30 September 2020: The Hindu Editorial Analysis
1) Weighing the costs: On COVID-19 vaccine-
GS 2
Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health
CONTEXT:
With over 6 million cases and the death toll from COVID-19 approaching 100,000, India is entering the first winter of the pandemic.
Viral infections, particularly of the influenza variety, are also common at this time of the year and there may be new unknowns in the risks that lie ahead.
However, another potential milestone approaches: the probable availability of a vaccine.
POLICY ON DISTRIBUTION:
Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, on multiple occasions has said that an India-made vaccine was likely to be available in “early 2021”.
The government already has an expert committee on vaccine distribution.
Their job is to decide who gets the vaccine first, how many will be eligible for the early doses, what the costs would be, and whether there should be a cost at all for the majority of Indians, who anyway were the hardest hit by the pandemic in the summer.
Storage and supply of vaccines are also problems as daunting(challenging) as making one and pose complex challenges in India.
The government is yet to make its policy on distribution explicit(detail) but the current thinking appears to be that nobody would be denied a vaccine on the grounds of affordability.
There is even discussion that a vaccine may be available via the national immunisation programme.
This initiative currently offers at least nine vaccines for preventable diseases free for children and pregnant women.
The pandemic’s global nature has meant that even the quest for a vaccine is international.
The GAVI Covax alliance has emerged as the largest coordinator of vaccine development as well as distribution of a probable vaccine.
Based on a combination of payments by 78 high-income countries and donations, the GAVI Covax aims to ensure that between 15-20% of every country’s population, or at least their most vulnerable, are able to be inoculated first.
PRINCIPLES OF EQUITY:
In principle, these are laudable(encouraging) aims and underline principles of equity. A paucity(lack) of testing facilities and equipment in March led to stringent restrictions on who could be tested.
Though the tests were ‘free’, they were first available only in government facilities and this contributed to a significant pool of untested carriers and a rapid spread of the virus that was only marginally blunted by the lockdown.
Only after the number of labs expanded to both public and private labs, restrictions on who could get tested were remove.
And a greater variety of tests became available that disease management improved even though testing — though not expensive — was also not free.
It is to be anticipated that vaccine delivery will be a protracted(lengthy) process and it will be a long time before the average citizen has access to it.
There are at least three Indian companies testing their own vaccines, and so a prohibitively expensive vaccine, besides being unacceptable, is also unlikely.
CONCLUSION:
A prohibitively expensive vaccine, besides being unacceptable, will do little good.
2) A wage code that is a hasty composition-
GS 2
Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors
CONTEXT:
In the brief monsoon session of Parliament, three new labour codes (The Industrial Relations Code, the Social Security Code and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020) were bulldozed(cleared) into passing and now await the President’s assent.
Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar told the media that four new labour codes will become operational before the year ends.
CONSOLIDATION OF LAWS:
Prime Minister, on his part, has said the Code on Wages, 2019 would expand the coverage of workers in all industries in the unorganised sector as the old Minimum Wages Act covered only 30% of the total workforce.
He also said that while there were 10,000 slabs of minimum wages that existed, they would now be reduced to 200 slabs.
The Code on Wages, 2019 seeks to consolidate and simplify four pieces of legislation — Payment of Wages Act, 1936, Minimum Wages Act, 1948, Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 and Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 — into a single code.
Its object and reasons stated that even the Second National Commission on Labour (Ravindra Varma, 2002) suggested consolidating all labour laws into four codes.
While the previous four pieces of legislation had a total of 119 sections, the new Code has 69 sections.
Considering that the repealed(deleted) legislations each had a definition section, inspectors, penalties, a competent authority, an appellate authority, and rule-making powers, any consolidation will impact their length.
As a result, the delegated pieces of legislation (Rules) will be bigger than the Code; this is no way to condense(cut) prior pieces of legislation.
NEW PROBLEMS WILL ARISE:
All the four repealed pieces of legislation were enacted historically at different points in time and to deal with different situations.
The combining of asymmetrical(uneven) laws into a single code is not an easy task and will only create its own set of new problems.
Barring a few new concepts, the new Code retains almost all provisions.
These are features such as the procedure for fixing minimum wage, limit for fines and deductions in wages, minimum and maximum bonus, calculation of allocable and available surplus, as well as gender neutral consideration in fixing wages.
The Code will have the same definition of the term “worker”; but, a person employed in a supervisory capacity drawing up to ₹15,000 will also be considered a worker.
In the (erstwhile) Minimum Wages Act, to fix minimum wage in an employment which has more than 1,000 workers to be first included in the Schedule, and, thereafter, minimum wages will be fixed as per law.
The new Code has dispensed with the necessity of having a minimum number of workers and the inclusion of such employment into the schedule.
The central government will have the power to fix a “floor wage”. Once it is fixed, State governments cannot fix any minimum wage less than the “floor wage”.
It is unwarranted since many States always fix minimum wages higher than the existing rates, depending upon the employment and workforce involved.
The concept should be for a binding minimum wage and not have dual wage rates — a binding floor wage and a non-binding minimum wage.
On MGNREGA:
Hitherto, there was a conflict between the minimum wages fixed by the State governments for agriculture workers.
There were cases as to whether the Minimum Wages Act would have an over-riding effect over the provisions of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005.
Several High Courts have placed the Minimum Wages Act to override MGNREGA. That has been set to rest by excluding MGNREGA from the purview of the Code on Wages.
However, foremost in the labour code will be its enforcement provisions and the sanctions behind it.
The Code has created an omnibus(several) inspector-cum-facilitator who will act as per the inspection scheme framed by the government.
He will advise employers and workers to comply with the provisions of the code and may carry out inspections as may be assigned by the government (Section 51).
As for the claim mechanism, Section 45 stipulates that they will be heard and determined by an authority who is not below the rank of a “Gazetted Officer”.
A government official without legal and administrative background can hear such claims.
However, any dispute regarding bonus will continue to go before the Industrial Tribunal (the new Industrial Relations Code Bill contemplates a two-member Tribunal).
As against the decision of the Gazetted Officer, one can prefer an appeal to an appellate authority who must be one rank higher than the competent authority (Section 49).
Neither the Code nor the Rules (presently, draft Rules) prescribe the qualifications and experience required for appointment of competent authority.
Complicated questions of law and facts arising out of claims will henceforth be decided first by a Gazetted Officer, and thereafter by an Appellate Authority who must hold one rank above him.
PROVISIONS ON PENALTY:
The penal provisions found hitherto(although) in any pieces of labour legislation never had an impact on employers.
In People’s Union For Democratic Rights and Others vs. Union Of India & Others, 1982 (Asiad case), the Supreme Court of India observed: “If violations of labour laws are going to be punished only by meagre fines, it would be impossible to ensure observance of the labour laws and the labour laws would be reduced to nullity.
They would remain merely paper tigers without any teeth or claws.”
But, curiously, a new provision (Section 52) has been introduced where an officer (not below the rank of an under secretary to the government) will be notified with power to impose a penalty in the place of a judicial magistrate.
An essential judicial function is now sought to be vested with the executive in contravention of Article 50 of the Constitution, where the State has been mandated to separate the judiciary from the executive in public services.
A similar provision (Section 21 of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976) which empowered revenue officers designated as executive magistrates to try offences under the Act was struck down by the Division Bench of the Madras High Court.
A review filed by the central government was dismissed (2018).
The Division Bench had observed: “On enforcement of the Code (Criminal Procedure), there has been complete separation of Judiciary from the Executive to implement the mandate under Article 50 of the Constitution which requires that State shall take steps to separate the Judiciary from Executive.
By merging the judicial function in the executive, the basic structure of the Constitution is affected.
Justice and fair trial cannot be ensured by the Executive Magistrates in as much as they are not required to be legally qualified and trained persons and in actual practice are required to perform various other functions.
In fact the functions of the Judiciary and Executive are quite different.
In other words it is clear that the Executive Magistrate has no role to play in conducting judicial trial and recording judicial decisions.”
Apart from providing for a compounding of offences (Section 56), the Code also exempts employers from penal provisions if they were able “to prove that they had used due diligence in enforcing the execution of the code and it was the other person who had committed the offence without his knowledge, consent or connivance(involvement)”.
CONCLUSION:
Though the Prime Minister had claimed that the erstwhile provisions covered only 30% of the workers, there is nothing particular in this Code that it will have wider coverage.
Similarly, as minimum wages mostly help the unorganised worker, the 200-slab categorisation may not have much of an impact.
The Code on Wages (yet to be notified) has neither succeeded in a consolidation of laws nor will it ever achieve the claims made by the Prime Minister.
3) Managing the global commons-
GS 3
Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation
CONTEXT:
This year is defined by a pandemic, record-breaking forest fires, floods and droughts in various places, and the rapid melting of Arctic ice.
The disruption of our environment is one of the main factors causing these events.
To cope with these events, we need to increase our efforts in managing our interactions with the environment on a global scale.
GOVERNING SHARED RESOURCES:
When we want to manage shared resources, we need to balance both private and public interests.
Each individual farmer may benefit from turning on the pump to irrigate his/her land, but on a larger scale, it contributes to declining groundwater levels and electricity blackouts.
In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin popularised the notion of the tragedy of the commons, which implies that communities cannot manage their shared resources and require governmental interventions to regulate resource use or privatise the resource.
In 1990, political scientist Elinor Ostrom published her landmark book on governing the commons that demonstrated that communities can govern on their own their shared resources, often better than imposed, well-intended solutions from outside.
Global commons refer to shared resources that cannot be managed within national jurisdictions.
The spread of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19; greenhouse gas emissions; biodiversity reduction; overfishing; and the accumulation of plastic waste are some of the problems within the scope of global commons.
Although we have a good idea of what kind of governance might be successful at the local community level, these insights do not directly address the challenges we face on a global scale.
The consequences of human activities on a global scale are only being recognised in recent times.
The appropriate scale of governance of global commons is a highly debated topic. Some argue that top-down governance with binding agreements is the only effective solution for problems of a global scale.
Multilateral negotiations on climate change and other global commons over decades have had limited success.
Others have emphasised a more decentralised multi-level or polycentric approach that builds on the observed successes of local solutions.
COORDINATED ACTIVITIES:
There is no panacea(one stop solution) to solve this problem. We need to have coordinated activities at different scales.
For example, local irrigation communities could monitor the state of infrastructure and water use and adapt their watering scheme or cropping patterns to changes in water availability.
Community members may have more knowledge about the local ecological and social context, but they could also lack expertise, may be ruled by powerful factions within the community, or may not perceive sufficient incentives to sustain the local commons.
Empirical(practical) research also demonstrates that well-intended solutions imposed on community members are typically short-lived.
To manage our global commons, we need to facilitate and accommodate the self-governance of local commons, but provide safeguards at different levels to avoid exploitation and manage risks.
If we facilitate rural and urban communities to self-govern their shared resources, there will be risks involved for which cities and nations need to accept responsibilities.
At the local levels, initiatives and solutions could be developed that fit the local context.
When expertise is not available, higher-level organisations could facilitate learning from peers in similar conditions.
CONCLUSION:
Failures will be inevitable(likely to happen) if we stimulate local-level experimentation, and higher-level authorities need to provide insurance for those cases.
If local initiatives are successful, higher-level authorities need to provide insurance that the outcomes of those successes will not be grabbed by outsiders.
Governing the global commons is the defining challenge for current and future generations.
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