The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 15th July ’21

Table of Contents

NEWS

Cabinet approves continuation of National AYUSH Mission as Centrally-sponsored Scheme
- Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Singh Thakur said that under the scheme, 12 thousand AYUSH Health and Wellness Centres will be set up across the country to provide services of a holistic wellness model based on AYUSH principles and practices.
Centre hikes DA for Central Govt employees, pensioners to 28%
PM to inaugurate and lay foundation stone of various development projects
EAM Dr. S. Jaishankar calls for earnest peace negotiations in order to resolve Afghan crisis
Over 39.76 cr vaccine doses administered till now under Nationwide Vaccination Drive
Health Minister dismisses allegations regarding shortage of COVID vaccines
Dr. Jitendra Singh addresses first ever joint meeting of all Science Ministries & Departments
Govt caps trade margin up to 70% on price to distributor level on five medical devices including Pulse Oximeter, Nebulizer and Glucometer
CCEA approves implementation of special livestock sector package
Death toll in South Africa rises to 72 as violence continues
Taliban claims capturing strategic border crossing of Spin Boldak along frontier with Pakistan
Nepali Congress Prez Sher Bahadur Deuba sworn-in as PM of the Himalayan nation
Cuba Protest: Man dies in Cuba during demonstrations against its Communist Govt
Sports Minister Anurag Thakur launches official team India cheer song for Tokyo Olympics contingent

Neighbourhood watch | ToI

Expansionist China is everywhere
Domestic politics in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives present different challenges for India
And Pakistan, partly thanks to the Afghan situation, is even more of an uncertain entity now.
In Afghanistan, India’s long-held position to support the national government must be finessed by starting work on establishing some sort of understanding with the Taliban.

India should engage with Iran and Pakistan while it tries to solve the Afghan conundrum.
Nepal’s revolving door governments mean India should be looking at a smart neutral approach and deal with whoever is in power.
In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa family is now firmly entrenched.
The case in Bangladesh is different, as the current government is one of India’s most valuable allies, and its economy is currently a success story.
In fact, New Delhi’s good image has taken a bit of battering because it hasn’t supplied as many doses as Dhaka would have liked.
It is even trickier in the Maldives, where jailed ex-president Abdullah Yameen wants India’s help.
China doesn’t care who is in power in countries it is interested in.
Bangladesh’s decision not to allow Chinese investments in deep-sea ports.
India’s resources are far less than China’s. That’s why its diplomacy has to be much smarter.

Water woes | Pionner

Misplaced priorities lead to subversion of economic and social development of a country as well as a State.
Tamil Nadu has hundreds of woes that need urgent intervention of the State administration and, that too, on a war footing.
Non-availability of water for irrigation is converting the fertile Cauvery Delta region (the districts of Tiruchirappalli. Thiruvarur, Thanjavur, Nagapattinam and part of Cuddalore) into a desert.

This region is the food basket of Tamil Nadu as the five lakh farmers here help the State meet its rice requirement.
Though the Cauvery River Water Disputes Tribunal and the Supreme Court have set up the quantum of water to be released by Karnataka to Tamil Nadu, most of the time the latter ends up at the mercy of Karnataka.
One cannot blame Karnataka because it has to meet the drinking water and irrigational needs of the State’s population also.
One of the solutions is to link the Cauvery with the Godavari and transfer the surplus water to Tamil Nadu through a series of canals.
Recently, all major political parties in Tamil Nadu met under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Stalin and passed a resolution asking the Union Government not to allow Karnataka to build a dam at Mekedatu across the Cauvery.
The State could build desalination plants along its coastline which would produce more water than it needs.
Stalin should seek help from the National Institute of Ocean Technology and the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research; two elite research institutes in Chennai that have developed the technology for desalination of seawater.
He needs to open a fresh chapter in the State’s development.

Ramping up supply | TH

Less than a month after the Centre revised its vaccination policy and took over the responsibility of vaccine procurement from the States, old worries of a supply constraint appear to have resurfaced.
The Centre’s CoWIN database shows that the weekly pace of vaccination has declined to nearly 60% of what was seen in the week after June 21, causing several States, particularly in South India, to complain of a shortage.
On June 21, the first day of the new policy, 91 lakh doses were administered and until June 27, it was about 4 crore.
The period July 5-11 saw only 2.3 crore vaccine doses dispensed.
The heady week of June 21-27 saw 60 lakh vaccines a day becoming the norm. However, the last time India crossed that daily figure was July 3.
At least 86 lakh doses have to be administered every day if all Indian adults are to be fully vaccinated by the year end.
Beginning this week, the daily doses have again slipped to 30-40 lakh though this is better than in May when India struggled to provide even 20 lakh doses a day.
India still has managed to inoculate only 33% of its adult population with at least one dose; just about 8% have been fully vaccinated.
The signs are apparent everywhere of an uptick in cases.
The U.S. — the only country with more cases than India — after a month of reporting less than 15,000 cases a day is now, like India, seeing over 40,000 cases a day.
India, while better off than in May, still averages about 800-1,000 deaths a day.
The Centre continues to put the onus on States for planning but does not address a concern of inadequate Covaxin supplies.
While daily vaccination rates will see spikes and dips, aggressive publicity measures and campaigns are necessary to boost vaccination, as was seen in end June.

Women work more, earn less | HT

Women tend to be the backbone of society during crises, even as they are also more likely to face the disproportionate impacts of such events.
It has severely exacerbated existing gendered barriers, widened India’s gender gap in the workforce, and affected (overwhelmingly female) caregivers and frontline workers.
In October-November 2020, Dalberg conducted one of the largest studies of the socio-economic impacts of Covid-19 on women in low-income households, analysing data from 17,000+ respondents, across 10 Indian states.
The study was primarily based on telephonic interviews and triangulated findings, where relevant, with other surveys.
The goal was to achieve a holistic understanding of the effects the pandemic had on women’s livelihoods, access to essentials and sanitation, assets and debt, food and nutrition, and time use.
We also assessed the role of government social protection programmes and self-help groups (SHGs) in supporting women in low-income households through the pandemic and discovered that some initiatives worked out better than one would have expected.
Women were more affected than men by employment issues.
Women made up just 24% of those working before the pandemic, yet accounted for 28% of all those who lost their jobs.
They also constitute 43% of those who are yet to recover their paid work. This had knock-on effects on other aspects of their lives.
One consequence of the loss in incomes for women as well as their households was reduced food supply; women absorbed more of this shock than men did.
More than one in ten (an estimated 32 million if extrapolated to the population) women limited their food intake or ran out of food in the week they were surveyed, and a further 10% reported being worried about future food supply.
Women’s health indicators also deteriorated because they could no longer afford contraception and menstrual products.
About 16% of women (an estimated 17 million if extrapolated) had to stop using menstrual pads, and more than one in three married women were unable to access contraceptives.
Indian women already do almost three times more unpaid work than Indian men (nearly 6.5 hours a day), and our survey showed a 47% increase in unpaid labour for women, and a 41% increase in unpaid care work for women.
At the same time (and perhaps, in part, because of the increase in unpaid work), far fewer women than men reported an increase in rest during the pandemic.
Women from historically marginalised groups (Muslims, migrants, single/separated/divorced), were more affected than the average woman.
The variance is across the board, with 20 percentage points (pp) more single, separated/divorced women having limited food or running out of food.
Three to six pp more women from households with monthly incomes less than ₹10,000 facing nutritional challenges; and Muslim women losing 13 pp more of their income.
Concerning as these figures are, conditions on the ground are likely to worsen for those women (such as transgender individuals and women unreachable via telephones) who fell outside of the restrictions of our data-gathering.
However, one in three women said that government welfare schemes and SHGs had played an important role in helping them navigate the pandemic, comparable to the commonly cited family support.
Specifically, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, and the public distribution system (PDS) supported 12 million, 100 million, and 180 million women respectively during the crisis.
The SHG network served as a reliable borrowing channel for both its members and women in the community.
Deepen PDS to be more focused on nutrition and bring back pulses to the initiative
Think about expanding PDS beyond food as it’s a far-reaching delivery channel.
Optimally, this would go hand-in-hand with national-, state- and district-level awareness drives around menstrual health and hygiene.
The government can also build upon and accelerate its existing efforts through Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers, Mission Parivar Vikas, and other schemes to strategically focus on contraceptive usage.
Launch drives to enlist women on MGNREGS job cards and increase the total number of person-days to meet women’s demand for job opportunities.
Strengthen the resilience of SHGs by focusing on their economic recovery and market linkages via the existing Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission.
SHGs could also provide technical and managerial training to help women develop the skills needed to run small businesses digitally.
Focus on the inclusion of single, divorced/separated women in the One Nation One Ration Card rollout, and build social assistance programmes for informal workers, specifically domestic workers and casual labourers.
There is a multi-generational impact of poor nutrition, lack of access to contraceptives, and debt.
Making the right investments in women’s issues now could prove transformational in the long-term recovery and health of our economy and society.