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Subject: Governance

Important aspects of Society

  • Social sector: the post-Covid priority

    The article highlights the need for more focus on the social sector in the post-Covid society and suggest ways to do the same.

    Why focus on social sector

    • No country has progressed without investing in the social sector.
    • India is committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, and social sector development is important in reaching them.
    • Progress in this sector has intrinsic (for its own sake) and instrumental (for higher growth) value.
    • It is needed even to build a $5 trillion economy faster.

    India’s social sector expenditure

    • India’s progress in the social sector has been much slower compared to its GDP growth.
    • In the social sector expenditure, the share of education as a percentage of GDP has been stagnant around 2.8-3 per cent during 2014-15 to 2019-20.
    • In the case of health, the expenditure as a percentage of GDP increased from 1.2 per cent to 1.5 per cent.
    • This is lower than the required 2-3 per cent of GDP.
    • An increase in health expenditure is also important to take care of the present and future pandemics.
    • There are supply side problems regarding the health infrastructure.
    • It is essential to have a huge increase in public expenditure on health and provide accessible, affordable and quality health coverage to all.

    Following are some key issues in the social sector India needs to focus on.

    1) The problem of undernutrition

    • The NFHS-5 report shows that malnutrition level has reduced marginally in a few states and has worsened in some other states between 2015-16 and 2019-20.
    • We can’t have a society with 35 per cent of our children suffering from malnutrition.
    • Apart from undernutrition, obesity seems to be increasing in both rural and urban areas.
    • There is a need to raise allocations for ICDS and other nutrition programmes.
    • The determinants of nutrition are agriculture, health, women’s empowerment, including maternal and child practices, social protection, nutrition education, sanitation and drinking water.
    • The Poshan Abhiyan is a good programme, but has to cover all these determinants with a multi-pronged approach to reduce undernutrition.

    2) Quality education

    • Quality education is key for raising human development.
    • The pandemic has enhanced inequalities in education and has revealed the widening digital gap.
    • Equality of opportunity in terms of quality education is the key for raising human development and for reducing inequalities in the labour market.
    • Several committees have recommended that public expenditure on education should be at 6 per cent of GDP.

    3) Social safety nets

    •  It is known that migrant workers were the most affected during the pandemic and that they do not have any safety nets.
    • There is a need to have safety nets like an employment guarantee scheme for the urban poor and facilities for migrants.
    • Similarly in rural areas, allocations to MGNREGA have to be increased because of the reverse migration.

    4) Programs for vulnerable section need to be continued

    • The government has done well in providing cooking gas through Ujjwala Yojana and electricity through Saubhagya Yojana, introducing programmes such as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and initiatives for housing, financial inclusion and providing loans to the self-employed.
    • These programmes have helped the vulnerable sections, particularly women.
    • Another initiative of the government was to facilitate direct benefit transfers (DBT) for welfare schemes.
    • These initiatives have to be continued.

    Way forward

    • The government should give more focus to the social sector with better policies and implementation.
    • It has to work closely with the states in revitalising the social sector as major expenditures particularly on health and education are met by them.
    • The 15th Finance Commission also seems to have mentioned that health expenditure should be increased to 2.1 per cent of GDP.
    • The Commission may also suggest some incentives for states to increase health expenditure.
    • Both Centre and states should have a five-year vision on the social sector.

    Consider the question “No country has progressed without investing in the social sector. In the post pandemic world India needs to chart the plan to invest more in the sector. In light of this, examine the challenges in the social sector and suggest the ways to deal with them.

    Conclusion

    India, aspiring to be a global power, should have a harmonious and inclusive social sector development. This is also important for achieving the SDGs, reducing inequalities and building a $5 trillion economy faster.

  • Salary to women for domestic work

    Recently, a political party promised salaries to housewives as a part of its electoral campaign in Tamil Nadu. This led to the debate on the issue. The article deals with the issue.

    Salary for housework: Historical background

    • Demand for wages against housework was first raised at the third National Women’s Liberation conference in Manchester, England.
    •  In 2012, the then minister for Women and Child development announced that the government was considering mandating a salary for housework to wives, from husbands.
    •  The purpose, once again, was to empower women financially and help them live with dignity.

    Recognising the value of unpaid domestic work

    • Time-use data from 2019 gathered by the National Sample Survey Organisation revealed that only about a quarter of men and boys above six years engaged in unpaid household chores, compared to over four-fifths of women.
    • Every day, an average Indian male spends 1.5 hours per day in unpaid domestic work, compared to about five hours by a female.
    • Housework demands effort and sacrifice, 365 days a year, 24/7.

    Issues with paying for domestic work

    •  Asking men to pay for wives’ domestic work could further enhance their sense of entitlement.
    • It may also put the additional onus on women to perform.
    • There is a risk of formalising the patriarchal Indian family where the position of men stems from their being “providers” in the relationship.

    Way forward

    • Despite a legal provision, equal inheritance rights continue to be elusive for a majority of women.
    • More than creating a new provision of salary for housework, we need to strengthen awareness, implementation and utilisation of other existing provisions.
    • Starting from the right to reside in the marital home, to streedhan and haq meher, to coparcenary and inheritance rights as daughters and to basic services, free legal aid and maintenance in instances of violence and divorce.
    • Women should be helped to reach their full potential through quality education, access and opportunities of work, gender-sensitive and harassment-free workplaces and attitudinal and behaviour change within families to make household chores more participative.

    Conclusion

    Just like we do not want women to commodify their reproductive services because of their inherently exploitative nature — we have, therefore, banned commercial surrogacy in the country — let us not allow commodification of housework and personal care.

  • Issues with Harsher Punitive measures for the sexual violence

    Harsher punishment for sexual violence

    • Recently, the Maharashtra cabinet approved the Shakti Bill, enlarging the scope of harsher and mandatory sentences — including the death penalty — for non-homicidal rape.
    • The Shakti Bill comes amid the recent legislative trend to invoke the death penalty for sexual offences.
    • In 2020, the Andhra Pradesh government passed the Disha Bill, pending presidential assent, that provides the death penalty for the rape of adult women.

    Issues with the Bills

    1) Focus on reporting of police complaint

    • The most severe gaps in the justice delivery system are related to reporting a police complaint.
    • The focus of the criminal justice system needs to shift from sentencing and punishment to the stages of reporting, investigation and victim-support mechanisms.
    • The bill does not address these concerns.

    2) Impact on rate of conviction

    • Harsh penalties often have the consequence of reducing the rate of conviction for the offence.
    • A study published in the Indian Law Review based on rape judgments in Delhi shows a lower rate of conviction after the removal of judicial discretion in 2013.
    • Introducing harsher penalties does not remove systemic prejudices from the minds of judges and the police.

    3) Harsher punishment would deter complainants

    • Studies on child sexual abuse have shown that in the few cases of convictions, the minimum sentence was the norm and the award of the maximum punishment was an exception.
    • Crime data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows that in 93.6 per cent of these cases, the perpetrators were known to the victims.
    • Introducing capital punishment would deter complainants from registering complaints.
    • The Shakti Bill ignores crucial empirical evidence on these cases.

    4) Moving away from standard of affirmative consent

    • An affirmative standard of consent is rooted in unequivocal voluntary agreement by women through words, gestures or any form of verbal or non-verbal communication.
    • In a sharp departure, the bill stipulates that valid consent can be presumed from the “conduct of the parties” and the “circumstances surrounding it”.
    • The vaguely worded explanation in the bill holds dangerous possibilities of expecting survivors to respond only in a certain manner, thus creating the stereotype of an “ideal” victim.
    • It also overlooks the fact that perpetrators are known to the survivors in nearly 94 per cent of rapes, which often do not involve any brutal violence.

    Conclusion

    Punitive responses to sexual violence need serious rethinking, given the multitude of perverse consequences and their negligible role in addressing the actual needs of rape survivors.

  • [pib] Longitudinal Ageing Study of India (LASI)

    The Union Minister for Health & Family Welfare has released INDIA REPORT on Longitudinal Ageing Study of India (LASI) Wave-1.

    Discuss various issues pertaining to old-age care in India.

    Longitudinal Ageing Study of India (LASI)

    • LASI is a full–scale national survey of scientific investigation of the health, economic, and social determinants and consequences of population ageing in India.
    • The LASI, Wave 1 covered a baseline sample of 72,250 individuals aged 45 and above till the oldest-old persons aged 75 and above from all States and UTs of India (excluding Sikkim).
    • It is India’s first and the world’s largest ever survey that provides a longitudinal database for designing policies and programmes for the older population in the broad domains of social, health, and economic well-being.
    • The evidence from LASI will be used to further strengthen and broaden the scope of National Programme for Health Care of the Elderly.
    • It would also help in establishing a range of preventive and health care programmes for older population and most vulnerable among them.

    Why need such survey?

    • In 2011 census, the 60+ population accounted for 8.6% of India’s population, accounting for 103 million elderly people.
    • Growing at around 3% annually, the number of elderly age population will rise to 319 million in 2050.
    • 75% of the elderly people suffer from one or the other chronic disease.
    • 40% of the elderly people have one or the other disability and 20% have issues related to mental health.
    • This report will provide base for national and state level programmes and policies for elderly population.

  • Need to focus on the well-being of the child from womb to first five years

    The article analyses the data of NHFS-5 and try to factors responsible for the outcomes.

    Analysing health and nutrition of child through NHFS-5

    • The recently released fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) provide insights into some dimensions of micro-development performance before COVID struck.
    • The latest round only has data for 17 states and five Union territories.
    • Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu are notable exclusions.
    • Many of the child-related outcomes are also determined by state-level implementation, therefore neither success nor failure can be attributed to state or the centre alone.

    Let’s understand the data

    • The NFHS has 42 indicators related to child’s health and nutrition.
    • Indicators fall into nine categories and each of these can be divided into outcomes and inputs.
    • For example, neonatal, infant and under-5 mortality rates can be thought of as outcomes.
    • Similarly, all the nutrition indicators —stunting, wastage, excess wastage, underweight and overweight can also be classified as outcomes.
    • In contrast, the post-natal care indicators relating to visits made by health workers and the extent and nature of feeding for the child can be classified as inputs.

    Outcomes of the survey

    • On the front of wasting (weight for height of children) these is an improvement because even though the gains were marginal, they reversed a negative trend between 2005 and 2015. 
    • India continues to be successful in preventing child deaths, but the health and nutrition of the surviving, living child has deteriorated, somewhat worryingly.
    • India continued to make progress in preventing child-related deaths (neonatal, infants and under-5).
    • The pace of improvement in child mortality slowed down relative to the previous 10 years (Fig.1).
    • Figure 2 shows the six indicators where outcomes have deteriorated. These all relate to what happens after survival:
    • The health (anaemia, diarrhoea, and acute respiratory illness (ARI)) and nutrition (stunting, and overweight) of the child deteriorated between 2015 and 2019.
    • The absolute deterioration in health and nutrition indicators must be seen against the fact that they reversed the historic trends of steady improvements.

    What explains the outcomes

    • Implementation capacity of individual states probably played an important role.
    • Sector-specific factors such as changing diets are also implicated.
    • A broader deterioration in outcomes hints at the likelihood of a common factor, namely the macro-economic growth environment, which determines employment, incomes and opportunities.
    • At the least, it is safe to conjecture that some of these outcomes are inconsistent with the narrative of a rapidly growing economy.

    Conclusion

    As discussed in Chapter 5 of the Economic Survey of 2015-16, perhaps the next big welfare initiative of the government should be a mission-mode focus on the well-being of the early child (and of course the mother), from the womb to the first five years, which research shows is critical for realising its long run potential as an individual.

  • School Bag Policy, 2020

    The Directorate of Education has issued a circular asking school to follow the new ‘School Bag Policy, 2020’ released by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).

    Q.What are the features of the School Bag Policy, 2020? Discuss how heavy school bags are a serious threat to the health and learning capability of students.

    School Bag Policy, 2020

    • According to the circular, schoolteachers should inform the students in advance about the books and notebooks to be brought to school on a particular day.
    • They frequently need to check their bags to ensure that they are not carrying unnecessary material.
    • It adds that the teachers should take the responsibility of checking the weight of school bags of the students every three months on a day selected for the whole class.
    • It also holds that any information about heavy bags should be communicated to the parents.
    • The circular also says that it is the duty and the responsibility of the school management to provide quality potable water in sufficient quantity.
    • It adds that files and thin/light exercise books should be preferred to thick/heavy ones.

    Prescribed weights

    The weight of the school bags, as per the policy, should be

    • 6 to 2.2 kg for students of Classes I and II
    • 7 to 2.5 kg for Classes III, IV and V
    • 2 to 3 kg for Classes VI and VII
    • 5 to 4 kg for Class VIII
    • 5 to 4.5 kg for Classes IX and X
    • 5 to 5 kg for Classes XI and XII

    Why heavy school bags are a curse?

    • Heavy school bags are a serious threat to the health and well-being of students.
    • A heavy backpack can pull on the neck muscles contributing to headache, shoulder pain, lower back pain and neck and arm pain.
    • Not just this, carrying backpacks over one shoulder is a wrong practice as it makes muscles strain.
    • The spine leans to the opposite side, stressing the middle back, ribs, and lower back more on one side than the other and this muscle imbalance can cause muscle strain, muscle spasm, and back pain.
    • Heavy school bags are also one of the major reasons for cervical and lumbar pains.
    • The posture of the body also gets affected to a great extent which in the long term develops imbalances in the body and affects the health of the nervous system.

  • FSSAI slashes limit for Trans Fats level in food

    The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has capped the amount of trans fatty acids (TFA) in oils and fats to 3% for 2021 and 2% by 2022 from the current permissible limit of 5%.

    New FSSAI norms

    • FSSAI has acted in response to the amendment to the Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restriction on Sales) Regulations.
    • The country’s food regulatory body notified the amendment on December 29, more than a year after it issued a draft on the subject for consultation with stakeholders.
    • The revised regulation applies to edible refined oils, vanaspati (partially hydrogenated oils), margarine, bakery shortenings, and other mediums of cooking such as vegetable fat spreads and mixed fat spreads.
    • It was in 2011 that India first passed a regulation that set a TFA limit of 10% in oils and fats, which was further reduced to 5% in 2015.

    What are Trans Fats?

    • Artificial Trans fats are created in an industrial process that adds hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid.
    • Since they are easy to use, inexpensive to produce and last a long time, and give foods a desirable taste and texture, they are still widely used despite their harmful effects being well-known.

    Why such a regulation?

    • Trans fats are associated with increased risk of heart attacks and death from coronary heart disease.
    • As per the WHO, approximately 5.4 lakh deaths take place each year globally because of intake of industrially-produced trans-fatty acids.
    • The WHO has also called for global elimination of trans fats by 2023.

  • Issues with U.P. religious conversion ordinance

    The article examines the provision of U.P. governments religious conversion ordinance and issues with these provision.

    Power to promulgate an ordinance

    • As per Article 213(1) of the Constitution of India, there are three pre-conditions to be satisfied before the Governor promulgates an ordinance, these are:
    • 1) The State Legislature should not be in session.
    • 2) Circumstances should exist for promulgating an ordinance and importantly.
    • 3) Those circumstances must warrant immediate action.

    Scrutiny of the circumstances

    • There is no established practice requiring the Governor (or the President under Article 123) to state the circumstances for promulgating the Ordinance.
    • The reason for immediate action is, as yet, not justiciable.
    • But the Supreme Court of India has held that the existence of circumstances leading to the satisfaction of the Governor can be inquired into.
    • A healthy convention should develop and the preamble to any ordinance should state the immediacy for promulgating it when the Legislature is not in session.
    • This would greatly enhance transparency in legislation.
    • This would also help legislators to understand why they are by-passed and why a procedures in the Legislature could not be awaited.

    Issues with the U.P. ordinance

    • The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance records the satisfaction of the Governor of the existence of circumstances and the necessity for “him/her to take immediate action.
    • If one fraudulent or coercive inter-faith marriage is taking place, the police can certainly prevent it.
    • An ordinance is not required for it.
    • Section 3 prohibits conversion or attempt to convert any person from one religion to another by coercion or fraud etc. or by marriage.
    • But, nobody gets converted by marriage.
    • The offense of attempting to convert poses a bigger rights issue.
    • Under Section 7, on receiving the information a police officer is authorized to arrest a person without orders from Magistrate or warrant.
    • The nature of information includes an allegation of allurement which includes an offer of any temptation in the form of a gift or gratification.
    • Under Section 8, if someone genuinely desires to convert but not get married, that person would have to inform the District Magistrate (DM) two months in advance of the plan through a declaration.
    • Assuming conversion is not objected to, even thereafter the DM must be informed by the converted through a declaration under Section 9.
    • Section 12 provides that the burden to prove the conversion was not on account of coercion, fraud, etc., or by marriage will be on the person who has caused the conversion.
    • But, how the person causing the conversion expected to know the mind of the converted?

    Conclusion

    The ordinance vilifies all inter-faith marriages and places unreasonable obstacles on consenting adults in exercising their personal choice of a partner, mocks the right to privacy and violates the right to life, liberty, and dignity. In short, it is unconstitutional.

  • Issues with NEP’s regulatory architecture

    The article deals with the idea of single regulator for higher education in the country and the challenges it could fece.

    Recommendations for regulation of higher education

    • Regulatory bodies came up in response to the rapid growth of private participation since the 1980s.
    • Due to multiplicity of regulatory bodies in higher education, nearly all advisory panels appointed since 2005 have been asked for a single regulator.
    • National Knowledge Commission (NKC) concluded in 2007 that the plethora of agencies attempting to control entry, operation, intake, price, size, output and exit had rendered the regulation of higher education ineffectual.
    • The NKC recommended the setting up of an overarching Independent Regulatory Authority in Higher Education (IRAHE).
    • A major concern of the Yash Pal Committee constituted in 2009 was compartmentalisation of academia.
    • To promote such a dialogue, the Yash Pal committee recommended the creation of an apex body called the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER).
    • TSR Subramanian committee in 2016 proposed an Act for setting up an Indian Regulatory Authority for Higher Education (IRAHE) to subsume all existing regulatory bodies in higher education.
    • The draft national policy presented by the Kasturirangan Committee in 2019 proposed a National Higher Education Regulatory Authority (NHERA) as a common regulatory regime for entire higher education sector.
    • The draft NEP 2020 proposed a Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog (RSA) to coordinate, direct and address inter-institutional overlaps and conflicts.

    The regulatory regime under NEP 2020

    • NEP 2020 has now a single regulator for all higher education barring medical and law education.
    • It envisages an overarching Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), with four independent verticals comprising the National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC), the National Accreditation Council (NAC), the Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC) and the General Education Council (GEC).
    •  The University Grants Commission (UGC) is to become HEGC while the other regulatory bodies will become professional standard setters.

    Fragmented regulation of medical education to continue

    • NEP-2020 provides for separate regulation for medical education.
    • But it envisions healthcare education as an inter-disciplinary system.[Allopathic student to have a basic understanding of Ayurveda, Yoga etc and vice-versa]
    • Multiple regulators in health education include the National Commission for Homoeopathy (NCH) and the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM) and continuation of the Dental Council of India (DCI), Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) and the Indian Nursing Council (INC),
    • Thus, making medical education inter-disciplinary would be difficult due to multiple regulators.

    Lessons from the governance of medical education

    • The above example demonstrate the difficulty in designing a single regulatory framework to take care of the domain-specific needs of even within healthcare education.
    • But if accepted as a principle, it has the potential to delay, if not derail, the idea of a single regulator.
    • And should that actually happen, the idea of reining in the regulators might mean abandoning the idea of regulation of regulators.

    Issues with the single regulator proposed in NEP 2020

    • The regulatory architecture proposed in the NEP is far too monolithic for a system of higher education serving a geographically, culturally and politically diverse country like ours.
    • Even in the matter of privatisation, there is enormous diversity of players and practices.
    • Historically too, private participation in the running of colleges has not followed a single pattern.
    • To imagine that a uniform structure called Board of Governors can serve all different kinds of institutions across the country is flawed.
    • Such a vision calls for better appreciation of what exists, no matter how worrisome a condition it is in.

    Consider the question “What are the challenges in the regulation of higher education in the country? What are the concerns with the idea of single regulator for the regualtion of higher education in country?”

    Conclusion

    Before proceeding with the single regulator, the government need to pay attention to the issue of diversity in various aspects in the country.

  • Give adequate time for investigation

    Andhra Pradesh’s Disha Bill of 2019 seeks to reduce the time period for investigation of some crimes to seven days. Such a move could have several consequences. The article deals with that issue.

    State governments reducing the period of investigation

    • The proposed Maharashtra Shakti Act of 2020 will have a provision to complete the investigation within 15 days.
    • Maharashtra has taken cur from the Andhra Pradesh’s Disha Bill of 2019.
    • Disha mandated completion of investigation within seven working days for offenses such as harassment of women, sexual assault on children, and rape, where “adequate conclusive evidence” is available.
    • The interpretation of “adequate conclusive evidence” by the police shall remain a problem.

    What are the CrPC provisions?

    • The Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) provides that investigations relating to offenses punishable with imprisonment up to 10 years must be completed within 60 days.
    • For offenses with higher punishment (including rape) the time limit is of 90 days of detaining the accused, else he or she shall be released on bail.
    • To speed up the process, the CrPC was amended in 2018 and the period of investigation was reduced from 90 to 60 days for all cases of rape.

    Factors that decide the time required

    • Generally, the time of investigation depends on several factors like the severity of the crime, the number of accused persons and agencies involved.
    • This is besides the fact that in many cases of rape, the victim remains under trauma for some time and is not able to narrate the incident in detail.
    • The speed and quality of investigation also depend on whether a police station has separate units of investigation and law and order.[ a long-pending police reform]
    • It also depends on the number of available IOs and women police officers, and the size and growth of the FSL and its DNA unit.

    Consider the question “Examine the reasons for the high crime rate in India? Recently, some state governments have reduced the duration for the investigation of crime. How such move could impact the investigation?” 

    Conclusion

    Setting narrow timelines for investigation creates scope for procedural loopholes that may be exploited during the trial. Therefore, instead of fixing unrealistic timelines, the police should be given additional resources so that they can deliver efficiently.