THE GIST of Editorial for UPSC Exams : 19 December 2018 (Review and revise)

Review and revise

Mains Paper 4: Polity
Prelims level: Transgender bill
Mains level: Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes.

Context

•  A Supreme Court judgment in 2014 laid out, for the first time, a bill of rights for the country’s much-exploited transgender community.
•  Four years on, despite misgivings of the community, the Lok Sabha has rushed through a bill that imperils many of the gains of the Nalsa judgment.
•  The trans/queer movement is known for its radical insistence that gender is not a one-time fixed membership, but a flowing, subjective and personal experience.
•  In this reimagination, an individual’s freedom to define herself as male or female or neither is entirely hers with no quarter given to social or parental vetoes.
•  This freedom is enshrined at the heart of the Nalsa judgment and completely missing from the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016.

Important highlights of this bill

•  The bill envisions a district screening committee which will be invested the power to certify people as trans or not.
•  A person who wishes to transition from one gender identity to another will be certified as male/female only after a gender reassignment surgery in effect, turning an issue of personal identity into a medical procedure, and making vast swathes of marginalised persons dependent on the whims of an often hostile bureaucracy.
•  The Nalsa judgment had specifically laid out that “any insistence on surgery for declaring one’s gender is immoral and illegal”.
•  That patronising reluctance to consider trans-people as humans with agency is also reflected in the provision that they should either live with their natal “family” defined as blood or adoptive relations or sent to rehabilitation centres, without factoring in the extent to which discrimination begins at home.
•  It also ignores the fact that hijra communities have for long sheltered young trans-people from the violence and coercion of family.
•  The bill is also silent on the issue of reserving jobs or educational opportunities for trans-people, or ways to punish the prevalent social and economic discrimination that impoverishes them.

Way forward

•  It is not as if the government had no model to follow while drawing up this bill.
•  A private member’s bill, moved by DMK’s Thiruchi Siva, in 2015 was passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2015.
•  Its progressive provisions on reservation, education and employment, its understanding of gender self-determination, are a measure of what the new amended bill could have become and how far from the ideal it has swerved.
•  As the bill moves to the Rajya Sabha, these fundamental errors are removed to allow it to become a piece of legislation that is an ally for the transgender community, rather than one more element in their exploitation.

Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Prelims Questions:

Q.1) The Union Government has recently waived the import duty on wheat to zero from 10 per cent for an indefinite period. This was done with a view of
1. Uncertainty over the wheat output this year
2. Cut down dumping by foreign producers
3. Adherence to the new commitments of India made at Nairobi conference of WTO

Select the correct answer using the codes below.
a) 1 and 2 only
b) 2 and 3 only
c) 3 only
d) 1 only

Answer: D

Mains Questions:
Q.1) Critically examine the Transgender bill passed by Lok Sabha falls short, needs more debate and deliberation.