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The appointments Committee of Cabinet has approved the appointment of senior IPS officer Ravi Sinha as the chief of India’s external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) for a period of two years.
Currently in charge of the agency’s operations wing, Sinha will take charge from Samant Kumar Goel, who completes his four-year stint at the helm on June 30.
The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved the appointment of 59-year-old Sinha, a 1988-batch IPS officer from Chhattisgarh, who is currently Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, as the Secretary R&AW for a tenure of two years from the date of assumption of the charge of post, or until further orders, whichever is earlier.”
Deputed to the agency around 20 years ago, Sinha has worked in different desks and is widely considered in the intelligence community as an expert on India’s neighbouring countries.
He has served in Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast. He was also posted in Bhutan, Hong Kong, China and The Hague. The Centre decided to appoint him after they found him to be a specialist on countries in India’s immediate neighbourhood. He has vast experience in handling matters related to Pakistan, Myanmar and Kashmir apart from the Khalistan issue.
Govt & Politics
Quality control norms for 24 footwear products from July 1 (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Quality Control Orders (QCOs) for 24 footwear products, including rubber ‘hawai chappal’, and formal and sports shoes will be implemented from July 1, 2023, Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Director General Pramod Kumar Tiwari said.
Tiwari, however, said that the QCOs will be implemented for large and medium enterprises from July 1, 2023, while for small and micro units, these will be applicable from January 1, 2023 and July 1, 2023, respectively.
All the stakeholders have been given sufficient time to comply with the QCOs, Tiwari said at a press conference. The government had begun the process of issuing QCOs for the footwear industry three years ago.
On October 7, 2020, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) notified 3 QCOs, bringing 27 footwear products under compulsory certification.
Of these, QCOs for 3 footwear products under the personal protective equipment came into force since January 1, 2022, while QCOs for two other categories—leather and other materials footwears and all-rubber and polymeric material footwear—will come into effect from July 1, 2023.
Among the personal protective equipment categories, three products are—safety footwear, protective footwear, and occupational footwear.
Sharing the details of the changes in standards for sports footwear, a BIS official said that sports footwear standards have been revised.
As per the revision there will be two categories of standards for sports footwear. First, sports footwear part-1 general purpose, and the second, sports footwear part-2 performance sports footwear. The standards for the sports footwear part-2 performance sports footwear category will be implemented from January 1, 2024.
Toxic syrups: WHO probe flags 20 product in India, Indonesia (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)
The World Health Organization’s probe into contaminated cough syrups, which have been linked to nearly 300 worldwide deaths so far, has flagged 20 such toxic medicines originating from two countries — India and Indonesia.
In response, WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said these 20 products were manufactured by “15 different manufacturers” in the two countries.
All the medicines are syrups — cough medicine, paracetamol or vitamins. These would include the 15 previously identified contaminated syrups, seven of which were manufactured in India by Haryana-based Maiden Pharmaceuticals (4), Noida-based Marion Biotech (2), and Punjab-based QP Pharmachem (1). The rest were made in Indonesia.
The WHO has already raised ‘medical product alerts’ on the 15 medicines in Gambia and Uzbekistan, where Indian-made syrups were linked to at least 88 deaths last year, as well as in Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
It also raised an alert in Indonesia, where the syrups, sold domestically, were linked to the death of more than 200 children.
Earlier this June, the Nigerian drug controller raised an alert after it found a paracetamol syrup sold in Liberia contaminated with diethylene glycol or ethylene glycol. The syrup was manufactured by a Mumbai-based company.
Editorial
A fair settlement (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
On June 8, the Reserve Bank of India set out a framework for bank settlements with defaulters. This circular has attracted widespread criticism because it covers settlements with fraudulent and wilful defaulters implying to some that the RBI is condoning their crimes.
This interpretation is not correct. On the contrary, the point of the circular is to establish safeguards so that public interest is protected when banks make such settlements.
That said, the circular has once again brought to fore two deeper issues in the Indian banking system: Government ownership of banks and weaknesses in regulatory governance.
When there is a default, the primary objective of a bank is to recover as much of the loan as possible. Various options might be available to the bank for recovering the loan.
The bank decides which strategy would work best, based purely on commercial judgement. For instance, the bank may want to trigger the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016) against the borrower.
Alternatively, in some other cases, it may decide to pursue a “compromise settlement” wherein the bank and the borrower negotiate a settlement amount.
Explained
Cyclone Biparjoy’s path was difficult to predict (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
Cyclone Biparjoy, which struck India last week, was not unusual. Cyclones of this nature and ferocity routinely hit the Indian coastline about three to four times a year.
May and June are months when cyclones are expected. On the western coast, Gujarat happens to be the most likely place for the east-moving cyclones in Arabian Sea to make landfall.
And yet, Biparjoy had some characteristics that not only made it difficult to predict its path, but also made the cyclone potentially more dangerous.
The case of Biparjoy is a reminder that despite the enormous progress made in developing warning systems and acting on them, cyclones remain a huge threat.
The fact that the reported death toll from Biparjoy has been in lower single digits, almost all of them accidental, is a marker of the success of the work done in the past 15 years.
But much more needs to be done to minimise the damage to infrastructure, loss of cattle and other animals, and livelihoods of local populations.
Unlike many other natural hazards, cyclones give adequate warning of their arrival. In the Indian context, it takes them between four and five days to reach the landmass from the north Indian Ocean, both on the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal sides.
If a sufficient number of weather instruments are monitoring them, from the oceans as well as from satellites, everything about the cyclones — speed, intensity, trajectory, associated wind speeds — can be predicted accurately.
Biparjoy developed into a cyclonic storm on June 6 and made its landfall on June 15. The 10-day life period, during which it developed into a very severe cyclonic storm and then an extremely severe cyclonic storm, was longer than the average but not the longest.
One of the reasons for its longer stay on the sea was its relatively slow speed. Cyclones in the Arabian Sea typically progress with a speed of about 12-14 km per hour.
Biparjoy, through most of its life, moved at a speed of 5-7 km an hour while covering a distance of nearly 1200 km to Gujarat.
Economy
FM Sitharaman suggests special outreach camps in credit deficient districts (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman suggested identification of credit-deficient districts in each state and carrying out special credit outreach camps there.
She also suggested holding a special district level review committee meeting between July 15 to August 15 and inviting MPs from such districts to further brainstorm on ideas of financial inclusion by opening Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) accounts.
She said this while chairing a meeting of a consultative committee attached to the finance ministry, which focussed on financial inclusion.
During the deliberations, Sitharaman reviewed the progress made under PMJDY, Jan Suraksha schemes and MUDRA Yojana.
The meeting was also attended by the Ministers of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary and Bhagwat Karad, as well as MPs of the consultative committee from Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
Senior officials of the Finance Ministry as well as RBI, NABARD and other public sector banks were also present at the meeting.
World
Blinken and Xi hold talks in Beijing both sides say progress made to improve ties (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Beijing: China and the United States agreed to try and stabilise their intense rivalry to avoid veering into conflict, but did not announce any major breakthroughs during a rare visit to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed "progress" after shaking hands with Blinken at the Great Hall of the People, a grand venue usually reserved for greeting heads of state.
Blinken, the first holder of his post to meet the Chinese leader since 2018, said he had raised contentious issues such as Taiwan, the democratic island Beijing claims as its own.
And while he said the two sides had not moved forward on establishing regular military-to-military communications - a major concern for the wider world - he expected more senior U.S. officials would visit China in coming weeks.