National Current Affairs – UPSC/KAS Exams- 1st November 2018
India moves up to 77th rank in Ease of Doing Business Index
Topic: Indian Economy
IN NEWS: India jumped 23 ranks in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index 2018 to 77. It ranked 100 in the 2017 report.
More on the Topic
- The Index ranks 190 countries across 10 indicators ranged across the lifecycle of a business from ‘starting a business’ to ‘resolving insolvency’.
- India’s strong reform agenda to improve the business climate for small and medium enterprises is bearing fruit. It is also reflected in the government’s strong commitment to broaden the business reforms agenda at the state and now even at the district level.
The Path to Improvement:
- During the past year, India made starting a Business easier by fully integrating multiple application forms into a general incorporation form.
- India also replaced the value added tax with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for which the registration process is faster in both Delhi and Mumbai, the two cities measured by the Doing Business report.
- In addition, Mumbai abolished the practice of site inspections for registering companies under the Shops and Establishments Act. As a result, the time to start a business has been halved to 16 days, from 30 days.
- There were several initiatives by the government in the works that would further ease doing business, such as enabling export and import using technology such as mobile phone.
Way Forward:
- Despite the sharp improvement India has made in several of the categories in the Index, there were others such as registering a property, starting a business, taxation, insolvency, and enforcing a contract where a lot of work still needs to be done.
Source:The Hindu
SC: live-in partner can seek maintenance
Topic: Polity and Governance
In news: A live-in partner can seek maintenance under the Domestic Violence Act, the Supreme Court has said in a recent order.
More on the topic:
- In fact, under the provisions of the DVC Act, 2005 the victim i.e. estranged wife or live-in-partner would be entitled to more relief than what is contemplated under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, namely, to a shared household also.
- It would be significant to note is that economic abuse also constitutes domestic violence under the 2005 Act.
Legal Status Of Live In Relationship
- In the absence of any law to define the status of live in relationships, the Courts have come forward to give clarity to the concept of live in relationships. The Courts have taken the view that where a man and a woman live together as husband and wife for a long term, the law will presume that they were legally married unless proved contrary.
- The first case in which the Supreme Court of India first recognized the live in relationship as a valid marriage was that of Badri Prasad vs. Dy. Director of Consolidation, in which the Court gave legal validity to the a 50 year live in relationship of a couple.
- In the case of Patel and Others., the Supreme Court has held that live in relationship between two adults without marriage cannot be construed as an offence. It further held that there is no law which postulates that live in relationships are illegal. The concept of live in relationship was again recognized in the case of Tulsa v. Durghatiya.
- In June, 2008, it was recommended by the National Commission for Women to the Ministry of Women and Child Development to include live in female partners for the right of maintenance under Section 125 of Criminal Procedure Code, 1973. The view was also supported by the judgment in Abhijit Bhikaseth Auti v. State Of Maharashtra and Others.
- In October, 2008, the Maharashtra Government also supported the concept of live in relationships by accepting the proposal made by Malimath Committee and Law Commission of India which suggested that if a woman has been in a live-in relationship for considerably long time, she ought to enjoy the legal status as given to wife.
Source:The Hindu
NASA’s Kepler space telescope to retire
Topic: Science and Technology
In news: The Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and will be retired after a 9-1/2-year mission in which it detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might harbour alien life
More on the Topic:
- Currently orbiting the sun 156 million km from the earth, the spacecraft will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters.
About Kepler:
- Kepler is a retired space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009,into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit.
- Designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way have such planets, Kepler’s sole scientific instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of approx 150,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.
- These data are transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by exoplanets that cross in front of their host star.
- Only planets whose orbits are seen edge-on from Earth can be detected. During its over nine years of service, Kepler observed 530,506 stars and detected 2,662 planets.
Source:The Hindu
Statue of Unity
Topic: Modern Indian history
In news:Statue of Unity has been inaugurated in Surat. The Statue of Unity is built in dedication to Iron Man Sardar Vallabhai Patel, who served as the first home minister of independent India.
About Statue of Unity:
- At 182 metre, the statue is 23 metre taller than China’s Spring Temple Buddha statue and almost double the height of the Statue of Liberty (93 metre tall) in US.
- Located on the Sadhu Bet island, near Rajpipla on the Narmada river, the Statue of Unity is located between the Satpura and the Vindhya mountain ranges.
- The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust (SVPRET), a special purpose vehicle set up by Modi in 2011, arranged some 129 tonnes of iron implements from nearly 100 million farmers in 169,000 villages across all states to construct the base of the statue in the ‘Loha’ campaign.
- The Statue of Unity was brought to fruition by Padma Bhushan-winning sculptor Ram V Sutar and intricate bronze cladding work was done by a Chinese foundry, the Jiangxi Toqine Company (JTQ).
- Sardar Patel is credited with uniting all 562 princely states in pre-independent India to build the Republic of India — hence the name of the statue. The date for the inauguration of the statue (October 31, 2018) also marks the 143rd birth anniversary of Sardar Patel.
Source:The Hindu
RBI-Centre Tussle
Topic: Indian Economy
In news: The break-down of communication lines between RBI and the Centre in recent times is worrying for the domestic economy.
More on the Topic:
- There are multiple flashpoints between the RBI and the Centre that seem to have precipitated this outburst.
- Disagreements between RBI and the centre over setting benchmark interest rates have been common over the years.But the disagreements appear to be over regulation in itself this time.
Concerns of RBI:
- There are three issues on which the Centre seems to have irked the RBI.It has refused to accept Governor Urjit Patel’s point that the RBI is hobbled by lack of adequate powers in regulating public sector banks.
- The second is the tussle over the RBI’s burgeoning reserves, a piece of which the Centre is eyeing to bridge its fiscal gap, while the RBI resents this.The last is the attempt by the Centre to set up an independent payments regulator, which the RBI sees as encroachment of its turf.
- The centre insisted on easing prudential norms for MUDRA and SME lending. With domestic banks just halfway through the process of resolving their mountain of NPAs from large corporates, it would be imprudent to increase SME loans without toning up their credit appraisal systems first.
- Centre has also demanded to relax Prompt Corrective Action rules for public sector banks, which might be fraught with risks to financial stability.
Concerns of centre
- The centre is upset over an RBI circular of February 12 which redefined NPAs and revised the framework for resolution.
- It is also upset that the central bank is not doing enough to ease the ongoing liquidity squeeze through extraordinary measures. However, the RBI argues that it lacks powers to replace managements or revoke licenses of PSBs, when questioned on regulatory gaps that led to bank NPAs and frauds.
- But it has effectively used its existing supervisory powers to plug process gaps in banks or head off ever greening of loans in recent times.The centre finds RBI guilty of not detecting the bad loans of banks in time or figuring out the IL&FS mess despite it being a systemically important NBFC.
- However, much of this applies to the government as well.As the owner of PSU banks, it needed to know what was happening and that is why it had its directors on these banks.As for IL&FS, apart from RBI, others were members of the Financial Stability and Development Council which is headed by the finance minister and the top shareholders of IL&FS include LIC, SBI and Central Bank of India.
- The government is also concerned with raising repo rates, since it is projected to rise its borrowings from the market in the future.
- There is an estimation of Rs 1.7 lakh crore of ‘extra budgetary resources’ to be raised in FY19, which will correspondingly involve higher interest payments in future if interest rates are raised.
Source:The Hindu
MSME Support and Outreach Programme
Topic: Indian Economy
In News: The Prime will be launching the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Support and Outreach Programme.
About MSME Support and Outreach Programme:
- MSME Outreach Programme will run for 100 days covering 100 Districts throughout the country. Various Central Ministers are likely to visit these districts in order to apprise the entrepreneurs about various facilities being extended to MSME Sector by the Government and financial institutions and to come forward and make best use of these facilities including access to credit and market, etc.
- It is expected that this Outreach Programme will help in further boosting the MSME sector since this sector is one of the major generator of employment opportunities and making a significant contribution to the overall growth of the economy.
Importance of MSME Sector in India
- Micro, Small & Medium enterprises- is the pillar of economic growth in many developed, and developing countries in the world.
- Often rightly termed as “the engine of growth” for India, MSME has played a prominent role in the development of the country in terms of creating employment opportunities-MSME has employed more than 50 million people, scaling manufacturing capabilities, curtailing regional disparities, balancing the distribution of wealth, and contributing to the GDP-MSME sector forms 8% of GDP.
- Though India is still facing infrastructural problems, lack of proper market linkages, and challenges in terms of flow of institutional credit, it has seen a tremendous growth in this sector.
- The advantage of this sector is it requires less investment, thus creating employment on a large scale, and reducing the employment and underemployment problems. Moreover, this sector has survived almost all threats emerging out of still completion from both domestic and international market.
- With the introduction of the MSME Act in the year 2006, the service sector that was not yet included in this sector was included in the definition of the Micro, Small & Medium sized Enterprises making a historic change to this Act, thus leveraging the scope of the sector even now government simplified the MSME Registration Online with the paperless work.
Safe City Project
Topic: Government Policies
In News: The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has approved a Safe City project for Lucknow at a total cost of Rs.194.44 crore under the Nirbhaya Fund Scheme. The project would be implemented as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme with Centre and State sharing the funding in 60:40 ratio.
About Safe City Project:
- The city will soon have integrated smart control room, exclusive women outposts, pink toilets, night patrols of women police and women help desks in all police stations with counsellors.
- It was approved by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs as part of its plans to implement Safe City Projects in eight selected cities Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Lucknow under the Nirbhaya Fund Scheme.
- The project is being implemented in consultation with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Urban Development, Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology, respective municipal and police commissioners of the cities besides civil society organisations.
- The other components of the project are an augmentation of existing Asha Jyoti Kendra, implementing safety measures in buses, including installation of cameras, improving street lighting and integration of women power helpline with single Emergency number ‘112’.
- The project also envisages gender sensitisation awareness campaigns and capacity building in collaboration with community and civil society organisations.
