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Week-long curbs begin Nov 13 as Delhi air worsens ahead of Diwali and its aftermath
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.
Main Examination:
• General Studies II: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
• General Studies III: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment.
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story- As Delhi’s air quality continues to be in the “severe” category, the Delhi government has directed schools to suspend physical classes, barring classes 10 and 12, until November 10 and reintroduced the odd-even scheme from November 13-20.
“The scheme has been enforced in Delhi before. On odd dates, vehicles with registration numbers ending in 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 will be allowed to ply. On even dates, vehicles with registration numbers ending in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 will run,” Environment Minister Gopal Rai said.
• What is the odd-even scheme?
• For Your Information-When odd-even is in force, cars can ply only on alternate days, based on their registration number. So, cars with numbers ending in an odd digit will be allowed on the street on odd dates (November 13, 15, 17, and 19), and those with numbers ending in an even digit will be allowed on even dates (November 14, 16, 18, and 20). The idea is to cut the number of cars on the road by roughly half which, the Delhi government hopes, will bring down AQI levels somewhat.
The scheme was tried out twice in 2016, and then in 2019. Several categories of vehicles were exempt, including taxis (which are CNG-run), cars driven by women (for considerations of safety), electric and hybrid vehicles, and all two-wheelers. The details of the new scheme have not been announced yet.
Odd-even as a way to bring down air pollution has been tried in some form in cities in China, Mexico, and France as well. Its efficacy has been hotly debated almost everywhere.
There are multiple reasons behind the current crisis. Delhi is situated in a shallow atmospheric ‘bowl’, in which pollutants are trapped easily. When combined with falling temperatures and slow wind speeds, pollutants in the air are not dissipated, and tend to hang low over the surface, causing Delhi’s infamous smog.
Adding to this is the smoke from the countless fires that burn across Punjab and Haryana at this time as farmers, rushing to prepare their fields for the rabi crop, set fire to the stubble that is left in the fields after the kharif crop has been harvested. While sources of pollution like vehicular emissions or road dust are present round the year, the farm fires and atmospheric conditions around Diwali act as force multipliers.
A study by the environment and climate change think tank Centre for Science and Environment, (CSE) found that at their peak in past years, farm fires contributed to 40% of the PM 2.5 concentration in the air. This year, on November 3, 4, and 5, the daily mean contribution from biomass burning to the PM 2.5 concentration in Delhi was 35%, 20%, and 21% respectively, according to Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology data.
Farm fires, however, burn in a small window — and taken for the year as a whole, their contribution to Delhi’s air pollution is only around 3% or less. Several studies have suggested that the bulk of Delhi’s air pollution is caused by local sources, and vehicles contribute up to 30% of the city’s annual PM 2.5 concentration.
Vehicles also emit other pollutants such as NO2, and the CSE estimates that levels of the gas this year are up by as much as 60% compared to the same time last year. Certain high traffic locations have reported levels as high as three-four times the 24-hour standard.
• To what extent are vehicular emissions responsible for Delhi’s bad air?
• Does the odd-even scheme make sense, given the inevitable hardships it will cause?
• Can odd-even prevent health issues?
• Why is reduction of NO2 important?
• What were the outcomes of previous experiences with the odd-even policy?
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍Odd-even’s health impact: what studies, doctors say
📍In Punjab paddy fields, harvesting underway, fewer farm fires so far
📍No silver bullet given the exemptions, but cuts toxic emissions
📍Timing, who’s exempted: Plan to be hashed out today
Was kept in dark on appointment of new CIC: Adhir writes to President
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Indian Polity and Governance-Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.
Main Examination: General Studies II: Statutory, regulatory and various quasi-judicial bodies.
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story-IN what could potentially deepen the trust deficit between the Opposition and the Centre, the appointment of Information Commissioner Heeralal Samariya as the Chief Information Commissioner Monday triggered a political row with Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, the Opposition member in the Prime Minister-headed high-powered selection committee, writing to President Droupadi Murmu, saying he was “totally kept in the dark” about the selection.
• What is the issue exactly?
• Central Information Commission-Is it a constitutional body?
• Central Information Commission-Know its composition
• The Chief Information Commissioner and Information Commissioners are appointed by whom?
• What is role of the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha in the appointment of Chief Information Commissioner?
• What are the powers and functions of the Central Information Commission?
• Do You Know-According to the Right to Information Act, 2005, the CIC and ICs are appointed by the President on the recommendation of a committee headed by the PM and comprising the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha (in this case the leader of the largest Opposition party) and a Union Minister nominated by the PM.
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍With Supreme Court order on EC appointments, a history of futile Opp dissent on picks for top posts
CJI Bench: Governors must act before state govts approach SC
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Indian Polity and Governance-Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.
Mains Examination:
• General Studies II: Appointment to various Constitutional posts, powers, functions and responsibilities of various Constitutional Bodies.
• General Studies II: Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States, issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure, devolution of powers and finances up to local levels and challenges therein
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story- At a time when three state governments have moved the Supreme Court against their Governors for keeping Bills pending, a three-Judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud on Monday said Governors “must act” before the matter reaches the court.
• What exactly Supreme Court said?
• “Cannot be oblivious to the fact that they are not elected representatives of the people”-Discuss
• Why have Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Punjab moved to the Supreme Court against their governors?
• What is the current conflict between the governor and the government in Punjab?
• Why the state government would approach the Supreme Court?
• What is the standard legislative procedure in state legislature?
• How Bills are passed in state assembly?
• What is role of governor in legislative procedure in state legislature?
• Every bill, after it is passed by the assembly or by both the Houses in case of a bicameral legislature, is presented to the governor for his assent. There are four alternatives before the governor-what are they?
• If the governor gives his assent to the bill, then what happens with the bill?
• If the governor withholds his assent to the bill, then what happens?
• Can the Governor withholds the Bills indefinitely?
• What is happening in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Kerela?
• What Punjab Governor doing with the bills?
• The governor enjoys only a suspensive veto-What is suspensive veto?
• How powerful is a Governor?
• Office of Governor-know the historical background
• Why has the Governor’s role and powers recently become a matter of contention?
• What is the relationship between the Governor and the state government?
• Various attempts were made to understand the role of the governor to strengthening centre-state relations-Can you name those committees and their recommendations?
• Administrative Reforms Commission of 1968, the Rajamanar Committee of 1969, the Sarkaria commission of 1988 and Punchhi Commission-What were their recommendations in the context of role of Governor?
• The Sarkaria Commission, set up in 1983 to look into Centre-state relations, proposed certain points for the selection of Governors-Know them in detail
• What Punchhi Committee, constituted in 2007 on Centre-state relations said on selection the Governor?
• The Punchhi Committee recommended deleting the “Doctrine of Pleasure” from the Constitution-What is “Doctrine of Pleasure”?
• What Supreme Court of India said about the Governor’s role?
• How things changed after the S.R. Bommai case ,1994?
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍Explained: Governor’s powers, friction with states, and why this happens often
📍The 360° UPSC Debate | Does India really need state Governors?
Previous Year Prelims Questions Based on same theme:
📍Which one of the following suggested that the Governor should be an eminent person from outside the State and should be a detached figure without intense political links or should not have taken part in politics in the recent past? (Please refer Prelims 2019 GS question Paper for complete question)
📍Which of the following are the discretionary powers given to the Governor of a State? (Please refer Prelims 2014 GS question Paper for complete question)
1. Sending a report to the President of India for imposing the President’s rule
2. Appointing the Ministers
3. Reserving certain bills passed by the State Legislature for consideration of the President of India
4. Making the rules to conduct the business of the State Government
GOVT & POLITICS
Modi dials Raisi to discuss situation in West Asia, both agree on early peace
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.
Mains Examination: General Studies II: Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story- Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi on Monday discussed the “difficult situation” in the West Asian region in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict, as part of Delhi’s diplomatic engagement with the key players in the war.
• Map Work-Mark West Asian Countries
• India and Iran bilateral relations-Know in detail
• What is the current state of economic relations between India and Iran?
• What is the strategic importance of Iran for India?
• What are the major issues between Indo-Iranian Ties?
• What is the significance of Chabahar Port?
• Map Work– Chabahar Port
• For Your Information-Besides discussing the conflict situation, Modi and Raisi also reviewed and positively assessed the progress in multifaceted bilateral cooperation, said the PMO. They welcomed focus and priority accorded to the Chabahar Port in Iran for improving regional connectivity. The strategically important Chabahar Port offers an alternative route that bypasses Pakistan, reducing India’s reliance on its neighbour for trade with Afghanistan and beyond. It also offers a gateway to the resource-rich and economically vibrant region of Central Asia. Chabahar, which is located 72 kilometres west of Pakistan’s Gwadar port, holds immense strategic and economic significance for India, which has already spent about US$ 100 million to construct a 218 km-long (140 mile-long) road from Delaram in western Afghanistan to Zaranj on the Iran-Afghan border to link up with Chabahar Port.
While there was a glacial pace in developing the Chabahar project, it gathered momentum in 2015 as the Iran-P-5+1 talks bore fruition and geopolitics took a new direction. About three weeks after Iran and world powers announced the framework deal on April 2, 2015, committing themselves to finalising a comprehensive deal by June-end, on April 27-29, 2015, the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited India — and stressed the importance of the Chabahar Port.
To make it a commercially and strategically viable option, Indian policymakers will have to use the Chabahar project as a lynchpin to integrate it with its larger connectivity project — the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC). The INSTC, initiated in 2000 by Russia, India and Iran, is a multi-modal transportation route linking the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea via Iran, and onward to northern Europe via St Petersburg in Russia. The INSTC envisages the movement of goods from Mumbai, India to Bandar Abbas, Iran, by sea, from Bandar Abbas to Bandar-e-Anzali, an Iranian port on the Caspian Sea, by road, from Bandar-e-Anzali to Astrakhan, a Caspian port in the Russian Federation, by ship across the Caspian Sea, and thereafter into the Russian Federation and further into Europe by Russian Railways.
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍Iran’s Chabahar port opens, allows India to bypass Pakistan on trade route to Afghanistan
THE WORLD
China, Australia agree to cooperate, welcome change in icy relations
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.
Mains Examination: General Studies II: Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story- President Xi Jinping said on Monday stable ties between China and Australia served each other’s interests and both should expand their cooperation, sending a clear signal that Beijing was ready to move on from recent tensions.
China and Australia should promote the development of their strategic partnership as they build up mutual understanding and trust, Xi told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the first Australian leader to visit Beijing since 2016, at the Great Hall of the People in the heart of the Chinese capital.
• Examine China and Australia bilateral relationship in detail.
• The China-Australia bilateral relationship-What history says?
• The evolution and subsequent devolution of strategic ties between China and Australia-Examine
• For Your Information-Ties between Australia and China were strained after Canberra in 2018 banned Chinese telecom firm Huawei from the 5G network. Later, it called for an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, and slammed China’s human rights record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. China responded by imposing trade barriers on Australian exports, and by cutting off all ministerial contact. India has been facing an aggressive Chinese military along the border. New Delhi and Canberra have been assessing the Chinese challenge since 2013.
In April 2020, Australia’s Minister of Home Affairs Peter Dutton suggested the start of an inquiry into the origins and the initial handling of the coronavirus. This was supported by the Australian Foreign Minister as well as Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Morrison called the suggestion “entirely sensible and reasonable” and asserted that the world ought to know everything about a virus that had claimed so many lives across the globe.
To this, China’s response was multi-pronged. The first reaction came from the Chinese Ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye, who alleged that Australia was teaming up with the US to spread “anti-China propaganda”. Jingye further called for boycotting Australia as a tourist and higher education destination and banning Australian products like wine and beef.
In May, Chinese authorities announced imposing an 80 per cent tariff on barley imports coming from Australia. China is the most important market for Australia barley. Days after the announcement China imposed tariffs totaling 80.5 per cent. China also began a trade probe into Australian wine and suspended import permits for four large beef processing plants.
• How has the Quad impacted trade relations between China and Australia?
• India, Australia and China-Analyse
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍Australia, and China open first high-level dialogue in 3 years in a sign of a slight thaw
ECONOMY
Viral ‘Rashmika Mandanna video’ spotlights Big Tech’s deepfake problem
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.
Main Examination:
• General Studies II: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
• General Studies III: Awareness in the fields of IT
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story- A popular Indian actor entering an elevator in revealing clothes. Football fans in a stadium in Madrid holding an enormous Palestinian flag. A video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons. The pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket.
These unrelated events have something in common: they never happened.
And yet, they were some of the most viral pieces of content on various social media platforms. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which has improved greatly over the past year, there are now platforms that allow nearly anyone to create a persuasive fake by entering text into popular AI generators that produce images, video or audio.
• What is a deepfake?
• What are they for?
• Is it just about videos?
• How are they made?
• Who is making deepfakes?
• How to spot a deepfake?
• Are deepfakes always malicious?
• What about shallowfakes?
• Deepfakes and Shallowfakes-Compare
• Do You Know-Deepfake is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”. It is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that superimposes a digital composite on to an existing video (or audio).
The origin of the word “deepfake” can be traced back to 2017 when a Reddit user, with the username “deepfakes”, posted explicit videos of celebrities.
“The term first rose to prominence when Motherboard reported on a Reddit user who was using AI to superimpose the faces of film stars on to existing porn videos, creating (with varying degrees of realness) porn starring Emma Watson, Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson and an array of other female celebrities,” a report in The Guardian said. In June this year, a deepfake video surfaced that showed Mark Zuckerberg saying that he is in total control of the stolen data of billions of people.
Deepfakes constitute fake content — often in the form of videos but also other media formats such as pictures or audio — created using powerful artificial intelligence tools. They are called deepfakes because they use deep learning technology, a branch of machine learning that applies neural net simulation to massive data sets, to create fake content.
It employs a branch of artificial intelligence where if a computer is fed enough data, it can generate fakes which behave much like a real person. For instance, AI can learn what a source face looks like and then transpose it onto another target to perform a face swap.
The application of a technology called Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which uses two AI algorithms — where one generates the fake content and the other grades its efforts, teaching the system to be better — has helped come up with more accurate deepfakes.
GAN can also come up with computer-generated images of fake human beings, which has been used by a website called ‘This Person Does Not Exist’. This makes it virtually impossible to detect whether the videos or images we see on the Internet are real or fake.
Deepfakes can be really difficult to detect. For instance, many people had fallen for Tiktok videos of Tom Cruise playing golf which were later revealed to be deepfakes.
A paper presented at the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2021 describes a new technique which renders deepfakes more foolproof, making it difficult for traditional tools to detect them.
The study, led by Paarth Neekhara and Shehzeen Samarah Hussain, both PhD students at University of California San Diego, found that the detection tools can be deceived by inserting slightly manipulated inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame.
• What are the threats posed by deepfake videos?
• Is there a crackdown in the offing?
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
📍RASHMIKA MANDANNA CONTROVERSY: HOW YOU CAN SPOT A DEEPFAKE
EXPLAINED
A National Security Strategy for India: what it should be guided by
Syllabus:
Preliminary Examination: Current events of national and international importance.
Main Examination: General Studies II: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
Key Points to Ponder:
• What’s the ongoing story-Vice Admiral Biswajit Dasgupta (Retd) PVSM AVSM, a former Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command, explains: A long wait is said to be coming to an end as the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) sets about drafting India’s first written National Security Strategy (NSS), according to a report published in The Indian Express on November 4. India has never had such a document — and the debate on whether one is needed is of fairly recent origin, spanning the last two decades or so.
• What is a National Security Strategy?
• Do You Know- A National Security Strategy document outlines the country’s security objectives, and the ways to be adopted to achieve these.
Updated periodically, it defines traditional, non-traditional threats and opportunities while introducing accountability of agencies tasked with the implementation of such responsibilities.
In a nutshell, a national security strategy would guide the military as well as critical defence and security reforms with strategic implications, providing a holistic view of the overall national security, the threats and the roadmap to address them.
The exact contours of the strategy being drafted is not known, but it will likely include the entire range of newer challenges and modern threats facing India, including non-traditional ones such as financial and economic security, food and energy security, information warfare, vulnerabilities in India’s critical information infrastructure, as well as those associated with supply chains and environment.
• Should India have a publicly articulated National Security Strategy?
• What will it take to draft such a strategy?
• What would be the guiding principles of the NSS?
• What doctrines and strategies must the NSS be mindful of?
• How soon can the NSS be expected?
• Which countries have a National Security Strategy?
• India’s need for a National Security Strategy-why?
• Why did India never have a national security strategy?
Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:
Most Read
📍India starts process to adopt National Security Strategy: why this is significant
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