General Studies Paper 2

Introduction:

• India is moving towards a future where the elderly will make up a significant proportion of society, primarily due to advances in health care and increased life expectancy. In 2011, about 9% of India’s population were over the age of 60. This is expected to increase to 12.5% by 2030.
• The elderly represent a storehouse of wisdom, and respect for their rights and freedoms benefits society. On International Day of Older Persons (October 1), we must resolve to invest in the health of our elderly population, and pay attention to their unique needs. This is especially true in the case of tuberculosis (TB), which affects over 25 lakh Indians every year, and kills at least 1,000 every day.

Tuberculosis (TB)

• It is an infectious disease usually caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs (pulmonary TB), but it can also affect other parts of the body (extra-pulmonary TB).
• Most infections show no symptoms, in which case it is known as latent tuberculosis. Around 10% of latent infections progress to active disease which, if left untreated, kill about half of those affected.
• Typical symptoms of active TB are chronic cough with blood-containing mucus, fever, night sweats, and weight loss.

• India’s National TB Prevalence Survey, 2021, revealed that the prevalence of TB in people over the age of 55 was 588 (per one lakh population), much higher than the overall national prevalence of 316. These findings were the starting point for a first of its kind rapid assessment report on TB among the elderly, which we published earlier this year in collaboration with the National TB Elimination Programme (NTBEP) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), highlighting TB’s impact on the elderly and the need for age specific TB guidelines.

How TB impacts the elderly

• Symptoms of TB including cough, fatigue and weight loss are mistaken as signs of other diseases or dismissed as signs of old age. The risk of having a TB diagnosis delayed or missed altogether is higher for the elderly compared to other adults.
• Once diagnosed, management of TB among the elderly is often complicated by multiple comorbidities, particularly diabetes.
• Challenges in accessing health services: in rural and hilly areas, they struggle to travel to health facilities by themselves.
• Their access to reliable information on health is also limited — social networks inevitably shrink for the elderly.
• Older persons also experience infrastructure related challenges such as lack of adequate seating and lack of disable-friendly public infrastructure.
• Crucially, they may not have access to high quality nutritious food, which is critical for recovery.
• Most people over the age of 60 are no longer working; they are living off savings or they are completely dependent on families. There are some social welfare schemes for the elderly but these are limited in scope and difficult to access.
• Absence of social and emotional support systems: Many older people refer to their fragile mental health, accentuated by the loss of purpose and connection, loneliness from losing spouses or family, and the anxiety of not being ‘useful’.
• Ageism has been recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a cause of poor health and social isolation.

Way forward: Building age responsive care

• We design and deliver TB care that is elder-friendly in following ways:
• We must move away from disease specific, vertical care programmes to holistic care models that reduce the need for the elderly to interact with multiple providers and facilities.
• Build capacity among health professionals at all levels for an improved clinical understanding of TB in the elderly and better management of multiple morbidities.
• Case finding among the elderly can be improved through (a) effective sputum collection, (b) transportation systems (c ) access to mobile diagnostic vans (d) active case finding at geriatric OPDs, residential homes for the elderly and other institutional settings.
• Technical and operational protocols that provide clear guidance on diagnosing and treating TB in the elderly —sample extraction protocols, comprehensive assessment of comorbidities and drug dosage adjustments etc.
• To address socioeconomic needs, we must have support protocols, with inputs from elderly people with TB. Examples include (a) an elder focused community care model with linkages to local caregivers; (b) doorstep delivery of medicines; (c ) age responsive peer support and counseling for older people and their families; (d) special help desks for the elderly at facilities; (e) support with documentation to access social support schemes.
• At a macro level, we must ensure rigorous gender and age disaggregated collection and analysis of data, to identify TB trends across age groups, and to make sure that the elderly are included as a separate age category in all TB reports.
• An important step towards building elderly friendly systems is strengthening collaboration within the health system.

• Finally, we need a stronger research agenda focused on TB in the elderly, (a) to better understand State Specific trends in case finding and outcomes among elderly people with TB; (b) substance use; (c ) drug resistance and comorbidity patterns across geographies; (d) uptake of TB preventive therapy in the elderly; (e) and intersectionality with other aspects of equity such as gender, disability, class, and caste.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• On the final declaration of the G-20 Summit, India missed a great opportunity to protect worker rights and advance the welfare of workers during the G-20 summit, despite the G-20’s Labour 20 (L20), a coalition of G20 leaders concerned about workers, holding two meetings in India.

An exploitative labour system

• The Indian government should have taken the opportunity to address the serious issues facing workers in India, such as forced labour, modern-day slavery, and the kafala system in the Arab Gulf where some nine million Indians are working under exploitative working conditions.
• The Arab Gulf countries follow an exploitative labour system called the kafala system, which ties migrant workers to their employers.
• This system makes it difficult for migrant workers to leave their jobs or change employers, and it increases the risk of forced labour and modern-day slavery.
• Portable insurance schemes are important, but they are not enough.
• Workers also need job creation, decent working conditions, equal pay, gender equality, the elimination of forced labour and child labour, an end to modern-day slavery, and the protection of their rights and the welfare of their families.
• It would have been a relief for the Indian working class, especially in the Arab Gulf, had these issues been prioritised and debated at the G-20.

The scenario of migrant workers in India

• India is the world’s largest migrant-sending country, with an estimated 13 million workers abroad. Of these, an estimated nine million are working in exploitative conditions in the Arab Gulf.
• But the exploitation of Indian workers is not limited to the Arab Gulf.
• In India itself, workers in a number of industries, including textiles, brick kilns, shrimp farming, copper manufacturing, stone cutting, and plantations, face forced labour and modern-day slavery.
• Many would be surprised with the term forced labour and modern-day slavery. According to the International Labour Organization, forced or compulsory labour is “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily”.
• It must be noted that India has signed and ratified the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention known as C29.
• In other words, forced labour is different from substandard or exploitative working conditions.
• Various indicators can be used to ascertain when a situation amounts to forced labour, such as restrictions on workers’ freedom of movement, withholding of wages or identity documents, physical or sexual violence, threats and intimidation or fraudulent debt from which workers cannot escape.

The underlying issues

• Workers who are paid less or unpaid for overtime, under the threat of being fired if they ask for it, are victims of forced labour.
• Workers who are forced to work until they have paid off a loan they took from the company are also victims of forced labour.
• Companies that withhold workers’ identity documents, such as Aadhaar cards or ration cards, and deny them access to the documents when required until the work is done are also engaging in forced labour.
• Issuing threats of sexual, physical, or mental abuse in order to get the work done is also forced labour.
• In addition, we should not forget that the move by the Union government to consolidate the labour laws into four labour codes is drawing protests from trade unions, civil societies, and workers, who allege that it will have a negative impact on decent working conditions.

Conclusion

• Addressing forced labour and modern day slavery is important for India because the exploitation of workers would increase inequality, unstable social justice and threaten democracy.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• A total of 10 tigers (six cubs and four adults) have died in the Nilgiris since the middle of August. The inability of the state forest department to trace the whereabouts of the two mother tigresses has raised concerns among conservationists about the welfare of the animals.

The instances

• The first reported tiger deaths occurred on August 16 in the buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) in Siriyur.
• After conducting a postmortem on the remains, forest department officials said that they suspect that the cubs, believed to be only two weeks old, could have died due to starvation or umbilical infection.
• The second death was suspected by the officials due to injuries after fighting with another animal. Another suspected incident of the tigers, a sub-adult, was found with injury marks, indicating that it too died due to a fight with another animal.
• After an investigation, a man was arrested for poisoning the carcass of the cow in retaliation for the tiger hunting the animal.

The concern

• In February this year, the forest department arrested four poachers from Rajasthan who had allegedly poached a tiger in the areas surrounding a few kilometres away from where the two tigers were found dead.
• In addition, the inability of the forest department to track down the two mothers of the six tiger cubs that died in Siriyur and Kadanad has raised concerns over their well-being.
• Camera traps and tiger trackers continue to look for the animals, but with little luck.
• One of the theories put forward by senior forest department officials is that the high density of tigers in the Mudumalai-Bandipur-Nagarhole complex of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve is pushing populations into the surrounding habitats in the Mukurthi National Park, Nilgiris and Gudalur forest divisions.
• This leads to increased competition between animals and more fighting, resulting in more deaths.
• Conservationists worry that this increase in population could lead to more negative human-animal interactions in the near future.
• They emphasise the need to regenerate degraded habitats that can be re-colonised by the tigers’ prey such as Sambar, spotted deer and the Indian gaur.

The response

• To allay fears that poachers could be targeting tigers, the forest department plans to set up anti-poaching camps in six forest ranges surrounding the Mukurthi National Park.
• There are also plans to begin annual monitoring of tiger populations in the Nilgiris Forest Division, with the population size, range of each individual animal and other parameters to be recorded for better management.
• They have also increased perambulation of areas surrounding key tiger habitats in Mukurthi and Mudumalai.

Conclusion

• The process of tiger conservation should be more dynamic and compatible with the future possibilities of climatic changes as well.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• In its latest report released this March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivers a stark warning: climate change heightens the global risk of infectious diseases.

Climate change, more infections

• Habitat loss forces disease-carrying animals to encroach upon human territory, increasing the risk of human-animal interaction and the transfer of pathogens from wildlife to humans.
• Viruses which do not harm animals can be fatal for humans.
• Nipah virus, which has been causing outbreaks in Kerala for many years now, is a good example.
• Over half of all-known infectious diseases threatening humans worsen with changing climate patterns.
• Diseases often find new transmission routes, including environmental sources, medical tourism, and contaminated food and water from once-reliable sources.
• This dynamic introduces invasive species and extends the range of existing life forms.
• Both these trigger upheavals in ecosystems that are complex and confound ecologists and epidemiologists to predict outbreaks.
• Human-induced climate change is unleashing an unprecedented health vulnerability crisis.
• India, in particular, has felt the ominous impact, with early summers and erratic monsoons causing water scarcity across the Gangetic plains and Kerala.
• These climatic shifts are manifesting in severe health crises, including a dengue epidemic in Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Kolkata and the Nipah outbreak in Kerala.

Surveillance and reporting

• Changed disease scenarios require a revision of strategies to detect and deal with them.
• The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) was rolled out in a few States in 2007.
• From reporting 553 outbreaks in 2008, it last reported 1,714 in 2017.
• It was phased out in favour of a new, a web-enabled, near-real-time electronic information system called Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP).
• The current design of surveillance is not adequate for the emerging disease scenario.
• Mitigating the spread of climate change-induced diseases requires safeguarding ecosystems, curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and implementing active pathogen surveillance.
• A unified approach, termed One Health which integrates monitoring human, animal, plant, and environmental health, recognises this interconnectedness.
• This approach is pivotal in preventing outbreaks, especially those that originate from animals.
• It encompasses zoonotic diseases, neglected tropical diseases, vector-borne diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental contamination.
• India must launch One Health and infectious disease control programmes by building greater synergies between the Centre and States and their varied specialised agencies.
• Animal husbandry, forest and wildlife, municipal corporations, and public health departments need to converge and set up robust surveillance systems.
• More importantly, they will need to build trust and confidence, share data, and devise logical lines of responsibility and work with a coordinating agency.
• So far, the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister has been taking this lead but with new World Bank and other large funding in place, this will need greater coordination and management.

‘Disease x’ and beyond

• Globally, there is an obsession with the enigmatic “disease X,” but it is the familiar annual cycles of known agents such as influenza, measles, Japanese encephalitis, dengue, diarrhoea among others that will continue to test the public health system.
• Climate change is not limited to infectious diseases. It also exacerbates injuries and deaths from extreme weather events, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and mental health issues.

Conclusion

• The re-emergence of Nipah in Kerala is a wake-up call, that mere biomedical response to diseases is inadequate. In the face of a changing climate and the growing threat of infectious diseases, protecting ecosystems, fostering collaboration, and embracing the One Health paradigm are our best defences.

General Studies Paper 3

Introduction

• The problem with the fertilisation of land is as old as agriculture itself. When early humans first began to engage in settled agriculture, they quickly realised that while crops require nutrients for their growth, repeated cycles of cultivation and harvest depleted these nutrients, reducing yield over time.

The change in practices

• This observation led to practices to restore essential nutrients in the soil necessary for plant and crop growth.
• Indigenous communities around the world developed methods of fertilisation, for example, using fish remnants and bird droppings (guano) as fertilisers.
• This changed in the 19th century, which saw significant advancements in chemistry, leading to the creation of synthetic fertilisers as well as the identification of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
• The Green Revolution of the mid-20th century accelerated the adoption of high-yield crop varieties and intensive use of these fertilisers, and today these substances are crucial to sustain global food production.

The issues with Phosphorus

• Phosphorus is scarce and exists only in limited quantities, in certain geological formations.
• Not only are we running out of it, it also pollutes the environment.
• It doesn’t exist as a gas, which means it can only move from land to water, where it leads to algal blooms and eutrophication.

Geopolitics and phosphorus

• The history of phosphorus spans its discovery in guano to current global supply chains.
• The world’s largest reserves are in Morocco and the Western Sahara region.
• But here, phosphorus coexists with cadmium, a heavy metal that can accumulate in animal and human kidneys when ingested.
• Removing cadmium is also an expensive process.
• As a result, cadmium-laden fertilisers are often applied to the soil, absorbed by crops, and consumed, bioaccumulating in our bodies.
• Studies have found that this accelerates heart disease.
• Only six countries have substantial cadmium-free phosphorous reserves.
• Of them, China restricted exports in 2020 and many EU countries no longer buy from Russia. So the market for safe phosphorus has suddenly exploded.
• This is one reason why Sri Lanka banned the import of synthetic fertilisers and went organic in 2021, later experiencing a sudden drop in crop yield that precipitated a political crisis.
• Today, India is the world’s largest importer of phosphorus, most of it from the cadmium-laden deposits of West Africa.
• Not all crops absorb cadmium at the same rate, but paddy, a staple crop in India, is particularly susceptible; Indian farmers also apply a lot of fertilisers to paddy.
• Other grains, such as wheat, barley, and maize also absorb cadmium, just less.

The phosphorus disposal problem

• First, only about a fifth of the phosphorus mined is actually consumed through food. Much of it is lost directly to water bodies as agricultural run-off, due to the excessive application of fertilisers.
• Second, most of the phosphorus that people consume ends up in the sewage. Most sewage in India is still not treated or treated only up to the secondary level.
• So even if the organic matter is digested, the effluent discharged from STPs still contains nitrates and phosphates.
• Of these, nitrates can be digested by denitrifying bacteria and released safely as nitrogen gas into the atmosphere, while phosphorus remains trapped in the sediments and water column.
• It is then absorbed by the algal blooms that grow in response to the high nutrient supply, and when they decompose, the bacteria that feed on them consume the dissolved oxygen.
• The result: water bodies become oxygen-starved, leading to fish deaths. The algal blooms are also toxic, causing respiratory issues, nausea, and other ailments to people exposed to them.

Finding phosphorus elsewhere

• Since much of the phosphorus is not actually taken up by crops, one way to ameliorate the phosphorus paucity is to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers through precision agriculture.
• Low-input agro-ecological approaches are increasingly proving to be a viable alternative.
• But there is increasing interest in closing the phosphorous loop by mining urban sewage to produce high quality phosphorus.
• Interest in ‘circular water economies’ has in fact prompted the European Union – which has almost no phosphorus reserves of its own – to rethink the urban water cycle.
• First, source separating toilets – almost two thirds of the phosphorus we consume leaves in our urine and the rest in faeces.
• Urine also contains large amounts of nitrogen and potassium. If we can collect this safe and concentrated waste stream, we could generate a local fertiliser source.
• Second, recycling wastewater and sludge – Sewage recycling already occurs in some form in India today.

Way forward

• The best way is to create a circular water economy. If the technology is cheap enough, can we give a concession to set up STPs with phosphorus mining plants and allow them to sell the fertiliser.
• And such changes, India can become less dependent on uncertain geopolitical crises; farmers can procure fertilisers at affordable rates; water bodies will have some hope of becoming swimmable and public health can gain from the consumption of food grown in cadmium-free soils.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The Parliament Standing Committee on Education tabled a report during the special session of Parliament on the “Implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 in Higher Education.”

About

• The panel met representatives of various State governments, Union Ministries, higher education institutions and other stakeholders to prepare the report.
• The report noted that of the 1,043 universities functioning in the country, 70% are under the State Act and that 94% of students are in State or private institutions with just 6% of students in Central higher educational institutions, stressing the importance of States in providing higher education.

The issues

• The 31-member panel tried to discuss issues such as the rigid separation of disciplines, limited access to higher education in socio-economically disadvantaged areas, lack of higher education institutes (HEIs) that teach in local languages, the limited number of faculty, lack of institutional autonomy, lesser emphasis on research, ineffective regulatory system and low standards of undergraduate education.
• The panel said that by 2030, every district in the country should have at least one multidisciplinary HEI and that the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education, including vocational education, should be increased from 26.3% in 2018 to 50% by 2035.

The recommendations

• The panel asked the Union Government and the State Governments to take actions such as earmarking suitable funds for the education of Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Groups (SEDGs), setting clear targets for higher Gross Enrolment Ratio for SEDGs, enhancing gender balance in admissions to HEIs, providing more financial assistance and scholarships to SEDGs in both public and private HEIs, making admission processes and curriculum more inclusive, increasing employability potential of higher education programmes and for developing more degree courses taught in regional languages and bilingually.
• The panel also recommended specific infrastructural steps to help physically challenged students and a strict enforcement of all no-discrimination and anti-harassment rules.
• The Committee appreciated the manner in which the NEP was implemented in Jammu and Kashmir.
• It said that the Union Territory was among the first in the country to implement NEP from the academic session 2022 in all its higher educational institutions.
• The panel said it witnessed a paradigm shift in the methods of teaching, leading to lifelong learning opportunities to students.

The funding

• The Committee suggested improving the effectiveness and impact of the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) in funding HEIs.
• It asked the HEFA to diversify its funding sources beyond government allocations and explore partnerships with private sector organisations, philanthropic foundations, and international financial institutions.
• It recommended reviewing and adjusting the interest rates on loans provided by HEFA “to make them more competitive and affordable” for HEIs.

The multiple entry multiple exit programme

• The panel said that Indian institutions were likely to face several issues in implementing the multiple entry and multiple exit (MEME) system.
• The panel said while the MEME looked like a flexible system, which was being operated by Western educational institutions effectively, it might not work well in the country.
• If institutions allow MEME, it would be very difficult for the institutions to predict how many students would exit and how many would join midway.
• Since institutions would not know the in- and out-traffic, it will certainly disturb the pupil-teacher ratio,” the report noted.

Conclusion

• The report looked at the salient features of the NEP’s implementation in the higher education sector and the progress made so far.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• India is to host the first-ever global summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI) this October. Additionally, as the Chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), India will also be hosting the GPAI global summit in December. These events suggest the strategic importance of AI, as it is projected to add $500 billion to India’s economy by 2025, accounting for 10% of the country’s target GDP.

The issue

• One area where India can assume leadership is how regulators address children and adolescents who are a critical (yet less understood) demographic in this context.
• The nature of digital services means that many cutting-edge AI deployments are not designed specifically for children but are nevertheless accessed by them.

The governance challenge

• Regulation will have to align incentives to reduce issues of addiction, mental health, and overall safety.
• In absence of that, data hungry AI-based digital services can readily deploy opaque algorithms and dark patterns to exploit impressionable young people.
• Among other things this can lead to tech-based distortions of ideal physical appearance(s) which can trigger body image issues.
• Other malicious threats emerging from AI include misinformation, radicalisation, cyberbullying, sexual grooming, and doxxing.
• The next generation of digital nagriks must also grapple with the indirect effects of their families’ online activities.
• While moving into adolescence we must equip young people with tools to manage the unintended consequences.
• For instance, AI-powered deep fake capabilities can be misused to target young people wherein bad actors create morphed sexually explicit depictions and distribute them online.
• Beyond this, India is a melting pot of intersectional identities across gender, caste, tribal identity, religion, and linguistic heritage.
• Internationally, AI is known to transpose real world biases and inequities into the digital world.
• Such issues of bias and discrimination can impact children and adolescents who belong to marginalised communities.
• AI regulation must improve upon India’s approach to children under India’s newly minted data protection law.
• The data protection framework’s current approach to children is misaligned with India’s digital realities.
• It transfers an inordinate burden on parents to protect their children’s interests and does not facilitate safe platform operations and/or platform design.
• Confusingly, it inverts the well-known dynamic where a significant percentage of parents rely on the assistance of their children to navigate otherwise inaccessible user interface and user experience (UI/UX) interfaces online.
• It also bans tracking of children’s data by default, which can potentially cut them away from the benefits of personalisation that we experience online.

Shifting the emphasis

• International best practices can assist Indian regulation to identify standards and principles that facilitate safer AI deployments.
• UNICEF’s guidance for policymakers on AI and children identifies nine requirements for child-centred AI which draws on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (India is a signatory).
• The guidance aims to create an enabling environment which promotes children’s well-being, inclusion, fairness, non-discrimination, safety, transparency, explainability and accountability.
• Another key feature of successful regulation will be the ability to adapt to the varying developmental stages of children from different age groups.
• California’s Age Appropriate Design Code Act serves as an interesting template.
• The Californian code pushes for transparency to ensure that digital services configure default privacy settings; assess whether algorithms, data collection, or targeted advertising systems harm children; and use clear, age-appropriate language for user-facing information.
• Indian authorities should encourage research which collects evidence on the benefits and risks of AI for India’s children and adolescents.
• This should serve as a baseline to work towards an Indian Age Appropriate Design Code for AI.
• Lastly, better institutions will help shift regulation away from top-down safety protocols which place undue burdens on parents.

Conclusion

• As we move towards a new law to regulate harms on the Internet, and look to establish our thought leadership on global AI regulation, the interests of our young citizens must be front and centre.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The 2023 summit of the G-20 under India’s presidency went exceptionally well given the group’s limited economic approach to the complex issues that the world faces, from climate change and underdevelopment, wealth concentration and poverty and, most critically for our times, falling democratic norms and principles of peace.

The G20 summit in India

• India’s remarkable success at the summit this year, in early September, was captured by the global press, except in China, for various outcomes such as the inclusion of the African Union in the G-20, a tangible offer of clean energy through a biofuel alliance, increasing substantial aid for Asia-Africa, an economic corridor that connects India, West Asia and Europe using an ambitious rail and shipping link, and the Delhi Declaration which was a joint statement of all the group.

A candid view

• The joint statement called the Delhi Declaration is newsworthy because of the fractured international order and power struggles between India and the United States with China or the U.S. with Russia.
• Despite the absence of China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the summit, India still got their agreement for the declaration which sums up the achievement.
• Substantially speaking, the statement is pareve as it does not name Russia for aggression against Ukraine; but it does evoke the United Nations charter and principles of territorial sovereignty.
• But the boldest outcome, and unanticipated by many, was the announcement of the economic corridor (the “India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor”), of a rail-ship route, to transport goods to Europe from India via the United Arab Emirates-Saudi Arabia-Jordan-Israel.
• Such a project will change the geopolitics for the future. The fact that it challenges China’s Belt and Road Initiative is beside the more significant point.

Israel’s absence, possible factors

• India ‘set a precedent in G20 history by inviting the most Middle Eastern countries ever to take part as guests in the group’s key summit’, and one wonders why Israel, India’s strategic partner also from the region, was not given such an invitation.
• As a host, India invited nine non-member countries — Bangladesh, Egypt, Mauritius, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Singapore, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates — to the summit.
• Perhaps factors such as a meet between Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Mr. Netanyahu may have been impossible unless there was diplomatic normalisation.

A push for peace

• Saudi Arabia is willing to end the diplomatic boycott of Israel.
• It is a historical change because such an acceptance of Israel by the most important, religiously speaking, Muslim country, will help Israel with other countries such as Pakistan (already willing), Indonesia and Malaysia.
• For such a change, Saudis demand that Israel commits to the two-state solution and the well-being of the Palestinian people, even if the occupation does not end soon.

Way forward

• Israel-Palestine peace is a very challenging aim and given the rise of extremism on both sides, it appears all the more impossible. Saudi Arabia is aware of it and is still interested in having deliberations to walk smoothly among Arabs and other Muslims while working with the Biden administration to make peace with the State of Israel. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor will have to wait until this happens.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Amendment) Bill, 2023, which promises 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha, and in the Legislative Assemblies of States and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, sheds the spotlight on another crucial aspect of representative democracy — the delimitation of electoral constituencies.

History

• Since the 1970s, there has been no change in the number of Lok Sabha seats. The Constitution (Forty-Second Amendment) Act, 1976 froze the delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies as per the Census of 1971, up to the Census which was to be conducted in 2001.
• However, in 2001, the day of reckoning was pushed further to 2026. This was done through an amendment to Article 82 by the Constitution (Eighty-Fourth Amendment) Act.
• While the boundaries of electoral constituencies were redrawn in 2002, there was no change in the number of seats in the Lok Sabha.
• Only after 2026 will we consider changing the number of seats in the Lok Sabha.
• Strictly speaking, the relevant numbers as to population are expected to come from the 2031 Census, which will be the first census after 2026.

Delimitation as of now

• Article 81 of the Constitution says that each State gets seats in the Lok Sabha in proportion to its population.
• The freeze on delimitation effected in 1976 was to allay the concerns of States which took a lead in population control and which were faced with the prospect of reduction of their number of seats in the Lok Sabha.
• The practical consequences, however, of the 1976 freeze is that the allocation done on the basis of the 1971 Census continues to hold good for the present population figures.
• India’s population has, of course, increased significantly since then. Using figures from 1971 to represent today’s population runs contrary to the grain of the Constitution besides obviously distorting what representative democracy stands for.
• The exercise of delimitation also implicates the constitutional values of federalism and representation of States as consolidated units.
• In the preceding decades, the population of the north has increased at a faster pace as compared with the south. In practical terms, this means that MPs in States in north India represent more voters than MPs in the south.
• Given this context, the question of delimitation necessarily has serious implications for both the individual voter as well as the States.

Delimitation in the near future

• The delimitation of constituencies will need answers to certain vexed questions.
• The 2021 Census was pushed courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Union Home Minister has indicated that the next Census and subsequent delimitation will be conducted after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
• Even more vexed are the qualitative concerns that will determine how boundaries of electoral constituencies will be redrawn.
• If done entirely in terms of proportion of population, the redrawing of constituencies would yield more seats to States in the north, given their higher population.
• Besides concerns around representation, this will also lead to distrust on the part of States in the south.

Way forward

• The recently concluded delimitation in Assam, ahead of the 2024 Assembly elections, witnessed widespread concerns around how altering the boundaries of certain districts and renaming certain constituencies can have a potentially acute impact on the representation of specific communities. That is all the indication needed to start a robust conversation around delimitation sooner than later.