29 Aug 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

E. Editorials

Category: GOVERNANCE

1. National well-being and the counts that matter

The editorial talks about the importance of adopting new ways for India to know its cumulative human capital and potential, as the decennial census operations are limited.

Issues:

• Since India’s crime data recording system is not built to capture subtleties, what proportion of pregnancies in India start off without the consent of the woman is not known.
• The intergenerational impact of a regretful and anxiety-loaded pregnancy is inadequately quantified by current clinical or epidemiological tools.
• To tackle the issue:
  • Underage marriage of girls must become history.
  • Ensuring secondary school completion of every child, especially girls in rural areas, has far-reaching impact, and needs to be pursued single-mindedly.
  • Provisioning separate, functional toilets and sanitary pads for girls, and teaching boys biology and gender differences (of their own and female) are key enablers to ensuring gender parity in school completion rates.
  • Teaching school-leaving girls and boys the notion of consent, and also the basics of contraception will ensure that the start of every pregnancy will be a desired and happy one.
  • A desired pregnancy is to be supported by a fully functional health-care system, able to anticipate complications before time and facilitating a safe delivery.

Parameters that are valuable:

• What is valuable is measured frequently, at different life stages, and at disaggregated levels: birth weights; the heights and weights of our children when they enter school; school completion rates; perhaps the age, height and weight of a first-time pregnant woman; and most definitely, the number of women in the formal workforce who are on a par with men in terms of earning.
• Birth weight is much more than a number — it is a complex outcome, telling of how well the woman and her family eat, her status among them, and also of any particular condition that the individual mother or new-born child has.
  • Tracking average birth weights by district and sub-district on a regular basis is a fair proxy for food security, the status of women and the delivery of primary health care.
  • For a nation with plans to assign digital health IDs to everyone, what is additionally required is the making of this moving average data live and visible to the people and their government.
• Parameters that take into account such cumulative human capital and potential are of greater importance.

Way forward:

Height-weight proportions:

• If India is to be truly taking advantage of its large birth rate in the form of a demographic dividend, then the correlate of birthweight and five-year height-weight needs to be reviewed at the highest political levels regularly.
  • It reflects the physical and cognitive nurture of human capital that India can bank on for its future.

Improved learning:

• Schooling is a socio-economic and gender parity springboard if school completion rates show no gender, rural-urban or parental income divides.
  • With improved education, India may bring down its maternal mortality ratios.
  • Also neonatal and under-five mortality rates can be improved through delayed marriages and exercising of reproductive choices by its empowered young women.
• Improved learning should translate into better completion rates at post-secondary and baccalaureate levels but need not necessarily correspond to universal, meaningful employment.
  • It is for the government and the corporate world to make opportunities and workplaces happen, irrespective of their gender.

Conclusion:

• Timely, disaggregated, multidimensional data helps immensely in ensuring collective well being – physical, mental and social.
• The tools to get these measurements must be employed meaningfully and must be seen in real-time to be able to take corrective actions where needed.
• Public health is about people, their continued well-being, and not just about controlling disease outbreaks.
• The 2017 edition of the national health policy and the recently unveiled new education policy can help India derive the benefits of its demographic dividend.

Category: POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

1. In ‘act of god’, coercive not cooperative federalism

Context:

The Centre has acknowledged that states are likely to face a GST revenue gap of ₹3 lakh crore this year, as the economy may contract due to COVID-19, and has offered states two options for borrowing to meet the shortfall.

This has been covered in the 28^th August 2020 Comprehensive News Analysis.

The issue has been covered in the editorial segment of 11^th August 2020 CNA: Making up for shortfalls in GST collection.

Category: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

1. Targeting Hezbollah

The editorial talks about the Israeli attacks in Lebanon.

Context:

The Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon following what it called “cross border fires” mark a significant escalation in the crisis that has been building up along the border in recent years.

Background:

• Hezbollah, a Shia militia-cum-political party in Lebanon, and Israel, which have fought two wars before, have been observing a tenuous ceasefire for 14 years.
  • It is considered an Iranian-funded terrorist group by both Israel and the United States.
• Tensions began after Israel’s targeting of Iranian weapons and supplies within Syria.
• Israel fears that Iranian supplies to Hezbollah via Syria would leave them stronger, enhancing Israel’s security challenges in the northern border.
• In the recent attacks, Israel targeted an observation post, which the Israeli Defense Forces claimed was used by Hezbollah for intelligence collection.
• The exchange was the latest of several recent spikes in tension along the heavily militarized border, which has been monitored by United Nations forces since the two countries fought a war in 2006.

Details:

• Hezbollah has been a tough target for Israel.
  • Israel, which has bombed Gaza several times since its 2005 withdrawal from the strip, had been careful when it came to Hezbollah.
  • In 2000, after 18 years of occupation of southern Lebanon, Israel was forced to withdraw mainly due to the fighting of Hezbollah.
  • In 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon, aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s military capabilities. But after a month of Israeli aerial and land attacks, even on the day of the ceasefire, Hezbollah fired hundreds of short-range rockets into northern Israel. Ever since then, both sides have been wary of another open conflict.
  • The militants, on the other side, turned their focus to capacity building after the 2006 war, and, since 2011, to the civil war in Syria.

Concerns:

• The raid, at a time when Israel was carrying out an air campaign in Gaza, shows the growing appetite of the newly formed unity government of Netanyahu for war as a means to address the simmering border problems.
• The Baathist Syria has been a vital link between Hezbollah and Iran ever since the group was founded in the early 1980s.
• Assad (President of Syria) has survived the civil war, and Iran has substantially increased its footprint in Syria, bolstering the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis.
• Israel sees this axis as a growing security challenge and hence, started the bombing operations in Syria, risking another conflict with Hezbollah.

Way forward:

• The past two wars suggest that it would not be easy for Israel, despite its military might, to defeat the battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters at their base.
• Hezbollah, on the other side, might resist an Israeli attack, but risks pulling Lebanon (already battling an economic crisis, political instability and the after-effects of the Beirut blast) into a wider war.
• Both sides should avert such an outcome and stick to the ceasefire.