14-Feb-2024

GS3 –01. Land Degradation

The world is rapidly losing usable land for self-inflicted reasons, ranging from intensive agriculture and overgrazing of livestock to real estate development and,yes,climate change. The crisis is further fuelling food and water insecurity, as well as adding to more greenhouse gas emissions.

,one of the biggest Challenges in the fight against Land degradation is universal:We need to eat.About 40% of the planet’s land – 5 billion hectares–is used for farming.One third of that is to grow crops and the rest for grazing livestock. Over the past 500 years, human activity (mainly agriculture) has led to nearly 2 billion hectares of land being degraded.

Further land degradation until 2050 could add an other120 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere, worsening climate change.

Investing about $2.7 trillion each year in ecosystem restoration, regenerative agriculture and circular business models could help add nearly 400 million new jobs and generate more than$10trillionin economic value annually.
– Commentary in News
Key Terms/Issues : Land Degradation

#GS3 – 02. Digital Impact

Only one out of every 10 Indians, or 140 million people (compared to 710 million in China), is a regular online shopper; e-commerce penetration is just 19%. Venture capital funding dropped two- thirds in 2023, making it more difficult for digital startups to get the capital they need.

About three-quarters of Indians fall short of full economic empowerment (estimated at a per capita income of about $5 a day), and that faster growth and business innovation could lift 700 million to that level by 2030. The digital economy, which has grown 2.5 times faster than the overall economy since 2016, could be a powerful force for sustainable and inclusive growth, not only through greater productivity, but as a way of delivering social goods, as the success of the Aadhaar and the CoWin and U- Win vaccination platforms have proven.In education,digital learning modules could be used to train many of the 70 million new entrants to the labour force each year and also deliver new content to schools at all levels. Financial inclusion is already a success story, thanks to India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and similar efforts. But more can be done to make credit accessible to India’s 64 million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.
-Mckinsey

#GS2 03. Affirmative Action

While the purpose of reservations is to help communities overcome generational and systemic hurdles, the bench correctly has said that any sub-classification will require a set of criteria. You can’t just dole out quotas ‘theoretically’. An efficient selection system is critical to ensuring that quotas benefit the last person, not just communities. It must consider parameters beyond SC/ST subgroup identities — such as family and individual wealth, income, education, rural or urban, and gender — to create a multidimensional index that objectively assesses comparative disadvantage within the SC/ST category.

Transparency is key to the quota process being effective for the purpose it was created. No point providing such affirmative action to, say, a wealthy dalit or denying it to a badly-off brahmin. In other words, individuals over groups.

– Commentary in News

#GS1 — 04. Bharat Ratna PV Narasimha Rao

Narasimha Rao was among India’s best PMs. He became PM in 1991 because Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, Sonia Gandhi refused to join politics, and party heavyweights opted for a lightweight who could be dispensed with when required. Rao headed a minority government — Congress was well short of a parliamentary majority and in constant danger of collapse if Opposition parties got together.

In 1991, India had run out of forex and gone to IMF for a humiliating rescue. Soviet and East European communist regimes had collapsed, so the socialist philosophy that propelled Congress for decades needed drastic modification. Rao presided over a bust government with a bust ideology.

This would have tested the strongest politicians. But Rao was a political nobody lacking a parliamentary majority. Bankruptcy obliged India to pledge its gold reserves. Yet, he had the intellectual capacity plus political craftiness to use the crisis as a launching pad to make India a miracle economy growing at 7%.

His masterstroke was to make Manmohan Singh, a technocrat, FM. Comprehensive economic reforms were necessary. Rao told Manmohan Singh, if you succeed, we will both share the credit for it, but if you fail, we will blame you entirely and sack you.

Opposition parties claimed that every new reform was being done on orders from World Bank and IMF, and swore to reverse these when they came to power. However, the reforms succeeded, and India averaged 7% GDP growth between 1994 and 1997. So, even though many other parties came to power later, all continued the same reform path chosen by Rao and Manmohan Singh.

Rao did not want to be called a reformer: that was politically risky, and so he claimed he favoured the middle path. The most dramatic, radical reform in 1991 was the abolition of industrial licences and the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Act, ending the licence-permit raj in industry. This reform was announced by the industry minister hours before Manmohan Singh’s first budget. Hence, when the newspapers reported the budget plus delicensing, readers thought Manmohan Singh was responsible for both.

Who was industry minister who initiated such a radical reform? None other than Rao. He also held the industry portfolio, but did not want to be associated with such a risky reform. His strategy worked. He evaded intra- party critics, yet succeeded in liberalising the economy.

–Commentary in News
Key Terms/Issues : Bharat Ratna, MRTP Act, Liberalization

#GS3 — 05. Electronics

Increasing value addition in the electronics sector and expanding India’s share of component production are the two primary goals of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY).

These are the two things that I think are really MeitY’s next goal, riding on the success of the large-scale electronics PLI (production-linked incentive), which is one of the most successful PLI programmes that the government of India has run in recent times. The next one which is coming up in terms of electronic hardware, where there’s been a very enthusiastic response from a large number of companies and is taking off quite well.

– MEITY Secretary S. Krishnan

#GS4 –06. Governance in Indian Startups

Recent developments around troubled edtech firm Byju’s has put the spotlight on governance among Indian startups a concern globally.

Edtech goes in and out of favour…It’s a really hard sector to get profitable, to maintain growth. It’s also got all sorts of regulatory friction… but the bigger issue we’re hearing is about India…is there (an issue) about transparency or governance. I’d like to argue that it’s the investor’s responsibility to drive those requirements (on corporate governance).

-Commentary in News

#GS3 07. Rice Exports

India is working to develop new tariff codes, called HSN codes in trade parlance, for certain rice varieties to enable exports of those which are traditionally not consumed by the people in the country.

The Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) is working on separate HSN codes for rice varieties which are GI (geographical indication) tagged such as red rice, black rice and Kalanamak rice.

– Commentary in News

Note : The Red Sea crisis is expected to impact India’s rice exports this year. Due to restrictions on exports of rice, sugar, and wheat, India’s agricultural exports may fall 9%, but the country has started exports of commodities such as water chestnut and makhana (fox nut).