Whatsapp 93125-11015 For Details
The southwest monsoon has ended and the northeast monsoon is likely to set in “in the next 72 hours”, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
The onset of the northeast monsoon, also known as the ‘retreating monsoon’, would likely be “weak”, the agency added.
The southwest monsoon began its withdrawal from Rajasthan on September 25, nearly a week behind its normal date of September 17.
Though monsoon withdrawal begins from Rajasthan, it takes nearly until early to mid-October for it to fully withdraw and be replaced by the northeast monsoon. However, India officially only counts rainfall received from June 1 to September 30 as monsoon rainfall.
Editorial
The shape of climate justice in a warming India (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The G-20 summit that was held in Delhi (September 9-10) agreed on tripling renewable energy capacity and a voluntary doubling of the rate of energy efficiency improvement by 2030.
However, this Delhi Declaration on the climate question did not find consensus on the most contentious issue, which is the root cause of the climate crisis — of the phasing out of fossil fuels.
Any energy transition initiative must embrace two normative ideals: first, internalising cost requires those who emit greenhouse gases to pay the social and environmental costs.
Second, climate justice requires compensation for those who are harmed. Often, those who contribute to climate change are not the ones who are affected by it.
Therefore, any mitigation effort must invert this carbon injustice by making the richer countries or richer classes within a country pay for the energy transition.
While these two principles are articulated at the international level, how such policies and politics affect the domestic front do not get debated.
India’s stance on the matter has largely been framed through the lens of foreign policy and its approach to common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) in international negotiations, which allows developing countries in the global south to prioritise economic growth and development over climate mitigation.
Given the country’s historically lower emissions, focusing on economic growth has naturally taken precedence over climate concerns.
Such an approach evades concerns of climate justice within India, particularly its effect on inequality across levels class, caste and region.
An opportunity to recast India’s food system (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Earlier this week, we celebrated World Food Day (October 16), but we rarely look at food as a system. No country can better understand the challenges of a food system than India, which feeds the largest population in the world.
While the primary goal of a food system is to ensure nutrition security for all, it can only be achieved sustainably if the producers producing the food make reasonable economic returns that are resilient over time.
This resilience, in turn, is intricately linked with the resilience of our natural ecosystem because the largest inputs to agriculture — soil, water and climatic conditions — are all but natural resources.
Appreciating this interconnectedness of nutrition security with livelihood and environmental security is essential to making our food system truly sustainable.
On the nutrition front, India faces a double burden of malnutrition. At one end, despite making great progress over the years, a sizable proportion of Indians exhibit nutrient deficiencies.
As in the National Family Health Survey, 2019-21, 35% of children are stunted, and 57% of women and 25% of men are anaemic.
At the other end, due to imbalanced diets and sedentary lifestyles, 24% of adult women and 23% of adult men are now obese.
India has been stepping up efforts to reduce malnutrition, which has included even the Prime Minister calling for a mass movement to eradicate it.
Opinion
Are southern States being punished for their success? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
Tamil Nadu Finance Minister Thangam Thennarasu accused the Union government of showing a “step-motherly attitude” towards the State over devolution of funds. Around at the same time, at a media conclave, Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor spoke about the potential danger of political disenfranchisement in the south when the delimitation freeze ends in 2026.
These statements have brought the tussle over the distribution of Central taxes as well as the delimitation of constituencies to the fore.
The Finance Commission decides not only on how much should be devoted from the Centre to the States, but also on distribution of these proceeds among the States.
These are based on certain criteria, which work against the south. Inter-State distribution is based on two factors.
One, the State’s share in the total population; and two, the income distance ratio, that is, how far the State’s per capita income is higher or lower than the national average.
On both these counts, the south loses out. So, you have a situation where there has been a drastic decline in the share of resources distributed to the south.
For example, in the case of Kerala, it was 3.8% during the 10th Finance Commission; now, it is 1.9%. This decline has been accelerating over time.
I accept that in any federal system, inter-State transfers would have to have a component of equity. The richer States and regions will have to contribute to the development of the States which are backward because every citizen has a right to certain minimum uniform services.
But the redistributive transfers must be within certain limits. So, far the higher resource transfers to the backward States have not produced the expected improvement, either in the economy or in social welfare. This means that there is something else that you have to do in those States which are backward.
Text & Context
Why SLLs also need to be reformed (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
The recent tabling of Bills on criminal laws has become a causa celebre. In as much as they set overdue reforms into motion, the Bills do well to amend the substantive criminal law as codified in the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and Indian Evidence Act (IEA).
The offences and procedures outlined in the IPC or CrPC represent just one facet of a general criminal law and its vital to recognise that the most critical offences and procedures are encompassed within the Special and Local Laws (SLLs).
Keeping SLLs away from the ongoing reform process is a major drawback. SLLs have immense quantitative and qualitative relevance in the Indian criminal justice system.
To illustrate, nearly 39.9% of all cognisable offences registered in 2021 were under SLLs. As per the Crime in India Statistics of 2021, of the total of nearly 61 lakh cognisable offences registered, 24.3 lakh offences were registered under SLLs alone.
On the qualitative side, SLLs have given rise to several fundamental and pertinent debates, discourses and discussions regarding the limits on the state’s power of criminalisation especially in the context of violation of individual rights and liberties.
News
SC asks States to appoint officers under POSH Act (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
The Supreme Court realised that women found protection under a law against sexual harassment at the workplace beyond their reach for the simple reason that there was no one to go to with their complaints.
The Sexual Harassment of Women At Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, or POSH Act, of 2013 mandates the States to appoint an officer in every district.
In its 20-page judgment, a Bench headed by Justice S.R. Bhat found that many States had not bothered to notify District Officers.
“A District Officer is where the buck stops, so to say, in terms of coordination and accountability relating to the POSH Act,” Justice Bhat underscored.
The court ordered the Principal Secretaries of the Women and Child Ministries in the States to ensure appointment of a district officer in each district within their jurisdiction within four weeks from the date of this judgment.
Major regional disparity in overcoming cancer though survival rates are up: study (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Nearly 52% of patients diagnosed with cervical cancer between 2012 and 2015 survived, says a study published in The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia, based on data from the Population-Based Cancer Registries across India.
Various urban PBCRs from different regions of India were assessed to find the survival rates of cervical cancer patients and it found that there was significant variations in survival rates across these regions.
Among those that participated in the study, the Ahmedabad urban registry demonstrated the highest survival rate at 61.5%, followed by Thiruvananthapuram with 58.8% and Kollam at 56.1% and in contrast, Tripura reported a survival rate of 31.6%.
The study focused on a total of 5,591 cervical cancer cases diagnosed between 2012 and 2015 in 11 PBCRs. The overall survival rate for these cases was 52%, which marked a notable improvement of approximately 6% compared with the previous SurvCan survey-3, where the survival rate was recorded at 46%, the report stated.
World
‘China to work with Egypt to help stabilise West Asia’ (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Chinese President Xi Jinping told Egypt’s Prime Minister that their countries should work together to bring “more stability” to West Asia, as the Israel-Hamas war casts a shadow over the region.
The conflict has raged since Palestinian militant group Hamas launched shock raids into Israel on October 7, killing 1,400 people — most of them civilians — and taking around 200 hostages.
In response, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, carrying out waves of air strikes in the Palestinian enclave, enforcing a blockade and massing troops on its border ahead of an expected ground assault.
Top UN humanitarian official Martin Griffiths on Wednesday said the situation in Gaza was dire, with hospitals overwhelmed, more than 3,000 Gazans killed and 12,500 wounded.
China has repeatedly backed a vague two-state proposal on the decades-long deadlock that preceded the war, but it has historically been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause — albeit in favour of the nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation rather than Islamist Hamas.
Mr. Xi met Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouli in Beijing on Thursday, repeating China’s support for a “two-state solution... to realise the peaceful coexistence of Palestine and Israel”, according to multiple state media outlets.
China building its nuclear arsenal faster than previous estimates: U.S. (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
A Pentagon report on China’s military power says Beijing is exceeding previous projections of how quickly it is building up its nuclear weapons arsenal and is “almost certainly” learning lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine about what a conflict over Taiwan might look like.
The report released also warns that China may be pursuing a new intercontinental missile system using conventional arms that, if fielded, would allow Beijing “to threaten conventional strikes against targets in the continental United States, Hawaii and Alaska”.
The China report comes a month before an expected meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden on the sidelines of next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.
The annual report, required by Congress, is one way the Pentagon measures the growing military capabilities of China, which the U.S. government sees as its key threat in the region and America’s primary long-term security challenge.
The Pentagon’s national defence strategy is shaped around China remaining the greatest security challenge for the U.S., and that the threat from Beijing will determine how the U.S. military is equipped and shaped for the future.
Business
‘India’s share of growth to rise to 18%’ (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India’s contribution to global economic growth will rise by 2 percentage points in 5 years as the Indian economy is projected to grow faster in the coming years, a senior International Monetary Fund (IMF) official said.
“Currently China and India’s contribution to global growth is 50%,” said Krishna Srinivasan, Director, IMF, Asia & Pacific Department. “Out of this India’s is 16% and the rest by China. This 16% contribution from India will grow to 18% in the next five years as India is growing faster”.
Observing that the Asia Pacific region remained a relatively bright spot despite a challenging global environment, Mr. Srinivasan added that the region’s economy was expected to grow by 4.6% in 2023 and by 4.2% in 2024, putting it on track to contribute about two-thirds to global growth.
Growth in India remains strong,” he said. “We are projecting growth for FY2023/24 at 6.3% supported by strong government capital expenditure with some crowding in for private sector investment, along with continued consumption growth and despite weakening external demand,” he asserted.
Stating that India’s retail inflation was moderating he said, “after sharp increase in price in tomatoes and other vegetables in the summer, headline inflation has resumed its downward trend and has returned within the RBI’s tolerance band,” he added.
Science
Seeing the magic of AI applications in ophthalmology (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
We all know, by now, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that focuses on creating computer systems and software that can perform tasks like problem-solving, learning, reasoning, understanding natural language, and perceiving the environment.
The aim of AI is to develop systems that can mimic and replicate various aspects of human intelligence or cognitive functions, and thereby automate and enhance processes, make predictions, assist in decision-making, and improve the efficiency and capabilities of systems and devices.
There are certain aspects of artificial intelligence that make it particularly useful in medicine. For instance, AI can analyse data from sensors and predict when equipment or machinery will require maintenance, reducing downtime. This, as you can imagine, will be massively useful in hospitals and clinics, particularly in procedures and diagnostics, where we constantly use some form of machinery to treat patients.
Additionally, AI can be used, with machine learning, to analyse and interpret images and videos, making it useful in reading and coming up with interpretations of scans and other diagnostics, based on the data we have fed it already.
Already, robotics has been employed in precision surgery, with good outcomes, and faster recovery periods. AI is being used in commerce to tailor recommendations on social media, and it is to be seen whether this application might assist in patient care too.
A draft menstrual hygiene policy is finally out (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
While the debate about whether menstrual leave must be given or not occupied space, time and effort, more recently, traditionally, menstrual hygiene or the access or affordability of menstrual products and private and clean toilets have not been the flavour of any season.
The Centre’s Menstrual Hygeine Policy that was recently hosted online for comments from the public and experts seems to remedy that.
The Menstrual Hygiene Policy officially aims at addressing the long-standing challenges associated with menstruation in our country.
The document records: “Historically, this biological phenomenon has been overlooked, resulting in negative impact on girls, women, families and the environment.
With time, awareness has increased, but we need more investment to comprehensively address the diverse requirements of all individuals who menstruate.
India, with its vast and diverse population, acknowledges the critical importance of this issue and places great emphasis on framing a comprehensive menstrual hygiene policy.
This policy is essential for effectively addressing the needs of all who menstruate and promote a positive transformation within our society.”