Daily Current Affairs

The Special Marriage Act, 1954 (GS Paper 1, Social Issues)

Why in news?

• Recently, the Supreme Court dismissed a writ petition challenging provisions of the Special Marriage Act (SMA), 1954 requiring couples to give a notice declaring their intent to marry 30 days before their marriage.

The Supreme Court dismissed a writ petition challenging the Constitutional validity of certain provisions of the SMA under which couples seek refuge for inter-faith and inter-caste marriages.

 

What does the petition seek? What did the court say?

• The writ petition has called these provisions violative of the right to privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution as they require couples to give a notice of 30 days before the date of marriage inviting objections from the public.
• The writ petition has also said that the provisions contravene Article 14 on prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste and sex as well as Article 15 on right to equality as these requirements are absent in personal laws.
• A Bench of Justices rejected the writ petition on the grounds that the petitioner was no longer an aggrieved party as she had already solemnised her marriage under SMA. The petitionersaid that they were now deliberating on an alternative approach to initiate this litigation such as through a public interest litigation involving other victims.
• Another writ petition in Nandini Praveen vs Union of India & Others filed on similar grounds was admitted by the Supreme Court in 2020 and the government’s reply to is awaited.

 

What are the provisions that have been challenged?

• Section 5 of the SMA requires couples getting married under it to give a notice to the Marriage Officer 30 days before the date of marriage. The writ seeks striking down of provisions that follow in Section 6 to Section 10.
• Section 6 requires such a notice to be then entered into the Marriage Notice Book maintained by the Marriage Officer, which can be inspected by “any person desirous of inspecting the same”.  These notices have to be also affixed at a “conspicuous place” in the office of the Marriage Officer so that anyone can raise an objection to the marriage.
• Section 7 provides the process for making an objection such as if either party has a living spouse, is incapable of giving consent due to “unsoundness of mind” or is suffering from mental disorder resulting in the person being unfit for marriage or procreation.
• Section 8 specifies the inquiry procedure to be followed after an objection has been submitted.

 

How do these provisions make couples vulnerable?

• These public notices have been used by anti-social elements to harass couples getting married.
• In Athira’s(petitioner) case, who got married in 2019 under SMA, her marriage notice containing her address was circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp calling on people to visit her parents and make them “aware” about her marriage.
• While Athira had the support of her parents, for many others who often marry without their parent’s consent this can be life-threatening.
• There have been instances, where marriage officers have gone over and beyond the law and sent such notices to the parents of the couple leading to a Muslim woman in Delhi being confined to her house by her parents in March 2020 until her boyfriend filed a habeus corpus in the Delhi High Court.

 

Different provisions:

• Following another petition, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) was slapped with a contempt notice and the Delhi government issued a warning to all SDMs in the State.
• The Haryana government has laid down 16 pre-requisites which ask couples to issue a notice in a newspaper and that such notices be sent to their parents. In certain States, couples have to seek a no-objection certificate from their parents.
• The Maharashtra Department of Registration and Stamps publicly shares the details of couples marrying under SMA on its website and so did the Kerala government until Athira came forward and pointed out that this allowed communal elements to access personal details and threaten and harass couples.
• Many also complain about the behaviour of the staff at the SDM’s office who often delete or delay applications and dissuade couples from marrying under SMA and ask them to convert at an Arya Samaj temple.
• With as many as 11 States passing anti-conversion (or so called love-jihad) laws, parents and the State are now armed to punish and harass such couples.

 

Save the Whale Shark Campaign

(GS Paper 3, Environment)

 

Why in news?

• Recently, the Delhi-based non-profit, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) launched ‘Save the Whale Shark Campaign’ along Karnataka, Kerala and Lakshadweep in Mangaluru.

 

About whale shark:

• The whale shark (Rhincodon typus) is the largest fish on Earth and a keystone species in marine ecosystems.
• It can grow to a length of approximately 18 metres and weigh as much as 21 tonnes.

 

Habitat:

• Although distributed widely across tropical and warm temperate seas, limited information is available on the population trends of this species, especially along the Indian coastline.
• The whale shark is distributed all along the Indian coast. However, the largest whale shark aggregation is along the Gujarat coast.

 

Conservation status:

• The fish is listed as a Schedule I animal under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.
• The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has noted that whale shark populations are on the decline and its global status is notified as ‘Endangered’.

 

Threats:

• According to IUCN, the main threat to these plankton feeders is accidental entanglement in fishing nets. This can result in mortality.
• The only way to curb such mortality is to ensure the release of the entangled whale sharks from the fishing net without any delay. For this, the primary target group, which is the fishers needs to be sensitised.

WTI has been running a project in Gujarat for the last 20 years which has resulted in fisher folk releasing 852 whale sharks in the Arabian Sea.

Beyond Gujarat:

• WTI with the support of IUCN had conducted a survey along the west coast (excluding Gujarat) during 2012-13 and found that the highest number of Whale Shark sightings (after Gujarat coast) were near the waters of Lakshadweep.
• Whale shark landings and stranding are largely reported from Kerala.
• The main goal of this project is to reduce and eradicate whale shark death in the incidental catch in fishing nets by the voluntary release of the whale shark.
• This initiative targets the marine fishers along these two states and the island of Lakshadweep.

 

Way Forward:

• Sensitisation and awareness is the only solution.

 

A cinematic demolition

(GS Paper 3, Infrastructure)

Context:

• The massive and cinematic cloud of dust that enveloped the surroundings of the recently-demolishedSupertech buildings in Noida is an apt metaphor of the new relations between land, private real estate players and the state.
• These, in turn, derive from changing aspirations on the part of different sections of the population that have fed the demand for individual dwellings across the country.
• Beyond the illegality of a pair of buildings in Uttar Pradesh, lies the story of a national drama with origins in the early to mid-1980s.

 

Government as a land monopolist:

• In Delhi and the areas that surround it (the territory known as the National Capital Region), the market for land during the 20th century was spurred by the actions of the government.
• In the first half of the previous century, private developers were confronted by formidable barriers to entry. As land-holding bodies, the Delhi Improvements Trust (established 1937) and the Delhi Development Authority (1957) were effective land monopolists.

Their actions led to massive inflation in land prices and locking out large sections from decent habitation infrastructure. They inhibited machinations by private players but did not, in fact, act in the public interest.

Private players:

• The government’s actions as a land monopolist in the Delhi region led private players to look beyond its boundaries. Areas in Haryana and UP that bordered the city emerged as important nodes of urbanization.
• From the mid-1980s, with the emergence of new sources of home loans, the expansion of the middle class and rise of overseas remittance, the private housing market took hold.
• However, notwithstanding the seemingly formal nature of the arrangements that surround land transactions land transactions remain extraordinarily informal and stubbornly damaging of the public good.

 

New urbanization:

• Since the 1980s, the history of new urbanisation in India is one of the new relationships between government mechanisms and private players where the visibility of planning methods acts as a curtain for constant post-approval alterations.
• This usually happened as land values increase and it became profitable to “convince” government regulatory authorities to allow changes in the plans that were actually approved, plans for schools and charitable hospitals were frequently transformed into more lucrative alternatives.
• In the newly urbanising rural-urban frontiers in particular, the multiplicity of land systems, units of measurement and the fact that planning procedures follow, rather than lead, actual construction makes it almost impossible to institute mechanisms of transparency.
• Technological fixes are easily subverted by kin-like relations that now exist between different stakeholders in land, the most important of which is the state.

 

Military-industrial complex:

• The visual impact of the Noida demolition appears to have been interpreted as a message to the powerful “builders lobby”.
• However, this is to miss the processes that have become established over the past few decades whereby there isn’t an easily identifiable builders lobby that acts against public interest.
• What we have, rather, is a state-real estate complex where it is increasingly difficult to work out where the state ends and private interests begin. This is the Indian version of the military-industrial complex.
• The corporatisation of the state –that has accompanied the emergence of recent land markets makes it increasingly difficult to protect public welfare.

 

Impact on urban environments:

• Keeping aside the legal aspects of the demolition, there is another danger in unequivocal celebration of the demolition for the ways in which we think of cities and urban life. For, it now becomes easier to say: “Demolish all that is illegal”.
• For every Noida-type demolition, cities are witness to several well-established patterns of illegalities that, in the fitness of time, become legalised. The several enclaves of the well-off and encroachments upon forest lands by powerful people are prominent examples. This denudes urban environments and also makes for incredibly unjust cities.
• It is easy to blow up illegal buildings here and there but more difficult to question the peculiar relations between the governments and land markets and our own participation in it. Demolitions are spectacular events but spectacles are not the best way to make better cities.

 

Conclusion:

• The relation to spectacular events as proxies for interrogating social and political structures, citizens cheer the fall of a building but are unwilling to question the nature of the state in whose full sight it blossomed, can only suggest that while the dust in Noida may settle in a while, the clouds will remain.

 

INS Vikrant vs. aircraft carriers from China and the US

(GS Paper 3, Defence)

 

Why in news?

• Recently, India will get its first Indigenous Aircraft Carrier with Prime Minister Narendra Modi set to commission INS Vikrant.
• The unveiling of INS Vikrant, the first indigenously designed and built aircraft carrier, at Kochi’s Cochin Shipyard Limited is set to mark a significant step towards strengthening India’s self-reliance especially in the strategic sector of defence.
• With the commissioning of Vikrant, India will have two operational aircraft carriers, which will bolster the maritime security of the nation.

 

INS Vikrant:

• Designed by the Indian Navy’s in-house Warship Design Bureau (WDB) and built by the Cochin Shipyard, a public sector shipyard, INS Vikrant has been built with state-of- the-art automation features and is the largest ship ever built in the maritime history of India.
• It has a displacement of 43,000 tonnes and can hit a maximum speed of 28 knots. It has an operation range of 7500 Nautical Miles.
• It has a beam of 62 meters and a height of 59 meters. It has 14 decks, five in the superstructure, and 2,300 compartments which can house a crew of 1,700, including special cabins for women officers.
• It has ship aircraft lifts (to take jets from hangar to deck) with a carrying capacity of 30 tonnes each, designed to operate without impeding the flight operations on deck.

 

Technology:

• The carrier is designed with a very high degree of automation for machinery operations, ship navigation and survivability. The carrier is equipped with the latest state of the art equipment and systems.
• It boasts a fully-fledged state of the art medical complex with the latest medical equipment facilities including major modular OT, emergency modular OT, physiotherapy clinic, ICU, laboratories, CT scanner, X-Ray machines, dental complex, isolation ward and telemedicine facilities.

INS Vikrant, with its ski-jump ramp technology with two take-off runways and a landing strip with three arrester wires can operate Short Take-Off but Arrested Landing (STOBAR) craft.

Fighter planes & Weapon system:

• However, the Indian Navy is in the process of acquiring a fleet of deck-based fighter jets (Boeing’s F/A-18E Super Hornet and Dassault Aviation’s Rafale-M (Marine) aircraft are on the shortlist).
• It will also operate Kamov-31 helicopters, MH-60R multi-role helicopters, and other indigenously built advanced light helicopters, as per the report.
• Some of its weapons and equipment have been imported.
• The long range surface-to-air missiles (LRSAM) are Israeli while Russia supplied the aviation complex and the MiG 29-K jets.
• The propulsion system’s integration has been done by Italian Fincantieri. The ship’s four engines, LM 2500 gas turbines, are from US company General Electric, but HAL played a role in the integration of engines.
• Integration of all weapon systems would be through an indigenous Combat Management System (CMS).

 

INS Vikramaditya:                                                                           

• INS Vikramaditya is currently the Indian Navy’s only operation aircraft carrier.
• It is a refurbished Russian Kiev-class carrier, originally named Baku when in the Soviet Navy in the late 1980s.
• It was decommissioned in 1996, refurbished and entered the service of the Indian Navy on 16 November, 2013. It serves on the Western seas.
• The INS Vikramaditya is propelled by eight turbo-pressurized boilers and four geared steam turbines generating a total output power of 180,000shp.
• These boilers power four enormous propellers, each greater in diameter than twice the height of an average male.

 

Key features:

• INS Vikramaditya has an overall length of about 284 meters and a maximum beam of about 60 meters, stretching as much as three football fields put together.
• Standing about 20 storeys tall from keel to the highest point, the ship has a total of 22 decks.
• Capable of hosting over 1,600 personnel, INS Vikramaditya has a capacity of over 8,000 tonnes of LSHSD and capable of operations up to a range of over 7,000 nautical miles or 13,000 kms.
• The 44,500-tonne vessel has specialized recovery equipment capable of carrying MiG 29K/Sea Harrier, Kamov 31, Kamov 28, Sea King, ALH-Dhruv and Chetak helicopters.
• The Indian Navy currently operates 45 MiG-29Ks, including variants and some two-seaters on it.

 

US’ USS Gerald R Ford:

• The USS Gerald R. Ford was commissioned in 2017.
• The USS Gerald R. Ford spans 1,106 feet and has a displacement of a whopping 112,000 tons, making it the largest warship in the world.
• It has the capacity to hold over 4,500 crew.
• The USS Gerald R. Ford comes with a slew of surface-to-air missiles including the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow and the RIM-116, and M2 machine guns.
• It can carry more than 75 aircraft including the Lockheed Martin F-35 and Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets, and Sikorsky MH-60R helicopters.

 

China’s Fujian:

• China in June launched its third aircraft carrier Fujian at a brief ceremony in Shanghai’s Jiangnan Shipyard. Much like INS Vikrant is for India, Fujian is China’s first domestically-designed and built catapult aircraft carrier.
• Constructed by the China State Shipbuilding Corporation Limited, the Fujian has a displacement of more than 80,000 tonnes – nearly double of Vikrant and 20,000 tonnes more than China’s other two aircraft carriers the Liaoning and Shandong.
• All three of China’s carriers use conventional engines rather than nuclear reactors, which limits the power they can generate and the time they can spend at sea. It is equipped with electromagnetic catapults and arresting devices.

 

CATOBAR System:

• Fujian has a completely flat deck and three catapult in keeping with China’s attempts to adopt the catapult-assisted take-off but arrested recovery (CATOBAR) system used on US aircraft carriers.
• The Fujian has thus replaced the STOBAR system, and the ski-jump ramp it requires, used on both  Liaoning and Shandong.
• The J-15 aircraft which China currently operates for its aircraft carriers were regarded a major problem for the PLAN as each plane weighed about 18 tonnes, too heavy for carriers in the long run. The planes were considered to be a big drag.
• Fujian would get an improved version of the J-15 heavy fighter compatible with a catapult launch, another electronic warfare version of the same jet, a stealth fighter called the J-35, and a fixed-wing EW aircraft called the KJ-600.
• A CATOBAR system can launch jets with bigger payloads and more fuel. It can also launch larger aircraft, like those suited for airborne early warning and control.

 

Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS):

• The Fujian has an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) which functions on powerful magnetic fields generated by electromagnetic induction motors to propel lighter objects, uses fewer resources and recharges faster, as per Eurasian Times
• The Type 003 warship with a hull number of 18 is the first carrier in China’s fleet to use an electromagnetic catapult to launch planes from the deck, which is faster than the older steam catapult system.
• EMALS was regarded by Indian naval experts as a major leap forward by the Chinese navy as currently, only the US has such an advanced one. It is more energy-efficient and reduces maintenance.

 

China’s Liaoning and Shandong:

• China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was a refit of the Soviet-era ship commissioned in 2012, followed by the indigenously built 2nd aircraft carrier Shandong in 2019.
• The Type 001 Liaoning and Type 002 Shandong, are about 1,000 feet long and displaced 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes.
• China plans to have around five aircraft carriers. China is expected to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier next.

 

Way Forward:

• With the INS Vikrant’s unveiling India will be catapulted into an exclusive club – nations (US, UK, Russia, France, and China) with the ability to design and build an aircraft carrier with a displacement of over 40,000 tonnes.

The new warship will offer an “incomparable military instrument with its ability to project Air Power over long distances, including Air Interdiction, Anti-Surface Warfare, offensive and defensive Counter-Air, Airborne Anti-Submarine Warfare and Airborne Early Warning.