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The Delhi High Court sent a batch of petitions seeking recognition of same-sex marriages under various laws to the Supreme Court.
On January 6, the top court transferred to itself petitions pending in various High Courts seeking legal recognition of same-sex marriages.
The High Court was seized of eight separate petitions by same-sex couples seeking a declaration recognising their marriages under the Special Marriage Act, the Hindu Marriage Act, and the Foreign Marriage Act.
A Bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad made the decision after it was informed by the counsel appearing in the matter that the SC has transferred to itself all petitions pending in various High Courts involving the same-sex marriage issue.
Earlier, the Centre had opposed any changes to the existing laws on marriage to recognise same-sex marriage saying such interference would cause “a complete havoc with the delicate balance of personal laws in the country”.
“Living together as partners and having sexual relationship by same-sex individuals is not comparable with the Indian family unit concept of a husband, a wife and children which necessarily presupposes a biological man as a ‘husband’, a biological woman as a ‘wife’ and the children born out of the union between the two”.
On November 25, the Supreme Court sought the government’s response to pleas to allow solemnisation of same-sex marriage under the Special Marriage Act.
The Special Marriage Act of 1954 provides a civil form of marriage for couples who cannot marry under personal law.
Earlier in 2018, the SC had decriminalised homosexuality, urging the LGBTQ+ community to forgive history for their “brutal” suppression.
The petitioners before the HC contended that marriages between same-sex couples are not possible despite the apex court decriminalising consensual homosexual acts.
Plan in place to eradicate invasive plant species from Kerala’s wildlife habitat (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Species in News)
The Nodal Centre for Biological Invasions (NCBI) at the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) has come out with a management plan to eradicate Senna spectabilis, the exotic invasive plant that is posing a severe threat to the State’s wildlife habitat.
Based on the results of the experimental study done at the Periyar Tiger Reserve, the plan envisages landscape-level management of the tree.
The two key factors considered in developing the management protocol were the fast nature of the spread of the tree in natural forests, and restoration of natural forests based on landscape.
The results of the field trials were presented at a recent national conference on bio-invasions organised by the Kerala State Biodiversity Board.
The management plan stipulates that there should not be an attempt to kill the trees before a detailed reforestation programme. The invasive species has to be removed using a threefold approach for large trees, large saplings, and small saplings.
The large trees need to be debarked from breast height downwards (1.3 m above ground level), including the collar part of the tree.
Once the trees start to dry up, their soil seed bank will become active and a large number of plantlets will sprout. The larger saplings can be uprooted using specially designed weed pullers.
The third is the removal of small plantlets which need to be removed mechanically.
Editorial
Tasks for India’s millet revolution (Page no. 8)
(Economy)
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets. Millets have special nutritive properties (they are high in protein, dietary fibre, micronutrients and antioxidants) and special agronomic characteristics (drought-resistant and suitable for semi-arid regions).
In 2019-20, the total offtake of cereals through the Public Distribution System (PDS) and the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and also school meals was around 54 million tonnes.
If about 20% of rice and wheat were to be replaced by millet, the state would have to procure 10.8 million tonnes of millet.
In 2019-20, the total production of nutri-cereals (earlier called coarse cereals) was 47.7 million tonnes. The bulk of this was maize (28.8 million tonnes), a non-millet crop used mainly as feed (M.S. Swaminathan had suggested that coarse cereals be replaced by nutri-cereals).
The production of sorghum (4.8 million tonnes), pearl millet (10.4 million tonnes), and finger millet along with other millets (3.7 million tonnes) put together was 18.9 million tonnes.
With this production, the inclusion of millets in the PDS would only be feasible if more than 50% production were procured — an unlikely scenario. Currently, millets are procured in only a few States, and stocks in the central pool are small.
In May 2022, central stocks had 33 million tonnes of rice and 31 million tonnes of wheat, but only four lakh tonnes of nutricereals.
The real problems are: first, the decline in the area under millet cultivation, and, second, the low productivity of millets.
Over the last decade, the production of sorghum (jowar) has fallen,the production of pearl millet (bajra) has stagnated,and the production of other millets, including finger millet (ragi), has stagnated or declined.
The productivity of jowar and bajra has increased, but only marginally. The average yield of jowar was 957 kg per hectare in 2011-12 and 989 kg per hectare in 2019-20.
The yield of bajra was 1,079 kg per ha in 2010-11 and 1,237 kg per ha in 2017-18.Unless productivity and production are increased substantially, all exhortations to consume millets will come to naught.
Text and Context
Are wealthy individuals reporting their income and accurately filing their taxes? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Singh, Ram, ‘Do the Wealthy Underreport their Income? Using General Election Filings to Study the Income-Wealth Relationship in India’, World Inequality Lab Working Paper No. 2023/01, January 2023
Growing economic inequality is a major concern in most developing countries and India is no exception. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% in India own more than 40% of the country’s total wealth while the bottom 50% share just 3% of it.
One of the proven ways to alleviate economic inequality — which has been associated with a number of social and political ills — is progressive taxation, where the greater your income, the higher the rate of taxation.
This approach would enable some form of redistribution to the poorer sections through state-funded welfare schemes and investments in social infrastructure, which is key to reducing inequality.
However, for this approach to work, reported incomes need to be accurate. Otherwise a progressive tax regime on paper may not prove to be so in practice.
For instance, what if a major chunk of an individual income never gets reported? It would never get taxed. Therefore, income reporting behaviour is a central issue in public finance.
This research paper by Ram Singh models the relationship between wealth and reported income for individuals from different economic strata.
For the first time, affidavits filed by contestants for elections to the Lok Sabha have been used for such a study. They provide income and wealth data for a large number of Indians — 7,596 households (HH) and their adult members.
The dataset is surprisingly inclusive, with incomes ranging from ₹178 to as high as ₹206 crore. Singh supplements this data with the Forbes’ List (FL) of billionaires, and statistics published by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT).
Taken together, they cover the full range of India’s wealth and income distributions, as well as regional and rural-urban population distribution.
The paper’s key finding, which has implications for public finance, inequality studies, and taxation design, is that the wealthier the individual or family, the lesser is the reported income relative to wealth.
Specifically, the study found that “a 1% increase in family wealth is associated with a decrease of more than 0.5% in the reported income as a ratio of wealth.”
News
SC to examine pleas on electoral bond scheme today (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Supreme Court is scheduled to examine whether petitions challenging the validity of the electoral bonds scheme need to be referred to a Constitution Bench.
The petitions, which have been in limbo for eight years, allege that the scheme has opened the doors for anonymous donations to political parties days before polls are due.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for petitioner NGO Association for Democratic Reforms, has argued that amendments made via Finance Acts of 2016 and 2017, both passed as Money Bills, have through the electoral bonds scheme, “opened the floodgates to unlimited political donations”.
Response received from the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) on January 27 to a Right to Information application filed by Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired) shows that electoral bonds were sold from March 2018 to December 2022 in 24 phases at a total cost of ₹10.23 crore to the taxpayer. While ₹6.74 lakh electoral bonds were printed, bonds worth ₹11,699.84 crore were sold, the RTI response showed.
The legality of the scheme and the long pendency of the case in court have come back into focus even as nine States are heading to the polls.
Also in focus in the court is a challenge to a recent notification allowing the sale of electoral bonds for an additional 15 days during Assembly poll years.
Centre to roll out process to set up 16th Finance Commission soon (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Centre State Relations)
The Union government will soon kick off the process to set up the 16th Finance Commission, with the Finance Ministry likely to notify the terms of references for the constitutional body, tasked with recommending the revenue sharing formula between the Centre and the States and their distribution among the States, towards the latter half of this year.
The 15th Finance Commission was set up in November 2017 with a mandate to make recommendations for the five-year period from 2020-21.
While the Constitution requires a Finance Commission (FC) to be set up every five years, the 15th FC’s mandate was extended by a year till 2025-26, breaking the cycle.
In the normal course of things, the next Finance Commission should have been appointed by now, but since our report covered six years instead of five, it must be appointed this year.
In late 2019, the commission was asked to give a standalone report for 2020-21 and another report for an extended five-year period till 2025-26.
The last time an FC was granted a six-year time frame was for the 9th Finance Commission, formed in June 1987. It was asked to submit a single year report for 1989-90 and a five-year report for the five years till 1994-95.
These reports were submitted in 1988 and 1990, when the country’s Finance Ministers were S.B. Chavan and Madhu Dandavate, respectively.
The 10th Finance Commission was still constituted in June 1992 within the five-year deadline specified by Article 280 of the Constitution, which has not been the case this time.
The commission is usually granted about two years to deliberate on its terms of reference, consult States and frame its recommendations, and the government should ideally have its report by October 2025 to consider it in time for Budget 2026-27 — where it will have to place its action taken report on the Commission’s report.
A key new challenge for the 16th FC would be the co-existence of another permanent constitutional body, the GST Council, Mr. Singh pointed out, as the Council’s decisions on tax rate changes could alter the revenue calculations made by the Commission for sharing fiscal resources.