CURRENT AFFAIRS – 28/07/2023

Terming China’s decision to revive the practice of “stapled visas” for Indian sportspersons from Arunachal Pradesh “unacceptable”, India on Thursday lodged a strong protest and said that it would respond suitably, after Beijing refused to give normal visas to three Wushu players.

The athletes were part of the 12-member team bound for the World University Games in Chengdu on Wednesday night. The team was held back after the government realised that the three athletes belonging to Arunachal Pradesh had been given “stapled visas”, which denotes China’s contention that the Indian State is a disputed territory.

News of the new rift came even as the External Affairs Ministry admitted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had discussed how to improve bilateral relations when they met in Bali in November 2022, something that the government had not revealed so far.

“It has come to our notice that stapled visas have been issued to some of our citizens representing the country in an international sporting event in China. This is unacceptable and we have lodged a strong protest with the Chinese side reiterating our position. India reserves the right to a suitable response to this action,” Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said.

China’s decision to give stapled visas to the athletes is a reversion to its actions in 2011-2013, when it began to issue stapled visas to Indians from Jammu and Kashmir (then including Ladakh) and Arunachal Pradesh. Mr. Bagchi also clarified that Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi’s talks when they met in Bali eight months ago were not merely an “exchange of courtesies”. The clarification came after China’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday that the two leaders had “reached an important consensus” in Bali on stabilising India-China relations.

“During the Bali G-20 summit last year we had said that at the conclusion of the dinner hosted by the Indonesian President, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had exchanged courtesies, and also spoke of the need to stabilise bilateral relations,” Mr. Bagchi said.

He added that for India the key to resolving bilateral issues was to resolve the issues at the LAC and to “restore peace and tranquillity to these areas”.

The Rajya Sabha on Thursday passed the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2023 that introduces stringent anti-piracy provisions, expanding the scope of the law from censorship to cover copyright also.

The Bill proposes a jail term of up to three years and a fine up to 5% of a film’s production cost for persons who “use any audiovisual recording device in a place licensed to exhibit films with the intention of making or transmitting … an infringing copy of” a film, or trying to do so.

The Bill seeks to amend the Cinematograph Act, 1952, which authorises the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to require cuts in films and clear them for exhibition in cinemas and on television.

Union Minister Anurag Thakur said, “The government will not have revisional powers [over the CBFC’s decisions] even after this Bill.”

The Bill introduces three age ratings for films requiring adult supervision. Such films now get a U/A rating, but this has been split into U/A 7+, U/A 13+ and U/A 16+. Films rated for adults have largely been prohibited on television, following a 2004 Bombay High Court order. Broadcasters often cut films voluntarily, and re-apply with the CBFC for a U/A rating. The Bill formalises this practice.

It will now have to be passed by the Lok Sabha.

The scientific community in India is abuzz with curiosity and excitement after the Union Cabinet’s approval of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Bill 2023 in June this year to “strengthen the research eco-system in the country”.

The Bill is to be introduced in Parliament. Once passed, it is to establish an apex body to spearhead research and development, foster a culture of innovation, and nurture a research ecosystem across all universities and colleges in the country.

Simultaneously, the Bill seeks to repeal the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) Act 2008, under which the SERB was established as a statutory body of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to carry out almost the same or similar functions which the NRF proposes to do.

The idea of establishing the NRF as an independent foundation to promote and fund research was mooted by the Kasturirangan Committee in 2019 and adopted in the National Education Policy (NEP 2020). Importantly, both documents mentioned, in no uncertain terms, that the institutions currently funding research, such as the DST, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), and the University Grants Commission (UGC), as well as various other private and philanthropic organisations, would continue to fund research according to their priorities and needs independently.

The list of existing institutions funding research did not separately mention the SERB but there was no indication in the policy document that it would be abolished or subsumed into the NRF. Therefore, the scientific community had assumed that it shall, as a statutory body of the DST, continue to support and fund research as before.

To lend credence to the idea, it highlighted the point that leading research-producing nations had multiple public and private funding agencies; further, there was no reason that India could not stand to benefit from the practice.

The idea of having multiple research funding agencies gets further reinforced by the statement that the NRF would coordinate with other funding agencies and work with science, engineering, and other academies to ensure synergy of purpose and avoid duplication of efforts.

Highlighting the lack of a conducive research ecosystem and underinvestment in research, the Kasturirangan Committee had said that the NRF would get an ‘annual grant of Rs. 20,000 Crores (Rs 2 Kharab or 0.1% of GDP)’.

It did not say how long this grant would continue, but it did note that research spending in the country was a meagre 0.65% of GDP compared to 2.8% in the United States, 2.1% in China, 4.3% in Israel and 4.2% in South Korea. It expressed concern that research and innovation spending in the country had declined from 0.84% of GDP in 2008 to 0.69% in 2014.

Against this backdrop, even those who were pessimistic had felt that the proposed annual grant would continue until the research spending in the country reached the level it had been in 2008. The optimists in the community had hoped that it might continue until it reached the level of research spending in the U.S.

The NEP 2020 adopted the idea, but without any specific financial commitment. In the meantime, public and private expenditure on research and development taken together kept sliding to touch 0.64% of GDP in 2020-21 compared to 0.76% in 2011-12.

A Press Information Bureau release suggests that the NRF will have ₹10,000 crore for five years and thus get a total of ₹50,000 crore. Despite the scant details available in the public domain, it shows that the government grant or budgetary support would be at the most ₹14,000 crore while the remainder (₹36,000 crore) is to be mobilised through industry and other private philanthropic sources. This would effectively mean that the NRF would get a maximum annual grant of ₹2,800 crore over the next five years, a mere 14% of what the Kasturirangan Committee had recommended.

Following the repeal of its Act, the SERB will be subsumed into the NRF. The SERB was established as a statutory body of the DST to plan, promote and fund internationally competitive research in emerging areas of science and engineering. The SERB has been instrumental in building a sustainable research ecosystem ‘through a diverse programme portfolio that includes grant funding, fostering young researchers, recognising and rewarding research excellence, promoting scientific networks and partnerships, and enhanced gender and social inclusiveness’.

Budgetary allocation for the SERB had steadily increased from ₹200 crore in 2011-12 to ₹1,000 crore in 2018-19. Since then, allocation declined to ₹742 crore in 2020-21, but again rose to ₹911.46 crore in 2021-22. SERB programmes, schemes and activities have been important in financing basic research in science and engineering, and most of them will continue under the NRF with some tweaking and tinkering.

It is hoped that the budgetary allocation for the NRF will not be reduced by the amount allocated for the SERB. Experience shows that when schemes are merged or subsumed into a new scheme, the allocation for the new scheme is generally lower than the total for the discontinued schemes.

The criticality of research and knowledge creation and the importance of enhancing funding for research has been amply highlighted by the New Education Policy. It insists that the economic prosperity of many developed countries, now and in the ancient past, can be attributed to their intellectual capital and to their fundamental contributions to new knowledge in science, arts and culture. It cites India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece as examples.

The NEP argues that a robust research ecosystem acquires greater importance now due to growing challenges in the world and opportunities due to technological advancements.

The policy asserts that India has had a long tradition of research and knowledge creation in science, mathematics, art, literature, phonetics, language, medicine and agriculture, which needs to be strengthened to make India a leader. These are laudable ideas and intentions, but need to be backed by ample financial support, at least to the extent the Kasturirangan Committee had insisted upon.

The views expressed are personal

The story so far: Battered by heavy rains, the Yamuna looks slow, sluggish and swollen. Last week, the water levels hit a 60-year-high, gushing through elite neighbourhoods built close to the floodplains. Waters advanced towards the Taj Mahal for the first time in half a century. More than 25,500 people were evacuated and ferried to rescue camps in a brown stream of waste; many of them lived in make-shift low-lying slum dwellings next to the river.

The late environmentalist Anupam Mishra once called Yamuna, Delhi’s “real town planner”: it meandered through Delhi ensuring the city was never short of water and never ravaged by famine or flood. Delhi was “well-planned along the course of the river Yamuna, but it isn’t so anymore,” he said. Causes, experts argue, can be traced to haphazard construction activities, rapid urbanisation, lack of proper housing and lax regulations — all of which have besieged the floodplains.

“We talk about rivers in isolation, but floodplains are inseparable from the river channel,” says Venkatesh Dutta, a professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University. The river system includes both water and land. Yamuna is a lifeline to five States, and its floodplains are a charging point.

Yamuna courses east of Delhi, entering the city from Palla village and exiting at the Okhla barrage. The floodplains are two km wide on each side. The floodplain along Yamuna’s 22 km run in Delhi, designated as the O zone by the Delhi Development Authority, has an area of approximately 9,700 hectares — the size of 1,500 new Parliament buildings.

Between Palla and Okhla, the composition of the floodplains changes from farmlands to slums, colonies, flyovers and bridges. It is also dotted with permanent structures like Ring Road, Akshardham Temple complex, Commonwealth Games Village, Player’s Building (housing the Delhi Secretariat) and the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium.

What is submerged now was once part of the river’s natural flow, Dr. Dutta explains. A river has the “right to expand” and needs to breathe through its flood plains. Any attempt to concretise constricts its air supply. “This is happening not only in Delhi, but all major cities including Pune, Lucknow, Mumbai,” he said.

As part of river systems, floodplains slow water runoff during floods, recharge groundwater and store excess water, replenishing the city’s water supply. “When you have sluggish flow, the surplus water stored in the floodplain is released back during the non-monsoon season,” Dr. Dutta explains. “If you lose the floodplain, you also lose the storage of water.” Delhi recorded similarly devastating floods in 1978, 1988 and 1995 which inundated floodplains, adversely impacting their health.

A 2022 report found there are 56 bastis (one basti has 15 or more houses), with 9,350 households and 46,750 people. Almost half of the households (4,835) practise farming as a livelihood; others rely on daily wage work, fishing, nurseries, and animal herding.

Most residents migrated from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Rajasthan; some bastis have existed for eight decades and others were built more recently. Farmers near Palla and Hiranki villages traditionally grow rice, wheat, and flowers on the rich silt deposited by the river.

“Zone O supports a large variety of nature-based livelihoods with a low ecological footprint. Yet, these are being forcibly evicted in the name of ecological rejuvenation of the region,” the report noted. The farmland size has reduced from 4,850 hectares in 2000 to 3,330 hectares in 2020, as people were evicted, and livelihood shifted to daily wage work.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) in 2016 imposed a blanket ban on agriculture-related activities till the “Yamuna is restored and made pollution free”.

On the NGT’s orders, the DDA in 2021 evicted 800 families in the Muslim-dominated Batla House area, a part of the floodplains that falls under no-construction zones. Private contractors built flats and sold to people, mostly daily wage and domestic workers, who cannot afford housing in other areas.

The first major non-agriculture settlements appeared after Independence when refugees from Western Punjab fled to Delhi. They built kuccha houses on the floodplains along the Yamuna Pushta (from the ITO bridge and up to Salimgarh Fort). The planning era propelled urbanisation in the 1950s and ‘60s, witnessing the construction of the first thermal power plant (employing people as labourers to unload coal from trains and clear fly ash), the Ring Road and Rajghat Samadhi.

Over 180,000 jhuggis on the Yamuna Pushta were demolished during the 1975 Emergency, and people were resettled in the peripheries.

The 1982 Asian Games brought more than one million migrant labourers from neighbouring States, tasked with building flyovers, sports facilities and luxury apartments. Little to no formal housing was provided; workers eventually settled on the open plain along the western embankment after the Games. By 2004, almost 3,50,000 people lived along the Yamuna, according to estimates. They earned livelihoods as domestic help, rickshaw pullers, porters, mechanics, small vendors, factory workers in nearby trade markets such as Chandni Chowk and Sadar Bazaar. The population boom outpaced Delhi’s ability to build a proper sewage network and spiked Yamuna’s pollution, Manu Bhatnagar of the Natural Heritage Division of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage told The Hindu in an earlier interview.

The Delhi High Court in 2004 ordered eviction of “unauthorised” settlements on the floodplains, demolishing shanties and evicting more than two lakh people.

“Their subsequent eviction on the charge of pollution cleared the way for the construction of capital-intensive projects of urban infrastructure and elite consumption,” sociologist Amita Baviskar wrote in a paper. Large portions along the floodplains were used for projects — Delhi’s largest depot for its public bus service, Akshardham Temple complex, Commonwealth Games Village, metro depots, luxury apartments, and highways.

Moreover, Dr. Dutta says, “in the name of flood protection,” cities use embankments which “jacket the river, limiting the river’s ability to spread.”

The Yamuna floodplain was designated as a protected area free from construction in the Delhi Masterplan of 1962. The Central Ground Water Authority in 2000 also notified the floodplains as ‘protected’ for groundwater management.

The draft Master Plan For Delhi 2041 divides Delhi into 18 zonal areas, designating Yamuna’s floodplains as ‘Zone O’, delineated in two parts: river zone (active floodplain) and riverfront (regulated construction is allowed). The latter is where structures such as Akshardham Temple and Commonwealth Village have been built.

The South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) in 2020 found large parts of the Yamuna floodplains and riverbed were “grossly abused” due to lax implementation: 23 bridges including rail, road, metro and barrages have been built; there was a bridge at every 800m. “The creation of new embankments, guide bunds… are fragmenting the floodplain, promoting encroachments, and also leaving a trail of construction and demolition debris into riverbed and floodplains,” the group wrote.

An Expert Committee in 2012 formed to examine DDA’s Riverfront Development Scheme warned against any construction on floodplains. The areas proposed under the Yamuna Riverfront Development (YRDF) plan — which proposes biodiversity parks and ‘recreational’ activities — were within the active floodplain, which could affect the topography, increase pollution and affect flood-carrying capacity, the Committee warned.

“If you build on areas reserved for recharge, you lose groundwater,” says Dr. Dutta. The layers of sediments of floodplains create aquifers contributing to the river channel, which in turn rejuvenates the groundwater. But encroachments stop this two-way exchange.

The river is unable to transport flood waters downstream during monsoons, wet the lands or deposit soil along its banks to preserve the riverine ecosystem.

Floodplains also protect against devastating flash floods by allowing excess water to spread out and storing that surplus.

However, encroachments restrict the river to a small channel. Any intense rainfall activity (India received 26% more rainfall in July than expected) swells the river, expanding in height not in width, eventually spilling over with devastating intensity. Climate change has intensified rains in frequency and severity, and seen in the Yamuna floods, runoff water comes as a huge gushing flow in a small span of time.

Dr. Dutta notes that “floods are inseparable from the hydrological cycle and are required for sediment transport, cleaning the riverbed, rejuvenating the river itself.”

“The concept of floodplain zoning is not mainstreamed in the Master Plan,” he adds, and authorities haven’t yet “taken cognisance of the river’s right to expand.” This gap, along with poorly implemented policies, frees up river land for private and public real estate. “The common property land — the river’s land — is open to auction and revenue generation. It’s a tragedy of commons because the river’s land has not been properly defined.”

A model draft Bill for defining floodplains and zoning was circulated in 1975. Only four States have drafted a National Floodplains Zoning Policy so far.

It is “reductive” to locate floodplains as a site of conflict between development and nature, says Dr. Dutta. Instead, action can be focused on creating climate-resilient infrastructures, de-silting drains, creating green areas and improving drainage systems. “You cannot police a river,” he says.

Embracing a circular economy model enables transition from the linear “take-make-waste” paradigm and embrace a more sustainable and regenerative approach, said Union Minister Bhupender Yadav at the launch of Resource Efficiency Circular Economy Industry Coalition (RECEIC) on the sidelines of the fourth G-20 Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group (ECSWG) and Environment and Climate Ministers’ meeting in Chennai on Thursday.

As many as 39 multinational corporations (MNCs) from sectors such as steel, FMCG and electronics came together to pledge to adopt resource efficiency and circular economy principles to address environmental challenges rising from waste, including plastics, microplastics, e-waste, and chemical waste. The launch of RECEIC, which involved signing of the foundational charter and unveiling of the logo by Mr. Yadav, was attended by Ministers of seven countries such as Mauritius, Denmark, Italy, Canada, the UAE, France, and the European Union.

Naresh Pal Gangwar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), told the media on Wednesday that the coalition would be led by industries and the government would only play a supporting role.

Speaking about India’s efforts to mitigating the burden of plastic waste, Mr. Gangwar said about 41 lakh tonnes of plastic waste were generated in the country in 2021-22, of which 30 lakh tonnes were allocated to 2,000-odd registered recyclers and plastic waste processing units.

Under Extended Producers’ Responsibility (EPR) guidelines established through the Plastic Waste Management (Amendment) Rules, 2022, 2.6 million tonnes worth of EPR certificates had been generated by plastic waste processors and around 1.51 million tonnes of those certificated had been purchased by PIBOs (Producers, Importers and Brand owners) against 2022-23 obligations, Mr. Gangwar said.

The ECSWG, which will conclude with the Ministers’ meeting on Friday, has been involved in discussing environmental issues and promoting global collaboration towards a sustainable future.