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In its first statement since US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei 10 days ago which angered China and led to PLA military drills, India called for “exercise of restraint” and to avoid “unilateral actions to change (the) status quo” over Taiwan.
It did not spell out the One-China policy, and instead said that the government’s “relevant” policies are “well-known and consistent” and “do not require reiteration”.
Responding to questions on India’s talks with NATO, Arindam Bachi, spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, said, “India and NATO have kept in touch in Brussels at different levels for quite some time now. This is part of our contacts with various stakeholders on global issues of mutual interest.”
New Delhi held its first political dialogue with NATO in Brussels on December 12, 2019. The talks were attended by senior officials including from the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Defence.
To questions on the Taiwan issue, Bagchi said, “Like many other countries, India too is concerned at recent developments. We urge the exercise of restraint, avoidance of unilateral actions to change status quo, de-escalation of tensions and efforts to maintain peace and stability in the region.”
On the question of the One-China policy, the MEA spokesperson said, “India’s relevant policies are well-known and consistent. They do not require reiteration.” India does not have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan yet as it adheres to the One-China policy.
Without naming China, New Delhi also called Beijing’s blocking of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Abdul Rauf Azhar as a global terrorist as “unfortunate”.
Referred to as Abdul Rauf Asghar in UN documents, he is the brother of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar and deputy chief of the proscribed terror group.
Express Network
Himachal now brings a more stringent Bill on religious conversions (Page no 8)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
In the final Vidhan Sabha session before the state heads for polls, Himachal Pradesh seeks to criminalise mass religious conversions.
An amendment to the Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act-2019 was tabled on the third day of the Monsoon Session. In the Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill-2022, a provision has been added which deems conversion of two or more persons as mass conversion.
The Jai Ram Thakur government said the initial Act was introduced to promote freedom of religion by prohibition of conversion from one religion to another through coercion, misrepresentation or fraudulent means.
However, no provisions for mass conversions were given in the Act. The amendment seeks to establish mass conversion within the same Act and with stringent punishment for the same.
Section 3 of the Freedom Act states, “No person shall convert or attempt to convert, either directly or otherwise, any other person from one religion to another by use of misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, inducement or by any fraudulent means or by marriage.”
The Amendment Bill will be defining conversion of two or more persons at the same time as mass conversion. “Provided further that whosoever contravenes the provisions of Section 3 in respect of mass conversion shall be punished with imprisonment for a term, which shall not be less than five years, but which may extend to ten years. The person accused of carrying out mass conversions will also be liable for a fine upto Rs 1.5 lakh.
If a person is found to be accused of a second offence of the same nature, the quantum of prison may extend to a minimum of seven years and a maximum of ten years.
The Bill further provides that if a person conceals his religion while marrying someone from another religion, he/she shall be punished with imprisonment for a term, which shall not be less than three years, but which may extend to ten years. The person will also be liable to a fine which shall not be less than Rs 50,000 and also may extend to Rs 1 lakh.
Environment Ministry looks to curb elephant deaths on railway tracks, resolve human-jumbo conflict (Page no 8)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The Union Environment Ministry will make a fresh push to curb unnatural elephant deaths by taking up track casualties with the Railway Ministry and holding workshops across the country to address human-elephant conflict.
The decisions were taken at the 17th steering committee meeting of Project Elephant which was held at Periyar National Park in Kerala. The meeting was chaired by Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav.
As per the last count in 2017, India has 29,964 elephants. Yadav said that on an average, 500 people are killed annually by elephants and about 100 elephants are killed in retaliation.
To find a long-term solution, we are revisiting the elephant corridors of the country and have finished more than 50 per cent of the task involving key stakeholders in this endeavour.
Marking World Elephant Day at an event in Periyar, Yadav Friday also announced the creation of a new elephant reserve. Agasthyamalai in Tamil Nadu will be India’s 32nd elephant reserve and the state’s fifth.
Sources said the steering committee has decided to set up a panel to look into the deaths of elephants in Odisha and Jharkhand and furnish a detailed report to the Centre by September 10.
Odisha has reported 13 cases of unnatural elephant deaths in the past two months, with five deaths caused by poaching.
Last year, its Environment Minister, Bikram Keshari Arukh, informed the Assembly that 406 elephants died in the state owing to multiple reasons in the last five years.
These deaths were caused by accidents with trains and electrocution, among others. Jharkhand, meanwhile, has historically seen a high level of human-elephant conflict.
The steering committee has also decided that separate management plans for elephants should be developed and incorporated in management plans of reserves, national parks, sanctuaries and the working plans of territorial divisions.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meanwhile, acknowledged World Elephant Day through a series of tweets – “On #WorldElephantDay, reiterating our commitment to protect the elephant.
You would be happy to know that India houses about 60% of all Asian elephants. The number of elephant reserves has risen in the last 8 years. I also laud all those involved in protecting elephants.
Editorial Page
Contradictions of Freedom (Page no 12)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
Celebrations around August 15 are mainly about freedom. This year is even more special as it marks 75 years of Independence and, as such, deserves a more nuanced commemoration.
While freedom from foreign rule is a cherished gift we acquired 75 years ago, we must remember that the celebrations on August 15 are and should be as much about democracy as about our national self-respect and identity.
India’s freedom was not merely an assertion of nationhood. Implicit in that nationhood was also an idea about how to conduct the affairs of the nation.
While our ability to sustain independence gives us pride and satisfaction, our ability to consolidate democracy should be a matter of deep concern and introspection.
As we pause to review the life of India’s democracy, we witness many a contradictory feature. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that our democracy is marked by contradictoriness.
Don't Miss from Express Opinion |As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of our Independence, a thought for what we lost
This contradictoriness emanates from the celebrations themselves.
The celebrations are about the nation. They are also about the abstract idea of the people. Yet, we are on the path of limiting both the scope of the nation and the expanse of what constitutes the people. The present juncture is marked by attempts to shrink the nation to one community.
This tends to result in exclusion rather than inclusion. The nation envisioned 75 years ago was certainly not confined to any one community but today, the entire nationalist rhetoric is marked by exclusion and an overemphasis on community identity.
The famous phrase “we the people” will continue to be invoked but it will refer to only a select section as the people. Apart from privileging one community over others, the idea of the people is also beset with the exclusion of the physical peripheries of the nation.
Besides, a new hierarchy between the nation and democracy is emerging. In this hierarchy, democracy is secondary to the nation. This also undermines the importance of the idea of the people because once democracy is sidelined, people exist only as constituents of the nation rather than as having agency.
The second contradiction is about the foundational document. India takes pride in a Constitution, which is both a stabilising and revolutionary document.
There are celebrations of that document but the adoption of its spirit in social and political practice is half-hearted. More worryingly, the stabilising dimension of the Constitution is used to make the state all-pervasive and transform governance into full-time, all-round regulation of the idea of citizenship.
The Idea Page
A system that heals (Page no 13)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Since Independence, India has been striving to establish a comprehensive primary healthcare care system. The Bhore Committee Report of 1946, the Kartar Singh Committee Report of 1973, the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) of 2005 and the Ayushman Bharat Mission of 2019 are significant landmarks in this endeavour.
The system today comprises a multi-tiered structure with a 30-bed community health centre operated by four specialists at the block-level and a community worker at the village-level. The services cover 12 diseases/needs.
The NRHM was a game changer. Backed by political imagination and a three-fold increase in budget, the mission set standards for physical infrastructure, human resources and service delivery — the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS).
The focused approach resulted in substantial gains — institutional deliveries went up from 41 per cent in 2005 to 89 per cent in 2021, the maternal mortality ratio went down from 407 per one lakh women in 2,000 to 113 per one lakh women in 2021 and the infant mortality ratio reduced from 58/1,000 live births in 2005 to about 28/1,000 live births in 2021.
With increased availability of drugs, diagnostics and doctors, the healthcare system’s footfall has registered an impressive improvement in states like Bihar and UP. The embedding of a million foot soldiers in the community is a major achievement.
Despite these efforts, however, less than 10 per cent of the facilities match up to the IPHS. One reason for the deficit is that public spending on healthcare is barely 1.1 per cent of the GDP.
The other reason is the wavering political support for primary care. As a result, the primary healthcare system continues to be plagued with gaps and deficiencies and the current facilities serve two to ten times the population they are designed to cater to.
The Covid pandemic once again highlighted the need for an effective primary healthcare system. The overcrowding of hospitals with anxious patients, the utter confusion and the stress on families, desperate for credible advice, brought to the fore the need for family doctors and a resilient primary health system.
It is not as if policymakers have been unaware of the need for close-to-home facilities to address everyday healthcare needs.
The UK’s GP (general practitioners) system has been a part of the public health discourse in the country for nearly a decade.
The barrier has, however, been the lack of understanding of how to transplant this system to India, given the wide differences in the history, culture and conditions of the two countries.
Labour and its discontents (Page no 13)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
India’s gravest socio-economic problem is the difficulty a vast majority of citizens have in earning good livelihoods. Their problem is not just employment.
It is the poor quality of employment — insufficient and uncertain incomes, and poor working conditions, wherever they are employed.
The dominant “theory-in-use” to increase employment is to improve the ease of doing business, with the expectation that investments in businesses will improve citizens’ ease of earning good livelihoods.
In this theory, large and formal enterprises create good jobs, and labour laws must be “flexible” to attract investments. Investors say the laws protect labour too much. Reforms were begun by the UPA government.
Their principal thrust was to improve administration by simplifying procedures and digitisation. Those improvements were appreciated by employers as well as workers.
However, they did not make the labour laws more employer-friendly. Therefore, the NDA government became bolder in 2014 and moved to reform the content of the laws.
The government designed a framework for reforms and, since labour is a state subject, it encouraged states to implement changes.
First off the blocks was Rajasthan. Other states followed. Economic reforms are a process of learning. The V V Giri National Labour Institute’s interim report, “Impact Assessment Study of the Labour Reforms undertaken by the States”, provides insights into the impacts of the reforms so far.
Labour laws cover many subjects — payment of wages, safety conditions, social security, terms of employment, and dispute resolution.
The report has focused on the reform of the Industrial Disputes Act, which is to raise the limits of applicability of laws relating to terms of service and modes of dispute resolution (roles of unions) to 300 persons.
The report spans the period 2004-05 to 2018-19. It focuses on six states that have implemented reforms: Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh.
The report reminds readers that labour laws are the only one factor affecting business investment decisions. Investors don’t go out to hire people just because it has become easy to fire them.
An enterprise must have a growing market for its products, and many things must be put together to produce for the market — capital, machinery, materials, land, etc. not just labour. Therefore, it must be worthwhile to employ more people before firing them!
Economy
Trade deficit almost triples to record $30 billion on oil imports (Page no 17)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Trade deficit almost tripled to a record $30 billion in July from a year before, as a surge in imports, driven by elevated global commodity prices, continued unabated, while export growth lost pace, albeit on an unfavourable base.
According to data released by the Commerce Ministry on Friday, merchandise exports rose just 2.1 per cent on-year in July to $36.3 billion, while imports jumped 43.6 per cent to $66.3 billion. Sequentially, exports in July fell 9.5 per cent from June.
In the first four months of this fiscal, exports grew 20.1 per cent to $157.4 billion, while imports jumped 48.1 per cent to $256.4 billion, leading to a deficit of $99 billion.
Elevated prices of crude oil, coal and fertiliser in the wake of the Ukraine war has inflated India’s import bill.
However, the country’s trade deficit may narrow a tad in August, easing concerns on the current account deficit (CAD), albeit to a limited extent.
Explained
India’s NATO engagement (Page no 19)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
New Delhi held its first political dialogue with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Brussels on December 12, 2019.
Attended by senior officials, including from the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Defence, the idea was to ensure the dialogue was primarily political in character, and to avoid making any commitment on military or other bilateral cooperation.
Accordingly, the Indian delegation attempted to assess cooperation on regional and global issues of mutual interest.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, is a political and military alliance of 28 European countries and two countries in North America (United States and Canada).
It was set up in 1949 by the US, Canada, and several western European nations to ensure their collective security against the Soviet Union. It was the US’s first peacetime military alliance outside the western hemisphere.
Thirty countries are currently members of NATO, which is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. The headquarters of the Allied Command Operations is near Mons, also in Belgium.
Members of NATO are committed to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party. Collective defence lies at the very heart of NATO, “a unique and enduring principle that binds its members together, committing them to protect each other and setting a spirit of solidarity within the Alliance”.
Article 5 reads: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
Giant meteorite impacts created continents, study shows (Page no 19)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
A new Curtin University study has found the most robust evidence yet showing that Earth’s continents were formed by giant meteorite impacts. The paper, ‘Giant impacts and the origin and evolution of continents’, was published in Nature on August 10.
Dr Tim Johnson from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who is one of the study’s authors, said: “By examining tiny crystals of the mineral zircon in rocks from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which represents Earth’s best-preserved remnant of ancient crust, we found evidence of these giant meteorite impacts.”
Studying the composition of oxygen isotopes in these zircon crystals revealed a ‘top-down’ process starting with the melting of rocks near the surface and progressing deeper, consistent with the geological effect of giant meteorite impacts.
Our research provides the first solid evidence that the processes that ultimately formed the continents began with giant meteorite impacts.
He said that understanding the formation and ongoing evolution of the Earth’s continents was crucial given that these landmasses host the majority of Earth’s biomass, all humans and nearly all of the planet’s important mineral deposits.
The researchers now plan to test the findings from Western Australia on other ancient rocks and see if the model is more widely applicable.
Chronic fatigue syndrome (Page no 19)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Tech)
A woman from Bengaluru has filed a petition in the Delhi High Court to stop her Noida-based friend, who has been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome since 2014, from travelling to Europe to undergo a physician-assisted euthanasia.
The petition stated that his condition has deteriorated over the past eight years, making him “completely bed-bound and just able to walk a few steps inside home”.
Also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is a serious and debilitating disease that affects the nervous system, the immune system and the body’s production of energy, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Experts have suggested that the term can trivialize the severity of the illness. In a 2015 report, the US Institute of Medicine proposed the term systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID).
Its causes are still unknown. However, the potential triggers would include viral or bacterial infection, hormonal imbalances and genetic predispositions. There is no specific test for the disease, and doctors have to rely on medical examinations, blood and urine tests.
The biggest telltale symptom is a significantly lowered ability to do activities that were performed before the illness. This is accompanied by at least 6 months (or longer) of debilitating fatigue that is more severe than everyday feelings of tiredness.
This fatigue is not relieved by sleep or rest and exercising usually makes the symptoms worse, according to the UK’s National Health Services (NHS).
Other symptoms include trouble sleeping, difficulty in thinking, memory retention and concentration, dizziness/lightheadedness, headaches, muscle pain, joint ache, flu-like symptoms, tender lymph nodes and digestive issues.
According to the New York state health department, the most recognizable symptom is post-exertional malaise (PEM). Patients often describe it as a “crash” in physical/mental energy following even minor activities like grocery shopping or brushing teeth.