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With Prime Minister Narendra Modi skipping Russia for the annual summit for the second year in a row, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar reached Moscow on a five-day visit to meet the Russian leadership. Shortly after his arrival, Jaishankar tweeted, “Arrived in Moscow. Look forward to my engagements.”
India and Russia have an annual summit at the leaders’ level, where the Indian Prime Minister and the Russian President visit each other’s country every alternate year. So far, 21 annual summits have taken place alternatively in India and Russia.
The last summit was held on December 6, 2021 in New Delhi, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit. After the war in Ukraine broke out, Modi did not travel to Russia for the annual summit last year, and Putin could not come for the G20 summit in Delhi in September this year.
Govt & Politics
Women participation in NREGS continues to rise, 59% this fiscal (Page no. 5)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Women participation in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was the highest in 10 financial years, with the proportion of women person-days in the total touching 59.25% till December 24 during the current financial year 2023-24.
The rates of participation of women in the MGNREGS, defined as women person-days out of the total in percentage, stood at 57.47% in 2022-23 and 54.82% in 2021-22.
It was 53.19% during 2020-21 at the time of the Covid-19 outbreak and 54.78% in 2019-20 during the pre-Covid period.
Data on NREGS portal shows of the total 238.62 crore person-days under the NREGS during 2023-24 till December 24, the figure of women person-days was 141.37 crore or 59.25%.
The number of women person-days was 169.90 crore (57.47 %) of the total 295.66 crore in 2022-23. The lowest percentage of women participation in the NREGS over the last 10 financial years was recorded in 2020-21 at 53.19%.
Women participation figures in NREGS for 2023-24 is based on data available up to December 24 and there might be a marginal change at the end of the financial year in March-end 2024. However, the broad trends indicate a steady rise in the women participation in the rural job guarantee scheme.
Editorial
The Pir Panjal challenge (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The Indian Army is not used to persistent negative encounters that upset its tremendous track record in counter-terrorist operations.
It does not claim continuous success either, as negative encounters did occur in the past intermittently — although mostly after long intervals.
That was when the strength of terrorists was high, intelligence less reliable, and even speculative search and destroy operations were productive in contacts.
The recent run of encounters in the depth areas of the Poonch-Rajouri sector have resulted in more losses for the Army than the terrorists, in an environment in which the strength of terrorists is much diluted, but better technologies are available.
In addition, while the Kashmir zone — the traditionally more volatile area — is relatively quiet, it’s the Pir Panjal (South) in the Jammu sector which has, in recent months, witnessed more operational activity and presence of terrorists.
Terrorism is like water; it takes the path of least resistance. Kashmir is too hot for Pakistan to make a strong statement on its “relevance” and “capability to calibrate” — both issues that are important to Pakistan’s doctrine of proxy hybrid war.
Kashmir’s strong and layered counter-infiltration (CI) and counter-terrorism (CT) grid makes planning of proxy operations difficult.
The Poonch-Rajouri sector has had a chequered history of local support, which enabled Pakistan to establish a strong proxy presence in the forested and rocky tracts of the Pir Panjal (South).
Ideas Page
Safety and cybersecurity (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
In October, Resecurity, a US company, informed the world about the availability of Indians’ personal data on the dark web.
It would have been easy to ignore this amid the deluge of bad news filling our news feeds but for the size and sensitivity of data.
The seller of the data set was providing verifiable, sensitive information of 55 per cent of the Indian population — roughly around 815 million ( 81.5 crore) citizens.
This included personally identifiable information like name, phone number, Aadhaar number, passport number and address. All for a paltry sum of $80,000. On December 18, we learnt that Delhi police had arrested four individuals in this matter.
Economy
India has potential to grow at 10% but land, labour reforms are important (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India has the potential to grow at 10 per cent. The strength of the economy lies in its demography, young population, consumption, investment and diverse skill sets, says Anand Rathi, Founder and Chairman, Anand Rathi Group goods and services tax (GST), Jan-Dhan and tax digitisation are some of the reforms that have aided the growth in the economy.
“Our advantage is that because we are developing later, we are also going ahead fast, technology-wise,” he told Hitesh Vyas and Sandeep Singh in an interview. Edited excerpts:
World over the highest growth has come when the infrastructure was part of the growth story. If you look at China, Japan or the United States, the best years of gross domestic product came there when infrastructure was created.
That is where I think, we lagged behind, but we are catching up now.
If you see budgets over the last few years, the amount of investment announced for the infrastructure has really increased.
Higher investment is possible because our tax revenue has increased rapidly, which gives us more headroom to spend money on infrastructure.
First rupee payment for oil to UAE: India looks for more deals, no targets say officials (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India's first-ever payment in rupees for crude oil purchased from the UAE is helping the world's third largest energy consumer push for taking the local currency global, as it looks for similar deals with other suppliers, adding internationalisation is a process and there are no targets.
With the nation more than 85 per cent dependent on imports for meeting its oil needs, India has been pursuing a three-pronged strategy of buying from the cheapest available source, diversifying sources of supply and not breaching any international obligation like the price cap in case of Russian oil.
While the strategy helped save billions of dollars, when it ramped up imports of Russian oil that was shunned by some in West post Ukraine war, it is looking to settle trade in rupees instead of dollars in a bid to cut transaction costs by eliminating dollar conversions. India in July signed an agreement with the UAE for rupee settlement and soon after Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) made payments for purchase of a million barrels of crude oil from Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in Indian rupees.