Shariat court and fatwas have no legal sanction, Supreme Court says

 The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that fatwas have no legal sanction. The apex court said that either Darul Qaza or any mufti cannot issue fatwas and try to enforce against a person who has not approached for religious opinion.

The SC said religion or faith cannot be used to victimize innocents.

The SC said no law has given any recognition to fatwas.

The apex court cited the Imrana case and said fatwas can cause irreparable damage to the rights of an individual.

The SC said though religious opinion as fatwas have a laudable object, it cannot be enforced the moment it breaches the fundamental rights of a person.

A bench headed by Justice C K Prasad said that no religion, including Islam, allows punishing innocent persons and ordered that no 'Darul Qaza' should give verdict which affects rights of a person who is not before it.

The court passed the verdict on a PIL filed by advocate Vishwa Lochan Madam questioning the constitutional validity of Shariat courts which allegedly run a parallel judicial system in the country.

All India Personal Law Board had earlier submitted that fatwa was not binding on people and it was just an opinion of a 'mufti' (cleric) and he has no power and authority to implement it.

The counsel, appearing for the board, had said if a fatwa was sought to be implemented against the wish of the person concerned, then he could approach the court of law against it.

The petitioner had submitted that the fundamental rights of Muslims could not be controlled and curtailed through fatwas issued by 'qazis' and 'muftis' appointed by Muslim organizations.

Rangarajan defends poverty estimates; Says meet global norms

Defending his calculation that three out of 10 in India are poor, former PMEAC Chairman C Rangarajan today said poverty numbers provided by him are not conservative estimates and they are at par with global standards.

The expert group headed by Rangarajan dismissed the Suresh Tendulkar Committee methodology on estimating poverty and estimated that the number of poor in India was much higher in 2011-12 at 29.5 per cent of the population.

As per the Rangarajan panel's estimates, three out of 10 in India would be poor. Estimates based on Tendulkar committee methodology, had pegged the poverty ratio at 21.9 in 2011-12.

"I dont think that it is conservative (poverty) estimates. In my view it is reasonable estimates. We have derived poverty estimates independently," Rangarajan told 'Times Now'.

He was responding to the criticism that anyone spending more than Rs 47 per day in cities and Rs 32 in villages would not be poor.

Elaborating further he said, "The World Bank also talks about purchasing power parity terms. The minimum expenditure per day.

They are talking about about USD 2 per day whereas our estimates comes to USD 2.4. Therefore it (our poverty estimates) is in keeping with the international standards".

He explained that the benefits are not being provided on the basis of any poverty line as in the case of food security law which would benefit 67 per cent of the population.

The noted economist believes that it is measure of poverty and measure of understanding how economy is moving. But apart from it there is no immediate policy implication.

He urged the people to look at the poverty line in terms of a household's consumption expenditure per month which is estimated at Rs 4,860 in villages and Rs 7,035 for cities for a family of five people.

Apart from the private consumption expenditure, people also benefit from public expenditure on health, education and other facilities, he said, adding: "poverty line is at appropriate level".

"All of these spendings have gone up in the recent past. That explains why urban poverty ratio is much higher in our estimation," he said.

As per the report submitted by Rangarajan to Planning Minister Rao Inderjit Singh earlier, persons spending below Rs 47 a day in cities would be considered poor, much above the Rs 33-per-day mark suggested by the Suresh Tendulkar Committee.

As per Rangarajan panel estimates, a person spending less than Rs 1,407 a month (Rs 47/day) would be considered poor in cities, as against the Tendulkar Committee's suggestion of Rs 1,000 a month (Rs 33/day).

In villages, those spending less than Rs 972 a month (Rs 32/day) would be considered poor. This is much higher than Rs 816 a month (Rs 27/day) recommended by Tendulkar Committee.

In absolute terms, the number of poor in India stood at 36.3 crore in 2011-12, down from 45.4 crore in 2009-10, as per the Rangarajan panel. Tendulkar Committee, however, had suggested that the number of poor was 35.4 crore in 2009-10 and 26.9 crore in 2011-12

Law Commission of India Submits its Report on Setting Up New Courts in the Country

    Law Commission of India today submitted its report “Manpower Planning in Judiciary: A Blue Print” to Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Law & Justice and Communications & IT. 

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the report will guide the Government in overcoming the shortage of judges in the judiciary.  Efforts made by the Government for filling up vacancies of judges and setting up new courts would soon lead to curbing of delays and timely delivery of justice to citizens.   Government has already written to Chief Justice of India for filling up the existing vacancies of High Courts and subordinate Courts.  Law Minister gave the assurance that the Government would give serious consideration to the recommendations of the Report and in principle decision has already been taken to increase the number of judges by 20 per cent.  Six States in India: Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Jharkhand, Odisha and Punjab have already acceded to this request.

Speaking on the occasion, Justice Ajit Prakash Shah, Chairman, Law Commission of India, said that the Commission has tried to use scientific formula to the extent possible to estimate the number of judges needed in the country.

Some of the highlights of the conclusions and recommendations are as below:-

i)             Recruitment of new judges should focus, as a matter of priority, on the number of judges required to breakeven and to dispose of the backlog, in a 3 year time frame;



ii)            Age of retirement of Subordinate judges be raised to 62.



iii)           Special morning and evening Courts be set up for dealing with Traffic/ Police Challan cases which constitute 38.7% of the institutions and 37.4% of all pending cases in the last three years before the Subordinate Judicial Services.

iv)           Recent law graduates may be appointed for short durations, e.g. 3 years, to preside over these special traffic Courts.



v)            Adequate provisions be made for staff and infrastructure required for the working of additional Courts.



vi)           High Courts be directed to evolve uniform data collection and data management methods in order to ensure transparency and to facilitate data based policy prescriptions for the judicial system.



vii)         Creation of additional Courts is one amongst various measures required to ensure timely justice and facilitate access to justice. The Commission recognizes that apart from increasing judge strength, many other measures have to be undertaken for reducing delays, including the application of good judicial management practices such as putting into place timeliness and performance benchmarks.

Solar panels will be installed on the platform roofs to generate 1 MW power

The Railways is planning to generate 1 MW solar power at the New Delhi railway station by installing solar panels on the platform roofs. Officials said the power project that will be implemented on a public private partnership model is a part of the Railways’ initiative to convert some of its stations into ‘green buildings’.

“A consultant has been roped in to conduct the feasibility study. While we plan to install solar panels on roof tops of the platform and the station building, the consultant has been asked to identify the exact locations on the station premises where solar panels can be installed, apart from the cost of installation,” said Anurag Sachan, Divisional Railway Manager (Delhi).

“As per the initial plans, the private partner will install the solar panels and generate power and the Railways will buy power at a pre-determined rate,” he added.

According to railway officials, the New Delhi railway station is spread over an area of the 6,38,467 sq m, including the yard area. Around 4,21,388 sq m of the total is built-up area. The station has 16 platforms. Officials said with no major high rises located in the vicinity of the station premise, generating 1 MW solar power is achievable.

“Once operational, around 25 per cent of the energy requirements at the New Delhi station, which has an average daily demand of over 4 MW, can be met just by solar power,” a senior Northern Railway official said.

Apart from the New Delhi station, the public transporter is also working at converting more stations in the Delhi Division like Bahadurgarh, Deewana and Gurgaon into green buildings. Solar power plants will also be installed at other major stations in the city like Old Delhi, Nizamuddin, Anand Vihar and Bijwasan.

“Once the pilot project at the New Delhi station becomes successful, we will have a model that could be replicated at other stations in Delhi,” a senior Northern Railway official said.

With the Narendra Modi government emphasising on harnessing solar power and taking lessons from solar projects in Gujarat, sources said the initiatives in the field are likely to get priority and easy clearances from the Ministry.

Sources said after senior railway officials made a presentation before the Prime Minister, he instructed the department to “use solar energy more aggressively and install them on the roofs of station buildings and other areas, apart from considering installation of solar panels atop the train coaches”.

“Installation of solar panels on train coaches is possible. It can meet the general requirements like lighting bulbs and running fans in the trains. An experiment is also being done with a toy train running on the Shimla-Kalka route,” an official said.

4 Indian-Americans honoured in US on Independence

Microsoft Corp chief executive Satya Nadella, Comedian and actor Aasif Mandvi, Carnegie Mellon University president Subra Suresh and former president of the University of West Georgia, Beheruz Sethna were honoured along with 36 others, the Wall Street Journal reported. File photo -Reuters

Four Indian-Americans were among 40 people who were honoured for their contributions to the US in the annual Great Immigrants tribute in New York on the country's independence day.

Microsoft Corp chief executive Satya Nadella, Comedian and actor Aasif Mandvi, Carnegie Mellon University president Subra Suresh and former president of the University of West Georgia, Beheruz Sethna were honoured along with 36 others, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Hyderabad-born Nadella created quite a stir recently by becoming one of the most powerful leaders in technology after taking over as head of the Microsoft Corp. He studied electronics and communication engineering before heading to the US in the 1980s.

Mumbai-born Mandvi first moved to England before migrating to the US when he was 16. He became famous as a correspondent on "The Daily Show," where he was known for his satire on issues such as Islam, the Middle East and South Asia.

Suresh, who is an engineer and scientist, was born in Chennai and moved to the US to work on a postgraduate science degree, graduating in 1979. He is the ninth president of the Carnegie Mellon University.

He served as director of the National Science Foundation from 2010 to 2013. Appointed by US President Barack Obama, he led the federal science agency in its mission to advance the fields of science and engineering research.

Sethna was born in India in 1948 and served as the sixth president of the University of West Georgia – the first Indian-American to lead a university in the US.

The July 4 event was sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, a foundation started by a Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie who spearheaded the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and was himself one of the most well-known philanthropists of his time

Mindless populism — facts and remedies

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley recently stated that there was no room for mindless populism in Budget 2014. In this article, the first of two, mindless populism will be defined and estimates provided; the second will contain further facts, and remedies.

The following simple definition of populism may be considered representative. Populism means expenditure programmes aimed at subsidising a large, preferably majority, of the voting population. In many countries, populism would be social expenditures targeted at the middle class. In India, these schemes would be those targeted at the absolute poor. However, what the Congress party did not realise, or appreciate, is the simple fact that the absolute poor were less than a quarter of the population in 2011-12, and possibly less than a fifth at the time of the 2014 election.

There is another element to the “mindful” nature of populism. Indian politicians should be aware that as per capita incomes have increased manifold, so has the percentage of the population subject to income tax. So this financing class worries about the efficacy of the delivery of subsidies to the poor, and to themselves. Mindless populism is now a deep negative for getting elected in India. Don’t believe me, believe the Congress which, despite many populist programmes, has just managed to register the largest loss for any incumbent national government anywhere at any time. In 2009 it won 206 seats; in 2014, just over a fifth of the seats. That is a world record for the BJP and Narendra Modi to be proud of, and for mindless populists to beware.

The longest running, and most expensive, of the social programmes for the poor is the food subsidy programme populistically called the Public Distribution System (PDS) — a scheme that has been in operation since the late-1970s. The total expenditure on this policy in 2014-15, thanks to its having been enshrined as law by the Sonia Gandhi-led previous government, is slated to be Rs 1,25,000 crore. The Tendulkar-defined poor today are likely to be around 250 million. So per poor person, the populism of the Congress dictated that the government would spend Rs 5,000 on food subsidies alone — that is, not including NREGA (let us call it by its original name rather than introducing the Mahatma into the controversy), not including fertiliser, not including diesel, not including kerosene, and not including LPG.

Incidentally, these excluded items together account for approximately Rs 1,75,000 crore.

Let us just concentrate exclusively on this PDS subsidy. Is expenditure of Rs 5,000 per poor person, “mindless” populism? The answer is a double emphatic yes. That is, it is not mindless populism but “mindless squared” populism.

In the run-up to the 2014 election, the welfare schemes of the UPA government came up for much discussion. Last year, at the time of the food securitybill, Sonia Gandhi’s dream project, which the BJP enthusiastically supported, it was believed that all was right with the PDS scheme, except perhaps implementation — and the BJP said they were doing PDS delivery much better than the Congress, and all one had to do was to look at Chhattisgarh, where three-time elected Chief Minister Raman Singh had completely revamped the corrupt food delivery system.

The table vindicates the BJP claim. It shows the PDS consumption for rice and wheat in selected states of India in 2011-12 (NSSO data). In Chhattisgarh, the delivery of PDS rice to the poor was close to the highest in the country — 4.2 kg per poor person. Not reported, per poor person PDS delivery of wheat was 0.5 kg. Thus, Chhattisgarh had nearly achieved the FSB target of 5 kg of foodgrains in 2011-12. Note, however, that both Tamil Nadu and Odisha are also PDS “success” states. But these three states are the only exception. Nationwide, the poor received only 1.9 kg of rice and 1 kg of wheat in 2011-12.

But there is another curious fact that emerges from just a casual perusal of the table. While PDS delivery increased substantially in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, the absolute consumption of foodgrains declined in these three states, as well as in all of India. And the decline is not small — more than 10 per cent in Chhattisgarh. The same pattern of declining total consumption is observed for the non-poor. This fact has several implications, especially for the consideration of mindless populism.

First, what this reveals is that the need for the food security act was never there, neither for poverty reduction nor for the attack on “hunger”. Foodgrains are what economists call an inferior good — as your incomes go up, and increase beyond the absolute poverty hunger level, your foodgrain intake goes down. For a poor person suffering from chronic hunger, cereal consumption does increase. However, past a certain biological need, cereal consumption plateaus, and then declines. From the data it appears that this peak plateau was reached sometime around 2000, and what can be said with near certainty is that the average poor person was not suffering from hunger in 2011-12, that is, while some fraction of households in India do suffer from hunger, this percentage is likely well below the Tendulkar poverty level of 22 per cent in 2011-12.

Second, as Dean Spears’ research has convincingly shown, which is also medically and biologically intuitive, digestion of food is a function of the quality of water intake and the quality of available sanitation. Hence, the desirability and advocacy of toilets before temples. So “thrusting” food down people’s throats (rich or poor) will not help wastage, or stunting, or health, if the appropriate and healthy sanitary environment is not present. For the lawmakers to be unaware of the inefficiency of food intake in the context of open defecation (lack of sanitation) shows a sinful disregard for facts that matter.

Third, and a final calculation, on the costof mindless food populism. Out of the 273 million poor in 2011-12, only half (145 million) received any PDS delivery of rice or wheat. The UPA government spent Rs 73,000 crore on food subsidy that year. Both rice and wheat subsidies to the poor added up to Rs 12,000 crore. In other words, the government spent more than Rs 6 to transfer Re 1 to the poor. Where the rest went is for you to figure out, but even a 2:1 ratio qualifies as mindless populism. What we have here is mindless cubed populism

India to become third largest economy by 2030: PwC

India is set to become the third largest economy in the world by 2030, according to latest estimates by a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report.

The London-headquartered accountancy giant said the rapid rise of the Indian economy with its young workforce would push it up from being the 10th largest economy in 2013 to the third largest by 2030, pushing the UK back into sixth place.

“In the longer run, other emerging markets may overtake the UK, but only India looks set to do so before 2030 according to our latest projections,” PwC said in its latest economic outlook.

China, the world’s second largest economy, is expected to close the gap with America by 2030, while Mexico is predicted to be the 10th largest economy by 2030, above Canada and Italy, both G7 nations.

Only a couple of years ago there were forecasts that Britain would rapidly become a second-class economic power and would need to defer to the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China in the near future.

China has ranked above Japan for a decade as the world’s second-biggest economy.

By some calculations Brazil leapfrogged the UK in 2012, with Russia and India close behind.

Britain’s fall was partly related to the costs of the banking crisis and the recession that followed, coupled with a sharp decline in the exchange rate, which knocked about a quarter off the country’s value in relation to its main rivals.

But since the beginning of last year the economy has recovered all the lost ground from the recession and banks have begun lending again.

The pound has bounced back from about $ 1.40 in 2009 to $ 1.71 on Saturday.

Brazil, by contrast, has suffered a rocky couple of years that have slowed GDP growth and pushed down the value of the real.

Russia will close the gap on the top eight, but its reliance on the oil and gas industry for growth and its rapidly ageing population will prevent it jumping up the table as quickly as previously thought.

Only India will move ahead of the UK by 2030, though it will be sharing a projected GDP of $ 6.1 trillion among more than 1.5 billion people, only half as much again as the UK’s predicted output of $ 4 trillion, produced by a population less than a 20th the size.

PwC urged policymakers in the UK to implement further structural reforms to ensure that it remained ahead of emerging markets.