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The Centre has decided to nominate Assam’s Charaideo Maidams — the Ahom equivalent of the ancient Egyptian pyramids — for the UNESCO World Heritage Centre this year, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose the maidams, representing the late medieval (13th-19th century CE) mound burial tradition of the Tai Ahom community in Assam, from among 52 sites across the country seeking the World Heritage Site tag.
The Ahom rule lasted for about 600 years until the British annexed Assam in 1826. Charaideo, more than 400 km east of Guwahati, was the first capital of the Ahom dynasty founded by Chao Lung Siu-Ka-Pha in 1253.
The nomination of the Charaideo Maidams has attained significance at a time when the country is celebrating the 400th birth anniversary of Lachit Barphukan.
News
Employment days under MGNREGS at a five-year low (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, Social Justicce)
The average days of employment provided per household under the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is at a five-year low, this financial year.
As on January 20, the average days of employment provided per household is 42 days while it was 50 days in 2021-22, 52 days in 2020-21, 48 days in 2019-20 and 51 days in 2018-19.
According to officials, there has been a decline in demand for jobs under the scheme this financial year as opposed to the two pandemic years, when a significant population depended on MGNREGS to make up for the deficit in their income created by job loss.
Academics and activists, however, do not buy this argument and allege that the programme has been plagued by systemic problems that is disincentivising participation.
“Choking of funds has led to suppression of work demand and delays in wage payments. It is most likely that such supply constraints have led to workers getting routinely discouraged from doing NREGA work.
The introduction of unnecessary technical complexities like an app for attendance at worksites has caused more hardships for workers who will be more dissuaded going forward.
Making the situation more bleak is the low utilisation of person days by several States. With less than two-months for the financial year to close, there are at least nine States and union territories which have utilised less than 70% of projected person days.
China building new dam in Tibet near Indian border’ (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, International Organisation)
In a development that is a matter of concern to both India and Nepal, China is constructing a new dam on the Mabja Zangbo river in Tibet, close to the tri-junction, satellite imagery has revealed.
The new dam is located around 16 km north of the tri-junction and is opposite the Kalapani area of Uttarakhand, according to sources in the security establishment.
Mabja Zangbo originates in Nagari county of Tibet, flows through Nepal into the Ghaghara river before joining the Ganga in India.
In a tweet on January 19, Damien Symon, a geospatial intelligence researcher at Intel Lab as per his Twitter profile, posted satellite images of the dam’s construction.
The images show the activity since May 2021 in the Burang county of Tibet that shares its border with Nepal.
“Since early 2021, China has been constructing a dam on the Mabja Zangbo river just a few kilometres north of the tri-junction border with India and Nepal.
While the structure isn’t complete, the project will raise concerns regarding China’s future control on water in the region,” Mr. Symon said in the tweet.
In addition to using water as leverage, the possibility of a military establishment by China near the tri-junction cannot be ruled out as the country had developed the same in the Yarlung Zangbo river near Arunachal Pradesh, the sources said.
Of a bygone era: excavations reveal Buddhist monastery complex at Bharatpur in Bengal (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Culture)
Recent excavations at Bharatpur in West Bengal’s Paschim Bardhaman district have revealed the presence of a Buddhist monastery.
The Kolkata Circle of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) started excavating the site in the second week of January and a structural complex of a monastery has now been partially exposed.
The site was initially excavated almost fifty years ago between 1972 and 1975 when archeologists from ASI and from Burdwan University found a Buddhist stupa at the site.
“The site lay unexcavated for almost fifty years. We were looking at the cultural sequence of the stupa from where black and red ware pottery belonging to the Chalcolithic Age was also recovered.
A Buddhist stupa cannot exist in isolation, and the recent excavations have revealed the presence of an extended monastery complex,“ said Shubha Majumder, superintending archeologist of the ASI Kolkata Circle.
Mr. Majumder, who is supervising the excavations, said that archeologists working at Bharatpur will be able to ascertain more details about the monastery complex and its date of construction once the excavation progresses.
So far, we have exposed some structures which appear to be the outer wall of the monastery, containing nine layers of brick and a small circular structure, probably a stupa.
Three years on, Ayushman Bharat School Health and Wellness Programme has less than 50% uptake (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
It has been nearly three years since the School Health and Wellness Programme was launched under the Ayushman Bharat scheme, and so far only 15 of India’s States – less than half – have started weekly 40-minute classroom sessions with students.
A crucial cog in implementing the programme for middle, secondary, and senior secondary grades across government and government-aided schools are Health and Wellness Ambassadors (HWAs).
Two teachers, preferably one male and one female, in every school, are to be designated as HWAs, says the National Health Mission website.
They are meant to be trained at the State-level, to impart health promotion and disease prevention information in a joyful and interesting manner, according to the operational guidelines of the Ministry.
Until December 2022, only 71 of 766 districts have achieved 100% HWA training targets, according to Ministry data.
Only four States and UTs – Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli – have achieved 100% coverage. Some States are on the road to achieving targets, like Rajasthan (99%), Uttarakhand (97%), and Haryana (92%).
World
Blinken calls for status quo by China on Taiwan (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has cautioned China against changing the status quo on Taiwan, which is vital to maintaining peace and stability in the region.
Over the last few years, China has been trying to build military and economic pressure on Taiwan, Mr. Blinken said during a conversation with University of Chicago's Institute of Politics Founding Director David Axelrod.
On Taiwan, what we have seen over the last few years is, I think, China made a decision that it was no longer comfortable with the status quo, a status quo that had prevailed for decades, that had actually been successful in terms of the relationship between our countries and managing what is a difficult situation.
We have seen them, over the last few years... ratchet up the pressure on Taiwan, military pressure, economic pressure, trying to cut off its ties to countries around the world, to international organisations.
From America's perspective, that status quo has worked and it is vital to what is important to the U.S., which is maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.
50% of container ships moving around the world every day go through the Taiwan Strait, 70% or more of the computer chips manufactured in the world at the higher ends are manufactured in Taiwan. If this gets disrupted, the entire world economy will suffer.
Science and Technology
Lost’ interview of Georges Lemaître rediscovered (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
In February 1964, a broadcaster in Belgium aired an interview with a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître (1894-1966). The footage was subsequently thought lost after it went missing from the broadcaster’s archives.
But on December 31, 2022, thebroadcaster in Belgium reportedthat it had rediscovered the video and that the video could not be found earlier because it had been misclassified.
It was because Lemaître was the originator of the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin and derived an important law that cosmologists still use to understand the motion of galaxies away from each other.
The interview is likely to have been his Georges Lemaître’s public lecture, of sorts. On January 17, researchers in the United Statespublished a transcriptof the original interview, in French, online together with an English translation.
First, Lemaître discusses the arguments by which the Big Bang theory replaced steady state theory, under which Fred Hoyle and others claimed that the universe was static, that the galaxies that were there had always just been there.
As Lemaître recounts with some dramatic flair, Hoyle had difficulty explaining the presence of hydrogen in the early universe.
Hydrogen was required to form the first stars and galaxies and had to come from somewhere, but the steady state theory couldn’t say where. In Lemaître’s telling, Hoyle resorted to claims that Lemaître said he couldn’t picture.
The beginning is so... different from the present state of the world that such a question does not arise.”
Lemaître also agrees vehemently with the interviewer when the latter says that god should not have to explain the movement of galaxies: “It goes without saying!
Why India has not witnessed any surge in cases for months (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
The third wave in India that began in the first week of January 2022, driven primarily by the BA.1 Omicron sub-lineage, peaked at around 3,38,000 new infections on January 21, and came to an end by the first week of March 2022.
Except for a short period — mid-June to mid-August — after the third wave, India has not witnessed even an uptick in new infections in 2022.
The relative calm in India comes even when new Omicron subvariants and recombinants with ever increasing ability to evade immune responses and greater transmissibility have emerged at regular intervals last year and have led to sudden surge even in hospitalisations and deaths in many countries.
While low levels of testing might wrongly indicate low virus spread in the population, the low test positivity rate and low levels of the virus in wastewater or sewage water surveillance strongly suggest that virus circulation is indeed low in India.
The hybrid immunity — natural infection and vaccination induced immunity — is the reason that there has not been an uptick in COVID-19 cases in India.
An estimated 95% of India’s population above 12 years of age has developed hybrid immunity. India’s situation of hybrid immunity is arguably the best possible protection against SARS-CoV-2.
What led to unusually low temperature at Ooty’s Fingerpost? (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
At around 7 a.m. on January 14, as the day before Pongal dawned on Udhagamandalam, a local temperature gauge measured a frigid ground temperature of –6.3 degree celsius in the Fingerpost locality.
The Government Botanical Garden said it was sprinkling water on the ground and covering flowering plants with another bushy plant to remove the rime.
The ground in other parts of Udhagamandalam had reached subzero temperatures as well. The lowest ambient temperature in the day was a more tolerable 1.7 degree celsius.
What had caused the mercury to dip so low in Fingerpost?
The answer, as is often the case with the weather in the 21st century, begins somewhere else on the planet: the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
We are in a La Niña winter,” Raghu Murtugudde, a visiting professor at IIT Bombay and an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland.
This means heady winds blow warm water on the sea surface away from the South American mainland, roughly off the coast of Ecuador.
FAQ
Why is China’s population shrinking? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 1, Social Issue)
China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on January 17, 2023 that the country’s population had fallen by 8,50,000 in the year 2022.
This marked the first decline since 1961, when the country was in the midst of a four-year famine following the failed ‘Great Leap Forward’ campaign.
Demographers say that with China’s population now having peaked, India is set to become the most populous nation this year.
Birth rates in China have declined since the 1980s and in the wake of the “one-child policy”, which introduced harsh measures such as forced abortions and high financial penalties.
The Chinese government still defends the policy, arguing it spared China an additional 400 million births. But critics of the policy say the estimate is an exaggeration, when considering declining family sizes over time in many countries along with economic development and without similarly harsh measures, and when factoring into account the policy’s legacy of leaving behind a rapidly ageing society.
If the one-child policy and its legacy has been one major factor, a second one, as pointed out by Barclay Bram of the Asia Society Policy Institute in a January 2023 paper, is that “young Chinese are marrying later, having fewer children, or forgoing having children altogether”, with the number of couples who married in China dropping from 13.46 million to 8.14 million in the period from 2013 to 2020.
Meanwhile, the average age of first-time parents, in the three decade-period from 1990-2020, rose from 24.1 to 27.5. With a growing preference for getting married and starting families later, couples are choosing to have fewer children. In 2022, for the first time the number of births fell below the number of deaths. Births last year were 9.56 million, a more than 10% drop from 2021.
To arrest the slide, Beijing finally abandoned the one-child policy in 2016 — by then, the policy had, in any case, included many exceptions, for instance for couples who were both only children or in rural areas for families where the first child was a daughter.
India’s plan to eradicate measles, rubella (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
As the new year dawned, so did a crucial target for India. India had set a target to eliminate measles and rubella (MR) by 2023, having missed the earlier deadline of 2020, due to a variety of reasons, exacerbated by disruptions due to the pandemic.
An earlier target that was set for 2015 was also missed. It was in 2019 that India adopted the goal of measles and rubella elimination by 2023, anticipating that the 2020 goal could not be reached.
The measles virus is one of the world’s most contagious human viruses that kills more than 1,00,000 children every year globally, and rubella is a leading vaccine-preventable cause of birth defects, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Both measles and rubella can be prevented by just two doses of a safe and effective vaccine. Over the past two decades, the measles vaccine is estimated to have averted more than 30 million deaths globally, as per the WHO’s statistics. In both diseases, the symptoms are a rash and fever.
While measles has a high fatality rate, rubella infection in a pregnant woman will have an impact on the foetus, resulting in birth defects.
From October 2022, an outbreak of measles in Maharashtra, particularly Mumbai, had the authorities worried. As per media reports at least 15 children died among several hundreds who contracted the infection. Coming at the cusp of a year in which India had a crucial target to achieve, it perturbed authorities.
Dr. Jacob John, noted virologist who heads the India Experts Advisory Group for eliminating MR, equates it to a phenomenon similar to COVID-19 infections catching up in China end of last year, since they had ‘escaped the previous waves of infection.
It is a similar phenomenon, because during the winter months of 2020 and 2021 (November to January when there is the usual spurt in cases of measles) there were no outbreaks.
The 2022 outbreak was like epidemiological compensation. However, experts aver that this outbreak will contribute to ramping up herd immunity in the population, which along with a robust vaccination programme will help achieve the necessary targets.
Why did China lift hold on Makki terror listing? (Page no. 12)
(GS-2)
On January 16, the United Nations Security Council announced it had placed Abdur Rehman Makki, the Pakistan-based deputy chief of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the brother-in-law of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed, on its 1267 List of Designated Terrorists.
The move was welcomed by India, who along with the U.S. had jointly proposed Makki’s name for UN sanctions in June last year, where China put a “hold” on it.
According to the joint submission in June 2022, which has now been accepted (Makki is al-Qaida Designated Individuals QDi 433), 69-year-old Abdul (Abdur) Rehman Makki has been the “Deputy Amir” of the LeT and head of its Political Affairs Wing.
India has specifically held Makki responsible for a number of terror attacks in the past including the Red Fort attack, 26/11 Mumbai attacks, a number of terror strikes in Jammu Kashmir and for radicalising youth to fight against Indian forces.
India had placed Makki on its “most wanted terrorists” UAPA list, while the U.S. named him a specially designated global terrorist in 2010, announcing a two million dollar reward for information that would lead to his prosecution.