Why India should prefer incremental over big-bang reforms?

Image Source: The Economist

• Political entrepreneurs have three reasons to choose incremental over big bang reforms. 

• First, India is a genuine democracy; it’s clear that, say, Chinese President Xi Jinping would never need to withdraw a GST or land bill. 
• A benevolent dictatorship might seem to be the best form of government but you are more likely to end up with Robert Mugabe rather than Lee Kuan Yew. 
• Indians are not irrational, ignorant or dyslexic — it’s just that our citizens and 30 lakh election winners disagree a lot. 
• Second, big bang reforms imply one solution for all of India, but exports labour markets like Bihar need different interventions than import labour markets like Kerala, whose population is now 9 per cent Bihari. 
• Finally, big bang reforms create an antibiotic reaction. If you propose 100 or zero, you usually get zero. India got more labour reform in the last one year than the 20 years before that because we stopped equating it with hire and fire and tackled inspections, apprentices, provident fund, decentralisation and online compliance. Of course a labour contract that is marriage without divorce must change but, just like the difference between a list of ingredients and a recipe, successful reform needs sequencing, proportioning and prioritising. Improving the ease-of-doing business involves a million negotiations but it would be delusional to believe that a public target to improve India’s global ranking and publishing a state ranking do not help. 
• Big bang reforms are surgery without anesthesia; sustainability for India’s reforms will not come from a regulatory beheading, but with death by a thousand cuts.
• [Ref: Indian Express]

Read More

Indo-Africa Relations

Click here:
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/this-is-indias-trade-footprint-in-africa/
http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/engaging-africa-indias-541-initiative/

Read More

Punjab: Unsustainable Agricuture

From the breadbasket of India, Punjab has become a basket-case economy.

• Endowed with ample water and good soil, Punjab’s happy, progressive people had a dream that is now a distant memory.
• The Centre’s policies aimed at increasing food production to ensure an adequate supply of grain, coupled with export restrictions, have taken a toll.

Read More

NJAC Struck down

The Supreme Court’s striking down of the 99th Amendment (National Judicial Appointments Commission act, NJAC) seems to confirm that Indian institutional development follows a maxim of its own: Thou shalt meet overreach with more overreach. The judiciary-legislature tussle in India has never been based on first principles. A dominant executive sought to undermine the independence of the judiciary in the 1970s. In response, the judges created an appointments process where they could, as Justice J. Chelameswar writes, “exult and frolic in our emancipation from the other two organs of the state”. The legitimacy of this arrangement, where the judiciary effectively shut out other branches of government, was always dubious on constitutional grounds. We put up with it because it seemed to have the effect of securing judicial independence. But then allegations of corruption, a general sense that the judiciary itself had become unaccountable, led to a clamour that judges could not be the sole judges of their own cause. Unaccountability, rather than independence, became the bigger worry.

Read More

Uniform Civil Code

Why in news?

• 3 instances of SC seeking UCC in 2015
• The Supreme Court asked the central government in October 2015 whether it was willing to bring a Uniform Civil Code to ride over inconsistent personal laws in different religions as there was “total confusion” over the incoherent stipulations about marriage, divorce, adoption, maintenance and inheritance, the court said
• What was this case about --> a Christian man has questioned a provision that requires a Christian couple to be judicially separated for two years before getting a divorce, whereas this period is one year for Hindus and other non-Christians
• A case seeking the court’s recognition to the Ecclesiastical Court, which operates under the Canon Law for Catholic Christians and not under India’s civil laws. The apex court was upset — wondering angrily whether India would remain secular in the present circumstances, and calling for stamping out religions from civil laws. This case remains pending. 



Source: Jaagore.com

• 3rd case: Court dealt with the issue of guardianship of a Christian unwed mother without the consent of the child’s father. While ruling in the woman’s favour, it said: “It would be apposite for us to underscore that our Directive Principles envision the existence of a uniform civil code, but this remains an unaddressed constitutional expectation"

What is UCC?

• It essentially means a common set of secular civil laws governing personal matters for all citizens of the country, irrespective of religion, caste or tribe.
• Currently, different laws regulate these aspects for adherents of different religions.
• Hindu Marriage Act, 1955
• The Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936, 
• Sharia law

Why do we need UCC?

• DPSP Says so:
• Article 44 of the Constitution, which is one of the Directive Principles of State Policy, says: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” 
• Directive Principles, as Article 37 makes clear, are not enforceable by any court. 
• But a body of judicial precedents says that they are fundamental in the governance of the country, and the State shall strive towards fulfilling obligations laid therein.
• Fundamental Rights say so:
• Article 25
• It is important for “secular” character of India, which has been identified as part of the basic structure of the Constitution, and Article 25, which guarantees the freedom to practise, profess and propagate any religion. 
• Some argue that because of 42nd Amendment of 1976, declaring India secular read with article 25, the State and its institutions can not interfere with religious practices, including in relation to various personal laws. this argument is unacceptable because 25(2) empowers the State to frame any law to regulate or restrict “secular activity which may be associated with religious practice” — therefore, it is argued, Article 25 is no bar to having a Uniform Civil Code. 
• Article 14 also demands UCC. Litigants have contended that their right to equality is endangered by personal laws that put them at a disadvantage. 
• Shah Bano Case
• SC ruled that a Muslim woman was entitled to alimony under the general provisions of the CrPC, like anybody else. 
• Following protests from Muslim leaders, Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1986 got the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act passed in Parliament, which nullified the ruling. 
• The Act allowed maintenance to a divorced woman only during the period of iddat, or for 90 days after divorce, according to provisions of Islamic law, but in stark contrast to general provisions under the CrPC. 
• Daniel Latifi vs Union of India (2001), 
• SC upheld the Act in so far as it confined the time period of maintenance to the iddat period, but held that the quantum of maintenance must be “reasonable and fair”, and therefore, last her a lifetime. In effect, the verdict did a balancing act between the Shah Bano judgment and the 1986 law. 
• Githa Hariharan vs RBI (1999)
• SC adjudicated upon the constitutional validity of certain provisions of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 and the Guardian Constitution and Wards Act, on a petition claiming they violated Articles 14 by treating the father as the natural guardian of a child under all circumstances. The court held that the interest of the child was paramount, and that the letter of law would not override this aspect. 
• It ushered in the principle of equality in matters of guardianship for Hindus, making the child’s welfare the prime consideration. 
• Artcle 21 also gets vviolated - individual liberty
• Article 15 requires non-discrimination based on “sex”, whereas Muslim Personal Law favours the man in many cases, especially in the issue of divorce and in the issue of polygamy.

So why is not UCC coming into existence?

• Will of governments is enmeshed with political considerations — and is mindful of protests by various religious institutions that it would violate their religious freedom, and may lead to 
• The fact is that an unprejudiced deliberation on the innate merits of a UCC has usually been overshadowed by communal and political overtones, provoking the Supreme Court to keep prodding the union government to ponder over it in the interest of national integration and gender parity.

Goan model:

• Goa is the only state in India which has enforced Uniform Civil Code for all citizens.
• The Portuguese Civil Code that remains in force even today which was introduced in the 19th century in Goa and wasn’t replaced after liberation.
• UCC in Goa s a progressive law that allows equal division of income and property regardless of gender between husband and wife and also between children.
• Every birth, death and marriage has to be compulsorily registered.
• Muslims that have their marriages registered in Goa cannot take more than one wife or divorce by triple talak.

Way forward:

• ICE cold treatment : Info, Communication, Education of masses
• In instalments

Read More

Mental Healthcare | Bills, Suggestions

Ref: Self Created

 ISSUES:

• for few countries have witnessed so many high-profile debates related to mental health while ignoring the centrality of mental health in any of them. Consider just three examples of long-standing, repeated tragedies that evoke media outrage and endless political mudslinging: 
• The impoverishment of families, domestic violence and deaths related to alcoholism; 
• the continuing tragedies of suicides, the leading cause of death in young Indians; and 
• the acts of terrible violence by adolescent boys who have faced terrible deprivations in their own childhood. 

SUGGESTIONS:

• Some interventions can be delivered through legislative and regulatory measures — 
• for example laws that restrict access to means of suicide (notably pesticides) and 
• that reduce the demand for alcohol (by, say, combating surrogate advertising of alcoholic beverages to youth). 
• Some effective interventions are delivered through a variety of community-based sectors, such as parenting programmes from infancy through adolescence, and life-skills training in schools to build social and emotional competencies in children and adolescents. 
• At the level of health services, there is evidence to support the delivery of frontline interventions by community health workers with appropriate training and supervision, in partnership with primary care doctors and mental health professionals. 
• In addition, there is the need for specialist care, such as in district hospital-based inpatient units, and continuing care, for instance through supported housing, for a relatively small proportion of people affected by severe disorders like psychosis, intellectual disability and dementia.
•  While India has the distinction of being one of the first countries in the developing world to establish a national mental health programme, decades of mismanagement have led to pitifully small gains. If the government has any desire to change this abysmal status quo, it would need to look no further than to implement, in letter and spirit, its own National Mental Health Policy and District Mental Health Programme.
•  The bills - as given above

Read More