What’s in today’s article?

• Inner Line system
• Sixth Schedule of the Constitution
• ILP, Sixth schedule and CAA
• Why are Assam, Tripura against CAA?

Why in news?

After the recent announcement of rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act or CAA, there are loud voices of dissent against it, but this time only in Assam and Tripura (The passage of CAA had caused unrest in the Northeast in 2019). The reason is that most parts of the Northeast, except for large areas of Assam and Tripura, have been excluded from the CAA.

However, the Act specifies that these provisions do not apply to: the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, or Tripura as included in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, and the areas covered under 'The Inner Line' notified under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873.

Inner Line system

• About
  • An Inner Line Permit (ILP) regime is operational in the four Northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur.
  • ILP is a special permit that residents of other parts of India need to apply for and receive, in order to enter and spend any duration of time in these states.
• Background
  • The British introduced the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation 1873 for tribal hill areas, aiming to protect the indigenous population by preventing the settlement of other Indian nationals.
  • This system continued after Independence and was implemented in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Mizoram.
  • Manipur was included in January 2020 due to protests following the enactment of the CAA.

Sixth Schedule

• About
  • Sixth Schedule gives tribal communities of NE states considerable autonomy within a larger administrative or political structure.
    • It was adopted under Article 244 (2) of the Constitution.
  • This schedule deals with the provisions for formation of autonomous administrative divisions within a state.
• Current status
  • Sixth Schedule of Indian Constitution provides a list of ten tribal areas in Assam (3), Meghalaya (3), Tripura (1) and Mizoram (3).
  • Each of these tribal areas constitutes an autonomous district. Each autonomous district has an Autonomous District Council (ADC).
• Inclusion under sixth schedule
  • Inclusion under this Schedule allows a region to create Autonomous District and Regional Councils (ADCs and ARCs) — elected bodies with the power to administrate tribal areas.
  • This would include the power to make laws on subjects such as forest management, agriculture, administration of villages and towns, inheritance, marriage, divorce and social customs.
  • The ADCs and ARCs may also:
    • constitute village councils or courts to decide disputes between parties from Scheduled Tribes, and
    • appoint officers to oversee the administration of the laws they enact.
  • In cases where the offences are punishable with death or more than five years of imprisonment, the Governor of the state can confer upon the ADCs and ARCs the power to try them under the country’s criminal and civil laws.
  • The Schedule also gives ARCs and ADCs the power to
    • collect land revenue, impose taxes, regulate money lending & trading,
    • collect royalties from licences or leases for the extraction of minerals in their areas, and
    • Establish public facilities such as schools, markets, and roads.

ILP, Sixth schedule and CAA

• Of the seven sisters in the Northeast, Mizoram is already outside the CAA ambit as the ILP is operational there.
• All of Meghalaya, barring a small part around Shillong, comes under three different ADCs — one each for the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia hills.
  • Despite most of Meghalaya coming under the Sixth Schedule, there is still some discontent among groups. These groups are against the implementation of the CAA in areas not under the Sixth Schedule.
  • Already, the Meghalaya government is pushing for the implementation of an ILP regime across the state, which would make the CAA redundant.
• Assam has three ADCs under the Sixth Schedule:
  • Bodoland Territorial Council that covers five districts;
  • North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council that covers one district; and
  • Karbi-Anglong Autonomous District Council that covers two districts.
• Similarly, Tripura has the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council.

Why are Assam, Tripura against CAA?

• Boundary with the Bangladesh and most of the region does not come under either the Sixth Schedule or the ILP regime
  • Assam shares a 263-km border with Bangladesh while Tripura has a 856-km border with Bangladesh.
  • Most of the Assam and Tripura do not come under either the Sixth Schedule or the ILP regime.
  • And that is why there’s unrest in these areas against the CAA.
• Strong anti-immigrant sentiment
  • Both states have strong anti-immigrant feelings because they share long, open borders with Bangladesh.
  • Also, they have experienced a continuous flow of refugees from the neighbouring country since the days of East Pakistan.
  • There are no official records of these migrations, whether large-scale ones during significant events like India's Independence and Partition in 1947 or the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, nor of the ongoing smaller movements.
  • While some of these migrants are Muslim, most are believed to be Bengali-speaking Hindus.
• Worried over rising number of Bengali speakers
  • CAA does not include Muslim refugees or migrants, focusing instead on legitimizing Hindu refugees.
  • This has angered Assamese ethno-nationalists and Tripuri tribals who are worried about the growing number of Bengali speakers.
• Separating CAA from NRC Raises Concerns
  • The government is now saying that the CAA will not be connected to the National Register of Citizens (NRC)— to weed out illegal immigrants, which was originally conceived for, and only implemented in Assam, but remains stalled.
  • This change worries many in Assam because they feel the CAA undermines their main beliefs and political platform. Tripura faces similar concerns.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• Why in News?
• Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Elections
• Imminent Dangers Posed by the AI on the Election Process
• Recent Regulatory Steps by India to Curtail Misinformation by AI Models

Why in News?

The shadow of large language models (LLMs) looms over elections around the world. The stakeholders are aware that even one relatively successful deployment of an AI-generated disinformation tool could impact both campaign narratives and election results very significantly.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Elections

• In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal brought into mainstream public discourse the impact of social media on electoral politics, and the possibility of manipulating the views of Facebook users using data mined from their private posts.
• AI can accelerate the production and diffusion of disinformation in broadly three ways, contributing to organised attempts to persuade people to vote in a certain way.
  • First, AI can magnify the scale of disinformation by thousands of times.
  • Second, hyper-realistic deep fakes of pictures, audio, or video could influence voters powerfully before they can be possibly fact-checked.
  • Third, and perhaps most importantly, by microtargeting.
• AI can be used to inundate voters with highly personalised propaganda, as the persuasive ability of AI models would be far superior to the bots and automated social media accounts.
• The risks are compounded by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter significantly cutting their fact-checking and election integrity teams.
  • While YouTube, TikTok and Facebook do require labelling of election-related advertisements generated with AI, that may not be a foolproof deterrent.

Imminent Dangers Posed by the AI on the Election Process

• A new study predicts that AI will help spread toxic content across social media platforms on an almost-daily basis in 2024 and could potentially affect election results in more than 50 countries.
  • This could destabilise societies by discrediting and questioning the legitimacy of governments.
• The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Perception Survey, ranks misinformation and disinformation among the top 10 risks.
  • The easy-to-use interfaces of large-scale AI models enable a boom in false information and “synthetic” content - from sophisticated voice cloning to fake websites.

Recent Regulatory Steps by India to Curtail Misinformation by AI Models

• The Indian government has asked digital platforms to provide technical and business process solutions to prevent and weed out misinformation that can harm society and democracy.
• According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), a legal framework against deepfakes and disinformation will be finalised after the elections.
• Earlier this month, the MeitY had issued an advisory to companies such as Google and OpenAI, that their services should not generate responses that are illegal under Indian laws or threaten the integrity of the electoral process.
  • The advisory had faced a backlash from some generative AI space startups over fears of regulatory overreach that could throttle the emerging industry.
• While the government stressed that the advisory was only meant at "significant" platforms and not startups, the incident highlights the need for regulators to tread carefully on the narrow line between -
  • Combating AI-linked misinformation and
  • Being perceived as restricting AI-led innovation.

Q1) How AI-generated disinformation might impact elections?

A potential new danger of AI-generated disinformation stems from the fact that it can be used to convincingly impersonate politicians, and use their image or voice to spread falsehoods among their own supporters.

Q2) What is the EU AI Act?

The EU AI Act aims to provide a risk-based framework that imposes varying levels of obligations based on the potential impact and risks posed by different AI applications, with the objective to foster innovation and safeguard democracy and environmental sustainability.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• About Electric Vehicles (Need for EVs in India, EV sales, FAME Scheme, etc.)
• Key Initiatives Taken by the Govt.
• News Summary

Why in News?

The Central Government has announced a new electric vehicle (EV) policy that will be coming with tax relief.

This is expected to provide a major boost to companies like Tesla, Vinfast that have plans to start operations in India.

Background

• India has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070 at the 26^th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in November 2021.
• This will require clear pathways to decarbonize high greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive sectors such as transport and energy.
• To decarbonize transport, the transition to clean mobility, led by electric vehicles (EVs), is paramount.
• India is on the cusp of an e-mobility revolution led by the two-wheeler (2W) and three-wheeler (3W) vehicle segments.
• 2Ws account for 70-80% of all private vehicles, and 3Ws play a critical role for public transit, freight transport and last mile connectivity in cities.

EVs in India

• Electric vehicle sales in India jumped 49.25 per cent year-on-year to more than15 lakh units in 2023, according to a data released by the Federation of Automobile Dealers' Association (FADA).
  • The EV industry had recorded a total sale of around 10 lakh units in 2022, as per the data.
• The surge in sales can be attributed to increase in the availability of products in the market, high fuel prices, state subsidies and sops offered under the FAME-II Initiative.

About FAME-II Scheme

• Launched in 2015, the Fame India scheme is an incentive scheme that encourages the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles.
• The full form of FAME India scheme is “Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric and Hybrid Vehicles in India”.
• In 2019, the Central government approved Phase-II of FAME Scheme with an outlay of 10,000 Crore for a period of 3 years.
  • Earlier this year, it was extended to March 31, 2024.
• Phase-II aims to generate demand by way of supporting 7000 e-Buses, 5 lakh e-3 Wheelers, 55,000 e-4 Wheeler Passenger Cars (including Strong Hybrid) and 10 lakh e-2 Wheelers.
• Nearly 2 lakh vehicles have been supported under the FAME-II scheme.

Other Measures taken by the Government to promote use of EVs

• Battery Swapping Policy:
  • Battery swapping is an alternative which involves exchanging discharged batteries for charged ones and provides flexibility to charge them separately.
  • This de-links charging and battery usage and keeps the vehicle in operational mode with negligible downtime.
  • NITI Aayog, recently, released a draft battery swapping policy under which all metropolitan cities with a population above 40 lakh will be prioritised for development of battery swapping network under the first phase.
  • Battery swapping is an alternative which involves exchanging discharged batteries for charged ones and provides flexibility to charge them separately.
  • This de-links charging and battery usage and keeps the vehicle in operational mode with negligible downtime.
• Switching to an EV:
  • Central/State governments provide an upfront subsidy that reduces the overall costs of electric vehicles.
• E-AMRIT Portal:
  • The e-AMRIT portal offers various resources to help ease the migration to electric vehicles.

New EV Policy with Tax Relief

• The Government of India has approved a scheme to promote India as a manufacturing destination so that e-vehicles with the latest technology can be manufactured in the country.
• The policy is designed to attract investments in the e-vehicle space by reputed global EV manufacturers.
• This will provide Indian consumers with access to latest technology, boost the Make in India initiative, strengthen the EV ecosystem by promoting healthy competition among EV players.
• It will also lead to high volume of production, economies of scale, lower cost of production, reduce imports of crude Oil, lower trade deficit, reduce air pollution, particularly in cities, and will have a positive impact on health and environment.

Key Features of the Policy

• Minimum Investment required: Rs 4,150 Cr;
• No limit on maximum Investment;
• Timeline for manufacturing:
  • 3 years for setting up manufacturing facilities in India, and to start commercial production of e-vehicles, and reach 50% domestic value addition (DVA) within 5 years at the maximum.
• Domestic value addition (DVA) during manufacturing:
  • A localization level of 25% by the 3rd year and 50% by the 5th year will have to be achieved.
• The customs duty of 15% (as applicable to CKD units) would be applicable for a period of 5 years
• Not more than 8,000 EVs per year would be permissible for import under this scheme. The carryover of unutilized annual import limits would be permitted.
• The Investment commitment made by the company will have to be backed up by a bank guarantee in lieu of the custom duty forgone.