New Delhi, Jul 18: In its effort to weed out archaic and dead statutes, the Union Cabinet Wednesday approved a bill to scrap 58 laws which have lost their relevance.
The NDA government in its two terms has sent to the chopping block 1824 old laws which had become redundant.
After the Repealing and Amendment Bill, 2019 gets parliamentary nod, 137 laws, which according to the government, have lost their relevance will be scrapped in the next lot.
The list of the 58 laws which will be repealed was not immediately available, but sources in the government said most are Acts which were enacted to amend principal or main laws.
“Once the principal Act was amended, these amendment laws have lost relevance. Their presence in the statute books as independent laws is unnecessary and they are only clogging the system,” said a government functionary.
The practice of scraping obsolete laws is called “scavenging” or “cleansing” of the statute books.
Some of the old acts that have been repealed are the Hackney Carriage Act 1879 which was legislated for the regulation and control of hackney-carriages, Dramatic Performance Act 1876 when theatre was being used a medium of protest against the British rule.
Another such old act which was repealed by the Lok Sabha was The Ganges Tolls Act, 1867 which provided for collecting toll “not exceeding 12 annas” on certain boats and steamers plying on the Ganga to improve navigation of the river between Allahabad (UP) and Dinapore (Bihar).
After the Modi government came to power for the first time in 2014, a two-member panel was set up to look into the repealing of archaic laws and the panel also consulted the Centre and the state government before recommending the legislations to be repealed.
Between 1950 and 2001 over a hundred Acts have been repealed. At one time, 100 such Acts were repealed in one go.
In September 2014, the Law Commission had said that while studying the issue, it found that a large number of Appropriation Acts passed during the past several years in reality have lost meaning but continue to be part of the statute books.
“It is common knowledge that Appropriate Acts are intended to operate for a limited period of time… Those Appropriation Acts that are older than certain date, say 10 years, may be repealed. This itself would result in the repeal of more than 600 laws,” the report had said.
It said Australia has a system where Appropriation Acts are repealed automatically as there is a ‘sunset clause’ attached to them.
The White House confirmed Wednesday that Turkey would be excluded from NATO’s F-35 stealth fighter jet program after it purchased a Russian missile defense system in defiance of warnings from Western allies.
“Unfortunately, Turkey’s decision to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems renders its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible,” White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.
The US-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighter “cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities,” she added.
Turkey’s foreign ministry termed the move “unfair,” saying in a statement that “this one-sided step neither complies with the spirit of alliance nor is it based on legitimate reasons.”
Grisham said that Washington had made “multiple” offers of its own Patriot missile defense system to Turkey, but Ankara went ahead and acquired the S-400, running counter to a NATO pledge to avoid adopting Russian systems.
“This will have detrimental impacts on Turkish interoperability with the Alliance,” she said.
Grisham added that the United States “still greatly values” its strategic relationship with Ankara and would “continue to cooperate with Turkey extensively, mindful of constraints due to the presence of the S-400 system in Turkey.”
The announcement came five days after Turkey began taking delivery of the Russian missile system, shrugging off two years of warnings from the United States and other NATO allies that it could imperil their relationship.
The US action will lock out a number of Turkish manufacturers that were producing parts and components for the F-35, and block Turkey’s plans to purchase about 100 of the advanced fighters.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump declined to criticize Turkey for the S-400 purchase, falsely charging that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was unfairly forced into the move by his White House predecessor Barack Obama.
“I’ve had a good relationship with President Erdogan,” Trump told journalists.
“It’s a very tough situation that they’re in and it’s a very tough situation that we’ve been placed in… With all of that being said, we’re working through it — we’ll see what happens,” he said.
Trump rued the loss of the sale of up to 100 F-35s to Turkey, saying manufacturer Lockheed Martin would suffer.
More than 821 million people suffered from hunger worldwide last year, the United Nations reported Monday — the third year in a row that the number has risen.
After decades of decline, malnutrition began to increase in 2015, mainly because of climate change and war. Reversing the trend is one of the 2030 targets of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals which aim to improve the planet and its people.
But getting to a world where no one is suffering from hunger by then remains an “immense challenge,” the report said, noting the number of people without enough to eat had risen from 811 million in 2017.
“We will not achieve zero hunger by 2030,” said David Beasley, head of the World Food Programme, one of the UN agencies contributing to the report.
“That’s a bad trend. Without food security we will never have peace and stability,” said Beasley, deploring that the media carry more talk about Brexit and Donald Trump than children dying of hunger.
He warned that extremist groups were using hunger and control over food supplies as a weapon to divide communities or recruit new members.
“The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” report was produced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other United Nations agencies including the World Health Organization.
“To safeguard food security and nutrition, it is critical to already have in place economic and social policies to counteract the effects of adverse economic cycles when they arrive, while avoiding cuts in essential services, such as healthcare and education, at all costs,” it said.
A “structural transformation” was needed to include the poorest people in the world, the authors said.
This would require “integrating food security and nutrition concerns into poverty reduction efforts” while tackling gender inequality and the exclusion of certain social groups, they said.
– Malnutrition widespread in Africa –
Malnutrition remains widespread in Africa, where around 20 percent of the population is affected, and in Asia where more than 12 percent of people experience it. In Latin America and the Caribbean, fewer than seven percent of people are affected.
Adding those hit by food insecurity gives a total of more than two billion people, eight percent of whom are in North America and Europe, who don’t regularly have access to enough nutritious, safe food, the report said.
The FAO said current efforts were insufficient to meet the goal of halving the number of children whose growth is stunted by malnutrition by 2030.
Robin Willoughby, the head of food and climate policy at Oxfam GB, said women were hit hardest by the rise in hunger.
“A toxic brew of climate shocks, inequality and conflict is unravelling years of progress,” he said.
“If we are to meet the target of ending hunger by 2030, governments must urgently cut greenhouse emissions, provide more support for small-scale agriculture and increase efforts to end violent conflicts.”
The French non-governmental group CCFD-Terre Solidaire said that in Africa and Latin America, food insecurity was affecting emerging economies as well, and not just those considered to be the least advanced.
Around 149 million of the world’s children currently suffer from hunger-related growth delays.
At the same time, the UN report notes that obesity and excess weight are both on the rise in all regions, with school-age children and adults particularly affected.