28 Jun 2018: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

A. GS1 Related

B. GS2 Related

• The government is set to replace the apex higher education regulator, University Grants Commission (UGC), with a higher education commission by repealing the UGC Act, 1951, for better administration of the HE sector.
• Centre has placed in the public domain a draft Bill for eliciting suggestions from educationists.

The Draft Bill

• The draft Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Act, 2018, takes away funding powers from the proposed regulator and gives it powers to ensure academic quality.
• The new regime separates the academic and funding aspects of higher education.
• While HECI will be in charge of ensuring academic quality in universities and colleges, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) – or another mechanism that will be put in place later – will be responsible for funding universities and colleges.
• Another key feature of the draft legislation is that the Regulator will have powers to enforce compliance to the academic quality standards and will have the power to order closure of sub-standard and bogus institutions.
• Moreover, non-compliance could result in fines or even a jail sentence (Till now, the UGC had no such powers. All it could do was to release a list of bogus institutions and not recognise their degrees).
• All institutions approved by the UGC will have to comply with the academic standards laid down by HECI within three years after the new law is passed by Parliament and notified by the union government. If an institution fails to do so, its approval will be revoked.

Composition

• The HECI will have a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and 12 other members to be appointed by the central government, including ex officio members, eminent academics and a doyen of industry.
• Of the 12 members, three members will represent union government namely: secretary of higher education, secretary of ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship and secretary, department of science and technology.
• The secretary of the commission will act as the member-secretary.

Functions

• HECI is tasked with the mandate of improving academic standards with specific focus on learning outcomes, evaluation of academic performance by institutions, mentoring of institutions, training of teachers, promote use of educational technology, etc.
• It will develop norms for setting standards for opening and closure of institutions, provide for greater flexibility and autonomy to institutions, lay standards for appointments to critical leadership positions at the institutional level irrespective of university started under any law.

Significance

• The transformation of the regulatory set-up is based on the principles of minimum government and maximum governance, separation of grant functions, end of inspection raj and focus on the academic quality.
• The draft Act is in accordance with commitment of the government for reforming the regulatory systems that provide more autonomy to higher education institutes to promote excellence and facilitate holistic growth of the education system.
• UGC staff would be retrained to adapt to the HECI regime, which would be fully digital and do away with file work.

Other plans to reform Higher Education sector

• Over the last four years, the HRD ministry has deliberated on several models like a single regulator for higher education by merging UGC, National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE); however, the plans were not taken forward.
• Once the HECI Bill is passed by Parliament, the technical education regulator AICTE and the teachers’ education regulator NCTE will also be reformed on similar lines.

C. GS3 Related

• A Japanese probe has reached an asteroid 300 million km away to collect information about the birth of the solar system and the origin of life after a more than three-year voyage through deep space.
• The Hayabusa2 probe successfully settled into an observation position 20 km above the Ryugu asteroid.
• The successful mission came just days before the UN’s International Asteroid Day on June 30, an event to raise awareness about the hazards of an asteroid impact and on how to counter such a threat.
• Scientists hope to glean clues about what gave rise to life on the earth from samples taken from Ryugu, which is thought to contain relatively large amounts of organic matter and water.
• Photos of Ryugu — which means “Dragon Palace” in Japanese, a castle at the bottom of the ocean in an ancient Japanese tale — show an asteroid shaped a bit like a spinning top with a rough surface.

D. GS4 Related

E. Editorials

Why in news?

• Updating of the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the Citizenship Amendment Bill could lead to a redrawing of the demographic map of South Asia, give new life to the discredited two-nation theory.

National Register of Citizens (NRC)

• It is a list of Indian citizens which is meant to decide who is a bona fide Indian citizen and those who fail to enlist in the register will be deemed illegal migrants. First list was made in 1951 across India according to the census of that year.
• It is for the first time that it is being updated and that too only in Assam. Now, it is not linked to census but one has to link oneself to a family member whose name had appeared either in the NRC of 1951, or to any of the state’s electoral rolls prepared till midnight of 24th march 1971.
• The year of 1971 is chosen as it was agreed in Assam accord 1985.If the applicant’s name is not on any of these lists, he can produce any of the 12 other documents dated up to March 24, 1971, like land or tenancy record, citizenship certificate or permanent residential certificate or passport or court records or refugee registration certificate.

Updating of NRC

• In the updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) — the Supreme Court has set June 30 as the deadline — as well as the citizenship amendment bill, there is an illusion of unilateralism that marks Indian policy.
• Citizens, non-citizens, minorities, The Indian approach to the minority question has not always been so insensitive to regional dynamics.
• The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, is intended to be supportive of religious minorities facing persecution in neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• But members of those communities living in the three countries do not seem to welcome the proposed amendment. Only those who have moved to India, and now live their lives as members of the majority community, do.

What are the issues?

• The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council for example, has expressed fears that the proposed amendment would make the communities it represents more insecure, not less.
• It would embolden political forces that would like to evict them from their lands and force them to leave Bangladesh and cross into India.
• Organisations like the Oikya Parishad have had to fight back rumours that the bill is the result of their reaching out to friendly political forces in India and to the Modi government.
• Developments in India have long affected the plight of minorities across the border.
• The suspicion of dual loyalty has been a persistent source of anxiety and fear for minority communities in the Subcontinent.
• There are many instances of communal conflict in India creating a backlash against minorities in Bangladesh.

India-Bangladesh

• In diplomatic meetings with Bangladesh, the politicians are reluctant to broach the subject of unauthorised migration. They pretend that India has no such problem with Bangladesh.
• One can hardly blame Bangladeshi officials for treating the NRC exercise as a matter of Indian domestic politics with no implications for their country. Even as the process nears completion, the official position of Bangladesh remains that there are no unauthorised Bangladeshi migrants in Assam.
• The NRC exercise and the citizenship amendment bill, in their eyes, are meant only to serve domestic constituencies; they do not belong to the high table of diplomacy and strategic affairs.
• Senior Bangladeshi officials claim that India has never raised the question of deporting illegal immigrants in discussions at any level with the Bangladeshi government. India has not challenged this position.
• This illusion of unilateralism is the main reason why people whose names will not appear in the final NRC in Assam are likely to face a gloomy future. They have long been subjects of suspicion of being false nationals.
• The NRC will now officially bestow on them the status of stateless citizens or of non-citizens with no rights. It is remarkable that the Supreme Court, which has mandated and monitored the updating of the NRC, has not been more proactive on this aspect of the question.

The Indian Approach

• The Indian approach to the minority question has not always been so insensitive to regional dynamics. The illusion of unilateralism is of relatively recent vintage.
• Indeed, the NRC exercise and the citizenship amendment bill — and the illusion of unilateralism driving them — would have been incomprehensible to political leaders of the Partition generation.
• It is worth recalling that the landmark Nehru-Liaquat Pact of April 1950 was a bilateral agreement between the two governments on the security and the well-being of minorities.
• Its main goal was to reassure “minority populations of their security within the country and to discourage them from migrating”.
• The two governments not only made a commitment to mutual accountability, the Pact even provided an institutional infrastructure — including provincial and district minority boards — to address the concerns of threatened minorities.
• To be sure, the relief that the Nehru-Liaquat Pact would afford proved to be temporary. Yet thanks to this Pact, large numbers of minority migrants who had crossed the Partition’s border because of communal violence felt encouraged to return to their homes on the other side. The bilateral premise of the process may be more relevant today than we recognise.

World of Diplomacy

• The bilateral way of approaching the question of minorities has a long history.
• Even the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 — conventionally thought of as the foundational event of the modern international state system — included safeguards for religious minorities.
• Concluding minority treaties was the instrument of choice for the protection of minorities during the early part of the 20th century. This was when the unraveling of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires had led to the emergence of a number of new minority situations in the reconfigured political space.
• In the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the great powers assigned the task of enforcing the minority protection clauses of those treaties to the League of Nations. By the time the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was signed, the United Nations had replaced the League of Nations.
• But the memory of the League of Nation’s way of dealing with the minority question influenced the thinking of the leaders of the Partition generation.
• The events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War discredited the League’s system of minority rights protection.
• The UN Charter, therefore, makes no reference to minority rights.

Conclusion

• The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, is intended to be supportive of religious minorities facing persecution in neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• Abandoning the illusion of unilateralism may be the first step in creating a durable regime of minority protection in the subcontinent.
• If India continues to hide behind the unilateral illusion, future historians will blame political leaders of the post-Partition generations for being unwitting accomplices to redrawing the demographic map of South Asia.

Category: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

1. Encouraging mediation to settle disputes

Question 1. Consider the following statements with respect to the Borneo island:

H. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

1. In the globalized world order, domestic economic policy changes reflect the global sentiments. Explain with recent examples.