India, Singapore launch UPI-PayNow linkage

India’s Unified Payments Interface 

• It is better known as UPI and Singapore’s PayNow was officially connected to allow for a “real-time payment linkage”. The virtual launch was led by a phone call between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong.
• The linkage is set to ease financial transactions for the Indian diaspora. Singapore has now become the first country with which cross-border Person to Person (P2P) payment facilities have been launched. 
• “This will help the Indian diaspora in Singapore, especially migrant workers/students, and bring the benefits of digitalization and FINTECH to the common man through the instantaneous and low-cost transfer of money from Singapore to India and vice-versa,” said the Ministry of External Affairs. 
• UPI payments through QR codes are already taking place in Singapore, though at a limited number of outlets.
• Demonstrating the link, the Reserve Bank of India’s Governor Shaktikanta Das and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Managing Director Ravi Menon made live “cross-border transactions” with each other using their mobile handsets.

Children have a right to protect their genetic information from DNA tests

• A child should not be lost in its search for paternity, said the court, directing family courts adjudicating between warring parents to order DNA tests only as a last resort.
• The Supreme Court has held in a judgment that children cannot be mechanically subjected to DNA tests in each and every case between warring parents as a shortcut to establishing proof of infidelity.
• “Genetic information is personal and intimate,” a Bench of Justices V. Ramasubramanian and B.V. Nagarathna observed in a judgment. “It sheds light on a person’s very essence... The information goes to the very heart of who she or he is,” the judgment added, emphasizing that “a child’s genetic information is part of his fundamental right to privacy.”
• “Children have the right not to have their legitimacy questioned frivolously before a court of law. This is an essential attribute of the right to privacy. 
• Courts are therefore required to acknowledge that children are not to be regarded like material objects and be subjected to forensic/DNA testing, particularly when they are not parties to the divorce proceeding. 
• It is imperative that children do not become the focal point of the battle between spouses,” Justice Nagarathna, who authored the judgment, underscored.

Psychological trauma

• Justice Nagarathna drew attention to the rights of privacy, autonomy, and identity recognized under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. “The Convention acknowledges the control that individuals, including children, have over their own personal boundaries and the means by which they define who they are in relation to other people. 
• Children are not to be deprived of this entitlement to influence and understand their sense of self simply by virtue of being children,” Justice Nagarathna wrote.
• The judgment said that “a child should not be lost in its search for paternity”, pointing out that details of parentage are an attribute of a child’s identity. 
• The court highlighted the psychological trauma that a child would be forced to suffer if his or her legitimacy was put under a cloud through DNA tests.
• “The plight of a child whose paternity and thus his legitimacy, is questioned would sink into a vortex of confusion which can be confounded if courts are not cautious and responsible enough to exercise discretion in a most judicious and cautious manner… Not knowing who one’s father is creates a mental trauma in a child,” Justice Nagarathna observed.