📰 Violence in the hills: on Shillong unrest
The Meghalaya government must remain firm against nativist demands in Shillong
•The spark for the week-long incidents of violence in downtown Shillong was a lie spread through WhatsApp, the ubiquitous messaging platform that has increasingly become an unfiltered medium for hate and rumour-mongering. A scuffle between members of the Mazhabi Sikh community, long-time settlers in the Punjabi Lane area of the city, and a Khasi youth and his associates over a local matter was amicably settled between representatives of the communities. But a fabricated story that the youth had succumbed to injuries sustained in the scuffle led to large numbers of Khasi protesters laying siege to Punjabi Lane, demanding that the Sikh residents move from the area. That the “settlers” have been in Shillong for more than a century and a half, having been originally brought there by the British colonials to work as manual scavengers, and have since integrated themselves within Shillong, has not insulated them from being described as outsiders. The administration did well to protect the dwellers of Punjabi Lane from physical harm, but mob violence persisted until curfew was imposed and the Army put on stand-by. Spokespersons of the Khasi Students’ Union, whose members were part of the agitation, continue to insist that the Punjabi Lane residents be moved from Shillong’s commercial heart to its outskirts. Picturesque Shillong is no longer just an idyllic hill station; it is a bustling city that has grown in an unplanned manner and requires reforms such as zoning regulation. But the agitators’ demand to shift the Sikh residents is unreasonable and must be resisted. In fact, the Meghalaya High Court had stayed an order by the District Commissioner to evict the residents from Punjabi Lane (also known as Sweepers’ Colony) in 1986.
•Tribal angst over economic issues leading to the scapegoating of non-tribal long-time residents reflects the continued failure to forge a more inclusive politics in Meghalaya. Today, there are enough provisions of affirmative action for the tribal people — 80% reservation for the Khasi, Jaintia, Garo and other tribes in jobs and professional studies. Yet, discontent persists over the lack of adequate jobs in the State, especially in urban areas. A Labour Bureau report on employment in 2015-16 found Meghalaya to have among the highest urban unemployment rates (13.4%). Discontent over lack of opportunities in the past had led to incidents such as the violent targeting of the Bengali community in 1979 and Nepalis in 1987, many of whom then fled the State. To prevent a repeat of those incidents, the government must stand by and protect the Sikh residents, and not give in to the nativist arguments of the protestors. And as calm is restored, Meghalaya’s politicians and civil society leaders must forge a more inclusive vision of the State’s demographics.
📰 Eye on routine
The bureaucracy fails when it comes to administering the mundane
•Some years ago, on Civil Services Day, I watched former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh present awards to young officers (most were from the IAS but there were a few from the other civil services), for something exceptional they had done.
•It left me wondering what routine tasks each of the awardees had neglected in order to focus on some innovation they had sought to bring about. In all probability that innovation was transitory and ephemeral, yet blown out of proportion by a top bureaucracy that highlighted the needless-exceptional, while neglecting the mundane yet critical regulatory and inspectorial functions of government.
•While in government, I had run systems that functioned well only when intensively monitored. I also often investigated frauds, and administered or reviewed punishments. Experience has convinced me that notwithstanding intrinsic corruption (the elephant in the room) all scandals in the public sphere and deficiencies in public services are caused by regulatory and inspectorial failures.
•From small frauds, such as those that occur occasionally in post offices and bank branches, to the much larger ones such as Bofors, the Bhopal gas tragedy and the Nirav Modi scam, a trail can be established to track how regulatory and inspectorial lapses at various levels “created” them or made them possible.
•The closure of the Sterlite plant in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu, is another case in point. If the regulators and the inspectors tasked with ensuring that the plant did not pollute the environment had held the management responsible at the first sign of deviation from norms, Sterlite would not have been closed today, destroying jobs and hurting families in their thousands. No one is asking why the regulatory and inspectorial systems that were always there failed to kick in in time, allowing matters to get so completely out of hand.
•The Indian bureaucracy is terrific at rising to the occasion in an emergency but not when it comes to administering the routine. The consequence is something we experience daily — transformers in the middle of footpaths, uncollected garbage blighting our cities, cows and dogs running amok on our roads, those convicted for the Bhopal gas tragedy seemingly staying out on bail forever, and the likes of Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi fleeing. There is a steady deterioration in the way government departments and ministries as well as field formations function across the country. The officers of all elite civil services of the Government of India are at fault here for failing to get systems they are in charge of to function as well as they should, through better training, record-keeping, and a ruthless application of accountability.
•Officers of the civil services constitute the maintenance crew of the government, primarily in charge of its regulatory and oversight functions. Everything else they do is secondary. It is when they, deliberately or otherwise, fail to recognise this role of theirs that things begin to go hopelessly wrong — often with horrific consequences all round.
📰 Averting Ponzi schemes
A new bill seeks to shield investors from scams
•Instances of people losing their hard-earned money to Ponzi schemes keep coming to light. The Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Bill, 2018 was approved by the Union Cabinet in February to provide comprehensive legislation to deal with illicit deposit schemes in the country.
•The Bill imposes complete prohibition of unregulated deposit taking activity. It provides for deterrent punishment for promoting or operating an unregulated deposit taking scheme, stringent punishment for fraudulent default in repayment to depositors, designation of a competent authority by the State government to ensure repayment of deposits in the event of default by a deposit taking establishment, powers and functions of the competent authority including attachment of assets of a defaulting establishment, designation of courts to oversee repayment of depositors and to try offences under the Act, and listing of Regulated Deposit Schemes in the Bill with a clause enabling the Central government to expand or prune the list.
•The Bill contains a substantive banning clause which bans deposit takers from promoting, operating, issuing advertisements or accepting deposits in any Unregulated Deposit Scheme.
•A Cabinet statement notes that the principle is that the Bill would ban unregulated deposit taking activities altogether, by making them an offence ex-ante, rather than the existing legislative-cum-regulatory framework which only comes into effect ex-post with considerable time lags.
•The Bill creates three different types of offences, namely, running of Unregulated Deposit Schemes, fraudulent default in Regulated Deposit Schemes, and wrongful inducement in relation to Unregulated Deposit Schemes.
•It provides for severe punishment and heavy pecuniary fines to act as deterrent. It has adequate provisions for disgorgement or repayment of deposits in cases where such schemes nonetheless manage to raise deposits illegally. The Bill provides for attachment of properties/ assets by the competent authority, and subsequent realisation of assets for repayment to depositors.
•Clear-cut time lines have been provided for attachment of property and restitution to depositors.
•The Bill enables creation of an central online database, for collection and sharing of information on deposit taking activities in the country. Primarily, the Bill defines the “deposit taker” and “deposit” comprehensively.
•The primary responsibility of implementing the provisions of the proposed legislation lies with the State governments.
📰 India not yet ready to sign the Hague treaty: Maneka
Concerns parental abduction of kids.
•The government is not yet ready to sign the Hague treaty on inter-country abduction of children by parents fleeing a bad marriage, said a senior official of the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD).
•There has been immense pressure from the U.S. on the government to sign the treaty though the government has long held the view that the decision could lead to harassment of women escaping marital discord or domestic violence.
•“The government is not yet ready to sign the Hague treaty. If at all we do, we will follow the Japan example and put safeguards in place before acceding to the Hague treaty,” said the official on condition of anonymity.
‘Political decision’
•“This is not a unilateral decision my Ministry can take. It has to be a political decision this government needs to take. We have sent the report to the Ministry of External Affairs and other Ministries, and we are waiting for a reaction from them,” WCD Minister Maneka Gandhi said.
•The Hague Convention is a multi-national treaty that seeks to protect children wrongfully removed by one of the parents from the custody of the other parent.
•A committee constituted by the Centre to examine legal issues involved in international parental abduction submitted its report in April, opposing a central provision of the Hague Convention. It said that 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 to the country of habitual residence, was not in the best interest of the child.
Nodal body
•It also recommended setting up of a Child Removal Disputes Resolution Authority to act as a nodal body to decide on the custody of the child as well as a model law to deal with such disputes.
•However, the government is contemplating assigning the National Commission for Protection of Children the responsibility to adjudicate on such cases along with a judicial expert.
•While the government had decided in late 2016 that it will not sign the Hague treaty, later it appointed a panel to prepare a report indicating that there was some rethinking within the government on the matter.
📰 Ghani announces first unconditional truce with Taliban, until June 20
Comes after a meeting of clerics this week declared a fatwa against suicide bombings, one of which, claimed by the IS, killed 14 people at the entrance to the clerics’ peace tent in Kabul
•Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday announced for the first time an unconditional ceasefire with the Taliban, coinciding with the end of the Muslim fasting month, but excluding other militant groups, such as the Islamic State (IS).
•The decision came after a meeting of Islamic clerics this week declared a fatwa, or ruling, against suicide bombings, one of which, claimed by the IS, killed 14 people at the entrance to the clerics’ peace tent in Kabul.
Clerics mooted the ceasefire
•The clerics also recommended a ceasefire with the Taliban, who are seeking to reimpose strict Islamic law after their ouster in 2001, and Mr. Ghani endorsed the recommendation, announcing a laying down of arms until June 20.
•Mr. Ghani has urged ceasefires with the Taliban before, but this was the first unconditional offer since he was elected in 2014.
•“This ceasefire is an opportunity for Taliban to introspect (sic) that their violent campaign is not winning them hearts and minds,” Mr. Ghani said in a message on social network Twitter after a televised address.
“One-sided love story,” analyst says
•There was no immediate reaction from the Taliban but an international political analyst based in Kabul was unimpressed.
•“It’s a one-sided love story,” he said.
•U.S. Forces-Afghanistan said they would honour the ceasefire.
•“We will adhere to the wishes of Afghanistan for the country to enjoy a peaceful end to the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and support the search for an end to the conflict,” Gen. John Nicholson, U.S. Forces-Afghanistan and the NATO-led Resolute Support commander, said in a statement.
Truce excludes US counter-terror ops
•The ceasefire would not include U.S. counter-terrorism efforts against IS and al- Qaeda, it said.
•A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was “really not too much to say” from NATO's point of view.
•“It is completely Afghan-originated and, as you know, it is our policy to support an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process,” he told reporters.
‘Taliban may regroup’
•Former Afghan army general Atiqullah Amarkhel said the ceasefire would give the Taliban a chance to regroup.
•“From a military prospect, it is not a good move,” he told Reuters.
•He also said he doubted the Taliban would lay down arms and deny themselves the opportunity of fighting during the holy month of Ramadan, in which attacks have intensified.
•The Id-ul-Fitr holiday ending Ramadan falls at the end of next week.
•Mr. Ghani in February offered recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political group in a proposed political process that he said could lead to talks to end more than 16 years of war.
Walking the extra mile
•Mr. Ghani proposed a ceasefire and a release of prisoners among options including new elections involving the militants and a constitutional review in a pact with the Taliban to end a conflict that last year alone killed or wounded more than 10,000 civilians.
•In August, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled a more hawkish military approach to Afghanistan, including a surge in air strikes, aimed at forcing the Taliban to the negotiating table.
•Afghan security forces say the impact has been significant, but the Taliban roam huge swathes of the country and, with foreign troop levels of about 15,600, down from 140,000 in 2014, there appears little hope of outright victory.
📰 NGT tells tanneries to pay up for treatment plants
Units in and around Kanpur told to contribute 25% of the cost for establishing CETPs
•Rapping tanneries in and around Kanpur for not setting up common effluent treatment plants, the National Green Tribunal has directed them to contribute 25% of the total cost towards establishing such plants.
•A Bench headed by NGT Acting chairperson Jawad Rahim further told the tanneries based in Unnao, Banthar and Jajmau that “appropriate action” would be passed against them if they failed to comply with the order.
Action ordered
•“We caution the industries that they will be dealt appropriately if they fail to contribute 25 % of their contribution to the CETP establishment exclusive to the cost of the establishment. However, we direct all concerned to ensure that the CETPs are established and the process is expedited,” the green Bench said in its May 25 order.
•Ratio of 60:40
•The directions came after the counsel appearing for the State pollution control board submitted that Rs. 23.50 crore in the ratio of 60:40 would be required to remove the waste that had been dumped.
Chromium waste
•Advocate M.C. Mehta, who had moved a plea in the green panel seeking cleaning of the Ganga, submitted that close to 60,000 tonnes of chromium waste was lying in Kanpur leading to environmental pollution.
•“Be that as it may, we shall have to consider this issue at subsequent stage and proper directions will be passed. We are adjourning this case granting one more month time to all the stakeholders to ensure that the directions are complied and report be filed by the next date of hearing,” the Bench said.
📰 The Thoothukudi fables
They demonstrate that civil society must be an embedded part of the new knowledge society
•The Thoothukudi firings of May 22 have been read as linear narratives, as specific reports without possessing the power of storytelling. The Thoothukudi violence needs a storyteller to capture the eloquence, the poignancy of anecdotes. One has to see the fables not as remote fragments, morsels of a marginal India, but as a microcosm of what is happening everywhere. Thoothukudi has to be treated as an early warning system for the emerging threats to Indian democracy.
Three tales
•One cannot even begin with a “once there was” because Thoothukudi is a collection of three tales. Time determines the depth and level of story. It is, first, a tale that began over 20 years ago when the Sterlite plant shifted from Maharastra to Tamil Nadu. It is also a tale that began 100 days before the firing, when housewives, children and villagers created a community of protest which found its one-lakh-strong epicentre at Thoothukudi. Yet the tale from Thoothukudi is just over a fortnight old when we focus around the scandal of the firings.
•The euphemism of media reports is intriguing. They are generally dubbed as shootings or firings, they are not called killings, blatant acts of murder. The symbolism of a sniper and the needlessness of his violence no longer belongs to the Gaza strip. Terror is at home in Thoothukudi and elsewhere as state terror extends its tentacles world-wide.
•Thoothukudi is global and local in a different sense. It reflects the new conversation between a decade of oral history, the complaints, the everyday gossip of people dying, of children fainting in school, the moment when the eventless history of environmentalism clashes with the trauma of the Internet. That the Internet was suspended in the area after the killings makes one realise that it is not in Kashmir alone that such events take place. Time becomes critical because suddenly the silence of waiting, the epidemic of little prayers, the little protests around every village combine to show that Sterlite is not just one company town but a state of mind. It introduces us to the company towns of the mind, the new panopticons which are spreading like dictatorships across the world. The ease with which environmental tribunals and scientific laboratories are subverted needs to be chronicled. Words such as sustainability or corporate social responsibility become acts of hypocrisy, the new oxymorons of ethics created by a corporate world indifferent to everyday suffering. As an ecologist friend of mine observes, there are more protests outside the Vedanta office in London than in India. It is almost as if patriotism and security are concepts designed to protect corporate greed.
About Section 144
•As a fable, the events at Thoothukudi threaten the very fabric of democracy. It is a strange democracy where people are suspect and hunted down. As a DIG investigating Thoothukudi told me, “I have never seen a more cynical use of Section 144.” What the police confronted was a community of women and children carrying food, school bags. Instead of facing a community in a democratic sense, the government created the myth of outsiders as anti-socials. It is almost as if ordinary people are not citizens but subjects to be continuously disempowered. It is evident now that police went far beyond the area under Section 144 of the CrPC and killed people. Yet our bureaucrats hide truth behind the norms of procedure, as if table manners are more important than the truths of governance. The police reportedly beating disabled people makes one wonder if barbarity is a part of the new training, where every citizen is to be treated as a Naxal by definition. The psychology of fear that they have created is the new model of Section 144 where an old law and order project now becomes an effort to create an ecology of fear, where every citizen is suspect by definition.
•In fact, it is around areas like Thoothukudi that one has to write the new history of violence around the body. The state of the body is symptomatic of the vulnerability of the body politic. Ironically, it is the people who look for democracy, while the state and Sterlite seek to subvert it. Words like ‘public and citizens’, once anchors of the democratic imagination, now have become suspect words in the new games of corporate life. Doctors who meet patients from Thoothukudi villages complaining of cancer, skin diseases call these symptoms ‘Sterlite symptoms’. In a similar way, we can talk of the symptoms of a ‘Sterlite democracy’, a disease as debilitating as majoritarian authoritarianism. Yet the answer to the death of democracy is a more intense democracy, stemming from the inventiveness of the community. We have to understand it is communities rather than movements which are resisting the regime, a fact that the regime finds difficult to respect.
•Thoothukudi demonstrated this through the resilience of the bar and traders’ associations which worked day and night to get arrested people released. It reminded one of what the sociologist Èmile Durkheim said in his classic Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, that only the ethics of professions like law and medicine can counter the rapacity of corporations and the emptiness of the state. Thoothukudi proved this in ample measure. It also demonstrated that civil society has to be an embedded part of the new knowledge society. The reports of civil society have to become testaments and testimonies for the emerging issues of democracy. For example, the government inquiry commission, State Human Rights Commission or National Human Rights Commission reports are unlikely to go beyond legal and procedural issues. Civil society reports carry a wider burden and responsibility, playing sociologist, ethicist, environmentalist and storyteller. A civil society report on an act of violence has to relate law and order to law and justice, and also to law and democracy, reflecting on knowledge and truth in new ways. For example, experts should not be allowed to get away behind esoteric language. A people’s sensorium of touch, taste, smell has to be translated into science to create new warning signals. Thoothukudi showed the importance of a people’s idea of knowledge to counter expert knowledge. In fact, it suggests the importance of a people’s ombudsman to accompany so-called expert committees.
Proactive citizenship
•Yet such civil society reports cover not just past and present. They are warning bells for the future. If one juxtaposes the reports on Thoothukudi with the nuclear site at Koodankulam, one senses the deep suspicion about proactive citizenship. Government attempts to create the bogey of the outsider as antisocial, alien, intruder, missionary, Christian are dangerous steps and need to be challenged. The citizen as a person of knowledge must be seen as central to democracy. Only a proactive citizenship and an experimentally open civil society can challenge, question and domesticate the emerging “Sterlite democracies” as the new diseases of our age. This then is the emerging fable of Thoothukudi.
📰 Is the Indian economy on an upswing now?
•The Indian economy has shown a strong V-shaped recovery driven largely by domestic growth impulses. If one considers nine consecutive quarters since the fourth quarter of 2015-16, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth fell quarter after quarter from a peak of 9% to a trough of 5.6% in the first quarter of 2017-18. As is widely recognised, this was due to demonetisation and the transitory adverse effects of the goods and services tax implementation. These eventually subsided and for the last three quarters, growth steadily recovered to 6.3%, 7.0% and 7.7% in the second, third and fourth quarters of 2017-18, respectively. This sharp recovery is based entirely on domestic factors as the contribution of net export growth to GDP has been zero or negative since the third quarter of 2016-17. From the demand side, two segments which have supported growth, particularly in the fourth quarter of 2017-18, are government consumption and overall investment demand. The growth in gross fixed capital formation was as high as 14.4% in the fourth quarter of 2017-18.
•The real investment rate has also increased to 34.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017-18, although paradoxically, the nominal investment rate during this period remained below 31%. This difference is explained by relatively lower implicit price deflator of investment goods when compared to that for consumption goods.
Productivity focus
•Many of the government’s policy initiatives have shown a clear productivity-enhancing supply-side thrust including demonetisation and the GST. The new Monetary Policy Framework agreement has institutionalised a consumer price index (CPI) inflation target of 4% on average. Key policy initiatives (Make in India, Start-up India) also aim at improving productivity. Two early policy successes are related to market determination of mineral and spectrum prices. The power sector further benefitted from the Ujwal DISCOM Assurance Yojana scheme. For real estate and banking, the regulatory framework was changed. Additional fiscal space was created by better targeting of subsidies while expansion for rail/road projects was prioritised.
•Two factors may create short-term drags on India’s prospects for maintaining a sustained level of high growth: rising global crude prices and prospects of fiscal slippage. Global crude prices recently touched $80 a barrel. for the first time since 2014. The supply factors include U.S. sanctions on Iran and the crisis in Venezuela.
•On the demand side, according to the World Bank, world oil consumption grew strongly in 2017, up by 1.6% year-on-year. In 2018, U.S. consumption growth is expected to gather further momentum. Rising crude prices may adversely affect most indicators of India’s macro balance including trade and current account deficits, inflation, exchange rate and fiscal deficit. Reversing a falling trend since December 2017, CPI-based inflation increased to 4.6% in April 2018 due to rising prices of petrol and diesel used for transport. Continued pressure on inflation may prompt the RBI to revise the repo rate upwards during the current year.
•The Centre’s fiscal deficit-GDP ratio, after showing a steady improvement since 2014-15, slipped back to a level of more than 3.5% of GDP in 2017-18, exceeding the fiscal responsibility and budget management (FRBM) target of 3% and the budgeted target of 3.2%. With the general election around the corner, this situation may not improve in spite of the fact that the FRBM Act has been modified, shifting the policy anchor to achieving a debt-GDP ratio of 40% while retaining the fiscal deficit target at 3% of GDP. This target is now to be reached by March 2021.
📰 DAC approves procurementof radars, air cushion vehicles
The radars have capability to detect high speed targets
•The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) on Thursday approved procurement of high powered radars for the Indian Air Force and air cushion vehicles for the Army and the Coast Guard together worth over ₹5,500 crore.
•The 12 high power radars will be procured indigenously under the ‘Buy (Indian) IDDM’ category.
•“The radars will provide long range medium and high altitude radar cover with the capability to detect and track high speed targets following parabolic trajectories. Technologically superior, the radars will have the capability to scan 360 degrees without mechanical rotation of Antenna and will operate on 24x7 basis with minimal maintenance requirement,” the Defence Ministry said in a statement.
•In the other deal, air cushion vehicles (ACVs) to be procured from an Indian shipyard will enable travel at very high speeds over shallow water, sand banks, mud flats and swamps which are non-navigable by boats and small crafts due to draught restrictions or uncharted depths.
•The DAC meeting, chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, was scheduled to discuss the broad contours of the Navy’s ambitious project to build six advanced submarines under the multi-billion P-75 (I) programme. But, it was not known whether there was any decision on it during the meeting.
📰 ‘PSB recap plan inadequate for growth’
Funds will only take care of provisioning, says Moody’s; ‘banks’ ability to generate capital has declined’
•The government’s recapitalisation plan for the 21 public sector banks (PSBs) will not be sufficient to support credit growth but will take care of the provisioning requirement for bad loans, according to Moody’s.
•“The PSBs’ capital shortfalls are larger than the scale that the government had expected when it announced the recapitalisation in October 2017, mainly because the banks have failed to raise additional capital from the market and it may be difficult for them to raise more capital given the substantial decline in their share prices since the beginning of 2018,” says Alka Anbarasu, vice-president and senior credit officer at Moody’s. In October last, the Centre had announced the infusion of ₹2.11 lakh crore in PSBs over two years, of which ₹1.35 lakh crore was to come through recapitalisation bonds. The government will infuse ₹65,000 crore in this financial year, following the ₹90,000 crore infusion made in FY18.
•“Moreover, the capacity of these 21 banks to generate internal capital has deteriorated because of their weak financial performance and a sharp increase in government bond yields, which hurt their investment income,” said Ms. Anbarasu.
•In addition, the discovery of the ₹14,400 crore fraud in Punjab National Bank in February this year increased the need for additional capital for the lender.
‘Modest growth’
•Moody’s said all PSBs will see their Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratios exceeding the 8% minimum by March 2019, following the capital infusion, though this assumes overall credit growth for the PSBs of a modest 6%-8% in the next year. The relatively stronger banks will have room to grow, but the weaker ones will continue to shrink their balance sheets to conserve capital, she said.
•Moody’s Indian affiliate ICRA said that with the accelerated recognition of stressed assets during FY18, the asset quality problems of the banking sector had peaked in March 2018.
•ICRA said further additions to gross non-performing assets will decline with fresh slippages falling to about 3% in FY19 compared with 7.1% in FY18 and 5.5% in FY2017. “The regulatory push for the recognition and resolution of stressed assets stepped up further during Q4FY2018 as the RBI announced the revised framework for the resolution of stressed assets during February 2018,” said Karthik Srinivasan, senior VP, group head — Financial Sector Ratings, ICRA.
📰 UN India business forum, NITI Aayog form consortium to help women entrepreneurs
Move aimed at reducing gender disparity in start-ups, expediting market linkages
•The UN India Business Forum and the Women Entrepreneurial Platform of NITI Aayog on Thursday formed a consortium to reduce gender disparities in start-up investments by providing mentorship and networking opportunities and accelerating financial and market linkages for women entrepreneurs.
•UN India-NITI Aayog Investor Consortium for Women Entrepreneurs will bring together key ecosystem stakeholders, including venture capitalists and impact investors, international donor and funding agencies, private sector partners and state governments, according to a joint statement.
•The consortium aims to strengthen women’s entrepreneurship by creating an enabling ecosystem for investments. Women entrepreneurs will be identified through key partners, including WEP, UN Women, and UNDP. The consortium secretariat will then connect entrepreneurs, according to their requests, with relevant members.
•In “full potential” scenario when women participate in the economy, equally to men, it could add $2.9 trillion to India’s GDP by 2025, according to the statement. However, Indian women entrepreneurs continue to face challenges in accessing investors and raising capital.
•Sustainable development has the potential to open up markets worth $12 trillion around the world by 2030.
$5 trillion estimated
•It is estimated that up to $5 trillion is needed in a year to implement UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) worldwide. Return on investments on implementing the SDGs could be about $30 billion a year.
•The UN India Business Forum, an alliance of India’s businesses, financial institutions, the government and the UN, aims to accelerate India’s rapid growth and achieve the SDGs.
•Key partners for finance include HDFC, ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, Ambuja Cement, Tata Housing and LinkedIn while for health and nutrition companies such as Cadila Pharmaceuticals, Philips India, and Tata Chemicals have enrolled.
📰 Sustaining earth for the future
India is in need of a massive new effort to catalogue, map and monitor all life forms
•Life is a unique asset of our planet. India is blessed with an extraordinary richness of life. A myriad of unusual and exquisite species occur in the countless ecosystems spread across our vast lands, rivers and oceans. Woven into this rich fabric of biodiversity is a stunningly vibrant and colourful tapestry of peoples, cultures and traditions.
•This unique bio-cultural tapestry has been resilient to change for centuries, but with the unleashing of unprecedented economic and environmental forces, it is now subject to increasing wear and tear. Ultimately, these forces could even destroy our tapestry of life, cultures and traditions — and in the process, ourselves.
•Biologists all over the world have been documenting the ongoing loss of life forms. Modern extinction rates are more than a thousand times greater than the rates of the geological past. In recent decades, populations of more than 40% of large mammals have declined and insect biomass has decreased by more than 75%. Natural habitats all over the world have shrunk. For these losses, our country ranks higher than most.
•We have entered what scientists are calling the Anthropocene era — a new period in earth’s history, when humans have begun to impact our environment at the global scale. We have seen our forests degrade and diminish, our rivers vanish, and our air become unfit to breathe. We constantly talk about cleaning up the Ganga, as if it were the sole festering wound, but we overlook that the whole tapestry covering our body is slowly disintegrating. All life requires nurturing.
Taking stock
•To protect life on earth, the famous American biologist E.O. Wilson has described an ambitious project he calls “Half-Earth”. He calls for formally protecting 50% of the earth’s land surface in order to conserve our rapidly disappearing natural heritage. Others have rightly argued that in the past conservation efforts have often disregarded issues of social justice and equity. Thus the goals of “Half-Earth” should not compromise the rights of indigenous people.
•Clearly, we must do more to safeguard biodiversity and the ecosystem services that support all human endeavours. India’s forest policy calls for forests to cover almost a third of the country, and if we include other natural systems such as grasslands and wetlands, the area to be protected could amount to almost 40%. In a populous country such as ours, that would be a huge achievement. Some areas could be fully protected while others might be managed by stakeholders for sustainable use and enrichment of biodiversity.
•We need a massive new effort to catalogue, map, and monitor life, using fundamentally different approaches. Current efforts to map India’s biodiversity are largely restricted to forestlands, while plans for species monitoring are even more inadequate. We have the digital tools and artificial intelligence today to efficiently catalogue, map, and monitor life’s fabric in a manner never before attempted — and with the potential engagement of millions of students and citizens. This mapping effort would include not only all life, including cultures, ethnicities, and dialects, but also the use of biodiversity and its vulnerability to changes in land use and climate.
New ideas
•Cataloguing, mapping and monitoring life will give us a glimpse of what we have, and what is most vulnerable. But how do we reconcile the growing needs of society with the need to sustain our vanishing natural heritage?
•We still have only the most basic understanding of how society interacts with biodiversity, and how economic, social and political forces can erode the biodiversity that ultimately sustains us. We are just beginning to learn how myriad species interact to drive our ecosystems, and how these systems in turn maintain our soils, water and breathable air. Wild pollinators, the microbiota of soils, and the many enemies of agricultural pests — these and many other natural services underpin our agricultural productivity and mitigate climate change.
•In many of our academic institutions, the ‘Life Sciences’ are still restricted largely to the study of cells and molecules — life at microscopic and submicroscopic levels. In such cases, the words Life Sciences sadly misrepresent a vast area of inquiry vital to humanity’s survival. Our institutions need to place far more emphasis on the scientific study of life at higher levels. We also need a comprehensive inquiry into how our society is shaping as well as responding to changes in biodiversity. A new biodiversity science is taking shape across the globe, focused on the intimate interweaving of nature with human societies. India has not been, but must be, at the forefront of this emerging science, because nowhere on Earth are natural and human systems tied together more inextricably than on the subcontinent.
The way forward
•Fortunately, some in the Indian science establishment, such as the Departments of Biotechnology and of Science and Technology, have recently started programmes and initiatives in the broader areas of science and society. Several non-government think tanks in the civil society sector have strong interdisciplinary programmes in environmental sustainability. The India Biodiversity Portal has the ambitious goal of mapping India’s biodiversity with the engagement of civil society though the portal relies largely on private support.
•However, the scale of the problem is so massive and its importance so vital for our future that government and private philanthropy need to bring together multiple stakeholders to develop a programme to document, map and monitor all life, and develop a new knowledge enterprise to fully explore various dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystem services and their critical link to our future.
