The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 20th Jan’20

Table of Contents

Bull and gore

Celebrated in Tamil Nadu
1. display of valour
2. inevitable part of the Pongal season
3. promoted as a tourist attraction
4. symbol of Tamil culture
Courts: cruelty on bulls
This sport was banned by court, and then restored by law.

1. The regulations have been tightened from time to time, and no event takes place without official permission or medical supervision.
The truth about jallikattu is that it is well nigh impossible to hold an incident-free event.
Popular sentiment, political patronage and the cultural instinct to preserve practices.

Needless fracas

Governors vs State governments
1. Kerala: Arif Mohammad Khan
2. West Bengal: Jagdeep Dhankhar
Mr. Khan: it was his duty to defend the laws made by the Centre.
1. there is no discernible precedent as such
His view that his office is not a rubber stamp is true.
Constitution envisages the execution of popular will through an elected government.
The Constitution seeks to bolster centripetal forces in this vast and diverse country, and the Centre’s power to appoint Governors is one such.
The Governor’s constitutional role has been debated and interpreted through several cases.
Sagacious occupants have used the Governor’s office to promote national integration.
Many others have merely acted as agents of the ruling party at the Centre.
The Governor’s role as a link between the State and the Centre shall not be an imperial one.
The office of the Governor must be a dialogic and consultative one.

Equity’s weak pulse and commodified medicine

Madras presidency 1924: Subsidised Rural Medical Relief Scheme
1. providing temporary annual subsidies to doctors choosing to settle down and practise privately in villages
2. an economical way of expanding health-care access in rural areas
3. The economic depression of the 1930s brought this scheme to a complete standstill
Honorary Medical Scheme (HMS)
1. initially planned to assist full-time permanent medical officers in government hospitals
2. honoraries soon started to overtake permanent doctors in an attempt to cut government spending on health.
3. Eventually, any further recruitment into full-time permanent positions (expect in cases of exceptional need) was halted.
1938: only 23% of doctors were in the public sector
There were 1,400 enterprises in 1950 and more than 10 lakh in 2010-11.
To doctors, this promised greater professional liberty, lesser restrictions, and higher incomes.
After liberalisation, the greater focus shifted to the lucrative tertiary-care sector.
Business finesse and social adroitness rather than clinical excellence and empathy become the touchstones of calibre in this market.
The National Health Service of the United Kingdom, despite having seen a number of pro-market reforms over the years, remains the single largest health-care provider, employs nearly the entire health-care workforce, and makes essential health care available to all practically free at the point of service.
A system founded on the concept of equity (which, while remunerating doctors well, is able to separate incomes from patient care decisions by and large) cultivates a totally different culture of patient care.
Things such as professional satisfaction and success come to be measured by a different yardstick, and there exists a different kind of motivation towards work, which is then bequeathed to the forthcoming generation.

Why ‘Make in India’ has failed

‘Make in India’: set an ambitious goal of making India a global manufacturing hub.
Three major objectives
1. To increase the manufacturing sector’s growth rate to 12-14% per annum in order to increase the sector’s share in the economy
2. To create 100 million additional manufacturing jobs in the economy by 2022
3. To ensure that the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP is increased to 25% by 2022 (revised to 2025) from the current 16%
The policy approach was to create a conducive environment for investments, develop modern and efficient infrastructure, and open up new sectors for foreign capital.
Gross fixed capital formation of the private sector, a measure of aggregate investment, declined to 28.6% of GDP in 2017-18 from 31.3% in 2013-14 (Economic Survey 2018-19).
Part of this problem can be attributed to the decline in the savings rate in the economy.
Household savings have declined, while the private corporate sector’s savings have increased.
Thus we find a scenario where the private sector’s savings have increased, but investments have decreased, despite policy measures to provide a good investment climate.
Policymakers neglected the third deficit in the economy, which is implementation.
While economists worry mostly about budget and fiscal deficit, policy implementers need to take into account the implications of implementation deficit in their decisions.
The spate of policy announcements without having the preparedness to implement them is ‘policy casualness’.
‘Make in India’ has been plagued by a large number of under-prepared initiatives.

Why did fail?

It set out too ambitious growth rates for the manufacturing sector to achieve.
The initiative brought in too many sectors into its fold.
The uncertainties of the global economy and ever-rising trade protectionism, the initiative was spectacularly ill-timed.

‘Make in India’ is a policy initiative with inbuilt inconsistencies.
A scenario where there is a quantum jump in the ‘ease of doing business’ ranking, but investments are still to arrive.
The economy needs much more than policy window dressing for increasing manufacturing activity.
Industrialisation cannot be kick-started by a series of bills in Parliament and hosting investors’ meets.

A net verdict that falls short of expectations

Ongoing communications blockade in the Kashmir Valley.
Court: any restrictions placed on the Internet, among other things, must meet a test of proportionality.
But judicial review, properly understood, entails more than a mere declaration of the law; it involves the application of law to facts.
Section 144 + shutdown of the Internet: more than five months
Justice N.V. Ramana: The right to freedom of speech and expression, contained in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, the Bench held, implicitly also includes a mandate to a right to information.
For, in the judges’ belief, the right to freedom of speech and expression includes within its ambit the freedom to disseminate and receive information through any means possible, including through the Internet.
“Lord Diplock’s aphorism”, that “you must not use a steam hammer to crack a nut, if a nutcracker would do.”

The basic aim that the restriction seeks to achieve is legitimate.
The state must demonstrate that it has chosen the “least restrictive” measure possible to achieve its purported objective.
The state must establish that there exists a rational nexus between the limitation imposed and its purported aim

For Brus, a permanent home

A quadripartite agreement in New Delhi on January 16 allowed some 35,000 Bru tribal people, who were displaced from Mizoram and are living in Tripura as refugees since 1997, to settle permanently in Tripura.

Centre
State government of Tripura
State government of Mizoram
Representatives of Bru organisations

The Brus, aka Reangs, are spread across Tripura, Mizoram and southern Assam.
While many Brus of Assam and Tripura are Hindu, the Brus of Mizoram converted to Christianity over the years.
Clashes in 1995 with the majority Mizos led to the demand for the removal of the Brus, perceived to be non-indigenous, from Mizoram’s electoral rolls.
This led to an armed movement by a Bru outfit, which killed a Mizo forest official in October 1997.
The retaliatory ethnic violence saw more than 40,000 Brus fleeing to adjoining Tripura where they took shelter in six relief camps.
The demand to rehabilitate the Brus in Tripura was first raised by Pradyot Manikya, the scion of the Tripura royal family.
The BJP-led Tripura government agreed.
Chief Minister Biplab Deb called the “solution” within Tripura historic, as did his Mizoram counterpart Zoramthanga.

NEWS

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