📰 Why are media regulators soft with scribes, asks SC
Petitioner flags repeated violations in sensitive cases
•The Supreme Court on Monday said media regulators tend to wear a “velvet fist inside a velvet glove” when it comes to dealing with journalists and media organisations whose actions, like revealing the identity of a rape survivor, make them criminally liable.
•It is a crime under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Indian Penal Code to disclose the identity of victims of sexual abuse, especially if they are children.
•The Supreme Court asked whether statutory bodies like the Press Council of India (PCI), Editors Guild of India, National Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA), and the Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) have no responsibility to inform the police when a journalist or a media outlet commits such a crime in the course of reportage.
•A Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta observed orally that it was not enough on the part of these statutory and independent bodies, most of them headed by retired judges, to say they have “norms” to deal with errant journalists.
•“This is like a velvet fist inside a velvet glove. It is of no use… If there is criminal liability involved, there should be prosecution launched under a penal statute,” Justice Lokur said categorically.
•Though the oral observations from the Bench came during the hearing of a petition filed by Nivedita Jha highlighting the repeated violations seen in media while covering sensitive cases.
•Advocate Madhavi Divan, appearing for a media body, said there were stringent norms of journalistic ethics and standards in place. Ms. Divan said an enquiry is held whenever there is a violation. She submitted that the grievance mechanism in place is “robust.”
•“By all means you can proceed against the person. But when a criminal offence is involved, the person should be prosecuted under a penal statute…if you do not prosecute a person for doing something criminal, then why are you there at all?” Justice Lokur asked the media bodies.
•Justice Gupta asked media bodies that “when the complainant is a child (who is a rape survivor and whose identity was revealed by the media), is it not your duty to inform the police? You should know because you are headed by retired judges… The offence comes under POCSO. Then, why should prosecution not be launched?”
•Justice Lokur referred to an affidavit filed by NBSA to point out that not a single prosecution seemed to have been launched against any journalist in the past.
•“There is a law which says that a person has to be prosecuted when there is a violation of law, but you have not prosecuted a single person. If you do not prosecute when a crime has been committed, you cannot claim to be robust. You may as well close down,” Justice Lokur told the media bodies.
•The court gave three weeks to PCI, Editors Guild and IBF to respond specifically on whether they had a responsibility to inform the police about an offence committed by a journalist or a media organisation.
📰 It’s not #MeToo, but ‘WeToo’ in Odisha
Campaign in migration-prone areas seeks to sensitise workers about sexual exploitation
•At a time when the #MeToo fire rages on with several women unmasking their harassers, a campaign is under way in Odisha’s migration-prone districts to sensitise migrant women workers about sexual exploitation.
•Sexual exploitation of women migrant workers from Odisha is widely regarded to be pronounced.
•But their agonising and harrowing ordeal mostly remains under wraps. They often suffer silently with no one to back them or confront their tormenters.
•Now, 300 women are undergoing an orientation programme in the State that seeks to empower them to raise their voices against any type of sexual exploitation and ensure the safety of accompanying vulnerable adolescent girls.
•As a three-lakh-strong workforce is getting ready to travel to other States, women in six targeted panchayats of Balangir, Nuapada, Bargarh, Kalahandi, Subarnapur and Boudh districts are being sensitised about the precautions they need to take at their workplace.
•The Western Odisha Migration Network, a civil society organisation, with support from organisations such as Aide et Action, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women and Aaina are working on a database of women migrant worker leaders. They have also created a list of potential migrant women and adolescent girls. A register is being introduced in all these six panchayats to track migration of all age groups.
No one to hear complaints
•“There have been a number of legal instruments to deal with sexual harassment in the informal sector. But workplaces in which poor workers work have no such complaint committee where grievances can be redressed,” said Umi Daniel, head of Migration Information and Resource Centre, Aide et Action, South Asia, and a prominent expert on migration issues.
•“If anything happens to women, they would suffer silently and come back. From discussions with migrant women workers, we came to know that every third woman has experienced some kind of harassment, including sexual assaults,” he said.
•“Now, we have started training 300 women. When these women go back to their workplace, they will talk to their peers. Important helpline numbers are being circulated among women workers for intimation in the event of an exigency. Women as dignified workers have the right to work in a non-exploitative environment outside the State and come back,” said Mr. Daniel.
•Of the hundreds of migrant women workers and adolescent girls, only a few have recently raised their voices and taken their sexual harassers to court.
•Around this time of the year, more than three lakh people from western Odisha districts migrate to Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and major towns of Odisha to work in brick kilns and the construction sector.
📰 The judiciary’s #MeToo moment
It is an opportunity to ensure that the defamation law is no longer used as a tool for harassment
•In Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation novels, one of the protagonists often explains that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”. In India, the fallout of the #MeToo movement has recently re-emphasised what was already well-known: defamation is the first refuge of the powerful. Whether it is M.J. Akbar’s criminal defamation complaint against Priya Ramani, or Alok Nath’s criminal and civil defamation complaints against Vinta Nanda, accusations of sexual harassment have seen a predictable response: the leveraging of criminal defamation law as a way of striking back.
Impinging on freedom
•It is trite to say that there must exist a balance between the freedom of expression and the right to reputation. No legal system can allow false and slanderous statements to be made publicly, with impunity. Defamation law is the tool that is used to strike the balance. But it is the shape and the form of defamation law that often determines whether the balance has been struck appropriately, or whether, in the guise of protecting reputation, the freedom of speech and expression has been effectively stifled.
•India’s criminal defamation law undoubtedly belongs to the latter category. A colonial relic that was introduced by the British regime to suffocate political criticism, Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code provides an ideal weapon for powerful individuals to silence critical or inconvenient speech. First, unlike many other countries, defamation in India is a criminal offence (and not just a civil wrong), and a conviction entails both social stigma and potential jail time. Second, there is a very low threshold for a prima facie case of defamation to be established by a complainant. Simply put, he must only show that an “imputation” has been made that could reasonably be interpreted as harming his reputation. This is enough to set the wheels of the law in motion. While an accused has multiple defences open to her — such as demonstrating that her statement was true and in public interest, or that it was an opinion made in good faith, and concerning a public question — these defences are effectively available only after the trial commences. By this time, an accused individual has already been dragged to court multiple times, and must also then go through a long-drawn-out trial process, where the procedure is the punishment.
•And third, even the defences open to an accused are insufficiently protective of speech, to an extent that is even less than what civil defamation allows. For example, while in a civil defamation case, a defendant need only show that her statement was true in order to escape liability, in a criminal defamation proceeding, an accused must show that her statement was true and in the public interest. This leads to the paradoxical situation where our legal system is more advantageous towards those at the receiving end of civil defamation proceedings, and harsher towards those who have to go through the criminal process!
•All these — and more — arguments were made as recently as 2016, when the constitutionality of criminal defamation was challenged before a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, however, they were largely ignored by (the then) Justice Dipak Misra, who simply held that Section 499 was constitutional, as it protected individual reputation. The disproportionality of criminalising what is essentially a civil wrong, and the numerous ways in which the specific structure of Indian criminal defamation law chills and suffocates free expression, was not considered by the court.
The #MeToo movement
•It is important to remember, however, that the 2016 challenge to criminal defamation was driven by politicians who — at the best of times — do not make for the most sympathetic of petitioners before a court. Much has changed in the last two years. And perhaps the most significant change has been brought by the #MeToo movement.
•It has seen women articulate their experiences of sexual harassment, often at the hands of powerful and well-established men. What is striking about the movement is how it has compelled all of us to confront systematic male behaviour that may sometimes be difficult to define as a legal offence, but which is nonetheless sexually predatory and abusive. Issues involving hierarchies in the workplace, differences in age and influence, the power exercised by men who are highly regarded in their professions and the abuse of that influence — issues that were long suppressed and simply not talked about — have, at last, found public utterance. It is a time of upheaval, when old pieties have been exposed as morally and ethically bankrupt, and old codes of behaviour shown to be exploitative and unacceptable. The #MeToo movement has brought submerged experiences to the surface, and given individuals a fresh vocabulary with which to express what, for all these years, seemed simply inexpressible.
•With the filing of the criminal defamation cases, therefore, the stakes have been made clear. Will powerful men be allowed to use the law to silence this new mode of public expression? Will criminal defamation be weaponised to restore the old status quo, and preserve and perpetuate the hierarchies that the #MeToo movement has challenged?
An opportunity for change
•It is the courts that must now confront these questions. And the courts now have a fresh opportunity: this is no longer about an abstract challenging to the constitutionality of criminal defamation, but a live issue about the relationship between our legal system and a social movement aimed at publicly redressing long-standing injustices.
•More than 50 years ago, courts in another country were faced with this challenge. In the 1960s, the American civil rights movement found itself under siege: States in the deep south not only violently reacted to the movement, but also filed defamation claims against newspapers, to stop them from covering it. Small factual errors in reports were picked up, and massive defamation suits were filed to harass and bankrupt reporters and newspapers. The New York Times, for example, was found liable for the crippling sum of $50,000, for its coverage of a civil rights protest in Montgomery, Alabama. When these defamation verdicts were challenged before the Supreme Court, therefore, no less than the fate of the civil rights movement was in its hands.
•The U.S. Supreme Court responded. In one of the most famous judgments in its history, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), it substantially modified defamation law to ensure that it could no longer be used as a tool of harassment and blackmail. Articulating a very high threshold of “actual malice”, the court ensured that journalists could go about their job without fear, as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly make outright false statements. Nothing less than this, the court held, was required by the constitutional right to freedom of expression, and a free press.
•In 2018, our courts are now faced with a similar situation: a vitally important public movement is threatened by the heavy hand of the law of defamation. And, like the American courts at the time of the civil rights movement, our courts too have a golden opportunity. They may, for one, choose to revisit the constitutionality of criminal defamation. But even without that, there are enough ways to judicially interpret Section 499 to ensure that it no longer remains the tool of the powerful to blackmail, harass, and silence inconvenient speech. Incorporating the Sullivan standard into the law might be a start; but the interpretive possibilities are endless. All that we need is for the courts to understand what is at stake, and respond with the courage and the sensitivity that these times demand of them.
📰 Ripe for prison reform
Political will is crucial to reform India’s criminal justice system
•In an acknowledgment that the more than a century-old system of prisons in India needs repair, the Supreme Court, late last month, formed a committee on prison reforms. Headed by former Supreme Court judge, Justice Amitava Roy, it is to look into the entire gamut of reforms to the prison system. But this is not the first time that such a body is being set up, examples being the Justice A.N. Mulla committee and the Justice Krishna Iyer committee on women prisoners (both in the 1980s).
•While marginal reforms have taken place, these have not been enough to ensure that prison conditions are in tune with human rights norms.
Punish or reform?
•The terms of reference for the new committee are omnibus and seem ambitious. One must also not forget that its formation comes at a time when controversy surrounds the Tamil Nadu government’s recommendation that the seven convicts in the assassination, in 1991, of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi be released. The plea of the petitioners is that however heinous the crime, the penalty imposed — they have served 27 years — was beyond endurance.
•This is the crux of the debate: incarceration in any form is uncivilised, especially when it is so long-drawn-out, and when the objective of criminal punishment should be one of reform rather than wreaking vengeance on a perpetrator of crime. The Hammurabi Code, it is argued, is no longer acceptable. In my view, any exercise to improve prison conditions — though not directly related to a plea for mercy, such as convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi case — must not ignore this axiom.
•There is a divide here. Significantly, those pleading for clemency in this case are outnumbered, which is reflective of popular sentiment that a gruesome crime needs to be dealt with severely. It is also about the unresolved conflict in attitudes about incarceration — punishment or reform — which also explains the halfway jail reforms agenda seen in many countries.
•So how do we render conditions within prisons less harsh and more humane? There are those who believe that if you keep improving prison conditions, there is likely to be an attendant impact on the incidence of crime. This accounts for the reluctance of many criminal justice administrators to employ or enlarge non-prison alternatives such as community service.
•The offshoot of all this is growing numbers of prisoners and the woeful incapacity of governments to build more and larger prisons. The question often asked by governments is, in these days of extreme fiscal stress, why should state resources be diverted to a ‘negative exercise, whose benefits are dubious’? This is why jail officials are often asked to ‘somehow manage’ with existing modest facilities.
Packed to the gills
•The data on prison overcrowding are frightening. Except in parts of Europe, where crime is still low or at acceptable levels, overcrowding is rampant.
•In the U.S., for example, which has a humongous crime problem, complicated by gun violence and a strident racist overtone in combating crime, the prison system is creaking under the stress of numbers. At any time, it is estimated, there are more than two million prisoners in state and federal prisons. In the U.K., the latest available data (July 2018) show a current prison population of approximately 92,500.
•In India, the publication, Prison Statistics India, brought out by the National Crime Records Bureau will provide food for thought for the Justice Roy Committee. In 2015, there were nearly 4.2 lakh inmates in 1,401 facilities, with an average occupancy rate of 114% in most. About 67% of total inmates were undertrials, a commentary on the speed and efficiency of India’s criminal justice system.
•There is an obvious poverty of ideas in justice administration. While public officials and social workers are agreed upon the need to reduce overcrowding, there is hardly any convergence on how to go about this delicate exercise. There is also an obvious fear of backlash against any move to decriminalise what is now prohibited by statutes.
Handling white collar crimes
•There is a popular view that in order to reduce prison populations, proven non-violent offenders could be dealt with differently. But it is frustrating that no consensus has evolved across the world on this relatively uncomplicated issue.
•White collar crime has assumed monstrous proportions but there is no reason why we should continue to lock up offenders instead of merely depriving them of their illegal gains. Devising swift processes of attachment of properties and freezing of bank accounts are alternatives to a jail term. There are legal impediments here, but these can be overcome by ensuring a certain fairness in the system, of the state taking over illegally acquired wealth. The argument that not all gains made by an economic offender are open is not convincing enough to opt for incarceration over punitive material penalties. In India, progress has been made in freezing ‘benami’ holdings of major offenders even though it may not be a 100% effective step of cleaning up. But these are the first steps towards making economic crimes unaffordable and unattractive for the average offender.
On prison officials
•Another complaint against prisons is the brutality and venality of prison officials, again common across the world. A solution will be a point to ponder over for the Justice Roy Committee.
•Finally, improving prison conditions has no political leverage. Just as humane prisons do not win votes, the bad ones do not lose votes for any political party. As long as there are no stakes here for lawmakers, one can hardly hope for model prisons, where inmates are accommodated with due regard to their basic human needs and are handled with dignity.
📰 The value of a health scheme
The challenges for the success of Ayushman Bharat are more than just at the financial and infrastructural level
•On September 24, the government launched the grand government-funded healthcare scheme, the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY). While some see its ambitious goals as its main strength, others are sceptical given the inadequate funding for the scheme, the weak infrastructure of primary health care centres, and the time required for the goals to be accomplished. However, nobody disputes the imperative of an insurance scheme as vast as the PMJAY, since every year about 36 million families, or 14% of households, face a medical bill that is equal to the entire annual living expenses of one member of the family. This frequently pushes many families into penury.
Two schemes, one focus
•The euphoria over this scheme is reminiscent of the excitement over the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), launched in 2008. Although the PMJAY is much wider in its reach than the RSBY (it covers 50 crore beneficiaries with ₹3,500 crore of government spending and provides benefits up to ₹5 lakh per eligible family), the central framework is the same: universal health care and health rights. The emerging discourse surrounding the PMJAY scheme resonates with those of RSBY. The focus continues to be on the top-down, deductive reasoning of the scheme, including issues such as allocation of funds for each illness, the types of care provided, financial considerations for empanelment of hospitals, types of illnesses covered, and transaction costs. These considerations matter. However, there are important missing links.
•My recent study of RSBY in Karnataka yielded important insights that are pertinent here. Given that RSBY was embedded within the framework of universal health care and health rights, it is appropriate to pay attention to the existence of health rights in a local set-up. I discovered that the way beneficiaries of RSBY (Below Poverty Line households) perceived the scheme was not as a health right but in terms of the value it imparted, which was measured along multiple dimensions.
•Households initially measured the value of the RSBY in terms of its material benefit and measurable impact. This included the financial ease it provided in taking care of illnesses, the expense and types of illnesses that the card covered, and the transaction costs it entailed — how easy it would be to use the card in terms of bureaucratic paperwork and formal procedures.
Beyond the visible impact
•However, households also valued the RSBY beyond its visible impact. They had little value for the RSBY because of many reasons. One, officials who distributed the RSBY smart card did not provide information on how to use the card. Two, hospitals did not respect patients with the card, believing that they were availing medical care free of cost. Sometimes they did not honour the card either due to inaccuracy of fingerprints or lack of money on the card. Three, neighbours and family members did not discuss the utilisation of the card, making households perceive the card as just a showpiece: important to possess but not useful. Four, the lack of involvement and endorsement by local leaders further diminished the value of the card for the households.
•The value of the RSBY was also derived in relation to the value of health itself. The difficulty in understanding the basic facts of the card and using it led households to opt for seeking medical care without the card. The value for one’s health undermined the value for the RSBY. As one household subsequent to repeated failed attempts to use the card lamented: “We lost time and money, and our illness got worse all because we wanted to use the card. I tell you, if you want to get well, if you really value your health, you cannot rely on this health card.” Next, the value of the RSBY card was derived in relation to the cultural ethos of health insurance. For a significant number of households, health insurance was perceived as a “bad omen” indicating the arrival of sickness and disease.
•As the delivery of universal health care and health rights find yet another expression in India through the PMJAY scheme, it is more important than ever before to explore how citizens exercise their right to health and understand how it could be better practised. The biggest challenges for the success of the PMJAY scheme are not just financial and infrastructural at the local level, but how its value is perceived by the community.
📰 Lower judiciary vacancies unacceptable: SC
5,000 posts to be filled up; 3 crore cases pending
•The Supreme Court on Monday took suo motu cognisance of over 5,000 vacancies in the lower judiciary across the country, saying the situation is “wholly unacceptable”.
•A Bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi found that even the official statistics provided by various High Courts on the recruitment processes “under way” did not match. The Supreme Court said it wanted specific, updated information by October 31 from the High Courts.
•Over three crore cases lie pending in lower courts.
•In a five-page order, the Supreme Court recorded that there are a total of 22,036 posts in the district and subordinate judiciary, from district judges to junior civil judges, across the States. As on date, 5,133 posts out of the total 22,036 are vacant, the court found. It said that information received from various High Courts say that recruitment is on to fill 4,180 of the 5,133 vacant posts. However, the same data show that recruitment is yet to start in 1,324 out of the 5,133 vacancies.
Mistmatch of figures
•“There is an obvious mismatch in the figures mentioned above which is being also looked into by the Registry of this court. The Registry of this court is, therefore, directed to register a suo motu writ petition,” Chief Justice Gogoi said in the order for the Bench.
•The Supreme Court asked the High Courts’ registries to provide the Secretary-General, Supreme Court, with information, such as when the recruitment process had commenced; whether it is expected to be completed within the schedule formulated by the Supreme Court in the Malik Mazhar Sultan vs U.P. Public Service Commission & Ors judgment; when the appointments would be made; whether the time expected to be taken to complete the ongoing process/processes can be shortened and so on.
📰 SC dismisses plea to lower marriageable age of men
•The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a PIL petition seeking a judicial order to lower the legal marriageable age of men from 21 to 18 years.
•A Bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi imposed ₹ 25,000 costs on petitioner-lawyer Asok Pande, and said there was no public interest in his petition.
•Mr. Pande argued that men could join the Army or vote at the age of 18, then why not marry.
•“If any 18-year-old person approaches us with such kind of a petition, then we will give him the cost deposited by you [Mr. Pande],” Justice Gogoi observed orally.
•The Bench said in such cases, the affected persons should come to court.
•The petition challenged the provisions of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, the Special Marriage Act and the Hindu Marriage Act, which deal with the minimum marriageable age for men and alleged that they were violative of various fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution.
•It contended that the provisions were “unreasonable, unjust and improper” and also violative of Article 15 which prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.
📰 Where Ganga meets the Bay of Pollution
Water quality falls drastically after Ganga Sagar Mela
•An exponential increase in the number of pilgrims coming to the Ganga Sagar Mela, which takes place at the Sagar Island every year during Makar Sankranti, has been responsible for the worsening water pollution, prompting scientists to raise serious concerns about the likely outbreak of several diseases.
•The number of pilgrims descending on the Sagar Island to take a dip at the place where the Ganga meets the Bay of Bengal, has risen from 2 lakh in 1990 to 20 lakh in 2018.
Health concerns
•“A health survey was conducted with the local people… it found that diseases like cholera, dysentery, and skin disease were predominant in the post-Ganga Sagar Mela period,” observed a paper titled ‘Pollution and its consequences at Ganga Sagar mass bathing in India’, published recently in the journal Environment, Development and Sustainability.
•The study noted a sharp deterioration in water quality parameters between the pre-mela and post-mela period. For instance, the concentration of faecal coliform bacteria, which was 22 MPN (most probable number) in 100 ml of water two weeks before the mela, was found to be 9,963 MPN two weeks after the mela.
•One of the authors of the paper, Tuhin Ghosh from the School of Oceanographic Studies at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, said the focus of the administration is mostly on managing the mela, and that it should also manage the pollution with sustainable strategies. He suggested that a wastewater treatment plant be set up. He stressed the need to make the mela plastic-free to prevent plastics from clogging the ocean.
•Researchers also pointed out that making the Ganga Sagar Mela pollution-free should be seen in the context of the Clean Ganga Mission and that the pollution wrought by the mela added to the pollutants which the river brings from upstream.
•Sagar is the biggest island of the Sunderbans archipelago, with a population of about 2.12 lakh people. Several studies have shown that the island is at the frontline of climate change, facing serious erosion on its east and west sides due to rising sea level and tidal surges.
📰 ‘In urban U.P., 87% of waste from toilets goes to rivers, agri land’
Study by Centre for Science and Environment says if more toilets and septic tanks are built without sewer systems it will swamp the State
•While urban Uttar Pradesh has an 80% coverage of toilets, inefficient sanitation systems ensure that almost 87% of the excreta bring generated by these toilets is being dumped in waterbodies or agricultural lands, according to a new analysis of 30 cities by the Centre for Science and Environment.
•“With 2019 just round the corner, the number of toilets and onsite sanitation systems being built in the state are all set to increase exponentially — if not managed scientifically and sustainably, the amount of faecal sludge that these new toilets will generate will swamp the State,” said Suresh Rohilla, programme director of waste and wastewater management at CSE.
•The report, released on Monday, argues that building more toilets will only worsen the environmental, sanitation and manual scavenging situation, unless sewerage connections increase from the current 28% of households in the 30 cities studied. Onsite sanitation systems – such as septic tanks or pit latrines – are far more prevalent, and are used by 47% of households.
Manual scavengers
•Without a sewerage system, the effluent from the septic tank, along with greywater from the kitchen and bathroom flows out into stormwater drains and open drains or nullahs. The faecal sludge, on the other hand, has to be periodically emptied from the septic tank, either manually or mechanically using vacuum trucks or tankers. CSE’s analysis found that half of all emptying work in these cities is done manually, despite the legal prohibition of the employment of manual scavengers.
•“As there is no designated site for disposal, the emptied faecal sludge ends up in open drains/nullahs/open fields, which eventually lead to polluting the Ganga and other rivers and surface water bodies,” said the CSE report.
•Over a six month period, researchers mapped excreta flow diagrams for 30 cities divided into four clusters by population.
•In cities with a population over 10 lakh, such as Lucknow, Kanpur and Agra, the sewerage system covers 44% of the population.
•However, only 28% of that wastewater is safely treated. A third of the population is dependent on septic tanks connected to open drains, while 4% of the population still defecate in the open. Overall, 44% of the waste generated is safely treated and managed.
•The situation is much worse in smaller cities. In cities with a population between five and 10 lakh, more than 70% of the population is dependent on tanks connected to open drains, and only half of them would actually qualify as septic tanks. Of the five cities in this cluster, only Jhansi has a designated disposal site. Overall, only 18% of waste and sludge is safely managed.
•In cities with a population between 1.2 lakh and five lakh, only 9% of waste and sludge are safely managed, while in the fourth cluster of cities whose populations are less than 1.2 lakh, that figure drops to a mere 4%.
📰 Turf battle: on independent payments regulator
The RBI makes a valid case against the proposal for a separate payments regulator
•The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Union government are once again at loggerheads over the legitimate extent of their powers. In a rare gesture, the central bank last week made public its reservations against the government’s plans to set up an independent payments regulator, potentially setting the stage for a regulatory turf war. In a strongly worded dissent note against the inter-ministerial committee for the finalisation of amendments to the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, published on its website on Friday, the central bank observed that it would prefer the Payments Regulatory Board to function under the purview of the RBI Governor. “There is no case of having a regulator for payment systems outside the RBI,” the note read. In support of its stance, the RBI stated that the activities of payments banks come well within the purview of the traditional banking system, which the central bank oversees as the overarching financial regulator. So, according to this logic, it might make better sense to have the RBI oversee the activities of payments banks as well instead of creating a brand new regulator for the growing industry. “Regulation of the banking systems and payment system by the same regulator provides synergy,” it noted. The RBI, in essence, is pointing to the interconnection between the payments industry and the banking system to back the extension of its regulatory powers.
•The RBI’s case makes good sense when seen from the perspective of the cost of regulatory compliance. As stated above, there is definite overlapping between the current regulatory powers of the RBI and the proposed regulations for the payments industry. A unified regulator can thus help in lowering the compliance costs and enabling the seamless implementation of rules. Further, there is the real risk that a brand new regulator may be unable to match the expertise of the RBI in carrying out necessary regulatory duties. So it makes better sense to have the RBI take charge of the rapidly growing payments industry which can ill-afford regulatory errors at this point. The fact that the RBI has made public its dissent against the Union government’s idea, suggests that the central bank has serious problems with the dilution of its current powers over the financial sector. However, the RBI’s demand for the centralisation of regulatory powers also brings with it the need for exercising a greater degree of responsibility. At a time when there are increasing risks to the stability of the domestic financial system, both the government and the RBI must look to work together to tackle these risks instead of battling over regulatory powers.
📰 Panel for adopting UN model on cross-border insolvency
The model forms part of international best practices in dealing with such issues
•The Insolvency Law Committee (ILC), tasked with suggesting amendments to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code of India, has recommended that India adopt the United Nations’ model to handle cross-border insolvency cases.
•“The ILC has recommended the adoption of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law of Cross Border Insolvency, 1997, as it provides for a comprehensive framework to deal with cross-border insolvency issues,” the government said in a statement. “The committee has also recommended a few carve-outs to ensure that there is no inconsistency between the domestic insolvency framework and the proposed cross border insolvency framework.”
•The UNCITRAL Model Law has been adopted in 44 countries and, therefore, forms part of international best practices in dealing with cross border insolvency issues, the government said.
Public interest
•“The advantages of the model law are the precedence given to domestic proceedings and protection of public interest,” the statement added.
•“The necessity of having a cross-border insolvency framework under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code arises from the fact that many Indian companies have a global footprint and many foreign companies have a presence in multiple countries, including India,” the government said.
📰 ‘Cockroaches of the ocean’ are eating away California’s underwater forests
The purple urchin is mowing down kelp forests that are crucial as a critical habitat and a source of food for a wide range of species
•Early on a grey summer Saturday, an unusual assemblage — commercial fishermen, recreational boaters, neoprene-clad divers — gathered for a mission at Albion Cove, a three-hour drive north of San Francisco.
•“Our target today is the purple urchin,” said Josh Russo, a recreational fishing advocate who organised the event. “The evil purple urchin.”
•Five years ago, assigning wickedness to the purple urchin, a shellfish the size of a plum with quarter-inch spikes, would have been absurd.
•That was before the urchins mowed down Northern California’s kelp forests.
•The underwater forests — huge, sprawling tangles of brown seaweed — are in many ways just as important to the oceans as trees are to the land. Like trees, they absorb carbon emissions and they provide critical habitat and food for a wide range of species. But when climate change helped trigger a 60-fold explosion of purple urchins off Northern California’s coast, the urchins went on a feeding frenzy and the kelp was devoured.
Warming ocean
•“It would be like one of those beautiful deciduous forests turned into a desert,” said Gretchen Hoffman, a professor of marine ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But in the matter of five years.”
•The dangers extend far beyond this inlet: Kelp forests exist along the cooler coastlines of every continent but Antarctica. And they are under threat both from rising ocean temperatures and from what those warmer waters bring.
•Already, Maine’s forests of sugar kelp, a source of the sweetener mannitol, have experienced temperature-linked declines. And in Tasmania, kelp forests have succumbed to a purple urchin outbreak. Here in Albion, they are trying to avoid a similar fate.
•The divers went to work, scraping purple urchins off the bottom of the cove, hoping it would allow the kelp, which has declined 93 percent in Northern California, to grow back.
•Cynthia Catton, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and a small team of interns sat on a boat counting the urchins that divers hauled to the surface, to get a sense of how they were faring.
•The story of the kelp’s disappearance is the story of an interwoven food system breaking down, and in the process threatening people’s livelihoods. Some of the first people to sound the alarm about the purple urchins, Catton said, were commercial red urchin harvesters.
•One of them is Gary Trumper, who has harvested red urchins for more than 30 years. Red urchins, larger than purple urchins, are commercially viable because people eat them — or more specifically, their gonads. The delicacy is better known to sushi aficionados as uni.
•But the increasing purple urchin population outcompeted the red urchins for the available kelp. Without kelp, the red urchins starved.
•That cut the value of Northern California’s commercial red urchin fishery from $3.6 million in 2013 to less than $600,000 in 2016. Many harvesters have moved on. “It’s probably 10 or 15 guys left doing it in the harbour,” Mr. Trumper said.
•The trouble began with the starfish. Sunflower starfish, whose appendages can span more than 3 feet, normally eat purple urchins, helping to limit their numbers.
Starfish deaths
•But in 2013, the starfish mysteriously began dying. There is not scientific consensus on why, but Drew Harvell, a Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, said she thought a virus was at least partly to blame and that warmer waters exacerbated its effects.
•Sea otters, another predator of purple urchins, were hunted to near extinction in Northern California by 19th-century fur traders. Their numbers have not rebounded.
•Around the same time as the starfish began dying, a mass of warm water appeared hundreds of miles off Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. By 2014 that warm water had moved toward land, stretching from Southeastern Alaska down to Mexico.
•The marine heat wave was hotter than anything humans had recorded dating back to the late 1800s. Researchers and locals called it “The Blob.” It would last into 2016.
•“Human-caused global warming made it much more likely to get as extreme as it did,” said Nathan Mantua, an author of a study linking The Blob to climate change.
•“They’re like cockroaches of the ocean,” said Sonke Mastrup, a program manager at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.. “They can endure starvation conditions much longer than most of the other critters.”
📰 An African island’s troubled waters
The Migingo Island, claimed both by Kenya and Uganda, is a fisherman’s paradise
•A rounded, rocky outcrop covered with metallic shacks, Migingo Island rises out of the waters of Lake Victoria like an iron-plated turtle. The densely populated island is barely a quarter of a hectare large. There’s little else but a few bars, brothels and a tiny port.
•Nevertheless, for over a decade, Migingo has been a source of tension between Uganda and Kenya, who have been unable to decide to whom it really belongs.
The ‘smallest war’
•They were once pushed to the brink of what some said would have been Africa’s “smallest war” over the island. While fishing communities around Lake Victoria have seen their catches slowly diminish over the years, the deep waters surrounding Migingo abound with catch such as Nile perch.
•It was in the early 2000s when the island was barely inhabited — then situated within Kenya on all maps — that it began drawing the attention of Ugandan authorities who sent officials to Migingo to tax fishermen and offer protection against pirates. Kenyan fishermen in return began complaining they were being shaken down by the Ugandans in their own waters and chased from the island. They called on Kenya’s government, which deployed security forces to Migingo in a move that nearly brought the two nations to blows in 2009.
•Kenya and Uganda then decided to create a joint commission to determine where the watery border is, relying on maps dating from the 1920s whose interpretation is a key point of contention. But nothing has come of the commission, and in the absence of any decisions on the boundary, the island is co-managed by both countries.
•Faced with mounting complaints from their constituents, local Kenyan politicians have called on Nairobi to ask the International Court of Justice to intervene and make a decision on the border — to no avail.
•On the island, some taunt each other good-naturedly. “This is Kenya,” said Colins Ochyeng. “It’s Uganda,” fired back a Ugandan fisherman passing by, with a smile.
•“I don’t know who this island belongs to,” said Kenyan fisherman Emmanuel Aringo. “These are all political issues and we just want to sell our fish.”
📰 Experts’ group to cut schoolbag weight formed, court told
“Union HRD Ministry is keen on evolving a draft policy within a month”
•Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) informed the Madras High Court on Monday that an Expert Group has been constituted to formulate a draft policy on reducing the weight of school bags in proportion to the age and average weight of children.
•Justice N. Kirubakaran was told that the Centre had decided to implement his May 29 judgement on the issue in letter and spirit. The MHRD had issued an order on October 5 to formulate a policy on schoolbags on the lines of Children School Bags (Limitation on Weight) Bill of 2006, which never turned into a law. Disposing of a writ petition filed by advocate M. Purushothaman, the judge had directed the Centre to formulate forthwith a nationwide policy on the permitted weight of backpacks that could be carried by schoolchildren after observing that “neither are children weightlifters nor school bags load containers.”
•Reporting compliance, Assistant Solicitor General (ASG) G. Karthikeyan told the court on Monday that MHRD was keen on formulating a draft policy within a month and professor Ranjana Arora of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) had been named as the convenor of the Expert Group. S. Vijaya Kumar, Joint Commissioner (Academics) of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan; A.N. Ramachandra, Joint Commissioner (Academics) of Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti; and Joseph Emmanuel, Director (Academics) of Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) would be members of the group.
•A decision had also been taken to include representatives of the education departments of Maharashtra and Telangana as additional members of the Expert Group, since the two States already had a policy in place stipulating that the weight of a schoolbag should not exceed 10% of the weight of the student. Government Orders issued in Maharashtra and Telangana were placed before the court for its perusal. The ASG said Maharashtra, while deciding the weight of the schoolbag, had considered the weight of books, geometry box, stationery, lunch boxes and even water bottles.
