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Rescue teams work to retrieve bodies from the wreckage at the crash site of an aircraft carrying 72 people in Pokhara in western Nepal on January 15, 2023.
Search teams retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders Monday of a passenger plane that plummeted into a gorge on approach to a new airport in the foothills of the Himalayas, officials said, as investigators looked for the cause of Nepal’s deadliest plane crash in 30 years.
At least 68 of the 72 people aboard were killed, and officials believe the three missing are also dead. Rescuers combed through the debris, scattered down a 300-meter-deep (984-foot-deep) gorge, for them.
Many of the passengers on Sunday’s flight were returning home to Pokhara, though the city is also popular with tourists since it’s the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit hiking trail.
The relatives and friends were still gathered outside a local hospital, some shouting at officials to speed up the post mortems so they could hold funerals for their loved ones.
It’s still not clear what caused the crash, which took place less than a minute’s flight from the airport on a mild day with little wind.
In footage taken by a passenger out of a window as the plane came in for a landing, buildings, roads and greenery are visible below.
The video, by Sonu Jaiswal and verified by The Associated Press, then shows a violent jolt and a series of jerky images accompanied by yelling before flames fill the screen.
Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said the aircraft last made contact with the airport, which began operations only two weeks ago, from near Seti Gorge. A witness who recorded footage of the plane’s descent said it looked like a normal landing until the plane suddenly veered to the left.
The twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft, operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines, was completing the 27-minute flight from the capital, Kathmandu, to Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west.
It was carrying 68 passengers, including 15 foreign nationals, as well as four crew members, Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement.
The foreigners included five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one each from Ireland, Australia, Argentina and France.
Editorial
This is an ‘address’ of great constitutional importance (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Governor of Tamil Nadu, in the customary Governor’s address to Members of the Tamil Nadu Assembly (on January 9, the first session for 2023), skipped an important and politically significant paragraph, which has stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy in the State.
The paragraph in question referred to the Dravidian model of governance which has great political and cultural significance especially in Tamil Nadu.
The present Governor is known to have no emotional link with the concept of a Dravidian model of governance or politics or its rich cultural past (evident in his speeches and observations), which is understandable.
The issue here is not one of the Governor’s personal likes or dislikes of a particular political ideology or a cultural tradition, but whether the constitutional authority can deviate from well-established and mandatory constitutional practices while performing a constitutional function.
Time to streamline the Provident Fund pension scheme (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
For around 70 lakh pensioners, the end to the agonising wait for higher pension under the Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS), 1995, appears to be no where in sight even though it has been over two months since the Supreme Court of India reiterated, as a matter of principle, its approval of the idea of higher pension.
A circular issued in late December by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), the administering body for the EPS, has only aggravated the sense of pain pensioners experience.
Though considered a sequel to the Court’s verdict where the EPFO was asked to implement the Court’s directions of October 2016 too, the circular covers only a segment of pensioners — that too subject to certain conditions.
It all began in early 2005 when a section of Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation staff, on the eve of their retirement, demanded higher pension.
As their employer had made the 12% mandatory contributions on their actual pay, which exceeded the statutory ceiling, they would be entitled to the benefit of the deposit of 8.33% of their actual salary in the Pension Fund.
But the EPFO was not impressed as the employees along with their employer did not exercise their option within the cut-off date. Eventually, the matter went to the Supreme Court.
In October 2016, the top court rejected the EPFO's notion of a cutoff date and held that the cut-off date, as in the EPS rules, was meant to calculate the pensionable salary only. An estimate shows that 24,672 pensioners got the benefit of higher pension.
Social equalizer (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Union Cabinet’s recent decision to earmark ₹2,600 crore for providing banks with an incentive to promote digital payments has focused attention on India’s welcome push to broaden and deepen alternatives to the most widely accepted method of payment worldwide, cash.
The Reserve Bank of India’s ‘Payments Vision 2025’ document observes that ‘payment systems foster economic development and financial stability’ while supporting financial inclusion.
There can be no two views that the rapid and widespread adoption of digital payment methods, coupled with steps to bring more people into the banking system’s fold, has significantly helped cut the reliance on cash for low-value transactions, especially in metros and cities.
At the heart of this payments revolution has been the National Payments Corporation of India and its Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The UPI’s function as a lynchpin transaction enabler has been key in undergirding this transformation.
In December 2022, the total monthly volume of UPI-facilitated transactions aggregated almost 783 crore with the value exceeding ₹12.8 lakh crore.
While this was a 71% jump in volume and a 55% increase in value from a year earlier, the UPI volume last month was close to 54 times the transactions in December 2017, and a staggering 98.6-fold of the value seen five years earlier.
The adoption of digital payment methods, while accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has also been enabled by the widening number of banks which have backed the UPI system, as well as the indigenous RuPay credit and debit cards.
A welter of private financial technology or fintech firms that offer tailor-made digital applications, and big technology and social media companies that have added payments with a view to enhancing stickiness with their core offerings have also been major enablers.
The banking sector, however, has been at a relative disadvantage in leveraging the payments ecosystem for its core business growth as the spending on infrastructure to support and secure such payments has been disproportionately higher than for fintech and big tech rivals.
The Government’s new incentive aims to level the field by offering payments in lieu of the commissions foregone by lenders in waiving the merchant discount rate they would otherwise have levied.
Still, challenges abound. Policymakers need to urgently ring-fence the wealth of individual spending data being generated and constantly enhance security to safeguard the payments system from cyberthreats.
Opinion
Balance fiscal consolidation with growth (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
s the number of COVID-19 cases subsided, 2022-23 was expected to be a normal year. However, this hope was shattered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The supply of critical imports was disrupted and, as a consequence, the prices of such imports increased sharply, derailing many economies. Growth slowed down, and India was affected too.
While India’s performance was relatively better than many other countries, the return to normalcy has been delayed. Even at the currently projected growth rate, India’s GDP at the end of the present fiscal year will only be 8.57% higher than its level in 2019-20, giving an average of 2.86% for three years. India needs to move on to a high growth path beginning 2023-24.
In 2022-23, real Gross Value Added (GVA) is estimated to grow by 6.7%. Its sectoral decomposition indicates that every output sector has turned positive as compared to the corresponding magnitudes in the pre-COVID-19 year of 2019-20.
In other words, the 2023-24 Budget would pertain to the first normalised economy after the pandemic shock. The expectation is that nominal GDP in 2023-24 may be close to ₹300 lakh crore.
This is based on applying a nominal growth of about 11-11.5%, which implies the assumption of a real growth in the range of 6-6.5% and a deflator-based inflation in the range of 4.5-5%. It may be noted that real growth in the second half of 2022-23 is only 5.5% as per the advance estimates.
Explainer
The Delhi CM-LG stalemate continues (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The recent flashpoint between Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Lieutenant Governor (LG) Vinai Kumar Saxena was triggered ahead of the January 6 election of the Mayor and deputy Mayor of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). AAP has accused the LG of issuing orders on “practically everything” and bypassing the elected government.
The LG appointed Satya Sharma, a BJP councillor, to preside over the mayoral polls issuing a gazette notification for the same. The AAP alleged that the LG had bypassed the tradition of nominating or appointing the senior-most councillor as the presiding officer and has also bypassed the elected government’s recommendation.
The LG also nominated 10 aldermen to the MCD who were persons who needed to have “special knowledge or experience in municipal administration”.
The AAP said that the aldermen had political links to the BJP and accused the LG of giving them voting rights in the mayoral polls, which is prohibited according to the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957. The first meeting of the newly-elected House of the MCD ended with councillors of the AAP and BJP coming to blows.
Mr. Kejriwal has accused Mr. Saxena of issuing orders on “practically every” subject directly to the Chief Secretary who gets them implemented, completely bypassing the elected government.
In a letter to the LG, Mr. Kejriwal said that barring the three reserved subjects of police, public order and land, executive control over all other subjects (transferred subjects) lies with the elected government but the LG has been issuing orders on these subjects and having them implemented by the bureaucracy.
The AAP’s stand is that the Supreme Court has said that the LG is bound by the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers on all transferred subjects. He can only invoke Article 239AA (4) of the Constitution if he differs with the decision of the Council of Ministers.
Replying to letters written to him, accusing him of bypassing the elected government, by Mr. Kejriwal, Mr. Saxena said that there are Constitutional provisions, Statutes and Acts that outline the multi-layered scheme of administration in the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi that emanated out of serious deliberations in the Constituent Assembly, State Reorganisation Commission, and Parliament of India, interpreted by various Supreme Court judgments.
His office released a statement with a point by point rationale for taking decisions that were pointed out by Mr. Kejriwal and said that these decisions were taken by him as he was the “administrator of NCT of Delhi”.
Why is Kerala opposing the new Electricity Rules? (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Government Policies and Interventions)
The gazette notification on the Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2022, came out on December 29. Ever since the Union Power Ministry shared the draft rules with the States last August, the CPI(M)-led government in Kerala had fiercely objected to Rule 14 which permits distribution companies (Discoms) to automatically recover from consumers, on a monthly basis, the expenses arising out of variations in fuel price and power purchase costs.
The Centre introduced the Electricity (Amendment) Rules, 2022, to amend the Electricity Rules, 2005. Rule 14 of the Rules requires the State electricity regulatory commission to specify a priceadjustment formula for automatically passing on the costs through the consumer tariff on a monthly basis.
"Fuel and power purchase adjustment surcharges shall be calculated and billed to consumers, automatically, without going through the regulatory approval process, on a monthly basis, according to the formula, prescribed by the respective State Commission," it says.
The State government has argued that giving Discoms the freedom to automatically pass on the aforementioned costs through the electricity bill endangers consumer interests.
The amendment spawns an "unstable pricing situation" in the power sector, akin to that of petrol and diesel prices. Consumers would be subjected, quite unfairly, to frequent price fluctuations, itsaid.
It further observed that the crucial role played by the State Electricity Commission in fixing the surcharge would get diluted. Electricity Minister K. Krishnankutty declared that his department would seek legal advice on how best to enforce the rules without burdening the consumers of the state-run Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB).
On January 11, Mr. Krishnankutty blamed the Centre for ignoring the State's stand and going ahead with the amendment.
Text & context
Plagiarism and malicious intent: does ChatGPT have an ethics problem? (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
November 2022, OpenAI opened to users its most recent and powerful Al chatbot, ChatGPT, to test its capability. It amazed netizens all over the world with its range of answering questions across disciplines.
The search interface could also generate fixes for broken code. The bot continues to attract diverse people to run experimental questions.
However, some users have been testing the bot's capability to do nefarious things. Illicit actors have tried to bypass the tool's safeguards and carry out malicious use cases with varying degrees of success.
Research outlet Ars Technica shared some exchanges between several forum users and Chat GPT. These users claimed the chatbot helped them write malicious code even though they claimed to be amateurs.
While it can close the gates for amateurcoders looking to build malware, the more seasoned ones could trick the bot into correcting or enhancing malicious code they have partially developed. They could get through the system by phrasing their request in an innocuousway.
A malicious code generator? OpenAl notes that asking its bot for illegal or phishing content may violate its content policy. But for someone trespassing such policies, the bot provides a starting point.
Cybersecurity firm Check Point's researchers tested the bot by asking it to draft a phishing email for a fictional web-hosting firm. In response, ChatGPT gave an impressive 'phishing email'.
The generated reply included a warning that read: "This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback - your input will aid our research in this area."
While surreptitiously asking ChatCPT to write malware is one problem, another issue several coders face is the inherently buggy code (buggy code refers to code which either already has bugs in it or is written in a way that will introduce bugs in the future) the bot spews out.
Things have gotten so bad that Stack Overflow, a forum for software programmers, banned its users from using any Al-generated code on the platform.
Check Point researchers also tested the bot on multiple scripts with slight variations using different wordings. They note that large language models (LLM) can be easily automated to launch complicated attack processes to generate other malicious artefacts.
News
ISRO likely to push Venus mission ‘Shukrayaan I’ to 2031 (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
In a talk on January 9, P. Sreekumar, the Satish Dhawan Professor at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and advisor to its space science programme, said that the organisation is yet to receive approval from the Indian government for the Venus mission and that the mission could as a result be postponed to 2031.
ISRO’s Venus mission, called Shukrayaan I, was expected to be launched in December 2024. The idea was born in 2012; five years later, ISRO commenced preliminary studies after the Department of Space received a 23% hike in the 2017-2018 budget. The organisation sought payload proposals from research institutes in April 2017.
Optimal launch windowsfrom earth to Venusoccur once around every19 months. This is why ISROhas “backup”launchdates in 2026 and 2028,should it miss the 2024 opportunity.
But even moreoptimal windows, whichfurther reduce the amountof fuel required at liftoff,come around every eightyears.Mr. Sreekumar, speakingat an IndoFrenchastronomymeeting at the IndianInstitute ofAstrophysics, Bengaluru,said that it was“originally scheduled for a2023 launch”, but that“right now the 2031 windowis very good”.