News Snippet
- News 1: Swachh Survekshan survey (Cleanliness survey conducted to measure the sanitation practices being implemented in both urban and rural areas. The points will provide a value contribution)
- News 2: NRIs to benefit from UAE’s new policy on immigration (Indian diaspora will be benefiting under the new visa policy and its implications. Important as it forms part of UPSC GS Mains Paper -2)
- News 3: With drained battery and no fuel, Mangalyaan bids adieu (Important as this was India’s 1st interplanetary space mission and has come in UPSC 2016 prelims)
- News 4: How can India reduce its impact on global warming? (Global warming is an important topic as it relates to climate change. In this the relation of agriculture and global warming has been explored)
- News 5: Centre raises mid-day meal per child cooking cost by 9.6% (Mid-day meal scheme or PM Poshan scheme is crucial as questions have been asked on government schemes)
- News 6: PM launches 5G (Questions related to new technology in UPSC Prelims has been asked consistently)
- News 7: Draft norms for RRB listing (RRB banks form an important part in rural banking scenario, and they provide 75% of advances under priority sector lending thus prompting financial inclusion and welfare)
- Other Important News
- Camel
- Burkina Faso
- PM Karin’s centrist party wins election in Latvia
- Corbett Tiger reserve
News 1 : Swachh Survekshan Survey
Background
- Telangana was ranked first for the cleanliness of its villages in the Swachh Survekshan Gramin (SSG), 2022.
- After Telangana, Haryana was placed second followed by Tamil Nadu in the Large States category.
- Indore (M.P) bags cleanest city award for sixth year.
Swachh Survekshan Survey 2022
- The Swachh Survekshan Gramin, 2022 award ranks States and districts on the basis of their performance attained on Swachh Bharat Mission Gramin (SBM-G) parameters and engagement of the rural community in improvement of their sanitation status
- Among smaller States and Union Territories, Andaman and Nicobar secured the first position, followed by Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Sikkim
- Since the launch of SBM-G in 2014, over 11 crore toilets had been built and about 60 crore people had given up open defecation.
- The second phase of the mission, launched in 2020, aims to make all six lakh villages in India ‘Open Defecation Free’.
- Around 62% of rural households in India have fully functional tap water.
Swachh Survekshan Survey is carried out by Quality Council of India (QCI).
News 2: NRIs to benefit from UAE’s new policy on immigration
Background
The news per say is not important. What is important is GCC.
The new visa rules are said to be highly beneficial to expatriates, investors and tourists travelling to this Gulf Cooperation Council nation. The new visa rules allows the expatriate community to bring their family members and friends to the UAE for a longer stay, as per a legal expert.
The advanced visa system includes a 10-year expanded golden visa scheme, a five-year green residency and new entry permits
Gulf Cooperation Council
News 3: With drained battery and no fuel, Mangalyaan bids adieu
Background
India’s Mars Orbiter craft has run out of propellant and its battery is drained beyond the safe limit, fueling speculation that the country’s maiden interplanetary mission Mangalyaan may have finally completed its long innings.
The ₹450 crore Mars Orbiter Mission was launched onboard PSLV-C25 on November 5, 2013, and the MOM spacecraft was successfully inserted into the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014 in its first attempt.
Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)
- The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), commonly referred to as Mangalyaan-1, is a space probe launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on November 5, 2013.
- The indigenously built space probe, which is India’s first interplanetary mission, has been in the Martian orbit since September 24, 2014.
- The mission which is aimed at studying Martian atmosphere helped the ISRO to enter the elite group of space agencies including the Soviet Space Program, NASA and the European Space Agency to reach Mars.
- The secondary objective is to explore Martian surface features, mineralogy, morphology and atmosphere using indigenous scientific instruments.
India is the first Asian nation to reach the Mars orbit and the first in the world to achieve it in its first attempt.
UPSC 2016 prelims
Consider the following statements:
The Mangalyaan launched by ISRO
- is also called the Mars Orbiter Mission
- made India the second country to have a spacecraft orbit the Mars after USA
- made India the only country to be successful in making its spacecraft orbit the Mars in its very first attempt
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 and 3 only
(c) 1 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3
Ans: (c) (Official UPSC Answer key) (India was the 4th space agency to launch Mars mission after NASA, Roscosmos and ESA)
News 4: How can India reduce its impact on global warming?
Background
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has pointed out that since the industrial revolution, which started around 1800, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) due to fuel burning and other ‘greenhouse gases’ such as methane, nitrous oxide, and compounds of sulphur, phosphorous, ozone into the atmosphere, changing the earth’s climate.
Alarming increase
- Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased by over 40%, from 280 ppm in the 18th century to 414 ppm in 2020.
- India had 170 million people in 1800, which has risen to 1.4 billion people today.
- And industrial revolution started only after India’s Independence 75 years ago.
- While it has helped in reduction of poverty, it has also led to rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases.
India’s agricultural scenario and its carbon footprint
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) points out that we have a rural population that constitutes 70% of the country, and their main occupation is agriculture. This gives us a total foodgrain production of 275 million tonne.
India is the second largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, cotton and groundnuts.
It thus, becomes important that India reduce its carbon footprint, more in its farming sector.
Farmers have come up with some admirable methods, with the help of agricultural professionals, by using solar panels in their fields, so that they can avoid diesel for groundwater pumps.
The government and professional groups have helped rural farmers put in solar panels to save money and gain greater income and it might help drop India’s carbon emissions by 45 – 62 million tonnes annually.
A common goal
- India has about 30% vegetarians and 70% of the population eat meat — mainly chicken, mutton and fish.
- India, with its many rivers, has a vast coastline which is rich in fishes.
- And fishes have high nutritional value and help in reducing carbon footprint.
- Thus, with farmers, meat sellers and fishermen, each contributing to India in reducing our carbon footprint, we can hope to be an exemplary nation for the EPA.
Global warming:
- Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere.
- Since the Industrial Revolution, the global annual temperature has increased in total by a little more than 1 degree Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since 2005—and the 5 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2015.
News 5: Centre raises mid-day meal per child cooking cost by 9.6%
Background
After a gap of over two years, the cooking cost per child under the mid-day meal scheme is set to rise by 9.6 per cent, with the Ministry of Finance approving the hike proposed by a committee which has recommended inter-ministerial deliberations on linking the number of LPG cylinders per school to enrolment.
The decision, which is likely to come into effect from October, comes at a time school authorities and food rights activists across the country have been demanding more funds to run the scheme, which has 11.8 crore student beneficiaries, citing an increase in the prices of vegetables, pulses and cooking gas.
Mid-day meal scheme
- It is renamed as PM POSHAN (Poshan Shakti Nirman) Scheme for providing one hot cooked meal in Government and Government-aided schools from 2021-22 to 2025-26, earlier known as ‘National Programme for Mid-Day Meal in Schools’ popularly known as Mid-Day Meal Scheme.
- Ministry: Ministry of Education
Funding
- NE States – Centre: State = 90:10
- Other states and UTs with legislatures – Centre: State = 60:40
- Type: Centrally sponsored scheme
- Beneficiaries: School children studying from class 1 to 8 in Government and Government – Aided schools
- Social Audit of the scheme is made mandatory in all the districts.
- Special provision is made for providing supplementary nutrition items to children in aspirational districts and districts with high prevalence of Anemia.
It is the largest school feeding programme of its kind in the world, Enhancing the enrolment in schools is the basic objective of the scheme.
The cost of foodgrains is borne entirely by the Centre, which will have to shell out an additional amount of Rs 660 crore in 2022-23, while the states will spend Rs 400 crore more than what was sanctioned in the annual budget to implement the revised cooking cost.
Tithi Bhojan is a community participation programme in which people provide special food to children on special occasions/festivals.
School Nutrition Gardens in schools to give children first-hand experience with nature and gardening. The harvest of these gardens is used in the scheme providing additional micronutrients. School Nutrition Gardens have already been developed in more than 3 lakh schools.
News 6: PM launches 5G
Background
Launching 5G services that promise ultra-high-speed internet on cellphones, Prime Minister said this is “a knock on the doors of a new era” and the “beginning of an infinite sky of opportunities”.
Terming the launch of 5G services as a success of the government’s Digital India initiative, he said the programme is based on four key pillars: cost of device, digital connectivity, data cost and a digital-first approach.
5G launch
- Among the three major telecom operators, Bharti Airtel immediately rolled out 5G services in eight cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi and Bengaluru, and said the rest of the country would get it by March 2024.
- Reliance Jio is set to launch 5G in metro cities by Diwali this year, and in the rest of the country by 2023-end. Vodafone Idea has not announced a timeline yet.
- For consumers, 5G will provide superior internet speed and low latency.
- At its peak, internet speeds on 5G could touch 10 Gbps, compared to the 100 Mbps peak of 4G.
- Similarly, latency under 4G is between 10-100 ms (millisecond), whereas it is expected to be under 1 ms on 5G. Latency is the time it takes for a device to send packets of data and get a response.
- According to government estimates, the cumulative economic impact of 5G is expected to touch $450 billion by 2035.
Are all operators employing the same 5G technology?
- 5G networks are deployed mainly on two modes: standalone and non-standalone.
- Each architecture has its advantages and disadvantages, and the path chosen by operators primarily reflects their view of the market for the new technology, and the consequent rollout strategy.
- In the standalone mode, which Jio has chosen, the 5G network operates with dedicated equipment and runs parallel to the existing 4G network.
- In the non-standalone mode, the 5G network is supported by the 4G core infrastructure.
- Given that the non-standalone networks are built on existing infrastructure, the initial cost and rollout times are significantly lower.
- The non-standalone mode, which Bharti Airtel has opted for, lets operators maximise the utilisation of existing network infrastructure with relatively lower investment.
- Non-standalone networks are generally considered to be a steppingstone, and global precedent suggests operators who have launched non-standalone 5G networks eventually transition to standalone networks.
- Most smartphones today have capability to connect to non-standalone 5G networks — which are essentially 5G airwaves transmitted through 4G networks — and will require software updates by their OEMs to be able to connect to standalone networks.
Want to read more on 5G : Click Here
News 7: Draft norms for RRB listing
Background
Regional rural banks (RRBs), which play a crucial role in credit disbursement in remote areas, will be eligible to list on stock exchanges and raise funds if they have net worth of at least Rs 300 crore over the previous three years and if they fulfil certain other criteria.
New draft norms
- As per the draft guidelines issued by the Finance Ministry, such banks must also have a capital adequacy of 9 per cent in each of the previous three years and recorded operating profit of at least Rs 15 crore for a minimum of three out of the preceding five years.
- There should not be any accumulated loss and the RRB should have offered at least 10 per cent return on equity in three out of the previous five years, according to the norms.
- Under the new norms, sponsor banks have been asked to identify the RRBs that are eligible for listing.
- The sponsors will also have to factor in relevant rules and regulations floated by both stock market and banking regulators — SEBI and RBI — with regard to capital raising and disclosure requirements when they zero in on eligible RRBs.
Other important news
Camel
- A camel is an even-toed ungulate in the genus Camelus that bears distinctive fatty deposits known as “humps” on its back.
- Camels have long been domesticated and, as livestock, they provide food (milk and meat) and textiles (fiber and felt from hair). Camels are working animals especially suited to their desert habitat and are a vital means of transport for passengers and cargo.
- There are three surviving species of camel. The one-humped dromedary makes up 94% of the world’s camel population, and the two-humped Bactrian camel makes up 6%. The Wild Bactrian camel is a separate species and is now critically endangered.
UPSC 2019
Consider the following statements:
- Asiatic lion is naturally found in India only.
- Double-humped camel is naturally found in India only.
- One-horned rhinoceros is naturally found in India only.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) 1 and 3 only
(d) 1, 2 and 3
Option: a (UPSC Official answer key)
Burkina Faso coup
- Soldiers carrying weapons escort the convoy of Burkina Faso’s self- declared new leader Ibrahim Traore recently.
- Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in Africa.
- Capital: Ouagadougou (Largest city)
- Currency: West African CFA franc
- In the dry season, the harmattan – a hot dry wind from the Sahara – blows in Burkina Faso.
- In West Africa, the easterly trade winds blow off-shore bringing dust-laden, dry winds from the Sahara and reach the coast of Guinea. The local name for this hot, dry, dusty wind is Harmattan (meaning ‘the doctor’).
PM Karin’s centrist party wins election in Latvia
- Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins’s pro-Western centrist party won the elections in Latvia.
- The Russian-speaking minority in Latvia makes up around 30% of the population.
- Latvia, a Baltic state in Europe lies along the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea
- Capital: Riga
- Currency: Euro
Corbett Tiger Reserve
- Corbett National Park has been renamed as Ramganga National Park.
- Corbett National Park, which is a part of the larger Corbett Tiger Reserve, a Project Tiger Reserve lies in the Nainital district of Uttarakhand.
- Established in the year 1936 as Hailey National Park, Corbett has the glory of being India’s oldest and most prestigious National Park. It is also being honored as the place where Project Tiger was first launched in 1973.
- The entire area of the reserve is mountainous and falls in the Shivalik and Outer Himalaya geological provinces.
- Ramganga, Sonanadi, Mandal, Palain and Kosi are the major rivers flowing through the Reserve.
- The national park along with the neighbouring 301-sq km-Sonanadi Wildlife Sanctuary together make the critical tiger habitat of the Corbett Tiger Reserve.
Recent Posts
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.