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Marking 50 years of Project Tiger, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced yet another quadrennial jump in the country’s tiger number with an estimated population of at least 3,167.
Officials in the Environment Ministry said this is an interim figure and the “spatial estimation process is still underway” at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII).
Once the final estimates are available, the gain in tiger numbers is likely to be significantly higher than the margin of 200 which the interim figure of 3,167 has compared with 2,967 reported in 2018.
After identifying individual tigers from camera-trapped photos, researchers at the WII use the Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture (SECR) method to estimate the range of tiger abundance. In 2018, for example, a tiger population of 2,967 was estimated within the range of 2,603-3,346 based on 2,461 unique photos.
In the present cycle, 3,080 unique tigers have been identified from the camera-trapped photos but the SECR analyses are still underway. In the interim, the minimum estimated figure of 3,167 tigers is comparable with the lower limit of the range – 2,603-3,346 – estimated in 2018, implying a gain of over 500 tigers.
Express network
Periyar Tiger Reserve gets top rank in management review, none ‘poor’ (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala is the best-maintained of all tiger reserves in the country, according to the 5th cycle of Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) carried out by the Centre and released Sunday alongside the Tiger Census.
While Periyar reserve has obtained an MEE score of 94.3%, it is followed closely by the Satpura Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Bandipur in Karnataka and Nagarhole in Karnataka.
The government has been using the MEE to assess tiger reserves across the country since its inception in 2006.
At present, the country has 998 Protected Areas – including 106 National Parks, 567 Wildlife Sanctuaries, 105 Conservation Reserves and 220 Community Reserves — covering 1,73,629 sq km or 5.28% of India’s geographical area.
Of these, 53 Tiger Reserves have been notified, which serve as an additional layer of protection around PAs.
Of these 53 tiger reserves, however, only 51, covering a total area of 73,765 sq km, were evaluated as two newly declared tiger reserves, Ramgarh Visdhari and Ranipur, have not been included in the current cycle of MEE.
The MEE results also suggested an overall improvement in the management effectiveness of the tiger reserves.
There has been continuous improvement with the subsequent cycles of evaluation in MEE scores of tiger reserves in India. The overall mean MEE score in the second cycle in 2010 was 65%, 69% in third cycle in 2014, and 70% in fourth cycle of evaluation in 2018 and 77.92% in present assessment.
In the 5th cycle, there are 12 Tiger Reserves that have scored 90% and above and therefore a new category of ‘Excellent’ has been added.
Twelve 12 tiger reserves have ranked in the “Excellent” category, followed by 20 in the ‘Very Good’ category, 14 in the ‘Good’ category and 5 in the ‘Fair’ category. None of the country’s tiger reserves was graded as ‘Poor’.
Editorial
Rights of the opposition (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Last week the Supreme Court refused to entertain a petition jointly filed by 14 Opposition parties in the context of pervasive apprehensions that leaders of the Opposition were being beleaguered by the arbitrary use of law enforcement agencies.
The petitioners were the Indian National Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Trinamool Congress, Aam Aadmi Party, Nationalist Congress Party, Shiv Sena (UBT), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Janata Dal (United), Communist Party of India (CPI) and CPI-Marxist, Samajwadi Party, and the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. Most of these parties are fierce rivals at the state level. That they agreed to sign a petition jointly is itself exceptional.
While refusing to allow the petition, the Court orally observed that “A political leader is basically a citizen. As citizens, we are all amenable to the same law. Political leaders do not enjoy an immunity”. The bench further observed that laying down general guidelines without relation to the facts of a case would be dangerous.
There can be no qualms or quibbles with this proposition. The Court was correct in orally observing that political leaders, members of Parliament, members of state legislatures and other political and civil society actors are all Indian citizens and the same set of constitutional rights and obligations must apply to them. However, herein lies a caveat.
Old approach, new pact (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India seems to be on a free trade agreement (FTA) signing and negotiating spree. In the last few years, India has signed FTAs with Mauritius and the UAE and an interim one with Australia. India is currently negotiating FTAs with the UK, European Union, Canada, and Israel. Since trade and investment are inextricably linked, especially when the objective is to build global value chains, countries sign FTAs that legalise the full gamut of international economic relations between themselves.
FTAs create binding international rules on trade and investment. Through these rules, states accept the instrument of international law to be held accountable for their sovereign conduct on trade and investment.
International law increases costs for states to act unilaterally, thus ushering in predictability and certainty in international economic relations.
India followed this logic in signing several FTAs in the 2000s with countries like Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, and Japan.
These FTAs include binding rules on both, international trade liberalisation, and the protection of foreign investment from arbitrary state conduct.
Additionally, these FTAs give foreign investors the guarantee to use international treaty arbitration to settle disputes with states.
However, India’s extant FTA policy seems to be a break from the past. As part of its FTA 2.0 approach, India is decoupling international trade law from international investment law (IIL).
The FTAs with Mauritius, UAE, and Australia contain detailed international rules on trade, but rules on foreign investment protection are missing.
The absence of investment protection in these FTAs is even more striking because India has unilaterally terminated its bilateral investment treaty (BIT) – conventional international law instruments that protect foreign investment — with Mauritius and Australia.
Ideas page
Building a blue economy (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Indo-Sri Lankan dispute over fishing rights in the Palk Strait, the water body separating Tamil Nadu from the Jaffna region of Sri Lanka, has been an emotive issue of long-standing. It has evoked loud complaints from Chennai, which have often led to a diplomatic furore between Colombo and New Delhi.
The Indo-Sri Lankan maritime boundary agreements signed in 1974 and 1976, allowed fishermen of both nations to “enjoy in each other’s waters such rights as they have traditionally enjoyed therein”.
Since maritime boundaries lack physical demarcation, the lull in fishing activity, during the civil war in Sri Lanka, encouraged Indian fishermen to encroach into Sri Lankan waters.
With the end of hostilities in 2009, the Sri Lankan fishing community sought to reclaim their rights, bringing them into conflict with Indian fishers. Intervention by the Sri Lankan Navy has often resulted in ugly situations, arrests and even fatal shootings of Indian fishermen.
With dwindling fish stocks, rising fuel costs, and growing tensions, fishing communities of both countries are in acute distress but remain confined to the Palk Strait for lack of finances, which could buy them sea-going trawlers and the means to venture forth on the high seas.
Explained
What is LIGO-India will do (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The government has given the final go-ahead to India’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, project, clearing the way for the construction of the country’s biggest scientific facility that will join the ongoing global project to probe the universe by detecting and studying gravitational waves.
LIGO is an international network of laboratories that detect the ripples in spacetime produced by the movement of large celestial objects like stars and planets.
These ripples were first postulated in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that encapsulates our current understanding of how gravitation works.
LIGO-India will be located in Hingoli district of Maharashtra, about 450 km east of Mumbai, and is scheduled to begin scientific runs from 2030. Here’s what you need to know about gravitation, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and the purpose and significance of the LIGO project.
Almost everyone with a high-school background would be familiar with Newton’s law of gravitation. The English mathematician Sir Issac Newton (1643-1727) had postulated that the force that makes any object fall to the ground was also the one that makes heavenly bodies go around in their orbits.
Newton proposed that this was due to the fact that every celestial body exerted an attractive force on every other body in the universe. He worked out a mathematical formulation to calculate the strength of this attractive force which, he found, was directly proportional to the masses of the two bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Mifepristone (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US plunged into uncertainty Friday (April 7) following conflicting court rulings over the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, which has been widely available for more than 20 years.
US District Judge from Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone. At nearly the same time, US District Judge Thomas O Rice, an Obama appointee, essentially ordered the opposite, directing authorities not to make any changes that would restrict access to the drug, AP reported. Mifepristone received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 2000.
While for the time being, the drug is expected to remain available, the fallout from the competing decisions is likely to put the matter on an accelerated path to the US Supreme Court.
The abortion debate, currently front and centre in US politics, has been deeply contested and polarising. After nearly a year since the landmark Roe v. Wade judgement was overturned by the conservative-leaning US Supreme Court, currently there are legal challenges to protect/remove the right to abortion across the country.
Mifepristone is a medication that is commonly used for medical abortion. It is a synthetic steroid compound that acts as a progesterone antagonist – it blocks the action of the hormone progesterone in the body.
Progesterone is necessary for maintaining the lining of the uterus during pregnancy, so by blocking progesterone, mifepristone can effectively terminate an early pregnancy.
Changes the NCF 2023 Draft proposes in the school education system (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
School system in India may undergo a major restructuring with an expert committee appointed by the Union government recommending board examinations twice a year, a semester system for class 12, freedom to students to pursue a mix of science, humanities and commerce subjects among others.
The Ministry of Education released the pre-draft of the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for school education for public feedback on the recommendations which will be finalised after further rounds of discussions involving the national steering committee led by former ISRO chairperson K Kasturirangan that developed it.
The NCF, which was last revised in 2005 under the Congress-led UPA government, is a key document based on which textbooks are prepared.
So the current set of NCERT textbooks, barring the deletions, are all based on the NCF 2005. Before 2005, the NCF was revised thrice, including once under the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
World
Sunak to meet President Biden tomorrow in Northern Ireland (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will meet Joe Biden in Northern Ireland next week when the U.S. president flies in to take part in events to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace accord.
Having helped broker the 1998 deal, the United States remains an influential voice in Northern Ireland's politics and has sought to protect the peace from the strains caused by Britain's exit from the European Union.
Sunak will greet Biden when Air Force One lands for what will be a closely watched visit to both sides of the Irish border at a time of heightened political uncertainty in Northern Ireland.
Sunak hosts a gala dinner on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary, his office said in a statement setting out some details of his itinerary.
Biden, who often speaks proudly of his Irish roots, will also spend time in the Irish Republic, where he will visit Dublin and his two ancestral homes.