📰 No more waiver, Bhutan to levy charges on Indian tourists
New charges necessitated by the sharp increase in tourists from the region, says visiting Minister
•In a major shift in policy, Bhutan plans to levy charges on tourists from regional countries, including India, Bangladesh and Maldives, who at present are exempted from any charges. The new draft tourism policy, which is likely to be finalised by the Bhutanese Cabinet next month, was discussed by visiting foreign minister Tandi Dorji with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and meetings in Delhi on Monday, sources said.
•According to the draft prepared by the Tourism Council of Bhutan (TCB), the new charges have been necessitated by the sharp increase in tourists from the region, mainly India, who cross over the land boundaries.
•“The essence of our “High Value, Low Impact” policy (also called the “High value, low volume” policy) is that we will monitor our tourist arrivals depending on our capacity to cater to them,” Director-General of TCB Dorji Dhradhul told The Hindu in a recent interview.
•“Over the last few years the number of tourists has been increasing at a really rapid rate, growing about 10 times in the past decade, and this policy was under threat.”
•The MEA declined to comment on the policy. According an official aware of the discussions, India has "some concern that the measures proposed should not cause too many hassles to Indian visitors," and would want a predictable and reasonable policy.
•In 2018, of the 2,74,000 tourists visiting Bhutan, the council estimated that about 2,00,000 were from the region, of which about 1,80,000 were from India. In contrast to other international tourists, who pay $250 (Approx. INR. 18,000) as a minimum charge per day per person, which includes a $65 a day “Sustainable Development Fee”, as well as a $40 visa charge, tourists from India, Bangladesh and the Maldives had so far paid no fees, and were able to cross over without visas. According to the new policy, however, they would be charged a Sustainable Development Fee, as well as a “permit processing fee.”
•Mr. Dhradul denied that the new charges were aimed at cutting down tourism numbers, especially from India, in the next few years, but at allowing them to “grow in a sustainable manner.” In particular, the Bhutanese government wants to stop regional tourists from using low-rent accommodation offered online, as this has led to a mushrooming of unregulated guest houses and homestays. This year, the Bhutanese government wrote to popular online accommodation site “Airbnb”, mandating that only rentals certified by the TCB should be posted.
•“After hydropower, tourism is the most important source of revenue, so any impact on tourism does affect us. This is why we are keen to mainstream regional tourism, and bring it on par with our tourism policy for international tourists,” Mr. Dhradul, who was in Delhi for the 10th India-Bhutan Dialogue, added.
•Experts say the measures could deter Indian tourists from visiting Bhutan, and may come in for criticism especially from those wishing to visit from bordering states like West Bengal and Assam.
•“The fees will certainly act as a check on mass tourism of the kind we see from India during festival seasons,” said former Ambassador to Bhutan Sudhir Vyas, who stressed, however, that the “challenges that Bhutan is facing from uncontrolled tourism” are well understood in New Delhi. In October, a Maharashtra biker was detained by the Royal Bhutan police, after he was seen ‘desecrating’ a holy Chorten by standing on top of it, one of a series of incidents where local Bhutanese papers have criticised Indian tourists, who aren’t mandatorily accompanied by guides, for being disrespectful to local culture.
•Even so, the Bhutanese government has been keen to explain their planned changes to the Indian government, officials said, and put off finalising them until Foreign Minister Dorji’s visit to India. During his five day visit this week, when he will also travel to Bodhgaya and Kolkata, Mr. Dorji was expected to discuss issues over hydropower tariffs and trilateral electricity deals with India and Bangladesh, as well as building riverine connectivity in the region, apart from the tourism issue.
Haryana to amend State Panchayat Act
•The Haryana Cabinet on Monday took an in-principle decision to bring an amendment in Section 31 of the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act, 1994, allowing devolution of powers to the Gram Sabha to ban liquor within the local area of a Gram Panchayat.
•A Cabinet meeting, held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, decided that a Gram Sabha may, at any time, during the period commencing on the 1st day of April and ending with the 31st day of December of any year pass a resolution banning the opening of a liquor vend in its region from April 1 of the next year.
•“The quorum of the Gram Sabha meeting for passing such a resolution shall be one-tenth of its members,” said an official statement.
•The Cabinet also gave authorisation to the Chief Minister for a further period of 6 months for all matters pertaining to the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax in the State including framing of new rules and rate of tax, amendments thereto and issue of notifications under the Act.
More HRA for Ministers
•The Cabinet also decided to revise the house rent allowance of Ministers from ₹50,000 to ₹80,000 plus ₹20,000 to cover electricity and water charges by bringing amendment in Rule 10-AA of the Haryana Ministers Allowances Rules, 1972.
📰 ‘Maternity scheme reaches only one-third of beneficiaries’
Researchers assert that extrapolation of RTI data show 31% of eligible mothers got benefits.
•A vital programme to support lactating mothers and pregnant women by compensating them for loss of wages during their pregnancy has been able to reach less than a third of the eligible beneficiaries, researchers who extrapolated from data obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act said.
•Almost 61% of beneficiaries registered under the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) between April 2018 and July 2019 (38.3 lakh out of the total 62.8 lakh enrolled) received the full amount of ₹6,000 promised under the scheme, according to an RTI reply. However, the researchers, who are development economists, assert that since the scheme failed to reach at least 49% of all mothers who would have delivered their first child (an estimated total of 123 lakh for 2017 according to the researchers), the scheme was able to benefit only 31% of its intended beneficiaries.
•The PMMVY is targeted only at women delivering their first child. A cash amount of ₹6,000 is transferred to the bank account of the beneficiary in three instalments upon meeting certain conditions including early registration of pregnancy, having at least one ante-natal check-up and registration of child birth.
•The scheme reached only half of the mothers who had their first child between April 2018 and July 2019. Moreover, only 31% of all eligible mothers received their total entitlement of Rs 6,000
•Given the stipulated conditions, the scheme brings under its ambit 23% of all births and pays full benefits to a mere 14% of all births, which was at 270.5 lakh for 2017. The meagre reach calculated is also an overestimate, asserts Ritika Khera, Assistant Professor, IIM Ahmedabad. The actual number of beneficiaries would have been higher for 2018-2019, she contends, as the figure increases from one year to the next.
•The data extrapolated from the RTI reply is also consistent with a survey coordinated by three development economists Jean Dreze, Anmol Somanchi and Ms. Khera. The survey was conducted to assess the implementation of the scheme. The survey team covered a district each in six States — Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha — in 2019 to interview women and inspect anganwadis. A total of 706 women were interviewed, including 342 pregnant and 364 lactating women.
Inadequate awareness
•The study found that only 50% of pregnant women and 57% of nursing women surveyed were eligible for the scheme. It also throws light on the need for higher awareness among the pool of beneficiaries — only 66% of pregnant women and 69% of nursing women knew about the scheme. Only 8% of pregnant women and 23% of nursing mothers received some benefits.
•Several factors impeded proper implementation of the programme that aims to fight malnutrition among children. These include an application form of about 23 pages, a slew of documents such as mother-child protection card, Aadhaar card, husband’s Aadhaar card and bank passbook aside from linking their bank accounts with Aadhaar.
•The requirement to produce the husband’s Aadhaar card results in excluding women who may be living with men they are not married to, single mothers and those who may be staying at their natal home. Women must also have the address of their marital home on their Aadhaar card, which often results in newly weds being either left out or forced to go from door-to-door when pregnant and needing rest and care.
•Odisha, which decided to not implement PMMVY because it has its own State-sponsored scheme called ‘Mamata’ that includes two births, has a few lessons to offer through its near universal coverage. According to the survey, 95% of pregnant women and 89% of nursing mothers had been enrolled, the level of awareness was more than 90% among the two categories of women. However, there were long delays in transferring the cash amount to the beneficiaries resulting in only 35% of all women who were pregnant and 67% of all nursing women receiving some benefits.
•The survey findings also highlight the need to pay greater attention to the special needs of pregnancy — good food, extra rest and health care. Only 22% of the nursing women surveyed reported that they had been eating more than usual during their pregnancy and the average weight gain was barely 7kg when it should be at least 13-18kg. Almost all the respondents had done household work regularly during their last pregnancy — 21% of nursing women said that they had no one to help them with domestic chores and 63% said that they had been working right until the day of delivery.
📰 BRICS on the ball?
The grouping must first focus on its existing commitments
•The 11th summit of the BRICS grouping comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was held in Brasilia last week. Pitted as a counterweight to G7, the combine of developed economies, BRICS represents the world’s top emerging economies and claims to serve as a bridge between the developed and developing world. What are its current concerns and priorities? Questions are also being raised about its efficacy and impact.
Brasilia outcome
•With Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro as the chair, BRICS was supposed to go into a slow mode. Instead, it hosted 116 meetings of leaders, ministers and others. During Brazil’s chairship, the grouping reported 30 new outcomes, initiatives and documents. The latest summit needed a 73 para-long Brasilia Declaration to spell out the leaders’ shared worldview and spectrum of their work.
•However, it is difficult to identify new elements in the BRICS’s endeavour to strengthen and reform the multilateral system. The “urgent need” to reform the UN, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and other international organisations was stressed once again, even as little progress has occurred on this score. Interest in open and free trade was reiterated, despite growing protectionist tendencies. On expansion of the UN Security Council, BRICS exposed its disunity yet again by sticking to the formulation that refuses to go beyond China and Russia supporting the “aspiration” of Brazil, India and South Africa “to play a greater role in the UN”.
•Much to India’s satisfaction, the commitment of BRICS to counterterrorism seems to be getting strengthened. Its working group on countering terrorism has expanded its activities through five thematic subgroups that deal with terrorist financing, use of Internet for terrorist purposes, countering radicalisation, issue of foreign terrorist fighters, and capacity building. If these exertions make India more secure, they will be most welcome.
•Where the BRICS shows signs of advancing is in the economic domain. Here, five facets need to be highlighted. First, the New Development Bank (NDB), the grouping’s flagship achievement, has 44 projects with its lending touching $12.4 billion, in just five years. This is not a small gain, but the bank needs to grow as “a global development finance institution”. A move is now afoot to open its membership selectively. The summit leaders are understood to have agreed on the criteria and probably on a list of nations as possible new members, although a formal decision has been left to the bank’s board of governors. NDB has opened its regional centres in South Africa and Brazil, and will do so in Russia and India in 2020.
•Second, with a successful Contingent Reserve Arrangement in the bag, BRICS governments are set to establish a local currency Bond Fund. But the earlier proposal to launch a credit rating agency remains shelved due to internal differences.
•Third, business promotion among member-states has been accorded a new salience. The BRICS Business Council held a substantive dialogue to foster cooperation in areas ranging from infrastructure and energy to financial services, regional aviation and digital economy. Its cooperation with the NDB is being encouraged. The national trade promotion agencies signed an MoU on cooperation among themselves. A BRICS Women Business Alliance was created, both as a women empowerment measure and as a tool to bring “a distinctive perspective on issues of interest for the business community.”
•Fourth, following up on the decisions taken at the previous summit, operationalisation of the Partnership on New Industrial Revolution is underway. It is focused on cooperation in digitalisation, industrialisation, innovation, inclusiveness and investment. This partnership will be concretised by establishing industrial and science parks, innovation centres and business incubators.
•Fifth, the stress on developing people-to-people interaction remains unchanged, with each chair-country drawing up a calendar of activities to strengthen links of culture, arts, sports, media and academic exchange.
To what avail?
•The contribution of BRICS to project the perspectives of developing economies is laudable. However, by hosting outreach meetings with countries in its neighbouring (or broader) region, each chair (with Brazil’s exception) gave the impression that BRICS would do more for them. But the NDB has been lagging behind on this score. It needs to start extending loans for projects in non-BRICS countries to create a solid constituency of supporters. Also, is such a plethora of meetings really essential? Do the results justify the expenditure? India’s representatives should ask, do they help the poor and vulnerable sections of the BRICS community? Finally, BRICS should ponder if in the short term it needs to focus on fulfilling existing commitments instead of taking on new ones.
📰 The mother of non-issues: on maternity entitlements
Rules and provisions on maternity entitlements have been brazenly violated and ignored for years, but who cares?
•Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if men, not women, were bearing and delivering babies. Quite likely, the maternity (oops, paternity) wards in hospitals would have the best equipment and doctors. The shelves of grocery shops would be filled with special food items for pregnant men. Women and children would be mobilised to attend to the needs and wishes of the heroic lads who give birth. An array of new professions, products and technologies would develop to make their life easier, and pregnant men would also have free bus passes and separate queues. Further, paternity benefits would be given through flagship social programmes, with hefty budgets.
•In contrast, maternity benefits in India are a non-issue. The Central government is clueless about their legal, financial and political aspects; as are the Opposition parties.
•Maternity benefits, of course, are reasonably generous (by international standards) for a small minority of Indian women employed in the formal sector and covered, in principle at least, under the Maternity Benefit Act. The vast majority of pregnant women, however, are left to their own devices.
Jaccha-Bachcha Survey
•We had a telling glimpse of the hardships they face last summer, during the Jaccha-Baccha Survey (JABS), conducted with student volunteers in six States of north India — Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. For lack of knowledge or power, most of the sample households were unable to take care of the special needs of pregnancy, whether it was food, rest or health care. Among women who had delivered a baby in the preceding six months, only 31% said that they had eaten more nutritious food than usual during their pregnancy. Their average weight gain during pregnancy was just seven kg on average, compared with a norm of 13 kg to 18 kg for women with a low body-mass index. In Uttar Pradesh, 39% of the respondents had no clue whether they had gained weight during pregnancy, and 36% had gone through it without a health check-up. It is only in Himachal Pradesh, where rural women are relatively well-off, well-educated and self-confident, that the special needs of pregnancy received significant attention.
•Maternity benefits could help to relieve these hardships and give babies a chance of good health. Under the National Food Security Act, 2013, all pregnant women (except those already receiving similar benefits under other laws) are entitled to maternity benefits of ₹6,000 per child. For more than three years, the Central government simply ignored its duty to act on this. Whenever the Supreme Court enquired about it, the government made false promises. Finally, on December 31, 2016, the Prime Minister proudly announced that pregnant women nationwide would soon be getting maternity benefits of ₹6,000. He said this without any reference to the NFSA, as if maternity benefits were an act of generosity on his part — perhaps to sweeten the demonetisation pill.
•In pursuance of this announcement, a maternity benefit scheme was rolled out in 2017: the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY). The modalities of the scheme, however, violate the NFSA: benefits are restricted to the first living child, and to ₹5,000 per woman. A budget provision of ₹2,700 crore was made for it in the 2017-18 budget — a fraction of the ₹15,000 crore required for full-fledged implementation of maternity benefits as per NFSA norms. The actual expenditure was barely ₹2,000 crore; the allocation oddly reduced to ₹1,200 crore in the revised Budget of 2018-19.
A damp squib
•Until recently, little was known about the performance of PMMVY, but two helpful sources of information are now available: summary statistics obtained from the Ministry of Women and Child Development under the Right to Information Act, and the JABS survey.
•According to the Ministry’s response to our RTI query, 80 lakh women received at least one instalment of PMMVY money between April 1, 2018 and July 31, 2019, and 50 lakh received all three instalments. On a 12-month basis, this would correspond to 60 lakh and 37.5 lakh partial and full beneficiaries respectively in the Financial Year 2018-2019. Based on an estimated population of 134 crore and a birth rate of 20.2 per thousand (2017 estimates), the annual number of births in India would be around 270 lakh. Of these, a little less than half would be first births.
•These figures imply that in 2018-19 only around 22% of all pregnant women received any PMMVY money, and around 14% received the full benefits. This scheme, in other words, is a damp squib.
•The JABS survey suggests that PMMVY has been ruined in three steps. First, the coverage and benefits were reduced (compared with NFSA norms, which are very modest in the first place). This defused public demand for PMMVY. Had the benefits been higher and universal, the scheme would have been a hit. Second, the application process is tedious. Aside from filling a long form for each instalment, women have to submit a series of documents, including their ‘mother-and-child protection’ card, bank passbook, Aadhaar card and husband’s Aadhaar card. Essential details in different documents have to match, and the bank account needs to be linked with Aadhaar. Had the government tried to discourage applications, it could not have done better. Third, there are frequent technical glitches in the online application and payment process. When an application is rejected, or returned with queries, the applicant may or may not get to know about it. Grievance redressal facilities are virtually non-existent.
•Special mention must be made of Aadhaar-related problems. Some of them are replays of problems observed earlier with pensions, scholarships and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act: for instance, rejected payments due to mismatch (say, in the spelling of the beneficiary’s name) between a person’s Aadhaar card and bank account. There are also new problems. For instance, more than 20% of the respondents mentioned that they had faced difficulties because the address on their Aadhaar card was that of their maika (parents’ home), not of their sasural (in-laws’ house). Why women are required to submit their Aadhaar card in the first place, let alone their husband’s Aadhaar card, is far from clear.
Examples of T.N., Odisha
•Meanwhile, some State governments have put in place effective maternity benefit schemes of their own. One notable example is Tamil Nadu, the serial pioneer in the field of social security. Under the Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy Maternity Benefit Scheme, pregnant women in Tamil Nadu receive financial assistance of ₹18,000 per child for the first two births, including a nutrition kit. Odisha’s Mamata scheme also covers two births, albeit with lower entitlements — ₹5,000 per child, as with the PMMVY. The JABS survey suggests that the Mamata scheme is working reasonably well: among women who had delivered in the last six months, 88% of those eligible for Mamata benefits had applied, and 75% had received at least one of the two instalments.
•It would take very little to extend and consolidate these initiatives on a national basis. The Modi government, however, is not interested. Nor, it seems, are the Opposition parties: efforts to draw their attention to these issues earlier this year, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, made little headway. Even the Congress Party, chief sponsor of the NFSA, did not mention maternity entitlements in its elaborate manifesto. If only men were the ones who give birth…
📰 Parliament proceedings: Equal representation to all States in Rajya Sabha sought
Members offer fresh suggestions
•Giving all States, irrespective of their population and size, an equal number of seats in the Rajya Sabha and all members, irrespective of their parties’ strength in the House, the same amount of time to speak in debates were among the suggestions made by members during a discussion of the role of the Upper House on Monday.
•During the discussion held on the role and future of the Rajya Sabha on the occasion of its 250th session, several members called for equitable representation. Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party said all States should have perhaps six each. The northeastern States, he said, did not have enough representation. He said the House should also be able to discuss matters related to judiciary.
•Prasanna Acharya of the Biju Janata Dal too said population should not be the basis for deciding representation. He said the selection of 12 nominated members should be left to the President, with no interference from the Central government.
•In response to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s charge that only 25% of Bills in the 16th Lok Sabha were referred to committees as opposed to 71% and 60% in the previous two Lok Sabhas, BJP’s Bhupender Yadav said while 17 Bills had been referred to committees in the past five years, only five had been from 2009 till 2014.
📰 A precedent: on apex court ruling on Essar Steel
The court ruling on Essar Steel is important in enabling quick resolution of bankruptcy cases
•The Supreme Court’s judgment on Friday in the matter of Essar Steel’s bankruptcy is a landmark in the short history of insolvency and bankruptcy resolution in India. Apart from clearing the way for eventual sale of Essar Steel to ArcelorMittal, the verdict has clarified on important aspects of insolvency resolution that had been interpreted variously by the National Company Law Tribunal and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT). First off, the apex court has upheld the primacy of financial creditors over operational creditors in the repayments waterfall, and rightly so too. It is the financial creditors who provide capital to an enterprise and their interests are secured in the form of collaterals on the firm’s assets. Operational creditors, who are largely suppliers of goods and services, are unsecured creditors and they cannot claim equality or precedence over financial creditors. Second, the Supreme Court has shown the NCLAT, which was attempting to appropriate the role of the Committee of Creditors (CoC) in an insolvency resolution, its place. The ruling is clear that the CoC is supreme when it comes to deciding on commercial issues, including the repayment waterfall, in an insolvency resolution. These two clarifications should alone help in quickening a number of other cases, big and small, that are stuck in the insolvency courts across the country.
•The apex court has also held that the 330-day limit for resolution is not sacrosanct. This will ensure that creditors are not pressured to accept a below-par deal due to paucity of time. With critical aspects of the law clarified, there may also not be reason to fear that entrenched promoter-defaulters can misuse the unlimited time now available to them. With the go-ahead given to the sale of Essar Steel, it is expected that banks will recover over 90% of the over ₹40,000 crore that the company owes them. Operational creditors are set to receive close to ₹1,200 crore. This should clearly help improve the financial position of weak public sector banks and bolster profitability as the Essar dues were fully written off by them. Shares of banks such as State Bank of India, and Punjab National Bank rallied following the verdict. More importantly, the decision, it is believed, will serve as a useful precedent when it comes to deciding on future bankruptcy cases. The insolvency and bankruptcy process is still young in India. There is a long way to go yet, especially in the matter of recovery percentages. The Essar Steel resolution has raised the bar but the overall recovery in all cases that have been adjudicated is less than 50%. This has to improve, along with the time taken for resolution, because significant capital is locked up in bankrupt companies.
