8 Dec 2023

#GS3: – 01. National Green Hydrogen Mission

In January 2023, the Union Cabinet approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission With an outlay of ₹19,744 crore with an aim to make India a Global hub for manufacturing this clean source of energy. The mission is expected to lead to development of 5million metric tones per annum of green hydrogen production capacityby2030.

Starting from high school to college, India is simply not prepared to deliver the labour force required for this industry.
– Sriram Vishwanathan, India Semiconductor Mission advisory committee member

#GS3: – 02. India’s Chip Design Imperatives

India should set up a $10 billion Fabless design initiative or incentive Scheme that requires private capital to Multiply that for every dollar of commitment that the Indian government makes. For fabless, $10 billion has to come from the outside, and that’s absolutely possible,
-IMF ManagIng director Kristalina Georgieva

#GS3: -03. Light Touch : AI Regulation

India, in trying to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), will take a light-touch approach to enable innovation, emulating the way the domestic information technology (IT) services industry was allowed to flourish in the 1990s.

This possibility interests us—from India’s perspective, the positives outweigh the negatives in the government’s policy thinking on AI. Clearly, there are safety concerns, with deep fakes and misrepresentations that have already been raised, and will need to be addressed more seriously in the days to come.
-S. Krishnan, secretary, ministry of electronics and IT (Meity)

#GS2: – 04. India-Maldives

A day after he took charge as president of Maldives on 17 November, Mohamed Muizzu asked India to withdraw its military personnel from the country. Coupled with his recent official tour of Turkey, breaking a tradition of the new leader’s first visit being to India, Maléissignalling a desire to break away from India’s sphere of influence. Though there have been hiccups in the past decade, New Delhi has long had a largely cordial relationship with the republic to its south-west. Its equatorial location in the Indian Ocean places it close to a key maritime corridor, making it an attractive spot for world powers with geo-strategic designs to setup a base. The islands of Diego Garcia, a US choice, are close-by. The worry is that Maldives could get co-opted by China for its ‘string of pearls’ game of surrounding India with bases.
– Air India

#GS3: – 05. Sustainability

As I warned in Mega threats, the so-called Great Moderation (a long period of low macro economic volatility following the mid-1980s) has given way to the Great Stagflation. In 2022,we witnessed a surge of inflation in advanced economies and emerging markets, as harp slow down of global growth that continued into 2023, and signs of severe private- and public-sector debt problems as central banks raised policy rates to stabilize prices.

Growth is harder to achieve and inflation harder to quell as covid supply snarls came with de-globalization in the form of shifts from free trade to secure trade and efficiency to resilience. With debt burdens heavy and credit dear, central banks trying hard to attain price stability without causing a financial cris is or recession might yet give up on their inflation targets.
-NYU Stern Professor Nouriel Roubini

#GS3: -06. IBC

The introduction of corporate insolvency under India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), 2016, was a watershed moment. It transformed the debtor-creditor relationship in India. Till August 2023, 26,518 applications for the insolvency resolution of companies with defaults on debt worth ₹9.33trillion were withdrawn before their admission, according to data from the In solvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI).The threat of losing ownership has changed the behaviour of debtors, many of which are opting for pre-IBC-process deals to resolve distress.