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With the cheaper, indigenously developed HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer scheduled to become available by April-May next year, a nationwide immunisation drive for girls in the age group of 9-14 years is likely to begin by mid-2023.
Disclosing this, Dr N K Arora, chairperson of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), told The Indian Express: “There is political commitment at the highest level.”
The quadrivalent vaccine called Cervavac, developed by the Serum Institute of India (SII), offers protection against four strains of HPV — 16, 18, 6, and 11.
The Sikkim government purchased vaccines from GAVI in 2016 and rolled out a programme, vaccinating nearly 97% of all girls between the ages of 9 and 14 years in campaign mode. They now provide it as part of routine immunisation and the coverage is about 88-90%,” said Dr Arora.
Learning from Sikkim’s experience, girls in the 9-14 years age group will first have to be vaccinated against HPV in campaign mode, followed by the inclusion of the vaccine as part of routine immunisation for nine-year-olds, he said.
While the Delhi government had also rolled out an HPV immunisation programme around the same time, it wasn’t as successful as the vaccines were available at only one of the state government run hospitals.
When we talk of the target population of the vaccine, they are all children of school-going age, and that is where it has to be introduced.
When we go to a single-age cohort, it can be given in primary school, where the enrolment is a high 90%. But we have to look beyond that too, we have to reach the girl children who are not in schools as well.
Citing lessons learnt from the Covid-19 vaccination drive, he said a system similar to CoWIN may be used. “A communication strategy is needed before any such rollout happens.
The acceptance of Covid-19 vaccine also did not happen by default. There was pushback during the initial two to three months, but we saw the hesitation go down with effective communication.
In addition to carrying out an immunisation drive, Dr Arora emphasised the need to carry out screening for women above the age of 30 years.
Editorial
Connect the dots (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
There has been yet another transgression by Chinese troops across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China. That it culminated in violence, that it took place this time in the Eastern Sector of their boundary dispute, or that it should take place in the middle of winter should surprise no one.
If there is one lesson that can be drawn from India’s experiences with Chinese transgressions over the last decade or so, it is that the Chinese seem to set the pace on the nature and timing of these transgressions.
In 2013, at Depsang in Ladakh, Chinese troops came across the LAC, pitched tents and refused to move for several weeks until New Delhi threatened to cancel the planned visit of Premier Li Keqiang to India.
This might have been a diplomatic victory for the Indian government but it also highlighted the inability of the Indian military to bring an end to the standoff or the unwillingness of the government to let the military take the lead in responding.
The following year in September, the Chinese intruded at Chumar, also in Ladakh, in the middle of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to India.
This was in keeping with a reasonably long tradition of Chinese transgressions during important visits but it was also notable for confronting Indian troops in an area where they enjoyed a degree of military advantage.
In 2017, China provoked India with infrastructure development in a third country — in Bhutan’s Doklam territory. This was a case of China trying to browbeat an Indian treaty ally.
Finally, in 2020, the Chinese PLA took advantage of Covid-19 and a lack of Indian military alertness to transgress across multiple locations on the LAC in eastern Ladakh.
Each time, however, and despite the great fount of expertise on China within its four walls, the Indian government has refused to publicly connect the dots between these transgressions and to educate and inform the Indian public about China.
There were clues from the diplomatic realm as well. The 2005 Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles between the two countries was a landmark treaty on the boundary dispute, which seemed to set explicit bookends and benchmarks for the eventual resolution of the boundary dispute.
But the very next year, then Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi declared that the status of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh was far from settled, explicitly contradicting the principles outlined in the 2005 treaty.
The question arises: What was the purpose of India’s negotiations with China? If negotiations were a strategy for buying time, the question that follows is of what buying time was for exactly.
The New Money challenge (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology/Economy)
On Monday, founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas. FTX crashed almost overnight after failing to meet a run on deposits, throwing the crypto industry into its latest crisis.
Earlier in October, Singapore-based Chainalysis published the third edition of the Global Crypto Adoption Index, in which India ranked fourth.
The Index ranks countries on five sub-indices, each weighted by their purchasing power parity per capita, thus favouring countries where the amount of cryptocurrency trading is more crucial based on the wealth of the average person. India’s performance, therefore, is more significant in light of the country’s low per capita purchasing power.
The need of the hour is to introduce regulations commensurate with this level of crypto adoption and to protect the markets from such episodes.
Across jurisdictions, the crypto market and crypto assets have been regulated broadly on grounds of anti-money laundering and combating financing terrorism, taxation, advertising, and consumer protection.
Currently in India, the regulations govern three aspects of crypto-related activities. First, in 2021, the central bank necessitated banks and regulated entities to carry out due diligence in line with KYC norms, and establish standards on anti-money laundering and combating of financing terrorism.
Second, the Budget 2022-23 introduced a 30 per cent tax on income from the transfer of any virtual digital asset, without allowing for set off of losses.
Third, the Advertising Standards Council of India released guidelines in February this year for advertising and promoting virtual digital assets and services, and directed that advertisements should carry a disclaimer stating the risk of loss from such transactions with no regulatory recourse.
Critically, however, there is a lack of independent prudential regulations and robust consumer protection for crypto assets. For this, India can seek guidance from legal frameworks proposed by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an international standard-setting body established by the G20, and jurisdictions like the European Union and Singapore.
Ideas page
Media, old and New (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
Journalists love social media. It keeps them informed about what is happening worldwide in real time, with updates coming straight from the horse’s mouth.
As a result, they can afford to spend less time collecting raw news and devote more time to connecting the dots, piecing the bigger story together, and developing a deeply-researched perspective in line with the needs of their loyal readers.
Social media, therefore, lowers the cost of news collection and enables journalists to do more value-added work. Social media also allows news publishers to connect instantly with millions of loyal readers and tease them to visit their website or app so they can monetise them via advertising or subscription.
Furthermore, it allows them to acquire new readers by connecting with them and learning about their interests. Social media is the best playground that journalists have today.
Journalists hate social media. The playground has become more powerful than the players. The relationship between the reader and social media has become so intimate that journalists are getting intermediated away.
More concerningly, it is hard for credible journalists to stand apart from misinformants on this playground. Efforts made by social media platforms to surface credible news and curb fake news are rudimentary and often half-hearted because the credibility of information does not determine their business success.
Moreover, social media platforms have a significant advantage over news publishers because of their size and superior information about users.
Driven by the need to generate the maximum possible returns for their investors, they do not shy away from leveraging this advantage when negotiating commercial agreements.
While news publishers in many countries come together as a consortium to further their collective interests, the rivalry among news publishers prevents them from presenting a united front to bargain for their collective interests.
As a result, in individual negotiations with social media platforms, the revenue share, if they ever get any, is trivial compared to the total money made by social media platforms.
The World
US scientist announce fusion energy milestone raising clean power hopes (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The U.S. Department of Energy will announce that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough on fusion energy, the process that powers the sun and stars that one day could provide a cheap source of electricity, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.
The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have achieved a net energy gain for the first time, in a fusion experiment using lasers, one of the people said. The FT first reported the experiment.
Fusion works when nuclei of two atoms are subjected to extreme heat of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million Fahrenheit) or higher leading them to fuse into a new larger atom, giving off enormous amounts of energy.
But the process consumes vast amounts of energy and the trick has been to make the process self sustaining and to get more energy out than goes in and to do so continuously instead of brief moments.
If fusion is commercialized, which backers say could happen in a decade or more, it would have additional benefits including the generation of virtually carbon free electricity which could help in the fight against climate change without the amounts of radioactive nuclear waste that today’s fission reactors produce.
Running an electric power plant off fusion presents tough hurdles however, such as how to contain the heat economically and to keep lasers firing consistently.
Investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr have poured money into companies building fusion. Private industry secured more than $2.8 billion last year for fusion, according to the Fusion Industry Association for a total of about $5 billion in recent years.
Explained
Fusion energy breakthrough (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Scientists in the United States have, for the first time, achieved a net gain in energy from a nuclear fusion reaction, seen as a big step forward in the decades-old endeavour to master a technology that is considered the most dependable source of energy in future.
Fusion is a different, but more powerful, way of harnessing the immense energy trapped in the nucleus of an atom. This is the process that makes the Sun and all other stars shine and radiate energy.
Attempts to master the fusion process have been going on at least since the 1950s, but it is incredibly difficult and is still at an experimental stage.
The nuclear energy currently in use across the world comes from the fission process, in which the nucleus of a heavier element is split into those of lighter elements in a controlled manner. In fusion, nuclei of two lighter elements are made to fuse together to form the nucleus of a heavier atom.
A large amount of energy is released in both these processes, but substantially more in fusion than fission. For example, the fusion of two nuclei of a heavier isotope of hydrogen, called tritium, produces at least four times as much energy as the fission of a uranium atom which is the normal process of generating electricity in a nuclear reactor. Besides greater energy yield, fusion is also a carbon-free source of energy, and has negligible radiation risks.
But fusion reactions happen only at very high temperatures, 10 times the temperature that exists at the core of the Sun, and creating such an extreme environment in a laboratory requires huge amounts of energy.
So far, the energy released in such experimental fusion reactions have been lower than what is consumed to create the enabling high temperatures. At best, some of these reactions have produced ‘near break-even’ energies.
That is why the latest experiment conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is being considered a big deal.
Significant though the achievement is, it does little to bring the goal of producing electricity from fusion reactions any closer to reality.
How J&K’s proposed family ID will work, and why it is being criticized (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Jammu and Kashmir Lt Governor Manoj Sinha’s announcement that the government has decided to introduce a family pehchan patra (identity card) for residents of the Union Territory has been criticised by the mainstream opposition parties in Kashmir, with the PDP describing it as a surveillance tool to keep a watch on Kashmiris.
It will be an identity card with a unique eight-digit alphanumeric number to identify each family and its members through the head of the family.
The card will contain details of all members of the family, including their names, ages, qualifications, employment status, etc.The card will be linked with the Aadhaar and bank account number of the head of the family.
It will be a single identifier for every family and individual in the UT that will instantly confirm their eligibility for government welfare schemes and facilitate direct transfer of benefits to their bank accounts with minimum human interference.
According to government officials, the primary objective is to create an authentic, verified, and reliable database of families in J&K to ensure speedy and transparent doorstep delivery of welfare schemes to eligible beneficiaries.
The database will help to identify and weed out duplicate ration cards and Aadhaar, and will help the government identify families that may have a number of educated youth, but without jobs.
While Aadhaar contains information about an individual, the family ID card will collate information about families to help in the delivery of welfare schemes.
Since the database will have information on births, deaths, and marriages that will be continuously and automatically updated, it will help the government plan policy based on authentic, updated population data.
Because updations such as the removal of a woman’s name from the family of her parents and addition in the family of her husband will be carried out automatically, people will no longer have to visit local officials for such purposes.
The government has said that the database will be created only with the consent of the family.
But the families that do not consent to having the card will likely face practical difficulties because benefits such as subsidised rations through the targeted public distribution system under the National Food Security Act, free medical treatment, old age/ widow pensions, help to victims of militancy, family pensions in case of death of sole earning member of a family, scholarships, etc. will be linked with the family ID card.
The new LAC crisis :where ,why and what now (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Hours after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament that “PLA troops tried to transgress the LAC in Yangtse area of Tawang Sector and unilaterally change the status quo”, the PLA claimed that the clash in the early hours of December 9 took place after Chinese troops on regular patrol on their side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the “Dongzhang” area were blocked by Indian soldiers who had “illegally crossed the line”.
A PTI report from Beijing quoted Senior Colonel Long Shaohua, spokesman of the PLA’s Western Theatre Command, as saying, “Our troops’ response is professional, firm and standard, which has helped to stabilise the situation.
We ask the Indian side to strictly control and restrain the frontline forces and work with the Chinese side to maintain peace and tranquility.”
The PTI report also quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin as saying that “the current border situation between China and India is generally stable”.
The clash in Tawang took place two and a half years after the deadly encounter between the two sides in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh in June 2020.
Soldiers of the two sides clashed in an area called Yangtse, in the upper reaches of Tawang sector in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang, indeed nearly all of Arunachal, is claimed by China. It is one of the more serious dispute points between India and China in the overall border question.
Tawang is the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama and an important pilgrimage centre for Tibetan Buddhists. The 14th Dalai Lama took refuge in Tawang after he crossed over from Tibet to India in 1959, spending some days in the monastery there before proceeding further.
Within Tawang, there are three “agreed areas” of differing Indian and Chinese perceptions of the LAC. Yangtse, which is about 25 km from Tawang town, north of the Lungroo grazing ground, is one of these areas.
As a result, it has been the site of regular “physical contact” between the Indian Army and the PLA, especially as the high ground is on the Indian side, giving it a commanding view of the Chinese side.