📰 Centre amends decades-old policy on suspension of family pension
When spouse is charged with murder of employee, next of kin to get family pension
•The Union government has amended a decades-old policy of suspending family pension to the spouse of a deceased government employee, when he/she is charged with murdering the employee or abetting the commission of such an offence.
•Under the new rule, other eligible members of the family would be entitled to receive the family pension till the disposal of the criminal proceedings against the spouse of the deceased employee. In case, the spouse is proved not guilty of the murder charge, the family pension would be payable to him/her from the date of acquittal.
•In accordance with the provisions under the Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 1972, if a person who is eligible to receive family pension on death of a government employee or a pensioner is charged with offences of murdering the government employee/pensioner or for abetting in the commission of such an offence, the payment of family pension shall remain suspended till the conclusion of the criminal proceedings.
•In such cases, family pension is neither paid to the person who is charged with the offence nor to any other eligible member of the family till the conclusion of the case.
•If on conclusion of the criminal proceedings the person concerned is convicted for the murder or abetment of the murder of a government servant, he/she would be debarred from receiving the family pension.
•In that case, the family pension would become payable to other eligible member of the family from the date of death of the government servant. But if the person concerned is subsequently acquitted of the criminal charge, the family pension becomes payable to that person from the date of the death of the employee/pensioner.
•However, denying payment of family pension to any other member of the family, particularly dependent children or parents who are not charged with the offence, till the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, was not considered justified. Since finalisation of the criminal proceedings may take a long time and the eligible children or parents of the deceased may suffer for want of financial support by way of family pension, the issue was taken up by the Department of Pension & Pensioners Welfare with the Department of Legal Affairs for a review.
•It has now been decided that in cases where a person eligible to receive family pension is charged with the offence of murdering the government servant or for abetting the commission of such an offence and the payment of family pension to him/her remains suspended, family pension may be allowed to other eligible member of the family till the conclusion of the case.
•In case the other eligible number is a minor child of the diseased government servant, the family pension to such should be payable through a duly appointed guardian.
8.5 time increase in children orphaned in April compared to previous month
•As many as 1.19 lakh children in India lost their primary caregiver (parent or custodial grandparent) due to COVID-19, placing the country at the third spot after Mexico (1.4 lakh) and Brazil (1.3 lakh), according to estimates in a new study published in The Lancet.
•Globally, this figure stood at 11.34 lakh between March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021.
•Children who lost either a mother or a father were 10.42 lakh, including 1.16 lakh in India.
•The study developed estimates of pandemic-associated orphanhood and caregiver deaths using excess mortality and deaths for 21 countries that accounted for 76•4% of global deaths between March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021. It then used these findings to develop global extrapolations. It was conducted by researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control’s COVID-19 Response Team, the Imperial College, London, the University of Oxford and the World Bank among others.
•More than 15 lakh children around the world had lost at least one primary caregiver or a co-residing grandparent. This figure stood at 1.86 lakh for India.
•Though India ranks third in absolute numbers, its rate of loss of primary caregiver per 1,000 children at 0.3 was much less than other countries like South Africa (5•1), Mexico (3•5), Brazil (2•4), Colombia (2•3), Iran (1•7), the U.S. (1•5), Argentina (1•1) and Russia (1•0).
•There were up to five times more children with deceased fathers than mothers. For example, in India, an estimated 25,500 children lost their mother and 90,751 their father and 12 children both parents.
•The rapid increase in COVID-19-associated deaths from February to April, 2021 in India was associated with an 8•5-times increase in the number of children orphaned or losing caregivers in April as compared to March, according to the study.
•The study underlines that such children are at greater risk of family separation and institutionalisation and recommends investments towards strengthening family based care, with the help of a surviving caregiver or through kinship, foster care or adoption.
📰 India is party to 26 bilateral pacts to fight drug trafficking
NCB coordinates with international organisations for sharing information and intelligence
•India has signed 26 bilateral pacts, 15 memoranda of understanding and two agreements on security cooperation with different countries for combating illicit trafficking of narcotic, drugs and psychotropic substances, besides chemical precursors, according to a Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) reply in the Lok Sabha.
•The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) coordinated with various international organisations for sharing information and intelligence to combat transnational drug trafficking. They included the SAARC Drug Offences Monitoring Desk; Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS); Colombo Plan; Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); ASEAN Senior Officials on Drug Matters (ASOD); Bay of Bengal Initiative For Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Co-Operation (BIMSTEC); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), it said.
•Sharp vigil, effective surveillance, public cooperation, source-based intelligence, sensitisation of field officials and associated measures had resulted in a gradual increase in the registration of a number of drug trafficking related cases in the country, the MHA stated.
•“For coordination among various Central and State agencies, the Narco Coordination Centre (NCORD) mechanism was set up by the MHA in year 2016 for effective drug law enforcement. This NCORD system has been restructured into a four-tier scheme up to district level on July 29, 2019, for better coordination,” it pointed out.
Launch of e-portal ‘SIMS’
•A Joint Coordination Committee with the NCB Director General as its chairman was set up on July 19, 2019, to monitor the investigation into cases involving large seizures. “For digitisation of pan-India drug seizure data, the MHA has launched an e-portal called ‘SIMS’ (Seizure Information Management System) in 2019 for all the drug law enforcement agencies under the mandate of Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS)...,” the MHA noted.
•Besides the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the Border Security Force, Sashastra Seema Bal, Indian Coast Guard, Railway Protection Force and the National Investigation Agency have also been empowered under the NDPS Act for making drug seizures. In order to strengthen surveillance along the border for preventing cross-border drug smuggling, the forces were using latest gadgets and equipment, it added.
📰 UNESCO strips Liverpool of its world heritage status
UNESCO found new buildings, including a football stadium, undermined the attractiveness of the English city’s Victorian docks
•The English city of Liverpool has been removed from UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites after the United Nations' cultural agency found new buildings,including a football stadium, undermined the attractiveness of its Victorian docks.
•Liverpool was named a World Heritage Site in 2004, joining cultural landmarks such as the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The city is only the third place to be removed from the prestigious list.
•After a vote in China by members of its World Heritage Committee, UNESCO said on Twitter that Liverpool should be deleted from the international cultural organisation's list.
•Joanne Anderson, the Liverpool mayor, said the decision was"incomprehensible" and she hopes to appeal.
•"I’m hugely disappointed and concerned by this decision to delete Liverpool’s World Heritage status, which comes a decade after UNESCO last visited the city to see it with their own eyes," she said. "We will be working with government to examine whether we can appeal."
•The only other sites stripped previously of the title are a wildlife sanctuary in Oman in 2007 after poaching and habitat loss and the Dresden Elbe valley in Germany in 2009 when a four-lane motorway bridge was built over the river.
•The heritage label gives historic sites access to UN conservation funding as well as featuring in tourist guidebooks across the world.
•The threat of being delisted has hung over Liverpool since 2012 after UNESCO warned that new buildings had changed the city’s skyline and was destroying the heritage value of its waterfront.
📰 Water as woe: On Mumbai’s annual mayhem
Mumbai cannot manage its flooding without a new deal for drainage and housing
•The revival of the monsoon has overwhelmed Mumbai and its suburbs once again, paralysing life, disrupting drinking water supplies, and exposing the parlous state of its infrastructure. It is clear that the volume and duration of monsoonal rain are turning unpredictable, and intermittent torrents, with crippling impacts on cities will become more frequent, influenced by a warming climate. Strengthening that theory, three weather stations in Mumbai recorded a staggering level of rainfall in one week from July 13, ranging from 628 mm in Mahalaxmi to 958.5 mm in Santa Cruz, the latter experiencing a peak of 234.9 mm on July 18. The inundation has taken a toll of at least 32 lives, and the majority of victims died in landslides that crushed their slum houses at Mahul in Chembur. These deaths of despair recur almost every year, soon to be forgotten in fair weather in a city that prides itself on its enterprise and resilience. In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the monsoon malady poses a double jeopardy, adding to the economic misery of the vulnerable who live in hovels in suburban landslide-prone locations. Such dire conditions stand in contrast to Maharashtra’s keen desire to keep Mumbai as the country’s pre-eminent financial metropolis. The limitations in its infrastructure to accommodate intense monsoons, and its notorious inability to provide affordable inner city housing to the less affluent and even the middle class, are making other cities look more attractive.
•The catastrophic floods in Mumbai and Chennai in 2005 and 2015, respectively, resulted in the emergence of a management plan drawn up by the National Disaster Management Authority and later, the first dedicated storm water drainage manual by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. But such initiatives can do little if States, which have both power and responsibility over city affairs, do not feel compelled to address the challenges posed by urbanisation. In fact, Mumbai’s inability to manage recurrent floods and the needs of a massive slum population was highlighted by a fact-finding committee appointed by the Maharashtra government after the 2005 deluge, with calls to liberate the city’s rivers and lakes from various impediments, enable perennial flow in the Mithi river, create fresh holding lakes for excess waters, and rehabilitate those who live in risky locations. There is a need to clear the air on the follow-up to these and other expert recommendations, which the State can do through a white paper. Mumbai’s neglect is not unique, though, and most big cities are amorphously expanding to the suburbs where basic infrastructure including drainage is absent, and lakes and rivers are heavily encroached, often with political support. Such unplanned growth, with no defences against weather disasters, is leaving cities a lot poorer.
📰 A cardinal omission in the COVID-19 package
The Government’s COVID-19 health package II again overlooks the need for and availability of health human resources
•Those who are either old enough or have read the history of health services in India, will testify that in the mid-1980s, there were a number of government health-care facilities across the country, with newly constructed buildings, impeccable linoleum floorings, imported state-of-the-art medical equipment such as infant radiant warmers and at times ‘foreign made’ cars/jeeps (for the field visits of health staff).
•These facilities had benefited from generous financial and commodity assistance as part of the overseas development assistance (ODA) from many well-intentioned international donors. However, in the year to follow, the number of patients attending these facilities continued to be low and the equipment remained packed and stacked in store rooms. Years later, the vehicles were repurposed for use in some national programmes such as polio elimination and blindness control. Most of such upgraded facilities had failed to meet the health needs of the poor people. A key reason was that while infrastructure was upgraded, there was perennial shortage of health staff, i.e., doctors, nurses and others, which was supposed to be recruited by the governments. Four decades later, in the COVID-19 pandemic response, the Indian government appears to repeat the same mistake.
Centre’s financial package
•On July 8, 2021, the Union government announced the “India COVID-19 Emergency Response and Health Systems Preparedness Package: Phase II”, with the stated purpose to boost health infrastructure and prepare for a possible third wave of COVID-19. Through this financial package, there is plan to increase COVID-19 beds, improve the oxygen availability and supply, create buffer stocks of essential medicines; purchase equipment and strengthen paediatric beds. However, the package barely has any attention on improving the availability of health human resources.
•Even before the novel coronavirus pandemic, as reported in rural health statistics and the national health profile (both official government documents), there are vacancies for staff in government health facilities, which range from 30% to 80%, depending upon the sub-group of medical officers, specialist doctors to nurses, laboratory technicians, pharmacists and radiographers, amongst others. In addition, there are wide inter-State variations, with States that have poor health indicators with the highest vacancies.
Workforce shortage
•The Government seems to have recognised the gaps in health infrastructure; however, the shortage in the health workforce is barely being discussed. An intensive care unit bed or ventilator is no use unless there are trained staff to run these equipment and qualified doctors and nurses to attend to patients. Sixteen months into the pandemic, though there has been occasional recognition of the shortage in the health workforce and a few commitments to fill the vacancies; very few are known to fructify, even partially, at both the Union and State levels. As an example, the Union Ministry of Health in May 2020, announced recruiting 300 epidemiologists; it is not known what the status is. Among the States which announced filling vacancies of health staff, attention has mostly been narrow — on select subgroups such doctors or nurses, and not holistic, and promises remain unfulfilled.
•The COVID-19 package II (which focuses on health infrastructure strengthening) needs to be urgently supplemented by another plan and a similar financial package (with shared Union and State government funding) to fill the existing vacancies of health staff at all levels. Alongside, an objective approach to assess the mid-term health human resource needs could be the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS), which prescribe the human resources and infrastructure needed to make various types of government health facilities functional. Once such a need is assessed, the Union and State governments would have to come up with another financial package for human resources to complement the COVID-19 health package II. That alone can make health facilities functional in a sustainable manner.
The broader picture
•Second, the COVID-19 pandemic should not be seen in the narrow sense of an infrastructure shortage for the health sector. Even after being supplemented by another package for health human resource, the pandemic should be used as an opportunity to prepare India’s health system for the future. As an initial step in this direction, the new Union Minister of Health should consider getting a comprehensive review of actions taken on the key decisions and Government promises made (to strengthen health services) since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
•Alongside, the progress on key policy decisions, for the last few years, to strengthen India’s health system, including those in India’s national health policy of 2017, need to be objectively scrutinised. These two sets of policy decisions and announcements should be reviewed and progress monitored, through a meeting of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare, of which the Health Ministers of the States are members. This should not wait for the pandemic to get over and should be done now. It is only if the past policy promises and commitments are followed through and implemented that India’s health system could be strengthened from what it is now.
•India’s health system will not benefit from ad hoc and a patchwork of one or other small packages. It essentially needs some transformational changes. The COVID-19 package II appears insufficient and seems to be based upon a misguided assumption that infrastructure is equal to health services. Governments (both Union and State) seem to be on the path to repeat four decade-old mistakes. While international donors could be excused for being bereft of ground realities, what would the excuse for the Government be?
📰 Prosecutor, not persecutor
The public prosecutor has an ethical obligation to balance the interests of the victims, the accused, and society
•Father Stan Swamy’s recent death while waiting for bail has prompted an outcry among lawyers, activists and concerned citizens. While those who admired him were processing their grief, the same National Investigation Agency (NIA) Court rejected bail for one of his co-accused, Anand Teltumbde. Father Swamy’s arrest under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the denial of bail to him and others accused in the Bhima-Koregaon case have highlighted issues related to police power, pretrial detention, and draconian anti-terror legislation. However, the role of prosecutors in perpetuating the dominant attitude towards undertrial detention has been largely ignored.
Role of public prosecutors
•The NIA Court order rejecting Father Swamy’s request for bail stated that the prosecutor submitted various pieces of evidence to prove a prima facie case against the accused. The prosecutor argued that the court must give precedence to the interest of the community/society over the right to liberty even though by this stage, Father Swamy’s need for medical attention was apparent. He had Parkinson’s disease, his hearing was impaired and he had contracted COVID-19. Was an 84-year-old man in such a precarious state of health a threat to the community’s interests? Was there any risk of him absconding or tampering with evidence if released? The prosecutor’s stand in the case as mechanically presenting the investigating agency’s case while zealously demanding prolonged detention of the undertrial throws up vexing questions about the role of public prosecutors in the criminal justice system.
•Public prosecutors are influential at every stage of a trial. They decide what offences the accused person should be charged with, whether to seek pretrial custody, and what sentence to ask for. However, public prosecutors, unlike defence counsel, have an ethical obligation to seek justice balancing the interests of the victims of crime, society, and those accused of crimes. They represent the public and are not mere mouthpieces for law enforcement agencies. The Supreme Court in Sheo Nandan Paswan v. State of Bihar (1986) cautioned that even though prosecutors have a duty to represent the executive for trying the offender, and it is broadly their responsibility to see that the trial results in conviction, they need not be extremely concerned about the outcome of the case. They act as officers of the court and are obliged to ensure that the accused person is not unfairly treated. The High Court of Delhi, in Jitendra Kumar v. State (1999), warned that, “In performance of his duty he can prosecute the accused, but he cannot assume the role of a persecutor. It is no part of his duty to secure conviction at all costs... The Public Prosecutor should act fairly and impartially and must be conscious of the rights of the accused. He is not only required to conduct prosecution case... but [also] respect and protect the rights of the accused.”
•The duty of a public prosecutor to not assume the role of persecutor is vital in trials under special statutes like the UAPA, which water down fair trial guarantees. Undertrial detention becomes a convenient means to punish those accused under the UAPA without convicting them. Such trials are long-drawn-out, and the conviction rate is low. In 2019, in 11% of UAPA cases (pending from previous years and filed in 2019), the police closed the case because of insufficient evidence or because the accused was untraceable. Charge sheets were filed in only 9% of the UAPA cases. The conviction rate for UAPA cases was 29.2% compared to an average conviction rate of 50.4% for crimes committed under the Indian Penal Code.
Narrative building
•Public prosecutors also have a role in narrative building. Since they present the state’s case in criminal trials, they build narratives of criminality and criminalisation. Daniel Richman describes them as “adjudicative gatekeepers” who play a key role in translating criminal “law on the books” to criminal “law in action.” Such narratives are especially pernicious in cases involving alleged terrorist activities and “anti-nationals”, where anxieties about the security of the state already haunt the imagination of those in the criminal justice system and ordinary citizens. Thus, public prosecutors who support criminal justice reform can be a powerful force for altering the culture of undertrial detention.
•The responses of the prosecutors and law enforcement agencies reflect the carceral logic that buttresses undertrial detention. Two-thirds of India’s prison population comprises undertrial prisoners. This reflects the embedding of this carceral logic in the architecture of law enforcement and manifests in prosecutors demanding prolonged custody of the accused. Reversing course will require a re-imagination of the objectives of the criminal justice system and cultural change.
📰 India must directly engage with Taliban 2.0
The time for hesitant, backchannel parleys is over and New Delhi has to begin ‘open talks’ as it is a strategic necessity
•With the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in process, New Delhi has decided to ramp down its civilian presence in the war-torn country, bracing for a full-blown civil war. India has ‘temporarily’ closed its consulate in Kandahar and evacuated its diplomats and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) personnel stationed there. This follows the decision to suspend operations in the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Herat. As a result, India today is left with its Embassy in Kabul and the consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif.
The Taliban’s sway
•These developments indicate two things: New Delhi’s decision to partially “withdraw” from Afghanistan shows that betting only on the government in Kabul was a big mistake, and that New Delhi realises the threat Taliban poses to Indian assets and presence in Afghanistan. Either way, India’s Afghan policy is at a major crossroads; to safeguard its civilian assets there as well as to stay relevant in the unfolding ‘great game’ in and around Afghanistan, New Delhi must fundamentally reset its Afghanistan policy.
•India must, in its own national interest, begin ‘open talks’ with the Taliban before it is too late. The time for hesitant, half-embarrassed backchannel parleys is over. However, when I say it is time to ‘openly’ talk to the Taliban, I do not mean according recognition to the Taliban. In any case, what is there to ‘recognise’ at this point as far as the Taliban is concerned? It is only one of the parties in Afghanistan — it is neither the Afghan government, nor a part of it. Not yet. But with over a third of Afghanistan’s more than 400 districts under Taliban control, the talk-to-the-Taliban-option is indeed the best of the many less than perfect options available to India.
•To be fair, New Delhi has been steadily abandoning its puritanical policy towards the Taliban over the past few years. In late 2018, when Moscow organised a conference which had the Taliban, members of the Afghan High Peace Council, and other countries from the region in attendance, India sent a ‘non-official delegation’ of two retired diplomats to Moscow. Thereafter, in September last year, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar joined the inaugural session of the intra-Afghan negotiations in Doha. Last month, reports indicated that India has started reaching out to the Taliban which was indirectly confirmed by the Ministry of External Affairs when it said “we are in touch with various stakeholders in pursuance of our long-term commitment towards development and reconstruction in Afghanistan”.
•However, such half-hearted, half-embarrassed, ideologically-hesitant meandering outreach to the Taliban is hardly sufficient to safeguard Indian interests in a rapidly shifting Afghan geopolitical landscape. Open dialogue with the Taliban should no longer be a taboo; it is a strategic necessity. Therefore, our outreach must now be direct and unambiguous. But before I explain why I say so, let me briefly analyse New Delhi’s rationale for the indirect approach to the Taliban.
Rationale for indirect talks
•There are at least five possible reasons why New Delhi appears to want to keep the Taliban engagement slow and behind closed doors. For one, if New Delhi chooses to engage the Taliban directly, it could make Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, thus far India’s trusted partner, uneasy. This could potentially nudge him to look towards China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for national security and personal political survival. So, in New Delhi’s calculation, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Two, decision makers in New Delhi are also faced with the dilemma of who to talk to within the Taliban given that it is hardly a monolith. New Delhi may have little access to the members of the Quetta Shura or the fighters on the ground in Afghanistan. So, the only option might be the Doha-based Taliban negotiators or leaders such as Abdul Salam Zaeef whose beef with Pakistan is well known. Third, given the global opprobrium that Taliban faced in its earlier avatar and the lack of evidence about whether the outfit is a changed lot today, New Delhi might not want to court the Taliban so soon. More so, there is little clarity about what the Taliban’s real intentions are going forward and what they would do after ascending to power in Kabul. Finally, it would not be totally unreasonable to consider the possibility of Pakistan acting out against India in Kashmir if India were to establish deeper links with the Taliban.
•New Delhi’s rationale is not entirely erroneous. And yet, there are more compelling reasons why India should engage with the Taliban more proactively and openly. For one, whether we like it or not, the Taliban, one way or another, is going to be part of the political scheme of things in Afghanistan, and unlike in 1996, a large number of players in the international community are going to recognise/negotiate/do business with the Taliban. So, basic statecraft requires that we follow that route as well. Making peace with the fait accompli is not always a bad thing especially in the absence of better alternatives.
The Pakistan factor
•Two, the Taliban today is looking for regional and global partners for recognition and legitimacy especially in the neighbourhood. So the less proactive the Indian engagement with the Taliban, the stronger Pakistan-Taliban relations would become. Put differently, and bluntly, letting the Pakistani deep state exclusively deal with the Taliban is an inherently bad idea.
•Third, even though the Taliban is widely considered to be propped up by Pakistan, it would be a mistake to think that the Taliban will continue to be Pakistan’s servile followers upon gaining power in Kabul. A worldly-wise and internationally-exposed Taliban 2.0 would develop its own agency and sovereign claims including perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of the Durand Line separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, something Pakistan was always concerned about. More so, contrary to what many analysts assume, a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, next door to its Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan-infested tribal areas, may not really end up becoming a happy space for Pakistan. In other words, the Taliban would want to hedge their bets on how far to listen to Pakistan. That is precisely when New Delhi should engage the Taliban.
•Four, India needs to court all parties in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, if it wants to ensure its security of its civilian assets there. It makes neither strategic nor economic sense to withdraw from Afghanistan after spending over $3 billion, something the Government seems to be prepared to do. Withdrawing from Afghanistan now because the Taliban is on the rise (and we do not want to have relations with them) will go on to highlight how weak our strategic resolve is.
•Five, India’s outreach to the Taliban should have started years ago before the Taliban had many suitors as they do today. So, if India is not proactive in Afghanistan at least now, late as it is, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and China will emerge as the shapers of Afghanistan’s political and geopolitical destiny, which for sure will be detrimental to Indian interests there.
Open the congested frontier
•Finally, and perhaps most importantly, opening up the congested north-western frontier is key to bringing India’s continental grand strategy on an even keel, a process New Delhi has already started. Backchannel talks with Pakistan and a consequent ceasefire on the Line of Control, political dialogue with the mainstream Kashmiri leadership, secret parleys with Taliban all indicate that New Delhi is opening up its congested north-western frontier. Proactive engagement of the Taliban will provide this effort with more strategic heft.
•Consider this. Except for the strategic foray into the Indo-Pacific, India today is strategically boxed in the region and it must break out of it. Afghanistan could provide, if not immediately, India with such a way out.
•In the end, India’s engagement with the Taliban may or may not achieve much, but non-engagement will definitely hurt Indian interests. In an ideal world, the Taliban, given its bloody past, should not have been anywhere near governing Afghanistan, but it is neither an ideal situation nor is the Taliban stoppable from gaining power in Kabul. So New Delhi must exorcise the demons of IC-814 (the December 1999 hijacking) from its collective memory and engage with the Taliban 2.0 — there is no need to be secretive or embarrassed about it. And yet, open engagement of the Taliban is neither tolerating nor accepting the condemnable atrocities committed by the Taliban.
📰 A compromise amid uncertainty
The OPEC deal to step up crude production will ease rising prices and balance domestic and global priorities
•For now, the risk has receded that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said to hold the world’s largest untapped crude reserves, might quit the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The end to the UAE’s weeks-long impasse with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest crude exporters, and Russia, a non-OPEC state, was brought about by Sunday’s deal. Under its terms, the UAE’s demand for an increase in its oil output quotas, in recognition of its higher production capacity, has been conceded. The baselines have also been raised for Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq and Kuwait.
The compromise
•The bloc will now step up crude production by 400,000 barrels a day starting in August. The deal will extend until the end of 2022. The output boost is in response to rising oil prices in the wake of the rebound in economic activity following the easing of lockdown restrictions and increased COVID-19 vaccinations in different parts of the world. Sunday’s deal has also extended until the end of next year the broad terms of the unprecedented production cuts the bloc enforced in April 2020. The cartel cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day (mbd) as oil demand fell from 100 mbd to 91.1 mbd and prices plummeted from $70 in January 2020 to around $20 in April. The bloc has since gradually rolled back these steep cuts and hopes to return production to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022.
•The UAE has played hard ball during the bloc’s attempts to deal with the pandemic-induced price volatility. In December, when OPEC+ tried to ease production cuts, the UAE insisted that members who diluted the original output reductions should compensate through even steeper cuts, following its own example. Thus, while the internal rift has been resolved for now, the danger cannot be ruled out of an increasingly economically and politically assertive UAE flexing its muscle. Any potential break with the bloc would undoubtedly prove far more consequential for the OPEC than the 2019 exit of Qatar.
•Bilateral relations between the traditional allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have been especially strained since the UAE established diplomatic ties with Israel last year and withdrew troops from the Saudi-spearheaded war in Yemen the year before. A more recent arena of tension is the tariffs Riyadh has imposed on imports from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council. Saudi Arabia will now exclude from the GCC tariff agreement goods made by companies with a workforce of less than 25% of locals and industrial products with less than 40% of added value after their transformation process. Home to a predominantly migrant population, the move could hit the UAE especially hard.
Peak in oil demand
•The latest OPEC compromise echoes growing recognition of the delicate balance between competing domestic and global priorities. Foremost is their eagerness to maximise the returns on their substantial hydrocarbon resources, amid growing speculation of a peak in oil demand within sight. The OPEC, echoing other assessments, forecast in 2016 that a strict implementation of the Paris climate accord could see the demand for oil peak by 2030, owing to the proliferation of alternative fuels and electric cars. Conversely, its report last year pins hopes on population growth and expansion of the middle class for continued increase in oil demand. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which in 2016 forecast a continued rise in oil consumption until the 2040s, has more recently hinted at about 5% rise or fall relative to the demand before the pandemic within a decade. The OPEC’s other concerns are the stabilisation of world oil prices without jeopardising national expenditure programmes, and the diversification of economies in anticipation of the unfolding global energy transition. Unity would be of the essence amid this uncertainty.
