News Papers EDITORIALS - 26 NOVEMBER 2016

✌✌✌✌   THE HINDU    ✌✌✌✌ 

✌✌  Appointing a Lokpal  ✌✌

By admonishing the Union government for delaying the appointment of a Lokpal, the Supreme Court has sent across a timely message that efforts to cleanse the economy must be matched by equally strong measures to cleanse public life too. There can really be no excuse for the failure to establish an institution even three years after passing the relevant law. The only reason for the delay in the appointment of the Lokpal is that a minor amendment to the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, to enable the leader of the largest party in the opposition in the Lok Sabha to join the five-member selection committee, is yet to be passed. A parliamentary committee has endorsed the amendment, which is on the same lines as the mechanism for the selection panels for the Central Vigilance Commissioner and the Chief Information Commissioner. The court has indicated that it will not allow the institution to remain inoperative indefinitely, evoking apprehension on the Centre’s part that a judicial direction may be given to get the amendment passed or an ordinance promulgated. The Centre needs to re-examine its own options on implementing the Lokpal Act. The law now provides for a five-member panel to select the anti-corruption ombudsman, comprising the Prime Minister, the Lok Sabha Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition, the Chief Justice of India and an eminent jurist. The hitch is that there is no recognised LoP in the lower House. The question now is whether the Centre is right in claiming the Congress floor leader cannot hold that post because its bench strength is well short of the required 55.

The rule that the Speaker can recognise as LoP only the leader of the principal opposition party that has 10 per cent of the total number of Lok Sabha seats is based on precedent. It was a ruling by Speaker G.V. Mavalankar, cited in the ‘Directions for the Functioning of the Lok Sabha’, with respect to recognising a group as a ‘parliamentary party’. The only legal provision defining the ‘Leader of the Opposition’ is a 1977 law concerning the office-holder’s salary. The definition says the LoP shall be the leader of the party in opposition with “the greatest numerical strength” and “recognised as such by the Speaker”. Therefore, there is nothing in law that prevents the Speaker from recognising the present Congress Parliamentary Party leader as the LoP. Instead of waiting for the amendment, the Speaker can adopt the solution of recognising the CPP leader and expedite the Lokpal’s formation. It just needs political will and some magnanimity.

✌✌  The gathering crisis in Seoul   ✌

Hundreds of thousands of angry citizens have been taking to the streets every weekend in South Korea, against the continuation in office of President Park Geun-hye. The crisis of confidence in Ms. Park’s leadership exploded after her aide Choi Soon-sil was arrested over allegations that Ms. Choi covertly exercised illegal authority over critical government decisions. She has also allegedly extorted $69 million from the giant industrial conglomerates, or chaebols, in the form of donations to two charitable foundations. Ms. Park has stood her ground and clung on to the presidency, even as she sacked at least eight of her aides in an unsuccessful attempt to regain public trust. Yet, pressure is mounting as the opposition parties are circling the wagons over impeaching her for breach of the Constitution. An impeachment motion would require two-thirds support in the 300-seat National Assembly. Opposition parties enjoy a combined majority there, and say they have secured the backing of more than 29 lawmakers of the ruling Saenuri party, the minimum number required to push this through. If they succeed, this would be the first time in 12 years that South Korea’s National Assembly has impeached a president.

History also matters in the broader context of the unravelling relationship between the South Korean government and the chaebols. What began as a storied macroeconomic strategy of “picking winners” from amongst competing industrial groups, a paradigm that produced the Samsungs and Hyundais of today, is under a cloud. On November 8, prosecutors raided the Samsung offices over allegations it had transferred $3.1 million to a company owned by Ms. Choi in Germany. The hard-fought democracy that South Koreans won in 1987, driven by “people power” protests similar to the ones seen in Seoul this month, is in need of revitalisation. The pressure to establish a more sustainable model of governance is immense, not least because South Korea finds itself at a strategic crossroads on the global stage. Whoever succeeds Ms. Park as President — and it might well be soon-to-retire UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — would have to address sky-high tensions with nuclear-armed North Korea, and manage an economy that is at risk of slowing. Ties are cooling with China, South Korea’s largest trading partner, and Beijing is hostile to the prospect of deploying the U.S.-made antiballistic missile system THAAD in the peninsula. Further, the rhetoric of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on economic protectionism and reviewing relationships with treaty allies does not help the South Korean cause. One way or another, the ball is in Ms. Park’s court, and she has the opportunity to bring the turmoil to a quick end.

✌✌✌✌  THE ECONOMIC TIMES  ✌✌✌✌ 

✌✌  Don’t divert coal cess from green projects  ✌✌ 

The Centre needs to clarify and make it clear that the green cess on coal mining would be solely used for green projects and not used, say, to part-compensate the states for any revenue shortfall in the changeover to the goods and services tax. Such diversion of funds for fiscal compensation would defeat the very purpose of the cess: to fund green projects and penalise environmental damage. Yet, finance minister Arun Jaitley has reportedly stated that the clean energy cess of Rs 400 per tonne, levied on users of coal, would now also be used to compensate the states. The Centre surely needs to reconsider.

The clean energy cess, which has rightly been raised from Rs 200 per tonne of coal lately, would now add up to over Rs 20,000 crore per annum, and it would be in our interest to use the funds for a dedicated purpose. There’s a techno-economic paradigm shift away from coal and other fossil fuels, and we do need to better allocate resources to boost systemic efficiency and remove energy poverty.

The recent doubling of the green cess also calls for a programme audit of the funds raised from mining over 500 million tonnes of coal. The corpus must, of course, be used to provide viability gap funding for green energy projects, such as solar and wind power facilities. In tandem, we need to fund smart grids and invest in reliable line capacity for the green power in the offing. Given that renewable power projects have high output variability, it is vital that we have sound evacuation facilities for transmitting and supplying such power cross-country. It is also important that we use the green cess funds to adopt and widely diffuse new technology to significantly shore up thermal efficiency in conventional power plants. It would proactively reduce carbon emissions and strengthen India’s climate action.