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Debrigarh, a wildlife sanctuary in Bargarh district of Odisha, has been made completely free of any human settlement following one of the country’s largest ‘peaceful’ relocations of forest-dwellers.
As many as 400 families have moved out of their villages after a series of consultations. In a State where permanent human settlements are common even within wildlife sanctuaries, Debrigarh now stands out as an exception alongside the Nalabana Bird Sanctuary in Chilika Lake.
The positive impact of this relocation was immediately evident in the tangible drop in incidence of man-wildlife conflict in Debrigarh, spread over 353.81 sq. km; this was witnessed recently when a tiger from the neighbouring Chhattisgarh crossed over into Debrigarh.
The relocation of villagers assumed significance as inhabitants did not have access to basic facilities such as electricity, healthcare and education. It was also a mandate to make critical wildlife sanctuaries inviolable. No force was used for relocating villagers from the sanctuary. Each eligible family was paid ₹15 lakh as compensation.
States
IIT-Kharagpur to develop tamper-proof signalling system for Indian Railways (Page no. 4)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, is developing a tamper-proof signalling system based on blockchain technology for the Indian Railways. Embedded with enhanced safety measures, the new system would complement the existing Data Logger, which is considered the ‘Black Box’ of rolling stock.
Acting on a request made by the Union Minister of Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw, researchers in the Electrical and Electronics Engineering stream are working on a robust system that would facilitate a mechanism to ensure safety, communication and control of train operations.
According to Professor Aurobinda Routray of IIT-Kharagpur, blockchain is a system of recording information which cannot be tampered, hacked or manipulated. The technology was being widely used in cryptocurrency and banking transactions.
Prof. Routray said the focus was to make the live movement of trains available for Station Masters, Section Controllers, Signal Engineers and others with all logs.
On how different the initiative would be from the existing Data Logger, he said the new system would provide enhanced data integrity, transparency and security.
It would enable secure data sharing among stakeholders, automate processes with smart contracts and create tamper-evident audit trails.
The system would complement the Data Logger which was limited by its centralised storage facility, lack of tamper-evident data, and limited access control.
The new blockchain system would address these limitations by storing data in a distributed ledger, using cryptography.
Editorial
Between two books, a revelatory social history (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Education)
Academic studies of social change in India have, by and large, followed the conceptual guidance of modernisation theory. It focuses on the deeper effects of technological change, social and political movements, and increase in participation in the modern economy and education.
Indian sociology produced several classics that continue to provide useful insights to university-level students. A parallel documentation of social change was attempted by journalists who travelled and gleaned from their brief interactions with ordinary people how the bigger changes in economy, technology and politics were affecting their lives.
Journalism is itself a major part of modern India’s history. Though journalists are now facing new kinds of difficulties in practising their profession, they bring in the kind of news about life that academic inquiry cannot afford to offer due to its methodological constraints.
In the mapping of social change over the last half century, two books written by journalists stand out.
When Kusum Nair was writing her book, the big question facing political leaders and intellectuals was how to deal with rural poverty.
The memory of Gandhi’s ideas and his vision of India as a society that cared for its rural civilisation was still fresh. Nair wanted to find out how villagers in different parts of the country were responding to the state’s efforts to help them through economic and social planning.
How to change beliefs and entrenched norms of behaviour was perceived as a major challenge. Programmes of ‘community development’ were focused on improving people’s access to new knowledge about sanitation and health, irrigation and manure.
Opinion
Has the Bhadralok culture in Bengal faded? (Page no. 9
(GS Paper 1, Culture)
The intellectual class of West Bengal, euphemistically termed the Bhadralok, has long held a pivotal role in shaping culture, politics and policy in the State.
From producing timeless cinema to dominating political power to setting policies on welfare, reforms and state interventions, this segment of Bengali society performed an outsized role.
The Bhadralok, historically, was composed of three castes: Brahmins, Baidyas, and Kayasthas. It evolved through colonial intervention in the sense that the caste could transform into a status group.
So, people from other castes could, theoretically speaking, gain Bhadralok status if they had certain kinds of attributes. Now, if you take it literally, it (Bhadralok) just means being gentlemanly.
The opposite of this is ‘Chhotolok’. If you look at the caste combination of the Chhotolok, there are Shudras and Namoshudras and the so-called outcastes.
On an everyday basis, when we say ‘you’re not behaving like a Bhadralok’, it means you are not conforming to certain normative ideals. And these ideals are applicable both in the public and private sphere.
SR: Bhadralok is about caste but not limited to caste. You can have people from the upper castes who are not Bhadralok, and other people can aspire to become more Bhadralok.
It is a very Bengali and, you could say, elitist construct. We don’t often think that when we are calling ourselves Bhadralok that we are, by default, calling people who are not part of our class and do not have a similar educational background as Chhotolok.
The writer Manoranjan Byapari used to always complain that he was never read because he was Chhotolok, which you could translate as subaltern.
Explainer
Exploring Assam’s delimitation draft (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
On June 20, the Election Commission (EC) released a draft proposal on the delimitation of the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies in Assam. The number of Assembly and Parliamentary seats remains unchanged at 126 and 14 but many constituencies were proposed to be reshaped and the number of reserved seats has been increased.
This has led to a churning among various organisations and political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies, with the fortunes of many MLAs likely to be affected.
Delimitation is the process of redrawing boundaries of Lok Sabha and State Assembly constituencies based on a recent Census to ensure each seat has an almost equal number of voters.
It is ideally carried out every few years after a Census by an independent Delimitation Commission formed under the provisions of the Delimitation Commission Act.
Such panels were set up in 1952, 1962, and 1972 before the exercise was suspended in 1976 due to the family planning programme. Before the exercise of the next panel could be completed in 2008, the delimitation of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland was deferred due to “security risks” through presidential orders.
In the case of Assam, many entities including the BJP wanted the delimitation done only after the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was updated to weed out “illegal immigrants”.
The Centre reconstituted the Delimitation Commission for the four north-eastern States and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir on March 6, 2020.
The EC notified the initiation of Assam’s delimitation on December 27, 2022, following which four districts were re-merged with the ones they were carved out of.
The Open Market Sale Scheme for wheat and rice (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
States have been looking at alternative ways of procuring wheat and rice in the after the Food Corporation of India’s (FCI) imposed quantity restrictions followed by the refusal to allow States to procure the two food grains through its Open Market Sale Scheme (OMSS).
The Centre has made it clear that the reason for restricting supplies per bidder and eventually excluding states from procuring through auctions was to curb inflation and regulate supply, States such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have criticised the government for engaging in “politics” at the expense of marginalised beneficiaries of State welfare schemes.
Under the Open Market Sale Scheme, the FCI from time to time sells surplus food grains from the central pool especially wheat and rice in the open market to traders, bulk consumers, retail chains and so on at pre-determined prices.
The FCI does this through e-auctions where open market bidders can buy specified quantities.States are also allowed to procure food grains through the OMSS without participating in the auctions, for their needs beyond what they get from the central pool to distribute to NFSA (National Food Security Act) beneficiaries.
This year’s OMMS was operationalised by the FCI in January. According to the latest press release of the Food Ministry, six weekly e-auctions of wheat had been conducted by FCI till March 15, 2023.
The total quantity of 33.7 LMT wheat was offloaded and the prices of wheat came down by 19% due to this massive intervention in a span of 45 days.
The next e-auction for wheat under OMSS will start on June 28 and the bidding for rice will commence on July 5.
News
India, Philippines to explore scope of joint sales, patrols to boost defence partnership (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
There is lot of scope for expansion of defence cooperation between India and the Philippines, especially in maritime security, including the potential for joint sales as well as joint patrols, diplomatic sources said, as the Philippines Secretary for Foreign Affairs Enrique A. Manalo held bilateral talks with his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar on Thursday. Mr. Manalo is on an official visit in India from June 27 to 30.
A joint statement issued after the 5th meeting of the Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation said that both Ministers expressed keen interest to continue to work together on defence cooperation, including through the regular or upgraded official-level interaction among defence agencies, opening of a resident Defence Attaché office in Manila, consideration of India’s offer for concessional Line of Credit to meet Philippines’ defence requirements, acquisition of naval assets, and expansion of training and joint exercises on maritime security and disaster response, among others.
Maritime cooperation can take the shape of exercises related to Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). This could be a combination of many activities,” a diplomatic source said, stating that defence cooperation will continue to grow and will not be limited to equipment sales.
Mr. Jaishankar and Mr. Manalo also discussed domains including cyber security, artificial intelligence, and space cooperation. A new issue that was discussed was cyber trafficking.
On defence cooperation, the key dialogue was not only in terms of weapons, but cooperation through training courses, greater military exchanges and in future joint exercises.
On economic cooperation, diplomatic sources said that the two sides discussed improved access to the Philippines’ markets. The statement said the Ministers also underlined that both countries have a shared interest in a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region.
World
Sri Lankan Central Bank moots recast of pension funds, haircut on bonds (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Sri Lanka’s Central Bank has proposed restructuring the beleaguered nation’s debt by recasting the outgo on the country’s pension funds and offering international sovereign bondholders a repayment plan that entails a 30% haircut.
Addressing a media briefing in Colombo, Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe unveiled the Ranil Wickremesinghe government’s domestic debt restructuring plan that seeks to protect local banks, while effectively transferring the burden to superannuation funds, including the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF).
The Central Bank will convert treasury bills and exchange superannuation funds’ treasury bonds to longer-term maturity treasury bonds at a lower interest rate. On the decision to exclude local banks from the restructuring plan, he said: “It is vital to protect the banking sector, as a collapse [of it] would have a catastrophic consequence for some 57 million depositors.”
The plan for domestic debt restructuring, cleared by the Cabinet on Wednesday, will be debated in Parliament the coming weekend, ahead of a vote.
Amid some speculation of a bank run, the government announced a five-day banking holiday beginning on Thursday. “The holiday is mainly to prevent any market-panic [around the parliamentary debate],” Mr. Weerasinghe said, as he sought to allay fears.
The government’s latest move is part of its efforts to restructure both its foreign and domestic debt, in line with the expectations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that extended a nearly-$3 billion External Fund Facility in the wake of Sri Lanka’s economic crash last year.
As of March 2023, the country’s foreign and domestic debt were estimated at about $41.5 billion and $42.1 billion, respectively. Earlier this week, President Wickremesinghe said his government hopes to restructure $17 billion of its foreign debt in five years.
After indiscriminate borrowing for years, and spending beyond its means, Sri Lanka is now aiming to reduce its public debt to GDP ratio from 128% to 95% by the year 2032.