Daily Current Affairs

The International Monetary Funds staff-level agreement with Sri Lanka (GS Paper 2, International Organisation)

Why in news?

Recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a staff-level agreement with Sri Lanka, months after the island nation’s economic crisis intensified in 2022, following a serious Balance of Payments problem.

 

What is the staff-level agreement?

• It is a formal arrangement by which IMF staff and Sri Lankan authorities agree on a $2.9-billion package that will support Sri Lanka’s economic policies with a 48-month arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF).
• However, even though the IMF has agreed to support Sri Lanka, the EFF is conditional on many factors. Sri Lanka must take a series of immediate measures that the Fund has deemed necessary to fix fiscal lapses and structural weaknesses such as raising fiscal revenue, safeguarding financial stability and reducing corruption vulnerabilities.
• Apart from making domestic policy changes to strengthen the economy, Sri Lanka must also restructure its debt with its multiple lenders.
• The IMF has said that it will provide financial support to Sri Lanka only after the country’s official creditors give financing assurances on debt sustainability, and when the government reaches a collaborative agreement with its private creditors. The process could take several months.

 

Policy measures taken by Sri Lanka:

• Sri Lanka has already taken some significant policy measures. Beginning in 2022, the Central Bank has floated the rupee, raised interest rates sharply, increased electricity tariffs and fuel prices and restored tax cuts introduced during President Gotabaya’s time in office.
• While the government embarks on a path of fiscal consolidation, it has the difficult task of negotiating with a diverse group of creditors, including International Sovereign Bond (ISB) holders, to whom the island owes nearly half of its foreign debt, multilateral-lateral agencies, and foreign governments, mainly China, Japan, and India.
• While talks with the ISB holders are likely to be legal and technical, discussion with bilateral creditors is a more complex exercise, with geopolitical dimensions.

 

Response by other countries:

• China has signalled its willingness to lend more money to the country but has put the onus of restructuring past debt on Sri Lanka.
• Japan has pledged to work with Sri Lanka and other creditors, but underscored that it is important for Sri Lanka, in collaboration with the IMF and Paris Club, “to work for the betterment of its economic and fiscal situation while securing transparency.”
• India, too, backs the IMF process and will likely cooperate, although India has said it is still studying the “evolving, unfolding” story of the IMF agreement.
• Issues of creditor equitability and transparency are important. This means that India expects Sri Lanka to treat all its creditors equally and fairly. The statement comes amid speculation on whether Colombo might accord preferential treatment to one partner.

 

Is the $2.9-billion a bailout package?

• The $2.9 billion agreed upon by both sides, is short of Sri Lanka’s expectations of support totalling $3 to $4 billion. In any case, even if the IMF package arrives swiftly, subject to Sri Lanka’s success with the “prior actions” spelt out by the Fund, it cannot “bailout” Sri Lanka.
• After a pre-emptive sovereign default in April, Sri Lanka is still grappling with its Balance of Payments crisis. The government has resorted to wide import restrictions, while exports remain limited to the country’s traditional basket of tea, garments, and spices.
• From the ordinary citizen’s point of view, cost of living is soaring. Headline inflation went up to 64.3% in August 2022, and food inflation increased to 93.7%.
• The World Food Programme estimated that about 30% of Sri Lanka’s population, became food insecure, since the crisis worsened this year. Many families, especially those belonging to the working population, are starving.

 

How then can the IMF package help?

• If it comes through, the IMF package will effectively make Sri Lanka credit-worthy again, allowing the government to borrow once again from private creditors, multilateral lenders and bilateral partners.
• While many see the programme as necessary, few think it will be sufficient for substantive economic recovery. They believe it would push the government to make necessary policy shifts to ensure higher revenue and lesser state spending and address the problem of corruption.
• The responsibility of building fiscal strength and resilience is, however, Sri Lanka’s. For that, the government must also introspect on its heavy reliance on imports, the status of domestic production, prospects for boosting exports with greater value addition, and ways to address income and wealth inequality.

 

IAEA seeking permanent presence at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)

 

Why in news?

• Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are assessing the safety situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (NPP) on the banks of the Dnieper River near the Ukrainian town of Enerhodar.
• The IAEA mission will now maintain a permanent presence at the plant with two of its inspectors staying back.

 

Background:

• Europe’s largest nuclear plant was seized by Russian forces in March but continues to be operated by Ukrainian staff.
• It has recently become a subject of concern as the war spilt over into its premises, with both Russia and Ukraine blaming each other for the shelling and warning of a possible Chornobyl-type radiation disaster.

 

What is the IAEA and what does it do?

• The IAEA is an autonomous intergovernmental body to promote safe, secure and peaceful nuclear technologies and has a relationship agreement with the United Nations.
• It was born on July 29, 1957, after the IAEA statute was approved by 81 countries in late 1956, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• Its creation was inspired by the “Atoms for Peace” speech made by former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower at the U.N. General Assembly in 1953 when he envisioned an organisation to promote peaceful and unifying uses of nuclear energy. The IAEA is entrusted with the task of upholding the principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1970.
• The IAEA and its former Director General Mohamed ElBaradei were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for the agency’s work of “incalculable importance”, at a time when disarmament efforts appeared “deadlocked” and when there was a danger that nuclear arms would “spread both to states and to terrorist groups”.

The Vienna-headquartered agency currently has 175 member states and functions through two policy-making organs- the Board of Governors and the General Conference.

What are some of its prominent international engagements?

• In the 1970s and 80s, the IAEA was quick to respond to severe nuclear disasters like the Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. IAEA helped the Soviet Union decommission the Chernobyl nuclear plant and safely dispose of radioactive waste.

 

Role in Iraq:

• After Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait, the U.N. requested the IAEA’s services in inspecting Iraq’s nuclear capabilities and in destroying and rendering harmless all assets relevant to the design and production of nuclear weapons.
• IAEA has since played a key role in Iraq by securing declarations from it and looking into its possible clandestine nuclear weapons programme. It is also credited for standing its ground under pressure from the George W. Bush administration to back the American claim that the Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons.
• The agency’s then Director General, maintained that he would not rush into a judgment on this matter without incontrovertible evidence that could prove that Hussein had committed a gross violation of non-proliferation.
• The cautious approach later proved to be in the IAEA’s favour when the U.S. invasion of Iraq failed to yield the necessary proof of Hussein’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

 

Role in Iran:

• In Iran, IAEA has played a key role in enforcing the original nuclear deal or the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.
• Since then, IAEA is pursuing a safeguards investigation into whether Iran failed to declare traces of uranium found at three undeclared sites and has become essential for a potential Iran deal as the country demands that the investigation be wrapped up for a deal to see the light of day.
• The IAEA probe relates to mainly old sites that apparently existed before or around 2003, which is when the IAEA and U.S. intelligence believe Iran halted a coordinated nuclear arms program. Iran denies this, but the IAEA was provided intel from Israeli intelligence about such material from the Iranian archives, which the country did not declare in its CSA.

 

North Korea:

• In North Korea, the IAEA was the first to announce that the country’s nuclear programme was not peaceful.
• North Korea in turn expelled all of IAEA’s inspectors in 2009, after which it has not been able to conduct an on-site visit there.
• The world is now reliant on ground sensors and satellite imagery to observe North Korea’s nuclear actions.

 

India:

• As for India, while it is not a signatory to the NPT, it is a ‘designated Member’ of the IAEA and has served on its Board of Governors.
• India signed a CSA with IAEA in 2009 and also subscribed to more scrutiny by the body entering into an “Additional Protocol” for the Application of Safeguards to Civilian Nuclear Facilities in 2014.

 

What are some of the criticisms of the IAEA?

• For years, there have been questions about the Agency’s ability to work independently, without being drawn into big power rivalries.
• The most recent case in point is Iran’s criticism of the body for relying on Israeli intelligence at the beginning of its 2018 undeclared material investigation.
• When Pakistan pursued a nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s, despite overwhelming evidence in possession of the American authorities, they did not pursue the case effectively through the IAEA because of the cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan on the Afghan front.
• Another issue is the IAEA’s lack of enforcement capability, it had “uneven authority” as it does not have any power to override the sovereign rights of any member nation of the UN.
• One major criticism of the IAEA is that it has not been able to challenge the nuclear dominance of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who themselves hold some of the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world. According to experts, the biggest difficulty facing the IAEA is with the U.S. and Russia.

 

What has the current mission said about the Zaporizhzhia NPP?

• After inspecting all areas of the Russian-captured plant, the IAEA director general said that as the site came in the line of military activity, it is obvious that the plant and the physical integrity of the plant has been violated, several times.
• In March, after a fire broke out due to alleged shelling near the Zaporizhzhia NPP, it had outlined the seven “indispensable pillars of nuclear safety and security” at a nuclear facility, warning that “several of them had already been put at risk during events overnight at the Zaporizhzhya NPP”.
• The pillars relate to maintaining structural integrity, the ability of the operating staff to make decisions free of undue pressure, and securing an alternate off-site power supply from the grid, among others.
• The increased military activity in the region worried him a lot as it posed a risk of physical damage to the plant.

 

Justice, rendered, but only incompletely

(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)

 

Why in news?

• Recently, a Bench of the Supreme Court of India led by the Chief Justice of India, granted interim bail to human rights activist TeestaSetalvad who was arrested in June 2022.
• The Court, in the instant case, has directly confronted a politically vindicative executive and performed its role. Yet, the order calls for critical discourse.

 

Questions raised by the Supreme Court:

Rather than the solution of interim bail that the Court has rightly provided to the activist, it is the set of questions that it has posed which requires the attention of all concerned, especially those at the helm of affairs.

1. During the hearing, the judges underlined four “features” of the case that “bothered” the Court. They are: omission in filing the charge sheet even after two months of Ms. Setalvad’s arrest;
2. registration of the First Information Report (FIR) on the very next day of the Supreme Court’s judgment that dismissed Zakia Jafri’s plea against exoneration of Narendra Modi and others in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with strictures against Ms. Setalvad and others;
3. the long adjournment of the bail plea by the High Court (from August 3 to a date after September 19);
4. lack of allegations regarding commission of any offence serious enough to deny bail.

The Court’s pointed questions have clearly exposed the malice in the State’s action. More importantly, the same questions remain equally relevant and compelling in hundreds of cases across the country, with an important supplement, that, in many of them, draconian provisions have also been recklessly invoked, to victimise the dissidents.

Concerns:

• The order, after noting the long custody of the appellant lady and the opportunity availed by the police officers for custodial interrogation, said that the petitioner had made out a case for “the relief of interim bail, till the matter was considered by the High Court”.
• When the fundamental questions which the Court posed remained relevant, the Supreme Court, as the guardian of the Constitution, should have and could have done better by answering them and granted regular bail to Ms. Setalvad, by which a useful precedent would have been set for the other accused (who are almost identically situated) in the case as well. Viewed in this way, the order is disappointing.

 

Indefinite bail delay:

• Adjournment of regular bail applications for an indefinite period occurs in many High Courts. This is an issue that should have been taken up seriously by the top court.
• In the very same context, the Court ought to have also held that when such an indefinite delay happens, that by itself is a reason for an appeal before the Supreme Court under Article 136 of the Constitution.
• The Solicitor General had raised a contention on the maintainability of Ms. Setalvad’s appeal based on the doctrine of elections, suggesting thereby that the petitioner having moved the High Court, should have waited for the High Court’s final decision. This could have been easily rejected by the top court on the ground of a gross violation of fundamental rights.
• In a scenario where the High Courts take several weeks or even months together in deciding a bail plea, the Supreme Court should have deprecated such practice.
• Ms. Setalvad’s case was a classic one where the delay in taking the decision itself amounted to an adverse decision warranting intervention by the top court. It is curious to note that the Centre relied on the principles of ‘rule of law’ and ‘equality before the law’ at the Supreme Court, to detain the activist. This terrible irony required a judicial reprimand, which too, unfortunately, did not occur.

 

What were the charges against Ms. Setalvad?

• On June 24, a Bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, quite unfairly and without materials, blamed Ms. Setalvad and others for showing “the audacity to question the integrity of every functionary” associated with the investigation.
• In the context of the long litigation for rendering justice to the Gujarat riot victims, Ms. Setalvad and others were accused of “keeping the pot boiling”. Without any convincing reason, the Bench also said that “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law”.
• This deplorable approach, which was erroneous and unjust, was the basis for the high-handed action against Ms. Setalvad and others.
• In view of this, the trial court as well as the High Court might have turned reluctant to grant bail to the accused. This is all the more the reason why the Supreme Court, as an institution, should have invoked its introspective jurisdiction to grant regular bail to Ms. Setalvad, which unfortunately did not happen.

 

Related judgements:

• In the celebrated judgment in GudikantiNarasimhulu (1977), Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer wrote: “The issue of ‘Bail or Jail’ -at the pretrial or post-conviction stage-although largely hinging on judicial discretion, is one of liberty, justice, public safety and burden of the public treasury, all of which insist that a developed jurisprudence of bail is integral to a socially sensitized judicial process.”
• These prophetic words had resonance in Joginder Kumar vs State of U.P. (1994), where the Court ordered procedural imperatives for arrest.
• In Sanjay Chandra vs CBI (2011), the Court put the issue in perspective: “The object of bail is neither punitive nor preventative”. It is only to “secure the appearance of the accused”.
• The judgment in Arnesh Kumar vs State Of Bihar &Anr. (2014), relying on the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code and the Law Commission reports, warned against arbitrary arrests and detention.

 

Conclusion:

• Recently, in Satender Kumar Antil vs Central Bureau Of Investigation (2022),while urging for a Bail Act in India, the Supreme Court said that the ideas of democracy and the Police state are conceptually opposite to each other.
• It is the Court’s own judicial philosophy on bail that makes the order in Ms. Setalvad’s case inadequate. The case deserved a better and stronger intervention. True, justice was rendered. But only incompletely.

 

Deploying 5G in a world built on 4G technology

(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)

Context:

• Since the dawn of mobile communication in the early 1980s, companies and consumers have been adapting to new ways of sending and receiving information.
• The first-generation technology let people make and receive phones calls through their mobile handheld devices while the second and third generations added text and multi-media messaging, as well as email services to cell phones.
• The emergence of 4G in the early part of the past decade changed the mobile-telephone landscape.

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard-based generation had two important characteristics that set it apart from its predecessors.

4G multiplexing:

• With 4G-capable cell phones, people could make calls over the Internet instead of via telephone networks. This generation’s evolution to 4G+ (LTE advanced), which offered download speeds of 200 to 300 Mbps, made it easier for people to connect and talk over the Internet.
• Secondly, 4G’s multiplexing capability, technically known as orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM), provided a level of efficiency in achieving high data transfer rates while allowing multiple users to share a common channel.
• The OFDM modulation scheme divides a channel into several subcarriers. These subcarriers are spaced orthogonally so they don’t interfere with one another despite the lack of guard bands between them.
• It is this aspect of 4G that lets people use social media, download music in an app, and live-stream videos on mobile devices.

 

Need for 5G:

• Since 4G’s inception in the early 2010s, the number of smartphone users have grown significantly.
• According to data intelligence firm Statista, the total number of smartphone users in the world has nearly doubled in the last seven years to 6.6 billion in 2022, from 3.7 billion in 2016. This number is estimated to rise by another billion by 2027.
• The number of devices and things connected to the internet is not confined to the consumer world.
• Enterprises are also moving to digital channels and optimising the way tasks get done with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), predictive maintenance, and other environmental condition monitoring sensors.
•  For these devices to work in sync with several other applications a far superior networking and connectivity is needed and the decade-old LTE-based generation is ill-prepared to handle workloads and real-time data processing of this magnitude.

 

5G New Radio (NR):

• The latest iteration of mobile connectivity offers low latency, greater download speeds coupled with the ability to connect multiple devices and exchange data in real-time.
• Building on the multiplexing technology of its predecessor, 5G ushers in a new standard called 5G New Radio (NR), which uses the best capabilities of LTE. 5G NR will enable increased energy savings for connected devices and enhance connectivity.
• Apart from this, the fifth-generation of mobile communication will use high-frequency millimeter wave (mmWave) bands that operate on wavelengths between 30 GHz and 300 GHz. For comparison, 4G’s LTE operates on wavelengths under 6 GHz.

 

Modes of deploying 5G:

• The telecom operators and businesses looking to build their services on 5G have two options. They can either build a non-standalone (NSA) or a standalone architecture.
• In an NSA framework, the operator can use their existing installed capacities and LTE architecture to deploy 5G services while implementing a new radio access network (RAN).
• The operations in the core network will be supported by the existing evolved packet core (EPC) from LTE. This short-to-medium term strategy can help operators reduce capital expenditure and lower operating costs that may arise from installing a new core network.

 

Standalone model:

• The SA model is a pureplay 5G architecture that provides operators full range of the fifth-generation’s capability and lets them slice the network. In this architecture, RAN and the core are completely new, and there will be a clear separation of different network functions in line with 3GPP recommendations.
• U.S.-based Dish Network Corporation deployed a standalone 5G network in 2021. The cloud-native firm is said to be building an Open RAN-based network from scratch, and is looking to run its service on the public cloud.

 

Scenario in India:

• In India, Chinese handset maker Oppo conducted 5G network trials in July 2021 on one of its premium smartphones under the SA network environment provided by Reliance Jio at its 5G Lab in Hyderabad.
• Reliance Industries Limited plans to expand its 5G network to “every town” in India by the end of 2023. The firm plans to implement 5G SA architecture to provide better performance than an NSA based set up.

 

Way Forward:

• Different countries and firms are at various stages of 5G deployment. Telecom operators will drive 5G deployment towards a standalone future in the next few years. This will simplify their network operations and improve user experience.
• And just like how the mobile device-based communication era made people adapt to the new technology four decades ago, 5G could potentially make consumers connect and exchange information in a new way.