Daily Current Affairs

The Bangladesh garment workers unrest (GS Paper 3, Economy)

Why in news?

• Since October, one of Bangladesh’s largest labour forces, the 4.4 million-strong ready-made garment (RMG) sector workers are demanding a trebling of their legally mandated minimum wages from 8,000 Bangladeshi Taka (BDT), or about $72, to 23,000 taka ($208).

 

What is fast fashion’s significance to Bangladesh’s economy?

• Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest exporter of fast fashion, or RMG, after China, accounting for 85% of the country’s exports earnings of $55 billion in 2022. It has a global market share of almost 8%.
• The RMG sector’s main markets are the U.S., the U.K., Europe and Canada, with H&M being the top importer. Other big brands include Levi’s and Zara.
• The 4,000 odd manufacturing facilities in the RMG sector are largely small and medium enterprises (SMEs), mainly employing rural women, and it has been credited with helping the country’s drastic reduction in poverty from 44.2% in 1991 to 5% in 2022 based on the international poverty line of $2.15 a day (using 2017 Purchasing Power Parity exchange rate).
• Rising remittances by a growing emigre population is the other factor contributing to the government’s foreign exchange.

 

Why are the RMG sector workers protesting now?

• It has been over five years since 2018, when Bangladesh’s Minimum Wage Board fixed a rate of BDT 8,000 for fast fashion sector workers.
• Unlike a universal base wage, Bangladesh follows a system of setting minimum wages for each sector of the economy, which is revised every five years.
• In the past four years, the country has witnessed steep inflation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, the volatility in oil prices fuelled by the Russia-Ukraine war.
• The country’s apex bank, the Bangladesh Bank, has pegged inflation of a 12-month, monthly average at 9.37% in October 2023, which is a more than 2% point rise from 7.23% in the corresponding period last year. This has priced out essentials like food and fuel for a vast number of Bangladeshis.
• Garment worker unions rejected a more than 50% raise in minimum wage proposed by Sheikh Hasina’s government earlier, saying it is too little too late. They have stuck to their demand of nothing short of BDT 23,000.

 

What role can brand importers play?

• Big brands like Nike have faced intense criticism beginning in the 1990s for being responsible for driving down procurement costs and amassing super profits at the expense of workers’ rights in the Global South, as they took advantage of neo-liberalism’s ‘race to the bottom’ approach of finding the cheapest source wherever available.
• These criticisms led to marginal changes, like verifying work conditions, working hours, safety gear, wages and sanitary conditions at global procurement facilities.
• But it did not lead to a meaningful contribution of sharing big brands’ profits, or investing in supplier SME’s infrastructure, or wages, until recently. This recent shift has been fuelled more so, by the global movement to decarbonise supply chains to tackle climate change.
• The Berlin-based coalition of “19 garment brands and IndustriALL Global Union”, called Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT) has pledged “supporting a living wage in the RMG sector in Bangladesh through the promotion of the conditions to achieve an industry-wide collective bargaining agreement supported by Brands’ purchasing practices”

 

What is the relationship between the RMG sector and carbon emissions?

• According to the UN Environment Programme, the fashion industry is responsible for anywhere between 2-8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it “one of the largest contributors to the climate and ecological crisis”.
• In Bangladesh, the textile and RMG sector combined constitute more than a quarter of the country’s total emissions as on 2020, with an average annual growth rate of more than 8% CO2 emissions in the past two decades alone.
• Bangladesh has the maximum number of U.S. Green Building Council certified RMG factories globally. While 202 facilities out of more than 4,000 is a good start, there is still a long way to go to be on track to realise the country’s 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
• While top global fashion brands recognise these gaps in financing, technology, governance, and the fragility of highly climate vulnerable economies like Bangladesh, their response to the current RMG sector crisis and decarbonising their own supply chains, at best, could be described as wanting.

 

What is at stake for Sheikh Hasina?

• The incumbent Prime Minister has been in power since 2008, making her the longest serving female head of state in history; and her government will be tested in the upcoming January 7 polls, where she is seeking a record fourth-term in office.
• It would be no exaggeration to say that this would be one of the biggest tests in her long political career.

 

How free cancer care alone won’t help the fight against cancer in India

(GS Paper 2, Health)

Why in news?

• By 2040, according to one estimate, 20 lakh people a year will be diagnosed with cancer in India. Cancer is already the third leading cause of death in India.
• The money spent by a patient on an ailment is the highest for cancer. The Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) has offered some respite by providing health insurance of ₹5 lakh per family per year.
• However, despite this support, people are financially destroyed by cancer and its treatment.
• A June 2023 study reported that even among patients availing of the PMJAY or other state-sponsored health insurance coverage, cancer treatment rendered catastrophic health expenses in more than 80% and impoverishment in more than 60% of people.

Where do the expenses arise?

• The government provides free cancer care. These devastating costs arise in the private sector. Ideally, one’s out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) for health should be zero.
• But the sheer burden of the disease plus an underfunded public health system forces people to access care in the private healthcare system in India. This worsens the financial burden by adding to the direct and/or indirect OOPE.
• Direct medical OOPE includes doctor’s consultation fees, cost of medicines, and medical tests, and direct non-medical OOPE includes costs of transport, accommodation, and food for people travelling to larger cities for treatment. Indirect OOPE accounts for loss of productive hours and/or income.

 

What makes the fallout worse?

• Delays allow the disease to worsen, and they happen if patients have to struggle to get an early date for treatment in overburdened government hospitals.
• The financial fallout of cancer is worse when it affects the breadwinner of the family. Compared to the general population, people with cancer are at seven times greater risk of unemployment within five years after diagnosis.
• Cancer diagnosis has a similar impact on caregivers.

 

Support by governments:

• Borrowing money and selling assets has been identified to be a common strategy that disproportionately affects people from rural areas. Governments have identified these issues in some parts of the country and made some efforts to address them.
• For example, in 2012, the Haryana government made transport for patients with cancer and one caregiver in public buses from their places of residence to their places of treatment free.
• Similar efforts have been made in Kerala, where patients with cancer are eligible for 50% concession on public bus tickets.
•  To improve compliance with care, patients travelling to seek care in the Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Center in Assam are given financial support for travel as well as free accommodation and food.
• In 2017, Delhi launched the Arogya Kosh scheme to reduce the burden on public health centres and avoid treatment delays. Here, residents of Delhi making less than ₹3 lakh a year are eligible to get certain tests, like ultrasound and CT scans, in private health centres for free.
• Haryana, Tripura, and Kerala have also floated a ‘cancer pension’ to financially assist patients with advanced-stage cancer — ₹2,500 per month in Haryana and ₹1,000 in Tripura and Kerala.

 

What is a permanent solution?

• The most obvious solution to such post-cancer problems is to open publicly funded cancer care centres in every nook and corner of India. Of course, at this time, this sounds unrealistic and will require decades to implement.
• But the fact is that until cancer care becomes as accessible as diabetes or hypertension care, there is need to continue to provide financial support to those who are suffering, either directly or indirectly, and their families.

 

Meet the Langlands Program, the world’s biggest maths project

(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)

Context:

• The Langlands Program consists of “very complicated theoretical abstractions, which can be difficult even for specialist mathematicians to grasp”.
• This program was set in motion in 1967 when Dr. Langlands wrote a 17-page letter to the French mathematician André Weil with a series of tentative ideas.

• In 2018, mathematician Dr. Robert Langlands was awarded the Abel Prize, one of the highest honours for mathematicians, for “his visionary program connecting representation theory to number theory”.

 

Langlands Program:

• At the heart of the Program is an attempt to find connections between two far-flung areas of mathematics: number theory and harmonic analysis.
• Number theory is the arithmetic study of numbers and the relationships between them. A famous example of such a relationship is the Pythagoras theorem: a2 + b2 = c2.
• Harmonic analysis is interested in the study of periodic phenomena. Unlike number theorists, who deal with discrete arithmetics (like integers), harmonic analysts deal with mathematical objects more continuous in nature (like waves).

 

What’s the purpose of the Program?

• In 1824, Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel proved that it was impossible to have a general formula to find the roots of polynomial equations whose highest power is greater than 4 (e.g., x5 + 2x4 – 5x3 – 9x2 = 0).
• An example of a general formula is the quadratic formula used to solve quadratic equations.
• Around the same time, unaware of Abel’s work, French mathematician Évariste Galois arrived at the same conclusion  and went a step ahead.
• In 1832, he suggested that instead of trying to find the precise roots of such polynomial equations, mathematicians could focus on symmetries between roots for an alternate route.
• Consider the polynomial equation x2 – 2 = 0. The two roots of x in this equation are 2 and -2. Now, consider a different polynomial involving one of these roots (say, 2): 22 + 2 = 2 + 2.
• This equation – of the form 2 + = 2 + , where = 2 – holds true for the other root as well: (-2)2 + (-2) = 2 + (-2) = 2 - 2.
• So the two roots of the polynomial x2 – 2 = 0 are symmetric.
• And a Galois group is a collection of symmetries of the roots of a polynomial equation.
• The Langlands Program seeks to connect every Galois group with automorphic functions, allowing mathematicians to investigate polynomial equations using tools from calculus, and build a bridge from harmonic analysis to number theory.

 

What are automorphic functions?

• Alex Kontorovich, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, has used the following example to illustrate the role of automorphic functions.

 

Translational symmetry:

• For example, the sine function itself can be represented on a circle. If you have a piece of string shaped like the sine wave, you can also bend it to shape it like a circle.
•  If a bead on the string goes from the baseline to the crest of the wave, then down all the way to the trough, and finally returns to the baseline, it would be like travelling from a point on top of the circle to the bottom and back – which is 360º degrees or 2 radians.
• So the sine wave can be said to repeat itself after 2 radians, and we can write f(x) thus: f(x) = f(x + 2)
• This function is said to have a translational symmetry: despite having been shifted by a factor of 2, the function looks the same. That f(x) has translational symmetry is a “spectacular miracle”, according to Prof. Kontorovich.
• Such functions that turn back into themselves when the variables are changed by some process are called automorphic functions. The sine function is a simple example.
• The Langlands Program is an effort to connect Galois groups to these functions.

 

How has the Program helped?

• In 1994, Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor applied Langlands’ conjectures to prove Fermat’s last theorem. This proof had eluded mathematicians for more than three centuries.
• The Program has also helped mathematicians create new automorphic functions from preexisting ones. Such possibilities, they understand, could be crucial to prove the Ramanujan conjectures, many of which remain unsolved.

 

Geometric Langlands:

• Since Dr. Langlands’ letter to Dr. Weil, the Program has also evolved into its own field of mathematics. One offshoot called Geometric Langlands investigates connections between algebraic geometry and representation theory.
• Mathematicians have even conjectured connections between Geometric Langlands and physics.
• Earlier in 2023, for example, mathematicians David Ben-Zvi, Yiannis Sakellaridis, and Akshay Venkatesh found signs of electromagnetism in number theory.
• In their paper, they recast two different mathematical objects; periods and L-functions into geometric objects that physicists use to study electromagnetic waves.