📰 ‘Return of child to place of habitual residence may not be in best interest’
Inter-country parental child abduction: Central panel questions key principle of Hague Convention
•A committee set up by the Centre to prepare a report on the issue of inter-country parental child abduction has questioned one of the basic principles of the Hague Convention by arguing that the return of the child to his or her habitual residence may not necessarily be in the best interest of the child.
•There is immense pressure on India from the U.S. to accede to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which is a multi-national treaty that seeks to protect children wrongfully removed by one of the parents from the custody of the other parent.
•At the heart of this treaty is the criterion of “habitual residence” of the child, which is used to determine whether the child was wrongfully removed by a parent as well as to seek the return of the child.
•“The Committee feels that the concept of habitual residence is not synchronous with the best interest of the child,” says a report by the Justice Rajesh Bindal Committee. It adds that returning a child to the place of habitual residence may result in sending the child to an inharmonious set-up as well as overlook the fact that a mother is the primary caregiver of the child.
•The panel has also prepared a draft law to safeguard the interest of the children, as well as those of the parents, particularly mothers.
•The proposed legislation lays down nine exceptions under which a child will not be returned to the country of habitual residence.
Conditions for refusal
•The important conditions under which a child’s return can be refused are — best interest of the child, domestic violence or mental or physical cruelty or harassment against the parent who fled with the child, the parent claiming the return of the child was not exercising the custody rights at the time of removal, and if there is a grave risk that the child would be exposed to physical or psychological harm.
Indian family system
•The panel has also emphasised the importance of the “Indian family system” in ensuring the best interest of the child, seemingly to question the logic behind returning the child to a place of habitual residence outside India.
•“With the older generation of womenfolk being home-makers, the households have great caregivers in terms of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc., on either sides. A child, even if he may have stayed in some other country, would never be completely uprooted from the country of his parents’ origin, who have families back home in India,” reads the report.
•The report also requires the setting up of an Inter-Country Parental Child Removal Disputes Resolution Authority, which will be the nodal body to decide on the custody of the child, mediate between the warring parties, as well as order the return of the child to the country of habitual residence.
•The Committee submitted its report to Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi last month. The Ministry will be circulating the report to the Ministries of External affairs and Home Affairs for their inputs.
•The Justice Rajesh Bindal Committee was set up last year to suggest a model legislation to safeguard the interest of the child as well those of the parents when an NRI (Non Resident Indian) marriage goes sour and one of the parents flees from one country to another with the child.
•Once the Central government decides to set-up the Authority and frames a law on the issue, it is expected to take a decision on whether it should accede to the Hague Convention. In 2016, the government had decided not to be a signatory to the treaty on the ground that it can be detrimental to the interest of the women fleeing an abusive marriage.
📰 Panel for revamp of Indo-Nepal treaty
Changes to reflect current realities
•The final report of a bilateral committee — appointed to advise governments in Delhi and Kathmandu — is likely to suggest that the 1950 India-Nepal Peace and Friendship Treaty should be revised.
•Speaking to The Hindu , a member of the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) that was appointed in 2016 to suggest measures for improving bilateral ties, said the committee will finalise its report, which will shape ties over the next two decades, by this summer. The committee consists of eight members with four persons representing each side.
Newer aspects
•“The India-Nepal friendship Treaty is now almost seven decades old and needs to reflect realities of our times. We are suggesting wide ranging changes in the Treaty covering newer aspects of transit facilities, energy trade, human movement etc.,” said Mahendra P. Lama, who has been a member of the EPG since the beginning.
•The EPG was set up during the February 2016 visit of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, in the aftermath of the economic blockade of Nepal, to bring in measures to address concerns of both sides. It has met seven times in two years and will hold its last meeting next month in Delhi when the report is expected to be finalised. At the penultimate meeting in Kathmandu, the two sides had exchanged an early draft of the report.
•“We have discussed all aspects of bilateral ties frankly and have not hesitated in addressing difficult issues,” said Mr. Lama.
•Given the difference of opinion on important issues like border trade, tariffs, and the friendship treaty, there were concerns on whether the two sides could reach a consensus. However, the member said both sides had addressed the key issues and it will be up to the governments on both sides to implement the report.
📰 Adult couple can live together, says SC
Allows Kerala woman to make her own choice
•An adult couple has a right to live together without marriage, the Supreme Court said, while asserting that a 20-year-old Kerala woman, whose marriage had been annulled, could choose whom she wanted to live with.
•The top court held that live-in relationships were now even recognised by the legislature and they had found a place under the provisions of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
•The observations came while the top court was hearing a plea filed by Nandakumar against a Kerala HC order annulling his marriage with Thushara on the ground that he had not attained the legal age of marriage. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act states that a woman can’t marry before the age of 18, and a man before 21.
•Mr. Nandakumar, who had approached the top court, will turn 21 on May 30 this year. The HC had also granted the custody of Ms. Thushara to her father after noting that she was not Mr. Nandakumar’s “lawfully wedded” wife.
•A Bench of justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said their marriage could not said to be “null and void” merely because Mr. Nandakumar was less than 21 at the time of marriage. It set aside the HC order granting custody to the father.
📰 Defying the logic of democracy
Simultaneous polls will prevent citizens from keeping their elected representatives on permanent notice
•Intent on creating a unified India through the adoption of one language, one dominant religion, one culture, one nation, one tax, and now one poll, the Bharatiya Janata Party seeks nothing less than the renegotiation of the basic terms of the political contract that inaugurated democracy in the country.
Inherent problems
•A great deal has been written and said on the advantages and disadvantages of simultaneous elections ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi began to speak of this practice as a good thing. Commentators charge the government with institutionalising managed democracy and with double-speak. Instead of scheduling simultaneous elections to the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assemblies in late 2017, the Election Commission held the Gujarat polls a month later in December, for obvious reasons. The argument that simultaneous elections will prevent corruption, and improve administrative efficiency has been dismissed as flimsy.
•There is another objection to the proposal that should be, perhaps, taken seriously. The implications of holding simultaneous elections to the Parliament and State Assemblies run contrary to the spirit of democracy, as well as that of federalism. Admittedly, Mr. Modi does not want to touch the relationship between the Central and State governments. What he wants is clear and undisturbed five years of rule between elections, so that his projects of governance can be consolidated.
•In other countries we have seen the rhetoric of governance replace the logic of democracy. We have arrived at the same juncture. In fact, we are already there since the time this government took over in 2014. Arguments that juxtapose governance and democracy simply overlook the fact that governance is about administration, democracy is about popular sovereignty. We expect governments to give us good governance, but not at the cost of democracy. In contemporary history, populist leaders have rallied people around the banner of good governance, but forgotten the D of democracy. We might need to remember the basics of the system.
Democratic concepts
•Democracy is a protean concept, justified for many reasons, and some of these reasons are purely instrumental. Democracy, for instance, enables a peaceful transfer of power from one political elite to another. It is, relatively speaking, more economical than authoritarian governments, which spend an inordinate amount of money in suppressing dissent. And above all, democracy provides legitimacy and enables accumulation of power in the name of ‘the people’. The idea that democracy is valuable because it secures a designated good, however, poses a dilemma. If tomorrow a benevolent despot provides these goods, is democracy dispensable?
•Democrats will have to find reasons why democracy is a good in itself and not because it leads to desired outcomes. Arguably, democracy is a good because it initiates, fosters and sustains a conversation between the rulers and the ruled. Elections constitute definitive moments in this conversation. They (a) enable the selection of candidates who will speak for and to the citizens; and (b) allow citizens to hold representatives responsible. That is, elections ensure a necessary correlation between the interests of the citizens and the accountability of the ruling class.
•In between elections, citizens can hold the rulers responsible for all acts of omission and commission through participation in movements, campaigns and other modes of representation in civil society. Citizens and their representatives thus engage in permanent conversations. Elections facilitate and develop the conversation between citizens and representatives. Elections are not equivalent to democracy; they are a definitive component of the democracy project.
•Unlike direct democracy, modern democracies are based upon the principle of representation. All elected representatives ‘stand in’ for their constituents in legislatures, but the responsibility of the ruling party is much more. It has to represent the interests of even those citizens who did not vote for it. If it fails to do so, and if the Opposition can muster the numbers in the legislature, it can vote the government out and provide an alternative government. Alternatively, the country can go to the polls to elect a new government. Under the proposed scheme, if the government fails to heed the mandate given by citizens, but the Opposition cannot offer an alternative government, and elections cannot be held before the stipulated time, the government will continue to rule, but illegitimately. This is the conundrum of simultaneous elections.
Accessible governments
•Representative democracies are based upon two crucial preconditions. One of these preconditions is that citizens must be well-informed on affairs of the state, the region, the local, and the global, before they make choices that are reasonably intelligent. In large and unwieldy societies like India, citizens should be able to distinguish between national issues, for example foreign policy and defence, and local issues that affect their quotidian lives, lack of education and health, the pathetic state of roads and water bodies, provision of infrastructure, and ease of living one’s life in relative autonomy from political intervention. The case for a federal form of government is constructed precisely on the need for decentralised power, decentralised finances, and accessible governments. Across the world the trend is towards regional autonomy. In India where this demand has acquired serious proportions in many parts of the country, any push towards the standardisation of elections will exacerbate the problem.
•Two, citizenship lies at the heart of electoral democracy. Citizens are stake-holders in the political system — therefore, they have the right to participate in processes of decision-making that affect them individually and collectively. Participation in national and State elections expands the spaces of citizenship. Imagine the dismal political scenario if the timing of all elections is controlled. No periodic elections, no sound, no fury, no old and tired political agendas we attack, no new faces in politics, no stand-offs, no colour, no band, baaja andbaraat . Indians will be deprived of the very things they love about elections: intense political theatre. When the curtain drops we the, otherwise, disempowered decide the fate of those very politicians who disregard us most of the time. This is the time to choose who we want to enter into a conversation with.
•If citizens have a right to exercise control on the representative, or the political party of which she is a part, they should be given an opportunity to do so through frequent elections. There is nothing like the electoral arena to expose politicians and party agendas to popular judgment. This keeps the conversation on democracy going. It keeps up the pressure on the representative to deliver on promises. A fixed system of elections provides representative with a god-given chance to ignore the constituency for five years and come back only during the silly season.
Polls a good force
•Finally, many and repeated elections are good for democracy for another reason. Democracy is not based upon faith in representatives, it is based on suspicion. That is why we feel the need to stalk and monitor our representatives. Suspicion, as Demosthenes, the Athenian statesman and orator (384-322 BCE) wrote, is the best protection against despots. We should have the opportunity of dismissing the very candidate we voted for in the previous election. We should be provided with the chance of vesting our confidence, provisionally, in another set of candidates. Political sociologists call this phenomenon the circulation of elites. We don’t trust our representatives. We subject them to reasoned scepticism. This is the best protection against managed democracy.
📰 GST’s complicated
The new compliance system and a proposal for cess on sugar send the wrong signals
•With collections from the goods and services tax peaking at over Rs. 1 lakh crore in April, industry hoped the GST Council would make life simpler for an increasingly compliant tax-payer base. Indeed, at its meeting last week the Council decided to introduce a new compliance system under which a single monthly GST return will have to be submitted by firms, barring a few exceptions. However, this will only be done in a phased manner — with the first of three transition stages to begin six months from now. Discussions over simplifying GST returns have been under way for months and considered by the Council, a committee of officers and a Group of Ministers. Nandan Nilekani, chairman of Infosys Technologies, the firm in charge of the GST Network’s IT system, has been consulted. Yet, the solution offered has gaps. For instance, in the second stage of the transition to simpler returns, buyers will get provisional input credit even if the seller doesn’t upload the invoices. While this could lead to disputes, in the third stage input credits will only be granted after sellers upload invoices. If a seller defaults on depositing GST dues collected from a buyer and remains evasive, the authorities can reverse the credit availed by the buyer for such outstanding taxes.
•In any case, the timelines for the transition are long and bring fresh uncertainty for businesses still recovering from the initial jitters and confusion around the tax regime. Firms will again have to cope with significant changes in accounting software in the middle of the financial year. The Council, credited with swift and significant course correction in GST processes in its initial months, could have done more. The most troubling is the Centre’s push for the imposition of a cess on sugar over and above the 5% GST levied on it. A cess at the rate of Rs. 3 a kg is proposed to alleviate ‘deep distress’ among sugarcane farmers. Not surprisingly, this faces opposition from several States. It has been rightly argued that this will burden consumers while favouring larger sugarcane-growing States like U.P. and Maharashtra. In addition, a special sugar cess will signal a looming breakdown of the basic tenet of GST: the abolition of such cesses and surcharges, barring the compensation cess for funding States’ revenue losses for five years. Along with a proposal to reward digital GST payments, this has been referred to new ministerial groups, which are to revert in a fortnight. Lastly, the decision to make the GSTN a 100% government-owned firm, instead of the present structure with 51% private ownership, explains neither how this will address data security concerns nor the impact on the Network’s functional efficiency, which was the original stated intent for giving private players an upper hand in operations.
📰 Continental ambition
A single market will enable Africa to transform into a supplier of manufactured goods
•The African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) is a potential game changer for the world’s poorest region. The pact — signed by 44 of the 55-member African Union (AU) in March — seeks to create a single market in goods and services, free movement of persons and investment, and eventually a customs union with a common external tariff.
•In recent years, intra-regional commerce as a share of Africa’s overall trade has risen to 15% from 8% in 2011, points out Moody’s, the ratings agency. But then exports within Africa accounted for a mere 18% of the continent’s total exports in 2016, compared to 59% and 69% of intra-regional exports in Asia and Europe, respectively, according to the Brookings Institution. With a number of African countries ranking among the world’s fastest-growing economies over the last two decades, the ACFTA could tap into the immense potential for closer trade integration. Moody’s also points out that exports in manufactured goods within the continent are more than double the exports to countries outside it. These findings buttress expectations that a continent-wide single market would enable Africa’s transformation from an exporter of commodities and raw materials to a supplier of finished manufactured goods. Such trade diversification from relatively less labour-intensive sectors to value-added industrial products would in turn lead to sustained economic growth and employment generation.
•The ACFTA aims to abolish import duties on 90% of goods, currently averaging at 6%, which is projected to raise internal trade by over 50%. That would double if non-tariff barriers are scrapped, says the UN Economic Commission for Africa. But the UN Conference on Trade and Development is cautious about the effects from initial loss of tariff revenues and uneven costs and benefits during the transition. The likely exemption of sensitive products from trade liberalisation, which seeks to cover only 90% of goods, could influence the ACFTA ratification process in national capitals and entry into force by the year-end.
•Deeper regional integration requires not only the dismantling of border tariffs, but also the elimination of non-tariff barriers such as poor infrastructure. Here, it is hard to overstate China’s presence as a major investor in Africa’s giant energy and transport projects, even if these are so far concentrated in a small number of countries. There has been a corresponding lack of U.S. engagement in the continent, especially under President Donald Trump, whose threat to reduce global aid could hit the region the most.
•African leaders have been highly successful in leveraging their influence in the global strategic and economic arenas. But they could strive harder to uphold democratic rights and constitutional principles at home. That is critical to promote sustainable development.
📰 Rupee is dancing to more tunes this year
•The Indian currency has been facing some selling pressure for the last 4-5 weeks, chiefly on the back of rising crude price. The rupee fell against the U.S. dollar by a little over 2.5% in April, and 4.3% since the beginning of the year, making it the worst-performing Asian currency.
•Compared to the position as of end-March 2017, the rupee is now about 3% weaker vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar. RBI is reportedly intervening in the market to cushion the rupee’s fall.
•After nearly four years of subdued and benign oil prices and the consequent improvement in the country’s terms of trade, India once again faces its age-old vulnerability to high cost of oil import.
U.S. dollar recovering
•And this has come at a time when the U.S. dollar seems to be on a cyclical recovery path against other major currencies on the relative strength of the U.S. economy. On all such occasions in the past, the rupee as well as the capital account of the country’s Balance of Payments came under pressure.
•But this repeat of history now has other elements that compound the overall external sector vulnerability: overvalued rupee, rising current account deficit, sudden ebb in capital inflows and certain developments in the domestic political economy policy front.
•Going by its 36-country trade-weighted real exchange rate index, the rupee is currently overvalued by more than 17% relative to 2005. The movement of this index over the last few years provides some interesting insights: the real effective exchange rate of the rupee has gone up by about 4.73% since 2015-16, but it remained flat in 2017-18, although the nominal effective exchange rate of the U.S. dollar fell by about 9% during that period.
•The table alongside illustrates this point. This highlights the structurally higher inflation in India not just in relation to the U.S., but vis-a-vis all its major trading partners and competitors as well.
•RBI expects CPI inflation to lie between 4.4%-5.1% during the current fiscal year, with higher inflation expected in the first half. For the purpose of this estimate, RBI has assumed an average oil price of $68 per barrel. If global prices turn out to be higher than this, then the inflation will be higher. With the benchmark Brent having already touched a high of $75 per barrel, the possibility of inflation crossing 5% in the coming months is high.
•The moot point here is that the inflation differential between India and most of the major trading partner countries is close to 3%, which explains the sustained real appreciation of the rupee.
•In the past, real exchange rate appreciation would lead to abrupt and large changes in the nominal exchange rate of the rupee against the U.S. dollar, often triggered by domestic macro/political and global economic developments, the latest example being the burst of sharp depreciation of the rupee in August-September, 2013 caused by the so-called ‘taper tantrum’ announcement by the Federal Reserve to curtail its quantitative easing programme.
Rising wages
•The significant real appreciation of the rupee calls for a deeper probe as regards its causes and consequences for trade competitiveness. First, labour productivity has increased at an average rate of 6.3% annually since 2005, which is way higher than the annual average of 3.3% recorded in the previous 12 years.
•We need further research to determine if the consequent wage rise led to higher inflation, real appreciation and increase in current account deficit within the theoretical framework of Balassa-Samuelson Effect.
•As regards the consequence of the real appreciation of the rupee, it needs to be ascertained if any increase in factor productivity in the tradeable sector has cushioned its adverse impact on the competitiveness of the country’s goods and services. This is crucial for the purpose of guiding exchange rate policies of RBI and the government. India’s current account deficit increased to 1.9% of GDP in April-December 2017 from 0.7% in the corresponding period of 2016-17 on the back of about 44% widening of the trade deficit during this period.
•While the country’s imports relative to its GDP is now much lower than the peak level reached in 2012-13, the performance of exports continues to be lacklustre. In the financial year 2013-14, exports were 17.2% of GDP and by the financial year 2016-17, the ratio fell to 12.4% of GDP.
•In the traditional areas of exports, such as garments and textiles, where India was second only to China, the country now occupies third position in textiles and fifth position in garments.
•The case of garments exports is interesting as in 2000 the share of clothing exports as a percentage of total global clothing exports of Bangladesh, Vietnam and India was 2.6%, 0.9% and 3% respectively. By 2016, while India’s share of global clothing exports has increased marginally to 4%, Bangladesh has improved its share to 6.4% and Vietnam’s share is a stellar 5.5%.
•This is a pointer to India’s inability to gain market share in a global business which is consolidating among the top ten countries. Despite the claims of ‘Make in India’, India does not yet figure among the top ten exporters of manufactured goods. China now exports manufactured goods worth $2 trillion (almost equal to India’s GDP) and its share of global exports of manufactured goods increased from 4.7% in 2000 to 17.9% in 2016.
•The silver lining in India’s current account in the past has been the export of services export. Indian IT services companies, which followed a low-cost global delivery model with success in the past, have not succeeded so far in graduating to the new world of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics.
•In the first half of the financial year 2017-18, growth in IT services exports compared to the corresponding period in 2016-17, was a meagre 2.3%. Growing trade protectionism in the West will certainly slow down the growth of exports of IT and IT-enabled services, unless Indian companies move up the value chain. Tourism and transfers from migrant workers in the Gulf have remained robust.
•India’s gold import, which was $56 billion in 2011-12, declined 52% to $27 billion in 2016-17. However, a rising trend of gold import is now being seen, with the import in 2017 at 855 tonnes — a 67% rise over the previous year,
•The other worrisome trend is the rapid growth in imports of electronic goods, which was $3.4 billion in 2011-12 and $42 billion in 2016-17 — a massive 12-fold increase in five years.
•There is a distinct possibility that imports of electronic imports, mostly from China, will surpass oil imports in the near future.
•The rising trend of import of gold and white goods could very well be a manifestation of the rupee’s overvaluation.
•The FDI and portfolio flows in the first nine months of 2017-18 remained robust. But, a decline in portfolios flows is taking place now, as evidenced by an outflow of $2 billion in April. Foreign exchange reserves at $424 billion, with another $22 billion in forward purchase, look formidable to be able to quell any market volatility. But, as before, the leeway to spend the reserves is not unlimited and decline in foreign currency assets is already happening. Further, applying IMF’s metric of reserves adequacy, the safe level of foreign exchange reserves for India turns out to be $496 billion.
Disagreements with IMF?
•Curiously, India’s annual Article IV consultation with the IMF staff, which usually takes place in February, has not yet happened this year. As per its office in India, the earliest it is going to happen is in July, 2018. One wonders if the delay is due to any disagreement between Indian authorities and IMF staff on macro issues.
•Typically, in the last ten years, sharp currency movements have happened in years of political transition. Macroeconomic populism has already led to fiscal slippage; and uncertainty around the extent of RBI’s commitment to an inflation-targeting regime amid rising inflationary pressures and external sector vulnerability will make 2018-19 a challenging year for Indian policymakers.
•Higher oil prices mean tough choices, especially on the fiscal front. In fact, there are no easy options left on any of the major macroeconomic policy front in the lead-up to the next general elections.
📰 When NECTAR turned poison for bamboo
Despite Rs. 1,290 crore in funds, the research body remains distant and redundant for the Northeast
•New Delhi’s renewed bid to turn bamboo into gold is riding a repackaged failure. This has made many in the Northeast, which grows 67% of India’s bamboo, wary of the “redesigned mission”.
•Bamboo farmers and entrepreneurs in the Northeast got a flicker of hope when Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allocated Rs. 1,290 crore in Budget 2018 for a restructured National Bamboo Mission (NMB).
President’s ordinance
•This followed President Ram Nath Kovind’s ordinance in November 2017 amending the Indian Forest Act to rid bamboo, botanically a grass, of its tree tag for 90 years and exempting it from requiring permits for felling or transportation.
•But a sense of deja vu soon crept in. This was primarily because of the failure of the Rs. 1,400-crore NMB from 2007-2014 as well as a related initiative called the North East Centre for Technology Application and Reach (NECTAR) that has refused to budge from New Delhi to its ‘headquarters’ in Meghalaya capital Shillong since its creation five years ago.
•The Department of Science and Technology (DST) had in 2004 launched the National Mission on Bamboo Application (NMBA) with an outlay of Rs. 200 crore.
•In almost a decade since, the NMBA has spent Rs. 100 crore on building demo bamboo houses that hardly impacted lives across India’s bamboo belts.
•An amount of Rs. 40 crore, refundable in instalments, was also provided to entrepreneurs as technology development assistance for partly procuring machinery and equipment. Contrary to its name, the NMBA neither developed any technology nor facilitated technology transfer for the assisted units.
Import duly slashed
•Bamboo entrepreneurs said the NMBA also failed to develop market linkages and virtually went off the radar. To add to their misery, the Centre slashed duty on imported bamboo products from 30% to 10%.
•Unable to compete with cheaper bamboo products – allegedly Chinese routed through Southeast Asian countries – in the domestic market, 99.7% of the 385 bamboo units formed with NMBA’s assistance shut shop.
•As the fortunes of the bamboo industry nosedived, the Centre realised the NMBA was remote-controlling the sector from New Delhi. In 2013, the Union Cabinet approved the creation of an autonomous society registered and headquartered in Shillong with a fund allocation of Rs. 292 crore.
•The society was called NECTAR.
•“NECTAR was basically old wine in a new bottle. The entire team that made NMBA a failure was rehabilitated in NECTAR without any responsibilities being fixed. Worse, it became more distant and redundant for the Northeast, where much of bamboo grows,” Rajib Goswami, president of Bamboo Industries Association of India (BIAI), said.
•NECTAR, though, isn’t all about bamboo. It covers “local and natural resources” of the region comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.
•Apart from providing technical expertise to market local products, its mission included women empowerment and skill development.
•But NECTAR’s role, entrepreneurs say, has been minimal except for occasional tours by officials to “use up funds” meant for creating livelihoods and employment.
•Soon after its formation, NECTAR began functioning from the same space of the DST Secretary’s office in New Delhi from where the NMBA operated. But DST was apparently unaware that NECTAR operated from the same building, as replies to BIAI’s queries reveal.
•Efforts by entrepreneurs to make NECTAR serve its purpose finally made Praveer Asthana, former DST Secretary, instruct NECTAR’s Director General Sanjiv Nair on October 24, 2016, to relocate to Shillong.
•The instruction was ignored, as was that of the Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences on April 17, 2017.
•Ashutosh Sharma, the incumbent DST Secretary, put the ball in NECTAR’s court when asked to update on its status.
•“We have asked Central Public Works Department, Shillong, to make the office ready in the premises provided by the Survey of India. They are yet to start work. We expect work to start within a month and make it ready within next three months,” Baldev Singh Rawat, NECTAR’s Director General, told The Hindufrom New Delhi.
•“After several such assurances to shift, we hope this time it is for real so that NECTAR serves its purpose. We also hope the society brings in people who know the Northeast and are serious about changing fortunes in the region,” Mr. Goswami said.
•Former Assam CM Prafulla Kumar Mahanta had last year wondered if NECTAR had been created to mean poison for bamboo-based industry in the Northeast.
•He also demanded an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation into misuse of bamboo funds that left many who invested in the sector in the lurch.
Huge market
•Regional trade bodies say the Northeast is crucial for India to tap the estimated $10 billion market potential of bamboo.
•India has the world’s largest fields of bamboo. It grows on nearly 13% of the country’s forest land. The eight North-eastern States – Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura – grow 67% of India’s bamboo and have 45% of global bamboo reserves. Nearly 35 species of superior quality bamboos are found in the region.
📰 Partial success for Gram Swaraj Abhiyan
Lags behind in power, gas connections
•At the end of a three-week drive to bring seven flagship schemes to 16,850 villages with a high number of poor, SC (Scheduled Caste) and ST (Scheduled Tribe) households, less than 30% of the target households received an electricity connection, while less than 40% got a gas connection, according to government data.
Targeted outreach
•However, financial schemes for rural beneficiaries to get Jan Dhan bank accounts and sign up for life and accident insurance achieved a high level of saturation. A scheme to fully immunise all pregnant women, and all children under two years, also reached almost all targeted beneficiaries.
•The Gram Swaraj Abhiyan was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14, the birth anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, to reach out to villages, most of which have a majority of Dalit and tribal homes.
•The official objective of the outreach programme, which was launched a fortnight after nationwide protests against the dilution of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, was to “promote social harmony, spread awareness about pro-poor initiatives of government, reach out to poor households to enrol them in various welfare programmes.” Villages in Karnataka and West Bengal, where the election code of conduct is in effect, were left out of it.
•The Saubhagya scheme to give every household an electricity connection reached 4 lakh homes, as against a target of 14.5 lakh homes, thus reaching 27% of the intended beneficiaries. Under the Ujjwala scheme to give gas connections to all homes, 39% or 5.6 lakh households were reached out of a total target of 14.4 lakh.
Till full saturation
•A senior official at the Rural Development Ministry said that KYC (Know Your Customer) processing was still ongoing for many applicants, especially for the Ujjwala scheme, where a total of 11 lakh applications were received. The official added that while the Gram Swaraj Abhiyan officially ended on Saturday, the government planned to continue until full saturation was achieved.
•Financial schemes also saw high saturation, with a higher number of Jan Dhan bank accounts being opened. The Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana, a life insurance scheme, enrolled 73% of targeted beneficiaries, while the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana, a risk insurance scheme for accidental death or disability, enrolled almost 88% of target beneficiaries.
