1. Water mission may miss 2024 target

Only three out of four rural households are likely to have drinking water tap connections by 2024; work has not even begun in 5% of homes

The government’s ambitious ‘Har Ghar Jal’ initiative to provide all rural households in India with potable water connections by 2024 under its flagship Jal Jeevan Mission is likely to fall short of its target. Only 75% of village homes are likely to have taps delivering drinking water by April 2024, The Hindu has learnt from multiple sources and an analysis of publicly available data.

Despite the scheme having been announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019, a time only 16% of rural households had tap water, officials say a slew of challenges — such as the pandemic, a dearth of qualified manpower in States, the scale of the exercise, State-specific issues and even the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war — meant that the project only picked up speed in several States in 2022.

“While the pandemic led to delays, the Ukraine war resulted in major shortages of steel and cement, [which are] critical to the manufacture and connection of metal pipes. This led to major price revisions and considerable time was lost in renegotiating contracts and improving supply,” a senior official told The Hindu on condition of anonymity. “There was also a huge problem in many States of not finding enough skilled manpower to make tanks, cisterns and water connections of acceptable quality,” the official said.

“There are States, for instance Rajasthan, where actual availability of water is a challenge. In West Bengal and Kerala, there are problems with water contamination. So ensuring adequate water quality is an issue. It is not enough to just provide a piped connection,” the official said and added, “We expect about 75% households to be covered byMarch 2024 and 80% by December.”

2. India adds 664 animal species to its fauna database, 339 taxa to its flora

In 2022, the biggest number of discoveries of animals and plants were from Kerala, which contributes to 14.6% of the new species and new records; Environment Minister says conservation work is critical to protect biodiversity of the country

India added 664 animal species to its faunal database in the year 2022. These comprise 467 new species and 197 new records (species found in India for the first time).

The country also added 339 new plant taxa — 186 taxa that are new to science and 153 taxa as new distributional records from the country in 2022. The details of new discoveries and new records were released by Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav in Kolkata on Saturday.

The faunal discoveries have been compiled in a publication by Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) titled Animal Discoveries – New Species and New Records 2023, whereas floral discoveries are contained in Plant Discoveries 2022 published by the Botanical Survey of India (BSI).

Among the major fauna species discovered are three new species and one new record of mammals; two new records of birds; 30 new species and two new records of reptiles; six new species and one new record of amphibia; and 28 new species and eight new records of fish.

The mammal species discovered include two species of bats — Miniopterus phillipsi, a long-fingered bat, and Glischropus meghalayanus, a bamboo-dwelling bat — both from Meghalaya. Sela macaque (Macaca selai), a new macaque species discovered in the western and central Arunachal Pradesh and named after the Sela Pass, is also among the highlights of Animal Discoveries 2022.

The new records include Macaca leucogenys, a white-cheeked macaque earlier found in Modog, southeastern Tibet, and sighted in India for the first time in 2022 in West Siang, Arunachal Pradesh.

The list also includes Ficedula zanthopygia, the yellow-rumped flycatcher, earlier known from Mongolia, Transbaikal, southern China, Korea, western Japan, and found last year in Narcondam Island of the Andaman archipelago.

The maximum number of new faunal discoveries has been of invertebrates with 583 species, while vertebrates constitute 81 species. Insects dominate among invertebrates with 384 species, whereas fish dominated among vertebrates, followed by reptiles, amphibia, mammals and aves.

In 2022, the maximum new discoveries were recorded from Kerala. As many as 82 animal species new to science and 15 new records were from Kerala, which contributes to 14.6% of the new species and new records. Karnataka followed with 64 new species and 24 new records accounting for 13.2%. Tamil Nadu saw 71 new discoveries and 13 new records, contributing to 12.6% of all the new discoveries and new records in the country. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands contributed to about 8.4% of the discoveries, whereas 7.6 % discoveries were from West Bengal and 5.7% from Arunachal Pradesh. With the new discoveries and new records, the fauna diversity of the country increased to 1,03,922.

Speaking at the launch of these publications, Mr. Yadav said that work done by the ZSI is critical to the faunal diversity of the country. “We must protect the diversity for our own sake,” he said.

ZSI Director Dhriti Banerjee said the year 2022 witnessed the highest number of new discoveries in the last 10 years.

‘Plant Discoveries 2022’ contains an enumeration of 339 taxa, which have been added to the Indian flora during 2022.

These comprise 319 species, and 20 infraspecific taxa as new to the Indian flora. Of these, 186 taxa are new to science and 153 taxa are new distributional records from India.

3. UCC push turns spotlight on SC’s query on religious freedom

The renewed push for a Uniform Civil Code, which many communities perceive as an encroachment into their personal laws and religious rights, is under way even as a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court is yet to decide the “ambit and scope” of religious freedom itself.

It has been three years since a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court framed seven questions of law linked to religious freedom, rights and practices in the Sabarimala case.

The first of the seven questions is “What is the scope and ambit of the right to freedom of religion under Article 25 of the Constitution?” The reference in the case is still pending. The questions remain unanswered by the court. Of all the nine judges, only two are currently serving in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given a public thrust for a UCC by highlighting the discriminatory practices against women in the personal laws of certain religious communities. His speech came just a week after the 22nd Law Commission of India issued a public notice for a fresh debate on the common law.

The Opposition and minority bodies have reacted that a common civil code was not in tune with Article 25, which provides protection and freedom for all to practise their religion and customary laws.

The core issue at the heart of both the Constitution Bench’s question on religious freedom framed in February 2020 and the recent controversy over the UCC is the tussle between discrimination on religious grounds and the right to preserve one’s religious identity through personal laws based on religion, customs and usages.

The 185-page consultation paper of the 21st Law Commission of India, largely ignored for the past five years, recommends a balancing act between the equal treatment of all religions and religious diversity by codifying personal laws.

The paper, published in August 2018, cautioned the government against compromising cultural diversity “to the extent that our urge for uniformity itself becomes a reason for threat to the territorial integrity of the nation”. It had noted that “most countries are now moving towards recognition of difference, and the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination, but is indicative of a robust democracy”.

“In the absence of any consensus on a uniform civil code, the Commission felt that the best way forward may be to preserve the diversity of personal laws but at the same time ensure that personal laws do not contradict fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution. In order to achieve this, it is desirable that all personal laws relating to matters of family must first be codified to the greatest extent possible, and the inequalities that have crept into codified law should be remedied by amendment… History shows that amendments to codify personal laws is not only a tried and tested way of bringing targeted social legislation but also of developing jurisprudence on family laws,” the 21st Law Commission recommended.

The 21st Law Commission view to test personal laws against fundamental rights is in tune with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s separate opinion in 2018 countering the 1951 judgment in State of Bombay versus Narasu Appa Mali, which had held that personal law was immune from constitutional scrutiny.

“This detracts from the notion that no body of practices can claim supremacy over the Constitution and its vision of ensuring the sanctity of dignity, liberty and equality,” Justice Chandrachud had observed.

The paper had stressed that the term ‘secularism’ would have meaning only if any form of difference, social or religious or cultural, did not get subsumed under the louder voice of the majority.

4. Crowdsourced data help identify flooded areas instantly

It is essential to know the ground condition to be able to forecast floods one or three days in advance; information culled from tweets by people and volunteers living in Mumbai help in this exercise

Like many other cities in India, Mumbai has experienced frequent extreme rainfall events leading to severe floods and waterlogging in the last decade. However, researchers are unable to monitor the flood situation in real time due to lack of any system that captures such data. Now, a team of researchers led by IIT Bombay has found a way to achieve this — they turned to Twitter to crowdsource data to identify in real time areas that are water logged after heavy rainfall.

The results of the study, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, have been posted in arXiv, a preprint server.

The team led by Dr. Subimal Ghosh from the Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay used an automated programme to retrieve flood-related data from Twitter. Using approximate level of water logging and location information, they were able to provide real-time information about flooding in Mumbai. The automated system to collect vital flood-related information from Twitter began last year.

They evaluated the usefulness of crowdsourced flood data for monitoring by using the data of an extreme rainfall event on July 5, 2022. They also retrieved flood-related tweets from previous years, and this helped in generating flood maps for heavy rainfall events in the last few years.

After the infamous flood of 2005, when Mumbai received about 90 cm of rainfall in 24 hours, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai set up a network of automatic weather stations (currently at 60 locations). “Besides other information, the automatic weather stations provide rainfall data at 15 minutes interval. But the stations do not provide any information on waterlogging or flooding,” says Prof. Ghosh. “This is where crowdsourced real time flooding data becomes very useful.”

Prof. Ghosh says that weather stations that received heavy rainfall and located in places with low elevations are more likely to be flooded. “It is precisely from these locations that we see more tweets related to waterlogging. We have seen consistency of crowdsourced data on flooding being with rainfall data we get from the automatic weather stations,” he says.

According to Shrabani Sailaja Tripathy from IIT Bombay and the first author of the preprint, besides being a large database, crowdsourced data available on Twitter is freely accessible and provides very useful and pertinent information that is also brief. “We need information about the location, water logging scenario and approximate water level (ankle, knee or waist) to be able to monitor flooding in real time,” Prof Ghosh says. Extracting information from tweets becomes easier when users share information using certain specific hashtags (#MumbaiRains #Mumbaiflood #Mumbaiflooddata).

The researchers trained around 80 volunteers from an NGO last year to work as volunteered geographic information (VGI) participants to provide information regarding flood location and water level. The campaign also included open requests to Twitter account holders to become volunteers and provide information by tweeting in a specific format. “The trained volunteers are very small and spread across the city, but they provide very reliable information, and this helps us validity the data retrieved from Twitter,” says Prof. Ghosh. To forecast floods one or three days in advance, the researchers need to know the ground condition. The information culled from tweets provide invaluable information about initial ground conditions for flood forecasting.

To validate the conclusions drawn from the crowdsourced data, the researchers surveyed six major flood hotspots in Mumbai. Though the project began last year, they back-tracked flood-related information from crowdsourced data from 2017 to 2022; there were 75 extreme events during this period. While there was a large number of flood-related tweets on days with extreme rainfall before the pandemic, the number of tweets dropped in 2021 and 2022 though the number of extreme events only increased. “We were not sure if fewer number of tweets about flooding from four of these hotspots was due to COVID-19 or due to less flooding. We learnt about the mitigation measures undertaken by local authorities, which had resulted in reduced flooding in the four hotspots and was in concordance with fewer tweets from these areas,” he says.

The researchers are developing a portal and an App to collect data from Twitter and the volunteers and make available flood maps of Mumbai in real time. “We are hopeful of completing it by mid-August. This should help us capture flood-related data in real time for the rest of this monsoon season,” Prof. Ghosh says.

5. What is China’s new law on foreign relations?

Will it tighten President Xi Jinping’s control over foreign policy? What are the political and economic ramifications? Is it aimed at formulating a legal response to Western sanctions? Does it talk about lending aid to foreign countries?

On June 28, China’s National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislature, adopted a new Law on Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China, which came into effect on July 1. The law will tighten President Xi Jinping’s control over foreign policy, which has, since his taking office in 2012, become increasingly centralised.

What is the new law?

The law involves foreign affairs, and as the very first article puts it, it was drafted to “safeguard China’s sovereignty, national security and development interests”. Explaining the need for the law, an unnamed official of the National People’s Congress (NPC) told state media the “legal system concerning foreign affairs still has some shortcomings” and “gaps exist in laws safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests.” The official said that “speeding up the building of the legal system concerning foreign affairs will help China more effectively deal with risks and challenges.”

The broader aim of the law appears to be aimed at giving a legal stamp to many of the key objectives of Chinese foreign policy under Mr. Xi, and to make it a punishable offence if individuals or organisations were deemed to act against those objectives. In a similar vein, a border law was adopted in October 2021 that warned against “any act that undermines territorial sovereignty and land boundaries”.

What will be the impact on foreign policy?

The centralisation of Chinese foreign policy under Mr. Xi now has a legal stamp, and challenging it may be deemed as a violation of Chinese laws.

The law specifically mentions several key initiatives championed by Mr. Xi, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI).

The law also emphasises sovereignty and security as being at the heart of Chinese foreign policy. While this was, to some extent, always the case, the new law coincides with a broader political shift in China that many observers say has, for the first time in the reform era, prioritised security over development and opening up — a key change that will likely have long-term political and economic ramifications.

For instance, the law says China “has the right to take, as called for, measures to counter or take restrictive measures against acts that endanger its sovereignty, national security and development interests in violation of international law or fundamental norms governing international relations.” It also says “the state shall take measures as necessary in accordance with the law to protect the safety, security, and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens and organizations overseas and safeguard China’s overseas interests against any threat or infringement.”

Chinese officials have said one of the objectives was a legal response to Western sanctions aimed at China. The law will reinforce the Law on Countering Sanctions and will essentially make it illegal for Western companies operating within China to comply with sanctions aimed at the country. In an article in the official People’s Daily on June 29, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi, who heads the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, said the context for the law was China “confronting a growing number of unpredictable factors” and facing the need to “continuously expand its legal ‘toolbox’ for ‘foreign struggles’”. “[We should] make full use of the Foreign Relations Law as a legal tool — through legislative, law enforcement, judicial and other means — to carry out our fight in response to acts of containment, interference, sanctions and destruction,” Mr. Wang was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post. “The … law clearly opposes all hegemonism and power politics, and is against any unilateralism, protectionism and bullying acts… towards China,” he said.

Besides sanctions, another section of the law appears to be a response to criticisms of China’s foreign lending which has come under scrutiny amid debt crises in several of its partners. According to Article 19 of the new law, in providing aid Beijing would “respect the sovereignty of recipient countries” and “not interfere in their internal affairs or attach any political conditions to its aid”.

What does the new law mean for India?

As with the Border Law adopted in 2021, the emphasis of security, sovereignty and territorial integrity as key tenets of Chinese foreign policy coincide with the border dispute returning to the centre of India-China relations. Indian experts saw the Border Law as essentially looking to formalise China’s moves along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), with the transgressions of April 2020 upending both bilateral relations and decades-old mechanisms aimed at carefully managing the boundary dispute. The two laws also coincide with territorial disputes being framed by Beijing as matters of national sovereignty rather than issues to be negotiated by two sides — framing that may narrow the scope for resolution.

Article 6 of the new law says all “state institutions, armed forces, political parties, people’s organisations, enterprises, public institutions, other social organisations, and citizens have the responsibility and obligation to safeguard China’s sovereignty, national security, dignity, honour and interests in the course of international exchanges and cooperation.” Article 31 may have a potential bearing on the signing of agreements to resolve disputes, as it declares that “implementation and application of treaties and agreements shall not undermine the sovereignty of the State, national security and public interests”. Article 17 says the main aim of the conduct of foreign relations is “to uphold its system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, safeguard its sovereignty, unification and territorial integrity, and promote its economic and social development.” The law also says China will at the same time “grow relations with its neighbouring countries in accordance with the principle of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness and the policy of enhancing friendship and partnership with its neighbours.”

Another article that will be scrutinised, particularly by Indian and foreign companies operating within China, is Article 8, which declares that “any organisation or individual who commits acts that are detrimental to China’s national interests in violation of this Law and other applicable laws in the course of engaging in international exchanges shall be held accountable by law.” Article 33 says the government “has the right to take, as called for, measures to counter or take restrictive measures against acts that endanger its sovereignty, national security and development interests in violation of international law or fundamental norms governing international relations.” What is deemed as “detrimental to China’s national interests” is not clear , giving the authorities a wide scope in how this may be implemented.