📰 Assam NRC: SC fixes December 15 as deadline for filing claims, objections
The apex court also fixed the timeline for issuance of notice as January 15 to claimants, and verification of documents as February 1.
•The Supreme Court on Thursday came on the same page as the government, allowing more than 40 lakh people left out of the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam to use five additional documents, including the ration card, to claim their Indian legacy.
•Consequently, the court extended the last date for filing of claims and objections from November 25 to December 15.
Notices till Jan. 15
•The deadline for issuing notices to claimants, after digitisation and completion of all formalities, is January 15, 2019. The verification of their claims would begin on February 1 next year. Further details of the time schedule, including the time for completion of verification/enquiry of the claims, will follow at the appropriate time.
List of documents
•In a major relief to claimants who did not find a place in the final draft of the NRC released on July 30, a Special Bench of Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Rohinton F. Nariman allowed them to use any of the five documents — the NRC, 1951; citizenship certificate; refugee registration certificate; certified copies of the pre-1971 electoral rolls, particularly those issued from the State of Tripura; and ration card. The court had earlier been circumspect about the use of the five records.
•The Bench disagreed with NRC Co-ordinator Prateek Hajela’s conclusion in his October 4 report that since these five documents could be easily forged, they should not be permitted to be used. “We do not think you are right, Mr. Hajela,” Justice Nariman told him.
•“We are of the view that the objection of Mr. Hajela to the five documents in question and specifically with regard to the documents listed at Serial Nos. (i) and (ii) i.e. names in NRC, 1951; and names in Electoral Roll up to 24th March, 1971 is based entirely on a possibility of abuse which, however, strong, cannot be an acceptable reason in law to exclude the documents from consideration,” Chief Justice Gogoi observed in the 18-page order for the Bench.
•The court had been worried about how fail-safe these documents would prove to be. Chief Justice Gogoi had orally wondered whether these documents could be ‘manufactured.’ Mr. Hajela’s negative report had confirmed the court's apprehensions. He had advised against the use of the five documents.
•Instead, on Thursday, the court struck a balance. It said the answer lay in allowing the use of these five records, subject to additional and thorough verification. It asked Mr. Hajela to prepare the groundwork for fool-proof verification of claims. The court directed him to submit a report after December 15.
📰 A catalogue of all that’s valuable
State and public initiatives to compile registers of antiquities must be closely coordinated
•Over the last two years, the Madras High Court has become the site of high drama in the most unlikely of ways. Binding spirited advocates, a famed industrialist, a gritty police force, and various other state agencies is the somewhat overlooked question of antiquities conservation. Tasked with the onerous mandate of investigating theft of idols and antiquities, Tamil Nadu Police’s Idol Wing has been engaged in a tense confrontation with the State’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department, a body charged with, among other things, the upkeep and safety of a vast collection of invaluable temple artefacts.
Only in Tamil Nadu
•Tamil Nadu is rich feeding ground for idol thieves and smugglers because of the sheer number of temples within its borders. It is not surprising that the State should then have a court designated specifically to deal with such matters. Earlier this year, the then Chief Justice of the Madras High Court constituted a special bench consisting of Justices R. Mahadevan and P.D. Audikesavalu to hear cases relating to idol theft.
•But it was in July last year that a remarkable development took place in this area of law. Justice Mahadevan passed a momentous order as far as the legal framework on antiquities is concerned. Noting the lack of coordination between departments responsible for custodianship of our cultural heritage and law enforcement agencies, the court observed: “It is their [the HR&CE Department’s] primary duty to protect the temples and safeguard the valuable idols/antiques, which, this Court with great anguish expresses that the department has failed to do…One more important point to be noted is that the department has not computerised the stock, provided adequate ICON Centres with surveillance to keep safe custody of the valuable idols in the Centre and in the temples… It also appears that the Idol wing is interacting with the respective departments of the Central Government only to recover the stolen Idols and antiques, but there seems to be no-coordination between them to curb the crime.”
•The court also passed detailed directions to be followed by the respondent State actors, including the following: “The stock of Idols maintained in the manual books in the State must be computerised within a period of four weeks, if not already computerised. Similarly, a list of stock of Idols in the temples must be computerised and the same must be reported to this court.”
•Significantly, this did not come in the course of interpretation of the statute that occupies the field (the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972), but despite it.
•Records do not indicate that a complete and computerised record of temple idols in Tamil Nadu has been submitted to the court so far. This is not to say such a record may or may not exist — but its inaccessibility to the layman, the scholar or the police brings into perspective the larger issue of creating an efficient and comprehensive database of antiquities.
A vital resource
•In the absence of such a searchable catalogue, the risk of antiquities theft and loss of cultural property is multiplied enormously because it becomes that much easier for art criminals to manufacture the provenance of a certain artefact. Without a reliable reference point to confirm the origins and the trail of ownership of a certain antiquity, its sale abroad becomes relatively harder to track. This concern has been voiced by academics and art enthusiasts alike, and was abated to a certain degree by the creation of the National Register on Antiquities.
•Established in 2007 under the aegis of the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities (now under the administration of the ASI), the Register is a publicly accessible repository of documented and registered Indian antiquities. There is also the India Pride Project, a volunteer-network of private individuals interested in protecting Indian antiquities, that has been instrumental in the repatriation of several works of incalculable archaeological and aesthetic value.
•But cause for concern still remains. Though the Register on Antiquities gets diligently populated on the basis of already registered antiquities and objects catalogued in public collections of museums or universities, there are still artefacts yet to be registered or documented. And the problem of non-coordination and lack of information highlighted by the Madras High Court still looms large. One easily identifiable example is that of the quantities of registered antiquities that have found their way into the NMMA’s Register. While the Ministry of Culture’s annual report for 2017-18 states that a mammoth 15.2 lakh registered antiquities have been documented through the NMMA, the Register only provides information for about 4.7 lakh of these. Similarly, if there indeed has been sharing data problem between two state agencies (HR&CE Department and the Idol Wing), what might be scale of this data asymmetry between a local body and the National Mission? Related to this are also the questions of how secure these heritage repositories are; whether the public at large can contribute to them or even use them to assist understaffed and underfunded state actors in foiling antiquity thefts.
•The NMMA fortunately does have a mandate to cultivate public engagement and awareness for the protection of India’s cultural heritage. Its progress towards that realisation seems slower than planned, and much remains to be completed. In the meanwhile, citizen-led initiatives and timely judicial interventions are making up for what already ought to be higher on the list of national priorities.
📰 India protests China-Pakistan bus via PoK
China says move part of CPEC, doesn’t reflect Beijing’s position on Kashmir
•India on Thursday reiterated its opposition to a proposed luxury bus service between Pakistan and China that would pass through parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan — territory that India claims — terming it “a violation of India’s sovereignty”, a day after it had summoned a Chinese diplomat to South Block to lodge a strong protest against the initiative.
•“We have lodged strong protests with China and Pakistan on the proposed bus service that will operate through areas of Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir State under the so-called ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’,” the spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told reporters. “Any such bus service through Pakistan Occupied Jammu & Kashmir State will be a violation of India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
India urges cancellation
•A Director in the MEA had delivered a note verbale to a Counselor in the Chinese Embassy on Wednesday, urging the cancellation of the bus service that is due to start on November 3, said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
•Both Beijing and Islamabad responded to New Delhi’s protests.
•While China asserted that the bus service from Lahore to Tashkurgan in Xinjiang — timed to begin when Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan will be visiting Beijing — did not alter the country’s stance on the Kashmir issue, Pakistan dismissed India’s objections as “frivolous”.
•“As for the bus service, I have not heard of the relevant information and I have not heard of complaints,” Lu Kang, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, said at the ministry’s regular briefing, when asked about India’s protest against the move.
•Mr. Lu stressed that the CPEC was an “economic project”, and did not reflect China’s position on Kashmir. “It is an economic cooperation project between China and Pakistan and not targeted at any third party. It has nothing to do with the territorial dispute and it will not affect China’s principled position on the issue of Kashmir,” Mr. Lu observed.
Red carpet
•China is preparing to roll out the red carpet for Mr. Khan, who is set to arrive in Beijing on Friday, and would be formally welcomed at the Great Hall of the People on Saturday. Reacting to India’s statement, the spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “India’s repeated regurgitation of claims over Indian Occupied Kashmir can neither change the facts of history nor the legality of the Jammu & Kashmir dispute.”
•India has consistently opposed the 1963 “China-Pakistan Boundary Agreement” that recognises PoK as under “actual Pakistani control” without prejudicing a final dispute resolution with India, and India has protested the Karakoram Highway on which traffic has been plying regularly, as well as subsequent infrastructure projects built by China in the disputed area.
•Asked on Thursday if India’s strong objection to the bus service indicates a “toughening of position”, the MEA spokesperson, however, declined to comment.
📰 Always a fine balance
The RBI-government tussle must prompt a debate on defining the RBI Governor’s position
•Yaga Venugopal Reddy, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, (RBI) known as much for his wit as his clever stewardship of the central bank,coined an interesting phrase, “open-mouth operation”, taking off from the Open Market Operation tool of the RBI.
•That phrase best describes RBI Deputy Governor Viral Acharya’s A.D. Shroff Memorial Lecture in Mumbai last week. Dr. Reddy had coined the phrase to describe his speech in Goa on August 15, 1997 at a conference of the Foreign Exchange Dealers’ Association. Then a Deputy Governor, Dr. Reddy (with the full support of the then Governor, C. Rangarajan) tried to talk down the rupee which the central bank felt was over-valued.
Compelling correctives
•The objective of an “open-mouth operation” is clear: influence a target audience to behave in a manner favourable to you or your objectives. If the target was the forex market in Dr. Reddy’s Goa speech, it was the Central government in Dr. Acharya’s speech. The “open-mouth operation” worked beautifully in both instances. The rupee corrected immediately after Dr. Reddy’s speech; after Dr. Acharya’s speech, the government has been forced to acknowledge, even if grudgingly, that the RBI’s autonomy is “within the framework of the RBI Act”.
•Shorn of the personalities, what we are witnessing now is a fascinating tussle between an institution covered by an Act of Parliament and the executive, with one fighting for its autonomy and the other for its interests. Where does the fair balance lie?
•Before trying to answer that question, we need to understand the ‘autonomy’ that the RBI enjoys and the limits to that. This is not the first time that the RBI’s autonomy has come under focus, and it will surely not be the last. Successive Governors have fought against what they felt were transgressions — formal and informal — on the central bank’s autonomy by powerful Finance Ministers.
•Dr. Reddy once famously quipped to a journalist: “I’m very independent. The RBI has full autonomy. I have taken the permission of my Finance Minster to tell you that.” On a more serious note, he clarified that the RBI is independent, but within the limits set by the government.
•In his book, Advice and Dissent: My Life in Public Service, he explains his understanding of this autonomy under three functions: operational issues, policy matters, and structural reforms. In the case of the first, he believed in total freedom; on the second, he preferred prior consultation with the mandarins in North Block; and on the third, he worked in “very close coordination” with the government.
•Dr. Reddy describes the interactions with the government as “walking on a razor’s edge” and concedes that the sovereign is ultimately supreme. That is because the RBI Act allows the government to give written directives to the RBI in the public interest (the infamous Section 7 that is now in the news). On critical issues, often the choice for the Governor is to concede to the government with or without a written directive. But tradition has been that both the government and the RBI have avoided recourse to this provision.
•That has been due only to the mature handling of differences behind closed doors, something that has been absent in the current tussle. Duvvuri Subbarao, another former Governor, argues along similar lines in his book, Who Moved My Interest Rate?
Handled with care, till now
•The existence of Section 7 in the RBI Act, even if it has never been used till now, proves that the RBI is not fully autonomous, says Dr. Subbarao. He points out that the fact that it has never been used is testimony to the sense of responsibility that the government and the central bank have displayed.
•The statement put out by the government on Wednesday underlines this message very clearly: the RBI is autonomous but within the framework of the RBI Act. It is thus clear that the central bank cannot claim absolute autonomy. It is autonomy within the limits set by the government and its extent depends on the subject and the context. There is a clear reason why, even while it is conceded that control of the nation’s currency should be with an independent authority removed from the sway of elected representatives, the RBI Act has the veto option in the form of Section 7.
•And that’s because it is not the technocrats and economists sitting in Mumbai’s Mint Street who carry the can for the policies they frame; it is the rulers in Delhi who do. Ultimately, it is the elected representative ruling the country who is answerable to the citizen every five years. The representative cannot split hairs before the voter while explaining the economy’s performance — he has to own up for everything, including the RBI’s actions, as his own.
•In a democracy, it is unthinkable that we will have an institution that is so autonomous that it is not answerable to the people. The risk of such an institution is that it will impose its preferences on society against the latter’s will, which is undemocratic.
•Seen from this perspective, the limits to the RBI’s autonomy will be clear. It is autonomous and accountable to the people ultimately, through the government. The onus is thus on responsible behaviour by both sides. There is enough creative tension between the two built into the system. The Governor has to be conscious of the limits to his autonomy at all times, and the government has to consider the advice coming from Mint Street in all seriousness, as indeed Dr. Reddy and Dr. Subbarao have pointed out.
Government’s failure
•But what if they do have fundamental disagreements, as they seem to be having now, and are unable to arrive at a common ground? Well, the brahmastra of Section 7 is certainly available to the more powerful side; but just as the weapon is a deterrent never to be used, so is Section 7. The cleverness of the politician in Delhi lies in negotiating with the RBI and having his way without ever threatening to unleash the brahmastra — the other side knows it exists anyway. This is where the present dispensation in Delhi seems to have failed.
•It is to avoid situations such as the one we are seeing now that former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan argued for a clear enunciation of the RBI’s responsibilities. In his book I Do What I Do, he points out that the position of the RBI Governor in the government hierarchy is not defined. The Governor draws the salary of a Cabinet Secretary, and it is generally understood that he will explain his decisions only to the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister. Argues Dr. Rajan: “There is a danger in keeping the position ill-defined because the constant effort of the bureaucracy is to whittle down its power.”
•The latest tussle between the executive and the central bank will eventually end, in all probability with a compromise. However, it’s purpose would have been served if the debate leads to greater awareness on both sides of the other’s compulsions. Better still, if it leads to a clear definition of the RBI’s responsibilities that would, to borrow Governor Urjit Patel’s words, be the pot of nectar coming out of this Samudra Manthan.
📰 Choked by smog: on air pollution
Urgent correctives are needed, or lethal winter pollution will become the new normal
•Air pollution is choking several cities in the northern States once again, as changes in temperature and slowing winds trap soot, dust and fine particulate matter. The National Capital Region is badly hit, as the burning of agricultural residue in Punjab and Haryana is releasing large volumes of smoke containing, among other pollutants, highly damaging fine particulates, or PM2.5. The problem is aggravated by the burning of urban waste, diesel soot, vehicular exhaust, road and construction dust, and power generation. Although India has nine of the 10 most polluted cities in the world, it has not taken consistent action on pollution. Tens of millions live with ambient air quality that is well short of even the relaxed parameters the country has set for fine particulates, compared with those of the World Health Organisation. India should at least now give high importance to the WHO warning about air pollution being the new tobacco. This year’s ‘severe’ air quality rating for Delhi and poor conditions prevailing in other cities in the Indo-Gangetic Plain should compel a decisive shift in policy. The Centre and the State governments need to get into crisis mode to dramatically reduce emissions. They must address the burning of carbon, which is a direct source, and emissions with oxides of nitrogen and sulphur from vehicles that turn into fine particulates through atmospheric reactions. Failure to take sustainable and urgent measures will inflict long-term harm on public health, affecting children even more by putting them at higher risk for diseases.
•The UN Environment Programme’s recent report titled ‘Air Pollution in Asia and the Pacific: Science-Based Solutions’ has sounded a warning, pointing out that only 8% of the population in the countries of the region get to breathe air of acceptable quality. One study of degradation of Delhi’s air over a 10-year period beginning 2000 estimated premature mortality to have risen by as much as 60%. With the steady growth in the population of the capital and other cities, the trauma is set to worsen. Farm stubble burning is a major contributor to the problem, and its footprint may be growing because of wider use of mechanical harvesters that is producing more waste. An innovative approach could be to use climate change funds to turn farm residues into a resource, using technological options such as converting them into biofuels and fertilizers. From an urban development perspective, large cities should reorient their investments to prioritise public transport, favouring electric mobility. The World Bank has said it is keen to enhance its lending portfolio to tackle air pollution, opening a new avenue for this. Governments should make the use of personal vehicles in cities less attractive through strict road pricing mechanisms. Sharply escalated, deterrent parking fees can be implemented. If governments delay action on the critical issue of pollution control, public pressure must force them to act.
📰 Oceans heating faster: study
Water bodies absorbed 60% more heat than previously thought, say scientists
•The world’s oceans have absorbed 60% more heat than previously thought over the last quarter of a century, scientists said on Thursday, leaving Earth more sensitive still to the effects of climate change.
•Oceans cover more than two thirds of the planet’s surface and play a vital role in sustaining life on Earth.
•According to their most recent assessment this month, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that the world’s oceans have absorbed 90% of the temperature rise caused by man-made carbon emissions.
•But new research published in the journal Nature used a novel method of measuring ocean temperature.
•It found that for each of the last 25 years, oceans had absorbed heat energy equivalent to 150 times the amount of electricity mankind produces annually.
•That is 60% higher than what previous studies showed.
•While those studies relied on tallying the excess heat produced by known man-made greenhouse gas emissions, a team of U.S.-based scientists focussed on two gases found naturally in the atmosphere — Oxygen and carbon dioxide.
•Both gases are soluble in water, but the rate at which water absorbs them decreases as it warms.
Accurate estimates
•By measuring atmospheric oxygen and CO2 for each year, scientists were able to more accurately estimate how much heat oceans had absorbed on a global scale.
•“Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep,” said Laure Resplandy, assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton and lead study author. “Our data show that it would have warmed by 6.5 degrees Celsius every decade since 1991.” That compares with a IPCC estimate of a 4.0 C rise each decade.
•She said the data showed mankind must once again revise down its carbon footprint, with emissions needing to fall 25% compared to previous estimates.
•“The result significantly increases the confidence we can place in estimates of ocean warming and therefore helps reduce uncertainty,” said Ralph Keeling, a geophysicist at the University of California-San Diego and co-author of the study.
•The IPCC warns that drastic measures need taking in order to limit global warming to 1.5 Celsius by the end of the century but the world produced a record amount of carbon emissions in 2017.
