New
Channel
On December 15, the Union cabinet announced
wide-ranging amendments to the Inter-State Water Disputes Act, 1956.
Proposal: It has proposed an agency to collect and maintain water data including those
pertaining to rainfall, irrigation
and inter-basin flows.
Salience: Collection of data is the first step towards
resolving water disputes. The country has lacked a specialised agency for the purpose. The new agency will
ensure that water data is regularly
updated and this will obviate the haste to collect data every time
there is a water dispute.
Proposal: The cabinet has also decided to constitute a permanent tribunal to adjudicate on all
inter-state water disputes over river waters.
Salience: This will mean doing away with the current practice
of having a separate tribunal for every inter-state river dispute. In recent
times, the practice of creating a tribunal every time an inter-state water
dispute crops up, has been subject to criticism. The cabinet’s decision to
constitute a permanent tribunal is in
consonance with the National Water Policy 2012, which had pointed out
that a multiplicity of tribunals
militates against the early resolution of water conflicts and tribunals
often work at cross purposes.
Challenges
in Way Ahead:
The Constitution attaches a special status to
inter-state water disputes, whereby they neither fall under the Supreme Court’s
nor any other court’s jurisdiction. The courts can, at best, interpret a
tribunal’s award. The award is binding, but legal anomalies have meant that a
tribunal’s decision is not enforceable — one reason inter-state river disputes
have become virtually irresolvable.
Non-compliance of tribunal awards by states remains a
weak link in dispute resolution. That might persist even when there is a
permanent tribunal. Minimum improvement over previous arrangement will have to
be in this: Awards should be free of the legal anomalies of its ad hoc
predecessors and also try to work around the changing discourse of water
management.
Food for
thought: Rights of lower riparian
states or regions — and concomitantly duties of upper riparian regions — are
finding their way into water management discourses, globally. In recent times,
scholars and administrators have recognised the limitations of the
litigation-centred approach to resolving water disputes. What can be some other approached apart from litigation?
Administrative Morality?
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How Will
GST help in making Indians more tax compliant?
GST allows those who pay tax on their supply of goods
or services to net out the tax they have paid on their inputs.
In order to claim input tax credit, producers would
want to procure their inputs only from suppliers who raise an invoice and levy
tax.
These suppliers, in turn, would procure their inputs
from other suppliers who also pay tax on their output.
Once everyone collects tax from those who purchase
their supplies, the volume of production that goes outside the tax net would
fall appreciably. Once most output gets reported, so would the associated
income.
Thus, transiting to GST is a reform that would expand
the base of both direct and indirect taxes.
However, for this potential to be realised, the
government must do things as well. One is to subsume stamp duty under GST,
treating registration as a service rendered for a fee on which service tax is
charged. Commercial establishments would then report their true value, so as to
maximise the input tax credit by way of tax paid on registration fees. This
would benchmark real estate transactions in general.
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Putting
firewalls in place for a digital economy
Recently Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that
people should make the digital
economy a way of life as it would be “transparent and effective”.
But there is a caveat: A digital economy comes with
its own pressure points and vulnerabilities.
In the words of a member of Legion—a hacker collective allegedly responsible for the
hacks of Indian politicians’ and media personalities’ Twitter accounts—in an
interview with FactorDaily last week, the group has “confidential data pertaining to NPCI [National Payments
Corporation of India] hub servers, and even the encryption keys/certificates used by some banks in India.
So, theoretically, we could generate ‘fraudulent’ financial messages! Does that
make #DigitalIndia safe?
Maybe Modi should think all of this through before launching it.”
The claim remains unverifiable for now. But the
government has taken it seriously enough for the ministry of electronics and
information technology under Ravi Shankar Prasad to mandate a cybersecurity audit of the financial
sector, review the Information
Technology Act and recruit expert
personnel to detect and respond to threats.
Instances of Cyber Security breaches in India:
* The debit
card hack affecting about 3.2 million cards earlier this year was among
the biggest ever financial data breaches in India.
* Also this year, Symantec,
a major global cybersecurity firm, claimed that a number of Indian
organizations—including central government systems, a financial institution and
a vendor to a stock exchange—had been breached by Suckfly, a cyberespionage
group.
* August saw details of the Scorpene submarine programme published online.
* In past years, a large number of valuable Indian
targets have been breached—from corporate entities and embassies to prominent
individuals and military institutions.
Instances of Cyber Security breaches globally:
* Hacking of US company Lockheed-Martin’s F-35 stealth fighter programme
* Massive wave of Russian
cyberattacks against Estonia and Georgia in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
* Or take old-fashioned theft—a remote affair now, as
the $81 million stolen from
Bangladesh’s central bank’s New York Federal Reserve account earlier
this year via malware attack on the Swift interbank transfer network
underscored.
* Data theft can be as damaging for both individuals
and corporations, perhaps more so. The just-revealed hack of a billion Yahoo accounts in 2013
illustrates just how vast the scope of such thefts can be.
Steps being taken in India to guard against Cyber
Attacks:
The Computer
Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a nodal agency responsible for
dealing with cyber threats, was established in 2004. But it remains woefully
understaffed.
Centre is moving to set up a National Cyber Security Coordination Centre. But far too
many vulnerabilities remain.
Further Steps Required:
The government’s financial
outlay on cybersecurity is a fraction of what it needs to be, for
instance. It needs to go up.
Lack of effective
regulations and transparency must be addressed: Take the SEBI’s cybersecurity policy. It
requires reports on detected breaches to be quarterly—far too tardy to be of
much use. Nor does it mandate informing the public. That mandatory disclosure
of an attack or attempted attack must be implemented in both the public and
private sectors. The lack of it has a dual effect: it reduces the chances of
effective analysis, response and planning, and it contributes to the consumer
ignorance—and consequently, wariness—of digital transactions that is a major
barrier to Modi’s goal of a digital economy.
Modi’s vision of a digital economy—indeed, a digital
nation—is a fine one. But his government must also work on putting firewalls in
place.
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