Syllabus: General Studies Paper 1

Context

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi is going to inaugurate the Statue of Equality, a gigantic statue of Ramanujacharya, on February 5 on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

About Ramanujacharya

• Born in 1017 in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, Ramanujacharya is revered as a Vedic philosopher and social reformer.
• He travelled across India, advocating equality and social justice.
• Ramanuja revived the Bhakti movement, and his preachings inspired other Bhakti schools of thought.
• He is considered to be the inspiration for poets like Annamacharya, Bhakt Ramdas, Thyagaraja, Kabir, and Meerabai.
• From the time he was a young budding philosopher, Ramanuja appealed for the protection of nature and its resources like air, water, and soil.
• He wrote nine scriptures known as the navaratnas, and composed numerous commentaries on Vedic scriptures.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

• Recently, India announced a diplomatic boycottof the Beijing Winter Olympics.
• By doing so, India has joined a growing list of countries that will not send government delegations to the Chinese capital for the Winter Olympics.
• In December, the United States had announced a diplomatic boycottof the event. The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and the Netherlands, among others, followed the US’s lead and made a similar decision.
• Moreover, Doordarshan’s has also decided to not telecast live the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Games. The announcement had come after the Indian government refused to send its envoy to the opening or closing ceremonies.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are considered as a gateway to a future written in chrome, operating on a virtual cloud.
• This techno-optimism underpinned 2022 budget speech, where AI was described as a sunrise technology that would “assist sustainable development at scale and modernise the country.”
• While there is an allure to national dreams of economic prosperity and global competitiveness, underwritten by AI, there is an environmental cost and — like any issue at the nexus of technology, development, growth and security — a cost that comes with being locked into rules about said environmental impact set by powerful actors.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 1

Context

Ethnocentrism broadly refers to ethnic self-centredness and self-importance. This attitude could lead an individual to believe that their own culture or way of life is the correct way of living. It could also result in hostility towards other cultures.

• Ethnocentrism is therefore the tendency to view one’s own group, the ‘in-group’, as the archetype and all other groups, the ‘out-groups’, with reference to this ideal.
• The in-group’s boundaries are defined by one or more observable characteristics such as language, accent, physical features or religion, indicating common descent.
• While initially used in anthropology, the term is now used widely in sociology, psychology, political science, economics and markets, among other disciplines.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

Context

• The Covid pandemic has amply demonstrated the health sector’s direct and indirect intersectoral impacts and its devastating power in creating disruption. It was, therefore, not surprising to see its imprint on the Economic Survey.
• Given the learnings of the pandemic, it was reasonable to expect a “health-centered” budget.
• Instead, the budget’s main focus is on increasing capital expenditures for expanding the economic infrastructure under the PM Gati Shakti scheme. Growth numbers no meaning for the millions who have been impoverished by the pandemic-induced income losses, hunger, sickness and trauma.

Covid impact

• Inequalities have widened. An estimated Rs 70,000 crore have been spent by the people out-of-pocket in this short time for medical treatment that the government ought to have provided.
• Spending at a time when earnings were down, pushed millions below the poverty line and hunger has emerged as a major issue placing India low on the malnutrition and hunger index rankings.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s fourth successive budget, while common-sensical in its approach, is not exactly bubbling with new ideas.

Highlights of the budget:

• The Minister acknowledges the role public capital expenditure could play in crowding-in private investment at a time when “private investments seem to require that support” and help to ‘pump-prime’ demand in the economy, the Budget outlay of ₹7.50 lakh-crore for the capital account marks 24.4% increase from the revised estimate of ₹6.03 lakh-crore for the current fiscal.
• The Budget speech highlights the PM Gati Shakti, a “transformative approach for economic growth and sustainable development” that is to be powered by the ‘seven engines’ of roads, railways, airports, ports, mass transport, waterways, and logistics infrastructure.
• ‘Master Plan for Expressways’ that will be formulated in 2022-23 under the scheme.
• It projects the addition of 25,000 kilometres of roads to the National Highways network.
• The talk of enabling seamless multimodal movement of goods and people and providing multimodal connectivity between mass urban transit systems and railway stations, however, all sound a familiar refrain from past speeches.

Context

• The Supreme Court has recently declared the suspension of 12 BJP legislators for one year by the Maharashtra Assembly for disorderly conduct, as grossly illegal and irrational.
• In doing so, the Supreme Court has set the limits of the legislature’s power to deal with disorderly conduct in the House.
• ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Brushing aside objections that the judiciary should not examine the validity of the proceedings of the House, a three-judge Bench, comprising Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and Justice C.T. Ravikumar, ruled that the suspension beyond the term of the particular session in which it was imposed was a nullity in the eyes of the law.

More about the incident

• July 2021: when the Maharashtra government introduced a resolution seeking empirical data on OBCs from the Union government there was ruckus in the house. The House was adjourned briefly for a few times before the resolution was passed, as BJP members rushed to the well of the House and were accused of damaging the presiding officer’s microphone and grabbing the mace.
• Suspension: Later the Chair, during the incidents, said that when he was in the Deputy Speaker’s chamber, some members rushed inside and abused him. A resolution moved by the Parliamentary Affairs Minister was subsequently adopted by the House suspending 12 MLAs. They were barred from entering the legislative premises for 12 months.
• The members challenged their suspension in the Supreme Court.

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Context

• Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the budget announced the launch of the Digital Rupee — a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — 2022-23 onwards.

Authority

• The Reserve Bank of India will launch the CBDC from the upcoming financial year.
• This follows the government’s plans to launch the CBDC that will be backed by blockchain technology.

CBDC

• CBDC is a legal tender issued by a central bank in a digital form.
• It is similar to a fiat currency issued in paper and is interchangeable with any other fiat currency.

Context

• India has invited applications from 100 domestic companies, startups and small and medium enterprises to become a part of the design-linked incentive (DLI) scheme.
• Along with it the IT ministry has sought proposals from academia, start-ups and MSMEs to train 85,000 qualified engineers on semiconductor design and manufacturing.

About Design-linked incentive (DLI) scheme:

• Aim: to provide financial and infrastructural support to companies setting up fabs or semiconductor making plants in India.
• It will offerfiscal support of up to 50% of the total cost to eligible participants who can set up these fabs in the country.
• It will also offerfiscal support of 30% of the capital expenditure to participants for building compound semiconductors, silicon photonics and sensors fabrication plants in India.
• Anincentive of 4% to 6% on net sales will be provided for five years to companies of semiconductor design for integrated circuits, chipsets, system on chips, systems and IP cores.

Importance of Semiconductor manufacturing:

• The sudden surge in demand of chips and semiconductor components has underpinned the need to establish a robust semiconductor ecosystem in India.
• Several sectors, including auto, telecom, and medical technology suffered due to the unexpected surge leading to the scarcity of chips manufactured by only a few countries.

Recently, the New York Times published an article extensively detailing how Pegasus, a spyware developed by Israel-based NSO Group, has been used as a tool to firm up Israel’s interests across the globe.

Claims of the investigative article:

• Israel got countries that had historically been against it on the Palestine issue to switch sides by offering this powerful spyware that can be deployed not only against drug traffickers and terrorists, but also against opposition activists and prying journalists.
• The tool is cited as one of the reasons why the Abraham accords between Israel and its neighbouring Arab countries fell into place and won the blessing of Saudi Arabia.
• Pegasus was part of a $2-billion “package of sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear” transaction between India and Israel after Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel. It was after this deal that India changed its historically pro-Palestine stance and voted in Israel’s favour in 2019 “at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization.”

About Pegasus Spyware:

• Capabilities-It can mop up information storedon phones such as photos and contacts, and also activate a phone’s cameras and microphones to turn it into a spying device without the owner’s knowledge.
• Mechanism:
  • The earliest avatars of Pegasus used spear phishingto enter phones, utilising a message designed to entice the target to click on a malicious link.
  • However, it evolved into “zero-click” attackswith the phones being infected without any action from the target individual.
• Detection of the Pegasus system for the first time:
  • In 2019, WhatsAppreleased a statement saying that Pegasus could enter phones via calls made on the platform, even if they were not attended.
  • Pegasus used several such “exploits”, or weaknesses, to enter Android and Apple phones; andmany of these exploits were reported “zero day”, which means even the device manufacturers were unaware of these weaknesses.