29 September 2023

DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS

1 – About NEET-PG qualifying percentile reduced to zero: GS II – Education-related issues

Context:

• The eligibility for the remaining seats this year will be zero percentile, according to the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC), which is in charge of allocating the post-graduation seats for medical education through the NEET-PG exam.

Key information:

• Since the exam replaced all other medical entrance tests in 2017, this is the first time the eligibility cut-off has been totally eliminated.
• The elimination of the eligibility cut-off effectively allows all exam takers, even those who received low scores, to enrol in post-graduation courses.
• Candidates that receive a score of 0 are extremely unlikely to be given a seat because the allocation will still take place based on the rank they were given.

The merit list’s preparation process:

• At the all-Indian level, each student is automatically given a rank based on the test-score points they received.
• 50% of the PG seats available under the all-India quota are allocated using this list.
• When the eligibility requirements alter, the list is updated;
• Near the end of the counselling process, if seats are still available, the cut-off is typically lowered by five or ten percentiles.
• For the remaining 50% of PG seats that are allocated by states, each one creates a comparable merit list.

Need:

• The decision was made primarily to fill PG seats.
• In order to fill the seats, the MCC typically conducts three rounds of counselling and one round of counselling for stray vacancies.
• Nevertheless, a number of PG seats have remained vacant over the years despite these attempts.
• Effect on available seats at private medical colleges:
• The improved eligibility will probably allow the wealthy to enrol in private universities even if their test scores are lower than the average.
• While students with lower grades can enrol in private colleges if they have the money, meritorious students who cannot afford the expensive fees would be left behind.
• Similar to a reverse economic quota, this.
• In private colleges, seats will be traded.

Source The Hindu

2 – About Personality rights: GS II – Government Policies and Interventions

Context:

• Anil Kapoor’s requests for the protection of his personality rights against infringement by outside parties were recently granted by the Delhi High Court.

What exactly is a personality?

• A celebrity’s personality can be recognised by their name, voice, signature, pictures, or any other attribute that the general public can quickly recognise. These features are referred to loosely as “personality rights.”
• Any feature of their personality, including a pose or a mannerism, may be one of them.
• Some characteristics are even trademarked by several celebrities for use in commerce.
• Usain Bolt’s “bolting” or lightning pose, for instance, is a trademark.
• According to the theory, only the owner or creator of these unique qualities has the right to profit commercially from them.
• Celebrities’ economic success is heavily influenced by exclusivity, and illegal use results in a real financial loss.
• When an unauthorised third party utilises their personality rights for commercial gain, celebrities have the right to file a court motion and request an injunction.

How does the law defend a person’s rights?

• The right to privacy and the right to property are the main categories under which personality rights and the protection of those rights fall in India.
• Several intellectual property ideas, such as passing off and deception, that are used to protect trademarks can be employed when determining whether a celebrity is deserving of injunctive relief.
• In the Anil Kapoor case, the Delhi High Court issued an ex-parte, omnibus injunction prohibiting 16 businesses from utilising Kapoor’s name, likeness, picture, or using technical techniques like as artificial intelligence, face morphing, or even GIFs for financial gain or commercial purposes.
• When a party receives relief without the other party being heard, it is known as an ex-parte injunction.
• An injunction issued against any unauthorised use, even those not specifically named in the plea, is known as an omnibus injunction.

When is a court permitted to issue an injunction?

• In the Titan case, the HC identified the fundamental components of the culpability for breach of the right of publicity in its sequence.
• The right must be legitimate first.
• This means that the plaintiff must have an enforceable right in the persona or identify of a human being in order for the court to be satisfied.
• The celebrity in the alleged misuse also needs to be clearly recognisable.
• Defendant must be able to identify the Celebrity from improper use.
• When the celebrity is recognisable, it is not necessary to demonstrate untruth, confusion, or dishonesty in order to violate the right to publicity.

Source The Hindu

3 – About Five Eyes Alliance: GS II – Government Policies and Interventions

Context:

• India stopped providing Canada with visas. The matter may have an impact on these nations’ relationships with their close Western allies, which also make up the Five Eyes Alliance, a coalition for intelligence cooperation, in addition to any potential effects on trade and immigration.
• Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States are all members of the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes.
• The Five Eyes partnership continues to be one of the most extensive known espionage alliances in human history, despite ongoing debate over its tactics.[15]
• In one of the most cohesive multilateral organisations in the world, these partner nations exchange a wide variety of intelligence with one another.

Origin:

• The Second World War is where the alliance first came into being.
• The UK-USA (UKUSA) agreement was built on the foundations of the Britain-USA (BRUSA) agreement, which was signed in 1943.
• The BRUSA agreement was made to exchange troops, share intelligence data to support US forces in Europe, and create collaborative guidelines for the handling and distribution of highly sensitive information.
• The alliance was created when Canada joined in 1949, followed by New Zealand and Australia in 1956.

What is the Five Eyes Alliance’s functioning?

• On issues of security and intelligence collecting, nations frequently interact with one another.
• The Five Eyes nations have recently come closer together because to shared goals, such as containing China’s ascent.
• They hold conference calls all year long, compare best practises, and they meet in person once a year to exchange viewpoints on topics of shared interest.

Five Eyes’ involvement in the current Canada-India dispute:

• Particularly the US, UK, and Australia are regarded as being near to India.
• Similar to Canada, they both have sizable populations of people of Indian descent.
• Additionally, they have observed a few pro-Khalistan actions over the past few years.
• However, demonstrating open support for either India or Canada is doubtful given their historical ties to Canada and the alliance on the one hand, and India’s increasing assertiveness when it comes to international affairs on the other.
• Nevertheless, given the current level of their relations, these nations, particularly the United States, might mediate the dispute once they had clear intelligence and information about it.
• Given their larger networks and capacities, Canada might also contact the US and other allies to share information on the probe.

Source The Hindu

4 – Humans breach most of the planetary boundaries: GS I – Geography-related issues

Context:

• According to a study, human-caused pollution and degradation of the natural world has caused six out of nine planetary boundaries that keep Earth healthy and habitable—which may be compared to blood pressure—to be violated.

Key information:

• The broken boundaries demonstrate how far Earth’s life-support systems have been pushed from the region that provided a safe operating environment for people throughout the Holocene.
• The end of the most recent ice age and the start of the Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the time era.
• It is typified by planetary conditions that are warm and comparatively steady.

What are the limits of the planets?

• A framework known as planet limits establishes boundaries for human impacts on the Earth system.
• It establishes restrictions on how much human activity is permitted to affect not only the climate but also other global processes that are crucial for preserving the environment needed to sustain advanced civilisations.
• The framework, which was created in 2009, consists of nine planet limits that scientists say capture all of the processes essential for preserving the system state of the Earth.
• Control variables are selected for each border to capture the most significant anthropogenic influence at the planetary level of the boundary under consideration.

The following borders and their regulating factors:

Ecosystem integrity:

• the condition of ecosystems and the pace of species extinction.

Changing climate:

• The ratio of solar energy that reaches Earth to the thermal energy that the planet loses is measured by the atmospheric CO2 concentration and the variation in radiative forcing.

A novel entity:

• levels of synthetic chemicals, gene-modified species, plastic, concrete, and other materials that would not exist on Earth if humans weren’t present.

Loss of stratospheric ozone

• the ozone-depleting discharge of synthetic chemicals caused by humans.

Change in freshwater

• It looks at how human activity has affected both green (accessible to plants and soil microbes) and blue (found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs) water.

Loading of atmospheric aerosols:

• Tracking different anthropogenic emissions-related particles that have an impact on both global and local atmospheric circulation and cloud formation.

Acidification of the ocean

• Decrease in ocean pH over an extended period of time.

Changing the land system:

• Altering how land is used, particularly turning tropical forests into cropland.

The biogeochemical flux

• a change in the naturally occurring cycles of the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, which are crucial for plant growth.

Nitrogen and phosphorus overflow in the environment:

• Although nitrogen and phosphorus are necessary for life, their widespread usage as crop fertilisers is causing chaos by, for example, causing algal blooms, which can force entire fish populations to migrate or even perish, and ocean dead zones, which have low oxygen levels in the sea.

Border of the biosphere:

• Additionally, researchers have noticed that the biosphere integrity threshold was breached in the 19th century when an increase in land usage had a significant negative impact on a wide variety of species.

Freshwater:

• Between 1905 and 1929, the boundary was crossed in the case of freshwater.
• Increased numbers of novel organisms in the environment:
• Without conducting proper safety testing, humans have been releasing previously unheard-of quantities of synthetic substances like pesticides and plastic.
• The Earth’s system is being harmed and made unstable by this.

Changing the land system:

• The Amazon tropical forest is rapidly changing due to land use change and fires, and the amount of deforestation there has grown to the point where it has crossed the planetary border.

Changing climate:

• According to the analysis, both the atmospheric CO2 content and radiative forcing are gradually rising in relation to climate change.
• As an illustration, the current concentration of CO2 is 417 parts per million (ppm), but it was only 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.
• Its 350 ppm safe boundary limit was crossed in the 1980s.

Moving ahead:

• Therefore, the borders that have been crossed can be brought back into space functioning space if humans stop burning fossil fuels and destructive farming.
• Notably, the stratospheric ozone depletion boundary, the only improving barrier, is recovering as a result of the coordinated worldwide efforts started by the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
• Dealing with additional boundaries might be made easier with this level of coordinated change.

Source The Hindu