Daily News Compilation (HINDU) for 21st May

The big debate

Author has discussed the question : Is democracy in long-run decline?

• Without a rival system to test them, democratic governments have decayed across the globe. 
• According to measures by Freedom House, freedom has been in retreat around the world for the past eight years. New democracies like South Africa are decaying; the number of nations that the Bertelsmann Foundation now classifies as “defective democracies” (rigged elections and so on) has risen to 52. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their book, “ The Fourth Revolution ,” “So far the 21st century has been a rotten one for the Western model.”
• The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.

The Guardian State

A new charismatic rival is gaining strength: the Guardian State. In their book, Micklethwait and Wooldridge do an outstanding job of describing Asia’s modernising autocracies. In some ways, these governments look more progressive than the Western model; in some ways, more conservative.

These Guardian States have some disadvantages compared with Western democracies. 

1. They are more corrupt. 
2. Because the systems are top-down, local government tends to be worse. 

But they have advantages. 

1. They are better at long-range thinking and can move fast because they limit democratic feedback and don’t face NIMBY-style impediments.
2. Most important, they are more innovative than Western democracies right now. 

So how should Western democracies respond to this competition? What’s needed is not so much a vision of the proper role for the state as a strategy to make democracy dynamic again.

The answer is to use Lee Kuan Yew means to achieve Jeffersonian ends — to become less democratic at the national level in order to become more democratic at the local level. At the national level, U.S. politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections.

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms.

Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

If the Guardian State’s big advantage is speed at the top, democracy’s is speed at the bottom. So, obviously, the elite commissions should push proposals that magnify that advantage: which push control over poverty programs to local charities; which push educational diversity through charter schools; which introduce more market mechanisms into public provision of, say, health care, to spread power to consumers.

Renewable energy provides 6.5 million jobs worldwide

India is one of the largest employers in the renewable energy industry, which has become a leading employer sector globally with approximately 6.5 million people directly or indirectly earning their livelihood from it, according to a study by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

The largest employers by country are China, Brazil, the United States, India, Germany, Spain and Bangladesh, while the largest employers by sector are solar photovoltaic, bio fuels, wind, modern biomass and biogas.

U.S. won’t use vaccine drives for covert operations

After the deans of 12 top U.S. public health schools wrote to the Obama administration earlier this year protesting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s use of Pakistani surgeon Shakil Afridi to conduct a fake immunisation drive in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the White House this week promised to never use a vaccine campaign again in counterterrorism operations.

Apparently 83 new polio cases were reported in Pakistan last year, which exceeds the number of cases discovered in Afghanistan and Nigeria, prompting an independent monitoring board set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to describe the country as “a powder keg that could ignite widespread polio transmission.” India however won global plaudits for successfully eradicating polio in 2013.

Antarctic ice loss has doubled: study

Antarctica is shedding 160 billion tonnes a year of ice into the ocean, twice the amount of a few years ago, according to new satellite observations. The ice loss is adding to the rising sea levels driven by climate change and even east Antarctica is now losing ice.

The new revelations follow the announcement last week that the collapse of the western Antarctica ice sheet has already begun and is unstoppable, although it may take many centuries to complete.

Global warming is pushing up sea level by melting the world’s major ice caps and by warming and expanding oceans. The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet would eventually cause up to 4 metres of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world.

RBI may ease norms for infrastructure funding

The Reserve Bank of India is examining whether it should relieve banks of CRR (Cash Reserve Ratio) and SLR (Statutory Liquidity Ratio) obligations with regard to infrastructure funding.

The CRR and SLR obligations disadvantage banks vis-a-vis other financial institutions in the raising and lending of long-term money, which becomes especially important for infrastructure, Dr. Rajan said. Since construction lasts for 5-7 years, banks should be able to raise long-tenor money for these purposes, said Dr. Rajan. However, at present, the raising of such money by banks is burdened with CRR and SLR requirements. Thereafter, any lending that banks do attracts further priority-sector obligations. “To the extent that banks raise long-term bonds and use them for infrastructure financing, could we relieve them of such obligations?” said Dr. Rajan.