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About 65 per cent of all electoral bonds sold since the start of the scheme in 2018, till the most recent phase for which data is available (October 1-10, 2022), were sold at the Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad branches of State Bank of India — but 62 per cent of the total bonds encashed during this period were at the New Delhi branch, according to a Right to Information (RTI) reply by SBI.
Since the first tranche was sold in March 2018, electoral bonds worth Rs 10,791.47 crore were sold at 17 branches of SBI, although 29 branches of the bank are authorised to sell them, according to the RTI response.
In a reply to transparency campaigner Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired) on November 23 this year, SBI data showed Mumbai (Rs 2,742.12 crore), Kolkata (Rs 2,387.71 crore) and Hyderabad (Rs 1,885.35 crore) were the top three branches for the sale of electoral bonds.
While the New Delhi branch sold electoral bonds worth Rs 1,519.44 crore, it accounted for the majority of the bonds encashed — Rs 6,748.97 crore — followed by Hyderabad (Rs 1,384.03 crore) and Kolkata (Rs 1,012.98 crore), the data show.
So far, the bonds have been encashed at 14 regional branches of SBI. Bonds worth Rs 50 lakh and Rs 2.50 crore were encashed at the Srinagar and Gangtok branches, respectively, even as the two branches saw zero sales, according to the SBI data.
The electoral bond scheme, which was started in March 2018, was recently amended by the Union Finance Ministry to allow sales for a longer period in a year.
Express Network
Centre to SC: Realise menace of forced conversion, will take steps (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
Stating that the right to freedom of religion does not include a fundamental right to “convert people to a particular religion”, the Centre on Monday told the Supreme Court that it is “cognisant of the menace” of forced conversions and will take “appropriate steps” to deal with it.
The Union Ministry of Home Affair (MHA) said in an affidavit, “…it is submitted that reliefs sought in the present petition would be taken up in all seriousness by the Union of India and appropriate steps shall be taken, as the Central government is cognisant of the menace”,
The government said that “undoubtedly” the right to freedom to religion, and “more importantly the right to conscience of all citizens of the country, is an extremely cherished and valuable rights which ought to be protected by the Executive and the Legislature”.
The MHA, however, added that “the right to freedom of religion does not include a fundamental right to convert people to a particular religion”, and that the “said right certainly does not include the right to convert an individual through fraud, deception, coercion, allurement or other such means”.
In the affidavit, the government pointed put that the “meaning and purport of the word propagate, falling under Article 25 the Constitution, was discussed and debated in great detail in the Constituent Assembly and the inclusion of the said word was passed by the Constituent Assembly only after clarification that the fundamental right under Article 25 would not include the right to convert”.
The MHA stated that in the 1977 decision in Rev Stainislaus vs State of Madhya Pradesh and Others, the apex court had examined the scope of the words “propagate” and “public order”.
Editorial Page
Standing With Palestine (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
As erstwhile India and Palestine share a great many commonalities. Both have a colonial history of subjugation and have experienced a wounding severance.
Both have been home to multiple religious communities with a complex sense of nationhood. For several decades after independence, India’s stance on Israel-Palestine has been of sympathy and support for Palestinians.
The leaders of India’s anti-colonial struggle vehemently criticised the forceful occupation of Palestine to establish a Jewish homeland.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today, cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.”
Similarly, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru stated, “Palestine is essentially an Arab country and must remain so” and “the right of the Jews for a homeland should not come at the expense of a homeland of the Arab population of Palestine.” During the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolutions (UNGA), India submitted that independence for Palestine should be the primary purpose of any plan for the future of the country.
India was also among the first countries that recognised the Palestinian state. In 1998, India co-sponsored the draft resolution on “the right of Palestinians to self-determination” in UNGA.
India has now turned its face from Israeli atrocities on Palestinians. Turning a blind eye to the human rights violations in Gaza, India, in 2015 and again in 2021, abstained at the UN Human Rights Council on resolutions relating to war crimes and violence in Palestinian territory. As if to underline this volte-face, in 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel who skipped visiting the Palestinian Authority.
The Ideas Page
What is the hurry for GM mustard? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
We are writing to express concern regarding the recent recommendation for approval for the environmental release of genetically engineered (GE) mustard (“DMH-11 hybrid”) in India.
The recommendation was made by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC). Our concern rests on several aspects of the proposal for release.
First, the potentially harmful long-term ecological and economic consequences of releasing DMH-11 have not received sufficient consideration.
Second, details of the mandatory trials to ensure food and environmental safety which is a prerequisite before environmental release have not been made public.
Finally, a detailed long-term assessment of the potential social and economic benefits of using DMH-11, vis-à-vis its potential drawbacks, remains to be made. Without minimising the importance of the last two aspects, the present note is restricted to highlighting the first aspect.
A central feature of DMH-11 is that it carries a gene for herbicide resistance (also termed herbicide tolerance or HT). This fact has not received appropriate consideration.
The deployment of herbicide-resistant or HT crops has been accompanied by deleterious outcomes in several places including the US, Australia, and Canada (so-called developed countries) as well as Argentina (a developing country).
The most well-established harmful consequence has been the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds across large tracts of agricultural land, which can spell disaster for the normal crop.
Data does not lie (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Social Justice)
A recent article by Jean Dreze (‘Poverty, uncensored’, November 24) looks at our commentary on multidimensional poverty decline (‘Poverty is down, period’, November 4) and concludes that the debate on relative performance towards poverty alleviation during the UPA years and Narendra Modi’s tenure as prime minister should continue to be “open” even as his own conclusion is that multidimensional poverty (MPI) declined considerably faster in the Modi years.
The availability of multidimensional poverty data for 2005-06, 2015-16 and 2019-21, (note that poverty is likely biased upward due to the exogenous shock of Covid in the Modi period), means that we now have an estimate of poverty decline during the Modi years.
Notwithstanding our inadvertent error in the reporting of 2011-12 values (IHDS not DHS data), the incontrovertible result remains that poverty decline was significantly faster during Modi’s tenure (period II, roughly 2015-21) than during the UPA years (hereafter period I, roughly 2005-15). We document this conclusion in detail below. But first, some transparent discussion of definition and measurement.
There are two sets of poverty estimates provided by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) that compile these data across countries, primarily from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS).
The first are uncensored estimates for individual indicators, which correspond to a simple question regarding whether a household is deprived (poor) in a given indicator — for example, nutrition.
Alternatively, one can obtain an indicator-specific censored poverty estimate via a two-stage process. The first stage estimates the population that is multidimensionally poor; the second stage estimates the population that is poor in each indicator for the multi-dimensionally (MP) poor.
For example, in 2005-06, the MP poor were 55.1 per cent; uncensored nutritionally poor were 57.3 per cent; and 44.3 per cent were censored nutritionally poor. In other words, close to 80 per cent of the nutritionally deprived are also multidimensionally poor.
Explained
Red Planet Day: remembering a pioneering space mission to mars (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
Commemorating the day one of the most significant space missions to Mars was launched, November 28 is marked as Red Planet Day.
On this day in 1964, the United States launched the space probe Mariner 4 on a course towards Mars, which it flew past in July 1965, sending back pictures of the red planet.
This was the first time that a spacecraft undertook the first flyby of the red planet, becoming the first-ever spacecraft to take close-up photographs of another planet.
Subsequently, considerable interest has been sparked around Mars, and missions have been launched, to the point that at present, the idea of settling a colony of humans on Mars (as suggested enthusiastically by billionaire Elon Musk) has also been put forth.
Here’s a brief look at how Mars became prominent in the popular imagination, aided by crucial space missions that helped advance knowledge about it.
In one of the earliest known cases of a fascination with the planet, NASA’s website notes how in the late 19th century, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to have observed linear patterns on the surface of the planet that he called canali.
This was mistranslated into English as canals, leading some to believe canals were built by intelligent beings on Mars — an early instance of Mars being thought to have life, similar to Earth.
Although that idea fell out of favour among scientists by the early 20th century, it did permeate into science fiction as well as popular culture, says NASA, helped by the fact that Mars was at a similar distance from the sun as the earth was and thus, shared certain structural characteristics.
After an eight-month voyage to Mars, the Mariner 4 helped humans see images showing lunar-type impact craters, some of them touched with frost. A television camera onboard took 22 pictures, covering about 1% of the planet. These photos were transmitted to Earth in four days.
Mumbai Measles outbreak: what is the role played by lack of vaccination (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Over 200 cases of measles have been recorded in Mumbai with 13 deaths. Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has blamed the lack of vaccination behind the ongoing outbreak. In fact, data accessed by The Indian Express showed that in October, when the outbreak started, Mumbai recorded only 41 per cent vaccine coverage against measles.
“Yet measles is a preventable disease through vaccination and everybody should get their shots on priority,” says Dr Asmita Mahajan, Consultant Neonatologist and Paediatrician, SL Raheja Hospital, Mahim.
Mumbai has certainly seen a surge in measles cases over the past few days, with most of the patients from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Poverty, poor hygiene practices, poor quality of nutrition and lack of vaccination in children have all contributed to the spiralling cases. Most cases have been reported from Bhiwandi (Thane) and Malegaon (Nashik) which lack vaccination coverage, especially among children.
Some families didn’t immunise their children because of religious and cultural backgrounds. Many lives could have been saved had the children been vaccinated on time and in more significant numbers.
Children below the age of five are the most vulnerable, especially those below the age of two. Children who have not been vaccinated are at the greatest risk. More importantly, if children are vaccinated and do contract the disease, the illness will be mild.
Studies have shown that vaccines are never 100 per cent protection against the disease but once taken, the child will report mild illness even if affected.
At least complications or deadly issues like pneumonia, diarrhoea, further sepsis and other problems may be avoided.
Vaccination is considered the key strategy in limiting the spread of measles during outbreaks. At the individual level, administration of measles vaccine within 72 hours of initial exposure may modify the clinical course of the illness and is generally recommended as a preventive tool.
Recent studies have confirmed a benefit from this intervention, with effectiveness of post-exposure immunisation ranging between 91–100 per cent, corroborating observations made in the pre-elimination era.
Economy
India-EU trade pact: Third round of talks commences (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Senior officials of India and the European Union (EU) commenced the third round of talks on a proposed free trade agreement, which aims at boosting trade and investments between the two regions.
India’s bilateral trade with the EU rose by 43.5 per cent to USD 116.36 billion in 2021-22. At present, the EU is India’s second largest trading partner after the US, and the second largest destination for Indian exports.
India and the EU on June 17 this year formally resumed negotiations on the proposed India-EU Trade and Investment Agreement, including the Geographical Indications (GI).
The EU delegation is here for the third round of talks and the talks will continue till December 9.The second round of negotiations were held in Brussels.
According to the commerce ministry, the trade agreement with the EU would help India in further expanding and diversifying its exports of goods and services, including securing the value chains.
A GI is primarily used for an agricultural, natural or a manufactured product (handicrafts and industrial goods) originating from a definite geographical territory.
Typically, such a name conveys an assurance of quality and distinctiveness, which is essentially attributable to the place of its origin.