- PM unveils strategy to boost exports
GS Paper - 3 (Economy)
Prime Minister spelt out a strategy to boost export of goods from India, a move aimed at lifting a sagging economy amid the outbreak of the pandemic when Interacting with Heads of Indian Missions abroad and stakeholders of trade and commerce virtually.
What
- PM pointed out four factors that are very important for accelerating outward shipments from India -- increasing domestic manufacturing, ironing out problems of transport, logistics, need for the Centre and state governments to walk shoulder to shoulder with the exporters and expanding the international market for Indian products.
- The larger idea of the interaction aimed at encouraging stakeholders towards expanding India’s export potential and utilizing the local capabilities to fulfil the global demand.
- Towards this, the Prime Minister said there is a need for diversification of India’s export basket as well as identification of new products that can be exported and relevant markets for such items and prepare strategies for that.
Flashback
- Presently, India’s export basket has been dominated by products with engineering goods, petroleum products, gems and jewellery, pharmaceuticals being the top items.
- At present our exports are about 20 percent of GDP. Considering the size of our economy, our potential, the base of our manufacturing and service industry, it has the potential to grow a lot, PM said, adding that India needs to have a seamless and high quality supply chain and low-cost logistics to boost exports.
- Robust exports can boost economic growth at a time when private consumption as well as investment have been tepid due to the disruption caused by the pandemic.
- Neeraj Chopra scripts history
GS Paper - 2 (Sports)
Star javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra on 7 August 2021 became only the second Indian to win an individual gold in the Olympics, out-performing the field by quite a distance to notch up the first track-and-field Games medal for the country. The 23-year-old from Khandra village near Panipat in Haryana produced a second round throw of 87.58m in the finals to stun the athletics world and end India's 100-year wait for a track and field medal in the Olympics.
What
- Chopra won the country's seventh medal and first gold in this Olympics and joined shooter Abhinav Bindra (2008 Beijing Games) as India's individual gold winners in the showpiece.
- With this, the country surpassed the previous best haul of six medals achieved in the 2012 London Games.
- Czech Republic throwers Jakub Vadlejch (86.67m) and Vitezslav Vesely (85.44m) took the silver and bronze respectively.
- No Indian has won a medal in athletics since the country started taking part in the Games in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium.
- Three track and field athletes were part of the five-member team -- the other two being wrestlers -- in that Games.
- Perseverance comes up empty in 1st try
GS Paper - 3 (Space Technology)
NASA’s newest Mars rover came up empty in its first attempt to pick up a rock sample to eventually be brought back to Earth. The rover Perseverance drilled into the floor of the planet’s Jezero Crater to extract a finger-sized sample from slabs of flat rocks. The drill seemed to work as intended, but it appeared no rock made it into the sample tube, the agency said.
What
- The drill hole is the first step of a sampling process that is expected to take about 11 days, with the aim of looking for signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in ancient lakebed deposits.
- Scientists also hope to better understand Martian geology.
- The mission took off from Florida a little over a year ago and Perseverance, which is the size of a large family car, landed on 18 February 2020 in the Jezero Crater.
- Scientists believe the crater contained a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago, where the conditions may have been able to support extraterrestrial life.
- NASA plans a mission to bring around 30 samples back to Earth in the 2030s, to be analyzed by instruments that are much more sophisticated than those that can be brought to Mars at present.
- ‘Startup’ incorporated in procurement process
GS Paper - 3 (Economy)
The government has incorporated the definition of ‘start-up’ in its procurement process for consultancy and other services. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) has amended the definition of ‘start-up’. It has, therefore, been decided to partially modify… the Manual for Procurement of Consultancy & Other Services, 2017, the expenditure department said in an office memorandum (OM).
What
- On 19 February 2019, the DPIIT amended the definition, as per which an entity will be considered a ‘start-up’ up to a period of 10 years from the date of incorporation/registration and if its turnover for any of the financial years since incorporation/registration does not exceed Rs 100 crore.
- In the OM, the expenditure department said the condition of prior turnover and prior experience may be relaxed for start-ups (as defined by DPIIT) subject to meeting of the quality and technical specifications.
- The quality and technical parameters are not to be diluted, the finance ministry said.
- An entity will be recognised as a startup for up to 10 years of existence and up to Rs 100 crore of turnover. Earlier, the existence period was five years and the turnover limit was Rs 25 crore.
- Another change is that a start-up should be “working towards innovation, development or improvement of products or processes or services, or if it is a scalable business model with a high potential of employment generation or wealth creation”.
- The earlier requirement was that it should be “working towards innovation, deployment of commercialisation of new products, processes or services driven by technology or intellectual property”.
India’s Afghan investment
Source: By Nirupama Subramanian: The Indian Express
As the Taliban push ahead with military offensives across Afghanistan, preparing to take over after the exit of US and NATO forces, India faces a situation in which it may have no role to play in that country, and in the worst case scenario, not even a diplomatic presence.
That would be a reversal of nearly 20 years of rebuilding a relationship that goes back centuries. Afghanistan is vital to India’s strategic interests in the region. It is also perhaps the only SAARC nation whose people have much affection for India.
After a break between 1996 and 2001, when India joined the world in shunning the previous Taliban regime (only Pakistan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia kept ties), one way New Delhi re-established ties with the country in the two decades after the 9/11 attacks was to pour in development assistance, under the protective umbrella of the US presence.
This was timely help. After five years of near-mediaeval rule by the Taliban from 1996, preceded by a half a dozen years of fighting among mujahideen warlords following the Red Army’s withdrawal in 1989 — the decade before that too was of fighting as the US-backed, Pakistan-trained mujahideen took on the Soviet military — Afghanistan was in ruins.
India built vital roads, dams, electricity transmission lines and substations, schools and hospitals, etc. India’s development assistance is now estimated to be worth well over $3 billion. And unlike in other countries where India’s infrastructure projects have barely got off the ground or are mired in the host nation’s politics, it has delivered in Afghanistan.
The 2011 India-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement recommitted Indian assistance to help rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure and institutions; education and technical assistance for capacity-building in many areas; encourage investment in Afghanistan; and provide duty-free access to the Indian market. Bilateral trade is now worth $1 billion.
Projects across the country
Speaking at the Afghanistan Conference in Geneva in November 2020, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said “no part of Afghanistan today is untouched by the 400-plus projects that India has undertaken in all 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces”. The fate of these projects is now up in the air.
SALMA DAM: Already, there has been fighting in the area where one of India’s high-visibility projects is located — the 42MW Salma Dam in Herat province. The hydropower and irrigation project, completed against many odds and inaugurated in 2016, is known as the Afghan-India Friendship Dam. In the past, the Taliban have mounted attacks in nearby places, killing several security personnel. The Taliban claim the area around the dam is now under their control.
ZARANJ-DELARAM HIGHWAY: The other high-profile project was the 218-km Zaranj-Delaram highway built by the Border Roads Organisation. Zaranj is located close to Afghanistan’s border with Iran. The $150-million highway goes along the Khash Rud river to Delaram to the northeast of Zaranj, where it connects to a ring road that links Kandahar in the south, Ghazni and Kabul in the east, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, and Herat in the west.
With Pakistan denying India overland access for trade with Afghanistan, the highway is of strategic importance to New Delhi, as it provides an alternative route into landlocked Afghanistan through Iran’s Chabahar port. Jaishankar told the November 2020 Geneva Conference that India had transported 75,000 tonnes of wheat through Chabahar to Afghanistan during the pandemic.
Over 300 Indian engineers and workers toiled alongside Afghans to build the road. According to a Ministry of External Affairs publication, 11 Indians and 129 Afghans lost their lives during the construction. Six of the Indians were killed in terrorist attacks; five in accidents. India has also built several smaller roads.
PARLIAMENT: The Afghan Parliament in Kabul was built by India at $90 million. It was opened in 2015; Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the building. In an expansive speech about India-Afghanistan friendship — he quoted Rumi, who was born in Balkh, Afghanistan, and the immortal Yaari hai imaan mera yaar meri zindagi from Zanjeer, featuring Pran in the role of Sher Khan, the Pathan — Modi described the building as India’s tribute to democracy in Afghanistan. A block in the building is named after former PM AB Vajpayee.
STOR PALACE: In 2016, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the restored Stor Palace in Kabul, originally built in the late 19th century, and which was the setting for the 1919 Rawalpindi Agreement by which Afghanistan became an independent country. The building housed the offices of the Afghan foreign minister and the ministry until 1965. In 2009, India, Afghanistan, and the Aga Khan Development Network signed a tripartite agreement for its restoration. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture completed the project between 2013 and 2016.
POWER INFRA: Other Indian projects in Afghanistan include the rebuilding of power infrastructure such as the 220kV DC transmission line from Pul-e-Khumri, capital of Baghlan province to the north of Kabul, to beef up electricity supply to the capital. Indian contractors and workers also restored telecommunications infrastructure in many provinces.
HEALTH INFRA: India has reconstructed a children’s hospital it had helped build in Kabul in 1972 —named Indira Gandhi Institute for Child Health in 1985 — that was in shambles after the war. ‘Indian Medical Missions’ have held free consultation camps in several areas. Thousands who lost their limbs after stepping on mines left over from the war have been fitted with the Jaipur Foot. India has also built clinics in the border provinces of Badakhshan, Balkh, Kandahar, Khost, Kunar, Nangarhar, Nimruz, Nooristan, Paktia and Paktika.
TRANSPORTATION: According to the MEA, India gifted 400 buses and 200 mini-buses for urban transportation, 105 utility vehicles for municipalities, 285 military vehicles for the Afghan National Army, and 10 ambulances for public hospitals in five cities. It also gave three Air India aircraft to Ariana, the Afghan national carrier, when it was restarting operations.
OTHER PROJECTS: India has contributed desks and benches for schools, and built solar panels in remote villages, and Sulabh toilet blocks in Kabul. New Delhi has also played a role in building capacity, with vocational training institutes, scholarships to Afghan students, mentoring programmes in the civil service, and training for doctors and others.
ONGOING PROJECTS: At the Geneva Conference in November, Jaishankar announced that India had concluded with Afghanistan an agreement for the construction of the Shatoot Dam in Kabul district, which would provide safe drinking water to 2 million residents. He also announced the start of some 100 community development projects worth $80 million.
Last year, India pledged $1 million for another Aga Khan heritage project, the restoration of the Bala Hissar Fort south of Kabul, whose origins go back to the 6th century. Bala Hissar went on to become a significant Mughal fort, parts of it were rebuilt by Jahangir, and it was used as a residence by Shah Jahan.
Bilateral trade relations
Despite the denial of an overland route by Pakistan, India-Afghanistan trade has grown with the establishment in 2017 of an air freight corridor. In 2019-20, bilateral trade crossed $1.3 billion, Afghan government officials said at a recent interaction with Indian exporters in Mumbai. The balance of trade is heavily tilted — exports from India are worth approximately $900 million, while Afghanistan’s exports to India are about $500 million.
Afghan exports are mainly fresh and dried fruit. Some of this comes overland through the Wagah border; Pakistan has permitted Afghan trade with India through its territory. Indian exports to Afghanistan take place mainly through government-to-government contracts with Indian companies. Exports include pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, computers and related materials, cement, and sugar.
Two air corridors — Kabul-Delhi and Herat-Delhi — are in operation now. Trade through Chabahar started in 2017 but is restricted by the absence of connectivity from the port to the Afghan border. Trade volumes are minuscule.
