Internationalisation of Rupee:-
Internationalization of Rupee will facilitate greater degree of integration of Indian economy with rest of the world in terms of foreign trade and international capital flows. Key benefits of internationalization of Rupee include savings on foreign exchange transactions for Indian residents, reduced foreign exchange exposure for Indian corporate, reduction in dependence on foreign exchange reserves for balance of payment stability etc.
One of the important drivers for internationalization of a currency is the country’s share in global merchandise and commercial services trade. India’s percentage share in the global trade is still on the lower side and it limits the pricing ability of domestic businesses in Indian Rupee. Moreover, the share of Indian Rupee in the Global foreign exchange market turnover at present is also very low. Internationalization of Indian currency would also require full capital account convertibility.
As a policy, we have followed a gradual and cautious approach in opening up the capital account. The capital account is being progressively liberalized in accordance with the evolving macro-economic conditions and requirements of the Indian industries, individuals and financial sectors. Government has been taking measures to promote the internationalization of the Indian Rupee. Recently, a framework was put in place for issuance of Rupee denominated bonds overseas by Indian corporate.
Levy of Tax on Digital Services
A Committee constituted by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has recommended for the levy of tax on most digital services. The Committee constituted to examine taxation of E-Commerce, has recommended that Equalization Levy may be imposed at a rate of six to eight per cent, on any consideration of more than one lakh rupees received by a non-resident from a resident of India or from a permanent establishment in India for certain specified digital services, including online advertising, any services for online advertising and digital advertising space.
The Finance Bill, 2016 proposes equalization levy at the rate of 6% of the amount of consideration for specified services received or receivable by a non-resident, from a resident in India who carries out business or profession, or from a non-resident having a permanent establishment in India, where the aggregate amount of consideration received in a year exceeds one lakh rupees. The proposed levy will have no direct impact on consumers as it is applicable only to business to business transaction.
Rs.100-cr. fine proposed for wrong India map
The government has proposed a law where wrong depiction of the map of India could land the violators in jail with a maximum term of seven years and fine up to Rs. 100 crore.
Details:
- The new draft bill, ‘The Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016‘, basically aims to regularize critical information on Maps services that affect “the security, sovereignty and integrity” of the country.
- According to the draft, it will be mandatory to take permission from a government authority before acquiring, disseminating, publishing or distributing any geospatial information of India.
- The draft Bill will ensure that online platforms like Google will have to apply for a licence to run Google Maps or Google Earth in India.
- Also, no person shall depict, disseminate, publish or distribute any wrong or false topographic information of India including international boundaries through internet platforms or online services or in any electronic or physical form.
Analysis :-
The amount sounds alarming, but nevertheless , due to lack of this , there has been a violation of it for quite sometime.Pick a textbook of any other country and India’s map is distorted.Majority of applications too depict distorted map of India including google.To check this it is necessary.One might construe and argue that it may hamper artistic freedom or freedom of expression or take the garb of innocent mistake, but nevertheless, sovereignty of India is India’s business and anyone who wants to draw a map or depict India through map , has to abide by the Indian circulars for that matter.Sovereignty is gained after hundreds of years and loosing hundreds of lives – a fine of 100 crore seems low if one contemplates the cost we paid for it , And no one should take the sovereignty for granted , intentional or otherwise.Of course there is a debate on the amount in newspapers – becasue they have to be extra cautious now.If anyone wants to do business in India , it should do as per the rules of the land – the least of it is not to distort the map of the very country it wants to do business with.After all we don’t want another Radcliffe and with this fine other can stop being one.
Offshore Tax Evasion
(vii) Proactively furthering global efforts to combat tax evasion/black money, inter alia, by joining the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement in respect of Automatic Exchange of Information and having information sharing arrangement with USA under its Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
International cooperation in tackling offshore tax evasion and avoidance is achieved, inter alia, through ‘Exchange of Information’ mechanism provided under tax treaties entered into by India with various countries. Presently, India has tax treaties (bilateral or multilateral) with 137 countries/ offshore jurisdictions.
Tax treaties entered into by India with various countries as stated in para above include treaties with no-tax or low-tax offshore jurisdictions. India and United States of America have committed to tackling offshore tax evasion and avoidance through mutual collaboration, including joint tax audits and tax examination abroad. Besides, India has proactively contributed to furthering the global efforts to combat tax evasion/black money, inter alia, by joining the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement in respect of Common Reporting Standard (CRS) on Automatic Exchange of Information. Over 90 jurisdictions, including several no-tax or low-tax offshore jurisdictions, have expressed their commitment for putting in place the CRS.
Infant feeding
The 4th assessment of WBTi for India, carried out in 2015, mentions lack of monitoring and evaluation of the Infant & Young Child Feeding components in government health and nutrition programme.
Early breastfeeding is monitored through Mother and Child tracking systems and Health Management Information System.
Following efforts are being undertaken to monitor and successfully implement Infant & Young Child feeding practices, apart from mentioned above:
i. National Guidelines on Infant and Young Child Feeding, 2006, have been issued by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, to emphasise appropriate Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) practices. The Ministry of Health & FW has also released guidelines on Enhancing optimal Infant & young child feeding practices in 2013.
ii. Reproductive Maternal Newborn Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCH) counsellor is provided at high case load delivery points for counselling and support to lactating mothers on breastfeeding.
iii. Incentive is provided to ASHA under the Home Based New-born Care programme for promotion of IYCF through home visits, upto 42 days after birth. Extended visits for low birth weight babies and babies discharged from Special New-born Care Units (SNCU) upto two years of age are also carried out to ensure IYCF practices as part of package of services.
iv. Counselling and support for IYCF is provided at each contact point such as immunization, weighing etc.
v. IYCF training is provided to frontline workers and Staff Nurses for capacity building.
vi. Infant Milk Substitutes Feeding Bottles, and Infant Foods (Regulation of Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 1993, as amended 2003, has been enacted in the country to protect and promote breastfeeding and ensure proper use of infant foods.
vii. Recently, the National Steering Committee on Infant and Young Child Feeding and National Coordination Committee on Infant and Young Child Feeding have been notified to give policy guidelines, coordinate and integrate all activities relating to breastfeeding and IYCF and advise on measures to promote breastfeeding.
viii. The restructured ICDS Mission also aims to increase Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices in the country. Under the Care and Nutrition Counselling component, focus is to provide counselling to women on issues relating to infant feeding practices. Under the Mission, there is also provision of an additional Anganwadi Worker in 200 High Burden Districts of the country for imparting counseling and behavior change communication through community and home visits as well as demonstration of appropriate feeding practices.
ix. Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY), is a centrally sponsored Conditional Maternity Benefit scheme for pregnant and lactating women, aims to improve nutritional and health status of pregnant and lactating women across the country by partly compensating for their wage loss. The scheme encourages women to follow optimal Infant and Young Child Feeding practices including early and exclusive breast feeding for the first six months. The scheme is now operational in 53 selected districts across the country.
x. “World Breastfeeding Week” is celebrated every year from 1-7 August by organizing various activities such as State level Workshop/ Seminar, lecture-cum-practical demonstration, etc. for creating greater awareness. Awareness is also generated through audio-visual medium for promotion of optimal IYCF. IYCF promotion activities are also carried out under the Intensified Diarrhoea Control Fortnight (IDCF) implemented during last week of July and first month of August.
Few Facts :-
- In the last three years, only disease to be eradicated from India was Polio, in 2014. It was noted that there has been recurrence of existing diseases and emergence of new diseases like Drug Resistance Tuberculosis, Leprosy, Influenza A (H1N1), Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) and Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD).
- Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK) is an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Women & Child Development (MWCD). It is a society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and an apex micro-finance organization. The main objective of setting up of RMK was to provide micro-credit to poor women for various livelihood support and income generating activities at concessional terms in a client-friendly procedure to bring about their socio-economic development. In fact, the quasi-formal delivery mechanism, simple procedure, in-built flexibility and concessional rates of interest are some of the hallmarks of the credit packages of the RMK.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.