What to Read in Indian Express Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

EDITORIAL 1: How Gaza war delayed IMEC

Context

Earlier this week, India’s National Security Council Secretariat hosted envoys and officials from the United States, UAE, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, Germany, Israel, Jordan and the European Union, to discuss progress on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

The IMEC

• The IMEC was announced during the G20 Summit held in New Delhi in 2023 to stimulate economic development through enhanced connectivity and economic integration between Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and Europe.
• The IMEC comprises two corridors — India-Gulf and Gulf-Europe.
• Its eastern leg will carry container traffic from India’s western ports to the UAE, from where high speed freight railway will carry goods across the Arabian peninsula (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) uptil the port of Haifa in Israel.
• The second leg will see cargo being shipped from Haifa to ports in Greece and Italy, from where Europe’s well-established train networks will take goods to their final destinations across the continent.
• Overall, the IMEC is expected to cut shipping time from India to Europe by about 40% when compared to the Red Sea route. But since being announced, progress has been limited.

The corridor’s ambitions

• In September 2023, during India’s G20 Presidency, the IMEC’s conceptualisation and agreement was a testament to a remarkable period of stability in the Middle East.
• Years of conflict along ideological and geopolitical lines (Qatar-GCC, Iran-Saudi Arabia, Arab states-Israel) had given way to normalisation agreements and rapprochements that prioritised regional economic growth.
• The economic underpinnings of the idea remain firm. TheEU is India’s largest trading partner with bilateral trade in FY 2023-24 at $137.41 billion, and non-oil trade between India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia has increased significantly in recent years.
• The IMEC itself was meant to be more than a trade corridor. Its implementing partners would lay cables for electricity and digital connectivity, pipes for clean hydrogen export to increase efficiencies, reduce costs, enhance economic unity, generate jobs, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Key challenges

• From the perspective of trade facilitation and accessibility, the IMEC was meant to address several issues that continue to persist till date, including no corridor-wide tariff standardisation and low financial integrationamong corridor partners, lack of corridor-wide insurance, and widely differing port capacities.
• The ambitious cross-Saudi/UAE railway meant to transit goods between the corridor’s sea-legs was also significantly under-developed.
• However, these presented benign modality and sustainability challenges which could be mitigated through commitment and investment from all stakeholders.

Gaza poses fundamental challenges

• The underlying economic logic of the IMEC remains. However, its challenges have evolved from reconcilable to fundamental.
• The IMEC’s cornerstone is the ‘Middle East-Europe’ connection, between Jordan and Israel.
• Unlike in 2023, Jordan-Israel relations are presently at a significant low, and are worsening due to the Israeli-American push for Jordan to absorb more of the Palestinian population.
• Similarly, the potential for Saudi-Israel normalisation is much lower today than in 2023. Riyadh has doubled down on the need for Israeli concessions towards Palestine while Israel’s appetite to concede a Palestinian state is at a historic low.
• In fact, Israel is presently focused on formally re-occupying and potentially re-settling the Gaza Strip, despite intensifying global opposition.
• For instance, while the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping vindicated the need for the IMEC as a more secure alternative, the expansion of Israel’s war bodes high insurance premiums for any trade transiting the region.

Future of IMEC up in the air

• While the western leg of the corridor is unlikely to materialise in the near future, the IMEC’s eastern leg benefits from the strategic partnerships that India has forged with the Arab states.
• While India’s economic and strategic relationship with the UAE has the most depth, India is Saudi Arabia’s second largest trading partner and both states have had a strategic partnership since 2010.
• Consequently, for India, progress on the IMEC corridor is very much possible. This is despite internecine issues between Arab states over trade modalities. The Saudi need to undercut the Emirati economic dominance of the region continues.

Way forward

• In the long term, for the IMEC to be realised in its originally envisioned form, a secure and stable Middle East is an imperative.
• This implies that if the IMEC was seen as the fruit of the region’s unprecedented stability in 2023, the regional architecture that brought about this stability will have to be recreated.

 

 

EDITORIAL 2: A unified welfare state

Context

The trend of populist welfare is global, and India is no exception. Though these political philanthropies provide short-term income support, they also raise a fundamental question: Should India remain trapped in fragmented, populist welfare politics, or is it time to build a unified, rights-based, and economically sustainable social security system that fuels the economy?

The International reports

• The answer is important for the future of over half of India’s population, who are under the age of 28 and aspire to live a developed-nation dream and the elderly who will need support by 2047.
• The International Labour Organisation’s Director-General recently lauded India’s “cash and non-cash” social protection schemes.
• The ongoing ILO-Phase II survey for India reveals that its schemes reach over 100 crore beneficiaries.
• This milestone is the cumulative result of numerous schemes launched by both the central and state governments.
• According to one estimate, there are over 34 major social protection schemes, 24 pension schemes and several independent welfare initiatives by states.
• The ILO’s World Social Protection Report (2021) initially estimated India’scoverage at 24.4 per cent, only later adjusting it to 48.8 per cent after the government highlighted the extent of state-level programmes.
• If even the ILO gets messed up with data, imagine what citizens face when looking for their scattered entitlements.

The pressing challenge

• The pressing challenge is optimising scattered schemes. This includes eliminating duplications, identifying the right beneficiaries, and investing in capacity building and market-ready skill sets for our working population to grow the pie, rather than compete over its pieces.
• A related challenge is the need to reimagine direct transfers not as isolated, consumptive payouts, but as self-multiplying instruments, where one entitlementhas the potential to unlock access to others.

India’s way and more

• The G20 New Delhi Declaration calls for sustainably financed universal social protection coverage.
• “One Nation, One Social Security governance” presents a promising path forward. It can address current inefficiencies to make the best of the scarce fiscal resources, while sparing citizens the pain of running between various units of the government.
• For instance, E-Shram registrations are meant for unorganised workers, and EPFO registrations largely cover formal employment.
• They compete with each other and create problematic boundaries when there is an overlap.
• Specified eligibility conditions and lack of interoperability often deny simple benefits envisaged by the legislators.
• A closer look at many state government schemes shows they often repackage existing benefits under new names, offering little differentiated value.
• In its report, the ILO found several examples to illustrate how an integrated national strategy and framework were useful to provide universal social assistance and develop basic capabilities of citizens.
• Brazil’s ‘The Fome Zero’ programme brought in a Unified System of Social Assistance (SUAS) that regulates and organises the social assistance service network in all 26 states, the federal district and 5,564 municipalities.
• South Korea faced similar challenges in the 1990s and responded by consolidating welfare programmes under institutions like the National Pension Service and the National Health Insurance Service. A similar transition in India is needed.
• A “one government” approach moves away from silos, shifting the focus to collective outcomes.
• It is time to put the Digital India Stack, Aspirational Districts Programme to best use and build on the experiences from programmes like PM-Gati Shakti.
• Our Constitution empowers states to frame similar schemes in their own spheres.

Conclusion

As a caution, any move towards a unified social security governance model must be federated, flexible, and incentive-driven, with the autonomy to factor in unique social realities. Through bold political consensus, this transition can become one of India’s most transformative governance reforms since Independence.