THIS FILE CONTAINS NEWS, EDITORIAL AND QUESTION BANK

NEWS

3 November 2016

Sr. No. Topic News

1. GSII: GOVERNANCE - OROP High drama after veteran commits suicide over OROP
2. GS III: ENVIRONMENT - Govt unveils roadmap to tackle air pollution
POLLUTION
3. GS II: GOVERNANCE Banned Mandrax tablets seized in Udaipur
4. GS III: S&T Researchers aim to scoop out marine oil spills
5. GS II: BILATERAL – INDIA- Avoid interference: Nepal to India
NEPAL

GS II: GOVERNANCE - OROP

High drama after veteran commits suicide over OROP

• A retired Army subedar’s suicide demanding one rank, one pension (OROP) plunged the capital into chaos
with the police detaining and releasing Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, his deputy Manish Sisodia and
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi.

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GS III: ENVIRONMENT - POLLUTION
Govt unveils roadmap to tackle air pollution

• As various agencies termed the Capital’s air quality ‘severe’ in the aftermath of Diwali celebrations, the Aam
Aadmi Party (AAP) government convened an emergency meeting to chalk out a roadmap to combat air pollution.
• Following a lengthy meeting with representatives of various government departments at his Delhi Secretariat office,
Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said that the government’s plan to tackle air pollution included the use of
emission-control devices, resuming vacuum cleaning of arterial roads, sprinkling water on streets, and
cutting dust pollution from construction sites.
• “Jet pressure pump technique will be used for sprinkling water on footpaths, road bumps and central verges.
By doing this, we can control dust particles. In several countries, such technology is being used to curb dust
pollution,” Mr. Sisodia said.
• The Deputy CM said that the Public Works Department (PWD) was exploring the option of installing air purifiers
and mist fountains at five major traffic intersections including Mukarba Chowk in northwest Delhi and Anand
Vihar, which is the most polluted area in the Capital.
• Mr. Sisodia said that the Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) has been told to carry out strict and regular
inspections at construction sites of above 20,000 square meters and had also been directed to submit a detailed
note about dust pollution from such sites.
• “As much as 90 per cent of dust pollution comes from construction sites, which needs to be regulated. There
are 61 major construction sites in Delhi, but there are several smaller sites and most of them are violating the rules,”
the Deputy Chief Minister said.
• Mr. Sisodia said that the government had also decided to make citizens aware about dust pollution.
• “We will appeal to them to inform us about violations of rules. The Swachh Delhi App, developed by the Urban
Development Department, can be used for this,” he said.
• Emission-control devices such as chimneys and wet scrubbers will be installed at 75 cremation grounds in
collaboration with all three municipal corporations, the Deputy Chief Minister added.

GS II: GOVERNANCE
Banned Mandrax tablets seized in Udaipur

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• In a huge haul, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) has confiscated 23.5 tonnes of banned Mandrax
tablets at Udaipur, Rajasthan.
• It contained about 2 crore tablets, which have been seized.
• The tablets, estimated to be worth over Rs. 3,000 crore, were meant for illegal exports to Mozambique and
South Africa.
• The party drug, a depressant, overdose of which can lead to coma and death, is used as a recreational drug in
Africa and Asia.

GS III: S&T
Researchers aim to scoop out marine oil spills

• Recovering marine oil spills may soon become simple, efficient and cost-effective, thanks to a compound
(gelator) developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER)
Thiruvananthapuram.
• The team used glucose as a starting material and through several chemical reactions produced compounds
(gelators) that selectively congeal oil, including crude oil, from an oil-water mixture.
• Unlike other alternatives, the gelators, which are in a powder form, can be easily applied over oil-water
mixture and do not cause any environmental damage.
• The gelator molecule is partly hydrophobic and partly hydrophilic. While the hydrophilic part helps in self-
assembling to form gelator fibres, the hydrophobic part is responsible for its diffusion into the oil layer.
• Since the outer part of the fibre is hydrophobic, oil tends to gets into the spongy network made of fibres.
• Once inside the fibre network, oil loses fluidity and becomes a gel. As the self-assembly is strong, the gel
maintains its structure and rigidity even under pressure.
• When the researchers applied the compound on a benzene-water mixture and diesel-water mixture, it was able to
congeal all the benzene and diesel within a short span of time. The gel was strong enough to be scooped with a
spatula.

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• In the case of crude oil, it took a longer time for the compound to form a gel that was strong enough to be
scooped off. “The crude oil is a mixture of several low- and high-boiling and polar and non-polar fractions. So the
efficiency to form a gel is less in the case of crude oil,” he explains.
• “We are trying to improve the efficiency of the compound in terms of better absorption capacity and use in
real marine oil-spill situations,” says a researcher involved.

GS II: BILATERAL – INDIA-NEPAL

Avoid interference: Nepal to India

• Nepal accorded a warm welcome to President Pranab Mukherjee but asserted that India should avoid
interfering in the internal issues of the country.
• Soon upon the arrival of the Indian President, divisions in Nepali politics became evident on the issue of
constitutional amendments for the Madhesi people of the plains, even as the visiting President praised the
democratic struggle in Nepal and urged his hosts to draft a constitution that would address the “diverse social
fabric.”
• Top sources from the Government of Nepal maintained that Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’
was on his way to complete a series of amendments to the year-old Constitution in the next three or four
months, but said they would prefer to do so without interference from major powers, including India.
• The new constitution adopted in September 2015 had triggered an internal upheaval.

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 3 November 2016

Tight race in a divided country

A few weeks ago, many Americans would have guffawed at any suggestion that there could be a nail-biting finish to the
November 8 presidential election. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had a comfortable lead in the polls, around 12
percentage points in some surveys. The campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump had been dealt multiple blows
stemming from the “Access Hollywood” tapes, where he was caught boasting about groping women without their
consent. His popularity plummeted further after at least nine women alleged he had sexually assaulted them years ago.
However, with less than a week to voting day, the race has tightened. For the first time since May, Mr. Trump is leading in
one major poll. The game changer is FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that his agency was reopening
inquiries into Ms. Clinton’s email record after discovering correspondence relating to her in the computer of Anthony
Weiner, estranged husband of her aide Huma Abedin. There are multiple undercurrents to this vicious election battle that need
to be parsed.

In the blue corner, Ms. Clinton still enjoys an overwhelming statistical probability of winning the 270 electoral college votes
required to secure the presidency. She maintained a statesmanlike poise throughout the presidential debates, and in Email-
gate the FBI has failed to unearth any evidence of criminality against her so far. Yet her problem lies in the perception of
untrustworthiness created by her use of a private server while she was Secretary of State, her proximity to deep-
pocketed donors on Wall Street and her hard line on a fiscally expansive welfare agenda for the middle class. In the red
corner, Mr. Trump has refused to tone down his abrasive rhetoric against women, Latinos, Muslims, African-
Americans and the differently abled despite the expected backlash from these demographics and growing alienation from
mainstream Republican Party leaders. He has similarly hurled defiance in the teeth of those demanding that he release
his tax returns. His brazen invitation to Russian hackers to go hunting for Ms. Clinton’s emails, and allegations about his
shadowy financial connections to associates of Vladimir Putin raise troubling questions. That 21 months of feverish
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campaigning have ended not with a bang but a collective groan of disappointment in two such untrusted and uninspiring
candidates says a lot about how bitterly polarised the electorate is. No matter who wins this ugly election, America’s leaders
will have to initiate an honest national conversation about reconciling its social mores. Else, the world’s only superpower will
find itself diminished.

Green farms and clean air

The massive pollution cloud enveloping northern India every year is a good example of the disconnect between official
policy and ground realities. It has been known for long that burning of agricultural waste in the northern States
significantly contributes to the poor air quality in large parts of the Indo-Gangetic Basin, with local and cascading impacts
felt from Punjab all the way to West Bengal. Harmful fine particulate matter measuring 2.5 mm in diameter (PM2.5) is
among the pollutants released. Punjab responded to the issue with a prohibition on the burning of paddy straw, and the
launch of initiatives aimed at better utilisation of biomass, including as a fuel to produce power. Yet, there is no mission
mode approach to the annual crisis. The efforts do not match the scale of agricultural residues produced, for one, and fail
to address farmers’ anxiety to remove the surplus from the fields quickly to make way for the next crop. The national
production of crop waste is of the order of 500 million tonnes a year, with Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and West Bengal
topping the list. Again, 80 per cent of straw from paddy is burnt in some States, impacting air quality and depriving
croplands of nutrients.

It is an irony that the national capital and several other cities suffer crippling pollution in the post-monsoon and winter
months partly due to biomass burning, when demand for fodder is rising and the surplus material could be used
productively. Pilot projects to produce power using biomass demonstrated in Rajasthan, and mechanised composting
and biogas production units of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute could be scaled up, and farmers given liberal
support to deploy such solutions. Given the twin benefits of pollution abatement and better productivity, conservation
agriculture needs to be popularised. This would encourage farmers to use newer low-till seeding technologies that
allow much of the crop residues to remain on site, and curb the release of a variety of pollutants. Burning residues add
greenhouse gases that cause global warming, besides pollutants such as carbon monoxide, ammonia, nitrous oxide and
sulphur dioxide that severely affect human health. Sustained work is called for, given that higher agricultural productivity to
meet food needs is inevitable, with a cascading increase in biomass volumes. The challenge is to identify measures to utilise
it. By one estimate, if India can reach its own air quality standards for fine particulate matter from all sources, annual
premature deaths can be cut by almost 10 per cent. A programme to cut pollution from waste-burning would be a good start.

3rd NOVEMBER 2016

QUESTION BANK
(2 Questions)

Answer questions in NOT MORE than 200 words each. Content of the answer is more
important than its length.
Links are provided for reference. You can also use the Internet fruitfully to further enhance and strengthen your
answers.

1. Who are contract or casual workers? Discuss their status and protection with respect to the
Contract Labour Act and judicial rulings.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/g-sampath-on-sc-rulling-on-contract-workers-getting-equal-pay-on-parallel-
tracks/article9296662.ece

Three major differences between permanent and contract workers:

• In establishments across the country, an elite minority of permanent workers enjoy relative job security and
higher wages, while the vast majority, comprising casual or contract workers, toil under terms where they can
be terminated any time without reason, and get paid a fraction of what the regular workers get.

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 • It would therefore be natural to hope that the SC verdict would have an immediate, and positive, bearing on contract
workers’ compensation. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen, due to the third difference between permanent
and contract workers: access to collective bargaining.

Trade Unions and contract workers:

• As per the Trade Unions Act, 1926, any workman who works in a factory can join a union of that factory. But trade
unions typically have only permanent workers as members. The reason cited is that contract workers are not
employees of the employer in question (the manufacturing unit), and so should not find representation in a union
body formed for the purpose of negotiating with the said employer. Contract workers are hired by the labour
contractor, who is empanelled with the employer as a supplier of contract labour, and who pays their salaries.
• But not being on the rolls of an employer does not disqualify a contract worker from being a member of a factory’s
union. Labour law experts point to section 2 (g) of the Trade Union Act, which defines “workmen”, for the purposes
of a trade union, as “all persons employed in trade or industry whether or not in the employment of the employer
with whom the trade dispute arises”.
• This question of who can become a member of a trade union also came up recently in the case of Chander Bhan, etc
versus Sunbeam Autoworkers Union in the Gurgaon District Court. In a judgment that went largely unnoticed, the
court ruled that any workman employed by a factory — irrespective of whether he was a permanent worker
or not, fulfilled the Industrial Dispute (ID) Act’s definition of workman or not — was eligible to participate in
union activities.
• In the Gurgaon industrial belt, Sunbeam Autoworkers Union is probably the only union that gives membership to
workers with less than 240 days’ service, and it needed a court intervention to be able to do so. But even it does not
offer membership to contract workers.

Why trade unions do not provide membership to contract workers:

• In fact, no union anywhere gives membership and voting rights to contract workers. The reasons are many.
1) First, in an industrial climate extremely hostile to any union activity, workers believe that forming a union that
also includes contract workers is bound to provoke the management into even greater hostility.
2) Second, managements refuse point blank to discuss with unionists any issues concerning contract workers.
3) Third, contract workers are far more insecure compared to regular workers. In an era where companies
frequently terminate even a permanent worker for engaging in union mobilisation, the stakes are too high for
contract workers, who could be summarily dismissed, without any consequences, by the management.
4) Fourth, and this is an unpalatable truth for most trade unionists, permanent workers themselves don’t want to
extend union membership to contract workers. In a factory, say, that employs 300 permanent workers and
1,200 contract workers, any union that gives voting rights to contract workers would instantly marginalise
permanent workers. Given that permanent workers’ salaries are much higher, economic self-interest militates
against the inclusion of contract workers in union membership.
• As a result, India’s contract workers, with the exception of some PSUs in select sectors such as steel and coal, remain
both heavily exploited and largely un-unionised, with the lack of unionisation and exploitation reinforcing each
other.

Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970

• Contract labour was initially employed only for non-core work such as gardening, cleaning, and maintenance.
Soon, they began to be increasingly employed in production as well. Workers protested. In response, the CL Act
was enacted. It expressly prohibits the employment of contract labour for perennial work, that is, in core
production.
• But labour contractors easily circumvent this requirement through what have come to be known as ‘sham
contracts’. It is a contract that may show a worker as having been hired for a cleaning job. But once he enters the
factory premises, he is engaged in production work. There is no documentation to show that a contract worker who,
on paper, is engaged for cleaning work, is actually in production.
• Ironically, it was the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (CL Act), ostensibly enacted to
abolish contract labour, that cemented their exploitation by offering a legal operating framework to labour
contractors.
• Before this legislation, temporary workers and permanent workers could make claims on their employer and
negotiate as members of the same union. But the CL Act, by introducing a distinction between an ‘employer’ and
a ‘principal employer’, kept the door open for expansion of contractualisation.

Recent Supreme Court verdict:

• In a significant judgment in November 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that contract workers should get the same
pay as permanent workers.
• It held that denial of equal pay for equal work to daily wagers, temporary, casual and contractual employees
amounted to “exploitative enslavement, emerging out of a domineering position”.
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 • The court also made the philosophical point that denial of the principle of equal pay for equal work is a violation of
human dignity.
• Though the verdict came in the context of workers employed by the government, it strikes at the heart of the
inequity that characterises the treatment of labour in both the public and private sector, whose defining characteristic
is the division of workers into a two-tier caste system of regular and contract workers.

Conclusion:
• The SC judgment thus poses an old question to India’s labour movement: how to unionise contract workers, who
are in one factory today, in another the next, and whose interests are all too easily played off against those of
permanent workers?
• Unless the labour movement comes up with an answer to this question, legislations and judicial pronouncements will
prove insufficient.

2. “The recent trend of cooperative sugar barons opting to set up private sugar units in
Maharashta despite overwhelming support of shareholders for the cooperative model is
alarming. This, when the entire country is looking to emulate the Maharashtra sugar
cooperatives’ model.” Elaborate.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/rajagopal-devara-on-maharashtras-sugarcane-production-crushed-by-the-cane-
lobby/article9296675.ece

Cooperatives opted out and private sugar units established:

• Maharashtra is the largest producer of sugar in India, contributing almost 37 per cent of the total national output.
• Cooperative sugar mills have contributed largely to the development of rural Maharashtra by providing
consistent farm income to large shareholding members.
• But the ownership profile of sugar factories in the State has undergone a major change in the past decade with the
amendment to Section 6A of the Sugarcane Control (Order), 1966.
• The change has also been accentuated by the questionable practice of lending banks, especially the Maharashtra
State Cooperative Bank, taking over assets under the provisions of the SARFAESI (Securitisation and
Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest) Act, 2002.
• Data indicate that altogether 68 cooperative units were liquidated and sold later to the private sector, to entities
floated by cooperative barons themselves, with a few exceptions.
• The bigwigs of the sugar cooperatives, including former State cooperative ministers, floated private sugar units, in a
way sowing the seeds of doubt on the working and efficacy of the cooperative model.
• The number of private sugar factories in Maharashtra has consistently increased from 2006-07. Almost 154
private sugar units have obtained Industrial Entrepreneur Memorandum (IEM); at present there are 78 operational
private sugar mills with total crushing capacity of 2.48 lakh tons of cane per day (TCD) as against a mere 12 private
units a decade ago. In comparison the number of operational cooperative units stands at 102 with a capacity of
3.52 lakh TCD.
• Private sector capacity gradually increased from 10 per cent of the total sugar production in the State to 45
per cent.

Impact of Cooperatives vs private mills

• The natural question that arises is how the increase in private sector participation impacted the sugar cane payment
and sugar recovery per ton of sugarcane crushed.
• The change in ownership pattern has impacted the cane price payment to the growers in the State (see graphs).
To understand the payment dynamics, it is essential to understand the process of Fair and Remunerative Price
(FRP), a payment model unique to Maharashtra.
• Unlike other cane-producing States where the farmer brings his produce to the factory for crushing, in Maharashtra it
is picked up by sugar millers from the farmers’ fields to ensure uninterrupted cane supply and smooth operations.
• The harvesting and transportation (H&T) cost thus incurred by millers is, however, ultimately deducted from
the FRP paid to the farmers.
• A year-on-year analysis of H&T costs incurred by cooperative and private millers illustrates the larger impact.
The private units have incurred Rs.57.07, Rs.48.58 and Rs.83.14 per ton on H&T more than cooperative units in
2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively, implying thereby that the cane farmers are burdened by an additional
Rs.477.20 crore.
• Likewise, the cooperative sector sugar recovery rate, which is directly linked to the FRP paid to farmers, has
always been higher than that of the private sector over the same period.

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 • The difference between cooperative and private sector in recovery when monetised, calculating on the basis of FRP
fixed by the Government of India, comes to Rs.1076.10 crore. Shockingly, in some cases cooperative sugar units
reported less H&T expenditure and better recovery before management was taken over by the private sector. If both
H&T and recovery are put together in monetary terms, the ultimate loss is borne by sugar cane farmers due to
dwindling payments under private mills.
• The common belief is that the private sector is competitive, efficient and professionally managed when compared to
the cooperative sector. Ironically, the private sugar sector in Maharashtra doesn’t stand the test of data.

Salient features of the Cooperative Model:

• Cooperative society members, with easy access to management, meetings of the board of directors and
vigilance on the factory premises during and after crushing, bring in effective stakeholder participation in the
overall working of mills.
• As a result there is better sugar recovery and considerable reduction in cost of H&T, thus financially
benefitting the cane farmers.

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