📰 Bengaluru, Shimla 'most liveable' cities in govt's Ease of Living Index
Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai also figure at the top of the list
•Bengaluru and Shimla were on Thursday ranked as the most liveable in the categories of cities with more than and less than 1 million population respectively by the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry’s Ease of Living Index.
•The Ease of Living Index 2020, in which 111 cities participated during the assessment in 2020 that included citizens’ feedback, had Bengaluru at the top, followed by Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Surat, Navi Mumbai, Coimbatore, Vadodara, Indore and Greater Mumbai in the category of cities with over 1 million population. In cities with less than a million population, Shimla topped the list, followed by Bhubaneshwar, Silvassa, Kakinada, Salem, Vellore, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Davangere and Tiruchirappalli.
•The Ministry also released the Municipal Performance Index 2020, which rated 111 municipalities on their services, finance, policy, technology and governance. Indore topped the ranking of municipalities with over 1 million population, followed by Surat and Bhopal, and the New Delhi Municipal Council was the best among civic bodies with under a million population, followed by Tirupati and Gandhinagar.
•At the online launch of the indices, HUA Minister Hardeep Puri raised concerns about some State governments not being as serious as others about the implementation of the Smart Cities Mission. He said the special purpose vehicles set up for the Mission in each city should be headed by the same person for the duration of the project.
Prakash Javadekar holds talks with OTT representatives.
•The Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry has clarified that none of the OTT (over-the-top) platforms will have to register with the govt and no government nominee will be present in the self-regulatory body.
•The Ministry statement followed I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar’s interaction with representatives of OTT platforms.
•The statement stated that during the interaction, Mr. Javadekar said the Ministry was open to any clarification or queries from the industry.
•“The Minister said it merely requires them to disclose information and that there is no requirement of registration of any kind with the Ministry,” the statement said. The Ministry would soon be releasing a form for the same.
•The statement, quoting Mr. Javadekar, further said, “the rules focus on self classification of content instead of any form of censorship.”
Grievance redressal mechanism
•The OTT platforms, he stated, were expected to develop an effective grievance redressal mechanism to tackle complaints raised about the content on these platforms.
•“Dispelling rumours, the Minister clarified that in the self-regulating body, no member will be appointed by the Government,” the statement said.
•Mr. Javadekar informed the industry representatives that under the rules, the government would create an inter-departmental committee to look at complaints that remain unresolved at the self-regulatory level.
•Representatives of Alt Balaji, Hotstar, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Jio, Zee5, Viacom18, Shemaroo and MxPlayer among others attended the virtual interaction.
•The Minister reasserted that the code of ethics had been brought in following representations from various cinema and TV bodies stating that while there were regulations for them, none existed for the OTT industry.
•“Thus, it was decided that the government would come out with progressive institutional mechanism for OTT players and develop a level-playing field with the idea of self-regulation,” the statement added.
📰 IISc among top 100 natural sciences universities in world
Only IITs Bombay, Delhi and Madras figure in top 100 in engineering and technology category. IITs Kharagpur, Kanpur drop out.
•The Indian Institute of Science broke into the top 100 in the natural sciences category of the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2021, which were released on Thursday.
•With regard to specific subject rankings, there are two new entrants to the top 100 list: JNU’s anthropology programme and O.P. Jindal Global University’s law programme, which is also the only private institution on the list.
•In the broad engineering and technology category, only three institutions made it to the top 100 — the IITS Bombay, Delhi and Madras — in comparison to five institutions last year. The IITs Kharagpur and Kanpur dropped out of the top 100 though the former is one of the government’s Institutes of Eminence (IoEs). The Bombay, Delhi and Madras IITs, which are also IoEs getting extra Central funding with the specific aim of rising in global rankings, have all dropped several places this year as well.
•In the other two broad categories, the University of Delhi was the highest ranked Indian institution in social sciences and management, but fell 48 places to drop out of the top 200. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences remained the only institution in the top 300 in life sciences and medicine, but also dropped more than 10 places.
•Overall, 25 Indian programmes from 12 institutions made it to the top 100 in their specific subject areas, two fewer than in 2020. Two programmes from the IIT Bombay and one each from the IITs Madras and Kharagpur slipped out of the list. Only two of the IoE programmes in the top 100 subject-specific list improved their rankings this year.
•The top ranked Indian programme globally is the IIT Madras petroleum engineering which dropped one place to the 30th rank, followed by mineral and mining engineering at IITs Bombay and Kharagpur, which are ranked at 41st and 44th place in their field. The University of Delhi’s development studies programme is the only other one in the top 50, sliding in at the 50th rank.
•Releasing the rankings at a virtual event, Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ said reforms brought in through the new National Education Policy would pave the way towards internationalisation of Indian education and also encourage the world’s top universities to open campuses in India.
•“In the next two years, we will take the number [of institutions with programmes in the top 100] from 12 to 25,” said NITI Aayog chief executive Amitabh Kant at the event.
•QS Head of Evaluation Leigh Kamolins noted that India had a good performance in COVID-19 research, ranking fifth in the world in terms of the number of published research papers on the pandemic.
•The QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings by Subject use four indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, research citation per paper and an index used to measure the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. Institutions are ranked according to five broad categories, as well as in 51 specific subjects.
📰 Not so stellar in protecting personal liberty
The outcomes from the judiciary in the defence of liberty, free thought and speech seem to be far from routine
•A pair of recent rulings gave us a glimmer of hope that the judiciary might yet serve as a tribune of people’s rights. The first was the acquittal of the journalist, Priya Ramani, on charges of criminal defamation. A Delhi court, in discharging her of the accusations, recognised that a woman’s right to dignity superseded any claims over reputation. The court also held that a survivor of sexual harassment had the freedom to place her grievance at any point of time after the occurrence of the event and on any platform of her choice.
•The second was the grant of bail to Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old woman who was arrested in Bengaluru and taken to New Delhi on charges of sedition. Her alleged crime: helping edit, and sharing, a “toolkit” that was meant to lend support to protests against the Union government’s new farm laws. In the order granting bail, the court of the additional sessions judge noted that the prosecution had failed to produce even an iota of evidence linking Ms. Ravi to an act of violence. It found the toolkit to be innocuous and the actions of the Delhi police, in restraining her liberty, to be based on “propitious anticipations”. The judge was also constrained to state the obvious: that, in a democracy, the right to dissent is fundamental.
Now for another ruling
•In a free republic, verdicts such as these will be seen as unexceptionable. If anything, they are attempts at undoing, at least in part, injustices wrought by the processes of the criminal justice system. Ms. Ramani spent months on end participating in a trial, not for being a perpetrator of any crime but for speaking out about sexual harassment at the workplace. Ms. Ravi spent 10 days in custody on the basis of evidence that the court found, at best, “scanty and sketchy”. But these rulings are now far from routine. Indeed, on February 25, the Allahabad High Court, in Aparna Purohit v. State of U.P., gave us a scantling of the disdain with which the higher judiciary views issues of personal liberty.
•In denying anticipatory bail to Ms. Purohit, who is the head of Amazon Prime Video’s India Originals, which ran the web series Tandav, the High Court was effectively telling the applicant that she deserved to be interrogated in custody for running a show that was “bound to hurt the sentiments of the majority community”. Not that Tandav necessarily does this, but it mattered little to the court that deriding a person’s belief is not an offence, not even under India’s draconian blasphemy laws.
Unconstitutional, but upheld
•Free speech, we all recognise, is a condition of legitimate government. We also recognise that there are limits to this right. The Constitution permits reasonable restrictions on speech on a variety of stated grounds. Determining what is reasonable and what falls within the bounds of those permitted limitations can sometimes be an exercise fraught with difficulty. But India’s Parliament has never grappled, with genuine seriousness, over these questions. It has either chosen to allow colonial-era laws to do the government’s bidding or it has legislated new rules that do not merely err on the side of restraint as much as they treat the restriction as their chief goal and purpose. The cases concerning Ms. Ramani, Ms. Ravi and Ms. Purohit each emanate out a law that is categorically unconstitutional, but that has nonetheless been upheld by the Supreme Court.
Tools of defamation, sedition
•Consider first criminal defamation. It ought to be self-evident that the punishment, even the very idea of prosecution, for libellous speech is disproportionate to the offence. Criminal law does not exist to make prosecutable acts that are essentially private in nature. By making ostensibly slanderous talk a punishable offence, the state imposes a chilling effect on all manners of legitimate speech. It is for this reason that almost every democratic nation of the world has revoked laws criminalising defamation. But in India. it remains a tool for the powerful and is routinely invoked not just by individuals and governments in positions of authority but also by corporations looking to protect their commercial interests.
•In the case of sedition, its colonial remnants are, again, plainly apparent. Although it was not a part of Macaulay’s original draft, it was incorporated by the British government into the Indian Penal Code with the explicit aim of repressing all forms of dissent against the regime.
•The offence — which carries with it the prospect of life imprisonment — is defined as any act which “brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India”. The clause also contains an ominous explanation: the word “disaffection” includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity.
•In saving the provision from the Constitution’s demands, the Supreme Court, in 1962, read down the offence and held that it was only seditious action that had the “tendency to disrupt public order” that was prosecutable. Since then, in other cases, the Court has held that speech can be criminalised only when it bears a proximate connection to disorder. But despite the imposition of these confines, the offence of sedition continues to be weaponised to restrict even the most inoffensive forms of dissent.
•India’s blasphemy laws, Section 153A, which deals with speech that seeks to promote enmity between different communities, and Section 295A, which criminalises speech that outrages religious feelings, are also vestiges of colonialism. Rather than aiding in dealing with genuine cases of hate speech, the laws permit governments to target acts that so much as offend a person’s belief, dislodging, in the process, the very foundation of free expression.
Signals from the judiciary
•That the Supreme Court has allowed these provisions to remain on India’s books ought to tell us that its record in protecting personal liberty is acclaimed without reason. Every now and then, the Court does bewail the state of affairs. In Arnab Manoranjan Goswami vs State of Maharashtra, decided in November 2020, the Court warned against the use of the criminal law as “a ruse for targeted harassment”. The judgment noted: “Our courts must ensure that they continue to remain the first line of defence against the deprivation of the liberty of citizens. Deprivation of liberty even for a single day is one day too many.” But any hope that the verdict would augur well for the many thousands who continue to languish in jail without trial was quickly quelled.
•When those involved with the making of Tandav first approached the Supreme Court, weeks after the verdict in Arnab Manoranjan Goswami, the Court not only refused to quash the criminal charges against them but also offered them no interim protection against arrest.
•What is more, when one of the show’s actors pleaded that he had simply been contracted to play a part, he was told, “You cannot play the role of a character which hurts the religious sentiments of others.”
•To be sure, as the lawyer Abhinav Sekhri has repeatedly highlighted, India’s bail jurisprudence suffers from a systemic malaise, where the manner in which offences are classified and the manner in which judicial discretion is vested invariably leads to arbitrary outcomes. But when this uncertainty is coupled with the prevailing distrust — which flows from the Supreme Court — in the values of personal liberty, of free thought and expression, what we get is a complete erasure of the rule of law.
📰 With Biden, India may need a new template
A ceasefire is in everybody’s interest but the question is who will blink first
•One of the first key foreign policy decisions that President Joe Biden took after assuming office was to end the U.S.’s support for Saudi Arabia’s six-year-long war on Yemen. He halted weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, appointed a Special Envoy for Yemen, and removed the Shia Houthi rebels, who control the northwestern parts of the Arab country, from the list of foreign terrorist organisations. Both former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump looked away from Yemen even as the country, amidst a multipolar civil war and Saudi bombing, descended into chaos and witnessed a humanitarian catastrophe. Can Mr. Biden be different?
The war in Yemen
•The crisis in Yemen is not only about the Saudi-Houthi conflict. It has many more dimensions: humanitarian, civil, geopolitical and sectarian. When Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies went to Yemen in March 2015, they had a clearly defined objective: drive the Houthis, who are backed by Iran, out of the capital Sana’a and stabilise the country under the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi that they support. The Saudi-led coalition imposed a blockade on Yemen, which they hoped would eventually weaken the Houthis, and started a bombing campaign aimed at wrecking the rebels militarily. This campaign was a failure as the Houthis entrenched themselves in the north-west despite the military and economic challenges.
•The only success the Saudis can claim from a tactical point of view is that the Houthis were limited to the north-west. But the Saudi-backed government failed to consolidate its position even in the south. A separatist group, the Southern Transitional Council (STC), has established its rule in southern Yemen. The UAE, which backs the STC, has pulled out of the Saudi-led coalition. All this is happening while the humanitarian situation in Yemen is worsening by the day. The war has killed over 10,000 people and pushed the country to the brink of a famine. According to the UN, 50,000 Yemenis are starving to death and 16 million will go hungry this year. They are depending on food assistance to survive, but the war is making it difficult for aid groups to operate in the country. Many more are dying due to preventable diseases as Yemen lacks proper health infrastructure and essential medicines.
Blockade and bombing
•Finding a solution to such a vexed, multipolar conflict will not be easy. But that shouldn’t prevent the international community from taking steps. Their immediate focus should be on tackling the humanitarian situation in Yemen. This week, the UN held a conference to raise up to $2.41 billion for aid works in Yemen, but got pledges only for $1.35 billion, which means the aid operations would be impacted further. Even the limited humanitarian work cannot be sustained if there is no reprieve in the fighting. The last six years of war prove that the Saudi strategy of blockade and bombing was a failure. The Houthis continued to amass weapons, even technologically advanced drones which they use to attack Saudi targets across the border, despite the blockade, while the Yemeni people continue to suffer.
•The Saudis should ask themselves whether they should continue with a failed strategy while the situation in Yemen keeps worsening. Also, the continued Houthi rocket and drone attacks have left a hole in Saudi Arabia’s national security umbrella. The Houthis are also under pressure. If they want international legitimacy, they should stop fighting and start talking with other stakeholders. A ceasefire is in everybody’s interest but the question is who will blink first. The Biden administration should use its leverage to pressure Riyadh to lift the blockade, a key Houthi demand, as a confidence-building measure and push for talks for a lasting ceasefire. Once a ceasefire between the two main rival blocs is achieved, the U.S. and its regional allies could call for a multilateral conference involving all stakeholders to discuss Yemen’s future. Yemen can find a way out of the current crisis provided the war is brought to an immediate end and the country is given diplomatic assistance.
