IASbaba's Daily Current Affairs Analysis

IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs (Prelims + Mains

Focus)- 25th December 2017

(PRELIMS+MAINS FOCUS)

Rising employment gap

Part of: Mains GS Paper III- Inclusive growth

Key pointers:

About 26 million people joined the potential workforce in the year to August 2017, while only about 1.5 million people were employed on an incremental basis, according to survey data provided by BSE-CMIE.
The population in the age bracket 15 years or above (the potential workforce) was up from 942 million to 968 million, while the number of employed increased from 403 million to 405 million.
BSE-CMIE conducts three surveys in a year on employment – with a sample of 1,01,724 households across 25 States.
According to BSE-CMIE, at least 16 million people are unemployed today.

Pic credit: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/multimedia/dynamic/03217/bl25-blmtu-job-_G1_3217940e.jpg

Central focus:

Many economists have said that if the pace of job creation is not accelerated, the ‘demographic bonus’ could become a ‘demographic onus’.
About 12 million people are expected to join the Indian workforce every year till 2050, according to the 2017 UN population estimate, mandating that many jobs to be created every year.
Labour force participation among women, at 11 per cent (as compared to 72 per cent for men), is among the lowest in the world.
The government needs to focus more on sectors with higher employment elasticity to catalyse job creation.
Currently, sectors such as construction (1.1), apparel (0.79), leather and leather products (0.64) have relatively higher employment elasticity as against utilities (0.04), trade and transport (0.2).
Employment elasticity- Employment elasticity is a measure of the percentage change in employmentassociated with a 1 percentage point change in economic growth. The employment elasticity indicates the ability of an economy to generate employment opportunities for its population as per cent of its growth (development) process

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115 ‘backward’ districts uplift plan

Part of: Mains GS Paper III- Inclusive growth

Key pointers:

The government has drawn up tailor-made action plans for 115 identified “most-backward” districts in the country to improve their socio-economic profiles by making available basic services like healthcare, sanitation and education as well as basic physical infrastructure like roads and drinking water supply in a time-bound manner.
The 115 districts, including 35 affected by left-wing extremism, were selected on parameters like deprivation (extent of landless households), health & nutrition (institutional delivery, stunting of children and wasting in children), education (elementary dropout rate and adverse pupil-teacher ratio) and infrastructure (un-electrified homes, lack of toilets, villages not connected by road and lack of drinking water).
The government’s focus is to work with states to bring a transformative change in these backward areas through rapid government-anchored programmes and interventions by 2022, the 75th year of India’s independence.
The district collectors will be the chief executors of the action programmes in districts.
At least one district has been included from each state under the backward district programme.

Central focus:

In 2016, India ranked 131 among 188 nations in the UN Development Programme’s human development index (HDI) with major inter-state and inter-district variations.
Nearly 40 per cent of children born in India are stunted and/or underweight while almost 50 per cent of women are anemic.
On nutrition, India even lags behind neighbours such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and China.
Among states, in Jharkhand nearly 50 per cent children are underweight, 64 per cent of class 5 students can’t read standard 2 English, density of population to doctor/hospital beds are the lowest in the country and 40 per cent households are not electrified. While , Jharkhand has the highest number of districts with 19, followed by Bihar (13) Chhattisgarh (10) and 8 each in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha.

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UNSC approves sanctions against North Korea

Part of: Mains GS Paper II- International relations

Key pointers:

The UN Security Council unanimously approved tough new sanctions against North Korea in response to its latest launch of a ballistic missile that Pyongyang says can reach anywhere on the US mainland.
North Korea today has termed the UN sanctions to target the country “an act of war” that violates its sovereignty, and said it is a “pipe dream” for the United States to think it will give up its nuclear weapons.
The resolution adopted by the Security Council includes sharply lower limits on North Korea’s refined oil imports, the return home of all North Koreans working overseas within 24 months, and a crackdown on ships smuggling banned items including coal and oil to and from the country.

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‘Awakened Citizen Programme’

Part of: Mains GS Paper IV- Human Values – lessons from the lives and teachings of great leaders, reformers and administrators; role of family, society and educational institutions in inculcating values.

Key pointers:

The Central Board of Secondary Education has tied up with the Ramakrishna mission to impart value education to its students and make them “awakened” citizens with values of peace, harmony, humility and cooperation.
Values such as harmony, peace, compassion and humility have for centuries been a part of the discourse of every society of the world and their need and importance is universally accepted and felt. With the objective to strengthen, promote and develop cooperation in promoting values education, the Ramakrishna Mission, New Delhi has prepared ‘Awakened Citizen Programme’ for teachers and students’.
This programme is a three-year graded Values Education programme for students of Classes 6 to 8 (or Classes 7-9).
The implementation of the programme by schools is voluntary.

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(MAINS FOCUS)

NATIONAL

TOPIC: General studies 2:

Structure, organization and functioning of the Judiciary

Time to increase budgetary allocation for the judiciary

Background:

In democracies, elected governments often view a strong and independent judiciary with suspicion. Politicians, regardless of ideology, desire a weak and submissive judiciary which will not come in the way of fulfilling the promises made before elections. The executive, at all times, tries to keep the judiciary in check. One such way is to keep the judiciary’s budgetary allocation to a bare minimum.

The judiciary’s budgetary allocation is bare minimum:

For 2017-18, the Union budget allocated a meagre about 0.4 per cent of the total budget.
To put this in perspective, each of the 12 companies with the highest non-performing assets (NPA) have debts at least eight to 10 times more than the judiciary’s budget.

Issues:

There are reportedly about 3.4 crore cases pending across all courts..
Poor manpower and crumbling infrastructure, coupled with a boom in litigation, made the judiciary underperform. As a result, courts were buried under cases.
New laws have been enacted by Parliament without a commensurate increase in judicial officers or courts.
For example, dishonour of cheques was made a criminal offence in 1988. There are an existimated 38 lakh such cases pending before magistrates across India. This took away manpower from other cases, with a cascading effect on pendency.
For 1.7 billion people in India, there are 31 judges in the SC and 1,079 in high courts.
As of April 2017, there were 430 posts of judges and additional judges lying vacant in high courts, and 5,000 posts vacant at the district level and lower.
When suggestions to fill vacancies are made by the chief justice, the government’s response is the same: They do not have the money for it.
In the Supreme Court (SC), each judge is tasked with reading huge number of cases.
Judicial decision-making is a complex, time-consuming process. It directly affects the rights and livelihoods of persons, which in turn requires hearings on facts, legal precedent and the arguments of lawyers of both parties.
Thus, the requirement of manpower is huge.

Way forward:

The government should cut down the number of cases it files in courts, as the Government of India and state governments file the maximum number of cases.
A policy should be put in place, and officers made accountable for filing of frivolous cases.
It would also be wise for the government to consider that whenever legislation (primarily economic and criminal) which would result in new kinds of disputes arising is proposed, for example, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, additional amounts should be provided for setting up of new courts and appointing officers to deal with such cases.
Constituting tribunals headed by retired judges is not enough, since cases eventually travel to a criminal court, and then to a high court or the Supreme Court. The government ought to estimate such jumps in the number of cases and increase the judiciary’s budget proportionally.

Conclusion:

Lack of infrastructure is a serious issue in the courts. Also, the salary offered to judges is very low. Given the work stress on the judiciary, it is time the government loosened its purse strings and give the judiciary a substantial hike.

Connecting the dots:

The budgetary allocations to the judiciary has been kept very low. This has led to issues ranging from poor infrastructure, pendency of cases, and overstressed judges. Discuss.