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The Supreme Court gave the BJP victory in the Chandigarh mayoral elections a jolt, threatening to order fresh elections after a video played in the open courtroom on Monday showed the Returning Officer “obviously defacing” ballot papers, while taking stealthy glances at the camera overhead like a “fugitive”.
It is obvious that he has defaced the ballot. This man has to be prosecuted. Why is he looking at the camera like a fugitive and then quietly defacing the ballot? This is a mockery of democracy.
The Supreme Court directed the sequestration of the entire records of the mayoral election under the custody of the Registrar-General of the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Editorial
A critical view of the ‘sanitation miracle’ in rural India (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Social Justice)
In the past decade, improving sanitation coverage has been one of the key public policy miracles in India. Access to water and sanitation is Goal 6 in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals envisaged by the United Nations. Public sanitation programmes have a long history in the country, beginning with the launch of the highly subsidised Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) in 1986.
The Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999 marked a shift from a high subsidy regime to a low subsidy one and a demand-driven approach. The public sanitation programme evolved as a mission in 2014 under the Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (SBM-G) to make India Open Defecation Free (ODF) by October 2019.
According to information by the Government of India, sanitation coverage in the country improved from 39% in 2014 to 100% in 2019. Encouraged by the achievements under the SBM, the government launched Phase II of the SBM-G.
The focus here was on the sustainability of initial achievements by promoting solid and liquid waste management and covering those households left out earlier.
The government aims to transform India from ODF to ODF Plus by 2024-25. Around 85% of villages in India have become ODF Plus, according to government data.
Nevertheless, this impressive performance also needs to be viewed from the perspective of behavioural change, which will usher in sustainability in a true sense.
An Uttar Pradesh model to tackle malnutrition (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Uttar Pradesh is a remarkable example of the importance of women’s empowerment in tackling malnutrition by supporting community-based micro enterprises led by self-help groups.
These enterprises produce fortified and nutritious foods for pregnant/breastfeeding mothers and children, provided as take home ration through the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme.
In 2020, the Department of Women and Child Development and the Uttar Pradesh State Rural Livelihood Mission collaborated to set up a decentralised production of take home rations by women’s enterprises.
The model involves the production of different variants for ICDS beneficiaries. This is done by a 20-member women group that uses automated equipment with a capacity of five metric tonnes per day.
Once the rations are delivered to Anganwadi centres by the women’s groups, the women are reimbursed according to ICDS cost norms.
The feasibility of this model was demonstrated by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) by using two pilot plants in Unnao and Fatehpur in 2021.
Opinion
The road to a healthy democracy (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The prospect of elevating India to the status of a developed nation by 2047, the 100th year of its Independence, is captivating. This vision of a ‘Viksit Bharat’ (Developed India) has never been as achievable as it is today.
Today, India is taking a quantum leap in every sector. There has been a massive expansion in social and economic infrastructure, a boost to entrepreneurship, rural transformation, and a manifold increase in the number of universities and colleges.
Chandrayaan has set a new milestone in science and technology and our digital public infrastructure, from Aadhaar to UPI, is the envy of the world.
Text & Context
Do exams throttle India’s education system? (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
The importance accorded to school-leaving examinations in India puts enormous pressure on students to score the highest possible marks.
But how scientific is the examination system at determining the progress of students? In a conversation moderated by G. Ananthakrishnan, Krishna Kumar, former director, National Council of Educational Research and Training and Rohit Dhankar , Professor of Philosophy of Education at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, talk about the education system.
This examination system is something that reminds us of the beginnings of the modern education system in India. The school-leaving examination was designed in the latter half of the 19th century as a way to determine who can be selected for further education, which was very scarce at that time, and also for lower-level jobs in offices.
It was basically a means of elimination. And it has remained that all the way up to now. The Grade 10 exam, for instance, fails a large number of children and stops them from going any further.
This is a kind of structural arrangement in a system in which secondary education is not very widespread and higher secondary education is even less so. Opportunities for further education at the undergraduate level or various kinds of technical education are also relatively scarce.
News
Indians win big at Grammys: Shakti takes home honours (Page no. 12)
(Miscellaneous)
Indian music struck a chord at the 2024 Grammy Awards with five musicians from the country, including tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain and flautist Rakesh Chaurasia, winning the coveted prize in Los Angeles.
While Mr. Hussain was India’s big winner with three Grammys, Mr. Chaurasia picked up two awards. Singer Shankar Mahadevan, violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan and percussionist Selvaganesh Vinayakram, Mr. Hussain’s collaborators in the fusion group Shakti, won one Grammy each at a glittering ceremony held on Sunday night.
Shakti won the 2024 Grammy Award for best global music album for This Moment. The album features the four Indians as well as its founding member, legendary British guitarist John McLaughlin. This Moment, which released to critical acclaim in June 2023, is the group’s first studio album in more than 45 years.
CBSE urges schools to prepare for National Credit Framework roll-out (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has urged principals of schools affiliated to the board to start contemplating the pattern for allocating credits to students for subjects, in line with the National Credit Framework (NCrF). The CBSE has proposed draft guidelines open for feedback from its affiliated schools.
The board is set to notify a new set of credit framework for schools next year from Classes 9 to 12, and in anticipation of the notification, has asked its schools to start implementing a sample credit framework at least for Classes 9 and 11.
As per the existing regulations, a student has to clear five subjects (two languages and three main subjects — maths, science and social science) to pass the class.
Nearly 1,050 hours are allotted to five compulsory subjects. In order to aid teachers to implement the credit framework, we have allotted an additional 150 hours for internal assessment of subjects like Physical Education and Health, Art Education, a skill-related subject, and a third language.
Business
FM seeks ₹78,673 cr. added funds for FY24 (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Centre on Monday sought Parliament’s nod for a net additional spending of ₹78,673 crore in the current financial year, including a sum of ₹10,798 crore in expenditure toward MGNREGA.
Second batch of supplementary demands for grants for 2023-24, tabled in Parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also provides for additional spending of ₹9,231 crore and ₹3,000 crore toward food and fertiliser subsidies, respectively.
Demands for grants include gross additional spending of more than ₹2 lakh crore, to be matched by savings of over ₹1.21 lakh crore.
The proposal involves net cash outgo aggregating ₹78,672.92 crore, the Centre said in Parliament. The Interim Budget for 2024-25 pegged govt.’s total expenditure in the current fiscal at ₹44.90 lakh crore, up 7.1% from FY23.
World
Maldives President Muizzu vows to boost defences after telling Indian troops to leave (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
The small but strategically placed Maldives will strengthen its military to defend its vast maritime territory, the new President vowed on Monday after ordering Indian troops to withdraw from the archipelago.
Mohamed Muizzu said in his first address to Parliament he would turn the modest Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF) into a modern military capable of patrolling its seas, which straddle key global shipping lanes.
The leader reiterated that India will begin withdrawing its troops operating three maritime reconnaissance aircraft from March 10 and complete the process within two months.
New Delhi considers the Indian Ocean archipelago to be within its sphere of influence. However, the Maldives has shifted into the orbit of China — its largest external creditor — with September’s election of Mr. Muizzu, who demanded the Indian troops leave.
I believe that the modern military capability to defend the country by road, sea and air should be strengthened in the Maldives,” Mr. Muizzu said. “We have started to do that now.”
He said the MNDF will soon be able to conduct surveillance of the country’s 9,00,000 square-km Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around the clock.
Science
The unusual cabbage mutation that could boost crop yield (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
The males of plants as diverse as cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, tomato, and rice can be made sterile by deleting a very small part of their genome’s DNA.
This is the take-home message of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications in October by researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Vegetable Biobreeding of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing.
The simple deletion resulting in such a drastic outcome brings to mind the story of a kingdom that was lost for want of a horseshoe nail.
But here, instead of loss, the researchers assure us of a gain: that the deletion could lead to an abundant harvest of these plants, thanks to a process called heterosis.
The DNA molecule consists of two long strands. Each strand is composed of four compounds called nucleotide bases.
They are designated A, C, G, and T for simplicity (for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine respectively). An A on one strand makes chemical bonds, called hydrogen bonds, with a T on the other and a C on one strand makes hydrogen bonds with a G on the other.
The bonds between As and Ts and the bonds between Gs and Cs hold the two DNA strands together. A base-pair, or bp for short, is a single A-T or G-C pair between the two strands, with the dash denoting the bond.
The genome of the cabbage plant (Brassica oleracea) consists of around 1.06 billion base-pairs organised in 18 chromosomes, which every cell holds in nine pairs of two each.
In each pair of two chromosomes, one chromosome comes from the pollen and the other comes from the egg. The DNA (which is all the base-pairs together) in every chromosome pair share a mostly identical sequence of base-pairs.
China bets on open-source chips to evade sanctions (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China’s bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand U.S. sanctions.
The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows.
RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.
The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, dominated by U.S. firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm, developed by Britain’s Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.
U.S. and UK export controls prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm designs - which produce the highest-performance chips - to clients in China.