📰 RPF launches nationwide operation to curb human trafficking
Focus on trains originating from districts bordering neighbouring countries
•Railway Protection Force has launched a nationwide operation to curb human trafficking. As part of “Operation AAHT”, special teams will be deployed on all long-distance trains/routes with focus on rescuing victims, particularly women and children, from the clutches of traffickers.
•The Railways, which operate about 21,000 trains across the country daily, is the most reliable mode of transportation for the traffickers who often moved their victims on long-distance trains.
•The RPF that recued more than more than 2,000 women and children between 2017-21 from the clutches of traffickers intensified the crackdown on human trafficking with the increasing number of cases. The National Crime Records Bureau registers about 2,200 cases of Human Trafficking cases on an average each year.
•Human Trafficking, especially of women and children, for sexual exploitation, forced marriage, domestic servitude, organ transplant, drug peddling etc is an organised crime and the most abominable violation of human rights. Thousands of Indians and persons from neighbouring countries were trafficked every day to some destinations where they were forced to live like slaves. “They are also being trafficked for illegal adoptions, organ transplants, working in circus, begging and entertainment industry…” Sanjay Chander, Director-General of RPF, said in a note to all Chief Security Commissioners of Zonal Railways.
•The Indian Railways which transported over 23 million passengers each day (pre-pandemic), is the largest, fastest and most reliable carrier for suspects who trafficked scores of women and children. The RPF personnel had a pan-India presence and were deployed in escorting trains to provide security to railway assets and passengers.
•As part of “Operation AAHT”, the infrastructure and intelligence network of the force could be utilised to collect, collate and analyse clues on victims, source, route, destination, popular trains used by suspects, identity of carriers/agents, kingpins etc and shared with other law-enforcing agencies. The RPF could act as a bridge cutting across States to assist the local police in the mission to curb the menace.
•Explaining the need to strengthen the intelligence machinery and the action plan to identify, investigate, rescue and rehabilitate victims of the offence, Mr. Chander said cyber cells would start patrolling the web/social media to look for digital footprints of Human Trafficking and added that the focus should be more on trains originating from districts bordering Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
Govt. has said PMMVY will cover second child only when it is a girl
•The government’s recent announcement that the maternity benefit programme which provides ₹5,000 for first child will be extended to cover the second child only if it is a girl has met with sharp criticism from activists who have demanded that it be universalised.
•The Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), launched in 2017, provides ₹5,000 for the birth of the first child to partially compensate a woman for loss of wages. It also aims to improve the nutritional well-being of the mother and the child. The amount is given in three instalments upon meeting certain conditions. It is combined with another scheme, Janani Suraksha Yojana, under which nearly ₹1,000 is given for an institutional birth, so that a woman gets a total of ₹6,000.
•“Under the revamped PMMVY under Mission Shakti, the maternity benefit amounting to ₹6000 is also to be provided for the second child, but only if the second is a girl child, to discourage pre-birth sex selection and promote the girl child,” Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani told the Lok Sabha last week.
•“Firstly, to provide maternity benefit only to the mother of the first-born is illegal as the National Food Security Act, 2013 lays down that every pregnant woman and lactating mother are entitled to it. Then to couch it to say that it is to promote the birth of a girl child is nothing but posturing” says Jashodhara Dasgupta, co-convener, Feminist Policy Collective.
•She says that adding more conditions to the scheme will prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare, which can be overcome if the scheme is universalised.
•“During COVID-19 in the past two years, ASHA [accredited social health activist]workers have not been giving out contraceptive supplies. When the State has failed to provide contraceptive services, why is it penalising women for having babies,” asserts Ms. Dasgupta.“The new announcement implies that women will be able to access the scheme only after the delivery, which will not have any impact on their nutritional uptake during the course of their pregnancy,” says Raghwesh Ranjan, Director, Social and Economic Empowerment, IPE Global.
•One of the objectives of the scheme is to also improve health seeking behaviour of women and, therefore, the first instalment of ₹1,000 is given after ascertaining early registration of pregnancy and the second instalment of ₹2,000 is given after an ante-natal check after six months of pregnancy and the final instalment of ₹2,000 is given after the registration of the child birth and vaccinations for the newborn. Though the Minister shared the information days after the Union Budget, the allocation for the scheme has not shown a notable increase. The scheme is clubbed with several other programmes under the Samarthya scheme. The allocation of ₹2,522 crore for the umbrella scheme last fiscal was almost the same as the allocation of ₹2,500 crore for the PMMVY alone the year before. For financial year 2022-2023, the umbrella scheme has seen a total increase of ₹100 crore.
📰 Notes for India as the digital trade juggernaut rolls on
Sitting out trade negotiations could result in the country losing out on opportunities to shape the rules
•Despite the cancellation of the Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) late last year (scheduled date, November 30, 2021-December 3, 2021) due to COVID-19, digital trade negotiations continue their ambitious march forward. On December 14, Australia, Japan, and Singapore, co-convenors of the plurilateral Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on e-commerce, welcomed the ‘substantial progress’ made at the talks over the past three years and stated that they expected a convergence on more issues by the end of 2022.
Holding out
•But therein lies the rub: even though JSI members account for over 90% of global trade, and the initiative welcomes newer entrants, over half of WTO members (largely from the developing world) continue to opt out of these negotiations. They fear being arm-twisted into accepting global rules that could etiolate domestic policymaking and economic growth. India and South Africa have led the resistance and been the JSI’s most vocal critics. India has thus far resisted pressures from the developed world to jump onto the JSI bandwagon, largely through coherent legal argumentation against the JSI and a long-term developmental vision.
•Yet, given the increasingly fragmented global trading landscape and the rising importance of the global digital economy, can India tailor its engagement with the WTO to better accommodate its economic and geopolitical interests?
Global rules on digital trade
•The WTO emerged in a largely analogue world in 1994. It was only at the Second Ministerial Conference (1998) that members agreed on core rules for e-commerce regulation. A temporary moratorium was imposed on customs duties relating to the electronic transmission of goods and services. This moratorium has been renewed continuously, to consistent opposition from India and South Africa. They argue that the moratorium imposes significant costs on developing countries as they are unable to benefit from the revenue customs duties would bring.
•The members also agreed to set up a work programme on e-commerce across four issue areas at the General Council: goods, services, intellectual property, and development. Frustrated by a lack of progress in the two decades that followed, 70 members brokered the JSI in December 2017 to initiate exploratory work on the trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Several countries, including developing countries, signed up in 2019 despite holding contrary views to most JSI members on key issues. Surprise entrants, China and Indonesia, argued that they sought to shape the rules from within the initiative rather than sitting on the sidelines.
•India and South Africa have rightly pointed out that the JSI contravenes the WTO’s consensus-based framework, where every member has a voice and vote regardless of economic standing. Unlike the General Council Work Programme, which India and South Africa have attempted to revitalise in the past year, the JSI does not include all WTO members. For the process to be legally valid, the initiative must either build consensus or negotiate a plurilateral agreement outside the aegis of the WTO.
•India and South Africa’s positioning strikes a chord at the heart of the global trading regime: how to balance the sovereign right of states to shape domestic policy with international obligations that would enable them to reap the benefits of a global trading system.
A contested regime
•There are several issues upon which the developed and developing worlds disagree. One such issue concerns international rules relating to the free flow of data across borders. Several countries, both within and outside the JSI, have imposed data localisation mandates that compel corporations to store and process data within territorial borders. This is a key policy priority for India. Several payment card companies, including Mastercard and American Express, were prohibited from issuing new cards for failure to comply with a 2018 financial data localisation directive from the Reserve Bank of India. The Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on data protection has recommended stringent localisation measures for sensitive personal data and critical personal data in India’s data protection legislation. However, for nations and industries in the developed world looking to access new digital markets, these restrictions impose unnecessary compliance costs, thus arguably hampering innovation and supposedly amounting to unfair protectionism.
•There is a similar disagreement regarding domestic laws that mandate the disclosure of source codes. Developed countries believe that this hampers innovation, whereas developing countries believe it is essential for algorithmic transparency and fairness — which was another key recommendation of the JPC report in December 2021.
India’s choices
•India’s global position is reinforced through narrative building by political and industrial leaders alike. Data sovereignty is championed as a means of resisting ‘data colonialism’, the exploitative economic practices and intensive lobbying of Silicon Valley companies. Policymaking for India’s digital economy is at a critical juncture. Surveillance reform, personal data protection, algorithmic governance, and non-personal data regulation must be galvanised through evidenced insights, and work for individuals, communities, and aspiring local businesses — not just established larger players.
•Hastily signing trading obligations could reduce the space available to frame appropriate policy. But sitting out trade negotiations will mean that the digital trade juggernaut will continue unchecked, through mega-regional trading agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). India could risk becoming an unwitting standard-taker in an already fragmented trading regime and lose out on opportunities to shape these rules instead.
•Alternatives exist; negotiations need not mean compromise. For example, exceptions to digital trade rules, such as ‘legitimate public policy objective’ or ‘essential security interests’, could be negotiated to preserve policymaking where needed while still acquiescing to the larger agreement. Further, any outcome need not be an all-or-nothing arrangement. Taking a cue from the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) between Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand, India can push for a framework where countries can pick and choose modules with which they wish to comply. These combinations can be amassed incrementally as emerging economies such as India work through domestic regulations.
•Despite its failings, the WTO plays a critical role in global governance and is vital to India’s strategic interests. Negotiating without surrendering domestic policy-making holds the key to India’s digital future.
📰 A self-reliant pharma industry
The production-linked incentive scheme needs to be modified in order to attract the industry
•The pharmaceuticals industry is a key sector for the Atmanirbhar Bharat programme. The objective of the Phase-I Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme in this sector was to reduce import dependence on active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), drug intermediates (DIs) and key starting materials (KSMs). This scheme was expected to attract a lot of interest as countries had begun to adopt measures to reduce their dependence on China for APIs. However, the response to this scheme did not meet expectations.
•A total of 239 applications were received in two rounds from an industry of over 3,000 firms. Of these, 61 were selected. As 11 beneficiaries withdrew from the scheme, the number reduced to 50 as on December 9, 2021, against the maximum number of 136 beneficiaries as mentioned in the guidelines. No beneficiary was identified in five of the 41 products notified for the scheme.
Creating confidence among investors
•A recent study conducted by us on this scheme, published as a working paper of the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), shows that India needs a strategy, not just a scheme, to realise the objective of reducing import dependence. There are three areas where this PLI scheme requires modifications. Other complementary measures also need to be put in place for India to become self-reliant in APIs, DIs and KSMs.
•Firms will invest in production in India if they see a prospect of producing at prices cheaper than the cost of imports. As cheaper imports from China are critical for maintaining their global competence in the export of formulations, investors will face an investment uncertainty if the proposed measures do not ensure the price competitiveness of domestic production. More than half the turnover of this industry is from exports. Imports from China are reported to be cheaper by 35–40% compared to indigenously produced products. So, any strategy aimed at achieving self-reliance should focus on achieving price competency in production.
•Technology plays a very crucial role in reducing import dependence as Indian producers have constraints in overcoming some of the advantages of Chinese producers such as scale of operations. Without appropriate technology, APIs/DIs/KSMs manufacturers in India will not be in a position to beat their Chinese counterparts in pricing. This PLI scheme doesn't have a technology component.
•Two, this scheme also insists on new manufacturing facilities, which doesn’t make business sense for firms which have idle capacities. Many firms used to produce these products and have wound up production as cheaper imports began to flow from China. Permission to utilise existing but inoperational or underutilised facilities for production would have elicited a better response.
•Three, the history of development of the indigenous pharmaceutical industry in India shows the significance of an industrial policy that is in tandem with trade and science and technology policies. This PLI scheme remains a standalone measure; it is not connected to other relevant policy measures.
•Nearly three-fourth of the production of pharmaceuticals in India is by MSMEs. Historically, large private sector firms have been interested in formulations, not APIs. As APIs are sold with their chemical names and without branding, large firms have no interest in their production. The production of APIs by large firms, if at all, is largely for captive consumption. The focus of the PLI Phase-I scheme, however, is on large firms. The data we obtained for 13 of the beneficiary firms shows that all of them are large firms, if the definition of MSMEs that existed at the time of announcement of the scheme is used. If the new definition is used, all except one are large firms. It seems like policymakers are interested in taking advantage of efficiencies associated with the scale of operations by encouraging large firms. But it is equally important to include smaller firms which are into the KSMs/DIs/APIs business in a major way.
Involving public sector enterprises
•In spite of the two rounds of applications, no beneficiary was identified (or no application was received) in five products, which are all antibiotics. It appears from our interactions with the industry that four of the five products — Neomycin, Gentamicin, Tetracycline and Clindamycin base are APIs that are not used much by the industry. This may be one of the reasons for the lack of enthusiasm by the industry. However, we should note that such APIs may be of great significance for public health. In such cases, public sector enterprises (PSEs) should be tasked with the production of APIs and their KSMs and DIs. The lead role that PSEs had played in the development of an indigenous pharmaceutical industry in India can never be forgotten.
