Editorial 1: Every drop counts
Context: In a first-ever count of its kind, a census has recorded an overwhelming disparity between rural and urban areas in terms of water bodies.
Introduction: report
- The report highlights that cities and towns have less than 3 per cent of these reservoirs. Conducted by the Jal Shakti ministry, the survey included natural and human-made water repositories like ponds, tanks, and lakes.
- With nearly 7,50,00 water bodies, West Bengal tops the list. The country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is a distant second with about 2,50,000 repositories.
Significance of the report
- At a time when stressed aquifers pose difficult ecological, economic and policy challenges — including for the government’s flagship scheme of providing drinking water to every household — the significance of this database cannot be overstated.
- With details on the size, encroachment status and storage capacity of the water bodies, the report could help policymakers arrive at informed decisions on matters as diverse as urban planning and rural employment generation schemes.
- The significance of the current study is underscored by the fact that it counted nearly five times the number of repositories enumerated by the last minor irrigation survey in 2013-14. The past studies did not have much data on urban centres.
- The enumeration of tanks, lakes and other water sources in cities and towns was left, largely, to civil society outfits and academic institutions.
Earlier Approach
- The Centre has been conducting a census of minor irrigation structures every five years since 1986. Much of the data indirectly compiled from the population Census by government agencies has also focused on minor irrigation works.
- The irrigation-centred approach was, to an extent, a fallout of the inclination of successive governments to view tanks, ponds and canals as economic utilities, rather than critical resources for human and ecological well-being.
Towards the course correction
- The UPA government, for instance, launched the Repair, Renovation and Restoration of Water Bodies scheme in 2005 and MGNREGA works have focussed on reviving traditional water bodies. But the lack of a comprehensive database has meant that these projects have not done sufficient justice to their objectives.
Way Forward
- Making panchayats, municipalities and other local bodies the nodal points for future water body surveys as well as roping in civil society groups in the endeavour could help policymakers arrive at a better picture of the water crisis, and frame solutions.
Editorial 2: Safeguarding Constitution
Context: On the morning of April 24, 1973, 13 judges shuffled into the court of the Chief Justice of India and began to deliver a judgment that would set into motion a series of events which put the executive on a collision course with the judiciary.
Introduction
- The lead petitioner in the batch of cases was the 29-year-old chief pontiff of the Edneer mutt in northern Kerala, Kesavananda Bharati. The state had sought to acquire the mutt’s property using the amended Kerala Land Reforms Act.
- A highly controversial pluralist judicial creation, the basic structure doctrine has been accepted now by legislatures, executive, and people of India. India’s very own astonishing judicial invention, now is spread across the Global South as a thriving aspect of constitutional judicial review (CJR).
Supreme Court setting limits
- Golaknath case (1967) began setting limits to political extravaganza — the ousting of CJR by subjecting Article 368’s amending power to the discipline of fundamental rights.
- But basic structure started a new interpretive enterprise by recognising the basic identity of the Constitution, which may not be destroyed by any amendment. The basic structure discredits the repeal of the Constitution; Article 368 authorises a constitutional amendment, not constitutional desecration or dismemberment.
Not a catastrophe, but as an opportunity
- KB emerged not as a constitutional catastrophe but as an opportunity for wise exercise of co-constituent power by the summit court. It has articulated vast plenary powers of the executive and legislature and repudiated the argument of “fear” by holding that the possibility of abuse of power is no ground for its non-conferment.
- Only a minuscule of amendments and actions have been declared invalid, whereas it has almost become a litigation habit to question, on basic structure grounds, almost all exercises of legislative and executive power
Recent National Judicial Appointment Commission case
- In the NJAC case (2015), everyone accepted that the Bill was passed by Parliament and endorsed by 20 legislative assemblies.
- But the juridical question before the Court was not about the calculus of political expediency — creation and mobilisation of public opinion directed against the very idea of BS — but a reasoned elaboration of juridical principles.
Judicial Appointment, essence of law
- Judicial independence is important as the “essence” of rule of law, which embeds both “decisional autonomy” and “institutional autonomy” (“freedom from the pressure from the State”). Rule of law means that the “parameters of decision making and discretion” remain always circumscribed by the Constitution and demands respect for “constitutional conventions”.
- As demonstrated in the Second Judges Case, a convention according primacy to the CJI in matters of judicial appointments has existed at least since the Government of India Act, 1935, and “constitutional conventions and practices” mark the intersection of the unwritten Constitution with the written text.
- A two-fold “limited primacy” exists; while the concurrence of the CJI (now the collegium) is essential for any elevation, the President as the appointing authority may consult other lawyers and justices.