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THE POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

1. CONTROL AND DELETE: ON GOVERNMENT APPELLATE PANELS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

THE CONTEXT: The Government’s plan to set up a panel that can overturn content moderation decisions made by social media platforms is problematic in many ways. The idea, which has been proposed as an amendment to the controversial IT Rules, 2021, is to constitute one or more appellate committees which will have the final word on any content moderation issue facing a social media platform.

THE EXPLANATION:

• The trigger for these Government-appointed committees to come to life will be, say, an appeal by a social media user who feels aggrieved by an order of the platform’s grievance officer. “Government policies and rulemaking are committed to ensure an open, safe, and trusted and accountable Internet for its users.
• As Internet access continues to rapidly expand in India, new issues related to the above commitments also keep emerging,” the draft reportedly says. It will be naive to think of such an aggrieved user as someone who has no axe to grind. With billions of users, social media is well and truly an influencing machine, and filled with influencers of all hues and shades. It is, therefore, important for democracy’s sake that it is not taken over by any one influential player, even if it is the Government, with an agenda
• But this is exactly what the mechanism will help to serve — tighten the Government’s grip on messaging on social media intermediaries, which not long ago served to disseminate alternative voices. Imagine how absurd it will be, for instance, if a Government-appointed committee sits to decide on an issue in which the aggrieved user is a Government entity or a ruling party member.
• How fair can that be? What makes it worse is in recent years, the Government has not covered itself with glory when dealing with dissent, in the real world and on social media. This will not only add another layer of complexity to the problematic IT rules that were introduced last year but also another lever of Government control.
• The IT rules were widely criticised, including by this newspaper as “deeply unsettling” for the kind of leverage that they give to the Government over digital channels, with troubling implications for freedom of expression and right to information. Ironically, they were launched by the then-Minister as a “soft-touch oversight mechanism”. It should be noted that the last word has not been said on those rules, what with pending legal challenges to them.
• All this is not to say that social media platforms should not be regulated. Far from it. What should be clear after all these years is that a Government committee is not the right answer for many woes, let alone social media ones. And in this case, it comes with dangerous implications for free speech. It is best, therefore, that the proposal is dropped.

2. WHAT IS THE PM CARES SCHEME FOR CHILDREN WHO LOST PARENTS TO COVID?

THE CONTEXT: Prime Minister released benefits like scholarships and health insurance under the PM CARES for Children scheme to support children who lost their parents due to coronavirus during the pandemic.

THE EXPLANATION:

• In February this year, a study in The Lancet had estimated the number of such children in India to be around 19 lakhs. This was termed as “sophisticated trickery” by the Ministry for Women and Child Development (MoWCD), which said the number was close to 1.53 lakh.
• PM CARES for Children was launched in May 2021 to ensure rehabilitation and education of children who lost caregivers to Covid between March 11, 2020, when Covid-19 was declared as a pandemic by the WHO, and February 28, 2022. The scheme applies to children who have lost both parents or a surviving parent or legal guardians/adoptive parents, to ensure their rehabilitation and education.
• Funded by PM Cares and with MoWCD at its nodal agency in the Centre, the scheme will provide a monthly stipend to each child from the age of 18 years, and a lump sum amount of Rs 10 lakh on attaining the age of 23. The Prime Minister said the benefits also include an annual scholarship of Rs 20,000 for school students and monthly financial support of Rs 4,000 for daily needs.
• Health coverage will be given through the Ayushman Card, and counselling through the Samvad helpline for psychological and emotional help.
• Different guidelines have been mentioned for the care of children under different age brackets.
• Till six years of age, children will receive support from Anganwadi services for supplementary nutrition, pre-school education.
• For children below 10 years of age, admission shall be provided in any nearest school – government/government-aided school/KendriyaVidyalayas (KVs)/ private schools – as a day scholar.
• In private schools, tuition fees will be exempted. The scheme will also utilise existing schemes and programmes. For instance, two sets of free uniform and textbooks shall be provided under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan.
• Additionally, the scheme will help place the orphaned children either in the care of relatives and family, or with Child Care Institutions (CCIs), or in a Sainik School, Navodaya Vidyalaya, or other residential schools. CCIs are centres for children in need of care or in conflict with the law, and are mentioned under the Juvenile Justice Act of 2015.

THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

3. GRADUAL ENGAGEMENT: ON INDIA-TALIBAN TIES

THE CONTEXT: India should maintain with Afghanistan a policy of gradual engagement rooted in realism

THE EXPLANATION:

• India’s decision to send a diplomatic delegation to Kabul to meet with Taliban officials shows a marked difference from the policy New Delhi took in the 1990s when the Sunni Islamist group was in power in Afghanistan. Back then, India had taken a policy of disengagement with Kabul and supported anti-Taliban militias.
• But this time, Afghanistan’s internal situation and the regional dynamics seem to be different, prompting many neighboring countries to adopt a more constructive line towards the Taliban regime, despite their differences with the group’s extremism. India shuttered its embassy in Kabul in August 2021, days before the Taliban takeover, but has maintained a line of communication with them.
• The MEA has said that the visit is only to help coordinate India’s humanitarian assistance for the Afghanistan people. While it could be true, the visit would also pave the way for better understanding and engagement given the bad blood in the past. India has three main concerns when it comes to the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan. One, India has made investments worth billions of dollars in the past 20 years. It would want to protect these investments and retain the Afghan people’s goodwill.
• Two, when the Taliban were in power in the 1990s, Afghanistan became a safe haven for anti-India terrorist groups. India also saw a sharp rise in violence in Kashmir during the Mujahideen-Taliban reigns of Afghanistan.
• New Delhi would not like history to repeat itself and would want commitments from the Taliban that they would not offer support for anti-India groups. Three, the Taliban remaining a Pakistani satellite forever is not in India’s strategic interest.
• New Delhi cannot pursue any of these objectives if it does not engage with the Taliban. But, at the same time, India should not hurry in to offer diplomatic recognition to the Taliban’s predominantly Pashtun, men-only regime, which has imposed harsh restrictions on women at home.
• India should work with other regional and global players to push the Taliban to adopt a more inclusive regime, while at the same time maintaining a policy of gradual bilateral engagement rooted in realism.

THE ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY

4. NEW RULES SPUR OPPORTUNITIES FOR E-WASTE RECYCLERS

THE CONTEXT: Last month, the Union environment ministry unveiled a set of draft rules that further incentivises registered electronic waste recyclers. The crucial difference from the 2016 rules is the generation of EPR, or Extended Producer Responsibility, certificates.

THE EXPLANATION:

• Over the next five years, Delhi-NCR-headquartered Attero Recycling, one of India’s largest electronic waste management companies, expects to invest close to $1 billion in expanding their electronic waste recycling facilities.
• More than 70% of it is for setting up operations in Europe, the United States and Indonesia to recycle lithium-ion batteries premised on the increasing share of electric vehicles in the years ahead.
• The CEO of the company says that while lithium batteries may be the future for the company, the present is hinged on the growing number of electronic wastes that his factory in Roorkee is processing. Credit, he says, is due to the mandatory recycling targets that electronics-goods makers have been set under the Electronic Waste Management Rules, 2016. From 30% of sales in 2018, companies are expected to recycle 70% of their sales by 2023.
• Prior to the EPR regime, recyclers like us had to pay to procure e-waste. We extract the precious metals and sell them. The informal recyclers use hazardous methods and therefore were able to do this at a lower cost. Even if their recovery (of metals) was low, their costs were low and so profitable, now with the EPR regime, it’s Original Equipment Manufacturers who are paying for recycling and a lot more is collected in the formal sector.
• Recyclers on processing a certain quantity of waste would be given a certificate verifying this number by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Electronics goods companies can buy these certificates online from the CPCB to meet their annual targets. Recyclers can also directly contract with a company to recycle a certain quantity of waste and generate certificates that can be accessed from the CPCB.
• The challenge is verifiability. How for instance, does the CPCB verify that the certificates indeed guarantee the quantity of e-waste recycled? Prior to the EPR scheme, state pollution control boards were expected to be conducting checks on recycler and monitoring if they were indeed processing the amount of waste they claimed. In the new regime, said Gupta, this verification would be done via “software matching.” A recycling company would be paying a certain amount of Goods and Services Tax (GST) annually based on the quantity of precious metal they’ had extracted and sold, said Gupta, and this would correlate to the amount of e-waste processed. This could be further matched with the certificates bought by a producer company to meet targets.
• The latest e-waste rules are yet to be formally become law and the Environment Ministry has set a 60 day-period for public consultation.
• Independent experts say that verifying the actual quantity recycled is next to impossible because none of the data—how many electronic goods were sold in a particular year and how much e-waste is generated and how much recycled—is available in public domain.
• The CPCB said that in 2019-20, 1 million tons of e-waste was generated, 22% of which was “collected, dismantled, recycled”.
• The Global E-Waste Monitor reports that nearly 3 million tons of electronic waste was generated in India, which is thrice the Centre’s estimates.
• “A company if asked how many mobile phones it sold in a year would at most share a figure in kilograms and not units. This is information that is supposed to be shared with the CPCB but practically the figure is unavailable. So, there’s no transparency on whether a company is ensuring that a percentage of its sales is being actually recycled. In our own surveys, we’ve seen that companies never physically visit a recycler.”
• The EPR regime was generally positive and helped smaller recycling companies who couldn’t directly bag large recycling contracts from large producers but there were lacunae. “Because companies only have annual targets, the finance team would only want to buy permits at the end of the financial year.
• However, we need to recycle through the year. Where would we get working capital for that? Therefore, it’s advisable to have monthly recycling targets.

5.KEEP ECO-SENSITIVE ZONE OF 1 KM AROUND FORESTS: SUPREME COURT

THE CONTEXT: Environment Ministry guidelines show that the purpose of declaring ESZs around national parks, forests and sanctuaries is to create some kind of a “shock absorber” for the protected areas.

THE EXPLANATION:

• The Supreme Court on Friday directed that every protected forest, national park and wildlife sanctuary across the country should have a mandatory eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) of a minimum one km starting from their demarcated boundaries.
• Environment Ministry guidelines show that the purpose of declaring ESZs around national parks, forests and sanctuaries is to create some kind of a “shock absorber” for the protected areas. These zones would act as a transition zone from areas of high protection to those involving lesser protection.
• A three-judge Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao, B.R. Gavai and Aniruddha Bose, in a 60-page judgment, highlighted how the nation’s natural resources have been for years ravaged by mining and other activities.
• The judgment, by Justice Bose, observed that the government should not confine its role to that of a “facilitator” of economic activities for the “immediate upliftment of the fortunes of the State”.
• The State also has to act as a trustee for the benefit of the general public in relation to the natural resources so that sustainable development could be achieved in the long term.
• “Such a role of the State is more relevant today, than, possibly, at any point of time in history with the threat of climate catastrophe resulting from global warming looming large,” Justice Bose wrote for the Bench.
• The judgment came on a petition instituted for the protection of forest lands in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. Subsequently, the scope of that writ petition was enlarged by the court so as to protect such natural resources throughout the country.
• In a series of directions, the court held that in case any national park or protected forest already has a buffer zone extending beyond one km, that would prevail. In case the question of the extent of buffer zone was pending a statutory decision, then the court’s direction to maintain the one-km safety zone would be applicable until a final decision is arrived at under the law.
• The court directed that “mining within the national parks and wildlife sanctuaries shall not be permitted”.
• It held the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Home Secretaries of States responsible for the compliance of the judgment.The Principal Chief Conservator for each State and the Union Territory has also been directed to make a list of subsisting structures within the ESZs and submit reports to the apex court in three months.

6.URGENT NEED TO DEVELOP ADAPTATION OPTIONS FOR WATER AND AGRICULTURE SECTORS

THE CONTEXT: Rains towards the end of the southwest monsoon in India in 2021 were unusual: a very large part of the country experienced the second wettest September since 1994.  In eight states in central, western, and northwestern India, the excess rain ranged from 70% above average in Odisha to 268% above the average in Gujarat.

THE EXPLANATION:

• In the previous year, 2020, rains were average or above average in almost the entire country. Going back further, 2014, 2015 and 2016 were marked by generally below-average rains; before that, there were above average rains in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.
• Such dry and wet epochs, each lasting several years to a decade, have occurred in the Indian subcontinent for at least the last 700 years. Some of the dry epochs caused mega-droughts, resulting in famines that killed millions of people, and catalysed mass migrations within and out of the subcontinent.
• Climate information recorded in trees over the last 300 years, ocean temperature and continental rain data in the last 50 to 100 years, and more recent climate models show that, worldwide, dry/wet epochs are caused primarily in 10-20-year-long decadal cycles in tropical-subtropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures. These in turn are due to the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) – also known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
• Decadal cycles in tropical-subtropical ocean temperatures are caused by large-scale interactions among winds, ocean currents and waves, and heat and water vapour transfers from oceans to the atmosphere.
• In the positive phase of an IPO cycle, the tropical-subtropical Pacific surface temperatures are warmer than average. As a result, there is below-average rain in central, western and northwestern India. In the negative phase of the IPO cycle, there is above-average rain in these regions.
• The IPO/PDO was generally in the negative phase of the cycle in the wet epochs (2010-2013 and 2020-2021) and in the positive phase in the dry epoch (2014-2016). The IPO is still in the negative phase of the cycle in 2022, so we should expect the Indian monsoon to be average to above-average.
• The IPO’s effects on the atmosphere and Indian monsoon rain also affect crop output, especially in regions of non-irrigated crops. Fifty years’ (1961-2010) worth of data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation shows that annual productions of rice, soybean, corn (maize), cashew nuts, orange, millet, cotton, barley and some other major, non-irrigated crops are substantially below average in the positive phases of the IPO, as should be expected.
• Apart from people and crops, natural ecosystems also fare poorly in both types of epochs. Especially in dry epochs, millions of milch and draft animals such as buffaloes, cows, goats and camels suffer due to shortages of fodder and forage.
• While such consequences of the IPO and other natural variable climate phenomena are bad enough, India’s long-term water quantity and quality situations are truly alarming.
• A 2018 report by NITI Aayog stated that India is currently facing its worst water crisis in history, with 600 million people facing high to extreme water stress, and 200,000 people dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water.
• The report also stated that by 2030, projected water demand would be double the available supply, implying permanent water scarcity for hundreds of millions of people and a 6% drop in India’s GDP. It pointed to an imminent need to deepen understanding of India’s water resources and use, and for the government to intervene to make water use efficient and sustainable.
• But as if this and other projections were not alarming enough, the report overlooked current and projected effects of climate variability and changes in their projections of India’s water situation.
• Data from tree rings indicates that the duration and severity of droughts have decreased substantially in the last 100 to 150 years. Since these droughts were caused by natural climatic variations, it seems likely that mega-droughts will return to the Indian subcontinent in future – and will be exacerbated by climate change. Then, there are the projected effects of climate change due to higher concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
• In light of India’s water situation already being precarious, the government should found and permanently sustain a multidisciplinary and multi-institution programme of research and applications in weather and climate variability; potential effects of climate change; understanding and predicting societal impacts of weather changes; and development of adaptation options for all affected sectors.
• Such a programme should have the Government of India as a partner and should be housed in an academic institution of national and international repute.
• This programme will have to address adaptation issues at all levels, from national to local administrative, and must involve stakeholders, government ministries and/or departments, and NGOs in all affected sectors and regions as partners. Finally, and importantly, such a programme must report frequently to the people of the country in languages and idioms they can easily understand.
• In the absence of such a programme sustained in this way, India will almost certainly face calamities like the ones in the past – multiplied manifold by the vastly increased scale of human activity, with consequences too catastrophic to contemplate.

THE PRELIMS PRACTICE QUESTIONS

QUESTION FOR 4TH JUNE 2022

Q1. Consider the following statements about Eco- sensitive zone:

1. They are transition areas around the protected areas of National parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
2. They are notified under the provisions of Environment (Protection) Act 1986.
3. They can be up to 20 Kms around the protected areas.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

a) 1 only

b) 1 and 2 only

c) 1 and 3 only

d) 1, 2 and 3

ANSWER FOR THE 1^ST JUNE

Answer: C

Explanation:

Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN)

• It was launched on 24^thFebruary, 2019 to supplement financial needs of land holding farmers.
• Financial benefit of Rs 6000/- per year in three equal installments, every four month is transferred into the bank accounts of farmers’ families across the country through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mode.
• The scheme was initially meant for Small and Marginal Farmers (SMFs) having landholding upto 2 hectares but scope of the scheme was extended to cover all landholding farmers.
• It is a Central Sector Scheme with 100% funding from the Government of India.
• It is being implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
• Objectives:

1. To supplement the financial needs of the Small and Marginal Farmers in procuring various inputs to ensure proper crop health and appropriate yields, commensurate with the anticipated farm income at the end of each crop cycle.
2. To protect them from falling in the clutches of moneylenders for meeting such expenses and ensure their continuance in the farming activities.