Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE
Topics Covered
- Digital Rupee Pilot
- Internal Study on MGNREGA
- Suspension Bridges
- IT Rules 2021
- Facts for Prelims – Section 62(5) of RPA
1 . Digital Rupee Pilot
Context: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will commence the pilot programme of Digital Rupee in the wholesale segment on November 1, 2022.
About the Pilot Programme of Digital Rupee
- RBI has identified nine banks including State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, YES Bank, IDFC First Bank and HSBC for the participation in the pilot.
- The use case for this pilot is settlement of secondary market transactions in government securities.
- Use of e₹-W is expected to make the inter-bank market more efficient.
- Settlement in central bank money would reduce transaction costs by preempting the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure or for collateral to mitigate settlement risk.
- The first pilot in Digital Rupee – Retail segment (e₹-R) is planned for launch within a month in select locations in closed user groups comprising customers and merchants.
What is Digital Rupee?
- The Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can be defined as the legal tender issued by the Reserve Bank of India, according to the concept note published by the RBI on October 7, 2022.
- Touted as Digital Rupee, the RBI has proposed to issue two versions or e-Rupee.
- RBI’s CBDC is the same as a sovereign currency and is exchangeable one-to-one at par with the fiat currency, the regulator mentioned.
- The RBI has proposed to issue two versions of Digital Rupee — general purpose or retail (CBDC-R) and wholesale (CBDC-W).
- Retail CBDC can be used by all including the private sector, non-financial consumers, and businesses.
- Wholesale CBDC is designed for restricted access to select financial institutions.
- While retail CBDC is an electronic version of cash primarily meant for retail transactions, the wholesale CBDC is designed for the settlement of interbank transfers and related wholesale transactions.
- Going forward, other wholesale transactions, and cross-border payments will be the focus of future pilots, based on the learnings from this pilot.
- Explaining the difference between CBDC and money in digital form, RBI said earlier, “A CBDC would differ from existing digital money available to the public because a CBDC would be a liability of the Reserve Bank, and not of a commercial bank.”
- The adoption and growth of CBDC is in the choices that the RBI makes based on the research and pilot programs.
- There will be significant investments in adapting or building infrastructure for CBDC, and the concept note is not keen to introduce incentives, so we can expect a few more policy dilemmas down the road.
Difference between digital rupee and cryptocurrency
- A cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital asset and a medium of exchange based on blockchain technology.
- However, it has primarily been controversial due to its decentralised nature, meaning its operation without any intermediary like banks, financial institutions, or central authorities.
- On the Contrary, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will be a legal tender in a digital form.
- The digital rupee will be different from Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies in the sense it will be backed by the government.
- Secondly, having an intrinsic value on account of government backing, the digital rupee will be equivalent to holding a physical rupee equivalent.
Benefits of Digital Rupee
- It will reduce the transaction cost
- It will be easier for governments to access all transactions happening within the authorized networks.
- It will become impossible to avoid the gaze of the government, thus subjecting every transaction to relevant laws within the country.
- Hence, the government will have better control over how money leaves and enters the country, which would allow them to create a space for better budgeting and economic plans for the future, and overall a much safer environment.
- Digital currency do not get torn, burnt or physically damaged. Neither can they be physically lost. The lifeline of a digital currency will be indefinite compared to physical notes.
2 . Internal Study on MGNREGA by Ministry of Rural Development
Context: An internal study commissioned by the Ministry of Rural Development has argued for decentralisation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), allowing for more “flexibility” at the ground level.
About the Report
- The Ministry recently made public the report of the sixth Common Review Mission.
- It surveyed seven States — Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Nagaland, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh — and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
- Objective: To assess the implementation of all rural development schemes, including the MGNREGS.
Findings of the report
- There should be a greater diversification of permissible works instead of listing the types of permissible works, broad categories of works may be listed out and flexibility should be given at ground level to select the type of works as per broad categories.
- In the past few years, the fund management has been centralised instead of paying the gram sabhas an advance enabling them to decide the work they want to undertake.
- The gram sabhas can take into account the local conditions and the community’s requirement instead of chasing a target set for them.
- The internal study also flagged the frequent delay in fund disbursal, and to deal with it suggested a “revolving fund that can be utilised whenever there is a delay in the Central funds”.
- The survey quoted various instances to underline this chronic problem.
- In Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh, it was found that because of the delay in the material component, the beneficiaries ended up buying the construction material themselves to complete the projects.
- In Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the delay in wages was by three or four months and the material component by six months.
- The study noted that the MGNREGS wages were far below the market rate in many States, defeating the purpose of acting as a safety net.
- At present, the minimum wage of a farm labourer in Gujarat is ₹324.20, but the MGNREGS wage is ₹229.
- The private contractors pay far more. In Nagaland, the wage is ₹212 per day, which does not take into account the difficult terrain.
- In Jammu and Kashmir, the rate is ₹214 per day. This, the study noted, “is lower than what is offered by private contractors which can go up to ₹600-₹700 per day”.
About MGNREGA
- The Government of India passed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 in September 2005.
- The Act gives the legal guarantee of a hundred days of wage employment in a financial year to adult members of a rural household who demand employment and are willing to do unskilled manual work.
- The objective of the Act is to enhance the livelihood security of the people in the rural areas by generating wage employment through works that develop the infrastructure base of that area.
- The mandate of the MGNREGA is to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.
- MGNREGA is demand driven wage employment programme and resource transfer from Centre to States is based on the demand for employment in each State.
- It is bottom-up, people-centred, demand-driven, self-selecting and rights-based programme.
- It provides a legal guarantee for wage employment by providing allowances and compensation both in cases of failure to provide work on demand and delays in payment of wages for work undertaken.
- Plans and decisions regarding the nature and choice of works to be undertaken, the order in which each worksite selection etc., are all to be made in open assemblies of the Gram Sabha (GS) and ratified by the GP.
- Social audit is a new feature, which creates accountability of performance, especially towards immediate stakeholders.
- Thus MGNREGA also marks a break from the relief programmes of the past towards an integrated natural resource management and livelihoods generation perspective.
3 . Suspension Bridges
Context: The bridge that collapsed in Gujarat’s Morbi, killing at least 134 people, was a suspension bridge — a type in which the deck is hung below suspension cables on vertical suspenders.
Structure of the suspension bridge
- The basic structural components of a suspension bridge system include stiffening girders, two or more main suspension cables, and towers and anchorages for cables at either end of the bridge.
- The main cables are suspended between the towers and are connected to the anchorage or the bridge itself.
- The vertical suspenders carry the weight of the deck and the commuter load on it.
- The design ensures that the load on the suspension cables is transferred to the towers at the two ends, which transfer them further by vertical compression to the ground by way of the anchorage cables.
- All of this balance has to happen within the permissible weight restrictions for the bridge, given that the deck is hanging in air, supported by the two sets of cables.
- Given that the most important load bearing members are the main suspension cables, the entire cross-section of the main cable is the mainstay of carrying the load and ensuring that buckling does not happen.
- But this is subject to two preconditions: there must be no overloading, and no excessive swaying.
Role of vertical support
- The job of the vertical cables in a suspension bridge is to transfer the weight of the deck, by tension, to the twin suspension cables that run horizontally between the two anchorages on either end, which, in turn, transfer the tension to the towers and, through them, to the ground by way of cables whose ends are anchored.
- Besides suspension, bridges can be arch bridges, beam bridges, cantilever bridges, truss bridges and tied-arch bridges.
- While beam bridges are among the simplest and oldest bridges, the reason for the enduring design of the suspension bridge is that the supporting cables running horizontally between the two far-flung anchorages provide the counterweight and effectively pass on the entire tensional force to the anchorages.
- As a result, suspension bridges can easily cross distances of well over 2,000 metres, beyond the scope of other bridge designs.
4 . IT Rules 2021
Context: The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has notified amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021) on October 28.
What are the IT Rules, 2021?
- World over, governments are grappling with the issue of regulating social media intermediaries (SMIs).
- Given the multitudinous nature of the problem — the centrality of SMIs in shaping public discourse, the impact of their governance on the right to freedom of speech and expression, the magnitude of information they host and the constant technological innovations that impact their governance — it is important for governments to update their regulatory framework to face emergent challenges.
- In a bid to keep up with these issues, India in 2021, replaced its decade old regulations on SMIs with the IT Rules, 2021 that were primarily aimed at placing obligations on SMIs to ensure an open, safe and trusted internet.
What was the need to amend the IT Rules, 2021?
- The stated objectives of the amendments were three-fold.
- First, there was a need to ensure that the interests and constitutional rights of netizens are not being contravened by big tech platforms.
- Second, to strengthen the grievance redressal framework in the Rules, and
- Third, that compliance with these should not impact early-stage Indian start-ups.
- This translated into a set of proposed amendments that can be broadly classified into two categories.
- The first category involved placing additional obligations on the SMIs to ensure better protection of user interests.
- Second category involved the institution of an appellate mechanism for grievance redressal.
What are the additional obligations placed on the SMIs?
- The notification of the final amendments carries forward all the amendments that it had proposed in June 2022.
- First, the original IT Rules, 2021 obligated the SMIs to merely inform its users of the “rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement” that governed its platforms along with the categories of content that users are prohibited from hosting, displaying, sharing etc. on the platform.
- This obligation on the SMIs has now been extended to ensuring that its users are in compliance with the relevant rules of the platform.
- Further, SMIs are required to “make reasonable” efforts to prevent prohibited content being hosted on its platform by the users.
- To a large extent, this enhances the responsibility and concomitantly the power of SMIs to police and moderate content on their platforms.
- This has been met with skepticism by both the platforms and the users given the subjective nature of speech and the magnitude of the information hosted by these platforms.
- Second, a similar concern arises with the other newly introduced obligation on SMIs to “respect all the rights accorded to the citizens under the Constitution, including in the articles 14, 19 and 21”.
- Given the importance of SMIs in public discourse and the implications of their actions on the fundamental rights of citizens, the horizontal application of fundamental rights is laudable.
- However, the wide interpretation to which this obligation is open to by different courts, could translate to disparate duties on the SMIs.
- Frequent alterations to design and practices of the platform, that may result from a case-to-case based application of this obligation, could result in heavy compliance costs for them.
- Third, SMIs are now obligated to remove information or a communication link in relation to the six prohibited categories of content as and when a complaint arises. They have to remove such information within 72 hours of the complaint being made.
- Given the virality with which content spreads, this is an important step to contain the spread of the content.
- Lastly, SMIs have been obligated to “take all reasonable measures to ensure accessibility of its services to users along with reasonable expectation of due diligence, privacy and transparency”.
- While there are concerns that ensuring “accessibility” may obligate SMIs to provide services at a scale that they are not equipped to, the obligation is meant to strengthen inclusion in the SMI ecosystem such as allowing for participation by persons with disabilities and diverse linguistic backgrounds.
- In this context, the amendments also mandate that “rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement” of the platform should be made available in all languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution.
What is the newly introduced Grievance Appellate Committees?
- The government has instituted Grievance Appellate Committees (GAC).
- The committee is styled as a three-member council out of which one member will be a government officer (holding the post ex officio) while the other two members will be independent representatives.
- Users can file a complaint against the order of the grievance officer within 30 days.
- The GAC is required to adopt an online dispute resolution mechanism which will make it more accessible to the users.
- It is unclear whether this is a compulsory tier of appeal or not, that is will the user have to approach the grievance appellate committee before approaching the court.
- The confusion arises from the fact that the press notes expressly stated that the institution of the GAC would not bar the user from approaching the court directly against the order of the grievance officer.
- However, the final amendments provide no such indication.
- While this makes the in-house grievance redressal more accountable and appellate mechanism more accessible to users, appointments being made by the central government could lead to apprehensions of bias in content moderation.
- Further, the IT Rules, 2021 do not provide any explicit power to the GAC to enforce its orders.
- If users can approach both the courts and the GAC parallelly, it could lead to conflicting decisions often undermining the impartiality and merit of one institution or the other.
Facts for Prelims
Section 62(5) of RPA
- The objective of the legal provision, Section 62(5) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 as declared by the supreme court is to exclude ‘persons with criminal background from participating in elections.
- It states that:
- No person shall vote at any election if he is confined in a prison, whether under a sentence of imprisonment or transportation or otherwise or is in the lawful custody of the police: Provided that nothing in this sub-section shall apply to a person subjected to preventive detention under any law for the time being in force.
- Nothing contained in sub-sections (3) and (4) shall apply to a person who has been authorised to vote as proxy for an elector under this Act in so far as he votes as a proxy for such elector.