15 April 2024, The Hindu
Needed urgently: more than just bait and tackle
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GS 3: Indian Economy
- In Shandhakuda, a bustling habitation of fisherfolk in the port town of Paradip on India’s eastern coast, Chavakula Tatababu, 46, is frantically making calls to his crew aboard a fishing vessel.
- He awaits updates on their catch from the depths of the Bay of Bengal. It is the beginning of April, and the ban on shoreline fishing scheduled from April 15 to June 15 will soon kick in.
- Disappointment sets in as reports from the seven crew members navigating the waters off Paradip, Odisha, indicate no significant haul.
- Tatababu, having already invested ₹30,000 in diesel and other provisions for the crew, anxiously calculates the potential loss.
- Without a catch worth ₹1 lakh in the deep sea, up to 100 kilometres out, this fishing expedition is poised to yield no substantial returns.
A manifesto where inclusivity takes centre stage
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GS 3: Indian Economy -Inclusive growth
- The publication of party manifestos is a big moment in a general election campaign. Political parties contesting elections announce their plans for running the country, setting out the policies they would deliver on, if they were to win.
- Manifestos contain a description of the party’s world view and approach to governance and state policies.
- Even though manifestos do not usually decide election outcomes, they can sometimes feature prominently in the campaign, and bear the ability to shape political narratives, and influence how people vote.
- The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) issued its manifestos, the ‘Sankalp Patra’, on April 14 just before April 19, the first phase of this potentially momentous general election in 2024.
- Perhaps it was issued this late because the party assumes that the election result is a foregone conclusion.
- Meanwhile, the Congress Party manifesto, titled the ‘Nyay Patra’, was announced on April 5 and has already evoked much interest.
- The manifesto offers an agenda of progressive politics and policies against the backdrop of unprecedented inequalities and the BJP’s majoritarian agenda.
- It defines an alternative vision, and proposes measures to ‘reverse the damage’ purportedly done by 10 years of BJP rule at the Centre.
Urbanisation, no liberating force for Dalits
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GS 1: Society: population and associated issues
- A quick look at the nameplates in India’s neighbourhoods will show you that caste is the primary language of spatiality in Indian cities.
- Despite such failings, B.R. Ambedkar rejected village life and encouraged Dalits to move to the city. Ambedkar said that an Indian village is “the working plant of the Hindu social order” and argued that it is the ideal place to understand caste.
- Gandhi, however, saw the Indian village as a self-reliant, equitable and a just non-violent order, and argued for the decentralisation of power to the villages through Gram Swaraj.
- In strong opposition, Ambedkar believed that the idealisation of Indian village life emerged either from the colonial romanticisation of the rural population or from the desire of Hindus to retain caste domination.
- In the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar opposed the idea that villages should be recognised as autonomous administrative units and felt relieved that the Assembly rejected the idea. “For the untouchables, there could not have been a bigger calamity,” he wrote.
Fleeting relief
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GS 3: Indian Economy (Inflation)
- For the first time in five months, India's retail inflation slid below the 5% mark in March, to 4.85%.
- While it constituted only a marginal easing from the 5.1% recorded in February, this was the lowest pace of price rise recorded since May 2023.
- The average inflation of 5% clocked in the final quarter of 2023-24 is not just in line with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) projections but also the slowest in three years.
- For the full year gone by, consumer price rise averaged 5.4%, as the RBI had forecast — a four-year low. Core inflation, excluding energy and food prices, has been under the 4% mark for four straight months.
- QuantEco Research estimates that overall fuel inflation in India hit a four-year low of -2.7% in March, which was the seventh straight month of disinflation in the segment.
- No doubt, the ₹2 per litre cuts in petrol and diesel prices and the ₹100 drop in cylinder prices have helped, though the full impact of these pre-poll steps will be seen this month.
- Amid these pleasant portents, two critical problems persist — food bills remain problematically high, even as overall inflation is rising for rural consumers, already hit by a weak monsoon.
Fixing India’s VVPAT-based audit of EVMs
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GS 2: Salient features of the Representation of People’s Act (RPA)
- The Election Commission of India (ECI) has attracted criticism for reducing the Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) based audit of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) to an exercise in tokenism and for its lack of transparency in the matter.
- The uniform sample size of “five EVMs per Assembly constituency” prescribed by it for all Assembly constituencies and States does not conform to the fundamental principles of statistical sampling and leads to high margins of error.
- At the same time, the ECI’s critics are also guilty of demanding arbitrary, non-statistical sample sizes like “25 per cent samples” and “50 per cent samples” for VVPAT-based audit of EVMs, under the mistaken impression that a “bigger percentage” guarantees greater accuracy of results. Some are now demanding a 100% manual count of all VVPAT voter slips.
What is doxxing and what measures can you take if it happens to you?
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- GS 3: General awareness
A woman in mid-February reached out to the Mumbai Police through X (formerly Twitter) to report a man who had shared a video of her dancing at an event and compared her performance to sex work.
- The woman clarified that the video was re-posted without her consent and requested the man multiple times to take down the video, but he refused to do so.
- Many others began to share the video as well, and joined in to harass the woman, who locked her X account.
- Though the video was later disabled by X on copyright grounds, the man - a verified X user with a blue tick - continued to defend the legality of his actions.
How fast is the universe expanding? New data keeps the mystery open
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GS 3: General awareness
- A big open problem in cosmology is the Hubble tension.
- There are two equally valid ways to measure how fast the universe is expanding, but they have yielded two very different estimates.
- No amount of rechecking and refining calculations has made this tension go away.
- In a study published recently in Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), scientists from Germany and the U.K. led with a radical explanation for the tension: our model used to understand the universe is wrong.
