Weekly Current Affairs (1st to 7th March 2023) Part - 2 | Current Affairs & Hindu Analysis: Daily, Weekly & Monthly - UPSC PDF Download

Supreme Court Verdict on ECI Appointments

Context: A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court (SC) unanimously ruled that the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners shall be made by the President on the advice of a Committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition of the Lok Sabha and Chief Justice of India (CJI).

• In case no leader of Opposition is available, the leader of the largest opposition Party in the Lok Sabha in terms of numerical strength will be a part of such committee.

What are the Other Important Points of the Verdict?

• SC Verdict:
  • SC stated that a reading of the debates of the Constituent Assembly (CA) on the appointment of ECI makes clear that all the members were of the clear view that elections must be conducted by an independent Commission.
  • The deliberate addition of the words “subject to the provisions of any law made in that behalf by Parliament” further indicates that CA envisaged parliament making norms to govern appointment to ECI.
  • While ordinarily, the court cannot encroach on a purely legislative power, but in the context of the Constitution and inertia of the Legislature and the vacuum created by it make it necessary for the court to intervene.
  • On the question whether process of removal should be same for CEC and the ECs, SC stated that it cannot be same as CEC has special position and article 324 becomes inoperable without CEC.
  • SC left the question of funding the EC, Permanent secretariat and need for expenditure to be charged on Consolidated Fund of India for the government to decide.
• Government Argument:
  • The government had argued that in the absence of such a law by parliament, the President has the constitutional power and asked the SC to exhibit Judicial restraint.

What is the Challenge?

• As the constitution places the power to make any law on appointment of ECI in the hands of Parliament, SC ruling on this issue poses a question of Separation of Power.
  • However, SC has stated that this ruling will be subject to any law made by parliament, which means parliament can bring a law to undo it.
• Another view is that since there is no law made by parliament on this issue, the Court must step in to fill the “constitutional vacuum.”

What are the Existing Provisions for Appointment to ECI?

Constitutional Provisions:

• Part XV (Article 324-329) of the Indian Constitution: It deals with elections and establishes a commission for these matters.

Structure of ECI:

• Originally the commission had only one EC but after the Election Commissioner Amendment Act 1989, it was made a multi-member body (1 CEC & 2 other ECs.).
• According to Article 324, the Election Commission shall consist of the CEC and such number of other election commissioners, if any, as the President may from time-to-time fix.

Appointment Procedure:

• Article 324(2): The appointment of the CEC and other Election Commissioners shall be made by the President, subject to the provisions of any law made in that behalf by Parliament.
  • The Law Minister suggests a pool of suitable candidates to the Prime Minister for consideration. The President makes the appointment on the advice of the PM.
• The President determines the conditions of service and tenure of office of the Election.
  • They have a tenure of six years, or up to the age of 65 years, whichever is earlier.

Removal:

• They can resign anytime or can also be removed before the expiry of their term.
• The CEC can be removed from office only through a process of removal similar to that of a SC judge by Parliament.
• Any other EC cannot be removed except on the recommendation of CEC.

Foreign Contribution Regulation Act

Context: Recently, the Ministry of Home Affairs suspended the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR).

• CPR (not-for-profit society), along with Oxfam India and the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation (IPSMF), was surveyed by the Income Tax department earlier.

What is the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act?

About:

• FCRA was enacted during the Emergency in 1976 amid apprehensions that foreign powers were interfering in India’s affairs by pumping money into the country through independent organisations.
• The law sought to regulate foreign donations to individuals and associations so that they functioned in a manner consistent with the values of a sovereign democratic republic.

Amendments:

• An amended FCRA was enacted in 2010 to “consolidate the law” on utilisation of foreign funds, and “to prohibit” their use for “any activities detrimental to national interest”.
• The law was amended again in 2020, giving the government tighter control and scrutiny over the receipt and utilisation of foreign funds by NGOs.

Criteria:

• The FCRA requires every person or NGO seeking to receive foreign donations to be:
  • registered under the Act
  • to open a bank account for the receipt of the foreign funds in State Bank of India, Delhi
  • to utilize those funds only for the purpose for which they have been received and as stipulated in the Act.
• FCRA registrations are granted to individuals or associations that have definite cultural, economic, educational, religious, and social programmes.

Exceptions:

• Under the FCRA, the applicant should not be fictitious and should not have been prosecuted or convicted for indulging in activities aimed at conversion through inducement or force, either directly or indirectly, from one religious faith to another.
• The applicant should also not have been prosecuted for or convicted of creating communal tension or disharmony.
  • Also, should not be engaged or likely to be engaged in the propagation of sedition.
• The Act prohibits the receipt of foreign funds by candidates for elections, journalists or newspaper and media broadcast companies, judges and government servants, members of legislature and political parties or their office-bearers, and organisations of a political nature.

Validity:

• FCRA registration is valid for 5 years, and NGOs are expected to apply for renewal within six months of the date of expiry of registration.
• The government can also cancel the FCRA registration of any NGO if it finds that the NGO is in violation of the Act, if it has not been engaged in any reasonable activity in its chosen field for the benefit of society for two consecutive years, or if it has become defunct.
• Once the registration of an NGO is cancelled, it is not eligible for re-registration for three years.

FCRA 2022 Rules:

• In July 2022, the MHA effected changes to FCRA rules which increased the number of compoundable offences under the Act from 7 to 12.
• The other key changes were exemption from intimation to the government for contributions less than Rs 10 lakh – the earlier limit was Rs 1 lakh — received from relatives abroad, and increase in time limit for intimation of opening of bank accounts.

World Bank to Lend USD 1 Billion to India’s Health Sector

Context: The World Bank has approved a loan of USD 1 billion to India to help the country prepare for future pandemics and strengthen its healthcare infrastructure.

• The loan will be split into two loans of USD 500 million each.

What Are the Areas Where World Bank Loan will be Channelised?

• The loan will be used to support India's flagship Pradhan Mantri-Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM), which was launched in October 2021, and will improve the public healthcare infrastructure across the country.
• Both loans utilize the Program-for-Results financing instrument, which focuses on achieving results rather than inputs. The loans have a final maturity of 18.5 years, including a grace period of five years.
• The Public Health Systems for Pandemic Preparedness Program (PHSPP) will provide USD 500 million to support the government's efforts to prepare India's surveillance system to detect and report potential international epidemics.
• The Enhanced Health Service Delivery Program (EHSDP) will provide another USD 500 million to support the government's efforts to strengthen service delivery through a redesigned primary healthcare model.
• One of the loans will also prioritize health service delivery in seven states: Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh.

What is the Status of India’s Health Sector?

About:

• According to World Bank estimates, India's performance in health has improved over time. India's life expectancy has increased from 58 in 1990 to 70.19 in 2022.
• The under-five mortality rate, infant mortality rate, and maternal mortality ratio are all close to the average for India's income level.

Major Issues:

• Inadequate Medical Infrastructure: India has a shortage of hospitals, particularly in rural areas, and many existing healthcare facilities lack basic equipment and resources.
  • According to the National Health Profile, India has only 0.9 beds per 1000 population and out of which only 30% are in rural areas.
• Gap in Doctor-Patient Ratio: One of the most critical concerns is the gap in the doctor-patient ratio. According to the Indian Journal of Public Health, India needs 20 lakh doctors by 2030.
  • However, currently a doctor in the government hospital attends to ~11000 patients, which is more than the WHO recommendation of 1:1000.
• Lack of Adequate Mental Healthcare: India has one of the lowest numbers of mental health care professionals per capita.
  • Government's spending on mental health is also very low. This has resulted in poor mental health outcomes and inadequate care for people suffering from mental illness.]

Women, Business and the Law 2023 Report

Context: India scored above the regional average in the World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2023 report. For India, report used data on laws and regulations in Mumbai, India's main business city.

• India received a perfect score for laws related to freedom of movement, women's work decisions, and marriage constraints.

What is Women, Business and the Law 2023 Report?

• About: Women, Business and the Law 2023 is the 9th in a series of annual reports that analyze laws and regulations affecting women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies.
  • Women, Business and the Law data is available for the period from 1971 to 2023 (calendar years 1970 to 2022)
• Indicators: It has eight indicators- Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension.

• Uses: Data and indicators in Women, Business and the Law 2023, used to build evidence of the relationship between legal gender equality and women’s entrepreneurship and employment.
  • Since 2009, Women, Business and the Law has been enhancing the study of gender equality and informing discussions on improving women's economic opportunities and empowerment.

What are Findings of the Report?

India:

• India as Lower middle Income group country with WBL index score is 74.4 out of 100.
  • 100 representing the highest possible score.
• The overall score for India is higher than the regional average observed across South Asia (63.7). Within the South Asia region, the maximum score observed is 80.6 (Nepal).
• In India, a thriving civil society also contributed to identifying gaps, drafting legislation, and organizing public opinion through campaigns, discussions, and protests, leading to enactment of the 2005 Domestic Violence Act.

Globally:

• Only 14 scored a perfect 100: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
• In 2022, the global average score is 76.5 out of 100.
• Nearly 2.4 billion women of working age around the world live in economies that do not grant them the same rights as men.
• At the current pace of reform, it would take at least 50 years to approach legal gender equality everywhere.
• Progress toward equal treatment for women has fallen to its weakest pace in 20 years.
  • Most reforms focused on increasing paid leave for parents and fathers, removing restrictions on women’s work, and mandating equal pay.
  • Progress across the areas measured has also been uneven, with most reforms in Workplace and Parenthood.

What are the Areas India needs to Focus on?

• Laws affecting pay, pension, inheritance and property rights. The laws affecting the Indian working woman’s pay and pension do not provide for equality with Indian men.
  • To improve on the Pay indicator, India should mandate equal remuneration for work of equal value, allowing women to work at night, and allowing women to work in an industrial job in the same way as men.
• In India laws affecting women's pay, laws affecting women's work after having children, constraints on women starting and running a business, gender differences in property and inheritance, and laws affecting the size of a woman's pension, India could consider reforms to improve legal equality for women.
  • For example, one of the lowest scores for India is on the indicator measuring laws affecting women’s pay (the WBL2023 Pay indicator).
  • Globally, on average, women enjoy only 77 percent of the legal rights that men do.

Forest Certification

Context: With climate change, Deforestation has become a critically sensitive issue globally in recent years, making imperative for Forest Certification to regulate the entry and sale of forest-based products.

• At the Glasgow climate meeting in 2021, more than 100 countries made a pledge to stop, and start reversing, deforestation by 2030.

What is Forest Certification?

Need:

• Forests absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide that is emitted in various economic activities, keeping a check on global warming.
• Many Countries are trying to avoid consumption of any product that might be the result of deforestation or illegal logging.
• And therefore, Europe and the United States have passed laws that regulate the entry and sale of forest-based products in their markets, creating the need for Forest Certification.

Forest Certification:

• It is a mechanism for forest monitoring, tracing and labelling timber, wood and pulp products and non-timber forest products.
• It is a process through which quality of management from environmental, social and economic perspectives is judged against a series of agreed standards.
• There are two major international standards for sustainable management of forests and forest-based products,
  • One has been developed by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC);
  • The other by Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certifications (PEFC).
• FSC certification is more popular and in demand, and also more expensive.

Two Types of Certifications:

• Forest management (FM) and Chain of Custody (CoC).
  • CoC certification is meant to guarantee the traceability of a forest product like timber throughout the supply chain from origin to market.

Forest Certification in India:

• The forest certification industry has been operating in India for the last 15 years.
• Currently, forests in only Uttar Pradesh are certified.
  • Forty-one divisions of the UP-Forest Corporation (UPFC) are PEFC-certified, meaning they are being managed according to standards endorsed by PEFC.
  • Some other states too obtained certifications, but subsequently dropped out.
• Forest certification in India is still at an early stage and therefore the nation has not been able to make use of the benefits of forest certification.

What are India Specific Standards?

• India allows the export of only processed wood, not timber. In fact, the timber harvested from Indian forests is not enough to meet the domestic demand for housing, furniture, and other products.
• India’s forests contribute just about five million cubic metres of wood every year. Almost 85% of the demand for wood and wood products is met by trees outside forests (ToF). About 10 % is imported.
• India’s wood import bill is Rs 50,000-60,000 crore per year.
• Since ToF are so important, new certification standards are being developed for their sustainable management.
• PEFC already has certification for TOF and in 2022, FSC came up with India-specific standards that included certification for ToF.

Social Protection for Children: ILO-UNICEF

Context: Recently, ILO (International Labour Organization) and UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) has released a report titled- “More than a billion reasons: The urgent need to build universal social protection for children”, which states that just 1 in 4 children are shielded by social protection, leaving others exposed to poverty, exclusion and multidimensional deprivations.

What is the Need for Social Protection?

• Social protection is a universal human right and a precondition for a world free from poverty.
• It is also a vital foundation to help the world’s most vulnerable children fulfill their potential.
• Social protection helps increase access to food, nutrition, education and healthcare.
• It can help prevent child labour and child marriage and address the drivers of gender inequality and exclusion.
• It can also reduce stress and even domestic violence, while supporting household livelihoods.
• And by tackling monetary poverty directly, it can also mitigate the stigma and exclusion so many children living in poverty experience – and the pain that a childhood feeling “less than” can produce.

What are the Findings of the Report?

Global Scenario:

• 1.77 billion children aged 0-18 years lack access to a child or family cash benefit, a fundamental pillar of a social protection system.
• Children are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as adults.
  • Approximately 800 million children are subsisting below the poverty line of USD 3.20 a day, and 1 billion children are experiencing multidimensional poverty.
• Only 26.4% of children aged 0-15 years are shielded by social protection, leaving the remaining 73.6% exposed to poverty, exclusion and multidimensional deprivations.
• Globally, all 2.4 billion children need social protection to be healthy and happy.

Social Protection Coverage:

• Child and family social protection coverage rates fell or stagnated in every region in the world between 2016 and 2020, leaving no country on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of achieving substantial social protection coverage by 2030.
  • In Latin America and the Caribbean, coverage fell significantly from approximately 51% to 42 %.
  • In many other regions, coverage has stalled and remains low.

Risk:

• Multiple crises are likely to push more children into poverty, necessitating an immediate increase in social protection measures.
• The impacts of lack of social protection for children are both immediate and lifelong, heightening rights violations such as child labour and child marriage, and diminishing children’s aspirations and opportunities.
• And this unrealized human potential has inevitable adverse and long-term implications for communities, societies and economies more broadly.

Significance of Social Protection:

• Before the Covid-19 pandemic, children were more than twice as likely to be living in extreme poverty than adults.
• One billion children live in multidimensional poverty without access to education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation or water.
• The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted that social protection is a critical response in times of crisis.
• Nearly every government in the world either rapidly adapted existing schemes or introduced new social protection programmes to support children and families.
  • In 2022, South Africa introduced a welfare scheme, Child Support Grant (CSG) Top-Up, aiming to increase the CSG amount for orphans and children heading or living in child-headed households.
  • 31 states in India had implemented the national ‘PM CARES for Children’ scheme, a package of measures for 10,793 full orphans and 151,322 half-orphans. So far, 4,302 children have received support from the scheme.

What are the Recommendations?

• Policymakers should take action towards universal social protection for all children, including investments in benefits that offer proven and cost-effective ways to combat child poverty.
• Authorities are also advised to provide child benefits through national social protection systems that also connect families to crucial health and social services, such as free or affordable quality childcare.
• There is a need for securing sustainable financing for schemes by mobilizing domestic resources, increasing budget allocation for children, strengthening social protection for parents and caregivers and guaranteeing access to decent work and adequate employee benefits.

G-20 and Need for Multilateralism

Context: India's G-20 Presidency places multilateral reform as one of its top presidential priorities as India stated that its agenda would be inclusive, ambitious, action-oriented, and decisive.

• India also said that its primary objectives are to build global consensus over critical development and security issues and deliver global goods.

What is the Need for Multilateralism?

• Due to persistent deadlocks, multilateralism has lost the majority’s trust. Multilateralism is facing a utility crisis, where powerful member-states think it is no longer useful for them.
• Moreover, increasing great-power tensions, de-globalisation, populist nationalism, the pandemic, and climate emergencies added to the hardships.
• This impasse led states to seek other arenas, including bilateral, plurilateral and Mini lateral groupings, which subsequently contributed to further polarization of global politics.
• However, cooperation and multilateral reform is the need of the hour. Most of the challenges nations face today are global in nature and require global solutions.
• Pressing global issues such as conflicts, climate change, migration, macroeconomic instability, and cybersecurity can indeed only be solved collectively.
• Furthermore, disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic have reversed the social and economic progress that global society made in the past couple of decades.

What are the Roadblocks to the Reforms?

Global Power Politics:

• Multilateralism is deeply entrenched in global power politics. As a result, any action in reforming multilateral institutions and frameworks automatically transforms into a move that seeks changes in the current distribution of power.
• Modifications in the distribution of power in the global order are neither easy nor normal. Moreover, it may have adverse implications if not done cautiously.

Considers a Zero-Sum Game:

• The status quo powers see multilateral reforms as a zero-sum game. For instance, in the context of the Bretton Woods system, the U.S. and Europe believed reform would reduce their influence and dominance.
• This makes decisions about reform in these institutions, by consensus or voting, hard.

Multiplex Global Order:

• Multilateralism appears at odds with the realities of the emerging multiplex global order.
• The emerging order seems more multipolar and multi-centred.
• Such a situation facilitates the formation of new clubs, concerts and coalitions of the like-minded, which makes the reform of older institutions and frameworks more challenging.

How can G-20 and India Promote Multilateralism?

Constitution of Engagement Group:

• Currently, the multilateralism reform narrative lives only in elite circles and some national capitals, particularly the emerging powers.
• Therefore, the G-20 should first focus on setting proper narratives of multilateral reform.
• G-20 may constitute an engagement group dedicated to bringing the narrative to the forefront of global discourse.
• India should also urge the upcoming chairs of the grouping, Brazil and South Africa, to place multilateral reforms as their presidential priorities. Since both have global high-table ambitions, it would be an easier task for India.

Encouraging Minilateral Groupings:

• While supporting multilateral cooperation, G-20 should continue encouraging minilateral groupings as a new form of multilateralism.
• Creating networks of issue-based minilateralism, particularly in areas related to the governance of the global commons will be helpful in preventing competitive coalitions where other actors play the same game to their advantage, leading to a more fragmented world order.

Being More Inclusive:

• The group needs to be more inclusive without sacrificing efficiency. For example, including the African Union as a permanent member and the UN Secretary-General and General Assembly President as permanent invitees would be helpful to enhance its legitimacy.
• Similarly, to address the crisis of trust and utility, G-20 should put all its efforts into solving one or two pressing global issues and showcase it as the model of new multilateralism.
• Food, fuel and fertilizer security can be one such issue. On the one hand, it falls under the ‘low politics of world politics, so cooperation is more achievable.