05 Jul 2018: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

A. GS1 Related

B. GS2 Related

• A five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court unanimously held that Lieutenant-Governor is bound by the aid and advice of the Delhi government.

The judgement

• Lieutenant-Governor is bound by the aid and advice of the Delhi government, except for issues of public order, police and land.
• In case of difference of opinion, the L-G should straightaway refer the dispute to the President for a final decision without sitting over it or stultifying the governance in the National Capital.
• It concluded that the governance of Delhi cannot rest upon the whims of one functionary — the Lieutenant-Governor.
• Real authority to take decisions lie in the elected government. This is the meaning of ‘aid and advice’.
• There is no independent authority with the LG to take decisions except in matters under Article 239 (every Union territory shall be administered by the President) or those outside the purview of the NCT government.
• Every trivial difference of opinion between the LG and the NCT government cannot be referred to the President for a decision. The issues referred should be of substantive or national importance.
• Elected representatives would be reduced to a cipher if ‘any matter’ in Art 239AA (4) is interpreted as every matter of governance.
• A reference to the President was only an exception and not the general rule.
• In this context, even in case of differences of opinion, the LG and the NCT government should act with constitutional morality and trust for each other. LG cannot act without applying his mind and refer everything to the President.
• The NCT government need only to inform the LG of its well-deliberated decisions. The government need not obtain his concurrence in every issue of day-to-day governance.
• Freeze on government decisions by the LG negates the very concept of collective responsibility. The governance of the National Capital demands a meaningful orchestration of democracy and a collaborative federal architecture.
• Collective responsibility means the government speaking in one voice to the people whose aspirations the govt reflects.

Background

• The judgment came on appeals filed by the NCT government against an August 4, 2016, verdict of the Delhi High Court, which had declared that the L-G has complete control of all matters regarding the National Capital Territory of Delhi, and nothing will happen without the concurrence of the L-G.

The question of Statehood

• SC opined that a mixed balance has to be struck considering the special status of the Delhi and fundamental concerns as Delhi is the National Capital.
• Delhi as the national capital belongs to the nation as a whole.
• The Supreme Court followed the 1987 Balakrishnan report to conclude that Delhi is not a State.
• The report envisaged that Delhi could not have a situation in which the national capital had two governments run by different political parties. Such conflicts may, at times, prejudice the national interest.
• The report foresaw that if Delhi became a full-fledged State, there would be a constitutional division of sovereign, legislative and executive powers between the Union and the State of Delhi.
• Parliament would have limited legislative access and that too only in special and emergency situations.
• The Union would be unable to discharge its special responsibilities in relation to the national capital as well as to the nation itself.
• The report said the control of the Union over Delhi was vital in the national interest.

• The Union Cabinet has cleared a Bill that allows law enforcement agencies to collect DNA samples, create DNA profiles and special databanks for forensic-criminal investigations.

The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill

• The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2018, is the latest version of a Bill that originated as a DNA profiling Bill, framed by the Department of Biotechnology.
• The aim of that draft legislation was to set in place an institutional mechanism to collect and deploy DNA technologies to identify persons based on samples collected from crime scenes or for identifying missing persons.

Proposals

• The Bill seeks to set up two new institutions — a DNA Profiling Board and a DNA Data Bank.

DNA Profiling Board

• The Board, with 11 members, is supposed to be the regulatory authority that will grant accreditation to DNA laboratories and lay down guidelines, standards and procedures for their functioning.
• It will advise central and state governments on all issues relating to DNA laboratories.
• It will also be the authority to make recommendations on ethical and human rights, including privacy, issues related to DNA testing.

DNA Data Bank

• A national databank of DNA profiles is proposed to be set up, along with regional databanks in every state, or one for two or more states, as required.
• All regional DNA databanks will be mandated to share their information with the national databank.
• The databanks will maintain five sets of databases — for DNA samples picked up from crime scenes, for suspects or undertrials, and for offenders, missing persons, and unidentified dead bodies.

Labs

• Certain DNA Profiling Board-accredited labs would be authorised to carry out DNA testing and analysis.
• These are the only places to which DNA samples, picked up from a crime scene, for example, by police, can be referred for analysis.
• Data from the analyses will need to be shared with the nearest regional DNA databank which will store it and share it with the national databank.

Concerns

• The main issue is whether DNA technology is foolproof, and whether the proposed law adequately addresses the possibility of abuse.
• There are chances, however remote, that a wrong match is generated. If the DNA result is taken as the ultimate evidence, no recourse will be available to an individual who has been wrongly matched.
• More frequently asserted are the privacy-related objections.
• Questions such as whose DNA can be collected and under what circumstances, whether the consent of the individual is required, who can access the database, to what uses the DNA information can be put apart from identifying an individual, and the circumstances under which a record can be deleted, have been raised repeatedly.
• It has been pointed out that information like ancestry or susceptibility to a disease, or other genetic traits, is liable to be misused.
• It has also been argued that DNA tests have not led to an improvement in conviction rates in countries where it is already being followed.

• The Election Commission has launched voter identity cards with Braille label (characters are represented by patterns of raised dots that are felt with the fingertips) to ensure greater participation of persons with visual impairment in the electoral process.

Accessible Elections

• The Commission also unveiled a strategic framework on “Accessible Elections” on conclusion of a two-day national level consultation with representatives of the Central government, political parties, NGOs and experts on disabilities.
• A series of measures for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) in the electoral process have been announced, which includes printing of photo-identity cards with Braille, accessible communication awareness materials, a mobile phone application to motivate and educate the voters and appointment of Disability Coordinates at the Assembly constituency, district and State level.
• The EC plans to impart cascaded training on accessibility to poll officials, set up auxiliary polling stations, provide accessible photo voter slips, sign-language window in all the audio visual training and advertisement content material for the convenience of deaf persons and free transport facility to PwDs and their Assistants.
• A new Accessible Division in the India International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Management will also be set up.

C. GS3 Related

• The Union Cabinet approved accession to the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty which extends coverage of copyright to the Internet and digital environment.
• Both the WIPO treaties came into force in 2002 and have 96 contracting partners each.

Significance

• India already extends protection to foreign works through the International Copyright order and the WIPO treaties will enable Indian right holders to get reciprocal protection abroad.
• The approval of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion proposal will enable creative right-holders to enjoy the fruits of their labour, through international copyright system that can be used to secure a return on the investment made in producing and distributing creative works.
• These treaties would enable Indian right holders to get reciprocal protection abroad.

WIPO

• WIPO is the global forum for intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation.
• It is a self-funding agency of the United Nations, with 191 member states.
• Its mission is to lead the development of a balanced and effective international intellectual property (IP) system that enables innovation and creativity for the benefit of all.
• Its mandate, governing bodies and procedures are set out in the WIPO Convention, which established WIPO in 1967.
• It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT)

• It is a special agreement under the Berne Convention which deals with the protection of works and the rights of their authors in the digital environment.
• In addition to the rights recognized by the Berne Convention, they are granted certain economic rights.
• The Treaty also deals with two subject matters to be protected by copyright:
  1. computer programs, whatever the mode or form of their expression; and
  2. compilations of data or other material (databases).

The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT)

• The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) deals with the rights of two kinds of beneficiaries, particularly in the digital environment:
  1. performers (actors, singers, musicians, etc.); and
  2. producers of phonograms (persons or legal entities that take the initiative and have the responsibility for the fixation of sounds).

• Oil prices, pace of banks’ balance sheet clean-up and investment remain the key credit risks in India, according to an investor survey by Moody’s Investors Service.
• India would not meet the central government’s fiscal deficit target of 3.3% of GDP for the financial year ending in March 2019, according to the release.
• The government’s bank recapitalisation package was mostly insufficient to resolve solvency challenges.
• Although the recapitalisation package will be sufficient to meet the minimum regulatory capital needs, it will be insufficient to support credit growth.
• Banks have not been able to raise new capital from the equity markets as planned under the government’s recapitalisation measures.

• Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has scheduled a ‘pad abort test’ of an experimental space crew capsule as an important cog of its plan to send Indians to space one day.
• The launch pad abort test, or PAT, involves aborting a space capsule at launch to save the inmates.

Significance

• The priority of all space agencies in a human space mission is the safe return of its astronauts.
• With the pad abort test, ISRO aims to prove its technology that will safely parachute future astronauts down in case their space vehicle develops snags while taking off.
• ISRO describes PAT as the first milestone in qualifying its crew escape system in an emergency.
• The test is also one of the many main and supporting technologies that the space agency is developing ahead of its ambitious Human Space Flight Programme (HSP).

Human Space Flight Programme (HSP)

• The Indian human Spaceflight programme is a proposal by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to develop and launch a two-person crew to low Earth orbit.
• There is no time-frame set for this, as manned space programme is not an approved programme by the Government of India.
• India and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding on joint activities in the field of human spaceflight programme in 2008.

D. GS4 Related

E. Editorials

Focus of the article: Mumbai’s capacity to deal with nature’s challenges is falling with every passing year

Introduction

• Mumbai is an efficient city in some ways, but this reputation depends on fair weather. It turns into a soggy mess with the arrival of a monsoon.
• This year the season has begun with the spectacular collapse of a pedestrian bridge on a crucial railway line in Andheri, causing injuries and overall urban paralysis.
• Not even a year has passed since the ghastly stampede on a foot overbridge at Elphinstone Road station, that took over 20 lives.

Thinking lines

• The recurrent disasters involving infrastructure are proof of the indifference among policymakers to the city’s needs, even as they speak of a ‘global standard’ of living.
• The city continues to attract a large number of people looking for opportunity
• Urban managers, led by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, have not invested enough in new infrastructure and have done a shoddy job of maintaining the old.
• If Maharashtra has to achieve higher rates of economic growth and touch an ambitious 10%, as Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis desires, Mumbai’s infrastructure planning should be in the hands of an empowered custodian who can secure the cooperation of all urban agencies.
• A return to nature is needed to relieve Mumbai of its flooding woes. According to one estimate, the city’s Mithi river, blocked by debris and garbage, has lost about 60% of its catchment to development.

Integrated Flood Management (IFM)

IFM – to maximise the efficient use of the flood plains and minimise loss of property and life; to enhance the benefits of floods and minimise their destruction

IFM measures can be grouped into 4 classes

• Land-use measures; – aimed at “keeping people away from floods”.
• Structural measures;- aimed at “keeping flood waters away from the people”.
• Flood preparedness measures; aimed at “getting people ready for floods”.
• Flood emergency measures; – aimed at “helping affected people cope with floods”.

Strategies to prevent floods in these two metros

• Introduce better flood warning systems
• Modify homes and businesses to help them withstand floods
• Construct buildings above flood levels
• Protect wetlands and introduce plant trees strategically
• Restore rivers to their natural courses
• Introduce water storage areas, Improve soil conditions, Put up more flood barriers must also be implemented.
• Municipal bodies of our cities have to come out with consistent and coherent urban policy.

 Way forward

• A cleaner river connected to functional drainage can aid in the speedy removal of flood waters, and improve the environment.
• In a 2015 study, the World Bank found that half of the poor did not consider moving out of flood-prone areas, because of the uncertainty of living in a new place with severe social disruptions and reduced access to education and health facilities.
• What this underscores is the need to make the best use of all available space, densify development where feasible, and improve conditions in situ.
• It is welcome that a joint safety audit with the IIT will be conducted on public infrastructure, in the wake of the bridge collapse. But such inspections must be regularly carried out and quick remedial steps taken.

Issue

• The latest employment estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) are factually incorrect.
• They are off the mark, and confined to the economy’s organised or formal sector, accounting at best for 15% of the workforce.
• According to CSO release titled – Payroll Reporting in India: An Employment Perspective – April 2018”, the economy added 4.1 million new jobs in the formal sector.
• Apparently, these estimates supplement the data on organised sector employment that are reported regularly in the Economic Survey since the early 1960s, compiled by the Directorate General of Employment, Ministry of Labour and Employment.
• The CSO release defines jobs as ones that provide at least one government financed (or mandated) social security benefit such as Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF), National Pension Scheme, or Employees’ State Insurance Scheme.
• NITI Aayog and official economists have also put out similar estimates since early this year, inviting widespread scepticism among knowledgeable people.
• As the formal sector accounts for just about 8-15% of India’s workforce (depending on the definitions used), the official estimates are completely silent about the majority of the workforce engaged in the informal sector.

Lacunae

• The estimates are based on administrative records of implementing the social security schemes, whose completeness, consistency and accuracy are unknown.
• Since a formal (organised) sector worker, in principle, can legitimately access (or subscribe to) more than one social security scheme, double counting is a distinct possibility.
• The release does not explain how the problem is addressed in the database.
• Therefore, rightly, experts have demanded the release of the administrative data for independent verification.
• Moreover, the official data suffer from a conceptual problem.
• The social security databases, by design, are lists of workers enrolled in the schemes, as an entitlement or as voluntary subscribers — not employment registers.
• These schemes are applicable to establishments above a certain size (of employment), and to certain kinds of enterprises.
• For instance, in the factory sector, those employing 20 or more workers are mandated to provide EPF to all the workers (with a matching contribution by the employer).
• So, if in a factory, employment goes up from 19 to 20 workers, it comes under the purview of the EPF, to be provided to all the 20 workers.
• Thus, the EPF enrolment increases by 20 workers, but the additional job created is just for one worker.
• Historically, evasion of EPF by employers is widespread, given poor enforcement of labour laws.
• The present government, in its efforts to formalise employment, has incentivised employers to enrol workers under EPF by offering to make employers’ contribution to the social security scheme for three years, thus boosting enrolment.
• Maharashtra, for instance, as an additional labour welfare measure, has widened the ambit of EPF to include all power-loom workers (irrespective of the size of the enterprise), boosting formal sector employment.
• Such measures, however temporary, may enlarge the formal sector size but cannot be counted as new jobs created. Hence, the official measure is flawed.

A comparison

• The formal sector stands at the apex of India’s labour market pyramid, agriculture being at the bottom, employing 50% of the workforce.
• The remaining workers are in the non-farm informal sector, spread across rural and urban areas.
• In fact, it is this sector that has grown in recent decades at the expense of the other two sectors mentioned above.
• Moreover, nearly half of the informal labour workers are self-employed in household (or own account) enterprises, often engaging unpaid family labour.
• Varying degrees of under-employment or disguised unemployment are the defining feature of informal labour markets.

Background

• Since 1972-73, the five-yearly Employment-Unemployment Surveys (EUS) conducted by the National Sample Survey (NSS) have been the mainstay for analysing labour market trends.
• Though infrequent, the database has served a valuable purpose of capturing the complexities of the labour market; access to household-level data lately has spawned rich and granular analyses of the informal economy.
• As the last round of the EUS was in held in 2011-12, there is no reliable way of updating employment trends.
• The EUS has been replaced with an annual Period Labour Force Survey, and a time use survey.
• However, it will be a while before these data series come up with stable and credible estimates.
• The Labour Bureau under the Ministry of Labour and Employment has been carrying out household surveys somewhat similar to the EUS since 2010-11.
• They show a decline in worker-population ratio between 2013-14 and 2015-16, suggesting a deteriorating employment situation recently (the estimates for 2016-17 are apparently withheld).

Challenges

• A few jobs have been created even when the economy is said to growing at over 7%.
• GDP growth figures are probably overestimated on account of the mis-measurement of GDP in the new National Accounts Statistics (NAS) series.
• The economy is probably growing much slower.
• The faulty barometer of economic well-being seems to be misleading the nation.
• For instance, in manufacturing, in the last few years, the growth rates reported by the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), and the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) are consistently lower than those reported by GDP in manufacturing, suggesting an overestimation of manufacturing value added in the NAS.
• Demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) seem to have dented informal sector production and employment, which official data sources seem in no position to capture.
• The CSO’s press release has claimed that 4.1 million new jobs were created in the economy’s formal sector during eight months since last September.
• It is based on enrolment of additional workers under state-provided (or mandated) social security schemes. The claim seems questionable on empirical and conceptual considerations. Empirically, there is a possibility of double counting of workers. Consistency and accuracy of the administrative datasets have not been publicly established. Conceptually, the data are about enrolment in the social schemes, not about new jobs generated. The recent rise in the enrolment is probably on account of an expanded coverage of the social security measures by incentives to employers’, and the mandated expansion of the coverage in States like Maharashtra.

Way forward

• The official claim is about the formal or organised sector, which at best counts for 15% of India’s labour force.
• In the absence of a nation-wide, time-tested EUS data for recent years, there is no way of knowing what is happening in agriculture and the non-farm informal sector, accounting for 85% of the workforce.
• The paradox or mystery of poor employment growth and high GDP growth disappears if one concedes that the recent output growth rates are probably overestimated after the latest revision of the National Accounts Statistics a few years ago, on account of the questionable methodologies and databases used.

2. Fuel: getting the mix right

Question 1. Consider the following statements:

Question 2. Which of the following statements with respect to Minimum Support Price (MSP)
is incorrect?

Question 3. Consider the following statements regarding Right to Equality:

Question 4. Indian Constitution talks about Right to Equality in employment. According to it:

Also, check previous Daily News Analysis