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Chinese research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 03 will not be carrying out research in Maldivian waters, but will arrive for a port call, the Government of Maldives said.
Reports of the Chinese vessel heading to the Maldives have drawn considerable attention in India, especially in the wake of Sri Lanka announcing a one-year moratorium on foreign research vessels calling at the island’s ports, after India voiced concern over visits by a Chinese vessel.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said a diplomatic request was made by the Government of China to the Government of Maldives for “necessary clearances to make a port call, for rotation of personnel and replenishment”.
“The vessel would not be conducting any research while in the Maldivian waters,” the Ministry said in a statement, which Foreign Minister Moosa Zameer shared on social media platform X.
Editorial
The larger message to New Delhi from the Red Sea (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The arrival of the Indo-Pacific marked India’s great break out from the unfriendly continental theatre, hemmed in by China and Pakistan and constrained by the vagaries of geopolitics on most of the remaining land borders. But is this ocean of opportunity, quite literally so, steadily becoming yet another theatre of conflict, competition and containment?
The Houthi terror attacks on MV Chem Pluto, an oil and chemical tanker, on its way to the New Mangalore port from the Al Jubail port in Saudi Arabia, and MV Sai Baba, a Gabon-owned, Indian-flagged crude oil tanker, with predominantly Indian crew forced India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar to rush to Tehran to persuade the principal Houthi sponsor to help cease the attacks.
India’s military response to the Red sea situation has also been swift: the Indian Navy deployed the guided missile destroyers, INS Mormugao, INS Kochi and INS Kolkata in the broader region.
The Houthi attack on commercial ships in the Red Sea and the fragility of order and stability in the Indo-Pacific, a direct result of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, is also a reminder of the rough weather ahead in the Indo-Pacific in general and India’s maritime space in particular.
For India, the Houthi challenge may soon pass, given New Delhi’s ties with Tehran. And yet, beyond the action-reaction mode, there is a larger question we must ponder.
Opinion
The need to overhaul a semiconductor scheme (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The mid-term appraisal of the semiconductor Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme is due soon. Since its announcement, the DLI scheme has approved only seven start-ups, markedly short of its target of supporting 100 over five years. This impact assessment, therefore, presents an opportunity for policymakers to appraise and revamp the scheme.
India’s $10 billion Semicon India Program has had mixed results, at best. There are three goals of India’s semiconductor strategy. The first is to reduce dependence on semiconductor imports, particularly from China, and especially in strategic and emerging sectors, ranging from defence applications to Artificial Intelligence development.
The second is to build supply chain resilience by integrating into the semiconductor global value chain (GVC). The third is to double down on India’s comparative advantage: India already plays host to the design houses of every major global semiconductor industry player and Indian chip design engineers are an indispensable part of the semiconductor GVC.
Text & Context
Analysing the rising gap in incomes (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
According to a recent report by the State Bank of India (SBI), India has witnessed a significant fall in inequality over the last decade.
Examining taxpayer data, the report claims that the Gini coefficient — a standard measure of inequality that ranges from 0, indicating perfect equality, to 1, indicating perfect inequality — has fallen from 0.472 in 2014-15 to 0.402 in 2022-23. A fall of almost 15% in the Gini coefficient indicates a significant reduction in inequality.
There are, however, some problems. For one, the analysis is conducted on taxpayer data, and a majority of income-earners fall outside the tax net.
According to data from the 2022-23 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), nearly 80% of income-earners earn less than ₹2.5 lakh per annum — the minimum taxable amount.
Using data from the 2017-18 and 2022-23 rounds of the PLFS (comprising the earliest and latest rounds of the survey), this article examines the changes in income inequality amongst all income earners in India, and disaggregates it according to the nature of employment, that is among the self-employed, regular wage and casual wage workers. This analysis reveals that the finding of a reduction in inequality, while broadly true, needs to be qualified in important ways.
News
On eve of birth centenary, Karpoori Thakur named for Bharat Ratna honour (Page no. 13)
(Miscellaneous)
A day before the birth centenary celebrations of former Bihar Chief Minister and socialist leader Karpoori Thakur, President Droupadi Murmu announced that he would be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award.
“The President has been pleased to award Bharat Ratna to Shri Karpoori Thakur (posthumously),” a Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X that “this prestigious recognition is a testament to his enduring efforts as a champion for the marginalised and a stalwart of equality and justice”.
Son of a marginal farmer from the Nai (barber) community, he went on to serve as the Chief Minister of Bihar twice — first between December 1970 and June 1971 as part of the Bharatiya Kranti Dal and later between December 1977 and April 1979 from the Janata Party.
Named Jannayak, or People’s Leader, Mr. Thakur was a freedom fighter, incarcerated during the Quit India movement in 1942, and has been seen as the architect of much of the social justice plank in politics.
SII, CEPI network to boost production of vaccines globally (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
The Serum Institute of India (SII) will join a growing CEPI network of vaccine producers in the Global South to support more rapid, agile, and equitable responses to future public health disease outbreaks. CEPI — Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations — is an innovative global partnership working to accelerate the development of vaccines and other biologic countermeasures against epidemic and pandemic threats.
CEPI has articulated an aspirational goal: vaccines should be ready for initial authorisation and manufacturing at scale within 100 days of recognition of a pandemic pathogen, when appropriate.
The idea is to combine the process of delivering a vaccine within 100 days with improved surveillance providing earlier detection and warning, and swift use of interventions such as testing, contact tracing and social distancing to suppress disease transmission. According to CEPI, this would give the world a better chance of containing and controlling future pathogenic threats and averting the type of catastrophic global public health and socio-economic impacts caused by COVID-19.
World
U.S., Britain launch second round of military strikes (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The United States and Britain launched a second round of joint military strikes on Yemen’s Houthis over their attacks on Red Sea shipping, as the Iran-backed rebels vowed to hit back.
The latest raids, heard by residents of the rebel-held capital Sanaa around midnight, hit eight Houthi targets, a joint U.S.-U.K. statement said, while the Houthis listed 18 strikes across their territory.
A senior U.S. military official said the strikes were carried out using a combination of precision-guided munitions from U.S. and British aircraft, and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
U.S. and British forces carried out a first wave of strikes against the rebel group earlier this month, and the United States launched further air raids against missiles that Washington said posed imminent threats to both civilian and military vessels.
But the Houthis have continued their attacks on shipping — just one part of a growing crisis in the West Asia linked to the Israel-Hamas war, which has raised fears of a broader war directly involving Iran.
Science
How physicists are making sense of the mystery of pulsar glitches (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The year was 1967. The Nathu La and Cho La clashes between the Indian and the Chinese armies had just concluded. A war was raging in Vietnam. The space race was at its peak.
At this time, a group of astronomers at the University of Cambridge had put together an array of antennae for use as a telescope to study the radio waves emitted by distant stars.
When they started operating the array, two members of the group – Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish – noticed one set of signals that were flashing in a periodic manner. They didn’t know its origins.
The pulsar turned out to be intimately tied to a discovery from 1932, when James Chadwick had discovered the neutron. When neutrons are in a group, they are not allowed to have the same energies.
Each neutron will have to settle for the lowest available energy level. If gravity tries to compress this collection of neutrons inward, their inability to ‘merge’ into a common energy level will resist with an outward pressure.