Daily Mains Practice Questions 02-01-2023

1) KEY POINTS

·        India’s competence in dealing with Covid should be replicated with respect to other endemic diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, cholera and heart disease.

·        It was heartening to see the Economic Survey 2020-21 recommend an increase in public spending on healthcare services from a measly 1 per cent to 2.5-3 per cent of the GDP as envisaged in the National Health Policy, 2017.

·        Such expansion can combat health emergencies while reducing the staggering Out-of-Pocket Expenditure (OOPE) which is close to 65 per cent of the overall healthcare spend in India.

·        Expenditure on health by the Centre increased from about Rs 53,000 crore in 2017-18 to nearly Rs 86,000 crore in 2021-22, a rise of 62 per cent.

·        The proportion of Central and State health spending to GDP has risen from 1.4 per cent to 2.1 per cent over this period.

·        If the learnings of the pandemic in terms of public spending outcomes are to be taken seriously, the Centre should show the way in stepping up health spending by 0.5-1 percentage point of GDP.

·        Meanwhile, only a handful of provinces including Delhi, Assam and other north-eastern States have progressed towards better provisioning of the sector.

·        The Delta wave last year overwhelmed India’s crumbling health infrastructure, in the northern States in particular.

 2) KEY POINTS

·        Given the regional variations in demographic trends and economic opportunities, India has a high rate of migration, which doubled in the census decade of 2001-2011.

·        Migrants often see their political and economic rights compromised at their place of origin and residence.

·        The Election Commission of India (ECI) has now proposed a mechanism to facilitate remote voting for domestic migrants.

·        The Remote Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) prototype can be used for up to 72 constituencies simultaneously from a single, remote polling booth.

·        A concept note by the Commission takes into account the legal, operational, administrative and technological challenges at hand.

·        Voter participation is comparatively high in India; yet, in 2019, one in three voters did not turn up.

·        While there is no technical basis for allegations of fraud in the current, single-constituency, non-networked EVMs, public trust in them has never been lower than it is today.

·        The ECI’s ambitious plan comes against this backdrop of public scepticism about its own impartiality and, less justifiably, about the reliability of the EVMs.

·        Even the ECI had expressed doubts about the practicality of remote voting rights for migrants in the past. Meanwhile, there is also an active demand for voting rights for Non-Resident Indians.

5) KEY POINTS

·        The government increased the returns on some small savings schemes for the first quarter of 2023 by 20 basis points to 110 basis points, or 0.2 to 1.1 percentage points.

·        Returns on the popular long-term savings avenue, the Public Provident Fund (PPF), have been left unchanged at 7.1%, prevailing since April 2020 when they were slashed from 7.9% at the onset of the pandemic.

·        Reserve Bank of India had estimated that the returns on the PPF should have been 7.72% and the Sukanya Samriddhi Scheme at 8.22%.

·        Having adopted a formula-based approach to resetting small savings rates every quarter since 2016, the government must not resort to selective implementation.

·        Investments in PPF, for instance, are in any case capped at Rs 1.5 lakh a year and overall deposits are far lower than bank deposits, if boosting the latter to ensure healthy credit availability for industry was a concern. 

·        Inflation in general has been elevated since the 2020 rate cuts and was above the 6% tolerance threshold through most of 2022, accompanied by sharp interest rate hikes.

·        Households have also grappled with income losses and higher health expenses through the past two and a half years, and deserve better.

gov scheme

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Q 5

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