📰 Centre, Assam govt. sign accord with Bodo groups
It will end 50-year-old crisis: Amit Shah
•The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), the Assam government and Bodo groups on Monday signed an agreement to redraw and rename the Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) in Assam, currently spread over the four districts of Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa and Udalguri.
•As per the agreement, villages dominated by Bodos that were presently outside the BTAD would be included and those with non-Bodo population would be excluded, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said. Bodos living in the hills would be granted Scheduled Hill Tribe status.
•Mr. Sarma said as of now, the agreement had not addressed the issue of “citizenship or work permit” for non-domiciles in the BTAD, to be renamed as the Bodoland Territorial Region.
•Several Bodo groups, led by the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU), have been demanding a separate land for the ethnic community since 1972, a movement that has claimed nearly 4,000 lives.
•Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who presided over the event, said the signing of the agreement would “end the 50-year-old Bodo crisis”.
•“Today, Assam is united. Around 1,500 cadres of NDFB (P), NDFB (RD) and NDFB (S) will be rehabilitated by Centre and Assam Government. They will be assimilated in the mainstream and will surrender on January 30 on Bapu’s death anniversary,” he said.
Reprieve of Rs. 40,000 crore in liabilities to buyer; second attempt in as many years
•The Union government on Monday invited bids for a 100% stake sale of Air India (AI) and transfer of management control along with its complete share in two subsidiaries — low-cost international carrier Air India Express and ground-handling arm AISATS. The government has offered to hive off liabilities worth nearly Rs. 40,000 crore to sweeten the deal.
•This is the second attempt in two years by the Narendra Modi-led government at privatising the national carrier. On May 31, 2018, when the deadline for bids closed, not even a single private player had shown interest.
•On the table is a 100% stake in AI, 100% stake in AI Express Limited (AIXL) and all of the government’s 50% stake in AISATS, which is a joint venture with the Singapore-based ground handling company SATS Limited.
Up for grabs
•The new buyer will get a total of 146 aircraft, 56% of which are owned by the airline group, while the remaining are on lease. It will also benefit from as much as 50% of the international market share held by Indian airlines as well as the airline’s 4,400 airport slots at airports in the country and 3,300 slots in 42 countries, which will be available at least for six months after the sale is complete.
•As many as 9,617 permanent employees, including pilots and cabin crew with deep technical and operational expertise, will be up for grabs along with the airline’s brand as well as the famous “Maharaja” and “Flying swan” logos.
•Any private or public limited company, a corporate body and a fund with a net value of Rs. 3,500 crore will be eligible to bid.
•The last date for submitting interest to the transaction advisor is March 17 and the outcome of this round will be known by March 31, following which qualified bidders will be given two months to submit financial bids.
‘Great asset’
•Minister of State for Civil Aviation Hardeep Puri said at a press conference, “There is a lot of interest [in Air India’s sale]. Today’s attempt is qualitative different from the previous attempt. Air India and Air India Express are a great asset.”
•But the private player keen to buy Air India will also have to take on liabilities of Rs. 32,474 crore, which includes the airline’s debt of Rs. 23,286 crore.
•The government will absorb Rs. 56,334 crore in liabilities, including Rs. 36,670 crore of debt.
•These have been transferred to a special vehicle known as Air India Assets Holding Limited (AIAHL), which will also comprise real estate and other assets worth Rs. 17,000 crore. Therefore, the net liability to be borne by the government will be Rs. 39,259 crore.
📰 Retrieving the idea of citizenship
Drawing on the Preamble, people are occupying the ‘constitutional commons’ to reclaim rights — on freedoms, justice
•The 70th Republic Day has ushered in lyrical constitutionalism of a kind never witnessed before in the history of independent India. It has also ushered in the full-blooded emergence of the constitutional commons as the space for a public, shared, collectively crafted jurisprudence of citizenship. Conversations on citizenship draw upon the rich tapestry of the Preamble and the echoes it contains, bringing people together in ways that shine a torch on the pathways to a transformative jurisprudence for our constitutional courts.
•It is not anymore that the people of this country falter in their steps towards courts to seek justice; it is courts that even while reciting the Constitution, are unable to take definitive positions, unfettered by governmental dispositions.
•When I suggested in 2012 in Tools of Justice that transformative constitutionalism is by definition insurgent, I had not in fact imagined that we would witness an insurgency of these proportions that carry forth rhythm, sight, sound, musicality, tenacity, constitutional wisdom, collective action and the redefinition of leadership (in terms of caste, religion, gender, class and age especially) in quite this manner in the face of threat, governance by fear, and the perpetual anticipation of terror.
•Just the demonstration of the possibility of this resistance is deeply transformative and moving. Will India and Indian-ness ever be the same again?
Ways of the Right
•The ways of the Hindu Right are cruel and ruthless beyond measure, disregardful of the rule of law, and utterly anti-national, the‘national’ defined in broad inclusive terms of ‘upholding the spirit of the Constitution and respecting its fundamental tenets.’ We have seen demonstration of that as well — especially in Kashmir and Assam, also in Uttar Pradesh, not to speak of the violence on university campuses. Against the brutal reign of terror, and threat of more to come, against a future that seems bleak on every score — employment, economy, education (especially higher education), and governance — it is the public and spirited defence of the constitutional commons that has forced accountability on the state and internationalised its depredations.
•The recitations of resistance range from wresting the national anthem from its empty ritualistic performance by military bands or the ritual flag-hoisting on Republic Day and Independence Day, to reinstalling the tricolour as a symbol of resistance. Recitations of resistance combine Faiz with the Preamble in the voice of Chandrashekhar Azad on the steps of Jama Masjid before he is arrested for inciting violence. The phrase ‘incitement to violence’ itself acquires a new meaning in the national space of this resistance — the recitation of the Preamble incites the state to violence, forcing a judge to ask the state, ‘What offence? Tell me. He’ll read the Preamble?’
•Extrapolating from the ideas of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and scholars of the commons, the conceptualisation of the Constitution as a commons opens it out to radical, insurgent readings that redefine belonging and ownership — it is no longer the property of state, legislatures and courts to (mis)interpret in the service of political expediency/judicial bias/equivocation. It is the people who through collective action and civic engagement hold institutions to account and provide the tools and experiences that must shape constitutional interpretation. The Preamble sets out the spirit of constitutional morality (not its narrow prescription) that guides an understanding of protections set out within. It also makes intelligible to people the legislative, judicial or executive action that undermine the spirit of the Constitution.
•For this public engagement is a justice cascade to borrow from Kathryn Sikkink, that will not (does not) stop with the recitation — it has forced the government into courts and has forced judicial deliberation on the reach of constitutional protections to discipline the state. Although we see a marked pushback from the spectacular position of the right to privacy judgment in 2017 — with no effective reliefs granted in the Kashmir cases and a deferral on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, or CAA, 2019, among others — it is institutions of justice that are now on trial. This is the singular achievement of this historic moment: the rupture of a sequestered ‘constitutional jurisprudence’ through the articulation of an expansive, inclusive constitutional commons and the performance of lyrical constitutionalism.
Freedoms as birthright
•This insurgency also holds a unique pedagogic moment: it demonstrates a different way of imagining the Constitution and a different understanding of citizenship. In her recent work, Birthright Citizens , African-American legal historian Martha Jones argues that citizenship is distinct from and deeper than political rights or voting alone, and embedded in birthright (as African Americans argued long before they belonged equally in the Constitution). In our context, we must ask, what is birthright? Is it swaraj (freedom or azaadi that has distinct cadences deriving from location)? Is it the elimination of untouchability (as Dr. Ambedkar observed)?
•Is birthright embedded in the undisturbed right of forest dwellers to the forest commons — Maava Naate Maava Raaj (our village, our governance), as Dr. Jaipal Singh Munda had argued for in the Constituent Assembly deliberations? Or is birthright embedded deep within the right to dignity and self-respect of losatravesados, the migrants, the crossers that Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of in her stunning work on borderlands? Is it all of this? For after all, as Martha Jones observes pertinently, “sometimes citizenship was defined in constitutions and statutes, most of the time it was not”. Certainly, citizenship by any definition is not a dole to be handed out by rulers to compliant subjects nor is its grant an alms deed to be distributed at whim.
•Since the conversation has now opened up to critical public deliberation, how would we draw constitutionscapes across the rugged terrains of azaadi? The Constitution itself recognises various levels of azaadi, lest we forget. The late B.D. Sharma famously called the Fifth Schedule ‘a Constitution within a Constitution’; prior to August 5, 2019, the Constitution of India recognised the Constitution of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Areas under the Sixth Schedule in northeast India similarly have constitutional guarantees of autonomy.
•The guarantees of azaadi to Dalits under the Constitution are unprecedented. Although each of these is only observed in the breach, mapping constitutionscapes in their specific figurations means keeping these firmly at the centre of debate and collective action. Witness its signposts: Chandrashekhar Azad, the dadis of Shaheen Bagh, the Ghanta Ghar resisters in Lucknow, resistance as withdrawal by the people of Kashmir, campuses, Kerala’s challenge to the constitutionality of CAA, the proxy strikes on conscientious resisters, the shutdown of Jammu and Kashmir, incarceration in detention camps and the proliferation of camps, the deferral by constitutional courts, the languages of rule and resistance, and indeed the languages of jurisprudence trapped in a chokehold that defers the pronouncement of freedom as birthright.
•The re-instatement of this experience and ways of knowing interwoven with a resurgent public constitutionalism, might help us reclaim the idea of citizenship as birthright and inscribe the constitutional commons by “occupying” them and establishing a shared, collective, inclusive ownership.
📰 A case of wholehearted biotechnology adoption
In biotech cotton in India, farmers have found a solution to some of their biggest on-field pest challenges
•In the Editorial page article, “The flawed spin to India’s cotton story” (January 23, 2020), there are unfounded claims about a technology that has in reality been a boon to farmers across the world.
•The first point made in the article is that GM cotton covers 95% of the area under cotton and that there are no choices for farmers. The fact: Indian farmers have voted for choice of seeds with biotechnologies by planting hybrid cotton biotech seeds on over 90% of the country’s cotton acreage. They want seeds and technologies that provide optimal yield, income and convenience in cultivation. Today, they choose from over 800 hybrid Bt cotton seed brands from over 40 Indian and global seed companies, with five approved ‘in-the-seed’ insect protection Bt cotton technologies and non-Bt varietal cotton seeds. Farmers have not shown any preference for planting non-Bt cotton seeds including the quantity supplied along with the Bt cotton seed by seed companies as per regulatory guidelines.
Ripple-effect benefits
•Several key studies by third-party economists and sociologists have established that 85% of hybrid Bt cotton seed farmers and farm labourers invested in better education for children; 77% reported better intake of nutritious food; 75% reported better health of their family members; 64% invested on the health of livestock; female workers on Bt cotton fields earned an average 55% higher income; and 42.4 crore additional days of rural employment have been generated, thereby doubling cotton production.
•India’s farmers are the ones who have reposed trust in biotechnology, making India the world’s second largest cotton producer and exporter by doubling cotton production over the past decade.
•Cotton Corporation of India data show that the highest production of 398 lakh bales of cotton in India was achieved in 2013-14, valued at around Rs. 72,000 crore. Additional incomes were generated from cotton seeds oil (1.3 million tons) and cotton seed oilmeal (11 million tons) worth Rs. 13,000 crore and Rs. 22,000 crore, respectively. The Bt cotton seed market is about Rs. 3,000 crore, making it hardly 2.5% of the total value generated.
•The article’s second point is about low productivity as compared to the global scene. The fact is that technology has not only increased yields but also greatly reduced pesticide use. Biotechnology in cotton, post its introduction in 2002, has led to transformational changes in India’s cotton cultivation. These have helped increase cotton yields by over 1.8 times — from 241 kg/hectare in 2002-2003 to 541 kg/hectare in 2018-2019. A BKS-CSD study shows that the significant increase in farmer incomes from higher yields and reduced pesticide use has generated additional farm income of over Rs. 42,300 crore. India is moving to first place as the largest producer of cotton in the world.
Extension efforts
•However, it is not just the technology that increases yields. India’s farmers face numerous uncertainties and crop management challenges, affecting farm yield and incomes; knowledge of cultivation and correct agronomic practices can make a significant impact. This is being addressed by numerous extension efforts.
•There is an opportunity to increase yields further in India when compared to other countries that have been using even more advanced GM traits than what is being used in India. New technology introduction has stopped in India since 2005, affecting growth of yields.
•The article’s third point is about the availability of low cost manual labour. The fact is that one of the major challenges lies in securing labour to conduct field operations. Today, labour accounts for over 58% of a farmer’s cost of cultivation per acre. In a fast-evolving global market, India’s farmers instead need the best technologies to remain competitive.
•The next claim is about varieties offering farmers increased benefits than hybrid cotton seeds. The fact is that Indian farmers who were using varieties for years switched to hybrids in the mid-1980s mainly because of the enormous benefits. Cotton Advisory Board data show that India’s cotton yields which were at 169 kg/hectare in 1980-81 increased to 278 kg/hectare in 2000-01 and then 542 kg/ hectare in 2016-17.
•The writer’s argument that High Density Planting (HDP) took place in various countries after introduction of biotech cotton is inaccurate. Planting rates are determined by several agronomic and environmental conditions and not based on biotech versus non-biotech. There is also no change in the seed rate in any of the countries in which biotech cotton has been adopted. HDP has done well in India because of the better quality of germplasm.
•Also, Turkey is not a large cotton producer. USDA statistics in 2017-18 shows that India leads with 35m bales, followed by China (28m bales), the U.S. (21m bales), Brazil (9m bales) and Australia (5m bales). All of them are GM cotton countries, contributing to more than 90% of global cotton production. GM cotton was introduced in Brazil in 2006-07.
•India also produces hybrid cotton seed because of the availability of labour to carry out the hand pollination at reasonable cost; this is not available in the U.S., Brazil, Australia and China. Hybrid cotton has delivered not only higher yields but also provided resistance to some pests and diseases.
•The article also claims that Indian farmers need to buy seeds repeatedly. The fact is that not just biotech cotton, but all hybrid seeds lose their benefits if replanted, creating reduced and erratic yields. New seeds help farmers sustain high yields year on year.
•In the case of biotech cotton in India, it is the farmers who adopted the technology wholeheartedly because they saw a solution in it to some of their biggest on-field pest challenges. The choice made by the Indian farmer to plant hybrid cotton seeds on over 90% of cotton acreage, and see increased cotton production is testament to the value created by better seeds, technologies and farming practices — when compared with the alternative of low tech seed and insecticide sprays.
•Bt cotton was released in varieties by some public institutions but it did not get much traction. There is always a debate about the use of hybrids versus varieties in any crop. The writer appears to be giving too much power to the seed industry in terms of influencing the farmer to prefer hybrids over varieties. This has not happened in the case of rice, mustard, many oilseeds, and pulses in which the farmers grow varietal crops in 90-100% of the area. The lesson is that the farmer adopts technologies which are beneficial to him and does not go by the recommendations of the industry or any other persons.
•Seeds with biotechnologies have helped conserve biodiversity: with higher production from the same area, the expansion of agricultural land into forest areas has been slowed.
•A one-sided depiction not only harms agriculture and the industry but also spreads misconceptions about biotechnology.
