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Stressing that the challenges for the poor citizens of every country are more severe due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the developments in Ukraine, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the crisis of essential goods and lack of financial capacity of the poor a “double whammy”.
Addressing the session on “food and energy security” at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, Tuesday, Modi said that the G-20 leaders have to find a way to return to the path of ceasefire and diplomacy in Ukraine.
“The current shortage of fertilizers in terms of food security is also a huge crisis. Today’s fertilizer shortage is tomorrow’s food crisis, for which the world will not have a solution,” said the PM while asking the world leaders to build a mutual agreement to maintain the supply chain of both manure and food grains stable.
PM Modi termed the current phase of climate change, the Covid pandemic, the developments in Ukraine, and the global problems associated with it as a “challenging global environment”. He said that all these together have caused havoc in the world and global supply chains are in ruins.
“There is a crisis of essential goods all over the world. The challenge for the poor citizens of every country is more severe. Everyday life was already a struggle for them.
They do not have the financial capacity to deal with the double whammy. Due to the double whammy, they lack the financial capacity to handle it,” he told the world leaders.
Regarding the reforms in the United Nations, PM Modi said that multilateral institutions such as the UN have been unsuccessful in tackling these issues. “We have all failed to make suitable reforms in them. Therefore, today the world has greater expectations from the G-20. The relevance of our group has become more significant,” he said.
Data protection Bill revised: Penalty up to Rs 200 crore if firms don’t have safeguards (Page no. 3)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Companies dealing in personal data of consumers that fail to take reasonable safeguards to prevent data breaches could end up facing penalties as high as around Rs 200 crore under the revamped version of the Data Protection Bill.
The Data Protection Board, an adjudicating body proposed to enforce the provisions of the Bill, is likely to be empowered to impose the fine after giving the companies an opportunity of being heard.
Penalties are expected to vary on the basis of the nature of non-compliance by data fiduciaries — entities that handle and process personal data of individuals.
Companies failing to notify people impacted by a data breach could be fined around Rs 150 crore, and those failing to safeguard children’s personal data could be fined close to Rs 100 crore.
In the previous version of the Bill, withdrawn earlier this year, the penalty proposed on a company for violation of the law was Rs 15 crore or 4 per cent of its annual turnover, whichever is higher.
The government is understood to be close to finalising the revamped Bill, internally being referred to as the ‘Digital Personal Data Protection Bill’, and come out with a final draft version this week.
The new Bill will only deal with safeguards around personal data and is learnt to have excluded non-personal data from its ambit. Non-personal data essentially means any data which cannot reveal the identity of an individual.
Express Network
Govt brings listed essential drugs under price cap (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Government Policies & Interventions)
The new National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), released by the Union Health Ministry in September, has now been brought under the Drug Prices Control Order, which fixes ceiling prices for these essential formulations based on average cost to retailers.
The gazette notification was issued on November 11 by the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, which is responsible for ensuring the pricing cap.
The price cap on 34 new essential medicines brought under NLEM will kick in now. With the inclusions, the NLEM has 384 drugs.
The ceiling price is determined by calculating the average price to retailers of all generics and branded generics with market share of more than 1% and then adding a small retailer margin to it.
This current revision is likely to bring down the cost of newer therapies for diabetes, such as the medicine Teneligliptin and the insulin Glargine, both included in the 2022 list.
The list has included more anti-cancer therapies such as Bendamustine Hydrochloride, used to treat certain type of blood and lymph node cancers; Irinotecan HCI Trihydrate, used alone or in combination with other drugs to treat colorectal and pancreatic cancers; Lenalidomide for treating various type of cancers; and Leuprolide acetate, used to treat prostate cancer.
In the explanation section after the revised schedule, the notification stated that any dosage or form of a drug with the same activity would come under the price ceiling.
Similar salts, analogues of an active ingredient, or vaccines manufactured by different processes would also come under price control, even if explicitly not mentioned in the schedule.
However, it noted that any innovation will be considered to be under price control only if explicitly mentioned. The notification stated, “Innovation in medicine must be encouraged.
Formulations developed through incremental innovation or novel drug delivery systems like lipid/liposomal formulations etc. should be considered as included only if specified in the list against any medicine.”
The Ideas Page
Low carbon pathway (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
India’s announcements at the 26th and 27th Conference Of Parties (COP) are now the pillars of its climate leadership. If COP26 last year was a watershed moment because of the Prime Minister’s announcement of the country’s plan to go net-zero by 2070, this year’s COP27 in Egypt will be remembered for the country’s path-breaking announcement of a long-term strategy (LTS) for low carbon development.
With this, India joins the coveted list of 56 countries that have submitted their LTS documents to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The 121-page LTS is consistent with India’s net-zero targets and gives key industries such as electricity, industry, transport and finance a guide for the future.
The strategies are bold, but they are also evolutionary and flexible. The Indian delegation was clear — the country has contributed little to global warming and the heat must be turned up on the rich countries to deliver on their net-zero promises first and to fulfill their financial commitments.
We outline the key takeaways from this flagship document that will guide India’s actions in the coming five decades.
First, sectoral transformations are key. India’s LTS has prioritised six strategic sectors — electricity, transport, urban, industry, carbon dioxide removal and forests.
Of these, electricity and industry sectors together account for over three-fourths of India’s CO2 emissions, while rapid changes are happening in the transport and urban systems.
More renewable power, demand side reductions and a just transition for phase down of coal will be priorities in the electricity sector.
In transport, India will look to transition to cleaner fuels, increase energy efficiency, and aggressive electrification. The urban transition will focus on material efficiency of buildings.
The industrial sector will aim to improve energy efficiency, electrification, material efficiency, green hydrogen and decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors.
No money for terror (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The spectre of terrorist violence looms large over the world. Amorphous terror groups, newer cyber linked methods of recruitment of radical elements, the increasingly lethal lone wolf attacks are all adding to the ominous threats emanating from extremist violent elements.
India has borne the brunt of terrorism and has witnessed serious loss of life and property in senseless violent explosions in large cities in the past few decades. The dastardly efforts to radicalise and mislead the youth create a schism in society.
As the world shrinks with technological and communication changes, terrorists, criminals, weapons and funds are also able to move across national boundaries easily.
International co-operation between law enforcement authorities in this area is a sine qua non for combating such cross border challenges.
In this situation, it is essential for India to take the lead to bolster such efforts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in all his international speeches spoken at length on this. India’s efforts in taking this momentum forward need to be appreciated.
We recently saw the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, followed by a special session of UN Security Council’s Counter Terrorism in late October.
In the third week of November, India will host another global conference focussed only on Countering Financing of Terrorism (CFT).
The global flow of funds for nefarious purposes has three traditional channels. First, direct smuggling of cash through international borders. Second, the use of hawala networks.
Third, banking networks including SWIFT and other international channels. But now, swift technological developments in areas of blockchain or cryptocurrencies which transcend national boundaries and international currency systems have emerged as a new channel for financing terrorist and other illegal activities.
The Indian point of view on this was adopted by the security council as the Delhi Declaration. To quote, “the Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) unanimously adopted the Delhi Declaration on countering the use of new and emerging technologies for terrorist purposes… the declaration aims to cover the main concerns surrounding the abuse of drones, social media platforms, and crowdfunding, and create guidelines that will help to tackle the growing issue.”
Express Network
World @ 8 billion, India set to be most populous (Page no. 16)
(GS Paper 1, Population and Associated Issues)
While India’s population growth is stablising, it is “still growing at 0.7% per year” and is set to surpass China in 2023 as the world’s most populous country, according to the United Nations Population Fund, which said the world’s population reached 8 billion.
China’s population is no longer growing and “may start declining as early as 2023”, the UN stated. It noted that India’s fertility rate has hit 2.1 births per woman — replacement-level fertility — and is falling.
“On 15 November, the world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion people. This unprecedented growth is due to the gradual increase in human lifespan owing to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine.
It is also the result of high and persistent levels of fertility in some countries,” the United Nations said in a statement.
The UN said while it took the global population 12 years to grow from 7 billion to 8 billion, it will take approximately 15 years — until 2037 — for it to reach 9 billion — “a sign that overall growth rate of global population is slowing”.
“Countries with the highest fertility levels tend to be those with the lowest income per capita…the UN said.
As of 2022, more than half the world’s population lives in Asia, China and India being the two most populous countries with more than 1.4 billion people each.
The World Population Prospects 2022, released in July of this year, put India’s population estimate at 1.412 billion this year, compared with China’s 1.426 billion.
According to the UN, falling mortality rate first led to a “spectacular population growth”, peaking at 2.1% per year between 1962 and 1965. Between 1950 and 1987, world population doubled from 2.5 billion to 5 billion. But as fewer children were born generation to generation, growth started to slow.
The UNFPA projects world population to peak at 10.4 billion in the 2080s and stay there until the end of the century.
According to the UN, 60% of the global population lives in a region where the fertility rate is below replacement level — up from 40% in 1990 — and international migration is now the driver of growth in many countries, with 281 million people living outside their country of birth in 2020.
PESA Act will curb conversions, marriages for tribal land: Chouhan (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, which gives more power to gram sabhas, will ensure that conversions and marriages done by “alluring” tribal women to get land notified as tribal land is stopped.
Chouhan announced rules for enforcement of the Act in Madhya Pradesh at a programme in Lalpur village of Shahdol district. President DroupadiMurmu was present at the programme.
PESA gives special power to gram sabhas in scheduled areas, especially for the management of natural resources. It will allow self-governance through Gram Sabhas in 89 tribal blocks of the state, covering 2,350 villages in 5,212 panchayats.
“Many times by deception, trickery, marriages done by means of allurement to our tribal sisters’ daughters, land is given in their name and called tribal lands.. sometimes conversion is used.
We will not let it happen in Madhya Pradesh. Gram sabhas will intervene when land is taken away from someone,” said Chouhan, while emphasising that conversions will not be allowed to happen in the state.
PESA allows gram panchayats to decide matters related to minor forest produce, land and small water bodies along with implementation of government schemes and maintaining records of migrant labourers for curbing bonded labour in these scheduled areas.
President Murmu, who visited Madhya Pradesh for the first time, said that the state has the highest tribal population in the country and that the rules under PESA would help in the development of tribal communities.
Economy
Nine Russian banks open special vostro accounts for Re trade (Page no. 19)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
As many as nine special vostro accounts by Russian banks have been opened with two Indian banks after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) gave its permission to do so to facilitate settlement of international trade in rupee. It will pave the way for the settlement of India’s trade with Russia in rupees.
Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal said: “Nine accounts have been opened. One in UCO Bank, one in Sberbank, one in VTB and 6 with IndusInd Bank.”
Russia top two banks–Sberbank and VTB Bank –have emerged as the first foreign lenders to receive the approval. Russia’s Gazprom, which does not have its branches in India, has also opened this account with state-run UCo Bank.
“We want to promote rupee trade because that is in the nation’s interest. We would also not be looking unnecessarily for dollars. To the extent, rupee trade is possible, we will go for it,” Barthwal told reporters here.
The RBI had in July notified the new mechanism to settle international trade in rupees to reduce the depreciation of the rupee against the dollar. Subsequently, the commerce ministry notified guidelines that will enable exporters to get stipulated benefits under the foreign trade policy even if the export realisation is in the domestic currency, and not dollar.
Explained
Attempt No. 3 for Artemis 1, with the promise of a new space age (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Space)
At 1.04 am Eastern time in the United States on Wednesday (11.34 am in India), a two-hour window will open for NASA to make a third attempt to send its new 322-foot-tall, multi-billion-dollar rocket known as the Space Launch System (SLS), to the Moon.
The debut flight of the rocket was scrubbed twice earlier, on August 29 and September 3, after technical issues were detected during the countdown.
This mission, known as Artemis 1, is unmanned, and is intended to test the rocket and the Orion space capsule, in which astronauts will ride on future missions.
If Wednesday’s launch takes place, Orion will spend a couple of weeks in lunar orbit before returning for a Pacific Ocean splashdown next month.
It’s been a half century since the six Apollo human Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. Since then, spacecraft have travelled beyond the solar system, exploratory missions have probed Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, more than 500 astronauts have made return trips to space, and permanent space labs have been set up.
What remains to be achieved, however, is the promise of transporting humans to new worlds, of landing and living on other planets, or maybe meeting aliens.
Artemis 1 is seen as the first step into that new space age. In the missions that will follow, human beings will go back to the Moon, explore the possibilities of long lunar stays, and assess the potential of the Moon as a launch pad for explorations into deep space.
While the mission objectives of Artemis 1 itself are humble — it is only a lunar Orbiter mission even though, unlike most Orbiter missions, it has a return-to-Earth target — it is intended to lay the foundations for more complex and ambitious missions.
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 2, International)
Turkey’s interior minister said that Kurdish militants were responsible for the bombing that killed six people and injured several dozen on Istanbul’s popular Istiklal Avenue on Sunday.
Police had detained the “person who left the bomb”, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency quoted Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu as saying.
The minister also said that evidence pointed to involvement of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and to the Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, in the attack, the AP reported.
The attack had been ordered from Kobani, a majority Kurdish city in northern Syria bordering Turkey, the minister said.
The AP report quoted Soylu as saying Turkey would “pay back heavily” the perpetrators of the attack. He also criticised the US, a condolence message from which, he said, was like a “killer being the first to show up at a crime scene”. Turkey is angry at the US support for Syrian Kurdish groups.
The Kurds are a major ethnic group who live in the mountainous geo-cultural region known as Kurdistan, which extends from southeastern Turkey in the west to northwestern Iran in the east, and from northern Iraq and northern Syria in the south to Armenia in the north.
Sizable populations of Kurds live in the highlands of southern and eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran, and in parts of south Armenia.
But the Kurdish people are a minority in the populations of each of these countries taken as a whole. Small communities of Kurds live in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, and eastern Iran as well.
While the Kurds are an ancient people — Kurdish nationalists claim a history that goes back 2,500 years — they became identifiable as a distinct community in the 7th century, when most tribes in the area adopted Islam. The majority today are Sunni Muslim, with a minority following Sufism and other mystical practices.
Ancient link between Kashi, Tamil land (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 1, Art and Culture)
Legend has it that King Parakrama Pandya, who ruled over the region around Madurai in the 15th century, wanted to build a temple to Lord Shiva, and he travelled to Kashi to bring back a lingam.
While returning, he stopped to rest under a tree — but when he tried to continue his journey, the cow carrying the lingam refused to move.
Parakrama Pandya understood this to be the Lord’s wish, and installed the lingam there, a place that came to be known as Sivakasi.
For devotees who could not visit Kashi, the Pandyas had built the Kasi Viswanathar Temple in what is today Tenkasi in southwestern Tamil Nadu, close to the state’s border with Kerala.
The connection between Kashi and the Tamil region is deep and old, said Dr Vinay Kumar of the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, at Banaras Hindu University (BHU).
There’s more: “Sant Kumara Gurupara from Thoothukudi district had negotiated with the princely state of Kashi to get a place for the consecration of Kedarghat and Vishvesvaralingam in Varanasi. He also composed Kashi Kalambagam, a collection of grammar poems on Kashi,” Dr Kumar said.
The month-long Kashi Tamil Sangamam, which begins in Varanasi on Thursday, will celebrate the many aspects of the historical and civilisational connection between India’s North and South. Some 2,400 people from Tamil Nadu will be taken to Varanasi in groups for visits that will last eight days and will include, besides an immersive local experience, trips to Ayodhya and Prayagraj.
“The broader objective is to bring the two knowledge and cultural traditions (of the North and South) closer, create an understanding of our shared heritage and deepen the people-to-people bond between the regions,” the official note for the event, organised by the Ministry of Education, says.
Road to net zero status (Page no. 20)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
A year after announcing its intention to achieve a net-zero emission status by 2070, India on Monday told the world how it was going to reach there.
In a 121-page document, India listed some of the measures — decarbonising of electricity and transport sectors, redesigning of urban spaces, increase in energy and material efficiency, revitalisation of forests, and a push for climate-oriented research and development — it planned to take in the coming decades to achieve the net-zero status.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries have to prepare and submit two kinds of climate action plans — one for the short term, and another for long-term.
The short-term climate action plans, also called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), have to be submitted every five years, with specific actions being taken over 5- or 10-year periods. The NDCs of all countries currently contain the actions they are taking till 2030.
For developed countries, NDCs must include specific emission reduction targets for the year 2030. Every subsequent NDC — next one is due in 2025 — must be a progression from the existing NDC.
In its NDC, India has promised three main targets for 2030 — a 45 per cent reduction in emission intensity (emission per unit of GDP) from 2005 levels, 50 per cent share of renewables in electricity generation, and creation of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of additional carbon sink through forests.
Apart from NDCs, the Paris Agreement also asks countries to submit their long-term strategies to reduce emissions. There is no particular time frame for which these long-term strategies have to be prepared, but it is generally understood that countries will draw out plans till the middle of the century.
In the run-up to last year’s climate change conference in Glasgow, countries also announced target years for achieving net-zero status.
In the case of most developed countries, this is 2050. China has set 2060 as its target year, while India said it would reach there in 2070. Long-term strategies, inevitably, got linked to net-zero targets after that.