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After announcing in the Budget this year that Chhattisgarh would revert to the old pension scheme for state government employees, the Cabinet led by Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel decided employees can shift back to the OPS after making a submission to deposit the contribution made by the state towards the National Pension System (NPS) and the dividend earned thereon.
Under the NPS, a state government employee contributes 10 per cent of her basic salary plus dearness allowance, with the state making a matching contribution.
The money is then invested in one of the several pension funds allowed by the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority. The state’s total NPS corpus as of now is Rs 17,000 crore.
The decision has been taken despite the Central government’s refusal to refund the amount of NPS to the officers and employees of the state. Under the OPS, state government employees will get 50 per cent of their last earned pay (basic salary plus dearness allowance) as pension on retirement.
Central government officials said there will be resistance for any such transfer of funds, adding that it is unlikely to be a smooth process as there has been no precedence of transfer of funds from the NPS account to account of the old pension scheme.
The state government employees will henceforth be considered as the members of the Chhattisgarh General Provident Fund from April 1, 2022.
The employee contribution deposited in the NPS account from November 1, 2004, or after to March 31, 2022, and the dividend earned thereon, will be payable to the government employee under the NPS rules.
Besides creating open-ended liabilities for future governments, reverting to the OPS will face obstacles in the immediate also. The Chhattisgarh Cabinet decision says employees will be allowed to switch only if they return to the state the latter’s contribution towards NPS. Pension fund regulator has already conveyed it will not return the corpus to the state.
But the Central government and the PFRDA have so far maintained it would not be possible to return the money deposited so far in the pension funds back to the state government.
There is no provision in the PFRDA Act or the regulations through which NPS funds can be returned to the state,” said an official, who did not wish to be named. This has been communicated to the state government.
Govt & Politics
Govt notifies 1-year scheme to give free foodgrains to 81 cr (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Food Security)
The Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Friday issued a notification to provide free foodgrains to all eligible households under the National Food Security Act, 2013, for a year beginning January 1.
In pursuance of the provisions of Schedule I to the National Food Security Act, 2013 (20 of 2013), the Central Government hereby decides that the rice, wheat and coarse grains shall be provided free of cost for all eligible households under section 3 of the National Food Security Act, 2013, for the period 1st of January, 2023 to 31st of December, 2023.
The ministry has also appointed 18 nodal officers to ensure a smooth rollout of the free foodgrain scheme. These officers are of the Deputy Secretary and Director levels. Besides, it has asked Food Corporation of India officials to visit fair-price shops in the first week of the rollout of the free foodgrain scheme.
The move came a day after Union Food Secretary Sanjeev Chopra held a meeting with the Principal Secretaries of the Food Department of states.
Last week, the government announced that it would provide free foodgrains to beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act, 2013, as per their entitlement, for a year beginning January 2023. The decision was taken at a Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 23.
The government, however, discontinued the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana launched in April 2020 amid Covid-19 under which 5 kg of free foodgrains was provided to every person on top of the NFSA entitlement of 5 kg foodgrains at subsidised rates.
As of now, the NFSA beneficiaries buy foodgrains at a subsidised rate — rice Rs 3 per kg, wheat Rs 2 per kg and nutria-cereals Re 1 per kg. The NFSA covers about 81.35 crore people and the Centre will bear the cost of Rs 2 lakh crore to provide them food security.
Govt spent Rs 13,000 cr on cleaning Ganga since 2014, UP got highest outlay among states (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 1/3, Water Resources /Environment)
The Union government spent more than Rs 13,000 crore on cleaning the Ganga since 2014, with Uttar Pradesh receiving the largest outlay among states, the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) is learnt to have informed the National Ganga Council on Friday.
The council, which met after three years, was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi through video conference. Modi was scheduled to travel to Kolkata for the meeting but addressed it virtually owing to the demise of his mother.
It is learnt that the NMCG, which is responsible for implementation of the government’s ambitious Namami Gange programme, provided a detailed financial progress report in the agenda note prepared for the council meeting.
As per the details available, the Centre has released a total of Rs 13,709.72 crore to the NMCG from the financial year 2014-15 till October 31, 2022.
Most of that sum — Rs 13,046.81 crore — was “released/expended” by the NMCG to state governments, State Missions for Clean Ganga (SMCG) and other agencies for implementation of projects under the programme.
And out of this, Rs 4,205.41 crore was released to Uttar Pradesh, the highest among states. About 1,100 km of the Ganga’s 2,525-km length falls in Uttar Pradesh.
The expenditure makes up around two-thirds of the budget allocated for the programme. The Centre had launched the Namami Gange Programme in June 2014, with a total budgetary outlay of Rs.20,000 crore.
The government had launched Namami Gange in 2014-15 for a period up to March 31, 2021 to “rejuvenate” the Ganga and its tributaries. The programme was later extended for another 5 years till March 31, 2026.
Explained
A new social media, Metaverse, and more AI (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
We don’t always realise how big an enabler technology is in our times. A lot of what we do or don’t do would have been different if present technologies were not available.
The past year, 2022, has only reinforced our dependence on technology, but maybe in a fashion that will be harder to change in the coming years.
Around the same time last year, we were on the cusp of a big tech leap in India: the shift to 5G. That finally happened towards the last quarter of the year.
Many of us have moved to this latest generation 5G, but maybe we are still waiting to see how that has made our life better. That is exactly how a lot of the tech shifts will be in the coming years — incremental changes that don’t seem like a huge experiential leap, but still change the way we do a lot of things, maybe without us even registering it.
The past year was not the best for tech companies around the world. It was the year which told them a lot of the shift in demand they saw during the Covid-induced lockdowns was not here to stay, and people would go back to their old ways.
The year ended with near mayhem across most Silicon Valley companies, especially those in the Internet business. There is still no real redemption in sight.
There is a feeling 2023 will be a bellwether year in more ways than one. There is a lot of saturation across realms of personal tech, which is impacting user engagement.
This is already forcing a rethink across companies, but it remains to be seen if these new technologies mature enough to be released to users in the new year.
ChatGPT has shown the world that conversational artificial intelligence is an idea whose time has come. Yes, it is intelligent enough now to start writing leave applications that are believable, but most such AI elements are now in standalone products, which is more play than work. In the new year, you will see this intelligence coming into more products that we use everyday — think of a Gmail that will not just auto-suggest but also write your next mail to the boss.
Ideas page
2022 in AI, in verse and prose (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
There once was a year called “Twenty-Two”/ In which AI breakthroughs were brand new / We saw synthetics that think/ And robots that can link / To the world in a way that is true.
No, I didn’t write this limerick. Neither did I swipe it from anyone else. In fact, no human was involved in its composition. I had simply set out to write a year-end column on whether 2022 could be a turning point in artificial intelligence (AI) and turned to AI itself for help to get things going, having read far too much already about ChatGPT.
This is the new AI-powered chatbot that has the chattering classes chattering like never before. It gives alarmingly well-composed, well-researched and well-punctuated responses to practically any question you can think of. I asked ChatGPT for a year-end sum-up of AI — in limerick form. You can judge the results: No Edward Lear, but serviceable.
I wondered if ChatGPT gets irony. I asked for an AI summation for the year, in the form of a joke. ChatGPT wrote back: Why was the AI researcher feeling depressed? Because he was having a breakthrough crisis! (I apologise if this joke falls flat. I am just a computer programme and do not have the ability to judge what humans might find humorous.)
Clearly, the stand-up comic industry has little to fear about being disrupted for now, but I would note that the AI is more self-aware than your uncle or school classmate who keeps sending you one bad WhatsApp joke after another.
My respect for AI, I must admit, was growing. At least it is modest. The “wow” was reserved for quantum computing, with no mention of the fact that ChatGPT itself has been the biggest wow-factor this year.
But my reasons for getting impressed and worried at the same time increased further as I realised that the programme is good at faking it as well: Technically, it is trained on all internet data up to 2021 and doesn’t let on that it hasn’t caught up.
No doubt, limericks, haikus and even the jokes will improve as its awareness of 2022 improves and it learns as more people use it. If it takes off, essays, legal documents, books, educational materials — even this newspaper column — can be assembled by a machine.
We may all struggle to tell if a composition comes from man or machine. You can see why ChatGPT has got the chattering classes in a stir as it is their jobs that would be among the earliest on the chopping block.
A leader, no naysayer (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
In September 2014, in his first meeting with President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about making the US a principal partner “in the realisation of India’s rise as a responsible, influential world power”.
This was in a way the first time that any Indian prime minister had talked about the country’s ambition to grow into a “responsible, influential world power”.
That ambition manifested in the functioning of the Modi government in the last eight years. From wars to the economy to climate, India has become integral to the contemporary global discourse.
India is not new to playing a proactive role in world politics. Right from Independence, India’s leadership had actively pursued an agenda that favoured the interests of developing or less developed countries.
Whether it was the GATT negotiations or the Non-Proliferation Treaty, India took a principled stand and stood up to the policy domination of the developed world.
India’s role as the protector of the interests of the developing world during WTO negotiations has been significant. Murasoli Maran, as the Minister of Commerce in the Vajpayee government, played a very critical role in preventing developed countries from pushing through their trade and commercial agendas.
The UPA government continued that approach, inviting opprobrium and occasional isolation from the interested players. However, that didn’t deter India from opposing agendas that were seen as against the interests of not only its people but also the larger developing world.
India’s significant contribution in all these fora was that it added a moral dimension to the developed world’s monetary vision. However, India, in the process, acquired the image of being a nay-sayer and obstructionist.
PM Modi affected a shift in this approach. While standing up for the developing world and zealously upholding its strategic autonomy, India started playing a proactive role in finding solutions.
The Paris Climate Summit in 2015 provided the first major opportunity for India to highlight its new priorities. It played a pivotal role in clinching the climate deal while ensuring that the interests of the developing world are not compromised.
PM Modi cogently articulated this stand in an article in the Financial Times on the eve of the Summit: “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow.
The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.” India’s efforts resulted in developed countries agreeing to the principle of “common and differentiated responsibility”.
India also convinced developed countries to agree to the formulation of not externally imposed targets but “intended nationally determined contributions” or INDCs.
Economy
One-three-year deposits see at least 1% interest rate hike (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2/3, Polity and Governance/Economy)
Amid rising yields on government securities and interest rates, the Finance Ministry on Friday hiked the interest rates for some small savings schemes by 20-110 basis points for the upcoming January-March quarter.
While interest rates have been kept unchanged for a 5-year recurring deposit, public provident fund scheme and Sukanya Samriddhi scheme, rates for 1-year, 2-year, 3-year and 5-year times deposits and senior citizens savings scheme have been hiked.
After keeping small savings rates unchanged for nine consecutive quarters, the Finance Ministry had hiked interest rates on some of the small savings schemes by 10-30 basis points for October-December and not done it uniformly for all schemes.
Interest rates were marginally hiked for 2-year and 3-year time deposits, senior citizens savings scheme and Kisan Vikas Patra, while rates for other schemes were unchanged in the previous quarter.
The changes have come amid a higher inflation rate and a rising interest rate cycle. Since April, the Reserve Bank of India has hiked the key policy rate by 225 basis points.
In its Monetary Policy Report released on September 30, the RBI noted that with government bond yields increasing, the revised small savings rates were 44-77 basis points below the formula implied rates.
The view within the ministry for hiking rates has been to balance the interests of senior citizens, persons saving in instruments without tax benefits along with keeping the interest rate for small savings in check, which essentially translates into a higher interest cost for the government when it borrows against the National Small Saving Fund. Interest rates on small saving schemes are reset quarterly, in line with the movement in benchmark government bonds of similar maturity.
Typically, the small-saving rates are linked to yields on benchmark government bonds, but despite the movement in G-sec yields, the interest rate changes have not strictly matched the yield movements over the last two years.
The reference period for small savings rates for the January-March quarter is September-November when the yield for five-year government securities rose about 15 basis points.Among the most popular fixed-income products, the National Savings Certificate will yield 7.0 per cent as against 6.8 per cent earlier.
Rates on the Public Provident Fund (PPF) will be unchanged at 7.1 per cent, while the interest rate for girl child savings scheme Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana also remains constant at 7.6 per cent.
The interest rate on savings deposits will continue to be 4 per cent per annum. EPF continues to have a higher interest rate for its subscribers despite the rate being reduced to 8.1 per cent for FY22 – the lowest in four decades.