Surrogacy regulation is long overdue

A comprehensive law to regulate surrogacy has been long overdue. Over the years, India has become a global hub for the practice of women being contracted to carry others’ babies, usually for a payment. While estimates of the size of the surrogacy market vary wildly, it is one in which the woman carrying an embryo has been in a grey zone, with uncertain legal and compensatory protection. The Union Cabinet has taken the first step towards regulation by approving the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, but it has many problematic provisions. The proposed law, in line with the practice in several other countries, says commercial surrogacy will be prohibited. However, in order that “altruistic surrogacy” is available for the benefit of infertile couples who are presumably desperate for a child that is genetically theirs, the Bill allows Indian couples, who must have been married for five years without a child, to take the help of surrogates, but without any payment. Only close relatives can be ‘surrogate mothers’, and once in a lifetime. Yet, it bars foreigners, homosexual couples, unmarried couples and single people from taking the help of an altruistic surrogate — leaving it open to questions about discrimination and inequality.

It is far from evident that the ban on commercial surrogacy has been thought through for its practical and ethical dimensions. In fact, it is not clear if the ban and the allowance for altruistic surrogacy are meant to make an ideological point or to actually confront the ground situation. While surrogacy has been legal since 2002, enumerating the surrogate mother’s rights and protecting her bodily integrity has been a challenge as the fertility industry mostly remains unregulated. The rights of children born thus too have remained unclear, highlighted dramatically in the case of Baby Manji Yamada, whose Japanese ‘parents’ divorced in the course of the surrogate pregnancy. Such a dilemma of statelessness has been sought to be prevented with the bar on foreigners. But given India’s failure to administer the ban on organ donations and sex determination tests, it is anybody’s guess how effective the ban on commercial surrogacy will be. The sex determination ban is a principled one, for it underlines intolerance for gender discrimination. The question is whether surrogacy is as big an evil as female foeticide. If it indeed is — and the jury is still out on this — why not ban surrogacy altogether? How does it suddenly become acceptable if the surrogate mother is a relative and uncompensated, besides probably being coerced, as women often are in intra-family decision-making? These are questions that will remain even if the Bill is passed.

Keywords: Surrogacy Regulation Bill

Source: The Hindu, 27-08-2016

Citizenship without bias

The new citizenship legislation should include refugees from persecuted minorities of all denominations who have made India their home

On July 19, 2016, the government introduced a Bill to amend certain provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The Bill has now been referred to the joint select committee of Parliament. The object of the proposed Bill is to enable Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who have fled to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh without valid travel documents, or those whose valid documents have expired in recent years, to acquire Indian citizenship by the process of naturalisation. Under the Bill, such persons shall not be treated as illegal immigrants for the purpose of the Citizenship Act. In another amendment, the aggregate period of residential qualification for the process of citizenship by naturalisation of such persons is proposed to be reduced from 11 years to six years. A large number of people who would otherwise be illegal immigrants can now heave a sigh of relief if the Bill goes through as they would be eligible to become citizens of the country.

Not inclusive enough

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, owes its genesis to the assurance given by the Prime Minister that Hindus from these three countries who have sought asylum in India would be conferred Indian citizenship. But since singling out Hindus alone could be discriminatory, the Bill has extended the right to acquire citizenship to other religious minorities living in the three countries.

V. Suryanarayan, Geeta Ramaseshan

The Bill, when passed, would be of immense benefit to the Chakmas and Hajongs of Bangladesh displaced because of the construction of the Kaptai Dam who have been refugees for nearly 65 years. The Supreme Court in Committee for C.R. of C.A.P. v. State of Arunachal Pradesh directed the Government of India and Arunachal Pradesh to grant citizenship to eligible persons from these communities and to protect their life and liberty and further prohibited discrimination against them.

Though India has not enacted a national refugee law, the three principles underlying India’s treatment of refugees was spelt out in Parliament by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959 with reference to Tibetan refugees. They include: refugees will be accorded a humane welcome; the refugee issue is a bilateral issue; and the refugees should return to their homeland once normalcy returns there.

The proposed Bill recognises and protects the rights of refugees and represents a welcome change in India’s refugee policy. But it would have been appropriate if the Bill had used the term “persecuted minorities” instead of listing out non-Muslim minorities in three countries. To give an example, the Ahmadiyyas are not considered Muslims in Pakistan and are subject to many acts of discrimination. Other groups include members of the Rohingyas, who being Muslims are subjected to discrimination in Myanmar and have fled to India. Such a gesture would also have been in conformity with the spirit of religious and linguistic rights of minorities guaranteed under our Constitution. Unfortunately the Bill does not take note of the refugees in India from among the Muslim community who have fled due to persecution and singles them out on the basis of religion, thereby being discriminatory.

The case of the Malaiha Tamils

Yet another disappointing feature of the Bill is that it does not provide citizenship to the people of Indian origin from Sri Lanka who fled to Tamil Nadu as refugees following the communal holocaust in July 1983. The Indian Tamils, or Malaiha (hill country) Tamils as they like to be called, are descendants of indentured workers who were taken by the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries to provide the much-needed labour for the development of tea plantations. The British gave an assurance that the Indian workers would enjoy the same rights and privileges accorded to the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Tamils. But soon after independence, by a legislative enactment the Indian Tamils were discriminated and rendered stateless. In the protracted negotiations that took place between New Delhi and Colombo on the thorny issue of stateless people, Nehru maintained that except for those who voluntarily opted for Indian citizenship, the rest were the responsibility of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Sri Lanka, on the other hand, argued that only those who fulfilled the strict qualifications prescribed for citizenship would be conferred citizenship, and the rest were India’s responsibility.

Nehru’s principled stance was abandoned by Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi when they entered into two agreements with Colombo in 1964 and 1974, respectively. New Delhi agreed to take back 6,00,000 people of Indian origin with their natural increase as Indian citizens, while Sri Lanka agreed to give citizenship to 3,75,000 with their natural increase. The wishes of the Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka were not ascertained. To the ruling elite in Colombo and New Delhi the people of Indian origin became an embarrassing set of statistics. Important national leaders — C. Rajagopalachari, K. Kamaraj, V.K. Krishna Menon, P. Ramamurthy and C.N. Annadurai — opposed the agreement as inhuman, but their views were brushed aside by the Central government in order to befriend the Government of Sri Lanka.

The ethnic fratricide in 1977, 1981 and 1983, which affected the plantation areas, convinced many people of Indian origin that they could not live amicably with the Sinhalese. They never subscribed to the demand for a separate state of Tamil Eelam; in fact, the hill country was relatively tranquil during the protracted ethnic conflict. Even then, they were subjected to vicious attacks by some lumpen sections of the Sinhalese population. They sold all their belongings, came to India as refugees, with the hope of acquiring Indian citizenship and permanently settling down here.

A point of no return

According to informed sources, there are nearly 30,000 Malaiha Tamils in the refugee camps scattered throughout Tamil Nadu. They have absolutely no moorings in Sri Lanka. Their children have intermarried with the local people and are well integrated into Tamil society. The young have availed of educational facilities, but are unable to get jobs commensurate to their qualifications because they are not Indian citizens. The refugees in Kottapattu camp, near Tiruchi, with whom we interacted, told us: “Come what may, we will not go back to Sri Lanka.”

All these refugees qualify for Indian citizenship by registration under Article 5 of the Citizenship Act of 1955. However their plea for citizenship has been negated citing a Central government circular that Sri Lankan refugees are not entitled for Indian citizenship. In a communication dated November 21, 2007 to the Special Commissioner for Rehabilitation, the Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu mentioned that there are strict instructions from the Government of India “not to entertain applications of Sri Lankan refugees for the grant of Indian citizenship”. We submit, in the light of recent developments, the above-mentioned circular of the Central government must be immediately withdrawn.

The tragedy of the Malaiha Tamils, a majority of whom are Dalits, must be underlined.

Immigrants, even those who are termed illegal, are entitled to equal protection before the law and the various rights that flow from Article 21. This was stressed by the Supreme Court in National Human Rights Commission v. State of Arunachal Pradesh while addressing the rights of Chakma refugees. If such immigrants are granted citizenship, the natural progression would mean that they enjoy the benefits of rights guaranteed under Article 19 besides others such as access to the public distribution system, right to participate in the political process, right to secure employment and other rights all of which currently are inaccessible to them. The Bill recognises this in its objects and reasons by referring to the denial of opportunities and advantages to such persons. The Bill therefore should not restrict itself to minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh but should include refugees from persecuted minorities of all denominations who have made India their home.

V. Suryanarayan is founding Director and former Senior Professor, Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras; Geeta Ramaseshan is an advocate at the Madras High Court.

Keywords: citizenship legislation, Indian citizens, illegal immigrants, refugees

Source: The Hindu, 27/08/2016

Get Back to the Basics

K S RAM





Development is a much-abused word -it is used almost always to refer to material development, excluding the spiritual or holistic aspects. In our zeal to quantify development and express it in empirical terms, we seem to expect that the graph should ideally move only upward. Hence our obsession with rising GDP , production, sales, profits and salaries.Development is equated with a culture of `more'. This is so at all levels: personal, national and global. Mahatma Gandhi might have called this a migration from a need-based economic order to a greed-based one.
The goal of development, according to Indian thought, is moksha, or liberation. In life, the manifestation of such development is in your movement towards being a jivanmukta, a free-in-life person. The four purusharthas, or pursuits recognised and sanctioned by Hindu thought, are: dharma, kama, artha, and moksha.Moksha, of course, comes in the end, as a supreme finale.The other three pursuits are not sequential: they do not come one after another: they run concurrent.
Once the road map to development is clear, all doubts resolve by themselves. Kama and artha are valid insofar as they are moderated and guided by dharma. Dharma renders development sustainable and holistic. A culture of more -in Gandhi's terminology , a world order based on greed -is ultra vires to dharma. It leads a person astray from the road to sustainable development. What is true of an individual is equally true of the nation and the world.

Getting Ready For 'A Whole New Life'

Lucia Giovannini





Breathing is a perfect bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. It is one of the few bodily functions that we can consciously react to. If we want, we can speed up our breathing, slow it down, amplify it or deepen it. But it continues to work even when we don't worry about it. In this moment, as you are reading and your attention is elsewhere, your breathing continues to exist.In other words, it is the only function that we cannot survive without for more than a few minutes. We can fast for days, even a month or more; we can go without drinking for about three days; we can go without sleep for over 24 hours without having any brain damage but we cannot go without breathing for more than three minutes!
Breathing comes first
Seventy-five per cent of the toxins in our body are released by breathing. Recent studies have demonstrated that patients with heart disease and myocardial infarction who learn deep breathing significantly improve their long-term health.
Deep breathing is a full invigorating massage of the internal organs and abdominal muscles and is shown to be helpful in many cases of hypertension and anxiety .
In his handbook, on how to achieve excellent health, the celebrated author and doctor, Andrew Weil, puts breathing in first place affirming, “The only and most efficient technique for relaxation that I know is the conscious regulation of breathing. By simply focusing attention on breathing, and not doing anything to change it, you are on your way to relaxation.“
Breathtaking moments
On the contrary , the first reaction we have when confronted with something or someone we fear is to hold our breath.It's an ancient unconscious reaction that we've inherited from our hunter ancestors, a reaction that we can still see today in the actions of animals. Think about a wild animal sniffing danger. Its first reaction is to hold its breath and then decide whether to fake its own death, to escape, or to attack.
We, too, when confronted with the challenges of life, tend to hold our breath. By doing this, the rate of carbon dioxide in our blood increases causing a numbness of our senses which allows us to forget our fear. But we don't live in the forest any more. We don't have to defend ourselves from tigers with saber-like teeth like our ancestors did.The dangers we face now are more or less emotional. Now we try to defend ourselves from what we perceive as verbal aggression, existential disaster, from the sense of inadequacy and from the fear of being judged. And every single time that a similar thought arises, we automatically hold our breath. You don't believe it? The next time you drive too quickly past a police car, notice how you breathe.
Get transformed
The risk is to get used to holding our breathing capacities at a minimum, as if we had to continually protect ourselves from danger. By doing this, we constantly live with the sensation of not having enough. Do you think you don't have enough time, money , love, friends and so on? Do your cells need oxygen?
It is only when we finally start breathing again and modify our breathing patterns that transformation can begin. (A Whole New Life: Discover the power of positive transformation; Hay House publisher, India.)

Industry must lead the way in skilling India

Govt initiatives such as Skill India can only be a part of the solution

Up to a third of the skills considered important today could change as soon as 2020

The chasm between India’s demographic bulge and the employment opportunities required to absorb it has been a staple in any debate about economic growth, and rightly so. The destabilizing political and social effects of a large unemployed population and the productivity loss from under- or poorly manned industries are anathema to any developing nation. Increasing levels of technology integration in production and business processes complicate the picture further. The National Democratic Alliance government has focused on a core aspect of the employment issue with the Skill India drive. But it will need to navigate an increasingly complicated landscape.

Recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development puts the skills shortage in India—measured as a percentage of firms with ten or more employees that have difficulty finding qualified employees—at 61%, among the highest ratios. This is not surprising. The Labour Bureau Report 2014 had pegged the skilled workforce in India at a dismal 2%. To its credit, the United Progressive Alliance administration had attempted a structured approach to the problem with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC)—a public-private partnership aimed at funding forprofit vocational training initiatives, now part of the Narendra Modi government’s skilling initiative.

But the NSDC’s performance to date has left much to be desired. It has a laundry list of problems: the need to coordinate with multiple ministries all running their own programmes creating bureaucratic sclerosis, funding tussles, issues of perception with job-seekers looking down on vocational training and job-creators unwilling to fork out a premium for skilled workers and poor hit rate as far as post-skilling employment goes. Unsurprisingly, the NSDC managed to train just 3.3 million people in 2014 and aimed for 6 million last year, when the 2022 target is 150 million.

The Modi government has built on its predecessor’s efforts with the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship’s flagship scheme, implemented by the NSDC. The momentum it is giving to the issue is commendable. But it should keep this in mind: skilling and upskilling efforts must be industry-led. The PMKVY’s various provisions and the triple-layer decision-making structure at the coordinating National Skill Development Mission pose the risk of a top-down approach that cannot anticipate or respond to shifts in demand and global conditions as effectively as the market can.

This is especially true in the context of employability-enhancing skills at a time when technology is rapidly changing their nature. A World Economic Forum report posits that up to a third of the skills considered important today will have changed as soon as 2020. Greater automation and machine intelligence integration is likely to hit the manufacturing sector—the great hope for boosting employment—hard over the next decade or two.

This is not to suggest that the government step back entirely. But it would do well to think outside the box. For instance, voucher programmes that give individuals the freedom to join training programmes of their choice—with the latter receiving government funding by redeeming the vouchers—improve outcomes via market mechanisms and have been found to work in countries as diverse as Austria and Kenya. The government must also create an economic environment that incentivizes industry players to step up. Labour reforms are key here. Paying a premium for workers from as yet fledgling skilling programmes is a risk when a deep pool of cheaper, unskilled labour is available. If employers are to take the risk—their unwillingness to do is currently a key problem—they must have the freedom to make appropriate adjustments in order to minimize and, if necessary, walk back the risk.

It’s also worth remembering that skilling programmes are the end point of employability creation, not the beginning. The education system is the primary incubator—and in India, it is sadly lacking. By some estimates, barely 40% of Indian graduates are employable. This is predictable when education models have few options or weightage given to skills and knowledge relevant in today’s market; nor is there sufficient interaction and integration between educational institutions and industry to facilitate internships, mentoring initiatives and feedback loops.

Skilling India is a mammoth task. The coming years will see substantial productivity increases, but also significant worker dislocation. Central government initiatives make for good messaging—but they are only one part of the solution.

Source: Mint epaper, 24-08-2016

BRICS countries adopt Udaipur Declaration on disaster

The two-day meeting of Ministers of Disaster Management (MDM) of BRICS countries concluded in Udaipur, Rajasthan with the adoption of the Udaipur Declaration. This was the second meeting and in the follow up of the first meeting of the BRICS MDM convened by the Russia in St. Petersburg in April, 2016. Udaipur Declaration BRICS nations to set up a dedicated Joint Task Force for Disaster Risk Management for regular dialogue, exchange, mutual support and collaboration among them. The meeting was a new milestone in collaboration and cooperation among BRICS countries in the field of disaster management. The roadmap for implementation of the three-year Joint Action Plan for BRICS emergency services (2016-18) was also finalised. Key Highlights of 2nd BRICS MDM meeting Objective: (i) Share experiences on flood-risk management, current systems in each country for forecasting extreme weather events. (ii) Identify opportunities for collaboration between institutions of respective BRICS countries in the area of flood risk management and extreme weather-related events. It focused on two themes: (i) ‘Flood Risk Management‘ and (ii) ‘Forecasting of Extreme Weather Events in the context of Changing Climate‘. Three technical sessions were held on areas of disaster risk management challenges, forecasting and early warning on flood and disaster risk in a changing climate.

Source: Current Affairs, 24-08-2016

President Pranab Mukherjee launches Akashvani Maitree Channel for listeners in Bangladesh

President Pranab Mukherjee launched Akashvani Maitree (Moitree) Channel and its multimedia website in Bengali language for listeners in West Bengal, Bangladesh and the adjoining areas. Akashvani Moitree Channel is an initiative of Kolkata Akashvani Kendra. It will provide a platform for blending content both from India and Bangladesh and preserving Bengali culture. Key Facts The channel will be broadcasted from a state-of-the-art brand new high power 1000Kw DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) transmitter in Chinsurah (West Bengal). It has capacity to reach the entire length and breadth of Bangladesh through medium wave and will be also available globally on its website and mobile app for Bengali Diaspora. The concept of the Akashvani Moitree Channel emanates from the decision taken during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh. Both sides had agreed to share content among their broadcasting organisations in order to broadcast a mix of news and cultural programming. What is Akashvani Maitree? The All India Radio (AIR) during the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971 had launched Akashvani Maitree, a Bangla radio service. The channel had played a historic role during the Bangladesh liberation movement. However, it was discontinued in 2010. Why it is launched again? The relaunch of Akashvani Maitree is being looked as an outreach to strengthen India’s shaky relations with Bangladesh as a part of its cultural diplomacy. The service is being re-launched twin objectives: (i) To attract Bengali-speaking listeners from both countries. (ii) To counter the presence of CRI (Chinese Radio International) with its strong presence in the region. The channel will also play a significant role in promoting and preserving the composite Bengali cultural heritage irrespective of geographical location.

Source: Current Affairs, 24-08-2016