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Two-nation Citizen (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level: Citizenship Bill
Mains level: Basic structure of Indian Constitution

Context:

• For the first time in India, citizenship will be defined, for some men, women and children, in religious terms. That is the terrible — and terrifying — burden of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019 cleared by the Union cabinet on Wednesday, which is all set to be introduced in Parliament this session.
• This bill will be passed by both Houses this time, unlike in the previous Lok Sabha when the Opposition forced it to a Joint Parliamentary Committee, with several parties submitting dissent notes.

Aimed of this bill:

• This bill has alarmed all those who have stakes in peace and calm in the Northeast — in its present version, it exempts large swathes of it from its provisions, so the dangers posed to a region already roiled by the cloddish National Register of Citizens process can be said to have been blunted somewhat.
• But the bill, in all its versions, raises a wider, more fundamental worry.
• By amending the Citizenship Act 1955 to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants who are Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while shutting India’s doors on all those who are Muslim.
• The proposed law violates the fundamental right to equality assured by the Indian Constitution, and its explicit prohibition of discrimination on the basis of religion.
• It also undermines the very foundation of the Republic in a spacious and plural idea that was nurtured and nourished by the freedom movement, an idea that refuted the two-nation theory that led to the creation of Pakistan.

Significance of the bill:

• The proposed citizenship law has the potential to make the NRC process, which has ignited more faultlines than it has settled in Assam, and which the Modi government promises, or threatens, to expand nation-wide, into little more than a witch-hunt against Muslims.
• The NRC’s fig leaf has been that it aims to settle long festering questions of belonging and identity in a region with a history of demographic turbulence.
• The proposed law’s own fig leaf is that it gives succour and refuge to minorities that are persecuted or fear persecution in Muslim-majority neighbouring countries.
• But if the citizenship bill is born of empathy for the vulnerable and the persecuted, why not extend it to the Rohingya from Myanmar, or the Ahmadiyas from Pakistan?

Way ahead:

• It is not just the Northeast, nor even only the minorities, which must worry about the citizenship bill becoming law.
• Its march to formalisation must concern all Indians who fear that this country will lose an inextricable and precious part of itself if it were to define itself as a nation with two kinds of citizens and citizenship, or if it is seen as one by its neighbours and the world.
• It must provoke the Supreme Court, which monitored the NRC process that the government at the state and the Centre have all but rejected because its results told an inconvenient truth.
• Can the nation’s highest court countenance such a drastic and unconstitutional change in the character of the nation, in its very basic structure?

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A potential seedbed for private profits (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level: Seeds Bill 2019
Mains level: Agricultural reforms

Context:

• Seeds Bill 2019 is now under Parliament’s consideration.
• The earlier versions of the Bill, in 2004 and 2010, had generated heated debates. The present version promises to be no different.

Background:

• In 1994, India signed the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
• In 2002, India also joined the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) Convention.
• Both TRIPS and UPOV led to the introduction of some form of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) over plant varieties.
• Member countries had to introduce restrictions on the free use and exchange of seeds by farmers unless the “breeders” were remunerated.

Balancing conflicting aims

• TRIPS and UPOV, however, ran counter to other international conventions.
• In 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) provided for “prior informed consent” of farmers before the use of genetic resources and “fair and equitable sharing of benefits” arising out of their use.
• In 2001, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) recognised farmers’ rights as the rights to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds. National governments had the responsibility to protect such farmers’ rights.
• As India was a signatory to TRIPS and UPOV (that gave priority to breeders’ rights) as well as CBD and ITPGRFA (that emphasised farmers’ rights), any Indian legislation had to be in line with all.
• It was this delicate balance that the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights (PPVFR) Act of 2001 sought to achieve.
• The PPVFR Act retained the main spirit of TRIPS viz., IPRs as an incentive for technological innovation.
• However, the Act also had strong provisions to protect farmers’ rights. It recognised three roles for the farmer: cultivator, breeder and conserver.
• As cultivators, farmers were entitled to plant-back rights. As breeders, farmers were held equivalent to plant breeders. As conservers, farmers were entitled to rewards from a National Gene Fund.

Requirement of seed bill:

• According to the government, a new Seeds Bill is necessary to enhance seed replacement rates in Indian agriculture, specify standards for registration of seed varieties and enforce registration from seed producers to seed retailers.
• While these goals are indeed worthy, any such legislation is expected to be in alignment with the spirit of the PPVFR Act.
• A shift from farm-saved seeds to certified seeds, which would raise seed replacement rates, is desirable.
• Certified seeds have higher and more stable yields than farm-saved seeds.
• However, such a shift should be achieved not through policing, but through an enabling atmosphere.
• Private seed companies prefer policing because their low-volume, high-value business model is crucially dependent on forcing farmers to buy their seeds every season.
• On the other hand, an enabling atmosphere is generated by the strong presence of public institutions in seed research and production.
• When public institutions, not motivated by profits, are ready to supply quality seeds at affordable prices, policing becomes redundant.
• From the late-1980s, Indian policy has consciously encouraged the growth of private seed companies, including companies with majority foreign equity.
• Today, more than 50% of India’s seed production is undertaken in the private sector.
• These firms have been demanding favourable changes in seed laws and deregulation of seed prices, free import and export of germplasm, freedom to self-certify seeds and restrictions on the use by farmers of saved seeds from previous seasons.
• Through the various versions between 2004 and 2019, private sector interests have guided the formulation of the Seeds Bill.
• As a result, even desirable objectives, such as raising the seed replacement rates, have been mixed up with an urge to encourage and protect the business interests of private companies.
• Not surprisingly, many of the Bill’s provisions deviate from the spirit of the PPVFR Act, are against farmers’ interests and in favour of private seed companies.

Problematic provisions:

Compulsory registration:

• The Seeds Bill insists on compulsory registration of seeds. However, the PPVFR Act was based on voluntary registration.
• Many seeds may be registered under the Seeds Bill but may not under the PPVFR Act. Assume a seed variety developed by a breeder, but derived from a traditional variety.
• The breeder will get exclusive marketing rights. But no gain will accrue to farmers as benefit-sharing is dealt with in the PPVFR Act, under which the seed is not registered.

PPVFR Act:

• As per the PPVFR Act, all applications for registrations should contain the complete passport data of the parental lines from which the seed variety was derived, including contributions made by farmers.
• This allows for an easier identification of beneficiaries and simpler benefit-sharing processes.
• Seeds Bill, on the other hand, demands no such information while registering a new variety. As a result, an important method of recording the contributions of farmers is overlooked and private companies are left free to claim a derived variety as their own.

Does not allow re-registration:

• The PPVFR Act, which is based on an IPR like breeders’ rights, does not allow re-registration of seeds after the validity period.
• However, as the Seeds Bill is not based on an IPR like breeder’s rights, private seed companies can re-register their seeds an infinite number of times after the validity period.
• This is “ever-greening” provision, many seed varieties may never enter the open domain for free use.

Vague provision for regulation:

• A vague provision for regulation of seed prices appears in the latest draft of the Seeds Bill, it appears neither sufficient nor credible.
• In fact, strict control on seed prices has been an important demand raised by farmers’ organisations.
• They have also demanded an official body to regulate seed prices and royalties. In its absence, they feel, seed companies may be able to fix seed prices as they deem fit, leading to sharp rises in costs of cultivation.

Failing of registered variety:

• According to the PPVFR Act, if a registered variety fails in its promise of performance, farmers can claim compensation before a PPVFR Authority.
• This provision is diluted in the Seeds Bill, where disputes on compensation have to be decided as per the Consumer Protection Act 1986.
• Consumer courts are hardly ideal and friendly institutions that farmers can approach.

Given conditions not defined:

• According to the Seeds Bill, farmers become eligible for compensation if a plant variety fails to give expected results under “given conditions”.
• “Given conditions” is almost impossible to define in agriculture.
• Seed companies would always claim that “given conditions” were not ensured, which will be difficult to be disputed with evidence in a consumer court.

Way ahead

• It’s given the inherent nature of seeds, farmer-friendly pieces of seed legislation are difficult to frame and execute.
• This is particularly so as the clout of the private sector grows and technological advances shift seed research towards hybrids rather than varieties.
• In hybrids, reuse of seeds is technically constrained.
• The private sector, thus, has a natural incentive to focus on hybrids. In such a world of hybrids, even progressive seed laws become a weak defence.
• On the other hand, strong public agricultural research systems ensure that the choices between hybrids, varieties and farm-saved seeds remain open, and are not based on private profit concerns.
• Even if hybrids are the appropriate technological choice, seed prices can be kept affordable. For the seed sector and its laws to be truly farmer-friendly, the public sector has to recapture its lost space.

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A turning point (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level : Adjusted gross revenue
Mains level : Factors responsible for telecom sector sustainability

Context:

• Major telecom operators announced tariff hikes in the range of 15 to 40 per cent across different plans, marking an end to the brutal price war that has bled the incumbents dry.
• For Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, the new tariffs will come into effect on December 3, while for Jio, the hikes will be effective from December 6.

Background:

• This decision, which comes against the backdrop of both Bharti and Vodafone Idea reporting massive losses in the second quarter, after the Supreme Court upheld the government’s position on what constitutes adjusted gross revenue (AGR), could potentially mark a turning point in the fortunes of the beleaguered sector.
• This would have further weakened incumbents, increasing the possibility of a duopoly with a weak second player.
• Statements by telcos which indicated that liquidation was the only option, unless the government eases off demands for spectrum fees, underline the seriousness of this scenario playing out.
• Developments over the past years both the manner in which a price war that bled incumbents was unleashed and the seemingly coordinated manner in which the tariffs have been hiked raise questions.
• They call for closer supervision of an already over-regulated sector to ensure that healthy competition exists, not the mere semblance of it.

Fulfillment of the long term growth:

• Tariff hikes alone are unlikely to be sufficient for long-term sustainable growth.
• The government needs to reexamine its approach towards the sector which is driven purely by considerations of revenue maximisation.
• While a cash strapped government will welcome any additional revenue, sticking to its position on what constitutes AGR in the Supreme Court has grave consequences for the sector’s health.
• The government has tried to soften the blow by announcing a two-year moratorium for telcos in making their spectrum payment for past auctions.

Way forward:

• This would positively impact telcos’ cash flow in the short run, it alone is not enough. The current situation calls for an overhaul of the current licensing regime.
• Telcos have filed a review petition against the Court’s order on AGR seeking waiver of penalties and interest.
• Restoring the health of the sector would be for the government to give up its demand of interest and penalties.
• It should also reconsider lowering the licence fees, and rethink its stance on spectrum pricing.

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India-Japan defence partnership can be a win-win (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: International Relations
Prelims level : India-Japan
Mains level : India-Japan strategic cooperation in defense sector

Context:

• India and Japan concluded their maiden ‘2+2 Foreign and Defence Ministerial Meeting’ in New Delhi.
• Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar have had wide-ranging discussions — on bilateral and multilateral cooperation and also on regional and international security — with their Japanese counterparts.
• The clear aim has been to look closely at the prospects for further deepening bilateral security and defence cooperation between the two nations.

From India’s perspective:

• For India, this is the only other 2+2 dialogue apart from that with the US, which started in September 2018.
• This clearly shows the importance that New Delhi assigns to the relationship with Japan, which definitely has been a long-standing one, going back to pre-Independence days.
• The current direction seeks to give the relationship a strategic edge.
• Japan’s contribution to India’s economic development has been steady, it’s been particularly strong in the heavy industry and infrastructure sectors.
• Japan opens up its defence sector, as envisaged in the 2018 National Defence Programme Guidelines (NDPG), there could be definite areas of cooperation in this sector too.

Cooperation in Defence sector:

• India’s participation in the just concluded maiden defence and security exhibition in Tokyo, where it was one of the few nations to have a booth, is an indicator of the increasing focus on this sector.
• Also, the recent past has seen bilateral military exercises — the ‘Dharma Guardian-2019’ (between the Indian Army and Japanese Ground Self Defence Forces), the ‘SHINYUU Maitri-2019’ (between Japanese Air Self Defence Force and the Indian Air Force) — and also the trilateral Malabar exercise by India, Japan and the US.

Strategic cooperation beyond these exercises:

• The discussions on amphibious Shinmawya US-2 Aircraft, for instance, have been going on for quite a few years but there no signs of a deal yet.
• Reports indicate that Japan has agreed to undertake a third of the aircraft’s manufacture and this could be an important step towards boosting the ‘Make in India’ initiative.
• Clearly, with the Japanese industry opening up to equipment manufacturing, factoring a bilateral cooperation using their precision and time-bound completion and India’s competence in design, engineering and supply chain, it could be a win-win situation.
• India and Japan can cooperate to build up armoured vehicles manufacturing, Mitsubishi which already is into manufacturing such vehicles.
• They could also jointly work with Indian companies that have already applied for the FICV (Futuristic Infantry Combat Vehicle) and the new FRCV (Future Ready Combat Vehicle) programmes.

Cyber security potential:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and chip manufacturing could set the trend for cooperation in cyber security and possibly the whole gamut of equipment modernising, and these could be made a part of the battle management system.
• Japanese companies are known for their superior chip-manufacturing capabilities and the next generation of AI-induced chips could be developed by the two nations and deployed.
• Even enabling 5G secured connectivity could be an area to dwell on.
• The India-Japan defence and strategic tie-up will have to be two-way, unlike the India-US one which has remained buyer-seller based with most equipment coming to India through the US foreign military sales (FMS) route.

Way ahead:

• The lesson for the India-Japan defence relationship in its evolution and the scope for two-way traffic is phenomenal and has to be worked on.
• Japan’s focus and budgets for the next 10 years for equipping in the context of increasing regional threats is an opportunity for many Indian companies, including the public sector, to work out a mutually-beneficial relationship.
• The earlier announced $12 billion ‘Japan-India Make-in-India Special Finance Facility’ fund is a very good step to boost confidence.
• The next round of 2+2 should have a roadmap for the initial areas of cooperation.

Conclusion:

• It now remains to be seen what more tangibles can be achieved during Shinzo Abe’s visit.
• Besides continuing the military exercises, the Japanese NDPG and India’s increasing focus on building the defence manufacturing ecosystem with thrust on ‘Make in India’ offer the best scope for improving bilateral cooperation.

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The many structural flaws in India’s higher education system (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Health and Education
Prelims level : Draft National Education Policy
Mains level : Structural flaws in India’s education system

Context:

• India’s higher education system is structurally flawed and underfunded. This crisis will affect innovation and human capital, the two pillars of labour productivity and GDP growth, while cheating India’s largest demographic of its potential.
• The latest ‘India Skills Report’ suggests that only 47% of Indian graduates are employable — a problem exacerbated by startlingly low faculty figures.

Faculty shortage:

• Faculty vacancies at government institutions are at 50% on average. A Deloitte gathering of 63 Deans of top-tier institutions revealed that 80% of those listed lack of quality faculty as their biggest concern.
• The problem lies in increased demand, and stagnant supply. The number of institutions has surged in India since the 2000s, while the number of students doing PhD has remained constant.
• Meanwhile, there are over a 1,00,000 India-born PhDs in universities around the world, kept away by paltry salaries and poor funding.
• China solved this problem by attracting Chinese-origin PhDs back home with dollar salaries and monetary incentives for published research.
• Tsinghua University, for example, is designed on the Western model of teaching and research, and is even ahead of MIT in terms of published papers.

Scenarios in India:

• Indian universities persist in separating research and teaching activities, depriving students of exposure to cutting-edge ideas.
• Monetary incentives for academia are practically non-existent, and Indian Research and Development expenditure at 0.62% of GDP is one of the lowest in emerging economies.
• Indian universities rank low in both research and teaching.
• The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, at rank 155, was our highest in the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) for research while six Chinese institutes figured in the top 50.

Macroeconomic impact:

• Such flaws could affect macroeconomic indicators such as labour productivity, which is determined by innovation and human capital, among other things.
• The workers of tomorrow need to transition to the formal, non-agricultural sector, armed with higher education credentials.
• In addition, an increase in research could lead to more innovation in the economy, which might in turn drive up labour productivity.
• Higher education has a potential twofold effect on productivity.
• The government released a Draft National Education Policy (DNEP) in June 2019, which proposed ambitious reforms.
• The DNEP aims to double education spending to 6% of GDP, and close the research-teaching divide in higher education.
• This is coupled with an ‘Institutions of Eminence’ programme started in 2018 that gave increased funding to some research universities.
• Experts, however, are doubtful about whether the dramatic increases will be politically feasible, and whether the implementation of such reforms will go the path of previous NEPs — watered down and eventually shelved.

Way ahead:

• The government needs to recognise the systemic anger at play, and ensure that higher education’s role in innovation and human capital is not ignored.
• The DNEP is a great first-step, but the reforms must be pushed through and must lead to legislation that will fund research-based universities.
• Only this can bring a culture of discovery and accountability to India’s higher education institutions.

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Close encounters: On faking anti-Naxal fight (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Defense and Security
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Combating with Naxalism

Context:

• Justice V.K. Agarwal judicial enquiry commission that no evidence existed to support the claim that the 17 people who died in the “encounter” on the night of June 28-29, 2012, in three villages in Bijapur and Sukma districts were “Naxalites”.
• In the official narration, two teams led by a DIG marched into the forests to outflank subversives in a meeting only to be surprised by gunfire.
• 17 Naxalites lay dead, and six uniformed personnel hurt. But the commission found no evidence of a gunfight, and held that firing had been one-sided beginning to end.

Key highlights:

• The findings are a chilling and sordid catalogue of how truth can be subverted and buried by the very officers who are supposed to enforce the law.
• Though the commission puts it down to a disproportionate reaction from the anti-naxal formation, the findings make it clear that the entire operation was botched from the start by poor intelligence, inadequate training, lack of communication, and hasty reaction.
• Postmortem reports showed injuries on 10 of those killed were on their backs, not consistent with claims the firing had been in self-defence.
• Instead, the nature and location of the injuries suggested they were fired upon while fleeing, and in no position to pose a threat.
• There were bullet shots on some of the heads, evidently from close quarters.
• There were injuries on the upper torsos caused by the butt of guns or rifles, signs of physical assault.
• The cataloguing and managing of the evidence relating to the armaments such as guns and detonators allegedly carried by the “Naxalites” suffered from imprecise documentation.
• There were signs of manipulation in the timing of injury and post-mortem reports in at least one case.
• What is worse for the security forces is that the commission concluded that injuries sustained by the uniformed personnel were more likely caused through friendly fire.
• Some of the recommendations are unexceptional, given the frequency of such incidents.

Conclusion:

• However, is the recommendation that training be imparted “to improve mental fabric of security forces” with a view “to make them more balanced so that they act with equanimity and do not succumb to panic reaction even in a critical situation”.
• Ways must be found to initiate action against the officers involved in this unfortunate operation and its heinous cover up.

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Another quota question: On creamy layer for SCs (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Creamy layer for SCs and STs

Context:

• An authoritative pronouncement on the question whether the concept of ‘creamy layer’ ought to be applied to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
• The Union government has called upon the Supreme Court to form a seven-judge Bench to reconsider the formulation in M. Nagaraj vs Union of India (2006) that it should be applied to the SC and ST communities.

Background behind the verdict:

• This verdict was a reality check to the concept of reservation.
• Even while upholding Constitution amendments meant to preserve reservation in promotions as well as consequential seniority.
• It contained an exposition of the equality principle that hedged reservation against a set of constitutional requirements, without which the structure of equal opportunity would collapse.
• These were ‘quantifiable data’ to show the backwardness of a community, the inadequacy of its representation in service, and the lack of adverse impact on “the overall efficiency of administration”.
• This placed a question mark on the continuance of quota policies of various State governments due to non-compliance with these parameters.
• In Jarnail Singh (2018), another Constitution Bench reaffirmed the applicability of creamy layer norms to SC/STs.

Nagaraj Case:

• On this ground, it felt that Nagaraj did not merit reconsideration.
• It ruled that Nagaraj was wrong to require a demonstration of backwardness for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, as it was directly contrary to the nine-judge Bench judgment in Indra Sawhney (1992), which had laid down that there is no need for a test of backwardness for SC/STs, as “they indubitably fall within the expression ‘backward class of citizens’.”

Way ahead:

• The Centre has accepted that the ‘creamy layer’ norm is needed to ensure that only those genuinely backward get reservation benefits.
• It is justifiably upset that this principle has been extended to Dalits, who have been acknowledged to be the most backward among the backward sections.
• Another problem is the question whether the exclusion of the advanced sections among SC/ST candidates can be disallowed only for promotions.
• Most of them may not fall under the ‘creamy layer’ category at the entry level, but after some years of service and promotions, they may reach an income level at which they fall under the ‘creamy layer’.

Conclusion:

• This may result in the defeat of the object of the Constitution amendments that the court itself had upheld to protect reservation in promotions as well as consequential seniority.
• In the history of affirmative action jurisprudence may be needed to settle these questions.

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The abdication (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1: Society
Prelims level : Sexual violence
Mains level : Key suggestion addressed by the legislatures to curb sexual violence

Context:

• Every day, millions of Indian women confront the possibility of sexual violence at home and in the wider world.
• It shapes their gait on streets and their silence in bedrooms, it decides the jobs they can and cannot do, and the limits of liberty they set for themselves. It makes them doubly vulnerable to caste and class impunity; it makes them fall in line.
• Those brave enough to seek justice often end up doubly violated by the police and judicial processes.

Suggestions given by legislatures:

• Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan, while expressing her anguish about the gang rape and murder of a vet in Hyderabad, proposed that the accused “should be brought out in public and lynched”.
• Justice, if it can still be so called, was reimagined in no less gory terms by P Wilson, a legislator from the DMK, who suggested surgical and chemical castration for rape convicts.
• Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu wondered aloud if the country should consider changes to the legal system that walled off any possibility for “mercy or appeal” to those punished for rape.
• In the Lok Sabha, Trinamool MP Saugata Roy asked for laws that make rape punishable “only by death sentence”.
• Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh expressed the government’s openness to making stringent laws more stringent.
• In the Delhi assembly, too, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal spoke in favour of hanging rape culprits “within six months”.
• A charitable view of this disturbing desire in legislators for “instant, on the spot” mob-like justice could be that it is an expression of their helplessness in dealing with sexual crime.
• More realistically, it is law-making that is abdicating its responsibilities for making considered, sober interventions in public life. Instead, it is channelling the worst of society’s instincts.

Root of the problem:

• Sexual violence and assault on women do not take place in a comic-book world of “lynch-worthy” bad guys and the Hangman as saviour.
• It is seeded in homes and societies, in grossly unequal power relationships, in the imagination of sex and desire that shuttles between the extremes of repression and rape videos.
• It gets its vicious velocity from existing caste and religious inequalities.
• It makes it easy to bay for blood when poor men are accused of the crime and easier to fall silent when the victim is a Dalit or the accused a religious head.

Way ahead:

• The Justice Verma Committee report argued that the state’s role was not to fashion more stringent punishment and definitely not the death penalty but to work towards creating cities and public places that make space for women, and justice systems that assure effective punishment, whatever the quantum.
• Since 2012, the political class as well as many institutions, from the judiciary to the media, have only faltered in addressing the patriarchal inequality inscribed in daily life.

Conclusion:

• The women, who set out every day, on lonely toll plazas, and to hostile workplaces, against all odds, deserve better answers.

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The railways lose steam (Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level : Operating ratio
Mains level : Challenges for boosting up railways income

Context:

• The Comptroller and Auditor General has flagged deteriorating finances of Indian Railways.
• The national rail carrier’s so-called “operating ratio" (OR) reached a decade’s low point in 2017-18, when the national transporter spent ₹98.44 to earn every ₹100 (an OR of 98.44).

A sharp decline:

• This is a steady decline from 2015-16, when the Railways spent ₹90.49 to earn ₹100.
• Rail Bhavan now uses almost all the money it makes on hauling freight—about 95% of these profits—to subsidize passenger traffic.
• In some categories of travel, the subsidy shoots up to 70% of the cost of ferrying a passenger.
• Dynamic pricing of fares for air-conditioned coaches has helped cover costs, but ordinary passengers still get rides that are almost free.
• The government must heed the auditor’s warning on passenger privileges exerting an unsustainable burden on the Railways.

How Indian Railways earns money has a bearing on how it is spent?

• A rising proportion goes into running trains, leaving a shrinking slice for upgrading the network.
• The state of railway infrastructure in the country, that is a bad sign.
• The auditor has also found the Railways pushing forward capital expenditure for which money has already been borrowed. This is disconcerting as well.
• The carrier has been consistently losing market share in the cargo business to road haulage, despite enjoying exclusive rights to transport such commodities like coal.

Conclusion:

• Rail Bhavan has ambitious plans laid out to modernize the network and haul it into the 21st century.
• This mode of transport remains relevant to India’s future, given that it is relatively clean—thanks to track electrification—and could play a major role in India’s commitments towards mitigating climate change.

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The trouble with using DNA matches to nab criminals (Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Science and Tech
Prelims level : Forensic genealogy services
Mains level : Forensic genealogy services advantages and loopholes

Context:

• For three decades, despite the best efforts of investigators to identify the perpetrator of these crimes, he evaded detection.

Background:

• It was not till 2001, when advances in forensic technologies made it possible, that the police were finally able to conclude that the Original Night Stalker and the East Area Rapist were one and the same person.
• A decade later, they were able to link the Goleta double murder to the same criminal.
• Until 2018 that investigators were able to positively identify Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer and Vietnam war veteran, as the perpetrator of all these crimes.

What was it that had changed to make it possible for investigators to identify him after all these years?

• DNA technology has been advancing steadily over the past two decades, allowing forensic investigators to correlate the evidence collected from the scenes of his many crimes and identify them all as the work of a single person.
• However, even then, there was no way to reliably identify him. That was only possible far more recently, with the growth in popularity of commercial forensic genealogy.

Forensic genealogy services:

• Forensic genealogy services allow users to trace their lineage.
• Users submit tissue samples, usually saliva or a cheek swab, to these services, which then generate genetic profiles from them.
• The profiles are then uploaded onto GEDmatch, a public aggregator that correlates information from various sites to throw up matches.
• GEDmatch is now able to locate distant relatives and map extensive family trees.
• This also means is that it offers investigators a large pool of identifiable genetic information, against which they can match evidence recovered from crime scenes to help identify the perpetrators.
• This was how the Golden State Killer was finally arrested, 30 years after committing his last offence.

Major challenges in this system:

• In the process, the investigation often uncovers private information about them that they did not want to know in the first place, such as the fact that they are related to criminals, or that their parents are not biological, or that they were conceived through adulterous or incestuous relationships.
• Law enforcement agencies threaten them with the public disclosure of such information to push them into cooperating more satisfactorily.
• Other relatives, who have not submitted genetic information, also find themselves swept up in the investigation.
• Once investigators have genetically identified the suspect’s relatives, their first job is to build up exhaustive family trees, turning everyone on those trees into suspects until otherwise eliminated.
• The harm visited upon these innocent relatives through the process of such investigations is excessive and far greater than what the perpetrator suffers.
• We need to ask ourselves whether these sort of incursions into the privacy of innocent bystanders is acceptable, regardless of how heinous the crime is that we are trying to solve.

Introducing forensic genealogy in India:

• Forensic genealogy is not yet a thing in India,.
• We will have to contend with issues such as this once the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019, is enacted into law.
• This legislation is to establish DNA data banks to make it easier to identify offenders and suspects, given the US experience of what happens to genetic information when it is used in this manner.
• It is more than likely that the process will inflict significant harm on innocent relatives who have nothing whatsoever to do with the crime itself. Given how harrowing criminal investigation processes can be in this country, the fact that we might suddenly find ourselves dragged into an investigation just because we are remotely related to some criminal seems terrifying.

Way forward:

• We will need to give these issues serious thought before the law is finally enacted.
• Given the number of sources from which genetic information is expected to be aggregated into this database.
• The citizens could find themselves swept up in an investigation whether or not they had anything to do with the criminals who committed the crime.
• Our current draft law does not seem to have considered these second-order consequences.

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The artificial intelligence frontier of economic theory (Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level : Economic theory
Mains level : Role of AI to shape economic theories

Context:

• Recently, two big impediments limited what research economists could learn about the world with the powerful methods that mathematicians and statisticians.

Data summary and pattern recognition:

• It was starting in the early 19th century, developed to recognize and interpret patterns in noisy data.
• Data sets were small and costly, and computers were slow and expensive.
• So it is natural that as gains in computing power have dramatically reduced these impediments, economists have rushed to use big data and artificial intelligence to help them spot patterns in all sorts of activities and outcomes.
• Data summary and pattern recognition are big parts of the physical sciences as well.

Defining a game:

• The mathematician John von Neumann defined a game as;
• a list of players;
• a list of actions available to each player;
• a list of how pay-offs accruing to each player depend on the actions of all players; and
• a timing protocol that tells who chooses what when.
• This elegant definition includes what we mean by a “constitution" or an “economic system": a social understanding about who chooses what when.

How different “games" might produce improved outcomes?

• We want to conduct experiments to study how a hypothetical change in the rules of the game or in a pattern of observed behaviour by some “players" (say, government regulators or a central bank) might affect patterns of behaviour by the remaining players.
• Thus, “structural model builders" in economics seek to infer from historical patterns of behaviour a set of invariant parameters for hypothetical (often historically unprecedented) situations in which a government or regulator follows a new set of rules.
• The government has strategies, and the people have counter-strategies, according to a Chinese proverb.

Challenges ahead to build up structural models:

• “Structural models" seek such invariant parameters in order to help regulators and market designers understand and predict data patterns under historically unprecedented situations.
• The challenging task of building structural models will benefit from rapidly developing branches of artificial intelligence (AI) that don’t involve more than pattern recognition.

Case study:

• AlphaGo team of computer scientists that created the algorithm to play the Chinese game Go combined a suite of tools that had been developed by specialists in statistics, simulation, decision theory, and game theory communities.
• Many of the tools used in just the right proportions to make an outstanding artificial Go player are also economists’ bread-and-butter tools for building structural models to study macroeconomics and industrial organization.

Physics vs. Economics:

• The economics differs from physics in a crucial respect.
• Pierre-Simon Laplace regarded “the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future," the reverse is true in economics: what we expect other people to do later causes what we do now.
• The “rational expectations", reflects a sense in which “the future causes the present" in economic systems. Taking this into account is at the core of building “structural" economic models.
• There are similar trade-offs with unemployment and disability insurance—insuring people against bad luck may weaken their incentive to provide for themselves—and for official bailouts of governments and firms.

Conclusion:

• Like physicists, economists use models and data to learn.
• They don’t learn new things until we appreciate that our old models cannot explain new data.
• They construct new models in light of how their predecessors failed.
• This explains how we have learned from past depressions and financial crises.
• Big data, faster computers and better algorithms, we might see patterns where once we heard only noise.

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Reform step a solution to prevent entry of black money into system (Mint)

Mains Paper 2: Governance
Prelims level : Electoral bonds
Mains level : Electoral bonds challenges

Context:

• Raging debate on electoral bonds in India by National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduce the process of using electoral bonds for political funding.

About Electoral bonds:

• Electoral bonds were introduced to stop cash funding of political parties because most political parties were taking large donations in the form of cash.
• Some political parties were using the method to get almost 100% political funding in cash, which was then deposited in bank accounts in denominations of less than ₹20,000.

Raising questions behind introducing the Electoral bonds:

• At a time when the whole nation was making a transition to a cashless or a less-cash economy.
• How can we expect people to follow the transition to a new economy, while political parties continue to accept cash donations?
• While introducing electoral bonds, the individual donations or cash donation to any political parties have been reduced from ₹20,000 to ₹2,000, in a way making it difficult for political parties to receive cash funding.

Definition of Electoral bonds:

• Electoral bonds are a transparent and a legal instrument.
• Here a donor has to purchase these electoral bonds from select branches of the State Bank of India (SBI) through a KYC bank account for electoral bonds.
• This system has ensured that cash cannot be used to purchase electoral bonds and cash cannot be donated to political parties in higher amount.

Objectives:

• The question being raised is that electoral bonds are anonymous, but the real purpose of these electoral bonds is to ensure clean money and tax paid money comes into political parties and not some slush funds or corrupt money.
• Corporates in the country have generally been averse to funding political parties in a manner that reveals their identity.
• This is a behavioural problem of India’s corporate, and political parties cannot really change it.

Raising questions and solutions:

• Ideally, we should have had a system where every donation is identified to a donor, but when donors are not prepared to reveal their identities, how does one get over the problem?
• If political parties want money to carry on their day-to-day activities and contest elections, moving towards state funding of political parties and elections is also a possibility.
• Money has to come from donors if not state funding.
• The question is should public money be given to political parties?
• Public approval will be needed for such a move.
• Electoral bonds are certainly a solution that helps us to overcome the challenges of preventing corrupt black money getting into the system.

Conclusion:

• To overcoming corporate inhibitions to offer transparent donations disclosing their identity.
• Bulk of the electoral bonds have gone to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the past 1-2 years because most of the support is for the BJP.
• The party, along with its allies, has 70-75% seats in the Lok Sabha, so obviously, the party will get greater share of the funds.

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Why India is staring at a middle-income trap (Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Role of institution to tackle middle-income trap

Context:

• For India, there are few things more important than our challenge of becoming a rich country.

About GDP statistics:

• From experience, we know that the only way out of mass poverty is to obtain modest rates of growth of per capita GDP sustained for many decades.
• If per capita GDP grows at 4% per year, there is a doubling every 18 years. Per capita GDP would then go up by 8 times in 50 years.
• That graduates us beyond middle income.

Idea of development:

• The early idea about economic development viewed an underdeveloped country as a child.
• Growth was inevitable. It was only a matter of putting in a few actions to enable that process.
• This leads to the risk of thinking that progress is inevitable.
• Now we know that there is no inevitability about the rise of a country to be a prosperous democracy.
• There are only four countries that were poor in 1945 that are now prosperous democracies: South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, and Israel.
• In all those countries, growth came as a result of improvements in state capability.

What are the state capability?

• A prominent measure of state capability is available for the 1996–2012 period.
• By this, the state capability in India declined in this period.
• Our institutional capacity got worse in a period of strong GDP growth.
• It is wrong to equate GDP growth with improvement in the foundations for GDP growth.

Higher GDP growth – reduced state capacity:

• When bigger rupee values are at stake, private persons gain by undermining state institutions.
• We saw this in India in the period after 2005 when the country was starting to reap remarkable success by private sector firms.
• The prospective gains from subverting state institutions were suddenly larger and we got bigger investments into attacks on institutions.
• State apparatus that used to work when million-rupee bribes were offered broke down when the offers went to billions of rupees.

Reasons:

• Perhaps India’s growth of 1979–2011 was not adequately grounded in the required institutional capacity to be a prosperous liberal democracy.
• This has something to do with the difficulties that have been seen after 2011.
• The growth model of 1991–2011 has not carried forward into the following years.
• Private “under implementation” investment projects rose from ₹10 trillion in 2006 to ₹50 trillion in 2011.
• After that, there has been a decline in nominal terms to ₹40 trillion in mid-2019.
• The share of non-workers in the working-age population stands at 60.43% in April–June 2019.

Middle-income trap

• In many other countries, the phenomenon of a “middle-income trap” has been observed.
• At the early stages of development, the simple mobilization of labour and capital is enough to escape from abject poverty.
• But once the minimal market economy is in place, a different level of institutional quality is required.
• The maturation of firms and the government creates the need for complex contracts, contract enforcement, economic regulation, and institutions that channel the conflicts between social groups.
• When a middle-income country wants to rise to a mature market economy, and institutional capacity is weak growth stalls.

Reasons for underperformance:

• A lot of government intervention and the license-permit-inspector raj remains in place.
• The economic freedom promised in 1991 has not evolved into a mature market economy.
• Private persons are beset with government intervention.
• The instincts of central planning are alive and well among policymakers.
• There is a great deal of arbitrary power in the hands of the government.
• Extensive interference in the economy by the government still exists.
• There is a policy risk associated with future interventions. The fear of how arbitrary power will be used has led to a loss of confidence in the private sector.

State capacity deficit:

• When India was a small economy, the GDP was small, and the gains from violating rules were also relatively small.
• The tenfold growth in the size of the economy created new opportunities to obtain wealth.
• The gains from violating rules went up sharply. Large resources were brought to bear upon subverting state institutions.
• The foundations of state institutions in terms of the rule of law, and checks and balances were always weak.
• The combination of an amplified effort by private persons to subvert institutions, coupled with low state capacity, has resulted in a decline of institutional quality.

Addressing the problems:

• Economic thinkers of the previous decades tended to focus on economics more narrowly, on issues such as the green revolution or heavy industry or trade liberalization.
• We need to more explicitly locate ourselves in the intersection of politics and the economy.
• The founding energy of liberal democracy is the pursuit of freedom, of people being masters of their own fate.
• We need to shift away from notions of a developmental state with big initiatives from the government, towards a philosophy of respect for the self-organizing system.
• We need to rely far more on private negotiations, private contracts, and civil society solutions, rather than turning to the government to solve problems.
• APMCs (agricultural produce market committees) were not intended to create entrenched power in the hands of traders. Land ceiling Acts were not intended to create shortages of real estate and high prices for real estate. Bank nationalization was not intended to hamper growth, stability, and inclusion.
• Single-window systems do not solve the problem of state coercion, and the threat of raids and punishments.
• In the absence of deeper reform, it is hard to build single-window systems that overcome a maze of restrictions.

Deeper reforms needed:

• The reform required in the early 1990s was not a single-window system governing IPO approvals, it was the abolition of the office of the Controller of Capital Issues. The reform required in trade liberalization was not a single-window system for import approvals, it was the removal of trade barriers.
• Some of the work of regulation can be pushed down to private firms. To tackle the problem of regulating taxis, one possibility lies in setting up bureaucratic machinery that engages with each taxi driver. Another pathway lies in contracting out this regulation to private taxi companies.
• Aggregation business models, such as Airbnb, have an incentive to utilize customer feedback and supervisory staff to improve the quality of their customer experience.
• Modern technology makes it possible to remove the market failure.
• In allocating spectrum, the state creates bureaucratic machinery which auctions spectrum and polices for violations. There is an alternative methodology where intelligent devices establish a self-organizing system through which the spectrum is shared. The need for government control of spectrum allocation is removed.
• Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom reminds us of the remarkable outcomes through some traditional community arrangements. The possibilities for purely decentralized solutions to allocate common goods without requiring a bureaucratic apparatus are high.
• A complex modern economy only works when it is a self-organizing system. It has to have the creative efforts of a large number of individuals.

Conclusion:

• It is always possible to obtain GDP growth without solving these deeper problems.
• We should shift focus from the numbers for GDP growth to focusing on the state of health of state institutions.
• Sustained improvement in institutional quality is hard, but it is the only way to obtain sustained GDP growth.

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The right stuff (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 4: Ethics
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Psychological behaviour and bias

Context:

• Dolphins, presumed to be the most intelligent and empathetic creatures of the deep, have shared a deep bond with humans.
• There are innumerable heart-warming stories about dolphins helping to save doomed swimmers, heading off sharks, retrieving dropped tools for divers, and so on.

About the findings:

• A paper on dolphin behaviour in the Royal Society’s journal, Open Science, finds more common ground — like humans, dolphins are predominantly right-handed, and they are even more fundamentalist about their preference than humans.
• The authors observed that over 99 per cent of observations showed them favouring the right side.

Appearance of right-handedness:

• Right-handedness appears to be intrinsic to cetaceans, which include whales and dolphins, the only creatures other than primates who are presumed to have some human-like qualities.
• This is bad news for the left-handed, who are oppressed quite enough already by the primacy of right-handedness among humans.
• The very words we speak are directionally weighed. Dexterity is from the Latin dexter (right), and sinister is Latin for “left”.
• The modern meanings are derived via convoluted routes, including but not limited to myth and augury, but the association of the terms with cleverness and vileness are now permanently set.

Way ahead:

• The most egregiously handed word is hiding in plain sight. It’s even in the headline above: “Right”.
• A wily, duplicitous word signifying both a direction and rectitude, and thereby conflating the ideas.
• With that, the victory of the right in human affairs is complete.
• But fortunately, barring humans and cetaceans, the rest of nature is ambivalent about handedness. Mice and budgies just don’t care, for instance. It’s best that way.

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Terror in London: on London Bridge knife attack (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Security
Prelims level : ISIS
Mains level : Terrorism, radicalization spread by Islamic state

Context:

• The knife attack on Friday near London Bridge that killed two and injured three others is yet another reminder of the threat lone-wolf assaults pose to public security.

Attacker:

• The attacker, Usman Khan, who was born in the U.K. to immigrants from Pakistan-held Kashmir, was a convicted terrorist.
• He was released in December 2018 with conditions after serving half his jail term.
• On Friday, Khan was attending a prisoner rehabilitation programme at Fishmongers’ Hall, a historic building on the northern end of London Bridge.
• Wearing a fake explosive vest, he first threatened to blow up the building and then went on a killing spree.
• He was driven out of the hall by members of the public and was later shot dead by the police.
• This is the latest in a series of terror attacks the U.K., especially London, has seen in recent years. In June 2017, terrorists had rammed a van into pedestrians on the Bridge and stabbed people in nearby bars and restaurants.
• In the same month, a van ran into pedestrians outside a London mosque.
• In May that year, a suicide bomber killed 22 concert-goers in Manchester.
• The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for, Khan at least succeeded in keeping the threat of terror to London alive.

Issues behind the attack:

• Radicalisation is the primary problem,
• The attack also points to security, intelligence and systemic failures.
• The British intelligence is often credited for foiling dozens of terrorist attacks since the 2005 London train bombings that killed 56, less sophisticated, less coordinated, often lone-wolf attacks are on the rise.
• Usman was convicted in 2012 for being part of an al-Qaeda-linked plot to bomb the London Stock Exchange.
• He was sentenced under the imprisonment for public protection (IPP) programme, which allowed the authorities to keep him, or convicts considered a threat to the public, in prison indefinitely.
• But when the Conservative-Liberal government withdrew the IPP, he got the verdict overturned and was sentenced to 16 years.
• Under the automatic early release scheme, he was freed in 2018 with an electronic tag and supposed to be monitored.
• But the police still could not prevent the knife attack. And with hardly two weeks to go before the parliamentary election, both Labour and the Tories have taken the issue to the political battle and promised to address the systemic issues — making policing more efficient and reviewing the early release scheme.

Way ahead:

• These could take time and are up to the next government, what is needed is a good counter-terror plan to tackle both extremism among youth and prevent lone-wolf attacks that often go undetected.
• State agencies need to work with civil society groups as well as community leaders and have deradicalisation programmes.
• There is no one-stop solution to terrorism.

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Taking stock of the anti-AIDS fight (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Health
Prelims level : HIV-AIDS
Mains level : Highlights the epidemics of HIV-AIDS

Context:

• The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), adopted by member countries of the United Nations in 2015, set a target of ending the epidemics of AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by 2030 (SDG 3.3).

About SDG 3.3:

• The key indicator chosen to track progress in achieving the target for HIV-AIDS is “the number of new HIV infections per 1,000 uninfected population, by sex, age and key populations”.
• In the terminology of HIV prevention and control, the phrase “key populations” refers to: men who have sex with men; people who use injected drugs; people in prisons and other closed settings; sex workers and their clients, and transgender persons.

Bridging gaps

• In order to infuse energy and urgency into global efforts to combat HIV-AIDS and complement the prevention target set by the SDGs.
• It is an ambitious treatment target was also adopted through UNAIDS, the lead UN agency that coordinates the battle against HIV.
• The “90-90-90” target stated that by 2020, 90% of those living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90% of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained anti-retroviral therapy and 90% of all people on such therapy will have viral suppression.
• The gaps in detection, initiation of drug therapy and effective viral control were to be bridged to reduce infectivity, severe morbidity and deaths from undetected and inadequately treated persons already infected with HIV.
• Even as prevention of new infections was targeted by SDG 3.3.

High and low points

• The world to achieve a reduction in new HIV infections by 37% between 2000 and 2018. HIV-related deaths fell by 45%, with 13.6 million lives saved due to Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART).
• Not only were effective drugs developed to combat a disease earlier viewed as an inescapable agent of death but they also became widely available due to generic versions generously made available by Indian generic manufacturers, led by the intrepid Yusuf Hamied.
• A rush of public and private financing flowed forth in a world panicked by the pandemic.
• Ignorance and stigma were vigorously combated by coalitions of HIV-affected persons who were energetically supported by enlightened sections of civil society and the media.
• Never before had the world of global health resonated so readily to the rallying cry for adopting a rights-based approach and assuring access to life-saving treatments.
• According to a recent report by UNAIDS, of the 38 million persons now living with HIV, 24 million are receiving ART, as compared to only 7 million nine years ago.

Why then the concern now?

• At the end of 2018, while 79% of all persons identified as being infected by HIV were aware of the fact, 62% were on treatment and only 53% had achieved viral suppression — falling short of the 90-90-90 target set for 2020.
• Due to gaps in service provision, 770,000 HIV-affected persons died in 2018 and 1.7 million persons were newly affected.
• There are worryingly high rates of new infection in several parts of the world, especially among young persons.
• Only 19 countries are on track to reach the 2030 target. Improvements have been noted in eastern and southern Africa, central Asia and eastern Europe have had a setback.
• With more than 95% of the new infections in those regions occurring among the ‘key populations’.
• Risk of acquiring HIV infection is 22 times higher in homosexual men and intravenous drug users, 21 times higher in in sex workers and 12 times more in transgender persons.

Reasons for the slowdown in progress:

• The success achieved in the early part of this century, through a determined global thrust against the global threat, led to a complacent assumption of a conclusive victory.
• The expanded health agenda in the SDGs stretched the resources of national health systems, even as global funding streams started identifying other priorities.
• Improved survival rates reduced the fear of what was seen earlier as dreaded death and pushed the disease out of the headlines.
• The information dissemination blitz that successfully elevated public awareness on HIV prevention did not continue to pass on the risk-related knowledge and strong messaging on prevention-oriented behaviours to a new generation of young persons.
• Vulnerability of adolescent girls to sexual exploitation by older men and domineering male behaviours inflicting HIV infection on unprotected women have been seen as factors contributing to new infections in Africa.
• Risk factors for cardiovascular disease are high among survivors as they age, with anti-retroviral drugs increasing the risk of atherosclerosis.
• Other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis can co-exist and cannot be addressed by a siloed programme.
• Mental health disorders are a challenge in persons who are on lifelong therapy for a serious disease that requires constant monitoring and often carries stigma.

Need for vigil in India

• In India HIV-related deaths declined by 71% between 2005 and 2017.
• HIV infection now affects 22 out of 10,000 Indians, compared to 38 out of 10,000 in 2001-03.
• India has an estimated 2.14 million persons living with HIV and records 87,000 estimated new infections and 69,000 AIDS-related deaths annually.
• Nine States have rates higher than the national prevalence figure. Mizoram leads with 204 out of 10,000 persons affected.
• The total number of persons affected in India is estimated to be 21.40 lakh, with females accounting for 8.79 lakh.
• Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Uttarakhand showed an increase in numbers of annual new infections.
• The strength of India’s well established National AIDS Control Programme, with a cogent combination of prevention and case management strategies, must be preserved.

Way ahead:

• Drug treatment of HIV is now well founded with an array of established and new anti-viral drugs.
• The success of drug treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), and male circumcision, especially among MSM population, is well documented.
• The wide diversity of the HIV virus strains, development of a vaccine has been highly challenging but a couple of candidates are in early stage trials.
• However, mere technical innovations will not win the battle against HIV-AIDS.

Conclusion:

• Success in our efforts to reach the 2030 target calls for resurrecting the combination of political will, professional skill and wide ranging pan-society partnerships that characterised the high tide of the global response in the early part of this century.
• The theme of the World AIDS day this year (“Ending the HIV/AIDS Epidemic: Community by Community) is a timely reminder that community wide coalitions are needed even as highly vulnerable sections of the community are targeted for protection in the next phase of the global response.

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Glimmer of hope: On fresh SIT report on 1984 riots (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1: Society
Prelims level : 1984 riots, Special Investigation Team
Mains level : Communalism, secularism, regionalism

Context:

• A confidential report by a court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) may contain answers to the question of whether there will be any significant improvement in the country’s poor record in securing justice for the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom.

Highlights the SIT report:

• Successful prosecutions have been few and far between, and each time a new probe is ordered or a fresh report submitted, it is seen as major progress.
• The SIT was formed by the Supreme Court a year ago to examine the record in 186 cases relating to the carnage that took place in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
• SIT had earlier scrutinised 293 cases, and closed 199 of them.
• A two-member team of retired apex court judges scrutinised these 199 cases, along with 42 other matters that had been closed earlier. \
• The supervisory committee gave its views on these 241 cases and the Bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, was informed that 186 cases merited further investigation.
• A fresh three-member team, headed by retired Delhi High Court judge, S.N. Dhingra, was asked to examine these 186 cases.
• Last week, the team submitted its report. Regardless of how many cases out of these result in prosecution, there is little doubt that the development offers a glimmer of hope to the victims of 1984.
• The country cannot forget that as many as 3,325 people from the Sikh community, including 2,733 in Delhi alone, were killed in the pogrom.

Challenges ahead:

• It is not easy to secure convictions in instances of communal riots and sectarian violence, especially those that involve thousands of offenders gripped by mob frenzy.
• In 1984, there was little effort in the early days to bring to book the high political functionaries of the Congress who were suspected to have instigated the riots.

Current scenario of violence:

• In the last 12 months, there have been at least two rare instances of success. In November 2018, two men were convicted of murder in a case that was closed many years ago and resurrected by the government’s erstwhile special probe team.
• One of them was sentenced to death, and the other to life.
• Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life by the Delhi High Court after being acquitted by the trial court five years earlier.
• The 35-year-long quest for justice is largely a story of failure due to political influence, scuttled investigation and shoddy prosecution.

Way ahead:

• The country has seen other large-scale riots and pogroms after 1984, but has not been able to ensure substantive justice.
• The time may have come to consider the Delhi High Court’s suggestion in its verdict on Sajjan Kumar that there could be separate legislation to deal with mass murders that amount to genocide or crimes against humanity.

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Bringing back treasures: On stolen idols (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1: Art and Culture
Prelims level : Cultural repatriation
Mains level : Measures needed to protect the artefacts

Context:

• Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison visits India in January 2020, he will not only bring with him the goodwill of his country, but also three priceless cultural artefacts.
• The sculptures, including a pair of dwarapalas or door guardians from Tamil Nadu and one nagaraja or serpent king from either Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh.

Background:

• It will come back to their place of origin after the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) voluntarily deaccessioned and returned them to India after establishing that they were, in fact, stolen.
• This ‘cultural repatriation’ comes in the wake of a similar, if more extensive return of idols in 2016, when Washington handed over around 200 sculpture pieces valued at $100 million to India.

Cultural repatriation:

• India’s historical artefacts, a treasure-trove of a rich cultural legacy and religious significance.
• They are strewn across far-flung lands, the result of decades of trafficking.
• The most extensive and ruthless of smuggling rings is one man, Subhash Kapoor, who allegedly has taken the illicit trade in antiquities to a truly global scale.
• The NGA, like many U.S. museums and art galleries, had obtained artefacts from Kapoor in good faith.\
• Rigorous provenance research had proved that their acquisition was a mistake.

Steps needed to crackdown:

• It has to crack down on the continued operations of idol thieves who are looting ancient temples.
• We have to pledged the foreign institutions collecting art to conduct a far greater degree of due diligence before acquiring any Indian idols.
• The problem is complicated by the fact that even among Indian institutions, the inventory documentation of idols is poor.
• Southern Tamil Nadu has many ancient temples, most situated in small, abandoned premises of a village, where even local residents have no recollection of what idol was originally within the temple, leave alone questions of safeguarding the structure.
• This has to be revealed that the extent to which certain sections of law enforcement have tacitly abetted the loot.
• Major institutional reforms are therefore required to end the operations of smugglers. Meanwhile in the global arena, India would do well to leverage the power of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
• Most major western nations are signatories and Mr. Modi would be well within his rights to demand that they institute stricter vetting protocols for international trade in historical artefacts.

Conclusion:

• Unless such multi-pronged action is taken by the government, targeting loopholes in domestic legislation and enforcement, idol trafficking will continue to erode India’s invaluable cultural heritage.

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Getting organ donation to tick again (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Health
Prelims level : Indian Organ Donation Day
Mains level : Organ donation awareness and eliminating the loopholes

Context:

• Organ donation day is observed with the primary objective of promoting organ donation and transplantation so that a number of persons suffering from organ failure.
• Such as the kidneys and liver, can get a new lease of life using organs gifted by others who have lost their lives (such as in road accidents or other reasons).

Undermining altruism:

• Indian Organ Donation Day is observed by the Government of India on November 30.
• It also needs to reflect on certain negative perceptions that appear to be growing and undermining the altruistic donation mindset of donor families.
• In Kerala from 76 deceased donors in 2015 to eight in 2018 due to a perceived.
• The scandal that private hospitals were declaring persons brain dead when they were not really so, in order to retrieve their organs and profit from them.
• The underlying factor is the highly privatised health-care system in India and the growing trust gap between patients and doctors trapped in the profit-seeking business of tertiary care; seeking second and third opinion on patient treatment is commonplace today.
• While an organ comes free, as donated to society, transplanting it to another person costs anywhere between ₹5 lakh and ₹25 lakh, including profit to the hospital.
• The reality that a majority of accident victims who become donors are lower middle class and below, while the majority of organ recipients are from the small number of persons who can afford transplant surgery and costly lifetime medication thereafter.
• The cost factor is the key reason why more than three quarters of donated hearts and lungs do not get taken.

Need to spend more in public hospitals:

• Very few public hospitals in the country do kidney transplants and less than five do liver and heart transplants.
• In a country where public spend on health care remains an abysmal 1.2% of GDP — less than a third of what even some developing countries spend.
• The priority should be on spending the limited allocation on areas that would benefit the greatest number of persons.
• World Health Organisation Consultative Group in its 2014 report points to a study in Thailand which finds that money spent on dialysis can save 300 times more healthy life years if spent on tuberculosis control.
• It considers expansion of low- and medium-priority services before near-universal coverage of high priority services as an “unacceptable trade-off” and does not include dialysis or organ transplantation even in the lo-priority category.
• A given amount, if spent on organ failure prevention will save many more lives than if spent on organ transplant.

Faultlines and solutions

• Only steps to moderate are possible in these deep-rooted societal fault lines.
• One usual approach is to regulate hospitals through acts and rules. \
• In the 25th year of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 , it is time to revisit its effectiveness.
• Substitution of bureaucratic procedures for hospital and transplant approval by self-declaration and mandatory sample verification involving civil society will improve compliance — as proved in other countries — and will also help get more hospitals involved.
• Further amendment is needed to ensure full State autonomy in this area, avoiding the Central government’s interference in organ distribution, which is now demotivating many hospitals.
• All State organ distribution agencies need to make their operations fully transparent.
• Steps such as making online organ distribution norms and the full details on every organ donation will help build public confidence in the system.

Way ahead:

• India figures in the top 10% of unequal countries in the world and among the top 10% of high proportion population spending more than a tenth of their income on health.
• This must also be considered in light of the fact that the organ comes totally free to a hospital from a donor.
• One approach could be to mandate that every third or fourth transplant done in a private hospital should be done free of cost to a public hospital patient.
• This will amount to cross-subsidisation, with the hospital, the doctor and the recipient footing the bill for free surgery to the section of the population that donates a majority of organs.

Conclusion:

• This may not please present stakeholders in this field but they need to avoid the tendency to sweep inconvenient issues under the carpet and discuss seriously how to address the trust gap and inequality that are factors impacting family consent for organ donation.

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Highway blues (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Science and Tech
Prelims level : FASTag
Mains level : Role of technology in transport sector

Context:

• From December 1, motorists across the country can zip across national highways, no longer bothered with hunting for change at every toll booth, thanks to the NHAI’s FASTag.
• Using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), the tag will ensure that the toll is automatically deducted from a pre-paid account or a bank account connected to it. \
• As they cruise unencumbered across India, travellers may lose in terms of experience what they will gain in speed and convenience.

Advantages of using FASTag:

• Outside big cities and their satellite towns, the “toll plaza” is more than just a spot to collect money.
• It around every window are the guards, official and unofficial, to ensure that nobody gets away without paying.
• In case of jams and long lines, a slew of informal assistants to the money collector crop up, crowding around car windows to “pre-collect” the money to avoid congestion at the window.
• Most important of all is the mini-economy that crops up at these points — sellers of suspiciously bottled water appear from nowhere as do vendors of cut kheera and the local, seasonal fruits. \
• There are roasted peanuts and popcorn to be had as well, and in parts of North India, many varieties of “mashoor shikanji”. \
• The only thing missing from the fair-ground atmosphere, unthinkingly defiant of the national narrative, are pakodas.\

Way ahead:

• The collection of the under-employed and the small tradesman at the toll booth has been an anachronism for sometime now.
• The FASTag is a technology whose time was here sometime ago, and in the larger scheme of things, objections to it on grounds of nostalgia will be understandably ignored. Or dismissed as being Luddite.
• As they traverse the country, the big city folk ensconced in their air-conditioned cars will experience just a little less of the country. And, more often than not, a good shikanji is worth the wait.

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