Category: Burning Issues

The ongoing stand-off between the Union government and protesting farmers does not show any signs of a resolution at the moment. Farmers, especially in Punjab and Haryana, have been protesting against the three agriculture laws enacted by the central government.

The situation is extremely volatile since the farmers are determined not to leave Delhi and camp therein for months for further protests.

The Three Contentious Laws: A quick recap

Tap here for a comprehensive image

(1) Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020:

• It expands the scope of trade areas of farmers produce from select areas to “any place of production, collection, and aggregation”. It allows electronic trading and e-commerce of scheduled farmers’ produce.
• It prohibits state governments from levying any market fee, cess or levy on farmers, traders, and electronic trading platforms for trade of farmers’ produce conducted in an ‘outside trade area’.

(2) Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020:

• It creates a national framework for contract farming through an agreement between a farmer and a buyer before the production or rearing of any farm produce.
• It provides farmers engaging with Agri-business firms, processors, wholesalers, exporters or large retailers for farm services and sale of future farming produce by a mutually agreed price framework.

(3) Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act 2020:

• It allows for the center to regulate food items through essential commodities.  
• It also requires that imposition of any stock limit on agricultural produce be based on price rise

Agitators at the forefront

Farmers in Punjab and Haryana are known for their adamant attitudes. They are heavily dependent on public procurement and assured price through MSP. Nearly 88% of the paddy production and 70% of the wheat production in Punjab and Haryana (in 2017-18 and 2018-19) has been absorbed through public procurement.

Why are farmers fuming over these laws?

These bills sought to bring much-needed reforms in the agricultural marketing system. However, farmers are apprehensive that the free market philosophy supported by these bills could undermine the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system and make farmers vulnerable to market forces.

Let us look at all their concerns one by one:

(1) Fear against the end of Mandi System

• The APMC regulates the mandi (marketplace) where farmers bring their produce, and therefore, guarantees that they receive the MSP.
• Since the state governments will not be able to regulate the trade outside the APMC markets, farmers believe the laws will gradually end the mandi system and leave farmers at the mercy of corporates.

(2) Fear over MSPs and procurement guarantee

• Farmers believe that dismantling the mandi system will bring an end to the assured procurement of their crops at MSP.
• Similarly, farmers believe the price assurance legislation may offer protection to farmers against price exploitation, but will not prescribe the mechanism for price fixation.
• They are demanding the government guarantee MSP in writing, or else the free hand given to private corporate houses will lead to their exploitation.

(3) Fear of Arhatiyas

• The arhatiyas (commission agents) and farmers enjoy a friendship and bonding that goes back decades.
• On an average, at least 50-100 farmers are attached with each arhatiyas, who takes care of farmers’ financial loans and ensures timely procurement and adequate prices for their crop.
• Farmers believe the new laws will end their relationship with these agents and corporates will not be as sympathetic towards them in times of need.

 (4) Fear over the end of subsidised electricity

• Farmers concerns are also fuelled by the proposed Electricity (Amendment) Bill 2020 which might end their access to subsidised electricity.
• The bill seeks to create an Electricity Contract Enforcement Authority (ECEA), a move aimed to further centralization.
• Another concern is the transfer of subsidies through DBT. Farmers will have to pay first from their own pocket, after which they will get subsidies.

(5) Fear over Contract Farming

• The FAPA Act formalizes contract cultivation through a “national framework” and explicitly prohibits any sponsor firm from acquiring the land of farmers through purchase, lease or mortgage.
• But farmers fear over the big corporate players’ monopoly over food processing industry and its supply chain dynamics.
• They fear that their ownership rights would be at risk as the Act provides for debt instruments for the companies which have their own recovery mechanisms.

(6) Fear over dispute resolution

• The FAPA Act provided for a three-level dispute settlement mechanism by the conciliation board, Sub-Divisional Magistrate and Appellate Authority.
• Since the highest level of appeal for the farmer against any private entity was the Appellate Authority, the farmer is effectively prevented from moving the Court.
• Thus, they claim that the Act was highly skewed in favor of private entity as the individual farmers did not have the resources that private companies had.

(7) Fear over EC Amendment Act

• The original EC Act de-regulated food items including cereals, pulses, potato, onion, edible oilseeds, and oils, and could only be regulated in the extraordinary circumstances.
• The new law states that government regulation of stocks will be based on rising prices.
• This stock-limiting puts farmers at the peril of the government and thus prevent them from making from any profit during any extra-ordinary circumstances as most of the time they only have to bear losses. (Ex. Onion farmers in Maharashtra).

What are the broader concerns?

Agriculture per se deals with everything that a farmer does — right from field preparation and cultivation to also the sale of his/her own produce.

 (1) The centre has overreached

• Article 246 of the Constitution places “agriculture” in entry 14 and “markets and fairs” in entry 28 of the State List.
• But entry 42 of the Union List empowers the Centre to regulate “inter-State trade and commerce”.
• While trade and commerce “within the State” are under entry 26 of the State List, it is subject to the provisions of entry 33 of the Concurrent List – under which the Centre can override.
• The Centre, in other words, has passed a law that removes all impediments to both inter-and intra-state trade in farm produce, while also overriding the existing state APMC Acts. The FPTC Act does precisely that.

(2) States authority grossly surpassed

• The act of primary sale at a mandi by the farmer is as much “agriculture” as production in the field.
• “Trade” begins only after the product has been “marketed” by the farmer.
• Going by this interpretation, the Centre is within its rights to frame laws that promote barrier-free trade of farm produce (inter-as well as intra-state) and do not allow stockholding or export restrictions.
• But these can be only after the farmer has sold. Regulation of the first sale of agricultural produce is a “marketing” responsibility of the states, not the Centre.

(3) A totalitarian move

• There is a debate around the constitutional provisions with regard to the respective domains of the State and the Union with regard to agricultural marketing,
• However, issues affecting the farming community have a far greater bearing on the States relative to the Centre.
• While enacting the Bills, the Centre extended little consideration to the sensitivity or consultations of the States who are busy fighting the pandemic this hour.

(4) Media insensitivity

• Punjab and Haryana farmers have been at the forefront of this struggle and the other regions were slow to catch up.
• The media terming it as a movement of ‘middlemen’ carried out by opposition parties and covertly supported by the ‘Khalistanis’ is the most distressing aspect.
• This claim, for which no evidence has been offered, has been amplified by many news channels.

Wait! Before you make up your mind ….. Ever wonder, why did the govt intervene through these legislations?

(1) Flawed argument over MSP

• These bills do not mention to do away with MSPs. Moreover APMCs have never assured that farmers get MSPs (which itself has no legal backings).
• Over 80% of all land holdings were small and marginal with less than 2 hectares of farm land and hence, most of them, far from selling, end up buying food for even their own consumption.
• In such cases, the rise in MSP actually hurts these farmers instead of helping them. The government assured price only helps a few large farmers.

(2) Food security is no more an issue

• The roots of state intervention in agriculture, from government procurement to rationing and restrictions on private traders are to found in recurring food shortages in the period after Independence.  
• Many experts believe that these incentives are not needed today because India is a food-surplus country now.
• This is what the current reforms seek to abolish. The sharp rise in India’s agriculture exports is often cited as evidence of this fact.

(3) An equalizing move for all

• The average nutritional intakes in India are much lower than just developed countries and, the purported food surplus seems to be the result of inadequate food consumption due to affordability issues.
• There still exists malnutrition as most of the public cannot afford good diets.
• According to research by the International Food Policy Research Institute, 63.3% of people in rural India could not afford the Cost of a Recommended Diet (CoRD).

(4) Protesting farmers are better off than the rest

Data from a 2013 survey carried out by the National Statistical Office (NSO) shows that farmers from Punjab and Haryana had the highest incomes in the country.

• The farmers who are protesting outside Delhi’s borders are among the richest among their peers in India.
• A disproportional share in government procurement at MSP plays an important role in this.
• States where there are no large-scale MSP operations tend to have lower prices in private markets as well. That incentivizes the richer farmers to lobby for the continuation of the status quo.

(5) Contract farming was a long pending issue

• Contract farming in India has shown that marginal and small farmers are generally excluded.
• The problems they face include the following- highly one-sided i.e. pro-contracting agency contracts, delayed payments, undue rejections and outright cheating among others.
• Hence it was necessary for the govt. to bring legislation.

Much of government procurement at MSPs — of paddy, wheat and increasingly pulses, cotton, groundnut and mustard — happens in APMC mandis. In a scenario where more and more trading moves out of the APMCs, these regulated market yards will lose revenues. “They may not formally shut, but it would become like BSNL versus Jio. And if the government stops buying, we will be left with only the big corporates to sell to….

Govt and farmers at crossroads: A timeline

In its first term, the government was forced to retract its proposal to ease the 2014-15 land acquisition norms fearing a political backlash, following massive protests across the country.  But the peace it bought with the farmers was short-lived.

Farmers’ angst in nooks and corners of rural India had been simmering, bursting out in spurts of violence like the one witnessed in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur in 2017 where farmers were protesting, demanding loan waiver and higher crop prices.

This was followed by the 2018 farmers’ agitation in Maharashtra. Moved by the poor implementation of the loan waivers, thousands of farmers undertook a march from Nashik to Mumbai demanding redressal. Though then the government decided to fulfil the demands, it, however, retreated.

Why do farmers get on the streets?

• It’s not that farmers’ agitation has picked pace only since 2014. But agriculture sector experts say farmers’ grievances have mostly remained unaddressed.
• Rural distress has been on the rise, stoking farmers’ anger. Politics has added fuel, making a lethal cocktail.
• Even though Punjab and Haryana are not as critical to the country’s food security as they were a few decades ago, they are extremely important in India’s farm economy.
• Decades of high farm earnings also mean that the peasantry in these two states has much more in terms of material wherewithal to fight for its interests.
• Therefore, the fact that the government’s attempts to undermine their interests by enacting the recent farm laws have triggered a sharp political backlash is hardly surprising.

What do they want?

• Farmers would want no restrictions on the movement, stocking and export of their produce.
• For example, Maharashtra’s onion growers have vehemently opposed the Centre’s resort to banning on exports and imposition of stock limits whenever retail prices have tended to go up.
• But these restrictions relate to “trade”.
• When it comes to “marketing” — especially dismantling of the monopoly of APMCs — farmers, especially in Punjab and Haryana, aren’t very convinced about the “freedom of choice to sell to anyone and anywhere” argument.

From the government’s standpoint, the elephant in the room would be if the farmers insist on an additional demand: Making MSP a legal right. That would be impossible to meet, even if the three farm laws get repealed.

What options does the government have?

While the farmers want the three farm laws to be repealed and a new law with a provision that ensures the MSP is not tinkered with, the government has maintained that MSP is not being done away with.

These may be just fears, but they aren’t small.

(1) Repealing the laws

• Punjab farmer leaders, including two major political parties, demand repeal of these laws.
• Overall, almost 90 per cent of the agri-produce is sold to the private sector. However, repealing would mean bringing back controls, licence raj and the resultant rent-seeking.
• Milk, poultry, fishery, etc. don’t go through the mandi system and their growth rates are 3 to 5 times higher than that of wheat and rice.

(2) Legally enforcing the MSPs

• Another demand is making the MSP statutory and legally binding even on the private sector.
• This is impractical as there are 23 commodities for which MSPs are announced, but in actual practice only wheat and rice enjoy MSPs in any meaningful manner and that too only in 6-7 states.
• The FCI is overloaded with grain stocks that are more than 2.5 times the buffer stock norms.
• If the government cannot cope up with excess production of just wheat and rice in any meaningful way, think of how it will handle 23 commodities under MSP.

(3) Implementing Price Stabilization Scheme

• The third policy option is to use the Price Stabilization Scheme to give a lift to market prices by pro-actively buying a part of the surplus whenever market prices crash.
• Farmers can use Commodity Derivatives Exchanges where farmers can buy “put options” at MSP before they even sow their crops.
• If the market prices at the time of harvest turn out to be below MSP, government can compensate them partly for lower market prices (which again aren’t feasible for the govt.)

(4) Decentralizing MSPs and other subsidies

• Another option is to totally decentralize the MSP, procurement, stocking, and public distribution system (PDS).
• The Centre can get off from MSP, PDS, fertilizer subsidy, and MGNREGA and let the states decide it.
• So, the whole money on food subsidy can be allocated to states on the basis of their share in all-India poverty/proportion of vulnerable population.

A bigger challenge at the moment

• Several farmers said that they had come prepared to dig in for a prolonged struggle.
• Farmers are carrying ration that can last months and are in no mood to turn back. Any use of force by the state may lead to a major law and order disruption.
• In the current situation, the police have already used water cannons and tear gas to disperse the agitated farmers — but both methods have failed.
• This could lead to a severe law and order crisis.
• Moreover, international voices are also rising on the credibility of the government to address the farmers concerns, which is not a healthy sign.

Way forward: Give reforms a chance

Reforms in agriculture have been overdue.  There has been rhetoric in last 10 years in favour of agricultural but very few concrete steps have been taken.

One rhetoric is very clear now. The APMC mandis were never filled with good samaritans and neither is the MSP religiously enforced everywhere.

• Just passing these laws won’t be enough. The success of liberalizing the farm market will hinge on effective implementation, constant monitoring and timely action.
• Accelerating research and academic excellence could bring in the ‘best in class’ technologies and can multiply farmers’ incomes.
• As far as the APMCs and commission agents are concerned, the governments should work on a clear roadmap to modernize them by facilitating them in providing value-added services.
• They could be leveraged to set-up grading and sorting, warehousing, cold chains and food processing infrastructure. This way, it is a win-win-win for the state government, farmers and the commission agents.
• While taking the control away from these agents, the government must also ensure that the gap is filled with foolproof mechanisms to ensure timely payments to farmers to avoid any cash crunch.

Don’t fear the competition

• When we create competition for their produce, the price improves. There are more buyers, more choices. Farmers can reap the benefits of that.
• The COVID-19 crisis opened a window of opportunity to reform the agri-marketing system.  Patience and professionalism will bring rich rewards in due course, not noisy politics.

Conclusion

• The governments must try to allay the fears of farmers over the Farm Bills and it is never too late to rethink. Unconditional talks with farmers would be an appropriate starting point.
• There is genuine uncertainty over what private procurement will mean. Will it mean greater corporate power over farmers, possibly unhealthy monopolies or duopolies?
• Leveraging the reforms and moving forward rather is the most feasible solution than to protest amid the pandemic.
• What farmers need and are asking for is legally guaranteed remunerative prices. If the Bills are perceived of good intent, then the government should not shy away from proper parliamentary scrutiny of all its details.
• Political parties that are opposing these Bills should coordinate better keeping farmers’ interests in the forefront, and not their party politics.

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References

Minimum Support Prices for Agricultural Produce

https://theprint.in/opinion/newsmaker-of-the-week/farmers-protest-a-big-challenge-for-modi-bigger-than-demonetisation-gst/553541/

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/four-key-aspects-of-the-farmers-protest/story-UKuhPOVY7N3nAs1OZXBU0L.html

https://www.businessinsider.in/india/news/apmc-and-msp-will-continue-under-new-farm-bills-2020/slidelist/78230172.cms

Dr. B R Ambedkar, in his lecture “Castes in India” in 1916 –

“One of the most intrinsic characteristics of the caste system is endogamy, which prohibits marriage outside of caste and the maintenance of caste in India is premised on the enforcement of strict endogamy.“

Discourse on interfaith marriages in India at present involves diverse narratives ranging from opposition and resistance to acceptance.

Forced religious conversions for interfaith marriages cases are widely seen in news these days. And many states are attempting to ban religious conversion for the sole purpose of marriage. The state of Uttar Pradesh has seen its first arrest under the new ordinance so passed.

What is Inter-faith Marriage?

• Interfaith marriage, sometimes called a “mixed marriage”, is marriage between spouses professing different religions.
• For individuals who choose interfaith marriage, love is their sole motivation and relationship is generally viewed in terms of individual compatibility.

Interfaith Marriages in India

• The right to marry is a part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.
• It is a universal right and it is available to everyone irrespective of their gender.
• A forced marriage is illegal and is invalidated in different personal laws on marriage in India, with the right to marry recognized under various religious laws.

Provisions for such marriages

• The Special Marriage Act, 1954 (SMA) was enacted to facilitate the marriage of couples professing different faiths, and preferring a civil wedding.
• However, some practical problems arise in registering such marriages.
• The law’s features on prior public notice being given and objections for the safety and privacy of those intending to marry across religions.
• To overcome this, many settle for marriage under the personal law of one of them, with the other opting for religious conversion.

Core Issue: Religious Conversions

Religious conversion is one of the most heated issues under interfaith marriage. There are various reasons for which people do convert their religion like:

• Voluntary Conversions i.e. conversions by free choice or because of change of beliefs
• Forceful Conversions i.e. conversions by coercion, undue influence or inducement
• Marital Conversions i.e. conversions due to marriage
• Conversion for convenience

The larger Constitutional issue

(A) Article 21

• Many high courts across India have ruled that- an individual’s right to marry a person of his or her choice is a fundamental right that cannot be denied on the basis of caste or religion by anybody.
• In the Hadiya Case (2016), the Supreme Court had ruled that the right to marry a person of one’s choice is integral to Article 21 (right to life and liberty) of the Constitution.

(B) Article 25

• Article 25 talks about the term “propagate” which means to promote or transmit or merely freedom of expression.
• The question of whether ‘right to convert’ comes under the ambit of ‘right to propagate any religion’ holds fundamental importance to determine the constitutionality of anti-conversion laws.
• There is no expressed provision for ‘conversion’ in the Indian Constitution but there are proponents whose contention is in the favour that right to conversion is implicit under Article 25 which emerges from freedom of conscience.

(C) Rights of women

• Any individual has the absolute right to choose a life partner and this cannot be affected by matters of faith.
• Again, the perception of such marriages is considered okay for males but not for females.
• This indicates gendered responses of the society towards such marriages.

Furore over interfaith marriage

Religious conversion has emerged as the practical way to cohabit as a couple, in a country where neither the inter-faith, inter-caste nor the live-in couples can earn societal approval.

• As per some Personal laws, in order to get married conversion of religion to get equalized is the only way.
• There are cases of being allegedly lured and honey-trapped by men and those girls now seeking their help to free themselves.
• Interfaith marriages these days are believed to be a forced conversion of the women spouses.
• Fundamentalists’ claims that men of a particular religion are trained on the intricacies of religious doctrine to allure other religion women for marriage in an attempt to finish off her religion.

States narrative against interfaith marriages

• Uttar Pradesh is the latest state to implement a law against forceful inter-faith conversions for marriage, amid similar steps by other states. Its proposed law defines punishment and fine for three different cases.

1. Conversion is done though “misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, allurement or by any fraudulent means” would face a jail term of one to 5 years, and a minimum fine of Rs 15,000.
2. Conversion of a minor, a woman from the SC or ST would have to face a jail term from three to 10 years, with a minimum fine of Rs 25,000.
3. If such conversion is found at the mass level, then those guilty would face a jail term from three to 10 years, with a minimum fine of Rs 50,000.

• It proposes among other things that a marriage will be declared “shunya” (null and void) if the “sole intention” of the same is to “change a girl’s religion”.

Such legislations are archaic because,

• In the K.S. Puttuswamy or ‘privacy’ judgment, the Supreme Court had already clarified that any interference by the State in an adult’s right to love and marry has a “chilling effect” on freedoms.
• The choice of a life partner, whether by marriage or outside it, is part of an individual’s “personhood and identity”, the apex court has held.
• In the Lata Singh case, the top court recognised the country is going through a “crucial transformational period”.
• It said the “Constitution will remain strong only if we accept the plurality and diversity of our culture”.

Arguements by the States

• It is accused that interfaith marriages often induce “undue influence”, “allurement” and “coercion” for religious conversions.
• Often, negotiations and accommodation post-marriage involve the issue of identity and its expression in the family.
• The recent murder of 20-year-old college girl by her stalker is a case in point. She was shot in the head from point-blank range. Matters came to head after she had filed a molestation complaint against the stalker month’s back, who was pressuring her to convert and marry him.
• It translates as violence against women’s autonomy.

Societal Response and Threats

• The couple faces societal norms against their alliances that are sometimes labelled as immoral, unholy or acts based on lust.
• It brings up the aspect of women as symbols of honour and ‘honour killings’ as one of the societal responses to interfaith marriages.
• Response to such alliances may also go to the extent of killings and ex-communication of individuals (by Khap Panchayats) who attempt to cross their community’s boundaries.
• Interfaith marriages also pose an ideological dilemma to different religious groups.
• On the one hand, different religions promote the philosophy of acceptance and concern for fellow human beings, and on the other hand, there is rigidity in the process of marriage.

Arguments in favour of such marriages

• Interfaith marriages have the potential to build a strong base for community-level changes towards greater sensitivity and acceptance among different faiths/religions.
• These marriages reflect the ‘genuine extent of heterogeneity’ in society, promote pluralism and diminish ‘ideological monopoly’ of different religions.

A sole matter of individual rights

• Ironically, interfaith marriages themselves are fairly common in India.
• The freedom of decision of his/ her marriage shall lie with the person only. The need is to accept the fact.
• Prohibition deprives a woman of her agency and, in effect, controls female sexuality.
• There are many high profile examples in fields such as the arts, sports, journalism, and business as well as politics.

Conclusion

• Marriage is an extremely personal affair. The right to marry a person of one’s choice or to choose one’s partner is an aspect of constitutional liberty as well as privacy.
• The issue of conversion can be resolved by actually agreeing to not convert.
• Marriage done solely for the purpose of conversion and conversion by misrepresentation, force, fraud, undue influence, inducement, allurement should be discouraged.
• In short, we should be focusing on dismantling the barriers of religion, caste and other divisions rather than bring up more barriers in these endeavours as is the attempt now.

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References

Religious Conversion and freedom of religion

https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/push-to-legislate-interfaith-marriages-sparks-backlash-in-india/

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-a-2013-study-revealed-about-interfaith-marriages-6742991/

https://www.deccanherald.com/specials/sunday-spotlight/why-we-can-t-have-laws-curtailing-the-right-to-marry-918518.html

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2393861717730620

UP Law against Forceful Inter-Faith Marriage and Conversions

India is one of such paradises on earth where you can speak your heart out without the fear of someone gunning you down for that, or, it has been until now. Even if the situation of Indians is a lot better than that of their fellow citizens of other nations, the picture is not really soothing or mesmerizing for Indians any more. This observation is being made with regard to the exercise of the right of freedom of speech and expression in the context of social media and the hurdles placed on that by the arbitrary use of the so-called cyber laws of the nation.

The Kerala government withdrew its controversial ordinance allowing police to arrest individuals for social media posts just two days after it had been introduced.  It had introduced Section 118A in the Kerala Police Act, to penalise ‘offensive,’ ‘abusive,’ and ‘threatening’ social media posts. The amendment had triggered off a public outcry leading to its hasty withdrawal.

Before delving into the issue in details, we should first understand the case of Kerala and its relation with the erstwhile Section 66A of the IT Act.

What was Kerala’s Law?

• Section 118A criminalized the communication of abusive, defamatory and intimidating speech.
• It says that any expression, publication or dissemination of threatening, abusive, defamatory or humiliating content made through any mode of communication punishable if the person does it knowing it to be false and damaging to reputation or mind of another person.
• A person, if convicted for the offence, could be punished with imprisonment of upto 3 years or fine of Rs. 10,000 or both.
• This is not just for writing or creating such a post, but those who share that post or opinion will also face the same kind of punishment.

Ambiguity over the Law

• The terms like “threatening, abusing, humiliating or defaming” were not defined in Section 118A of the Kerala Police Act.
• The outlawed sections spoke of vague notions like ‘annoyance’ and ‘inconvenience’, which are not defined in law anywhere.
• But Section 2 of the same Act states that the words and expressions not defined under the said law shall have the meanings as defined in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) or Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC).
• Out of four actions criminalized under the latest amendment by Kerala, only defamation is clearly defined in the IPC.

Section 66A in a new bottle

Section 66A of the IT Act dealt with information related crimes in which sending information, by means of a computer resource or a communication device, which is inter alia offensive, derogatory and menacing is made a punishable offence.

The entire provision was struck down by the Supreme Court in the Shreya Singhal judgement.

• In judgement, the Court had found that Section 66A was contrary to both Articles 19 (free speech) and 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.
• It lay in the fact that it had created an offence on the basis of undefined actions: such as causing “inconvenience, danger, obstruction and insult”.
• These did not fall among the exceptions granted under Article 19 of the Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech.

In addition, the court had noted that Section 66A did not have procedural safeguards like other sections of the law with similar aims, such as:

1. The need to obtain the concurrence of the Centre before action can be taken.
2. Police authorities could proceed autonomously, literally on the whim of their political masters.

Criticisms of the Keralan law

It needs no explanation that the law had the potential for great abuse against lay people and the media alike. It gives enormous, unbridled powers to the police. Anybody could be accused of humiliating someone and prosecuted.

• Terming the law draconian, experts has said that the new law was another affront on free speech and its wide and vague ambit left it vulnerable to rampant misuse.
• The law was no way related to women’s safety or anything that the government had earlier said.
• The law would have been misused by people who may want to sue over the smallest disagreements and by those who are already misusing defamation laws.
• Its misuse would not have been restricted to political criticism or religious opinion formation but “all ‘likes’, blogs, ‘unfriending’ now will be settled at police stations,” he says.
• It mentioned “class of persons” in the law which could even mean deities, any group, organisation, brand or company.
• It will effectively be a DDOS attack (denial-of-service attack) on the police functioning on the state, as well as on the police. There will be a huge rush of FIRs filed against all kind of issues between people.
• Another aspect of worry was that it gave power to the police to file suo-motu cases against anyone.

Bigger Picture: Freedom of Speech on Social Media

• The Internet and Social Media has become a vital communications tool through which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of expression and exchange information and ideas.
• In the past year or so, a growing movement of people around the world has been witnessed who are advocating for change, justice, equality, accountability of the powerful and respect for human rights.
• In such movements, the Internet and Social Media has often played a key role by enabling people to connect and exchange information instantly and by creating a sense of solidarity.
• And in the light of the growing use of the internet and social media as a medium of exercising this right, access to this medium has also been recognized as a fundamental human right.

Hate Mongering: A new cool

Social media today is a hotbed of toxic and hateful conversations. Curbing hate speech and fake news has emerged as a critical challenge for governments globally.

• Unregulated social media promotes misinformation, hate speech, defamation, and threats to public order, terrorist incitement, bullying, and anti-national activities.
• Abusive posts do promote violence against or threaten people based on their race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender and religious affiliation.
• On grim situations, they include death threats and rape threats to women.
• Also, the fake news panacea is not a new phenomenon linked to the rise of social media. Fake news has even lead to lynchings.

Why controlling social media expressions is a difficult task?

It is undeniable that the consequences of the narrative that takes shape on online platforms, more often than not, have real life implications.

• The number of users on social media is ever-increasing and the volume of traffic is too huge to monitor.
• The social media platforms are least bothered about public normalcy and social order.
• They even with public policy departments seem to neglect their role in curbing hate- content and misinformation.
• If over-regulated, the platforms would become ripe for the state’s control over the public perception through state-promoted posts.

Limited cyber safeguards

• There is no specific legislation in India which deals with social media except The Information Technology Act, 2000.
• There are several provisions in it which can be used to seek redress in case of violation of any rights in the cyberspace, internet and social media.

Other provisions are:

Some of the safeguards include Section 67 IT Act (punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form); Section 506 IPC (punishment for criminal intimidation); Section 509 IPC (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman); Section 500 IPC (punishment for defamation).

Way forward

• The regulations to deal with such issues in India are insufficient and are also scattered across multiple acts and rules under the IPC, the IT Act and CrPC.
• The need is to harmonize and unify the existing laws.
• Moreover, there is a need to amend the draft intermediary guidelines rules to tackle modern forms of hate content that proliferate on the Internet.
• Therefore, it is imperative for the government to recognize the menace of hate speech and ensure that there is proper regulation in place to tackle the issue.

Keeping all this in mind, the Government should consult technical experts to look into all the possible facets of the use and misuse of social media and recommend a suitable manner in which it can be regulated without hindering the civil rights of citizens.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that we require some legal provisions to protect persons from cyber bullying. But the amendment brought in by Kerala provided ample scope for gross misuse.

• It is clearly evident that social media is a very powerful means of exercising one’s freedom of speech and expression.
• However, it is also been increasingly used for illegal acts which has given force to the Governments attempts at censoring social media.
• Where on the one hand, the misuse of social media entails the need for legal censorship, on the other hand, there are legitimate fears of violation of civil rights of people.
•  What is therefore desirable is regulation of social media, not its censorship.

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References

https://thewire.in/government/kerala-free-speech-law-constitution

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/as-kerala-brings-new-gag-law-recalling-sc-rap-on-another-5-years-ago-7061423/

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/keralas-new-118a-law-is-section-66a-new-bottle-138185

http://www.legalserviceindia.com/legal/article-426-social-media-and-freedom-of-speech-and-expression.html

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/government-decides-to-backtrack-from-implementing-kerala-police-act-amendment/articleshow/79365385.cms

https://www.oneindia.com/explained-what-is-118a-of-the-kerala-police-act-cs-3180068.html

India’s decision to stay out of the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, Asia’s mega free-trade agreement (FTA), has been met both with a sense of approval and disappointment and divided economists on the issue.

Context

• Last week, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was signed by 15 countries led by China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the 10-country ASEAN group.
• It is billed as one of the world’s largest Free Trade Agreement (FTA), accounting for nearly 30% of the global GDP covering 30% of the world’s population.
• After long negotiations, India exited the grouping last November, saying it wanted to protect its economy from rising trade deficits with a number of RCEP members.
• India’s decision is still the subject of much debate, and the RCEP has left a special window open for India to rejoin at a future date.

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a free trade agreement (FTA) between –

• The 10 members of ASEAN = Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam
• Additional members of ASEAN +3 = China, Japan, South Korea
• Members with which ASEAN countries have FTA = Australia, New Zealand

What is the objective of RCEP?

• RCEP aims to create an integrated market with 15 countries, making it easier for products and services of each of these countries to be available across this region.
• The negotiations are focused on the following:

Trade in goods and services, investment, intellectual property, dispute settlement, e-commerce, small and medium enterprises, and economic cooperation.

China in RCEP

• RCEP was pushed by Beijing in 2012 in order to counter another FTA that was in the works at the time: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
• The US-led TPP excluded China.  However, in 2016 US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the TPP.
• Since then, the RCEP has become a major tool for China to counter the US efforts to prevent trade with Beijing.

Significance for China

• The beginning of RCEP is a major development that will help China and trade in the Asia-Pacific region in the post-Covid-19 scenario.
• It will give China access to Japanese and South Korean markets in a big way, as the three countries have not yet agreed on their FTA.
• While China already has a number of bilateral trade agreements, this is the first time it has signed up to a regional multilateral trade pact.

RCEP and India

• India ended negotiation on RCEP over terms that were perceived to be against its interests.

• The ties with China in recent months have been disturbed by the military tension in eastern Ladakh along the LAC.
• In the meantime, India has also held a maritime exercise with Japan, Australia, and the United States for the “Quad” that was interpreted as an anti-China move.

Why did India walk out?

• India decided to exit RCEP negotiations over “significant outstanding issues”.
• Its decision was to safeguard the interests of industries like agriculture and dairy and to give an advantage to the country’s services sector.
• The current structure of RCEP still does not address these issues and concerns.

 (1) Escalated tensions with China

• Escalated tension with China is considered to be a major reason for India’s decision.
• Major issues that were unresolved during RCEP negotiations were related to the exposure that India would have to China.

(2) Surge in imports

• This included India’s fears that there was “inadequate” protection against surges in imports.
• It felt there could also be a possible circumvention of rules of origin— the criteria used to determine the national source of a product.
• In the absence of this, other partner countries could dump their products by routing them through other countries that enjoyed lower tariffs.

(3) Rules of origin criteria

• Its concerns on a “possible circumvention” of rules of origin — the criteria used to determine the national source of a product — were also not addressed.
• Current provisions in the deal reportedly do not prevent countries from routing, through other countries, products on which India would maintain higher tariffs.
• This is anticipated to allow countries like China to pump in more products.

(4) Inability for countermeasures

• India was unable to ensure countermeasures like an auto-trigger mechanism to raise tariffs on products when their imports crossed a certain threshold.
• It also wanted RCEP to exclude most-favoured-nation (MFN) obligations from the investment, especially to countries with which it has border disputes.

(5) No assurance of market access to India

• RCEP also lacked clear assurance over market access issues in countries such as China and non-tariff barriers on Indian companies.
• The agreement would have forced India to extend benefits given to other countries for sensitive sectors like defence to all RCEP members.

(6) Trade balances paradox

• India’s stance on the deal also comes as a result of learnings from unfavourable trade balances that it has with several RCEP members, with some of which it even has Free Trade Agreements.
• Taking the current scenario, India only exports 20% to the RCEP countries, while the import is accounted for 35%.
• Furthermore, RCEP members like China are well known for using non-tariff barriers against Indian products in the past, preventing India from growing its export to these countries.

(7) Protecting domestic industries

• Several sections of the Indian industry have raised concerns over RCEP.

• They have argued that some domestic sectors may take a hit due to cheaper alternatives from other participant countries.
• For instance, the dairy industry was expected to face stiff competition from Australia and New Zealand. Similarly, steel and textiles sectors have also demanded protection.

The global hoax of FTAs

• Our External Affairs Minister has inferred that the mantra of an open and globalised economy was used to justify unfair trade and production practices against India.
• In the name of openness, we have allowed subsidised products and unfair production advantages from abroad to prevail.
• The effect of past trade agreements has been to de-industrialize some sectors, said EAM without mentioning RCEP directly.
• The consequences of future ones would lock us into global commitments, many of them not to our advantage.

Gains from opting out

India comprises half of the world population and accounts for nearly 40% of global commerce and 35% of the GDP. Without India, the RCEP does not look as attractive as it had seemed during negotiations.

(1) A Diplomatic win

• ASEAN has been keen on a diversified portfolio so that member states can deal with major powers and maintain their strategic autonomy. Without India, the ASEAN has no major partner except China.
• India signalled that, despite the costs, China’s rise has to be tackled both politically and economically.

(2) Not becoming China’s dumping ground

• China provides enormous subsidies to its domestic products and goods. Consequently, this makes it vulnerable to the Indian market which becomes a dumping station.
• China also needs greater access to the Indian market as Chinese companies have been suffering because of the US-China trade war that affected Chinese manufacturing companies in the past 2 years.
• So, it could have proven to be a detriment to the Make in India initiative.

(3) Relief for Indian Farmers

• Farmers opine that RCEP deal could have aggravated the agrarian crisis.
• The input prices are heavily taxed in India and thus the Indian farmers are not being provided with the profitable prices which result in significant losses and also throwing farmers into a debt trap.
• India after green revolution emerged as a self-sufficient country in agricultural product.  It could have brought India’s ‘food sovereignty’ at stake as opening markets.

Limited benefits that RCEP would have offered

(1) Boosting the existing ties

• Clubbing with the ASEAN has always been a principal policy priority for India’s Act East Policy.
• The RCEP agreement would have complimented India’s existing FTAs with the ASEAN and some of its member countries.
• It would have also helped achieve its goal of greater economic integration with countries East and South East of India through better access to a vast regional market ranging from Japan to Australia.

(2) Expansion of services sector

• The RCEP would have created opportunities for Indian companies to access new markets.
• India is well placed to contribute to other countries in RCEP through its expertise in services.

(3) Counterbalancing China

• Both geopolitically and geo-economically, China now looks set to dominate the Indo-Pacific.
• India’s allies in Southeast Asia, as well as Australia, wanted India to join it to balance China.
• Some of these are founded on opacity that surrounds the Chinese government’s decision making.

Wait! Did we miss the bus?

(1) Capturing Foreign Markets

• Trade with RCEP nations was a chance for Indian service, IT, health and education sectors to prove its leverage. That is to say, India’s service sector had huge export potential in RCEP.
•  ‘Rules of origin’ could have also provided a possible chance for India to become a major hub in coordinating with the regional partners and establishing a trustable value chain.

(2) Could have helped boost exports

• Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has called for signing RCEP agreement, as India could have also served as a major market for final good.
• RCEP could have helped India in further export to the 3rd world nations, and primarily to West Asia, Africa and few European countries.

(3) Isolation from global value chain

• India’s absence in integrating with global value chains will impact India’s internal and external ambitions.
• India’s own evidence shows that jobs linked to global value chains earn one-third more than those jobs focused on the domestic market.
• The inability to accede to the RCEP and ensure India’s integration into these emerging global value chains means India will lose out on a key opportunity to create such high-quality, high-paying jobs.
• Moreover, India’s absence in both of Asia’s two key economic architectures will take away from India’s goals as a regional and Indo-Pacific power, as well as a prospective global power.

(4) Missed opportunity with ASEAN

• The large size of the Indian economy and its negotiating heft would pose a valuable counterpoint to China within the grouping.
• Several RCEP countries still hope India will reconsider its decision of staying out.
• For ASEAN countries that led the RCEP negotiations, India’s presence would provide weight to the centrality of the ASEAN grouping in the region.
• It is for this reason that Japan led the drafting of the special statement on India, which would waive the 18-month mandatory waiting period if India applied formally to rejoin the group.

Why should India review its decision?

The COVID-19 pandemic has left the global economy in a state of disarray. For the first time in 60 years, nearly every country in the RCEP grouping is facing a recession.

(1) For a speedy economic recovery

• With global trade and the economy facing a steep decline due to Covid-19 pandemic, RCEP could serve as a bulwark in containing the free fall of the global economy and re-energizing economic activity.
• Further, the RCEP presents a unique opportunity to support India’s economic recovery, inclusive development and immediate job creation even as it helps strengthen regional supply chains.

(2) Rhetoric vs reality

• While deficits have increased for India in all foreign trade, India’s FTAs or PTAs (Preferential Trade Agreements) do not account for a bigger chunk of the trade deficit than they did before.
• The growing trade deficits come from the downturn in India’s GDP since 2016, and the decline in manufacturing.
• It is said that imports from China would have flooded had India entered RCEP, but haven’t they already flooded the country?

(3) Learning from allies

• In this regard, India can draw inspiration from Japan & Australia, India’s Quad partners.
• They chose to bury their geopolitical differences with China to prioritize what they collectively see as a mutually beneficial trading compact.

(4) Balancing the block

• It is not just because gains from trade are significant, but the RCEP’s membership is a prerequisite to having a say in shaping RCEP’s rules.
• This is necessary to safeguard India’s interests and the interests of several countries that are too small to stand up to the largest member, China.

(5) China is too big to defeat

• Even before the RCEP, China was an important player in regional trade and regional supply chains, and RCEP made its position stronger.
• Interestingly, even with the Covid-19 pandemic, other countries went ahead and signed the RCEP agreement without India.
• China now has an advantage vis-a-vis India in the 14 markets of RCEP. It also has more bilateral agreements in the region than India.

(6) Doing away with Protectionism

• It has been argued that Indian industry has hidden behind a wall of protectionism for far too long, and must open itself to global competition.
• There is a tendency in Indian industry to seek protection, whenever any steps towards globalization are taken.
• However, it is an acknowledged fact that globalization did benefit the Indian economy; it brought in newer technology and made Indian industry far more competitive.

Way forward

• India, as an original negotiating participant of RCEP, has the option of joining the agreement without having to wait 18 months as stipulated for new members in the terms of the pact.
• A possible alternative for India is to review its existing bilateral FTAs with some of these RCEP members as well as newer agreements with potential for Indian exports.
• There is also a growing view that it would serve India’s interest to invest strongly in negotiating bilateral agreements with the US and the EU, both currently a work in progress.
• Nor is the problem only China, because India has a trade deficit with virtually every country in the Asia-Pacific.
• The problem is a broader one, of India’s competitiveness, which has to be improved so that opening up leads to more benefits than costs, to industrialisation and not it’s opposite.

Conclusion

• Economic isolation can never be a not an option for India. It does not seem a good idea for India to be out of the agreement from its inception, only to join it later.
• Given India’s own ambitions to generate growth and jobs within India, and becoming a key player and rule-maker on the world stage, India’s decision to withdraw from the RCEP is debatable.
• India must now translate this withdrawal into a commitment for domestic reforms to prepare itself for the next opportunity to integrate itself into the global value chains and unleash Indian manufacturing.
• However, having no deal is far more prudent than signing up for a bad one.
• It is easy to succumb to the rapturous sound of global applause, but far tougher to make a tactical retreat in the larger national interest.

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References

What is the significance of RCEP for India?

https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/how-will-rcep-benefit-member-nations-and-what-does-indias-exit-from-the-trade-pact-mean/545701/

https://www.thehindu.com/business/a-day-after-rcep-jaishankar-slams-trade-pacts-globalisation/article33110309.ece

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/indias-no-to-rcep-could-still-be-a-no/article33145957.ece

https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/why-india-was-right-in-staying-out-of-rcep/story-IbGTgBnZBwS4vvJbzxITxH.html

https://theprint.in/opinion/not-signing-rcep-could-be-one-of-modis-biggest-blunders-atmanirbhar-an-admission-of-defeat/548907/

https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/india-rcep-and-economic-theory-120112300193_1.html

• Early this year, our PM attended the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) virtual summit, after previously skipping two summits.
• Not attending that last few summits, had signalled India’s sudden departure away from NAM and having adopted the policy of multi-alignment.
• This has raised eyebrows of those who still believe in the true spirit of Non-Alignment of which India has been the champion for a long time.
• The question of strategic autonomy is in limelight since the 2+ 2 talks between India and the US.

Exploring India’s role in the launch of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) during the Cold War and its relations with participant countries today is pivotal to understanding ‘ India’s idea of strategic autonomy.

What is NAM?

• The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a forum of 120 developing world states that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.
• After the United Nations, it is the largest grouping of states worldwide.
• Drawing on the principles agreed at the Bandung Conference in 1955, the NAM was established in 1961 in Belgrade, SR Serbia, and Yugoslavia.
• It was an initiative of then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, Indonesian President Sukarno, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito.
• The countries of the NAM represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations’ members and contain 55% of the world population.

Membership of NAM

• Membership is particularly concentrated in countries considered to be developing or part of the Third World, though the NAM also has a number of developed nations.

At that point in time, reason behind NAM creation

• Non-alignment, a policy fashioned for the Cold War, aimed to retain the autonomy of policy (not equidistance) between two politico-military blocs i.e. the US and the Soviet Union.
• The NAM provided a platform for newly independent developing nations to join together to protect this autonomy.
• NAM was thus similar to neutrality in a sense of not taking sides, but with the difference that if their decisions and actions coincide with one of the fighting blocs, it is their own preference, their own worldview, not supporting the bloc who has similar standings.

Relevance TODAY

• Since the end of the Cold War, the NAM has been forced to redefine itself and reinvent its purpose in the current world system.
• In the years since the Cold War’s end, it has focused on developing multilateral ties and connections as well as unity among the developing nations of the world, especially those within the Global South.

Fading significance of the NAM

• The policy of non-alignment lost its relevance after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of unipolar world order under the leadership of the US since 1991.
• De-colonization was largely complete by then, the apartheid regime in South Africa was being dismantled and the campaign for universal nuclear disarmament was going nowhere.
• Freed from the shackles of the Cold War, the NAM countries were able to diversify their network of relationships across the erstwhile east-west divide.

India and the NAM

• India played an important role in the multilateral movements of colonies and newly independent countries that wanted into the NAM.
• India’s policy was neither negative nor positive.
• Country´s place in national diplomacy, its significant size and its economic miracle turned India into one of the leaders of the NAM and upholder of the Third World solidarity.
• The principle of ‘acting and making its own choices’ also reflected India’s goal to remain independent in foreign policy choices, although posing dilemmas and challenges between national interests on international arena and poverty alleviation.
• Namely, the economic situation with the aim to raise the population’s living standards challenged the country’s defence capacity and vice versa. Preserving the state’s security thus required alternative measures.

• Wars with China and Pakistan had led India to an economically difficult situation and brought along food crisis in the mid-1960s, which made the country dependent on US food.
• India’s position was further complicated due to agreements with the Soviet Union about military equipment.
• This placed India again in a situation where on one hand the country had to remain consistent on the principles of NAM while on the other hand to act in a context with fewer choices.

The guiding principle of NAM should be repurposed as a balance between ‘Global value consensus’,‘Freedom of Alignment’ and ‘Neutrality’.

What is meant by Strategic Autonomy?

• Strategic autonomy for India denotes its’ ability to pursue its national interests and adopt its preferred foreign policy without being constrained in any manner by other states.
• In its pure form, strategic autonomy presupposes the state in question possessing overwhelmingly superior power.
• This is what would enable that state to resist the pressures that may be exerted by other states to compel it to change its policy or moderate its interests.
• Today’s ideation of ‘strategic autonomy’ is much different from the Nehruvian era thinking of ‘non-alignment’.
• Strategic autonomy is today a term New Delhi’s power corridors are well-acquainted with. It is an issue & situation-based, and not ideological.

Beyond Power-Politics nexus

• Strategic autonomy for India is both about power-politics and responsibilities.
• India’s quest for strategic autonomy is more about justice in terms of creating the international system where all states’ voices will be heard and decisions are made on value-based consensus.
• Such an idea is often misunderstood and confused with ‘opposing some states and allying the others.’

What dictates India’s alignment now?

India acknowledged the importance of economic growth as a factor in domestic poverty alleviation and for the realization of national interests in the international arena.

(1) National security

• China’s rise and assertiveness as a regional and global power and the simultaneous rise of middle powers in the region mean that this balancing act is increasing in both complexity and importance, simultaneously.
• China’s growth presents great opportunities for positive engagement, but territorial disputes and a forward policy in the region raise concerns for New Delhi, particularly in the Indian Ocean and with Pakistan.

(2) Global decision-making

• Another distinctive feature of India’s foreign policy has been the aim to adjust international institutions consistent with changes in international system.
• The support for strengthening and reforming the UN as a multilateral forum, restructuring the international economic system and preserving independence in its decision-making has become an integral part of India’s foreign policy.

(3) Prosperity and influence

• India’s 21st century’s strategic partnerships with two of the biggest economies, the USA and EU rely heavily on trade and technology cooperation.
• In addition, the partnership with the USA has touched the boundaries of strategic issues like cooperation on counter-terrorism, defence trade, joint military exercises, civil nuclear cooperation and energy dialogue.

(4) Multi-polarism

• Another means to execute India’s foreign policy strategy of autonomy has been forming extensive partnerships with other emerging powers.
• India has been an active G4 country speaking for the reform of the UN Security Council and having been elected seven times as a non-permanent member.
• As a result, there is an overlap of countries in different platforms, as can be seen in cases of India’s partnership with BRICS, SAARC, etc.
• The purpose of India is to increase the participation and share of developing countries in global policy-making.

Benefits out of strategic alignment

• India needs investments, technology, a manufacturing ecosystem to employ millions of its young population and improve its living standards.
• It requires advanced weapons and technologies for its military. India is ambitious and wants to be a great power and the US and the Western world recognise this and are willing to partner India.
• US along with France, are India’s principal backers in the UN Security Council and also support its membership in it.
• The Quad of India, US, Japan and Australia is also slowly institutionalizing the multilateral partnership that is committed to an open, secure, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.

China’s “not-peaceful rise”

• India is a long term rival for China, which does not want India’s rise. It wants to keep India boxed into South Asia, and tries to keep it off balance using Pakistan which it arms and supports.
• It has made inroads into the region using the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It continues to block India’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and continues to needle in the UNSC over Kashmir.
• We all know the recent heat up after Ladakh standoff. It occupies parts of Indian Territory and also claims the entire state of Arunachal.

Hence, the Non-alignment is difficult because,

• We have to safeguard ourselves from a power which has trampled upon all her neighbours most blatantly and the whole world has seen and withstood them with deafening silence.
• China has kept our territory since 1962 violating all international norms and we could do nothing with this diplomatic tool called Non- Alignment.
• Any policy formulation has to serve the national interest.
• The US prefers its partners to pay for and manage their own security, but collaborate in all possible ways — weapons sale, sharing civil and military arsenals, diplomatic support, intelligence sharing etc.
• It will be pragmatic to take advantage of the great power rivalry by suitably aligning with a power that India can derive maximum benefit from.

But Wait, NAM still matters!

(1) Global perception of India

• India’s image abroad has suffered as a result of allegations that creep into our secular polity and a need arises to actively network and break out of isolation.
• India’s partnership with America faces an uncertain future in the post-pandemic period ahead of the regime change under Joe Biden.
• Indeed, India is overtly keen to upgrade a quadrilateral alliance with the US, Japan and Australia — but there too, we’re all dressed up and nowhere to go. There is no concrete commitment yet.
• We can sense the growing proximity between the NAM member countries and China.
• As it is, one-half of NAM comprises members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which remains highly critical of the plight of Indian Muslims.

(2) For the Impulsive U.S.

• For India complete dependence on the U.S. to counter China would be an error.
• As the U.S. confronts the challenge to its dominance from China, the classical balance of power considerations would dictate accommodation with Russia.
• A strong stake in India’s relations with the US could reinforce Russia’s affinity for China.
• Russia, these days looks less pragmatic to see Indian ties with its rivals as a joint venture, not an alliance in which they could pursue shared objectives to mutual benefit.

Importance of NAM: As power booster for multilateralism

The NAM  can never lose its relevance because-

Cold War has revitalized with time: Critics of NAM who term it as an outcome of the Cold War must also acknowledge that a new Cold War is beginning to unfold, this time between the US and China, which if reflected in Trade War, Protectionism, Indo-Pacific narrative, etc.

NAM provides a much bigger platform:  NAM becomes relevant to mobilize international public opinion against terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), nuclear proliferation, ecological imbalance, safeguarding interests of developing countries in WTO (World Trade Organization) etc.

NAM as a tool for autonomy: NAM’s total strength comprises 120 developing countries and most of them are members of the UN General Assembly. Thus, NAM members act as an important group in support of India’s candidature as a permanent member in UNSC.

A podium for India’s leadership: India is widely perceived as a leader of the developing world. Thus, India’s engagement with NAM will further help in the rise of India’s stature as the voice of the developing world or global south.

NAM for multilateralism:  Though globalization is facing an existential crisis, it is not possible to return to isolation. In the world of complex interdependence, countries are linked to each other one way or another. With rising threats such as climate change, terrorism, and receding multilateralism, the global south and NAM countries find themselves in a precarious condition.

NAM as a source for soft power: India can use its historic ties to bring together the NAM countries. India’s strength lies in soft power rather than hard power. Therefore, NAM cannot be based on the current political structure where military and economic power is often used to coerce countries.

NAM as a tool for institutional reforms: Global institutions such as WTO and the UN are facing an existential crisis because only a few nations dictate their functions. India can use the NAM platform to push for reforms in these institutions for a more equal and democratic world order.

Elasticity is the guiding principle of diplomacy.

– Anonymous

Way Forward

In the post-COVID-19 world, India will have to make a disruptive choice — of alignment.

• In the threat environment marked by a pushy China, India should aim to have both- American support and stay as an independent power centre by cooperation with middle powers in Asia and around the world.
• Complete dependence would be detrimental to India’s national interest such as its ties with Iran and Russia and efforts to speed up indigenous defence modernization.
• Rather than proclaiming non-alignment as an end in itself, India needs deeper engagement with its friends and partners if it is to develop leverage in its dealings with its adversaries and competitors.
• A wide and diverse range of strategic partners, including the U.S. as a major partner is the only viable diplomatic way forward in the current emerging multipolar world order.

Conclusion

Though sections of the Indian establishment still want to reinvent non-alignment under ever new guises, India is showing signs of pursuing strategic autonomy separately from non-alignment.

• India continues to practice a policy of non-alignment in an attempt to maintain sovereignty and oppose imperialism.
• Indo-US ties are complementary, and a formal alliance will only help realize the full potential of these relations.
• India, thus, emphasizes the relations with the region and emerging powers not only in terms of economic development but also as actors with similar understandings and expectations of the world system.
• In some way, the relations can be described as expectations without expectations. States interact with each other in expectations to change the international system, but without expectations to ‘ally or oppose.’
• India believes in making value-based decisions and maintains its coherent foreign policy. As it is familiar with the phrase ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy, it is high time to maximise its potential.

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References

Finding alternative to non-alignment

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/why-india-should-align-us-66233/

https://www.dailypioneer.com/2020/state-editions/the-question-of-strategic-autonomy.html

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/raja-mandala-alliances-and-strategic-autonomy-indian-foreign-policy-5538447/

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/what-is-in-a-nam-and-indias-alignment/article32555378.ece

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/under-biden-unfurling-indias-foreign-policy-concerns/article33062436.ece

India and the US are the two largest democracies in the world but the electoral systems of the two countries are poles apart. While the Indian system is charmingly simple, the US system is extremely complex and confusing. Let’s have a look at that:

A Brief about the US parliamentary system

• The senate of the US is the upper house of the legislature. This senate, together with the United States House of Representatives forms the United States Congress.
• The Senate has several powers, which include confirming appointments of federal judges, cabinet secretaries, other federal officials, military officials and ambassadors.
• The Senate is also known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Must read:

Constitution of USA: Features, Comparison with Indian + other constitutions

The Process to become POTUS

(1) Primary and Caucuses

Before the general election, most candidates for president go through a series of state primaries and caucuses. Though primaries and caucuses are run differently, they both serve the same purpose. They let the states choose the major political parties’ nominees for the general election.

• In general, primaries use secret ballots for voting. Caucuses are local gatherings of voters who vote at the end of the meeting for a particular candidate.
• Then it moves to nominating conventions, during which political parties each select a nominee to unite behind.

(2) National Convention

After the primaries and caucuses, most political parties hold national conventions.

• Conventions finalize a party’s choice for presidential and vice-presidential nominees. To become the presidential nominee, a candidate typically has to win a majority of delegates.
• This usually happens through the party’s primaries and caucuses. It’s then confirmed through a vote of the delegates at the national convention.
• But if no candidate gets the majority of a party’s delegates during the primaries and caucuses, convention delegates choose the nominee. This happens through additional rounds of voting.
• The candidates then campaign across the country to explain their views and plans to voters. They may also participate in debates with candidates from other parties.

(3) Electoral College

• When Americans go to the polls in presidential elections they’re actually voting for a group of officials who make up the electoral college.
• ‘Electoral College’ is the term given to the body of individuals who are selected or elected to be “electors”.
• These electors then vote for the president and vice president of the US.
• The electoral college meets every four years, a few weeks after election day, to carry out that task.
• To win, a presidential candidate has to just attain a simple majority of 270 electoral votes.

How does it work?

• The number of electors from each state is roughly in line with the size of its population.
• Each state gets as many electors as it has lawmakers in the US Congress (representatives in the House and senators).
• California has the most electors – 55 – while a handful of sparsely populated states like Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota (and Washington DC) have the minimum of three.
• There are 538 electors in total.
• Each elector represents one electoral vote, and a candidate needs to gain a majority of the votes – 270 or more – to win the presidency.

Electing the ‘Electors’

• Unlike India, it’s not just one election but a bunch of simultaneous elections in the US.
• In many states, a voter will be choosing not just the US president but 20 different contestants on a single ballot.
• These include the member of the US Senate and the House of Representatives, state senate, governor, state attorney general, Supreme Court judge, among others.

Election Management

• There is no centralised election management body like the Election Commission in India.
• All 50 states, and within these, more than 3,000 counties have different management bodies.
• The date of the election is fixed — the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November — since 1845.

(4)General Elections

• The General Election refers to the voting process in which every US citizen who is at least 18 years of age can vote to chose the President.
• Unlike in most elections, the person who becomes president is not necessarily the candidate who wins the most votes on Election Day.
• Instead, voting for the president of the United States takes place in two-steps.
• First, voters cast ballots on Election Day in each state.
• In nearly every state, the candidate who gets the most votes wins the “electoral votes” for that state, and gets that number of voters (or “electors”) in the “Electoral College.”
• Second, the “electors” from each of the 50 states gather in December and they vote for president.
• The person who receives a majority of votes from the “Electoral College” becomes President.

Winning the elections

• To win the US presidential election, one needs 270 electoral college votes, an absolute majority of the 538 electors.
• The complexity of the election process and the multiplicity of authorities is a perfect breeding ground for confusion.
• This, however, is perhaps the first time that a candidate — Donald Trump — has cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the election even before the first vote has been cast.

A comparison with India

(1) Election Management

• There is no centralised election management body like the Election Commission in India.
• All 50 states, and within these, more than 3,000 counties have different management bodies.
• The date of the election is fixed — the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November — since 1845.

(2) Electorates

• Unlike India, it’s not just one election but a bunch of simultaneous elections in the US.
• In many states, a voter will be choosing not just the US president but 20 different contestants on a single ballot.
• These include the member of the US Senate and the House of Representatives, state senate, governor, state attorney general, Supreme Court judge, among others.

(3) Political parties

• The most important aspect of the difference between electoral process in India and USA comes from the nature of their party systems.
• It is common knowledge that there are two dominant parties in the USA political scene with polar different ideologies, viz. the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
• Although the Libertarian Party, Green Party, and other smaller parties exist, they are considered to be independent entities as they are outliers and cannot quite compete with the two major ones.
• India, however, has many parties that operate on the state level and only a few that successfully operate on the national level.

(4) Electoral College

• The onus to register as a voter lies on the voter and it is neither compulsory to register nor to vote.
• The last date for registration varies from one month prior to the poll to the same day (polling day).
• Any person turning 18 even on polling day is eligible to register.
• The voter identification system varies too — from different photo identity proofs to self-authentication without a photo.

(5) Voting systems

• The voting systems are diverse — voting at polling stations on poll day, early voting in person, absentee voting by mail.
• The ballot design varies from state to state. Voting technology varies from direct recording electronic voting machines (like Indian EVMs) to paper ballots (marked by pencil or pen).
• But scanning is invariably used to facilitate counting. Some states have the VVPAT — Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail.
• The hours of voting are longer — 13 hours — as compared to minimum eight hours (usually nine) in India.

(6) Voters’ turnout

• The turnout in the last presidential election was 61.8 per cent (compared to India’s 66.8 per cent). With low registration, this effectively means that less than 45 per cent of eligible Americans voted.
• Voting demographics show that older people — 65 plus — tend to vote more than 18-24 year-olds by as much as 25 percentage points.
• People with more education and income vote more than the less endowed.
• Similarly, women vote in larger numbers. Blacks and Hispanics vote less because of lack of interest.

(7) Election regulation

• The US has two federal bodies — the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC).
• But both of them together do not add up to anything as powerful or effective as the EC in India.
• In fact, they have no control over the election administration. Its role is confined to federal campaign finance regulations.
• The EAC was created back only in 2002 to provide funding to states for upgrading their registration and voting systems besides establishing minimum voter identification standards. Its decisions are, however, not binding.

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References

https://www.usa.gov/election#item-212585

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/us-presidential-elections-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-india-election-system-4030161/

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/10-point-guide-to-us-election-and-how-its-different-from-india-1622424

https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/donald-trump-joe-biden-us-presidential-election-america-india-election-commission-1738184-2020-11-05

“In an economy that is overleveraged to historic proportions, economic stimuli may not do the trick.”

– Kenneth Eade

Several governments across the world have announced fiscal stimulus measures to help their respective economies stay afloat. India, with large swathes of people facing the risk of infection, has nothing significant so far to show to the world.  The government and the RBI are still weighing their options to hand out a stimulus.

What is a Fiscal Stimulus?

A ‘stimulus’ is an attempt by policymakers to kick-start a sluggish economy through a package of measures. A monetary stimulus will see the central bank expanding money supply or reducing the cost of money (interest rates), to spur consumer spending. A fiscal stimulus entails the Government spending more from its own coffers or slashing tax rates to put more money in the hands of consumers.

Need for a fiscal stimulus

With monetary policy, both conventional and unconventional, having reached the limits of its effectiveness in most of the advanced industrial countries, the only instrument left for boosting demand is fiscal policy. There are calls for a government stimulus package to revitalize the economy.

 (1) Powering the Demand

• When demand in an economy stays weak for long, businesses stop investing in new projects, unemployment rises, income shrinks and consumer confidence wanes. This prompts consumers to retreat further.
• A stimulus could shot to consumer spending; it revives business confidence, restarts projects, creates jobs and sets off a virtuous cycle of feel-good, demand and growth.

(2) Boosting the Employment

• Many people have lost their jobs or seen their incomes cut due to the coronavirus crisis.
• Unemployment rates have increased across major economies as a result.

(3) Risking away the recession

• The IMF says that the global economy will shrink by 3% this year. It described the decline as the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• If the economy has to grow, it generally means more wealth and more new jobs and more spending, which is difficult without a stimulus package.

(4) Business resumption

• The COVID-19 pandemic came as a major blow to almost every sector of our economy and has created a credit-crunch. With most business permanently shut, others are crippled and reluctant to resume their business.
• Almost all manufacturing industries were affected by the crisis. Pharma was actually identified as one of the very few “winners”, while motor vehicles were (and continues to be) one of the biggest “losers”.

Precautions necessary before ANY stimulus decision

Today’s stimulus measures have understandably been rolled out in haste — almost in a panic — to contain the economic fallout from the pandemic. Bad policies can contribute to inequality, sow instability, and undermine political support for the government precisely when it is needed to prevent the economy from falling.

 (1) Fear of liquidity trap

• During periods of deep uncertainty, precautionary savings typically rise as households and businesses hold on to cash for fear of what lies ahead.
• A liquidity trap is a situation in which, “after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash.
• Without a massive injection of emergency liquidity, there probably would have been widespread bankruptcies, losses of organisational capital, and an even steeper path to recovery.

(2) Inflationary outcomes

• The fiscal response is driven by the need to arrest a major slowdown in economic growth.  However, there could be medium-term risks to the future inflation path, in the absence of timely fiscal consolidation.
• A sudden spike in demand is highly inflationary in nature.

(3) Strain on the exchequer

• Fiscal stimulus is warranted especially expenditures on health, food and income support for vulnerable households, and support for businesses.
• This is likely to have a considerable impact on the government exchequer and the overall expenditure of the government on key sectors.

(4) Deterioration of public finances

• India’s fiscal deficit in 2019-20 stood at around Rs 7.7 lakh crore, i.e. 3.8% of GDP. Hence, India’s fiscal room to opt for a massive stimulus appears much more limited.
• Any aggressive stimulus spending will not only result in a surge in India’s gross public debt but will also negatively impact its credit ratings, highlighting the country’s fiscal conundrum.

India’s response to pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare our pre-existing fault lines and exposed the country to an unprecedented crisis. This situation has led to bold policy measures by governments at all tiers.

The Indian fiscal response is thus much weaker than what has been seen in advanced economies, but it is broadly in line with the average for emerging markets.

FISCAL	MONETARY
Economic Relief Package under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana worth Rs 1.75 lakh crore (roughly 0.8% of the GDP).	Repo rate and Reverse Repo rate reduced to 4.4% and 4% respectively on March 27 in an effort to boost liquidity into the system.
Direct food, cooking gas and cash transfers to selected sections of the lower-income households.	Liquidity measures worth Rs 3.7 trillion via Long Term Repo Operations (LTRO) and a reduction of 100bps in Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR).
Insurance coverage for workers in the healthcare sector and wage support to low wage workers in terms of benefits for those currently working, as well as those who might lose their jobs.	Provided relief to customers and lenders by granting a 3-month moratorium on loan repayments. SEBI has also relaxed its norms related to debt default on rated instruments.
Additional Rs 150 billion (roughly 0.1% of GDP) to be devoted to health infrastructure. Several measures to ease tax burden, including postponing compliance deadlines.	Second round of measures which include Rs 50,000 crore liquidity for NBFCs and MFIs via TLTRO 2.0, Reverse Repo rate reduced to 3.75% to kickstart investments, WMA limit for state governments increased.

PM also announced Rs. 20 lakh crore packages for farmers, cottage industry, MSMEs, labourers, middle class etc., titled the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan in various tranches. These measures contain both fiscal and monetary measures combined into a single package.

International experience with the stimulus

India has surpassed almost all others in the stringency of its containment measures. However in terms of expenditure, India’s response isn’t that promising.

• India’s fiscal stimulus to date, estimated at ₹1.7 trillion, is less than 1% of the country’s GDP, which is paltry compared to the magnitude of stimulus injections undertaken by many East Asian countries such as Japan (20%), Malaysia (16.2%) and Singapore (12.2%).
• Even, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Egypt, all while averaging less stringent measures than those in India, have announced stimulus measures that are as large or more substantial, as a share of GDP.
• Countries have also significantly expanded coverage of their cash transfer programmes from pre-COVID-19 levels; Bangladesh and Indonesia have increased the number of beneficiaries by 163% and 111%, respectively. Indonesia’s cash schemes now cover more than 158 million people (or 60% of the population).
• Developing countries are resorting to drastic means to finance COVID-19 responses. Actions so far include the amendment of legal budget limits and the enhanced issuance of bonds — including a ‘pandemic bond’ by Indonesia.
• Many developing countries have a dual strategy of providing immediate aid to workers who have been laid off and feeding poor families, while also trying to keep firms afloat. Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and China have all announced tax relief — in the form of deferments or reductions — for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in hard-hit regions.
• Brazil has also created a $10 billion (₹760 bn) programme to allow businesses affected by COVID-19 to reduce workers’ salaries and hours by up to 70%, with the government partially compensating workers for up to three months.
• One important omission from the Indian response is such direct wage support for micro, small, and medium enterprises, which account for the bulk of employment.

While we might not be able to match these advanced economies in terms of financial resources, we can implement policies on a similar scale.

“It is important that we note the weaknesses in our financial system, and work toward implementing solutions before the next crisis roars.”

Analysis of India’s response

The whole world is commending India’s efforts and bold initiatives that have prioritized “life over livelihood”. Based on the figures, it is safe to say that India has spent a lot less, especially on the fiscal front in terms of stimulus packages introduced by governments, as compared to other countries.

One might argue that these responses cannot be compared to each other due to two main reasons.

1. First, the number of cases as well as the rate at which they are increasing is much less in India due to the early implementation of lockdown.  
2. And second, India’s economy is much more different than the ones whose data has been mentioned above, so it is not at all necessary for the same measures to be effective for our country as well.

However, the economic crises faced by all these countries do share some common ground. Here’s what we can derive from this data:

1) Sectors like small businesses and MSMEs have been adversely affected by this crisis in all countries irrespective of how developed they are. India is yet to address their issues directly; hence, a strong assumption is that we will soon see measures from the government’s side to provide them with some relief.

2) India’s healthcare system is hardly as developed and advanced as in the above-mentioned countries. And yet, the amount these countries have allocated to this sector is much higher.

3) Unemployment is on the rise everywhere. A report by the ILO said that more than 40 crore Indian workers in the unorganised sector are expected to lose their jobs. Hence, printing more money in order to give it directly to people in these times as income, something which is already being done in countries like the US and UK, is worth considering for India as well.

4) Special focus has been given to worst affected industries like airlines, travel and e-commerce in these countries. We are yet to see something similar in India.

Moving ahead: India needs to spend more

• Under the ambit of fiscal policy, first, the government should front-load its $250 billion spending plan under the National Infrastructure Pipeline.
• Second, it should announce a sizeable package to compensate, at least partially, the irrecoverable loss of income suffered by the Indian industry, be it big, small, or medium.
• Third, this is an opportunity for India to position itself as the next global manufacturing hub in sectors such as textiles, food processing, pharma, and metals (particularly steel). Trade, tax and investment policies should be calibrated accordingly to achieve this.

Under the ambit of monetary policy, following steps can amplify the impact of fiscal measures.

• First, banks must extend term loans and working capital to Indian industry with a government backstop for the first loss up to 25%.  The government needs to provide credit protection to the banking system.
• Second, banks should have discretion and flexibility to undertake loan restructuring aimed at ensuring the stability of operations across several sectors.
• Third, a sharp reduction in lending rates is imperative. While the policy rate has fallen by 210 basis points, transmission to industry has been less than 60 basis points.
• Fourth, banks must defer loan and interest payments by at least one year, as industry needs time to generate free cash flows.

Three T’s for optimum impact

To have the greatest impact with the least long-run cost, the stimulus should be timely, temporary, and targeted.

• Timely, so that its effects are felt while economic activity is still below potential; when the economy has recovered, the stimulus becomes counterproductive
• Temporary, to avoid raising inflation and to minimize the adverse long-term effects of a larger budget deficit, and
• Well-targeted, to provide resources to the people who most need them and will spend them: for fiscal stimulus to work, it is essential that the funds be spent, not saved.

We can hope that the above steps are taken expeditiously and translated into action on the ground to reboot the Indian economy at the earliest.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ongoing debate might be a misleading factor to judge our response to this crisis. And it definitely doesn’t mean what we’re doing is enough. This crisis happens to be an uncertain and unprecedented one; holding back on spending clearly doesn’t seem to be an option for the Indian government right now.

Maintaining the overall fiscal discipline, the government must not worry about the fiscal deficit, as reviving the economy is the need of the hour, even if it comes at the cost of high inflation, though such an outcome is unlikely.

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References

https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/opinion-stimulus-is-the-need-of-the-hour-for-a-reboot-of-economic-activity-11587924077595.html

https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/which-economic-stimulus-works-120060901820_1.html

https://www.cbgaindia.org/study-report/numbers-edge-assessing-indias-fiscal-response-covid-19/

https://thewire.in/economy/liquiduty-fiscal-stimulus-covid-19-relief

https://bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/policy/india-v/s-the-world-response-to-the-coronavirus-economic-crisis/75284378

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-covid-19-fiscal-response-and-indias-standing/article32154153.ece

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs has last month approved ‘Natural Gas Marketing Reforms’, taking another significant step to move towards a gas-based economy.

What is Natural Gas?

• Natural gas is a fossil fuel source consisting primarily of methane. It is the cleanest fossil fuels among the available fossil fuels.
• It is used as a feedstock in the manufacture of fertilizers, plastics and other commercially important organic chemicals as well as used as a fuel for electricity generation, heating purpose in industrial and commercial units.
• Natural gas is also used for cooking in domestic households and a transportation fuel for vehicles.

Natural gas scenario in India

The share of domestic gas and imported RLNG was about 48% & 52% respectively. The City Gas Distribution (CGD) accounts for the largest consumption of natural gas followed by fertilizers, power and other industrial sectors.

(1) Domestic Gas Sources

• The domestic gas in the country is being supplied from the oil & gas fields located at western and southeastern areas viz. Hazira basin, Mumbai offshore & KG basin as well as North East Region (Assam & Tripura).

(2) Import of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)

• In order to meet the gas demand, LNG is imported through the Open General License (OGL) in the country.  At present, India is having six operational LNG regasification terminals at Dahej, Kochi, Mundra, Ennore etc.

Gas Pipelines

• Gas Pipeline infrastructure is an economical and safe mode of transporting natural gas by connecting gas sources to gas-consuming markets.
• An interconnected National Gas Grid has been envisaged to ensure the adequate availability and equitable distribution of natural gas in all parts of the country.

Why go for Natural Gas?

• Energy Efficient: Natural gas produces more energy than any of the fossil fuels in terms of calorific value.
• Cleaner fuel: Natural gas is a superior fuel as compared with coal and other liquid fuels being an environment-friendly, safer and cheaper fuel.
• Economy of use: Natural Gas (as CNG) is much cheaper compared with petrol or Diesel.
• Emission commitments: India made a commitment to COP-21 Paris Convention in December 2015 that by 2030, it would reduce carbon emission by 33%-35% of 2005 levels.
• Diverse applications: Natural gas can be used as domestic kitchen fuel, fuel for the transport sector as well as a fuel for fertilizer industries and commercial units.
• Supply-chain convenience:  Natural Gas is supplied through pipelines just like we get water from the tap. There is no need to store cylinders in the kitchen and thus save space.
• Pacing up the progress line: On the global front, switching to natural gas is bringing commendable results. The latest report released by IEA shows that the electricity produced by natural gas worldwide was more than that of coal for the first time ever.

Various govt. initiatives

India’s quest to increase the share of natural gas in the overall energy mix hinges crucially on two factors: (1) Development of pipelines and (2) Hassle free exploration. In this regard, the govt. has taken several measures.

• The Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) is a policy indicating the new contractual and fiscal model for the award of hydrocarbon acreages towards exploration and production (E&P).
• The govt. has envisaged developing and expanding the National Gas Grid. At present about 16,788 Km natural gas pipeline is operational and about 14,239 Km gas pipelines are being developed.
• The Pradhan Mantri Urja Ganga (PMUG) pipeline project currently under will provide connectivity to another flagship project, the North-East Gas Grid.
• The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which aims to provide free cooking gas connections to poor families is also a roaring success.
• Moreover, India is constantly moving to revive the 1,814 kilometre-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) transnational gas pipeline which is in shamble for years.

What are the Natural Gas Marketing Reforms?

• Gas-based economy implies gas as the main commercial energy source in the energy mix of an economy.
• The reforms aim to provide a standard procedure for the sale of natural gas in a transparent and competitive manner to discover market price by issuing guidelines for sale by the contractor through e-bidding.
• This will bring uniformity in the bidding process across the various contractual regimes and policies to avoid ambiguity and contribute towards ease of doing business.

Components of the policy

• The objective of the policy is to prescribe standard procedure to discover market price of gas to be sold in the market by gas producers, through a transparent and competitive process.
• It would permit affiliates to participate in bidding process for sale of gas and allow marketing freedom to certain Field Development Plans (FDPs) where Production Sharing Contracts already provide pricing freedom.

Objectives of these reforms

These reforms will build on a series of transformative reforms rolled out by the Government in last several years. These reforms in gas sector will further deepen and spur the economic activities in the following areas:

• The whole eco-system of policies relating to production, infrastructure and marketing of natural gas has been made more transparent with a focus on ease of doing business.
• These reforms will prove very significant for Atmanirbhar Bharat by encouraging investments in the domestic production of natural gas and reducing import dependence.
• These reforms will prove to be another milestone in moving towards a gas-based economy by encouraging investments.
• The increased gas production-consumption will help in the improvement of the environment.
• These reforms will also help in creating employment opportunities in the gas-consuming sectors including MSMEs.
• The domestic production will further help in increasing investment in the downstream industries such as City Gas Distribution and related industries.

Making it happen 

• The government brought a series of reforms in the Gas sector and as a result investment of more than Rs. 70,000 crore is being made on the East coast very recently.
• Gas production from the East coast will contribute to Atmanirbhar Bharat by meeting the increasing energy needs of the country.
• The domestic gas production has complete marketing and pricing freedom. All discoveries and field development plans approved after 28 Feb 2019 have a complete market and pricing freedom.

Better done than said …… Overcoming challenges

• Lack of infrastructure:  India has enough storage capacity of the current state of domestic consumption of natural gas. However, to fill the entire energy bucket, we need to increase energy storage.
• Import dependence: Energy consumption in India is growing at 4.2 per cent per annum, which is the fastest among major economies of the world. Presently 52% of our domestic consumption relies on imported LNG. Moreover, the global disruptions in the import supply-chain can wreak havoc as the general hikes in Diesel prices do.
• Safety concerns: The global oil and gas market remains vulnerable to a wide range of risk factors, including natural disasters, major technical accidents, and geopolitical tensions among others.
• Domestic issues and delays: Petroleum including gas falls under the Union List. Pipeline laying has faced land acquisition challenges due to local farmers’ protest and unviable routes causing major project delays.
• Underutilization: GAIL is getting hit over the scarcity of domestic natural gas leading to underutilization of its 11,500 km of the pipeline network. Its network is operating at an average of 47% capacity.
• Less-feasible power alternative: Within the power sector, natural gas has received little traction primarily because the per-unit cost of electricity generated by a gas-fired power plant in India is higher than that from fossil fuels such as coal.
• Ecological concerns: Offshore drilling operations can possibly affect fish, lead to a build-up of heavy water contaminants, disorient whales and sea life that rely on sonar for navigation and exacerbate the risk of oil spills.
• Energy Trilemma: In order to build a strong basis for prosperity and competitiveness, India must balance the three core dimensions of the energy trilemma: affordability and access, energy security and environmental sustainability.

Way forward

• A shift to a gas-based economy has to ensure both availability and affordability. Availability may be ensured by increasing production or import, developing the requisite delivery infrastructure — terminals, stations and pipelines.
• The current gas market is dominated by countries such as the US, Qatar and Russia. India must make use of these multiple gas production centres and ensure a balanced geographical portfolio of imports to ensure a robust and secure natural gas strategy as it does for Oil.
• India will have to embark on a balanced approach to develop indigenous gas resources, maybe through technology-intensive deeper drilling techniques and large scale import tie-ups.

Conclusion

• It is evident that clean energy transitions are underway – and it’s also a signal that we have the opportunity to meaningfully move the needle on emissions through more ambitious policies and investments.
• But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as governments do play an important role in the growth of the energy sector in any country. Given the fact that the market in India is still nascent, there is always this concern of how effective these measures can be.
• With domestic production of gas stagnating and consumption growing at a CAGR of 4.5 per cent, there’s still a long way to go for transforming the economy to a gas-based one.

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References

http://petroleum.nic.in/natural-gas/about-natural-gas

https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/modis-gas-based-economy-dream-to-help-cut-global-emissions-heres-how-india-can-end-coal-legacy/1865302/

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/how-india-is-unbottling-the-gas-economy/article32984963.ece

https://www.indiainfoline.com/article/news-sector-oil-gas/great-business-opportunity-for-indian-industry-to-participate-in-making-gas-based-economy-120110500417_1.html

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/on-road-to-a-gas-based-economy/article25765361.ece

Food has deep ties to culture, religion, ethnicity and most Indians regard food as sanctified or holy. We celebrate, mourn, express, entertain, donate and thrive on the food, boasting of countless regional delicacies, inherited recipes, as we continue to seek pride in our spicy curries and rich sugary deserts.

The latest Global Hunger Index 2020 study does not make for cheery reading for India. The study has placed India 94th out of 107 countries in terms of hunger, locating it in the ‘severe’ hunger category. This puts India alongside the poorest African nations.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI)

• The GHI has been brought out almost every year by Welthungerhilfe lately in partnerships with Concern Worldwide since 2000; this year’s report is the 14th one.
• The reason for mapping hunger is to ensure that the world achieves “Zero Hunger by 2030” — one of the SDGs laid out by the UN.
• A low score gets a country a higher ranking and implies better performance. It is for this reason that GHI scores are not calculated for certain high-income countries.
• Each country’s data are standardised on a 100-point scale and a final score is calculated after giving 33.33% weight each to components 1 and 4 and giving 16.66% weight each to components 2 and 3.

GHI composition

India’s performance this year

• In the 2020 GHI, India ranks 94th out of the 107 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2020 GHI scores.
• With a score of 27.2, India has a level of hunger that is serious.
• The situation has worsened in the 2015-19 period, when the prevalence of child wasting was 17.3%, in comparison to 2010-14, when it was 15.1%.
• India fares worst in child wasting (low weight for height, reflecting acute undernutrition) and child stunting (low height for age, reflecting chronic undernutrition), which together make up a third of the total score.
• In the region of the south, east and south-eastern Asia, the only countries which fare worse than India are Timor-Leste, Afghanistan and North Korea.

Worse among its neighbours

• As per the study, roughly 14 per cent of the country’s population remains undernourished.
• To put this into perspective, China and Brazil, perhaps the only two countries with populations comparable to India’s had under-nourishment rates under 2.5 per cent. 
• India has improved its rank by 8 positions from last year but still sits behind the majority of its South Asian neighbours – Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
• Only Afghanistan, ranked 99th, is worse off than India. 

The starvation challenge

• According to ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World’ report compiled by the FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, India was home to 189.2 million (28 per cent) of the 673 million undernourished people in the world as of 2017-2019.
• It also accounted for 28 per cent of the world’s stunted (low height-for-age) children under the age of five, and 43 per cent of the world’s wasted children (Low weight-for-height). 
• In terms of overall undernourishment, 14% of India’s population does not get enough calories, an improvement from almost 20% in 2005-07.
• From a productivity standpoint, India ranks 158 (out of 195) in the Lancet human capital study owing to the anaemic, underweight or obese workforce.

Why are we still battling hunger? 

“Often consumption of egg is as big a taboo as beef is, while one can consume sugar (ending up with diabetes) all day long and be religiously compliant.“

• There is an interesting difference observed between child wasting in South Asia and the poorer nations of Africa, according to researchers.
• African babies are usually healthy at birth, but as they grow up into their toddler years, undernourishment starts to kick in.
• South Asian babies, on the other hand, show very high levels of wasting very early in their lives, within the first six months.
• This reflects the poor state of maternal health, more than anything else.

(1) Poor Maternal health

• Mothers are too young, too short, too thin and too undernourished themselves, before they get pregnant, during pregnancy, and then after giving birth, during breast-feeding.
• Almost 42% of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 have a low body mass index (BMI), while 54% have anaemia.
• Almost 27% of girls are married before they reach the legal age of 18 years, and 8% of adolescents have begun childbearing in their teens.
• Almost half of all women have no access to any sort of contraception. These poor indicators of maternal health have dire consequences for the child’s health as well.

(2) Poor sanitation

• Poor sanitation, leading to diarrhoea, is another major cause of child wasting and stunting. At the time of the last NFHS, almost 40% of households were still practising open defecation.
•  Only 36% of households disposed of children’s stools in a safe manner. One in 10 children under the age of five suffers from diarrhoea.

(3) Food insecurity

• Low dietary diversity in India is also a key factor in child malnutrition.
• Although India has overall food security with record levels of foodgrain production in recent years, access to healthy food is still difficult for poor households.
• A recent study showed that three out of four rural Indians cannot afford the cheapest possible diet that meets the requirements set by the government’s premier nutrition body.

(4) Poverty

• Almost 50 million households in India are dependent on these small and marginal holdings.
• Though we have surplus food, most small and marginal farming households do not produce enough food grains due to cash crops production. 
• The relative income of poorer section of people has been on the decline due to many factors (say COVID). This has adverse effects on their capacity to buy adequate food.

(5) Livelihood loss

• The emaciated rural livelihoods sector and lack of income opportunities other than the farm sector have contributed heavily to the growing joblessness in rural areas.
• The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18 revealed that rural unemployment stood at a concerning 6.1 per cent, which was the highest since 1972-73.
• The kinds of work a section of people has been doing are less remunerative or there is less opportunity to get remunerative works.

(6) Dietary habits

• Indian diets typically involve copious consumption of staples such as rice and wheat, with limited dietary diversification toward micronutrient-rich foods like fruits, vegetables, and animal products.
• The vegetarian vs non-vegetarian identity is usually determined by religion, irrespective of body type and nature of work.
• Even when people have enough money they tend to gravitate towards expensive food and indulging in calories, like modern confectionary or fats.

(7) Policy failures

• The national food security approach has been hung up in a ‘defeat the famine’ mode, which aims to provide gross calorie availability via the National Food Security Act (NFSA).
• The MGNREGS continue to be the lone rural job programme that, too, had been weakened over the years through great delays in payments and non-payments, low wages and reduced scope of employment.
• The public distribution system (PDS) fair price shops often fail to function due to supply delays.
• While this stable and subsidised policy has helped counter the problem of absolute hunger, it limits the food choices and does not provide the needed nutrients and micro-nutrients.

What can be done?

Below are some multidimensional ideas which have proven to be effective over the past century across countries that can be helpful.

(1) Diversify food basket

• The recent agro reforms which promote contract farming and scraps the archaic colonial tyrannical essential commodities act seem to be policy steps in the right direction.
• States level agro agencies need to ensure effective implementation of these reforms and assist with appropriate means to cover for the need for fruits, micro-nutrients, pulses.

(2) Harness the legacy ICDS

• India’s 1.4 million Anganwadi workers – the core component of the nation’s Integrated Child Development Services – play a vital role in ending the cycle of undernourishment witnessed particularly in rural areas.
• There is a real need to further empower these workers towards improving the overall nutritional status of the country.
• Allowing these workers to leverage digital technologies, for instance, in creating awareness over basic health and nutrition, could prove to be an invaluable intervention that leads to much-improved outcomes. 

(3) Go beyond PDS stuffs

• Learning from other low-income societies with successful micro-nutrient based interventions, we need to redefine the scope and mechanism of the PDS programmes to extend beyond funnelling cheap or free grains and generate higher fidelity using the vast local network.
• Promising lessons can be seen in Mexico’s distribution system of nutrition pouches and the SMS-based digital PDS in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh where the distribution involves pulses and millets in addition to rice and salt.

(4) Biofortification of food

• “Hidden hunger,” or micronutrient deficiency, that inhibits proper growth and development of the human mind and body, affects a large section of the Indian population.
• Plenty of studies across the world show that bio-fortification can turn out to be an extremely cost-effective solution to improving households’ diet. 
• Biofortification can be a key food-based approach to tackle malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency, especially among the poor who cannot afford high-value foods.

(5) Empower the mother, before all

• Studies have indicated that one of the chief determinants of malnutrition is that of the mother’s education.
• India has made some headway in improving female literary, but as of 2015-2016, only 13.7 per cent of women had, reportedly, received higher education – a startlingly low figure.
• A lack of basic facilities like separate female toilets in schools, along with the large distances between girls’ homes and schools are key factors that contribute to the high dropout rates witnessed among young females. 

Way forward

• To begin with, small steps can be taken to deal with the crisis. The government may create provisions to supply cooked nutritious food to the vulnerable section of society.
• This has to be done in addition to the existing provisions of healthy diets from Anganwadi and schools through mid-day meals for children, mothers and students.
• Rural employment schemes such as MGNREGA should be given a boost to increase employment and wages.
• Finally, a strong inverse correlation exists between female education and under-nutrition, indicating that facilitating women’s education could have significant multiplier effects.
• This can be reflected not just on food security, but in child feeding practices and sanitation.

Conclusion

• Malnutrition continues to be the largest underlying epidemic in our society. In India, the Covid-19 containment measures have brought out the multi-dimensionality of India’s diverse food challenges.
• The problem does not seem limited to the countryside and gets further complicated in developed areas which perceivably have enough food on the table.
• For decades, India has accorded the highest priority to building roads and highways and power generation, considering these sectors are critical for economic growth.
• Time is now ripe, in bridging the divide between short-term relief and long-term development goals for which food security is the important milestone.

---

References

Highlights of the Global Hunger Report, 2020

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/the-hindu-explains-the-chronic-battle-with-malnourishment/article32937615.ece

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/food/global-hunger-index-why-is-india-trailing–73920

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-road-to-zero-hunger-by-2030/article32865528.ece

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-exacerbates-indias-hunger-problem/a-55299109

The judiciary is weakened by the very act of publication when legal remedies are not accessed. When that happens, ‘We the People’ are the losers.

Andhra Pradesh CM has stirred a hornet’s nest by writing to the Chief Justice of India complaining about a Supreme Court judge for allegedly influencing posting of cases in the State High Court. The alleged Judge is slated to be the next Chief Justice of India, and some judges of the AP High Court has opened the proverbial can of worms. This has led to a tricky situation.

Confronting the judiciary: With alleged Misconduct

• He alleged that some High Court judges are hostile to his government and are deliberately striking down his regime’s decisions and orders.
• In effect, he has accused many judges of misconduct, corruption and political bias.
• Such an open conflict between the judiciary and a Chief Minister is without precedent.
• In view of the above, the CM urged the CJI to consider initiating steps to ensure that the State’s judicial neutrality was maintained.

How are allegations of misconduct against judges dealt with?

• The Constitution protects the independence of judges of the High Courts and the Supreme Court by making them removable only through a long process of impeachment.
• However, not all forms of misconduct will warrant impeachment. There could be other kinds of impropriety too.
• There are times when serious complaints of this sort are received, and the Chief Justice of India (CJI) is called upon to examine them.
• Since 1997, judges have adopted an ‘in-house procedure’ for inquiring into such charges.

Handling the complaint

• The complaint by the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister will have to be examined by the CJI from the perspective of whether it can be rejected as baseless, or it requires a deeper investigation.
• In details annexed to his letter, the CM has cited several writ petitions in which adverse orders were passed against his regime.
• Therefore, a key question would be: do the charges pertain merely to the merits of judicial orders, or are they serious enough to warrant a probe?

Consequences of this Letter

(1) Impacts on Democratic Functioning

The confrontation and mistrust between two the organs of the state are not conducive for the smooth working of democracy.

(2) Politicization of Judiciary

The serious accusation by a sitting CM brings out to the foreground the weakness of Judiciary. Similar kind of charges might be levelled by opposition parties when it comes to power. All this leads to the undue politicization of the sacrosanct Judiciary.

(3) Scandalization of the Courts

Every judgement delivered the judges involved in this controversy will be questioned which is not good even from Institutional perspective. Such type of allegations and counter allegation will create doubts in minds of Public about the ability to get justice from formal system.

(4) Surpassing the limited propriety

The limits of propriety are being stretched, as the allegations have taken distinctly political overtones. It is disturbing enough that some judicial orders are seen in a political light, or lend themselves to such an interpretation. It becomes quite ominous if these charges give rise to open threats and abuse.

(5) Unclear charges

The problem is that allegations of possible judicial bias, which are difficult to establish, are combined with those of misconduct, a serious charge. Regardless of what happens, it may end the recriminations. India can ill-afford a public perception that judges have strong political loyalties.

(6) Public disclosure has led to media trials

The letter and its public disclosure have somehow compromised the dignity and independence of the apex court. This has also interfered with administration of justice and scandalized the court in the eyes of the people by sensationalizing the issue.

(7) A case for constitutional impropriety

Article 121 and Article 211 of the Constitution expressly bar the Parliament and State Legislatures to discuss the conduct of any Judge. The Constitution confers such immunity having regard to the onerous responsibility of judges in discharging constitutional functions. However, it is subject to a decision by the CJI on the touchstone of the applicable contempt laws in the country.

(8) A bigger dilemma

This case is not just about accused judge or the charges levelled against him and his judgements. It is equally about the duty and responsibility of CJI to stand like a shield not only to safeguard the honour and reputation of a brother judge but also to protect the institutional integrity of the highest forum of justice in the land.

A trial of the Judiciary itself

• The Supreme Court has not been immune to serious blows and allegations from within and without.  The institution has been more fragile ever since the press conference addressed by four former judges.
• There is a rise in personal attacks through the captive or the social media which can be a devastating weapon of disinformation against a judge who cannot mount a counterattack on the same platform.
• Their aim, more often than not, is not to point out flawed judgments or administrative failures, but rather to weaken the judiciary and bend it to their own narrow interests.
• The attacks have snowballed during the last six years. The courts, strong and invincible as they may look from the outside, have preferred caution rather than aggressive responses.

Why Judiciary must probe the case?

Whether the writing to CJI is in itself wrongdoing or is making it public an act of contempt of the court — may differ. But, the more important question is whether the CJI should examine the matter or just dump it.  Here are the five reasons for the CJI to take a serious look into the matter. 

(1) Credibility of the Institution

The credibility of the institution of judiciary is of paramount importance. Involved persons are mortals and temporary. But, the institutions are permanent. 

(2) Maintaining the Public faith

An open hearing is the character of the adjudication process. Whether the CM’s decision to make his letter to the CJI public is acceptable or not is a different debate altogether.  That doesn’t mean his complaint loses its relevance and the obligation of the Supreme Court to inquire into it is annulled.

(3) Every case isn’t an attack on Judiciary

The complaint should not be treated as an attack on the judiciary, as he categorically named the judges in his letter to the CJI. The Constitution of India has envisaged action against judges for judicial ‘misconduct’, according to Article 124(4).

(4) There exists an established mechanism

The Supreme Court announced a mechanism in 2015 for receiving and considering complaints against judges. Any person can complain against the judges. A three-member committee must be constituted.  This committee can either reject the complaint; or may recommend to the Parliament to initiate proceedings of impeachment if the contents of the complaint are of very serious nature.

(5) Upholding the Constitution

The judiciary draws its powers from the Constitution and magnificence from the unflinching faith of the people. The CM is a Constitutional Head vested with specific powers and responsibilities. He holds an important constitutional position and that in itself is the basis of the complaint. The CJI should give importance to what was said in the complaint rather than who lodged it.

(6)Test of the grievance redressal mechanism

 How the CJI & SC is going to handle this case will set a precedent to deal with the misconduct of Judges in future. If the process is not robust, fair & transparent then the calls for greater executive control on Judiciary will increase to the scale of the pre-NJAC verdict.

The solutions do not lie in token one-rupee fines but in balanced and calibrated action.

Way forward

Since we all have a vested interest in an independent and impartial judiciary, for that effective remedies for judicial misbehaviour must be found.

• It is nobody’s case that the judiciary is immune from the investigation into misbehaviour and misconduct, the question is who has the power and the authority to investigate serious misconduct by a sitting judge.
• Misbehaviour by judges is too serious an issue to experiment with. It needs clear mechanisms of accountability to the general public.
• The right thing would probably be for the honourable CJI to order an inquiry into the letter in accordance with the apex court’s internal procedure.  
• Opportunistic attacks on the judiciary must be discouraged.  On the other hand, effective remedies for judicial misbehaviour must be found, for which the impeachment is one of the option to consider.
• In a longer run, the judiciary, civil society and the political class must come together on a common platform to devise a systematic approach in which adhocism; favouritism and impunity are kept at an arm’s length.
• There is a need for lawful creation of an arrangement and structure which are fair, impartial, just, constitutional, and safeguard the separation of powers.

Conclusion

• Aspersions and allegations against them ought not to be made lightly for sensationalism without substantive and positive evidence. Nothing short of the faith of the people in the judiciary and the rule of law is at stake.
• A fair, independent judiciary whose integrity is unimpeachable is the bedrock of the Indian democracy, and the CJI must save it by taking up this issue. With the spirit of everyone is equal before the law.
• The Judiciary owes it to its own institutional history to keep its unblemished character supreme and its dignity sacrosanct, as it is an exemplar of democratic values.

References

https://thewire.in/law/andhra-cm-jagan-declares-war-on-justice-ramana-next-in-line-to-be-chief-justice-of-india

https://www.dailyo.in/politics/chief-justice-of-india-andhra-pradesh-high-court-jaganmohan-reddy-justice-nv-ramana/story/1/33759.html

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/after-jagan-letter-to-cji-need-free-judiciary-it-is-for-a-judge-to-withstand-pressure-says-justice-ramana-6762198/

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/unpleasant-spectacle-the-hindu-editorial-on-jagan-mohan-reddys-complaint-against-supreme-court-judge/article32856516.ece

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/the-hindu-explains-what-can-cji-bobde-do-about-charges-levelled-against-judges-by-the-andhra-pradesh-chief-minister/article32883894.ece

https://www.indialegallive.com/column-news/bobdes-burden/