📰 NGT directs Odisha to submit action plan on strengthening elephant corridors
•The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has directed the Odisha government to prepare an action plan within three months on 14 identified elephant corridors for providing stress-free migration to jumbos from one habitation to another in the State.
•The State government had proposed 14 corridors stretching over a total area of 870.61 sq.km. having a length of 420.8 km. Despite the passing of several years, no tangible progress had been made on government’s proposal.
•Biswajit Mohanty, secretary of the Wildlife Society of Orissa (WSO), a voluntary organisation, had moved the NGT seeking concrete action on strengthening of corridors.
•The WSO had sought the NGT’s intervention for necessary legal action against encroachers and those violating the Provisions of the Forest Conservation Act 1980 and the Indian Forest Act 1927 in the proposed corridors.
•The government was urged to remove the unauthorised buildings from the reserve forest land in Dhenkanal district, which sees acute human-elephant conflict, and make the forestland free from encroachment.
•“Traditionally 14 corridors have been identified in the State which used to be used by elephants during the course of their migration. These corridors need to be protected. The all-round development like human settlements, roads, railway line, electric lines, canal and mining are the main cause of corridor fragmentation,” the government mentioned in the plan.
•The NGT had issued a prohibition order directing that all such activities which are not permissible to be carried out in such a highly eco sensitive zone (ESZ), should not be undertaken. Moreover, the NGT directed authorities to expedite demarcation of the corridors and the process for formal notification within a specific time frame in 2017.
•The State responded stating that the work of assessing habitat viability and ground-truthing of the already identified elephant corridors was handed over to the Asia Nature Conservation Foundation (ANCF).
•The ANCF had completed its task with respect to the corridors. The government had even submitted that elephants were sighted in places where the jumbos had never been seen in the recent past.
•The government had sought time to inform the NGT about action plan to strengthen corridors. It, however, failed to give a concrete action on physical progress on corridors. The principal Bench of the NGT — comprising S. P. Wangdi, judicial member, and Saibal Dasgupta, expert member — in its latest order said the government must treat it as the last opportunity to come up with an action plan.
•Meanwhile, an elephant died when a passenger train hit the animal near Jujumara in Sambalpur district. The East Coast Railway has ordered a probe into the circumstances under which the elephant died. This year, as many 42 elephants have died and 64 persons lost their lives in man-animal conflict in Odisha.
In less than a decade after Moolamylliang turned its back on rat-hole mining, it has become a green dot in a vast sea of black
•Rat-hole coal mining had sucked the life out of Moolamylliang less than a decade ago. The village in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district has now risen like the proverbial phoenix to become a clean, green dot in a vast black blot.
•But Apmon Pachiang, a schoolteacher and Moolamylliang’s waheh chnong, or headman, said the job of making the village of 960 people and its surroundings breathe freely again — “like the good old days” — is only 30% done.
•But the villagers’ progress has been good enough for people in the mining-ravaged area to believe all is not lost amid abandoned pits and coal-blackened earth.
•The Jaintia Coal Miners and Dealers’ Association claims there are some 60,000 coal mines across 360 villages in East Jaintia Hills district. Moolamylliang used to be one such village until the National Green Tribunal banned rat-hole mining in April 2014.
•Rat-hole mining is a term used for a hazardous and arduous mining technique where miners crawl into winding underground tunnels that are just 4-5 feet in diameter to extract coal from the deep seams with a pickaxe.
Crucial change
•Though the NGT ban did not stop illegal mining in the district, it helped Moolamylliang reform — in part because unregulated mining had contaminated its farmlands and turned the streams acidic, and also because the village dorbar, or traditional governing body, had a change of guard.
•“Soon after a younger set took over the village decision-making body, we banned mining in our area. By that time, the nearest mine was a kilometre away. Then we went about cleaning the coal-stained surroundings and planting saplings along the pathways connecting our village,” Mr .Pachiang told The Hindu.
•The encouragement for the younger members of the Moolamylliang dorbar came from one of their own — Meghalaya Police Service officer Chempang Syrti, who helped organise some saplings for the afforestation drive and bring government schemes to the village.
•“Today, every house has a toilet, the roads are decent and tree-lined and the young and the old ensure there is no littering. The district authorities have been helpful but we have a long way to go,” Mr. Pachiang said.
Official support
•The push for convergence of multi-sector government schemes at Moolamylliang began after Malthus Sangma took charge as the district’s Additional Deputy Commissioner in October.
•“To be honest, the villagers did things on their own. We are just facilitators for projects they deserve, encouraging them to become a model village for others to follow,” Mr. Sangma said at the East Jaintia Hills district headquarters Khliehriat, about 15 km from the village.
•“Some say Moolamylliang is like a green island in a coal-blackened sea. I prefer to call it an oasis in a coal mine desert,” Mr. Sangma said, adding that the administration was trying to make four coke factories and three cement plants in the vicinity contribute to “earth rejuvenation” programmes in the area under their corporate social responsibility.
•Among the projects being pursued is low-cost rainwater harvesting for recharging the area that has become dry because of coal mining, he said.
•Another is to make Moolamylliang a base camp for tourists to explore caves, canyons and waterfalls in parts of East Jaintia Hills that have escaped the impact of mining.
•“We are banking on this as an alternative to coal mining, as the local people should reap the benefits of giving back to the environment,” Mr. Sangma said.
📰 Culture and peace: On India’s stand against ‘UN’s selectivity on religions’
India’s stand against ‘UN’s selectivity on religions’ gains force from its secularism
•In a strong statement at the UN General Assembly discussing resolutions of the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) on the ‘Culture of Peace’, India criticised the world body for what it called “selectivity” in seeking to protect Abrahamic religions — Islam, Christianity and Judaism — over others. The Indian delegate pointed out that previous resolutions of the UNAOC dating back to 2006 had repeatedly decried the hatred against those religions — “Islamophobia, Christianophobia and anti-Semitism” — but didn’t condemn attacks on other religious groups including Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, who have suffered terror strikes and seen their shrines destroyed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In particular, India said, the UNGA statement welcomed the Kartarpur Gurdwara corridor agreement between India and Pakistan, but failed to note that Pakistan’s government has taken over the management of the Sikh shrine, which it called a contravention of the agreement and a violation of Sikh beliefs. India’s delegate also accused Pakistan of a “culture of hatred” against “religions in India” and fostering cross-border terrorism and said a culture of peace cannot exist until that is changed. Above all, the Indian statement said, the UN’s selectivity under the aegis of the UNAOC, an organisation that was set up in 2005 to prevent polarisation between societies and cultures and to bridge differences between them, only serves to further the theory of an inevitable “clash of civilisations” instead.
•India’s concerns over the UN resolutions that portray only three religions as victims of religious hatred are completely valid, and it is important that they are broadened to include every community that faces religion-based violence. It is also important that the government thwarts Pakistan’s particularly insidious attempts to create a controversy against India at this time, by pushing these resolutions as India steps to take its two-year seat at the UN Security Council. New Delhi has been concerned by an increase in intrusive language from the UN bodies concerned as well, given that UNAOC issued a statement of “grave concern” over the Delhi riots in February this year that it said resulted in casualties of “mostly Muslims”. India is keen to push back on the UNAOC and other UN arms, like the UN Human Rights Council, that have criticised the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. As it seeks to do all of this, however, the government must be careful about ensuring that in exposing the UN’s “selectivity” it doesn’t open a flank for a counter-charge against India. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, for example, has been criticised for offering fast-track citizenship to only a select group of religions, leaving out Muslims. India cannot call for a culture of peace that stitches together an alliance of faiths, while Indian States bring laws that seek to make difficult inter-faith marriages. In the larger analysis, the force of India’s argument against the UN’s selective resolutions and non-inclusive language as well as the international efforts of adversaries such as Pakistan remains its own secular credentials enshrined in the Constitution and its pluralistic ethos.
📰 Trust deficit: On MSP and the need for a legal guarantee
Apart from the fresh amendments, the Centre must consider a legal guarantee for MSP
•The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, a federation of around 500 farmer organisations, has resolved to intensify its agitation against three farm laws hurriedly enacted by the Centre. After dismissing the protests as ill-informed and motivated initially, the Centre has offered to make some changes to the laws, but the farmers have now called for a Bharat Bandh on December 8. Thousands of farmers camping on the outskirts of the national capital are sceptical of the government claim that these laws would make agriculture more lucrative and secure by allowing market forces to play. The fear that the new regime will dismantle the system of procurement under Minimum Support Price (MSP) and leave farmers at the mercy of corporations is real. Responding to concerns, the Centre has suggested safeguards to prevent land alienation via contract farming; strengthening the State-run mandi system and ensuring its equal footing with private buyers through equalising taxes; allowing grievance redress in civil courts rather than just in the offices of Sub-Divisional Magistrates; and ensuring proper verification of private traders. It has not, however, offered a legal guarantee of MSP and the question of power subsidies also remains contentious.
•The Narendra Modi government has a declared policy of ensuring farm prices that are at least 50% more than the input costs. This has remained more an intent than reality, and the discussion has also been muddled by the government’s refusal to include rental value of the land in input costs. Agriculture has to remain environmentally sustainable and remunerative for farmers. Significant challenges have emerged with regard to these benchmarks, though India has ensured substantial food stock and a robust distribution mechanism that covers the entire country. There is a strong case for reworking the incentive structures and cropping pattern in order to account for changes in water availability and changing dietary requirements. The problems faced by farmers are by no means the same across India. But a sense of hostility from the state and market is now pervasive. Changes in land acquisition laws and the general thrust towards industrialisation together with the pressure on agriculture subsidies have increased the feeling of vulnerability of farmers in recent years. The abrupt changes in the sector brought in through the three laws have aggravated the trust deficit of the government. The combative attitude of the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party towards criticism worsened it further. Food security is considered a component of national security by all countries. The Union Agriculture Minister has said the government has no ego. The Centre must strive for reaching an agreement with the farmers that addresses their concerns.
📰 A mirage sold as a panacea for the unorganised sector
The labour codes will only better India’s ‘ease of doing business’ ranking instead of improving conditions of employment
•In an interview with The Hindu in October this year, the Union Labour Minister claimed that the four labour codes would generate employment and secure the basic rights of the workers. He also claimed that the labour codes seek to universalise the right to minimum wage of workers and social security entitlements. These appear to be extremely positive steps from the perspective of all workers. Why, then, have the labour codes not been universally welcomed by workers and their organisations, with even the Bharatiya Janata Party-affiliated Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh opposing the codes? What are the reasons for this cold reception to what the BJP claims is a game changer for all workers in the country?
Universal social security
•Let us first look at the claim of universal social security. The codes mandate benefits of Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) and Provident Fund (PF) only for workers belonging to establishments employing 10 workers or more. This leaves out nearly 80% of all Indian workers — the informal sector — from the ambit of these benefits. These workers have to be satisfied with a promise of some special schemes for them in their as yet undefined future. They may also be allowed access to underutilised Employees’ State Insurance Corporation hospitals — and even that only on payment of a usage charge! The most ubiquitous workers we encounter in our daily life — our domestic help, or the street vendor, or even the paper boy who delivers the morning newspaper home — are all left out of reckoning of this universal coverage.
•What does ESI coverage mean for the remaining 20% of the workers? In 2016, the ESI covered 2.1 crore workers; this increased to 3.6 crore by March 2019. The ESI employed around six doctors per one lakh beneficiaries in 2016, as against the World Health Organization norm of 100 doctors; the proportion of doctors to beneficiaries would have further fallen with the expanded membership. The ESI would have needed to urgently increase doctor and paramedical strength, for which it would need more resources. However, in the interest of ‘ease of doing business’, the employer plus employee contribution to the ESI was reduced from 6.5% to 4% from July 2019. The decision to reduce the contribution rate at a time when the need for the ESI was to increase expenditure on medical care surely appears counter-intuitive. With the new codes seeking to cover 20% of all workers, the membership would further increase to around 10 crore workers: a three-time increase over the membership in 2019. The available capacity of the hospitals and dispensaries would evidently be inadequate. The hope of ‘underutilised hospitals’ being made available to the informal sector is mere populist kite-flying.
•There is another side to this picture. The ESI coverage follows the map of industrial growth in the country. Thus, in industrialised States like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the ESI covered around 20% of the population as beneficiaries in 2016; the corresponding figure was just 0.7% for Bihar. Surely the possibility of scaling up coverage is a remote possibility in Bihar, given the very low base at present. It is not surprising that the granting of universal social security does not seem to have figured big in the election rhetoric before the Bihar Assembly election. The political promises there are more basic — to provide jobs rather than job regulation.
•While introducing the new codes, the government also did away with a number of existing cess-based welfare schemes. These included the Beedi Workers Welfare Board, covering an estimated five lakh home-based women workers. Even to this day, older beedi workers in the erstwhile South Kanara district of the Madras Presidency credit the education schemes available to them to the Board, which they say, enabled their children to escape the pernicious bind of poverty. The workers also had access to free dispensation in the hospitals run by the Board. With the new codes, the beedi workers will forego these facilities in exchange for an undefined promise of universal social security.
Promise of miminum wage
•The second claim for universal coverage was of the minimum wage. According to the Union Labour Minister, at present only around 30% of all workers get covered under the various minimum wage schedules. The government’s remedy in the codes is to include a floor wage covering all workers. At various instances, the Labour Minister announced a floor wage of ₹178 per day in 2019; and more recently the Finance Minister announced ₹202. This is only a little more than half the ₹375 per day recommended by the Labour Ministry’s Expert Committee on Wage in 2019; and also lower than the poverty line family expenditure estimated by the government-appointed Rangarajan Committee in 2011, corrected for inflation. This ‘floor wage’ should more aptly be called the below poverty line, or BPL wage. It can only serve to pull down wages, far from shoring up the wage level.
•The true colours of the government are clearly revealed. These codes, which also include various measures restricting the unions’ right to strike and relax norms for factory closure, serve to improve the ‘ease of doing business’ ranking instead of improving the conditions of employment. The popular children’s fairy tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, shows up the Emperor as wearing nothing. For the unorganised sector workers, the labour codes provide a similar story; a set of fairy tale promises that are nothing but a mirage.
📰 True fiscal responsibility
Slashing public expenditure amid a recession is a recipe for serious economic disaster
•The National Statistical Office (NSO) recently announced estimates of economic activity in the second quarter of the current financial year. As most of the first quarter coincided with the lockdown announced by the Central government, it would only have been expected that output would be depressed as production could not have taken place. And this is what happened. The GDP contracted by 23.9% in that quarter (compared to the same quarter of the previous year). However, there was no particular reason for assuming that we would see a contraction in the second quarter as well, but that is what we now find. Though the contraction has been less than both what it was in the previous quarter and what several sources had forecast, at 7.5%, it is still significant. Thus far, we have not had the V-shaped recovery predicted by the government’s economists.
•To have assumed a V-shaped recovery following the lifting of the Centre’s lockdown would not have been wrong if output were determined entirely from the supply side under normal circumstances. Following this reasoning, output would remain depressed so long as the lockdown prevented production from taking place, but would spring back once these restrictions are removed. However, after they are lifted, we would return to a world in which output is determined by demand. This now introduces the possibility that output may not spring back, as investment may have actually declined post the lockdown. It would happen if depressed output causes private investors to hold their plans for the future and contract expenditure. A quarter is, after all, a very short period of time, and impulses in one may take effect only in the next.
Telling figures
•The NSO’s press release makes speculation about investment behaviour unnecessary. We see in it that gross fixed capital formation at constant prices actually increased in Q2, indeed by a whopping 60%. It may be said that this was completely unanticipated, thus suggesting the prospect of growth in the future.
•Three other sources of expenditure exist, namely, exports, private final consumption expenditure and government final consumption expenditure. The first two show a substantial increase over their Q1 levels, but the government final consumption expenditure actually declines by 25% over the same period. Could it be that the contraction in GDP would have been less but for this cut in government expenditure? From the NSO’s statement, we can determine the extent of contraction that would have occurred had the government maintained its consumption expenditure into the second quarter of this financial year. This figure turns out to be -4.1%, indicating that the contraction would have almost halved had this been the case.
•As currently we do not possess the knowledge on how the gross fixed capital formation this year is divided between the public and private sectors, we are forced to confine our analysis to the government’s consumption expenditure alone. This reveals the stark reality that public consumption expenditure in the first half of the year of the pandemic has been less than what it was in 2019-20, a normal year.
•The existence of a public sector provides us with an instrument to stabilise an economy subjected to a natural shock that depresses output. What we are experiencing in India today is actually the opposite, with the government having reduced expenditure in the face of a decline in output to a level lower than what it was two years ago. The macroeconomic consequences of the disruption to economic activity and the need for expansionary economic policy had been flagged by independent economists at the very onset of COVID-19. For fiscal policy in India to ignore that advisory and reduce spending when it is most needed is to destabilise the economy. It cannot be anyone’s case that an economy should be run on public consumption expenditure permanently. However, maintaining it for a little longer could have checked the economy’s slide with its negative consequences. It would have been the fiscally responsible thing to do.
📰 Tenuous tack: On RBI holding interest rates
The MPC’s policy of prioritising growth over price stability is clearly fraught with risks
•Friday’s decision by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Reserve Bank of India to maintain status quo on benchmark interest rates and continue with an accommodative policy stance for “as long as necessary” has been widely welcomed as being ‘pro-growth’. With the MPC noting that the signs of economic recovery were still far from broad-based, the panel asserted that it was incumbent on policymakers to support a durable rebound. The MPC also flagged its expectation that inflation would continue to “remain elevated” through the coming months to average 6.3% — well above the 6% upper bound of its target range — through the second half of the current fiscal. The RBI, which in October estimated retail inflation to range between 4.5% and 5.4% in the six-month period, has in just two months raised its projection for price gains by at least close to one percentage point. Seen in this light, the MPC’s decision shows that the RBI is clearly prioritising growth over price stability for now. While the compulsion to ensure that monetary policy remains broadly supportive of an economy that is in recession as a fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns is understandable, the rate setting panel’s readiness to shrug off both persistently high inflation and its own outlook on prices is cause for concern.
•Recent increases in the prices of iron ore, steel and transportation fuels also add to the worries that cost pressures are continuing to accumulate at a time when the economy is still well under water. The RBI has also, surprisingly, raised its GDP forecast for the full year. The central bank now expects the economy to shrink by only 7.5% in the 12 months ending in March, a full 2 percentage points shallower than the 9.5% contraction it had projected in October. The forecast is predicated on a return to growth of 0.1% in Q3 and 0.7% in Q4. It is this ostensibly sanguine outlook on the economy that is hard to square with the RBI’s stand according primacy to growth over price stability. With the central bank prognosticating that, save some possible continued softening in the prices of cereals and transient easing of vegetable costs through the winter, other food prices would persistently remain at elevated levels, the MPC’s policy approach is clearly fraught with risks. By laying the onus on supply disruptions, profiteering and taxes for the inflation spiral, the RBI is abdicating its primary mandate.
