The New Indian Express Analysis, 5th & 6th April, 2023
CRITICISM OF GOVT ISN’T ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT: SC
The Supreme Court on Wednesday lit into the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) for invoking national security out of ‘thin air’ to deny broadcasting rights to Malayalam channel Media One, adding criticism of the government cannot be termed anti-establishment.
Directing the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to renew the channel’s broadcasting permission within four weeks, a bench of Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and Justice Hima Kohli said non-renewal falls within the purview of restriction on freedom of the press.
“The critical views of the Channel, Media-One on policies of the government cannot be termed, ‘anti-establishment’... The action of the MIB by denying security clearance to a media channel based on the views which the channel is constitutionally entitled to hold produces a chilling effect on free speech, and in particular on press freedom. Criticism of governmental policy can by no stretch of imagination be brought within the fold of any of the grounds stipulated in Article 19(2).”
Dwelling on the independence of the press, the court said the government has to accept criticism and cannot expect all sections of the media to take a homogenized view. “An independent press is vital for the robust functioning of a democratic republic... The press has to speak the truth to power... The restriction on the freedom of the press compels citizens to think along the same tangent. A homogenized view on issues that range from socio-economic polity to political ideologies would pose grave dangers to democracy.”
It also said that the non-disclosure of reasons for the denial of security clearance by MHA and disclosure only to the court in a sealed cover violated the principles of natural justice and the right to fair proceedings, leaving the company to fight in the dark.
(Note- This will help us in GS-2, Free Speech, Polity)
Anwesha's door reopens for poor SC & ST kids after the Covid break
Anwesha Scheme
AFTER a three-year hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the process has begun for admission of 200 poor scheduled tribe (ST) and scheduled caste (SC) students to private English medium schools in the current academic session under the state government’s Anwesha scheme.
Introduced by the ST and SC Development (SSD) department in 2015, the scheme aims to provide quality education to children of backward and below-the-poverty-line (BPL) families. So far, 2,264 students including 1,585 ST children have been admitted into 17 private English medium schools with CBSE and ICSE affiliations. They are staying at Anwesha hostels, three each in Sundargarh town and Rourkela. The government bears the entire education cost of the students
District welfare officer Pabitra Mohan Pradhan said under the scheme, ST and SC students get admitted to Class I and study till Class X. Around 70 percent of the students are from the ST community, and the rest belong to the SC category with a 50:50 ratio of boys and girls.
The scheme is meant only for BPL families in ST and SC categories.
(Note- This will help in GS-2, Social Justice, Welfare Schemes for Vulnerable Section of population.)
EXPANDED GOLDEN TRIANGLE MANIPUR’S NEW NIGHTMARE
In the last few years, the drug problem has acquired another dimension. From just being a transit route, a new culture of illegal poppy cultivation has arrived in the hills.
Manipur government’s anti-drugs campaign, grandiosely named “War on Drugs”
Manipur has had a drug problem for decades, thanks to an ancient trade route that connects it to Southeast Asia and therefore to the infamous Golden Triangle not too far away from its eastern border. In geographical terms, this is a tri-junction where the Mekong River, at a confluence point, splits the landmasses of three nations— Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. Beginning in the 1970s, this had become the focal point of an international network of illegal opium and heroin trade.
Shelby Tucker has a good account of how this came to be so in his book Burma: The Curse of Independence. It is intriguing how this predicament was a fallout of the geopolitics of the time—more specifically the Cold War between the Capitalist West and Communist East blocs.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Security topics)
Post-Art 370, investment gets a boost in Kashmir
Centre scrapped Article 370 on August 5, 2019, which granted special status to J&K, and Article 35A, which barred outsiders from purchasing land and property in J&K.
The Union government bifurcated J&K state into two UTs - Jammu and Kashmir (with legislature) and Ladakh (without legislature)
No non-locals who bought land: 2020- 1, 2021- 57, 2022- 127.
No of companies invested: 2020-21- 310, 2021-22 -175, 2022-23 -1074.
In Ladakh, Leh Apex Body (LAB) and Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA), an amalgam of trade unions, and social, political, and religious, students groups from Ladakh, have joined hands to spearhead the campaign for the grant of 6th Schedule status, statehood with the legislature, creation of two Lok Sabha seats and reservation of jobs to locals in Ladakh UT.
(Note- This will help in GS-1, Post Independence Consolidation topics)
Adern’s climate pitch in the last parliament speech
FORMER New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern bowed out of parliament on Wednesday, making an impassioned plea during her tearful final speech to “please take the politics out of climate change”.
She singled out the climate crisis as the defining issue of her time in politics. “Climate change is a crisis. It is upon us,” she said.
Jacinda Ardern to begin a new role combating online extremism.
Jacinda Ardern, who stepped down as New Zealand’s PM in January, will begin an unpaid role this month combating online extremism.
Ardern launched the Christchurch Call with French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019, two months after a white supremacist gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.
Christchurch Call’s goal is to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.
More than 50 countries have since signed up for the Christchurch Call, including the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea.
Tech firms to sign up include Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Zoom, and Twitter.
(Note- This can be used in GS-3, Environment, Cyber Security topics and GS-4 Ethics)
World Bank, ADB slashes India growth projection
The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have slashed India’s growth forecast for the financial year 2024 citing a slowdown in consumption as a major challenge. The World Bank now projects India’s GDP to moderate to 6.3% against its earlier estimate of 6.6%, while ADB pegs it at 6.4%, against 7.2% estimated earlier
Global growth is expected to slow down in 2023 to 1.8%. At the same time, central banks worldwide continue to raise benchmark lending rates to tame inflation.
The World Bank said the turmoil in the financial sector in the US and Europe could have implications for India.
Meanwhile, the ADB said any worsening of geopolitical tensions is likely to exert further downward pressure on global demand, denting India’s growth rate
(Note-This will help in GS-3, Economic Growth & Development topic.)
AVALANCHE IN SIKKIM KILLS 7
SEVEN tourists were killed and 11 others received injuries on Tuesday in a massive avalanche near the Nathu La pass in east Sikkim, on the border with China.
Nathu La, one of the most important Himalayan passes in the country, is a major tourist destination.
It is 14,450 feet above sea level, is 55 km from Sikkim’s capital Gangtok and it is one of the three open trading border posts between India and China.
Army and Border Road Organisation personnel were deployed to rescue the trapped tourists
Many of the rescued were administered first aid and brought to Gangtok. The Army, National Disaster Response Force, a state disaster management team, and the local police are involved in the search and rescue operations.
(Note- This will help in Prelim & GS-1 Geophysical phenomenon, GS-3, Disaster management topics)
Nippon Steel Corp to set up 30 MTPA plants in Odisha
The 30 MTPA greenfield project that the company intends to set up in Odisha will be beneficial for a large number of people in Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, Keonjhar, Jajpur, and Bhadrak districts
PRESIDENT of Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC) Eiji Hashimoto on Wednesday announced the establishment of the world’s largest and most modern steel plant in Odisha.
He committed during a meeting with Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in Tokyo. “Our sole intention is to set up the largest and most modern steel plant in Odisha. We want to build a steel plant with a production capacity of 30 million tonnes per annum (MTPA). Now, globally 20 MTPA steel plants are the largest,” he told the high-level delegation.
In 2021, AMNS India, a joint venture of ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel, had inked a pact with the state government for a 12 MTPA integrated steel plant with an investment of `50,000 crores in Kendrapara district. The JV has also got the clearance for another 7 MTPA steel plant with an investment of `38,000 crores in Jagatsinghpur district.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Industrialisation in Odisha Topic)
Odisha plans new Expressway between Bhubaneswar & Puri
The `3,600 crore road project will pave the way for the proposed metro rail plan
The proposed Expressway that will start from the Biju Patnaik International Airport (BPIA), Bhubaneswar, and end at Shri Jagannath International Airport (SJIA), Puri will have no internal roads connected to it. The road will be designed for a speed of 120 mph.
EXPRESSWAY FEATURES: To connect BPIA with the proposed airport at Puri. Road to be designed for a speed of 120 km Distance to reduce by nine kilometers. Around 1,300 acres are to be acquired at an estimated `1,010 cr for the project.
The new road network will serve as an additional road and improve connectivity for air travelers, tourists, and pilgrims by providing better connectivity and reducing travel time. Besides making the surrounding areas more attractive for investment and development, it is also expected to have a significant impact on the real estate sector in both cities.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Infrastructure Development topic)
Budhi Thakurani deity steps out on 28-day sojourn, Maa Hingula for nine
THE much-awaited 28-day Budhi Thakurani yatra began in Berhampur on Tuesday amid much fanfare and religious fervor. Considered the biggest yatra of Southern Odisha, the city has geared up to celebrate the deity’s visit to her parental home in a grand way after the Covid lull for two years.
Being the presiding deity of Berhampur, Maa Budhi Thakurani festival is celebrated by lakhs of people belonging to south Odisha and neighboring north Andhra Pradesh districts.
The city wears a festive look, particularly the Desibehera Sahi, which is the parental abode of the Goddess. As per sources, the deity will reach her parent’s home on Tuesday night and give darshan to people at the temporary mandap put up in the area.
People from different areas, age groups, and social backgrounds throng the mandap to offer prayers to Maa Budhi Thakurani. As per rituals, every evening, during the 28 days, the goddess leaves the temporary mandap and visits devotees in a procession. Nine sacred ‘Kalashas’ or sanctified pots, representing the goddess and her eight sisters are taken around in a procession through the streets of Old Berhampur.
In Talcher too, the nine-day Maa Hingula yatra began on Tuesday amid a gathering of thousands of people at Gopal Prasad, 25 km from here. Goddess Hingula, during the yatra, manifests in the form of fire and people worship her as the goddess of fire.
Devotees from far and wide congregated at Gopal Prasad to offer puja to the goddess even as the daytime temperature remained high. The yatra began with mangala arati and other rituals by the priest.
Devotees started making a beeline to the ‘peetha’ right from 3 am to offer sarees, coconut, gur, banana, and other items to Maa Hingula.
The chief priest of Hingula temple Kishore Chandra Dehury said, “Nine days before the commencement of the yatra, the goddess appears near the temple in the form of fire after a special puja is offered. This year Maa Hingula gave darshan near the main Hingula temple in the form of fire where the embers are kept surrounded with heaps of coal till the yatra gets over.”
(Note- This will help in GS-1, Regional tradition of Odisha- Festivals.)
REUSABLE LAUNCHER OFFERS MYRIAD BENEFITS
The successful Reusable Launch Vehicle Autonomous Landing Mission (RLV-LEX) experiment of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on April 2 potentially offers a bouquet of benefits for the space and defense sectors in the coming years.
The experiment—at the Aeronautical Test Range (ATR) of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in Challakere in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district—involved a Chinook helicopter of the Indian Air Force lifting the RLV (a winged space plane) to an altitude of 4.6 km, and releasing it to power it's way back to the ATR runway and safely landing in an autonomous mode.
The successful return landing implies that the space plane can be repeatedly used for subsequent satellite launches without building a new launcher to send the next batch of satellites into space
For the space sector, it significantly reduces satellite launch costs. ISRO scientists are looking at an 80% cut in launch costs for low-earth orbit missions.
For the defense sector, the RLV can be used as an autonomous flight transport system to deliver material from one location to another.
Many more potent applications can be adapted subsequently. The other benefit is that this concept of space launch can drastically cut the contribution of rocket parts to the burgeoning space debris in low earth orbits, which is already posing hazards to space missions.
ISRO’s revenues may boom in relative and exponential terms with this technology. The RLV’s reusable nature means saving a large part of the cost involved in building new rockets. With this enhanced capability, ISRO could expect higher revenues by launching more low-earth orbit satellites per year, promising to attract more domestic and foreign clients for satellite launches.
The RLV is not like the US shuttles, which needed a rocket to launch them into space. However, more experiments are in the pipeline to ensure that the RLV succeeds in payload delivery to low earth orbits. The technology demonstrator in May 2016 was able to achieve a peak altitude of 64.8 km, while it should be able to reach an altitude of 350–600 km in a real mission mode to low earth orbits. Besides, a larger space plane would enable accommodating multiple satellites in a single mission. Once that is successfully achieved, all the benefits—technological and financial—could be reaped.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Sc & Tech, Awareness in the field of Space topic)
Security on table, PM meets Bhutan King
The visit comes days after Bhutan PM’s remark in an interview with a newspaper that Thimpu was monitoring the Doklam issue.
“Doklam is a junction point between India, China, and Bhutan
The Doklam plateau is considered an important area for India’s strategic interest. The standoff at Doklam tri-junction in 2017 began after China tried to extend a road in an area that Bhutan claimed belonged to it. India had strongly opposed the construction as it would have impacted its overall security interests. The India-China face-off was resolved following several rounds of talks.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Security Challenges and their management in border areas)
13 emergency landing strips on NH ready: Gadkari
In a major step to boost military infrastructure, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari on Monday announced that 13 emergency landing facilities (ELFs) are ready for any situation, while others are awaiting approvals from the Indian Air Force (IAF).
Gadkari at this newspaper’s Delhi Dialogues, a monthly interaction with the power elite in Delhi, added that in normal circumstances, the ELF will be used like any other national highway, but during emergencies, IAF will take over, while the service road will be used for smooth flow of traffic.
This emergency landing strip will be helpful not only during the war but also during times of natural calamities. A natural calamity is no less than any war.
The first ELF is on NH-925 at the Gandhav Bhakasar section, south of Barmer in Rajasthan, and will be used for aircraft operations during emergencies on the Western borders with Pakistan. The clearances from the IAF are necessary as it involves high impact landing of the fighters starting with the Sukhoi-30MKI fighter and the transport aircraft.
Of the 29 ELFs being constructed in the country, five will be in Assam, four in West Bengal, three each in Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, and two in Jammu and Kashmir.
PM Narendra Modi on Tuesday pitched for an integrated response system to disasters. Addressing the ‘International Conference on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure - 2023’, he said disasters occurring in a region can cause a big impact on other world regions in a closely connected global setting. “In a closely connected world, the impacts of disasters will not just be local; rather the disaster in one region can have a big impact in a completely different region. Therefore, our response should be integrated, not isolated,” the PM said in his video address to the conference. He also said that 40 countries have also become part of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in a few years. He also said that advanced economies, large and small countries, and others are coming together at this forum.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Infrastructure and Disaster management topic)
Eyeing $2 tn exports by ’30, India embarks upon a dynamic trade policy
EXHIBITING a transformational departure from earlier trade policy announcements, the new trade policy announced by the government provides much-needed flexibility and dynamism in addressing long-standing needs of international trade dynamics.
. Since 1992, Export-Import (EXIM) Policies were announced for five years, renamed as Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) in 2004, necessitating numerous amendments from time to time to the extent that the essence of the initial policy announcement got significantly altered.
The FTP has no end date, providing dynamism and flexibility to assess the international business environment and make necessary modifications consistently.
The government sets a target of achieving exports worth $2 trillion by 2030 and brings out a broad strategy to achieve the same.
The FTP presents a comprehensive and unified document, with impressive precision, delineating the government’s vision, unlike earlier policy traditions to present the policy in multiple parts detailing incentive schemes and rebates, procedural modalities, and even input-output norms.
The new FTP envisages active engagement with states at the district level to effectively implement policy measures to promote exports. It calls for states’ active participation in export promotion, which had hitherto been indifferent to exports, not only at the state -level but even encouraged at the district level by the One-District-One-Product scheme (ODOP) and promotion of district export hubs.
The new FTP is WTO-compliant as Indian policies were criticized for providing subsidies for being non-compatible under the WTO’s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures.
Creating export competitiveness of products seems to be the key focus of the new FTP as it departs from the era of incentives to remission of duties and taxation and operational ease of the entire trade cycle.
Research often indicates that providing financial incentives with an assortment of complex procedures hardly helps the sustainability of exports, especially in the long term. But to make it competitive in the international marketplace, the governments must have the courage to make tough decisions like doing away with subsidies. There is no secret that a substantial part of financial subsidies had considerable seepage before they reached the target beneficiaries. Moreover, even importers hardly hesitate to get their share in such subsidies by way of forcing price cuts in many cases
Key policy measures to facilitate exporters include the digitization of applications for several export promotion schemes such as advanced authorization, export promotion capital goods (EPCG) scheme, duty-free import authorization scheme, and export-import licenses have been made completely paperless and online. Moreover, rule-based automatic approval systems using business analytics tools are being implemented by DGFT with a processing time of just a day, which would considerably speed up the export operations and reduce the hassles.
To boost exports of manufactured goods, a host of targeted interventions in the policy, such as the inclusion of Prime Minister Mega Integrated Textile Region and Apparel Parks (PM Mitra) scheme for benefits under Common Service Provider (CSP) under the EPCH scheme. Extending a special advance authorization scheme for the apparel and clothing sector would greatly facilitate the speedy execution of export orders.
. Special measures have been taken to support the dairy industry to upgrade the technology by way of exemption from maintaining average exports obligation, which would go a long way to transform India, the world’s largest milk producer with a 24% share globally in milk production but less than 0.5% share in world dairy exports, into world’s leading dairy exporter.
The policy introduces special provisions to boost merchant trading activities from India, especially in the case of third-country trade where the goods do not touch India. Special emphasis is on promoting e-commerce exports with the intent to set up e-commerce export hubs, backed by a separate policy framework.
Internationalization of trade in the rupee that allows trade settlement in the Indian rupee with enabling provisions for the grant of export incentives under the FTP and fulfillment of exports obligations for exports realization in the rupee as per the RBI is highly commendable.
The flexibility of the FTP may now be leveraged to incorporate an increased emphasis on international market promotions, dynamic exploration of potential markets, and brand building. Even export promotion organizations, such as EPCs, commodity boards, and trade associations, may be supported in their international market promotion efforts backed by increased provisions in schemes like market access initiatives.
However, it would make strategic sense if officers of the Indian Trade Service, well-trained in the intricacies of global trade with hands-on experience, are posted in overseas missions, similar to large economies, with the sole task of promoting trade and investments.
(Note- This will help in GS-3, Economic Growth & Development topic)
GROUPS LAUD SCRAPPING OF THE DEATH PENALTY
Human rights groups on Tuesday applauded Malaysia’s move to scrap the mandatory death penalty. Instead of the death penalty, lawmakers approved bills to give courts the option of imposing prison sentences of between 30 and 40 years and caning not less than 12 times.
Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said Malaysia’s progressive stance could help “break the logjam on the forward movement towards the abolition of the death penalty”.
(Note- This will help in GS-2, Social Justice, Human Resource topic.)
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