7 September 2024, The Indian Express
A thaw in chill: Delhi, Male hold defence talks
Page no- 1
GS2- India and its neighbourhood relations
- For the first time since India withdrew its uniformed military personnel from the Maldives early this year, New Delhi and Male held a defence dialogue here Friday at the level of top officials where they discussed “ongoing defence cooperation projects” and “forthcoming bilateral military exercises”.
- This is significant since a chill has gripped bilateral relations since President Mohamed Muizzu assumed office last year on the plank of his “India Out” campaign.
- The last defence cooperation dialogue was held in March last year in Male when then President Ibrahim Solih was in office, months before Muizzu took over as President.
High Court CJ can’t individually decide on judges’ elevation: SC
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GS2- Structure, organization and functioning of the Judiciary
- The Supreme Court Friday ruled that a High Court Chief Justice cannot individually reconsider a recommendation for a judge’s elevation and that this is something that can only be done by the High Court Collegium acting collectively.
- A bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and P K Mishra said this while directing the Himachal Pradesh High Court Collegium to again consider for elevation District Judges Chirag Bhanu Singh and Arvind Malhotra, who were passed over for promotion to High Court judgeship.
Process is time-taking, but Project Cheetah a success: Union Minister
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GS3- Biodiversity conservation
- The work on Project Cheetah has been a time-taking process but it has been a success, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said Friday ahead of the project’s second anniversary.
- “They (cheetahs) had to adapt and set themselves to the local system. We brought 20 cheetahs. Unfortunately, climatic conditions led to mortality. But in two years, we have 26 cheetahs,” Yadav said.
Facing East
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GS2- Foreign relations of India
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Singapore this week marks a major attempt to reboot one of India’s most valuable partnerships in Asia and the world.
- It is also about giving a fresh impetus to India’s engagement with South East Asia and more broadly the vast Pacific region.
- Before the PM’s visit to Brunei — the first bilateral visit to this small petroleum-rich nation and Singapore this week — Delhi had hosted the prime ministers of Malaysia and Vietnam.
- President Droupadi Murmu travelled to Fiji and New Zealand last month. External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met several foreign ministers in the region and received them in Delhi.
- These engagements have once again demonstrated the extraordinary goodwill for Delhi in the region and the high expectations from India.
- The intensity of this Asian diplomatic activity at the beginning of Modi’s third term will hopefully translate into concrete outcomes when the PM heads to Laos next month to attend the annual summit meetings with ASEAN and East Asian leaders.
At a strategic crossroads
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GS2- Foreign policy and foreign relations of India
- Even as the 31st meeting of the diplomatic Working Mechanism on India-China Border Affairs concluded infructuously in end-August, our gallant jawans prepare for yet another winter in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Chinese PLA on frigid Himalayan heights.
- While the man on the street believes that by significant army redeployment, we have been able to checkmate China’s nefarious designs, Beijing — playing its own deceitful game — has been busy fortifying military positions in Ladakh and creating “border defence” villages across the Arunachal border.
Insurgency at its end
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GS3- Linkages between development and spread of extremism
- The five-decades-old Maoist insurgency is indeed on its last leg. Various governments have fought this misguided ideological movement in states and at the Centre. In the last decade, the Modi government has dealt a death blow to its infrastructure.
- A violent ideological movement based on the teachings of Mao Zedong, Maoism’s roots in India can be traced to the peasant uprising in the Naxalbari region of Bengal in 1967-75.
- When poor peasants forcibly took control of huge land holdings belonging to the landlords leading to violent clashes between the two, a section of the Communist Party of India — Marxist (CPM) leadership, led by Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and others — extended its support to the rebellion.
- Expelled from the CPM, Majumdar and Sanyal started the All India Committee of Communist Revolutionaries, which was later rechristened as the CPI (Marxist-Leninist).
A silent epidemic stalks
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GS1- Salient features of Indian Society
- India is poised for rapid economic growth, potentially spurred by a young population driving production and demand. In the process, inevitably, lifestyles are being dramatically altered for the worse.
- India now reports the highest growth of ultra-processed food consumption among the youth, as well as low levels of exercise and adequate sleep.
- Cultural changes, including smartphones and a preponderance of English in schools, are also associated with weakened family relationships. Until recently, in the absence of extensive data, the role of these factors on mental well-being, encompassing our full range of mental capability, was not well understood.
- Recent findings based on a large database of over 1,50,000 individuals in India are beginning to shed light on the correlates of mental well-being among adolescents. The findings are dire. There is a silent epidemic of mental ill-health in India.
Not talking about caste
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GS1- Salient features of Indian Society
- There is a popular idea in some sections of Indian society that describing the caste system actually intensifies its effects and that if you don’t talk about caste, it will, somehow, go away.
- The idea of not talking about caste as a strategy of addressing it has a relatively long history in the modern life of the nation.
- A 1980s’ official history of a famous boys’ public school noted that students “lost” their caste identity simply because the “school deliberately plays down these differences by a common uniform, the same food… irrespective of the background of the student”.
- The school had been part of a certain strand within early Indian liberalism and its students went on to occupy important positions in public life.
India overtakes China in emerging market index
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Prelims Syllabus- Economy Current Affairs
- India has overtaken China in the MSCI EM Investable Market Index (IMI) on September 4 to become the largest weight, and is nearing the threshold to surpass China as the top weight in the broader MSCI Emerging Markets index as well.
- The weight of India in MSCI EM IMI stood at 22.27% compared to 21.58% of China. MSCI IMI consists of 3,355 stocks and includes large, mid and small cap companies.
- It captures stocks across 24 Emerging Markets countries and targets coverage of nearly 85% of the free float-adjusted market capitalisation in each country.
The law and the ground realities of passive euthanasia
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GS2- Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health
- Finding that 30-year-old Harish Rana was not being kept alive ‘mechanically’, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court recently rejected a plea by his parents for constituting a medical board to examine if this is a viable case for passive euthanasia.
- The case has reignited the debate around the ethics and law that defines passive euthanasia — withdrawing life-supporting treatment to allow a person to die naturally.
How agriculture in Haryana differs from Punjab
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GS3- Major crops-cropping patterns in various parts of the country
- Like with rice-wheat, many economists and policy analysts conflate Punjab’s agriculture with that of Haryana.
- Both states are seen to embody the best and worst of the Green Revolution, helping India turn self-sufficient, if not surplus, in rice and wheat production and also paying a steep environmental price through mono-cropping of the two cereals.
Why La Nina is delayed, and how it could still impact India’s weather
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GS1- Important Geophysical phenomena
- All leading global agencies were significantly off the mark in their La Niña predictions this year.
- India had pinned hopes on the influential climate phenomenon to drive enhanced rainfall during August-September. Now that a delay in La Niña’s onset is imminent, what is the likely impact going to be in the upcoming months? And why did global weather models get their predictions wrong?
Night-time light pollution linked to higher Alzheimer’s risk: Study
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Prelims Syllabus: General Science
- Researchers in the US have found a correlation between light pollution at night and the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.
- “Exposure to artificial light at night is one environmental factor that may influence Alzheimer’s,” researchers Robin Voigt, Bichun Ouyang, and Ali Keshavarzian of Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center wrote in the study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience on Friday.
