📰 Kerala tops NITI Aayog Health Index again; U.P. at bottom
Telangana moves into top three with Tamil Nadu
•For the fourth year in a row, Kerala has topped a ranking of States on health indicators. Uttar Pradesh has come in at the bottom. The “Health Index” is part of a report commissioned by the NITI Aayog, the World Bank and the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry.
•Kerala is followed by Tamil Nadu and Telangana, which improved its ranking.
Three categories
•The Health Index score is prepared based on the States’ performance across a large set of indicators that are divided into three broad domains — health outcomes, governance and information, and key inputs and processes. Health outcomes, for instance, include parameters such as neonatal mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate and sex ratio at birth.
•Governance includes institutional deliveries, average occupancy of senior officers in key posts earmarked for health. And the “key inputs” domain consists of the proportion of shortfall in healthcare providers to what is recommended, functional medical facilities, birth and death registration and tuberculosis treatment success rate.
Evidence needed of harassment close to death
•Dowry death can be presumed if the wife was harassed, mentally and physically close before her death in the marital home, the Supreme Court has held.
•A Bench led by Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana was interpreting Section 304B of the Indian Penal Code (dowry death).
•The provision mandates that the death of a married woman could be linked to the crime if she had been harassed for dowry “soon before her death”.
•“The cruelty has to be proved during the close proximity of time of death. It should be continuous. Such continuous harassment, physical or mental, by the accused should make life of the deceased miserable which may force her to commit suicide,” Justice Hima Kohli, who authored the judgment for the Bench, recorded.
•The court said the expression “soon before her death” would normally imply that the interval should not be much between the cruelty or harassment concerned and the death in question.
•“In other words, there must be an existence of a proximate and live link between the effect of cruelty based on dowry demand and the death concerned. If the alleged incident of cruelty is remote in time and has become stale enough not to disturb the mental equilibrium of the women concerned, it would be of no consequence,” the Bench, also comprising Justice Surya Kant, noted.
•“Section 304B IPC read in conjunction with Section 113B of the Evidence Act leaves no manner of doubt that once the prosecution has been able to demonstrate that a woman has been subjected to cruelty or harassment for or in connection with any demand for dowry, soon before her death, the court shall proceed on a presumption that the persons who have subjected her to cruelty or harassment in connection with the demand for dowry, have caused a dowry death within the meaning of Section 304B IPC,” Justice Kohli underscored.
•However, the presumption of dowry death was also rebuttable, Justice Kohli observed.
•“The presumption is, however, rebuttable and can be dispelled on the accused being able to demonstrate through cogent evidence that the ingredients of Section 304B IPC have not been satisfied,” the judgment said.
•The judgment was delivered in the death of a woman in 1997 in Bihar only a few months after her marriage. The few months of her marital life was marred by constant harassment for dowry. Her body was found on the banks of a river several days after she was reported missing from her marital home. The apex court concluded that she was pushed into the river by her husband, and confirmed his conviction by the lower courts.
📰 A progressive step: On setting of panel for AFSPA by Nagaland
Formation of a panel to look into withdrawal of AFSPA from Nagaland is a welcome move
•The announcement by the Nagaland government that a high-powered panel will be set up to look into the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in the State addresses a key concern in the Northeast following the Mon massacre where a botched ambush by an armed forces unit led to the deaths of 15 civilians earlier this month. As is typical of how the Union government has dealt with issues concerning Nagaland in the recent past, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) — whose Additional Secretary (Northeast) is to head the committee — has been tight-lipped about the proposed panel with the information about it emanating only from the Nagaland government. Nevertheless, the gesture to set up a panel, even if it is acknowledged only by the Nagaland government, should help in assuaging some concerns of citizens of the State who had immediately associated the massacre with the impunity afforded by the unpopular Act. The Indian Army has also reiterated that it deeply regretted the loss of lives and that a probe into the incident was progressing, even as the Nagaland government in its statement mentioned that a court of inquiry will initiate disciplinary proceedings against the Army unit and personnel involved in the incident. The Act is in place in Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, three districts of Arunachal Pradesh, and areas falling within the jurisdiction of eight police stations of the State bordering Assam, with the authority to use force or open fire to maintain public order in “disturbed areas”. The Meghalaya Chief Minister has already sought its revocation in the Northeast, while Manipur is also set to discuss the demand for its repeal.
•People in the Northeast associate the series of civilian killings in the region over a number of years with the Act being in effect. The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee set up by the previous UPA-led government at the Centre in 2005 had recommended the repeal of the Act calling it “highly undesirable” and that it created an impression that civilians in the Northeast were being targeted for hostile treatment. But the Act has remained in place because of the resolute opposition to its repeal by the Army. The panel can take recourse to studying precedents — Tripura revoked the Act in May 2015 after noticing an improvement on the ground in the State while Meghalaya did the same on April 1, 2018. Both States did so after the Act was in force for decades. A clear-cut understanding on the definition and the extent of “disturbed areas” in Nagaland following discussions among the State, the MHA and armed forces’ representatives will go a long way in working towards a rethink on the Act’s relevance in the entire region.
📰 Why the Aadhaar-voter ID link must be stopped
Aadhaar use to construct elector databases has resulted in exclusion and will help in profiling the voter
•The Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021 that was passed in haste in the winter session in the Lok Sabha, and which facilitates amendment to the Representation of People’s Act, is a step toward implementing online-based remote e-voting for which the use of Aadhaar will be the primary identity. The linking of Aadhaar with one’s voter ID was primarily to build a biometric dependent voting system from the very beginning. The tall claim made to support this change was to fight “fraud and duplicates” in the electoral rolls. At the same time, in practice, in places where it was used — done by the mashing of Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) data with surveillance databases — it facilitated a selective removal of voters from the lists. In the 2018 Telangana Assembly elections for instance, the consequence of such a measure led to the deletion of an estimated two million voters.
The case of two States
•In 2014, the Election Commission of India (ECI) conducted two pilot programmes on linking the voter id with Aadhaar in the districts of Nizamabad and Hyderabad. Using the claim of effectiveness in removing duplicate voters, the ECI called for a National Consultation on Aadhaar and voter id linking, organised in Hyderabad in February 2015. The ECI launched the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) on April 1, 2015, which had to be completed by August 31, 2015. After a Supreme Court of India order on August 11, 2015, it was announced that this NERPAP would be shut down. But as Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were early adopters of this programme since 2014, both States have nearly completed linking Aadhaar and voter id for all residents. Though the composite State of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated in 2014, there was only one office of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Telangana and Andhra Pradesh as the bifurcation procedure was not yet complete in 2015.
Database integration
•The methodology followed by the ECI to find duplicate voters using Aadhaar is unknown to the general public. Nor is the information available in the public domain. Several applications under the Right to Information Act to the Chief Electoral Officer, Telangana asking for this information have been in vain. In 2018, the ECI wrote back to the CEOs asking for the methodology used in NERPAP for Aadhaar data collection after questions were raised about the ECI collecting Aadhaar data without the consent of voters. In a letter (No. 1471/Elecs.B/A1/2018-3, April 25, 2018), from the CEO Andhra Pradesh (then for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) to the ECI, it is clear that the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) application of the Government of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh was used to curate electoral rolls.
•The SRDH has data on residents of the State which is supplied by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or collected further by the State governments. The UIDAI initially created the SRDH to give States information on residents — similar to the Aadhaar database without biometrics. Private parties now maintain the SRDH. While the UIDAI was constrained not to collect data on caste, religion and other sensitive information data for Aadhaar, it recommended to the States to collect this information, if required, as part of Aadhaar data collection; it termed the process as Know Your Resident (KYR) and Know Your Resident Plus (KYR+).
•In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the State governments also conducted State census where voter data, Aadhaar data, 360-degree profiling with details such as caste, religion, bank accounts and other sensitive personal information were also collected. These State Census surveys were called the Samagra Kutumba Survey 2014 and the Smart Pulse Survey 2016.
•The SRDHs are now a part of the State surveillance architecture targeted at the civilian populace. It is these SRDH applications that the ECI used to curate electoral rolls which resulted in the deletion of a sizeable number of voters from the list in Telangana in 2018. It is not just Telangana but across India; the ECI has already linked Aadhaar and voter IDs of close to 30 crore people resulting in voter deletions (Unstarred question 2673, Rajya Sabha of January 2019).
Disenfranchisement
•The role of the ECI to verify voters using door-to-door verification (in 2015) has been subsumed (based on RTI replies from the ECI, and widely reported in 2018, after the Telangana Assembly elections in December); a software algorithm commissioned by the Government for purposes unknown to the public and maintained by a private IT company is in control now. While the role and autonomy of the ECI itself is speculative, subjecting key electoral rolls to surveillance software damages the concept of universal adult suffrage. What the experience in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh highlights is voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
•A mock election (in October 2021) was conducted in Telangana by the State Election Commission with smartphones using facial recognition, voter ID, Aadhaar number and phone number for authentication while voting (this was tweeted by the Collector, Khammam). This method kills the “secret ballot”. In a situation where the role of money makes a mockery of the democratic process, linking Aadhaar will be futile. Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), if foolproof, put an end to the days of booth capturing prevalent in the days of paper ballots. But these manifestations are about to bring the age back. E-voting can also be gamed using malware to change the outcome of an election. While the Bill does not look into large-scale e-voting, there is an issue of ensuring electoral integrity.
•An Aadhaar-voter ID linkage will also help political parties create voter profiles and influence the voting process. Online trends on the day of voting and micro-targeting voters using their data will make it easier for political parties in power to use data for elections. A ruling coalition will always have an advantage with the data it possesses. An example is of the Chief Ministers from certain States being asked to get the data of the beneficiaries of welfare schemes. How this data was used in the 2019 elections is a pointer. The way Aadhaar has been pushed across the country has been undemocratic and unconstitutional since its inception. Aadhaar itself has several fake and duplicate names, which has been widely documented. The linking of Aadhaar with voter ID will create complexities in the voter databases that will be hard to fix. This process will introduce errors in electoral rolls and vastly impact India’s electoral democracy.
📰 The cold truth about India’s income inequality
Far from pushing for social and economic equality, the state is fanning systems and principles to strengthen the divide
•The latest edition of the World Inequality Report (https://bit.ly/3Fx8vv4 and https://bit.ly/3EvazlY) has confirmed that the world continues to sprint down the path of inequality. “Global multimillionaires have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the past several decades: the top 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, whereas the bottom 50% captured just 2% of it.” India’s case is particularly stark. The foreword by Nobel laureate economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, says, “India is now among the most unequal countries in the world.” This means that the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 50% is widest for India among the major economies in the world. The gap is wider in India than the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and France.
Poverty has persisted
•The journey of this inequality over time reveals that “socialist-inspired Five Year plans contributed” to reducing the share of the top 10% who had 50% of the income under colonial rule, to 35%-40% in the early decades after Independence. However, since the mid-1980s, deregulation and liberalisation policies have led to “one of the most extreme increases in income and wealth inequality observed in the world”. While the top 1% has majorly profited from economic reforms, growth among low- and middle-income groups has been relatively slow, and poverty has persisted.
•In recent years, on the economic front, India, post-2014, seems to have got into a phase of an even greater reliance on big business and privatisation to fix economics and the result has been to beget even more inequality. The latest World Inequality Report firmly concludes that the “bottom 50% share has gone down to 13%. India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite”.
Static growth rate
•But beyond all this, what bears emphasis is the observation by Aunindyo Chakravarty, in The Tribune, about what was happening to the income of the bottom 50% in India since 1951. This grew at the rate of 2.2% per year between 1951 and 1981, but what is telling is that “the growth rate remained exactly the same over the past 40 years”. This makes it clear that irrespective of the economics or politics at play, the state of the bottom half of India barely changed, with an abysmal rate of income growth. That inequality in terms of the immobility of those at the bottom (at least one half of India) stood, irrespective of the economic policies adopted, is an irrefutable fact. It was because of the social conditions and constraints in India.
•Clearly, the very social structure that underpinned India, encouraged and fanned this inequality. Plenty changed after India’s Constitution was adopted. In the Nehruvian years — and after that too — a bid was made to battle the basic absence of social democracy in India, but it remained confined to States and regions. Therefore, one sees a little more mobility and well-being in States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Parts of Karnataka and Andhra also recorded attempts at smashing social structures that had pushed those at the bottom to a life in perpetual poverty and deprivation, and those attempts showed in better economic prospects. So, beyond these economic policies which have been fanning inequality, it is the ruling party tying faith directly into politics and backing of old social structures – far from getting rid of them, strengthening them each day – that should set alarm bells ringing. The linkages between our social structures and income inequality and poverty must be faced up to.
Survey and data
•Globally, the economic transformation of people and particularly the lessening of inequality has never happened unless socially regressive mores have been challenged. Path-breaking research across 106 countries in 2018 tackled the elephant in the room when researchers from the Universities of Bristol in the U.K. and Tennessee in the U.S. used data from the World Values Survey to get a measure of the importance of religion spanning the entire 20th century (1900 to 2000) and found “that secularisation precedes economic development”.
•Furthermore, the findings show that secularisation only predicts future economic development when it is accompanied by a respect and tolerance for individual rights. That can only happen when beyond sufferance of diversity or tolerance, a society is able to see all shades of humans, of varying castes, creeds, faith, colour, gender and choices as equal. The central aspect of secularisation is delinking of religion from public life. It leads to respect for each citizen irrespective of their faith and for science and rationalism. This is clear from the European experience over centuries or of Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea and others — the old social structures need to be smashed and not resurrected.
‘One size nation’ is flawed
•The rapid movement of India in the reverse direction of secularisation, with the Union government’s now-stated policy to prioritise members of one religion and one language, has severe economic consequences too and the widening income inequality only reflects that. The quick descent into a ‘One size nation’, does not fit its many diversities. The avenues available for all kinds of citizens to make a life, informal if not formal, is deeply inhibited by India’s social fabric being torn by the Government’s new priorities and policies. Far from pushing for social and economic equality, which can be done by dismantling old shibboleths in which India’s rank social and economic inequalities are anchored, the state is now fanning systems and principles to further them. This fundamentally distorts the hard wiring that had made modern India possible.
•Criminalising the freedom of religion and choices, which is what the Indian compact is based on, by hunting out the diverse, mixed or cosmopolitan as inauthentic has consequences, both social and economic. It was exactly this that B.R. Ambedkar had warned of: “In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?”
•B.R. Ambedkar had issued a grim warning in 1949 that if we continue to deny social and economic inequality for long, we could “blow up the structure of political democracy”. We risk much more. There is no ‘destiny’ of nations foretold. Choices are made and destinies created. By choosing to reverse the idea of modernisation, linking religion firmly into the public sphere, trying to unmake the modernity India had tried to set for itself as an ideal, we may be already setting ourselves on a narrow path which ends in places that scores of nations in the world and several in our neighbourhood have already arrived at, only to their peril and dismay.
📰 The gaps in the plan to tackle plastic waste
The draft regulations on extended producer responsibility are retrogressive in their approach
•In October, the Environment Ministry published draft regulations on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), set to come into effect by the end of this year. Disregarding the commitments made by the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016; the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016; and the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), these regulations denote a backslide, particularly with respect to integration of the informal sector.
•EPR requires the manufacturer of a product, or the party that introduces the product into the community, to take responsibility for its life cycle. An FMCG company should not only account for the costs of making, packing and distributing a packet of chips, but also for the collection and recycling/reuse of the packet. In India, producers have externalised these costs due to the presence of a robust informal sector composed of waste pickers. By failing to mention waste pickers or outlining mechanisms for their incorporation under EPR, the guidelines are retrogressive. An effective EPR framework should address the issue of plastics and plastic waste management in tandem with the existing machinery, minimise duplication and lead to a positive environmental impact, with monitoring mechanisms including penalties for non-compliance. The guidelines fall short in three areas: people, plastics and processing.
People
•For decades, waste pickers, working in dangerous and unsanitary conditions, have picked up what we throw away. They form the base of a pyramid that includes scrap dealers, aggregators and re-processors. This pyramid has internalised the plastic waste management costs of large producers. Besides, by diverting waste towards recycling and reuse, waste pickers also subsidise local governments responsible for solid waste management. Further, they reduce the amount of waste accumulating in cities, water bodies and dumpsites and increase recycling and reuse, creating environmental and public health benefits.
•Unfortunately, most informal waste pickers remain invisible. Between 1.5 and 4 million waste pickers in India work without social security, health insurance, minimum wages or basic protective gear. The SBM Plastic Waste Book attributes India’s high recycling rate to the informal sector. But the guidelines not only disregard waste pickers and don’t involve them as stakeholders in formulating the guidelines, but also direct producers to set up a private, parallel plastic waste collection and recycling chain. This is akin to dispossessing waste pickers of their means of livelihood as all plastic waste, contributing up to 60% of their incomes, will likely be siphoned away from them and channelised into the new chain.
•EPR funds could be deployed for mapping and registration of the informal sector actors, building their capacity, upgrading infrastructure, promoting technology transfer, and creating closed loop feedback and monitoring mechanisms. For easily recycled plastics, EPR requirements could have been fulfilled by formalising and documenting the work of the informal sector and adequately compensating them. Without strong government regulation, the millions of workers who have shouldered the burden of waste management for decades will stand to lose their livelihoods – only so that companies can keep meeting their targets to continue producing plastic.
Plastics
•The EPR guidelines are limited to plastic packaging. While a large part of plastics produced are single-use or throwaway plastic packaging, there are other multi-material plastic items like sanitary pads, chappals, and polyester that pose a huge waste management challenge today, but have been left out of the scope of EPR.
•Plastic packaging can be roughly grouped into three categories: recyclable and effectively handled by the informal sector, technologically recyclable but not economically viable to recycle, technologically challenging to recycle (or non-recyclable).
•Rigid plastics like PET and HDPE are effectively recycled. In keeping with the EPR objective that all recyclable plastics are effectively recycled at the cost of the producer, the government could support and strengthen the informal recycling chain by bridging gaps in adequate physical spaces, infrastructure, etc.
•Typically flexible plastics like LDPE and PP bags are recyclable, but due to their contamination with organic waste, light weight, and high volume, the costs of recycling are prohibitively expensive relative to the market value of the output. Market value for these plastics can be increased by increasing the demand for and use of recycled plastics in packaging, thus creating the value to accommodate the current costs of recycling. The mandated use of recycled plastics, as prescribed in the draft regulations, is a strong policy mechanism to create this value.
•Multi-layered and multi-material plastics form the abundant type of plastic waste. These are low weight and voluminous, making them expensive to handle and transport. Since they are primarily used in food packaging, they often attract rodents, making storage problematic. Even if this plastic is picked, recycling is technologically challenging as it is heterogeneous material. The Plastic Waste Management Rules mandated the phase-out of these plastics. However, in 2018, this mandate was reversed.
Processing
•Not all processing is recycling. Processes like waste-to-energy, co-processing and incineration have been proven to release carbon dioxide, particulate matter, harmful dioxins and furans which have negative climate and health impacts. Technologies like chemical recycling and pyrolysis are capital-intensive, yielding low returns and running into frequent breakdowns and technological problems. They also release carbon dioxide and other pollutants.
•The SWaCH-ITC Ltd project has diverted over 1,000 MT of multi-layered and low-value flexible plastics since its inception. However, project scalability suffers due to the absence of processing plants that can consistently accept multi-layered plastics. These end-of-life processes are economically, environmentally and operationally unsustainable. A number of gasification, pyrolysis and other chemical recycling projects have figured in accidents such as fires, explosions and financial losses. GAIA estimated that such technologies wasted at least $2 billion in investments, due to permit complications, operating costs, etc. While the environmental impact and desirability of these processes continues to be debated, the draft regulations legitimise them to justify the continued production of multi-layered plastics.
•In conclusion, the government should redo the consultation process for the draft guidelines and involve informal workers. The scope of plastics covered by the guidelines could be altered to exclude those plastics which are already efficiently recycled and to include other plastic and multi-material items. And end-of-life processing technologies should be closely evaluated, based not only on their health and environmental impacts, but also on the implications for continued production of low-quality and multi-layered plastics.
