📰 Lack of basic rights for the aged a concern: SC
‘Their statutory right to be provided dignity, health & shelter’
•Terming the rights of the rising elderly population of the country an “emerging situation” not envisaged even in the Constitution, the Supreme Court on Thursday said the government could not tighten its purse strings in the name of “economic budgeting” to explain the inadequate welfare provided to senior citizens and the aged. The court said it was a statutory right of every aged person under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act of 2007 to be provided dignity, health and shelter. All the three are important components which make the fundamental right to life under Article 21.
•A Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur ordered the Centre to obtain the “necessary information” from all the State governments and the Union Territories about the number of old age homes in each district and file a status report by January 31.
•“In the absence of a suitable number of old age homes, and homes as per their status, they are left to fend for themselves making them vulnerable to mishaps and other unforeseen events,” Justice Lokur, who authored the verdict, observed.
•The apex court ordered the Centre to obtain details from the States about the medical and geriatric care facilities available to senior citizens in each district.
•“There is no reliable information about the number of beds reserved for geriatric care in government or private hospitals or information regarding specific geriatric centres,” the court observed.
Pension pittance
•The court directed that the Centre should prepare a plan of action for giving publicity to the provisions of 2007 Act and ensure that the State governments carry out and execute the provisions of the law.
•The court’s judgment, based on a petition filed by former Union Law Minister Ashwani Kumar, expressed shock at the “pittance” paid to senior citizens and the elderly in the form of pension.
•The Centre also noted that there had been a steady rise in the population of senior citizens in India. It submitted in court that the number of elderly persons had increased from 1.98 crore in 1951 to 7.6 crore in 2001 and 10.38 crore in 2011. It is projected that the number of 60+ in India would increase to 14.3 crore in 2021 and 17.3 crore in 2026.
📰 SC bats for rights of death row convicts
‘Allow them to meet family, lawyers’
•Death row convicts should be allowed to meet with family, friends, lawyers and mental health professionals for a “reasonable period of time with reasonable frequency” like any other prisoner.
•It is part of their fundamental right to dignity and equality, the Supreme Court held in a judgment on Thursday.
Entitlement of prisoners
•“With regard to the entitlement of a prisoner on death row to have meetings and interviews with his lawyers or members of his immediate family or even mental health professionals, we are of opinion that such meetings and interviews should be permitted,” a three-judge Bench, led by Justice Madan B. Lokur, observed.
•The court said prison manuals or laws depriving condemned prisoners of their basic rights should be nixed.
•The judgment came after the court took suo motu cognisance of the rights of the incarcerated and conditions in prisons across the country.
•One of the issues specifically pertained to the right of the condemned; the extension of their right to be treated on a par with other convicted prisoners and the facilities allowed to them.
•The judgment, however, does not delve into questions like at what specific point a person becomes a death row convict — is it when he is sentenced to death by a trial court or much later when all his remedies have been exhausted and he waits for his execution at the hands of the State.
Solitary confinement
•The judgment mentions submissions made to solitary confinement of prisoners on death row. Here too, the court banks on generalities, referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and reiterating that right to life includes the “right to live with human dignity.”
📰 The fear of executive courts
India urgently needs the return of a thriving legal culture that uncompromisingly calls out political posturing
•On Monday, Justice S.R. Sen of the Meghalaya High Court observed in a judgment that “anybody opposing... Indian laws and the Constitution cannot be considered... citizens of the country.” The case involved the denial of a domicile certificate. Justice Sen, however, thought it fit to further note that in 1947 India “should ... have been declared... a Hindu country”, and that “our beloved Prime Minister” ought to legislate to grant automatic citizenship to (non-Muslim) religious minorities “who have come from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan”. He also noted that “our political leaders” in 1947 “were too much in a hurry to get the independence... thus, creating all the problems today”, and that “nobody should try to make India as another Islamic country”. In parting, Justice Sen directed the Assistant Solicitor-General to hand over a copy of his judgment “latest by 11-12-2018 to the Hon’ble Prime Minister, Hon’ble Home Minister, and Hon’ble Law Minister”.
•It is tempting to dismiss this as an aberration, like the time that Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court observed that peacocks don’t have sex. Giving in to that temptation, however, would be a mistake. Justice Sen’s ill-advised and ill-judged diatribe is only the latest in a series of instances where judges have inserted themselves into fraught political controversies, and have deployed the prestige of judicial office to lend weight to one side of the controversy. This is an alarming trend.
The meaning of judicial independence
•We normally think about judicial independence as independence from the government. Our Constitution is designed to ensure that judges can do their work “independent” of government influence: fixed salaries, security of tenure, and an appointments process that — through the Supreme Court’s judgments — is insulated from executive control.
•Independence, however, means something more. It also requires that judges perform their constitutional role independent of personal biases, political and moral beliefs, and partisan ideologies. Of course, adjudication is a political task, and there is no doubt that a judge’s political vision will inform her work. That, however, does not authorise the judge to turn into a politician. At all times, she is bound to maintain primary fidelity to the law and the Constitution: to the text of legal instruments, to the canons of legal interpretation, and to the body of judicial precedent that holds the field. These are crucial checks upon judicial power.
•Judicial independence, therefore, depends on judges recognising that law, while being influenced by politics, is not reducible to it. Law and adjudication must remain autonomous from partisan politics in important ways. And the more we strengthen judicial independence in its first sense — independence from the government — the more attention we must pay to independence in this second sense. This is because control brings with it accountability. Politicians, for example, remain “accountable” to the people in at least some sense, because they depend upon them in order to continue in office after five years. Judges who are insulated from any external control are accountable only to themselves, and their own sense of the limits of their constitutional role.
•Accountability only to oneself, however, is a very weak form of constraint. The temptation to overstep is always immense, more so when such immense power has been placed in one’s own hands. It is here that legal culture plays a critical role in establishing judicial accountability. By legal culture, I refer to a set of unwritten, but clearly established, norms that determine what is or is not acceptable in the process of adjudication. And a legal culture does not spring up out of a vacuum: it must be created and nurtured by judges, lawyers, legal academics, the press and the citizenry.
The roots of the crisis
•Where, then, has the legal culture failed us? The answer takes us back a few decades. In the 1980s, there was a rapid expansion of judicial power. This expansion was motivated by a sense that the judiciary had long been a conservative institution, taking the side of landed interests against “the people”. This needed to change. In order to accomplish this, the Supreme Court began to dispense with procedural checks upon its power. Some of these steps were important and necessary, such as allowing “public interest” cases to be filed on behalf of those who were unable to access the courts. Others, however, were double-edged swords, such as diluting the evidentiary standards required to prove disputed facts, and vastly expanding the courts’ discretion to shape and fashion remedies.
•The 1980s Supreme Court was highly praised for this. Influential legal scholars — whose views continue to hold sway in law schools today — lauded the destruction of pesky “Anglo-Saxon” procedural rules, which stood in the way of “complete justice”. Judges were painted as crusading heroes. In words that might have embarrassed Louis XIV, the Supreme court was called “the last refuge of the oppressed and the bewildered”. By the 1990s and the 2000s, under the misleading label of “judicial activism”, the court was beginning to engage in a host of administrative activities, from managing welfare schemes to “beautifying cities” to overseeing anti-corruption initiatives. The constitutional court had become a Supreme ‘Administrative’ Court. This, too, was justified on the altar of necessity: politicians were corrupt, bureaucrats were inefficient, and things didn’t move. Someone had to come and clean it all up.
•A combination of viewing the judiciary as an infallible solution to all social problems, and viewing procedure — that would otherwise constrain judicial power — as an irritant that stands in the way of a truer, purer justice has created the perfect storm that we see today. The first allows a judge to project her own social and political views as universally valid and beneficial; the second allows her to ignore the barriers that stand between her and the implementation of those views. Wrapped up in patriotic zeal, a judge does not stop to think whether he is authorised to compel all cinema halls in the nation to play the national anthem; another does not consider whether he has the power to mandate that every student in Tamil Nadu must study the Tirukkural; a third takes over the entire process of preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC), with nary a thought about whether the Constitution ever contemplated a task such as this to fall within the judicial domain.
A frightening prospect
•The record of the courts in protecting civil rights has been a mixed one. In far too many cases, courts have tended to defer to the executive and the government. However, judgments like the national anthem order, the Tirukkural order, the NRC process, and Justice Sen’s recent foray raise an altogether more frightening prospect: that of an “executive court”. By an executive court, I mean a court whose moral and political compass finds itself in alignment with the government of the day, and one that has no compunctions in navigating only according to that compass. Instead of checking and limiting government power, an executive court finds itself marching in lockstep with the government, and being used to set the seal of its prestige upon more controversial parts of the government’s agenda.
•We are not there yet. But we urgently need the return of a thriving legal culture, one that uncompromisingly calls out political posturing of the kind we have seen this week. And this legal culture cannot pick and choose, criticising regressive orders like Justice Sen’s, while exempting judgments that equally cross the line, but nonetheless seem to have achieved a “right outcome”. Only a principled consistency in requiring that judges must always give reasons for their judgment can halt the transformation of the constitutional court into an executive court.
📰 The anatomy of a police station
Lacking personnel, funds and motivation, the thana is not structured to enforce the rule of law
•The death of inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, shot while trying to control a mob of cow vigilantes in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, is a vivid expression of the contempt of our ruling classes, and those aligned to them, for the rule of law. The increasing number of human sacrifices for the alleged protection of cows signals a steep rise in this contempt. These incidents shock us because they are graphic and indicate a discernible change for the worse. The shock turns into dread as the ruling elite fails to condemn and punish the perpetrators. Mob violence is growing, and the government’s efforts to contain it are wanting.
•Underlying these shocking incidents is an equally terrifying lawlessness, which is quiet, insidious and pervasive. The stunningly casual statements from the establishment after the incident are a new development in a systematised attack on the rule of law. This is illustrated in my case study of an unobtrusive, sleepy looking police station in the tribal belt of central India.
Unable to enforce law
•The police station was structured to perpetrate lawlessness in two ways. First, it was simply not enabled to enforce the rule of law. Manned by 16 people in all, with six of its 22 posts vacant, and headed by a sub-inspector, it was expected to serve 83 villages across 2,680 sq km. The police personnel were expected to investigate crime, maintain law and order, and were frequently deployed on VIP duty. The personnel rotated through it rapidly, as there was at least one transfer per month. The senior officers complained that postings were based on patronage, and it was not possible to deploy the best people for the most difficult tasks. The thana was always short of money, and personnel spent from their pocket on stationery and other needs.
•The police personnel were extremely dissatisfied. They were entitled to 16 days of leave in a year, but this was never actually sanctioned. They reported being overworked, on duty 24 hours a day, with high stress. Their families were neglected. A head constable said that he had never attended a parents’ meeting in his child’s school. A majority of the constables lived in the nearby city because of lack of housing, schools and health facilities in that area. They travelled to the police station everyday, which is not how things should be as they need to be available in case of a crisis. This cost them around ₹5,000 per month. They saw themselves as underpaid and not respected.
•To this demotivating background were added idiosyncratic working styles. Though a police station is expected to respond to the needs and events of the area, it was assigned targets, such as for seizing a certain amount of liquor and issuing a number of challans. Every year, the targets were increased. Sometimes they simply did not correspond to the situation. For example, it had problems achieving its targets for issuing challans in the case of people riding without helmets, because there were few motorcycles in the area and people simply did not have money to pay the fine.
•Discussions with the police personnel showed poor understanding about enforcing the law. When violence against women was discussed, many said that women usually made false complaints. During the study, a mentally disturbed person was beaten up as he stood hallucinating, decrying imagined enemies. The shortage of personnel, the sorry working conditions and their ignorance created a system not capable of upholding the rule of law.
Deep-rooted corruption
•The second way in which the police station became an agent of lawlessness was corruption. Interaction with the community showed that the village people feared and avoided the police. They said that the police listened to those who had money. The usual dismal tales of police greed and brutality emerged. Constables extracted money from vehicles plying the highway, snatched away mobile phones of ordinary people and returned them only when they were paid money. When an FIR was lodged, the police evinced sympathy for the victims as well as the accused, and took money off both to solve the case. An attempted rape was ignored after money exchanged hands.
•One police personnel admitted that it was difficult not to be corrupt, because everyone was. She had started her career determined to never accept bribes. But over time, her perspective changed, as she faced pressure from senior officials as well as local leaders to ‘help’ in various ways. The pressure from inside, she said, was worse. This problem was clearly systemic and not individual, as the police personnel themselves were not happy with their corruption. They tried to atone for their sins by ensuring proper last rites when bodies were not claimed by anyone after accidents, by spending their own money.
•This dull-looking police station was not newsworthy, and its activities did not shock anyone. But it symbolises the pervasive lawlessness to which we are now habituated. It is out of this system of lawlessness that the more dramatic incidents like the death of Singh emerge. We remain apathetic to systemic callousness, which also needs scrutiny and action.
📰 Theresa must
Having survived a party challenge, the British PM should spell out London’s next steps
•British Prime Minister Theresa May has survived a trust vote on her Conservative party stewardship. But there is little sign that the bitter infighting within the ruling party will abate. Nor is there any assurance that Parliament will back her government’s controversial Brexit deal with the European Union. The leadership challenge was suddenly triggered by a growing number of Tory rebels who felt emboldened by widespread opposition to the withdrawal agreement that has united Europhiles and Eurosceptics across parties. Their resistance gained momentum when Ms. May, deeply apprehensive about its approval by the Commons, decided to defer a vote on the deal. Following her victory in the party leadership battle, Ms. May hopes to secure more assurances from European leaders that Britain would not be permanently locked into a customs union with the EU. The customs union is the backstop arrangement meant to continue the open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, a lifeline of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. London has sought to sell the backstop as the best possible deal that could protect the U.K.’s territorial integrity. The EU insists the withdrawal agreement cannot be reopened for negotiations. The Remain and Leave camps want legal assurances that the customs union would at best be temporary, given the curbs it would impose regarding trade agreements with third countries.
•It is possible that Brussels will adopt a flexible stance, despite its protestations to the contrary, to avert a no-deal scenario on the expiry of the Article 50 deadline on March 29, 2019. Examples of how the dilemma posed by the Danish rejection of the 1991 EU treaty, or Ireland’s ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty were legally overcome are being cited in relation to the present difficulty with the Irish backstop. Clearly, the EU’s main concern is not to stretch the basic idea that the benefits of membership are limited to insiders. But the U.K. will have to show some flexibility, of deferring to the democratic mandate of the referendum, while recognising the practical imperatives of ceasing a long partnership. In that respect, it would be wishful thinking, to paraphrase former Prime Minister John Major, to want to dispense with the Irish formula that has been written into the withdrawal agreement. Tory rebels should rise above their narrow differences in the national interest and back the final agreement presented to Parliament in January. Else, they risk an extension of the Brexit deadline and even possibly a second referendum on the EU membership issue. The meaning of the 2016 referendum verdict has evolved from implying that a no-deal withdrawal was better than a bad deal to an acceptance that a soft exit is the more realistic option. Now, opinions on a second referendum are being openly voiced. It’s time London decided what it really wants.
📰 India, Russia discuss measures to boost joint production in defence
Private firms Private will also be involved in manufacturing spares.
•India and Russia have agreed on way to simplify export clearances to take forward joint manufacturing in defence. This was among various issues discussed during the 18th meeting of the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission on Military Technical Cooperation (IRIGC-MTC) chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Russian counterpart General Sergei Shoigu on Thursday.
•“The two focus areas of the discussions were on further expanding military to military and defence industrial engagement between the two countries,” a defence source official said on condition of anonymity.
•India is keen on moving from license manufacturing of defence equipment to joint production under Make in India. This includes allowing Indian companies, both Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSU) and private sector, manufacturing spares for Russian systems in India. “We have worked out some formats for end use clearances,” the official stated.
•Eventually India is keen that its companies supply components and spares to export to third world countries. “There is a larger shift to that,” the official explained.
•The two sides also agreed to take forward inter-governmental arrangements for facilitating joint manufacturing of spares for Russian origin equipment in India, under the ‘Make in India’ initiative, Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in a statement.
•In this regard, four military -industry conferences were held between Russian manufactures and Indian companies to take the process forward.
Military to military cooperation
•To enhance military to military engagement and rationalise the functioning of the joint commission, a revised Inter-Governmental Agreement on restructuring the existing IRIGC-MTC was also signed by the two ministers.
•“An additional institutional working group headed by chief of Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) to the chairman chiefs of staff committee and deputy chief of the main operational directorate of general staff of armed forces of Russian federation would be set up under the expanded Commission,” MoD statement added.
•The two countries signed a bilateral road map on defence cooperation in June 2017 for enhancing joint exercises and resumption of training exchanges.
•India signed several big ticket defence deals with Russia recently and more are in the pipeline. In a reference to the threat of US sanctions Russian Defence Minister said in a statement, “Despite the pressure from individual States, we have signed a large package of documents and landmark contracts for supply of S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missile systems and construction of Project 11356 frigates.”
•Stating that India is ready to “deepen military and technical cooperation” with Russia, Ms. Sitharaman said that such cooperation has a “long history”.
📰 Home Ministry to tech giants: Check abuse of women, kids on social media
Time to take down content after authorities request it reduced from 72 to 36 hours.
•The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approached U.S.-based search engine Google for sharing its Application Programming Interface (API) for identifying child sexual abuse material on social media platforms.
•The MHA is also in talks with Microsoft to commercially acquire PhotoDNA, a tool that aids in finding and removing known images of child exploitation, according to technology giant’s website.
•In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the MHA said that as many as 26 First Information Reports were registered based on complaints against child pornography and sexual harassment faced by women received on www.cybercrime.gov.in.
•Over 2 lakh people have visited the website since the portal was launched on September 20 to receive complaints from citizens on objectionable online content related to child pornography, child sexual abuse material, and sexually explicit material such as rape and gang rape.
•The MHA said that it has sent a draft agreement to U.S.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to access its “cyber tipline reports regarding missing and exploited children.”
•The MHA also told the court that it has compiled keywords to identify objectionable content in the English, Hindi, Bengali and Kannada languages, and has shared the same with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook..
•The official also said that the time limit given to social media platforms to take down such content after a request has been sent by law enforcement agencies has been reduced from 72 to 36 hours.
•On the directions of the apex court, the MHA will also send detailed guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to eliminate child pornography, rape and gang rape imageries, videos and sites on content hosting platforms and other applications.
•“The government of India may frame the necessary guidelines/SoPs and implement them within two weeks so as to eliminate child pornography, rape and gang rape imageries, videos and sites in content hosting platforms and other applications,” the SC said in its December 11 order. The case will come up for hearing in February 2019.
📰 Scientists launch study to help Punganur cow back on its knees
Diminutive breed has a cult following, but numbers are dwindling
•The Punganur cow, considered one of the world’s smallest breeds of cattle, is said to be on the verge of extinction due to cross-breeding being conducted by farmers, according to livestock journals.
•While R.W. Littlewood was the first to highlight the breed’s vulnerable status in his 1936 book ‘Livestock of South India’, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Animal Genetic Resources lists the breed as facing extinction.
•Animal genetics and breeding scientists from the NTR University of Veterinary Sciences in Gannavaram are now engaged in efforts to save the unique breed from extinction.
•The Punganur cow is diminutive, with a height of 70 cm to 90 cm and weighing around 115 to 200 kg. In comparison, the famous Ongole bull stands tall at 1.70 metres and weighs 500 kg. Both breeds trace their origins to Andhra Pradesh.
•The Livestock Research Station (LRS) at Palamaner in Chittoor district is said to be the last bastion of the breed. LRS has instituted a programme to conserve the breed.
Status symbol
•The Punganur cow has become a status symbol in recent years as wealthy livestock farmers began buying it, believing it brings good luck.
•Former Chief Minister N Kirankumar Reddy, the late N Harikrishna, and former TTD chairman K Bapi Raju were among the notable individuals who bought the Punganur cow. The TTD also has several Punganur cows, whose milk is used to prepare ghee which is offered as ‘archana’ to Lord Venkateswara.
•However, cows from other breeds are now increasingly being mistaken for Punganur cows, with the actual breed dwindling in numbers, say scientists.
•Veterinary University Animal Genetics and Breeding head R. Vinoo says the majority of the animals being referred to as Punganur breed are “not in agreement with the phenotypic (physical and other observable traits induced genetrically) characteristics” described historically by Shortt in 1885, Wallace in 1888 and Littlewood in 1936.
Extensive study
•“The University has embarked on a project to assess the genetic and phenotypic status of the Punganur Cattle,” Dr. Vinoo said. Along with his colleagues K. Sudhakar and M. Muralidhar, Dr. Vinoo will study coat colour, horn patterns, biometric traits and demographic data of the Punganur cows and other similar breeds at LRS, Palamaner, besides studying the Punganur cows owned by farmers across the state.
•The team will also analyse mitochondrial DNA to study genetic traits of the Punganur cow as compared to other breeds. These studies would help “separate the grain from the chaff”, according to the researchers.
•At the end of their study, the scientists would be able to distinguish the Punganur cows and initiate further research, Dr. Vinoo said.
📰 Come June, industries must pay for using groundwater
Agriculture sector, defence units will be exempt from the water conservation fee
•In a bid to promote conservation of groundwater, the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) has notified a water conservation fee (WCF) that industries will need to pay on groundwater extraction starting from June.
•As per the notification, industries extracting groundwater including mining-dewatering units and those that use groundwater for packaged drinking water would also need to apply for a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the government. Individual households that draw groundwater using a delivery pipe of a greater than 1” diameter, too, would need to pay a WCF.
•However, the agriculture sector — the largest consumer of groundwater in the country — will be exempt from the fees.
•The guidelines would come into force with effect from June 2019 and would apply across the country.
Online NOC process
•“The entire process of grant of NOC will be done online through a web based application system of CGA,” the Water Resources ministry said in the notification.
•The rates, according to a notification by the CGA on Wednesday, would be levied depending on the location of the groundwater extraction point and the amount of water being extracted. The government has a list of groundwater blocks, called assessment blocks. These are classified as ‘safe,’ ‘semi-critical,’ ‘critical’ and ‘over-exploited’ depending on the groundwater draft.
•Drawing up to 20 cubic metres (a cubic metre is 1,000 litres) a day in a ‘safe’ block would cost a company ₹3 per cubic metre. However, extracting 5,000 or more cubic metres a day, at an ‘over exploited’ block would invite a daily charge in excess of ₹100 per cubic metre .
•The WCF for residential projects ranges from ₹1-2 per cubic metre. The WCF apart, all industrial as well as residential bodies would also need to apply for an NOC.
•“These are not water charges but a water conservation fee and will be used for groundwater recharge projects,” said K.C. Naik, Chairman, Central Ground Water Board (CGWB).
•The rates were decided in consultation with industry, which had “fully supported” the government’s assessment of the need to impose charges for drawing groundwater, Mr. Naik added.
•Defence establishments and users who don’t use electricity to extract water have also been granted exemption from the requirement of obtaining NOCs and having to pay the WCF.
•In India, extracted groundwater is mainly used for irrigation and accounts for about 228 BCM (billion cubic metre) — or about 90% of the annual groundwater extraction. The rest, 25 BCM, is drawn for drinking, domestic and industrial uses.
•India is the largest user of groundwater in the world, and accounts for about 25% of the global water extraction. The CGWB classifies 6,584 assessment units countrywide. While 1,034 units have been categorised as ‘over-exploited,’ 253 are termed as ‘critical’, 681 as ‘semi-critical’ and 4,520 as ‘safe.’ The remaining 96 assessment units have been classified as ‘saline.’
📰 Migratory birds at Chilika face avian flu threat
•Lakhs of migratory birds which have congregated at the Chilika lake are facing a threat to their lives following the detection of avian influenza virus barely a few kilometres away from the Nalabana Bird Sanctuary.
•Some crows and chickens were found dead inside poultry farms in Krushnaprasad block last week. Subsequently, samples were sent to the National Institute of High Security Animal Diseases, Bhopal, for testing.
•The State government informed that the samples have tested positive for H5N1 virus and a massive culling operation would be undertaken from Friday inside private poultry farms in the affected villages, including Sana Sahi, Maluda and Patharganj.
•The Puri district administration would cull birds within one km radius of the place where the carcasses were found. Besides, officers of animal husbandry department have been asked to intensify surveillance in 10 km-radius area.
•As a precautionary measure, the State government has withdrawn eggs from the menu of midday meals being served in Puri district. Transportation of birds from affected areas has also been prohibited. Sale of eggs and chicken has also been banned in the district.
•“There is threat to migratory birds as avian flu was detected barely 5 km from the sanctuary limit. Bar-headed goose birds are most susceptible to H5N1 virus, which is very contagious,” said Susanta Nanda, Chief Executive of Chilika Development Authority.
•“No preventive action can be taken as it is difficult to sanitise such a large area of the Nalabana Bird Sanctuary. The Chilika Wildlife Division is prepared to face any emergency situation,” he added.
•“There is an existing guideline how to dispose of affected birds. The dead birds have to be buried deep beneath the soil. One needs to send whole sample for testing without opening it,” he elaborated.
