Daily Current Affairs

The injustice of exceptionalism (GS Paper 2, Governance)

Context:

• Eleven men who were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008 for the gang rape of BilkisBano (she was pregnant then) and the murder of her family members in 2002 were released recently from a jail in Gujarat.

A Special Central Bureau of Investigation Court had sentenced the men to life imprisonment in 2008.

 

Injustice:

• Their release seems unjust and the subsequent celebration of their release by some is revolting.
• While the applicable law in this case, on the face of it, seems to give the power to the Gujarat government to release these men, serious questions about the legality of the decision have emerged.

 

Remission policy:

• As in most States, Gujarat’s current remission policy (it adopted a new and revised remission policy for prisoners in 2014), makes those convicted of rape ineligible for premature release.
• However, the Supreme Court of India had earlier ruled that the remission question in this case would be governed by the remission policy of 1992 that was in force at the time of conviction which did not exclude those convicted of rape from executive remission.

 

Criteria for remission:

• State governments have laid down behaviour/activities that can earn prisoners a certain amount of days as remission,that is then deducted from their sentence.
• For example, if a prisoner earns two years in remission and a court has sentenced them to 10 years, they can leave prison effectively after eight years. This system is enshrined in the Prisons Act, 1894, and also rules developed by different States (prison is a state subject).
• However, the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) is clear that life convicts have to undergo a minimum of 14 years of actual imprisonment before they can be considered for remission/premature release.
• Each State has its own procedure to consider each application for release. There is very little transparency on how these decisions are made.

 

Premature release rules:

• Besides this, State governments have also developed premature release rules that include the power to give effect to the Governor’s powers of remission under Article 161 of the Constitution.
• Those powers are not governed by the CrPC and are often used to bypass the minimum 14 years of actual imprisonment requirement in the CrPC.
• But in this case, the term of imprisonment of all 11 men was more than 15 years and therefore, the calculation of 14 years is irrelevant.

 

A right to life:

• While, undoubtedly, questions of punishment and reformation need to be individualised, a meaningful criminal justice policy should never adopt offence-based exclusions when considering remission or premature release with respect to individual persons.
• Remission is borne out of the central objective of prisons to operate as reformative and rehabilitative spaces.
• The Supreme Court has recognisedremission as an inherent part of a prisoner’s right to life. Contrary to popular conception, remission is a right and not a privilege extended to the convict by the state.

 

Justice in case of BilkisBano case:

• However, that broader position on remission cannot settle the questions of justice in this case. It is the extraordinary treatment bestowed on these 11 men when it is now denied to an entire class of offenders across the country that carries the stink of injustice.
• While the policy of 1992 provided no disqualification for their release, it is unclear why the Gujarat government found these men fit for release when it has excluded the very same category of prisoners from any consideration whatsoever under the policy of 2014.
• A cardinal rule of justice stands broken , one set of considerations for everyone else convicted for the same offence but, somehow, a different set of governance considerations for these 11 individuals.

 

Survivors and challenges:

• While there is much to worry about the legislature, the executive and the judiciary moving towards harsher sentences for those convicted for sexual offences, the impunity for sexual violence remains a grave concern.
• There is significant research demonstrating the challenges that rape survivors face in filing criminal complaints and navigating the justice system.
• These difficulties are particularly pronounced and qualitatively different for survivors from caste and religious minorities against whom rape is used as a weapon of social oppression.
• One such aspect is the intimidation and pressure from perpetrators, the majority community, and often the police to drop criminal charges. The lack of witness protection measures results in many complainants turning hostile to protect themselves from more harm.

 

Act of exceptionalism:

• For the BilkisBano case too, not only was it an uphill struggle to initiate criminal proceedings but it was also accompanied by several death threats throughout the course of her case. She relocated constantly for her safety.
• In pursuing justice, survivors from caste and religious minorities have to bear the brunt of a casteist and Islamophobic society, apart from facing greater challenges in negotiating the criminal justice system than other survivors do.
• Given this lived reality of survivors, the exceptionalism in granting the release of these 11 individuals in the BilkisBano case becomes even starker.
• When the executive has otherwise made the choice to exclude this category of offenders from the benefit of remission/premature release, releasing these men from the majority community who gang raped BilkisBano and murdered her family members during a communal riot is an act of exceptionalism. It is this exceptionalism that lies at the core of injustice in this case.

 

Way Forward:

• However, rage at the grave injustice, in this case, must not be accompanied by a corresponding legitimisation of overly-punitive approaches to sexual violence.
• The insurmountable difficulties endured by BilkisBano to pursue justice and collective fear for her safety now may make 15 years of imprisonment seem insufficient.
• But dissatisfaction with a broken and discriminatory system cannot be fixed by harsher sentences and practices which is, unfortunately, the only form of justice that a punitive system can offer.

 

An India Blockchain Platform

(GS Paper 3, Economy)

Context:

• In recent years, India has made a significant effort to become a digital society by building a large citizen- scale digital public infrastructure.
• The Government of India and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been promoting simplification and transparency to increase the speed of interaction between individuals, markets, and the government.

With the commencement of the Digital India mission in 2015, payments, provident fund, passports, driving licences, crossing tolls, and checking land records all have been transformed with modular applications built on Aadhaar, UPI, and the India Stack.

Limitations of public digital infrastructure:

• It is well established that digital infrastructure should be designed based on principles of availability, affordability, value, and trust.
• The invisible rules underlying technology can be made visible using design principles, legislative frameworks, governance frameworks, and public engagement. But when looked at the current digital ecosystem, it’s identified that existing different digital infrastructures are not interconnected as a design; a technical integrationis required to make them conversant and interoperable.
• Today, information has to travel across multiple systems to complete the interaction, and rely on private databases, which makes the validation of data more complex as the network grows, driving up costs and creating inefficiencies.

 

Web 3.0 to address challenges:

• It is becoming increasingly essential for developing nations to iteratively buildinnovative solutions on top of existing digital infrastructure.
• The Web 3.0 architecture establishes a new version of the Internet protocol incorporating token- based economics, transparency, and decentralisation.
• It is critical to understand that Web3 is not only the cryptocurrencies, but also NFTs or non-fungible tokens, representing physical assets or digital twins. A user can access all ecosystem benefits using a distributed token where they can show proof of ownership, tax history, and payment instruments.
• Since the Web 3.0 ecosystem is less zero-sum, user lock-in is not the primary goal for new companies, and key operations can be encoded in “smart contracts” that are auditable, immutable, and easier for an early adopter to complete.
• A blockchain-based infrastructure can provide all of these attributes without the need of trusting any particular actor to verify a ledger’s history. The blockchain records could be visible, compiled, and audited by the regulators in real time.

 

Increasing global adoption of blockchain infrastructure:

• According to the management consulting company Gartner, by 2023, 35 per cent of enterprise blockchain applications will be integrated with decentralised applications and services. Many countries have already begun establishing their blockchain policies and infrastructure.
• Estonia, the world’s blockchain capital, is using blockchain infrastructure to verify and process all e-governance services offered to the general public.
• China launched a program in 2020 called BSN (Blockchain-based Service Network) to deploy blockchain applications in the cloud at a streamlined rate.
• In Britain, the Centre for Digital Built Britain, a partnership between the University of Cambridge and the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy, and Business Strategy, is running the National Digital Twin program (NDTp) to foster collaboration between owners and developers of digital twins in the built environment.
• The Brazilian government recently launched the Brazilian Blockchain Network to bring participating institutions in governance and the technological system that facilitates blockchain adoption in solutions for the public good.

 

Decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms:

• There are also well-established decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms that rely on blockchaininfrastructure like Ethereum, however, pegged to the base cryptocurrencies owned by that platform.
• As is well known, these platforms have multi-country presence and usage, and do not come under any particular regulatory ambit.
• DeFi allows users to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies on a short-term basis at algorithmically determined rates. DeFi users are rewarded with tokens that confer governance rights, which are analogous to seats on the protocol’s board.

 

Case of India:

• Recently, blockchain provider Solana launched a prototype smartphone with hardware and security that can support decentralised apps for people interested in crypto wallets, Web3, and NFTs.
• Many Indian technology firms are building layer 2 chains (L2) on top of the base proven layer 1 chains (L1), while providing value-adds like scale, throughput, etc., mainly through bundling the transactions. These implementations convey the story of blockchain technology driving the future of Web 3.0.

 

The digital roads that India must build using blockchain:

• The Indian digital community, including fintechs, academia, think tanks, and institutions, should focus on supporting research in standards, interoperability, and efficient handling of currentknown issues with the distributed technologies, e.g., scalability and performance, consensus mechanisms, and auto-detection of vulnerabilities.
• Also, at present, end-user devices such as smartphones do not support blockchain-based technology and, as a result, the last mile is always outside the network. However, the day is not far when smartphone manufacturers will deliver blockchain compliant devices by adding extensions.
• The blockchain models today are either permissioned, which suffice for the need of a consortium, or are public like Ethereum which are unregulated and rely on intrinsic standards.

 

Solutions for India:

• The ideal solution to solving most of the known issues of decentralised technologies lies in the middle path, i.e., a national platform operating at L1 that interconnects blockchains (both permissioned and public), application providers (decentralized applications and existing), token service providers, and infrastructure managers. Together they can form a reliable and efficient network for the Indian digital economy.
• The ecosystem can further deploy relevant and purpose-specific applications at L2 for very little cost and effort, while the L1 continues to handle the heavy lifting for all the L2s operating on layer 1.
• All L2 chains on this public infrastructure L1 will communicate with each other, thus replicating the communication (and avoiding the need for complex integrations with each other) on the Internet for existing Indian digital infrastructures.

 

Way Forward:

• The need of the hour is to work on an indigenous solution of the people, for the people, and by the people; an India Blockchain Platform, even if it takes years to design and implement.
• A digital infrastructure based on blockchain technology will transform the digital ecosystem in India, and will enable the future of digital services, platforms, applications, content, and solutions.

 

Undersea crater found in Atlantic

(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)

 

Why in news?

• Scientists have found evidence of asteroid impact. The asteroid crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind a massive 8.5-kilometer-wide crater in the seabed.

The crater has been found nearly 400 meters below the seabed, nearly 400 kilometers off the coast of Guinea, West Africa.

Key Findings:

• Researchers using computer simulation managed to scope out the crater and identify the causes and effects of the massive crash.
• The simulation indicated that the crater was formed by the collision of a 400-meter-wide asteroid in 500-800 meters of water, that could have generated a tsunami over one kilometer high, as well as an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 or above.

• The energy released would have been around 1000 times greater than that from the January 2022 eruption and tsunami in Tonga.
•  These are preliminary simulations and need to be refined, but they provide important new insights into the possible ocean depths in this area at the time of impact.

Nadir crater:

• The crater was discovered by Dr. Uisdean Nicholson, a geologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh when he was examining the seismic reflection from the seabed of the Atlantic.
• Instead of flat sedimentary sequences in the seismic reflection, he found an 8.5km depression under the seabed, with very unusual characteristics.
• It has particular features that point to an asteroid. It has a raised rim and a very prominent central uplift, which is consistent for large impact craters. It also has what looks like ejecta outside the crater, with very chaotic sedimentary deposits extending for tens of kilometers outside of the crater.
• Naming it Nadir crater after a nearby seamount, the researcher maintains that the characteristics are just not consistent with other crater-forming processes like salt withdrawal or the collapse of a volcano.

Was it part of the same asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs?

• Analysis of seismic data revealed that sediments impacted by the asteroid correspond with the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, however, they are not yet sure due to the resolution of the seismic data. The period corresponds to the age when the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs from Earth came crashing down.
• It is speculated that it could be part of the impact cluster or a breakup of a common parent asteroid.
• The Nadir Crater is an incredibly exciting discovery of a second impact close in time to the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction. So far only 200 such impact sites have been found in the 4.5-billion-year history of the planet.

What’s next?

• The scientists are hopeful that if they are able to drill into the seabed and collect samples, they could prove the theory of the asteroid impact that likely happened 66 million years ago - around the same time that the Chicxulub asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.

 

NGT asks panel to monitor Vishnugad-Pipalkoti Hydro-Electric project

(GS Paper 3, Economy)

 

Why in news?

• Recently, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has directed a six-member monitoring cell, headed by the Uttarakhand Chief Secretary to oversee the Vishnugad-Pipalkoti Hydro-Electric project.

Appeal before NGT:

• The NGT chairperson Justice (retd) Adarsh Kumar Goel was dealing with an appeal against the Environment Clearance (EC) granted by MoEF&CC (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change) to the project, which is situated over an area of 141.568 ha at Haat village, in Joshimath of Chamoli district.
• In the order, it was noted that the concern of obstructing the movement of fisheries by the projectmay adversely affect the local communities.
• Impact on habitations upstream and downstream areas by flooding, landslides, etc. have also been considered.

 

Key Highlights:

• The court observed that more than Rs 2,000 crore have been invested in the project which has been executed beyond 50 per cent.
• However, a strenuous monitoring mechanism is required to be provided, especially for areas prone to landslides and to prevent damage to the dam and other infrastructure.
• The panel will oversee the execution of mitigation measures to prevent damage to the dam, the infrastructure, and the habitation upstream and downstream of the dam.
• There are provisions in the EMP (environmental management plan) for Disaster Management Measures, strengthening of impediments and other forcible impacts on fragile Himalayan Geomorphology.

 

VishnugadPipalkoti Hydro Electric Project:

• The VishnugadPipalkoti Hydro Electric Project (VPHEP) is a proposed 444 Megawatt (MW) run-of-the-river hydro generation project on the Alaknanda River, which is a tributary of the Ganga.

 About NGT:

• Established on 18th October, 2010 under the National Green Tribunal Act 2010.
• Its mandate is effective and expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources.
• New Delhi is the Principal Place of Sitting of the Tribunal and Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai shall be the other four places of sitting of the Tribunal.

The Tribunal is not bound by the procedure laid down under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, but shall be guided by principles of natural justice.