Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Comprehensive Agreement of Investment between China and the EU
Mains level: Paper 2- Contours of the post-pandemic world order
Thought the article is not directly related to India, the conclusion of the investment treaty between the EU and China serves as the prelude to the post-pandemic world order which surely matters for India. The article explains the implications of the agreement.
Investment agreement between EU and China
- Recently, the EU and China announced the completion of a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) between the two.
- The CAI gives European firms enhanced access to the Chinese market, removes (or relaxes) Chinese government requirements on joint ventures and technology transfer in some sectors.
- The European Commission has claimed that the CAI allows the EU to maintain its “policy space”, especially in “sensitive” sectors such as energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and public services
- The deal also promises equal treatment with state enterprises and greater regulatory transparency in China.
- Moreover, the Chinese government has undertaken some obligations on environmental sustainability and labour rights, notably by agreeing to make “continued and sustained efforts” to ratify the Forced Labour Convention.
Reaction to the agreement
- The US reaction ranged from disappointment to outright hostility.
- The incoming Biden administration would have preferred a unified front against China, by striking an economic deal with Europe first.
- For others, it was the EU’s apparent misjudgement on China’s human rights promises.
Post-pandemic world order and role of democracies
- The Europe-China agreement underscores a fundamental question of the post-pandemic world order: Can democracies remain true to their values while engaging in trade and investment with China?
- To answer that, we must recognize two facts.
- First, it is impossible to decouple the economies of the West from the Chinese economy without causing an economic catastrophe.
- Second, there is little that Western countries can do to reshape China’s state-driven economic model or repressive human- and labour-rights regime.
What should be the approach in dealing with China
- The West should pursue more limited, more attainable, and ultimately more defensible goals.
- Two goals are paramount.
- First, trade and investment rules should be such that Western firms and consumers are not directly complicit in human-rights abuses in China.
- Second, such rules should safeguard democratic countries against Chinese practices that could undermine their domestic institutional arrangements on labour, environment, technology, and national security.
Lack of clarity over arbitration mechanism
- The agreement contains an arbitration scheme that enables the parties to bring violation complaints against each other.
- Arbitration scheme could serve as a means for the Chinese government to challenge specific entry barriers against Chinese firms.
- How much this mechanism will be sensitive towards the issues such as treatment given to workers or the environmental protection is not clear.
- Similarly, how much deference will panels show to exceptions to market access based on “national security” considerations is not clear.
Conclusion
We should not judge the CAI by whether it enables Europe to export its system and values. We should judge it by whether it allows Europe to remain true to its own.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Functions of the the judiciary
Mains level: Paper 2- Issues with the Supreme Court order suspending the implementation of the Farm acts
The article deals with the recent Supreme Court order in which it suspended the implementation of the Farm Acts. This order gives rise to several issues. The article deals with these issues.
What is the issue
- The Supreme Court has suspended the implementation of the farm laws.
- The court created a committee to ascertain the various grievances of the farmers.
- But the Supreme Court has not clarified the legal basis of this suspension.
What are the issues with the suspension?
- The court’s action, at first sight, is a violation of separation of powers.
- It also gives the misleading impression that a distributive conflict can be resolved by technical or judicial means.
- It is also not a court’s job to mediate a political dispute.
- Its job is to determine unconstitutionality or illegality.
- Even in suspending laws there needs to be some prima facie case that these lapses might have taken place.
- It has set a new precedent for putting on hold laws passed by Parliament without substantive hearings on the content of the laws.
- Also in appointing the committee, the court has violated the first rule of mediation: The mediators must be acceptable to all parties and appointed in consultation with them.
Conclusion
The Supreme Court order has given the government a setback while not addressing the concerns of the protesting farmers. The court needs to consider these facts and mend its implications.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: SAARC, USMCA, MERCOSUR, AfCFTA
Mains level: Paper 2- Revival of SAARC
The article examines the issues are making it difficult to function and suggests its revival.
Dysfunctional SAARC and its implications
- The year 2020 marked the sixth year since the leaders of the eight nations that make up SAARC were able to meet.
- India-Pakistan issues have impacted other meetings of SAARC as well.
- Inactive SAARC is making it easier for member countries, as well as international agencies, to deal with South Asia as a fragmented group.
- India’s refusal to allow Pakistan to host the SAARC summit is akin to giving Pakistan a ‘veto’ over the entire SAARC process.
- The events of 2020, particularly the novel coronavirus pandemic and China’s aggressions at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) shone a new spotlight on this mechanism.
- This should make the government review its position and reverse that trend.
Reasons India should review its position on SAARC
1) India attend other forums with Pakistan
- India continued to attend Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meetings along with their Pakistani counterparts.
- While China’s incursions in Ladakh constituted the larger concern in the year, India did not decline to attend meetings with the Chinese leadership at the SCO, the Russia-India-China trilateral, the G-20 and others.
- No concerns over territorial claims stopped the government from engaging with Nepal either.
2) Pandemic caused challenges
- Reviving SAARC is crucial to countering the common challenges brought about by the pandemic.
- Studies have shown that South Asia’s experience of the pandemic has been unique from other regions of the world.
- This experience needs to be studied further in a comprehensive manner in order to counter future pandemics.
- Such an approach is also necessary for the distribution and further trials needed for vaccines, as well as developing cold storage chains for the vast market that South Asia represents.
3) Impact of the pandemic on economies of South Asia
- Apart from the overall GDP slowdown, global job cuts which will lead to an estimated 22% fall in revenue for migrant labour and expatriates from South Asian countries.
- World Bank have suggested that South Asian countries work as a collective to set standards for labour from the region, and also to promoting a more intra-regional, transnational approach towards tourism, citing successful examples including the ‘East Africa Single Joint Visa’ system.
- In the longer term, there will be a shift in priorities towards health security, food security, and job security, that will also benefit from an “all-of” South Asia approach.
- While it will be impossible for countries to cut themselves off from the global market entirely, regional initiatives will become the “Goldilocks option”.
4) Dealing with the China challenge
- In dealing with the challenge from China too, both at India’s borders and in its neighbourhood, a unified South Asian platform remains India’s most potent countermeasure.
- At the border, tensions with Pakistan and Nepal amplify the threat perception from China, while other SAARC members (minus Bhutan), all of whom are Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partners of China will be hard placed to help individually.
- Significantly, from 2005-14, China actually wanted to join SAARC.
- Despite the rebuff, China has continued to push its way into South Asia.
Conclusion
Seen through Beijing’s prism, India’s SAARC neighbourhood may be a means to contain India, with the People’s Liberation Army strategies against India over the LAC at present, or in conjunction with Pakistan or Nepal at other disputed fronts in the future. New Delhi must find its own prism with which to view its South Asian neighbourhood as it should be: a unit that has a common future, and as a force-multiplier for India’s ambitions on the global stage.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not Much
Mains level: Parental care and associated societal perspectives
Indian cricket captain has opted for paternity leave amidst an ongoing tournament. This has led to his criticism as well as praise for prioritizing family.
Q.Paternity leave is one of the solutions which can help in ending the “motherhood penalty”. Examine with context to working mothers.
What is Paternity leave?
- Paternity leave is a short period of leave for the father to take immediately following childbirth to help care for the child and assist the mother.
- Parental leave is a longer period of leave granted to look after the infant child, usually after the expiration of paternity/maternity leave.
Legal Aspects of Paternity Leave in India
There is no specific or explicit law for paternity leave in India.
- Maternity leave is governed by the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 which was last amended in 2017 to enhance the period of maternity leave to 26 weeks from the previous 12 weeks.
- The Central Civil Service (Leave Rules), 1972 allows for 15 days of paid paternity leave before childbirth or up to 6 months from the date of the delivery of the child.
- An attempt was made to introduce a pan India legislation on paternity leave in 2017 as a private member’s bill in Lok Sabha, but it was not successful.
- The Paternity Benefit Bill, 2017, provided for a paid leave of fifteen days which could be availed up to three months from the date when the child was born.
- It also included an adopted child below the age of three months and applied to men in the organised i.e. private as well as unorganised sectors.
Popular trends
- The longest leave –– six months –– is provided by Ikea, which extends rules from home country Sweden to India.
- Among Indian companies, Zomato made news in 2019 when it decided to give 26-week paternity leave to its employees.
Precursors in India
- The Central Government recently announced that male government employees who are ‘single parents’ which included widowers, divorcees, or unmarried men raising children single-handedly would now be entitled to “child care leave” (CCL).
- Here, they would receive 100% of the leave salary for the first 365 days of leave and 80% of leave salary for the next 365 days.
- This leave was previously only available to women employees.
Why paternity leave matters?
- Most working new mothers (for those who can make that choice) opt for maternity leave either just before the birth or after childbirth.
- It paves the way for at least their temporary, and sometimes their permanent exit from the workplace.
- On the other hand, not many fathers experience much difference in their employment and workplace situation after their child is born, which may either be voluntary by not taking time off or involuntary.
- This structural difference is one of the key components that influence gender dynamics both in the workplace and at home.
The gender dynamics behind
- Lack of paternity leave not only robs new fathers of the crucial chance to bond with their newborn child but also reinforces women’s role as the primary caregiver and underpins the belief that child care is predominantly the mother’s job.
- Paternity leave is a way to directly address the gender dynamic that prevails both at the workplace and at home.
- The undue burden of childcare that is placed on women at home is bound to and does, spill over into their workplace and professional lives.
- The natural effect of it is that it puts hurdles across women’s careers and might slow their growth prospects while some women might choose to quit altogether.
Way forward
- By only having maternity leaves and not giving due consideration to paternity leave, the stereotype that women belong at home, taking care of children is reinforced.
- By no means is the introduction of paternity leave a panacea for gendered workplaces, but it will be a significant step in combating and overcoming stereotype.
- For India, a decent way to begin would be to have a national policy on paternity leave that would include all fathers and would apply irrespective of whether they worked in the organised or unorganised sectors.
- Shifting from a purely maternity oriented care framework to a parental care framework which would involve both parents would be beneficial for all stakeholders and is what we need today.
Conclusion
- A major benefit that accrues from paternity leave is that it eases pressure and stigma from women at the workplace, as they no longer are the only ones who are taking leave for child care purposes.
- Paternity leave is also one of the solutions which can help in ending the “motherhood penalty”.
- The motherhood penalty is a term that describes the disadvantages that women with children face as compared to women who don’t in workplaces.
- Fathers need to be active co-parents and not just helpers to their female partners/wives.
- And for ones with feminist’s perspectives, they should not look paternity leave as a sole vacation for men.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not Much
Mains level: Persecution of minorities in neighbouring countries
Pakistan’s Hazaras finally ended a protest and agreed to bury the bodies of 11 coal miners from the community killed by the IS.
Genocide and Pakistan are the two inseparable metaphors. Pakistan’s treatment of its minorities is the least highlighted global violation of Human Rights. Hindus, Sikhs and Christians are the most persecuted communities.
Who are the Hazaras?
- Around 1773, the mountainous region of Hazarajat in modern-day central Afghanistan was annexed and made a part of the territories of the Afghan Empire under Pashtun ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani.
- The Sunni Muslim majority under the Pashtun ruler resulted in further marginalization of the Shiite Hazara community, to the extent that in the 18th and 19th century.
- They were forced to leave fertile lowlands in central Afghanistan and make the dry, arid mountainous landscape their new home.
Their persecution
- Persecution of the Shiite Hazaras is nothing new in Pakistan or neighbouring Afghanistan.
- They have been frequently targeted by Taliban and IS militants and other militant groups in both countries.
Causes of persecution: Ethnicity and Religion
- Their unique identity, ethnicity and religion always made the Hazaras stand out among the other communities.
- Hazaras speak Hazaragi, which is close to Dari Persian, the official language of modern-day Afghanistan.
- The community also shares physical similarities with the Mongols and their speech, specific terms and phrases, reflect strong Central Asian Turkic influences.
- This sets them apart from their neighbours in Pakistan and other communities within Afghanistan.
An attempted ethnic cleansing
- In the 19th century, the Hazara community constituted approximately 67 per cent of Afghanistan’s total population.
- Since then, primarily due to violence, oppression and targeted massacres, that number has come down to a little as 10 to 20 per cent of the population now.
- The attacks reached a crescendo in 2013 when three separate bombings killed more than 200 people in Hazara neighbourhoods of Quetta.
- In the aftermath of this incident, the Shia community in Pakistan had erupted in anger over the Pakistani government’s lack of protection of its minorities.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: PMFBY
Mains level: Success of PMFBY
The Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) has completed 5 Years of successful operations.
It has become vital these days to remember and recognize every detail of government schemes.
What is PMFBY?
- 5 years ago, on 13th January 2016, the GoI took a historic step towards strengthening risk coverage of crops for farmers of India and approved the flagship crop insurance scheme – the PMFBY.
- The scheme was conceived as a milestone initiative to provide a comprehensive risk solution at the lowest uniform premium across the country for farmers.
- Premium cost over and above the farmer share is equally subsidized by States and GoI.
- However, GoI shares 90% of the premium subsidy for the North Eastern States to promote the uptake in the region.
- The average sum insured per hectare has increased from ₹15,100 during the pre-PMFBY Schemes to ₹40,700 under PMFBY.
Coverage of Risks and Exclusions:
Following stages of the crop and risks leading to crop loss are covered under the scheme.
- Prevented Sowing/ Planting Risk: The insured area is prevented from sowing/ planting due to deficit rainfall or adverse seasonal conditions
- Standing Crop (Sowing to Harvesting): Comprehensive risk insurance is provided to cover yield losses due to non-preventable risks, viz. Drought, Dry spells, Flood, Inundation, Pests and Diseases, Landslides, Natural Fire and Lightening, Storm, Hailstorm, Cyclone, Typhoon, Tempest, Hurricane and Tornado.
- Post-Harvest Losses: Coverage is available only up to a maximum period of two weeks from harvesting for those crops which are allowed to dry in cut and spread condition in the field after harvesting against specific perils of a cyclone and cyclonic rains and unseasonal rains.
- Localized Calamities: Loss/ damage resulting from the occurrence of identified localized risks of hailstorm, landslide, and Inundation affecting isolated farms in the notified area.
Try this question from CSP 2020:
Q.Under the Kisan Credit Card Scheme, short-term credit support is given to farmers for which of the following purposes? (CSP 2020)
- Working capital for maintenance of farm assets
- Purchase of combine harvesters, tractors and mini trucks
- Consumption requirements of farm households
- Construction of family house and setting up of village cold storage facility
- Construction of family house and setting up of village cold storage facility
Select the correct answer using the code given below:
(a) 1,2 and 5 only
(b) 1,3 and 4 only
(c) 2,3,4 and 5 only
(d) 1, 2, 3 and 4
Progress till date
- The Scheme covers over 5.5 crore farmer applications year on year.
- Till date, claims worth Rs 90,000 crores have already been paid out under the Scheme.
- Aadhar seeding has helped in speedy claim settlement directly into the farmer accounts.
- Even during COVID lockdown period, nearly 70 lakh farmers benefitted and claims worth Rs. 8741.30 crores were transferred to the beneficiaries.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Khadi Prakritik Paint
Mains level: KVIC and its success
Union Minister for MSMEs has launched an innovative new paint called Khadi Prakritik Paint – India’s first cow dung paint
It is very unlikely that an MCQ will be asked in Prelims. However one must know this from mains perspective.
Khadi Prakritik Paint
- It is developed by Khadi and Village Industries Commission at his residence.
- The eco-friendly, non-toxic paint, called “Khadi Prakritik Paint” is a first-of-its-kind product, with anti-fungal, anti-bacterial properties.
- Khadi Prakritik Paint is available in two forms – distemper paint and plastic emulsion paint.
- The project was conceptualized by Chairman KVIC in March 2020 and later developed by Kumarappa National Handmade Paper Institute, Jaipur (a KVIC unit).
- The paint is priced at only Rs. 120 per litre for the distemper, and Rs.225 per litre for the emulsion, almost half the price charged by big paint companies.
A no lesser brand
- Khadi Prakritik Emulsion paint meets BIS 15489:2013 standards; whereas Khadi Prakritik Distemper paint meets BIS 428:2013 standards.
- The paint has successfully passed various test parameters such as application of paint, thinning properties, drying time and finish, among others.
- It dries in less than 4 hours and has a smooth and uniform finish.
Why makes it competent?
- Based on cow dung as its main ingredient, the paint is cost-effective and odourless and has been certified by the Bureau of Indian Standards.
- The paint is free from heavy metals like lead, mercury, chromium, arsenic, cadmium and others.
- It will be a boost to local manufacturing and will create sustainable local employment through technology transfer.
- This technology will increase the consumption of cow dung as a raw material for eco-friendly products and will generate additional revenue to farmers and gaushalas.
- Utilization of cow dung will also clean the environment and prevent clogging of drains.
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