Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Critical Wildlife Habitat (CHW) under FRA
Mains level: Forest dwellers role in its conservation
- The COVID-19 pandemic has driven migrant workers back to their villages, including many situated inside or on the fringes of forested areas, including sanctuaries and national parks.
- Even as they seek to remake livelihoods there, a new battle has emerged between the forest department (FD) and these local communities.
- It pertains to the declaration of a Critical Wildlife Habitat (CWH), which a PIL in the Bombay High Court seeks to get the department to urgently notify.
Try this question for mains:
Forest dwellers are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem. Analyse.
What is Critical Wildlife Habitat (CHW)?
- CWH is a provision under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA).
- The Act primarily focuses on recognising the historically-denied rights of forest-dwellers to use and manage forests.
- The CWH provision, however, is an attempt to assuage concerns of wildlife conservationists.
- It allows for the possibility that in protected areas (PAs) — wildlife sanctuaries and national parks — these rights could be attenuated, and, if absolutely necessary, forest-dwellers could be relocated in the interest of wildlife conservation.
Forest dwellers vs. Wildlife
- Conservationists believe that wildlife needs absolutely “inviolate” areas — those devoid of humans and human activities.
- Many others believe human-wildlife co-existence is generally possible and must be promoted if we are to have “socially just conservation”.
Achieving balanced conservation: The FRA provisions
- A careful reading of the CWH provisions in the FRA shows that it is open to both possibilities, as long as they are arrived at through a rigorous and participatory process.
- It requires setting up a multi-disciplinary expert committee, including representatives from local communities.
- It also requires determining — using “scientific and objective criteria” and consultative processes — whether, and wherein the PA, the exercise of forest rights will cause irreversible damages.
- It then requires determining whether coexistence is possible through a modified set of rights or management practices.
- Only if the multi-stakeholder expert committee agrees that co-existence or other reasonable options are not possible, should relocation be taken up, again with the informed consent of the concerned gram sabhas.
- For any such process to commence, the Act requires that all forest rights under the FRA must first be recognised.
Issues with the FRA
(1) Concerns of eviction
- Hardline conservationists took FRA as a great opportunity to complete its agenda of evicting forest-dwellers from PAs.
- It has been observed that many villages were resettled when they had rights claims pending, others had their claims illegally rejected or incompletely granted, and several had not even applied to this controversy erupted.
- However, there are settlements in some of these PAs, and of course, people in villages adjacent to all the PAs are likely to have customary rights.
- In spite of the court ordering rapid completion of the rights recognition process, there has been almost no progress on this front.
(2) Issues with expert committees
- The constitution of the expert committees is faulty. They do not contain expert social scientists familiar with the area. Wildlife enthusiasts are sometimes substituted for experts in life sciences.
- Many members have challenged the very constitutionality of the FRA, making a travesty of the idea of “objectivity” in the process.
(3) Criteria judging the damages
- The criteria being used by the committees to determine the threat of “irreversible damage” to wildlife are quite extreme and are not supported by any consensus even among ecologists.
- There are no objective criteria decided yet by these committees.
Conclusion
- The FRA begins by recognising that forest dwellers “are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem”.
- In that context, the CWH provision should not be seen as simply a tool for evicting forest-dwellers to create so-called “inviolate” spaces.
- It is an opportunity to rigorously and participatorily explore all avenues of co-existence.
- Such co-existence is indeed possible. In general, forest-dwellers harbour both the knowledge and the attitudes needed for conservation.
- Co-managing PAs is, therefore, the most effective and socially just long-term solution, and relocation should be seen as the absolute last resort.
B2BASICS
Forest Rights act
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Census of India
Mains level: Need for reforms in Census and Surveying
- In all likelihood, the February 2021 Census will have to be rescheduled to ensure comparability with earlier censuses.
- This will also affect the National Sample Surveys and others that use the census as the sampling frame.
- The delay can, however, be used to introduce much-needed reforms to this gigantic exercise whose roots go back to the late 19th century.
Try this question for mains:
Q.The Census of India needs a basic overhaul beyond its procedural digitization. Critically analyse.
Background: Census of India
- The decennial Census of India has been conducted 15 times, as of 2011.
- While it has been undertaken every 10 years, beginning in 1872 under British Viceroy Lord Mayo, the first complete census was taken in 1881.
- Post-1949, it has been conducted by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.
- All the censuses since 1951 were conducted under the 1948 Census of India Act.
- The last census was held in 2011, whilst the next will be held in 2021.
Census 2021
- The Census 2021 will be conducted in 18 languages out of the 22 scheduled languages (under 8th schedule) and English, while Census 2011 was in 16 of the 22 scheduled languages declared at that time.
- It also will introduce a code directory to streamline the process
- The option of “Other” under the gender category will be changed to “Third Gender”.
- There were roughly 5 lakh people under “other” category in 2011.
- For the first time in the 140 year history of the census in India, data is proposed to be collected through a mobile app by enumerators and they will receive an additional payment as an incentive.
- The Census data would be available by the year 2024-25 as the entire process would be conducted digitally and data crunching would be quicker.
Issues with the Census
(1) Data quality issues
- The past four decades have seen a decline in the quality of data and growing delays in its release despite technological innovations.
- The use of census data in delimitation and federal redistribution has been questioned on grounds of poor quality, while the Covid-19 pandemic revealed the obsolete and poor quality of data on internal migration.
(2) No major reforms
- The legal foundation of the census has remained largely unchanged since newly independent India enacted permanent census legislation in 1948.
- Despite sustained problems, the census has not seen any major reform after 1994 when both the Census Act, 1948 and Census Rules, 1990 were amended.
(3) Old methods and questionnaire
- The methodological core – extended de facto (synchronous) canvasser-based enumeration – too has remained intact even though the length and layout of schedules changed quite a bit.
- The Household Schedule, for instance, grew with the footprint of the state, from 14 questions in 1951 to 29 questions in 2011.
(4) Workforce issues
- Data collection has not kept pace with improvements in data processing technology due to the lack of motivated and adequately trained enumerators.
- Given the high salaries of school teachers, the modest honorarium paid for census work does not cover the opportunity cost of conducting the door-to-door enumeration.
Understand the ‘purpose’ of the census
Reforms should begin with the design of schedules based on a clear understanding of two essential functions of the census:
(a) Resource allocations
- First, census facilitates the rule-based distribution of power and resources through constitutionally mandated redistribution of taxes, delimitation of electoral constituencies and affirmative action policies.
- It is also used in routine policy-making across tiers of government.
(b) Population projections
- Second, census serves as the sampling frame for surveys and is also the basis of population projections.
- Other routine policies require distribution of the headcount by households, marital status, age, sex, literacy, migrant status, and mother tongue.
- Put together, these variables are sufficient for choosing representative samples for surveys.
What can be done?
1.Cut the questions
- Nearly half of the ‘Houselisting and Housing Schedule’ of the census is devoted to questions on household amenities and assets.
- These questions can be dropped because the information can be more appropriately collected through sample surveys and administrative statistics.
Why put fewer questions?
- Cutting down the length of unwieldy schedules has several advantages.
- First, it will improve data quality by reducing the workload of enumerators.
- Second, it will also free up senior census officials and help revive the earlier tradition of producing detailed administrative and other reports crucial for understanding the context of data.
- Third, shorter schedules will seem less invasive and assure respondents uncomfortable with sharing too many details.
- Fourth, it will cut down processing time and help in reducing delays in the release of data.
2.Dealing with data manipulation
- There is poor accounting of migrants that distorts estimates of urbanisation as well as the inter-state distribution of the population.
- There exists grassroots manipulation of data-driven by political and economic considerations.
- There is a need to demystify census operations and build trust in the impartiality of the exercise, better scrutiny of electoral records and welfare schemes to weed out bogus beneficiaries.
Conclusion
- These reforms are essential to ensure that the census exercise is able to fulfil its constitutional, policy and statistical obligations and also clear the ground for debates on the future of census in the digital era.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: West Bank and its location
Mains level: Israeli claims over West Bank and Gaza
The United Arab Emirates and Israel have agreed to establish full diplomatic ties as part of a deal to halt the annexation of occupied land sought by the Palestinians for their future state.
What is the deal?
- The deal halts Israeli annexation plans, the Palestinians have repeatedly urged Arab governments not to normalize ties with Israel until a peace agreement establishing an independent Palestinian state is reached.
Significance
- The announcement makes the UAE the first Gulf Arab state to do so and only the third Arab nation to have active diplomatic ties to Israel.
- For Israel, the announcement comes after years of boasting by Israeli PM Netanyahu that his government enjoys closer ties to Arab nations than publicly acknowledged.
West Bank and its annexation plan
- The West Bank is located to the west of the Jordan River.
- It is a patch of land about one and a half times the size of Goa, was captured by Jordan after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
- Israel snatched it back during the Six-Day War of 1967 and has occupied it ever since.
- It is a landlocked territory, bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel to the south, west, and north.
- Following the Oslo Accords between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during the 1990s, part of the West Bank came under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
- With varying levels of autonomy, the Palestinian Authority controls close to 40 per cent of West Bank today, while the rest is controlled by Israel.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Sixth Schedule
Mains level: Special provisions for North-east India
The revival of the demand for two autonomous councils has made political parties and community-based groups call for bringing the entire Arunachal Pradesh under the ambit of the Sixth Schedule or Article 371 (A) of the Constitution.
Try this question from CSP 2015:
Q.The provisions in Fifth Schedule and Sixth Schedule in the Constitution of India are made in order to-
(a) protect the interests of Scheduled Tribes
(b) determine the boundaries between States
(c) determine the powers, authority and responsibilities of Panchayats
(d) protect the interests of all the border States
What is the Sixth Schedule?
- The Sixth Schedule consists of provisions for the administration of tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, according to Article 244 of the Indian Constitution.
- Passed by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, it seeks to safeguard the rights of the tribal population through the formation of Autonomous District Councils (ADC).
- ADCs are bodies representing a district to which the Constitution has given varying degrees of autonomy within the state legislature.
- The governors of these states are empowered to reorganize boundaries of the tribal areas.
- In simpler terms, she or he can choose to include or exclude any area, increase or decrease the boundaries and unite two or more autonomous districts into one.
- They can also alter or change the names of autonomous regions without separate legislation.
Autonomous districts and regional councils
- The ADCs are empowered with civil and judicial powers can constitute village courts within their jurisdiction to hear the trial of cases involving the tribes.
- Governors of states that fall under the Sixth Schedule specify the jurisdiction of high courts for each of these cases.
- Along with ADCs, the Sixth Schedule also provides for separate Regional Councils for each area constituted as an autonomous region.
- In all, there are 10 areas in the Northeast that are registered as autonomous districts – three in Assam, Meghalaya and Mizoram and one in Tripura.
- These regions are named as district council of (name of district) and regional council of (name of region).
- Each autonomous district and regional council consists of not more than 30 members, of which four are nominated by the governor and the rest via elections. All of them remain in power for a term of five years.
B2BASICS
Try this question from AWE Initiative:
The Sixth Schedule of the Constitution is often referred to as a charter for autonomy of a wide magnitude, but it has failed to decrease the tension between different stakeholders at the ground level. Elaborate. (150 W/ 10 M)
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: National flag
Mains level: NA
The final design of the Indian National Flag, hoisted by PM Nehru on August 16, 1947, at Red Fort, had a history of several decades preceding independence.
Note various personalities involved in the development of our National flag. It may be no wonder to accept a personality-based question on such topics.
Story of our National Flag: A timeline
(1) Public display for first time
- Arguably the first national flag of India is said to have been hoisted on August 7, 1906, in Kolkata at the Parsee Bagan Square (Green Park).
- It comprised three horizontal stripes of red, yellow and green, with Vande Mataram written in the middle.
- Believed to have been designed by freedom activists Sachindra Prasad Bose and Hemchandra Kanungo, the red stripe on the flag had symbols of the sun and a crescent moon, and the green strip had eight half-open lotuses.
(2) In Germany
- In 1907, Madame Cama and her group of exiled revolutionaries hoisted an Indian flag in Germany in 1907 — this was the first Indian flag to be hoisted in a foreign land.
(3) During the Home Rule Movement
- In 1917, Dr Annie Besant and Lokmanya Tilak adopted a new flag as part of the Home Rule Movement.
- It had five alternate red and four green horizontal stripes, and seven stars in the saptarishi configuration.
- A white crescent and star occupied one top corner, and the other had Union Jack.
(4) Final version by Pingali Venkayya
- The design of the present-day Indian tricolour is largely attributed to Pingali Venkayya, an Indian freedom fighter.
- He reportedly first met Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa during the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when he was posted there as part of the British Indian Army.
- Years of research went into designing the national flag. In 1916, he even published a book with possible designs of Indian flags.
- At the All India Congress Committee in Bezwada in 1921, Venkayya again met Gandhi and proposed a basic design of the flag, consisting of two red and green bands to symbolise the two major communities, Hindus and Muslims.
(5) During Constituent Assembly
- On July 22, 1947, when members of the Constituent Assembly of India, the first item on the agenda was reportedly a motion by Pandit Nehru, about adopting a national flag for free India.
- It was proposed that “the National Flag of India shall be horizontal tricolour of deep saffron (Kesari), white and dark green in equal proportion.”
- The white band was to have a wheel in navy blue (the charkha being replaced by the chakra), which appears on the abacus of the Sarnath Lion Capital of Ashoka.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Greater Male Connectivity Project
Mains level: India-Maldives Relations
India will fund the implementation of the Greater Male Connectivity Project (GMCP) in the Maldives with $500 mn packages.
Try this question from 2014:
Which one of the following pairs of islands is separated from each other by the ‘Ten Degree Channel’?
(a) Andaman and Nicobar
(b) Nicobar and Sumatra
(c) Maldives and Lakshadweep
(d) Sumatra and Java
About Greater Male Connectivity Project
- The GMCP will consist of a number of bridges and causeways to connect Male to Villingili, Thilafushi and Gulhifahu islands that span 6.7 km.
- It would ease much of the pressure of the main capital island of Male for commercial and residential purposes.
- When completed, the project would render the Chinese built Sinamale Friendship bridge connecting Male to two other islands, thus far the most visible infrastructure project in the islands.
- At present, India-assisted projects in the region include water and sewerage projects on 34 islands, reclamation project for the Addl island, a port on Gulhifalhu, airport redevelopment at Hanimadhoo, and a hospital and a cricket stadium in Hulhumale.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: OSOWOG Initiative
Mains level: Global collaboration for Solar Energy
The Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has put calls for proposals to the One Sun, One World, and One Grid (OSOWOG) initiative on hold till further notice.
Try this PYQ:
Q.Consider the following statements:
- The International Solar Alliance was launched at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015.
- The Alliance includes all the member countries of the United Nations.
Which of the above statements is/are correct? (CSP 2016)
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2
OSOWOG Initiative
- Under the project, India envisaged having an interconnected power transmission grid across nations for the supply of clean energy.
- The vision behind the OSOWOG mantra is ‘The Sun Never Sets’ and is a constant at some geographical location, globally, at any given point of time.
- With India at the fulcrum, the solar spectrum can easily be divided into two broad zones viz. far East which would include countries like Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia etc. and far West which would cover the Middle East and the Africa Region.
Implementation
- The OSOWOG would have three phases. In the first phase Phase I, Middle East, South Asia and South-East Asia would be interconnected.
- In the second phase, solar and other renewable energy resources rich regions would be interconnected.
- In the third phase would vie for global interconnection of the power transmission grid to achieve the One Sun One World One Grid vision.
Benefits of the project
- Attracting investment: An interconnected grid would help all the participating entities in attracting investments in renewable energy sources as well as utilizing skills, technology and finances.
- Poverty allevation: Resulting economic benefits would positively impact poverty alleviation and support in mitigating water, sanitation, food and other socio-economic challenges.
- Reduced project cost: The proposed integration would lead to reduced project costs, higher efficiencies and increased asset utilization for all the participating entities.
Issues with project
- It is hindered with the issues of intricate geopolitics, unfavourable economics, unwarranted globalisation and undue centralization that act against the concept.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: BRR
Mains level: Not Much
In efforts to have a single source for all non-financial disclosures by corporates, a government-appointed panel has made various proposals on business responsibility reporting, including putting in place two formats for disclosing information.
Try this PYQ:
Which one of the following is not a feature of Limited Liability Partnership firm? (CSP 2010)
(a) Partners should be less than 20
(b) Partnership and management need not be separate
(c) Internal governance may be decided by mutual agreement among partners
(d) It is corporate body with perpetual succession
What is the Business Responsibility Report (BRR)?
- Business Responsibility Report is a disclosure of the adoption of responsible business practices by a listed company to all its stakeholders.
- This is important considering the fact that these companies have accessed funds from the public, have an element of public interest involved, and are obligated to make exhaustive disclosures on a regular basis.
- BSR is to be submitted as a part of the Annual Report.
- It contains a standardized format for companies to report the actions undertaken by them towards the adoption of responsible business practices.
- It has been designed to provide basic information about the company, information related to its performance and processes, and information on principles and core elements of the BSR.
SEBI recommendations for BSR
- As per the report, reporting may be done by top 1,000 listed companies in terms of their market capitalization or as prescribed by markets regulator SEBI.
- The reporting requirement may be extended by MCA (Ministry of Corporate Affairs) to unlisted companies above specified thresholds of turnover and/ or paid-up capital.
- The panel has suggested two formats for disclosures — a comprehensive format and a “lite version” — and also called for the implementation of the reporting requirements in a gradual and phased manner.
- Smaller unlisted companies may adopt a lite version of the format, on a voluntary basis.
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