10 Sep 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

B. GS 2 Related

Category: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

1. Israel in trade talks with India, China

Context:

Israel is in talks with India and China on trade agreements and hopes that border tensions between the two countries would be sorted out peacefully.

Details:

• India and Israel are negotiating a limited trade deal for about 200 designated products.
  • Though the trade deal is not in an advanced stage, they are discussing lower tariffs on the products.
• Israel is also planning to discuss India-United Arab Emirates (UAE)-Israel cooperation in a number of areas such as agriculture, technology and water once the UAE-Israel agreement is formally signed in September 2020.
• Israel is also in talks for Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, China and Vietnam.
• In its first “Asia-Pacific Day”, inaugurated in August 2020, Israel hosted 11 Asian countries, including India, at a special event.
  • This was done with a view to increasing trade and investment with the East as a key priority for post-COVID-19 economic recovery.

Note:

• China, Hong Kong and India are Israel’s biggest trading partners in Asia.
• China and India established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992.
  • Since then, China’s trade has increased from $50 million to $15 billion.
  • India’s trade has grown from $200 million to about $5 billion.

E. Editorials

Category: POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

1. In blockchain voting, leave out the general election

Context:

• The article analyzes the attempts by the Election Commission of India to further digitize the electoral infrastructure of the country.

Background:

Blockchain Technology:

• A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of information/transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain for the purpose of ensuring integrity and verifiability of data stored on the ledger.
• This makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system.
• Blockchain technology has been traditionally used as supporting structures for cryptocurrencies. However, their use in non-cryptocurrency applications has witnessed a steady rise, in fields such as the monitoring of supply chain networks in industries and in remote voting and elections.
  • Recently, In Russia, the vote on the constitutional amendment was carried out through votes cast online.

Details:

• The Election Commission is exploring the possibility of using blockchain technology for the purpose of enabling remote elections.
• The proposals for the system include a system wherein the electors would have to physically reach a designated venue in order to cast their vote. The systems would use “white-listed IP devices on dedicated internet lines” and make use of the biometric attributes of electors to identify the users.
  • IP whitelisting is a security feature often used for limiting and controlling access only to trusted users. IP whitelisting allows you to create lists of trusted IP addresses or IP ranges from which your users can access your domains.

Arguments in favour of remote voting:

• Remote voting would benefit internal migrants and seasonal workers who face considerable difficulties in exercising their democratic right of voting. This would make them politically relevant and empower them. This could help further deepen democracy in India.
  • India is home to the largest internal migrants in the world at around 51 million of the populace based on the 2011 Census.
• Remote voting might also be useful for some remotely-stationed members of the Indian armed forces.

Arguments against remote voting:

Security concerns

• Previous experiences of remote voting in other countries have pointed out to many vulnerabilities in the system.
  • Any shortcomings in the implementation of cryptographic protocols in the remote voting system would make it possible to access and decrypt the votes stored on the blockchain. Physical implants or software backdoors placed on an individual system could allow attackers to collect and deduce the voting choices of individuals. This goes against the secrecy of voting required to ensure free elections.
  • An attacker may be able to clone the biometric attributes required for authenticating as another individual and cast a vote on their behalf.
  • The provision of a dedicated line for remote voting will make the infrastructure increasingly prone to targeted Denial-of-Service attacks, where an attacker would be in a position to block traffic from the system.

Infrastructural needs

• The adoption of digitisation and interconnectivity introduce additional points of challenges into the system. Round the clock electricity and broadband connectivity is a necessity to ensure the envisaged system works. This would be a challenge in remote areas.

Explore existing solutions

• Given that there are other existing solutions like the postal ballots and proxy voting proposed solution like the ‘One Nation, One Voter ID’ system to ensure ballot portability, it makes little sense to explore newer technological solutions which involve setting up entirely new, untested systems.

Way forward:

• There is the need to shed the obsession with techno-solutionism. It is important to note that further digitisation, in itself, does not make processes more robust. Any solution to electoral problems must be fault tolerable and not affect the integrity or transparency of the overall election process.
• Instead, the existing systems like the postal ballots and proxy voting provisions should be improved upon to make the systems more inclusive and also robust.
• Even if the Election Commission is able to design a system which is proven to be satisfactorily secure, such a system should be limited only to lower-level elections, and not for something as significant as the general election.

Category: AGRICULTURE

1. The twisted trajectory of Bt cotton

Context:

• Bt cotton cultivation in India.

Background:

Cotton cultivation in India:

• Cotton is one of the most important fibres and cash crops of India and plays a dominant role in the industrial and agricultural economy of the country.
  • Cotton in India provides direct livelihood to 6 million farmers and about 40 – 50 million people are employed in the cotton trade and its processing.
• Much of the cotton cultivated in India until the 20th century was of the indigenous ‘desi’ variety, Gossypium arboreum. From the 1990s, hybrid varieties of G. hirsutum were promoted. The Bt cotton was introduced in India in 2002.
  • Though both hybrids and GMOs involve genetic changes, the two are different given the difference in approach to bring this genetic change.
    • Hybrids can occur naturally or they might be facilitated by humans. Hybridization is a traditional breeding technique where commonly in plants, the pollen from one plant is used to fertilize another related or unrelated plant species.  “Hybrids” are the offspring of such a cross.
    • GMOs are always created in laboratories. GMOs involve gene splicing resulting in a seed that has a specific gene of known function from another plant or organism.

Bt cotton:

• Cotton crop is highly prone to pests and diseases. Cotton is prone to infestation from moth pests (Lepidopteran) such as the Pink Bollworm (PBW) and sap-sucking (Hemipteran) pests such as aphids and mealy bugs. To overcome this vulnerability, GM cotton was developed.
• Genetically modified (GM) cotton contains the pesticide gene from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). This protects the plant from bollworm.
• As per the data available with the Agriculture Ministry, the adoption of Bt cotton stands at around 93% in 2011.

Benefits of Bt Cotton:

• The resistance to pests reduces the plants’ vulnerability to pest attacks and thus helps increase the yield from the plant.
  • One study has noted that the adoption of Bt cotton is said to have increased cotton production from India by three times between 2002-2014.
• The inherent resistance to pest attacks would also help reduce insecticide spraying on the cotton plant.
  • This would help reduce the cost of cotton cultivation for the farmers and also would ensure better safety for the farmers due to reduced exposure of farmers to toxic insecticides and pesticides.
• The use of Bt cotton would also lead to some environmental benefits.
  • The reduced pesticide usage would lead to lesser environmental pollution by these harmful chemicals.
  • Also, the targeted strategy against only the relevant pests through Bt cotton would eliminate the threat posed by pesticides which eliminate all the insects in the field even if they are not harmful to the crop. This would have a detrimental impact on the biodiversity and may lead to undesired effects like imbalances in the food chain and may also degrade soil fertility.

Concerns with respect to Bt cotton:

Questions over yield:

• Recent studies have questioned the yield improvements being attributed to the adoption of Bt. Cotton.
• They note that the contribution of Bt cotton to yield increase was only about 4% each year and the current yields were lower than in the initial years of Bt adoption.
• The rise in cotton yields can be explained by improvements in irrigation and a dramatic growth across the country in the use of fertilizers.
  • Gross fertilizer use for cotton more than doubled from 2007-2013; the average rose from 98 kg/ha in 2003 to 224 kg/ha in 2013.
• Some countries that don’t have Bt, hybrids or good access to inputs have been able to match India’s cotton productivity.

Increasing resistance of pests:

• There are indications that the PBW has developed a resistance to Bt cotton in India. Bollworm spraying has begun to increase. With rising acreage under Bt cotton cultivation, expenditures for spraying for sucking pests also went up.
  • By 2018, farmers were spending an average of $23.58 per hectare on insecticide — 37% more than the pre-Bt levels.

Neglect of desi varieties:

• The growing share of Bt Cotton has led to the neglect of the desi varieties.
• The cost of ignoring ‘desi’ varieties would lead to loss of the biological potential and diversity offered by these.
• The desi varieties resist many pests and don’t present the problems faced by hybrids.
  • The hybrid varieties cannot resist a variety of local pests and require more fertilizers and pesticides. The increasing use of man-made pesticides to control pests has led to the emergence of resistant pests. Resistant Pink and even American Bollworm (ABW), a minor pest in the past, began increasing, leading to the growing use of a variety of pesticides.

Way forward:

Comprehensive view of GM crops:

• Despite finding huge favour in India, the GM crop has only brought modest and short-lived benefits. This should guide India’s choices when it comes to other Bt crops such as brinjal.

Focussing on desi varieties:

• Research suggests that with pure-line cotton varieties, high-density planting, and short-season plants, cotton yields in India can be substantially increased and also such varieties stand a better chance at withstanding the vagaries of climate change.
• There is a need for a comprehensive government policy for supporting ‘desi’ varieties.

For more information on the issue of Bt crops in India, refer to:

CNA dated Jan 28, 2020: A case of wholehearted biotechnology adoption

Additional information:

• Cotton fabric from around 3,000 BCE has been excavated from the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, and archaeological findings in Mehrgarh, Pakistan, show that cotton was used in the subcontinent as far back as 5,000 BCE.
• In India, there are ten major cotton-growing states which are divided into three zones, viz. north zone, central zone and south zone. North zone consists of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan. The central zone includes Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat. South zone comprises Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Besides these ten states, cotton cultivation has gained momentum in the Eastern State of Odisha. Cotton is also cultivated in small areas of non-traditional states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal & Tripura.

Q1. Which of the following are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)?

Q2. Consider the following statements with respect to National Commission for Backward 
Classes (NCBC):

Q3. Consider the following statements with respect to PM SVANidhi Scheme:

Q4. Consider the following statements:

I. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

1. What is meant by blockchain technology? Evaluate its potential in enabling a remote voting system in India. (10 marks, 150 words)(GS Paper 2/Polity and Governance)
2. What are the significances and concerns with respect to GM crops in the Indian context? (10 marks, 150 words)(GS Paper 3/Agriculture)

Read the previous CNA here.