📰 Union Cabinet gives nod to raise women’s marriage age to 21
The decision is based on the recommendation of a four-member task force led by former Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitly.
•The Centre has decided to raise the legal age of marriage of women from 18 to 21 years and is likely to move legislative amendments in the ongoing winter session of Parliament.
•The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared a proposal to bring uniformity in the marriageable age of men and women, sources told news agency PTI on Thursday, adding that a Bill to amend the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006, will be introduced during this session.
•The proposed Bill may also contain amendments to various personal laws relating to marriage of various communities to ensure a uniform age of marriage.
•As of now, the legal age of women to get married is 18, while that for men is 21.
No comment from Minister
•Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani and Secretary, Ministry of Child Development, Indevar Pandey, refused to comment on the subject on the sidelines of an event.
•Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in his Independence Day speech that the government would soon take a decision on the age of marriage of women. This followed a government decision to appoint a four-member task force led by former Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitly. The panel submitted its report to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Ministry of Women and Child Development in December last year and recommended that the age of marriage of women be raised to 21. The panel’s report has not been made public yet.
•Ms. Jaitly told PTI that the rationale behind its decision was to make the age of marriage equal for both men and women.
•“If we talk about gender equity and gender empowerment in every field, then we can't leave marriage out because this is a very odd message that a girl is fit to be married at 18 years that cuts away her opportunity to go to college and the man has the opportunity to prepare himself for life and earning up to 21,” she told PTI. When The Hindu contacted Ms Jaitly, she declined to comment on the issue.
Panel’s terms of reference
•The panel was constituted in June 2020. Its terms of reference included examining the correlation of age of marriage and motherhood with the health of the mother and infant as well as key health and population indicators like Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR), Total Fertility Rate (TFR), Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB), Child Sex Ratio (CSR) etc. It was also tasked to suggest measures for promoting higher education among women. According to the National Family Health Survey-5, in 2019-2021 23.3% of women in the age of 20 to 24 were married before the age of 18, which is an improvement from 26.8% in 2015-2016.
•Experts argue that even at the current age of marriage of women and men, the implementation of the child marriage law is very hard so there is no basis for increasing the age of marriage of women to 21. Evidence suggests that when the law is used, it is mostly to penalise young adults for self-arranged marriages. Activists say the answer to delaying child marriages lies in ensuring access to education since the practice is a social and economic issue.
AIDWA’s appeal
•The women’s wing of the CPI(M), All India Democratic Women's Association, on Thursday appealed to the government to scrap the move to raise the age of marriage of girls. It said that it was “a diversionary tactic from a government which refuses to allocate adequate resources towards nutritional programmes like the ICDS [Integrated Child Development Scheme], education and healthcare. If, as has been noted, the nutritional status of women remains low from birth onwards, getting married at 21 and having a child after that cannot improve the condition of maternal and child health or mortality.”
Hong Kong research says it infects, multiplies faster than Delta in bronchus
•The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 infects and multiplies faster than the Delta variant and original SARS-CoV-2 in the human bronchus, which may explain why it may transmit faster between people than previous variants. However, it does not easily infect the lower lungs and this, researchers say, potentially explains why instances of severe disease are proportionally lower in cases involving Omicron.
•The study was led by researchers from the LKS Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
•The two bronchi lie at the end of windpipe and split like a ‘y’ into each lung. The research paper, that is still being peer reviewed, however, does not explain why the virus was less successful in progressing deeper into the lungs compared to previous variants.
•The scientists used lung tissue removed for treatment of the lung, which is normally discarded, for investigating viral diseases of the respiratory tract. After isolating the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant, they used it to compare infection with the original SARS-CoV-2 from 2020, the Delta variant and the Omicron variant. They found that Omicron replicated around 70 times higher than the Delta variant and the original SARS-CoV-2 virus over 24 hours. In contrast, the Omicron variant replicated less efficiently (more than 10 times lower) in the lung tissue than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Note of caution
•However scientists involved with the study said this was not reason enough to breathe easy. “It is important to note that the severity of disease is not determined only by virus replication but also by the host immune response, which may lead to dysregulation of the innate immune system, or cytokine storm,” said Dr. Michael Chan Chi-wai, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, HKUMed and the leader of the study, in a press statement.
•“By infecting many more people, a very infectious virus may cause more severe disease and death even though the virus itself may be less pathogenic. Therefore, taken together with our recent studies showing that the Omicron variant can partially escape immunity from vaccines and past infection, the overall threat from Omicron variant is likely to be very significant.”
•India has so far reported at least 73 cases of the Omicron variant and reports from a study in South Africa, which has seen the fastest rise of the Omicron surge, suggest that at least a fourth of nearly 78,000 positive cases were of the Omicron variant. Recent laboratory studies so far also suggest that antibodies produced against Omicron by those vaccinated were 20-40 times fewer than in older variants. The antibody levels were highest in those vaccinated and with previous exposure to the virus.
•The United Kingdom has reported around 10,000 cases of Omicron so far with at least 10 people hospitalised. One person has died after contracting the variant, which is anticipated to become the dominant strain. The country is currently reporting close to 80,000 cases a day. India has seen daily case counts dip to 5,000 a day but has now seen an increase to around 7,000 on Thursday with nearly 3,500 cases being reported out of Kerala. Most of these reportedly involve the Delta and its related variants.
•Anurag Agrawal, Director, CSIR-IGIB and closely involved with the sequencing of SARS-CoV2 variants, tweeted that the findings were an “interesting twist” and could mean less severe infections. “Omicron infects and replicates better in airways than lung compared to ancestral SARS CoV2 / Delta. This could translate to less severity — more like a Upper Respiratory Infection / common cold than a pneumonia, but I still think of the threat level as high.”
📰 Wrong forum: On climate change and the UNSC
The attempt to securitise the climate change agenda could have unintended consequences
•India’s negative vote at the UN Security Council (UNSC) on a draft resolution on climate change is a reflection of its long-held opposition to expanding the UNSC’s mandate into areas that are already being dealt with by other multinational fora. The resolution, piloted by Ireland and Niger and which had the support of a majority of the UNSC members, was voted down by India and Russia — it has veto powers — while China abstained. Their position is that the UNSC’s primary responsibility is “maintenance of international peace and security” and climate change-related issues are outside its ambit. But the supporters of the resolution argue that the climate is creating security risks in the world, which will exacerbate in the future with water shortage, migration and a destruction of livelihoods. Germany had circulated a similar draft last year which was never put to vote in the Security Council as the Trump administration opposed it. Now, with support from the Biden administration, the developed world is pushing to include what they call “climate security” in the agenda of the UNSC. While the urgency to take action to tackle climate change is appreciated, the attempt to securitise the climate agenda could have unintended consequences. Bringing the issue under the UNSC will also give more powers to the world’s industrialised countries, which hold a veto power, to decide on future action on climate-related security issues.
•Currently, all matters related to climate change are being discussed in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a specialised agency. And with over 190 members, its framework has made progress in tackling climate change. It is this process that led to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement and the recent COP26 summit, and has put in place an international approach to combat global climate change. Sure, there is valid criticism that decision making at UNFCCC conferences is slow and there has to be faster collective action to tackle climate change and associated challenges. But the solution is not outsourcing decision making to the five permanent members of the UNSC. Also, it is wrong to look at climate change through the prism of security. Each nation faces different challenges in transitioning into a greener economy. As India’s Permanent Representative at the UN T.S. Tirumurti pointed out, the developed countries, all big polluters, have not met the promises they made with regard to climate action. The least developed and developing countries should be encouraged to keep the promises they made with financial assistance. This needs to be a collective process and the best way is through the UNFCCC, where decisions made are by consensus. The UNFCCC should not only make sure that the promises made by member countries, especially the powerful ones, in previous conferences are kept but also expand the scope of discussions to include climate-related security issues.
📰 Is the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act past its expiry date?
The final solution to insurgency or terrorism is not military in nature; it is political and economical
•The recent killing of 14 civilians in Nagaland’s Mon district by the Indian armed forces has put the spotlight back on the efficacy of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) of 1958. If its raison d’etre was to quell militancy and make way for the peaceful integration of insurgency-hit regions, has it served its purpose? In a conversation moderated by S. Anandan, Patricia Mukhim and Major General (retd.) Gajinder Singh discuss the moral, legal and political questions pertaining to the controversial legislation and its impact. Edited excerpts:
The Santosh Hegde Committee, appointed by the Supreme Court to look into six of the 1,528 alleged extrajudicial killings in Manipur, noted in its report in 2013 that the “continuous use of the AFSPA for decades in Manipur has evidently had little or no effect on the situation”. Has the Act been counterproductive?
•Patricia Mukhim: It is evident that the Act has not succeeded in its mission of containing insurgents because even today in Manipur, there are 32 active militant outfits. In Nagaland, because of the peace talks, most of the outfits have come under one umbrella, the NSCN(I-M) [National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah)], which is very ambiguous in its demands.
•The Supreme Court said that a grave situation of law and order must occur for a region to be declared a ‘disturbed area’ and that Section 3 of the AFSPA cannot be construed as conferring power to issue a declaration without any time limit. The Disturbed Areas Act is reviewed every six months because without it in place, you cannot have the AFSPA. In 2015, the Tripura Chief Minister, Manik Sarkar, cited a drop in militancy to revoke the Disturbed Areas Act, with which the AFSPA too went away.
•The AFSPA is a colonial law which hangs over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. It must go as it is prone to abuse and also shows that the country cannot come up with an anti-insurgency or a counter-insurgency force. When you use the Army against your own people, you are actually abusing the Army because it is trained to fight the enemy, not its own people. By sending the Army to fight its own people and then creating an uproar about the abuse of the AFSPA, you are making the Army schizophrenic.
•Gajinder Singh: The normalisation of the situation in many parts of the country — be it in Mizoram; Tripura; the Cachar Hills of Assam; the Tirap, Changlang and Logding districts of Arunachal Pradesh; or areas south of the Pir Panjal in Jammu and Kashmir — was made possible by the armed forces. In fact, the removal of the AFSPA from Tripura is testimony to what the forces have been able to achieve. They couldn’t have done this without the legal provision for their deployment in counter-insurgency areas.
•However, I would say that the final solution to insurgency or terrorism is not military in nature; it is political and economical. The Army has normalised the situation many times in J&K and the Northeast. But the State governments, and to a certain extent the Central government, have not been able to carry forward the political process.
Three Chief Ministers in the Northeast have now demanded that the Act be repealed. Many a time, the Centre undermined federalism by refusing to listen to the States, while on occasions, the States themselves have wanted the Act to stay. So, is AFSPA being used more as a political tool?
•Patricia Mukhim: Perhaps what is needed is a referendum on the AFSPA because the State governments and the Centre are playing football with it. As I said earlier, when Mr. Sarkar revoked the Disturbed Areas Act, the AFSPA automatically went away. Why are the other State governments not doing the same? In 1958, the nation-building process was at its nascent stage and the country was in no position to understand its periphery. So, to have the military bring in a certain degree of law and order in a conflict situation for a short period would have been forgiven. But the Act is not meant to continue forever. It is ethically, morally and legally wrong. Perhaps it’s time for the people to rally under a common platform and go to Jantar Mantar to voice their views. It’s difficult for the entire Northeast to come together, as every State has got a border problem with Assam. It would also depend on the ruling dispensation in each State. But politics apart, you have to show that you mean business. Otherwise, this will
become another dead issue before long.
•Gajinder Singh: The prolonged deployment of the armed forces for internal security duties is not desirable. No one wants to be fighting their own people. The State governments must review the security situation and see if they need the presence of the Army and the Assam Rifles in their States. They need to see if their police forces are capable of handling the situation. If they don’t feel the need to have the Army or the Assam Rifles, they should ask for the withdrawal of these forces. The AFSPA is just a tool; it’s a legal provision for the Army to operate in these areas. However, we would want the State police forces to be enabled to control the situation on their own. The Army should be preparing all the time for war against external aggression.
Lt. Gen. (retd) D.S. Hooda in 2018 said it would perhaps be better to replace the AFSPA with a more humane, acceptable legislation, which would also provide better legal protection to the soldiers in counter-insurgency areas.
•Gajinder Singh: I’m not aware of what he said. But notwithstanding that, many people have demanded its repeal. Some feel that there’s a need to modify this Act, while some others think it should be replaced with something else. The Jeevan Reddy Committee, the J.S. Verma Committee, and the Second Administrative Reforms Commission have all commented along these lines. Having served in these areas for a very long time, I think the Act can be amended to make it more humane. But repealing it or replacing it in full is not going to work if the armed forces are to operate in these areas.
•It is actually an issue of perceptions. Data do not actually support the bad opinion about the AFSPA. On many occasions, the Supreme Court has upheld its legality and endorsed the dos and don’ts which were laid out by the Army headquarters. And at the ground level, the commanders and the soldiers are sensitive and know that they are operating against their own people.
But is there any mechanism for accountability? The AFSPA grants blanket immunity to the forces. Further, the Government of India (GoI) has reportedly denied permission to prosecute any armed forces personnel in cases of alleged fake encounters investigated by the CBI.
•Patricia Mukhim: There isn’t any mechanism at the moment because the GoI also has its hands tied. If it uses the Army, it cannot disable the Army by diluting the Act in some way. And the Army will not want to operate in that kind of situation. But why is the Army not used in the Maoist-affected areas? There too people and uniformed personnel are killed. Are the people of the Northeast and J&K not India’s own people that they have to be fought with the Army?
•Gajinder Singh: Having served in the Northeast for seven tenures, I can say that there cannot be a more wrong assumption. The Northeast is very close to the hearts of the people of the rest of India, especially people like me.
There’s an argument that the continuous enforcement of the AFSPA has derailed the peace process, involving the NSCN (I-M) in this case, with large sections of the people disenchanted that they have been kept out of the process.
•Patricia Mukhim: The NSCN(I-M) could have demanded revocation of the Act as a prerequisite for the peace talks back in 1997 itself when it became a party to it. It’s only now that it is jumping on the bandwagon, clamouring for the Act’s repeal.
•In Nagaland, the people are traumatised because they are caught between the state and non-state forces. The non-state forces extort money from businesses, entrepreneurs, the government, government employees. Even development funds are being shared with militant outfits. So, there’s a total absence of law and order in these States. For instance, we don’t have an opposition any longer in the Nagaland Assembly. All the 60 MLAs have joined the government on the plea that they will ensure the culmination of the 25-year-old peace process. But that’s not happening.
•How does the NSCN(I-M)’s demand for a flag and a separate Constitution work in the Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur which have given up the demand for sovereignty? The GoI is very clear that it is not going to allow any territorial rearrangement. But by demanding a flag and a Constitution, the NSCN(I-M) wants the peace talks to go on unresolved.
•Gajinder Singh: The law-and-order situation is really bad in these States. There are large numbers of highly indoctrinated, seditious, violent elements who are lured by money and the gun culture. They go about collecting ‘taxes’ on everything, and the police and the local administration are quite ineffective. In most of these disturbed areas, there’s a communal, tribal, ethnic divide that makes the local police partisan as well. It is the Army or the Central police force that restores some degree of law and order in these places.
•As for the NSCN(I-M), it uses the ceasefire in Nagaland to keep moving around. It has no reason to conclude the peace process. But it’s not just them; there are many splinter groups that carry out extortion. So, the forces have to intervene.
Are civil society organisations coming together to raise the issues with the Centre?
•Patricia Mukhim: The Nagaland Gaon Bura Association, with representation from all 16 tribes of Nagaland, had written to the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister asking them to conclude the deal on what had been agreed with the NSCN(I-M). But the Centre did not respond.
•You have put the people of Nagaland in a situation where they are in no position to speak up, because speaking up has consequences. At least, thankfully now, because of social media which offers anonymity, they are able to express themselves.
How do people lead a normal life in the shadow of the gun?
•Patricia Mukhim: When some things happen over a long period, they become part of your culture. You learn to live with it, although you are unhappy. You have a government that is held hostage by the NSCN(I-M). On the other side, you have people with guns. The situation is the same in Assam and parts of Arunachal Pradesh. This problem is compounded by the 16-km free movement zone on either side of the 1,643-km India-Myanmar border. It aids the smuggling of arms and drugs and the movement of militants. Shouldn’t there be a stricter border regime?
•Gajinder Singh: The presence of the armed forces in these States is not so formidable as to be intimidating. If anything, it has only positively impacted people’s lives. Barring a few undesirable incidents, which get investigated, people’s daily lives are unaffected. And the situation along the India-Myanmar border is much better now with the use of technology, communication and the forward movement of Assam Rifles posts.
📰 Reflections on flying blind into the storm
The lack of public data on the pandemic will hit the integration of a fast shifting scientific frontier with clinical practice
•An increasingly asked question is, “If COVID-19 cases were to suddenly rise now, in a third wave of the disease, would India be better prepared than we were for the second wave in April-May of 2021?” In the past two weeks, such a question has been motivated by reports of Indian cases of the Omicron variant, despite India reporting record low case numbers currently and there being considerable relaxation in COVID-appropriate behaviour. Worryingly, Omicron cases across the United Kingdom are set to constitute, by some modelling predictions, more than 50% of all COVID-19 cases there in two to four weeks, displacing the Delta variant. Omicron cases in Denmark are rising steeply. It has been reported that the severity of these cases appears less than was associated with the previous Delta wave, but these are early days for a new variant reported three weeks ago.
The two sides
•So where do we stand? There are positives. The extreme shortages of oxygen that we saw barely six months ago will hopefully not be a feature of a third wave. We have now vaccinated more than 50% of the adult population with both doses of vaccine, and approximately 85% have received one or two doses. Vaccines for the 12 year-18-year-old population as well as booster shots for frontline health-care workers, those who are immunocompromised, and those above 60 years are being discussed currently. When implemented, these will protect those currently most vulnerable, based on booster and variant data from elsewhere. Ramping up testing to deal with a spike should not require an increase in capacity. We have more vaccine doses than in May 2021 and the potential for oral antiviral therapy in the near future.
•But there are negatives. Several of these have been discussed since the novel coronavirus pandemic began. Of those we could list, we highlight an urgent and important one — the lack of publicly available data on the pandemic from Government sources, particularly in regard to testing, but also in terms of being able to correlate disease severity with age, prior medical conditions, locations and other variables.
A letter and action taken
•In April 2021, we and 900 other scientists, co-signed a letter addressed to the Prime Minister of India. The letter contained the following message, among others: “While new pandemics can have unpredictable features, our inability to adequately manage the spread of infections has, to a large extent, resulted from epidemiological data not being systematically collected and released in a timely manner to the scientific community.” Within a day of this letter becoming public, the Principal Scientific Adviser, Prof. K. VijayRaghavan promised prompt action, with his office listing nodal personnel in the main agencies responsible for COVID-19 data collection which could be contacted for these data.
•Now, six months later, what progress has resulted? As far as we can see, none. Data from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), India’s premier medical research agency, remains inaccessible. The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has not responded. The CoWIN data (The Government web portal for COVID-19 vaccination registration) contains valuable information but beyond the real-time data on vaccine delivery by doses, as displayed, it is of little value for future planning and prediction unless it can be tied to testing data and clinical information at the level of individuals.
Data is pivotal
•Why are these data needed? If we knew that a person had tested positive on successive tests separated by, say four months or more, with a negative test in-between, that would suggest a reinfection. We could then infer the probability of such a reinfection. With information about testing and vaccination status, we could compute the probability of a vaccine breakthrough event. By checking to see whether the positive test happened after the first but before the second dose of vaccine, or after the second dose, the relative efficacy of such single vaccine doses at preventing disease could be derived. By examining symptoms reported after a vaccine breakthrough event, we could understand the extent to which vaccines reduce disease severity. Add to this a layer of sequence information, and we could study the impact of new variants.
•The Indian Council of Medical Research holds data on every COVID-19 test conducted in India. At this stage of the novel coronavirus pandemic, it seems unfathomable that these data are not correlated to the vaccine data in the CoWIN platform.
•Data on hospitalisations, etc. are apparently available at the State level, but seem inaccessible which, considering both the enormous resources devoted to COVID-19 across government agencies and the use of universal health IDs and records, demonstrates that we have a long way to go. If we cannot do this for COVID-19, what is the likelihood that we will accurately record other health conditions?
•The most trustworthy and granular data on cases in India have resulted from the remarkable and public-spirited work of a volunteer organisation, Covid19India.org. Their volunteers maintained a public website where data were culled from individual reports by States, even sometimes from informal sources, such as journalist groups or citizen science reports. Their work has now been taken over by several other voluntary groups, all operating on the same broad principles of data accessibility: covid19bharat.org, incovid19.org and covid19tracker.in.
•For the COVID-19 data void in India to be filled by volunteer groups and not by the Government is unusual by any means. The Government has access to more data than these groups. Yet, it is the data put out by these groups that appears to be trusted more, even by those in the Government.
•We have laid the stress on data availability because this is the one area where a swift realignment is possible. Setting right a public health system that has been underfunded — and, in some cases, neglected — over decades, is a harder task, but we must not fail to recognise that data is a public good. The more widely data are shared, the greater the likelihood of integration of the rapidly shifting scientific frontier with clinical practice.
South Africa’s experience
•South Africa’s actions with its sequencing data when the Omicron variant was first detected are illustrative. With the advantages of a relatively high-quality surveillance system among low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) countries, bolstered by a commitment towards transparency and data accessibility, South Africa’s rapid sharing allowed the world to prepare swiftly for the appearance of the highly mutated Omicron variant.
•From the experience of other countries, it is likely that Omicron will spread in India, as it has elsewhere in the world. We do not know currently — and it would be irresponsible to extrapolate on the limited information available to us so far — about what this might lead to, but it is clear that pre-emptive decisions on vaccination and other measures could be made faster and better if more integrated data were available. Now, more than ever before, is the time for us to urgently re-assess our attitude towards data for public health purposes and the role of national health agencies in sharing data, generated with public funds, with scientists in India and across the world.
•The title of our piece is ‘... Flying blind into the storm”. If we do not pay attention to this now, that is indeed what we will be reduced to in the months to come.
📰 The WTO’s challenge to MSP is another frontier to cross
The need is to convince farmers of other effective policy interventions that are World Trade Organization compatible
•The demand of farmers to provide a legal guarantee for the minimum support price (MSP) for their produce has triggered a nationwide debate. Some believe it would be “fiscally ruinous” to procure all the 23 crops for which MSP is announced annually. Others contend that procuring these crops would be a logistical nightmare. There is yet another dimension of this debate that has largely gone unnoticed. Can India provide a legal guarantee for MSP without violating its international law obligations enshrined in the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO)?
As a trade-distorting subsidy
•One of the central objectives of the AoA is to cut trade-distorting domestic support that WTO member countries provide to agriculture. In this regard, the domestic subsidies are divided into three categories: ‘green box’, ‘blue box’ and ‘amber box’ measures. Subsidies that fall under the ‘green box’ (like income support to farmers de-coupled from production) and ‘blue box’ (like direct payments under production limiting programmes subject to certain conditions) are considered non-trade distorting. Countries can provide unlimited subsidies under these two categories. However, price support provided in the form of procurement of crops at MSP is classified as a trade-distorting subsidy and falls under the ‘amber box’ measures, which are subject to certain limits.
•To measure ‘amber box’ support, WTO member countries are required to compute Aggregate Measurement of Support (AMS). AMS is the total of product-specific support (price support to a particular crop) and non-product-specific support (fertilizer subsidy). Under Article 6.4(b) of the AoA, developing countries such as India are allowed to provide a de minimis level of product and non-product domestic subsidy. This de minimis limit is capped at 10% of the total value of production of the product, in case of a product-specific subsidy; and at 10% of the total value of a country’s agricultural production, in case of non-product subsidy. Subsidies breaching the de minimis cap are trade-distorting. Consequently, they have to be accounted for in the AMS.
•The procurement at MSP, after comparing it with the fixed external reference price (ERP) — an average price based on the base years 1986-88 — has to be included in AMS. Since the fixed ERP has not been revised in the last several decades at the WTO, the difference between the MSP and fixed ERP has widened enormously due to inflation.
•For instance, according to the Centre for WTO Studies, India’s ERP for rice, in 1986-88, was $262.51/tonne and the MSP was less than this. However, India’s applied administered price for rice in 2015-16 stood at $323.06/tonne, much more than the 1986-88 ERP. When this difference is accounted for in the AMS, the possibility of overshooting the de minimis limit becomes real. Procuring all the 23 crops at MSP, as against the current practice of procuring largely rice and wheat, will result in India breaching the de minimis limit making it vulnerable to a legal challenge at the WTO.
•Even if the Government does not procure directly but mandates private parties to acquire at a price determined by the Government, as it happens in the case of sugarcane, the de minimis limit of 10% applies. Very recently, a WTO panel in the case, India – Measures Concerning Sugar and Sugarcane, concluded that India breached the de minimis limit in the case of sugarcane by offering guaranteed prices paid by sugar mills to sugarcane farmers.
Peace clause
•The AoA needs to be amended so that it provides adequate policy space to run an MSP-backed food security programme. Although a permanent solution is nowhere in sight, the countries have agreed to a peace clause. The peace clause forbids bringing legal challenges against price support-based procurement for food security purposes even if it breaches the limit on domestic support. However, the peace clause is subject to several conditions. For example, it can be availed by developing countries for the support provided to traditional staple food crops to pursue public stockholding programmes for food security (procuring food to provide free ration through the Public Distribution System).
•Furthermore, the peace clause is applicable only for programmes that were existing as of the date of the decision and are consistent with other requirements. Countries are also under an obligation to notify the WTO if their subsidies exceed the permissible level. For instance, earlier this year, India reported to the WTO that it gave subsidies worth $6.31 billion for rice in 2019-20 while the value of rice production was $46.07 billion. In other words, the subsidies were 13.6% of the total value of production as against the de minimis level of 10%.
•India’s procurement for rice and wheat, even if it violates the de minimis limit, will enjoy legal immunity. However, India will not be able to employ the peace clause to defend procuring those crops that are not part of the food security programme (such as cotton, groundnut, sunflower seed).
•Even if the AoA is amended to exclude MSP-backed procurement for food security purposes from the AMS, procurement for other crops at prices higher than the fixed ERP would be considered trade-distorting and thus subject to the de minimis limit. Therefore, India needs to recalibrate its agricultural support programmes to make use of the flexibilities available in the AoA.
Some alternatives
•Arguably, India can move away from price-based support in the form of MSP to income-based support, which will not be trade-distorting under the AoA provided the income support is not linked to production.
•Alternatively, one can supplement price-based support (keeping the de minimis limit in mind) with an income-based support policy. However, it will be arduous especially given the climate of high misgiving prevailing between the farmers and the political establishment.
•The recent fiasco with the three repealed farm laws demonstrates that reforms in agriculture, no matter how sagacious, cannot be shoved down the throats of the farmers. The Government needs to engage with the farmers and create an affable environment to convince them of other effective policy interventions, beyond MSP, that are fiscally prudent and WTO compatible.
