Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 3- Use of statecraft in finding solutions to security problems
Context
In many countries, both the authorities and security agencies are beginning to acknowledge the importance of resorting to statecraft as a vital adjunct to the role played by the security agencies.
The important role of statecraft in security
- Statecraft involves fine-grained comprehension of inherent problems; also an ability to quickly respond to political challenges.
- It further involves strengthening the ability to exploit opportunities as they arise, and display a degree of political nimbleness rather than leaving everything to the security agencies.
- It entails a shift from reposing all faith in the security establishment to putting equal emphasis on implementation of policies and programmes.
- Two prime examples which provide grist to the above proposition are the prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir and the continuing problem involving Maoists.
- The need to use statecraft to deal with quite a few other internal security problems — some of which have lain dormant for years — is also becoming more manifest by the day.
Security issues in various regions
- Jammu and Kashmir: While Jammu and Kashmir has been a troubled region ever since 1947, the situation has metamorphosed over the years.
- No proper solution has emerged to a long-standing problem.
- Irrespective of the reasons for the latest upsurge in violence, what is evident is that Jammu and Kashmir has again become the vortex of violence.
- Evidently, the doctrine of containment pursued by the Jammu and Kashmir police and security agencies is not having the desired effect.
- In Jammu and Kashmir today, as also elsewhere, there is no all-in-one grand strategy to deal with the situation.
- The missing ingredient is statecraft which alone can walk in step with the changing contours of a long-standing problem.
- Punjab: The recent discovery of ‘sleeper cells’ in the Punjab clearly indicates the potential for the revival of a pro-Khalistan movement — which once ravaged large parts of the Punjab.
- While pro-Khalistani sentiment is present in pockets in the United Kingdom and in Europe, it has not been in evidence in India for some time.
- Hence, the recent attack by pro-Khalistan elements on the headquarters of the Punjab Police Intelligence wing in Mohali was a rude shock to the security establishment.
- The incident is a reminder that militancy in the Punjab has not been permanently extinguished, and will need deft statecraft to nip it in the bud.
- North-east: In India’s North-east, more specifically in the States of Assam and Nagaland, there are again incipient signs of trouble which, for the present, may need use of statecraft rather than the security forces.
- In Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom–Independent (ULFA-I) is trying to revive its activities after a long spell of hibernation.
- Likewise in Nagaland, where the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (I-M) has recently initiated a fresh push for a solution of the ‘Naga political issue’, the situation is pregnant with serious possibilities.
- Both instances merit the use of statecraft so that the situation does not get out of hand.
- South India: In the South, intelligence and police officials appear concerned about a likely revival of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)-sponsored activities in Tamil Nadu.
- This stems from a possible revival of LTTE-sponsored militancy in Sri Lanka following the recent economic crises and uncertainty there.
- This situation again needs deft statecraft to prevent a resurgence of the past.
Conclusion
India faces several challenges today, but the answer to this is neither grand strategy nor grand simplifications nor resort to higher doses of security. A properly structured set of policies, having liberal doses of statecraft in addition to a proper set of security measures, is the best answer to India’s needs, now and in the future.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Indus Water Treaty
Mains level: Restoration and normalization of India-Pak ties
A five-member Pakistani delegation has arrived in India for talks over the ongoing water dispute under the Indus Water Commission between the two countries.
Why in news?
- India is building 10 hydro plant projects to cut excess water into Pakistan.
- Pakistan is expected to raise the projects being constructed by India under the Indus treaty.
What is Indus Water Treaty?
- The Indus Waters Treaty is a water-distribution treaty between India and Pakistan, brokered by the World Bank signed in Karachi in 1960.
- According to this agreement, control over the water flowing in three “eastern” rivers of India — the Beas, the Ravi and the Sutlej was given to India
- The control over the water flowing in three “western” rivers of India — the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum was given to Pakistan.
Basis of the treaty: Equitable water-sharing
- Back in time, partitioning the Indus rivers system was inevitable after the Partition of India in 1947.
- The sharing formula devised after prolonged negotiations sliced the Indus system into two halves.
- Equitable it may have seemed, but the fact remained that India conceded 80.52 percent of the aggregate water flows in the Indus system to Pakistan.
- It also gave Rs 83 crore in pounds sterling to Pakistan to help build replacement canals from the western rivers.
- Such generosity is unusual of an upper riparian.
- India conceded its upper riparian position on the western rivers for the complete rights on the eastern rivers.
- Water was critical for India’s development plans.
What were the rights accorded to India?
- The treaty allowed India to use western rivers water for limited irrigation use and unrestricted use for power generation, domestic industrial and non-consumptive uses such as navigation, floating of property, fish culture, etc.
- It lays down precise regulations to build any water or hydel projects.
- India has been given the right to generate hydroelectricity through run-of-the-river projects on the western rivers subject to specific criteria for design and operation.
- The pact also gives the right to Pakistan to raise objections to designs of Indian hydroelectric projects on the western rivers.
Significance of the treaty
- It is a treaty that is often cited as an example of the possibilities of peaceful coexistence that exist despite the troubled relationship.
- It has survived 3 crucial wars.
- It may be listed among the most successful international treaties as it has withstood the test of time.
Why has the treaty survived?
- It is for India’s generosity on Pakistan for sharing waters of its own rivers.
- India has refrained from weaponizing waters. Pakistan cannot survive without this treaty.
- About 80% of Pakistan’s agriculture depends on Indus and the riparian rivers waters.
- Backtracking on the treaty could affect India’s stand as global reliable partner who disrespects bilateral agreements.
A tacit nerve of terroristan
- Responding to state sponsor of terrorism by Pakistan, India can escalate a water war , which can kill the crippling economy of Pakistan.
- If India wants, it can either flood or drought-starve Pakistan by not obligating to this treaty.
Need for a rethink
- But PM Modi’s words equally hold relevance that “Blood and waters cannot flow together”.
- There is no reason to believe that India could start a water war with Pakistan on humanitarian grounds.
- Floods and droughts will starve ordinary Pakistanis while their politicians would still live in luxury.
Way forward
- The role of India, as a responsible upper riparian abiding by the provisions of the treaty, has been remarkable.
- However, India needs to rethink or re-negotiate this treaty.
- Just like water affects ordinary Pakistanis, so does terrorism affects Indians.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Unicorns
Mains level: Startups boost in India
Prime Minister has praised India’s startup ecosystem as he highlighted that the country has reached a landmark figure of 100 unicorns with a valuation of more than $300 billion.
What is a Unicorn Startup?
- Unicorns are privately held, venture-capital-backed startups that have reached a value of $1 billion.
- The valuation of unicorns is not expressly linked to their current financial performance.
- This is largely based on their growth potential as perceived by investors and venture capitalists who have taken part in various funding rounds.
Some of the successful Indian unicorns:
- Lenskart
- Cred
- Meesho
- PharmEasy
- Licious
- Grofers etc.
When was the term first used?
- American venture capitalist Aileen Lee is credited with coining the term in 2013.
- It was used to emphasize the rarity of the emergence of such startups.
Unicorn boost in India
- The growth of Unicorns in India has been phenomenal in the past two years.
- From 17 Unicorns in 2018 the number went up to 38 in 2020 and it’s 71 and counting in 2021.
- Many of these unicorns, which have cumulatively raised more than 9 billion dollars till date, have also seen a surge in valuations.
Features of a unicorn Start-up
To be a unicorn is no cakewalk and each unicorn today has its own story with a list of features that worked in its favour.
The few pointers that are commonly seen across all the unicorns is as under:
- Disruptive innovation: Mostly, all the unicorns have brought a disruption in the field they belong to. Uber, for example, changed the way people commuted.
- ‘Firsts’: It is seen that unicorns are mostly the starters in their industry. They change the way people do things and gradually create a necessity for themselves.
- High on tech: Another common trend across unicorns is that their business model runs on tech. Uber got their model accepted by crafting a friendly app.
- Consumer-focused: Often, theirgoal is to simplify and make things easy for consumers and be a part of their day-to-day life.
- Affordability: Keeping things affordable is another key highlight of these startups. Spotify, for example, made listening to music easier to the world.
- Privately owned: Most of the unicorns are privately owned which gets their valuation bigger when an established company invests in it.
- *Mostly software based: A recent report suggests that 87% of the unicorns’ products are software, 7% are hardware and the rest 6% are other products & services.
Entrepreneurship today is ‘survival-driven’ self-employment, formed out of necessity, as well as opportunity motivated, largely because poverty and lack of formal employment opportunities rear their ugly head in striving economies.
Reasons for sudden success
- COVID pandemic: The pandemic accelerated adoption of digital services by consumers helping start-ups and new-age ventures that typically build tech-focused businesses delivering an array of offerings to customers.
- Boost in online services: Many Indians who had traditionally been subscribers of brick-and-mortar businesses moved online and explored a host of services ranging from food delivery and edu-tech to e-grocery.
- Work-from-home culture: This added significant numbers to start-ups’ user base and expedited their business expansion plans and attracting investors.
Inherent challenges to Start-ups in India
- Financial scarcity: Availability of finance is critical for the startups and is always a problem to get sufficient amounts.
- Lack of Infrastructure: There is a lack of support mechanisms that play a significant role in the lifecycle of startups which include incubators, science and technology parks etc.
- Regulatory bottlenecks: Starting and exiting a business requires a number of permissions from government agencies. Although there is a perceptible change, it is still a challenge.
- Compliance hurdles: For example, earlier Angel tax, which stands removed no, falls under corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies.
- Low success rate: Several startups fail due to shifting away the focus on the fundamentals of business grows.
- Lack of an Innovative Business Model: To be successful a start-up must be innovative. Unfortunately, Indian startups are less innovative than startups elsewhere.
- Non-competitive Indian Markets: Too many startups serving too few consumers are saturating the Indian market. Most startups serve the fraction of Indians who live in urban India.
- Digital divide: The majority of Indians who live in rural areas and small towns remain untouched by most startups.
Various initiatives by the Govt.
There are numerous government initiatives to assist start-ups:
- MUDRA Scheme: Through this scheme, start-ups get loans from the banks to set up, grow and stabilize their businesses.
- SETU (Self-Employment and Talent Utilization) Fund: Government has allotted Rs 1,000 Cr in order to create opportunities for self-employment and new jobs mainly in technology-driven domains.
- E-Biz Portal: It is India’s first government-to-business portal that integrates 14 regulatory permissions and licenses at one source.
- Credit Guarantee Fund: launched by the GoI to make available collateral-free credit to the micro and small enterprise sector.
- Fund of Funds for Start-ups (FFS): 10,000 Rs corpus fund established in line with the Start-up India action plan under SIDBI for extending support to Start-ups.
- Tax Sops: Tax exemption on Capital gain tax, Removal of Angel tax, Tax exemption for 3 years and Tax exemption in investment above Fair Market Value.
Roadmap for the future success of start-ups
Start-ups can judiciously take cues from unicorns in understanding the ecosystem and building a business model that adds value while being sustainable.
- New-age startups should devise a customer-centric business model.
- Through proper branding and strategy, they should make sure that this value proposition reaches the end-user.
- What brings startups closer to success is the execution and customer acquisition strategy, where all the action occurs.
- Notably, technology (rather deep-technology) has played a key role in the making of pioneer business models.
Attracting venture capitalists
- VCs are actively looking for investment opportunities in early-stage startups.
- They possess the selection ability to effectively screen startups having a higher potential to succeed.
- VCs primarily look for a mindset alignment with promoters and companies where they, as investors, can add value by leveraging their industry experience, expertise, network and reputation.
Conclusion
- The current economic scenario in India is in expansion mode. Indian Startups are now spread across the length and breadth of the entire country.
- The word ‘unicorn’ has come a long way from just being a mythological creature to a regular feature in business and finance discussions.
- Innovation and economic growth depend on being able to produce excellent individuals with the right skills and attitudes to be entrepreneurial in their professional lives.
- The Indian government’s policies like Make in India, Digital India, Atmanirbhar etc. shows the enthusiasm to arrest this talent.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Param Ananta Supercomputer
Mains level: National Supercomputing Mission
Param Ananta, a state-of the art Supercomputer was commissioned at IIT Gandhinagar.
Param Ananta
- Param Ananta is capable of offering peak performance of 838 teraflops.
- It is a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST).
- This facility is established under Phase 2 of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
- The system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, High Memory nodes, High throughput storage and high performance Infiniband.
- The supercomputer will rank behind C-DAC’s Param Siddhi-AI, which as of November 2021 was the 102nd most powerful supercomputer in the world — with peak performance capability of 3.3 petaflops.
What is a Supercomputer?
- A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
- The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
- Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS (peta FLOPS).
- Since November 2017, all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.
Specific features
- Param Ananta system is based on Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technology to obtain a high power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost.
- Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.
- This high end computing system will be a great value addition for the research community.
Back2Basics: National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)
- NSM is a proposed plan by GoI to create a cluster of seventy supercomputers connecting various academic and research institutions across India.
- In April 2015 the government approved the NSM with a total outlay of Rs.4500 crore for a period of 7 years.
- The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
- Currently there are four supercomputers from India in Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.
Aims and objectives
- The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of National importance across the country by 2022.
- This network of Supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more compute power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.
When did India initiate its efforts to build supercomputers?
- India’s supercomputer program was initiated in the late 1980s, when the United States ceased the export of a Cray Supercomputer due to technology embargos.
- This resulted in India setting up C-DAC in 1988, which in 1991, unveiled the prototype of PARAM 800, benchmarked at 5 Gflops. This supercomputer was the second-fastest in the world at that time.
- Since June 2018, the USA’s Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world, taking away this position from China.
- As of January 2018, Pratyush and Mihir are the fastest supercomputers in India with a maximum speed of Peta Flops.
What are the phases of the National Supercomputing Mission?
Phase I:
- In the first phase of the NSM, parts of the supercomputers are imported and assembled in India.
- A total of 6 supercomputers are to be installed in this phase.
- The first supercomputer that was assembled indigenously is called Param Shivay. It was installed in IIT (BHU) located in Varanasi.
- Similar systems, Param Shakti (IIT Kharagpur) and Param Brahma (IISER, Pune) were also later installed within the country.
- The rest will be installed at IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (JNIAS).
Phase II:
- The supercomputers that are installed so far are about 60% indigenous.
- The 11 systems that are going to be installed in the next phase will have processors designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and will have a cumulative capacity of 10 petaflops.
- These new systems are to be constructed more cost-effectively than the previous ones.
- One of the 11 proposed supercomputers will be installed
- at C-DAC exclusively for small and medium enterprises so that they can train employees as well as work on supercomputers at a very low cost.
Phase III:
- The third phase aims to build fully indigenous supercomputers.
- The government had also approved a project to develop a cryogenic cooling system that rapidly dispels the heat generated by a computing chip. This will be jointly built together by IIT-Bombay and C-DAC.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Pacific Nations in news
Mains level: Chinese counter to Western Indo-Pacific strategy
China has suffered a big diplomatic humiliation in the pacific. 10 island nations in the region rejected China’s proposed security pact.
Why in news?
- Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has returned empty-handed in a highly decorated visit to the Pacific Nations.
- The secret deal that was to be brokered got leaked in public media, caused huge embarrassment to the Chinese.
Conspicuous features of the Pact
- China has had offered to radically ramp up its activities in the South Pacific, directly challenging the influence of the US and its allies in the strategically vital region.
- The failed deal saw Beijing to:
- Train Pacific island police,
- Become involved in cybersecurity,
- Expand political ties,
- Conduct sensitive marine mapping and
- Gain greater access to natural resources on land and in the water
- As an enticement, Beijing is offering millions of dollars in financial aid, the prospect of a potentially lucrative China-Pacific islands free trade agreement and access to China’s vast market.
Why Pacific Nations rejected this lollipop?
- The offer is perceived was “disingenuous” and would “ensure Chinese influence in government” and “economic control” of key industries.
- The nations also cited a lack of regional consensus.
Pls make observations about Pacific Island Nations:
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