A veritable firestorm has broken out over the recent order of the Supreme Court to gather stray dogs in the Delhi-NCR region (estimated at between 500,000 to one million), and put them in designated shelters within eight weeks. The author has nothing to add to the debate over the ethics and justice of the controversy. The first thing that came to many discerning minds was: a large section of bureaucrats, municipal councillors, contractors and perhaps even a few MLAs must be celebrating a new financial bonanza bestowed by the SC.
How so? Well, the economics is simple. Millions will be spent on building the dog shelters. One can simply take a guess how much is likely to be pocketed through rent-seeking mechanisms. People will be appointed to look after the shelters. More discretionary decision-making powers for the municipal officials and councillors. Tenders will be floated for the supply of food and other items for the dogs. Some of the Delhi-based bureaucrats will be ready to rake in millions. To even suggest that the process will be corruption-free is laughable. Now, high courts in other states are hinting that they may pass similar orders. The numbers will shoot up to tens of millions of dogs. Thousands of crores for shelter, staff, food and veterinary care.
The age-old cliché is never wrong: the road to hell is paved with noble intentions. The Supreme Court may have nurtured the best of intention-balancing humane treatment of animals with the rights of people to walk on roads without being attacked by packs of stray dogs. Yet, the court has unintentionally created space for more rent seeking. For an economy that claims to be pursuing Ease of Doing Business, that is bad and unwanted news.
The stray dog issue is not the only one where the judiciary passed or upheld orders that made little economic sense, although they were backed by morals and ethics. Many years ago, the National Green Tribunal passed an order that stipulated that 10-year-old and 15-year-old cars cannot operate in the Delhi-NCR region. The Supreme Court upheld it in 2018. This year, residents with old cars realised to their horror that authorities had started seizing old vehicles, and imposing hefty penalties. Many of the older cars are maintained well, and do not add to pollution. Once again, a situation of rent-seeking emerged as authorities gained discretionary powers over the owners, whose cars were seized. Mercifully, there is now a stay on “coercive action.”
Two similar orders passed to check pollution have not worked as they defied the basics of economics, demand and supply. The first one is a complete ban on firecrackers during Diwali. Every year, people are arrested. But every resident of Delhi knows that there is no check on the bursting of firecrackers. In the late 1990s, the Supreme Court banned polluting industrial units in Delhi. Years later, they were back with a vengeance with authorities collecting more money. Go to the areas in west and north Delhi, and one can easily find scores of industrial units. What these verdicts do is to make doing business even more complex, difficult and corrupt. In a country, where greed is rampant, such orders provide more opportunities.
Sometimes, courts pass orders that are inexplicable. Everyone knows that drunk driving is dangerous, needs to be curbed, and causes deaths of thousands of people in India. The dangers are more in the case of highways, or roads that connect to them. With an extremely noble intention, some years ago, there was a judgement to curb drunk driving. It stated that liquor shops or bars would not be allowed to operate within 500 metres of a highway. This order led to disruption and much hilarity. There is little doubt the higher judiciary needs to step in, given the tendency among Indians to brazenly flout rules and regulations. But such interventions must make economic sense too. They cannot merely be dictated by politics, traditions, morals and noble intentions.
The author has worked for leading media houses, authored two books, and is now Executive Director, C Voter Foundation