Will the Paris agreement be ratified by end of 2016?

Presently, 27 countries accounting for 39.08% of global emissions have ratified the climate pact.

If there is one question that climate treaty watchers are speculating on the world over, it is this: Will the Paris agreement be ratified by end of 2016? The treaty that was negotiated at the UN summit in Paris last year can enter into effect only 30 days after at least 55 countries, accounting for 55 per cent of the global emissions ratify the treaty. That means, only if the requisite countries ratify the treaty by end of November, around the 22nd Conference of Parties (CoP) summit in Morocco, will the Paris pact be ready to enter into force by the end of this year, not otherwise. Presently, 27 countries accounting for 39.08 per cent of global emissions have ratified the climate pact, according to the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change, the nodal UN agency monitoring the implementation of the treaty.

With the two top global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emitters – U.S. and China - ratifying the treaty ahead of the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, all eyes are now fixed on the other top global emitters - EU, India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Mexico – to see when they will be following suit. According to an earlier World Resources Institute calculation, if along with U.S.and China, all the other mentioned top emitters take action, then over 70 per cent of the global GHG emissions will be covered.

Here is an up-to-date list of countries that have ratified the Paris climate treaty as of now:

Country	Signed	Ratified
Bahamas	22 Apr 2016	22 Aug 2016
Barbados	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Belize	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Cameroon	22 Apr 2016	29 Jul 2016
China	22 Apr 2016	3 Sep 2016
Cook Islands	24 Jun 2016	1 Sep 2016
Democratic People's Republic of Korea	22 Apr 2016	1 Aug 2016
Fiji	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Grenada	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Guyana	22 Apr 2016	20 May 2016
Lao People's Democratic Republic	22 Apr 2016	7 Sep 2016
Maldives	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Marshall Islands	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Mauritius	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Nauru	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Norway	22 Apr 2016	20 Jun 2016
Palau	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Peru	22 Apr 2016	25 Jul 2016
Samoa	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Seychelles	25 Apr 2016	29 Apr 2016
Somalia	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
St. Kitts and Nevis	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
St. Lucia	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
St. Vincent and the Grenadines	22 Apr 2016	29 Jun 2016
State of Palestine	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
Tuvalu	22 Apr 2016	22 Apr 2016
United States of America	22 Apr 2016	3 Sep 2016 A

The current stress on ratification of the Paris treaty is partly due to the outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama’s diplomatic ambition to leave behind a legacy of positive climate action, something that he had indicated in an exclusive interview to The New York Times on Thursday. Except U.S., China, and perhaps Norway and Belgium, most of the other countries that have ratified the Paris treaty till now are countries with low GHG emissions. These small nations stand a high risk of facing the adverse consequences of the climate catastrophe. Island countries such as Maldives, Samoa, Tuvalu, St. Lucia, Seychelles, acted promptly to ratify the treaty because they are threatened by sea-level rise

However, the question remains whether other top emitters who are contributing to the problem of climate change will act as decisively. India, which ranks number four globally in terms of absolute emissions, but has a low per capita GHG emission, has clarified that it will be unable to ratify the Paris accord this year due to domestic procedures that have to be addressed.

Beyond ratification

Despite all the current hype over the ratification of the Paris pact, the truth is that even if all the major GHG emitters ratified the treaty, it will not count towards plugging global temperature rise above the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold. In April, ahead of a signing ceremony for the Paris agreement at the UN headquarters in New York, a UNFCCC report had observed that even if all the pledges made by 197 countries that are signatory to the Paris pact were fulfilled, it would be insufficient to meet the conservative goal of keeping global temperature rise within the 2 degree Celsius threshold. The ideal, desired goal of keeping temperature rise within the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold is far away still.

The national climate action plans, referred to as INDCs (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) in UNFCCC lingo, are not enough to meet the goals of the Paris accord. That is why climate treaty watchers must keenly observe the next round of negotiations at the upcoming COP22 UN summit in Morocco in November, which will focus on implementation of the Paris agreement.

Nick Nuttall, the spokesperson for the UNFCCC, based in Bonn, Germany told The Hindu that ratification of the treaty was only the first step, and there has to be a improving of ambition for climate action over time and this will be a long term process. “What is on the table, in the form of the climate action plans are an improvement on what we had before Paris, but they are insufficient. That is why there has to be a regular stock take of the emissions scenario and ramping up of action over time. The ratification process is just a beginning.”

Keywords: Climate change, Paris agreement, global emissions, UN Framework Convention for Climate Change

Source: The Hindu, 10-09-2016

Dark clouds over the PDS

The imposition of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in the Public Distribution System threatens to disrupt recent progress with PDS reforms. It also deprives millions of people of essential food entitlements.

India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) has improved steadily during the last 10 years. The system used to be most ineffective and corruption-ridden, with leakages of around 50 per cent at the national level, going up to 80 or 90 per cent in some States. Around 2007, Chhattisgarh took the lead in reforming the PDS — making it more inclusive, methodical and transparent. Within a few years, the system was overhauled. Today, most rural households in Chhattisgarh have a ration card, and are able to secure their entitlements (typically 7 kg of rice per person per month) on time every month.

The ‘Chhattisgarh model’ 

Later on, it turned out that the Chhattisgarh model (so to speak) was replicable. Odisha was among the first States to emulate Chhattisgarh’s experience, with similar results. Many other States also initiated Chhattisgarh-style PDS reforms: broad coverage, clear entitlements, de-privatisation of PDS shops, separation of transport agencies from distribution agencies, computerisation, fixed distribution schedules, tight monitoring, active grievance redressal, and more.

Jean Drèze

In the last few years, I have been involved in several surveys of the PDS initiated by independent researchers with student volunteers. In 2011, we studied the PDS in nine States: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. We found that the system was working reasonably well for “below poverty line” (BPL) households: on average, they were receiving 84 per cent of their foodgrain entitlements from the PDS. A similar picture emerged from a follow-up survey in 2013. However, high leakages continued in the “above poverty line” (APL) quota, which tended to be used by the Central government at that time as a dumping ground for excess food stocks.

The National Food Security Act (NFSA), enacted three years ago, was — and still is — a chance to complete the process of PDS reform and ensure a modicum of food security for everyone. Under the NFSA, the APL category is abolished and eligible households come under two well-defined categories: priority households, entitled to 5 kg of foodgrains per person per month at nominal prices, and Antyodaya households (the poorest), entitled to 35 kg per household per month. The PDS is to cover at least 75 per cent of rural households at the national level, rising to 80-90 per cent in the poorest States.

Impending setback

In June this year, we went back to six of India’s poorest States (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal) for an update. We found that four out of six had a fairly good PDS, with most NFSA cardholders receiving the bulk of their entitlements every month and relatively low exclusion errors. The last two, Jharkhand and especially Bihar, still have a long way to go. Even there, however, the situation is much better than it was a few years ago. In Jharkhand, for instance, the transparency of the system has vastly improved, and the official NFSA website is among the best in the country. However, recent progress is in danger of being undone soon due to the Central government’s counter-productive push for Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in the PDS. This involves installing “Point of Sale” (PoS) machines at PDS shops, and verifying the identity of cardholders by matching their fingerprints against the Aadhaar database over the Internet.

This system requires multiple fragile technologies to work at the same time: the PoS machine, the biometrics, the Internet connection, remote servers, and often other elements such as the local mobile network. Further, it requires at least some household members to have an Aadhaar number, correctly seeded in the PDS database.

This is a wholly inappropriate technology for rural India, especially in the poorest States. Even in State capitals, network failures and other glitches routinely disable this sort of technology. In villages with poor connectivity, it is a recipe for chaos. Note that Internet dependence is inherent to Aadhaar since there is no question of downloading the biometrics.

Recent developments in Rajasthan illustrate the dangers of forcing biometric authentication on the PDS. During the last few months, the Government of Rajasthan has tried hard to enforce the system. The use of PoS machines is compulsory and every PDS shop has one. Yet, according to official data compiled by Nikhil Dey, only 61 per cent of Rajasthan’s foodgrain allocation found its way through the PoS system in July 2016, with a similar figure (63 per cent) for August. The rest is either siphoned off or delivered using the old “register” system — which of the two is hard to say since utter confusion prevails about the permissibility of using registers as a fallback option.

Further evidence comes from Ranchi district in Jharkhand where the PoS system is also mandatory. In July 2016, NFSA cardholders in Ranchi district received less than half of their foodgrain entitlements through that system, according to the model website mentioned earlier. The situation was much the same in August.

As in Rajasthan, it is not clear whether those for whom the PoS system does not work in Ranchi are getting any grain through the old “register” system. Officially, that is not allowed, according to local PDS dealers and officials (indeed, some dealers have been suspended for using this fallback option). Even if it happens unofficially, this dual system, where PDS grain goes partly through the PoS system and partly through the fallback register system, is the worst. The reason is that only PDS dealers know whether and when the register system is permissible, and they have no incentive to share that information with the cardholders. Quite likely, the new system is reviving PDS corruption in Jharkhand, reversing a healthy trend towards lower leakages in recent years.

A short visit to a PDS shop just outside Ranchi quickly brings out the multiple vulnerabilities of the new system. Within minutes we met many people who had been deprived of their food rations for months because they had no Aadhaar number; or because their Aadhaar number had not been correctly seeded; or because their biometrics did not work, or simply because the PoS machine returned various error messages.

Even those for whom the system works face huge inconvenience. Often they have to make repeated trips to the PDS shop, or send different members in turn, until the machine cooperates. Sometimes schoolchildren are asked to skip classes and try their luck at the PDS shop. This unreliable system causes a colossal waste of time for everyone.

By the way, all this is one year after I was told by the Food Department’s upbeat consultants that “the PoS system is functional throughout Ranchi district”.

The Aadhaar juggernaut

In spite of ample warnings, the Central government continues to push for compulsory Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in the PDS. Incidentally, this is a violation of Supreme Court orders. The court did allow the use of Aadhaar in the PDS, but not making it compulsory for PDS users. Nor can the government invoke the Aadhaar Act to justify this move: the relevant sections of the Act are yet to be notified.

PoS machines seem to be expected to ensure a corruption-free PDS. This expectation, however, builds on a misunderstanding of PDS leakages. The main vulnerability today, at least in the States I am familiar with, is not identity fraud (e.g. bogus cards), but quantity fraud: PDS dealers often give people less than what they are entitled to, and pocket the rest. PoS machines are ineffective in preventing quantity fraud. They may help in reducing identity fraud, such as it is, but that does not justify depriving people of their food entitlements when the technology fails.

As with many other applications of Aadhaar, this one is proceeding like a juggernaut, without paying serious attention to the collateral damage. Instead, the Central government peddles bogus figures of Aadhaar-enabled financial savings (often relayed by unsuspecting columnists or economists) to justify further imposition of the technology. It is only when concerned journalists, activists or researchers make enquiries from the victims that we learn about the adverse effects of Aadhaar on the PDS.

The Central government and its advisers pride themselves on their commitment to “evidence-based policy”, but this is a case where evidence is being systematically ignored to press on with technological solutions based on blind faith (handsomely nurtured by commercial interests). The drive to impose biometric authentication on the PDS must stop immediately to avoid further damage. There are better ways of plugging last-mile leakages, including the use of simpler technologies not dependent on the Internet. Imposing a technology that does not work on people who depend on it for their survival is a grave injustice.

Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.

Keywords: Public Distribution System, PDS, Aadhaar card, biometric authentication, National Food Security Act, NFSA

Source: The Hindu, 10-09-2016

India needs to have a multipronged approach towards sanitation

Initiated by the prime minister in 2014, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) aims at making India clean by 2019. This year, Rs 9,000 crore was allocated for the mission. Additionally, the government is charging 0.5% as Swachh Bharat Cess (SBC) on all taxable services from November 15. The mission has a rural and an urban sub-mission, with different objectives and approaches for tackling the issue.

As per government reports, 115 cities have achieved the ‘Open Defecation Free’ (ODF) status and another 739 cities (out of the 4,041 statutory cities and towns) will achieve it this financial year. According to reports on the rural areas, the top five states are Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Haryana, and Uttarakhand, and the bottom five are Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Bihar, Odisha, Jammu & Kashmir, and Jharkhand. This year 39,309 villages out of targeted 612,157 have been declared ODF.

Since the start of the mission, 21 million toilets have been constructed in rural areas, covering only 53.6% of the total rural population of India. There is a considerable gap between the target and what has been achieved so far, which means there is a critical need to accelerate the efforts to achieve 100% coverage.

The target set for rural areas is 12 crore toilets and till date only 2.5 crore toilets have been built. At this pace the deadline is likely to be missed.

Besides toilet construction, its usage is an important factor. For promoting usage, raising awareness is important and information, education and communication (IEC) activities are vital. About 97% of the total expenditure from April 2015 to February was on the construction of household latrines, clearly indicating the neglect on IEC activities, for which merely 1% was spent in the last fiscal.

The sanitation programme of Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan also ignored the importance of IEC activities and raising awareness It was reported that many villages were awarded the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, as all the households had toilets — but in reality people were still defecating in the open.

One of the focuses of the mission has been on behaviour change regarding healthy sanitation practices and usage of toilets. This change of mindset is a challenging task. Another important reason for toilets not being used is the lack of access to running water — this is a major problem in drought-affected states.In addition to being ODF, waste management is crucial because if this is not strictly monitored, water sources could be contaminated with faecal coliform leading to grave health risks..

There is a need for integrating the mission with other water policies like the Namami Gange and Mgnrega. There is also a need for thoughtfulness and attention for developing innovative ideas for solid waste management. For the success of the mission, access to water, capacity building, implementation of IEC activities, management of waste and involving users is of as much importance as constructing toilets.

Sonia Grover is associate fellow and Fayaz Ahmad Malla is research associate at TERI

Source: Hindustan Times, 10-09-2016

Nothing is Impossible

ANIL K RAJVANSHI





Our brains and our minds are products of the same time frame as the universe. Hence, we cannot think anything beyond what exists in the Universe.Thus, our wildest dreams and imaginations have roots and templates somewhere in the Universe and point to the existence of ideas and designs beyond our surroundings. We can access this knowledge base through enhanced mental faculties via sanyam and yoga.All our discoveries, inventions or creations are, therefore, nothing else but rediscovering existing knowledge. We get this knowledge from `Knowledge Space' that may contain fundamental knowledge produced in the past and is continuously fed by the ever-increasing knowledge from various civilisations. This is similar to cyber space.
A prepared and focused human mind can access knowledge from Knowledge Space and I feel that great discoveries of humankind have come from such access. It is also possible that as the earth moves around the sun and the solar system revolves around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy , periodically , we come across Knowledge Space, which helps humankind to evolve.
Similarly , a younger civilisation than ours may come across Knowledge Space developed by us and, in this manner, evolution continues ad infinitum. Since it is often said that we are rediscovering the Truth, it possibly means that Truth has always existed -and Truth is beyond space and time. In fact, Truth is part of Universal design. Could that be God?

What isn’t sedition

SC stymies the clever dodge of misrepresenting public protest and criticism as crime against the state.

In a wonderfully minimalist case of dental surgery, the Supreme Court has defanged governments and administrations which have been wielding Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code to throttle speech and cow down vocal critics. It has done this simply by refusing to lay down the law — reminding everyone that it was laid down a generation ago, in 1962. It has clarified that mere criticism of the government does not constitute sedition and that, in fact, it should not even attract a defamation charge. This observation should act as a restraining order on governments — particularly the Central government — which have been using the colonial curb of the sedition law as a blunt instrument to bludgeon critics with. The principle invoked was articulated in the landmark case of Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar, in which the apex court had upheld the constitutional validity of Section 124A, but had disabused the government of the politically convenient notion that the draconian law could be applied to words, deeds or actions “intended to or… likely to incite public disorder” or violence. The court had insisted on the centrality of intention, since likelihood is a subjective notion which could invite unconstitutional behaviour from the authorities. Which is precisely what has been seen in recent months — unseemly campaigns to restrain those perceived to be political embarrassments like Hardik Patel and Kanhaiya Kumar, apart from sundry writers, performers, cartoonists.

Now, in a public interest litigation filed by Common Cause, the Supreme Court has recalled the necessity to establish intention. The NGO had argued that ignorance of the law is causing the police to arbitrarily arrest critics of government, and had pleaded for guidelines requiring the clearance of a senior police official before Section 124A could be imposed. The court has declined to intervene in sedition cases past and future, and only required officers of the law to follow the principle of the ruling set down in 1962. Following a basic tenet of criminal jurisprudence, it has elaborated that the merit of a sedition charge must be appraised from case to case.

The law of sedition was designed by a colonial power to prevent fractious citizens from overthrowing it by force. In the way it is used, it is anachronistic in a democracy where governments rule at the pleasure of the people, who are entitled to democratic protest and public criticism to force governments to acknowledge their concerns and opinions. To wilfully misrepresent protest as sedition is an egregious error on the part of government. It has been happening far too often and reflects an ugly paradox — democratically elected governments find democratic protest intolerable.

Source: Indian Express, 7-09-2016

The equality of entry

The Haji Ali Dargah case verdict was arrived at by hewing closely to the Constitution, to law, and to the task of defending individual rights. It is admirable for resisting the temptation of interpretive adventurism

When B.R. Ambedkar was asked why he was so passionate about the issue of temple entry for Dalits, he replied: “The issue is not entry, but equality.” It did not matter to Ambedkar that he, himself, was indifferent towards religion, or that temple entry was hardly the solution to Dalit oppression. What did matter to him, however, was that one of the most powerful tools by which an unequal society expressed and reinforced its hierarchies — through the denial of equal access to religious and sacred spaces — had to be smashed.

More than 80 years later, August 26, 2016, the Bombay High Court agreed with Ambedkar when it held that the exclusion of women from the inner sanctum of the Haji Ali Dargah by the Dargah Trust violated not only their fundamental right to religious freedom but also their right to equality and non-discrimination under the Indian Constitution. And in holding that women were entitled to police protection, if needed, to exercise their right to equal access, the court placed the state firmly on the spot for effectively guaranteeing and enforcing the constitutional rights of individuals, even against their own communities.

Gautam Bhatia

An issue framed in legal terms

The Bombay High Court’s judgment, authored by Justice Revati Mohite Dere, is not the last that we’ve heard of this matter. The Dargah Trust will certainly appeal (the High Court stayed the operation of its judgment for six weeks to allow it to do just that), and the battle will move to the Supreme Court. There, it will join the other contentious issue of religious access, which is already before the apex court: the right of women to enter the Sabarimala shrine in Kerala. But whatever happens in the Supreme Court, Justice Dere’s judgment is a landmark ruling. This is not only because of its unambiguously progressive outcome, coming down firmly on the side of equal access for women but also because of its dexterous handling of the fraught and tense stand-off between the claims of individual rights and gender equality on the one hand and tradition and religious values on the other.

Indeed, the issue was framed before the Bombay High Court in precisely these terms. The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, the women’s organisation that initiated the public interest litigation against the Dargah Trust, invoked the protection of Articles 14 and 15 (rights to equality and non-discrimination), and 25(1) (right to religious freedom) of the Constitution. The trust responded by invoking Article 25(1) itself, arguing that Islam mandated the exclusion of women from the inner sanctum. It also (though faintly) invoked Article 26(b), that granted religious denominations the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion.

Court intervention in religion

This clash — and the use of the courts to resolve it — is not new. The Supreme Court has previously ruled on the legality of religious excommunication, the exclusion of Dalits from temples, and the hereditary caste-based succession of temple priests. To mediate the competing claims of individuals, communities and the state, very early on in its history, the Supreme Court invented something that it called the “essential religious practices test”. Under this test, ostensibly religious practices could gain constitutional sanction only if — in the view of the Court — they were “essential” or “integral” to the religion in question. In the beginning, the court emphasised that essential religious practices would have to be determined by taking an internal point of view, and looking to the tenets and the doctrines of the religion itself. In later years, however, the court began to take an increasingly interventionist stance, using the essential religious practices test to make wide-ranging — often untethered — claims about religions, and even trying to mould religions into more rationalistic and homogenous monoliths, while marginalising dissident traditions. The high watermark of this approach came in 2004, when the court held that the public performance of the Tandava dance was no essential part of the religion of the Ananda Marga sect, even though it had been specifically set down as such in their holy book.

A question of civil rights

Faced with more than five decades of consistent Supreme Court jurisprudence, the Bombay High Court had no feasible choice other than deploying the (unsatisfactory) essential religious practices test to determine the validity of the Dargah Trust’s arguments. The manner in which it did so, however, was careful and circumspect. The court refrained from making grand, rhetorical claims about Islam and gender equality (even though it was invited to do so) and, instead, limited itself to considering the material placed before it by the Dargah Trust. On a perusal of these passages from the Koran and the Hadith, the court found that none of this material supported the trust’s claim that Islam mandated the exclusion of women from the inner sanctum of shrines. The trust’s claims were thrown further into doubt because right until 2012, women’s entry had, in fact, been allowed. The trust was unable to show what had changed so suddenly in 2012, even though it did attempt to argue that it had been interpreting the requirements of the Sharia wrongly for all these years.

Likewise, the court’s rejection of the trust’s Article 26 claims was sober and measured. Surveying the history of the Dargah Trust, it found that it had been set up in pre-Independence days by a government-imposed scheme. That scheme did not even authorise the trust to adjudicate religious claims. Furthermore, the trust was a public charitable trust. Consequently, the Dargah was akin to a public space, and access to it could not be denied on discriminatory grounds. Interestingly, the court’s reasoning mirrored the earliest temple-entry movements in colonial India. While agitating for the rights of Dalits to enter Hindu temples, Ambedkar repeatedly argued that temples were public spaces, akin to roads, schools, or water tanks. In a society where religion and the public sphere have always been so intertwined, Ambedkar’s fundamental insight was that religious exclusion had a public character, and that it was not just an issue of sacral traditions but one of civil rights and material and symbolic equality. In a society that has long treated women as second-class citizens, and emphasised and concretised that inequality through control over religious spaces, Ambedkar’s arguments find clear resonance in the judgment of the Bombay High Court.

Putting onus on the state

Once the court had found that the Dargah Trust could not invoke constitutional protection for its exclusion of women from the inner sanctum, the logical conclusion followed: since exclusion clearly violated the women’s right to religious freedom, as well as their right to equality, it was unjustified. However, there was one more thing that the court had to do. Since the Constitution primarily guarantees fundamental rights to individuals against the state, it had to explain how the Mahila Andolan could succeed where the rights-infringing actor was a private, non-state body (the Dargah Trust).

Justice Dere answered this question by holding that the state was constitutionally bound to respect fundamental rights, not merely by refraining from infringing them, but also by actively intervening in order to protect them when they were threatened by others. Consequently, it was for the state to ensure — whether by providing adequate protection or otherwise — that women who wanted to exercise their fundamental right to equal access at the Haji Ali Dargah could do so.

In the exercise of their constitutional functions, there are times when it becomes necessary — and inevitable — for courts to consider and decide deeply divisive and polarising questions about gender relations, the family, religion, and society. In such situations, it is tempting for judges to think that they are in a position to solve age-old, intractable social problems, and to sally forth on adventurous tracks where both their competence and their legitimacy are called into question. This is a temptation that the Indian judiciary has not always been able to resist. The Bombay High Court verdict in the Haji Ali case, however, is an example of a judgment that adroitly negotiates these difficult issues by hewing closely to the Constitution, to law, and to the judicial task of defending individual rights. For that, the Bombay High Court must be praised, and its judgment upheld.

Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer.

Keywords: Haji Ali Dargah, Right to Pray, equal rights for women, gender gap

Source: The Hindu, 8-09-2016

Govt thinking of a common entrance test for all central universities

The Union human resource development ministry is exploring the option of introducing a common entrance test for all central universities, a move that will end the unrealistic high cutoffs for admission, recorded often in Delhi University.

Several Delhi University colleges declare 100% marks as cutoff to study popular courses such as mathematics, economics, and history. Many students seeking admission miss out by a whisker despite having impressive marks — such as 95% in their Class 12 school exam.

The proposed admission procedure will put all students on an equal footing as everyone will be tested through a common examination. The Centre is likely to call a meeting of central university vice-chancellors on October 6 to discuss the common test.

“A number of issues have been brought to our notice, including the common entrance test. We will draw up the agenda of the meeting soon,” HRD minister Prakash Javadekar said on Wednesday.

Staff vacancy, which is around 35%, in the 40-odd central universities, and issues relating to students’ grievance redressal system are likely to be on the table.

Most central universities have individual entrance tests, while Delhi University follows a cutoff formula for admitting students to its undergraduate courses.

High cutoffs have triggered debates as some states are known to be lenient in giving marks, leaving students from other school boards in the lurch. Of 188 enrolments in Delhi University’s popular Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) this admission season, 129 seats went to students from Tamil Nadu who came with top-grade mark-sheets. Eyebrows were raised as 33 of them were from a single school in the southern state.

Sources said around seven central universities — in Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Kerala, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu — admit some students on the basis on their performance in the Central Universities Common Entrance Test. “There are complaints about students having an advantage in getting admission through the cutoff system because of lenient marking from state boards … a common test will also do away with students’ travel expenses, as they need not visit different places seeking admission,” a senior HRD official said.

The planned entrance test has its drawbacks too. “This will burden students with another examination after class 12. Any entrance exam is competitive and will spawn private coaching centres all around,” said Dinesh Singh, former vice-chancellor of Delhi University. But, at the same time, students will be spared of the drudgery of applying in several universities individually for admission, and hopefully reduce the fierce competition for higher marks as cutoffs will no longer apply, he said.

Source: Hindustan Times, 8-09-2016