21 AUGUST 2023

Topic 1: Ragging regulations in India

Context: An 18-year-old undergraduate student died after falling from the second floor of his hostel in Kolkata allegedly due to ragging.

Supreme Court on ragging

• The Supreme Court in a 2001 case had dealt with ragging, which it termed the menace pervading the educational institutions of the country.
• The Court also issued key guidelines on anti-ragging.
• These included setting up proctoral committees to prevent ragging and internally address complaints against ragging.

UGC guidelines

• In 2009, the UGC issued detailed guidelines for universities on anti-ragging.
• The guidelines include nine explanations of what could constitute ragging.
• At an institutional level, the UGC requires universities to take measures for prevention of ragging including declaring its intent publicly to prevent ragging and requiring students to sign an undertaking that they will not engage in ragging activities.
• The institution shall set up appropriate committees to actively monitor, promote and regulate healthy interaction between the freshers, junior students and senior students.
• If found guilty by the anti-ragging committee, the UGC guidelines require any member of the committee to proceed to file a First Information Report (FIR), within twenty four hours of receipt of such information or recommendation.

Under IPC:

• While ragging is not a specific offence, it could be penalised under several other provisions of the Indian Penal Code.
• The offence of wrongful restraint is criminalised under Section 339 of the IPC which is punished with simple imprisonment and/or fine.
  • Wrongful restraint is an offence when a person is prevented from proceeding in any direction in which that person has a right to proceed.
• Section 340 criminalises wrongful confinement which is defined as wrongfully restraining any person in such a manner as to prevent that person from proceedings beyond certain circumscribing limits.
  • This is punishable with a jail term and/or a fine.

State laws:

• The Kerala Prohibition of Ragging Act, 1998 provides for suspension or dismissal of the student accused of ragging and mandatorily requires the college administration to inform the nearest police station.
  • If an educational institution fails to do so, it would be “deemed abetment” to commit the offence.

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Topic 2: Turmeric supplements

Context: Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) issued a medical advisory warning Australians of the risk of liver injury from using medicines and herbal supplements containing turmeric or its active ingredient, curcumin.

Health benefits of turmeric:

• The risk of liver injury did not appear to relate to curcuma longa consumed in typical dietary amounts as a food.
• As a staple ingredient in South and South East Asian cuisine, turmeric is also used in Ayurvedic and Chinese-medicine concoctions.
• Several studies report it to have anti-oxidant properties that can help with inflammation.
  • These include arthritis and infections.
• A research have reported that curcumin used along with the drug Artemisinin was effective in treating malaria when tested on mice.
• There have also been studies investigating the drug as an adjuvant in chemotherapy based on results in mice and animal studies.
• However, their effect in human trials have been inconclusive.

Adverse effects of turmeric:

• The French Agency for Food reported various adverse effects, including reports of hepatitis, potentially related to the consumption of food supplements containing turmeric or curcumin.
• The ANSES report underlines that turmeric has “choleretic” properties, which means it stimulates the secretion of bile to improve digestion, and therefore, it is advisable that those with bile duct disease should avoid turmeric.
• Curcumin could also interact with medications such as anticoagulants, cancer drugs and immunosuppressants, reducing their safety and effectiveness.

Why is curcumin being used in supplements?

• One of the challenges of turmeric and by extension curcumin is that very little of it is absorbed, or made ‘bioavailable’, by the body.
• To improve its bioavailability, a popular approach is to use piperine, the major active component of black pepper, which improves bioavailability by 2000.
• However, whether increasing the bioavailability of curcumin and packaging them in supplements makes them effective and safe for use in medicines is still being debated with no conclusive evidence emerging from trials.

Safe limit on consumption of turmeric:

• The European Food Safety Authority has set an acceptable daily intake of 180 mg of curcumin per day for a 60 kg adult as the safe level of consumption.
• A World Health Organization/Food and Agricultural Organisation advisory recommends 3 mg/kg of body weight.
• India’s Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has standards that packaged turmeric must comply with but nothing on the recommended dietary allowance.
• Statistically, on an average about 200 to 500mgs is consumed on a daily basis in Indian households.

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Topic 3: RBI’s new pilot for frictionless credit

Context: The RBI commenced a pilot programme endeavouring to evaluate the feasibility and functionality of the ‘Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit’.

Need for the platform:

• The suggested platform would strive to enable delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to lenders.
• Digital delivery of credit (delivering credit/loans though digital means) or any loan is preceded by a process of scrutiny known as credit appraisal.
  • The process attempts to evaluate and accordingly predict the prospective borrowers’ ability for repayment of credit/loan and adhering to the credit agreement.
  • This pre-disbursal process is particularly important for banks since it would in turn determine their interest income and impact on the balance sheet.
  • The central banking regulator has observed that the data required for the process rests with different entities like central and state governments, account aggregators, banks, credit information companies, and digital identity authorities.
  • Thus, being in separate systems, it creates hindrances in frictionless and timely delivery of rule-based lending.
• This new platform would bring all of it together in a single place.
• To facilitate frictionless and timely delivery of loans, the central banking regulator had instituted a pilot project for the digitalisation of Kisan Credit Card (KCC) loans, of less than ₹1.6 lakh.
• It tested end-to-end digitalisation of the lending process in a paperless and hassle-free manner.
• It provides for doorstep disbursement of loans in assisted or self-service mode without any paperwork.

More about the platform:

• The platform is premised around the learnings from all the ongoing programmes, and further expands the scope to all types of digital loans.
• The public platform will be developed by its wholly owned subsidiary, the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH).
• The proposed end-to-end platform will have an open architecture, open Application Programming Interfaces (API) and standards, to which all financial sector players would be able to connect seamlessly in a ‘plug and play’ model.
• With the participation from certain banks, the platform would extend its focus also towards dairy loans, MSME loans (without collateral), personal loans and home loans.
• It is expected to link with services like:
  • Aadhar e-KYC,
  • Aadhar e-signing,
  • land records from onboarded State governments,
  • satellite data,
  • PAN validation,
  • transliteration,
  • account aggregation by account aggregators (AAs),
  • milk pouring data from select dairy co-operatives, and
  • house/property search data.
• Thus, it would cover all aspects of farming operations (essential to understand the exposure and default risk for loans of the nature) alongside those necessary for ascertaining financial profiles.

Significance of the project:

• Access to information:
  • Improved access to information provides the basis for fact-based and quick credit assessments.
• More coverage:
  • It ensures that credit is extended to a larger set of borrowers with good credit history.
• Benefit to borrowers
  • The borrowers too would benefit by the resulting lower cost of accessing capital, which would translate into productive investment spending.
  • The lending platform would bring about reduction of costs, quicker disbursement and scalability.

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