📰 Rights of children caught in parental conflict need focus: Supreme Court
Apex court calls for negotiated settlement between petitioners.
•A proactive step need to be taken to focus on child rights, specifically in cases of parental conflict, the Supreme Court has highlighted.
•The rights of children caught in the middle of an ugly divorce or a custody battle between parents need specific articulation.
A quagmire
•Divorce and custody battles are a quagmire and it is heart-wrenching to see an innocent child ultimately suffer for the legal and psychological war waged between the parents, the Supreme Court has observed.
•A Bench of Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and Ajay Rastogi expressed “deepest concerns” about the plight of children caught in the emotional roller-coaster of their parents’ divorce and custody battles.
•The case in question concerned two U.S.-based children whose mother brought them here and filed a custody case against the husband.
Psychological harm
•Justice Rastogi, who wrote the judgment, said the courts and judges could be able to resolve the legal problems of the parents, grant them divorce and send them on their separate ways. But what would become of the psychological harm caused to child who has witnessed the ugliness between the parents
•The child is unwittingly at the centre of the custody battle, but is yet not a true participant in the process, Justice Rastogi observed.
•Everybody is working for the “best interests” of the child, but they seldom understand what they are in fact. The judge paints the portrait of the child’s helplessness. “While the ‘best-interests’ principle requires that the primary focus be on the interests of the child, the child ordinarily does not define those interests himself or does he have representation in the ordinary sense,” Justice Rastogi wrote.
•“The child’s psychological balance is deeply affected through the marital disruption,” the court said.
•“The judicial resolution of a custody dispute may permanently affect or even end the parties’ legal relationship but the social and psychological relationship will usually continue. It seems appropriate that a negotiated resolution between the parents is preferable from the child’s perspective for several reasons,” Justice Rastogi observed.
•Hence, for the sake of a child’s future relationship with each of his parents, a negotiated settlement is much better than an order imposed by a court after adversarial proceedings.
Why the recent undermining of the credibility of India’s statistical output is especially regrettable
•Over the past two months, Indian national statistics and the organisations that administer them have faced a volley of criticism. In January, two independent members of the National Statistical Commission resigned in protest, over alleged suppression of economic data by the government. More recently, amidst growing scepticism regarding India’s official statistics, more than a hundred scholars comprising economists and social scientists released a statement decrying the fall in standards of institutional independence, suggesting political interference as the cause. Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, also recently bemoaned the declining credibility of India’s official statistics.
Pioneering history
•While declining data quality has been an issue for a while, concern over institutional independence is new. What several of these criticisms reference is the fact that India’s national statistics were once internationally renowned among economists and policy professionals for their reliability. In the decades following World War II, India had reason to be proud not only of the institutional independence of national statistical bodies but also — uniquely among developing countries — of a pioneering history of independent data collection and publication. But what exactly was that history?
•The growth of India’s vast national statistical infrastructure dates back to its first decade as an independent country. The birth of a new nation led to an explosion of national statistics, based on the need to plan the economy through Five Year Plans. These years would see the establishment of the office of the Statistical Adviser to the Government, bi-annual National Sample Surveys (NSS), the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO), and National Income Committees (that made the estimates similar to GDP measurements). The moving spirit behind these developments was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, whom Jawaharlal Nehru described as the “presiding genius of statistics in India,” and the institute that he had founded in Calcutta in 1931, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI).
•While the British colonial government had made efforts to collect statistics on the subcontinent from the early 19th century, these were provincially organised and geared towards trade and administration. On the eve of World War II, it had become apparent, both to the colonial government and the Indian National Congress, that any concerted postwar developmental effort would require fine-grained statistical information on the national economy. Nehru, Chairman of the Congress’s National Planning Committee, called attention in 1938 to the “fact of the absence of accurate data and statistics.”. Even a decade later, he would admit, “we have no data,” as a result of which, “we function largely in the dark.”
•It was this need that would elevate the profile of the Indian Statistical Institute and Mahalanobis, both internationally feted in the 1940s for their scholarly contributions to theoretical and applied statistics. ‘The Professor’, as Mahalanobis was known to associates, was involved in the discussions that led to establishment of the UN Statistical Commission in New York (a body that he would be voted Chairperson of several times during the 1950s). As a pioneer in the emerging field of large-scale sample surveys, he would also be the force behind creating the UN Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling in 1947, co-authoring the textbook on the subject in 1950.
Launching sample surveys
•By the middle of the twentieth century, the Indian Statistical Institute was globally recognised as a leader in the field of sample surveys. It would soon even begin training statisticians from other developing countries. The famed English statistician R.A. Fischer observed that its achievements “brought India not far from the centre of statistical map of the world.” The Institute’s fingerprints were readily apparent in the creation of India’s National Income Committee, the Central Statistical Organisation, the International Statistical Education Centre in Calcutta, and the National Sample Survey — all created around the mid-century mark.
•The inaugural National Sample Survey was, as the Hindustan Times reported in 1953, “the biggest and most comprehensive sampling inquiry ever undertaken in any country in the world.” These were, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton put it, the “world’s first system of household surveys to apply the principles of random sampling.” The sheer scale seemed foolhardy, even to sympathetic statisticians. As the American statistician W. Edwards Deming recalled: “We in this country [U.S.], though accustomed to large scale sample surveys, were aghast at Mahalanobis’ plans for the national sample surveys of India. Their complexity and scope seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.” The first survey, performed by hundreds of dedicated staff, involved manifold challenges according to reports: in Odisha’s forested areas investigators had to be accompanied by armed guards; in the Himalayas they waited for the snows to melt in the passes; in Assam they encountered “naked tribes” who did “not know what money means”; and elsewhere they waded through “deep jungles infested with wild-beasts and man eaters.”
High-definition snapshots
•The results of the National Sample Survey offered high-definition snapshots of the country’s material life — casting light on cost of living, crop estimates, household consumption, industry, trade, and land holding patterns. Twenty years later, the once sceptical Edwards Deming was now a convert: “No country, developed, under-developed or over-developed, has such a wealth of information about its people as India.” The contemporary Singaporean statistician Y.P. Seng observed that by comparison that China had “no genuine statistics” and so India’s example of using surveys would “serve as a guide and an example worthy of imitating”.
•The Planning Commission, beginning in 1962, used the data the National Sample Survey generated by its household surveys to craft the country’s poverty line. India was a frontrunner in this regard: the United States developed its own poverty line three years later. With their combined influence on the UN Statistical Commission and the UN Sub-Commission on Statistical Sampling, the Indian Statistical Institute and the National Sample Survey continue to have a lasting impact on estimating poverty across the developing world. Methods pioneered by the National Sample Survey have become the norm for household surveys across the globe. For example, the Living Standard Measurement Study surveys conducted in several countries by the World Bank can trace their lineage back to the work of Indian statisticians associated with the Indian Statistical Institute and the National Sample Survey.
An anomaly?
•This distinguished history, which India can claim with pride, makes the recent undermining of the credibility of our statistical output especially regrettable. We can, however, ensure that when we look back on this several years from now, it represents an anomaly rather than a lasting, irreparable loss of institutional credibility.
📰 Reality of impunity, rhetoric of human rights
•In May 2017, addressing representatives from countries at the UN’s Human Rights Council, the then Attorney General of India said, “The concept of torture is completely alien to our culture and it has no place in the governance of the nation.”
•Last week in Sitamarhi district, Bihar, two families received the bodies of their two sons from the police. The two men were questioned at the Dumra police station for a case of theft and murder in the area. Instead, they came back dead. The ritual bathing revealed torture — tell-tale marks of nails hammered into their thighs and wrists.
A common story in India
•Between the rhetoric of Geneva and the reality at Dumra lies the all too frequent story, in India, of police torture. We are rightly cautioned to call it ‘alleged murder’ until proven in court. But the story we come across is too common for us to suspend belief.
•More than a week has passed. The motions of taking action have begun but there are clear signs of routine impunity. Top police officials in Bihar have recognised that the custodial deaths were “unacceptable”. There were some transfers and the policemen who were implicated were suspended and had a criminal case filed against them. A First Information Report has been registered. But in the first instance, the policemen who were implicated were not named. They were arrested and taken into custody but escaped, allegedly with the help of local police. They remain untraceable.
•The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is content giving the Bihar Police six weeks to explain its conduct. A plea from several concerned civil society representatives urging the immediate despatch of an NHRC team to Sitamarhi has been turned down. For now, it’s wait and watch.
What statistics show
•That torture is ‘endemic’ across police stations in India is well known. Official statistics show that last year there were 144 deaths in police custody. About 40% of complaints received every year by the NHRC are against the police — mainly for custodial violence.
•Though forbidden by law, the system perpetuates and incentivises torture. Top police officials tolerate it, turn a blind eye to it, citing it as a ‘practical tool’, or go easy on the perpetrators; Bihar will be a space to watch. Those in the lower judiciary, which is the first point of check against custodial violence, are frequently not vigilant in checking if arrested persons are secure in custody, have a lawyer assigned, or have the means to speak out.
•Often, pliant doctors further weaken protections to those in custody by willingly minimising or not disclosing the nature of the harm or injuries they have sustained. Oversight bodies like police complaints authorities and human rights commissions are comfortable with the slow pace of accountability from state actors and do no doggedly pursue outcomes.
•The brazenness is strengthened when legal precedents towards torture prevention are not paid heed to. South Asia is among the last regions where the political executive must grant permission before public servants can be prosecuted for acts done in the course of their work. Courts have repeatedly said that torture is no part of policing and so there is no question of waiting for permission for prosecution. Yet, the executive is still asked, decisions are delayed, and trials cannot proceed.
•According to judicial precedent, recovery of evidence made as a result of torture cannot be used in court, but without proactive lawyers and magistrates, these important details are overlooked in the early stages of the legal process. For victims of torture, this means a harder fight in courts.
•Besides being illegal and immoral, torture is not even a useful tool to stop crime. Eliciting unreliable confessions — the bedrock of the use of torture — destroys the process of deciding through evidence-based means whether the accused is the real perpetrator or not. Moreover, whenever it goes unpunished, torture actually supports more crime by creating a class of criminals within law enforcement. You cannot have a cohort of torturers masquerading as officers of the law while they destroy it.
Feeble course correction
•There have been attempts to restrain the use of torture. The Kerala Police Act puts the onus on all police officers to report any physical torture they know of. Prisons in Telangana refuse to admit people brought into judicial custody if they appear injured; such persons are sent back to hospitals, forcing their injuries to be properly recorded.
•But isolated innovations are not enough to stop this horror that has embedded itself in the subculture of policing. A comprehensive solution would be to ensure that disincentives are put in place and that there is proper accountability. But there is a lack of political will.
•India signed the UN Convention against Torture in 1997, but despite repeated domestic and international recommendations to ratify it, there has been no attempt to create a specific and comprehensive torture prevention law. This is in sharp contrast with Bangladesh, which passed a strong law in 2013. Until we have such a law, Indians must accept that the active tolerance of torture puts punishment before the crime and judgment in the hands of the wrong agency. This violates the rule of law in every way.
•For those who now plead on behalf of the police personnel of Sitamahri and say “let the law take its course”, this is absolutely right. Let the effort to establish guilt or innocence be thorough and speedy. Sadly, for Mohammad Gufran, 30, and Mohammad Taslim, 35, their guilt or innocence will never be known after their death that day in Dumra police station. It is all so very far from the resplendent halls of the UN in Geneva and the averments of India’s highest law officer.
📰 The case of the missing election in J&K
The failure to hold Assembly polls shows up problems in the working of the Election Commission
•On December 28, 2018, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh confidently told the Lok Sabha that the government was prepared for an election in Jammu and Kashmir any time. As Home Minister he knew the security situation in the State. He explicitly added that if the Election Commission decided to hold the elections, the Home Ministry would provide the security requisite for the conduct of a free and fair poll.
•From December 20, President’s rule was imposed in the State with dubious constitutional validity. When the Rajya Sabha debated its ratification on January 3, Mr. Singh repeated his assurance in these unqualified terms: “We are willing to provide whatever security force Election Commission wants for holding elections there.” Responding to Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad’s question on why elections were not held after the BJP pulled out of the State government, Mr. Singh said, “If the Election Commission wants, our government will have no objection.”
Implication of assurances
•The implication of both assurances in identically explicit terms to each House of Parliament on separate occasions was clear. Mr. Singh was cognisant of the security situation and was confident that a simultaneous poll was possible. But on March 10, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora announced that while Assembly polls will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls in Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim, they would not be held likewise in Jammu and Kashmir.
•He asserted, ahead of the reactions in Kashmir, that “the Election Commission will not capitulate to anyone”. The feeble reasons he gave, despite the Home Minister’s assurances, confirm the impression of a ‘fixed matter’. He argued, “The Election Commission recently visited Jammu and Kashmir, met political parties and government officials. Due to constraints in the number of security forces and recent violent incidents in Jammu and Kashmir, there will be no Assembly elections in the State.”
•There are three obvious flaws in this laboured defence. The Union Home Minister is better informed of the political and security situation in Jammu and Kashmir than the Election Commission can be after its brief visit. He has inputs from the Central and State intelligence besides other sources. He was surely well aware of the “constraints in the number of security forces” when he repeatedly offered his categorical assurances. And when was Kashmir free from “violent incidents” ever since 1996, when elections began to be held after the outbreak of militancy there in 1989?
Suggestions and amendments
•Mr. Arora was appointed as the Chief Election Commissioner without consultation with the Opposition. So were his two colleagues as Election Commissioners. The recent case draws attention to a grave lacuna in our constitutional system which its architect, B.R. Ambedkar, frankly admitted in the Constituent Assembly, on June 16, 1949: “My provision, I must admit, does not contain anything to provide against nomination of an unfit person to the post of the Chief Election Commissioner or the other Election Commissioners. I do want to confess that this is a very important question and it has given me a great deal of headache.”
•In 1974, a Committee on Electoral Reforms, appointed by Jayaprakash Narayan, suggested that the members of the Election Commission should be appointed by the President on the advice of a committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition (or a Member of Parliament elected by the Opposition) in the Lok Sabha, and the Chief Justice of India. In May 1990, an All-Party Committee on Electoral Reforms recommended consultation with the Chief Justice of India and the Leader of the Opposition. This was modified in the Constitution (70th Amendment) Bill which the then Union Law Minister, Dinesh Goswami, who had chaired the Committee, moved in the Rajya Sabha on May 30, 1990.
•Article 324(2) was to be amended to enjoin consultation with the presiding officers of both Houses of Parliament and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. The Chief Justice of India was dropped from this panel. In appointing the other Election Commissioners, the Chief Election Commissioner was also to be consulted. The Bill lapsed on the dissolution of the Lok Sabha. Consultation with the two political figures who preside over the House of Parliament is surely a far weaker check than one with the Chief Justice of India.
Instances of partisanship
•On October 23, 2018, the Supreme Court referred to a five-judge Bench a PIL seeking a collegium-like system for the selection of the Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners. It was opposed by Attorney General K.K. Venugopal contending that persons of unblemished virtue had held the post of Chief Election Commissioner. This is untrue. Successive Chief Election Commissioners have been criticised for partisanship. S.P. Sen Verma’s report on the Fifth General Elections in India 1971-72 contains blatantly political remarks reflective of a clear bias in favour of the Congress. The CPI(M) held him responsible for rigging the elections to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. Jayaprakash Narayan thought of appointing a non-official inquiry committee. S.L. Shakdher was rightly criticised for delaying by-elections arbitrarily. R.K. Trivedi was criticised for adopting double standards in holding elections in Assam despite the clear certainty that a free and fair poll was simply not possible in the State. A bloodbath followed. On Kashmir he rejected the State government’s views on the dates for spurious reasons. Who held those rigged polls in Jammu and Kashmir but the Chief Election Commissioner?
•T.N. Seshan changed the trend. He and his successors like J.M. Lyngdoh won public confidence. Mr. Arora’s appointment as Chief Election Commissioner raised eyebrows. Recently, laws setting up institutions like the Lokpal invariably prescribe a wide consultative mechanism. The time has come to fill the lacuna which Dr. Ambedkar himself pointed out. It brooks no delay.
📰 Integrate TB services with primary health system: Lancet
8 million lives could be saved with subsidised tests, support
•Of the 10 million new tuberculosis (TB) cases reported globally in 2017 by the World Health Organisation, 2.74 million were from India, showing a marginal reduction from 2.79 million in 2016. Despite TB incidence in the country being 204 cases per 1,00,000 in 2017, the government has set a highly ambitious target of “eliminating TB by 2025”, five years ahead of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target.
•But according to The Lancet Global Health article based on modelling for three high-burden countries, including India, compared with 2015 data, 57% reduction in incidence and 72% reduction in mortality will been seen only by 2035. Strengthening the care cascade could reduce cumulative TB incidence by 38% in the case of India, it notes. India has to adopt measures to prevent TB on a population level to eliminate the disease in the coming decades, it adds.
Access to services
•The India report card says diagnosis and treatment for drug-sensitive and drug-resistant TB need improvement. Modelling suggests that lives of eight million (28%) people with TB can be saved over the next 30 years if tests are subsidised and patients are supported to complete the treatment. “This would cost an extra $290 million each year, which is significantly less than India’s $32 billion losses associated with TB mortality each year,” it notes.
•The Lancet Commission recommends that India should scale up access to TB services for all those seeking them, optimise engagement of private sector providers and guarantee universal access to drug susceptibility testing and second line TB drugs.
Ambitious plan
•“India has set an ambitious goal of eliminating TB by 2025, but integration of TB services with the primary health system to reduce diagnostic delays is not happening. Patients are not diagnosed and treated at the primary level, which is the first point of contact. Only this will lead to early diagnosis and help cut the transmission cycle,” said Dr. Nalini Krishnan from the Resource Group for Education and Advocacy for Community Health, Chennai, and co-author of The Lancet Commissions on TB published on Thursday (March 21) in The Lancet. “In studies carried by us in Chennai, we have seen diagnosis delay up to two months in the private sector,” she added.
•According to her, funding for the national TB control programme is encouraging, there is political will and the programme mentions all the correct initiatives to bring the disease under control. “Only accountability will allow course correction if things are not going well,” Dr. Krishnan said.
•In an accompanying Comment piece, Health Minister J.P. Nadda writes that in 2018, TB case notification was 2.15 million, which is 16% more than the previous year. The number of notifications by the private sector has been increasing. “Last year, 0.54 million cases were notified by the private sector, which is 35% increase compared with 2017,” he writes. While the increase in case notification may appear encouraging, it is just one-fourth of the desired number. India’s National Strategic Plan for TB Elimination (2017–25) has called for a six-time increase in private notifications to two million patients per year by 2020.
•Instead of waiting for people with TB to reach diagnostic centres for testing, India has now undertaken case-finding campaigns to cut the transmission cycle. So far 144 million people at risk of the disease in 447 districts have been screened and more than 50,000 new cases have been detected, Mr. Nadda writes.
•According to the article, 10% of individuals with TB die or self-cure before presenting for care. According to the survey in Gujarat, 40% of those bacteriologically tested positive for TB had not sought care. Patient delay before first presentation for care is 4.1 months. Even initiation of treatment after diagnosis happens after 2.1 days. The proportion of people with TB completing treatment is 85%. But it says systematic efforts to screen high-risk populations have already begun in India.
•The Health Minister acknowledges that high out-of-pocket expenditure incurred during TB treatment keeps people in poverty for seven years after completing treatment.
•With 1,35,000 cases in 2017, India has the highest number of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases in the world. According to The Lancet Commission report, increasing evidence shows that the majority of MDR-TB cases in India due to direct transmission. Hence, early diagnosis and prompt initiation of effective treatment should be high priority to curb MDR-TB transmission. According to the report, inIndia, only 14% of people with MDR-TB completed treatment and just 11% remained disease-free at the end of one year. Yet, in the Comment piece, the Health Minister does not make a mention of howIndia would be tackling MDR-TB.
📰 About 44% of PM-KISAN beneficiaries await payment from Centre
•With just 10 days to go for the first payout deadline under PM-KISAN, only 2.74 crore farm families, or about 56% of the total list of 4.92 crore names submitted by States, have been paid so far. The remaining 2.18 crore farm families are still awaiting processing or are caught somewhere within a four-stage validation process set up belatedly to weed out fakes.
•The scheme to pay ₹6,000 per year to small farming families was introduced less than a month before the announcement of the Lok Sabha polls, and the first instalment of ₹2,000 is to be paid by March 31.
•“These checks and balances were built as we implemented the scheme; it’s not like they were thought of in advance,” said a senior official from the Agriculture Ministry, which is coordinating with the States to roll out the scheme at a breakneck pace. “The four-stage validation came into the picture because we found discrepancies in the names after the first set of beneficiaries,” added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
•The scheme was operationalised on February 24.
•In Telangana, where a similar fund transfer scheme for farmers has been ongoing for a year, the State spent one year before the scheme’s rollout to clean up land records, identify beneficiaries and weed out fakes.
•For PM-KISAN, the Centre left it to States to identify beneficiaries using their own land records. The first stage of validation is to check the State-submitted database and ensure that data entry is complete with all mandatory details filled in; the second stage involves verification of the bank account number and IFSC code; in the third stage, banks verify if the name on the account actually matches the beneficiary’s name. If a proposed beneficiary trips up at any of these stages, the details are sent back to the States for on-the-ground manual verification, a process that has become slower as State governments have shifted their focus to poll preparation.
•Once these three stages are cleared, States sign a fund transfer order for the remaining beneficiaries and money is transferred directly into beneficiary accounts. About 1% of these transactions fail, mostly due to problems with the nature of the bank account, said the senior official.
•In real terms, this means 4.1 lakh farm families facing failed transactions.
•Farmers in several non-BJP ruled States are likely to miss out on the first ₹2,000 instalment entirely as the March 31 deadline approaches. West Bengal, Delhi and Sikkim have not submitted any beneficiary names at all. Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have sent in names, but failed to sign the fund transfer order, said the official. Karnataka has approved fund transfer for only 17 beneficiaries.
•“Let politics not come in way of farmers’ interest,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley tweeted on Tuesday. Several Opposition leaders have previously dismissed PM-KISAN as a poll gimmick and a “bribe for votes”.
•Meanwhile, the Centre has approached the Election Commission to clarify whether fresh names can be added to the database even after the Code of Conduct was imposed, and whether these new beneficiaries can be paid just before the general elections.
📰 Dollar-rupee swap, a useful tool
The dollar-rupee swap allows the RBI to directly influence rupee value and liquidity
•The Reserve Bank of India’s decision last week to resort to a dollar-rupee swap, instead of the traditional open-market purchase of bonds, to infuse liquidity into the economy marks a significant shift in the central bank’s liquidity management policy. Under the three-year currency swap scheme, which is scheduled to open on Tuesday next week, the RBI will purchase $5 billion from banks in exchange for rupees. The central bank will infuse as much as ₹35,000 crore into the system in one shot at a time when liquidity generally tends to be squeezed. For the banks, it is a way to earn some interest out of the forex reserves lying idle in their kitty. Apart from injecting fresh liquidity into the economy, the move will have implications for the currency market even as it helps shore up the RBI’s dollar reserves. Bond yields rose on the day following the announcement of the swap scheme last week, reflecting the prevailing opinion among traders that the RBI may gradually reduce its dependence on the regular bond purchase scheme to manage liquidity within the economy. While traditional open market operations distort the bond market, the new forex swap scheme will introduce new distortions in the currency market. The rupee’s recent rally against the dollar has been halted by the RBI’s decision to infuse rupees and suck out dollars through the swap scheme. Even so, it is worth noting that the rupee has appreciated significantly in value terms against the dollar since the low reached in October as foreign investors have begun to pour money into the Indian economy.
•Overall, the dollar-rupee swap is a useful addition to the RBI’s policy toolkit as it offers the central bank a chance to directly influence both the value of the rupee and the amount of liquidity in the economy at the same time using a single tool. In the aftermath of the liquidity crisis in the non-banking financial sector, it can be an effective way to lower private borrowing costs as well. The coming elections, which can lead to an increase in cash withdrawals from banks, may have also played a role in the RBI’s larger decision to boost liquidity in the system. The way banks respond after receiving fresh liquidity from the RBI, however, will determine the success of the new liquidity scheme to a large extent. Businesses could benefit from the greater availability of liquidity, but only if banks aggressively pass on the benefit of lower rates to their borrowers. If banks choose to deposit the fresh RBI money in safe government securities at low yields, as they have done in the past, the de facto cap on the government’s borrowing costs will remain intact. But if banks manage to find alternative ways to deploy their money, the RBI’s new liquidity scheme could end up raising borrowing costs for the government, punishing it for fiscal indiscretion.
📰 Hold those in power responsible in the fight against terorrism
The fight against terrorism can never succeed without holding people to account for costly lapses
•Terrorism has no place in a civilised world and is completely contrary to all religious tenets. Thousands of civilians have died in India in terrorist strikes. Hundreds from the armed forces, paramilitary forces and the police have laid down their lives while fighting against terrorism and protecting citizens and our democracy. No amount of gratitude is enough to acknowledge their sacrifices. But is that enough?
No accountability
•What we need now is a very serious debate on how to counter terrorism in a manner far more effective than what has been done by governments so far. National security is in the hands of intelligence agencies, the police, the Army, and bureaucrats and politicians who frame and implement policies. But it is time for citizens to question all of them for a number of reasons, the primary being the virtual absence of accountability from them, which has resulted in repeated failures in preventing terrorist attacks.
•In its 2014 election manifesto, the BJP had said, “We will generate ‘Kartavya Bhawna’ among public servants as lives and productivity of people is dependent on the quality and efficiency of public services.” The manifesto also said there would be no policy paralysis. It also declared that the “BJP would restore trust and credibility in the government, [and ensure] that a chain of accountability is built into the system.” Where is that chain?
•By all accounts, the terrorist attack in Pulwama took place despite intelligence input about a possible attack. Jammu and Kashmir Governor Satya Pal Malik himself said, “There was no intelligence failure because we had received inputs [of a possible attack]. But there was surely some kind of negligence. If the terrorist could bring such a big vehicle without being checked, it had to be because of failure on our part.” When roads are routinely closed for politicians, causing great inconvenience to lakhs of people, why was the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway not closed for such a massive movement of troops? Someone must be held accountable for such a serious lapse. Politicians, bureaucrats overseeing national security, the Director General of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and top officers of the Jammu and Kashmir police must be taken to task. The fight against terrorism can never succeed without holding people responsible for costly lapses. The government must act swiftly and let citizens know that it means business when it says it will fight against terrorism. It is not enough to remember the dead, hold prayer meetings, and compensate families. True homage can only be paid when action is taken against those responsible for failures.
•The attacks in Pathankot and Uri in 2016 revealed chinks in India’s armour. However, apart from taking action against a few, no large-scale accountability was fixed by the Modi government. No wonder Pulwama was waiting to happen. Pakistan is responsible for the attack and it must be blamed. But again, is that enough?
•This example may not be comparable perhaps, but following the Godhra tragedy in 2002, no responsible officer from the civil or police administration in Gujarat was held accountable either, for failing to save the lives of 59 kar sevaks. Even then, I believe, there were intelligence inputs of a possible attack in Godhra.
Turning failures into victories
•Regrettably, political leaders are trying to turn such failures into victories by pushing their lapses under the carpet and celebrating post-attack retaliations instead. At this crucial juncture, a question confronting us is whether political parties and politicians should be allowed to ride on failures that have resulted in the deaths of brave soldiers. A debate on nationalism cannot centre around failures. It must emanate from successes in stopping terrorist strikes altogether.
•How should citizens view India’s ‘strong’ Prime Minister’s handling of such tragedies? Both Godhra and Pulwama resulted in the avoidable deaths of citizens and CRPF personnel, respectively. Yet, those who could have prevented them continue to thrive in power. This is not what Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP promised while repeatedly attacking Manmohan Singh as being a ‘weak’ Prime Minister. Citizens are not naive. They demand the chain of responsibility and accountability that Mr. Modi and his party promised before they came to power.
📰 For a healthy planet
We must think of context-specific solutions for India to play its part in reducing global warming
•Last week in Nairobi, governments welcomed the Global Environment Outlook 6: Healthy Planet, Healthy People (GEO-6) report. GEO-6 argues that in a business-as-usual scenario, the world will exhaust its energy-related carbon budget in less than 20 years to keep the global temperature rise to well below 2°C; it will take even less time to exhaust the budget to keep the global temperature rise to below 1.5°C.
•India could save $3.3-8.4 trillion in a 1.5°C world. It is in India’s interest to aim for 1.5-2°C. This would mean investing in not new fossil fuels but in renewables and better batteries. Investing in inappropriate infrastructure has costs in terms of climate change and stranded assets — decommissioning oil and gas infrastructure in the Netherlands, a small country, is €6.7-10 billion. If India’s universities develop tomorrow’s technologies, it could provide cutting-edge and frugal technologies. This could change energy geopolitics and remove the excuse of rich countries of postponing carbon neutrality. Developing countries can change – Costa Rica, for instance, has pledged carbon neutrality by 2021.
•GEO-6 shows that the interlocking environmental crises kill millions prematurely and affect and displace billions. Substituting for nature by buying air purifiers, building coastal defence systems to compensate for degrading mangroves, or just cleaning beaches is expensive. Ironically, such costs increase the GDP as currently calculated. As GDP grows at the cost of the environment and does not reflect an increase in everyone’s well-being, India should reconsider how it calculates its GDP.
•A healthy planet is a public good and governments should take responsibility for it. When they hand responsibility to the private sector, clean air is only available to those who can pay for an air purifier. Poor people cannot afford air purifiers. Investing in water and sanitation will bring returns — a $1 investment in water and sanitation could bring $4 in returns; a green investment of 2% of global GDP could lead to similar growth rates by 2050. We must mobilise think tanks to work out context-specific solutions for India.
•Investing in education for sustainable development, vertical and compact cities, public transport with cheap parking facilities, renewable energy, removing single-use plastics, and reducing food waste are the way to go to reduce global warming.
•Many Indians are vegetarians. Why not promote that lifestyle? Much of India was a circular economy, so why not cherish the re-users and recyclers? India had a judiciary that thought of long-term justice; why not protect that? We must debate where we want to be in 2050 and strive towards that.
📰 Kazakhstan renames capital ‘Nursultan’ after ex-President
Interim President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed changing the name of the Central Asian nation’s capital from Astana to Nursultan, or “Sultan of Light” in Kazakh, and parliament approved the change within hours.
•Kazakhstan’s new interim President was sworn in on March 20 following the shock resignation of the country’s long-time ruler and in his first official act renamed the capital after his predecessor.
•Kassym-Jomart Tokayev took office in a pomp-filled ceremony less than 24 hours after Nursultan Nazarbayev, the only leader an independent Kazakhstan had ever known, suddenly announced he was stepping down.
•Mr. Tokayev immediately proposed changing the name of the Central Asian nation’s capital from Astana to Nursultan, or “Sultan of Light” in Kazakh, and parliament approved the change within hours.
•The Senate also appointed Mr. Nazarbayev’s eldest daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva as Speaker, setting her up as a potential contender to succeed her father.
•Mr. Tokayev, 65, will serve out the rest of Mr. Nazarbayev’s mandate until elections due in April 2020, though the former President retains significant powers in the country he ruled for nearly three decades.
•Mr. Tokayev told lawmakers that Mr. Nazarbayev had “shown wisdom” by deciding to step down, a rare move in ex-Soviet Central Asia where other leaders have stayed in power until death.
•“Yesterday the world witnessed a historic event,” Mr. Tokayev said, hailing Mr. Nazarbayev as a visionary reformer. “The results of an independent Kazakhstan are there for all to see.”
Futuristic capital
•Mr. Nazarbayev changed the capital from Kazakhstan’s largest city Almaty to Astana in 1997, transforming it from a minor provincial town into a futuristic city of skyscrapers rising from the steppes.
•Its name meant “capital” in Kazakh and there had long been speculation of a renaming after the leader who shaped it. The city is central to government propaganda highlighting the achievements of Mr. Nazarbayev’s reign and his journey to build it was recently the subject of a state-funded film Leader’s Path: Astana.
•Mr. Nazarbayev, 78, ruled Kazakhstan since before it gained independence with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He steered the country through a major transformation, developing huge energy reserves and boosting its international influence, but was accused of cracking down on dissent and tolerating little opposition.
•Mr. Nazarbayev will continue to enjoy significant powers thanks to his Constitutional status as “Leader of the Nation”, life-time position as chief of the security council and head of the ruling Nur Otan party.
•Mr. Tokayev appeared to be in pole position to take over in the long term until Senators voted shortly after his swearing-in to name Ms. Nazarbayeva, 55, as their new chief. She is the most politically prominent of Mr. Nazarbayev’s three children and has long been mooted as a potential successor.
•Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister from 2015 to 2016, Ms. Nazarbayeva has significant influence over the media. Analysts said it was too early to declare a clear frontrunner to become the next elected President, with the recently named Prime Minister, 53-year-old Askar Mamin, another possible contender.
Seat warmer or contender?
•Mr. Tokayev, the interim President, has a strong diplomatic record dating back to the Soviet period and has twice been Foreign Minister. This should go some way to reassuring Kazakhstan’s major partners including China, the European Union, Russia and the United States that the move will not threaten key relationships. But analysts are in two minds over whether he has the attributes to take the job beyond the term that Mr. Nazarbayev would have served.
•As Mr. Tokayev alternated between Russian and Kazakh in his speech in the parliament on March 20, he appeared notably more comfortable in Russian. Independent political analyst Dosym Satpayev said that language skills are closely scrutinised by Kazakh speakers tired of the dominance of Russian. “In terms of Kazakh language, we cannot say that Tokayev is as comfortable as the first President. This is an important issue in the long term as over 60% of the population is Kazakh and this demographic is expanding,” Mr. Satpayev said.
•But Mr. Satpayev also said that Mr. Tokayev’s diplomatic skills had helped him forge a careful career path through an elite prone to clannishness and regionalism. “He is capable of negotiating between different groups and taking different interests into account. He lacks popular recognition to some extent but he is a heavyweight in the bureaucracy.”
•The new leader will need to tackle growing discontent over falling living standards after Kazakhstan’s economy was hit by the 2014 drop in oil prices and sanctions against Russia, a key trading partner.
📰 Finland is the happiest nation, India slips 7 spots, ranks 140th
South Sudanese are unhappiest, says World Happiness Report
•Indians are not as happy in 2019 as they were in 2018 and the country figures at 140th place, seven spots down from last year, on UN World Happiness Report- 2019, released on Wednesday. The list is topped by Finland for the second year in a row.
•The report was released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations on March 20, which was designated as the World Happiness Day by the UN General Assembly in 2012.
•The report ranks countries on six key variables that support well-being: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity.
•According to the report, the overall world happiness has fallen over the past few years, which has mostly been fuelled by a sustained drop in India, which came in 140th place this year compared with 133rd place a year ago.
•The UN’s seventh annual World Happiness Report, which ranks the world’s 156 countries on “how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be”, also noted that there has been an increase in negative emotions, including worry, sadness and anger.
•Finland has been ranked as the happiest country in the world for the second year in succession. The Nordic nation is followed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland and The Netherlands.
•Pakistan is ranked 67th, Bangladesh 125th and China is place at 93rd.
•People in war-torn South Sudan are the most unhappy with their lives, followed by Central African Republic (155), Afghanistan (154), Tanzania (153) and Rwanda (152).
•The happiness study ranks the countries of the world on the basis of questions from the Gallup World Poll. The results are then correlated with other factors, including GDP and social security.
