DAILY NEWS ANALYSIS 27 NOVEMBER
POLITY AND GOVERNANCE
Fundamental Rights and Duties go together, asserts Shri Venkaiah Naidu
Vice President of India and Chairman of Rajya Sabha, Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu has stressed that Fundamental Rights of citizens are critically dependent on discharge of Fundamental Duties since both the rights and duties flow from each other.
Fundamental duties in constitution:
These were incorporated in Part IV-A of the Constitution by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976 on the recommendations of Swaran Singh Committee.
Originally, 10 in number, one more duty were added through the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2002. All the eleven duties are listed in Article 51-A of the Constitution.
- To abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem;
- To cherish and follow the noble ideals that inspired the national struggle for freedom;
- To uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India;
- To defend the country and render national service when called upon to do so;
- To promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities and to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women;
- To value and preserve the rich heritage of the country’s composite culture;
- To protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for living creatures;
- To develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform;
- To safeguard public property and to abjure violence;
- To strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement; and
- To provide opportunities for education to his child or ward between the age of six and fourteen years (added by the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2002).
Methods to propagate it:
- Introduction of Fundamental Duties at an appropriate level in the curriculum.
- Displaying the duties at all the educational institutions, offices and public spaces across the country.
- Reaching out to the youth through appropriate campaigns.
Reference: PIB
J&K curbs will help check terror’
Hearing on Jammu and Kashmir curb in Supreme Court
Government arguments:
- Danger of weaponisation of social media by local and cross-border elements to ‘radicalise’ Kashmiri people had led to imposition of restrictions.
- Government acknowledged that access to Internet was indeed a part of the fundamental right to free speech. However, modern terrorism relies heavily on the Internet.
- Authorities had acted on heaps of material, including intelligence and military, about inflammatory material and speeches, circulation of fake news, morphed images and videos spread on social media.
- Apex court judgments about free speech for newspapers would not apply to the world of the Internet.
- National security was exclusively a matter of policy firmly placed within the government’s domain and not a subject of law.
Court Observation:
- Restrictions imposed under Section 144 had halted normal life, movement and means of communication in the Valley.
- It choked Press freedom.
- Women are suffering morphing on the Internet.
- State has an obligation to ensure children went to school.
- If most Kashmiri people are peaceful, then government should let them come out.
- State had an obligation to balance national security interests with the fundamental right of the ordinary citizen to live with dignity.
Nagrik Kartavya Paalan Abhiyan
- Ministry of HRD has launched a portal under it.
- The portal will be used primarily for holding monthly essay competitions for students as well as other activities like quizzes, debates, poster making etc. pertaining to Nagrik Kartavya Paalan Abhiyan.
- This will make them aware that rights are automatically realized when we follow our duties religiously.
- The competition will be held online through the infrastructure and testing centres of National Testing Agency.
- It will be open for every student registered in any higher education institution in the country.
- Department of Higher Education will be holding eleven rounds of National Essay Competitions during the year.
- The topics of the essay will be based on one Fundamental Duty every month.
Source: PIB
The misadventure of a new citizenship regime
The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner has completed a 10-year project of data collection, at the household level, for the Census of 2021.
Other identity related Projects:
- The individual level data collection for the National Population Register is also to be uploaded next summer, alongside the Census.
- Nearly 123 crores Aadhaar cards had been issued.
- There is a proposal for a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC). It focuses on identifying citizens.
- Other proposals, NPR, Aadhar cards and Census count residents of country.
Challenges of Nationwide NRC:
- Moral Challenge: The NRC effectively places an entire population under suspicion of alienage. A state, which cannot protect borders from illegal immigrants, cannot eliminate aliens by process of elimination.
- Cost: The Assam NRC is reported to have cost Rs. 1,600 crores with 50,000 officials deployed to enrol almost 3.3 crores applicants. Taking 87.9 crores an indicative number of Indian electorate, a nationwide NRC would require an outlay of Rs. 4.26 lakh crores.
- Manpower requirement: It would entail the deployment of 1.33 crores officials. In 2011-12 (the most recent official data available), the total number of government employees in India was 2.9 crores. Therefore, the exercise would require half of the government manpower.
- Poor citizens have little documentation of their citizenship. The enrolment drive could actually put undocumented nationals at risk of losing their citizenship in a futile search for non-national migrants who are invariably better documented.
- This may lead to suicide of many people.
- Cut off date: July 1948 as cut off date for NRC makes little relevance due to citizenship amendment act of 1955.
- Government needs to take all the state government on board. Already, many state government of North –East are against it.
- This exclusionary ideal of citizenship is inconsistent with the ideals of citizenship adopted since independence. We had opted for birth-based citizenship than racial citizenship based on idea of Jus Sanguinis.
- It goes against equality of citizenship, based on birth and without regard to creed.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Sharp-eyed Cartosat-3 to take to the skies today
About Cartosat-3:
- It will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR at Sriharikota in coastal Andhra Pradesh.
- PSLV-C47 will carry the earth observation satellite and 13 small ones two U.S. customers will be the secondary payloads.
- It can pick up an object of a minimum of 25 cm size from a height of around 500 km.
- Data from, especially the last four Carto-2 series ones are exclusively used by the armed forces.
- An existing policy allows only government and government authorised agencies to access ISRO's high-resolution imageries below a resolution of 1 m.
- It has new technologies:
- Highly agile or flexible camera
- High-speed data transmission
- Advanced computer system and new power electronics
ECONOMY
Reserve Bank flags rising bad assets from Mudra loans
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has expressed concern over rising bad loans from Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY).
RBI observation:
- There have been some concerns at the growing level of non-performing assets among Mudra borrowers.
- RBI is to ask bankers to monitor such loans closely as unsustainable credit growth in the sector could risk the system.
- Systemic risk may arise from unsustainable credit growth, increased inter-connectedness, pro-cyclical and financial risks manifested by lower profitability.
- Total NPA in the Mudra scheme of over Rs. 3.21 lakh crores has jumped to 2.68% in FY19 from 2.52% in FY18.
- Over 19 crores loans have been extended under the scheme up to June 2019.
- Of the total, 3.63 crores accounts are in default as of March 2019.
- The bad loans in the scheme soared a whopping 126% in FY19, jumping by Rs. 9,204.14 crores to Rs. 16,481.45 crores in FY19.
Mudra Scheme:
It is for “fund the unfunded” by bringing such enterprises to the formal financial system and extending affordable credit to them.
- It enables a small borrower to borrow from all Public Sector Banks such as PSU Banks, Regional Rural Banks and Cooperative Banks, Private Sector Banks, Foreign Banks, Micro Finance Institutions (MFI) and Non Banking Finance Companies (NBFC).
- Any Indian Citizen who has a business plan for a non-farm sector income generating activity such as manufacturing, processing, trading or service sector and whose credit need is less than Rs 10 lakh can apply.
- There are three categories of loans: Shishu, Kishor and Tarun.
SOCIETY
Negotiating the fault lines
As a series of tweets unravelled over the last few weeks, it became evident that not all women had been entirely honest when jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon.
Reasons for Fallouts:
- There was no reason to seek evidence for alleging of the crime. Any women could throw mud on anybody. It took all charges at face value.
- It put immense pressure on women to take part or be cast out of Feminism.
- The fallout of the movement was not light: men lost reputations, careers, friends and incomes.
- Many cases where women had agency like refuting to send the nude photo, or not taking part in sexting were considered cases of me too.
- It was flooded of complaints from a single demography where women lived alone in metropolises and worker and partied hard.
Impact of Movement:
- It forced men to take the idea of consent seriously.
- It pushed organisations to sit up and take notice of sexual harassment.
- It ensured that due process mechanisms were set up in institutions.
Possible Changes:
- Responsible leaders should ask for detailed accounts, get background, establish context.
- Naming and Shaming should be reserved for cases where channels of justice and mediation had already been tried.
- Only genuine cases should go to public.
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