The HINDU Notes – 23rd January

THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 23 January

The print run was slashed by 60% from 5,100 copies 2015-16 to 2,047 copies for Union Budget 2016-17. The number of Budget sets to be printed in 2015-16 reduced by 35%.
The cost of printing a Budget set stood at ₹3,450 last year, but the Centre sold each of them at the Lok Sabha counter for less than half, at ₹1,500. The printing cosct for each set of the Budget and its accompanying explanatory documents more than doubled.
Budget sets were sold at cost, ranging between ₹835 and ₹1,330, while printed copies were sold in the Lok Sabha counter at a heavily subsidised price.
The Standing Committee on Finance in 2014-15 had asked the Finance Ministry to set up an expert group to make the whole Budget exercise cost-effective, environment and people-friendly.
Despite a reduction in 2016-17, the printing cost more than doubled, from ₹1,300 per set in 2015-16 to ₹3,450 in 2016-17 with total printing cost went up by 4%.
The cost of printing rose to ₹70.62 lakh in 2016-17, against ₹67.83 lakh in 2015-16, (the latter was a 28% decline over the year before).

India’s IT industry has warned about the adverse impact that curbs on outsourcing will have on the U.S. economy, which lacks high-skilled workers.
Trump had promised to follow a ‘Buy American, Hire American’ policy in his inaugural speech. Indian IT industry provided services to American companies, which helped them to be competitive in the global market.
More than 60% of the Indian IT industry’s $108-billion export revenue comes from the U.S.
There is huge inter-dependency between the U.S. and the Indian economy. The economic logic for U.S. companies to work with Indian IT companies is compelling and the bonds are strong.

U.S Job in Indian Companies:

Indian IT company which tried to hire people in the U.S had interviewed more than 4,000 people but could hire only about 20. It’s not that they not qualified, but are not qualified with the skills that are needed.
According to December 2015 projections by the U.S. Labour Department, employment of computer and information technology occupations will grow 12% from 2014 to 2024 (faster than the average for all other occupations).
However, due to shortfalls in college graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), entering the STEM workforce, there could be 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs in the U.S. by 2018 — with more than half of these vacancies in computer and IT-related skills.
The Indian IT industry’s investments in the U.S. were to the tune of $2 billion between 2011-13 and in the four-year period between 2011-15, Indian IT industry had paid $20 billion in taxes.

Foreign students:
- In U.S colleges and universities more than 50% of the students are foreigners in STEM courses. Companies need to hire them on visa because they are foreigners as well.
- According to a 2015 report, the industry had created more than 4 lakh jobs in the U.S., including 150,000 direct employment positions.
- The problem is “discriminatory”, as the provisions implemented by the U.S. to curb immigration of high skilled workers. The restrictions which were imposed in terms of higher cost of visa is applicable only to so called 50-50 companies, which is actually only the Indian companies.
- Only Indian companies get affected and even some of the other bills which have been introduced are only targeting so called 50-50 companies.

TRAI is likely to recommend to the Department of Telecom (DoT) that Aadhaar-based eKYC be allowed even for outstation customers who want to get a mobile connection in a particular service area.
The existing mobile subscribers in the country should be encouraged to go in for Aadhaar-based electronic Know Your Customer verification, for which telecom service providers could offer incentives such as free data or talk time.
The facilitation of Aadhaar-driven eKYC for the existing customer base would ensure proper verification of subscribers and address the security concerns pertaining to fake or bogus mobile connections.
It would also help telecommunication operators to avoid the hassle of storing physical customer verification paper documents that could get damaged or misplaced in the long run.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, are likely to unveil in December a computerised model that can forecast the impact of climate change on the Indian monsoon until 2100.
It is the first time India will be submitting a home-grown assessment to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body convened by the United Nations, and hugely influential to policymakers and governments on the risks posed by climate change.
A test version of the model is already available on websites of research groups affiliated to the IPCC.
The IPCC summarises projections from such models, developed by scientists from around the world, to report on the level of consensus, among scientists, of the extent to which specific pollutants and gases — from carbon dioxide to particulate matter — interfere with weather patterns and ocean temperatures.
IITM scientists have customised significant parts of a model, called CFS 2 (Climate Forecast System version 2) and used it to give three month forecasts of the Indian monsoon, to project how the it will be altered by climate change over the next century.
The model has to first reasonably simulate land and ocean temperatures that existed in the 1850s, or before the carbon dioxide-spewing Industrial Revolution, and also capture droughts and floods in the years up to the present.

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