UPSC/STATE PSC
Curated by Experts For Civil Service Aspirants
The Hindu & Indian Express
News 1: ‘India may need up to 28 GW in new coal-fired plants by 2032’
Background:
- India may need up to 28 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants by 2032 to meet power demand that is expected to more than double from the current 404.1 GW, a government advisory body said, signaling more increases in coal use by the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter.
India’s energy demand:
- India’s annual electricity demand could grow by an average of 7.2% over the five years to March 2027, almost double the rate of increase in the fiscal years from 2017 to 2022, the plan said.
- The share of coal in India’s total power generation, however, is likely to fall below 60% by 2027, with India targeting the addition of 500 GW in non-fossil based installed capacity by 2030, according to the plan.
- Although India is a major greenhouse gas producer, its per capita power demand and emissions are much lower than most developed countries.
- It also accounts for a huge share of renewables along with China.
Central Electricity Authority
- Ministry: Ministry of Power
- Type: Statutory
- Vision: To ensure reliable 24×7 power supply of adequate quality to all consumers in the country.
- Function: The functions and duties of CEA are delineated under Section 73 of the Electricity Act, 2003.
- CEA has to discharge various other functions as well:
- Section 3 (National Electricity Policy & Plan)
- Section 8 (Hydro Electric Generation)
- Section 34 (Grid Standards)
- Section 53 (Provision relating to Safety and Electric Supply)
- Section 55 (Use of Meters)
- Section 177 (Making of Regulations) of the Electricity Act, 2003.
News 3: Naga delegation meets Shah, pushes for revival of talks
Background:
- A Naga delegation led by Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio met Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday to push for revival of talks between the Centre’s envoy and Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM).
Demands by NSCN-IM:
- Inclusion of Yehzabo (Naga constitution) into the Indian constitution
- Integration of Naga-dominated areas of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur into the existing State of Nagaland
- Creation of regional autonomous territory council for Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.
Peace talks:
- The NSCN-IM, a key player in Naga peace talks, has been demanding a separate Constitution and a flag for the Nagas and creation of ‘Greater Nagaland’ or ‘Nagalim’ by integrating Naga-dominated areas in neighbouring Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh to unite 1.2 million Nagas.
News 4: E-FAST- India’s first National Electric Freight Platform Launched by NITI Aayog, WRI
Background:
- NITI Aayog and World Resources Institute (WRI), launched India’s first National Electric Freight Platform- E-FAST India (Electric Freight Accelerator for Sustainable Transport-India).
About E-FAST:
- The platform aims to raise awareness of freight electrification bolstered by an on-ground demonstration pilot and evidence based research.
- It will support scalable pilots and inform policies aimed at accelerating freight electrification in India.
NITI Aayog:
- Established: 2015
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- NITI Aayog replaced erstwhile Planning commission in 2015 and serves as the apex public policy think tank of the Government of India, and the nodal agency tasked with catalyzing economic development, and fostering cooperative federalism through the involvement of State Governments of India in the economic policy-making process using a bottom-up approach.
- Composition:
- Chairperson: Prime Minister
- Vice-Chairperson: To be appointed by Prime-Minister
- Chief Executive Officer: Appointed by Prime minister for a fixed tenure, in rank of Secretary to Government of India.
- Governing Council: Chief Ministers of all states and Lt. Governors of Union Territories.
- Regional Council: To address specific regional issues, Comprising Chief Ministers and Lt. Governors Chaired by Prime Minister or his nominee.
- Ad hoc Membership: 2 members in ex-officio capacity from leading Research institutions on rotational basis.
- Ex-Officio membership: Maximum four from Union council of ministers to be nominated by Prime minister.
- Special Invitees: Experts, Specialists with domain knowledge nominated by Prime minister.
- Hubs of NITI Aayog:
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- Team India Hub acts as an interface between States and Centre.
- Knowledge and Innovation Hub builds the think-tank acumen of NITI Aayog.
- Important index published by NITI Aayog: Composite Water Management Index, Sustainable Development Goal index, India Innovation Index, School Education Quality Index, Export Competitiveness Index
News 5: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
- Headquarter: Vienna, Austria
- Membership: 175 member states
- Objective: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is an intergovernmental organization that seeks to promote safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear energy and to inhibit its use for any military purpose, including nuclear weapons.
- It is known as Atoms for Peace organization and is not a Principal or specialized agency of UN
- It reports to both General Assembly and Security Council of United Nations
- Missions:
- Peaceful uses: Promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy by its member states,
- Safeguards: Implementing safeguards to verify that nuclear energy is not used for military purposes, and
- Nuclear safety: Promoting high standards for nuclear safety
News 6: Rohingya Refugees
- Rohingyas are the minorities, who are predominantly Muslims but also includes people from different religions, are from Rakhine state of Myanmar.
- Several Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh and India.
- Bangladesh has relocated several Rohingyas to Bhasan Char island, which lies in ecologically fragile area, as it is prone to cyclone, floods, erosion.
News 7: National Investigation Agency:
- Established: 2009 constituted under National Investigation Agency Act, 2008
- Ministry: Ministry of Home Affairs
- Headquarter: New Delhi
- NIA is functioning as the Central Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Agency in India.
- NIA aims at creating deterrence for existing and potential terrorist groups/individuals. It aims to develop as a storehouse of all terrorist related information.
- It can deal with investigation of terror crimes in states without the permission from states under written proclamation of Ministry of Home Affairs.
- Areas of investigation:NIA is mandated to investigate all the offences affecting the sovereignty, security and integrity of India, which includes:
- Friendly relations with foreign states.
- Against atomic and nuclear facilities.
- Smuggling of arms, drugs and fake Indian currency and infiltration from across the borders.
- The offences under the statutory laws enacted to implement international treaties, agreements, conventions and resolutions of the United Nations, its agencies and other international organisations.
Jurisdiction:
- It extends to the whole of India and also applies to Indian citizens outside the country.
- Persons in the service of the government wherever they are posted.
- Persons on ships and aircraft registered in India wherever they may be.
- Persons who commit a scheduled offence beyond India against the Indian citizen or affecting the interest of India.
News 8: G7 countries:
- Formed: 1973
- Members: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
- The Group of Seven (G7) is an inter-governmental political forum.
- In addition, the European Union is a ‘non-enumerated member’.
- Its members are the world’s largest advanced economies and liberal democracies.
- The G7 was founded primarily to facilitate shared macroeconomic initiatives in response to contemporary economic problems; the first gathering was centered on the Nixon shock, the 1970s energy crisis, and the ensuing global recession.
Recent Posts
Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.