The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 5 April 2023

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis for UPSC

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 4 April 2023

• The World Bank has forecast a 6.3% economic growth rate for India in the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2024, a downgrade of 0.7 percentage points since its October forecast.
• The primary reasons for this are high borrowing costs and slower income growth causing weaker consumption, as well as the government tightening fiscal expenditure, the World Bank said in its South Asia Economic Focus: Expanding Opportunities: Toward Inclusive Growth report, released ahead of next week’s Spring Meetings in Washington DC.
• While India fared better than the rest of the South Asian region, two major concerns were the female labour participation rate, which had dropped to below 20%, and the informal sector neither becoming more productive nor shrinking, according to the study’s lead economist.

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• One is management of inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates, for which the Reserve Bank of India is expected to find a solution.
• The second is negotiating bilateral and multilateral trade agreements that protect the interests of India’s farmers and workers, for which coordination is required amongst the Ministries of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture.
• The third problem that is affecting all citizens is secure employment with adequate incomes, which involves all Ministries and all State governments. The third one is linked with the other two: it has become a principal cause of social tensions and political conflicts in the country.
• Since wages in China have become much higher, India seems well-placed to attract global investors. To attract investors, India must compete with other countries. Vietnam is often cited as a country that is proving to be more attractive than India to western and Japanese investors.

• It is not exactly surprising when the India Meteorological Department (IMD) says that the summer months will be searingly hot.
• Last week, it proclaimed that most parts of the country are expected to experience above normal maximum temperatures during the “hot weather season”(March-May), barring parts of peninsular and northwest India, which would see normal or even below normal ‘maximum’ temperatures
• The purpose of forecasts is to give lead time to States to prepare. The National Disaster Management Authority has been issuing guidelines to States on preparing Heat Action Plans since 2016.
• Many States have prepared documents that detail measures and methods to deal with heat-related contingencies, that, as reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn, are only poised to get worse.

• On March 12, the Centre filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court frowning upon same-sex marriage. It invoked the “accepted view” that a marriage between a biological man and woman is a “holy union, a sacrament and sanskar (culture)” in India.
• First, it is argued that legalising queer marriages will destroy the concept of family, which is the “fundamental building block of society.”
• It is also argued that this is not a matter of judicial interference, but one of interpreting the statutes.

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation:

• Organisation of Islamic Cooperation is an international organization founded in 1969, consisting of 57 member states.
• It is the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations.
• The organisation states that it is “the collective voice of the Muslim world” and works to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony“.
• The OIC has permanent delegations to the United Nations and the European Union.
• Permanent Secretariat is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

• Indian courts are jammed with cases and are seeing pendency increase by the day. At the same time, they are also functioning with fewer judges than the sanctioned number, the India Justice Report (IJR), 2022 said.
• As of December 2022, against a sanctioned strength of 1,108 judges, the High Courts were functioning with only 778 judges. The subordinate courts were found functioning with 19,288 judges against a sanctioned strength of 24,631 judges.
• The India Justice Report is a collaborative effort undertaken in partnership with DAKSH, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Common Cause, Centre for Social Justice, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and TISS-Prayas.
• There are more women judges at the district court level than at the High Court level, with 35% of the total number of judges at the district court level and only 13% of judges in the High Courts across the country being women, the India Justice Report (IJR), 2022 has revealed.
• While the share of women judges remains uneven across the States, Goa, with 70%, has the highest percentage of women judges at subordinate courts, followed by Meghalaya and Nagaland at 63% each.
• Among the High Courts, Sikkim, with a total strength of just three judges, has the highest national average at 33.3% of women judges. Meanwhile, Bihar, Tripura, Manipur, Meghalaya, and Uttarakhand continued to have no women judges in their High Courts, the IJR said.

• Finland formally joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on Tuesday, roughly doubling the length of the border that the alliance shares with Russia and bolsters its eastern flank as the war in Ukraine grinds on with no resolution in sight.
• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the NATO expansion was an “encroachment on our security and on Russia’s national interests”. Moscow would watch closely for any NATO military deployments in Finland, he said.
• Blinken said: “I’m tempted to say this is maybe the one thing we can thank Mr Putin for. Because he once again here precipitated something he claims to want to prevent.”

What is NATO?

• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) of April, 1949, by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
• There are currently 31 member states.
• Its original members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Joining the original signatories were Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955, from 1990 as Germany), Spain (1982), the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999), Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004), Albania and Croatia (2009), Montenegro (2017), and North Macedonia (2020), Finland (2023).
• Headquarters: Brussels, Belgium.
• Headquarters of Allied Command Operations: Mons, Belgium.

What are the Objectives of NATO?

• Political objectives: NATO promotes democratic values and enables members to consult and cooperate on defense and security-related issues to solve problems, build trust and, in the long run, prevent conflict.
• Military Objectives: NATO is committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes. If diplomatic efforts fail, it has the military power to undertake crisis-management operations.
• These are carried out under the collective defence clause of NATO’s founding treaty – Article 5 of the Washington Treaty or under a United Nations mandate, alone or in cooperation with other countries and international organisations.
• NATO has only once invoked Article 5, on September 12, 2001 following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in the US.

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