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The Delhi High Court has appreciated steps taken to implement the climate change commitments made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the court was told the government has approved India’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.
The government also informed the court on August 4 the updated NDC will be communicated to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The NDC encompasses national plans and pledges made by a country to meet the goal of maintaining global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels, while aiming for 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
The High Court also appreciated the efforts made on the part of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change as well as other Ministries for implementation of the steps in respect of climate change. The status report makes it very clear that India is proceeding ahead on a war footing in implementing the NDC.
Editorial
Fair trial goes beyond courts, to the police and media (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
Recently, the Chief Justice of India objected to the lack of media accountability in the media’s coverage of legal issues.
His remarks came less than a month after the Delhi police admitted to informing the media about the outcome of AltNews’ co-founder Mohammed Zubair’s bail hearing before the judicial order was even pronounced in open court.
While the matter of how this information was known to the police remains an open issue, it is problematic that a considerable portion of its news coverage depicted the remarks of the police officer as fact without waiting for the judicial order.
In criminal cases that attract the most sensationalist media coverage, media attention is often drawn toward investigation and early trial stages, with a notable disconnect from eventual outcomes of trial that follow several months or even years after an arrest.
This makes the police a crucial source for the media and communication between the two institutions is often a starting point of the troubles of media trials.
Unregulated divulgence of case details by an eager police force and disproportionate reliance on this information by the media (to the detriment of the judiciary and other sources), results in a public stripping of the rights that typically accompany a fair trial.
Reportage of this nature violates the presumption of innocence and the right to dignity and the privacy of suspects, the accused, victims, witnesses and persons closely related to them.
They often face social ostracisation and difficulties in retaining employment, making them vulnerable to crime and exploitation.
Though the police are meant to be an independent agency, tasked with truth-seeking (ostensibly an objective shared with the news media), this is not always the case.
Police narratives are sometimes designed to achieve political goals, and the media’s ready acceptance of these narratives does little to prevent their insidious effects.
Given the media’s ability to shape political opinion, law enforcement agencies are sometimes under pressure to selectively reveal certain facets of the investigation or to mischaracterise incidents as communal or systemic.
Just a few years ago, the investigation of the Bhima Koregaon violence (2018) was marked by a slew of motivated arrests of popular dissenters critical of the Government.
While the investigation was underway, the police exposed letters purportedly written by these activists that were still undergoing forensic analysis. While these letters received extensive news coverage, none of them was presented as evidence in court.
OPED
Navigating Sri Lanka’s rocky road to recovery (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Relation)
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has been brewing for a while. Years of policy missteps and a problematic growth model came to a head at the start of 2022, with a debilitating foreign reserves crisis.
Shortages of essentials hurt families and firms. A precarious balance of payments position left little buffers to face the shocks emanating from global markets.
All this culminated in the people’s rejection of the regime that oversaw the economic collapse, an uprising that lasted many months, and the installation of President Ranil Wickremasinghe under extraordinary circumstances, in July.
Since the government’s announcement in April of a suspension of foreign debt payments, discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a bailout — an Extended Fund Facility programme — have progressed, and a staff-level agreement (SLA) is being finalised. In recent weeks, there has been a tendency by those in power to blame the people’s protest, terming it as “anarchy” and “unrest”, for the delay in firming up an IMF deal. This is not only disingenuous but unhelpful in understanding the rocky road ahead.
Even once the SLA is done, the IMF Executive Board will approve a programme and release bailout funds only once it has ‘adequate financing assurances’.
This means that Sri Lanka would have to secure some agreements with major creditors (to the IMF’s level of comfort) and the Fund’s major shareholders such as the U.S. would have to be confident of Sri Lanka’s fair treatment of all creditors.
Until then, other multilaterals like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank will also refrain from lending new money. For Zambia, which defaulted in November 2020, this process took nearly eight months, from concluding an SLA in December 2021 to getting agreement from its bilateral creditor group (which China co-chaired) in July this year.
Evidently, Sri Lanka must make reasonable progress on debt negotiations quickly — with private creditors (holders of international sovereign bonds and commercial loans) and bilateral creditors like Japan, China, and India, to convince the IMF’s Executive Board.
Rankings that make no sense (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF)’s ranking of higher education institutions (HEIs), released in July, has received considerable flak.
The broad parameters on which a HEI is ranked by the NIRF are ‘teaching, learning and resources’, ‘research and professional practice’, ‘graduation outcome’, ‘outreach and inclusivity’, and ‘perception’.
Each of them is assigned a specific weightage. HEIs are ranked overall, university-wise, college-wise and also under disciplines such as law, medical, pharmacy, management, architecture, and engineering.
To show the contradictions, inconsistencies, and flaws in the NIRF’s methodology, we have taken law as a case in point.
The NIRF places some private multi-discipline institutions higher than many prestigious national law universities (NLUs) and law departments.
It is a fact that students often seek admission into NLUs; private universities and institutions, barring a few, are invariably their last choices. Generally, students who cannot secure a seat in NLUs are admitted to private institutions.
Similarly, private universities and institutions are the last choices for those looking for a career in academia. However, the NIRF ranking shows that a private law university scored 100% in perception.
If we consider this score, it should have been the most preferred place for students. But the Common Law Admission Test admission choices show a different picture: this institution figures below 10 NLUs as a preferred place to study.
An analysis of the data submitted by some multi-discipline private universities participating in various disciplines under the NIRF provides evidence of data fudging.
There seems to be a lack of a rigorous system of verification by the NIRF of the data submitted by HEIs. For instance, the faculty-student ratio (FSR) is an important criterion for ranking.
Evidence suggests that some private multi-discipline universities have claimed the same faculty in more than one discipline. Faculty in liberal arts have been claimed as faculty in law too, to claim an improved FSR.
This manipulation defeats the purpose of ranking, especially in the case of single-discipline institutions like the NLUs.
Explainer
How the maiden flight of ISRO’s SSLV went awry (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
On August 7, ISRO got ready for the first developmental flight of the SSLV-D1/EOS-2 mission. The launch took place from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota.
The Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) D1/EOS-2 mission, was carrying two satellites — the Earth Observation Satellite-2 (EOS-2) which weighed about 135 kg and AzadiSAT which weighed about eight kg.
The mission aimed to place the EOS-2 in a circular low-Earth orbit at a height of about 350 km above the Equator and inclined at an angle of 37 degrees. The initial part of the story was successful with the launch vehicle operating smoothly.
However, the mission failed to place the satellites in their required orbits, and the satellites, as they were already detached from the launch vehicle, were lost.
The purpose of this mission was to place the two satellites in circular low-Earth orbits at a height of about 350 km above the Equator.
The larger one, the EOS-2 which was designed and developed by ISRO, offered advanced optical remote sensing operations.
It would have operated in the infrared region and could have served many purposes, from imaging for climate studies to simply keeping an eye on Earth.
AzadiSAT, on the other hand, was a collective of 75 tiny payloads weighing around 50 grams each, which were integrated by students.
It carried tiny experiments which would have measured the ionising radiation in its orbit and also a transponder which worked in the ham radio frequency to enable amateur operators to access it.
The SSLV was composed of three stages powered by solid fuels and these three performed their function as planned.
However, when it came to the stage when the satellites had to be set in orbit, there was a glitch which resulted in the satellites being lost forever.
With a degree of openness that is unprecedented in ISRO, it was announced that there was a malfunctioning of a sensor which resulted in placing the satellites in an elliptical orbit, rather than a circular orbit.
The ellipse or oval shape of the elliptical orbit is elongated in one direction and compressed in another (the so-called major and minor axes, which are like two radii of the ellipse). The shortest height above the Earth of this oval orbit was only about 76 km.
On guardianship and adoption of minors (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
A Parliamentary panel has recommended conferring equal rights on mothers as guardians under the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act (HMGA), 1956 instead of treating them as subordinates to their husband, and has called for joint custody of children during marital disputes. It has also proposed allowing the LGBTQI community to adopt children.
The department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice tabled its report on August 8, 2022, in both Houses of Parliament on the ‘Review of Guardianship and Adoption Laws’.
In its report the committee has said that there is an “urgent need to amend the HMGA (Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956) and accord equal treatment to both mother and father as natural guardians as the law violated the right to equality and right against discrimination envisaged under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution.”
In cases of marital dispute, the panel says there is a need to relook at child custody which is typically restricted to just one parent where mothers tend to get preference.
It says courts should be empowered to grant joint custody to both parents when such a decision is conducive for the welfare of the child, or award sole custody to one parent with visitation rights to the other.
On adoption, the Committee has said that there is a need for a new legislation that harmonises the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act (HAMA), 1956 and that such a law should cover the LGBTQI community as well.
Indian laws accord superiority to the father in case of guardianship of a minor. Under the religious law of Hindus, or the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, (HMGA) 1956, the natural guardian of a Hindu minor in respect of the minor’s person or property “is the father, and after him, the mother: provided the custody of a minor who has not completed the age of five years shall ordinarily be with the mother.”
The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 says that the Shariat or the religious law will apply in case of guardianship according to which the father is the natural guardian, but custody vests with the mother until the son reaches the age of seven and the daughter reaches puberty though the father’s right to general supervision and control exists.
The concept of Hizanat in Muslim law states that the welfare of the child is above all else. This is the reason why Muslim law gives preference to the mother over the father in matters of custody of children in their tender years.
Text and Context
Can women be true representatives of the people? (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Issues related to Women)
Hussain, Sadia, ‘Performance of Women in Parliament: A Quantitative Study of Questions by Women Members in Lok Sabha (1999-2019)’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 57, Issue No. 31, July 30, 2022
Literature on the workings of Parliament and its performance has been scarce. Very few academic papers have covered critical reviews of the institution.
Even less are research works on women’s performance in leadership positions or how they participate and represent people in political spaces. Sadia Hussain’s article, ‘Performance of Women in Parliament: A Quantitative Study of Questions by Women Members in Lok Sabha (1999-2019)’ draws attention to women’s performance in the Lok Sabha through a quantitative analysis of the questions posed by women leaders on the floor.
It contests claims that women members act as silent dolls or ‘gungi gudiyas’ during the Question Hour in Parliament and that they act as mere token representation in political spheres.
The article contextualises women’s position in Indian electoral politics. Nivedita Menon’s work on feminist theory and politics in India asserts how India has not had a single women’s movement that challenged patriarchal and gender norms in the last two decades.
Women have had to use alternate methods to come to power. Education and wealth have aided women in political participation. Studies suggest that more women have started to organise themselves into economic groups, and financial freedom has pushed them to be more politically active.
The decreased gap in voter turnout between men and women is a positive sign toward gender inclusivity in the political sphere. The 2019 general election was a historic moment for women’s politics, as it saw 78 women elected to the lower house of Parliament for the first time since independence where only 22 women were present in the 543-member Lok Sabha. But the author explains that this number is still not representative of the actual proportion of women in the country.
With more women representatives in Parliament, it is imperative to look at their performance. Women’s performance during the Question Hour session becomes relevant as it is a space where legislators act free from party regulation.
Substantive representation or acting in the interest of those represented defines the quality of a leader. It becomes imperative to analyse whether descriptive representation transforms into substantive representation.
News
Bangladesh river water deal likely (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
India and Bangladesh are likely to ink at least one major river agreement later this month. The planning for the agreement is being tightly guarded by officials on both sides as water sharing between the two countries is considered to be a sensitive subject given the fact that it often takes political meaning.
Apart from the major agreement(s) under discussion, sharing of data of river waters and better flood control planning are expected to feature in the upcoming meeting of the Joint River Commission (JRC) that will meet in the last week of August ahead of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's September 6-7 India visit.
In response to a query, The Hindu learned that there is a "strong possibility" that an agreement on the Kushiyara that flows from Assam into Bangladesh is part of one such agreement that may get "done" during the JRC.
A diplomatic source also hinted at a "major agreement" involving the Ganga may also be taken up as there is a "strong urge" to achieve a big river agreement ahead of Prime Minister Hasina's visit, which may be her last trip to Delhi before Dhaka goes into election mode next year.
The Awami League government has been insistent on sealing the Teesta waters agreement, which has eluded settlement so far.
Ms. Hasina visited India during October 2019 and Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Dhaka in March 2021 and during all high-level interactions, Bangladesh conveyed its urgency over the Teesta issue.
In that context, Indian High Commissioner Vikram Doraiswami had earlier referred to "reservations by the West Bengal government", while explaining the delay in the Teesta waters agreement.
However, it is understood that India has agreed to offer Bangladesh a package on river waters-related deals that will be considered a significant advancement in terms of sharing of river resources with Dhaka.
While political ties between Delhi and Kolkata have been a reason that apparently stalled Teesta waters, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was in Delhi last week and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on issues that are relevant to her state.
Ms. Banerjee's visit, which came in the backdrop of the tightly-guarded India-Bangladesh negotiation, has contributed to the speculation on river water sharing between India and Bangladesh.