1) Education as an eligibility to contest elections:-
News :- The Supreme Court has upheld the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act, 2015 which mandates that only those having minimum educational qualifications will be eligible to contest panchayat elections in the State.
What the court says :-
- The court is of the opinion that basic education would enable the candidates to effectively discharge duties of the panchayat.
- The court also says that education gives a human being the power to take informed decision
Provisions of the Act:-
General category candidates require a minimum qualification of Class X pass, men contesting in the Scheduled Caste category and women in the general category need to be Class VIII pass, while women in the Scheduled Caste category need to be Class V pass to be eligible.
Issue of this nature has 3 dimensions :-
- Rights issue
- State of our society
- Rationale behind the judgement
1)Rights Issue :-
Arguments against the judgement :-
- The basic element of democracy is participation.Its sole aim is to provide voice to each and every citizen irrespective of their caste , sex, religion, place of birth , social background, economic strength , educational qualification etc.
- Therefore making educational qualification a criteria will deprive most of the people from effective participation.
- It will make politics biased towards privileged sections of society .
- Every citizen has a right to vote irrespective of their educational qualification then why should he/she be restricted from contesting election .
- Legislation demands a political vision not technical expertise .
Comprehensive analysis :-
- Generally , it is held that contesting election is a basic right and every citizen can contest the election.
- However there exist a number of criteria that makes one ineligible to contest an election , For eg:- a general or a male candidate can not contest in a reserved constituency (SC/ST/Women).
- Though , for MP and MLA elections the women criteria is yet to come in to force, for panchyat elections at least 33% of seat are reserved for women.
From the above analysis, it is clear that the state discriminates among people on who can contest election on the basis of their gender or caste.
The question is – Is the above mentioned eligibility criteria for reserved constituency is discrimination ?To answer this question , we need to understand , why there are reserved constituencies?
Reserved constituencies:-
- Reserved constituencies are declared by delimitation commission .
- Under Article 82 of the Constitution, the Parliament by law enacts a Delimitation Act after every census.After coming into force ,the Central Government constitutes a Delimitation Commission.
- This Delimitation Commission demarcates the boundaries of the Parliamentary Constituencies as per provisions of the Delimitation Act.
- The present delimitation of constituencies has been done on the basis of 2001 census figures under the provisions of Delimitation Act, 2002.
- Notwithstanding the above, the Constitution of India was specifically amended in 2002 not to have delimitation of constituencies till the first census after 2026. Thus, the present Constituencies carved out on the basis of 2001 census shall continue to be in operation till the first census after 2026.
How the Reserved Constituencies are declared ?
- Allocation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in the Lok Sabha are made on the basis of proportion of Scheduled Castes and Tribes in the State concerned to that of the total population, vide provision contained in Article 330 of the Constitution of India read with Section 3 of the Representation of Peoples’ P. Act, 1950.
- So, on the basis of proportion the SC/ST constituencies are arrived and the logic being, wherever the majority of the population is SC/ST , the constituency is reserved.The philosophy being , the elected leader will serve the people better as he/she is one of them.
- If we use same analogy – A Brahmin leader will serve Brahmins better, a leader who has come from poor background will serve the poor better and so on .However , this is not true. We have evidence both in support and against this.
- Then, there are arguments that , only the privileged section among the SC/ST get the benefits of the government provisions and it does not reach those who are in real need.
- Yet , we have this provision because , from a broader perspective , our legislature will represent people from all sections, there by making it a true representative legislature.The concerns of all sections can be put forth in the legislature , there by helping it to make sensible laws and policies to serve every section of the population.For eg- A tribal leader will understand the importance of certain hill or river that is worshiped by fellow tribals and the place of the hills/river in the tribal psyche and way of life, thus can ably contribute to legislation by putting forward the socio-economic-religious impact of certain policy or law that may impact the tribals ,thus making the law more sensible and upon implementation which will not alienate them.
Now the part of reserve constituency is understood as long as the SC/ST is concerned. But, why we have reserve constituencies for Women ?
- The declaration of women constituencies in Panchyats is not a direct representation of Women as such ( in terms of Number). That means, a Panchayat is not reserved because the women population is more in the Panchayat . Hence numbers play no role here. This provision is more of philosophical in nature, which aims at women empowerment.
- By this provision , women will participate more in the grass-root level of politics and could work towards betterment of the society altogether.On a broader sense, this will give the women to participate in politics and this platform can be used to enter state level and national level politics.
Hence , above provision, which at first sight look like discrimination , are actually positive discrimination – where the state intervenes to uplift and bring certain section of society at par with other sections.
Eligibility to contest election can be looked up as a positive discrimination which can not only help promote value of education but also give the people an educated representative.And as proved above with regard to reserved constituencies , there exists positive discrimination as a precedence- so to say , there are no rights issue here (broader sense).
2)State of our Society:-
- As mentioned above only the privileged section among the SC/ST get the benefits of the government provisions and it does not reach those who are in real need.This is because , the privileged sections have access to information and other don’t have access to information because they don’t have the necessary education.
How Literate is our Literacy:-
- Though our literacy rate is around 75% , yet the functional literacy is way too low. this is because of the rudimentary definition of literacy :
- “Definition of Literacy :- Literacy, as defined in Census operations, is the ability to read and write with understanding in any language. A person who can merely read but cannot write is not classified as literate. Any formal education or minimum educational standard is not necessary to be considered literate“
- A candid analysis of illiteracy’s political and cultural consequences throughout the population will necessitate in our seeking to move literacy expectations beyond a rudimentary ability to read, write and calculate. The recognition that ‘literacy’ has to be situationally relevant has given rise to the concept of ‘functional literacy’, which has been referred to by the Second Education Commission.
- So to say, though our census says , India is 75% literate – the question is – are we ?
- The dismal state of affair has to change , if we want to be a true literate state – where literacy goes beyond just writing ,reading or doing addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. The literacy program yet to reach where it aims the development of literacy where one can do higher-order thinking – conceptualizing, inferring, inventing, testing, hypothesis and thinking critically.
3)Rationale behind the Judgement:-
- The rationale behind the judgement is well founded, there is a need for our leaders to have basic level of education – else it will render the leadership subject to undue influence from various corners.
- Moreover, if our leaders can’t read or write – it sends a wrong message to the society altogether. It inspires none to take up education.
- Education helps one to make informed decisions and thus a leader should be able to comprehend and deal with the issues better.
- It is education that has given an edge to certain Panchayats. As the leaders were educated , they could find alternative solution to the social problems.
- Chhavi rajawat of soda in Rajasthan, Arati Devi of Ganjam odisha or Sushma Bhadu of Haryana – they are the poster girls of changing the rural landscape in India.
- India lives in its villages and it is essential to change the rural landscape in our pursuit of developed India. Its education that helped them realize the potentiality of the village – they are not just leaders for few but in itself are inspiring tales who propagate the value of education.
- Though Government promotes right to education, it became necessary to have real time , on the field , living and inspiring leaders who can push the rural landscape and it’s people to embrace educations .
- Political vision comes from education.With out the basic education one may have political vision , but the chances of finding such individual is very slim and usually are exceptions.Exceptions are not rules and hence the argument of political vision is the only requirement is wrong founded – one should understand from where the political vision have genesis – mostly education.
- For one, the law provides for basic (Emphasis on Basic ) education ,which is very necessary and of course non-technical in nature.
Conclusion and Way Forward:-
- To Sum up , India is yet to realize the true literacy.Education still remains a choice of affordability for many.
- In order to help the needy , education is the only empowerment where information can flow to the masses and government benefits can reach to the deserving candidate.
- So while educated politicians are desired yet the minimum education as an eligibility to compete election is quite sensitive issue and a highly debated one, to strike a balance between the constitutional prudence and rural transformational pursuance, the changes of eligibility criteria in competing election should take the discourse of gradualism not radicalism i. e. in order to change the system the policy must take care to address and uplift the society to accept the changed system.
- The educational eligibility for competing election, though may stand against the opinions of constitutional and legal experts, still given our social desirability for better political representative – the change should be gradually implemented.
- Needless to say , unless we have educated leaders , irrespective of how many well intended polices , the rural India will not transform.One can argue that, educated leaders are not guarantee of transformation , but as a wise philosopher once said – “If you think Education is costly, try Ignorance”. In the same vein, we can’t remain ignorant of the fact, it is better to try and fail than not to try altogether , and all arguments against the judgement promotes status quo – and by now, we already know how dismal is our status quo.
- Until and unless this is implemented and experimented we will never realize the true facets and impacts of this public discourse and our opinions, knowledge and analysis will remain just an inference rather than a proven fact.
Way Forward:-
- Given its public impact it will give rise to few oddities such as corruption in educational practices, barring socio-politically enlightened but non educated leaders etc
- To compensate this, Government can enlarge the evening schools and enroll those who want to attend irrespective of their age, so that one who wants to contest Panchayat election , given adequate opportunity to make himself/herself eligible.
- Also , a gradual implementation will help to build the necessary social affinity for change.
2)Social Security Scheme for Farmers :-
The Government is implementing a number of schemes to help the farmers in increasing their productivity by reducing cost of cultivation, achieving higher yield per unit and by realizing remunerative prices. Some of the important new initiatives in this context are:
(i) Soil Health Card (SHC) scheme by which the farmers can know the major and minor nutrients available in their soils which will ensure judicious use of fertiliser application and thus save money of farmers. The balanced use of fertiliser will also enhance productivity and ensure higher returns to the farmers.
(ii) Neem Coated Urea is being promoted to regulate urea use, enhance its availability to the crop and reduce cost of fertilizers application. The entire quantity of domestically manufactured urea is now neem coated.
(iii) Parampragat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) is being implemented with a view to promoting organic farming in the country. This will improve soil health and organic matter content and increase net income of the farmer so as to realise premium prices.
(iv) The Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana (PMKSY) is being implemented to expand cultivated area with assured irrigation, reduce wastage of water and improve water use efficiency.
(v) In addition, the Government is also implementing several Centrally Sponsored Schemes – National Food Security Mission (NFSM); Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture (MIDH); National Mission on Oilseeds & Oilpalm (NMOOP); National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA); National Mission on Agricultural Extension & Technology (NMAET); National Crop Insurance Programme (NCIP); Unified National Agriculture Markets; and Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY).
(vi) The Government undertakes procurement of wheat and paddy under its ‘MSP operations’. In addition, Government implements Market Intervention Scheme (MIS)
Market Intervention Scheme (MIS) for procurement of agricultural and horticultural commodities not covered under the Minimum Price Support Scheme on the request of State/UT Government.
The MIS is implemented in order to protect the growers of these commodities from making distress sale in the event of bumper crop when the prices tend to fall below the economic level/cost of production.
Losses, if any, incurred by the procuring agencies are shared by the Central Government and the concerned State Government on 50:50 basis (75:25 in case of North-Eastern States). Profit, if any, earned by the procuring agencies is retained by them.
The proposed new National Crop Insurance Scheme will protect the interest of farmers with a broader coverage towards crop losses and other such natural calamities. This is an intervention to cover the risks involved in farming.
3)Anti Dengue Vaccine:-
- The Mexican government has approved the world’s first anti-dengue vaccine – Dengvaxia , which is designed to protect people in the age group 9-45 from all four subtypes of the virus.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.