user9's blog

A dialogue of civilisations (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : International
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Uprising of a new Cold War

Context

• Is the 21st century going to be marked by a fruitful conversation among civilisations or marred by a frightening conflict of civilisations?
• This is one of the most vigorously debated questions in our times.
• In the closing decade of the last century, Samuel Huntington, a noted American political scientist, put forward the thesis of ‘The Clash of Civilisations’.
• He claimed that the future trend of world politics would be defined by the conflict between Western and non-Western civilisations. His belief: the West’s superior civilisation would triumph in this clash.
• Many in America and Europe lapped up his thesis, since it had appeared soon after the end of the Cold War, which saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the U.S. as the sole superpower.
• Since then, numerous public figures around the world have countered Huntington’s theory. Notable among them was Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s President from 1997 to 2005.
• To its abiding credit, the United Nations endorsed his counter-concept and proclaimed 2001 as the “UN Year of Dialogue among Civilisations”.

A new Cold War?

• The U.S. has become a diminished power in the past three decades. Nevertheless, it appears that Huntington’s argument still has backers in the Donald Trump administration.
• One of its high-ranking officials has sought to paint the current U.S.-China trade war on the canvas of a ‘clash of civilisations’.
• Speaking at the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017, he highlighted the relevance of this debate to the newest, and one of the most pressing, problems facing the entire planetary population: climate change.
• He said the world needs to make a transition from “industrial civilisation” to “ecological civilisation”, and learn to create “harmony between man and nature”, a noble teaching embedded in all the world’s civilisations, cultures and religions.

Dialogue of civilisations

• Over 2,000 participants representing the 48 Asian countries, and also many distinguished personalities from other continents, attended the event.
• In his keynote, Mr. Xi stressed the importance of Asia, a continental “cradle of civilisations” that “covers a third of the earth’s land mass and has two-thirds of the world’s population”.
• Explaining the purpose of the conference, he said, “The world today is moving toward greater multipolarity, economic globalisation and cultural diversity, and is becoming increasingly information-oriented. All this points to promising prospects for the future.
• Meanwhile, instability and uncertainties are mounting and the global challenges faced by humanity are becoming ever more daunting, calling for joint responses from countries around the world.”
• His prescription: “to meet our common challenges and create a better future for all, we look to culture and civilisation to play their role, which is as important as the role played by economy, science and technology.”

Conclusion

• History is witness to how civilisations decline and die when they become exclusivist.
• We need to stay open and inclusive and draw on each other’s strengths.
• All living organisms in the human body must renew themselves through metabolism; otherwise, life would come to an end. The same is true for civilisations.
• Long-term self-isolation will cause a civilisation to decline, while exchanges and mutual learning will sustain its development.”

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Dangerous moves (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2: International
Prelims level : US-Iran tussle
Mains level : Rising US-Iran tensions could have disruptive consequences for India

Context

• US President Donald Trump’s stepped back from the brink of a shooting war with Iran when he said with his usual bluster that weapons were “cocked and loaded” to fire against Iran.
• The world can only breathe a sigh of relief Trump refused to proceed with a military strike despite being reportedly egged on by hard-line advisors like National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to attack in retaliation for Iran’s US drone downing.
• Such an action would have had potentially devastating consequences for a region already wracked by wars and rivalries that have reached a new intensity in recent years. It would also have plunged the global economy into turmoil almost instantly.

Decision taken by Trump

• Trump, following his familiar bad cop, good cop, routine now is extending an olive branch to Iran, saying on the weekend, “Let’s make Iran great again” and offering to “start all over” with nuclear negotiations.
• He’s even thanked Tehran for not downing a US military plane with dozens of personnel aboard.
• Trump’s sworn to bring US troops home from conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is apparently uneasy about opening a new theatre of conflict and the prospect of retaliation against US targets across the troubled region.
• Still, while Trump’s retreated from an imminent confrontation with Iran, the risk of conflict is still very much alive.
• Iran, enraged by US sanctions that have tightened the noose around its economy and which Trump’s shown no sign of lifting, has hinted that it could easily launch missile attacks on oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz through which almost a fifth of the world’s oil supplies flow.
• The Iranian armed forces are said to have built up a formidable arsenal of missiles that could be used to attack shipping from long distances.

Discovering oil reserves

• The US, which has discovered its own fresh oil reserves, doesn’t depend on Middle East oil. Even so, oil prices could turn skittish and yet again rock India’s economy.
• Fears of a skirmish have triggered chaos in the aviation sector, with flights from India to the US and Europe avoiding Iranian space.
• A US war with Iran could put India in a delicate position.
• Already, there’s deep uncertainty around the future of Chabahar port being developed with the Iranians that would give India a new route into Afghanistan and Central Asia.
• The Middle East’s been in disarray almost continuously since the first shots were fired in the 1980 Iran-Iraq war.

Conclusion

• At the heart of the region’s troubles is the intense rivalry between the Saudis and the Iranians.
• In the middle are the Israelis who’ve sided with the Saudis.
• The Iranians have warned its stock of uranium is about to exceed limits set by the 2015 nuclear deal.
• If the Iranians develop their own nuclear weapons, the Saudis would do their best to follow suit.
• This means there’s no room for any complacency about the region, despite easing of the immediate Iran crisis.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

The case for a new framework to ensure auditor independence (Live Mint)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : ICAI
Mains level : Framework needed to establish Auditors independence

Context

• Auditors in particular and the auditing profession in general have often been portrayed as the main culprits in corporate frauds and failures and alleged to have been in active connivance with the management of the concerned companies.
• This is natural because of the general understanding of the scope of an audit and an auditor’s proximity to the cause of the fraud or failure, which is usually financial.

Background

• Recent high-profile corporate collapses/frauds of the likes of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services in India and of Carillion and BHS in the UK have shaken the Big Four auditors.
• Regulators are debating measures such as banning these beleaguered firms and amputating the non-audit services rendered by them and are also considering various structural changes in the regulatory framework.
• The audit regulator in the UK, the Financial Reporting Council, which is akin to the recently set up National Financial Reporting Authority, or NAFRA, in India, is likely to be replaced by an authority accountable directly to the UK Parliament.
• The role of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), the regulator for CAs in India, was made peripheral by the operationalization of NAFRA after the Punjab National Bank fraud.

Appointment to the auditors

• An audit is carried out in the public interest.
• The appointment of auditors and determination of their remuneration has to be totally and effectively made independent of the audited company’s management.
• Any measure short of this, like the one introduced through the Companies Act, 2013, routing the appointment of an auditor through an audit committee, or restrictions on non-audit services provided by the auditor, or requiring auditors to separate their audit and non-audit services through a so-called “Chinese wall", would be inadequate in ensuring quality audits.
• It is universally recognized that high-quality technical standards, tools and techniques are effective only if auditors remain independent and objective in their functioning and are able to challenge management decisions.

Steps needed to ensure Auditor’s independence

• Audit firms clamour for non-audit services to cross-subsidize their audit services, arguing that if they are not able to audit, quality would be the first casualty.
• The structural or operational separation of audit and non-audit services sounds sufficiently radical.
• Yet, it may not address issues of independence or conflict of interest.
• Rather, the solution lies in making audit fees remunerative indeed, commensurate with the true cost of a quality audit.
• What people expect of auditors in terms of scope and skills are on the rise. The audit fees, however, are not.
• In recent years, fees have actually shrunk under competitive pressure.
• Audit committees in general have failed to ensure that audit compensation is sufficient to cover the extra work sometimes needed when an auditor discovers things that need close inspection for example, suspect transactions.
• It is common knowledge that audit fees for bank branches in some cases do not even cover the cost of junior audit staff deployed. Unfortunately, in the ongoing debate, audit economics is not being talked about.
• Audit fees should be based on the complexity involved and work to be done.
• High quality necessarily leads to an increase in cost, but that is imperative for an audit that can be trusted. Sebi should also warrant disclosures of audit fees, skill sets deployed and hours spent on audits.

Conclusion

• This would allow us to assess the fees paid in comparison with inflation and increases in the pay packages of senior management, and also with other companies.
• Regulators should create an ecosystem where auditors do not have incentives to compromise the integrity and standards they are expected to uphold. Audits serve the public interest and their quality should concern us all.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Aadhaar must sync with voter IDs to empower citizens (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Voting process and transparency

Context

• The recently concluded national polls have brought to light, yet again, a problem that has plagued every election in India.
• Discrepancies in voter eligibility and rolls, and the disenfranchisement it inevitably results in.
• It is hard to think of a more disempowering moment in a democracy than a voter showing up at a booth, only to be told that she is ineligible to exercise her franchise.

Four factors of voter’s disenfranchisement

First factors

• Several people are unable to register to vote, for reasons ranging from not being aware of the registration methodology, to the process itself being inconvenient to not even knowing there is one.
• It is the responsibility of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to inform those that have not registered to vote yet but are otherwise eligible.
• The ECI does this via mass campaigns since it is not possible for it to exclusively identify unregistered adult citizens.
• Currently, the easiest way to freshly apply to be registered as a voter is to fill out a Form 6 on the NVSP (National Voters’ Service Portal) or the ECI’s app.
• This is an extremely cumbersome exercise and potentially an impediment to comprehensive voter registration efforts. Aadhaar can significantly simplify the process, once the ECI has ascertained that a resident is eligible to vote. This whole process could be replaced with a single step Aadhaar based e-KYC.

Second factors

• There are people who have voted at a particular booth previously but have been inexplicably omitted from the voter rolls.
• In many cases, the ECI does not have the contact details (or updated ones) of voters to notify them before a deletion takes place.
• The absence of contact information stems from the fact that up until recently, the ECI did not collect these details.
• In cases where they have contact details, the changes in the same are not made by voters unless the Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) is their de facto ID.
• If during registration, Aadhaar holders do give consent to the ECI to have their contact details shared, they could be preemptively notified about an impending deletion.

Third factor

• Several people have been turned away due to discrepancies between their details as listed on the rolls and the ID documents they present for validation.
• It is common for people who get married or have recently changed other demographic parameters to make the necessary changes to their Aadhaars and neglect other IDs.
• In such cases, reliance on Aadhaar will mitigate the risks of exclusion that are a consequence of demographic data mismatches.

Fourth factors

• The most easily addressable cause of this disenfranchisement, is relocation.
• It is far more likely for people to update Aadhaar rather than their EPIC: The Constitution grants the right to every citizen to cast her vote in the constituency where she is ordinarily residing.
• There are a number of constitutional stipulations that must be addressed to achieve ordinary residence, but the ECI will accept such documents as a proof of residence (as an electricity or water bill) along with a prescribed form completed.
• It is often the case that people who have made the requisite changes will feature both on the voter list of their new residence as well as that of their previous residence.
• This was the very problem for the ECI’s most recent ambassador in Karnataka, Rahul Dravid, who, having only recently changed residences, was turned away from his new booth on polling day.

Discretionary powers of removal process

• Several government functionaries have discretionary powers that empower them to remove names from voter lists.
• The ECI has the right to disqualify citizens from voting under certain conditions as per the Constitution.
• The ECI maintains and is indeed mandated to publish a list of people disqualified from voting in each state, but the reasons for their disqualifications is not included and likely not recorded either.
• The most sinister factor is the political adventurism of parties (and politicians) and voters alike.
• There have been cases reported, for example, of voters that are registered to vote in multiple booths and, thus, can vote multiple times.
• More worryingly, there has long been speculation that there is incentive for political agents to use their influence to omit people, and indeed whole communities, from the voter rolls. These factors need to be made transparent so that any misuse is fixed.
• The illegality and perniciousness of private and political actors needs to be checked. Here, Aadhaar’s anti-fraud and deduplication features can be put to use.

Limitations

• Many of the exclusions discussed here can be remedied with Aadhaar.
• It uniquely identifies every individual in the country through all of the same details as the EPIC.
• Unlike EPIC, Aadhaar captures biometric data, which is generally benign information and only useful in validating uniqueness.
• The EPIC, however, captures additional information such as familial details — it was a crucial source of identification or proof of residence, but that was before Aadhaar.
• The EPIC does not guarantee a vote: If a name does not appear on the voter rolls, she will not be permitted to vote under any circumstances.
• Even if a person’s name does appear on the voter rolls, the EPIC is not the only document that is accepted as proof of identity.
• A considerable portion of voters likely use their Aadhaars to identify themselves.
• Therefore, the very existence of the EPIC is worth reconsidering today.

Conclusion

• The ECI publicly expressed its interest in seeding their databases with Aadhaar to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls and clear doubts of malpractice and duplication error.
• It also attempted a drive to voluntarily link Aadhaar to voter IDs but was halted by the Supreme Court in 2017.
• There have been recent reports, however, suggesting that the ECI has been preparing to resume these activities.
• Given that Aadhaar is the only universal, de-facto identification infrastructure in India today, it is inexplicable that this sangam has not happened yet.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Why ‘jobs for the boys’ is a bad idea (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1 : Society
Prelims level : Not much
Mains level : Issues associated with employment

Context

• Earlier this week, one such creaking drawbridge, signalling a nativist impulse, was pulled up in Andhra Pradesh, with the passage of a Bill to provide for 75 per cent job reservation for locals in industrial units, factories, joint ventures, and projects set up under the public-private partnership mode.

Background

• The precise delineation of who will quality for this quota is yet to be made, but to the extent that this takes the State past the point of no return in terms of institutionalising job reservations in the private sector, it marks a defining moment in its industrial history.
• Once the law takes effect, it will apply to all existing and upcoming industrial units, although the former will have three years to comply.
• Under the law, if skilled personnel are not available for the jobs at hand, these industrial units cannot ‘import’ labourers from elsewhere; the burden of imparting the requisite skills to, and of employing, locals will fall on the units.

Unintended consequences

• The measure has come about in response to a perceived need to “protect” industrial jobs for so-called ‘sons of the soil’.
• And while it may play well by the political playbook to the extent that the new ruling dispensation is seen to be looking out for ‘locals’, it is certain to have unintended consequences that will have adverse impact over the longer term.
• The trouble with the State sliding down the slippery slope of sub-nationalism with such restrictive geography-bound job quotas is that, as with all bad habits, it is a contagious failing, and is bound to be emulated by other States too.

Strategies adopted by other state government

• Indicatively, the Madhya Pradesh government, hanging on by a slender majority and evidently looking to shore up its support base, has already given voice to a policy to reserve 70 per cent jobs in the private sector for ‘locals’.
• A few other States, too, are articulating similar parochial sentiments.
• The malefic effects of such games are manifest at the global level.
• When countries wage ‘trade war’ by debasing their currencies to gain competitive advantage or by erecting protectionist barriers they only advance a zero-sum game where both sides lose from such ‘beggar thy neighbour’ policies.

Changing jobs landscape

• The erection of sub-national protectionist walls with the stated intention of fencing off industrial jobs is also flawed on another count.
• It doesn’t reckon with the shifting of the tectonic plates of the employment landscape.
• India is actually experiencing a peculiar phenomenon of “premature non-industrialisation”: as a consequence of this, it has begun to “de-industrialise” even before reaching peak industrialisation.

Exercise in futility

• For Andhra Pradesh, therefore, to attempt to artificially ‘protect’ industrial jobs within its domain, when in fact the ground is shifting beneath it, amounts to an exercise in futility.
• There is one other supreme irony to the timing of the populist move by Andhra Pradesh.
• Economists had thus far bemoaned the absence of labour market reforms, and in particular the failure to iron out entrenched rigidities therein, as one of the primary contributory factors for the inability to generate manufacturing jobs in sufficient quantities to absorb the new entrants into the workforce.
• The Centre took the first tentative steps towards untangling the spaghetti bowl of labour laws in order to enhance the ease of doing business.

Conclusion

• There still remains much to be done, but it held out the hope that it would help reverse (at least in part) the de-industrialisation currently under way, and perhaps generate jobs.
• However, backward-looking initiatives, such as the one undertaken by Andhra Pradesh, may put paid to such hopes prematurely.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Zero clarity (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3 : Economy
Prelims level : ZBNF
Mains level : Government’s allocation of funds in ZBNF

Context

• To announcing zero-budget natural farming (ZBNF) in the Budget, the Centre seemed to have reiterated its policy support for non-chemical-based farming methods.
• However, ZBNF has kicked up something of a stir, not least because of the positions taken by the individual associated with it, Subash Palekar.

Palekar’s formula on ZBNF

• Palekar has gone to great lengths to drive a distinction between ZBNF and other forms of non-chemical farming, be it ‘climate resilient sustainable agriculture’, organic farming, natural farming or permaculture, arguing that the rest are damaging from the emissions viewpoint.
• This is an egregious distinction.
• Palekar’s formula of jeevamrutham (cow dung, urine, jaggery, pulse flour and clean soil), beejamrutham (cow dung, urine and lime coating on seed and seedlings), mulching and aeration, as a result of these applications, is supposed to be a winning one.
• It has been promoted by the Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka governments.
• But the jury is still out, in terms of whether his package can work across all soil and climatic conditions.
• ZBNF is not really zero input; it connotes that no input needs to be purchased from the market, assuming that the farmer has at least a cow, a desi one at that, and plenty of water.
• Inorganic farming in many regions has driven farmers to debt and worse. But a transition to sustainable practices needs to be managed differently.
• A scientific approach must replace one that favours the fad or cult of the day.

Government’s allocation of funds in ZBNF

• The Centre’s rhetoric on ZBNF is not matched by budgetary allocations.
• The total allocation for schemes such as the National Project on Organic Farming, Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana, and National Project on Soil Health and Fertility is just about ₹650 crore.
• The soil health cards scheme, in fact, holds much promise, as it seeks to match soil quality with cropping patterns, nudging farmers to make sustainable choices.
• However, an outlay of ₹324 crore does not indicate seriousness of intent.

Conclusion

• Farmers must be convinced that sustainable farming helps in doubling incomes.
• Their costs have been rising over time, while prices have not.
• If the government seeks to drive down costs of fertiliser and pesticide use, it must do so by ensuring that there are no serious production setbacks that derail the transition.
• Above all, farmers must be encouraged to undertake organic farming by trying what works for them and innovating accordingly. Top down packages are not likely to help.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

The crime of silence around the country’s suicide epidemic (Live Mint)

Mains Paper 2 : Health
Prelims level : Talk therapy
Mains level : Reason behind rise of suicide epidemic

Context

• Every 40 seconds, someone somewhere in the world takes his or her own life.
• Imagine if it was not someone somewhere in the world. Instead, it is a family member, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour, or a person we know, who is perhaps thinking of taking their life. The crisis would then look different.

Highlights of the WHO’s data

• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), for every 100,000 women, about 16 women take their own lives.
• By the data available, India’s suicide rate for women is the sixth highest in the world. About a decade ago, a bulk of young female deaths in the country were attributed to child-bearing and related causes.
• Today, suicide is the leading cause of death among young women. We lose about 25 men for every 100,000 men to suicide.
• Suicide is the second biggest cause of death, especially amongst younger men, exceeded only by death due to traffic accidents.
• The Lancet series, the last such extensive study on suicides in India, placed the death toll of suicide in 2010 at 187,000.

Background

• Suicide is a complex phenomenon, and can be precipitated by a range of inter-related factors laced with a sense of hopelessness.
• The two mental ill health conditions most often associated with suicide are alcoholism and depression. Amongst the young, the commonest causes seem related to academic performance, and a “let down" in romance.
• Other factors stem from opportunity deficits and disadvantages determined by caste, economic and other forms of social inequity, political ideology, domestic violence, bullying, harassment and chronic diseases, among others.
• Global studies also show that a great number of suicides occur in countries with a rapid pace of development, such as India and China.
• What is evident is that it has taken on epidemic proportions, especially in our country.
• Each case leaves behind a close network of other human beings whose lives will never be the same again.
• Yet, there is a deafening silence around suicide, beyond the very few that get discussed in the media.

Risk factor

• Several studies have indicated that there are multiple risk factors associated with suicide, and these may vary with gender, age, physical and mental well-being, and individual experiences.
• Treatments and therapies, therefore, vary as well. Psychosocial interventions have been found to be beneficial for individuals who have attempted suicide.
• It has been observed that these interventions have dissuaded several individuals from making another attempt

Talk Therapy

• Psychotherapy or Talk Therapy is one such type of psychosocial intervention that can effectively reduce suicide risk.
• This can help people learn new ways of dealing with stressful experiences through training;
• To help individuals recognize their own thought patterns and consider alternative actions when thoughts of suicide arise;
• To reduce the rate of suicide among people with borderline personality disorder, a serious mental illness characterized by unstable moods, relationships, self-image, and behaviourWay ahead
• Decision makers and policies must ensure reduced access to means that promote thoughts of suicide.
• In order to address the immense need for viable mental health care services, there is also a need to develop scalable and evidence-based models of care across the country through collaborations and partnerships.
• These models, once endorsed by the government, can be replicated across India.
• The Maharashtra government’s partnership with Tata Trusts on mental health initiatives in Nagpur is one such example.
• Each and every individual can make a difference, and all it takes is one little step to reach out to someone who is in need.

Conclusion

• It is important to listen and connect and seek professional help whenever there is a need for it.
• One little gesture may, perhaps, save a family member, a friend, or someone we know.
• This one little gesture can help end this crime of silence that lurks in our midst.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Robbing Peter to educate Paul (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3 : Economy
Prelims level : Investor Education and Protection Fund
Mains level : Investment models

Context

• Can you name a social cause in India which is inundated with so much money, that those collecting it don’t know what to do with it? Investor education and protection must surely fit this description.
• Over the years, Indian policymakers have devised so many creative ways of appropriating retail investor money towards this cause that today multiple institutions sit on stockpiles of money dedicated to it.

The many funds

• The Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) managed by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs is the big daddy of all such funds. Created by the Companies Act.
• It houses sums unclaimed from companies by way of matured deposits, debentures and IPO application monies, apart from dividends (after a waiting period of seven years).
• In 2013, it was decreed that companies would also transfer into the IEPF all shares on which dividends weren’t claimed for seven years (this could be due to owing to incorrect bank details, physical certificates, death or incomplete transmission).
• Though the IEPF offers a searchable database for investors looking to reclaim lost amounts, retail investors complain that it is an arduous process with a very low success rate.
• The IEPF has thus deployed its rich coffers in conducting nationwide Investor Awareness Programmes (IAPs), propagating messages through radio jingles and TV ads even developing a TV serial on financial frauds.
• In FY19 alone, it organised 35,000 IAPs, covering rural areas.

Problem of plenty

• SEBI manages its own Investor Protection and Education Fund carved out of its profits and sums forfeited from de-recognised stock exchanges.
• As per its last published accounts for FY17, it managed ₹108 crore and spent roughly ₹20 crore on investor education.
• Every stock exchange is required to create an Investor Protection Fund out of turnover fees and fines levied from members. While their primary purpose is to compensate retail investors after broker default, surpluses go into investor education.
• NSDL and CDSL chip in with their own Investor Protection Funds, contributing 5 per cent of their profits and penalties from market participants.
• With very little financial information about these funds in the public domain, it is hard to say how much money they’re sitting on, or how they spend it.
• SEBI added a gusher in 2012 by decreeing that all the 40-odd mutual fund houses must spend two basis points of their annual net assets towards investor awareness. Half of this sum was later handed over to AMFI.
• With the fund industry now managing assets of over ₹25-lakh crore, that’s nearly ₹500 crore dedicated to investor education.
• According to AMFI, AMCs conducted 72,257 IAPs until May 2017. But this apart, no public data is available on the amounts garnered or spent by the fund industry under this head.

More, but not merrier

• It given that most of the investor education initiatives today rely on IAPs, print ads and online content, there’s significant overlap in the content across institutions.
• While many entities, including mutual funds, do make genuinely laudable efforts to propagate financial literacy, there’s also wastage, with some market players using it to subtly solicit business or conduct five-star jamborees for distributors.
• With stock market participants funding most of these initiatives, the content is heavily skewed towards equity investing, SIPs and mutual funds. But there’s a far greater need to teach young people the basics of personal finance and have basic literacy initiatives around financial planning, banking and insurance, loans, safe digital transactions, and so on.

Reworking the idea

• The financial market regulators including RBI, IRDAI and PFRDA need to get together with the MCA to see how all the publicly-funded investor education initiatives can be pooled together and monitored, so that there is little wastage and duplication of efforts.
• SEBI could be a good choice to oversee this money, as it has been a more efficient user of it than the MCA.
• Once this is done, with RBI’s active collaboration, it can work to broad-base the current IAPs and print content to include explainers on interest rates, loan pricing, personal finance, insurance, banking or digital transactions, across multiple Indian languages.
• It is time investor education initiatives went beyond creating generic content designed to induce the novice investor into taking his first step into equities or funds.
• The stock exchanges on their part, must be induced to put basic information about indices and trading activity in the public domain, instead of trying to monetise every scrap of data.

Conclusion

• Today, a lay investor is denied access even to rudimentary data on the individual stock weights in the Nifty or Sensex, historical adjusted stock prices, total return indices and debt benchmarks, while they’re available on a subscription basis to fat-cat investors.
• All entities collecting retail money in the name of investor education must be mandated to put their latest audited accounts in the public domain.
• If it transpires that a lot of the money is being idled, there would be a strong case to roll back some of the levies, charges and penalties on the existing investors who are paying so heavily for the education of their brethren.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

The terror debate (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3 : Security
Prelims level : Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act
Mains level : Mechanism adopted to prevent terrorism

Context

• The debate in Parliament this week over the National Investigation Agency (Amendment) Bill, 2019 was instructive in understanding our lawmakers’ attitude to law not as an instrument against abuse of power and violence but more as a tool to legitimise the politics of national security and validate precisely such abuse.

Background

• While the provisions of the amendment bill which seeks to give the NIA extra territorial powers to probe cases of terrorism, cyber crimes, human trafficking and facilitate creation of special courts are unobjectionable, what is disturbing is the farcical nature of the debate in both the Houses which culminated in a majority of the parties supporting its passage.
• The Congress supported the amendment bill with only some of its MPs making peripheral references to the State’s encroachment of civil rights with extraordinary anti-terror legislation and the unprofessional manner in which investigations were carried on in the name of probing terrorism.

Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act

• Not one Member in any of the Houses thought it fit to mention the documented abuse of POTA and its predecessor, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), in targeting political opponents and minorities in the name of national security.
• These laws had to be repealed because they exemplified a complete departure from procedural fairness and Constitutional principles.
• In the case of TADA, 76,166 persons were arrested between 1985-1994.
• Of these, 18,708, i.e., 24.5 per cent, were discharged before the trial commenced.
• Of the 20,386 persons who were tried, as many as 19,543 were acquitted.
• Only four per cent of those tried under TADA were found guilty.

Conclusion

• In the current polarised climate that hinges heavily on national security, few politicians feel emboldened enough to make a legitimate argument about the primary function of the law as balancing State power with individual rights.
• These were the arguments that won the Opposition, including the BJP’s eminent predecessors, the nation’s favour against the Emergency. Aping their oppressors does the ruling party little credit.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

It takes two (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : Right to Information (Amendment) Bill 2019
Mains level : Various constitutional amendments

Context

• In the last few days of the (now extended) first session of the 17th Lok Sabha, the Opposition’s demand in Rajya Sabha that seven key bills should be sent to parliamentary panels is a call for attention.
  It points to a disquieting trend:
• The government is using its overwhelming majority in Lok Sabha to push legislation through Parliament without adequate discussion and debate.
• Of the several bills that have already been passed in this session, not one has been referred to a select or standing committee.
• Rajya Sabha passed the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019, which has widely sparked apprehensions of a dilution of the RTI, after voting against sending it to a select panel, and Lok Sabha passed the triple talaq bill.
• This should be seen as alarming for several reasons. Because it denies important and consequential bills their due scrutiny, which can happen only in the parliamentary committee.
• Because it suggests that the government is turning a deaf ear to the voice of an already diminished Opposition.
• After all, if the first session of the new Lok Sabha is so inhospitable to the Opposition, despite all the government’s promises of winning sabka vishwas.

Can the sessions to come be far behind?

• In a Lok Sabha such as this one, where the numbers are so steeply tilted against the Opposition, it means that it must fight for every inch of its space.
• But in a parliamentary democracy which goes not just by the bare-knuckled rule book, but is also guided by unwritten grace, convention and norm, it is the responsibility of the government to reach out across the aisle, be generous and accommodating to those on the other side of the political fence.
• The government must hear out the Opposition, and not be quick to label it as obstructionist.
• It must ensure that the law-making exercise does not become reduced to a brutish numbers game, but strives, instead, to be the deliberative process that the people of India deserve, which draws in a plurality of vantage points and views.
• The government, even one that has a large majority, and especially one that has a large majority, must be open to the questions, suggestions and checks of the Opposition in Parliament.

Conclusion

• It is important for the NDA government to review its stance and to strike the right note vis a vis the Opposition in this session of Parliament.
• It would be gravely misreading the mandate if it uses it as a weapon against the Opposition. The trust of the people enables it to be more self-assured.
• It would be letting them down if it makes it more intolerant.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Making national legislatures more gender-balanced (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : Global Gender Gap report for 2018
Mains level : Women participation in legislature

Context

• The Global Gender Gap report for 2018 said that the widest gender disparity is in the field of political empowerment.
• To cite the Inter-Parliamentary Union 2018 report, women legislators account for barely 24% of all MPs across the world.
• However, the experience of the top-ranked countries in the IPU list does give an indication of how women’s presence in political spaces took an upward turn in those nations.
• Rwanda, a landlocked nation with a population of 11.2 million, tops the list, with 61.3% seats in the Lower House and 38.5% in the Upper House occupied by women.

Background

• Since 2003, the country has implemented a legislated quota of 30% in all elected positions, which has enabled a steady inflow of women parliamentarians after successive elections.
• Its Constitution has also set a quota of 30% in all elected offices.
• However, some believe that the higher representation of women in the country cannot be attributed solely to quotas — women were thrust into the political limelight due to the huge vacuum that emerged in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, which resulted in a large chunk of the country’s male population getting killed.

Leader in the Caribbean

• Cuba, the largest Caribbean island nation with a population of about 11.1 million, holds the second rank, with 53.2 % seats of its 605-member single House being occupied by women representatives.
• The Communist dispensation in Cuba did not opt for legislated gender quotas, but does follow a practice akin to voluntary quota systems.
• However, Cuban women are less represented at the local level, where candidates are selected by the local communities that often overlook women candidates.

Situation in Sweden

• Sweden, the fifth-rank holder in the IPU, has a professedly feminist government and has maintained a women’s parliamentary representation of at least 40% since 90s.
• The 349-member single House, Swedish Parliament, now has 161 women with 46.1% representation.
• Sweden does not have any constitutional clause or electoral law earmarking representation for women in elected bodies.
• The issue of compulsory gender quota didn’t find favour in Sweden as it was believed that such a quota will create reverse discrimination and violate the principles of equal opportunities.
• Almost all political parties there have adopted measures to ensure a fair representation for women at all levels.
• In 1993, the Social Democratic Party adopted the ‘zipper system’, described as “a gender quota system whereby women and men are placed alternately on all party lists.”

Nepal’s example

• Nepal occupies the 36th position in the IPU and its 275-member Lower House has 90 women, about 32.7% of the total strength.
• The Nepal Constitution stole a march over many others in the South Asia by earmarking 33% seats for women in all state institutions, including the legislature.

Situation in India

• India, at 149 among the 192 countries in the IPU list, had barely 11.8% women’s representation in the 16th Lok Sabha, which improved to 14.5% in the current Lower House.
• At least seven out of the 29 States have not sent a single woman MP.
• The 108th Constitutional Amendment Bill stipulating 33% quota for women in the Parliament and in State Assemblies remains in political cold storage.
• The system of voluntary party quotas, which has worked well in many countries, is not likely to cut much ice in India’s deeply embedded patriarchal society.

Conclusion

• As has happened in the case of panchayats and municipalities, only a legally mandated quota could perhaps ensure a large-scale entry of Indian women into the higher echelons of political power.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

The terrorist tag: on the latest amendments to the NIA Act (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : NIA Act
Mains level : Highlights of the NIA Act

Context

• The idea of designating an individual as a terrorist, as the latest amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act propose to do, may appear innocuous.
• However, designating an individual as a terrorist raises serious constitutional questions and has the potential for misuse.
• The practice of designating individuals under anti-terrorism laws, prevalent in several countries, is seen as being necessary because banned groups tend to change their names and continue to operate.

Major amendments of the NIA Act

• However, there is no set procedure for designating an individual a terrorist. Parliament must consider whether an individual can be called a ‘terrorist’ prior to conviction in a court of law.
• The absence of a judicial determination may render the provision vulnerable to invalidation. There ought to be a distinction between an individual and an organisation, as the former enjoys the right to life and liberty.
• The likely adverse consequences of a terrorist tag may be worse for individuals than for organisations.
• Further, individuals may be subjected to arrest and detention; even after obtaining bail from the courts, they may have their travel and movements restricted, besides carrying the taint.
• This makes it vital that individuals have a faster means of redress than groups.
• Unfortunately, there is no change in the process of getting an entity removed from the list.
• Just as any organisation getting the tag, individuals, too, will have to apply to the Centre to get their names removed.

Decisions taken by the government

• A wrongful designation will cause irreparable damage to a person’s reputation, career and livelihood.
• Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s warning that his government would not spare terrorists or their sympathisers, and his reference to ‘urban Maoists’, are portentous about the possibility of misuse.
• It has been argued by some members in Parliament that the Bill contains anti-federal features.
• The provision to empower the head of the National Investigation Agency to approve the forfeiture of property of those involved in terrorism cases obviously overrides a function of the State government.
• At present, the approval has to be given by the State police head. Also, there will be a section allowing NIA Inspectors to investigate terrorism cases, as against a Deputy Superintendent of Police or an Assistant

Commissioner.

• This significantly enhances the scope for misuse.
• The 2004 amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, made it a comprehensive anti-terror law that provided for punishing acts of terrorism, as well as for designating groups as ‘terrorist organisations’. Parliament further amended it in 2008 and 2013 to strengthen the legal framework to combat terror.

Conclusion

• While none will question the need for stringent laws that show ‘zero tolerance’ towards terrorism, the government should be mindful of its obligations to preserve fundamental rights while enacting legislation on the subject.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Share of the state (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : Constitutional Bodies
Mains level : Maintaining Fiscal Federalism

Context

• Last week, the Union cabinet passed an amendment to widen the terms of reference of the 15th Finance Commission.

Background

• The Commission has now been asked to examine the possibility of setting up a mechanism for funding defence and internal security.
• As capital spending on defence continues to fall well short of what is required, it is difficult to contest the premise that it needs to be bolstered.
• But, as the creation of “secure and non-lapsable funds for defence and internal security” may end up reducing the divisible tax pool further, the move could face resistance from states, especially when several of them are arguing for a greater share in tax revenues.
• While the commission is yet to spell out its views on the subject, this request raises fundamental questions over the spending priorities of different levels of government and the framework that governs Centre-state fiscal relations.

Constitutional Underpinnings

• The Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution specifies the separate as well as concurrent responsibilities of the Centre and state governments, with defence falling in the Union list.
• The inability of the Centre to ramp up its spending on defence indicates the limited fiscal space available to it.
• In large part, this is due to an increase in spending on items in the state and concurrent list, and a corresponding decline in spending on items in the Union list.
• In 2015-16 alone, the Centre spent 16 per cent of its revenue expenditure on items in the state list, and another 16.4 per cent on items in the concurrent list.

To reduced Fiscal space for states

• In a federal structure, the Centre must address regional imbalances in the delivery of public services.
• But the bulk of this spending is routed through sector-specific transfers or centrally sponsored schemes that curb the autonomy of the states in deciding their own expenditure priorities.
• The added fiscal pressures on the Centre have, in turn, contributed to reduced fiscal space for states.
• Over the years, the Centre has begun to rely increasingly on taxes collected through cesses and surcharges to meet its expenditure priorities.
• But revenue from these sources does not form part of the divisible tax pool, it is not shared with states — squeezing them from both ends.

Conclusion

• While the compulsions of the political economy have ensured greater central government spending on items in the state and concurrent lists, the current juncture may well be an opportune moment to rethink the spending priorities of different levels of the government.
• There is a need, particularly, to address legitimate concerns of states about increasing encroachment by the Centre.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Having the last word on ‘population control’ (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 1 : Society
Prelims level : National Family Health Survey
Mains level : Population and associated issues

Context

• On July 11, World Population Day, a Union Minister expressed alarm, in a Tweet, over what he called the “population explosion” in the country, wanting all political parties to enact population control laws and annulling the voting rights of those having more than two children.
• Both these demands are wayward and represent a warped thinking which has been rebutted rather well in the Economic Survey 2018-19.
• The Survey notes that India is set to witness a “sharp slowdown in population growth in the next two decades”.

Dangerous imagery

• The demand for state controls on the number of children a couple can have is not a new one.
• It feeds on the perception that a large and growing population is at the root of a nation’s problems as more and more people chase fewer and fewer resources.
• This image is so ingrained in the minds of people that it does not take much to whip up public sentiment which in turn can quickly degenerate into a deep class or religious conflict that pits the poor, the weak, the downtrodden and the minorities against the more privileged sections.
• From this point to naming, targeting and attacking is a dangerous and short slide.
• The implications of such an approach are deep and wide but not easily understood because the argument is couched in sterile numbers and a rule that, it would seem, applies to all sections equally.

Policy of choice

• The fig leaf of population control allows for the outrageous argument to be made that a family will be virtually ostracised and a citizen will be denied his or her basic rights if he or she is born as the third child.
• This has of course never been public policy in India.
• In fact, a far-sighted and forward-looking National Population Policy (NPP) was introduced in 2000 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister.
• The essence of the policy was the government’s commitment to “voluntary and informed choice and consent of citizens while availing of reproductive health care services” along with a “target free approach in administering family planning services”.
• This is a position reiterated by various governments, including the present government on the floor of both Houses of Parliament.

Crucial connections

• Thus, family health, child survival and the number of children a woman has are closely tied to the levels of health and education of the parents, and in particular the woman; so the poorer the couple, the more the children they tend to have.
• This is a relation that has little to do with religion and everything to do with opportunities, choices and services that are available to the people.
• The poor tend to have more children because child survival is low, son preference remains high, children lend a helping hand in economic activity for poorer households and so support the economic as well as emotional needs of the family.
• This is well known, well understood and well established.

Highlights of NFHS data

• As the National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-16) notes, women in the lowest wealth quintile have an average of 1.6 more children than women in the highest wealth quintile, translating to a total fertility rate of 3.2 children versus 1.5 children moving from the wealthiest to the poorest.
• Similarly, the number of children per woman declines with a woman’s level of schooling. Women with no schooling have an average 3.1 children, compared with 1.7 children for women with 12 or more years of schooling.
• This reveals the depth of the connections between health, education and inequality, with those having little access to health and education being caught in a cycle of poverty, leading to more and more children, and the burden that state control on number of children could impose on the weakest.
• As the latest Economic Survey points out, States with high population growth are also the ones with the lowest per capita availability of hospital beds.
• In fact, demographers are careful not to use the word “population control” or “excess population”.

Scars of the past

• The NPP 2000 uses the world “control” just thrice: in references to the National AIDS Control Organisation; to prevent and control communicable diseases, and control of childhood diarrhoea.
• This is the spirit in which India has looked at population so that it truly becomes a thriving resource; the life blood of a growing economy.
• Turning this into a problem that needs to be controlled is exactly the kind of phraseology, mindset and possibly action that will spell doom for the nation.
• It will undo all the good work that has been done and set the stage for a weaker and poorer health delivery system exactly the opposite of what a scheme such as Ayushman Bharat seeks to achieve.
• Today, as many as 23 States and Union Territories, including all the States in the south region, already have fertility below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. So, support rather than control works.

Way forward

• The damage done when mishandling issues of population growth is long lasting. Let us not forget that the scars of the Emergency are still with us.
• Men used to be part of the family planning initiatives then but after the excesses of forced sterilisations, they continue to remain completely out of family planning programmes even today.
• The government now mostly works with woman and child health programmes. Mistakes of the Emergency-kind are not what a new government with a robust electoral mandate might like to repeat.
• So it is time to ask some of the prejudiced voices within the government and ruling party not to venture into terrain they may not fully understand.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Undermining RTI (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : Polity
Prelims level : RTI
Mains level : Separation of powers between various organs dispute redressal mechanisms and institutions

Context

• Amendments passed by the Lok Sabha to the Right to Information Act are so obviously unnecessary that naturally many see an ulterior motive.
• It is difficult not to concur with activists who contend that the amendments pose a threat to the freedom and autonomy of Information Commissions at the Central and State levels.
• The Central Information Commissioner, the corresponding authorities in the States (State Information Commissioners) and other Information Commissioners at both levels are statutory functionaries vested with the power to review the decisions of public information officers in government departments, institutions and bodies.

Background

• The amendments propose to modify the status, tenure and conditions of appointment of these Commissioners and empower the Union government to set their tenure and remuneration.
• While the original law assured incumbents of a fixed five-year term, with 65 as the retirement age, the amendments say the Centre would decide their tenure.
• The security of tenure of an adjudicating authority, whose mandate is to intervene in favour of information-seekers against powerful regimes and bureaucrats, has been undermined.
• The original legislation says the salary and terms and conditions of service of the CIC are the same as those of the Chief Election Commissioner, equal in status to a Supreme Court judge. Similarly, the other Information Commissioners at the Central level have the same conditions of service as Election Commissioners.

Aim behind this move

• At the State level, the SIC has the same terms and conditions of service as Election Commissioners, while other Information Commissioners are equated with the Chief Secretary of a State.
• The government claims its aim is to ‘rationalise’ the status of the authorities.
• It argues that while the Chief Election Commissioner is a constitutional functionary, the CIC is only a statutory authority. And while the CEC is equal in status to a Supreme Court judge, it would be incongruous for the CIC to enjoy the same status as the CIC’s orders are subject to judicial review by the high courts.
• This is a fallacious argument as even the Election Commission’s decisions can be reviewed by high courts.
• Protecting citizens’ right to information is a cause important enough for adjudicating authorities to be vested with high status and security of tenure.

Conclusion

• Given the extent to which the RTI Act has empowered citizens and helped break the hold of vested interests over the administration, the law has always faced a threat from many in power.
• The RTI Act was a consensus law and a product of public consultation.
• The present amendments have not been put to any debate.
• The government would do well to drop the Bill or at least send it to a parliamentary select committee for deeper scrutiny.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

India's shifting strategic concerns (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : International Relations
Prelims level : Shimla Conference
Mains level : India needs to do as the U.S. and China get busier in the subcontinent

Context

• The U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest gaffe has introduced another thorn in what is now clearly an unsettled India-U.S. relationship.
• While India’s hand is not as strong as we sometimes believe it to be, there might be opportunities to leverage the international situation further down the road.

What are the perceived advantages?

• If we step back and evaluate the India-Pakistan equation over the past five years, what stands out is that both sides proceeded from a perception that each holds an advantageous position.
• India’s confidence emanated from Mr. Modi’s electoral victory in 2014 that yielded a strong Central government and expectations of stable ties with all the major powers.
• Mostly overlooked in India, Pakistani leaders too have displayed confidence that the international environment was moving in a direction that opened options for Pakistan that were unavailable in the previous decade.
• This included the renewed patterns of Pakistan’s ties with the U.S. and China, with the latter reassuring Pakistan and, most importantly, the Army on their respective strategic commitments and bilateral partnerships.

Pakistan’s leverage

China’s angle

• Historically, U.S. policymakers have always sought to restore the alliance with Pakistan whenever Islamabad’s ties with China became stronger. India has borne the brunt of this recurring geopolitical dynamic.

Situation in Afghan conflict

• Much of Pakistan’s contemporary leverage can of course also be traced to the ongoing phase of the Afghan conflict. It fended off the most dangerous phase when U.S. policy might have shifted in an adversarial direction, or instability in the tribal frontier areas might have completely exploded.
• So, both India and Pakistan perceive themselves to be in a comfortable strategic position.

Pakistan’s benefactors

• Both the U.S. and China have overlapping interests in regional stability and avoidance of a major subcontinental conflict.
• While each maintains deep ties with Pakistan for different reasons, it is unclear to what extent their longer term interests coincide with India, which seeks a structural transformation in Pakistan’s domestic politics and external behaviour.
• The U.S. and China appear content with, or probably prefer, a Pakistan with a strong Rawalpindi, along with competent civilian governance structures and an elite with a wider world view.
• For China, a stable Pakistan can be a partner in the Belt and Road initiative and future continental industrial and energy corridors.
• In sum, both the U.S. and China seek a strong, stable and secure Pakistan that controls its destabilising behaviour because that undermines their wider regional interests. For the U.S., a revisionist Pakistan pulls India inward and away from potential India-U.S. cooperation on Asian geopolitics.
• For China, it undermines its industrial and connectivity projects in Pakistan, while negatively impacting India-China ties.

What is the India’s Stance?

• Maintaining that India has the right and the capacity to adopt an active defence posture that is, blocking the flow of cross-border terror by proactive operations on the Line of Control (LoC) along with reserving the option for more ambitious punitive strikes in response to major terrorist attacks on Indian military targets would play an important part in shaping how third parties view Indian interests and thereby assume constructive roles in managing Pakistani behaviour.

Conclusion

• If India ever asks third parties to assist in the region, it should be for a cessation of Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir, and, once an atmosphere of peace has been established, to persuade Pakistan to accept the LoC as part of a final territorial settlement similar to the offer by Indira Gandhi in the 1972 Shimla negotiations.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

What businesses can learn from social movements (Live Mint)

Mains Paper 1 : Society
Prelims level : Vinoba Bhave
Mains level : Powerful social movements and its impact on Indian society

Context

• Vinoba Bhave was hard of hearing, and dressed in the garb of poverty: a homespun cloth around his waist and cheap brown canvas sneakers.
• But in the 1950s, this gentleman, a faithful disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, started one of the country’s most impactful social movements, transitioning the lives of millions.

Backgroun

• The goal of Vinoba’s “Bhoodan"—“land gift"—movement was to help rectify India’s massive wealth inequity.
• At the time, wealth in the country’s primarily agricultural economy was concentrated in the hands of landowners. Vinoba walked thousands of miles for 13 years, visiting landowners, one homestead at a time.
• His request to each one was: “I have come to loot you with love. If you have four sons, consider me your fifth and give me my share."
• With this simple appeal, Vinoba collected over four million acres of land, which he transferred to the landless. Bhoodan remains history’s largest peaceful land transfer.

Key principles

Common enemy or collective pride:

• Hayagreeva Rao, professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford, says that you either need a common enemy or collective pride to galvanize actions towards a major transition.
• For Gandhi, the enemy was the British; for Mandela, the apartheid system.
• But collective pride can also be a powerful catalyst, as Bhave proved.
• In organizations too, if we want people to move in the same direction with a strong purpose, we need a compelling narrative, which speaks to collective purpose, and is easy to understand.

Turn grassroots into gold:

• The Strength Of Weak Ties by Mark Granovetter is a seminal paper on social networks.
• Granovetter explains that your immediate friends may number under a dozen, yet your friends-of-friends and third-degree connections turn out to be, surprisingly, even more important in many situations.
• Winning movements, too, are fuelled by energy that uses the principle of weak ties.
• Granovetter points out that the most successful organizational leaders understand that they must turn their approach to power upside-down and let local activists lead.

Embrace the mess:

• The transformation journey is always messy policy disagreements, personality conflicts, territorial fights, and much more.
• But in winning movements, the leaders put their egos and organizational identities aside, which allows them to step back, focus on purpose and mission, and discover novel solutions that were not previously apparent.
• Private truth and public lies: Donald Trump’s presidential victory was a surprise to pollsters.
• The reason: many Trump voters denied their intentions; they said they would not vote for him, while planning to do so.
• Economist Timur Kuran calls this “preference falsification"—misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures.
• It happens frequently in everyday life, such as a “white lie" to a dinner host saying we’ve enjoyed their bland meal.
• Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.
• In large organizations too, people often tell things they don’t mean and, over time, create systematic patterns of negative unintended consequences.
• A wise leader creates an environment of trust that minimizes this tendency, and must be a fine-tuned sensor to detect and eradicate systematic organizational falsehoods.

The tipping point:

• As transformations progress, there is often a tipping point, where minority opinion shifts to majority.
• In a 2018 online experiment, researchers discovered that the critical mass a minority needs to reverse a majority viewpoint is just 25%.
• So, in your business, if you wish to bring a fundamental transformation, follow the “25% Revolution" theory: convert the mindset of 25% and you have a chance to reshape your business.

Conclusion

• As transformation leaders, our job is to engineer large-scale social change.
• This is no less challenging than engineering a new computer system, or designing a new aeroplane.
• The above principles are only a few of perhaps hundreds of lessons you may find from studying history’s great change-makers.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Eye on China (Live Mint)

Mains Paper 3 : Defense and Security
Prelims level : IndSpaceEx
Mains level : Importance of the IndSpaceEx mission

Context

• The Indian armed forces are all set to conduct the country’s first-ever simulated space warfare exercise “IndSpaceEx” this week.

About IndSpaceEx

• The tri-Service integrated defence staff under the defence ministry is conducting the two-day “IndSpaceEx”, with all military and scientific stakeholders.
• Aim: to assess the requisite space and counter-space capabilities that are needed by India to ensure we can protect our national security interests in this final frontier of warfare.
• Such an exercise was being planned after India successfully tested an anti-satellite (A-Sat) interceptor missile to destroy the 740-kg Microsat-R satellite, at an altitude of 283-km in the low earth orbit, in a “hit-to-kill mode”.
• The exercise will help Indian armed forces in testing the cosmic war zone and see how the A-Sat capabilities can be used to defend the Indian skies.
• The exercise comes at a time when India’s neighbour China is aggressively growing in this field.
• Shortly after ‘Mission Shakti’, Beijing had launched several missiles from a ship to demonstrate its A-Sat capabilities.

In response to China

• China has been developing an array of A-Sat weapons, both kinetic in the shape of co-orbital killer satellites and direct ascent missiles as well as non-kinetic ones like lasers and electro-magnetic pulse weapons.
• Though India for long has had an expansive civilian space programme, it largely restricted military use of space to intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, communication and navigation.
• It will lead to an assessment of the “imminent threats” in the expanse beyond earth and the drafting of a joint space doctrine for futuristic battles.
• The A-Sat test and the approval for the tri-Service Defence Space Agency signifies the crossing of that self-imposed threshold for developing offensive space capabilities.
• India has no option but to develop deterrence capabilities to ensure no adversary can threaten its assets in outer-space.

Why such exercise is important?

• Not only can an adversary’s counter-space weapons take out India’s assets critical for its economic and social infrastructure, they can also “blind and deafen” the Indian armed forces.
• They could do so by destroying or jamming satellites vital for surveillance, communication, and precision-targeting.

Way Forward

• To having demonstrated its ASAT capability, India is in an ideal place to demonstrate its global governance credentials.
• The efforts like the IndSpaceEx are important to determine the degree of the space security challenges India faces and to develop appropriate measures for effective deterrence.
• But India must step up its efforts to develop global rules and norms about such challenges and threats.
• India must continue working towards all-encompassing legally-binding instruments such as the Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS).

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

Old tricks (Indian Express)

Mains Paper 3: Security
Prelims level : FaceAPP
Mains level : FaceAPP privacy concerns

Context

• When you get old, you’ll look like yourself, only older.
• The fact that there’s an app to visually illustrate the obvious, should come as no surprise. Nor, perhaps, should the joy that millions of celebrities and commoners seem to be getting by posting digitally-aged photos of themselves.

Background

• What is a surprise, a refreshing one, is the suspicion over FaceApp’s surge in popularity.
• While the app was first launched in 2017, it has had over 100 million downloads since it introduced the “ageing” feature last month, which allows users to upload a photograph and have it morphed, through a “neural network” AI system-based filter.

Privacy threat

• Much like Facebook’s 10-year-challenge that went viral earlier this year, FaceApp sparked concerns that the vast inventory of photographs it is collecting will be used to develop facial recognition software, make possible identity theft.
• The “terms of service” of the app state that users grant its creators “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide” use of any data they share.
• The panic around privacy has been enhanced by the fact that FaceApp’s parent-company is Russia-based, “Russian hacking” having become synonymous for some Americans with fixing elections, undermining choice.
• The panic around FaceApp could be dismissed as a throwback to Cold War-era paranoia.
• But in the off chance that Vladimir Putin isn’t actually interested in your beach-side selfie, (FaceApp has clarified that it deletes most of its data every 48 hours and stores it on temporary servers in the US), the paranoia may be a positive thing.

Conclusion

• It could mean that a degree of data literacy has permeated internet users, that the cost of every internet fad will now be weighed and measured.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials

The complexities of Naga identity (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 2 : Governance
Prelims level : Inner Line Permit
Mains level : Indigenous Inhabitants of Nagaland (RIIN) and its major issues

Context

• The Nagaland government’s move to compile a Register of Indigenous Inhabitants of Nagaland (RIIN) opens up possibilities in the context of the decision to link the register to the Inner Line Permit (ILP) system without a consensus on the definition of an ‘indigenous inhabitant’.

Cutoff date

• Though the official notification on RIIN has not mentioned a cut-off date to compile the proposed register, the authorities in Nagaland have till date issued indigenous inhabitant certificates using December 1, 1963 as the cut-off date.

Opposition from NSCN (I-M)

• The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), which has been engaged in peace talks with the government of India since 1997, has opposed the compilation of RIIN asserting that “all Nagas, wherever they are, are indigenous in their land by virtue of their common history”.
• On June 29, the Nagaland government notified that RIIN “will be the master-list of all indigenous inhabitants” of the State.
• All those to be included will be issued “barcoded and numbered indigenous inhabitant certificates”.
• It added that all existing indigenous inhabitant certificates would become invalid once the process of compiling RIIN is completed and fresh certificates issued.
• RIIN is different from Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) as exclusion or inclusion in RIIN is not going to determine the Indian citizenship of anyone in Nagaland.

Three conditions

• Since 1977, a person, in order to be eligible to obtain a certificate of indigenous inhabitants of Nagaland, has to fulfil either of these three conditions:
• the person settled permanently in Nagaland prior to December 1, 1963;
   
• his or her parents or legitimate guardians were paying house tax prior to this cut-off date; and
• the applicant, or his/her parents or legitimate guardians, acquired property and a patta (land certificate) prior to this cut-off date.
• The compilation of RIIN also involves the complexities of deciding claims in respect of children of non-Naga fathers as well as non-Naga children adopted by Naga parents.

Key Issues

• If the Nagaland government goes ahead with a compilation of RIIN with this cut-off date, then all Naga people who have migrated to the State from the neighbouring States of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh and elsewhere in India after this day will have to be excluded.
• The NSCN(I-M) statement adds, “Nothing is conclusive on the Naga issue, until and unless a mutually agreed honourable political solution is signed between the two entities.
• Therefore, any attempt to dilute the final political settlement by justifying any past accord of treasons should be seriously viewed by all Nagas.”
• This clearly indicates the opposition the Nagaland government may have to face if it goes ahead with the move to compile RIIN.

Conflicts

• The Centre and the NSCN (I-M), which is the largest among all armed Naga rebel groups, signed a Framework Agreement in 2015, the content of which has still not been made public, in turn leaving room for speculation on the contentious issue of integration of all contiguous Naga-inhabited areas of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.
• Unless otherwise clarified through an official notification, the proposed linking of RIIN with the ILP system may require large numbers of non-indigenous inhabitants of Dimapur district, more particularly the commercial hub (Dimapur town), to obtain an ILP to carry out day-to-day activities.
• Most of them migrated from other States and have been carrying out trade, business and other activities for decades.
• Migration also explains the higher density of population in Dimapur district (409 persons per sq. km) when compared to all the other districts in the State.
• The ILP is a travel document issued by the government of India to allow a ‘domestic tourist’ to enter Nagaland, and is valid for 30 days.

Key challenges

• While the move to streamline the ILP system to curb the influx of “illegal migration” to Nagaland has been welcomed by civil society, public opinion is still divided on compiling RIIN without a consensus on the cut-off date.
• As the Nagaland government has begun a consultation process on RIIN, it will be under pressure to de-link the work of streamlining the ILP mechanism from the proposed register and put it on hold till the ongoing peace process concludes and the final solution is worked out.

Conclusion

• Besides this, the complexities that may arise in streamlining the ILP mechanism due to non-issuance of domicile certificates or permanent residence certificates to a large number of non-Naga, non-indigenous inhabitants could also make the task even more difficult for the Neiphiu Rio-led Nagaland government.

  Online Coaching for UPSC PRE Exam

  General Studies Pre. Cum Mains Study Materials