Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 2- Importance of medical workforce in making the healthcare system robust
Context
On July 8, 2021, the Union government announced the “India COVID-19 Emergency Response and Health Systems Preparedness Package: Phase II”. But it lacks provision for the medical workforce.
Objectives of the package
- The stated purpose of the package is to boost health infrastructure and prepare for a possible third wave of COVID-19.
- There is plan to increase COVID-19 beds, improve the oxygen availability and supply, create buffer stocks of essential medicines; purchase equipment and strengthen paediatric beds.
What is lacking in the package?
- Workforce shortage: The package barely has any attention on improving the availability of health human resources.
- As reported in rural health statistics and the national health profile there are vacancies for staff in government health facilities, which range from 30% to 80% depending upon the sub-group of medical officers, specialist doctors to nurses, laboratory technicians, pharmacists and radiographers, amongst others.
- Interstate variation: In addition, there are wide inter-State variations, with States that have poor health indicators with the highest vacancies.
Way forward
- Package for filling the existing vacancies: The COVID-19 package II needs to be urgently supplemented by another plan and a similar financial package (with shared Union and State government funding) to fill the existing vacancies of health staff at all levels.
- An objective approach to assess the mid-term health human resource needs could be the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS).
- IPHS prescribes the human resources and infrastructure needed to make various types of government health facilities functional.
- The pandemic should be used as an opportunity to prepare India’s health system for the future.
- Scrutiny of the progress on policy decision: The progress on key policy decisions, for the last few years, to strengthen India’s health system, including those in India’s national health policy of 2017, need to be objectively scrutinised.
- These two sets of policy decisions should be reviewed and progress monitored, through a meeting of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare, of which the Health Ministers of the States are members.
Conclusion
India’s health system will not benefit from ad hoc and a patchwork of one or other small packages. It essentially needs some transformational changes.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: OPEC+
Mains level: Paper 2- Tension in bilateral relations of oil producing companies and its implications for the world
Context
The end to the UAE’s weeks-long impasse with Saudi Arabia and Russia, a non-OPEC state, was brought about by Sunday’s deal.
What was the deal about?
- United Arab Emirates (UAE), said to hold the world’s largest untapped crude reserves, had demanded an increase in its oil output quotas.
- The end to the UAE’s weeks-long impasse with Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest crude exporters, and Russia, a non-OPEC state, was brought about by Sunday’s deal.
- Under its terms, the UAE’s demand for an increase in its oil output quotas, in recognition of its higher production capacity, has been conceded.
- The baselines have also been raised for Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, and Kuwait.
- The bloc will now step up crude production by 400,000 barrels a day starting in August.
- The output boost is in response to rising oil prices in the wake of the rebound in economic activity.
- The cartel had cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day (mbd) as oil demand fell from 100 mbd to 91.1 mbd and prices plummeted from $70 in January 2020 to around $20 in April.
Strain in Saudi Arabia-UAE relations
- The UAE has played hardball during the bloc’s attempts to deal with the pandemic-induced price volatility.
- Thus, while the internal rift has been resolved for now, the danger cannot be ruled out of an increasingly economically and politically assertive UAE flexing its muscle.
- Bilateral relations between the traditional allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have been especially strained since the UAE established diplomatic ties with Israel last year and withdrew troops from the Saudi-spearheaded war in Yemen the year before.
- A more recent arena of tension is the tariffs Riyadh has imposed on imports from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.
- Saudi Arabia will now exclude from the GCC tariff agreement goods made by companies with a workforce of less than 25% of locals and industrial products with less than 40% of the added value after their transformation process.
- Home to a predominantly migrant population, the move could hit the UAE especially hard.
OPEC’s concerns
- The OPEC, forecast in 2016 that a strict implementation of the Paris climate accord could see the demand for oil peak by 2030.
- There is an eagerness to maximise the returns on their substantial hydrocarbon resources, amid growing speculation of a peak in oil demand within sight.
- The International Energy Agency (IEA), which in 2016 forecast a continued rise in oil consumption until the 2040s, has more recently hinted at about a 5% rise or fall relative to the demand before the pandemic within a decade.
- OPEC’s other concerns are the stabilization of world oil prices without jeopardizing national expenditure programs, and the diversification of economies in anticipation of the unfolding global energy transition.
Conclusion
The latest OPEC compromise echoes growing recognition of the delicate balance between competing domestic and global priorities.
B2BASICS
OPEC
- The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent, intergovernmental organization, created at the Baghdad Conference in 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
- It aims to manage the supply of oil in an effort to set the price of oil in the world market, in order to avoid fluctuations that might affect the economies of both producing and purchasing countries.
- It is headquartered in Vienna, Austria.
- OPEC membership is open to any country that is a substantial exporter of oil and which shares the ideals of the organization.
- Gabon terminated its membership in January 1995. However, it rejoined the Organization in July 2016.
- As of 2019, OPEC has a total of 14 Member Countries viz. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates(UAE), Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Angola, Ecuador, and Venezuela are members of OPEC.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar
Mains level: Paper 2- Engaging the Taliban
Context
With over a third of Afghanistan’s more than 400 districts under Taliban control, the talk-to-the-Taliban option is indeed the best of the many less than perfect options available to India.
India need a reset in its Afghanistan policy
- India has ‘temporarily’ closed its consulate in Kandahar.
- This follows the decision to suspend operations in the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Herat.
- India’s decision to partially “withdraw” from Afghanistan shows that betting only on the government in Kabul was a big mistake,
- It also shows that India realises the threat the Taliban poses to Indian assets and presence in Afghanistan.
- To safeguard its civilian assets there as well as to stay relevant in the unfolding ‘great game’ in and around Afghanistan, India must fundamentally reset its Afghanistan policy.
- India must, in its own national interest, begin ‘open talks’ with the Taliban before it is too late.
- Open dialogue with the Taliban should no longer be a taboo; it is a strategic necessity.
Reason for avoiding open talks with Taliban
- There are at least five possible reasons why India appears to want to keep the Taliban engagement slow and behind closed doors.
- First, if India chooses to engage the Taliban directly, it could make Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, to look towards China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for national security and personal political survival.
- Second, India is also faced with the dilemma of who to talk to within the Taliban given that it is hardly a monolith.
- Third, given the global opprobrium that Taliban faced in its earlier avatar and the lack of evidence about whether the outfit is a changed lot today, New Delhi might not want to court the Taliban so soon.
- Fourth, there is little clarity about what the Taliban’s real intentions are going forward and what they would do after ascending to power in Kabul.
- Fifth, it would not be totally unreasonable to consider the possibility of Pakistan acting out against India in Kashmir if India were to establish deeper links with the Taliban.
Reasons India should engage with the Taliban openly
- Wide international recognition: Whether we like it or not, the Taliban, is going to be part of the political scheme of things in Afghanistan, and unlike in 1996, a large number of players in the international community are going to recognise/negotiate/do business with the Taliban.
- Countering Pakistan: The Taliban today is looking for regional and global partners for recognition and legitimacy especially in the neighbourhood.
- So the less proactive the Indian engagement with the Taliban, the stronger Pakistan-Taliban relations would become.
- A worldly-wise and internationally-exposed Taliban 2.0 would develop its own agency and sovereign claims including perhaps calling into question the legitimacy of the Durand Line separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, something Pakistan was always concerned about. T
- The Taliban would want to hedge their bets on how far to listen to Pakistan.
- That is precisely when New Delhi should engage the Taliban.
- Security of civilian assets: India needs to court all parties in Afghanistan, including the Taliban if it wants to ensure its security of its civilian assets there.
- It makes neither strategic nor economic sense to withdraw from Afghanistan after spending over $3 billion, something the Government seems to be prepared to do
- Being a part of Afghanistan’s future course: If India is not proactive in Afghanistan at least now, late as it is, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and China will emerge as the shapers of Afghanistan’s political and geopolitical destiny, which for sure will be detrimental to Indian interests there.
- Continental grand strategy: Backchannel talks with Pakistan and a consequent ceasefire on the Line of Control, political dialogue with the mainstream Kashmiri leadership, secret parleys with Taliban all indicate that India is opening up its congested north-western frontier.
- Except for the strategic foray into the Indo-Pacific, India today is strategically boxed in the region and it must break out of it. Afghanistan could provide, if not immediately, India with such a way out.
Consider the question ” India’s Afghan policy is at a major crossroads; to safeguard its civilian assets there as well as to stay relevant in the unfolding ‘great game’ in and around Afghanistan, New Delhi must fundamentally reset its Afghanistan policy. Comment.”
Conclusion
In the end, India’s engagement with the Taliban may or may not achieve much, but non-engagement will definitely hurt Indian interests.
Back2Basics: Durand Line
- Durand Line, boundary established in the Hindu Kush in 1893 running through the tribal lands between Afghanistan and British India, marking their respective spheres of influence.
- In modern times it has marked the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- The acceptance of this line—which was named for Sir Mortimer Durand, who induced ʿAbdor Raḥmān Khān, amir of Afghanistan, to agree to a boundary—may be said to have settled the Indo-Afghan frontier problem for the rest of the British period.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Article 21
Mains level: Paper 2- Right to speedy trial
The Bombay High Court has said that speedy trial is a fundamental right highlighting the issue of people languishing in prisons waiting for the trial to begin.
Background
- The HC was hearing a petition seeking a judicial probe into the death of a tribal rights activist.
- The petitioner told the court that he was not looking for the cause of the death, but an inquiry into what happened in jail that ultimately led to his death.
Right to speedy trial
- It is a right under which it is asserted that a government prosecutor may not delay the trial of a criminal suspect arbitrarily and indefinitely.
- Otherwise, the power to impose such delays would effectively allow prosecutors to send anyone to jail for an arbitrary length of time without trial.
- Right to speedy trial is a concept gaining recognition and importance day by day.
Its constitutional status
- The right to speedy trial is guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India.
- In the case Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab (1961) it was declared that right to speedy trial is an essential part of fundamental right to life and liberty.
- Article 21 declares that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to the procedure laid by law.”
What causes delay?
- Delay in disposition of cases due to huge pendency
- Provision for adjournment
- Vacation of the court
- Investigative agencies generally delay
Why speedy trial is necessary?
The right to a speedy trial serves several important purposes:
- First, requiring a speedy trial helps to ensure that a defendant does not have to spend an unreasonable amount of time in jail.
- It also helps to respect and protect the mental health of the defendant by making sure that the defendant is not kept in suspense or anxiety over pending criminal charges for months or years at a time.
- The right to a speedy trial protects a defendant’s ability to gather evidence for his or her own defense.
- Over time, physical evidence can become harder and harder to locate, and witnesses may move, lose their memories of an event, or even pass away.
Alternative solutions
- The Law Commission of India and the Malimath Committee recommended that the system of plea bargaining should be introduced in Indian criminal justice system.
- Plea bargaining refers to a person charged with a criminal offence negotiating with the prosecution for a lesser punishment than what is provided in law by pleading guilty to a less serious offence.
- This will facilitate the speedy disposal of criminal cases and reduces the burden on the courts at least for some minor trials and not serious criminal offences.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: SMILE
Mains level: Paper 2- Scheme for
The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has formulated a scheme “SMILE – Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise”.
SMILE Scheme
- This scheme is sub-scheme under the ‘Central Sector Scheme for Comprehensive Rehabilitation of persons engaged in the act of Begging’.
- It covers several comprehensive measures including welfare measures for persons who are engaged in the act of begging.
- The focus of the scheme is extensively on rehabilitation, provision of medical facilities, counselling, basic documentation, education, skill development, economic linkages and so on.
- The scheme would be implemented with the support of State/UT Governments/Local Urban Bodies, Voluntary Organizations, Community Based Organizations (CBOs), institutions and others.
- Scheme provides for the use of the existing shelter homes available with the State/UT Governments and Urban local bodies for rehabilitation of the persons engaged in the act of Begging.
- In case of non-availability of existing shelter homes, new dedicated shelter homes are to be set up by the implementing agencies.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Harela Festival
Mains level: Paper 1- Festivals in India
Villagers across Uttarakhand celebrated Harela, a festival of greenery, peace, prosperity and environmental conservation.
Harela Festival
- Harela means ‘day of green’ and is celebrated in the month of Shravan (the fifth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) to worship Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati.
- People across Uttarakhand, especially the Kumaun region, associate greenery with prosperity.
- The seeds of five to seven types of crops — maize, til (sesame), urad (black gram), mustard, oats — are sown in donas (bowl made of leaves) or ringalare (hill bamboo baskets) nine days before the festival.
- They are harvested on the ninth day and distributed to neighbours, friends and relatives.
- The flourish of the crops symbolizes prosperity in the year ahead.
- People make clay statues of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati, known as Dikare, and worship them a day before the festival.
- Harela is also linked to the Barahnaza system (12 types of crops), a crop diversification technique followed in the region.
Answer this PYQ in the comment box:
Q.Consider the following pairs:
Tradition: State
1. Chapchar Kut: festival Mizoram
2. Khongjom Parba ballad: Manipur
3. Thang Ta dance: Sikkim
Which of the pairs given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 1 and 2
(c) 3 only
(d) 2 and 3
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