Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The Supreme Court has recently asked the Punjab and Haryana High Court to decide within four weeks the validity of the Haryana law mandating 75% reservation for local candidates in private sector jobs that pay up to ₹30,000 a month.
• The apex court set aside an interim stay order granted by the High Court, because the stay was granted without assigning reasons.
  • It is a settled principle that legislation cannot be stayed unless there is a preliminary finding that it is unconstitutional or suffers from any glaring illegality.
• Other states with similar bills-Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand have also introduced such laws, while the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu had promised 75% reservation in its election manifesto for last year’s Assembly polls.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• The Centre on recently notified the green hydrogen and green ammonia policy aimed at boosting the domestic production of green hydrogen to 5 million tonnes by 2030and making India an export hub for the clean fuel.

Types of hydrogen

• Green hydrogen is hydrogen gas produced through electrolysis of water — an energy intensive process for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen— using renewable power to achieve this.

• Brown hydrogen is produced using coal where the emissions are released to the air.
• Grey hydrogen is produced from natural gas where the associated emissions are released to the air.
• Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas, where the emissions are captured using carbon capture and storage.

Policy set to boost domestic production of green hydrogen

• The new policy offers 25 years of free power transmission for any new renewable energy plants set up to supply power for green hydrogen production before July 2025.
  • This means that a green hydrogen producer will be able to set up a solar power plant in Rajasthan to supply renewable energy to a green hydrogen plant in Assam and would not be required to pay any inter-state transmission charges.
  • The move is likely going to make it more economical for key users of hydrogen and ammonia such as the oil refining, fertiliser and steel sectors to produce green hydrogen for their own use. These sectors currently use grey hydrogen or grey ammonia produced using natural gas or naphtha.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

There is an imbalance now which the Supreme Court of India needs to address by empowering High Courts again

• India is a union of States. The Supreme Court of India has held that the federalist nature of our country is part and parcel of the basic structure of the Constitution.
• Much has been written about the federal structure in relation to the legislature and the executive. There is a need to examine the Indian judiciary and the need to strengthen the federal nature of our judiciary.

Integrated system

• Federalism is a midpoint between unitarism which has a supreme centre, to which the States are subordinate, and confederalism wherein the States are supreme, and are merely coordinated by a weak centre.
• An integral requirement of a federal state is that there be a robust federal judicial system which interprets this constitution, and therefore adjudicates upon the rights of the federal units and the central unit, and between the citizen and these units.
• The federal judicial system comprises the Supreme Court and the High Court in the sense that it is only these two courts which can adjudicate the above rights.
• The Supreme Court was created under the Constitution, and is a relatively new court. On the other hand, some of the High Courts in our country have been in existence since the 1860s (and some existed even before that, in their earlier avatars as supreme courts of the Presidencies).

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• The date, February 15, 2021 will be regarded as a watershed moment when new guidelines took effect to completely de-regulate the geospatial sector for Indians.
• As we celebrate the first anniversary of this moment, it is time to look back and assess its impact and identify the bottlenecks so that the full potential of the geospatial sector can be realised.

Not much of a percolation

• India has a robust ecosystem in geospatial, with the Survey of India (SoI), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), remote sensing application centres (RSAC)s, and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in particular, and all ministries and departments, in general, using geospatial technology.
• However, the full benefits have yet to percolate to the public; neither is there much contribution to the nation’s GDP.

New interest and developments

• Since the declaration of the guidelines, there has been a lot of hype and hoopla about the geospatial sector.
• The media too published many articles projecting the market to some ₹1 lakh-crore by the year 2029 with 13% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). Consequently, the geospatial sector, is seeing new interest.
• The last year has also witnessed some activity on the ground. The most noticeable was the over subscription of the initial public offering of MapmyIndia.
• The other noticeable activity was the launching of a city mapping programme by Genesys International in India.
• Such an aggressive stance by investors for geospatial was not seen in the earlier regime; it is certain that the new guidelines have played a role. Today, there is a positive mood in the private industry, which is no more apprehensive and conservative like it was in previous years.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The amendments proposed to Rule 6(1) of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) (Cadre) Rules of 1954, which seek to empower the Central government to unilaterally order the Central deputation of IAS officers without the consent of the State governments or the officers concerned, have provoked controversy.
• The Centre has justified them on the ground that the States are not meeting their Central Deputation Reserve (CDR) obligations.
  • As a result, Centre is suffering from an acute shortage of mid-level IAS officers, especially Deputy Secretaries and Directors.
• However all the States, including the BJP-ruled ones, not meeting CDR obligations indicates that their reluctance to forward names to the Centre is not the real problem.
• There can be simpler, more effective and less contentious solutions to the shortage than the proposed amendments.

In fact, once the root causes of the shortage are identified, the solutions suggest themselves.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• At a time when India is poised to breach the annual $400-billion target for exports, the move to change laws governing the Special Economic Zones Act comes as a big boost for the sector.
• This transformative announcementwill enable states to become partners in the Development of Enterprise and Service Hubs.
• As the finance minister observed, the move would enable all large industrial enclaves to optimally utilise the available infrastructure, thereby pushing up competitiveness of exports.

Current scenario

• In the April-December 2021 period, exports from SEZs increased by 25% to $93 billion; these were $102.3 billion in 2020-21.
• About 270 SEZs are currently operational, though many more have been notified.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The Quad Ministerial meeting in Melbourne, meant to set the stage for a meeting by the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. later this year in Tokyo, ended with outcomes that showcased its “positive agenda” in the Indo-Pacific region.

Positive Outcomes of Ministerial Meeting

• From plans to deliver more than a billion vaccine doses — India-made with U.S. funding and distributed through Japanese and Australian networks — and donate another 1.3 billion doses around the world;
• to prepare for an Indo-Pacific Clean Energy Supply Chain Forum to tackle climate change;
• to further a “Quad vision” for technology governances and safe and transparent 5G systems,
• and to launch humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, the Quad is, in the words of the joint statement issued, “more effective in delivering practical support to the region”.
• India was also able to insert a reference to fighting “cross-border” terrorism, and condemnation of the 26/11 attack and Pathankot attacks.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Finance Secretary recently accused ratings agencies of “double standards” when assessing emerging markets and developing economies.
• He was responding to ratings agencies’ terming the country as the most indebted emerging market and the claim that the latest budget did not provide clarity on fiscal consolidation plans.

What did the rating agencies say?

• Fitch, a rating agency, had stated that higher deficits and continued lack of clarity on medium-term consolidation plans in the recent Union Budget was its rationale for projecting of a downward trajectory in the country’s debt/GDP.
• Another agency, Moody’s, said the Union Budget was growth-oriented, credit positive for many issuers but the budgetary provisions posed fiscal challenges. Focus on capital expenditure, it said, supported near-term growth but challenged long-term fiscal consolidation. Additionally, the budget projected only a slight narrowing in the central government deficit.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

Cyber attacks may be a relatively new phenomenon, but in a short time frame have come to be assessed as dangerous as terrorism.

Cyber attacks in recent years:

• The world was possibly made aware of the danger and threat posed by cyber weapons with the advent of theStuxnet Worm in 2010, which resulted in large-scale damage to Iran’s centrifuge capabilities.
• Two years later, in 2012, abank of computers belonging to the Saudi Aramco Oil Company were targeted, reportedly by Iranian operatives, employing malware that wiped out data on 30,000 computers.
• A few weeks later, Iranwas again believed to have been behind a targeted attack on the Qatari natural gas company, RasGas.
• The string of instances appear to have provoked then United States Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta, to utter the warning that the world had to prepare for a kind of ‘cyber Pearl Harbour’,highlighting a new era of potential vulnerabilities.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Two recent achievements have taken us a step closer to the dream of creating an artificial sun.
• China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) sustained the plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,056 seconds in January 2022.
• In February 2022, the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, U.K., produced 59 megajoules (MJ) of energy from thermonuclear fusion.
• These are dress rehearsals for the upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a global experiment to generate 500 MW of power by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms by 2035.

The thermonuclear fusion:

• In a thermonuclear fusion reaction, lighter atoms like those of hydrogen fuse to produce slightly heavier atoms like that of helium.
• The mass of combination of Hydrogen atoms reduces to form energy:
  • The mass of one hydrogen atom is 1.007825 Atomic Mass unit (AMU).
  • When four hydrogen atoms are combined, it transmutes into a helium atom. The sum of the mass of four hydrogen atoms is 4.03130 AMU, while the mass of one helium atom is just 4.00268 AMU.
  • As we know, matter is neither created nor destroyed; hence the mass difference 0.02862 AMU is converted into pure energy by way of Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2.
• If we fuse four grams of hydrogen into helium, about 0.0028 grams of mass would be converted to 2.6×10^11 joules; with that energy, we can light a 60-watt light bulb for over 100 years! 600 million tons of hydrogen are fused every second in the Sun, producing 596 million tons of helium. If one-thousandth of a gram of mass can create energy to power a 60W bulb for a hundred years, imagine the amount of energy the remaining four million tons of hydrogen unleash every second by the Sun.