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Put away the stick (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: Health
Prelims level: National Family Health Survey
Mains level: Limitations of the two child norms

Context

• On Tuesday, the Assam government announced that people with more than two children will not be eligible for government jobs from January 2021.

Two child policy

• Assam will become the fourth state after Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to have a two-child norm in place for government jobs.
• At least five other states follow this norm for candidates seeking elections to local bodies such as panchayats, municipal corporations and zila parishads.

Limitations of the two child norms

• Measures such as debarring people from holding government office amount to penalising weaker sections of the population, including women, whose reproductive choices are often subject to a variety of constraints.
• The Assam government has chosen to ignore the discriminatory nature of the two-child policy.
• Almost all surveys indicate that India’s population growth rate has slowed substantially in the last decade.
• According to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), at 2.2, India’s total fertility rate (TFR) is very close to the desired replacement level of 2.1.
• NFHS-4 data confirms that women’s education has a direct bearing on fertility rates.
• The decadal survey shows that women who have never been to school are likely to bear more than three children while the fertility rate of those who have completed 12 years of schooling is 1.7.

Fertility rate and Population growth

• In spite of the fall in TFR, India’s population has continued to grow because nearly 50 per cent of the people are in the age group of 15-49.
• This means that the absolute population will continue to rise even though couples have less children.
• NFHS-4 figures on contraception point to a major shortfall: The unmet need for contraception is 13 per cent — over 30 million women of reproductive age are not able to access contraception.

Way ahead

• A further slowing down of the momentum will require raising the age of marriage, delaying the first pregnancy and ensuring spacing between births.
• Dealing with the country’s demographic peculiarity will require investments in health, education, nutrition and employment avenues.
• The right to seek a government job or contest elections are citizens’ rights.
• State governments will do well to rethink throttling such rights to enforce population control.

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The law isn’t enough (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Amending lynching law

Context

• The glaring absence of figures relating to incidents of lynching in the recently released National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) database on the pretext that the data received from the states were “unreliable” hints at a deliberate attempt to keep the figures under wraps.

Highlighting the figures

• Figures available from various other sources indicate that in 63 incidents, 28 persons were killed between 2010 and 2017, of which 24 were Muslims.
• There have been 266 cases of lynching since 2014 and this continues to show an upward trend, casting an adverse impression about the role of the police in arresting such trends.

Law against lynching

• The police have played a partisan role in most incidents of lynching, there have been cases where policemen acted promptly and prevented incidents of lynching.
• The Supreme Court has directed the Centre and all states to frame stringent laws against lynching.
• Manipur passed an anti-lynching law last November. Rajasthan and West Bengal have passed such legislation more recently.
• West Bengal’s law is stringent, punishing with death those held guilty of lynching victims to death.
• But these will be futile unless they are strictly enforced on the ground. Political patronage to fundamentalist elements will deter the policemen from doing their duty.

Others measures need to be taken

• Uttar Pradesh State Law Commission has stressed the need to take stringent action against officials for dereliction of their duties.
• The district magistrate and police officers can be imprisoned for a term extending upto three years with a fine upto Rs 5000.
• Monitoring fake news and arresting those who originate and forward news that could trigger mob violence or communal unrest.
• The police has to spread its intelligence dragnet to such an extent that any plan to upset the law and order machinery is reported to the control room within minutes.
• Districts that are communally sensitive ought to have additional armed and well-equipped companies to rush to any spot within minutes to handle frenzied mobs.
• Prompt investigations into incidents of mob lynching followed by arrests and trial by fast track courts could go a long way in curbing such incidents.

Way forward

• It is likely that every effort will be made to influence the victims and witnesses to either withdraw the case or to give statements that would weaken the prosecution’s case.
• Policemen who watch as mute spectators should also be tried in the same manner as the culprits.
• Senior police officers also need to be taken to task if found guilty of dereliction of duty.

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Fog of secrecy (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Mains level: Transparency and the role of whistleblowers

Context

• Australian newspapers published redacted front pages on Monday, protesting curbs on the press in the name of national security.

Right to know

• The Right to Know campaign has drawn competing publications to protest the impact of national security laws on press freedoms, and on the whistleblowers who bring in the bad news.

Background

• The headquarters of ABC were raided over stories alleging war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian special forces.
• The Australian government instructed police to consider the importance of a free press and the public interest before proceeding against the media.
• But the government seems reluctant to treat the journalists’ broader demands favourably.

Role of whistleblowers to maintaining transparency

• Governments become more opaque and intrusive at the same time.
• With intensifying information asymmetry in politics, whistleblowers and digital activists like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Christopher Wylie have become crucial sources of insight about the intent of governments.
• They are also defenders of the liberties taken in the lee of security laws.
• Some of them may have personal motives, but that is secondary in comparison to the value of their efforts to the public interest.
• They seek the right to contest search warrants, new rules for determining what the government can stamp as secret, reform in the law of defamation and freedom of information, the protection of journalists from national security laws and whistleblower protection.

Conclusion

• It is important to dispel the fog of secrecy, which governments have revelled in since the colonial era.

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Need for balance: On web content regulation (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Security
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Web content regulation framework

Context

• The Supreme Court’s decision to take over the hearing of all pending cases relating to web content regulation, including the role of intermediaries and the traceability of encrypted messages, is both a challenge and an opportunity.
• The Centre has informed the court that it intends to notify by January 2020 new guidelines for intermediaries, a term that covers the Internet and other online service providers and includes social media platforms.

Challenges for the court

• Even while transferring to itself related cases pending in different High Courts, the court has rightly decided to hear them only after the Centre notifies its new guidelines for intermediaries.
• It is for the executive to frame policy on this sensitive matter, while the question whether social media need weeding out of objectionable content will ultimately require adjudication.
• The challenge before the government and the court is to find a balance between requiring access to the originators of encrypted content and respecting individual privacy.
• It is also a unique opportunity to test the impact of the K.S. Puttaswamy verdict (2017) on the proposed legal framework.
• The judgment had declared privacy as a fundamental right and laid down a proportionality standard to test the validity of restrictions on that right.
• The government has voiced concern about the threat posed by social media content to the democratic polity through fake news and hate speech, to the country’s security and sovereignty, as well as to society through undesirable online content such as child pornography and communal messaging.

Draft issued by the government

• The Centre’s new draft of Intermediary Guidelines, originally issued in 2011, was made public last year, and comments invited from all sections.
• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has received numerous responses, and inter-ministerial discussions have taken place.
• It is not yet known whether concerns voiced by Internet freedom activists and social media companies will be factored into the final notification.
• In particular, the provisions on the mandatory disclosure of “originators” of offending messages are a source of worry to social media platforms that use end-to-end encryption.

Way ahead

• It is technologically feasible for the platforms to provide back-door access to law enforcement is itself in doubt.
• The government’s larger concern about the use of messaging technology and the potential for ‘virality’ of fake news and hate-mongering is quite valid, the threshold for law enforcing agencies to seek a ‘key’ to unlock the encryption ought not to be low.
• Vague appeals to ‘security’ and ‘sovereignty’, and a blanket claim of crime prevention contingency without narrowly defined circumstances in which intermediaries should be obliged to help the agencies, can have a devastating effect on privacy.
• Other requirements such as proactive removal of offending content through automated tools may also come close to infringing free speech and expression.

Conclusion

• The line between public interest and individual rights should be thick and clear.

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Keys to kingdom (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Security
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Social media: Security vs Regulation

Context

• In the Supreme Court, a matter related to communication platforms is being debated.
• The matter was originally a plea for regulatory parity between internet telephony platforms and OTT communications providers like WhatsApp.
• It has turned into a question of national security and the threat to democracy posed by social media platforms.

Social media – security issues

• The government’s anxieties about social media date back at least to 2016, when there was a mass exodus of workers from the Northeast from Bengaluru panicked by rumours.
• Recently, fake news and lynchings across the country has intensified public fears.
• Government has told the court that the internet is “a potent tool to cause unimaginable disruption to the democratic polity,” and will publish rules for its regulation in three months.
• It was seen as the democratic force-multiplier of Arab Spring.
• It has become a foe of democracy — even in the US, where the attorney general has requested Facebook not to deploy software which makes interception impossible.

Key Issues out of the debate: Technical Issue and Political

• This turns the spotlight to the two issues, technical and political.
• Technically, it would mean rolling back or compromising end to end encryption, which would affect the data security of everyone, and not only suspects.
• This would represent a huge step back for privacy as a right.
• Dismantling or bypassing encryption could work in a climate of political probity where they limit their attention to legitimate targets only.
• But if governments snoop obsessively and take arbitrary action, it becomes a cause of concern.
• Social media companies have shown a reluctance to police content, and Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown University last week spelled it out explicitly.
• They have opened the door to governments seeking increased access to private communications, in the interest of public safety — and now of democracy.

Issue with governments

• Governments in India have shown themselves to be incompetent and malignant by incarcerating harmless citizens arbitrarily for trivial communications, wilfully misreading satire as sedition and weaponising the law.
• This has continued even after Section 66A of the Information Technology Act was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, on the ground that it offered too much latitude.

Conclusion

• Governments must demonstrate that they are able guardians of citizens’ data before they demand the security keys.

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The NREGA signal (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level: MGNREGA scheme
Mains level: Youth of MGNREGA indicating the distress in economy

Context

• As this paper has reported, the proportion of young workers, those in the age group of 18-30, in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act or MGNREGA scheme, has begun to rise, especially after 2017-18, when the economy was hit first by demonetisation and later by the implementation of the GST.

Highlights of the report says

• The number of young workers employed under the demand driven social security scheme rose to 70.71 lakh in 2018-19 — up from 58.69 lakh in FY18.
• This seems to be on an upward trajectory also, with 57.57 lakh having been employed upto October 21 this year.
• After the contraction of factory output by 1.1 per compared to the past year.
• The sharp decline in commercial credit in the year till September and cent in August other such gloomy indicators, come fresh signs of the deepening slowdown.

Reflecting the data

• MGNREGA is a scheme targeted at the hinterland, aiming to provide 100 days of work to each rural household.
• It is clearly a reflection of the little or limited opportunities for the young in rural India to venture out to bigger towns or cities given the slump in construction, real estate and manufacturing and the informal sector besides services, especially the hospitality business.
• The warning signs were evident much earlier, including in the last fiscal, when the demand for work under the MGNREGA, rose almost 10 per cent compared to the previous year.
• It given mounting rural distress and low farm support prices.

Issue with MGNREGA

• The government pegged the allocation for this scheme for FY20 at Rs 60,000 crore.
• This is a marginal decline compared to the revised estimates for the last fiscal.
• A minister said that the government did not want MGNREGA to be a programme in perpetuity.

Way ahead

• Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee had recently pointed to what he reckoned is a worrying factor — average consumption expenditure at 2018 prices had fallen from Rs 1,587 per person each month in 2014 to Rs 1,524 in 2017-18 in rural areas, according to NSSO data.
• Banerjee has suggested raising wages under MGNREGA and farm support prices.

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The case for meat options that taste like the real thing (Live Mint)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level: UNFAO
Mains level: Food Security problems and solutions

Context

• According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, rapid increases in the demand for foods derived from animals has led to an unprecedented increase in livestock production.
• Livestock accounts for about 40% of the global value of agricultural output today and supports the livelihoods and food security of almost 1.3 billion people on the planet.
• The total volume of land set apart for grazing and for the cultivation of crops dedicated to feeding livestock represents almost 80% of all land under agricultural cultivation today.

About Animal husbandry industry

• Animal husbandry has become an industrial enterprise designed to churn out livestock like widgets.
• Modern livestock farms are factories, keeping animals indoors so that they can be fed to a plan and bred faster.
• As a result of all of this, the average time-to-market for a US chicken has come down from 112 days to 48 over the last century, while its weight has more than doubled.
• Estimates vary, but in general farming today uses up anywhere between 70% and 90% of the world’s freshwater.

Significance of the environmental costs

• The huge amounts of nutrients and organic by-products of animal farming that make their way into our water bodies, the algae and plants in our lakes and ponds have begun to grow aggressively, using up all the oxygen available at the expense of other species.
• A recent study in Nature magazine indicated that 72–78% of all food related greenhouse gas emissions are related to animal products.
• According to the study, the environmental impacts of the food system exceeds the planetary boundaries for food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 110%, for cropland use by 70%, for nitrogen application by 125%, and for phosphorus application by 75%.
• Unless we make drastic changes to our global dietary habits, we will not be able to meet our planetary target of keeping global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
• This means that everyone on the planet will have to eat, on average, 75% less beef, 90% less pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling our consumption of beans and pulses and quadrupling the nuts and seeds we eat.

Way ahead

• Central to its verisimilitude is a food molecule called heme that Impossible Foods claims to have been the first to identify.
• Heme is found in every living plant and animal, but is most abundantly available in animal tissue.
• This, apparently, is what makes meat taste like meat and what we yearn for when we bite into a burger.
• Plant-based heme is widely available—most commonly in the root nodules of soybean plants—but Impossible Foods seems to have found a way to produce heme at an industrial scale through the fermentation of genetically engineered yeast.
• This is what makes their meatballs, kebabs, sausages and burger patties so hard to distinguish from the real stuff.

Conclusion

• Given human consumption patterns, it seems inevitable that we will need to change the way we farm.
• In which case, instead of banning meat altogether, we’d do well to encourage a tasty alternative.

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Leaving the door open to a border settlement (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: International Relations
Prelims level: McMahon Line
Mains level: Border Management and policies

Context

• The second informal summit between India and China at Mamallapuram, off Chennai (October 11-12, 2019), China’s President Xi Jinping had told Prime Minister Narendra Modi: “In accordance with the agreement on political guiding principles, we will seek a fair and reasonable solution to the border issue that is acceptable to both sides.”
• But a look at the past will show that the 2005 “Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question” agreement was a ray of light in an otherwise dim process of talks that began in 1981.

At the northern border

• It is now accepted that the frontier politics of British India had failed to produce a single integrated and well-defined northern boundary separating the Indian subcontinent from Xinjiang and Tibet.
• In the eastern sector, the British had largely attained an ethnically and strategically viable alignment via the 1914 Simla conference of British India, China and Tibet, even though the Chinese repudiated the agreement itself.

On the western sector

• This sector, the crux of the dispute, was never formally delineated nor successfully resolved by British India.
• The fluid British approach in this sector was shaped by the geopolitical goals of the Empire, and was never envisaged to meet the basic requirements of a sovereign nation state.
• There were almost a dozen British attempts to arrive at a suitable boundary.
• Most, however, were exploratory surveys by frontier agents reflecting British expansion in the north-west frontiers rather than a concerted pursuit of an international border.
• And they varied with British geopolitical objectives vis-à-vis a perceived Russian threat.
• For instance, when Russian influence reached Xinjiang, some British strategists advocated an extreme northern Kashmiri border to keep Britain’s main adversary at bay.
• At other times, a relatively moderate border was favoured, with reliance even being placed on Chinese control of Xinjiang as a buffer against Russia.

Background

• The net result was that in 1947, no definite boundary line to the east of the Karakoram Pass existed.
• On the official 1950 map of India, the boundary of Jammu and Kashmir east of this pass was expressed as “Boundary Undefined”, while the 1914 McMahon Line, the de facto border between Arunachal Pradesh and China today, was depicted as the boundary in the eastern sector.
• Hence, in effect, India and China were faced with a “no man’s land” in eastern Ladakh, where the contentious Aksai Chin lay.
• Between 1954 and 1956, Jawaharlal Nehru engaged in several long exchanges with Premier Zhou Enlai in Delhi and Beijing but the border issue was mostly excluded from their conversations. New Delhi’s underlying assumption was that highlighting the border issue would re-open the whole question and provide the Chinese with an opportunity to make all kinds of claims.
• For Nehru, the 1954 Agreement that affirmed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet (but made no reference to the border) was seen as having “dealt with all outstanding matters and nothing remained...”

The swap principle

• It is only in December 1956 that the eastern section of the border was raised in the context of the Sino-Burmese border.
• Zhou Enlai had then remarked that the McMahon Line was an “accomplished fact” and both agreed that the “minor” border problems with India should be settled soon. In early 1957, India invited the Chinese for talks to resolve those “minor” disputes.
• But that never materialised and was quickly overshadowed by an escalating crisis in Tibet.
• And China’s attempt to restore its authority in Tibet became inextricably linked with its attitude on the frontier with India.
• India’s fateful decision of March 1959 to provide asylum to the Dalai Lama dramatically transformed India-China relations. That year would also witness two bloody skirmishes on the border.
• Both sides would henceforth perceive each other with deep suspicion and mistrust: India for China’s prevarication on the border, and China for India’s open interference in its domestic affairs. Despite the dramatic setback to the relationship, there was an opportunity to settle the border question on reasonable acceptable terms.

Conclusion

• It was at this crucial juncture of the crisis where Nehru along with most of the Indian leadership erred.
• In retrospect, the inability of the Indian side to countenance the swap principle was a missed opportunity that could have eventually settled the dispute and contained the escalating conflict in the ensuing years.

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The ‘landmark’ Calcutta Club verdict changes GST norms for clubs (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: GST norms for clubs

Context

• Recently, the Supreme Court pronounced a landmark judgment under service tax laws in the Calcutta Club case.
• The decision was that clubs are not entitled to charge, collect and pay service tax on any services made to members.
• The rationale for the decision was that if there are no members, there is no club and vice-versa.

Background

• The Supreme Court followed its earlier decision on the same topic in the case of CTO versus Young Men’s Indian Association, (1970) 1 SCC 462.
• The necessity for the Supreme Court to rule on this matter arose because of the insertion of Clause (e) in Article 366 (29-A) in the Constitution of India through the 46th Amendment.
• This clause stated that tax on purchase or sale of goods includes a tax on the supply of goods by any unincorporated association or body of persons to a member for cash, deferred payment or another valuable consideration.
• The Supreme Court needed to decide whether the doctrine of mutuality has been done away with by Article 366 (29-A) (e), and whether the ratio of Young Men’s Indian Association would continue to operate even after the 46th Amendment.

Graff versus Evans

• The Young Men’s Indian Association case was, in turn, based on two judgements that were not from India.
• In Graff versus Evans (1882) 8 QB 373, the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division ruled that the true construction of the rule is that the members were the joint owners of the general property in all the goods of the club, and that the trustees were their agents with respect to the general property in the goods.
• Any member was entitled to obtain the goods on payment.
• A sale involves the element of a bargain. There was no bargain here, nor any contract with Graff with respect to the goods.
• In Trebanog Working Men’s Club and Institute Ltd versus Macdonald [1940] 1 KB 576, the court held that as the members owned the liquor between themselves, there was no actual ‘sale’, and the club was simply a trustee of the liquor for its members.

The GST element

• The Supreme Court is using the logic and rationale of cases decided in foreign countries under service tax laws.
• These laws are not exactly similar, and the interpretations given by Indian tax authorities are extremely different from those ruled by courts abroad.
• The timing of this decision raises a question on its utility, as the GST has replaced service tax.
• Those who have charged service tax on services provided to their members would want to know whether they need to do something, or just let bygones be bygones.

Conclusion

• The clubs would be keen to know whether services provided to their members would attract the definition of supply under Section 7 of the CGST Act.
• Using the logic of the Calcutta Club decision, the answer should probably be no, as the taxman should not separate the club from its members.
• The CBIC would do well to use this decision as the trigger to issue a notification stating that the GST need not be charged on services provided by a club to its members.

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Banning single-use plastic (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Environment
Prelims level: Single-use plastic
Mains level: Adopted mechanism to control single-use plastic

Context

• Policies announced in haste are an opportunity gone to waste.
• It was in the course of his Independence Day speech this year that the Prime Minister made a statement that held out much hope for those concerned about the degradation of the environment.

Can we free India from single-use plastic?

• The time for implementing such an idea has come. May teams be mobilised to work in this direction.
• A significant step be made on October 2,” the PM said, leading to widespread speculation that India would take its first decisive step towards being plastic-free on Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

Initiatives taken by the government

• The Environment Ministry carried reports on the fines that would be imposed on those violating the ban on single-use plastic. But October 2 came and went without bringing any cheer to environmentalists.
• The government, apparently yielding to pressure from the industry — including the powerful FMCG and pharma lobbies — refrained from taking any momentous decision.
• It merely promised to sharpen its awareness campaign against single-use plastic.
• It is now clear that the government failed in its intent because enough homework had not been done before the deadline was set.
• Any move to render illegal the use of such a widely-used packing material involves seeking the cooperation of all stakeholders.
• All this takes several months, and perhaps years, of planning and preparation.
• In retrospect, the distance between Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanthi was only 48 days — too inadequate to implement any major policy decision.

Conclusion

• The government in its World Environment Day pledge in 2018, it promised to phase out single-use plastic by 2022.
• To meet this commitment, work should begin right earnest. Plastic, as we have learnt, cannot be rooted out in a day or, for that matter, in 48 days.

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LIC should take the lead to revive IDBI Bank (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level: IDBI
Mains level: Challenges faced by IDBI conversion into a universal bank

Context

• Post 2000, the national development banks — IFCI, IDBI and ICICI — changed their business models to remain relevant in a competitive market. ICICI, which always had visionary leadership, transformed quickly into a commercial bank.
• IFCI, the oldest of the DFIs, and IDBI, the largest, had a public sector set-up with short-term or ad hoc leadership and myopic outlook.

Several challenges faced by IDBI conversion into a universal bank:

• Its efforts to grow fast in the retail and priority sector created several issues.
• Merging with United Western Bank had not given any particular advantage to IDBI.
• The NPA menace, primarily driven by underperformance of the corporate sector, impacted IDBI Bank severely due to predominance of project lending.
• NPA level in the bank surged to 29 per cent, highest in the industry.
• No serious efforts to reduce the headline gross NPA were taken by the bank management, which declared loss after loss for consecutive seven quarters.

Revamping management

• With the change in shareholding, LIC holds 51 per cent, while the government continues to hold a significant share of about 48 per cent.
• With this dual ownership, it looks difficult for LIC to take any unilateral step for its revival, unless LIC can be empowered to take independent decisions on management and strategies.
• The government should divest its holding to private investors.
• Alternatively, it can reduce the owners’ equity by converting it to preference shares or Tier-I debt, together with a rights issue (with the government renouncing the rights in favour of LIC).
• Banking is highly competitive, and the earlier LIC and the government realise the need to create a conducive environment for IDBI Bank succeed, the better it is for both. A retired PSB head has been hired to drive the company.
• IDBI cannot be in status quo mode. What is needed immediately is a dynamic leader who can bring in a new vision, culture and leadership to this ‘private sector bank’.
• LIC should ensure a professional management and an independent board with complete operational freedom.
• IDBI has been losing good clients, particularly during the last 2-3 years when it was under Prompt Corrective Action.
• Aggregate business of the bank, which was more than ₹4.5 trillion in 2017, declined to about ₹3.7 trillion by March 2019. Advances declined from ₹2.7 trillion to ₹1.7 trillion by 2019.

Stressed assets

• Gross NPA of the bank as on March 31, 2019 was ₹500 billion and Net NPA was ₹150 billion.
• With increasing NPAs and shrinking balance sheet, gross NPA ratio surged to 29 per cent, which is unsustainable for a bank in normal circumstances.
• If LIC can manage ownership and management issues, resolution of existing toxic assets will be the least of the problems.
• Stressed asset management has been the forte of IDBI, having had the opportunity of working closely with BIFR, managing the CDR mechanism and creating a Stressed Asset Stabilisation Fund (SASF).
• With the bank having provided significantly for bad assets, management of net NPAs of ₹150 trillion is not difficult.
• In the immediate future, IDBI and LIC should focus on ramping up the banking business and getting back good clients. Recovery from NPAs is crucial for profits in the coming quarters.

Conclusion

• This can be achieved by outsourced recovery services, sale of NPAs to ARCs/distress funds and creation of SASF model trusts by LIC.
• The existing ARC infrastructure which is well-regulated can offer innovative structures for the bank’s benefit.
• It is important that LIC evolve the aspiration to develop a new vibrant private bank under its umbrella.

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The limitations of Abhijit Banerjee’s methods (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3: Economy
Prelims level: Randomised control trials (RCT)
Mains level: Evidence-based research for urban policy

Context

• As we continue to struggle with using evidence-based research for urban policy there is bound to be some interest in whether the answer lies in the method suggested by Abhijit Banerjee.
• The Nobel prize is a confirmation of its intellectual rigour.
• An affirmation of its value has come from the man who implemented the most fundamental economic reforms in India — Manmohan Singh.
• The true value, and difficulties, of this method, however, emerge when we take it to the challenge of Indian urban policy.

Highlighting the method indicating serious lacunae in urban policy

• The support for the method is best understood when we place it in the context of the larger challenges to economic thinking.
• If the ideal of a completely free market was confronted by the Great Depression in the first half of the twentieth century, the collapse of communism ensured scepticism over all ideological theories.
• The resultant rise of pragmatism meant that policymakers could take virtually any step on the expectation that it would work.
• Since the success or failure of a policy was only known after implementation, there was no way of knowing beforehand whether it would work.
• We could never be certain policymakers were not pursuing policies due to vested interests, while all the while claiming they would be beneficial. And if the policies did not work, we could never be sure whether it was the result of corruption or due to more legitimate causes.
• As the line between genuine failure and corrupt practices blurred, we tended to tar all failures with the same brush of corruption.
• This made the honest policymaker averse to the risks of taking a decision, and hence contributed to policy paralysis.

Tested randomized control trials

• In this method, specific policy options are tested under experimental conditions.
• Using randomised control trials (RCT), not unlike the ones used to test drugs, the method throws up results that are objectively arrived at.
• This rules out the possibility of individual policymakers only doing what they find expedient.
• In an urban policy environment in India where decisions are based on anything from popular beliefs to the fancies of individual policymakers, any movement towards objective evidence is undoubtedly a good thing.
• Apart from keeping out expediency and its contribution to corruption, the evidence generated by this method provides a better view of what actually works. And this could include several unexpected results.
• Valuable as this method could be in increasing evidence-based research in urban policy-making, it falls well short of providing an effective policy framework.
• Its focus is entirely on testing specific policy options. It tells us little or nothing about how to arrive at the options that are to be tested.
• There could easily be policy options that fall outside the purview of current beliefs and hence slip under the radar.
• These include not just entirely new options but also previously prominent ones.
• Would anyone spend the money required for these trials to find out whether nationalisation was an effective urban policy option today?

Much also depends on when a policy is believed to work

• An experiment in an urban school could show that teachers in one that requires them to swipe a card when they enter tend to be more on time than those in a school that has no such requirement. But a mother who is a teacher in the school where they are forced to come on time may do so by cutting the time she spends on the pre-school learning of her young daughter at home.
• An enforcement of this policy could then result in the more sensitive mothers, and teachers, dropping out of the workforce.
• Is there any objective way of judging the overall impact of such a policy, of when we can say it works?
• Even if we arrive at a consensus on what works, there are other difficulties. What do we do when the results of an experiment at one place and time contradict those of another done elsewhere at another time?
• Banerjee’s suggestion would be to do more experiments for each local situation.
• But policy cannot always wait endlessly for experiments to be done in a way that suits academic rigour.
• As another Nobel laureate, Angus Deaton, has pointed out, RCT is neither necessary nor sufficient for evidence-based policy-making.

Conclusion

• Urban policymakers should thank Abjijit Banerjee for his much-needed reminder of the importance of evidence-based approaches, but they should refuse to be shackled by the narrowness of randomised control trials.

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Safe, but not entirely: On milk safety survey (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Health
Prelims level: aflatoxin M1
Mains level: Milk safety and quality standards survey

Context

• The “most comprehensive and representative” milk safety and quality survey has demolished the perception of large-scale milk adulteration in India.
• It was undertaken on 6,432 samples collected last year between May and October, and picked from over 1,100 town/cities with over 50,000 population.

Key highlights of the survey

• By survey Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) found 93% of the samples were absolutely safe.
• The samples were tested for 13 common adulterants and three contaminants — pesticides, aflatoxin M1 and antibiotics.
• Only 12 adulterated samples were found to be unsafe for consumption. The adulterated samples — they were also subjected to confirmatory tests — were from just three States: Telangana (nine), Madhya Pradesh (two) and Kerala (one).
• The survey claims that quantitative analysis of all adulterated samples showed the amount of adulterants and contaminants in the dozen samples was not high and hence “unlikely to pose serious threat” to human health.
• It did find 368 samples (5.7%) had aflatoxin M1 residues beyond the permissible limit of 0.5 microgram per kilogram.
• Compared with aflatoxin M1, antibiotics were seen above the permissible level in 77 samples, from Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
• At 227, aflatoxin M1 was more widely present in processed milk samples than in raw milk (141).
• This is the first time the presence of the contaminant in milk has been assessed.

Presence of aflatoxin in milk

• According to the FSSAI, aflatoxin M1 in milk is from feed and fodder, which is not regulated.
• The highest residue levels of aflatoxin M1 in milk were seen in samples from three States — Tamil Nadu (88 out of 551 samples), Delhi (38 out of 262) and Kerala (37 out of 187).
• According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer the contaminant has been classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”.
• Its carcinogenic potency is estimated to be about a one-tenth of aflatoxin B1.
• It is not clear how widespread aflatoxin M1 contamination is in milk products such as cheese, and hence the total exposure to it.
• Aflatoxin M1 in milk and milk products is a public health concern especially in infants and young children as milk constitutes one of the major sources of nutrients.
• According to the World Health Organisation, exposure to aflatoxin M1 in milk and milk products is especially high in areas where the grain quality used as animal feed is poor.

Conclusion

• Hence all attempts need to taken both before and after food crop harvest to reduce the toxin amount.
• Improper storage of food harvest in warm and humid conditions leads to aflatoxin contamination that is much higher than what is seen in the field.
• Equally important is in having facilities to regularly test for aflatoxin M1.

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(Download) CS (MAIN) EXAM:2019 Urdu Literature

Exam Name: CS (MAIN) EXAM:2019 Urdu Literature
Marks: 250
Time Allowed : Three Hours

PAPER-1

PAPER-2

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BIHAR State GK Questions (Set-30) for BPSC Exam

Q.1 : बिहार में कितनी चीनी मिलें है ?

(a) 12
(b) 28
(c) 25
(d) 24

Q.2 : बिहार में सूती वस्त्र उद्योगों के केन्द्र है ?

(a) फुलवारी शरीफ
(b) मुजफ्फरपुर
(c) गया
(d) उपरोक्त सभी

Q.3 : निम्न में से बिहार में कहा पर सूती वस्त्र उद्योग केन्द्र नहीं है ?

(a) मुजफ्फरपुर
(b) गया
(c) शाहपुर
(d) फुलवारी शरीफ

Q.4 : बिहार में सिगरेट बनाने का कारखाना कहॉं पर है ?

(a) भागलपुर में
(b) दिलवारपुर में
(c) चक्रधरपुर में
(d) मुजफ्फरपुर में

Q.5 : बिहार में कहॉं पर एक मात्र तेलशोधक कारखाना है ?

(a) दरभंगा
(b) मरकुण्डा
(c) बरौनी
(d) पटना

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Supreme protection (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: Polity
Prelims level: Fundamental Rights
Mains level: Role of Judiciary to protect FR

Context

• The October 4 order by the chief judicial magistrate of Muzaffarpur is worrisome in so far as he entertained a petition by a serial litigant, directing the police to register an FIR against 49 eminent citizens who had written a letter to the PM to intervene and stop lynchings.

Supreme Court observations

• The constitution bench of the Supreme Court of India in its judgment of July 2018 held that authorities which are conferred with the responsibility to maintain law and order in the States have the principal obligation to see that vigilantism of any perception does not take place.
• When any core group with some kind of idea takes the law into their own hands, it ushers in anarchy, chaos, disorder and, eventually, there is an emergence of a violent society.
• Lynching is an affront to the rule of law and to the exalted values of the Constitution itself.
• Hate crimes as a product of intolerance, ideological dominance and prejudice ought not to be tolerated; lest it results in a reign of terror.
• The Court laid down various guidelines for the central and state governments — including preventive, ameliorative and punitive measures.
• It directed the appointment of nodal officers by the police in each district of every state in this regard.
• It also recommended the Parliament to create a separate offense for lynching and provide adequate punishment for the same.

Role of judiciary

• Though the right to life is a Fundamental Right, the violations in these types of cases go unpunished or under-punished.
• In a large number of cases of this kind, the judges have been extremely lenient towards the perpetrators. Acquittals in virtually open-and-shut cases have come at regular intervals, as in the Pehlu Khan lynching case.
• The orders for granting bail by the Jharkhand High Court in the Ramgarh lynching case, by the Allahabad high court in Bulandshahr lynching case, by the Bombay High Court in Dhule lynching case, by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Junaid lynching case, and, by the sessions court in Hapur lynching case, are some of the instances which raise serious question marks on the judicial approach of the courts in India towards such heinous crimes.
• The grant of bail to the convicted and accused in the Gujarat riot cases add to this list of avoidable decisions.
• This is compounded by the approach of the police in improperly investigating cases and not taking them to their logical end before the courts.

Way Forward

• The SC and the high courts to take up such cases of acquittals/grant of bails suo motu, and pass appropriate orders after hearing concerned parties.
• This should be the approach of the entire judiciary, which is the ultimate protector of the Right to Life as guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution.
• The judiciary needs to undergo extensive sensitisation programs to deal with such matters.

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Pullback and chaos (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2: International Relations
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: US withdrawal from Syria

Context

• With the withdrawal of US forces from north-east Syria under Kurdish control, Trump is attempting to fulfill his promise of extricating the US from the conflicts it has been embroiled in across the globe ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections.

What are the regional scene?

• The manner of the troop withdrawal sharpened the conflict in the region.
• It also increased the influence of Russia in West Asia.
• Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan ordered his troops into the region, and there are reports of civilian casualties. US troops had suffered minimal casualties and were a buffer protecting the Kurdish forces.
• Erdogan is facing a violent Kurdish-led in the insurgency in his own country. He is seeking a deeper strategic buffer through military control of Syria’s autonomous Kurdish region.
• Russia and Iran are expected to back the Assad regime, filling the power vacuum left by the US.
• Erdogan seems undeterred by the threats of sanctions and other diplomatic consequences by the US and NATO.

Impact of the withdrawal

• Trump’s sudden withdrawal is likely to be counterproductive.
• The claim that the “ISIS caliphate” has been defeated may be technically true, but many IS fighters retreated into remote parts of Iraq and Syria.
• Since the conflict in Syria began in 2015, the Kurds were instrumental in the fight against the Islamic State. Now, remnants of the IS may be emboldened.
• Assad regime has consolidated and its influence is growing along with that of Russia.
• An aggressive and expansionist Turkey could pose a long-term challenge to the regional balance of power. It has long been a NATO ally and even houses a US military base with nuclear capabilities.

Way ahead

• In the near term, what is required is well-thought-out, firm diplomacy by the US and other world powers, that goes far beyond what President Trump’s tweets have hinted at.

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Rewriting history: On Amit Shah’s call (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1: Society
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Validating the amending history

Context

• The study of history has always been contested territory, as it should be. There are always multiple interpretations of the past, and most professional historians would often have disagreements on the interpretation of an event or a phenomenon from the past.
• But what they would agree upon is the need to establish the facts about the past through a rigorous methodology that bases itself on social science approaches.

Background

• Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in a seminar at Banaras Hindu University, on Thursday spoke about the need to “rewrite history” from an “Indian point of view” and went on to ask, “who is stopping us from amending history”.
• Historical events can indeed be rewritten if new facts emerge about the past or there is new evidence that challenges previous interpretations.
• But Mr. Shah’s call to “rewrite history” is predicated on specific, pre-determined outcomes and cannot be seen in isolation from his regime’s and his political organisation’s overall world view.

Questions behind rewriting history

• The Hindutva-oriented right wing glorifies India’s ancient past, largely through a literal reading of epics and religious texts, and views the “medieval period” negatively as little more than a narrative of invasion by outsiders.
• This blinkered view of the past actually flows from a reductionist approach to the world in terms of religion-centric identities based more on faith than on facts.
• True, other approaches towards history are not without ideological moorings. But modern historiography must be aligned to social science where methods rely on evidence to build upon findings and interpretations to reconstruct the past.
• In historiography, new interpretations are created by consistently questioning extant scholarships. Unfortunately such rigorous methods that base themselves on social science are anathema to those promoting the Hindutva world view.

Way forward

• Modern historiography views epics and scriptures as just one part of the vast corpus of material open to scholarship, which include, among other things, inscriptions and archaeological findings.
• This is perhaps why Mr. Shah asks for history to be rewritten without getting into a dispute with other existing approaches.
• His exhortation to historians to create more knowledge on the legacies of the Maurya, Vijayanagara and Gupta empires, and the rule of Maratha warrior-king Shivaji, among others, could indeed be well taken if the exercise engages with existing historiography without promoting a free-floating alternative narrative formed around pre-conceived notions of past glory and civilisational hubris.

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Greening the powerhouses (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: Governance
Prelims level: C40 summit
Mains level: Urbanisation

Context

• Recently, the C40 Cities initiative was held in Copenhagen wherein the heads (Mayors) of the cities of the world met to discuss issues related to integrating climate change in the policy decision with respect to infrastructure, etc. of the cities.
• In this context, it is necessary to understand the issues faced by the cities, the initiatives of various cities and the way forward.

Key issues

• Nearly 90% of urban areas are at high risk from extreme climate events such as storms because they are situated along coastlines.
• Annually, about 70 million people will be drawn to cities and towns for the next three decades, according to the special report on global warming of 1.5°C issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year.

Initiatives of different cities and companies:

• Toronto and Berlin - Expensive plans to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency and shift their transport infrastructure to greener options.
• Montreal - Moving city logistics to electric vehicles.
• Rome - An aggressive plan to ban diesel emissions, encourage sustainable shared mobility including biking and walking, and pursue a green new deal.
• China’s Hangzhou - Largest public bicyclesharing system and is moving to a smart bus service.
• Hong Kong - Harvest super typhoons in new drainage tunnels that will reuse rainwater and grow biodiversity.
• Singapore - Price on carbon emissions.
• Novo Nordisk, a healthcare company - Wants to partner with mayors on its Cities Changing Diabetes programme to “bend the curve” on the public health challenge through better facilities for biking, walking and urban mobility.
• Kolkata - Bagged an award for green mobility at the summit

Way forward

• Heads (Mayors) of cities worldwide and State governments in India must prepare for difficult times with action plans for urban centres.
• All planning must be climate-centric as most of the infrastructure stands built unlike the cities around the globe.
• India’s Environment Ministry should have helped States come up with citylevel action plans since the country lacks empowered mayors after the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

Conclusion

• Thus determined policies can restore the power of the commons: through inclusive and green urban spaces, sustainable mobility protected water sources and a reduction of waste — all of which will sharply reduce carbon emissions in a growing economy.

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The screws tighten (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Security
Prelims level: FATF listings
Mains level: Money laundering and its prevention process

Context

• Pakistan’s escape, at least for the moment, from the so-called black list of the global Financial Action Task Force (FATF) that acts against terror financing in the world has surely disappointed Delhi.

Key implications of this event

• It reinforce Delhi’s critics, who believe Pakistan can’t be “isolated” even if its army brazenly violates its international legal commitments on fighting terrorism.
• Disappointment and criticism arise from the fact that the government of Narendra Modi had mounted a sustained campaign in the last few years to apply the existing international norms against money laundering and terror financing on Pakistan.

About FATF listing

• The grey list is about putting countries on notice and seek time-bound compliance with a range of FATF benchmarks.
• If countries fail to comply, they get on to a black list that calls on nations to take additional measures against financial transactions involving Pakistan’s jurisdiction.
• At the moment, only two countries are on the black list — Iran and North Korea.

Pakistan and FATF

• Pakistan was first put on the grey list in 2012 but got off it in 2015 when the FATF and its procedures caught Delhi’s serious political interest.
• The intense Indian effort resulted in Pakistan being put on the grey list again in 2018.
• The FATF has certainly issued a stern warning to Pakistan that it could get to the black list if there was no progress by February 2020.

Limitations by FATF

• There is no guarantee, of course, that Pakistan will pay the price four months down the road.
• FATF is a multilateral mechanism, where bilateral political considerations do impact on the outcomes.
• Pakistan can thank China, Turkey and Malaysia, whose support helped it escape the black list.
• There is nothing to suggest that the Pakistan policies of the three countries might change any time soon.

Way forward

• India’s effort has generated unprecedented international pressure on Pakistan Army’s support to cross-border terrorism.
• Sustaining the international mobilisation also turns harsh light on Islamabad’s allies — especially China — that talk the talk on opposing terrorism and improving ties with India but refuse to walk the walk.

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