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• The Sensex and Nifty rallied more than 3% to close at lifetime highs.
• The Sensex soared by 2,507.47 points to settle at a new closing peak of 76,468.78 points.
• This also marked its biggest single-day gain in three years.
• The NSE Nifty climbed 733.20 points to finish at 23,263.90 points.
• If the BJP wins a stronger majority than 2019, experts say that equity markets are likely to further rally in anticipation of growth-supportive economic policies, such as spending on infrastructure and a push for the manufacturing sector.

Why

• Stocks across the board were in demand after exit polls, released on June 1, predicted a massive win for the BJP-led NDA in the recently-concluded general elections.
• In 2019, the Sensex rose 1,400 points and the Nifty rose 421 points after exit polls predicted a victory for the BJP.
• SAMCO Mutual Fund Fund Manager & Head of Equity Research Paras Matalia said the optimism of the markets can be attributed to “policy continuity with higher seats for the NDA government.”

The boost

• On the Sensex, stocks of state-owned NTPC, State Bank of India and Power Grid jumped over 9% each.
• Other big gainers included Larsen & Toubro, Axis Bank, Reliance Industries, UltraTech Cement, Mahindra & Mahindra, IndusInd Bank, ICICI Bank and Tata Steel.
• Vinod Nair, head of research, Geojit Financial Services, said that the rise in public sector companies’ stocks was due to “anticipation of continuation of the reform gains”.

Sweetened optimism

• Markets were also buoyed by GDP data released on May 31, which showed the Indian economy grew 8.2% in the financial year 2023-24 .
• Estimates predicted the economy would grow by 7.6%. India remained the fastest growing economy in the world.
• India’s manufacturing sector experienced a slight slowdown in growth during May, with the HSBC final India Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index falling to 57.5 from 58.8 in April.
• However, given the index remained above the 50-mark, it indicated continued expansion in the sector. The fall was attributed to the heatwave and election-related disruptions.

• Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar on Monday said that “social media meme pages are calling EC ‘Laapataa Gentlemen’, but we never went missing”.
• “Now memes can say the ‘Laapataa Gentlemen’ are back,” the CEC added.
• This was the first time that the poll body has held a post-election, pre-result press briefing.

Claims and feats

• The CEC said that the county created a world record with 64.2 crore voters, including 31.2 crore women, participating in the Lok Sabha elections this year.
• He said over 68,000 monitoring teams and 1.5 crore polling and security personnel were involved in the polling.
• Only 39 repolls took place in 2024 over 540 in 2019.
• J&K recorded its highest turnout in four decades at 58.58% overall and 51.05% in the Valley.
• “Seizures of Rs 10,000 crore, including cash, freebies, drugs and liquor, were made during the 2024 polls as compared to Rs 3,500 crore in 2019,” he said.
• Over 90% of 495 complaints of Model Code of Conduct violations were dispensed with.
• It also issued notices to top leaders, while FIRs were filed against many, and top officials were transferred to “sanitise the poll process”.

On Opposition’s concerns

• Kumar said, “All issues raised by multi-party delegations have been addressed.”
• It also clarified on the Congress’ poll ballot demand during the presser, saying that the poll ballots are always counted first during the process.
• On Sunday, a delegation of leaders from the INDIA bloc met EC and urged it to ensure that all the guidelines are followed on June 4, including declaring the postal-ballot results before the outcome of the EVMs is announced.

Meanwhile…

• The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a petition filed by the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) challenging the ECI’s relaxation of norms relating to the attestation of postal ballots in the state.
• A vacation bench upheld the Andhra Pradesh High Court’s decision to not interfere with the ECI’s directive, granting the state liberty to challenge the norms through an election petition post-results declaration, which is scheduled for today.
• Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing the YSRCP, had argued that the ECI’s circular, issued on May, 30 altered the rules concerning postal ballots exclusively in Andhra Pradesh.

• Amid repeated concerns from companies, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) is working on a standard operating procedure (SOP) to allow select Chinese nationals working for European, American, Japanese and other non-China multinational corporations to enter India with relative ease.

Challenges

• Businesses across various sectors, particularly those excluded from the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, encounter challenges in engaging Chinese nationals for machinery installation, hindering efforts to diversify production under the “China plus 1” strategy.
• Often, industry players have struggled to spell out urgent reasons to get Chinese workers to execute projects in India.
• Sources tell TOI that even in the case of PLI visas, there have been instances of delay, which are sought to be addressed.

Impact due to delay

• The sluggish visa approval process has delayed the commencement of production in numerous industries, causing frustration among companies.
• There are several instances of machinery in high potential sectors, such as textiles and leather, lying idle for months as Chinese vendors insist that only their personnel will switch them on but have found it tough to get visas.

Why the delay

• “In several cases, there is some hesitation in granting visas to Chinese nationals since there have been instances where some of them have been found to be engaging in illegal activities. While this issue certainly cannot be generalised, officials have usually refrained to show leniency. Government may provide some exemptions, but it will be based on a certain SOP,” a source familiar with the deliberations tells TOI.

Easing approvals

• DPIIT is in talks with other ministries, such as communications, IT, home and external affairs, as well as industry players, to ensure that investment is not hampered by curbs that came up after the tension in Ladakh escalated a few years ago.
• A final call on putting in place a revised mechanism will be taken at the political level. More here

• The Supreme Court on Monday ordered an urgent meeting with the Upper Yamuna River Board (UYRB) on June 5 as Delhi grapples with an acute water crisis.
• A vacation bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and KV Viswanathan also scheduled a hearing for June 6 on Delhi’s plea for additional water from Haryana.

Regulating water allocation

• Established in 1995, the UYRB regulates water allocation among states including Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, and the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi.

The agreement

• Yamuna river serves as a primary water source for Delhi.
• In 1994, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed among the five basin states of the Yamuna — Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh — to regulate the sharing of water from the upper Yamuna.

What Delhi wants

• The plea filed by Delhi’s Water minister Atishi has made the Centre, the BJP-governed Haryana and the Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh a party to the petition, saying that access to water is essential for survival.
• “Access to water is one of the basic human rights of an individual… and an essential component of the guarantee of dignity and a quality of life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution,” the plea states.
• The plea also seeks a directive for Haryana to release water at the Wazirabad barrage, including surplus water from Himachal Pradesh, to address Delhi’s water crisis as a one-time measure.

Cause of crisis

• Delhi is a landlocked city and receives raw water from neighbouring states like Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
• The Yamuna water has been a contentious issue for a long time between Delhi and Haryana.
• Delhi is extracting more water than it recharges, with annual extraction at 101.4%, with 17 of its 34 blocks overexploited, seven critical, seven semi-critical, and three safe, according to a Central Ground Water Board report.

• The Nagpur district court on Monday handed life imprisonment to former BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd engineer Nishant Agarwal under the Official Secrets Act for spying for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
• Agarwal will have to undergo rigorous imprisonment (RI) for 14 years and has also been fined Rs 3,000.
• Additional sessions court judge MV Deshpande stated in the order that Agarwal was convicted under Section 235 of the Criminal Procedure Code for an offence punishable under Section 66 (f) of the IT Act and various sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA).

Who is he

• Agarwal was employed in the technical research section of BrahMos Aerospace’s missile centre in Nagpur.
• He was a winner of the Young Scientists award by the Defence Research and Development Organisation and an alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra.
• In 2018, he was arrested in a joint operation by the military intelligence and anti-terrorism squads (ATS) of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.
• Sources at BrahMos reportedly say “he is a bright engineer, but didn’t really have access to sensitive details” as he was “too junior” in the hierarchy.
• Moreover, sensitive “information is stored and shared on a need-to-know basis”.
• He was granted bail by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court last April.

What did he do?

• He had worked at the BrahMos facility for four years and was in touch with Pakistani agents through two Facebook accounts — ‘Neha Sharma’ and ‘Pooja Ranjan’.
• These accounts, based out of Islamabad, were believed to be run by Pakistan’s ISI.
• Despite the nature of his work, Agrawal was reportedly “casual” on the internet, and made himself an “easy target”, an officer was quoted at the time of his arrest.
• He added that classified files with red markings were found in his personal laptop. “Such sensitive information, which (if) shared, could be a threat to the country,” the officer said.

Classified

• BrahMos Aerospace is a joint venture between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the military Industrial Consortium (NPO Mashinostroyenia) of Russia.

• The El Nino weather pattern that can cause extreme events, such as wildfires and tropical cyclones, is forecast to swing back into generally cooler La Nina conditions later this year, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday.

What this means

• WMO said there was a 60% chance that La Nina conditions would take hold between July and September and a 70% chance of them occurring between August and November.
• “The end of El Nino does not mean a pause in long-term climate change as our planet will continue to warm due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett.
• “Exceptionally high sea surface temperatures will continue to play an important role during the next months.”

So far

• The world experienced the warmest April ever and the 11th consecutive month of record-high temperatures this year.
• Sea-surface temperatures have been record-high for the last 13 months, according to the WMO.
• Amid a prevailing but weakening El Nino, millions of people in South Asia, including India and Pakistan, endured brutal heat in April and May.
• The last nine years have been the warmest on record even with the cooling influence of a multi-year La Nina from 2020 to early 2023.
• El Nino peaked in December 2023 as one of the five strongest on record.

The difference

• El Nino is a naturally occurring warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific.
• La Nina is characterised by cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific region and is linked to floods and drought.

Meanwhile

• India reported nearly 25,000 suspected heat stroke cases and 56 deaths due to health-related causes from March to May, according to a Reuters report.
• May was particularly harsh, with temperatures in Delhi and Rajasthan reportedly soaring to 50 degrees Celsius.
• The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said heat wave conditions over northwest, central and east India are likely to continue with reduced intensity during the next three days.

• Seoul will fully suspend a 2018 tension-reducing military deal with nuclear-armed North Korea, the South’s National Security Council (NSC) said on Monday, after Pyongyang sent hundreds of trash-filled balloons across the border.

The backstory

• The 2018 military deal, signed during a period of warmer ties between the two countries which remain technically at war, aimed to reduce tensions on the peninsula, and avoid an accidental escalation, especially along the heavily fortified border.
• But Seoul partially suspended the agreement last year after the North sent a spy satellite into orbit.
• The NSC said it would tell the cabinet “to suspend the entire effect of the ‘September 19 Military Agreement’ until mutual trust between the two Koreas is restored”.

Provocation

• Last week, Pyongyang sent nearly a thousand balloons carrying garbage, including cigarette butts and manure, into the South, in what it says was retaliation for missives bearing anti-regime propaganda organised by activists in the South.

Balloon rivalry

• During the Cold War, North and South Korea engaged in psychological warfare, often launching balloons filled with leaflets into each other’s airspace.
• While these leaflets vilified each other’s governments, balloons from North Korea rarely carried common trash until recently.

Impact

• South Korea has called the latest provocation from its neighbour “irrational” and “low-class” but, unlike the spate of recent ballistic missile launches, the trash campaign does not violate UN sanctions on Kim Jong Un’s isolated government.

North vs South

• The North called off the balloon bombardment on Sunday, saying it had been an effective countermeasure — but warning that more could come if needed.
• South Korean officials have also said Seoul would not rule out responding to the balloons by resuming loudspeaker propaganda campaigns along the border with North Korea.

Two Koreas

• In the past, South Korea has broadcast anti-Kim propaganda into the North, which infuriates Pyongyang, with experts warning a resumption could even lead to skirmishes along the border.