Broadband, broad-based(Indian Express)

• Mains Paper 3:Science and Tech
• Prelims level: Information and Communications Technology
• Mains level: Need institutional and policy framework for Information and Communications Technology

Context:

• In 2015, all 193 UN member states affirmed their commitment to the SDG by 2030. 
• From data collection to analysis, and global cooperation to effective action, the role of ICT is crucial in achieving these 17 goals, as seen in our fight against Covid-19. 

Need institutional and policy framework:

• We need institutional and policy framework to deliver universal, affordable and quality broadband services, while also enabling individuals to afford, access and use the devices and services.
• According to the ICT Price Trends 2019 by the ITU, benchmarking 192 countries, India was one of 33 countries where high-consumption mobile data and voice package can be purchased for less than 1% of per capita income. 
• It is notable given that, in 2019, the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development set out the target of 2% by 2022.

A cause for celebration? 

• For a developing country like India with huge infrastructure gap and limited state capacity, progress in telecom over 25 years has been nothing short of stupendous. 
• Reduction in tariffs, network expansion, availability of low-cost devices and a spurt in audio-visual content led to exponential growth of mobile subscriptions to 1.2 billion, with unique subscribers of 700 million. 

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ITU report:

• Contrary to general belief, India ranks between 25 and 85 within the ITU report across five price baskets:
• High-consumption mobile data and voice; Low-consumption mobile data and voice; 
• Mobile voice basket; 
• Mobile data; and, 
• Fixed-broadband. 
• Even the Alliance for Affordable Internet had put India at the ninth rank in its 2019 report.

Digital divide persists:

• India presented a strong case at the WTO to invest in digital infrastructure and digital skills in developing and least developed countries to bridge the digital divide between them and developed countries. But, within India, there are fault-lines. 
• According to TRAI, at the end of 2019, urban teledensity was 156% while the rural one was trailing at 56%.
• The GSMA’s The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2019 shows that only 59% of adult women in India owned a mobile phone, as against 80% of adult men, representing a 26% gender gap. 
• Women account for just 35% of all internet users in the country and just 31% in rural areas, and the gap is more than double at 56% in mobile internet usage.

A bridge too far? 

• ‘Affordable’ services have been the refrain in national policies all along right from the National Telecom Policy in 1994 to the National Broadband Mission in 2018. 
• It’s time to reorient the policy framework to realise the vision of ‘universally affordable and quality broadband’ by committing to time-bound targets for both affordable tariffs and percentage of internet connected population at the bottom of pyramid. 
• The USOF has been providing subsidy for infrastructure to telecom operators for expanding access in rural and remote areas.
• While this is a standard method in many countries, a variant of this is needed in India. 
• The USOF should provide end-user subsidy both for the device and service, leveraging Aadhaar and the DBT platform, much like the MGNREGA.

Way ahead:

• This can be done through telcos’ mobile recharge top-up mechanisms and the MNP would offer the requisite flexibility to the users. 
• It can provide reprieve to the millions returning to their native villages during the lockdown. 

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Delhi diktat (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2:Health 
Prelims level: WHO
Mains level: Healthcare infrastructure and related issues

Context:

• FIR on a hospital for procedural oversight in testing speaks of a high-handedness that is ill-advised, especially in crisis.
• As India begins to unlock, a steadily rising infection curve and viral load puts it among the world’s most burdened nations. 
• The capital is a hotspot, and Delhi’s fresh infections have numbered in four figures for days now. 

Testing, Testing, Testing:

• When the pandemic first spread and the world was bracing for a shock, the WHO had prescribed “testing, testing, testing” as the first line of defence. 
• As in Delhi, it anticipates a fresh wave of infections triggered by the unlocking, the most visible initiative of the Arvind Kejriwal government is to suspend testing in the respected Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and slap an FIR on it. 
• The government accuses the hospital of not using the RT-PCR app, which shares test data efficiently with all stakeholders. Suspending testing affects lives more deeply. 

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Accessibility of testing:

• In many cities, adequate access to testing has become a stumbling block for families with critically ill members. 
• With facilities defined as COVID and non-COVID, the status of patients must be declared at the time of admission.
• Patients and their families are finding it difficult to get themselves tested, and as a consequence, there are reports of patients being turned away by hospitals. 
• Ideally, everyone who has concerns should have the right to be tested. 
• Denial conveys the public impression that having failed to flatten the infection curve, the government wants to flatten the data curve by limiting access to testing.

Invited controversies:

• While the Delhi government has worked to make beds available for COVID-19 patients, it has also invited controversies. 
• Its pandemic data has failed to tally with that of hospitals providing it, and there have been public complaints that government data on free beds does not tally with reality. 
• A day before filing the FIR, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had accused private hospitals of allotting beds for huge markups, without naming them. 

Why the reticence?

• If the allegation is true, then they are hoarding a scarce resource and gouging desperate people during a crisis. 
• They should be named and proceeded against. 

Conclusion:

• And institutions like Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, whose focus is affordable health rather than commerce, and which are serving the public in this crisis, should be spared the unwelcome attentions of the muscular state.

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Undoing the damage (Indian Express)

• Mains Paper 2:International Relations
• Prelims level: India China border settlement
• Mains level: To know about India-China bilateral relations, what are the disputed areas between India and China, what is LAC, issues associated with this, key analysis and way forward

Context:

• On Saturday’s talks between senior Indian and Chinese generals, the ministry of external affairs sounded surprisingly positive about the nature of the conversation.
• It said there will be more military and diplomatic engagement to resolve the current crisis in Ladakh region. 
• Saturday’s military talks followed inconclusive local-level engagement between the two armed forces in the last few weeks. 

Diplomatic consultation: 

• On the eve of Saturday’s talks, there was intensive diplomatic consultation between the two sides that reaffirmed the mutual political interest in a peaceful resolution of the issues at hand. 
• That the talks between senior generals were held in a “cordial atmosphere” is a relief. 
• Delhi’s affirmation that the two sides agreed to resolve the situation in accordance with the bilateral confidence-building measures instituted over the last three decades is welcome. 

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Little room:

• Before Saturday’s talks, Delhi was careful to downplay the prospects for an early breakthrough and suggested an extended process is at hand. 
• The government’s caution was complemented by widespread pessimism within the Indian strategic community about an immediate resolution. 
• That scepticism was rooted in the fact that India was taken unawares in April by the big forward push by the People’s Liberation Army across multiple locations along the so-called Line of Actual Control separating the two sides.
• That the PLA had dug into the new positions and had brought in heavy weapons systems seemed to suggest China was here to stay in the new positions it had secured. 
• With China having seized some ground that it did not control before, Delhi’s task of getting Beijing to undo the new facts it had created in Ladakh appears rather difficult.
• But having publicly signalled its case for the restoration of the status quo that existed in April, Delhi has little room to back off. Therefore, the government’s suggestions that the Indian armed forces are in this for a long haul.

Negative implicationsof Delhi’s current engagement with Beijing:

• The strategic community fears two negative implications of Delhi’s current engagement with Beijing. 
• One is that Delhi might be tempted to ease the standoff in return for some cosmetic steps from the PLA to defuse the current crisis. 
• The other is that Beijing might demand rather costly political concessions from Delhi in return for a full restoration of the April status quo. Given the unenviable situation Delhi finds itself in, South Block’s upbeat description of the talks suggests that the outcomes on Saturday may have exceeded initial expectations. But there is no forgetting that the April surprise has given the upper hand to the PLA. 

Conclusion: 

• Delhi will have to press all its leverages — on the military, diplomatic and political fronts — to persuade Beijing to restore status quo ante in Ladakh. 
• If Delhi, however, is seen asmaking unreasonable concessions to ease the current crisis, it will face a domestic political backlash and considerable diminution of its regional and international status in relation to Beijing.

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Who’s afraid of monetisation of the deficit? (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Economy 
Prelims level: Public debt 
Mains level: Measures taken to control economic crisis by the government

Context: 

• As the government began to fight the novel coronavirus pandemic and the economic downturn, some economic pundits urged the government to go out and spend without worrying about the increase in public debt. 
• They said the rating agencies would understand that these are unusual times. 
• If they did not and chose to downgrade India, we should not lose too much sleep over it.

Rating and fundamentals

• Well, the decision of the rating agency, Moody’s, to downgrade India from Baa2 to Baa3 should come as a rude awakening. 
• The present rating is just one notch above the ‘junk’ category. 
• Moody’s has also retained its negative outlook on India, which suggests that a further downgrade is more likely than an upgrade.
• The rationale given by Moody’s should especially make people sit up. 
• The downgrade, Moody’s says, has not factored in the economic impact of the pandemic. 
• It has to do with India’s fundamentals before the onset of the pandemic and the extended lockdown with which India responded. 

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Cloud cuckoo land:

• We should not lose sleep over a further downgrade and simply borrow our way out of trouble? Anybody who thinks so is living in cloud cuckoo land. 
• Whatever the failings of the agencies, in the imperfect world of global finance that we live in, their ratings do carry weight. 
• Institutional investors are largely bound by covenants that require them to exit an economy that falls below investment grade.
• If India is downgraded to junk status, foreign institutional investors, or FIIs, will flee in droves. 
• The stock and bond markets will take a severe beating. The rupee will depreciate hugely and the central bank will have its hands full trying to stave off a foreign exchange crisis. That is the last thing we need at the moment.

Work towards an upgrade:

• To do so, we need to note the key concerns that Moody’s has cited in effecting the present downgrade to our rating: slowing growth, rising debt and financial sector weakness. 
• Many economists as also the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) expect India’s economy to shrink in FY 2020-21. 
• The combined fiscal deficit of the Centre and the States is expected to be in the region of 12% of GDP. 
• Moody’s expects India’s public debt to GDP ratio to rise from 72% of GDP to 84% of GDP in 2020-21. 
• The banking sector had non-performing assets of over 9% of advances before the onset of the pandemic. Weak growth and rising bankruptcies will increase stress in the banking sector.
• The government’s focus thus far has been on reassuring the financial markets that the fisc will not spin out of control. 
• It has kept the ‘discretionary fiscal stimulus’ down to 1% of GDP, a figure that is most modest in relation to that of many other economies, especially developed economies. 

Clearing misapprehensions:

• We need to increase the discretionary fiscal stimulus without increasing public debt. 
• The answer is monetisation of the deficit, that is, the central bank providing funds to the government. 
• Mention ‘monetisation of deficit’ and many economic pundits will fear. 
• These fears are based on misconceptions about monetisation of the deficit and its effects.
• A common misconception is that it involves ‘printing notes’. But that is not how central banks fund the government. 
• The central bank typically funds the government by buying Treasury bills. 
• As proponents of what is called Modern Monetary Theory point out, even that is not required. 
• The central bank could simply credit the Treasury’s account with itself through an electronic accounting entry.
• When the government spends the extra funds that have come into its account, there is an increase in ‘Base money’, that is, currency plus banks’ reserves. 

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Objections:

• What could be the objection to such an expansion in money supply? It could be that the expansion is inflationary. 
• This objection has little substance in a situation where aggregate demand has fallen sharply and there is an increase in unemployment. 
• In such a situation, monetisation of the deficit is more likely to raise actual output closer to potential output without any great increase in inflation.
• Exponents of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) make a more striking point. 
• They say there is nothing particularly virtuous about the government incurring expenditure and issuing bonds to banks instead of issuing these to the central bank. 
• The expansion in base money and hence in money supply is the same in either route. The preference for private debt is voluntary. 
• MMT exponents say it has more to do with an ideological preference for limiting government expenditure. But that is a debate for another day.
• Central banks worldwide have resorted to massive purchases of government bonds in the secondary market in recent years, with the RBI joining the party of late. 
• These are carried out under Open Market Operations (OMO). 
• The impact on money supply is the same whether the central bank acquires government bonds in the secondary market or directly from the Treasury. 
• So why the protest against monetisation of public debt?

About inflation control:

• OMO is said to be a lesser evil than direct monetisation because the former is a ‘temporary’ expansion in the central bank’s balance sheet whereas the latter is ‘permanent’. 
• But we know that even so-called ‘temporary’ expansions can last for long periods with identical effects on inflation. 
• What matters, therefore, is not whether the central bank’s balance sheet expansion is temporary or permanent but how it impacts inflation. 
• As long as inflation is kept under control, it is hard to argue against monetisation of the deficit in a situation such as the one we are now confronted with. 

Way forward:

• We now have a way out of the constraints imposed by sovereign ratings. 
• The government must confine itself to the additional borrowing of ₹4.2 trillion which it has announced. 
• Further discretionary fiscal stimulus must happen through monetisation of the deficit. 
• That way, the debt to GDP ratio can be kept under control while also addressing concerns about growth. 
• The rating agencies should be worrying not about monetisation per se but about its impact on inflation. 

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Selling space: On SpaceX's mission to space (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Science and Tech 
Prelims level: 
Mains level: 

Context:

• United States to send American astronauts to space from American soil after a gap of nine years is a milestone in itself. 
• That this took place at the time of one of the biggest civil rights upsurges since the 1960s makes it almost like an escape to fantasy, riding on the wings of a public-private partnership between NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 
• The less expensive journey is a clear financial advantage as the U.S. has been paying the Russians $80 million to put one astronaut into space ever since they stopped NASA’s human space launch programme. 

Advantages in costs, innovation and safety:

• SpaceX comes in to provide advantages in costs, innovation and safety. 
• In the 2000s, when Mr. Musk showed off his rockets and lobbied in Washington DC, he was mostly ignored, yet now, NASA wants him to find customers for space flights. This can expand the power of U.S. commerce exponentially. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already signed up as a potential traveller to the moon and back. 
• With this partnership, Americans have taken yet another leap of faith in creating commerce in space. If his plans get realised, Mr. Musk could make space flights as common as domestic flights. 
• The collaboration brings in a ‘willingness to fail’ which has kept SpaceX alive. This is coupled to the propensity to ‘qualify every component’, which has been NASA’s strength.

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Innovating, testing and building new technology:

• NASA has partially outsourced its work of innovating, testing and building new technology to market players such as SpaceX. 
• It has made clear its desire to invite more such innovative space companies to participate. India under Prime Minister Modi has also opened up the space sector including ISRO facilities to private players. 
• The emergence of successful partnerships here will likely depend on how well they stand up against the American example of allowing for failure. 
• ‘Fly, test, fail, fix’ has been the rubric followed by SpaceX. 
• India has not witnessed such huge experiments in space except by the state-led ISRO, its most recently celebrated one being the Mars Orbiter Mission at the cost of ₹7 per km, which is cheaper than autorickshaw travel as cited by Mr. Modi himself, famously. 
• ISRO already has a competitive edge in the global market for space technology. The opening up of space technologies could harbour many an innovation of this kind.

Conclusion:

• However, it calls for a high degree of accountability coupled with a non-partisan approach on the part of all players. 
• The state’s role as a just arbiter in finding a delicate balance between entrepreneurial adventure and vested interests is a prerequisite to compete in space with the superpowers.

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Pandemic offers chance to pursue an alternative model of urbanisation(Indian Express)

Mains Paper 1:Society 
Prelims level: Not much 
Mains level: Population and associated issues, poverty and developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies.

Context:

• Going by present trends, India will build a new Chicago every year to accommodate new urban dwellers. 
• Between the year 1 CE and the start of the Industrial Revolution (around the early 1800s), the decadal growth of the global population was around 0.8 per cent. 
• With the advent of concentrated production centres, improved medicine and the era of fossil fuels, the global population has shot up by seven times in the last 180 years, clocking a decadal growth rate of over 11 per cent.

Highlights of the population growth areas across the world:

• This population growth rate has been largely urban and metro-centred. 
• Today, cities consume two-thirds of the global energy consumption and account for more than 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. 
• London became the first modern city to cross the one million population mark around 1800. 
• By 1960, our planet had 111 cities with over a million inhabitants.
• In China and India, the number rose from 371 in 2000 to 548 in 2018, with 61 of these cities in India. 
• Recently, the UN projected that by 2030, 28 per cent of the world population will live in dense, congested spaces, jostling for ever-dwindling space and choked infrastructure. 

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Raised questions due to COVID-19: 

• Will concentrated, high-investment, high-density cities have a prominent place in the new, emerging world? Are they successful at providing an adequate return on investment? 
• And, above all, do they provide a quality of life and happiness to all their inhabitants? An average Mumbaikar daily spends 95 minutes commuting between office and home, wasting nearly 10 per cent of his time awake everyday. 
• Eight people die every day in Mumbai in local train-related accidents, and in Delhi, five people lose their lives in road accidents.

Present trends:

• India will build a new Chicago every year to accommodate new urban dwellers. 
• This will require about $2.5 trillion of investment until 2030 — to create more congested urban spaces. 
• Should we not look at alternative models of habitations, which are more frugal, more sustainable and offer more satisfying lifestyles and higher welfare levels?

Effects due to over population to cities: 

• Once cities expand beyond one million, they start to experience dis-economies of scale with pressure on every urban amenity increasing exponentially.
• More people means more vehicles, more vehicles mean need for more roads and increased pollution, which mean more hospitals, more energy and more waste. 
• Even the most robust megacities can easily witness the “domino” effect where a minor and local failure is compounded into a catastrophe. 
• In China in 2010, due to some broken cars and road repair work, a minor traffic snarl expanded quickly into a massive jam of 120 kilometres on the highway connecting Inner Mongolia and Beijing. 
• Drivers were left with nowhere to go for a punishing 12 days. Even in India, we have witnessed smaller but painful versions of the same phenomenon. The truth is that overpopulated cities strain their resources inordinately and leave little room to successfully tackle every contingency.

Causes of natural and man-made disaster:

• Cities are the most affected by natural and man-made disasters. Nearly every hot-spot of the COVID-19 outbreak is a congested urban centre. 
• The low-income areas of cities, where anything from drinking water to sanitation can be a shared facility, are the most vulnerable to any disease outbreak. 
• Congested low-income urban spaces not only bear an inordinately high disease burden, they also bear the brunt of air pollution, water contamination and crime infestation. 
• In the face of any disaster like a flood, earthquake or, worse still, a pandemic, migrant workers, who throng these megacities, rush to go back to their villages. 
• India, with its approximately 72 million migrant workers (including their families), is vulnerable to such disruptions as amply demonstrated in recent weeks.

Multi-disciplinary interactions:

• Some of the principal and strong advantages claimed for megacities with their sky scrapers are the economies of agglomeration and the generation of new ideas and innovations through multi-disciplinary interactions. 
• These advantages have been largely nullified with advances in digital technologies that have made online interactions numerous, equally rich in content and covering a wider range of disciplines. 
• The “cloud” is the new interaction space, which can be accessed by innovators from widely-spread geographies. 
• Digitisation has apparently resulted in the loss of cities’ innovative mojo.

Way ahead: 

• With this major transformation and with the onset of COVID-19, it is surely the time to reconsider our habitation model. 
• Gandhiji’s model of gram swaraj, APJ Abdul Kalam’s vision of providing urban amenities in rural areas and Nanaji Deshmukh’s idea of self-reliant village development clearly deserve of fresh and focused attention. 
• We have vast swathes of land, people and resources located in our over 6,00,000 villages. 
• These offer another chance for us to pursue an alternative model of development where agriculture, industry and service sectors move in sync for sustainable development, which is in harmony with nature. 
• This will minimise our carbon footprint. 
• At the same time, it will also minimise social disruption with jobs coming to people rather than the other way round. 

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The call for self-reliance asks for a pragmatic development strategy to capitalise on India’s inherent strengths(Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2:National 
Prelims level: Atmanirbhar Bharat mission
Mains level: Role and objectives of the Atmanirbhar Bharat mission

Context:

• One of the most disruptive health challenges in recent history, each country is crafting its strategy to cope with the pandemic. 
• The subtle balance between protecting lives and restarting economic activities is hard to strike. 
• India is navigating this complex odyssey with great agility, flexibility, sensitivity and tenacity. 
• The challenge has engendered a spirit of solidarity and unity. It has shown yet again how resilient we can collectively be.

Unlock 1.0:

• As India looks at opening up after four phases of lockdown, it is seeking to find new doors and windows of opportunity. 
• It is aiming to discover possibilities for spurring inclusive, equitable growth, to discover new value chains that would create wealth, to harness the untapped human potential and optimally utilise the natural resources. 
• It is embarking on a mission that would make the country self-reliant. 
• The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, as it is called, is a mission to galvanise the forces of growth across the country in various sectors of the economy. 
• It’s a launchpad for fostering entrepreneurship, nurturing innovation and creation of an ecosystem for rural-urban symbiotic development.
• The decisions taken by the government on June 1 will have a far-reaching impact on the farm and non-farm sectors in rural areas as well as on the development and sustainability of medium, small and micro-enterprises. 
• It tends to turn the current challenge into an opportunity. If the sound policy intent can be effectively translated into practice, it is bound to have a profound impact on our country’s economy, especially in rural areas.

Intensely interconnected and inter-dependent:

• The pandemic has created a difficult situation. We had got used to an intensely interconnected and inter-dependent world.
• As we had to perforce isolate ourselves to break the chain of viral transmission, the global supply chains which we had relied upon have been disrupted, prompting many countries like ours to think of ways to mitigate the negative impact of economic downturn.

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Shortage of health essential elements: 

• Given the magnitude of the virus’s threat and the size of our population, the hard reality of acute shortage of basic requirements like the masks, ventilators and Personal Protection Equipment came to the fore. 
• The emergency forced us to scale up the production of essentials needed to fight the virus. 
• At the same time, medicines made in India like Hydroxychloroquine were in great demand from various nations. India gladly supplied this drug to several countries.

Response to an unprecedented emergency:

• It was in this context of an effective response to an unprecedented emergency that disrupted most channels of internal and international trade, that Prime Minister gave a clarion call for the country to become self-reliant. 
• It is not a call for protectionism or isolationism, but for adopting a pragmatic development strategy that would enable the country to recognise and capitalise on its inherent strengths. 
• It is a trigger for reforms in the policy matrix and charting out the way forward as we reboot and reset our economic trajectory in an uncertain, post-COVID-19 world.
• As the Prime Minister underscored, “self-reliance also prepares the country for a tough competition in the global supply chain”. 
• By increasing the efficiency of all our sectors and also ensuring quality, the new thrust on self-reliance is expected to enhance India’s role in the global supply chain. 
• It is aimed at giving a new boost, a quantum jump to the economic potential of the country by strengthening infrastructure, using modern technologies, enriching human resource, and creating robust supply chains.

Objectives of the self-reliance: 

• The appeal for self-reliance aims at a serious reflection on whether we are making the best use of our natural, human and technological resources. 
• It seeks to galvanise our unused and hidden potential.
• It only underlines the need to be on our own with respect to basic and core necessities based on our ability to meet them with our known available resources and technologies.
• Our country is blessed with a vast array of natural resources, a huge demographic advantage with over two-thirds of our population under the age of 35 years, a large farming community that indefatigably ensures food security for all of us, dynamic captains of industry who are creating world-class institutions and a set of young, aspirational and entrepreneurial path-breakers.
• We need to make the connection between these strands to weave the fabric of a new India that not only meets its domestic demand for goods and services but builds global brands that the world will recognise as uniquely Indian.

Provides an opportunity:

• The new Atmanirbhar Bharat mission provides an opportunity to gradually reduce imports in every sector. 
• We can convert our demographic advantage into a demographic dividend by providing high-quality technical and vocational training to our youth.
• We can further simplify procedures for setting up and running businesses.
• We can focus strategically on the critical bottlenecks that are constricting rapid growth and find solutions to overcome them.
• We can foster research and innovation, the mission we are embarking on will be able to achieve its transformative potential.

Way ahead:

• Any mission has to have people at the centre. People must internalise the concept of valuing local products and artefacts and promoting them. 
• Once the demand is generated and the market expands, the production tries to keep pace and eventually, with a branding effort, the products go global. 
• Being vocal for “local” can be a stepping stone to a self-reliant India and an India that will add its own unique glow and charm to the vast array of products in the global marketplace.
• We can certainly chase the dream of transforming “Local” India into a “Glocal” India by using our resources wisely and strategically. 

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Building a better India (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3:Economy 
Prelims level: MGNREGA
Mains level: Indian economic policy paradigm and key challenges 

Context:

• India seems, in retrospect, to have gone to lockdown early and come out early. 
• India may yet find that it has adopted suppression, followed by the herd immunity approach unknowingly.

Challenges to doubling the GDP target: 

• India was supposed to be set upon doubling its GDP from $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion in the five years 2019 onward. 
• But, in the post-Covid scenario, it seems impossible. 
• Output could be down 25-30% before bounce-back begins. 
• As it was, the economy had been on the downswing of a growth cycle, and the last quarter of the most recent financial year has confirmed the continuing downswing despite the July 2019 Budget.

Indian economic policy paradigm:

• Covid 19 has exposed fundamental structural and secular (i.e., long run) weaknesses of the Indian economic policy paradigm over the last 70 years. 
• In India, apart from the 10 good years of 1998-2008, income growth has not been steady or adequate to absorb the available labour power. 

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Socialism and self-sufficiency:

• Two obsessions have hurt India sorely: socialism and self-sufficiency. 
• Socialism meant state ownership of ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, protection for domestic goods and domestic bureaucrats. 
• The state capitalism, benefiting the minority, perhaps 15% of the population, employed in the public-sector enterprises or in the government administrative and political machinery. 
• The crony capitalists, sustained by the nationalised banks. It is not socialism as welfare state for the poor, but bonanza for the privileged.
• Self-reliance cost the country slow growth and persistent poverty. 
• Self-sufficiency meant import substitution, discouragement of modern technology and promotion of small enterprise over large ones, thanks to labour legislation.

Misreading of India’s long run of economic history:

• These ideologies come from a misreading of India’s long run of economic history. 
• If India was one of the richest countries up until the 17th century, it was because it was a trading nation with an extensive global trade and finance network. 
• Until the steam power revolution totally changed productivity of labour on machines compared to handicraft, India was at the forefront of technology as well. 
• But, in mistaking modern capitalist industry with imperialism, the Indian elite subjected its masses to poverty.

Comparing India with East Asia:

• Just compare India with East Asia, which neither interpreted self-sufficiency as rejection of trade nor capitalism as an alien Western ideology. 
• The East Asian state was in the vanguard, but it was a smart and pragmatic state rather than an ideologically-rigid state.
• Japan set the model by cooperation between its big business and the state. It relied on an export strategy pursued by the business houses backed by the government. South Korea copied the Japanese model. 
• It also pursued smart land reform and literacy reform. Again, exports were the key. Singapore and Taiwan learnt from that. 
• Even China followed the Japanese example once it gave up Leninist economics.

Way ahead:

• There is, yet, a scope for learning from Covid 19, especially on where the weaknesses lie. 
• Apart from MGNREGA which is currently dealing with nearly 30 crore households in rural areas (swelled by migrants returned home), there is no provision of unemployment benefit for the poor.
• Strong interest groups such as farmers, dalits, OBCs, regardless of their actual economic status, and more due to caste status, enjoy sporadic benefits from the state.
• What can be done immediately is to create a national version of MGNREGA for urban workers as well. 
• Give every man and woman above 18 a guarantee of 100-days-work. That will provide a solid floor level of support. Pay for it by selling off publicly-owned assets.

Conclusion:

• The misery of the migrant workers must never shame India again. 
• Then, there has to be a systematic completion of a welfare state covering health, housing and education. Some of these areas were covered under Modi 1.0. Time has come to finish that task.

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Swarms of extremism (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Science and Tech
Prelims level: Swarm intelligence
Mains level: Function of Swarm intelligence and its effectiveness in political movements 

Context:

• Clouds of locusts have overrun western India. 
• As with COVID-19, country borders and barriers put up by proud sovereign nations have been crossed without difficulty, as the locusts have travelled from Africa to South Asia.

Swarm intelligence

Are locusts intelligent? 

• Individual locusts are not. However, their swarms are swift, focused, responsive to stimuli and dangerously effective in their depredations. 
• Biologists call this phenomenon ‘swarm intelligence’, where the individuals that make up a colony of living creatures are singularly unintelligent and are driven by programmed instinct, but their collective actions make their entire colony intelligent as an entity by itself. 
• Swarm intelligence is common amongst insects; bees, ants and locusts demonstrate it amply. Yet, it is not unknown amongst higher animals as well. 
• Migrating birds and shoals of fish display high degrees of swarm intelligence too.

How does swarm intelligence work? 

• An important point to note is that they are leaderless. 
• A queen bee is not a royal in our human sense; she is just a vast progeny-producing machine.
• It is fascinating to see how a shoal of fish, without a ‘king or queen’ fish, when attacked at one flank by a predator, almost instantly displays an avoidance reaction. 
• How did the fish furthest away from the attacked flank know that the shoal was in danger in less than a microsecond and veer away from the predator? 
• Scientists put it down to the fact that within a swarm, individuals are constantly communicating with each other through actions, signals or otherwise, in a binary manner. 
• Through binary communication, the fact that the swarm is in danger reaches all individuals in an instant and thereby, the instant response. 

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No biological curiosity:

• This phenomenon is no biological curiosity. It is the very essence of the logic behind understanding brain function, as also the design of artificial intelligence. 
• If the human brain was considered a colony of independently alive neuron cells, then it can be imagined that all its nuanced thought emerges from simple, binary synapse mediated conversations between individual neurons.
• The atomisation of complex thinking as emerging from binary signals also lies at the foundation of computer science.

What does the peculiar effectiveness of extremist political movements?

• They combine swarm intelligence with the more conventional leadership models shown by higher-level animals. 
• We see all around us, for example, the resurgence of powerful right-wing movements, all fuelled by leaders who provide the focus of attention, then upscaled by swarms of followers, engaged in binary conversations. 
• A leader signals something, whether it is the need to distort history, create a false sense of assurance in a faltering economy, fuel hate against somebody, or signal success when strategies fail.
• From then on, the swarms take over the creating of simple messages, fake news, sloganeering and hate. 
• Individuals down the ladder, shorn of individual capabilities for critical thinking, share messages, amplify them and make hashtags trend.

Is there any political future for the critical, thinking mind then?

• At first sight, liberals who are ruggedly individualistic are especially unsuited for being a part of any swarm. 
• They reject binary communications, and see their proximate supporters as competitors rather than as part of a larger, coordinated order. 
• Yet leaderless movements are not unknown in the liberal, freedom-loving world either. 
• Think Hong Kong, the Arab Spring, and you have the elements of swarm intelligence backing the flowering and upscaling of pro-freedom movements.

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Social media needs an independent oversight body (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Science and Tech
Prelims level: Independent oversight body
Mains level: Need of an independent oversight body to look into Social media related issues

Context:

• The public spat involving Twitter, Facebook, and President Donald Trump has once again exposed Facebook’s double standards when it comes to regulating content on its platform. 
• Twitter ‘fact-checked’ two of Trump’s tweets and labelled another on George Floyd as glorifying violence. 
• Twitter also disabled a video by the President’s campaign team citing copyright infringement. Facebook, on the other hand, refused to take down a controversial post by Trump despite protests from its own employees. 

Initiatives taken so far:

• Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook, defended his decision by saying that though he did not agree with the President’s views, the social network’s free speech principles warranted that the post could not be taken down. 
• In sharp contrast, ahead of the general elections in India in 2019, Facebook took down 1,000 pages and accounts for allegedly engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour or spam. Of this, 687 were associated with entities close to the opposition Congress party. 
• Facebook based its action on user behaviour, without even going into the content they posted. There were no concerns about free speech expressed by the social media platform while taking down the pages then. 

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Challenges to the Facebook oversight board:

• Lack of consistency could set a dangerous precedent as pages related to political dissent or a social campaign could be taken down, or left untouched, depending on how Facebook perceives the situation or how vulnerable it is to pressure from governments. 
• The social media platform recently set up an oversight board in a bid to showcase that it can self-regulate. 
• However, a big drawback of this board is that, with up to 90 days allowed for a decision, it is simply not designed for an era of instantaneous transmission. 
• A platform which has been accused of not doing enough to prevent users’ data from being leaked to third party entities cannot be trusted to do its own policing. 
• Neither can it be left to governments to regulate as this could become a potent weapon to control public discourse. 
• Given the influence social media platforms wield on public opinion, electoral outcomes and consumer behaviour, it is time to set up an independent regulatory oversight mechanism.

Way ahead:

• In India, social media is both unregulated and vulnerable to government pressure. 
• While social media has enhanced the free flow of information and supported freedom of speech, it has also led to the rise of hate-mongering.
• India leads the world in the number of official “take down” orders issued to social media. 
• Policymakers must put in a framework that brings in transparency in terms of the responsibilities and rights of all stakeholders — users, intermediaries, and the government.

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A sobering comparison(Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2:Health 
Prelims level: Not much 
Mains level: Comparison of India’s Covid 19 situation with its neighbours

Context:

• A comparison of India’s situation with its neighbours is much more meaningful than the comparisons where India is almost always compared to countries in North America or Europe.
• It is well known that the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic has varied enormously across countries.
• While there are no conclusive explanations for this variation yet, age-structure, genetic make-up, universal BCG vaccination, and climate might play important roles.
• In all these respects, India is similar to its neighbours in South Asia.
• Hence, a meaningful comparison of India with its largest neighbours — Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — is a much better way to understand the spread of the pandemic and assess the effectiveness of responses to contain it.

Different Times:

• The pandemic came to south Asian countries at very different times.
• Sri Lanka was the first to report a COVID-19 case, on January 27.
• The first case was reported within three days in India, on January 30.
• Pakistan reported its first case on February 26, and Bangladesh on March 8.
• The progression of COVID-19 has varied across these four nation-states.
• Hence, from today’s vantage point, the duration of the pandemic varies in these countries.
• To assess the pandemic at the same stage of its life cycle, we will identify its beginning in a country on the date total number of cases crossed 50 for the first time.
• Using this method, we see that, on May 24, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were 54, 75, 69 and 66 days into the pandemic.

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Reported Cases:

• A first indicator to understand the spread of the pandemic is the total number of reported cases.
• On the day 54 of the pandemic, the total number of reported cases were 39,980 in India, 32,078 in Bangladesh, 27,474 in Pakistan and 869 in Sri Lanka.
• These countries are very different in terms of population size. If we look at the total number of reported cases per million population on the 54th day of the pandemic, we get quite a different picture.
• Bangladesh has 195, Pakistan has 124, Sri Lanka has 41 and India has 29 cases per million population.

Fatality Rate:

• One of the most direct impacts of the pandemic can be measured in terms of lives lost.
• Dividing the total number of reported deaths by the total number of reported cases, we get what epidemiologists call the case fatality rate.
• On the 54th day, the case fatality rate was highest in India, at 3.25 per cent, and lowest in Sri Lanka at 1.04 per cent.
• Pakistan and Bangladesh fell in between, with 2.25 per cent and 1.41 per cent respectively.
• In terms of total cases per million population, India has done better than most of its neighbouring countries — especially during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• When we look at the impact of the pandemic in terms of direct deaths, the picture is completely reversed.
• India has lagged behind its neighbours in reducing the fatal impact of the pandemic on the lives of its citizens.

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Ramping Testing:

• India, and more so Sri Lanka, have ramped up COVID-19 testing to adequate levels.
• This is suggested by the fact that the test-positive rate, that is, the number of positive cases per 100 persons tested, has been low and stable over the past several weeks — at around 2 per cent for Sri Lanka and 4 per cent for India.
• The situation in Bangladesh and Pakistan vis-a-vis COVID-19 testing is very different.
• Not only do these countries have much higher test positive rates, at over 10 per cent, but it has been increasing over the past weeks.
• Thus, Bangladesh and Pakistan have yet to reach adequate testing levels.

Relative Magnitudes of Fatality Rates:

• This has an important implication regarding the relative magnitudes of case fatality rates across these countries.
• Since Bangladesh and Pakistan are not testing at adequate levels, many positive cases are not being reported in these two countries.
• If they had been reported, the case fatality rates would have been even lower than what we now see.
• Hence, the “true” gap of Bangladesh and Pakistan vis-a-vis India, concerning the case fatality rate, is higher than currently reported. 

Conclusion:

• The daily press briefings of the health ministry paint rosy pictures of the situation in India only because of the largely meaningless comparisons with European and North American countries.
• Looking at our neighbours will have a much-needed sobering effect.

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What is the problem that monetisation is trying to solve? (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3:Economy 
Prelims level: Open Market Operations
Mains level: Significant implications for India’s economic prospects in the short-term, and indeed in the long-term

Context:

• In her interview to this newspaper last week, the finance minister said that she is keeping her options open on monetisation of the deficit by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
• How the government and the RBI decide on this will have significant implications for India’s economic prospects in the short-term, and indeed in the long-term.

Highlights the Clarifications:

First:

• Monetisation of the deficit does not mean the government is getting free money from the RBI.
• If one works through the combined balance sheet of the government and the RBI, it will turn out that the government does not get a free lunch, but it does get a heavily subsidised lunch.
• That subsidy is forced out of the banks. And, as in the case of all invisible subsidies, they don’t even know.

Second:

• It is not as if the RBI is not monetising the deficit now; it is doing so, but indirectly by buying government bonds in the secondary market through what are called open market operations (OMO).
• Note that both monetisation and OMOs involve printing of money by the RBI. But there are important differences between the two options that make shifting over to monetisation a non-trivial decision.

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Historical Context:

• To understand the issue, some historical context will help. In the pre-reform era, the RBI used to directly monetise the government’s deficit almost automatically.
• That practice ended in 1997 with a landmark agreement between the government and the RBI.
• It was agreed that henceforth, the RBI would operate only in the secondary market through the OMO route.
• The implied understanding also was that the RBI would use the OMO route not so much to support government borrowing but as a liquidity instrument to manage the balance between the policy objectives of supporting growth, checking inflation and preserving financial stability.

Historic Outcomes:

• In hindsight, the outcomes of that agreement were historic. Since the government started borrowing in the open market, interest rates went up which incentivised saving and thereby spurred investment and growth.
• Also, the interest rate that the government commanded in the open market acted as a critical market signal of fiscal sustainability.
• Importantly, the agreement shifted control over money supply, and hence over inflation, from the government’s fiscal policy to the RBI’s monetary policy.
• The India growth story that unfolded in the years before the global financial crisis in 2008 when the economy clocked growth rates in the range of 9 per cent was at least in part a consequence of the high savings rate and low inflation which in turn were a consequence of this agreement.

Escape Clause:

• The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act as amended in 2017 contains an escape clause which permits monetisation of the deficit under special circumstances.
• What is the case for invoking this escape clause now even if it means potentially jeopardizing the hard won gains of the government-RBI agreement?
• The case is made on the grounds that there just aren’t enough savings in the economy to finance government borrowing of such a large size.
• Bond yields would spike so high that financial stability will be threatened.
• The RBI must therefore step in and finance the government directly to prevent this from happening.

Bond Yields:

• But there is no reason to believe that we are anywhere close to that situation. Through its OMOs, the RBI has injected such an extraordinary amount of systemic liquidity that bond yields are still relatively soft.
• In fact the yield on the benchmark 10 year bond which was ruling at 8 per cent in September last year has since dropped to just around 6 per cent.
• Even on the day the government announced its additional borrowing to the extent of 2.1 per cent of GDP, the yield settled at 6.17 per cent.
• That should, if anything, be evidence that the market feels quite comfortable about financing the enhanced government borrowing.

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Monetisation and OMOs:

• Both monetisation and OMOs involve expansion of money supply which can potentially stoke inflation. If so, why should we be so wary of monetisation?
• Because although they are both potentially inflationary, the inflation risk they carry is different.
• OMOs are a monetary policy tool with the RBI in the driver’s seat, deciding on how much liquidity to inject and when.
• In contrast, monetisation is, and is seen, as a way of financing the fiscal deficit with the quantum and timing of money supply determined by the government’s borrowing rather than the RBI’s monetary policy.
• If RBI is seen as losing control over monetary policy, it will raise concerns about inflation. That can be a more serious problem than it seems.

Inflation Prone:

• India is inflation prone. Note that after the global financial crisis when inflation “died” everywhere, we were hit with a high and stubborn bout of inflation.
• In hindsight, it is clear that the RBI, on my watch, failed to tighten policy in good time.
• Since then we have embraced a monetary policy framework and the RBI has earned credibility for delivering on inflation within the target. Forsaking that credibility can be costly.
• If, in spite of all this, the government decides to cross the Rubicon, markets will fear that the constraints on fiscal policy are being abandoned and that the government is planning to solve its fiscal problems by inflating away its debt.
• If that occurs, yields on government bonds will shoot up, the opposite of what is sought to be achieved.

Conclusion:

• There are cases when monetisation — despite its costs — is inevitable. If the government cannot finance its deficit at reasonable rates, then it really doesn’t have much choice.
• But right now, it is able to borrow at around the same rate as inflation, implying a real rate of 0 per cent.
• If in fact bond yields shoot up in real terms, there might be a case for monetisation, strictly as a one-time measure. We are not there yet.

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Experience with GST holds valuable lessons for One Nation One Ration Card(Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2:Governance 
Prelims level: One Nation One Ration Card
Mains level: Significance and Challenges towards implementation of the One Nation One Ration Card Scheme 

Context:

• The economic crisis precipitated by COVID-19 has focussed the country’s attention on inter-state migrants.
• Millions of Indians in this diverse, complex group have crossed state borders in search of better economic opportunities.
• The crisis, however, has highlighted their precarioussocio-economic condition.

Inter-state portability:

• Historically, governments have made several attempts to bridge the gap.
• A key part of that roadmap is the idea of portablewelfare benefits, that is, a citizen should be able to access welfare benefits irrespective of where she is in the country.
• In the case of food rations, the idea was first mooted under the UPA government by a Nandan Nilekani-led task force in 2011.
• The current government had committed to a national rollout of One Nation, One Ration Card (ON-ORC) by June 2020, and had initiated pilots in 12 states.
• While intra-state portability of benefits has seen good initial uptake, inter-state portability has lagged.
• The finance minister has now announced the deadline of March 2021 to roll out ON-ORC.

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Challenges to the roll out ON-ORC:

• To ensure a smooth rollout, we would benefit from reviewing the challenges thus far.
• First, the fiscal implications: ON-ORC will affect how the financial burden is shared between states.
• Second, the larger issues of federalism and inter-state coordination:Many states are not convinced about a “one size fits all” regime because they have customised the PDS through higher subsidies, higher entitlement limits, and supply of additional items.
• Third, the technology aspect: ON-ORC requires a complex technology backbone that brings over 750 million beneficiaries, 5,33,000 ration shops and 54 million tonnes of food-grain annually on a single platform.
• These barriers might seem daunting, but the country has previously dealt with an equally complex situation while rolling out the GST, which was widely toutedas “one nation, one tax”.

Drawing comparison between GST and ON-ORC:

• Just like with ON-ORC, fiscal concerns had troubled GST from the start.
• States like Tamil Nadu and Gujarat that are “net exporters” were concerned they would lose out on tax revenues to “net consumer” states like UP and Bihar.
• Finally, the Centre had to step in and provide guaranteed compensation for lost tax revenues for the first five years.
• The Centre could provide a similar assurance to “net inbound migration” states such as Maharashtra and Kerala that any additional costs on account of migrants will be covered by it for the five years. 

National Council for ON-ORC:

• GST also saw similar challenges with broader issues of inter-state coordination.
• In a noteworthy example of cooperative federalism, the central government created a GST council consisting of the finance ministers of the central and state governments to address these issues.
• The government could consider a similar national council for ON-ORC.
• To be effective, this council should meet regularly, have specific decision-making authority, and should operate in a problem-solving mode based on consensus building.

PDS Network (PDSN):

• Finally, GST is supported by a sophisticated tech backbone, housed by the GST Network (GSTN), an entity jointly owned by the Centre and states.
• A similar system would be needed for ON-ORC.
• The Nilekani-led task force recommended setting up of a PDS network (PDSN) to track movement of rations, register beneficiaries, issue ration cards, handle grievancesand generate analytics.
• Since food rations are a crucial lifeline for millions, such a platform should incorporate principles such as inclusion, privacy, security, transparency, and accountability.

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Learning from GST shortcomings:

• At the same time, we should learn from the shortcomings and challenges of the GST rollout.
• For example, delay in GST refunds led to cash-flow issues.
• Similar delays in receiving food rations could be catastrophic.
• Therefore, ON-ORC should create, publish and adhere to time-bound processes, like right to public services legislation that have been adopted by 15 states, and rapid grievance redress mechanisms.
• MSMEs also complained about the increase in compliance burden especially for those who had to digitise overnight. Similar challenges could arise in ON-ORC.
• PDS dealers will need to be brought on board, and not assumed to be compliant.
• Citizens will need to be shieldedfrom the inevitableteething issues by keeping the system lenientat first, providing different ways of authenticating oneself, and publicising a helpline widely.

Conclusion:

• If done well, ON-ORC could lay the foundation of a truly national and portable benefits system that includes other welfare programmes like LPG subsidy and social pensions.
• It is an opportunity to provide a reliable social protection backbone to migrants, who are the backbone of our economy.

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The missing data (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3:Economy 
Prelims level: Household Consumer Expenditure Survey
Mains level: Highlights of the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey data

Context:

• For a country already short of recent large sample survey-based data.
• Nobody knows whether and how much poverty has fallen in the last decade or if consumption of vegetables and protein-rich foods is growing at the same rate as before.

Household Consumer Expenditure (HCE) Survey:

• The National Statistical Office (NSO) was to undertake its household consumer expenditure (HCE) survey for 2020-21 from July, which is now practically ruled out.
• The houselisting phase of the Census, crucial for carving out and assigning “blocks” to field enumerators tasked with collecting household/individual-level information, was scheduled during April-September.
• Its postponing could have a bearing on the main census slated for February-March 2020.
• Since the houselisting and enumeration blocks are also used for the rural development ministry’s Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), it points to serious data challenges ahead.

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Lacking Justification:

• The novel coronavirus has, no doubt, created a war-like situation.
• The census and other surveys being put off by even a year shouldn’t, to that extent, be held against the government.
• This argument, however, lacks justification when there has been no officially-released HCE survey, normally conducted every five years, after 2011-12.
• Nor is there a single field survey-based government study capturing the impact of demonetisation, goods and services tax or even programmes such as Mudra and Jan Dhan Yojana on household incomes, consumption and poverty.
• Contrast this to the 2011-12 period, when there was a surfeitof information from the census, SECC and the NSO’s HCE and employment-and-unemployment surveys.
• The NSO carried out an HCE survey for 2017-18, but its report was withheld, apparently for showing a decline in real rural consumption on the back of rising farm distress.
• Any survey now or even in 2021-22 may throw up similar, if not worse, results. Will that, then, act as a deterrentto not release them as well?

Doing large sample surveys:

• The time has come for the government to move to a continuous mode of doing large sample surveys.
• Technology and rotational panel sampling design can easily enable this.
• If a private data analytics company like the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy can, through its Consumer Pyramids Household Surveys, cover over 1.74 lakh households annually, there’s no reason why the NSO cannot.
• It has, in fact, made a beginning through its periodic labour force surveys from 2017-18.

Conclusion:

• Informed policymaking requires continuous data generation, for which one shouldn’t wait for a “normal” year that also suits the government.

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Unlocking justice(Indian Express)

• Mains Paper 2:Polity 
• Prelims level: Sedition Laws
• Mains level: Challenges to the use of Sedition Law

Context:

• Individuals against whom cases of sedition have been filed in recent months, for protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens in particular, may be facing a double injustice, in the justice process.

Denying Justice:

• As a report in this paper has brought to light, amid a public health emergency in which courts are hearing only “urgent” cases through video-conferencing, bail pleas filed in these cases are not being defined as such.
• That these people, like 19-year-old Amulya Leona, arrested in February by Bengaluru police under Section 124 of the IPC for raising “Pakistan Zindabad” slogans at an anti-CAA rally, are languishing in custody, their bail pleas unheard, is the second injustice.
• The first, as another report in this paper underlined in February, predatesthe pandemic:

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Misuse of Sedition Laws:

• A scrutinyof 25-odd arrests made on charges of sedition in UP, Karnataka and Assam since the anti-CAA protests began, threw up a soberingpattern of police custody granted by courts, no questions asked, no reasons given, or after the most perfunctoryhearings.
• While the Supreme Court has upheld the colonial-era sedition law, it has also read the provision restrictively, saying only seditious “speech tended to incite public disorder” was punishable.
• The apex court has emphasised that clear and immediate incitement to violence is necessary for making the offence of sedition.

Courts not acting:

• The apparent languorof the courts, the evidentlack of rigour or urgency, in cases where it would appear that the government is criminalising acts of protest by slapping serious charges on them, is troubling.
• It is disquietingif the pandemic becomes a cover to delay or deny the weak and the vulnerable their day in court, their fundamental right to bail.
• Ever since people’s protests began across the country against the CAA and the proposed NRC, the BJP-led government at the Centre has, deservedly, invited accusations of intolerance of views different from its own.
• The government did not just turn a deaf ear to the protesters, it also attempted to subdue them, including by wielding the sedition law. This has cast a greater responsibility on the court.

Conclusion:

• The courts are the time-tested recoursefor upholding and safeguarding constitutional protections for the citizens’ freedom of expression, including and especially the liberty to dissent.
• They must not show, nor be seen to show, a lack of alacrityin performing their vital role.

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