India is in an advanced stage of drawing up the contours of the structure and processes of the “theatre command” to bring integration and coordination of all the three services.

• The timeline for operationalising this is yet to be made public.

Key Points

• Defence Minister recently cited on “Synergised Objectives”,organised to mark 50 years of victory in the India-Pakistan War in 1971,
  • He stated that the theatre integration would be ensured following the creation of Chief of Defence Staff and Department of Military Affairs in the Defence Ministry. Chief of the Defence Staff detailed the work done on theatrisation so far.
• Recalling the integrated efforts of the three services in bringing victory in the India-Pakistan War in 1971 and leading to the biggest surrender of troops after the Second World War, they emphasised the need for integration in the changing situation.
• In the coming days as a forward process, theatre integration will be ensured.
• Integration will be in procurement, indigenisation and prioritising capability development.”
• Borrowing from the best
  • India had extensively studied the theatre command models of the U.S., the U.K., Russia and China to adopt some of the best practices.
  • We will adopt atailor-made model to meet our national security.
  • We are moving forward with maritime theatre command, joint air defence structure and land-centric theatre command.
  • The concept of theatrisation is being progressed on a consensus-based approach at various levels.
  • To bring about greater synergy and bring down redundancy, the service chiefs are likely to retain operational control.
• Identification of theatre command, would be based on the tasks, threats, opportunities and assets.
• After the proposal was examined and finalised by the chiefs of staff committee, it would be operationalised by the Government.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context:

• The winter is setting in in the icy cold deserts of Ladakh and there is no respite for Indian and Chinese soldiers who will remain deployed against each other. 
  • Even if it is a period of calm at the tactical level, the rarefied atmosphere, low temperatures and high altitude take their toll on both men and materiel. 
  • In the last 10 months, the Chinese Western Theatre Command has seen four commanders, two of them- both ‘rising stars’ of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) — moved out for serious health issues.

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• An aggressive focus on India: This ought to have raised wider concerns in the PLA about the health and well-being of its men in the theatre, leading to quick deinduction of its forces from eastern Ladakh. 
  • However, going by the obstinate Chinese stance in recent weeks, the PLA seems singularly uninterested in ending the prolonged deployment. 
• The verbal attacks have been matched by massive infrastructure construction, induction of a large quantity of modern equipment, and a sharp increase in the number of military exercises directed towards India. 
  • These actions are not limited to Ladakh but have also been initiated in the middle and eastern sectors of the 3,488-kilometre long Line of Actual Control (LAC).

India’s Status

• India has correspondingly readied contingency plans to deal with any security challenges in the region. Marginal increase in Chinese patrolling in eastern sector across LAC: Army Commander
• The PLA incursion into Barahoti in Uttarakhand in August was a significant pointer to the renewed Chinese aggression against India. 
• Even though Barahoti is a disputed area between the two sides, it has been a demilitarised zone. No persons in uniform enter the area. 
  • This was violated when PLA soldiers came deep into Indian territory in uniform and damaged some infrastructure. 
• The forays of Chinese patrols in Arunachal Pradesh have also increased in frequency and duration, denoting the PLA’s intention to keep the Indian military under pressure. 
• Such hostility carries the risk of triggering an unintended escalation, as was the case after 200 PLA soldiers were stopped by an Indian patrol in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang earlier this month.

Concerns

• Western scholars with Chinese connections point to two major drivers for the PLA’s aggressive approach against India.
• The first is its institutional interest as the ‘army of the revolution’ which is now losing its primacy to the PLA Air Force and PLA Navy when it comes to Taiwan or the South China Sea. 
  • With China having resolved its boundary disputes with most countries, the only major adversary available for the PLA to reassert its importance is India. 
  • Even under President Xi Jinping, the PLA remains a major actor in the Chinese political system and can promote actions that further its institutional interests.
• The second driver is the PLA’s view that the Indian military has been registering a greater presence on “Chinese territory” in the border areas in the last 10-12 years. 
• After the United Progressive Alliance government decided to build infrastructure and raise additional forces for the China border, a larger number of Indian patrols have been going more frequently into areas which they would rarely, if ever, visit. 
• The Doklam stand-off of 2017, when Indian soldiers walked onto Bhutanese territory claimed by China, was a turning point in the PLA’s appreciation of Indian designs, reinforcing its apprehensions about territorial losses. 
• Western scholars say that there is a strong constituency in the PLA that wants to put India in its place, evoking an eerie parallel to the discourse in Mao’s China after 1959.

New Delhi’s response

• In response to the PLA’s actions on the LAC, the Indian military has also inducted more modern military platforms and systems on the China border which has been backed by infrastructure construction. 
• Despite these accretions, the quantitative and qualitative asymmetry with the Chinese has widened in the past 20 months. 
  • Senior Indian commanders hope that this gap can be offset to some extent by the vast operational experience of Indian troops in hostile climactic and terrain conditions but recognise the very formidable nature of Chinese challenge.
• The Indian military always maintained a defensive deterrence against the PLA which worked for nearly three decades before breaking down completely in 2020. 
• The new troop deployments and equipment inductions, along with infrastructure creation — showcased extensively to the Indian media — are trying to reconstruct that deterrence. 
• India’s advantage in dissuading a major military conflict with China is that as a lesser power, it has to only deny an outright military victory to the PLA for the top Chinese leadership to lose face. 
• Only time will tell whether this reconstructed deterrent will work for India but a lot will depend on factors that are beyond the remit of the Indian military.

Recent Developments 

• The foremost Impact on modernisation is the sharp decline in the Indian economy after demonetisation, further battered by the Government’s poor handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic. 
  • It means that New Delhi is unable to generate enough resources for military modernisation. 
  • It was calculated in 2016 that the Indian Air Force (IAF) would need about 60 fighter jet squadrons by 2020 for a serious two-front threat from China and Pakistan but is down to 30 and losing numbers sharply. 
  • The Indian Navy Chief’s pleas for another aircraft carrier have been rebuffed for want of funds. 
  • The parliamentary standing committee on defence has repeatedly warned about the abnormally high share of vintage equipment in the Indian Army’s profile. 
  • So rapidly is the technological asymmetry with the PLA increasing, that in a few years it is feared that India and China will be fighting two different generations of war.
• The second factor is the increasingly divisive majoritarian politics practised by the ruling party that has left India vulnerable. 
  • The ruling ideology has also held captive the country’s foreign policy in the neighbourhood, adversely affecting Indian interests. 
  • The United Arab Emirates-brokered backchannel deal with Pakistan fell through apparently because of New Delhi’s policies in Kashmir, reactivating the challenge of a two-front collusive military threat. The ceasefire on the Line of Control is barely holding up, with infiltration from the Pakistani side adding to the local Kashmiri youth willing to pick up the gun, opening another half-front for the military. 
  • The recent fracas with Bangladesh on the treatment of religious minorities or the ongoing turmoil over the influx of Myanmar refugees in Mizoram has left India, internally unbalanced, weaker in the region to deal with China. 
• The third is the geopolitics arising out of the great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. 
  • Many strategic commentators in India had pinned their hopes on the external rebalancing via the Quad (India, the United States, Australia, Japan) but the grouping does not have a ‘hard power’ agenda yet. 
    • That role seems to have devolved upon the AUKUS (the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States). 
  • Closer ties between Washington DC and New Delhi, short of an alliance, leave the questions of actual support during a Sino-India military crisis unanswered. 
• Finally, the lack of institutional checks and balances on the political executive, which imposes an even bigger cost in decision-making on national security issues. 
  • In the Ladakh border crisis, the Government and its supporters were in denial about the Chinese ingress into Indian territory for months, including the Prime Minister’s statement that no one had entered Indian territory. 
  • Use of euphemisms like ‘friction points’ for places of Chinese ingress or the removal of an official report about Chinese presence across the LAC from the Defence Ministry’s website or non-acknowledgement of Indian soldiers in Chinese captivity after the Galwan clash have been done to evade political accountability. 
  • Parliament has not been allowed to ask questions or seek clarifications; nor has the parliamentary standing committee deliberated upon the issue. 
  • Large sections of Indian media have been complicit in this cover up, keeping the public in the dark and blocking the feedback loop that keeps democratic governments honest and responsive. 
  • The costs and consequences of a government taking decisions after buying its own spin on national security issues will be inconceivable for India.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context:

During the recent G-20 ministerial meeting in Italy, the Commerce Minister made a pitch for deepening India’s trade ties with several countries. 

• India is negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with several countries. 
• However, rising trade protectionism at home, demonstrated by several examples, could throw a spanner in the works.

Challenges for international trade in India

• Rising tariffs: The simple average of India’s tariffs that stood at 8.9 per cent in 2010-11 has increased by almost 25 per cent to 11.1 per cent in 2020-21. 
  • The proportion of tariff lines with rates above 15 per cent in 2020-21 stood at 25.4 per cent, up from 13.6 per cent in 2014-15. These increases in tariff rates have reversed the political consensus on tariff liberalisation that India followed since 1991. 
  • Tariffs are used to restrict imports. Simply put, they increase the price of goods and services purchased from another country, making them less attractive to domestic consumers.

• India is the highest initiator of anti-dumping measures aimed at shielding domestic industry from import competition. 
  • According to the WTO, from 2015 to 2019, India initiated 233 anti-dumping investigations, which is a sharp increase from 82 initiations between 2011 and 2014 (June). 
  • The anti-dumping initiations by India from 1995 (when the WTO was established) till 2020 stand at 1,071. 
  • This is higher than the anti-dumping initiations by the US (817), the EU (533), and China (292), despite India’s share in the global merchandise exports being far less than these countries.
  • The government imposes anti-dumping duty on foreign imports when it believes that the goods are being “dumped” – through the low pricing – in the domestic market. 
  • Anti-dumping duty is imposed to protect local businesses and markets from unfair competition by foreign imports.
• India recently amended Section 11(2)(f) of the Customs Act of 1962, giving the government the power to ban the import or export of any good (not just gold and silver, as this provision applied earlier) if it is necessary to prevent injury to the economy. 
  • The power to ban the import or export of gold and silver is consistent with WTO regime, provided the ban is not applied in an arbitrary or discriminatory manner. 
  • However, expanding the scope to cover any good is inconsistent with India’s WTO obligations. 
  • WTO allows countries to impose restrictions on imports in case of injury to domestic industry, not to the “economy”. 
  • However, these trade remedial measures can be imposed only if certain conditions are satisfied and after an investigation. India already has laws to impose these trade remedial measures. 
  • Additionally, countries can also impose restrictions on trade on account of balance of payment difficulties and national security purposes. 
  • However, section 11(2)(f) of the Customs Act does not talk of any of these grounds to restrict trade, thus is unnecessary.
• India amended the rules of origin requirement under the Customs Act. Rules of origin determine the national source of a product. 
  • This helps in deciding whether to apply a preferential tariff rate (if the product originates from India’s FTA partner country) or to apply the most favoured nation rate (if the product originates from a non-FTA country). 
  • But India has imposed onerous burdens on importers to ensure compliance with the rules of origin requirement. 
  • The intent appears to be to dissuade importers from importing goods from India’s FTA partners.
• The call given by the Prime Minister to be “vocal for local” (giving preference to domestically made goods) is creating an ecosystem where imports are looked at with disdain, upsetting competitive opportunities and trading partners. 

International trade is not a zero-sum game. India can’t maximise its interests at the expense of others. Its experiment with trade protectionism in the decades before 1991 was disastrous. We should recall Winston Churchill’s warning: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Context:

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs decided to extend the Border Security Force (BSF’s) jurisdiction from 15 km to 50 km inside the international border along Punjab, West Bengal and Assam.

Rationale behind the move

• The Ministry stated that it was amending an earlier notification of 2014 on jurisdiction of the BSF to exercise its powers in states where it guards the international border.
• The Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan has revived serious threats of cross-border infiltration from Pakistan, while China has been increasingly aggressive over the past year.
• The BSF’s powers have not altered, only its jurisdiction has changed from 15 to 50 kilometres and that is for the purposes of uniformity.

• It outlined the new jurisdiction as the whole of the area comprising the States of Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya and Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.
• Incidentally, the BSF’s jurisdiction in the international border along Gujarat has been reduced from 80 km to 50 km.
• A Union Home Ministry stated that the changes were made under the Border Security Force Act of 1968, following suggestions from the BSF.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context:

As the global recovery gains strength, the price of crude oil is nearing its highest level since 2018, while the price of natural gas and coal are hitting record highs amid an intensifying energy shortage.

Reason behind the fuel price rise

• The price of Brent Crude breached the $85 per barrel mark, reaching its highest level since 2018 on the back of a sharp increase in global demand as the world economy recovers from the pandemic.
• Key oil producing countries have kept crude oil supplies on a gradually increasing production schedule despite a sharp increase in global crude oil prices.
• The price of Brent crude has nearly doubled compared to the price of $42.5 per barrel a year ago.
• Recently, the OPEC+ group of oil producing countries reaffirmed that they would increase total crude oil supply by only 400,000 barrels per day in November 2021 despite a sharp increase in prices.
• The output of the top oil-producing countries – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, UAE and Kuwait — would still be about 14 per cent lower than reference levels of production post the increase in November 2021.
• OPEC+ had agreed to sharp cuts in supply in 2020 in response to Covid-19 global travel restrictions in 2020 but the organisation has been slow to boost production as demand has recovered.
• India and other oil importing nations have called on OPEC+ to boost oil supply faster, arguing that elevated crude oil prices could undermine the recovery of the global economy.
• Supply side issues in the US including disruptions caused by hurricane Ida and lower than expected natural gas supplies from Russia amid increasing demand in Europe have raised the prospect of natural gas shortages in the winter.
  • International coal prices have also reached all-time highs as China faces a coal shortage that has led to factories across China facing power outages.
  • A faster than expected recovery in global demand has pushed the price of Indonesian coal up from about $60 per tonne in March to about $200 per tonne in October.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context:

• • China in August tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle that circled the globe before speeding towards its target.

• Hypersonic speeds are 5 or more times the speed of sound.

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• The vehicle was launched on a Long March rocket, which is used for the space programme.
• The Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle, which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target. 
• The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation

Technology used:

• The exact details on the technology used by China in this particular test are not known through media sources. But most hypersonic vehicles primarily use scramjet technology.

Concerns and implications for India and the world:

• The weapon could, in theory, fly over the South Pole. That would pose a big challenge for the US military because its missile defence systems are focused on the northern polar route.
• India is especially concerned with the latest developments considering relations with China in the recent past. Such capabilities highlight the threat for our space assets along with the surface assets.

Global Status regarding hypersonic weapons

• The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum.
• India’s DRDO tested a hypersonic vehicle in September last year. 

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context:

• For the first time, a document has emerged from the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in the nature of an alternative to the present foreign and defence policies named ‘India’s Path to Power: Strategy in a world adrift’. 
  • It is authored by eight well-known strategists and thinkers.

Background

• India does not have a tradition of shadow cabinets lurking behind the government in power with ready alternative approaches to policy matters. 
• The opposition challenges government policies, but provides no alternatives to be adopted in the event of a change in government. 
  • It is only at the time of elections that a manifesto is put forward, but that does not become the policy of the government automatically. 
• The opposition uses think tanks and NGOs to float ideas, which may become part of policy if they become publicly acceptable. 
  • Since there has been a consensus on foreign policy, a shadow foreign policy was out of the question.
• In 2012, many of the same authors had produced another document, ‘Non-alignment 2.0’, in the light of the global changes at that time, as a contribution to policy making, without criticising the policies of the government. 
  • But the new government in 2014 had its own ideas and not much attention was given to the study. 

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• The present document, is in the nature of an alternative to the foreign and defence policies of the Modi government, as some of its tenets are not considered conducive to finding a path to power for India in the post-pandemic world. 
• The eight conclusions are quite logical and reasonable, but the tenor and tone of the paper is one of criticism and need for course correction.

Change in foreign policy

• The first term of the Modi government was remarkable for its innovative, bold and assertive foreign policy, which received general approbation. 
  • He laid out his priorities and pursued them with vigour. 
  • After his unconventional peace initiatives with Pakistan failed, he took a firm stand and gained popularity at home. 
  • His wish to have close relations with the other neighbours did not materialise, but his helpful attitude to them even in difficult situations averted any crisis. 
  • He brought a new symphony into India-U.S. relations and engaged China continuously to find a new equation with it. 
  • India’s relations with Israel and the Arab countries became productive. 
• It was when the second Modi government dealt with some of the unfinished sensitive matters, which were essentially of a domestic nature (Article 370, citizenship issues and farming regulations), that their external dimensions led to a challenge to its foreign policy. 
• The opposition in India began to question the foreign policy postures of the government. 
• The pandemic, the economic meltdown and China’s incursion into Ladakh added to the woes of the government.
• The cumulative effect of these developments is reflected in the CPR report. 
  • The foundational source of India’s influence in the world is the power of its example. 
  • This rests on four pillars, domestic economic growth, social inclusion, political democracy and a broadly liberal constitutional order. If these integral pillars remain strong, there is no stopping India.
• This assertion at the beginning of the report is the heart of the report and it is repeated in different forms. 

Significance of the Report

• The finding is that domestic issues have impacted foreign policy and, therefore, India should set its house in order to stem the tide of international reaction. 
• It is important that we acknowledge the perverse impact of domestic political and ideological factors that are driving our foreign policy. 
• Once the basic premise is set aside, the report has many positive elements, which will help policymakers to rethink policy. 
  • For instance, the report rightly points out that “it would be incorrect and counterproductive for India to turn its back on globalisation”.
  • It also suggests that SAARC should be revived and that India should rejoin the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and continue its long-standing quest for membership in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
• The report also stresses the importance of strategic autonomy in today’s world where change is the only certainty. 
• As for the India-U.S.- China triangle, the report makes the unusual suggestion that India should have better relations individually with both the U.S. and China than they have with each other.
• The report contains detailed analyses on different regions and key countries, but the general thrust is that all is not well with Indian foreign policy and a fundamental change is necessary to meet the present situation. 
• The report concludes that since China will influence India’s external environment politically, economically and infrastructurally, there is no feasible alternative to a combination of engagement and competition with China. 
• A considerable part of the report is devoted to issues relating to defence, the nuclear doctrine, space, cyberspace and the ecological crisis. 
• On the looming environmental disaster, the report states that since India is still at an early stage of its modern development trajectory, it is not yet locked into an energy-intensive pattern of growth. Much of its infrastructure remains to be built.

• In an energy-dependent country like India, the availability of energy supplies at affordable rates is pivotal for fulfilling developmental priorities.

Background

• The energy sector is beset with problems.
• The distribution sector has for long been the bane of the power sector, consistently making huge losses owing to problems such as expensive long-term power purchase agreements, poor infrastructure, inefficient operations, and leakages and weaknesses in State-level tariff policies.
• Most discoms are deep into the red as high aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses are chipping into their revenues.

Context:

• The post-Covid economic recovery has led to a major increase in the demand for power, both in India and globally.

Background

• In India, coal-based power plants have witnessed rapid depletion of coal stocks from a comfortable 28 days at the end of March to a precarious level of four days by the end of September.
• The country is struggling to understand how the crisis is likely to pan out in the near future.
• Coal India Ltd (CIL) has been unfairly attacked, even as it gears up to play a crucial role in fighting the power crisis.

Reasons for the crisis

• Structural: A government-appointed committee in the early 1990s concluded that CIL “cannot be expected to meet the demand of the power sector, in case the pace of capacity addition accelerates.”
  • This led to an amendment in the Coal Mines Nationalisation Act (CMNA)in 1993 that enabled the government to take away 200 coal blocks of 28 billion tons from CIL and allocate them to end-users for the captive mining of coal.
    • These end-users, mostly in the private sector, failed to produce any significant quantity of coal to meet the rapidly rising power capacity between 2007 and 2016.
    • The cancellation of 214 blocks by the Supreme Court added to the problem.
  • Commensurate with the captive mines allocated to the end-user industries, the coal production today should have been at least 500 million tonnes per annum (mtpa). In reality, this has never exceeded 60 mtpa.
  • CIL, with denuded reserves, is called to meet the rising gap in coal supplies. These structural factors fuelled not just over-expectations from CIL, they also kept the company in a constant state of stress.
• On the operational side, power plants are required by the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) to maintain a minimum stock of 15 to 30 days of normative coal consumption, depending upon the distance of the plant from the source of coal.
  • The compliance with this directive by power plants has been severely lacking. This enhances the vulnerability of power plants, particularly those at longer distances, to supply constraints on account of the coal producer or transporter.
  • The persistent non-payment of coal sale dues by power plants to coal companies has created a serious strain on their working capital position.
  • Some companies were forced to borrow from banks to meet the operational expenses, including disbursement of salaries.
  • According to reports, Rs 18,000 crore is currently due to coal producers.

Context:

• Recently, Global Hunger Index (GHI)  Jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe
  • India has slipped to 101st position in the GHI 2021 of 116 countries, from its 2020 position of 94th.

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• The GHI puts India far below some of its neighbouring countries.
• Barring  last year’s rank of 94 out of 107 countries, India’s rank has been between 100 and 103 since 2017.
• This year’s slide in the rank assumes significance especially in the context of COVID-19.

About the Global Hunger Index:

• It is an annual Report Jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe.
• It was first produced in 2006. It is published every October. The 2021 edition marks the 16th edition of the GHI.
• Aim: Tocomprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels.
• It is calculated on the basis of four indicators:
  • Undernourishment:Share of the population with insufficient caloric intake- is applicable for all age groups.
  • Child Wasting:Share of children under age five who have low weight for their height, reflecting acute undernutrition.
  • Child Stunting: Share of children under age five who have low height for their age, reflecting chronic undernutrition.
  • Child Mortality: Themortality rate of children under the age of five.
• Based on the values of the four indicators, the GHI determines hunger on a 100-point scale where 0 is the best possible score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
• Each country’s GHI score is classified by severity, from low to extremely alarming.
• Undernourishment data are provided by theFood and Agriculture Organisation and child mortality data are sourced from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).
• Child wasting and stunting dataare drawn from the joint database of UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, among others.