📰 States other than Delhi-NCR can use existing stocks of firecrackers for Diwali this year: SC
Green crackers a must for Delhi-NCR
•The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed States other than Delhi to use their existing stocks of crackers for Diwali next month.
•However, the Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan checked the enthusiasm by directing that only green crackers can be manufactured henceforth across the country. That means once the existing stocks are used up, no new polluting crackers can be made in the cracker factories.
•The court has allowed Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and the adjoining southern States, which celebrate Diwali in the morning, to burst crackers for two hours in the day. The time-slots for bursting crackers can be staggered through the festival days, for instance like one hour in the morning and an hour in the night. The decision to finalise the time slots has been left to the respective State authorities.
•The court, in its order on October 23, had fixed 8 pm to 10 pm as the time-slotfor bursting crackers on religious festival days like Diwali uniformly across the country. Tamil Nadu had challenged the order, saying it violated its people right to religion protected under Article 25 of the Constitution.
•As far as Delhi-NCR concerned, the court did not let down its rigour both in terms of the time-slot for bursting crackers, that is between 8 pm and 10 pm, and the mandatory manufacture and sale of green crackers for Diwali this year. The Bench refused to modify its October 23 order despite repeated requests from the firecracker manufacturing association, which pleaded to the court to allow them to produce and sell non-green crackers this year in NCR.
•“You mean you want us to allow you to contaminate the air this year and then you may fall in line next year?” an unconvinced Justice Sikri asked the association.
•The court refused to lift the pan-India ban on sale of crackers online through e-commerce websites. Any violation of this direction would lead to contempt of the apex court.
•The October 23 order was based on petitions filed by a six-month-old and a 14-month-old, through their fathers in 2015. They had said the air pollution caused by various factors, especially firecrackers, has made Delhi a gas chamber. They pleaded for their right to life.
•The court had banned the manufacture, sale and use of joined firecrackers (series crackers or laris), holding that they cause “huge air, noise and solid waste problems”. The sale of green and improved crackers would be only through licensed traders.
•While the court made community bursting of crackers in pre-designated areas compulsory for Delhi-NCR, it urged other States to endeavour to attempt the welfare measure to reduce air pollution.
•The court said the October 23 order was only a preliminary step and it would not shy away from imposing more stringent measures against firecrackers in the future “if the situation so warrants”.
📰 1987 Hashimpura massacre: Delhi HC sentences 16 ex-PAC personnel to life
Court quashes a 2015 trial court judgment that exonerated them of the crime. It directs all the convicts to surrender before a court in Delhi.
•The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sentenced 16 former Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) men in Uttar Pradesh to life imprisonment for killing 42 persons in Hashimpura area of Meerut in 1987.
•The court quashed a 2015 trial court judgment that exonerated them of the crime. It directed all the convicts to surrender before a court in Delhi.
•On September 6, the High Court reserved its verdict on the appeals filed by Uttar Pradesh State, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and some private parties, including Zulfiqar Nasir, a survivor of the massacre.
•On March 21, 2015, the trial court gave the benefit of doubt and acquitted the 16 former PAC personnel, saying lack of evidence had failed to establish their identification.
•The NHRC had intervened in the matter seeking further probe into the massacre.
PTI adds:
Hashimpura massacre: Chronology of events
•The following is the chronology of events relating to the 1987 Hashimpura massacre case:
•May 22, 1987: 50 Muslims picked up allegedly by Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel from Hashimpura village in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh; victims later shot and bodies thrown into canal; 42 persons declared dead.
•1988: U.P. government orders CB-CID probe in the case.
•February 1994: CB-CID submits inquiry report indicting over 60 PAC and police personnel of all ranks.
•May 20, 1996: Charge sheet filed against 19 accused before Chief Judicial Magistrate, Ghaziabad by CB-CID of Uttar Pradesh police; 161 people listed as witnesses.
•September 2002: Case transferred to Delhi by the Supreme Court on petition by the families of victims and survivors.
•July 2006: Delhi court frames charges of murder, attempt to murder, tampering with evidence and conspiracy under the IPC against 17 accused. | I feigned death: witness in Hashimpura massacre case
•March 8, 2013: Trial court dismisses Subramanian Swamy’s plea seeking probe into the alleged role of P Chidambaram, then Minister of State for Home, in the matter.
•January 22, 2015: Trial court reserves judgement.
•March 21, 2015: Court acquits 16 surviving accused giving them benefit of doubt regarding their identity. | Judge: shoddy probe in Hashimpura case
•May 18, 2015: Trial court decision challenged in the Delhi HC by the victims’ families and eyewitnesses who survived the incident.
•May 29, 2015: HC issues notice to the 16 PAC personnel on Uttar Pradesh government’s appeal against the trial court verdict.
•December 2015: National Human Rights Commission is impleaded in the matter. NHRC also seeks further probe in to the massacre.
•February 17, 2016: Delhi HC tags Swamy’s appeal with the other petitions in the matter.
•September 6, 2018: Delhi HC reserves verdict in the case.
•October 31, 2018: Delhi HC convicts 16 former PAC personnel for life after finding them guilty of murder of 42 people.
📰 India moves up to 77th rank in Ease of Doing Business Index
It was ranked 100 last year and 130 in 2016 and 2015. When Modi government took over in 2014, it was ranked 142 among 190 nations.
•India jumped 23 ranks in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index 2018 to 77. It ranked 100 in the 2017 report.
•The Index ranks 190 countries across 10 indicators ranged across the lifecycle of a business from 'starting a business' to 'resolving insolvency'.
•“India’s strong reform agenda to improve the business climate for small and medium enterprises is bearing fruit. It is also reflected in the government’s strong commitment to broaden the business reforms agenda at the state and now even at the district level,” said Junaid Ahmad, World Bank Country Director in India in a press release. “Going forward, a continuation of this effort will help India maintain its goal of strong and sustained economic growth and we look forward to recording these successes in the years ahead."
•"The improvement in rankings is excellent news for India, and good news for the business community," Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said at a press conference. "I'm sure we will continue to improve it more and more."
•Mr. Prabhu said that there were several initiatives by the government in the works that would further ease doing business, such as enabling export and import using only a mobile phone.
•"The government will get out of business and allow people to conduct their business," the Commerce Minister added.
•Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pointed out that, since the World Bank sets May 1 as the deadline for measurement, there are several initiatives taken by the government that will only reflect in next year's rankings including the effects of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code and the full effect of the Goods and Services Tax.
•He noted that, despite the sharp improvement India has made in several of the categories in the Index, there were others such as registering a property, starting a business, taxation, insolvency, and enforcing a contract where a lot of work still needs to be done.
•"During the past year, India made Starting a Business easier by fully integrating multiple application forms into a general incorporation form," the World Bank said in a release. "India also replaced the value added tax with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for which the registration process is faster in both Delhi and Mumbai, the two cities measured by the Doing Business report. In addition, Mumbai abolished the practice of site inspections for registering companies under the Shops and Establishments Act. As a result, the time to start a business has been halved to 16 days, from 30 days."
•India moved from rank 184 in 2014 to 52 in 2018 in the construction permits category, 137 to 24 in getting electricity, 126 to 80 in trading across borders, 156 to 121 in paying taxes, 137 to 108 in resolving Insolvency, 186 to 163 in enforcing contracts, 158 to 137 in starting a business, and 36 to 22 in getting credit.
•“The upward movement in India’s ranking is as expected," Vishwas Udgirkar, Partner, Deloitte India said in a note. "This has been on back of overall reforms driven by the government, and to a large extent, use of digital and technology leading to process improvement. The country is on the right track in adopting technology and innovations in business processes. Government efforts to this end are laudable. Government’s thrust on infrastructure development to promote trade and business, especially logistics and supply chain centred initiatives, as also overall fiscal reforms including bankruptcy code, are showing results."
📰 Tussle for power: what's the RBI-government stand-off?
What is the RBI aggrieved about?
•One, the Reserve Bank of India wants more powers over regulating public sector banks (PSBs). Two, it feels that the government should not dictate the quantum of its surplus that can be paid as annual dividend. And three, it is miffed that the Centre has suggested a separate payments regulator.
Does it have a point?
•Slammed for poor regulation following the fraud at Punjab National Bank, RBI Governor Urjit Patel told a parliamentary panel in June that it does not have enough powers over PSBs. But the RBI does have nominee directors on bank boards. It leads physical inspection at banks and financial audits. It has also orchestrated mergers between banks whenever a bank has been on the verge of collapse (for instance, Global Trust Bank merged with Oriental Bank of Commerce). So, the RBI does have adequate control over PSBs but may not be exercising it fully.
•The RBI earns income from lending to commercial banks and from purchase and sale of government securities. It also has a surplus seigniorage (the difference between the value of notes that it prints and the cost of printing and distributing them). After setting aside an amount for contingency and asset development, the RBI transfers the surplus to the government. In 2016, that amount was ₹65,876 crore; this dropped to ₹30,659 crore in 2017. This year, it paid ₹50,000 crore to the government. One view is that if the RBI dips further into its reserves to pay the Centre, this would weaken its balance sheet. On the other hand, the RBI is accountable to the government. Plus, globally, central banks do transfer surplus reserves to their governments.
•As payment systems fall under monetary policy, a separate payments regulator is unwarranted.
Why is the government miffed?
•The RBI’s circular on February 12 stressed assets recognition as a sore point. The regulator scrapped all the past restructuring mechanisms and said that if a borrower delayed payment for even one day, he should be dragged to an insolvency court and the asset classified as a non-performing asset (NPA).
•The Centre sees the prompt corrective action (PCA) framework by the RBI, which restricts weak banks from lending, as contributing to the liquidity crisis. It also wanted special dispensation by the RBI to help non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) apart from relaxed norms for lending to micro, small and medium enterprises.
Are these arguments valid?
•Mr. Patel calls the circular as “Samudra Manthan” (when you churn the ocean, it is unavoidable that some poison will precede the nectar). Bankers, industry and the government view the circular as harsh and are unhappy with its timing.
•The RBI is right in placing weak banks under the PCA. If anything, the RBI says, it has helped control the problem of bad loans. The government wants the PCA diluted so that bank lending rises, thereby easing the liquidity crisis. The RBI could have heeded the Centre’s signals on easing liquidity through extraordinary measures in addition to routine open market operations. It is a fact that NBFCs, housing finance companies and microfinance institutions are in a spot of bother due to the squeeze on liquidity.
📰 NASA’s Kepler space telescope to retire
Runs out of fuel needed for operations
•The Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and will be retired after a 9-1/2-year mission in which it detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might harbour alien life, NASA said on Tuesday.
•Currently orbiting the sun 156 million km from the earth, the spacecraft will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, the U.S. space agency said.
•The telescope laid bare the diversity of planets that reside in our Milky Way galaxy, with findings indicating that distant star systems are populated with billions of planets, and even helped pinpoint the first moon known outside our solar system.
•The Kepler telescope discovered more than 2,600 of the roughly 3,800 exoplanets — the term for planets outside our solar system — that have been documented in the past two decades.
•The telescope has now run out of the fuel needed for further operations.
📰 Support for lives on the move
A national policy for internal migration is needed to improve earnings and enable an exit from poverty
•Though migration is expected to enhance consumption and lift families out of absolute poverty at the origin, it is not free from distress — distress due to unemployment or underemployment in agriculture, natural calamities, and input/output market imperfections. Internal migration can be driven by push and/or pull factors. In India, over the recent decades, agrarian distress (a push factor) and an increase in better-paying jobs in urban areas (a pull factor) have been drivers of internal migration. Data show that employment-seeking is the principal reason for migration in regions without conflict.
The costs of migration
•However, at the destination, a migrant’s lack of skills presents a major hindrance in entering the labour market. Further, the modern formal urban sector has often not been able to absorb the large number of rural workers entering the urban labour market. This has led to the growth of the ‘urban informal’ economy, which is marked by high poverty and vulnerabilities. The ‘urban informal’ economy is wrongly understood in countries such as India as a transient phenomenon. It has, in fact, expanded over the years and accounts for the bulk of urban employment.
•Most jobs in the urban informal sector pay poorly and involve self-employed workers who turn to petty production because of their inability to find wage labour. Then there are various forms of discrimination which do not allow migrants to graduate to better-paying jobs. Migrant workers earn only two-thirds of what is earned by non-migrant workers, according to 2014 data. Further, they have to incur a large cost of migration which includes the ‘search cost’ and the hazard of being cheated. Often these costs escalate as they are outside the state-provided health care and education system; this forces them to borrow from employers in order to meet these expenses. And frequent borrowing forces them to sell assets towards repayment of their loans. Employment opportunities, the levels of income earned, and the working conditions in destination areas are determined by the migrant’s household’s social location in his or her village. The division of the labour market by occupation, geography or industry (labour market segmentation), even within the urban informal labour market, confines migrants to the lower end. Often, such segmentation reinforces differences in social identity, and new forms of discrimination emerge in these sites.
The benefits of migration
•Despite these issues, internal migration has resulted in the increased well being of households, especially for people with higher skills, social connections and assets. Migrants belonging to lower castes and tribes have also brought in enough income to improve the economic condition of their households in rural areas and lift them out of poverty. Data show that a circular migrant’s earnings account for a higher proportion of household income among the lower castes and tribes. This has helped to improve the creditworthiness of the family members left behind — they can now obtain loans more easily. Thus, there exists a need to scale-up interventions aimed at enhancing these benefits from circular or temporary migration. Interventions targeting short-term migrants also need to recognise the fact that short-term migration to urban areas and its role in improving rural livelihoods is an ongoing part of a long-term economic strategy of the households. Local interventions by NGOs and private entrepreneurs also need to consider cultural dimensions reinforced by caste hierarchies and social consequences while targeting migrants.
Why a national policy?
•The need for a national policy towards internal migration is underscored by the fact that less than 20% of urban migrants had prearranged jobs and nearly two-thirds managed to find jobs within a week of their entry into the city, as a study in the early ’90s showed and that we verified through field work in Tamil Nadu in 2015. The probability of moving to an urban area with a prearranged job increases with an increase in education levels. Access to information on employment availability before migrating along with social networks tend to reduce the period of unemployment significantly. Social networks in the source region not only provide migrants with information on employment opportunities, but are also critical as social capital in that they provide a degree of trust. While migrants interact with each other based on ethnic ties, such ties dissipate when they interact with urban elites to secure employment.
•In India, the bulk of policy interventions, which the migrants could also benefit from, are directed towards enhancing human development; some are aimed at providing financial services. As government interventions are directed towards poverty reduction, there is a dearth of direct interventions targeted and focussed on regions. Policies on this could be twofold. The first kind could aim at reducing distress-induced migration and the second in addressing conditions of work, terms of employment and access to basic necessities.
•Narrowly defined migrant-focussed interventions will not enhance the capabilities of migrants that could lead to increased earnings and an eventual exit from poverty. There is also a need to distinguish between policy interventions aimed at ‘migrants for survival’ and ‘migrants for employment’. Continued dynamic interventions over long periods of time would yield better results compared to single-point static interventions, especially in the context of seasonal migrants. Local bodies and NGOs which bring about structural changes in local regions need to be provided more space.
•There is a lack of focussed intervention aimed at migrants. Interventions aimed at enhanced skill development would enable easier entry into the labour market. We also need independent interventions aimed specifically at addressing the needs of individual and household migrants because household migration necessitates access to infrastructure such as housing, sanitation and health care more than individual migration does. Various interventions must complement each other. For instance, government interventions related to employment can be supported by market-led interventions such as microfinance initiatives, which help in tackling seasonality of incomes. Policy interventions have to consider the push factors, which vary across regions, and understand the heterogeneity of migrants. As remittances from migrants are increasingly becoming the lifeline of rural households, improved financial infrastructure to enable the smooth flow of remittances and their effective use require more attention from India’s growing financial sector.
📰 Deal inked for biofuel research
•The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has signed a three-year, ₹11 crore deal with The Energy and Research Institute to set up a centre to produce “advanced biofuels and bio-commodities.”
•This is the fifth such dedicated centre for bioenergy-research and development set up by the Department.
•The others are located at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi; the Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati; Transtech Green Power Limited, Jaipur; and the Oil and Natural Gas Energy Centre in the National Capital Region.
•The bio-centre would be focussed on not only developing technology but also commercialising it, said Renu Swarup, Secretary, DBT. “We are looking at this project not only to carry out R&D research work but also products in the area of bio-commodities and bioenergy that can be finally commercialised as well,” she said at an event to announce the deal.
•There about a 100 scientists in the country, tasked with research projects to achieve the goals spelt out in the biofuel policy, which envisages high-quality algal biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol, bio butanol and bio hydrogen, according to the DBT.
•Other than fuel, by-products envisaged at the TERI-DBT Centre include food, feed, nutrition supplements, bio-plastics and novelty speciality chemicals.
•Last year, TERI established a photo bioreactor of 10,000-litre capacities for round-the-year-production of algal strains that contain heightened lipid concentrations and a pilot scale (1,500 litre) scale bio-hydrogen production facility.
