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  • Increasing age of marriage will be exercise of carceral power by state

    The article examines the issue of the age of marriage of girls and its relation with their education level and economic status.

    Trends in early marriage

    • The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) data 2015-16 points to certain trends in early marriages:
    • That rural women are likely to marry earlier than their urban counterparts.
    • The higher up a woman is on the wealth quintile, the later she marries.
    • Most importantly, it establishes a direct causal link between education levels and delayed age of marriage.
    • Women with 12 years or more of schooling are most likely to marry later.
    • Only 8 per cent rural girls who drop out in the age group 6 to 17 years cite marriage as the reason.

    Impact on STs and SCs

    • According to the wealth quintile data, the poorest households are concentrated in rural India.
    • The lowest quintile, which is most likely to marry off their girls early out of socio-economic necessities, have 45 per cent of the Scheduled Tribe (ST) and 25.9 per cent Scheduled castes.
    • The NFHS-4 data on women aged 15-49 by number of years of schooling completed shows that 42 per cent ST women and 33 per cent SC women have received no schooling.

    Issues

    • Marriages in India are governed by various personal laws which set varying minimum ages for girls as also the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006, where it is 18 years for girls and 21 for boys.
    • This is compounded by The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, that increased the age of consent, from 16 years to 18 years.
    • Several studies have shown how this has criminalised self-arranged adolescent marriages as parents often misuse it to punish couples marrying without their approval, especially in cases of inter-caste marriages.

    Way forward

    • The National Human Rights Commission showed how higher education levels lead to a lower likelihood of women being married early and recommended that the Right to Education Act, 2009, be amended to make it applicable up to the age of 18 years.
    • Noting the law’s patriarchal underpinnings, the 18th Law Commission report (2008) asked for uniformity in the age of marriage at 18 years for both men and women and lowering the age of consent to 16 years. Government could act on such a recommendation.

    Consider the question “What are the advantages of increasing the minimum age of marriage for girls. Also, examine the issues with the move.

    Conclusion

    The median age at first marriage for both men and women in India has registered a significant decadal improvement with more people now marrying later than ever before. Any attempt to leapfrog through quick-fix and ill-conceived punitive measures will only considerably reverse these gains.

  • Increasing the age of marriage for girls and related issues

    The article analyses the issues with objectives of increasing the age of marriage for girls.

    Poverty of mother: Important factor

    • Raising the age of marriage is the could be the way to improve the health and nutritional status of mothers and their infants.
    • An article published in the journal The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health analyses data on stunting in children and thinness in mothers in the latest round of the National Family Health Survey 4 (2015-16).
    •  The authors examine the strength of the association between many different causal factors.
    •  As it turns out, the poverty of the mother plays the greatest role of all by far.
    • Instead of early pregnancy causing malnourishment, they may both be the consequences of poverty.
    • The best way to go about breaking such a cycle would be to pick the factors perpetuating it, it would be the poverty of the mother in this case.

    Declining fertility rate in India

    • India’s fertility rates have been declining to well below replacement levels in many States, including those with higher levels of child marriage.
    • This could be the reason for the shift from fuelling fears about booming populations to expressing concern for the undernourishment of children.
    • So, the problem of “populations explosion” is not the real problem as the demographic data suggests.

    Concern

    • The change in the marriage age will leave the vast majority of Indian women who marry before they are 21 without the legal protections.

    Conclusion

    The proposal and the objective to be achieved through raising the age of marriage needs reconsideration for the reasons cited above.

  • Three areas to work on to put India on the path to growth

    The article suggests the three areas on which country should work on to make it resilient in the future. These three areas include the labour laws for informal employment, conditions of our cities and the strength of our rural economy.

    Background

    • The Prime Minister, while addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) annual meeting urged to think big and partner with the government in putting India on the path to growth.
    • There is much that we can be achieved if government and industry work towards the same objective, and in a spirit of mutual trust.

    Let’s look into some areas

    1) Employment

    • Over 85 per cent of employment in India is in the informal sector.
    • The Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) estimates that between mid-March and mid-April, 120 million people lost their jobs.
    • With this unemployment rise to an all-time high of 27 per cent.
    • There was reverse migration on an unprecedented scale — some 10 million people abandoned cities to return to their native villages.
    • As economic activity has restarted in cities, CMIE reports that unemployment is now down to around 9 per cent.

    3 Problems we must address

    1) Need for labour regulation

    • We have stringent labour laws to protect workers, but this covers only the 15 per cent formal sector employment.
    • The 85 per cent of our workforce who are informally employed have almost no protection, and employers have almost complete flexibility.
    • We need to address both the formal and informal labour spectrum to get the balance right between flexibility and protection for all labour.

    Way forward

    • Everyone must have a minimum level of protection, and every employer a minimum level of flexibility.
    • This calls for a new social contract to define a well-calibrated social security system.
    • This huge project demands good faith and strong leadership by industry, labour and government.

    2) Living conditions of our cities

    • We need a massive private home-building programme.
    • It probably needs much more liberal land-use regulations — our cities have among the least generous floor-space indices (FSI) in the world.
    • New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo have an FSI five times Mumbai’s.
    • Again, this is a multi-year project, and it involves state and city governments partnering with private developers.
    • India is unique in having 70 per cent of our population still residing in rural areas.
    • We must encourage the migration of people to higher productivity occupations in our cities.
    • And we must ensure that clean, affordable and accessible housing is available for all in our cities.

    3) Strength of our rural economy

    • Reverse migration is also an opportunity to collaborate in spreading the geography of development.
    • We need a three-pronged approach:
    • 1) As Ashok Gulati has often argued, the easiest way to grow farmer incomes is by having them grow more value-added crops.
    • Exports of fruits and vegetables must be consistently encouraged.
    • The cultivation of palm plantations with potential for huge import substitution, we need corporate farming as the gestation period of seven years for the first crop is too much for the average farmer to handle.
    • The Atmanirbhar agricultural reforms, which permit contract farming, and open up agricultural markets, are major medium-term reforms. Implemented right, they can transform agricultural markets.
    • 2) We need to encourage agro-processing near the source.
    • Fostering entrepreneurship in rural and semi-urban areas would combine nicely with local processing.
    • 3) We need to invest even more massively in rural connectivity.
    • Today, we would add digital connectivity to road connectivity to level the playing field for all regardless of where they live.

    Consider the question “What are the vulnerabilities in our economic structure that were highlighted by the covid pandemic? Also suggest the measures to make our rural economy strong and resilient to such shocks.”

    Conclusion

    The task is huge, and only collaboration between all levels of government (Union, state, and city) and our dynamic private sector can hope to make substantial progress.

  • National Strategy for Financial Education

    The National Strategy for Financial Education (NSFE): 2020-2025 documents has been released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

    Try this question for mains:

    Q.What is the role of Financial Education in ensuring financial inclusion in India?

    What is the Strategy?

    • The NSFE for the period 2020-2025, the second one after the 2013-18 NSFE, has been prepared by the National Centre for Financial Education (NCFE) in consultation with all the Financial Sector Regulators (RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA.
    • Other stakeholders include (DFIs, SROs, IBA, and NPCI) under the aegis of the Technical Group on Financial Inclusion and Financial Literacy (TGFIFL) under the Chairmanship of Deputy Governor, RBI.

    Key recommendations

    • The strategy recommends the adoption of a multi-stakeholder approach to achieve financial well-being of Indians.
    • The document has recommended a ‘5 C’ approach for dissemination of financial education in the country. These include an emphasis on:
    1. development of relevant content in the curriculum in schools, colleges and training establishments,
    2. developing capacity among the intermediaries involved in providing financial services,
    3. leveraging on the positive effect of the community-led model for financial literacy through appropriate communication strategy, and
    4. enhancing collaboration among various stakeholders

    Other objectives

    • The strategic objective is also towards improving usage of digital financial services in a safe and secure manner; as well as bringing awareness about rights, duties and avenues for grievance redressal.
    • To achieve the vision of creating a financially aware and empowered India, certain strategic objectives have been laid down including:
    1. Inculcating financial literacy concepts among various sections of the population through financial education to make it an important life skill
    2. Encouraging active savings behaviour and developing credit discipline

  • [pib] Highlights of the Swachh Survekshan 2020

    Image Source: TH

    Indore was declared the cleanest city in India for the fourth consecutive time in the Swachh Survekshan, 2020 — India’s annual survey on cleanliness.

    Note the following things about Swachh Survekshan:

    1) Nodal Ministry (It is Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs)

    2) Authority carrying out the survey

    3) Various parameters of the survey

    Swachh Survekshan

    • It is an annual survey of cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation in cities and towns across India.
    • It ranks India’s cities, towns and states based on sanitation, waste management and overall cleanliness.
    • It was launched as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which aimed to make India clean and free of open defecation by 2 October 2019.
    • The first survey was undertaken in 2016 and covered 73 cities; by 2019 the survey had grown to cover 4237 cities and was said to be the largest cleanliness survey in the world.

    Survey methodology

    • The surveys are carried out by the Quality Council of India. The criteria and weightage for different components of sanitation-related aspects used for the survey were:

    a) Municipal documentation (solid waste management including door-to-door collection, processing, and disposal, and open defecation free status. These carried 45 per cent of the total 2,000 marks.

    b) Citizen feedback – 30 per cent (450 + 150 marks)

    c) Independent observation – 25 per cent (500 marks)

    Highlights of the 2020 Rankings

    • Surat in Gujarat and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra bagged the second and third spot respectively among the cleanest cities with more than a million populations.
    • Maharashtra’s Karad, Saswad and Lonavala bagged the first three positions for cities having a population less than one lakh.
    • Among the cities with a population between one and 10 lakh, Chhattisgarh’s Ambikapur was declared the cleanest, followed by Mysore in Karnataka.
    • In fact, Chhattisgarh has ranked the cleanest state in the category of states having more than 100 Urban Local Bodies (ULB). It was followed by Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
    • In 2019, Chhattisgarh was in the third position in the category. The survey found that Chhattisgarh is the first and only state where every city achieved Open Defecation Free (ODF)++ status.

  • Namath Basai Programme

    Namath Basai, the State government’s unique programme of teaching tribal children in their mother tongue, has become a runaway hit in Kerala’s tribal districts.

    Try this MCQ:

    Q. The Namath Basai Programme recently seen in news is related to:

    Tribal Education/ Women SHGs/ Forest Produce/ Tribal Health

    Namath Basai Programme

    • The NBP is implemented by the Samagra Shiksha Kerala (SSK).
    • It has succeeded in retaining hundreds of tribal children in their online classes by making them feel at home with the language of instruction.
    • The SSK has distributed some 50 laptops exclusively for Namath Basai. Pre-recorded classes are offered through a YouTube channel.

  • Issues with the graded autonomy

    The article analyses the issues the graded with the graded autonomy to the Higher Education Institutes.

    Background

    • NEP 2020 provided for phasing out of the system of affiliated colleges and the grant of greater autonomy in academic, administrative and financial matters to premium colleges.

    Concerns with the autonomy

    • The move has raised concerns about the politico-bureaucratic interference in the internal functioning of universities.
    • It has also raised concerns about the substantial burden on universities which have to regulate admissions, set curricula and conduct examinations for a large number of undergraduate colleges.
    • Concerns have long existed about over-centralisation, due to constraints imposed on the potential for premium affiliated colleges to innovate and evolve.
    • These apprehensions about the autonomy came to be used by successive governments to build a case for the model of graded autonomy.

    The push towards graded autonomy

    • Successive governments have pushed through measures that have largely allowed for greater penetration of private capital in higher education.
    • Recommendations of recent education commissions have promoted the unequal structure of funding for higher education.
    • Under this, hierarchy in higher education was created: Central government-funded universities, provincial Central government-funded universities, regional universities and colleges funded by State governments, etc.
    • The National Knowledge Commission (2005) stated that good undergraduate colleges are constrained by their affiliated status… the problem is particularly acute for undergraduate colleges which are subjected to the ‘convoy problem’ as they are forced to move at the speed of the slowest.
    • In turn, the dominant policy discourse vocally propagates “graded autonomy” for better performing Higher Educational Institutions.
    • Under which academic excellence can be supported through a grant of special funds and allowing greater power to such institutions.
    • This basis has been gradually enforced with the UGC in 2018 granting public-funded universities the right to apply for autonomy based on whether they are ranked among top 500 of reputed world rankings or have National Assessment and Accreditation (NAAC) scores above 3.26.

    NEP 2020: Centralisation and autonomy

    • NEP 2020  is a combination of enhanced centralising features and specific features of autonomy.
    • Deeper centralisation is indicative in the constitution of the government nominated umbrella institution, Higher Education Council of India (HECI); Board of Governors, the National Education Commission etc.

    Concerns

    • The model of graded autonomy will encourage hierarchy that exists between different colleges within a public-funded university, and between different universities across the country.
    • While the best colleges gain the autonomy to bring in their own rules and regulations, affiliated colleges with lower rankings and less than 3,000 students face the threat of mergers and even closure.
    • A shrinking of the number of public-funded colleges will only further push out marginalised sections.
    • Autonomy could lead to more inaccessibility as the independent rules and regulations of autonomous colleges and universities shall curtail transparent admission procedures.
    • Graded autonomy can be expected to trigger a massive spurt in expensive self-financed courses as premium colleges, which will lead to exclusion.

    Conclusion “Examine the issues with the autonomy of Higher Education Institutes in the NEP 2020.”

    Conclusion

    More than deliverance, autonomy represents the via media for greater privatisation and enhanced hierarchization in higher education.

    Sources: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/privatisation-via-graded-autonomy/article32396753.ece

  • Setting up of National Recruitment Agency

    The Union Cabinet has approved the creation of a National Recruitment Agency (NRA) for conducting a Common Eligibility Test (CET) for various government jobs.

    Try this question:

    Q.Discuss the role and function of the newly setup National Recruitment Agency.

    National Recruitment Agency

    • NRA will be a Society registered under the Societies Registration Act, headed by a Chairman of the rank of the Secretary to the Government of India.
    • It will have representatives of the Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Finance/Department of Financial Services, the SSC, RRB and IBPS.
    • It is envisioned that the NRA would be a specialist body bringing the state-of-the-art technology and best practices to the field of Central Government recruitment.
    • The NRA will conduct the Common Eligibility Test (CET) for recruitment to non-gazetted posts in government and public sector banks.
    • This test aims to replace multiple examinations conducted by different recruiting agencies for selection to government jobs advertised each year, with a single online test.

    Salient features of NRA

    • The Common Eligibility Test will be held twice a year.
    • There will be different CETs for graduate level, 12th Pass level and 10th pass level to facilitate recruitment to vacancies at various levels.
    • The CET will be conducted in 12 major Indian languages. This is a major change, as hitherto examinations for recruitment to Central Government jobs were held only in English and Hindi.
    • To begin with, CET will cover recruitments made by three agencies: viz. Staff Selection Commission, Railway Recruitment Board and the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection.  This will be expanded in a phased manner.
    • CET will be held in 1,000 centres across India to bid remove the currently prevalent urban bias. There will be an examination centre in every district of the country.  There will be a special thrust on creating examination infrastructure in the 117 aspirational districts.
    • CET will be a first level test to shortlist candidates and the score will be valid for three years.
    • There shall be no restriction on the number of attempts to be taken by a candidate to appear in the CET subject to the upper age limit.
    • Age relaxation for SC/ST and OBC candidates as per existing rules will apply.

    Advantages for students

    • Removes the hassle of appearing in multiple examinations.
    • Single examination fee would reduce the financial burden that multiple exams imposed.
    • Since exams will be held in every district, it would substantially save travel and lodging cost for the candidates. Examination in their own district would encourage more and more women candidates also to apply for government jobs.
    • Applicants are required to register on a single Registration portal.
    • No need to worry about clashing of examination dates.

    Advantages for Institutions

    • Removes the hassle of conducting preliminary / screening test of candidates.
    • Drastically reduces the recruitment cycle.
    • Brings standardization in the examination pattern.
    • Reduces costs for different recruiting agencies. Rs 600 crore savings expected.

  • Job Losses during Lockdown

    The data by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) briefs us about the job losses due to lockdown restrictions imposed because of the COVID pandemic.

    We can utilize this data as examples for answer writing.

    CMIE data on job losses

    • Salaried jobs: They suffered the biggest hit during the lockdown, with a total loss estimated to be at 18.9 million during April-July.
    • Informal and non-salaried jobs: They have shown improvement during the same period increasing to 325.6 million in July from 317.6 million last year, an increase of 2.5 per cent.
    • Small traders, hawkers and daily wage labourers: They were the worst hit by the lockdown in April, comprising 91.2 million of the jobs lost from the total loss of 121.5 million in that month.
    • Farm employment: A sharp rise was seen in June to 130 million, with good rains and the consequent sowing absorbing a lot of the labour that was lost in non-farm sectors.

    About CMIE

    • CMIE, or Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, is a leading business information company.
    • It was established in 1976, primarily as an independent think tank.
    • CMIE produces economic and business databases and develops specialised analytical tools to deliver these to its customers for decision making and for research.
    • It analyses the data to decipher trends in the economy.

  • [pib] Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) 2020

    The Vice-President has released the Atal ranking ‘ARIIA 2020’.

    Note the indicators on which the ARIIA ranking is based.  Also try this PYQ:

    Q. Which one of the following is not a sub-index of the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business Index’? (CSP 2019)

    (a) Maintenance of law and order

    (b) Paying taxes

    (c) Registering property

    (d) Dealing with construction permits

    Highlights of the ARIIA 2020

    • The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has topped the ARIIA 2020 under the ‘Best Centrally Funded Institution’ category.
    • Last year too, the institute emerged as the top innovative institution in the country.
    • IIT Bombay and Delhi have secured the second and third spots, respectively.

    About ARIIA

    • ARIIA is an initiative of erstwhile Ministry of HRD, implemented by AICTE and Ministry’s Innovation Cell.
    • It systematically ranks all major higher educational institutions and universities in India on indicators related to “Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development” amongst students and faculties.
    • ARIIA 2020 will have six categories which also includes special category for women only higher educational institutions to encourage women and bringing gender parity in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship.
    • The other five categories are 1) Centrally Funded Institutions 2) State-funded universities 3) State-funded autonomous institutions 4) Private/Deemed Universities and 5) Private Institutions.

    Major Indicators for consideration

    • Budget & Funding Support.
    • Infrastructure & Facilities.
    • Awareness, Promotions & support for Idea Generation & Innovation.
    • Promotion & Support for Entrepreneurship Development.
    • Innovative Learning Methods & Courses.
    • Intellectual Property Generation, Technology Transfer & Commercialization.
    • Innovation in Governance of the Institution.