What to Read in Indian Express Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

EDITORIAL 1: Let the rivers talk to each other

Context

The BJP-led Delhi government’s prioritisation of cleaning the Yamuna, supported by the central government’s Namami Gange Programme, offers a valuable opportunity for reciprocal learning and the development of a comprehensive river rejuvenation policy in India.

Namami Gange Programme

• The NGP, launched in 2014 as the Government of India’s flagship programme, can boast of a discernible impact in improving the water quality and ecological status of the Ganga.
• Besides the recent cleaner Maha Kumbh, the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) offers the rising populations of keystone species such as the Ganges dolphinas evidence of the improved ecological status of the river.
• In over a decade of its implementation, the NGP’s responsive policy and institutional experiments stand out as a departure from the earlier Ganga Action Plan.

To a broad approach

• Implemented in mission mode, the NGP has interesting legal and institutional innovations to its credit.
• The foremost among these is that it has shifted from the regulatory framingof what was the Ministry of Environment and Forests to an executive approach, in the Ministry of Jal Shakti.
• The programme also marks a shift from pollution abatement to improving the ecological condition of the river.
• The NGP has pursued a river basin approachinformed by a plan produced by a consortium of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
• In celebrated river restoration programmes, like those in Europe, such shifts took decades.
• The International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine (ICPR),established in 1950 to restore the River Rhine, made these shifts only after the Sandoz disaster in 1986.

An ‘authority’ status

• The NMCG was accorded the status of an authority soon after it was launched through the River Ganga (Rejuvenation, Protection and Management) Authorities Order of 2016.
• The National Ganga River Basin Authority, constituted earlier, was dissolved through this order and was replaced with a National Ganga Council (NGC).
• The NGC is headed by the Prime Minister with the chief ministers of the riparian states and 10 Union ministers as members.
• The NGC guides an empowered task forceheaded by the Union Minister for Jal Shakti, and an executive council headed by NMCG’s director general with extensive financial and regulatory powers.
• The most striking feature of the 2016 order is the recognition of the subnational governments as important partners.
• It mandates a layered structure of state Ganga committees and district Ganga committees — accommodating the important roles of governments at different levels.

The absence of ownership

• Despite this deliberate effort, the subnational participation in Namami Gange has not been very encouraging.
• The absence of ownership of the programme — the basin states’ legal, institutional and budgetary responses — raises questions about its enduring impact.
• This is where the NGP can leverage the Delhi government-driven project of cleaning the Yamuna for a model that can be scaled.
• The project can reveal the missing and less understood drivers, motivations, and channels of subnational mobilisationfor river rejuvenation.

Delhi’s Yamuna

• Delhi’s Yamuna project is a particularly complex one and can therefore make a useful contribution.
• The Yamuna, like all other major Indian rivers, is an interstate river.Improving its ecological status depends on reliable interstate cooperation mechanisms for enduring outcomes — a challenge that Delhi will need to address.
• At the same time, it faces water quality deterioration due to a pollutant load of close to 80 per cent from the city-state of Delhi.
• Studies have shown that Delhi’s uncaptured and untreated sewage is responsible for the pollution load in the Yamuna.
• This is a classic instance where improvement in river water quality directly depends on improved urban governance.

Conclusion

The NGP can potentially leverage responses like Delhi’s cleaning of the Yamuna towards creating a policy and institutional ecosystem to rejuvenate India’s rivers.

 

EDITORIAL 2: BRICS is China’s playground

Context

India’s membership of multilateral institutions such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has been justified along the lines that these provide platforms to push for a more multipolar world order that limits the dominance of Western powers and West-led institutions.

BRICS

• Indeed, BRICS emerged as a group focused on challenging the norms that shaped multilateral economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
• BRICS offered another avenue for India’s aspirations for global leadership as it, along with Brazil, China and Russia, negotiated a larger proportion of quotas and votes at these institutions.
• In recent years, as BRICS has expanded its membership, it has arguably provided India another platform to develop ties with countries in the Global South.

Foreign policy goals

• The international order is going through a transformation and the contours of the new order are not yet clear, and it is pertinent to ask whether China-dominated institutions such as BRICS will help India or drag it down.
• While BRICS and the SCO still provide India platforms to push for multipolarity, they do not further many of its key foreign policy goals.
• In some cases, its interests might even be adversely affected through the collective positions taken.
• Clearly, China’s economic size, assertive foreign policy and dominance in these institutions limit the extentto which India can exert its influence and secure its interests.

China’s playground

• China’s GDP, at $17.79 trillion, is nearly five times the size of India’s at $3.56 trillion.
• This economic might, along with China’s extensive trade and investment ties with other BRICS countries, allow it to exert greater political influence.
• At the BRICS summits, Beijing has used its leverage to promote goalssuch as de-dollarisation and expansion of the organisation’s membership.
• It has also used the venue to advocate for a larger role in global governance for itself.
• While India seeks to pursue some of these goals, it has not been able to further its interests through BRICS.

Leader of Global South

• While India seeks to expand its ties with countries in the Global South and portray itself as their leader, given the deep economic ties China enjoys with other BRICS countries, it is difficult for New Delhi to claim the leadership mantlewhile operating within the organisation.
• Additionally, India is deeply conflicted on de-dollarisation. While it has not been opposed to creating alternative payment mechanisms, it has enjoyed strong and increasing trade and investment ties with the US and has sought to limit its dependence on China.
• The economic asymmetry within BRICS has also spilled over in the way Beijing has used the New Development Bank, the group’s flagship financial institution.
• While India has borrowed for its infrastructure projects, it is China that has been able to leverage its economic power to shape the discussion at the NDB around infrastructure and connectivity, which in turn bolsters its Belt and Road Initiative.

Way forward

• As China’s economic might has continued to grow and its foreign policy has increased in ambition and assertiveness, the forum today might constrain rather than further India’s foreign policy objectives. Indian leaders might be well advised to reevaluate BRICS’s utility.