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The Supreme Court has held that orders of courts in bail cases should neither be too long and elaborate nor come too late as both violate the constitutional mandate of personal liberty.
A Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and Sanjay Karol said judges, while rejecting or granting bail to accused persons, should not slip into extensive deliberations on the merits of the case or evidence involved. Such “long” debates at the stage of bail may prejudice the case itself for the accused.
Again, once a case for bail is reserved for orders, the pronouncement of the decision should not take too long. Every day of waiting is a dent on the personal liberty of an undertrial.
The Bench underscored the importance of brevity in bail orders and the need for promptness in their pronouncement while allowing bail to Kadar Nazir Inamdar, represented by advocates Sana Raees Khan and Sriram Parakkat, who is an accused in the murder of Shiv Sena leader Rahul Shetty in 2020.
Ms. Khan argued that the Bombay High Court had rejected his bail application in a “detailed” 16-page order elaborating the merits and evidence of the case. Moreover, the HC had kept the case reserved for orders for three months, July to September, last year.
The court agreed with Ms. Khan that Inamdar had been behind bars for nearly three years. He was accused of only conspiracy.
The Maharashtra counsel had vehemently objected to the plea for bail, saying the High Court had discussed the “circumstances” of the crime, which “clearly points the finger towards” Inamdar.
The Supreme Court, however, deprecated the “practice of detailed elaboration of evidence in the orders granting/rejecting bail/anticipatory bail and the practice of long delay between reserving the matter for order and pronouncing the order”.
Editorial
This strategic-economic bloc will only tighten the leash (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
In November 2019, India walked out from the trade pact called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) involving China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and the 10-state Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) grouping.
Fast forward to 2023, and now India along with many of the same countries, but with China replaced by the United States, is getting into the U.S.-driven Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF). The obvious questions are: what has changed? And how are the two economic partnership frameworks different?
The one clear difference is of China versus the U.S. Developing a strategic partnership with the U.S. is India’s top foreign policy priority. Its relationship with China has, meanwhile, further deteriorated.
But a strategic partnership with the U.S. need not come at the cost of economic dependency on it. With China, the big economic fear was any trade deal’s impact on India’s manufacturing sector; of cheap Chinese goods flooding Indian markets.
But the economic issues with the U.S. have been no less problematic, e.g. about agriculture, intellectual property, labour and environment standards, and the digital economy.
Strategic partnership should not mean accepting a completely U.S. self-interest-driven economic framework that does not suit India’s current economic interests.
Traditionally, trade deals used to be mostly about tariffs. Increasingly though, issues related to intellectual property, services, investment, domestic regulation, digital, and labour and environmental standards, are becoming more important.
The U.S.’s IPEF proposal completely removes the tariff element of typical trade deals, and is entirely about all these other areas. In any case, traditional trade deals in the U.S. face likely roadblocks in the legislature.
The U.S. has also found a tariffs-free trade deal, presented as a new kind of win-win economic partnership, as a good way to get around the resistance of many countries, including India, to free trade agreements, as they used to be called.
However, the IPEF’s ‘new age’ language itself is the biggest trap. It knits vaguely-worded webs that are not obvious in their actual economic impact, other than to U.S. strategists who created the proposals.
Early assessment by many experts shows that the IPEF would result in a complete stranglehold over the economic systems of the participating countries, in a manner that is to the complete advantage of the U.S.
The IPEF is really about developing a strategic-economic bloc — an integrated economic system centred on the U.S., and, as importantly, excluding China.
The systemic integration caused by the IPEF’s actual long-term impact will leave little leeway for domestic policies to help a country’s own industrialisation (for example through tight supply chain integration that many elements of the IPEF contribute to).
Explainer
The nutritional value of millet (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Agriculture)
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has declared 2023 to be the ‘International Year of Millets’, giving these crops a shot in the arm even as countries worldwide are looking to them for their ability to grow in environmental conditions that the climate crisis is rendering more common.
Millets are becoming more popular in India as well because of their low input requirements and high nutritional density, both of which are valuable for a country whose food security is expected to face significant challenges in the coming decades.
However, the consumption of millets face one threat that has already overtaken India’s major food crops — grain-processing.
Millets are fundamentally grasses. They are cultivated worldwide, but especially in the tropical parts of Africa and Asia, as cereal crops. Some of the more common varieties include pearl millet (Cenchrus americanus), barnyard millet (Echinochloa utilis), finger millet (Eleusine coracana), and foxtail millet (Setaria italica).
There is both palaeontological and textual evidence to indicate that millets were being cultivated in the Indian subcontinent five millennia ago.
According to the Agricultural and Processed Foods Development Authority, India is the world’s largest producer of millets. In 2021-2022, the country accounted for 40.51% of the world’s pearl millet production and 8.09% of sorghum. Within the country, pearl millet made up 60% of all the millet production, sorghum 27%, and ragi 11%.
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), adlay millet (Coix lacryma-jobi), and teff (Eragrostis tef), among others, are grasses that differ in some respects from millets but are grouped together with them.
Millets have two broad features that render them attractive — their nutritional value being comparable to that of major extant food crops (and better on some counts) and their ability to reliably withstand harsh, resource-poor conditions.
They are drought-tolerant, adapted to growing in warm weather, and require low moisture (axiomatically, they are particularly efficient consumers of water) and loamy soil.
They don’t grow well in water-logged or extremely dry soil which might occur after heavy rainfall or particularly bad droughts, respectively.
Nonetheless, millets have the upper hand over crops like rice and maize with more drought-like conditions expected in many parts of the world, including the newly realised prospect of ‘flash droughts’.
That being said, millets don’t abhor better growing conditions, and respond positively to higher moisture and nutrient content in the soil.
Text & Context
Explaining mitochondrial donation treatment: how a baby has three parents (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The announcement that a baby was born using three persons’ DNA in the U. K. on Thursday caused the stir that news of this kind was expected to evoke.
The baby, technically, has three parents, deriving the mitochondria from a donor apart from the genetic material (DNA) from biological parents. Pioneering technology was used to facilitate this, in order to prevent the child from inheriting the mother’s mitochondrial disease.
The baby carried most of its DNA from its parents, and a minor per cent from the donor, whose mitochondria has been used while fertilising the egg.
Mitochondria are basically the powerhouses of the cells. They generate energy, and thus are also responsible for cell function in the human body.
Certain defects might occur impacting the way the mitochondria produces energy for the cells (especially in the ‘energy-hungry’ tissues of the brain, nerves, muscles, kidneys, heart, liver), and thereby impacting cell function.
The diseases that arise out of such mitochondrial mutations are called mitochondrial diseases. When the mitochondria are impaired and do not produce sufficient energy, it affects how organs function, leading to a broad assortment of symptoms across the body, including brain damage, organ failure and muscle wastage.
The symptoms get more and more debilitating as a child grows, and have no cure, but can be treated. Some estimates put the incidence of mitochondrial diseases as one in 5,000 people.
In this case, the mother had a mitochondrial disease she was intent on not passing on to her baby. She also did not want to have a donor egg, for the baby would carry the genetic material of the donor.
Mitochondrial diseases are only passed on by the mother, and research has been attempting to find a way for protecting the infant from inheriting the disease.
Here, through an advanced in vitro fertilisation technique developed and refined by the Newcastle Fertility Clinic, the baby’s biological father’s sperm was used to fertilise the eggs from the biological mother, who has a mitochondrial disease, and a third, female donor with clear mitochondria, separately.
Then, the nuclear genetic material from the donor’s egg is removed and replaced with the genetic material from the biological parents’.
The final product — the egg — which has the genetic material (DNA) from the parents, and the mitochondria from the female donor, is implanted in the uterus, and carried to full term to yield a baby who will be free from the mother’s mitochondrial disease.