The arrest of two women in Palghar (near Mumbai) for an innocuous Facebook status update is the latest indicator of an increasing intolerance of free speech, especially online. The state has also increased its surveillance. The focus on surveillance and censorship is evident not only in specific instances but also in the statistics. In February, the government said it taps 300 new phones on an average day. Google&rsquo;s latest Transparency Report says India also generates the second-largest number of requests for content takedowns and information about user accounts. Between January 2012 and June 2012, India made 2,319 requests for user data from 3,467 accounts and 273 requests for takedowns. Google complied with only 64 per cent of those requests, which means the rest did not meet legal standards, even under the provisions of Indian law. Many requests were for the removal of content &ldquo;defamatory &rdquo; to sundry politicians, and &ldquo;government criticism&rdquo;.

Absurd arrests

Business Standard

It is not often that the government asks the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) to review its report on the pricing and marketing policy for wheat &mdash; though the commission&rsquo;s recommendations have been overlooked in the past to factor in political considerations while fixing minimum support prices (MSP). The present controversy over wheat- marketing policies concerns chiefly two issues.

Listen to the CACP

The attack on Mumbai that unfolded on November 26, 2008, and didn&rsquo;t stop for 60 unrelenting hours was not an ordinary crime. Indeed, if there ever is any occasion that fits the Supreme Court&rsquo;s &ldquo;rarest of rare&rdquo; qualifier in handing out the death sentence, this would be it, considering how emotive the issue has become in India and how much the scenes of carnage from 26/11 have embedded themselves in collective public memory.

Swift closure

The recent summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, in Phnom Penh was noteworthy for two reasons. First, because it became clear that a powerful bloc within Asean is not willing to allow Beijing to bully its way through maritime territorial disputes, even though the host nation, Cambodia, lobbied hard for China.

More FTAs, less red tape

The government has finally kicked the disinvestment ball a little further towards the goal of achieving the target figure of Rs 30,000 crore this financial year. With luck it might get there, though the lacklustre state of the stock market is no help &mdash; as demonstrated by the response to the ONGC share auction, which was salvaged only by the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) picking up the bulk of what was on offer.

India's own fiscal cliff

Not for a decade has growth in gross domestic product been as low as it is likely to be this financial year. Finance Minister P Chidambaram now says that it may be in the 5.5-6.0 per cent range; the Reserve Bank&rsquo;s figure is midway, at 5.7 per cent. More worryingly, while the slowdown has been caused very substantially by a shortfall in investment, there seem to be few sources of recovery on this front.

The sources of growth

The summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, at which India was an observer, concluded last week with a reaffirmation of the virtues of free trade and regional integration. US President Barack Obama&rsquo;s visit to Phnom Penh to the summit was preceded by a stopover in Myanmar, which only underlined the new importance of the country as a source of natural resources. Of course, for India, Myanmar means even more &mdash; particularly in the context of trade with Southeast Asia. Good relations with its eastern neighbour are essential if new communications networks are to be built that will reduce non-tariff barriers to trade between India and Asean countries.

Leading questions

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government&rsquo;s appointment of a new head of India&rsquo;s major investigation agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, has deservedly come in for some flak. It is important to state that this is not because of who has been picked to head it &mdash; the senior-most of the three candidates on offer from the 1974 batch of the Indian Police Service. It is, very properly, a question of procedure that is being raised.

Appointment point

The government has not yet formally announced the new drug pricing policy that it has finalised at the eleventh hour to meet a Supreme Court deadline set for later this week. However, it has reportedly firmed up one key element. The price of a drug coming under control will be the average of the prices of all brands of that drug with at least one per cent market share. This means a lower price than what would have emerged had the earlier formula of applying a weighted average price been accepted. Predictably, the biggest players &ndash; whose prices tend to be higher &ndash; are unhappy. The industry as a whole had earlier welcomed moving away from the practice of fixing controlled prices on the basis of costs to one of relying on market prices because the latter is less discretionary and contestable. Civil society groups whose litigation before the Supreme Court had forced the government to come up with a new pricing policy to replace the one framed in 1995 are also unhappy.

Curing medicines

Normally, diseases that break out during the rainy season tend to fade away on the withdrawal of the monsoon. That hasn&rsquo;t happened this year. Infections typical of hot and humid weather, such as dengue, malaria, encephalitis, meningitis and chikungunya, have tended to persist despite the onset of winter. Meanwhile, cold-weather maladies like various types of influenza, including the dreaded swine flu and bird flu, have also surfaced. Delhi alone has recorded more than 1,800 cases of dengue &ndash; the count of unreported cases must be much higher &ndash; causing scores of deaths. Mumbai, too, has seen over 700 cases of dengue, including some deaths, the most famed victim being filmmaker Yash Chopra. The situation in other cities and villages is no different. And over a dozen cases of swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus, have come to light in areas around Delhi.

Unseasonal illness 

The central government is going full speed ahead with the operationalisation of the Aadhaar platform. About 50 districts will have various pilot projects running soon; and it intends the entire country, more or less, to have access to the Unique ID-empowered variants of existing schemes by the end of 2013, according to a recent statement by the finance minister. The movement to cash transfers for welfare spending is overdue and presents the possibility of considerable saving.

UID's unintended effect

What to make of the compromise allegedly worked out between Egypt&rsquo;s President Mohammed Morsi and the judiciary to curb the sweeping powers he gave himself last Thursday? Those powers, among other things, put his rulings outside the purview of judicial review until a new Parliament is elected. The agreement, as purveyed to the press by a presidential spokesperson, suggests that only &ldquo;sovereign decisions&rdquo; would be kept outside judicial oversight.

The Pharaoh complex

The import of two items contributes disproportionately to India&rsquo;s record trade gap and current account deficit. One of these, namely energy imports, is unavoidable. The strong demand for the other item &ndash; gold &ndash; is driven by several factors and may perhaps be reduced. India imports up to a quarter of annual global production, and gold imports equal 75 per cent of the current account deficit.

Chains of gold

The nearly decade-old programme to promote ethanol-blended petrol has failed to make much headway despite continued attempts by the government to get it going. The latest such attempt was last week, when the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) made the very poor decision to force oil marketing companies to mix five per cent ethanol with petrol throughout the country from next month. Past experience should have warned the CCEA off.

Nothing in the tank

Investigations are still ongoing into the confused few seconds just over a week ago when Gurdeep Singh &ldquo;Ponty&rdquo; Chadha and his brother Hardeep Singh Chadha were both shot and killed in Chhattarpur, in one of the farmhouses that dot the green, expensive and dangerous southern margin of Delhi. Seven recreations of the crime have not, reportedly, helped. Meanwhile, the fallout of the murders has taken a political turn. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has apparently accused a minister in the state government of Delhi of having links to Hardeep Chadha &mdash; the latter&rsquo;s spirits company was reportedly given a contract to operate buses in South Delhi, which it only partially fulfilled. Another accused in the shootout is an expelled BJP leader from Uttarakhand, Sukhdev Singh Namdhari.

Ponty Chadha's world

Trouble is again being caused by the inherent contradictions between the two laws &ndash; the Indian Forest Act and the Forest Rights Act (FRA) &ndash; that govern India&rsquo;s forests, their produce and the people dependent on them for their livelihood. The fact that these statutes are implemented by different ministries &ndash; the environment ministry for the forest law and the tribal affairs ministry for the FRA &ndash; exacerbates the problem. The latest manifestation of this conflict has emerged from the missive despatched by Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo to his environment ministry counterpart, Jayanthi Natarajan, accusing the latter of handing over forests to industry without seeking consent from the local Gram Sabhas, which is mandatory under the FRA. Another revealing discrepancy between the two laws that has come to light recently concerns the collection and movement of minor forest produce by forest-dwelling communities.

Forests vs tribals 

A war of words has broken out between the Socialist Party government of France and ArcelorMittal after the steel maker announced on October 1 that it would shut two blast furnaces at Florange because these had become uncompetitive. It had agreed to the French government&rsquo;s request that it would like to find a buyer for these furnaces by the end of this month, probably because 629 jobs were at stake. ArcelorMittal had added a coke plant to the sale, though it was not being closed. This Monday, Arnaud Montebaurg, France&rsquo;s minister for industrial renewal, threatened to nationalise the entire Florange plant (not just the two blast furnaces) and said the group was no longer welcome in France. He later watered down his comments, but accused Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, who is the chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, of &ldquo;non-respect of its commitments, blackmail and threats&rdquo;.

France vs Mittal 

The report of the Vijay Kelkar Committee on fiscal consolidation argues that the Indian economy is &ldquo;poised on the edge of a fiscal precipice&rdquo;. The fiscal deficit is poised to miss its budgeted target by a large margin for the second year in a row &mdash; it could be 6.1 per cent of gross domestic product, a full percentage point higher than the Budget estimate.

Heed the Kelkar report

In the final act of former Chief Justice Sarosh Kapadia&rsquo;s tenure, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion on the Presidential reference on auctions of natural resources that was motivated by the court&rsquo;s 2G judgment earlier this year.

A sensible last act

The recommendation by a group of ministers that all 348 drugs in the list of essential medicines be brought under price control regulations will not come as a surprise to the pharmaceutical industry, as it was signalled in the pharmaceutical pricing policy formulated by the government last year under instructions from the Supreme Court.

Making drugs affordable

This newspaper reported on Monday that work has stopped at the Mali Parbat mine in Odisha that was to feed bauxite to Hindalco Industries&rsquo; aluminium smelter and refinery in the same state. Work on building the latter &ndash; named the Utkal Alumina refinery &ndash; has not stopped, but its future is uncertain.

Moving forward on mining

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 608 - Editorial Comment