📰 World lost 11.2 crore jobs in the first quarter of 2022: ILO
Gender gap in India’s employment data finds mention in the report on the ‘world of work’
•The "world of work" is being buffeted by multiple crises, says the ninth edition of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Monitor. The report says that after significant gains during the last quarter of 2021, the number of hours worked globally dropped in the first quarter of 2022, to 3.8% below the employment situation before the pandemic. About 11.2 crore jobs might have lost between this period, according to the report.
•The gender gap in India’s employment scenario is mentioned in the report on the "world of work". The report said both India and lower-middle-income countries excluding India experienced a deterioration of the gender gap in work hours in the second quarter of 2020. “However, because the initial level of hours worked by women in India was very low, the reduction in hours worked by women in India has only a weak influence on the aggregate for lower-middle-income countries. In contrast, the reduction in hours worked by men in India has a large impact on the aggregates,” the report mentions.
•Explaining the data, an ILO official told The Hindu that for every 100 women at work prior to the pandemic, 12.3 women would have lost their job as an average through the entire period considered by the report. The official added that, in contrast, for every 100 men, the equivalent figure would have been 7.5. “Hence, the pandemic seems to have exacerbated the already substantial gender imbalances in employment participation in the country,” the official said.
•The fresh lockdowns in China, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and the global rise in the prices of food and fuel are cited as the main reasons for the findings. The ILO urged its member countries to take a humane approach to address the situation. Financial turbulence, potential debt distress and global supply chain disruption points at a growing risk of a further deterioration in hours worked in 2022, as well as a broader impact on global labour markets in the months to come, the report said.
•The report added that a “great and growing divergence between richer and poorer economies” continues to characterise the recovery. “While high-income countries experienced a recovery in hours worked, low- and lower-middle-income economies suffered setbacks in the first quarter of the year with a 3.6 and 5.7 per cent gap respectively when compared to the pre-crisis benchmark,” the report said.
•Commenting on the report, trade unions urged the Centre to address the issue of unemployment. “Women employment in India has come down, particularly in sectors such as healthcare as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ILO report suggests that the purchasing capacity of the workers should be improved. ILO has been proposing decent jobs and decent wages. We do not have decent employment here in India. Most people are on contract without any social security. If there are no decent wages, purchasing power will also come down. The Code on Wages was passed in 2019 but is not yet implemented. The Wage Committee in 1948 asked the government to implement minimum wage, living wage and decent wage. We have not implemented even minimum wage yet under pressure from industrialists,” Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) general secretary Binoy Kumar Sinha said.
•All India Trade Union Congress general secretary Amarjeet Kaur said the ILO’s projections have underestimated the real picture in India. “According to our calculation, 30%-60% of workers — five crore people — who lost jobs during the lockdown have not joined any work. One-third of MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) can never be revived according to a survey by the associations of MSMEs. Hawkers and vendors facing problems due to high prices of fruits and vegetables. The Centre had accepted that 50% of the women workforce returned back to cities after the first lockdown. Overall women participation has also gone down. We need more jobs. The governments have to do a lot. They must ensure that there are no retrenchments,” Ms. Kaur said.
The mandate of the council is to create a strong institutional framework to promote and support cooperative federalism in the country, activate the council and zonal councils by organising its regular meetings.
•The Inter-State Council, which works to promote and support cooperative federalism in the country, has been reconstituted with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as Chairman and Chief Ministers of all States and six Union ministers as members.
•Ten union ministers will be the permanent invitees to the Inter-State Council, according to an official notification.
•The government has also reconstituted the standing committee of the Inter-State Council with Union Home Minister Amit Shah as Chairman.
•While PM Modi is the Chairman, Chief Ministers of all States and Union Territories having a legislative assembly and the administrators of UTs not having a legislative assembly have been made members.
•The union ministers who were made members of the council are: Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah, Nirmala Sitharaman, Narendra Singh Tomar, Virendra Kumar, Hardeep Singh Puri, Nitin Gadkari, S Jaishankar, Arjun Munda, Piyush Goyal, Dhamendra Pradhan, Pralhad Joshi, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Kiren Rijiju and Bhupender Yadav.
•The mandate of the council is to create a strong institutional framework to promote and support cooperative federalism in the country, activate the council and zonal councils by organising its regular meetings.
•It also facilitates consideration of all pending and emerging issues of the Centre- State and inter-State relations by the zonal councils and inter-State council and develop a sound system of monitoring the implementation of the recommendations of the inter-State council and zonal councils.
•In a separate notification, the Union Home Ministry said the composition of the standing committee of the Inter-State Council will be: Amit Shah (Chairman) while members include Union ministers Nirmala Sitharaman, Narendra Singh Tomar, Virendra Kumar and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat.
•The Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are also members of the standing committee of the Inter-State Council.
•The standing committee will have continuous consultation and process matters for consideration of the council, process all matters pertaining to centre-state relations before they are taken up for consideration in the inter-state council.
•The standing committee also monitors the implementation of the decisions taken on the recommendations of the council and consider any other matter referred to it by the chairman or the council.
•The standing committee may, if necessary, invite experts and persons eminent in specific fields to have the benefit of their views while deliberating upon the related subjects.
📰 India joins Biden’s new trade initiative for Indo-Pacific, negotiations to begin
U.S. officials made it clear that the IPEF would not be a “free trade agreement”, nor are countries expected to discuss reducing tariffs or increasing market access.
•India signalled its readiness to join a new economic initiative led by the United States for the region, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and leaders of 10 countries, who joined virtually, for the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) in Tokyo on May 23. The negotiations for the IPEF, which will begin on May 24, are expected to center around four main pillars, including trade, supply chain resiliency, clean energy and decarbonisation, and taxes and anti-corruption measures. The grouping, which includes seven out of 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), all four Quad countries, and New Zealand, represents about 40% of global GDP.
•“India will work together with [other IPEF countries] to build an inclusive and flexible Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,” Mr. Modi said at the launch of the new initiative, that comes three years after India walked out of the 15-nation RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership).
•“I believe that resilient supply chains must be based on three-pillar foundation of trust, transparency and timeliness and I am sure that this framework will make these pillars strong and lead to prosperity, peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region,” Mr. Modi added.
•U.S. officials made it clear that the IPEF would not be a “free trade agreement”, nor are countries expected to discuss reducing tariffs or increasing market access. In that sense, the IPEF would not seek to replace the 11-nation CPTPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) that the U.S. quit in 2017, or the RCEP, which China, and all of the other IPEF countries (minus the U.S.) are a part of. Three ASEAN countries considered closer to China — Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos — are not members of the IPEF, however.
•Briefing the media, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that the U.S. would seek to attract businesses investing in China away towards IPEF. “I would say, especially as businesses are beginning to increasingly look for alternatives to China, the countries in the Indo-Pacific Framework will be more reliable partners for U.S. businesses.”
•U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai also said that the IPEF would be different from the original Trans-Pacific partnership as the U.S. was “unable to deliver on the plan”, indicating hurdles in the U.S. Congress, where any trade concessions are seen in an increasingly unfavourable light.
•U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also said that the IPEF was intended to boost U.S. manufacturing. “The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, or IPEF, is part of President Biden’s commitment to putting American families and workers at the centre of our economic and foreign policy, while strengthening our ties with allies and partners for the purpose of increasing shared prosperity,” Mr. Sullivan told journalists.
•Details of the framework on the four pillars are still to be fleshed out, and government officials said India will keenly watch the progress in negotiations on the IPEF. One of the IPEF’s roles in the Indo-Pacific, said documents and a fact sheet released after the launch, will be to set and follow standards for the digital economy and cross-border data flows and data localisation, areas where India has had some strong differences with the U.S. and allies, especially after it tabled a data protection Bill that makes data localisation mandatory.
•The framework also seeks to counter inflation through more resilient supply chains, promoting more commitments from every member country on clean energy and decarbonisation, and commitments on a “fair economy” though effective tax regimes that tackle money laundering and bribery and corruption, the documents said.
•“With today’s launch, partner countries will begin discussions focusing on strengthening economic cooperation and achieving shared goals,” the Ministry of External Affairs’ statement said, underlining the fact that the IPEF’s contours are still to be formally agreed upon. The IPEF plan follows a U.S. plan for a “Blue Dot Network” to certify infrastructure projects against a set of criteria and standards, that was launched by the U.S., Japan and Australia in 2019.
📰 Engineering tomatoes to produce vitamin D
Scientists have used a novel way to modify tomato plants to have fruits rich in a precursor to vitamin D
•Li, J., Scarano, A., Gonzalez, N.M. et al. Biofortified tomatoes provide a new route to vitamin D sufficiency. Nat. Plants (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01154-6
•Reading the pages of the World Sustainable Development Goals 2 (SDG2) — Eradicating Hunger — is depressing to say the least. According to the estimates made in 2020, nearly 690 million people, who make up close to 8.9% of the world’s population, are hungry. This number has increased by 60 million in the preceding five years. The index which was initially decreasing has started to rise since 2015. This does not portend well for the SDG2 which has as its target zero hunger by 2030, and the guess is, if this trend continues, that the world will have 840 million people affected by hunger by 2030.
The ‘invisible’ hunger
•There are various ramifications to hunger, and an important part of it is micronutrient malnutrition. This is a term used for diseases caused by deficiency of vitamins and minerals in the diet. This is particularly a problem in developing countries and the number of those suffering from this so-called invisible hunger is huge. Some methods of combating this are to provide micronutrient supplements in the form of tablets or capsules and to fortify food products such as flour or salt by enhancing micronutrients in them. There is also the route of genetically modifying plants to produce biofortified leaves and fruit which can be consumed to alleviate micronutrient hunger.
•In this line, a paper in Nature Plants by Jie Li et al tries to address vitamin D deficiency by genetically modifying tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants so that the fruit contains a significant amount of provitamin D 3 which is a precursor from which humans can make vitamin D. Provitamin D 3 has the chemical name 7-dehydrocholesterol, or 7-DHC for short. Humans can synthesise Vitamin D from 7-DHC when they are exposed to ultraviolet B (UVB) light. Vitamin D is needed for a process known as calcium homeostasis which is the maintenance of constant concentration of calcium ions in the body. This is needed for, among other things, bone development and strength, and its deficiency is a cause of conditions such as rickets and osteoporosis.
•Other diseases that are associated with vitamin D deficiency are cancer, Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Vitamin D 3 is present in fish and dairy products. Vegetarian diets are particularly deficient in Vitamin D.
Mutant tomatoes
•The recommended intake of vitamin D is 15 microgram per day for children and 20 microgram per day for elders. This can be given through supplements or a careful exposure to sunlight, but there are various caveats for the latter. It is in this context that the work of J. Li et al is significant. The authors of the paper, published in Nature Plants, tweaked a recently discovered pathway in tomato plants to produce cholesterol and a substance called steroidal glycoalkaloid (SGA for short) using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. This inhibits the conversion of 7-DHC to cholesterol and instead the former accumulates in the leaves, green and ripe fruits.
•Usually, in untreated tomato plants, 7-DHC is present in leaves and to a lower extent in green fruit, but not in ripe fruit — which is the most consumed of the lot. The researchers showed that in their modified plants, the suppression of the activity of a particular gene, “led to substantial increases of 7-DHC levels in leaves and green fruit,” and, according to the paper, while levels of 7-DHC were lower in ripe fruits of the mutant, they remained high enough that if converted to Vitamin D 3 by shining UVB light, the amount in one tomato would be equivalent to that in two eggs or 28 grams of tuna, both of which are recommended sources of vitamin D. In addition, the researchers report that the mutants showed a reduction in their leaves of a substance called alpha-tomatine, and they comment that this may even be beneficial because of alpha-tomatine’s reported toxicant or antinutritional activity. Surprisingly, the cholesterol levels in both fruit and leaves of the mutants was higher that of the wild-type. This was despite having blocked the conversion of 7-DHC to cholesterol.
Need for deeper understanding
•Prof P. V. Shivaprasad, whose group in National Centre of Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, studies the effect of small RNA biogenesis in establishment of epigenetics (epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes in the way your genes work), and who is not involved in this work comments that while the study throws open a welcome new angle to increase vitamin D intake, it needs better understanding. Alpha-tomatine is believed to have a role in the plant’s resistance to viral, fungal, insect and herbivoral attacks. Thereby it is important in safeguarding the plant and its self-preservation, and the reduction of alpha-tomatine in the mutants may not necessarily be a good thing. The unexplained levels of cholesterol are also surprising and need to be explained. So, while this experiment is an important one and promises to be fruitful in replenishing vegetarian diets with vitamin D, it needs further scrutiny and a deeper look.
📰 Meeting family planning goals
India needs to focus on improving access to family planning services for not just adults, but also the younger population
•India’s family planning programme has improved access to contraceptives. This has led to a reduction in the Total Fertility Rate from 3.4 in 1990-92 to 2.0 in 2019-21, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS). However, there are two themes that need further attention. First, according to NFHS-5 and the 2022 report by the United Nations Population Fund, there is a rise in adolescent childbearing in some States such as Tripura and Meghalaya. Second, COVID-19 has had a severe impact on economic resources and access to education, thereby influencing the choices women and the youth make about their sexual and reproductive health. In order to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of Family Planning by 2030, India now needs to focus on improving access to family planning services for not just the adult population, but also the youth.
Expanding the horizon
•In India, frontline health workers have contributed significantly in implementing Mission Parivar Vikas, which aims to accelerate access to high-quality family planning choices, to successfully increase the modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (mCPR), especially among female non-users from vulnerable communities. They have achieved this by delivering contraceptives at homes and offering a wider basket of alternatives such as injectable contraceptives. However, there are still many districts in India that have low mCPR, with a large proportion of them being the youth. We need to strengthen the capacity of health workers in using the Family Planning Logistics Management Information System — a dedicated software to ensure the smooth forecasting, procurement and distribution of family planning commodities across all the levels of health facilities — to ensure the availability of and access to contraceptives by marginalised communities.
•Family planning interventions need to be tailored around the diversity of contexts, health needs, and populations for whom the intervention is to be implemented. The youth are not a homogenous group. We need to answer key questions pertaining to the sexual reproductive health needs of adolescents with varying profiles such as males and females who are in school, out of school, married, unmarried, and so on.
•These are key considerations in planning and designing programmes. There is a need to break down the data by key characteristics in order to reach specific groups of people in order to have the greatest impact. Moreover, when addressing younger populations, holistic health awareness programmes on the right age of marriage, safe sexual behavior, contraception, reproductive health, and diet diversity are paramount. It is only by working holistically on overall health goals and addressing social determinants can we ensure equitable family planning services for both adults and young people.
Prompting male engagement
•We have still not involved men as much as we can in the family planning programme. Certain gender transformative approaches have shown promising results in various places. For instance, The Men in Maternity (MiM) study conducted in Delhi demonstrated the effectiveness of teaching young couples about contraceptives and promoting joint decision-making in choosing family planning methods. Several other examples of involving men in the family planning discourse include the PRACHAR project in Bihar, the Yaari Dosti programme in Mumbai, and the GEMS project in Goa.
•Many of the programmes in public health have also started leveraging the capabilities of the private sector to improve service delivery. For instance, leveraging India Post and partnering with a third-party logistics partner through the Informed Push Model showcases how the private sector can be effectively engaged to provide family planning products at health facilities and make them available when the community needs them. The private sector can offer innovative solutions in family planning, thereby improving the community’s access to services.
•India needs to develop an equitable model that meets the needs of the youth and adolescents. In several districts, more than one-fifth of the population in the adolescent age group are now entering the reproductive age group. Thus, building capacity among health workers, addressing intersectionality, engaging men in the discourse of family planning, and drafting innovative solutions through effective public and private partnerships can greatly improve access to family planning services and the overall health of our younger population.
📰 A Harvard branch in India, prospects and challenges
It will be worthwhile for policymakers to look at the experience of other countries for positive and negative lessons
•India, after half a century of keeping its higher education doors closed to foreigners, is on the cusp of opening itself to the world. The traditional orientation to swadeshi that has characterised much of Indian thinking, at least in higher education, is changing. The wide-ranging National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 promises higher education reforms in many areas, and internationalisation is prominent among them. Among the underlying ideas is to strengthen India’s “soft power” through higher education collaboration, bringing new ideas and institutions from abroad to stimulate reform and show “best practice”, and in general to ensure that Indian higher education, for the first time, is a global player.
New thinking
•An example of the new thinking was part of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s April 2022 visit to India, which featured a visit to the innovative Gujarat Biotechnology University and strengthening the United Kingdom-India academic collaboration. The Gujarat Biotechnology University is an example for new models of international academic partnerships emerging in India. It was established by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of Gujarat in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, which assists the Gujarat Biotechnology University in developing strategies with regard to teaching, learning, research and innovation, and quality assurance, among others. This is a unique model in the present Indian academic context as there are many regulatory hurdles that still exist in the country with regard to international academic partnerships, which includes the operation of international branch campuses.
•Currently, India does not allow the entry and the operation of foreign university branch campuses. The NEP 2020 was a turning point for the entry of foreign universities as it recommended allowing foreign universities ranked in the “top 100” category to operate in India — under somewhat unrealistic conditions. In February 2022, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Budget speech, announced that “world-class foreign universities and institutions would be allowed in the planned business district in Gujarat’s GIFT City” (or the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City) and they would be free from domestic regulations to facilitate availability of high-end human resources.
•The Minister’s statement was a marked departure from the NEP 2020 recommendations that allow only the “top 100” category to operate in India. A similar accommodating stance could be observed in the (written) reply given by the Minister of State for Education, Dr. Subhas Sarkar, in the Lok Sabha in March. He noted that two foreign institutions, from France and Italy, had expressed interest in setting up campuses in India. However, the Italian institute “Istituto Marangoni”, is not a university. It was reported that in April 2022, the University Grants Commission (UGC) formed a committee to draft regulations to allow foreign institutions in the “top 500” category to establish campuses in India — realising that more flexibility was needed.
•Establishing branch campuses of top foreign universities is a good idea as this will bring much-needed global experience to India. But is this practical? And will overseas universities be interested? Globally, branch campuses, of which there are around 300 now, provide a mixed picture. Many are aimed at making money for the sponsoring university — and this is not what India wants. And some have proved to be unstable. A recent example in this regard is the ending of the decade-long partnership between Yale University and the National University of Singapore in running the Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
Current initiatives
•There has been modest growth of various forms of partnerships between Indian and foreign institutions. The joint PhD programmes offered by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay-Monash Research Academy and the University of Queensland-Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Academy of Research (UQIDAR), both with Australian partners, are some examples. Another example is the Melbourne-India Postgraduate Academy (MIPA). It is a joint initiative of the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with the University of Melbourne. MIPA provides students with an opportunity to earn a joint degree accredited both in India and Australia: from the University of Melbourne and one of the partnering Indian institutions. These partnerships suggest that India could offer opportunities for international branch campuses as well.
•International branch campuses, if allowed, could function as a structurally different variant of India’s private university sector. The establishment of foreign university branch campuses would encourage competition mainly between existing private universities and foreign branch institutions, but would have less impact on the public universities. Branch campuses, if effectively managed, could bring much needed new ideas about curriculum, pedagogy, and governance to Indian higher education — they could be a kind of educational laboratory.
Practical challenges
•On the positive side, India is seen around the world as an important country and an emerging higher education power. It is the world’s second largest “exporter” of students, with 4,61,792 students studying abroad (according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics). And India has the world’s second largest higher education system. Foreign countries and universities will be eager to establish a “beachhead” in India and interested in providing opportunities for home campus students to learn about Indian business, society, and culture to participate in growing trade and other relations.
•Still, it will not be easy to attract foreign universities to India and even more difficult to create the conditions for them to flourish. Many of those top universities are already fully engaged overseas and would likely require incentives to set up in India. Further, there are smaller but highly regarded universities outside the ‘top 500’ category that might be more interested. Universities around the world that have academic specialisations focusing on India, that already have research or faculty ties in the country, or that have Non-Resident Indians (NRI) in senior management positions may be easier to attract. What is most important is to prevent profit-seekers from entering the Indian market and to encourage foreign institutions with innovative educational ideas and a long-term commitment. Many host countries have provided significant incentives, including building facilities and providing necessary infrastructure. Foreign universities are highly unlikely to invest significant funds up front.
More hurdles to cross
•A big challenge will be India’s “well-known” bureaucracy, especially the multiple regulators. If bureaucratic hurdles cannot be drastically cut, there will be no success in attracting branch campuses. In addition, a recent study underlined the fact that apart from allowing home institutions to repatriate surplus funds after tax clearance, a new accreditation mechanism, flexible visa rules for foreign students and faculty, financial incentives to offer programmes in priority areas should also be considered.
•Branch campuses would be helpful in addressing skill requirements and providing examples of different approaches to higher education. It will be worthwhile to look at the experience of other countries for both positive and negative lessons. After examining national experiences elsewhere, clear policies can be implemented that may be attractive to foreign universities. Once policies are in place, the key to success will be relationships among universities — and not grandiose government schemes.
📰 Why vaccine mandates are essential
The court’s view that the States’ vaccine mandates are disproportionate could undermine community interest
•The recent Supreme Court verdict upholding the government’s current vaccination policy deserves to be lauded. The court, however, held that restrictions imposed by States and Union Territories on unvaccinated individuals cannot be said to be proportionate as they sought to invade an individual’s bodily integrity and personal autonomy under Article 21 of the Constitution. The court used the test of proportionality to scrutinise these vaccine mandates. The proportionality test is a standard of review that is invoked to keep a check on the infringement of bodily integrity and privacy of an individual by the state.
Misinterpreting proportionality
•At the outset, the proportionality test requires any state action which purports to infringe on individual privacy and autonomy to satisfy the following conditions. One, the state action should be sanctioned by law; two, the proposed action should have a legitimate state aim; and three, the extent of interference by the proposed state action should be proportionate to the need for such interference. This essentially means that there should not exist any other less restrictive measure which can be employed to achieve the same legitimate state aim.
•To the extent that the vaccine mandates of the States require partial or full vaccination of individuals as a precondition for accessing public spaces, services, or using public transportation, they can fully withstand the contours of the proportionality test, especially at a time when the state interest is as compelling as that of preventing the transmission of COVID-19 and the number of deaths. This has been illustrated forthwith.
•First, the competency of the States to legislate and take effective measures on issues concerning ‘public health’ flows from Entry 6 of the State List of Schedule VII of the Constitution. The Disaster Management Act of 2005 and the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 empower the States to undertake effective measures to mitigate the harms caused during a medical emergency. As such, the States’ actions have legislative backing.
•Second, the legitimate aim of the state is unequivocally illustrated by the fact that inoculations can go a long way in preventing serious illness and reducing deaths in persons infected with COVID-19. In this regard, the Indian Council of Medical Research said that 92% of COVID-19 deaths in India this year occurred in unvaccinated individuals. Any vaccine mandate which nudges individuals to get inoculated in order to prevent deaths or further mutations of the virus has a legitimate state aim.
•Third, the extent of interference exercised by the state with the privacy and bodily autonomy of an individual in making vaccination an essential precondition for availing of certain services cannot be said to be disproportionate. While we acknowledge that the third prong of the proportionality test requires the court to make a value judgment in terms of what measures may or may not qualify as disproportionate, we would be remiss here if we lost sight of the fact that any less restrictive measure would have failed to achieve mass inoculation, which lies in the vanguard of our battle against the pandemic.
Safeguard community interest
•The imposition of vaccine mandates to safeguard community interests of the society is not unprecedented. In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts held that the city of Cambridge in Massachusetts could punish citizens who rejected smallpox vaccinations. In 1901, a smallpox outbreak raged across the Northeast and Cambridge, and the state responded by mandating that all adults obtain smallpox vaccinations or face a $5 fine. In 1902, Pastor Henning Jacobson refused to get vaccinated and pay the fee, claiming that he and his son had been harmed by prior immunisation. Jacobson contended in the State court that the legislation violated both the Massachusetts and Federal Constitutions. His claims were denied by State courts, including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Jacobson argued before the Supreme Court that “compulsion to introduce disease into a healthy system is a violation of liberty.” The Supreme Court dismissed Jacobson’s arguments and said: “A community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.” This ruling was soon fortified when a separate issue of vaccinations — state laws requiring children to be vaccinated prior to attending public school — came up in Zucht v. King in 1922. Justice Louis Brandeis and a unanimous court held that Jacobson had already established that a state may exercise its police power to provide for compulsory vaccination.
•In India, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s sentiments on community interest being prioritised over individual interests were echoed by the Supreme Court in Asha Ranjan v. State of Bihar (2017). In that case, the court essentially laid down a hierarchy for a situation when two fundamental rights under the same umbrella are pitched against each other. It observed that the community interest cannot be sacrificed at the altar of individual interests especially in a situation where a fear psychosis is running through the community.
•It is puzzling to note here that despite acknowledging the argument on community interest in paragraph 49 of the judgment and addressing the need to limit individual liberty in such cases, the Supreme Court still went on to declare vaccine mandates to be disproportionate until the time infection rates remain low. This will inevitably have a direct bearing on India’s ability to equip itself and its citizens for further mutations of the virus, if any, in the times to come.
•The arguments in opposition to vaccine mandates could have the potential to be sustained if it had not been proved that vaccines are medically essential to prevent severe illness and reduce deaths among infected persons. Should the virus mutate further, the presence of a class of unvaccinated persons would have wide-ranging ramifications for an already overburdened healthcare system.
•Being a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, India is bound to take all possible measures to progressively realise the enjoyment of “highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” of its citizens under Article 12 thereof. In this regard, it is only befitting that the state expedites inoculations at a time when infection rates are relatively low. This will not only alleviate the burden on the healthcare system during more difficult times, but will also ensure that the state’s healthcare policies are proactive and not merely reactionary.
•As for bodily integrity and personal autonomy of an individual under Article 21 of the Constitution, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the fact that such autonomy proceeds on the guarantee of life itself. In such a scenario, it becomes essential for the state to first safeguard the life and health of its citizens before individuals’ decisional autonomies, even if that requires the state to take aid of its constitutionally recognised police powers.
