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  • Global Geological And Climatic Events

    How the Moon ‘Wobble’ affects rising tides

    Prelims Only | Enviro & Biodiversity | Mains Paper 1: Geographical Features & Their Location

    US coastlines will face increasing flooding in the mid-2030s due to a regular lunar cycle called the wobble effect that will magnify rising sea levels caused by climate change.

    What is the Moon Wobble?

    • The moon wobble is nothing but a regular swaying in the moon’s orbit.
    • It was first documented way back in 1728.
    • This wobble takes over an 18.6-year period to complete and continues in a cyclic fashion.

    How does this wobble occur?

    • High tides on this planet are caused mostly by the pull of the moon’s gravity on a spinning Earth. On most beaches, you would see two high tides every 24 hours.
    • The moon also revolves around the Earth about once a month, and that orbit is a little bit tilted.
    • moon’s orbital plane around the Earth is at an approximate 5-degree incline to the Earth’s orbital plane around the sun.
    • Because of that, the path of the moon’s orbit seems to fluctuate over time, completing a full cycle — sometimes referred to as a nodal cycle — every 18.6 years.
    • At certain points along the cycle, the moon’s gravitational pull comes from such an angle that it yanks one of the day’s two high tides a little bit higher, at the expense of the other.
    • This does not mean that the moon itself is wobbling, nor that its gravity is necessarily pulling at our oceans any more or less than usual.

    What impact does this wobble have on Earth?

    • Influences the ebb and flow of tides: The moon wobbles impacts the gravitational pull of the moon, and therefore, indirectly influences the ebb and flow of tides here on the Earth.
    • One half of the 18.6-year cycle suppresses the tides, which means that the high tides get lower, while the low tides get higher than normal.
    • Once this cycle completes, the situation flips—in the subsequent cycle, the tides are amplified, with high tides getting higher and low tides, lower.
    • The lunar cycle is expected to shift again by mid-2030, and in the coming phase, the tides will amplify once again.

    Moon wobble and climate change

    • The upcoming changes in the lunar cycle will pose a serious threat, as the amplified high tides coupled with the rising sea levels will make the risk of flooding far greater across all coastal regions of the globe.
    • The study predicts that the high tide-associated floods—also known as nuisance floods or sunny day floods—may occur in clusters that could last for months or even for longer periods!
    • This surge will be closely associated with the position of the Moon, Earth and the Sun.
    • When the Moon and Earth line up in specific ways with each other and the Sun, the resulting gravitational pull and the ocean’s corresponding response may leave city-dwellers coping with floods every day or two.

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  • Climate Change Impact on India and World – International Reports, Key Observations, etc.

    Places in news: Great Barrier Reef

    India Mapping | Enviro & Biodiversity | Mains Paper 1: Important Geophysical Phenomena

    Chinese official has said that political tensions between Beijing and Australia were not behind a UNESCO recommendation to place the Great Barrier Reef on its endangered list.

    Great Barrier Reef

    • The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands.
    • It is stretched for over 2,300 kilometres over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres.
    • The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
    • It was world heritage listed in 1981 by UNESCO as the most extensive and spectacular coral reef ecosystem on the planet.

    Importance of Corals

    Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth.

    • They support more species per unit area than any other marine environment, including about 4,000 species of fish, 800 species of hard corals and hundreds of other species.
    • This biodiversity is considered key to finding new medicines for the 21st century.
    • Medical use: Many drugs are now being developed from coral reef animals and plants as possible cures for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, viruses, and other diseases.
    • Fisheries: Healthy coral reefs support commercial and subsistence fisheries as well as jobs and businesses through tourism and recreation.
    • Local economies receive billions of dollars from visitors to reefs through diving tours, recreational fishing trips, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses based near reef ecosystems.
    • Coral reef structures also buffer shorelines against 97 per cent of the energy from waves, storms, and floods, helping to prevent loss of life, property damage, and erosion.

    Answer this PYQ in the comment box:

    Q.Consider the following statements:

    1. Most of the world’s coral reefs are in tropical waters.
    2. More than one-third of the world’s coral reefs are located in the territories of Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
    3. Coral reefs host far more number of animal phyla than those hosted by tropical rainforests.

    Which of the above statements is/are correct?

    (a) 1 and 2 only

    (b) 3 only

    (c) 1 and 3 only

    (d) 1 and 3 only

    Back2Basisc: Coral Reef

    • Coral reefs are built by and made up of thousands of tiny animals—coral “polyps”—that are related to anemones and jellyfish.
    • Polyps are shallow-water organisms that have a soft body covered by a calcareous skeleton. The polyps extract calcium salts from seawater to form these hard skeletons.
    • The polyps live in colonies fastened to the rocky seafloor.
    • The tubular skeletons grow upwards and outwards as a cemented calcareous rocky mass collectively called corals.
    • When the coral polyps die, they shed their skeleton on which new polyps grow.
    • The cycle is repeated for millions of years leading to the accumulation of layers of corals shallow rock created by these depositions is called a reef.

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  • Cyber Security – CERTs, Policy, etc

    Back in news: Pegasus Spyware

    Prelims Only | Security Issues | Mains Paper 3: Cyber Security

    Telephone numbers of some noted Indian journalists were successfully snooped upon by an unidentified agency using Pegasus software.

    Pegasus Spyware

    • All spyware do what the name suggests — they spy on people through their phones.
    • Pegasus works by sending an exploit link, and if the target user clicks on the link, the malware or the code that allows the surveillance is installed on the user’s phone.
    • A presumably newer version of the malware does not even require a target user to click a link.
    • Once Pegasus is installed, the attacker has complete access to the target user’s phone.
    • The first reports on Pegasus’s spyware operations emerged in 2016, when Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the UAE, was targeted with an SMS link on his iPhone 6.

    What is the new threat?

    • Pegasus has evolved from its earlier spear-phishing methods using text links or messages to ‘zero-click’ attacks which do not require any action from the phone’s user.
    • This had made what was without a doubt the most powerful spyware out there, more potent and almost impossible to detect or stop.

    How do zero-click attacks work?

    • A zero-click attack helps spyware like Pegasus gain control over a device without human interaction or human error.
    • Zero-click attacks are hard to detect given their nature and hence even harder to prevent.
    • Detection becomes even harder in encrypted environments where there is no visibility on the data packets being sent or received.
    • Most of these attacks exploit software that receive data even before it can determine whether what is coming in is trustworthy or not, like an email client.

    Answer this PYQ from CSP 2018:

    Q.The terms ‘WannaCry, Petya, Eternal Blue’ sometimes mentioned news recently are related to

    (a) Exoplanets

    (b) Crypto currency

    (c) Cyber attacks

    (d) Mini satellites

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  • A panoramic look at our three decades of economic reforms

    | Economics | Mains Paper 3: Indian Economy

    Context

    This month marks the 30th anniversary of the economic reforms launched by our then finance minister Manmohan Singh in his budget speech of 24 July 1991.

    After and before reform comparison

    •  The average annual growth over the past three decades has been 5.8% per annum.
    • It is slightly higher than 5.6% in the decade before 1991.
    • Clearly, our growth acceleration was not sustained, despite a pick-up in the pace of reforms.
    • However, on a long-term comparison, the economy did better than its 4.1% average of the first 40 years of independence.
    • But if we compare our first four decades with the pre-1947 phase, and on that score, we saw a massive growth improvement.

    Impact of reforms

    • Their biggest contribution was a change in India’s economic paradigm.
    • Every government after 1991 has embraced the philosophy of liberalization and privatization that those reforms initiated and has tried to outdo the previous regimes on that.
    • Still, 30 years on, the situation for most of our population remains unchanged.
    • The reforms created a class of rich entrepreneurs and a small but vocal middle class in urban areas.
    • But it also contributed to widening inequality, which has worsened after 1991 and is now at its worst level since 1947 on almost all dimensions.
    • The widening of disparities also occurred between urban and rural areas, between laggard states and developed ones.
    • Disparities have increased even further in terms of access to health and education and several other human- development indicators.
    • On most of these, be it education, health, women’s workforce participation and hunger, we remain at the bottom of any global chart of comparison.
    • The logic of reforms meant that expenditure on welfare and investment in human development were not a policy priority.
    • The situation is no different on employment, with data suggesting an absolute decline on this count and a historic rise in unemployment rates.
    • An official consumption survey that was not accepted about two years ago by the Centre had shown, a decline in real consumption and a rise in poverty.
    • Rising informalization and contractualization of the country’s workforce has been a factor in the worsening of most workers’ working conditions.

    Why reforms failed to deliver

    • In many ways, they are no different from our pre-reform economic policies, all of which were supply- side responses.
    • The reforms attempted to use the private sector for the task through a liberalized regulatory framework and business-friendly fiscal and monetary policies.
    • But an absence of concern for distributional inequities and aggregate-demand management has continued as the defining feature of our economic policymaking.
    • The consequences of supply-side- biased reforms will show up in a further worsening of income distribution and eventually slow growth down.

    Conclusion

    Things have taken a turn for the worse with the pandemic. The problem this time is not like the 1991 crisis. What is needed at this point is a fundamental shift in the way economic policy is designed, keeping people and workers at the centre of the exercise.

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  • Labour, Jobs and Employment – Harmonization of labour laws, gender gap, unemployment, etc.

    Need for social security to migrant and informal workers

    op-ed snap | Governance | Mains Paper 2: Schemes For Vulnerable Sections

    Context

    The migrants’ crisis after the two covid waves compelled policy-makers to make certain provisions for them in the schemes announced for the assistance of the poor.

    Supreme Court judgement on the issue

    • On June 29, the Supreme Court finally delivered its judgment on the plight of migrant labour.
    • The judgement was notable for two main reasons.
    • First, it recognised that there was the large-scale exclusion of migrant workers and other informal workers from existing schemes due to the lack of their registration and outdated eligibility lists.
    • It noted that no benefits will be denied to migrant workers for want of an Aadhaar card and that food assistance will be provided for migrants who were not covered by the National Food Security Act.
    • Second, it connected informal workers and migrant workers, both of whom experience exclusion, and mandated that the portal for registration of all informal/migrant workers should be fully operational before July 31.

    Advantages of providing social protection

    • Investment in social protection is not charity, it is an investment in workers’ productivity and in equitable growth.
    • Providing social protection is, as the UN mooted in 2009 when it spelt out the social protection floor (SPF) initiative after the global financial crisis, the surest way out of a crisis by boosting demand at the bottom of the pyramid.
    • The report of the Advisory Committee of the ILO, in which India was represented by its labour secretary, provides a strong rationale for instituting a universal SPF during economic crises.
    • As a result, all constituents of the ILO adopted Recommendation 202 on social protection floors at the International Labour Conference in 2012.

    Inadequate provisions by government

    • The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, was approved by Parliament in December 2008.
    • But it lacks the mandatory elements of the NCEUS’s proposals and included neither a National Minimum Social Security Package, nor the provision for mandatory registration.
    • Estimates show that the central government’s expenditure on all major social protection programmes declined from 1.96 per cent of GDP in 2008-09 to 1.6 per cent in 2013-14 and to only 1.28 per cent in 2019-20.

    Way forward

    • The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) had pointed out that the circular migrant workers were a disadvantaged segment among informal workers.
    • Comprehensive law: The NCEUS had advocated a comprehensive law for the protection of the rights of all informal workers, including migrants, home workers, and domestic workers.
    • Universal registration: NCEUS had also recommended a universal registration mechanism based on self-declaration, with the issuance of a smart social security card, and a National Minimum Social Security Package.
    • Guaranteed social security/social protection: We need the provision of a minimum level of guaranteed social security/social protection for all informal workers and their households within a definite time frame.
    • More public spending: Guaranteed social protection would involve a clear framework and a commitment to greater public resources being spent on social protection as a large class of workers in India do not have an identifiable employer and a contributory social insurance framework will not work for them.
    • Recommendation 202: Government should embrace ILO’s Recommendation 202 and work towards these in a time-bound manner.

    Conclusion

    To end the silent, painful, and enduring crisis for the workers, as well as the crisis for the economy, the government must urgently recognise the right to social security, embedded both in the Indian Constitution and international covenants.

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  • Can India invoke state sovereignty in Cairn Energy case?

    op-ed snap | Economics | Mains Paper 3: Infrastructure: Energy, Ports, Roads, Airports, Railways Etc.

    Context

    Last year, an arbitration tribunal indicted India for breaching its obligations by imposing taxes retrospectively on Cairn. As a result, Cairn Energy has been attempting to seize Indian assets in several jurisdictions to recover $1.7 billion due from India.

    How asset seizure order affects India?

    • This episode projects India as an unfriendly country for investors at a time when it wishes to project itself as a prime destination for foreign investment.
    • This episode puts India in the league of countries like Pakistan, Congo, Venezuela, Russia and Argentina, who have been part of attachment proceedings overseas due to their failure to comply with international arbitral awards.
    • Fighting cases will consume an enormous amount of time, money, and resources, in addition to attracting bad press internationally.

    Understanding the doctrine of state immunity

    • State immunity is a well-recognised doctrine in international law.
    • It safeguards a state and its property against the jurisdiction of another country’s domestic courts.
    • Despite the universal acceptance of this doctrine, there is no international legal instrument in force administering its implementation.
    • Attempts are underway to create binding international law on the application of the rules of state immunity such as the United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property (UNSCI).
    • However, this convention is yet to be ratified by 30 countries — the minimum number required to bring it in force, as per Article 30(1) of UNSCI.
    • India has signed the convention, but not ratified it.
    • The doctrine of state immunity has progressed from absolute immunity to restrictive immunity in which immunity is only for the sovereign functions of the state.

    Can India invoke state immunity?

    • Most prominent jurisdictions follow the concept of restrictive immunity.
    • State immunity can be invoked to resist the seizure of sovereign assets, but not commercial properties. 
    • In the context of the execution of the investment treaty arbitration awards, properties serving commercial functions are available for seizure.
    • In the case of India, the most popular commercial property that foreign investors would target for attachment are the global assets of India’s public sector undertakings such as Air India.

    Way forward

    • If India wishes to continue the case, it needs to carefully study the laws on state immunity in different jurisdictions where attachment proceedings are likely to come up.
    • A better option would be to admit that amending the tax law retrospectively was a mistake and comply with the international ruling.

    Conclusion

    At the time when India seeks to project itself as an attractive investment destination, such cases could be a setback. India needs to avoid such disputes in the future.

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  • Freedom of Speech – Defamation, Sedition, etc.

    Explained: Shreya Singhal case that struck down Section 66A of IT Act

    | Polity | Mains Paper 2: Indian Constitution – historical underpinnings, evolution, features, amendments, significant provisions and basic structure

    Six years after it struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Supreme Court earlier this month termed its continued use by law enforcement agencies of various states as “a shocking state of affairs” and sought a response from the Centre.

    What did Section 66A do?

    • Introduced in 2008, the amendment to the IT Act, 2000, gave the government power to arrest and imprison an individual for allegedly “offensive and menacing” online posts, and was passed without discussion in Parliament.
    • Section 66A empowered police to make arrests over what policemen, in terms of their subjective discretion, could construe as “offensive” or “menacing” or for the purposes of causing annoyance, inconvenience, etc.
    • It prescribed the punishment for sending messages through a computer or any other communication device like a mobile phone or a tablet, and a conviction could fetch a maximum of three years in jail.
    • In 2015, the apex court struck down the law in the landmark case Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, calling it “open-ended and unconstitutionally vague”, and thus expanded the contours of free speech to the Internet.

    Why was the law criticized?

    • The problem was with the vagueness about what is “offensive”.
    • The word having a very wide connotation was open to distinctive, varied interpretations.
    • It was seen as subjective, and what might have been innocuous for one person, could lead to a complaint from someone else and, consequently, an arrest arbitrarily.

    So, how did 66A come under the Supreme Court’s scrutiny?

    • The first petition came up in the court following the arrest of two girls in Maharashtra by Thane Police in November 2012 over a Facebook post.
    • The girls had made comments on the shutdown of Mumbai for the funeral of a political leader.
    • The arrests triggered outrage from all quarters over the manner in which the cyber law was used.
    • The petition was filed by Shreya Singhal, then a 21-year-old law student.

    What were the grounds for the challenge?

    • The objective behind the 2008 amendment was to prevent the misuse of information technology, particularly through social media.
    • The petitioners argued that Section 66A came with extremely wide parameters, which allowed whimsical interpretations by law enforcement agencies.
    • Most of the terms used in the section had not been specifically defined under the Act.
    • The law was a potential tool to gag legitimate free speech online and to curtail freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the Constitution, going far beyond the ambit of “reasonable restrictions” on that freedom.

    What did the Supreme Court decide?

    • In March 2015, a bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and R.F. Nariman ruled in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India declared Section 66A unconstitutional for “being violative of Article 19(1)(a) and not saved under Article 19(2).”
    • Article 19(1)(a) gives people the right to speech and expression whereas 19(2) accords the state the power to impose “reasonable restrictions” on the exercise of this right.
    • The decision was considered a landmark judicial pushback against state encroachment on the freedom of speech and expression.
    • The bench also read down Section 79– now at the centre of the ongoing “intermediary liability” battle between the Centre and micro-blogging platform Twitter– defining key rules for the relationship between governments and commercial internet platforms.
    • Section 79 says that any intermediary shall not be held legally or otherwise liable for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hosted on its platform.

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  • Civil Aviation Sector – CA Policy 2016, UDAN, Open Skies, etc.

    Draft Drone Rules, 2021

    Bills/Act/Laws | Governance | Mains Paper 2: Bilateral, Regional and Global Groupings and agreements involving India

    The Ministry of Civil Aviation has released Draft Drone Rules, 2021, for public consultation. The rules will replace the Unmanned Aircraft System Rules, 2021.

    Highlights of the Draft Drone Rules 2021

    Number of forms: The rules propose to reduce the number of forms required for manufacturing, importing, testing, certifying and operating drones in India from 25 to six.

    Abolishing authorization number: The draft seeks to abolish the unique authorisation number, unique prototype identification number, and certificate of conformance that were previously required for approval of drone flights.

    Digital Sky Platform: Digital Sky, a platform launched by the government in December 2018, will become a single-window system for all approvals under the newly proposed rules.

    Airspace map: An airspace map segregating the entire landmass of India into Green, Yellow and Red zones will be published on the platform within 30 days of notification of the new rules, the government said. The map will also be machine-readable through an Application Programming Interface (API) for easier plotting of drone flight paths.

    Airport Perimeter: The draft rules reduced the airport perimeter from 45 km to 12 km. The rules state that no flight permissions would be required to fly up to 400 feet in green zones and up to 200 feet in the area between 8 and 12 km from the airport perimeter.

    Drone corridors: The government will also publish a policy framework for Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) within 60 days of notifying the rules. This will also include frameworks for developing “drone corridors” for the safe transfer of goods by drones.

    Drone Promotion Council: The Rules also propose the setting up of a Drone Promotion Council, with the aim of facilitating a business-friendly regulatory regime for drones in India, the establishment of incubators for developing drone technologies and organizing competitive events to showcase drones and counter-drone solutions.

    Others: To implement safety features such as “no permission, no take-off”, real-time tracking and geofencing, drone manufacturers, importers and operators will get six months’ time to comply from the date of notification of the rules.

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  • Modern Indian History-Events and Personalities

    When were Tilak and Gandhi tried under the Sedition Law?

    Prelims Only | | Mains Paper 1: Modern Indian History

    Recently, Chief Justice of India N V Ramana observed that the “colonial law” was used by the British to silence Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

    Must read:

    Sedition Law and its discontents

    Use of sedition law through history

    • According to the LOC blog, the first known instance of the application of the law was the trial of newspaper editor Jogendra Chandra Bose in 1891.
    • Other prominent examples of the application of the law include the trials of Tilak and Gandhi.
    • Apart from this, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar were also charged with sedition.

    When was sedition law used against Gandhi and Tilak?

    • In 1922, Gandhi was arrested on charges of sedition in Bombay for taking part in protests against the colonial government.
    • He was sentenced to six years in prison but was released after two years because of medical reasons.
    • Before Gandhi, Tilak faced three trials in cases related to sedition and was imprisoned twice.
    • He was charged with sedition in 1897 for writing an article in his weekly publication called Kesari and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment.
    • He has tried again in 1908 and was represented by MA Jinnah. But his application for bail was rejected and he was sentenced to six years.
    • The second time he was tried was also because of his writings, one of which referred to the murder of European women in Muzzafarpur when bombs were thrown by Bengali revolutionaries.
    • Interestingly, the judge who announced Tilak’s sentence in the second trial, Justice DD Davar, had represented him in his first trial in 1897.

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  • Digital India Initiatives

    [pib] Kisan Sarathi Platform

    PIB | Agriculture | Mains Paper 3: E-Technology In The Aid Of Farmers

    In order to facilitate farmers to get ‘right information at right time’ in their desired language, a digital platform namely ‘Kisan Sarathi’ was launched by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

    Kisan Sarathi

    • This digital platform empowers farmers with the technological interventions to reach farmers in remote areas.
    • Through this platform, the farmers can interact and avail personalized advisories on agriculture and allied areas directly from the respective scientists of Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVKs).
    • Using this platform, farmers can get information about crop and crop production, among other things that will help them in improving the quantity of their produce.
    • Farmers will be able to get information about good crop practices, the right amount of products and many other basic things.

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