Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Electoral Bond Scheme, RTI
Mains level: Paper 2- Issues in Electoral Bond Scheme
A recent order passed by CIC in an appeal against the State Bank of India (SBI) has once again highlighted the issues with the Electoral Bond Scheme. The article deals with this issue.
Issues with the scheme
- The scheme creates banking instruments for a donation of funds to political parties facilitated by the SBI.
- It conceals the identity of the donors and donees as well as the amount of donation.
- In effect, the scheme is not transparent, promotes arbitrariness, and is therefore illegal.
- The scheme facilitates undisclosed quid pro quo arrangements between donors, who are likely to be corporates, and political parties.
- The Supreme Court held that the freedom of speech and expression also contained the fundamental right of a voter to secure information about the candidates.
- When the voter is permitted to know if an electoral candidate is facing any cases, she should be equally entitled to know who is financing the expenses of the party and its candidate.
CIC order and RTI Act
- The CIC, in an earlier order, deemed political parties to be public authorities under the RTI Act.
- In the present order, the CIC has upheld the contention of the SBI that it is not required to furnish the details of donors, donees, and donations, under the RTI Act.
- In doing so, SBI has relied on two grounds provided under Section 8 of the RTI Act.
- Section 8 exempts disclosure of information if it has been held in a fiduciary capacity and that there was no public interest involved in the application.
- However, any exemption provided under Section 8 should be read-only in a very narrow sense.
- Section 8(2) directs that when public interest outweighs any harm to protected interests, the information sought may be accessed.
- Therefore, it overrides the grounds erroneously relied upon by the CIC.
- The public interest in the present matter is indisputable.
Consider the question “What are the various provisions in the Electoral Bond Scheme? How some of its provisions could come in conflict with the RTI Act.”
Conclusion
By suppressing knowledge of political financing, we are breaking the basic bonds of democracy holding the country together. An unsettled law is as dangerous as bad law. The Court must conclusively settle the questions around the constitutionality of electoral bonds.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Paris Agreement
Mains level: Paper 3- Climate change policies and issues with them
The article highlights the issues with the current climate policies which are centred on the inequality.
Inequality and climate change
- Inequity is built into the climate treaty, which considers total emissions, size, and population, making India the fourth largest emitter.
- According to the United Nations, the richest 1% of the global population emits more than two times the emissions of the bottom 50%.
- .China, with four times the population of the U.S., accounts for 12% of cumulative emissions.
- India, with a population close to that of China’s, for just 3% of cumulative emissions that lead to global warming.
- In an urbanized world, two-thirds of emissions arise from the demand of the middle class for infrastructure, mobility, buildings, and diet.
- Well-being in the urbanized world is reflected in saturation levels of infrastructure.
- Growth in the developed countries is consumption-driven not production driven.
- The vaguely worded ‘carbon neutrality’, balancing emitting carbon with absorbing carbon from the atmosphere in forests is a triple whammy for latecomers like India.
- Such countries already have less energy-intensive pathways that will not encroach on others’ ecological space, a young population, and are growing fast to reach comparable levels of well-being with those already urbanized and in the middle class.
What changes are required in the policies
- At present, the focus is on physical quantities which indicates effects on nature.
- The solutions require analysis of drivers, trends, and patterns of resource use.
- This anomaly explains why the link between well-being, energy use, and emissions is not on the global agenda.
- Modifying unsustainable patterns of natural resource use and ensuring comparable levels of well-being are societal transformations.
- New thinking must enable politics to acknowledge transformational social goals and the material boundaries of economic activity.
India’s unique national circumstances
- India must highlight its unique national circumstances.
- For example, the meat industry, especially beef, contributes to one-third of global emissions.
- Indians eat just 4 kg of meat a year compared to those in the European Union who eat about 65 kg.
- Also to be noted is the fact that the average American household wastes nearly one-third of its food.
- Transport emissions account for a quarter of global emissions.
- Transport emissions are the symbol of Western civilization and are not on the global agenda.
- Rising Asia uses three-quarters of coal drives industry and supports the renewable energy push into cities.
- India, with abundant reserves and per capita electricity use that is one-tenth that of the U.S., is under pressure to stop using coal.
Way forward
- India has the credibility and legitimacy to push an alternate 2050 goal for countries currently with per capita emissions below the global average.
- These goals should include well-being within ecological limits, the frame of the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as multilateral technological knowledge cooperation around electric vehicles, energy efficiency, building insulation, and a less wasteful diet.
Conclusion
Emissions are the symptom, not the cause of the problem. India, in the UN Security Council, must push new ideas based on its civilizational and long-standing alternate values for the transition to sustainability.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Atmanirbhar Bharat
Mains level: Paper 3- Importance of resilient supply chains
What does supply chain resilience mean?
- When assembly lines are heavily dependent on supplies from one country, the impact on importing nations could be crippling if that source stops production intentionally (economic sanction) or unintentionally (natural disaster)
- Example: Japan imported $169 billion worth from China, accounting for 24% of its total imports. Japan’s imports from China fell by half in February 2020 that impacted Japan’s economic activity.
- In the context of international trade, supply chain resilience is an approach that helps a country to ensure that it has diversified its supply risk across a clutch of supplying nations instead of being dependent on just one or a few
Recent incidents that led to supply chain disruption
- Disruptions in supply chains can be natural or man-made.
- When the novel coronavirus pandemic broke out, it had an immediate and telling effect on supply chains emanating from China.
- In Japan’s case, a nuclear disaster (Fukushima Daiichi) caused a sharp drop in Japanese automobile exports to the United States.
- Terrorist drone attacks on oil refineries in Saudi Arabia in September 2019 resulted in a drop of 5.7 million barrels of oil per day.
- That attack triggered a steep plunge in Saudi Arabia’s stock market and a sharp spike in global oil prices.
- Tensions with China led the United States government to impose restrictions on the export of microchips to China’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer SMIC.
Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (SCRI)
- Geo-politics and geo-economics can never be truly separated.
- Also, there is a growing trend of weaponization of trade and technology.
- China had imposed sanctions on its key exports of grain, beef, wine, coal, etc to Australia for demanding an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus and advocating a robust Indo-Pacific vision.
- It is against this backdrop that India, Japan, and Australia initiated the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (SCRI).
- It focuses on automobiles and parts, petroleum, steel, textiles, financial services, and IT sectors.
- The SCRI may be strengthened by the future involvement of France.
- Kingdom has also shown interest in the SCRI.
“China plus one” strategy
- For many Japanese companies, global performance and profits are linked to manufacturing facilities and supply chains in China.
- Yet, they have shown an early capacity for risk mitigation through the “China Plus One” business strategy.
- The “China plus one” strategy aims at diversification of investments to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), India, and Bangladesh.
- Japan announced a 2.2 billion Relocation Package.
- Of the companies that availed this package, 57 relocated to Japan, 30 to Southeast Asia, and two to India.
India’s vulnerability to supply chain disruptions
- India can ill-afford the shocks of disruption in supply chains.
- For instance, the pandemic caused a breakdown in global supply chains in the automotive sector.
- For India, which imports 27% of its requirement of automotive parts from China, this quandary was a wake-up call.
- It is t is noteworthy is that despite being the fourth largest market in Asia for medical devices, India has an import dependency of 80%.
- Given the renewed thrust in the health-care sector, this is the right time to fill gaps through local manufacturing.
India increasing its presence in global supply chains
1) Electronic industry
- India’s electronics industry was worth $120 billion in 2018-2019 and is forecast to grow to $400 billion by 2025.
- India is enhancing its presence in the global supply chains by attracting investments in the semiconductor components and packaging industry.
- The Indian electronics sector is gradually shifting away from completely knocked down (CKD) assembly to high-value addition.
2) Defence sector
- Defence is among the key pillars of the ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ policy.
- The government is providing a big boost to defence manufacturing under the ‘Make in India’ program.
- It has identified a negative import list of 101 items.
- There is a tremendous opportunity for foreign companies to enter into tie-ups with reputed Indian defence manufacturers to tap into the growing defence market in India.
Consider the question “Pandemic has demonstrated the damage vulnerable supply chains can cause. It also underscored the importance of resilient supply chains. In light of this, examine the importance of diversification of supply chains.”
Conclusion
India has the capacity and the potential to become one of the world’s largest destinations for investments, and one of the world’s largest manufacturing hubs, in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Dedicated freight corridor
Mains level: Dedicated freight corridor
Prime Minister has inaugurated a 351-km section between Khurja and Bhaupur in Uttar Pradesh for commercial operations of the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC).
There is another concept named Dedicated Passenger Corridors (DPCs). Can you guess the idea behind?
Background of DFCs
- The concept of Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) was mooted in 2006 to generate substantial capacity for freight traffic by developing separate tracks on identified routes.
- The Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd (DFCCIL) was incorporated as a separate company under the Ministry of Railways.
What is the DFC?
- Under the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–12), Railways started constructing a new DFC in two long routes, namely the Eastern and Western freight corridors.
- The section recently launched is part of the 1,839-km Eastern DFC that starts at Sohnewal (Ludhiana) in Punjab and ends at Dankuni in West Bengal.
- The other arm is the around 1,500-km Western DFC from Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to JNPT in Mumbai, touching all major ports along the way.
- There is also a section under construction between Dadri and Khurja to connect the Eastern and Western arms.
Why is it important?
- Around 70% of the freight trains currently running on the Indian Railway network are slated to shift to the freight corridors, leaving the paths open for more passenger trains.
- Tracks on DFC are designed to carry heavier loads than most of the Indian Railways.
- DFC will get track access charge from the parent Indian Railways, and also generate its own freight business.
What trains will use the new section?
- Freight trains plying on this section from now on will help decongest the existing Kanpur-Delhi main line of Indian Railways, which currently handles trains at 150% of its line capacity.
- The new section means on the Indian Railway mainline, more passenger trains can be pumped in and those trains can, in turn, achieve better punctuality.
- Foodgrain and fertilizers from the northern region are transported to the eastern and Northeast regions.
- From East and Northeast, coal, iron ore, jute, and petroleum products are transported North and West.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: GAVI
Mains level: Global collaboration against COVID
Union Health Minister has been nominated by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) as a member of the GAVI Board.
Q.The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of global cooperation. Critically analyse.
GAVI
- GAVI is a public-private global health partnership with the goal of increasing access to immunization in poor countries.
- GAVI has observer status at the World Health Assembly.
- GAVI has been praised for being innovative, effective, and less bureaucratic than multilateral government institutions like the WHO.
- Members: the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry in both industrialized and developing countries, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among others.
- GAVI programs can often produce quantified, politically appealing, easy-to-explain results within an election cycle, which is appealing to parties locked in an election cycle.
Its function
- It currently supports the immunization of almost half the world’s children, giving it the power to negotiate better prices for the world’s poorest countries and remove the commercial risks of manufacturers.
- It also provides funding to strengthen health systems and train health workers across the developing world.
Significance of India’s membership
- The GAVI Board is responsible for the strategic direction and policymaking oversees the operations of the Vaccine Alliance and monitors program implementation.
- With membership drawn from a range of partner organizations, as well as experts from the private sector, the Board provides a forum for balanced strategic decision making, innovation, and partner collaboration.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Digital Ocean platform
Mains level: India's deep ocean mission
The Ministry of Earth Sciences has inaugurated the web-based application “Digital Ocean” developed by INCOIS.
Digital Ocean
- Digital Ocean is a first of its kind digital platform for Ocean Data Management.
- The platform will be promoted as a platform for capacity building on Ocean Data Management for all Indian Ocean Rim countries.
- It would help share ocean knowledge about the ocean with a wide range of users including research institutions, operational agencies, strategic users, the academic community, and the maritime industry and policymakers.
- It also provides free access to information to the general public and the common man.
- It will play a central role in the sustainable management of our oceans and expanding ‘Blue Economy’ initiatives.
Its’ features
- It includes a set of applications developed to organize and present heterogeneous oceanographic data by adopting rapid advancements in geospatial technology.
- It facilitates:
- Online interactive web-based environment for data integration,
- 3D and 4D (3D in space with time animation) data visualization,
- Data analysis to assess the evolution of oceanographic features,
- Data fusion and multi-format download of disparate data from multiple sources viz., in-situ, remote sensing, and model data, all of which is rendered on a georeferenced 3D Ocean.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Sea of Galilee
Mains level: Not Much
The Sea of Galilee, well-known in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic lore, has swelled up due to recent rains, according to reports in the Israeli media.
Do you know?
The Sea of Galilee Lake Tiberias, Kinneret or Kinnereth is a freshwater lake in Israel. It is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth and the second-lowest lake in the world (after the Dead Sea, a saltwater lake).
Sea of Galilee
- The lake lies in northern Israel, between the occupied Golan Heights and the Galilee region. It is fed by underground springs but its major source is the Jordan River.
- The lake has risen to 209.905 meters below sea level due to heavy rainfall in the surrounding areas.
- The Jordan flows into the lake and then exits it before ending in the Dead Sea, the saltiest and the lowest point on the planet.
- Water is not extracted from the Sea of Galilee. But it is considered to be an important barometer of the water situation in Israel.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: TiHAN
Mains level: Not Much
Union Minister of Education laid the foundation stone of ‘TiHAN-IIT Hyderabad’, India’s first Testbed for Autonomous Navigation Systems (Terrestrial and Aerial).
Must read:
https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/regulations-for-flying-of-drones/
TiHAN
- TiHAN is an acronym for Technology Innovation Hub on Autonomous Navigation and Data Acquisition Systems (UAVs, RoVs, etc.).
- It is a multi-departmental initiative, including researchers from Electrical, Computer Science, Mechanical and Aerospace, Civil, Mathematics, and Design at IIT Hyderabad.
- It would focus on addressing various challenges hindering the real-time adoption of unmanned autonomous vehicles for both terrestrial and aerial applications.
Why need TiHAN?
- One major requirement to make unmanned and connected vehicles more acceptable to the consumer society is to demonstrate its performance in real-life scenarios.
- However, it may become dangerous. Especially in terms of safety, to directly use the operational roadway facilities as experimental test tracks for unmanned and connected vehicles.
- In general, both UAV and UGV testing may include crashes and collisions with obstacles, resulting in damage to costly sensors and other components.
- Hence, it is important to test new technologies developed in a safe, controlled environment before deployment.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now
Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: AAAN
Mains level: Agenda for Atmanirbhar Bharat
The Health Ministry has released the report Action Agenda for an AtmaNirbhar Bharat (AAAN) prepared by Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC).
Q.‘Doubling Farmer’s Income’ and ‘USD 5 trillion economy’ seems more like slogans today in wake of COVID pandemic. Comment on the statement with keeping in view the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan of the government.
AAAN Report
- The report AAAN is a consequential follow-up of the TIFAC’s White Paper on Focused Interventions for ‘Make in India’: post-COVID -19 which was released earlier this year.
- The White Paper highlighted five thrust sectors namely, Healthcare, Machinery, ICT, Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Electronics that would be critical for India’s economic growth post-COVID.
- This AAAN action plan has been structured with reference to timeline, highlighting short/medium and long term interventions in various identified sectors.
Why need such an agenda?
- The World is experiencing unprecedented health and economic crisis. A widespread deep global recession has been bolstered, undermining global cooperation and multilateralism.
- The most outward global economies have turned inwards and are designing enhanced measures for rebooting and resilience of the economy.
- The document also specifically defines overarching policy recommendations with reference to technological inputs, focusing towards Local to Global.
- It would thereby revive the Indian economy, in identified domains of Innovation and Technology Development, Technology Adoption/Diffusion, Boosting up Manufacturing and Productivity, Trade and Globalization etc.
Get an IAS/IPS ranker as your 1: 1 personal mentor for UPSC 2024
Attend Now