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India is set to overtake China to become the world’s most populous country by the middle of 2023, according to data released by the United Nations.
India’s population is pegged to reach 142.86 crore against China’s 142.57 crore. This shows India will have 29 lakh more people than its Asian neighbour.
The United States is a distant third, with an estimated population of 34 crore, the data by the State of World Population Report, 2023 of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) showed.
The world’s population hit the 800-crore mark in November 2022.
The report says that contrary to the alarm bells about exploding numbers, population trends everywhere point to slower growth and ageing societies.
Just eight countries will account for half the projected growth in global population by 2050 — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania — while two-thirds of people now live in a country where lifetime fertility corresponds with zero growth.
At a time when there have been increasing calls for imposing a two-child norm in India by various political leaders, and some States such as Assam have issued an order in 2021 to bar those with more than two children from government jobs, the UN agency said its findings for India too had suggested that “population anxieties have seeped into large portions of the general public”.
It called for a radical rethink on how countries address changing demographies and cautioned against use of family planning as a tool for achieving fertility targets.
Global experience showed that family planning targets can lead to gender-based discrimination and harmful practices such as prenatal sex determination leading to sex-selective abortion, it says.
Editorial
It is a new assault on India’s liberty (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
On April 6, 2023, the Union government introduced a new set of measures with a view to crushing fake news and misinformation on the Internet.
These introductions came through an amendment made to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, or IT Rules.
The amendment grants to the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) unbridled power to create a “fact check unit”, which will identify false or misleading online content that concerns the central government’s business in any manner.
Should social media intermediaries fail to prevent users from hosting or publishing information that have been flagged as false by the fact check unit, they stand to lose their “safe harbour” immunity. In other words, any protection that online platforms might have enjoyed against criminal prosecution will be withdrawn.
The upshot of the new regulation is this: the Union government gets to decide for itself what information is bogus and gets to exercise wide-ranging powers of censorship by compelling intermediaries to take down posts deemed fake or false.
In a democracy, where information is free, and where the right to freedom of speech is constitutionally guaranteed, the new law must strike us as deeply abhorrent.
The IT Rules derive their authority from the Information Technology Act, 2000, a law which, at its inception, was meant to provide “legal recognition” for electronic commerce.
Through section 79, the Act provides a “safe harbour”, by granting immunity to intermediaries, so long as these entities observe “due diligence” in discharging their duties under the law, and so long as they follow other guidelines prescribed by the state.
An intermediary under the law refers to any person who receives, stores, or transmits electronic records — it would include Internet service providers, search engines, and social media platforms. For example, WhatsApp, Signal, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all what the law construes as intermediaries.
India-UAE cooperation to sow regional food security (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose food security has been built on imports from global markets, is now focusing on the twin objectives of food access and readiness to confront supply chain crises.
India, the world’s second-largest food producer, is an essential partner in the UAE’s ambition to strengthen food security. The India-UAE food security partnership stands to benefit from multiple points of convergence.
India has built its status as a global agri-export powerhouse using its vast tracts of arable land, a highly favourable climate, and a large and growing food production and processing sector.
Along with serving global markets with its diversified agri-produce, India has, in recent years, acted as a humanitarian provider of food to developing countries, demonstrating awareness of its evolving role in advancing regional and global food security.
India has also made major budgetary outlays towards setting up massive food parks, with due emphasis on modern supply chain management spanning farm gate to retail outlet.
These investments, complemented by how India has placed its food sector to benefit from bilateral trade agreements, reflect the country’s strong and sustained intent to make the most of its agri-capabilities in the global food marketplace.
In parallel, India runs the Public Distribution System, the world’s largest food subsidy programme, providing nearly 800 million citizens with subsidised grains, providing its people with the reassurance of daily, affordable meals.
Equally laudable is India’s ‘Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition (POSHAN) Abhiyaan’, the world’s largest nutrition programme for children and women.
As a part of its G-20 presidency, India is promoting the consumption and farming of millets — nutritious, drought-resistant, sustainable, crops — that demonstrate the resilience focus that India offers to the global food security dialogue.
In the realm of food security, India’s G-20 presidency seeks to address the three Cs, of “Covid, Conflict, and Climate” (to borrow from India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s address last year), issues pernicious to food security in India and across the globe.
Text & Context
Why is a star-planet pair emitting radio signals? (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Space)
An alien world called YZ Ceti b has suddenly become the cynosure of astronomers. YZ Ceti b is a rocky, earth-sized exoplanet rotating around a small red dwarf star, YZ Ceti, barely 12 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers have detected a repeating radio signal from this exoplanet, suggesting the presence of a magnetic field — one of the prerequisites for a habitable planet — around it.
The discovery was made by Jackie Villadsen from Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, and Sebastian Pineda from the University of Colorado, Boulder, using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. They published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy on April 3.
They had to make multiple observations before they could detect the radio signals from the star YZ Ceti, which seemed to match the orbital period of the planet YZ Ceti b. From this, they deduced that the signals were a result of the interaction between the planet’s magnetic field and the star.
Just as energy surges from the sun sometimes disrupt telecommunications on earth and damage orbiting satellites, intense bursts of energy from the YZ Ceti star-exoplanet exchange produce spectacular auroral lights. “We get to see this indirectly in the form of the radio emission we receive,” Dr. Pineda said.
These radio waves, strong enough to be picked up on earth, confirmed the existence of an exoplanetary magnetic field. Such signals can only be produced if the exoplanet orbits very close to its parent star and has its own magnetic field to influence the stellar wind and generate the signals.
YZ Ceti b has a small orbit — astronomers determined that the planet takes just a couple of earth-days to circle its star. Since the mid-1990s, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars similar to the sun.
To have an atmosphere and sustain water, a planet has to be at a certain distance from its star (in orbits said to be in the star’s “Goldilocks zone”), or it will get burnt. Earth, for example, would have been a lot more like Venus if it had been just a little closer to the sun or cold like Mars if it had been any farther. Astronomers believe nearly 30% of all star systems discovered could potentially have “Goldilocks zones”.
News
Union Cabinet gives nod for ₹6,003 crore Quantum Mission (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the ₹6,003 crore National Quantum Mission (NQM) that will fund research and development of quantum computing technology and associated applications.
Quantum computers are a work in progress globally and exploit properties of the atom, which are only explainable by the principles of quantum mechanics.
The promise is a reliable class of computers that work several times faster than the speediest machines of today and also facilitate exponentially secure communication networks, with wide applications.
The plan involves developing “intermediate scale” quantum computers with 20-50 physical ‘qubits’ in three years, 50-100 physical qubits in five years and 50-1,000 physical qubits in eight years. Just like bits (1 and 0) are the basic units by which computers process information, ‘qubits’ or ‘quantum bits’ are the units of process by quantum computers.
The mission will help develop magnetometers with high sensitivity in atomic systems, atomic clocks for precision timing, communications and navigation.
Fabrication of quantum materials such as superconductors, novel semiconductor structures, and topological materials for fabrication of quantum devices.
“Four Thematic Hubs (T-Hubs) would be set up in top academic and National R&D institutes on the domains of ‘quantum computing’, ‘quantum communication’, ‘quantum sensing and metrology’ and ‘quantum materials and devices’.
The hubs will focus on the generation of new knowledge through basic and applied research as well as promote R&D in areas that are mandated to them,” Science Minister Jitendra Singh said on Wednesday, explaining the policy.