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Citing the induction of the indigenously-built Tejas light combat aircraft, light combat helicopters and aircraft carrier INS Vikrant into the Indian armed forces, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that decisions to induct ‘Make in India’ products were not because of “political will”, but due to the “courage” shown by the leadership of the armed forces.
Change is happening very quickly. There was a time in this country when pigeons used to be released. Now we have the power to release cheetahs,” Modi said in his inaugural address at the DefExpo 2022 in Gandhinagar.
The ‘Fourth Positive Indigenisation List’ of 101 items announced by the Prime Minister includes next generation frigates, surface-to-surface missile Pralay and ship-borne unmanned aerial systems.
The Ministry of Defence said it will facilitate a conducive environment and render all possible support to the industry to ensure that the timelines mentioned in the ‘Fourth Positive Indigenisation List’ are met.
Items in the list with effect from December 2022 are next generation frigates, mobile disaster relief equipment for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations, and remote embedded systems support for naval ships.
Nine items with effect from December 2023 include ILMEN-GUVK gyro system for Kamov helicopters, full motion simulator for LCA, bulletproof security vehicle for IAF, and 76.2 mm high explosive plugged cartridges for naval applications.
Effective December 2024, the items include fleet support ship for Navy, mine countermeasure vessel, naval hospital ship, main and nose wheels for Jaguar, IL-76, IL-78, LCA, MiG-29, Mi-17 and batteries for AWACS and Hawk aircraft.
All items included in the list will be procured from indigenous sources as per provisions in the Defence Acquisition Procedure 2020 and will provide “continuous impetus towards self-reliance in defence.
The Ministry of Defence had earlier promulgated three such indigenisation lists which comprised 310 items. These lists were made public in August 2020, May 2021 and April 2022.
Of the 101 items in the fourth list, 75 items are to be indigenised between 2025 and 2032. These include long range UAV (HALE), medium range reconnaissance aircraft, long range anti-ship missile for ships, 30 mm naval surface guns, shipborne unmanned aerial system, automatic missile detection radar for ships, landing platform dock and surface-to-surface missile Pralay.
Editorial Page
What DC doesn’t get (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
It is widely believed that the neoliberal global order based on open economies, reciprocal gains from trade, free flows of finance, elite mobility, and faith in interdependence is now ending.
One can pick any moment as marking its end. The Biden administration’s slew of tough export regulations targeting China’s semiconductor industry is as good a marker as any.
But what will replace that neoliberal world is not a social-democratic fantasy reorienting politics towards global public goods or justice. It is an even more militarised world, now less capable of trade and diplomacy, hurtling towards a conflict all the principal actors think they can calibrate and control.
The rise of China was always going to be a challenge; an authoritarian, opaque militarised China, relying on strident nationalism for legitimacy even more so. There are no easy options here.
There is no way of confidently knowing what strategy would work. But the ideological framing of the American sanctions is striking. As Jake Sullivan put it:
We previously maintained a sliding scale approach that saidwe need to stay only a couple of generations ahead. This is not the strategic environment in which we are today. Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.
At one level, this statement expresses the unexceptional desire to be competitive. But in the context in which it was uttered, it has huge ramifications.
For one thing, it has now expanded the pretext on which sanctions can be imposed: There is no casus belli here, no gesture at securing a global public good. The justification is maintaining American hegemony, pure and simple.
There are gestures towards working with allies, and some countries might harbour the hopes of opportunistically benefitting from these sanctions.
But the far-reaching nature of these sanctions will have implications for the reliability of the global trading and financial order.
They express the crudest kind of mercantile reordering of the world system possible. In a curious way, the US is now fusing corporate and state power in ways that will resemble China.
Second, announcing these sanctions just before the Party Congress was a gesture that was designed to humiliate the Chinese.
And it is equally hard to imagine that there will not be Chinese retaliation of some kind, perhaps on products that might have more play in American domestic politics. It is tempting to send a strong signal to the Chinese regime.
But if you look at it from the point of view of the rest of the world, the framing is nothing but neo-colonial. It is saying something like “our objective is to ensure that one-fifth of humanity (and the rest of the world) always stays at least a couple of generations behind”.
By openly declaring a war of supremacy, the options for diplomacy or subtle backing down are foreclosed. There is no attempt even to frame a non-zero-sum game solution here.
Idea Page
Don't force the vote (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
On Tuesday morning, I woke up to the shocking news in The Indian Express that the Election Commission had signed MoUs with over 1,000 corporate houses undertaking to monitor “electoral participation of their workforce” and publish on their websites and notice boards those who do not vote.
To make matters worse, the Chief Electoral Officer of Gujarat has said that the employees of state public sector units and government departments who don’t vote will also be tracked.
The report also mentioned that on a recent visit to Gujarat, the CEC himself had said that though the commission cannot enforce compulsory voting, it “wanted to identify workers in big industries who don’t vote despite availing the holiday”.
These shocking developments raise once again serious issues surrounding voters’ rights, compulsory voting, secrecy of voting and debates around privacy and coercion. Any coercion — particularly coercion of the kind being proposed by the EC in this case — betrays an authoritarian approach that is not only antithetical to democracy, but is directly violative of the Constitution and the laws of the land.
The Supreme Court, in PUCL vs Union of India, 2013, (popularly known as the NOTA judgment) has held that abstention from voting and negative voting are protected as freedom of expression — a fundamental right (Article 19). Earlier, in April 2009, the Court had taken the same view while dismissing a plea that sought to make voting mandatory on grounds of governments not representing the majority because of low turnouts.
In every election, there will be those who do not vote out of conviction or for ideological reasons. More importantly, there are millions of daily wage workers, and many homeless and ill.
The proposal for compulsory voting has been raised for years in response to chronic voter apathy, especially in urban areas. However, persuasion and motivation by education rather than compulsion is the answer.
The EC has consistently held and practised this by implementing its flagship programme called SVEEP (Systematic Voters Education for Electoral Participation) since 2010.
The law completely enables, but does not force, citizens to vote. Section135B of the Representation of People Act, 1951, grants a paid holiday to every person employed in any business, trade, industrial undertaking or any other establishment.
Even a daily wage worker shall be paid for the day.
Express Network
Draft framework looks beyond classroom, to let students earn credit for vocational studies, too (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
School students will soon be able to earn credits from classroom learning as well as extracurricular activities, which will be deposited in a credit bank — a system already in place at the higher academic level — as the Centre unveiled the draft National Credit Framework.
The framework aims to formulate a unified credit accumulation and transfer for general and vocational studies, and from school to higher education.
Besides, frameworks for higher education and skill education are currently not integrated, and the proposal is to integrate all frameworks, including the one at school level, under one umbrella.
At the launch of the draft framework and a public consultation on it, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan also announced plans to conduct an “Aadhaar-enabled student registration” drive, which will be followed by opening of Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) accounts, where credits can be deposited.
An Aadhaar-enabled student registration will take place. After student registration, an ABC account will be opened. The deposit of degree and credits will take place in those accounts. There will be a knowledge locker along the lines of DigiLocker.
Pradhan said the framework has been developed to enable integration of academic and vocational domains to ensure flexibility and mobility between the two. This, he said, “would be a game-changer by opening numerous options for further progression of students and inter-mingling of school and higher education with vocational education and experiential learning”.
The proposed framework seeks to prepare the educational system for gradual implementation of National Education Policy provisions such as the four-year undergraduate programmes, which comes with features such as multiple entry and exit. It will, among others, enable students who have dropped out of mainstream education to re-enter the education ecosystem.
The draft framework has been formulated under UGC (Establishment and Operation of Academic Bank Of Credits in Higher Education) Regulations, notified in July 2021.
While the National Institute of Open Schooling follows a credit system, currently there is no established credit mechanism for regular school education in the country.
Explained Page
Missed chances on India-China border (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Sixty years ago on this day — October 20, 1962 — Chinese troops came down from the Himalayan heights all along the India-China border and confronted an unprepared India, shredding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s faith in the Himalayan shield.
But relations with China, whether on the borders or in the political sphere, had long been a cause for concern, Nehru’s benign view notwithstanding. As would be seen, there were infirmities in India’s boundary with China, both in the east and the west.
Back in 1950, Nehru had declared in Parliament that in the east, “McMahon Line was our border, map or no map”. In the west, the border in Aksai Chin was marked “undefined” in the Survey of India maps that India inherited on Independence — but Nehru said it was known by custom and usage.
On March 13, 1949, with the civil war in China at its peak, India had rejected a suggestion to demarcate the Aksai Chin border: “In the present disturbed conditions, it is not possible to demarcate undefined frontier between Kashmir and Sinking (Xinjiang).”
Subsequently in 1954, the border along Aksai Chin was defined by Nehru’s fiat, dispensing with the mandatory requirement of consulting the other stakeholder, China.
The new, unilaterally defined boundary included Aksai Chin within India; however, no effort was made to occupy it or to even plant the Indian flag there as a mark of sovereignty.
India remained unaware that this area was already in use by China. It came to know that the Chinese had built a 220-km-long road there only after the completion of the project was announced in 1957.
In the eastern sector, the McMahon Line had been drawn in 1914 without even a survey. Henry McMahon admitted in 1935 that the “want of local accurate knowledge and absence of detailed surveys rendered it impossible to define large portion of it, except in a general term”.
While negotiating the Tibet agreement in 1954, India consciously avoided discussions about the border, leaving the boundary question open while giving up all the facilities it had inherited from the British.
By the end of 1959 there were enough straws in the wind to suggest an impending escalation, since the dialogue between the two countries had by then become polemical.
The April 1960 discussions between Nehru and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in New Delhi failed to bridge their differences. The major stumbling block was in the western sector, involving Aksai Chin.
Nehru stonewalled repeated suggestions from China on the need to negotiate and demarcate the boundary through joint surveys.
Cuban missile crisis (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
The October of 1962 saw the Cold War hit its height, when the two great superpowers, the Soviet Union and the US, teetered on the brink of nuclear warfare for 13 days.
The standoff, known as the Cuban missile crisis, was resolved and disaster narrowly averted thanks to timely negotiations between Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F Kennedy.
Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s veiled threat of using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine marked the first prospect of nuclear “armageddon” since the Cuban missile crisis. A day later, his administration said there was no evidence for this claim.
On the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, we explain the event.
An important precursor of the Cuban missile crisis was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, in which US-backed Cuban counter-revolutionaries attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in the country and establish a non-communist government friendly to the US.
After successfully fending off the operation, Castro turned increasingly towards the USSR and its premier Khrushchev, to deter any future invasion by the US.
An agreement was made between the two, and by July 1962, a number of clandestine missile launch facilities began to be constructed in Cuba.
Other than wanting to protect another communist country, Khrushchev also wanted to place nuclear weapons in Cuba to counter the urgent threat of US missiles close to its own borders.
From the late 1950s, Washington had begun placing nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy, which had the capability of destroying strategic centres within the USSR. By placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, the USSR could challenge the strategic status-quo favourable to the US.
On October 14, 1962, a US U-2 spy plane flying over Cuban territory took pictures of several medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missile sites being constructed in Cuba, which had the capacity to target strategic centres in the heartland of the US.
On the morning of October 16, Kennedy summoned his cabinet officials and top advisors to form the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM), to develop a course of action.
While some members recommended air strikes followed by another invasion of Cuba, others favoured issuing stern warnings.
‘Oldest dock’ lothal to get heritage complex :its features, significance (Page no. 18)
(GS Paper 1, History)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed the construction of the National Maritime Heritage Complex (NMHC) site at Gujarat’s Lothal via video conferencing.
There are many such tales of our history that have been forgotten,” the PM said. “Lothal was not only a major trading centre of the Indus Valley Civilisation, but it was also a symbol of India’s maritime power and prosperity.”
Lothal was one of the southernmost sites of the Indus Valley civilization, located in the Bhāl region of what is now the state of Gujarat.
The port city is believed to have been built in 2,200 BC. Lothal was a thriving trade centre in ancient times, with its trade of beads, gems and ornaments reaching West Asia and Africa. The meaning of Lothal (a combination of Loth and (s) thal) in Gujarati is “the mound of the dead”.
Incidentally, the name of the city of Mohenjo-daro (also part of the Indus Valley Civilisation, now in Pakistan) means the same in Sindhi.
Indian archaeologists started the search for cities of the Harappan Civilisation post-1947 in Gujarat’s Saurashtra. Archaeologist SR Rao led the team which discovered a number of Harappan sites at the time, including the port city of Lothal.
Excavation work was carried out in Lothal between February 1955 and May 1960. According to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Lothal had the world’s earliest known dock, connecting the city to an ancient course of the Sabarmati river.
Additionally, the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa discovered marine microfossils and salt, gypsum crystals at the site, indicating that sea water once filled the structure and it was definitely a dockyard.
In later excavations, ASI unearthed a mound, a township, a marketplace, and the dock. Adjacent to the excavated areas stands the archaeological site museum, where some of the most prominent collections of Indus-era antiquities in India are displayed.
Lothal was nominated in April 2014 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its application is pending on the tentative list of UNESCO. As per the nomination dossier submitted to UNESCO, “The excavated site of Lothal is the only port-town of the Indus Valley Civilisation.