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The Supreme Court asked Enforcement Directorate (ED) Director Sanjay Kumar Mishra to quit four months before his third extension ends in November even as it upheld statutory amendments that facilitate the tenures of Directors of the Central Bureau of Investigation and the ED to be stretched “piecemeal”.
CBI and ED chiefs have fixed tenures of two years. However, amendments introduced in 2021 to the Central Vigilance Commission Act, the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act and the Fundamental Rules allow them three annual extensions.
The tweaks in the law came shortly after the Supreme Court, in a September 2021 judgment, directed the government to stop giving extensions to Mr. Mishra. The amendments allowed the government to overcome the court’s direction and grant Mr. Mishra another two extensions.
A Bench headed by Justice B.R. Gavai held that the back-to-back service extensions given to Mr. Mishra in 2021 and 2022 were both invalid and illegal.
The court, however, gave Mr. Mishra time till July 31 to quit office. The court said the leeway to aid with the “smooth transition” of official responsibilities to his successor. Mr. Mishra is in his fifth year as ED Director.
By upholding the 2021 amendments, the court disagreed with the submissions made by its own amicus curiae, senior advocate K.V. Viswanathan, now a Supreme Court judge.
The amicus curiae had urged the court to strike down the amendments. Mr. Viswanathan had argued that the Centre could use the prospect of service extensions as a “carrot and stick” policy to ensure that the CBI and ED Directors work according to its wishes.
GST Council to impose 28% tax on online gaming firms (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council, at its 50th meeting, reduced or clarified the tax rate on some items ranging from uncooked or unfried snack pellets to special utility vehicles (SUVs), exempted imported drugs to treat cancer and rare diseases, and brought an end to a years-long debate on tax treatment of online gaming, casinos and horse racing.
Whether they involve skill or chance, or both or neither, bets and wagers made on all three activities, will attract a 28% levy and the GST laws will be amended to include online gaming.
The council also examined States’ proposals to set up 50 Benches of the GST Appellate Tribunals in the country.
The government has said that the statutory bodies to resolve mounting GST disputes shall become operational within four to six months, with Benches coming up in the State capitals and places where the High Courts have Benches.
The Council cleared the appointment and service conditions for tribunal members and president.
Editorial
Demographic transition and change in women’s lives (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 1, Indian Society)
The passage of World Population Day (July 11) is also a time to look at how India’s demographic journey has changed the lives of its citizens, particularly its women. India’s population grew from about 340 million at Independence to 1.4 billion.
This growth was fuelled by the gift of life that receding starvation, improved public health, and medical miracles brought to India. In 1941, male life expectancy was about 56 years; only 50% of boys survived to age 28.
Today, life expectancy for men is 69 years, and nearly 50% live to see the ripe old age of 75. This rapid decline in mortality took parents by surprise, who no longer needed to have four children to ensure that at least two would survive, causing population growth until fertility decline caught up with the mortality decline, and the Total Fertility Rate fell from 5.7 in 1950 to 2.1 in 2019.
These statistics mask the tectonic shift in the lives of people as they learn to adjust to a longer lifespan and fewer children. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the lives of Indian women.
Women’s childhood, adulthood, and old age have been transformed over the course of demographic transition, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively.
As families began having fewer children, ensuring at least one son became more difficult. With four children, the chance of not having a son was barely 6%, but with two children, it grew to 25%.
Social norms and patrilocal kinship patterns combined with lack of financial security reinforce a preference for sons. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS) found that 85% of women respondents expected to rely on their sons for old age support, while only 11% expected support from their daughters.
Hence, parents who want to ensure that they have at least one son among their one or two child family, resorted to sex-selective abortion, and, in some cases, the neglect of sick daughters. Consequently, the number of girls per 100 boys, ages under five dropped from 96 to 91 between 1950 and 2019.
Citizen action for clean politicians, cleaner politics (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constitution)
All candidates now follow stipulations following a Supreme Court of India judgment, filing self-sworn affidavits which record the details of criminal cases they have, if any. Of the 4,001 sitting MLAs, 1,777 of them, or 44%, have a criminal case.
The current Lok Sabha also has 43% Members of Parliament (MP) with criminal cases. In 2004, the percentage was around 22%, and has now doubled.
Many people feel that the cases are either trivial ones or politically motivated. The point that these are not frivolous first information reports needs to be emphasised.
These are cases registered after a due process of investigation, filing of charge sheets, a preliminary hearing of the case and being formally charged in a court of law.
Even if we say that the cases are foisted by rival political parties, it shows that political parties are selectively using the law and the system needs to change.
The law and order system was put in place by political parties and they need to change it. However, facts show that most cases were filed when the party to which the MLA or MPs belonged to was in power. So, the cases are not all politically motivated.
If we dig deeper and look at serious criminal cases — which on conviction would lead to a jail sentence of five years or more — there are 1,136 or 28% of such MLAs today.
There are 47 MLAs with murder cases, 181 with attempt to murder cases, another 114 with cases related to crimes against women, and 14 with rape cases.
States/Union Territories with the highest number of serious criminal cases are Delhi 53%, Bihar 59%, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Telangana 39% each, and Uttar Pradesh 38%.
Opinion
The unseemly politics of the Uniform Civil Code (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and is blaming the Opposition for trying to “instigate” Muslims on the issue.
In 2017, the Supreme Court struck down triple talaq as illegal. In a society that aims to be egalitarian, laws that are discriminatory to various sections of society have to be amended progressively.
Personal laws that cover marriage, divorce, succession, inheritance, adoption, alimony and maintenance are a pernicious legacy of the British Raj. The sooner they are done away with, the better it is for the people.
As Law Minister, B.R. Ambedkar, supported by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, had recommended enacting a UCC, but favoured it being voluntary. He faced resistance for the idea.
Since then, successive governments have failed to provide a UCC that is consistent with India’s commitment to being a democratic, secular and socialist Republic.
They have succumbed to the vested interests of large sections of patriarchal Hindu society and of Muslim groups who want to follow Sharia law.
Today, it is ironical that the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is advocating a UCC, while the purportedly liberal, socialist, and secular Congress and Left are opposed to it.
Many regional parties have opposed the idea, while some such as the Aam Aadmi Party and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) have maintained silence on it.
Muslim organisations are divided: while the All India Muslim Personal Law Board has criticised the proposal, the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind has said a UCC could affect all Indians.
Explainer
North India’s monsoon mayhem (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
Every year, the entire country awaits the onset and evolution of monsoon with baited breath. Each year tends to be different, and this year has managed to produce a rather unique onset and evolution thus far.
The onset this season was delayed by unforeseen interactions between typhoons and cyclones. Cyclone Biparjoy was born after the onset and lingered for longer than normal to delay the arrival of monsoon over Mumbai by nearly two weeks.
For the first time in over half a century, the city saw monsoon arrive together with Delhi. The monsoon trough thus ended up with an exaggerated curvature over northwest India.
The deficit due to the delayed onset has been all but wiped out but the distribution of rainfall remains as patchy as ever, with excess rainfall over the northern Western Ghats into northwest India and deficits extending in a horseshoe pattern from Uttar Pradesh into Odisha and back to the east into Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.
Extreme heat has also been reported in parts of Himachal Pradesh, even as some areas of the State received heavy rainfall.
The impact of climate change has always been of great interest, but it is worth remembering that everything today happens in a warmer world that is also more humid.
With global warming, a warm and humid atmosphere acts like a steroid for the weather. Every weather event now has some contribution from global warming.
At the same time, one must also pay close attention to weather patterns that emerge due to other factors. While the El Niño has been grabbing many headlines this year, it is not yet clear how much the current monsoon mayhem has had to do with the El Niño.
What is the legal row between farmers and PepsiCo? (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
On July 5, the Delhi High Court held that there was “no merit” in the appeal filed by PepsiCo over the patent rights for its ‘unique potato’ variety.
The appeal was against an order passed by the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights’ Authority (PPVFRA), revoking PepsiCo’s registration vis-a-vis the unique potato variety developed by it.
The PPVFRA revoked PepsiCo’s registration with respect to its potato plant variety, ‘FL 2027’ (used in Lay’s chips), on the grounds provided under Section 34 (grounds for revocation of registration) of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act, 2001 (PPV&FR). FL 2027 is a ‘chipping potato’ variety with low external defects, high dry matter/high solids content and stable sugars, all of which make it highly suitable for the manufacture of chips.
According to the appellant, it was developed in the U.S. by Robert W. Hoopes, a plant breeder and a former employee of Frito-Lay Agricultural Research, a division of PepsiCo Inc.
A certificate of registration for FL 2027 was granted to PepsiCo India on February 1, 2016, conferring it an exclusionary right to market, sell, import, export or distribute FL 2027 for a period of six years.
However, in an application filed by Kavitha Kurungati, a farmers’ rights activist, the PPVFRA revoked the company’s registered potato variety on December 3, 2021.
The Act provides an effective framework to conserve and encourage the development of various plant varieties. It established an effective system to safeguard and recognise the rights of breeders, researchers and farmers to promote agricultural development in the country.
Additionally, it also facilitates the mushrooming of the Indian seed industry to ensure the availability of high-quality seeds and planting materials to farmers.
Text
What we lose when we work with ‘giant artificial intelligences’ like ChatGPT (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
ChatGPT and its ilk of ‘giant artificial intelligences’ (Bard, Chinchilla, PaLM, LaMDA, et al.), or gAIs, have been making several headlines.
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM). This is a type of (transformer-based) neural network that is great at predicting the next word in a sequence of words.
ChatGPT uses GPT4 — a model trained on a large amount of text on the internet, which its maker OpenAI could scrape and could justify as being safe and clean to train on.
GPT4 has one trillion parameters now being applied in the service of, per the OpenAI website, ensuring the creation of “artificial general intelligence that serves all of humanity”.
Yet gAIs leave no room for democratic input: they are designed from the top-down, with the premise that the model will acquire the smaller details on its own.
There are many use-cases intended for these systems, including legal services, teaching students, generating policy suggestions and even providing scientific insights.
gAIs are thus intended to be a tool that automates what has so far been assumed to be impossible to automate: knowledge-work.
In his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, Yale University professor James C. Scott delves into the dynamics of nation-state power, both democratic and non-democratic, and its consequences for society.
States seek to improve the lives of their citizens, but when they design policies from the top-down, they often reduce the richness and complexity of human experience to that which is quantifiable.
The current driving philosophy of states is, according to Prof. Scott, “high modernism” — a faith in order and measurable progress.
He argues that this ideology, which falsely claims to have scientific foundations, often ignores local knowledge and lived experience, leading to disastrous consequences. He cites the example of monocrop plantations, in contrast to multi-crop plantations, to show how top-down planning can fail to account for regional diversity in agriculture.
News
415 million Indians came out of multidimensional poverty in 15 years, says UNDP study (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
A total of 415 million people moved out of poverty in India within just 15 years from 2005-06 to 2019-21, with its incidence falling from 55.1% to 16.4% during the period, the United Nations (UN) said.
The latest update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
It said that 25 countries, including India, successfully halved their global MPI values within 15 years, showing that rapid progress is attainable. These countries include Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Serbia and Vietnam.
The report demonstrates that poverty reduction is achievable. However, the lack of comprehensive data during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges in assessing immediate prospects.
In 2005-06, about 645 million people were in multidimensional poverty in India, with this number declining to about 370 million in 2015-16 and 230 million in 2019-21.
The report noted that deprivation in all indicators declined in India and “the poorest States and groups, including children and people in disadvantaged caste groups, had the fastest absolute progress”.
According to the report, people who are multidimensionally poor and deprived under the nutrition indicator in India declined from 44.3% in 2005-06 to 11.8% in 2019-21, and child mortality fell from 4.5% to 1.5%.
Those who are poor and deprived of cooking fuel fell from 52.9% to 13.9% and those deprived of sanitation fell from 50.4% in 2005/2006 to 11.3% in 2019/2021.
In the drinking water indicator, the percentage of people who are multidimensionally poor and deprived fell from 16.4 to 2.7 during the period, electricity (from 29 to 2.1) and housing from 44.9 to 13.6.
Business
SC asks SEBI why was law altered to jettison norm barring opacity in FPI ownership (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Supreme Court asked the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to explain why the law was altered in 2018 to junk crucial clauses that prohibited opacity in Foreign Portfolio Investors’ (FPI) ownership structure.
The court’s query was in light of a finding in the Justice A.M. Sapre expert committee report that the SEBI investigation into the allegations made by U.S.-based Hindenburg Research against the Adani Group had hit a wall because of amendments made in the FPI Regulations, 2014.
These amendments had put the market regulator in a “chicken-and-egg situation” in its investigation into the “ownership” of 13 overseas entities, including the 12 FPIs mentioned in the Hindenburg report.
The committee had said SEBI itself suspected these 13 entities of having “opaquestructures” because their chain of ownership was not clear.
In 2018, the very provision dealing with ‘opaque structure’ and requiring an FPI to be able to disclose every ultimate natural person at the end of the chain of every owner of economic interest in the FPI was done away with.
It said for SEBI to put to rest its suspicions, its probe would require information about the “ultimate economic ownership”, and not just the “beneficial owners”, of the 13 overseas entities under its lens.