Project Report on “DRISHTI” Submitted to Finance Minister

Project Report on “DRISHTI” Submitted to Finance Minister

The Government constituted a High Powered Committee (HPC) on “DRISHTI” -(Driving Information System for Holistic Tax Initiatives) in February 2014.  The Committee is headed by Shri T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education and consisting of eminent persons from the private sector having in depth domain knowledge as well as senior officers from the Department of Revenue. The Committee has finalised the Report after holding extensive discussions with the departmental officers, technical experts, taxpayers and other stake holders to understand the present business practices, IT initiatives and stakeholders expectations. On 21st October, 2014, the Committee submitted its Report on “DRISHTI” to the Hon’ble Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. The Report, after examining the existing business processes and the current status of IT Systems in CBEC, has highlighted the areas for improvement. The recommendations of the Committee aim at leveraging IT for improving the quality and extent of taxpayer services, encouraging voluntary tax compliance and detecting tax evasion. The Strategic Recommendations of the Committee include the following: o   Creation of National Taxpayer Services Directorate, National Assessment Centre for Customs & National Processing Centre for Central Excise & Service Tax Returns, National Targeting Centre & Directorate of International Customs o   Setting up of specialised function-based units for Data Analytics & Business Intelligence, Tax Dispute Resolution and Litigation, BPR, etc o   Leveraging Service Oriented Architecture for IT Applications o   Merging different Customs IT Applications into a Single System o   Enabling Mobility solutions in Business Workflows o   Introduction of Entity-based Risk Management System o   Introduction of IT Centric HR Policy The Committee also examined the suitable options for an appropriate IT Governance Model for CBEC. The recommendations have been classified as Short (upto 2 years), Medium (2 to 4 years) and Long Term (4 to 6 years). The Committee has also suggested steps for overseeing the implementation of the above Recommendations.

National Portal for Museums

Union Minister of State for Culture and Tourism, Shri Shripad Naik launches the National Portal for Museums Complete collections of Museum of Ministry of Culture and ASI to be digitized over the next 3-4 years

Shri Shripad Naik, Minister of State (Independent Charge) Culture and Tourism today launched the National Portal for Museums www.museumsofindia.gov.in in a brief but impressive function held in Shastri Bhawan, New Delhi. The Ministry of Culture has decided to digitize the collections of all the Museums under its control as well as the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) In the first phase of this project, the following 10 Museums under the Ministry of Culture have been digitized: 1. Indian Museum, Kolkata 2. Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata 3. National Museum, New Delhi 4. Allahabad Museum 5. Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad 6. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi 7. National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai 8. National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru 9. Archaeological Museum, Nagarjunakonda 10. Archaeological Museum, Goa. The web portal (www.museumsofindia.gov.in) displays a part of the digitized collections of these 10 leading museums. More than 11,000 art objects have been incorporated in the Digital Repository. Apart from this a database of more than 2 lakh antiquities has also been prepared by the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities (NMMA.) It is planned to digitize the complete collections of all the Museums of Ministry of Culture and ASI in a phased manner over a period of next 3-4 years and make the same available over the internet for online viewing. This digitization endeavour of the Ministry of Culture and making available of the collections of all its Museums on a single and uniform platform over the internet is a unique experiment being done on such a large scale worldwide. This will greatly help the scholars, school students as well as general viewers by providing them glimpses of the rich collections of our museums, hitherto hidden from the public eye. This move is also expected to give an impetus to tourism in the country and to encourage more and more people to visit the Museums. Digitization is being implemented by using the Jatan Collection Management Software. During the year 2014-15, the Jatan software is proposed to be implemented in 7 additional museums of the ASI as given below: 1. Ratnagiri Museum 2. Halebidu Museum 3. Lothal Museum 4. Mattancherry Palace, Cochin 5. Fort St. George Museum, Chennai 6. Bodhgaya Museum 7. Sarnath Museum The software and the web portal have been developed for the Ministry of Culture by Centre of Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune.

IAS-2015 NEW BATCH,UKPCS-12 TEST SERIES -SAMVEG IAS ,DEHRADUN,UTTARAKHAND

Payment banks - Spot the difference With post office deposits and Jan Dhan already in place, is there really place for yet another institution for banking inclusion?

The introduction of the concept of payments banks is an interesting proposition, but given that we already have similar systems, should we be duplicating them?

The idea of the payment banks is to provide access to banking for people, especially in rural areas. The bank's operations are rudimentary: funds will be invested exclusively in government securities or treasury bills with maturity of less than a year, eschewing issues such as non-performing assets and capital adequacy.

However, two competing entities already perform similar functions on a fairly large scale. First, India Post has around 1,40,000 post offices in rural areas, which have outstanding deposits of around Rs 3,70,000 crore (as on March 2013) with an annual flow of Rs 1,70,000 crore. This excludes certificates and Public Provident Fund accounts. Therefore, we do have strong structures in place that collect deposits from the public in the regular course of activity.

The business models are also almost the same. The money collected is devolved to the state and Central governments based on a formula and, since post offices are not commercial entities, they do not lend the money. The funds go towards balancing the budget, which is analogous to government securities and treasury bills.

The second area of competition for payment banks comes from the Jan Dhan scheme. This project is being executed within the existing structure of commercial banking where the public sector banks are to take the lead and open 75 million no-frills accounts by the year end. These accounts have two advantages - they have an embedded insurance product and, at a future date, could be entitled to an overdraft.

The Jan Dhan directly supersedes the payments bank objective because it has managed to include 55 million households (according to market reports) in an aggressive manner. Therefore, payment banks may not have many takers since they will be competing with post offices and the commercial banks' Jan Dhan, which goes beyond what the payments bank offers.

Prima facie, the payment bank model looks attractive - cost of deposits at four per cent, intermediation costs at 1.75 per cent and returns of seven to eight per cent, giving a net yield of 1.25 to 2.25 per cent. But there are nagging problems as revealed by the Jan Dhan experience.

The cost of opening an account is Rs 250, which includes a debit card. But 80 to 90 per cent of such accounts stay dormant forever. The numbers available from media reports on Jan Dhan indicate that for the 55 million accounts opened, the total amount mobilised was Rs 4,000 crore, which translates to roughly Rs 725 per account. The cost incurred by banks would have been Rs 1,375 crore, thus eroding a part of the deposits mobilised, hardly good economics for the payments banks.

There are other, practical issues. For instance, payment banks will entail building brick-and-mortar branches. There is a lot of talk about leveraging technology but given that most villages have limited access to power supply and knowledge of internet, physical access will be required. New ATMs have to be installed, since only 15 per cent of them are in rural areas right now.

It is generally believed that if financial inclusion is to be achieved we need an aggressive approach. In that sense, having multiple schemes to achieve the objective can really do little harm, so hence payments banks can coexist with post office savings bank and Jan Dhan. But it will be worthwhile to do an efficiency audit of the existing structures and put in place performance parameters for the new banks, so that we do not end up with a model that ends up eroding value.

Finally, we do have a proclivity for creating new institutions - the Mahila Bank is an example. This bank was set up with fanfare, even though the same objective could have been achieved by designating public sector branches exclusively for women. We have not heard much about this bank since. Is it possible that the payments banks could also reach this state?

The right to be forgotten On the new dimensions in the battle for online privacy

It was 1984, and the Berlin Wall is still standing, when Gerd Wiesler - a foot soldier in the Stasi, the dreaded East Germanspy agency - is assigned to keep under surveillance a playwright, Georg Dreyman, who apparently is an enemy of the State. Wiesler soon discovers the real reason for the surveillance: Dreyman is having an affair with a movie actress that the minister of culture also covets. The minister's goal is to find some political charges he can pin on his rival. Wiesler, an idealist, though a loyal servant of the state, works silently to protect the man who he is assigned to keep under surveillance.

This is the plot for The Lives of Others, the 2006 German-language film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which, apart from winning innumerable awards, brought so powerfully to centre stage the issue of mass surveillance. It is believed to have influenced even Edward Snowden, the former United States government computer programmer who leaked, among other things, the news that even the phone lines of foreign heads of government, such as Angela Merkel of Germany and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, were being tapped by the American government security apparatus.

Mr Snowden's revelations reveal one of the central paradoxes of contemporary life. The coming of the internet has made it infinitely easier for us citizens to communicate with each other; we can do that by email, through social media posts, through apps on phones - and from what we can see, citizens worldwide seem to be spending much of their day doing just that. But the way the internet is organised has also made it infinitely easier for governments to tap into this vast information flow. This is because information flow on the internet is concentrated at a few telecom companies, email providers and social media networks. Governments, for both valid purposes such as law enforcement and for improper purposes such as spying on political or commercial opponents, can tap into these networks in a way that was impossible for them to do in the good old days of the paper-post, telegraph and land-line based telephone.

And what is worse, it is not just overweening governments that we citizens have to worry about. Commercial service providers: email service providers, social media networks, e-commercecompanies, to mention just a few, are all potential infringers of our rights. When we use one of these services, we entrust to them our names, our addresses, our credit-card numbers, our dates of birth, who our friends are, who we share a sense of intimacy with, to name just a few dimensions of the information we share. It is only gradually that it is dawning on us that some of this information we have trustingly shared can be used against us when we apply for a job or when we apply to admission to a college.

A frivolous social media post from your college days can return to haunt you when you go for a job interview later. Many such posts are perhaps because the internet allows you spontaneous and effort-free ways to express your opinions; in an earlier era, by the time you committed your silliest thoughts to paper, stuck a postage stamp to it, and sent it off, much time had passed. And even if you posted it, it would at best be seen by one or two persons - whereas, in the internet era, your silly idea may get forwarded around, find an unintended audience of hundreds, and exist in cold cyberspace for ever.

With this realisation has come the battles about "privacy" and the demands that explicit laws be passed to protect the privacy of citizens.

Countries differ to the extent and scope of protection of privacy laws and even on what information should be considered "private". In the United States, for example, there is a specific Privacy Act that specifies that the information about an individual that is collected and stored by the United States government in the normal course of its functioning must be made available for inspection to that individual. In addition, there are innumerable other statutes that define what use can be made of information about an individual's financial status, credit status and health status. There is even a law that prohibits asking a person her age in a job application or interview.

The Europeans have added a new dimension to information privacy by insisting that citizens have a "right to be forgotten". It started in 2010, when a Spanish citizen lodged a complaint saying that an auction notice about his repossessed home was appearing on web search results even though the proceedings against him had been fully resolved; he demanded that search engines and a newspaper site that still showed this auction notice in search results stop doing so. The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld his demand and ruled that this information be removed not only from internet search engines' servers in Spain but also from their servers in the United States. A new human right, the "Right to be Forgotten", has been born, and it is going to extend worldwide.

Constructive lessons from a destructive cyclone The damage caused by Cyclone Hudhud in Visakhapatnam underlines the need for the government to follow some basic disaster management and environmental rules

Hudhud, a severe cyclonic storm, originating in the Andaman Sea around October 6, crossed the coastline nearVisakhapatnam at 11:30 a m on October 12, spewing venom and ferocity unknown in these parts for at least a century.

Hudhud's first spell, which preceded the landfall, lasted six to seven hours. It wreaked destruction, uprooting huge trees and breaking whatever that was fragile in its way. The eye of the cyclone, when it hovered over the city for about three hours, brought in a deceptive but eerie sense of relief, followed this time by the more ferocious, highly destructive second spell that levelled everything that the first spell had missed. After the cyclone, Visakhapatnam bore no resemblance to what it used to be, with its lush green cover. But, its impact was more drastic on the lives of the poor, the slum dwellers and fishing villages along the coast.

There are many lessons to be learnt from Hudhud.

Mangroves and casuarina plantations along the coast and the thick tree cover on the hills used to protect the city in the past from the vagaries of cyclones. Indiscriminate denudation, in defiance of environmental laws in force and the Visakhapatnam Urban Development Authority's mandatory Master Plan, have rendered the city vulnerable to high-velocity cyclones.

The Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) requirements are indispensable for protecting the coastal and marine environment of Visakhapatnam. For example, CRZ prohibits mechanical pumping of water through borewells within 500 metres from the high tide line since it will cause saline sea water to contaminate the ground water aquifers. This rule is wantonly breached. When Hudhud disrupted municipal water supplies, potable ground water, had it been available, would have provided relief.

Conserving mangroves, raising casuarina and other durable species of plantations along the coastline and regulating quarrying over the hills should, therefore, form part of the city's future plans. The laws to protect the environment need to be respected rather than held in contempt.

Following the killer Diviseema cyclone and tidal wave of 1977 in Andhra Pradesh, 146 cyclone shelters were constructed along the Visakhapatnam coast. These shelters need to be maintained in a state of readiness. However, few of them came in handy for providing relief to the people. For a government that makes huge investments on statues and decorative arches, to invest in the upkeep of these cyclone shelters should not be difficult.

Post-1977, the state had set up a Coastal Zone Management Authority with its counterpart institutions in each coastal district. These institutions have become defunct. They need to be revived and adequately equipped and empowered. The same is the case with the state and district disaster management authorities.

Cyclones seem to attract VIPs like lights attract insects. Each VIP puts pressure on the already strained local resources such as food, water, milk, vehicles, fuel and so on. When one VIP arrived soon after the cyclone this time, a truck carrying food packets for the victims had to be stopped for several hours for security reasons, causing the food to rot. A taxi booked by a patient was requisitioned for a VIP. One important lesson that our VIPs should learn is to stay at their respective places of work and provide help to the local institutions to deliver.

Hudhud gave the state government more than a week to plan. Knowing that the city's municipality, its police force and the local urban development authority were headless, the government could have quickly responded and posted able officials to give them direction. In times of emergency, nothing can substitute well-managed institutions that can respond on their own.

No government can ever match the spontaneous effort that could come from local communities. Andhra Pradesh has a law providing for area sabhas/ward committees in towns, but the law has remained on paper. Similarly, gram sabhas in villages can play a crucial role in facing calamities. If fallen trees could be cleared along many lanes in the city within five days after the cyclone, the credit should go to self-help groups and some NGOs. The government should, therefore, involve civil society as a part of any disaster management effort in the future.

Lastly, the city's airport was a sad spectacle and so were the petrol stations and many other structures. The design and the architecture of all large buildings should provide for aerodynamic stability at high velocity winds. The material used should be corrosion-free in view of the salinity that pervades any coastal environment.

INS Teg Visits Simon's Town, South Africa for IBSAMAR

Indian Naval Ship Teg, a Stealth Frigate of the Indian Navy, is scheduled to make port calls at Simon’s Town and Cape Town between 20th October and 10th November 2014. The ship will participate in the fourth edition of the biennial India-Brazil-South Africa Maritime (IBSAMAR) Exercise. The port call at Simon’s Town will coincide with the visit of Vice Admiral Anil Chopra, PVSM, AVSM, ADC, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Western Naval Command.

INS Teg is the 9th Indian Naval ship to participate in IBSAMAR to strengthen the existing bonds of friendship between the three nations. The visit also seeks to underscore India’s solidarity with countries of the Indian Ocean Region.

The ship sailed from her base port Mumbai on 1st October 2014 as part of a four-ship Task Group headed by Rear Admiral R Hari Kumar, VSM, Flag Officer Commanding Western Fleet. During the ship’s stay in harbour at Simon’s Town, various activities are planned including professional interaction between naval personnel. On departure from South Africa, the ship is scheduled to make a port call at Mozambique before returning to Mumbai in end Nov 2014.

INS Teg, built at Kaliningrad, Russia was commissioned into the Indian Navy on 27th April 2012. The ship is a guided missile Stealth Frigate with formidable arsenal. The ship is commanded by Captain Anand Yeshwant Sardesai and is manned by a crew of 25 officers and 220 sailors.