📰 It is a long journey to distribute fortified rice at government schools, say experts
They say there is need to bring millers and snack manufacturers on board and improve quality control
•Experts warn that a long journey lies ahead to implement distribution of fortified rice at government schools and anganwadi centres in 15 States as there is need to bring millers and snack manufacturers on board and improve quality control. However, some are also wary of its nutritional outcomes and caution that fortification of staples such as cereals may hurt local economies.
•The government announced earlier this week its plans to expand supply of rice fortified with iron, vitamin B-12 and folic acid on pilot basis from 15 districts to 15 States with the aim to curb anaemia.
•“Fortified rice can provide 30-50% of the recommended dietary allowance of iron that adults need to consume daily, based on average Indian consumption,” says Mini Varghese, Country Director - India, Nutrition International, which is one of the organisations partnering with the government to implement a pilot project distributing fortified rice through fair price shops in 15 districts, and expand it to all anganwadis and government schools in 115 districts next year.
Baseline studies
•“Trials in a controlled setting, giving 100% RDA of iron through tablets, have shown results within ten months. However, in a programmatic setting, with fortified rice, a minimum of 24 months of constant exposure is needed before we can see the impact,” she said, adding that baseline studies are now being conducted in the 15 pilot districts to measure current levels of anaemia in the population.
•The immediate next step requires convincing food manufacturers to use the extrusion machines now used to make snacks such as kurkure or dried pasta shapes to also make fortified rice kernels, enriched with iron and other nutrients. “So far, there are about 15 manufacturers making the kernels, producing a total of 15,000 tonnes per year. The government is talking to other manufacturers and also looking at an expansion in existing capacity, so that the output can be increased to 1.3 lakh tonnes for the 112 districts,” said Suresh Lakshminarayanan, National Program Manager, Food Fortification- India, Nutrition International, who participated in a meeting with the Food Ministry on the subject earlier this week.
Role of millers
•The other immediate step is bringing the country’s 28,000 rice millers on board, to install blending machines which can mix the fortified kernels into the normal rice in a 1:100 ratio.
•“Millers will have to make the immediate investment, but the government may offer loans or other incentives to create an enabling environment. They are also being promised good return on investment,” said another government partner on condition of anonymity.
•Since the fortified kernels look and taste the same as normal rice grains, there is also an urgent need for quality control to ensure that consumers are not being cheated, and FSSAI is in talks with NABL labs to build capacity for such testing, he added. However, the most important step in the long-term will be to create awareness about the benefits of fortified foods to ensure uptake.
•“In order to take it to scale there is a need to create demand for fortified rice by ensuring that it is integrated in our food system and implemented in the open market. Its distribution should not just be limited to social feeding programmes such as Mid Day Meals for government schools and anganwadi beneficiaries but expanded beyond by building on the successes of salt iodisation programme,” says Dr. Sheila C Vir, Founder Director, Public Health Nutrition and Development Center. Dr. Vir was closely associated with the salt iodisation programme in the country.
Adverse consequences
•Some public health experts also warn of adverse consequences of “the corporatisation of the food system” by insisting on processes that demand a centralisation of food supplies. “Local economies should be protected by decentralising procurement and distribution. Since the impact on anaemia through fortification remains poorly evidenced, such processes may do more harm than good. Micronutrient supplementation can be achieved by many other means, including diversification of diets and providing better quality meals, as well as through supplements that don’t further centralise food systems,” says Vandana Prasad, public health professional associated with the People’s Health Movement, India and the Right to Food Campaign.
•Though on the opposite of the debate on the need for fortified foods, both Dr. Vir and Dr. Prasad are critical of the government’s decision to expand the rice fortification programme without conducting an implementation analysis. “Why has the government made a big ticket promise without doing a cost-benefit analysis of implementing such a programme,” asks Dr. Prasad.
The case would come up again in December.
•The Supreme Court on Friday stopped short of putting the builders of the demolished and illegal high-rise Maradu apartment complexes in Kochi on a two-week deadline to provide a “concrete plan” to compensate residents or, in the alternative, face the sale of their attached properties to cover the payments due.
•A Bench led by Justice Rohinton F. Nariman put that course of action on hold after senior advocate R. Basant and advocate Karthik Ashok interjected on behalf of some of the builders to point out that the court should first adjudicate on certain issues.
•Mr. Basant referred to a September 27, 2019 court ruling that ordered the Kerala government to pay ₹25 lakh each to residents whose flats were demolished. These amounts were then to be reimbursed to the government by those responsible for the flats coming up illegally in violation of the coastal zone regulations.
•An October 28 report filed by the court-appointed committee led by Justice K. Balakrishnan Nair said the builders were responsible for the constructions and had to pay the compensation. Mr. Basant and other lawyers appearing for the builders opposed this recommendation, saying the entire liability for the illegal constructions cannot fall upon them.
•“You accept the committee report... Will give you a last opportunity to pay”, Justice Nariman said.
•Mr. Basant said, “We have very serious objections to the committee”.
•The court then asked the builders’ lawyers to file their written submissions for a detailed hearing. It said it would take up all aspects of the case. The case would come up again in December.
•The court also appointed advocate Gaurav Agarwal as amicus curiae in the case.
•Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for the committee, said his client was facing “personal attacks”.
Govt affidavit
•Meanwhile, an October 16 affidavit filed by Kerala Chief Secretary Vishwas Mehta said that 27,735 building violations of coastal regulations have been detected by coastal district committees in 10 districts. But the affidavit said the actual field surveys of violations had been delayed due to COVID-19, and would be done in eight weeks.
•Mr. Mehta was responding to a contempt petition filed against the government for not complying with a September 23, 2019 order to provide a “concrete plan” to prevent illegal constructions in violation of the coastal zone regulations, which protect the fragile and eco-sensitive areas of the State.
September last year order
•It has been a year since the court, on September 23, 2019, ordered the government to submit the plan, which has to also detail the action intended against the existing violators. The direction was an aftermath of the court ordering the demolition of luxury apartments.
•The court then directed the State to provide details of the existing constructions in violation of the coastal zone regulations. It slammed then Chief Secretary Tom Jose for “patent breach of law” by the State in allowing illegal structures to come up along a fragile coastal zone even as thousands perish or are rendered homeless by natural tragedies like floods that devastate the State.
•“We are shocked. Devastations are taking place in entire Kerala. This cannot happen in a civilised country. In Kerala, this is a colossal loss. Lives are lost, properties are destroyed... But see their [State government] attitude... Instead of protecting, you are permitting these structures to continue. All of them illegal and nothing is stopped... If this is your attitude, you are facing a tough court”, the court had observed orally.
📰 Capital continues to choke under ‘severe’ pollution
Level of PM2.5 is almost five times the safe limit
•A thick blanket of smog covered the Capital on Thursday with the air quality remaining in the “severe” category for the second consecutive day.
•The level of PM 2.5 (deadly respirable particles), which is a chief pollutant, was almost five times (286.7 ug/m3) the safe limit (60ug/m3) in Delhi and NCR at 8 p.m.
•The pollution is chiefly due to stubble burning in neighbouring States and very low wind speed. The air quality is expected to slightly improve on Friday and then on Saturday, according to government-run monitoring agency System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR).
•The stubble fire counts in Haryana and Punjab have increased to 2,396 from 1,057 in the last 24 hours, SAFAR said. But its contribution to Delhi’s pollution has decreased to 27% on Thursday from 35% (Wednesday), it added.
•The Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA) extended a ban on construction activities, hot mix plants and stone crushers from 6 p.m. to 10 a.m. to November 2. The ban will be applicable to Delhi as well as Gurugram, Faridabad, Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Sonipat and Bahadurgarh. Also, coal-based industries will remain shut till November 2.
•“We have called a meeting and if the pollution persists, then we will think about implementing the other steps,” EPCA Chairman Bhure Lal told The Hindu. The EPCA will have to enforce odd-even vehicle rationing scheme and a complete ban on construction activities among other measures if the pollution stays in “severe” category for 48 hours.
•“The Chief Secretary [Delhi] and Secretary of the Environment Department [Centre] talk over phone about the situation every day. The Chief Secretary is holding meetings almost every alternate day with different agencies to control pollution,” a senior government official said.
•Meanwhile, the contribution of stubble burning in neighbouring States to the city’s pollution is expected to decrease to 25% on Friday. Also, a fresh western disturbance will approach north-west India by November 2 and is likely to influence Delhi’s air quality positively. An improvement to the lower end of the “very poor” category is expected by November 2.
📰 Alimony guidelines: On maintenance laws
Early enforcement of maintenance laws is a must to protect dependent women
•In India, though more girls are going to school now, for many, the inevitable reality seems marriage before completion of higher education. Girls are married off early and bear children long before they should. This triggers a state of poor maternal health and is one of the root causes of high levels of child stunting and wasting in India. There is also the possibility of a marriage not working out for varied reasons, leaving the girl or young woman in extreme distress because often she is not financially independent. Parliament and the courts have persistently enacted legislation to give women better rights. Article 15(3), which states ‘nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children’, read together with Article 39, which directs state policy towards equal pay and opportunities for both men and women, and protecting the health of women and children, are two key constitutional safeguards. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court leaned on these two Articles, and a host of other laws, while hearing a dispute between a Mumbai-based couple, and set down comprehensive guidelines on alimony. The court ruled that an abandoned wife and children will be entitled to ‘maintenance’ from the date she applies for it in a court of law.
•In a 67-page judgment, a Bench of Justices Indu Malhotra and R. Subhash Reddy, outlined specifics, including “reasonable needs” of a wife and dependent children, her educational qualification, whether she has an independent source of income, and if she does, if it is sufficient, to follow for family courts, magistrates and lower courts on alimony cases. Given the large and growing percentage of matrimonial litigation, some clarity was necessary. Cases are known to drag on and acquire cobwebs, worsening the misery for vulnerable women. The Court laid down that while women can make a claim for alimony under different laws, including the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 and Section 125 of the CrPC, or under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, it “would be inequitable to direct the husband to pay maintenance under each of the proceedings”, urging civil and family courts to take note of previous settlements. Perhaps keeping in mind the vastness of India and its inequities, the Court also added how an “order or decree of maintenance” may be enforced under various laws and Section 128 of the CrPC. For women in India, especially the poor who are often overlooked in discourses, the top court’s words that maintenance laws will mean little if they do not prevent dependent wives and children from “falling into destitution and vagrancy”, offer a glimmer of hope.
📰 NBFCs with high systemic risks need more regulation: RBI DG
Such lenders may even be subjected to the same norms as banks, says Rao
•Asserting that there was a need to recalibrate regulations for non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), Reserve Bank Deputy Governor M. Rajeshwar Rao on Friday said NBFCs with significant externalities and which contribute substantially to systemic risks must be identified and subjected to a higher degree of regulation.
•“One can also argue that the design of prudential regulatory framework for such NBFCs can be comparable with banks so that beyond a point of criticality to systemic risks, such NBFCs should have incentives either to convert into a commercial bank or scale down their network externalities within the financial system,” he said. This would make the financial sector sound and resilient while allowing a majority of NBFCs to continue under the regulation-light structure, Mr. Rao said at an Assocham conference.
•Observing that NBFCs currently enjoyed a great degree of regulatory arbitrage vis-a-vis banks, he said these entities could contribute to a build-up of systemic risks because of such arbitrage and hence there was a need to recalibrate the regulations. “We could perhaps consider a graded regulatory framework for NBFCs, calibrated in relation to their contribution to systemic significance,” he said.
MFI norms
•Mr. Rao said the share of NBFC-MFIs (microfinance institutions) in the overall microfinance sector had come down to a little more than 30% as several large MFIs had converted into Small Finance Banks.
•“There is a need to re-prioritise regulatory tools in the microfinance sector so that our regulations are activity-based rather than entity-based,” he said.
📰 Market dictates and a blow against equality
The GST levy on mobility aids places a prohibitive burden on the ability of disabled citizens to lead a dignified life
•On October 27, the Supreme Court of India heard brief arguments on the constitutional validity of the levy of Goods and Services Tax (GST) on mobility aids used by disabled citizens. The petitioner, in Nipun Malhotra vs. Union of India, argued that the tax imposed on these products, which included wheelchairs, tricycles for the disabled, braille paper and braille watches, was patently discriminatory. But the Court indicated that the scope of its power to review the levy was slender. A decision to impose a tax, it said, was a matter of policy over which the judiciary ought not to ordinarily interfere. In adjourning the case, it suggested that the petitioner exhaust his options by submitting his grievances to the GST Council, which is the governing body responsible for determining which products are taxed, and at what rate.
Tax and a fundamental right
•At first blush, this approach seems reasonable. But should the GST Council reject the petitioner’s plea, it would be imprudent of the Court not to test the legitimacy of the levy. Much as it might be keen to ensure that the judiciary does not sit on judgment over matters that fall within the domain of legislative and executive competence, it must recognise that there is nothing inherently distinct about taxing laws; they are in no way plenary and unamenable to judicial review. Quite to the contrary, taxes have a direct bearing on how society is arranged. The nature and rate of tax imposed on a product can impinge both on a person’s freedom and on a person’s right to be treated with equal care and concern. Therefore, it ought to be well within an independent judiciary’s province — as the top courts in Canada and Colombia, among others, have recently held — to examine whether or not an imposition of a tax violates a fundamental right.
Market forces are at play
•The GST regime was launched amid much fanfare in July 2017, with the idea of not only simplifying India’s complex and multi-layered tax structure but also with a view to fashioning the country into a unified, common market, in which the levy of GST will subsume almost all other extant indirect taxes. To that end, the GST serves as a consumption tax on the supply of all manners of goods and services. But its functioning has proved far from transformative. At the time of its inception, the central government claimed that the causes of liberty and equality would benefit from the States pooling their sovereignty together with that of the Union. But what we have seen since is that with the withering of the States’ fiscal autonomy, it is the dictates of the market alone that appear to determine how and what goods are taxed. The levy on commodities used by the disabled is a prime example of this.
•Until the advent of the GST, mobility aids were almost entirely immune from indirect taxes. In virtually every State, exemptions were granted on the payment of value-added-tax on such goods. The GST did away altogether with this exemption. Indeed, it was only after substantial outcry that the originally proposed 18% tax on these devices was reduced to 5%. But even at that rate, as the petition in the Supreme Court demonstrates, the levy increases manifold the prices of commodities that allow the disabled to perform the most basic tasks — in this case, to walk or to read.
•Despite this affront to dignity, the government claims that it cannot relieve mobility aids from taxation, because to do so will disincentivise domestic manufacturers. “The 5% concessional GST rate,” the government said in a statement explaining the levy, “will result in a win-win situation for both the users of such devices, the disabled persons, as well as the domestic manufacturers of such goods.” This argument is influenced by the GST’s structure, in particular the manner in which firms are allowed to claim credit on taxes paid by them in the making of a product.
•Under the existing regime, if the maker, say, of a wheelchair has paid taxes on commodities that serve as raw material in the process of manufacturing, it will be entitled to claim credit for the tax paid when it remits the levy collected from the eventual purchaser of the product. So, if the manufacturer spends a sum of ₹100 as taxes towards the purchase of aluminium that goes into the making of a wheelchair and then collects a sum of ₹120 as GST when it sells the wheelchair, it would be entitled to claim the sum of ₹100 as “input tax credit” and would consequently only have to deposit ₹20 to the government. The State’s argument is that in the absence of a levy of GST on the final product, the manufacturer will be burdened with input taxes. Since it cannot claim any credit for those taxes paid, the prices of the final product would have to be concomitantly higher, and, as a result, the manufacturer will be placed in a relative position of disadvantage to foreign makers.
Parliament can find a way
•This argument, though, suffers from at least two fallacies. First, a reading of the various notifications issued by the GST Council shows that many other products that are essential to human needs are exempt from tax — notably, in July 2018, following a sustained campaign, the levy imposed on female personal hygiene products (tampons and sanitary pads) was removed.
•Second, that the grant of an exemption in cases such as these would disentitle manufacturers from claiming input tax credit is a matter of legislative design. Nothing suggests that Parliament cannot find other ways to ensure that domestic manufacturers are granted credit for the taxes that they pay on inputs. A set off against taxes collected from the eventual consumers can scarcely be seen as the only legitimate mechanism available to ensure that a rebate is provided. What is more, the government might well have all manners of other options available — it could, for example, exempt firms from paying taxes on inputs on the condition that such inputs will be used to manufacture mobility aids.
A reasonable classification
•Ultimately, a decision taken on exempting goods from taxation is a matter of classification. The Constitution’s equality code requires such a classification to be a reasonable one. In the case of mobility aids, the oppressive nature of the levy is evident. The tax places a prohibitive burden on the ability of disabled citizens to access the most basic goods, to lead lives with dignity. Given that the classification rests on a state of disability, it must be seen, on any sensible consideration of our equality jurisprudence, as, at least facially, inequitable. The onus must, therefore, rest on the government to show the Court that it had cogent reasons for treating these goods as distinct from other commodities that are exempt from tax. A failure to discharge this onus ought to render the levy illegitimate.
•It need not come to this. The GST Council can take a leaf out of the books of Canada and Australia, and grant a complete exemption on the levy imposed on mobility aids. A fair and just regime ought to demand nothing less. Taxation, after all, is a tool that is intended to augment general welfare. It is time we recognised that an unreasonable levy can deeply compromise fundamental human needs. To free taxing statutes from the ramparts of the Constitution is to risk the entrenching of inequality.
