The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 20 June 2023

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis for UPSC

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 19 June 2023

• A Mesolithic period rock painting depicting a person tilling a piece of land has been found by D. Kanna Babu, former Superintending Archaeologist of the Temple Survey Project (Southern Region) of the Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai, in Orvakallu village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh.
• Babu also singled out a painted figure of a man holding a plough and appearing to be tilling land — an indication, in his telling, “of a semi-settled life pattern” in which members of this community cultivated crops.

 The Hindu Editorial Today

• Mesolithic, also called Middle Stone Age, is an ancient cultural stage that existed between the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), with its chipped stone tools, and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), with its polished stone tools.

• India took 63 years to reach $1 trillion GDP, seven years to hit $2 trillion, three years to hit $3 trillion, and is estimated to reach $25 trillion by 2047 (according to PricewaterhouseCoopers), 100 years after Independence.
• In 1700, India accounted for over 35% of global GDP, making it the world’s biggest, and by the time of the economic crises in 1991, it was down to almost 1%. Today, it is at around 4%-5% and rising. The United States needs this market desperately, and India needs America’s capital and its technology — military and non-military, both.
• By 2030, India will have a working population of one billion, which is more than the entire G-8 population; today, it has Internet coverage almost equal to it. As recently as eight years ago, India’s per capita mobile data consumption was one of the lowest in the world (122nd), and today it is ranked at one, more than that of the U.S. and China combined, which is helping take prosperity to every nook and corner of India.
• Let us take the example of how a combination of carbon tax on fuel coupled with a coal cess and an infrastructure development cess, found enough savings to fund at least a part of the rail, roads and ports expansion.
• Indeed, a lot remains to be done. India needs greater digitalisation of internal processes and better services delivery using India Stack, revive stalled agriculture reforms, build up supply chain capability and move manufacturing to India as companies look for other homes outside China, and carry out deeper judicial reforms, to name a few.
• Introduction
• PRAGATI (Pro-Active Governance And Timely Implementation), as the name suggests, is aimed at starting a culture of Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation.
• It is also a robust system for bringing e-transparency and e-accountability with real-time presence and exchange among the key stakeholders.
• The platform was launched on March 25, 2015.

• World Refugee Day (June 20).
• Global conflicts which include the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Myanmar and Sudan among others, and the protracted situations in Afghanistan, and Somalia present an unprecedented challenge. These crises extend to our region where many individuals have been uprooted from their homes.
• India is home to some 250,000 forcibly displaced persons, with women and children constituting half of that population.
• Refugees and asylum seekers encounter a myriad of obstacles, such as legal recognition and challenges in obtaining government-issued documents, which hinder their access to essential services, including financial support and health care.
• India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Conference nor to its 1967 protocol on the repute of refugees.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a UN Refugee Agency and a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting the rights and building a better future for refugees, forcibly displaced communities and stateless people.
• It was created in 1950 to help millions of Europeans who had fled or lost their homes.
• It is headquartered at Geneva, Switzerland.

• Reports of drugs manufactured in India causing severe harm and dozens of patient deaths from across the world continue to trickle in, the latest being the deaths of two patients in Sri Lanka who were administered Indian-made anaesthetic drugs.
• Diethylene glycol-contaminated drugs have led to at least five incidents of poisoning in Chennai, Mumbai, Bihar, Gurugram and Jammu between 1972 and 2020.
• India can continue to be the pharmacy of the global south only if the regulator begins to behave like a watchdog to ensure drug safety, and not as a facilitator for the pharma industry.

• Every day, the cost of climate change and inaction becomes dearer, particularly for low- and middle-income countries that face the brunt of it.
• This gap between promises and payment goes to show that international funding is unpredictable and poorly structured, and does not address the liquidity challenges of developing countries.
• In November 2022, on the occasion of the G20 Summit and at the end of a COP27 with mixed results, Emmanuel Macron announced the organization of an international conference in Paris in June 2023, aimed at taking stock “on all the means and ways of increasing financial solidarity with the South”.
• India, the president of the G20 this year, is co-chairing the steering committee of the summit with France and can be counted on to be that voice of the Global South.

India and Millets:

• India has led the global conversation on reviving millet production: Because of India, the UN declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets.
• Leading producer: It is the world’s leading producer of millets(around 41% of total production in 2020)
• National Food Security Mission: Government is implementing a Sub-Mission on Nutri-Cereals (Millets) as part of the National Food Security Mission.
• State-level missions: Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh revived the indigenous crops for food security.
• 2018 was observed as the ‘National Year of Millets”

• The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) calls for the formulation of one law for India, which would be applicable to all religious communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption.
• While the criminal laws in India are uniform and applicable equally on all, no matter what their religious beliefs are, the civil laws are influenced by faith.
• Matters like marriage, inheritance, adoption, succession, etc. are governed in India according to the personal laws of the various religious communities.
• The founding fathers of the Indian republic had anticipated these issues and hence inserted Article 44 in the chapter on Directive Principles of State Policy that makes up Part IV of the Constitution of India.
• Article 37 says that the “provisions contained in this Part (Part IV) shall not be enforceable by any court… and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws”.

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