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On the eve of Parliament’s Budget Session, the suspension of 14 Opposition MPs — 11 from Rajya Sabha and three from Lok Sabha — was revoked to enable them to attend the customary President’s address to both Houses of Parliament on Wednesday.
The decision came hours before senior ministers met Opposition leaders and floor leaders and sought their cooperation for conduct of a smooth session.
A record 146 Opposition MPs, from both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, were suspended during the Winter Session for disrupting proceedings to press their demand for a statement from Home Minister Amit Shah on the Parliament security breach on December 13.
While the other MPs were suspended for the remainder of the Winter Session, the suspension of 14 MPs was referred to the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha privileges committees.
Govt & Politics
Corruption perception index: India at 93 among 180 countries (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
India ranked 93 out of 180 countries on the corruption perceptions index (CPI) for 2023, according to the latest report released by Transparency International.
The index, which lists countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, ranked Denmark at the top, followed by Finland, New Zealand and Norway.
The index uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. In 2023, India’s overall score was 39 while in 2022, it was 40. India’s rank in 2022 was 85. In the Asian region, Singapore ranked at the top, scoring 83 and occupying the fifth slot.
India (39) shows score fluctuations small enough that no firm conclusions can be drawn on any significant change. However, ahead of the elections, India sees further narrowing of civic space, including through the passage of a (telecommunication) Bill that could be a ‘grave threat’ to fundamental rights.
While Western Europe and the European Union remained the top-scoring regions, its regional average score dropped to 65 this year, as checks and balances weakened and political integrity eroded.
Express Network
Mosque panel on ASI report: Will submit objections after getting historians views (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Culture)
Reacting sharply to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) report on the Gyanvapi mosque complex, the Anjuman Intezamia Masajid committee, which runs the mosque in Varanasi, has said they are studying the report and would submit objections to it in court after getting opinions from historians.
S M Yasin, joint secretary, Anjuman Intezamia Masajid Committee, said, “We have sent copies of the ASI report to five historians, including some non-Muslim ones.
We will wait for their opinion and we have started having conversations with Buddhists here in Varanasi. They also claim that a lot of signs and objects found at the mosque belong to their faith.
We have also sent copies (of the report) to our lawyers and after we have received opinion from the historians, we will sit with them and draft our objections to the report.”
The ASI, tasked by the Varanasi district court to ascertain whether the mosque was “constructed over a pre-existing structure of a Hindu temple”, has concluded that a temple “appears to have been destroyed in the 17th century, during the reign of Aurangzeb and part of it modified and reused in the existing structure”.
The ASI report — which has four volumes — was made public on Thursday after copies of it were handed over to the Hindu and Muslim litigants by the court.
Explained
Issues with EVs and possible hybrid solution (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
India needs to “embrace” hybrid vehicles over the next 5-10 years on the way to full electrification, HSBC Research has said. Such vehicles are the more practical medium-term solution for the country’s decarbonisation efforts and, more importantly, less polluting, according to the note.
The note says that currently, overall carbon emissions are lower in hybrids compared to both electrics and those that run on petrol and diesel for similarly proportioned vehicles. In fact, it could take as long as a decade for EV and hybrid vehicle emissions to come to the same level.
Hybrids have both an internal combustion engine and an on-board electric motor, with the two systems working in tandem to provide motive power.
Countries everywhere, including India, are pushing toward electrification. In India, Tata Motors, Mahindra & Mahindra and Hyundai Motor have been betting big on EVs.
But passenger car market leader Maruti Suzuki has taken a more conservative approach, with no battery electric vehicle in the market so far. Maruti has, however, prioritised hybrids in its portfolio in partnership with Toyota Kirloskar.
Test tube rhinos: Why rebuilding doomed species is a desperate race against time (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The death of the last male in 2018 made the extinction of the northern white rhino an inevitability. But already in 2015, a group of 20 scientists from five continents had launched an audacious and expensive project to rebuild the subspecies through in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
Last week, the scientists announced the first-ever rhino pregnancy achieved by transferring a lab-made rhino embryo into a surrogate mother.
It took 13 attempts for the breakthrough with a southern white rhino, a closely-related subspecies that branched away from the northern whites about a million years ago.
The international consortium of scientists, named BioRescue, is confident that the success can be replicated with 30 embryos of the northern white stored in liquid nitrogen. However, rebuilding a species is easier said than done.
In 2009, four northern white rhinos were brought from a zoo in the Czech Republic to a conservancy in Kenya in the hope that they might breed in their natural environment. The two males — Suni and Sudan — have died since, and the two females — Najin and her daughter Fatu — turned out to be incapable of reproduction for pathological reasons. This meant surrogacy was the only option to produce a northern white calf through IVF.