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Citing a “strategic” imperative, the Union Home Ministry wanted the 8.45-square-km airport component of the Great Nicobar Development project to be kept confidential.
However, the Environment Ministry, in an unprecedented move, has withheld all discussions on the forest clearance to the entire 166.10-sq km project recommended by the statutory Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in which the airport falls.
The FAC is an expert body that examines and authorises diversion of forest land for projects.Besides the airport, the “Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island” project proposes: Rs 72,000-crore township (149.60 sq km); a container transhipment terminal (7.66 sq km); and a power plant (0.4 sq km).
Requiring to divert 130 sq km of forest land and cut 8.5 lakh trees, the project is facing widespread opposition for its impact on the island’s forest and coastal ecology and the indigenous tribes.
In May 2022, the ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC), which examines infrastructure projects for environmental clearance, put on record that as per the Ministry of Home Affairs, the proposed international airport will be “developed as a joint military-civil, dual-use airport, under the operational control of Indian Navy.
It said that the “project is for Defence, Strategic, National Security, and Public Purpose. In view of this, the portion of deliberation made for Airport component may not be made public due (to) its strategic nature.
Accordingly, the EAC recorded a detailed discussion on the environmental aspect of the project, withholding from its minutes only matters related to the strategic airport. It cleared the project subject to forest clearance by the FAC.
Govt & Politics
Modi to release third PM-KISAN instalment in Belagavi today (Page no. 5)
(GS Paper 2, Welfare Schemes)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will release the 13th instalment under the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) Scheme in Belagavi, Karnataka.
The Prime Minister will unveil several development projects, including the Shivamogga Airport, during his visit to the poll-bound state.
Under the PM-KISAN scheme, eligible farmer families are provided a benefit of Rs 6,000 per year in three equal instalments of Rs 2,000 each.
A total of more than Rs 16,800 crore will be deposited directly into the bank accounts of more than eight crore farmers under the scheme,” said the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar and Agriculture Secretary Manoj Ahuja will be present on the occasion.
The airport at Shivamogga has been developed at a cost of around Rs 450 crore. The passenger terminal building of the airport can handle 300 passengers per hour.
The airport will improve connectivity and accessibility to Shivamogga and other neighbouring areas in the Malnad region.
The Prime Minister will also lay the foundation stone for two railway projects in Shivamogga – the Shivamogga-Shikaripura–Ranebennur new railway line and Koteganguru railway coaching depot.
The new railway line will be developed at a cost of Rs 990 crore and will provide enhanced connectivity of Malnad region with Bengaluru-Mumbai mainline.
The Koteganguru railway coaching depot will be developed at a cost of more than Rs 100 crore to help start new trains from Shivamogga and decongest maintenance facilities at Bengaluru and Mysuru.
Express Network
Govt plans 10 ‘Clean Plant Centres’ to boost fruit crop production (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Agriculture)
With the demand for foreign planting materials of fruits like apple, avocado and blueberry rising over the years, the Centre plans to set up 10 ‘Clean Plant Centres’, on the lines of those in developed countries such as the US, Netherlands and Israel, to boost domestic production of the selected crops.
These centers will be set up under the ‘Atmanirbhar Clean Plant Program’, which was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Union Budget 2023-24.
The concept of Clean Plant Centres is unique in itself and does not exist in India,” said a source at the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
The source said the 10 centres will be established for fruit crops like apple, walnut, almond, grapes, mango, pomegranate, among others, with an overall budget of Rs 2,200 crore in the next seven years till 2030.
Highlighting the need for the programme, the source said it is very difficult to get disease-free and genuine planting materials for horticultural crops in India.
The process of importing plants is very cumbersome, as the imported plants must be kept in quarantine for two years. After the establishment of the Clean Plant Centres, this period will be reduced to six months.
The Clean Plant Centres will provide services of disease diagnostic, therapeutics, multiplying of plants and generation of mother plants.
The centres will be fully funded by the Centre. It will be implemented in a PPP mode in partnership with research organisations, agriculture universities and private sector partners, adding that the National Horticulture Board (NHB) will anchor the clean plant programme.
The demand for imported planting material of various fruit plants has risen sharply over the years. According to a source, the permissions given by the EXIM committee for import of planting material of fruits during 2018-2020 show that in 2018, 21.44 lakh apple plants were imported, which increased to 49.57 lakh in 2020.
There is also a jump in the number of avocado plants import permissions. In 2018, permission for import of 1,000 avocado plants was given, which increased to 26,500 in 2020. Similarly, the number of blueberry plants allowed for import has increased from 1.55 lakh in 2018 to 4.35 lakh during 2020, the source said.
Economy
Direct benefit transfer at 5.5 trillion so far; to surpass FY 22 level (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Transfer of assorted subsidies and sops to the beneficiaries through the direct benefit transfer (DBT) has reached about Rs 5.5 trillion so far in the current financial year, nearly the same as for the whole of FY21 and just 13% short of the achievement in the whole of FY22.
Given that a lot of dues are cleared in the last month of the year, the DBT transfers are expected to surpass Rs 6.3 trillion achieved in FY22.
Fertiliser subsidies worth Rs 1.9 trillion have been provided to farmers so far in the current financial year, which was 53% higher than Rs 1.24 trillion in the whole of FY22 as input costs and global prices of fertiliser doubled in a year or so.
Given that over two months are still to go before closure of FY23, the subsidised fertiliser to farmers for the whole of the year would be substantially higher than reported so far.
The Centre’s total fertiliser subsidy bill is estimated to be Rs 2.25 trillion for FY23 as against the budget estimate of Rs 1.05 trillion and the actual Rs 1.54 trillion (including dealer and manufacturer) in FY22.
Subsidies worth Rs 1.5 trillion were transferred to beneficiaries via foodgrains under the public distribution system (PDS) so far in FY23.
The food DBT through PDS will likely end the year around Rs 2.2 trillion in FY23, the same as in FY22. The elevated food DBT was due to the free grains scheme.
Among other major DBT schemes, the government’s assistance for beneficiaries under Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana-Rural (PMAY-R) beneficiaries in FY23 would likely exceed the FY22 achievement of about Rs 40,000 crore. So far in the current fiscal, DBT in PMAY-R has reached Rs 38,638 crore.
Explained
Hard vs Soft landing (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Both India and the US are headed for big elections next year in April-May and November respectively. How their economies perform this year and closer to the polls — in terms of growth, jobs generated, inflation and real incomes — would matter for Narendra Modi and Joe Biden.
From this standpoint, official economic data released this month for the two countries contain reasons for concern.
Start with the consumer inflation numbers for the US, based on the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index prepared by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The overall PCE price index for January was 5.4% higher than its level in the same month of 2022. Core PCE inflation, which excludes changes in consumer energy and food prices that tend to be more volatile, stood at 4.7% year-on-year.
Both ‘general’ and ‘core’ inflation have been ruling well above the US Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. While the former has fallen from its June high of 7%, the latter, considered a more accurate gauge of the underlying inflationary trend in the economy, has been stubbornly stuck at around 5%
But more than year-on-year (Jan 2023 over Jan 2022), it’s the month-on-month (Jan 2023 over Dec 2022) inflation that has been the shocker from the PCE price index data issued on February 24. The increase in prices over the prior month was 0.6%, translating into an annualized rate of 7.2%. Chart 2 shows this monthly rise was the highest since May for the general and August for the core index.
ALMA’s new brain: chile telescope will produce even better images of the universe (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Space)
The Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) — a radio telescope comprising 66 antennas located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile — is set to get software and hardware upgrades that will help it collect much more data and produce sharper images than ever before, the journal Science reported recently. It added that the upgrades would take around five years to finish and cost $37 million.
The most significant modernisation made to ALMA will be the replacement of its correlator, a supercomputer that combines the input from individual antennas and allows astronomers to produce highly detailed images of celestial objects.
“Over the next 10 years, the upgrade will double and eventually quadruple their overall observing speed,” said the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), whose Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre will work along with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory and a Canadian industry partner to upgrade the telescope’s “brain”.
As ALMA is operated under a partnership among the United States, 16 countries in Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile, the announcement came after all the partners cleared the funding required for the improvements.
Fully functional since 2013, the radio telescope was designed, planned and constructed by the US’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Over the years, it has helped astronomers make groundbreaking discoveries, including that of starburst galaxies and the dust formation inside supernova 1987A.
ALMA is a state-of-the-art telescope that studies celestial objects at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths — they can penetrate through dust clouds and help astronomers examine dim and distant galaxies and stars out there.
It also has extraordinary sensitivity, which allows it to detect even extremely faint radio signals.
Caveat: request to court not to take steps without giving notice (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
An Apex Court bench headed by CJI D Y Chandrachud reprimanded a law student for filing a caveat in “Shailendra Mani Tripathi v. Union of India & Others”, a petition seeking menstrual leave for female students and working women across Indian institutions while adding that “this is a publicity-oriented caveat” and the student had “no business here.”
In common parlance, a caveat refers to “warning” or “caution”. However, legally it connotes a “formal notice requesting the court to refrain from taking some specified action without giving prior notice to the person lodging the caveat.” The person lodging the caveat is called a “caveator”.
Inserted by the Amendment Act of 1976, added after the Law Commission’s recommendation, Section 148A of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC) explains when a person has a right to lodge a caveat as “where an application is expected to be made, or has been made, in a suit or proceeding instituted, or about to be instituted, in a Court, any person claiming a right to appear before the Court on the hearing of such application may lodge a caveat in respect thereof.”
The caveator or the person lodging is also required to serve a notice of the caveat by “registered post” to the person on whose plea they are lodging the application.
Indian defence exports: eye on $5 billion target,what is the state of play now (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Defence)
The defence ministry’s target to raise India’s annual defence exports to $5 billion by 2024-25, from the $1.5 billion currently, was reiterated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the recently concluded Aero India 2023 in Bengaluru earlier this month.
In the past few years, there has been a strong government push towards achieving self-reliance in defence, which is subsequently expected to increase India’s defence exports as well.
Towards this, the defence ministry has brought in several new policies, such as earmarking 75 per cent of its defence capital budget for 2023-24 towards procurements from domestic sources and three positive indigenisation lists of 3,738 items, for which there would an embargo on import beyond timelines specified against them.
Also, two defence industrial corridors are being set up in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and there is an ongoing simplification of processes for ease of doing business aimed at boosting defence exports.
India is in talks with several countries to export several of its indigenous big-ticket platforms, such as the Light Combat Aircraft Tejas and the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile made by BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd, a joint venture between India and Russia.
The key to reaching the $5 billion defence export goal lies in expanding indigenous offerings, ramping up production for faster and timely deliveries, particularly for PSUs, and developing niche and critical technologies for export for fighting modern warfare but also to eliminate competition.