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Editorial
‘The order of this court has to be followed. I am concerned about the dignity of our court. If someone feels that this was a stricture passed by a local court against a government servant, they are mistaken.’
These are the words of the Chief Justice of India, who felt despair over the inaction by the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker with respect to the disqualification petitions of its members that has been pending before him since July 2022.
As the presiding officer of the Lok Sabha at the Centre and the Legislative Assembly in the States, the Speaker is required to act in an impartial manner. However, the functioning of this institution over the years in India has left much to be desired.
The office of the Speaker emerged in medieval Britain, when the House of Commons needed a spokesman in their dealings with the King. Until the 17th century, the Speaker was often seen as an agent of the Crown.
However, since the middle of the 19th century, the Speaker has been considered to be an impartial Chairman of the House of Commons. They are the custodians of the rights and privileges of the House, its committees and its members.
Under the Indian Constitution, the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies elect two of its members to be the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, respectively.
Apart from the traditional roles with respect to the conduct of business, the Speakers perform two important functions: of certifying a Bill to be a Money Bill (over which the Rajya Sabha/Legislative Council have a limited role), and deciding on disqualification under the Tenth Schedule for defection.
Time and change (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constitution)
A parliamentary committee appears to be quite close to finalising its report on the three Bills seeking to replace the existing criminal laws.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs has postponed the adoption of the draft report, following demands from Opposition members that they be given more time to study it.
The report is said to have at least three dissenting notes, mainly pertaining to the text of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which will replace the Indian Penal Code and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which will come in the place of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
There appears to be unanimity on the third Bill, the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill, the one in lieu of the Indian Evidence Act. Having begun its deliberations only on August 24, and having held only 12 sittings, there may be questions about the adequacy of the scrutiny.
The whole point of introducing these new criminal codes was to bring about a major overhaul of a body of law deemed to be too colonial in orientation.
Any meaningful study of these Bills ought to have involved wide consultations among stakeholders across the country.
Ideally, the panel should hold sittings across the country and listen to lawyers and activists on the details of the various sections, besides members of the subordinate judiciary who actually work the law and procedure laid down in the codes.
Opinion
An unfolding economic tragedy (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
A reflexive cheer of India as the fastest-growing major economy rang out when the National Statistics Office (NSO) announced in late August that GDP had increased in the April-June quarter at an annual rate of 7.8%.
The most euphoric cheerleaders predicted growth to accelerate to 8%. Even conservative forecasters routinely project GDP growth between 6% and 7%.
This GDP-centric framing of alleged Indian economic success is wrong-headed. GDP is a flawed metric of national economic welfare.
It hides inequalities and deflects attention from acute job scarcity, poor education and health, unlivable cities, a broken judicial system, and environmental damage.
Feverish celebrations of India’s large but unequally distributed GDP hide the struggles of large numbers of people; large GDP is not purchasing power.
For India, ‘fastest-growing’ growing GDP should be a trivial achievement. Just as a 10-year-old child gains height more rapidly than a 20-year-old adult, India as the poorest of the major economies should grow fastest.
Embarrassingly, it has failed to consistently do so. In fact, contrary to the hype, GDP growth has slowed sharply over the past two decades. The problem has been weak mass demand.
Text & Context
What has caused the recent thaw in U.S.-Venezuela ties? (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Maria Corina Machado has won a huge victory in the October 22 Venezuelan opposition primary. The Biden administration, just days earlier, had agreed to ease years-long brutal sanctions against the country’s oil, gas and mining industries, in exchange for President Nicolas Maduro conducting free and fair elections in Venezuela in 2024.
Part of the explanation for the re-engagement between Washington and Caracas lies in the challenges presented by the shifts in geopolitical realities consequent to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
Within weeks of the February 2022 invasion, the Biden administration dispatched top officials to negotiate with Caracas, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, so as to smooth the effects of the energy crisis issuing from the conflict.
Another dimension to the re-engagement were the apprehensions over the potential regional security implications of Moscow’s backing of its Latin American allies in the event of a deepening conflict between the two superpowers.
Caracas has more or less weathered the consequences of the U.S. and EU sanctions on its energy sector, thanks to crucial support from Cuba, China, Russia and Iran.
News
Govt. preparing to release Vision India 2047 document (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
The government is in the midst of finalising a national vision plan to make India a developed nation by 2047 and ensure that the country does not slip into a middle-income trap that several countries have fallen into at similar stages of development.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to unveil the plan within the next three months, which includes an outline of reforms and outcomes to be achieved by 2030, along with structural changes in governance that will be critical to make India a $30-trillion economy by 2047, with a per capita income of $18,000-$20,000.
The NITI Aayog is giving finishing touches to theplan called ‘Vision India@2047’ that has been in the works for almost two years and was presented to Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba.
In November, parleys will be held with thought leaders and corporate heads such as Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Gautam Adani, Mukesh Ambani, K.M. Birla, N. Chandrasekharan and Indra Nooyi, to glean their insights.
By December, we will have the draft version of the plan ready, and several States are also in the process of preparing their own road maps. The national plan also seeks to address regional cleavages in economic development and reforms of government processes.
ED ropes in ISRO, IIT Kanpur to probe illegal sand mining (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) has roped in experts from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) to assist in its ongoing investigation into allegations of excessive sand mining in Tamil Nadu.
Investigators from the ED have sought the support of scientists of ISRO and IIT-K to assess the area and quantum of sand mined along riverbeds in the State. As part of the probe into allegations that a huge quantity of sand was excavated in violation of environmental clearance norms and sold illegally to sand lorry owners without any record, evading taxes, the ED registered a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and searched designated sand mining sites in six districts on September 12, 2023.
After the searches, which lasted for about three days, the Central agency had seized incriminating documents, including fake receipts and counterfeit QR codes, that pointed to irregularities in the sale of sand.
Developed countries to overshoot carbon emissions goal, says study (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Developed countries — responsible for three-fourths of existing carbon emissions — will end up emitting 38% more carbon in 2030 than they have committed to, going by current trajectories, shows a study published last week by the Delhi-based think tank Council for Energy Environment and Water (CEEW).
The study, which comes ahead of the 28th Conference of Parties (COP-28) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to be held in Dubai in November and December, shows that 83% of this overshoot will be caused by the U.S., Russia, and the European Union.
At COP-28, countries are expected to give an account of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are their commitments to the UN on emission cuts.
The CEEW study noted that the NDCs of developed countries already fall short of the global average reduction of emissions to 43% below 2019 levels that is needed to keep temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. Instead, developed countries’ collective NDCs only amount to a 36% cut.
For a fighting chance at keeping warming below critical tipping points, decades of negotiations have obliged developed countries to lead global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with legally binding targets.
Collectively, developed countries were to reduce emissions by 5% from their 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012, and by 18% during 2013 to 2020.
World
Chinese party delegation visits Solomon Islands (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
A Chinese communist party delegation has visited the Solomon Islands, calling the “flourishing” cooperation between China and the Pacific nation a show of how diplomatic ties were in their peoples’ interest.
The delegation led by the deputy head of the international department under China’s Communist Party central committee, Guo Yezhou, met Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare during a visit spanning. The delegation also met the Foreign Minister and the Energy Minister.
China had signed a policing pact with the Solomon Islands in July, as both countries upgraded their ties to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” when Mr. Sogavare met Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing.
China’s visit to the southern Pacific archipelago comes a week before Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is set to visit Beijing.
In June, Mr. Sogavare called for a review of its security treaty with Australia, which has historically provided policing support to the Solomon Islands.
Science
Was Turkiye earthquake due to interrupted ‘chat’ between fault lines? (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
On February 6, 2023, a pair of powerful earthquakes struck Turkiye and Syria, leaving destruction in their wake. The latest known death toll is 50,000; more than a lakh other people were injured in 11 provinces.
At least 1.5 crore people and 40 lakh buildings were affected; some 3.45 lakh apartments were destroyed.
The earthquakes weren’t entirely unexpected given Turkey’s seismic history, but scientists were startled by their unprecedented scale.
A study published on August 3 in the journal Science unearthed the intricate union of tectonic forces that led to the disaster, advancing researchers’ understanding of these quakes, their unexpected power, and what they portend for the way scientists are trying to forecast others like them.
Scientists seek to understand how earthquakes occur and grow to devastating sizes. The earth’s crust consists of tectonic plates.
Fault lines form where these plates interact, as they collide, pull apart or slide past each other. When these plates abruptly grind and slip past each other, they release pent-up pressure, leading to earthquakes.
The earthquakes in Turkey occurred along the East and North Anatolian Fault Lines, which run 700 km and 1,500 km long, respectively. And these geological behemoths, the new study found, were in constant dialogue.
The gravitational constant (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Science)
Any mass warps the fabric of space-time around itself. The more the mass, the more the warping. The force that an object feels when travelling along this warped path is called gravity. It tends to move the object towards the mass.
The strength of this force depends on the gravitational constant. Denoted by a ‘G’, it is a fundamental physical constant. It was first accurately determined by Henry Cavendish in 1797.
G is an essential component of both Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In Newton’s theory, the gravitational force between two objects is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. G is the proportionality constant.
In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, G appears in the equations that describe the curvature (or the ‘warping’) of spacetime in the presence of mass and energy.
This theory provides a more accurate description of gravitation, particularly in extreme conditions, such as near massive celestial objects.
The precise value of G is crucial to understanding celestial mechanics and to determine the mass of celestial bodies.
Yet its value has been determined only with an uncertainty of about 22 parts per million. Its precise determination remains a topic of ongoing research in the field of experimental physics.