📰 ‘India won’t import power equipment from China’
The strategic sector is vulnerable to cyberattacks, says R.K. Singh
•Union Power Minister R.K. Singh on Friday said India will not import power equipment from China, saying the sector, being strategic and essential, was vulnerable to cyberattacks.
•At a virtual conference with the States, the Minister said equipment imports from China and Pakistan would not be permitted.
•The State power distribution companies should not place orders with Chinese firms for equipment.
•Highlighting the need for self-reliance in the sector, Mr. Singh said the country’s power equipment import bill was about Rs. 71,000 crore during 2018-19, including purchases worth over Rs. 20,000 crore from China, even when the country had manufacturing facilities. As the sector was vulnerable to cyberattacks, Mr. Singh said, the imported equipment would be checked for any malware like Trojan.
Embassy terms PM’s comments on expansionism ‘exaggerated and fabricated’
•China on Friday warned India against making “a strategic miscalculation with regard to China”, in a sharp reaction to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Ladakh to meet Indian troops.
•China also described Mr. Modi’s comments on “expansionism” as being “exaggerated and fabricated”, underlying the tense state of relations. “China has demarcated boundary with 12 of its 14 neighbouring countries through peaceful negotiations, turning land borders into bonds of friendly cooperation. It’s groundless to view China as ‘expansionist’, exaggerate & fabricate its disputes with neighbours,” Ji Rong, the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, said on Twitter.
Against ‘complication’
•In Beijing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted to Mr. Modi’s visit by saying India should not “complicate” the situation along the border. “China and India are in communication with each other through military and diplomatic channels,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily press briefing, when asked about the visit. “Neither side should make any move that may complicate the border situation.”
•Mr. Zhao warned India to “avoid a strategic miscalculation with regard to China”.
•“I would like to stress that China hopes that India will work with us, follow faithfully the important consensus reached between the two leaders, abide by the agreements reached between the two governments, strengthen communication and coordination on properly managing the current situation through diplomatic and military channels, and jointly uphold peace and stability in the border areas,” he said.
•“At the same time, we need to see that China and India, both major developing countries, bear the historic mission of accelerating national development and rejuvenation,” the official said. “China and India should follow the important consensus reached by the leaders of the two countries and uphold overall bilateral relations,” he said.
•Mr. Lijian also warned against “artificial barriers” that would hurt economic relations, in reference to India’s recent moves on the trade and investment front, from banning 59 Chinese apps to announcing a halt to highway projects.
•On Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari’s remarks on July 1 to keep Chinese firms away from highway projects, Mr. Zhao said: “In recent days some politicians in India have kept issuing irresponsible remarks that are detrimental to China-India relations. It calls for concerted efforts on both sides to maintain China-India relations. Artificially setting up barriers for such cooperation not only violates WTO rules, but also hurts India's interests.”
•He said China would “take all necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights of Chinese businesses”.
📰 With economic measures, India seeks to turn tables on China
Options are tilted in Beijing’s favour as it is far less dependent on India’s market than the latter is on Chinese imports
•India is considering a range of economic measures aimed at Chinese firms amid the border tensions. The move to ban 59 Chinese apps may be just the start, with other measures likely to follow if tensions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) continue, without disengagement.
•On Friday, Power Minister R.K. Singh said India would not import power equipment from China — worth $2 to $3 billion annually — while Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said on July 1 Chinese companies would not be allowed to take part in road projects. Reports have said the government is considering trade and procurement curbs targeting China. The government is also increasing scrutiny of Chinese investments in many sectors, and weighing a decision to keep out Chinese companies from 5G trials.
•The moves could potentially cost Chinese companies billions of dollars. The message from Delhi is it cannot continue trade and investment relations as normal, if China does not agree to return to the status quo of April before its incursions along the LAC began.
•The Chinese government has hit out at the measures, while state media have widely criticised calls in India to boycott Chinese goods. China is itself no stranger to such moves, having frequently deployed economic countermeasures, from restricting market access to boycotting goods, in the midst of its own disputes, with countries ranging from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines.
•China’s state media spearheaded a boycott of South Korean goods in 2016 and 2017, when Seoul deployed the U.S. Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missile system. China then placed curbs on outbound tourism to South Korea, and closed almost 90 Korean-owned Lotte Mart stores in the mainland. In 2010, China began restricting exports of rare earths elements to Japan — a key ingredient for many electronics industries — following a collision near disputed East China Sea islands. Two years later, mass protests were organised by China over the islands issue, which led to boycotts of Japanese brands. With the Philippines, a dispute over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea in 2012 led to China curbing imports on bananas.
China’s leverage
•In all those relationships, China had particular leverage that it used to inflict immediate economic pain. In the India-China economic relationship, where trade is lopsided in China’s favour, both sides have different levers that they could turn to, but options are tilted in China’s favour because China is far less dependent on India’s market than India is on Chinese imports.
•India’s biggest lever is its market. For TikTok, one of the 59 apps banned, India is the biggest overseas market with more than 100 million users. While the parent company ByteDance reported modest earnings of $5.8 million in 2018-19, its first full year in India, a source close to the company told the Chinese finance magazine Caixin that ByteDance “is anticipating a loss of more than $6 billion, most likely more than the combined losses for all the other Chinese companies behind the other 58 apps banned in India.”
•If India does have leverage that could hurt potential revenues of Chinese companies, the problem for New Delhi is China could inflict immediate economic pain should it choose to. In 2019-20, India’s imports from China accounted for $65 billion out of two-way trade of $82 billion. India relies on China for crucial imports for many of its industries, from auto components to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Between 70% to 90% of APIs come from China.
•Industry representatives have expressed concern over delays in customs clearances. If China curtailed exports to India, consequences would be more serious.
•India faces difficult choices and needs to be selective in its measures, said former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran. “You have to choose areas where you don’t get hurt more than they do,” he told The Hindu . “TikTok is a good candidate as India is their largest market. Telecom is another. This is a huge market for Huawei.”
•Whether India’s measures will influence China’s behaviour on the border will ultimately depend on Beijing’s calculus, and whether its perceived gains from the current border stand-offs outweigh the potential costs of losing a key market.
📰 Reset rural job policies, recognise women’s work
As India emerges from the lockdown, labour market policy has to reverse the pandemic’s gender-differentiated impact
•The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on women’s work, but as official statistics do not capture women’s work adequately and accurately, little attention has been paid to the consequences of the pandemic for women workers and to the design of specific policies and programmes to assist them.
•A survey by the Azim Premji University, of 5,000 workers across 12 States — of whom 52% were women workers — found that women workers were worse off than men during the lockdown. Among rural casual workers, for example, 71% of women lost their jobs after the lockdown; the figure was 59% for men. Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) also suggest that job losses in April 2020, as compared to April 2019, were larger for rural women than men.
The pre-COVID-19 situation
•To comprehend the effects of COVID-19 on women workers, we need to begin with the situation before the pandemic. I draw here on the experience of the last 10 years with village studies conducted in collaboration with the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS).
•According to national labour force surveys, a quarter of adult rural women were in the labour force (or counted as “workers” in official data) in 2017-18. If we examine data from time-use surveys, that is, surveys that collect information on all activities undertaken during a fixed time period (usually 24 hours), the picture changes radically. There are no official time-use survey data: the National Statistical Office did conduct a time-use survey in 2019 but the results are not available (a previous pilot survey was conducted 20 years ago). I use detailed, village-level time-use surveys from Karnataka, with data for 24 hours a day for seven days consecutively over two agricultural seasons in 2017-18, to illustrate the ground-level situation. Taking time spent in economic activity (or what falls within the production boundary in the System of National Accounts or SNA) and using the standard definition of a worker as one who spent “major time” during the reference week in economic activity, time-use data show that, although there were seasonal variations in work participation, almost all women came within the definition of “worker” in the harvest season.
Crisis of regular employment
•These data suggest — and this finding is echoed in observations by women activists — that rural women face a crisis of regular employment. In other words, when women are not reported as workers, it is because of the lack of employment opportunities rather than it being on account of any “withdrawal” from the labour force. This crisis of regular employment will have intensified during the pandemic and the lockdown.
•A second feature of rural women’s work, brought to light by gender-disaggregated data at the household level in villages across India surveyed by FAS, is that women from all sections of the peasantry, with some regional exceptions, participate in paid work outside the home. In thinking of the potential workforce, thus, we need to include women from almost all sections of rural households and not just women from rural labour or manual worker households.
•A third feature of our village-level findings is that younger and more educated women are often not seeking work because they aspire to skilled non-agricultural work, whereas older women are more willing to engage in manual labour.
•A fourth feature of rural India is that women’s wages are rarely equal to men’s wages, with a few exceptions. The gap between female and male wages is highest for non-agricultural tasks — the new and growing source of employment.
•Finally, an important feature of rural India pertains to the woman’s work day. Counting all forms of work — economic activity and care work or work in cooking, cleaning, child care, elderly care — a woman’s work day is exceedingly long and full of drudgery. In the FAS time-use survey, the total hours worked by women (in economic activity and care) ranged from 61 hours to 88 hours in the lean season, with a maximum of 91 hours (or 13 hours a day) in the peak season. No woman puts in less than a 60-hour work-week.
Lockdown and jobs
•How did the lockdown affect employment for rural women? A rapid rural survey conducted by FAS showed that in large parts of the country where rain-fed agriculture is prevalent, there was no agricultural activity during the lean months of March to May. In areas of irrigated agriculture, there were harvest operations (such as for rabi wheat in northern India) but these were largely mechanised. In other harvest operations, such as for vegetables, there was a growing tendency to use more family labour and less hired labour on account of fears of infection. Put together, while agricultural activity continued, employment available to women during the lockdown was limited.
•Employment and income in activities allied to agriculture, such as animal rearing, fisheries and floriculture were also adversely affected by the lockdown. Our village studies show that when households own animals, be it milch cattle or chickens or goats, women are inevitably part of the labour process. During the lockdown, the demand for milk fell by at least 25% (as hotels and restaurants closed), and this was reflected in either lower quantities sold or in lower prices or both. For women across the country, incomes from the sale of milk to dairy cooperatives shrank. Among fishers, men could not go to sea, and women could not process or sell fish and fish products.
•Non-agricultural jobs came to a sudden halt as construction sites, brick kilns, petty stores and eateries, local factories and other enterprises shut down completely. In recent years, women have accounted for more than one-half of workers in public works, but no employment was available through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) till late in April. The first month of lockdown thus saw a total collapse of non-agricultural employment for women. In May, there was a big increase in demand for NREGS employment.
•One of the new sources of women’s employment in the last few decades has been government schemes, especially in the health and education sectors, where, for example, women work as Anganwadi workers or mid-day meal cooks. During the pandemic, Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHAs, 90% of whom are women, have become frontline health workers , although they are not recognised as “workers” or paid a regular wage.
Effect on health and nutrition
•While the lockdown reduced employment in agriculture and allied activities and brought almost all non-agricultural employment to a standstill, the burden of care work mounted. With all members of the family at home, and children out of school, the tasks of cooking, cleaning, child care and elderly care became more onerous. There is no doubt that managing household tasks and provisioning in a situation of reduced incomes and tightening budgets will have long-term effects on women’s physical and mental health. The already high levels of malnutrition among rural women is likely to be exacerbated as households cope with reduced food intake.
A new road map
•As we emerge from the lockdown, it is very important to begin, first, by redrawing our picture of the rural labour market by including the contribution of women. While the immediate or short-run provision of employment of women can be through an imaginative expansion of the NREGS, a medium and longer term plan needs to generate women-specific employment in skilled occupations and in businesses and new enterprises. In the proposed expansion of health infrastructure in the country, women, who already play a significant role in health care at the grass-root level, must be recognised as workers and paid a fair wage. In the expansion of rural infrastructure announced by the Finance Minister, specific attention must be paid to safe and easy transport for women from their homes to workplaces.
•As the lockdown is lifted, economic activity is growing but the young and old still remain at home. Further, as the COVID-19 infection spreads, given a higher likelihood of cases among men than women, the burden on women as earners and carers is likely to rise. We need immediate measures to reduce the drudgery of care work. To illustrate, healthy meals for schoolchildren as well as the elderly and the sick can reduce the tasks of home cooking.
•It is time for women to be seen as equal partners in the task of transforming the rural economy.
📰 Police violence and how some lives do not matter
As a country, Indians seek accountability selectively because their commitment to the rule of law is not principled
•As you begin to read this article, we would like you to think of the reactions to the Hyderabad police killing Chennakesavulu, Mohammed Areef, Naveen and Shiva, in the ‘Disha’ case. That incident, from December 2019, must surely bring back memories of collective celebration at ‘justice’ having been executed swiftly. The showering of petals, the raucous calls for adopting such measures of instant justice, and our pride in such police officers must still be vivid in our memory.
•Now contrast that to the reactions in response to the custodial killings, of Jayaraj and his son Benicks in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu. Celebrities, media platforms, politicians, Twitter and Facebook users, the general public, all aghast at the brutal violence inflicted on these two men. Everyone collectively reminding us that we need to keep our police in check, and that we must not tolerate such abuse of police powers while lamenting the lack of ‘rule of law’ in our society.
•The contrast in the response to these two incidents could not be starker. What lies at the heart of this contrast? Was it because the four men in Hyderabad were accused of raping, murdering and burning the body of the victim? It revolted us so much that we were willing to accept this version of instant (but illegal) justice and trust the police when they told us that it was indeed these four men who were responsible. Despite no court having looked into it, we were convinced that they ‘deserved’ to be killed in that manner for what we believed they had done, conveniently blurring the lines between our moral judgment and the limits we must place on police power.
A different reaction
•But with Jayaraj and Benicks, we must ask what really shocks us? Is it just that they were brutally assaulted and violated in a manner that caused their death? Or is our shock inextricably connected to what they were accused of — that they were tortured in this manner for keeping their shop open for a few minutes after lockdown timings? What we will or will not accept from the police in terms of their abuse of powers seems to be intrinsically linked to our moral evaluation of what they tell us people in their custody are accused of. When they present to us sexual offenders, terrorists and anti-nationals, we find ourselves reposing great faith in the narratives they feed us, and are even eager for it to be true. It literally is a few steps away from mob justice. It is just that we let the police and the legal system do our dirty work. But thankfully for the family of Jayaraj and Benicks, we have judged differently and we are on their side this time. In different circumstances, our reactions would look, sound and feel very different.
The data
•We must be careful not to mistake our reactions in this case as some commitment to the rule of law and due process. The track record of our public and legal conversation on torture and fixing accountability for it present a very different picture. In the last three years, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), India has received nearly 5,300 complaints of custodial deaths (police and prison) and we can be sure that it is only a fraction of the actual number of such deaths. If reporting such deaths is difficult, the legal process to investigate, prosecute and fix accountability has even more hurdles. This is evident from the fact that while government data recorded 1,727 deaths in police custody between 2000 and 2018, only 26 police officials were convicted.
•In a country where custodial torture and killing is an open secret, it is baffling that we still do not have a domestic law that enables torture prosecution by accounting for the particularities of custodial torture. We continue to struggle with the inadequacies of our regular criminal law in this regard.
An issue glossed over
•Despite a suggestion by the Law Commission of India that if a person dies in police custody the burden should be on the police to show that they are not responsible for it, the law still requires the prosecution to prove that the police caused the death. India’s political commitment to address torture is symbolised by its failure to ratify the UN Convention Against Torture, and thereby putting itself in the list of only 19 countries to have not adopted it. The Supreme Court of India has laid down many measures to prevent torture and fix accountability, but these judgments are rarely followed. Even legislative mandates suffer the same fate. Besides the usual police investigation into a custodial death, the law mandates an independent magisterial inquiry. It is perhaps a reflection of our institutional apathy that such inquiries have happened in only about 20% of custodial deaths. And to top it all, prosecution of police officials for custodial torture requires the sanction of the government.
•The question about why torture is rampant has no straightforward answers. One of course is that the system incentivises torture by seeking convictions without modernising the police force. However, police violence is not limited to investigations and goes well beyond that. The use of torture is also often justified by police personnel as being required to teach ‘hardened criminals’ on behalf of society. But here in killing Jayaraj and Benicks, the police seem to have inflicted violence out of sheer expectation of impunity. It reflects a deeply worrying aspect of torture where police unleash violence because they know that the chances of being held accountable are slim.
•The worst thing we can do now is to think of the incidents at the Sattankulam police station in Tamil Nadu as being perpetrated by a few errant police personnel. There is an institutional and public culture that breeds, protects and even celebrates this kind of violence. At the heart of that culture is our proclivity to embrace mob justice in situations where we feel it is ‘deserved’. And in instances where we are forced to confront murders such as those of Benicks and Jayaraj, we must acknowledge that our celebration and tolerance of police brutality is just as much to blame as anything else. The blood of Benicks and Jayaraj are on all our hands.
