📰 Indian Navy inducts its first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle
DSRV is used to rescue crew members stranded in submarines that get disabled
•The Indian Navy on Wednesday inducted its first Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) System at the Naval Dockyard in Mumbai.
•DSRV is used to rescue crew members stranded in submarines that get disabled. The Indian Navy joins a select group of naval forces in the world that boasts of this niche capability.
•The DSRV can be operated at a depth of 650 meters and can hold around 15 people. The Indian Navy in March 2016 had commissioned two DSRVs, the second will deployed at the Eastern Naval Command in Visakhapatnam.
•Describing it as a landmark event Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Sunil Lanba said, “The induction of the DSRV marks the culmination of years of effort of the Indian Navy in acquiring this niche submarine rescue capability.”
📰 NSG must have its own air wing, panel urges Centre
•A Parliamentary panel has recommended that the Centre urgently take steps to ensure that the National Security Guard (NSG) — the country’s premier counter-terrorist and contingency force — is equipped with its own dedicated air wing.
•The committee headed by Congress leader P. Chidambaram observed with anguish that the two Mi-17 helicopters procured by the NSG in 1988-99, were grounded and unavailable. While one of the helicopters met with an accident on February 22, 2002, and got damaged extensively; the second one was unserviceable due to want of spare parts.
•The 215th Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on Home Affairs tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday recommended that the “Ministry of Home Affairs should make urgent and sincere efforts to commission a dedicated Air Wing of NSG and provide requisite types and number of air assets to strengthen the aviation capability of the force.”
•The NSG’s delay in reaching Mumbai during the November 2008 terrorist attacks on the city had come under severe criticism, with the non-availability of dedicated aircraft hampering the force’s rapid reaction capabilities.
•“The Committee observes that NSG has yet not tested its power to commandeer any aircraft in real-time circumstances and feels that, unless this power is used, the force would remain unaware of the response time and logistical challenges that it may face in operational situations,” the panel noted.
•The NSG was raised in 1986 following the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Operation Blue Star. The force, which is trained to operate as an elite urban anti-terrorist and anti-hijack force, doesn’t have a cadre of its own or direct recruitment and is instead dependent on personnel sent on deputation from the army and the central armed police forces (CAPF).
📰 End IPS hegemony in Central Armed Police Forces, says parliamentary panel
•A parliamentary panel has recommended that the post of Director-General and other senior positions in Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) should not be reserved for Indian Police Service officers. The panel has suggested that the nature of duty of CAPF are more similar to that of the Armed Forces and it would make more sense to bring more officers from the Armed Forces on deputation. The panel, Committee headed by Congress leader P. Chidambaram, had sought to know from the home ministry Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) the rationale for a majority of the higher posts of the top hierarchy in the CAPFs being filled with officers coming on deputation, especially from the IPS.
•MHA in its reply said that “exposure, training and grooming of an IPS officer matches with the job requirements for the senior posts of CAPFs.”
•“The inter-departmental coordination between various CAPFS and State Police becomes smooth and seamless with the presence of IPS officers in every CAPF …therefore IPS officers are best suited to lead and provide supervisory directions to any CAPFs in an effective, efficient and impartial manner at these ranks,” MHA argued.
•Currently, the DG rank in CAPFs like the CRPF, CISF, BSF, ITBP, SSB and NSG is “100% reserved for IPS officers.” Other positions — Additional DG, Inspector General and Deputy IG — are also mostly reserved for IPS officers.
•“The Committee also recommends that the Government may re-examine the Rule 6 (1) of the IPS Cadre Rules, 1954 for fixing a limited percentage of deputation of IPS officers in the CAPFs keeping in view the interest of CAPF personnel…not more than 25% posts should be reserved for Officers coming on deputation, either from IPS or from the Armed forces, in any rank, and there should be no reservation of for the posts of DG in any CAPF and the officers of the CAPF cadres should be given equal opportunity to reach the topmost ranks. ….it will go a long way to boost the morale of the CAPFs but will also provide a bigger pool of qualified officers,” the report said.
📰 Becoming a citizen could become easier for some
What is the proposal?
•The winter session of Parliament may see the government push for the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill of 2016. The proposed law, which amends the original Citizenship Act of 1955, mandates that Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan will not be treated as illegal immigrants despite having entered India without valid documents. They will not face deportation as illegal immigrants under the Passport (Entry into India) Act of 1920 and the Foreigners Act of 1946. Illegal immigrants from these six communities from these countries are assured a smooth sail to citizenship over Muslims.
Why did the Act come into existence?
•The Bill, which was introduced in Parliament on July 15, 2016, explains that many persons of Indian origin including persons belonging to the six “minority communities” from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been unsuccessfully applying for citizenship under the Citizenship Act of 1955 but are unable to produce proof of their Indian origin. Hence, they are forced to apply for citizenship by naturalisation which prescribes 12 years’ residency as qualification.
•The Bill states that such a long-drawn process denies illegal immigrants from these six minority communities of the three nations “many opportunities and advantages that may accrue only to the citizens of India, even though they are likely to stay in India permanently”. The amendment shortens the period of residency from 12 to seven years for gaining citizenship by naturalisation. The Bill also empowers the government to cancel registration as OCI in case of any violation of the Citizenship Act or any other laws. Recently, the government has made its resolve clear to go ahead with the amendments by notifying amendments in the Citizenship Rules of 2009 to include a separate column notifying changes in the citizenship form for applicants belonging to six communities from these three nations.
Why is it a bone of contention?
•Critics say the Bill violates the basic tenets of the Constitution. By distinguishing illegal immigrants on the basis of religion, the proposed law goes against the fundamental right to equality under Article 14. The protection of Article 14 applies equally to both citizens and foreigners. Second, the Bill would hamper what the Assam National Register of Citizens seeks to achieve in the State. The NRC does not distinguish on the basis of faith unlike the 2016 Bill.
What lies ahead?
•The Bill is seen by many as an effort by the BJP to make good their 2014 election promise of making India a safe haven for Hindus persecuted in the three foreign nations. However, the proposed move has drawn flak from the BJP’s coalition partner, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), which has threatened to break ties with the BJP if the Bill is passed. The AGP believes that the Bill is a threat to the cultural and linguistic identity of the people of Assam. The Bill, if passed as law, would be challenged in the Supreme Court on the grounds of Article 14 and as a move to disturb the NRC process.
📰 Engaging with climate change
A solid syllabus can enable children to hold governments to account on sustainability
•Thousands of schoolchildren demonstrated on the streets of Australian cities at the end of November. They were protesting against their government’s lacklustre response to climate change. Their protest march coincided with the G20 summit in Argentina. The summit showed no consensus on climate change, proving the point the children in Australia had made — that political leaders are not serious about the environmental crisis.
Official reaction
•Over the recent years, Australia has experienced dire consequences of global warming. By dropping their school routine on a working day, the children were making an additional point. They were conveying the feeling that natural catastrophe would make academic attainment meaningless. Their collective anger was neither politically engineered nor unruly. That is why it elicited a quick, though disapproving, response from the Australian Prime Minister. On his way to the G20 summit, he said students should focus on learning and avoid activism.
•Resources Minister Matt Canavan’s response was sharper. He said students should be learning about geology and mining rather than protesting on streets. He was referring to the coal mining projects some of the children specifically mentioned.
•An important thing about the protests in Australia is that many parents and teachers had given their consent. Some had encouraged children to go out on the streets. The deeper inspiration had come from similar plans reported from Swedish schools. Like children in various other parts of the world, Swedish and Australian children have been studying environment science in their regular curriculum. It specifically refers to the dangers of global warming and the impending disasters associated with climate change. But in addition to the curriculum, direct experience of endemic forest fires impelled adolescent minds in Australia to mount public protests. Several students spoke to the media, articulating specific demands. These included the closure of a new coal mining projects.
•How important such projects are to Australia’s continued economic prosperity is clear from the sharp reaction that children’s mass protest received from the Minister. Mr. Canavan is in a vast company of popular politicians of different countries. American President Donald Trump is one of them. Leaders like him see climate change as an irritating discourse. They think it has no substance or truth.
•Moreover, they feel it confuses and distracts the public. These leaders believe that no goal should override high industrial and economic growth. As for the threat of climate change, these leaders deny it and blame activist scientists for creating and spreading a myth. A vast section of people in otherwise educated countries, such as the U.S. and Australia, agrees with politicians like Mr. Trump and Mr. Canavan.
Concept formation
•Why people think that climate change is a myth is easy to explain. A basic lesson in geography in elementary schools across the world concerns the distinction between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’. The two concepts are typically explained as being different in terms of changeability. Weather changes from day to day and season to season, according to standard geography texts. Climate, on the other hand, refers to a permanent frame within we study change in weather conditions. So, the term ‘climate’ is used for classifying the world and each country in zones. These zones constitute the permanent lore of learning. In India, for example, an educated person is expected to know that there are six climate zones. Many of us recall the different colours we used to fill up the Indian map to show these zones in an exam. Concepts formed in childhood become stable frames of mind.
•It is intellectually challenging for many people to reconcile this notion of climate with the idea of climate change that the UN is using to warn people against terrible environmental disasters. Another idea that the UN is doing its best to promote is that of ‘sustainable development’.
•Interestingly, the UN’s promotion of these ideas is based on a global consensus which gave birth to these concerns in the first place. I recently participated in a study mooted by UNESCO’s Delhi-based Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. Its report, “Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century”, presents an analysis of curriculum policy documents from over 20 Asian countries. The analysis shows that the sustainable development goals promoted by UNESCO have been included in the school syllabus across Asia, but their presence is merely nominal in most countries. Policy documents include environmental concerns, but prioritise economic growth. In the context of globalisation, most countries propagate competitive nationalism. It is used as a major ground for regimentation of children’s bodies and minds in order to ensure that they become proud, loyal citizens.
•These messages are hardly unique to Asian countries. The Australian children who registered their protest on city streets receive similar lessons at school. Yet, they feel more sensitive than Australia’s political leaders to the threat of climate change. The reason perhaps lies in the nexus between politics and economic interests. As Sunita Narain demonstrates in her book, Conflicts of Interest, all environmental struggles are caught in sharply divided goals of popular politics and people’s right to live in a safe and sustainable environment. Those who espouse environmental causes are often seen as romantics while people who support fast economic growth based on rapid industrialisation are perceived as practical realists.
•Australian children have rejected this view. They have figured out that the term ‘climate change’ means little to their political leaders. A new UN report, released just when the G20 summit was starting, says that the window of opportunity for taking meaningful steps to avert climate change will close within a decade or so. Who can understand the implications of this better than children? They have no financial investments to be redeemed by deeper mining for coal or building taller apartment blocks.
📰 A self-goal for India
There are substantive reasons for the questions being raised about the new GDP back series
•Without in any way impugning the integrity of the Central Statistics Office (CSO), most knowledgeable people are asking: if most important indicators of the Indian economy were better in 2004-2014, how is the GDP growth rate higher in estimates just released (7.4% per annum since 2014 and only 6.7% per annum in 2005-2014)? This is curious also because the Mundle expert panel, which was constituted to prepare the back series under the revised methodology, had not come up with the counter-intuitive estimates that have just been released. They estimated the average GDP growth at market prices at 8.37% (2004-05 to 2008-09), and then 7.69% (2009-10 to 2013-014).
•Three changes occurred in the revision that was first announced in 2015: first, in the base year; second, in the methodology from GDP at factor cost to GDP at market price (this is the international norm and the basis of the current government’s claim that this is what CSO has followed); and third, in the method of estimating company output/revenue, which has been done in a much more detailed manner using new data collected by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA 21).
Questions over the new series
•MCA 21 is available since 2008 but is probably not available prior to that. This could be one source of the problem. Another possible source may be that the CSO used a deflator which is different for the back series. But questions arise over the new GDP series for the following substantive reasons.
•Agricultural growth rates at constant prices were much higher from 2004-05 to 2013-14 than since then. Two back-to-back drought years (2014 and 2015) notwithstanding, policies have not been exactly supportive. Why else are farmers agitating year after year? The Index of Agricultural Production, with a base of 100 for the triennium ending 2007-08, had risen to 129.8 in 2013-14. But after falling, it barely recovered to 130 in 2017-18. Agriculture, like the non-agricultural informal sector, collapsed first after demonetisation and then after a poorly implemented Goods and Services Tax. Both measures affected output as well as jobs, especially in the unorganised sector which constitutes nearly half of GDP and half of all exports.
•Exports have performed much worse in the last four years than over the preceding 10 years. Exports were only $50 billion in 2002-03, but had risen to $250 billion in 2010-11, and reached $315 billion in 2013-14. They have not recovered to that level even in 2017-18.
•Investment to GDP is the most egregious source of difference in economic performance between the two periods. In 2003-04, India’s savings rate had risen from 9.5% of GDP in 1950-51, and stood at 25.9%. It rose sharply thereafter to peak at 36.8% — precisely because of a rise in per capita income growth — to a level unprecedented in India’s economic history, and not achieved since.
•This rising savings rate contributed to an unprecedented increase in the investment to GDP ratio, which peaked at 36.8% in 2007-08, having risen from 23.8% of GDP in 2002-03 . Then the investment to GDP fell in the wake of the global economic crisis. But in 2010-11, it still stood at 34% of GDP. In the 2011-12 series, the new government, having inherited an investment/GDP share of 31.3% in 2013-14, allowed it to fall to 30.4% in 2014-15, to 29.3% in 2015-16, to 27.1% next year (provisional estimate), and 26.4% in 2017-18. It is investment that mainly drives growth.
•The slowing growth is consistent with trends in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP, which consists of manufacturing, mining, electricity). IIP had risen from 100 in 2004-05 to 172 in 2013-14 (in the 2004-05 series), and from a base of 100 in 2011-12 (in the later series) to 107 in 2013-14, but only rose to 125.3 in 2017-18.
•Slower industrial production recently is also suggested by other indicators. In no year between 2004-05 and 2013-14 did bank credit grow less than 14% (range 14.1 to 37%). Since then, in no year has bank credit grown faster than 10.9% (range 8.2% to 13.9%). Plant load factor (PLF, or the ratio of actual energy produced to maximum possible energy that could have been produced) averaged 68.5% from 2004-05 to 2013-14, and until 2011 had never fallen below 74%. By contrast, the PLF from 2014-15 to 2017-18 has been 57%.
The situation in the labour force
•But it is the much lower job growth in the non-agricultural sector that really shows the difference in the real economy. I had estimated that non-agricultural job growth between 2004-05 and 2011-12 was at 7.5 million jobs per annum, at a time when only 2 million were joining the labour force per annum. The sharp fall in the entrants into the labour force after 2004-05 resulted from the very large increase in those joining and remaining in school. At the same time more than 5 million workers from agriculture left farming for non-agricultural work. This was the first time in India’s history that the absolute number of workers in agriculture fell. That tightened labour markets in rural areas and, apart from a rise in demand for labour from MGNREGA from 2005 to 2012, raised open market rural wages, which had a ratchet effect on urban wages. As a result, monthly per capita consumption expenditure rose faster than hitherto, reducing poverty very sharply. Never before 2004 had the absolute number of poor fallen. However, the rising wages (plus faster non-agricultural job growth) reduced the absolute number of the poor (according to the Tendulkar poverty line) by 168 million between 2004-05 and 2011-12, a staggering achievement for India.
•More youth have become better educated since 2004, and yet non-agricultural jobs are not growing. Both my analysis until 2016 and the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy data since then show beyond a shadow of doubt that job growth is lower in recent years than from 2004 to 2014.
•Meanwhile, the world has already begun to laugh at us. A commentator of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote: “I’m afraid this entire exercise casts doubt on the credibility of India’s growth numbers. When even government officials — present and former — are left scratching their heads, you know there’s a problem.”
