IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs (Prelims + Mains Focus)- 17th January 2018

Archives

(PRELIMS+MAINS FOCUS)

ASER 2017 Report 

Part of: Mains GS Paper II- Issues related to education

Key pointers:

• The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), carried out by NGO Pratham finds that while 86% of youth in the 14-18 age group are still in the formal education system (school or college) and 73% students had used a mobile phone within the last week, more than half of them (57%) struggle to do simple Class 2-level division.
• Unlike earlier surveys, which measured learning levels in the 5-to-16 age group, ASER 2017 focused on 14- to 18-year-olds — those who have moved just beyond elementary school age and are on the threshold of adulthood.
• The study attempts look at skills beyond foundational reading and arithmetic and focusing on four As — activity (what they are doing), ability (level of basic skills), awareness (their access to media, traditional and new) and aspirations.
• It finds that while the youth are high on aspiration (about 60% wanted to study beyond Class 12), they are short on vital, everyday skills that are needed to help them get to where they aspire.
• About 25 per cent of those in this age group couldn’t read basic text fluently and 57% struggled when asked to divide a 3-digit number by a single digit.

Gender gap:

• The survey also finds a glaring gender divide with boys outperforming girls in almost every task assigned to them, such as counting money and adding weights, and on many other parameters such as access to digital media.
• Girls and young women had far lower access to computers and the Internet when compared to boys.
• While in normal ASERs (previous reports that surveyed 5- to 16-year-olds, there wasn’t much difference in reading levels and math between boys and girls, here (14-18 yrs) in almost every task assigned to them, there is a gender difference. What it probably tells is that some of these daily tasks, such as calculating money, involve an exposure to a world outside their homes which these girls don’t have access to.

Mains focus:

• Academic skills don’t seem to get transferred to life skills or everyday skills. It’s time to connect the dots. It probably involves a relook at the curriculum.

Article link: Click here

Attack on couple going for Inter-caste marriages Illegal: SC

Part of: GS Mains Paper I- Social Issues

Key pointers:

• Supreme Court- “Any attack against an adult man and woman opting for an inter-caste marriage by khap panchayats or associations is “absolutely illegal”.
• The bench asked the Centre to respond on suggestions given by amicus curiae (friend of the court) Raju Ramachandran on ways to prevent harassment and killing of young couples in the name of family honour for marrying out of their caste or in the same clan (gotra).
• The top court added that if the Centre does not do anything to ban such panchayats then it would have to step in.
• Khaps, caste or community organisations representing a clan or a group of related clans, frequently make pronouncements on social issues and have often landed in controversies owing to their diktats.

Article link: Click here

(MAINS FOCUS)

NATIONAL

TOPIC: General Studies 2:

• Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
• Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and States and the performance of these schemes; mechanisms, laws, institutions and bodies constituted for the protection and betterment of these vulnerable sections
• Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Failure of Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication Public Distribution System (PDS)

Background

India’s Public Distribution System is one of the largest food distribution network in the world. PDS means distribution of essential commodities to larger section of the society, mostly vulnerable people, through a network of fair Price Shops on a recurring basis.

Established by the Government of India under Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution and managed jointly with state governments in India, it distributes subsidized food and non-food items to India’s poor.

This scheme was launched in India on June 1997.

Major commodities distributed include staple food grains, such as wheat, rice, sugar, and kerosene, through a network of fair price shops(also known as ration shops) established in several states across the country.

The state governments can provide subsidies to over and above these items too.

Food Corporation of India (FCI), a Government-owned corporation, procures and maintains the PDS.

The National Food Security Act has proposed to make ‘Right to Food’ through existing Targeted Public Distribution System.

However, there have been many leakages in PDS such as –

• non-inclusion of beneficiaries,
• huge subsidy burden,
• inadequate storage capacities leading to black marketing and hoarding of food grains

To solve this, alternative measures and PDS reforms like cash transfers, Aadhaar-based biometric authentication and food coupons have been initiated by many states.

(The below article examines how far these initiatives and reforms have been successful)

Case study of Jharkhand

Aadhaar-based PDS

Jharkhand government made Aadhaar-based biometric authentication compulsory for PDS users.

Consequences:

• Large numbers of people, especially among vulnerable groups such as widows and the elderly, found themselves excluded from the PDS.
• Those who were still able to buy their food rations faced considerable inconvenience due to connectivity and biometric failures.
• Worse, there was a revival of corruption, as PDS rice meant for those who failed the biometric test was siphoned off with abandon.

The damage was made worse in mid-2017, when the Jharkhand government mass-cancelled ration cards not linked with Aadhaar.

• Many of the cancelled ration cards actually belonged to families that had been unable to link their card with Aadhaar for no fault of their own.
• The mass-cancellation of Aadhaar-less ration cards, without verification and without even informing the victims, was both inhuman and illegal.

Jharkhand government launched a further attack on people’s food entitlements: the monthly PDS rations of 5 kg per person were restricted to those whose individual names had been linked with Aadhaar in the ration-cards database.

For instance, a family has five members, but only three are listed along with their Aadhaar number in the database, so the family ends up getting 15 kg of rice per month instead of 25 kg. This restriction is a flagrant violation of the instructions issued by the Union Food Ministry.

Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) based PDS

Jharkhand government has now decided for transition to “direct benefit transfer”

Under the DBT system, people have to collect their food subsidy in cash from the bank before using it to buy rice from the ration shop at ₹32 per kg. Until now, they were able to buy rice from the ration shop at ₹1 per kg.

The DBT system was initiated in Nagri Block of Ranchi district.

Consequences:

• The new system is a disaster and most people are angry with it.
• The main problem with DBT is that people waste enormous time shuttling between the banks, pragya kendras (common service centres) and ration shops to get hold of their money and then use it to buy rice at the ration shop.

For many of them, this is a three-step process.

1. First, they go to the bank to find out whether the subsidy has been credited and update their passbook.
2. Second, they go to the pragya kendra to withdraw the cash, as the bank often insists on their doing so from these centres.
3. Third, they take the cash to the ration shop to buy rice at ₹32 per kg.

At every step, there are long queues, and for many people the bank or pragya kendra is also far away. For people with mobility problems, like the elderly or disabled, this entire process is a nightmare.

Even as the people of Nagri fume and protest against the DBT experiment, the State government is trying its best to project it as a success and justify its extension to the whole State. If this happens, millions of people will face renewed food insecurity.

Conclusion:

Similar reforms and moves are happening in other States. Most of them are under tremendous pressure from the Central government to impose Aadhaar-based biometric authentication or move towards DBT. (growing centralisation and technocracy)

The failures of many districts in different states went largely unreported.

• In Rajasthan, the biometric authentication has caused enormous damage, evident even in the government’s own transactions data.
• Even Chhattisgarh, known for its model PDS, is under pressure to follow the diktats of the Central government and adopt Aadhaar-based technology.

The most disturbing aspect of this trend is a lack of concern for the hardships that people face.

• Aadhaar-less ration cards are cancelled without notice.
• Pensions are discontinued without the victims being told what the problem is.
• Job cards are cancelled just to meet the “100% seeding” targets.
• Elderly persons with rough fingerprints are deprived of food rations without compensation.
• Cash payments are automatically redirected to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts that people sometimes know nothing about.

Jean Drèze (Belgian-born Indian development economist and activist) comments –

• In effect, vulnerable people are treated as guinea pigs for undependable technologies, without any effective arrangements for grievance redressal or even information sharing.
• Let people perish if need be, Aadhaar must prevail.

Connecting the dots:

• Insisting on Aadhaar-based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) will result into failure of PDS, which is a lifeline for the poor. Critically analyze.
• Growing centralisation and technocracy has become a larger malady in India’s social sector. Do you agree? Examine with suitable examples.

NATIONAL

TOPIC:

General Studies 1:

• Poverty and developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies

General Studies 2:

• Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.

General Studies 3:

• Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment

Climate change: Avoiding the worst case scenario

Background:

The risks of climate change are greater than currently feared.

• A report in the December 2017 issue of the British Journal Nature presents a doomsday scenario for the planet by concluding that the rise in average global temperature by the end of the century under the “business as usual scenario” is likely to be about 5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
  This is off by a huge margin from 2 degrees Celsius scenario which has been considered by the global scientific community as the upper threshold that the Earth’s environment can withstand, beyond which irreversible changes in the global climate are likely to occur.
• In November 2017, a report by the US government, the “Fourth National Climate Assessment” (NCA4), reaffirmed that climate change is “real” and “man-made” and that anthropogenic activities are fundamentally altering the Earth’s environment.
  It further said that the average global surface temperature has already risen by 1 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial revolution and could further rise by another 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Paris agreement:

In December 2015, in a radical departure from the top-down approach to global climate negotiations, 196 parties came together under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to steer the world towards sustainable development by agreeing to limit global average surface temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above than pre-industrial levels. 

Dismal progress:

The progress of the Paris agreement, two years after it was signed and hailed as the “greatest diplomatic success”, has been dismal.

• A study by Climate Tracker shows that no advanced industrial country is on track to meeting its pledges to control greenhouse-gas emissions. Not the EU. Not the US. Not Canada. Not Japan. In fact, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to rise.
• The World Meteorological Organization says that global emissions reached a record high of 403.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2016, the highest in 800,000 years, and presents a scary picture of irreversible changes already happening in the global climate system.

Way ahead:

Avoiding the climate tipping point requires unprecedented response at the global level.

While the 2 degrees Celsius threshold looks unlikely now, we, however, can still minimize its impact while simultaneously developing infrastructure to face the worst scenario.

• First, we need to accept the fact that the status quo is not going to work. We need to fundamentally change our model of development which is based on the excessive resource consumption.
  If the same model of development were to continue, it is going to be ecologically unsustainable for the planet.
• We ought to treat the natural environment as a fundamental right and ask politicians to ensure it. Political will flows from the people—when citizens care, politicians too act. While most of us blame lack of a political will for the poor response to climate change, we as citizens have not demanded a measured action from our public representatives.
• In the past, the US helped in shaping the global response to climate change. Now when it has relinquished the global climate leadership by pulling out of the Paris agreement, it seems unlikely that there will be a global agreement now or in the near future.
  Hence rather than a grand national or global strategy, we need to focus on regional, national and local strategies, e.g., cities.
• The global urban population is likely to go up from 54% (3.9 billion) in 2014 to 66% (6.4 billion) in 2050.
• Investing in energy-efficient appliances, powering homes with renewable energy, reducing water waste, using public transport and other measures can help in lowering the national, and ultimately the global, carbon profile.
  Sharing platforms like Airbnb, Craigslist and Uber too can help cities in cutting emissions.
• As the impact of climate change becomes increasingly visible, developing countries like India, which are at the risk of facing serious threats due to climate change, need to focus more on adaptation than mitigation.
  They need to develop infrastructure to rehabilitate people in their coastal areas, meet food demand with changing rain patterns and manage immigration caused by climate change.

Positive development:

The sharp fall in renewable energy cost had led to a record renewable capacity addition of 161 gigawatt (GW) in 2016, a 10% rise over 2015. The falling price of renewable energy has made its cost comparable to fossil fuel in many parts of the world. This is likely to accelerate the transition towards a fossil-free future.
Already, 47 countries—some of them are among the poorest in the world— are moving towards a fossil-free energy future by 2050.

Conclusion:

As the latest data on GHG emissions shows a continuous growth and the global response to limit these emissions remains lackadaisical, it seems impossible to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius looks over.
The only positive thing can be to stabilize the temperature not very far off from the 2 degrees Celsius to avoid catastrophic changes in the global environment.

Connecting the dots:

• Various reports suggest that restricting the limit of increase in global temperature from pre-industrial levels to 2-degree celsius will not be possible because of the business as usual approach. The only positive thing can be to stabilize the temperature not very far off from the 2 degrees Celsius. Suggest measures for the same.

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