📰 RTI trumps Official Secrets Act, says SC
Justice Joseph cites information law as government seeks to keep Rafale pricing details under wraps
•An all-out effort by the government to claim privilege and push the Rafale jets’ pricing details back into the dark zone was met with a stoic counter from Justice K.M. Joseph in the Supreme Court on Thursday.
•The government’s reasons to hush the Rafale prices ranged from national security to not upsetting a “solemn undertaking” given to France to keep the price of the jets a secret.
Multiple Sections
•But Justice Joseph, one of the three judges on the Bench, asked the government to read out Sections of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. The judge said the information law has revolutionised governance and overpowered notions of secrecy protected under the Official Secrets Act, 1923.
•Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal was first made to read out Section 22 of the RTI Act, which declared the RTI to have an “overriding effect” over OSA. Then Section 24, which mandates even security and intelligence organisations to disclose information on corruption and human rights violations. Finally, Section 8(2), which compels the government to disclose information “if public interest in disclosure outweighs the harm to protected interests”.
•Mr. Venugopal defended that defence purchases dealt with the security of the state, which “supercedes everything else”. To this, Justice Joseph said, “The Parliament has passed the RTI Act in 2005 and brought about a complete revolution, a complete change. Let us not go back to what it was”.
•The government wants the court to refrain from examining the documents, which have already been published in the media, primarily The Hindu , on the purchase of the Rafale fighter aircraft. It claimed the documents were unauthorisedly photocopied from the originals kept in the Ministry of Defence and sneaked into the public domain.
•Even the petition seeking a review of the December 14 judgment of the Supreme Court, upholding the Rafale deal, is based on these “stolen” documents”, the government claimed.
•The Bench heard the case for an hour and reserved its orders on two preliminary issues — the admissibility of “stolen” documents as evidence and the claim of privilege raised on them by the government. “How is it that you decide privilege protection? Is there a high-level, inter-departmental call taken on this? Can’t the court even examine the documents to decide your claim of privilege,” Justice Joseph asked Mr. Venugopal at one point.
Delegations meet in technical aspects of corridor
•India has urged Pakistan to grant visa-free travel rights to Indian pilgrims visiting the Kartarpur shrine. The proposal was part of the Indian agenda at Thursday’s meeting between delegations from both countries at Attari where the draft agreement for the Kartarpur Corridor was discussed.
•A joint statement after the meeting said the delegations held detailed and constructive discussions on the proposed agreement and agreed to work towards expeditiously operationalising the pilgrimage corridor.
📰 23 Opposition parties move court on EVMs and VVPAT
Paper trail crucial, say petitioners; SC hearing today
•In a major show of pre-poll strength, 23 Opposition parties moved the Supreme Court on Thursday, demanding the random verification of at least 50% Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) using Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) in every Assembly segment or constituency.
•They further sought to quash an Election Commission guideline that Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) should be conducted “only for VVPAT paper slips of one randomly selected polling station of an Assembly constituency in case of election to State Legislative Assembly and each Assembly segment in case of election to the House of the People.”
•The petition, led by presidents and leaders of 23 different national and regional political parties — six out of the seven national parties, and 17 regional parties — said they electorally represent about 70%-75% of the people of India.
•The apex court has listed the case for urgent hearing on March 15.
•The petition has been filed in the names of Andhra Chief Minister and Telugu Desam Party leader N. Chandrababu Naidu, Nationalist Congress Party’s Sharad Pawar, Congress’ K.C. Venugopal, Trinamool Congress’ Derek O’Brien, Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief M.K. Stalin, Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party president Arvind Kejriwal, National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah, Loktantrik Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Manoj Jha, among others.
•The petition said free and fair elections was part of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution. It quoted the apex court’s judgment in the Dr. Subramanian Swamy case in 2013, which held that the paper trail for EVMs was an indispensable requirement of free and fair elections, thereby making VVPAT inherent in and intrinsic to the very basic structure.
•The ECI guideline hits at the basic structure of the Constitution by making VVPAT “completely ineffective and merely ornamental in nature,” the petition said.
📰 Supreme Court agrees to hear The Shillong Times editor’s plea
Meghalaya HC had held Patricia Mukhim guilty of contempt
•A Supreme Court Bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi on Thursday agreed to hear a plea by The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim against an order of the Meghalaya High Court finding her and her publisher, Shobha Chaudhuri, guilty of contempt.
•The case relates to articles published by the paper on the perks and facilities for retired judges and their families. A Bench comprising Chief Justice M.Y. Mir and Justice S.R. Sen of the Meghalaya High Court, taking umbrage at two reports published in The Shillong Times, had held the newspaper liable for contempt of court.
•The High Court invoked its powers under Article 215 of the Constitution to sentence the contemners.
•The two were made to sit in a corner of the courtroom as punishment till the judges rose for the day and fined ₹2 lakh each. Failure to deposit the amount would result in six months simple imprisonment and a ban on the paper.
•The CJI listed the case for hearing on March 15.
‘Uncalled for’
•The Press Council of India said the conviction of Ms. Mukhim and Ms. Chaudhuri was uncalled for. If allowed by the Supreme Court, it will join their petition.
📰 An abhorrent and unjust device: on death penalty
Retention of the death penalty utterly undermines India’s moral foundations
•On March 5, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court delivered verdicts in three different death penalty cases. In two of those the court entirely exonerated the suspects, while in the third it not only found the accused guilty of murder, but also deserving of capital punishment. Individually read, the judgments typify the deep penological confusion that pervades India’s criminal justice system. Collectively, the cases demonstrate how arbitrary the death penalty is, how its application is mired by a belief in conflicting values, and how the fundamental requirement of precision in criminal law has been replaced by a rhetorical cry for avenging crime by invoking the “collective conscience” of society.
Conjecture and farce
•In the first of the cases, Digamber Vaishnav v. State of Chhattisgarh, two persons were convicted of murdering five women and were sentenced to death in 2014. A year later, the Chhattisgarh High Court affirmed these sentences. But the chief testimony, which formed the backbone of the prosecution’s case, was that of a nine-year-old child, who was, shockingly, not even an eye-witness to the crime. This, the court therefore ruled, was effectively a conviction premised on surmise and conjecture.
•Ankush Maruti Shinde v. State of Maharashtra, the second of the cases, saw a gut-wrenching series of events being reduced to macabre farce. In 2006, a trial court found six persons guilty of rape and murder and sentenced each of them to death. A year later, the Bombay High Court confirmed the finding of guilt, but commuted the sentences imposed on three of the individuals to life imprisonment. However, in 2009, the Supreme Court not only dismissed the appeals filed by those sentenced to death, but also, astonishingly, enhanced the penalties of the three persons whose sentences had been commuted by ordering that they too be punished with death. In doing so, the court relied on a 1996 verdict, in Ravji v. State of Rajasthan, where it had ruled that in determining whether to award the death penalty “it is the nature and gravity of the crime” alone that demand consideration. Although in May 2009, the Supreme Court had declared its earlier ruling in Ravji incorrect, by holding that even in those cases where the crime is brutal and heinous the criminal’s antecedents, including his economic and social background, must have a bearing on the award of the sentence, it took until October last year for the court to recall its order sentencing the six persons to death.
•During this time, as the court records, “The accused remained under constant stress and in the perpetual fear of death.” What is more, one of them, who was later found to be a juvenile at the time when the alleged crime was committed, was kept in solitary confinement. He was not allowed to meet any of the other prisoners and was only allowed an occasional meeting with his mother. For their troubles — for having spent more than a decade on death row despite having committed no crime — the bench ordered that the state pay each of them a sum of ₹5 lakh. But while the court was quick to apportion blame on the prosecution, it didn’t so much as mention its own errors and its own proclivity to mirror the mentality of a mob.
A ‘rarest of rare’ case
•Yet, we might have been forgiven for thinking that the court’s experience in hearing Digamber Vaishnav and, especially, Ankush Maruti Shinde may have made it more circumspect in upholding death sentences. After all, if these decisions had shown us anything, it was that the judicial process is far from inerrant. But the collective conscience of society, represented through the court’s capital punishment jurisprudence, it appears, is still alive and kicking. For in the third of the cases, in Khushwinder Singh v. State of Punjab, it not only affirmed the conviction of the accused, on charges of murdering six members of a family, but also gave its imprimatur to the award of the death penalty. The murders, the judgment holds, were “diabolical and dastardly” and the case fell into the “rarest of rare” categories where “there is no alternative punishment suitable, except the death sentence”.
•The rarest of rare doctrine has its origins in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab(1980). There, the court declared Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, which prescribes the death penalty for murder, as constitutionally valid, but bounded its limits by holding that the punishment can only be prescribed in the rarest of rare cases. Since then, the court has repeatedly cautioned that capital punishment ought to only be decreed when the state can clearly establish that a convict is incapable of being reformed and rehabilitated. But, in Khushwinder Singh, the court does not place on record any such piece of evidence that the state was called on to produce. Indeed, the court does not so much as attempt to answer whether the accused was, in fact, capable of reformation or not. Instead, it merely endorses the death sentence by holding that there simply were no mitigating circumstances warranting an alternative penalty.
Victims of the system
•That capital punishment serves no legitimate penological purpose is by now abundantly clear. There’s almost no empirical evidence available showing that the death penalty actually deters crime. If anything, independent studies have repeatedly shown the converse to be true. In the U.S., for instance, States that employ capital punishment have had drastically higher rates of homicide in comparison with those States where the death penalty is no longer engaged. In India, evidence also points to a disproportionate application of the sentence, with the most economically and socially marginalised amongst us suffering the most. The Death Penalty India Report (DPIR), released on May 6, 2016, by Project 39A of the National Law University, Delhi, for example, shows that 74% of prisoners on death row, at the time of the study, were economically vulnerable, and 63% were either the primary or sole earners in their families. More than 60% of those sentenced to death had not completed their secondary school education, and 23% had never attended school, a factor which, as the report states, “points to the alienation that they would experience from the legal process, in terms of the extent to which they are able to understand the case against them and engage with the criminal justice system.” Just as distressingly, 76% of those sentenced to death belonged to backward classes and religious minorities, including all 12 female prisoners.
•In the face of this invidiously prejudiced application, the retention of capital punishment utterly undermines the country’s moral foundations. Over the course of the last decade, the Supreme Court may well have expanded the rights of death row prisoners: delays by the President in disposing of mercy petitions now constitute a valid ground for commutation; review petitions filed by death row convicts now have to be mandatorily heard in open court. But as the judgments delivered on March 5 reveal, the very preservation of the death penalty creates iniquitous results. Cases such as Ankush Maruti Shinde, where the accused, as the judgment records, were very poor labourers, “nomadic tribes coming from the lower strata of the society,” ought to make it evident that the death penalty is an abhorrent and unjust device.
•Not only are wholly irrational criteria applied to arrive at dangerously irreversible decisions, the law’s application is made all the more sinister by invariably imposing these standards on the most vulnerable members of society. The Constitution promises to every person equality before the law. But capital punishment renders this pledge hollow. It legalises a form of violence, and it closes down, as Judith Butler wrote, expounding Jacques Derrida, “the distinction between justice and vengeance,” where “justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes.”
📰 Will a court-mandated mediation on Ayodhya solve the issue?
The Supreme Court’s attempt at mediation has its share of supporters and critics
•The Supreme Court has opted for a time-bound mediation process in a bid to resolve the Ayodhya dispute. Sukumar Muralidharan and Sanjay Hegde debate whether mediation is necessary at this stage, and if the process is viable, in a discussion moderated by K. Venkataramanan. Excerpts:
Is mediation viable at this stage of the litigation, when the Supreme Court is set to begin the final hearing in the Ayodhya dispute? Is it advisable and desirable?
•Sukumar Muralidharan: I think the Supreme Court has stepped in as a problem-solver at numerous stages of this dispute over the years. And sometimes it has declined to play that role — instances being as far back as in 1989, when it was asked to put a stop to the Shila Pujans that were going on all over the country and causing a lot of communal violence, and it declined to do so; and then again in 1992, when it was asked to ensure the safety of the structure when the Vishva Hindu Parishad was planning its kar seva on December 6, 1992. Of course, it did issue a writ and asked for guarantees to the safety of the structure. The rest is history. Then, the reference was made to determine whether there was a Hindu religious structure under the mosque prior to the mosque being built. The Supreme Court declined to hear it but held that the acquisition of the land was good in law. And that a mosque was not part of essential religious practice for the Islamic faith and, hence, there was no violation of religious freedom in the acquisition of that land. It then reverted the case to the Lucknow Bench for a determination of the title suit. So, that’s what we had coming out in 2010. This mediation decision comes out of an appeal against the Lucknow Bench’s decision. So, I think this fits in with the normal course of adjudication in the matter. The mediation decision is the court, in a manner of speaking, abdicating its responsibility.
•Sanjay Hegde: Any court always has the option of asking parties to mediate before it proceeds to adjudicate. That is laid down in the Civil Procedure Code. This is a kind of case where even if there is adjudication, the court is not particularly sure as to whether its verdict would be honoured if it is unpopular on one side or the other. However, the court decided to be proactive, not in the sense of abdicating its jurisdiction, but is aware now that mediation itself is a specialised process. It is not exactly in the sense of a negotiating or bargaining kind of situation. Mediation is something much deeper and the court wants to see whether that process with the trained mediator plus two others who are of repute within the community, both legally as well as in terms of a broader religious appeal... they’ve tried to get some kind of representational team together. And see where the process goes.
There is a small window of eight weeks for mediation. Would it have been better if the mediation process was given more time, or if it was open-ended so that there could be a more viable process?
•S.H.: If you give too much time, nothing really happens. So, having a deadline also concentrates parties’ minds wonderfully, inasmuch as there is time pressure to arrive at a solution.
•S.M.: My worry is that the court has opted for a deadline that just puts it over the threshold of the electoral cycle, so that it does not get affected by the heat and dust of the election campaign. Now, it may be prudent to have done this, but I don’t see that the court should really be allowing this political scenario to impinge upon its decision. Now, once the mediation begins, who will the mediators involve in the process? There are a number of litigants involved. The original litigants are the Nirmohi Akhara, the Wakf Board, and there is Ram Lalla, the deity. But the VHP is creating trouble on the streets, and they have become, by virtue of their coercive politics, litigants in the problem. So, who are going to be part of the mediation? It’s going to be a tricky process because whoever is left out of the mediation process can move out to the streets with their grievance, and whip up public fury.
The suits are representative in nature with the two communities on either side of the dispute. It is said it will be difficult to enforce a decree of the court, if one party expresses misgivings and the other party is happy about it. Does this not apply to the mediation process also?
•S.H.: A negotiated settlement will also ultimately end up in a decree of the court. What will happen on the enforcement of the decree is another question. Right now, we are wondering whether the decree can be arrived at by consensus among the parties to the litigation, or whether the decree has to be arrived at only through the adjudicatory route.
Do you agree with the basic formulation — that this is a matter concerning faith and not merely the civil rights of the respective parties?
•S.M.: There’s so much of politics riding on this. They [the Muslim parties] say they are willing to cede the land if it is proven that it was taken by fraud or by force from the other side. And the other side is arguing, ‘No, it is a matter of faith, and we cannot negotiate, or have a judicial determination on a matter of faith.’ I don’t see any reason why they will retreat from that really hard-line position now, without risk of loss of face, since it has become such a high-stakes issue politically. The judiciary could have just proceeded to take the bull by the horn, rather than bring in the question of faith and the emotion.
Do you get the sense that the legal issues are secondary?
•S.H.: Politically, it has always been framed like that. How does the judiciary handle it? The judiciary could have well said, ‘Look there are no manageable standards,’ and declined to get into the dispute altogether. Or, it could have said, ‘We have no space for faith and belief out here. Let us go simply by the law as laid down.’ The mosque has stood there for nearly 500 years, and we all saw this go down in 1992. How does, in the face of all that evidence, one side prove title?
•There are two basic emotions out here. One emotion on the Hindu side is, ‘We have suffered religious hurt and we have lived with it through 500 years. This may not be a Hindu state, but it is a Hindu majority country. The wishes of the majority on this thing must prevail.’ On the Muslim side, it is this emotion that, ‘Look, we are not intruders. These are things that have happened so many years ago.’ These underlying emotions, if the multi-faith mediation team could address somewhere, and get people to understand that irrespective of faith, irrespective of the past... this country needs to move on ahead.
It is argued that for Hindus it is a matter of faith as far as the spot is concerned, whereas the right of worship of Muslims can be exercised anywhere. The idea behind the mediation seems to be to get the Muslim side to give up their claim over the site, and instead have a mosque elsewhere. Against this backdrop, it is interesting that the Sunni Wakf Board and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board were open to the idea of mediation, whereas the three Hindu parties were not in favour of it.
•S.H.: You are right that the Muslim side in a way perceives itself to be the weaker side, and it had always said whatever the court orders, it will abide by it. The thing on the Hindu side is that after all this is god’s property. There is almost a sense of crusade out there and we cannot give up anything, having started the fight in god’s name. At the end of the day, Hindus and Muslims are all part of India.
•S.M.: We should avoid any impression that the institutions of our governance process are skewing the whole balance in favour of favour of majoritarian coercive politics. Because, I think the people of the minority faith have a sense of grievance that they have not been given a fair deal in this process. In fact, even the ruling that the acquisition of land was legitimate because the place of worship is not an essential part of the religious faith of Muslims — that also has caused some disquiet... but now they’re even being restrained from even offering prayers in public places.
Would you like to comment on the choice of the mediators?
•S.H.: Well, about two choices nobody has any doubts: Sriram Panchu and Justice Kalifulla. The question is about Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The point is that you needed somebody on the Hindu side who could possibly sell a settlement to the larger Hindu community. Therefore it did make sense to bring in a holy man. But why this particular godman? That is a choice left to individual judges who can constitute the Bench.
•S.M.: Well, he’s on record saying Muslims should give up their claim to the title of the land and also threatening dire consequences if that does not happen. So, that gives him not exactly the best claim to being a fair mediator to this process. So before the task of achieving a mediated outcome between the different litigants to this process, I think the mediators have to achieve consensus amongst themselves about how they’re going to approach this. And given the composition of this team, I think that is not a trivial challenge.
What do you think will be the larger implications for constitutional values like the rule of law and secularism, when this litigation reaches either an adjudicated or negotiated settlement?
•S.H.: Quite frankly, I think we, as a democracy, gave up our belief in the rule of law on December 6, 1992. What we are trying to do is to snatch back whatever remains; to rebuild it, because ultimately, let me put it this way and this is my question to even those who propound a Hindu Rashtra: Even a Hindu Rashtra can’t work without the rule of law. And if you do something which is out of the law, and then you try to retrospectively make it right, it just doesn’t work.
•S.M.: That is the key question going forward. Because once you have destroyed the faith that people of different religious convictions might have in the neutrality of the governance process, it is very difficult to retrieve that. Over the last 30 years, the balance has shifted too far in favour of majoritarian assertion and we’ve allowed a number of political campaigns to ride on this issue, which should have been settled right at the moment it was born. That default over 30 years has allowed this issue to become a political matter on which very emotive campaigns were mounted by both sides. The damage has been very deep and it’ll be very lasting unless we sort things out very quickly.
📰 Govt. defends electoral bonds scheme in SC
‘Ensures transparency, checks misuse’
•Electoral bonds have been introduced to promote transparency in funding and donation received by political parties, the government told the Supreme Court on Thursday.
•“They [bonds] can be encashed by an eligible political party only through their accounts with authorised banks. The bonds do not have the name of the donor or the receiving political party and only carry unique hidden alphanumeric serial numbers as an in-built security feature,” a 21-page affidavit said. The government described the scheme, introduced on January 2 last year, as an “electoral reform” in a country moving towards a “cashless-digital economy.”
Yechury’s plea
•The government was responding to a petition filed by the CPI(M) and party secretary general Sitaram Yechury to strike down the ‘Electoral Bond Scheme 2018’ and amendments in the Finance Act, 2017, which allow for “unlimited donations from individuals and foreign companies to political parties without any record of the sources of funding.”
•Denying the charge, the government said “the scheme envisages building a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and an audit trail.” It said a limited window and a very short maturity period would make misuse improbable. “The electoral bonds will prompt donors to take the banking route to donate, with their identity captured by the issuing authority. This will ensure transparency and accountability and is a big step towards electoral reform,” it said.
•The electoral bond, a bearer instrument, can be bought for any value and has a life of only 15 days. Bonds will be available for purchase only for 10 days in designated months.
📰 U.K. lifts cap on PhD-level work visas
Indians will benefit from the relaxation
•Indians are among the largest group of professionals set to benefit from a new U.K. government plan to remove any limit on the number of PhD-level work visas to be granted. U.K. Chancellor Philip Hammond announced on Wednesday in a Budget update, referred to as the annual Spring Statement, that from later this year all such highly-qualified roles will be exempt from any cap on the numbers that can apply and come to work in Britain.
•“[A] key pillar of our plan is backing Britain to remain at the forefront of the technology revolution that is transforming our economy. And to support that ambition, from this Autumn we will completely exempt PhD-level roles from the visa caps,” Mr. Hammond said in his speech in the House of Commons.
Tier 2 category
•“From Autumn 2019, PhD-level occupations will be exempt from the Tier 2 (General) cap, and at the same time the government will update the immigration rules on 180-day absences so that researchers conducting fieldwork overseas are not penalised if they apply to settle in the U.K.,” he added in his statement.
•According to the most recent U.K. Home Office data, Indians form the largest chunk of highly-skilled professionals within the Tier 2 (General) category of work visas, accounting for 54% of all such visas granted in 2018. Indian nationals also marked the largest increase in the grant of Tier 2 visas last year, up by 6% at 3,023 more visas compared to the previous year.
•The U.K. government’s latest PhD-level visa exemption was welcomed by U.K. universities, who are key employers of international researchers. Universities UK International, the main representative body for the U.K.’s higher education institutions, said that despite making up only 0.9% of the global population, the U.K. is responsible for 15.9% of the world’s most highly-cited research articles.
📰 China swears by consensus on blacklisting of Masood Azhar
Beijing offers to work with India, Pak. on ‘triangular formula’
•Hours after blocking a UN ban on Masood Azhar, China made it plain that it would consider shifting its position on designating the head of the Jaish-e-Mohammed as an international terrorist only after reaching a consensus between Beijing, New Delhi and Islamabad.
•Responding to a question, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang signalled that Beijing was ready to back a triangular formula that would involve Pakistan on designating Azhar as a global terrorist in the UN Security Council’s 1267 committee. “I said earlier that only a solution that is acceptable to all sides could be fundamentally providing a chance of lasting solution,” he said.
•The spokesperson said there would be no lag in diplomatic efforts to get all three countries on board.
📰 Eco-sensitive zone in Bannerghatta curtailed
Citizens objected to reduction of nearly 100 sqkm
•Bannerghatta National Park’s Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ), which provides a regulated buffer zone around protected areas, will remain at 168.84 sq.km. despite thousands of citizens formally objecting to the reduction of nearly 100 sq. km. as compared to the original proposal.
•In the 33rd ESZ Expert Committee meeting of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) held on February 28, members recommended finalisation after ‘detailed deliberations’ of the November 5 draft notification which declared an ESZ area of 168.84 sq.km. around BNP.
•As reported previously in The Hindu , this represents a 37% reduction from the first draft notification issued in 2016 which had marked an ESZ area of 268.9 sq.km.
•The new ESZ will range from 100 metres (towards Bengaluru) to 1 kilometre (in Ramanagaram district) from the periphery of the protected area. The ESZ Committee estimates that between 150 and 200 elephants were observed at BNP.
•During the meeting, members of the expert committee discussed extending the area of the proposed ESZ towards Bengaluru city. “However, representative of the State cited that it will be difficult to further expand ESZ due to thick habitation in the adjoining areas,” as per the minutes of the meeting which were made public recently.
Objections overruled
•Thousands of comments were sent to the MoEF from the city after the draft notification was published in November.
•S.K. Malkhede, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), who represented Karnataka in the meeting, said a majority of these comments pertained to quarrying activities. “There is a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting quarrying and mining activities within 1km of a protected areas irrespective of the ESZ distance. Since this safe zone is applicable, the objections couldn’t hold,” he said.
•MoEF accepted the State government’s position, which is derived from a cabinet sub-committee formed to look into delineation of ESZs in 31 protected areas of the State. In 2015, the State government approved the sub-committee report that reduced ESZ in multiple areas as it ‘may hinder developmental activity’ and was ‘opposed by locals’.
•Surprisingly, multiple objections were sent to the committee seeking a further reduction in the ESZ. These objections were dismissed, said Mr. Malkhede.
•“It may take another three months or so for the final ESZ notification to be published,” he said.
📰 Fire breaks out in Bandipur again
Forest watchers, others manage to douse it within hours
•A fresh outbreak of fire was reported from Kundkere range of Bandipur Tiger Reserve on Thursday afternoon, but the authorities were able to douse it within hours.
•The fire was sighted by the forest watchers around 3.45 p.m. near a private resort and soon over 100 field staff, including volunteers and forest watchers, reached the spot and got engaged in stomping it out. Four fire extinguishers were also pressed into service.
•“The fire spread to the canopy of two trees and they were chopped to prevent the flames from spreading,” said T. Balachandra, director, Bandipur Tiger Reserve. He said the fire extinguishers and the watchers managed to bring the situation under control by 5.30 p.m. Vast swathes of Bandipur were ravaged by a major fire in February and satellite data analysis indicated that the area affected by fire was in excess of 15,000 acres.
📰 A climate vulnerability index for India on the anvil
An online portal with district-wise data also in pipeline
•The Department of Science and Technology (DST) will be commissioning a study to assess the climate risks faced by States in India. This follows an assessment of the global warming risks faced by 12 Himalayan States — and discussed at last year’s U.N. climate change conference in Poland — that found States such as Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand vulnerable to climate change.
•“We eventually hope to have a climate portal, whereby users can zoom in on any district in the country and get a sense of what kind of risks — climate, socio-economic — are present,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, DST.
Common methodology
•Last year the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) at Mandi and Guwahati, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, coordinated with State authorities in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, the hill districts of West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir, to evolve a common methodology, and determine how districts there are equipped to deal with the vagaries of climate change.
•The researchers prepared a ‘vulnerability index’ of each of these States based on district-level data. Vulnerability would be a measure of the inherent risks a district faces, primarily by virtue of its geography and socio-economic situation.
•The scientists conducted workshops with the States and culled eight key parameters on the basis of which a vulnerability score could be generated. They included: percentage of area in districts under forests, yield variability of food grain, population density, female literacy rate, infant mortality rate, percentage of population below poverty line (BPL), average man-days under MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), and the area under slope > 30%.
•On a scale ranging 0-1, 1 indicating the highest possible level of vulnerability, at the top of the scale were Assam with a score of 0.72 and Mizoram at 0.71, whereas Sikkim, with an index score of 0.42 was relatively less vulnerable. “This doesn’t mean that States with a lower score are safe in an absolute sense. In fact, some districts in Uttarakhand [at 0.45 and at the lower end of the scale] are more vulnerable than those in Assam,” said Shyamasree Dasgupta, Assistant Professor, IIT-Mandi, one of the key authors of the report.
Different factors
•Different factors contributed to a State’s vulnerability. In Arunachal Pradesh, the key factors are low female literacy and high percentage of population above BPL whereas in Nagaland the key issues are loss of forest cover, steep slope and high yield variability.
•Akhilesh Gupta, a senior coordinator of the initiative at the DST said that the over-arching aim of the analysis was to give actionable inputs to States.
📰 Disinvestment target within reach: Centre
So far, the government has collected a total of Rs. 56,473.42 crore against the target of Rs. 80,000 crore
•The government expects to meet its disinvestment target of Rs. 80,000 crore even though it has achieved only Rs. 56,473.42 crore so far with only 15 days left for the end of the financial year, according to a senior official in the Finance Ministry.
•The government hopes that the Power Finance Corporation’s (PFC) acquisition of the Rural Electrification Corporation (REC), expected to be completed ‘soon’, would push disinvestment proceeds above the target.
•In addition, the ongoing Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Mini Ratna company MSTC is also expected to earn more than Rs. 1,000 crore.
•“We are of the hope that the target is still within reach,” the official said on the condition of anonymity, as the government cannot make formal announcements under the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct in the run-up to the general elections.
•“The last few months have seen collections pick up, especially due to the Bharat-22 ETF, and the sale of the SUUTI stake in Axis Bank.”
Bharat-22 ETF sale
•The government collected over Rs. 10,000 crore from the Bharat-22 ETF sale in February, and another Rs. 5,378.66 crore from the sale of Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India (SUUTI) stake in Axis Bank.
•So far, the government has collected a total of Rs. 56,473.42 crore from disinvestments and stake sales. It retained the target of Rs. 80,000 crore for the current financial year and set a target of Rs. 90,000 crore for the next year.
•In 2017-18, the government earned Rs. 1,00,056.91 crore from disinvestment against a target of Rs. 72,500 crore.
•“In the remaining period, we are hopeful that the PFC acquisition [of REC] will take place soon, which could push us over the target,” the official added.
•“It is unlikely that we will achieve the success of last year, however.”
•He added that the ongoing IPO of State-owned e-commerce firm MSTC will mop up more than Rs. 1,000 crore. The IPO is to end on Friday.
•Ratings agencies, however, feel that the government would miss its disinvestment target for the current year.
•Care Ratings predicted that the volatility in the financial markets would result in the government collecting only Rs. 60,000 crore this year.
