UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis Sep26

A. GS1 Related

B. GS2 Related

• India ranks 158th in the world for its investments in education and health care, according to the first-ever scientific study ranking countries for their levels of investment in human capital.
• The study is based on analysis of data from government agencies, schools, and health care systems.

Rankings

• The nation is placed behind Sudan (ranked 157th) and ahead of Namibia (ranked 159th) in the list.
• The U.S. is ranked 27th, while China is at 44th and Pakistan at 164th.
• South Asian countries ranking below India in this report include Pakistan (164), Bangladesh (161) and Afghanistan (188).
• Countries in the region that have fared better than India in terms of human capital include Sri Lanka (102), Nepal (156), Bhutan (133) and Maldives (116).

Significance

• India is ranked at 158 out of 195 countries in 2016, an improvement from its position of 162 in 1990.
• The findings show the association between investments in education and health and improved human capital and GDP.

Concerns

• It also shows that India is falling behind in terms of health and education of its workforce, which could potentially have long-term negative effects on the economy.

• The Supreme Court has held that there was no bar on legislators doubling up as lawyers.

Petition

• The writ petition, filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, had argued that legislators donning the lawyers’ robes is a matter of serious concern to the judiciary.
• Upadhyay had argued that lawmakers drew their salaries and pensions from the public exchequer and hence could be classified as employees.

Judgement

• The Bench dismissed the arguments made in the petition that such legal practice by lawmakers was in violation of Rule 49 of the Bar Council of India Act, which forbade an advocate to be full-time salaried employee of any person, government, firm, corporation or concern, so long as he continues to practise.
• More importantly, the Supreme Court said there is no conflict of interest if the MPs are allowed to practise law in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts before the very judges they have power to impeach.
• The conferment of power on the legislators (MPs) to move an impeachment motion against the judge(s) of constitutional courts does not per se result in conflict of interest or a case of impacting constitutional morality or for that matter institutional integrity.
• The judgment said lawmakers could not be described as full-time salaried employees of the State. They were elected representatives and occupied a unique position in our democracy.

Significance

• The judgment by a Bench of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud comes as a great relief to many sitting MPs of both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, who are practising lawyers in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts.

• The Supreme Court has directed political parties to publish online the pending criminal cases of their candidates and urged Parliament to bring a strong law to cleanse political parties of leaders facing trial for serious crimes.

Observations

• Supreme Court reproduced the words of the freedom fighter and last Governor-General of India, C. Rajagopalachari, to show how Independent India’s founding fathers apprehended the slow slide of honesty and integrity in politics.
• Justice Misra reflected that Rajaji had written in his prison diary that “elections and their corruption, injustice and tyranny of wealth, and inefficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as soon as freedom is given to us.”
• Similarly, the judgment quotes Rajendra Prasad, who said, “A Constitution like a machine is a lifeless thing. It acquires life because of the men who control it and operate it, and India needs today nothing more than a set of honest men who will have the interest of the country before them.”
• Finally, it talks about the limitations of a Constitution through the words of B.R. Ambedkar. “A Constitution can provide only the organs of State, the factors on which the working of those organs of the State depend are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics. Who can say how the people of India and their parties will behave?”
• A politician may be disqualified from being a legislator, but he may continue to hold high positions within his party, thus also continuing to play an important public role which he has been deemed unfit for by the law.
• Convicted politicians may continue to influence law-making by controlling the party and fielding proxy candidates in legislature, the Chief Justice wrote in the judgment.
• Political parties act as a conduit through which interests and issues of the people are represented in Parliament. They play a central role in the interface between private citizens and public life, Chief Justice Misra noted.
• The verdict referred to past efforts to usher in transparency within political parties. It quotes the efforts to bring political parties under the Right to Information regime.
• The judgment refers to observations made by the CIC in Subhash Chandra Agarwal v. INC and others to describe the position of political parties in democracy.
• Criminalisation of politics and corruption, especially at the entry level of elections, has become a national and economic terror. It is a disease which is self-destructive and becoming immune to antibiotics.
• Chief Justice Misra said Parliament is obligated to act, as criminalisation in politics is a bitter manifest truth, which is a termite to the citadel of democracy.
• It noted with anguish that the Election Commission of India has its hands tied, helplessly watching as criminalisation of politics at the entry level is on the rise.
• It is one thing to take cover under the presumption of innocence of the accused but it is equally imperative that persons who enter public life and participate in law making should be above any kind of serious criminal allegation.
• Rapid criminalisation of politics cannot be arrested by merely disqualifying tainted legislators but should begin by cleansing political parties, a five-judge Constitution Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, observed.
• The court said Parliament should frame a law that makes it obligatory for political parties to remove leaders charged with heinous and grievous crimes, such as rape, murder and kidnapping, to name only a few, and refuse ticket to offenders in both parliamentary and Assembly polls.
• The Chief Justice said criminals in power are nothing but a liability to this country. Their presence in power strikes at the roots of democracy.
• The best available people, as is expected by the democratic system, should not have criminal antecedents and the voters have a right to know about their antecedents, assets and other aspects.
• Citizens in a democracy cannot be compelled to stand as silent, deaf and mute spectators to corruption.

Directions

• The Bench, also comprising Justices A.M. Khanwilkar, Rohinton Nariman, D.Y. Chandrachud and Indu Malhotra, however, made it clear that the court cannot legislate for Parliament by introducing disqualification to ban candidates facing trial for heinous crimes from contesting elections.
• The court directed that candidates divulge their criminal past to the Election Commission in block letters.
• Candidates should make a full disclosure of the criminal cases pending against them to the political parties under whose banner they intend to contest the polls.
• The parties, in turn, should put up the complete details of their candidates on their websites for public consumption.
• Further, both the candidate and the political party should declare the criminal antecedents of the former in widely-circulated newspapers.
• Finally, both the candidate and the political party should give wide publicity to the criminal record of the former by airing it on TV channels, not once, but thrice after the filing of nomination papers.

Elections Commission

• The Election Commission said it would examine the Supreme Court judgement and based on the findings, would issue necessary instructions for compliance by the parties concerned.

Significance

• The judgement, which compels political parties to come clean about the criminal elements within their apparatus, is unique as it opens a new vista that the process of breaking crime-politics nexus extends much beyond purity of legislators and encompasses purity of political parties as well.
• The directions to political parties to go public about the criminal cases against their candidates is a step to foster and nurture an informed citizenry. It is to protect the culture and purity in politics.
• It ensures that ordinary voters can have an informed choice about who he or she has to vote for in a country which already feels agonised when money and muscle power become the supreme power.
• Disclosure of antecedents makes the election a fair one and the exercise of the right of voting by the electorate also gets sanctified.

Background

Law Commission Reports

• The verdict by the five-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India referred to the Law Commission reports which pointed out that political parties have been chiefly responsible for criminalisation of politics.
• The Law Commission of India, in its 244th report, succinctly put it that instead of politicians having suspected links to criminal networks, as was the case earlier, it was persons with extensive criminal backgrounds who began entering politics.
• The Law Commission said that in the 10 years since 2004, 18% of the candidates contesting either national or State elections had criminal cases against them (11,063 out of 62,847).
• Though the Representation of the People Act disqualifies a sitting legislator or a candidate on certain grounds, there is nothing regulating the appointments to offices within the party.

1993 Mumbai bomb blasts

• The presence of criminalisation of politics was felt in its strongest form during the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, said in a 100-page judgment.
• The blasts, the court said, was the result of a collaboration of a diffused network of criminal gangs, police and customs officials and their political patrons and the tremors of the attacks shook the entire nation.

Vohra panel report

• The court referred to how the N.N. Vohra Committee, which was set up following a public outcry after the blasts, submitted its report in October 1993 after its study of the problem of criminalisation of politics and the nexus among criminals, politicians and bureaucrats in India.
• The committee had concluded that agencies, including the CBI, IB, RAW, had unanimously expressed their opinion that the criminal network was virtually running a parallel government.
• The committee report mentioned how money power was first acquired through real estate and then used for building up contacts with bureaucrats and politicians.
• The money power is used to develop a network of muscle power which is also used by the politicians during elections.

Other reports

• The judgment also refers to the fact that voices within Parliament also felt the need to end the bane of criminal politics.
• The 18th Report presented by a parliamentary committee to the Rajya Sabha in March 2007 expressed a strong feeling that politics should be cleansed of persons with established criminal background. It said criminalisation of politics is the bane of society and negation of democracy.
• The Goswami Committee on Electoral Reforms, as early as in 1990, highlighted the crippling effect of money and muscle power in elections.

C. GS3 Related

• With higher growth rates not having translated into more jobs and increases in productivity failing to spur a commensurate rise in wages, the government ought to formulate a National Employment Policy that takes these trends into account, the State of Working India 2018, a new study released by Azim Premji University’s Centre for Sustainable Employment, recommends.

The study

• The study uses government data to show that total employment actually shrank by seven million between 2013 and 2015, and cites private data to posit that an absolute decline has continued in the years since.

Growth vs jobs

• Confirming the spectre of jobless growth, the study contends that this divergence between growth and jobs had increased over time.
• If we look back at the 1970s and 80s, when GDP growth was around 3-4%, employment growth was about 2%.
• Currently, the ratio of GDP growth to employment growth is less than 0.1.
• That means that a 10% increase in GDP results in a less than 1% increase in employment.

Unemployment

• Unemployment has risen to more than 5% overall, and the study slices the data to show that in geographic terms, north Indian States are the most severely affected, while in demographic terms, young people with higher education levels suffer an unemployment rate as high as 16%.
• While wages are rising in almost all sectors, hidden within the positive data is the worrying fact that rural wage growth collapsed in 2014, and has not risen since.
• In the organised manufacturing sector, though the number of jobs has grown, there has also been an increase in the share of contract work, which offers lower wages and less job security, according to the study.

Productivity

• Also, of concern is the divergence of productivity and wages in the organised manufacturing sector.
• Labour productivity in the sector is six times higher than it was 30 years ago; however, managerial and supervisory salaries have only tripled in the same period, while production workers’ wages have grown a measly 1.5 times.

Gender gap

• Women’s participation in the paid workforce is still low, but the situation is unequal across States.
• In Uttar Pradesh, only 20 women are in paid employment for every 100 men, while that figure jumps to 50 in Tamil Nadu and 70 in Mizoram and Nagaland.

Caste gap

• With regard to earnings, the caste gap is actually larger than the gender gap.
• Dalits and Adivasis are over-represented in low-paying occupations, and severely under-represented in higher-paying ones, the study reveals.
• They earn only 55-56% of upper caste workers’ earnings, the data shows.

D. GS4 Related

E. Editorials

Context

• The people of Maldives voted for change and brought to power the Opposition candidate, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.
• They came out in huge numbers with the turnout being 89.2% and dealt a decisive blow to Mr. Yameen.
• The interim results of Sunday’s presidential election in the Maldives have given the joint opposition candidate, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih a victory in the direct contest with the incumbent, Abdulla Yameen.
• Maldivian voters have ushered in change, with 58% of the voters choosing Mr. Solih.

Background

Positive aspects of the Election with respect to India

• There was a turnout of 89.2% . President Yameen conceded defeat and vowed to ensure a smooth transition.
• New Delhi must stay clear of partisan positioning on the internal politics of the Maldives.
• The larger agenda must be to partner the Maldives in its stability and development rather than engaging in a tug of war with China

Mr. Yameen also fostered closer ties with China and Saudi Arabia, ignoring India and even pulling the Maldives out of the Commonwealth in 2016.

Tilt towards China

• The alacrity with which Mr. Yameen embraced China caught India off guard. During his China visit last year, the two nations signed 12 pacts, including a free trade agreement (FTA).
• Yameen not only fully endorsed China’s ambitious Maritime Silk Road initiative but also made the Maldives the second country in South Asia, after Pakistan, to enter into an FTA with China.
• The Yameen government pushed the FTA through the nation’s Parliament, the Majlis, stealthily, with the opposition not attending the parliamentary session.
• The opposition accused the Yameen government of allowing a Chinese ‘land grab’ of Maldivian islands, key infrastructure, and even essential utilities, which not only undermines the independence of the Maldives, but the security of the entire Indian Ocean region.
• The massive infrastructure growth funded by Chinese debt was a key part of Mr. Yameen’s election campaign but the massive debt trap made it a difficult proposition to be accepted.
• India’s Ministry of External Affairs said Sunday’s election marked not only the triumph of democratic forces in the Maldives but also reflects the firm commitment to the values of democracy and the rule of law.

Challenges ahead for the Maldives

• Democratic institutions have been weakened and a fragile democracy can also be susceptible to radical ideologies if not effectively governed.
• China’s economic presence in the Maldives is a reality that all governments will have to contend with.

Lessons for India

• Yameen’s ouster has certainly produced a favourable outcome for New Delhi and it should seize the moment to rebuild ties with Male.
• If there is one lesson out of the Maldives crisis, it is that political elites in India’s neighbours will come and go but if India can stand together with the aspirations of citizens of neighbouring countries, then the prospects of a long-term sustainable relationship will be much brighter.

1. SC forms prison reforms panel

3. NPAs with PSU banks declining: Jaitley

4. IL&FS, 40 group firms knock on NCLT doors seeking relief

5. Apex court wants government to fill SAT vacancies quickly

6. Option on capping exports to U.S. is still open, says Commerce Secretary

7. Hopes rise in India for an end to Maldives visa row

8. CJI Bench to hear plea against Gogoi elevation

9. SC to decide today on live telecast

10. Shortage of forms upsets NRC applicants

11. SC to deliver verdict on quota in promotion

12. SC verdict on Aadhaar today

13. EC should curb religious appeal in polls

14. Centre mulls allowing Naga leader’s return

15. Kerala seeks ₹5,000 cr. as special Central aid

16. Triple talaq ordinance challenged

1. ‘Parakram Parv’ to be celebrated

2. Haryana okays aid to acid attack victims

3. A virtual visit to Indian Museum

Question 1. Consider the following:

1. i) and ii) only
2. ii) and iii) only
3. i) and iii) only
4. All of the above

See

Question 2. Which of the statement/s below is/are incorrect?

1. Nonconvertible debentures are unsecured bonds that cannot be converted to company equity or stock.

2. Nonconvertible debentures usually have higher interest rates than convertible debentures.

Options:

1. i) only
2. ii) only
3. Both i) and ii)
4. None of the above

See

Question 3. The inter-state council, provided under article 263, for the coordination between 
states is chaired by:

1. The president

2. The vice-president

3. The prime minister

4. None of the above

See

Question 4. Before elections to the state legislature, regional commissioners are appointed, in 
consultation with the election commission, by:

1. the governor

2. the chief election commissioner

3. the president

4. the union cabinet

See

1. A multi-pronged strategy should be evolved, considering the magnitude of the atrocities and discrimination practices against Scheduled Castes. Discuss.

2. The socio-cultural awakening in Indian society in the 19th century was a result of interaction with the West. In light of the above statement, discuss the trends that emerged in Indian socio-cultural discourse.

Also, check previous Daily News Analysis

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