GS-1 Salient features of Indian Society, Diversity of India.
GS-2 Parliament and State Legislatures—Structure, Functioning, Conduct of Business, Powers & Privileges and Issues Arising out of these.
GS-3 Disaster and Disaster Management.
GS-4 Aptitude and Foundational Values for Civil Service, Integrity, Impartiality and Non-partisanship, Objectivity, Dedication to Public Service, Empathy, Tolerance and Compassion towards the weaker-sections.
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A chief whip of the largest party in opposition in the Rajya Sabha has moved a privilege motion against Culture Minister over the appointment of the chairperson of the National Monuments Authority.
What is Parliamentary Privilege?
Parliamentary privilege refers to the right and immunity enjoyed by legislatures.
The legislators are granted protection against civil or criminal liability for actions done or statements made in the course of their legislative duties.
They are granted so that the MPs/MLAs can effectively discharge their functions.
The powers, privileges and immunities of either House of the Indian Parliament and of its members and committees are laid down in Article 105 of the Constitution.
Article 194 deals with the powers, privileges and immunities of the State Legislatures, their members and their committees.
What is a privilege motion?
When any of the rights and immunities are disregarded, the offence is called a breach of privilege and is punishable under law of Parliament.
A notice is moved in the form of a motion by any member of either House against those being held guilty of breach of privilege.
Each House also claims the right to punish as contempt actions which, while not breach of any specific privilege, are offences against its authority and dignity.
What are the rules governing privilege?
Rule No 222 in Chapter 20 of the Lok Sabha Rule Book and correspondingly Rule 187 in Chapter 16 of the Rajya Sabha rulebook govern privilege.
It says that a member may, with the consent of the Speaker or the Chairperson, raise a question involving a breach of privilege either of a member or of the House or of a committee thereof.
The rules however mandate that any notice should be relating to an incident of recent occurrence and should need the intervention of the House.
Notices have to be given before 10 am to the Speaker or the Chairperson.
What is the role of the Speaker/Rajya Sabha Chair?
The Speaker/RS chairperson is the first level of scrutiny of a privilege motion.
The Speaker/Chair can decide on the privilege motion himself or herself or refer it to the privileges committee of Parliament.
If the Speaker/Chair gives consent under Rule 222, the member concerned is given an opportunity to make a short statement.
What is the privileges committee?
In the Lok Sabha, the Speaker nominates a committee of privileges consisting of 15 members as per respective party strengths.
A report is then presented to the House for its consideration. The Speaker may permit a half-hour debate while considering the report.
The Speaker may then pass final orders or direct that the report be tabled before the House.
A resolution may then be moved relating to the breach of privilege that has to be unanimously passed.
In the Rajya Sabha, the deputy chairperson heads the committee of privileges, which consists of 10 members.
Answer this PYQ in the comment box:
Q.With reference to the Parliament of India, which of the following Parliamentary Committees scrutinizes and reports to the House whether the powers to make regulations, rules, sub-rules, by-laws etc. conferred by the constitution of delegated by the Parliament are being properly exercised by the Executive within the scope of such delegation?
Karnataka has renamed the Mumbai-Karnataka region, consisting of seven districts, as Kittur Karnataka.
What is the Mumbai-Karnataka Region?
The erstwhile Mumbai-Karnataka region consisted of Uttara Kannada, Belagavi, Dharwad, Vijayapura, Bagalkote, Gadag and Haveri districts.
Reasons behind renaming
The Karnataka government has meant to dissociate itself from any ties with the erstwhile Presidency or colonial-era nomenclature in regions that came under the newly formed state of Karnataka in 1956.
The renaming is also to detach itself from any ties with Maharashtra.
Claims made by Maharashtra
Maharashtra has staked claim to an area of over 7,000 sq. km along its border with Karnataka.
It comprised 814 villages in the districts of Belagavi, Uttara Kannada, Bidar and Gulbarga, and the towns of Belagavi, Karwar and Nippani.
Maharashtra wants to annex all these areas.
The erstwhile Bombay Presidency, a multilingual province, included present-day Karnataka districts of Vijayapura, Belagavi, Dharwad and Uttara Kannada.
The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 made Belagavi and 10 talukas of Bombay State a part of the then Mysore State (which was renamed Karnataka in 1973).
A case pending in the Supreme Court
Successive governments in Maharashtra have demanded their inclusion within the state– a claim that Karnataka contests.
In 2004, the Maharashtra government moved the Supreme Court for a settlement of the border dispute under Article 131(b) of the Constitution.
It demanded 814 villages from Karnataka on the basis of the theory of village being the unit of calculation, contiguity and enumerating linguistic population in each village.
The needs of defence and environment have to be balanced and a “nuanced” approach is required, said the Supreme Court while hearing an appeal against the widening of roads in Uttarakhand hills for the “Char Dham project”.
What is Char Dham?
The Char Dham is a set of four pilgrimage sites in India.
It is believed that visiting these sites helps achieve moksha (salvation).
The four Dhams are, Badrinath, Dwaraka, Puri and Rameswaram.
The highway project
The Char Dham highway project connects the four himalayan shrines of Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath in Garhwal Himalayas.
It has 899-km road which the Centre wants to broaden near Dehradun.
What is the controversy?
The Supreme Court formed a high-powered committee (HPC) to examine the issues. In July 2020, the HPC submitted two reports after members disagreed on the ideal width for hill roads.
Deforestation: In 2018, the road-expansion project was challenged by an NGO for its potential impact on the Himalayan ecology due to felling trees, cutting hills and dumping muck (excavated material).
Terrain damage: It was observed that a wider road requires additional slope cutting, blasting, tunnelling, dumping and deforestation.
Increasing vulnerability: All of this will further destabilise the Himalayan terrain, and increase vulnerability to landslides and flash floods.
Criticism of the Project
Work without clearance: Project work and felling of trees on different stretches, adding up to over 250 km, has been continuing illegally since 2017-18.
Misusing old clearance: Work started on stretches adding up to over 200 km on the basis of old forest clearances issued to the Border Roads Organisation during 2002-2012.
False declaration: The work began by falsely declaring that these stretches did not fall in the Eco Sensitive Zones of Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary, Rajaji National Park, Valley of Flowers National Park etc.
The defence angle
Even as the project grappled to come clean, it garnered support from the MoD seeking a double-lane road to meet the requirement of the Army.
The project always had a strategic angle to it as the highways would facilitate troop movement to areas closer to the China border.
Suddenly, this became the sole justification for building wider roads.
A new study has challenged the widely accepted view that the continents rose from the oceans about 2.5 billion years ago.
About Singhbhum
Singhbhum district of Jharkhand is part of the Chhota Nagpur Division.
It is one of the leading producers of copper in India.
First landmass to emerge
The study suggests that the earliest continental landmass to emerge may have been Jharkhand’s Singhbhum region.
Scientists have found sandstones in Singhbhum with geological signatures of ancient river channels, tidal plains and beaches over 3.2 billion years old.
They somewhat represent the earliest crust exposed to air.
Studying the sandstones
The research studies a sedimentary rock, called granite. They tried to find their age and in which conditions they have formed.
They found the age by analysing the uranium and lead contents of tiny minerals.
These rocks are 3.1 billion years old, and were formed in ancient rivers, beaches, and shallow seas.
All these water bodies could have only existed if there was continental land.
Thus, they inferred that the Singhbhum region was above the ocean before 3.1 billion years ago.
How did they analyse?
The researchers studied the granites that form the continental crust of Singhbhum region.
These granites are 3.5 to 3.1 billion years old and formed through extensive volcanism that happened about 35-45 km deep inside the Earth.
This process continued on-and-off for hundreds of millions of years until all the magma solidified to form a thick continental crust in the area.
Due to the thickness and less density, the continental crust emerged above surrounding oceanic crust owing to buoyancy.
Back2Basics: Emergence of Landmass
In the beginning, more than 4.6-billion years ago, the world was a ball of burning gas, spinning through space.
It took hundreds of millions of years for the first land masses to emerge.
About 250-million years ago, long, long after the Earth had formed, all the continents of the time had joined together to form a super-continent called Pangaea.
This super-continent broke up about 200-million years ago to form two giant continents, Gondwana and Laurasia.
Gondwana comprised what is now Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica and India.
The Indian sub-continent lay off the east coast of Africa, before it broke off and moved north rapidly.
Isostacy
Huge plates of crustal and upper mantle material (lithosphere) “float” on more dense, plastically flowing rocks of the asthenosphere.
The “depth” to which a plate, or block of crust, sinks is a function of its weight and varies as the weight changes.
This equilibrium, or balance, between blocks of crust and the underlying mantle is called isostasy.
The taller a block of crust is, the deeper it penetrates into the mantle because of its greater mass and weight. Isostasy occurs when each block settles into an equilibrium with the underlying mantle.
Blocks of crust that are separated by faults will “settle” at different elevations according to their relative mass.
The Union Cabinet has decided to declare November 15 as ‘Janjatiya Gaurav Divas’ to mark the birth anniversary of revered tribal leader and freedom fighter Birsa Munda.
Who was Birsa Munda (1875-1900)?
Birsa Munda was an Indian tribal freedom fighter, religious leader, and folk hero who belonged to the Munda tribe.
He spearheaded a tribal religious millenarian movement that arose in the Bengal Presidency (now Jharkhand) in the late 19th century, during the British Raj.
His legacy
(A) Birth and early childhood
Born on November 15, 1875, Birsa spent much of his childhood moving from one village to another with his parents.
He belonged to the Munda tribe in the Chhotanagpur Plateau area.
He received his early education at Salga under the guidance of his teacher Jaipal Nag.
On the recommendation of Jaipal Nag, Birsa converted to Christianity in order to join the German Mission school.
He, however, opted out of the school after a few years.
(B) New faith ‘Birsait’ against religious conversion
The impact of Christianity was felt in the way he came to relate to religion later.
Having gained awareness of the British colonial ruler and the efforts of the missionaries to convert tribals to Christianity, Birsa started the faith of ‘Birsait’.
Soon members of the Munda and Oraon community started joining the Birsait sect and it turned into a challenge to British conversion activities.
The Mundas called him Dharati Aaba, the father of earth.
(C) The Ulgulan
The Great Tumult or Ulgulan was a movement started by Birsa Munda against the exploitation and discrimination against tribals by the local authorities.
Although the movement failed, it did result in the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act which forbade tribal lands passing to non-tribals, protecting their land rights for the foreseeable future.
(D) Death
On March 3, 1900, Birsa Munda was arrested by the British police while he was sleeping with his tribal guerilla army at Jamkopai forest in Chakradharpur.
He died in Ranchi jail on June 9, 1900, at the young age of 25.
(E) Creation of Jharkhand
Birsa Munda’s achievements are known to be even more remarkable by virtue of the fact that he came to acquire them before he was 25.
In recognition of his impact on the national movement, the state of Jharkhand was created on his birth anniversary in 2000.
Try this PYQ from CSP 2020
Q. With reference to the history of India, “Ulgulan” or the Great Tumult is the description of which of the following event?
The Ministry of Mines has notified the Mineral Conservation and Development (Amendment) Rules (MCDR), 2021.
About the Amendment
The MCDR have been framed under section 18 of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957.
It aims to provide rules regarding conservation of minerals, systematic and scientific mining, development of the mineral in the country and for the protection of environment.
Key highlights of the amendments:
Digital aerial imaging of the mines
Digital mapping: All plans and sections related to mine shall be prepared by combination of Digital Global Positioning System (DGPS) or Total Station or by drone survey.
Drone Imaging: Lessees having annual excavation plans of 1 million tonne or more or having leased area of 50 hectare or more are required to submit drone survey images of leased area and up to 100 meters outside the lease boundary every year.
Satellite imaging: Other lessees submit high resolution satellite images obtained from CARTOSAT-2 satellite
This step will not only improve mine planning practices, security and safety in the mines but also ensure better supervision of mining operations.
Penalty Provisions
Penalty provisions in the rules have been rationalized. Amendment in the rules categorized the violations of the rules under the following major heads:
Major Violations: Penalty of imprisonment, fine or both.
Minor Violations: Penalty reduced. Penalty of only fine for such violations prescribed.
Decriminalization of Rules: Violation of other rules has been decriminalized. These rules did not cast any significant obligation on the concession holder or any other person
Financial Assurance
Amount of financial assurance increased to five lakh rupees for Category ‘A’ mines and three lakh rupees for Category ‘B’ mines from existing three and two lakh rupees, respectively.
Provision of forfeiture of financial assurance or performance security of the lease holder added in case of non-submission of final mine closure plan within the period specified.
Employment Opportunity
Allowed engagement of a part-time mining engineer or a part-time geologist for small mines which will ease compliance burden for small miners.
Diploma in mining and mine surveying is added in qualification for full-time Mining Engineer.
The informal economy is a global and pervasive phenomenon.
According to ILO approximately 60 percent of the world’s population participates in the informal sector.
Defining Informal Economy
As the International Labour Organization defined the informal sector in 2002, the informal sector does not include the criminal economy.
While production or employment arrangements in the informal economy may not be strictly legal, the sector produces and distributes legal goods and services.
The informal economy also does not include the reproductive or care economy, which is made up of unpaid domestic work and care activities.
It is part of the market economy, meaning it produces goods and services for sale and profit.
India and informal economy
In developing countries like India, large share of the population typically depends upon the informal economy.
According to Periodic Labour Force Survey over 90 percent of workers in India are informal workers.
Out of these those engaged in rural areas is significantly more than urban areas.
What makes an economy ‘informal’?
The informal sector is largely characterized by several qualities:
Skills gained outside of a formal education
Easy entry (meaning anyone who wishes to join the sector can find some sort of work which will result in cash earnings)
Lack of stable employer-employee relationships
Small scale of operations
What characterizes the informal economy in India?
Workers who participate in the informal economy are typically classified as employed.
The type of work is diverse, particularly in terms of capital invested, technology used, and income generated.
The spectrum ranges from self-employment or unpaid family labour to street vendors.
Most workers in the informal sector do not have access to secure work, benefits, welfare protection, or representation.
Many workers engage in informal ventures by choice, for either economic or non-economic reasons.
What makes informality grow in an economy?
There are three basic views to explain the causes of informality:
Informality due to overt regulation: Informal sector is a reservoir of potentially productive entrepreneurs who are kept out of formality by high regulatory costs, most notably entry regulation.
Informality for profiteering: Informal forms are “parasitic” which are productive enough to survive in the formal sector but choose to remain informal to earn higher profits by not complying with taxes and regulations.
Too unproductive to become formal: Informality is a survival strategy for low-skill individuals, who are too unproductive to ever become formal.
Distribution of Informal Workers
Rural: A large number of informal workers are engaged in farm or agricultural activities.
Urban: Those in urban areas are involved primarily in manufacturing, trade, hotel and restaurant; construction; transport; storage and communications; and finance, business and real estate.
Issues surrounding India’s informal sector
Work hazards: Most industries, especially mining, have inadequate safety and health standards. Environmental hazards are evident in the case of the informal sector.
Irregularities in Wages: The daily wages are below the minimum rate of wages for informal workers.
Long Hours of work: Long hours of work in the unorganised sector beyond the labour and regulatory norms are common in India.
Poverty and Indebtedness: Workers in the unorganised sector had a much higher incidence of poverty than their counterparts in the organised sector.
Inactivity of work: There are many times when a worker cannot be economically active. For instance, due to biological circumstances such as sickness or old age, on account of personal calamities such as an accident or unemployment.
No Social Security Net: There are no social security measures to provide risks coverage and ensure maintenance of basic living standards at times of crises such as unemployment or health issues.
Why does formalization matter?
Livelihood guarantee: Ignoring problems in the informal sector can be costly as it can lead to job and wage losses, higher inflation and even risk the livelihood of migrant workers.
Assuring minimum wages: For instance, following demonetisation, a disproportionately higher number of jobs were created in rural India which isn’t the positive it might seem as wages are 2.5 times lower than in urban India.
Migration control: Informal sector workers suffered far more from the national lockdown in 2020 than their formal sector counterparts. With an inadequate safety net, there were painful accounts of displaced informal workers trying to get back to their rural homes.
Inflation control: India was one of the few countries with high inflation throughout pandemic-stricken 2020. Some of this is likely to be associated with the disruption in informal firms, who in normal times are very active in the production of essential goods like food and textiles.
What does all of this mean for economic growth?
Ans.Formalization can be a double-edged sword
The constructive way to think about this is to differentiate between “forced” and “organic” formalisation.
Formalisation that comes only on the back of external pressure or leads to deep distress in the informal sector, may not be sustainable.
Formalisation that happens on the back of policy changes that help small and informal firms grow over time into medium or larger formal sector firms is more sustainable.
Various policy measures
(1) Labor legislations
The legal initiatives like the Employees State Insurance Act (1948), the Minimum Wages Act (1948), the Coal Mines Provident Funds Act (1948), The Employees Provident Fund Act (1952), the Maternity Benefit Act (1961) and the Contract Labour Act (1970) etc. are important for labour welfare.
(2) National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector
India is the first country to set up, a commission named National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) in 2004 to study the problems and challenges being faced by the informal economy.
(3) Govt schemes
The Government of India initiated several poverty-related development schemes which indirectly benefited the urban informal sector since independence. Schemes like the MGNREGA and the Swarna Jayanti Shahri Rozgar Yojana were launched to provide support to the poor who constitute bulk of the informal sector.
(4) Social security legislations
The govt has enacted the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 in this regard. The government has also launched Atal Pension Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana etc.
(5) Skill development
To take care of the need for skills of workers in the informal economy, the government has started various programs such as the Skill India Mission, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushal Yojana, recognition of prior learning etc.
Way forward
Overhauling labour laws: Labour, as well as tax policies, are key to improving the business environment. Labour regulations have to allow for more flexible work arrangements. Moreover, the right to associate freely should be vigorously protected.
Preventing occupational hazards: Innovative means to prevent occupational accidents and diseases and environmental hazards need to be developed through cost-effective and sustainable measures at the work-site level to allow for capacity-building within the informal sector itself.
Local support: Building-on local institutional support to progressively extend social protection will be critical.
Sensitization: Special attention should be paid to the sensitization of policy makers, municipal authorities and labour inspection services to change their traditional role towards a preventive and promotional approach.
Regulatory ease: In the meantime, steps to promote reforms that are needed to help small businesses grow are critical. For example, lowering the regulatory burden associated with growing firms.
Social protection: The extension of occupational health care to workers in the informal sector should be promoted incorporating occupational health into public health care services at district and local levels and establishing a link between first aid and prevention at the work-site’s level.
Conclusion
India’s informal sector is the backbone of the economy.
The nation’s quality of life hinges on things becoming better for masses of informally employed people.
Over the longer term, the prospects for this group will depend on the progress of policy reforms and economic growth, which are the leading drivers of real wages.
Even though New Delhi has invested in renewable energy and announced a net-zero target, there is a gap between the announcements and the ground reality, as is evident from the promotion of coal.
India’s commitments
AT the COP 26 in Glasgow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India has set a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2070.
India also updated its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) that have to be met by 2030.
Its new pledge includes increasing the country’s installed renewable capacity to 500 GW, meeting 50 per cent of its energy requirements from non-fossil fuel sources.
India’s achievements on past commitments
At the COP 21 in Paris, India, made similar ambitious announcements and aimed to reduce the economy-wide emissions intensity by 33-35 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
In August, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy announced that the country has installed 100 GW of renewable energy capacity.
The majority of this 100 GW, about 78 per cent, is due to large-scale wind and solar power projects.
While this is a milestone, India is on track to accomplishing only about two-thirds of its planned renewable target of 175 GW installation by 2022.
To achieve its new goals, India will need to do more in different directions.
For instance, it has a target of achieving 40 GW of green energy from the rooftop solar sector by 2022, but it has not been able to achieve even 20 per cent of that so far.
In the transport sector, India has targeted a 30 per cent share of electric vehicles (EV) in new sales for 2030.
India’s climate actions against the Paris Agreement targets
The Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis that tracks government climate action against the Paris Agreement targets, deems India’s performance as “highly insufficient” simply because coal represents about 70 per cent of the country’s energy supply.
India also needs to cut down subsidies to the fossil fuel industry drastically — not the case currently.
While in the past seven years, the country has invested Rs 5.2 trillion in renewable energy, the investment in fossil fuel industry, though down by (only) 4 per cent from 2015-19, was Rs 245 trillion.
Coal production is estimated to increase to one billion tonnes by 2024 from 716 million tonnes in 2020-21.
According to the Central Electricity Authority, coal capacity is projected to increase from 202GW in 2021 to 266GW by 2029-30.
The Government of India is not actively discouraging such investments.
On the contrary, coal subsidies are still 35 per cent higher than the subsidies for renewables and coal-fired power generation receives indirect financial support from the government through income tax exemptions and land acquisition at a preferential rate.
Conclusion
It is also true that India’s energy transition would be in its own interest because, otherwise, economic growth will not be sustainable and human security will be at stake if dozens of millions of climate refugees are created due to the devastating consequences of climate change.
There has been quite a lot of debate on India’s dependence on coal against the backdrop of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) meeting. The crux of the theoretical argument is that India needs to develop, and development requires energy.
Carbon budget framework
India has neither historically emitted nor currently emits carbon anywhere close to what the global North has, or does, in per capita terms.
If anything, the argument goes, it should ask for a higher and fairer share in the global carbon budget.
There is no doubt that this carbon budget framework is an excellent tool to understand global injustice but to move from there to our ‘right to burn’ is a big leap.
However, the question is do the countries in the global South necessarily need to increase their share in the global carbon budget?
Why should developing countries aim for development without increasing carbon emission
1) Reducing the cost of renewable energy
Normally the argument in favour of coal is on account of its cost, reliability and domestic availability.
Recent data show that the levelised cost of electricity from renewable energy sources like solar (photovoltaic), hydro and onshore wind has been declining sharply over the last decade and is already less than fossil fuel-based electricity generation.
On reliability, frontier renewable energy technologies have managed to address the question of variability of such sources to a large extent and, with technological progress, it seems to be changing for the better.
As for the easy domestic availability of coal, it is a myth.
India is among the largest importers of coal in the world, whereas it has no dearth of solar energy.
2) Following different development model
During the debates of post-colonial development in the Third World, there were two significant issues under discussion — control over technology and choice of techniques to address the issue of surplus labour.
India didn’t quite resolve the two issues in its attempts of import-substituting industrialisation which worsened during the post-reform period.
But it can address both today.
The abundance of renewable natural resources in the tropical climate can give India a head start in this competitive world of technology.
South-South collaborations can help India avoid the usual patterns of trade between the North and the South, where the former controls technology and the latter merely provides inputs.
And the high-employment trajectory that the green path entails vis-à-vis the fossil fuel sector may help address the issue of surplus labour, even if partially.
Such a path could additionally provide decentralised access to clean energy to the poor and the marginalised, including in remote regions of India.
3) Limitation of addressing global injustice in terms of a carbon budget
The framework of addressing global injustice in terms of a carbon budget is quite limiting in its scope in more ways than one.
Such an injustice is not at the level of the nation-states alone; there is such injustice between the rich and the poor within nations and between humans and non-human species.
A progressive position on justice would take these injustices into account instead of narrowly focusing on the framework of nation-states.
Moreover, it’s a double whammy of injustice for the global South when it comes to climate change.
Not only is it not primarily responsible, but the global South, especially its poor, will unduly bear the effect of climate change because of its tropical climate and high population density along the coastal lines.
So, arguing for more coal is like shooting oneself in the foot.
Way forward
One of the ways in which this can be done is by making the global North pay for the energy transition in the South.
Chalking out an independent, greener path to development may create conditions for such negotiations and give the South the moral high ground to force the North to come to the table, like South Africa did at Glasgow.
Conclusion
Even if one is pessimistic about this path of righting the wrongs of the past, at the very least, it is better than the status quo.
