📰 'Political parties most distrusted, Army, judiciary win people’s trust,' says study
A new survey ahead of elections shows lack of jobs is single biggest worry
•Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, a public opinion survey in 12 states has found that political parties are the most distrusted political institutions in India. It also found that one in five of those surveyed felt that unemployment is the single biggest issue facing the country today.
•The survey, Politics and Society between Elections 2019, found that political parties had a negative net trust rate of -55% (calculated as the percentage of respondent who trust them minus the percentage who do not). They are the only institutions with a negative net rate.
•On the other end of the scale, the Army is the most trusted institution in the country, with an effective trust rate of 88%, while the judiciary – including the Supreme Court, High Courts and district court – enjoys an effective trust rate of more than 60%.
•The report, published jointly by Azim PremjiUniversity and Lokniti, surveyed a sample of about 24,000 people from 12 states -- Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, and the National Capital Region of Delhi. The sample is not weighted by state population; instead, each state had about 2,000 respondents. Previous surveys over the last two years have covered 12 more states, and researchers expect to collate all three surveys for a more comprehensive analysis in the future.
•“For too long, studies on Indian democracy have focussed only on elections, as though our democratic system can be reduced to the electoral process,” said political scientist Zoya Hasan at the report launch on Tuesday, welcoming a survey that did not focus on how many seats would be won by which party, but rather looking into the perspectives and opinions of the Indian voter.
•Apart from measuring institutional trust, the survey attempts to provide a glimpse into people’s views on governance, sexuality, gender, nationalism, populism, caste and religious identities.
•Researchers also asked respondents what is the single biggest problem facing the country. Almost 20% of those surveyed said unemployment was their biggest concern. Among those between the ages of 18 and 35 years, that figure shot up to 49%. Other issues cited include development, growth and poverty (15%) and law, governance and corruption (13%).
•The survey asked whether the government should punish those who eat beef, engage in religious conversion, do not stand for the nationalism or refuse to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’. It found differences across states, with people in UP, Delhi and Uttarakhand being mostly likely to support government punishment in such cases. Punishment for beef consumption had the largest support; only Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir had a higher percentage of respondents who opposed punishment rather than supported it in this case.
Former Kolkata police chief connived with accused in ponzi cases, says agency
•The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked whether it is expected to close its eyes, “suppose if some very very serious matters” come to light.
•The court’s observation came after perusing the CBI’s status report on the examination of former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar in Shillong in connection with the multi-crore ponzi scam cases, including the Saradha and Rose Valley scandals. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, however refrained from making any comments on the contents.
•The petition stems from a February 3 incident in which the West Bengal police manhandled a CBI team that went to Mr. Kumar’s Kolkata residence to question him in the Saradha scam case.
•The Supreme Court, while transferring the probe into the ponzi scams to the CBI from the State police, had ordered the latter to fully support the central investigating agency to reach the truth.
•However, what began as a contempt case has now snowballed into the CBI levelling allegations that Mr. Kumar, as the functional head of the West Bengal government-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), actively connived with the high-profile accused in the ponzi scams to tamper with the crucial call data records (CDRs).
•Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, for the CBI, said the statements made by the contemnors in their affidavits were misleading and demonstrably false. The court asked the CBI to file an application listing the allegations supported by full facts and particulars in the next 10 days.
•It rejected a plea by the West Bengal government counsel and senior advocate A.M. Singhvi to spare the State Chief Secretary and the DGP.
•The Bench said it would hear the application in detail after the contemnors file their responses to the CBI’s application.
•“Suppose if some very, very serious matters come to light, should we close our eyes to all that? Something sufficiently serious has been brought to our knowledge…We will look into allegations and counter-allegations,” Chief Justice Gogoi said, addressing Mr. Singhvi.
•The court also perused separate affidavits filed by CBI Director Rishi Kumar Shukla, the agency’s Joint Director Pankaj Kumar Srivastava whose Kolkata residence was allegedly surrounded by the West Bengal police, and finally Tathagat Vardhan, a Deputy Superintendent of Police with the CBI, who was part of the CBI team which was roughed up on February 3.
•Mr. Shukla said the Saradha case itself involves the non-refund of over ₹1,983.02 crore of a total ₹2,459.59 crore collected from lakhs of investors. This is only the principal amount.
•The CBI Director said the SIT took 14 months to share the CDRs of five mobile numbers of Debjani Mukherjee, one of the promoters/directors of Saradha group, for the period between 2012 and 2013. The CBI was provided with a blank CD and then later given records for only a limited period. The complete CDRs were finally obtained from the service provider. It said there were discrepancies in the frequency and number of calls with regard to one of the mobile numbers of Ms. Mukherjee.
📰 China destroys 30,000 ‘incorrect’ world maps
China claims the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. The country also routinely objects to Indian leaders visiting Arunachal Pradesh to highlight its stand.
•Customs officials in China have destroyed 30,000 world maps printed in the country for not mentioning Arunachal Pradesh and Taiwan as part of its territory, according to a media report.
•China claims the north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. The country also routinely objects to Indian leaders visiting Arunachal Pradesh to highlight its stand.
•India maintains that the State of Arunachal Pradesh is integral and inalienable part of the country and Indian leaders visit Arunachal Pradesh from time to time, just as they visit other parts of the country.
•The two countries have so far held 21 rounds of talks to resolve the border dispute covering 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC).
•China also claims the estranged island of Taiwan as its part.
•The maps were meant for export to an unspecified country, state-run Global Times reported on Tuesday.
•Almost 30,000 “incorrect” world maps, showing Taiwan as a separate country and wrong depiction of the Sino-Indian border, were destroyed by the customs authorities in Qingdao, it said.
•“What China did in the map market was absolutely legitimate and necessary, because sovereignty and territorial integrity are the most important things to a country. Both Taiwan and South Tibet are parts of China’s territory which is sacred and inviolable based on the international law,” Liu Wenzong, professor from the department of International Law of China Foreign Affairs University said.
📰 A bridge to nowhere
Poor people are running from pillar to post as the Aadhaar payment bridge routinely obstructs their welfare benefits
•Perhaps you will remember “l’affaire Airtel” — the mass diversion of LPG subsidies to Airtel wallets that came to light in 2017. Many of the wallets were unwanted, or even unknown to the recipients. Those affected, fortunately, included millions of middle-class Airtel customers who protested when the goof-up emerged. The subsidy money was returned, Airtel was fined by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), and the world moved on.
•This is an instance of what might be called “diverted payments” — bank payments being redirected to a wrong account, without the recipient’s consent or knowledge. What has escaped attention is that diverted payments have become a widespread problem in recent years, not so much for the middle class as for powerless people such as old-age pensioners and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers. The main culprit is the Aadhaar Payment Bridge System (APBS).
Shaky foundations
•The basic idea of the APBS, an offspring of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is that a person’s Aadhaar number becomes her financial address. Instead of having to provide multiple account details (say, her name, bank account number and IFSC code) to receive a bank transfer, she only has to provide her Aadhaar number.
•Induction of a bank account into APBS involves two distinct steps, both of which are meant to be based on informed consent. First, the account must be “seeded” with the customer’s Aadhaar number. Second, it must be connected to the NPCI mapper — a step known as “mapping”. In cases of multiple accounts for the same person, the APBS automatically sends money to the latest-mapped account.
•To understand the dangers of this “bridge”, we must rewind to 2014, when the Jan Dhan Yojana (JDY) was launched. In the frantic drive that followed, millions of bank accounts were opened and seeded with Aadhaar in a haphazard manner, under relentless pressure from the Central government. Some JDY accounts certainly served a purpose, but many others were superfluous and created a confusing multiplicity of accounts. More importantly for our purpose, Aadhaar numbers were seeded into these accounts without proper verification.
Given short shrift
•Haphazard seeding continued well beyond 2014 because the government wanted to bring all direct benefit transfer (DBT) payments — pensions, scholarships, subsidies, MGNREGA wages, and so on — under the Aadhaar payments umbrella. Government departments started sending bulk lists of bank accounts and Aadhaar numbers to the banks for accelerated Aadhaar seeding. Meeting the seeding targets was the top priority and due verification, once again, took the back seat.
•Thus the groundwork required for APBS to work — reliable seeding of bank accounts with Aadhaar — had simply not been done when the APBS was rolled out. The seeding mess, it seems, was sought to be cleaned up by making “e-KYC” compulsory. This essentially means that account holders were required to go through biometric authentication to verify their Aadhaar number and identity information. To enforce e-KYC, many banks used the “ultimatum method”: a deadline was set, and people’s accounts were blocked when they missed the deadline.
•Compulsory e-KYC became a nightmare for poor people, for a number of reasons: some did not know what they were supposed to do, others had problems of biometric authentication, others still struggled with inconsistencies between the Aadhaar database and the bank database. Among the worst victims were old-age pensioners. To this day, in Jharkhand, many pensioners are struggling to understand why their pension was discontinued after e-KYC was made compulsory.
A risky bridge
•So far so bad. But there is worse: without waiting for the seeding mess to be cleaned up, the APBS was forced on millions without consent. Mapping (the induction of an Aadhaar-seeded account into the APBS), according to NCPI and UIDAI guidelines, should be based on an explicit request from the customer. This gives a measure of protection to educated middle-class customers. It ensures, for instance, that they know which account their money is being directed to by the APBS. For poor people, however, consent is a fiction. In Jharkhand at least, bank accounts have been mass-mapped onto the APBS without any semblance of consent, with or without e-KYC being completed — in other words, without necessarily verifying that an account has been correctly seeded with Aadhaar.
•Recent discussions with local managers of 10 different banks spread across Ranchi district revealed that they make no clear distinction between seeding and mapping. The two steps are essentially conflated, based on default options and symbolic consent — sometimes just a signature on a photocopy of the account holder’s Aadhaar card, or below a consent line printed in English.
•The result of this premature and coercive imposition of the APBS is that diverted payments have become a serious problem in Jharkhand. For example, recent victims include Premani Kunwar, an elderly widow in Garhwa district who died of hunger on December 1, 2017, two months after her pension was diverted by the APBS to someone else’s account.
•Others affected are MGNREGA workers. Already discouraged by delays in wage payments, they have to contend now with diverted payments and other pathologies of the APBS. A recent study of the Indian School of Business (ISB), based on an analysis of more than 10 million payments in 2014-18, concludes that 38% of all the APBS payments of MGNREGA wages in Jharkhand “redirect wages to a completely unrelated account”. This study should have set alarm bells ringing, but little has been heard of it so far.
•Even if the ISB study’s estimate (38%) is on the higher side, we do know from numerous ground reports that MGNREGA workers in Jharkhand often have great difficulty tracing or withdrawing their wages. For example, hundreds of workers in Boram block were mystified, a few years ago, when their wages stopped being credited to their Bank of India accounts. It turned out that wages had been redirected by the APBS to ICICI accounts that had been opened by business correspondents on their behalf without proper intimation. This is a precise analogue of the Airtel-wallet mix-up.
Lack of accountability
•We end with a few overarching remarks. First, diverted payments are not the only problem associated with the APBS. There are others, discussed elsewhere, such as rejected payments — another nightmare for powerless DBT recipients.
•Second, these problems are magnified by a pervasive lack of accountability. The ABPS is a very opaque payment system and few people have a clear understanding of it. When people have problems of diverted or rejected payments, they have no recourse. More often than not, they are sent from one office to another. Even with the best of intentions, a bank manager may be unable to help them. Guidelines for resolving payment problems are conspicuous by their absence. Some cases of diverted payments we have personally dealt with took days to understand and weeks to resolve.
•Third, none of this seems to perturb the agencies that are promoting the APBS and related financial technologies. Last month, we tried to draw the attention of the NPCI and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to some of these issues. They gave us a patient hearing but their response was far from reassuring. Nobody seems to be responsible for monitoring the sort of problems we have discussed, let alone resolve them. Similarly, nobody appears to be in charge of enforcing the consent norms and other “guidelines” issued by the NPCI. The RBI may be the nominal regulator, but the real action is at the NPCI, the UIDAI and other strongholds of the Aadhaar lobby.
•The UIDAI did take cosmetic damage control measures from time to time in the last two years. Judging from Jharkhand’s experience, however, the pathologies of the APBS continue to cause havoc on the ground. An independent and participatory review of the system is long overdue.
📰 An own goal for Britain?
No one, in Parliament or in government, is still clear on what Brexit means
•The Brexit slogans have returned like a boomerang in the U.K. “Take back control,” the Brexiteers had demanded. Parliament has now wrested control of the Brexit process from Prime Minister Theresa May and will indicate the type of exit from the European Union (EU) that might be acceptable to it, having earlier rejected both her withdrawal agreement and her threat of leaving without an agreement. Though it is now abundantly clear that no one can quite agree on what Brexit means, let alone how to achieve it.
A new deal?
•Ironically, the European Council had to take control of the Brexit time-line last week to offer Ms. May a reprieve until April 12 to decide how Britain wishes to exit the EU. Until then, Britain had been in very real danger of chaotically crashing out of the Union on March 29. Without a transition agreement, Britain will lose all current arrangements for 49.5% of its total trade; EU laws that govern its industry, banking, agriculture and influence national laws will cease to apply. Until a new arrangement is negotiated, seamless exchanges in goods and services will collapse. The EU, however, is not known for speedy negotiations.
•At the heart of the current crisis is a 585-page draft on an interim trading relationship. Much of this could have been avoided if Ms. May had consulted widely on what Brexit meant before triggering Article 50 to take Britain out of the EU. Instead, she chose to negotiate with 27 other countries in a bloc by first putting down red lines, as if she held all the cards. When hemmed in by the extreme right of her Conservative Party, she prioritised party unity by calling an election where she lost her slim majority and then, astonishingly, carried on in Parliament as if she commanded a majority and was not at the mercy of the equally hard-line DUP of Northern Ireland.
•In pandering to the Tory extreme right, Ms. May increased divisions between those who saw their future as best provided for within the EU and those who wanted to shed the perceived over-weaning powers of Brussels and regain control of immigration. Alternative visions of Brexit were never seriously debated even though the referendum itself was completely silent on what sort of exit was envisioned in the Leave option in the 2016 referendum.
Parliamentary turmoil
•This weakness of the referendum process left Parliament in a bind. Convention has tasked Parliament with consulting on, debating and legislating for the country’s future. Quite simply, MPs are voted into Parliament to use their judgment. A referendum turns this convention on its head because it hands MPs a decision that has not been arrived at through proper parliamentary procedure, leaving Parliament unsure of how to treat that decision. There is no precedent for this — the Brexit referendum was only the third ever held, and the first where the majority of parliamentarians voted in opposition to the referendum result. Parliament chose to treat this as a binding instruction even though most MPs disagreed with the result. This then is the genesis of the current impasse.
•Most parliamentarians voted Remain to safeguard Britain’s future. London’s attractiveness as a financial hub owes less to its soggy climate than to its position as a gateway to the rest of Europe; Britain imports a quarter of all its food from the EU; most large industry depends on complex just-in-time supplies from mainland Europe; and Britain imports medicines ranging from insulin to medical isotopes for cancer treatment to scalpels and syringes. Any regulatory, tariff or logistical barriers to imports could potentially cost lives. For those MPs to vote for or even acquiesce in a ‘hard’ or no deal Brexit which endangers prosperity and health is unthinkable. And yet, this is what a group of deeply Eurosceptic Conservative MPs are pushing Britain towards. They have threatened to break up the Conservative Party over Europe, and Ms. May has, time and again, caved into their demands, prioritising party over national interest.
•And yet, her government cannot be sacked because of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2011, which makes it very difficult to remove a government mid-term. So Britain is stuck with a government that remains in power without wielding any power. The constitutional ‘firsts’ over Brexit continue. This is the first time Parliament has voted to take control of Parliament business; this is the first government to have been held in contempt of Parliament over its withholding of the Attorney General’s advice on elements of the withdrawal agreement; it is the first to lose a vote on the main business of the House of Commons by an overwhelming margin, twice; and it is the first in living memory on whose watch party discipline has disintegrated so completely that Cabinet Ministers can vote against their government and still retain their jobs.
•In the meantime, the clock is ticking to April 12, when Britain has to tell the EU whether it wants to leave with the current unloved deal, no deal or needs more time to reconsider Brexit altogether. The gift of that extension which could safeguard Britain’s prosperity now lies in the hands of the 27 remaining EU member states, any one of whom could exercise their veto. It is indeed an odd way for Britain to take back control.
📰 ‘Let Finance Commission function the way it does now’
No need to tamper with its structure, says former RBI chief
•The Finance Commission should be allowed to function in the same manner as it is doing currently, according to former Reserve Bank Governor Y.V. Reddy.
•“Let [the] Finance Commission do whatever it is supposed to do. There is no need to tamper with the structure,” he said in a speech on ‘New approaches to fiscal federalism in India’ as part of Madras Institute of Development Studies’ Founder’s Day lecture.
•Asked about various views on the need for, and against, a permanent structure for the Commission, he said, “Currently, the Finance Commission has a five-year term. The system of appointing a Finance Commission once in five years is fine. Let it continue. The way forward is to stick to the old approach.... New approach is not warranted. What is warranted is to behave more faithfully, with honesty and integrity,” he said.
•Pointing out that the proposal for making the Finance Commission a permanent body could evolve in two ways, he said: “First, the government would abdicate its discretion currently available in designing and implementing the specific purpose transfers. Second, it would dilute the neutrality of the Finance Commission between the Union and the States through a process of continuous association with the government.”
•Dr. Reddy said that in his view, there was considerable merit in having one apolitical body that provided stability and predictability primarily to share taxes that ensured fiscal balance and another forum of transfers involving continuous political bargaining with a broader mandate.
•“The former exists in the body of Finance Commission and the latter does not exist. The problem and the solution therefore are not with the Finance Commission but outside of it in terms of institutional structures,” he said.
•The way forward for fiscal federalism in India is to refocus the scope of Finance Commission to maintain the trust of all stakeholders in the institution and reinvent NITI Aayog to fill the vaccuum for other Central transfers to States,” he said.
•“Our story of fiscal federalism is a of remarkable success but in the last four years we are at crossroads,” he added.
•The Centre and States were in crossroads because the XIV Finance Commission recommended an increase in tax devolution from 32% to 42%, which was perceived to have considerable adverse impact on the fiscal space of Union.
•“Perception is that the States have got lot of money but the reality is otherwise,” he said.
•On the Goods and Service tax (GST), he said it was an historic step but the States seem to be disadvantaged in terms of design and implementation.
•“By giving up independence of tax power, relative loss of fiscal autonomy of States is more than the Union,” Dr. Reddy said.
•“For the first time, there is a whole lot of controversy surrounding the terms of reference of the XV Finance Commission.
•“Most of the concerns are in the nature of mistrust between Union and States, and to some extent, lack of transparency, if not misunderstanding,” he added.
•He also urged reinventing NITI Aayog with appropriate stature with the benefit of Constitutional legitimacy, possibly linking it to the Inter State Council.
📰 Coming soon — a robot to clean septic tanks
Situation poses multiple challenges, says IIT-Madras group
•A group in IIT-Madras is developing a robot to clean septic tanks. After mock trials in the lab scheduled for April and May, the robot will undergo site trials in July through August. The dire need for such an invention is starkly obvious with six persons killed on Tuesday near Chennai while cleaning a septic tank.
•Deepthi Sukumar, national co-convener of the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), points out, “From January 2019 alone, some 15 deaths have taken place.”
•The number of septic tanks in India runs into hundreds of thousands, and though it is illegal, sending a person down to clean the chamber is not uncommon. According to the 2011 Census, about 400 million people in India use septic tanks.
•“The liquid on top can be pumped out, but the bottom layer has thick sludge. It is to remove this that people are sent in,” said Ms. Sukumar.
Technical obstacles
•Propelling a robot in this environment is a major challenge, explains Prabhu Rajagopal of the Centre for Non-Destructive Evaluation at IIT-Madras, who has been working on the project for about four years.
•To move in the fluid, a robot needs to have a propeller but the conditions in a septic tank pose specific problems.
•Dr. Rajagopal explains, “If you use a rotary propeller, like in an aircraft, the blades will get congested within this fluid.”
•The group hence opted for bio-inspired fins. Three master’s projects later, they now have a standalone six-fin propeller, which was developed by Srikanth, an M.S. student.
•To simulate the tank liquid, they are now trying to procure sludge from the oil and gas sector, whose properties are similar and are working with Professor Indumathi Nambi of the Environmental Engineering group at IIT-Madras in this regard.
•As a first step, the group has developed a cutter that can homogenise the sludge, which can then be sucked out. Initially working with a simplistic cutter model, they now they have an umbrella-like cutter. “It is retracted, put into the septic tank, then it opens again; we rotate it and the contents of the septic tank are cut up. Then it can be sucked out using vacuum pumps,” explains Dr. Rajagopal.
•Talking to the SKA members, who work with sanitary workers involved in cleaning drains and septic tanks, added a sense of responsibility to the group. “We met two women who had lost their husbands when they entered septic tanks,” Dr. Rajagopal recalls. The group is in close talks with the SKA for a partnership.
•It is not that cleaning solutions do not exist, but these are expensive. Dr. Rajagopal cites a cost for the IIT robot of ₹10-30 lakh, admitting that even that is expensive.
•But the engineering challenges remain. For instance, the robot has to be spark-proof, because the septic tank environment includes gases that are inflammable.
Stand alone solution
•However, using the cutter alone is less expensive and can be a stop-gap solution. Eventually, a complete robot will be needed that moves inside the septic tank, and that is what the group plans to develop.
•“This is excellent work. Now, under the Swachh Bharat scheme, many toilets are being built in remote areas with narrow streets where the pumps cannot enter. This invention will be very useful for these cases,” says Ms. Sukumar.
•The funding for the project was met partly by IIT- Madras Socially Relevant Project on Compact Robotic Vehicle for Sewer lines and Septic tank inspection, 2017-2018, and by 2018 Carbon-Zero National Energy and Environment Innovation Challenge.
📰 Stubble burning menace emerges in Kuttanad
The practice, common in Punjab and Haryana, is a major threat to environment
•Paddy fields in Kuttanad, the rice bowl of Kerala, look black these days with some of them emitting plumes of smoke. Relatively a new phenomenon in this part of the region, setting paddy fields on fire after harvest by ‘padashekhara samitis’ and farmers is emerging as a major cause for concern.
•It is posing serious health and environmental hazards. After the harvest of the puncha crop (first crop) began last month in Kuttanad, Fire Services and Rescue personnel and fire tenders have been pressed into action several times after the blaze went out of control, threatening to engulf even houses, life and property.
•In Punjab or Haryana, residue burning is rampant after harvest, resulting in heavy smog choking the region every year.
‘Unaware of danger’
•This season, farmers have undertaken paddy cultivation in more than 30,000 hectares in Alappuzha district, a major portion of which is in Kuttanad.
•“The rampant burning of fields started only a few years ago. The smoke from stubble contains carbon monoxide and other toxic chemicals, which adversely affect human health and environment. However, the farmers are yet to be aware of the dangers. In 2017, a farmer died after inhaling the smoke while burning his field in the region,” says Jayan Champakulam, district convener, Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad environment subject committee.
•In Kuttanad, the farmers are burning fields to destroy stubble, to check the germination of weedy rice and prevent diseases, as part of preparing their fields for the next crop season. They believe setting the fields on fire will improve the soil fertility.
•Experts, however, say the burning impacts the quality of soil as it robs the soil of vital nutrients.
•“We are not recommending burning of stubble. There was a time when Kerala Agricultural University recommended burning of paddy straw following a pest attack. However, with global warming and scientifically speaking, we can no more justify it,” a scientist at the Rice Research Station, Moncompu, told The Hindu .
📰 India’s carbon dioxide emissions up 5%
IEA report shows China, U.S. & India together accounted for nearly 70% of the rise in energy demand
•India emitted 2,299 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018, a 4.8% rise from last year, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). India’s emissions growth this year was higher than that of the United States and China — the two biggest emitters in the world — and this was primarily due to a rise in coal consumption. China, the United States, and India together accounted for nearly 70% of the rise in energy demand.
•India’s per capita emissions were about 40% of the global average and contributed 7% to the global carbon dioxide burden. The United States, the largest emitter, was responsible for 14%.
•As per its commitments to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, India has promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. It has also committed to having 40% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and, as part of this, install 100 GW of solar power by 2022.
•However the IEA report, made public on Tuesday, showed that India’s energy intensity improvement declined 3% from last year even as its renewable energy installations increased 10.6% from last year.
•Global energy consumption in 2018 increased at nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010, driven by a robust global economy and higher heating and cooling needs in some parts of the world. Demand for all fuels increased, led by natural gas, even as solar and wind posted double digit growth. Higher electricity demand was responsible for over half of the growth in energy needs. Energy efficiency saw lacklustre improvement. As a result of higher energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.7% last year and hit a new record, the authors of the report said in a press statement.
•The United States had the largest increase in oil and gas demand worldwide. Gas consumption jumped 10% from the previous year, the fastest increase since the beginning of IEA records in 1971.
•India says it will cost at least $2.5trillion (Rs. 150 trillion approx.) to implement its climate pledge, around 71% of the combined required spending for all developing country pledges.
📰 Maximum gambit: on Congress' minimum income pledge
The Congress’s minimum income pledge is high on ambition but low on detail
•It would be easy to dismiss the Congress party’s promise of transferring ₹6,000 a month to poor households as just a pre-poll gimmick by an Opposition party seeking to be one up on the ruling regime’s minimal cash transfer scheme in the form of PM-KISAN. For now, the party has not fully spelt out the details of its minimum income guarantee scheme, Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), and has limited itself to saying this would be a flat transfer of ₹6,000 a month to identified poor households. There has been little word on how the Congress expects to finance NYAY. A ballpark estimate of the fiscal expenditure, to transfer ₹72,000 every year to the poorest 20% of the approximately 25 crore Indian households, would be ₹3.6 lakh crore. This is twice the estimated amount set aside for food subsidy and five times that for fertilizer subsidy in the 2019-20 Union Budget. It is not clear whether the Congress, should it come to power, will cut back on other subsidies and programmes in order to finance NYAY. There is also the additional problem of the identification of the poor — the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011 is the most comprehensive exercise for this, but it has been riven by reliability and authenticity issues and has only been partially released to the public as yet. By having an inbuilt provision of targeting the beneficiaries, NYAY can fall short as other programmes have, such as the targeted public distribution system.
•The devil in the detail and the financing of the scheme apart, the idea behind NYAY is not entirely unsound. An unconditional transfer of a specified minimum income support to the poor will go a long way in helping address immediate needs related to health, education and indebtedness. A large section of the targeted poor would include landless workers and marginal farmers in rural areas, and unemployed youth in families engaged in menial labour in urban areas. Besides shoring up income to meet such basic needs and pushing wages upwards, the transfer scheme can help spur demand and consumption in rural areas in particular. There are disincentives inherent in the scheme as well. A section of the beneficiaries could withdraw themselves from employment but this could be mitigated by the expected overall spur in demand in the economy through consumption, and by the rise in real wages consequent to the shrinking of the labour market. Limited cash transfers in the form of direct farm income support in States such as Telangana and Odisha have helped ameliorate agrarian crises. This was the reason why the BJP-led government came up with the PM-KISAN Yojana as a countrywide scheme. A massive programme such as NYAY, however, has no precedent. It might give a fillip to the Congress election campaign, but much more homework is required for its implementation. A dole is not a magic bullet; it can only be one among a clutch of robust and prudent welfare policies.
📰 RBI receives aggressive bids, infuses ₹34,500 cr. liquidity
Bids for swap auction thrice as much as what was on offer
•The first dollar-rupee buy/sell swap auction by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which was aimed at infusing primary liquidity, saw aggressive bidding by banks, data released by the central bank showed.
•The RBI received $16.31 billion in bids for the auction for a notified amount of $5 billion. In turn, RBI infused ₹34,561 crore rupee liquidity.
•Market participants said the auction was successful as RBI got bids three times more than what it had intended to purchase, adding that both domestic and foreign banks participated in the auction. “There was aggressive bidding for the auction, almost three times of what was on offer. Cut-off came in line with the market expectation,” said Madhavi Arora, Economist, FX and Rates, Edelweiss Securities.
Fewer OMOs
•There is expectation that RBI would conduct more such auctions as there is an appetite in the market, and reduce dependence on open market purchases of bonds. RBI has infused a significant amount of liquidity in the current fiscal through open market operations (OMOs).
•“This would be one of the ways RBI would be continuously evaluating. This swap window could be used as and when needed to infuse liquidity,” Ms. Arora said.
