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Ten security personnel returning from a counter-insurgency operation and a civilian driver were killed when the vehicle they were travelling in was blown up by Maoists, in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada, according to State police.
Acting on a tip-off about Maoist presence in the area, an operation was conducted by the Deputy Inspector General. As they were returning to the Dantewada headquarters, the team was targeted by the Maoists,” said Inspector General of Police (Bastar Range) Sundarraj P., adding that the incident took place on the Aranpur road. Dantewada headquarters is in the Bastar region, nearly 350 km from the State capital of Raipur.
Reinforcements of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and District Reserve Guard (DRG) have been sent to the spot. Search operations are underway and senior officials are there. The process of removing the bodies of the slain personnel is underway.
A senior government official said that the attack took place around 1.5 km from a police station and a CRPF security camp. After blowing up the vehicle with an IED [improvised explosive device], the Maoists exchanged fire with other policemen who were part of the convoy. There were two other vehicles following the affected vehicle. The Maoists managed to flee.
It is not clear when the IED was laid, either at the time of construction or later. It was packed with over 50 kg of explosives. It also remains unclear why a civilian was driving the vehicle full of policemen, or whether the vehicle was a private civilian one, and if so, under what circumstances they boarded it.
The deceased jawans were members of the District Reserve Guard, a locally-raised force designed to carry out anti-Maoist operations.
With this incident, the number of security forces killed by Maoists in Chhattisgarh in the first four months this year has touched at least 17, almost twice the nine casualties reported in 2022.
States
SC modifies order on ESZ around protected forests (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The Supreme Court, modified its judgment to have mandatory eco-sensitive zones (ESZ) of a minimum one kilometre around protected forests, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries across the country.
A Bench led by Justice B.R. Gavai reasoned that ESZ cannot be uniform across the country and has to be “protected area-specific”.
However, the Centre and several States, including Kerala, had returned to the apex court seeking modification of the June 2022 judgment, saying the judicial direction affected hundreds of villages in the peripheries of forests.
Agreeing, the court said “the purpose of declaring ESZs is not to hamper the day-to-day activities of the citizens. If the direction as issued is continued, it would certainly hamper the day-to-day activities of the citizens residing in ESZs. As such, we find that the direction needs to be modified”.
The court said a stringent observance of the June 2022 judgment would cause more harm than good. For one, man-animal conflict would only increase rather than abate.
It will be impossible for forest departments to conduct eco-development activities around national parks and sanctuaries… Centrally sponsored Scheme-Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats, which includes assistance for eco-development activities, would come to a standstill.
It would also affect certain projects of national and strategic importance such as construction of national highways, railways, defence-related infrastructure, etc.
However, the court made it clear that “mining within the national park and wildlife sanctuary and within an area of one kilometre from the boundary of such national park and wildlife sanctuary shall not be permissible”.
Editorial
The challenge of reviving a sense of fraternity (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The Constitution of India was drafted by the Constituent Assembly. The idea was initially proposed in December 1934 by M.N. Roy, a pioneer of the Communist movement in India and an advocate of radical democracy.
It became an official demand of the Indian National Congress in 1935 and was officially adopted in the Lucknow session in April 1936 presided by Jawaharlal Nehru, who also drafted the Objectives Resolution.
The proceedings of the Constituent Assembly show the richness of ideas that characterised it. The Drafting Committee was presided over by B.R. Ambedkar.
In the concluding session of the Committee, on November 25, 1949, B.R. Ambedkar drew attention to a lacuna in the draft. “The second thing we are wanting in is recognition of the principle of fraternity.
Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians — if Indians being one people. It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life. It is a difficult thing to achieve.
Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint’; that fraternity has been most forgotten in our Constitution and in our electoral process, that in turn are reproduced in our hearts and homes.
The idea of fraternity is closely linked to that of social solidarity, which is impossible to accomplish without public empathy.
So along with liberty, equality and justice, fraternity was added to the principles in the Preamble. There was little discussion nor was it sufficiently clarified that a sense of fraternity enriches and strengthens the gains emanating from the other three.
Those in the audience familiar with the history of the French Revolution might have recalled with some disquiet the message of the 1792 Edict of Fraternity (‘All governments are our enemies, all people our friends’).
Democracy will be made into autocracy and it will be made into imperialism, and it will be made into fascism. But as a moral principle, it must be lived in life. It is not lived in life, and the whole of it in all its departments, it becomes only a formal and a legal principle.
Virtual digital assets, India’s stand and the way ahead (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
Rulemaking is an arduous task. Oftentimes, the words in a gazette take a form of their own in the real world, diverging from the intent. This can be particularly challenging in the case of emerging technologies, where change is rapid and constant.
Consider the infamous Red Flag Act the United Kingdom introduced at the advent of motorcars. It mandated that every motorcar had to have three “drivers”: one at the wheel, the second, a fellow passenger, and the third, on foot, holding a red flag to alert oncoming horse-drawn carriages.
Ostensibly established in the interest of safety, the Act only ended up strengthening the motorcar industry elsewhere in Europe. It was ultimately repealed in 1896, clearing the path for the golden era of the British motorcar industry and icons such as Rolls-Royce.
The advent of new technologies, in fact, often evokes Red Flag Acts of their own. History is replete with many such laws — from the Internet to mobile phones, innovations were often curtailed. Today, there are calls for the prohibition of artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies.
It is, therefore, heartening to see India taking a measured approach to regulating virtual digital assets. A prominent, and far-reaching, update has been India’s recent notification extending the anti-money laundering provisions to virtual digital assets businesses and service providers.
On March 7, the Union Finance Ministry, in a gazette notification, extended these activities under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Act of 2002: exchange between virtual digital assets and fiat currencies; exchange between one or more forms of virtual digital assets; transfer of virtual digital assets; safekeeping or administration of virtual digital assets or instruments enabling control over virtual digital assets; and participation in and provision of financial services related to an issuer’s offer and sale of a virtual digital asset.
This means virtual digital assets platforms carrying out the said activities will now have to register as a reporting entity with the Financial Intelligence Unit-India.
The unit is the national agency to strengthen India’s efforts against money laundering and terror financing. Reporting entity platforms such as CoinSwitch are now mandated to implement know your customer, record and monitor all transactions, and report to the Financial Intelligence Unit-India as and when any suspicious activity is detected.
Opinion
The third-gen web is about public good (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
There is a pervasive notion that the third-generation web is biased towards the gaming and cryptocurrency industry. However, a 2021 report by the U.S.- India Strategic Partnership Forum states that the third-gen web will be crucial for India to realise its $1.1 trillion digital asset opportunity by 2032.
From a policy perspective, the next-gen web is complex. Part of the problem lies with the diverse descriptors employed by experts. Also, the web’s immense social relevance is hard to comprehend.
Some experts term the third-gen web as ‘Web3’, while others use the descriptor ‘Web 3.0’. For web-tech buffs, Web3 is decentralised, privacy-oriented, blockchain-driven and crypto-asset friendly; while Web 3.0 upholds the property of the ‘semantic web,’ which is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The real point about the semantic web is its ability to recombine information available on different websites to generate new content and knowledge resources that are more authentic and creative.
Followers of Web 3.0 claim that their version is endowed with robust capability on the data analytics front. This way, it is argued that Web 3.0 will create far better search engines.
Of the two variants, Web3 seeks to radically transform the manner in which data is generated, monetised, shared and circulated.
Further, it advocates decentralised data storage systems with the objective of unshackling the oligopolistic grip of technology behemoths over data.
Web3 has file-sharing systems such as the Inter-Planetary File System which are cryptographically protected, more secure and capable of functioning off Internet and off blockchains. In this manner, Web3 seeks to overcome the data storage barriers of blockchains.
Web3’s boldest element is the strategic role it assigns to non- custodial wallets that function as digital passports for users to access blockchain-enabled transaction platforms.
These wallets aid the creation of a ‘ownership economy,’ whereby creators themselves control their content. Fundamentally, they work as the digital proof of identity.
Web3 seeks to replace micro-economic organisations with decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). At a more macro level, it seeks to create a distributed economic system, where special classes of native digital tokens and cryptocurrencies would form the media of monetary circulation. In general, Web3 platforms would serve to raise the efficiency of peer-to-peer transactions.
Text & Context
The ambiguities in the nuclear liability law (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
The issues regarding India’s nuclear liability law continue to hold up the more than a decade-old plan to build six nuclear power reactors in Maharashtra’s Jaitapur, the world’s biggest nuclear power generation site under consideration at present.
An official at the French energy company Electricite de France (EDF), which submitted its techno-commercial offer for the construction of the 9,900 MW project two years ago, that the issues arising out of the liability law “would have to be solved before any contract” could be signed with India.
Laws on civil nuclear liability ensure that compensation is available to the victims for nuclear damage caused by a nuclear incident or disaster and set out who will be liable for those damages.
The international nuclear liability regime consists of multiple treaties and was strengthened after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The umbrella Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC) was adopted in 1997 with the aim of establishing a minimum national compensation amount.
The amount can further be increased through public funds, (to be made available by the contracting parties), should the national amount be insufficient to compensate the damage caused by a nuclear incident.
Even though India was a signatory to the CSC, Parliament ratified the convention only in 2016. To keep in line with the international convention, India enacted the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA) in 2010, to put in place a speedy compensation mechanism for victims of a nuclear accident.
The CLNDA provides for strict and no-fault liability on the operator of the nuclear plant, where it will be held liable for damage regardless of any fault on its part.
It also specifies the amount the operator will have to shell out in case of damage caused by an accident at ₹1,500 crore and requires the operator to cover liability through insurance or other financial security.
In case the damage claims exceed ₹1,500 crore, the CLNDA expects the government to step in and has limited the government liability amount to the rupee equivalent of 300 million Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) or about ₹2,100 to ₹2,300 crore.
The Act also specifies the limitations on the amount and time when action for compensation can be brought against the operator.
India currently has 22 nuclear reactors with over a dozen more projects planned. All the existing reactors are operated by the state-owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL).
The international legal framework on civil nuclear liability, including the annex of the CSC is based on the central principle of exclusive liability of the operator of a nuclear installation and no other person.
News
India intends to make healthcare affordable for whole world: Modi (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
India’s goal is to make healthcare accessible and affordable, not only for our citizens but for the whole world,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his video message following the inauguration the 6th Edition of One Earth One Health – Advantage Healthcare India 2023 meet.
He said that India’s traditional healthcare systems held a lot of answers to stress and lifestyle diseases and called for an integrated, inclusive and institutional global response to healthcare challenges.
The COVID-pandemic showed that borders cannot stop threats to health in a deeply-connected world. The once-in-a-century pandemic reminded the world of a number of truths. It showed us that in a deeply connected world, borders cannot stop threats to health,’’ he said adding that true progress was people-centric.
Stating that no matter how many advances were made in medical science, access must be assured to the last person at the last mile, the Prime Minister said that India was proud to have been a partner to many nations in the noble mission of saving lives through vaccines and medicines.
Mr. Modi said that the lack of illness was often equated with good health but India’s view of health did not stop at lack of illness. Being free of diseases was just a stage on the way to wellness and our goal was wellness and welfare for everyone.
Our goal was physical, mental and social well-being, he said. “When it comes to holistic healthcare, India has many important strengths like talent, technology, track record and tradition.
The world has seen the impact of Indian doctors as they are widely respected for their competence and commitment,’’ he said, lauding the services of the country’s nurses and other caregivers.
Meanwhile, Health Ministers of several countries besides delegates from West Asia, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation countries, Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African region are participating in the two-day conclave that began. Additionally stakeholders from public and private sectors, from professional and academic domains are also participating.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in association with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry has co-branded the 6th edition of One Earth One Health - Advantage Healthcare India 2023 with India’s G20 Presidency.
The event will emphasise the importance of global collaborations and partnerships for building resilient global health architecture and working towards achieving Universal Health Coverage through value-based healthcare, according to a release issued by the Health Ministry.
Business
Only half of PMJDY insurance claims settled in two years (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
In the last two financial years, only 329 claims for accident insurance cover provided to bank account holders under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) have been settled out of the 647 claims that were filed.
This information was revealed in a reply to an RTI (Right to Information) application filed by activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur. In August 2014, while launching the Jan Dhan Yojana which was hailed as an unprecedented step for financial inclusion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also announced accident cover for the account holders.
The accident insurance cover for death or permanent disability is extended to all the 48.65 crore account holders, out of which more than 50% are women. No premium is charged from account holders.
Under the PMJDY, a RuPay debit card is provided to account holders. The key condition to avail the accident insurance is that the beneficiary must have performed at least one successful transaction (financial or non-financial) using the card in the 90 days prior to date of accident. This condition can make filing claims difficult.
In financial year 2021-22, 341 claims were received, of which 182 were settled and 48 rejected. No details about the remaining 111 cases was provided by the Union Ministry of Finance. The total claim amount paid for the period was ₹2.27 crore.
In financial year 2022-23, 306 claims were received, of which 147 were settled and 10 rejected. Again no information was shared on the status of the remaining 149 claims. The total claim payout for the year was ₹1.88 crore.
Mr. Modi had first announced his government’s intention to offer zero balance accounts to the “unbanked” in his first Independence day address as Prime Minister in 2014 and he had formally launched the project on August 28 the same year.
Originally, an accident insurance cover of ₹1 lakh was offered and later enhanced to ₹2 lakh for new accounts opened after August 28, 2018.
In the original scheme, the government had also announced a life insurance cover of ₹30,000 to the PMJDY account holders. But the government’s reply to the RTI query stated that this facility had been discontinued since March 2020.
As of March 2023, these 48.65 crore PMJDY bank accounts have a total deposit of ₹1,98,844.34 crore. But 4.03 crore of these accounts hold zero balance.