📰 Centre to fix jurisdiction of river boards
Meeting called to resolve differences between A.P. and Telangana on sharing Krishna, Godavari waters
•The Centre will determine the jurisdictions of the Krishna and Godavari river management boards (KRMB and GRMB), Union Water Resources Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said on Tuesday.
•He was speaking after convening an apex council meeting involving the Centre, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the second since 2016. The meeting is primarily to resolve the conflict between the two States over executing irrigation projects and sharing water from the Krishna and Godavari rivers.
Key points
•The key points on the agenda at Thursday’s meeting which was convened via videoconference are: jurisdiction of the KRMB and GRMB, submission of Detailed Project Reports (DPR) of new projects by the two governments for appraisal and sanction by the apex council, establishing a mechanism to determine the share of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in the Krishna and Godavari waters. Shifting of the KRMB office from Hyderabad to Andhra Pradesh — Amaravati/Vijayawada or any other city — was another important outcome of the Apex Council meeting.
•“The Centre will go ahead with notifying the jurisdiction of both KRMB & GRMB. Telangana Chief Minister dissented on this, but as per the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, no consensus is needed. Both Chief Ministers agreed to submit the DPRs of all the projects taken up by their States. Their technical appraisal will be done in the shortest possible timeframe,” said Mr. Shekhawat. “We have taken the decision to enable the two boards function properly by notifying their purview as the Centre has powers to do so under the provisions of Reorganisation Act,” Mr. Shekhawat said. The headquarters of the KRMB would be located in AP, he added.
•With regards to sharing of river waters, the Telangana Chief Minister agreed to withdraw the case filed in Supreme Court, to allow the Centre to refer water sharing issues to the Krishna Godavari tribunal. Regarding the sharing of Godavari waters, both the States were asked to send in their requests to the Centre so that it could refer them to the tribunal, a statement from the Water Resources Ministry said.
•As expected, Chief Minister of Telangana K. Chandrasekhar Rao and Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy, availed the opportunity to put forth their States’ argument on issues related to river waters. While Mr. Chandrasekhar Rao reiterated the injustice being done to Telangana in the matter of river water allocation from the days of combined Andhra Pradesh State and explained the perennial impact of the neighbouring State’s plans to divert Krishna water from Srisailam reservoir by taking up a new lift scheme such as the Rayalaseema lift irrigation scheme and enhancement of the carrying capacity of the Pothireddypadu head regulator, Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy stressed on the impact of projects being executed by Telangana in Godavari Basin.
📰 Approaching the misinformation storm
Those who use social media must pull in another direction to maintain access to a range of views
•Echo chambers have been a defining character of smaller towns for a number of years. When I first went to the U.S. for postgraduate study, I chose a small town in New York state. The university was considered one of the best business schools in the world. The fact that the long since diminished Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak, and Xerox were headquartered in the town meant the university was well-funded. It attracted star faculty despite the town’s small size and reputation for long, cold winters.
•When I arrived there, however, I was horrified by the paucity of news. The local Democrat & Chronicle (derisively called the ‘Demagogue and Comical’) only covered news from the local county. There was no U.S. news to speak of, let alone global news. Having grown up on a diet of broadly focused Indian newspapers, this was anathema to me.
•My indulgent father gifted me a subscription to the international edition of The Hindu , which was printed weekly and took at least a further week to arrive by post. It was only six pages in a small pamphlet format that could be folded and stuffed into a regular envelope to save on postage costs. Nonetheless, it gave me a much-needed view of international, Indian, and even U.S. news.
Biased ‘news’
•In the 1980s, the penultimate decade of U.S. newspaper ascendancy, hundreds of news organisations existed to serve these sorts of towns, much like they still do in multilingual India today. The Internet put paid to all that. One would have thought that democratic access to a large variety of news from all corners of the globe would have opened up the echo chambers in towns and rural areas, but the hard fact is that the Internet has pulled the other way. There are far fewer news outlets now than there were some years ago.
•The travesty is that many of these organisations are not news outlets; they are social networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. These have no journalistic norms. Anyone can say anything at any time about any topic with scant respect for the truth. Everything is an opinion, but not clearly labelled as such. As a result, much of the ‘news’ available on these platforms is biased. The unscrupulous sale of personal information and meddling by inimical foreign regimes can potentially even influence the outcome of an election. Worse, the spread of false and malicious news can stoke violence at short notice. We have already seen this in India, when WhatsApp came under Indian regulatory scrutiny after a doctored video that originated as an innocent advertisement in Pakistan spread on that medium and stoked violence.
A stark warning
•The ascendance of Jio and the response from its competition means that anywhere between 500 million and 700 million people are now newly online, almost all from towns and rural areas. The U.S.’s experience with the Internet should serve as a stark warning to India. Most Americans now get their news from dubious Internet sources. The hardening of political stances on both sides of the divide is plain to see, and the acute polarisation of the average American’s viewpoint is painful to watch. For India, the danger is that like the U.S., such extreme polarisation can happen in a few short years.
•Also, the echo chamber has been greatly enhanced by the highly targeted algorithms that these companies use. The algorithms were built around making users stay online longer and click through to advertisements. They are likely to bombard users with information that serves to reinforce what the algorithm thinks the searcher needs to know. For instance, if I search for a particular type of phone on an e-commerce site even once, future searches are likely to autocomplete that search by showing that phone when I next open the app. It is the same with news. If I show a preference for right-wing leaning posts, for instance, the algorithms are likely to provide me with ever more right-wing posts from people and organisations.
•As they familiarise themselves with the Internet, newly online Indians are bound to fall prey to the echo chamber algorithms that social network firms use, as well as other algorithms that ensure that they spend inordinate amounts of time within the bubble of one social network, therefore becoming easy marks for targeted advertising — both for products and of political viewpoints. Much can be said about how we should approach the impending Internet misinformation storm. I shall attempt to make a beginning here.
Things to do
•First, we know that tech firms are already under fire from all quarters. Just as they are struggling to meet calls to contain the online spread of misinformation and hate speech online, they are being accused of suppressing both left-wing and right-wing views. There is no pleasing anyone on this issue. Nonetheless, we need to act.
•Second, unlike the U.S., which has now become unlikely to directly regulate such firms, India might need to chart its own path by keeping them under check before they proliferate. In the U.S., these issues were not sufficiently legislated for and have existed for over a decade. Existing legislation has been tested by the American court system which has held that companies like Google and Facebook clearly engage in both free speech and press activities when they display content created by third-parties. Free speech is inherent in the Constitution of many other democracies, including India’s. This means that new Indian legislation needs to preserve free speech while still applying pressure to make sure that Internet content is filtered for accuracy, and sometimes, plain decency. Let us remember that our courts do not legislate; they ensure adherence to existing legislation.
•The third issue is corporate responsibility. Facebook, for instance, has started to address this matter by publishing ‘transparency reports’ and setting up an ‘oversight board’ to act as a sort of Supreme Court for Facebook’s internal matters. However, for all these companies’ efforts at transparency, we cannot ignore the fact that these numbers reflect judgements that are made behind closed doors. What should be regulatory attempts to influence the transparency of information that members of the public see are instead being converted into secret corporate processes. We have no way of knowing the extent of biases that may be inherent inside each firm. The fact that their main algorithms target advertising and hyper-personalisation of content makes them further suspect as arbiters of balanced news. This means that those who use social media platforms must pull in another direction to maintain access to a range of sources and views. Whether this will be possible as the hinterland of India comes online is doubtful. We need strong intervention now. Else, in addition to the media, which has largely been the responsible fourth estate, we may well witness the creation of an unmanageable fifth estate in the form of Big Tech.
📰 The disintegration of the criminal justice system
A problem-solving system handled by the executive is taking shape; establishing truth through trials has ceased to exist
•A well-established textbook on the principles of criminal law in the United Kingdom painstakingly establishes various theoretical bases for justifying what should be a crime — that it should involve some harm, must carry a certain degree of seriousness, and so on. But then, revealingly, it undoes this edifice in a single section by telling us that at the end of the day, criminal law and crimes are whatever the state says it is. In India, this political nexus is arguably more pronounced: A majority government makes the laws and controls the investigative machinery, which means that not only does it define what a crime is but it can also selectively pursue only those crimes which it cares about and forget about the rest.
In disarray across India
•Pursue those crimes to what end, you ask. Ultimately, the idea of “crime” is hollow without the accompanying punishment. The loss of liberty upon imprisonment we are all taught to dread. However, it is often forgotten that this punishment can only arise upon a judgment of conviction at the end of a trial. There is, then, a synergy between the crime, its pursuit by an investigation, and the calling to account of those found guilty, which is colloquially referred to as a criminal justice system. And wherever one looks across India, it is in a shambles.
•The morbid happenings in the State of Uttar Pradesh are but one stark example of just how bad things can get. A notorious gangster was involved in a gunfight with police, fled, and was later captured from another State. In the meanwhile, the news was awash with stories alleging corrupt links of the accused to public servants. As his entourage made its way back to Uttar Pradesh, there was an “encounter” and the accused was shot dead.
•There was a crime, several crimes in fact. The State police decided to pursue it. However, there was no waiting for a trial to condemn the accused and sentence him; punishment was swiftly meted out by the police itself. So much so, that an erstwhile Supreme Court Judge felt that the State’s version of events made it appear as if it did not even care whether the encounter story was believed or not.
Extremes in Uttar Pradesh
•If the Vikas Dubey encounter death demonstrated a willingness to punish without condemning an accused through trial, Uttar Pradesh has also demonstrated a willingness to condemn without any trial. It passed a law enabling the publishing of massive hoardings with the names and personal details of persons allegedly involved in the destruction of property caused in riots following the anti-Citizenship Act protests. But, here is the thing: all of this is before a court convicted them for these acts. Rather, the power to condemn was sourced not from a judicial order, but from the power to level allegations, which is wholly executive in scope. In this fashion, the police became judge, jury, and executioner.
•Of course, these instances are where the State decided to pursue alleged crime. There are many cases where it turns a blind eye to incidents of violence, either indefinitely or for long enough. A young girl was brutally assaulted and left to die when she was found by her family on September 14 in the village of Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. The same family did what anyone would do — report the incident to the police while they rushed their daughter to a hospital. Only, here, despite the injuries being evident, the police did not register a case for hours, and even then did not include the serious offence of rape. Of course, where the police was not willing to register this single case of rape, it has swiftly registered at least 19 cases regarding an alleged conspiracy to use the incident for political purposes to show the State in a bad light.
Govt.-judiciary disconnect
•There are clear, discernible tendencies which these examples from the State of Uttar Pradesh only serve to demonstrate. These are, first, the growing disconnect between the government and judiciary in matters of criminal justice; second, the bolstering of executive power as a result of this growing disconnect, and third, the unsurprising imitation of executive-mindedness by the judiciary. The result of this, I argue, is a transformation from a criminal justice system, to a problem-solving system.
•The Crime in India data for 2019 (https://bit.ly/34pB7VK) confirm a trend that has been on display for decades now: our police are seemingly super-efficient, but our courts are super-slow. Let us continue with Uttar Pradesh as an example. Its police have a pendency rate for cases at just above 15%, but the courts have pendency rates just above 90% (for IPC crimes). And, worryingly, these are not the worst figures. What this means is that as police forces keep adding to the docket every year, the courts are becoming ever slower in their ability to conduct trials and pass judgments.
•This exacerbates the natural time-gap between the incident and any potential punishment, and reduces the importance of courts in the criminal justice system. Among other things, this disconnect also reduces whatever value condemnation through trial might have had, as people move on and so does life in almost all cases. Just how severely this tendency is magnified in an era defined by the 24-hour news cycle is anyone’s guess.
•How does a system fill this gap between incident and eventual judgment? By slowly legitimising the idea of punishments without condemnation or any kind of being called into account. All that matters, is solving the problem, and moving on.
•This system where judges lose sway is where the executive gains more power. It is the arrest, and not a conviction, which becomes the seminal moment in the criminal process. Victims do not even think as far as proving anything in court, at times, and all that matters is arrest and an indefinite incarceration, or even an encounter if the allegation is heinous enough. At the same time, the executive tries to legally bolster powers of pre-trial arrest and custody, while also arrogating to itself more powers to punish without condemnation — asset forfeiture being a key power.
Presumption of innocence
•The transformation stands complete, when judges try to regain some of their lost footing by trying to imitate the now popular branch. Courts become happy to look at facts, in detail, at the stage of bail itself. What is more, courts also become willing to help arrive at settlements through this stage by using incarceration as a bargaining tool to force errant accused persons to make reparations. In doing so, courts actively replace facts established through cross-examination of a witness with her untested allegations that the police decided to pursue, because even courts no longer have the time for the process either. The presumption of innocence be damned, so long as the problem is solved and a victim can go home satisfied.
•Amidst this pandemic and the spiralling chaos that it has brought, there has been a comforting background score that has steadily played on. This is the systematic disintegration of any criminal justice system worth its name across India, and its gradual replacement with a problem-solving system where initial accusations and their handling by the executive branch becomes most critical and values such as the presumption of innocence and establishing truth through trials have long ceased to exist. That certain States are at the vanguard of this progression could, perhaps, cynically be seen as yet another symptom of their development which makes many others envious.
📰 3 black hole researchers get Nobel Prize for Physics
Scientists awarded for discoveries on ‘one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe’
•Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the U.S. won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for their research into what the Nobel committee called “one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole”.
•Mr. Penrose, 89, was honoured for showing “that the general theory of relativity leads to the formation of black holes”, while Mr. Genzel, 68, and Ms. Ghez, 55, were jointly awarded for discovering “that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the centre of our galaxy”, the jury said. Ms. Ghez is just the fourth woman to receive the physics prize since 1901 when the first Nobel prizes were handed out.
•“I feel delighted to be recognised in that way because I think having visible role models can make a huge impact on young women thinking about becoming scientists,” Ms. Ghez said.
•The first woman to win the prize was Marie Curie in 1903, who was also the first person to receive two Nobel prizes when she won the 1911 chemistry prize.
•The term “black hole” refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed as to create a gravity field from which even light cannot escape. For years, physicists questioned whether black holes could really exist but Mr. Penrose, a professor at the University of Oxford, used mathematical modelling to prove back in 1965 that black holes can form.
•His calculations proved that black holes — super dense objects formed when a heavy star collapses under the weight of its own gravity — are a direct consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry and economics, said Mr. Penrose’s 1965 article “is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein”.
•Mr. Penrose also worked closely with famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, and some experts lamented that he was no longer around to share the credit. Mr. Genzel and Ms. Ghez have led research since the early 1990s focusing on a region called Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way.
•Using the world’s largest telescopes, they discovered an extremely heavy, invisible object — around 4 million times greater than the mass of the Sun — that pulls on surrounding stars, giving the galaxy its characteristic swirl.
