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Article 110(1) of the Constitution states that a bill can be termed as a Money Bill if it contains "only" six types of provisions or anything incidental to these. Broadly speaking, these include taxation, government receipts and expenditure, government borrowings, and guarantees.
The government has argued that the primary objective of the Aadhaar Bill was to create a system for providing subsidies, and as the provisions relate to government expenditure the Bill can be termed as a Money Bill
The counter argument is that the Aadhaar Bill has several other provisions, including permitting use of the system for other purposes, so it does not meet the requirement of having "only" the six provisions.
The Finance Bill too had provisions other than those related to taxation. It amended the Reserve Bank of India Act to enable the creation of a monetary policy committee
It also amended the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (with retrospective effect) to change the definition of foreign company.
Article 110(3) states: "If any question arises whether a Bill is a Money Bill or not, the decision of the Speaker of the House of the People thereon shall be final."
In addition, Article 122 prohibits courts from inquiring into proceedings of Parliament and examining their validity.
There was a similar case decided in 2014. The Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly passed a Bill to amend the Uttar Pradesh Lokayukta and Up-Lokayuktas Act as a Money Bill and did not send this to the Legislative Council. The Act was challenged (Mohd. Saeed Siddiqui v State of U.P.) but the Supreme Court decided that the decision of the Speaker "that the Bill in question was a Money Bill is final and the said decision cannot be disputed nor can the procedure of the State Legislature be questioned by virtue of Article 212".
Article 212 applies to State legislatures and is analogous to Article 122 for Parliament.
There are several prior cases in which the Supreme Court has examined the decision of the Speaker or the legislature.
One set of cases pertains to the anti-defection law as laid down in the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution
Paragraph 6(1) states: "If a question arises as to whether a member of a House has become subject to disqualification under this Schedule, the question shall be referred for the decision of the Chairman or, as the case may be, the Speaker of such House and his decision shall be final."
Paragraph 6(2) says that all proceedings in relation to such question shall be deemed to be proceedings within the meaning of Articles 122 or 212.
The Supreme Court examined the constitutional validity of this paragraph in Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu (1992)
That Paragraph 6(1) of the Tenth Schedule, to the extent it seeks to impart finality to the decision of the Speakers/Chairmen, is valid.
But the concept of statutory finality embodied in Paragraph 6 (1) does not detract from or abrogate judicial review under Articles 136,226 and 227 of the Constitution in so far as infirmities based on violations of constitutional mandates, mala fides, non-compliance with Rules of Natural Justice and perversity, are concerned."
It went on to say that the protection of Articles 122 and 212 was only to protect the validity of proceedings from mere irregularity of procedure.
The Court also struck down paragraph 7 (which barred judicial review) stating that it did not meet the requirements of Article 368(2), which requires ratification of half of all State legislatures for any changes made to provisions related to the higher judiciary
The Supreme Court has examined its powers of review under Articles 122 and 212 in the Raja Ram Pal case in 2007.
This case pertained to the expulsion of some members of Parliament after they were found to have taken cash to ask questions in Parliament
The Court said: "The proceedings which may be tainted on account of substantive illegality or unconstitutionality, as opposed to those suffering from mere irregularity thus cannot be held protected from judicial scrutiny by Article 122(1)"
This principle was later applied in Amarinder Singh v. Spl. Committee, Punjab Vidhan Sabha, in 2010. In that case, the Supreme Court set aside the expulsion of Capt. Amarinder Singh from the Punjab Vidhan Sabha
The point to note is that the court has set limits to the privilege of the legislature under Article 122, and overturned its resolution to expel a member.

- 11:57 AM

Judgements indicating limits of speakers power in using discretion

Article 110(1) of the Constitution states that a bill can be termed as a Money Bill if it contains "only" six types of provisions ...

government on Friday announced the long-pending, "all-encompassing" National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy.
The Policy, to be reviewed every five years, aims to push IPRs as a marketable financial asset, promote innovation and entrepreneurship, while protecting public interest including ensuring the availability of essential and life-saving drugs at affordable prices
no changes are made in that Section (which prevents ever-greening of drug patents) and the patent-disabling Compulsory Licensing regime.
The policy comes in the backdrop of the US Trade Representative (USTR), in its annual (2016 edition) Special 301 Report (on the global state of IPR protection and enforcement) retaining India on the 'Priority Watch List' this year for "lack of sufficient measurable improvements to its IPR framework.
India shall remain committed to the (World Trade Organisation's) Doha Declaration on (WTO's) Trade Related IPR Agreement (TRIPS) and Public Health
India will continue to utilise the legislative space and flexibilities available in international treaties and the TRIPS Agreement
These flexibilities include the sovereign right of countries to use provisions such as Section 3(d) and CLs for ensuring the availability of essential and life-saving drugs at affordable prices.
The Policy says that to have strong and effective IPR laws, which balance the interests of rights owners with larger public interest, steps could be taken — including review of existing IP laws — to update and improve them or to remove anomalies and inconsistencies
To ensure strong and effective IPR laws, the Policy states India will engage constructively in the negotiation of international treaties and agreements in consultation with stakeholders. The government will examine accession to some multilateral treaties which are in India's interest; and, become signatory to those treaties which India has de facto implemented to enable it to participate in their decision making process, it added.
the international treaties and agreements referred to are international IP classification agreements, including the Nice and Vienna Classifications, and not pacts like the Trans Pacific Partnership, which apparently has TRIPS-plus provisions.
The Policy also seeks to facilitate domestic IPR filings, for the entire value chain from IPR generation to commercialisation
Besides, it also aims to promote research and development through tax benefits. Another significant measure include the proposal to create an effective loan guarantee scheme to encourage start-ups.

- 8:41 AM

National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy : GS 3 : IAS

government on Friday announced the long-pending, "all-encompassing" National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy. The Policy...

In 1977, the new Janata Government dismissed State governments headed by Congress Chief Ministers and dissolved the Assemblies on the ground that they had lost the people's mandate.
The matter was carried to the Supreme Court in the State of Rajasthan v. Union of India.
A seven-judge bench dismissed the petition on several preliminary grounds, including its refusal to get into the thicket of political questions.
Some judges even held that presidential satisfaction in invoking Article 356 of the Constitution was not justiciable.
Mrs. Gandhi's return in 1980 saw her return the favour by dismissing Janata Party governments in the States. This action went unchallenged in the courts in the wake of the Rajasthan judgment.
The Supreme Court in Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu and Others ruled that the Speaker's decisions on disqualification were subject to judicial review.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid saw P.V. Narasimha Rao's government dismiss four State governments lead by the BJP. In 1994, the challenge to this dismissal and earlier impositions of President's Rule came to be decided by a nine-judge bench in the S.R. Bommai v. Union of India case.
The judgment held that the President's satisfaction in the invocation of Article 356 could be inquired into by the courts
It upheld the dismissal of the BJP governments to protect secularism, which was part of the Constitution's basic structure
It held that the President was required to act on objective material and that Article 356 could only be resorted to when there was a breakdown of constitutional machinery as distinguished from an ordinary breakdown of law and order.
The court also held that in no case should a State Assembly be dissolved without Parliament approving the proclamation, and that a test of numerical strength could only be conducted on the floor of the Assembly and not outside it.
Relying on a Pakistani Supreme Court decision in Nawaz Sharif's case, the judgment ruled that an improperly dismissed government could be restored to office.
The doctrine in Bommai came to be applied by the Supreme Court in the Bihar case of Rameshwar Prasad & Ors v. Union of India
In 2005, Governor Buta Singh, after an inconclusive election, recommended the dissolution of the State Assembly, without it being convened even once.
The Court struck down the imposition as unconstitutional but refused to restore the Assembly because another election had already been ordered
Since 1994, the instances of the imposition of President's rule have dwindled considerably
The question is of the willingness of the judiciary to cut through the political thicket in time to be of consequence to the political process.

- 10:20 AM

Supreme court rulings in cases of state government dismissals : centre state relation : GS 2 : IAS

In 1977, the new Janata Government dismissed State governments headed by Congress Chief Ministers and dissolved the Assemblies on the ground...

Two years on, a watered down version of that idealisation is raising more questions than providing answers
neither are greenfield (or new) cities coming up, nor even are satellite cities
minuscule parts of existing cities—often, exclusive pockets—have been identifed for development by special purpose vehicles (SPVs).
For instance, just four sq km out of Bhubaneswar's 135 sq km are to be 'smartified'.
the SPVs are essentially companies (in which the local body has a shareholding), triggering apprehensions about governance and extraneous authority.
Smart cities will create exclusive 'cities within cities', which is against the very spirit of the panchayati raj and go against the 73rd and 74th amendments (related to panchayats and urban local bodies)
the demolition of 4,000 government houses in excellent upkeep, felling of over 40,000 trees, dislocation of 6,000 families and auctioning of 300 acres to builders.
Elected local representatives are worried about erosion of authority.
The other aspect is prioritisation.
all 20 cities on the smart city first list were already better off than the rest.
at the city level, of which Delhi offers an apt example: the areas around India Gate, Connaught Place, the diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri, Lodhi Road and the Ridge, which have wide, tree-lined avenues, large parks, pleasing architecture and bins everywhere are to be smartified with "app- integrated cycle tracks, sensor-based car parking, geo-tagged bins" and so on
A lot of technology is involved, as if it is the end-all, prompting one critic to say, "The only aim of the project seems to be to allow foreign companies to dump expensive technology on us.
The beneficiaries will be those who own property there.
whatever NDMC is being given under the smart city project, it already has plans for—water supply, sewers, roads, parks and WiFi.
corporatisation of municipal work, it also allows the Centre a degree of control over city governance via the SPVs, the CEOs of which can't be removed without the Centre's permission.
There's no clarity on the role of elected municipal bodies either.
urban development is a state subject, so friction between SPVs and municipal bodies can't be ruled out
The Centre clearly doesn't trust the municipal corporation to use funds properly. Else, why create SPVs?" On top of that, the Kochi corporation is expected to raise Rs 500 crore in equity for the SPV when its annual revenue itself is around that amount
The biggest fears, however, are that smart cities, part of Modivision—right-of-centre economics and corporate-style governance with an attendant blindness to weaker sections—will be ruthless with the urban poor
What troubles the poor most, however, is the fear of being lifted out—by means of 'keep them out of sight' policies.
"unlocking the full value of land", a euphemism perhaps for evicting people.
Every city has a unique footprint. That is not being taken into consideration
if the money might not be better spent on changing these things rather than making a few areas 'smart'

- 10:55 AM

some points for criticism of smart cities project : GS 3 : IAS

Two years on, a watered down version of that idealisation is raising more questions than providing answers neither are greenfield (or new) c...

Only about 45 per cent of the cropped area in the country is irrigated, which results in widespread production uncertainty
The Budget attempted to address this through the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchai Yojana (PMKSY) with an outlay of Rs 17,000 crore.
This programme aims to bring an area of 28 lakh hectares under irrigation, reinvigorate defunct irrigation schemes thereby benefiting 81 lakh hectares and also harness groundwater resources
hese, together with the proposed long-term irrigation fund of Rs 25,000 crore, are positive initiatives for long-term growth in the agricultural sector.
Credit constraints have been an important bottleneck in agriculture
The share of long-term (investment) credit has declined sharply from 55 per cent in 2006-07 to 39 per cent 2011-12.
The target for agricultural credit in the Budget has been increased to Rs 9 lakh crore, which is Rs 0.5 crore more than last year
An additional provision of Rs 15,000 crore has been made for interest subvention. These measures should help relax the credit constraint to an extent.
However, much will depend on the access to credit of the actual cultivators, which depends on the legal right to land and formal tenancy.
Therefore, tenancy reforms and modernisation of land records need to be taken up urgently.
A revamped crop insurance programme has been announced recently to address crop losses due to vagaries of the climate. An allocation of Rs 5,500 crore has been made to this scheme.
The attractive feature of the scheme is that there is no cap on premium and therefore, there is no reduction of the sum assured.
However, this programme covers only production shocks whereas market (price) shocks still need to be borne by the farmer. This needs to be corrected through products for price/revenue insurance.
The Budget also proposes to encourage more states to undertake decentralised procurement through online procurement.
There are also proposals to build a buffer stock of pulses and to automate three lakh fair price shops.
About 585 regulated markets are proposed to be connected under the National Agriculture Market (NAM) programme
the states need to amend their respective Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Acts (APMC) to implement this. This also involves a single licence across the state, single-point levy of market fee and electronic auctioning system for price discovery.
The biggest allocation for the rural sector comes from the increased grants-in-aid to gram panchayats and municipalities to the tune of about Rs 2.87 lakh crore.
This is likely to translate into Rs 80 lakh per gram panchayat, which is substantial. These increases in allocations should spur rural spending, which in turn should help generate employment in the rural non-farm sector.
There is little attempt to incentivise states to invest more in agriculture.
Given that agriculture is a state subject, this is very important. Gross capital formation in agriculture (as a percentage of the gross value added in agriculture) has declined from 18.3 per cent in 2011-12 to 15.8 per cent in 2014-15.
This sharp fall in investment during the last few years is in sharp contrast to the rapid increase since 2004-05
The second shortcoming is the absence of region-specific initiatives.
Agro-climatic conditions vary greatly in India and any programme needs to factor in local conditions to be successful.
Irrigation programmes under PMKSY and other programmes need to be dovetailed with district agricultural plans prepared by the states, to be successful.

- 11:47 AM

Budget provisions for agricultural sector : GS 3 : IAS

Only about 45 per cent of the cropped area in the country is irrigated, which results in widespread production uncertainty The Budget attemp...

Classification of Towns In India

Urban centres are numerous, and these vary in their size, functions, location and in their social composition, culture and heritage too. It is therefore worthwhile to classify towns into categories for better understanding about their role in the regional and national context.

In India, the problem of classifying urban centres is not an easy task. This is because of several reasons. First, the number of towns in India is too large to handle on some viable grounds. The size of towns has a wide span ranging between 5,000 to 10,000,000, and this might not characterize town's personality by breaking these into subjective or arbitrary classes.

Second, the towns of India have a long historical background and have been under various regimes dating back thousand years from birth of Christ to the present era of democratic set-up. Finally, the data about functions and economy of Indian cities have not yet been standardized because of the absence of a suitable urban agency to deal with these. Under these circumstances classifications and categorization of urban places in India differ from state to state and from author to author.

There may be several methods, ways and means to classify urban centres. Site and situation of towns, population, size and functions, their social and cultural environment, etc., are some of the recognized bases to put them into groups. Out of all the bases of classification, the variable of 'function of a town' is widely accepted and reliable too. 'Reliable' in the sense that town itself is defined as an unit characterized by non-agricultural activities.

Non-agricultural activities include administrative, industrial, commercial, cultural, etc. It is rarely that a town is 'mono-activity' centre. Often towns develop diversified activities and are known to posses multifarious functions like economic, administrative and cultural.

Nearly all towns are supposed to provide various services like health, education, municipal (water, electricity, sanitation), transportational and marketing. Therefore, it is not worthwhile to classify urban places into a single particular function.

Aurousseau's Attempt:

Here some of the most significant classifications have been discussed. In 1921, M. Aurousseau classified towns into six classes: administrative, defence, culture, production-towns, communication and recreation. His classification though a simple one, however, suffers from the defect of over-generalization. To classify a town into one major category, generally neglects the role of other classes. The cut-off point of one-class is decided by the arbitrary percentage, and therefore it is subjective.

Economic activities too are neglected. These are important in the sense that a town also caters for the need of people residing outside its municipal limits. Various classes of functions as suggested by Aurousseau create confusion in the sense that both functional and locational characteristics are mixed; for example, under communication-class group of towns performing function of 'transfer of goods' are put.

Towns with tidal-limit, fall-line-towns, bridgehead towns point out attribute of location in performance of their function. It is thus doubtful that such towns are exclusively communicational, and not locational. Similarly, pilgrimage centres are cultural towns, but these equally are significant in their geographical location on mountainous terrain, in valleys or on banks of rivers.

University-town is also a misnomer because this type of adjective cannot be its function but only a single quality among its overall urban milieu. But Anuousseau's classification marks a significant stage and provides a springboard for sophisticated methods. It is actually a comprehensive scheme bringing together polygonal functional urban activities to classify urban centres.

Harris's Classification:

Chauncy D. Harris remedied the deficiencies of the former subjective and common-sense-judgement-based classifications. He was able to identify quantitatively dominant function out of multifunctional character of cities. He used employment as well as occupational figures reduced to percentages to indicate cut-off points for urban activities varying in importance.

His classification is based on the fact that some activity-groups employ many more persons than others do. For example, USA's 27 per cent employed persons of the total urban employment are in manufacturing, while wholesale trade has about 4 per cent. Thus, it is obvious that some functions should be assigned higher percentages than others. From analyzes, he was able to set up limits for each of his types as shown in the Table 9.1.

Criteria used by Harris in Functional Classification of Cities of USA

Harris's classification suffers with some grave defects and cannot be universally viable. He used metropolitan districts as functional units because the industry-group data such as those published now were not then available when he did his research. Consequently, number of cities which were too small to have metropolitan districts were left unclassified. In his article referred here (Geo. Rev. Vol. 33, Table 1) he did not include a list of urban centres and the categories to which they belonged.

Carter labelled Harris's classification as subjective because the decisions to access or delete with a minimum number or cut-off points seem to be a personal one and were set by simple empirical means. Under the class of 'Transport and Communications', workers engaged in telephone and telegraph services were omitted simply on empirical grounds which was nothing more than a subjective decision.

Duncan and Reiss tried to revise the problem of functional specialization by using the lowest value of supper decline or quantile groups. This revision is advantageous in the sense that it made an allowance for the different size-classes in the classification.

Howard Nelson's Classification:

Nelson further removed the shortcomings of the classifications of those of Harris and others by using a stated procedure that could be objectively checked by other workers. He decided to base his method of classification entirely upon major industry groups as listed in the 1950 Census of Population for standard metropolitan areas, urbanized areas and urban places of 10,000 or more population. He omitted the little significance groups like agriculture and construction, and finally, arrived at the nine activity groups.

The problem of city specialization, and also the degree of specialization above the average was solved by giving margins of different degree to different size classes. He did find a definite tendency for the percentages employed in some activities vary with city size. The question – 'When is a city specialized?' was solved by using a statistical technique – the Standard Deviation (SD).

A city can be specialized in more than one activity and to varying degrees. Thus he showed for each city all activities that qualified for plus 1, plus 2, or plus 3 SDs above the mean. Table 9.2 indicates averages and SD in percentages for selected nine activity groups (1950) as developed by Nelson.

Suppose, any city which is classified as Pf 2F, it means that it has 22.87 or more but less than 28.76 per cent of its labour-force employed in professional service and 4.44 or more but less than 5.69 per cent employed in finance, insurance and real estate. In short, the table indicates, the number of SDs shows the degree to which the urban centre stands out for the activity in question. A city which does not fall even under 1 SD, average in any activity appears as diversified D, in Nelson's classification.

- 10:11 PM

chapter for Classification of towns : asked in geography paper 1 in 2015 (as per harris) : book - rupa made simple: IAS

Classification of Towns In India Urban centres are numerous, and these vary in their size, functions, location and in their social compositi...

- 12:05 PM

Few raw materials for answers regarding rights of LGBT sexual rights : rights issues : GS 2 : IAS

Indian philosophy, unlike the Western construct of a rigid male-female binary, has always recognised that gender is socially grafted on to w...