📰 Create more jobs, revamp employment policy
The Government’s 10 lakh jobs creation plan does not appear to have factored in the ground realities
•The Government of India has recently announced its plan to create 10 lakh government jobs in the next 18 months. Of about 40 lakh sanctioned posts, 22% posts are now vacant and the Government will fill these posts in 18 months.
•Though the announcement has been called a “historic step in the interest of the youth” and as “raising a new hope and confidence among youth” by some top Government leaders, the plan has serious problems.
Vacancies are much higher
•The first question is: how is the Government managing now in the absence of more than a fifth of the required number of staff? There are as many as 8.72 lakh positions that were vacant in various departments of the Central government, as told by the Minister of State in Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Jitendra Singh, to the Rajya Sabha on February 3, 2022. If various positions in public sector banks, the defence forces and police, the health sector, central schools and central universities, and the judiciary are added, then the number touches about 30 lakh posts. This number does not include vacancies in State government jobs. As sanctioned posts broadly indicate the required posts needed to run a government, it appears that this government is perhaps facing a serious shortage of staff, which is then causing long delays in work, corruption and maybe other inefficiencies.
•The Government, however, has not made any complaints about such shortages in recent years. Why then has it made this sudden announcement? Is it because the Government is concerned about youth unemployment? Or is it because it wants to fill the required posts? Or, is it because elections are due in a number of States?’
‘Quality’ as issue
•Another major concern is about the quality of employment that will be generated through this plan. The share of contract workers in total government employment has been increasing rapidly in recent years — from 11.11 lakh in 2017 to 13.25 lakh in 2020 and to 24.31 lakh in 2021. In addition, there are “honorary workers” such as Anganvadi workers, their helpers, accredited social health activist (ASHA) workers, etc. These employees of the government earn a lower salary (consolidated wages), and are not entitled to “decent work” conditions (International Labour Organization recommendations) including a minimum package of social security.
•The Government must ensure that the employment generated under its plan will be of a standard quality. There has been no assurance so far on this by the Government.
More jobs are needed
•The total labour force in the country stands at 437.2 million (April 2022 data). At a labour force participation rate of 42.13% (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Ltd.) the unemployment rate of the youth is about 20% at present. Given the backlog of about 30 million unemployed people and an annual addition of 50 lakh-70 lakh workers every year (World Bank), the dimensions of India’s unemployment problem today are formidable. The generation of a mere 10 lakh jobs in the next 18 months is too little. This scheme of the Government will hardly provide any relief to the youth of the country; and will not have much of an impact on the present unemployment problem.
•It is important to note here that the performance of the private sector in creating employment opportunities has remained dismal. Currently, when the economy is still struggling to overcome the shocks caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic, and when private final consumption expenditure has not crossed the pre-pandemic level, private firms are being seen to be managing their profit margin by cutting costs (in the form of rationalising wage bills). In this situation it is all the more important for the Government to ensure as many jobs as possible.
Focus on basis needs
•As is claimed, if the Government is really in ‘mission mode’ to provide employment to the unemployed, and to the youth, it will have to do much more than what has been announced. To start with, the Government will have to create more employment within the Government. Recent national and international reports and rankings have shown that India is lagging far behind most other countries in terms of health and nutrition, particularly women and children, in education, literacy and skills, holistic care of children in early childhood and later; drinking water and sanitation, and other basic infrastructure, etc.
•We believe that the Government will have to take responsibility for meeting these basic needs without depending on privatisation — at least for the bottom 40% of the population. The first task for the Government would be to take much better direct care of basic well-being, human development and human resource development, and the basic infrastructure of the bottom population without privatisation in these areas.
•Another major task would also be to reorient the industrialisation policy to focus on labour-intensive sectors of the economy, and promote Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and informal production by ensuring better technology and higher productivity, providing finances (including working capital) and pushing further cluster development for all industries that have the potential.
Urban employment
•And, finally, considering the fact that the urban economy has been badly hurt by the pandemic, a carefully designed urban employment guarantee programme would be most desirable to create ample urban employment avenues for urban youth. This programme will have to be different from the rural employment guarantee programme. The urban programme should include: basic urban services, where the youth would get special training so that they can be absorbed in the mainstream economy; day-care centres set up for childcare to enable women to reduce their unpaid services and to ensure quality care for children; and infrastructural gaps filled in under construction work to facilitate quality urban life.
•If the gesture of filling vacant posts in the Government is part of a mission employment, it will have to be followed by radical changes in the Government’s employment policy. Let us hope that people of India will be able to discern the motives behind the gesture, and assess the Government’s performance accordingly.
📰 A new judicial device for ‘complete justice’
India’s top court cannot be seen to be helpless when faced with issues of individual liberty
•Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of Alt News, continues to be in prison despite the Supreme Court of India, last Friday, granting him interim bail, because of remand in another case by the Delhi police. The Court was aware of the futility of the bail order. Yet, the Court did not direct his release by granting him bail in the other case too.
•The order relates to a case challenging the Allahabad High Court’s judgment refusing to quash the First Information Report (FIR) against Mr. Zubair. The charge was under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) — outraging religious feelings ... by insulting religion or religious beliefs. Later, a charge under Section 153-A IPC, of promoting religious enmity, was added.
•It was explained to the Court that there was not even a prima facie case against Mr. Zubair. Also, it was shown that the case itself was a device to crush dissent. The political malice behind the charge was very obvious. The Court also seemingly accepted the contentions, as evident from the grant of bail. Yet, the Court said the order was with respect to only the case registered in Uttar Pradesh. This has meant the continued detention of Mr. Zubair.
Challenges before judiciary
•The Supreme Court of India is regarded as the world’s most powerful top court, on account of its wide power of judicial review. It has the jurisdiction to issue writs under Article 32 of the Constitution. It also has the original jurisdiction under Article 131 of the Constitution. There is also wide appellate power under Articles 132, 133, 134 and 136 of the Constitution. More significantly, the Supreme Court has the power to “make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it”, as per Article 142 of the Constitution. Yet, the top court has shown itself to be helpless when issues of individual liberty have been placed before it on very many occasions. Many political prisoners languish in prison after their bail pleas have been repeatedly rejected by different courts. The executive is able to register multiple FIRs in different States of India so as to ensure that the dissident is not released from prison even if bail is granted in some of the cases. Thus, the
jail jurisprudence of the executive effectively surpasses the Court’s bail jurisdiction. Reports say that after the Supreme Court’s order, another warrant was issued against Mr. Zubair by a local court in Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh. This scenario, which reflects the new normal in the country’s criminal jurisprudence, poses crucial challenges to the judiciary.
•The Supreme Court cannot afford to be conventional if it really wants to tackle this situation where an aggrandising executive hunts its opponents in a systematic and incremental way. Conventional legal wisdom proclaims that every criminal case is a case which requires to be dealt with as such and taken to its logical conclusion. Even in Mr. Zubair’s case, the contention of the Solicitor General of India was that “any order passed by (the Supreme) Court (in this case) will interdict four judicial orders passed by two courts which have not been challenged”. It is the Court’s inability to overcome this line of argument by invoking the spirit of Article 142 that led to the ironic predicament of Mr. Zubair being in jail, despite the grant of the ‘interim bail’.
•The practice of registering multiple FIRs is extremely problematic. In the context of free speech, American legal scholar Professor Vincent Blasi identifies “historical periods when intolerance of unorthodox ideas is most prevalent and when governments are most able and most likely to stifle dissent systematically”. The situation in India is illustrative.
More ‘rule by law’
•The criminal justice system in such tough times degenerates into rule by law, that replaces rule of law. The law becomes an effective device in the hands of the Government for the purposes of a witch-hunt and this operates against the opponents of a regime, as a class. In this scenario, if the Court erroneously presumes that the nation’s legal system is governed by the principle of rule of law, fallacies and unjust consequences are bound to occur. In such a legal ambience, it will be equally fallacious to treat each case as isolated, as in reality, it is not so. Climatic changes in a nation’s constitutionalism are a hard reality which no court can ignore.
•Even in challenging times, a constitutional court should be able to evolve a mechanism of its own to preserve the democratic foundation of the country by intervening in the incremental process of nation’s “deconstitutionalisation”. Professor of law Rosalind Dixon in a recent study says that “at least under certain conditions — of sufficient independence, political support and remedial power — courts can too play an important role in buttressing democratic processes and commitments”, and this, according to her, “is the essence of responsive judicial review”. The constitutional courts in Colombia and Brazil have developed the new doctrine of “unconstitutional state of affairs”. This enables the court to address structural deficits with a sense of realism and to pass effective orders even by deviating from procedural rigour, with a view to protect fundamental rights. This is, in certain ways, akin to the practice of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in India and structural injunctions in the United States.
Create a judicial atmosphere
•The courts, no doubt, may sometimes subserve the interest of the executive. This may even pose a serious threat to personal liberty, as it happened recently in its observations against activist Teesta Setalvad and former police officer R.B. Sreekumar. But in certain rare situations, it could still act as a determined umpire who checks the executive’s excesses. The Supreme Court’s intervention in the Centre’s COVID-19 vaccine policy and the Pegasus episode illustrates this point. The need is to expand the latter approach and to create and perpetuate a democratic judicial atmosphere that supports the cause of freedom.
•At least in principle, the Indian Supreme Court is constitutionally equipped with the power to invoke its jurisdiction for the larger cause of liberty, even by deviating from the conventional technical route. The “complete justice” under Article 142 is meant to be used when the legalistic arguments such as those raised by the state in Mr. Zubair’s case have the effect of sabotaging the goal of constitutional justice. The Court needs a new version of judicial activism, which the Court itself evolved, in the 1980s.
•The genesis of Article 142 shows that the makers of the Constitution have consciously incorporated this provision by drastically modifying the earlier corresponding provision in the Government of India Act, 1935. The Government of India Act, by way of Section 210(2), only said about the enforceability of the orders of the Federal Court. It did not, naturally, contain an idea of complete justice in the constitutional sense. Article 142, on the other hand, arms the Supreme Court with this supplemental power.
•The interpretation of the scope of this provision has been varied, and sometimes even conflicting. Some judgments pleaded for its restrictive use while some others did for its liberal and contextual application. In Delhi Development Authority vs Skipper Construction Company (1996), the top court said that the power under Article 142 should remain “undefined and uncatalogued, so that it remains elastic enough to be moulded to suit the given situation”.
Treat them as a class
•It is essential for the Supreme Court of India to treat political prisoners and dissenters facing multiple FIRs and undergoing unjustifiably long incarceration as a class. It needs jurisprudence at the normative level to tackle the technical arguments that create a false notion of rule of law when the very cause of arrest and detention is the lack of it. When a glaring instance of curtailing a person’s freedom is placed before the top court, it should be capable of calling for the records pertaining to the multiple FIRs and to suo motu add all the stakeholders as parties (if needed); the Court should immediately ensure that vindictive incarceration does not continue even for a day. This might be difficult, yet not impossible. Mr. Zubair’s case is one (like many other cases in the past) that demonstrates the juridical deficits of today’s Supreme Court. It is, therefore, an imperative to evolve an effective jurisprudence of “complete justice” by focusing on personal liberty. It is the praxis of this new judicial device that can, perhaps, preserve the country’s democratic legacy.
Fiscal deficits, constraints in tax base expansion, and weakening of institutional mechanisms are challenges
•The health of municipal finances is a critical element of municipal governance which will determine whether India realises her economic and developmental promise. The 74th Constitution Amendment Act was passed in 1992 mandating the setting up and devolution of powers to urban local bodies (ULBs) as the lowest unit of governance in cities and towns. Constitutional provisions were made for ULBs’ fiscal empowerment. However, three decades since, growing fiscal deficits, constraints in tax base expansion, and weakening of institutional mechanisms that enable resource mobilisation remain challenges. Revenue losses after implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the pandemic have exacerbated the situation.
•Comprehensive data sets on municipal finance are important to understand and counter these challenges, but few exist at the city level. Recently, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) analysed data from 80 ULBs across 24 States between 2012-13 and 2016-17 to understand ULB finance and spending, and found some key trends.
Share of own revenue
•The first is that ULBs’ own sources of revenue were less than half of their total revenue, with large untapped potential. The ULBs’ key revenue sources are taxes, fees, fines and charges, and transfers from Central and State governments, which are known as inter-governmental transfers (IGTs). The share of own revenue (including revenue from taxes on property and advertisements, and non-tax revenue from user charges and fees from building permissions and trade licencing) to total revenue is an important indicator of ULBs’ fiscal health and autonomy. This ratio reflects the ULBs’ ability to use the sources they are entitled to tap, and their dependency on IGTs. Cities with a higher share of own revenue are more financially self-sustaining.
•Our study found that the ULBs’s own revenue was 47% of their total revenue. Of this, tax revenue was the largest component: around 29% of the total. There was a 7% increase in own revenue from 2012-13 to 2016-17, but ULBs still lacked revenue buoyancy as their share in GDP of own revenue was only 0.5% for the five-year period.
•Property tax, the single largest contributor to ULBs’ own revenue, accounted for only about 0.15% of the GDP. The corresponding figures for developing and developed countries were significantly higher (about 0.6% and 1%, respectively) indicating that this is not being harnessed to potential in India. Estimates suggest that Indian ULBs’ can achieve these levels. It is essential that ULBs leverage their own revenue-raising powers to be fiscally sustainable and empowered and have better amenities and quality of service delivery.
Dependent on IGTs
•Second, many ULBs were highly dependent on IGTs. Transfers from the Central government are as stipulated by the Central Finance Commissions and through grants towards specific reforms, while State government transfers are as grants-in-aid and devolution of State’s collection of local taxes. Most ULBs were highly dependent on external grants — between 2012-13 and 2016-17, IGTs accounted for about 40% of the ULBs’ total revenue.
•Stable and predictable IGTs are particularly important since ULBs’ own revenue collection is inadequate. While dependence on IGTs dipped over the years due to modest increase in own revenue, the scale of IGTs in India remained at around 0.5% of GDP, which is far lower than the international average of 2% to 5% of GDP.
•This can be improved by increasing the revenue assigned to ULBs from the State governments, and by allocating a share of the State and Centre’s GST proceeds to ULBs. This will cushion ULBs’ balance sheets as they mobilise their own revenue and explore market-based instruments. IGTs can also incentivise ULBs to deliver better service quality and maintain fiscal discipline.
•Third, tax revenue is the largest revenue source for larger cities, while smaller cities are more dependent on grants. There are considerable differences in the composition of revenue sources across cities of different sizes. Class I-A cities (population of over 50 lakh) primarily depend on their own tax revenue, while Class I-B cities and Class I-C cities (population of 10 lakh-50 lakh and 1 lakh-10 lakh, respectively) rely more on IGTs.
•Own revenue mobilisation in Class I-A cities increased substantially. It was primarily driven by increases in non-tax revenue. In the five-year period studied, tax revenue in Class I-A cities grew by about 11%, while non-tax revenue grew by about 30%. The external revenue dependency of these larger cities gradually reduced over time, from around 27% in 2012-13 to about 15% in 2016-17. Own revenues of Class I-B and Class I-C cities, on the other hand, were stagnant even while these cities grew in size.
Operations and maintenance
•Fourth, operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses are on the increase but still inadequate. O&M expenses are crucial for the upkeep of infrastructure and for maintaining quality of service delivery. The share of O&M expenses in ULBs’ total revenue expenditure increased from about 30% in 2012-13 to about 35% in 2016-17. While the expenses were on the rise, studies (such as ICRIER, 2019 and Bandyopadhyay, 2014) indicate that they remained inadequate. For instance, O&M expenses incurred in 2016-17 covered only around a fifth of the requirement forecast by the High-Powered Expert Committee for estimating the investment requirements for urban infrastructure services.
•O&M expenses should ideally be covered through user charges, but total non-tax revenues, of which user charges are a part, are insufficient to meet current O&M expenses. Cost recovery for services such as water supply, solid waste management, transportation and waste water management are thus clearly inadequate.
•The non-tax revenues were short of the O&M expenditure by around 20%, and this shortfall contributed to the increasing revenue deficit in ULBs. Increasing cost recovery levels through improved user charge regimes would not only improve services but also contribute to the financial vitality of ULBs.
•The scale of municipal finances in India is undoubtedly inadequate. A ULB’s realised own revenue resources are far below the estimated potential. Tapping into property taxes, other land-based resources and user charges are all ways to improve the revenue of a ULB. IGTs assume significance in the fiscal composition of ULBs, and a stable support from Central and State governments is crucial till ULBs improve their own revenues. Measures need to be made to also cover O&M expenses of a ULB for better infrastructure and service.
