11 October 2019: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

A. GS1 Related

Nothing here for today!!!

Context:

• India has described Turkey’s military action in Syria as “unilateral” and asked Ankara to respect Syria’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
• The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has called upon Turkey to exercise restraint.

Background:

• Turkey launched a military campaign, Operation Peace Spring, targeting the Kurdish YPG rebels, a branch of the PKK of Turkey that it considers a terrorist organisation.
• Ankara claims the groups being targeted in the operation are already designated as terrorists in the U.S. and the European Union.
• Turkey has accused the PKK/YPG of killing 40,000 civilians.
• Tough diplomatic exchanges between Turkey and India have intensified in recent weeks following India’s decision to end the special status of Kashmir, India issued a strong statement expressing “deep regret” after Turkish President took up the Kashmir issue in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

The issue has been comprehensively covered in October 10 2019 Comprehensive News Analysis under the Editorials segment. Click here to read.

Context:

• A report by Oxfam, a confederation of independent charitable organisations focussing on the alleviation of global poverty, has flagged violation of labour rights in the tea estates of Assam.
• Along with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Oxfam India had conducted the research that yielded the report ‘Addressing the Human Cost of Assam Tea’ through interviews with 510 workers in 50 tea estates of the State.

Concerns:

• Oxfam India’s report has found tea plantation workers’ poor conditions with no toilets, crumbling houses, poor wages, lack of quality health and education entitlements.
• The report noted that the Assam government’s commitment to increasing the minimum wages of tea plantation workers to 351 met with hurdles of financial viability in the sector.
• Tea brands and supermarkets typically capture over two-thirds of the price paid by consumers for Assam tea in India — with just 7% remaining for workers on tea estates.
• The researchers found that despite working for over 13 hours a day, workers earn between Rs.137-167.

Way forward:

• The tea workers’ working and living conditions call for an urgent response.
• The consumers, supermarkets and brands must support the government’s move to provide living wages to workers and to ensuring more of the price paid by the consumers trickle down to them.
• It hoped that the proposed Occupational Health and Safety Bill would help the struggling Assam tea industry.
• It is hoped that the provisions of the bill would be viable and at the same time “ensure fair living wages and decent working and living conditions for tea plantation workers and their families”.

Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Bill, 2019:

• The Code applies to establishments employing at least 10 workers, and to all mines and docks.
• It does not apply to apprentices.
• Further, it makes special provisions for certain types of establishments and classes of employees, such as factories, mines, and building and construction workers.
• The Code repeals and replaces 13 labour laws relating to safety, health and working conditions.
• The central and state governments will set up Occupational Safety and Health Advisory Boards at the national and state level, respectively. These Boards will advise the central and state governments on the standards, rules, and regulations to be framed under the Code.
• The Code specifies several duties of employers. These include:

(i) Providing a workplace that is free from hazards that may cause injury or diseases, and

(ii) Providing free annual health examinations to employees, as prescribed.  In case of an accident at the workplace that leads to death or serious bodily injury of an employee, the employer must inform the relevant authorities.

• Work hours for different classes of establishment and employees will be provided as per the rules prescribed by the central or state government. For overtime work, the worker must be paid twice the rate of daily wages.
• No employee may work for more than six days a week. However, exceptions may be provided for motor transport workers.

C. GS3 Related

Category: ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY

1. Annual Ganges river dolphin census begins

Concerns:

• Way back in 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Convention on Biodiversity, biological invasion of alien species of plants was recognised as the second-worst threat to the environment after habitat destruction.
• But nothing much was done subsequently to contain the spread of invasive weed species in environmentally-sensitive areas like the former composite Adilabad district, where plants are threatening to obliterate pastures from precious habitats.
• Adilabad is now in need of grasslands for herbivores to thrive and in turn, support the swelling influx of tigers from forests across the border in Maharashtra.

Invasive alien species:

• Invasive alien species are species whose introduction and/or spread outside their natural past or present distribution threatens biological diversity.
• They occur in all taxonomic groups, animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms.
• They have the ability to adapt physiologically to new conditions.
• They can affect all types of ecosystems.
• For a species to become invasive, it must successfully out-compete native organisms, spread through its new environment, increase in population density and harm ecosystems in its introduced range.

Way forward:

• More research must be carried to monitor and check the influx of exotic pests and weeds.
• Action should be taken to stem the propagation of invasive weeds and remove those that have already propagated as they do not allow the grasses palatable to wild herbivores to grow.

D. GS4 Related

E. Editorials

Introduction

• The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 has 63 clauses with the aim of reducing road traffic fatalities and injuries in India.
• The amended MVA has several new provisions: increased compensation for road accident victims, a Motor Vehicle Accident fund to provide compulsory insurance cover to all road users, defining a Good Samaritan, recall of a defective motor vehicle, development of a National Transportation Policy, a National Road Safety Board, recognising taxi aggregators and increased penalties for several offences.
• All these are intended to reduce traffic crashes by at least 50% by 2030 (a target set by the United Nations).
• Out of the many amendments, the increased penalties have been implemented in many States at the same time, many states have decided to “dilute” the suggested increase in penalties.

Can penalties act as deterrent?

• New penalties have been introduced for ‘faulty registration details, the concessionaire or the contractor who is responsible for a faulty road design or has not followed standards, and for guardians of juvenile offenders to be penalised.
• While there have to be penalties for offenders, there does not seem to be any correlation between stricter and higher penalties and a reduction in road traffic crashes in countries where road traffic deaths have reduced over the years’, examples being West Europe, the United States, Japan and Australia.
  • A report from New South Wales, Australia in 2007 evaluated the effectiveness of stricter penalties which said: “It is suggested that substantial increases in fines and licence disqualifications would have limited potential in deterring recidivist offenders”.
• The idea of higher fines as a deterrent to traffic crashes is based on the assumption that a driver is careless and that the fear of a higher penalty will encourage “careful” behaviour while on the road.

But this goes against current scientific understanding of Road Safety. How?

• Studies have shown reducing traffic crashes can be done by promoting the design of a system that can forgive mistakes made by road users.
• Road safety experts suggest that road designs such as lane width, shoulder presence, number of lanes and median design influence driving behaviour such as operating speeds, lane changing, etc.
• Therefore, one could expect that ‘roads themselves play an important role in road safety, and improved geometry design and infrastructure could in turn help to improve road safety.
• Studies have also shown drivers are more likely to fall asleep or experience boredom on straight, monotonous, dual carriageway roads with little traffic’. Stricter penalties and intensive driver training cannot reduce the risk of driver fatigue.
  • However, road engineers can change the road design to reduce boredom and monotony.

There is another factor in India.

• The density of small towns and villages along highways and the presence of tractors, three-wheelers, cars, buses, trucks and truck trailers on these highways present a very different traffic mix as compared to North America and Western Europe where most highway standards have been developed.
• Pedestrian and motorcyclist involvement in fatal crashes on highways is greater than those involving other road users.
• In the past two decades, there have been major investments in expanding the national highway system in India. Yet, fatalities have continued to grow.

Road safety data

• It has been a tradition in ‘road safety to analyse road safety data in order to understand why crashes occur, which factors influence risks, and what determines crash severity, and then, based on this understanding, to arrive at reliable conclusions on how to prevent them most effectively and efficiently. This is called a Data-Driven Approach.
• In this approach, priorities are derived by using crash data, background data, exposure data and data on safety performance indicators’. This is what researchers call as a scientific method and evidence-based interventions.
• India has still not created a culture of producing scientific evidence for designing preventive strategies.

Conclusion

Given the understanding from traffic safety theories of the last 50 years, safety interventions have to be based on three important principles:

• Recognition of human frailty,
• Acceptance of human error,
• Creation of a forgiving environment and appropriate crash energy management.

Experience from the U.S. and European countries shows that road standards alone cannot ensure safe roads for all unless safety performance is evaluated. Therefore, if there is to be a reduction in India in the growing health burden due to traffic crashes, it requires establishing a system or institutional structure which enables the generation of new knowledge-new road standards thereby ensuring safe highways and urban roads. Thus, we have a long way to go in ensuring “safe road behaviour”.

Context

• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has flagged a “more pronounced” slowdown in India as it called for a coordinated fiscal response to arrest the “synchronised slowdown in global growth”.

Details

• The IMF expects growth to slow down in nearly 90% of the world in 2019, in contrast to two years ago when nearly 75% of the world witnessed accelerated growth.
• In fact, global growth is expected to hit its lowest rate since the beginning of the current decade.

Why Slowdown?

• Elements where slowing growth was blamed on various factors including the trade war between the United States and China, which is expected to shave off 0.8% from global GDP by 2020.
• India’s economic growth is weaker because of corporate and environmental regulatory uncertainty and “lingering weakness” in some non-bank financial companies.

Recommendation

• IMF chief emphasized the need for structural reforms to boost growth, particularly in the emerging market economies.

NRC:

Read more on the NRC here.

Context

• After rolling out the National Register of Citizens in Assam, the Centre has said it will conduct a similar exercise in the rest of the country.

Experts have red-flagged several concerns

• The NRC process, which ended in Assam on 31 August, has already left 1.9 million “disenfranchized” people, who will now have to appear before foreigner’s tribunals to avoid being declared stateless.
• The exercise somewhat makes sense in Assam because in 1971 around 10 million people crossed over from Bangladesh to India but implementing the same across India will create a lot of confusion.
• To reduce confusion even if it is a transparent and technology-driven process, the people who are excluded are mostly the poor.
• The tribunals in Assam in some pockets do not have judge. So judicially trained officers are acting as judges.
  • And any adjudication on a tribunal without a judicially trained person there is null and void adjudication.
  • Any adjudication process without legal aid for the poor is a null and void adjudication.
• This approach of NRC at the national level is likely to divide the nation terribly

F. Tidbits

• The stance adopted by the Malappuram District Cooperative Bank on not merging with the Kerala State Cooperative Bank is unlikely to impede the formation of the proposed Kerala Bank within the time frame stipulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
  • On deciding to boycott the merger, the Malappuram bank would not be able to avail itself of the refinance facility.
  • The government could also refuse to guarantee the loans sought by the bank. Though NABARD has a direct lending option to district banks, it would not be easy for the district bank to explore the option since the rate of interest is unaffordable.
  • Once the proposed Kerala Bank becomes functional, it would open branches all over the State, including Malappuram, and that would throw fresh challenges to the lone district bank.
• A majority of the primary banks in Malappuram, including those governed by UDF constituents, are reported to have favoured the merger.

G. Prelims Facts

• Swachh Survekshan is a ranking exercise taken up by the Government of India to assess rural and urban areas for their levels of cleanliness and active implementation of Swachhata mission initiatives in a timely and innovative manner.
• The objective of the survey is to encourage large scale citizen participation and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities a better place to live in.
• Additionally, the survey also intends to foster a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens, towards creating cleaner cities and towns.
• The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India takes up the Swachh Survekshan in urban areas and the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in rural areas.
• The Quality Council of India (QCI) has been commissioned the responsibility of carrying out the assessment.

• The Indian Railways has launched a website and mobile app that allows passengers to register their complaints online.
• The Sahyatri app will help railway passengers find out the jurisdiction of a police station and the details of Government Railway Police (GRP) officials by geo-tagging with Google Maps.
• It will also have the facility to scan and read QR codes and make an emergency call.
• The database of criminals, including their photographs, active in railways’ jurisdiction all over India would be uploaded on the website.
• The website will facilitate crime detection by integrating the criminal database online.

• Aarogyasri health cards would be issued to all eligible persons by the Andhra Pradesh government with a provision to record their medical history.
• The government issues an Aarogyasri card and the beneficiary can use it at government and private hospitals to obtain services free of cost.
• In order to facilitate the effective implementation of the scheme, the State Government set up the Aarogyasri Health Care Trust under the chairmanship of the Chief Minister.
• The trust is administered by a Chief Executive Officer, an IAS officer.
• The beneficiaries of the scheme are the members of Below Poverty Line (BPL) families as enumerated and photographed in White Ration Card linked with Aadhaar card and available in the Civil Supplies Department database.

Context:

• Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has said that the government would bring the treatment of 2,000 types of diseases and procedures within the ambit of its flagship program ‘Aarogyasri’ on a pilot basis in West Godavari district.

• It was launched as a Track-1.5 initiative at the beginning of 2015.
• Its mission is to offer an open and geopolitically unbiased platform for research and discussion on international affairs and security in Eastern Europe.
• The Minsk Dialogue Forum provides a unique platform where relevant stakeholders can engage in such discussions and seek, at the very least, to agree on minimum standards of security for all.

Q1. Consider the following pairs:

Q2. Consider the following statements:

Q3. Consider the following statements with respect to Lunar Crater Observation and 
Sensing Satellite (LCROSS):

Q4. Consider the following statements with respect to PM KISAN Scheme: