📰 India to impose retaliatory tariffs on 29 U.S. goods from June 16
Move comes after a year of talks on U.S. barriers to Indian steel, aluminium.
•India has decided to impose retaliatory tariffs on 29 goods imported from the U.S. from June 16 onwards, officials in the Commerce Ministry told The Hindu. The decision comes a year after New Delhi initially decided to do so.
•The tariffs will place a burden of $220-290 million on the U.S., about the same amount imposed by Washington on India in 2018.
•The official notification of the tariffs will be issued before June 16 by the Finance Ministry, the official added.
June 16 deadline
•“India has decided to go ahead and impose the retaliatory tariffs on U.S. items,” the Commerce Ministry official said. “The deadline after which the tariffs would be imposed was supposed to be June 16. The notification to impose the tariffs will be issued by the Finance Ministry before then.”
•The tariffs on the 29 goods — including walnuts, apples, and some pulses — were initially announced in June 2018 in retaliation to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision in March that year to impose higher import tariffs on Indian aluminium and steel. India has repeatedly asked for exemption from these higher tariffs, but to no avail.
•However, negotiations continued for about a year, with India repeatedly extending the deadline for the imposition of retaliatory tariffs. These talks, as well as the ones surrounding granting India duty-free imports for certain items under the U.S.’ Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) seem to have fallen through.
•Last year, the U.S. announced that it would be reviewing India’s eligibility for the GSP, and in June this year, decided that it would withdraw the benefits.
•According to the Trade Promotion Council of India (TPCI), the impact of the retaliatory tariffs imposed by India on the U.S. would amount to about $290 million. While the Federation of Indian Export Organisations estimates the impact to be $220-240 million, the consensus view is that the impact is commensurate to the impact on India due to the U.S. tariffs on aluminium and steel imports.
•“If the Indian government goes ahead with retaliatory tariffs, 29 items imported from the US will face higher duties, cutting benefits to U.S. exporters,” Chairman of TPCI Mohit Singla said.
•“India is a robust market and its economic fundamentals are sound,” Mr Singla added. “The withdrawal of GSP will not make much difference as Indian exports are all geared to take this challenge.”
•“The point is that it was something that was long due,” Director General and CEO of FIEO Ajay Sahai said. “We decided to impose the retaliatory tariffs in June last year, but in the spirit of negotiation, we postponed it several times. But unfortunately it has not yielded the desired result. The effect will be matching the amount that will affect India on aluminium and steel exports to the U.S..”
•Mr Sahai added that the imposition of increased import tariffs on agricultural commodities will help domestic farmers.
The draft National Education Policy reinforces outdated ideas about the goals of a foundational literacy programme
•Many children in elementary classrooms across India cannot read and write proficiently, as demonstrated on an annual basis by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER). This affects other school-based learning, as well as functioning in societies and economies that prize literacy.
Capabilities of young children
•It was heartening, therefore, to see a chapter devoted to “Foundational Literacy and Numeracy” in the draft National Education Policy, 2019. The focus it places on the early years is welcome, and the continuity it recommends between the pre-primary and primary years is necessary. Likewise, its emphasis on mother tongue-based education and oral language development are critical. However, the analysis presented on why children fail to learn to read and write largely points to factors surrounding the teaching and learning process — the health and nutritional status of children, high student-teacher ratios, and so on. While each of these factors is undoubtedly important, they do not address with sufficient clarity curricular, pedagogical and teacher education-related issues that plague the teaching and learning of early literacy in many Indian classrooms.
•Most classrooms across India view the task of foundational literacy as teaching children to master the script, and being able to read simple words and passages with comprehension. Higher order meaning making, critical thinking, reading and responding to literature, and writing are typically reserved for later years of schooling. This draft reinforces such restrictive and outdated ideas about the goals of a foundational literacy programme.
•Research evidence from around the globe demonstrates unequivocally that even very young children are capable of using early forms of reading, writing and drawing to express themselves and to communicate; they are also capable of inferential meaning-making, critical thinking, and so on. This entire body of scholarship, referred to as “emergent literacy”, has been ignored in the draft. This has powerful consequences for the recommendations that follow, which propose largely oral activities for the pre-primary grades, reading hours for Grades 1-3, with an additional hour for writing starting only in Grades 4 and 5. It contradicts evidence suggesting that young children be taught listening, speaking, reading and writing simultaneously and not sequentially.
Many pedagogical approaches
•Another concern is that the recommendations are based on generic theories of early childhood education, such as multiple age groups learning together in flexible, play- and activity-based ways. They don’t draw upon ideas specific to the teaching and learning of early literacy. Early literacy requires a “balance” between helping children to acquire the script, and engaging them with higher order meaning making. It also requires knowledge of a variety of pedagogical approaches, such as reading aloud to children, guiding children in their efforts to read and write, encouraging independent exploration, helping them learn about different genres of texts, and so on. Further, it needs a balance of materials — moving beyond textbooks and workbooks to high quality children’s literature, material created by the children themselves, and the like.
•Teachers need to know how to differentiate instruction for learners at different levels and how to provide specific help to students who are struggling. This also requires sufficient time — an average of two-three hours per day, as per the recommendations of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). While it may be beyond the scope of a policy document to detail specific curricular and pedagogical approaches, it must provide sufficient direction for a national curriculum framework to pick up from — in this case, it should signal the need for a balanced and comprehensive approach to foundational literacy and knowledgeable teachers for its implementation. Earlier documents addressing this issue (for example, MHRD’s Padhe Bharat, Badhe Bharat, 2014, and Ambedkar University’s position paper on Early Language and Literacy in India, 2016) have been far more specific in recommending a comprehensive approach with expanded time, and a balance of goals, methods and materials.
Teaching literacy
•This brings me to a third concern, which is a lack of discussion about what it takes to prepare teachers to successfully teach foundational literacy in a multilingual country. Instead, the document recommends recruiting volunteers and community members to support the acquisition of early literacy (even remedial instruction!) in the primary grades, albeit under the guidance of teachers. This lends credence to a dangerous and erroneous idea that any literate person can teach literacy, and undercuts sophisticated understandings related to children’s development and literacy learning that teachers ideally bring to their jobs. Volunteers can be used, but cannot be a primary mechanism that a national policy relies upon to deliver foundational literacy to students.
•In focusing on the limitations of the non-academic nature of anganwadi experiences on the one hand, and the inappropriate curricular and pedagogic practices followed by many private pre-schools on the other, the authors of the draft appear to have not engaged with the advances made by scholars, practitioners and policy-makers in the field of early literacy.
📰 PM Modi hits out at trade protectionism
Unilateralism and protectionism have not benefited anyone, Modi tells SCO
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday hit out at unilateralism and trade protectionism, and said there is a need for a rules-based, anti-discriminatory and all inclusive WTO-centred multilateral trading system. Mr. Modi’s remarks come amidst the raging trade war between the U.S. and China.
•Addressing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit here, Mr. Modi said unilateralism and protectionism have not benefited anyone.
•“Economic cooperation is the basis of our people’s future... We need a rule-based, transparent, anti-discriminatory, open and all inclusive WTO-centred multilateral trading system focused so that the interests of every countries specially the developing ones can be taken care of,” he said.
India’s stand
•India is committed to ensuring a favourable environment for the economic cooperation between the SCO member countries, the Prime Minister said in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
•President Xi said India and China should uphold free trade, and multilateralism, without directly referring to the ongoing China-U.S. trade war.
•The SCO member states said the situation in global politics and economy remains turbulent and tense, and the process of economic globalisation is being hindered by the growing unilateral protectionist policies and other challenges in international trade, according to the Bishkek Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Heads of State Council.
•The declaration stressed the importance of further improving the architecture of global economic governance, and deepening cooperation to build a transparent, predictable and stable environment for the development of trade and investment cooperation.
📰 Akshaya Patra wins BBC award
•Akshaya Patra, a non-profit organisation running one of the world’s largest school meals project in India, has been awarded the BBC World Service Global Champion Award for the programme.
•The award, presented at the BBC Food and Farming Awards in Bristol this week, recognises a person or project that is changing the way the world produces, processes, consumes or thinks about food for the better.
•The Bengaluru-based NGO was selected by an international panel of judges from nominations sent in by the World Service audience around the world.
•Other projects on the shortlist included UK charity WRAP, and Food 4 Education.
📰 Reversing the scale of priorities
The Chennai-Salem highway case will test the judiciary’s assessment of environmental and economic interests
•In the weeks ahead, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on an appeal filed against a judgment of the Madras High Court in P.V. Krishnamoorthy v. The Government of India. There, a series of notifications acquiring land for a proposed eight-lane expressway connecting Chennai to Salem were quashed. The Supreme Court has already denied, with good reason, the National Highway Authority of India’s urgent request for a stay of the judgment. Such an order would have rendered unavailing the High Court’s lucidly reasoned ruling. Indeed, the quality of the High Court’s verdict is such that, when the appeal made against it is heard, the Supreme Court could find that the judgment demands a wider, national embracing.
Question of procedure
•The eight-lane highway is part of the “Bharatmala Pariyojana”, a centrally sponsored highways programme, aimed chiefly as a corridor for more efficient freight movement. The intended highway between Chennai and Salem will cover more than 250 km, and, once constructed, will cut its way through a slew of agricultural and reserve forest lands. Although the High Court framed a series of questions that required answering, the ultimate controversy in the case came down to this: was an environmental impact assessment (EIA) required before efforts were made to acquire land for the highway project? If not, at what stage of the project was such an assessment required?
•According to the petitioners, many of them landowners, the state had failed to obtain an environmental clearance for the project before acquiring land and had thereby violated its responsibilities. What is more, in any event, such permission, they argued, could hardly be obtained since it was clear that the project would have a deleterious impact on the forests, the surrounding water bodies and the wildlife of the region.
•The government denied this. It argued that its power to acquire land under the National Highways Act, 1956, was unconditional. There was, it said, no law mandating an EIA before efforts are made to acquire private land. In its belief, a notification under the Environment (Protection) Rules, 1986, which required an EIA for the construction of a new highway, did not decree such an assessment for the purposes of securing the land.
Sustainable development
•For some time now, it’s been evident that the environment is in a state of utter ruin. Recognising this, in 1987, a United Nations-backed committee led by the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland proposed a long-term strategy which called for sustainable development, among other things. This programme, radical at the time, titled “Our Common Future”, defined the principle as an endeavour to ensure that any development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs.” Since then, sustainable development has been viewed as something of a mantra in environmental jurisprudence. So much so that in India, even before the principle crystallised into a binding international norm, the Supreme Court in Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum (1996) read the idea as intrinsic to India’s constitutional structure. “The traditional concept that development and ecology are opposed to each other is no longer acceptable,” wrote Justice Kuldip Singh. “‘Sustainable Development’ is the answer.”
•But grand as this statement sounds, in practice it’s proved scarcely useful. For the courts have invariably seen sustainable development as demanding a balancing exercise, as requiring a calculation of trade-offs between the environment and the economy. What this has meant, as Nivedita Menon has argued, is that the courts of neoliberal India wound up fashioning a sliding scale of priorities in which the environment, particularly the urban ecosystem, always trumped people, but where eventually development trumped it all. This approach, she showed, was typified in the Supreme Court judgment in a case concerning industrialisation at the Kudremukh National Park (Godavarman, 2002). Holding that any development would have an adverse effect on the ecology and the environment, a balance, wrote Justice Arijit Pasayat, had to be struck. “Where the commercial venture or enterprise would bring in results which are far more useful for the people, difficulty of a small number of people has to be bypassed,” he wrote. “The comparative hardships have to be balanced and the convenience and benefit to a larger section of the people has to get primacy over comparatively lesser hardship.”
•Utilitarian reckonings of this kind, perhaps, represent a problem inherent in seeing sustainable development as a virtuous model. It could easily be argued that by its very design the principle calls for a form of calculation that tends to see growth as outplaying all other concerns. As Amartya Sen wrote, while the prominence accorded to sustainable development may be laudable, we must equally ask whether “the conception of human beings implicit in it is sufficiently capacious”. A project, for example, which might deny future generations the opportunity to breathe fresh air may well be defended on a simple application of the norm if those future generations are likely to be rich enough to enable them to live comfortably without breathing fresh air. In this illustration, the principle overlooks, as Prof. Sen wrote, “the need for anti-emission policies that could help future generations to have the freedom to enjoy the fresh air that earlier generations enjoyed.”
Primacy to the environment
•Sustainable development can, therefore, work only if the environment is seen as valuable for its own sake. The Madras High Court does this in its judgment in Krishnamoorthy. To argue, as the government did, that an EIA wasn’t required before land was acquired for a highway, as the court recognised, was to effectively place the cart before the horse. As the court pointed out, the highway in question here was a greenfield project that was intended as an altogether new road to be constructed on virgin land. In such a case, to eschew an EIA before land was obtained would have created irreversible effects that would have had a bearing not only on the environment, but also on the social and economic life of the landowners.
•“The land of an agriculturist,” wrote Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, for the court, “is vital to sustain his livelihood… The land provides dignity for the person.” The judgment, therefore, not only holds the state accountable for the violation of basic notions of due process, in exercising the power of eminent domain, but also sees the possession of farmlands by farmers as an article of faith. But most importantly, the ruling deepens a commitment to the protection of forests and waterbodies. It places the environment in a position of primacy over unthinking measures of ostensible development.
•When a highway passes through a reserve forest would it not, the court asks, “pave way for establishments in the near vicinity”? Would it not “pave way for poaching of endangered species of birds and animals”? Would it not “pave way for illicit felling and transportation of valuable timber”? The rigours of the country’s environmental laws, the judgment therefore holds, ought to outweigh those of procedural laws concerning acquisition of land, for “the protection of environment stands in a higher pedestal when placed on scale with that of the economic interest.”
•By so holding, the Madras High Court has effectively reversed the prevailing scale of priorities. This is especially remarkable since it comes at a time when the government is seeking to further weaken the existing norms for environmental clearance. That such efforts at diluting environmental protections are underway when it has become increasingly apparent that climate change represents an existential threat ought to alarm us into action. One way to act is to compel the state to look beyond exercises of balancing, as the High Court does, and to see nature as intrinsically valuable.
📰 Trade deficit widens to $15.36 bn in May
Imports grow faster than exports; electronics, chemicals see good export growth
•India’s trade deficit widened in May 2019 to $15.36 billion, with imports growing faster that exports during the period, official data released on Friday showed.
•Exports grew 3.93% in May to $30 billion compared with $28.86 billion worth of exports in the same month last year.
•The industries that saw a major growth in exports include electronic goods (50.97%), organic and inorganic chemicals (20.64%), and readymade goods of all textiles (14.15%).
‘Sub-optimal level’
•“Export growth for May remains at sub-optimal level requiring immediate government intervention,” Engineering Export Promotion Council India chairman Ravi Sehgal said.
•“For engineering sector, exporters need crucial raw material like steel at international prices. Exporters are looking forward to Budget for fiscal relief,” he said.
•“Such a growth in exports is a reflection of extremely modest growth in global trade and increasing protectionism,” said Ganesh Kumar Gupta, president, Federation of Indian Export Organisations.
Liquidity concerns
•“MSME sectors are still facing the problem of liquidity besides various other challenges, including uncertainties owing to tariff war, volatility in commodities/currencies, rapid rise in trade restrictive measures and constraints on the domestic front,” he added. Imports into India grew 4.31% in May 2019 to $45.35 billion, up from $43.48 billion worth of imports in May of last year.
•The segments that saw strong growth in exports include pulses (84.2%) and gold (37.4%).
📰 WPI inflation at 2-year low in May
Inflation in food articles basket was at 6.99%, down from 7.37% in April
•Wholesale price-based inflation hit a 22-month low of 2.45% in May on falling prices of food articles, fuel and power items.
•The Wholesale Price Index (WPI)-based inflation was at 3.07% in April this year. It was 4.78% in May 2018.
•Inflation in the food articles basket was 6.99% in May 2019, down from 7.37% in April, official data released on Friday said.
•However, onion prices spiked during the month with inflation at 15.89%, as against (-) 3.43% in April. Inflation in pulses continued in double digit for the fourth consecutive month at 18.36% in May, up from 14.32% in the previous month.
•WPI inflation in May is the lowest in 22 months, since July 2017, when it was at 1.88%. India Ratings & Research principal economist Sunil Kumar Sinha said the core inflation at 1.2% is 29 months’ low in May 2019.
•“This is clearly an indication of weakening of demand impulse in the economy. Dwindling auto and FMCG sales growth has been pointing towards this for past several months.”
•The delayed and less than normal monsoon could aggravate the food inflation further in the coming months lest the government monitors the situation proactively, checks speculative activities, and intervenes in the market to stabilise prices, he added.
•Vegetables inflation eased to 33.15% in May, down from 40.65% in the previous month. Inflation in potato was (-) 23.36%, against (-) 17.15% in April.
•Inflation in ‘fuel and power’ category cooled to 0.98% from 3.84% last month on account of softening global crude oil prices.
•Manufactured items too saw decline in prices with inflation at 1.28% in May, against 1.72% in April.
