Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Ujjwala Yojana
Mains level: Paper 2- Impact of increasing prices of subsidised LPG on PMUY
Price increase of subsidised LPG
- Subsidised LPG prices have increased by a massive 50% in this financial year alone.
- This would have a significant impact on the government’s flagship scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY).
- Since 2016, PMUY has provided LPG connections to 80 million poor households to reduce women’s drudgery and indoor air pollution.
- Providing an upfront connection subsidy of ₹1,600, PMUY helped expand LPG coverage to more than 85% of households.
Challenges
- Large-scale primary surveys by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) suggest that, on average, recent PMUY beneficiaries consumed only about half the LPG compared to long-standing regular consumers.
- Limited uptake of LPG among poor households has two main reasons.
- First, the effective price of LPG is not affordable for such households, despite the subsidy.
- Second, many rural consumers have access to freely available biomass, making it difficult for LPG to displace it.
- Beyond causing indoor air pollution, biomass use for cooking contributes up to 30% to the ambient PM2.5 at the national level, more than the contribution of transport, crop residue or coal burning.
Impact of price rise
- The recent increases in the subsidised LPG price have made it more difficult for the poor to sustain LPG use.
- As the pandemic set in, the LPG subsidised price began to rise, even when global LPG prices plummeted.
- Now with LPG prices rising globally, a 50% reduction in the LPG subsidy budget for FY22 (versus FY21) does not bode well.
- The information about LPG price build-up and subsidy has become more difficult to obtain in recent years.
Way forward
- The central government tread should balance between LPG subsidies and sustained clean fuel consumption in poorer households by better targeting of subsidy.
- One approach for such targeting is to rely on the existing LPG consumption patterns of consumers.
- Provide households exhibiting low consumption or a decline in LPG consumption over time with greater subsidy per cylinder to sustain health gains.
- Further, the subsidy levels could be dynamic with different slabs reflecting the previous year’s consumption.
- Alongside, the de-duplication efforts must continue to avoid subsidy leakages.
Consider the question “What is the social impact of the Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY)? What are the challenges in its success.”
Conclusion
In the post-pandemic rebuilding, the continued support to the economically poor for sustaining LPG use is not merely a fiscal subsidy but also a social investment to free-up women’s productive time and reduce India’s public health burden.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: National Digital Health Mission
Mains level: Paper 2- Issues to consider in digitising health infrastructure
As India seeks to create digital health infrastructure, it must consider several issues.
Integrated digital health infrastructure
- The National Digital Health Mission aims to develop the backbone needed for the integrated digital health infrastructure of India.
- This can help not only with diagnostics and management of health episodes, but also with broader public health monitoring, socio-economic studies, epidemiology, research, prioritising resource allocation and policy interventions.
- However, before we start designing databases and APIs and drafting laws, we must be mindful of certain considerations for design choices and policies to achieve the desired social objectives.
Factors to be considered
1) Carefully developing pathway to public good
- There must be a careful examination of how exactly digitisation may facilitate better diagnosis and management, and an understanding of the data structures required for effective epidemiology.
- We must articulate how we may use digitisation and data to understand and alleviate health problems such as malnutrition and child stunting.
- We need the precise data we require to better understand crucial maternal- and childcare-related problems.
2) Balancing between public good and individual rights
- The potential tensions between public good and individual rights must be examined, as must the suitable ways to navigate them.
- Moreover, for the balancing to be sound and for determining the level of due diligence required, it is imperative to clearly define the operational standards for privacy management.
- Conflating privacy with security, as is typical in careless approaches, will invariably lead to problematic solutions.
- In fact, most attempts at building health data infrastructures worldwide — including in the UK, Sweden, Australia, the US and several other countries — have led to serious privacy-related controversies and have not yet been completely successful.
3) Managing the sector specific identities
- Even if we define and use a sector-specific identity, the question of when and how to link it with that of other sectors remains.
- For example, with banking or insurance for financial transactions, or with welfare and education for transactions and analytics.
- Indiscriminate linking may break silos and create a digital panopticon, whereas not linking at all will result in not realising the full powers of data analytics and inference.
4) Working out the operational requirement of data infrastructure
- We need to work out the operational requirements of the data infrastructure in ways that are informed by, and consonant with, the previous points.
- In other words, the design of the operationalisation elements must follow the deliberations on above points, and not run ahead of them.
- This requires identifying the diverse data sources and their complexity — which may include immunisation records, birth and death records, informal health care workers, dispensaries etc.
- It also requires an understanding of their frequency of generation, error models, access rights, interoperability, sharing and other operational requirements.
- There also are the complex issues of research and non-profit uses of data, and of data economics for private sector medical research.
5) Issue of due process
- Finally, “due process” has always been a weak point in India, particularly for technological interventions.
- Building an effective system that can engender people’s trust not only requires managing the floor of the Parliament and passing a just and proportional law, but also building a transparent process of design and refinement through openness and public consultations.
- In particular, technologists and technocrats should take care to not define “public good” as what they can conveniently deliver, and instead understand what is actually required.
- While we can understand the urge to move forward quickly, given the urgent need to improve health outcomes in the country, deliberate care is needed.
Consider the question “While seeking to develop digital health infrastructure through the National Digital Health Mission, we should be mindful of certain considerations for design choices and policies to achieve the desired social objectives. Comment.”
Conclusion
Developing a comprehensive understanding of the considerations related to health data infrastructure may also inform the general concerns of e-governance and administrative digitisation in India, which have not been all smooth sailing.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 3- Indian economy's growth rate
India’s growth numbers reveal a different story when seen through the quarter-on-quarter growth lense. The article deals with this issue.
Weakness of India’s GDP statistics
- The CSO press release for 4Q20 stated that India grew 0.4 per cent on a year-ago basis.
- That is, relative to the level of GDP four quarters before.
- Many heaved a sigh of relief at growth turning positive after two-quarters of negative year-ago: -24.4 per cent in 2Q20 and -7.3 per cent in 3Q20 and declared that growth would accelerate from hereon.
- Nothing could be further from the truth.
- To know whether the economy will accelerate or decelerate, one needs to know its current speed.
- To do that, one needs to compute the quarter-on-quarter growth as almost all large economies do.
- This is a central weakness of India’s GDP statistics, exemplified by last week’s 4Q20 print.
Challenges in measuring quarter-on-quarter growth
- These computations are not easy, because each quarter has its own characteristics or, as economists call it, “seasonality”
- Seasonality naturally increases or decreases activity in that period.
- Think of quarters with festivals or with harvests versus those without them.
- The modern economy is more complicated as its seasonal patterns change when its structure does.
- To compare two quarters, these changes to seasonality need to be excluded from the data.
- Statisticians have been working on this issue for more than a century and, over the last two decades.
- As a result, many official statistical bodies (such as the US Census Bureau) have made deseasonalising methods freely available.
Understanding the issue through example
- If the level of 1Q20 GDP is set at 100, then the quarterly growth rates imply that it fell to 75, rising to 91.1 in the following quarter and then to 96.3 last quarter.
- Now assume that the level of GDP remains constant for the next five quarters, that is, there is no growth in the economy until the end of fiscal year 2021-22.
- This would mechanically put the full-year growth in 2021-22 at 7.2 per cent simply because of the low average level of GDP in the previous year.
- If the speed of the economy were to remain at its current pace of 5.7 per cent, then the annual growth in 2021-22 would be an astonishing 28.7 per cent.
- Any annual growth projection for next year that is less than this necessarily implies a slowdown from the current pace.
So, what is Indian economy’s current growth rate
- J.P. Morgan uses one of the above mentioned deseasonalising technique.
- The derived quarterly path is the following: In 1Q20, India’s economy grew 3.7 per cent over the previous quarter, in 2Q20 the economy contracted 25 per cent and then recovered 21.5 per cent in 3Q20 and ended the last quarter at 5.7 per cent.
- Put differently, growth slowed to 5.7 per cent last quarter — the latest reading of the economy’s “current” speed.
Putting in context the projected nominal growth
- The budget documents suggest that the government’s projected nominal growth for 2021-22 is 14.5 per cent.
- This implies a real growth rate of around 11 per cent assuming inflation averages 3.5 per cent.
- The implied average quarterly pace, consistent with an 11 per cent annual growth, is just 1 per cent.
- The year-on-year quarterly numbers will keep rising giving the false assurance of a strengthening recovery when in reality the level of income would rise only at a grinding pace.
Reasons behind the deceleration
- India’s growth drivers had already slowed dramatically prior to the pandemic, the pandemic likely exacerbated them.
- With listed companies posting strong profit growth in 3Q and 4Q, much of the decline in overall income has fallen on households and MSMEs.
- This is likely to have not only worsened income inequality, but also severely impaired their balance sheets, making it that much more difficult to access credit in the coming quarters.
- While industry has recovered to 98 per cent of its pre-pandemic level, the service sector remains substantially below.
- Thus, much of the continued high unemployment (as reported by private surveys) is in services.
- This is likely to have disproportionately increased women’s unemployment, thereby widening the gender gap.
- Last quarter, central government spending rose 12 per cent, but overall public expenditure contracted 1 per cent, implying a sharp contraction at the state level.
Consider the question “Why quarter-on-quarter growth rates reveal a true picture of India’s growth rate as compared to year-on-year rates? What are the challenges in dealing with the quarter-on-quarter data?”
Conclusion
Neither fiscal policy nor monetary policy are designed to reverse these widening economic imbalances. This makes it hard to see India’s growth engines firing on all cylinders, despite the rollout of vaccines and the anticipated surge in US growth.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Sattras, Sankardeva's Philosophy
Mains level: Various schools of philosophy in India
In poll-bound Assam, the campaigns are sought to be held in the Bartadrava Than/Sattra (monastery) in Nagaon, which is the birthplace of renowned Vaishnavite saint-reformer Srimanta Sankardeva.
Q.Discuss the role of religion in India’s electoral politics. Discuss how identity politics is harmful to a harmonious society.
What are Sattras?
- Sattras are monastic institutions created as part of the 16th-century Neo-Vaishnavite reformist movement started by Vaishnavite saint-reformer Srimanta Sankaradeva (1449-1596).
- As the saint travelled across Assam, spreading his teachings and propagating an egalitarian society, these Sattras/Thans were established as centres of religious, social and cultural reforms in the 16th century.
- These institutions are of paramount importance and lie at the heart of Assamese culture.
- Today, Sattras are spread across the state, promulgating Sankardeva’s unique “worship through art” approach with music (borgeet), dance (sattriya) and theatre (bhauna).
Composition of Sattra
- Each Sattra has a naamghar (worship hall) as its nucleus and is headed by an influential “Sattradhikar”.
- Monks, known as bhakats, are inducted into Sattras at a young age.
- They may or may not be celibate, depending on the kind of Sattra they are inducted into.
What is Sankardeva’s philosophy?
- Sankardeva propagated a form of Bhakti called eka-sharana-naam-dhrama.
- He espoused a society based on equality and fraternity, free from caste differences, orthodox Brahmanical rituals and sacrifices.
- His teaching focused on prayer and chanting (naam) instead of idol worship. His dharma was based on the four components of deva (god), naam (prayers), bhakats (devotees), and guru (teacher).
Try this PYQ:
Q. With reference to the cultural history of medieval India, consider the following statements:
- Siddhas (Sittars) of Tamil region were monotheistic and condemned idolatry.
- Lingayats of Kannada region questioned the theory of rebirth and rejected the caste hierarchy
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2
What is the relationship between the Sattra and the State?
- During the Ahom reign, the Sattras received a lot of donations in the form of land or money from the kings.
- Unlike temples, Sattras did not require patronage because they were self-sufficient, grew their own food and could sustain themselves.
- However, today, it is different. Annual grants from the state and central government are doled out to Sattras, in the hope of political support.
Do Sattras matter in elections?
- While Sattra votes may not decide the outcome of an election, it is undeniable that the Sattras and Sattradhikars have a lot of influence.
- There are especially Sattra-based constituencies like Nagaon, Kaliabor, Majuli, Barpeta, Bartadadrva etc.
- Assamese families usually have ties with one Sattra, or the other.
- That is why politicians — regardless of party are often seen visiting Sattra.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Telecom Spectrum
Mains level: 5G technology and its rollout
The end of India’s first auction of telecommunications spectrum in five years was held with the government generating revenue of ₹77,815 crores from the exercise.
What is Spectrum?
- Devices such as cellphones and wireline telephones require signals to connect from one end to another.
- These signals are carried on airwaves, which must be sent at designated frequencies to avoid any kind of interference.
- The Union government owns all the publicly available assets within the geographical boundaries of the country, which also include airwaves.
- With the expansion in the number of cellphones, wireline telephone and internet users, the need to provide more space for the signals arise from time to time.
Spectrum allocations
- Spectrum refers to the invisible radio frequencies that wireless signals travel over. The frequencies we use for wireless are only a portion of what is called the electromagnetic spectrum.
- To sell these assets to companies willing to set up the required infrastructure to transport these waves from one end to another, the central government through the DoT auctions these airwaves from time to time.
- These airwaves called spectrum is subdivided into bands that have varying frequencies.
- All these airwaves are sold for a certain period of time, after which their validity lapses, which is generally set at 20 years.
How has the industry been since the last auction?
A lot has changed in the industry since 2016 when the previous auction took place.
- In the last few years, there has been a consolidation in the industry, as a result of which there are only a few major players now.
- While the user base has grown, the industry itself has witnessed unforeseen financial stress in the form of an important court case against it.
- The reference is to the Supreme Court verdict last September that ordered telecom players to share revenues coming from even non-telecom services with the government.
- It gave telecom companies 10 years to pay their Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) dues to the government, with 10% of the dues to be paid by March 31, 2021.
Try this question for mains:
Q.What are the various challenges faced by India’s telecom before the upgradation to 5G technology?
What about the 5G rollout?
- The auction for 5G is likely to happen later.
- In the auction that was held last week the government offered spectrum for 4G in the following bands: 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2,100 MHz, 2,300 MHz and 2,500 MHz.
- The “king” in 5G, the C-band, which is the band between 3,300 MHz and 4,200 MHz, was not on offer in this round of auctions.
How did this auction compare to the last round?
- In 2016, about 40% of the 2,355 MHz of spectrum (at a reserve price of ₹5.6 lakh crore) was sold, giving the government ₹65,789 crores in revenue.
- This time, the Centre has managed to get more.
- The government said the revenue generated by the auction has exceeded its expectations, which was about ₹45,000 crore.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Cluster universitites, NEP 2020
Mains level: NEP 2020
National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) envisions establishing large multidisciplinary universities to promote research directed to solve contemporary national problems, and provides the option of setting up clusters of higher education institutes.
Q. Discuss the salient features of Cluster Universities as propounded by the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP).
What are Education Clusters?
- This new concept is dedicated to students who want to discover & learn new things regardless of the field/branch/discipline they’re in.
- Currently, higher educational institutions (HEIs) follow the structure of single-stream education.
- Generally, what happens is that a student who has taken a major is allowed to study relevant subjects. He/she can’t opt for subjects from other majors.
- This may restrict students to widen their thinking & learning capability.
- With the introduction of Cluster University, the single-stream approach of teaching-learning will be ruled out.
- All the institutions including the ones that are offering professional degrees will be transformed into a rationalized architecture that is popularly being referred to as- multidisciplinary clusters.
What are the Key Benefits of Cluster Universities?
More Space for Student-Teacher Collaboration
- With HEIs getting merged to form a large unit, there would be more space for better student-teacher collaboration.
- Students that are genuinely interested in learning a particular course would come together helping faculties to achieve better student learning outcomes.
Inculcating Leadership Qualities in Students
- Students would be more confident as they pursue their choice of subjects. They would get an open field to polish their skills and also develop new ones.
- Thus, the process would ultimately lead to the inculcation of leadership qualities in students.
Accelerate Institutional Networking
- Since the Cluster University concept of the new education policy speaks of merging multidisciplinary HEIs, institutional networking would obviously go uphill.
Fewer Resources & More Expertise
- Many students would be able to learn under a single entity. It is bound to increase the outcomes with comparatively fewer resources.
- Such universities would increase faculty strength, both in terms of numbers and diversity of disciplines, and facilitate the conduct of research on real-life problems.
Way forward
- For moving away from single-discipline institutions to multi-disciplinary universities, clustering is a promising model to achieve a critical mass in a university to invigorate research.
- Many industry associations have established research centres and more could be encouraged to do.
- India needs to earnestly pursue this model.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Vaccine for COVID
Mains level: Vaccination challenges for coronavirus
As the vaccination drive gains momentum, questions have emerged about appropriate behaviour after being vaccinated.
What does being vaccinated mean?
- Being fully vaccinated means a period of two weeks or more following the receipt of the second dose in a two-dose series, or two weeks or more following the receipt of a single-dose vaccine.
- In India, currently, both vaccines being used — Covishield and Covaxin — follow a two-dose regimen.
- Typically, the immune response takes a while to build up after a vaccine shot.
- After the first jab of a two-dose vaccine, a good immune response kicks in within about two weeks. It is the second dose that boosts the immune response.
Is the COVID threat averted?
- It is still unclear how long immunity lasts from the vaccines at hand now.
- Whether or not the immune response is durable, how it performs with the passage of time, and how long it lasts can be found out only by monitoring people who have already been vaccinated over a period.
- If the vaccinated individual is still carrying the virus, the vaccine may provide immunity from severe disease for him or her, but the individual could still transmit the virus.
What changes after you get a vaccine shot?
- After vaccination, one risk of severe disease from COVID-19 goes down dramatically.
- There is not enough evidence yet of vaccine response for some age groups, and vaccines are in short supply in the community.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Maitri Bridge
Mains level: Recent trends in India-Bangladesh ties
PM will inaugurate ‘Maitri Setu’ between India and Bangladesh tomorrow.
Maitri Setu
- The bridge ‘Maitri Setu’ has been built over the Feni River which flows between the Indian boundary in Tripura State and Bangladesh.
- The 1.9 Km long bridge joins Sabroom in India with Ramgarh in Bangladesh.
- The construction was taken up by the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd.
Try this PYQ:
Q. Recently, which of the following States has explored the possibility of constructing an artificial inland port to be connected to the sea by a long navigational channel?
(a) Andhra Pradesh
(b) Chhattisgarh
(c) Karnataka
(d) Rajasthan
Significance of the bridge
- With this inauguration, Tripura is set to become the ‘Gateway of North East’ with access to Chittagong Port of Bangladesh, which is just 80 kms from Sabroom.
- The name ‘Maitri Setu’ symbolizes growing bilateral relations and friendly ties between India and Bangladesh.
About Feni River
- Feni is a river in southeastern Bangladesh and Tripura.
- It is a trans-boundary river with an ongoing dispute about water rights.
- It originates in the South Tripura district and flows through Sabroom town and then enters Bangladesh.
- The question of sharing the waters of the river between India and Pakistan was first discussed in 1958.
Other associated projects
Sabroom Check Post
- PM will lay the foundation stone for setting up an Integrated Check Post at Sabroom.
- It will help ease the movement of goods and passengers between the two countries provide new market opportunities for products of North-East states and assist the seamless movement of passengers to and from India and Bangladesh.
- The project is being taken up by the Land Ports Authority of India.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now