📰 For affluent, EPF is not nest egg but goose that lays golden eggs
1.23 lakh high net worth individuals deposited ₹62,500 crore into EPF accounts in 2018-19; largest EPF account has a staggering ₹103 crore balance.
•Over 1.23 lakh high net worth individuals (HNIs) deposited over ₹62,500 crore into their employees’ provident fund (EPF) accounts in 2018-19 alone, and the largest EPF account has a staggering ₹103 crore balance, sources in the Department of Revenue said on Thursday, defending the Budget move to tax the income on employees’ PF contributions over ₹2.5 lakh a year.
•“Since any tax exemption is provided through taxpayers’ money, it was unfair to allow a small group of HNIs to misuse a welfare facility and earn wrongfully tax-free income as assured interest return,” an official said, stressing that the step was intended to enforce the principle of equity among PF contributors.
•Of an estimated 4.5 crore EPF accounts, the source said about 0.27% members had an average corpus of ₹5.92 crore and so were earning over ₹50 lakh a year as “tax-free assured interest”.
•EPF accounts are mandatory for employees earning up to ₹15,000 a month in firms with over 20 workers, with 12% of the basic pay and dearness allowance deducted as employees’ contribution and another 12% remitted by the employer.
•The government had capped the contributions by employers into employee welfare schemes like the EPF or the National Pension Scheme or a superannuation plan, at ₹7.5 lakh a year, in last year’s Budget. However, government as well as private sector employees are allowed to make voluntary contributions over and above the statutory deductions into the general provident fund (GPF) or EPF, respectively.
•On Monday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that some people went to the extent of contributing ₹1 crore each month into such PF accounts. “What would be his salary? For him to get both tax concession and an assured income is not comparable with an employee who earns ₹2 lakh and gets 8% return,” she had pointed out.
•The top 20 HNIs have about ₹825 crore in their EPF accounts and the top 100 have over ₹2,000 crore, said the Revenue Department official quoted earlier. The largest EPF account has over ₹103 crore, followed by two accounts that have over ₹86 crore each.
•“The average normal EPF or GPF contributor would not be affected by the removal of this anomaly in the system prevailing over a long period of time,” the official said.
•While some tax experts have said this amendment may be applicable retrospectively for interest earned after April 1, 2021 on past contributions over ₹2.5 lakh, Revenue Department sources said it will apply prospectively.
•Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairperson P.C. Mody has told The Hindu that taxpayers will be required to include the annual income from contributions beyond ₹2.5 lakh into their PF accounts while filing their returns.
The survey sampled people from 70 districts across 21 States.
•Nearly one in five Indians had been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus until December 2020, the third round of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) serological survey has found. This is roughly a three-fold increase since August 2020 and a 30-fold increase since May 2020, when previous rounds of the survey were conducted.
•“The message is that a large proportion of the population remains vulnerable. Vaccines are necessary and there can be no complacency with regards to masks, social distancing and hand hygiene,” Dr. Balram Bhargava, Director General, ICMR, said at a press briefing on Thursday.
•The survey sampled people from 70 districts across 21 States.
•The overall prevalence in the population was 21.5%, which averaged over India’s population indicates that about 270 million may have been exposed to the virus. India has so far confirmed a little over 10 million infections — or 27 cases to each confirmed case of infection. In the previous survey, there were 26 to 31 undetected cases for every confirmed case.
•India is showing a declining number in fresh infections since September, with only around 12,899 new infections added on Thursday, and 1.6 lakh active cases. Experts, however, have previously noted that serosurveys don’t capture the extent of the spread, and other modelling studies have shown that as much as 50% of the population may have been exposed.
•In the previous survey, only 5.2% of those sampled in rural areas showed antibodies, whereas that figure has now jumped to 19% in the latest survey. There was a sharp rise across urban and non-urban slum areas, too. In urban slums, it was 31%, nearly twice as much as the previous survey findings of 16%. In “urban non slums” the prevalence this time was 26% compared with 9% in the second survey.
•About 19.9% of adults sampled in the 18-44 years age group had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies as did 25% of children/teenagers (10-17 years), and 23% in those over 45 years.
•By comparison, in the second survey, only 5.4% of children/teenagers, and 6.9% of those in the 18-44 years age group reported positive for antibodies.
•The latest serosurvey also separately sampled 7,171 healthcare workers and those who work in hospital settings. Nearly 26% of doctors and nurses have coronavirus antibodies, as did 25.4% of paramedical staff — underlining their higher risk of being exposed to coronavirus infections than the general population.
•“We are seeing that that infection rates in rural areas, too, are catching up. Recent serosurveys in Delhi, Pune and Hyderabad all show high prevalence in urban settings. The spread is certainly slower in rural areas because of density but that doesn’t mean we are immune from future spikes and it would be wise to probably prioritise vaccination in the villages than cities. The survey also doesn’t account for the possibility of reinfection, or whether we will be more vulnerable to mutant strains,” said a senior epidemiologist who was involved in the survey.
•The higher prevalence among children or young adults, according to Dr. Samiran Panda, who heads ICMR’s epidemiology division, showed that it was no longer true, as earlier believed, that children or the young were better protected. “Several studies have now established this. They are much less likely to be severely sick but they can be infectious,” he told The Hindu.
•Another factor was that in the newest survey, the antibody test employed was specifically designed to check for antibodies produced against the spike protein. “This is more sensitive than the one used last time and therefore overall detection rates could be higher,” Dr. Panda said.
📰 An inevitable showdown: On government’s notice to Twitter
While provocative posts have no place on any platform, free speech should not be hit
•The government’s notice to Twitter after it reinstated several handles that mentioned a controversial hashtag, which the former wanted blocked, marks a critical point in an already uneasy relationship between a powerful government and an influential technology platform. A showdown seems inevitable now, what with the government threatening Twitter with penal action for not complying with its orders. The issue pertains to tweets put out by some handles on the ongoing farmer protests as also a hashtag that suggested that a farmer genocide was being planned. The Ministry of Electronics and IT ordered these handles (257 URLs and one hashtag) to be blocked on the grounds that they were spreading dangerous misinformation about the protests. Twitter initially complied with the order but then restored these tweets and handles, which included those of media houses. The Government’s initial order was issued under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, under which it can direct an intermediary to block any information for public access “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above…” This is the same Section under which hundreds of Chinese apps have been banned in recent months.
•The world over, technology platforms have enough safeguards to act as intermediaries without being liable for the content that is published. But Twitter’s act of defying the orders as per the law means it is on slippery territory. Though the use of Section 69A has been often criticised for the secrecy surrounding the process, it was upheld by the Supreme Court in the landmark Shreya Singhal vs Union of India (2015). The Court then was satisfied with the safeguards available. The technology platform’s stance may perhaps even lead to a legal challenge to the provisions of the Section. On the other hand, while there are many grounds on which this Government’s handling of the farm protests can be criticised, including its hyper-sensitivity to any criticism, reflected in the FIRs filed against many journalists, it has to be unequivocally said that the hashtag that it wanted blocked was not merely distasteful but seriously problematic, and indefensible on the grounds of freedom of speech. In a very sensitive setting, one that at least at one point was simmering with the potential for large-scale violence, provocation of any kind is unacceptable. What further happens in this face-off will be of interest not just for the two parties but for the governments of the world as well as the platforms of the world.
📰 Missing the Gandhian imprint
Neither the government nor the urban middle classes have felt a sense of unease over the farmers’ despair
•Gifted journalist Ved Mehta, who passed away last month, believed that Gandhi was hard to copy. Writing about Martin Luther King’s struggle against racism in the United States, Mehta wondered if Gandhi could be replicated in that country. Mehta found Gandhi’s standards of ethical conduct far too high for emulation by others. He also thought that Gandhi was lucky not to have been born in Leopold’s Congo or Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. Under such regimes, ‘he would have met his death in a purge’, Mehta wrote.
A complex legacy
•In the same article, Mehta recalls a dialogue between Gandhi and Nehru during the non-cooperation movement of the 1920s. On hearing about a violent incident in the Chauri Chaura village of Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi decided to withdraw the first all-India movement he had led. Jawaharlal Nehru asked him, ‘Must we train the 300 and odd millions of India in the theory and practice of non-violent action before we (can) move forward?”
•Gandhi’s reply was short and unequivocal: ‘Yes.’ Gandhi’s rigour did mellow with age and experience, but some of his tall contemporaries remained sceptical of his strategy of mass mobilisation. Tagore foresaw that Gandhi’s legacy might prove tough to follow in the absence of his leadership.
•However, Gandhi’s legacy is complex and evokes some fundamental issues embedded in the theory of peaceful settlement of conflicts. It is useful to visit these issues today when we are in the middle of a mass movement focused on a subject of Gandhi’s deep concern: rural economy. Those in the forefront of this movement are farmers. The questions their protest brings into public attention go well beyond the validity of their apprehensions and doubts. Gandhi is highly relevant to these questions. His legacy for India, and the rest of the modern world, is not confined to the culture of protest. It also involves an interpretation of peace: its logic and the method of inquiry it demands. Can a conflict be peacefully resolved? A satisfactory answer to this question requires that we understand peace more precisely in the context surrounding the present mass protest.
Farmers’ agency
•Several scholars, columnists and advisers have argued over the past few weeks that farmers need to be persuaded and their suspicion... about the new laws removed. This is also the state’s line of argument. As for the government, its initial position was that opposition to the new farm laws is based on misunderstanding. The government has maintained the view that the farmers who are agitating are misled and do not represent the farming community as a whole. Among experts, those who support the new farm laws have taken the stand that these laws are necessary for reforming the agricultural sector and such wider reform will eventually benefit farmers. Their protest has been attributed to insufficient dialogue.
•Thus, both the government and the supporters of the new laws view farmers as objects of persuasion or guidance. In this jointly held view, the farmers are believed to have no agency of their own. For the government and its expert advisers, an outreach effort is the answer to protests. This idea is similar to the persuasion approach. The term ‘outreach’ reveals its inherent approach: that of spreading the word across the boundary that divides decision-makers and targets of decisions.
Persuasion and inequality
•If persuasion is what this conflict requires for resolution, let us examine its nature. Along with mediation, persuasion ranks high among the means of achieving a peaceful resolution in a conflict situation. However, there is a condition attached to the use of persuasion in this context. The condition is that both sides, i.e. the persuaders and the ones to be persuaded will be equal partners in the act. It is not enough to say that during the negotiation they will behave as if they are equal. For persuasion to work, the two sides must be equal to begin with. They must feel equal. If there are mediators, their job is to make each side realise that they are equal. This condition is clearly difficult to apply in the present conflict.
•Inequality between farmers and the state has deep historical roots. It is reflected in the rural-urban gap. As a professional community, farmers suffer from the common stereotypes that the urban educated classes carry with regard to villagers. According to these stereotypes, farmers cannot be expected to know their own good — especially the benefits that are somewhat distant — on account of general ignorance and lack of education. The poor spread of education reinforces this stereotypical perception of the farming community as being simple-minded, and therefore prone to being misled.
•Education is, in fact, quite crucially responsible for widening the hierarchical divide between the rural and the urban, and for portraying the latter as the engine of change in the former. The view that farmers’ opposition to the new laws is merely a reflection of certain “doubts” which can be removed in the course of further discussion is reminiscent of the stereotype that the villagers are like children who do not understand the complex decisions made to benefit them in the long run. Teachers in India typically conclude their class lecture by asking “Any doubts?” The assumption is that children can only have doubts, but no real questions.
•The kind of protest the farmers have launched — and have done their best to sustain — carries unmistakable traces of Gandhi. Indeed, the very idea that a mass protest must remain peaceful is a legacy of Gandhi. His faith in non-violence has an unstated, hidden view of the adversary. While the one who protests is expected to shun violence, the other side must also fulfil an expectation. In Gandhi’s frame, the protester endures great suffering, and thereby arouses the deeper human instincts in the adversary’s heart. To see this as a strange, romantic idea is to miss its moral vision and where it comes from.
Tradition to political use
•Gandhi did not invent this vision; he spotted it in tradition and put it to a new, political use. The value system he used and modernised can still be witnessed in certain settings and contexts. For instance, when an irksome neighbour falls ill or meets with an accident, a few people do ask if the family needs help. A similar customary value covers hospitality. Teachers ask children not to take advantage of an injured member of the rival team. Internationally maintained modern norms for warring nations have their origins in similar old ethics sustained by tradition in several cultures. Gandhi used this old value system to develop his ethic of non-violence in oppositional politics. It was rooted in the belief that an adversary has human instincts which can be activated by demonstration of self-inflicted suffering. Gandhi saw the protester’s willingness to endure physical discomfort as a means of awakening the adversary’s saner instincts.
The struggle versus values
•The farmers’ struggle and suffering have failed to achieve this psychological goal. Neither the government nor the privileged urban middle classes seem to have felt a sense of unease over the physical suffering the farmers have endured in Delhi’s severe winter. Many among the protesters have lost their lives and their deaths have been ignored. Over the past few decades, a few lakh farmers have committed suicide. Their despair has not moved many in metropolitan centres and other cities. Apparently, India has gone through a sea change in values, both at personal and collective levels. The charade one routinely hears that education must inculcate moral values, overlooks the broader social context and direction of change. It is a romantic idea that education can compensate for psychological losses incurred in the pursuit of lopsided goals. It is hardly surprising that a farmers’ movement is reminding us of the legacy we inherited from Gandhi’s social experimentation.
📰 A year on, mind the gaps in the pandemic response
India needs to revisit its disease control strategy to ensure a more robust and humane response in similar crises
•January 30, 2021 marked one year since India detected its first case of COVID-19 — a student in Kerala who had returned from Wuhan, China.
•Analysing the country’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic so far reveals a mixed bag of successes and failures along with a host of unknowns looming ahead, that urgently need to be addressed to both limit damage due to the pandemic and get back to the path of economic and social recovery.
•Till date the country has recorded 1,07,90,183 cases and 1,54,703 deaths due to COVID-19 — the second largest in the world in terms of cases, after the United States, and fourth in terms of deaths.
India versus the world
•Official statistics show that India has fared better on rates of infections and deaths than many higher income countries. For example, India’s case fatality ratio on February 3 stood at 1.4% compared to 2.8% in the United Kingdom or 3.1% in South Africa, while India’s deaths per million is 112, compared to 1,362 in the United States, 1,486 in Italy, or 1,831 in Belgium.
•However, it has not done so well compared to countries of similar income and demography in South Asia. While India’s case fatalities ratio was lower than Bangladesh (1.5%) and Pakistan (2.1%) it was but significantly higher than Bhutan (0.1%), Nepal (0.7%), the Maldives (0.3%) and Sri Lanka (0.5%). Deaths due to COVID-19 per million population in Bangladesh was 50, Pakistan was 54 and Sri Lanka was just 16, lower than in India.
•India’s initial response was marked by political commitment at the highest level, with several steps taken early in screening international travellers, restricting inbound traffic from severely affected countries, and preparing quarantine facilities for those testing positive. However, like with many other countries, India too has not been able to figure out till now what the best way to open its borders to normal travellers is while keeping out those carrying COVID-19 infection, particularly the new more virulent strains.
Lockdown and after
•India was also among the few countries to announce a stringent nationwide lockdown much before it had a significant number of cases. The U.K. and the U.S. hesitated to impose a lockdown, costing many lives due to their late response. However, the Indian lockdown was imposed at very short notice without stating the strategy or specific objectives.
•To begin with, there was no evidence-based justification provided for such a sudden imposition of the lockdown without any lead time, nor was its purpose clearly communicated to the public. Was the lockdown meant to eliminate the epidemic through contact treatment, isolation and case management? Was the valuable time gained to be used to strengthen the health system and prepare for the expected rise in cases?
•Ultimately when India ended up lifting the lockdown, cases were already rising rapidly with confirmed cases per million people going further from 200 on June 9, 2020 to 7,454 on January 1, 2021.
•Unfortunately, the lockdown was also marked by excessive dependence on security forces to ensure enforcement of physical distancing measures and quarantine-related restrictions. An unintended offshoot of the lockdown was the large-scale exodus of migrants and families forced to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their homes in the countryside. Dozens died in the exodus, with many in horrific road accidents. There were also deaths due to lack of sufficient food, drinking water and the sheer stress of travelling. Their plight highlighted the lack of a social safety-net for poor Indians both from before as well as during the pandemic.
State-level ownership
•In terms of lessons learnt, there are many. First, in the context of the country’s federal structure, no public health response can be successful without ownership at the state level. The lack of consultation with State governments saw many of them implementing COVID-19 response policies hesitantly without much initiative or innovation. This experience has however not prompted any rethink of the top-down approach towards States at the national level.
•Second, in all epidemic responses, generation and use of strategic information plays a crucial role. Given India’s global reputation as a software superpower, the pandemic would have been an ideal staging ground for fast-tracking plans to create an integrated digital health information system to improve the efficiency and transparency of the COVID-19 response. The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), India’s national disease surveillance framework, was not visible throughout the response. While the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) carried out selective sero-surveillance studies in metropolitan areas, these surveys were limited in coverage and periodicity. It is therefore still a matter of guesswork as to what percentage of India’s population have been infected with the virus — an indicator of herd immunity.
Civil society’s role
•The response was also marked by a lack of involvement of civil society organisations as partners with state agencies. On earlier occasions such as polio eradication and AIDS response, civil society played an important preventive and promotional role in bringing the infections under control. It goes to the credit of many civil society organisations that they voluntarily stepped into the response and played a meaningful role in providing social support and lobbying with funding organisations such as the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) to provide social support to affected families.
•As India joins the select group of vaccine-producing countries, there is light at the end of the tunnel. With health-care workers, frontline workers, people above 50 and those with underlying health conditions covered by the vaccination programme launched in mid-January 2021, it can be expected that the epidemic would slow down. However, here again the end game strategy for the vaccination programme remains unclear, raising questions about whether its benefits will be sustainable in the long term.
Divide widened
•Another critical unknown in India’s COVID-19 response is over its plans to revive the economy and restore livelihoods of millions of people, who are today in danger of starvation and for whom even basic health care has become unaffordable. The pandemic period has exacerbated existing social inequalities and the poor face a ‘lost decade’ ahead, a challenge which needs to be addressed on priority.
•There is an urgent need to examine all these critical gaps in the response to the pandemic, whether they occurred through acts of omission or commission. Without such an open inquiry and widespread debate, India will miss yet another chance to learn the right lessons and ensure a more robust, well-thought out and humane response to similar crises in future.
📰 The way forward in Myanmar
There are several lessons to be learnt from the country’s tortuous politics
•In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, causing at least 138,000 deaths and displacing 1.5 million people. Surprisingly, the government announced a pre-scheduled referendum on the military-scripted constitution around the same time.
•Amid limited communication channels available to reach out to Myanmar generals, there were calls for international military intervention to secure access to relief as the Myanmar military refused to allow foreign aid. It took several rounds of diplomacy from various members of the international community to gain access. This sums up the zeitgeist of Myanmar generals and the dilemma before the international community of isolating a country riven with mass-scale poverty and ethnic strife.
•There are indeed some common lessons for the international community to avoid making mistakes made in the past. One, the developments in Myanmar will invariably bring back the old debate around the prudence of sanctions. The coup in Myanmar coincided with the first month of the Biden administration in the U.S., which has promised to bring back the values of democracy and respect for human rights to the core of the U.S. foreign policy. Notwithstanding the western sanctions before 2010, China, Thailand and Singapore were the key trading partners of Myanmar. The present reality is no different. Singapore was reportedly the largest foreign investor in Myanmar in 2020, accounting for 34% of the overall approved investment. Given that the military has been able to economically withstand sanctions by striking deals with Asian countries in the past, sanctions are unlikely to bring any major political change. The limited European trade with Myanmar that started after 2010 benefits the poor — the European Union’s ‘Everything But Arms’ scheme targets the poor in Myanmar’s garment industry. The scheme allows the world’s least-developed countries, such as Myanmar, to export most goods to the EU free of duties.
•Two, the old debate around the need for accountability for crimes against humanity will resurface. As political changes got underway in 2010, many generals, such as Than Shwe, who was the de-facto head of Myanmar from 1992 to 2011 and was on the radar of the international community for perpetuating a regime of human rights abuses, quietly vanished from the scene. This bred a culture of impunity. During the 2017 Rohingya crisis, senior military officials brazenly exploited social media to mobilise public support for brutality against Rohingyas.
China’s influence
•Three, a critical international player in Myanmar is China. China has appointed specific envoys for Asian affairs, who are de-facto working on Myanmar-related issues since 2013. The international community, particularly the West, has to factor in China’s multi-layered influence on Myanmar.
•Four, many international mechanisms comprising Western and Asian countries that were formed to coordinate strategies on Myanmar were disbanded after the 2015 election. That the changes in Myanmar were irreversible was the standard thinking. Relevant actors should be brought on a common platform by reviving past mechanisms.
•Five, the expectation that Myanmar will see a nationwide protest against the Tatmadaw after the coup should be examined with the geographical extent of Bamar, Myanmar’s largest ethnic group, who support the National League for Democracy. The minorities in the country form around 35% of the population. In the current scenario, the military will continue to exploit ethnic and religious fault lines. Engagement with domestic stakeholders, including ethnic minorities, especially from the north, should be pursued by the international community.
•No one possesses a magic wand of solutions. But there is one consistent lesson, that no change is irreversible, particularly in a context where military leadership scripted the meaning of democracy, and domestic forces and geopolitics continuously fail to deter its actions and impulses to rule.
