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  • Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for electronics manufacturers

    Global electronics giants are set to expand their presence in India under the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme for making mobile phones and certain other specified electronic components.

    Try this question for mains:

    Q. What is the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme? Describe its various features and benefits.

    What is the PLI scheme?

    • As a part of the National Policy on Electronics, the IT ministry had notified the PLI scheme on April 1 this year.
    • The scheme will, on one hand, attract big foreign investment in the sector, while also encouraging domestic mobile phone makers to expand their units and presence in India.
    • It would give incentives of 4-6 per cent to electronics companies which manufacture mobile phones and other electronic components.
    • A/c to the scheme, companies that make mobile phones which sell for Rs 15,000 or more will get an incentive of up to 6 per cent on incremental sales of all such mobile phones made in India.
    • In the same category, companies which are owned by Indian nationals and make such mobile phones, the incentive has been kept at Rs 200 crore for the next four years.

    Tenure of the scheme

    • The PLI scheme will be active for five years with financial year (FY) 2019-20 considered as the base year for calculation of incentives.
    • This means that all investments and incremental sales registered after FY20 shall be taken into account while computing the incentive to be given to each company.

    Which companies and what kind of investments will be considered?

    • All electronic manufacturing companies which are either Indian or have a registered unit in India will be eligible to apply for the scheme.
    • These companies can either create a new unit or seek incentives for their existing units from one or more locations in India.
    • Any additional expenditure incurred on the plant, machinery, equipment, research and development and transfer of technology for the manufacture of mobile phones and related electronic items will be eligible for the incentive.
    • However, all investment done by companies on land and buildings for the project will not be considered for any incentives or determine the eligibility of the scheme.

  • What is the Gandhi-King Initiative?

    A Bill to promote Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr’s legacies has been passed in American Senate.

    Practice question for mains:

    Q. Discuss how the civil rights movement in America is paralleled by India’s freedom struggle under Mahatma Gandhi.

    Gandhi-King Initiative

    • The initiative is an exchange program between India and the U.S. to study the work and legacies of Gandhiji and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
    • It will establish annual scholar and student exchange programs for Indians and Americans to study the leaders’ legacies and visit historic sites in India and the U.S.
    • The visits will be relevant to India’s freedom struggle and the U.S.’s civil rights movement.

    Gandhi-King Global Academy

    • The bill also seeks to establish the Gandhi-King Global Academy, a conflict resolution initiative based on the principles of nonviolence.
    • It proposes the establishment of the United States-India Gandhi-King Development Foundation set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the GoI, organized under Indian law.
    • The Foundation, which has a proposed budget authorized of up to $ 30 million per year for five years through 2025.
    • It is tasked with administering grants to NGOs that work in health, pollution and climate change, education and empowerment of women.

  • Turkey enacts Social Media Law

    Turkey’s parliament approved a law that gives authorities greater power to regulate social media despite concerns of growing censorship.

    Unregulated social media promotes misinformation, hate speech, defamation, and threats to public order, terrorist incitement, bullying, and anti-national activities.

    Turkey: The forerunner of cyber policing

    • Turkey leads the world in removal requests to Twitter, with more than 6,000 demands in the first half of 2019.
    • More than 408,000 websites are blocked in Turkey, according to The Freedom of Expression Association.
    • Online encyclopedia Wikipedia was blocked for nearly three years before Turkey’s top court ruled that the ban violated the right to freedom of expression and ordered it unblocked.
    • The country also has one of the world’s highest rates of imprisoned journalists, many of whom were arrested in a crackdown following a failed coup in 2016.

    Features of the Law:

    1) Appointing representatives:

    • The law requires major social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to keep representative offices in Turkey to deal with complaints against content on their platforms.
    • If the social media company refuses to designate an official representative, the legislation mandates steep fines, advertising bans and bandwidth reductions.

    2) Bandwidth reductions

    • Bandwidth reductions mean social media networks would be too slow to use.
    • With a court ruling, bandwidth would be reduced by 50% and then by 50% to 90%.

    3) Privacy protection

    • The representative will be tasked with responding to individual requests to take down content violating privacy and personal rights within 48 hours or to provide grounds for rejection.
    • The company would be held liable for damages if the content is not removed or blocked within 24 hours.

    4) Data storage

    • A most alarming feature of the new legislation is that SM companies would require social media providers to store user data in Turkey.
    • The government says the legislation was needed to combat cybercrime and protect users.
    • This would be used to remove posts that contain cyberbullying and insults against women.

    Turkey seems to have given an attempt to regulate social media amidst the chaos. It lags on various fronts, making it realizable for India not to go hastily for such a regulation.

    Concerns over the law

    • Hundreds of people have been investigated and some arrested over social media posts.
    • The opposition is pointing that the law would further limit freedom of expression in a country where the media is already under tight government control and dozens of journalists are in jail.

  • [pib] Atal Innovation Mission launches ‘AIM-iCREST’

    NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), has launched AIM iCREST – an Incubator Capabilities enhancement program for a Robust Ecosystem, focused on creating high performing Startups.

    Note the following things about AIM-iCREST

    1) Meaning of the acronym as it gives the central idea of the initiative

    2) Aims and objective

    3) Technological partners

    AIM-iCREST

    • AIM iCREST, as the name suggests, has been designed to enable the incubation ecosystem and act as a growth hack for AIM’s Atal and Established incubators across the country.
    • Under the initiative, the AIM’s incubators are set to be upscaled and provided requisite support to foster the incubation enterprise economy that will help them to significantly enhance their performance.
    • This will be complemented by providing training to entrepreneurs, through technology-driven processes and platforms.
    • The program aims at going beyond incubator capacity building.  This is a first of its kind initiative for advancing innovation at scale in India.

    Various partners

    • AIM has joined hands with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wadhwani Foundation – organizations that can lend credible support and expertise in the entrepreneurship and innovation space.
    • These partnerships will provide global expertise and showcase proven best practices to the AIM’s incubator network.

    An initiative for incubators

    • India needs world-class incubators fostering world-class startups leveraging the tremendous innovation talent of our country.
    • For the first time in the Government, the Incubator capacity development program is being extended to the entire portfolio of supported Atal incubators.
    • This programme is unique also in its design – it is a combination of interactive practices in the field of incubation; enabling the incubators to support sustainable and successful startups.

    Back2Basics: Atal Innovation Mission

    • Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) is NITI Aayog’s flagship initiative to promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in India
    • AIM has been established to create and promote an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship in a holistic manner through various initiatives at school, university and industry levels
    • The Atal Innovation Mission has thus two core functions:
    1. Innovation promotion: to provide a platform where innovative ideas are generated.
    2. Entrepreneurship promotion: Wherein innovators would be supported and mentored to become successful entrepreneurs at Incubation Centres.

  • The South Asian-Gulf Migrant Crisis

    The pandemic has exacerbated the plight of the migrant workers in the Gulf countries. This article examines the issue and suggests the ways to deal with it.

    Context

    • The Covid-19 exposed the precarious conditions of migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
    • Employers have used the crisis as an opportunity to retrench masses of migrant labourers without paying them wages or allowances.

    Impact of Covid-19

    • The South Asia-Gulf migration corridor is among the largest in the world.
    • The South Asian labour force forms the backbone of the Gulf economies.
    • The pandemic, the shutdown of companies, the tightening of borders, and the exploitative nature of the Kafala sponsorship system have all aggravated the miseries of South Asian migrant workers.
    • They have no safety net, social security protection, welfare mechanisms, or labour rights.
    • Now, thousands have returned home empty-handed from the host countries.
    • Indians constitute the largest segment of the South Asian workforce.
    • Gulf migration is predominantly a male-driven phenomenon.
    • A majority of the migrants are single men living in congested labour camps.
    • The COVID-19 spike in these labour camps has mainly been due to overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

    Nationalisation of labour in Gulf

    • Now, the movement for nationalisation of labour and the anti-migrant sentiment has peaked in Gulf countries.
    • Countries like Oman and Saudi Arabia have provided subsidies to private companies to prevent native lay-offs.
    • However, the nationalisation process is not going to be smooth given the stigma attached to certain jobs and the influence of ‘royal sheikh culture’.

    Challenges and solutions

    • The countries of origin are now faced with the challenge of rehabilitating, reintegrating, and resettling these migrant workers.
    • The Indian government has announced ‘SWADES’ for skill mapping of citizens returning from abroad.
    • But implementation seems uncertain.
    • Kerala, the largest beneficiary of international migration, has announced ‘Dream Kerala’ to utilise the multifaceted resources of the migrants.
    • Countries that are sending migrant workers abroad are caught between the promotion of migration, on the one hand, and the protection of migrant rights in increasingly hostile countries receiving migrants, on the other.

    Way forward

    • The need of the hour is a comprehensive migration management system for countries that send workers as well as those that receive them.
    • No South Asian country except Sri Lanka has an adequate migration policy.

    Conclusion

    The pandemic has given us an opportunity to voice the rights of South Asian migrants and to bring the South Asia-Gulf migration corridor within the ambit of SAARC, the ILO, and UN conventions.

    Original article:

    https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-south-asian-gulf-migrant-crisis/article32215146.ece

  • 29th July 2020 | Prelims Daily with Previous Year Questions

    [WpProQuiz 492]

    [WpProQuiz_toplist 491]

  • Russia-India-China: A triangle that is still relevant

    RIC engagement started on the promising note but the geopolitical changes over the last two decades have set the three countries on diverging paths. It is against this backdrop, the article articulates why RIC is still relevant.

    Background of RIC

    • The RIC dialogue commenced in the early 2000s.
    • At that time the three countries were positioning themselves for a transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order.
    •  It was not an anti-U.S. construct though.
    • The initial years of the RIC dialogue coincided with an upswing in India’s relations with Russia and China.
    • The 2003 decision to bring a political approach to India-China boundary dispute and to develop other cooperation, encouraged a multi-sectoral surge in relations.
    • An agreement in 2005, identifying political parameters applicable in an eventual border settlement, implicitly recognised India’s interests in Arunachal Pradesh.

    Growing India-U.S. relations

    • During the same period in which RIC dialogues took place, India’s relations with the U.S. surged.
    • This involved trade and investment, a landmark civil nuclear deal and a burgeoning defence relationship.
    • This rising relations with the U.S. met India’s objective of diversifying military acquisitions away from a near-total dependence on Russia.
    • The U.S. saw value in partnering with a democratic India in Asia as China was rapidly emerging as a challenger.

    How India-U.S. relations affected RIC

    • China went back on the 2005 agreement.
    • It launched the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and worked to undermine India’s influence in its neighbourhood.
    • And expanded its military and economic presence in the Indian Ocean.
    • As U.S.-Russia relations imploded in 2014 after the annexation/accession of Crimea.
    • Russia’s pushback against the U.S. included cultivating the Taliban in Afghanistan and enlisting Pakistan’s support for it.
    • The western campaign to isolate Russia drove it into a much closer embrace of China.

    Thus, the RIC claim of overlapping or similar approaches to key international issues, sounds hollow today. But it is still holds significance.

    Why RIC is still significant for India

    1) SCO

    • Central Asia is strategically located, bordering our turbulent neighbourhood.
    •  Pakistan’s membership of SCO and the potential admission of Iran and Afghanistan heighten the significance of the SCO for India.
    • It is important for India to shape the Russia-China dynamics in this region, to the extent possible.
    • The Central Asian countries have signalled they would welcome such a dilution of the Russia-China duopoly.
    • The ongoing India-Iran-Russia is an important initiative for achieving an effective Indian presence in Central Asia, alongside Russia and China.

    2) Significant bilateral relations

    • India’s defence and energy pillars of partnership with Russia remain strong.
    • Access to Russia’s abundant natural resources can enhance our materials security.
    • With China too, while the recent developments should accelerate our efforts to bridge the bilateral asymmetries, disengagement is not an option.

    3) The Indo-Pacific issue

    • For India, it is a geographic space of economic and security importance, in which a cooperative order should prevent the dominance of any external power.
    • China sees our Indo-Pacific initiatives as part of a U.S.-led policy of containing China.
    • Russia’s Foreign Ministry sees the Indo-Pacific as an American ploy to draw India and Japan into a military alliance against China and Russia.
    • India should focus on economic links with the Russian Far East and the activation of a Chennai-Vladivostok maritime corridor.
    • This may help persuade Russia that its interests in the Pacific are compatible with our interest in diluting Chinese dominance in the Indo-Pacific.

    4) Strategic autonomy of India

    • The current India-China stand-off has intensified calls for India to fast-track partnership with the U.S.
    • National security cannot be fully outsourced.
    • India’s quest for autonomy of action is based on its geographical realities, historical legacies and global ambitions.

    Consider the question “The changing geopolitical landscape should not dampen the importance of India’s engagement in the RIC (Russia-India-China) triangle. Comment.” 

    Conclusion

    India should continue its engagement in the RIC while keeping and protecting its interests.

  • The issue of powers of Speaker and Court

    The article examines the larger issue of powers of the Speaker under 10th Schedule and the current interim order of the Rajasthan High Court.

    Context

    • The Rajasthan High Court had admitted the petition by the Congress faction group challenging the notice of the Speaker.
    • In the interim order, the High Court had ordered to maintain the status quo.

    Why Kihoto Hollohan Case matters

    • The Kihoto Hollohan decision of the Supreme Court delivered in 1992 forms the basis in such decisions.
    • The Constitution Bench which heard it was split 3:2.
    • The majority on the bench upheld the constitutionality of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution.
    • The High Court is not empowered to unsettle Kihota Hollohan and must apply its ratio that the Chairman/Speaker is the final arbiter on the disqualification of a member.
    • Rajasthan High Court has raised the issue about whether disqualification under Tenth Schedule is applicable in the case of “intra-party dissent”.
    • Para 2(1) a of 10th Schedule deals with disqualification of a member of a House belonging to any party “if he has voluntarily given up his membership of such political party”.

    Let’s look at what the Supreme Court said  in Kihoto Hollohan case:

    “paragraph 2 of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution is valid. Its provisions do not suffer from the vice of subverting democratic rights of elected members of Parliament and the legislatures of the States. It does not violate their freedom of speech, freedom of vote and conscience as contended”.

    Consider the question “Examine the issue of powers of Speaker/Chairman in the matters of disqualification of the member against the powers of the Courts in such matters. What are the reasons for frequent frictions between the two authorities on this matter?”

    Conclusion

    The high courts and the Supreme Court routinely refuse to interfere in matters where the concerned authority has merely issued a show-cause notice or granted an opportunity of being heard. So, it must fix the issue raised by the Rajasthan High Court interim order.

  • What are Pre-packs under the present insolvency regime?

    The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) has set up a committee to look into the possibility of including what is called “pre-packs” under the current insolvency regime to offer faster insolvency resolution.

    Practice question for mains:

    Q.What are the key features of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code? Discuss how operationalization of IBC is hindered by the slower resolutions of insolvency cases. Suggest measures for faster resolution.

    What is Pre-pack?

    • A pre-pack is an agreement for the resolution of the debt of a distressed company through an agreement between secured creditors and investors instead of a public bidding process.
    • This system of insolvency proceedings has become an increasingly popular mechanism for insolvency resolution in the UK and Europe over the past decade.

    Why need Pre-packs?

    • Slow progress in the resolution of distressed companies has been one of the key issues raised by creditors regarding the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) under the IBC.
    • Under the IBC, stakeholders are required to complete the CIRP within 330 days of the initiation of insolvency proceedings.

    A case for India

    • In India’s case, such a system would likely require that financial creditors agree on terms with potential investors and seek approval of the resolution plan from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT).
    • This process would likely be completed much faster than the traditional CIRP which requires that the creditors of the distressed company allow for an open auction for qualified investors to bid for the distressed company.
    • The process needs to be completed within 90 days so that all stakeholders retain faith in the system and cases that take more than this time should be taken through the normal CIRP.

    What are the other key benefits of a pre-pack?

    • Pre-packs would mostly be used for businesses that are running; the investors would likely need to maintain good relations with operational creditors.
    • In the case of pre-packs, the incumbent management retains control of the company until a final agreement is reached.
    • The transfer of control from the incumbent management to an insolvency professional as is the case in the CIRP leads to disruptions in the business and loss of some high-quality human resources and asset value.

    Some limitations

    • The key drawback of a pre-packaged insolvency resolution is the reduced transparency compared to the CIRP.
    • Financial creditors would reach an agreement with a potential investor privately and not through an open bidding process.
    • This could lead to stakeholders such as operational creditors raising issues of fair treatment when financial creditors reach agreements to reduce the liabilities of the distressed company.

  • What is Green-Ag Project?

    The Union government has launched the Green-Ag Project in Mizoram, to reduce emissions from agriculture and ensure sustainable agricultural practices.

    Note the following things about Green-Ag Project:

    1)Core objective

    2)Implementing agencies

    3)Regions of Implementation

    Green-Ag Project

    • The Green-Ag project is designed to achieve multiple global environmental benefits in at least 1.8 million hectares (ha) of land in five landscapes, with mixed land-use systems.
    • It aims to bring at least 104,070 ha of farms under sustainable land and water management.
    • The project will also ensure 49 million Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) sequestered or reduced through sustainable land use and agricultural practices.

    Implementing agencies

    • The project is funded by the Global Environment Facility, while the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation, and Farmers’ Welfare (DAC&FW) is the national executing agency.
    • Other key players involved in its implementation are the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Environment Ministry (MoEF&CC).

    Regions of implementation

    The project has been launched in high-conservation-value landscapes of five States namely

    • Madhya Pradesh: Chambal Landscape
    • Mizoram: Dampa Landscape
    • Odisha: Similipal Landscape
    • Rajasthan: Desert National Park Landscape
    • Uttarakhand: Corbett-Rajaji Landscape

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