- Kerala to give ‘maximum’ water to T.N.
- Page 5.
- GS 2, Inter-State Water Disputes, Polity.
- Steps will be taken to provide maximum water to Tamil Nadu from Siruvani Dam considering the water shortage faced by Coimbatore city, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said.
- At the centre of job creation
- Page 7.
- GS 2,3; Employment, Human Resources, Growth and Development.
- The creation of employment is indeed a problem and can no longer be hidden from the public discourse. The private sector, especially modern sectors such as the service and manufacturing sectors, which are dominated by multinational companies, have not created many jobs. Even if the Information Technology sector or the modern gig economy have created jobs, these are either very high-skilled jobs or low-skilled ones. Also, the government in the Nehruvian scheme of development occupied an important place in the labour market.
- Resurrecting a dead law
- Page 7.
- GS 2,3; Judiciary, Technology.
- Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional in 2015 in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India for having a “chilling effect on free speech”, is in talks. As part of the ongoing negotiations at the United Nations for a proposed international treaty on combating cybercrime, India made a formal submission for criminalising “offensive messages”.
- Dutch disease
- Page 9.
- GS 3, Economy.
- Dutch Disease in economics refers to a phenomenon wherein a country witnesses uneven growth across sectors due to the discovery of natural resources, especially large oil reserves. According to the concept, when a country discovers natural resources and starts exporting them to the rest of the world, it causes the exchange rate of the currency to appreciate significantly and this, in turn, discourages the exports from other sectors while encouraging the import of cheaper alternatives. While the idea was first proposed by economists Peter Neary and Max Corden in 1982, the term ‘Dutch disease’ was first coined by The Economist in 1977 to describe the decline of the manufacturing industry in the Netherlands.
- Solving the Sterlite problem
- Page 9.
- GS 3, Growth and Development, Resources.
- Sterlite Copper of Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu has become a moral issue after the police firing on protesters resulted in the deaths of 13 people in May 2018. Sterlite’s product, copper, is a strategic metal. Important applications are energy, electrical equipment and electronics. Copper production provides strategic balance and price stability. The shuttering of the Sterlite plant quickly made India, a copper exporter, an importer. However, distrust of Sterlite is so much that many people now credit good rains to the shuttering of the plant. The community complains that Sterlite did not employ enough local people and did not give enough contracts for local businessmen. Therefore, the corporate group needs to act responsibly and take the people along with it if it wants to conduct its business.
- Shah flags importance of data protection
- Page 10.
- GS 3, Cyber Security.
- Union Home Minister said that forces inimical to India had constituted “cyber armies” to launch cyberattacks against India but the Home Ministry was ready to thwart any such attempt. Mr. Shah said crimes such as malware attacks, phishing, attack on critical infrastructure and child pornography were not new and these were going to only increase in the future. The number of cybercrimes registered in 2012 was 3,377 and in 2020, it had increased to more than 50,000 cases and by 2025, the crime rate was projected to go up by 231%.
- India faces near-term challenges: Finance Ministry
- Page 14.
- GS 3, Economy.
- India is facing near-term challenges in managing its fiscal deficit, sustaining economic growth, reining in inflation and containing the current account deficit but the country is relatively better placed to weather these headwinds compared with other nations, the Finance Ministry said in its monthly economic report.
