Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 21 January 2018

::National::

PILs for an independent probe into the death of CBI judge B.H. Loya to be heard by CJI

• A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, will, on January 22, hear two public interest litigation (PIL) petitions for an independent probe into the death of CBI judge B.H. Loya.
• Justice Loya, at the time of his death in Nagpur in December 2014, was hearing the politically sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh police encounter case.
• On January 16, a Bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Mohan M. Shantanagoudar recused itself from hearing the PIL petitions any further by inserting a line in its order, saying: “Put up case before appropriate Bench.”
• This line was not part of the order dictated by the Bench in court at the end of the hearing, which saw the court direct the Maharashtra government to place documents pertaining to Justice Loya’s death on court record, and if “considered appropriate,” share them with the PIL petitioners — the Maharashtra-based journalist B.R. Lone and activist TehseenPoonawala.
• Justice Mishra had, during the hearing, orally said, “This is a case in which they [the PIL petitioners] should know everything”.
• After the two judges recused themselves, the petitioners made an oral mention of their cases before the Chief Justice-led Bench on January 19.
• This Bench acknowledged the urgency and ordered the cases to be heard by an “appropriate Bench” on January 22.
• Now, it seems Chief Justice Misra, in his administrative capacity as the master of the roster, has decided to place the PIL petitions for judicial hearing before a Bench of himself and Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud.
• After the judges recused themselves, the PILs had gone back to Chief Justice Misra.

US govt could not pass the funding bill

• The U.S government shut down on Saturday as disagreements between Democrats and Republicans on immigration and border security stalled the passage of a funding Bill in the Senate, even as President Donald Trump completed his first year in office.
• Leaders are trying to resolve the crisis over the weekend, but accusations flew thick and fast.
• “Democrats are far more concerned with illegal immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border. They could have easily made a deal but decided to play Shutdown politics instead,” he said, calling for the election of more Republicans to the Senate in the midterm polls later this year.
• The Bill needed 60 votes to pass but could get only 50 in the 100-member senate in which the Republicans enjoy a narrow majority.They have 51 members to the Democrats’ 49.

Even after 33 years fight for sikh riots victims issues goes on

• More than 33 years after the anti-Sikh riots rocked Delhi and several other places in the country, the Supreme Court has ordered the formation of another team to investigate 186 cases arising out of the pogrom that took place in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984.
• As many as 3,325 people of the Sikh community, including 2,733 in Delhi alone, were killed in the riots.
• The new Special Investigation Team (SIT) will comprise Shiv Narayan Dhingra, a retired judge of the Delhi High Court, Rajdeep Singh, a retired police officer, and Abhishek Dular, a serving police officer. The SIT has been asked to file a status report in two months.
• A government-appointed Special Investigation Team has been functioning since February 2015. It was constituted on the recommendation of a committee headed by Justice G.P. Mathur. It was headed by Pramod Asthana, an IPS officer, and included Rakesh Kapoor, a retired district and sessions judge, and Kumar Gyanesh of the Delhi police.
• A Supreme Court Bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, has been hearing a writ petition filed by S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon since 2016. The petitioner, a member of the Delhi Gurdwara Management Committee, wanted the SIT’s investigation monitored by the court to ensure justice to the victims.
• On March 24, 2017, the court was informed that the SIT had scrutinised 293 cases and closed 199 of them. Of the remaining, 59 cases were taken up for further investigation after a preliminary inquiry. Forty-two of these were closed after investigation.
• On hearing that 199 cases had been closed after scrutiny, the Bench appointed a Supervisory Committee, comprising two former judges of the Supreme Court J.M. Panchal and K.S.P. Radhakrishnan, to scrutinise these 199 case files and give their views on whether the closure was justified. The panel was also asked to scrutinise 42 other matters that had been closed.
• In December 2017, the supervisory body gave its views on all 241 cases it had examined. On January 10, the Bench noted that the SIT had not done further investigation in 186 cases and decided that a fresh SIT be constituted to pursue the investigation further.
• However, the court clarified that naming another SIT did not reflect adversely on the functioning of the earlier team.
• Despite the passage of time, the ongoing investigation holds out a glimmer of hope for thousands of people affected by the riots, which several inquiries had attributed to the negligence of the police and, in many cases, their connivance.
• There have been two major judicial commissions of inquiry — one headed by Justice Ranganath Misra and another by Justice G.T. Nanavati — besides several committees and bodies to deal with different aspects of the inquiry and investigation.
• Only a few cases have reached their logical conclusion in criminal courts. Congress leaders Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler are two politicians whose names are still linked to complaints of suspected involvement in the riots.

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::International::

Tension between U.S. and China over South China Sea

• Beijing said it had dispatched a warship to drive away a U.S. missile destroyer which had “violated” its sovereignty by sailing close to a shoal in the disputed South China Sea.
• The USS Hopper sailed within 12 nautical miles of Huangyan Island on the night of January 17 without alerting Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said, referring to the shoal by its Chinese name.
• Also known as Scarborough Shoal, the ring of reefs lies about 230 km (140 miles) from the Philippines in the South China Sea, where Beijing’s claims are hotly contested by other nations.
• The U.S. vessel “violated China’s sovereignty and security interests”, and put the safety of nearby Chinese vessels “under grave threat”, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said.
• China’s Defence Ministry said in a separate statement that a Chinese frigate “immediately took actions to identify and verify the U.S. ship and drove it away by warning” it.
• The USS Hopper recently entered the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet area of operations, where the ship is on an “independent deployment”, according to a statement released earlier this month on the Navy’s website.
• Its mission in Asia involves “security cooperation, building partner capacity, and performing routine operations within the area”.
• News of the encounter follows Friday’s release of a new U.S. national defence strategy that says America is facing “growing threats” from China and Russia.
• China is a “strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbours while militarizing features in the South China Sea”, the document says.
• China’s Defence Ministry dismissed these claims on Saturday, saying “the situation in the South China Sea has steadily stabilised,” in comments attributed to spokesperson Wu Qian.
• But it added, “the United States has repeatedly sent warships illegally into the adjacent waters of the South China Sea islands and reefs.”
• Beijing asserts sovereignty over almost all of the resource-rich South China Sea despite rival claims from Southeast Asian neighbours and has rapidly built reefs into artificial islands capable of hosting military planes.
• China seized Scarborough Shoal in 2012 after a brief standoff with the Philippine navy. The shoal is also claimed by Taiwan.

::Business and Economy::

Ro-Ro services to start in Bengal

• A small but significant takeway from the just-concluded Bengal Global Summit is the announcement of a roll-on roll-off service that will ferry trucks from three points on the east bank of River Hooghly to the west bank, eliminating road movement.
• The service would be introduced through Tirupati Vessels Pvt. Ltd., a sister concern. He said the company had signed a deal with the West Bengal Transport Department to move about 1,500 trucks, from the port and industrial fringes of the city in Budge Budge, Garden Reach and Diamond Harbour to Uluberia, Howrah and Haldia on the opposite bank of the river.
• While the vessels have been made in Mumbai, the technology for this roll-on roll-off service is from Korea. The company will invest Rs. 150 crore in this venture from its internal funds, of which Rs. 110 crore is for building the jetties, according to Mr. Agarwal.
• On the new RO-RO policy announced by State Finance Minister Amit Mitra on Wednesday, Mr. Agarwal said he was yet to know the finer details. “However, this is a capital-intensive business which helps combat air-pollution and we would welcome any subsidy,” he said.
• Tirupati Vancom is engaged in moving fly ash from one power station each in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh. While 60% of the fly ash generated by the Budge Budge plant of CESC is sent through waterways to Bangladesh, the fly ash generated at APGENCO (Tirupati Vancom also has a deal with this utility) is supplied to domestic cement companies.
• Its clients include Zuari Cement Limited, UltraTech Cement Limited , India Cement Limited, Pyramid Chemicals Limited and plants at Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad.
• The company has tugs and barges at its disposal and has already moved cargo through national waterways to Assam.

Capital market participants are hoping for some investor-friendly measures in Budget

• With Union Budget 2018 less than two weeks away, capital market participants are hoping for some investor-friendly measures, having already submitted their wish lists to the Centre.
• As has been the case in the past few years, rationalisation — if not complete removal — of securities transaction tax (STT) tops the list of demands that includes a few other tax-related measures as well that would not only lower the overall transaction costs for the investors but also strengthen the stock exchange mechanism to avoid any possible misuse through tax loopholes or regulatory arbitrage.
• The Centre introduced STT in October 2004 to replace the then-existing long term capital gains (LTCG) tax.
• Ever since STT was introduced, there had been regular demands for its removal or at least rationalising the rates to encourage investment rather than speculation.
• Further, the manner in which STT was levied on options contracts was changed in 2008, making the tax component quite negligible in such contracts. This led to a huge jump in their volume at a time when the cash market turnover had not grown in a corresponding manner.
• Market participants had been demanding an increase in the STT rates in derivatives while lowering them in the cash segment so that the tax component affects speculative trades more in the derivatives segment as compared with investment transactions.
• Incidentally, the issue of LTCG tax replacing STT has been raised again by a large section of market participants this year with some even highlighting that the government has lost revenues of more than Rs. 3 lakh crore by withdrawing LTCG in 2004-05.
• Interestingly, the BSE, in a letter written in 2015 to the then Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, had made a similar proposal for bringing back LTCG. The issue of tax evasion through stock exchanges by paying a small STT component instead of LTCG tax has been raised regularly by a large section of market participants.
• Meanwhile, the Association of National Exchanges Members of India (ANMI), an umbrella body of stock brokers, has demanded the abolition of dividend distribution tax, industry status for the broking business and re-introduction of Section 88E of the Income Tax Act.
• Section 88E, which was withdrawn in 2008, allowed entities to claim rebates on the tax liability arising from the gains in securities transactions.
• The tax liability could be adjusted against the quantum of STT paid in that particular assessment year.
• “The withdrawal of Section 88E and the consequent double taxation completely broke the back of the market and caused a huge fall in volumes,” stated the note by ANMI. The Hindu has reviewed a copy of the memorandum submitted by ANMI to the government.
• The CII has already submitted a detailed representation to the government for consideration in the upcoming Union Budget.
• It has proposed to rationalise the dividend distribution tax (DDT) rate to 10% from the current 15%.
• It has also said that the government could – if it does not want to lower the DDT rate – tax the dividend paying company on the profit, including the distributed profits at corporate rates to negate the multiple level taxation issues related to dividend.
• Dividend should be taxed in the hands of the non-corporate (leveraged) shareholders as normal income, and expenses should be allowed against such dividend in full, according to CII. It also wants the government to give tax pass through status to all categories of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs).
• For mutual fund investors, it wants the holding period for debt mutual fund to be brought on par with that of equity to qualify for LTCG benefits.
• For availing LTCG, the current requirement is 36 months for debt units and 12 months for equity.

::Science and Tech::

Study finds that drought kills deep routed trees first

• Droughts can kill, but you would imagine that deep-rooted forest trees – whose roots tap into more permanent water resources – would be the least affected. But a study now finds that droughts killed tree species that access deeper water much more.
• Tree deaths due to droughts are a major threat in both temperate and tropical ecosystems. This could further aggravate with climate change, with droughts predicted to increase in many parts of the world.
• In a 50-hectare forest plot, the scientists measured how much 7,677 trees belonging to 12 common tree species grew and how many others died between 1992 and 2012, which also saw an intense drought (2000 to 2003).
• The team collected local hydrological data including daily rainfall and water-holding capacities of local soils to estimate how much water is available across varying soil depths.
• Devising a novel eco-hydrological model to quantify the depths from which trees took up water, the scientists find that while species like teak that absorbed water from near the surface may be adapted to droughts by surviving on scanty rainfall across the year, others like axlewood (Anogeissus) and laurel (Terminalia) took water from the deeper depths composed of weathered rocks.
• Their study, published in theJournal of Ecology, shows that though species that access deep water experience fewer droughts, they are more vulnerable to protracted droughts.
• Climate change—droughts could kill such species, says Chitra-Tarak. “At large scales, this can even lead to lesser water being recycled into the atmosphere, worsening droughts,” she says.
• This novel hydrological modelling approach can help scientists model the impacts of increasing droughts on forests and their feedbacks on climate change. Chitra-Tarak is currently testing this across forest types and climates across the world.

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