Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 20 December 2017

Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 20 December 2017

::National::

U.S. support in making India as a “leading global power"

• President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy, promised support for India’s emergence as a “leading global power,” while identifying China, Russia and Islamism as main threats.
• “We welcome India’s emergence as a leading global power and stronger strategic and defence partner,” the U.S. strategy document said. Enhancing India’s global standing from being a ‘balancing power’ to be a ‘leading power’ has been a stated strategic objective of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
• “We will seek to increase quadrilateral cooperation with Japan, Australia, and India... We will expand our defence and security cooperation with India, a major defence partner of the United States, and support India’s growing relationships throughout the region,” said the strategy document, finalised after months of internal deliberations.
• India finds a mention as a partner in Mr. Trump’s plans for South and Central Asia and Indo-Pacific, while China is named as a threat in both sections. The document said America “will help South Asian nations maintain their sovereignty as China increases its influence in the region.”
• Many countries in the Indo-Pacific were looking to the U.S. for leadership even as “Chinese dominance risks diminishing the sovereignty of many states in the region,” it noted.
• China and Russia, it says, “are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries and to control information a nd data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
• The document reiterates a series of announcements and speeches by the President and other senior officials in the last one year in the context of India.
• “We will deepen our strategic partnership with India and support its leadership role in Indian Ocean security and throughout the broader region,” it said.
• The document also underscores the warning to Pakistan. “We will press Pakistan to intensify its counter-terrorism efforts, since no partnership can survive a country’s support for militants and terrorists who target a partner’s own service members and officials,” it said

Fasttrack courts for politicians

• Finance Minister Arun Jaitley defended the government’s decision to set up fast track courts for dealing with criminal cases against politicians and said lawmakers should take the lead in setting an example.
• After Opposition members in the Rajya Sabha expressed concern over the decision, Mr. Jaitley, who is also Leader of the House, said he felt that like Caesar’s wife, lawmakers should be above suspicion.
• “As elected representatives, can lawmakers say their trial should be delayed,” he asked, urging the political parties to set an example. Earlier the Opposition parties raised the SC directive on setting up fast track courts.
• The Supreme Court had recently directed the Centre to draft a scheme for setting up fast-track courts to deal exclusively with criminal cases involving legislators and politicians.
• Raising the issue through a point of order, Naresh Agrawal of the Samajwadi Party said Article 14 of the Constitution provides for equity before law and elected representatives are on a par with other citizens.
• While there were no special courts to fast track the trial of terrorists and dreaded criminals, setting up such a court for elected representatives would create a misleading perception of politicians, he said. He questioned the government’s affidavit supporting the fast-track courts.
• Anand Sharma of the Congress said that while there was no question of delaying prosecution of anyone, it would amount to profiling and excessive vilification of lawmakers if a perception was created that fast-track courts were needed only for the elected representatives.
• The government, he said, should ensure enough funds were allocated for creation of enough number of courts to fast-track trial of all. But singling out the elected representatives would create a perception that could be abused by the government of the day, he said.

Centre favors inclusion of petroleum products in the ambit of GST

• The Centre favours including petroleum products within the ambit of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), but it would want a consensus among the States before taking such a step, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told the Rajya Sabha.
• During Question Hour, Congress leader and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram sought to know the Centre’s position on bringing petrol and diesel under the GST.
• He also sought to know why the prices of petrol and diesel did not decline with a fall in the global crude prices.
• He said the present government had persuaded the States to include petrol within the GST and the States reluctantly agreed to do so. However, it is only when the States demanded it and a consensus was formed, that it would be done.
• Responding to the charge that petrol and diesel prices were not coming down in line with global prices, Mr. Jaitley said it has to be kept in mind that a large number of duties on these products were imposed by the States.
• He said that on the Centres advice, many States had brought down these taxes but those ruled by the UPA (Congress and its allies) had not done so.

None of the Above (NOTA) vote gets more share in Gujarat elections

• Gujarat has registered the second highest None of the Above (NOTA) vote share of 1.8% among the States and Union Territories where Assembly elections have been held since 2015. Bihar is on top of the list with a 2.48% vote share.
• For the 243 seats in Bihar, a total of 3,450 candidates were in the fray for the elections held in October-November 2015. More than 3.79 crore voters exercised their franchise.
• Of the total voters, 2.48% had refused to pick any of the candidates, instead opting to press the NOTA button.
• More than 5.5 lakh voters chose not to vote for any candidate in Gujarat and instead went for NOTA, affecting the results in several constituencies across the State.
• In Puducherry, during the 2016 elections, 1.67% of the over 8 lakh voters opted for NOTA.
• West Bengal stands fifth on the list with 1.53% of the 5.4 crore electors having exercised the option in 2016. The Tamil Nadu Assembly elections recorded a 1.3% NOTA vote share last year.
• While in Goa, where 291 candidates contested the elections for 40 seats earlier this year, 1.19% of the over 9 lakh voters preferred not to vote for any of the candidates in their respective constituencies.
• Assam fell a little behind with 1.12% of 1.7 crore voters not opting for any candidate last year, while Uttarakhand recorded a 1.01% NOTA vote share in February.
• The lowest NOTA vote share of of 0.4% was recorded in the Delhi Assembly elections in 2015 when a total of 1.33 electors cast their votes.
• In Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP swept the elections, only 0.87% voters who turned up at the polling stations rejected all the candidates. Again, the 2017 Assembly elections in Punjab recorded 0.7%; Manipur earlier this year registered 0.55%; and Kerala in 2016 recorded 0.53%.

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IIM bill gets a nod by Parliament

• Parliament unanimously passed a Bill to grant the Indian Institutes of Management the power to grant degrees instead of post-graduate diplomas.
• The Bill also allows students to acquire doctoral degrees from the IIMs.
• The Bill, passed by the Lok Sabha earlier, was passed by the Rajya Sabha.
• Earlier, fellowships of the IIMs were not regarded as Ph.D.s, which led students to complete their diplomas and go abroad if they wanted to earn a doctoral degree.
• The hope is that the passage of this Bill will pave the way for more research at these prestigious institutions.
• The Bill also confers on the 20 IIMs the status of institutions of national importance, granting them greater functional autonomy by restricting the role of the government in them.
• Till now, the Centre had a role in the appointment of the chairpersons and directors to their Boards and also fixing the pay of the directors.
• As per the IIM Bill, 2017, a Board of Governors will appoint the Director of each IIM.
• A search-cum-selection-committee will recommend the names. And the director will be eligible for variable pay as determined by the Board.

UIDAI tightened norms for mapping Aadhaar number to a different bank account

• Following the Airtel India-Aadhaar subsidy fiasco, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has tightened norms for mapping Aadhaar number to a different bank account.
• According to the latest rules, ‘explicitly informed consent’ from customers is now a must.
• The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will disable the override feature that the UIDAI said is being misused by many banks while seeding Aadhaar to accounts, without the informed consent of residents.
• As a result, subsidy from the government is being credited to new accounts without their knowledge.
• The UIDAI said there had been complaints pertaining to customer verification. “When an Aadhaar holder visits the telecom service provider for verifying his mobile number, as per the Supreme Court’s February 6, 2017 order, the telecom firm is opening the customer’s payment bank account and puts that bank account on the NPCI’s Aadhaar Payment Bridge, overriding the existing bank account. The mapping is done without the informed consent of the Aadhaar holder,” UIDAI said
• Similar problem is being faced when Aadhaar holders verify their bank accounts to comply with Prevention of Money Laundering rules (the date for which is now March 31, 2018).
• Residents, particularly those in rural and remote areas, are being put to inconvenience as they are clueless about receipt of subsidy and unable to withdraw the subsidy amount credited in payment bank accounts as payment banks are not having branches or cash outpoints in these areas, the UIDAI said.

Time to repeal Colonial time laws

• The Lok Sabha passed two Bills repealing 245 obsolete and archaic laws including the 1911 Prevention of Seditious Meeting Act.
• Calling it a progressive move of the Modi government, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said many of them were “unfortunate part of the colonial legacy”.
• The Minister said over 1,800 such laws had been abolished since the Modi government came to power.
• Parliament had repealed 1,029 laws in 1950. Such an exercise was undertaken even during the Vajpayee government, he said. Some of the repealed laws were the Calcutta Pilots Act of 1859 and the Dramatic Performance Act 1876.

::International::

U.S’s national security strategy is of cold war era says China and Russia

• China and Russia decried President Donald Trump’s first national security strategy — which pilloried both nations as challengers to U.S. power — as a “Cold War mentality” with an “imperialist character”.
• The two global powerhouses hit back hours after the Trump administration unveiled its approach to the world with biting language framing Beijing and Moscow as global competitors.
• “We urge the United States to stop intentionally distorting China’s strategic intentions and to abandon outdated notions such as the Cold War mentality and zero-sum game, otherwise it will only harm itself or others,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.
• Moscow issued its own denunciation moments later. “The imperialist character of this document is obvious, as is the refusal to renounce a unipolar world, an insistent refusal,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
• The report’s tough tone contrasts sharply with Mr. Trump’s friendlier face-to-face encounters with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” the document says.
• Accusing China of seeking “to displace the United States” in Asia, the 68-page strategy is a litany of U.S. grievances, from the Chinese stealing data to spreading “features of its authoritarian system”.
• Beijing launched a vigorous defence of its “peaceful development”, saying any report “which distorts the facts, or maliciously slanders will only do so in vain”.
• “China will never pursue its own development at the expense of other countries’ interests,” Ms. Hua told a regular news briefing. “At the same time, we will never give up our legitimate rights and interests.”
• The security strategy warns that Russian nuclear weapons are “the most significant existential threat to the United States”.
• The Kremlin’s Mr. Peskov responded that Russia “cannot accept” being described as a threat to U.S. security.
• But Mr. Peskov praised “modest” positive features in the report, pointing to what he said was Washington’s readiness to cooperate with Russia in areas such as an exchange of security information.

::Business and Economy::

Identifying new markets to boost services exports

• The government is formulating a new strategy to boost services exports by identifying new markets such as Latin America as well as services, including healthcare and financial services, which have tremendous potential in terms of exports and job creation, according to Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu.
• Addressing the Services Conclave, organised by CII in cooperation with the Commerce Ministry and Services Export Promotion Council, Mr. Prabhu said with manufacturing becoming increasingly automated, services would contribute more to employment generation. He said his Ministry, along with the EXIM Bank, was working on a strategy to define each market along with the kind of products that could be exported.
• “I don’t think we are just the back office of the world. We should be the front office... providing services of all kinds,” he said. Uday Kotak, chairman, CII National Council on Services, said the sectors which had the most potential for exports included health and wellness, media and entertainment and leisure.

The new Industrial Policy being framed for the development of industries in the northeast

• The new Industrial Policy being framed for the development of industries in the northeast would prove catalytic to the trade with southeast Asian nations, according to the government.
• The department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Commerce, in its report on trade with Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), said that the Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) had informed it that the department would work with ASEAN nations to improve FDI inflow. “... it would be done through... Business Leaders’ Forums, CEOs’ forums and Invest India and by further intensifying present efforts in this direction.
• The Committee was briefed about the new Industrial Policy being framed for the development of industries in the North East Region and how it would prove catalytic to the trade with ASEAN,” the panel.
• Of the $56 billion of FDI that came in in 2000-2017 from ASEAN countries, $54 billion was from Singapore. “[Secretary, DIPP] attributed reasons for the bulk investment to the Double Tax Avoidance Agreement between India and Singapore.”

No currency conversion charge for purchasing products in duty free shops at Indian airports

• Passengers will no longer have to pay a currency conversion charge for purchasing products in duty free shops at Indian airports using INR credit or debit cards. The government ordered that sales in these shops be carried out in rupees and not in foreign currency.
• “In view of the Foreign Trade Order 2017 and clarification of RBI, it has been decided to extend the facility of payments in Indian rupees, through INR debit cards or credit cards at duty free shops, without any need for conversion of foreign currency into Indian rupees,” the order said.
• The shops should mandatorily display the price of all goods on sale in Indian rupees only, it added.

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