Whatsapp 93125-11015 For Details
Yet to make public a recommendation by the Election Commission on action to be taken against Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren over his ownership of a mining lease, more than two months after it was sent, Governor Ramesh Bais indicated action on the matter, saying in an interview that “atom bomb could explode any time in Jharkhand.
However, sources in both the Raj Bhavan at Ranchi and the Election Commission in Delhi said they had no information about any such opinion being sought or received.
In its opinion shared with the Governor on August 25, the EC is believed to have recommended Soren’s disqualification over assigning a mining lease to himself, while he headed the department himself. Bais is yet to make this opinion public, despite the ruling JMM repeatedly asking him to do so.
The JMM-Congress coalition has claimed that the BJP is trying to put together numbers to topple its government, and hence buying time on the issue through the Governor.
Neither has the decision by the EC sent to the panel again for a second view, nor to anyone else. It cannot be sent again to anyone.
A senior EC official said that the commission had not received any representation from the Jharkhand Governor for a second opinion. S K Mendiratta, a retired legal advisor with the EC, said he had not seen Bais’s statement.
However, to my knowledge, no Governor has ever sent back any EC opinion or sought any second opinion. Under the Constitution, only the EC can give opinion on such references from a governor.
Former Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat also said that there was no provision in the law for a second opinion. The law is very clear that the opinion of the EC is binding on a governor or the President, whatever may be the case. The Supreme Court said in the case of (an appeal to disqualify) 12 BJP MLAs of Manipur that the governor ‘shall’ proceed accordingly after receiving the EC’s opinion.
Asked in the interview by the channel about accusations of him doing “vendetta politics” and trying to “destabilise” the Jharkhand government, Baissaid: “I could have taken a decision based on the recommendation of the Election Commission, if at all I had such intentions.
Asked if a big decision could come after receiving the second opinion, the Governor said: “Bursting crackers is banned in Delhi but not in Jharkhand. Maybe one atom bomb could explode there.”
Recently, addressing a press conference, CM Soren said this was a unique case in which “a criminal or an accused” is seeking punishment while the Constitutional authorities that should have pronounced the judgment are silent.
Deadline missed, Modi, Sunak discuss early conclusion of free trade pact (Page no. 3)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
In their first conversation since Rishi Sunak entered 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to the new British Prime Minister and they agreed on the importance of early conclusion of a comprehensive and balanced Free Trade Agreement.
India and the UK were expected to sign on the FTA by Diwali but they missed the deadline due to lack of consensus and the transition in the UK political leadership.
After the call, Modi, in a Twitter post, said, “Glad to speak to Rishi Sunak today. Congratulated him on assuming charge as UK PM.
We will work together to further strengthen our Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. We also agreed on the importance of early conclusion of a comprehensive and balanced FTA.
Sunak expressed his gratitude to Modi and said he is “excited” about what the two “great democracies” can achieve as they deepen their ties.
Taking to Twitter, Sunak said, Thank you Prime Minister Narendra Modi for your kind words as I get started in my new role.
The UK and India share so much. I’m excited about what our two great democracies can achieve as we deepen our security, defence and economic partnership in the months & years ahead.
In his previous role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak had expressed support for the FTA as he saw enormous opportunities for both countries in the fintech and insurance sectors.
The phone conversation between the Prime Ministers came a day ahead of British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s visit to India.
In Mumbai Friday, Cleverly will pay his respects to those who lost their lives in the terror attack at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in 2008.
On Saturday, he will travel to New Delhi to speak at the Special Meeting of the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee. He will call upon countries to work together to fight online terrorism, including global terror recruitment campaigns and live streaming of attacks.
He is also due to meet Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar to discuss the latest on the 2030 Roadmap, the landmark commitment to boost cooperation between the UK and India over the next decade under a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
Since it was launched last year, huge progress has been made, including the start of ambitious free trade negotiations, the expansion of our defence and security partnership, including through a visit to India last year by HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Carrier Strike Group (CSG), and joint exercises to enhance cyber security collaboration.
Express Network
Emissions in India, 6 other nations top pre-Covid levels (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Ahead of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27, scheduled to take place in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh next month, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said that the world is falling short of the goals set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement adopted in 2015, and that no credible pathway is currently in place to restrict global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The UNEP report released on Thursday, titled ‘Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window — Climate Crisis Calls For Rapid Transformation of Societies’, has found that in India and six other top emitters, emissions have rebounded and increased after the pandemic.
The top seven emitters (China, the EU27, India, Indonesia, Brazil, the Russian Federation and the United States of America) plus international transport accounted for 55 per cent of global GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in 2020. Collectively, G20 members are responsible for 75 per cent of global GHG emissions,” said the report.
The global average per capita GHG emissions was 6.3 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) in 2020. The US remains far above this level at 14 tCO2e, followed by Russia at 13 tCO2e, China at 9.7 tCO2e, Brazil and Indonesia at about 7.5 tCO2e, and the European Union at 7.2 tCO2e.
India remains far below the world average at 2.4 tCO2e.For most major emitters, including China, India, the Russian Federation, Brazil and Indonesia, GHG emissions (excluding land use and forestry sectors) rebounded in 2021, exceeding pre-pandemic 2019 levels.
UNEP said that the G20 countries have just started to work on meeting their new targets, and collectively, are expected to fall short of their promises for 2030.
Policies currently in place, without further strengthening, suggest a 2.8°C hike. To get on track to meet the Paris Agreement goal, the world needs to reduce greenhouse gases by unprecedented levels over the next eight years.
The Paris Agreement defined 2°C above pre-industrial levels as the global warming limit, which if breached, can lead to extreme weather events such as extreme heat waves, droughts, water stress and others that can significantly impact lives.
The UNEP report says that unless unprecedented action is taken, global warming is on course to breach this mark.
Unconditional and conditional NDCs are estimated to reduce global emissions in 2030 by five and 10 per cent respectively, compared with emissions based on policies currently in place.
The Editorial Page
Renew the Goal (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Anew UN climate change report holds out a glimmer of hope that the world’s GHG burden in 2030 will be less than what was feared about a year ago. It shows that the national global warming mitigation targets will increase emissions by 10.6 per cent by 2030, compared to 2010 levels.
This is an improvement over last year’s assessment, which projected that emissions in 2030 will rise by nearly 14 per cent over 2010 levels. This year’s analysis also shows that emissions are not likely to increase after 2030.
But that’s where the good news ends. The cumulative climate ambition of countries will not limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century — the target of the Paris Climate Pact.
The current combined National Determined Contributions (NDCs) will lead the planet to at least 2.5 degrees warming.
At the COP-27 in Glasgow last year, 194 countries agreed to upscale their Paris Pact targets. However, only 24 of them — including India — have updated their plans.
The delay is understandable. Raising climate ambition requires countries to take difficult decisions in areas as diverse as agriculture, forest management, transport, and urban planning.
These issues relate to people’s livelihoods and well-being and demand that policymakers balance sustainability with developmental goals.
ll countries are not on the same footing in this respect, especially because climate cooperation has rarely gone beyond silos. Inadequate technology transfer from the developed world remains a persistent grouse of developing countries.
There are fears that the ambitious targets of several countries could remain on paper if they are not matched by adequate financing.
In 2009, developed countries agreed to raise $100 billion per annum up to 2020 to help developing countries reduce emissions and cope with the effects of global warming.
The target was never met — the shortfall, according to some estimates, is more than half the total funds that had to be mobilised.
The UN report comes less than two weeks before global climate diplomats will assemble at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt for the UNFCCC’s COP-27.
Idea Page
Nutrition, not Hunger (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Govt. Policies & Interventions)
Every October, the Global Hunger Index (GHI) is released. It generally creates an uproar, and with good reason. But this time it has gone overboard.
The fountainhead is a 16-year-old German and Irish organisation, which measures and ranks countries on a hunger index at the global, regional, and national levels, but not at the sub-national level where some Indian states fare better.
The GHI’s stated aim is to reduce hunger around the world. But its methodology focuses disproportionately on less than five-year-olds.
In common parlance, hunger and nutrition are two different things. Hunger is associated with food scarcity and starvation. It produces images of emaciated people holding empty food bowls.
GHI uses childhood mortality and nutrition indicators. But its preamble states “communities, civil society organisations, small producers, farmers, and indigenous groups… shape how access to nutritious food is governed.” This suggests that GHI sees hunger as a food production challenge when, according to the FAO, India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of grain and the largest producer of milk; when the per capita intake of grain, vegetables and milk has increased manifold. It is, therefore, contentious and unacceptable to club India with countries facing serious food shortages, which is what GHI has done.
The sensational use of the word hunger is abhorrent given the facts. But there is no denying that in India, nutrition, particularly child nutrition, continues to be a problem.
Unlike the GHI, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) does a good job of providing comparative state-level data, including the main pointers that determine health and nutrition.
NFHS provides estimates of underweight, (low weight for age), stunting (low height for age) and wasting (low weight for height).
These conditions affect preschool children (those less than 6 years of age) disproportionately and compromise a child’s physical and mental development while also increasing the vulnerability to infections.
Moreover, undernourished mothers (attributable to social and cultural practices,) give birth to low-birth-weight babies that remain susceptible to infections, transporting their handicaps into childhood and adolescence.
The power of small (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The human race is plundering Planet Earth at a pace that far outstrips its capacity and ability to support life. A recent study says that if the current rate of consumption were to continue, by 2050, humans would need two more planets, in addition to the Earth, to continue to exist.
This means that we could be staring at major climatic crises in the years to come and our future generations may never get to experience the beauty of nature, the glaciers, the oceans, the snow and the rivers, that we have been fortunate to see and experience.
In view of this danger lurking around, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 20 unveiled the action plan for Mission LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment), an India-led global mass movement that will nudge individuals and communities for action to protect and preserve the environment.
PM Modi had first given the mantra of LiFE to the world in 2021 at COP 26 in Glasgow. On October 20, 10 heads of states, including French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, Guyana President Irfan Ali, Argentina President Alberto Fernandez, Mauritius Prime Minister PravindJugnauth, Madagascar President AndryRajoelina, Nepal Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, Maldives President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, Georgia Prime Minister IrakliGaribashvili and Estonia Prime Minister KajaKallas extended support to the India-led LiFE movement.
Environment protection, as rightly stated by PM Modi, has for far too long been perceived as a policy issue by the general masses.
There has been a perception that only national governments and international organisations can do something to protect the Earth and environment.
But Mission LiFE makes environmental protection and conservation a participative process and recognises the importance of each effort — no matter how small or big — to save the environment both at the level of the individual and at the level of the community.
What threatens our existence more than anything else is the pace at which we are producing and consuming. The consumption pattern of the world is mindless and pays scant regard to the environment.
Mission LiFE tries to remind the world that the mindset of “use and throw” must immediately be replaced by “reduce, reuse and recycle” so that our scarce resources are not overexploited and the world doesn’t crumble under the weight of all the waste that it is generating by the second.
In India, the cultural ethos of limiting needs and treating the environment and its resources with reverence has produced very visible results.
We constitute 17 per cent of the world’s population, but our contribution to global carbon emissions is only four per cent.
Against the developed world’s carbon footprint of four tonnes per head, the carbon footprint of an average Indian counts to only 1.5 tonnes.
Explained Page
Myanmar's violent chaos (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
ASEAN foreign ministers were meeting in Jakarta to discuss their options in Myanmar, where the military is using increasingly violent methods to suppress the armed resistance against its February 2021 takeover.
Twenty months on, the junta has not been able to establish full control over the country. Many of Myanmar’s ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) have joined armed civilian groups called People’s Defence Force (PDF), which are allied to the self-declared National Unity Government (NUG) in exile.
The meet is being held ahead of the ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Cambodia from November 10 to 13, amid unprecedented differences among members of the grouping on how to deal with the regional crisis that has affected all of them in one way or another.
Much of the resistance by the civilian PDFs is in the Chin State and Sagaing Region, which share borders with Mizoram and Manipur.
A fragile truce between some EAOs and the military dating back to 2018 has broken down. Many EAOs support the civilian rebellion, and the junta is fighting separate armed groups as well as the PDFs across the country.
On October 23, according to reports from Myanmar, over 60 people were killed in an airstrike by the Myanmar military in Kachin State, in an area famous for its jade mines some 400 km from Kohima as the crow flies.
The strike targeted an open air concert to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the Kachin Independence Organisation, whose military wing, the Kachin Independence Army, has been fighting a protracted battle against Myanmar’s rulers. The military has said all casualties were combatants.
While the Myanmar army has routinely used air power against the EAOs, in the months since the coup, it has not hesitated to strike at civilians as well. Attack helicopters have been deployed against PDFs in the Sagaing and Magway Regions.
In Rakhine State, the military is fighting the Arakkan Army (AA), with the violence sometimes spilling over to Bangladesh.
The AA, which is fighting for the independence of Rakhine, has kept its distance from the PDFs and the NUG. While the AA is anti-Rohingya, the NUG, comprising parliamentarians who were elected in 2020, has appeared to take a more progressive view on the Rohingya people, officially declaring that they are entitled to citizenship in Myanmar.
On the political front, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy who was jailed after the coup, has been convicted in multiple cases and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Economy
Grievance panels for social media: Govt to go ahead despite concerns (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, Govt. Policies & Interventions)
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has received final approval from the Department of Legal Affairs over its proposal to create government-appointed bodies that will be empowered to review and possibly reverse content moderation and user grievance decisions taken by social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, The Indian Express has learnt.
The proposed changes, first introduced as part of draft amendments to the Information Technology Rules, 2021 (IT Rules) in June, are learnt to have been finalised with the final version expected to be notified within this week.
The development comes amid criticism from civil society activists, who have raised concerns about the government’s involvement in the appeals process, and even as the government had initially said that it would be open to social media companies setting up a self regulatory body among themselves provided that the government found the body’s functioning satisfactory.
What the changes essentially mean is that in case a user is not satisfied with the content moderation decision taken by a social company’s grievance officer, they can appeal that decision before the proposed government-appointed appeals committee.
The government’s initial proposal had stemmed from users’ complaints about being deplatformed, or being removed from a social media site, without companies giving them an adequate avenue of hearing.
According to a senior government official, the Centre will set up one or more grievance appellate committees (GACs) within three months of the final amendments being notified.
Each GAC is slated to have a chairperson and two whole time members appointed by the Centre, one of which will be a government official. The GAC will also have two “independent members. The initial draft of the amendments had not made the exact composition of the GAC clear.
The final rules are also expected to allow the GAC to seek assistance from people who may have adequate expertise and experience in a subject matter while dealing with users’ appeals.
The GAC could adopt an “online dispute resolution mechanism” where the entire appeal process, from its filing to the final decision, will be done online. Social media companies will also have to compile every order passed by the GAC and report them on their respective websites.