports. Was the exercise worth it?
•The reviews show that countries have taken steps to incorporate SDGs in their national plans and policies and identified polices which already include some of the goals. Governments have created new institutions, or have used existing institutions, to facilitate execution of the SDGs. On this count, the HLPF/VNR exercise has yielded results.
•However, there was significant apathy or antipathy among governments to consult and include suggestions from civil society actors in the VNRs. Except in Europe, and some other countries like Brazil and Japan where governments incorporated the inputs of civil society, the process remained largely non-inclusive or superficial. In India, too, the process was patchy. There was also a visible lack of awareness among civil society actors across the world about the mechanism and processes of VNR. The secretariat for HLPF of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has no place for carrying the shadow reports on SDGs of civil society organisations.
•In the VNRs, countries generally outlined how well they have performed. Barring some countries in Latin America and Europe and possibly a few in other regions, stress on critical areas and ways to address them was missing. A survey done in 20 VNR nations by Action for Sustainable Development, a global civil society organisations’ platform on SDGs, suggests: “In many cases, although there is a sense that the SDGs are included in existing national plans, the ‘transformational’ aspect of the agenda has been significantly diluted or lost.”
•The shadow reports prepared by civil society on SDGs find that the scale of inequality is constantly rising while governments’ ‘austerity’ measures of cutting public investment in the social sectors is continuing. There is simultaneously reduction in the corporate taxation. This is worrying as the UN Secretary General’s report finds that in 2016, only 45% of the world’s population was protected by some social protection system.
•A multidimensional poverty index ought to be adopted to analyse domestic poverty conditions as suggested by some nations. A clear road map needed to address pressing challenges of refugee crisis, terrorism, fundamentalism, increasing hunger, inequality and climate change. The HLPF process needs to be strengthened by formalising multi-stakeholder consultations, discussing critical challenges, and making the ministerial declaration mandatory for nations to fulfil.
