Tuesday, June 09, 2020
What is Human Rights Day?
Human Rights Day 2019: The theme for this year is 'Youth Standing Up for Human Rights', under which the UN aims to celebrate the potential of youth as agents of change, amplify their voices and engage a broad range of global audiences in the promotion and protection of rights.
Human Rights Day is observed on December 10 every year. It is the day when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
UDHR is a document proclaiming the inalienable rights which everyone is entitled to as a human being, irrespective of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or any other status. It is the most translated document in the world, and is available in over 500 languages.
The theme for the year 2019 is ‘Youth Standing Up for Human Rights’, under which the United Nations aims to celebrate the potential of youth as agents of change, amplify their voices and engage a broYouth have been chosen for the campaign led by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) since their participation is essential to achieve sustainable development for all, they play a crucial role in positive change and empowering them to better know and claim their human rights will generate benefits globally.
Human rights and sustainable development are correlated to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the sense that human rights are driven by progress on all SDGs and SDGs are driven by advancements on human rights.ad range of global audiences in the promotion and protection of rights.
Source: Indian Express, 10-12-2019
Pandemic offers chance to pursue an alternative model of urbanisation
With this major transformation and with the onset of COVID-19, it is surely the time to reconsider our habitation model.
Between the year 1 CE and the start of the Industrial Revolution (around the early 1800s), the decadal growth of the global population was around 0.8 per cent. With the advent of concentrated production centres, improved medicine and the era of fossil fuels, the global population has shot up by seven times in the last 180 years, clocking a decadal growth rate of over 11 per cent.
This population growth rate has been largely urban and metro-centred. Today, cities consume two-thirds of the global energy consumption and account for more than 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. London became the first modern city to cross the one million population mark around 1800. By 1960, our planet had 111 cities with over a million inhabitants. In China and India, the number rose from 371 in 2000 to 548 in 2018, with 61 of these cities in India. Recently, the UN projected that by 2030, 28 per cent of the world population will live in dense, congested spaces, jostling for ever-dwindling space and choked infrastructure. Population densities have increased enormously, with the Dharavi slum in Mumbai registering a mind-boggling density of 3.75 lakh persons per sq km.
But COVID-19 has raised the question: Will concentrated, high-investment, high-density cities have a prominent place in the new, emerging world? Are they successful at providing an adequate return on investment? And, above all, do they provide a quality of life and happiness to all their inhabitants? An average Mumbaikar daily spends 95 minutes commuting between office and home, wasting nearly 10 per cent of his time awake everyday. Eight people die every day in Mumbai in local train-related accidents, and in Delhi, five people lose their lives in road accidents.
Going by present trends, India will build a new Chicago every year to accommodate new urban dwellers. This will require about $2.5 trillion of investment until 2030 — to create more congested urban spaces. Should we not look at alternative models of habitations, which are more frugal, more sustainable and offer more satisfying lifestyles and higher welfare levels?
Once cities expand beyond one million, they start to experience dis-economies of scale with pressure on every urban amenity increasing exponentially — more people means more vehicles, more vehicles mean need for more roads and increased pollution, which mean more hospitals, more energy and more waste. Even the most robust megacities can easily witness the “domino” effect where a minor and local failure is compounded into a catastrophe. In China in 2010, due to some broken cars and road repair work, a minor traffic snarl expanded quickly into a massive jam of 120 kilometres on the highway connecting Inner Mongolia and Beijing. Drivers were left with nowhere to go for a punishing 12 days. Even in India, we have witnessed smaller but painful versions of the same phenomenon. The truth is that overpopulated cities strain their resources inordinately and leave little room to successfully tackle every contingency.
Thus, cities are the most affected by natural and man-made disasters. Nearly every hot-spot of the COVID-19 outbreak is a congested urban centre. The low-income areas of cities, where anything from drinking water to sanitation can be a shared facility, are the most vulnerable to any disease outbreak. Congested low-income urban spaces not only bear an inordinately high disease burden, they also bear the brunt of air pollution, water contamination and crime infestation. In the face of any disaster like a flood, earthquake or, worse still, a pandemic, migrant workers, who throng these megacities, rush to go back to their villages. India, with its approximately 72 million migrant workers (including their families), is vulnerable to such disruptions as amply demonstrated in recent weeks.
Some of the principal and strong advantages claimed for megacities with their sky scrapers are the economies of agglomeration and the generation of new ideas and innovations through multi-disciplinary interactions. These advantages have been largely nullified with advances in digital technologies that have made online interactions numerous, equally rich in content and covering a wider range of disciplines. The “cloud” is the new interaction space, which can be accessed by innovators from widely-spread geographies. Digitisation has apparently resulted in the loss of cities’ innovative mojo.
With this major transformation and with the onset of COVID-19, it is surely the time to reconsider our habitation model. Gandhiji’s model of gram swaraj, APJ Abdul Kalam’s vision of providing urban amenities in rural areas and Nanaji Deshmukh’s idea of self-reliant village development clearly deserve of fresh and focused attention. We have vast swathes of land, people and resources located in our over 6,00,000 villages. These offer another chance for us to pursue an alternative model of development where agriculture, industry and service sectors move in sync for sustainable development, which is in harmony with nature. This will minimise our carbon footprint. At the same time, it will also minimise social disruption with jobs coming to people rather than the other way round. New technology, the carbon constraint and diseconomies of congestion and density must force us to review our urbanisation landscape.
Kumar is vice chairman NITI Aayog, Singh is CEO of Dr. Kalam Centre, New Delhi. Views are personal
Source: Indian Express, 8/06/2020
Create opportunities for migrants back home
Many of the migrants who have returned are, in fact, craftspeople. Crafts provide the second-largest source of livelihood in India and are a source of employment even in the most remote parts of the country.
Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi, in his latest Mann Ki Baat, acknowledged the suffering of “underprivileged labourers and workers”, saying, “their agony, their pain, their ordeal, cannot be expressed in words”. What does the future hold for those migrant workers who have managed to get back to their villages?
For now, the only prospects of work these migrants who have gone back have are agricultural labour or work under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). With all the skills they bring back with them, this is the time to upgrade the MGNREGS work and widen its scope so that lasting assets are created. Some of those assets will also create jobs.
Will the workers stay in their villages or will they return to the cities once the coronavirus pandemic is no longer an ever-present threat? Historically, urbanisation does seem to be the universal trend as economies develop. China has gone in one generation from a primarily rural to an urban nation. In 1980, one in five Chinese citizens lived in the countryside. Now more than half live in urban areas. There is, however, an important difference between China and India. China adopted a policy of building urban housing specifically for rural migrants. In India, migrants have drifted into cities where they have had to fend for themselves. The result has been that these slums are now, inevitably, proving to be coronavirus hotspots. In Mumbai, more than 40% of the population lives in slums. In fact, Slumdog Millionaire made the sprawling Dharavi slum so famous it became a tourist attraction. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Mumbai has such high figures for infection.
Now the PM has promised to build affordable property for migrant workers to rent. However, the problems of land and land values, finding suitable locations near work sites, clearing slums, and managing properties will prove to be obstacles.
In spite of the pull of urbanisation, many migrants have said that they are so scarred by their experience in the aftermath of the pandemic that they will never go back to the cities. This may not be a bad thing. It will rebalance the population so that villages are no longer emptied of young men. And because there would no longer be an endless supply of labour in the cities, those who employ migrants will, at last, be forced to value their workers.
Young people staying at home could provide the opportunity to revive rural economies too. Of all the sectors that have the potential to provide rural employment, agriculture and craft are the two most obvious examples. Many of the migrants who have returned are, in fact, craftspeople.
Crafts provide the second-largest source of livelihood in India and are a source of employment even in the most remote parts of the country. Fifty per cent of artisans are women. Crafts create little or no carbon footprint. They preserve an important element of India’s traditional culture. Unfortunately, however, they have been ignored by economists. No reliable database of craft activities has been created. Mahatma Gandhi recognised this neglect of artisans as a problem and said that if recognition and encouragement were not forthcoming, we would be guilty of strangling them with our own hands. Giving the prestigious CD Deshmukh lecture at Delhi’s India International Centre, Ashoke Chatterjee, former executive director of the National Institute of Design and adviser to the Crafts Council of India, said, “This lack of awareness has meant that the development of crafts has not been given any priority.”
Once again, artisans have been largely ignored in the measures announced to cope with the crisis created by the pandemic in the address by the finance minister. Giving crafts their rightful place in the economy will provide livelihoods that will provide villagers with the opportunity to stay at home.
Source: Hindustan Times, 6/06/2020
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Needed: A fellowship of countries to fight Covid-19 | Opinion
Find a way to incentivise innovators developing medicines and vaccines, yet ensure access to the innovation is for all.
“One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”.
In JRR Tolkien’s story Lord of the Rings, a “Fellowship of the Ring” was formed to destroy the one ring and its evil powers. The fellowship comprised of representatives of different races of Tolkien’s middle earth: Hobbits, wizards, elves, dwarves and men, who were united in their quest, despite their differences. Tolkien’s remarkable story is about how they succeed by acting together.
The coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is clearly the ring binding humanity in its darkness. Sadly, however, there is no fellowship in sight. On the contrary, the dark powers of the ring appear to be dividing countries more than ever before, with increasing protectionism and the decline of globalisation.
The 73rd World Health Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO), at its virtual meeting on May 18-19, adopted a resolution that recognised the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic, and called for “equitable access to and fair distribution of” all essential health technologies and products to combat the virus. It also recognised that extensive immunisation against Covid-19 is a “global public good”. Ahead of the World Health Assembly, more than 140 world leaders and experts made an unprecedented call that all vaccines, treatments and tests be patent-free, mass-produced, distributed fairly and made available to all people, in all countries, free of charge. The WHO assembly, however, failed to achieve consensus on ensuring how this “global public good” of extensive immunisation will be achieved.
The WHO Assembly was preceded by a United Nations General Assembly resolution emphasising on the need for “equitable, efficient and timely” access to any future vaccines developed to fight the coronavirus, as well as a virtual meeting of G20 countries which emphasised that people’s health and well-being are at the heart of all decisions taken to protect lives, tackle illness and strengthen global health security. None of these initiatives, however, addressed how equitable access to medicines or vaccines for addressing Covid-19 can be achieved.
India and the United States (US) were nowhere to be seen in the May 4 virtual summit, co-organised by the European Union (EU), Britain, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Canada, South Africa and several other countries and non-governmental organisations which collectively pledged $8 billion to research, manufacture and distribute possible vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. The geopolitical tensions between the US and China are threatening any coordinated multilateral response, as well as the continued existence of multilateral institutions which are central to a global effort to find a vaccine. President Donald Trump has announced a freeze on funding to WHO, on the allegations of mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic and bias towards China. There are also calls in the US to abolish the World Trade Organization (WTO) whose role in enforcing trade rules have in any event been rendered ineffective by US actions to scuttle the WTO’s appellate body. The US government’s Operation Warp Speed (a partnership between private pharmaceutical companies, government agencies and the military) is focused on the availability of a vaccine, but only for the US while Chinese biotech companies are engaged in similar efforts with their government and the Peoples’ Liberation Army.
Outrage from the French government and the EU has reportedly resulted in the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi withdrawing its plan to give the US priority access to its potential Covid-19 vaccine. Reports on the EU-supported May 4 virtual initiative quote EU officials as stating that while pharmaceutical companies that receive the funding will not be asked to forgo Intellectual Property Rights on the new vaccine and treatments, they should commit to making them available worldwide at affordable prices. This hortatory statement, however, falls flat in the absence of a definitive plan of action necessary to address equitable access.
Who will own, who will have access and on what terms, to the medicines and vaccines that are being developed — this lies at the heart of any real and effective solution to tackle Covid-19. Patents, rights over test data, and know-how, are important economic mechanisms for incentivising innovation and development of new technologies. While dealing with a pandemic of such large dimensions, however, there is a crucial need to balance private profit and the larger public good. In the mid-20th century, both inventors of the polio vaccines — Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin — declined to patent their inventions, an act which ensured widespread access and near-eradication of polio worldwide. This stood in stark contrast with one of the largest lawsuits in 1998, when 39 pharmaceutical companies sued South Africa, alleging patent violations resulting from it importing cheaper anti-AIDS drugs and other medicines. While public pressure led to the lawsuit being dropped after three years, it exemplified the complexities and significant litigation risks that can accompany any effort to implement affordable access to patented medicines.
Covid-19 needs an innovative solution, and this is necessary at the stage of research and development and clinical trials, rather than something which can be addressed after a cure is found. The virus has bound our globally interconnected world like no other, and the utility of any vaccine to fight it can succeed only if there is rapid universal access to the cure. That can happen only if governments across the world develop a pragmatic approach that recognises and rewards innovators, while ensuring that access to the innovation is held in trust for the benefit of humankind. We urgently need a fellowship of countries that can fight off, arguably, the 21st century’s greatest challenge.
RV Anuradha is a partner at Clarus Law Associates, New Delhi and specialises in international economic laws
Source: Hindustan Times, 26-05-20
Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents
Vol. 55, Issue No. 21, 23 May, 2020
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