The Evening Wrap: SC forms Special Bench to hear EWS quota case on Jan. 5

A three-judge Special Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud is scheduled to hear on Wednesday a case raising questions on the ₹8-lakh annual income limit criterion fixed to identify the economically weaker sections (EWS) of society for extending reservation benefits. The development came hours after Chief Justice of India (CJI) N.V. Ramana on Tuesday agreed to adjust the various combinations of the court’s Benches, fixed for the week, to accommodate the case. The other two judges on the Special Bench are Justices Surya Kant and A.S. Bopanna. The Union government, represented by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, has been making back-to-back oral mentionings before the court, on January 3 and 4, to hear the case quickly. January 3 — the very day the court reopened after Christmas holidays — had seen Mehta plead with Justice Chandrachud, who has been hearing the EWS case, for an urgent listing. On Tuesday, again, Mehta came up before the CJI’s Bench to press for a hearing on January 5 itself. Mehta underscored that NEET counselling was suspended since late November because of the questions raised about the criteria in the EWS quota. Medical admissions were getting delayed, and the issue had to be resolved quickly. Resident doctors in Delhi had recently organised a massive protest over the delay in the counselling schedule, leading to violence. Mehta submitted to the court that the doctors were rightly agitated about their future prospects. He urged the CJI to list the case on January 5. During the interaction, Chief Justice Ramana said the court’s Benches have already been fixed for the entire opening week of miscellaneous hearings. The EWS case was heard by a Bench of three judges led by Justice Chandrachud while the Benches were sitting in a combination of two judges for the week. But Mehta persisted that even a two-judge Bench led by Justice Chandrachud would be enough to hear the case as long as it was scheduled on Wednesday. The CJI finally agreed in court to see whether the schedule could be juggled to form a three-judge Special Bench. NEET counselling was suspended after the Union government, on November 25, informed the court about its “considered decision” to revisit the “criteria” determining EWS. The government had asked for four weeks to form a review committee, examine the issue and file a report. The government’s submission followed rounds of grilling from the court in past hearings to reveal the logic and study before zeroing in on the “exact figure” of ₹8 lakh as the annual income limit to identify EWS of society. The Centre had formed a review committee comprising Ajay Bhushan Pandey, former Finance Secretary; Professor V.K. Malhotra, Member Secretary, ICSSR; and Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India. The panel submitted a report on December 31, supporting the ₹8 lakh income threshold as a “reasonable” basis to determine EWS. “The current gross annual family income limit for EWS of ₹8 lakh or less may be retained. In other words, only those families whose annual income is up to ₹8 lakh would be eligible to get the benefit of EWS reservation,” the report stated. The committee has maintained that the ₹8 lakh criterion struck a “fine balance” between overinclusion and inclusion errors. “The figure ensures that most low-income people who are not required to pay income tax are not excluded and are covered in EWS and at the same time it should not be so high that it becomes overinclusive by including many income tax-paying middle-and high-income families into the EWS,” the report observed. The court’s query was significant as the One Hundred and Third Constitutional Amendment of 2019, which introduced the 10% EWS quota, is itself under challenge before a larger Bench. The Amendment is under question for making economic criterion as the sole ground for grant of reservation benefits. ‘Bulli Bai’ app row: Engineering student remanded to custody till January 10 A local court on Tuesday remanded a 21-year-old engineering student, arrested in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app case, in Mumbai Police’s custody till January 10. The Mumbai cyber police apprehended the student, Vishal Kumar, from Bengaluru on Monday and later arrested him. After being brought to Mumbai, he was produced before the Bandra metropolitan magistrate. The police sought Kumar’s custody for 10 days and also permission from the court to carry out searches at his premises in Bengaluru. After hearing the police’s submission, the magistrate remanded Kumar in police custody till January 10 and also permitted the cops to carry out searches at his premises. The cyber cell had filed the FIR against unidentified persons following complaints that photographs of hundreds of Muslim women were uploaded for ‘auction’ on an app called `Bulli Bai’, hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub. While there was no actual `auction’ or `sale’, the purpose of the app seemed to be to humiliate and intimidate the targeted women, many of whom are active social media users. The app appeared to be a clone of Sulli Deals which triggered a similar row last year. A team of the Mumbai cyber police has also detained a 19-year-old woman in Uttarakhand, an official said, adding that she seemed to be the main person behind the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. She was being produced before a court in Uttarakhand for transit remand, and then she would be brought to Mumbai, he said. Rahul Gandhi questions PM’s silence on Chinese bridge at Pangong Tso Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday questioned the silence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over media reports that China is constructing a bridge on the Pangong Tso (lake) in Ladakh near the Line of Actual Control (LAC). On Monday, some of the leading media outlets, including The Hindu, reported that China is constructing a bridge in eastern Ladakh, connecting the north and south banks of the Pangong lake, that will considerably bring down the time to move troops between the two sectors. “PM's silence is deafening. Our land, our people, our borders deserve better,” Gandhi said on Twitter. Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge also targeted the Narendra Modi government by alleging that it is busy in elections when the ‘enemy’ is at India’s gate. “China is busy building a bridge on Pangong Tso to make it easier to deploy troops. Meanwhile, Beijing Janata Party leaders led by PM [Prime Minister] & HM [Home Minister] are busy in election rallies. Enemy is at our gates. PM Modi is taking a siesta. One has to open their eyes to show the promised Lal Aankh!” tweeted Kharge. The Congress party and Gandhi have been critical of the government’s handling of the border situation with China in eastern Ladakh and questioned the government over media reports that the Chinese troops had unfurled the Chinese flag at the Galwan Valley. “How dare China raise the Chinese flag over Galwan valley, where only the Indian Tricolour can be flown, unfurled proudly. It is a bounden duty of our government and the Prime Minister to ensure that Chinese transgression into India’s territories is defeated decisively,” chief Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala had said on Monday. Uptick in sale of COVID-19 home-tests kits has health officials worried Self-test kits for COVID-19 are flying off the shelves in Bengaluru as the city amidst fears of a third wave. Stores in the city have registered an uptick in sales of home-test kits, essentially rapid antigen tests. And much to the dismay of health officials, many citizens who have mild flu-like symptoms or those who have to travel frequently are relying on the results of these home tests. Chandan Hiremath, a software engineer who is scheduled to travel to Germany next week, used such a kit to ease his fears and ensure that his travel plans aren’t derailed. He tested negative. But what if he had tested positive? Unless citizens voluntarily report the results and agree to take an RT-PCR test from a certified facility, the government has no way to capture this data. “Had I tested positive, even if I wanted to report it, I wouldn’t know how to contact the civic body,” said Hiremath. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in its recent letter to all States and Union territories recommended the use of self-tests/home tests for symptomatic individuals. But the lack of any mechanism to capture positive cases through home tests, unless individuals report it themselves, is a cause for concern. Though home tests have been in the market for a few months now, sales have gone up only since December 2021, in the backdrop of the Omicron scare and the subsequent rise in cases. A senior civic health official said home tests, essentially rapid antigen tests, had good accuracy in case of a positive result, but could be misleading in the case of negative results. “If a person has COVID-19 like symptoms, s/he better get themselves a RT-PCR test even if they test negative in a home test,” he said. New coronavirus variant ‘IHU’ identified in France As the world grapples with the highly mutated Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, scientists have identified a new strain of the COVID-19-causing virus in Southern France. Known as ‘IHU’, the B.1.640.2 variant has been reported by researchers at institute IHU Mediterranee Infection in at least 12 cases, and has been linked to travel to African country Cameroon. However, the researchers noted that it is too early to speculate on how this variant behaves as far as infection and protection from vaccines is concerned. The yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, posted on the preprint repository MedRxiv on December 29, revealed that IHU has 46 mutations and 37 deletions, resulting in 30 amino acid substitutions and 12 deletions. Amino acids are molecules that combine to form proteins, and both are the building blocks of life. Fourteen amino acid substitutions, including N501Y and E484K, and nine deletions are located in the spike protein. Most currently used vaccines are targeted at the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which the virus uses to enter and infect the cells. N501Y and E484K mutations were earlier also found in Beta, Gamma, Theta and Omicron variants. “The mutation set and phylogenetic position of the genomes obtained here indicate based on our previous definition a new variant we named IHU," the authors of the study said. “These data are another example of the unpredictability of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants, and of their introduction in a given geographical area from abroad,” they added. The B.1.640.2 has not been identified in other countries so far or labelled a variant under investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to the researchers, the index (first) case was an adult diagnosed positive by RTPCR performed in a laboratory on a nasopharyngeal sample collected in mid-November last year. Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding posted a long Twitter thread in which he said that new variants keep emerging but it does not necessarily mean they will be more dangerous. “What makes a variant more well-known and dangerous is its ability to multiply because of the number of mutations it has in relation to the original virus,” Feigl-Ding tweeted on Tuesday. “This is when it becomes a ‘variant of concern’, like Omicron, which is more contagious and more past immunity evasive. It remains to be seen in which category this new variant will fall,” he said. Many countries are currently experiencing a spike in COVID-19 cases driven by the Omicron variant which was first identified in South Africa and Botswana in November last year. Since then, the variant of concern has spread to over 100 countries. Covid Watch: Numbers and Developments The number of reported coronavirus cases from India stood at 3,49,70,187 at the time of publishing this newsletter, with the death toll at 4,82,540. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved a testing kit for detecting the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The kit is manufactured by Tata Medical and Diagnostics and is named OmiSure. The RT-PCR kit, Omisure, was earlier sent to the ICMR for approval after continued testing. The kit will be used to confirm the Omicron in patients with its S-Gene Target Failure (SGTF) strategy. Evening Wrap will return tomorrow. [logo] The Evening Wrap 04 JANUARY 2022 [The Hindu logo] Welcome to the Evening Wrap newsletter, your guide to the day’s biggest stories with concise analysis from The Hindu. [[Arrow]Open in browser]( [[Mail icon]More newsletters]( Supreme Court forms Special Bench to hear EWS quota case on Jan. 5 A [three-judge Special Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud is scheduled to hear on Wednesday]( a case raising questions on the ₹8-lakh annual income limit criterion fixed to identify the economically weaker sections (EWS) of society for extending reservation benefits. The development came hours after Chief Justice of India (CJI) N.V. Ramana on Tuesday agreed to adjust the various combinations of the court’s Benches, fixed for the week, to accommodate the case. The other two judges on the Special Bench are Justices Surya Kant and A.S. Bopanna. The Union government, represented by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, has been making back-to-back oral mentionings before the court, on January 3 and 4, to hear the case quickly. [A view of the Supreme Court of India. File]  January 3 — the very day the court reopened after Christmas holidays — had seen Mehta plead with Justice Chandrachud, who has been hearing the EWS case, for an urgent listing. On Tuesday, again, Mehta came up before the CJI’s Bench to press for a hearing on January 5 itself. Mehta underscored that NEET counselling was suspended since late November because of the questions raised about the criteria in the EWS quota. Medical admissions were getting delayed, and the issue had to be resolved quickly. Resident doctors in Delhi had recently organised a massive protest over the delay in the counselling schedule, leading to violence. Mehta submitted to the court that the doctors were rightly agitated about their future prospects. He urged the CJI to list the case on January 5. During the interaction, Chief Justice Ramana said the court’s Benches have already been fixed for the entire opening week of miscellaneous hearings. The EWS case was heard by a Bench of three judges led by Justice Chandrachud while the Benches were sitting in a combination of two judges for the week. But Mehta persisted that even a two-judge Bench led by Justice Chandrachud would be enough to hear the case as long as it was scheduled on Wednesday. The CJI finally agreed in court to see whether the schedule could be juggled to form a three-judge Special Bench. NEET counselling was suspended after the Union government, on November 25, informed the court about its “considered decision” to revisit the “criteria” determining EWS. The government had asked for four weeks to form a review committee, examine the issue and file a report. The government’s submission followed rounds of grilling from the court in past hearings to reveal the logic and study before zeroing in on the “exact figure” of ₹8 lakh as the annual income limit to identify EWS of society. The Centre had formed a review committee comprising Ajay Bhushan Pandey, former Finance Secretary; Professor V.K. Malhotra, Member Secretary, ICSSR; and Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India. The panel submitted a report on December 31, supporting the ₹8 lakh income threshold as a “reasonable” basis to determine EWS. “The current gross annual family income limit for EWS of ₹8 lakh or less may be retained. In other words, only those families whose annual income is up to ₹8 lakh would be eligible to get the benefit of EWS reservation,” the report stated. The committee has maintained that the ₹8 lakh criterion struck a “fine balance” between overinclusion and inclusion errors. “The figure ensures that most low-income people who are not required to pay income tax are not excluded and are covered in EWS and at the same time it should not be so high that it becomes overinclusive by including many income tax-paying middle-and high-income families into the EWS,” the report observed. The court’s query was significant as the One Hundred and Third Constitutional Amendment of 2019, which introduced the 10% EWS quota, is itself under challenge before a larger Bench. The Amendment is under question for making economic criterion as the sole ground for grant of reservation benefits. [underlineimg] ‘Bulli Bai’ app row: Engineering student remanded to custody till January 10 A [local court on Tuesday remanded a 21-year-old engineering student, arrested in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app case]( in Mumbai Police’s custody till January 10. The Mumbai cyber police apprehended the student, Vishal Kumar, from Bengaluru on Monday and later arrested him. After being brought to Mumbai, he was produced before the Bandra metropolitan magistrate. [The incident came six months after a similar app “Sulli Deals” was uploaded on the same hosting platform and pictures of Muslim women were posted on it without their consent.]  The police sought Kumar’s custody for 10 days and also permission from the court to carry out searches at his premises in Bengaluru. After hearing the police’s submission, the magistrate remanded Kumar in police custody till January 10 and also permitted the cops to carry out searches at his premises. The cyber cell had filed the FIR against unidentified persons following complaints that photographs of hundreds of Muslim women were uploaded for ‘auction’ on an app called `Bulli Bai’, hosted on the open-source software platform GitHub. While there was no actual `auction’ or `sale’, the purpose of the app seemed to be to humiliate and intimidate the targeted women, many of whom are active social media users. The app appeared to be a clone of Sulli Deals which triggered a similar row last year. A team of the Mumbai cyber police has also detained a 19-year-old woman in Uttarakhand, an official said, adding that she seemed to be the main person behind the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. She was being produced before a court in Uttarakhand for transit remand, and then she would be brought to Mumbai, he said. [underlineimg] Rahul Gandhi questions PM’s silence on Chinese bridge at Pangong Tso Former Congress president [Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday questioned the silence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi]( over media reports that China is constructing a bridge on the Pangong Tso (lake) in Ladakh near the Line of Actual Control (LAC). On Monday, some of the leading media outlets, including The Hindu, reported that China is constructing a bridge in eastern Ladakh, connecting the north and south banks of the Pangong lake, that will considerably bring down the time to move troops between the two sectors. “PM's silence is deafening. Our land, our people, our borders deserve better,” Gandhi said on Twitter. Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge also targeted the Narendra Modi government by alleging that it is busy in elections when the ‘enemy’ is at India’s gate. “China is busy building a bridge on Pangong Tso to make it easier to deploy troops. Meanwhile, Beijing Janata Party leaders led by PM [Prime Minister] & HM [Home Minister] are busy in election rallies. Enemy is at our gates. PM Modi is taking a siesta. One has to open their eyes to show the promised Lal Aankh!” tweeted Kharge. The Congress party and Gandhi have been critical of the government’s handling of the border situation with China in eastern Ladakh and questioned the government over media reports that the Chinese troops had unfurled the Chinese flag at the Galwan Valley. “How dare China raise the Chinese flag over Galwan valley, where only the Indian Tricolour can be flown, unfurled proudly. It is a bounden duty of our government and the Prime Minister to ensure that Chinese transgression into India’s territories is defeated decisively,” chief Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala had said on Monday. [underlineimg] Uptick in sale of COVID-19 home-tests kits has health officials worried Self-test kits for COVID-19 are flying off the shelves in Bengaluru as the city amidst fears of a third wave. Stores in the city have registered an uptick in sales of home-test kits, essentially rapid antigen tests. And much to the dismay of health officials, many citizens who have mild flu-like symptoms or those who have to travel frequently are relying on the results of these home tests. Chandan Hiremath, a software engineer who is scheduled to travel to Germany next week, used such a kit to ease his fears and ensure that his travel plans aren’t derailed. He tested negative. But what if he had tested positive? Unless citizens voluntarily report the results and agree to take an RT-PCR test from a certified facility, the government has no way to capture this data. “Had I tested positive, even if I wanted to report it, I wouldn’t know how to contact the civic body,” said Hiremath. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in its recent letter to all States and Union territories recommended the use of self-tests/home tests for symptomatic individuals. But the lack of any mechanism to capture positive cases through home tests, unless individuals report it themselves, is a cause for concern. Though home tests have been in the market for a few months now, sales have gone up only since December 2021, in the backdrop of the Omicron scare and the subsequent rise in cases. A senior civic health official said home tests, essentially rapid antigen tests, had good accuracy in case of a positive result, but could be misleading in the case of negative results. “If a person has COVID-19 like symptoms, s/he better get themselves a RT-PCR test even if they test negative in a home test,” he said. [underlineimg] New coronavirus variant ‘IHU’ identified in France As the world grapples with the highly mutated Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, [scientists have identified a new strain of the COVID-19-causing virus in Southern France](. Known as ‘IHU’, the B.1.640.2 variant has been reported by researchers at institute IHU Mediterranee Infection in at least 12 cases, and has been linked to travel to African country Cameroon. However, the researchers noted that it is too early to speculate on how this variant behaves as far as infection and protection from vaccines is concerned. The yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, posted on the preprint repository MedRxiv on December 29, revealed that IHU has 46 mutations and 37 deletions, resulting in 30 amino acid substitutions and 12 deletions. Amino acids are molecules that combine to form proteins, and both are the building blocks of life. Fourteen amino acid substitutions, including N501Y and E484K, and nine deletions are located in the spike protein. Most currently used vaccines are targeted at the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which the virus uses to enter and infect the cells. N501Y and E484K mutations were earlier also found in Beta, Gamma, Theta and Omicron variants. “The mutation set and phylogenetic position of the genomes obtained here indicate based on our previous definition a new variant we named IHU," the authors of the study said. “These data are another example of the unpredictability of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants, and of their introduction in a given geographical area from abroad,” they added. The B.1.640.2 has not been identified in other countries so far or labelled a variant under investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to the researchers, the index (first) case was an adult diagnosed positive by RTPCR performed in a laboratory on a nasopharyngeal sample collected in mid-November last year. Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding posted a long Twitter thread in which he said that new variants keep emerging but it does not necessarily mean they will be more dangerous. “What makes a variant more well-known and dangerous is its ability to multiply because of the number of mutations it has in relation to the original virus,” Feigl-Ding tweeted on Tuesday. “This is when it becomes a ‘variant of concern’, like Omicron, which is more contagious and more past immunity evasive. It remains to be seen in which category this new variant will fall,” he said. Many countries are currently experiencing a spike in COVID-19 cases driven by the Omicron variant which was first identified in South Africa and Botswana in November last year. Since then, the variant of concern has spread to over 100 countries. [underlineimg] Covid Watch: Numbers and Developments The [number of reported coronavirus cases from India]( stood at 3,49,70,187 at the time of publishing this newsletter, with the death toll at 4,82,540. The [Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has approved a testing kit for detecting the Omicron variant]( of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The kit is manufactured by Tata Medical and Diagnostics and is named OmiSure. The RT-PCR kit, Omisure, was earlier sent to the ICMR for approval after continued testing. The kit will be used to confirm the Omicron in patients with its S-Gene Target Failure (SGTF) strategy. 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