Friday, August 24, 2012

HEADLINES

• After restricting SMS to prevent spreading of rumours which had led to mass exodus of northeasterners from certain states, the Govt increased the number of SMS from 5 to 20 per day with immediate effect
• Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee decides to examine the latest reports of the CAG on coal block allocation, Delhi Airport, Ultra Mega Power Plants and the atomic energy regulator
• Ban Ki Moon announced that he would join representatives from 120 nations in Tehran next week at a summit of Non-Aligned countries despite US and Israeli objections
• The Govt and Twitter headed for a showdown with Twitter refusing to block certain websites siting technical difficulties

NATIONAL NEWS

• Govt directs its departments to tread carefully on social media
  • The government on Thursday issued guidelines for its departments using social media networks asking them not to post confidential information and “unverified” facts. With 40 million Facebook and 16 million Twitter users in India, social media have emerged as a powerful platform for forming an opinion as well as generating mass support, the Information Technology Ministry said in its 38-page guidelines issued on Thursday;
  • It asked persons handling social media for all government agencies including public sector undertakings not to comment and respond unless authorised to do so especially in the matters that are sub judice, draft legislations or relating to other individuals;
  • Asking social media handlers to be polite, discrete and respectful, the guidelines said personal comments for or against any individuals or agencies should not be made and professional discussions should not be politicised;
  • The guidelines stated that social media can only be used by the government to communicate existing government information and propagate official policy to the public. The guidelines said while employees were free to post response in their personal capacity but they should make it clear that it is not the official view;
  • The government’s communication to citizens via social media should follow the same data retention policy as its communication through other electronic and non-electronic channels.
• In a fix over reply in Parliament, Govt does a U-turn in the Supreme Court
  • In a reply which is likely to cause a major embarrassment to it in Parliament, the Centre on Thursday informed the Supreme Court that it had not accepted 69 of the 81 recommendations of the Ashok Chawla Committee that natural resources be auctioned;
  • Ashok Chawla was a former finance secretary of the Govt and was appointed in 2011 to head the committee to consider the allocation of natural resources, such as telecom sprectrum, natural gas, oil, etc;
  • On August 9, three questions were raised in the Rajya Sabha — “whether it is a fact that the Ashok Chawla Committee has submitted its report in the wake of the 2G spectrum scam to the government; if so, the details of the recommendations and the number of recommendations that have been accepted; and how many are yet to be accepted and what is the time frame”;
  • Minister of State Namo Narain, in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, said the committee gave 81 recommendations covering eight natural resources — coal, minerals, petroleum, natural gas, spectrum, forests, land and water. He said: “The government has accepted 69 recommendations, one has not been accepted and 11 are under consideration”;
  • Completely disowning this reply, the Telecom Secretary, in a note filed in the court, said “the statement and the answer that the government has accepted 69 recommendations are not accurate and the correct position is that it was decided that the 69 recommendations would be pursued by the individual Ministries in a timely manner and this is still ongoing.”
• Rangarajan panel to submit its report on one year's time
  • The expert group set up under the chairmanship of Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council chief, C. Rangarajan, to review the methodology of measuring poverty and look into the criteria of pegging the poverty line, will be submitting its report in a year’s time;
  • The five-member group headed by Dr. Rangarajan has also been mandated to recommend how estimates of poverty should be linked to eligibility and entitlements for government schemes and programmes;
  • It may be recalled that following criticism from various quarters on the estimation of poverty, the panel was set up in June to examine the norms of fixing the poverty line, review alternative ways of poverty estimation, and recommend ways to update consumption poverty lines on the basis of new consumer price indices for rural & urban areas;
  • This comes at a time when the Govt decided to drop the methodology proposed in the Tendulkar committee report submitted 2009 on the same issue. The Alagh Committee (1977) and the Lakdawala Committee (1989) were constituted before the Tendulkar Committee (2005) to review the poverty line and the ratios.
• Controller and Auditor General pulls up the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board
  • The CAG on Wednesday pulled up the AERB for not preparing a nuclear and radiation safety policy for the country despite receiving a specific mandate to do so in the order constituting the Board as far back as 1983;
  • In a scathing report tabled in Parliament, the CAG also noted that the AERB had yet to develop 27 out of the 168 safety documents despite recommendations made by two panels in 1987 and 1997 that the process of developing safety documents be expedited;
  • The report was also critical of the AERB not having a direct role in conducting independent assessments and monitoring to ensure radiological protection of those working in nuclear power plants. In India, the responsibility of monitoring radiological exposure and conducting radiological surveillance of the plants lies with their operators — the Nuclear Power Corporation of India — and not the AERB;
  • In addition, the CAG noted that the AERB did not have a detailed inventory of all radiation sources to ensure effective compliance of regulations for safe disposal of disused sources;
  • Specifically, the CAG observed that 91 per cent of the medical x-ray facilities in the country were not registered with the AERB and that despite a Supreme Court directive issued in 2001 requiring the setting up of Directorate of Radiation Safety in every State, such agencies had so far been set up only in Kerala and Mizoram.
• Election Commission working on new design for Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs)
  • The Commission is working on a new design for EVMs which will accommodate more than the present maximum limit of 64 candidates. At present ballot boxes were used in elections where the number of candidates was more than 64.
• The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved amendments in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act by including unlawful financial activities like money laundering, terror financing and circulation of fake Indian currency in the definition of “terrorist act.”

EDITORIALS, OPINIONS & COLUMNS

• Read this article about the bio-safety issues that Genetically Modified crops pose in India
• Read this editorial on the need for a refugee law in India. India is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, nor does it have a national framework on the issue.

ECONOMY & BUSINESS NEWS

• State Bank of India for phasing out of Cash Reserve Ratio of the Reserve Bank of India
  • The system of CRR should be phased out as the original reasoning behind the CRR has been diluted over time, SBI Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri said. “There were compelling reasons to have a re-look at CRR as a policy instrument. In effect, the CRR policy has possibly denied the country growth, income and taxes,” he said. He said that a phasing out of CRR would allow banks to lower lending rates thus helping industry;
  • Section 42 of the RBI Act authorises the central bank to notify the quantum of the cash reserve ratio to be maintained by the scheduled bank by way of a deposit with the RBI. The provision has served the twin purpose of impounding resources to curb speculative lending and ensuring liquidity reserve for banks and is also used as a tool to control inflation.
• India-Mauritius tax treaty being abused says Govt
  • Government today said investors are abusing India-Mauritius treaty to avoid tax liability and efforts are on to find a mutually acceptable solution to check its misuse. Under the India and Mauritius Double Taxation Avoidance Convention of 1983, taxation of capital gains arising from alienation of shares is allowed only in the country of residence of the investor (i.e. Mauritius). However, capital-gains is fully exempt from taxation in Mauritius;
  • Thus an investor routing his investment through Mauritius into India does not pay capital gains tax either in India or in Mauritius. Mauritius thus became an attractive route for investment through treaty abuse;
  • India has proposed to review the DTAC bilaterally to incorporate changes in the treaty for prevention of treaty abuse and strengthen the mechanism for exchange of information on tax matters between the two countries;
  • A joint working group was constituted in 2006 to put in place adequate safeguards to prevent misuse of the treaty and seven rounds of discussions have taken place so far.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

• Nobel Laureate predicts 'dark' future for universe
  • Renowned astronomer and Nobel laureate Brian P. Schmidt predicted a “dark” future for the universe which he says will eventually fade away throwing astronomers out of work. He predicts that human beings will look to an empty universe in 100 billion years, as all the galaxies will fade away except the Milky Way we live in;
  • Prof. Schmidt shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Before their discoveries, it was commonly thought that the expansion of the universe was slowing down;
  • By monitoring the brightness and measuring the red-shift of the supernovae, Prof. Schmidt and his partners discovered that billion-year-old exploding stars and their galaxies are accelerating away from their reference frame;
  • Their discoveries led to research on dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to accelerate the expansion of the universe. They say - “We don’t know how dark energy is generated. It seems to be a part of the fabric of space itself. So dark energy makes more space, and more space makes more dark energy, which then makes more space. The universe runs away because of the stuff (process).”