General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy sparked a debate last week by urging young Indians to work 70 hours per week, citing Japan and Germany as examples of countries that grew because their citizens worked harder and for longer hours to rebuild their nations in the aftermath of the Second World War. He further noted that India’s worker productivity is one of the lowest in the world.

Worker productivity vs  labour productivity

• The only conceptual difference between the two is that the ‘work’ in worker productivity describes mental activities while the ‘work’ in labour productivity is mostly associated with manual activities.
• Productivity of an activity is usually measured as the quantum of output value per unit of labour (time) cost at a micro level. At a macro level, it is measured in terms of the labour-output ratio or change in Net Domestic Product (NDP) per worker in each sector (where working hours are assumed to be 8 hours per day).
• However, in certain types of services, especially ones involving intellectual labour, measuring the value of the output independently is very difficult, so the income of workers is usually taken as proxies to suggest productivity.
• Productivity in a more sophisticated usage is an attribute not of time but of skill.
• Human capital including education, training, nutrition, health etc., enhances the ability of labour to become more productive, or churn out greater quantum of value within the same number of working hours.
• Based on this understanding, the reduction in the number of working hours does not hamper the value of output produced, but in turn enhances the leisure and quality of life of workers in real terms, while the value added to the economy could still be increasing, nominal wages remaining the same.

Link between worker productivity and economic growth

• While an increase in productivity made through any sector is likely to affect the value added and the accumulation or growth in the economy, the relationship between the two could be quite complex.
• If by prosperity we intend to suggest prosperity of the workers, this may or may not be true.
• It is noted that the increase in incomes or the prosperity of the richest people is not quite explained by their productivity.
• On the contrary, this prosperity is either linked to hereditary transfers of wealth upon which the rich are earning yields (he called this patrimonial capitalism) or to the ‘super managerial’ class who seem to be deciding their own exorbitant pay packages, quite arbitrarily, not related in any way to their productivity.

India and worker productivity

• As incomes are seen as a proxy for productivity, there is a fallacious inference about productivity of workers in India being low.
• A U.S based multi-national workforce management firm, has in fact observed that Indians are among the most hard working employees in the world.
• On the other hand, Picodi.com an international ecommerce platform has observed that India ranks one of the lowest in terms of average wages per month globally.
• Informal employment in both the unorganised as well as the organised sectors has been on the rise through the course of economic reforms.
• The dubious claim of increased formalisation has been limited only to bringing activities under the tax net. This has however had no impact on improving labour standards or working conditions.
• Even in the formal manufacturing sector you find an overwhelming presence of Micro-Small-Medium Enterprises (MSME) which are labour intensive.
• Studies have also found that there is a systematic process of cost cutting through wage cutting in these enterprises.

Way forward

• Japan and Germany are neither comparable in terms of the size and quality of labour force nor in terms of the nature of their technological trajectories or their socio-cultural and political structures.
• India presents a unique case and any arbitrary comparison would only lead to dubious analytical inferences and fallacious policy prescripts.
• Enhancing social investments, focusing on exploring domestic consumption potential for increased productivity with a human centric assessment of development achievements is the way to a more sustainable and desirable outcome.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• There is a great deal of attention paid to the recipient of a organ transplant, and rightly so, but the backbone of live kidney transplantation for transplant surgeons is also to make sure that donors do not face the same problem in the future.

Before the donation

• Before donating the donor is fully evaluated to make sure the person is completely normal. Age-matched kidneys may be ideal but usually 18 to 60 years is accepted. Between 60- 70 years, an exceptional kidney function and health may permit donation. Blood group matching is usually required but O can donate to any group.
• Minor ailments may not be a contraindication for donating. Diabetes or pre diabetes, obesity, hypertension, kidney stones, etc. require special attention. Medical evaluation is always biased in the donor’s favour. Diabetes in the donor is usually an absolute contraindication. Hypertension with easy control with a single tablet is permitted.
• It is also essential that the kidney function on special test is at least 75 ml per minute There should no protein leak. Metabolic workup in persons having small stone is a must. Those with multiple stones should be rejected. Normally the evaluation should favour the donor and the better working kidney should be left behind with the donor.

After the donation

• After the donation the person requires life long follow-up. Immediately after the surgery the kidney function drops by almost half and the single kidney starts working more to compensate for the loss of the other. This is a process of hyperfiltration at the microscopic level and compensatory hypertrophy at the gross level.
• Donors require to periodically monitor blood pressure. Kidney function and protein loss should be checked at least once a year. Almost one third of donors would develop hypertension over several years but this almost the same incidence as in the general population. A small percentage would develop protein leak in the urine.
• It is essential that the donors are instructed properly with regards to diet, exercise and avoidance of drugs toxic to the kidneys. DASH diet (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) would be ideal. Sufficient vegetables, fruits, whole grains, lean meat, moderate restriction of salt and sugar, and avoidance of transfats is essential.

Salt and Kidney

• The WHO and other medical associations caution on the importance of salt restriction to 5 gms per day in the general population. The 5 gms includes salt present in natural food, salt added during cooking and hidden salt present in preserved or packed food like bread and noodles. Restriction of salt reduces not only blood pressure but also strokes and kidney failure.

Calculating kidney function

• Creatinine is produced by muscles in the body and excreted by the the kidneys. Since normally only kidneys remove the creatinine ,its measurement in blood reflects kidney function .
• Mathematical formulae adjusting for age, weight and sex are used to calculate kidney function and express as eGFR(Glomerular function rate).
• Protenuria or protein leak is a more sensitive test and 85% of the kidney diseases are detected earlier than creatinine estimation. Protein has a large molecular weight and does not appear in the urine unless the microscopic vessel (glomerulus)in the kidney is damaged or it is secreted by tubules.
• The quantity of protein loss in the urine reflects the kidney damage and is used as a measure to see the response for treatment.
• Proteinurea unlike creatinine is not only a marker of kidney disease but also a cause for progression of kidney disease.
• This understanding has led to the development of several group of drugs which would lower protein loss to reduce damage to the kidneys. They include the anti renin system (ACE and ARB) group of drugs, the SGLT2 inhibitors, anti aldosterone drugs etc.

Conclusion

• A recent study from MIOT international on the salt intake in renal donors has highlighted the importance of monitoring salt intake in kidney donors Chronic Kidney disease(CKD) affects almost 10% of the worlds population. So it is essential to detect CKD early and intervene to halt the disease.  It is hightime we realise the importance of this, and implement salt reduction globally.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• Textbooks have said for decades that haemoglobin is found in the red blood cells (RBCs), that it makes blood red, carries oxygen, and is essential for our survival.

‘Haemoglobin bodies’

• A new and serendipitous discovery has revealed that haemoglobin isn’t used by RBCs alone. In a study published in Nature, scientists from China have reported that chondrocytes – cells that make cartilage, the connecting tissue between bones – also make haemoglobin and seem to depend on it for their survival. Feng Zhang, a pathologist in China, had been working on bone development since 2010.
• In 2017, when he was studying growth plates –cartilaginous tissue at the end of certain long bones that allow the bones to become longer –he stumbled upon a few spherical blob-like structures. They seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to RBCs, and they contained haemoglobin.
• Picture what happens when oil is mixed into water: the oil separates out into little globules in a process called phase separation. That’s what seemed to be happening in the chondrocytes in the cartilage as well. Dr. Zhang ascertained that the chondrocytes within the growth plates of newborn mice were not only producing large amounts of haemoglobin, but also that it was coalescing and forming large blobs without a membrane. The scientists called these blobs haemoglobin bodies, or Hedy.

The haemoglobin does something

• Now that they knew chondrocytes were making haemoglobin bodies, the question was: were the Hedy functional or not. To test this, the scientists used genetically modified mice, in this case mice in which the gene making haemoglobin had been removed. These mice produced almost no haemoglobin molecules and they died as embryos. But it turned out that if one looked closely at the growth plate cartilage tissue from these mice, most of the chondrocytes were dying.
• Removing the gene that made haemoglobin specifically in the cartilage tissue also resulted in the same outcome: cell death among the chondrocytes. It was clear that Hedy was essential for the chondrocytes to live.

An oxygen store

• Now they knew that the absence of haemoglobin caused the chondrocytes to go through some sort of low-oxygen stress. They then wanted to see how normal and haemoglobin-free chondrocytes behaved when there is little oxygen in the cells’ environment. The researchers proceeded to test the cells in a low-oxygen, or hypoxic, environment. In the presence of haemoglobin, the cells seemed to release more oxygen. But in the absence of haemoglobin, the chondrocytes started dying. This further confirmed their hunch that the haemoglobin in the chondrocytes was most likely storing oxygen and supplying it to the cells when required.

Conclusion

• What is important in this paper is that it breaks down barriers between haematology and skeletal biology, and shows that, in fact, these fields are more connected than it seems. The discovery of functional haemoglobin in cartilage also leads to the possibility that it plays a role in certain joint diseases. There are many bone deformities that develop from defects in chondrocytes. Scientists hopes this discovery can reinterpret the mechanisms underlying some joint diseases.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• On October 16, in X vs Union of India, the Supreme Court of India declined permission to a woman who was seeking to terminate a 26 week-long pregnancy.

About

• A Bench presided over by the Chief Justice of India (CJI), D.Y. Chandrachud, held that the woman’s case fell outside the scope of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, 1971. The Court said the statute permitted the termination of pregnancy beyond 24 weeks only in cases where the foetus exhibited substantial abnormality, or where the woman’s life was under direct threat.

Viable foetus versus woman’s right

• The judgment falls short of bestowing any explicit rights to the unborn. But the upshot of its conclusion is just that: when a foetus becomes viable, and is capable of surviving outside the mother’s uterus, the woman’s right to choose stands extinguished, barring circumstances where the specific conditions outlined in the MTP Act are met.
• In so holding, the judgment suffers from at least two errors. The judgment does not engage with these questions and, as a result, places the rights of a foetus at a pedestal, above that of the rights of a pregnant woman to her privacy and dignity.
• Second, the Court fails to examine whether the MTP Act is merely an enabling legislation. Had these questions been posed and answered, the Court may well have considered whether a woman ought to be allowed to terminate her pregnancy outside the terms spelled out in the legislation. If the right to freely make reproductive choices is fundamental, flowing from the Constitution, the Court ought to scarcely feel injuncted from issuing directions beyond the MTP Act’s remit.

Foetuses and rights

• Even more damaging, though, is the judgment’s implicit assertion that foetuses have constitutional rights. Our jurisprudence on abortion has been built on a converse premise. The guarantees of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution — the rights to equal protection and life — are conferred on persons, and the Constitution decidedly does not award personhood to a foetus. As it happens, even the MTP Act makes no such assertion. For if it did, it could not plausibly create an exception from the timelines it stipulates to cases where a pregnant woman’s life is under immediate and direct threat.

Conclusion

• There is no place within our constitutional structure to see a foetus as anything but dependent on the mother. To see it as a separate, distinct personality would be tantamount to conferring a set of rights on it that the Constitution grants to no other class of person. Such a reading would efface altogether a jurisprudence that grants primacy to a woman’s freedom to make reproductive choices — a right that is intrinsic in Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.

General Studies Paper 2

Context:

• Supreme Court (SC) of India has fixed a deadline for the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker to adjudicate on petitions seeking the disqualification of members who had broken away from the leadership of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

Disqualification of legislators

• Constitutional provisions consist of Articles 102 & 191: The basic disqualification criteria for an MP are outlined in Article 102 of the Constitution, while those for an MLA are outlined in Article 191.
• Grounds for disqualification under the Constitution include conditions like holding a profit-making position in the Government of India or a state government, Being of unsound mind, being an unpaid insolvent, not being an Indian citizen, or acquiring citizenship of another country.
• Article 102 also empowers the Parliament to enact legislation governing the conditions of disqualification.

Anti-defection law (ADL) and 10th schedule

• Parliament added 10th schedule to the Constitution via the 52nd Amendment Act, 1985. Grounds of Disqualification under the law are:
• If an elected member voluntarily gives up his membership of a political party.
• If s/he votes or abstains from voting in such House contrary to any direction issued by his political party or anyone authorized to do so, without obtaining prior permission.
• If any independently elected member joins any political party.
• If any nominated member joins any political party after the expiry of 6 months.

Role of Speaker:

• Pressing officers of the legislature are empowered to take the final decision in matters of disqualification of legislators under 10th schedule, although after Kihoto Hollohan case (1992), their decision in the matter is now subject to judicial review (eg, on grounds of mala fide/bad intent etc).
• There is no clarity in the law about the timeframe for the action of the House Chairperson or Speaker in the anti-defection cases. In the Maharashtra assembly case, it has been pending since July 2022.
• Long experience shows that Speakers tend to treat disqualification issues with great alacrity or supine indifference, depending on their political affiliations. Despite being reminded from time to time of their duty to remain neutral and demonstrate a sense of urgency in dealing with questions arising out of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, presiding officers appear to place political loyalties above their constitutional duty.

Role of the judiciary

• It is quite fitting, therefore, that the apex court has asked Speaker Rahul Narwekar to decide the disqualification petitions against Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s camp by December 31 and those concerning the NCP’s breakaway group headed by Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar by January 31, 2024.
• The directions are a natural follow­up to the outcome of a Constitution Bench decision on May 11, 2023, in which the Speaker was asked to decide the disqualification issue “within a reasonable period”.
• None can dispute that the Speaker has had enough time to decide the matter, even though a few procedural aspects and the clubbing of petitions may account for some delay. In an earlier order in September, the Court had observed that it expected the Speaker to show deference to its directions, especially when he is acting as a tribunal under the Tenth Schedule.
• Even without judicial orders, the issue of whether a member has incurred disqualification is not a matter which can be dealt with in a leisurely or partisan manner. Recent political history is rife with instances of ruling parties casually recruiting members of the Opposition in several States without any fear of disqualification, as they know that friendly Speakers will not disqualify them.

Way forward

• So long as the Speaker is vested with the authority to adjudicate disqualification issues, it will be difficult to free matters of defection from the thicket of politics.
• India may examine following the UK model regarding the position of the Speaker, whereby a legislator elected as Speaker to the House resigns from his/her political party membership in order to remain neutral in his/her functions

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Climate finance has a crucial role in retaining the trust of the developing countries in future climate change negotiations. The issues relating to climate finance are likely to be prominent in the United Nations Climate Change Conference or UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP 28) meeting (2023), in Dubai (UAE).

Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report findings:

• It comes in the context of the Synthesis Report providing the main scientific input to the global stocktake at COP. The report says that the current temperature increase at 1.1° Celsius is responsible for frequent hazardous weather.
• Thus, the developed countries and climate vulnerable countries are likely to demand a ramping up of mitigation action by the developing countries — which is likely to be countered with the demand that the developed countries have not been able to meet the mark of a mobilisation of $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020 as committed at the Copenhagen summit of UNFCCC.
• The sum is inadequate in terms of the challenges faced by the developing countries in switching over to a low carbon development pathway and climate resilient development. Providing finance to developing countries is based on the principle of the Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC).

Estimating adequate climate finance

• The developed countries are required in mandatory terms to provide financial resources to developing country parties. Under Article 9 of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, it is also mandatory for the developed countries to provide in their Biennial Update Reports (BUR), information relating to the financial resources which they have provided. At the Copenhagen Change Conference in 2009, the developed countries made the commitment to mobilise $100 billion per year by 2020.
• Further, the developed countries are required, in accordance with the decision accompanying the atmosphere of Paris Agreement, to collectively mobilise $100 billion through 2025, before a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) ‘from a floor of $100 billion per year is to be set at the end of 2024’.
• At the 26th UNFCCC in Glasgow in 2021, the developed countries noted, with deep regret, of being able to mobilise only a total of $79.6 billion.
• The Paris Agreement is based on the self determined efforts of all the parties inscribed in the nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which contain the mitigation efforts to be made by a party for the next 5 years.
• Entire NDCs put together project a picture of overshooting the 1.5° C temperature goal. Going by the needs of countries in the Global South expressed in their NDCs, the amount quantified for the first time touches close to $6 trillion until 2030.
• India’s 3rd BUR says that its financial needs derived from its NDCs for adaptation and mitigation purposes for 2015­-30 are $206 billion and $834 billion, respectively.

Unclear burden sharing formula

• The developed countries are mandatorily required to provide financial resources to developing country parties, but there is no agreed approach among developed countries to share the burden of this goal. One analysis suggests that the United States provided just 5% of its fair share in 2020.
• Without any mandatory formula for collecting money, it is difficult to predict how the said money or the NCQG for climate finance will be mobilised. Neither the UNFCCC nor the Paris Agreement mention the criterion for mobilisation. Instead, the mobilisation is done with the help of a replenishment process.
• Global Environment Facility (GEF), a UNFCCC-­designated funding agency providing grant and concessional loan to developing countries, is replenished every four years.
• A similar approach has been borrowed into the Green Climate Fund (GCF) by the developed countries to mobilise part of the $100 bn finance for developing country parties to switch over to low emissions and climate resilient development path. GCF had its second replenishment recently in 2023, in which only 25 countries out of 37 developed countries met in Bonn, pledging to contribute $9.3 billion.

Replicate this action

• Strong political will, perceived urgency and enlightened self interest of the elite Global North were writ large in the case of a perceived collapse of global public good (global financial stability) in 2009­-10 when the G­20 governments quickly responded to the global financial crisis, getting $1.1 trillion in a few weeks to support the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and multilateral development banks to save the global financial system.
• Unfortunately, these factors are missing when it comes to the necessary climate finance transfers from developed to developing countries to safeguard another global common — the atmosphere.

General Studies Paper 1

Context

• India’s urban areas have been flooding more and more often, destroying lives and livelihoods. Yet, according to a study led by the World Bank and published in Nature recently, flood risk in many cities is rising because they are expanding into flood prone areas.
• Findings of the paper:
• According to the paper, since 1985, human settlements in flood prone areas have more than doubled. Experts say the findings spotlight the risk of unsustainable urbanisation in India. The study also found that middle income countries like India have more urban settlements in flood prone zones than low and high income countries.

How is India at risk?

• India isn’t among the 20 countries whose settlements are most exposed to flood hazards, but it was the third highest contributor to global settlements, after China and the U.S., and also third — after China and Vietnam — among countries with new settlements expanding into flood prone areas, all from 1985 to 2015.
• India is at significant risk of flood related problems that could worsen in the coming years if the country wasn’t careful. At the heart of flood related hazards is where we build or expand our cities.
• For example, Bengaluru floods cost the city ₹225 crore. During the last century, the city’s population grew from around 1.6 lakh to more than a crore. To accommodate these people, the city expanded — but new localities overlooked the local topography.

Who are the most affected?

• The risks are disproportionately higher for those living in informal structures. Informal housing in cities is on land that is vacant and less desirable, so that they are not immediately driven off. So they often lie in low lying, flood prone areas.
• An important reason why urbanisation has expanded into flood prone areas is that we don’t have the governance processes to say that this kind of development is environmentally unsustainable.
• When environmental regulations are applied to new constructions, they are often applied only to big infrastructure projects and not to medium and small scale modifications of localities. This contradicts the notion that certain localities are more flood prone and that flooding and flood risk are locality level issues.
• People commonly violate existing government regulations. For example, there has been a rise in ecotourism resorts on forest land and the construction of large structures, including government buildings and even religious structures, on rivers’ floodplains.

What is to be done?

• As cities continue to expand, we can no longer avoid expanding into flood prone areas. Market forces tend to push expansion into flood prone areas. But recognising what these areas are and that we are actually expanding into them is the first step towards sustainable urban planning that addresses the risks.
• Some forms of adaptation are necessary and they need to differentiate between low income residents and unauthorised structures erected for the elite.
• Examples of local and sustainable housing models include riverside settlements that use stilt houses, like those used by the Mishing and the Miyah communities along the Brahmaputra.
• Every city needs to do a proper scientific mapping of the flood prone areas. Urban governments need to make housing in such areas more flood resilient and protect low income housing.

Conclusion

• Moving habitations from low lying, flood prone areas to higher grounds, regulating them, and building ecologically and economically sustainable houses for the poor will contribute towards sustainable development goal number 11, ie, sustainable cities and communities.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• COVID-19 pandemic extracted a heavy mortality toll across the world during 2020 and 2021, and this has been a huge global public health concern. But we were not able to accurately assess COVID-related death toll.

Gaps in registration data

• Given the challenges in direct causal attribution of deaths to COVID-19 infection, the international public health community emphasised the need to measure pandemic impact in terms of excess mortality, derived by comparing observed mortality during the pandemic with expected mortality based on pre pandemic trends. Ideally, excess mortality estimation requires robust population based mortality data from death registration systems.
• India faced a big challenge in estimating excess deaths directly due to COVID-19 due to the following issues:
• Death registration in India is still about 70%, which further varies widely across States and districts.
• Pandemic severity was particularly observed in India during the second wave in April-June 2021, when death statistics were not accurately captured.
• India’s death registration data also does not give weekly or monthly mortality data which is essential for excess death calculation.

Civil Registration System (CRS) and Sample Registration System (SRS) data:

• To assess the mortality toll, independent investigators compiled CRS mortality records from local offices of the government in 14 States and 9 cities across India from 2018 to 2021. Various scientific teams utilised these and other available mortality data from the SRS and household surveys to develop modelled excess mortality estimates for India.
• COVID-19 related death estimates varied widely from one to another study — the highest was 4.7 million excess deaths in India during 2020-21 using available local data as inputs for mortality models.
• There has been intense debate and controversy around the likely plausibility of various mortality estimates for India, which have focused on the statistical methods and data assumptions employed for estimation.
• However, most of these studies could not overcome some crucial biases in the input data for the modelling exercises, as well as in the assumptions applied to fill data gaps.
• Some studies are based on insufficient samples while others have information bias at various levels. It is very likely that the COVID-related excess deaths in India may have been overestimated.

Set up a task force

• The official CRS report for 2021 is scheduled for release shortly, and holds much promise for providing the best possible primary evidence. However, it may also lead to new debates if variations such as improvements in reporting, delayed registration, and remaining deficiencies in data completeness across States by sex and age are not considered and appropriately accounted for, while inferring from this data.
• Therefore, it is necessary that the government should convene a task force of national experts in this field to attend to this matter. This task force could be provided access to all the microdata from the CRS, SRS, and other relevant data sources as necessary.
• Once equipped with all the available and required information, the task force will be enabled to conduct a thorough analysis using standard statistical methods that utilise empirical data, to provide measures of excess mortality by sex and age at national, State and district levels.

District- level interventions

• Going forward, the imperative for accurate district level mortality measures is urgent, for evidence based health action to tackle the quadruple burden from maternal and child health conditions, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and injuries.
• Hence, while the outputs of such a detailed analysis would complete the debate on pandemic mortality in India, the analytical operations will establish capacity for subnational mortality measurement, and also inform interventions to strengthen local data quality.
• Concomitantly, there is also an urgent need to strengthen attribution of causes of death, either through medical certification for physician attended deaths, or through the use of retrospective interview methods for household events.

Conclusion

• Taken together, the activities of the National Task Force for data analysis, along with proposed initiatives for data quality improvement, will vastly enhance the utility of the CRS for routine local and national mortality measurement in India.

General Studies Paper 3

Context:

• National Statistics Office (NSO) announced in late August that GDP had increased in the April- June quarter at an annual rate of 7.8%. The most euphoric cheerleaders predicted growth to accelerate to 8%. Even conservative forecasters routinely project GDP growth between 6% and 7%. This GDP- centric framing of alleged Indian economic success is wrongheaded.

Gross domestic product (GDP)

• GDP is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced in a specific time period by a country. It is most often used by the government of a single country to measure its economic health.
• India is the world’s fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP and the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Issues with a GDP-centric approach

• GDP is a flawed metric of national economic welfare. It hides inequalities and deflects attention from acute job scarcity, poor education and health, unlivable cities, a broken judicial system, and environmental damage.
• For India, ‘fastest growing’ growing GDP should be a trivial achievement. India as the poorest of the major economies should grow fastest. But, it has failed to consistently do so. In fact, contrary to the hype, GDP growth has slowed sharply over the past two decades. The problem has been weak mass demand.

Pre-COVID and post-COVID

• Indian GDP grew at an annual 9% rate in the mid-2000s as historically high world trade growth lifted all economies. A financial sector- real estate- construction bubble added froth to that growth. This was unsustainable.
• Growth slowed to 6% after the global financial crisis of 2007-08 as world trade decelerated quickly. By 2012-13, GDP growth had fallen to about 4.5%, but growth for that year and the next three jumped courtesy of a mysterious data revision in January 2015.
• The slowdown from the heady 9% GDP growth in the mid-2000s to 3%-4% before the pandemic reflected severe weakness in demand. That weakness manifested in the glaring drop in private corporate fixed investment from a peak of 17% of GDP in 2007-08 to 11% in 2019-20.
• Private corporations cut back investments recognising that domestic consumers, fearful of job and earning prospects, had constrained purchasing power, and foreigners had only a limited appetite for Indian goods.
• In the post-COVID19 years, the economy has bounced around. If we consider the latest four quarters over the four quarters before COVID, the annual growth rate (of the income and expenditure average) is 4.2%. If we compare only the latest quarter over the quarter before COVID, the annual growth is just above 2%.
• The telltale sign of post-COVID demand weakness is the further drop in private corporate investment to 10% of GDP in 2021-22; analysts believe that it has remained anaemic in 2022-23.
• Meanwhile, to maintain consumption, households have slashed their savings rates to 5.1% of GDP, from 11.9% in 2019-20. Those eligible for credit cards are racking up worrying levels of debt. And with an overvalued rupee and world trade barely crawling ahead, Indian exports have been falling.

Need to bolster demand

• In the glow of a fake high growth story, government policy has tried to revup supply rather than bolster demand through good jobs, more human capital investment, and functional cities. Unsurprisingly, the September 2019 corporate tax cut, sops like PLI schemes, and shiny flyovers and highways have failed to revive corporate investment. Increased fiscal reliance on indirect taxes, which erode purchasing power, has aggravated demand.

Conclusion

• A sober analysis of GDP growth just before and after COVID points to a medium-term annual GDP growth forecast of 3%- 4%. Unfortunately, a domestic elite and international media narrative of “high growth” will continue, as will policies in opposition to India’s needs.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• Recently Chief Justice of India (CJI) felt despair over the inaction by the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker with respect to the disqualification petitions of its members that has been pending before him since July 2022.

Role of the speaker:

• As the presiding officer of the Lok Sabha at the Centre and the Legislative Assembly in the States, the Speaker is required to act in an impartial manner. However, the functioning of this institution over the years in India has left much to be desired.
• The presiding officers of legislatures in India are the custodians of the rights and privileges of the House, its committees and its members.
• Apart from the traditional roles with respect to the conduct of business, the Speakers perform two important functions:
• Certifying a Bill to be a Money Bill (over which the Rajya Sabha/Legislative Council have a limited role)
• Deciding on disqualification under the Tenth Schedule for defection.

Bypassing anti-defection law (ADL):

• The Lok Sabha and Legislative Assembly rules provide for suspension of members for misconduct in the House. It has been noticed that the Speakers and the Houses misuse these provisions more often than not against the Opposition members.
• On the other hand, our elected representatives find ingenious methods to circumvent the anti defection law. The authority to decide on the disqualification of members under the Tenth Schedule is vested in the Speaker of the House.
• While he/she is expected to perform this constitutional role in a neutral manner, past instances have hardly inspired confidence, with the Speakers favouring the ruling dispensation.
• The minority judges in Kihoto Hollohan case (1992) were of the view that vesting the power to decide on defections with the Speaker violates the basic democratic principles.
• The Supreme Court in Keisham Meghachandra Singh vs The Honble Speaker Manipur(2020), recommended that Parliament amend the Constitution to vest these powers in an independent tribunal to be headed by judges.
• The present indictment of the Speaker of Maharashtra Assembly is also due to his continued inaction in deciding disqualification petitions for more than a year despite directions from the Court.

Other roles of the Speaker

• The Speaker is the authority to refer Bills introduced to the Parliamentary Standing Committees. However, even significant Bills that require detailed scrutiny are not referred to such committees. As against more than 60% of Bills referred to committees in the Lok Sabha during 2004-14, less than 25% have been referred during 2014-23.
• Additionally, there have also been challenges in the Court in recent years against certification of certain Bills as a Money Bill by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha.

Once a speaker, always a speaker

• In Britain, the Speaker once elected to his/her office, resigns from the political party to which he/she belonged. In subsequent elections to the House of Commons, he/she seeks election not as a member of any political party but as ‘the Speaker seeking reelection’. This is to reflect his/her impartiality while presiding over the House.
• In the Indian Constitution, while the Tenth Schedule allows a Speaker (or Deputy Speaker) to resign from their political party on being elected to their office, it has been never done by any Speaker till date.

Conclusion

• We should adopt the practices as in Britain to instil confidence in the office of the Speaker. However, even till such time, it is imperative that Speakers eschew the ‘impropriety’ in their functioning and demonstrate ‘impartiality’.