The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 4 August 2023

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis for UPSC

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 3 August 2023

• The Union government on Thursday restricted all imports of laptops, tablets, and all-in-one and small-factor personal computers (PCs), requiring licences for these products to be brought into the country and sold to consumers.
• The move is expected to particularly impact short-term laptop availability from laptop brands that rely on assembly abroad, such as Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple. The notification may entail longer wait times for individual products to be cleared for import and sale in India.

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• “The said restriction shall not be applicable to imports under Baggage Rules,” the Directorate General of Foreign Trade said in its notification announcing the curbs, indicating that travellers may be free to bring one of these products back with them from overseas without attracting penalties.

• The Centre’s ambitious ₹72,000-crore Great Nicobar Project may see 9.64 lakh, and not 8.5 lakh, trees felled to enable the construction of a trans-shipment port, an international airport, a township, and a 450- MVA gas- and solar-based power plant on the Great Nicobar island, according to a response by Minister of State (Environment) Ashwini Kumar Choubey in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday.
• The Great Nicobar Island (GNI) Project is a mega project to be implemented at the southern end of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
• The project includes an international container transshipment terminal, a greenfield international airport, township development, and a 450 MVA gas and solar based power plant over an extent of 16,610 hectares in the island.
• As per the NITI Aayog report, the proposed port will allow Great Nicobar to participate in the regional and global maritime economy by becoming a major player in cargo transshipment.
• It is equidistant from Colombo to the southwest and Port Klang (Malaysia) and Singapore to the southeast, and positioned close to the East-West international shipping corridor, through which a very large part of the world’s shipping trade passes.
• The proposal to develop Great Nicobar was first floated in the 1970s, and its importance for national security and consolidation of the Indian Ocean Region has been repeatedly underlined.
• Increasing Chinese assertion in the Indian Ocean has added great urgency to this imperative in recent years.
• The project has faced several criticism citing concerns regarding its adverse impact on the rich biodiversity of the area and damage to the habitats of endangered species.
• The project area is part of Coastal Regulation Zones-IA and IB, and the Galathea bay which is a nesting ground for birds.
• Also, turtle nesting sites, dolphins and other species will be harmed by dredging.
• Great Nicobar
• Great Nicobar is the southernmost island of the Nicobar Islands Archipelago.
• It covers 1,03,870 hectares of unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems.
• It is home to a very rich ecosystem, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, bryophytes, among others.

• The project has faced several criticism citing concerns regarding its adverse impact on the rich biodiversity of the area and damage to the habitats of endangered species.
• The project area is part of Coastal Regulation Zones-IA and IB, and the Galathea bay which is a nesting ground for birds.
• Also, turtle nesting sites, dolphins and other species will be harmed by dredging.
• Great Nicobar

• Great Nicobar is the southernmost island of the Nicobar Islands Archipelago.
• It covers 1,03,870 hectares of unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems.
• It is home to a very rich ecosystem, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, bryophytes, among others.

• The conflict in Ukraine and the recourse to nuclear rhetoric have revived concerns about nuclear escalation management between the major nuclear powers. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States-Russia nuclear rivalry had taken a back seat.
• Instead, North Korea, Iran and India-Pakistan got attention, with many analysts getting nostalgic about ‘nuclear stability’ during the Cold War.
• Deterrence is fundamentally based on the assumption that both adversaries are rational enough to judge when costs outweigh the benefits of the act.
• Thomas Schelling, whose writings during the 1960s and 1970s shaped nuclear deterrence thinking (he won the Economics Nobel in 2005), concluded that nuclear weapons were not usable but had political utility in terms of preventing a war with another nuclear power.
• The nine nuclear-armed states, including the United States, Russia, and China, continue to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals, deploying new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2022.
• Other nuclear-armed countries are UK, France, India, Pakistan, the North Korea and Israel
• Russia and the United States possess almost 90% of all nuclear weapons, with relatively stable sizes of their respective nuclear arsenals.
• The suspension of the strategic stability dialogue and the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) has halted discussions for a follow-on treaty.

• The recent push to integrate ‘AYUSH’ medicinal systems into mainstream health care to achieve universal health coverage and ‘decolonise medicine’ is a pluralistic approach that would require every participating system to meet basic safety and efficacy standards.
• Homoeopathy does not meet these standards. But its supporters have argued in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia recently for expanding its use by citing demand and decolonisation, disregarding its flaws.
• India’s path to universal health care must be grounded in evidence-based and ethics-driven medicine.
• AYUSH is the acronym of the medical systems that are being practiced in India such as Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy.
• These systems are based on definite medical philosophies and represent a way of healthy living with established concepts on prevention of diseases and promotion of health.
• The basic approach of all these systems on health, disease and treatment are holistic.

• The Bill was introduced as a financial Bill, but Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw informed the Lok Sabha that it was not a money Bill.
• Government sources confirmed that the Bill was an ordinary one that would have to pass through both Houses, brushing aside a claim by Congress MP Manish Tewari who initially interpreted the legislation as a money Bill that would only require clearance by the Lok Sabha.
• The Bill strikes off Section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 that requires companies which mishandle user data to compensate users. Government sources said this was because “compensation is a judicial process”, while ex-gratia payments were at the discretion of the governments, and that legally compensation would have to be awarded through civil tort law.
• The Bill provides a wide range of exemptions for the “state and its instrumentalities”. For instance, personal data can be processed “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India or security of the state” for “fulfilling any obligation under law”.
• While the law requires firms to disclose to users the identity of other firms to which their data will be entrusted for processing, they are explicitly exempted from disclosing sharing of such data in the case of lawful interception of data.

• Researchers have recorded the first instance of captive breeding of the Himalayan vulture (Gyps himalayensis) in India at the Assam State Zoo, Guwahati.
• Categorised as ‘near threatened’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of threatened species, the Himalayan vulture is a common winter migrant to the Indian plains, and a resident of the high Himalayas.
• Four VCBCs established by Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) at Pinjore in Haryana, Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, Rani in Assam, and Rajabhatkhawa in West Bengal are involved in conservation breeding of the white-rumped vulture (Gyps bengalensis), slender-billed vulture (Gyps tenuirostris), and the Indian vulture (Gyps indicus).
• The unprecedented scale and speed of declines in vulture populations has left all the three resident Gyps vulture species categorised ‘Critically Endangered’.
• India is home to 9 species of Vulture namely the Oriental white-backed, Long-billed, Slender-billed, Himalayan, Red-headed, Egyptian, Bearded, Cinereous and the Eurasian Griffon.

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