Whatsapp 93125-11015 For Details
A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday directed in a landmark judgment that the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and Election Commissioners will be appointed by the President on the advice of a panel of the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha or the leader of the single largest party in Opposition and the Chief Justice of India (CJI).
The court said “fierce independence, neutrality and honesty” envisaged in the institution of the Election Commission requires an end to government monopoly and “exclusive control” over appointments to the highest poll body.
States
Ornamental fish aquaculture to help women in Lakshadweep islands (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Community-based ornamental fish aquaculture, using local resources, is expected to help women in the Lakshadweep islands to take the first step towards self-reliance through concerted activities.
In what is being described as the first-of-its-kind experiment, as many as 82 islanders, 77 of them women, were selected and underwent intensive training.
They have formed groups for ornamental fish aquaculture with technical support from the ICAR-National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources (NBFGR).
The NBFGR maintains a germplasm resource centre for marine ornamental organisms on Agatti Island for conservation as well as boosting livelihood sources for the islanders.
Four cluster-mode community aquaculture units with the participation of 46 women were created, and the group has successfully been raising ornamental shrimps to marketable size, and they have completed four cycles to generate substantial income.
To expand the activity, in addition to the two species of ornamental shrimps, captive-raised clownfish seeds were also supplied.
Culture devices (rearing tubs, mini blower, aeration tubes, stones, hand net, feed, and beneficial bacteria) along with the seeds of shrimp (Thor hainanensis) newly reported from Indian waters by the NBFGR and Anylocarisbrevicarpalis and clownfish had been supplied.
Forty-six women beneficiaries from the four clusters of Agatti island received the materials and stocked the animals in their units for further rearing.
The NBFGR project team will monitor the units and provide technical inputs till the organisms reach the marketable size.
Editorial
Positing India’s stand on the Ukraine war (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
On February 23, 2023, on the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution, calling for an end to the war.
The resolution was favoured by 141 members and opposed by seven, while 32 states abstained. Unsurprisingly, India was one among the 32. This is in line with the position India has been taking on the Ukraine crisis from the beginning.
India has refused to condemn Russia for the invasion; it has refused to join the West’s sanctions; has stepped up buying Russian fuel at a discounted price, and has consistently abstained from UN votes on the war.
India’s position has triggered sharp responses in the West. Before the war, there was much debate among the global strategic commentariat about India’s irreversible shift towards the West.
However, after the war began, many wondered why the world’s largest democracy did not condemn Russia. For some others, India was “financing” Vladimir Putin’s war by buying Russian oil.
Why did India take a different line from that of its partners in the West? To understand India’s position, one has to look at how India sees the war.
For U.S. President Joe Biden, as Simon Tisdall argued in The Guardian (“Outdated and out of time ...”, February 26), this is a global crusade for democracy. He called the Russian invasion “a test for the ages”.
For the Atlanticists in general, the war by an authoritarian Russia on a “democratic” Ukraine is an affront to global democracy.
According to this narrative, anything less than a complete Russian defeat would mean “the end of the international order”. So, to save global democracy, the rules-based order and international law, all democratic and law-adhering states should take a position against Russia and join the western coalition.
But beyond the UN votes, the U.S. has hardly managed to mobilise democracies outside its traditional western alliance system against Russia.
India and South Africa, large democracies from Asia and Africa, have consistently abstained from votes at the UN and refused to join the sanctions — because the sanctions were unilateral, imposed by specific countries or blocs, without UN approval. Brazil, the largest democracy in South America, has not joined the sanctions; so have many smaller democracies (and non-democracies) across geographies.
South Asia’s human capital is the resilience it needs (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
The last few years have ushered in a harsh new reality where crises are the norm rather than the exception. Pandemics, economic slumps and extreme weather events were once tail-end risks, but all three have hit South Asia in rapid succession since 2020.
COVID-19 alone put millions of lives and livelihoods at risk, and its impacts have already undermined decades of development gains.
This is deeply distressing because the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate — their human capital — is a critical source of the resilience that countries rely on for recovery.
To strengthen resilience and protect the well-being of future generations, governments across South Asia need to take urgent policy action and invest in human capital.
South Asia’s people are its biggest asset but remain wastefully underutilised. With nearly half its population under the age of 24 and over one million young people set to enter the labour force every month until 2030, the region could reap an enviably high demographic dividend.
But South Asia is also home to over one third of the world’s stunted children. And a child born in the region today can, by the age of 18, expect to attain only 48% of their full productive potential. If the quantity and quality of South Asia’s human capital were to improve, regional GDP per worker could double.
These numbers are jarring but will be hard to shift without more resources. South Asian governments on average spend just 1% of GDP on health and 2.5% on education. In comparison, the global average is 5.9% on health and 3.7% on education.
Against this background, the COVID-19 pandemic, which pushed an additional 35 million people across South Asia into extreme poverty, dealt an unprecedented blow to the region’s human capital.
Among its most woeful impacts is a rise in learning poverty, or the inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10. While around the world, on average, schools remained closed for in-person learning between 2020 and 2022 for 141 days, in South Asia they were shut for 225 days. Coupled with ineffective remote instruction, this increased South Asia’s learning poverty from 60% to 78%.
News
Divisions between the West, Russia-China derail a joint statement at G20 meeting (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Deep divisions between the United States-led Western countries and the Russia-China combine upended India’s attempt to forge a consensus at the G-20 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting.
The meeting in Delhi, which brought together the world’s 20 most-developed economies, saw sharp words exchanged by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and a number of other Foreign Ministers, despite an appeal from Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the start of the meeting to “rise above differences”.
We should not allow issues that we cannot resolve together to come in the way of those we can,” said the Prime Minister in a reference to the divide over the Ukraine war, adding that he hoped that the meeting “in the land of Gandhi and the Buddha” would inspire the G-20 delegates to “focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us”.
Our task was not an easy one given the state of polarisation in the world and we were not able to reach a complete consensus as we and a group of countries were able to do in Bali.
Eventually, the meeting chaired by Mr. Jaishankar ended with a “Chair’s Summary and Outcome Document” issued by India, which, like the G-20 Finance Ministers’ Meeting last week, named Russia and China as the reason the two paragraphs (three and four from G-20 Bali Document of 2022) pertaining to the war in Ukraine could not be reconciled.
Explaining the decision to shun language on Ukraine that he had accepted last year, Mr. Lavrov said, “The Bali Declaration took place half a year ago.
A lot of events took place since then,” indicating the Ukrainian President’s announcement that he no longer would adhere to the Minsk Agreements with Russia, and pointing to the explosions on the Nord stream energy pipelines that Russia blames the U.S. carried out.
As the Indian negotiators failing to convince their Russian and Chinese counterparts to sign on to the language of last year’s joint communique in Bali is a setback, New Delhi will have to do some heavy diplomatic lifting in the next few months, in order to have a joint communique at the G-20 leaders summit in September.
However, Mr. Jaishankar pointed out that despite the differences, negotiators who tried to resolve issues by working through the nights on February 28 and March 1, had been able to achieve consensus on all issues of concern to the Global South.
India, Italy elevate ties, sign MoU on defence cooperation (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
Ending the chill in the bilateral relationship in the past few years, in what Foreign Secretary Vinay M. Kwatra described as “legacy issues” now behind, India and Italy announced the elevation of the bilateral relationship to the level of strategic partnership while also concluding a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on defence cooperation.
Today, we are announcing the establishment of a ‘Startup Bridge’ between India and Italy. Another important area of our mutual cooperation is defence.
We have also decided to organise the joint military exercises and training courses on a regular basis,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a joint press statement after bilateral talks with Italian Prime Minister GiorgiaMeloni.
Welcoming Italy’s active participation in the Indo-Pacific, Mr. Modi said Italy had decided to join the Indo-Pacific Ocean Initiative (IPOI). This will enable us to identify concrete themes for enhancing our cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The two countries also concluded a Declaration of Intent (DOI) on migration and mobility.
Delivering the inaugural address of the 8th Raisina Dialogue organised by Observer Research Foundation jointly with the Ministry of External Affairs, Ms. Meloni said global interconnection has enabled our economies to grow and flourish but it comes at a cost especially in times of turbulence in international community.
On the war in Ukraine, she said it is a violation of the fundamental principle of global order that enables the international community to thrive.
Russian attack is not simply an act of war or a localised act. It’s an act against territorial integrity of a sovereign nation in violation of the fundamental principle of the global order that enables the international community to thrive.