GS Analyst: Daily Current Affairs

According to the Directorate General of Health Services, the incidence of infertility in eligible couples is approximately 14 per cent-16 percent.

What is Total Fertility rate?

• Total fertility rate (TFR) in simple terms refers to the total number of children born or likely to be born to a woman in her lifetime if she were subject to the prevailing rate of age-specific fertility in the population.
• TFR of about 2.1 children per woman is called Replacement-level fertility. TFR lower than 2.1 children per woman — indicates that a generation is not producing enough children to replace itself, eventually leading to an outright reduction in population.

Types of Infertility:

• Primary infertility – where someone who's never conceived a child in the past has difficulty conceiving.
• Secondary infertility – where someone has had 1 or more pregnancies in the past, but is having difficulty conceiving again.

Health Issues Overburdening in India:

• As per the National Health Policy, 2017, public investment in health is expected to reach 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025.
• As per latest economic survey 2023-24, the Government Health Expenditure (GHE) for the last three years i.e. 2021-22, 2022-23 (RE) and 2023-24 (BE) is 1.9 per cent of GDP.
• The government told the House that the Department of Health and Family Welfare (DoHFW) has made efforts to increase allocation in the health budget.

Reasons for rising Infertility:

• Impact of Climate Change on Women and Children:
• Climatic changes may also spur shifts in fertility by decreasing children's health and survival, which may lead women to have additional children in anticipation of increased mortality risks (“insurance effects”) or in response to an actual child death.
• Rise in use of Intoxicants: Fertility is affected by unhealthy coping mechanisms such as tobacco and alcohol overuse.
• Contraceptives: Also, there has been a significant increase in current use of any modern contraceptive method. Contraceptive Prevalence Rate has increased substantially from 54% to 67% at the all-India level.
• Reversible Spacing: Introduction of new reversible spacing (gaps between children) methods , wage compensation systems to undergo sterilisation, and the promotion of small family norms also worked well over the years.

Challenges:

• Lack of Data: The Union Ministry of Women and Child Development has not conducted an audit regarding the impact of climate change on women and children.
• Declining Sex Ratio: India needs to give huge stress on declining sex ratios and the discrimination towards girls so that people don’t have a high number of children in the hope of having a boy.
• Concerns of Lower TFR: TFR lower than 2.1 children per woman — indicates that a generation is not producing enough children to replace itself, eventually leading to an outright reduction in population.
• Thus, TFR lower than 2 (as it is the case in urban areas in India) has its own set of problems. For example, Declining population.

Government Policies for Better health strategies:

• Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has already made regulations to ensure that cancer causing used cooking oil does not enter in the food chain.
• FSSAI has also launched Repurpose Used Cooking Oil (RUCO) initiative to enable the collection and conversion of UCO to biodiesel and/or soap.

The government has announced its intent to review the IT Act. To fundamentally resolve the source of these disputes requires that the contentious sections of the Act be carefully redrafted, and tax structure simplified.

What is Taxation?

• Taxation is not just a vehicle for raising state revenue. It can also be critically important for economic and political development.
• In recent times, India has introduced some far-reaching reforms to increase compliance (like Goods and Services Tax (GST), reduction in corporate tax rate and phasing out of exemptions etc.) and to reduce tax evasion (like Place of Effective Management, Black Money Act etc.).

Income Tax Structure in India:

• Between assessment years 2019-20 and 2022-23, the number of taxpayers increased from 89.8 to 93.7 million.
• Budget 2024-25 has further reduced the tax rate for incomes below Rs 12 lakh, which will impact more than 80 per cent of individual returns and 51 per cent of the gross income filed in returns.
• Only 6.08 cr individuals pay taxes (~4.9%) much below the desired level of 23%.
• In India, only 15.5% of net national income is reported.
• Overall, Tax-to-GDP ratio (at 17.82% in FY 2017-18) still remains below that of emerging economies (~21%) and much below OECD average (~34%).

Reasons behind low Tax-to-GDP ratio in India:

• Low tax base:
• Income Tax: In India, the exemption threshold of income tax has been consistently raised, much rapidly than underlying income growth. This implies that relatively well off people are subsidized at the cost of services which could be provided to poor with the forgone money.
• Corporate Tax: Before the recently unveiled tax-cuts, India was branded as a high-tax destination with corporate tax rate over 30%.
• Moreover, a complex system of exemptions, tax cuts, preferential tax rates, deferral of tax liabilities etc. has led to large tax collection expenditure and a significant amount of revenue foregone.
• Tax Evasion: Tax evasion and corruption undermines the legitimacy of the State. It creates a belief among the citizens that the public resources are being wasted, reducing the willingness to pay.
• A state that over-emphasizes or prioritizes redistribution over delivery of services ends up having middle class 'exit from the state' i.e. people start avoid paying taxes, start associating state with inefficiencies, promote using private hospitals or sending children to private schools etc. This will reduce the demand of services from state, further eroding its legitimacy to earn taxes.
• Multiplicity of exemptions and exclusions further increase the complexity of the tax structure and acts as a disincentive for tax-compliant society, as in case of GST.
• Weak Tax Administration: is considered a key barrier to effective and fair tax collection in the country.
• Tax administration and tax compliance is weak due to lack of technical expertise and financial resources, as well as due to corruption.
• Tax administrative capacity at sub-national and local government levels (e.g. user charges, property tax etc.) is particularly wanting.
• Structural Issues: Several structural factors have impinged upon India’s tax revenue performance such as: o large share of agriculture (historically untaxed sector) & service sector (lightly taxed sector).

Need for Tax Reforms:

Various committees, to consolidate the direct taxes, were constituted by the government like Raja Chelliah Committee (early 1990s), Vijay Kelkar Committee (2002), and the Easwar Panel.

• Recently, with the constitution of Arbind Modi Committee on Income Tax Reforms and Akhilesh Ranjan Panel on formulating a new Direct Tax Code (DTC), Government seems to be moving firmly in the direction of Direct Tax reform.
• Direct Taxes Code (DTC) aims to revise, consolidate and simplify the structure of direct tax laws (like the Income tax Act, 1961; Wealth Tax Act, 1957) in India into a single legislation.

Measures taken by the Government

• Increasing Tax Compliance
• CBDT launched ‘E- Sahyog’ portal to facilitate online filing of the returns;
• Project Saksham was launched by CBIC to help in implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) and in extension of Indian Customs Single Window Interface for Facilitating Trade (SWIFT)
• Extending the scope of Tax Collected at Source (TCS): E.g. 1% TCS is charged on luxury items (cars > 10 lakh/ cash payment > 2 lakh) collected by seller. o Push towards digitalization and formalization will increase expansion of tax net.
• Anti-Tax Avoidance Measures:
• Advanced Pricing Agreements (APAs): APA is an agreement between a taxpayer and tax authority determining the transfer pricing methodology for pricing the tax payer’s international transactions for future years.
• GAAR (General Anti-Avoidance Rules), effective from April 1st, 2017, is a set of rules which helps the revenue authorities to decide:
  • whether a particular transaction has commercial substance or not
  • tax liability associated with a genuine transaction.

Recently, a senior official mentioned that a draft notification classifying parts of the Western Ghats in six States as Ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs), yet to become law after a decade because of States’ objections.

About the draft:

• The last time this draft was issued was in July 2022.
• The draft had proposed to declare 13 villages in Wayanad, spanning the three talukas of Mananthavady, Sulthan Bathery, and Vythiri, as part of an ESA.
• Despite its six iterations, affected States like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu — have objected to specific places that have been included in the ESA regions.
• The dominant sentiment in Kerala was that this notification would subsume agricultural plantations, curtail the State’s hydro-electricity plans, and lead to a migration crisis given the State’s high population density.

What are Ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs)?

• Ministry Of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notifies Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESA), which have unique biological resources and requires special attention for their conservation.
• In so far as the 13 States of Indian Himalayan Region are concerned, 2 ESAs and 92 ESZs have been already notified.
• The last decade has seen significant action around Ecologically Sensitive Areas at the national level.
• The MoEF has defined the term ‘ecological sensitivity’. The criteria and procedure for designation of areas as ‘ecologically sensitive’ have been decided and ‘environmental sensitivity’ has emerged as an important driver of conservation.

Criteria to declare ESAs:

• The Pronab Sen Committee Report was submitted to the MoEF in September 2000. The report mentions that recommendations of the earlier reports (Report of the MoEF on Parameters for Determining Ecological Fragility, 1990 and the Planning Commission Report on Conserving Ecologically Fragile Ecosystems, 1996) that developed parameters had not been effectively implemented;
• The report defines ‘ecological sensitivity / fragility’ as the imminent possibility of permanent and irreparable loss of extant life forms from the world, and of significant damage to the natural processes of evolution and speciation.
• These criteria are divided further into three categories: species-based, ecosystem-based and geomorphological features-based. The species-based category includes criteria like endemism, rarity, presence of endangered species and centres of evolution of domesticated species as primary criteria and centres of lesser-known food plants as auxiliary criteria.
• One of the most significant recommendations of the Pronab Sen Committee Report states that though its criteria only deal with ecological sensitivity, the protection provided by the EPA should address broader environmental concerns as well.

Private sector investment in agriculture technologies will help to boost crop yields or cutting production costs for Indian farmers majorly like the Direct Seeding Method for Rice Cultivation.

What is Direct Seeding Method?

• Direct Seeding of Rice refers to the process of establishing a rice crop from seeds sown in the field rather than by transplanting seedlings from the nursery.
• It has been recognized as the principal method of rice establishment since 1950’s in developing countries. 
• The cultivation technique involves fertilising and planting directly into the soil in one or two steps. The soil is mildly disturbed by the seeding machine.
• Direct seeding is can be done by sowing of pre-germinated seed into a puddled soil (wet seeding) or standing water (water seeding) or prepared seedbed (dry seeding).

Recently the Parliament session has underlined the difficulties around predicting landslides, calling out the inadequacy of remote sensing technologies.  

What is Remote Sensing?

• Remote sensing is the process of detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation at a distance (typically from satellite or aircraft). Special cameras collect remotely sensed images, which help researchers "sense" things about the Earth. Some examples are:
• Cameras on satellites and airplanes take images of large areas on the Earth's surface, allowing us to see much more than we can see when standing on the ground.
• Sonar systems on ships can be used to create images of the ocean floor without needing to travel to the bottom of the ocean.
• Cameras on satellites can be used to make images of temperature changes in the oceans.

Some specific uses of remotely sensed images of the Earth include:

• Large forest fires can be mapped from space, allowing rangers to see a much larger area than from the ground.
• Tracking clouds to help predict the weather or watching erupting volcanoes, and help watching for dust storms.
• Tracking the growth of a city and changes in farmland or forests over several years or decades.
• Discovery and mapping of the rugged topography of the ocean floor (e.g., huge mountain ranges, deep canyons, and the “magnetic striping” on the ocean floor).

The Supreme Court ruling allows states to classify Scheduled Castes for preferential treatment, challenging previous judgments on SC homogeneity and reservation norms.

Evolution of Affirmative Action:

• Substantive Equality: The jurisprudence of affirmative action has shifted from formal equality to substantive equality, aiming to address historical and social disabilities.
• Diversity and Accommodation: Reservation is now seen as a means to embrace diversity and accommodate disadvantaged groups, deepening the idea of equality.
• SC Sub-classification: The Supreme Court's recent ruling allows states to classify Scheduled Castes for preferential treatment, marking a progression in affirmative action jurisprudence.

Supreme Court Judgment:

• Non-Homogeneity of SCs: The majority verdict recognizes that Scheduled Castes are not a homogeneous class, with varying levels of backwardness among them.
• State Empowerment: States are empowered to identify and extend benefits to the weaker sections among SCs, rejecting the idea that only Parliament can modify the SC list.
• Creamy Layer Concept: The exclusion of the creamy layer among SCs to ensure the weakest benefit from affirmative action is discussed, though applying this concept differs from its application to OBCs.

Mains Question

Q. Discuss the implications of the recent Supreme Court judgment allowing states to classify Scheduled Castes for preferential treatment on the broader principles of equality and affirmative action in India.

The political nature of governor appointments in India highlights the recent appointment of O.P. Mathur as Governor of Sikkim.

Political Nature of Governor Appointments:

• Role of Governors: Governors represent the President but often act as political agents of the Union government.
• Political Appointments: The appointment and reshuffling of governors frequently have political implications.
• Example of Sikkim: P. Mathur’s appointment as Governor of Sikkim suggests a move to hinder the political structure of other states.

Implications of Political Appointments:

• Political Maneuvering: Such appointments may aim to manage internal party dynamics and conflicts. The appointments and reshuffles of governors have political significance as they indicate the ruling party’s plans for the states and for those being appointed governors.
• Undermining Neutrality: The political nature of these appointments can undermine the neutrality expected of constitutional authorities.
• Governance Concerns: The practice raises concerns about the impartial functioning of governors in their respective states.

Mains Question

Q. Examine the impact of the political nature of governor appointments on the impartiality and effectiveness of governance in Indian states.

There are several legal and ethical implications of AI, particularly large language models, on existing internet liability frameworks like Section 230 and Section 79 of IT Act.

Legal Protections for Online Platforms:

• Section 230 Overview: Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act protects online platforms from liability for third-party content.
• Indian IT Act Section 79: Similar protections are offered under Section 79 of the Indian IT Act, requiring due diligence.
• Historical Context: These laws emerged to address concerns about harmful online content and have facilitated tech industry growth.

Challenges Posed by AI Systems:

• AI Liability Questions: The rise of AI, especially large language models (LLMs), challenges existing legal frameworks on liability for generated content.
• Debate on Exemptions: Advocates argue for extending good samaritan exemptions to AI, while critics highlight AI's autonomous content generation risks.
• Moral Responsibility: Regardless of legal interpretations, AI operators have a moral duty to ensure transparency, mitigate biases, and address harmful content.

Mains Question:

Q. Examine the challenges that artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, pose to existing legal frameworks of the Indian IT Act. Discuss potential solutions to address these challenges.