Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: JAM trinity
Mains level: JAM trinity, financial inclusion and Direct Benefit Transfer
Context
- Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lauded India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Scheme as a “logistical marvel” that has reached hundreds of millions of people and specifically benefitted women, the elderly and farmers. Paolo Mauro, Deputy Director in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, praised the role of technological innovation in achieving this feat.
What is Direct Benefit Transfer(DBT)?
- With the aim of reforming Government delivery system by re-engineering the existing process in welfare schemes for simpler and faster flow of information/funds and to ensure accurate targeting of the beneficiaries, de-duplication and reduction of fraud Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) was started on 1st January, 2013.
- DBT Mission was created in the Planning Commission to act as the nodal point for the implementation of the DBT programmes. The Mission was transferred to the Department of Expenditure in July, 2013 and continued to function till 14.9.2015. To give more impetus, DBT Mission and matters related thereto has been placed in Cabinet Secretariat under Secretary (Co-ordination & PG).
Efforts behind the efficient DBT
- Mission-mode approach for financial inclusion: Government endeavoured to open bank accounts for all households, expanded Aadhaar to all, and scaled up the coverage of banking and telecom services.
- Public Finance Management System through Aadhar: It evolved the Public Finance Management System and created the Aadhaar Payment Bridge to enable instant money transfers from the government to people’s bank accounts.
- Participation of various stakeholders for extensive UPI: The Aadhaar-enabled Payment System and Unified Payment Interface further expanded interoperability and private-sector participation.
- Directly receiving of subsidies: This approach not only allowed all rural and urban households to be uniquely linked under varied government schemes for receiving subsidies directly into their bank accounts but also transferred money with ease.
What is the Present status of DBT?
- The status of JAM trinity (Jan Dhan Aadhar Mobile)
- By 2022, more than 135 crore Aadhaar’s have been generated,
- There are 47 crore beneficiaries under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana,
- Mobile subscribers number more than 120 crores.
- Riding on this network, the DBT programme has reached commanding heights towards achieving the government’s vision of “sabka vikas”.
- Last mile banking through Bank Mitras: 5 lakh Bank Mitras delivering branchless banking services.
- DBT applicable to government schemes: Becoming the major plank of the government’s agenda of inclusive growth, it has 318 schemes of 53 central ministries spanning across sectors, welfare goals and the vast geography of the country.
How benefits are delivered through DBT?
- DBT in rural areas: In rural Bharat, DBT has allowed the government to provide financial assistance effectively and transparently to farmers with lower transaction costs be it for fertilisers or any of the other schemes including the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, PM Fasal Bima Yojana, and PM Krishi Sinchayi Yojana thus becoming the backbone for supporting the growth of the agricultural economy.
- DBT in urban area: In urban India, the PM Awas Yojana and LPG Pahal scheme successfully use DBT to transfer funds to eligible beneficiaries.
- Benefits under MGNAREGA: The benefits received under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Public Distribution System drive the rural demand-supply chain.
- Various assistance programmes: Various scholarship schemes and the National Social Assistance Programme use the DBT architecture to provide social security.
- Scheme for rehabilitation: DBT under rehabilitation programmes such as the Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers opens new frontiers that enable social mobility of all sections of society.
- DBT as last mile support in Pandemic: The efficacy and robustness of the DBT network were witnessed during the pandemic. It aided the government to reach the last mile and support the most deprived in bearing the brunt of the lockdown. From free rations to nearly 80 crore people under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, fund transfers to all women Jan Dhan account holders and support to small vendors under PM-SVANidhi, DBT helped the vulnerable to withstand the shock of the pandemic.
- An enabling policy regime: Proactive government initiatives and supportive regulatory administration allowed the private and public sector entities in the financial sector to overcome longstanding challenges of exclusion of a large part of the population.
- Creation of a dedicated ecosystem: These are essential elements of the pioneering ecosystem created by the government for the aggressive rollout of the ambitious DBT programme, achieving impressive scale in a short span of six years.
Conclusion
- Direct Benefit Transfer has transformed the welfare aspect of the governance. Going forward digital and financial literacy, robust grievance redressal, enhancing awareness and an empowering innovation system are some of the aspects that would require continued focus. This would play a vital role for India in meeting the diverse needs of its population and ensuring balanced, equitable and inclusive growth.
Mains Question
Q.Enlist the schemes that comes under DBT. How DBT has changed the lives of needy people in urban and rural India?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: INS Arihant ,SLBM
Mains level: Security Challenges,Indias naval capability.
Context
- On October 14, India joined a select group of nations when it announced the successful launch of an SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile). The other six nations that have demonstrated similar underwater capability include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council Russia, the UK, France and China. In August 2016, North Korea claimed a successful launch of an SLBM.
Features of K-15 SLBM
- The code names K-15 or B-05, is an Indian submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) with a range of 750 kilometres (466 mi) that was designed for retaliatory nuclear strikes. It belongs to the K Missile family and forms a part of India’s nuclear triad.
- The K-15 is a two-stage submarine-launched ballistic missile which uses a gas booster to eject out of its launch platform and rise up to the surface of water. A solid rocket motor is fired after the missile reaches a fixed altitude. The missile has a range of around 750 kilometres (466 mi).
About INS Arihant
- Launched in 2009 and Commissioned in 2016, INS Arihant is India’s first indigenous nuclear powered ballistic missile.
- It is capable submarine built under the secretive Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) project, which was initiated in the 1990s.
- INS Arihant and its class of submarines are classified as ‘SSBN’, which is the hull classification symbol for nuclear powered ballistic missile carrying submarines.
- While the Navy operates the vessel, the operations of the SLBMs from the SSBN are under the purview of India’s Strategic Forces Command, which is part of India’s Nuclear Command Authority.
What is the Significance of SLBM for India?
- Making India’s strategic profile strong: This achievement is significant in the context of India’s strategic profile. The navy, DRDO and other agencies who have enabled this success should be commended.
- Enhancing Underwater deterrence: A credible underwater deterrent is perceived as being invulnerable to detection and hence nations with the capacity can deliver a retaliatory second strike this enhances their deterrence capabilities.
- Showcasing the precision and high accuracy: While the press release is sparse in providing technical details or confirming the range of the SLBM, its assertion that the missile impacted the target area “with very high accuracy” is, nevertheless, instructive.
- Familiarity and capability with SLMB : The crew of the INS Arihant and the entire HR (human resource) comprising the pyramid from the SFC (strategic forces command) going right up to the national command authority with the Prime Minister at the apex have acquired the necessary proficiency to launch an SLBM should the exigency arise.
- Demonstration of competence: India can be justifiably proud of having acquired and demonstrated this level of competence, but this achievement needs to be located objectively. An SSBN (a nuclear-propelled submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile) is deemed to be the ultimate deterrent and this profile of macro-lethality and zero error credibility is predicated on the robustness of the “boat” and the efficacy of the missile.
- Validates SSBN programme: The successful user training launch of the SLBM by INS Arihant is significant to prove crew competency and validate the SSBN programme, a key element of India’s nuclear deterrence capability. A robust, survivable and assured retaliatory capability is in keeping with India’s policy to have ‘Credible Minimum Deterrence that underpins its ‘No First Use’ commitment.
What is the deterrence?
- Deterrence, military strategy under which one power uses the threat of reprisal effectively to preclude an attack from an adversary power. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the term deterrence largely has been applied to the basic strategy of the nuclear powers and of the major alliance systems.
How the SLBM will secure deterrence against the enemy?
- Tackling to rising Chinese capability: It merits recall that China became nuclear weapon capable in 1964 and carried out its first SLBM test (the J-1 with a range of 1700 km) in 1982. Over the years, the PLA Navy had its own techno-strategic challenges with nuclear-propelled submarines and was able to test a 9,000 km missile only in 2018. It is understood that a fully armed Chinese SSBN that would be deemed to be operational to undertake a credible deterrence patrol is scheduled for mid-2025.
- Nuclear deterrence is necessary: Acquiring the optimum degree of nuclear deterrence is imperative for India, given its distinctive spectrum of security and strategic challenges. India has made slow but steady progress in its missile programme, nuclear weapon capability, the nuclear submarine and more recently the building of an aircraft carrier
Conclusion
- India’s restraint in relation to announcements and claims about strategic capability burnishes deterrence in a quiet but effective manner. Walking softly, while wielding a big stick is desirable as a national trait.
Mains Question
Q. How the launch of K-15 SLBM will enhance the security dynamics of India? Discuss the India’s underwater capability to maintain deterrence and security at the same time?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Global Hunger Index
Mains level: Global Hunger Index, Indias Stance,issues with the index.
Context
- For the second time in two years, the Ministry of Women and Child Development rejected the Global Hunger Index (GHI) that ranked India 107 among 121 countries. India was accorded a score of 29.1 out of 100 (with 0 representing no hunger), placing it behind Sri Lanka (66), Myanmar (71), Nepal (81) and Bangladesh (84). It referred to the index as “an erroneous measure of hunger”.
- Annual report: The GHI is a peer reviewed annual report that endeavours to “comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels”. Authors of the report primarily refer to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 2(SDG 2) that endeavours to achieve ‘Zero Hunger’ by 2030.
- Four Indicators: According to them, the report attempts to “raise awareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger”. The GHI score is computed using four broad indicators under nourishment (measure of the proportion of the population facing chronic deficiency of dietary energy intake), child stunting (low height for age), child wasting (low weight for height) and child mortality (death of a child under the age of five).
Why these four Indicators are considered?
- To acknowledge undernourishment: As per the authors, it provides a basis to measure inadequate access to food and is among the lead indicators for international hunger targets, including the UN SDG 2. Child stunting and mortality, offers perspective about the child’s vulnerability to nutritional deficiencies, access to food and quality of nutrition.
- To address urgent requirement of nutrition: Since children (especially below five) are at a developmental age there is a greater and urgent requirement for nutrition with results particularly visible. This forms the basis of assessing nutritional requirement among children. Adults are at a sustainable age they are not growing but rather subsisting on nutrition for healthy survival. And lastly, on the same rationale, child mortality indicates the serious consequences of hunger.
- Uses data provided by Government: It explains that while FAO uses a suite of indicators on food security, including two important indicators — prevalence of undernourishment and prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity. The GHI only uses the data obtained through food balance sheets based on data reported by member countries, including India.
- Shows a picture of food supply chain: A food balance sheet provides a comprehensive picture of the pattern of a country’s food supply during a specified reference period. It lists down the source of the supply and its utilisation specific to each food category.
- Takes into account three child specific indicators: On why the GHI uses three child specific indicators out of the four to calculate hunger for a country’s population, the website explains, By combining the proportion of undernourished in the population(1/3 of the GHI score) with the indicators relating to children under age five (2/3of the GHI score), the GHI ensures that both the food supply situation of the population as a whole and the effects of inadequate nutrition within a vulnerable subset of the population are captured.
- International recognition: A Senior Policy Officer at the GHI said that, “All four indicators used in the calculation of the global hunger are recognised by the international community, including India, and used for measuring progress towards the UN SDGs.”
What are the Objections of Government of India?
- Very small sample size of the Index: As per the Ministry for Women and Child Development, the report lowers India’s rank based on the estimates of the Proportion of Undernourished (PoU) population. It elaborates that the U.S. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimate is based on the ‘Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES)’ survey module conducted using the Gallup World Poll that bears a sample size of 3,000 respondents being asked eight questions. It stated that the data represented a miniscule proportion for account of India’s size.
- Counter assertion by India’s dietary supply is increasing: It countered the assertions in the report pointing to India’s per capita dietary energy supply increasing year on year due to enhanced production of major agricultural commodities in the country over the years.
- Index doesn’t reflect the actual ground reality: According to the Ministry, the report is not only disconnected from ground reality but also chooses to ignore the food security efforts of the Central government especially during the pandemic.
- Efficient PMGKAY: The Union Cabinet through the Pradhan Mantri Garib KalyanAnn Yojana (PMGKAY) provisioned an additional 5 kg ration per person each month in addition to their normal quota of food grains.
What are the Government efforts to address the hunger issue so far?
- The Midday Meal Scheme: The Midday meal is a school meal programme in India designed to better the nutritional standing of school-age children nationwide.
- The programme supplies free lunches on working days for children in primary and upper primary classes in government, government aided, local body, Education Guarantee Scheme, and alternate innovative education centres, Madrasa supported under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and National Child Labour Project schools run by the ministry of labour.
- Serving 120 million children in over 1.27 million schools and Education Guarantee Scheme centres, the Midday Meal Scheme is the largest of its kind in the world.
- PM-POSHAN: The name of the scheme has been changed to PM-POSHAN (Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman) Scheme, in September 2021, by MoE (Ministry of Education), which is nodal ministry for the scheme.
- The Central Government also announced that an additional 24 lakh students receiving pre-primary education at government & government-aided schools would also be included under the scheme by 2022.
Conclusion
- No country becomes great by dwarfing its people. India has certainly improved its poverty and hunger problems but there is still lot of ground yet to cover. Global hunger index may have exaggerated the India’s hunger issue but hunger problem in India is real if not substantial.
Mains Question
Q.Explain the methodology used by global hunger index report and India’s objection to it. What are the initiatives of government to reduce the hunger problem in India?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: global Food security challenge
Context
- The Hunger Hotspots Outlook (2022-23) a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) forebodes escalating hunger, as over 205 million people across 45 countries will need emergency food assistance to survive. 16 October is celebrated as World Food Day.
What is the current situation of Food security worldwide?
- Adverse impact of COVID 19 pandemic: Globally, food and nutrition security continue to be undermined by the impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic, climate change, spiralling food inflation, conflict, and inequality.
- Challenge of Severe hunger continues: Today, around 828 million people worldwide do not have enough to eat, and over 50 million people are facing severe hunger.
What are the challenges for ensuring food security?
- The challenge of Climate change: Recent climate shocks have raised concerns about India’s wheat and rice production over the next year. Therefore, it is important to place a greater focus on climate adaptation and resilience building.
- Rising population will need more resource: By 2030, India’s population is expected to rise to 1.5 billion. Agro food systems will need to provide for and sustainably support an increasing population.
- The challenge of Soil degradation: Nutrition and agricultural production are not only impacted by climate change but also linked to environmental sustainability. Soil degradation by the excessive use of chemicals, non-judicious water use, and declining nutritional value of food products need urgent attention.
- Constant efforts towards Self-sufficiency: India has had an inspiring journey towards better production and achieving self-sufficiency and is now one of the largest agricultural product exporters. During 2021-22,it recorded $49.6billion in total agriculture exports a 20%increase from 2020-21.
- Efficient targeted public distribution system: One of India’s greatest contributions to equity in food is its National Food Security Act (NFSA)2013 which anchors the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), the PM POSHAN scheme (earlier known as the Midday Meals scheme), and the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).
- Extensive food safety net: Today, India’s food safety nets collectively reach over a billion people. The WFP works with State and national governments to strengthen these systems to reach the people who need them most.
- Large scale digitization of programmes: The Government continues to take various measures to improve these programmes with digitisation and measures such as rice fortification, better health, and sanitation.
- Better buffer stock policy: Food safety nets and inclusion are linked with public procurement and buffer stock policy visible during the global food crisis (2008-12)and the COVID19 pandemic fallout, whereby vulnerable and marginalised families in India continued to be buffered by the TPDS which became a lifeline.
- Successful implementation of PMGKAY: An International Monetary Fund paper titled ‘Pandemic, Poverty, and Inequality: Evidence from India’ asserted that‘ extreme poverty was maintained below 1% in 2020 due to the Pradhan Mantri Garib KalyanAnna Yojana (PMGKAY
How India and World can manage food security?
- Avoiding conventional input intensive agriculture: There is increased recognition to move away from conventional input intensive agriculture towards more inclusive, effective and sustainable agro food systems that would facilitate better production.
- Promoting sustainable practices: Since 1948, the FAO has continued to play a catalytic role in India’s progress in the areas of crops, livestock, fisheries, food security, and management of natural resources through the promotion of sustainable practices.
- Focus on millets: Millets have received renewed attention as crops that are good for nutrition, health, and the planet. As climate-smart crops, they are hardier than other cereals. Since they need fewer inputs, they are less extractive for the soil and can revive soil health.
- India’s Efforts as an example: India has led the global conversation on reviving millet production for better lives, nutrition, and the environment, including at the UN General Assembly, where it appealed to declare 2023 as the International Year of Millets. It is the world’s leading producer of millets, producing around 41% of total production in2020. The national government is also implementing a Sub-Mission on Nutrition-Cereals (Millets) as part of the National Food Security Mission.
- G20 presidency an opportunity for India: India’s upcoming G20 presidency is an opportunity to bring food and nutrition security to the very centre of a resilient and equitable future.
Conclusion
- India can lead the global discourse on food and nutrition security by showcasing home grown solutions and best practices, and championing the principle of leaving no one behind working continuously to make its food system more equitable, empowering, and inclusive.
Mains Question
Q.Food security has become increasingly challenging due to unpredictable weather conditions. Illustrate. How India can contribute to the global food security issue.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Quantum Technology
Mains level: Cyber security, Quantum Technology applications, advantages and disadvantages.
Context
- The Army has collaborated with industry and academia to build secure communications and cryptography applications. This step builds on last year’s initiative to establish a quantum computing laboratory at the military engineering institute in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh.
- Quantum computing is an area of study focused on the development of computer based technologies centered around the principles of quantum theory.
- Quantum computing studies computation systems that make direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena to perform operations on data.
- Classical computers encode information in bits. Each bit can take the value of 1 or 0. These 1s and 0s act as on/off switches that ultimately drive computer functions.
What is quantum Theory?
- Quantum theory explains the nature and behavior of energy and matter on the quantum (atomic and subatomic) level. Quantum theory is the theoretical basis of modern physics.
- The nature and behavior of matter and energy at that level is sometimes referred to as quantum physics and quantum mechanics.
What is quantum computing laboratory that the Army has set up?
- Two research centres: The Army has set up a quantum computing laboratory and a centre for artificial intelligence (AI) at a military engineering institute in Madhya Pradesh. The Army will get support from National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS).
- Purpose of the quantum lab: To spearhead research and training in this key developing field. It said the Indian Army is making steady and significant strides in the field of emerging technologies
- To Train personnel on the cyber warfare: Training on cyber warfare is being imparted through a state of the art cyber range and cyber security labs.
- The Focus areas: Key thrust areas are quantum key distribution, quantum communication and quantum computing, among others.
What is the rationale behind this development?
- To provide facility centre for extensive and dedicated research: The two centres will carry out extensive research in developing transformative technologies for use by the armed forces.
- To transform the current system of cryptography: Research undertaken by the Army in the field of quantum technology will help it leapfrog into the next generation of communication and transform the current system of cryptography to post-quantum cryptography.
- Developing quantum resistant systems: With traditional encryption models at risk and increasing military applications of quantum technology, the deployment of quantum-resistant systems has become the need of the hour.
- Vulnerable existing digital infrastructure: There is a need of upgrading current encryption standards that can be broken by quantum cryptography. Current protocols like the RSA will quickly become outdated. This means that quantum cyber attacks can potentially breach any hardened target, opening a significant vulnerability for existing digital infrastructure. Hack proofing these systems will require considerable investments.
- To be in a League of nations in this sector: For example US: National Quantum Initiative Act has already allocated $1.2 billion for research in defence related quantum technology. China now hosts two of the world’s fastest quantum computers.
India’s developments in this sector so far?
- National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications: In 2019, the Centre declared quantum technology a “mission of national importance”. The Union Budget 2020-21 had proposed to spend Rs 8,000 crore on the newly launched National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications.
- Successfully demonstrated a Quantum key Distribution (QKD) link: In February 2022, a joint team of the Defence Research and Development Organization and IIT Delhi successfully demonstrated a QKD link between two cities in UP Prayagraj and Vindhyachal located 100 kilometres apart.
What are the challenges facing India?
- Current capabilities are not sufficient: Currently, India has very few capabilities in developing advanced systems capable of withstanding quantum cyber attacks.
- The china challenge: China’s quantum advances expand the spectre of quantum cyber attacks against India’s digital infrastructure, which already faces a barrage of attacks from Chinese state-sponsored hackers.
- Dependence on Foreign hardware: India is heavily dependent on foreign hardware, particularly Chinese hardware, is an additional vulnerability.
How India can make its cyberspace resilient?
- Procuring quantum resistant mechanism from US: India must consider procuring the United States National Security Agency’s (NSA) Suite B Cryptography Quantum-Resistant Suite as its official encryption mechanism. The NSA is developing new algorithms for their cypher suite that are resistant to quantum cyber attacks. This can then facilitate India’s official transition to quantum-resistant algorithms.
- Enhancing cryptographic standards: The Indian Defence establishment can consider emulating the cryptographic standards set by the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which has developed a series of encryption tools to handle quantum computer attacks. It has developed a series of four algorithms to frame a post-quantum cryptographic standard.
- Diplomatic partnerships in this sector: Diplomatic partnerships with other techno-democracies countries with top technology sectors, advanced economies, and a commitment to liberal democracy can help India pool resources and mitigate emerging quantum cyber threats.
- Active participation in global avenues: Active participation in the Open Quantum Safe project a global initiative started in 2016 for prototyping and integrating quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms.
- Providing funds and encouragement: India must start its national initiatives to develop quantum-resistant systems. For this, the government can fund and encourage existing open-source projects related to post-quantum cryptography.
- Start implementing the capabilities: The country should start implementing and developing capabilities in quantum-resistant communications, specifically for critical strategic sectors. QKDs over long distances, especially connecting military outposts for sensitive communications, can be prioritised to ensure secure communications whilst protecting key intelligence from potential quantum cyber attacks.
- Establishing nationwide network: Establish a nationwide communication network integrated with quantum cryptographic systems, thereby protecting cyberspace from any cross-border quantum cyber offensive.
Conclusion
- The world is moving towards an era in which the applications of quantum physics in strategic domains will soon become a reality, increasing cyber security risks. India is getting there slowly but steadily. India needs a holistic approach to tackle these challenges. At the heart of this approach should be the focus on post-quantum cyber security.
Mains Question
Q.The world is moving towards an era in which applications of quantum physics in strategic domains will soon become a reality, increasing cyber security threats. In this context, what steps can India take to make its cyberspace resilient and quantum-resistant? Discuss.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: Cyber security,Right to privacy,Technology
Context
- In a bid to upgrade the Indian Telegraph Act 1885, a law that is more than a century old, the Department of Telecommunications, or DoT, issued the Draft Indian Telecommunications Bill 2022 on 21 September. Among other things, the proposed legislation brings digital communications applications like Signal and Telegram under telecommunications law and regulation and treats them like internet and telecom service providers and broadcasters.
What are the Current regulations of communication networks?
- Information Technology Act 2000: Digital communication applications are currently governed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Information Technology Act 2000 where there is no licensing requirement.
- Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI): The move has been debated for some years now, with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issuing multiple consultations on the matter, most recently in 2018.
- National Digital Communications Policy in 2018: DoT may have legitimate grounds for extending its jurisdiction over digital communications applications, including a policy mandate established by the National Digital Communications Policy in 2018. However, there is a conflict that must be resolved, namely the jurisdictional overlap between the prospective law and the existing information technology framework.
Why is security of communication networks important?
- National security: Communication networks are a part of our critical information infrastructure which was defined in the IT Act, 2000 as “the computer resource, the incapacitation or destruction of which, shall have debilitating impact on national security, economy, public health or safety.”
- Protecting critical Infrastructure: Communications networks are crucial to the connectivity of other critical infrastructure, viz. civil aviation, shipping, railways, power, nuclear, oil and gas, finance, banking, communication, information technology, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, space, defence, and government networks. Therefore, threats can be both through the networks as well as to the networks.
- Ready to Information Warfare (IW): Because of the increasing relevance of information technology (IT) to people’s lives, individuals who take part in IW are not all soldiers and that anybody who understands computers may become a fighter.
- To stop the adverse impact on information system: IW is inexpensive as the targeted party can be delivered a paralysing blow through the net and it may be difficult for the latter to discern where the attack originated. Large amount of useless information can be created to block or stop the functioning of an adversary’s information system.
- For Possible mass mobilisation: Thus, a People’s War in context of IW can be carried out by hundreds of millions of people, using open-type modern information systems. Even political mobilisation for war can be achieved via the internet, by sending patriotic e-mail messages and by setting up databases for education.
Why new law is necessary?
- No obligation on communication applications: A key reason for the DoT to bring such applications under telecommunications law is national security. Licensed telecom service providers must provide law enforcement authorities access to their networks and intercept messages in the course of investigations.Conversely, there is a contention that there is no corresponding obligation on digital communications applications, potentially leaving a gap in safeguarding national security interests.
- For increased Encryption and secrecy: A further assertion is that the encryption used by most digital communications apps hampers investigative efforts as it becomes difficult to ascertain user identity on these platforms and stop malfeasance.
- Necessary to Ensure security: The draft telecom bill attempts to address this gap by including a provision which enables the government to undertake measures in the name of national security, including issuing directions regarding the use of any telecommunication service.
- Licensing for more transparency: Presumably, licences issued for digital communications applications under the proposed legislation will prescribe conditions that would require these apps to give law enforcement authorities access to their systems for monitoring and intercepting communications.
- Existing law is sufficient: the IT Act already has provisions to enable lawful interception and monitoring of messages sent through digital communications applications. Under Section 69 of the IT Act, the central or state government may issue directions to do so in the interest of preserving, among other things, national security and public order. Moreover, rule 4 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) 2021 requires digital communications applications with 50 lakh users or more to enable identification of those sending messages on their platforms.
- Possible mass surveillance by Government: The implication here is that digital communications apps would have to break encryption and create meaningful pathways for the surveillance of their services. Importantly, while rule 4 has been challenged, it has not been stayed by any court, meaning digital communications apps must comply with it.
- New laws will overlap with IT Act: It would appear, then, that the provisions regarding national security in the draft telecom bill and the IT Act overlap. So how would the situation be resolved, as both have clauses that give them the ability to override provisions in other laws? Specifically, both the Draft Telecom Bill, 2022 and the IT Act have a non-obstante clause, a provision that enables a statute to uphold the enforceability of its provisions over others that contradict it. Thus, in case of a contradiction between these two laws, which would prevail?
- Introducing Digital India Act will likely to override other laws: Reports indicate that MeitY aims to introduce a newer version of the IT Act, namely the ‘Digital India Act’. This law will likely deal with matters related to lawful interception and other matters related to the governance of digital communications applications. If such a law is passed, the ‘Digital India Act’ would override the enacted version of the telecom bill.
- Judicial challenge of acknowledgment: A situation emerges where the telecom bill, if enacted, may face a judicial challenge. Based on the analysis of the court’s treatment of special laws, this proposed legislation is unlikely to prevail as the ‘Digital India Act’ will emerge after it
Conclusion
- National security and privacy of citizens an equally important. One cannot be traded for other. Arbitrary power of surveillance must be regulated by independent body under the parliament which will seek the transparency and accountability from law enforcement authorities.
Mains Question
Q.Unchecked communication networks are grave internal security threat. Comment why new law is necessary for interception and regulation of communication networks in India?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: Role of Women in livestock Rearing,Importance of livestock in Indian Economy.
Context
- The livestock sector is one of the most rapidly growing components of the rural economy of India, accounting for5% of national income and 28% of agricultural GDP in 201819.In the last six years, the livestock sector grew at 7.9% (at constant prices) while crop farming grew by 2%. In rural households that own livestock, women are invariably engaged in animal rearing.
What is mean by Livestock?
- Livestock are the domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting The livestock provides food and non-food items to the people. Food: The livestock provides food items such as Milk, Meat and Eggs for human consumption.
Role of Livestock in Indian Economy
- Livestock plays an important role in Indian economy. About 20.5 million people depend upon livestock for their livelihood. Livestock contributed 16% to the income of small farm households as against an average of 14% for all rural households. Livestock provides livelihood to two-third of rural community. It also provides employment to about 8.8 % of the population in India. India has vast livestock resources. Livestock sector contributes 4.11% GDP and 25.6% of total Agriculture GDP.
DO YOU KNOW?
- India is the world’s largest milk producer, followed by the United States of America, China, Pakistan and Brazil.
- India ranks 1st contributing 23 of the global production. In the last 3 decades, India witnessed over 3 times rise in milk production.
Role of Women in rural economy
- Mostly engaged in agricultural activities: It is widely recognised that the majority of women workers in rural areas (72%) are engaged in agricultural activities. However, with the exception of participation in dairy cooperatives, specifically in milk marketing, women’s role in the livestock economy is not as widely known or discussed.
- Rise in no of women in Dairy cooperatives: There were five million women members in dairy cooperatives in 2015-16, and this increased further to 5.4 million in 202021.Women accounted for 31% of all members of dairy producer cooperatives in 2020-21.In India, the number of women’s dairy cooperative societies rose from 18,954 in 2012 to 32,092 in2015-16.
- Sporadic nature of work: Conventional labour force surveys fail to accurately record women’s work in livestock raising for many reasons. Among the many problems in data collection, two significant ones are the sporadic nature of work undertaken for short spells throughout the day and often carried out within the homestead, and women’ own responses.
- Poor data collection: 12 million rural women were workers in livestock raising an estimate based on the Employment and Unemployment Survey of2011-12. However, with the augmented definition, according to estimates, around 49 million rural women were engaged in raising the livestock.
- Non recognition by policy makers: The problem clearly is that women livestock farmers are not visible to policymakers, and one reason is the lack of gender disaggregated data.
What are the Problems associated with women and livestock rearing?
- No specific data on women in the livestock economy: Recent employment surveys such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey fail to collect data on specific activities of persons engaged primarily in domestic duties. So, the undercounting of women in the livestock economy continues.
- Lack of Training: the reach of extension services to women livestock farmers remains scarce. According to official reports, 80,000 livestock farmers were trained across the country in 2021, but we have no idea how many were women farmers. only a few women in each village reported receiving any information from extension workers. Women wanted information but wanted it nearer home and at times when they were free.
- Difficulty to avail loans: women in poor households, without collateral to offer to banks found it difficult to avail loans to purchase livestock. Around 15 lakh new Kisan Credit Cards(KCC) were provided to livestock farmers under the KCC scheme during 2020-22.There is no information on how many of them were women farmers.
- Lack of technical knowledge: Women livestock farmers lacked technical knowledge on choice of animals (breeding) and veterinary care. Men invariably performed these specific tasks and took animals for artificial insemination.
- No active role in cooperatives: Women were not aware of the composition and functions of dairy boards and that the men exercised decisions even in women only dairy cooperatives. Further, the voice of women from landless or poor peasant Scheduled Caste households was rarely heard.
What are the Government policies?
- The National Livestock Policy (NLP) : The NLP of 2013, aimed at increasing livestock production and productivity in a sustainable manner, rightly states that around 70% of the labour for the livestock sector comes from women. One of the goals of this policy was the empowerment of women.
- The National Livestock: The National Livestock Mission (NLM) of2014-15 was initiated for the development of the livestock sector with a focus on the availability of feed and fodder, providing extension services, and improved flow of credit to livestock farmers. However, the NLM does not propose any schemes or programmes specific to women livestock farmers.
- Responsibility of state Government: The policy proposes that the State government allocates 30% of funds from centrally sponsored schemes for women. There is no logic for the 30% quota.
Conclusion
- Women’s labour is critical to the livestock economy. It follows then that women should be included in every stage of decision making and development of the livestock sector. Today, women livestock workers remain invisible on account of their absence in official statistics. We must recognise the due role of women in livestock rearing.
Mains Question
Q.How women contribute to rural economy? Despite being a core in animal rearing, why women are yet not recognised in policy framework of government?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: Madal report ,Social Empowerment,Resevations-advantages and Disadvantages
Context
- The social justice discourse in modern India can be traced to the initiatives of social revolutionaries such as Jyotiba Phule, Savitribai Phule, Shahu Maharaj and Periyar, B.R. Ambedkar during colonial rule. But the Mandal politics completely changed the social empowerment of depressed classes.
What is the Mandal way?
- The Mandal Commission: The Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission (SEBC), was established in India in 1979 by the Janata Party government under Prime Minister Morarji Desai with a mandate to “identify the socially or educationally backward classes” of India.
- To address Caste based discrimination: It was headed by B.P. Mandal, an Indian parliamentarian, to consider the question of reservations for people to redress caste discrimination, and used eleven social, economic, and educational indicators to determine backwardness.
- Recommendation of Other backward classes: In 1980, based on its rationale that OBCs (“Other backward classes”) identified on the basis of caste, social, economic indicators made up 52% of India’s population, the commission’s report recommended that members of Other Backward Classes (OBC) be granted reservations to 27% of jobs under the Central government and public sector undertakings, thus making the total number of reservations for SC, ST and OBC to 49%.
- What Constitution of India says: As per the Constitution of India, Article 15 (4) states, “Nothing in this Article or in clause (2) of Article 29 shall prevent the State from making any provision for the advancement of any socially or educationally backward classes of citizens or for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled tribes”. Hence the Mandal Commission created a report using the data of 1931 census which was last caste wise census and extrapolating same with some sample studies.
- Affirmative action taken: VP Singh was accused of using the Mandal Report which was ignored by the Janta government. It was a social revolution and affirmative action. Earlier 25% population of India which is SC ST was covered and now more than 50% of Other Backward Class came under reservation.
- Witnessed violent protest: The youth went for massive protest in large numbers in the nation’s campuses, resulting in many self-immolations by students.
- What is Mandal 2.0: In 2006, reservations were extended to OBC candidates in institutionsof higher learning popularly known as MandalII.
How mandal politics empowering the social groups?
- Helped to ensure the brotherhood: “Fraternity” as enshrined in the ‘Preamble’ of the Constitution, entails instilling confidence and camaraderie in the all communities. Reservations raised the hope of OBC communities to actively become the part of Government functionaries.
- Increased spending on socially backward group: Public spending is considered a reliable way to measure development. Governments can choose to distribute their limited resources in either economic or social sectors. Economic sectors, like industry, ports, highways, etc., generally support economic growth by attracting private investment. Social sectors like education, healthcare, and social security promote the welfare of the masses. Influential theories in social science argue that working-class coalitions support social welfare (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). In the Indian context, OBC and SC politicians should be expected to support social spending.
- Increased sensitivity towards backward classes: It is found that places with higher OBC political representation in combination with higher OBC reservation in the bureaucracy are more likely to spend more in social sectors.
- Removing the elite culture: Appointment of lower caste officials at the local level can help in breaking down long-established upper-caste patronage networks and hence potentially reduce ‘elite capture’ of government programmes.
- Built confidence and empowerment: According to IAS officer from Bihar cadre Lower castes would not have dared to enter the office of the DM (district magistrate) or BDO (block development officer). They thought that if they said something, they would be punished. That changed. Now they have the confidence to raise their voice against the DM. They don’t know if their job will get done, but they can enter his office without fear.”
- Statistics: The central list of OBC has 2,633 entries. According to the commission, many of the 2,633 entries comprise several classes, communities and sub-communities, etc, which means the total number of individually named classes/castes in the central list is between 5,000 and 6,000.
- Skewed benefits: 25 per cent of the reservation benefits were availed of by communities listed in 10 entries of the central list. Another 25 per cent were availed of by communities listed in another 38 entries.
- Few communities never got the benefit: The commission also found that 20 per cent of the communities, listed in 983 entries, could not avail of any benefits. Those in another 994 had a share of just 2.68 per cent.
- 1% but 50% reservation: Just about 40 of 5,000-6,000 castes/communities among the OBCs (other backward classes) — which constitute less than 1 per cent — have cornered 50 per cent of the reservation benefits in admissions to central educational institutions and recruitment to central services, a panel constituted by the government has found.
Conclusion
- Reservation is definitely an affirmative action to end the social discrimination. But it cannot continue forever. It’s high time that we should strictly enforce the creamy layer categorisation both in OBC and SC, ST reservations.
Mains Question
Q.How reservation helps in social empowerment of backward class? Describe the powers and functions of National Commission for backward class in India.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Population prospectus,NFHS report
Mains level: Declining fertility,Population prospectus and development
Context
- Earlier this year, the United Nations published data to show that India would surpass China as the world’s most populous country by 2023.According to the 2018-19Economic Survey, India’s demographic dividend will peak around2041, when the share of the working age population is expected to hit 59%.
What is the Present status of India’s population?
- Declining Total fertility rate (TFR): The Total fertility rate (TFR) has declined from 2.2 (reported in 2015-16) to 2.0 at the all- India level, according to the latest National Family Health Survey of India OR NFHS- 5 (phase 2) released by Union Health Ministry.1.6 in urban areas2.1 in Rural area and 2.0 all India.
- Sex ratio: There are 1,020 women per 1,000 men in India according to the recently released Fifth Edition (NFHS-5). Such a sex ratio has not been recorded in any of the previous four editions of the NFHS.
Need for population control measures
- At present, India hosts 16% of the world’s population with only 2.45% of the global surface area and 4% of water resources.
- The ecosystem assessments also pointed out the human population’s role in driving other species into extinction and precipitating a resource crunch.
- So, the population explosion would irreversibly impact India’s environment and natural resource base and limit the next generation’s entitlement and progress. Therefore, the government should take measures to control the population.
What will be the Impact of declining fertility?
- Implications on Political economy: It’s not just the economic implications that we need to think about but also the implications of the political economy.
- Spatial difference: India’s fertility fell below 2.1 births for certain States 10 years ago. In four other States, it’s just declining. So, not only is the fertility falling, the proportion of the population that will be living in various States is also changing.
- North-south imbalance: The future of India lies in the youth living in U.P., Bihar, M.P. If we don’t support these States in ensuring that their young people are well educated, poised to enter the labour market and have sufficient skills, they will become an economic liability.
How India can take advantage of its demographic dividend?
- Investing In literacy: If China hadn’t invested in literacy and good health systems, it would not have been able to lower its fertility rates. In any case, we have much to learn from China about what not to do.
- Planning for elderly: Especially in the case of the elderly, where the estimates show that12% of India’s total population by 2025 is going to be the elderly. Every fifth Indian by 2050 will be over the age of 65. So, planning for this segment merits equal consideration.
- Focusing on gendered dimension: India certainly has the capacity to invest in its youth population. But we don’t recognise the gender dimension of some of these challenges. Fertility decline has tremendous gender implications.
- Lowering the Burdon on women: What it means is that women have lower burden on them. But it also has a flip side. Ageing is also a gender issue as two thirds of the elderly are women, because women tend to live longer than men do. Unless we recognise the gender dimension, it will be very difficult for us to tap into these changes.
- Educating the young girls: So, what do we need to do? India has done a good job of ensuring educational opportunities to girls. Next, we need to improve employment opportunities for young women and increase the female employment rate. Elderly women need economic and social support networks.
Do we really need the population policy?
- Existing policy is right: India has a very good population policy, which was designed in 2000. And States also have their population policies. We just need to tweak these and add ageing to our population policy focus. But otherwise, the national population policy is the right policy.
- Reproductive health is important: What we need is a policy that supports reproductive health for individuals. We also need to start focusing on other challenges that go along with enhancing reproductive health, which is not just the provision of family planning services.
- Avoiding the stigma: We need to change our discourse around the population policy. Although we use the term population policy, population control still remains a part of our dialogue. We need to maybe call it a policy that enhances the population as resource for India’s development, and change the mindset to focus on ensuring that the population is happy, healthy, productive
- Thinking beyond two child policy: Our arguments and discussions have not gone beyond the two-child norm. The two-child norm indicates a coercive approach to primarily one community. And there are too many myths and misconceptions around population issues, which lead to this discourse, which takes away attentions of from real issues.
Way forward
- Family welfare approach: We need to move from a family planning approach to a family welfare approach. We should be focusing on empowering men and women in being able to make informed choices about their fertility, health and wellbeing.
- Thinking about automation: As fertility drops and life spans rise globally, the world is ageing at a significant pace. Can increasing automation counteract the negative effects of an ageing population or will an ageing population inevitably end up causing a slowdown in economic growth? We need to look at all of that.
- Changing the mindset: We are where we are, so let’s plan for the wellbeing of our population instead of hiding behind the excuse that we don’t have good schooling or health because there are too many people. That mindset is counterproductive.
- Skill development and making population productive: It is not about whether the population is large or small; it is about whether it is healthy, skilled and productive. Thomas Malthus had said as the population grows, productivity will not be able to keep pace with this growth, and we will see famines, higher mortality, wars, etc. Luckily, he proved to be wrong.
- Adhering to the Cairo consensus: Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 stressed population. The Cairo Consensus called for the promotion of reproductive rights, empowering women, universal education, maternal and infant health to untangle the knotty issue of poverty and high fertility. The consensus also demands an increase in the rate of modern contraceptive prevalence, male contraception. States instead of releasing population control measures can start to adhere to implementing the Cairo consensus.
- Adopting Women-Centric Approach: Population stabilisation is not only about controlling population growth, but also entails gender parity. So, states need to incentivize later marriages and childbirth, promoting women’s labor force participation, etc.
- Seeing Population as a Resource rather than Burden:
- As the Economic Survey, 2018-19, points out that India is set to witness a sharp slowdown in population growth in the next two decades.
- Further, population estimates also predict a generational divide between India’s north and south, Fifteen years from now.
- So instead of population control policies at the state level, India needs a universal policy to utilize population in a better way.
Conclusion
- We have the capacity to tap into the potential of our youth population. There is a brief window of opportunity, which is only there for the next few decades. We need to invest in adolescent wellbeing right away, if we want to reap the benefits. Otherwise, our demographic dividend could turn easily into a demographic disaster.
Mains Question
Q.Why India’s fertility rate is declining? How India can convert its demography into opportunity by investing in gendered based population policy?
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: NA
Mains level: Regulation of Online speech,freedom of speech,Public awareness
Context
- The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) has mooted two proposals for governance of online speech government appointed grievance appellate committees (GAC) and the industry self-regulatory body (SRB) seek to preclude this contest in favour of a unilateral government and industry agenda.
What is an online speech?
- A recorded online speech is delivered, recorded, and then uploaded to the Internet for later viewing. Examples are TED Talks and presentations in online or blended speech classes.
- Such speech are recorded or sometimes made in real time using various social media platforms.
How unregulated online speech is becoming dangerous day by day?
- Gendered disinformation and harassment campaigns: Impacting the mental health, job performance, and if and how they engage with online spaces.
- GLAAD’s 2021 Social Media Safety Index says: 64% of LGBTQ social media users reported experiencing harassment and hate speech, including on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
- Contributing to communal violence: In countries like India and Sri Lanka, failure to remove and prevent the amplification of harmful content can contribute to profound offline consequences, including violence and death.
- Setting up Grievance appellate committees (GAC): The GACs, as per the draft issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), will be constituted by the central government and will serve as an appellate body against decisions of various social media platforms.
- Appointing Self-regulatory body by social Media platforms(SRB)?: As the name suggests, industries such as twitter, meta etc will appoint their own personnel and constitute the self-regulatory body to hear the grievances against the social media posts.
What are the Criticism over GAC and SRB?
- Lack of substantive framework: Not only has the government not laid down a substantive policy with objectively defined contours of forbidden speech, the government wants the right to apply this highly subjective criteria on individual pieces of content and/or users.
- Unreasonable removal of content: It is notable that the government has already arrogated this right and routinely issues take down orders (without providing rationale) to social media platforms to take down or block content with minimal pushback from platforms.
- Serving the Governments agenda: However, the national security, public order logic of takedowns does not apply to reinstatement of content/users proactively blocked by the platforms and it is likely that an additional purpose of the GACs is to provide an institutional avenue for the ruling government machinery to get a set of aligned accounts/content reinstated instead of just takedowns.
- Such regulations are said to be Non-democratic: It is evident that the GAC doesn’t meet even minimal standards of democratic legitimacy and should be scrapped. The industry SRB proposal too lack democratic legitimacy.
- Profit before public interest: Platforms have repeatedly shown themselves to be driven by profit motives, which are often at odds with public interest. It is thus likely that such a platform-led body will try and maximise the interests of the industry and individual platforms as opposed to the interests of the Indian people.
- It will increase Government’s unrestrained powers: Notwithstanding Twitter’s plea in Karnataka High Court against Centre’s “disproportionate use of power” to issue “overbroad and arbitrary” content-blocking orders, the track record of platforms in India of resisting government pressure has been very poor.
- For example recent Twitter episode: For instance, a former safety head with Twitter reportedly told US regulators that Twitter put a government agent on its payroll under duress.
- High Chances of Government’s pressure: The SRB may act as a rubber stamp providing false legitimacy for covert government pressure while the binding nature of SRB orders will make it easier for the government to exercise pressure on a single lever to ensure compliance across all platforms.
- Lack of consensus in SRB: The other real possibility is that such a body will be a non-starter, wracked by internal dissensions or non-compliance and thus pave the way for the government GAC. This possibility is indicated by the divergent views of the constituent platforms.
What are the Suggestions?
- Relooking the proposals: It is evident that neither of the two proposals meet the minimum standards of democratic legitimacy and need to be rethought.
- Follow the democratic way: Given the centrality of free speech in a democracy, no government or private body can have unmitigated right to make decisions regarding the contours of acceptable speech. The argument that an elected government has earned the executive right to determine standards of speech like other policy decisions is fallacious because speech is the only democratic way to contest the government itself.
- Least government interference: The governance of speech, including setting standards and implementation, must thus sit squarely outside the ambit of government.
- Independent body answerable to parliament: This can be achieved through a statutory regulator answerable to Parliament.
- Standard operating procedure to remove content: In the meantime, there has to be transparency in the manner content moderation decisions are taken, including the takedown orders issued by the government.
Conclusion
- The current proposals are preoccupied with policing individual pieces of content whereas the impact of social media platforms on our information ecosystems is fundamental. Social media platforms now play an increasingly interventionist role in amplifying certain voices and our public debate must move forward to review structural issues affecting information ecosystems.
Mains Question
Q.What are the perils of unrestrained online speech? Critically analyse the recent proposals by government to regulate the free speech.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: Equitable delivery
Context
- 15th Finance commission on horizontal devolution agreed that the Census 2011 population data better represents the present need of States, to be fair to, as well as reward, the States which have done better on the demographic front, Finance commission has assigned a 12.5 per cent weight to the demographic performance criterion. Population, area, forest and ecology, demographic performance, tax efforts, income and distance are the criteria for horizontal distribution of funds.
Why equitable delivery is necessary in the country?
- To fulfil the need of basket of Goods: There is a basket of goods and services that should be delivered by the State. It is best not to call them public goods, since “public goods” have a specific meaning for economists and this basket has items that are typically collective private goods.
- To achieve Aantodaya approach (last person): Curlew Island is in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Until the 2011 Census, it had a population of two. Pulomilo Island, also in Andaman and Nicobar, had a population of 20 in 2011. At the time of elections, we read of astounding attempts made, so that voters in remote locations can vote. No one should be disenfranchised because of remoteness of location. By the same token, a resident, regardless of location, must be entitled to that basket.
- To achieve poverty alleviation: The quality of public services affects economic growth via its impact on poverty alleviation, human capital formation and corruption.
- High cost of delivery: States can have differential sources of revenue. Alternatively, the cost of delivering that basket may vary across geographical zones.
- Problems associated with migration: Over time, villages of course get depopulated. They are reclassified, get absorbed into larger agglomerations, or disappear because of migration.
How equitable delivery can be achieved?
- State need to take honest responsibility: The State cannot abdicate its responsibility of providing the basket.
- Economic compulsion: Migration is a voluntary decision, often driven by the pull (and push) of economic forces. That voluntary decision cannot be replaced by fiat.
- Dividing the pool between the governments: The Union Finance Commission has a vertical task, dividing the divisible pool between the Union government and states.
- Adjusting to the criteria set by FC: It also has a horizontal task, dividing State share between different states. Accordingly, from the 1st to the 15th, Finance commission have adopted different formulae, with an attempt to also create incentives, by attaching weights to fiscal efficiency and even demographic performance.
- This leaves variables like population, geographical area, income distance, infrastructure distance and forest cover:
- expenditure equalisation based on needs/costs of public services;
- Revenue equalisation measured by the ability of the state to raise revenue from one or more sources; and
- Macro indicators covering broader economic or non-economic indicators that approximate fiscal capacity, where data constraints make it difficult to apply the other approaches.
- Addressing Geographic area and population: Needs/costs are sought to be measured through geographical area and population. All Finance Commissions have used area as another criterion in the devolution formula on the ground of need — the larger the area, greater is the expenditure requirement for providing comparable services.
Conclusion
- Equitable access to public goods and services in low income and inequal (economic inequality) country like India is cumbersome task. Finance commission is trying their best for equitable allocation of resources.
Mains Question
Q. How Equity is different from equality? What is the finance commission’s criteria for horizontal allocation of resources among the states ?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Central Information Commission
Mains level: RTI Act,amendments,pending complaints ,Delay in the process, Credibility of the CIC
Context
- The number of information officers and first appellate authorities in the Central government has remained stagnant in the last few years. In contrast, the new Right to Information (RTI) applications filed as well as pending applications are increasing every year. Worryingly, the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions, the final recourse in matters concerning RTI, also face manpower shortage. As a result, appeals and complaints are piling up.
- RTI is an act of the parliament that sets out the rules and procedures regarding citizens’ right to information.It replaced the former Freedom of Information Act, 2002.
- Time bound response: Under the provisions of RTI Act, any citizen of India may request information from a “public authority” (a body of Government or “instrumentality of State”) which is required to reply expeditiously or within 30.
- Immediate Information in an urgent petition: In case of a matter involving a petitioner’s life and liberty, the information has to be provided within 48 hours.
- Digitization of records: The Act also requires every public authority to computerize their records for wide dissemination and to proactively publish certain categories of information so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally.
Implementation of RTI
- The RTI Act is implemented using a three-level structure.
- Public Information Officer: At the first level is the Central Assistant Public Information Officer/Central Public Information Officer (CAPIO/CPIO). Once an RTI query reaches the CAPIO/CPIO, they are expected to reply within 30 days.
- First Appellate Authority (FAA): If the reply is not satisfactory or does not arrive on time, a first appeal can be made to the First Appellate Authority (FAA).
- Central Information and State Information Commissions: If the FAA does not answer or if its answer is not satisfactory, the Central Information and State Information Commissions can be approached.
What are the vacancy related issues?
- Low Performance of Information Commissions: A report released in October by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan, titled ‘Report Card on the Performance of Information Commissions in India,2021-22’,states that the number of appeals and complaints pending before the Central and State Information Commissions as of June 30, 2022 was 3,14,323. The figure is based on data gathered from 26 Information Commissions obtained through 145 RTI applications.
- Increase in the pending appeals: There is an Increase in the number of pending appeals and complaints from 2.18 lakh to3.14 lakh in the last three years.
- Leading states in pending complaints: Maharashtra tops the list with nearly 1 lakh appeals and complaints pending followed by Uttar Pradesh (44,482) and Karnataka (30,358). Data were not available for Tamil Nadu State Information Commission. The Commissions in Jharkhand and Tripura were defunct.
- Substantial delay in reply: The Sangathan assumed that appeals and complaints would be disposed of in a chronological order. It would take the West Bengal State Information Commission 24 years and 3 months to dispose of a complaint filed on July 1, 2022. A similar analysis in Odisha and Maharashtra showed that it would take five years. Only Meghalaya and Mizoram showed no waiting time(not plotted on the tree map).
What is the recent amendment?
- Parity with CEC broken: So far, the CIC received the same salary and perks as that of the Chief Election Commissioner or a judge of the Supreme Court.
- Now on par with Cabinet Secretary: The new rules make the CIC an equivalent of the cabinet secretary and central information commissioners the same as secretary to the government in terms of salary. In the states, the downgrading will be to the level of a secretary to the government, and additional secretary respectively.
- Tenure: The tenure has been reduced from 5 years to 3.
- Power of ICs undermined: The CICs and ICs at both the Centre and the states have the power to review the functioning of government public information officials, and intervene on behalf of citizens seeking information about decisions of the government. This stands undermined.
- Lack of enforcing powers: these officials have zero powers to enforce their orders, except the imposition of a fine for non-compliance.
- Authority exercised: Over the years, government departments coughed out information because they were seen in the same league and of the same authority as the CEC and Supreme Court judges.
Conclusion
- The RTI has unquestionably proved to be one of the significant milestones and a major step towards ensuring the participatory and transparent development process in the country. Dilution of RTI is like downgrading the participation of citizens in public affairs. Government should strengthen the RTI instead of weakening.
Mains Question
Q. Discuss the dilution of RTI through 2019 amendments. How vacancies affect the time bound replies under the RTI Act 2005?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Appointment of Judges
Mains level: NJAC,Collegium system and related issues.
Context
- Once again, the Collegium of the Supreme Court of India is in the news, and once again for the wrong reasons. This time, it is because of the difficulty hat its five judges have in getting together for one meeting. Justice Chandrachud and Justice Nazeer withhold approval.Apparently, they do not object to the names but object to the procedure of circulation.
What is Collegium system?
- The Collegium of judges is the Indian Supreme Court’s invention.
- It does not figure in the Constitution, which says judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts are appointed by the President and speaks of a process of consultation.
- In effect, it is a system under which judges are appointed by an institution comprising judges.
-
After some judges were superseded in the appointment of the CJI in the 1970s, and attempts made subsequently to affect a mass transfer of High Court judges across the country.
What was the perception around Independence of judiciary under threat?
- There was a perception that the independence of the judiciary was under threat. This resulted in a series of cases over the years.
- First Judges Case (1981): SC ruled that the “consultation” with the CJI in the matter of appointments must be full and effective. However, it rejected the idea that the CJI’s opinion, albeit carrying great weight, should have primacy.
- Second Judges Case (1993): Introduced the Collegium system, holding that “consultation” really meant “concurrence”. It added that it was not the CJI’s individual opinion, but an institutional opinion formed in consultation with the two senior-most judges in the Supreme Court.
- Third Judges Case (1998): On a Presidential Reference for its opinion, the Supreme Court, in the Third Judges Case (1998) expanded the Collegium to a five-member body, comprising the CJI and four of his senior-most colleagues.
- Emphasis on Seniority principle: Collegium system emphasizes excessively on seniority.
- No discussion on merit and objectivity: However, following the seniority convention offers a semblance of certainty and transparency, even though it takes away from selecting judges on other objective criteria such as merit and competence.
- Collegium changes its own decision: At times, the sanctity of Collegium’s own decisions no longer stands. Its own previous decision to appoint other persons to the Supreme Court was reversed, without any explanation or justification.
- Lack of procedure: Besides this, no one knows how judges are selected, and the appointments made reek of biases of self-selection and in-breeding.
- Widely known Nepotism: Sons and nephews of previous judges or senior lawyers tend to be popular choices for judicial roles.
- Lack of checks and balances: With its ad hoc informal consultations with other judges, which do not significantly investigate criteria such as work, standing integrity and so on, the Collegium remains outside the sphere of legitimate checks and balances.
- Opaque system: The lack of a written manual for functioning, the absence of selection criteria, the arbitrary reversal of decisions already taken, the selective publication of records of meetings.
Collegium system is blessing in disguise
- Protect independence of judiciary: The framers of the Constitution were alive to the likely erosion of judicial independence.
- On May 23, 1949, K T Shah stated that the Judiciary, which is the main bulwark of civil liberties, should be completely separate from and independent of the Executive, whether by direct or by indirect influence.
- NJAC Declared unconstitutional: In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a constitutional amendment for creating the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC).
- Distrust on political executive: The SC strongly disapproved of any role for the political executive in the final selection and appointment of judges. The SC said that “reciprocity and feelings of payback to the political executive” would be disastrous to the independence of the judiciary.
What is National Judicial Appointment Commission (NJAC)?
- What is NJAC?
- guarantee the independence of the system from inappropriate politicisation,
- Strengthen the quality of appointments,
- Enhances the fairness of the selection process,
- Promotes diversity in the composition of the judiciary, and
- Rebuilds public confidence in the system.
- NJAC was missed opportunity of reforms: The SC in its majority decision declared the NJAC unconstitutional and missed an opportunity to introduce important reformatory changes in the functioning of the judiciary.
- Judicial majority could have been discussed: According to the experts, the Supreme Court could have read down the law, and reorganised the NJAC to ensure that the judiciary retained majority control in its decisions. However, it did not amend the NJAC Act to have safeguards that would have made it constitutionally valid.
- No reforms in the collegium system: It also did not reform the Collegium in any way to address the various concerns voiced by one and all, including the Court itself, Instead, to the disappointment of all those who hoped for a strong, independent and transparent judiciary, it reverted to the old Collegium based appointments mechanism.
Conclusion
- Appointments to the top court seem to be the preserve of judges from the High Court with a handful of appointments from the Bar. Surely some nodding acknowledgement should be given to a specific provision made by the founding fathers in the Constitution. Judges appointing the judges is not a sustainable practice for future of judiciary.
Mains Question
Q.What is NJAC? Why Collegium system is blessings in disguise? Explain the Collegium system of appointments.
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: Mission Millets
Mains level: Mission Millets .Advantages of Millets Crop
Context
- International Year of Millets in 2023 was approved by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 2018 and the United Nations General Assembly has declared the year 2023 as the International Year of Millets. The Odisha Government had launched Odisha Millet Mission (OMM), which aims to bring millets back to its fields and food plates by encouraging farmers to grow the crops that traditionally formed a substantial part of the diet and crop system in tribal areas.
Importance of millets
- Nutrition rich: Millet is a good source of protein, fibre, key vitamins, and minerals. The potential health benefits of millet include protecting cardiovascular health, preventing the onset of diabetes, helping people achieve and maintain a healthy weight, and managing inflammation in the gut.Millet is fibrous in content, has magnesium, Niacin (Vitamin B3), is gluten-free and has a high protein content.
- Requires less water: Millet’s comprise a significant staple in the semiarid tropic and guarantee food and nutritional security for needy individuals, who can’t develop other food crops because of poor rainfall and soil fertility. They are profoundly nutritious and are utilized by people in the rural area.
- Requires Moderate fertile soils: They can grow in low to medium fertile soils and in areas of low rainfall. Jowar, Bajra, and Ragi are the significant Millet’s developed in India.
- Profitable crop: Millets are the good choice for farmers to achieve primary goals of Farming e.g., profit, versatility, and manageability.
- Drought resistant and sustainable: Millet’s are the ‘marvel grains’ of the future as they are drought resistant which need few external inputs. Due to its high resistance against harsh conditions, millets are sustainable to the environment, to the farmer growing it, and provide cheap and high nutrient options for all.
- Long shelf life: Nearly 40 percent of the food produced in India is wasted every year. Millets do not get destroyed easily, and some of the millets are good for consumption even after 10-12 years of growing, thus providing food security, and playing an important role in keeping a check on food wastage.
What is Odisha Millet mission (OMM) and its impact?
- Promotion of millets: OMM promotes production and consumption of seven millets. But so far, focus has been on ragi, which has accounted for 86 per cent of the total area under millets, according to data on the OMM website. In contrast, little millet, foxtail millet, sorghum, pearl millet, kodo millet and barnyard millet cover less than 13 per cent of the area.
- Non ragi millets: Mission aimed at looking for high-yielding seeds for non-ragi millets. Farmers are urged to plant some non-ragi millets
- Limited procurement: In 2020-21, the state government procured slightly more than 20 million kg of ragi. However, this accounts for only 27 per cent of the total ragi produced, as OMM procures only 500 kg of ragi per ha and leaves the rest for farmers to consume.
- Millets in diet for complete nutrition: This practice has prompted farmers to consume more millets in all seasons, shows a mid-term evaluation by NCDS in 2019-20. But given that average yield is 1,500 kg per ha, much of the produce does not get procured and farmers are forced to sell it at distressed rate. OMM officials also admit that despite ragi being distributed in PDS and as a mix through anganwadi centres in two districts, its consumption has not picked up in a significant manner.
- Diverse products of Millets: OMM also sells millet products, such as cookies, savoury snacks, vermicelli and processed millets, under a brand called “Millet Shakti” through food trucks, cafés, kiosks and other outlets.
- Food processing chain using SHGs: Women self-help groups (SHGs) have been kept at the centre of the programme. They do not just pay a major role in manufacturing biological inputs to improve millet yields and undertake processing of the produce, but also operate the millet-based cafés and outlets.The full potential of SHGs, though, has not yet been realised. So far, only three women’s SHGs manufacture and process Millet Shakti products, which limits the volume available, income generated, and consumption.
- Market linkage by FPOs: OMM also leverages farmer-producer organisations (FPOs) to provide better marketing linkages. Until now, OMM has tapped into existing FPOs to sell processed millets in the open market or aggregate produce for Tribal Development Co-operative Corporation of Odisha Limited; if a block does not have an FPO, an SHG or community group is registered as one.
- Current status of FPO’S: Currently, there are 76 FPOs under OMM. But some of them are engaged only in minor processing and aggregation, without plans of scaling up market linkages. Encouraging FPOs with better incentives and benefit-sharing will help them compete in the market
What are other government efforts to promote millet crops?
- Smart food campaign: Smart Food with the tagline ‘good for you, good for the planet and good for the smallholder farmer’ is an initiative that will initially focus on popularising millets, and sorghum and has been selected by LAUNCH Food as one of the winning innovations for 2017.
- Popularising the millets: Smart Food will be taken forward as a partnership and many organisations have already teamed up to popularise millets. In India, this includes Indian Institute of Millet Research (IIMR), National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).
Conclusion
- One way to double farm incomes and encourage farm diversification is to make millet production attractive by introducing millet cultivation in areas where farmers’ distress is visible.Dedicated programmes with proper training and capacity-building initiatives that urge farmers to move away from loss-making crops toward diversification via millets can be a timely method to pull farmers away from the region’s distress.
Mains Question
Q.why millets cultivation is suitable for geographic conditions of India? Analyse the various efforts by government to promote the millets.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Space technology Developments
Mains level: Space,Space security and Sustainability.
Context
- World Space Week this year is themed around ‘Space and Sustainability’. Among other things, the 2022 theme seeks to specifically inspire focus on the challenges the world faces to keep space safe and sustainable.
What is mean by Space?
- Space is an almost perfect vacuum, nearly void of matter and with extremely low pressure. In space, sound doesn’t carry because there aren’t molecules close enough together to transmit sound between them. Not quite empty, bits of gas, dust and other matter floats around “emptier” areas of the universe, while more crowded regions can host planets, stars and galaxies.
- From our Earth-bound perspective, outer space is most often thought to begin about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level at what is known as the Kármán line. This is an imaginary boundary at an altitude where there is no appreciable air to breathe or scatter light. Passing this altitude, blue starts to give way to black because oxygen molecules are not in enough abundance to make the sky blue.
What is mean by Space sustainability?
- Space sustainability is ensuring that all humanity can continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit now and in the long term. This will require international cooperation, discussion, and agreements designed to ensure that outer space is safe, secure, and peaceful.
What necessitate the sustainable space technology debate?
- Mounting challenge of Space debris: Challenges are endless in both quantitative and qualitative terms, i.e., they are several and severe, ranging from satellite crowding and collision risk to space debris in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
- Ever increasing satellites: The sense of urgency around space sustainability is already skyrocketing—more than 80 countries currently contribute to the over 6,800 active satellites in orbit, of which many are used for both civilian and military purposes, as well as over 30,000 pieces of orbital debris.
- Militarization of space: Given the development of new and emerging space technologies, the rapid militarisation and securitisation of space, and the growing distrust amongst nations in the domain, space activity is only set to increase and acquire a more national security-oriented focus.
- Large scale Development of ASAT: This is already visible in several countries around the world. There has been a recent uptick in the development and testing of destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, with 26 tests in the past two decades conducted by the four countries that have access to these weapons (US, Russia, China, and India).
- Massive investment into military space capability: France, which is currently leading the European Council, has also invested several billion euros into military space capabilities, and regularly emphasises the security importance of space for other EU countries.
- Increasing Defence space commands: Australia set up its Defence Space Command in early 2022 to increase its strategic potential in space, and South Korea deployed a spy satellite to better monitor North Korea in June 2022, giving its military space plan a huge push.
- However, none of these countries have a sustainability provision in their defence space operations or programmes.
- Dichotomy in Security and sustainability: Sustainability and security are two sides of the same coin, but as a result of this inherent dichotomy, they are often juxtaposed against each other.
- Keeping Security is the priority: The contrast between highly motivated and funded national security efforts and the relatively non-prioritised international engagements around space sustainability is an example of a larger trend of indifference towards sustainable development in favour of higher military spending.
- SDG on backburner: To substantiate this point, funding for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was adversely affected due to COVID-19 in 2021, and this reportedly dramatically pushed back progress on the SDGs, but the global military expenditure has consistently been on an upward incline and crossed the US$2 trillion mark for the first time in the same year.
- Securitization of space: The trade-off between security and sustainability can jeopardise sustainable development within a plethora of issue domains, thus, increasing the likelihood of exhausting limited resources. This in turn could exacerbate the risk of conflict due to the resulting scarce resources, ultimately creating a vicious cycle of securitisation and conflict.
- Rat race in Space : As a case in point, the incumbent space race has always been marked by competing security and commercial interests, which has resulted in a constant escalation of global government spending on space programmes to its record value of US$98 billion in 2021. Space sustainability, on the other hand, has only seen activity recently, and primarily in an international and voluntary set-up.
What regulations are needed for Sustainable Space?
- Prioritising peaceful use of space: A Working Group on the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities was set up by the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 2010, which has 95 UN member states taking part in it. The Group adopted a set of guidelines by consensus in 2019, although it failed to make these guidelines or any other regulations legally binding. It agreed to work over it for 5 years from 2022 onwards, but since the Group uses a consensus-based approach to reach agreements, it is difficult to expect more stringent or extensive regulatory frameworks to emerge from it.
- Consensus is difficult but necessary: Consensus-based approaches in multilateral forums, especially related to arms or other security objectives, often contrast with individual national security interests of its member states and have been criticised for their slow or ineffective progress.
- Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons: Another example of this is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’ (CCW) Group of Government Experts (GGE) meetings on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), which have only produced a set of 11 non-binding guiding principles since deliberations around LAWS began in 2014.
- Space sustainable ratings should be developed: The World Economic Forum, for instance, introduced a new standard called the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), in 2022, which aims to recognise, reward, and encourage space actors to design and implement sustainable and responsible space missions. It remains to be seen whether countries will respond favourably to tools like the SSR, which are based on a positive reinforcement model, to be more space sustainability-conscious.
Conclusion
- space sustainability is only at the cusp of becoming actionable. When space experts, intergovernmental organisations, or countries themselves conclude that sustainability should be a part of their space mandate, and when they devise possible methods to help achieve this, they cannot do so in a vacuum. Space sustainability should not become the political football like climate change.
Mains Question
Q.What are the threats to sustainable space technology? Comment on various laws, regulations, forums on sustainable space technology.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Holistic decriminalisation Bill
Mains level: Holistic decriminalisation Bill ,advantages and MSME's,Ease of doing business
Context
- The government’s proposal to bring a “holistic decriminalisation” bill in the Winter Session of Parliament, If gets enacted into law, it will be one of India’s greatest reforms since 1991. One of the objectives of this proposed law is to “end harassment and reduce compliance burden on businesses.
What is Holistic decriminalisation Bill?
- A new holistic decriminalisation bill is set to amend burdensome provisions in laws related to businesses.
- Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal said that the Decriminalising sections of various laws will end the harassment faced by businesses and reduce compliance burden. Seeking quick industry feedback on problematic areas that can be covered in the proposed Bill.
What is the status of existing laws in India?
- Burden of Imprisonment clauses: Business regulatory universe comprises 1,536 laws, of which more than half, or 843 laws, carry imprisonment clauses. Under these laws, there are 69,233 compliances businesses face as an aggregate, of which almost two out of five, or 26,134, carry imprisonment clauses.
- Union and state legislations on the compliance: Of the 843 laws with imprisonment clauses, 28.9 percent, or 244 laws, have been enacted by Parliament; the rest by State legislatures and rules. Of the 26,134 compliances that carry imprisonment clauses, a fifth, or 5,239 clauses are situated in Union laws.
- No institutional support for informal sector: Of the 69 million enterprises in India, only 1 million are formal employers; as a result, the remaining informal enterprises get no access to institutional capital, talent, or supply chains.
- Smaller the better attitude: India’s predatory and rent-seeking policy infrastructure ensures that businesses choose to remain under the regulatory radar—small may not be beautiful but it is certainly safe. For instance, a small business with 150 employees or more has to deal with 500 to 900 compliances a year, on which it can end up spending up to INR 12-18 lakhs by hiring consultants to be compliant with labour laws, taxes, factories, and so on.
- Burden of compliance is cost-effective: Creating a regulatory bias against small businesses once a line of scale is crossed, managing a compliance department becomes cost-effective; until then, for the small business owner-manager, compliances becomes a risk-management strategy, almost an economic activity.
Why such reforms in business laws are necessary?
- To attract more investment: When viewed through the lens of the government’s intention to make India an investment destination for global and domestic capital, it would be a reform that should end the endemic of harassment, corruption, and rent-seeking by officials of the Union government.
- To end corruption at state level: Corruption by officials of state governments will end when criminal provisions in State laws and rules get similarly rationalised; some of these will get rationalised with amendments to Union laws that are enforced by state governments.
- Encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit: Regulatory framework is cumulative policy actions of the three arms of the State the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary using instruments of legislations, rules, regulations, or orders, to create or raise barriers to a smooth flow of ideas, organisation, money, and, most importantly, the flow of the entrepreneurial spirit.
What are the recommendations for Holistic decriminalization?
- Amend the overreaching laws: Reform all compliances with overarching legislation, across ministries and departments. Smaller steps being taken to ease doing business in India, such as shifting the responsibility under the Legal Metrology Rules from directors to executives, should converge into this single bill.
- There should be Justifiable imprisonment: Use criminal penalties in business laws with extreme restraint the idea of using a criminal clause as a default option should be done away with and replaced by a justification for imprisonment, including the term in jail.
- Ending the criminalisation: End the criminalisation of all compliance procedures such as filing on a wrong form or mislabelling.
- Introducing new laws: Introduce sunset clauses for all imprisonment clauses this needs a new enabling law as a precursor.
- Bringing extensive Digitisation: Digitise all compliance filings, as has been done by the income tax department.
- Focus on paperless work: Convert every department that acts as a regulatory body to go paperless and faceless. This should look beyond merely creating a website and uploading records. This will enable automated record reconciliation, identify leakages, detect frauds, and flag discrepancies.
- More such steps in the right direction: By reducing the compliance burden such that it ends harassment, the government is moving in the right direction. To prevent any policy holes left after the passage of the bill into an act, this is a law that needs to be studied hard, debated well, and only then enacted. Of course, there will be political opposition. It is up to the government to ignore the rhetoric and embrace the solutions for the greater good of the country.
Conclusion
- The country is getting ready for third-generation reforms. Among them are reforms that rationalise compliances and imprisonment clauses—retain a handful, reduce or remove most, compound the rest and turn physical imprisonment into financial penalties. The Inspector Raj, expressed through the colonial, corrupt, and rent-seeking policy infrastructure, must be disassembled and jobs, wealth, and large enterprises created.
Mains Question
Q. Why current industrial policy and laws are causing the harassment of entreprenuers? Discuss the reforms needed in the light of proposed “ Holistic Discrimination” Bill.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: NA
Mains level: Human Migration: Reasons and Impact
Context
- India has used Aadhaar (digital identity) and UPI (digital payments) extensively to address the challenges of identification and financial inclusion in social protection delivery, particularly in the case of migrants.
Who is a migrant worker?
- A “migrant worker” is a person who either migrates within their home country or outside it to pursue work.
- Usually, migrant workers do not have the intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.
- As per the census 2011, the total number of internal migrants in India is 36 crore or 37% of the country’s population.
- The Economic Survey pegged the size of the migrant workforce at roughly 20 percent or over 10 crores in 2016.
What are the problems faced by migrants?
- Issues with finding local Employment: Most migrant workers have a seasonal nature of employment. During off-seasons, they struggle to feed their families. Repeated lockdowns made situations more difficult for migrants to find jobs in their localities. They faced travel restrictions which hindered their job search as well.
- Lack of Insurance Benefits in a Pandemic Environment: Migrant workers work in precarious conditions with little wages and no access to government schemes and services. Poor and unsafe working and living conditions make them prone to diseases. Greater threats of occupational illnesses, nutritional diseases, alcoholism, HIV, and communicable diseases are rampant in the migrant workforce.
- Issue of timely and Fair Payment of Wages: The informal workforce in India consists of more than 150.6 million regular and daily wage earners. Most of these workers are unaware of their rights as ‘migrant workers. Many unscrupulous agents coerce them and don’t pay minimum wages as per law.
- Lack of portability of benefits: Migrants registered to claim access to benefits at one location lose access upon migration to a different location. This is especially true of access to entitlements under the PDS. The ration card required to access benefits under the PDS is issued by state governments and is not portable across states. This system excludes inter-state migrants from the PDS unless they surrender their card from the home state and get a new one from the host state.
- Lack of affordable housing: The proportion of migrants in urban population is 47%. In 2015, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs identified migrants in urban areas as the largest population needing housing in cities. There is inadequate supply of low-income ownership and rental housing options.
Government steps for migrant workers
- Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana: After the lockdown, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana with a financial package of Rs. 1.7 lakh crore was launched to help poor, needy, and unorganized sector workers of the country.
- PM SVANidhi Scheme: PM SVANidhi Scheme was launched to facilitate collateral-free working capital loans up to Rs.10,000/- of one-year tenure, to approximately, 50 lakh street vendors, to resume their businesses.
- Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan: In order to facilitate the employment of migrant workers who have gone back to their home state, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan was initiated in 116 districts in Mission Mode.
- State migrant cell: Migrant workers’ Cell is being created to prepare a database of migrant workers in states with mapping.
- eShram portal: It is a national database created to register the unorganised workers in the country, including the migrant workers.
- National policy on migrant workers: NITI Aayog has been mandated to prepare a draft national policy on migrant workers to reimagine labour-capital relations while integrating the migrant workers within the formal workforce.
How technology could provide Solutions?
- Providing digital public infrastructure (DPI): Digital public infrastructure systems that enable the effective provision of essential society-wide functions and services can enable a paradigm shift, allowing governments to co-create solutions with the private sector and civil society.
- Adopting Public private partnership models: There are three key areas where DPI can enable public-private partnerships (PPP) in the delivery of social protection of migrants,
- Awareness of entitlements: One barrier faced at the initial stage is lack of awareness of entitlements or of the need to reapply, when migrants move from one state to another. Jan Saathi is an application that provides migrants withinformation on eligible social security schemes. Organisations such as Haqdarshak not only inform potential beneficiaries about their eligibility for various schemes, Central or State, but also help them avail entitlements.
- Information about livelihoods and housing: The informal nature of the labour market makes access to affordable and safe living conditions a challenge, especially if the family migrates as a unit. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairshas introduced the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes under PMAY-Urban but the availability of such facilities is inadequate compared to the number of migrants. Bandhu’s ecosystem of applications connect migrant workers directly with employers and housing providers, to give them more informed choices. Jobsgaar and MyRojgaar also play a similar role by connecting workers to employers.
- Healthy Grievance redressal Mechanism: Gram Vaani bridges the gap in grievance redressal by providing a platform where citizens can use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to record their grievance in accessing entitlements. Aajeevika Bureau and The Working People’s Charter built the India Labourline to provide legal aid and mediation services to migrant workers.
- Adopting a well-designed data: While a growing ecosystem of private players (NGOs, civil society organisations, not-for-profit and for-profit entities) are addressing these needs, well designed data exchanges can help unlock a strong public-private collaboration in the delivery of social protection.
What more government can do to address the issue of migrants?
- Creating centralized data: The state’s digital efforts are often in siloes and the need to maximize the use of data across schemes and departments is a high priority.
- E-Shram: Initiatives such as direct benefit transfers and linking schemes for the portability of entitlements have shown promise. e-Shram, which is a national database of unorganized workers, aims to reduce access barriers to social protection for migrants.
- Making portable entitlement: Recent announcements of API-based integration of e-Shram with the various state government labor departments and with the One Nation One Ration Card scheme are a step in that direction.
- Working with the private sector: Enabling linkages of migrant data with the private sector can lead to benefits on the demand side, in the form of reduced transaction costs in identifying jobs, affordable housing, and redressal of grievances.
- Engaging the private sector: Private players who have established relationships with these mobile populations can help the state in planning and forecasting the demand for benefits. An example of this is the digital payment ecosystem since the introduction of UPI.
Conclusion
- Digital technologies have potential solutions to problems and transform the livelihood of migrants. The need for adequate data protection and safeguards is essential for the implementation of any such initiative.
Mains Question
Q.Enlist the problem faced by migrant workers? Elaborate on how use of technology can solve the many problems of migrants.
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: NA
Mains level: Urab floods,Urban challenges and solutions
Context
- After flooding of major metropolitan cities of Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Delhi following heavy rainfall, the Centre has pointed to two cities – Davanagere and Agartala – as successful examples of cities that have curbed urban flooding.
Why cities are so important in India?
- Drivers of Growth: Urbanisation has played and will continue to play a critical role in India’s growth story in the 21st century.
- Cities are seen as GDP multipliers: By some estimates, Indian cities already contribute up to 70% of the country’s GDP. Yet, depending on which official estimates you use, India is just 26% or 31% urban. But there is growing evidence that India is more urban than is officially recognized.
- Cities have more productivity: Well-functioning and diverse cities allow for the sharing and cross-pollination of ideas, which in turn drive greater productivity.
- Lack of Planning: current urban planning policies and practice have led to suboptimal use of land in Indian cities. This has multiple consequences. There is not enough floor space for accommodating migrants in search of economic opportunities; they make space for themselves in informal settlements. There is also not enough land in the public domain for developing adequate open spaces or augmenting infrastructure capacities.
- Lack of Housing:The pandemic revealed that the cities’ economies rely on migrant populations in the formal and informal sectors. Workers in both markets move from rural to urban and urban to urban areas as they find better opportunities; they are mobile and need adequate rental options. Today, in most Indian cities, this demand is not met and leads to unaffordable options, pushing the poorer sections out to slums and other informal settlements.
- Lack of Transport: Indian cities are infamous for their road congestion; three of them rank in the 10 most congested in the world according to the 2020 TomTom Travel Index with Mumbai ranking second. The existing public transportation systems are already overcrowded and of poor quality.
- Lack of Public health: Like other health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the need to ensure adequate healthcare services and sanitation infrastructure for a healthy population in cities. In the initial months of the outbreak, the focus of health services shifted entirely towards addressing the novel coronavirus, leaving other health issues unaddressed and shutting down routine care services.
- Impact on Environment: The causes for low air quality are multiple; vehicular movement and on-road congestion are major contributors. A safe and clean environment is key to good public health.
- Problems faced by vulnerable sections: The economic shock and work from home guidelines changed migration patterns; workers in cities returned to their home towns and villages. Slum dwellers, with limited access to adequate infrastructure, and migrant workers, disenfranchised from social protection systems or daily wagers, were more vulnerable to this shock. In the medium and long term, it is difficult to predict what the job market will be in cities.
What can be done to address the urban challenges?
- Future planning is necessary: Manage the spatial growth of cities and allow them to build more planned road networks for future horizontal expansion and revoke faulty policies that constrain the use of floor space to build vertically.
- Housing for all scheme is important: Focus on providing public housing for the poor; India can learn from successful models in Singapore or Hong Kong and understand the strategic challenges of other international examples such as Mexico. India can also work toenable efficient rental markets
- Holistic transport should be focused: Integrate formal and informal modes of transportation into holistic transportation strategies to ensure seamless mobility, as well as first and last mile connectivity.
- Increasing funds to Cities: Decentralise fiscal powers to the local level and train city authorities so that they can make more strategic decisions in health expenditures or public health infrastructure, as well as gain the capacity to raise their own resources.
- Need of a healthy Environment: Increase the number of open spaces in the public domain, maintain them and monitor their use. Prepare for disasters with robust framework of physical infrastructures, road networks and large open spaces. Build adequate infrastructure to support the sustainable development of emerging Tier-2 and Tier 3 towns.
- More attention to vulnerable: Develop more systematic identification mechanisms of the urban poor to ameliorate the delivery of public services and social protection. Collect accurate data on migrant population and capture their socio-economic diversity to better address their needs. Monitor access to services, housing and jobs of the vulnerable communities in real time.
Conclusion
- Urban infrastructure is crumbling day by day. In the next 25 years, cities will have more population than rural areas. Indian cities need urgent reform in order to unlock their economic potential and transform quality of life.
Mains Question
Q.Discuss the urban infrastructure challenges? What are the governments scheme and actions to address the urbanization challenges?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Critical Minerals,rare earth minerals
Mains level: critical minerals and applications ,Aatmanirbharta in Energy security.
Context
- In his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted the country to pursue aatmanirbhar bharta in energy by focusing on clean energy technologies. Securing access to key critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth metals is critical for building resilient and indigenous supply chains for clean energy technologies.
Background
- Concerns over the pricing and availability of oil and gas in the wake of the Ukraine crisis continue to fuel global policy debates on energy security. However, the fragility of clean energy supply chains obscures pathways for countries to reduce dependence on fossil fuel.
- Imported inflationary pressures through exposure to volatile oil and gas markets also pose risks to macroeconomic growth and stability, particularly for India, import dependent for around 85% of its oil and half of its gas needs.
What are Critical Minerals?
- Critical minerals are elements that are the building blocks of essential modern-day technologies, and are at risk of supply chain disruptions.
- These minerals are now used everywhere from making mobile phones, computers to batteries, electric vehicles and green technologies like solar panels and wind turbines.
- Based on their individual needs and strategic considerations, different countries create their own lists.
- However, such lists mostly include graphite, lithium, cobalt, rare earths and silicon which is a key mineral for making computer chips, solar panels and batteries.
- Aerospace, communications and defence industries also rely on several such minerals as they are used in manufacturing fighter jets, drones, radio sets and other critical equipment.
Why is this resource critical?
- As countries around the world scale up their transition towards clean energy and digital economy, these critical resources are key to the ecosystem that fuels this change.
- Any supply shock can severely imperil the economy and strategic autonomy of a country over-dependent on others to procure critical minerals.
- But these supply risks exist due to rare availability, growing demand and complex processing value chain.
- Many times the complex supply chain can be disrupted by hostile regimes, or due to politically unstable regions.
- They are critical as the world is fast shifting from a fossil fuel-intensive to a mineral-intensive energy system.
What are Rare Earth Metals?
- The rare earth elements (REE) are a set of seventeen metallic elements. These include the fifteen lanthanides on the periodic table plus scandium and yttrium.
- Rare earth elements are an essential part of many high-tech devices.
- They have a wide range of applications, especially high-tech consumer products, such as cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, and flat-screen monitors and televisions.
- Significant defense applications include electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.
- Rare earth minerals, with names like neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium, are crucial to the manufacture of magnets used in industries of the future, such as wind turbines and electric cars.
Applications of REMs in various fields:
- Electronics: Television screens, computers, cell phones, silicon chips, monitor displays, long-life rechargeable batteries, camera lenses, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), baggage scanners, marine propulsion systems.
- Defense Sector: Rare earth elements play an essential role in our national defense. The military uses night-vision goggles, precision-guided weapons, communications equipment, GPS equipment, batteries, and other defense electronics. These give the United States military an enormous advantage. Rare earth metals are key ingredients for making the very hard alloys used in armored vehicles and projectiles that shatter upon impact.
- Renewable Energy: Solar panels, Hybrid automobiles, wind turbines, next-generation rechargeable batteries, bio-fuel catalysts.
- Manufacturing: High strength magnets, metal alloys, stress gauges, ceramic pigments, colorants in glassware, chemical oxidizing agent, polishing powders, plastics creation, as additives for strengthening other metals, automotive catalytic converters
- Medical Science: Portable x-ray machines, x-ray tubes, magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) contrast agents, nuclear medicine imaging, cancer treatment applications, and for genetic screening tests, medical and dental lasers.
- Technology: Lasers, optical glass, fiber optics, masers, radar detection devices, nuclear fuel rods, mercury-vapor lamps, highly reflective glass, computer memory, nuclear batteries, high-temperature superconductors.
DO YOU KNOW?
Metals such as cadmium, lead are often used in manufacturing plastic and over time can enter coastal waters. These are acutely harmful for coastal wildlife and humans.Different kinds of plastic releases different kinds of metals that may release when exposed to water and UV lights.
- Deposits in geopolitically sensitive regions: Reserves are often concentrated in regions that are geopolitically sensitive or fare poorly from an ease of doing business perspective.
- Controlled production: A portion of existing production is controlled by geostrategic competitors. For example, China wields considerable influence in cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo through direct equity investments and its Belt and Road Initiative.
- Agreements in advance from outside: Future mine production is often tied up in off take agreements, in advance, by buyers from other countries to cater to upcoming demand.
A step taken by Indian government for sourcing strategic minerals
- For sourcing of strategic minerals, the Indian government established Khanij Bidesh India Limited (KABIL) in 2019 with the mandate to secure mineral supply for the domestic market.
What is Khanij Bidesh India Limited (KABIL)?
- Joint venture: A joint venture company namely Khanij Bidesh India Ltd. (KABIL) set up with the participation of three Central Public Sector Enterprises namely, National Aluminium Company Ltd.(NALCO), Hindustan Copper Ltd.(HCL) and Mineral Exploration Company Ltd. (MECL).
- Objective: The objective of constituting KABIL is to ensure a consistent supply of critical and strategic minerals to Indian domestic market. While KABIL would ensure mineral security of the Nation, it would also help in realizing the overall objective of import substitution.
Suggestions based on Council on energy environment and water (CEEW) to achieve the objective of KABIL
- Mapping out the domestic requirement: Figure out the mineral requirements of the domestic industry. This could best be accomplished by a task force which includes the ministries of power, new and renewable energy, heavy industry, and science and technology.
- Clear road map for indigenous manufacturing: Five year road maps with clear targets for deployment and indigenous manufacturing across clean energy applications would provide visibility to domestic investors. Assess the technology mix that would support this deployment. On this basis, determine the quantities of minerals necessary to support indigenous manufacturing.
- Better coordination between different stakeholders: Coordinate with the domestic industry to determine where strategic interventions by the government would be necessary for the purpose.KABIL could collaborate with industry to bolster its market intelligence capabilities for tracking global supply side developments.
- Preemptive agreements through KABIL for reliable supply: If conducive investment opportunities don’t exist KABIL should preemptively sign off take agreements with global mineral suppliers to secure future production. It could aggregate reliable supply of minerals for domestic requirements and sign back to back sales agreements with the domestic industry .Such large scale centralised national procurement could be done at preferential terms.
- Joint Investment In mining assets to mitigate investment risks: The government should jointly invest in mining assets with geostrategic partners. KABIL should make equity investments in mining jurisdictions that private sector investors may deem too risky. It should leverage government to government partnerships to mitigate investment risks. This could be done through joint investments with sovereign entities from geostrategic partners or private sector entities with expertise in specific geographies.
- Finding the alternatives: Technologies such as sodium ion batteries could reduce requirements for sourcing minerals from beyond India’s borders. It could also propose co development of such technologies with geostrategic partners.
- Developing policies on sustainable urban mining and recycling: Develop policies on urban mining aimed at recycling mineral inputs from deployments that have completed their useful life. These could help further reduce dependence on international sourcing.
Conclusion
- Besides Ukraine, other potential geopolitical flash points also exist against a backdrop of dwindling multilateral cooperation. India must act immediately and decisively to mitigate these risks to its energy security.
Mains Question
Q.What are critical minerals? Why the critical minerals are so important? What steps India can take to achieve the objective of Atmanirbhar Bharat in domestic mineral supply and thereby mitigating energy security risks?
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
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: Cotton crop,Voluntary Sustainable Standards (VSS)
Mains level: Paper 3- Textile industry,Voluntary Sustainable Standards (VSS)
Context
- Cotton, one of the most important crops, has a strategic role in India’s international agriculture play. India is the world’s third-largest exporter of cotton and the second-largest exporter of textiles, therefore, also contributing significantly to the country’s economy.
All you need to know about the Cotton crop
- Rainfall and Temperature: Sensitive to timing of rainfall and rainfall during harvest might lead to crop failure. Temperature required is around 20-30 degree c., while rainfall is about 75-100cm.
- Soil: Black soil ideally suited for cotton cultivation as it is rich in lime.cotton is vulnerable to pest attack.
- Humidity: Cotton cultivation requires more than 200 frost free days. Humidity during harvest is harmful.
- Oilcake: The cotton seeds are crushed for oil and the oilcake is an important animal fodder and also used as farm manure.
- India holds a 4% share of the U.S.$840 billion global textile and apparel market
- India has been successful in developing backward links, with the aid of the Technical Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS), in the cotton and technical textiles industry.
- However, India is yet to move into man-made fibres as factories still operate in a seasonal fashion.
- Areas of cotton cultivation are Gujrat, Maharashtra, Telangana, Punjab, etc.
Do you know?
The latest archaeological discovery in Mehrgarh puts the dating of early cotton cultivation and the use of cotton to 5000 BCE. The Indus Valley civilization started cultivating cotton by 3000 BCE. Cotton was mentioned in Hindu hymns in 1500 BCE.
What are the voluntary sustainable standards (VSS) in cotton?
- Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS): Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS), which encapsulate certification schemes, labelling programmes, and private standards. The major VSS that are dominant in the sustainable cotton value chain today include Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), Organic Cotton, Fair trade Cotton, and Cotton Made in Africa.
- To achieve sustainable Goal: The global textile supply chain is undergoing a paradigm shift; it is pursuing environmental and social upgradation to meet the sustainability requirements imposed by global textile and home furnishing retailers, so as to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change on cotton farmers and cotton cultivation.
What are the benefits of VSS for India?
- Enhance position in global cotton supply: Adapting to VSS is clearly beneficial for India. On the one hand, it will help it remain globally competitive in the cotton supply chain and strengthen its position in the export market, while on the other, it will help meet India’s SDG commitments.
- Takes India a step closer towards sustainable farming: India has made considerable progress in its transition towards a more sustainable cotton farming ecosystem. The total cotton area under VSS has reached 1.5 million hectares, contributing to 24 percent of the global VSS cotton area.
- Increases organic production of cotton: With approximately 0.2 million hectares of area for production, it is the largest producer of organic cotton, accounting for 50 percent of global organic cotton production, and the second-largest producer of ‘Better Cotton’, accounting for 16.5 percent of total Better Cotton production covering an area of 1.5 million hectares.
- Higher yeild: According to the BCI’s 2020 Impact Report for India, Better Cotton farmers have 9 percent higher yields and 18 percent higher profit than conventional farmers.
- Eco friendly production:The Thinkstep report 2018 on the Life Cycle Assessment of VSS Cotton conducted in Madhya Pradesh revealed a reduction of 50 percent in climate change impact, 59 percent in blue water consumption, 84 percent in ecotoxicity, and 100 percent eutrophication in organic over conventional cotton.
- To achieve SDG Targets: The VSS cotton growth story in India has already demonstrated its contribution towards the achievement of SDG targets for Zero Hunger (Goal 2), Clean Water and Sanitation (Goal 6), Responsible Consumption and Production (Goal 12), Life on Land (Goal 15), and Climate Action (Goal 16).
- NITI Aayog’s Assessment: VSS cotton delivers real, measurable outcomes according to priority indicators as outlined by NITI Aayog which maps India’s SDG goals. These indicators include changes in the extent of water bodies, improving groundwater withdrawal against availability, and rationalising nitrogen fertiliser.
Conclusion
- India must scale up the VSS while aligning it with its SDG commitments since VSS in cotton ensures a better production system, sourcing methods, and consumption patterns while also influencing the lives of hundreds of millions.
Mains Question
Q. What are the Voluntary Sustainable Standards (VSS)? Cotton production can be boosted in India using VSS method. Elaborate.
UPSC 2023 countdown has begun! Get your personal guidance plan now! (Click here)
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now