Editorial 1: A woman’s eye view
Recent Context:
- Never in the last 75 years have Indian women been so celebrated and at the same time, pupblicaly so degraded.
- As the recent incident of violence against women in Manipur shaken the whole India and raised certain questions for the society and nation
Struggle of women against strong matriarchal past
- In societies like ours, Manipur defines to what extent the male viewpoint has come to dominate a community with a strong matriarchal past, its politics, administrative system and local legal ecosystem.
- Recent incident of Manipur dispelled the lustre of early feminism in Manipur where women fought two wars (Nupi Lan) against the British in 1904 and 1939 and later led strong movements against alcoholism and drugs and the AFSPA.
There is need for effective implementation of existing laws apart from bring new legislative reform:
- No law guaranteeing gender equality will succeed in an unequal society. If we want true equality in the next 25 years, certain steps need to be taken effectively
- Need to bring reform within existing law:
- As whether it is rape or a uniform civil code, we must first talk about how our present laws, shaped from male perspectives, have been used to argue cases, mostly by male lawyers.
- They have also been adjudicated upon by mostly male judges, resulting in judgments that created precedents for combining coercion with authority.
- As, Inequality is hard to spot in India when women challenge their powerful exploiters. The way things unfurl once an FIR is registered, whether it’s the female wrestlers or Bilkis Bano or other less-known victims, they learn that in the eyes of the implementers of law, status quo is equality for women.
- Therefore, there is need to enumerate and confront by law the inequalities affecting women’s condition so as to begin a chain of changes
- Need to frame and Implement UCC efficiently:
- Nothing exposes women to destitution, enforced dependency and permanent relegation to low visibility and low-paying jobs than the graphic reality and threat of sexual abuse within homes, in streets, at public rallies or even public transport.
- So, when life-changing laws like the uniform civil code are being discussed, one hopes that, as a first step, these discussions can include women representatives who can claim women’s experiences as legitimate.
- There is need to erode existing patriarchy within society:
- There is routinely discriminated against women, despite laws giving them legitimate share in property, control over their own wombs and custody of their children.
- Therefore, the systemic inequality between men and women today that marks women of all ages, castes and classes and makes them vulnerable to male dominance within homes and at the workplace must go.
Conceptualizing women Empowerment:
Conclusion:
- Law is society’s text and also its gold standard.
- Therefore, there is need for implementation of existing laws effectively while bring collective reform from the Judiciary, legislation and within the society itself.
- As, in a democracy, women are intrinsically as human as men, and all human life in the nation is and will be born of women. And it will be through them that the nation will first learn of love and powerlessness, love and hate, power and tenderness.
Editorial 2: Centre withdraws DNA Bill: What it says, and what are the objections against it
Recent Context:
- Recently, Union government withdrew the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019, from the Lok Sabha
- As it was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee after being introduced in the Lok Sabha in which it highlighted the fears of a number of MPs, saying the Bill could be misused to target segments of society based on religion, caste or political views
What is the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill and its purpose
- The Bill seeks to create a regulatory framework for obtaining, storing and testing DNA samples of human beings, mainly for the purposes of criminal investigations,and with the objective of establishing the identity of a person.
- DNA testing is already being used for a variety of purposes, such as criminal investigations, establishment of parentage, and search for missing people.
- The proposed law seeks to bring in a supervisory structure to oversee these practices, and frame guidelines and rules so that the DNA technology is not misused.
Significant provisions of the bill
- The Bill proposes to set up two institutional structures a DNA regulatory board and a DNA data bank at the national level.
- Regional centres of the board as well as the data bank can be set up at the state level too.
- The board, which is proposed to be the main regulatory authority, would frame the rules and guidelines for DNA collection, testing and storage, while the data bank would be the repository of all DNA samples collected from various people under specified rules.
- The Bill proposes that testing of DNA samples can be carried out only at laboratories that are authorised to do so by the regulatory board.
- It also specifies the circumstances under which a person can be asked to submit DNA samples, the purposes for which such requests can be made, and the exact procedure for handling, storing and accessing these samples.
What are the objections against the Bill?
- The main debate over the proposed law has been around three issues
- whether DNA technology is foolproof,
- whether the provisions adequately address the possibility of abuse of DNA information, and
- whether the privacy of the individual is protected.
- DNA information can be extremely revelatory. It can not only establish a person’s identity but also reveal a lot about physical and biological attributes of the person like eye, hair or skin colour, susceptibility to diseases, possible medical history, and possible clues to biological relatives.
- The critics of the Bill have been claiming that collecting and storing such intrusive information could lead to abuse, besides being violative of a person’s privacy.
- he Standing Committee’s 2021 report said, “The Committee is conscious of the fact that this Bill is very technical, complex and sensitive.
- A number of Members have expressed concern about the use of DNA technology — or more accurately its misuse — to target different segments of our society based on factors like religion, caste or political views. These fears are not entirely unfounded (and) have to be recognized and addressed.”
What has the government said?
- The government has defended the Bill by arguing that nearly 60 countries have enacted similar legislation and that all important matters related to privacy, confidentiality and data protection have been taken into account.
- It has also claimed that very limited information is proposed to be stored in the indices just 17 sets of numbers out of billions that DNA samples can reveal. These can tell nothing about the individual and only acts act as a unique identifier
Conclusion
- The Centre must address concerns over misuse and privacy while harnessing the potential benefits of DNA technology for criminal investigations and other purposes.
