GS II Topic: Statutory, regulatory and various quasi-judicial bodies.
Vigilance Awareness Week, 2016
The Indian Railways has observed of Vigilance Awareness Week, 2016 with a Pledge taking ceremony by Officers and staff.
- Theme- “Public participation in promoting integrity and eradicating Corruption” .
- This is aimed to reinforce commitment of officials towards bringing about integrity and transparency in all spheres of their activities and to fight corruption with vigour.
- There is a special focus on sensitizing the youth and to achieve this objective through lectures, panel discussions, debates, discussions, plays, essay writing competitions etc.
GS II Topic: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources, issues relating to poverty and hunger.
Empowerment of differently abled
Registrar General of India has released Census 2011 data on Disabled Population in the age-group 5-19 by their Attendance Status in Educational Institutions and type of Disability.
Observation
- There are 380.1 million people in the age group of 5-19 years, of which 269.8 million (71%) are attending educational institutions. In all, 44.9 million (11.8%) people have attended schools earlier, while 65.4 million (17.2%) have never been to a school.
- There were about 6.57 million disabled people in the age group of 5-19 at Census 2011 in India out of which 4.02 million people (61.2%) are attending educational institutions (2.28 million (56.7%) are males and 1.74 million (43.3%) are females).
- There is an improvement of about 11 percentage points for the disabled persons attending schools in the age group 5-19 during the decade 2001-2011.
- Disabled persons with ‘any other disability’ show the highest percentage (71.2%) in attending educational institution followed by ‘seeing’ (68%), ‘hearing’ (67%), ‘movement’ (59.6%), ‘speech’ (58.9%), ‘mental retardation’ (47.2%), ‘multiple disability’ (37.2%) and least with ‘mental illness’ (34.1%).
- Maximum percentage of disabled persons who attended educational institution earlier is seen in ‘movement’ (17.7%) followed by ‘mental illness’ (15.5%), and least in ‘multiple disability’ (8.4%).
- on the basis of percentage of differently abled attending school-Kerala> TN> Karnataka
India and Nepal must build on their unique political, social and economic ties
For India, Nepal is the “Punya Bhoomi”, as Prime Minister often reminds us. Nepal’s sacred geography is a living repository of the Subcontinent’s spiritual heritage. For Nepal, India is the vast economic hinterland and may well be called its “Karma Bhoomi”. (For example, the fact that India offers the citizens of Nepal national treatment on its soil. Nepalese are free to come and work in India including in its Central government services. Nepal on its part allows its citizens to serve in large numbers in the Indian army.) If their destinies are inseparably intertwined, problems have often arisen whenever Delhi or Kathmandu has acted against the logic of extraordinary interdependence.
Problems
- Delhi’s too deep an involvement in Nepal’s internal affairs- India’s frequent political interventions fuel the demands in Nepal for breaking the interdependence. Delhi must learn to resist the temptation to meddle in Nepal’s political processes. Frequent interventions, in pursuit of tactical goals, damage India’s strategic interests in Nepal.
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Nepal’s internal divisions make its political classes seek Delhi’s intervention in their favour and resent it when the Indian moves help their opponents. If Nepal has a settled constitutional framework and its elites share power on that basis and ensure peaceful political transitions, Delhi will have no reason for injecting itself into its internal disputes.
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If geography makes Delhi the most important economic partner for Kathmandu, Nepali leaders have often politicized commercial cooperation with India at great costs to the people. Delhi, which must take the larger share of the blame, has had no economic imagination beyond formal aid projects that increasingly ran into political resistance from the Left in Nepal.
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Political vs economic- While Delhi’s political classes see Nepal as a mere extension of India and the security establishment views the northern neighbour as part of India’s exclusive sphere of influence, the economic decision makers have treated Nepal as a separate sovereign entity. Delhi’s economic separatists have done more damage to the relationship than the political separatists in Nepal.
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Little appreciation for the value of trading with neighbours has allowed the border infrastructure to deteriorate and turned an open frontier into a huge barrier for trade and commerce. In the last two decades, India has indeed talked about regionalism and connectivity; but progress has been very slow.
Way forward-
- Implementation of major infrastructure projects.
- Changing the nature of the frontier through trade facilitation, simplifying transit arrangements, removing non-tariff barriers, improving transborder roads, improving the ease of business for Nepali enterprises and making life easier for Nepali citizens working in India.
For all the political efforts in Kathmandu to construct a political symmetry between relations with Delhi and Beijing, the logic of economic geography tilts Nepal massively towards India. If Delhi has allowed this advantage to dissipate over the decades, Beijing is trying to overcome its geographic disadvantage through mega projects like the Tibet Railway. But Nepal’s nearest ports will always be in India and the Gangetic plain will remain its largest market. If only Delhi respects the logic of its profound interdependence with Kathmandu and acts in tune with it, it would have fewer reasons to worry about China’s rising profile in Nepal.
10th Indo-Nepal Joint Exercise Surya Kiran
- Indo-Nepal Joint Military Exercise Surya Kiran-X has commenced at Army Battle School, Saljhandi, Nepal. It is conducted annually, alternatively in Nepal and India.
- The Surya Kiran series of Exercises are of all the exercises involving India Surya Kiran series with Nepal is the largest in terms of troop’s participation.
- The aim of this exercise is to conduct battalion level joint training with emphasis on Counter Terrorism in mountainous terrain. Aspects of Disaster Management have also been included in the exercise.
Rashtriya Ekta Diwas
- It was observed on 31stOctober across the nation on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
- The theme this year is Integration of India.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.