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Aided by good performance of the agriculture and services sectors, India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to grow 7 per cent in financial year 2022-23, supported by higher growth in agriculture and services sectors, according to the first advance estimates of national income released by the National Statistical Office (NSO).
This is slower than the 8.7 per cent GDP growth in 2021-22, but slightly higher than the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) forecast of 6.8 per cent for the current financial year.
Gross Value Added or GVA — which is GDP minus net product taxes — is seen growing at sub-7 per cent – 6.7 per cent in FY23 as against 8.1 per cent last fiscal.
The GDP projection of 7 per cent factors in a 0.2 per cent contraction in private final consumption expenditure during October-March, the second half of the current financial year, indicating weak demand and the impact of slowing exports.
However, the assumption of 11.9 per cent exports growth for October-March is seen as optimistic by experts, in the backdrop of a slowing global economy and declining export demand.
This marks the first official government estimate for economic growth ahead of the upcoming Union Budget for 2023-24. The first advance estimates, obtained by extrapolation of seven months’ data, are released early in January to help officers in the Union Finance Ministry and other departments frame the broad contours of the budget for the next financial year. The second advance estimate of GDP is then released on February-end.
Among sectors, agriculture is seen growing at 3.5 per cent in FY23 as against 3 per cent growth in the previous year, while the manufacturing sector is seen growing 1.6 per cent as against 9.9 per cent last fiscal.
Electricity generation is estimated to grow 9 per cent as against 7.5 per cent last year, while the construction sector is seen growing at 9.1 per cent as against 11.5 per cent last fiscal.
The services sector, especially hospitality and financial services, are expected to post a strong rebound. Trade, hotels, and transport services are projected to post a growth of 13.7 per cent in 2022-23 from 11.1 per cent growth last fiscal.
Financial, real estate and professional services are seen growing at 6.4 per cent in FY23 from 4.2 per cent. However, public administration, defence and other services are seen posting a slower growth rate of 7.9 per cent in FY23 as against 12.6 per cent growth last fiscal.
Supreme Court on delay by Govt: Extreme concern, signals other factors (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Supreme Court Friday expressed “extreme concern” over 10 recommendations for transfer of High Court judges pending with the government and said “keeping it pending sends a very wrong signal that other factors are coming into play”.
Calling it “a matter of great concern”, Justice Kaul pointed out that two of the names were sent by the end of September 2022 and eight by the end of November.
Honestly, in this the role of the government is very limited. If in the administration of justice, we feel some people have to be transferred, the Collegium does so. Keeping it pending sends a very wrong signal that other factors are coming into play which I would say is unacceptable to the collegium.
The bench, also comprising Justice A S Oka, detailed the process to underline the due diligence that the collegium deployed and “there is no reason” for the government to sit on the recommendations.
The Collegium discusses and seeks opinion of consultee judges and as also the Chief Justices from where the transfer is made and where to transfer is being made. Comments of the judges concerned are also obtained.
At times, at request of judge concerned, alternative courts are also assigned for transfer…This process is completed before a recommendation is made for transfer of a judge to the government.
Delay in the same not only affects the administration of justice but creates the impression… there are third party sources interfering on behalf of these judges with the government.
Hearing a plea which sought contempt action against the government for the alleged delay on its part in the matter of appointment of judges, the court also said that when lawyers become judges, they train to do their job independent of political affiliation and just because they have their own thought process doesn’t mean they are aligned one way or the other.
It, therefore, counselled the government “let’s not look to what the lawyer is doing” while deciding their eligibility to be made judges.
There are people of different points of view. And a court must reflect different philosophies and points of view…We praise Krishna Iyer as one of the outstanding contributors to the bench.
Express network
SC puts on hold HC order staying Assam-Meghalaya border pact (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The Supreme Court put on hold the Meghalaya High Court’s order staying the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by the chief ministers of Assam and Meghalaya for settling the border dispute.
The order was given by a bench comprising Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and J B Pardiwala. The bench was listening to submissions filed by Solicitor Tushar Mehta and lawyers representing governments of the two states.
The apex court also issued notices to the four people who had originally moved the high court against the execution of the MoU on various grounds including that the settlement breached Article 3 of the Constitution.
Article 3 empowers Parliament to make a law related to the formation of new states and alteration of the boundaries of existing states.
On December 9, a single judge bench of the Meghalaya HC had ordered an interim stay on physical demarcation or erection of boundary posts on the ground following the inter-state border pact.
Later, a division bench of the court refused to interfere with the earlier order, prompting the petitioners to an appeal in the SC.
Meghalaya and Assam CMs Conrad K Sangma and Himanta Biswa Sarma had in March last year signed an MoU for demarcating the border in at least six of the 12 contested locations that often raised tensions between their states.
On March 29 last year, the agreement was signed in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah by Sangma and Sarma.
The pact sought to resolve the protracted dispute in six of the 12 places along the 884.9-km border between the two states.
The boundary dispute between Assam and Meghalaya has been going on for 50 years, and efforts at resolution have picked up in the last few years.
First time in a decade, UK vessel sails to Port Blair (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
For the first time in a decade, an offshore patrol vessel of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, HMS Tamar, has entered Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as part of its permanent deployment in the Indo-Pacific region.
Over the next five days, the ship and her crew will undertake capability demonstrations and maritime exercises with the Indian Navy.
As per defence officials, this is the first time since 2011 that a Royal Navy ship has entered Andaman and Nicobar Islands which sits on the gateway to the Indo-Pacific region.
Naval ships of other foreign countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand are among those which visited the islands since 2011, though such visits have not been “very frequent.
This also shows the significant growth in the naval infrastructure of the Andaman and Nicobar Command to host foreign ships,” a defence official told The Indian Express.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who is on a two-day visit to the strategic military command at the islands, visited Indira Point, the southernmost tip of India, at the Great Nicobar Island—which is separated from Indonesia by the 163-km wide Six Degree channel.
Royal Navy ships have, however, visited other ports in the mainland and have in the past taken part in various maritime exercises with the Indian Navy, a recent one being the maiden India – UK Joint Tri-Service exercise Konkan Shakti between October 21-27, 2021, in the Arabian Sea.
Officials said any foreign ship visiting an Indian port first puts in a request, which after clearances from the Navy and the Ministry of External Affairs, is communicated to the country.
HMS Tamar, along with HMS Spey, are the two Royal Navy vessels on permanent deployment in the Indo-Pacific as set out in the UK’s Integrated Review, the British High Commission statement mentioned.
Supreme Court transfers to itself all pleas pending before HCs on same-sex marriages (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Supreme Court on Friday transferred to itself petitions pending before various High Courts seeking legal sanctity for same sex marriages.
A bench of Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and J B Pardiwala, which allowed the request to transfer the petitions, also permitted the petitioners to appear virtually before it.
As writ petitions are pending before Delhi, Kerala and Gujarat High Courts involving the same question, we are of the view that they should be transferred and decided by this court. We direct that all writ petitions shall stand transferred to this court.
It also deputed Advocate Arundhati Katju as nodal counsel for the petitioners and Advocate Kanu Agarwal as nodal counsel for the government side.
The Supreme Court is seized of a batch of pleas in the matter, including one by a 46-year-old Indian national, who said he married a US citizen in September 2010 in the US and registered their marriage in Pennsylvania, in June 2014.
He and his partner, residents of Pune, said their attempts to get their marriage registered under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, came to a naught as the Registrar of Marriages refused to grant their request.
They said they subsequently wrote to the Indian embassy in Washington DC, seeking to register the marriage under Foreign Marriage Act, 1969, but that request was also turned down.
Among other petitions are those filed by one Supriyo Chakraborty and Abhay Dang and Parth Phiroze Mehrotra and Uday Raj Anand, seeking recognition of same sex marriage under the Special Marriage Act, 1954.
Editorial page
Opening the campus door (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
Internationalisation of Indian higher education is a salient feature of National Education Policy 2020. The draft regulations of the UGC on Setting up and Operation of Campuses of Foreign Higher Educational Institutions in India 2023 pave the way for the entry of foreign universities into the groves of higher education in the country.
There is also a significant change. In NEP-2020, only the top-100 QS ranking universities could establish their branch campuses in India to provide quality higher education to Indian students who aspire to gain foreign degrees.
The UGC draft regulations-2023 have “top 500 foreign universities” and the ranking will be decided by the UGC “from time to time”.
Surely the top 100 universities were not terribly keen to open their campuses in India. A few Australian universities showed interest, for instance, in a conversation with this author in 2020 on the feasibility of foreign branch campuses in India.
Now the door is wide open. The draft regulations-2023 set another criterion for a branch campus to be opened up in India that “the applicant should be a reputed institution in its home jurisdiction”.
It is not clear how the UGC would determine the reputation of such foreign universities that do not appear in any world rankings but are considered “reputed” in their home country.
The draft regulations-2023 allow foreign higher educational institutions to decide a fee structure that is “transparent and reasonable”. This gives foreign branch campuses in India an upper hand in deciding different fees for different programmes. As a result, programmes with higher market value would be more expensive and not accessible to many students.
Foreign higher educational institutions now have the freedom to decide “qualifications, salary structure, and other conditions of service for appointing faculty and staff”.
Public higher education institutions in India follow the standard regulations (qualifications for recruitment, salary structure, and service condition) set by the UGC or state governments.
However, very few private universities in India adhere to these rules. The opaque salary structure of private higher education institutions remains a cause of concern to many and, in the absence of tangible recruitment rules, the gap would further widen once foreign branch campuses are operational in India.
The history and functioning of successful foreign branch campuses worldwide (for instance, Dubai Knowledge Park) indicate that the host country provides physical infrastructure to facilitate their strategy of internationalisation of higher education.
The new war machine (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Defence)
India is on a drive to induct unmanned combat systems into the military. Months after the Indian Army announced the induction of “swarm drones” into its mechanised forces, the Navy chief, Admiral R Hari Kumar, reiterated the importance of autonomous systems in creating a “future-proof” Indian Navy (IN). Speaking at the Navy Day press conference last month, Admiral Kumar listed initiatives to bolster the Navy’s operational prowess, including a move to procure a fleet of armed “Predator” drones from the United States.
It is incumbent on the IN, he said, to keep a close eye on the movements of Chinese vessels in the Indian Ocean Region. Military drones are important assets in “navigating the turbulent security situation” in the littorals.
The IN, indeed, has been on a mission to expand surveillance in India’s near-seas. Two years after it leased MQ-9B Sea Guardian drones from the US, the navy, in July 2022, released an unclassified version of its “unmanned roadmap” for the induction of remote autonomous platforms, including undersea vehicles.
A key driver for the enterprise is underwater domain awareness, deemed an increasingly vital component of maritime deterrence in the Eastern Indian Ocean.
In the aftermath of the conflict in Ladakh in June 2020, there is a growing sense among Indian experts and military planners that China’s undersea presence in the Indian Ocean is on the cusp of crossing a critical threshold.
Recent reports of the sighting of Chinese drones in the waters off Indonesian islands suggest the Peoples Liberation Army Navy has been studying the operating environment of the Indian Ocean.
Already, there has been a rise in the deployment of Chinese research and survey vessels in the waters around India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Ever more alive to the dangers posed by foreign undersea presence in Indian waters, the IN sought to acquire its own autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with twin surveillance and strike capabilities.
The navy’s interest in armed undersea drones, however, has tickled the curiosity of maritime observers. Despite being widely used in underwater search and exploration, underwater vehicles have never quite been viewed as warfighting assets by India’s military establishment.
Notwithstanding the AUVs’ utility in tasks such as mine detection and ship survey, India’s naval planners have traditionally desisted from deploying undersea drones in a combat role.
Ideas page
A lighter load for the court (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
Much has been said about why we have a staggeringly high number of cases that constitute “pendency” or cases that are undecided in the court system.
While there are multiple reasons for pendency, this column will focus on the government as the largest litigant in the court system. As an aside, we must appreciate that India has a terribly low number of judges serving a very large population.
To be more precise, India has about 21 judges for every million people, as the government recently informed the Rajya Sabha. China, by contrast, has about 159 judges for every million people.
Pendency or cases pending in courts have been a source of agony for litigants, lawyers and judges alike. I am sure it is also a cause of concern for the government since an arduous dispute resolution system adversely impacts governance and weakens law and order in any country.
Our government has been seized by the burdens of the justice system for long, and is acutely aware of its own role in contributing to the number of cases that enter the courts and remain to be decided.
On June 13, 2017, the department of justice of the Government of India, released an “Action Plan to reduce Government Litigation”.
The action plan was in response to the fact that 46 per cent of the total pending cases in the court system pertains to the government. Hence, the government has been cognisant of its role in contributing to litigation simply by being the biggest litigator in the courts.
In 2015, they started the rather aptly named LIMBS project (Legal Information Management Briefing System) that intends to connect 55 ministries and their departments for litigation management. Aptly named, for it seeks to connect the various limbs of governance of our state. As on January 3, LIMBS shows that there are 6,20,000 cases involving the government pending before the court system.
In 2018, the Law Commission of India, in its 230th report, noted that the government is the biggest litigant in the system. Similarly, the government’s own “status note” on the National Litigation Policy, 2010, comes to the same conclusion.
The status report to the NLP, 2010, was prepared because it is “based on the recognition that the government and its various agencies are the predominant litigants in the courts and tribunals in the country”.
Explained
Assam delimitation exercise: Why now, what are the concerns raised (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The new year has started with the Election Commission kicking off the process of delimitation of Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies in Assam.
The EC had announced on December 27, 2022 that the government had asked it in November to re-draw constituency boundaries in Assam, where delimitation has not been done since 1976.
Within a week of the announcement, the process of data collection through the office of the Assam Chief Electoral Officer has started.
While the EC has said it will formulate its own guidelines for the process, no time frame has been announced. The most-recent delimitation exercise, that of Jammu and Kashmir, took a little over two years to complete.
Boundaries of Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies are required to be updated from time to time to ensure that the population size in each seat is roughly the same.
The basic principle is that one vote should have the same value, irrespective of the constituency. Apart from population, geographical features, boundaries of administrative units and connectivity are also considered.
The Constitution says boundaries of Assembly constituencies should be updated after every decadal Census, but through amendments in 1976 and 2001, the process of delimitation was put off for 25 years each time.
So far, delimitation for the whole country has been carried out four times — under Delimitation Acts in 1952, 1962, 1972 and 2002 — and remains in abeyance till 2026.
In 2020, the government set up a Delimitation Commission for J&K, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland. But a year later, in March 2021, the government omitted the four North-Eastern states when it extended the tenure of the Commission.
The commission, headed by Justice Ranjana Desai, went on with redrawing the boundaries of J&K, giving its final award in May 2022. Now, the government and the EC have revived the delimitation plan for Assam, but are yet to state publicly what led to the decision.
The Election Commission is empowered to carry out delimitation of Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Nagaland, as per Section-8A of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.
The section says “if the President is satisfied that the situation and the conditions prevailing” in the states are conducive for conducting delimitation, then he or she may rescind the deferment order.
An order under the same section was issued by the President on February 28, 2020, saying that there had been “a significant improvement in the security situation”, allowing for the delimitation exercise in all four of the states.