📰 Accept gay relationships, says SC judge
•Public acceptance of people in gay relationships will help meet health concerns and control the spread of HIV, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud of the Supreme Court told lawyers who argued in support of criminalising homosexuality on Tuesday.
•Same sex couples living in denial with no access to medical care were more prone to contracting and spreading sexually transmitted diseases, Justice Chandrachud observed. “All suppression is wrong.”
•Justice Chandrachud, who is part of the five-judge Bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra hearing a plea to strike down Section 377 that criminalises gay sex even if it is between consenting adults, was reacting to arguments that homosexual behaviour leads to spread of HIV.
•“The cause of sexually transmitted diseases is not sexual intercourse, but unprotected sexual intercourse. A village woman may get the disease from her husband, who is a migrant worker. This way would you now want to make sexual intercourse itself a crime?” Justice Chandrachud asked lawyers supporting Section 377.
📰 A review of Mandela’s legacy
He expanded our capacity to rethink politics in terms of empathy, forgiveness, and values
•Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Nelson Mandela was a man who cherished the ideal of a free society all his life; an ideal that as he proclaimed at his trial in Pretoria, in April 1964, he hoped to live for, but if need be, die for.
•During his lifetime, Mandela dedicated himself to the freedom struggle of the African people, and in doing so, fought against White and Black domination in South Africa. But more than anything else, he fought for democracy as a plural society in which all races, languages and opinions could live together in harmony, and with equal opportunity.
•However, what Nelson Mandela, as a political and moral leader, made possible for humanity was to extend and expand our capacity to rethink politics in terms of an ethics of empathy, a politics of forgiveness, and a revolution of values. As such, he was not necessarily, as he proclaimed later, “an ordinary man who became a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.” Truly speaking, South Africa’s transition to democracy, under the leadership of Mandela, was a great work of political creativity and moral wisdom. The two noted definitions of a human being — by Aristotle — that he is a political being and a being endowed with speech, supplement each other in Mandela’s anti-apartheid practice of freedom. What Mandela understood through his life experience was that freedom cannot be speechless, while violence is incapable of speech. That such an outspokenness (what the Greeks called parrhesia) must be intimately connected with the ideal of freedom seems to be true in the legendary life of Mandela. His life experience speaks clearly for itself: the transformation of Mandela and that of the South African society went hand in hand.
Political stirrings
•Mandela was born a century ago in a world where outspokenness was not practised among Blacks in South Africa. “We were meant to learn through imitation and emulation, not through asking questions,” he wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. While at the University of Fort Hare, surprisingly, and in contrast to other students, Mandela’s commitment to African politics was much more undecided and uncertain. There were many conflicting interpretations in relation to the early stages of Mandela’s life, but all his biographers agree that the important development in his political life began after his arrival in Johannesburg. At this point, Mandela put his rural experience in Transkei behind him and made up his mind to engage himself in politics.
•Interestingly, his political future as a national leader was established and solidified by two facts: the bus boycott in the 1940s in Alexandra and his meeting with Walter Sisulu, who was an African nationalist. “Walter’s house in Orlando,” Mandela wrote later, “was a Mecca for activists and ANC members.” These two influences drove Mandela to form the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League in 1944. However, the young Mandela proved to be a much more inflexible Africanist than many of his colleagues in the Youth League. Mandela observes, in Conversations with Myself, “I must be frank and tell you that when I look back at some of my early writings and speeches I am appalled by their pedantry, artificiality and lack of originality.”
•In a sense, his political lifestyle and thinking did not really start to evolve before the 1950s. It is after he established a legal practice in 1952, with fellow lawyer and ANC executive member Oliver Tambo, that his self-confidence grew, in turn changing his lifestyle and his political leadership.
•The next two turning points in his personal life and his political struggle were his marriage with Winnie Madikizela, and the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), when a hundred African demonstrators were killed, and both the ANC and the Pan-African Congress were banned. Mandela decided to go underground and create a new armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). In the eyes of Mandela, the choice of turning the ANC into a violent organisation was to acquire the best hope of reconciliation afterwards. Nevertheless, he was the first to criticise this decision of his in the mid-1970s. Mandela was not a direct actor in any of the non-lethal acts of sabotage, but he was not followed in his decision by some influential members of the ANC such as Oliver Tambo. In any case, Mandela’s clandestine travels within and outside South African territory ended in his arrest on August 5, 1962 at Howick.
•At the famous Rivonia trial, Mandela insisted on the ANC’s heritage of non-violence and racial harmony and delivered his historical speech which was received with empathy around the world. On June 12, 1964, Judge de Wet pronounced life imprisonment for Mandela and his fellow prisoners. Mandela spent 27 years and six months in captivity, with more than 17 years of this sentence on Robben Island as the prisoner 466/64. However, as he wrote later, prison gave him plenty of time “to stand back and look at the entire movement from a distance”. He revised his views and values while keeping his moral authority and his capacities for political judgment.
His relevance
•Nelson Mandela left Victor Verster prison on February 11, 1990, but his march to freedom was not yet over. The second memorable moment of his life and that of South African nation was when he became, in 1994, South Africa’s first democratic and Black African President. “Madiba”, as Mandela was known by his clan name, accomplished his heroic status by meeting the challenges of his life and those of his time. As an activist, as a prisoner or as a leader in government, he remained intensely conscious of his moral and political responsibilities as a man in search for excellence. Even after his death, on December 5, 2013, he has remained a global figure with a legacy — of a politics of excellence. If we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth today, it is not because we take leave of his time and his struggle but mainly because his politics of excellence and his moral capital are more relevant than ever to all those who continue to believe in the non-violent pursuit of public happiness and in peace-making governance.
📰 Make lynching a separate offence, SC tells Parliament
Bench terms killings ‘horrendous mobocracy’; tells govt. to take preventive steps
•Asking whether the people of India have lost their tolerance for one another, the Supreme Court on Tuesday condemned the recent spate of lynchings as “horrendous acts of mobocracy” and told Parliament to make lynching a separate offence.
•The 45-page judgment, by a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, wonders whether the “populace of a great Republic like ours has lost the values of tolerance to sustain a diverse culture?”
•“The recent litany of spiralling mob violence, their horror, the grim and gruesome scenes of lynchings are made worse by the apathy of the bystanders, numbness of mute spectators, inertia of the police and, finally, the grandstanding of the incident by the perpetrators of the crimes on social media,” Chief Justice Misra wrote.
‘Beware of the monster’
•Describing lynchings and mob violence as “creeping threats”, the court warned that the rising wave of frenzied mobs — fed by fake news, self-professed morality and false stories — would consume the country like a “typhoon-like monster.”
•It said the primary obligation of the government is to protect all individuals irrespective of race, caste, class or religion. “Crime knows no religion and neither the perpetrator nor the victim can be viewed through the lens of race, caste, class or religion,” the court observed.
•It directed several preventive, remedial and punitive measures to deal with lynching and mob violence. It ordered the Centre and the States to implement the measures and file compliance reports within the next four weeks. Lynchings cannot become the order of the day, the court said.
•The judgment refers to submissions by senior advocate Indira Jaising, for petitioner Tehseen Poonawalla, about self-styled vigilantes brazenly targeting Dalits and minority community members in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi.
📰 Trump faces fire for Putin summit, comments
Putin summit was better than NATO meet: Trump
•President Donald Trump is in the eye of a storm in the U.S for blaming American security agencies and praising Russian President Vladimir Putin after a summit meeting between the two in Helsinki, Finland on Monday. A vast array of mainstream political leaders and strategic commentators have accused the President of compromising American national interest.
•Former CIA Director John Brennan denounced Mr. Trump’s approach to Russiaand Mr. Putin as “treasonous.” “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???” Mr. Brennan posted on Twitter. Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said: “In my almost four decades with national defense starting in the Pentagon under Ronald Reagan, I never saw or imagined so uneven a handover of American security interests and principles with nothing in return at a meeting. It was like watching the destruction of a cathedral.”
•The mainstream commentary on the Trump-Putin summit has particularly focussed on the President’s refusal to endorse the claim by American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S presidential election to help his victory. “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Mr. Trump had said in response to a question on the issue, during a joint press conference with Mr. Putin.
•A section of experts that are broadly supportive of better ties between the U.S and Russia also found this remark over the top. William Tobey, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University said: “Better U.S.-Russian cooperation on a host of issues — including fighting nuclear terrorism and proliferation — would be a good thing, as President Trump rightly notes. …..This willful obliviousness to hard evidence of Russian cyber attacks amounts to failure to execute his office and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
•As the media trained its guns on Mr. Trump, a rare voice of support for him came from Republican Senator Rand Paul, not usually a supporter of the President. “We must find a way to keep our historic allies, while realizing that threatening Russia through NATO expansion is not the answer,” Mr. Paul said. “While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia. Sadly, it is not being reported that way - the Fake News is going Crazy!,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
•Mr. Trump has championed better ties with Russia amid an investigation into allegations that his campaign was aided by Kremlin. While Russia is widely seen as America’s primary rival by its professional strategists, support for better ties are on the rise among Mr. Trump’s supporters. According to a Gallop poll last week, 40% of Republicans say Russia is an ally or friendly, up from 22% in 2014. Among Democrats, 25% say the same compared to 28% in 2014. Among all Americans, 31% say Russia is an ally or friendly to the U.S.
•While the TV noise has been overwhelmingly against any rapprochement with Russia, some experts are more optimistic about potential of the Helsinki summit. Matthew Bunn, Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Centre said: “Despite President Trump’s blame-America-equally press conference blunders, the Trump-Putin summit may have opened windows of opportunity for some areas of cooperation that would serve American and world security interests. Both presidents emphasized the importance of working together to stop jihadist terrorism, stop nuclear proliferation, and control the dangers of existing nuclear arsenals, with President Putin calling for extending the New START nuclear agreement and expressing a willingness to address the serious problem of INF Treaty compliance. The two presidents have asked their security experts to follow up, potentially opening paths to address both terrorist and nuclear dangers. The United States has to be able to confront Russia when needed while simultaneously cooperating with Russia where our interests align.”
📰 RTI Bill to be placed in monsoon session
Opposition fears dilution bid
•The Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2018, which proposes to give the Centre the power to set the tenure and salaries of State and Central Information Commissioners, will be introduced in the Lok Sabha in the monsoon session beginning on Wednesday.
•The Bill is being opposed by several Opposition political parties and RTI activists, who warn that the amendments will dilute the RTI law and compromise the independence of the Information Commissions.
•The current law gives Information Commissioners a tenure of five years and salaries which match those of Election Commissioners. The Bill -— which was only circulated to lawmakers on Tuesday morning — seeks to amend that.
•“The functions being carried out by the Election Commission of India and the central and state Information Commissions are totally different,” says the statement of objects and reasons attached to the amendment Bill.
‘Differing mandates’
•It argues that while the Election Commission is a constitutional body, the Information Commissions are statutory bodies, and their differing mandates mean that “their status and service conditions need to be rationalised accordingly.”
•Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), termed the move ridiculous.
•“The decision to give the Information Commissioners a high stature and protected tenures is meant to ensure their independence, and was approved by Parliament when the law was passed,” Ms. Bhardwaj told The Hindu. “This is simply a way of giving the Central government a greater grip on Information Commissioners, who have been giving orders which the government finds inconvenient.”
Protest march
•NCPRI plans to hold a protest march in the capital and nationwide agitations against the Bill on the opening day of the monsoon session. Several opposition parties, including Congress, CPI, CPI (M), TMC and RJD, plan to join in a Jan Manch on Wednesday.
•“The amendments are one more Modi nail in the RTI coffin,” Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said.
•The amendments “will completely destroy the autonomy of Information Commissions...and fundamentally weaken the institution”, said a statement by NCPRI. It added that the Centre “usurping” the power to decide the tenure and salaries of State Information Commissioners raised key issues of federalism.
•The NCPRI has also protested the fact that the secrecy around the amendments has prevented any meaningful debate or public engagement with the proposed changes. RTI requests asking about the content of the amendments over the past month went unanswered. “It’s ironic that the process of amending a law meant to bring transparency itself lacks transparency”, said Ms. Bhardwaj.
📰 Activists oppose draft anti-trafficking Bill
Say it will criminalise sex workers and transgenders
•The proposed anti-trafficking Bill likely to be tabled in Parliament during the Monsoon Session will criminalise sex workers and transgenders, according to activists who have appealed to parliamentarians that the draft legislation be sent to the Standing Committee.
•Activists as well as sex workers have also appealed to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, which drafted the legislation, that the Bill should explicitly state that consenting adult workers will not be penalised under the new law.
•“When a law prescribes life imprisonment for trafficking leading to AIDS or begging or injecting of hormones, it will ultimately lead to criminalisation of trans-identities,” said LGBTQ rights activist Vikramaditya Sahai at a press conference on Tuesday.
•He added that the law would also lead to a multi-fold increase in violence against sex workers.
•“If a sex worker is violated, she won’t be able to go to court because she will be immediately understood as exploited, trafficked and sent to rehabilitation. The law will lead to increase in violence against sex workers and silence them,” he added.
•A sex worker at the press meet argued that forceful rehabilitation as laid down under the proposed legislation would uproot women like her and deprive them of their source of livelihood.
‘A roadblock’
•Dr. S. Jana, who was part of a Supreme Court-appointed committee in the Buddhadeb Karmakar Vs State of West Bengal on rehabilitation of sex workers, said the Bill went against the basic tenets of rehabilitation as it did not distinguish between trafficking and sex work and failed to assure dignity to consenting adult sex workers. He said it would also be a roadblock in HIV prevention.
•Activist Aarthi Pai also argued that certain clauses in the Bill endanger freedom of expression. She said Section 36, 39 (2) and 41 which pertain to advertisements or material that promote trafficking as well as solicitation through electronic modes lend themselves to misuse.
•The Union Cabinet approved the draft Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill 2018. The Bill which could not be tabled during the Budget session because of continued disruptions deals with trafficking and aggravated forms of trafficking.
•While the former category of crimes carry a jail term of seven to 10 years, the latter carry a punishment of 10 years in jail to life imprisonment. Aggravated offences include trafficking for the purpose of forced labour, begging, trafficking by administering chemical substance or hormones on a person for the purpose of early sexual maturity, or where a survivor contracts HIV.
•Earlier this month, nearly 4,300 sex workers wrote a letter to Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi appealing her to ensure that the new law does not lead to their incarceration.
📰 Decoding Trump’s attack on Europe
His incendiary tour of the continent seeks to reverse the gains Europe has achieved over the last 70 years
•U.S. President Donald Trump’s incendiary tour of Europe has justly generated extensive coverage for his disregard for diplomatic niceties and attacks on his allies, especially on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May, both of whom are facing stiff domestic opposition. Yet, mainstream commentaries on Mr. Trump’s attacks on the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) do not place the trans-Atlantic relationship in the broader historical context.
•In the first instance, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. promoted economic integration among its European allies as an essential condition for the post-war revival of world trade. At war’s end, wealth had become concentrated in the new superpower — it accounted for 48% of world industrial capacity and 70% of gold reserves. With the demobilisation of some 10 million soldiers in the U.S., the shift to a peacetime economy needed allies to open their markets to U.S. products and investments. Its European allies were too poor to provide a market and the notorious ‘meat-axe’ 80th Congress unwilling to undertake a programme for European reconstruction.
•In this context, the U.K. government’s admission in February 1947 that it could no longer intervene in the Greek Civil War provided an opportune moment for U.S. President Harry Truman to follow Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to “scare the hell out of the American people” by manufacturing the Cold War. A Congress that was not willing to aid Clement Attlee’s “socialist welfare state” was eager to rebuild Western Europe and Japan as levees to defend the ‘free world’ against ‘godless communism’.
•Along with NATO founded in 1949 was the Marshall Plan instituted in 1948. It was innovative not because of its size — $17 billion over four years was not substantially more than the $9 billion the U.S. had channelled to its European allies in the previous two years — but because it pressured West European states to reduce tariffs between themselves and to standardise regulations to facilitate the creation of a market viable enough to reap the economies of scale and for U.S. corporations to invest in the continent. This trans-Atlantic U.S. corporate expansion was welcomed by European governments and trade unions as these were the only entities with the funds to create employment.
Post-war reconstruction
•A trans-Atlantic military alliance and European economic integration were thus the twin projects of a successful post-war reconstruction. Economic integration proceeded rapidly over the last 40 odd years, with the European Union (EU) becoming the largest economy on the planet and thereby threatening the U.S.
•At the same time, the rationale for the NATO military alliance — to protect Western Europe from Soviet expansion and to tie Germany to its neighbours — has largely evaporated with the breakup of the USSR and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.
The Russian angle
•In the context of the current outcry among NATO member states about the Russian annexation of Crimea from the Ukraine, it is important to recall that U.S. President George H.W. Bush and other leaders had assured Russia in 1991 that the trans-Atlantic alliance would not extend beyond East Germany’s borders. Then when Russia was immensely weakened in the 1990s, U.S. President Bill Clinton led the charge to invite states in Central and Eastern Europe into the alliance. It was this expansion that led to a new confrontation with Russia once it had stabilised itself under President Vladimir Putin.
•Nevertheless, there is clearly no Russian threat to Europe. Even in the case of the Ukraine, as Steven Cohen, emeritus professor of Russian studies at New York University, has argued, the crisis was precipitated in 2014 when the EU pressured the Ukrainian government to sign an agreement that would have disadvantaged Russia. When then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych hesitated, he was overthrown by EU- and U.S.-supported demonstrators even though he had signed an agreement brokered by three EU foreign ministers the previous day to form a coalition government. It was this march of NATO to the frontiers of Russia that provoked Mr. Putin to intervene in the Ukraine.
Recasting security
•Far from Russia posing a threat to the Western alliance, the major source of destabilisation to the EU comes from the flow of migrants from Africa. In this context, it is not higher military spending by member states that is crucial but the provision of aid. Members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had pledged to contribute 0.7% of their GDP as aid to the poorest countries. Germany and the U.K. spend 0.66% and 0.7%, respectively, of their GDP in aid while the U.S. spends a mere 0.18%; Mr. Trump is threatening to slash even that by a third. Spending on aid, especially to African countries, will help stem the tide of refugees coming to Europe far more effectively than policing the Mediterranean.
•In this context, Mr. Trump’s blistering attack on European states for not meeting their military spending obligations is misplaced. Not only does he fail to recognise that their military spending has risen since 2014 when they agreed to raise their military spending to 2% of their GDP by 2024 but also that European states are not positioned to be global powers. Unlike the U.S. which is bordered by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Europe has no need for navies to patrol distant oceans and match the U.S. in defence spending. Moreover, rather than spending massively on defence as the U.S. has opted to do, European states provide their citizens with health care, education, and other welfare benefits.
•Mr. Trump’s support for Brexit and his humiliating undermining of Ms. May, his outrageous comments on Germany being beholden to Russia and on Ms. Merkel in particular, and his alleged offer of a trade deal to French President Emmanuel Macron if France leaves the EU are all designed to break up the organisation so that he can deal from a position of strength with small states. As Britain’s difficulties in exiting the union indicates, supply chains are so integrated across the continent that breaking up the EU would have disastrous consequences for production for all its member states and may even risk a global economic downturn.
•In short, what Mr. Trump is seeking to do is to reverse the gains Europe has achieved over the last 70 years and make it beholden once again to the U.S.
📰 Counter-drone strategy for country’s airports is ready
•Aviation security watchdog BCAS has finalised a strategy to neutralise drones near airports, with the government set to unveil a framework to regulate unmanned aircraft systems in the country.
•The counter-drone plan prepared by a committee headed by Director General of BCAS (Bureau of Civil Aviation Security) Kumar Rajesh Chandra has proposed neutralising drones through a “soft kill” approach which will include entrapping or jamming drones instead of destroying them.
•The strategy deals with drones operating near aerodromes as the body is mandated to ensure aviation security. The Ministry of Home Affairs may prepare a separate plan to deal with drone attacks in sensitive zones such as Parliament, said a government official.
•The official added that a “soft kill” approach instead of a hard kill approach has been suggested because destroying a drone with a payload of explosives or biochemical will result in an attack and serve the purpose of their handlers. Therefore, the official said, the best approach is to entrap them and not destroy them.
•The Ministry of Civil Aviation had released draft rules for unmanned aircraft systems in November last year and proposed to ban their operation within 5 km radius of an airport and 50 km from an international border. It also barred drones within 5 km radius of Vijay Chowk in New Delhi.
•The BCAS will now conduct a trial to examine effective technology to neutralise drones, following which it will prepare technical specifications.
📰 Inflation worries
Wholesale Price Index data for June warrant a closer macro-economic scrutiny
•The Wholesale Price Index as a measure of price gains is back in the national spotlight. The latest data, which show a sharp surge in wholesale inflation in June, to a 54-month high of 5.77%, are a cause for concern. While the WPI is no longer the primary focus in the Reserve Bank of India’s inflation-targeting approach to monetary policy formulation — having ceded that role to the Consumer Price Index — the gauge remains economically significant nevertheless. The measure of wholesale price gains is the key deflator in computing the Index of Industrial Production and is also used to deflate Gross Domestic Product at current prices. A detailed look at WPI data for June reveals several pressure points warranting closer macro-economic scrutiny. Not only have rising crude oil prices persistently fanned inflation — by contributing significantly to a 214 basis-points month-on-month jump in June for the primary articles group — they have also led to rapidly accelerating double-digit price gains in the fuel and power group. Inflation in the fuel and power group has quickened every month since February’s 4.55% print, to 16.18% in June. Food articles are another source of worry, especially the prices of vegetables and the politically sensitive duo of potatoes and onions. While inflation in vegetable prices more than tripled in pace from May’s 2.51% to 8.12% in June, the annual gains in potato prices have been in a steep upward spiral for five straight months and exceeded 99% in June. And while inflation in onion prices at the wholesale level has cooled appreciably from January’s 194% level, at 18.25% the rate is still far from reassuring.
•Manufactured products — the third key group-level constituent of the WPI with the largest weight of 64.2% — are also signalling a worrying wider inflationary trend. This could feed through to consumer price gains, which touched a five-month high of 5% in June. The headline inflation in this group, spanning 564 items, ticked up for a third consecutive month in June to 4.17%. Manufacture of basic metals that includes a range of goods from alloy steel castings, stainless steel tubes to copper plates and aluminium sheets — products that find diverse applications across multiple end-use industries — posted headline inflation of 17.34%, an increase from the 15.79% reading in May. To be sure, the price gains have to be seen from the perspective of an unfavourable base effect — WPI inflation in June 2017 was just 0.9%. But policymakers can ill afford to ease their vigil, especially given the government’s decision to increase the minimum support price for kharif crops and uncertainty about the spatial impact of this year’s monsoon rains on overall agricultural output. After all, a sustained trend of high WPI inflation will not only add pressure on the RBI to raise interest rates, but could also potentially undermine the pace of GDP growth.
📰 Goa’s glass problem
It needs a better waste management system, not knee-jerk bans
•There are three key arguments made in favour of the recent proposal to ban beer bottles in Goa. One, most bottlers do not collect empty bottles. Two, shards of glass injure people at beaches; and three, the staff at waste facilities injure themselves. It is important to debunk these arguments if Goa is to truly become garbage free by 2020.
•The fact that most bottle-makers do not collect empty bottles is being used as a reason to ban glass bottles. This indicates the government’s unwillingness to force bottlers to do the right thing. If one company has a collection facility — and it does — it begs the question of why others can’t have the same. Are companies, in an effort to reduce costs, shirking their social responsibilities? The government can induce companies to initiate bottle collection schemes and ask companies to include all types of outlets, and consumers, in such schemes. A refundable deposit should be levied on the outlets and on the customers to encourage return of bottles. The deposit charged on the outlets should be the same as that they charge on customers.
Providing better infrastructure
•Second, if shards of glass are injuring people on the beach, this is a symptom of lack of civic sense and the absence of an effective waste management system. One way to prevent such injuries is to prevent drinking in the open, but that may be considered too restrictive in a tourism-driven economy such as Goa.Instead, there is need to bring behavioural change and provide better infrastructure to collect waste. A proper policing system should be put in place to deter, sensitise and punish people who litter.
•Third, there are two major reasons for avoidable but hazardous injuries of staff at waste facilities. The first is that waste is not segregated at source. Unsegregated waste not only hides sharp material but can also be a source of pathogens. On the other hand, waste segregation enhances the potential of the waste material to be reused and recycled.
•The second reason for injury is inadequate protective equipment for personnel. Waste handlers usually do not use gloves and if they are given gloves, these are usually the rubber ones that easily get torn. However, there are special gloves for handling waste which are not just stronger but also provide better grip. Workers in waste collection facilities need to be provided such gloves.
•The question that Goans must ask themselves is whether they are waging a war against waste or battling a mindset. The former seeks easy but unsustainable alternatives that will eventually magnify current problems. The latter seeks a collective solution which could ultimately clear the path to a garbage-free Goa by 2020.
