Government issues notification of ‘Indian Skill Development Service’
The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) has issued the notification of setting up of Indian Skill Development Services (ISDS). This service has been created for the Training Directorate of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.
The purpose of instituting a formal service in Group ‘A’ category was initiated almost two years back when the Ministry was formed and the union cabinet approved its creation on October 7, 2015. With notification of this service the skill ecosystem is expected to get strengthened and modernised in line with the current scientific and industrial development in the country.
ISDS will be a Group ‘A’ service where induction will take place through Indian Engineering Service Examination conducted by UPSC.
The mystique of Mehrauli Complex
The Archaeological Park in Mehrauli is the site of many a monument and the abode of history. Every lane and stone in it is historical, for here flourished many kings, princes, princesses, wazirs, generals, warriors, saints and mendicants.
Prehistoric tales associate Mehrauli with the descendants of the Pandavas. Later, it saw the building of Quila Rai Pithora which bears witness to the glory of Prithviraj Chauhan. But after the Rai’s defeat in the second battle of Terain at the hands of Mohammed Ghori, Qutubuddin Aibak made Mehrauli his capital and the Slave kings who followed him continued to rule from there.
Then the Khiljis took over and monuments like the Qutub Minar, Alai Darwaza and Alai Minar of Alauddin took shape. The Tughlaqs built their own capital nearby and the Sayyids and the Lodhis also left behind their grand creations.
The Moghuls too built monuments there as they were great devotees of the saint Qutubuddin Bhakhtiar Kaki after whom the Qutub Minar is named.
Near the post office in Mehrauli is a rugged, nondescript building that gives the impression of a fortress, a small one, which marks the site where Banda Singh, the famous Sikh warrior, was executed by emperor Farrukhsiyar. Now more than 250 years after Banda’s martyrdom, a shrine has been built in his memory.
Semi-divine females or yoginis have been an integral part of the Indian folklore. These women were naturally beautiful and had voices which could charm the listener by the emotional intensity of their songs, a sort of heavenly chant which was not of this world.
Many a king and commoner was enchanted by yoginis who appeared suddenly in wood, glen and dale or standing under a gnarled tree or beside a stream where the angler was taken by surprise. A temple dedicated to yoginis is said to have existed in Mehrauli which legend says was built by the eldest of the Pandava brothers, Yudhishtra. It was after them that the part of Delhi not covered by the imperial city of Indraprastha was known as Yoginipura. The temple of yoginis is now referred to as the Yogmaya or Jogmaya mandir.
To its north is Anang Tal, a tank said to have been built by Anangpal or Anandapal, son of Raja Jaipal, who was defeated by Mahmud of Ghazni. Anangpal also built a sun temple close to the Yogmaya mandir but of this no trace remains.
When Taimur the Lame camped on the bank of Hauz Khas in 1398, his historian Sharfuddin Yazdi remarked that the place was not only a good retreat, but worthy of respect for its creator, whom he wrongly thought was Feroz Shah Tughlaq. The tank was actually built by Alauddin Khilji, who reigned from 1296 to 1316.
Viewing the tomb of Iltutmish from inside one instinctively looks up at the sky, for it is roofless. It is believed that the Slave Emperor, who ruled from 1210 to 1235, had asked his beloved daughter Razia not to get him buried under a roof, though there are some who think that the roof caved in during an earthquake. It was subsequently repaired by Feroz Shah Tughlaq, though the original construction was completed by Razia.
The tomb of Adham or Adam Khan in Mehrauli gives the impression of peace and quietude, but it has a turbulent history behind it, a history of rape, murder and bloodshed. The person who lies buried below it is Adham Khan, Akbar’s foster brother, and the son of the Emperor’s wet nurse Maham Anga. He was a man with a great deal of swagger and could not bear the sight of Atgah Khan, the husband of another wet nurse of Akbar’s. So he murdered him one day in the Agra Fort. When Akbar came to know of it he was mad with rage and struck Adham Khan a blow on the head that knocked him down senseless. Some say the infuriated king threw Adham Khan down a balcony of the fort. The monument is rarely visited by women because of the stigma attached to him as a womaniser.
The tomb of Jamali-Kamali is a riddle of sorts. Sheikh Fazalullah was a noted poet and saint who lived through the reigns of Sikander Lodhi, Ibrahim Lodhi, Babar and Humayun. He died in 1536, exactly 10 years after the Moghul rule had been established. His romantic bent of mind found expression in poetry which was highly appreciated and because of this young Fazalu went about with his head high in the air. One night Fazalu paced the green grass up and down as the hours went by and at last saw a form approaching through the trees. Thinking that his beloved had come, he bounded forward and caught hold of the figure draped in a robe. But on parting it found to his surprise that it was an old man who looked like a dervish. Since that night his life changed and he became a hermit himself.
Three surveyors who contributed to our knowledge of India
Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, generally known as Buchanan, began his assignment in South India after the final Mysore War with the mandate to gather botanical, agricultural and zoological information as well as knowledge about the soil and natural resources found in the area of his first survey.
Buchanan discovered and named laterite as “indurate clay” or “iron clay” and said this soft red soil which hardened on exposure to air and heat was ideal for building purposes, something long known in the area but first recorded for a wider audience, and given a name by him.
The mention of this ‘discovery’ was made in the context of a story related about another ‘discovery’, that of a monument to Buchanan and his ‘find’ in Angadipuram (near Malappuram) in Kerala where he first spotted the material. The monument, one of the 26 National Geological Monuments in the country, has inscriptions in English, Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil describing the material, and recalls Buchanan. The monument was recently ‘found’ while clearing the overgrown garden of the Government Rest House in Angadipuram.
The laterite-Buchanan monument in Anganwadipuram
Another surveyor – William Lambton, ‘the Father of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’ that led to the map of the India we know.
William Lambton and the European on the Big Temple gopuram in Thanjavur.
Colin Mackenzie,was the first Surveyor-General of India, mandated with creating a Survey of India office.
Helpline for Handloom Weavers ‘Bunkar Mitra’ starts functioning
“Bunkar Mitra”, the Government of India’s Helpline for Handloom Weavers, went live today. The helpline was launched by the Union Textiles Minister.
Info:-
- Justice JS Khehar sworn in as 44th Chief Justice of India
- David Reid Syiemlieh appointed as UPSC chairman.(A History scholar with special works on N-E Indian history (e.g.-Tirot Singh)
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.