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A Surat court on convicted former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in a criminal defamation case and awarded him a two-year jail term over his “why all thieves have Modi surname” comment.
Mr. Gandhi was present at the court when the judge passed the verdict. The court suspended the sentence for 30 days, so that Mr. Gandhi can appeal in a higher court.
The court has given bail to him on ₹10,000 bond. The Congress has said that it will appeal against the verdict.
Mr. Gandhi had allegedly made the remarks during campaigning for the 2019 parliamentary polls. The criminal defamation case was filed against him by BJP MLA Purnesh Modi, who was earlier president of the BJP unit of Surat city.
In his complaint, Mr. Purnesh Modi alleged that Mr. Gandhi while addressing a poll rally in 2019 in Karnataka defamed the entire Modi community with his remark, “How come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname?”
Chief Judicial Magistrate H.H. Varma had last week concluded hearing final arguments from both sides. Mr. Gandhi had last appeared before the Surat court regarding the case, filed under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 499 and 500 (dealing with defamation), in October 2021 to record his statement.
In the landmark 2013 Lily Thomas v Union of India judgment, the Supreme Court had clearly spelt out that a lawmaker stands immediately disqualified on attracting a sentence of two years or more unless the conviction is stayed by a higher court.
India rejects J&J’s attempt to extend patent on TB drug (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
In a victory for patients fighting for wider access to the crucial anti-tuberculosis drug Bedaquiline, the Indian Patent Office rejected U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson’s attempt to extend its monopoly on manufacturing the drug in India beyond July 2023.
J&J’s primary patents on Bedaquiline expire in July, paving the way for generic drug manufacturers such as Lupin and Macleods, among others, to produce Bedaquiline, thus ensuring cheaper and wider access to the drug. Currently, Bedaquiline tablets are priced at $400 per six-month treatment course.
Bedaquiline is a crucial drug in the treatment of multi-drug resistant TB patients for whom the first-line drug treatment has stopped working.
Since 2007, J&J had indulged in ‘evergreening’ — a strategy to extend the life of patents about to expire in order to retain revenues from them — by making multiple claims in its applications for patent extensions.
When the firm filed for evergreening of its patent on fumarate salt (a formulation salt of Bedaquiline), the practice was challenged by TB survivors Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisile.
We filed a patent challenge in 2019, because we wanted to ensure that safer, oral and efficacious drug Bedaquiline was available to all people who need it.
Editorial
A climate change survival guide to act on (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the synthesis report of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) cycle, drawing together key findings from its six most recent reports.
The report gains added legitimacy as its summary for policymakers is approved line-by-line by governments of the world. The United Nations Secretary General has called it a ‘survival guide for humanity’.
The report can shape our collective response in this critical decade, which may be make-or-break for humanity, and is likely to be the last IPCC report for a few years.
The report confirms that human activity is ‘unequivocally’ driving global temperature rise, which has reached approximately 1.1° C above pre-industrial levels.
While the rate of emissions growth has slowed in the past decade, humanity is estimated to be on a 2.8° C(2.1°-3.4° C range) trajectory by 2100. This temperature rise has already led to rapid and widespread impacts on climatic systems.
It flags that “For any given future warming level, many climate-related risks are higher than assessed in AR5”. This new realisation underpins the considerable attention in the IPCC report to trajectories that constrain global warming to 1.5° C rather than 2° C. This relative focus on 1.5° C has two implications.
First, the amount of carbon that the world can cumulatively emit before reaching key temperature limits, i.e., the world’s ‘carbon budget’, is far lower for the 1.5° C than the 2° C target. Modelled global pathways suggest that limiting warming to 1.5° C (with a probability of >50% requires greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be reduced by 43% by 2030 (median estimate), while the same number for limiting warming to 2° C (probability of >67%) is 21%.
Strikingly, it notes that the projected CO2 emissions over the lifetime of existing fossil fuel infrastructure without additional abatement already exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5° C.
Explainer
India’s push for semiconductors (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Union Government has disbursed around ₹1,645 crore in performance-linked incentives (PLI) for electronics manufacturers so far, as part of its efforts to bring in more of the electronics supply chain to India.
The push for semiconductors, or integrated circuits, is far more pressing now, as these chips are found in practically every modern electrical appliance and personal electronics devices.
More and more nations are trying to turn away from China’s dominance in the space, following geopolitical pressures to de-leverage themselves from supply chain vulnerabilities.
Semiconductor fabrication units, or fabs, turn raw elements such as silicon into integrated circuits that are fit to be a part of practically all electronic hardware in the world. Fabs are highly capital-intensive undertakings, costing billions of dollars for large facilities.
Semiconductor fabs of today may still be building circuits, but they require highly reliable and high-quality supply of water, electricity, and insulation from the elements, reflecting the high degree of precision, cost and capital needed to make the sophisticated circuits.
Countries have spotted strategic value in cornering segments of the value chain for fabs, even as the sophistication and capital needed to run them have climbed to historic highs.
China pulled ahead of Taiwan last year, in terms of share of global sales from fabs, according to a report by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).
It’s not just India that is wary of this dominance. The U.S. passed the CHIPS Act last August, providing upwards of $280 billion in subsidies and investments to manufacturers opening fabs and making semiconductors in the U.S. This has been combined with restrictions on the Chinese semiconductor industry.
The government’s Invest India agency estimates that electronics manufacturing as a whole will be worth $300 billion by the financial year 2025–26.
Why is India’s CAMPA at odds with the new IPCC report? (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
A report released on March 20, that originates in the Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. expert body, states that not degrading existing ecosystems in the first place will do more to lower the impact of the climate crisis than restoring ecosystems that have been destroyed — a finding that speaks to an increasingly contested policy in India that has allowed forests in one part of the country to be cut down and ‘replaced’ with those elsewhere.
India has committed to adding “an additional (cumulative) carbon sink of 2.5-3 GtCO2e through additional forest and tree cover by 2030”, as part of its climate commitments to the U.N.
Afforestation is also codified in the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), a body chaired by the environment minister.
When forest land is diverted to non-forest use, such as building a dam or a mine, that land can longer provide its historical ecosystem services nor host biodiversity.
According to the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, the project proponent that wishes to divert the land must identify land elsewhere to afforest, and pay for the land value and the afforestation exercise. That land will, thereafter, be stewarded by the forest department.
The money paid sits in a fund overseen by the CAMPA. As of 2019, the fund had ₹47,000 crore. The CAMPA has come under fire for facilitating the destruction of natural ecosystems in exchange for forests to be set up in faraway places.
News
Government tapping technology to secure ancient scriptures for future: Amit Shah (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the government was securing the knowledge in India’s ancient scriptures and manuscripts for the future through technology.
Inaugurating the ‘Vedic Heritage Portal’ created by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) here, Mr. Shah said that with the help of this, the younger generation would be able to carry forward the knowledge and tradition of the Vedas and the Upanishads.
The IGNCA comes under of Ministry of Culture. Mr. Shah also inaugurated a virtual museum ‘Kala Vaibhav’ based on 64 arts, through which, he said, the world would be more familiar with India’s architecture, painting, drama, music, and thereby the rich history of the country’s glorious culture.
The portal is a one-stop solution for common users and researchers seeking any information regarding Vedic heritage. It gives detailed information about oral traditions, textual tradition in form of published books/manuscripts, or implements, the IGNCA said.
One conviction for unsafe sewer work so far, govt. tells panel (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Union government has informed a Parliamentary Standing Committee that FIRs have been registered in 616 cases where contractors had not provided safety gear and equipment to sewer workers.
Among the cases registered under the Manual Scavenging (Prohibition) Act, one conviction has been secured so far.
The Department of Social Justice and Empowerment made these submissions before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, which in a report tabled in both Houses, said that the implementation of the MS Act must be done strictly and that errant contractors should be “immediately held and convicted”.
The government submitted before the House panel that a total of 1,035 people had died in India due to hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks since 1993, and families of 836 victims have been given the full compensation of ₹10 lakh.
When asked about what action was being taken against contractors who were failing to provide safety gear to the workers, a representative of the Social Justice Ministry said that the Union government’s responsibility in this regard was to ensure the registration of FIRs.
Meanwhile, on the recently announced NAMASTE scheme (National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem), which proposes to spend ₹350 crore over the next three years, the panel urged the government to set up a timeline for enumerating the workers.
Panel questions low expenditure for two scholarship schemes (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
In the first nine months of the financial year 2022-23, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment was able to spend only 1% of its allocation for a pre-matric scholarship scheme for Scheduled Caste students and others; and less than half the amount allocated for a post-matric scholarship scheme for SC students, government data submitted before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment showed.
In its report on the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment’s Demands for Grants for 2023-24, tabled in both Houses, the House panel also pointed out that under the PM-YASASVI scheme, which provides for pre- and post-matric scholarship benefits to Other Backward Classes, Extremely Backward Classes, and Denotified Tribes, just a little over 2% of the more than ₹1,500 crore allocation had been spent, as of December 31, 2022.
The committee further noted that in the case of the post-matric scholarship for SC students, the government had been able to spend just ₹2,500.22 crore of the allocated ₹5,660 crore until December 31, 2022.
In the same time period, the actual expenditure on the pre-matric scholarship scheme for SC students and others was just ₹56 lakh out of the ₹500 crore allocated.
The low expenditure in the schemes for SC students was due to delays caused by a new disbursement mechanism for Centrally-sponsored schemes which require State contributions, the panel noted.
However, the PM-YASASVI scheme also saw low utilisation even though it is 100% supported by the Union government.
Business
GST appellate tribunal may be headed by a former SC judge (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Appellate Tribunal is likely to be headed by a former Supreme Court judge or a former Chief Justice of a High Court and its framework may permit the resolution of disputes involving dues or fines of less than ₹50 lakh by a single-member bench.
Amendments to the GST laws to enable the tribunal’s constitution, are expected to be introduced in the Lok Sabha.
While there will be one principal bench of the Appellate Tribunal in New Delhi and several State benches, appeals pertaining to disputes of less than ₹50 lakh that don’t deal with a question of law could be decided by a single-member bench, as per the norms approved by the GST Council.
In February, the Council had reached a broad consensus on the long-awaited appellate body’s functioning. Tax experts said the delay in setting up the Appellate Tribunal has led to a pile-up of unresolved legal matters over the tax.
Currently, taxpayers are filing writ petitions to directly move the High Court,” said Tanushree Roy, director at Nangia Andersen. “Establishment of Appellate tribunal would result in lower burden on the courts and taxpayers.