General Studies Paper 3

Introduction

• India became the world’s top sugar producer in 2021-2022, surpassing Brazil with a record of 359 lakh tonnes. However, the extensive use of resources in sugar production is depleting rapidly, leading to a potential crisis in the future. Over-cultivation of sugarcane has caused a sugar surplus and high exports, impacting groundwater negatively. To prevent the risk of agricultural collapse, addressing groundwater overuse in the sugar industry is crucial.

Hike in Sugar production

• India is the world’s largest consumer of sugar, and thus has to produce enough to meet its huge domestic demand.
• But the excess production stems from policies and measures that make farmers favour sugarcane cultivation.
• The Central government offers a fair and remunerative price (FRP) scheme, which mandates a minimum price that sugar mills have to pay to sugarcane farmers, ensuring that farmers always get fair profits for their crop.
• State governments also offer heavy subsidies to incentivise sugarcane cultivation.
• In fact, Brazil, Australia, and Guatemala filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against India for violating international trade rules by offering excessive export subsidies and domestic support to farmers to outcompete other countries in the global sugar market. The WTO ruled against India and India also lost its appeal.

Efforts for addressing the issue

• To deal with the sugar surplus, the Indian government considered diverting it to the production of ethanol, an organic compound made by fermenting sugarcane molasses or sugar.
• Ethanol is the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages and is also used in the chemicals and cosmetics industries.
• In the transport sector, the use of ethanol-blended petrol (EBP) significantly reduces harmful emissions, such as carbon monoxide and various hydrocarbons, from vehicles.
• The government launched the EBP programme in 2003 to reduce crude oil imports and curtail greenhouse gas emissions from petrol-based vehicles; it has been fairly successful.
• It started with the modest goal of achieving a blending rate of 5%, but the target set for 2025 is 20%.
• The government also reduced the Goods and Services Tax on ethanol from 18% to 5% in 2021.
• In the same year, of the 394 lakh tonnes of total sugar produced, about 350 lakh tonnes were diverted to produce ethanol, while India achieved a blending rate of 10% months ahead of the target.

Excessive sugarcane cultivation impacting groundwater

• India’s EBP program reduced crude-oil imports, sugar exports, and greenhouse-gas emissions. However, sugarcane’s water-intensive cultivation has taken a toll.
• Sugarcane requires 3,000 mm of rainfall, but top-growing States get 1,000-1,200 mm, relying heavily on groundwater from confined aquifers, a limited resource.
• 100 kg of sugar needs two lakh litres of groundwater for irrigation, raising concerns as these States are already drought-prone and groundwater-stressed, as per a 2022 CGWB report.

The solutions

• A better and more sustainable way would be to assess and then correct incentives that skew in favour of sugarcane over other crops, leading to a consistent surplus.
• Introducing fair and comprehensive subsidy schemes for a variety of crops can help farmers diversify as well as distribute cultivation evenly, prevent monocultures, and ensure an equitable income.
• The availability of a wider range of profitable and less resource-intensive crops can lower the strain on vital natural resources.
• This must be complemented by environmentally responsible sugarcane cultivation practices that prioritise groundwater, such as drip irrigation, to tackle the issue in the long run.
• In drip irrigation, water is allowed to drip slowly but directly to the roots of sugarcane plants, reducing water consumption by up to 70% relative to the current flood irrigation method.
• This method has already been made mandatory in many parts of India, and the government has also offered subsidies to farmers for setting up the system.
• Next, India needs to invest in overall water-saving and management systems.

Way forward

• Concerted efforts to adopt cleaner practices such as rainwater harvesting, wastewater treatment, and canal irrigation networks, will help minimise stress on groundwater reservoirs as other water sources become available for irrigation.
• Although the CGWB conducts significant research and generates valuable data, many aspects of groundwater availability and distribution remain poorly understood and/or mapped.
• Investment in groundwater research, therefore, needs to be considered seriously.
• As India continues to become more of a global frontrunner in the agricultural sector, it must put sustainability at the centre.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• A new study has found higher frequency of homozygous genotypes in South-Asian populations, most likely as a result of caste, endogamy, and consanguineous sexual unions. Such a frequency could lead to higher risk of genetic disorders.

The study

• In 2009, a study in Nature Genetics by the group of Kumarasamy Thangaraj, at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, reported a fascinating finding on why a small group of Indians were prone to cardiac failure at relatively young ages.
• They found that the DNA of such individuals lacked 25 base-pairs in a gene crucial for the rhythmic beating of the heart (a 25-base-pair deletion).
• Intriguingly, this deletion was unique to the Indian population and, barring a few groups in Southeast Asia, was not found elsewhere.
• They estimated that this deletion arose around 30,000 years ago, shortly after people began settling in the subcontinent, and affects roughly 4% of the Indian population today.
• Another recent study found stark genetic differences between people from different regions of the subcontinent.
• While this is to be expected between different countries in the region, it was actually evident even at the level of smaller geographies within India.
• Unbiased computational approaches showed little mixing between individuals from different communities.
• It is a no-brainer that endogamous practices (including caste-based, region-based, and consanguineous marriages) in the subcontinent are responsible for such conserved genetic patterns at the community level.
• In an ideal scenario, there would have been random mating in a population, leading to greater genetic diversity and lower frequency of variants, which are linked to disorders.

A worrying trend

• The study also highlighted a worrying trend in the Indian population.
• Compared with a relatively outbred population, like that of Taiwan, the South Asian cohort – and within it, the South-Indian and Pakistani subgroups – showed a higher frequency of homozygous genotypes.
• Humans typically have two copies of each gene. When an individual has two copies of the same variant, it is called a homozygous genotype.
• Most genetic variants linked to major disorders are recessive in nature and exert their effect only when present in two copies.
• Having different variants – being heterozygous – is usually protective.
• The South Indian and Pakistani subgroups were estimated to have a high degree of inbreeding, while the Bengali subgroup showed significantly lower inbreeding.

Map of the Indian genome

• It has been some 20 years since scientists published the human genome sequence.
• In this time, several studies have shown important ethnic differences in the genome. Thanks to this, scientists have sequenced populations from Africa and China – but a detailed map of the Indian genome has been missing.
• This is important because of India’s incredible diversity as well as for economic, matrimonial, and geographical reasons.
• The study has not just highlighted this but also indicated how our cultural aspects might need mending for the sake of population health.
• This is obviously fraught with sensitivities owing to deep-rooted customs and biases, but we must move away from the idea of genetic puritanism because it will be the simplest way to prevent major hereditary disorders.

Way forward

• Genetics was once practised with the sole aim of ensuring the lineage of European royal families. Since then, we have come a long way to mapping the human genome and identifying genes linked to haemophilia, skin colour, and cardiac failure.
• We need to develop the competence and infrastructure to undertake a study of this magnitude within the country and as a multi-centre collaboration.
• Conducting such studies within the country would also help safeguard the many vulnerable communities within the country who might be exploited.
• As an ambitious nation, we should devote efforts to harness the power of such studies for our well-being.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• In modern times, human impacts are primarily responsible for species extinctions and biodiversity loss.
• In India’s context, The cheetah, the only large carnivore made extinct in independent India by human actions, was reintroduced by Indian government in September 2022, reinforcing the government’s commitment to conserving our natural heritage.

Cheetah is flagship and umbrella species of the ecosystem

• The cheetah served as an evolutionary force and was responsible for the fast speed of the blackbuck, its major prey.
• Unlike tigers, leopards and lions — ambush predators — the cheetah hunts by chasing its prey and thereby removes the sick, old, as well as young from the population, ensuring the survival of the fittest and keeping the prey population healthy.
• A top carnivore at the apex of the food chain can sustain its population when lower trophic levels are functioning optimally.
• This is the philosophy of Project Tiger, which uses the tiger as a flagship to garner resources for conserving intact ecosystems. Several ecosystems in India do not have tigers; cheetahs could serve as a flagship for conservation there.

Successful reintroductions require long-term commitments

• Successful reintroductions require long-term commitments in several areas.
• Re-wilding ecosystems requires a reduction in biotic pressures by incentivized voluntary relocation of communities, as has been done in tiger reserves. Resources required for these need to be committed to a minimum of three to five sites for the long term (25-30 years).
• As, India does not have Africa’s vast wilderness with low human densities. However, within the historic range of the cheetah, India approximately one lakh square km under protected areas (PAs). However, Individual PAs by themselves are not big enough to sustain a viable cheetah population in the long term.
• Therefore, conservation practitioners need to be innovative and manage cheetahs from these sites as a metapopulation artificially moving animals between them to mimic natural dispersal for demographic and genetic viability.
• Once cheetahs build up a population, they will disperse naturally to colonise larger human-dominated landscapes and may potentially exchange individuals between some of the conservation sites naturally.

Conservation effort of biodiversity provides incentives for local communities

• As, conservation efforts lead to relocation of forest dwelling communities, incentives are given to local communities by government to relocate them.
• It is a win-win situation for the local people and biodiversity conservation, and an opportunity for governments to earn peoples’ goodwill.
• Given an opportunity, most forest communities prefer to join mainstream society that gives them access to markets, roads, electricity, hospitals, jobs, and education.
• Community-based ecotourism, sharing of gate receipts with buffer zone villages, and an increase in real estate with the arrival of biodiversity are some direct economic benefits to local people if schemes are implemented prudently and equitably
• Along with, A scheme to compensate for livestock predation that is transparent needs to be implemented.
• If people benefit economically from having cheetahs in their neighbourhood like people in Saurashtra benefit from lions, they are likely to be more tolerant towards the animals.

Challenges related to introduction of Chettah in Kuno National Park

• As Southern Africa, from where the cheetahs have been brought, currently has a cold dry winter in response the animals developed a winter coat. Therefore, their physiological cycle is still tuned to the photoperiod of Southern latitudes.
• In Kuno, they experienced a hot and humid climate — their winter fur accumulated moisture and the radio collars aggravated the condition making their skin itchy and delicate. Scratching resulted in wounds that were infected by maggots.
• Unfortunately, the inexperience of the field staff did not allow detection of the infection in time which could have led to an easy cure.
• Given time, the Southern African cheetahs are likely to adapt to the Indian photoperiod and change their biorhythms to time their coat with Indian winters.

Conclusion

• The release of the first inter-continentally translocated cheetahs, gave the project the required prestige. Metapopulation management along with economic benefits to communities is the only way to reestablish Cheetahs in India.
• The reintroduction project is much required for the ecological security of India. Therefore, threatened species of the savanna and deciduous forests — wolves, caracal, blackbuck, bustards, four-horned antelopes and chinkara — would benefit from the investments in bringing back the cheetah.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• Lactose intolerance is caused by a lessened ability or inability to digest lactose, a sugar found in dairy products. Humans vary in the amount of lactose they can tolerate before symptoms develop. Symptoms may include abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, flatulence, and nausea. These symptoms typically start thirty minutes to two hours after eating or drinking something containing lactose, with the severity typically depending on the amount consumed. Lactose intolerance does not cause damage to the gastrointestinal tract.

A disorder or not!

• Doctors do not consider lactose intolerance to be a disorder. They describe it as the digestive system’s reaction to milk sugar (lactose) which it cannot digest.
• The body needs an enzyme called lactase which is produced by the cells lining the small intestine, to digest lactose.
• If one is deficient in lactase, the undigested lactose passes on to the colon, where it produces extra gas and water, resulting in bloating, cramps and diarrhoea.
• Lactose intolerance thus produces symptoms which can be uncomfortable, but it is never dangerous.

Extremely common

• Lactose intolerance is so common that except for the 1-2% people who might experience serious bloating and cramps and nausea immediately after consuming dairy, almost every adult has lactose intolerance in various degrees.
• As one ages, there is a normal decline in the amount of lactase that the small intestine produces.
• Lactose intolerance is a specific digestive issue associated with the consumption of dairy products and ceases to be a problem when the person totally avoids or restricts milk products in the diet.
• But its symptoms can easily overlap with another common and chronic gastric disorders such as IBS, the pathogenesis of which is quite different.

Varies by ethnicity

• According to literature, estimates for lactose intolerance vary by ethnicity.
• The prevalence rate is 75-95% in African American and Asian ethnicities while it is estimated to be 18-26% amongst Europeans.
• Though there are specific tests like the hydrogen breath test to determine lactose intolerance, these tests do not have much use in clinical practice.
• This is a condition that is generally self-diagnosed and self-managed. The usual tests for detecting lactose intolerance are not available here or are expensive but clinical diagnosis seems to suffice.
• It is possible to develop secondary lactose intolerance all of a sudden following surgery or chemotherapy or if one has an infection, ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease which affects the small intestine. But this usually goes away once the small intestine regains health

Intolerance distinct from allergy

• The lactose intolerance is quite common among Asians — over 50% of the Indians are deficient in lactase — it is very easy to misdiagnose this condition, especially amongst the elderly.
• In the elderly, some malignancies like colon cancer can present themselves in the initial stages with atypical symptoms similar to that of the symptoms of lactose intolerance.
• The reaction is often immediate and severe in the case of milk allergy, while lactose intolerance will never lead to any serious disease or long-term complications.

Conclusion

• For persons with lactose intolerance who love to consume milk, there are options such as plant-based milk (soy/almond milk) or lactose-free milk. There are plenty of other food sources — yoghurt, tofu, nuts, spinach, broccoli, orange, lentils and legumes — that a lactose-intolerant person can depend on for calcium supplementation.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• The G-20 has provided Prime Minister Narendra Modi an opportune stage before the next general election in 2024. Promotions of the G-20, with PM’s picture a part of them, are everywhere. Of greater significance to the world is that the G-20 is being led by India, the world’s most populous country.

Governance is facing trouble

• Global governance is in bad shape. The trajectory of progress must change.
• The world is being divided by wars amongst nations, and strife within them — wars with military weapons and with financial and trade weapons.
• Desperate millions are being pushed back to their deaths while trying to cross borders and oceans in search of better lives and safety, while three multi-billionaires are competing to create commercial space ventures to take a handful of wealthy people for a brief joyride in borderless space.
• Humanity cannot carry on the way it is. The trajectory of progress must be changed to make economic growth more equitable and sustainable.
• Economists try to prove with numbers that poverty is reducing, and incomes are increasing for everyone. They should look around and listen to real people struggling in precarious livelihoods.
• The planet is heating up inexorably. It cannot take the pressure of the present consumptive model of economic growth any longer. More economic growth will not solve the world’s problems. It must be sustainable and equitable too.

The importance of G20 chair for India

• India, as chair of the G-20, has offered a vision of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (One Earth, One Family, One Future) to bring all citizens of the world together and make the world better for everyone.
• To continue to solve systemic problems with the same approach that caused them is madness, Einstein declared. A new paradigm is required for global governance.
• In 2015, all countries adopted the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved by 2030.
• The SDGs describe 17 complex combinations of environmental, social, and economic problems. All 17 problems do not appear in every country, and when they do, they do not appear in the same form.
• No country has only one of the SDG problems; every country has at least six or seven.
• Calculations show that even seven problems (out of a possible 17) can combine in 98 million different ways.
• Clearly, one global solution for the environment, society, or economy, cannot apply everywhere. People on the ground know where their shoes pinch. Standard solutions cannot fit all.

A map of ground realities

• The McKinsey Global Institute has produced a detailed map of realities on the ground, in its report which concludes that growth of GDP at a country level explains only 20% of the progress on the ground. The remaining 80% is local and specific.
• The present theory-in-use of top-down problem-solving is conceptually flawed.
• Complex systemic problems that appear in many places require local systems solutions that are found using cooperation and implemented by communities that combine solutions to economic, environment, and social problems.
• India has proposed an approach of LiFE (lifestyles for sustainable development) to the G-20.
• Principle 7 of LiFE also requires the world’s leaders to “recognize and amplify the role of local communities, local and regional governments and traditional knowledge in supporting sustainable lifestyles”.

Way forward

• Democracy is government of, for, and by people.
• A government elected by the people that provides benefits top-down to people is not a complete democracy.
• Pressure to change and new solutions must come from the peripheries of power systems, with movements on the ground in India and around the world.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s State visit to Washington on June 22, 2023, was historic — the first for an Indian head of state in 14 years, and only the third for an Indian leader in 75 years since Indian Independence.

A central role for trade

• In comparison with the substantial progress in many areas, the economic, and more specifically, trade relationship between the two countries, is growing — surpassing U.S.$120 billion — but it continues to underperform relative to the sheer potential.
• If this strategic partnership lives up to its billing as one of the most consequential in this century, then trade must be pushed to a more central role as the U.S.-India story continues to unfold.
• India is exhibiting a remarkable openness to negotiating new trade relationships with important partners around the world.
• In the last two years, the Narendra Modi government has inked new free trade agreements (FTAs) with the United Arab Emirates and Australia and launched or reinvigorated negotiations for parallel deals with the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

The U.S.’s approach

• In contrast, the Biden administration maintains that it has evolved away from FTAs and discovered a better approach to trade, emphasising resilient supply chains, reshoring or friend-shoring, and prioritising labour rights and climate-friendlier production over craven and mistaken globalisation.
• This policy has many sceptics at home and abroad, particularly since it ignores that all these objectives could be robustly addressed in a revamped FTA agenda.
• It is the moment for the U.S. administration to meet India halfway in its trade policy before the strategic side of the relationship leaves the trade side much further behind.
• There were important results from Mr. Modi’s State visit in resolving six disputes under the World Trade Organization (WTO).
• Building on these wins, and looking to opportune moments ahead following national elections in both countries in 2024, trade negotiators on both sides must be tasked with a more ambitious mandate by their leaders.

India’s Progress in Trade

• India’s is in progression in negotiating FTAs with its other trading partners through work at the Atlantic Council.
• India’s agreements to date fall far short of the U.S. gold standard, i.e., the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but the gaps are decreasing.
• Even in the sensitive area of agriculture, India has shown surprising readiness to gradually open its market when offered opportunities to win concessions in return through FTAs.
• Australia, in the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement, obtained important gains in the Indian market for wine, wool, and sheep meat, among other goods, while India won nearly duty-free access to the Australian market.
• In fact, the U.S. and India have been able to agree to transactional concessions in their respective markets (e.g., mangoes and pomegranates for India in exchange for cherries, hay and pork for the U.S.) through the bilateral Trade Policy Forum (TPF) even without an active FTA negotiation.

Way forward

• The PM State visit should be a starting point for a more ambitious trade agenda going forward. U.S. and Indian trade negotiators already know how to go small, and even achieve results along the way.
• But the trade relationship deserves more attention, and a stronger mandate from the leaders of both the Biden and Modi administrations.
• With greater ambition, the often-mentioned target of $500-$600 billion in bilateral trade by 2030 can easily be attained and surpassed.

General Studies Paper 3

Introduction

• Some headlines proclaimed recently that a particular day in July was the warmest in more than a 100,000 years. It is not scientifically possible to make such a claim.

Temperature estimates

• Temperature estimates from before thermometers were invented are derived from “palaeo proxies”.
• These are biological and chemical signatures of the temperature somewhere having been warmer or colder than a specific baseline temperature.
• Such a baseline is typically from the modern times, when thermometer records have existed.
• These measures are called “proxies” because they do not directly measure temperatures. Instead, they are simply the responses of physical, biological, and chemical processes to temperatures at that time having been warmer or colder than the baseline value.
• Another thing we need to make claims about temperatures of a time in the past are some isotopes that undergo a steady rate of radioactive decay.
• Knowing this rate, and the expected quantity of the isotope X years ago, scientists can estimate how long it took to diminish to its present quantity.
• Based on the length of time one needs to go back to, the isotopes could be of carbon or lead, based on their half-lives (5,000 to more than 10 million years).

Longer and shorter timescales

• A major assumption required to make the “paleo proxy” technique workable is that the processes that produced the proxies have operated similarly back then as they do today.
• More specifically, and crucially, for a period of hundreds of thousands of years, proxies – which are typically buried in the ocean and lake sediments – can only record temperature anomalies, i.e. deviations from the baseline, on time scales of centuries, if not thousands of years.
• They are mixed by the ocean water above and the microbes within, smoothing out the information they contain over such long timescales.
• From this object, it is almost impossible to estimate even decadal or annual changes in long-term temperature.
• Scientists derive estimates of temperature anomalies over shorter time scales from tree rings, corals, and the shells of marine and terrestrial organisms.

The Holocene epoch

• The most relevant bit of knowledge experts might wish to piece together today from historical temperature-related anomalies is whether any warming during the Holocene epoch can tell us something about the response of modern humans to climate change.
• There is some evidence as to the causes of demise of various civilisations in this epoch – and a climate-related event was not always the sole or even the proximal cause.
• At the same time, modern humans’ (bipedal) ancestors also survived larger climatic changes over the evolutionary timescales of hundreds of thousands of years.
• The earth’s climate has witnessed glacials, or ice ages, and deglacials for at least a million years. The Holocene itself has been a deglacial period, with a relatively small volume of glaciers compared to a proper ice age.

Endangering climate action

• It is scientifically impossible to estimate daily temperatures even for a particular day from last year – unless we have a thermometer measurement.
• To wish to elicit collective and individual climate action while sacrificing scientific rigour and accuracy is a dangerous approach.
• It simply amounts to an ‘ the end justifies the means’ approach that is likely to lead to a loss of credibility for the climate community.

Conclusion

• Modern societies have placed a considerable amount of trust in their scientists. Squandering this trust could render irreversible damage to the efforts that scientists and government officials have been making to improve global participation in climate negotiations, the willingness of governments to adhere to their climate commitments, and the grass roots initiatives that push governments and businesses into action, and to support communities dealing with the consequences of climate change.

General Studies Paper 3

CONTEXT

• The government is set to introduce the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill in Parliament.

RECHECKING THE ERRORS

• The Data Protection Bill of 2022 includes a provision to amend the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which has empowered millions of Indian citizens since its enactment in 2005.
• To effectively hold their governments accountable in a democracy, people need access to information, including various categories of personal data.
• For example, the Supreme Court of India has held that citizens have a right to know the names of wilful defaulters and details of the Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) of public sector banks.
• Democracies routinely ensure public disclosure of voters’ lists with names, addresses and other personal data to enable public scrutiny and prevent electoral fraud.
• Experience of the use of the RTI Act in India has shown that if people, especially the poor and marginalised, are to have any hope of obtaining the benefits of government schemes and welfare programmes, they must have access to relevant, granular information.
• For instance, the Public Distribution System (PDS) Control Order recognises the need for putting out the details of ration card holders and records of ration shops in the public domain to enable public scrutiny and social audits of the PDS.

Threat to transparency, accountability

• The RTI Act includes a provision to harmonise peoples’ right to information with their right to privacy through an exemption clause under Section 8(1)(j).
• The DPDP Bill 2022, however, proposes amendments to Section 8(1)(j) to expand its purview and exempt all personal information from disclosure.
• This threatens the very foundations of the transparency and accountability regime in the country.
• The DPDP Bill, 2022, unfortunately, empowers the executive to draft rules and notifications on a vast range of issues.
• For instance, the central government can exempt any government or even private sector entity from the application of provisions of the law by merely issuing a notification.
• This would potentially allow the government to arbitrarily exempt its cronies and government bodies such as the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), resulting in immense violations of citizens’ privacy.

No autonomy

• Further, to meet its objective of protecting personal data, it is critical that the oversight body set up under the legislation be adequately independent to act on violations of the law by government entities.
• The draft Bill does not even make a pretence of ensuring autonomy of the Data Protection Board — the institution responsible for enforcement of provisions of the law.
• The central government is empowered to determine the strength and composition of the board, as well as the process of selection and removal of its chairperson and other members.
• The chief executive responsible for managing the board is to be appointed by the government, giving it direct control over the institution.
• The creation of a totally government-controlled Data Protection Board, empowered to impose fines upto ₹500 crore, is bound to raise serious apprehensions of it becoming another caged parrot — open to misuse by the executive to target the political opposition and those critical of its policies.

Conclusion

• These concerns need to be urgently addressed before the DPDP Bill is enacted. Unfortunately, given the manner in which Bills are being passed in the Parliament, without any debate or discussion, the citizens of the country might end up with a law that empowers the central government while taking away peoples’ democratic right to seek information and use it to hold the powerful to account.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• The Computer Emergency Response Team of India issued an alert for the ransomware dubbed “Akira.” The ransomware, found to target both Windows and Linux devices, steals and encrypts data, forcing victims to pay double ransom for decryption and recovery.

Akira ransomware

• The Akira ransomware is designed to encrypt data, create a ransomware note and delete Windows Shadow Volume copies on affected devices.
• The ransomware gets its name due to its ability to modify filenames of all encrypted files by appending them with the “.akira” extension.
• The ransomware is designed to close processes or shut down Windows services that may keep it from encrypting files on the affected system.
• It uses VPN services, especially when users have not enabled two-factor authentication, to trick users into downloading malicious files.
• Windows Shadow Volume files are instrumental in ensuring that organisations can back up data used in their applications for day-to-day functioning.
• VSS services facilitate communication between different components without the need to take them offline, thereby ensuring data is backed up while it is also available for other functions.
• Once the ransomware deletes the VSS files it proceeds to encrypt files with the pre-defined the “.akira” extension.

The working

• The ransomware also terminates active Windows services using the Windows Restart Manager API, preventing any interference with the encryption process.
• It is designed to not encrypt Program Data, Recycle Bin, Boot, System Volume information, and other folders instrumental in system stability.
• It also avoids modifying Windows system files with extensions like .syn. .msl and .exe.
• Once sensitive data is stolen and encrypted, the ransomware leaves behind a note named akira_readme.txt which includes information about the attack and the link to Akira’s leak and negotiation site.
• Each victim is given a unique negotiation password to be entered into the threat actor’s Tor site.
• Unlike other ransomware operations, this negotiation site just includes a chat system that the victim can use to communicate with the ransomware gang, a report from The Bleeping Computer shares.

The process of infecting devices

• Ransomware is typically spread through spear phishing emails that contain malicious attachments in the form of archived content (zip/rar) files.
• Other methods used to infect devices include drive-by-download, a cyber-attack that unintentionally downloads malicious code onto a device, and specially crafted web links in emails, clicking on which downloads malicious code.
• The ransomware reportedly also spreads through insecure Remote Desktop connections.
• Once it breaches a corporate network, the ransomware spreads laterally to other devices after gaining Windows domain admin credentials.
• The threat actors also steal sensitive corporate data for leverage in their extortion attempts.

Protecting against the ransomware

• CERT-In has advised users to follow basic internet hygiene and protection protocols to ensure their security against ransomware.
• These include maintaining up to date offline backups of critical data, to prevent data loss in the event of an attack.
• Additionally, users are advised to ensure all operating systems and networks are updated regularly, with virtual patching for legacy systems and networks.
• Companies must also establish Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Sender policy for organisational email validation, which prevents spam by detecting email spoofing.
• Strong password policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) must be enforced.
• The agency has also advised periodic security audits of critical networks/systems, especially database servers.

Conclusion

• Continuous efforts are needed to Secure (National Cyberspace), Strengthen (Structures, People, Processes, and Capabilities), and Synergise (Resources including Cooperation and Collaboration) in the field of cyberspace in India.