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Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu and Russian Defence minister Sergei Shoigu have confirmed that they will attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in New Delhi next week along with their counterparts from other member nations of the grouping, it is learnt.
The two ministers will attend the SCO Defence Ministers’ meeting scheduled on April 27 and 28. The SCO member countries are India, Russia, China, Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will chair the meeting. Issues related to terrorism, regional security and the security situation in Afghanistan are among topics expected to dominate the meeting.
While India had invited Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif to the meeting, there is no confirmation yet whether he will attend it.
The SCO Defence Ministers’ meeting will be followed by a meeting of the Foreign Ministers on May 5 in Goa, for which Pakistan Foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has confirmed participation.
The terror attack in Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir earlier this week has the potential to cast a shadow on these visits, if investigations point to the involvement of Pakistan-based terror groups.
This is the first time since the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes that the Chinese Defence Minister Li will be visiting Delhi. Despite disengagement at certain friction points along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh, border tensions between the two countries continue to simmer with no resolution reached on the legacy friction points. In December last year, Chinese and Indian troops clashed at Yangtse in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh.
This will also be Russian Defence Minister Shoigu’s first visit to India since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict last year.
The visit comes amid a series of high-level engagements between India and Russia, such as the visit of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov for the 24th India-Russia talks.
In latest ISRO launch, solar panels to power final stage experiments (Page no 1)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched two commercial Singaporean satellites in a mission that, for the first time, will see solar panels powering the PSLV rocket’s final stage for conducting month-long experiments.
Usually, the fourth and final stage of a rocket remains in space for only a couple of days before dropping back into the atmosphere and burning up.
And although ISRO has used this stage of the PSLV as an experimental platform twice before, this is the first time the agency has installed solar panels on it to generate energy.
For the first time, there will be a deployable solar panel on the upper stage of a rocket. That is another exciting thing to happen.
The PSLV-C55 rocket’s main payload is an earth observation satellite, TeLEOS-2, developed by SD Engineering. It will be used to support satellite imaging requirements of Singapore government agencies. Its predecessor, too, was launched by PSLV in 2015.
The other satellite is Lumelite-4, co-developed by the Institute for Infocomm Research and Satellite Technology and Research Centre of the National University of Singapore.
Built to demonstrate the “High-Performance Space-borne VHF Data Exchange System”, it will augment Singapore’s maritime navigation and benefit the global shipping community, ISRO said.
The fourth stage of the rocket, the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module, will conduct seven experiments. One mission by the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, ARIS-2, will study the ionosphere, the zone where Earth’s atmosphere meets space.
The module is also carrying an electronic propulsion system by the start-up Bellatrix Aerospace and satellite deployment systems developed by the start-up Dhruva Space.
This is also the first time that the first two stages of the PSLV were combined at the newly created PSLV Integration Facility.
This is important because it cuts down the time between missions. Rockets are usually assembled on the launch pad with the help of a mobile service tower — but this process can’t begin until the pad is prepared for the launch. Now, vehicle assembly can begin along with launchpad preparations.
For forthcoming PSLV missions, all four stages of the rocket will be integrated at the new facility, transported to the launchpad on a mobile platform, and then integrated with the satellite before launch.
ISRO has also made some design changes to the rocket to bring down the cost and integration time, keeping in mind that the established launch vehicle will be taken over by the industry for future missions.
Although transfer of the PSLV to the industry has been in the works since before the space sector was opened up to private players in 2020, the recently released Indian Space Policy 2023 says ISRO will move out of routine activities and focus more on research and innovation.
The goal is to have increased production and launches of PSLV in the times to come, especially as the industry is taking over from us to operate in large numbers,” the ISRO chairperson said after the launch.
Govt & Politics
India-Bangla rail project to be completed by Sept (Page no 5)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Tripura Transport Minister Sushanta Chowdhury Friday announced that the Indo-Bangla railway connectivity that would reduce the travel time for Agartala-Kolkata via Dhaka from 31 hours to 10 hours will be launched in September.
The minister told reporters that the latest review suggests that 85 per cent construction work in India and 73 per cent work in the Bangladesh side were completed.
The countries would be connected through Agartala on the Indian side and Akhaura on the Bangladesh side through Tripura. India and Bangladesh governments inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in 2013 for the railway project connecting the two countries.
The project, which was scheduled to be completed by December 2020, was delayed due to land acquisition issues and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The travel time would be reduced since the route would effectively reduce the distance from the existing 1,600 km to 550 km.
Minister Chowdhury visited New Delhi on April 19 and met Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav and placed a series of proposals related to the development of railway infrastructure and services in the state.
During their meeting, the union railway minister requested Minister for Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) G Kishan Reddy for an allocation of Rs 150 crore additionally to complete the Agartala-Akhaura railway project at the earliest.
The DoNER ministry will allocate the money for the project soon. The railway link is about to start in September,” the minister told reporters at the Civil Secretariat in Agartala.
Besides, Chowdhury placed proposals such as extending railway services from Belonia (South district) to the zero point of the Indo-Bangla border, doubling of railway tracks in Lumding (Assam)- Sabroom (Tripura), the elevation of Agartala railway station to international standards, the extension of services from Dharmanagar (north district) to Pecharthal (north district) till Kailashahar (Unakoti district), and the introduction of two escalators at Agartala and Dharmanagar stations.
All the proposals were discussed in the meeting. Among these, the introduction of railway services from Dharmanagar to Kailashahar also received priority.
Our railway minister already directed the officials of the railway ministry to take the initiative for the project. Accordingly, 50 per cent of the survey work has been completed. The project cost is estimated to be Rs 1,855 crore.
Besides, the state has already started preparing a detailed project report to elevate the Agartala station to international levels. “The foundation stone for the project will be laid in the next 2-3 months,” he said.
Earlier, Chowdhury said that the flight connectivity between Agartala and Chittagong in Bangladesh will start. As gap-funding to sustain the connectivity, the state government will spend Rs 15 crore every year, and Rs 3 crore has been disbursed till now.
Economy
Legal challenge: Chat GPTs debut sends policymakers scurrying to regulate AI tools (Page no 11)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point,” AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and co-founder of the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute propounded in an apparent improvisation of Moore’s Law.
While the degree of existential risk posed by AI, a topic of renewed debate since the explosive debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, may seem overblown for now, policymakers across jurisdictions have stepped up regulatory scrutiny of generative AI tools.
The concerns being flagged fall into three broad heads: privacy, system bias and violation of intellectual property rights.
The policy response has been different, too, with the European Union has taken a predictably tougher stance by proposing to bring in a new AI Act that segregates artificial intelligence as per use case scenarios, based broadly on the degree of invasiveness and risk; the UK is on the other end of the spectrum, with a decidedly ‘light-touch’ approach that aims to foster, and not stifle, innovation in this nascent field.
The US approach falls somewhere in between, with Washington now setting the stage for defining an AI regulation rulebook by kicking-off public consultations earlier this month on how to regulate artificial intelligence tools.
This ostensibly builds on a move by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in October last year to unveil a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. China, too has released its own set of measures to regulate AI.
India has said that it is not considering any law to regulate the artificial intelligence sector, with Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw admitting that though AI “had ethical concerns and associated risks”, it had proven to be an enabler of the digital and innovation ecosystem.
The NITI Aayog has published a series of papers on the subject of Responsible AI for All. However, the government is not considering bringing a law or regulating the growth of artificial intelligence in the country.
The US Department of Commerce, on April 11, took its most decisive step in addressing the regulatory uncertainty in this space when it asked the public to weigh in on how it could create rules and laws to ensure AI systems operate as advertised.
The agency flagged the possibility of floating an auditing system to assess whether AI systems include harmful bias or distort communications to spread misinformation or disinformation.
According to Alan Davidson, an assistant secretary in the US Department of Commerce, new assessments and protocols may be needed to ensure AI systems work without negative consequences, much like financial audits confirm the accuracy of business statements.
A catalyst for all of this policy action in the US seems to be an October 2022 move by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which published a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights that, among other things, shared a nonbinding roadmap for the responsible use of AI.