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Amid the ongoing military standoff with China at the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh, India is planning to procure the Very Short Range Air Defence System or VSHORAD (IR Homing) missile system, which is being designed and developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh Tuesday accorded Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) to critical procurements for the defence forces, including that of the VSHORAD (IR Homing) missile system.
The DAC also approved procurement of the HELINA Anti-Tank Guided Missiles, launchers and associated support equipment for the indigenous Advanced Light Helicopters (ALH) with the Army and the Brahmos Launcher and Fire Control System (FCS) for the Shivalik class of ships and Next Generation Missile Vessels (NGMVs) for the Navy.
The AoN is the first step in the long and complex defence procurement process. Not all AoNs accorded necessarily materialise into a final order.
The three capital acquisition proposals—two of the Army and one of the Navy—totals Rs 4,276 crore and will be procured under the Buy (Indian-IDDM) category.
“In view of the recent developments along the northern borders there is a need to focus on effective Air Defence (AD) weapon systems which are man portable and can be deployed quickly in rugged terrain and maritime domain,” the Defence Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry added that procurement of VSHORAD, as a robust and quickly deployable system, will strengthen India’s air defence capabilities.
Last year, there were several instances where China threatened violations along the LAC in eastern Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.
While some instances involved Chinese fighter jets, there were instances of Chinese drones flying very close to the LAC in the Northeast in the later half of last year, prompting the IAF to scramble their fighter jets in response.
India has been in talks with Russia since 2018 to procure the Igla-S air defence missiles at a cost of $1.5 billion under the VSHORAD programme in a bid to replace the Russian Igla-M systems which have been in use with the Army.
However, with a strong pitch for ‘Atmanirbharta’ in defence, there has been little progress on this front in the last two years, with sources indicating that the deal has been put on hold for now.
SC: Will first decide on constitutional validity of Citizenship Act’s Section 6A (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Supreme Court Constitution Bench while hearing petitions challenging Section 6A of the Citizenship Act said Tuesday it will first decide whether the provision is constitutionally valid before proceeding to other issues raised in the pleas.
Presently, the following issue as framed for primary determination for the Constitution Bench, whether section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, suffers from any constitutional infirmity.
The bench, also comprising Justices M R Shah, Krishna Murari, Hima Kohli and P S Narasimha, said it will take up the matter once it completes hearing the petitions arising out of the split in the Shiv Sena and subsequent developments in Maharashtra. The bench will start hearing the Maharashtra matter from February 14.
Section 6A deals with “special provisions as to the citizenship of persons covered by the Assam Accord”. It says that all those who came to Assam on or after January 1, 1966, but before March 25, 1971, from the specified territory (it includes all territories of Bangladesh at the time of commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 1985), and since then are residents of Assam, must register themselves under Section 18 for citizenship.
The provision was introduced in 1985 following the signing of the Assam accord between the Government of India and agitating groups in the state.
Appearing for the Centre Tuesday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta urged the court to also look into another issue approved by the Attorney General, which is “whether the Assam accord, a memorandum of settlement between Union of India, the State of Assam, All Assam Students Union, and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad arrived at for resolving a long pending issue, being a political settlement and a matter of great policy importance can at all be judicially reviewed at this stage as courts will decline to enter into the political thicket and annul matters of such magnitude and immense consequences.
The CJI pointed out it’s an argument supporting Section 6A. He said, “Therefore, we take it that your argument is that 6A is valid. Additionally, of course, it’s not constitutional ultra vires, but it’s valid also for the reason that when the government has enacted a statute to give effect to an accord.
Editorial page
Game in perspective (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Government Policies and Interventions)
The pandemic saw a huge spurt in the popularity of online games. While some of them are games of chance, many are games of skill.
This includes crossword puzzles, bridge, rummy, poker, scrabble and other games that require application of mind and an element of skill.
The law has always frowned upon gambling and the Supreme Court has held it to be res extra commercium. At the same time, courts have repeatedly held that money involved in the playing of a game of skill would not amount to gambling.
The distinction between a game of chance and a game of skill has been maintained for over 150 years. The Public Gambling Act, 1867 expressly excluded games of skill from the purview of the expression “gambling”.
Section 12 of this vintage law stated: “Nothing in the foregoing provisions of this Act contained shall be held to apply to any game of mere skill wherever played.”
While several old laws were repealed, this one continues to be in force. Therefore, Parliament has maintained the distinction between the two categories of games and has continued to hold that games of “mere skill wherever played” will not amount to gambling.
Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has come up with a draft notification to regulate online games. While there is no problem in regulating online games of skill, it would be impermissible to treat games of skill as amounting to gambling either in the rules or in the notification as this would be contrary to the Public Gambling Act, 1867.
Indeed, a serious controversy arose as to whether horse racing was a gambling activity. In a detailed judgment, the Supreme Court held that horse racing was a game of skill and could not be treated as gambling.
The repeated attempt is to treat all games where any winning is involved as a pernicious activity, to be taxed as harshly as possible.
The same moral dilemma seems to plague the Group of Ministers in deciding whether online games should be subject to tax at the highest rate of 28 per cent on the entire collection or only on the platform fee charged by the gaming company.
If a person pays Rs 1,000 for playing a game of skill such as bridge or rummy, Rs 100 is deducted as the service charge or platform fee of the company that conducts the game and the balance of Rs 900 goes into the winner pool.
If 10 persons play such a game, the gross collection of the online gaming company is Rs 10,000 and its fee is Rs 1,000; the balance of Rs 9,000 is then shared by the winners.
The question is whether the levy of 28 per cent will be on Rs 10,000 or Rs 1,000, which is the service consideration for the supply of online gaming services under the GST regime.
Ideas page
India, the bridge (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Is India returning to the post-colonial roots of its foreign policy? The decision to convene a virtual summit of the leaders of the so-called Global South — or the developing world — this week is certainly an important effort to reconnect with one of India’s natural international constituencies.
Delhi’s decision to renew its engagement with the developing world and take up their causes that don’t get enough international attention is a welcome move. India’s leadership of the G20 this year offers a special moment to engage with developing countries.
The summit, however, is not a simple return to the past. After all, the context and concerns in the 21st century are very different from those in the middle of the 20th.
India and the Global South are very different today from what they were in the 1970s, when the political mobilisation of the so-called “Third World” peaked.
On the face of it, though, the Global South is a reincarnation of the Third World framework from the 1970s. But many of the past political divides — including the one between North and South — have blurred. India’s new activism in the Global South must necessarily adapt.
The idea that there were “three worlds” became obsolete after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many countries of the Second World or the socialist world have become a part of the First World of capitalist states.
Many East European countries that were part of the Soviet economic and military sphere of influence are now part of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Consider, for example, that China, which continues to call itself a developing country, is today the world’s second-largest economy.
Its military power overshadows many developed states of the North. After he led the Chinese Communists to power in Beijing in 1949, Mao Zedong turned to Stalin, the leader of Soviet Russia from the Global North, for economic and military assistance.
Today, China’s economy is 10 times larger than that of Russia and is more advanced in several technological and industrial areas. It is also the senior partner in the Sino-Russian alliance.
South Korea, which was one of the poorer countries in the world in the middle of the 20th century, has been a member of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, which is the rich nations’ club.
If Japan goes nuclear (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Japan’s National Security Strategy released in December is a remarkable document. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s assertive rise, and DPRK provocations are listed as key developments creating for Japan the most severe and complex security environment since the end of the Second World War.
Japan’s response – the document states with the tranquillity of a sober tea ceremony– will be to build comprehensive national power, reaffirm the security alliance with the US, develop autonomous capabilities through a sustained military build-up, procurement of deep strike weapons and investing in the Indo-Pacific and the Quad.
On the surface, the new Strategy has nothing startlingly new to offer. However, probing beneath for the pulse of the understated, Japan’s new concerns – the inadequacy of its current defence posture and its military alliance with the US to measure up to future security needs — echo through the document, mildly but with the certainty of the heartbeat of a newborn baby.
Unconstrained by bilateral or multilateral agreements, Chinese military power is noted as growing exponentially. In less than a decade, the Chinese nuclear arsenal would match numbers currently held by the US and Russia. Expectations are low that the US would have the will or the capacity to bring China to the arms control table.
DPRK is riding a runaway proliferation train. Having shaken off all the limits to its nuclear programme it pretended to accept during the Trump Administration, its nuclear programme is perhaps now unstoppable.
Ballistic missile tests, conducted with the scantest regard to international reaction, have overflown Japanese airspace. The mood in South Korea is despondent but slowly turning in favour of its own nuclearisation.
As underlined by the document, extended deterrence including nuclear weapons is the cornerstone of the US-Japan alliance. Its success until now allowed Japan the luxury of its three nuclear no’s policy – no production, possession, or introduction of nuclear weapons on its territory.
But it was never truly tested in Asia, as US nuclear superiority over China was largely uncontested. Now it is no longer so, and will be less so in the future.
Japan has no reason to question the validity of its security alliance with the US. What perhaps worries Japan is its future adequacy. The options going forward are three – one stated and two unstated.
The National Security Strategy calls for Japan to strengthen the deterrence and response capabilities of its alliance with the US, including extended deterrence by the US, backed by its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.
This is the stated position, not very different from previous Japanese pronouncements on the subject. Ukraine’s sorry plight about security assurances – provided by Russia in the past and the US in the current war — would not have gone unnoticed in Tokyo.
Express network
Prithvi-II tactical ballistic missile successfully tested (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 3, Defence)
India carried out a successful test launch of tactical ballistic missile Prithvi-II from a test range off the Odisha coast.A successful training launch of a short-range ballistic missile, Prithvi-II, was carried out on January 10 from the Integrated Test Range, Chandipur off the coast of Odisha.
A well-established system, Prithvi-II missile has been an integral part of India’s nuclear deterrence. The missile struck its target with high accuracy.
The user training launch successfully validated all operational and technical parameters of the missile, the ministry said.
The missile, which is powered by light propulsion twin engines, has a range of around 350 km and can carry 500-1,000 kg of warheads. It uses an advanced inertial navigation system to strike the set target.
The Prithvi-II was earlier successfully test-fired during night hours in 2018 and in 2019.
Prithvi was developed by the DRDO under the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme.
Delhi still a most polluted city,3 from Bihar placed in top 10 (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Delhi continued to be the top polluted city in the country in 2022 with an annual average of PM 2.5 concentration 99.7 micrograms per cubic metre (ug/m3) of air, much above the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) standard of 40 ug/m3 of air, an analysis of CPCB air quality data by the NCAP (National Clean Air Programme) tracker has shown.
The analysis has however revealed that PM 2.5 levels in the city has shown a 7% improvement from 108 ug/m3 in 2019.
The analysis, which has been released Tuesday to mark four years of the launch of the NCAP by the Centre, has found that some of the top polluted non-attainment cities in 2019 have marginally improved their PM 2.5 and PM 10 levels but continue to breach CPCB’s standards.
Most of the least polluted non-attainment cities in 2019 on the other hand, have actually seen an increase in both PM 2.5 and PM 10 since then, the analysis said.
The NCAP tracker is a joint project of the Carbon Copy portal and Maharashtra-based Respirer Living Sciences.
The Union Government launched NCAP in 2019 to address air pollution in 102 cities, to which more cities were added later. There are now 131 non-attainment cities, that are cities which did not meet national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for the period of 2011-15 under the National Air Quality Monitoring Program (NAMP).
The country’s current annual average safe limits for PM 2.5 and PM 10 are 40 ug/m3 and 60 ug/m3. The NCAP initially set a target of reducing key air pollutants PM10 and PM2.5 by 20-30% in 2024, taking the pollution levels in 2017 as the base year to improve upon.
In September 2022, the centre set a new target of a 40% reduction in particulate matter concentration in cities covered under NCAP by 2026.
Government data shows that in the past four years, Rs 6,897.06 crore has been released to the cities.For analysis, the NCAP tracker has only taken into account non-attainment cities which recorded a monitoring uptime of more than 50%.
The analysis has found that most cities in the top 10 most polluted list of 2022 are from the Indo-Gangetic Plain. All three of Bihar’s non-attainment cities — Patna, Muzaffarpur and Gaya, now feature in the top 10 on the basis of PM 2.5 levels.
The top ten most polluted cities in 2022 for PM 2.5 were Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Patna, Muzzafarpur, Noida, Meerut, Gobindgarh, Gaya and Jodhpur.
Explained
What is a cold wave, why northwest India is shivering (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
Delhi and other parts of northwest India have been reeling under a cold wave spell that set in last week.In Delhi, the Safdarjung weather station, which provides representative figures for the city, has recorded cold wave conditions for five consecutive days so far this month, making it the longest such spell in a decade.
The lowest minimum temperature recorded this month was 1.9 degrees Celsius on January 8, the second-lowest minimum temperature in January in 15 years.
While lower-than-normal temperatures were recorded over parts of Northwest India from the last week of December, these conditions intensified in the first week of January.
The IMD marks a cold wave in terms of minimum temperatures – when the minimum temperature in the plains is 4 degrees or less or when the minimum temperature is less than 10 degrees and 4.5 to 6.4 degrees below the normal.
One of the major factors contributing to colder than normal temperatures over north India this month is the large-scale fog cover, according to RK Jenamani, scientist, IMD.
While westerly and northwesterly winds of around 5 to 10 kmph in the afternoon have also been contributing to the dip in temperature, an important factor this month is fog, which has been lasting for longer durations, preventing sunlight from reaching the surface and affecting the radiation balance.
There is no heating in the day time, and then there is the impact of the night. Foggy or cloudy nights are usually associated with warmer nights, but if the fog remains for two or three days, cooling begins even at night.
Light winds and high moisture near the land surface have been contributing to the formation of a blanket of fog over large swathes of the Indo-Gangetic plains in the morning.
Since there has not been any significant impact of western disturbances over the region, cold northwesterly winds have also been contributing to low temperatures.
Western disturbances, which are storms from the Mediterranean region, are associated with a change in wind direction, bringing easterly winds to northwest India. The last time the region saw easterly winds was on December 29.
Delhi usually records cold wave spells in December and January. Over the past decade, the number of cold wave days in January has ranged from none to seven.
Ozone hole, filling up now (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The ozone ‘hole’, once considered to be the gravest danger to planetary life, is now expected to be completely repaired by 2066, a scientific assessment has suggested.
In fact, it is only the ozone layer over Antarctica — where the hole is the most prominent — which will take a long time to heal completely. Over the rest of the world, the ozone layer is expected to be back to where it was in 1980 by 2040 itself, a UN-backed scientific panel has reported.
The recovery of the ozone layer has been made possible by the successful elimination of some harmful industrial chemicals, together referred to as Ozone Depleting Substances or ODSs, through the implementation of the 1989 Montreal Protocol.
The assessment has reported that nearly 99 per cent of the substances banned by the Montreal Protocol have now been eliminated from use, resulting in a slow but definite recovery of the ozone layer.
The depletion of the ozone layer, first noticed in the early 1980s, used to be the biggest environmental threat before climate change came along. Ozone (chemically, a molecule having three Oxygen atoms, or O3) is found mainly in the upper atmosphere, an area called stratosphere, between 10 and 50 km from the Earth’s surface.
Though the problem is commonly referred to as the emergence of a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer, it is actually just a reduction in concentration of the ozone molecules.
Even in the normal state, ozone is present in extremely low concentrations in the stratosphere. Where the ‘layer’ is supposed to be the thickest, there are no more than a few molecules of ozone for every million air molecules.
In the 1980s, scientists began to notice a sharp drop in the concentration of ozone. This drop was much more pronounced over the South Pole, which was later linked to the unique meteorological conditions — temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction — that prevail over Antarctica. The ozone hole over Antarctica is the biggest during the months of September, October, and November.
By the middle of 1980s, scientists had figured out that the chief cause of ozone depletion was the use of a class of industrial chemicals that contained chlorine, bromine or fluorine.
The most common of these were the chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, that were used extensively in the airconditioning, refrigeration, paints, and furniture industries.
Delegated Legislation (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
In upholding the Centre’s 2016 decision on demonetisation, one of the key questions to decide for the Supreme Court was whether Parliament gave excessive powers to the Centre under the law to demonetise currency.
While the majority ruling upheld the validity of the delegated legislation, the dissenting verdict noted that excessive delegation of power is arbitrary.
Parliament routinely delegates certain functions to authorities established by law since every aspect cannot be dealt with directly by the law makers themselves. This delegation of powers is noted in statutes, which are commonly referred to as delegated legislations.
The delegated legislation would specify operational details, giving power to those executing the details. Regulations and by-laws under legislations are classic examples of delegated legislation.
A 1973 Supreme Court ruling explains the concept as: “The practice of empowering the Executive to make subordinate legislation within a prescribed sphere has evolved out of practical necessity and pragmatic needs of a modern welfare State.
At the same time it has to be borne in mind that our Constitution-makers have entrusted the power of legislation to the representatives of the people, so that the said power may be exercised not only in the name of the people but also by the people speaking through their representatives.
The role against excessive delegation of legislative authority flows from and is a necessary postulate of the sovereignty of the people.
Section 26(2) of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 essentially gives powers to the Centre to notify that a particular denomination of currency ceases to be legal tender.
Here, Parliament, which enacted the RBI Act, is essentially delegating the power to alter the nature of legal tender to the central government.
The Centre exercised that power by issuing a gazette notification, which is essentially the legislative basis for the demonetisation exercise.