The Hindu Editorial Analysis | 5th October ’20

Table of Contents

Until vaccine

Unlock0 regulations – allowing a further expansion of public activity mainly in education, entertainment and business conferences.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center data – 60,000/day
Stringent March-April lockdown – subsequent measures to unlock the economy to prevent an equally debilitating crisis to livelihoods
Careless attitudes – continued transmission
Slowing community spread is bound to become more complicated.
Research – high prevalence of infection among children who were contacts of virus cases in the same age group.
Safe public behaviour – or pay – a heavy social cost
Polite, persuasive enforcement would be essential to reduce infection rates.
Cinemas and multiplexes to open at 50% capacity
Govt has emphasised massive recovery rates from the infection, it has failed to standardise testing and reporting methods among States, and publish fine-grained data on types of tests carried out in each State, anonymised patient histories, post-recovery status for complications and mortality.
Every effort to relieve the citizen’s fatigue over COVID-19 should be made, but the goal is to preserve health until a medical breakthrough is made.

Broken system

An important idea which provides the foundation for India’s Constitution is that citizens will be allowed to exercise their agency.
Not only is police important to ensure justice, it has also become the fallback option for governments dealing with almost any kind of emergency.
Hathras case – Sushant Singh Rajput – Sathankulam town custodial deaths – have turned the spotlight on grave lapses in police functioning.
In Hathras many aspects of the police’s treatment of the victim, her family, media and protesters have been reprehensible.
The suspension of the SP and other police officers there shows that the state itself accepts this.
Unless these flaws are addressed, India’s constitutional vision will not materialise for many people.

Criminalisation of politics
Politicisation of crime

India’s police force is ill equipped and made to work in almost inhuman conditions.
The Status of Policing in India Report (2019) pointed out that at the national level only 75.2% of the sanctioned personnel strength has been filled, in UP a mere 46.9%.
Filling these resource gaps is important but so is operational autonomy for police.
A modicum of fairness in appointments and transfers is a prerequisite for mending India’s criminal justice system.

Reading the rain

The recent southwest monsoon season (June-September) has ended with an 8.7% cumulative rainfall surplus for the country as a whole.
This comes after a 10.4 per cent surplus in 2019, making it the first time since 1958 and 1959 that India has recorded two consecutive significantly above-normal monsoons.
Moreover, rainfall has been above the long period average in as many as 13 out of the 15 months from July 2019.
And it may even prolong, especially with global weather models forecasting the current La Niña conditions, favourable for rains in India, to continue through the winter months.
Simply put, the rain gods couldn’t have been kinder, amid the economic and public health devastation wrought by the novel coronavirus.
The farm sector has since the October-December 2019 quarter — even before the pandemic — been faring better than the rest of the economy.

The recharged groundwater tables from the rain bounty, plus major reservoirs being 14.1 per cent more full than the last 10-years’ average for this time, would contribute to a bumper rabi (winter-spring) crop on top of the monsoon kharif produce whose harvesting has just started.
It means agricultural growth will outpace that of other sectors for the next couple of quarters as well.
Past GDP de-growth episodes were always accompanied, if not led, by drought-induced farm output contractions.
What’s being seen now — record foodgrain, oilseeds and possibly even cotton production even as factories, restaurants, malls and airports are still grappling with the fallout of the COVID-19-induced lockdown — is unprecedented
Exports growing for the first time since February, the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index pointing to expansion for a second successive month and auto sales rising year-on-year.
The three reform laws enabling free marketing, movement and stocking of agricultural produce should be viewed in this context.
For one, they are well-timed and send out the right signals for attracting private investment — whether in direct procurement and aggregation, cold chain and warehousing, processing or organised retailing and exports.
Secondly, they recognise the reality that India has transitioned from being a structurally-deficit to a surplus farm producer.
The challenge of finding markets for produce is qualitatively different from that of managing shortages.
The Narendra Modi government should stay the course on reforms and trust the ability of farmers and private entrepreneurs to face up to the challenge.

A commission misguided

NCPCR is the apex body for upholding, monitoring and facilitating child rights in the country.
Some of the recent actions of the Commission that suggest a grave departure from its primary duty to ensure the well-being of all children, especially children in need of care and protection.
Amongst its significant powers and duties, the NCPCR has been specifically charged with the monitoring of Child Care Institutions (CCIs) and was instructed to carry out a social audit of the same by the Supreme Court.
The social audit was initiated in 2015 and upon its completion, the NCPCR, in its wisdom, directed District Magistrates in eight States to ensure that all children within CCIs be de-institutionalised, repatriated and rehabilitated within a specified period.
Civil society organisations have raised several obvious concerns about this, especially because most of these children are in CCIs due to abusive conditions in the family, and a mandated repatriation without an adequate case-by-case assessment plan within a short period of time would likely place the children again at grave risk of abuse, exploitation and neglect.
They also point to the sheer inadequacy of current systems to organise adoption and foster care.
Juxtaposed with this diktat is the disturbing report of raids being undertaken on the eve of Gandhi Jayanti by the NCPCR in select NGO-run CCIs, in order to establish whether foreign funds have been misused in any manner.
The pandemic has exacerbated existing issues of child malnutrition, child labour, child abuse, child marriage and mental illness.
We would have expected the NCPCR to show concern for the gross violation of children’s rights during the lockdown and in its aftermath.
The NCPCR could have used its authority and power to issue recommendations to relieve these grave conditions by reiterating the need for strengthening all child-related institutions (government and non-government) through adequate funds, and appreciating the relief measures that many civil society organisations, including the ones being raided and instructed to close down, were engaged in.
As citizens concerned with the rights and welfare of children, we have also been appalled at the daily reports of Dalit children and young women being raped and murdered, with gross irregularities by the very institutions that are charged with their protection.
Undoubtedly, CCIs need monitoring and reforms; the Commission should be in the vanguard to ensure the support that would necessarily be required to implement these reforms.
Yet, it seems to be deriving its priorities from the political agenda of the day rather than upholding a steadfast and fair commitment to the welfare of children.

Transforming business and the insolvency system

The Prime Minister mentioned the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC 2016) as one of the key legislative reforms that would help aid India’s path to self-reliance on a high growth trajectory.
The IBC, along with the Goods and Services Tax regime, among other key reforms, were helping in significantly improving the ease of doing business in India and enabling it to emerge as a ‘Make for World’ platform.
He also credited these reforms for a surge in Foreign Direct Investment into India in 2019-2020, to the tune of nearly $74.5 billion, or a significant increase of 20 per cent from the previous year.
The IBC has been a far-ranging and structurally significant reform that has transformed insolvency resolution in India.
IBC has focused on time-bound resolution, rather than liquidation, as an empowering tool to support companies falling within its ambit.
It has successfully instilled confidence in the corporate resolution methodology, and perhaps, more importantly, on creating a possibility for the creditors recouping some of their investments in firms being liquidated or going in for resolution.
Its core implication has been to allow credit to flow more freely to and within India while promoting investor and investee confidence.
Despite the suspension of the IBC for a limited duration due to the COVID 19 pandemic, in the short, medium and long term, it will prove to have been a timely reform.
It will greatly streamline insolvency processes in a sustainable, efficient, and value retaining manner.
India, unfortunately, suffers from a serious backlog in court cases, to the tune of nearly four crore matters pending final judgment.
The enforceability of contracts has been a challenge.
On an average, it takes as many as 1,445 days for a contract to be enforced, and that too at a cost of nearly 31% of the claim value.
This is simply unacceptable.
Government of India is also working toward decriminalisation of minor offences.
Criminal penalties including imprisonment for minor offences act as major deterrents for investors.
The government’s intent is to help differentiate between good faith mistakes and intentional bad faith actions, so as to penalise the former, and criminalise the latter.
Other legislative measures that will further improve the investment climate, include the rolling out of the commercial courts, commercial divisions and the Commercial Appellate Divisions Act, 2015, to allow district court-level commercial courts, and the removing of over 1,500 obsolete and archaic laws.
Together with the IBC, these highlight a major and multi-dimensional effort by the government to provide comfort, relief and reliability to the potential investors.
According to the Resolving Insolvency Index, India’s ranking improved to 52 in 2019 from 108 in 2018, a leap of 56 places.
Further, the recovery rate improved nearly threefold from 26.5% in 2018 to 71.6% in 2019.
And, the overall time taken in recovery also improved nearly three times, coming down from 4.3 years in 2018 to 1.6 years in 2019.
The report of the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee speaks of the critical need for speed in the working of the bankruptcy code.
Going forward, there could perhaps be a look at institutionalising the introduction of a pre-packed insolvency resolution process, the need for which is highlighted by the necessary suspension of the IBC proceedings.
The MCA along with IBBI are working diligently on putting in place a Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) and non-MSME framework to help expedite this process.
Concerted effort should be made to enhance the role of digitally conducting all processes and hearings to achieve greater efficiency in the new normal.
Bringing in technology would help ease of access to justice and greatly help ease of doing business from a process and efficiency standpoint as well.
IBC’S further streamlining and strengthening will surely instil greater confidence in both foreign and domestic investors as they look at India as an attractive investment destination.

NEWS

PM Modi to inaugurate artificial intelligence ‘RAISE 2020’ Summit
India exceeds 140 per day per million Covid tests as advised by WHO by nearly six times
COVID-19 recovery rate in country improves to 84.1%
Around Rs. 1082 crore paid to over 41 thousand farmers for procurement of paddy on MSP: Govt
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to limit his East Asia visit to Japan only