01 Aug 2018: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

C. GS3 Related

Context:

Tata Trusts and the Copenhagen Consensus for the India Consensus project commissioned a group to look at state-level solutions for Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. They found that India’s total energy losses are significantly more than international norms.

The research is part of the proposition that no state has resources to do everything. It is crucial to identify where decision makers can achieve the most good, in policy areas ranging from education to agricultural performance and power sector reform. Inadequate and poor-quality power supply means frequent interruptions, poor voltage levels, and dissatisfied consumers across much of the country.

Details:

• Adding up all the losses in the system—including the losses due to energy dissipated in conductors, transformers and other equipment, along with pilferage by those who bypass meters, and losses from failure to recover the amount billed to consumers—India’s total energy losses came to 24% in 2015-16, significantly more than international norms.
• This, however, is an improvement on 2003-04 when the losses were 38%. Progress was made because of national- and state-level reforms.
• The researchers looking at power distribution zeroed in on the agriculture sector, one of the most inefficient electricity users.
• In the 1960s, the rural electrification programme was introduced to enhance agricultural output using groundwater for irrigation.
• Due to un-metered supply and the flat-rate electricity tariff provided for irrigation, the number of pump sets increased substantially—and unregulated and free water has contributed to over-exploitation of groundwater resources.
• Subsidized power intended to benefit farmers allowed problems such as pilferage and theft, and disguised losses from the utilities, which degraded their finances.
• One of the major reasons for the high losses was the adoption of a low tension (LT) distribution network spread over long distances to serve dispersed, small, individual agriculture connections. This resulted not only in high technical losses, but also in theft facilitated by un-metered supply and the flat tariff.
• The degradation of the utilities’ finances has adversely affected farmers by making the supply and quality of power unpredictable and by providing it mainly during the night hours, resulting in frequent failure of pump sets, forcing farmers to use inefficient motors, and keep the pump sets constantly on, wasting energy and causing overexploitation of groundwater. This is a vicious cycle in which farmers, distribution companies and state governments alike face ever-increasing losses.

Way Forward:

The researchers who studied the state of Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan propose the following solutions:

1. Introducing a high-voltage distribution system (HVDS), by upgrading the network and replacing transformers.

Andhra Pradesh (AP), which has already made a strong start on conversion of its LT network to HVDS, managing to reduce losses to 12%, has demonstrated that this approach works. The biggest saving would come from the fact that pump sets wouldn’t fail so often.  Factoring in carbon savings, energy savings and the reduction in transformer failure, the states would still benefit. In short, each rupee invested would generate a return worth more than rs. 2.

2. Replacing inefficient pump sets with energy efficient ones—further enhances the return on investment.

The total costs would be almost twice as high, because we would need not only the high-voltage distribution system to be set up, but also to replace all existing pumps. Yet, the total benefits would grow even more, allowing each rupee to generate Rs. 3 worth of social benefits through lower pump breakage along with energy savings and carbon savings. These interventions will enable reduction in the subsidy by governments for irrigation which could be redirected to other spending.

3. Benefits could be derived from of using water- or salt-based thermal energy storage in buildings, and find the investment would have a return worth more than ₹2 for every rupee spent in each of the states studied.

This research highlights the lasting challenges that can result from well-meaning decisions such as the low-tension distribution network. But it also highlights the opportunities that exist to reduce losses in India’s power sector.

Context

• Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology accepted the finalised result of the deliberations of an expert committee on data protection chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice BN Srikrishna.
• Now there are two documents: a draft bill on personal data protection and the full report of the expert committee.
• One Year ago on August 24, the nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court gave a unanimous affirmation of the right to privacy.
• The court imposed upon the government a clear obligation to make a law safeguarding a person’s informational privacy, commonly referred to as data protection.
• The right to privacy judgment noted that the Union government had tasked a committee headed by Justice B.N. Srikrishna to formulate such a law in July last year.
• This committee has produced a set of recommendations that includes a draft law titled the “The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018”.

Issue areas in the Report

• Despite being formed within the ambit of, and even being bound by, the Right to Privacy judgment, the recommendations undermine the legal principles and also re-interprets them.
• Any bill, or other legislative recommendations, should ideally go through pre-legislative consultation as per the 2015 Pre-legislative Consultation Policy, followed by Union Cabinet review before being submitted to Parliament.
• Srikrishna Committee’s end product is worth deeper review. Both documents are worth detailed review, particularly given that there are things written in the report which have not been included in the draft data protection bill.
• The expert committee appears to make no mention of the history and previous work of earlier attempts to create privacy and data protection frameworks in India.
• There appears to be no formal referencing to :
  • The recommendations issued in 2012 by the Justice AP Shah chaired expert committee on privacy to the erstwhile Planning Commission
  • The 2010 approach paper on a privacy law for India published by the Department of Personnel and Training or the draft Privacy Bill developed by them interdepartmentally across 2011-15 for the Union Government.
• The bulk of the Srikrishna Committee report is on specifying the extent of a legal framework for data protection in India, how it can be claimed, a regulatory structure in the form of a Data Protection Authority, and the several exceptions it suggests to these rules in certain cases.

Structure of Data Protection

• The education, policy setting, investigation, enforcement, and adjudication functions for data protection are nearly all provided to one single national regulatory agency , the Data Protection Authority of India.
• Established by the Central Government, the DPA would be managed by a Chairperson and six members, selected by a committee composed of the Chief Justice or another Supreme Court Justice nominated by him, the Cabinet Secretary, and one “expert of repute” appointed by the judicial member of the committee in consultation with the Cabinet Secretary.

Some controversial areas of the Report

1. Judicial members left out

• There is no requirement in either the report or the draft bill of judicial members. This is in violation of existing Indian case law from the High Courts and Supreme Courts on the functioning of tribunals,
• This would also likely in conflict with the Puttaswamy ruling, since in that judgment indicated that making decisions on intrusion into privacy is one that involves a judicial role.

2. Surveillance and Communications

• The draft bill does not propose any specific measures to more directly consolidate or update Indian law regarding surveillance and communications interception by law enforcement and intelligence organisations.
• The expert committee report is interesting in this regard, because it acknowledges that post the Puttaswamy ruling, many existing practices and legal measures regarding surveillance in India may not match the constitutional tests outlined by the Supreme Court to protect the fundamental right to privacy.
• The expert committee even lists the Telegraph Act, Telegraph Rules, Information Technology Act, and several criminal procedure related statutes as likely needed changes.

3. On Aadhaar

• The expert committee report did chose to provide detailed recommendations on Aadhaar.
• Its section on Aadhaar acknowledges that several existing provisions of the Aadhaar Act required fixes and reform, ranging from legal recognition of virtual tokenised IDs in place of Aadhaar numbers to drastically reducing the legality of online authentication of Aadhaar by private players and others.

Two key points of Supreme Court Judgment

• First, it expressly stated the primacy of the individual as the beneficiary of fundamental rights.
• Second, it rejected the argument that the right to privacy dissolves in the face of collective notions of economic development.
• The priorities of the Srikrishna committee stray from these two basic points.
• Its report, titled “A Free and Fair Digital Economy: Protecting Privacy, Empowering Indians”, keeps to the apparent pecking order that its title signals: the common good and the economy come first and individuals second.

How the Report varies from Supreme Court judgement?

• In justifying this framework, the report runs into tremendous difficulties as it attempts to put together a regulatory agenda that reconciles the expansion of the digital economy and state control with the principles of the right to privacy judgment.
• These difficulties reveal themselves in a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of constitutional law.
• The trouble begins with the report’s conception of the state. The state’s purpose under the Constitution, says the report, is “based on two planks”.
• First and foremost, “the state is a facilitator of human progress” and is “commanded” by the Directive Principles of State Policy “to serve the common good”.
• Here, Fundamental Rights, which help protect against a state “prone to excess”, come “second”.
• This ignores the very structure of the Constitution in which the chapter guaranteeing enforceable Fundamental Rights stands on its own, preceding the one setting out unenforceable Directive Principles of State Policy.
• In doing so, the report attempts to open the right to privacy to allow the state the most convenient means by which to realise its regulatory agenda.
• Enabling the government’s convenience is not an objective laid out by the right to privacy judgment. Constitutional guarantees of rights do not automatically bend even to the pursuit of constitutionally legitimate aims.
• Instead, a rigorous three-part test set out in the right to privacy judgment makes clear that it is for the government to measure and justify its actions at every point that it seeks to make inroads into our privacy.
• To justify its priorities, the report proceeds on the premise that upends the historical consensus of what Constitutions and rights exist to do: protect every citizen of the republic against incursions into the vast repository of freedoms that exist naturally.
• The report says that “to see the individual as an atomised unit, standing apart from the collective, neither flows from our constitutional framework nor accurately grasps the true nature of rights litigations.
• Rights (of which the right to privacy is an example) are not deontological categories that protect interests of atomised individuals.”
• Then, it proceeds to conclude, “Thus the construction of a right itself is not because it translates into an individual good, be it autonomy, speech, etc. but because such good creates a collective culture where certain reasons for state action are unacceptable.”
• To the report’s view that the individual ought not to be the spotlighted while making a law, the right to privacy judgment is in stark contrast.
• In Justice S.A. Bobde’s words, “Constitutions like our own are means by which individuals – the Preambular ‘people of India’ – create ‘the state’, a new entity to serve their interests and be accountable to them.”
• Moreover, in Justice Chandrachud’s words: “The individual is the focal point of the Constitution because it is in the realisation of individual rights that the collective well being of the community is determined.”
• In stating that rights are not things which are essential in themselves is an unacceptable position to take under our Constitution.
• In fact, in the right to privacy judgment, Justice J. Chelameswar approves of the principle that liberty — which is the family to which the right to privacy belongs — is valuable in a democracy not only as a means but as an end in itself.

• This is why the right to privacy judgment was celebrated last year. It signified hope that things could get better, that values of freedom, autonomy and dignity would be realised.
• However, the Srikrishna Report shows that the danger to a high constitutional principle may more often be that it is disregarded, rather than that it is disobeyed.
• By re-framing and re-interpreting the right to privacy, the report entrenches the positions of the two entities which already wield the most power over ordinary Indians: corporations and the government.

Nothing here for today!!!

Question 1. Zika Virus is related to which of the following virus/es

1. Yellow fever
2. Dengue
3. Japanese encephalitis

Options:

1. 1 only
2. 1 and 3 only
3. 1, 2 and 3
4. None of the above

See