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Aditya-L1, India’s first space-based observatory to study the sun, will be launched on September 2, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
According to ISRO, the spacecraft will be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the earth.
It is expected to take over 120 days for the spacecraft to reach the L1.
The mission profile of Aditya-L1 states that “a satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the sun without any occultation/eclipses.
This will provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time.
The spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the sun”.
‘Article 35A denied many their rights’ (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud said Article 35A, which empowered the Jammu and Kashmir Legislature to define “permanent residents” of the State and provide them special privileges, denied fundamental rights to others.
Article 35A gave special rights and privileges to permanent residents and virtually took away the rights for non-residents. These rights included the right to equal opportunity of State employment, right to acquire property and the right to settle in Jammu and Kashmir,” Chief Justice Chandrachud, heading a Constitution Bench.
Addressing Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, the Chief Justice, however, asked whether the Centre had adhered to the principle of federalism while abrogating Article 370 and abolishing J&K as a full-fledged State.
The Chief Justice said the abrogation was facilitated by first dissolving the J&K State Legislature and then proclaiming President’s Rule under Article 356 on the ground of breakdown of constitutional machinery in the State.
He pointed to the proviso to Article 3, which made it mandatory for the President to consult the State Legislature before altering the status of a State.
The proclamation of President’s Rule in December 2018 had done away with the applicability of the proviso. “But the Parliament assumed the role of the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislature,” the Solicitor-General insisted.
Editorial
At Delhi summit, demonstrate climate leadership (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The G-20 members emit most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and produce the bulk of its fossil fuels. But, most of them have also pledged to be “net-zero”, cutting back on emissions and fossil fuel use.
It is time for the G-20 to act as a united group that drives its own collective climate ambition through collaboration, coordination and competition.
The G-20 summit in New Delhi (September 9-10) is a crucial moment to show leadership ahead of the UN Secretary General’s Climate Ambition Summit and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP28.
Recently, G-20 members have shown a degree of commitment to shift towards clean energy: renewable energy sources provided 29% of their energy mix in 2021, an increase from 19% in 2010.
India has made significant steps in the last decade to become the world’s third largest producer of renewable energy and setting targets to continue the expansion of installed renewables to account for 50% of energy production by 2030.
But, governments need to create a bigger shift as demand increases and the world’s carbon budget is shrinking faster than previously thought.
Old ties (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Speaking after a bilateral meeting with Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted that India-Greece bilateral relations have neither been “diminished” nor has the warmth decreased despite no Indian Prime Minister having visited Greece since 1983.
However, the absence of high-level contact has meant a lack of close strategic ties in the way India has with other nearby countries in Europe such as France, Spain, Italy and Cyprus.
To that end, Mr. Modi’s visit, which came shortly after Mr. Mitsotakis’s re-election in June, sought to leap-frog ties. India and Greece agreed to establish a “Strategic Partnership” and announced plans for a dialogue mechanism between their National Security Advisers apart from plans for a skilled migration and mobility partnership, as well as cooperation to complete negotiations for the India-European Union (EU) Free Trade Negotiation on Connectivity partnership.
While connectivity between the two countries was forged by Alexander’s invasion in 326 BCE, exchanges now have been mainly predicated on tourism, trade (about $2 billion) and migration of labour, without a more comprehensive bilateral strategy at play.
Speaking to the Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, Mr. Modi hoped that India’s ambition to become a global manufacturing hub could now be melded with Greece’s aspirations to become an “economic gateway” to the EU.
In addition, India and Greece, once plundered by colonial powers, have also held discussions on the restoration of artefacts.
They may find common cause in pushing legislation through UNESCO to help restore some of their historical property.
Opinion
India needs comprehensive sexuality education (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, Social Justice)
Earlier this month, a man and his minor son were arrested for sexually abusing a five-year-old girl, who was related to them, over six months.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 51,863 cases were reported under The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in 2021; of them, 33,348 or 64% were of sexual assault.
How do we prevent child abuse? An effective approach would be comprehensive sexuality education, which, according to the United Nations (UN), is a curriculum-based process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality.
Several State governments and certain sections of society in India have adopted an ostrich-like approach to comprehensive sexuality education.
Claiming that it sexualises children, they have either watered down the existing programmes or withdrawn them on the grounds that they violate “Indian values”.
Traditional values are often shaped by patriarchal and hierarchical social structures. Mass media often propagates such values. All this negatively affects young adults of all genders.
In the context of POCSO cases, the Madras, Delhi, and Meghalaya High Courts along with the Chief Justice of India have highlighted the frequent criminalisation of consensual adolescent relationships and have asked the government to consider reducing the age of consent.
Explainer
Why was the WFI suspended by United World Wrestling? (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)
In the backdrop of the wrestlers’ protest over various issues, United World Wrestling (UWW), the world governing body for the sport, has provisionally suspended the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) primarily for not conducting its elections on time.
As per the UWW letter to the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) appointed ad-hoc committee, which is running the WFI in the absence of an elected body, “wrestlers and their support personnel (individuals with a high-performance, medical or technical role such as coaches, assistant coach, sport physicians or masseur) remain authorised to participate in all UWW sanctioned events (that is all events on the UWW calendar), however they shall do so under the UWW flag.”
This means that Indian wrestlers cannot compete under the national flag in UWW events, including the World championships in Belgrade in September. No national anthem will be played if an Indian wrestler wins a gold medal.
As some prominent wrestlers — including Olympic medalists Bajrang Punia and Sakshi Malik and World championship medallist Vinesh Phogat — brought allegations of sexual harassment, intimidation, financial irregularities and administrative lapse against the then WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and others and sat in protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in January, the Union Sports Ministry asked the federation chief to step aside until an M.C. Mary Kom-headed Oversight Committee (OC) completed its enquiry.
After the enquiry, even though the OC report was not made public, the WFI on April 16 announced that its elections, which were due in February, would be held on May 7. The wrestlers then returned to the protest site and demanded the arrest of former WFI president.
News media versus OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
A group of news media organisations,, recently shut off OpenAI’s ability to access their content. The development comes in the wake of reports that The New York Times is planning on suing the artificial intelligence (AI) research company over copyright violations, which would represent a considerable escalation in tensions between media companies and the leading creator of generative artificial intelligence solutions.
The company is best known for creating ‘ChatGPT’, which is an AI conversational chatbot. Users can ask questions on just about anything, and ChatGPT will respond pretty accurately with answers, stories and essays.
It can even help programmers write software code. The hype around ChatGPT — specifically, the breathtaking advancements in the field of AI required to create it — has propelled OpenAI into becoming a $30 billion company.
Software products like ChatGPT are based on what AI researchers call ‘large language models’ (LLMs). These models require enormous amounts of information to train their systems.
If chat bots or digital assistants need to be able to understand the questions that humans throw at them, they need to study human language patterns.
Tech companies that work on LLMs like Google, Meta or Open AI are secretive about what kind of training data they use. But it’s clear that online content found across the Internet, such as social media posts, news articles, Wikipedia, e-books, form a significant part of the dataset used to train ChatGPT and other similar products.
This data is put together by scraping it off the Internet. Tech companies use software called ‘crawlers’ to scan web pages, hoover up content and put it together in a dataset that can be used to train their LLMs.
News
China releases new map showing territorial claims (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The Chinese government on Monday released the “2023 edition of the standard map of China”, which continues to show the entire State of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin region within China’s borders.
The 2023 map was released by the Ministry of Natural Resources. The territorial claims on China’s western borders, as also the so-called nine-dash line covering the entire South China Sea, are shown on the map as in previous editions. Also as in previous maps, a “tenth dash” is placed east of Taiwan, underlining Beijing’s claims over the island.
The latest map follows Beijing’s announcement in April that it would “standardise” the names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, including a town close to the Arunachal Pradesh capital of Itanagar.
This was the third such list “renaming” places in Arunachal Pradesh, and was seen by observers as a response to India holding events in the lead-up to the G-20 summit in the State, which Beijing had opposed. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to attend the summit in New Delhi on September 9 and 10.
The 2023 map, state media reported, was released during what is being called the “National Mapping Awareness Publicity Week” in China.
Following the release of the standard map for public use, the Ministry of Natural Resources will also release “digital maps and navigation and positioning” for use in various fields including “location-based services, precision agriculture, platform economy and intelligent connected vehicles”, the report said.
Bihar caste survey case: Centre tells SC that only it is entitled to conduct census (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
The Union government said only it is entitled to conduct a census, in its reply to the Supreme Court on the Bihar government’s caste-based survey.
Census is a statutory process and is governed by the Census Act, 1948. The subject of census is covered on the Union List under Entry 69 in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution,” the Office of the Registrar-General, Home Ministry, said in a two-page affidavit.
The Centre had filed an affidavit earlier on Monday which said in its penultimate paragraph that “no other body is entitled to conduct the exercise of either census or any action akin to census”.
The paragraph was later purged in a revised affidavit. The revision is significant as the Bihar government has argued that its action is not strictly a census but only a survey done for the welfare of its people.
The affidavit said the Centre is “committed to take all affirmative actions for the upliftment of SCs/STs/SEBCs and OBCs in accordance with the Constitution”. The Ministry said the affidavit was only meant to state the position in law before the top court.
Earlier, the Supreme Court had refused to stay the uploading of data collected in the recently concluded Bihar caste-based survey while debunking claims that the Nitish Kumar government had violated the fundamental right to privacy by compelling people to reveal their caste.
World
France to ban wearing abayas in schools: Minister (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
French authorities are to ban the wearing of abaya dresses in school, the country’s Education Minister said on Sunday, arguing that it violated France’s strict secular laws in education. Abaya is worn by some Muslim women.
The move comes after months of debate over the wearing of abayas in French schools, where women have long been banned from wearing the hijab.
The right and far-right had pushed for the ban, which the left argued would encroach on civil liberties. There have been reports of abayas being increasingly worn in schools and tensions within school over the issue between teachers and parents.
Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,” Mr. Attal said, describing the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must constitute.
You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them. A law of March 2004 banned “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly show a religious affiliation” in schools. This includes large crosses, kippas and hijabs.
Japan PM condemns China over events of stone throwing at embassy, schools (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Japan’s Prime Minister urged China to ensure its people “act in a calm and responsible manner” after instances of stones being thrown at diplomatic missions and schools, following the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Last week, China banned all seafood imports from its neighbour as Japan began releasing cooling water from the Fukushima plant in an operation that Tokyo and the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog have said is safe.
Since then, Japan has urged its citizens in China to keep a low profile and has increased security around schools and diplomatic missions. Businesses in Japan have meanwhile been swamped with nuisance calls from Chinese numbers.
There have been numerous harassment calls believed to originate from China and instances of stones being thrown at the Japanese embassy and Japanese schools. It must be said these are regrettable.
We summoned the Chinese Ambassador to Japan today and strongly urged him to call on Chinese people to act in a calm and responsible manner.
Asked what action Beijing would take over the stone throwing, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Monday that China “always protects the safety and legitimate rights and interests of foreigners in China”.
Business
‘Population growth not a panacea’ (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India’s population growth would raise its labour force availability but that alone won’t be enough to make the economy stronger or improve fiscal outcomes, due to the quality of education in the country.
Emphasising that better educational outcomes will help countries like India avoid potential job losses from digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence in the long run, especially in services like call centres and BPOs.
In a report titled ‘Population growth alone will not drive credit benefits for emerging economies’, the rating major said it expects continued population growth in the region to support economic expansion as working-age populations will remain large compared with younger and older citizens.
However, the availability and scale of labour inputs alone will not drive materially stronger economic strength or better fiscal outcomes. Other conditions such as strong education and quality infrastructure are also key to reaping the benefits,” it noted.
There remains a considerable gap in the quality of education between Pakistan, Bangladesh and India compared with China and other peers in South East Asia, which contributes to labour force participation imbalances.