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The Supreme Court ordered status quo on the implementation of a Delhi High Court order to hand over the affairs of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) to a Committee of Administrators (CoA).
A three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana passed the order to maintain status quo after the Centre and the IOA informed the apex court that the charge had not yet been transferred to the three-member CoA.
The apex court said the case would be posted for hearing before an appropriate Bench on Monday.
The apex court’s order on Thursday came on an urgent mentioning made by the Centre and the IOA that the Delhi High Court’s decision to appoint a CoA ran the risk of India being banned from participating in international events, including the Olympics.
According to the rules of the International Olympic Committee, representation of a national level body like the IOA by a non-elected body would be treated as a third party interference. The IOA is bound by these rules. Every country in the world is bound by it.
High Court’s decision to appoint a CoA may or may not be for valid reasons. The apex court could separately look into the merits. “But the moment they [the CoA] take over, India stands a 99% chance of being suspended from participating in any Olympic event,” Mr. Mehta said.
This turn of events in the athletic arena comes even as India is grappling with the reality of the FIFA ban of the All India Football Federation (AIFF).
The governance of the AIFF had similarly been transferred to a CoA by the Supreme Court. The FIFA had recently gone ahead and suspended the AIFF, citing “third party interference”, leaving an air of uncertainty on the prospect of India hosting the Under-17 Women’s World Cup in October.
The High Court had justified the order citing the “persistent recalcitrance” of the IOA to comply with the Sports Code. It has directed the Executive Committee of the IOA to forthwith hand over the charge to the CoA, which would be assisted by three eminent sportspersons, namely, Olympians AbhinavBindra, Anju Bobby George and Bombayla Devi Laishram.
Ascertain who decided to shift Rohingya refugees to EWS flats' (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia he has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah urging him to order a probe to ascertain on whose instructions the decision to shift Rohingya Muslims to apartments in the national capital was taken.
Addressing a press conference, Mr. Sisodia said he has also urged the Home Minister to make clear the Centre’s stand on the issue of shifting of Rohingya Muslims.
Mr. Sisodia claimed the Home Ministry came out with a clarification on the issue on August 17 only after Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s tweets on the move to shift Rohingyas was opposed by his AamAadmi Party (AAP) and others.
Hours after Mr. Puri said that Rohingya refugees in the national capital will be shifted to flats for economically weaker section, the Union Home Ministry on August 17 denied any such move and directed the Delhi Government to ensure that “illegal foreigners” remain in detention centres pending their extradition.
It also said that the Delhi Government “proposed to shift Rohingya Muslims to a new location.
Rejecting the Union Home Ministry’s claim that it was the Delhi Government’s proposal, Mr. Sisodia had alleged on August 17 the BJP-led Centre was “secretly” trying to give “permanent residence” to Rohingya refugees in the national capital.
City
Woman withdraws petition to stop friend’s euthanasia bid (Page no. 3)
(GS Paper 4, Ethics)
The Delhi High Court permitted a woman, who had sought to stop her friend from travelling to Switzerland to undergo euthanasia on account of his long-term debilitating sickness, to withdrew her petition.
Justice Yashwant Varma, before whom the petition came up for hearing, allowed the 49-year-old woman to withdrawn her plea and also directed the court registry to redact the particulars of the friend from court records.
I would like to withdraw this petition as I came to know that [my friend] is deeply traumatised after hearing about it. I am afraid that the very purpose of filing this writ may go in vain if I proceed,” the counsel, representing the woman, told the High Court as soon as the case came up for hearing.
In her petition filed last week, through advocate SubashChandran K.R., the woman, a resident of Bangalore, sought direction to the Centre to not grant “emigration clearance” to her close friend, in his late 40s and diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, to travel for physician-assisted suicide.
The woman, in her petition, sought for constitution of a medical board to examine the medical condition of her friend and also provide necessary medical assistance considering his peculiar health condition.
The plea stated that the most common symptom of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is extreme tiredness and it can affect anyone, including children. “Studies say it is more common in women, and tends to develop in mid-40s.
His symptoms started in 2014 and his condition deteriorated over the past eight years. He is now completely bed-bound and just able to walk a few steps inside home,” the woman said in her plea.
Finally, this year the man decided to go for euthanasia through Dignitas, an organisation in Zurich, Switzerland, which provides physician-assisted suicide. The woman said her friend had travelled to Zurich for the first round of psychological evaluation in June 2022.
She said the application was accepted by Dignitas and the first evaluation was approved. He is now awaiting the final decision by end of August, 2022.
The woman stressed that there was no financial constrains for providing her friend with better treatments within India or abroad. “But he is now adamant on his decision to go for euthanasia which affects the lives of his age-old parents miserably,” she urged. She submitted that there still persists a ray of hope for the betterment of his condition.
Active euthanasia entails an affirmative action of use of lethal substances or forces to cause the intentional death of a person by direct intervention, e.g., a lethal injection given to a person with terminal cancer who is in terrible agony.
Passive euthanasia, on the other hand, entails withdrawing of life-support measures or withholding of medical treatment for continuance of life, e.g., withholding of antibiotics in case of a patient where death is likely to occur as a result of not giving the said antibiotics or removal of the heart lung machine from a patient in coma.
States
Why parties are going all out to woo Lingayats ahead of 2023 polls (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 1, History)
In the span of a fortnight, the ruling BJP and the principal Opposition Congress have sought to send strong signals to appease the politically strong Veerashaiava-Lingayat community.
BJP nominated the former Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa to the party’s Parliamentary Board and the Central Election Committee. Earlier, the former AICC president Rahul Gandhi underwent ‘LingaDharana’ procedure at Murugha Mutt in Chitradurga.
While the BJP is trying to assuage the community’s feelings by inducting the sulking Lingayat strongman over a year after he stepped down as the Chief Minister, allegedly under duress, the Congress seems to be making amends over its move to support a separate Lingayat movement in 2017 that apparently did not go down well with the community ahead of the last Assembly elections.
Though a good number of the Veerashaiva-Lingayats are believed to be with the ruling BJP currently, the Congress is trying to appease the politically dominant community to wean away those “undecided voters” from the saffron party with the elections to the Legislative Assembly about eight months away.
The political optics is coming in the midst of demand for inclusion of Veerashaiva-Lingayats in the central OBC list by the All India VeerashaivaMahasabha, and the demand for 2A reservation by Panchamshalis — a powerful sub sect — that has put the BJP in a spot.
Politically, the importance of Veerashaiva-Lingayatscan be gauged with as many as 58 legislators out of the 224 elected in 2018 elections being from the community, making them the largest caste-based block. Of the 58 (not taking into account subsequent bypoll results), 38 belonged to the BJP, 16 to the Congress, and four to the Janata Dal (Secular).
The community has a say in electoral politics in as many as 135 constituencies. If in North Karnataka the community is dominant where political opponents are from the same community, in South Karnataka, the community’s swing will be decisive on the election results.
The Veerashaiva-Lingayats believe that their political clout has been curtailed since the 2008 elections that were conducted after the delimitation exercise.
A list compiled by the mahasabha shows that 22 constituencies that were represented by Lingayat legislators earlier were either reserved or subsumed.
On average, 70 Lingayat legislators were elected in every Assembly before 2008 with the highest of 90 Lingayat legislators in 1967. The lowest number of Lingayats in the Assembly was in 2013 when an angry Mr. Yediyurappa formed the KJP to contest against the BJP, resulting in 48 Lingayat legislators being elected.
Editorial
Hard truths about India’s labour reforms (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Independent India was born at the midnight hour on August 15, 1947, 75 years ago, when India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the country’s tricolour flag and announced to Parliament that India had made a “tryst with destiny”. India had won its independence after a long, remarkably peaceful struggle for freedom, led by Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi had a vision of a country not divided into fragments by religious and communal walls. He envisioned a country in which all Indians, whether rich or poor, would hold their heads high in dignity.
India’s “tryst with destiny” was to provide “ poornaswaraj” (i.e., full freedom) to all its citizens: political freedom, social freedom, and economic freedom.
The country’s democratic Constitution created the world’s largest democracy. Sadly, 75 years later, political liberties and freedoms of speech are being curbed in India. Social equality amongst castes has not been achieved.
Lower caste citizens continue to live in great indignity. Lower caste poor women live in abject poverty in India’s villages. They are among the most oppressed humans on the planet.
While the numbers of Indian billionaires increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of millions of Indians lost their incomes when the country locked down during the pandemic. They struggled to find shelter, food, and even drinking water for their families.
India’s gravest socio-economic problem is the difficulty a vast majority of citizens have in earning good livelihoods. Their problem is not just employment.
It is the poor quality of employment: insufficient and uncertain incomes, and poor working conditions, wherever they are employed — in factories, farms, service establishments, or homes.
The dominant ‘theory-in-use’ to increase employment is to improve the ease of doing business, with the expectation that investments in businesses will improve citizens’ ease of earning good livelihoods.
In this theory, large and formal enterprises create good jobs, and labour laws must be ‘flexible” to attract investments. Investors say the laws protect labour too much.
Reforms were begun by the United Progressive Alliance government. Their principal thrust was to improve administration by simplifying procedures and digitisation.
Those improvements were appreciated by employers as well as workers. However, they did not make the labour laws more employer friendly. Therefore, the National Democratic Alliance government became bolder in 2014 and moved to reform the content of the laws.
OPED
Should there be limits on ‘freebies’? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
While hearing a petition demanding the de-recognition of political parties that promise “irrational freebies” to voters, the Supreme Court recently drew attention to the substantial fiscal cost of freebies.
The court noted that a legislation banning freebies is not advisable, but at the same time called for a balance between welfare measures and loss to the public exchequer.
The Supreme Court’s observation comes in the backdrop of the clash between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the AamAadmi Party on the issue of wasteful spending on freebies.
It also takes in the larger public debate on how to differentiate welfare spending from freebies. ReetikaKhera and N.R. Bhanumurthy discuss various aspects of the subject in a discussion moderated by PrashanthPerumal J. Edited excerpts:
This is not an easy question to answer because it depends on your perspective and where you sit on the income distribution pyramid. Also, even if people are sitting at the top of the income distribution pyramid, you could still see something that the petitioner describes as a “freebie” as a welfare measure.
There’s a reference in the petition to the Directive Principles. Directive Principles can certainly guide state policy. But it is not always possible to clearly say this is welfare, and this is a freebie.
We can take the example of the DravidaMunnetraKazhagam’s response to this petition where they refer to electricity, which is one of the things that the petitioner objects to as a freebie, as something that can provide clean fuel in the house, keep you warm, help a child study, etc. So, there are all kinds of ripple effects. Something at first glance may look like a freebie to someone who is privileged, but it may be something that enhances the future earnings of a poor person.
If we limit ourselves to the economic and public policy perspective, a freebie is any public policy intervention that will have a long-term impact on production as well as productivity.
Any public policy intervention that doesn’t support medium-term to long-term production and productivity may be termed as a freebie. Many States and even the Central government follow some policies that don’t really support production and productivity.
We need to have an institutional mechanism to control wasteful expenditure. We just talked about electricity. It is also important to understand and identify who can be the beneficiary of a particular public policy.
You cannot have a blanket policy — for instance, say that you will give free electricity for all. So, there is a need to identify the policies that have a long-term impact. At the same time, there is a need to identify the beneficiary sets.
First, let’s first understand what’s happening to the fiscal situation of the States. Studies, especially by the Reserve Bank of India (Study on State Finances), have showed that from 2014 onwards, the social sector expenditure at the State level has been declining even after States were given more resources.
Text & Context
The recent blocking of the VLC Media Player (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2)
The website of VideoLAN Client (VLC) has been banned in India. Although there is no official information on the ban, VLC states that according to its statistics, its website has been banned since February this year.
VLC gained popularity in India in the late 90s when advancements in information technology led to the penetration of personal computers in Indian homes. It continues to be one of the most popular media players.
Apart from being free and open source, VLC easily integrates with other platforms and streaming services and supports all file formats without requiring additional codecs.
Given VLC’s popularity, the ban on the VLC website caused quite a kerfuffle. Civil society organisations have repeatedly filed RTI applications with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
These applications have been met with similar responses stating that “no information is available” with the Ministry. This is despite the fact that when trying to access the website previously, the message “The website has been blocked as per order of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000”, was displayed. Lack of authoritative information from the government has led to speculation that VLC was banned along with the 54 Chinese applications in February this year.
Although VLC is not a Chinese app, reports from cybersecurity firms, such as Symantec, in April this year suggested that Cicada, a hacker group allegedly backed by China, has been using the VLC Media Player to deploy a malicious malware loader.
It is being suggested that this was part of a longer cyberattack campaign that started in mid-2021 and was still active in February 2022. It pointed out that Cicada’s targets were spread over a number of regions, including India.
This is also being used to explain why the present ban is a soft ban rather than a hard ban. While the VLC website has been banned, the VLC app continues to be available for download on Google and Apple stores.
This is probably because the app stores’ servers where the mobile apps are hosted are considered safer than servers where the desktop versions are hosted.
There are two routes through which content can be blocked online — executive and judicial. First, given the reach of the internet and its potential to cause significant harm to online users, governments across the world reserve the power to monitor and issue directions for regulation of the online content being available in their jurisdictions.
The Government of India gets this power from Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Section 69A allows the government to direct an intermediary to “block for access by the public ….. any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in any computer resource” if it is “necessary or expedient to do so, in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence”.
Section 69A draws its power from Article 19(2) of the Constitution which allows the government to place reasonable restrictions on the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.
Second, courts in India, also have the power to direct intermediaries to make content unavailable in India to provide effective remedy to the victim/plaintiff. For example, courts may order internet service providers to block websites which provide access to pirated content and violate the plaintiff’s copyright.
News
Bustards adapt to produce 2-egg clutch (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The perceived beliefs and recorded observations pertaining to the egg-laying habits of the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) have changed after the recent excessive rains in western Rajasthan.
The critically endangered bird species has adopted an altogether new habit of laying a clutch of two eggs at a time after having a diet with additional proteins during the monsoon season.
Environmentalists in Rajasthan have hailed it as a new record as all experts had been reporting a clutch of a single egg by GIBs all through its natural history of more than a century.
Scientists working on ex situ breeding of these endangered birds have discovered the new proclivity in Jaisalmer district's Desert National Park (DNP).
Four female GIBs laid two eggs at a time during the current rainy season in the DNP, while two others were observed laying clutches of two eggs each earlier in the 2020 season.
Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India's (WII) scientist Sutirtha Dutta, who is leading the project for the breeding of the rare species, told The Hindu that six nests with two eggs each had been detected so far in the DNP.
Dr. Dutta said 5% to 10% of the female GIBs had been detected in the past laying two eggs each, but the high incidence, with the signs of an evolving habit, had been observed for the first time.
The natural feed for birds gets produced in abundance whenever it rains excessively in the DNP,” he said. The rains exceeded 20 mm by mid-August in Jaisalmer district. As the GIB, which is the State bird of Rajasthan, survives mainly on reptiles, gerbils, grasshoppers, large insects and locusts, a rich quantity of feed was produced this year, providing additional proteins to the endangered birds, which have doubled their clutch size “in happiness”.
The WII's team has been working on ex situ breeding of GIB for the last three years. Dr. Dutta said the team had picked up one egg from each nest to be incubated and hatched under artificial conditions at a facility established near Sam in Jaisalmer district. The remaining eggs were left within the natural nests of the females to be hatched.
Aimed at preserving the GIBs, whose population has reduced to less than 150 in the wild, the breeding project focuses on spatial prioritisation, risk characterisation, and conservation management with the endangered species.
The laying of clutches of two eggs in 2020 aroused immense curiosity, after which the WII’s experts became vigilant in monitoring the nests to assess if such an instance would get repeated. The team has considered the GIBs’ new habit as an important element of the project’s progress.
The State government's Forest Department started the breeding project in collaboration with the WII to raise the new stock of GIB chicks in 2019 after a long wait by environmentalists for nearly four decades. Secretary of the Tourism and Wildlife Society of India (TWSI), Harsh Vardhan, said that though the bird species had been facing the threat of its extinction, the breeding project took off only after it vanished in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
World
BRI projects are slow, but lending rises (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
China’s investments in infrastructure projects under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have declined while Beijing’s short and medium-term assistance to partner countries, some of which are dealing with rising debt levels, is increasing, according to recent research highlighting a shift in China’s approach to overseas lending.
In the first half of 2022, China’s engagement through financial investments and contracts in 147 countries amounted to $28.4 billion, up by 47% from the previous year, said a report from the Green Finance and Development Centre (GFDC) at Shanghai’s Fudan University. Of this, $11.8 billion was through investments and $16.5 billion through project contracts.
This marked a decline from $48.5 billion in the same period in 2019. Since the launch of the BRI in 2013, the report estimated China’s total engagement at $932 billion, with $561 billion in construction contracts and the rest in other investments.
The report noted three clear trends in the BRI: a growing role for Chinese State-owned Enterprises; the average size for project deals falling, from $558 million in 2021 to $325 million last year; and an increasingly uneven spread of engagement.
Several countries “saw no Chinese engagement” in the first half of the year, including Russia, Sri Lanka and Egypt, while the figure in Pakistan was down by 56%.
At the same time, China’s short and medium-term lending to several BRI partners has rapidly risen, according to research from the AidData research lab reported by Bloomberg this month.
In the past five years, China “made nearly $26 billion in short and medium-term loans to Pakistan and Sri Lanka” alone, marking a shift in its overseas engagement “from funding infrastructure toward providing emergency relief.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said, commenting on the GFDC report noting falling engagement in Pakistan, that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor “is an important pilot program under the BRI” that had “brought tangible benefits for socio-economic development of people’s lives.”
Business
Elevated inflation warrants apt policy response say RBI officials (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Monetary authorities will still need to take necessary policy actions to tame inflation as it remains above the target range even though it has eased slightly, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials wrote in an article on the ‘State of the Economy’ in the August edition of the RBI Bulletin.
Inflation has edged down, but its persistence at elevated levels warrants appropriate policy responses to anchor expectations going forward.
Observing that global growth prospects had turned gloomier over the month, they said the easing of supply chain pressures and the recent ebbing of commodity prices were providing some breather from record high inflation.
In India,supply conditions are improving, with the recent monsoon pick-up, strong momentum in manufacturing and a rebound in services. The onset of festival season should boost consumer demand, including rural, also as sowing activity picks up. Robust central government capital outlays are supporting investment activity.
Amidst somewhat mixed signals being emitted by high frequency indicators, perhaps the best word to describe the state of domestic economic activity relative to the rest of the world is resilience.
Asserting that private final consumption expenditure, the mainstay of the economy, was poised to surge in the upcoming festival season, which would also in turn buoy subdued rural demand, they said investment demand was separately benefitting from a massive increase of 54% in the Central government’s capital outlay.
Emphasising that inflation had eased in July by 30 basis points from June and an appreciable 60 basis points from the average of 7.3% for Q1:2022-23, they said “this has validated our hypothesis that inflation peaked in April 2022”.
“For the rest of the year, the RBI’s projections scent a steady easing of the momentum of price changes,” they added.
Fortuitously, base effects are favourable all through. If these expectations hold, inflation will fall from 7 to 5% in Q1 next financial year - within the tolerance band, hovering closer to the target, but not yet positioned for landing.
Stating that this was a decisive point in the inflation trajectory, they stressed that “imported inflation pressure points remained the overarching risk, followed by pending pass-through of input costs if producers regained pricing power”.
Bigbangprivatisation of banks can be harmful’ (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Big-bang privatisation of public sector banks can do more harm than good, authors of an article in the latest RBI bulletin have warned, asking the government to take a nuanced approach on the issue.
While private sector banks (PVBs) are more efficient in profit maximisation, their public sector counterparts have done better in promoting financial inclusion, they said in the article.
Privatisation is not a new concept, and its pros and cons are well known. From the conventional perspective that privatisation is a panacea for all ills, the economic thinking has come a long way to acknowledge that a more nuanced approach is required while pursuing it.
The gradual approach to privatisation adopted by the government could ensure that a void was not created in fulfilling the social objective of financial inclusion and monetary transmission.
Quoting various studies, the authors said, PSBs (Public Sector Banks) had played a key role in catalysing financial investments in low-carbon industries, thereby promoting green transition in countries such as Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, and in the European Union.
Evidence suggested that public sector banks were not entirely guided by the profit maximisation goal alone and have integrated the desirable financial inclusion goals in their objective function unlike private sector banks, they pointed out.
Our results also point out the countercyclical role of PSB lending. In the recent years, these banks have also gained greater market confidence. Despite the criticism of weak balance sheets, data suggests that they weathered the COVID-19 pandemic shock remarkably well.
Recent mega mergers of PSBs have resulted in consolidation of the sector, creating stronger and more robust and competitive banks.