📰 How will food reach migrant labourers without ration cards, asks Supreme Court
Centre pulled up for delaying the completion of a national database to identify and register migrant workers
•The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Centre how it intended to take food to crores of migrant labourers who have no ration cards.
•“How will food reach migrant labourers without ration cards?” a Bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and M.R. Shah addressed Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, for the Centre.
•The court said the schemes rolled out so far seemed to cover only ration card holders.
•Ms. Bhati explained that the Centre had kept its best foot forward with the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, which covers 80 crore poor identified as beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act. The scheme provides 5 kg of free food grains to every person for May and June. It intends to help the poor tide over the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic. Eight lakh metric tonnes of food grains have already been given, she added.
•“No doubt you [the Centre] are providing food… No doubt some migrant labourers have ration cards… But we are only bothered about those who do not have them. We want to know about your mechanism to identify and provide food for people who do not have ration cards…” Justice Bhushan addressed the government side.
•Ms. Bhati said the Centre was only in charge of making available or procuring food grains. The States had to distribute the food within their territories. The law officer said the Centre was ready to give the States whatever they wanted.
•Senior advocate Dushyant Dave, who appeared for some activists along with advocate Prashant Bhushan, said the “Centre was leaving them [the poor without ration cards] to the mercy of the States.”
•“Those without ration cards cannot be allowed to die… The economic situation is far more dire now,” Mr. Dave said.
•Mr. Mehta strongly objected to Mr. Dave’s submissions, saying he was “dramatising” the issue.
•In the previous hearing, Mr. Bhushan had submitted that the Centre had last year recorded 8 crore migrant workers without ration cards. The States had identified 2.8 crore of them.
•At this point, the court pulled up the government for delaying the completion of a national database to identify and register migrant workers. The creation of the database portal has remained a non-starter for months now.
•The government said the delay had something to do with the “software”. The database would have helped the Centre work in tandem with State governments to identify migrant labourers and provide them timely welfare during the pandemic.
•The government side said the database would be ready in the next three or four months.
•“Why do you need three or four months? You are only preparing a database portal,” Justice Bhushan asked.
•Ms. Bhati explained that the portal would be an “end-to-end” one, which would not only function as a database but also help in tracking and monitoring benefits meant for migrant labourers.
•“It will be a self-sustaining, self-managing portal,” Mr. Mehta assured.
•Senior advocate Maninder Singh, for Gujarat, said the State had inaugurated its new database portal for migrant workers on June 8. The court asked the Centre to study the “Gujarat model” and see if it could be incorporated nationally.
The International Court of Justice had asked Pakistan to provide a proper forum for appeal against the sentence given to Mr. Jadhav.
•Pakistan’s National Assembly has passed a government-backed bill that will provide the right of appeal to Indian death-row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav, according to a media report.
•The National Assembly passed the ICJ (Review and Re-consideration) Bill, 2020 on Thursday aimed at allowing alleged Indian spy Jadhav to have consular access in line with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) verdict, the Dawn newspaper reported.
•Mr. Jadhav, the 51-year-old retired Indian Navy officer, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April 2017.
•India approached the ICJ against Pakistan for denial of consular access to Mr. Jadhav and challenging the death sentence.
•The Hague-based ICJ ruled in July 2019 that Pakistan must undertake an “effective review and reconsideration” of the conviction and sentence of Mr. Jadhav and also to grant consular access to India without further delay.
•The ICJ, in its 2019 verdict, had asked Pakistan to provide a proper forum for appeal against the sentence given to Mr. Jadhav.
•Speaking after the passage of the bill, Law Minister Farogh Nasim said had they not passed the bill, India would have gone to the UN Security Council and could have moved contempt proceedings against Pakistan in the ICJ.
•Mr. Nasim said the bill was being passed in light of the verdict of the ICJ.
•He said by passing the law, they had proved to the world that Pakistan was a “responsible state”.
•The National Assembly also passed 20 other bills, including the Elections (Amendment) Bill.
•The Opposition members staged a walkout and pointed out the lack of quorum three times, but each time the chair declared the house in order and continued the business, forcing the Opposition to resort to noisy protest.
•The Opposition members gathered in front of the Speaker’s dais and raised slogans.
•Criticising the government’s move, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker Ahsan Iqbal pointed out that it had included the bill in the heavy legislative agenda to provide relief to Mr. Jadhav.
•Mr. Iqbal said it was a person-specific bill and the name of Mr. Jadhav was mentioned in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the bill.
•He said when the country’s law allowed high courts to review the sentences awarded by military courts then what was the need for bringing the law.
•The government had already enforced the law through the promulgation of an ordinance in May last year soon after the ICJ verdict in Mr. Jadhav’s case.
•Amid stiff resistance offered by Opposition parties, the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice on October 21 last year had approved the bill that seeks a review of the conviction of Mr. Jadhav.
•The house also witnessed a rumpus when Pakistan Peoples Party’s Raja Pervez Ashraf protested over remarks of Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who had stated that by opposing the bill to provide relief to Mr. Jadhav, the Opposition members were toeing the Indian narrative, the paper said.
•Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari asked the speaker to provide some time to the members to see the bills.
•He criticised the government for first bringing the bill to provide relief to Mr. Jadhav through an ordinance and then getting it passed through bulldozing the legislation.
•Law minister Nasim said he was shocked to see the Opposition’s behaviour and it seemed that the opposition had not read the ICJ verdict. He said the ICJ had clearly asked Pakistan to make effective legislation to provide the right of review to Mr. Jadhav.
📰 Slowing of projects worries Railways
Changing targets of completion causing embarrassment, says Railway Board
•The lack of progress in key railway projects across the country was resulting in an “embarrassing” situation for the Ministry of Railways during review meetings convened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to the Railway Board.
•In an advisory issued on Thursday to general managers of all Zonal Railways, Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd., IRCON International Ltd., Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation Ltd., and other major construction organisations, the Railway Board said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was monitoring several railway projects through the Pro-Active Governance And Timely Implementation (PRAGATI) portal.
Drone visuals
•Besides assessing data management and analysis, geo-spatial applications and video-conference inputs, Mr. Modi was also viewing videos captured by drones of the project sites to review the progress.
•“It is seen that regular monitoring and follow-up is not being done for these projects and issues discussed before Prime Minister and this results in embarrassing situation for Ministry of Railways. Targets given by Zonal Railways/PSUs during meetings are frequently changed and this gets adversely commented upon during meetings,” the advisory said.
•The Railway Board was referring to 90 projects across India the progress of which were discussed in 36 meetings (from 25/03/2015 to 24/02/2021). The listed projects included the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor (1,856 km), Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla (272 km), Mumbai Urban Transport Project (Phase-II), Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail Project (508 km), Madurai-Thoothukudi via Aruppukottai (144 kms), Angamali-Sabarimala Line (111 km) and others.
•The note said officers working on these projects may be sensitised to avoid procedural delays and follow up with other statutory authorities and State governments for early completion of the projects.
📰 G7 to pledge 1 billion vaccine jabs for world
U.S. President Biden commits 500 million doses while British PM Johnson commits another 100 mn
•British Prime Minister Boris Johnson greeted world leaders at the Group of Seven (G7) summit on Friday, offering elbow bumps to dignitaries gathered for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
•The virus was set to dominate their discussions, with leaders of the wealthy democracies’ club are set to commit to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine shots with struggling countries.
•A commitment from U.S. President Joe Biden to share 500 million doses and one from Mr. Johnson for another 100 million shots set the stage for the G7 meeting in southwest England, where leaders will pivot Friday from their “family photo” by the seaside directly into a session on “Building Back Better From COVID-19.”
•“We’re going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners,” Mr. Biden said. The G7 also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
•The leaders hope the meeting in the resort of Carbis Bay will also energise the global economy. Despite the moody skies, the group walked away their photo as cheerful as children who had just built a sand castle. Led by Mr. Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron threw his arm around Mr. Biden’s shoulder. Talks were animated, but inaudible.
Global minimum tax
•On Friday, they are set to formally embrace a global minimum tax of at least 15% on multinational corporations, following an agreement reached a week ago by their Finance Ministers. The minimum is meant to stop companies from using tax havens to shift profits and to avoid taxes.
•It represents a potential win for the Biden administration, which has proposed a global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects, in addition to creating an alternative that could remove some European countries’ digital services taxes that largely hit U.S. tech firms. But the endorsement from the G7 is just one step in the process; the hope is to get many more countries to sign on — a fraught proposal in nations whose economies are based on attracting business with low corporate taxes.
•For Mr. Johnson, the first G7 summit in two years — last year’s was scuttled by the pandemic — is a chance to set out his vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” as a midsized country with an outsized role in international problem-solving.
•It’s also an opportunity to underscore the U.K-U.S. bond, an alliance often called the “special relationship” — but that Mr. Johnson said he prefers to call the “indestructible relationship.”
•Climate change is also a top issue on the agenda, and hundreds of protesters gathered in Cornwall to urge the leaders to take action. Demonstrators deployed a barge off the coast with two large inflatable figures depicting Mr. Biden and Mr. Johnson on board. At another protest, demonstrators carried flags that read “G7 drowning in promises” and “Action not words.”
•The official summit business kicked off on Friday, with the customary formal greeting and a socially distanced group photo.
📰 Finance Ministry tightens belt
Tells Ministries to cut ‘controllable’ expenditure by 20%
•The Finance Ministry has told ministries to slash ‘controllable’ spending by 20% and drop other wasteful expenditure, introducing fresh austerity steps amid concerns with breaching the fiscal deficit target for the year following the second COVID-19 wave.
•Expenditure related to containment of COVID-19 is excluded from the scope of this order. A suggestive list of object heads of controllable expenditure has been shared, that includes advertising and publicity, foreign and domestic travel, office and administrative expenses and overtime allowance.
•“The government has decided that all ministries take steps to curb wasteful expenditure and aim for a 20% reduction in controllable expenditure,” the Department of Expenditure wrote in a memo, approved by Finance Secretary T.V. Somanathan, to all ministries.
Base year
•Urging departments to take steps to curtail all avoidable non-scheme expenditure, the memo has told them to take the expenditure incurred in 2019-20 as the base for this purpose.
•The Expenditure Department has been directed to review the progress in the matter. The other items where spending may be controlled are general grants-in-aid, royalty payments, publications, rents and taxes, ration costs, clothing and tentage, minor works and maintenance.
•Separately, ministries have also been told to expedite appraisals and clearances for schemes in their domains that need to be extended beyond March this year. Ministries that are yet to seek the requisite expenditure clearances have been given till July to do so, in order to secure funds.
•“No further extension to ongoing schemes and release of funds will be allowed,” said the Expenditure Department.
📰 Monsoon malady: On Mumbai’s decrepit buildings
Mumbai must urgently replace decrepit buildings to prevent houses collapsing in rain
•The monsoon over the greater Mumbai region has come to be characterised by the unsettling annual spectacle of collapsing buildings, and this year is proving to be no different. An unsafe multi-storeyed building in a core area of the city has collapsed on to another, leaving at least 11 people dead and exposing once again, the decrepit base of dwellings in India’s much-romanticised economic powerhouse. The disaster has brought in its wake the familiar litany of accusations, of people occupying unsafe and illegal buildings, and civic authorities failing to act in time. Mumbai’s Mayor Kishori Pednekar has responded to criticism with a helpless exhortation to the city administration to remove dangerous structures. Going beyond these predictable impulses, the overburdened city needs a time-bound and accountable system of ensuring the safety of its housing stock. Coinciding with this year’s monsoon, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority identified 21 structures in Mumbai as being extremely dangerous, with an advisory to over 700 occupants to move to transit accommodation, while reconstruction is undertaken. Understandably, the occupants are reluctant, since the alternative housing is far away from their education and work locations. This is a conundrum that Maharashtra will have to address, treating it as a crisis that will only be aggravated by changes to monsoon rainfall intensity over time.
•Coastal Maharashtra sits in the pathway of extreme monsoon weather events, which are forecast to increase in frequency due to ongoing warming of the Arabian Sea. Scientists including those of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology have proposed, in the context of the deluge a few years ago, that accurate monsoon forecasting over central India, incorporating changes to sea surface temperature, would help governments prepare better to save lives and agriculture. For Mumbai, what this means is to accelerate its repair and rehabilitation programme for weak structures and replace those that cannot be salvaged. The city desperately needs channels for huge volumes of water to flow out, and a plan to create new urban wetlands where feasible to store the precipitation. A rejuvenated Mithi river — its planned clean-up has been delayed by the COVID-19 crisis — could offer some relief, but more waterbodies are needed. And it will take a mass housing programme to make life safer for the thousands in hovels. A far-sighted plan to shift people from squalid buildings to modern ones is also a health imperative; such a start must be made with the most dangerous structures. It is also unseemly for political parties to use a disaster such as the one in Malad as a cudgel against the government, considering that Mumbai’s civic base lies neglected over the decades regardless of who ruled.
📰 Refocused vaccination campaigns are possible
Local planning will need to go hand-in-hand with equitable plans at the national and global levels
•Poornima and Ashok, 80-year-old parents of two and grandparents of three, have been hunkered down in their Mumbai apartment for a year. When a COVID-19 vaccine became available in March 2021, they went to the local hospital to get their first dose of the Serum Institute of India’s Covishield vaccine — the vaccine that was supposed to save the world. Seeing long lines and not wanting to risk being infected while waiting to be vaccinated, they returned home. This happened again the next day before a very helpful staff member of the World Health Organization (WHO) stepped in to help, taking them to a health centre early one morning and making sure they did not have to wait in a line to get vaccinated. This played out again in April 2021 for their second dose. This couple was lucky.
Where the focus must be
•As we look ahead to what is promised to be a transition from a lack of vaccine supply to one of greater availability, the plan must be to prioritise people like the two octogenarians in Mumbai — older adults who remain unvaccinated, and very much at risk. Ensure we vaccinate them before we open vaccination to younger adults. This would prioritise people based on the risk of severe disease, and need — essential principles if we plan with justice in mind.
•Local governments and municipalities should also prioritise vaccines for the historically marginalised by focusing through the lens of equity and justice. What does it mean to focus through a lens of equity and justice? It would mean ensuring that the vaccine roll-out does not result in avoidable differences in vaccine uptake — and hence preventable disease and death — between marginalised groups and the rest of the country. It would require prioritising the poor, religious minorities, socially disadvantaged castes, Adivasi communities, those living in remote areas, and women.
In Chhattisgarh
•One example of an equity-focused vaccination plan came from the Chhattisgarh government. The plan prioritised ration card holders, specifically because they are poor, and often live in multi-generation, larger households, putting them at higher risk of infection. They also often lack access to mobile phones and the Internet, which are necessary to register for vaccination. Though the High Court asked that the plan be modified to provide vaccines to the general public alongside ration card holders, we would propose prioritisation of the marginalised when vaccine supply is limited in order to minimise the risk of severe outcomes due to COVID-19. WHO’s strategic advisory group of experts on immunisation recommend prioritising sociodemographic groups at significantly higher risk of severe disease or death (for vaccination) in the context of limited supply. We should ensure that we remove barriers to vaccination for the most vulnerable in India to minimise preventable disease and deaths.
•India depended, and continues to depend on the AstraZeneca vaccine because it was stable in a refrigerator for longer periods than mRNA vaccines. Presumably, this was so that vaccines could be made available where freezers do not exist. But it also enables the vaccine to be transported in vaccine carriers, and taken to the people where they are. In Indian villages, Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Auxiliary Nurse-Midwives (ANMs) have vast experience and expertise with campaign-style pulse polio vaccination and newborn vaccination; their expertise should be harnessed to take vaccines to villagers.
•Urban slums and neighbourhoods, where socially disadvantaged caste and community groups, and migrants from Adivasi communities often reside, have poor access to and low levels of trust in the health-care system. Vaccines should be provided in camps or door-to-door in such areas. Appropriately, local governments are considering providing vaccines to older adults in door-to-door campaigns. A similar approach — vaccination camps where people live and work — could also greatly enhance vaccine uptake among essential workers and the poor. We need to ensure that those who work for daily wages are able to get the vaccine without having to forego work or pay.
•Adivasi communities also reside in remote and forested areas that are also being ravaged by waves of death, presumably due to COVID-19; vaccine distribution should be prioritised to districts where they live. In India today, perhaps the most marginalised are religious minorities, and, specifically, poor Muslim communities. Vaccine distribution should also be prioritised to Muslim-dominated tier-3 towns across the country. An explicit focus on justice would prioritise the engagement of trusted spokespeople to engage in effective risk communication with vulnerable and marginalised communities, and to build trust in the vaccine.
Women-only vaccine days
•We need women-only vaccine days to ensure that women know that they are being prioritised. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, India was one of few locations where mortality was higher in women than in men, and we barely understand the drivers of this observation. In the current pandemic, it is very possible that if women are not explicitly prioritised, economic pressures to protect the (often male) breadwinner in families, and the historically marginalised stature of women in society, will end up resulting in gender inequities in vaccine uptake — early signs of exactly this have been recently reported.
•Unfortunately, our data during the pandemic do not allow us to examine whether gender, caste, religious, and indigenous identities have impacted the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection or death. Despite global calls for better surveillance, including among vulnerable groups, India does not regularly report even gender-disaggregated data. Despite crowd-sourced efforts to collect and make data available, reporting of geographic and other meta-data for tests conducted and sequenced samples is variable across laboratories and States. Better leadership to standardise and enforce meta-data collection and timely reporting is essential to inform data-driven interventions and prioritised resource mobilisation.
Equity and justice
•Local planning will need to go hand-in-hand with a refocus on equity and justice at the national and global levels as well. Nationally, people have recognised that digital apps for registration are a recipe for inequity along age, gender, and economic dimensions, and reports have highlighted the plight of those on the wrong side of the digital divide. CoWIN data that are available to date show that vaccination rates have been inequitable between tribal and non-tribal areas, for example. Going forward, let us focus on first doing no harm — get people vaccinated to save the lives most at risk. At the national level, the recent decision to procure vaccines centrally and make COVID-19 vaccines available free of cost through the public system goes a long way towards ensuring equity and justice. WHO has been tireless in its call for the urgent need for vaccine equity at the global level. In an ideal world, vaccines would be procured and equitably distributed to countries based on need through the COVAX facility. But instead, wealthy countries have once again, as during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, secured more doses than they need to vaccinate every member of their population, and even pre-ordered booster doses. This leaves only poor countries to be dependent on supplies through COVAX, and they find themselves at the end of the line. This is a wake-up call for setting up vaccine distribution systems with equity in mind for the next pandemic. At this time, unfortunately, poor countries are at the mercy of the European Union and the United States, who need to donate vaccines now. They need to vaccinate the world alongside their own communities — they need to vaccinate grandparents everywhere alongside children and adolescents within their borders. Work during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic showed that willingness among the U.S. public to donate vaccines to the poorer countries was appreciable. Today as well, surveys show that U.S. public support for immediate donation of COVID-19 vaccine exists. Doses need to be donated to COVAX now so that they can be distributed to countries based on need. Every life matters in this world and world leaders need to follow the lead of WHO and embody global solidarity in this pandemic.
•Refocused, rejuvenated local, national, and global vaccination campaigns are possible. Let us ensure that we plan now so that we get those shots in arms when they are available. Let us get to work in India.
