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The Supreme Court dismissed an application by the State Bank of India (SBI) for time till June 30 to provide details of electoral bonds purchased anonymously and their encashment by political parties.
A five-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, which on February 15 struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional, gave the bank 24 hours, that is, by the close of business hours on March 12, to provide the details to the Election Commission (EC).
The court said the information on electoral bonds required to be divulged by the judgment was “readily available” with the bank. Once the bank forwards the details, the EC has to compile and publish the data on its website on March 15 by 5 p.m.
Test flight of Agni-5 with MIRV successful (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the successful test-firing of Agni-5 ballistic missile with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) technology by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) under Mission Divyastra.
The flight test was carried out from Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island in Odisha. This is considered a major technological breakthrough.
Proud of our DRDO scientists for Mission Divyastra, the first flight test of indigenously developed Agni-5 missile with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) technology.
The MIRV technology means a single missile can carry multiple warheads. It will ensure that a single missile can deploy multiple warheads at different locations.
Centre notifies CAA rules ahead of polls (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constituion)
Just days ahead of the announcement of Lok Sabha election, the Union Home Ministry on Monday notified the Citizenship Amendment Rules, 2024 that would enable the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by Parliament in 2019.
Though the law facilitates citizenship to undocumented people belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi, Christian, and Jain communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, the rules state that applicants will have to provide six types of documents and specify the “date of entry” into India.
Home Minister Amit Shah posted on X, “These rules will now enable minorities persecuted on religious grounds in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to acquire citizenship in our nation.
With this notification, PM Shri Narendramodiji has delivered on another commitment and realised the promise of the makers of our Constitution to the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians living in those countries.”
The list of documents includes birth certificate, tenancy records, identity papers, any licence, or educational certificate issued by a government authority in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Editorial
Central transfers and the issue of shares of some States (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constituion)
There are many issues that the Sixteenth Finance Commission will have to deal with. In this article, we focus on one issue which has been raised by many States, particularly those in the south of India.
The issue (or the complaint) is that these States have been facing a decline in their share out of the resources transferred from the Centre to the States, from Finance Commission to Finance Commission.
In finding a solution to this issue, we need to look at: which States have been gaining and which are losing their share over time; the criteria of horizontal distribution which has led to some States steadily losing their share; and what can be done to reverse this trend.
The shares of groups of States and those for selected States are shown, for the Twelfth Finance Commission to the Fifteenth Finance Commission (final report).
In the case of the southern States, there has been a steady fall in their share, from 19.785% to 15.800%. In a comparison of these two Commissions, the northern and eastern States have also lost. The ‘gainer States’ were the hilly, central, and western States including Maharashtra.
A tribe in the Western Ghats in need of a lifeline (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Social Justice)
In Karnataka’s section of the Western Ghats, lies Makuta village, under Betoli gram panchayat of Virajpet taluka in Kodagu district.
More specifically, the village falls under the Makuta Aranya Valaya which is in the vicinity of the Kerti reserved forest.
This area is in the Talacauvery sub-cluster, identified as one of the 10 World Heritage Sites in Karnataka and is a region of dense tropical evergreen forests that have remained undisturbed to a large extent.
The village has a Girijan colony inhabited by the ‘Phani Yerava’ tribe. In 2021, with the help of two local people including a Muslim gram panchayat member, all the 19 Yerava households here were able to successfully claim their ‘land’ in the forest, under the Forest Rights Act.
In a joint survey conducted by the Forest, Revenue and Social Welfare Departments, officials found that the Yeravas reside on 135 acres of forest land, right from the time of their ancestors.
Opinion
Time to prohibit judges from joining politics (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay recently resigned as a judge of the Calcutta High Court and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
He said that he was approached by the BJP, and he also approached the BJP, during his tenure as judge. He declared that henceforth, he will be a “party soldier”.
While he was judge, Mr. Gangopadhyay was often in the news for the wrong reasons. He allegedly gave an interview to a TV channel criticising the West Bengal government and speaking about the school job-for-bribe case.
He created controversy by defying an order of a division bench. Sometimes he had run-ins with lawyers and even fellow judges.
While dealing with one of the cases pertaining to Mr. Gangopadhyay’s conduct, a bench of Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice P.S. Narasimha rightly said that judges have no business giving TV interviews on pending matters.
The Chief Minister criticised Mr. Gangopadhyay after his resignation saying his judgments will always remain questionable.
Text & Context
Why did the top Court reject SBI’s plea? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Judiciary)
On March 11, the Supreme Court dismissed a plea by the State Bank of India (SBI) to extend the deadline for providing details of electoral bonds purchased anonymously and their encashment by political parties to June 30, 2024.
A five-judge Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud gave the bank 24 hours, that is, by the close of business hours on March 12, to provide the details to the Election Commission of India (ECI).
It was also hearing a contempt plea filed by NGOs — Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Common Cause — against the SBI Chairman Dinesh Kumar Khera that contended that the bank was deliberately trying to ensure that details of donors and the amounts contributed to political parties anonymously were not disclosed to the public before the Lok Sabha elections due in April-May. Analysis reveals that the BJP was the scheme’s greatest beneficiary.
The petition was filed in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s verdict on February 15 striking down the electoral bonds scheme, where the Court had directed the SBI to furnish details of the bonds to the ECI by March 6, 2024.
These details were to include the date of purchase of each bond, the name of the purchaser of the bond and the denomination of the bond purchased.
The ECI was subsequently ordered to publish all such information shared by the SBI on its official website by March 13, 2024.
Understanding the basic principles of artificial intelligence (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Intelligence is the capacity of living beings to apply what they know to solve problems. ‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) is intelligence in a machine.
There is currently no one definition of AI. A simple place to begin is with AI’s material existence, as a machine-software combination.
Consider linear classification, a simple example-problem: plot some points on a graph and find a way to draw a straight line through the graph such that it divides the points into two distinct groups.
Say you give the machine 1,000 pictures of cats and 1,000 pictures of dogs, and ask it to separate them. (This task is usually not given to a linear classifier but it illustrates a point.) Y
ou also equip the machine with tools — say, a camera and an app that can measure distances of different parts of an image, can analyse depth (using trigonometry), and can assess colours.
News
Liberal democracy has declined significantly in India: report (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constituion)
India, which was downgraded to the status of an “electoral autocracy” in 2018, has declined even further on multiple metrics to emerge as “one of the worst autocratisers”, according to the “Democracy Report 2024” released by the Gothenburg-based V-Dem Institute.
The report categorises countries into four regime types based on their score in the Liberal Democratic Index (LDI): Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy. “India, with 18% of the world’s population, accounts for about half of the population living in autocratising countries”.
Noting that almost all components of democracy were getting worse in more countries than they were getting better, the report singled out freedom of expression, clean elections, and freedom of association/civil society as the three worst affected components of democracy in autocratising countries.
South and Central Asia regressed significantly, with the level of “liberal democracy” enjoyed by the average Indian now “down to levels last seen in 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India”.
As per the V-Dem classification, a liberal democracy is one where, in addition to the requirements of electoral democracy such as regular free and fair elections, mechanisms for judicial independence and constraints on executive overreach are robust, alongside rigorous protection of civil liberties and equality before law.
Centre signs ₹200-cr. pact for anti-drone systems (Page no. 1)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The Defence Ministry has signed a ₹200-crore contract for anti-drone systems for the Army and the Air Force with Big Bang Boom Solutions Private Ltd. (BBBS).
This is the largest contract signed by the Ministry under the Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) initiative, according to the company.
The focus of the iDEX programme is to foster an ecosystem of innovation and technology development in defence,” Vivek Virmani, CEO of iDex, which comes under the Ministry.
In a statement, the company said the system uses passive radio frequency sensor technology to eliminate false alarms.
The system’s core sensor, built around artificial intelligence and computer vision algorithms, enables precise identification, classification and location identification of drones, the company said, adding that its sophisticated decision-making matrix enables autonomous decision-making for countermeasures like signal jamming.
World
Sweden hoists flag at NATO office as it is 32nd member of bloc (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)
Sweden’s flag was raised at NATO headquarters, cementing the Nordic country’s place as the 32nd member two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine persuaded its reluctant public to seek safety under the alliance’s security umbrella.
The Russian, brutal, invasion against Ukraine united Sweden behind the conclusion that a full-fledged NATO membership is the only reasonable choice.
Sweden set aside decades of post-World War II neutrality when it formally joined NATO on March 7. The neighbouring nation of Finland had already joined in April 2023.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to order troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, triggered an about-face in public opinion in both countries and within three months they had applied to join the world’s biggest security organisation.
Oppenheimer sweeps major awards at Oscars (Page no. 17)
(Miscellaneous)
Oppenheimer swept the board on Sunday at the Oscars, Hollywood’s biggest night of the year, with seven awards including best picture and best director, crowning a triumphant year for filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s masterful drama about the father of the atomic bomb, half of last summer’s massive “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, also bagged acting prizes for lead Cillian Murphy and supporting actor Robert Downey Jr.
Nolan — a British-American filmmaker hailed as a generational talent — said that film as an art form still has room to grow.
“We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here. But to know that you think that I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.”
The movie also snapped up prizes for editing, cinematography and best original score.
The other huge smash of 2023, Greta Gerwig’s pop feminist blockbuster Barbie, only won one Oscar for best original song.
Science
Oldest ‘dead galaxy’ yet is spotted by James Webb Telescope (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The James Webb Space Telescope since becoming operational in 2022 has uncovered numerous surprises about what things were like in the universe’s early stages.
We now can add one more: observations of a galaxy that was already ‘dead; when the universe was only 5% of its current age.
Scientists said on March 6 Webb had spotted a galaxy where star formation had already ceased by roughly 13.1 billion years ago, 700 million years after the Big Bang event that gave rise to the universe. Many dead galaxies have been detected over the years, but this is the earliest by about 500 million years.
“The galaxy seemed to have lived fast and intensely, and then stopped forming stars very rapidly,” said astrophysicist Tobias Looser of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
In the first few hundred million years of its history, the universe was violent and active, with plenty of gas around to fuel star formation in galaxies. That makes this discovery particularly puzzling and interesting.
Once star formation ends, existing stars die and are not replaced. This happens in a hierarchical fashion, by order of stellar weight, because the most massive stars are the hottest and shine the brightest, and as a result have the shortest lives.