Giving new life to Aadhaar

The imperatives of governance have a tendency to make political parties think differently once they are in power and revisit earlier misgivings. Nothing illustrates this better than the Narendra Modi government’s decision to go ahead with the ‘Aadhaar’ scheme aimed at giving unique identification numbers to residents. The Bharatiya Janata Party had on some occasions in the past voiced its reservations about the viability and desirability of the scheme and questioned the legal basis of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) set up by the previous United Progressive Alliance regime. Many had questioned the lack of statutory basis for the project, voiced concern over the security implications of the possible enrolment of non-citizens, and argued that collecting biometric data without enabling legal provisions violated constitutional rights. However, the Modi regime views the scheme as a possible means to meet its own policy goals. It appears to have come round to the view that having a unique identification number may improve efficiency and targeted delivery of services. The Home Ministry has in a letter to the States come out in support of the Aadhaar scheme, saying it is a sound way of authenticating beneficiaries of government schemes and services.

The NDA government is now targeting universal coverage of the entire country under the Aadhaar project by June 2015. Latest statistics show that as many as 70 crore Aadhaar numbers have been issued, making it the world’s largest biometric database, and that over 50 crore people are yet to be covered. The government will have to reckon with multiple challenges before it can translate its policy goal of using authentic identification as the driving force behind delivery of benefits and services. The scheme is under challenge before the Supreme Court, and by an interim order the government has been restrained from making Aadhaar numbers mandatory for availing any benefit or service. To overcome the judicial challenge, the government needs to put in place a sound legal framework. This requires provisions for digital identity protection and steps to ensure that different kinds of personal, demographic and biometric data are truly disaggregated and do not fall cumulatively in the wrong hands — transnational databases, for instance. Secondly, the physical process of enrolling people with both demographic and biometric data remains cumbersome, and it needs to be made simpler and more accessible. Thirdly, the government must always preserve alternative means of identifying individuals and verifying their addresses so that a particular form of identification does not become restrictive or mandatory.

The venom online Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others have done us a world of good but they also unleash the worst of human nature. Can the law offer a middle path

Show me, show me," said the mother of an 11-year-old girl to another mum at a gathering earlier this month. The son and grand-daughter of two of India's biggest film stars had reportedly been taped while making out. One woman was passing the video clip to the other. I pointed out that forwarding it on WhatsApp is probably a crime especially since those two kids are minors. Also, how would she feel if someone were to circulate clips of her daughter's indiscretions. The lady with the clip deleted it and the other one said, "That's true."

Late one night last week my husband got a message on WhatsApp. Somebody needed O+ blood urgently. Since he is the right type, he called the sender. She had no clue who needed the blood and whether they had got it. The message had been forwarded so many times, that no one knew. Another friend called the patient's numbers. It turned out to be a hoax.

Just as an experiment, post a comment that questions anything that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government is doing and watch the reactions. You will be roundly abused.

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others have done us a world of good - by making communication cheaper, easier, quicker. But it has also brought out the worst in humanity - voyeurism, hatred, bile, slapdash opinions, intolerance. Never has the need for instant gratification of every little feeling been so easy. And never have so many millions of people gratified themselves, emotionally, intellectually and morally with such abandon and so publicly - without checking facts, without bothering with right or wrong and without worrying about the harm they may be causing someone else. It is a bit like the hippie culture of the mid-sixties - let it all hang out, man.

If you were at a gathering and disagree with someone you would probably argue with them, gently, then forcefully. And if there is no consensus you might agree to disagree or just drop the subject. But many online discussions begin from the shouting, screaming stage - figuratively speaking. There is no intermediate phase. Everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen. And almost everybody who wants to talk has a strong and not always erudite opinion.

In response to analytical pieces I wrote on corruption in media, I have been accused (on Twitter and on email) of trying to up Business Standard's ad rates. This is nothing compared to what celebrities face online - the threat of rape, dirty pictures and verbal abuse. Under pictures of Priyanka Chopra standing with folded hands to greet people coming to mourn her father's death, somebody posted a comment saying she was posing to show the tattoo on her wrist that read "Daddy's lil girl".

While discussing this with a lawyer, we debated whether it was anonymity that encouraged bad behaviour or just the nature of the online medium that breeds so much hatred. And how does this sit with the whole freedom of speech argument?

The only restriction on freedom of speech, granted under the Indian Constitution, is when it threatens national security and public order. The controversial section 66A of the Information Technology Act (2000) criminalises the sending, through a computer device, messages that are, "offensive or false or created for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill-will." This led to a spate of arrests in 2012, including that of a couple of teenage girls in Maharashtra for criticising the bandh after Balasaheb Thackeray's death. This led to a directive, in 2013, that restricts its indiscriminate use. There is now an entire campaign (rightly) to have Section 66A scrapped.

The other question is - do we need the law for this or is it just another "Indian" trait. We spit, we litter, we drive badly, treat the underprivileged like scum - similarly we behave badly online. That, however, does not answer why Monica Lewinsky or Jennifer Lawrence face offensive behaviour online in the US where freedom of speech in practised in the real sense and where online is a robust market.

Human nature perhaps? And if so, does online hatred help reduce violence on the ground? It will take several decades of online existence to answer these questions accurately.

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The right questions

Twenty-eight leading and not so leading Indian economists wrote a letter to the prime minister a couple of fortnights ago expressing concern over the possible dilution of the rural employment guarantee scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). It is difficult to disagree with them without sounding like a heartless right-wing monster. Yet some questions need to be asked and I hope that, at least, 28 other economists have similar queries in mind.

I would like to begin with a general question. The ruralemployment guarantee scheme is part of a broader policy approach, redistribution through rights and entitlements(RRE) - to borrow an acronym from the new chief economic advisor to the finance ministry, Arvind Subramanian. Thefood security Act and the minimum support price (MSP) scheme are other elements of this approach. Many of us have persistently opposed this RRE approach arguing that it might bring short-term gains but would stand in the way in the way of long-term growth, fiscal viability and more productive employment. I would not like to revisit the arguments here, but I wonder if what the MGNREGA supporters are offering is a limited endorsement of the employment scheme, or whether their plea or counsel is part of a more general support for the RRE model. If it is, then I have a more serious bone to pick with them.

But let me stick to the MGNREGA and ask my second question. Is the MGNREGA scheme indeed a cheap way to "buy" a lot of welfare as the 28 suggest? The letter points that the MGNREGA involves expenditure of a seemingly minuscule 0.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) but creates jobs for 50 million households. However, 0.3 per cent of GDP might not be that small in budgetary terms. As a percentage of total Budget expenditure, for instance, it works out to 2.5 per cent. If one bears in mind that capital expenditure of the central government last year was just 12 per cent of the total spending of the Centre, the number might not appear that small in relative terms. It is also worth remembering that many of the efforts to check the fiscal deficit in the last years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime involved a compression of capital expenditure, while protecting the allocations to the RRE schemes.

Question three comes next. Would I be wrong in pointing out that a persistent decoupling of productivity and real wages in a major segment of the economy is bound to lead to large-scale macroeconomic imbalances manifested in things such as persistent inflation. Let me present some simple statistical facts and analysis that I have partly borrowed from a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) working paper by G V Nadhanael (RBI Occasional Papers, Volume 33, 2012) to make my case. First, there was a sharp (five-fold increase) in money wage growth in rural areas from 2007, the year in which large scale implementation of the MGNREGA scheme took place. Is this just coincidence?

Mr Nadhanael's analysis suggests that in the period between 2007 and 2012, wages became a determinant of inflation rather than catching up with inflation. It also set off a wage-price spiral that intensified as the MGNREGA wages began to be indexed to consumer price inflation. But here's the most important bit. Between 2007-08 and 2011-12, rural real wages grew at 6.8 per cent annually. The latest data for growth in productivity for agricultural workers that I could lay my hands on is from the KLEMs (Capital, Labour, Energy and Material Services) project sponsored by the RBI. It turns out to be 2.59 per cent for the period 2000 to 2008. Thus, for parity to hold between wages and productivity, the latter should have doubled in the ensuing period. Even if one assumes some diversification away from farm activities, is it possible to explain a virtual doubling of productivity in the rural economy in the post-2008 period?

Again, as many MGNREGA supporters like to claim, are wages under this scheme far too low to matter in setting market wage rates? The RBI study found that in all the major labour-supplying states (Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh), the wages received under the MGNREGA were significantly higher than the wages received in the labour market. There was the inevitable fall in agricultural employment that followed.

This brings me to a related question. Is it fair to describe the somewhat sharp increases in minimum support prices in the post-2007 period essentially (as some do) as fiscally reckless pandering to certain interest groups? Here are some facts.

Wage costs on average constitute about 50-60 per cent of production costs in farming. Rising wages, thus, automatically pushes up the cost of production. The MSP follows a cost-plus approach and, thus, it is not surprising that with sharply rising wages, the MSP, too, climbed up. Those who like to blame the rise in the MSP for our inflation ills should perhaps take a step back and see exactly what caused a rise in the MSP.

Finally, is it unfair to ask what the impact of rising rural wages has had on manufacturing and construction companies? My sample might be small, but I have heard dozens of companies in labour-intensive manufacturing sectors complain not just about the sharp increase in their wage bill, but the fact that labour was simply not available even at significantly higher wages. By allowing this wage escalation, are we not jettisoning a process (that has been painfully slow in our country) of moving workers from the farm sector to more productive work in industry? Is it incorrect to argue that continuously accelerating rural wages would encourage more contract labour and perpetuate the low employment elasticity of manufacturing in India?

I have nothing against a robust employment scheme that works well in the poorest of the poor districts. But when it comes to supporting a nationwide entitlement programme of this kind, I have my questions.

A response to the 28 economists defending the employment guarantee scheme

Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation in the field of oil and gas between India and Mozambique

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister gave its approval for signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation in the field of oil and gas between India and Mozambique for a period of five years.

Offshore gas discoveries in 2010 in two adjacent offshore blocks have seen the emergence of Mozambique as a significant hydrocarbon rich nation. Mozambique is strategically located near India and is ideally suited for bringing natural gas to India at market determined price. Participation of Indian energy companies in the project will facilitate access to LNG for the growing Indian gas market.

The MoU seeks cooperation in the areas of upstream and downstream oil and gas sector; encourage and promote trade and investment between the parties or through their affiliated companies; promote dialogue and consultations among all concerned parties with regard to sharing of information; enhance capacity-building, including forging closer cooperation between research and training centres and intensifying technology transfer, conduct of applied research and development activities and installation of demonstration facilities.

7 new frog species reported from Western Ghats and Sri Lanka

Research shows that frogs in the region are increasingly under threat due to habitat destruction

A team of researchers from India and Sri Lanka has discovered seven new species of golden-backed frogs in the Western Ghats-Sri Lanka global biodiversity hotspot, throwing new light on the highly distinct and diverse fauna in the two countries.

The results of the decade-long survey published in the latest issue of Contributions to Zoology, an international journal brought out by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, show that the frogs in Sri Lanka and those in India belong to distinctly different species. It was earlier believed that some of the golden-backed frogs (Genus Hylarana) found in the two countries were of the same species.

DNA study

The team, led by Delhi University’s Prof. S.D. Biju, used DNA techniques and morphological evidence as tools to identify species and understand the frogs’ distribution.

The survey yielded 14 distinct golden-backed frogs, with seven new species, including one (Hylarana serendipi) from Sri Lanka. Of the six new species from the Western Ghats, four (H. doni, H.urbis, H.magna and H sreeni) are found in Kerala and one each in Karnataka (H. indica) and Maharashtra (H.caesari).

“The distribution pattern of the species highlights the need to reassess the conservation status of the amphibians and work out separate conservation strategies,” Prof. Biju said.

The study also indicates that frogs in the region are under threat due to habitat destruction. Interestingly, one of the newly-named species, Hylarana urbis, had remained unnoticed though its habitat is in urban areas in and around Kochi and is under threat due to human activity.

Ratification of the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur supplementary protocol on liability and redress to the Cartagena protocol on biosafety by India

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister gave its approval for ratifying the `Nagoya-KualaLumpur supplementary protocol on liability and redress to the Cartagena protocol on bio-safety` by India.

The proposed approach provides for an international regulatory framework in the field of liability and redress related to living modified organisms that reconciles trade and environment protection. The Supplementary Protocol would promote sound application of biotechnology making it possible to accrue benefits arising from modern biotechnology while minimizing the risk to the environment and human health.

The proposal will protect the interests of all Indians without distinction or differentiation.

The proposal is based on the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity and Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, both internationally negotiated and binding legal instruments. It will promote innovation in agricultural and healthcare research and development that is safe for the environment and human beings.

About the Protocol:

The Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress is a supplementary protocol to the Cartagena protocol on Biosafety. After several years of negotiations, the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety adopted the Supplementary Protocol on 15 October 2010, in Nagoya, Japan.

The Supplementary Protocol aims to contribute to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity by providing international rules and procedures for liability and redress in the event of damage resulting from living modified organisms (LMOs).

The Supplementary Protocol fulfils the commitment set forth in Article 27 of the Cartagena Protocol to elaborate international rules and procedures on liability and redress for damage to biodiversity resulting from transboundary movements of LMOs. It is also inspired by Principle 13 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development which calls on States to “cooperate in an expeditious and more determined manner to develop further international law regarding liability and compensation for adverse effects of environmental damage caused by activities within their jurisdiction or control”.

The Supplementary Protocol takes an ‘administrative approach’ whereby response measures are required of the operator (person or entity in control of the LMO) or the competent authority if the operator is unable to take response measures. This would cover situations where event of damage to biological diversity has already occurred, or when there is a sufficient likelihood that damage will result if timely response measures are not taken.

However, countries can still provide for civil liability in their domestic law and the first review of the Supplementary Protocol (five years after its entry into force) will assess the effectiveness of domestic civil liability regimes. This could trigger further work on an international civil liability regime.

The Supplementary Protocol is the second liability and redress treaty to be concluded in the context of multilateral environmental agreements next to the 1999 Protocol on Liability and Compensation to the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes.

A new bank for Asia

A little more than a year after it was broached, a new multilateral bank in Asia — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) — was born last week in Beijing, signalling in the process the failure of hectic lobbying by the United States against the move. The bank has 21 signatory- countries, with India being the only major backer apart from China; the rest are the smaller economies of Asia. The event was not without its share of drama as Australia, Indonesia and South Korea pulled out apparently under pressure from the U.S. Yet, it may not have been easy for them, as statements from some of their diplomats show. The three countries, which have extensive trade dealings with China, seem to be still torn between safeguarding their relations with the Asian giant and not displeasing the U.S. It should surprise no one if they decide to take the plunge after watching from the sidelines how the bank develops. The AIIB, along with the other new China-based institution, the BRICS Bank, represents the first major challenge to the U.S.-led global economic order and the 70-year uncontested reign of the Bretton Woods twins. In a way, the IMF and the World Bank have only themselves to blame if they find their dominance under threat, because the seeds of the new bank sprouted from either their inability or unwillingness, or both, to meet the growing funding needs of Asia.

As per the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) assessment, Asia needs on an average $800 billion of investment in infrastructure annually between now and 2020. Against this, the ADB, dominated by Japan which is also a founding member, lends no more than $10 billion a year for infrastructure. With the American-dominated World Bank and the Europe-led IMF also remaining hamstrung, the need for a multilateral body to finance the growth region of the world was real. The ADB has been cautious in its comments, and understandably so; it can do with support for infrastructure lending, yet needs to safeguard its turf. India, with its participation, has lent heft to the AIIB, which would otherwise have been seen as a Chinese bank backed by membership from lightweight countries of the region. India, which will be the second largest shareholder in the bank, should work with China to ensure that best practices are followed in projects for procurement and materials and in terms of labour and environmental standards. While there is without doubt a geo-political angle to the founding of the bank — which is natural, given that the economic balance of power is shifting to Asia — care should be taken to ensure that it does not become the driving factor in the bank’s functioning. The bank should do what it has been founded for — fund Asia’s infrastructure.