The News Editorial Analysis 28th November 2021
Lawmakers ignore impact of laws on society: Chief Justice of India
Lawmakers do not care to assess the impact their laws will have on the society, Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana said on Saturday.
“Legislature does not conduct studies or assess the impact of the laws that it passes. This sometimes leads to big issues,” the CJI said in his address at the closing ceremony of the Constitution Day celebrations.
The Chief Justice said “many people” misunderstand the role of the judiciary. For one, they think courts make the laws, the CJI said.
“We need to clear the prevailing misconceptions. For example, many people in this country believe that it is the courts which make the laws… People need to know the scope and limitations of the roles ascribed to the different organs of the State,” Chief Justice Ramana said.
The CJI had clarified on Friday, at the opening ceremony of the celebrations, that courts intervene not to usurp the role of the government, but to nudge it towards the right path.
The CJI’s words come at the end of a year which saw the Supreme Court intervene on issues as varied as vaccination programme for COVID-19, distribution of oxygen to Delhi’s dying citizens to setting up the Justice R.V. Raveendran expert committee to enquire into Pegasus spyware allegations and appointing a retired High Court judge to monitor the Lakhimpur Kheri killing of farmers and civilians in which a prime accused is the son of a Union Minister.
On Saturday, Chief Justice Ramana said the government should give thought to Attorney General K.K. Venugopal’s view that the judicial hierarchy needs to be restructured to include four National Courts of Appeals across the country.
These appellate courts would act as a buffer between the State High Courts and the Supreme Court. They would absorb ordinary appeals from the High Courts, not involving constitutional questions of law, and decide them finally. These courts, manned by 15 judges each, would stem the flow of all and sundry cases to the apex court and reduce pendency to a great extent.
Mr. Venugopal wanted both the government and the judiciary to put their heads together and make National Courts of Appeals come true.
“The Attorney General’s suggestions yesterday were enlightening. While highlighting the issue of judicial pendency, he proposed the restructuring of the judicial system and altering the hierarchy of the Courts. This is something that merits consideration by the government,” the country’s top judge acknowledged.
He said the hierarchy has remained stagnant since the country won freedom from the British rule.
“Since Independence, I do not think there has been a serious study to consider what exactly should be the structural hierarchy of judiciary in India,” the CJI said.
While speaking at the Valedictory event of the Constitution Day celebrations conducted by the Supreme Court, President of India Ram Nath Kovind urged the judiciary to exercise restraint while making remarks in courtrooms.The President, who was the chief guest at the event, highlighted how a throw-away remark, even if made with good intention, could be interpreted in questionable ways and affect the image of the judiciary as a whole.”It is important for judges to maintain utmost discretion in their utterances in court rooms. Indiscreet remarks, even if made with good intention, give space for dubious interpretations to run down the judiciary.“President Kovind went on to lament the manner in which users on social media, taking advantage of their relative anonymity, brazenly scorn the judiciary.”It pains me no end that of late there have been instances of disparaging remarks on judiciary on social media. The media has worked to democratise information yet it has a dark side to it. The anonymity granted to the users is exploited by some miscreants.“Yesterday, while speaking at the inauguration ceremony of the event, Chief Justice of India NV Ramana had also focused on increasing attacks on judges, be it physical or on social media, which he opined seemed sponsored and synchronised.“An area of grave concern for the judiciary is the increasing attacks on judges. Physical attacks on judicial officers are on the rise. Then there are attacks on the judiciary in the media, particularly social media. These attacks appear to be sponsored and synchronised,” he had said.The CJI urged Central agencies to work effectively to curb physical attacks and malicious social media attacks on judges so that the judiciary can function in a secure environment.
In a similar vein, the President called for a collective examination of what might be causing increasing attacks on the judiciary, especially on social media.
“I hope it’s an aberration and it will be short-lived. I wonder what could be behind this phenomenon. Can we collectively examine the reason behind this?“
President Kovind also surmised that the same would be essential to ensure that the judiciary can function independently.
Further, he suggested that other reforms such as the All India Judicial Service (AIJS) to centrally recruit judges on the lines of the civil services, could go a long way in ensuring the same.
“Independence of judiciary is non negotiable. There is a need for an All India Judicial Services. There will be other suggestions for reforms but the aim should be to strengthen the justice delivery mechanism.“
One in two women who go to a private hospital undergoes a Caesarean section (C-section), according to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data.
The increasing trend in private medical facilities, which have seen a rise in such operations from 40.9% to 47.4%, has led to a jump in pan-India numbers — from 17.2% in 2014-2015 to 21.5% in 2019-2020, according to NFHS-5. This means that one in five women who go to any medical facility, private or public, undergoes a C-section.
When medically justified, a C-section can effectively prevent maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity. According to WHO, the ideal rate is between 5% and 15%. When the rates rise towards 10% across a population, the number of maternal and newborn deaths decreases. When the rate goes above 10%, there is no evidence that mortality rates improve.
There are many States and Union Territories where private hospitals conduct seven or eight out of 10 deliveries through C-section. These include West Bengal (82.7%), Jammu and Kashmir (82.1%), Tamil Nadu (81.5%), Andaman and Nicobar (79.2%) and Assam (70.6%). While many of these States have had a poor record in the past too, there are many others that have seen a big jump in such surgeries.
These include Assam (17.3 percentage points increase to 70.6%), Odisha (17 percentage points 70.7%), Punjab (15.8 percentage points to 55.5%), Tamil Nadu (12.5 percentage points to 63.8%) and Karnataka (12.2 percentage points to 52.5%). As many as 26 States and UTs have shown a rise in private hospitals.
The deliveries have also increased in public hospitals but this could partly be due to an increase in institutional deliveries in such facilities from 52.1% in 2014-2015 to 61.9% in 2019-2020. States with the biggest surge across public health facilities are Sikkim (12.3 percentage points to 30.4%), Punjab (12.1 percentage points to 29.9%), Goa (11.6 percentage points to 31.5%), Chandigarh (10.9 percentage points to 30.4%) and Tamil Nadu (9.7 percentage points to 36%). The rates rose from 11.9% to 14.3% for public health facilities across the country.
At the other end of the spectrum is Bihar, which has only 3.5% C-sections in public health facilities, indicating inability to provide critical care to prevent maternal and infant deaths.
Women having babies at a later age, increase in in-vitro fertility and sedentary lifestyle of mothers are some of the reasons.
“There are also caregiver and hospital factors. Doctors doing solo-practice and delivering 20-25 babies in a month can’t stay awake in the night so they prefer to schedule an operation. As far as corporate hospitals are concerned, there is an emphasis on more numbers and doctors spending 20-30 days on 10 deliveries is frowned upon,” says Dr. Rinku Sengupta Dhar, Consultant and Head, Maternity Programs, Sitaram Bhartia Hospital.
Public hospitals see a rise in C-sections because of poor doctor-patient ratio and concentration of high-risk pregnancies at one place with less doctors and less caregivers.
Different interventions are needed for public and private hospitals as well as for different parts of the country, says Subhasri Balakrishnan, member, Common Health — a coalition for maternal health and safe abortions.
“C- section audits must be strictly enforced in public hospitals, whereas in private sector there is a need to check widespread commercialisation by regulating medical practices and costs. But there are also States with an unmet need for C- sections where they are needed to prevent maternal deaths and poor foetal outcomes. For example, Bihar has only 3.5% C-sections in public hospitals. Such States need an overall improvement in the health system such as more number of anaesthetists and specialists, blood banks, etc.”
Countries must enhance surveillance, sequencing and assess the risk of importation through international travel based on updated information on circulating variants and response capacities, and take measures accordingly, World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Southeast Asia Region office said on Saturday, stating that countries in the region should be vigilant of the new VoC [variant of concern] Omicron.
“Though COVID-19 cases have been declining in most countries of our region, the surge in cases elsewhere in the world and confirmation of a new Variant of Concern, is a reminder of the persisting risk and the need for us to continue to do our best to protect against the virus and prevent its spread. At no cost should we let our guards down,” said Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director,WHO Southeast Asia Region.
She added that comprehensive and tailored public health and social measures to prevent transmission must continue.
“The earlier the protective measures are implemented, the less restrictive they would need to be in order to be effective. The more COVID-19 circulates, the more opportunities the virus will have to change and mutate, and the pandemic will last longer,” Dr. Singh warned.
According to a release issued by the WHO South-East Asia Region, the most important thing people must do is reduce their risk of exposure to the virus — wear a mask and wear it properly covering nose and mouth; keep distance; avoid poorly ventilated or crowded spaces; keep hands clean; cover cough and sneeze; and get vaccinated.
“As of today 31% of the Region’s population is fully vaccinated, 21% partially vaccinated while nearly 48%, or about a billion people are yet to receive even a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Dr. Singh, adding that they continue to be at risk of contracting severe disease due to the virus and spreading it further.
Even after getting vaccinated, everyone must continue to take precautions to prevent becoming infected and to infect someone else who may get severely affected by the virus.
“We must not forget that the pandemic is far from over. As societies open up, we should not get complacent. Festivities and celebrations must include all precautionary measures. Crowds and large gatherings must be avoided. The current situation warrants further stepping up efforts on all fronts,” the regional director said.
A little-known species of tropical bee has evolved an extra tooth for biting flesh and a gut that more closely resembles that of vultures rather than other bees.
Typically, bees don’t eat meat. However, a species of stingless bee in the tropics has evolved the ability to do so, presumably due to intense competition for nectar.
“These are the only bees in the world that have evolved to use food sources not produced by plants, which is a pretty remarkable change in dietary habits,” said UC Riverside entomologist Doug Yanega.
Honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees have guts that are colonized by the same five core microbes. “Unlike humans, whose guts change with every meal, most bee species have retained these same bacteria over roughly 80 million years of evolution,” said Jessica Maccaro, a UCR entomology doctoral student.
Given their radical change in food choice, a team of UCR scientists wondered whether the vulture bees’ gut bacteria differed from those of a typical vegetarian bee. They differed quite dramatically, according to a study the team published on November 23, 2021, in the American Society of Microbiologists’ journal mBio.
In a case of celestial serendipity, an international team of researchers has discovered two hidden galaxies in empty space – the area devoid of almost anything at all – beaming out from behind huge clouds of space dust. One of them represents the most distant dust-obscured galaxies The discovery suggests that our current census of our local universe is still incomplete.
“These new galaxies were missed not because they are extremely rare, but only because they are completely dust-obscured,” explains Yoshinobu Fudamoto from Waseda University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
The signals were discovered with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), when researchers were attempting to observe different targets.
Evolution is a process of natural selection in which traits that improve the fitness of the organism to survive the challenges posed by its surrounding environment. However, genes have multiple effects: The very same genes that are responsible for improving an aspect of the fitness of the organism may have other contributions too, such as increasing the risk for a non-communicable disease. A paper published recently in Scientific Reports shows that this may be the case also with some severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
The examine examined 80 people from 80 separate households from southern India, which every had a number of members affected by extreme mental illness. Each of these 80 people had a minimum of two first-degree family members who had a significant psychiatric dysfunction, resembling schizophrenia, bipolar dysfunction, obsessive compulsive dysfunction, dementia or substance use dysfunction.
Researchers from NIMHANS, Bengaluru; Institute of Genomics, Tartu, Estonia and ADBS Consortium, analysed the entire exome information from these 80 people and recognized 74 genes that have been positively chosen. “Our genetic material or DNA consists of 3 billion [letters] or bases. Of this, only a small portion codes for the proteins that make up our cells,” says Meera Purushottam, from the Department of Psychiatry, NIMHANS, and a corresponding creator of the paper, in an electronic mail to The Hindu.
Sequencing the exome means sequencing this, comparatively small, portion of the genome, which codes for proteins. Under the premise that variations within the frequency of genetic variants between populations have arisen by means of pure choice, the researchers in contrast the exomes of these 80 people from households in southern India with a number of members having psychiatric problems with a second, associated inhabitants (random members from southern India) and a 3rd set from an African inhabitants (which is the ‘parent’ inhabitants). This comparability revealed the genes which have been positively chosen for within the 80 people. “So, these 74 genes that we have identified are different in more than one way in our patients and their families, compared to what we see in the population at large in this part of the world,” says Dr Purushottam.
After a year-long agitation on the borders of Delhi, protesting farm unions under the banner of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha have achieved their headline demand, namely the repeal of three contentious laws seeking to reform the storage and marketing of agricultural produce. However, farmers say this is only a half-victory and are pushing for their other major demand for providing a legal guarantee that all farmers will receive remunerative prices for all their crops.The Centre faces multiple concerns over the agitating farmers’ demand for a legal guarantee for minimum support price (MSP) for crops such as global prices, pressure on the government for procurement, export competitiveness and central expenditure, said senior agriculture ministry officials.
The farmers, who had been protesting against the three new central farm laws at Delhi’s borders for more than a year
EWS criteria rethink
The solicitor general’s submissions came following repeated grilling by the top court over the last two months as regards to the methodology adopted by the Centre in fixing the income criteria for EWS uniformly across the country
Nudged by the Supreme Court to do a “high-level policy rethink”, the Union government has decided to review the ₹8 lakh annual income limit to identify economically weaker section (EWS) for providing 10% quota in public jobs and educational institutions.
On Thursday, a Supreme Court bench, headed by justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, was informed about the Centre’s decision by solicitor general (SG) Tushar Mehta, who submitted that the government will revisit the annual income criteria by constituting a committee for this purpose.
“I have instructions to say that the government has decided to revisit the criteria for EWS. We will form a committee and decide within four weeks… we will be revisiting the economically weaker section criteria reservation and take a call,” Mehta, who represented the Centre, told the bench, which included justices Surya Kant and Vikram Nath.
The SG’s submissions came following repeated grilling by the top court over the last two months as regards to the methodology adopted by the Centre in fixing the income criteria for EWS uniformly across the country.
MP tribal icons village to be pilgrimage spot
PATALPANI the place of martyrdom of tribal hero of country’s freedom movement tantya bheel will be developed as a new pilgrimage spot in Indore district of Madhya Pradesh the state chief minister shivraj Singh chouhan announced on Saturday .Adressing a programme organised in Barod Ahir in state Khandwa district to mark the beginning of Kranti Surya jannayak tantya Mama Gaurav Yatra the MP CM also annponced that a giant statue of Jannayak Tantya Bheel will be erected at the site of his sacrifice in patalpani.
While praising the leadership of tantya Bheel,the MP CM chouhan said that Tantya Mama gave aclarion call against exploitation and injustice .He looted money and food grains from the british and Distributed it among the hungry and the needy .We salute the great revolutionary of the state ,the CM said.
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