TOPIC-1: Delivering on
Make in India
In its last 18 months, the UPA
government faced up to an economic reality: new investments had come to a halt and projects worth lakhs of crores of rupees
caught in red tape were turning unviable,
posing a threat to banks that had lent
for them. The then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, heeded
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s concern about the impact on public sector
banks if these projects were not brought back on track through high-level
intervention. When the NDA government assumed office, it found that the
mechanism that Dr. Singh had approved to fix the problem — a project monitoring
group in the Cabinet Secretariat to steer around
roadblocks to big-ticket manufacturing and infrastructure projects — had helped
clear projects worth Rs.6.5 lakh crore. In June 2014, the Prime Minister’s
Office asked the group to ascertain if the projects it had helped had begun
operations. The PMO wanted to know if more chimneys
were billowing smoke, if production
was going up and jobs were being created on the ground. Three months later, the
government launched its Make in India programme to encourage the world to use
the country as a global production hub. It promised reforms on norms for
foreign direct investment — many of which it subsequently delivered — and a fix
for problems that gave the country a poor reputation among foreigners,
including unpredictable tax policies and a difficult regulatory environment.
Over the last week, about 1,000 CEOs
and 4,000 delegates representing 2,000 overseas firms were in Mumbai at a glitzy event to showcase Make in India, which
Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented as the biggest brand to emerge from the
country. He said India was adding deregulation to its strengths of democracy,
demography and demand, and promised to end retrospective
taxation that had spooked investors
during the UPA rule. The Industries Ministry has claimed that Rs.15.2-lakh
crore worth of investments were committed at the event. These include some by
foreign firms such as Oracle (Rs.2,749 crore) and Ascendas (Rs.4,571 crore),
but the list is dominated by Indian players making announcements to coincide
with the occasion, including a Rs.6,204-crore project by public sector
undertaking Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilizers. Instead of doubting the
numbers, it may be more pertinent to
focus on two other developments of the week. Authorities served Vodafone a
reminder for tax, which warned of asset seizure
in case of failure to pay the dues, prompting a sharp reaction from the British
firm. It also emerged that Foxconn was yet to follow through on a $5-billion
investment it had announced in Maharashtra last August. To capitalise on the
success of Make in India, the government must now show sustained improvement on
the ease of doing business and create a transparent and stable tax environment
to prove it is capable of delivering on its intent. It should use the same yardstick to measure Make in India’s success as it
did for the earlier stalled projects:
would products start rolling out of factory gates anytime soon?
VOCABULARY:
1.halt : the state
of inactivity following an interruption.
2.unviable : not
capable of working successfully; not feasible.
3.threat :something
that is a source of danger.
4.heeded : pay
attention to; take notice of.
5.steer : an
indication of potential opportunity.
6.chimneys : a
glass tube protecting the flame of a lamp.
7.billowing : (of
smoke, cloud, or steam) move or flow outward with an undulating motion.
8.unpredictable :unknown
in advance.
9.glitzy :
attractive in a showy and often superficial way.
10.retrospective :an exhibition of a representative selection of an artist's life work.
11.spooked :
frighten; unnerve.
12.pertinent : having precise or logical relevance to
the matter at hand.
13.seizure : a
sudden occurrence (or recurrence) of a disease.
14.yardstick : a
measure or standard used for comparison.
15.stalled : stop or cause to stop making progress.
TOPIC-2:
Unreasonable demands
The recurrence
of violent protests led by relatively well-off communities demanding reservation,
be it Patidars in Gujarat last year or Jats in Haryana this year, is perplexing. The Jats are a relatively prosperous
land-owning community in Haryana and are regarded as being high on the “social
ladder” in the region. Their political and social might is even more evident in
the influence they wield in rural areas
and in the leadership of the dominant political parties in the State. The
National Commission for Backward Classes had in the past come out with specific
reasons against the inclusion of the Jats
in Haryana in the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) list. This was overruled by the
Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government
at the Centre through a notification in March 2014, promising a special quota
for Jats over and beyond the 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in jobs and
higher education. It was left to the Supreme Court in March 2015 to reiterate the reality and to quash the decision of the UPA to include Jats in
nine States among OBCs, stating that “caste” alone could not be the criterion
for determining socio-economic backwardness. Clearly, even if the demands do
not make any constitutional or legal sense, the bipartisan consensus over
extending reservations has emboldened protestors among the Jat community. After
all, the Bharatiya Janata Party in power too had voiced support for the
implementation of the March 2014 notification.
Yet, the demands for reservations
from these powerful communities is also a consequence of the success of the
system of reservations that formed the most significant component of the Mandal
Commission recommendations, implemented for the past 25 years, apart from the
65 years of reservations for Dalits and Adivasis. The larger goal went beyond
the uplift of the underprivileged and the
historically backward; the purpose was to reduce the gap between the “upper”
and the “lower” strata in the social hierarchy. That communities which have
identified themselves with the upper strata of society also seek “backward”
status suggests that through public sector representation and expansion in
access to higher education the “economic gap” has been narrowed, or is at least
seen to be narrowing. Specifically in the case of Jats, despite higher economic
and social standing, there has been a reduction in landholding owing to
distribution over generations and a squeezing
of rural incomes due to the persisting sluggishness in the agrarian
economy. It is a combination of these structural issues over time, besides the
relative success of the reservation programme, that has fuelled the
unreasonable demands made by Jats. In the case of the more prosperous and
diverse Patidars in Gujarat, the demands for reservation were a thin pretext to
do away with the system of reservation itself. The agitations,
in a way, point to the need to review the list of castes counted as OBCs and to
deepen the definition of creamy layer. An opportunity for this was provided
through the Socio-Economic and Caste Census, but it was missed.
VOCABULARY:
1.recurrence : happening again (especially at regular intervals).
2.perplexing : lacking clarity of meaning; causing confusion or perplexity.
3.wield :
handle effectively.
4.inclusion : the state of being included.
5.Alliance : an organization of people (or countries) involved in a pact or treaty.
6.reiterate
: to say, state, or perform again.
7.quash :
put down by force or intimidation.
8.underprivileged : lacking the rights and advantages of other members of society.
9.squeezing : the act of gripping and pressing firmly.
10.agitations : a state of anxiety or nervous excitement.
