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Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written to the leaders of the G-20 nations proposing that the African Union be given full membership of the grouping at its upcoming summit in India, official sources said.
The Prime Minister has taken a “bold step” to enhance Africa’s voice on the international stage and in shaping the future of “our shared world”, they said. India is hosting the G-20 summit in Delhi in September.
The African Union (AU) is a continental body consisting of 55 member states. This will be a right step towards a just, fair, more inclusive and representative global architecture and governance.
Mr. Modi has been particularly focusing on incorporating priorities of the African countries in the G-20 agenda.
The African Union is considered the top-most grouping representing the voice of Africa. It has been working towards ensuring the progress and economic growth of the African nations.
It was officially launched in 2002 as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity.
Science
Monkeypox outbreaks in Asia-Pacific region (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
Over a month ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Mpox, the global health emergency over. Even though cumulative cases across the world continue to decline, there has been an increase in reported cases from some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific Region.
Monkeypox, or Mpox, is a viral disease that primarily spread to the human population through zoonotic spillovers, with rodents and primates serving as potential reservoirs.
Mpox can be transmitted between humans through close contact and exposure to infected bodily fluids or lesions. Sexual contact is also believed to contribute to the spread of the disease particularly among certain demographics.
Mpox was a rare infection that was predominantly restricted to some countries in Africa until early 2022, when a rise in cases across the globe where the disease was not endemic, particularly in Europe and North America.
According to WHO, over 87,000 cases of Mpox have been reported to date since January 2022, including 146 deaths.
In recent weeks, overall global cases of Mpox have been decreasing, but some regions are seeing an increase in reported cases.
In the European region, new cases have been reported from Spain and the U.K. But the large European and North American outbreaks observed in 2022 have been brought under control through vaccination campaigns and increasing awareness about the disease.
The global situation of Mpox is, however, far from being resolved, with an increasing number of reports from new countries. Significant impacts observed in Southeast Asia and Western Pacific region.
In June 2023, China reported four cases of Mpox —two from Beijing and two from Guangzhou — raising concerns about the spread of the disease in the country.
Two cases were also reported from Sri Lanka, in patients who had a travel history to Dubai. Earlier this year, Mpox was also detected in Thailand, Taiwan, Pakistan and Japan.
Incidentally, several cases have a travel history to the Middle East, however, reports from Middle East do not indicate an increase in the number of cases.
Cooler days, warmer nights in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
A recent study by researchers from the School of Earth Ocean and Climate Sciences at IIT Bhubaneswar has found that increased urbanisation of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack has led to increased land surface temperature in the last 20 years (2001-2020).
While there has been an increase in relatively cooler regions over these cities during daytime, the reverse is seen during night time.
During the night, both cities have been witnessing increased urban heat island effect. As a result, there has been a reduced daytime and night time temperature difference. The results of the study have been published in the journal Environment, Development and Sustainability.
“The urban areas of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack are about 0.75 degree Celsius and 1.22 degree Celsius warmer than the surrounding rural areas.
The core city area is warmer than the recently developed suburban regions. The temperature changes over the last two decades have been more rapid in the suburban areas in the two cities, and suburbs experience almost twice the warming than by the entire city, who is the corresponding authors of the paper. The daytime land surface temperature for Bhubaneswar and Cuttack was over 32°C.
The increase in relatively cooler regions during the daytime has been from 27% and 40% (2001-2010) to 73% and 63% (2011-2020) in both the cities.
This can be attributed to an almost 2.7 and 1.6 times increase in the cooler fractional land cover during the daytime. However, studies published in 2020 and 2021 have reported a similar phenomenon for both urban and surrounding non-urban regions in Pune.
FAQ
How can India tackle its diabetes burden? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
There was great interest in the results of the largest, long-term (2008-2020) study on metabolic factors in the Indian subcontinent as part of the ICMR-InDiab study published in The Lancet (by Anjana Ranjit Mohan et al) last week.
It was launched in 2008 to estimate the country’s NCD (chronic non-communicable diseases) burden, and done over five phases between 2008 and 2020 across the country, with each phase covering five States (all seven northeastern States were covered in one phase).
Individuals aged over 20 were recruited for the door-to-door survey and 1.24 lakh individuals were part of the survey.
It estimated that about 11% of the population is diabetic, and 15.3 % of the country is in the pre-diabetic stage. Given that the study was conducted in the most populous nation in the world, the actual numbers are naturally staggering.
As per these estimates, 101.3 million people in the country are diabetic, and in the pre-diabetes stage, there are another 136 million people.
Questions are being raised about whether this constitutes an emergent crisis in India and of the urgent methods that need to be employed to handle this situation, and control possible burgeoning of these numbers in the future.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, and 1.5 million deaths are directly attributed to the disease each year.
Both the number of cases and the prevalence of diabetes have been increasing, and there is a globally agreed target to halt the rise in diabetes and obesity by 2025, according to the WHO.
What’s the India, U.S. initiative on future tech? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Earlier this week, India and the United States unveiled a roadmap for enhanced collaboration in high-technology areas, with a focus on addressing regulatory barriers and aligning export controls for smoother trade and “deeper cooperation” in critical areas.
This was part of the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) announced by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year.
National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval and his American counterpart Jake Sullivan, who visited India this week to prepare the ground for the Prime Minister’s state visit to the U.S. from June 21, reviewed the progress of the initiative at the second track 1.5 dialogue on iCET on Tuesday.
The Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies is a framework agreed upon by India and the U.S. for cooperation on critical and emerging technologies in areas including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors and wireless telecommunication.
It was launched in January this year to strengthen their strategic partnership and drive technology and defence cooperation.
Mr. Modi and Mr. Biden first announced the framework on the sidelines of the Quad meeting in Tokyo in May 2022.
“The United States and India affirm that the ways in which technology is designed, developed, governed, and used should be shaped by our shared democratic values and respect for universal human rights.
We are committed to fostering an open, accessible, and secure technology ecosystem, based on mutual trust and confidence, that will reinforce our democratic values and democratic institutions,” the White House said.
What does the alleged CoWIN data leak reveal? (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, Health)
On June 12, reports emerged that a bot on the messaging platform Telegram was allegedly returning personal data of Indian citizens who registered with the COVID-19 vaccine intelligence network (CoWIN) portal for vaccination purposes.
The bot spewed out personal details like name, Aadhaar and passport numbers upon entry of phone numbers. On the same day, the Health Ministry denied reports of a data breach, and said the allegations were “mischievous in nature.”
It added that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) was reviewing existing security infrastructure of the portal.
Separately, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the nodal cyber security agency had reviewed the alleged breach and found that the CoWIN platform was not “directly breached.”
CoWIN is a government-owned web portal set up in 2021 to administer and manage India’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
The health register-style platform leverages existing public digital infrastructure like the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN), an app that provides data on vaccine cold chains in the country; Digital Infrastructure for Verifiable Open Credentialing (DIVOC), a vaccine certificate issuer; and Surveillance and Action for Events Following Vaccination (SAFE-VAC), a vaccine adverse event tracker.
The platform, on a real-time basis, tracks vaccines and beneficiaries at the national, State, and district levels. It monitors vaccine utilisation and wastage, and maintains an inventory of the vials.
For citizens, CoWIN verifies identity, helps schedule vaccine appointments, and issues a vaccine certificate. The database captures information flowing from four separate input streams — citizen registration; health centres; vaccine inventory; and vaccine certificates.
Each stream functions independently, and at the same time exchanges data to minimise redundancies. The platform is a microservices-based, cloud-native architecture developed from the ground up on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Profiles
Banking on China (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Canada’s decision to “immediately halt” its involvement in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has brought the spotlight to the inner workings of the Beijing-based multilateral development bank.
The announcement by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland that Ottawa would conduct an “expeditious” review of its involvement in the bank followed the sudden resignation of a Canadian executive who led the bank’s global public relations team and said the bank was being “dominated” by members of China’s ruling Communist Party. Chinese officials rejected those claims as “outright lies” and “sensational hype”.
The recent controversy has underlined the continuing shadow of politics over the functioning of the bank, which was started in 2016 with 57 founding members.
The membership has now grown to more than 100 countries. China holds the most voting power with 26.58%, having contributed $27 billion. India is the bank’s second largest shareholder with a 7.6% voting power, and committed $8 billion.
The bank has often been billed as a “rival” to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), but that widely used description largely overstates its capacities.
Indeed, the bank’s founding members viewed it more as a vehicle to fulfil a growing need for development finance in the region.
The “competitive” element has also been somewhat exaggerated considering many of the bank’s early projects have been those that were co-funded with the World Bank or the ADB, particularly in the bank’s early years when its capacities to evaluate projects was limited, although the share of co-funded projects has decreased.