📰 Need to step up efforts to meet nutrition targets, says NITI Aayog report
The review report of the Nutrition Mission was drafted before COVID-19
•The National Nutrition Mission or the Poshan Abhiyaan — the world’s largest nutrition programme for children and mothers — must be stepped up in order to meet the targets set by the Centre to reduce stunting, wasting, and anaemia by 2022, warns a report by NITI Aayog with only a little over a year left to reach its goals.
•Significantly, the review report was drafted in March and does not factor worsening poverty and hunger levels over the past seven months, which is expected to dent strides made since 2018 to achieve nutritional targets.
•The government’s flagship programme to improve nutritional outcomes for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers was launched in 2018 with specific targets to be achieved by 2022. It aims to reduce stunting and wasting by 2% per year (total 6% until 2022) among children and anaemia by 3% per year (total 9% until 2022) among children, adolescent girls and pregnant women and lactating mothers. More than a third of children under five suffer from stunting and wasting and 40% of children between one and four are anaemic. Over 50% of pregnant and non-pregnant women were found to be anaemic, according to the National Family Health Survey-4 released in 2016.
•The government’s policy think tank warns, “we need to now accelerate actions on multiple fronts. We need to quickly graduate to a POSHAN-plus strategy which apart from continued strengthening the four pillars of the Abhiyaan also requires renewed focus on other social determinants in addition to addressing the governance challenges of NHM/ ICDS delivery mechanisms,” notes the NITI Aayog’s third progress report on the Nutrition Mission.
•The report calls for a need to lay as much emphasis on complementary feeding as it does on breastfeeding, which it points out can help avert 60% of the total stunting cases in India. It also recommends improved “water, sanitation, hand washing with soap and hygienic disposal of children’s stools” as other interventions which could help avert a quarter of the stunting cases.
•On stunting, the review says that India's targets are conservative as compared to the global target defined by the World Health Assembly (WHA), which is a prevalence rate of 5% of stunting as opposed to India’s goal of reducing stunting levels to 13.3% by 2022. “Additional preventive nutrition and health sensitive strategies are required to achieve further reductions in wasting to meet WHA target for India,” says the report.
•The target of reducing prevalence levels of anaemia among pregnant women from 50.3% in 2016 to 34.4% in 2022 and among adolescent girls from 52.9% in 2016 to 39.66%, is also considered to be conservative as compared to the WHA's target of halving prevalence levels.
•It notes that the government must implement interventions beyond the health sector and its focus on distribution of IFA tablets, and must include efforts to improve socio-economic conditions, else India will “achieve modest improvements in anaemia” among women of reproductive age.
Deepening poverty
•Significantly, the report was prepared before COVID-19 spread rapidly across the country, but was released only last month. Experts warn that deepening poverty and hunger may delay achieving the goals defined under the Nutrition Mission.
•“The projections are optimistic, and will need to be re-adjusted for the COVID-19 disruptions to health and nutrition services,” cautions Purnima Menon, Senior Research Fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute, which provided technical support and data to NITI Aayog for the report.
Ministries not allowed to seek nod for global tenders for contracts worth up to ₹200 crore
•The government has tightened its procurement norms to make it tougher for Ministries to pursue global tenders for contracts worth up to ₹200 crore.
•Under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan announced in May, the government had barred departments from issuing global tenders for contracts worth ₹200 crore or less.
•The General Financial Rules were amended to disallow global tender enquiries in such procurement of goods and services, with an eye on boosting the prospects of domestic micro, small and medium enterprises. Any Ministry seeking an exemption to the norm, in order to call for a global tender enquiry, is required to seek the Cabinet Secretariat’s prior nod.
•So far, Ministries’ requests could be considered if they gave valid justification for the need to issue a global tender and the lack of alternatives within the country.
•Now, Ministries can no longer seek a nod for issuing a global tender unless they have first floated a domestic tender for their requirements, and tried to locate domestic producers in co-ordination with industry bodies, as per new rules issued by the Cabinet Secretariat and the Finance Ministry over the past week. Moreover, departments also cannot submit exemption proposals unless they have first published their procurement plan for the next three and five years on their websites.
•Publishing such a procurement plan was mandated by the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) in September through a Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) order.
Exemption offered
•In an office memorandum, the Department of Expenditure has conveyed the Cabinet Secretariat’s instructions to Ministries and departments, stressing that domestic tenders need to be floated for all goods and services before a global tender could be considered.
•However, local tenders floated before May 15 this year, when the new procurement norms came into place, shall not count.
‘Discuss, send proposal’
•“Ministries, departments are requested to discuss with DPIIT, relevant industrial bodies for identification of domestic manufacturers and service providers and send the details of such deliberations along with the proposal,” the memo stated.
•A blanket exemption to allow global tenders was recently granted for procurement of spare parts from foreign original equipment manufacturers after multiple departments and public sector firms raised concerns about the lack of domestic options.
📰 Diplomatic offensive: On Nagrota encounter and after
India did well to highlight the terror threat from Pakistan amid steps along the border
•With more details coming in of a planned terror strike in Jammu and Kashmir by four men, believed to be members of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, who were gunned down by security forces last week, and the discovery of a tunnel in the Samba sector from where the men are supposed to have infiltrated into India, the government has decided to step up its diplomatic campaign to hold Pakistan accountable. On Monday, Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla briefed a select group of Ambassadors on the plot, which the government believes was planned on the same scale as last year’s Pulwama bombing that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel, and timed for the anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The envoys were part of the first batch of diplomats being briefed. Indian missions have also been instructed to pass on details of the “information docket” handed over, which includes details of the encounter in Nagrota between the suspected terrorists hiding in a truck and security forces, as well as the AK-47 rifles, 29 grenades and 7.5 kg of RDX explosive material the men allegedly had. That this was no ordinary encounter was evidenced from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement, calling it a “nefarious attempt to target grassroots level democratic exercises in Jammu and Kashmir”, a reference to the District Development Council elections due to start on November 28.
•By apprising the international community, it would seem the government has a multi-pronged strategy. The first imperative is to ensure that the full implications of the aborted attack and what could have occurred are understood worldwide, and the threat India continues to face from cross-border terror is acknowledged. In addition, any actions India takes against terror threats the Army perceives along the LoC this point on will be considered retaliatory. The second is to put Pakistan, which has itself been making allegations about a terror threat from India, squarely on notice. Pakistan still faces the final FATF decision in February 2021 on whether it will be blacklisted for its inability to curb terror financing and to shut down groups such as the JeM and the LeT, and the Imran Khan government would be better positioned in fulfilling the action plan it has been tasked with rather than flashing unsubstantiated dossiers with counter-claims against India. However, the Modi government must also remember that invoking the international community can be a double-edged sword in its bilateral conflict with Pakistan, that could invite discomforting interventionary interest. Eventually, India’s success lies in protecting its borders, as done in Nagrota, and by providing a peaceful and stable environment in J&K so as to restart the much-delayed democratic process there, despite all attempts to derail it.
📰 Say ‘no’ to corporate houses in Indian banking
The banking sector needs reform but the recommendation of corporate-owned banks is neither ‘big bang’ nor risk-free
•An Internal Working Group of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recommended that corporate houses be given bank licences. In today’s pro-business climate, you would have thought the proposal would evoke jubilation. It should have been hailed as another ‘big bang’ reform that would help undo the dominance of the public sector in banking. Instead, the reaction has ranged from cautious welcome to scathing criticism. Many analysts doubt the proposal will fly. It is worth examining why.
First, the idea
•The idea of allowing corporate houses into banking is by no means novel. In February 2013, the RBI had issued guidelines that permitted corporate and industrial houses to apply for a banking licence. Some houses applied, although a few withdrew their applications subsequently. No corporate was ultimately given a bank licence. Only two entities qualified for a licence, IDFC and Bandhan Financial Services.
•The RBI maintained that it was open to letting in corporates. However, none of the applicants had met ‘fit and proper’ criteria. The IWG report quotes the official RBI position on the subject at the time. “At a time when there is public concern about governance, and when it comes to licences for entities that are intimately trusted by the Indian public, this (not giving a license to any corporate house) may well be the most appropriate stance.”
•In 2014, the RBI restored the long-standing prohibition on the entry of corporate houses into banking. The RBI Governor then was Raghuram G. Rajan. Mr. Rajan had headed the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms (2008). The Committee had set its face against the entry of corporate houses into banking. It had observed, “The Committee also believes it is premature to allow industrial houses to own banks. This prohibition on the ‘banking and commerce’ combine still exists in the United States today, and is certainly necessary in India till private governance and regulatory capacity improve. (https://bit.ly/3ftp7Yf)” The RBI’s position on the subject has remained unchanged since 2014.
The worry is the risks
•What would be the rationale for any reversal in the position now? The Internal Working Group report weighs the pros and cons of letting in corporate houses. Corporate houses will bring capital and expertise to banking. Moreover, not many jurisdictions worldwide bar corporate houses from banking.
•It is the downside risks that are worrying in the extreme. As the report notes, the main concerns are interconnected lending, concentration of economic power and exposure of the safety net provided to banks (through guarantee of deposits) to commercial sectors of the economy. It is worth elaborating on these risks.
•Corporate houses can easily turn banks into a source of funds for their own businesses. In addition, they can ensure that funds are directed to their cronies. They can use banks to provide finance to customers and suppliers of their businesses. Adding a bank to a corporate house thus means an increase in concentration of economic power. Just as politicians have used banks to further their political interests, so also will corporate houses be tempted to use banks set up by them to enhance their clout.
•Not least, banks owned by corporate houses will be exposed to the risks of the non-bank entities of the group. If the non-bank entities get into trouble, sentiment about the bank owned by the corporate house is bound to be impacted. Depositors may have to be rescued through the use of the public safety net.
•The Internal Working Group believes that before corporate houses are allowed to enter banking, the RBI must be equipped with a legal framework to deal with interconnected lending and a mechanism to effectively supervise conglomerates that venture into banking. It is naive to suppose that any legal framework and supervisory mechanism will be adequate to deal with the risks of interconnected lending in the Indian context.
•Corporate houses are adept at routing funds through a maze of entities in India and abroad. Tracing interconnected lending will be a challenge. Monitoring of transactions of corporate houses will require the cooperation of various law enforcement agencies. Corporate houses can use their political clout to thwart such cooperation.
•Second, the RBI can only react to interconnected lending ex-post, that is, after substantial exposure to the entities of the corporate house has happened. It is unlikely to be able to prevent such exposure.
•Third, suppose the RBI does latch on to interconnected lending. How is the RBI to react? Any action that the RBI may take in response could cause a flight of deposits from the bank concerned and precipitate its failure. The challenges posed by interconnected lending are truly formidable.
Regulator credibility at stake
•Fourth, pitting the regulator against powerful corporate houses could end up damaging the regulator. The regulator would be under enormous pressure to compromise on regulation. Its credibility would be dented in the process. This would indeed be a tragedy given the stature the RBI enjoys today.
•What we have discussed so far is the entry of corporate houses that do not have interests in the financial sector. There are corporate houses that are already present in banking-related activities through ownership of Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs).
•Under the present policy, NBFCs with a successful track record of 10 years are allowed to convert themselves into banks. The Internal Working Group believes that NBFCs owned by corporate houses should be eligible for such conversion. This promises to be an easier route for the entry of corporate houses into banking.
•The Internal Working Group argues that corporate-owned NBFCs have been regulated for a while. The RBI understands them well. Hence, some of the concerns regarding the entry of these corporates into banking may get mitigated. This is being disingenuous.
•There is a world of difference between a corporate house owning an NBFC and one owning a bank. Bank ownership provides access to a public safety net whereas NBFC ownership does not. The reach and clout that bank ownership provides are vastly superior to that of an NBFC. The objections that apply to a corporate house with no presence in bank-like activities are equally applicable to corporate houses that own NBFCs.
It points to privatisation
•There is another aspect to the proposal that cannot be ignored. Corporate houses are unlikely to be enthused merely by the idea of growing a bank on their own. The real attraction will be the possibility of acquiring public sector banks, whose valuations have been battered in recent years. Public sector banks need capital that the government is unable to provide. The entry of corporate houses, if it happens at all, is thus likely to be a prelude to privatisation. Given what we know of governance in the Indian corporate world, any sale of public sector banks to corporate houses would raise serious concerns about financial stability.
•India’s banking sector needs reform but corporate houses owning banks hardly qualifies as one. If the record of over-leveraging in the corporate world in recent years is anything to go by, the entry of corporate houses into banking is the road to perdition.
📰 With land rights, but no land
Many Adivasi families are unlikely to benefit from the implementation of the Forest Rights Act in J&K
•Tribal politics in the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir was focused on the twin issues of political reservation and enactment/extension of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. Mainstream political parties, which are now arguing for these rights for the Adivasis in J&K, failed to provide them these rights when they were in power for years. This failure continues to aggravate the problems of the Adivasis in J&K who were provided reservations in jobs, but no political reservation though this was constitutionally mandated.
•It is this lack of political reservation that has been a major reason for their marginalisation. The Adivasis have had to largely depend on non-tribal leadership to represent their issues and demands. Lack of political reservation meant that their issues were never adequately represented in the Legislative Assembly. The vote share of Adivasis is a major deciding factor in almost 21 Assembly constituencies, yet they remain politically marginalised. After the abrogation of J&K’s special status, there was no delay in providing political reservation for the Adivasis. Its actual impact will be seen only after elections are conducted for the Legislative Assembly of the Union Territory of J&K. However, similar urgency wasn’t shown in the extension of the FRA to J&K after the abrogation of special status though many other Central laws were extended to the Union Territory.
More evictions
•In fact, the FRA should have been in place in J&K long time ago — nothing in Article 370 prevented the Legislative Assembly from enacting a similar law. Adivasi lands have not been protected, nor have these communities been given ownership rights. Instead, evictions of Adivasis have intensified in the last few years. The FRA would have provided Adivasis in J&K access and ownership rights, forest-based livelihood rights, and minor forest produce rights. Adivasis, especially nomads, have neither land rights nor rehabilitation rights.
•The J&K government has now decided to implement the FRA. On November 18, the J&K Chief Secretary reviewed the implementation of the FRA. It has been decided that the survey of claimants by the forest rights committees for assessing the nature and extent of rights being claimed at the village-level would be completed by January 15, 2021. Subsequently, the claims would be scrutinised by the sub-divisional committees, which will then prepare a record of forest rights by or before January 31, 2021. District-Level Committees will give the final approval and grant forest rights by March 1, 2021.
Proving ownership
•Implementing the FRA is a welcome step. However, instead of alleviating fears of displacement and disempowerment, the law has only increased those fears. This is primarily because this is happening against the backdrop of the J&K government’s decision on October 31 to declare the State Land (Vesting of Ownership to the Occupants) Act, 2001, also known as the Roshni Act, null and void. This Act has been controversial due to the questionable transfer of ownership of state land to many influential people, including Ministers, legislators, bureaucrats, and police officers. Some say that it provided ownership rights to many poor, landless Adivasis as well; now the land will be retrieved from them. In such a scenario, the Adivasis will fail to prove their claims of ownership under the FRA. Further, in the last few weeks, the eviction and demolition drives against nomads have intensified without any rehabilitation plans in place. The FRA, then, is unlikely to benefit such poor, landless Adivasis.
•In the rest of India, the FRA provided and recognised the forest rights of forest dwellers who had occupied forest land before December 13, 2005. No such cut-off date has been mentioned in the case of J&K. Without a cut-off date, with land being retrieved after declaring the Roshni Act null and void, and with forceful evictions taking place, many tribal families are unlikely to benefit from the implementation of the FRA.
📰 The migrant worker as a ghost among citizens
A new publication contends that their lockdown misery was no anomaly but an effect of exclusion from full citizenship
•When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the world’s most stringent lockdown on March 24, 2020 with barely four hours notice, lakhs of migrant workers across the country found themselves trapped in a novel situation: their livelihood in the city was gone, but they could not return to their native villages. The lockdown offered them only two options: starvation or charity. It was merely a matter of time before they pursued the third option: an arduous walk to their homes hundreds of kilometres away, risking starvation and death. Many did die in transit.
•India is not the only country to have witnessed lockdown-related governance failures. But it stands alone for the sheer magnitude of the humanitarian tragedy unleashed by a poorly conceived lockdown. It was as if the nation’s top decision makers had no idea that migrant workers existed. Perhaps this is not as far-fetched as it may seem. If we assume that a government makes policies keeping in mind the interests of its citizens, then the question to ask would be: are migrant workers in India full citizens? Or are they half-citizens at best, tolerated only because cities and industries need cheap labour?
•A new publication, Citizens and the Sovereign: Stories from the Largest Human Exodus in Contemporary Indian History, brought out by Migrant Workers Solidarity Network (MWSN), a collective of workers’ groups and non-governmental organisations, explores these questions through the personal experiences of migrant workers. It contends that the avoidable misery they endured during the lockdown was not an anomaly but an effect of their implicit exclusion from full citizenship.
Quarantine without ‘home’
•Take, for instance, the story of Gulab and Sukhlal, two migrant workers from Delhi. The couple was forced to travel 500 kilometres to Lamgara tehsil in Rajasthan with three children and all their belongings to do ‘home quarantine’ — in a home that did not exist. Lada, another worker from Delhi, went home to her parents in Rajiyawas, Rajasthan, only to find that their basti alone did not — and will not — get any form of relief because, as per government records, it does not exist.
•Lada is a Sansi, while Gulab and Sukhlal are Babarias — all three belong to nomadic tribes. Gulab and Sukhlal have mostly practised the tradition of shifting settlements and do not have a permanent home. “It seems the lockdown had not planned for ‘nomads’. All ten crore of them,” observes the report. “Their settlements and belongings do not exist enough to exist on paper. They live lives which are too invisible to have rights or its poor substitute, relief. They are ghosts among citizens.”
•Mere existence, sans cognition by the gaze of the state apparatus, is no longer a sufficient condition of being. Nomadic tribes are the quintessential migrant community. The Indian state’s governance structure for nomadic tribes is determined by the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952, which upholds the colonial legacy of treating them either as threat or nuisance, while erasing their rights as citizens. This state of ‘non-being’ that marks the political existence of nomadic tribes extends to India’s 5.6 crore migrant workers (2011 Census), who may as well not have existed for the policymakers behind India’s lockdown.
•The report suggests that the most fitting comparison for India’s lockdown is not with those implemented by other countries but one from its own past: the Bubonic Plague of 1896 and the draconian measures implemented under the then newly minted Epidemic Diseases, Act, 1897. Section 4 of this Act grants “Protection to persons acting under Act. No suit or other legal proceeding shall lie against any person for anything done or in good faith intended to be done under this Act.” More than 120 years later, policemen protected by this legislation would brutally assault desperate migrants for trying to walk home. Even for the ‘independent’ Indian state — a democracy where the citizen is supposed to be the sovereign — migrant workers seem to trigger the same repressive impulses that the ‘uncouth’ natives did for the colonial state.
•The despotic interventions of the colonial British administration sparked some of the processes that led to the transformation of the natives into “the people,” leading eventually to the formation of a new national sovereign in 1947. The National Democratic Alliance government’s lockdown too sparked several protests, which this report documents with a ‘Migrant Resistance Map’, but systemic changes in the way migrant workers live and work seem remote for now.
Bridging social distance
•A cartoon that went viral during the lockdown captured the anomalous position of the migrant worker in the metropolis. It depicts a street on which families of migrant workers, with their belongings tied up in cloth bundles, are seen trudging past. On either side of the street, at a safe height from this tired procession, people in balconies are seen cheering, clapping and chanting, “Go, corona, go.” The cartoon is titled ‘social distancing’.
