📰 After RCEP reticence, need for reform recalibration
India needs to prepare for the next round of structural reforms to join global value chains and unleash manufacturing
•Last Monday, on November 4, 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India would not sign on to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement. The agreement, which is dubbed as the world’s biggest trade agreement, is expected to proceed with the 15 other members of the agreement, including Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
•India’s decision to withdraw at this stage, particularly in light of India’s own articulation of its national interest and its ambitions internally and on the world stage, reflects an inability to translate ambitions into action.
Defining ‘national interest’
•A long-standing goal for India, articulated by multiple governments from across India’s political spectrum, is to generate a high level of sustained economic growth. Such growth matters for two reasons: within India, it will create millions of jobs and secure a stable future for India’s young population, and externally, to facilitate India’s rise as one of the poles in a multipolar 21st century. The Prime Minister articulated this same vision, in 2014, in his first Independence Day speech as Prime Minister, arguing “India cannot decide its future by remaining isolated and sitting alone in a corner. The economics of the world have changed and, therefore, we will have to act accordingly.” His path to “acting differently” was focused on “promot[ing] the manufacturing sector.”
•Soon after his speech, he launched the “Make in India” programme, encouraging global companies to manufacture products in India. He articulated the goal of the initiative as “We launched the Make in India campaign to create employment and self-employment opportunities for our youth. We are working aggressively towards making India a Global Manufacturing Hub.” This articulation of India’s economic interests is particularly relevant in the context of India’s decision on RCEP.
Concerns and imperatives
•In defending India’s withdrawal from the RCEP, the government has articulated three key concerns. The first is the negative impact of joining the agreement in key constituencies in India, particularly farmers and small business owners. The second is the lack of concessions within the final agreement on key demands for India such as work visas and liberalisation in services. The final is regarding India’s trade deficit, and how those deficits would expand under the RCEP, given that India currently runs deficits with 11 of the 15 other member states. This concern is particularly acute when it relates to China, with India fearing an influx of cheap Chinese imports into India.
•These concerns, particularly on the fears of Chinese imports and its impact on Indian domestic manufacturers, are legitimate and well-founded. Indeed, the Minister for External Affairs, S. Jaishankar, has argued that India has faced “unfair restricted market access” from China when it exports to the country, and Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale has pointed to “millions of non-tariff barriers” in China while accusing China of dumping.
•However, the answer to these concerns is not India’s withdrawal from the agreement.
•As academician James Crabtree has noted: “India had already won concessions, including implementation delays stretching into decades and safeguards to protect sensitive sectors like agriculture.” Moreover, as Arvind Panagariya, former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, stated in a TV interview, existing WTO rules “allow us to impose safeguard duties and anti-dumping,” which India has used and can continue to use against China when it comes to unfair trade practices.
Value chain integration
•Beyond these concerns, India has enormous strategic and long-term economic imperatives to join the RCEP. India’s ambitions to become a global hub for manufacturing means that it is the country’s long-term national interest to be integrated into global value chains. However, in Asia today, there are effectively now two economic structures — the RCEP and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) — which will effectively determine global value chains for manufacturing in Asia for years to come. India, now a part of neither architecture, will continue to remain unintegrated in such supply chains, and will see its ambitions of becoming a global manufacturing hub further delayed.
•Returning to India’s articulation of its national interest, this delay in integrating with global value chains will impact India’s internal and external ambitions. The World Bank found that when coupled with domestic reforms, joining such global value chains can “boost growth, create better jobs, and reduce poverty”. India’s own evidence shows that jobs linked to global value chains earn one-third more than those jobs focused on the domestic market. The inability to accede to the RCEP and ensure India’s integration into these emerging global value chains means India will lose out on a key opportunity to create such high-quality, high-paying jobs. Moreover, India’s absence in both of Asia’s two key economic architectures will take away from India’s goals as a regional and Indo-Pacific power, as well as a prospective global power.
•Given India’s own ambitions to generate growth and jobs through spurring manufacturing within India, and becoming a key player and rule-maker on the world stage, India’s decision to withdraw from the RCEP is not ideal. India now faces a choice: does it translate this withdrawal from the RCEP into a commitment for domestic reforms to prepare itself for the next opportunity to integrate itself into the global value chains and unleash Indian manufacturing? Or does it revise its ambitions and, as the Prime Minister said, remain “isolated and sitting alone in a corner?” Hopefully, India chooses the former path.
A balance sheet would show that more has been lost than retrieved in the Ayodhya judgment
•The Supreme Court of India has to be given wide latitude in its effort to address an unwelcome task: to resolve a dispute that has stirred up ancient resentments beyond the powers of a modern republican order to placate. It was a matter involving criminal trespass, that should have been reversed by local administrative action. Once criminality was deterred, the underlying dispute should have been settled at the local civil court.
•That the matter finally reached a Constitution Bench is a sign of democratic dysfunction. That five Supreme Court judges achieved unanimity on an issue that has convulsed Indian politics through seven decades, points to a quite heroic effort at salving deep wounds.
•Several pages into its long, reflective and often digressive judgment on the Ayodhya title dispute, and after many an excursus into the discipline of archaeology, the top court admits that it has been embarked on an exercise in irrelevance. “A finding of title”, it pronounces, “cannot be based.. on... archaeological findings”. Rather, the matter “must be decided on settled legal principles... applying evidentiary standards which govern a civil trial”.
•Likewise, after long expeditions to uncover textual records from history, the Bench pleads its inability to “entertain claims that stem from the actions of the Mughal rulers against Hindu places of worship”. The genesis of the dispute spanned “four distinct legal regimes — that of Vikramaditya, the Mughals, the British and now, Independent India”.
Constitution as watershed
•India’s history, the court writes, is “replete with actions that have been judged to be morally incorrect and even today are liable to trigger vociferous ideological debate”. A moment of liberation from the torments of the past occurred at that “watershed moment” when India adopted its republican Constitution. That was when “we, the people of India” — as the resonant phrase in the preamble put it — “departed from the determination of rights and liabilities on the basis of our ideology, our religion, the colour of our skin, or the century when our ancestors arrived at these lands”. It was when all Indian citizens “submitted to the rule of law”.
•Certain continuities between republican India and the British Raj were retained. Article 372 of the Constitution allowed the adjudication of title bequeathed from before. And yet, with no clear pathway towards resolving a dispute that originated with the British conquest of Awadh in 1856, the top court invokes an extraordinary power uniquely granted under Article 142 of the Constitution, to ensure that justice is delivered to all.
•Heroic so far in squaring impossible circles, the court wanders then into a deep moral quandary. It seeks to bridge “significant gaps in the positive law” by applying principles of “justice, equity and good conscience”. Yet it arrives at findings that negate these values.
•December 22, 1949, roughly halfway between the adoption of the Indian Constitution and its formal entry into force, with a delinquent district magistrate looking the other way, a number of idols were smuggled into a place of worship at Ayodhya. Cutting through the mythology that has since surrounded that act, the court has declared that this was a “desecration of the mosque and the ouster of the Muslims otherwise than by the due process of law”. And then came the final act of destruction on December 6, 1992, when a monument with hoary references to India’s history was effaced, in what the court recognises as “an egregious violation of the rule of law”.
Offender and victim
•The abiding mystery with the Supreme Court ruling on Ayodhya, as the Indian republic marches ahead, would be to negotiate the complicated routine through which it seeks to reward the worst violations of the rule of law. After acknowledging all these historical wrongs, the court recognises a body that has been the most serious offender against rule of law, and awards it virtually undiluted title to the land. It seeks to placate the victims of this cycle of physical and rhetorical violence, through the award of five acres in the near vicinity of Ayodhya, for the 2.77 acres lost. Evidently, the court has decreed that the injuries to an entire religious community’s sense of identity and belonging, can be easily redressed through seeming generosity in the quantitative sense.
•It is an easy metric, but does it do sufficient remedy to all the principles trampled upon? An alternative metric could be used to assess how far the Supreme Court judgment bears true faith to the foundational principles of India’s republican identity. Anybody with the tools to do the search, would find the word “Hindu” occurring 1,062 times through the court’s judgment, while “Muslim” appears 549 times. The word “citizen” occurs a mere 14 times.
•Equal citizenship was a promise that India made to itself at the time of its transition to a modern republic. B.R. Ambedkar and other preceptors of the democratic order knew that it was a difficult transition, because of the deep chasm between the assurance of political equality and the reality of social and economic inequality.
•Ambedkar of course, had in mind a different dimension of inequality. But as the Constituent Assembly (CA) debated the issue of fundamental rights, and heard representations from the diminishing and disempowered spokespersons of communities who argued for a charter of minority rights, Govind Ballabh Pant came up with a lofty response, rendered perhaps from his privileged posture as an upper caste person. G.B. Pant’s attitude and the CA’s in general has been likened by scholars such as Christophe Jaffrelot, to a “Jacobin” position, after the French revolutionary faction that insisted on the extinction of all intermediary loyalties between the citizen and the State, since in a republican order, none of these distinctions would have any reason to exist.
Equal citizenship
•Speaking in the Constituent Assembly, G.B. Pant had deprecated the “morbid tendency”, to disregard the “individual citizen who is really the backbone of the State, the pivot, the cardinal centre of all social activity, and whose happiness and satisfaction should be the goal of every social mechanism”. The citizen, he regretted, had been lost in the “body known as the community”, because of the “degrading habit of thinking always in terms of communities and never in terms of citizens”.
•When the intrusion into the Ayodhya mosque took place under his watch as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, G.B. Pant proved a little less mindful of the principle of equal citizenship. He responded vaguely to urgent demands from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that the idols smuggled into the mosque be removed. To Nehru’s worries that the commandeering of a Muslim place of worship might seriously impair India’s claim to sovereignty over Kashmir, Pant with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as his ally responded with references to law and order compulsions.
•This entire saga may have vanished into the rabbit-hole of history had not the course of Indian democracy exposed its assurances of republican equality as a thin cover for upper caste privilege. From being an unstated premise, sectarianism was officially reintroduced into India’s electoral politics in the 1980s, as the foundations of upper caste hegemony began to falter. The Ayodhya dispute was one among many manifestations of this moment of crisis. The Supreme Court’s heroic and yet logic-defying effort to set right the problem may well be too little and too late.
📰 Centre gets responses to draft Social Security code
Government had asked for public suggestions
•The draft code on social security, which subsumes eight existing laws covering provident fund, maternity benefits and pension, is being further worked upon after a recent round of public consultations, officials of the Labour and Employment Ministry have said.
•A draft of the social security code, one of the four codes that are part of the Centre’s labour reforms agenda, was published on September 17 for public comments and suggestions till October 25.
•Officials said over 400 comments or suggestions had been received. The draft might be finalised in time for the session of Parliament beginning on November 18, an official said.
•Trade unions, however, are against the proposal for provident fund, pension and insurance funds to be administered by a central board, and a national pension scheme that employees can opt for.
•Recently, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said it had rejected the draft code in its comments submitted to the Ministry. The BMS said in a statement that the first draft had provisions for the right to social security for all and establishment of a central apex council, headed by the Prime Minister, but these were missing from the latest draft.
•On November 7, the Labour Ministry said the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2019, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha at the last session, was referred by the Speaker to the Standing Committee on Labour. The committee has invited views and suggestions from the public. At the last session, the government also introduced and passed the Code on Wages, 2019.
📰 Maternal deaths on the decline: report
•Survey from 2015 to 2017 also reveals highest casualties in the age group of 20-29
•A special bulletin on maternal mortality has revealed that Indian women in their 20s make up for the biggest chunk of maternal deaths. The report by the Sample Registration Survey (SRS) from 2015 to 2017 shows 68% of deaths were among women in the age group of 20-29. The three-year data also reveals a positive development of reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) as compared to 2014-2016.
•“It is heartening that the MMR of India has declined from 130 in 2014-2016 to 122 in 2015-17. The drop has been most significant in empowered action group (EAG) States from 188 to 175,” the report said.
The SRS had categorised the States into three groups — the EAG States comprise Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Assam; southern States consist of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu; and Other States cover the remaining States and Union Territories. “Among the southern States, the decline has been from 77 to 72 and in the Other States from 93 to 90,” the report said.
•What is maternal death?
Maternal death is the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes.
•Where do maternal deaths occur?
The high number of maternal deaths in some areas of the world reflects inequalities in access to quality health services and highlights the gap between rich and poor. The MMR in low income countries in 2017 is 462 per 100 000 live births versus 11 per 100 000 live births in high income countries.
•Why do women die?
1.Women die as a result of complications during and following pregnancy and childbirth. -Most of these complications develop during pregnancy and most are preventable or treatable.
2.Other complications may exist before pregnancy but are worsened during pregnancy, especially if not managed as part of the woman’s care.
3.The major complications that account for nearly 75% of all maternal deaths are: severe bleeding (mostly bleeding after childbirth), infections (usually after childbirth), high blood pressure during pregnancy (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia), complications from delivery and unsafe abortion.
Factors that prevent women from receiving or seeking care during pregnancy and childbirth:
•poverty
•distance to facilities
•lack of information
•inadequate and poor quality services
•cultural beliefs and practicesAs per the World Health Organization (WHO), maternal death is the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy. The WHO says the MMR dropped by 38% worldwide between 2000 and 2017. However, an estimated 810 women died every day in 2017 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.
📰 Study moots lowering the age of consent
‘It will protect teens from social stigma’.
•A new study calls for a need to distinguish between self-arranged marriages among older adolescents and forced child marriages to protect teens from social stigma, parental backlash and punitive action.
•The report titled “Why Girls Run Away To Marry — Adolescent Realities and Socio-Legal Responses in India” is based on a qualitative study of 15 girls aged 15-20 years from Jaipur, Delhi and Mumbai who had been in a consensual romantic relationship, some of which resulted in self-arranged marriages. The participants included those who entered a romantic relationship when they were aged 12-19 years. These case studies involved intra and inter caste and interfaith relationships with boyfriends who were older and younger than 18. These cases were from between 2010 and 2016 to assess the impact of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012.
•The study — authored by Madhu Mehra and Amrita Nandy and published by Partners For Law in Development — makes a case for an age of consent that is lower than the age of marriage to decriminalise sex among consenting older adolescents to protect them from the misuse of law for enforcing parental and caste controls over daughters.
•In most of these cases, a couple elopes fearing opposition from parents resulting in a situation where families approach the police, who then book the boy for rape under POCSO and abduction with the intent to marry under IPC or the Prohibition of Child Marriages Act.
•In one case a couple was terrorised by the spectre of caste violence. In at least three cases, the girl gets married but her parents refuse to accept it.
•There were also three cases where the boy abandons the girl fearing punitive action following a police complaint by the girl’s parents.
•The study also records that while girls face restrictions on their mobility, premarital relations and sexuality, the same was not true for boys of the same social milieu who enjoyed greater freedom.
•The study again provides evidence of the misuse of POCSO, which raised the age of consent from 16 to 18 years. Activists have long argued that this would result in adolescents being wrongfully targeted for consensual sexual relationship and deter girls from seeking safe abortion.
•The study also assumes significance when the government has been discussing amending the PCMA to declare all child marriages null and void ab initio, while in its current form the law only permits one of the consenting parties to seek annulment of their marriage as children until two years after they turn adults (in case of minors, their parents can seek annulment).
•The Women and Child Development Ministry moved a draft Cabinet note last year on this matter. The study argues that so far the law allows for differentiated response to various kinds of child marriages, which the proposed amendment will remove.
•On the basis of these findings, the study calls for a need to examine coercion based on power, age and the nature of the relationship between the parties before treating a marriage between young couples as a case of child marriage.
•“It would help people if reforms aimed at calibrating and nuancing responses to the different kinds of underage marriages and the particular harms connected with each, while simultaneously decriminalising non-coercive sexual contact between adolescent peers who are close in age. This would protect young people from retaliation and stigma while enabling confidential access to support and sexual health services,” the authors argue in the report.
