📰 EWS quota in all educational institutions from 2019-20 academic year: Prakash Javadekar
The Union HRD Minister says SC, ST, OBC quotas will be implemented in private institutions too
•The 10 per cent reservation for economically weaker sections among the general category will be implemented across all colleges and universities, including private institutions, from the 2019-20 academic year, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar has said.
•This quota will be over and above the existing quotas for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes, which will also be implemented in private institutions, Mr. Javadekar said on Tuesday.
•It is, however, unclear that a new legislation or an executive order would be passed to implement the quota for admissions in this academic year.
•By saying that the quota would be implemented “across 40,000 colleges and 900 Universities in the country”, Mr. Javadekar made it clear that private institutions would also come under its ambit. The SC, ST and OBC quotas will also be mandated in private institutions across the country through this measure, he said.
•“In the 2019-20 academic session, we will have this 10% reservation without disturbing, [while] keeping intact the SCs, STs and OBC reservation. This will be given in addition, by creating additional seats,” said Mr. Javadekar. He estimated that the seat increase would be to the tune of 25% more seats.
•“Colleges will be asked to include this information in their prospectus. The UGC and AICTE will be provided the operational mandate within a week to implement the quota,” he said.
•The income criteria for the EWS quota would be set at a gross annual household income of ₹8 lakh, said a senior Ministry official.
•While the 93rd Constitutional Amendment enabled the provision of 27% reservation for OBCs in both public and private educational institutions, the Central Educational Institutes Amendment Act of 2006 only mandated the implementation of the OBC quota in centrally-funded institutions. Private players in several States do not implement the OBC quota.
7th Central Pay Commission
•In another decision, the 7th Central Pay Commission will now be extended to the teachers and other academic staff of state and state government-aided degree level technical institutions. As the Centre will reimburse 50% of the total additional expenditure to be incurred by these institutes for payment of arrears, the Centre will bear an additional liability of Rs. 1241.78 crore, said Mr. Javadekar.
📰 Showing the way: on Manipur's new anti-lynching law
Its anti-lynching law breaks important ground in attempting to control hate crimes and ensure police action
•Six months have passed since the Supreme Court — anguished by what it described as ‘horrific acts of mobocracy’ — issued a slew of directions to the Union and State governments to protect India’s ‘pluralist social fabric’ from mob violence. The court felt compelled to act in the shadow of four years of surging hate violence targeting religious and caste minorities. It also urged Parliament to consider passing a law to combat mob hate crime.
•The Union and most State governments have done little to comply with the directions of India's highest court. But Manipur became the first to pass a remarkable law against lynching, late last year. It did this after a single horrific video-taped lynching of a Muslim youth with an MBA degree stirred the public conscience.
Comprehensive in definition
•The Manipur law closely follows the Supreme Court’s prescriptions, creating a nodal officer to control such crimes in every State, special courts and enhanced punishments. But its weighty significance lies in that it breaks new ground in some critical matters concerning hate violence in India, and shows the way in which the Union and other governments need to move if they are serious about combating hate crimes.
•Its definition of lynching is comprehensive, covering many forms of hate crimes. These are “any act or series of acts of violence or aiding, abetting such act/acts thereof, whether spontaneous or planned, by a mob on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth, language, dietary practices, sexual orientation, political affiliation, ethnicity or any other related grounds .…”
•The law, however, excludes from its provisions solitary hate crimes. For the law to apply instead it requires that these hate crimes are undertaken by mobs (defined as a group of two or more individuals, assembled with a common intention of lynching), thereby excluding from its provisions solitary hate crimes. When we look back at the last four years, the majority of hate crimes were indeed by mobs of attackers and onlookers, but we also saw solitary hate murders, such as of the Bengali migrant Mohammad Afrazul in Rajasthan. This restriction of numbers is arbitrary, since the essence of what distinguishes these kinds of crimes is not the numbers of attackers but the motivation of hate behind the crimes; therefore, provisions of this law should apply to all hate crimes, not just lynching, regardless of the numbers of persons who participate.
On the public official
•The most substantial and worthy contribution of the law is that it is the first in the country dealing with the protection and rights of vulnerable populations which creates a new crime of dereliction of duty of public officials. It lays down that “any police officer directly in charge of maintaining law and order in an area, omits to exercise lawful authority vested in them under the law, without reasonable cause, and thereby fails to prevent lynching shall be guilty of dereliction of duty” and will be liable “to punishment of imprisonment of one year, which may extend to three years, and with fine that may extend to fifty thousand rupees”.
•Equally pathbreaking is that it removes the protection that is otherwise extended to public officials charged with any offence committed while acting in their discharge of official duty. At present, no court can take cognisance of such an offence except with the previous sanction of the State government. The Manipur law means that now no prior sanction is required to register crimes against public officials who fail in their duties to prevent hate crimes such as lynching.
•In almost every incident of hate crime that the Karwan e Mohabbat, a campaign of solidarity for victims of such crimes, has investigated, the police acted brazenly in ways that would have been deemed crimes by public officials if a law such as the Manipur law had been in force. They arrived late deliberately, or watched even as the crimes were under way without restraining the mobs; they delayed taking those injured to hospital and on occasion even ill-treated them, ensuring their death; and after the hate crimes, they tended to register criminal cases against the victims and to defend the accused.
•If police officers knew that they could be punished for these crimes (which would also put them at risk of losing their jobs), it is very unlikely that they would have acted in this way. They would have prevented, or stopped in their tracks, these hate crimes, and protected the victims.
•I would also include in the crimes of dereliction of duty deliberately protecting criminals during investigation after the hate crime. I would also, most importantly, incorporate command responsibility, so that officials and also those who have directed them to betray their constitutional duties are criminally liable..
•The second momentous contribution of the Manipur law is that it does away with the requirement of prior state sanction before acting on a hate crime. All hate crimes today should attract Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code, which is related to fostering enmity between people on the basis of religion, race, language and so on. But registering this crime requires prior permission of the State government, and most governments use this power to shield perpetrators of hate crimes who are politically and ideologically aligned to the ruling establishment. The Manipur law does away with this requirement, which would make acting against hate crimes far more effective and non-partisan.
•The third substantial feature is that it clearly lays down the duty and responsibility of the State government to make arrangements for the protection of victims and witnesses against any kind of intimidation, coercion, inducement, violence or threats of violence. It also prescribes the duty of State officials to prevent a hostile environment against people of the community who have been lynched, which includes economic and social boycott, and humiliation through excluding them from public services such as education, health and transport, threats and evictions.
Rehabilitation
•The last substantial contribution of the law is requiring the state to formulate a scheme for relief camps and rehabilitation in case of displacement of victims, and death compensation. Again, in most cases of lynching, we have found that States have only criminalised the victims, never supported the survivors who live not just in loss and fear, but also in penury.
•But the law needs to prescribe a much more expansive framework of mandatory gender-sensitive reparation on an atonement model, requiring the state to ensure that the victim of hate violence is assisted to achieve material conditions that are better than what they were before the violence, and that women, the elderly and children are supported regularly with monthly pensions over time.
•Even with these caveats, the Manipur government has broken new ground, being the first government in the country to hold public officials criminally accountable if they fail to prevent hate crimes. If emulated by the Union and other State governments, such a sterling law could substantially prevent hate attacks, ensure public officials are faithful to their constitutional responsibilities and victims, and that their families and communities are assured of protection and justice.
📰 The coast is unclear: on the 2018 CRZ notification
The Coastal Regulation Zone notification of 2018 increases the vulnerability of coastal people to climate disasters
•The National Democratic Alliance government has unleashed several extremely unimaginative developmental policies that target areas that have retained some degree of ecological value to turn them into sites for industrial production. This is despite evidence of the damaging effects of such policies. The latest instance of this is the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification of 2018. The government has announced “amendments” to the CRZ law which, in the words of the fisher leader from Goa, Olencio Simoes, spell the death of the coasts. These changes negate the coastal space entirely of its special socio-ecological uniqueness and open up this niche space that joins land and sea to mindless real estate development, mass scale tourism, and industry.
Devalued fisheries economy
•Successive governments have created the impression that India’s coastline is a vast, empty space that economic actors can take over. Industrialists and real estate developers share this view because coastal lands are for the most part outside the regime of individual property rights. Land grabbing by private and government actors has been the norm. These actors forget that this space is the common property of coastal villages, towns and cities, and public beaches. Over 3,000 fishing hamlets reside along India’s coast, park and repair their nets and boats and organise their economic and social activities here. The fisheries sector employs 4-9 million people. The self-reliant fisher communities generates ₹48,000-₹75,000 crore for the economy, with almost no support from governments in the form of subsidies.
•A government that has performed dismally on its promise of employment generation should avoid taking away the jobs of people engaged in this sector. Yet, that is exactly what this notification seeks to do. The misfortune of the fisher communities is their lack of effective political representation. Even though at least 75 MPs are elected from coastal constituencies, as stated by V. Vivekanandan of South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies, fisher people are not a vote bank as they are spread across the coast. This may be why they are the targets of hostile government policies.
•With rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, coasts have become convenient dumping grounds. Sewage, garbage and sludge from industrial processes land up on the coastline and makes life for coastal dwellers a living hell. The new amendments legalise the setting up of common effluent treatment plants (CETPs), an impractical technology for cleaning up waste, on the most fragile parts of the coast. These projects have made the coastal people of Saurashtra and south Gujarat more vulnerable to toxicity in their food, water and air. Since India’s systems to reduce waste generation and comply with pollution standards are so poor, the law now makes the coasts legitimate receptacles for all waste.
•India’s coasts are already facing climate change events such as intensive, frequent and unpredictable cyclones and erosion. In 2017, cyclone Ockhi killed over 300 people on the west coast, a region not familiar with such events. The combined effects of harmful coastal development and climate change are apparent in the form of mass migrations from coastal areas like Odisha and the Sundarbans in West Bengal. These lessons have already sparked decentralised action: mangroves are being planted, sand dunes and coastal wetlands are being protected, and coastal communities and local governments are collaborating on disaster preparedness. But the top-down policy of the Central government to encroach what’s left of the coasts and increase activities that involve dredging, sand removal, and large-scale constructions contradict grass-roots and scientific wisdom.
Risking lives
•It is untrue that this notification has been introduced after consultations with “other stakeholders”. The National Fishworkers Forum (NFF), for instance, has vociferously opposed these amendments since the review was announced in June 2014 by the Shailesh Nayak Committee. It has carried out protests demanding fisher rights to the coastal commons and legal action against corporate and government violators of coastal laws. The indifference of the government to coastal and marine regions has even led the forum to demand a separate Fisheries Ministry. Instead of using the NFF’s knowledge to craft an effective policy, the government has peddled the same development model that has generated conflict and impoverishment. The notification now exposes more people to the unassessed impacts of climate change-related coastal damages. Is the capital too far from coastal India to understand this?
📰 Tobacco companies targeting children: Study
•A report released on Wednesday finds that tobacco companies in India are systematically targeting children as young as eight by selling tobacco products and placing tobacco advertisements near schools.
•These tactics, happening all over the country, is a clear violation of Section 5 and 6 of Cigarettes & Other Tobacco Products Act, it said.
•To gather evidence regarding tobacco products being sold around educational institutions in violation of the law, two groups working in the area of tobacco control -- Consumer Voice and Voluntary Health Association of India -- undertook a study in 20 cities across six states in India.
•Titled Tiny Targets, the study was conducted to determine the extent of tobacco products being marketed and sold around schools in India. A sample of 243 schools and 487 points of sale were closely surveyed during this study.
•“Despite the prohibition on sales of tobacco products near educational institutions, numerous shops/vendors/points of sale sell and advertise tobacco products around schools,” found the study.
•“Vendors display tobacco products in ways that are appealing to children and youth. Investigators documented that in 225 tobacco points of sale observed, 91% of displays were at 1 metre – child’s eye level, 54% had no visible health warning; and 90 per cent of displays were, beside candies, sweets and toys, items marketed to children,” noted the study.
•This is not the first time the tobacco industry has been found targeting children, nor is it unique to India. However, the data is alarming because it documents a very systematic and widespread pattern of activity by tobacco companies to get young people addicted to tobacco.
•“The tobacco industry must be held accountable for their aggressive advertising efforts around our children’s schools,”Bhavna B Mukhopadhyay, Voluntary Health Association of India said. “Our schools are not safe so long as the tobacco industry continues to try and lure our children into buying their deadly products."
📰 Learning to compete: on Skill India
Skill India needs a sharp realignment if it is to meaningfully transform people’s life chances
•In 2013, India’s skill agenda got a push when the government introduced the National Skills Qualification Framework (NSQF). This organises all qualifications according to a series of levels of knowledge, skills and aptitude, just like classes in general academic education. For instance, level 1 corresponds to Class 9 (because vocational education is only supposed to begin in secondary school in many countries, including India). Levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 correspond to Classes 9, 10, 11 and 12, respectively. Levels 5-7 correspond to undergraduate education, and so on. For each trade/occupation or professional qualification, course content should be prepared that corresponds to higher and higher level of professional knowledge and practical experience.
•The framework was to be implemented by December 27, 2018. The Ministry mandated that all training/educational programmes/courses be NSQF-compliant, and all training and educational institutions define eligibility criteria for admission to various courses in terms of NSQF levels, by that time.
•In this article, we look at NSQF implementation through the prism of national skill competitions, or India Skills, a commendable initiative of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE). Twenty-seven States participated in India Skills 2018, held in Delhi. Maharashtra led the medals tally, followed by Odisha and Delhi. Now, teams will be selected to represent India at the 45th World Skills Competition, scheduled in Russia this year. It was also heartening that the Abilympics was included in India Skills 2018, for Persons with Disabilities.
Course curriculum not clear
•However, there are two priorities requiring action before the next round of India Skills is held. There are five pillars of the skills ecosystem: the secondary schools/polytechnics; industrial training institutes; National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC)-funded private training providers offering short-term training; 16 Ministries providing mostly short-term training; and employers offering enterprise-based training. From which training programmes and NSQF courses did participants come to the competition? The answers to this would hold the key to improve Skill India government programmes dramatically.
•Meanwhile, the India Skills competition has provided evidence that many reforms are critical and urgent. We have advocated these reforms in the Sharda Prasad Expert Group report, submitted to the MSDE in 2016.
•India Skills was open to government industrial training institutes, engineering colleges, Skill India schemes, corporates, government colleges, and school dropouts. Skill India is understood to mean courses that are compliant with the NSQF. A majority of the participants were from corporates (offering enterprise-based training) and industrial training institutes; only less than 20% were from the short-term courses of the NSDC. Neither industrial training institutes nor corporates’ courses are aligned with the NSQF.
•This points to the need for more holistic training and the need to re-examine the narrow, short-term NSQF-based NSDC courses to include skills in broader occupation groups, so that trainees are skilled enough to compete at the international level. If India Skills 2018 was only open for the NSQF-aligned institutions, it would have been a big failure. This indicates that the NSQF has not been well accepted or adopted across India. One reason for this is that unlike for general academic education, which requires the completion of certain levels of certification before further progression is permitted, there is no clear definition of the course curriculum within the NSQF that enables upward mobility. There is no connection of the tertiary level vocational courses to prior real knowledge of theory or practical experience in a vocational field, making alignment with the NSQF meaningless. Efforts to introduce new Bachelor of Vocation and Bachelor of Skills courses were made, but the alignment of these UGC-approved Bachelor of Vocation courses was half-hearted. There is no real alignment between the Human Resource Development Ministry (responsible for the school level and Bachelor of Vocation courses) and the Ministry of Skill Development (responsible for non-school/non-university-related vocational courses).
Too many councils
•We must also reduce complications caused by too many Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) anchoring skill courses. World Skills holds competitions in construction and building technology, transportation and logistics, manufacturing and engineering technology, information and communication technology, creative arts and fashion, and social and personal services. To cater to these sectors, 19 SSCs participated in India Skills 2018 as knowledge partners with the help of industry or academic institutions. But India has 38 SSCs (earlier it had 40). Why did the others not participate? The first reason is that the representation of their core work was done by the other SSCs. For example, we have four SSCs for manufacturing: iron and steel, strategic manufacturing, capital goods, and, infrastructure equipment. In effect these are treated as one in World Skills courses. As we had proposed, there should be just one SSC called the Machinery and Equipment Manufacturing Council, in line with the National Industrial Classification of India. Similarly, there is no reason to have four SSCs (instead of one) each of textile, apparel made-ups and home furnishing, leather and handicrafts.
•It was a mistake to create 40 SSCs. Outcomes have shown that they have been ineffective. If we want Skill India trainees to win international competitions and if we want competitors to come from schemes of the Ministry, we must find a way to provide broader skills in broader occupational groups.
•The second, and related, reason is that the other SSC courses were not comprehensive enough for students to compete. Most of their NSDC-SSC- approved training does not produce students who can showcase “holistic” skills for broad occupational groups in such competitions. This takes us back to the point made in our report: sectors should be consolidated in line with the National Industrial Classification of India. This will improve quality, ensure better outcomes, strengthen the ecosystem, and help in directly assessing the trainee’s competence. It might also bring some coherence to our skills data collection system.
•India could learn a lesson from Germany, which imparts skills in just 340 occupation groups. Vocational education must be imparted in broadly defined occupational skills, so that if job descriptions change over a youth’s career, she is able to adapt to changing technologies and changing job roles. Skill India needs a sharp realignment, if India is to perform well in the World Skills competition later this year.
📰 Hitting its stride: on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has grown stronger, but it should develop a wider portfolio of projects
•On January 16, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) marked its third anniversary. India has been the bank’s biggest beneficiary, with a quarter of the AIIB’s approved projects geared towards its development. India is also the only country apart from China to enjoy a permanent seat on the Bank’s board of directors.
•When the AIIB opened for business in 2016, critics assailed it as a barely concealed attempt by China, India and the global south to supplant the existing international financial order. The reality is that the bank has been both a rule-maker and rule-taker, devising innovations in multilateral development finance while upholding existing best practices. Most of its projects are co-financed with the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, suggesting a healthy mix of complementarity and competition with its peers.
•Critics also assailed the AIIB for its non-transparent internal procedures, notably the lack of a resident board, and potentially lax loan appraisal standards, which they claimed would spark a rash of irrecoverable loans. Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration sought to dissuade Western countries and Asian allies from joining the bank as prospective founding members, pointing to concerns related to governance and environmental and social safeguards. The reality is that the AIIB’s lending practices have been socially conscious and prudent, attested by its triple-A credit rating secured from the three major international rating agencies. Disregarding the U.S.’s ‘dog in the manger’ attitude towards infrastructure finance, 90-odd countries have signed up as founding or prospective members.
•As the AIIB marches from strength-to-strength, it should develop a wider portfolio of projects in areas such as smart cities, renewable energy, urban transport, clean coal technology, solid waste management and urban water supply. Along with the New Development Bank, its uniqueness must lie in faster loan appraisal, a lean organisational structure resulting in lower cost of loans, a variety of financing instruments, including local currency financing, and flexibility in responding to its clients’ needs. It should leverage its unique ‘special funds mechanism’ to crowd-in infrastructure financing from external sources, including extra-regional, public and private, as well as nurture infrastructure as a profitable asset class for capital market investors.
•A distracted U.S. appears neither willing nor capable of fundamentally reshaping and resourcing the much-vaunted Bretton Woods-era institutions for the challenges of the 21st century. India, China and other multilaterally minded major countries will need to pick up this gauntlet in the areas of trade, development and finance. The successful mainstreaming of the AIIB in three short years must become just the beginning of system-wide reform and overhaul.
📰 TV choices, a la carte: How the new TRAI regulatory framework will pan out
What does TRAI’s new regulation say?
•The new regulatory framework by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which comes into effect from February 1, will apply to all direct-to-home (DTH) and local cable operators. Under these rules, customers can choose which channels they wish to watch rather than pick from pre-decided packs offered by service providers. Accordingly, consumers will only need to pay for channels they want to view.
Why was this change needed?
•According to TRAI, post-digitisation of cable TV networks in March 2017, there was an urgent need to improve transparency as many stakeholders were not giving choices to consumers. The new regulatory framework has been introduced after a consultative process that lasted more than one-and-a-half years.
Do the new rules benefit consumers?
•The new framework makes it mandatory for the service provider to offer every channel on an a la carte basis. Additionally, the MRP of the channels needs to be displayed on the TV screen through the Electronic Program Guide. Along with giving customers a la carte choice, broadcasters and distributors can offer bouquets of channels. However, the price of the bouquet is also to be published transparently. Given that the MRP of the channels will be displayed to users, the distributor will not be able to charge more than what has been declared by a broadcaster. This is likely to bring down the monthly cable/DTH bill.
How much will consumers need to pay?
•The framework puts in place a network capacity fee with an upper ceiling of ₹130 for 100 channels. Any subscriber who opts for more than 100 channels can choose additional channels in each slab of 25 channels with a maximum price of ₹20 per slab. A high definition channel will be treated as two standard definition (SD) channels for the purpose of determining the network capacity fee.
•According to TRAI, less than 15% of consumers are likely to opt for more than 100 channels. The regulator has put out some examples of the probable packs in different markets on its website. For the Tamil-speaking market, one package costs ₹294 a month, including taxes for 100 SD channels. This pack includes 23 paid channels, 52 free-to-air channels and 25 Doordarshan channels. In addition to a ₹130 network capacity fee for 100 channels, the consumer will have to pay MRP for the 23 paid channels (amounting to ₹119) and the GST (₹45). Depending on the number and price of the paid channels, the bill may go up.
What if subscription charges are paid ahead?
•In case a subscriber has paid advance charges for a scheme with a future lock-in period like an annual plan, the distributor will continue to provide services for the committed period without any increase in price or charges and without altering the other terms of subscription. Distributors cannot make any changes that may lead to a disadvantage to the subscriber in such cases, the regulator has said. However, if the subscriber wants to switch over to a new package after February 1, the proportional balance amount of the existing package as on the date of switchover may be adjusted for the new package prices.
📰 Cut red meat, sugar by 50%: Lancet’s diet plan for the world
The new diet could avert around 11 million premature deaths a year.
•With the ideal diet, your life would be less sweet but your lifespan would be longer. Cut consumption of sugar and red meat by 50%, and increase the intake of fruits, vegetables, and nuts — that is the top recommendation of a worldwide diet plan according to a special report released on Thursday by the journal Lancet. Such a diet would not only be healthier but also more environment-friendly.
•The EAT-Lancet Commission, an independent non-profit consisting of 19 scientists and 18 co-authors from 16 countries, was tasked with developing global scientific targets for a healthy diet and sustainable food production.
•The experts on this panel from India included Srinath Reddy of the Public Health Foundation of India and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment.
•The Commission recommended that the average adult, whose daily requirement is about 2,500 calories, must strive to source around 800 calories from whole grain (rice, wheat or corn), 204 calories from fruits and vegetables, and not more than 30 calories from red meat (beef, lamb or pork). It also suggested that the ideal diet should have no “added sugar” or “added fat”. Unhealthy diets are the leading cause of ill-health worldwide, and following this healthy diet could avoid approximately 11 million premature deaths a year, the report said.
UN goals
•“These global targets define a safe operating space for food systems that allow us to assess which diets and food production practices will help ensure that the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement [on Climate Change] are achieved,” said a press statement accompanying the report.
•Though the Commission’s recommendations for a healthy diet do include red meat, it emphasises that “global targets” ought to be applied “locally” and must keep in mind “cultural sensitivities”. That means the protein requirement from meat can be substituted, with, say, legumes or equivalent substitutes.
•People in North American countries eat almost 6.5 times the recommended amount of red meat, while those in South Asia eat only half the recommended amount. All countries are eating more starchy vegetables (potatoes and cassava) than recommended, with intakes ranging from between 1.5 times above the recommendation in South Asia to 7.5 times the optimum level in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dramatic change
•“The world’s diets must change dramatically. More than 800 million people have insufficient food, while many more consume an unhealthy diet that contributes to premature death and disease,” said co-lead Commissioner Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard University. “To be healthy, diets must have an appropriate calorie intake and consist of a variety of plant-based foods, low amounts of animal-based foods, unsaturated rather than saturated fats, and few refined grains, highly processed foods, and added sugars.”
•The researchers also modelled the effects of a global adoption of such a diet on deaths from diet-related diseases.
•Three models each showed major health benefits, suggesting that the new diet could globally avert 10.9-11.6 million premature deaths a year.
•The report shared a road map to help global populations move towards such a diet by 2050. These include re-orienting the focus of agriculture from large-scale production of a few crops to “a diverse range of nutritious foods from biodiversity-enhancing food production systems”.
📰 RBI eases norms for external commercial borrowing
Firms eligible for FDI can opt for ECB; sectoral curbs lifted
•In a bid to improve ease of doing business, the Reserve Bank of India has decided to liberalise external commercial borrowing (ECB) norms, allowing all companies that are eligible for receiving foreign direct investment, to raise funds through the ECB route.
•“The list of eligible borrowers has been expanded. All entities eligible to receive foreign direct investment can borrow under the ECB framework,” the central bank said in a statement on Wednesday. The new framework takes immediate effect.
•“It has now been decided, in consultation with the Government of India, to rationalise the extant framework for ECB and Rupee denominated bonds to further improve the ease of doing business,” the RBI said.
3-year maturity
•The RBI has decided to keep the minimum average maturity period at 3 years for all ECBs, irrespective of the amount of borrowing, except for borrowers specifically permitted to borrow for a shorter period. Earlier, the minimum average maturity period was five years. The ceiling for borrowing remains at $750 million.
•“All eligible borrowers can now raise ECBs up to $750 million or equivalent per financial year under the automatic route replacing the existing sector-wise limits,” RBI said.
•Any entity who is a resident of a country which is financial action task force compliant, will be treated as a recognised lender. “This change increases lending options and allows various new lenders in ECB space while strengthening the [anti money laundering / combating the financing of terrorism] framework,” it said.
•RBI had capped funds raised via ECBs at 6.5% of GDP, at current market prices. Based on GDP figures for March 31, 2018, ‘the soft limit works out to $160 billion,’ RBI had said.
📰 Investors in start-ups may get special rights
SEBI mulling board representation and appointment of auditors among other privileges
•The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is examining whether investors in start-ups can be granted special rights in terms of board representations and governance if such ventures list on the Innovators Growth Platform (IGP).
•As part of its attempts to attract start-ups and investors to the platform, the capital markets regulator is examining whether investors, including those that have convertible instruments, could have special rights such as board representation and appointment of auditors or internal auditor, among other rights. According to a memorandum presented to the SEBI board, ahead of its meet in December, market participants have suggested such special rights to investors. SEBI has reportedly decided to examine the matter.
•“Suggestions have been made that the investors could have special rights, including on convertible instruments, and governance, such as board representation, appointment of auditor/internal auditor, and the like, if such rights can be incorporated as part of Articles of Association of the company and disclosed in the RHP/Prospectus,” the memorandum said. The issue of special rights, it is believed, will be examined by the SEBI in conjunction with the issue of differential voting rights, which is already being examined by a sub-group within PMAC [primary market advisory committee].
Regulatory framework
•Apart from the SEBI, market intermediaries such as exchanges, merchant bankers and investors have also been trying hard to create a regulatory framework to encourage start-ups to list on Indian exchanges.
•“Start-ups have different set of investors such as angel, seed, venture capital, etc., who usually come with special rights in terms of information access, governance and exit, among other parameters,” Mahavir Lunawat, managing director, Pantomath Capital Advisors, said.
•“When such start-ups pursue public listing, special rights are required to be foregone by investors, which could become a stumbling block. Listing mechanism could, therefore, encourage continuity of special rights as to governance etc., which do not potentially jeopardise the overall common rights,” Mr. Lunawat added.
•Last month, SEBI tweaked the norms for the technology start-up platform. Apart from renaming the segment, it relaxed various regulatory requirements. This included lowering the number of allottees in a public issue from the earlier 200 to 50, reducing the lot size from the earlier ₹10 lakh to ₹2 lakh, and including qualified institutional buyers and Category III foreign portfolio investors among others in the list of eligible entities holding pre-issue capital.
•The regulator has also done away with the 25% cap on post-issue holding by any person individually or collectively with persons acting in concert.
