📰 The spirit of Sentosa
South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s skilful diplomacy is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize
•The Nobel Peace Prize has been conferred on international organisations which simply do their job and even the promoters of impractical disarmament initiatives, while the real issues that involve the very survival of mankind cry out for out-of-the-box solutions.
•Three festering situations which guarantee this Nobel for anyone who can break the impasse are Korea, Palestine and Kashmir. There is no dearth of proposals to resolve them but they elude acceptance as the parties concerned have adopted ironclad positions. The traditional approach is to let things be.
•Till very recently, North Korea was a clear case of a total freeze being preferable to any meddling that might cause an escalation. With a mix of authoritarianism, holding out nuclear threats and irrational behaviour, three generations of Kims held the world to ransom while successive U.S. Presidents followed a carrot and stick approach to keep things within manageable limits.
Slow progress
•Then came a U.S. President with a clearly disruptionist policy and no fear of consequences. War, he said, was an option if leaders starved their people, violated their human rights and threatened the world itself with a nuclear war. After much sabre rattling and the use of undiplomatic language, both leaders (of the U.S. and North Korea) came to the conclusion that peace should be the preferred option and took hesitant steps that were unthinkable even a few months ago. A summit was an on-again, off-again concept till Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un reached Sentosa island in Singapore.
•The outcome, on June 12, which made the world heave a sigh of relief, was characterised as a comprehensive document. In fact, there is nothing in the document which was not agreed in 1994 and 2005. Though it is a four-point document, in actual fact it is nothing more than a declaration of intent. Crucial issues such as denuclearisation and a guarantee of security remain undefined. There is no timeframe either for any of the proposals. There could be many a slip between the cup and the lip. Still, a grateful world has hailed it as real progress and called for the Nobel for Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim.
•If one considers where the two leaders started from and where they have reached, there could be some justification to reward them for switching gears from war to peace. But they are unworthy of the honour if one is to go by their past records.
•The number of bilateral and multilateral agreements that Mr. Trump has sacrificed and his irrational agendas cannot be forgotten just because of what he has decided on North Korea. Mr. Kim, on the other hand, was till the other day the butcher of North Korea where his family oppressed their people, starved them and used the nation’s resources to splurge on weapons of mass destruction. He has blood on his hands.
Candidate Moon
•Instead, the person who should get the Nobel was not on Sentosa. South Korean President Moon Jae-in — who is the real peace maker — was in Seoul, thinking about the two leaders whose decisions will be critical for his country and the wider region.
•What Mr. Moon worked on for long and finally accomplished is nothing short of a miracle given the stances adopted by Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim before he set out on his journey to explore peace. With determination, charm and incorrigible optimism, he stuck his neck out, ready to pay a price if his efforts failed. He knew that his country would be the first to face the fire and fury that Mr. Trump had talked about. He even allowed, without hesitation, a South Korean official to announce the news of a possible thaw from the lawns of the White House.
•Mr. Moon has an impeccable record of integrity, poise and sincerity. In late April, the world watched in awe as he warmly welcomed Mr. Kim in the demilitarised zone at the start of a historic summit. He even unhesitatingly stepped on to North Korean soil when asked to by Mr. Kim and the agreement they reached in the path of peace was unequivocal. The transparency and dignity of Mr. Moon is a model worth emulating.
•Another reason why it should be Mr. Moon who should get the Nobel is because it is he who brought the warring sides together. The Sentosa document is a concept while the summit is a reality. Moreover, Mr. Moon has a crucial role as both peacemaker and stakeholder. He should be enabled to come to terms with Mr. Trump’s impulsive decision to suspend joint military exercises with South Korea, as a concession announced after the Sentosa meet. Even if peace eludes the Korean Peninsula for some time, Mr. Moon’s skilful diplomacy should not go unrewarded.
📰 On Colombia's first presidential election: In the shadow of FARC
Iván Duque’s election as Colombia’s President puts a question mark on the peace accord
•Colombia’s first presidential election since the landmark 2016 peace deal with the FARC Marxist guerrillas has thrown up the youngest winner in its history. But the victory of the 41-year-old right-wing candidate, Iván Duque, raises questions for the future of the agreement negotiated by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning outgoing President, Juan Manuel Santos. Mr. Duque, a relative political novice, beat his rival, Gustavo Petro, an erstwhile insurgent, by a 12 percentage point margin in Sunday’s run-off. Mr. Duque’s victory is likely to help the conservatives further consolidate their gains in the Congress, where the centrists led by Mr. Santos remain weakened. Mr. Duque’s decade-long work experience with the Inter-American Development Bank perhaps partly explains his programme of economic orthodoxy — to cut corporate taxes and create a conducive climate for investment in the oil sector. A protégé of the conservative former President Álvaro Uribe, Mr. Duque can count on backing from his mentor’s Democratic Centre party. There is some concern, however, that the veteran politician could exert undue influence. This is especially so because Mr. Duque, like many on the political right, has been sceptical of the peace agreement with the rebels, and Mr. Uribe had actively opposed the referendum on the deal. The grant of amnesty to the extremists and codified guarantees of representation in the Congress, to ensure a smooth passage into the political mainstream, have proved the most contentious provisions. As President, Mr. Duque may be more disposed to adopting a moderate stance.
•The outcome in the run-off was not surprising given the steady marginalisation of centrist forces, leaving the field open to the extremes. In March, the contender from the Revolutionary Alternative Common Force(FARC), the rebel movement refashioned as a political party with a name that retains its former acronym, quit the presidential race. After violent attacks on its candidates, it had suspended its campaign for the Congressional election. The FARC’s withdrawal from the contest marked a setback for the central plank of the peace process — the rebels’ right to run for public office in return for the surrender of arms. It also illustrates the tenuous nature of the accord overall, as the judicial and other mechanisms to advance its objectives are still not in place. A return to civil peace after a protracted conflict, in which hundreds of thousands were killed and many more displaced, is a painstaking process that, above all, calls for firm moral and political conviction. The legacy Mr. Santos leaves behind is the courage he mustered to clinch the controversial peace accord with the perpetrators of the worst brutalities for half a century. Mr. Duque, who assumes office in August, will be judged in terms of the distance he can travel to make the Colombian dream an enduring reality.
📰 Acres of contention
The judiciary doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the economic consequences of its judgments
•The number of legal disputes involving property, contract, labour, tax and corporate laws is bound to increase with an expanding economy. How they are adjudicated by courts not only has direct consequences for the disputants, but also shapes the behaviour of individuals and entities involved in production, commerce and banking. Judicial findings also influence decision-making of government agencies, which are major actors in a developing economy. Yet, the Indian judiciary doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the economic consequences of its judgments.
Case studies
•A case in point is a May 31, 2018 order of the Allahabad High Court —Independent Power Producers Association of India v. Union of India and Ors . The court has ruled that bankruptcy proceedings cannot be started against a power company unless the company is a wilful loan defaulter. It did not factor in the issue of viability of the project. As such, the ‘wilfulness’ condition is hard to prove. Nonetheless, the ruling is one of the less problematic ones.
•Consider another judgment, this time from the Supreme Court (SC) inRameshwar and Ors v. State of Haryana and Ors (2018). Here, the dispute involved 688 acres of land for which the then Haryana government had issued an acquisition notification in 2007. As soon as the notification was issued, developers started approaching owners to buy their land. Since the official compensation was going to be meagre, many owners sold their land at throwaway prices. Later, the government decided to drop the acquisition plan. By then, hundreds of acres had been purchased by builders through such deals. In flagrant disregard for the rules, the State authorities not only approved the land deals but further obliged the builders with regulatory approvals. Unsurprisingly, the SC held the State’s decision a fraud, acted out through an unholy nexus between the officials and the builders.
•As the owners sold their land under duress and on unconscionable terms, the land should have been restored to them by declaring the deals infructuous. However, the SC handed over the land to the State government.
•In Uddar Gagan Properties Ltd v. Sant Singh & Ors (2016) , at dispute were 280 acres of land under acquisition in 2005. The land was illegally transferred to developers through dubious deals approved by the then Haryana government. Here too, the SC handed over the land to the official agency that was an active partner in the fraud. Farmers were forced to accept paltry compensations.
•Through such judgments, the judiciary has failed not only to protect the legitimate rights of owners, but also to provide economic justice enshrined in Article 38 of the Constitution. Moreover, the court has transferred land, a precious economic resource, from those who own, need and use it to governments who do not need it by their own accord. Transfers have been forced for a cause known neither to the beneficiary governments nor to the judiciary. It is due to the perverse incentives created by such judgments that government agencies abuse laws and are sitting on a massive stock of unused land, which would have been put to more productive use by its owners.
•Several infrastructure projects are being held up due to judicial interventions in the bidding process. Courts should realise that the quality of infrastructure assets and the technical capability of contractors to deliver them are serious issues. The mere difference in prices demanded by the bidder may or may not be a decisive factor. On the contrary, the court’s intervention can delay the project, escalating its cost far more than any possible gains from ruling in favour of the lowest price bidder.
•Courts’ interpretation of concession contracts also seem to be unmindful of consequences for future user-fee based projects. In the Delhi-Noida-Direct flyway case (2016), the Allahabad High Court struck down an explicit contract term dealing with the calculation of costs and profit for the private partner. The court held it to be “arbitrary and opposed to public policy”, and the profit to the company as “super-normal”. In this case, the problem is not the contract terms but their manipulation. With the help of experts it is possible to assess construction and maintenance costs for road projects. Rather than setting aside an explicit contract term, the court should have ordered a transparent implementation mechanism. Moreover, the government authority should be held accountable for dereliction of duty in not raising and settling the issue with the help of experts.
•Sure, courts should interpret a contract and cut into its terms if found unconscionable. However, this should be done sparingly and after meeting high standards, especially for contracts awarded through competitive bidding. Otherwise, judicial interventions can undermine the sense of security that comes from signing contracts, thereby discouraging investment.
A public good
•The adjudication process can serve as a public good. By clarifying the law it can reduce legal uncertainty. This in turn reduces legal disputes and costs associated with investments and other economic decisions. Consequently, economic activities get promoted. Casual and unpredictable adjudication has the opposite effect.
•Fortunately some judges seem to have taken note. Shivashakti Sugars Limited v. Shree Renuka Sugar Limited and Ors (2017) is a landmark judgment delivered by justices A.K. Sikri and A.M. Sapre. It not only admitted the role of economic reasoning in adjudication, but pushed for the inter-discipline between law and economics to serve the developmental needs of the country. In situations where alternative views are possible or wherever discretion is available, the two judges have argued for the view which subserves the country’s economic interest. They have exhorted the courts to avoid outcomes which can have adverse effects on employment, growth of infrastructure, the economy or the revenue of the State.
•An economic analysis of the law and disputes is welcome but courts should not go overboard. First, treating economic growth and the revenue of the state as public purposes is walking on a slippery slope. Second, even for genuinely public purposes, economic efficiency cannot justify the trampling of legal or economic rights at stake. Adjudication of such cases requires a cost-benefit analysis of a different kind. Infringement of individual rights can be considered only if it is absolutely necessary. The situation should be such that public purpose cannot be achieved without putting limitations on individual rights. Moreover, the degree of infringement should be minimum to realise the purpose. It should not cut too deep. Finally, infringement should follow the proportionality principle — the social benefit must be commensurate with the seriousness of the infringement.
📰 Road map laid for India-U.S. meet
Experts to allay Indian concerns on defence pacts ahead of July’s 2+2 dialogue
•Indian and U.S. experts began a three-day consultations on Monday to find meeting points in bilateral relations in preparation for the first-ever meeting of the Ministers for External Affairs and Defence with their U.S. counterparts next month.
•The July meeting in Washington DC between Sushma Swaraj and Nirmala Sitharaman and their U.S. counterparts, called the two-plus-two discussions, is expected to further cement the India-U.S. engagements.
•According to officials, among the key focus areas of the meeting that began here on Monday morning is finding a breakthrough in concluding the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), one of the four foundational agreements that helps the U.S. to intensify its defence cooperation with a partner nation.
•Indications emerging from the U.S. side is that they are keen to stress the importance given to India in its Indo-Pacific strategy. The U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) was recently renamed Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), symbolic of the significance U.S. attaches to India in the region.
•Apart from the foundational agreements, the U.S. is also keen on a broad based intelligence-sharing agreement with India as the two countries have vastly expanded their counter-terror cooperation. In this context, the fourth foundational agreement, Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-spatial Cooperation (BECA), will be significant.
•COMCASA and BECA are the two foundational agreements that India is yet to sign. It has already signed the General Security Of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) and the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA). The most significant of them is LEMOA, which gives both nations access to each other’s military facilities. But it does not make it automatic or obligatory.
•The U.S. has been engaging India since 2002 on the foundational agreements, but successive governments have been wary of giving in to the U.S. demands.
Sale of drones
•The COMCASA will facilitate transfer of encrypted communications systems. The agreements are a key requirement by Washington for sharing h-tech military hardware, especially armed drones which the U.S. is willing to supply to India. Sale of armed drones is high on the agenda of the 2+2 dialogue.
•New Delhi has shed its traditional reluctance and has been open to COMCASA, with both sides holding several rounds of discussions in recent times. There have been widespread expectations that a broad understanding could be reached ahead of the 2+2 dialogue.
•However, India had concerns on some of the clauses and the language, which both sides would attempt to address in the discussions.
•As part of improving high tech cooperation, India and the U.S. announced the ambitious Defence Technology and Trade Initiative and India was designated a major defence partner. But it has not made any progress.
📰 Paper setters to receive training from National Testing Agency
National Testing Agency will take it up: Javadekar
•The National Testing Agency, which is being set up to relieve the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) of the burden of conducting multiple examinations, will also train paper setters to set better question papers and provide better model answers.
•“There is no system for paper-setter training till now. We will introduce it as part of the National Testing Agency’s mandate,” HRD minister Prakash Javadekar told journalists on Tuesday, while listing the “achievements” of the Modi government in the field of education.
NTA to conduct exams
•The agency’s mandate as envisaged by the Ministry of Human Resource Development is to put in place a robust system for the conduct of examinations.
•The National Testing Agency is expected to conduct some of the examinations that the CBSE has been conducting till now, Mr. Javadekar, who held a review of the proposed body on Sunday, said.
•Eventually, the new body will take over all examinations from the CBSE, except the 10th and 12th board examinations.
•Among the examinations that will be transferred to the NTA are the prestigious Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to engineering colleges like the IITs and NITs and the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to all medical colleges in the country, except AIIMS and JIPMER, Puducherry.
•The creation of NTA was approved by the Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister in November 2017. After a one-time grant of ₹25 crore to the NTA, it is supposed to become financially self-sustainable.
📰 Heart of the matter
We must publicise the full information on organ allocations to secure public trust in the donation process
•Over the last few days a storm has been raised following publication of an article in The Hindu (June 12, 2018) based on a leaked WhatsApp message from the head of the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) claiming that foreign patients who are waiting for a donor heart transplant are being prioritised over Indian patients by private hospitals in Chennai. This article has angered many. Unfortunately, amidst the din, the basic concepts of organ donation, allocation and transplantation have been completely lost.
Tamil Nadu’s advantage
•A forward thinking bureaucracy, committed non-governmental organisations and a willing political dispensation took up promotion of cadaver organ donation as a must-have in Tamil Nadu around 10 years ago. This was primarily in response to a widely publicised and unrelated kidney donation racket unearthed in the late 1990s. The initial kick-start and continuing efforts have made Tamil Nadu the undisputed leader in organ donation in India. Thousands of lives have been saved through organ donation.
•Many southern States have successfully emulated Tamil Nadu’s road map and have developed organ donation programmes on their own. The uptake of the concept of organ donation, however, has been disappointing in north India. This has led to a steady stream of patients from north India to travel to the south for a cadaver donor organ as their chance of getting a timely transplant in their own State is close to zero. While the organ donation rate in Tamil Nadu is over 10 times greater than most of the northern States, there is a lot of work to be done to achieve the West’s donation rates.
•Every country goes through an evolution process in terms of organ donation, and this is different for each organ. Kidney transplantation has been practised in India for over 25 years. There is public confidence in the procedure, and it is not surprising that there is a massive waiting list for cadaver kidney transplants. On the other hand, liver transplant as a treatment option for liver failure remained an esoteric idea in India until 10-15 years ago. The results of liver transplantation in India were poor in the early stages. That has changed in the last 10 years. With increasing success, an increasing number of patients who need a liver transplant are getting waitlisted. So there is no real possibility of a foreigner getting a cadaver liver or kidney in India, as there will always be a patient to whom a donor liver or kidney, irrespective of its characteristics can be matched. Among 2,100 liver transplants performed by our group in south India over the last nine years, not a single foreign patient has been transplanted with a cadaveric liver.
Heart transplants
•Cardiac and lung transplantation have been the last to develop in India. Until five years ago, results of heart and lung transplantation were dismal in India. Many doctors would have been reticent to put their patients forward for transplantation even if they would have benefitted from the treatment. However, over the last two-three years, results have improved significantly with the influx of talented and trained surgeons. But the number of patients being assessed and listed are still fewer in comparison to those listed for livers or kidneys. Waiting lists for heart transplantation are still small, and in such a situation while a donor liver or kidney can be immediately matched to a suitable Indian patient, this is not always possible for a heart or lungs.
•This is where the claim for utilising the organ for a foreign patient comes in as otherwise the organ would be wasted. Even though occasional abuse of the system may be a possibility, it is important to point out that even with the current practice of allocating an organ to a foreigner when there is no suitable Indian patient, one-third of all hearts and lungs are still not being used due to “lack of a suitable recipient”. As public and physician confidence in the success of heart and lung transplantation improves in India, the waiting list of Indian patients will increase and it will be possible to match every organ to a suitable Indian patient. Once that stage is reached, there will not be even a remote possibility of a foreigner getting an organ.
•An additional issue with heart and lung transplantation is the strict criteria for size and quality and the very tight timeframes within which these organs should be transplanted. While a kidney can be preserved for 12-18 hours and a liver for 8-12 hours, hearts and lungs should be transplanted within six hours, otherwise outcomes are likely to be poor. So while sharing of livers and kidneys across the country is possible, it is very difficult as far as hearts and lungs are concerned, considering the size of our country. In the absence of a viable and accessible air ambulance service to transport organs, feasibility will depend on the timing of the donation and the flight schedules of commercial airlines. Remember, most organ donation procedures happen in the night as logistics permit. So, at least for hearts and lungs, exceptions notwithstanding, sharing is feasible only by adjacent States.
Fine-tuning the process
•What can be done to improve the situation? The government can decide that no foreigners can receive a cadaver donor organ in India even if it means that an organ is wasted due to lack of a suitable Indian recipient. But this may be an extreme step as local governments and corporate hospitals are still very interested in medical tourism. Another option is to develop a system of zonalisation across the country (like in the U.S.) so that more efficient sharing of organs across States is feasible, possibly with the development of a publicly-funded air ambulance service. This will significantly benefit transplant programmes in government hospitals.
•Organ donation is based on public trust that due process is being followed. Currently, the donation process and organ allocation in Tamil Nadu is fully monitored by Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu (TRANSTAN). Every organ that is transplanted, even to a foreign patient, is only done after approval from TRANSTAN. The authority of course depends on the clinical judgment and decisions of the transplant team as to the best use of each organ. The process should be made more transparent and accessible to the public. If donation and the allocation of each organ can be tracked, that will be a strong deterrent to mischief. Most importantly, the outcome of every transplant should be monitored. TRANSTAN should make it mandatory that the transplanting centre should report the outcome of the organ and the patient with updates at one week, one month and one year after transplantation.
•Organ donation is a highly emotive topic. When a family agrees for organ donation, they are making a decision to be generous to some unknown person in the midst of a great personal crisis. For this to succeed, they should have utmost trust in the process of organ donation and allocation. Even in highly developed countries, donation rates drop temporarily when news of suspicious practices surfaces. In India, this is even more important as controversies such as these can break a developing programme and bring us back to square one. A reduction in donation rate will affect patients waiting for organs as each donor can save up to seven lives. The issue must be thoroughly investigated before newspapers and televisions proclaim a “scandal”. It does no good to the system and can cause immeasurable harm to sick patients desperately waiting for the call that “they have an organ”.
📰 Is data science the same as statistics?
The confusion continues till date
•The growth of data has been exponential. According to an IBM report, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created per day. This has created a new class of professionals — data scientists. The question is, is data science another ‘hot’ job or a new form of science? In the Hollywood movie 21, six students, brilliant with numbers, make money at the blackjack tables of Las Vegas casinos by using numbers, codes, and hand gestures. Can we call them data scientists?
The ‘fourth paradigm’
•In 2009, pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray argued that data science is the “fourth paradigm” of science, the other three being empirical, theoretical and computational paradigms. In terms of the volume of data to be handled nowadays, it certainly sounds sensible. However, data have always played a major role in scientific developments and the growth of knowledge, not just now. About two centuries ago, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was largely based on observational data that he collected during his voyages around the world. About 150 years back, Gregor Mendel developed the laws of Mendelian inheritance from the the data he collected from his experiments on peas. So, historically, science has been data-driven. What has changed is that with the Internet, there is more data available now.
•Statistics, according to the American Statistical Association, is the “science of learning from data”. So there is huge scope of confusing data science with statistics. Statistics is a data-driven science, but it focusses on developing theories based on data insights. In the early 1900s, William Gosset, under the pseudonym Student, used the Guinness brewery data to develop the famous Student’s t-distribution. Was he a data scientist? Important theories of statistics were developed by small data quite often. Take an interesting example from the 1930s. A woman colleague of the legendary statistician R.A. Fisher claimed that she could identify whether tea or milk was added first to a cup. In order to verify this, Fisher prepared eight cups of tea, of which milk was added first in four cups. The woman could correctly identify six cups, three from each group. Fisher analysed the data by his newly developed Fisher’s exact test. Half a century on, this ‘Lady Tasting Tea’ experiment would be treated as one of the two supporting pillars of the randomisation analysis of experimental data. There is no doubt that statistics was primarily data-driven. In 1997, C.F. Jeff Wu gave a famous lecture entitled “Statistics=Data Science?” at the University of Michigan. The confusion somewhat continues till date.
•Incidentally, the term data science was used initially as a substitute for computer science by Peter Naur in 1960. His book Concise Survey of Computer Methods defines data science as “the science of dealing with data.” ‘Dealing’ certainly includes cleaning, processing, storing and manipulating data, and the subsequent analyses of data.
•Today, people expect a data scientist to know mathematics and algorithms, experimental design, engineering chops, and communication and management skills. A jack of all trades cannot be the master of anything. Yet people struggle to decide whether data science is statistics on a high capacity computer or not. More importantly, is a data scientist someone who is better in statistics than any software engineer, and better in software engineering than any statistician? Does data lead to “the end of theory”?
Small and big data
•To me, data science appears to be a technology rather than a science, at least in its present form. Should we then call it data technology? A Harvard Business Review article of 2012 concludes that a hybrid of data hacker, analyst, communicator and trusted adviser makes a successful data scientist. A considerable part of the work of a data scientist is data cleansing. That is surely not the description of a statistician.
•With the ocean of data at hand, the scope of data science might look limitless. However, due to the very nature of the expertise, over time, softwares will invariably take up much of the work of data scientists. For example, existing tools like Tableau have already eased the task of data visualisation.
•In response to the new technological demand, statistics, the subject, did not completely surrender to the new hype of handling waves of data, and thus paved the way for developing a new set of experts. Many types of small data are of great challenge, even in this era of big data. Thankfully, statistics did not detract itself from the principle of theorising from data, big or small. We are possibly heading towards an era of softwares and algorithms. A shade of uncertainty remains with the advent of data science.
📰 Women’s rights and personal choice
How a country’s legal system may explain HIV prevalence
•According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, about 80% of women in the world who are infected with HIV infections are in Africa. In fact, Africa is the only geographical area where women outnumber men when it comes to being affected by HIV, a virus that is transmitted largely through unprotected sex and which damages the immune system. However, the prevalence of HIV infections is not uniform across Africa. Women in some African countries are significantly more affected by the virus than others.
•“Legal origins and female HIV”, a 2018 paper by Siwan Anderson published in the American Economic Review, finds that HIV prevalence among African women is higher in countries that had their legal origins in the common law rather than under the civil law. To be precise, female HIV infection rates are 25% higher in common law countries. But how can the legal system in a country possibly explain the prevalence of HIV?
Legal rights
•Anderson argues that the answer lies in the difference in legal rights that the common law and the civil law grant women in the continent. For instance, the common law does not provide African women much in the way of property rights after marriage. This undermines the bargaining power of women within their families and increases the chances of them being forced to engage in unprotected sex with their husbands.
•The civil law, on the other hand, offers women better marital property rights. Women are recognised for the unpaid work that they perform in their households, offered the right to joint ownership of all property under marriage, and also offered explicit protection in the case of a divorce. This, in turn, provides these women with better bargaining power within their households and increases their chances of negotiating safe sex.
•The study highlights how people’s behaviour is influenced by the cost they need to pay for their actions. When men faced the threat of legal sanction for abusing women, they had more reason to respect women’s rights.
•The paper, however, stops short of trying to establish whether it is better laws that improved the status of women in these countries or if it is the improved status of women in a society that caused gender-neutral laws to be framed.
📰 RBI alters ‘relative’ definition to check outward remittances
Aims to prevent misuse of facility
•Concerned over funds sent abroad under the ‘maintenance of close relative’ category of the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has narrowed the definition of relatives to check the flow of funds.
•Hence, funds under the ‘maintenance of close relative’ category can be sent only to immediate relatives such as parents, spouses, children and their spouses. This has brought about by defining ‘relatives’ under the Companies Act, 2013 instead of the same act of 1956.
•“In the context of remittances allowed under LRS for maintenance of close relatives, it has been decided to align the definition of ‘relative’ with the definition given in Companies Act, 2013 instead of Companies Act, 1956,” the central bank had said in its June policy statement.
•Outward remittances under maintenance of close relatives shot up to almost $3 billion in 2017-18 from a mere $174 million in 2013-14. In fact, funds sent under this category have more than doubled since 2015-16.
•Overall outward remittances under LRS went up to $11 billion from $1 billion in the same period.
•“It may not be the case that the central bank is suspecting money laundering,” said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist, Care Ratings, when asked on the possible reason for the change.
‘Commercial purpose’
•“It is possible that the facility [maintenance of relatives] under the Liberalised Remittances Scheme is used for commercial purposes which is not its objective. That may have prompted the regulator to narrow the definition of relatives.”
•RBI has introduced a system for daily reporting of individual transactions under the LRS by banks.
•This enables banks to view remittances already made by an individual during the fiscal, thus improving monitoring and ensuring compliance.
•Since the system uses the Permanent Account Number of the remitter to aggregate remitter-wise data, the central bank has made furnishing of PAN mandatory for such transactions.
📰 Govt. to set up fifth national data centre
Centre planning to expand BPO promotion scheme to 1 lakh seats, says Prasad
•The Centre will set up the country’s biggest data centre in Bhopal with a capacity to host five lakh virtual servers, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday.
•The data centre, which will take about two years to come up, will be set up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
•This will be the fifth National Data Centre after the ones at Bhubaneswar, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune. These National Data Centres host government websites, services and applications.
•“India’s digital ecosystem has got a momentum of its own and this process is going to be irreversible. As far as data privacy is concerned, we have always said that data must be protected, and India should become a good centre of data analysis,” the Minister said.
•Replying to a query on data mining by firms in the context of the general elections in 2019, Mr. Prasad said, “Any attempt to influence India’s elections in a covert or overt manner by abuse of data will not be tolerated. People can campaign on social networking sites, but misuse and abuse of data is not acceptable.”
•He added that the government planned to expand its BPO promotion scheme to one lakh seats from the “current 48,000 seats.”
•Under the initiative, which had an outlay of ₹493 crore, 91 BPOs had been set up in small towns and rural areas till now.
‘121 cr. Aadhaar issued’
•On Aadhaar, the Minister said that while only 61 crore Aadhaar numbers had been generated up to 2014. The numbers had jumped to more than 121 crore as on June 16, 2018. “The difference between Narendra Modi Government’s Aadhaar and that of Manmohan Singh... the old Aadhaar was Niradhar [without basis]...there was no legislative support to that platform. Today, Aadhaar has a robust parliamentary law,” Mr. Prasad said.
•Asked about the government’s action plan in case the Supreme Court’s decision was not in favour of Aadhaar, the Minister said, “The question is hypothetical... the judgment [in the case] is reserved but I believe our Aadhaar team lawyers have argued it with proof, and Aadhaar has already established its benefits for the public.”
•He further added that as many as 59.15 crore Indians had linked 87.79 crore bank accounts with Aadhaar.
