UPSC Key: H-1B visas, AI in 2025 and Labour code

Mains Examination: General Studies-II: Effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests, Indian diaspora.

What’s the ongoing story: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, owner of Tesla, X and SpaceX, and a key ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, waded into the debate around hiring H-1B visa-holders and said he “will go to war” on the issue and asked right-wingers to “take a big step back”.

Key Points to Ponder:

• What is the history of India-US relations?

• What are the areas of cooperation between India and the US?

• How have India-US defence relations evolved? 

• What are the key developments in India-US relations in the various sectors?

• What is the difference between a visa and a passport?

• What is the H-1B visa program?

• How does the H-1B visa program impact skilled migration from India to the United States?

• What significant policy changes have occurred in recent years regarding the H-1B visa?

• How does the H-1B visa program affect diplomatic and trade relations between India and the United States?

Key Takeaways:

• The H-1B programme allows businesses in the US to employ skilled foreign nationals. While the discourse on immigration in the US usually centres around illegal entrants via the US-Mexico border, legal ways such as the H-1B program have also come under intense scrutiny over the past week by the far right in the US.

• In fiscal year 2023, of the 2.65 lakh H-1B visas issued by the US, 72 per cent went to Indian nationals. During the same period, top four Indian IT majors with a presence in the US, viz., Infosys, TCS, HCL, and Wipro, obtained approval for around 20,000 employees to work on H-1B visa, as per the latest US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data.

• Immigration was an important political hot-button issue in the 2024 US presidential elections, where Trump had promised to shut down illegal immigration at the southern border and start a mass deportation effort. However, the current debate focuses on legal immigrants.

• Technology companies say H-1B visas for skilled workers, used by software engineers and others in the industry, are critical for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut US citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the programme to be eliminated, not expanded.

Do You Know:

• The H-1B visa programme allows US employers to hire immigrant workers in specialty occupations that require “a high level of skill” and “at least a bachelor’s degree”, according to the US Department of Labour. The H-1B visa can be issued for a maximum of six years at a stretch.

• “The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the US workforce by authorising the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorised to work in the United States,” the department’s website says.

• The H-1B visa is a hit especially among Indians. Data from the US government shows that Indians make up a significant majority of H-1B visa-holders — in the fiscal year 2023, Indians accounted for 72.3% (2.79 lakh of a total of 3.86 lakh) H-1B visa holders, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Chinese immigrants came a distant second, holding 11.7% of the total H-1B visas H-1B visas.

• The sheer dominance of Indian H-1B visa holders, a majority of whom work in computer-related occupations, has invited criticism from anti-immigration voices such as Lippincot — they see Indians in the context of well-paying software engineering jobs in the same light as they see Mexicans when it comes to poorly paid manual labour.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

📍What is the contribution of Indian Americans to US society and economy?

📍Explained: Debate on skilled immigration, green cards & H-1B visas in US

UPSC Prelims Practice Question Covering similar theme:

(1) With reference to the H-1B visa program, consider the following statements:

1. It allows American employers to hire non-immigrant workers in specialty occupations that require a high level of skills.

2. There is no capping in the total number of new H-1B visas.

3. In the fiscal year 2023, Indians accounted for more than half of the total H-1B approvals.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

(a) 2 and 3 only

(b) 1 only

(c) 1 and 3 only

(d) 3 only

Previous year UPSC Mains Question Covering similar theme:

Indian diaspora has a decisive role to play in the politics and economy of America and European Countries.’ Comment with examples (UPSC CSE 2020)

ECONOMY

All states/UTs expected to complete draft labour code rules by March

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination: Current events of national importance and social development

Mains Examination: General Studies-II, III: Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilisation, of resources, growth, development and employment,  Government policies and interventions 

What’s the ongoing story: All 36 states and Union territories (UTs) are expected to complete “harmonisation and pre-publication” of draft rules under the four labour codes by March 31, 2025, a release by the Labour Ministry said on Saturday. 

Key Points to Ponder:

• What are Indian labour laws?

• Labour laws fall under which list of the Seventh schedule of the Indian Constitution?

• What are the key features of the four Labour Codes introduced by the Government of India?

• What is the significance of the Labour Codes in promoting Ease of Doing Business in India?

• What are the challenges associated with the implementation of Labour Codes?

• How do the Labour Codes address issues related to gig and platform workers in India?

• What are the benefits of labour codes?

Key Takeaways:

• So far, barring five states and UTs, all others have pre-published the rules, setting the stage for the much-awaited rollout of the four codes — Code on Wages, Code on Social Security, Code on Industrial Relations, and Code on Occupational Health & Safety — by next year. The Labour Ministry has been consistently working for harmonisation of rules under the four codes across the states, said the release.

• Labour laws fall under the concurrent list of the Constitution. Hence, both the Centre and states are empowered to make rules. But in the event of a conflict between state and central laws, central legislation generally takes precedence, unless the state’s law has obtained presidential assent.

• The four labour codes are a judicious combination of reforms aimed at easing labour market rigidities, and reinforcing workers’ rights and welfare. 

• As many as 44 labour related Acts were consolidated into the four codes in 2019-2020 with the objective of reinforcing trade and investment, facilitating ease of doing business and easing compliance. 

• Several minor offences were decriminalised via the codes, while skill development and dispute resolution have been accorded due priority. Meanwhile, the ministry also is working towards development of a framework for social security coverage to gig and platform workers, said the release.

• Extensive stakeholder consultations were conducted with aggregators, knowledge partners, platform worker organisations, and state/UTs this year to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the Social Security Code, 2020, and to develop collaborative approaches for a social security framework tailored to gig and platform workers, it said.

Do You Know:

• Since labour matters fall under the Concurrent List, both Parliament and state legislature hold the authority to enact relevant laws. Before the introduction of the New Labour Code, the central government identified over 40 central laws and more than 100 state laws addressing various labour issues.

• The Second National Commission on Labour (2002) recommended reforms to consolidate these existing laws into four main labour codes, which are still awaiting implementation: the Code on Wages (2019), the Code on Social Security (2020), the Industrial Relations Code (2020), and the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code (2020).

• These new codes prioritise critical aspects such as worker safety, fair wages, and social security. For example, the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code establishes comprehensive health and safety standards for employers.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

📍Explained: What labour law changes by states mean

📍How Ambedkar reformed labour laws in India

Previous year UPSC Prelims Question Covering similar theme:

(2) Consider the following statements: (UPSC CSE 2017)

1. The Factories Act, 1881 was passed with a view to fix the wages of industrial workers and to allow the workers to form trade unions.

2. N.M. Lokhande was a pioneer in organizing the labour movement in British India.

Which of the above statements is/are correct?

(a) 1 only

(b) 2 only

(c) Both 1 and 2

(d) Neither 1 nor 2

Previous year UPSC Mains Question Covering similar theme:

“Success of ‘Make in India’ programme depends on the success of ‘Skill India’ programme and radical labour reforms.” Discuss with logical arguments. (UPSC CSE 2015)

West Bengal & Rajasthan new migrant destination hotspots; Uttar Pradesh tops

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination: Current events of national importance and social development, Economic Geography of India.

Mains Examination: General Studies-I, II, III: Effects of globalization on Indian society, Indian Economy and issues relating to planning, mobilisation, of resources, growth, development and employment, Government policies and interventions 

What’s the ongoing story: West Bengal and Rajasthan are the new centres of migrants movement from across the country and have found place in the list of top five states where maximum numbers of general or second class passengers travelled to by the Indian Railways, shows the latest working paper of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) on migration trends.

Key Points to Ponder:

• Who are migrants?

• What data on migration says?

• Human Migration-know in detail

• What is the difference between inter and intra migration?

• What are the Push and Pull factors of migration?

• What is the significance of migration?

• What are the challenges associated with the migration?

• What does the term “domestic migrant” mean?

Key Takeaways:

• Other three states in the top five are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. According to the analysis of data from the Indian Railways on unreserved tickets of non-suburban passengers (150+ kms journey), the council has concluded that while most of the states showed reduction in the passenger headed to them from outside, possibly as a result of an overall reduction in migration, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Karnataka are the states that showed the maximum amount of growth in percentage share of the arriving passengers.

• Compared to 2012 data, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar are now ranked a notch lower. Titled as “400 Million Dreams!”, the PM advisory body in its report said that the overall number of migrants in the country has reduced by 11.78 per cent as compared to the 2011 census.

• The paper hypothesised that improved economic opportunities in smaller cities are among the reasons for the slowing migration in India.

• Apart from ticket bookings data from Indian Railway Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) for year 2023 and 2012, EAC-PM used mobile telephone subscribers’ roaming data and district level banking data on remittances to come up with the figure of 40.20 crore migrant, as of 2023, in the country. The total number of migrants in Census 2011 were 45.57 crore.

• According to its analysis, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka and Telangana are the major origin states for arrivals into Maharashtra. Similarly, for Delhi, the major origin states are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.

Do You Know:

• Migration is seen as an important and essential livelihood strategy for rural households in the developing world. In India, internal migration or domestic migration –  the movement of people within a country’s borders – plays a crucial role in shaping both urban and rural economies. 

• Internal migration can be understood and measured in terms of types or streams of movement. The types of internal migration can be intra-district or within the district, intra-state or within the state, and inter-state. The streams of internal migration can be rural-rural, rural-urban, urban-rural, and urban-urban.

• It is difficult to precisely calculate the volume of migration, especially because of the informal nature of the Indian economy. The Census of India provides useful data on understanding permanent movement and, to some extent, semi-permanent migration. The Census defines two types of migrants in India – migration by place of birth and migration by last residence. 

• A migrant by birth is a person who is enumerated in a Census at a different place than where they were born. A migrant by the last residence is one who resides at a place different from the place of enumeration continuously for at least six months prior to the migration.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

📍Migration in India is slowing, reduced by 11.78 percent in 2023: PM advisory body report

📍 How to facilitate safer and more productive migration patterns

Previous year UPSC Mains Question Covering similar theme:

Discuss the changes in the trends of labour migration within and outside India in the last four decades. (UPSC CSE 2015)

As tech firms look to translate the promise of AI in 2025, 3 clear templates emerge 

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.

Mains Examination: General Studies III: Awareness in the fields of IT, Space, Computers, robotics, nano-technology, bio-technology and issues relating to intellectual property rights.

What’s the ongoing story: If the year 2024 started with the promise of generational AI, 2025 could be more about testing out the use cases of some of these AI tools. And finding answers to the quintessential question of monetising AI. Going forward, there could be three board templates for the most compelling use cases yet. 

Key Points to Ponder:

• What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

• What are the areas of AI application?

• Is there any legal framework for AI regulation globally and nationally?

• What are the benefits of AI?

• What are the ethical challenges posed by the use of Generative AI (GenAI)?

• What are the challenges associated with the AI?

• How is Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) different from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

• Read about the India artificial intelligence (AI) Mission?

Key Takeaways:

• One, is this clear focus on AI agents — artificial intelligence tools that can handle multi step chores like onboarding clients, approving expenses and not just routing, but actually responding to customer-service requests, all with minimal human intervention. 

• Second, if monetising AI is a big question, San Francisco-based Perplexity AI has some answers. In November, Perplexity – a conversational ‘answer engine’ that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries using sources from the web and citing links within the text response – launched a user-focused shopping hub in a bid to beef up its platform as it attempts to take on Google’s dominance in the search engine space.

• Third, is a doubling down on improving the AI interface by the segment leaders – a handful of companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Anthropic that have converged at the top of the current generation of LLM models. 

• Google too has a pitch in this segment, with the promise to launch Gemini 2.0, its most capable model that it says is built for the ‘new agentic era’. With new advances in multimodality — like native image and audio output — and native tool use, Google said the new launch “will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant”.

• All this comes at a time when most of the segment leaders feel that the progress on AI is going to get harder, with the low hanging fruit gone and the curve on the hill getting steeper in 2025. The foundational models are likely to get better at reasoning, comparing a sequence of actions more reliably in a more agentic way, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a conversation at a New York Times event earlier this month.

Do You Know:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of machines, especially computers, to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include things like understanding language, recognising patterns, solving problems, and making decisions. 

• Essentially, AI enables machines to think and learn from experience, just like humans do, but often at a much faster pace with access to vast amounts of data. 

• AI can be classified into two types: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) also known as weak AI and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) also referred to as strong AI. 

• ANI is designed for specific tasks and excels within a narrow domain. Examples include virtual assistants like Siri, recommendation systems on platforms like Netflix, and image recognition software. ANI systems are highly specialised and cannot transfer their expertise to unrelated tasks. 

• In contrast, AGI aims to replicate human cognitive abilities, enabling it to perform any intellectual task a human can do. AGI would possess general reasoning skills, understand context, and adapt to new situations across various domains. It would be capable of autonomous learning and problem-solving without requiring task-specific programming.

• Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) are subsets of AI but differ in complexity and capabilities. ML involves training algorithms to learn from data and make predictions and often requires manual feature extraction. 

• DL, a subset of ML, uses neural networks with many layers (hence “deep”) to automatically learn features from large datasets. While ML works well with smaller datasets, DL requires vast amounts of data and computational power.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

📍What is Artificial Intelligence, how is it revolutionising healthcare

📍What is Generative AI, the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT?

Previous year UPSC Prelims Question Covering similar theme:

(3) With the present state of development, Artificial Intelligence can effectively do which of the following? (UPSC CSE 2020)

1. Bring down electricity consumption in industrial units

2. Create meaningful short stories and songs

3. Disease diagnosis

4. Text-to-Speech Conversion

5. Wireless transmission of electrical energy

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1, 2, 3 and 5 only

(b) 1, 3 and 4 only

(c) 2, 4 and 5 only

(d) 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

(4)  Consider the following statements with regard to the Bletchley Park Declaration:

1. The declaration was signed by 28 countries.

2. Frontier AI is defined as highly capable foundation generative AI models that could possess dangerous capabilities that can pose severe risks to public safety.

3. The United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and India are not signatories to the declaration.

How many of the statements given above is/are correct?

(a) Only one

(b) Only two

(c) All three

(d) None

Previous year UPSC Prelims/Mains Question Covering similar theme:

Introduce the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How does Al help clinical diagnosis? Do you perceive any threat to privacy of the individual in the use of Al in healthcare? (UPSC CSE 2023)

 

THE WORLD

Taliban forces hit back at Pakistan days after airstrikes inside Afghanistan 

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance

Mains Examination: General Studies-II: India and its neighbourhood- relations, Effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests.

What’s the ongoing story: Afghan Taliban forces targeted “several points” in neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan’s defence ministry said on Saturday, days after Pakistani aircraft carried out aerial bombardment inside Afghanistan. 

Key Points to Ponder:

• What is the Durand Line?

• Why has the Durand Line been a point of contention between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

• How does the strained relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan impact regional stability in South Asia?

• What challenges arise in managing borders in mountainous and tribal regions, such as the Afghanistan-Pakistan boundary?

• How has the legacy of colonial borders influenced modern-day interstate relations in South Asia?

• How has the Taliban’s governance in Afghanistan influenced its diplomatic approach toward Pakistan and regional disputes?

• What are the key features and implications of the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan?

• What is the McMahon Line? How does it contribute to the border dispute between India and China?

•  Map work: Check India’s international borders (Refer Atlas)

Key Takeaways:

• The statement from the Defence Ministry did not specify Pakistan but said the strikes were conducted “beyond the ‘hypothetical line’” – an expression used by Afghan authorities to refer to a border with Pakistan that they have long disputed.

• Afghanistan has for decades rejected the border, known as the Durand Line, drawn by British colonial authorities in the 19th century through the mountainous and often lawless tribal belt between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan.

• Afghan authorities warned on Wednesday they would retaliate after the Pakistani bombardment, which they said had killed civilians. Islamabad said it had targeted hideouts of Islamist militants along the border.

• The neighbours have a strained relationship, with Pakistan saying that several militant attacks that have occurred in its country have been launched from Afghan soil – a charge the Afghan Taliban denies.

Do You Know:

• The border that divides India and Pakistan is called the Radcliffe line as it was drawn up by the Boundary Commission headed by Cyril Radcliffe. 

• The Durand Line was demarcated as the border between British India and Afghanistan in 1893 and with partition in 1947 became the border of the newly created Pakistan with Afghanistan. 

• The McMahon Line was drawn up in British India at the Simla Conference that lasted from October 1913 to July 1914. It separates Tibet from Assam and was named after the chief British negotiator Sir Henry McMahon. The McMahon Line became the basis of the Sino-India War of October-November 1962.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

📍Explained: Pakistan’s Taliban problem, on either side of Afghanistan border

📍Explained: In India-China border dispute, strategic significance of Hot Springs, Gogra Post

UPSC Prelims Practice Question Covering similar theme:

(5) Consider the following pairs:

1. Durand Line: Afghanistan-China Border

2. McMahon Line: India-China Border

3. Radcliffe line: India-Pakistan Border

Which of the pairs given above is/are correct?

(a) 1 and 3 only

(b) 1 only

(c) 2 and 3 only

(d) 2 only

 

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