23 September 2024, The Hindu
GST Council is looking at tax rates item by item for rationalisation: Sitharaman
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GS 3: Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization, of resources, growth, development and employment
- Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday (September 21, 2024) said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council is looking at the GST rates, item by item, for rationalisation and the process was being discussed for a long time and delayed due to several factors including the impact of COVID-19.
- In an interaction with senior journalists of The Hindu Group of Publications at The Hindu’s head office in Chennai, Ms. Sitharaman, while responding to a question on rationalisation of GST, said: “It has been delayed for a long time and it’s much overdue due to various factors including the impact of COVID-19, election in some States. Now there is the seriousness, saying we need to take this up. The committee [Group of Ministers committee on rate rationalisation] is looking into it item by item.”
Quad launches maritime, health initiatives; condemns aggression in disputed regions
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GS 2: Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests
- The leaders of the Quad group of countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, U.S. President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met at their sixth summit level meeting at Archmere Academy, Mr Biden’s former school in Claymont, Delaware, to announce a broad range of outcomes. These included the launch of a new coast guard exercise, a logistics network, expansion of maritime surveillance, and a project to combat cervical cancer.
Left leader Dissanayake is Sri Lanka’s new President
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GS 2: India and its neighborhood- relations
- Anura Kumara Dissanayake emerged winner in Sri Lanka’s presidential race on Sunday (September 22, 2024), obtaining a mandate that signals a clean break from the island nation’s political establishment and ushers in unprecedented change.
- Mr. Dissanayake was officially declared President-elect by the Election Commission of Sri Lanka after it completed a second count of votes to add preference votes, an exercise undertaken for the first time in the country’s election history.
CWC took unilateral decision to release water: Mamata to PM
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GS 2: Issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure
- Upping the ante against the Union government, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday (September 22, 2024) wrote another letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the flood situation in the State, pointing out that all critical decisions to release water were made unilaterally by the representatives of the Central Water Commission (CWC) without arriving at a consensus.
- This is the second letter by the Chief Minister to the Prime Minister in a span of two days, blaming the release of water from the reservoirs controlled by the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) for inundation of large areas in south Bengal. Ms. Banerjee in her letter dated September 20 said that her government will sever all association with the DVC if the situation continues to remain the same. According to the Chief Minister, the DVC has released about five million cusecs of water and she claimed that five million people in the State were affected by the floods.
AMU teachers’ outfit expresses concern over the Waqf Bill
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GS 2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Education
- The Aligarh Muslim University Teachers’ Association on Sunday (September 22, 2024) hosted its first public meeting on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 in which over a hundred members of teaching and non-teaching staff participated. The event underscored concerns regarding the possible homogenisation of the waqf system, which could lead to the “erosion of local and cultural variations”.
- Prof. Aftab Alam, former secretary of AMUTA, said there was a mismatch between the stated objectives of the Bill and the proposed legislation. “At a time when there is a trust deficit between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Muslim community, the BJP-led government should first focus on confidence building rather than creating further mistrust,” Prof. Alam told The Hindu.
India needs a ‘National Security Strategy’
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GS 3: Security challenges and their management
- The demand for a national security strategy is again under public discussion as the neighbourhood gets into a flux, old enemies muscle up, and new friends are yet to commit themselves. India’s economic ambitions to be a $4 trillion economy, is also likely to also face strong headwinds as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue, dragging down global growth. The economy is really the key to everything else. After all, everyone wants a slice of the economic pie, from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Defence. That means prioritisation within rather scarce resources, and that is the key to national security strategy making.
- For such an exercise, one has to first decide what comes under the umbrella term of ‘national security’. The problem is it means different things to different states, at different times.
Brace for the new threat to air passenger safety
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GS 2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation
- The recent and startling incidents in West Asia of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies have had another effect. A question mark now hangs over the safety of flights. The Israelis, with the blessings of the Americans and the western world, have been running amok. Do the powers realise that the backlash is going to affect innocent air travellers? When the COVID-19 pandemic grounded flights worldwide, the world pointed the finger at China. It is now obvious that Israel has escalated matters and its tactics may pose risks to aviation.
- In the 1970s and 1980s, hijacking was the method used to settle political scores. It fizzled out slowly until the 9/11 tragedy that set off worldwide paranoia. The security checks introduced took the pleasure out of flying. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) came up with several safety standards to prevent another 9/11 event. The world, except India, exempted only a limited number of dignitaries from the mandatory security checks. In 1989, in India, there were just five categories of persons exempt from security checks (even Union Cabinet ministers were not exempt; the Governors of States were added to the list later). But India is the only country where individuals with very suspect and shady antecedents get VVIP status because of the illogical exemption granted by the government to please its political colleagues.
Capturing the cost of healthy diets
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GS 2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health
- Despite falling poverty rates and rising incomes over the last decade or more, India has struggled to substantially improve its nutritional outcomes. The National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) in 2015-16 and 2019-21 show stubbornly high rates of undernutrition among children and high (and rising) rates of anaemia among adults, even as obesity and overweight prevalence has increased in both rural and urban areas.
- Healthy nutritious diets are widely recognised as key to tackling the so-called ‘triple burden of malnutrition’, that is, the coexistence of undernutrition, overnutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies, as is the case in India. Unfortunately, most Indians do not consume healthy diets.
On the pitfalls of estimating GDP
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GS 3: Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilization, of resources, growth, development and employment
- Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is the most significant measure of a country’s economic size. It is also a universal denominator for comparing indicators across countries and regions or for sizing up tax burdens or welfare expenditures. GDP is usually more meaningful at “constant” prices or in “real” terms — netting out the effect of price changes. The real GDP is estimated for the “base year”, requiring a variety of datasets on output, prices, and employment. Every 5-10 years, the GDP base year is revised to account for changes in relative prices and output composition. The National Statistical Office (NSO) is tasked with “ revising” the GDP series, usually drawing upon expertise from many fields.
- The ongoing GDP series with the base year 2011-12 is due for revision. 2020-21 is the proposed new base year. All required major datasets are said to be available except for Census data. The NSO is considering using the goods and services tax (GST) data to estimate value addition, replacing the currently used Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ MCA-21 database for the Private Corporate Sector (PCS), which accounts for about 38% of GDP.
Doval stayed back from PM’s U.S. visit to deal with security situation in J&K polls: officials
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GS 3: Challenges to internal security
- National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval stayed back in India to deal with the security situation arising from the ongoing Jammu and Kashmir election and other “domestic issues”, officials said. The officials dismissed speculation that Mr. Doval dropped out of the visit due to a summons issued by a New York court, even as the Khalistan issue and allegations from Sikh groups against the government appeared to loom over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s three-day U.S. visit.
- The summons, in response to a civil suit filed by Khalistani activist and Sikhs for Justice founder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, followed by the introduction of a newly drafted Act against ‘Transnational Repression’ that names India in the American Senate, as well as a meeting between the U.S. White House and National Security Council officials and Sikh activists from groups that have campaigned against the Modi government, has led to questions over whether the U.S. government was sending a “sharp message” to New Delhi, diplomats said.
Modi celebrates his return to power at diaspora event
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GS 2: Indian diaspora
- Addressing thousands of his supporters in Long Island, New York, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday (September 22, 2024) talked up his general election performance, highlighted the government’s achievements in the past 10 years and the plans for the future, as he repeatedly praised the Indian diaspora.
Only 16% of land reclaimed under Swachh project to rid urban areas of legacy waste
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GS 1: Urbanisation, their problems and their remedies
- Launched with much fanfare, the legacy waste management project of the Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 has been a slow starter, with only 470 out of 2,424 dumpsites completely remediated and an area of 16% reclaimed, three years since the mission was rolled out.
- Legacy waste dumpsites are places that contain solid waste that has been collected and stored for years in an unscientific and uncontrolled manner.
India envoy meets BNP leadership in Bangladesh
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GS 2: India and its neighborhood- relations
- In a significant act of political outreach, the High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh, Pranay Verma, and his colleagues met Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, general secretary of the principal Opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in Dhaka. This is the first meeting between the BNP leadership and the Indian diplomats stationed in Bangladesh after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina government on August 5, 2024.
- “India wants to bring a positive outlook to the relation with the BNP. They are also seeking to strengthen BNP’s relation with political parties in India. They conveyed that they would like to firm up relations with Bangladesh, especially in the context of the big political change that has taken place here,” said Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, briefing the media after the meeting that took place at the BNP’s headquarters in the Gulshan neighbourhood of Dhaka. He shared that the two sides discussed the security situation.
