Crossing the line: On Delhi’s decision to limit health services

Part of: GS-II- Governance (PT-MAINS-PERSONALITY TEST)

Delhi should not hide failures by limiting health-care access to just its residents

The decision announced by Chief Minister to restrict COVID-19 treatment in Delhi’s private hospitals and those run by the government of NCT only to those with proof of residence in the city was ill-thought-out.

• As Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal noted in his order overruling the decision, ‘Right to Health’ is an integral part of ‘Right to Life’ under Article 21 of the Constitution.
• While health care is far from being universal in India, positively denying that to someone on the grounds of residency is insensitive and irresponsible.
• The Lieutenant-Governor has now directed that treatment should not be denied to anyone.
• Mr. Kejriwal depicted a scenario of “people of the whole country” overwhelming hospitals in the city as justification for his nativism.
• After the LG’s intervention, the Chief Minister and his deputy, reiterated the argument and preemptively sought to wash their hands of the worsening situation.
• They expect 5.5 lakh COVID-19 cases by July-end for which 80,000 beds could be needed.
• The 10-week lockdown was meant to ramp up health infrastructure, and if the AAP government has not done that, it has only itself to blame. In fact, it must come clean on what it has done.

What to do?

• Restriction of movement is a crucial tool in pandemic management, but it has to be justifiable.
• The NCT is functionally contiguous with Gurugram in Haryana and NOIDA in Uttar Pradesh.
• Thousands cross these borders for work and other needs including health care. People contribute to tax revenues in three different jurisdictions.
• This makes Mr. Kejriwal’s rhetoric unreasonable as much as Karnataka’s decision to prevent residents of Kasargod in Kerala from accessing hospitals in Mangaluru earlier.
• The AAP government’s approach is contentious for more reasons, however, as it is using it also as a diversionary tactic.
• While the city is recording an exponential growth in infections, the government is trying to deflect attention from its inadequacies by hiding the numbers.
• It has reduced testing dramatically — on June 2 it was 6,070, on June 7, 5,042, and on June 8, 3,700.
• The AAP government accused private labs of flouting ICMR guidelines and discouraged testing of asymptomatic people. The high positivity rate — the proportion of positives to total tests — indicates that the NCT is not testing enough.

The ICMR’s May 18 strategy directed testing of direct and high risk contacts of confirmed coronavirus individuals even if asymptomatic. The government revised this by removing “asymptomatic” from the clause, which was also overturned by the LG who ordered that guidelines must be adhered to in their entirety. Delhi is testing more than the national average for per million population but that does not say much given that it has a population density 30 times the national figure. Delhi needs to get its act together.

Pincer provocations? India-China-Pakistan

GS- PAPER-II India and China

India should not conflate the various threats to its security in the Kashmir-Ladakh region

Although the latest news on the Ladakh front suggests that Chinese and Indian forces have begun to disengage in select areas, this does not detract from the reality that in the past few weeks Beijing and Islamabad are making coordinated efforts to challenge India’s presence in the Kashmir-Ladakh region. There is stepped-up activity on Pakistan’s part to infiltrate terrorists into the Valley. China has undertaken provocative measures on the Ladakh front to assert control over disputed areas around the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Overlapping interests

• In Pakistan’s case, the intensification of its terrorist activities is related in part to the dilution of Article 370 which it perceives as undercutting its claims on Kashmir with finality.
• China seems to have calculated that the division of Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir, which delinks Ladakh from the Kashmir problem, allows India a freer hand in contesting China’s claims in the region.
• Increasing road-building activity on India’s part close to the LAC augments this perception.
• In addition to bordering China’s most restive provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet, Ladakh is contiguous to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), Gilgit and Baltistan, where the Chinese have invested hugely in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.
• When completed, the CPEC will connect Xinjiang with Gwadar port in Balochistan.
• External Affairs Minister's remark last year that India expects to have “physical jurisdiction over (POK) one day” has alarmed Beijing which sees any such Indian move as threatening the CPEC project.
• These factors demonstrate the overlapping interests that Beijing and Islamabad have regarding India in this region.
• Both would like India to be so preoccupied with taking defensive measures in Kashmir and Ladakh as to have little time and energy left to attempt to alter the status quo in POK or in Aksai Chin.

Divergence in VIEWPOINT OF Pak and China

• However, there are major differences in Pakistani and Chinese objectives regarding India that are related to their divergent perceptions of their disputes and their different force equations with India.
• For China, Ladakh is primarily a territorial dispute with strategic ramifications.
• China also believes it is superior to Indian militarily and, therefore, can afford to push India around within limits as it has been attempting to do in the recent confrontation.
• For Pakistan, its territorial claim on Kashmir is based on an immutable ideological conviction that it is the unfinished business of partition and as a Muslim-majority state is destined to become a part of Pakistan.
• Islamabad also realises that it is the weaker power in conventional terms and therefore has to use unconventional means, primarily terrorist infiltration, to achieve its objective of changing the status quo in Kashmir.
• China is a satiated power in Ladakh having occupied Aksai Chin and wants to keep up the pressure on New Delhi to prevent the latter from trying to change the situation on the ground.

Changing the status quo

It is true that China is agitated about the recent vociferous revival of India’s claims on PoK but its primary concern with regard to Kashmir is to prevent any Indian move from threatening the CPEC project. It does not challenge the status quo in Kashmir. Pakistan, on the other hand, is committed to changing the status quo in Kashmir at all costs. It has been trying to do so since Partition not only through clandestine infiltration but also by engaging in conventional warfare. Therefore, while it is possible to negotiate the territorial dispute with China on a give-and-take basis this is not possible in the case of Pakistan which considers Kashmir a zero-sum game. India should, therefore, distinguish the different objectives on the part of Beijing and Islamabad and tailor its responses accordingly without conflating the two threats to its security. Lumping the two threats together because of a tactical overlap between them makes it difficult to choose policy options rationally.

River water dispute

Part of: GS-II- Governance (PT-MAINS-PERSONALITY TEST)

Recently, the Union government has decided to take the stock of water utilisation from the Krishna and Godavari rivers following the filing of complaints against each other by Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments.

Water Dispute:

Telangana and Andhra Pradesh share stretches of the Krishna and the Godavari and own their tributaries.

Both states have proposed several new projects without getting clearance from the river boards, the Central Water Commission and the Apex Council, as mandated by the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014.

Imp Points

• The Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 mandates for constitution of an Apex Council by Central Government for the supervision of the functioning of the Godavari River Management Board and Krishna River Management Board.
• The Apex Council comprises the Union Water Resources Minister and the Chief Ministers of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
• The Andhra Pradesh government’s proposal to increase the utilisation of the Krishna water from a section of the river above the Srisailam Reservoir led to the Telangana government filing a complaint against Andhra Pradesh.
• The Srisailam reservoir is constructed across the Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh. It is located in the Nallamala hills.
• The Andhra Pradesh government retaliated with its own complaints saying that Palamuru-Rangareddy, Dindi Lift Irrigation Schemes on the Krishna river and Kaleshwaram, Tupakulagudem schemes and a few barrages proposed across the Godavari are all new projects.

Krishna Water Dispute Tribunal:

Two tribunals have been constituted to resolve the disputes of the Krishna water.

Andhra Pradesh has countered the second Krishna Water Dispute Tribunal (KWDT) order issued by Justice Brijesh Kumar in 2010.

The Brijesh Kumar Tribunal has allocated 81 thousand million cubic feet (tmcft) of surplus water to Maharashtra, 177 tmcft to Karnataka and only 196 tmcft to Andhra Pradesh.

After the creation of Telangana as a separate state in 2014, Andhra Pradesh is asking to include Telangana as a separate party at the KWDT and that the allocation of Krishna waters be reworked among four states, instead of three.

It has challenged the order of the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal in the Supreme Court.

Godavari Water Dispute Tribunal:

• The Godavari Water Dispute Tribunal headed by Justice Bachawat was constituted by the Government in April, 1969.
• The tribunal was tasked to look after the dispute over Godavari river between Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Karnataka over the sharing of the Godavari river water.
• The Bachawat Tribunal gave its final award in 1980.
• Accordingly, each State was free to utilise the flow in Godavari and its tributaries up to a certain level.
• Thus, Andhra Pradesh decided to divert 80 tmcft of Godavari water from Polavaram to Krishna river, upstream of Vijayawada, so that it could be shared with Karnataka and Maharashtra.
• Once Telangana came into existence in 2014, the Godavari water and, more specifically, the Polavaram project became the bone of contention between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
• While the project will take care of the irrigation needs of the Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana fears it would submerge many villages in its Khammam district.
• Odisha too has expressed its reservations over the Polavaram dam's design.

Union Government’s Move:

It has asked the Krishna and Godavari River Management Boards to procure the details of the irrigation projects on these rivers, including from Maharashtra and Karnataka and submit them to the Centre in a month. The main objective of the exercise appears to be to assess whether surplus water will be available for the new projects in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, in the light of the disputes.

Inter-State Water Disputes

• Article 262 of the Constitution provides for the adjudication of inter-state water disputes.
• Under this, Parliament may by law provide for the adjudication of any dispute or complaint with respect to the use, distribution and control of waters of any inter-state river and river valley.
• Parliament may also provide that neither the Supreme Court nor any other court is to exercise jurisdiction in respect of any such dispute or complaint.
• The Parliament has enacted the two laws, the River Boards Act (1956) and the Inter-State Water Disputes Act (1956).
• The River Boards Act provides for the establishment of river boards by the Central government for the regulation and development of inter-state river and river valleys.
• A River Board is established on the request of state governments concerned to advise them.
• The Inter-State Water Disputes Act empowers the Central government to set up an ad hoc tribunal for the adjudication of a dispute between two or more states in relation to the waters of an inter-state river or river valley.
• The decision of the tribunal is final and binding on the parties to the dispute.
• Neither the Supreme Court nor any other court is to have jurisdiction in respect of any water dispute which may be referred to such a tribunal under this Act.