Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 3- India's manufacturing capacity
The article highlights how India could offer the solution to the tactical issue faced by the Quad: matching China’s manufacturing capacity.
Strategic case for the Quad
- The strategic case for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad, has always been sound.
- A rising China, with its authoritarian one-party system, is a challenge to the democratic order.
- The strategic case for the Quad has, however, always faced a tactical hurdle.
- China was the factory of the world.
- It had become an almost indispensable cog in the global supply chain owing to its low-cost manufacturing prowess at a mass scale.
- How could any grouping hope to challenge China’s power-play dynamics while at the same time being dependent on its factories to sustain its economies?
Two recent development that changed the dynamic
- Two recent developments have completely changed the dynamic.
- First, Australia returned to the Malabar Naval exercises in 2020, after 13 years.
- Second, on March 12, the first summit-level meet of the Quad — comprising the US, India, Japan and Australia — is scheduled to take place.
Rise in India’s manufacturing ability
- What has changed between 2007 and 2020 that Quad 2.0 has become viable is the globally visible rise in India’s manufacturing ability.
- Consider the following examples.
1) PPE Kit manufacturing
- First, the success in PPE kits.
- At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, India was manufacturing zero PPE kits.
- India not just created an overnight world-class manufacturing capacity to meet its own needs but also started exporting PPE kits.
2) Vaccine Maitri
- Second, the soft power of Vaccine Maitri.
- The developed countries are scrambling to secure vaccines for their domestic population.
- India is not only vaccinating its own people faster than any other country but is also exporting millions of vaccines to countries in need.
- From Canada to Pakistan and from the Caribbean Islands to Brazil — Made in India vaccines have been a life vest across the globe.
3) India’s private industry
- Third, the enterprise of India’s private industry — a hallmark of the deepening manufacturing base.
- As a recent New York Times report noted, when it came to syringes — without which the vaccines were useless — the global scramble again led to Indian manufactures.
- Hindustan Syringes alone has ramped up its manufacturing capacity to almost 6,000 syringes a minute.
4) Precision high-end manufacturing
- The PLI scheme launched for electronics’ manufacturing evinced unprecedented global interest with 22 top companies, including the top manufactures for Apple and Samsung mobile phones.
- Over the next five years, a manufacturing capacity of over $150 billion and exports of $100 billion have been tied up through this scheme.
5) Figher plane manufacturing
- Fifth, the success of India’s fourth-generation fighter jet programme and the orders placed by the Indian Air Force for 83 Tejas jets.
- India’s success is one more milestone in its journey towards emerging as a global manufacturing destination.
Policy changes to make India manufacturing destination
- Concurrently, India has been reforming its economic policies to make it even more attractive as a manufacturing destination.
- India has the lowest tax rate anywhere in the world — 15 per cent for new manufacturing units.
- FDI norms have been relaxed across the board and automatic approval processes instituted for FDI even up to 100 per cent.
- Privatisation of PSUs is now an established process.
- Labour laws have been finally reformed and compliance burdens significantly eased.
- Taxation is now faceless, thus ending the spectre of rent-seeking.
- A well-functioning, world-class bankruptcy law is in place. Interest rates are low.
- And India’s digital infrastructure rivals the best in the world and in many cases beats it.
Consider the question “India’s growing prowess as the manufacturing hub could provide the Quad tactical basis by replacing China. Comment.“
Conclusion
The only arrow that was missing in the quiver of the Quad has now been attained. The strategic case for the Quad was never in doubt. The dependence on China’s factories is what kept the grouping of democracies from emerging. India has raised its hand to solve that problem.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 2- Improving the colleges
The article highlights the important role students can play in improving the quality of colleges and institution in India.
Improving the colleges
- The global QS ranking is out and India has 12 universities and institutions in the top-100 in particular subjects.
- We have many colleges offering higher education but typically they are not very good.
- Today, with a huge number of students going to college, education is tied strongly to career prospects.
- If studying and thinking harder do not lead to even a decent chance of career improvement, it is natural for most students to lose academic ambition.
Career prospects in various colleges
- For admission in IIT, many work extremely hard to secure admission, but then lose motivation and drift towards near-certain graduation.
- IIT admission is a value signal to future employers who do not see much relevance in the actual syllabus.
- The entry wall is high, the exit wall is low, and the four-year syllabus is an obstacle course between the student and an employer with whom eye contact was made from atop the entry wall itself.
- Students of varied subjects thus remain uninterested in their core syllabi.
- Lower-ranked colleges may attract a slightly different mix of employment prospects, some in core areas.
- In many colleges, both good and bad ones, high grades correlate only loosely with career outcomes.
Improving the college
- Very few jobs actually require the highest quality education — the best academic and research jobs.
- In such a system, it may not be worthwhile or even practical for a mediocre college to unilaterally improve itself.
- Having improved, it remains to convince society that it deserves to displace the pre-eminent colleges at the top.
- For lower-ranking colleges to improve itself, its students must first see useful value in a better education.
- That requires system-wide growth in opportunity.
How to achieve system-wide growth in opportunity
- Such growth cannot be legislated from above. It must occur organically, from below.
- There are several stakeholders involved in such transition.
- 1) At the top are policymakers.
- Policymakers are trying and have achieved many things.
- In recent years, however, our demographics have caught up with us.
- We have more than 650 million people under age 25.
- No other country is close. We need more than policies.
- 2) Next is industry. It faces a learning curve for technology.
- Countries that wish to lead must develop their own technology, even at high cost.
- Indian industry can often choose between importing slightly older technology from outside or developing things in-house.
- A slow growth in the latter has begun and may pull our college system upward over time.
- 3) Our next stakeholders are college teachers.
- For a college to flourish, it needs many students who compete to enroll.
- Our entrance exams for good engineering colleges are hard.
- Our nationally renowned degree colleges which admit based on board marks are frequently forced to set very high cutoffs.
- The need for more engineering colleges, for many students who are clearly good enough, has led to the creation of several private colleges that teach well in large volumes.
- Quality of teachers’ is improving.
- College teachers improve as their employers aim higher, and as their students bring more into the classroom.
- 4) Finally, we have students. If students demand better instruction, colleges will sooner or later supply it.
Way forward for students
- Students must aim to relate their learning to society.
- They must see their learning not as an obstacle course but as an initiation into a process that yields tangible long-term value.
- Indian society does not merely have people looking for work.
- It also has work looking for people: Work in food, health, design, manufacturing, transport, safety, garbage, water, energy, farming, and a hundred other things that we can do better.
- Room for improvement is plentiful, though the market models may not be efficient or mature yet.
- The walls between our classrooms and our lives must be broken, if our colleges are to flourish.
- In recent decades, India has also attracted much work from overseas. Growth in that direction may well be sustained.
Consider the question “India has many colleges and institutions offering higher education but few could get the spot in the list of top global institutes. Examine the factors responsible for this. Suggest the measures to deal with this issue.”
Conclusion
Such change, driven by student aspirations, will be organic, bottom-up, and unstoppable.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Bamiyan Buddhas
Mains level: Spread and decline of Buddhism
Two decades later after its destruction, the Bamiyan Buddhas have been brought back to life in the form of 3D projections in an event called “A Night with Buddha”.
Bamiyan Buddhas
- In their Roman draperies and with two different mudras, the Bamiyan Buddhas were great examples of a confluence of Gupta, Sassanian and Hellenistic artistic styles.
- They are said to date back to the 5th century AD and were once the tallest standing Buddhas in the world.
- Salsal and Shamama, as they were called by the locals, rose to heights of 55 and 38 metres respectively, and were said to be male and female.
- Salsal means “the light shines through the universe”; Shamama is “Queen Mother”.
- The statues were set in niches on either end of a cliffside and hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs.
Try this PYQ from CSP 2014:
Q.Lord Buddha’s image is sometimes shown with a hand gesture called ‘Bhumisparsha Mudra’. It symbolizes-
a) Buddha’s calling of the Earth to watch over Mara and to prevent Mara from disturbing his meditation
b) Buddha’s calling of the Earth to witness his purity and chastity despite the temptations of Mara
c) Buddha’s reminder to his followers that they all arise from the Earth and finally dissolve into the Earth and thus this life is transitory
d) Both the statements ‘a’ and ‘b’ are correct in this context
The significance of Bamiyan
- Bamiyan is situated in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush in the central highlands of Afghanistan.
- The valley, which is set along the line of the Bamiyan River, was once integral to the early days of the Silk Roads, providing passage for not just merchants, but also culture, religion and language.
- When the Buddhist Kushan Empire spread, acting as a crucible of sorts, Bamiyan became a major trade, cultural and religious centre.
- As China, India and Rome sought passage through Bamiyan, the Kushans were able to develop a syncretic (mix) culture.
- In the rapid spread of Buddhism between the 1st to 5th centuries AD, Bamiyan’s landscape reflected the faith, especially its monastic qualities.
Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas
- The hardline Taliban movement, which emerged in the early 1990s, was in control of almost 90 per cent of Afghanistan by the end of the decade.
- The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was part of this extremist culture.
- In February 2001, the Taliban declared its intention to destroy the statues, despite condemnation and protest from governments and cultural ambassadors’ world over.
The aftermath of the destruction
- The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas met with global criticism, many of whom saw it as a cultural crime not just against Afghanistan but also against the idea of global syncretism.
- Following the fall, UNESCO included the remains in its list of world heritage sites in 2003, with subsequent efforts made to restore and reconstruct.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Genome Mapping
Mains level: India's deep ocean mission
A team of scientists and researchers from the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) onboard its research vessel Sindhu Sadhana will work on a research project to reveal the internal working of the body of the ocean at a cellular level.
Genome Mapping of the Indian Ocean
- The first-of-its-kind research project in the country is aimed at understanding the biochemistry and the response of the ocean to climate change, nutrient stress and increasing pollution.
- The researchers will collect samples from various stretches of the ocean at an average depth of about 5 km.
- Just like gene mapping is carried out on blood samples collected from humans, the scientists will map these in the bacteria, microbes found in the ocean.
- The mapping of the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and Ribonucleic acid (RNA) will show the nutrients present in them, and also those lacking in different parts of the ocean.
Objectives of the mission
- This project will help scientists understand the internal working of the ecosystem of the Indian Ocean.
- The research will enable scientists to identify the factors controlling the changes in RNA, DNA in the oceans, and various stressors impacting them.
- The ocean has several micronutrients like nitrates, sulphates and silicates, minerals like iron ore and zinc, and trace metals like cadmium or copper.
- The genome mapping will show the presence of which these microbes have adapted to, in addition to their reaction to atmospheric carbon dioxide.
- This will help in identifying which part of the ocean has a greater concentration of which mineral or element.
- Scientists will then use these as tracers to tackle the causative factors for excess or lack of a certain mineral or element and suggest possible solutions for their mitigation.
- In addition, the large pool of RNA, DNA library of the oceans will be utilized for using the Indian Ocean for human benefit in the future.
Studying the interactions of trace metals
- Trace metals are the metals subset of trace elements; that is, metals normally present in small but measurable amounts in animal and plant cells.
- Trace metals like cadmium or copper are supplied to oceans via continental run-offs, atmospheric deposition, hydrothermal activities and continental shelf interaction.
- They are essential for ocean productivity for having a holistic understanding of nutrient cycling and productivity of the oceans.
- Isotopic forms of trace metals can be utilized to track the movement of water masses responsible for ocean circulation and as tools to study the biological, geochemical and ecosystem processes and food web analyses.
Also read
https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/explained-indias-deep-ocean-mission/
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: LUPEX Mission
Mains level: Not Much
India and Japan are working together on a joint lunar polar exploration (LUPEX) mission that aims to send a lander and rover to the Moon’s the South Pole around 2024.
Try this PYQ from CSP 2020:
Q.The experiment will employ a trio of spacecraft flying in formation in the shape of an equilateral triangle that has sides one million km long, with lasers shining between the craft.” the experiment in the question refers to?
(a) Voyager-2
(b) New horizons
(c) LISA pathfinder
(d) Evolved LISA
LUPEX Mission
- The LUPEX is a robotic lunar mission concept by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
- It would send a lunar rover and lander to explore the South Pole region of the Moon in 2024.
- JAXA is likely to provide the under-development H3 launch vehicle and the rover, while ISRO would be responsible for the lander.
- The mission concept has not yet been formally proposed for funding and planning.
- The Lunar Polar Exploration mission would demonstrate new surface exploration technologies related to vehicular transport and lunar night survival for sustainable lunar exploration in Polar Regions.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: ONORC
Mains level: Welfare of the migrant workers
Seventeen (17) States have successfully operationalised the “One Nation One Ration Card system” with Uttarakhand being the latest State to complete the reform.
Practice question for mains:
The ‘One nation one ration card ‘scheme would bring perceptible changes to the lives of India’s internal migrant workers. Comment.
One Nation One Ration Card
- This scheme aims to ensure all beneficiaries, especially migrants get ration (wheat, rice and other food grains) across the nation from any Public Distribution System (PDS) shop of their own choice.
- Under the existing system, a ration cardholder can buy food grains only from the fair price shop (FPS) in the locality where he or she lives.
- It was also launched with the purpose that no poor person should be deprived of getting subsidised food grains under the food security scheme when they shift from one place to another.
- It aims to reduce instances of corruption by middlemen and fraudulence in ration cards to avail benefits from different states.
Who is eligible under this scheme?
- Any citizen, who is declared under the Below Poverty Line (BPL) category, will be eligible to get the benefit of this scheme across the country.
- The beneficiaries will be identified on the basis of their Aadhar based identification through the electronic point of sale (PoS) device.
- All the PDS shops will have the facility of electronic PoS devices.
Impact on states
- The reform enables the States to better targeting of beneficiaries, elimination bogus/ duplicate/ineligible cardholders resulting in enhanced welfare and reduced leakage.
- An additional borrowing limit of 0.25 per cent of the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) is allowed to the States only on completion of both of the following actions:
- Aadhar Seeding of all the ration cards and beneficiaries in the State
- Automation of all the FPSs in the State.
Back2Basics: Public distribution system (PDS)
- The public distribution system (PDS) is an Indian food Security System established under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food, and Public Distribution.
- PDS evolved as a system of management of scarcity through the distribution of food grains at affordable prices.
- PDS is operated under the joint responsibility of the Central and the State Governments.
- The Central Government, through the Food Corporation of India (FCI), has assumed the responsibility for procurement, storage, transportation and bulk allocation of food grains to the State Governments.
- The operational responsibilities including allocation within the State, identification of eligible families, issue of Ration Cards and supervision of the functioning of FPSs etc., rest with the State Governments.
- Under the PDS, presently the commodities namely wheat, rice, sugar and kerosene are being allocated to the States/UTs for distribution.
- Some states/UTs also distribute additional items of mass consumption through PDS outlets such as pulses, edible oils, iodized salt, spices, etc.
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