General Studies Paper 2

Context

• BRICS found new purpose with expansion; but contradictions too.

BRICS Summit

• If there was any doubt about the relevance of the BRICS grouping (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), which held its 15th Summit in Johannesburg this week, the massive global interest in its outcomes should have put those to rest.
• Ever since the grouping, set up as a coalition of emerging economies, said last year that it was open to new members, as many as 40 countries from the global south have evinced interest in joining, with at least 22 formal applications.
• The decision to more than double its membership overnight, from 5 to 11, by inducting four major middle eastern players, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Ethiopia and Argentina, from Africa and South America, respectively, is significant.

Significance of the grouping

• The enthusiasm is obvious. BRICS has weathered several storms and is today seen, if not as any alternative, as a counter-narrative creator to the western-led G-7 club on diverse issues: from climate change commitments and UN reform to its rejection of unilateral western sanctions against Iran, Russia and Venezuela.
• By also creating the New Development Bank, which has funded nearly 100 projects so far, instituting a Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and other institutional mechanisms, the BRICS countries have also shown their ability to work on practical initiatives.
• While the grouping may not yet rival the wealth of the G-7, it does now rival its share of the global GDP (approximately 30% each), and represents a more equitable representation across 40% of the world’s population to the G-7 countries that make up just 10%.
• Once the new members join, six of 10 of the biggest global oil suppliers will be BRICS countries, giving BRICS new heft in the field of energy.

The shortcomings

• While the battle of proving its raison d’être may have been substantially won, the BRICS countries still fall short in showing a coherence of purpose, and are still mired by inner contradictions.
• The rivalry between India and China has no doubt slowed the grouping down and the induction of arch rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia-UAE, despite their recent détente, could well create similar issues for the group in the future.
• In addition, any overtly political, anti-western stance by BRICS will make India, and other countries in the grouping who walk a tightrope between the global powers, including Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, uncomfortable.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine too has caused uneasiness, and BRICS members did not vote as a bloc on any of the UN votes; nor did any of the other members support Russia’s actions.

Way forward

• Above all, any attempts by China to overpower the group with its strategic or economic vision will require a firm pushback if the foundational idea of BRICS, to assert the strategic autonomy of its members, is to be followed.
• Eventually it is the promise of shared prosperity and a more democratic model of global governance that attracts so many in the global south to the grouping, and will provide the mortar for an expanded line-up of BRICS countries.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• A ‘holding together federation’ with a built-in unitary bias, the Indian Constitution was the contextual product of centrifugal forces and fissiparous tendencies in the run-up to Independence.

About

• It has journeyed over 73 years with remarkable resilience. Even so, the emerging dynamics of India’s fiscal federalism needs some rethinking.
• The paradigm shift from a planned economy to a market-mediated economic system, the transformation of a two-tier federation into a multi-tier fiscal system following the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, the abolition of the Planning Commission and its replacement with NITI Aayog, the passing of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act, with all the States forced to fall in line, the Goods and Services (GST) Act with the GST Council holding the controlling lever, the extensive use of cess and surcharges which affect the size of the divisible pool and so on have altered the fiscal landscape with varying consequences on India’s federalism.

Issues.

• India’s intergovernmental transfer system should be decidedly more equity-oriented. Although the natural proclivity of any market-mediated growth process is to work in favour of the propertied class, the actual experience in India has been astounding.
• indeed, equity should be the overarching concern of the 16th Finance Commission and that HDI could be considered as a strong candidate in the horizontal distribution of tax devolution.
• There is a case for revisiting Article 246 and the Seventh Schedule for a denovo division of powers, functions and responsibilities for a variety of reasons.
• India is no longer the one-party governance of post-Independence times. It has become a truly multi-party system. The nature of polity, society, technology, demographic structure and the development paradigm itself have significantly changed.
• Under the changing dispensation, several pieces of central legislation such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, the National Food Security Act 2013 and many others impose an extra burden on the States.
• At the time of constitution-making, we never asked the pertinent question of who should do what and who should tax what. We borrowed copiously from the Government of India Act 1935 and failed to apply the subsidiarity principle, viz., that whatever could be done best at a particular level should be done at that level and not at a higher level, in the division of functions and finance.
• Although the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments provided an opportunity to re-examine the issue, nothing was done.

A respectable place for the third tier

• The persistent failure to place the third tier properly on the fiscal federal map of India is a serious issue.
• The absence of a uniform financial reporting system comprising all levels of government is a major deficit which the coming Union Finance Commission may be required to address.
• Although the Constitution refers to the third tier as ‘institutions of self-government’, policymakers, experts and even the UFCs generally refer to them as ‘local bodies’ and have not given the respect and the handholding they deserve.
• It is well-recognised that the prime objective of our federation with deep heterogeneity is to provide basic services of standard quality to every citizen irrespective of her choice of residence and they have a critical role to play.

Review off-Budget borrowing

• There is a great need to review the off-Budget borrowing practices of both the Union and the States.
• Off-Budget borrowings mean all borrowings not provided for in the Budget but whose repayment liabilities fall on the Budget.
• They are generally unscrutinised and unreported. That all income and expenditure transactions should fall under some Budget head or other is a universal principle.
• State public sector undertakings and special purpose vehicles raise resources from the markets, but their servicing burden often falls on the State government.
• In cases where the government is the ultimate guarantor, the burden of repaying the debt also falls on the State.
• Although the States are disciplined through Article 293(3) by the Union and through the FRBM Act, the Union often escapes such controls.
• The liberal utilisation of the National Small Saving Fund (NSSF) for extra-budgetary financing of central public sector undertakings and central ministries by way of loans is not reflected in the Union fiscal deficits.
• This is because only the Consolidated Fund of India balance is considered for calculating fiscal deficit, and items in public accounts such as the NSSF are kept out. While the borrowing space of States is restricted, the Union escapes such discipline.
• There is also a huge area of special banking arrangements using public sector banks to facilitate cash and credit flow outside the budgetary appropriations to help various agencies involved in quasi-fiscal operations with the government.
• Transparency guarantees and public accountability demand that the Union, States and local governments come clean and bring all extra-budgetary transactions to the public domain.

Conclusion

• In sum, the dynamics of the emerging fiscal federalism of India entails significant rethinking especially in the context of the 16th Finance Commission

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• Murmansk, popularly called the capital of the Arctic region and the beginning point of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), is witnessing the rising trend of Indian involvement in cargo traffic.

Significance of the Arctic region to India

• The vulnerability of the Arctic region, which is above the Arctic Circle and includes the Arctic Ocean with the North Pole at its centre, to unprecedented changes in the climate may have an impact on India in terms of economic security, water security and sustainability.
• The region also constitutes the largest unexplored prospective area for hydrocarbons remaining on the Earth as it is estimated that the region may hold over 40 per cent of the current global reserves of oil and gas.
• There may also be significant reserves of coal, zinc and silver.
• However, the government’s Arctic Policy of 2022 mentions that the country’s approach to economic development of the region is guided by UN Sustainable Development Goals.

History of India’s engagement with the Arctic

• India’s engagement with the Arctic can be traced to the signing of the Svalbard Treaty in 1920 in Paris and India is undertaking several scientific studies and research in the Arctic region.
• This encompasses atmospheric, biological, marine, hydrological and glaciological studies.
• Apart from setting up a research station, Himadri, at, Svalbard, in 2008, the country launched its inaugural multi-sensor moored observatory and northernmost atmospheric laboratory in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
• Till last year, thirteen expeditions to the Arctic were successfully conducted.
• In May 2013, India became an observer-State of the Arctic Council along with five others including China.

Northern Sea Route

• The Northern Sea Route (NSR), the shortest shipping route for freight transportation between Europe and countries of the Asia-Pacific region, straddles four seas of the Arctic Ocean.
• Running to 5,600 km, the route begins at the boundary between the Barents and the Kara seas (Kara Strait) and ends in the Bering Strait (Provideniya Bay).
• A paper published states that in theory, distance savings along the NSR can be as high as 50% compared to the currently used shipping lanes via Suez or Panama.
• The 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal, which forms part of the widely-used maritime route involving Europe and Asia, has led to greater attention on the NSR.

Driving factors for India to participate in the NSR development

• Primarily, the growth in cargo traffic along the NSR is on the constant rise and during 2018-2022, the growth rate was around 73%.
• With India increasingly importing crude oil and coal from Russia in recent years, the record supplies of energy resources for the Indian economy are possible due to such a reliable and safe transport artery as the NSR.
• Secondly, the NSR assumes importance, given India’s geographical position and the major share of its trade associated with sea transportation.
• Thirdly, the Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor (CVMC) project, an outcome of signing of the memorandum of intent between the two countries in September 2019, is being examined as one linking with another organise international container transit through the NSR.
• A study commissioned by Chennai Port Trust reveals that coking coal [used by steel companies], crude oil, Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and fertilizers are some of the cargo that can be imported from Russia to India through CVMC.
• Fourthly, experts are discussing the possibility of China and Russia gaining collective influence over the NSR.

Way forward

• In March, a Russian delegation had promised to provide the availability of key components for the year-round operation of the route as it seeks the participation of Indian companies in projects related to the NSR.

General Studies Paper 2

Context

• By presenting itself as a more participative and less exploitative alternative, India can make its ties with Africa a win-win ecosystem for the 21st century.

About

• Like an absentee landlord, Africa is flagging its demands nowadays on multilateral fora such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the G-20 and the United Nations General Assembly.
• For a continent with 54 countries, over a quarter of the “Global South”, it is populated at BRICS and the G-20 by South Africa, an atypical representative of the Black continent.

Challenges and disruptors

• Africa, in general, and the Sahel region in particular, are passing through several existential challenges such as misgovernance, unplanned development, the dominance of ruling tribes and corruption.
• Recently, new disruptors such as the Islamic terror, inter-tribal scrimmage, changing climate, runaway food inflation, urbanisation and youth unemployment have further strained the traditional socio-political fabric.
• As the past military interventions by France, the United States and Russia’s Wagner Group to curb the militancy have shown, they frequently become part of the problem.
• These interventions have costs: keeping dictatorships in power to protect their economic interests, such as uranium in Niger, gold in the Central African Republic and oil in Libya.
• Africa’s problems are further compounded by an erosion in its international support base. China has been Africa’s largest trading partner and investor, but a slowing economy and trade have reduced its appetite for Africa’s commodities.
• Its Belt and Roads Initiative has raised the debts of some African countries to unsustainable levels, in turn causing them to cede control of some of their assets to China.
• France, the United Kingdom and other colonial powers as well as the United States have continued to exploit mineral wealth in Africa, but their economic downturn has limited their outreach.

India’s robust ties

• India’s ties with Africa are deep, diverse and harmonious that range from Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha against the apartheid to the UN peacekeeping role.
• Although we now import less oil from Africa and sell fewer agricultural products, India-Africa trade reached $98 billion in 2022-23.
• India’s investment and other socio-economic engagements with Africa remain robust, especially in such sectors as education, health care, telecom, IT, appropriate technology and agriculture.
• India was the fifth largest investor in Africa and has extended over $12.37 billion in concessional loans.
• India has completed 197 projects and has provided 42,000 scholarships since 2015.
• Approximately three million people of Indian origin live in Africa, many for centuries. They are Africa’s largest non-native ethnicity.
• India is well placed to leverage its comprehensive profile with Africa to help the continent either bilaterally or through these multilateral forums.
• Its hosting of the G-20 Summit will present it with a historic opportunity to up the ante. It could consult like-minded G-20 partners and multilateral institutions for a comprehensive semi-permanent platform to resolve the stalemated security and socio-economic situations in several parts of Africa.

Way forward

• India should deliver political stability and economic development by combining peacekeeping with socio-political institution building.
• We can offer force multipliers such as targeted investments and transfer of relevant and appropriate Indian innovations, such as the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile), DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer), UPI (Unified Payments Interface), and Aspirational Districts Programme.
• By offering a more participative and less exploitative alternative, New Delhi can make the India-Africa ecosystem an exemplary win-win paradigm for the 21st century.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• It is fantastic to see India, the world’s largest democracy, take the global stage as host of the G-20, a vital forum for fostering international cooperation. The United Kingdom has long held the belief in trade as a force for growth and prosperity. It is why we advocate for free and fair trade at the World Trade Organization and why we are taking advantage of our newly recovered powers to forge trade deals with booming economies such as India.

India and UK

• As India’s middle class grows to a quarter of a billion middle class consumers by 2050, any improvements on our current trading relationship could be a huge boost for U.K. businesses.
• It is no secret that the U.K. and India share a thriving trading relationship, which was worth £36 billion in 2022.
• New figures from the U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade reveal that India retained its position as the U.K.’s second largest source of investment projects in the last financial year.
• And, importantly, our trade and investment relationship goes both ways. In fact, as India’s sixth largest investor, between April 2000 and March 2023, the U.K. has invested $34 billion in India in foreign direct investment.
• K. companies are also creating jobs and growth opportunities. There are 618 U.K. companies in India employing about 466,640 people directly as of 2021.

The ambitious FTA, a strong partnership

• Both parties are underway to discuss progress on an ambitious Free Trade Agreement, which could boost India’s bilateral trading relationship even further.
• The U.K. and India’s strong partnership extends far beyond trade and investment into culture, sport, education and tourism too.
• To borrow a phrase from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there is very much a ‘living bridge’ between our nations — you only have to look at our shared love of Bollywood to see this in action.
• As one of Bollywood’s largest audiences outside of India, the U.K. has featured in some of Bollywood’s iconic films.
• A vibrant Indian diaspora of over 1.6 million people makes a significant contribution across all walks of life in the U.K., from education through to the workforce, with Indian students making up one of the U.K.’s largest groups of international students.

Marketing campaign

• K. is launching ‘Alive with Opportunity’, a £1.5 million marketing campaign designed to showcase the tremendous bond between our countries and build on the continuous exchange of people, ideas and culture.
• As part of the U.K.’s ambitions to double trade with India by 2030, the campaign aims to stimulate interest and demand for U.K. goods and services, increase the U.K.’s ability to grow their business through trade with India, and attract new Indian inward investment.

Conclusion

• Over the course of the next year one can expect to see a celebration of the business, trade, cultural, and sporting links between the U.K. and India across billboards shining a light on this relationship which is very much alive with opportunity.

General Studies Paper 2

INTRODUCTION

• The concept of ‘One Health’ is currently gaining popularity worldwide; India has of late been taking significant strides to deploy concepts and strategies rooted in this idea to bolster the way it responds to health crises.

One Health concept

• One Health is a holistic approach to problems that recognises the interconnections between the health of humans, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
• An early articulation can be found in the writings of Hippocrates (460-367 BC), who contemplated the relationships between public health and clean environments.
• The 19th-century German physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1863) later wrote: “Between animal and human medicines there are no dividing lines – nor should there be.”

Specialities

• Human population growth, urbanisation, and industrialisation have compounded the damage to biodiversity and ecosystems.
• These harmful environmental changes are linked to zoonoses – diseases shared between animals and humans.
• Researchers have estimated that 60% of emerging diseases that can infect humans are zoonotic in nature. They include bird flu, Ebola, rabies, and Japanese encephalitis.
• In addition, humankind has also become beset by major issues of antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, and the control of vector-borne diseases.
• Taken together, these issues warrant both the intersectoral management and the efficiency that characterises the One Health strategy.
• One Health minimises resource requirements across sectors. An important way it does this is by encouraging coordination across governmental units, including the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare, Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Environment, and Science and Technology.
• Taking a One Health approach allows researchers to, for example, share their laboratories and findings, and ultimately make decisions that lead to resilient, sustainable, and predictable policies.

Recent One Health initiatives

• The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023 highlighted the importance of adopting a One Health approach.
• The Government of India established its ‘Standing Committee on Zoonoses’ in 2006 under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).
• The Department of Biotechnology launched India’s first consortium on One Health in October 2021.
• In June 2022, the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairy (DAHD) – in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Confederation of Indian Industry – launched a One Health pilot project in Karnataka and Uttarakhand.
• India is also currently preparing for a wider ‘National One Health Mission’ to be spearheaded by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor.

Ways to implement

• The implementation process can be broken down into four major stages. Each stage requires consistent political will and sustainable financing structures.

Stage 1: Communication

• In this stage, the basic mechanisms for communication between various ministries and/or sectors are set up. The focus is on keeping the important stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the One Health transformation.

Stage 2: Collaboration

• After initiating communication between the relevant sectors, sector members need to exchange their knowledge and expertise in order to translate ideas into short-term interventions.
• Stage 3: Coordination
• The activities carried out during this stage are usually routine and long-term. Initiatives to achieve One Health in this stage are spearheaded by a national or a subnational agency.
• Stage 4: Integration
• By default, government sectors and their units are designed to function vertically – and this is good for managing individual programmes. However, One Health is implicitly intersectoral, and existing system can’t accommodate One Health’s goals and mechanisms if it doesn’t ‘horizontalise’: i.e. it needs to integrate and develop synergies between programmes undertaken across various sectors.

Way forward

• To reap all the advantages of a One Health approach, India should move beyond short-term collaborations and create an integrated, science-based environment.
• This is a prerequisite for platforms to not just share office space but to also provide access to laboratories and biological samples to the relevant researchers.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• Influenza viruses are almost always circulating among humans. The nature of the virus means that every year, the virus’s genetic material undergoes some minor changes, rendering it a little different from the virus of the previous year. So scientists have to guess which changes are likely to survive the next year, and design or update their vaccines accordingly.

Nature of the virus

• An influenza virus can also infect birds, pigs, horses, and other domestic animals.
• It can assort the types of the two genes it contains – haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) – in these animals to generate a new virus altogether, some of which may infect humans.
• All these complications ensure that designing an effective vaccine for influenza remains challenging.
• The virus mainly infected the lungs, and laid waste to them.
• While all eight pieces of the virus’s genetic material caused severe disease, two in particular stood out: the haemagglutinin and the RNA polymerase genes.

Haemagglutinin and RNA polymerase

• Haemagglutinin is the protein on the outer surface of the virus that docks with proteins on the cells of another organism.
• This way, the virus has a portal through to begin its invasion. The haemagglutinin segment of the 1918 strain contained modifications such that the virus could easily gain access to cells.
• The viral RNA polymerase, on the other hand, makes copies of the viral genetic material.
• In the H1N1 strain, the polymerase was extremely efficient at this process, allowing the virus to make numerous copies of itself in a very short span of time.
• This then took a heavy toll on the infected cell, since the virus hijacked the cellular machinery to replicate itself.

Unrivalled

• The full virus demonstrated a pathogenicity unrivalled by any other influenza virus scientists have ever studied – recombinant or natural.
• It was highly virulent: there were 39,000-times more virions (virus particles) in the lungs of the mice infected with the 1918 virus than those infected by the more benign laboratory strain.
• The former lungs were filled with fluid within days, causing extensive lung damage and resulting in death.
• The haemagglutinin and the RNA polymerase genes were important reasons for the extreme nature of the 1918 virus, by themselves they did not wreak just as much havoc as when they did in combination with the other gene segments.
• All viruses have to ensure they will be transmitted to more hosts. A virus that kills its host too soon will fail at this objective because a virus is only alive as long as it is inside a host.
• So a change in a virus that makes it more pathogenic will either kill the host faster or it will become an easier target for the host’s immune system. Both outcomes are detrimental to the virus’s long-term survival.
• So such genetic changes must be associated with alterations elsewhere in the genome that mitigate those effects on the creature’s long-term survival prospects.
• It could be a mutation that enhances its transmission rate, one that slows the viral life cycle, or something else that allows the virus to escape the immune system long enough for it to be transmitted.

Conclusion

• The 1918 influenza pandemic is a reminder to us all, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that ever so rarely, nature will arrive at that perfect, deadly combination after mixing thousands of genes and end up creating something as destructive as the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus. Ironically, nature’s ability to do so is at the very heart of evolution, and of all life on earth.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• To aim for a 10 trillion-dollar economy, without protecting India’s environment, is a goal not worth pursuing.

Development and Environment protection

• Fostering tourism, undertaking construction projects and developing infrastructure are ways through which a State generates revenue and creates employment opportunities.
• However, some of them come at a steep environmental cost.
• In the recent case of Re: Cleanliness of Umiam Lake versus State of Meghalaya (2023), the Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice W. Diengdoh, in its order, stated that “In the absence of any other employment opportunities and in the name of promoting tourism, the natural beauty of the State should not be destroyed”.

The biodiverse northeast India

• Northeast India is a green belt region due to its abundant natural resources such as oil, natural gas, minerals and fresh water.
• The Garo-Khasi-Jaintia hills and the Brahmaputra valley are some of the most important biodiversity hotspots.
• Though the northeast is industrially backward, deforestation, floods, and existing industries are causing serious problems to the environment in the region.
• An environmental assessment of the North East Rural Livelihood Project undertaken by the Ministry of Development of the North-eastern Region lays out that Northeast India lies within ecologically fragile, biologically rich region, highly prone to climatic changes, located in trans boundary river basins.
• Both flora and fauna of the areas are under threat due to deforestation, mining, quarrying, shifting cultivation.

Environmental laws

• Thus far a considerable number of environmental laws and policies have been developed in the country, especially during the 1980s.
• Offences related to or against the environment have also taken the shape of “public nuisance” under Sections 268 to 290 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860, dealing with pollution of land, air, and water.
• However, as the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution grants autonomy to District Councils, it limits the authority of the State over matters pertaining to the jurisdiction of the District Councils, including the use of land.
• In many instances, like in the case of the Umiam Lake, the District Councils do not place any regulations for the preservation and protection of land, especially those around waterbodies.
• PILs and judicial activism encouraged under Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution led to a wave of environmental litigation.
• The enforcement of strict guidelines and imposition of heavy penalties by judicial and quasi-judicial organs of the State, often rescue the ecologically sensitive flora and fauna of these regions.

The pressing priority

• Central and State governments have to develop infrastructure, generate revenue and create employment through sustainable policies.
• The ‘Negative List’ in the North East Industrial Development Scheme (NEIDS), 2017 is a step in the right direction.
• If an entity is not complying with environment standards; not having applicable environmental clearances; does not have consent from the concerned pollution boards, it will not be eligible for any incentive under the NEIDS and will be put on the ‘negative list’.
• Similarly, the ‘Act Fast for Northeast’ policy should not only include “trade and commerce” but also the preservation of “environment and ecology” in the region.

Conclusion

• The government should consider the case of creating a uniform environmental legislation, which caters to environmental issues at all levels of governance.

General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Over the last few months, former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and the Minister of State for Electronics Rajeev Chandrasekhar have sparred over how well a Central government scheme to boost electronics manufacturing has been faring.

The issue

• It started when Mr. Rajan, along with two other economists, released a brief discussion paper arguing that the programme isn’t really pushing India towards becoming a self-sufficient manufacturing powerhouse.
• Instead, the government is using taxpayer money to create an ecosystem of low-level assembly jobs that will still depend heavily on imports.

The PLI scheme

• Around five years ago, the Government of India decided it wanted more companies to make things in India.
• Manufacturing is a key ingredient to economic growth and also comes with what economists call a multiplier effect — every job created and every rupee invested in manufacturing has a positive cascading effect on other sectors in the economy.
• However, the problem was that many industries didn’t want to set up shop in the country.
• India’s infrastructure isn’t great, the country’s labour laws are archaic, and the workforce isn’t very skilled.
• To solve this, the government used, and uses, a carrot-and-stick approach. The ‘stick’ is raising import duties, thus making it more expensive for companies to import stuff from somewhere else and sell it in India. The ‘carrot’ is to provide subsidies and incentives.
• One key set of incentives is the production-linked incentives (PLI) scheme. Here, the government gives money to foreign or domestic companies that manufacture goods here. The annual payout is based on a percentage of revenue generated for up to five years.
• The industry that has shown the most enthusiasm for the scheme is smartphone manufacturing.
• Companies like Micromax, Samsung, and Foxconn (which makes phones for Apple) can get up to 6% of their incremental sales income through the PLI programme.
• And with the scheme, mobile phone exports jumped from $300 million in FY2018 to an astounding $11 billion in FY23. And while India imported mobile phones worth $3.6 billion in FY2018, it dropped to $1.6 billion in FY23.

The glitches

• The export boom hides more than it reveals. While imports of fully put-together mobile phones have come down, the imports of mobile phone components — including display screens, cameras, batteries, printed circuit boards — shot up between FY21 and FY23.
• Incidentally, these are the same two years when mobile phone exports jumped the most. This matters because manufacturers aren’t really making mobile phones in India in the traditional sense.
• That would involve their supply chain also moving to India and making most of the components here as well.
• This is important as low-level assembly work doesn’t produce well-paying jobs and doesn’t nearly have anywhere the same multiplier effect that actual manufacturing might provide.

Conclusion

• The main divide is over whether the PLI programme will be able to create long-lasting jobs and firmly establish India as a manufacturing and supply hub that adds value to the production process.

General Studies Paper 2

Introduction

• Scientists routinely engineer new viruses in the laboratory. They make changes to the genetic material (DNA or RNA) of existing viruses to create new variants that may or may not exist naturally. Doing so allows scientists to compare the properties of the edited variants to their natural counterparts and infer the role of the changes that they made.

Virus from scratch

• For example, if they observe that some patients have a higher viral load in their blood for a given disease, and a particular mutation is observed in the DNA of viruses isolated from those patients, they can introduce that mutation into the DNA of viruses that don’t naturally harbour it, to see if it improves the viral output in the laboratory.
• But while scientists can easily introduce changes to the genetic material of a virus, they can’t create a virus from scratch. They have to rely on nature to do this.
• So, scientists take samples from patients, make more copies of the genetic material using a technique called a polymerase chain reaction, and use it to understand the sequence of bases that makeup its genetic material. Once they have the sequence, they can tweak it.

Meet H and N

• Researchers designate influenza strains using the types of two genes that the virus contains, named haemagglutinin and neuraminidase, designated ‘H’ and ‘N’.
• There are 18 subtypes of haemagglutinin, labelled H1-H18, and 11 types of neuraminidase, N1-N11, in nature. An influenza virus contains one of each and is classified accordingly.
• For example, the 1918 epidemic was caused by the H1N1 variant; the 1957 Asian flu was caused by H2N2; and the 1968 Hong Kong flu was caused by H3N2.
• There exist further sub-variations of these primary classifications, where different mutations exist in the ‘H’ and ‘N’ genes and which can further modify a virus’s properties.
• The 1918 flu and the 2009 swine flu were both caused by H1N1 – but they varied in disease severity due to the presence of changes on the H1 and N1 genes.

Full genetic sequence

• Scientists get to study the deadly 1918 H1N1 influenza virus. The samples allowed Taubenberger and Reid to determine the virus’s full genetic sequence.
• The sequence allowed other scientists to unearth insights into the virus’s beginnings.
• It appeared to have an ancestor that was avian in origin. But there were also tell-tale signs that the virus had adapted, by evolving, to infect mammals.
• In other words, the ancestral virus that infected birds had switched to infecting humans or swine.
• It had also been circulating for a few years, getting better at its job, before it vanished. Sometime later, it reemerged as one of the deadliest pathogens ever to afflict humankind.

Conclusion

• But for all these remarkable insights, the virus’s genetic sequence revealed nothing dramatic about the virus itself. It failed to explain how it could infect people so quickly or why it killed millions. There were minor variations in the genetic material but this is to be expected for RNA viruses. There remained but one way to answer that question: to recreate the virus itself.