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As the global population reached 8 billion, the UN said India’s population growth appears to be stabilising which shows that the country’s national policies and health systems, including access to family planning services, are working.
The world population touched eight billion on Tuesday and India was the largest contributor to the milestone, having added 177 million people, the United Nations said., noting that for China, which added 73 million people, the projection is its contribution to the next billion in the global population is to be in the negative.
“The good news is that India’s population growth appears to be stabilising. The Total Fertility Rate — more or less the average number of children born per woman — has declined from 2.2 to 2.0 at the national level,” the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said.
A total of 31 states and Union Territories (constituting 69.7 per cent of the country’s population) have achieved fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1, it said.
The main reasons for the decline in fertility include increase in adoption of modern family planning methods (from 47.8 per cent in 2015-16 to 56.5 per cent in 2019-21) and a reduction in unmet need for family planning by four per cent points over the same period, it said.
Editorial
A call to action to avoid climate catastrophe (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Climate change is a global problem that requires cooperation between all nations. That’s why today more than 30 newspapers and media organisations in more than 20 countries have taken a common view about what needs to be done.
Time is running out. Rather than getting out of fossil fuels and into clean energy, many wealthy nations are reinvesting in oil and gas, failing to cut emissions fast enough and haggling over the aid they are prepared to send to poor countries. All this while the planet hurtles towards the point of no return - where climate chaos becomes irreversible.
Since the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow 12 months ago, countries have only promised to do one fiftieth of what is needed to stay on track to keep temperatures within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels.
No continent has avoided extreme weather disasters this year — from floods in Pakistan to heatwaves in Europe, and from forest fires in Australia to hurricanes in the US. Given that these came about from elevated temperatures of about 1.1C, the world can expect far worse to come.
As many nations seek to reduce their reliance on Russia, the world is experiencing a “gold rush” for new fossil fuel projects. These are cast as temporary supply measures, but they risk locking the planet into irreversible damage.
All this underlines that humanity has to end its addiction to fossil fuels. If renewable energy was the norm there would be no climate emergency.
The world’s poorest people will bear the brunt of the destruction wrought by drought, melting ice sheets and crop failures. To shield these groups from the loss of life and livelihoods will require money.
Developing countries, says one influential report, need $2 trillion annually to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with climate breakdown.
Undermining federalism, eroding States’ autonomy (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
When the National Democratic Alliance Government (NDA) took office in 2014, there were hopes that India would move towards cooperative federalism.
This was because Narendra Modi, as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, had been championing the cause of States’ autonomy. This hope was reinforced when NITI Aayog replaced the Planning Commission of India with the main objective of promoting cooperative federalism.
The Cabinet Resolution of January 1, 2015 constituting the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) has articulated, among others, that “India is a diverse country with distinct languages, faiths and cultural ecosystems... The States of the Union do not want to be mere appendages of the Centre.
They seek a decisive say in determining the architecture of economic growth and development. The one-size-fits-all approach, often inherent in central planning, has the potential of creating needless tensions and undermining the harmony needed for national effort”.
One of the main mandates of NITI Aayog is to foster cooperative federalism through structured support initiatives and mechanisms with the States on a continuous basis, recognising that strong States make a strong nation.
It is unfortunate that NITI Aayog has not taken any major steps since its constitution to promote cooperative federalism. Contrary to its public statements on promoting cooperative federalism, the Government of India has been doing exactly the opposite.
The following instances clearly demonstrate as to how the central government’s policies have undermined the spirit of federalism and eroded the autonomy of the States.
Opinion
Health as the focus of air pollution policy (Page no. 7)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
The worsening winter air quality in north India has yet again brought into public focus the harmful effects of air pollution on our health.
The effects of exposure to bad air are felt in every organ of the body, and most deeply by the vulnerable in society — children, the elderly, pregnant women, and those with pre-existing health conditions.
In India, in 2019, 17.8% of all deaths and 11.5% of respiratory, cardiovascular and other related diseases are attributable to high exposure to pollution (The Lancet).
This public health emergency has resulted in calls for health to be made central to air pollution policymaking.
The primacy of protecting public health — the raison d’etre of environmental legislation — is clearly laid out in the statement of objects and reasons of India’s key environmental laws.
Yet, if we examine the constitution of our environmental regulators, expert groups and decision-making entities that define and translate those laws into air pollution policy, health expertise is glaring in its absence.
Driven by a combination of the isolated nature of policymaking and an insufficient understanding of health among policymakers, air pollution policy is created and implemented in a vacuum. There is little cognisance of the effect it has on society.
So, what would it mean for India to place health at the centre of air quality governance and policymaking? So far, Indian air pollution policy has at best treated health as merely one of the several equally relevant facets in decision-making.
It must transcend this. Health must be turned into a feature and eventually a function of air pollution policy.
To treat health as a facet of air pollution policy has meant to occasionally provide a health voice a seat at the table. However, an examination of even the most recently constituted institution, the Commission for Air Quality Management, reveals a lack of any health representation.
Recent papers published by the Centre for Policy Research also reveal that health sector representatives comprise less than 5% of the membership of State Pollution Control Boards.
How can their work as front-line air pollution regulators be effective or more sensitive to health needs if health doesn’t even feature in important policy discussions?
Explainer
Is climate change affecting global health (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 2, Environment)
The story so far: Even as countries are meeting at the ongoing Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt, a recent report by Lancet, has traced in detail the intimate link between changing weather events and their impact on the health of people.
The 2022 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Health at the Mercy of Fossil Fuels points out that the world’s reliance on fossil fuels increases the risk of disease, food insecurity and other illnesses related to heat.
For long, much of the world believed that those predicting the harmful effects of climate change were part of a doomsday cult with a touch of the dramatic.
It is now increasingly clear that the deleterious effects of climate change not only have the potential to severely disrupt life, but that they are already upon us.
Climate change is not an isolated incident or occurrence, but a global phenomenon, leaving its impact on almost every aspect of life, sweeping in its train nations across the world, irrespective of whether they contributed to it or not.
The 2022 Lancet Countdown report comes at a time when the world is face-to-face with the threat of climate change. It says: “Countries and health systems continue to contend with the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and persistent fossil fuel overdependence has pushed the world into global energy and cost-of-living crises.
As these crises unfold, climate change escalates unabated. Its worsening impacts are increasingly affecting the foundations of human health and wellbeing, exacerbating the vulnerability of the world’s populations to concurrent health threats.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), climate change affects the social and environmental determinants of health — clean air, safe drinking water, sufficient food and secure shelter.
Text & context
How the act of gaslighting isolates people from society and distorts their reality (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Society)
In 1938, playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a thriller play called the Gas Light, which tells the story of a man who attempts to drive his wife insane in order to steal from her.
He convinces her that she was going insane, to the point where she was made to believe that the noises from the attic and the flickering gas light were imagined by her, while in reality, he was responsible for it.
Though not used in the play, the etymology of the term “gaslighting” dates back to it which was later adapted into two movies in the 1940s.
Psychologists R. Barton and J. A. Whitehead coined the term “gaslighting” in 1969 as they analysed involuntary hospitalisation as a form of abuse.
Rarely used after this, the term was popularised by psychotherapist Robin Stern in 2007 and has now become a ubiquitous term.
Gaslighting is a phenomenon wherein techniques of manipulation are used to control people in politics and interpersonal relationships.
Stern explained that in order for such abuse to exist the “mutual participation” between the “gaslighter” (perpetrator) and the “gaslightee” (victim) is imperative.
When a person is gaslighted they experience confusion, anxiety and loss of trust in themselves. If successful in the act of gaslighting, the perpetrator can isolate the victim from society and even from their closest social circles to the extent that the gaslightee starts believing that the gaslighter is the only person they can trust.
In relationships, especially romantic or intimate ones, the process begins gradually, with the perpetrator gaining the partner’s trust by showering them with romantic gestures.
As time goes on, the abuser tends to suggest that their partner is unreliable, forgetful and endlessly dependent. They go on to isolate them from any systems that may provide the victim support.
With the help of these techniques, the perpetrator pushes the victim to doubt their sense of rationality by suggesting that they are mentally unstable.
News
Third edition of the ‘No Money For Terror’ conference to discuss crowdfunding of terrorism (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Internal Security)
The use of crowdfunding platforms to finance terrorist activities and weak control mechanisms of social media platforms is one of the four main agendas to be discussed at the third No Money For Terror (NMFT) conference to be hosted by India this week.
The conference, to be held on November 18-19 in New Delhi, is expected to be attended by representatives of about 75 countries.
The major topics to be discussed at the conference spanning four sessions are global trends in terrorism and terrorist financing; use of formal and informal channels for terrorism; emerging technologies and terrorist financing; and international cooperation to address challenges in combating terrorist financing.
On Tuesday, the official handle of NMFT tweeted, “Humanitarian forces of the world and India will have to fight unitedly to defeat the menace of terrorism.”
The agenda of the conference said that “terrorists and extremists have improvised on technologies like cryptocurrency and crowdfunding by customising them to suit their requirements”.
It added that the dark web brings together professional hackers and terrorists seeking to transfer or crowdsource funds, and the anonymous, decentralised, and often untraceable nature of terror financing through various means poses a serious challenge.
“The world still lacks a universal consensus on laws and norms regarding cyber crimes. The weak control mechanisms of social media platforms and their misuse by terrorist and extremist groups to raise funds have been regularly highlighted.
An effective multilateral and multi-stakeholder approach can help in the identification and mitigation of threats of emerging terror-financing mechanisms.
An effective legislative framework can help ensure that internet service providers/social media platforms work towards effective, proportionate and dissuasive self-regulation,” the agenda said.
Business
Nine Russian banks open Vostro accounts for rupee trade (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Russia is the only country to engage with India’s rupee-based trade gambit for now, and nine Russian banks have been permitted to open special Vostro accounts to pave the way for such export-import transactions.
For Rupee trade to happen, you require a balance of trade because it is not an international currency,” said Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal.
We want to promote rupee trade because it is in the nation’s interest and unnecessarily, we won’t have to look for dollars, adding that the Commerce Ministry was working with the Department of Financial Services, the central bank and traders to expedite its adoption.
Among the nine Russian banks, Gazprombank had opened an account with Kolkata-based UCO Bank, while six others had opened an account with private lender IndusInd Bank. The central bank, Mr. Barthwal said, has to issue some guidelines to move the process forward.
For rupee trade (to materialise), first the importer has to put some money into the trade account. Then only can exporters set it off against their exports.