News snippet
News 1: Global Hunger Index is out, India in ‘serious’ category at rank 107
News 2: India, China agrees for more military talks to resolve LAC issues
News 3: INS Arihant carries out key missile test
News 4: Eco-sensitive zone: top court may take up Kerala’s review
News 5: Haryana, Punjab CMs fail to reach consensus on SYL canal row
News 6: 20 percent ethanol blending may be available from Dec or Jan
News 7: GSLV MkIII to make commercial foray
News 1: Global Hunger Index is out, India in ‘serious’ category at rank 107
Background:
- India ranks 107 out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index in which it fares worse than all countries in South Asia barring war-torn Afghanistan.
Global Hunger Index:
- The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
- GHI scores are based on the values of four component indicators – undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting and child mortality.
- Countries are divided into five categories of hunger on the basis of their score, which are ‘low’, ‘moderate’, ‘serious’, ‘alarming’ and ‘extremely alarming’.
- Based on the values of the four indicators, a GHI score is calculated on a 100-point scale reflecting the severity of hunger, where zero is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.
India’s position:
- India’s score of 29.1 places it in the ‘serious’ category.
- India also ranks below Sri Lanka (64), Nepal (81), Bangladesh (84), and Pakistan (99). Afghanistan (109) is the only country in South Asia that performs worse than India on the index. China is among the countries collectively ranked between 1 and 17 having a score of less than five.
- India’s child wasting rate (low weight for height), at 19.3%, is worse than the levels recorded in 2014 (15.1%) and even 2000 (17.15), and is the highest for any country in the world and drives up the region’s average owing to India’s large population.
- Prevalence of undernourishment, which is a measure of the proportion of the population facing chronic deficiency of dietary energy intake, has also risen in the country from 14.6% in 2018-2020 to 16.3% in 2019-2021. This translates into 224.3 million people in India considered undernourished.
- But India has shown improvement in child stunting, which has declined from 38.7% to 35.5% between 2014 and 2022, as well as child mortality which has also dropped from 4.6% to 3.3% in the same comparative period.
- On the whole, India has shown a slight worsening with its GHI score increasing from 28.2 in 2014 to 29.1 in 2022. Though the GHI is an annual report, the rankings are not comparable across different years. The GHI score for 2022 can only be compared with scores for 2000, 2007 and 2014.
News 2: India, China agree for more military talks to resolve LAC issues
Background:
- India and China on Friday agreed to hold another round of talks between senior military commanders to take up remaining issues along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and “create conditions for the restoration of normalcy” in ties.
‘At an early date’
- Both sides reviewed the LAC situation and welcomed the latest disengagement at Patrolling Point 15 in the Gogra-Hot Springs area, the MEA said. Following the fifth disengagement, differences remain in two areas, Demchok and Depsang.
- The MEA said both sides “agreed to continue discussions through diplomatic and military channels to resolve the remaining issues along the LAC at the earliest so as to create conditions for restoration of normalcy in bilateral relations.”
China welcomes move
- A statement from China’s Foreign Ministry similarly welcomed the recent disengagement, and said both sides were “willing to take measures to further ease the border situation and promote the border situation from emergency response to normalised control.”
- It added that they agreed to hold the next military talks as soon as possible.
- India has maintained that the currently strained ties cannot return fully to normalcy without peace on the boundary. Full disengagement will have to be followed by de-escalation and de-induction of the 1,00,000 troops from both sides still deployed in forward areas.
News 3: INS Arihant carries out key missile test
Background:
- The country’s first ballistic missile nuclear submarine INS Arihant carried out a successful launch of a Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) on Friday, validating India’s second-strike nuclear capability.
- The missile was tested to a predetermined range and impacted the target area in the Bay of Bengal with high accuracy, the Ministry said in a statement. “All operational and technological parameters of the weapon system have been validated,” the statement added.
INS Arihant:
- INS Arihant, designated S2 Strategic Strike Nuclear Submarine, is the lead ship of India‘s Arihant class of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. The 6,000 tonne vessel was built under the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) project at the Ship Building Centre in the port city of Visakhapatnam.
News 4: Eco-sensitive zone: top court may take up Kerala’s review
Background:
- The Supreme Court on Friday indicated it may consider taking up Kerala’s review of the Supreme Court’s judgment to have a one-km eco-sensitive zone ringing protected forests, national parks and wildlife sanctuaries across the country along with a plea for clarification sought by the Centre.
- The review by Kerala has argued that the judgment would lead to massive displacement of people living in the vicinity of forest areas. Even worse, the judgment would strip thousands of Scheduled Tribe families and forest dwellers of their vested rights under the law. “Human habitations are there within one km of the protected areas,” the review petition said.
- In June, the Supreme Court, in its judgment, referred to Environment Ministry guidelines highlighting that ESZs around national parks, forests and sanctuaries would function as a “shock absorber” for the protected areas. These zones would act as a transition zone from areas of high protection to those involving lesser protection. The court had noted how the national resources were ravaged by mining and other activities.
Ecologically sensitive zone:
- As per the National Wildlife Action Plan (2002-2016), issued by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, land within 10 km of the boundaries of national parks and wildlife sanctuaries is to be notified as eco-fragile zones or Eco-Sensitive Zones (ESZ).
- While the 10-km rule is implemented as a general principle, the extent of its application can vary. Areas beyond 10-km can also be notified by the Union government as ESZs, if they hold larger ecologically important “sensitive corridors.
Why are Eco-Sensitive Zones created?
- According to the guidelines issued by the Environment Ministry on February 9, 2011, ESZs are created as “shock absorbers” for the protected areas, to minimize the negative impact on the “fragile ecosystems” by certain human activities taking place nearby. Furthermore, these areas are meant to act as a transition zone from areas requiring higher protection to those requiring lesser protection.
- The guidelines also state that the ESZs are not meant to hamper the daily activities of people living in the vicinity, but are meant to guard the protected areas and “refine the environment around them”.
News 5: Haryana, Punjab CMs fail to reach consensus on SYL canal row
Background:
- Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal and his Punjab counterpart Bhagwant Mann failed to reach a consensus on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal project — the focal point of the water-sharing dispute between the two States — at a meeting here on Friday.
- The meeting was held on the directions of the Supreme Court. “Both States reached no consensus on the construction of the SYL canal,” Mr. Lal said after the meeting.
- While Haryana said the construction of the canal was necessary as it is the lifeline of the State, Punjab maintained that it did not have even a “single drop” of water to share.
- Mr. Mann said that instead of seeking water from Punjab, Haryana should in fact give water to his State from the river Yamuna.
Satluj – Yamuna Link canal:
The river waters
- The canal, once completed, will enable sharing of the waters of the rivers Ravi and Beas between the two states. The issue dates back to 1966 at the time of reorganisation of Punjab and formation of Haryana was formed. Punjab was opposed to sharing the waters of the two rivers with Haryana, citing riparian principles.
The canal
- On April 8, 1982, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched the construction of the SYL Canal with a groundbreaking ceremony in Kapoori village in Patiala district. A stretch of 214 km was to be constructed, out of which 122 km was to cross Punjab and 92 km in Haryana. But the Akalis launched an agitation in the form of Kapoori Morcha against the construction of the canal. Then in July 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and then Akali Dal chief Sant Harchand Singh Longowal signed an accord agreeing for a new tribunal to assess the water.
News 6: 20 percent ethanol blending may be available from Dec or Jan
Background:
- Twenty percent ethanol blended petrol is likely to be available in the country from December 2022 or January 2023, ahead of the April 2023 target.
Ethanol blending and flex-fuel:
- Citing the example of Brazil where flex fuel vehicles are available and consumer can take ethanol or petrol as per choice, he said this will be the ultimate goal of the Government.
Ethanol Blended Petrol Programme:
About ethanol:
- Ethanol, an anhydrous ethyl alcohol having chemical formula of C2H5OH, can be produced from sugarcane, maize, wheat, etc which are having high starch content. In India, ethanol is mainly produced from sugarcane molasses by fermentation process. Ethanol can be mixed with gasoline to form different blends.
- As the ethanol molecule contains oxygen, it allows the engine to more completely combust the fuel, resulting in fewer emissions and thereby reducing the occurrence of environmental pollution. Since ethanol is produced from plants that harness the power of the sun, ethanol is also considered as renewable fuel.
- Launch: 2003
- Objective: The programme sought to promote the use of alternative and environment friendly fuels and to reduce import dependency for energy requirements.
News 7: GSLV MkIII to make commercial foray
Background:
- Indian Space Research Organisation’s heaviest rocket, GSLV MkIII, is set to launch 36 satellites of the OneWeb communication constellation from the country’s only space port at Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, at 7 am on October 23. With this the GSLV MkIII will enter the global commercial launch service market.
Launches and GSLV Mk III:
- The launch aboard India’s heaviest rocket was purchased by the United Kingdom-based Network Access Associated Limited through the New Space India Limited, one of the commercial arms of the space agency. Bharti group-backed OneWeb is a constellation of satellites in low earth orbit to provide broadband services.
- This is the first time that India’s heaviest rocket is being used for a commercial launch. Also, this will the first time a rocket other than India’s workhorse – Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) – is being used to carry out commercial launch.
- This will be the second flight of the GSLV Mk III — after it joined the ISRO fleet having completed two development flights — since it carried India’s second lunar mission Chandrayaan-2.
- India currently has three operational launch vehicles – the PSLV, GSLV, and GSLV Mk III. The space agency has also developed a small satellite launch vehicle, whose first development flight earlier this year was partially successful.
- The government opened up the space sector for private players in 2020, promoting new activities by existing ISRO collaborators and also encouraging start-ups that offer full gamut of activities from launch services, satellite development, to down-stream applications.
- There are over 100 start-ups in the country now. The aim of opening up the sector was to allow the private players to offer routine space services while ISRO focuses on scientific missions.
GSLV Mk III:
- GSLV Mk III will be capable of placing the 4 tonne class satellites of the GSAT series into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbits.
- The powerful cryogenic stage of GSLV Mk III enables it to place heavy payloads into Low Earth Orbits of 600 km altitude. The C25 is powered by CE-20, India’s largest cryogenic engine.
- GSLV Mk III uses two S200 solid rocket boosters to provide the huge amount of thrust required for lift off.
- GSLV MkIII is configured as a three stage vehicle with two solid strap-on motors (S200), one liquid core stage (L110) and a high thrust cryogenic upper stage (C25).
News 8: NGT imposes Rs 500 crore fine on Karnataka government for failure to protect Chandapura lake
Background:
- After taking suo moto cognisance of a report in The Indian Express on the issue, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has imposed an environmental compensation of Rs 500 crore on the Karnataka government for its failure in maintaining Chandapura lake in Anekal taluk and taking steps to restore the water body.
- The NGT noted that the water quality of the lake has deteriorated. It further said that there were “illegal encroachments and construction activities and unchecked violations of environmental norms by the industries” and pointed out the authorities’ “failure to protect and regulate buffer zones and catchment areas of the lake and to control pollution”.
NGT orders:
- The NGT said that the amount may be deposited within one month and kept in a ring-fenced account with the state pollution control board which will be the responsibility of the state chief secretary. The amount, the tribunal said, can be utilised for restoration measures, preferably within six months, as per directions and supervision of a monitoring committee.
- The monitoring committee, the NGT said, will be headed by the chairman of the State Wetland Authority. Other members will include the principal secretary/ACS, urban development; nominees of Regional Office, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bangalore; regional director of the Central Pollution Control Board, Bangalore; member secretary of the state pollution control board; and district magistrate of the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board, Karnataka Tank Conservation and Development Authority.
- The principal bench of NGT further directed the state government that restoration measures may include biological measures such as plantation/afforestation of suitable trees, shrubs and grass in consultation with the state forest department. It also mentioned engineering measures that can be undertaken.
- The committee has stated that all the upstream lakes connecting to Chandapura lake are polluted. The committee in its report has also stated that sewage generated in the municipal limits of Chandapura is being discharged into the lake directly or indirectly through drains, except for private residential apartments, since there is no common sewage treatment plant (STP) to treat sewage.
National Green Tribunal:
Established: 2010 under National Green Tribunal Act, 2010
Objective:
- For effective and expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources including enforcement of any legal right relating to environment and giving relief and compensation for damages to persons and property and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.
- It is a specialized body equipped with the necessary expertise to handle environmental disputes involving multi-disciplinary issues. The Tribunal shall not be bound by the procedure laid down under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, but shall be guided by principles of natural justice.
- The Tribunal’s dedicated jurisdiction in environmental matters shall provide speedy environmental justice and help reduce the burden of litigation in the higher courts. The Tribunal is mandated to make and endeavour for disposal of applications or appeals finally within 6 months of filing of the same.
- Initially, the NGT is proposed to be set up at five places of sittings and will follow circuit procedure for making itself more accessible. New Delhi is the Principal Place of Sitting of the Tribunal and Bhopal, Pune, Kolkata and Chennai shall be the other four place of sitting of the Tribunal.
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.