18 Apr 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

A. GS 1 Related
B. GS 2 Related
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
1. ‘Food supply chain disruption a concern’
C. GS 3 Related
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
1. New indigenous kit may soon accelerate testing
ECONOMY
1. RBI to pump in 1 lakh crore
2. NBFCs get 50,000-cr. liquidity booster
D. D. GS 4 Related
E. Editorials
GEOGRAPHY
1. A season of change
POLITY AND GOVERNANCE
1. A virus, social democracy, and dividends for Kerala
2. Institutional fixes and the need for ethical politics
F. Tidbits
1. Minor forest produce in exemption list
2. Tribals using indigenous practices to sustain during lockdown
3. Post-lockdown, India’s infection growth rate has slowed down
G. Prelims Facts
1. India says IMF liquidity boost may be costly
H. UPSC Prelims Practice Questions
I. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

E. Editorials

Category: GEOGRAPHY

1. A season of change

Context:

In the season of the abnormal, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has announced that the monsoon this year would likely be normal. 

Forecast System:

• The agency follows a two-stage forecast system:
  • Indicating in April whether there are chances of drought or any other anomaly.
  • Then a second update, in late June, with a more granular look at how the monsoon will likely distribute over the country and whether danger signs are imminent. 
• ‘Normal’ means India will get 100% of its long period average, with a potential 5% error margin. 

Issues:

• The IMD’s April forecast is not much to go by especially if the agency declares it ‘normal’ as rarely do weather models catch signs of an impending shortfall or a large excess in April. 
• Also being a part of a hierarchical government set-up, the agency defaults to being conservative. 
  • For example: In April last year, it said the monsoon would be near normal, an arbitrary category. Private forecasters expected a shortfall, predicated on the development of a future El Niño. The IMD did account for this but said it was unlikely El Niño would strengthen enough to dampen the monsoon. It however kept its estimate on the lower side of ‘normal.’ In the end, India received excess rains, the highest in a quarter century.
• The April forecast is a vestige of the agency’s reliance on the ‘statistical forecast system’ where values of selected meteorological parameters are recorded until March 31 and permutations of these are computed and compared to the IMD’s archive of weather data.
• It is also reflective of an era when landline telephones were the state-of-the-art in personal communication. 

Way forward:

• Along with connectedness, weather forecasting has metamorphosed. 
• Climate, as well as technological change, allows new weather variables — such as surface temperatures from as remote as the southern Indian Ocean and regular updates from the Pacific Ocean — to be mapped. 
• Powerful computers mathematically simulate the weather based on these variables and extrapolate onto desired time frames. IMD can incorporate these learning.
• Using these dynamical models is a change the IMD has incorporated and experimented with for years. 
• It made two key changes this year: 
  • Reducing the definition of ‘normal’ rainfall by 1 cm, to 88 cm
  • Officially updating monsoon onset and arrival dates for many States.
• This was long due and constituted acknowledgement of the accumulated impact that global warming has been having on monsoon patterns, particularly for cities and States. 
  • The monsoon was arriving later in many places, had long weak spells, and lingered longer. 

Conclusion:

These points have already heralded thinking, in the agency, on whether India should move to a new monsoon-accounting calendar instead of the century-long tradition of June-September. This would signal a truly momentous break from the past. It is time for the IMD to incorporate the lessons from the new normals.

Category: POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

1. A virus, social democracy, and dividends for Kerala

Context:

• A range of responses in battling the COVID-19 pandemic,  being seen at the national and subnational levels reveal not only existing inequalities but also the political and institutional capacity of governments to respond. 
• In case of India, the Central government ordered a lockdown but it is States that are actually implementing measures, both in containing the spread and addressing the welfare consequences of the lockdown.
• A government’s capacity to respond to a cascading crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic relies on a very fragile chain of mobilising financial and societal resources, getting state actors to fulfil directives, coordinating across multiple authorities and jurisdictions and maybe, most importantly, getting citizens to comply.
• An effective response begins with programmatic decision-making.
• The editorial talks about Kerala’s response in battling the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

Details:

• Kerala was primed to be a hotspot owing to its:
  • Population density.
  • Deep connections to the global economy.
  • High international mobility of its citizens.
• It was the first state with a recorded case of coronavirus.
• Though Kerala once led the country in active cases, it now ranks 10th of all States and the total number of active cases has been declining and is below the number of recovered cases. 
  • It is also worth noting that it is the state that has done the most aggressive testing in India.

Flattening the curve – Why does Kerala stand out in India and internationally?

• Kerala has not only flattened the curve but also has rolled out a comprehensive ₹20,000 crore economic package before the Centre even declared the lockdown. 
• The current crisis underscores the comparative advantages of social democracy.
  • Taming a pandemic and rapidly building out a massive and tailored safety net is fundamentally about the relation of the state to its citizens. 
  • From its first Assembly election in 1957, through alternating coalitions of Communist and Congress-led governments, iterated cycles of social mobilisation and state responses have forged what is in effect a robust social democracy. 
  • Social democracies are built on an encompassing social pact with a political commitment to providing basic welfare and broad-based opportunity to all citizens. 
• In Kerala, various movements not only nurtured a strong sense of social citizenship but also drove reforms that have incrementally strengthened the legal and institutional capacity for public action. 
  • The social pact itself emerged from recurrent episodes of popular mobilisation — from the temple entry movement of the 1930s, to the peasant and workers’ movements in the 1950s and 1960s, a mass literacy movement in the 1980s, the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP)-led movement for people’s decentralised planning in the 1990s, and, most recently, various gender and environmental movements. 
• The emphasis on rights-based welfare has been driven by and in turn has reinforced a vibrant, organised civil society which demands continuous accountability from front-line state actors. 
• Constant demand-side pressure of a highly mobilised civil society and a competitive party system has pressured all governments in Kerala, regardless of the party in power, to deliver public services and to constantly expand the social safety net, in particular a public health system that is the best in India. 
• The pressure has also fuelled Kerala’s push over the last two decades to empower local government. 
  • Nowhere in India are local governments as resourced and as capable as in Kerala. 
• Finally, all of this ties into the greatest asset of any deep democracy, that is the generalised trust that comes from a State that has a wide and deep institutional surface area, and that on balance treats people not as subjects or clients, but as rights-bearing citizens.

So how has this built-up capacity translated into both flattening the curve and putting broad and effective welfare measures in place? 

• From the moment of the first reported case in Kerala, Chief Minister convened a State response team that coordinated 18 different functional teams, held daily press conferences and communicated constantly with the public. Kerala’s social compact demanded no less. 
• Not only did the CM directly appeal to Malayalees’ sense of citizenship by declaring that the response was less an enforcement issue than about people’s participation, but also pointedly reminded the public that the virus does not discriminate, destigmatising the pandemic.
• The government was able to leverage a broad and dense health-care system that despite the recent growth of private health services, has maintained a robust public presence. 
  • Kerala’s public health-care workers are also of course highly unionised and organised.
  • From the outset the government lay emphasis on protecting the health of first responders.
• The government activated an already highly mobilised civil society. As the cases multiplied, the government called on two lakh volunteers to go door to door, identifying those at risk and those in need. 
  • A State embedded in civil society — the women’s empowerment Kudumbasree movement being a case in point — was in a good position to co-produce effective interventions, from organising contact tracing to delivering three lakh meals a day through Kudumbasree community kitchens.
• In the given situation, the key has been the capacity of state actors and civil society partners to coordinate their efforts at the level of panchayats, districts and municipalities.
• A recent survey in 10 Indian cities by Bengaluru non-governmental organisation Janaagraha, shows that Malayalees have extremely high levels of trust in both their institutions and locally elected local representatives. 
• This, more than anything, points to the robust nature of Kerala’s social compact.

Conclusion:

• This brutal, unpredictable, external shock is laying bare the most essential as well as the most complicated challenges of democratic citizenship. In moments like these, the authoritarian temptation for some is irresistible.
• At a time when questions were being raised about India’s democracy, it is important to be reminded that Kerala has managed the crisis with the most resolve, the most compassion and the best results of any large State in India. 
• The state has done it precisely, by building on legacies of egalitarianism, social rights and public trust.

2. Institutional fixes and the need for ethical politics

Context:

The Editorial talks about how States have managed to bypass the anti-defection law and toppling elected governments – pointing to the political crisis in Madhya Pradesh just as India was about to go for a lockdown in its efforts to contain the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

New method of bypassing the anti-defection law:

The Karnataka example:

• The Congress-JD(S) government was brought down in 2019, with 17 MLAs of the ruling coalition resigning and joining the BJP. 
• Under this novel method, a set of legislators of the party in power are made to resign from the Assembly to reduce the total strength of the House enough for the other party to cross the halfway mark to form government. 
• This method of mass defection circumvents the provisions of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution (better known as the anti-defection law) that prescribes the grounds for disqualification of legislators: 
  • Voluntarily giving up party membership 
  • Voting or abstaining to vote against party directions etc. 

• Though resignation is not mentioned as a ground for disqualification, the Speaker in Karnataka disqualified them for the rest of the Assembly’s term, thereby barring them from contesting the by-polls. 
• While the Supreme Court upheld the disqualification, it stuck down the bar from contesting by-polls. 
• In the ensuing by-elections, the members who resigned were then fielded as BJP candidates (most of whom have been re-elected in the case of Karnataka).

In Madhya Pradesh, since the Speaker has accepted the resignation of the MLAs, the defectors can in any case contest the by-polls.

Know more about the Anti-defection Law.

Concerns:

• The recurrence of this model of defection in Madhya Pradesh as well, signals the exploitation of the inherent weaknesses of the anti-defection law. 
• While solo legislators jumping ship might have reduced now, “horse-trading” persists.
•  This threatens the underpinnings of India’s electoral democracy since such surreptitious capture of power essentially betrays the people’s mandate in a general election.
•  Further, as the by-polls are held after the alternate political formation has assumed office, the turncoats now have an upper-hand in the election as members of the ruling dispensation.
• The constitutionality of the Tenth Schedule was challenged for violating the Basic Structure of Constitution with regard to parliamentary democracy and free speech.
  • But the Supreme Court in Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu (1992) in a 3-2 verdict upheld the law while reserving the right of judicial review of the Speaker’s decision.

Way forward:

• In this context, it is important to examine whether the anti-defection law fulfils any purpose. 
  • This law raises fundamental concerns regarding the role of a legislator in a parliamentary democracy. 
  • It denies the legislator the right to take a principled position on a policy matter and reduces her to an involuntary supporter of the whims of party bosses. 
• The anti-defection law, on the one hand, severely restricts the freedom of a legislator and makes her a slave of party whips. 
• On the other hand, it has not been able to meet its primary objective of preventing horse-trading and continues to be circumvented to bring down elected governments. 
• This calls for reforms that address concerns at both ends of the spectrum.
• For addressing the first issue, as the Dinesh Goswami Committee also suggested, the scope of the binding whip should be restricted to a vote of confidence.
• For addressing the second issue, it is best to institutionalise the Karnataka Speaker’s decision to bar the defected members from contesting in the ensuing by-poll, if not for a longer period, and thereby disincentivise MLAs from jumping ship.
• These reforms would require a constitutional amendment to the Tenth Schedule, an uphill task under the current circumstances. 
• Beyond institutional fixes, there is a need for popular articulation of an ethical politics that causes the public to shun such political manoeuvres.

F. Tidbits

1. Minor forest produce in exemption list

• The new Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) guidelines regarding the lockdown relaxation has added the collection, harvest and process of minor forest produce to the list of activities that will be permitted.
• Minor forest produce include non-timber items such as bamboo, roots, seeds, fruits, flowers and plants.
  • A number of people from the Scheduled Tribes and other forest dwelling communities depend on the collection and sale of such items for their livelihood.

2. Tribals using indigenous practices to sustain during lockdown

• Faced with the challenge of sustaining themselves during the national lockdown, tribal communities in southern Rajasthan are utilizing their indigenous practices of food and agricultural management.
• With an enormous storehouse of knowledge on food gathering and cultivation, the tribal communities have embraced a pragmatic food management.
  • The kitchen gardens developed in the tribal households during the last few years were helping in regular supply of vegetables and spices to these labourers.
• Tribals have adopted a number of micronutrient-rich plant foods as their daily dietary intake.
  • The region’s commonly consumed foodgrains and vegetables, such as rajan, dhimda, kodra, bati, baota, kang, cheena, hama, hamli and gujro, are rich in iron and dietary fibre content. The consumption of these grains and maintenance of diverse food habits based on the locally available oilseeds, pulses, fruits and spices have helped the tribal people develop immunity against diseases.
• Though the tribals generally do not have access to market-based products of oil, spices and sugar, their food security has been ensured through their own resource management in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, pasture and medicinal products.

3. Post-lockdown, India’s infection growth rate has slowed down

• The Union Health Ministry has stated that the doubling rate of positive COVID-19 cases was now down to 6.2 days, compared to 3 before the nationwide lockdown that began on March 25, 2020.
• India has registered an average growth factor of 1.2 % since April 1, compared to 2.1 in the two weeks preceding that [March 15 to March 31] which marks a 40% decline in infection rates.

G. Prelims Facts

1. India says IMF liquidity boost may be costly

• The Indian Finance Minister has stated that India would not support a general allocation of new Special Drawing Rights (SDR) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
  • This move would provide all 189 members of IMF with new foreign exchange reserves with no conditions.
• There are concerns that this major liquidity injection might not be effective in easing COVID-19-driven financial pressures and would rather produce potential side-effects if countries used the funds for “extraneous” purposes.

H. UPSC Prelims Practice Questions

Q1. Special Drawing Rights (SDR) is associated with which of the following?

1. World Bank
2. International Monetary Fund
3. G-20
4. Asia development Bank

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Q2. Which of the following statement/s is/are correct?

1. The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution is in charge of the central sector scheme for marketing of Minor forest produce through the Minimum Support Price mechanism.
2. The Minimum Support Price for Minor forest produce is decided by the Commission for agricultural costs and prices.

Options:

1. 1 only
2. 2 only
3. Both 1 and 2
4. Neither 1 nor 2

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Q3. Which of the following statement/s is/are correct?

1. The International Development Association (IDA) is an international financial institution which offers concessional loans and grants to the world’s poorest developing countries.
2. The International Development Association is part of the World Bank.
3. India is not eligible for IDA support.

Options: 

1. 1 and 2 only
2. 2 and 3 only
3. 1,2 and 3
4. 1 only

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Q4. Which of the following statement/s is/are correct?

1. Ways and Means Advances option can be exercised only by the central government.
2. The interest rate for Ways and Means advances is aligned with the reverse repo rate.

Options:

1. 1 only
2. 2 only
3. Both 1 and 2
4. Neither 1 nor 2

See

I. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

1. Discuss the significance of the activities of the Indian Meteorological Department and suggest the necessary changes for the organisation to remain relevant in the current times. (15 Marks, 250 Words)
2. With legislators circumventing the provisions of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution with novel methods, is it time to overhaul the Anti-defection Law? Comment. (15 Marks, 250 Words).