📰 Parliamentary Panel for body to address human-animal conflict
Committee flags it as serious concern needing legislative backing
•The Environment Ministry must constitute an advisory body of experts to tackle growing instances of human-animal conflict, according to a report by the Standing Committee on Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change headed by Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh.
•The report analyses the Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Bill, 2021 tabled in the Lok Sabha in December 2021. The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 provides a legal framework for the protection of various species of wild animals and plants, management of their habitat and the regulation and control of trade in wild animals, plants and their parts and products. While it has been amended several times, the latest set of proposed amendments by the Environment Ministry were to make it more compliant to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which India is a signatory. CITES regulates international trade in over 38,700 species of wild animals and plants.
•One of the clauses proposed by the Ministry was to have a Standing Committee of the State Board for Wild Life (SBWL) to make the functioning of the body “more purposive” but the report points out that several independent experts and bodies had expressed their concern that such a body would be packed with official members, exercise all powers of the SBWL and take decisions independent of the SBWL itself and “end up being a rubber stamp for faster clearances of projects.”
•The report instead suggests that were such a body to be constituted, it should have at least one-third of the non-official members of the SBWL, at least three institutional members and the Director of the Wildlife Institute of India or his/ her nominee.
•A wildlife standing committee is usually a subset of members that reports to a wider Wildlife Board, in the case of States headed by the Chief Minister, and in charge of executing day-to-day matters.
•While Standing Committee reports on Bills usually stick to criticism of text of the Bill, this report devoted space to the question of Human Animal conflict— a subject not mentioned in the proposed amendments — as it was “a complex issue as serious as hunting” and needed “legislative backing.”
•The report recommends an HAC Advisory Committee to be headed by the Chief Wild Life Warden, who can consult the committee to act appropriately. “Such a committee with few members and in-depth technical knowledge for evolving effective site-specific plans/ mitigation strategies including recommendations on changing cropping patterns and for taking critical decisions at short notice, empowered under the law is necessary,” the report noted.
📰 Everything about this refugee deterrent plan is flawed
The U.K.’s Rwanda asylum plan is marked by a set of burning issues — moral, legal and political
•On April 14, 2022, the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, signed the U.K. and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the United Kingdom and Rwanda. Under this MoU, most migrants who have made their way to the U.K. via unauthorised routes on or after January 1, 2022 will find themselves redirected to a holding centre in Rwanda where they will wait for the Rwandan government to make decisions on their asylum applications. For their assistance in hosting adult and non-criminal migrants, the U.K. will pay Rwanda £120 million along with an unspecified amount per migrant. The U.K. government refers to this as a humane solution that will deter people-smuggling operations run by gangs that charge desperate migrants from several war-torn and developing countries exorbitant prices for transit, only to endanger them by putting them on unseaworthy boats to cross the English Channel.
Broader debate in the U.K.
•While there is no doubt that people-smuggling operations need to be combated as they exploit and jeopardise vulnerable groups of people, the Rwanda asylum plan is not the most effective way to achieve this goal.
•This plan needs to be seen in the context of the broader immigration debate in the U.K. In 2012, the Home Office implemented the Hostile Environment Policy that was meant to make it as hard as possible for any person who had arrived through an unauthorised route, to stay in the country. According to a 2020 report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, this policy not only fostered racism and discrimination against minority groups but also negatively impacted people who had legally arrived in the U.K. In the run-up to Brexit in 2016, more immigration controls were promised to regulate the flow of European Union workers, especially from Eastern Europe. In the right-wing British press, distinctions between legal and illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees are seldom made clearly. This almost deliberate conflation of categories has worked effectively to mobilise the stereotype of an immigrant as a poor, non-white, non-English speaking, benefits sucking and free medical care consuming person, who al
so may be a threat to national security.
•In 2021, the Boris Johnson government introduced the Nationality and Borders Bill with one stated objective being to “deter illegal entry into the United Kingdom, thereby breaking the business model of people smuggling networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger”. The Rwanda asylum plan is the operationalisation of this objective.
What the key issues are
•At the heart of the Rwanda asylum plan, is a set of moral, legal and political issues. First, the plan punishes asylum seekers for entering the U.K. using unauthorised routes. This is a clear violation of Article 31(1) of the Refugee Convention, 1951, which prohibits any state from penalising any person seeking sanctuary for entering the country illegally provided they present themselves to authorities on arrival. So, the plan actively discriminates against refugee and asylum claims made by those who do not arrive via an authorised route. The plan also contravenes Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which gives everyone the right to “seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”.
•Second, the Rwanda asylum plan is unclear on what economic, financial and health-care rights relocated persons will have once they are in Rwanda. The U.K.’s obligations for the well-being of relocated persons will end once they have boarded a flight to Rwanda, a country that struggles with its human rights record.
•Third, there is very little evidence to suggest that such a plan will work to combat people smuggling operations. However, we do need to ask why people resort to using unauthorised means of entry to the U.K. British immigration laws make it very difficult for people without money and documentation to find their way into the country for asylum, thereby forcing extremely vulnerable people to use clandestine migration routes. Also, there is no guarantee that people who have been forcibly flown to Rwanda will not try to attempt the same crossing into the U.K. again. In this case, the people-smuggling gangs will only increase their profits.
•Fourth, let us look at some parallel cases. Rwanda had a similar deal with Israel which was scrapped in 2019. Israel deported a reported 4,000 people from Eritrea and Sudan to Rwanda and Uganda under a voluntary departure scheme. Many who reached Rwanda, also left shortly after and were found attempting to reach Europe precisely through the same people-smuggling routes. Those who stayed had difficulty finding employment and many were left destitute. Similarly, Australia had an offshoring deal with Papua New Guinea and ran a processing facility on Manus Island. The Papua New Guinea Supreme Court found the facility “illegal and unconstitutional” in 2017 and directed Australia to pay Australian $70 million as compensation to the 2,000 detainees at the centre. Its other processing facility on Nauru has been reported to have detainees with declining mental health who are at risk of self-harm; reports of child abuse and sexual abuse in the facility have also surfaced.
Hardly ‘world-class’
•So, who exactly is being protected when vulnerable people seeking refuge are forced to relocate to a country that has shown scant regard for rights and freedoms? Further, does not the forced relocation of already exposed and vulnerable people make them worse off? Ms. Patel has described her plan as “world-class and a world first”. It is neither. Similar experiments touted as humane policies to combat trafficking in migrants and refugees have failed and cost countries such as Australia more taxpayer money than if they had simply processed asylum applications and worked on integrating people into their communities. The U.K. has now shown that it is quite eager to run afoul of its international legal obligations along with demonstrating that it is willing to pay millions to build new systems of discrimination against people from the global south and view them as commodities. The question to put before the British government is this: when did abdication of a state’s responsibility towards any human being become ethical?
The country can be the fulcrum of the new global order, as a peaceful democracy with economic prosperity
•I have been deeply saddened by recent global developments of conflict and violence in Ukraine. Talk of nuclear threats have alarmed me. Regardless of provocations and causes, however justifiable they may seem to be, violence and consequent loss of human lives are deeply regrettable and avoidable. As Mahatma Gandhi’s nation, India must be a committed and relentless apostle of peace and non-violence, both at home and in the world.
Conflict and a reshaping
•The Russia-Ukraine conflict portends a reshaping of the world order. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a paradigm of free societies, frictionless borders and open economies evolved to be the governing order in many nations. This catalysed freer movement of people, goods, services and capital across the world. Global trade and per capita GDP nearly doubled in this period, marking an era of general peace and prosperity. Societies and economies in the world became intertwined closely in the pursuit of shared global prosperity. Such tight inter-dependence among nations will lead to fewer conflicts and promote peace, was the established wisdom.
•The Russia-Ukraine conflict has dismantled this wisdom. If inter-connectedness and trade among nations were mutually beneficial, then it follows that its disruption and blockade will be mutually harmful. Retaliatory economic sanctions imposed on Russia have hurt all nations, albeit some more than the others.
•Egyptians are reeling from food shortages due to their dependence on Russian and Ukrainian wheat, Germans suffer from high costs of heating in winter due to their dependence on Russian gas, Americans face a shortage of electric cars due to unavailability of car batteries that are dependent on Russian nickel, Sri Lankans have taken to the streets on economic woes and Indian farmers run the risk of high fertilizer prices triggered by a global shortage.
‘Global Village’, a lived reality
•‘Global Village’ is not just an academic term but a lived reality for the nearly eight billion people on the planet. This ‘Global Village’ was built on the foundation of advanced transportation networks, cemented with the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency and fenced by integrated payment systems. Any disruption to this delicate balance runs the risk of plunging the ‘Global Village’ into disequilibrium and derailing the lives of all.
•India too has benefited enormously from being an active participant in this interconnected world, with a tripling of trade (as share of GDP) in the last three decades and providing vast numbers of jobs. Trade with other nations should and will always be an integral cornerstone of India’s economic future. A reversal towards isolationism and protectionism will be foolhardy and calamitous for India.
•The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a global geo-economic conflict that threatens to hark back to the Cold War era of two dominant power blocs. Nations that did not condemn the Russian aggression in the United Nations constitute more than half the world’s population but a quarter of the world economy versus nations that condemned Russia, account for three-quarters of the global economy. The former, the Russia-China bloc, are large producers with rising consuming power while the latter, the western bloc, are today’s large consumers. Any new curtain that descends between these two blocs and divides them will cause major upheavals to the entwined global economic equilibrium.
A trade opportunity
•During the Cold War, when India pursued a prudent foreign policy of non-alignment, trade was a small part of India’s economy. Now, trade represents a significant share of India’s GDP. India’s trade is dependent on both these power blocs and on the current global economic structures of free trade, established reserve currency and transaction systems. As the western bloc of nations looks to reduce dependence on the Russia-China bloc of nations, it presents newer avenues for India to expand trade.
•The western bloc of nations has expressed its desire to embrace a new paradigm of ‘free but principled trade’ that values both morals and money. While one may reasonably quibble about this new doctrine, India, as the largest peace-loving democracy, stands to gain enormously from this ‘principled trade’ aspiration of the western bloc. It presents a tremendous opportunity for India to become a large producing nation for the world and a global economic powerhouse. However, to capitalise on these opportunities, India needs free access to these markets, an accepted and established global currency to trade in and seamless trade settlements.
•The American dollar has emerged as the global trade currency, bestowing an ‘exorbitant privilege’ on the dollar, much to the justifiable consternation of other nations. But a forced and hurried dismantling of this order and replacing it with rushed bilateral local currency arrangements can prove to be more detrimental for the global economy in the longer run.
•I recall the time when I was part of bilateral currency negotiations such as the Indian rupee-Russian rouble agreement in the late 1970s and 1980s, when we mutually agreed on exchange rates for trading purposes. Such isolated bilateral agreements are fraught with risks, but when trade is a small share of the economy and such agreements are limited to a few trading partners, it was wieldy.
Needed, ties on either side
•Now, with India’s robust external sector, a flourishing trading relationship with many nations and tremendous potential to expand trade, such bilateral arrangements are unsustainable, unwieldy, and perilous. Opportunities to buy discounted oil or commodities may be enticing but if it entails a prolonged departure from the established order of dollar-based trade settlement or jeopardises established trading relationships with western bloc markets, it can have longer term implications for India’s export potential. In the long run, India stands to gain more from unfettered access to the western bloc markets for Indian exports under the established trading order than from discounted commodities purchased under new bilateral currency arrangements that seek to create a new and parallel global trade structure.
•India thus needs not just a non-aligned doctrine for the looming new world order but also a non-disruptive geo-economic policy that seeks to maintain the current global economic equilibrium. By the dint of its sheer size and scale, India can be both a large producer and a consumer. With rising inflation, volatile crude oil prices, global uncertainty, weak domestic private investment and deteriorating fiscal situation, expanded external trade in the changed global situation presents the best opportunity to salvage India’s economy and create large numbers of jobs for our youth and women. To best utilise this opportunity, India needs not just cordial relationships with nations on either side of the new divide but also a stable and established global economic environment. It is important for India to adopt a strategic economic self-interest doctrine within the larger paradigm of its non-alignment foreign policy.
Social harmony is a must
•Just as it is in India’s best interests to balance the current geo-economic equilibrium, it is also imperative for India to maintain its domestic social equilibrium. To be a large-scale producing nation, India needs millions of factories with hundreds of millions of people of all religions and castes across all States to work together. Social harmony is the edifice of economic prosperity. Fanning mutual distrust, hate and anger among citizens, causing social disharmony is a shameful slide to perdition.
•The reshaping and realignment of the world order will be a unique opportunity for India to reassess its foreign policy, economic policy and geo-political strategy and don the mantle of global leadership. Strengthening India’s global economic might through a cautious geo-economic strategy in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine conflict can potentially mark a pivotal turn in India’s economic history. India can be the fulcrum of this new global order, as a peaceful democracy with economic prosperity. But this requires India to first stem the raging communal divisions within. I sincerely wish and fervently hope that India can emerge as the harbinger of peace, harmony and prosperity in this new world.
