Is it so helpless to check sale of the chemicalIJ
It is shameful that the Congress-led UPA regime had to be pushed and prodded by the Supreme Court before it could get its act together and enact basic rules to restrict and regulate the sale of acid across the country. The Union Government's submission of a ‘draft model rule' on the matter, to the apex court on Tuesday, comes only after the former received a veritable dressing down from the latter last week for not taking the matter seriously enough. “People are dying but you are not worried about it”, the two-judge Bench comprising Justices RM lodha and SJ Mukhopadhaya told the Additional Solicitor General on July 10, after the Government sought extra time to implement the apex court’s previous directive. On April 16, the Supreme Court, while hearing a Public Interest litigation filed by an acid attack victim, had ordered the Union Government to work with its counterparts in the States and Union Territories to formulate a mechanism to strictly regulate acid sales.
The easy availability of these highly corrosive fluids, not to mention their destructive, usually irreversible and often fatal impact on the victim, has been one of the reasons why acids have become the weapon of choice for many. An estimated 1,000 individuals suffer acid attacks every year, almost all of them women, and the number has been rising at an alarming rate. In April, the Supreme Court had given the Government one month to come up with a regulatory policy framework but no progress was made. Consequently, almost three months later, when the matter was heard last week, the apex court was justifiably livid by the Government's request for additional time. So much so that it threatened to take matters into its own hands and ban the retailing of acid, if the Government failed to respond in the next seven days.
That the judiciary had to almost barge into the executive's terrain before the latter could get into action is a scathing indictment of the UPA regime which clearly does not even pretend to govern anymore. After all, framing a regulatory mechanism for acid sale was not something that required long debates and discussions in Parliament; it was not even a contentious matter that required the regime to invest in a time-consuming consensus building process. In fact, the Poisons Possession and Sale Rules, 2013 that has been proposed by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs is merely an extension of the Poison Act of 1919. Essentially, the Government has now declared that acid is a poisonous substance. Therefore, most of the new rules regarding the sale of acid — such as, allowing only licensed shopkeepers to stock and sell acid, insisting that they keep records of acid buyers and making it compulsory for buyers to provide identification proof — are actually existing regulations that already apply to the sale of other poisonous items. Nevertheless, the regulations are welcome and it is only to be hoped that the Government will implement them strictly.