10 June 2023

DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS

1 -Demographic Dividend: GS I – Population-related issues

Context:

• In contrast to China, where the median age is already 39, India’s median age of 28 predicts that India will continue to benefit from its demographic edge until the end of this century.

China’s case:

• The youth population in China was shrinking, and the elderly population was growing.
• 12 million Chinese students are anticipated to complete their studies in 2023.

China’s difficulties:

• China is dealing with a brand-new epidemic: unemployment.
• The Covid-19 lockdowns and widespread layoffs in vital industries including real estate, technology, and education had a significant negative impact on the job market.
• shortage of work options and rising need for job security.

What went wrong with the labour market in China?

• Throughout the Zero-Covid three years, the nation’s growth was severely hampered.

Situation in India:

• Poor education, unemployment, and a lack of trained workers.

Impact:

• Unregistered migration.
• The rise in crime rates: Internet scams have grown very popular in India.

Why did India go wrong?

• More than 2,500 Industrial Training Institutes, many of which are state-run and were founded in the 1960s, have not modernised their skill-building programmes.
• The NSDC, or National Skill Development Corporation: The 2003-founded NSDC’s one-year-long short courses are insufficient for learning actual skills.
• Low-quality engineering colleges: They primarily serve as profit-making businesses that provide subpar education.

Jobs and the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020:

• For pupils in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, the NEP 2020 introduced vocational training to help them develop their talents in a particular sector.
• At the secondary level, career-focused schools must continue this.

What remedies are there?

• The creation of jobs is the top priority.
• The constant objective should be to improve one’s skill to the point of effective outcome.
• A distinct form of high school that continues with skill-training should be the result of the NEP vision.
• MSMEs should be given more incentives because they are the main sources of new jobs.
• India must expand its current IT skills while also paying attention to the manufacturing industry.
• The German model of skill development, which is best practise: It consisted of two distinct sectors: the higher education system and the dual vocational education and training system (at the firm level and in classes at a vocational school).

Conclusion:

• India currently only reaps a small portion of the demographic dividends. High-quality employment must be developed and filled by highly skilled young people if demographic dividends are to be fully realised.

Source The Hindu

2 – Representative Democracy: GS II – Constitution-related issues

Context:

• Citizens have a crucial role in representational democracies.

Direct vs representative democracy:

• People cast votes for representatives in representative democracies, who subsequently cast votes on proposed policies.
• People directly elect representatives in a direct democracy.

Fundamental tenets of representative democracy:

• Equality before the law for all citizens.
• Democratic elections.
• Popular sovereignty principle: The majority rule principle of popular sovereignty is employed to implement the political will of the people.
• Political liberty: According to this perspective, everyone has the right to exercise basic rights including the freedom of speech, assembly, movement, and thought.
• The federal democratic ethos of India’s representative democracy is one of the broadest and most complicated in the world, with elected representatives embodying the desires of their population.

Indian representational democracy’s difficulties:

• Growing differences in ideologies between political parties and the people that support them.
• Consensus building is hindered, which hinders fruitful discussions and causes policy gridlock.
• Individual faith in institutions is damaged by corruption in governance and personal values.
• Citizens’ right to ethical representation is hampered by identity politics, the influence of money in elections, and unequal chances.

Representative democracy reform:

• To encourage increased “democratisation” of political life, representative democracy should be transformed into participatory democracy.
• Gramme Sabha, for instance [Article 243 (b)].
• Decentralising authority and giving local governments more authority can improve accountability and encourage citizen participation in topics of national concern, which will strengthen federal democracy.
• The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution are two examples.
• NLC, or the National Legislators Conference:
• In a ground-breaking move, 4,000 MLAs and MLCs from all political parties are gathered under one roof.
• Through the presentation of case studies of best practises and governance, the three-day boot camp provides a platform for note-sharing across ideological boundaries.

Switzerland’s best practise is:

• One of the unique aspects of the Swiss political system is direct democracy.
• It is supported by two mechanisms: initiatives (to put forth constitutional proposals or legislative enactments) and referendums (to voice opinions on Swiss Parliament decisions).

Way Forward:

• Consider the idea of the ability to remove corrupt and ineffective politicians from office.
• bolster RTI and safeguard informants.
• making use of technology to enhance governance. With 600 million smartphone users and a nearly 60% internet penetration rate in India, lawmakers have a chance to connect with voters.
• As they exercise their rights and freedoms and gain from the nation’s democratic system, citizens play a crucial role in representative democracies.

Source The Hindu

3 – Government Initiatives in Education Sector: GS II – Health-related issues

Context:

• The education sector has undergone some good developments in recent years, from a new strategy that lays out the educational roadmap for the next 20 years to significant revisions in school textbooks and the opening of the Indian higher education market to foreign players:

Accomplishments:  

• Reforms and New Education Policy (NEP)The NEP 2020 is a policy document that outlines a number of educational reforms to be implemented through 2040. Up until now, India has had three policies.
• The NEP 2020 suggests significant changes, such as establishing a system where “children not only learn but more importantly learn how to learn,” changing pedagogy to make education more experiential, inquiry-driven, and flexible, and removing the “hard division between arts and sciences.”

State of the National Curriculum:

• The National Curriculum Framework (NCF), a key policy document for updating textbooks and instructional methods, is essential. One of its main recommendations, intended to lessen the strict divisions between the arts, commerce, and science in classes 11 and 12, is to hold board exams twice a year, implement a semester system for students in Class 12, and give students the freedom to combine science and humanities.

Textbooks for school:

• Three rounds of textbook changes have been conducted by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the highest authority advising the Centre on school education.
• Universities abroad.
• The UGC is putting the finishing touches on a rule that would permit foreign universities to establish campuses in India with their own admissions procedures, the freedom to choose their own price schedules, and the ability to hire local and international teachers and staff.

New Organisations, Greater Capacity:

• The EWS quota significantly increased the capacity of existing institutions in addition to the new centrally-run educational institutions (including 7 IITs, 7 IIMs, 16 IIITs, and 15 AIIMS, of which 12 are partially or fully functional) established in the last nine years.

Position of women:

• Female representation increased in IITs and NITs from 9% in 2017 to 20% in 2022 as a result of the introduction of supernumerary seats for women in those institutions in 2018.
• Since 2014, the gender gap in enrollment in higher education has decreased, per AISHE data.

Additional noteworthy projects and developments in education:

• The Right to Education Act of 2009’s no-detention rule, which ensured progression from Class 1 to 8, was repealed in 2019.
• In 2017, the National Testing Agency was established as a lone organisation to handle all entrance exams for higher education.
• The Medical Commission of India, the nation’s top medical education authority, was abolished in September 2020 and replaced by a new organisation, the National Medical Commission, in an effort to eradicate “inspector raj” and eliminate lobbying.
• The Higher Education Financing Agency, or HEFA, was established in 2017 to use market resources to leverage money for long-term loans that will support the expansion of infrastructure at educational institutions.

Pending Projects:

Autonomy:

• Despite the claims of more autonomy under the IOE programme, it has now come to light that most of it merely exists in theory.

Leadership and Faculty Positions Available:

• Approximately 6,000 positions (nearly 30% of the sanctioned postings) remain empty, and just 1,471 teachers have been employed across all central universities since the recruiting campaign began, according to legislative statistics.

NRF, the National Research Foundation:

• Despite being stated in each of the union budget speeches from 2019 to 2021, the programme that was supposed to encourage multidisciplinary research has not taken place.

Indian Higher Education Commission:

• Even five years after its initial announcement, has not yet been created as the new overall authority that will take the place of UGC and AICTE.

Source The PIB

4 – Climate Resilient Agriculture: GS III – Indian Agriculture

Context:

• Climate-resilient agriculture (CRA) needs to be recognised and applied more rigorously because it can cause a 15–25% decrease in agricultural income.

CRA:

• The ability of a system to adapt to, bounce back from, and even thrive under changing climatic conditions while preserving crucial functions, identities, and structures is known as resilience.
• Therefore, CRA is a method for utilising natural resources in a sustainable manner in order to increase farm revenue and productivity over the long term when dealing with climatic variations.

Need:

• Extreme weather conditions threaten food security and farm revenues by lowering agricultural output and altering food prices.
• In order to combat climate change and achieve the SDGs, it is necessary to adapt the right mitigation technologies.

Results of CRA:

• improved use of and access to technology.
• increased application of technologies for resource conservation.
• a greater level of climatic stress adaptability in crops and cattle.
• decreases poverty and hunger (by preserving agricultural production).

Technologies and adaption strategies for climate change:

• Crops that are tolerant: Farmers in Aurangabad (MH) developed the early maturing, drought-tolerant green gramme (BM 2002-1).
• Indigenous breeds of cattle and poultry are tolerable because they are disease-resistant, able to consume and digest low-quality feed, and resistant to droughts.
• Feed management is a type of adaptation that can tangentially increase the productivity of livestock producers.
• Microirrigation, the cover-crop approach, deficit irrigation, precise crop water demands estimation, and other water management/water-smart technologies are a few examples.
• Agro-advisory: States like Tamil Nadu have previously adopted an integrative strategy known as response farming (farming with advisories).

Soil organic carbon: Various farm management techniques:

• technologies used in conservation agriculture (cover crops, crop rotations, and decreased tillage).
• practises for conserving the soil (contour farming).
• Strategies for nutrient recharge can boost soil functional stability and increase soil carbon reserves.

Way Forward:

• interventions aimed at raising agriculture productivity, including watershed development, better irrigation, water management, soil health, and diversification of sources of income.
• Along with agricultural productivity, adaptive capacities need to be given priority.
• Prioritisation must be given to reducing GHG emissions from all agricultural and non-agricultural sources.
• Building stakeholder confidence and raising their awareness of climate change events require structured training.
• reducing the distance between necessary agro-advisories and current management practises.
• To advance CRA, there is cooperation between farmers, research organisations, financing organisations, governments, NGOs, and the corporate sector.

Source The Hindu