📰 Layers of protection: on changes in anti-corruption law
Protecting honest public servants is important; so are anti-corruption efforts
•The amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, adopted recently by both Houses of Parliament, are a mixed bag. Moves to make changes in this law, aimed at combating corruption in government, were initiated during the UPA’s second term in office and largely centred on the misuse of one provision — Section 13 (1)d. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had criticised this section, under which public servants are culpable for securing a pecuniary advantage for another “without any public interest”, for ignoring a foundational principle of criminal law: mens rea. This resulted in many honest officials being prosecuted even when they gained nothing and merely exercised their power or discretion in favour of someone. Insofar as it had a chilling effect on governance and deterred bold decision-making, the amended form may have a liberating effect on honest officials. Besides, it is more concise and restricts criminal misconduct to two offences: misappropriating or converting to one’s own use property entrusted to a public servant or is in his control, and amassing unexplained wealth. There was concern initially with the wording, “intentionally enriches himself illicitly during the period of his office”, as it raised a doubt whether the ‘intention’ to amass wealth would also have to be proved. Now an explanation has been added that a person “shall be presumed to have intentionally enriched himself” if he cannot account for his assets through known sources of income.
•By making citizens liable for offering a bribe to a public servant, the anti-corruption law has been brought in line with the UN Convention Against Corruption. The only exception to this rule is when one is forced to give a bribe. This exception kicks in only when the fact that one was forced to pay a bribe is reported to a law enforcement authority within seven days. The penal provision can empower people by allowing them to cite it to refuse to pay a bribe. At the same time, what happens when the police or any other agency refuses to register a complaint? People may be left in the lurch with no redress. Further, it may render them vulnerable to threats from unscrupulous public servants who collect money to speed up public services but do not deliver. The most unacceptable change is the introduction of a prior approval norm to start an investigation. When a prior sanction requirement exists in law for prosecution, it is incomprehensible that the legislature should create another layer of protection in the initial stage of a probe. Public servants need to be protected against unfair prosecution, but a genuine drive against corruption needs a package of legislative measures. These should contain penal provisions, create an ombudsman in the form of a Lokpal or Lokayukta, as well as assure citizens of time-bound services and whistle-blower protection. Laws to fulfil these objectives are either not operational or are yet to materialise.
📰 Climb the escalator of reason
Our politicians and courts must avoid the language of retribution
•The Supreme Court’s recent order on mob lynching adjudicates as well as educates on India’s promise of secularism and the need for effective prevention in law and order. In his judgment, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra condemns “a reactionary retributive attitude transforming itself into dehumanisation of human beings”. The court also reposes faith in the rule of law. But the court’s criticism of its citizenry for dehumanising ‘the other’ may hold lessons for our political and judicial leadership too.
•The judgment endorses the belief that “it is the fear of law that prevents crimes”. However, effective policing of mob violence may not be the only cause for failure. Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon notes that when one’s perception of justice is combined with a lack of accountability, it creates ‘the other’ and allows for dehumanisation and violence. This dehumanisation is layered with de-individuation, or the inability to see the other beyond the wrong he or she may have committed, and the use of pejorative caricatures to refer to the other. When viewed in such a framework, dehumanisation explains how India’s expanding death penalty regime has moulded people’s perception of justice.
Talk of the death penalty
•The political class has shown increasing affinity for the death penalty. Earlier this month, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh suggested the death penalty for first-time drug offenders despite his earlier position that the death penalty is against basic human rights. The move betrays a lack of understanding of the complexity of drug dependence in individuals. Similarly, in 2016, the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar introduced the death penalty for illicit liquor trade without any evidence to suggest its efficacy. Earlier this year, BJP MP Subramanian Swamy moved, and then withdrew, a private member’s Bill in the Rajya Sabha for death penalty for cow slaughter, an act already disproportionately punishable by life imprisonment in Gujarat.
•More prominently, a Presidential ordinance was introduced by the Union government to impose the death penalty for the rape of girls under 12 years of age, in response to public dissatisfaction against the political shielding of suspects in separate incidents of rape in Kathua (Jammu and Kashmir) and Unnao (Uttar Pradesh). In doing so, the government contradicted its own stance before the Supreme Court when earlier this year it submitted that the death penalty could not be the solution for everything. The elements of dehumanisation are writ large in these impulsive policy decisions and pronouncements. Our political class has opted too often in the recent past to declare certain categories of criminals worth eliminating. The constant introduction of the same method to deal with a wide range of policy challenges has created a ‘perception of justice’ that equates retribution with respect for victims.
•Unfortunately, courts have often joined the chorus and actively sought and encouraged harsher punishments. This January, for instance, the Uttarakhand High Court recommended that the State introduce the death penalty for cases of child rape. The courts have in the recent past showcased language with helpless frustration. ‘Monstrous,’ ‘beastly,’ ‘diabolical’ and ‘unfathomable’ have been used to refer to offenders. This language is then read with approval across television studios in India, feeding the public with an idea of the other against whom violence is the only means of justice. Judicially expressed disgust does not aid in understanding crime, or preventing its recurrence.
•Even for crimes as heinous as child rape which require serious policy interventions, neither the court nor the Union government has defended the punishment of death beyond the simplistic ‘fear of the law’. The introduction of death penalty for non-homicidal crimes, unchecked by the court, inspires the state to enter into a unhealthy competition of symbolism, at the cost of regressing notions of justice in the public.
•The 2013 Justice Verma Committee’s restraint in not recommending the death penalty for rape, and the Law Commission’s recommendation to restrict the death penalty only to crimes against the state have been forgotten in this impassioned discourse. Dehumanisation is the outcome when the court calls upon the ‘collective conscience’ to justify the death penalty. As the court increases its reliance on retribution, societal standards and definitions of justice also change, making the demand of the collective a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Demonstrable rationality
•Justice Bhagwati, the lone dissenter in the Bachan Singh case (1980), which upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, opined that the right to life could not tolerate an infringement without demonstrable rationality. Rationality seems to suffer at the hands of retribution. Eradicating the evil-doer provides seductive comfort to the mob and the state. The court must resist being the avenger for society in favour of nurturing a culture where justice and retribution are not the same.
•The cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, identifies ‘the escalator of reason’ as a historical force, which has helped reduce violence in societies. For India’s criminal justice system to climb the escalator of reason, our political and judicial leadership need to create and preserve a culture of the dispassionate study of the human costs and benefits of retribution, no matter how serious the shock to our conscience.
📰 God cannot be privatised
Examining the implications of the observation in the Sabarimala case that a temple is not a private space
•A recent observation by the Chief Justice of India (CJI), Dipak Misra, while hearing the case relating to the ban on women aged 10 to 50 from entering the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, comes at an appropriate time, soon after the release of the contentious list of Institutions of Eminence by the government. Interestingly, many issues relating to access to temples are also relevant to a debate on the excessive privatisation of education. It will be useful to understand the implications of the claim that temples cannot be private places.
•The CJI observed that the temple draws funds from the Consolidated Fund, is a “public place of worship” and that there is “no concept of private mandirs”. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said that the “right to freely profess, practise and propagate religion” is a constitutional right. Although the final judgment has not yet been delivered, these observations are extremely important for a public discourse on this contentious topic.
Private and public
•In what sense is a temple not a private space? The argument that the temple takes public funds should be understood more broadly. There are many public institutions, including major scientific institutions and government buildings such as the legislatures, which subsist on public funds but do not allow everybody the right of entry into their premises. Moreover, there are temples (and other religious places of worship) which do not take government money. Can they claim that they are private?
•I do not think so, for two reasons. One, they are allowed to collect money from the public; and two, more importantly, they collect money in the name of various gods. Unlike a business transaction, which can be protected as private, this privilege cannot be extended to a place of worship primarily because the divine is not a commodity which can be transacted in any exclusive manner. Any demand for the right to privacy in a place of worship will ultimately imply the privatisation of god.
•The observations above link the right to worship to the right to enter a physical space. Why should this be the case for prayer but not for other public institutions? In the case of the Sabarimala temple, it is not just the link between the right to pray and the right to enter the temple space because the restriction is only applicable to menstruating women. Thus, the right is primarily the right of (possibly) menstruating women to enter the temple. This is not the same as the right to worship or even the right to enter a temple. It is more about not differentiating between menstruating and non-menstruating women in a public space and for a public activity.
•However, the interesting observation here is that temples are not private spaces. Just this remark alone is not enough since there are many public spaces which have restrictions on who can enter. So, what really is the implication of the claim that a temple is not a private space?
Land ownership and use
•This claim decouples the accepted norms of private land ownership from the use of that land. Let’s suppose that an individual buys a plot of land as a private property and then builds a temple within that property which is open to the public. How do the private rights of that individual get erased the moment a temple is built there? What is the conflicting relationship between the presence of a temple and the doctrines of private ownership?
•The clue to this conflict lies in a particular notion of god which is needed to understand the full implications of this relationship between god and privacy. This notion is that god is a public entity, the most public entity. God is the best example of the idea of ‘public’ since god is, by definition, accessible to all. Praying to god does not require entry permits or a license from anybody. This is only because god is, in principle, available to all on equal terms. God may be ‘housed’ in a temple (or any other place of worship) but cannot be imprisoned and restricted to that private space alone. It is the omnipresence of, and egalitarian access to, god that this observation rests upon, even if it is not declared in such a manner.
•A temple or any place of worship cannot claim a right to the deity who is being worshipped in that place, since the deity by definition is present to all at all other places. God is not an entity who can be privatised and put under the control of certain individuals or communities or some dominant males. Equivalently, god really has no privacy, nor can any human claim ‘copyright’ over their gods. Even rituals cannot be privatised and copyrighted since they are also done for god, a public being. In the case of the god of Sabarimala, he is worshipped in countless temples outside Sabarimala where women of the proscribed age group can enter. He is also worshipped by women of this age in their houses. Thus, all the arguments about celibacy invoked in this context are attempts to impose concepts of the private on a public being.
Redefining public
•Based on this argument, we can redefine ‘public’ in such a way that it can override the private. We are living at a time in which the private has entered most domains of the public, and, in doing so, has radically displaced the positive possibilities of the public. My argument that the temple is not a private space because of its dependence on the idea of god as the supreme ‘public entity’ has an important corollary. Other such public entities that are present within the confines of a private space also have the ‘right’ to dismantle the privacy of that place. If this is so, what other public entities can negate the privilege of the private?
•If there is one important idea similar to god and prayer, it is that of education. Like prayer, the right to basic education is also a constitutional right. It is not an accident that places of learning such as schools, colleges and universities are often referred to as temples of education. Education, like god, should be accessible to all, irrespective of gender, caste, class or any other obstacle. But what we have done is build private temples of education which are all about keeping some people out — the underprivileged. Hopefully, the public discussion around entry into Sabarimala will help open the doors to the temples of education to the millions who are denied that entry on so many counts. And if god should not be privatised, education, water and air, among other public goods, should also not be privatised.
📰 Keeping friends close
Empty American threats should not come in the way of India-Iran ties
•In a recent interview, former Vice-President Hamid Ansari said, “Our relationship with Iran has been built carefully by all past governments as Iran for us is not just an energy supplier… For us, Iran is a land power on the other side of Pakistan that provides us with an alternative route to Afghanistan.” Mr. Ansari, veteran diplomat and Ambassador to Iran in the 1990s, made these remarks in response to the threat by the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, that unless India drastically reduces its energy imports from Iran by November 4, it would be subject to American sanctions.
•Ms. Haley’s threat reflects the Trump administration’s hubris and is an insult to Indian sovereignty. More importantly, it is in direct conflict with India’s strategic interests in the region. Even during the heyday of the Central Treaty Organisation and the Regional Cooperation for Development, which counted both Iran and Pakistan as members, India was careful not to alienate Iran.
•The Shah visited India in 1969 and 1974. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Iran in 1974 following her Special Envoy P.N. Haksar’s visit to Iran in 1973 that successfully allayed the Shah’s fears that India wanted to dismember Pakistan in the wake of the Bangladesh War.
•The Iranian revolution of 1979 brought a sea change in Tehran’s foreign policy, which came to identify the U.S. as its principal adversary. Given Pakistan’s close relations with the U.S. following the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, the Iranian leadership was suspicious of Pakistan and its President. In a conversation with me in early 1981, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then Speaker of the Iranian Majlis, referred to Zia-ul-Haq, literally the “light of truth”, as Zia-ul-Batil meaning “the light of falsehood”.
•Unfortunately, India was unable to take full advantage of Iran’s new anti-Pakistan orientation despite repeated exhortations by the then Indian Ambassador to Tehran, Akbar Mirza Khaleeli, for several reasons. First, New Delhi was worried that increasing closeness with Tehran could provoke adverse reactions from the U.S., especially after Iranian students held American embassy staff hostage for months. Second, Indian policymakers were apprehensive of the Islamic content of the Iranian revolution. They were unable to decipher that this nomenclature meant very little as far as India-Iran relations were concerned and that Iran’s new policy of non-alignment converged with Indian stances in the region. As Rafsanjani pointed out, the only difference between the Indian and Iranian approach to non-alignment was that “for India it is a policy, for Iran it is a creed”.
•Recently, India-Iran relations have improved considerably because of growing energy and trade dependency and greater recognition on both sides of the conjunction of strategic interests. India should not allow relations with a potential regional ally to be disrupted by empty American threats.
📰 Govt. plans ‘ISRO-like’ ocean mission
₹8,000 crore proposal given to PMO for a revolution similar to space exploration
•Looking to emulate the success of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in designing and launching satellites, the Centre has drawn up a five-year, ₹8,000 crore plan to explore the deep recesses of the ocean.
•The Union Earth Sciences Ministry — tasked with coordinating the exercise — unveiled a blueprint of the ‘Deep Ocean Mission (DOM)’ on Friday.
•Among the key deliverables to achieve these goals are an offshore desalination plant that will work with tidal energy, and developing a submersible vehicle that can go to a depth of at least 6,000 metres with three people on board.
•“The mission proposes to explore the deep ocean similar to the space exploration started by ISRO about 35 years ago,” the report notes.
India’s share
•India has been allotted a site of 1,50,000 square kilometres in the Central Indian Ocean Basin (CIOB) by the UN International Sea Bed Authority for exploitation of polymetallic nodules (PMN). These are rocks scattered on the seabed containing iron, manganese, nickel and cobalt. “It is envisaged that 10% of recovery of that large reserve can meet the energy requirement of India for the next 100 years. It has been estimated that 380 million metric tonnes of polymetallic nodules are available at the bottom of the seas in the Central Indian Ocean,” the report adds. India’s Exclusive Economic Zone spreads over 2.2 million square kilometres and in the deep sea, lies “unexplored and unutilised.”
•Madhavan Rajeevan, Secretary, Earth Sciences Ministry, said he had outlined his plans to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
•The focus will be on technologies for deep-sea mining, underwater vehicles, underwater robotics and ocean climate change advisory services, among other aspects.
📰 Govt to roll out DigiYatra offering for air passengers soon
The facility will use digital technology to enhance air passenger experience all the way from ticket booking to airport entry check, security check and aircraft boarding.
•Having worked on the DigiYatra project for over a year, the Ministry of Civil Aviation is close to rolling out this service at airports in a few months, a senior union minister said.
•“We have this programme called DigiYatra, which hopefully will be introduced in a few months itself,” Suresh Prabhu, Union Minister for Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation said at the sidelines of GJEPC 44th Gem & Jewellery Awards in Mumbai on Saturday night.
•“(Under this) the moment you will enter the airport, your images will be captured and then you will be able to go through the full lifecycle of your travel in a seamless manner,” the minister said.
•The basic objective is to reduce queues at airports and bring efficiency to the boarding process. As the civil aviation sector has started growing by 20%, airport infrastructure needs to cope up.
•Clarifying that the facility is in conformity with privacy guidelines of the Supreme Court, Mr. Prabhu said, “ It is not just Aadhaar (based). It is beyond Aadhaar. Once you establish your identity you will be able to pass through the entire lifecycle of the travel and this facility is optional.”
•“If somebody does not want to disclose identity, there will be separate provision for them. So we are strongly following Supreme Court’s guidelines. DigiYatra is a unique system which we will be introducing in a few months,” the minister said.
•He added, “Currently we are undertaking some trials and it has been tested successfully. In security we are also thinking to bring some changes. It can happen in the proper manner at the same time speed can be increased.”
•DigiYatra is an industry-led initiative coordinated by the Ministry of Civil Aviation in line with Digital India programme. It aims to transform the flying experience for passengers and position Indian Aviation amongst the most innovative aviation networks in the world.
•The facility will use digital technology to enhance air passenger experience all the way from ticket booking to airport entry check, security check and aircraft boarding.
•For this a passenger needs to enrol in to DigiYatra program through AirSewa app and a DigiYatra verified passenger will get hassle free entry at airport through E-Gates.
•The ID verification will be done by the BCAS-approved Government ID. At the entry gate a single token for the passenger will be created.
•The DigiYatra programme is expected to be initially rolled out at airports in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Varanasi and Vijayawada.
•This facility is expected to enable passengers to plan their trips efficiently by identifying price trends and estimate future airfares at the time of ticket booking, optionally link their Aadhaar to airlines and other ecosystem players at the time of booking for faster airport entry and automated check-ins without requiring any paper-based interventions.
•This will also facilitate walk-through security scanners swiftly owing to advanced biometric security solutions.
📰 Now to compete: on Vodafone, idea merger
The ground has shifted since they agreed to merge, and Vodafone Idea has its task cut out
•A week is a long time in politics. In business, especially one as rapidly evolving as mobile telecommunications, a year can be an eternity. So for the Vodafone Group’s Indian unit and Idea Cellular Ltd., which had in March 2017 announced an agreement to merge, last week’s approval of the proposed union by the Department of Telecommunications came not a day too soon. The changes in the industry landscape over the intervening 16 months have been dramatic. The market has contracted marginally in terms of overall subscriber numbers — from 1.17 billion on March 31, 2017, to 1.13 billion at the end of May this year. But the number of competing service providers is set to shrink from double digits to just three privately run large rivals plus state-owned BSNL and MTNL. This consolidation, from the wave of mergers and acquisitions over the last couple of years, was the gain the companies left standing were hoping for. From more wholesome slices of the customer pie to more bang for the buck in a highly capital-intensive business, the merged entities including Vodafone Idea Ltd. — as the new business will be called — ought to be happy with the way things have panned out. But the situation on the ground is far from ideal.
•The intensity of competition has steadily increased since the entry of Reliance Jio, founded by the deep-pocketed billionaire Mukesh Ambani. This has left the incumbents battling furiously to protect their turf with tariff reductions to match the newcomer’s ‘no prisoners’ approach to pricing of its voice and data services. The telecom regulator’s September decision to more than halve the fee that operators pay on cross-network calls has only added to their woes, resulting in a steep and continuing erosion in average revenues per user and margins. The managements of Vodafone and Idea have repeatedly underscored the competitive challenges facing them, with both operators losing customers and the latter awash in red ink. With about 430 million subscribers, Vodafone Idea would vault past Bharti Airtel’s current India customer base of about 345 million to the top of the heap. But this scale that they gain would ultimately count for little if the combine fails to staunch customer losses, and do that without compromising on the business’s viability. The cost of bidding for fresh wireless spectrum is escalating steadily and mobile number portability has made it easier for customers to switch networks in case of dissatisfaction with service quality levels or pricing. The combine will therefore need more than just a few smart ‘ideas’, as Idea Cellular’s erstwhile marketing campaign used to stress, to make a fist of their merger.
📰 Under the grey skies
Exploring nimbus clouds and the Great Indian Ocean
•The day Alexander Frater was born, in a small mission hospital in an island in the South West Pacific, “2.1 inches of rain fell in a space of seven hours and 12 minutes,” knocking flowers off trees and washing away top soil. As he explains in the prologue to Chasing the Monsoon (1990), his father, a doctor, told him this detail and also taught him to observe and analyse weather. Later, a picture by his bedside would lead him to “Cherrapunji: the wettest place on earth.” But before he embarked on his journey in the late 1980s, he began reading and found that the temperamental monsoon had acquired some “disturbing behavioural changes”. It had grown “spiteful... Some areas of India were paid only fleeting visits, some no visits at all. This wilfulness puzzled the weather men and frightened the politicians.” In the 21st century, the monsoon is just as capricious, but are politicians still scared?
•Leaving nimbus clouds aside, geopolitical writer and intrepid traveller Robert D. Kaplan drew up the importance of the Greater Indian Ocean in Monsoon (2010). “In this rimland of Eurasia... we can locate the tense dialogue between Western and Islamic civilisations, the ganglia of global energy routes, and the quiet, seemingly inexorable rise of India and China over land and sea,” he wrote. Recalling the late British historian C.R. Boxer’s words “Monsoon Asia”, Kaplan said India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Tanzania “will demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty first century world”; a world “where the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won”. He even highlighted issues like climate change and its impact.
•Calling attention to some of the perils lurking in the waters of the region is Amitav Ghosh’s searing narrative, The Great Derangement (2016), where he spoke of “elemental” forces that had “untethered” hundreds of people, including his ancestors, early “ecological refugees”. While writing his book set in the Sunderbans (The Hungry Tide), Ghosh became aware of the unique landscape. As he wrote in his notes: “I do believe... that the land is demonstrably alive; that it doesn’t exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.” Here rivers change course overnight, villages disappear in a flash — and the deluge during the monsoons usually has a hand in it.
📰 India plans to procure missile shield from U.S.
‘To prevent 9/11 type attacks on Delhi’
•India is in talks with the U.S. to procure an advanced air defence system to defend the National Capital Region (NCR) from aerial attacks. The process for procuring the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System-II (NASAMS-II), estimated at $1 billion, has been initiated.
•“This system will help in preventing 9/11-type attacks [when terrorists flew hijacked planes into New York’s World Trade Center] on Delhi. It is in the Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) stage now,” an official source said.
Secure airspace
•India is deploying a multi-tiered air defence network to fully secure its airspace from incoming fighter aircraft, missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
•The official said this system would complement other systems such as the medium and long-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems under procurement. India is also in an advanced stage of talks with Russia for the procurement of very long range S-400 air defence systems.
•Apart from these imports, India is also developing an indigenous Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system.
•Phase-I of the BMD is expected to be deployed soon.
•The NASAMS was developed by Raytheon in partnership with KONGSBERG Defence and Aerospace of Norway. The Raytheon website says it is a “highly adaptable mid-range solution” for any operational air defence requirement and provides a tailorable, state-of-the-art defence system that can maximise the ability to quickly identify, engage and destroy current and evolving enemy aircraft, UAV or emerging cruise missile threats.” NASAMS-II is an upgraded version of the NASAMS and features new 3D mobile surveillance radars and 12 missile launchers for quicker reaction.
•India is going ahead with the procurement of the S-400 systems despite differing views of the U.S. over the sanctions against Russia and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
📰 Army’s Smerch systems to roll on Indian wheels
Vehicles made by Ashok Leyland to replace Russian ones
•For the first time, an Indian vehicle manufacturer will deliver heavy duty, high mobility vehicles for the Army’s Russian-built Smerch Multi-Barrel Rocket launchers (MBRL) as well to carry strategic missiles developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
•In April, Ashok Leyland was awarded a Rs. 100-crore contract for 81 high mobility 10x10 vehicles by the Army to replace the Russian vehicles which currently carry the Smerch launchers.
•“The delivery will start in this financial year and will be completed in the next financial year,” said Amandeep Singh, head of Defence, Ashok Leyland.
•The tender for the vehicles was floated by the Army in 2015 and trials were completed in 2017-end, with three contenders in the race. The 10x10 vehicle is powered by the Ashok Leyland 360HP Neptune engine and can carry a maximum load of 27 tonnes at a maximum speed of 60 kmph. Some of the vehicles will be fitted with rocket handling cranes.
•“This will reduce dependency on imports. It [the vehicle] has undergone extensive trials by the Army. The feedback is that our vehicle is superior to the Russian vehicles in use. These are fully designed, developed and built in India,” Mr. Singh said.
DRDO tender
•Ashok Leyland also won a tender from the DRDO to develop an even heavier 12x12 vehicle to mount the country’s long range strategic missiles. These vehicles can carry a maximum load of 34 tonnes.
•An Army source observed that indigenising vehicles is a key step in improving the maintenance and efficiency of the Army’s logistics chain. In recent years, Indian vehicle manufacturers have managed to develop a variety of heavy and specialist vehicles required by the Armed Forces, thereby reducing import dependency.
•India initially procured two regiments of the 12-tube, 300 mm Smerch systems from Russia under a Rs. 2,600 crore signed in end 2015, and later procured additional systems under a second deal in 2007.
•Each regiment has two batteries of six launchers each. The Smerch has a maximum range of 90 km.
📰 FASTags aim to quicken pace of journey through toll booths
‘Highways could see free flow, multi-lane plazas in future’
•Less than two years after the government introduced the radio frequency identification device (RFID)-based FASTag system for vehicles crossing toll gates on the country’s highway network, 26 lakh cars and trucks now use the windscreen-mounted tags to shorten their journey time.
•According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways officials, FASTag users can experience ‘near’ non-stop movement at 405 of the 479 toll plazas on various national highways.
•This is how the device works – the tag with a quick response (QR) code and an identification number is affixed to the windscreen of a vehicle. The tag is linked to a user’s FASTag account with the bank of his or her choice.
•When a vehicle approaches a toll plaza on a national highway, it can use dedicated FASTag lanes to avoid stopping to pay a toll tax. However, the technology being currently used in India still requires one to slow down to a speed of 10 km per hour as the toll plaza antennae has a range of only six metres.
•Once the vehicle passes through a toll booth, the user receives an SMS alert regarding the charge debited to his or her account. To encourage the use of FASTags, the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) refunds 5% of the total monthly transactions.
Lack of RFID lanes
•But some users say that the promise of seamless travel is only in theory and the ground reality is very different.
•“Many plazas don’t have a dedicated lane for RFID tags, which means that one still has to wait in a queue along with other vehicles which need to stop to make cash transaction,” said Naveen Kumar Gupta, secretary general, All India Motor Transport Congress.
•“What we need is free flow of vehicles which will take our average of 300 kms per 12 hours to about 800 kms, resulting in an increase in return on investment for transporters as well as bringing down logistics cost. Also, at many places RFID readers don’t work because concessionaires are not keen to switch to the new technology. We need a system that will allow movement which is free of human interventions, lanes as well as boom barriers,” he said.
Biggest users
•Trucks and taxis account for the biggest users of FASTags unlike personal car owners whose movement is most likely to be restricted to city limits.
•Ministry sources acknowledge the challenges faced by the users and say that with advancement of technology they are hopeful that in coming years the country’s highways could see free flow multi-lane plazas allowing a vehicle to zip through at higher speeds similar to some foreign countries.
•Officials are also enthused by the data on the use of FASTags. They say that the RFID card has seen an average uptake of two lakh vehicles per month and their use currently accounts for 12.5% or five lakh transactions of the total 40 lakh transactions recorded per day at all toll booths across the country.
•The value of these transactions is higher, at 25% of the total toll collected — ₹15 crore out of ₹60 crore garnered per day —which points to a larger number of heavy vehicles availing the service as the toll paid by them amounts to seven to eight times that of cars.
•While the device was rolled out in April 2016, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways made it mandatory from December 1, 2017 for all new cars and trucks to be fitted with a FASTag before they were sold. But, the use of these smart cards is not mandatory yet.
•The Ministry has also proposed to make FASTag compulsory for all commercial vehicles seeking a national permit.
