Policy Watch: Constitutional Values and Democratic Institutions – September 2020

The first article is a transcript of a speech titled Why the Constitution Matters? by Shri Dushyant Dave, Senior Advocate and President, Supreme Court Bar Association, which was streamed live on 22nd July 2020. It draws attention to the contemporary crisis of confidence in all the important institutions of democratic governance in our country, as envisaged in the Constitution. Readers may also like to see the Policy Watch issue of Feb 2020, in which we carried the speech of Shri Sanjay Hegde on 70 years of Citizenship and the Constitution.

The second article is on the basic foundation of the Constitution – the definition of Citizenship and the attempt to amend it through the Citizenship Amendment Bill. This article is based on an interview by Nikhila Henry with a legal scholar – Prof. Faizan Mustafa, Vice-Chancellor of NALSAR, Hyderabad. It first appeared in the Huffington Post in Dec 2019, when the protests against the CAA were at their peak.

The third article is about one of the rights-based legislations enacted during the UPA regime – the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014: Implementation Bottlenecks and the Covid-19 Crisis. This has been written by Arnab Bose, Senior Research Associate, RGICS. It shows that the actual implementation of this progressive legislation is far behind the legislative intent, seven years after enactment. It goes into the reasons why this is so and gives some recommendations on how implementation can be improved.

The fourth article is by Vijay Nadkarni, Program Coordinator for RGICS in Chhattisgarh, who also coordinated a five-state survey by RGICS, of rural residents (Niwasis) and migrant workers (Prawasis) who had returned to the native villages. The results of the survey were published in the earlier issue of Policy Watch. (See: https://www.rgics.org/wp-content/uploads/PolicyWatch_Aug20.pdf). In this article, Vijay Nadkarni looks at the policy lessons from what the migrant workers went through and suggests a number of steps by which such a situation is averted in future. We also carry a succinct PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Rajesh Tandon of PRIA on a similar topic, in an online National Workshop on Labour Migration: Issues and Way Forward, held on 15th Sept 2020.

The fifth article is by Ashok Khosla, Rajesh Tandon and Vijay Mahajan, and is a call to action. Drawing on the lessons of the Covid crisis, it lays out a Citizen’s Agenda for 2050, three decades from now but at the same time identifies what needs to be done in the next three months and the next three years. The article emphasizes the need for Civil Society institutions, including the Academia and the Media, to play a much more prominent role in rebuilding India around a different vision after the Covid crisis, taking into account both the lessons on why many of our constitutional provisions and institutions did not work as designed and the issue which has not been dealt with in the Constitution – humans versus the environment.