The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 28 September 2023

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis for UPSC

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 27 September 2023

• The Manipur government on Wednesday extended the imposition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in the whole State — except in the jurisdiction of 19 police stations in seven districts of the Imphal valley — for another six months.
• The “disturbed area” status under the Act will remain applicable in all the hill districts, which are dominated by tribal communities. However, since 2022, the AFSPA has been gradually withdrawn from the valley districts, which are dominated by the Meitei community, due to a “significant improvement” in the security situation.

 The Hindu Editorial Today

• Origin of AFSPA:
• The Act in its original form was promulgated by the British in response to the Quit India movement in 1942.
• After Independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to retain the Act, which was first brought in as an ordnance and then notified as an Act in 1958.
• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, enacted in the year 1958, grants extraordinary powers and immunity to the armed forces to bring back order in the “disturbed areas”.
• Armed forces have the authority to prohibit a gathering of five or more persons in an area, can use force or even open fire after giving due warning if they feel a person is in contravention of the law.
• If reasonable suspicion exists, the army can also arrest a person without a warrant; enter or search a premises without a warrant; and ban the possession of firearms.
• Any person arrested or taken into custody may be handed over to the officer in charge of the nearest police station along with a report detailing the circumstances that led to the arrest.
• The 2005 BP Jeevan Reddy Committee on the Northeast and the 2007 Veerappa Moily Report of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission both recommended that the Act be abolished.
• The Justice Verma Committee (2013) and the Justice Hegde Commission (2013) endorsed addressing the abuses done under the AFSPA and eliminating the security forces’ effective impunity. The Hegde Commission (2013) said that all seven killings in the six incidents, it studied, in Manipur were the result of extrajudicial executions.

• Unfortunately, India missed a great opportunity to protect worker rights and advance the welfare of workers during the G-20 summit, despite the G-20’s Labour 20 (L20), a coalition of G20 leaders concerned about workers, holding two meetings in India.
• The Arab Gulf countries follow an exploitative labour system called the kafala system, which ties migrant workers to their employers. This system makes it difficult for migrant workers to leave their jobs or change employers, and it increases the risk of forced labour and modern-day slavery.
• India is the world’s largest migrant-sending country, with an estimated 13 million workers abroad. Of these, an estimated nine million are working in exploitative conditions in the Arab Gulf.
• In India itself, workers in a number of industries, including textiles, brick kilns, shrimp farming, copper manufacturing, stone cutting, and plantations, face forced labour and modern-day slavery.

• On September 24, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft dropped off a capsule over the earth, leaving it to be pulled down by the planet’s gravity. It then deployed parachutes and gently landed in Utah in the U.S., where experts waited to retrieve its invaluable contents: around 250 grams of rocks and dust that OSIRIS-REx had collected from the surface of 101955 Bennu.
• Bennu is an asteroid orbiting the sun (with a period of 436 days) such that it comes relatively close to the earth once every six years or so.
• It is a carbonaceous asteroid with characteristics that suggest it settled into its present form and composition within 10 million years after the solar system’s formation, surviving the last 4.5 billion years nearly intact. Such ‘leftover’ pieces of debris are expected to reveal the system’s ingredients and the signatures of the processes that combined them in different ways.

• On October 20th, 2021, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly touched asteroid Bennu, from where it is meant to collect samples of dust and pebbles and deliver them back to Earth in 2023.
• What is the OSIRIS-REx mission?
• OSIRIS-Rex stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.
• This is NASA’s first mission meant to return a sample from the ancient asteroid.
• Launched in 2016, it reached its target in 2018.
• The departure window for the mission will open up in 2021, after which it will take over two years to reach back to Earth.

• Data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union show that the share of women in Parliament in India is around 15%. India ranks 141 out of 193 countries on this count. Even Pakistan, South Africa, and Kenya have a higher share of women representatives.
• Reservation for women in elections to the local bodies in India has resulted in increasing their participation in governance.
• In spite of the law, and its laudable intent, the ultimate game changer lies in changing societal approach to gender roles. Representation of women to elected bodies must necessarily be seen in the larger context of female labour force participation in India, which is abysmal by any standards.
• Recent research from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Time Use Survey (2019) shows that for 97 minutes spent daily by men on unpaid domestic services for household members, women spend 299 minutes.
• In this context, government programmes which recognise unpaid labour done by women within households, such as the Magalir Urimai Thogai in Tamil Nadu, are designed to recognise and address the vast gulf in unpaid household labour.
• The Urimai Thogai scheme is a monthly cash transfer programme.

• With the decadal growth rate of the elderly population of India estimated at 41% and its share of the total population projected to double to over 20% by 2050, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), India, in its 2023 India Ageing Report, has said that by 2046, it is likely that the elderly population will have surpassed the population of children (aged up to 15) in the country.
• More than 40% of the elderly in India are in the poorest wealth quintile, with about 18.7% of them living without an income, the report said, adding that such levels of poverty may affect their quality of life and healthcare utilisation.
• The data showed that women, on an average, had a higher life expectancy at the age of 60 and 80 when compared with men — with variations across the States and Union Territories.
• “Poverty is inherently gendered in old age when older women are more likely to be widowed, living alone, with no income and with fewer assets of their own, and fully dependent on family for support

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