Daily Current Affairs

Election Commission declares 253 RUPPs as inactive (GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)

Why in news?

• Recently, the Election Commission of India delisted 86 non-existent Unrecognized Political Parties (RUPPs) and declared additional 253 as ‘Inactive RUPPs’.
• This action against 339 non-compliant RUPPs takes the tally to 537 defaulting RUPPs since May 25, 2022.

 

Section 29A of the RP Act:

• As per statutory requirements under section 29A of the RP Act, every political party has to communicate any change in its name, head office, office bearers, address, PAN to the Commission without delay.
• 86 RUPPs have been found to be non-existent either after a physical verification carried out by the respective Chief Electoral Officers of concerned States/UTs or based on report of undelivered letters/notices from Postal Authority sent to the registered address of concerned RUPP.
• These 253 RUPPs have been declared inactive, as they have not responded to the letter/notice delivered to them and have not contested a single election either to the General Assembly of a State or the Parliament Election 2014 & 2019. These RUPPs have failed to comply with statutory requirements for more than 16 compliance steps since 2015 and are continuing to default.

Common Symbol:

• 66 RUPPs of the above 253 parties, actually applied for a common symbol as per para 10B of the Symbol’s Order 1968 and did not contest the respective elections.  It is pertinent to note that privilege of a common symbol is given to RUPP based upon an undertaking for putting up at least 5 percent of total candidates with regard to said legislative assembly election of a State.
• Possibility of such parties occupying the available pre-election political space by taking benefits of admissible entitlements without contesting elections cannot be ruled out. 
• This also tends to crowd out the political parties actually contesting elections and also creating confusing situation for the voters.

 

Conditions for registration of political parties:

• The primary purpose of registration of political parties is contained in Section 29A which lists out privileges and advantages which accrue to an association once it gets registered as a political party and all such advantages and privileges are directly relatable to the said participation in the electoral processes.
• Accordingly, in the 13 (ii) (e) guidelines for registration of political parties issued by the Commission for condition of registration, reads as follows:Declares that party must contest an election conducted by the Election Commission within five years of its registration and thereafter should continue to contest. If the Party does not contest elections continuously for six years, the Party shall be taken off the list of registered parties.

Way Forward:

• The compliances work of the EC acts as the building blocks of a transparency mechanism for informing the voters of the affairs of the political parties necessary for making informed choices.
• All these stated regulatory requirements have direct bearing on the Commission's constitutional mandate of conducting free, fair and transparent elections.

 

“Adopt a TB patient” plan

(GS Paper 2, Health)

Why in news?

• Recently, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare launched the Pradhan Mantri TB-Mukt Bharat Abhiyan campaign, which is part of the National TB Elimination Programme.
• It also includes the “Adopt a TB patient” plan and the aim is to adopt all patients who have given their consent for this initiative by 17 September.

Eliminating TB:

• The government has set the target of making India TB-free by 2025, five years before that global target of eliminating the disease. 
• The plan emphasis the important role of janbhagidari (people’s participation) in solving critical problems and building a prosperous nation.

 

What is the “Adopt a TB patient” programme?

• Now, individuals, organisations, corporates, cooperative organisations, elected leaders and non-profits can provide support by adopting persons with TB.
• The donor can pledge their support for one or three years.
• Those who adopt TB patients are called Ni-kshayMitra. A first-of-its-kind initiative, this is a voluntary scheme that the Centre has initiated under its plan to eliminate TB.

 

How to adopt a TB patient?

• In order to become a Ni-kshayMitra, a person has to visit the official website of the scheme. They then have to search for the state, district, block and peripheral health institution to make a donation or adopt a TB patient.
• Health Ministry urged everyone to join the soon-to-be-launched TB Patient/Village Adoption scheme, where everyone can adopt TB patients and ensure their well-being, provide nourishment, timely diagnosis and prompt treatment.
• Under the scheme, a Ni-kshayMitra can offer three types of support to TB patients – nutritional, diagnostic, vocational and additional nutritional supplements.

 

Nutritional & social support:

• The initiative intends to provide essential nutritional and social support to people with TB and root out stigma and discrimination against them. Three types of support are essential:

1. First, a kit that contains appropriate food and supplements to take care of their nutritional needs.
2. Second, support for additional lab-based diagnostic requirements.
3. Third, equipping the patients with vocational skills to help them join the workforce and live a prosperous and productive life.

• The health ministry has recommended a monthly food basket for patients which will comprise three kg of rice, 1.5 kg of pulses, 250 grammes of vegetable cooking oil and one kg of milk powder or six litres of milk or one kg of groundnut.
• The food basket support will be an addition to free diagnostics, drugs and Rs 500 that the government already provides to TB patients.

 

TB burden in India:

• India reported a sharp 19 per cent rise in tuberculosis cases in 2021 over the previous year, revealed the India TB Report 2022. The total number of incident TB patients (new and relapse) notified during 2021 was 19, 33,381 as opposed to that of 16, 28,161 in 2020.
• The National TB Prevalence Survey of India 2019-2021 found that the prevalence of the disease is 312 per 100,000 population. While more than 40 per cent of the population in India carries the TB infection only 10 per cent get the disease.
• According to World Health Organisation (WHO), in 2020, 30 high TB burden countries accounted for 86 per cent of new TB cases around the world, with India leading the count.

 

Way Forward:

• Under the newly launched Pradhan Mantri TB-Mukt Bharat Abhiyan campaign, 1.78 lakh patients have been adopted.The government will reach out to the remaining TB patients for consent and also encourage the community for adopting them as a part of the campaign.
• With this programme, India is taking a big step toward getting rid of the dreaded disease.

 

The fall in natural rubber prices in India

(GS Paper 3, Economy)

 

Context:

• Recently, a day-long sit-in protest was staged in front of the Rubber Board headquarters in Kottayam, Kerala by workers of rubber industry.
• After a moderate post-pandemic revival, the price of natural rubber (NR) has crashed to a 16-month low of ₹150 per kg in the Indian market. The price of latex, which soared during the pandemic due to huge demand from glove makers, took a more severe drubbing with its prices rolling down below ₹120.
• With the impact of the falling prices beginning to reflect in their daily lives as well as the local economy, the growers are up in arms against the authorities for their perceived delay in checking the slide. 

What has caused the sharp fall in prices?

• The current fall in prices is attributed primarily to a weak Chinese demand and the European energy crisis, along with high inflation and an import glut, among other things.
• While the unremitting zero COVID strategy in China, which consumes about 42% of the global volume, has cost the industry dearly, analysts have also flagged the acceleration of imports.
• The domestic tyre industry is sitting pretty on an ample inventory, especially in the form of block rubber from the Ivory Coast and compounded rubber from the Far East.

 

Where does India stand in terms of the production and consumption of natural rubber?

• India is currently the world’s fifth largest producer of natural rubber while it also remains the second biggest consumer of the material globally. About 40% of India’s total natural rubber consumption is currently met through imports.
• A latest report by the Rubber Board has projected the natural rubber production and consumption in India during 2022-23 as 8,50,000tonnes and 12,90,000 tonnes respectively.
• The production of the material improved by 8.4%, to 7,75,000tonnes, during 2021-22 compared to 7,15,000 tonnes in the previous year.
• An increase in yield, tappable area and area tapped during the year contributed to the rise in production.
• The auto-tyre manufacturing sector accounted for 73.1% of the total quantity of natural rubber consumption.

 

How does the falling price affect the growers?

• The turnaround has exposed the growers, mostly small and medium scale to a painful reckoning, contributing to wide-spread panic in Kerala, which accounts for nearly 75% of the total production.
• The impact of the price fall is felt more in the rural areas, where most people are solely dependent on rubber cultivation and have no other option but to cut expenses. This has caused a sluggishness in the respective local economies, which also coincided with the festive season in Kerala.
• If a reversal in prices seem distant, the trend may also trigger a crop switch or even a fragmentation of the rubber holdings in the long run.

 

What do the farmers demand?

• The key demands they have raised to the Union government include raising the import duties on latex products and compound rubber to make it on par with natural rubber, by either 25% or ₹30 per kg, whichever is lower.
• Its demands to the state government are to raise the replanting subsidy in Kerala, which remains at ₹25,000 per ha, and the support price of the crop under the price stabilisation scheme to ₹200 from ₹170.

 

How is the Rubber Board reacting?

• The Rubber Board regards the price fluctuation as cyclical and rests its hopes on the projections of a remarkable shortage of rubber seven years from now due to slow replanting in place of old trees in existing plantations.
• It is said to be also working on a set of programmes to arrest the free-falling of prices.

 

CRISPR solution to problems of health begins to take shape

(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)

 

Context:

• Over the last two and a half years, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the world and exposed the vulnerabilities of humans to new diseases, scientists continued to push ahead with significant progress in utilising an exciting recent technology for permanent cures to some of the most intractable health disorders.
• In the 10 years since it was developed, the genome-editing technology called CRISPR has begun to deliver on the near unlimited potential that scientists say it has to improve the quality of human life. 

CRISPR technology in practice:

• The technology enables a simple but remarkably efficient way to ‘edit’ the genetic codes of living organisms, thus opening up the possibility of ‘correcting’ genetic information to cure diseases, prevent physical deformities, or to even produce cosmetic enhancements.
• Over the last three years especially, several therapeutic interventions using CRISPR for diseases like thalassaemia or sickle cell anaemia have gone into clinical trials, mainly in the United States, and the initial results have been flawless.
• In 2021, the Indian government approved a five-year project to develop this technology to cure sickle cell anaemiathat mainly afflicts the tribal populations of the country.
• The developers of the technology, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020, one of the fastest recognitions accorded by the Nobel committee following after a breakthrough.

 

What is the CRISPR technology?

• CRISPR is short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is a reference to the clustered and repetitive sequences of DNA found in bacteria, whose natural mechanism to fight some viral diseases is replicated in this gene-editing tool.
• Editing, or modification, of gene sequences to eliminate or introduce specific properties in an organism is not a new development.
• It has been happening for several decades now, particularly in the field of agriculture, where genetically modified variants, with specific desirable traits, are regularly developed. It usually involves the introduction of a new gene, or suppression of an existing gene, through a process described as genetic engineering.
• CRISPR technology is different. It is simple, and still far more accurate and it does not involve the introduction of any new gene from the outside. Its mechanism is often compared to the ‘cut-copy-paste’, or ‘find-replace’ functionalities in common computer programmes.
• A bad stretch in the DNA sequence, which is the cause of disease or disorder, is located, cut, and removed and then replaced with a ‘correct’ sequence. And the tools used to achieve this are not mechanical, but biochemical, specific protein and RNA molecules.
• The technology replicates a natural defence mechanism in some bacteria that uses a similar method to protect itself from virus attacks.

 

How CRISPR Technology works?

• The first task is to identify the particular sequence of genes that is the cause of the trouble. Once that is done, an RNA molecule is programmed to locate this sequence on the DNA strand, just like the ‘find’ or ‘search’ function on a computer.
• After this, a special protein called Cas9, which is often described as ‘genetic scissors’, is used to break the DNA strand at specific points, and remove the bad sequence.
• A DNA strand, when broken, has a natural tendency to re-attach and heal itself. But if the auto-repair mechanism is allowed to continue, the bad sequence can regrow.
• So, scientists intervene during the auto-repair process by supplying the correct sequence of genetic codes, which attaches to the broken DNA strand.
• It is like cutting out the damaged part of a long zipper, and replacing it with a normally functioning part.The entire process is programmable, and has remarkable efficiency, though chances of error are not entirely ruled out.

 

Potential:

• A vast number of diseases and disorders are genetic in nature,  that is, they are caused by unwanted changes or mutations in genes. These include common blood disorders like sickle cell anaemia, eye diseases including colour blindness, several types of cancer, diabetes, HIV, and liver and heart diseases. Many of these are hereditary as well. This technology opens up the possibility of finding a permanent cure to many of these diseases.
• This is also true for the deformities arising out of abnormalities in gene sequences, like stunted or slow growth, speech disorders, or inability to stand or walk.
• Also, CRISPR is just a platform; a tool to edit gene sequences. What is to be edited, and where, is different in different cases. Therefore, a specific solution needs to be devised for every disease or disorder that is to be corrected. The solutions could be specific to particular population or racial groups, since these are also dependent on genes.

 

Success in clinical trials:

• Over the last three years, several such solutions have been undergoing clinical trials. These mainly pertain to blood disorders, diabetes, inherited eye diseases, and some kinds of cancers.
• The case of Victoria Gray, suffering from sickle cell anaemia, who was in the first batch of patients who were treated using CRISPR-based solutions, has been widely tracked. Gray is now considered cured of the disease.
• In India, Debojyoti Chakraborty and SouvikMaiti at CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology have indigenously developed a CRISPR-based therapeutic solution for sickle cell anaemia, which is now being readied for clinical trials.
• Japan has already approved the commercial cultivation of a tomato variety that has been improved using CRISPR-based intervention. In India, several research groups are working on CRISPR-based enhancements for various crops including rice and banana.

 

The ethical dilemma:

• Because of CRISPR’s power to induce dramatic changes in an individual, scientists, including the main developer Doudna, have been warning of the potential for misuse of the technology.
• In 2018, a Chinese researcher disclosed that he had altered the genes of a human embryo to prevent the infection of HIV. This was the first documented case of creating a ‘designer baby’, and it caused widespread concern in the scientific community.
• Preventive interventions to obtain special traits is not something that scientists currently want the technology to be used for. Also, because the changes were made in the embryo itself, the new acquired traits were likely to be passed to future generations.

 

Conclusion:

• Though the technology is fairly accurate, it is not 100 per cent precise, and could induce a few errors as well, making changes in other genes. This has the possibility of being inherited by successive generations.
• In case of therapeutic interventions, the changes in genetic sequences remain with the individual and are not passed on to the offspring.