Radhika Barman

INTRODUCTION

The 1990’s economic model initiated by the Congress Government stopped working nearly around 2012. However, the present government readapted that same model once again when they came to power in 2014. Currently, the economy is under threat like never before. During 2008 economic crisis, the government of India had admitted the problem & worked for improving it. But, today we have ablaze distractions as an agenda of pseudo-improvement, which is a direct result of modinomics instead of following the education, employment and economy rhythm.

We will now further discuss about certain reports and events that prove that our country is currently going through a quasi recession.

Features/Evidence/Example/Data

World Bank Emplacement

Recently, World Bank analysis says, that India is presently the 7th largest economy. As per, 2017 report India was at 6th place with 2 trillion dollars. However, currency fluctuations and slow growth slipped it to 7th place from the 4th place (2014). This analysis is done primarily on the basis of GDP rankings. It must not noted, that GDP formula was changed by the BJP government apparently to make the GDP look artificially higher and there have controversies regarding the credibility of the GDP position even by the new calculation formula.

Currency Value

According to IMF report, the Indian rupee has depreciated at 6.6% rate. Experts have said, the falling currency value jack up prices of imported goods such as oil and petroleum products, put an upward pressure on inflation.

World Economic Forum Competitive Index

India was ranked 58th in the annual Global Competitiveness Index compiled by Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) last year but is among the worst-performing BRICS nations this year, along with Brazil which has fallen even further to the 71st position. Presently, it is 68, which is 10 rungs below than the previous year. Poor health conditions and unhealthy life expectancy have been considered features of it.

Automobile Industry in Crisis

The past 3 years have been the most critical era for India’s Automobile Industry. The industry somehow managed to function after demonitisation and GST disasters, but by the end of 2017 , it faced severe labour and production issues. The problem increased to such an extent that by the end of 2018, many companies were forced to cut off production. The 2019 year was a nightmare for car company owners, as there has been a drastic fall in investments behind cars. Civilians have stopped investing behind cars, due to falling national income and rapid consumption denial. Crude oil prices inched up sharply in 2018, to touch $86 a barrel in early October 2018. Patchy monsoons and crash in farm prices dented rural sales.  In July/August 2018, the government increased the axle load limit for all trucks. As per CRISIL estimates, this move resulted in the increase in the freight capacity of the entire population of trucks operational in India by 20-25 per cent, equivalent to three years of incremental freight demand. Even the bank credit growth slowed. From about 12-13 per cent growth at the onset of the festival season last year, growth in vehicle loans disbursed by banks trickled down to 5 per cent by June 2019. In the 12th Annual General Meeting, Bajaj Auto Chairman Rahul Bajaj criticized the centre’s lack of efforts towards curbing the steady decline and boosting private investments in the country’s automotive sector. “The government may or may not be saying this but there are clear cut markings from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which shows a decrease in growth in the last three-to-four years. Like any government, they would like to show a happy face, but the reality is a reality,” Bajaj said.

Parle company crisis

Parle-G had been worsening since India rolled out a nationwide goods and services tax (GST) in 2017. Consumption denial especially in the rural area with slow economic growth have led to production problems in the Parle industry. The biscuit sales have fallen drastically. It is estimated that 10,000 jobs can be cut off due to such issues, in an already unemployed environment.

Restriction from revealing the truth

Several investors and experts have accepted that they are receiving calls to not speak on the economic crisis. I mean, how is this government thinking of becoming a 5 trillion dollar economy with such arrogance and insecurity. This has become a state for whom the only currency that matters is raw power which is responsible for ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions. Our great Indian democracy has become a laughing stock of monkeys.

Pernicious side of falling GDP

As per experts, if per capita monthly income grows at 4%, then the income growth will be only Rs 421. This means a 1% reduction in the growth rate has reduced per capita monthly income growth by Rs 105. In other words, a decline in the annual GDP growth rate from 5% to 4% would mean getting Rs 105 less per month. So as a total a person will have a 1260 rupees loss per year

Index of Industrial production

As per this report, India’s industrial output rate is at 7 year low. There has been a 1.1% shrank. The data showed April-August factory output growth at 2.4% well below 5.3% for the same period in the last fiscal. Lack of consumption of durable and capital goods have been considered as reasons behind this downfall by experts.

Endangered consumer price index

The consumer price index(2019) has stated that India currently has the highest inflation in the past 6 years along with a 7.25% increment.

Ignominious fast moving consumer goods industry crisis

As India’s consumption breakdown begins to bite, the focus is firmly shifting to the four big buttresses that once kept the consumer economy rolling but are now floundering. And these B’s are bikes, biscuits, briefs and boozes. This fall in sentiment has been widely attributed to listless growth of incomes. Nominal per capita disposable income in India fell to 9.5 per cent between 2015 and 2018 from a high of 13.3 per cent between 2010 and 2014.

Falling innerwear sales

Imagine, where are we leading as a so called developing economy, that we are not purchasing underwears. Yes, this sounds hilarious, but it’s a fact that innerwear sales growth fell sharply in the June quarter, demonstrating the relevance of the ‘men’s underwear index,’ as Indian consumers struggled to stretch budgets to cover discretionary spending.

Disgraceful status of physical quality life index

India has ranked 54th in this index, this year. We cannot dream to be a 5trillion dollar economy with such ranking. Anyway, what else can be expected in a nation where mob lynchers are garlanded and civilians can auction their motherland for petty bribery.

Human or cow devlopment?

India’s cow obsession is well known fact. In this country cows have better lifestyles than human beings. This also reminds me of mr. yogi adityanath’s statement , ‘ we have came here to serve cows not humans.’ Anyways, coming to the point, we have scored a mere, 0.64 in human development index. And just, for the information of the nationalists, Pakistan has scored 0.564,which demonstrates where exactly we are leading.

CAUSES

Stock Market Juncture

The Sensex is at 39,161.41 points. Inappropriate market sentiments have been noticed , which has led to a situation where the investors had to sell their stocks. And eventually, the prices fell down. Rising random tax cuts have also declined the purchasing power of the real estate investors. With 197.57 points which is 0.51% the stock market has imploded like never before. Due to this, low capital formation and increment in cost of capital has occurred, which are direct consequences of a falling economy. Capital formation and capital savings have substantially effected.

Lack of investment

An economy , especially the one that dreams of becoming a 5 trillion dollar economy by 2024, can never function without investments. India has had, the lowest investments between the period of 2018 – 2019. The heavy industries, have been assailed brutally, primarily due to the reluctance of private bodies. Also, as I mentioned before this is not 1990, we have to bring in structural and behavioural changes in also spheres of the economy. Generally, Indians are unwilling to invest in stock market. But, at this situation when the banking system is jammed shut and PSU’s are been murdered, we have to take the risk of investing in share market. The economy will remain stagnant otherwise. Share marketing is generally avoided, due to fear of losses and lack of financial understanding. This timid attitude of Indians in general is another cause behind this economic emergency.

Falling exports

India has a high national debt with 70% of GDP, while its fiscal deficit remained at 3.4% of GDP. In top 20 markets, India has less than 1% market share, figuring marginally in Chinacentred supply chains, but not much in Europe or US-centred ones. India has only 2.5 goods in the Chinese market. Low access to more consumers and businessmen, homogeneous market opportunities, and frequent diplomatic issues are the direct consequences of low export earnings. Btw, recently, India has been declared as the second largest country for beef (yes beef) exportation. ‘Holy’ sh*t! Isn’t it? As per the index, there are 1.6 million beef exporters residing in India! But, alas, they are the same people giving nationalism lessons to our country. Hope our great democracies stop tending to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, as our politicians pretend to be even more stupid than nature made them. I doubt if the government of India even knows, how many zero’s are there in 1.6 million metric tons.

Rupee blow up

One dollar equals to 70.94 rupees today. As a result there has been slower GDP growth, negative multiplier effect, domestic firms are neglected from the benefit of increased sales leading to unemployment in the export industries. Rupees has terminated itself to the worst performing currency in Asia.

Class disparity

Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of income and opportunity between individuals or different groups in society. Let us understand this better by classifying it into different sections.

The Global Gender Gap Report, 2018, ranks India at 142 among 149 countries.

Four parameters for measuring gender inequality are economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, educational attainment and political empowerment.

Gender wage gap is highest in India according International Labor Organization women are paid 34% less than men.

Women comprise over 42 per cent of the agricultural labour force in the country, yet they own less than 2 percent of its farm land according to the India Human Development Survey (IHDS).

Caste is significant factor for determining access to resources like education, income, health valued by individuals.

India’s upper caste households earned nearly 47% more than the national average annual household income, the top 10% within these castes owned 60% of the wealth within the group in 2012, as per the World Inequality Database.

Religious identities are significant for an individual’s ability to mobilize resources.

Religious identities can cause prejudices which may lead to economic exclusion and other forms of discrimination which can impact jobs and livelihood opportunities.

While minorities such as Christians, Parsis and Jains have a larger share of income/consumption than their population share, Muslim and Buddhist populations have significantly lower access to economic resources.

Tribal communities in India have been identified as ethnic group on the basis of their unique culture, language, dialect, geographical location, customs etc.

The National Family Health Survey 2015-16 (NFHS-4) showed that 45.9% of ST population were in the lowest wealth bracket as compared to 26.6% of SC population, 18.3% of OBCs, 9.7% of other castes.

More than the existence of the unequal distribution of wealth among the people, the gap of difference between the classes have increased like never before. This unaccepted difference is a factor behind poor development indicators like IMR, MMR, low per capita income, lower education and learning outcomes at schools, high rate of population growth can be traced to existing socio-economic inequalities.

Rising oligopsony

It is a state of the market in which only a small number of buyers exists for a product. There is no demand in the market. Consumption denial and of the fallGNP are the major criterions behind the present crisis. Our social denial and arrogance are too responsible. But this not because suppliers have increased and are at competing ends but because people are not been able to afford goods and services due to low income, unemployment, less GDP , underemployment and anticipation of punitive hard and fast sudden decisions of the government. Indians are residing in an atmosphere of fear.

GDP labyrinth

The GDP calculation formula has been changed to make the figures look artificially higher. Several reports including reports from government bodies have been dismissed in order to hide the truth. During, demonitisation India lost 2% of it’s GDP, which is pathetic. Presently, India is running in 5% GDP. However, that too is debatable. Seeing the present situation, it can’t be more than 2%.

Capture of institutions

Our democracy is under threat like never before. Institutions in India today, are like caged parrots but now the wings of the parrots have been cut. Due to excessive government interference institutions are in a state of ignominy towards the economy. The systematic destruction of institutions in India today, has sent the economy in long time paralysis. Meanwhile, our legacy is stinking with worms. Democracy has become a mockery of monkeys in India today.

Technological backwardness

Another very important bottleneck in the way of economic growth is the scarcity of technical know-how and skilled personnel. These elements of productive power take long in building up and foreign technicians are very costly. But the government which can spent 100 crores per head to purchase MLA’s can certainly invest in technology. But in India technology is limited to radar theory of Mr.modi and cow urine cures cancer discovery by non other than terrorist Pragya Singh thakur who is an MP also of this illegal government.

Bank frauds

The most insightful example is of the PMC bank case. Infact, the arrogance of the owners after the expose have raised tensions. Multiple incidences of protests by the public in general have occurred. There have been individuals who were unable to pay surgery fees, education fees and infact many people died due to financial crisis during an emergency. This is brutal. The country is going through a severe economic crisis. The brutality done in pmc banks is incongruous in an environment of deep recession. From RBI stealing case to this, Mr. 56inch of this illegal government have shown their real chest size .

Fake currency

No matter how many pseudo-gps chips are inserted in the 2000 rupee note, counterfeiting didn’t stop at all. It has increased to an extremely high level. The Introduction of 2000 rupee note has made the accessibility of counterfeiting more easier even. What is more shocking is that the RBI did not print a single 2000 rupee note this year. After deteriorating the economy, the precarious government looted RBI to satisfy it’s fascist aspirations. While there has been an indirect acceptance of demonitisation failure,the contemptible finance minister remains clueless being doubly stereotyped to economy.

Anti intelletualism

Now this is certainly a very important factor. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life,nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. The disdain for modern and scientific knowledge, intellectuals and academics, books, research, and celebrating mob mentality as subaltern’s vengeance, are all pointing towards one fact: India is walking backwards towards the age of barbarism and base instincts. After all, nothing much can be expected from a circus ruled by a prime minister who got degrees from two universities simultaneously in a non-existent subject. And this is one of the reasons, intellectualism is not well accepted in this government and rational decision is not made by real experts. According to this government any man speaking sensibly is a leftist. What else can be said!

Global trade wars

If you switch on the television today , the only thing this news channels will show is that this that country is responsible for India’s economic crisis. Global matters are responsible. India is not guilty. Mr.modi is innocent. But these kind of stupid justifications can’t erase the reality. Now , the point is that yes there has been an impact on Indian economy by global trade wars but not as substantially how the media is presenting. This hyperbole attitude of the Indian media today has made it a grammar of anarchy with regards to democracy. The moth- eaten journalism is wrecked with holes, flawed in it’s structure, thereby punitive in it’s design. Biased media is the biggest contributing factor to Indian fascism. Anyways coming to the point, there have been crude oil price hikes, import and export fluctuations and other trade pricing policing differences but couldn’t this be sort out by a shrewd diplomacy? This happens when diplomacy implies with no agenda meetings, photo op sessions and teleprompter speeches with fancy taglines and cheesy quotations to a dumb and deaf audience. And the audience consists of the residents who reside in the atmosphere of fear.

Stagflation

Stagflation is a combination of stagnant economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation. It’s an unnatural situation because inflation is not supposed to occur in a weak economy. In a normal market economy, slow growth prevents inflation. As a result, consumer demand drops enough to keep prices from rising. Random unnecessary tax rate fluctuations, GDP down fall and useless monetary policies have caused stagflation.

Corruption

Corruption and the modi government goes hand in hand. Last year, the modi Government had passed a new law in Lok Sabha. Investigative agencies now need permission from the government before investigating any kind of corruption on any government officer / minister. It’s like requesting for Osama Bin Laden’s permission before calling him a terrorist. This government had also legalized corruption by the Introduction of the electoral bonds. Mr.modi and capitalism are connected. Some say it’s a friendly relationship, some love relationship. However, it’s a divine spiritual tryst, perhaps, economy calls it electoral bonds which are hard to be separated.
One must wonder, what makes this government so insecure inspite of having the institutions in India , a paralysed caged parrot whose body is stinking with worms. In truth, the invisible PM’s domination has increased.

Predominancy of the agricultural sector

Indian is an agriculture based country, where more than 50% of population is depend on agriculture. This structures the main source of income. The commitment of agribusiness in the national income in India is all the more, subsequently, it is said that agriculture in India is a backbone for Indian Economy. The contribution of agriculture in the initial two decades towards the total national output is between 48% and 60%. However, the workforce of the agricultural sector, is under a severe threat. Cost of chemicals,seeds,agricultural equipment has been increased for already indebted farmers. They don’t have direct integration with the market. Crop failure,unsustainable production,water crisis, interstate water disputes & indebtedness have lead to farmer suicides. The farmers in India are being treated like the pseudo urban naxals.

Low rate of capital formation

Capital formation is a concept used in macroeconomics, national accounts and financial economics. It is used also in economic theory, as a modern general term for capital accumulation, referring to the total “stock of capital” that has been formed, or to the growth of this total capital stock. Mostly, due to falling national income, lack in demand in capital, underemployment, backwardness of technology, lack of effective fiscal policy, low investments and unequal distribution of income.

Rapid population growth

The 1.3billion population is also a major problem. The effect of population growth can be positive or negative depending on the circumstances. A large population has the potential to be great for economic development: after all, the more people you have, the more work is done, and the more work is done, the more value (or, in other words, money) is created. So, surely this can be nothing but good. There’s a reason that farmers often have a lot of kids – more kids means more workers. And due to rising population, wants are increasing and resources are decreasing, making the economy suffer more.

Underemployment

It is the condition in which people in a labor force are employed at less than full-time or regular jobs or at jobs inadequate with respect to their training or economic need. As per reports, many companies in India have stopped hiring people only on the basis of degrees.

Consumption denial

Recently, Mr.Piyush Goyal has commented that the E-commerce sites must not offer discounts and bumpers. I would like to say that, Individuals who make their abodes in vitreous edifices would be advised to refrain from catapulting perilous projectiles. Moreover, Indian economy cannot function without foreign trade flow. Consumption denial is the major hindrance, which can be countered via bumper sales.

Distractions

This government very well knows it has failed like anything, thus , distractions are placed in public domain to hide the incompetency. Have you ever seen any news channel recently, talking about 5% GDP growth? No right! Kashmir, Pakistan and other nonsense is daily broadcasted. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction- the pitiable fact of Paid media journalists. Spurious realities are manufactured by the media ; we are bombarded with pseudo-realities! The economy is under threat like never before. During 2008 economic crisis, the govt of India had admitted the problem & worked for improving it. But, today we have ablaze distractions as an agenda of pseudo-improvement, which is a direct result of modinomics.

Demonitisation

How can we forget 8th November, 2016!? This was the event, the country will never forgive.

Let’s recall our memories regarding Demonetization
☞Over 99% of banned notes back.
☞Cash at home with a 7 year high rate.
☞Bank deposits have fallen sharply.
☞Corruption still going on
☞Swiss bank matters not solved.
☞ Patients suffered because hospitals refused cash.
☞People died in queues. (150+)

Then let us see some more facts;
➡November 2016: “I have only asked for 50 days. Give me time till December 30. After that, if any fault is found in my intentions or my actions, I am willing to suffer any punishment given by the country.”~Narendra Modi
➡August 2018: “99.3% demonetized notes back with RBI.”~Central bank

You know what, demonetization wasn’t a failure. It achieved what Modi wanted – agriculture, jobs & small businesses destroyed for the benefit of his friends like Ambani-Adani. In the year after demo, while economy collapsed, Ambani & Adani’s turnover increased by 77% & 125%.

Production problems

While, the government is under a deep slumber, India is facing severe production problems. Lack of innovation in production process, planning, machine capability etc were rampant.Shortage of skilled persons in the market. ITI and other technical training centres are producing the skilled labor who are using old technologies and they are not a “ready fit for market”. Industries had to invest in them to bring them to a level. job opportunities for today’s young generation is more and due to this, few are working in Manufacturing Industry. Now this has an impact on the growth and affecting the economy too.

Elasticity of demand

Price elasticity of demand (PED or E_d) is a measure used in economics to show the responsiveness, or elasticity, of the quantity demanded of a good or service to a change in its price when nothing but the price changes. More precisely, it gives the percentage change in quantity demanded in response to a one percent change in price. The short-run price elasticities vary: −1.35 in agriculture sector, −0.65 in residential sector, −0.26 in commercial sector, −0.45 in HT industry, −0.32 in the industrial sector. 

Child labour

10.13 million child labourers between 5-14 years in India (2011 census data). Child labour in 2011 has decreased by around 20 percent from 2001 census are 22.87 million working children in India between 15-18 per 2011 census, one in 11 children are working in India (5-18 years). 80 percent of the child labour in India is concentrated in rural areas.ILO 2016 data indicates that there are 152 million working children in the world between 5-17 years, of which 23.8 million children are in 16 peIndia. Percent of the working children (or every 6th working child) in this age group is in India.

GST

The NDA moth-eaten GST is wrecked with holes, flawed in its structure,thereby punitive in its design. It has destroyed small and medium sized business along economic growth.

Data Scam

I personally think data scam is the biggest scam of this government. We the citizens of india do not know how many farmers died, how many people lost jobs, how many women are raped in our own country & etc; since the past 3 years. So barbaric😔 but again #ModiHaiTohMumkinHai!😬 . Infact, the 5% GDP growth data released has raised controversies. Experts have claimed there are substantial chances of it being false.

Budget 2019

Petrol price increased by ₹2.5
Diesel price increased by ₹2.4Many predicted this would happen as soon as Elections are over, And it did. Some would argue Govt wants to promote Electric Cars, but they are still too costly for middle class even after 5% GST + Tax Deduction.

Unemployment

No wonder mr.modi made educated youth a Chowkidaar, as a proxy for unemployment replaced by pakodanomics perfidy. It will be difficult to reawaken our tryst with destiny in 2024. It has turned to a tryst with a nefarious sinister republic(if you still call it). As per the NSSO report, unemployment rate in India is at 45 year low.

Social intolerance

The biggest hindrance to India’s growth is social disharmony.Our fractured social fabric has been repeatedly sent to paralysis by the growing intolerance in India today. Keeping aside, current GDP rate & other statistical analysis. economy in the world, can never develop even towards 1trillion dollar, by preaching hatred, by going in a blitz with it’s own people and most importantly by the very existence of intolerance. Indeed, it’s New India where intolerance which was once a joke has become reality. And those aspirations are turning into anger, the mind is with fear, the head is held not high , knowledge is not free & the social fabric has been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.

SOLUTIONS

We will now further discuss the solutions for the present Economic crisis. The ones written in purple don’t color are the tasks which the government can initiate and the ones which are written in green don’t colour are the ones which an individual perhaps the society in large can initiate. It’s our collective responsibility to revive the falling economy.

Acceptances

Acceptance plays a role here in solutions.
We Indians are amused in the glorification of our country in the drunken dilemma of nationalism, thus, we don’t accept that anything wrong can happen in this nation. You see , Economic issues don’t have one singular solution hence, firstly, we have to also remove this ignorant attitude that at least we have done this, at least we have launched this program. You can’t use the what at least when you are a policy maker just to hide your incompetence. Secondly, whataboutism! We need to seriously stop this attitude of whataboutism.
We must acknowledge that before our nation gets even more destroyed in the midst of already driven fascism. This government, has gone in a blitz with it’s own people. This warfare ultimately has no where to go beyond tyranny. However, we can’t deny the fact, that fascism rises with public support.The undeclared emergency in India has risen with the votes of sheeplians. It’s high time we need to understand this before we go any further. Our Indian society, is residing in illusions, perhaps, in a paradise of foolish persuasions like a virtual world. The government and society both are responsible for the present situation. Both have absolutely equal value contribution. However, it’s negative in nature . I can’t even see a desire, forget about effort. We Indians have become, lazy , timid and meek towards the issue. We are busy finding, inventing rather excuses, justifications and other irrational argument. The amount of time we spending behind the task of hiding our ignorance, had that much desire, effort, energy and time was spent behind the economy of this nation, India would be far more developed today. So how, literally HOW, we are going to solve Economic issues, if we don’t accept them, talk about it, discuss about it and eventually draft policies regarding it.

The education, employment and economy tagline

Education system in India today is wrecked with holes. The moth-eaten structure of it reveals that the message going to the next generation is one of hatred, bigotry and intolerance. Being victims of WhatsApp University gyaan the youth today gets subjugated to distorted history. But, it’s actually education that is the core way of bringing people to right path in hope of a progressive nation. Education is the key to development and integration of a country. As per reports, most educated Indians are not employable, because the education provided to be them in theory and practice is not up to the mark. So we need , to improve the educational infrastructure, which will lead to employment opportunities. And if there are employed youths with capability then the problem of underemployment can be avoided and will usefully impact the economy.

Entreupenership encouragement

The government must setup an Enterprise Support Agency to help entrepreneurs, including start-ups, with all-round business support, including counselling, incubation; access to technology, funding, domestic and export markets; and the creation of new products, services and intellectual property. The government must start regulatory forbearance for Micro and Small Enterprises. They will be exempt from all applicable laws and regulations (except the Minimum Wages Act and tax laws) for a period of 3 years , or, in the case of new businesses, from the date of commencement of business. This means freedom from ‘Inspector Raj’ until they stabilise. It must promote ‘Mass Entrepreneurship’ and support entrepreneurs to replicate tried and tested models of businesses in order to meet the growing demand for such goods and services.

Ease of business

India climbed 23 points in the index to 77th place in 2019, becoming the top ranked country in South Asia for the first time and third among the BRICS. However, in reality, it’s a false narrative. Be it by income tax raids, demonitisation, GST , finance bill(2017) , budget(2019) , inflation, inappropriate tax cuts, the list goes infinite. Now, the most important thing the government can do and should do is to simplify GST to one layer for ease of business.

Self employed

As I have repeatedly said before also, the reason underemployment is rising because of we are not educated without books. We are failing to prove ourselves in non-academic fields. We are lacking of practical skills. Making the problem of unemployment increased further. So we must educate ourselves without books too. We must make ourselves more employable, by developing and exploring more skills. So, that companies hire us more comfortably. We must also strive make us CV more creative with more content. Times have changed. You need to be a multi Tasker. And referring to the current situation, you require to be multi talented.

Mutual funds

As i have said before times have changed. Structural, behavioural and functional change is necessary for the blood of economy to generate haemoglobin cells. Just like the stock market the mutual funds are also an important place for investing. In fact, it is more safer than the stock market. The mutual funds are more simple and non complicated. The country has entered a quasi recession , in order to exit from here, the middle class section of the society needs to invest. As dividends and other interest income is declared for the fund, it can be used to purchase additional shares in the mutual fund, therefore helping your investment grow. As I have said, your investments need to be diversified. The mutual funds help you diversify your investments. When you invest only in a single security, you could risk a loss if the market crashes. However, you can avoid this problem by investing in different asset classes and diversifying your portfolio. If you were investing in stocks and had to diversify, you would have to select at least 10 stocks carefully from different sectors. This can be a lengthy, time consuming process. For instance, if you invest in a mutual fund that tracks the NSE Nifty you would get access to as many as 50 stocks across sectors in a single fund. This could reduce your risk to a large extent.

Bring intellectuals

There have been series of RBI resignations. You know what, we must not blame mr.modi for deteriorating our economy. It’s like asking Hitler to play music. This government has no idea what to do. They are clueless about how to survive in this type of situations when the country has entered a quasi recession. Normal sitaraman shows arrogance in press, and says this is rule you have to follow. Little did she remember, she is has the responsibility of a law maker and India is not an absolute anarchy, that laws have to rigid and not flexible. But who cares? This government only knows how to ban. This government believes ban is the solution for everything. This government needs to bring in intellectuals who can handle the situation.

Independence of institutions

One must wonder, what makes this government so insecure inspite of having the institutions in India , a paralysed caged parrot whose body is stinking with worms. In truth, the invisible PM’s domination has increased. But that’s not how democracy is going to function. This insensate government has made a statue of Sardar Vallabhai Patel but, the idea of India he believed in has not been established. Independence of the institutions is needed. If government interference dosen’t reduces , then the economy cannot function at all.

Increase in bank rate

In order to establish a harmonous environment in the banking sector. The first thing that’s needed to do so, is to increase bank rates. Deposits rates have been falling over the past few months, much to depositors’ anguish. Many banks have cut the rates they offer on fixed deposits by 0.3-0.5 percentage points, even by a higher 0.75 percentage points in some cases. Following SBI’s footsteps, many banks are now looking to link deposit rates to RBI’s repo rate, hence deposit rates can fall further in the coming months. For starters, if you have surplus funds, don’t let them idle in your savings account. Remember, banks offer a meagre 3.5 per cent on your low value savings deposits. In case of SBI, its savings deposit rate (for over ₹1 lakh deposit) is linked to RBI’s repo rate — 2.75 per cent below repo rate — which implies a very low 2.65 per cent on savings deposits. Reports suggest that other banks are likely to link their deposit/loan rates to the repo rate soon.

Increase in cash reserve ratio

Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) is the share of a bank’s total deposit that is mandated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to be maintained with the latter in the form of liquid cash. Another objective of CRR is to keep inflation under control. During high inflation in the economy, RBI raises the CRR to lower the bank’s loanable funds. Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) is one of the main components of the RBI’s monetary policy, which is used to regulate the money supply, level of inflation and liquidity in the country. The higher the CRR, the lower is the liquidity with the banks and vice-versa. During high levels of inflation, attempts are made to reduce the flow of money in the economy. For this, RBI increases the CRR, lowering the loanable funds available with the banks. This, in turn, slows down investment and reduces the supply of money in the economy. As a result, the growth of the economy is negatively impacted. However, this also helps bring down inflation.

Reduction in government expenditures

Be it in wasting 3600crores behind statue of unity, 100crore in horsetrading MLA’s, bullet train, Gau Seva, troll army management, media marketing, the government of India really needs to reduce it’s expenditures, especially behind such useless stuffs.

Emphasis on agricultural sector and land reform policies

The development of agriculture, to a considerable extent, depends on the adequate expansion and development of irrigation, credit, transport, power, marketing, training and education. It also depends on the improvement of research and development and other such facilities.

Reduction in transfer payment

A transfer payment is money paid to an individual who has not performed any service or rendered any goods for it. Transfer payments are ways for local, state, and federal governments to redistribute money to those in need. Transfer payments are considered income and are potentially taxable. This needs to be decreased.

Reduction in fiscal deficit and revenue deficit

The difference between total revenue and total expenditure of the government is termed as fiscal deficit. It is an indication of the total borrowings needed by the government. While calculating the total revenue, borrowings are not included. A revenue deficit occurs when realized net income is less than the projected net income. This happens when the actual amount of revenue and/or the actual amount of expenditures do not correspond with budgeted revenue and expenditures.

Increase in the minimum alternative tax revenue

Minimum Alternate Tax is a provision in Direct tax laws to limit tax exemptions availed by companies, so that they pay at least a minimum amount of corporate tax to the government. The key reason for introduction of MAT is to ensure minimum levels of taxation for all domestic and foreign companies in India. But, capitalism and modi Government goes hand by hand. They have waived corporate tax. In this situation, the corporate tax needs to be increased instead of reduction.

Economic planning

Economic planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources between and within organizations which is held in contrast to the market mechanism. The last Economic plan was from 2012-2017. It was the twelfth plan. However, a thirteenth year plan did not come up because the planning commission got dissolved in 2017. The Niti aayog replaced the planning commission. This was a massive catastrophe done by the government of India. The Niti aayog needs to be scrapped out. They crawled down the line tyranny when they were asked to bend. However, trapped in the concentric serrations of a convoluted illegal govt d citizens are not seeking an honourable exit from this labryinth.

Reservation on economic criterias

Reservation essence was historical inequality and underrepresentation, not poverty. It is a question of representation of people who have been denied that in institutions for millennia. Financial assistance must be distributed by making the income of an individual the touchstone instead of his/her caste. Giving the marginalised label is also a denial to their cardeur. It must not seem like a favour if we are serious regarding the protection of the SC/ST/OBC. Systems of oppression kill opportunity, spirit and resilience. We must understand that understand that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can’t liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality—the fact that along different axes, we’re all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged. Equality is essential, equality implies equal respect regardless of caste not inspite of caste.

Gandhian economy

Gandhian economics is a school of economic thought based on the spiritual and socio-economic principles expounded by Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. It is largely characterised by rejection of the concept of the human being as a rational actor always seeking to maximize material self-interest that underlies classical economic thinking.

Gandhian economics do not draw a distinction between economics and ethics. Economics that hurts the moral well-being of an individual or a nation is immoral, and therefore sinful. The value of an industry should be gauged less by the dividends it pays to shareholders than by its effect on the bodies, souls, and spirits of the people employed in it. In essence, supreme consideration is to be given to man rather than to money.

The first basic principle of Gandhi’s economic thought is a special emphasis on ‘plain living’ which helps in cutting down your wants and being self-reliant. Accordingly, increasing consumer appetite is likened to animal appetite which goes the end of earth in search of their satisfaction. Thus a distinction is to be made between ‘Standard of living’ and ‘Standard of life’, where the former merely states the material and physical standard of food, cloth and housing. A higher standard of life, on the other hand could be attained only if, along with material advancement, there was a serious attempt to imbibe cultural and spiritual values and qualities. The second principle of Gandhian economic thought is small scale and locally oriented production, using local resources and meeting local needs, so that employment opportunities are made available everywhere, promoting the ideal of Sarvodaya– the welfare of all, in contrast with the welfare of a few. This goes with a technology which is labour-using rather than labour-saving. Gandhian economy increases employment opportunities; it should not be labour displacing. Gandhi had no absolute opposition to machinery; he welcomed it where it avoids drudgery and reduces tedium. He used to cite the example of Singer sewing machine as an instance of desirable technology. He also emphasised dignity of labour, and criticised the society’s contemptuous attitude to manual labour. He insisted on everybody doing some ‘bread labour’. The third principle of Gandhian economic thought, known as trusteeship principle, is that while an individual or group of individuals is free not only to make a decent living through an economic enterprise but also to accumulate, their surplus wealth above what is necessary to meet basic needs and investment, should be held as a trust for the welfare of all, particularly of the poorest and most deprived. The three principles mentioned above, when followed, are expected to minimise economic and social inequality, and achieve Sarvodaya.

Annihilate crony capitalism

Mr.Modi is known for his penchant for lying and social decimation as he are a strong pillar of support for the theif sections of society in their quest for empowerment of crony capitalism.
His autocracy has become the nature of all souls. This needs to end, by bringing more transparency in the corporate world.

Priority sector lending

Priority Sector Lending is an important role given by the (RBI) to the banks for providing a specified portion of the bank lending to few specific sectors like agriculture and allied activities, micro and small enterprises, poor people for housing, students for education and other low income groups and weaker sections. The government must increase the rates of it, especially in agricultural sector. In 2012 , when the economic model had stopped functioning, it was the agricultural sector that handled the GDP.

Infrastructure

APJ Abdul Kalam had called infrastructure the muscle, blood and bones of the economy. Infrastructure plays a vital role in developing the economy. Economic infrastructure refers to the facilities, activities and services which support operation and development of other sectors of the economy. These facilities, activities and services help in increasing the overall productivity of the economy. In addition, infrastructures are such basic requirements like railways, roads, ships, airways, communication, etc. They also include energy, banking, science, technology, health, education and other public utility concerns. Without the existence and presence of economic infrastructures, the growth and fast pace of the economy is impossible. Moreover, infrastructures of an economy are also termed as ‘social and economic overheads‘. They concern with the supply of such services as to meet the basic needs of a society. In simple words, social infrastructures refer those basic services such as education and training. It also includes health and sanitation, drinking water, housing, sewerage, etc. Social infrastructures are also termed as ‘social overheads’. These social overheads indirectly support the economic systems. They indirectly increase the productivity and the economy sees the impact after some time. Social infrastructures lead to growth in the long run. Physical infrastructure is those infrastructures which directly concern themselves with the needs of such production sectors as agriculture, industry, trade, etc. In simple words, physical infrastructure directly supports the economic production. They also directly support the process of production and distribution in the economy. A few such examples are energy, irrigation, transportation, telecommunication, banking, insurance, technology, finance, etc. Physical infrastructures, however, directly increase the productivity and the economy sees the impact immediately. They also lead to an immediate growth in the short run. So, these things need to improve. Infrastructural facilities are very necessary and vital for the smooth functioning of the economy. They are like wheels of development without which the economy will not be able to function properly.

Bank awareness

Be aware about the condition and position of your bank. Be aware, whether your bank is under any controversy or not. And keep your self updated about the affairs of the state.

Save

We need to get into the saving habit, like anything. Even though it is pretty obvious, but still stop wasting. Purchase only absolutely neccesary goods and services.

Take care of loans

Don’t fall in an interest labryinth. Pay off the debts, as early as possible.

MNREGA

Mnrega days and wages increment will generate more employment and stability for the middle class section of the society.

Create an emergency fund

This government has become frantic in it’s extreme sadomasochistic actions. In the drunken dilemma of nationalism, the naked sheeplians doth nothing but fall as a prey in it’s labyrinth. Institutions have died. And, let’s not even talk about the the herd of cattle. Anything can happen anytime. Thus, it’s advices the create an emergency fund in advance, before the govt takes any lethal step.

Invest

As I mentioned before this is not 1990, we have to bring in structural and behavioural changes in also spheres of the economy. Generally, Indians are unwilling to invest in stock market. But, at this situation when the banking system is jammed shut and PSU’s are been murdered, we have to take the risk of investing in share market. The economy will remain stagnant otherwise. Also, the investments need to be diversified in various different sectors instead of one singular source.

The flow strategy

Keep the money flowing in. If you have a job, be an amazing employee. Now is not the time to slack. Show up early, stay late, and volunteer for projects. Pick up the slack for other workers; it’s what will happen when people get laid off, anyway, so now is the time to prove yourself. Look for ways to save your employer money, especially if you see your employer doing little things to that effect, like encouraging employees to turn of their computers. Try to quantify your efforts in terms of how you’ve raised profits and cut costs. Start networking so that in case you still get laid off, you have a safety net of contacts who might be able to help.
If you don’t have a job, find other ways to make money fast. Focus on cutting your expenses, as described in the previous step, and consider volunteering; if you’ve got the spare time, there are organizations that will need your help, and you could establish good karma in your community.

Deflation

There is a serious need of deflation in our country today. As I have said, consumption denial has impacted the economy. By deflation, prices will get decreased, and the consumption of goods and services especially of the FMCG goods will get increased.

Risk management plan

Develop a risk management plan. If you haven’t already done so, create a plan for what to do in the event of a recession. This risk management plan should include a set of actions you plan to take in the event that you lose business or customers due to an economic downturn. After all, it will be easier to think of what to do before a recession that in the heat of the moment as your employees are panicking and unsure of what to do. Make sure to create concrete steps to follow and then transmit the plan to other managers or partners so that they can follow it as well.

Cross train your employees

Cross-train your employees. If you do end up letting some employees go, you will need others to step into their roles. This is why it is important to cross-train your employees for various roles within the business. This is best if done before it is needed.

Rationing

Rationing is the controlled distribution of scarce resources, goods, services, or an artificial restriction of demand. Rationing controls the size of the ration, which is one’s allowed portion of the resources being distributed on a particular day or at a particular time. This measure has been working under few state governments in India, successfully. However, taking in consideration of the current Economic situation, it needs to be a centralized step as well.

NYAY

Congratulations to Dr Abhijit Banerjee and his wife Esther Duflo for jointly winning the Nobel prize on Economics. Nobel Laurette Abhijit Banerjee had helped in the of making poverty elevation scheme NYAY. However, NYAY faced strong criticism from pseudo-bhaktnomists, on grounds of it’s fiscal practicality. This clearly goes to show that we as a nation have no where to go beyond tyranny. Besides, Dr. Banerjee, other great economists and experts where also consulted for NYAY. NYAY was required for consumption demand increment. Consumption demand and fall of GNP are the major criterions behind the present crisis. Our social denial and arrogance are too responsible. He was a JNU student, Harvard graduate and the man behind NYAY scheme. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. The disdain for modern and scientific knowledge, intellectuals and academics, books, research, and celebrating mob mentality as subaltern’s vengeance, are all pointing towards one fact: India is walking backwards towards the age of barbarism and base instincts.

Harmonious environment

We need back the India that didn’t believe in binaries. The one which did not subscribe to black and white ideology. Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high ,where knowledge is free and where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. The incredible heritage that has brought more than a billion imaginations to light needs to be protected.

CONCLUSION

The economy is decimated. The rupee is on its knees. Petrol is at an all time high. The stock market has imploded. Twelve Lakh crore in nonperforming assets and the banking system is jammed shut. The informal sector has been decimated as a result of demonetisation and an extremely complex multi layered GST. Millions of small and medium business have been wiped out. This is the price of hatred. Aspiration is turning into anger. However, there is a ray of hope for your survival rather our survival. We need to convert ourselves from sheeplians to civilians. Awareness, acceptance and implementation can create wonders.

Where is Lynchistan heading towards? This remains one of the unanswered yet notable questions whose answer shall illustrate the destruction caused by modi version 2.0.

Recently, a 50-year-old man, accused of child lifting, was killed by a mob in the Dhanbad district of Jharkhand. Just three days before this incident, on Tuesday, six people – three from Jharkhand and three from Uttar Pradesh – were mercilessly beaten by separate mobs on the suspicion of being child-lifters in Jharkhand’s Koderma district. On the same day, an unidentified man in his 40s was thrashed by yet another mob in Ramgarh district on the suspicion of child lifting. The man succumbed to his injuries while being taken to a hospital in Ranchi.

These events came despite the fact that a few months ago, Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das had asserted that “mob lynching or other crimes and anarchy won’t be tolerated” in the state. According to media reports, more than 20 cases of mob lynching have been reported in the last three years across the state, in which more than a dozen people have been killed.

The reasons for these incidents range from allegations of beef consumption or transportation to the practice of witchcraft and child-lifting. What is even more worrisome is that these cases are not limited to Jharkhand alone.

The first mob lynching in Independent India took place on 13th August 2004. Bharat Kalicharan, alias Akku Yadav (1972 – 13 August 2004), was a 32-year-old rapist and murderer in India who, on 13 August 2004, was lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar. Yadav was stabbed over seventy times, and chili powder and stones were thrown in his face. One of his alleged victims also hacked off his penis. This lynching occurred in the Nagpur district court, on the marble floor of the courtroom. The women who killed him claimed that Yadav had been raping and abusing local women with impunity for over a decade, and that the local police had refused to help his victims or pursue charges as Yadav was allegedly bribing them. Yadav had also reportedly murdered at least three people and dumped their bodies on the railroad tracks. The lynching reportedly occurred when Yadav spotted a woman he had raped and called her a prostitute, enraging the crowd and the rest is history.

Multiple cases of mob lynchings have been registered in Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh. Several cases have also been reported in the south Indian states of Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala. In other words, mob lynching has almost become a national phenomenon.

Opportunistic leaders exploit the powerlessness experienced in a world that is increasingly globalized and is domesticated by the bureaucratic state and multinational capital. They are quick to redirect the frustrations with the dissolution of community life into anger aimed at those seen responsible for their suffering. Predictably, minorities are the scapegoats.

‘Minorities’ is arguably the most ubiquitous tag used against muslims,christians,jains and etc including dalit,adivasi,OBC,schedule caste/tribe and etc; , and yet it’s nearly impossible to define. This nebulous, unquantifiable quality of the tag is what makes it so distressing – there’s no way to disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And because it’s meant to be more of an identity than a label, it’s a term not easily shaken off. And members under this tag are often the victims of toxic prejudice through mob lynching which has both socio-political aspects to it.

Factors that led to the rise of lynchings:

Jai Shri Ram- Slogan or Caution?

All religion seems to need to prove that it’s the only truth. And that’s where it turns demonic. Because that’s when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

In Barpeta district in the north-eastern state of Assam, a group of young Muslim men were assaulted and then made to chant slogans like “Jai Shri Ram”, “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (long live Mother India) and “Pakistan murdabad” (death to Pakistan).

In the commercial capital Mumbai, a 25-year-old Muslim taxi driver was abused, beaten up and told to chant “Jai Shri Ram” by a group of men. Faizal Usman Khan said he was attacked when his taxi broke down and he was trying to fix it. His attackers fled after a passenger called the police.

And in the eastern city of Kolkata, Hafeez Mohd Sahrukh Haldar, a 26-year-old Muslim teacher at a madrassa (religious seminary), was heckled while travelling on a train by a group of men chanting “Jai Shri Ram”.

He told reporters that they made fun of his clothes and beard, and then insisted that he also chant the slogans. When he refused, they pushed him out of the moving train. Mr Haldar was injured, but lived to tell the tale.

The slogan-shouting and heckling is no longer restricted to the mob and the streets. Worryingly, it has also entered parliament.

In villages across north India, devout Hindus have traditionally used “Ram Ram”, “Jai Siya Ram” (goddess Siya or Sita is Ram’s consort) or “Jai Ram Ji Ki” as a greeting.

And many feel a sense of unease that these attacks and killings are being carried out in the name of a god revered by millions for his sense of justice and benevolence.

But “Jai Shri Ram” has now been turned into a cry of attack, meant to intimidate and threaten those who worship differently.

Infact, right after the BJP’s stunning victory in May, Mr Modi expanded his earlier slogan of “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (development for all) to include “sabka vishwas” (to win the trust of everyone), giving rise to hopes that this term would be different.

A few days after Tabrez Ansari’s death, he told parliament that he was “pained” by the incident and that “the guilty must be severely punished”.

But many Indians doubt that any serious action will be taken against those who carry out such attacks. There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head.

Fake WhatsApp Forwards

The Indian WhatsApp lynchings are a spate of mob-related violence and killings following the spread of rumours, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the WhatsApp message service. The spate of lynchings commenced in May 2017 with the killing of seven men in Jharkhand, but did not become a national trend until the beginning of the following year. Fake messages customised with locally specific details are circulated along with real videos attached to fake messages or claims.

Lynchings, however, did not remain limited to religious hysteria. The same conditions – easy spread of rumours using social media, an apathetic or incapable administration and a mercurial population – meant a spate of mob violence with varied motivations.

On June 27, 2017, a mentally ill woman was lynched in West Bengal after a 14-year old child went missing in the area with and rumours of Bangladeshi child abductors being active in the area. In June, 2018, a mob in Assam beat two young men to death – again on the suspicious on being child lifters. During the assault, the victims pleaded with the assaulters that they were Assamese – even listing their parents’ names but the mob did not listen. May 2018 saw multiple mob attacks in Andhra Pradesh of Hindi-speaking people as false rumours spread that child abductor gangs from Bihar and Jharkhand were active in the state. Two months later, five men from a nomadic tribe were beaten to death in Maharashtra.

Mob violence, vigilante justice and outbreaks of mass panics have a long history in India, but they have tended to be localised events. What differentiates the Indian WhatsApp lynchings of 2017–2018 is that social media has enabled acts of violence to be filmed and shared across the country in such a way as to build upon and perpetuate an atmosphere of fear and misinformation that instigates further violence in unconnected locations. For example, video of a lynching in Karnataka has been linked to a spate of violent lynchings in Maharashtra.

The only movement on the issue has been from WhatsApp, by far India’s most popular mobile phone messaging service. In July, 2018, the company limited forwarding of messaged to five chats at a time in a bid to curb rumours. But that alone cannot solve the issue.

Last mob lynching via WhatsApp was on July 28,2018 in Madhya Pradesh. A 29-year-old from a neighbouring district was suspected of being a child kidnapper and set upon by a mob wielding iron bars and bamboo rods. They threw the body in a well where it was discovered a week laterLast mob lynching via WhatsApp was on July 28,2018 in Madhya Pradesh.

Political motivation

We should not believe two types of people in this world. Firstly, a religious leader who promotes politics and secondly, a politician who promotes a particular religion, When religion and politics ride in the same cart the whirlwind flows as both are equally perilous.

Those who believe politics and religion do not mix, understand neither. As Indians, we are fundamentally insane and in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s. In India we have more discussion on religion than hunger and poverty.

It is a kind of politics going on in India today that denies democracy’s ideal for equality. That creates war among its own people. That strives to impose one particular right wing ideology over a billion ideologies that had binded India together over the decades. It is fascist in nature, toxic in its structure yet has created a chaotic labyrinth. The word hindustaan has converted itself to LYNCHISTAAN- where populism latches on to the politics of winners and losers to mobilize psychically potent resentments and anger against the supposed outsiders responsible for the pain of the “people”.

Over the last five years, India has seen an outbreak of religious hate crimes, with an average of one happening every week. Many of them have drawn mass protests, social media outrage, hashtags and even a response from the government.

But one particularly heinous case has fallen through the cracks and has drawn little attention and outrage, despite the brutality and injustice experienced by the victims.

The politics of hatred and communal polarisation is irreparably damaging our social fabric. We need to reject any politics that targets people because of religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

While liberalism is captured by the idea of an overlapping consensus these political opportunists flow the communal whirlwind.
We are deeply & inescapably religious, and religion cannot be defined restrictively as the worship of a supernatural deity alone.

The brutal lynchings across India that have sickened our nation, are the direct consequence of that kind of politics. India runs by love not hatred! Sadly, lynchers are garlanded too by politicians.

In April this year, 55-year-old Prakash Lakda, a member of a Christian tribe, was lynched by a mob of Hindu villagers who suspected him of slaughtering a cow in the central Indian state of Jharkhand. Three other tribals from his village were also attacked, leaving them grievously injured.

Social Intolerance

Lynching is born of fundamentalism not of religion. Their roots are socio-political condition. Religion is only used as a divine tool of authoritative justification in the search of absolution for fascists. The irony is, we just have enough religion to hate each other but not enough to love each other. Hindutva is fundamentally anti democratic. It seeks to resolve the crisis of governance by building a Hindu nation with a ressentiment driven majoritarian politics that reduces the minorities to second class citizens. Also antithetical to democracy is the neoliberal market based ideology that treats the market as the underlying principle of all domains. Modi has pursued neoliberalism while deploying hindutva to manage the state society relations convulsed by democratic mobilization.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ Such fascism is just the trailer of New India.

Another important aspect explaining why mob lynching incidents continue to take place is because as a society, the idea of the so-called form of ‘instant’ justice is immensely popular. This means that society feels duty-bound to intervene in matters – without even understanding the issue – as rightly pointed by psychologist and Supreme Court advocate Anuja Trehan Kapur.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
There is nothing wrong in believing in God. There is everything wrong in believing in a religion. Lynchings are not caused by supposed religious loyalty but by radical terrorists who held an extremist interpretations in which human life is of little value. India seriously needs to understand that tolerance is not a sign of weakness.

It is a neglected but essential fact that we cannot appreciate the relationship between religion and violence unless we grasp the nature and meaning of the two partners in this relationship.Yet our understandings both of religion & violence are inadequate.

There are no government statistics of hate crimes in India but there are a few media outlets that have attempted to track them. According to IndiaSpend, there have been 117 gau raksha-related incidents of violence in India since 2015. As per Quint, there have been 88 people killed in lynchings since 2015 across India.

Poor governance

The intertwined shadows of populism harnessed by strong men and authoritarianism hanging over democracy in the present invite us to pay attention to the challenges it faced in the past 1975.

The apex court, while hearing the case of Tehseen Poonawalla vs the Union of India on 17 July 2018, gave a detailed order addressing the issue of mob lynching. The court observed, “Mob vigilantism and mob violence have to be prevented by the governments by taking strict action… Rising intolerance and growing polarisation expressed through [a] spate of incidents of mob violence cannot be permitted to become the normal way of life or the normal state of law and order in the country.” The court issued guidelines to be followed by the state governments to curb mob lynching.

A little over a year has passed since the apex court issued these guidelines. So far, three states have given legislative backing to the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court. Manipur was the first state to do so followed by Rajasthan and West Bengal. The Manipur government initially promulgated an ordinance in November 2018 and a few days later the state’s legislature passed the Manipur Protection from Mob Violence Act. Rajasthan and West Bengal have used the Manipur law as a template. Last month they enacted a law to prevent mob lynching in their respective states. The Supreme Court’s guidelines to prevent lynching are at the heart of the laws passed by these three states.

The court formulated a three-pronged approach to putting an end to mob lynching. The first step requires states to take preventive steps to ensure that lynching does not occur. The court’s guidelines mandate the states to identify regions where lynching could occur. The guidelines also prescribe that in every district a senior police officer should be designated as the nodal officer to take measures to prevent lynching. They specify that the nodal officer should take steps to prevent the creation of a hostile environment against any community or caste. The officer is also required to prevent the spread of messages or videos that could incite mobs. Also, regular situational review and coordination meetings between police and state administration are part of the preventive approach prescribed by the court. The guidelines categorically state that every police officer shall be duty-bound to disperse a mob which may cause lynching.

In case the preventive measures fail, the court’s guidelines prescribe remedial measures which include protection to witnesses, legal aid to victims or next of kin and time-bound completion of judicial proceedings. The guidelines also direct the states to create a scheme to provide compensation to victims of lynching/mob violence. The final step in the court’s approach to curbing lynching is to hold the police or district administration officers accountable for their negligence in preventing incidents of lynching.

The laws passed by the Manipur, Rajasthan and West Bengal have incorporated most of the Supreme Court’s guidelines. These laws define lynching as an act of violence by a mob on the grounds of religion, caste, sex, place of birth, language, dietary practices, sexual orientation, political affiliation and ethnicity. They also define “offensive material” whose spread has to be checked and what constitutes a “hostile environment”. But the laws of the three states are not entirely similar.

For example, the Manipur law empowers the state government to impose a collective fine on the inhabitants of an area if the government is satisfied that they are involved in lynching or a connected offence. The Rajasthan law does not have this provision. The two states also differ in their approach to holding police officers responsible for their failure to prevent lynching. Manipur’s law punishes its police officer with one year’s imprisonment while the Rajasthan law does not have a similar provision. However, the two states have the same punishment for the act of lynching. They provide that in case of the death of a victim of a lynching, the perpetrators of the crime will be punished with rigorous imprisonment for life. The West Bengal law, on the other hand, provides the death penalty as the maximum punishment for this offence.

State administration’s insensitive/lackadaisical approach tantamounts to giving such mobs a virtual free hand.Does government need to be reminded that protecting our plurality & diversity is it’s constitutional obligation? But the government is blind and deaf.

Stringent laws are not the only solution to a problem. They are part of the solution set and have to be supplemented with other measures. For maintaining law and order in the states, the most important requirement is that of an adequate, professional and responsive police force. Data from the Bureau of Police Research and Training points to gaps in the police forces of our states. For example, our police forces are severely overburdened. In 2017, state police forces had a 21.8% vacancy in their ranks. They also face constraints in their mobility and weaponry.

A recent report by Delhi-based NGO Common Cause and CSDS on policing in India provided a vital clue about why incidents of mob lynching continue to take place despite the Supreme Court’s intervention. According to the report, “35% of police personnel interviewed for the survey think it is natural for a mob to punish the “culprit” in cases of cow slaughter, and 43% think it is natural for a mob to punish someone accused of rape.”

If such an overwhelming number of police personnel think that mob lynching is a ‘natural’ act for certain crimes, its not hard to assume why they would not try to prevent it or act against it.

This also explains why – as revealed by a report published in 2017 – the police registered cases against the victims and survivors of mob lynchings in 30% of the cases, and why, in 5% of the attacks, no report of the attackers being arrested was recorded.

Moreover, given the state of the police and judiciary in the country, there is a wide-ranging perception that ‘culprits’ go unpunished, and that there is a chance that the accused in heinous crimes like rape, child lifting and cow-slaughter will go scot-free.

Furthermore, an analysis of several cases clearly shows that there is a higher level of acceptance of such so-called forms of justice if the perceived crime is allegedly committed by a Muslim, Dalit, Christian or tribal. As a study published in EPW noted, the discrimination faced by Muslims and Dalits “continue to blight the very institutions designed to create a fairer society.”

As per Hate Crime Watch, a FactChecker.in database, Muslims, who constitute “14% of India’s population, were victims in 60% of hate crimes; Christians, 2% of the population, in 14% cases; and Hindus, 79.8% of the population, in 14% cases.”

Moreover, the Common Cause and CSDS study also revealed that “50% cops feel Muslims (are) naturally prone to crime.”

So strong is the force of the mob that even the Opposition has been muted on the issue. The Congress has said little on how it intends to tackle lynchings and neither have any of the other parties in North and West India even as the general elections approach.

Hindu Khatre mein hain narrative

Deemed as threats to the very existence of the nation and community, muslims have become targets of majoritarian desire to inflict pain to avenge their projected grief. The spectacle of anger victors theatrically mocking and taking sadistic pleasure in the plight of their defeated ‘alien’ tormentors is all to visible globally. This is exactly what kasaab believed in. No difference at all. Brainwashing in the name of protecting the religion leads to unprotected human race. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. As long as people use violence to combat violence,we will always have violence. It’s not a catalyst. The mob lynchings going on in India on the name of religion is an utter disgrace not only for this nation but for global existence of humanity as well. Such religious wars caused by the spirit of intolerance is the total eclipse of human reason.

Casteism

Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors. The caste based discourse addresses democracy’s concern with equality. Father of the constitution, B.R.Ambedkar had called casteism the grammar of anarchy. Casteism is the breeding ground of hatred that has distorted humanity. Something totally unacceptable in 2019. There have been multiple cases of caste based lynching towards dalits recently. Pathetic state of affairs!

Islamophobia

We are reading the srcipt jaish wants us to read, which is one of hatred. With nationalism now hijacked by hindu majoritarianism, the defense of minority rights can summon no history of popular struggle on its behalf. Populist mobilization under hindu nationalism. particularly from the aspiring urban classes, continues to provide mr.modi with formidable support. The breeding ground of this support is islamophobia. On 25th July, 2019 a video went viral across the internet where a kid possibly of 4 to 5 years of age was been repeatedly slapped by an elderly person to chant Jai Sri Ram. This blatant perhaps unacceptable islamophobia defines whether this government is really a sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman. The kid was crying, he could not even speak.

‘Terrorism Has No Religion’ ; this is not just a phrase but a supposed universal truth itself. Terrorism justification from a communal angle eradicates the principles of not only that religion itself but the humanity and the entire mankind perhaps.

Preoccupation with real evil is the difference between right & left. Today right is preoccupied with fighting Islamism; left is preoccupied with fighting ‘Islamophobia’,while liberalism stands tall and balanced- that’s where pluralism lies.

Cow Protection

Hindutva ideologies dismiss those protesting the lychings as elites whose supposed rootless cosmopolitanism is out of step with the so called culture of popular hinduism. They label critics as enemies of national unity and the development desired by majority. Little did they know, in their way of protecting cows they have dismantled humanity. If cow is holy and sacred, then whats the purpose behind the creation of mankind- to create holy sh*t out of supposed holy acts which holds no ground of spirituality but only prejudice? Well, apparently yes. At least thats what seems like.

The lynching of Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan serves as a classic example. In this case, the state police filed a chargesheet for cow smuggling against the deceased who was lynched by a mob of self-styled gau rakshaks – who were eventually acquitted – in Alwar for transporting cattle in 2017.

According to a Reuters report, a total of 63 cow vigilante attacks had occurred in India between 2010 and mid 2017, mostly since the Modi government came to power in 2014. In these attacks between 2010 and June 2017, “28 Indians – 24 of them Muslims – were killed and 124 injured”, states the Reuter’s report.

In 2015 Business Insider reported that vigilante attacks on trucks carrying cattle had increased in Maharastra. In 2017, Bloomberg reported that according to the meat industry representatives, cow vigilantes have been stopping vehicles, extorting money and stealing valuable livestock. Cow vigilante activity also increased during the run up to 2015 Bihar Legislative Assembly election. BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi said the election was “a fight between those who eat beef and those who are against cow slaughter”. The Economist argued in 2016 that cow vigilantism can sometimes be a profitable business. It pointed to an Indian Express investigation that found that vigilantes in Punjab charge cattle transporters 200 rupees ($3) per cow in exchange for not harassing their trucks.

The most recent of such lynching was at Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh on 9th August ,2019. A driver was assaulted by five persons, including a woman, they broke the windows of the vehicle, overturned it and disrupting traffic, who were later arrested by the police. The driver was transporting carcasses of dead cattle to disposal plant in Chhajarsi village but the cow vigilantes were spreading fake news about cow slaughter to the crowd which created ruckus.

Analysing the reasons for the vigilantism, academic Christophe Jaffrelot has said that the RSS is attempting to transform society from within through a sense of discipline which it believes is needed for defending Hindus more effectively. He also has stated that the Hindu nationalists do not want the state to prevail over the society, and want the society to regulate itself, with an importance on social order and hierarchy, that is part of Hindutva ideology. According to him, this Hindu nationalist approach gives the act of policing a greater legitimacy and it is clearly synonymous with the populist behavior, since for the populist leader, the people and their will prevail over the law and institutions. Jaffrelot further remarks

But again the dystopian future of India awaits more surprises and as mr.modi recently said what happened in India in the recent few months of his tenure was just a trailer and the main picture is still left. Although, he labelled it as development works and one must wonder if injecting bigotry in the society is DEVELOPMENT, but certainly in New India it is. New India; New Norms, perhaps. All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us:Them, good:bad and white:black. Even if another government comes to power in 2024, such extremism is not bound to end. For it is clear that the purpose of a remedy is to cure; but if the remedy should only aggravate the complaint it had better be left alone. Any religion which is not a cause of love and unity is no religion.The dastardly act of lynching has no easy solution. The responsibility of state legislatures should not be limited to enacting a law providing strict punishments. State legislatures need to be continuously involved with the issue. Their involvement should extend to an in-depth discussion with respect to budgetary requirements of police and judiciary and a continuous holding to account of the state administration for every unlawful act of lynching in the state. Hence, until and unless there is a realisation, coupled with accountability, that punishing the culprit, no matter how grave and heinous the alleged crime, is not the duty of the citizens, let alone the mob, there won’t be any pause in cases of lynchings. In fact, people have to understand that their act of providing ‘instant justice’ is nothing but in itself a serious crime. And a crime cannot be countered by another. Whenever someone thinks of Indira Gandhi, the first word that comes to their mind is – “EMERGENCY”. 50 years from today, whenever someone will think of Narendra Modi, the first word that will come to their mind will be – “MOB LYNCHING”

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2019 was introduced by the Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Dr. Harsh Vardhan in Lok Sabha on July 15, 2019. The Bill defines surrogacy as a practice where a woman gives birth to a child for an intending couple with the intention to hand over the child after the birth to the intending couple.

The Bill prohibits commercial surrogacy, but allows altruistic surrogacy. Altruistic surrogacy involves no monetary compensation to the surrogate mother other than the medical expenses and insurance coverage during the pregnancy. Commercial surrogacy includes surrogacy or its related procedures undertaken for a monetary benefit or reward (in cash or kind) exceeding the basic medical expenses and insurance coverage.

Surrogacy is permitted when it is: (i) for intending couples who suffer from proven infertility; (ii) altruistic; (iii) not for commercial purposes; (iv) not for producing children for sale, prostitution or other forms of exploitation; and (v) for any condition or disease specified through regulations.

The intending couple should have a ‘certificate of essentiality’ and a ‘certificate of eligibility’ issued by the appropriate authority.

A certificate of essentiality will be issued upon fulfilment of the following conditions: (i) a certificate of proven infertility of one or both members of the intending couple from a District Medical Board; (ii) an order of parentage and custody of the surrogate child passed by a Magistrate’s court; and (iii) insurance coverage for a period of 16 months covering postpartum delivery complications for the surrogate.

The certificate of eligibility to the intending couple is issued upon fulfilment of the following conditions: (i) the couple being Indian citizens and married for at least five years; (ii) between 23 to 50 years old (wife) and 26 to 55 years old (husband); (iii) they do not have any surviving child (biological, adopted or surrogate); this would not include a child who is mentally or physically challenged or suffers from life threatening disorder or fatal illness; and (iv) other conditions that may be specified by regulations.

To obtain a certificate of eligibility from the appropriate authority, the surrogate mother has to be: (i) a close relative of the intending couple; (ii) a married woman having a child of her own; (iii) 25 to 35 years old; (iv) a surrogate only once in her lifetime; and (v) possess a certificate of medical and psychological fitness for surrogacy. Further, the surrogate mother cannot provide her own gametes for surrogacy.

The central and state governments shall appoint one or more appropriate authorities within 90 days of the Bill becoming an Act. The functions of the appropriate authority include; (i) granting, suspending or cancelling registration of surrogacy clinics; (ii) enforcing standards for surrogacy clinics; (iii) investigating and taking action against breach of the provisions of the Bill; (iv) recommending modifications to the rules and regulations.

Surrogacy clinics cannot undertake surrogacy related procedures unless they are registered by the appropriate authority. Clinics must apply for registration within a period of 60 days from the date of appointment of the appropriate authority.

The central and the state governments shall constitute the National Surrogacy Board (NSB) and the State Surrogacy Boards (SSB), respectively. Functions of the NSB include, (i) advising the central government on policy matters relating to surrogacy; (ii) laying down the code of conduct of surrogacy clinics; and (iii) supervising the functioning of SSBs.

A child born out of a surrogacy procedure will be deemed to be the biological child of the intending couple. An abortion of the surrogate child requires the written consent of the surrogate mother and the authorisation of the appropriate authority. This authorisation must be compliant with the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971. Further, the surrogate mother will have an option to withdraw from surrogacy before the embryo is implanted in her womb.

The offences under the Bill include: (i) undertaking or advertising commercial surrogacy; (ii) exploiting the surrogate mother; (iii) abandoning, exploiting or disowning a surrogate child; and (iv) selling or importing human embryo or gametes for surrogacy. The penalty for such offences is imprisonment up to 10 years and a fine up to 10 lakh rupees. The Bill specifies a range of offences and penalties for other contraventions of the provisions of the Bill.

However, women are once again being asked to use their bodies for the greater good without getting paid for it. Sperm donors will continue to get paid. Men in general are masters of their bodies. But women’s bodies need to be regulated, policed and legislated into dependence. Such seems to be the way of the world. I mean why cannot we look beyond the women question? Why cannot we see a problem beyond the identity and the gender that person holds? Why not make laws, making human values the touchstone regardless of gender? Why create so many societal classifications for an already complicated issue as a direct consequence of the submissive attitude of our Indian society?

There is clear evidence of malpractice surrounding commercial surrogacy in India. Middlepeople take most of the money, and women are robbed of the income that they deserve. It is also alleged that surrogates are not allowed to choose whether to become surrogates – they are forced into the business by their greedy families.

But even as this brief sketch makes clear, the problem with surrogacy lies in the structure of the workplace, not with the work itself. Rather than implementing ways for paying women directly into bank accounts in their names, making doctors accountable for the welfare of surrogates, and insisting that social welfare workers monitor every surrogacy from start to finish and beyond, the government has done what it does best: it punishes the weakest sections of society. In the name of saving The Poor Indian Woman, it ties her into even greater networks of poverty.

We have seen such narratives before: let us rescue people who do not have a voice by taking away their voice altogether. This has been the ideological bedrock of patriarchy and colonialism and multiple forms of domination across time. Let’s save the women by not allowing them out of the house. Let’s save Dalits and Muslims by ghettoising them. For their own good. The threat of “danger” is wheeled in to curtail opportunities and freedoms.

But the problem is not with the colonised or the women or the Dalits or the Muslims: the problem is with us. It is with us who are in positions of power. It is with us who legislate against weaker sections of society in order to make them weaker still, and utterly dependent on us for their welfare.

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill is in the service of a patriarchy that insists women be dependent on men for their financial well-being. From rich to poor, from white to brown and black, this is the fate in store for women around the world. Some of us fight against this script by using our education in our favour. Many of us do not have the advantage of such education and such privilege. But all of us have our bodies. And universally, we are encouraged to use our bodies to sexually satisfy men and bear offspring. This we are allowed and encouraged to do because in our society a women’s body is a graveyard of societal convictions or tombstones inscribed with centuries of shame.

So why not monetise what we are sanctioned to do? One of the arguments that has been made in favour of the bill is that surrogates are not given the choice of whether to carry someone else’s child, and they are therefore being taken advantage of. But this argument immediately begs two questions, one rhetorical and the other logistical, but both principled.

First, how many women in India are given the choice of when and to whom to get married to and whether to have children? They are simply expected to comply with the dictates of marriage and childbirth because that is what women are expected to do.

Second, if that is the case, then why not pass a “Marriage (Regulation) Bill” or a “Childbirth (Regulation) Bill”? If even the possibility of such bills seems absurd to us, then it is because we have completely naturalised violence against women, and completely forgotten that in fact millions of us have no choice whatsoever about bearing children. So again, I ask: why not make money out of the one thing that we are universally allowed to do?

Because it would make us financially viable, and therefore less dependent?

With the passage of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, women will be cut off from what could be a guaranteed source of income. Motherhood will be mystified as sacred, and women will be punished for being independent. The wrongdoers will continue to do what they do, and women will find that their choices – meagre enough to begin with – have shrunk alarmingly.

Instead, infertility clinics find legal loopholes or move surrogate mothers across borders. These activities expose surrogate mothers to great risks. Commercial surrogacy cannot be eradicated by placing a domestic ban on it.

When India first banned surrogacy for gay couples in 2012, various infertility businesses in Delhi continued to sign on gay clients from all over the world. To avoid the ban, infertility clinics moved surrogate mothers across international borders into Nepal. This emerging trade route between Delhi and Kathmandu halted when an earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, 2015, killing 8,000 people and injuring more than 21,000. While various governments airlifted babies belonging to their citizens, the fate of the Indian surrogate mothers and how they got back home remains unclear.

This kind of illegal activity is nearly inevitable if commercial surrogacy is banned. It will place surrogate mothers in dangerous situations that lie beyond the scope of law enforcement and beyond the knowledge of the Government. Thus, it is very difficult to ban commercial surrogacy the way this verdict attempts to. All it does, is ban legal commercial surrogacy.

Then, there is also the case of IVF and recruitment of surrogate mothers from other countries who were then implanted with the embryo in Mumbai by an infertility specialist, and then flown back to their own country. This is a loophole because in this manner, the ‘practice’ of surrogacy goes on, in the absence of Indian surrogate mothers and Indian intended parents.

With a ban on commercial surrogacy, India could end up in a condition similar to that of Cambodia. In Cambodia, surrogate mothers from Phnom Penh are being sent to Bangkok, Thailand to deliver babies. Thai law bans commercial surrogacy transactions, but enforcement agencies are unable to distinguish surrogate mothers in hospitals from other pregnant women. Cambodian surrogate mothers are also being sent to Laos, where there are no laws, to deliver babies in clinics staffed by Thai doctors who once worked in Thailand when commercial surrogacy was still legal there.

Evidently, all that a ban accomplishes is uproot the trade from one country and plant it in another. Also, illegal surrogacy has already grown to become a $2 billion industry, banning it will push it further underground and only contribute to the illegality of it all. It will create an international problem thereby widening the scope of commercial surrogacy and only benefiting the process. The problem with this is, it aggravates the presence of commercial surrogacy by not just taking it outdoors (out of the concerned country), but also by placing the lives of the surrogate mothers on slippery ground. It therefore, becomes an illegal trade which is difficult to monitor for the domestic government and evidently, does not contribute positively to the country’s global image. Furthermore, this makes surrogate mothers very vulnerable because of their helplessness. The surrogacy agencies provide housing and health facilities, and regulate their income. The lives of women become uncertain and powerless because they cannot terminate their contract upon their will. They are dependent on the agency. Additionally, because it is an illegal trade, they cannot seek legal remedy for any kind of abuse, financial issues, or medical malpractices, and in a new country, they are not in a position to object to the procedures adopted by the surrogacy agency.

The alternative is heavy regulation of commercial surrogacy, quite contrasting to the consequences of the ban. Supporting surrogacy with proper screening, adequate documentation, and strict selection of cases in a supervised environment would have been more considerate, in comparison to a ban which is a very extreme step.

Further, an actionable solution would be proper legislation to regulate surrogacy, which the government has stated in the Surrogacy Bill that provides for the formation of a National Surrogacy Board, State Surrogacy Boards, and appointment of appropriate authorities for the regulation of the practice of surrogacy. Surrogacy clinics should be licensed, authorised, and audited. However, adopting these measures and banning commercial surrogacy are two steps in opposite directions. In order to judiciously utilise these provisions and facilities, we should be permitting commercial surrogacy.

Even the arguments that oppose surrogacy from the sociological perspective can be easily debunked with a simple change in the social perception of surrogate mothers, which is not being brought about by replacing commercial surrogacy with altruistic surrogacy. Surrogate mothers should be treated as complete human beings who have the right to know who the intended parents are, the right to choose how they get pregnant, the right to determine which contracts they sign, the right to refuse cesarean surgeries, and the right to maintain contact with the babies they birthed. As long as the bodily autonomy, integrity, and dignity of surrogate mothers is respected, commercial surrogacy should remain a permissible act. This, can again be achieved with an appropriate degree of government intervention and formulation of comprehensive contracts.

A prohibition of commercial surrogacy is a glaringly regressive move considering that India has had some very progressive legal reforms in the previous year.

Hence, the answer is definitely not prohibition. The answer is regulation. But, of course, a ban is an easier way out because stricter regulation demands better legislative machinery and infrastructure. Ban culture, as a whole, is a convenient escape from accountability, on part of the government. A ban on surrogacy shifts responsibility and repercussion, from the government to the people.

The idea that commercial surrogacy is exploitative is a myth, because it views surrogacy from the lens of medical exploitation only. It is crucial to note that commercial surrogacy is simultaneously, a source of income for many unemployed women.

And, altruistic surrogacy is another form of exploitation in itself. It will lead to emotional abuse of female relatives by making surrogacy, a social obligation. It will just transport reproductive labor from the markets to the households by making women’s reproductive capacities into a free resource available for unquestionable consumption within families. Furthermore, since it is supposed to be altruistic in nature, the relatives cannot demand any compensation for the physiological risks of gestation that are a part of pregnancy, not to forget the emotional implications as well. This is just another form of labor, that is both emotionally and socially detrimental.

Any force on a close relative either emotional or otherwise can amount to forced labour violating Article 23 of the Constitution. This brings us to question the legitimacy of only providing medical compensation to surrogate mothers, opposing, feminist decisions of the court and states that restricting surrogacy to only married couples within the hetero-normative, patriarchal structure of conventional, Indian society is an act of inequality. It states that this bill infringes upon the right to reproductive autonomy and interferes with the personal decisions of the intending parents. However, the compensation a surrogate gets only empowers her family. The government should not rely on feminist views to articulate its position. Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees ‘equality before the law and equal protection of laws to all persons’. Article 21 guarantees ‘protection of life and personal liberty of all persons’. Restricting conditional surrogacy to married Indian couples and disqualifying others on the basis of nationality, marital status, sexual orientation or age, does not appear to pass the test of equality and there is no connection with the intended objectives of the proposed legislation.

Instead of viewing commercial surrogacy as a means of exploitation, why not look at it as a source of income, as a profession, as providing compensation for services delivered? Surrogacy is too high a price to pay for altruism.

Additionally, the debate against commercial surrogacy is similar to the debate against sex work. The body is not being ‘sold’, it is being appropriately utilised in order to earn a livelihood. It is very easy to defame a profession with populist remarks, it is very easy to ban a whole industry and not provide any subsequent compensation to the stakeholders. The Government should provide monetary reparations to the women whose families are now at stake due to a lack of stable income and make immediate provisions for a minimum wage allowance (unemployment allowance) or create compensatory jobs. The Government is liable to provide financial compensation. The surrogacy bill has only made surrogate mothers more vulnerable to exploitation because of their joblessness, such a blanket ban on surrogacy will only turn out to be more distressing for women previously engaged in the practice.

Well, the bill is anything but feminist. The regulatory rationale seems to be centered on two axes—the notion of an ‘ideal”’family and ‘commerce’ in reproduction.

The Surrogacy Bill places women in a position of mandatory altruism which is a form of exploitation, regardless of who enforces it and whether it occurs with a household or outside one; exploitation and forced labor are not relative and subjective concepts, and altruism may not always be voluntary. Close relatives who are women are subject to being forced into surrogacy that is assumed to be altruistic and voluntary. Do you see how this Bill will inevitably place women in an insecure position? Gender violence can occur and has occurred within families before, and because it takes place within families, women feel emotionally abused and incapable of seeking redressal. After all, speaking up against a relative is far more difficult than speaking up against a professional surrogacy agency.

And as far as the feminism context is concerned , i would like to say that Feminism is not about annihilating ideas that are different than yours on womanhood but embracing prideness of your gender individually. But in modern feminism in India this conceptually wrong noesis is breeding blindness like an artificial stimulant with its first effect being heightening of conciousness and then with increasing dose it gets muddles and brings a jubliant persuasion that is misleading. A feminist’s fight isn’t just against the patriarchy; it’s against all systems of oppression and even my own privilege. Let us think critically about the systems we rely on as a society, and realise the full spectrum of womanhood in its various hues. We must understand that understand that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can’t liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality—the fact that along different axes, we’re all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged.

It is interesting that the phenomenon of commercial surrogacy is found to be objectionable only because the woman acting as the surrogate receives remuneration. Apart from this aspect, there is no difference between what is known as commercial and altruistic surrogacy. This Bill will only rob women of an income for rendering services that they’ve always rendered.

Also, by making surrogacy a moralistic argument, medical concerns have been sidelined. The post-natal requirements of surrogate mothers have not been attended to. he bill has also left out the commercial and profit-driven industry of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), which is overwhelmingly found in the private healthcare sector. Infertility treatment using ARTs and IVF has been available commercially in India for over three decades now. Yet there is no regulation that governs this sector. Though guidelines were formulated by the Indian Council of Medical Research in 2005, they are not legally binding. While it is important to debate surrogacy, at the same time, the ARTs industry, which drives it, must also be regulated.

Hence, surrogacy is only a specialised part of the bigger industry of assisted reproduction; solely regulating commercial surrogacy will not bring about any major changes in the industry.

Banning commercial surrogacy will send the booming medical tourism industry crashing to its doom.

Many Indian fertility clinics and banks advertise online, providing a range of information for overseas clients from countries such as Britain, the United States, and Australia. It is a lucrative, $400 million-a-year business with over 3,000 fertility clinics across India that recruit poor, uneducated women to carry the embryos of others through to birth. The industry sees it as a win-win situation: childless couples see their dream come true with a genetic child and the impoverished Indian surrogate mother gets a generous income. The surrogate mothers are the primary beneficiaries in the surrogacy process, particularly from the financial perspective.

The surrogacy tourism industry not only supports individual women, but also the economy as a whole. About 80 percent of babies born through surrogate mothers are taking place for foreigners, not Indians. Medical tourism companies have made significant profits from commercial surrogacy by using sophisticated Internet-based strategies to market comprehensive services to prospective fertility patients. Designed to bridge the distance between healthcare consumers in developed countries on the one hand and healthcare providers and surrogates in developing and transitional-economy countries on the other, these services depend on low prices and lack of regulation in India to keep costs and hassles to a minimum. Fertility tourists come to India in search of surrogates from a wide range of countries, including Britain, France, the United States, Canada, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Middle East, and Israel. The discrepancy between access to treatment at home and access abroad is perhaps the most significant contributor to the growth of fertility tourism in general and commercial surrogacy in particular. Hence, it is clear that the surrogacy industry has contributed significantly in sustaining the Indian economy. With a large clientele overseas, Indian infertility clinics received significant revenue through commercial surrogacy. Evidently, commercial surrogacy as a practice is not the problem, the problem is its repercussions which can be controlled with stringent regulations.

According to the amendments approved by the cabinet, commercial surrogacy including sale and purchase of human embryo and gametes will be prohibited while, the health ministry stated, “ethical surrogacy to the needy infertile couples will be allowed on fulfillment of certain conditions and for specific purposes.” The amended Surrogacy Bill aims to benefit “infertile married couples who want to avail ethical surrogacy” and protect the rights of surrogate mothers and children born out of surrogacy.

There is an elementary problem with this- the necessity of marriage which again, indirectly restricts commercial surrogacy. Why is access to surrogacy limited to married couples? When live-in couples are recognised under the law, why not permit them to form a family? Necessitating marriage will also lead to psychological stress between couples who desire to have a child, and surrogate parenthood is premised on the notion of providing the opportunity of parenthood to everyone incapable or unwilling to have a child naturally. The restriction on single parents is unjustified too, because in many cases, single parents have successfully nurtured children.

Also, according to the Bill, surrogacy will only be permitted to couples, married for at least five years and who cannot conceive a child naturally.

Another thing, which freezes my blood, is the existence of homophobia in a bill belonging to a democratic republic which is meant for a supposed civilized society. The bill prohibits homosexual couples, live-in relationships couples to opt for altruistic surrogacy. Homosexuality is immutable, irreversible and nonpathological, denying them from their reproductive rights is a disgrace to humanity. I mean are we serious?

Why Can’t Surrogacy Be An Openly Accessible Option? Why Is Infertility A Necessary Prerequisite? Under the Bill, ‘infertility’ is a condition that has to be medically proven by a couple to be eligible to commission a surrogacy. The Bill defines infertility as the inability to conceive after five years of unprotected sex or medical conditions preventing a couple from conception. This definition does not cover all cases in which a couple is unable to bear a child, such as weak uterus, multiple miscarriages, fibroids, hypertension and diabetes. Such medical conditions which are becoming very common with changing lifestyles will not qualify a couple for altruistic surrogacy. Also, the Right to Life includes the right to reproductive autonomy, which includes the right to procreation and parenthood. It is not for the State to decide the modes of parenthood. Constitutionally, the State cannot interfere in the prerogative of a person(s) to have children, naturally or through surrogacy.

The surrogacy regulation bill is insensitive and inconsiderate, to say the least. Surrogacy is a complex medical procedure with social, cultural, biological, and economic repercussions, and this bill does not do sufficient justice to all the dimensions of surrogacy. A ban is not the answer, a ban is never the answer and it is essential to bring the ongoing ban culture to an end. It is necessary to question the legitimacy of the bill and critically understand its medical as well as societal relevance.

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The controversial move to withdraw Kashmir’s special legal status fulfills a longstanding goal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party to yoke the disputed northern territory more closely to the rest of India. The special protections date to the earliest days of India’s independence in 1947, when the new nation sought to bring the territory under New Delhi’s authority. Pakistan, which rules another portion of Kashmir, has gone to war with India twice over the region in the last seven decades. Pakistan’s government said it “strongly condemns” India’s effort to change Kashmir’s status unilaterally, arguing that the bilateral dispute was a matter for the United Nations Security Council. In India, the legality of the presidential order was not immediately clear, and challenges to the move will almost certainly go to the country’s Supreme Court. For supporters of Modi, who won a sweeping reelection victory in May but has been buffeted in recent weeks by reports of a slowing economy, the announcement sparked jubilation.“What a glorious day,” the national general secretary of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Ram Madhav, tweeted. In the hours after the announcement, #KashmirHamaraHai, or “Kashmir Is Ours,” trended on Indian social media.As part of the announcement, India said it was reorganizing the state known as Jammu and Kashmir, which includes the disputed Kashmir valley. The state would be downgraded to a union territory, giving New Delhi far greater control over its affairs, including authority over the local police.The sparsely populated region of Ladakh would be carved into a separate union territory, a move likely to be welcomed by the area’s residents, most of whom are Hindu. The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said U.S. citizens in the state “are strongly advised to leave as soon as possible and to exercise great caution until they depart.” The move by the Hindu nationalist BJP government prompted outrage in parliament, and some legal experts have called it an attack on the constitution.Critics fear the move is designed to change the demographic make-up of India-administered Kashmir – by giving people from the rest of the country to right to acquire property and settle there permanently.

Until the Modi government moved to end it yesterday with a presidential ordinance, Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed a special constitutional relationship with the Union of India because of the circumstances in which Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Kashmir, signed the Instrument of Accession after Indian independence in 1947 ended British paramountcy over his princely state. Monday’s move has not repealed Article 370; it has effectively made it defunct. Article 370 was brought into the Constitution after the events of 1947, when a more popular section of the Kashmiri leadership, led by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, negotiated Kashmir’s unique relationship with the Indian Union. The “special status” granted to the state through Article 370 allows the state to have its own Constitution – that is why elections to its legislative assembly are held once in six years, unlike other states where they are held once in five years.

Kashmir was likely to be rooted ultimately, but manner in which it got eradicated especially after illegitimate house arrest and violence, questions a lot about the supposed democracy of India. This article should have been automatically lapsed rather than using a muscular force of eradictating it. Kashmir should have been made developed so that the kashmiris consider living in India as literally beneficial and eventually the existence of this bill would have been made primitive.

India’s political map will be redrawn, minorities will be attacked, communalism will increase, besides lynchings genocides will also be normalized and India will pay the price of hatred.
I hope the 303 voters who auctioned themselves in the market of nationalism are satisfied!

If all goes as planned, and there is little sign it won’t, the state of Jammu and Kashmir will be replaced by two union territories — one with a legislature subservient to a puppet governor, and one with just a puppet governor.
And we dream to be a superpower!!

This will go to Court. Meanwhile Kashmir will boil. We would all be glued to tv debates. What amazing distractions from the crashing economy.

Removing those restrictions could pave the way for Hindu settlers to move into the area – a rugged landscape of snow-frosted mountains and rippling apple orchards – to dilute the Muslim population. Critics drew comparisons to Israel’s promotion of Jewish settlement in Palestinian territories. This latest move is only an attempt by the Indian state to try and change the demography of Kashmir such that it ceases being a conflict.

Within the Kashmir valley, there will be opposition leading to heightened and prolonged unrest, including increased activities of the terrorist groups.

The country is making decisions about Kashmiris. And the country ensured no Kashmiri voice can be heard by blacking them out. Those who are not offended by this is because they do not view Kashmiris as humans.People from J&K staying, studying outside are distressed, worried- unable to contact their families. NO communication.This is done by shutting down an entire state of Jammu And Kashmir and putting anyone who will have to be consulted under house arrest. By filling the state with military. By announcing it after the President has already signed it. This is not decisiveness, this is bullying.There are times in the history of a republic when it reduces itself to jackboot. Nothing more and nothing less. We are witnessing that moment in Kashmir. But this moment is also a dry run for the political desecration that may follow in the rest of India. The manner in which the BJP government has changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir by rendering Article 370 ineffective and bifurcating the state is revealing its true character. This is a state for whom the only currency that matters is raw power. This is a state that recognises no constraints of law, liberty and morality. This is a state that will make a mockery of democracy and deliberation. This is a state whose psychological principle is fear. This is a state that will make ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions.The narrative supporting a radical move on Kashmir is familiar. Article 35(a) was a discriminatory provision and had to go. Article 370 was not a mechanism for integration but a legal tool for separatism. The Indian state, despite the horrendous violence it has used in the past, has never had the guts to take a strong stand on Kashmir. The radicalisation within Kashmir warrants a crackdown. The treatment meted to Kashmiri Pandits has never been recompensed either through justice or retribution. The international climate is propitious. We can do what China is doing: Remake whole cultures, societies. We can take advantage of the fact that human rights is not even a hypocrisy left in the international system. We can show Pakistan and Taliban their place. Let us do away with our old pusillanimity. Now is the time to seize the moment. Settle this once and for all, if necessary with brute force.There are kernels of truth to many of these arguments. The status quo was a double whammy: It did nothing to address the well-being of Kashmiris who have now endured two generations of what was effectively military occupation. And it increased the gulf between Kashmir and the rest of the nation. So some movement was inevitable. But the kernel of truth is being deployed with an armoury of evil. The solution being proposed is an annihilation of decency. The fact that these measures had to be done under stealth, with a tight security noose and informational blackout is a measure of the evil of the step taken. This is not the dawn of a new constitutional settlement, designed to elicit free allegiance. It is repression, plain and simple, reminiscent of the Reichstag or Chinese constitutional ideology that sees federalism as an obstacle to a strong state and homogenous culture.

The larger worry is the fabric of our culture that is making this possible. There is a propaganda machinery unleashed with the media that builds up a crescendo baying for blood and calls it nationalism. There is the coarsening of human sentiments that makes empathy look worse than violence. There is the sheer political impatience with any alternative. The old Congress system of dealing with these issues appears so decrepit and corrupt that even a total carpet bombing of institutions and morality will be better. There is a kind of cruel aestheticism in our politics where audacious evil will be celebrated for its audacity, and mundane goods will invite contempt because they are mundane.These proposals are not about solving a problem. What is playing out in Kashmir is the warped psyche of a great civilisation at its insecure worst. The BJP thinks it is going to Indianise Kashmir. But, instead, what we will see is potentially the Kashmirisation of India: The story of Indian democracy written in blood and betrayal.

A year earlier in 1994, Dr Abdullah was part of a delegation to Geneva to persuade Iran to drop the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) resolution at the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), later rechristened as Human Rights Council, condemning India for human rights violations in Kashmir. The resolution, with UNCHR approval, was to be referred to the UN Security Council for initiating economic sanctions and other punitive measures against India. (Privately, Dr Abdullah says, he had been offered restoration of Constitutional arrangement that existed prior to 1953. A euphemism for greater autonomy in lieu of saving India from possible disgrace at a time when the country had mortgaged its gold reserves. Dr Abdullah was however, persuaded by Rao’s successor Deve Gowda to participate in the October 1996 assembly elections on the assurance that he was free to pursue legislative process to seek changes in the Constitutional relationship between Srinagar and New Delhi. )

Independent India has seen the creation of new states frm older ones — Jharkhand frm parts of Bihar & Bengal, Uttarakhand UP in the north. UT like Goa have become states, but this is perhaps the first time a state & its residents have simply been imagined out of existence.

All lines of communication are shut down, thousands of troops deployed, &public assembly forbidden.Delhi lays out J&K’s abbreviated future,the Kashmiris are silenced;&in this silence we see the demise of democracy.

Tension built for 10 days in a Himalayan valley that is as scenic as it is turbulent.
In rugged Kashmir, India sent in thousands more troops without an official explanation. Authorities canceled a famed Hindu pilgrimage. Police trolled lakes and guesthouses to evacuate tourists. Schools were closed, phone and internet connections shut down and residents sheltered in their homes.Then, on Monday, with most Kashmiris unable to follow the news, the Indian government announced a historic constitutional change, revoking the limited autonomy held for decades by its only Muslim-majority territory.It also appears certain to heighten tensions with rival Pakistan – which also claims Kashmir – and trigger a violent backlash among separatist insurgents and civilians bitterly opposed to Indian rule.“Today marks the darkest day in Indian democracy,” Kashmiri political leader Mehbooba Mufti tweeted, calling the change “illegal and unconstitutional.” Modi’s top lieutenant, Home Minister Amit Shah, announced the presidential decree in Parliament, drawing angry outbursts from opposition members who argued the move violated the constitution and denied Kashmiris the right to self-determination promised to them for more than 70 years.The decree, once approved by a legislature dominated by members of Modi’s party, will cancel Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which grants the territory the right to its own constitution and bars outsiders from buying land, holding government jobs and receiving educational scholarships.

Indian-ruled Kashmir had been on edge for days, starting when New Delhi sent thousands of additional paramilitary troops to the Kashmir valley – already one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world – without any formal explanation. Local authorities then abruptly canceled the annual Amarnath Yatra, a Hindu pilgrimage to a remote cave in the Himalayan foothills, and ordered non-Kashmiris and tourists to leave immediately due to “the prevailing security situation in the Kashmir valley. The unusual move fueled speculation that the government was about to announce a decision on the state’s special status. Many of the area’s 5.5 million residents stocked up on supplies and medicines.On midnight Monday, the communications lockdown went into effect and local authorities passed orders restricting people’s movement. Two former chief ministers of the state – Mufti and Omar Abdullah – as well as politician Sajjad Lone were placed under house arrest.Tariq Ahmad, who leads houseboat tours on Dal Lake in the main city of Srinagar, said police officers approached him Friday morning and asked his Indian guests to leave immediately.It was an absolute panic,never in the years of turmoil in Kashmir have tourists been forcibly evicted like this.Hours later, after the announcement in Parliament, it remained unclear whether many Kashmiris had learned of the decision. Experts expected large public protests despite the security presence, and said that Pakistan could foment further violence by firing artillery shells across the border and supporting attacks by militants.

Accession of Kashmir to India was conditional to Article 370 and Section 35a. Now that govt wants to do away with it, does it mean accession is now null and void?The abrogation of Article 370 hasn’t just made accession null & void but also reduces India to an occupation force in Jammu and Kashmir. This illegal and unconstitutional step will serve only to inflame & escalate tensions further pushing away efforts of peace and resolution.The measure was accompanied by a telecoms and media blackout which began on Sunday evening.There is a long-running insurgency on the Indian side. India and Pakistan fought several conflicts over Kashmir.For many Kashmiris, Article 370 was the main justification for being a part of India and by revoking it, the BJP has irrevocably changed Delhi’s relationship with the region, the BBC’s Geeta Pandey reports from Delhi.
We do such nonsense in 2019 & call ourselves a civilized society!

Constituent assembly in Article 370(3) has been read as Legislative Assembly. And Legislative Assembly has been construed as a reference to the Governor. This is how the President has issued the order on Article #370. Now it is all about the interpretation by the Court. Think of the proposal’s broader ramifications. India has betrayed its own constitutional promises. India has many asymmetric federalism arrangements outside of Kashmir. This act potentially sets the precedent for invalidating all of them. How can we justify offering Nagaland asymmetric federalism but deny it to Kashmir? Its implication is that the government can unilaterally declare any existing state to be a Union Territory. This is a constitutional first. We are simply a union of Union Territories that happen to be a state at the discretion of the Centre.Think of the proposal’s broader ramifications. India has betrayed its own constitutional promises. India has many asymmetric federalism arrangements outside Let us also not put too fine a point on this. Even if Article 370 were to be scrapped, the proposal to alter Jammu and Kashmir’s status to Union Territory, even if temporarily, is designed to humiliate an already subjugated population. How dare a Muslim dominated state exist in India? Kashmir can now not even be trusted to be a state. The optics of this measure is not integration, it is humiliation, of a piece with subtle and unsubtle reminders to minorities of their place in India.Let’s take the argument that this pain is worth the price, if it actually solves the problem. But will it? There will be a sullen peace, militarily secured, that we will mistake for victory. The very army, behind whom every patriot now hides, will now potentially be put in even more harm’s way: To be used more and more as the sole basis for keeping India together. And even if we concede to the tragic necessity of force, that force can work only in the context of a larger political and institutional framework that inspires free allegiance, not fear. But even if Kashmir resigns to its fate, pummelled by military might, the prospect of radicalisation in the rest of the country cannot be ruled out. There are already incipient signs of that. The theatre of political violence will shift. In the context of the communally sensitive arc from UP to Bengal and in Kerala, India will seem more fragile.

Even in the USA such is the width of state autonomy that an advocate getting his law degree from Washington University cannot as a matter of right practice in the state of New York. No one has suggested that this is endangering the unity of the USA.Recently in the election fever even the Congress seems to have got entrapped when it gave an election promise to separate Ladakh from the territory of J&K and even give it a separate legislative assembly. This is a provocative suggestion, which can only inflame the sentiments of people of J&K against India, apart from the fact that it is not legally possible because the J&K legislature will never give its consent, as provided by Article 370.

It was only at its genesis that Article 370 gave the Union government jurisdiction only over three subjects—defence, foreign policy and communications. Over the decades, this has changed: 94 of the 97 entries in the Union list and 26 of the 47 entries in the concurrent list were extended to J&K. So were 260 of the 395 Articles of the Indian Constitution. Subsequent presidential orders further ‘eroded’ the original substance of the Article. Today, it is a mere husk of the original seed.It is no doubt true that Article 370(3) provides that the President may by notification declare that this article shall cease to be operative, but the proviso clearly lays down a limitation that the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the state shall be necessary before the President issues such a notification. It is not disputed that the Constituent Assembly of J&K has never given any such recommendation. In that view Article 370 cannot be withdrawn by Parliament purporting to exercise the power of amendment given by Article 368. That the power to amend the Constitution is not totally unfettered admits of no disputes vide the famous case of Keshvanand Bharthi, (1973) in which the Supreme Court held that a “Constitution like ours contains certain features which are so essential that they cannot be changed or destroyed”.There is also nothing very special in laying this limitation in Article 370. Even Article 368 limits the power of Parliament to make any amendment to the Constitution which would result in a change in any of the lists in the Seventh Schedule; such amendment shall also require to be ratified by the legislatures of not less than half of the states.
Under our Constitution the Governors are only formal heads of state and have no powers at all in the administration of the state which is vested in the Cabinet. But yet by the Constitution Amendment Act 1956, Article 371 provides for a special responsibility of the Governor for the establishment of separate development boards for Saurashtra and Kutch (in Gujarat) and Vidharba in Maharashtra for an equitable allocation of funds for the development of the area. No objection by the BJP has been raised which curtails the power of Gujarat Chief Minister Modi, while there is not such limitation on the chief ministers in other states!
Article 371G, introduced by the 55th Constitution Amendment Act 1986, provides that no Act of Parliament in respect of the ownership and transfer of land shall apply to the state of Mizoram unless the legislative assembly of Mizoram by a resolution so decides. This provision is identical to Article 370 of the Constitution regarding J & K. The BJP was a party to the above amendment. Why do the RSS and why does the BJP apply double standards in the case of the Muslim majority state of J & K? Is it because J & K is the only state that is Muslim minority?That prohibition is a holdover from Dogra times. Besides, other states have similar restrictions.Among the foremost grievances against Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which grants special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir, is the impression that it prevents Indians from buying land in the state. That is not true. While the Article does give the state a “special status”, it says nothing about land. As it turns out, the prohibition against outsiders buying land in Kashmir was introduced by the Dogras who bought the territory from the British in 1846 under the Treaty of Amritsar.

It needs to be appreciated that the retention of Article 370 is a matter of self-respect and honour and an assertion of their distinct identity for the people of J&K. Can’t the BJP leaders, even when most of the parties in J&K are desirous of finding a lasting solution, be statesmen enough to give up their opposition to Article 370, which no Kashmiri can possibly agree to abrogate because it is a matter of preserving his special identity?Faced with this reality, politicians must realise that all talk of abrogation of Article 370 is moonshine and a non-issue. It is also a very sensitive matter touching the credibility of our secular professions and the justifiable fears of the minorities. With all this, when it is also patent that the abrogation of Article 370 is not legally and constitutionally possible, is there any moral, political or logical justification to keep up this empty noise?

In other words, if Article 370 is abrogated, then it will have to be replaced by a similar article. Otherwise, abrogation would require renegotiating the terms of accession, which may open up the issue of accession itself, and would certainly permit the introduction of new terms. Are the people of the state and India willing to reopen the accession issue and terms? Have their representatives considered what could be put in place instead, not to mention, ever discussed it?

Much water has flowed since then. The argument that Article 370 constitutes a psychological barrier between the governing elite in Delhi and the Kashmiri youths is a false one. The real problem lies in Kashmir’s history of rigged elections and foisting unpopular Chief Ministers on the people. Delhi needs to address are these two areas of anxiety and suspicion — and not Article 370.

Most importantly, India, especially New Delhi needs to reach out to the youth of J&K, to persuade them that Article 370 is a ‘psychological barrier’ that must be dismantled to meet their aspirations. That persuasion must be directed to where it matters most: in the Valley. The sentiment there is that the country’s only Muslim-majority state must preserve what remains of its distinctive political and cultural identity and its territorial unity.

There are constitutional hurdles that the new government will also have to cross should it move to abrogate Article 370. A new constituent assembly will have to be formed to recommend the abrogation. (Given the majority of disaffected Kashmiri Muslims such an assembly will have, no such recommendation will be forthcoming.) Only then can the President of India issue a public notification to this effect. Parliament is well within its rights to amend this provision. But what if the Supreme Court rules that the special status accorded to J&K is a basic feature of the Constitution?

Article 370 cannot be abrogated or amended by taking recourse to the amending provisions of the Constitution. For, in relation to Kashmir, Article 368 has a proviso which says that no constitutional amendment “shall have effect in relation to the state of Jammu and Kashmir” unless applied by Order of the President, that requires the concurrence of the state government and ratification by its Constituent Assembly. With the Assembly’s dispersal on November 17, 1956, after adopting the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, there is no authority left to recommend its abrogation.

Jitender Singh’s initiative will open a Pandora’s box. It will give a fillip to secessionist forces in the Valley, increase Pakistan-supported terrorist activities and, no less serious, internationalise the Kashmir issue. And this at a time when Pakistan has begun to send signals that it is prepared to move away from its entrenched stand on this intractable problem.
In its pristine form, Article 370 of the Indian Constitution had given J&K the constitutional right to have its own separate Constitution, its own prime minister, its own president and its own national flag. The residuary powers were vested with the state assembly and not the Parliament of India.
The residents or state subjects of J&K were not citizens of India and the entry of Indian nationals into J&K was restric­ted. The goods from India had to pass through a customs barrier by paying import duties. The people of J&K were not obliged to uphold the integrity and sovereignty of India.
The Supreme Court’s jurisdiction was restricted only to Article 131 dealing with disputes between the Union and the states. In all other matters, the apex court was given only appellate jurisdiction.
The J&K government had complete, exclusive control over all the taxes. The I-T department of J&K was free from all central controls. There was no ‘financial integration’ between J&K and India.
To put it simply, J&K was a sovereign within India having an agreement on three matters—defence, foreign affairs and communication—with the government of India.
None of this holds true now. Over the years, the privileges have been overridden by various constitutional orders issued by the president of India.
Article 370 is now just a husk; the seed has been long taken out. Out of the total number of 395 articles of the Indian Constitution, 260 have been applied to the J&K Constitution. The remaining 135 are identical to the Indian Constitution. So there are no real privile­ges or protections. In other words, Article 370, even though it is there, has been made irrelevant. Yet, it is important! Why?
The answer to this comes from the most unlikely of people, Mr Narendra Modi! As the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi in his Republic day message, wrote, “A country such as ours cannot survive without a vibrant and functional federal structure. Sitting in New Delhi, the Centre may not always be able to do justice to the potential and needs of various states.” Article 370 is exactly about tilting the existing power balance in favour of J&K, which is a state within the Union.
In an obvious reference to the appointment of the governor and the Lokpal, Modi wrote, “Chief ministers are not consulted on crucial appointments. Rather, app­ointments are being thrust down, violating the spirit of the laws of the land.” Article 370 prevents exactly this from happening in the case of J&K.
Further, Modi has been lamenting the fact that the “Sarkaria Commission, which called for consultation between the states and the Centre on the concurrent list, hasn’t seen the light of day”. Again, Article 370 makes it obligatory on the Centre to seek concurrence of the state on matters of the concurrent list.
Modi was also in the forefront in criticising the Centre for not discussing the Communal Violence Bill or the NCTC with the states. The benefit of Article 370 in the case of J&K is that even if the Centre passes these laws, they will require the concurrence of the state legislative assembly to be applicable. So the last word rests with the J&K state!
For its detractors, Article 370 is a hindrance to beneficial legislations like the Right to Education, which are not automatically applicable to J&K. This is a fallacious argument; all these can be easily extended as other laws have been over time.
Unlike Article 371, sub-clause (a to g), which gives Northeastern states constitutio­nal protection on the ownership of land, Art­icle 370 doesn’t do that for J&K. The restriction on ‘outsiders’ buying and selling land in J&K is because of a state law promulgated in 1929 by the Dogra maharaja of the state.
To put it on its head, the emaciated Article 370 may well provide PM Modi with the framework for a new federal structure that he had been advocating as Gujarat CM.
For what was a “sovereign within a nation” has been over the years, wittingly or unwittingly, converted into a model for a country aspiring to have genuine cooperative federalism. As such, far from abrogation, it may serve as the basis of a model for other states.
The benefit of Article 370 has been to make J&K a politically empowered state, an inclusive economy, an identity- conscious society. The single biggest benefit of Article 370 to the people of J&K is the radical restructuring of agrarian relations. It is not well recognised that the land reforms carried out in J&K have been possible only because of Article 370.
As such, the current controversy on Article 370 is completely mindless; it’s only giving a lifeline to the otherwise thoroughly corrupt and compromised National Conference which got drubbed in the recent parliamentary polls. There is no need to abrogate as there is nothing left to abrogate!
To borrow a medical analogy, Article 370 is to India what the appendix is to the human body. As long as it’s left alone, one can live with it forever. The moment it gets inflated or infected, it needs surgical attention! Or it will burst, end­anger life. Better to leave it alone, especially as it isn’t infected.

Do you think the Narendra Modi government could extend Parliament by another few days to make Mumbai a separate state out of Maharashtra? Or carve Darjeeling out of West Bengal? Or suddenly, make Tamil Nadu a Union Territory? Do you think the government could put all politicians in Odisha under house arrest, cut all communication channels, impose a military lockdown, and suddenly declare it’s a Union Territory?
In the days and months to come, there will be a lot of discussion on the legality of this move. Challenges in the Supreme Court are inevitable. There will be a lot of politics and polarisation. India will be divided between those supporting and those opposing the move. But the most urgent issue is the manner in which this has been done, and the timing of it.

The BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto had said, “BJP reiterates its stand on the Article 370, and will discuss this with all stakeholders and remains committed to the abrogation of this article.” Re-iterating this promise in its 2019 manifesto, it removed the bit about holding discussion with the stakeholders.

The government notification says it is being issued in “concurrence with the government of Jammu & Kashmir.” That’s a joke, because the state has been under President’s rule. The assembly election there has been due for a while. The Election Commission did not hold it along with the Lok Sabha election for ‘security’ reasons. If they could put one EVM in the polling booth, why couldn’t they put two? Clearly, the Modi regime didn’t want an elected government in Jammu and Kashmir. It gets worse when you consider that governor Satyapal Malik has said on record that no constitutional change was on the cards, and if there was, he didn’t know.

Radical changes in a democracy must come through debate, discussion and dissent, which will lead to consensus. The Modi government should have tabled the bill at the beginning of the session, made it public that this is what it wants to do, listened to all voices, and then moved ahead with its plan – even if it didn’t agree with the naysayers.

Instead, the government decides to put former chief ministers under house arrest. These are the same Kashmiri politicians who stand up for India and take oath under the Indian Constitution. But the Modi government is changing the very idea of India, from unity in diversity to brute majoritarianism and authoritarianism.

In the 2014 Jammu and Kashmir election, the BJP had similarly put the abrogation of Article 370 in its manifesto. A BJP candidate in Srinagar, Hina Bhat, had then said: “If the Article is touched, it will force Kashmiris to pick up guns again. And you know I am a Kashmiri too.” When a PDP MP tears apart a copy of the Constitution of India in the Rajya Sabha, you know why consensus is a good word in democracy. It appears that we are no longer a democracy. Sanjay Gandhi would have approved.

If you are cheering this, do remember: you don’t know what the Modi government will change overnight and how it will affect you.
What is also curious is the timing of the move. Why could this not have been done before or after the Amarnath Yatra? The claim that the Amarnath Yatra was suspended because of a ‘terror threat’ now appears thin. It was obviously suspended as step one of a plan to put all of Kashmir Valley and parts of Jammu in a state of lockdown – no news, no phone, no internet, no right to assembly. Just stay at home, there’s no advance warning. In fact, the J&K governor and the Modi government were telling people not to panic. Those who took this advice seriously might now be worrying about stocking up on food. The curfews won’t go away soon.

The timing of the move is clearly to shift the headlines away from the economy. Kashmir, Kashmir, Kashmir will be what we will talk about for many weeks to come. The Modi government will not have to answer any tough questions about the economy anymore. Did demonetisation lead to the slowdown? Is the GST still a mess? What is the government doing to arrest the shutting down of car manufacturing units that’s leading to massive job losses? The answer to all your questions about the economy is Kashmir.

It’s not that simple. The economy will worsen. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. The Modi government will need more to deflect attention. What’s next? Ram Mandir? National Register of Citizens across India? Political dissenters declared terrorists under the amended UAPA law?

Clearly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was laying the ground for this momentous occasion when he spoke to Donald Trump at the Osaka G20 summit. He definitely did not ask for mediation, but he almost certainly informed him of the decision, although that clearly went awry. Trump’s restraint in not responding to a public denial by the Indian government meant that some kind of urgent communication had taken place and the US President was finally informed about the exact request. Clearly when asked again – he did offer to mediate if asked – he did not repeat that he was asked to mediate by Modi.

In many ways, the US reaction is not just the most important reaction, it’s the only real reaction that counts. This is because the western foreign policy media, dominated as it is by US thinking, is seldom divergent and will align its views to the US.

We saw this in Bosnia, for example, when Britain and France, initially sympathetic to the Serbs, changed their stance rapidly when the US decided it was on the side of the Bosniaks.

Does the US need Pakistan for a safe withdrawal from Afghanistan? Yes, but the problem is the terms of the said withdrawal were already negotiated by Imran Khan and Trump. Any attempt to tag Kashmir on to the price will be seen as an attempted renegotiation by Trump and will not go down well. In short, if Pakistan thinks it can play the Kashmir vs Afghanistan card with the US, the boat has sailed.
This also means Germany and other European countries too will fall in line, even if reluctantly. They after all have much bigger issues to manage back home and Britain, which was the only real worry given its large Pakistani expat population, is bogged down by Brexit. Focusing on Kashmir when it desperately seeks alternative partnerships in Europe, will not go down well with its electorate. Although we can expect Pakistani-origin MPs and possibly Jeremy Corbyn to make some noise, given their constituencies. However, this will not translate into official British policy.
The problem may arise from three quarters: an EU prone to posturing, Russia, and China. Here again, the EU can be safely ignored because the bilateral trade interests of the EU member states with India are so great that they can’t afford to outsource policy to the EU on this. Any EU protestations must be seen as purely superficial.

China, similarly, may protest, but that would open it up to comparisons with its actions in Tibet and Xinjiang that are far, far worse than India’s worst excesses.

As for Russia, we have on record, former ambassador to India Vyacheslav Trubnikov saying “the solution to Afghanistan lies through Kashmir”. Old and clueless Trubnikov is a known stooge of Putin’s Afghanistan point person Zamir Kabulov, who is anyway considered by the Indian establishment as being a compromised ISI stooge. Given the large arms deals with Russia recently, it is highly unlikely that Putin will allow Kabulov to guide Kashmir policy and the fallback position will almost certainly be the USSR’s, which is that Kashmir is India’s problem or bilateral at best.

All up, expect furious media reactions, but as far as foreign governments go, all you will get is indifference or silence, and silence as they say is acquiescence.

The UTL will not have its own legislature, but the UTJK will have its own Legislative Assembly. This is of course one of the key differences between States and UTs – all States have their own Legislative Assemblies, which draft laws for them, but UTs normally don’t, instead being administered by the President.
UTJK joins Puducherry and Delhi as the only UTs with their own legislatures. UTL will follow the same system as Chandigarh and the rest of the Union Territories in India.
The Governor of Jammu and Kashmir (currently Satya Pal Malik) will be designated as the Lieutenant Governor of both UTL and UTJK.
The existing State of J&K’s four Rajya Sabha representatives will now represent the UTJK. UTL will not have any representatives in the Upper House of Parliament.
UTJK will have five representatives in the Lok Sabha, while Ladakh gets one. The existing State of J&K currently has six MPs in the Lok Sabha.
A new delimitation of constituencies has been effected for the Lok Sabha and for the new Legislative Assembly of UTJK, which can be found in the schedules to the Bill. This also fulfils a longstanding policy objective of Modi and Shah.

The model for how the UTJK will operate is, it would seem, Puducherry, rather than Delhi. Article 239A of the Constitution will apply to UTJK to allow the setting up of a Legislative Assembly and a Council of Ministers. The UTJK will not have a Legislative Council, ie, there is no Upper House.

The manner in which these changes to Jammu and Kashmir have been introduced has raised a number of questions regarding the process, and there could well be grounds to challenge the Bill if it is passed by Parliament.

First off, the entire Bill is only possible because of the presidential order on Article 370. Without this, the slate of Central Acts applied to the new UTs would not be possible, for instance. Yet the presidential order itself looks liable to challenge for failing to comply with the spirit of Article 370.

Furthermore, the nature of Jammu and Kashmir is intrinsically tied to what its people and its representatives agreed to at the time of acceding to India. In addition to the Instrument of Accession, there was the Delhi Agreement of 1952 and the deliberations of the J&K Constituent Assembly, none of which envisaged J&K as a Union Territory.

The whole idea was for it to be a state with special status, so it is difficult to see how this new iteration of J&K is in consonance with any of that. This could lead to a challenge against the Bill for attacking the federal structure of the country and for violating what does appear to be part of the Basic Structure of the Constitution.

And then of course there is the fact that none of this has been done with even a semblance of consent of the people of J&K. Instead, local leaders have been detained, there is a total communications blackout, and military forces were rushed into the region on alternative pretexts.

If this scrapping of 370 would bring peace to valley, it is largely welcome, and in fact, it is wished; but as far as now, this seems no guarantee of peace. The perception runs that with these removals, corporates and businesspersons from other parts of India would move towards to build businesshouses and earn revenue. Land will be took over, demography will be changed completely. Local environment would be as vulnerable as it has been made in other parts. Let’s see who will take benefits. And for people, youths of the valley, they will feel cheated for forever if state would be unable to take them in confidence. This will only alienate them from their trust and may be even thoughts of ‘reconciliation’ with it. Resistance may abruptly go high, things may be changed completely and fuel from across the borders may support more dangerous and more complicated situation all over. And with the legislature in state cutting few seats of Laddakh, and re-boundary of constituencies would be done to have representatives elected in the way state wants. And the unfortunate is that this all has been done without any parliamentary debate on such a big issue. It seems that majority democracy acted as autocracy, kingship.
True that the issue is burning since last many years and it needed a solution, but solution of what? Of taking over the state militarily and no LEGALLY without making consciousness and consent of state subjects ? With keeping them in homes from fear and deaths?
On the other hand, it is also said that this can bring a big change, by allowing complete merger, and allowing business that will bring wealth and employment and will reduce militancy and disturbances.
Let’s see what’s in future’s pocket.
Let’s hope that everything remain safe after this big gamble.
All sides must remain peaceful.

This government is doing the same with Kashmir what the British had done with India.Today Kashmir, tomorrow your doorstep. The curtailment of the citizen’s personal freedoms, the closing down of communications, the arrest of political leaders, it can all happen in other parts of India too.The Kashmiris are Indians-that has been an article of faith of all political parties all this time. Then why are they being subjected to this level of intimidation? This is not about militancy-Omar Abdullah has never advocated picking up a gun.No, this is about using force to impose the will of not just the government but also a particular ideology. That mindset can drive the ruling party to put down all other forms of legitimate protest and dissent too, even peaceful ones.Someone can be declared a terrorist and his/her rights can be taken away. After all, as the Home Minister has said, the idea is to ‘smash Urban Maoists’-naturally it is the government that will decide who fits the bill.

Similiar contradictions can be made with demonitization which we assumed a master stroke but turned out to be a disaster. It was the care and humility kashmir needed rather than muscular attitude.

The decision to eliminate the state of Jammu & Kashmir by legislative decree was made in absolute secrecy, & will be executed in absolute darkness. For, fundamentally, what this change signals is that Indian democracy is failing. It is descending into majoritarianism, the brute power of the vote; it will no longer have the safety valves that allowed inclusion. The feckless abdication of the Opposition will only deepen the sense of alienation. There are no political avenues for protest left. Most of the so-called federal parties turned out to be more cowardly than anyone anticipated; the Congress can never stand for any convictions. Not a single one of us can take any constitutional protections for granted. Parliament is a notice board, not a debating forum.Let us see what the Supreme Court does, but if its recent track record is anything to go by, it will be more executive minded than the executive. Kashmir is not just about Kashmir: In the context of the UAPA, NRC, communalisation, Ayodhya, it is one more node in a pattern hurtling the Indian state towards a denouement where all of us feel unsafe. Not just Kashmiris, not just minorities, but anyone standing up for constitutional liberty.
And yes this was the script of hatred Jaish Mohammed wanted us to read perhaps even Jinnah desperately desired.
Are we a democracy?

Revoking this article is a scar for our nation. We gave a direct response to jinnah after 72 years. In 2019, we are doing such communally polarized nonsense. This shows where we are heading. It is also a collective shame , that kashmir issue is still there in 2019, wheras it should have been solved by now.

After all Kashmir is not an issue but a subject.

BJP succeeded today divide India on communal lines.
But no, today;
Democracy failed,
Humanity failed;
Secularism failed;
Liberty failed;
Love failed.
Only fascism won.

Having said this before also the worst is yet to happen.

Disclaimer

Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. The views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. The blog owner is not responsible for the content in comments. This blog disclaimer is subject to change at anytime.

Right to Information (RTI) is act of the Parliament of India to provide for setting out the practical regime of the right to information for citizens and replaces the erstwhile Freedom of information Act, 2002. Under the provisions of the Act, any citizen of India may request information from a “public authority” (a body of Government or “instrumentality of State”) which is required to reply expeditiously or within thirty days. The Act also requires every public authority to computerise their records for wide dissemination and to proactively certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally. Information disclosure in India is restricted by the Official Secrets Act 1923 and various other special laws, which the new RTI Act relaxes. Right to Information codifies a fundamental right of the citizens of India. RTI has proven to be very useful, but is counteracted by the Whistleblowers Act.

Since it was passed in June 2005, the Right to Information Act has been slowly empowering citizens to extract a level of accountability from their government. Using the legislation, citizens have been acting as vigilance monitors and uncovering corruption and arbitrariness.
However, the amendments to the Act passed by the Rajya Sabha last week are unfortunate.

Information Commissioners were vital to the functioning of the legislation. It was infact the primacy of the Bill in the sense that the mechanism of access to information will depend on effectiveness of this system, the. It should have been therefore ensured that the Information Commission and its functionaries perform their duties independently and with complete autonomy. For this, it was necessary to elevate their status to that of the Election Commission of India.The recent amendments introduced to the RTI Act, are a testimony to the NDA government’s determination to undermine independent bodies and fundamentally weaken any system or structure that can uncover the truth. The amendment to the Act passed by the Rajya Sabha last week makes the decisions of the tenure, status and emoluments of Information Commissioners subject to the whims of the central government. The ostensible reason given for this in the is that the Election Commission is a body set up under the Constitutional body whereas the Information Commission is a statutory body established by Parliament. The government’s rationale appears to be shaky. Both the Election Commission and the Information Commission enforce the fundamental right under Article 19 (1)(a) and hence have the role of maintaining citizen’s constitutional right. The Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Jitendra Singh has stated in Parliament that the Central Information Commissioner and the Information Commissioners are equivalent to the judges of the Supreme Court. “However, if one intends to challenge their decision then one has to move the High Court,” he said. “Does it happen anywhere in the world? The Congress party enacted a very clumsy law and we are trying to modify it.” I mean are we serious? That’s such a deplorable fallacy! High Courts cannot entertain any appeals against an order of the Information Commission. The challenge to the Information Commission’s orders must be made under the writ jurisdiction of the courts. The orders of the president, prime minister, governors and Central election commissioners can also be challenged before the High Courts in writ jurisdiction. Will it be argued that all these positions must be downgraded? This has dangerous implications. The whole edifice of the RTI’s implementation stands on the way the information commission deals with it. The independent interpretation of the RTI Act is possible only with its independence from the executive.

The specific suggestion of making the Commissioners equal to the Election Commissioners was made with clear reasoning by the Parliamentary Committee: this was considered essential for the Commission’s independence and autonomy. Last week’s amendment runs counter to the proposal. No public consultation has been held about the changes. The speed with which they were rushed through and the way the Biju Janata Dal and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi
changed their convictions are a sad comment on our democracy. India’s RTI Act is one of the best in the world and what is lacking is its proper implementation. The least the government should have done is to rush through without prior consultations with the stakeholders.

What is more intriguing is that the salaries of the chairpersons and members of the statutory tribunals mentioned above were upgraded; this happened even before the President gave his assent to the law upgrading the salaries of Supreme Court and high court judges. This law was gazetted in January 2018, six months after the salaries of the statutory tribunals were hiked. It seems, the Centre had no problems raising the salaries of statutory tribunals mentioned above, before upgrading the salaries of the Judges, who are constitutional authorities.
This law was gazetted in January 2018, six months after the salaries of the statutory tribunals were hiked. It seems, the Centre had no problems raising the salaries of statutory tribunals mentioned above, before upgrading the salaries of the Judges, who are constitutional authorities.
So the justification that the central government gave for amending the RTI Act — that the information commissions being statutory authorities cannot be treated on a par with constitutional authorities such as the ECI — does not sound convincing at all. By diminishing the status of the CIC, IC and State CIC from that of a Supreme Court judge would reduce their ability to issue directives to senior government functionaries, it would kill the RTI Act. It is an affront to federalism, good governance and ultimately, democracy.

Earlier, the central government had sought to harmonise the status, salaries, and allowances of members of various tribunals. Their chairpersons’ salaries were made equal to the election/information commissioners; those of the members was made equivalent to high court judges.
The Law Commission of India (LCI), in its 272nd Report on Assessment of Statutory Frameworks of Tribunals in India 2017, called for the harmonisation of salaries and allowances of many of the statutory tribunals mentioned above.
The spirit of the recommendations of LCI applies equally to the information commissions and there is no reason to treat them differently. It is relevant to note here that salaries of election/information commissioners are the same as those of SC Judges.
The RTI Act 2005 has clearly laid down the pay structure and terms of the CIC in Section 13(5). It provides that the salaries and allowances and other terms and conditions of service of the CIC and information commissioners shall be the same as that of the CEC and election commissioners, respectively.
The salaries and allowances and other terms and conditions of service of the CEC and election commissioners are equal to the judges of the SC. The CIC, information commissioner and state CICs, hence, became equivalent to a judge of the SC in terms of their salaries and allowances and other terms and conditions of service.
The real strength and independence of the commissioners is coming from these provisions. With removal of this status, the ICs will be paralysed and subjugated to senior bureaucrats in the government.

This Bill seriously encroaches upon the sovereign authority of states. The Centre not only usurped powers from the Legislature, but also from states in determining the status, etc of the state information commissioners.
It said that the terms and status of the state information commissioners will be as prescribed by the Centre. This is against the principle of federalism, which is a basic structure of the Constitution that cannot be amended by Parliament.
Till today, the CIC had power to direct a cabinet secretary or defence secretary or home secretary or any other principal secretary to give information.
After usurping the power from Legislature to decide terms of the ICs, the central Executive ‘may prescribe’ by rules a lower status to CIC and state information commissioners, with which, they cannot direct the babus in Secretariat of the Centre and states.
Similarly, sub-section (5) of Section 16 of the Act provides that the salaries and allowances and other terms and conditions of service of the state CICs and State information commissioners shall be the same as that of the Election Commissioner and the chief secretary to the state government, respectively.
This also will change now and will be according to terms ‘as may be prescribed’ by the Centre, not by states.
The question is: When the pay structure of tribunal members has been harmonised, why did the government want to break the harmony between the information and election commissions regarding the status and pay structure?
What was the compelling reason to downgrade the commissioners? What status did it want to accord to the ICs? Even Parliament was not informed about this vital aspect. I am not sure whether government would inform the President, the appointing authority of CICs, as to their status.
This Bill was not preceded by consultations with various stake holders. At least it should have been at least sent to the joint select committee or Parliamentary standing committee for a wider discussion and consultation.

Not only the RTI activists and opposition political leaders but also former information commissioners have been strongly opposing such amendment. They fear it would compromise autonomy and independence of the information commissions and the commissioners. It was their protests which had forced the government to desist from introducing such an amendment in 2018 after having circulated it among the Members of Parliament.

The amendment goes against the Supreme Court judgement of February 2019 (in the case of Anjali Bhardwaj and Others vs Union of India and Others) 3 . The apex court had clearly stated while dealing with vacancies of information commissioners that, “Insofar as terms and conditions of appointment are concerned, no doubt, Section 13(5) of RTI Act states that the CIC and Information Commissioners shall be appointed on the same terms and conditions as applicable to the Chief Election Commissioner/Election Commissioner. At the same time, it would also be appropriate if the said terms and conditions on which such appointments are to be made are specifically stipulated in the advertisement and put on website as well.”

It is clear that the government has weakened the sunshine law without providing any credible rationale for doing so. This has led to widespread speculation about the real motives. One widely held view is that some recent ordersprominent among them being directions to disclose information related to the educational qualifications of the prime minister and his foreign travels; records related to demonetisation; details of high-profile fraud cases in relation to the insupportable NPAs of public sector bankshave irked the government.

The manner in which the amendment bill was passed has also raised serious concerns. In the Lok Sabha, the NDA simply used its brute majority to ride roughshod over objections raised by opposition benches. But in the Rajya Sabha, even though 15 political parties reportedly signed a motion to have the bill referred to a select committee, many backtracked on their demand during the voting, fuelling apprehensions about the pressure that was exerted by the ruling dispensation.

The RTI law has suffered a serious setback, but the legal validity of the amendments is open to challenge. And despite this attempt to tamp down the flow of information, for the millions who have experienced the effectiveness of the law in holding the government to account, the amendments are unlikely to be a deterrent. People will continue to use the transparency law to exercise their fundamental right to know. Isn’t it supposed to be a by the people, for the people and to the people democracy?

It is essential for citizens to first appeal to the President’s conscience to at least send the bill back instead of signing it since it negates his own convictions as a member of the Parliamentary Committee of 2005.

Fascists like mr.modi believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state. New India usually includes ultranationalism, racial supremacy, populism, authoritarianism, nativism, xenophobia and opposition to immigration, as well as opposition to liberal democracy, parliamentarianism, Marxism, communism and socialism hence, if citizens do not defend their fundamental rights, there could be further constriction of their fundamental right under Article 19 (1)(a), which may impact the right to speak and publish.

Disclaimer

Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. The views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. The blog owner is not responsible for the content in comments. This blog disclaimer is subject to change at anytime.

Parliament on Tuesday approved the bill that makes instant triple talaq a criminal offence, after the contentious legislation was passed by Rajya Sabha following non-aligned BJD extending support and NDA constituents JD(U) and AIADMK walking out. Lok Sabha had passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill last week and with Rajya Sabha now approving it, the practice of instant divorce by Muslim men will be punishable by jail term of up to three years.The Upper House passed the bill by 99 votes in favour and 84 against it. It earlier rejected an opposition sponsored motion to send the bill to a Rajya Sabha Select Committee with 100 votes against it as compared to 84 in favour. While BJD supported the legislation, JD-U and AIADMK walked out, lowering the majority mark which normally stands at 121. The ruling NDA has 107 members in the 242-member Rajya Sabha.
The NDA was also helped by the absence of some members of SP and BSP as well as those of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and YSR-Congress. Once granted assent by the President, the bill will replace an ordinance promulgated last on February 21 to the same effect as the bill.

Most arguments on opposing this was based on the fact that it is not written in the Quran. I vividly disagree! It doesn’t matters whether the triple talaq custom was allowed in Quran or not; This practice needs to be rejected because it is against the basic tenance of human values. Whether the Quran allows or not is irrelevant of this discussion, because in 2019 we cannot make laws for a civilized society based on what was written centuries ago when democracy, gender equality, liberalism, or human rights wasn’t even thought of. Scriptures don’t evolve. How can religious texts be it fair or liberal or conservative be the touchstone to make such laws today?

I am not doing whataboutism, but if this government wants to criminalize instant triple talaq because making ‘abandoning wives’ a insensate default reason then why not make it for all communities of this nation. Why only the muslim community? Doesn’t this give a communal color to the decision? Of course, abandoning your wife must not have any justification but why make a religious custom the criterion for decision making. How is religion connected with basic human values a women deserves? Abandoning wives has nothing to do with religious customs but certainly has with grounds of humanity and honour. Couldn’t the government make a law to criminalize men who abandon their wives without holding substantial legitimate grounds irrespective of the religion that person belongs to?
Isn’t this violation of article 25 to 28 of the Indian constitution implying that the State will not discriminate, patronise or meddle in the profession of any religion.

If the government really had plans of empowerment then it wouldn’t have created a religious environment behind this case. Women empowerment is when we look beyond the women question. When we see a problem beyond the religious identity and the gender that person holds. When we make laws, making human values the touchstone regardless of gender, race, caste, orientation, religion and etc; That is when empowerment is. When give this exclusive criteria of female requisites of a muslim community, somewhere down the line you even believe they are inferior. Whom do you give exclusiveness? To the marginalized sections! Women be it Hindu or Muslim are not marginalised and following this conceptual fallacies on the name of women empowerment is like sprinkling salt on wounds and you know what these wounds are incurable coz the tragic truth is a women’s life is like a white cloth. The stain remains. This is not what is expected from a civilized society perhaps a secular democracy but then this bill is a psychological gimmick with conceptually wrong arguments, and it plays the role of nationalism gimmick in form of unnecessary feminism.

Pseudo feminist liberals have claimed this a measure of equality as women are being made follow this custom because of the gender they belong to. But it has nothing to do with equality which is nothing but a fancy word used in this context. The key to our liberation is ensuring everyone has an equal chance at success and happiness. It’s consciously choosing to be open-minded and inclusive. It’s about starting conversations that make us uncomfortable. It’s about minimising our role as oppressors, about recusing apathy, as that inevitably hurts us too. That is what equality is. Is womenhood so fragile, that it needs to prove men inferior to them , for proving equal status for their supposed supriority.

What is much more ironic, is that we don’t bother to inquire the prime minister why did he abandon his wife, but then idolize him to pass this so called women empowerment law of criminalizing triple talaq. I mean, are we serious? His case won’t get priority because of the designation he holds and the religion he belongs too. Classic illustration of New India.

This election had proved that India is no longer interested to follow the footsteps of a secular democratic republic. Hatred and bigotry is something it supports. The question is not whether congress did minority appeasement or not but now it’s clear the word ‘minority’ will erase. The BJP government used to blame congress for minority appeasement , then what is this? Isn’t this minority appeasement too, that also at the cost of human values!? It is nothing but a limpid minority appeasement and contrived act to shroud the previous failures perhaps to perturb the voters from real issues in order to inflict a hoax perspective. A fox and a stork can’t eat from the same plate and giving the stork a special beaker for food is not minority appeasement but then laminating his identity is definitely minority appeasement, which must be looked beyond black and white perfections of our personal account of preferences just for the sake of tangible absolute conclusions of votebank politics.

No economic and socio-legal support is provided by the government in the Bill to women, children and other dependents, when the husband will be behind the bars or on his account of not being able to give the required monetary support. Instant triple talaq is generally practiced in the most primitive societies of this nation. If suddenly, a man divorces his wife through the custom and then you criminalize that man , then what will happen to the women? Will she get any maintenance or subsidy? Why isn’t this government concerned about the source of living for that divorced women who apparently doesn’t holds any financial legacy to sustain herself? You can’t whitewash this point by giving self respect as a default justification. Neither with him nor without him the women can lead her life. And in that case, the government must assure individual financial liberty for that women, but then why will the government do this as the government needs to give thesis on religion for totalitarian eclipse of human conscience subjected with electoral benefits at the cost of neglecting the aftermath status of that women.

Infact, terms like “Subsistence Allowance” is not defined u/s 2 of the Act, meaning thereby, that such allowance u/s 5 is open for the Magistrate to interpret. This might pose a problem of interpretation. The intention of the legislature and judiciary might differ on this subject.

The government has stated criminalization of triple talaq custom as protection of the rights of muslim women. Is this protection? I don’t think so!
Firstly, why did a situation like this got created where the muslim women needed to be protected? Why weren’t they protected by default? Using this bill and protection at the same breath is a self insult for the government. The government has gone to a blitz with its own people because it wants to obtrude one outlook on 1.3 billions & desires to impose one terrific, suffocating memory on our 1.3 billion memories. India is paying the price of hatred, where ambitions are gyrating into anger. And then we label this protection? In that same India where innocent civilians are regularly being lynched because of the religion they belong to? Isn’t the government failing to protect the dignity of those citizens? It’s really surprising to see that the government which fails to protect the women of this nation from their own government MLA’s is talking about women protection! The government never paid so much concern to the rapes happening in this nation. When Asifa was raped the incident was coloured with religion, why? Because this government doesn’t give a damn to things that really matter.

The bill follows a Supreme Court verdict of 2017 declaring instant triple talaq as unconstitutional. But before idolizing the supreme court verdict we must also acknowledge the fact, that there was no mention about penalization of the husband. And I have previously mentioned about the disadvantages of penalization of the husband in context with maintenance before. However, I would like to add on that we must think critically about the systems we rely on as a society, and realise the full spectrum of womanhood in its various hues. We must understand that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can’t liberate only one group without the others, which requires us to acknowledge kyriarchy and intersectionality—the fact that along different axes, we’re all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged; this introspection will certainly not be achieved by overlooking the side of the man and must be followed in a systematic divorce system without the grounds of gender and solely based on consideration of the magnitude of the reason behind the talaq. And if the usual reason which is extramartial affair or polygamy is taken into consideration for either of the partners then the adultery, cheating and other judicial provisions are enough to guarantee a civilized divorce with the option of maintenance to the divorced provided the women is not guilty of extramartial affair or false accusations without going on lines of religious customs or religion in general, for instance the Hindu marriage act of 1955 which broke the ancient sastrik law and created system of divorce or separations, allowed contested divorce along with section 28 of the special marriage act 1954 and section 10A of the Indian divorce act 1869 allowing mutual consent divorce and other civilized provisions.

The triple talaq Bill does not even take account of instances like a man threatening his wife to give triple talaq, abetting a Muslim man to give triple talaq, attempt to give triple talaq etc. This bill perhaps proves to be very challenging to the judiciary as there are chances of there being a conflict between civil and criminal remedies. This is aka principle of alternative remedies. In resolving such conflicts, there may be differences in the application of mind and appreciation of evidences made by various judges, thereby putting the courts under a constant dilemma and hopelessness.

Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum [1985 (1) SCALE 767 = 1985 (3) SCR 844 = 1985 (2) SCC 556 = AIR 1985 SC 945], commonly referred to as the Shah Bano case, was a controversial maintenance lawsuit in India, in which the supreme court delivered a judgment favouring maintenance given to an aggrieved divorced Muslim woman. The Act has led to Muslim women receiving a large, one-time payment from their husbands during the period of iddat, instead of a maximum monthly payment of ₹500 – an upper limit which has since been removed. Cases of women getting lump sum payments for lifetime maintenance are becoming common. However it is seen that despite its unique feature of no ceiling on quantum of maintenance, the Act is sparingly used because of the lack of its knowledge even among lawyers. The legal fraternity generally uses the CrPC provision while moving maintenance petitions, considering it handy. The government of India in it’s urgency of eradicating congress acts using women empowerment as a proxy actually disgraced the power of a 300+ mandate.

What is even more insensate and distressing, is that we have to make laws for stopping wives to be abandoned in 2019 , and then we claim ourselves a civilized democracy. Why isn’t there enough security already provided by default to stop such old age practices such as triple talaq? Banning and criminalization of triple talaq are two different aspects. Why wasn’t such practices banned in 19th century, or 20th century at least? Why did such a situation get created, where the Indian parliament had to discuss about ancient immoral practices in 2019, at the cost of other important issues?

The principles of equality and non-discrimination form the basis of all human rights instruments. It is therefore clear that as a matter of human rights law, all women must be entitled to the full enjoyment of their human rights. Women are not a homogenous group of rights holders and discrimination against them can be expressed in many different forms and contexts. In order to protect, promote and advance women’s human rights, advocates and policy makers must take into account differences among women with respect to age, socio-economic status, racial/ethnic background, religion or status. Among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable are women from minority communities, whose problems are compounded by their uniquely disadvantaged positions in society but playing politics with the tagline of minority isn’t acceptable either. If you have to empower, then empower all communities and definitely not with a clinched fist.

Disclaimer

Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. The views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual. All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. The blog owner is not responsible for the content in comments. This blog disclaimer is subject to change at anytime.

The ocean makes up 70 percent of the earth’s surface and accounts for 96 percent of the water on the planet. The problem is, this water can’t be consumed. It’s oversaturated with salt.

Desalination plants remove dissolved salts and other minerals from seawater and turn it to drinking water which provide a solution for areas that have limited resources of fresh water and a reliable alternative source of water in times of severe drought. Desalination also produces water that can be used for irrigation, which is great for arid regions or in many areas around the world that are experiencing droughts. Desalination has been in use for decades now, and its method has been proven effective in creating fresh sources of drinking high quality water that is considered to be safe and reliable. The process has been tried and tested in many industries and applications over the years. As the freshwater supply on our nation is limited, we should preserve its resources by utilizing the method of desalination to eliminate water shortage crisis that the nation might face.

The Middle East has been a leader in desalination so far. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Israel rely heavily on desalination as a source for clean water. Israel gets 40 percent of domestic water from desalination. These countries also have hardly any groundwater or fresh water sources so desalination is a case of innovation by necessity. These countries make up the one percent of the world currently relying on desalination to meet water needs. But the UN predicts that by 2025 14 percent of the world will rely on desalination to meet water needs.

Desalination is the process of purifying saline water into a potable fresh water. Basically–turning ocean water into drinkable fresh water. Sounds pretty cool!

There are several ways to remove salt from water. Reverse osmosis and distillation are the most common ways to desalinate water. Reverse osmosis water treatment pushes water through small filters leaving salt behind. Distillation on a large scale involves boiling water and collecting water vapor during the process. Both require a lot of energy, infrastructure and are costly.

Solar distillation uses the sun to heat sea water until evaporation occurs, then the vapor is condensed onto a cool surface.

In vacuum distillation, atmospheric pressure is reduced, which lowers the temperature required to evaporate water. A basic law of physics is that liquids boil when their vapor pressure equals that of the ambient pressure. Vapor pressure increases with temperature, and this allows low-temperature “waste” heat from electrical power generation or industrial processes to be used.

In a process called cogeneration, a power plant provides the heat to distill water. Most current and planned cogeneration desalination plants utilize either fossil fuels or nuclear power, and most are located in the Middle East or North Africa. There, the countries can leverage their petroleum resources to offset their limited water resources.

Dual-purpose facilities of power generation and desalination are more efficient in their energy consumption that each is alone, and this makes desalination more viable.

The reverse osmosis desalination process uses an ultra-thin, aromatic polyamide thin-film, but it has a number of maintenance issues. These include ionic contamination from calcium and magnesium, dissolved organic carbon, bacteria, viruses, colloids and insoluble particulates, and scaling.

According to the non-profit Food & Water Watch, desalinated ocean water is the most expensive form of fresh water out there, given the infrastructure costs of collecting, distilling and distributing it. The group reports that, in the U.S., desalinated water costs at least five times as much to harvest as other sources of fresh water. Similar high costs are a big hurdle to desalination efforts in poor countries as well, where limited funds are already stretched too thin.

Israel invested in a large desalination plant in 2005 and will be producing enough water to supply half the country by the end of 2015. Yes, building desalination plants is very costly (1 billion USD for the largest plant in the US) but it is a safety net for places where drought conditions persist and freshwater is limited or lacking entirely. California, you know what I’m talking about.

California is building seventeen new desalination plants after years of severe drought. And it’s still controversial. Desalination is being used as a last resort in California. Cities in California have tried investing in infrastructure for desalination previously. Santa Barbara built a desalination plant years ago and is just now restarting it after initial costs were too high to run the plant previously. It will cost 55 million USD to restart and maintain. Water obtained from desalination costs twice the amount of water from freshwater sources. But now, parts of California don’t have many other options.

The only way desalination can be a good option to solving the water crisis is if renewable energy is used, costs are lowered, and environmental protections are put in place for marine life too.

Companies and countries and trying to lower the amount of energy needed to desalinate water and look into using cleaner energy sources. For example, Saudi Arabia has pushed to use solar energy to power desalination plants.

In California, the California Coastkeepers Alliance is working with desalination plants on a plan to make sure marine life is minimally harmed by using techniques sub-surface water intake as opposed to sucking in water from the surface where marine life is more prevalent.

Desalination does allow for severely water-stressed areas to have their own water source, but it still comes at a high cost. But with climate change and severe drought affecting more and more areas, I think it’s a process worth investing in to lower cost and cut carbon footprints of production. Combining renewable energy with improved technology could make desalination a more viable option. But it’s still not going to be a first choice for most countries.

Each day 100 million gallons of seawater are pushed through semi-permeable membranes to create 50 million gallons of water that is piped to municipal users. Carlsbad, which became fully operational in 2015, creates about 10 percent of the fresh water the 3.1 million people in the region use, at about twice the cost of the other main source of water.

It’s been a long time coming for desalination — de-sal for short. For decades, we have been told it would one day turn oceans of salt water into fresh and quench the world’s thirst. But progress has been slow.

That is now changing, as desalination is coming into play in many places around the world. Several factors are converging to bring new plants on line. Population has boomed in many water-stressed places, including parts of China, India, South Africa and the United States, especially in Arizona and California. In addition, drought — some of it driven by a changing climate – is occurring in many regions that not that long ago thought their supplies were ample.

San Diego is one of those places. With just 12 inches of rain a year in the Mediterranean climate of Southern California and no groundwater, the region gets half of its water from the distant Colorado River. The amount of snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains and keeps that mighty river flowing, however, has greatly diminished over the last two decades and according to some researchers may be part of a permanent aridification of the West. Climate change is a very real phenomenon for water managers throughout the Southwest and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the cost of desalinated water has been coming down as the technology evolves and the cost of other sources increases. In the last three decades, the cost of desalination has dropped by more than half.

A boom in de-sal, though, doesn’t mean that everywhere with access to the sea has found a new source of fresh water. Circumstances play a large role. “As populations increase and existing surface water supplies are being tapped out or groundwater is depleted or polluted, then the problems are acute and there are choices to be made” about de-sal, said Michael Kiparsky of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “There are places around the world where de-sal makes economic sense, where there is high pressure on the water resources plus a lot of available energy resources,” such as the Middle East.

De-sal proponents acknowledge the industry must confront and solve some serious environmental issues if it is to continue to grow. Desalination requires vast amounts of energy, which in some places is currently provided by fossil fuels.

The first large-scale de-sal plants were built in the 1960s, and there are now some 20,000 facilities globally that turn sea water into fresh. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with very little fresh water and cheap energy costs for the fossil fuels it uses in its de-sal plants, produces the most fresh water of any nation, a fifth of the world’s total.

Australia and Israel are also major players. When the Millennium Drought gripped southeastern Australia from the late 1990s until 2009 water systems in the region dropped to small fractions of their storage capacity. Facing a crisis, Perth, Melbourne, and other cities embarked on a large desalination plant spree. The plant in Melbourne, which provided its first water in 2017, cost $3.5 billion to build and provides a third of the city’s supply. It’s critical because the region has had below-average rainfall for 18 of the last 20 years.

India too had a desalination plant. The Minjur Desalination Plant is a reverse osmosis, water desalination plant at Kattupalli village, a northern suburb of Chennai, India, on the coast of the Bay of Bengal that supplies water to the city of Chennai. Built on a 60-acre site, it is the largest desalination plant in India. Construction works were carried out by the Indian company IVRCL and the Spanish company Abengoa, under the direction of the Project Manager Fernando Portillo Vallés and the Construction Manager Juan Ignacio Jiménez-Velasco, who returned to Europe after the inauguration of the plant to work on Renewable Energy Projects. Originally scheduled to be operational by January 2009, the work on the plant was delayed due to Cyclone Nisha in October 2008, which damaged a portion of the completed marine works and destroyed the cofferdam meant for the installation of transition pipes. The trial runs were completed in June 2010 and the plant was opened in July 2010. Water from the plant will be utilised chiefly for industrial purposes such as the Ennore Port and North Chennai Thermal Power Station. However, during droughts, water from the plant will be supplied to the public, serving an estimated population of 1,000,000.

Chennai Water Desalination Ltd. (CWDL) is a special purpose vehicle of IVRCL Infrastructure & Projects Ltd. and Befesa Agua of Spain, created in 2005 to design, build, own and operate the seawater desalination plant for the Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB). In September 2005, the CMWSSB signed a bulk water purchase agreement with CWDL to purchase water from the plant at a cost of ₹ 48.66/m³ (US$1.03/m³). The water to industries is sold at a rate of ₹ 60/m³ (US$1.27/m³). At the end of the 25-year agreement, the plant will be transferred to the state government.

With an installed capacity to produce 100 million liters of drinking water per day, it is the largest such plant in India. Commercial operations began on 25 July 2010, and average production has been 90 MLD. With Chennai being a burgeoning metropolis with an unfulfilled requirement of nearly 400 MLD of water, this project is the first among a series of desalination plants being planned in the state to meet the deficit in supply.

Reverse osmosis (RO) technology is employed at the plant to desalinate the sea water, which contains up to 6.4 ppm aluminium and about 50 NTU of turbidity. Energy recovery units help increase the efficiency of the system by recovering kinetic energy from the brine solution and transferring the same to the desalinated water that has passed through the osmotic membrane.

Pre-treatment of the raw sea water includes coagulation-flocculation, gravity, and pressure filtration. The filtered water is then pumped to the plant where it undergoes various preliminary treatments before being passed through the RO trains. The water is then forced through the RO membranes at high pressure. The membranes retain the salts and pass on the desalinated water to the next stage, namely, the post-treatment process. The treated water is then flavoured and stored in a 20 MLD underground water tank, from where it is pumped to the Red Hills reservoir and then released into the city grid.

The RO technology of the plant produces 100 MLD of desalinated water from 273 MLD of sea water.

The plant consists of 8,600 sea water reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, 248 pressure vessels, 23 pressure exchangers, 5 high-pressure pumps, 16 pressure filter vessels, electrical, automation and control systems and 1,200 m of HDPE pipelines of 1,600 mm diameter. The CMWSSB laid a 33 km pipeline at a cost of ₹ 930 million (US$20 million) to carry the treated fresh water from Minjur to Red Hills. The project also included infrastructure for the collection of seawater, including a 110 kV/22 kV sub-station built by the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board for uninterrupted power supply to the desalination plant. Before construction of the plant, studies were also conducted on the environmental impact on the livelihoods of fishermen and other communities and the impact of high saline discharge on the fisheries and turtle nesting.

A reinforced concrete cylindrical intake well of 5 m diameter and 4 m height has been installed nearly 600 m from the shore at a depth of 9 m. A stainless steel screen sits atop the well. The sea water intake pipeline enters the well at the bottom. The HDPE pipeline is 1,600 mm in diameter. It was welded using butt fusion welding machines on the shore before being floated out to the sea and being sunk along the required alignment. The pipeline empties the water into a sea water intake sump on the shore where 3 vertical turbine pumps of variable discharge up to a maximum of 4,000 cum/hr each are used to pump water into the plant. The average intake flow is 9,000 to 10,000 cum/hr, and the average product water output of the plant is about 4,000 cum/hr. The system is designed to work as a self-priming suction for sea water intake.

The plant also has 5 additional intake lines of 560 mm OD as a stand-by intake system. These pipelines have a separate pump house where centrifugal pumps of discharge up to a maximum of 1,500 cum/hr each have been installed. The marine works subcontract (involving laying of the intake pipelines, intake structures and outfall pipeline) was executed by Flowline Systems Pvt Ltd.

Chennai Metrowater purchases water from the plant for ₹ 48.66 per kilolitre of water in accordance with the bulk water purchase agreement with Chennai Water Desalination Limited, a special purpose vehicle promoted by IVRCL. The tariff is high compared to the plant at Nemmeli since the company that has set up the plant also has to add in capital and operations costs.

However, there are demerits too. There are environmental concerns too. Desalination plants take in salt water straight from the ocean and can kill or harm fish and other small ocean life as water travels from the source to the plant. De-sal is needed as the planet warms, which leads to more greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, there are serious concerns about the damage to marine life from the plant’s intake systems and extra-salty wastewater.

There are two types of desalination – thermal, which heats up water and then captures the condensation, and reverse osmosis, which forces sea water through the pores of a membrane that are many times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. This traps salt molecules, but allows the smaller water molecules to go through. Both require a great deal of energy, and greenhouse gas emissions created by the power needed – especially in the Middle East, where fossil fuels generate electricity – are a significant contributor to global warming.

There are ecological impacts as well. It takes two gallons of sea water to make a gallon of fresh water, which means the gallon left behind is briny. It is disposed of by returning it to the ocean and – if not done properly by diffusing it over large areas – can deplete the ocean of oxygen and have negative impacts on sea life.

A study by the UN Institute for Water, Environment and Health published earlier this year contends that the problem of brine waste has been underestimated by 50 percent and that, when mixed with the chemicals meant to keep systems from fouling, the brine is toxic and causes serious pollution.

Another problem comes from the sucking in of sea water for processing. When a fish or other large organism gets stuck on the intake screen, it dies or is injured; in addition, fish larvae, eggs and plankton get sucked into the system and are killed.

A strategy increasingly being used to obviate, or reduce, that problem is to bury the sea water intakes beneath the sea floor and use the sandy ocean bottom as a natural filter.

In 2016, California passed the Desalination Amendment, which tightened regulations for intake and brine disposal. Proponents of desalination contend the changes have been onerous and are slowing the march toward a de-sal future.

Because of the cost of seawater processing and the impacts on the ocean, much of the recent desalination growth has involved the use of brackish water. The solids in brackish water are one-tenth the amount in ocean water, and that makes the process much cheaper.

Arizona, perpetually short on water and facing a Colorado River supply shortage, is looking at both a seawater de-sal plant in partnership with Mexico – which has the ocean access that the state lacks – and at plants that can treat the 600 million acre-feet of brackish water deposits the state estimates it has.

Texas, meanwhile, now has 49 municipal desal plants that process brackish water, both surface and subsurface. San Antonio currently is building what will be the largest brackish water desal plant in the country. In its first phase, it produces 12 million gallons a day, enough for 40,000 families, but by 2026, the plant – known as H2Oaks – will produce 30 million gallons a day. Brackish water de-sal costs $1,000 to $2,000 per acre-foot.

A new desalination technique called a freeze-thaw method freezes seawater in a vacuum, then under vacuum conditions, the desalinated ice is melted and diverted for collection. Two facilities in Western Australia have begun to use CETO, a wave power technology that desalinates seawater using submerged buoys. Wave-powered desalination plants began operating in Australia on Garden Island in 2013 and in Perth in 2015

Pretreating the intake water can help, but the additives include acid for anti-scaling, the organic polymers polyacrylamide and polymaleic acid, phosphonates and polyphosphates, biocides such as as chlorine, ozone, sodium or calcium hypochlorite. These contaminates are often released back into the ocean and can do serious harm to sensitive marine habitats.

All desalination methods produce a concentrated waste product composed of the salts found in seawater and chemicals used in the process. Disposal methods for the concentrate include dumping it back in the ocean, injecting it into deep underground wells, storing it in above-ground evaporation ponds, and zero-liquid discharge procedures that produce a solid waste product.

Lastly, to conclude this article, let me counter the financial argument.

You might say desalination is too expensive to be used. However, i disagree with it. The government which can offer 1000 crore bucks(per head) for purchasing MLA’s, spend 3500 crores on an useless statue, get crores of 1000s from electoral bonds and has an excellent bonding with crony capitalists, desalination is like bread and butter for them. It is democracy is not when the poor have cars but when the rich use public transportation. But, our one has neither of them.

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India is facing one of its major and most serious water crisis.

After two consecutive years of weak monsoons, 330 million people — a quarter of the country’s population — are affected by a severe drought. With nearly 50 per cent of India grappling with drought-like conditions, the situation has been particularly grim this year in western and southern states that received below average rainfall.

According to the Composite Water Management Index (CWMI) report released by the Niti Aayog in 2018, 21 major cities (Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and others) are racing to reach zero groundwater levels by 2020, affecting access for 100 million people.

However, 12 per cent of India’s population is already living the ‘Day Zero’ scenario, thanks to excessive groundwater pumping, an inefficient and wasteful water management system and years of deficient rains. The CWMI report also states that by 2030, the country’s water demand is projected to be twice the available supply, implying severe water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people and an eventual six per cent loss in the country’s GDP.

The Union government recently formed a new Jal Shakti (water) ministry, which aims at tackling water issues with a holistic and integrated perspective on the subject. The ministry has announced an ambitious plan to provide piped water connections to every household in India by 2024.

The ministry has set a tough target at a time when hundreds of millions don’t have access to clean water. Aiming at laying huge pipeline networks for water supply means that yet again, we are giving more preference to infrastructure. Also, the moot questions are: what will happen if there is no water to supply? What will happen to all the wastewater that gets generated?

This indicates that there is a clear disconnect between water, society and economy. Currently, we are interested in laying large networks, constructing huge storage dams, fetching water from 150 kilometres and above, which involves a huge carbon footprint.

We are valuing land more than water, neglecting our local water bodies, which have either gone dry or encroached. Also, in many Indian cities, water is not properly distributed. Some areas of mega cities like Delhi and Mumbai are privileged to get more that than the standard municipal water norm of 150 litres per capita per day (lpcd) while other areas get 40-50 lpcd.

According to a study by the federal government think tank NITI Aayog, 21 Indian cities will run out of groundwater by next year, including the capital New Delhi and the information technology hub of Bengaluru. Two hundred thousand Indians already die every year because they don’t have a safe water supply, the report said. A shocking 600 million people face “high to extreme” water stress.

That Chennai should have run dry first is instructive. Less than four years ago, the now drought-ridden city was inundated by devastating floods. Though located on a flood plain, the city had paved over the lakes and wetlands that might have helped the process of recharging the water table. As a result, heavy rains couldn’t percolate into aquifers under the city.

Water pooled and surged aboveground. That reduced the resources available to deal with a crisis like this year’s.

Elsewhere, demand is the issue. In theory, India receives enough rain every year to meet the needs of over a billion people. According to the country’s Central Water Commission, it requires at most 3,000 billion cubic meters of water annually and receives 4,000 billion cubic meters of rain.

But too much water is wasted thanks to inefficiency and misuse. The situation is particularly dire in India’s northwest, irrigated by the great rivers that rise in the Himalayas. Indians are taught to revere the “green revolution” of the 1970s, when the northwest became India’s granary thanks to canals and tube wells that pumped out groundwater. That revolution, however, has turned out to be unsustainable. In 2011, 245 billion cubic meters of water were withdrawn for irrigation — a quarter of the total groundwater depletion globally that year.

Northwestern states should be growing less water-intensive crops; areas in the east of the country that receive much more plentiful rainfall should take their place as the bread baskets of India. But shifting cultivation patterns around is politically problematic. Farmers in the northwest don’t just expect to continue to grow water-intensive crops, they also want free or subsidized power with which to run the tube wells that pump out their rapidly depleting groundwater.

Climate change activists have long argued that water will be the political flashpoint of the 21st century. Water-stressed India will likely be one of the first places to test that theory. The state of Tamil Nadu complains that it doesn’t receive its fair share of the waters of the Cauvery River; recently, the authority that nominally manages the river accused the government of neighboring Karnataka of holding onto water that it should have allowed to flow down to the Cauvery delta.

Things might get even testier up north, where more than a billion people depend upon rivers that rise in the Himalayas. Bangladesh and Pakistan feel that India is being stingy with river water. Indian strategists constantly worry that China will divert water from the Himalayan rivers that rise in Tibet to feed the thirst cities in its own north.

The floods in Chennai are a warning. As the world warms, the rains on which India depends have become erratic: They frequently fail to arrive on time, and they fall in a more disparate and unpredictable pattern. The country can no longer afford to waste its dwindling resources.

A rapidly urbanizing and developing India needs to drought-proof its cities and rationalize its farming. Water-harvesting must be a priority, alongside mechanisms for groundwater replenishment. As it is, every summer is hotter and less bearable. If Indians run short of water as well, one of the world’s most populous nations could well become unlivable.

Aggravating the problem is that the water being supplied currently is of drinking water standards.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that an individual requires around 25 litres of water daily for meeting his/her basic hygiene and food needs. The rest is used for non-potable purposes like mopping and cleaning. This indicates that for most of the non-potable uses, a quality lower than drinking water is required. Thus, for economic efficiency and environmental sustainability, water must be treated and supplied according to usage.

To top this, are issues of leakage losses, water pricing and metering of water. Lack of proper maintenance of existing infrastructure causes further losses of almost 40 per cent of piped water in urban areas.

Looking at the current situation, there is a need for a paradigm shift. We urgently require a transition from this ‘supply-and-supply-more water’ provision to measures which lead towards improving water use efficiency, reducing leakages, recharging/restoring local waterbodies as well as applying for higher tariffs and ownership by various stakeholders.

A recovery-based closed loop system is the need of the hour.

It is time to go back and start using our traditional practice of rainwater harvesting — catching water where it falls. Presently, India captures only eight per cent of its annual rainfall, among the lowest in the world.

Another aspect is the treatment and reuse of wastewater. About 80 per cent of the water that reaches households, leaves as waste and pollutes our waterbodies and environment. There is a huge potential in reusing and recycling this treated wastewater at least for non-potable purposes, which is cost effective.

All this leads to the fact that we need to promote a decentralised approach, with a key focus on water conservation, source sustainability, storage and reuse wherever possible.

It is important to understand that managing the water situation is not the job of only engineers but all stakeholders including hydrogeologists, economists, planners and most importantly, communities themselves.

In a recent tweet, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed upon the vitality of increasing water use efficiency through sprinkler and drip irrigation, including in sugarcane cultivation.

This comes in the wake of the most severe water crisis that India is facing today, especially with our headlines full of Chennai’s ongoing water scarcity. According to a recent study by government think tank NITI Aayog, nearly 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress, with about two lakh people dying each year because of inadequate access to safe water. And the crisis is about to get worse.

Emphasis on behavioural change is not getting enough attention because it is nuanced and complex. But locals/citizens/ communities have a huge part to play. By keeping in check our own usage and actions, we can contribute.

While the importance of conservation can’t be stressed enough, focusing just on urban use is the proverbial drop in the ocean because of this one statistic: Domestic usage accounts for less than 5% of India’s annual water consumption, while agriculture’s share is 90%.

Now, that is in keeping with international patterns, but India fares miserably in terms of water efficiency of most crops, shows data from Water Footprint Network (WFN), a global network on water issues.

WFN classifies water usage into three types: green (rain water); blue (surface and groundwater); and grey (amount of water required to carry off pollutants). It also gives data on water use for different purposes. WFN data for 1996-2005 shows that crop production, grazing and animal water supply (broadly agricultural use) accounted for a little over 92% of total water use in the world. Industry and domestic use accounted for another 4.4% and 3.6%, respectively.

For India, the figures were 92.6%, 3% and 4.4% for agriculture, industrial and domestic use, respectively. India is ranked second behind China in terms of total use of water, although per capita consumption is below the global average. However, it is way ahead of all countries in terms of usage of blue water, showing the high rate of exploitation of surface and groundwater in the country.

While job opportunities have soared in the sprawling city, millions have no piped water and instead rely on an army of privately-run tankers that suck water from wells inside and outside the city and deliver it to homes.

Other families dig unauthorised private wells in search of water for drinking, bathing, laundry and other daily needs.

Even those living in long-established neighbourhoods with piped water often find water trickling, rather than gushing, from the tap.

Thousands of rural families in India needs fresh water. But these families can’t just turn on a tap. Instead, the women in the household must walk to fetch it, sometimes travelling miles carrying plastic or earthenware pots, possibly with a child or two in tow, to the nearest safe source—regularly repeating the journey up to three times a day. In the scorching summer months of April and May, when temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees, it is a particularly gruelling daily ritual—and when they get home they must complete their other household chores: cooking, washing, bringing up the children, even helping on the family farm. From the Western Ghats and the mountainous north-east to the arid desert state of Rajasthan, women across the country act as water collectors. And this gender-specific role has a severe impact on every aspect of their lives, from their health and social life to education and their ability to have a real say in the community.

It is estimated that 163 million Indians still don’t have access to clean, running water. Until that’s fixed, this significant national problem will prevail, with women paying the biggest price.

One concern is that India may lack overall long-term availability of replenishable water resources. While India’s aquifers are currently associated with replenishing sources, the country is also a major grain producer with a great need for water to support the commodity. As with all countries with large agricultural output, excess water consumption for food production depletes the overall water table.

Many rural communities in India who are situated on the outskirts of urban sprawl also have little choice but to drill wells to access groundwater sources. However, any water system adds to the overall depletion of water. There is no easy answer for India which must tap into water sources for food and human sustenance, but India’s overall water availability is running dry.

India’s water crisis is often attributed to lack of government planning, increased corporate privatization, industrial and human waste and government corruption. In addition, water scarcity in India is expected to worsen as the overall population is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by year 2050. To that end, global water scarcity is expected to become a leading cause of national political conflict in the future, and the prognosis for India is no different.

Water collection in India is a woman’s job, irrespective of her physique—and there’s no respite, even when she’s menstruating, ill, or has something else to do. As groundwater resources are placed under increasing pressure due to over-reliance and unsustainable consumption, wells, ponds and tanks can also regularly dry up, escalating the water crisis and placing a greater burden on women to travel long distances. Access to unsafe drinking water also results in the spread of water-borne diseases. And women are often the first victims of both water scarcity and water pollution.

In urban areas, long queues of women with colourful plastic water pots are eye-catching. But such images also highlight problems of water scarcity and the long waits they endure for the water tankers that deliver it in cities.

Urban woman, especially on the outskirts of cities and in slum areas, face the particular burden of this water scarcity. In some areas, water is occasionally supplied in the middle of the night, meaning that these women are deprived of sleep and their productivity is affected. Indeed, there are women in the global south who are denied education purely because they have to collect water rather than go to school. In fact, one report revealed that almost 23% of girls in India drop out of school on reaching puberty due to a lack of water and sanitation facilities.

When girls have to drop out of school to help their mothers collect water and perform other household tasks, they are denied their right to education—which is now a fundamental right under Article 21A of the Indian Constitution. The saying goes: “Educate a woman, and she shall educate her family”—well, not these women. And because they’re missing out on the opportunities education provides, so are their other family members.

Collecting water is an irksome journey, especially in dry areas during heat waves. But it can be a dangerous one, too. Women may risk physical attack, for example, or abuse. The situation is made worse by the lack of adequate sanitation facilities both at home and en route to the water source. And things are even worse for women from the lower strata of society who are even denied access to water sources like public wells. This caste discrimination persists even though the Indian Constitution—which ensures equal access to public wells without any discrimination based on religion, race, caste, and sex—is 70 years old.

It is estimated that 163 million Indians still don’t have access to clean, running water. Until that’s fixed, this significant national problem will prevail, with women paying the biggest price.

About 42 per cent of India is ‘abnormally dry’ which is around 6 per cent more than last year, according to the Drought Early Warning System (DEWS).

A delay in the arrival of monsoon further pushed the country’s rainfall deficiency in the first nine days of June to 45 per cent, according to the India Meteorological Department.

The pre-monsoon season this year is the second driest in 65 years, with gross rainfall deficiency recorded at 25 per cent, said private forecaster Skymet.

The country witnessed 99 mm of rainfall in the three-month pre-monsoon season that ended on May 31, against the average of 131.5 mm, it said.

All the four regions of the country – Northwest India, Central India, East and Northeast India as well as South Peninsula — have recorded deficit rains of 30 per cent, 18 per cent, 14 per cent and 47 per cent respectively.

Delhi’s water crisis has left lakhs of people seething with anger this summer, even in the gated communities. The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) is supplying 900 MGD (million gallons a day) of water, against a peak demand of 1,200 MGD, resulting in a massive shortage.

And it’s not just that. Those lucky to get some water in this scorching heat complain of sewage in the taps. DJB’s tanker supplies are also falling hopelessly short, triggering clashes and allowing the water mafia to thrive, even more.

Tanker supplies are insufficient in adjoining areas such as Deoli, Govindpuri and Sangam Vihar like every summer. Najafgarh is receiving water only around 3-4 am. Even this supply is often disrupted or mixed with sewage.

Bharat Vihar, Sainik Nagar, Mansa Ram Park, Sevak Park and Dwarka are reeling under reduced supplies and low-pressure crises. In East Delhi’s Chilla, residents could be seen waiting for DJB’s tanker. They returned disappointed as none came.

Social activists in the area said several complaints by the RWA to the Delhi government haven’t led to any action. Jagat Puri residents are seen filling water from public taps on roads. One cancer patient, an elderly man, walked down the street to fill water. The crisis is more acute where migrant workers live.

Badarpur’s residents in South Delhi that they will start getting Ganga water in their taps within a week. Experts say the city has sufficient water, but as high as 45% of it is lost to spillages and thefts. They say Delhi must revive its water bodies and storm drains (being lost to brazen illegal concretisation, garbage dumping and sewage disposal), store rainwater, and recycle and reuse its waste water.

Weather prediction and disaster response have become issues fuelling the blame game between state officials in Uttarakhand. An analysis of rainfall data for the past five years, available on the website of the India Meteorological Department, points to changes in rainfall trends in India, with a greater number of incidents of excess rain in Uttarakhand in June. The trends in rainfall do not indicate the kind of disastrous rainfall the state received this year, but it does point to the necessity for a robust disaster management programme, which as of now does not exist in the state.

The areas of Uttarakhand affected by the recent floods, particularly Uttarkashi, have experienced excess rains in June for the past several years. Last year, there was a rainfall deficit in the same month across the state. But data for the preceding five years indicates a trend towards excess rainfall in June.

Monsoon trends from 1961 to 2004 analysed by scientists show that the amount of rainfall received has increased in the months of May and June across India. In northwest India where Uttarakhand lies, this amount has increased by 22.4 per cent. The data also shows a decrease in rainfall in July and August. The northwest region receives 6.7 per cent less rain than before in these two months.

Shortage of water is a major crisis in the deserted state of Rajasthan and prolonged dry summer has aggravated the situation as almost all ponds and wells have dried up. Most people are dependent on the hand pumps that have very little water to offer in this scorching heat.

Several parts of India face severe water scarcity and drought during the summer months. The reason for this water scarcity lies at the grass-roots level—unsustainable water consumption and unscientific ways of managing water supply. Traditional water sources and groundwater recharging points, such as tanks, ponds, canals and lakes, are either neglected, polluted or used or filled in for other purposes.

The situation is particularly bad in Marathwada and Vidarbh regions. Keeping in mind the rain shortfall, the state government has approved a 30-crore fund for cloud seeding plan to trigger artificial rain in these areas.

According to data provided by the Central Water Commission (CWC), more than 90 reservoirs across the country have less than 20 per cent water of their total capacity.

Guwahati city is plagued with scarcity of drinking water supply. Long queues can be observed near water supply pipes as people make do with just a bucket or two of water to last 24 hours for the entire family. The problem has aggravated in the recent times as even these supply pipes, more often than not, fail to supply water, sometimes for days on end. Protests and demands at the government to secure safe drinking water for the citizens are common news now. Infact the state. Guwahati will face an unprecedented drinking water crisis by 2025 in case Dispur fails to complete execution of its four water-supply projects at South Guwahati West, South Guwahati Central, South Guwahati East and North Guwahati. The four water-supply projects were designed by the Guwahati Development Department to cater to the need of the city’s estimated population of nearly 25 lakh in 2025. But the progress of execution of these projects is literally slower than the snail. If the present trend of progress continues, there is no chance of completion of these projects by 2025. The present requirement of water for over 10 lakh population in the city is about 132 million litres of water per day (MLD) against which the government agencies are supplying only 79 MLD, the source said. The city’s daily drinking water requirement will go up to 350 MLD by 2025.

In western regions of the country, 27 reservoirs have less than 10 per cent water. According to the Meteorological department (IMD), the country received 23 per cent less rainfall this year between March and May. This is the second lowest pre-monsoon rainfall in the last 65 years.

Wells and hand-pumps have dried up, ponds have disappeared, the water table has receded and Bundelkhand in Uttar Pradesh is now fighting for water.

The few water sources that remain are becoming the proverbial bone of contention among the people and water riots are being reported from the rural interiors of Bundelkhand.

The state government, however, denied that there is any law and order problem due to water shortage in this region.

Whenever a water tanker comes, people fight among themselves to get their share of water. We have seen family members fighting among themselves. On several occasion, people have had to intervene when the arguments turn physical. Water riots are becoming increasingly common in the area.

In Badhauli village here, two days ago, an elderly woman and her grandson were seriously wounded when they went to fill water from a tap that had been connected to a submersible pump by the owner.

“The owner refused to let them take water and when they insisted, he got his men to beat them with sticks. Both have suffered head injuries. We understand the owner’s point of view too – he cannot allow the entire village to draw water from his tap – but the administration must also step forward and deal with the situation,” said locals

The officials in Banda district headquarters deny having any information of such clashes.

A large number of weddings in Bundelkhand have also been postponed due to paucity of water. Some have even been cancelled.

Devi Dayal Pandey of Jalaun district said: “My son’s wedding was cancelled because the girl refused to walk 2 km every day to fetch water. She said that she would not marry my son because our toilet is also non-functional – how can we use the toilet where there is no water supply?”

Dozens of cattle, birds, monkeys and dogs have died in Bundelkhand in the past two weeks but officials said that they have no information about this.

“This is a usual situation at this time of the year. The water supply is affected because the water table has receded and we send water tanker whenever there is a demand for one. The heat wave conditions are extreme and we hope to get rainfall soon which will bring respite from power and water shortage,” said an official in Banda.

The Executive Officer of Orai Nagar Palika, Sanjay Kumar, said that water tankers were being sent to areas that faced a severe water crisis.

Bundelkhand has five rivers – Betwa, Yamuna, Kunwari, Satlej and Pahuj – but most of them have seen a depletion in water over the years.

Nagaland is also experiencing an economic water scarcity mainly induced by lack of investment in water resource construction and management to meet the demand. The total drinking water requirement for the whole state is 96.26 million litres per day (MLD) – 56.30 MLD for urban areas and 39.96 MLD for rural areas. As per the norms prescribed by the GoI, 40 litres per capita per day (lpcd) for rural and 70 lpcd for urban areas is required. Only 195 of rural areas have 100% coverage of the total water requirement while 508 gets less than 25%, 209 upto 50%, 404 gets upto 75%, and 171 get a little more than 75%.Nagaland is also experiencing an economic water scarcity mainly induced by lack of investment in water resource construction and management to meet the demand. The access to water supply and sanitation infrastructure is increasing but the state is lagging in access to reliable, sustainable, and affordable water supply and sanitation services. Even Kohima, which requires 10 MLD, is getting only 10% of the total requirement. While tube wells and spring wells are supplementing the water shortage, random drilling of deep tube wells is a concern.

The main concern in the water management domain, includes erratic distribution of rainfall; inefficient water use; unregulated groundwater extraction and unsustainable management; water pollution; population pressure; poor water quality due to open defecation, poor waste management and inter-village river disputes; and poor management. The situation is aggravated by climate change, with future predictions suggesting a worsening of the situation.

Many parts of Kolkata are reeling under a water crisis because of excessive dependence on groundwater and inadequate supply of water from Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). Citizens often have to fall back on water bodies in the neighbourhood for bathing and washing clothes, contaminating them in the process. Locals say that water supply is often erratic in the locality and the low pressure of water in the taps means it takes a long time for the bucket to get filled up, causing long queues that often end in mild altercations. The water crisis has boosted the business of mineral water suppliers who have been minting money at the expense of people’s woes, people are forced to spend Rs 3000 every month on mineral water because the groundwater is not of good quality and has high levels of iron and arsenic, while the fresh water supplied is not enough to fulfil our needs. The candidates of all political parties make false promises of working to improve the condition, but nothing has been done and the problem persists. People should decide wisely and vote for candidates who seem to be genuinely concerned about the issues we face every dayMany parts of Kolkata are reeling under a water crisis because of excessive dependence on groundwater and inadequate supply of water from Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC). Citizens often have to fall back on water bodies in the neighbourhood for bathing and washing clothes, contaminating them in the process. Locals say that water supply is often erratic in the locality and the low pressure of water in the taps means it takes a long time for the bucket to get filled up, causing long queues that often end in mild altercations.

Experts say that fast depletion of groundwater might have far more dangerous consequences than the common perception that Kolkata might face acute water shortage in the near future. Dr P K Sikdar, researcher and acting Registrar at the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM) who has also authored five books on environment, points out “Groundwater (availability) is rapidly shrinking in the city. It might lead to land subsidence as there is a layer of around 40 metres of clay underground and then sand that might give away.”

Thus, groundwater levels dropping can result in sinking of the earth’s surface, leading to tilting or collapse of buildings. Sikdar adds, “The deepening of the ground water level would also hamper its quality and increase the cost of extraction.”

P K Sikdar has actually been researching the groundwater of West Bengal for more than thirty years now. He points out that the flow of water began to change from the late 1970s to early 1980s, when large scale extraction began: “Earlier, in the fifties, the groundwater used to flow from north to south but a change was noticed three decades ago when a groundwater pressure trough developed in the south central part of Kolkata city due to heavy groundwater abstraction and the water started flowing into the trough from all directions. This pressure trough then began to widen slowly and still persists today. The pressure troughs remain even after the monsoon, suggesting that the discharge has been more than recharge.”

He further said the ground water level that was more or less near the sea level has dropped drastically by 15 to 16 meters in the past five decades.

A study by P K Sikdar and others has found that the city faces high levels of manganese and iron content in the groundwater which can cause serious ailments. Concentrations of manganese exceed 0.3 mg/L, which is the Indian permissible health guideline value for drinking water and going beyond which may adversely affect children in terms of memory, attention and motor skills. The concentration in the groundwater of the city supplied through municipal and public wells is as high as 1.4 mg/L in places.

As per Indian standards, the permissible limit of iron in the water should be less than 0.3 milligram per litre and even 1 milligram per litre is permissible where alternative sources of water are not available. However, in Kolkata’s groundwater, the iron content has been found to be much higher and even upto 23 milligram per litre in places.

High concentration of iron may lead to hemochromatosis damaging the liver, heart and pancreas, as well as diabetes, said Dr Sikdar. He, however, made it clear that barring some pockets in Tolly nullah area in the south, the city areas do not face serious threat of arsenic contamination.

But one need not go too far to witness the presence of arsenic contamination. Researchers at Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI), Kolkata claim that low level arsenic (11-50 µg/L) found in the groundwater of the rural areas of North and South 24 Parganas and Nadia, approximately 80 kms from the city, could pose serious health hazards.

“We conducted tests on more than a thousand people and approximately 50% or even more were found to have molecular and cellular alterations which lead to aggravation of pulmonary and systemic inflammation. Chronic low arsenic exposure may lead to persistent inflammation which in turn may increase the vulnerability towards a vast array of inflammatory disorders, including cancer,” said Dona Sinha, Senior Scientific Officer at CNCI whose group has been conducting research on the health effects of low arsenic in rural pockets of Bengal since 2012.

Sinha laid stress on reducing the dependency on ground water as the only alternative to prevent the high intake of arsenic, “The authorities should decrease the excessive dependence on ground water by supplying fresh water in the outskirts. Even the reverse osmosis water cannot be a complete solution, as all households cannot afford it, especially those living in slums.”

Soon after coming to power, the state government led by Mamata Banerjee had abolished the collection of water tax in 2011. It crippled the revenue for municipal authorities and encouraged activities of private water suppliers. This triggered reckless and callous use of water has increased, creating inevitable pressure on groundwater. But the consequence of this is what citizens and authorities both need to wake up to, urgently.

Kolkata officially has about 14,000 stand posts (as water hydrants, drawing water from the Ganges, are referred to in the city), 12,000 hand tube wells (hand pumps) and around 2,500 large tube wells mainly catering to multi-storied buildings, but the actual figures are far higher.

Western South Asia looks set for an increasingly dry summer, with NASA predicting drought in Afghanistan over low snowfall this winter, but the crisis in the Indian state of Kashmir has been long in the making. In October 2017 the Jhelum – the main river running through the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir – recorded the lowest levels ever measured. It was inevitable that in such circumstances this would impact Kashmir’s agricultural sector, which employs the largest number of people in the state. As of the moment it is impossible how this will impact India’s downstream riparian, Pakistan.

In the villages of Kashmir, farmers are worried about the creeping dryness in the Himalayan region. While they are acutely aware how it can affect their crops in summer, a recent government advisory that asks farmers in several districts not to cultivate rice this year has only heightened their anxieties.

The rainfall and snowfall numbers collected at the regional directorate of the meteorological department corroborates the helplessness shown by the irrigation department. Rainfall in the first three months of 2018 has been the lowest in 30 years, according to Mukhtar Ahmad, deputy director at Jammu and Kashmir Meteorological Department.

Gulmarg, for instance, recorded a mere 172 mm precipitation (snowfall and rainfall) in the three months to March, compared with an average of 602 mm in the past 30 years for the three-month period, Ahmad said. Similarly, Kupwara received only 198 mm compared with the 30-year average of 424 mm, whereas in Srinagar it was 82 mm against an average of 255 mm.

Scientists say more uncertain rainfall and snowfall is one of the major impacts of climate change.

Only with the constructive involvement of all of society’s stakeholders can this problem be solved. And it must be solved soon. With the increasing threat of climate change, water scarcity could soon be an irreparable issue—and not just for women, but for everyone in society. India needs solutions now. Children in 100 million homes in the country lack water, and one out of every two children are malnourished. Environmental justice needs to be restored to India so that families can raise their children with dignity, and providing water to communities is one such way to best ensure that chance. Dear readers, my next article will be on solutions. This is just the part 1. There are three more parts to it.

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