📰 Use drones more effectively: Civil Aviation Ministry
Several Ministries receive suggestions for a range of uses, from surveillance to disaster management
•In a nationwide programme to take the third eye to the sky, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has called for more effective utilisation of drone applications and urged the Ministry of Home Affairs to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, situational analysis, crime control, VVIP security, disaster management, etc.
•In a note sent to at least a dozen Ministries, the Secretary, MoCA, Rajiv Bansal, said drones offered tremendous benefits to almost every sector of the economy, including but not limited to, national defence, agriculture, law enforcement, and mapping, among others. As part of the initiatives to make India a global hub for drones under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan and in the backdrop of the Union Government rolling out the liberalised Drone Rules 2021, he suggested the heads of various Ministries promote effective use of the technology.
•The suggestions include deployment of drones for combat, communication in remote areas, counter-drone solutions, etc., by the Ministry of Defence; and delivery of medicines, collection of samples from remote or epidemic/pandemic-affected areas by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
•Acting on the recommendations that unmanned aerial vehicles could be used to undertake disaster management, incidence response, inspection/maintenance works and project monitoring, the Ministry of Railways wrote to General Managers across its network to implement the ideas, sources in the Railways said, adding that the Principal Chief Security Commissioner, Western Railway, had been nominated as the nodal officer to co-ordinate with the Aviation Ministry for guidance and support.
Real-time surveillance
•The Petroleum and Natural Gas, and Power Ministries, have been asked to fly drones for real-time surveillance of assets and transmission lines, theft prevention, visual inspection/maintenance, construction planning and management, etc. Drone operations suggested for the Environment, Forests and Climate Change Ministry include anti-poaching actions, monitoring of forests and wildlife, pollution assessment, and evidence gathering.
•As a complete replacement to expensive helicopter-based videography, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting could use drones for high-quality videography of events and difficult-to-reach-places at a fraction of the cost and approvals required. This move would also facilitate low altitude shooting without noise, and prevent dust pollution and risk of accidents.
•Mr. Bansal said the suggestions had been made in consultation with experts, drone start-ups and industry bodies, and said an official had been nominated to exclusively coordinate with various Ministries to facilitate further flow of information.
📰 HAL jet trainer demonstrates its prowess
Aircraft needs another twoyears of testing
•In an important milestone, the Intermediate Jet Trainer (IJT), designed and developed by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) for Stage 2 training of Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots, has successfully demonstrated the capability to carry out six turn spins, displaying an important requirement for the platform.
•The aircraft will require another two years of testing after which it will be ready for induction, R. Madhavan, Chief Managing Director, HAL, said.
•“The IJT needs another two years of testing. There were some major modifications done in the aircraft. So all the earlier tests have to be repeated and demonstrated in the new configuration,” Mr. Madhavan said. “If the requirement [from the IAF] comes within that time, we can roll out immediately,” he stated.
•With this, the HAL would have the entire range of trainer aircraft — HTT-40 Basic Trainer Aircraft (BTA), the IJT, Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer (AJT) and the Lead-in Fighter Trainer (LIFT) being conceptualised based on the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas twin seat trainer aircraft, Mr. Madhavan noted.
•The IJT, meant to replace the ageing Kirans of the IAF fleet, had earlier completed demonstration of capabilities in terms of altitude and speed envelope, load factor, satisfactory stall characteristics and limited armament capability as required by the IAF.
•However, the programme came to a halt in 2016 and flight testing resumed in April 2019.
Major modifications
•Major modifications were undertaken such as shifting the vertical tail aft on the airframe and increasing the rudder area.
•Stating that spin flight testing is inherently a high risk manoeuvre and therefore progresses incrementally turn by turn, the HAL said due to the complex interplay of aerodynamic and inertia forces, the motion of the aircraft in spin was unpredictable and flight testing was the only way to assess the acceptability or otherwise of its characteristics.
📰 Is it right to increase the age of marriage of women to 21?
Empowerment of women through education should be a priority irrespective of the law
•In the recent session of Parliament, the government introduced the Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2021, to raise the age of marriage for women from 18 years to 21 years. After Opposition MPs demanded greater scrutiny of the Bill, it was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports. The government says the proposed law will ensure equal chance for women in higher education and access to jobs and help improve maternal mortality rate and nutrition levels. In a conversation moderated by Jagriti Chandra, Mary E. John and Noorjehan Safia Niaz discuss whether the Bill is welcome. Edited excerpts:
Do you welcome the move to raise the age of marriage for women to 21 years in order to make it equal to the age of marriage for men?
•Mary E. John: The minimum age of marriage could well be the same as the age of majority, which is 18 years. If the question of equality is so critical, the age of marriage for boys should also be 18 years. But we really need to put focus on what should be the minimum age, not the right age. When I look at the government’s pronouncements, the talk is about the right age for marriage. There has almost never been a reference to a minimum age. The law should prescribe a minimum age and I think 18 years is as good as any. It should continue to be a legal presumption, and there is no reason, therefore, to raise it to 21 years.
•Noorjehan Safia Niaz: The main concern of this law is not so much about equality but to raise the age of marriage for women to 21 years. The law shows the way to society, right? When [the] 18 years [rule] also came in, there was some resentment to that. Whenever a law which is a little ahead of its time comes in, there will be some people who won’t like it. But the job of the law is also to show where we are moving as a society. If you look at urban metro cities, where girls are getting educated, that is one section of society that has moved ahead. And that section of society also needs certain protection by the law. But the issue here is of effective implementation of the law. Unless that improves, we are going to have problems of whether the age of marriage for girls is 18 years or 21 years.
Some Muslim MPs in Parliament have called the Bill an attack on personal laws because it proposes that it will override the personal laws of Muslims, Parsis, Hindus and Christians. It also says that some personal laws will be amended, though the Muslim Personal Law is not one of them. Do you then not see this as an attempt to encroach on religious laws?
•Noorjehan Safia Niaz: If you have to really use the word ‘encroachment’ for personal laws, I would say that has been happening for the Muslim community for a long time, even before Independence. The British government brought the Shariat Application Act way back in 1937, and two years later, we had the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, which codified the divorce law and gave the right to Muslim women for divorce. Then came the 1986 Act [Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act]. Because we don’t have fully codified laws, we have had piecemeal legislation. In the 1986 Act, which came after the Shah Bano case, Parliament intervened on the demand of these very religious groups who don’t want parliamentary intervention now. The groups asked Parliament to override the Supreme Court judgment, which was in favour of Shah Bano. And then we have the triple talaq legislation where again Muslim women demanded an intervention by the state to end this practice. Look at the Hindu Marriage Act, which was codified in 1955. It includes the Sikhs and the Buddhists, who are religious minorities. So, the state recognises that each community is to be governed by their personal laws and if there are problems with the personal laws, then it steps in. The state has to be there to listen to grievances. The state has to play its role whether you are a majority or a minority. So, I don’t think this is encroachment. And if there’s a progressive law in the country, why should I be deprived of it just because I am a Muslim woman? There are laws for the Hindu community, which includes Sikhs, Buddhists and the Jains who are otherwise a religious minority. All aspects of the personal law such as marriage, divorce and custody are already codified, i.e. passed by Parliament. Christians are governed by their own personal law, and so are the Parsis. But because of the kind of politics that played out at the time of Partition, and the communalisation and the violence that Muslims faced as a minority, the issue of family law reform always took a back seat. The process of codification of laws began in 1937 [for Muslims], and had Partition not happened, I’m sure Muslims would have had a codified law probably earlier than the Hindu community. But after India gained Independence, there was absolutely no movement towards codifying the Muslim family law till Shah Bano went to court demanding maintenance. Then, too, the legislation went against the Supreme Court judgment. So, Muslim women were again deprived of the provisions of Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Of course, later on, with the Danial Latifi judgment, the damage that that law caused was subverted. But the fact remains that this law [1986 Act] was an attempt to get Muslim women out of the ambit of all legislative protections and constitutional safeguards. And till date, we don’t have a codified family law.
•We are in the 75th year of Independence and Muslims [constitute] 15% of the population of this country. But Muslims are deprived of the legal security which everybody else has. Our tragedy is that even 18 years as the year of marriage for girls is not fully implemented in the Muslim community. There have been contradictory High Court judgments: while some have held that the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act applies to the Muslim community, others have held that it does not. The Shariat law, which is again not codified, says the age of marriage is puberty or age 15. So, where is the protection even for the 18 years of marriage that everybody else has had for so many years? And that is why we are insisting that within this current Bill, a special mention has to be made that the Muslim community will also come under its ambit. Even if tomorrow 21 years is not implemented and even if the law is as it exists today, it should be made applicable to Muslims. To that extent, an amendment is necessary.
•Mary E. John: Noorjehan has raised very important points about the sharp differences post-Partition which have been the subject of considerable debate in the women’s movement. Let us, therefore, take on board that it is not the same kind of question [for Muslim women]. But I just want to point out that if you look at the data on underage marriage, there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims. There are similar proportions of 26.6% in the National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-2016) data. If anything, there’s a slightly better picture on the part of the Muslims compared to the Hindus. So, the popular conception that Muslims are always backward compared to Hindus is not true here. As far as our underage marriage data goes, the pattern is much the same.
•Noorjehan Safia Niaz: The Muslim community may be better on some of the parameters that we are discussing but the question is here of legal parity. Why are Muslims not on par with the rest of the citizens? If 18 is the age of marriage for the entire country, why should Muslim women be left behind? If polygamy is not allowed and if Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code governs Christians and Parsis, why should it be not applicable to Muslims as well? How long are Muslim women going to be suffering this, because we have been told time and again that our minority status is in danger. We have the provision of codifying our personal law to bring it on par with the society we are living in, and bring the best of provisions of the Quran. But if we don’t reform, the state will step in. The part of the community [that resists reform] will allow the state to step in.
The Bill says that it aims to reduce maternal mortality rates, improve nutrition indicators and ensure access to education and jobs for women. Will a law help achieve these goals?
•Mary E. John: The claims that are being made that the nutritional status of the mother and child and maternal mortality rates will improve with the increase in the age of marriage simply do not hold up. If you look at higher ages at marriage, you will look at better data sets because higher ages at marriage correspond with better-off people with better health indicators. People who are wealthier marry at later ages. However, if you control for all these factors, and only concentrate on the factor of age, then you find that age plays the least significant role in any of these indicators. Anaemia is not affected by age at marriage and it is the cause for our terrible maternal mortality rates. Similarly, a poorly nourished woman does not become better nourished because she’s being married off three years later. And sex ratio is particularly off because States with the worst sex ratio, such as Punjab and Haryana, have higher-than-average ages at marriage. So, there is a lot of confusion here and the so-called scientific basis that is being put out by the government does not hold up.
•Noorjehan Safia Niaz: The law is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. If the commercialisation of education continues, how are the poor, especially women and girls, going to access education? If our districts, villages and smaller towns don’t have health facilities, how are women going to access various schemes and programmes? So, these need to simultaneously get addressed.
Many have concerns over the manner in which the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, is implemented and used mostly to criminalise young adults who elope to marry against the wishes of their parents, and have inter-faith or inter-caste marriages.
•Noorjehan Safia Niaz: I understand there are issues. There are going to be problems. Any law when it comes into being does not play out equally for different sections of society. We are a huge country. We have different economic strata, different religions and caste compositions. And maybe that is where the courts come in and judges decide.
•Mary E. John: Existing studies show that the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act is not being used to stop communities from holding underage marriages. It is being used by parents of a girl who is in a so-called elopement or love marriage that they are opposed to. So, please imagine what will happen tomorrow if the age is raised to 21. These women are not children. By the laws of the land, they are young adults who will find themselves at cross purposes with this new law whereby other adults will be able to render their relationships null and void and leave them in a complete legal limbo if not in a criminalised situation. In Nepal where the age of marriage was recently raised to 20 for both men and women, there are large numbers of young women in shelter homes simply because they’re in this legal limbo. Is this the kind of future we want the law to create for us?
📰 Extinguishing the tobacco industry’s main narrative
Tax is not the core driver for the illicit trade in cigarettes, as the industry would like people to believe
•Tobacco is a product that kills more than 13 lakh Indians every year. The annual economic burden from tobacco use is estimated to be ₹177,340 crore which is more than 1% of India’s GDP. About 27 crore people above the age of 15 years and 8.5% of school-going children in the age group 13-15 years use tobacco in some form in India. There is no doubt that tobacco use is highly detrimental to public health. We have to find the ways and the means to reduce the demand for tobacco among existing as well as aspiring users.
Impact of tax
•A large body of literature shows price and tax measures to be one of the most cost-effective measures to reduce demand for tobacco products. When tobacco products become more expensive, people either quit using them or use them less, and it incentivises many to not initiate the habit. Because it hurts both revenue and profits, the tobacco industry, globally, is always devising tactics and narratives that will pre-empt any kind of tax increases on tobacco products. The narrative of “increasing illicit trade” is something the tobacco industry has historically used to pre-empt potential tax increases on tobacco products in most countries around the world. The story is no different in India. The tobacco industry, led by ITC Limited, has maintained that the illegal cigarette trade accounts for as much as 25% of the cigarette market in India. In a recent report by the Tobacco Institute of India, a representative body of the cigarette industry, it was said that the illicit cigarette volume in India has grown by 44% from 2011 to 2019 while adding that high and increasing tax rates provide a profitable opportunity for tax evasion and encourage growth in illegal trade.
Estimates by two studies
•In the interest of regulating tobacco use and protecting public health, it is important to examine whether there is any truth in these industry claims. When one takes a deeper look, however, it is easy to see that neither the estimates nor the methods used to derive them are backed by any transparent studies. On the other hand, there are two studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in recent years that estimate the percentage of illicit cigarettes in the Indian market using widely accepted best practice methodology to estimate the same. The first study published in 2018 which used a survey of empty cigarette packs collected from retail outlets across different cities in India estimated that illicit cigarettes constitute 2.7% of the market. The second study published in 2020 used tax-gap analysis to estimate that the percentage of illicit cigarettes was 5.1% in 2009-10 and 6.6% in 2016-17. Both these studies used transparent and replicable methods and their estimates of the illicit market were nowhere near the 25% figure that the tobacco industry in India has been using to influence the public discourse on tobacco taxation.
•The economic burden from tobacco use in India has increased by 22% in real terms over the period 2011 to 2017. There has been a 3% real decline in Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenues from tobacco products in the past two financial years. On the other hand, the annual reports of ITC show their profits after tax in real terms have increased, on average, 3% every year for the past 10 years. One must also note that despite all the business diversification ITC has undertaken over the years, close to 85% of its profits still come from the cigarette business alone.
•Exaggerating both the scale and the extent of illicit trade has been a means the tobacco industry has used historically to advocate against tobacco tax increases. However, it is to be noted that taxes and prices are not the key determinants of illicit trade. There is sufficient evidence in the literature on illicit trade in cigarettes that shows tax increases only have a minimal impact, if at all, on illicit trade. There are several countries where tobacco taxes are quite high and yet have low levels of illicit trade, while there are also countries with high levels of illicit trade despite having relatively low tax rates. Several factors such as the quality of tax administration, the strength of the regulatory framework, government commitment to control illicit trade, the strength of governance, social acceptance, and the presence of informal distribution networks are known to play a larger role in determining the scale and the extent of an illicit market.
WHO protocol
•The estimated percentage of the illicit market for cigarettes in India is far lower than most countries out there and well below the world average at 11.2% as estimated in a recent study (https://bit.ly/32SGhwI) on the illicit cigarette market across 36 countries. Eliminating all forms of illicit trade in tobacco products through a package of measures is one of the major objectives of the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products under the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The Protocol provides the tools and the measures to eliminate or minimise illicit trade which includes strong governance, establishing an international track and trace system, and securing supply chains. India has already ratified the World Health Organization Protocol and it should now show leadership in implementing these measures to effectively address even the relatively lower levels of illicit trade.
•India had no significant tax increases on any of the tobacco products for the past four years since the introduction of GST in 2017 because of which tobacco products have become more affordable as shown in recent studies. There is no scientific or public health rationale not to increase tax on tobacco products for unfounded fear of increasing illicit trade.
