📰 ‘Access to Aadhaar database will help solve cases faster’
Unidentified bodies can be identified, says NCRB Director
•National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) Director Ish Kumar on Thursday requested the government to provide limited access to Aadhaar database, which would help the investigating agencies in conducting probe into inter-State criminals more effectively and timely with the help of fingerprint.
•He said limited access to Aadhaar database is need of the hour as 80 to 85% of the criminals every year are first-time offenders with no record with the police.
•“If the government provides us Aadhaar database, the local police can tally the collected fingerprint and nab the accused,” he said.
•Similarly, more than 40,000 unidentified dead bodies are recovered by the police every year and with access to Aadhaar, these could be identified and handed over to their relatives.
Age-old system
•Speaking at the 19th All India Conference of Directors of Finger Print Bureaux here, Mr. Kumar emphasised the need for National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS).
•He said the current Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) which was developed in 1992, has only 11.5 lakh fingerprint database, while all the States have about 50 lakh finger print database.
•“The AFIS has limited capacity and is outdated now. So we have proposed for a NAFIS that can be linked to 850-odd police district headquarters and commissionerates from where a search query could be sent to the National Database,” he said, adding that the FBI has 50-million fingerprint database.
•In the second phase, the NCRB would stretch their arms to all the 15,600-odd police stations across the country so that a police constable on patrolling duty, or at a naaka can send the query and check the incidents of any suspect.
•“Once the database is ready, there would be a need for Artificial Intelligence in data analytic tools by which we can analyse the data and see whether an offender has a criminal record in other states too,” the NCRB director said.
Amendment in Act
•Amendment in Identification of Prisoners Act 1920 is also required to include other biometrics as face, palm and voice which are the need of the hour, he said. “There is also need to do away with the clause of one year rigorous imprisonment in the identification of Prisoners Act, 1920 and the NCRB has already sent the proposal to MHA,” he said.
Can reach only 1 % cases
•He said out of 50 lakh cases registered each year in the country, the fingerprint experts are able to visit only around 55,000 scenes of crime, which is just 1% of all cases and is grossly inadequate.
•“The reason is many states do not have adequate fingerprint cadre strength nor do they have the proper equipment,” he said.
•Mr. Kumar requested the Ministry of Home Affairs to modernise all the State Finger Print Bureaus so that experts could at least visit 10% of the scenes of crime.
📰 Wave of lynchings
Local authorities must show good faith, and facilitate policing to deal with mob violence
•The events that led up to the brutal assault on Monday of two men in Uttar Pradesh’s Hapur district on the outskirts of New Delhi are unclear — but one of them died and the other sustained injuries. The family of the dead man, Qasim, a 45-year-old cattle trader, says that he had set out when he heard about the possibility of cattle being on sale, and the next thing they heard was that a mob had set itself upon him, killing him. Sameyddin’s relatives say he had been out getting grass for his cattle when he spied the mob attack on Qasim — he tried to run to safety, but was beaten up nonetheless. Qasim’s son says his father’s death was the outcome of a conspiracy. Others in the village say locals were on edge following rumours that cow smuggling was afoot. And administration officials say it may all have been a case of road rage. Investigations are on, so what actually transpired is not definitively known yet. But given lynchings across north India by ‘cow protection’ vigilantes, it is not difficult to miss the communal dangers here. Elsewhere, from Tamil Nadu in the south to Assam in the Northeast, men and women have been lynched on suspicion that they were out to kidnap children. To give just a few examples, in May, a homeless man in Pulicat, north of Chennai, was battered to death on such suspicion, as was a car-borne woman pilgrim in Tiruvannamalai district, who offered some sweets to children while seeking directions. This month, in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district, two men from Guwahati were killed by a mob on the same anxiety that they were looking to kidnap children. In many cases — including in Tamil Nadu and Assam — such public concern was created or heightened by warnings that were circulated on social media.
•Yet, irrespective of whether the lynchings are due to fear of kidnappings or are deliberate acts by cow protection vigilantes, the authorities should not treat the crime of murder and the allegations that enrage a mob with the same equivalence. Murder is murder, but the killing of another human being by a murderous crowd out to enforce mob justice or avert an imagined crime takes an extraordinary toll of the civilities of wider society. The police must make it clear, by word and action, that murder and mob violence will be strictly dealt with. Yet, the administration must also reckon with a new challenge: the use of social media, especially WhatsApp groups and forwards, to spread fear and panic. Responses such as surveillance and Internet shutdowns are not just impossible — in a free society, they are inadvisable. What is needed is an administration that reaches out to local communities to keep them in the loop in order to check trouble-makers — and that conveys sufficient good faith so individuals will trust it to keep the peace and sift real threats from mischievous rumours.
📰 A Bill that is causing worry
The what and why of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill
•It has been made clear that the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, will not be tabled in Parliament in the monsoon session, and that the Joint Parliamentary Committee examining it will be holding wider consultations.
•The Bill was introduced in July 2016, and referred to a parliamentary committee.
•The Bill’s objective is to remove the tag of ‘illegal migrants’ from members of minority communities — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians and Parsis — from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, who have entered the country without legal documentation or whose documents have expired. The idea is to make them eligible to apply for Indian citizenship.
•If the Bill is passed, these individuals will be eligible for citizenship by naturalisation. Under the present law, citizenship by naturalisation requires applicants to have stayed in the country for 11 years of the previous 14 years, and throughout the last 12 months. The proposed amendment reduces the residency requirement to six years, besides the last 12 months. The amendment will not cover Muslims, who form the majority in these three countries.
•Opposition to the Bill is strong in Assam, where there is fear that non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh will become Indian citizens. There is also an apprehension that this would be in conflict with the ongoing exercise to update the National Register of Citizens in Assam, for which the cut-off date is March 24, 1971.
•The Bill is also seen as discriminatory in some quarters as it does not cover Muslim sects fleeing persecution from dominant sections in these countries.
•The Bill’s statement of objects and reasons argues that the aim is to help persons of Indian origin, including those from these minority communities in the three countries, who are unable to produce proof of their Indian origin while applying for citizenship by registration. As naturalisation is their only means of acquiring citizenship, the government wants to reduce the residency requirement from 12 to seven years. The long waiting period in the present law would deny them “opportunities and advantages” that accrue to citizens, even though they are likely to stay in India permanently.
•Another feature of the proposed amendment is that it enables cancellation of the registration of any Overseas Citizen of India cardholder for violation of Indian law.
📰 World’s hungry population on the rise again, says UN report
Conflicts, climate change are main hurdles in meeting development goals
•The number of hungry people in the world has risen for the first time in more than a decade, according to a United Nations report released on Wednesday.
•There are now approximately 38 million more undernourished people in the world, rising from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, the year for which the latest statistics are available.
•According to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 2018 report, conflict is now one of the main drivers of food insecurity in 18 countries. “After a prolonged decline, world hunger appears to be on the rise again. Conflict, drought and disasters linked to climate change are among the key factors causing this reversal in progress,” said the report. Violent conflicts also led to the forced displacement of a record high 68.5 million in 2017.
Economic losses
•Noting the increasing impact of extreme events related to a changing climate, the report said economic losses attributed to disasters were estimated at over $300 billion in 2017. This is among the highest losses in recent years, owing to three major hurricanes affecting the United States of America and several countries across the Caribbean.
•While there is little country-specific data in the report, it does examine the performance of various regions in meeting the 17 SDGs, which were adopted by UN member nations in 2015. The deadline to meet them is 2030.
•South Asia, which includes India, has seen child marriage rates plunge, with a girl’s risk of getting married in childhood dropping by 40% from 2000 to 2017. On the other hand, water stress levels for many countries in the region are above 70%, indicating fast-approaching water scarcity. More than nine out of 10 people living in urban areas around the world are breathing polluted air, with southern Asia scoring the worst in this area. While electricity and sanitation deficits in south Asia are still poor, the report noted efforts are being made to close the gap.
Sense of urgency
•“With just 12 years left to the 2030 deadline, we must inject a sense of urgency,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in the foreword to the report. “Achieving the 2030 Agenda requires accelerated actions by countries along with collaborative partnerships among governments and stakeholders at all levels. This ambitious agenda necessitates profound change that goes beyond business as usual.”
📰 How the world explains football
The game’s potential was seen at Tehran’s Azadi stadium this week as the local council finally let women into the stands
•Writing in July 2014, moments after Germany beat Argentina in Rio de Janeiro to win the football World Cup, the then editor of The New Republic, and author of the acclaimed book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer, sounded notes of an impending disaster. “Vladimir Putin loomed at the center of the Maracanã today,” he wrote. “And in a way, he’s loomed over this whole past month of soccer. Russia will host the next tournament and then Qatar the one after that, and there was always the unspoken sense that this was the last of the great World Cups — a moment of relative innocence before the fall.”
•Foer, however, wasn’t the only doomsayer. Many others pointed to the apparently depraved thinking in awarding the World Cup to Russia and, in particular, to Qatar in 2022 as signalling the end of the joie de vivre that the tournament once brought with it. “In four years we’ll be in Russia and it’s hard to imagine that will be much fun,” wrote the Cambridge University professor David Runciman in the London Review of Books.
•But now here we are in Russia. And the fun, it appears, has gone nowhere. To the fan, each match has brought with it a certain thrill, and each contest has been imbued with an inner drama, with a narrative that in many of our eyes lends to the World Cup a sense of the ethereal. Take Egypt’s tryst with this year’s tournament. In the lead up to its first match against Uruguay, all the talk surrounded the question of whether its star player Mohammed Salah, who had injured a shoulder while playing the European Champions League final in May, would be fit to start the country’s first World Cup match since 1990. As Salma Islam wrote in The Guardian, Salah’s magic has “transcended the pitch.” He’d managed the impossible, unifying Egyptians of all class and political proclivity — a staggering achievement when one considers the chaos that’s afflicted the country since its 2011 uprising. The country’s ouster from the tournament may devastate its fans’ dreams, but perhaps the World Cup can provide the nation a catharsis that only a sporting loss can deliver.
Potential for change
•International football, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote of sport in the early periods of the 20th century, can be an “expression of national conflict, and the sportsmen representing their nation or their state, primarily expressions of their imagined community.” There is more than a kernel of truth to this even today, so much so that a win on the field can occasionally even represent a geopolitical victory of sorts. But football’s potential for change goes further than simple concerns over soft international power, exemplified best perhaps by the protests of a group of Iranian women who unfurled banners in the arena in St. Petersburg during their country’s match against Morocco. They were protesting the ban in Iran on women watching the sport at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran. In the months before the World Cup, an all-women reggae band “Abjeez” had even called on Iranian men to lend their support to the movement: “The empty seat by your side is my place. To have me by your side is your right. It’s my right! Consider me a part of you. I am your equal,” the song’s opening lyrics read. The Ayatollah’s diktats have been breached in the past, not always bringing with it tangible change. But this time Tehran’s local council granted permission to women to enter the Azadi Stadium to watch Iran’s second match in the tournament, against Spain, albeit on a giant TV screen. We cannot yet be sure whether this will herald a larger change, but sport, and football in particular, certainly serve as a special engine for social movement in Iran.
Why it means so much
•The World Cup matters, as Musa Okwonga wrote in The New York Times, because it’s not just about football but about everything, about “politics, economics, social issues,” about “race and class and history” and “about corruption and nationalism, fear and joy.” But it also matters because it is about football. At its heart the sport represents a thing of pure beauty. The Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits aptly defined games as a “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” In football, these obstacles are especially arduous. When a great goal is scored, therefore, it resonates almost mythically with us. This grace inherent at the core of the sport has been typified no better recently than in Portugal’s draw last week against Spain, in a match that involved a clash of two contrasting styles, between Spain’s clever and dazzling patterns of passing and movement and Portugal’s counter-attacking approach, relying heavily on its virtuoso footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
•In the final minute of the match, with Portugal trailing 2-3, Ronaldo won himself a free kick at the edge of the box. What followed was a familiar routine: “When Cristiano poses for a free kick, he readies himself by taking those few theatrical paces back — signalling to all that something special is about to happen,” Mexican journalist Juan Villoro wrote in 2016. “And then he stands, legs astride resembling a statute of himself. It’s a pose Apollo might have pulled off, had he simply practised more.” But on 44 previous occasions spread over three past World Cups Ronaldo’s efforts at scoring directly from a free kick had come a cropper. Yet, here, on a hat trick, there seemed an unerring inevitability about the result and, sure enough, within moments of taking his position, he curled the ball past the wall set by Spain’s goalkeeper David De Gea into the back of the net. An un-saveable shot if ever there was one. It was a moment of such sublime brilliance and skill that, at the instant when it happened, it unravelled the game for us, purging it of all its ugliness.
•Now, not everyone finds Ronaldo especially likeable. When he enters a football pitch he seems to indulge in his own project of ostentation. He gives us an impression that the game merely exists to serve his greatness. Yet, for many of us fans the virtues of his genius invariably tend to veil his narcissism. At the centre of celebrating Ronaldo there lies, therefore, an absurdity, perhaps not dissimilar to the paradox of celebrating the World Cup: that it is possible for beauty to exist within structures that we might otherwise find indecorous or even unpardonable.
Everything's possible
•There’s little question that professional football does everything possible, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it, to “castrate the energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites.” Russia isn’t going to be the end of the fun, and indeed neither is Qatar. When America hosts the World Cup in 2026 (curiously, we’ve seen little questioning of the U.S.’s own appalling human rights record) together with Canada and Mexico, the football will remain as alluring as ever. But it must still matter to us now that FIFA is a hugely corrupt organisation, that while its leadership has changed hands its wicked culture has remained unaltered. If we want to elevate football into something beyond the merely beautiful, to something truly transcendent, we’ll have to help rid the game of the many evils wrought by its present administrators.
📰 Dangerous spiral: on global trade war
There will be no winner in the ongoing global trade war
•The global trade war is hotting up as major economies continue to impose tariffs on each other. India is the latest to join the tit-for-tat battle by slapping tariffs as high as 50% on a list of 30 goods imported from the U.S. Earlier this week, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to frame new tariffs on $200-billion worth of Chinese imports. This was in retaliation to tariffs on $50- billion worth in American goods imposed by China last week in response to Mr. Trump’s earlier round of tariffs on Chinese goods. The first shot in the spiralling trade war was fired by the U.S. in March when Mr. Trump unveiled tariffs to discourage the import of steel and aluminium into the country. The latest round of tariffs imposed by the U.S. will be the highest in terms of the value of goods. In all, U.S. tariffs will now affect Chinese goods worth $450 billion — to put this in perspective, total Chinese imports into the U.S. last year were worth around $500 billion. The European Union also joined the trade war this month, imposing tariffs on $3.3 billion of American goods. While the India-U.S. tariff tiff could escalate, the amounts being discussed right now are minuscule compared to those under threat in the unfolding U.S.-China situation or even the spat between the U.S. and the EU. India’s notification to the WTO says that U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium would cost India $241 million, and that the tariffs imposed on the U.S. would bring in a commensurate amount. It has also indicated its preference to deal with the issue through dialogue, and not “measures and counter-measures”.
•For long, global financial markets largely ignored risks of an all-out trade war among major economies, but things are changing quickly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by as much as 1.6% on Tuesday, while the Shenzhen Composite Index was down 5.8% for the day. This fresh round of volatility suggests investors may be beginning to take threats of a trade war more seriously. The fact is that all sides engaged in a trade war eventually lose. The longer it goes on, the greater the cost as growth slows down under the increasing burden of taxes. The only gainers in a trade war will be special interest groups, such as the U.S. steel industry, which also happens to be a major vote bank for Mr. Trump. Even retaliatory tariffs aimed at pushing back the U.S. may only perpetuate the vicious negative-sum game instead of bringing the war to an end. Mr. Trump’s rejection of the G-7 communique that endorsed a “rules-based trading system” for the world suggests there may be no offer of truce from his side any time soon. Nevertheless, global powers must try their best to bring an end to the ongoing trade war before it gets out of hand.
