by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
By Mayank Aggarwal,
New Delhi : The Indian government has unveiled its long-awaited National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) that aims at a 20-30 percent reduction of particulate matter (PM) concentration over the next five years, with an overall goal of mitigating air pollution and improving air quality in the country, which has some of the world’s most polluted cities.
The time-bound plan, targeting a specific PM level reduction by 2024, is encouraging, following the draft version in April 2018 that drew criticism for having no clear targets. However, the key challenge lies in the implementation of the NCAP, particularly as the targets are not legally binding in the current plan. With no mechanism to legally enforce the targets, there is concern that the plan, while good in intention, might not be effective.
The NCAP comes after years of public outcry and continuous intense pressure from the judiciary, media and experts on the government to take action on India’s toxic air pollution. Though it has been welcomed by experts as a step forward, some believe it would be stronger with legally-binding targets and provision for action against its non-implementation.
“We need to give credit (to the government) that there is a plan now. This is a step in the right direction, but in its current form it lacks the ambition to achieve breathable air,” Sunil Dahiya, senior campaigner with Greenpeace India, told Mongabay-India. “It needs to build on missing links. It’s basically a plan of plans which lacks teeth to bite (in case of non-compliance). In India, where a (legally) notified plan (GRAP) by government to reduce pollution failed, the implementation of the NCAP will be a challenge in its current form.”
Dahiya said they hope that India’s environment ministry will show more seriousness in implementing the plan and strengthen it.
The need to ensure compliance of the plan is an important factor that will determine the success of the plan. Director of Climate Trends, Aarti Khosla, stressed that “solutions to the problem of air quality will come faster if there is strongest political will at the top”.
“The plan does not have an associated enforcement, regulation or compliance mechanism. It is basically a wish list. The question, which was the question even before, is that it is okay to have all these plans but what will happen in terms of strengthening enforcement which really is the missing piece. They have not addressed it,” Khosla said.
Even the NCAP admits that non-compliance is an issue. It noted that the experience of authorities so far “indicates lack of regular monitoring and inspection as the major reason for non-compliance”. To deal with the issue, it stressed that “trained manpower and regular inspection drive will be ensured for stringent implementation”.
The plan is significant given that around a million lives are lost every year due to air pollution. According to a study published in The Lancet in December, of the total deaths in India in 2017, 1.24 million deaths, equivalent to 12·5 percent of total mortalities, could be attributed to air pollution.
The continued outcry against air pollution intensified few years ago when the capital Delhi and adjoining regions in northern India consistently recorded “severe” levels of air pollution during the winter season, from November to February.
The plan, launched by India’s environment minister Harsh Vardhan last week, sets a national level target of 20-30 percent reduction of PM2.5 and PM10 concentration by 2024, with 2017 as the base year. It is currently a mid-term five-year action plan, with 2019 as the first year and an initial funding allocation of Rs 300 crore. However, the government emphasised that international experience and national studies indicate that a significant change in terms of air pollution initiatives will only be visible in the long term. Thus, after a mid-term review, the programme may get extended for 20-25 years.
The other main features of the NCAP include a substantial increase in number of monitoring stations across the country including in rural areas, increased focus on indoor air pollution, an air quality forecasting system and city-specific plantation plans for the non-attainment cities and towns. It also focuses on research and monitoring with source apportionment studies, health impact studies, review of standards and emphasis on enforcement and sectoral interventions.
The NCAP highlighted that with 4,000 cities in the country, just 703 manual monitoring stations in 307 cities reflects a limited reach and needs augmentation. “It is proposed to augment it to 1,500 stations from existing 703 stations,” said the NCAP. It also proposed to set up 75 monitoring stations in rural areas. The improved monitoring will be helpful in determining status and trends of air quality.
In addition, the plan aims to increase the existing number of continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations (CAAQMS) from the 134 stations in 71 cities and 17 states, with a special focus on the Indo-Gangetic plain. “Impetus will be on low-cost indigenous real-time monitoring stations,” said the plan.
On plantation plans, NCAP aims to link to India’s target of additional forest and tree cover of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030. “There needs to be more focus on the western regions of India (Rajasthan and Gujarat) for enhanced tree cover, which will reduce wind-blown dust within the country and will also act as barriers for transboundary dust,” the plan noted.
The NCAP will be made functional with a combined effort of different ministries including ministries of transport, petroleum, new and renewable energy, heavy industry, housing and urban affairs, agriculture, health, NITI Aayog, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), experts, civil society and academics.
Meanwhile, during the launch it was also emphasised that the plan is envisaged to be dynamic and will continue to evolve based on any emerging scientific and technical information. The plan will be integrated with the existing policies of the government, including the five major missions of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC).
(In arrangement with Mongabay.com, a source for environmental news reporting and analysis. The views expressed in the article are those of Mongabay.com. Feedback: gopi@mongabay.com)
—IANS/Mongabay
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, Markets, Networking, Technology
New Delhi : The Indian government asked Apple to provide information regarding 27 devices and 18 accounts in the January-June 2018 period, with the company providing data in most of the cases owing to an iTunes Gift Card fraud investigation.
The number of requests from India — in various formats such as subpoenas, court orders, warrants or other valid legal requests — also included 34 financial identifiers and three emergency requests, Apple said in its bi-annual transparency report released late Monday.
For device requests, Apple provided data to the Indian government in 63 per cent of cases and 85 per cent in the cases related to financial identifiers.
“The high number of financial identifiers were specified in requests predominantly due to an iTunes Gift Card fraud investigation,” said Apple.
“One request may contain one or multiple identifiers. We count the number of identifiers identified in each request and report the total number of identifiers by type (Device, Financial Identifier, Account),” the company added.
For account requests, Apple provided data in 78 per cent of cases and for all the three emergency requests.
In the July-December 2017 period, Apple had provided data in 14 out of 27 requests (52 per cent) to the Indian government.
Keeping with the global trends where several tech giants, including Facebook and Twitter, release bi-annually transparency reports, Apple has now launched a new transparency report website which makes it easier to scan data requests from various governments.
Globally, the company received 32,342 demands from governments to access 1,63,823 devices, with 80 per cent of the requests granted.
In total, the Cupertino-based iPhone maker approved more than 25,000 government requests to access customer data in the first half of 2018 – an almost nine per cent rise in demands in the July-December 2017 period.
“Apple is committed to your privacy and being transparent about government requests for customer data globally. This report provides information on government requests received,” said the company.
The governments around the world sent requests for device information on 29,718 Apple devices, with India asking for 27 device requests in the July-December 2017 period. Overall, the data was provided in 79 per cent of cases globally.
“Apple regularly receives multi-device requests related to fraud investigations. Device-based requests generally seek details of customers associated with devices or device connections to Apple services,” said the Cupertino-based company.
Apple requires government and private entities to follow applicable laws and statutes when requesting customer information and data.
“We contractually require our service providers to abide by the same standard for any government information requests for Apple data. Our legal team reviews requests received to ensure that the requests have a valid legal basis,” the company has said earlier.
“When we receive an account request seeking our customers’ personal information, we notify the customer that we have received a request concerning their personal data except where we are explicitly prohibited by the legal process, by a court order Apple receives, or by applicable law,” it added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Commodities, Commodities News, Opinions
By Vivek Puri,
The Indian government wants to double the income of farmers by 2022. A roadmap prepared by NITI Aayog outlines the rationale, strategy and action plan for achieving this commendable milestone. We believe that such a plan needs a separate set of measures that focus on mustard farmers — and promotes mustard as a crop.
The agricultural, economic and nutritional importance of mustard is enormous in the Indian context. It is the country’s most important winter oilseed crop. The area under mustard cultivation is significant — close to 70 lakh hectares — producing 6.82 million tonnes in 2015-16, with the estimate for 2016-17 being 7.9 million tonnes. And millions of farmers and their families derive their livelihood from it.
To give these figures some perspective, consider the other oilseed crops. Groundnut is grown on just 6.39 lakh hectares — or less than a tenth of mustard’s acreage — linseed on 4.01 lakh hectares, sunflower seed on 1.74 lakh hectares, sesame seed on 0.68 lakh hectares and safflower on 0.62 lakh hectares.
Also, mustard oil is an innately Indian cooking medium, having been around for thousands of years. This means that mustard and mustard oil are already aligned with the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative.
The importance of mustard is a strong reason for evolving a National Mustard Policy to promote it at all levels — as an agricultural commodity, as cooking oil, as a nutritional intervention and as a means for promoting health in general and cardiac health in particular.
Currently, the government does not have a policy focused on promoting mustard as an attractive cash crop for farmers. Ideally, such a policy should expand the area under mustard cultivation, reduce the gaping demand-supply gap by increasing domestic production of mustard oil, and ease the dependence on edible oil imports which are, on an average, around 15 million tonnes each year — that’s a forex outgo of a whopping Rs 77,000 crore. (Although, this year’s data indicates a significant drop for the first time in decades.)
The proposed policy should look at ways to make the National Commodities and Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX) more farmer-friendly. Earlier this year, the Finance Ministry flagged off a modality that offers agricultural commodity options which would enable farmers to protect themselves against adverse price changes and minimise their risks. However, farmers — in particular, mustard farmers — have not been able to get minimum prices and remunerative returns despite assurances.
A comprehensive National Mustard Policy would also need to establish clearly-defined norms and guidelines for the introduction of GM (Genetically Modified) varieties of mustard (if that were to happen in the imminent future). Such norms should include upgrading our food-testing facilities which are, at present, not geared to detect and identify GM varieties. This would also facilitate effective labelling norms for GM products.
Mustard and mustard oil have always been an integral part of the ancient Indian healing science of Ayurveda. The government has already established an apex body to develop this domain — the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy). This ministry could play a key role in the evolution and implementation of the proposed policy, and in promoting “nature’s gift to India” all over the world.
At a broader level, the evolution of an effective National Mustard Policy must include infrastructure and supporting systems. For several years now, we have been recommending the establishment of an apex body by the government — a Mustard Oil Development Board, along the lines of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, the American Soybean Association and Spain’s International Olive Council.
The proposed Board could go a long way in ensuring an integrated approach to the development and promotion of the mustard industry as a whole, helping mustard farmers obtain remunerative prices, increasing per acre productivity, and enhancing value addition.
Moreover, like its counterparts in the US, Malaysia and Spain, the proposed Board could also promote mustard oil overseas, and lobby for the removal of unfair (and unscientific) constraints that exist in the US and certain EU countries where Indian mustard oil must statutorily be labelled “For External Use Only”. What palm oil is for Malaysia, olive oil for Italy and soya oil for the US, mustard oil can indeed be for India. And, therefore, like these countries, India can become a significant foreign exchange earner through the robust export of mustard oil.
There is, admittedly, a lot of work to be done to actualise an initiative as ambitious and wide-ranging as a National Mustard Policy. But as with all plans, one must begin somewhere. The coming financial year offers excellent prospects for giving mustard — and mustard farmers — an opportunity to establish new benchmarks as one of India’s leading edible oils.
(The writer is the Managing Director, Puri Oil Mills Ltd. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at vpuri@purioilmills.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Banking, Economy, Finance, News, Opinions
By Nikhil Arora,
The battle between the Indian government and its central bank is neither new nor unique.
Though the ongoing spat between the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the government can boast of multiple drivers, the most recent, and by all appearances a perennial bone of contention, is the former’s adoption of Flexible Inflation Targeting (or FIT) as its monetary policy framework.
What is FIT? Through an agreement signed between the RBI and the government as at February 20, 2015, RBI decided to adopt a “modern monetary policy framework” with the objective to “primarily maintain price stability, while keeping in mind the objective of growth”.
Thus, price stability became an overarching objective of monetary policy, moving other factors to the background.
The said price stability is to be achieved by keeping track of, forecasting, and controlling inflation, meaning that if the percentage change in monthly Consumer Price Index or CPI (headline) year-on-year was outside or expected to be outside a specific range of numbers (the “Target”) for a certain duration, it gives RBI a justification to decrease or increase short-term interest rates.
No other consideration is to have an equivalent weight. Inflation must be granted precedence.
The agreed upon target range at present stands at four per cent with a band of () two per cent for three consecutive quarters.
So, what is the problem? The proponents of FIT argue that it gives a clear goal for policy setting and, over time, helps in establishing the credibility of the central bank while managing and anchoring price and policy expectations of the public. A quantifiable target reduces the chances of monetary policy being steered for political purposes.
Both high inflation and low inflation hurts. While the former eats through real rates of return, i.e. the borrowed interest rate minus inflation; the latter is an indicator of either oversupply or low demand. Hence it makes a lot of sense to keep it on a leash.
However, the outcome of using monetary policy to control inflation often depends on how the said price instability has originated in the first place.
When inflation is demand-driven, i.e. the demand gets too hot for sustainable supply, the FIT approach works well as hawkish monetary policy then becomes a lever to control consumption spend.
However, when inflation is supply-driven, i.e. the supply is artificially low (either due to low productivity, lack of investment, hoarding, supply shocks caused by inadequate monsoons, oil price hikes, etc.) but the demand is “business as usual”, FIT would be less effective as it would lower investment appetite, thereby risking supply being pushed further down.
Warwick J. McKibbin, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, a think tank says: “Falling productivity would cause both a rise in input costs and a fall in output. An inflation targeting central bank would tighten monetary policy as input costs rose but in doing so would reduce real GDP in the economy. Thus, monetary policy would lead to a worse outcome for the real economy than caused by the shock alone.”
Most governments, especially in emerging markets where supply shocks are common, are hence apprehensive of FIT. Plus, there is a natural tendency to blame lack of growth on tighter monetary policy, taking attention away from larger structural issues where fiscal intervention is needed.
Businesses also tend to oppose FIT, linking higher rates to a lower investment appetite which may be a disingenuous claim.
Raghuram Rajan, ex-RBI Governor who pushed for FIT, in his book “I do What I do” elaborates: “I have yet to meet an industrialist who does not want lower rates, whatever the level of rates. But will a lower policy interest rate today give him more incentive to invest?”
Answering his rhetoric himself, he claims: “Even if [RBI cuts] policy rates, we don’t believe banks, who are paying higher deposit rates, will cut their lending rates. The reason is that the depositor, given her high inflationary expectations, will not settle for less than the rates banks are paying her. Inflation is placing a floor on deposit rates, and thus on lending rates.”
What, you may wonder, is the solution? A popular alternative suggested by many has been to track the growth in Nominal GDP (NGDP targeting), instead of inflation. NGDP growth is basically the sum of inflation and real GDP growth.
The idea here is that in supply shock-driven inflation, though the inflation component of NGDP would go up, the real GDP component would go down. Whilst a FIT regime would drive up rates to control inflation but be at the risk of pushing real GDP down further, the NGDP target would be a more holistic measure in that situation, warranting a less dramatic response.
Optically it literally combines the objective of price stability and growth. It would, however, widen the mandate and accountability of the central bank, as per a view shared by The Economist, while it was pushing for a NGDP target framework for the US Federal Reserve (Fed).
“A Central bank with an explicit NGDP level target would have faced (appropriately) intense pressure to do much more much sooner than one with the Fed’s present, vague focus on an inflation target as a means to broader macro-economic stability,” The Economist said.
(Nikhil Arora, a former investment banker at HSBC London, is Founder and CEO at Transfin. Views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at arora.nix@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance, News, Politics
New Delhi : In a bid to curb emissions from the vehicles based on outdated technology, the Central government has proposed to set the registration deadline for BS-IV standard vehicles to June 30, 2020.
While the government had already ordered the implementation of the Bharat Standard-VI compliant cleaner transport fuels across the nation by April 2020 and by April 2018 in Delhi, it has now invited suggestions and objections in a draft notification on the Central Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Rules, 2017.
“New motor vehicles conforming to Emission Standard Bharat Stage-IV, manufactured before 1st April, 2020 shall not be registered after 30th June, 2020,” said the notification.
It added that if the new motor vehicles of category M (eight-seater cars) and category N (trucks), conforming to Emission Standard Bharat Stage-IV and manufactured before April 1, 2020 and sold in the form of drive-away chasis, then they will not be registered after September 30, 2020.
At par with its Europen counterpart “Euro-VI”, under the BS-VI standard fuel, petrol and diesel are at the same level of emissions. Apart from this, while BS IV-compliant fuels which are currently being used in the country, has 50 parts per million (ppm) sulphur, BS VI emits a low 10 ppm.
The move is being welcomed by the Supreme Court-appointed Environment Pollution Control Authority (EPCA) that had earlier in April this year recommended to the apex court that only BS-VI emission standards compliant vehicles should be allowed to be sold from April 1, 2020.
“This is a welcoming move as after the Petrolium Ministry (on BS-VI implementation), the Ministry of Road Transport has taken a wise step,” Usman Naseem, researcher at the Centre for Science and Environment and member of the EPCA, told IANS.
He added that earlier the automobile industries contended its suggestions regarding introduction of the BS-VI compliant vehicles citing the lack of technology.
“The same auto manufacturers had been making cars in Europe where Euro-VI is compulsory, so their logic failed,” Naseem said.
Currently, only BS-IV compliant vehicles are being registered across the nation, after the Supreme Court ordered that no BS-III vehicles shall be registered after April 1, 2017 onwards.
The move however did not came well on the auto industries, except only a hand few, due to huge stock of BS-III compliant vehicles.
The government had earlier made it clear that India shall shift directly to BS-VI, skipping BS-V.
—IANS
