📰 Over 1,600 kg of gold seized till September
Rising prices, flight curbs spur smuggling from Myanmar, say officials
•The over 30% increase in the price of gold in India has led to a spurt in smuggling in the past one year and enforcement agencies seizing more than 1,600 kg of gold from across the country.
•“The share of middlemen and carriers goes up with the increase in gold price. Most of the smuggled gold of foreign origin is ultimately traced to Dubai or Thailand. Gold is currently worth about ₹50 lakh per kg in India,” said a customs official.
•On Friday, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized about 33 kg of gold worth ₹17.51 kg from a truck in West Bengal’s Siliguri district and arrested four persons. The consignment was smuggled in from Myanmar via Manipur and was destined to Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan.
2,112 cases
•Till August this year, as many as 2,112 cases of gold seizures were reported by various agencies. About 484 kg of gold was seized in February, while in March the figure was 205.81 kg and 280.66 kg in April. However, due to the lockdown measures, no seizures were made in May and only 37.54 kg of gold was impounded in June.
•“Gold is smuggled through both the air and land routes. International flights were banned as part of the lockdown guidelines. Therefore, the land routes have become more active. A spurt in the gold smuggling through the Indo-Myanmar, Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh borders has been noticed,” the official said.
Delhi haul
•In August, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) arrested eight persons with 504 gold bars weighing 83.62 kg worth ₹43 crore at the New Delhi railway station. They were on board the Dibrugarh-New Delhi Rajdhani Express.
•The gold bars were smuggled in from Myanmar via Manipur, through a Guwahati-based syndicate and were destined for major cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai for disposal.
•Two more major seizures of 10.30 kg and 26.56 kg were made on the Imphal-Moreh Road, close to the Myanmar border, and at the New Jalpaiguri railway station. In both the cases, the agency suspects that the gold was smuggled in from Myanmar.
•The same month, a total of 101 cases with the seizure of about 185 kg of gold was reported by the agencies.
•Five more cases were reported by the DRI in September, including two from Guwahati and one from Siliguri. “In July, 15kg of gold was seized by the agency in Kolkata,” the official said, adding that the number of seizures had increased after the lockdown restrictions were lifted.
•In July, the enforcement agencies registered 104 cases and seized 127.70 kg of gold. The same month, on July 5, 30 kg of gold was seized by the Customs Department from a diplomatic bag at the Thiruvananthapuram airport. The bag was to be delivered at the UAE Consulate. Multiple agencies are now probing the case, which has resulted in several arrests.
📰 Intention to abet suicide cannot be assumed, it has to be evident: Supreme Court
Benchsays every crime should be backed by a ‘state of mind’ or mens rea or intention
•The intention to abet suicide cannot be assumed and it needs to be backed by solid, visible proof, the Supreme Court held in a judgment.
•A three-judge Bench of Justices N.V. Ramana, Surya Kant and Hrishikesh Roy said every crime should be backed by a “state of mind” or mens rea or intention.
•The police have to establish that an accused wanted to abet the suicide. ‘Abetment’ is defined in Section 107 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Its ingredients consist of instigating a person or to intentionally aid a person to do or not do something. Similarly, the crime of ‘abetment of suicide’ under Section 306 of the IPC involves instigating or actively aiding a person to take his own life. Abetting a person to commit suicide should be intentional, deliberate and calculated, it said.
•The police cannot assume the intention (mens rea) of the abettor of a suicide. It has to be evident, it held.
•“In order to prove mens rea, there has to be something on record to establish or show that the appellant herein had a guilty mind and in furtherance of that state of mind, abetted the suicide of the deceased. The ingredient of mens rea cannot be assumed to be ostensibly present but has to be visible and conspicuous”, Justice Roy, who authored the judgment, said.
•The judgment came on an appeal filed by Gurcharan Singh, who was convicted of abetting the suicide of his wife 22 years ago in Punjab.
Found guilty
•The trial court found him guilty, saying the woman was pushed into taking her own life when her hopes of a happy relationship was dashed by his “wilful neglect”. There was, however, no direct evidence of any cruelty on his part towards her. The trial court had even acquitted the man of dowry harassment charges.
•The High Court agreed with the trial court, saying the death was a cause of the “circumstances and the atmosphere” at home.
•In his appeal before the Supreme Court, Singh argued about the complete lack of evidence to show that he had instigated or intentionally aided his wife to take her own life. There was no clarity about “which particular hope or expectation” of hers was frustrated by him. There was no proof that he wilfully neglected her, he said.
•Setting aside his conviction, the apex court said it cannot make conjectures about why a young woman with two small children chose to take her own life.
📰 16% of PDS rice stocks in M.P. ‘unfit for human consumption’
Statewide inspection undertaken following checks by Centre
•As much as 16.6% rice stocks meant for the public distribution system across Madhya Pradesh have been found to be beyond the prevention of food adulteration (PFA) standards or unfit for human consumption, during an inspection.
•Of the 2.747 lakh metric tonnes (LMT) inspected across 52 districts, 1.806 LMT had been found to be issuable, while 0.494 LMT has been found to be replaceable by millers, Madhya Pradesh State Civil Supplies Corporation Limited Managing Director Abhijeet Agrawal told The Hindu. Further, 0.457 LMT has been found to be beyond the PFA limit.
•“We are issuing notices to more than 15 officials. Since there are quite many people responsible, we can’t remove everyone. So we will initiate departmental inquiry against them,” Mr. Agrawal added.
•Meanwhile, 18% of the stocks inspected were replaceable, and would be returned to millers. The Department of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection has given millers three weeks to supply issuable stocks.
•When asked about action taken against millers responsible, Mr. Agrawal said first the stocks needed to be replaced. “We still have around 7 LMT of paddy, which is to be milled,” he explained.
•The State-wide inspection was undertaken following inspection by the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution in Mandla and Balaghat districts which found all samples to be unfit for human consumption, and instead suitable for livestock, cattle and poultry. The Centre had directed the State government to withhold stocks across districts until recategorisation after inspection.
Revamp of policy
•Earlier, the State government said it planned to revamp its milling policy in view of the inspection’s findings with greater emphasis on quality control and a graded approach to incentives and mobile phone-based solutions. It said a separate quality control cadre was essential.
📰 Human-leopard conflict has increased threefold in Karnataka, finds study
Policy guidelines on conflict mitigation has made little impact
•A study conducted across Karnataka indicates that the policy guidelines brought out by Government of India to mitigate human-leopard conflict and discourage translocation of the animal has had little impact on the ground.
•The number of leopards captured per month increased more than threefold (from 1.5 to 4.6) after the human-leopard policy guidelines were brought out in 2011. Similarly, there was a threefold increase in the number of leopards translocated per month (from 1 to 3.5).
•Sanjay Gubbi of the Nature Conservation Foundation, who led the study in the State, said the guidelines for human-leopard conflict management were brought out in April 2011 to reduce conflict with leopards, discourage their translocation, and suggest improved ways of handling emergency conflict situations.
•Mr. Gubbi, the lead author of the paper, said that in Karnataka, 357 leopards were in conflict situations and were captured between 2009 and 2016, and the final outcome was available in the case of 314 leopards. Of these, 268 were translocated in contravention of the spirit of the policy, 34 were captured and kept in captivity, while 12 died during the capture.
•These findings have been published in a paper titled ‘Policy to on-ground action: Evaluating a conflict policy guideline for leopards in India’ in the Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy. The co-authors of the paper are Aparna Kolekar and Vijaya Kumara.
•Taking Karnataka as a case study, the researchers analysed pre- and post-guidelines leopard captures, reasons for the captures, and the outcome for the captured leopards.
The numbers
•The study found that out of 357 leopards captured across 23 of the 30 districts in the State during 2009-16, a majority (79%) occurred in Mysuru, Udupi, Hassan, Tumakuru, Ramanagaram, Ballari, Koppal, and Mandya districts.
•Of the 268 leopards translocated, many were moved to protected areas (59.7%) and some to reserved/State/minor forests (29.8%). The highest number of translocations occurred into Bandipur Tiger Reserve (22.5%), followed by Nagarahole Tiger Reserve (20.6%) and Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary (15%).
•The study indicated that of the 80 leopards that were translocated to reserved/State/minor forests, most releases were to Kemphole Reserved Forest (16.2%), followed by Devarayanadurga State Forest (7.5%) and Bukkapatna State Forest (5%).
•Though eight reasons were attributed to capture and translocation of leopards, the main justification was livestock depredation (38.1%), said Mr. Gubbi. The other reasons included leopards rescued from snares and wells (15.7%), anxiety caused owing to leopard sightings in human habitations (13.7%), and leopards entering human dwellings (10.9%). Human injuries (4.5%) and human deaths (2%) formed a small part of the reason for leopard captures and translocation.
📰 Pathways to diversity: On UN Biodiversity Summit
As a biodiversity convention key member, India’s pandemic recovery must be greened
•The UN Summit on Biodiversity convened on September 30 in the midst of a global crisis caused by the novel coronavirus that is thought to have spilled over to humans from an animal reservoir. In New York, member-nations of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) took note of the link between biodiversity loss and the spread of animal pathogens, calling for an end to destructive industrial and commercial practices. There is consensus that conservation targets set a decade ago in Aichi, Japan, to be achieved by 2020, have spectacularly failed. Evidence is presented by the latest UN Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 report: none of the 20 targets has been fully met. Many countries have chosen to ignore the connection between biodiversity and well-being, and depleted ecological capital in pursuit of financial prosperity. Among the Aichi targets that fell by the wayside are those on reform or phasing out of subsidies that erode biodiversity, steps for resource use within safe ecological limits, preventing industrial fisheries from destroying threatened species and vulnerable ecosystems, and an end to pollution, including growing plastic waste. A bright spot is the partial progress made on protecting surface and subsurface water, inland, coastal and marine areas. But the losses appear even more stark from WWF’s Living Planet Index, which points to precipitous declines in vertebrate populations, a key indicator, by 68% over 1970 levels. Faced with fast-eroding ecosystem health, the 196 CBD member-countries must chart a greener course, aligning it with the Paris Agreement, which has a significant impact on the health of flora and fauna.
•At Wednesday’s summit, India’s message was one of pride in an ancient conservation tradition, as one of the few megadiverse countries, and one that recognised the value of nature as much as the destructive impact of unregulated resources exploitation. National laws of the 1970s and 1980s have indeed shielded islands of biodiversity, particularly in about 5% of the country’s land designated as protected areas, but they are today seen as irritants to speedy extraction of natural resources. In this unseemly hurry, due process is sought to be dispensed with, as envisaged by the new EIA norms proposed by the NDA government. There is little concern for indigenous communities that have fostered biodiversity, and no effort to make them strong partners in improving the health of forests and buffer zones. Now that CBD members are set to draw up fresh conservation targets to be finalised next year, India too has the opportunity to plan a trajectory of green growth after COVID-19, around clean energy, ecological agriculture, a freeze on expansion of mining and dam-building, resource recovery from waste, and regeneration of arid lands. It should join the coalition of the enlightened.
