UPSC 2017: Comprehensive News Analysis - Sept 23

A. GS1 Related
Social Issues
1. ‘It is for States to crack down on cow vigilantes’
B. GS2 Related
Governance
1. Nirbhaya scheme in disarray: SC
International Relations
1. Strident Pakistan presses for UN envoy on Kashmir
2. India plans to train Afghan police officers
C. GS3 Related
Science and Technology
1. Next PSLV launch in November-December
Environment
1. From ocean to ozone, the limits of our planet
Economy
1. Tax trauma
D. GS4 Related
E. Prelims Fact
F. UPSC Prelims Practice Questions
G. UPSC Mains Practice Questions 

A. GS1 Related

Keypoints:

• It is the state governments prime responsibility to crack down on cow vigilante groups.
• Chief Secretaries of 22 States to file their compliance reports on steps taken and also appoint a nodal police officer in the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police, to prevent cow vigilantes, or ‘gau rakshaks’ as they call themselves, from “taking the law or becoming a law unto themselves.”

Who are Cow Vigilantes?

• Vigilante is a form of the word “vigilant,” which means keeping a watchful or close eye on events and people.
• If you’re a vigilante, you might take the law into your own hands by trying to catch or punish someone in your own way. 

B. GS2 Related

Context:

• A 10-year-old rape survivor from Chandigarh who recently gave birth, has not received the Rs.9 lakh due to her from the Central Victim Compensation Fund under the Nirbhaya scheme.

Keypoints:

• Money is provided as a fixed deposit to tackle the psychological well-being, medical treatment and education of the victim.
• It was part of the total Rs.10 lakh the Supreme Court had awarded her while denying her an abortion. So far, her family has received only Rs.1 lakh.
• The disbursal of compensation to sexual assault victims under the Nirbhaya scheme, started in 2013 following the brutal gang-rape and death of a 23-year-old student in Delhi.
• The Centre has disbursed Rs.200 crore each to the States to compensate sexual assault victims under the Nirbhaya fund. Yet the disbursal to the victims is delayed.
• Few States have spent the money on CCTV cameras and other “paraphernalia” rather than using it to pay compensation to the human victims of sexual assault and abuse.

 About the Nirbhaya Fund

• Nirbhaya Fund is an Indian rupee 10 billion corpus announced by Government of India in its 2013 Union Budget.
• This fund is expected to support initiatives by the government and NGOs working towards protecting the dignity and ensuring safety of women in India.
• Nirbhaya (fearless) was the pseudonym given to the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim to hide her actual identity.
• The Ministry of Women and Child Development, along with several other concerned ministries, will work out details of the structure, scope and the application of this fund.

Keypoints:

• Pakistan blames India and Afghanistan for the volatile security situation in the region.
• Pakistan denies that it is harbouring terrorists who target both the countries and also denies any role for Pakistan in supporting the Taliban.
• Islamabad has diverted international military and development aid towards creating “a dangerous infrastructure of terror on its own territory,”
• Pakistani Prime Minister sought the appointment of a special UN envoy on Kashmir, and accused India of human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.
• The Pakistan PM told the UNGA that “…if India does venture across the LoC or acts upon its doctrine of “limited” war against Pakistan, it will evoke a strong and matching response,” he said, adding that his country had “faced unremitting hostility” from India.
• Abbasi sought an international investigation into “India’s crimes in Kashmir.”

Context:

• MoU supported by UNDP, could be signed next week to train the Afghan Police.

Objective:

• Ultimately enhancing the security partnership between India and Afghanistan by providing top grades security and defense capabilities to the Afghan government.

Keypoints:

• India had earlier trained the Afghan National Army officers and soldiers for four years.
• India is now planning to train Afghan police officers.
• Indian knowledge and experience is going to be very useful especially in counter-terror, and counter-narcotic moves.
• Afghan expects to shape the outlines of the U.S.’s newly announced Afghanistan policy, in which U.S. President Donald Trump called for greater Indian involvement in development projects in Afghanistan.
• US envoy for bilateral talks on the Indo-U.S. defence partnership is expected to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan, as well as the U.S.’s declared policy to shut down “safe havens for terror” in Pakistan.

Trilateral meet

• Looking at it as a good opportunity for India, Afghanistan and the U.S. to develop their partnerships in Afghanistan, the focus will be on further enhancing our cooperation in the economic and development field.
• Afghan representative hopes that Indian businessmen would see that investing in Afghanistan would “pay them back” in the region as well, once India completes the Chabahar port in Iran.

India’s response:

• The External Affairs Ministry did not respond to requests on the plan to train police officers.
• Reason being the brunt of a spike in attacks by Taliban since 2016, when about 6,300 members of Afghan security and defence forces were killed.
• At present about 200 Afghan soldiers are trained at a time at the Indian Military Academy, including 130 cadets and 30 to 40 officers.
• The training of police officers, which India had first offered to Afghanistan in 2011, will be a significant step in security ties, which are a small part of the relationship, compared with India’s $3 billion investment in civilian projects since 2002, with 116 new projects announced this month.
• In 2016, India sent Afghanistan four Russian-made Mi-25 helicopters, but has yet to concede to Afghan requests for more equipment, transport vehicles, while an agreement for Indian engineers to repair the helicopters and to refurbish old aircraft that is non-functional, has still not been finalised.

B. GS3 Related

Keypoints:

• Aerospace Technologies, AseT 2017, was organized by the Aeronautical Society of India (AeSI) and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.
• ISRO Chairman said the next launch of the PSLV will be in November-December.
• Certifying a system or a technology for actual usage is a problem which was similar among the developing countries, says Chairman of ISRO.
• Government agencies and industry partners could design, build, and realise products.
• Technology needs to be consistently upgraded so that India was globally competitive in the sector.
• There was a need to accelerate commercialization of technologies we developed. The nation faced a major lacuna in terms of design capabilities.

Keypoints:

• The population of vertebrate species on Earth in the wild saw a dramatic fall of about 30% between 1970 and 2006.
• Reason being the worst effects being in the tropics and in freshwater ecosystems.
• Habitats destruction by pollutants and land-use change are destroying flora and fauna at unprecedented rates.
• The natural habitats, such as water and land, transformed or destroyed as a result of human activity that in fact far exceeds the biological capacity of the earth.
• According to the Stockholm Environment Institute, the elements of the biophysical world that link us together are often regarded as a “safe operating space for humanity”.
• These planetary boundaries include loss of biodiversity, land-use change, changes to nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosols loading, ozone depletion, chemical production, freshwater use and, of course, climate change.
• Since the last ice age, the Holocene epoch has offered a stable climate, a period of grace for humanity to grow and to flourish, with settlements, agriculture, economic and population expansion.
• Today the Anthropocene epoch, whose exact beginnings are debated, but which has led to over-reliance on fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, pollution in water, soils and air, loss of species and so on, have been devastating for many life forms and connected ecosystems throughout the planet.
• The ecosystems that are stressed by their exposure to pollutants may not recover once the pollutants are removed.
• These boundaries interact with one another and cause changes across scales, crossing a threshold in one domain can speed up or undermine processes in another subsystem.
• For instance, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increase ocean acidification, land-use change often increases GHG emissions, and increasing nitrogen and phosphorus deplete species biodiversity and freshwater resources and increase warming from climate change.
• Considering the stats today earth is already about a degree Celsius warmer than average pre-industrial temperatures.
• Thus planetary boundaries as support systems for life on Earth should be viewed as expressing “carrying capacity” and defining “limits to growth”.

On sustainability

• The idea of sustainability is embedded in the human imagination and is expressed through our ideas of nature, society, economy, environment and future generations. But it became formally a part of international agreements and discourse at the Earth Summit of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.
• The safety of the future generations lies on the view and the recognition of interlinkages among the social, environmental, and economic pillars of sustainability, and between biophysical planetary boundaries and social conditions.

Context:

• Anomalies in the GST management are increasing the anxiety among Indian businesses

Keypoints:

• The GST Network (online backbone), is struggling to keep pace with the millions of invoices and returns being filed electronically by businesses across the country.
• A ministerial group formed by the GST Council to resolve the GSTN’s glitches gave an assurance that 80% of the problems would be fixed by the end of October.
• Critically, for an economy that is slowing down for multiple reasons, even more troublesome is the implication of these implementation stumbles for 85 lakh taxpayers now registered for GST.
• Exporters have already alerted the Centre that the delayed timelines for filing GST returns will mean that no refunds can be expected before mid-November on input taxes paid in advance and the integrated GST levied on goods they imported.
• This will result in working capital getting blocked, cramping their ability to ramp up capacity and raw material procurement in time for festive season orders from around the world.
• Government has asserted that many exporters’ funds were blocked for five-six months even before the GST, even as it said a solution to speed up refunds is being worked out.
• Moreover, in contrast to the ₹95,000-crore GST collections recorded so far for July, about ₹65,000 crore has been claimed as transitional credit (that is, taxes paid on stock purchased before the GST).
• Several revisions in deadlines, tax and cess rates, rules, clarifications and tweaks later, the GST regime is turning out to be neither simple nor friendly for taxpayers.

D. GS4 Related

E. PRELIMS FACT

F. Practice Questions for UPSC Prelims Exam

G. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

GS Paper I

GS Paper III

Also, check previous Daily News Analysis