2 September 2023 : Daily Current Affairs
Daily Current Affairs
2-September-2023
Daily Current Affairs For UPSC ,Daily Current affairs of The hIndu and Indian Express.
1) Special session of Parliament
Topic: GS2-Polity
Context:
- On August 31, Pralhad Joshi, the Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, announced that a “special session” of Parliament would be held from September 18 to 22. The Minister was quoted as stating that “important items” were on the session’s agenda, which the government would circulate.
- The announcement has led to speculation about the government’s legislative plans for the session. Usually, a few days before a Parliament session, the government convenes an all party meeting to share its agenda and build consensus on possible issues for discussion.
When does Parliament meet?
- India’s Parliament has no fixed calendar of sittings.
- In 1955, a Lok Sabha committee had proposed a timetable for parliamentary sessions. It recommended that the Budget session of Parliament begin on February 1and go on till May 7, and the Monsoon session start on July 15 and end on September15.
- The committee suggested that the Winter session, the last session of the year, commence on November 5 (or the fourth day after Diwali, whichever is later) and finish on December 22. While the government agreed to this calendar, it was never implemented.
Who decides when Parliament meets?
- The government determines the date and duration of parliamentary sessions.
- The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs takes this decision. It currently has ten Ministers, including those for Defence, Home, Finance, Agriculture, Tribal Affairs, Parliamentary Affairs, and Information and Broadcasting. The Law Minister and the Minister of State for External Affairs are special invitees to the Committee. The President is informed about the Committee’s decision, who then summons Members of Parliament to meet for the session.
What does the Constitution say?
- The Constitution specifies that six months should note lapse between two parliamentary sessions.
- This provision is a colonial legacy. The framers of the Constitution borrowed it from the Government of India Act of 1935.
- It allowed the British Governor General to call a session of the central legislature at his discretion, requiring that the gap between two sessions should not be more than 12 months.
- Dr BR Ambedkar had stated that the purpose of summoning the central assembly was only to collect taxes, and the once-a-year meeting was for the government to avoid scrutiny by the legislature. The Constituent Assembly reduced the gap between sessions to six months.
How did the Constituent Assembly reach this decision?
- Some members of the Constituent Assembly wanted Parliament to meet throughout the year with breaks in between. Others wanted Parliament to sit for longer durations, and cited the examples of the British and American legislatures meeting for more than 100 days a year.
- One member wanted the presiding officers of the two Houses to be empowered to convene Parliament under certain circumstances.
- Dr Ambedkar did not accept these suggestions. He thought that independent India’s government would hold regular parliamentary sessions.
How often do Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha meet?
- Before independence, the central assembly met for a little more than 60 days a year. This number increased to 120 days a year in the first 20 years after Independence.
- Since then, the sitting days of the national legislature have declined.
- Between 2002 and 2021, Lok Sabha averaged 67 working days.
- The situation in state legislatures is much worse. In 2022, 28 state Assemblies met for 21 days on average.
- This year, Parliament has met for 42days so far.
- On multiple occasions, the conference of presiding officers has recommended that Parliament should meet for more than 100 days. The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution set up in 2000 made a similar recommendation.
- Individual MPs have introduced private member Bills that stipulated increased sitting days for Parliament.
- If the 1955 recommendations of the Lok Sabha committee were accepted. Parliament would be in session for eight months every year.
- The US Congress and parliaments of Canada, Germany, and the UK are in session throughout the year, and their calendar of sitting days is fixed at the beginning of the year.
What is a special session of Parliament?
- The Constitution does not use the term “special session”.
- The term sometimes refers to sessions the government has convened for specific occasions, like commemorating parliamentary or national milestones.
- For the two Houses to be in session, the presiding officers should chair their proceedings.
- The presiding officers can also direct that the proceedings of their respective Houses would be limited and procedural devices like question hour would not be available to MPs during the session.
- However, Article 352 (Proclamation of Emergency) of the Constitution does refer to a “special sitting of the House”.
- Parliament added the part relating to the special sitting through the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978.
- Its purpose was to add safeguards to the power of proclaiming Emergency in the country. It specifies that if a Proclamation of Emergency is issued and Parliament is not in session, then one-tenth of Lok Sabha MPs can ask the President to convene a special meeting to disapprove the Emergency.
2) Aditya-L1 mission and its objectives
Topic: GS3-Science and Tech
Context:
- The Aditya-L1 mission, launching today, will take India into an elite group of nations that have sent probes to study the Sun.
- While India has carried out experiments to study the Sun using satellites earlier, Aditya-L1, which aims to park a spacecraft in the ‘L1’ spot in space is the country’s first dedicated solar mission. Aditya-L1 is also ISRO’s second astronomy observatory-class mission after AstroSat (2015).
Special mission:
- Indian scientists have so far observed the Sun through telescopes on the ground, and relied on data from solar missions launched by the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
- As India lacked a large-scale modern observational facility, we were dependent on other sources for solar data.
- Aditya-L1 presents a unique opportunity to not only address the existing gaps but also complement with newer data to address the unsolved problems in solar physics.
- Astronomy based space missions are gaining importance “due to the new findings, and inspiration to the youth and general public it can provide”.
- Science missions also take longer to develop, since technological development can be demanding.
Eyes in space:
- Disturbances in the form of solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejection, or solar winds directed towards Earth, can adversely impact space weather.
- Studying the Sun is, therefore, of paramount importance.
- While AstroSat, India’s first dedicated astronomy mission aimed at studying celestial sources in X-ray, optical, and UV spectral bands simultaneously, remains operational almost eight years after its launch, Aditya-L1 can potentially pave the way for future Indian astronomy missions.
- AstroSat, weighing 1,515 kg, lifted off with five in situ instruments; Aditya-L1, weighing 1,475 kg, will carry seven pay loads, four of which will directly look at the Sun.
- The other three will perform in situ(onsite) studies of particles and magnetic fields at and around the L1 point.
- Solar physics now demands multi wavelength astronomy. It will be important how data from various instruments on Aditya-L1 are effectively combined and put to use to make sense of a solar event, its source, causes, local conditions, etc.
- This will require coordinate observations taken across different instruments.
- The four remote sensing instruments will probe the solar sources and try to identify the source regions with greater focus — an edge over all predecessor solar missions. This could help better understand the origins of solar eruptions or flares.
Space weather alerts
- The mission hopes to generate user friendly information that can help safeguard a range of satellite-dependent operations such as telecommunications, mobile-based Internet services, navigation, power grids, etc.
- Once tested, tailor made information obtained from the data can be used to issue space weather alerts.
L1 and afterward:
- Aditya-L1 will travel for nearly 100 days to cover the 1.5 million km distance to L1.
- This is a shorter voyage than Mangalyaan, which took 298 days to reach the Martian orbit in 2014.
- Like the Chandrayaan-3 mission, Aditya L1 too, will undergo multiple apogee-raising orbital manoeuvres, and is expected to exit the Earth’s orbit on the fifth day after launch.
- “After leaving Earth’s gravity, it will get into a heliocentric path, and this is crucial. Later, getting into the orbit around L1 is the most crucial aspect.
- L1 is not an object, just a location in space, which also co-moves with Earth around the Sun.
- Six of the mission’s payloads — VELC, SUIT, SoLEXS, HEL1OS, PAPA, and MAG — will remain in the ‘off’ mode until around January 6, 2024, when the spacecraft is expected to be inserted into a ‘halo’ orbit near L1.
- The Aditya Solarwind Particle Experiment (ASPEX), built by the Physical Research Laboratory, will turn on while in transit.
- During the cruise phase, ASPEX will turn on and start performing insitu measurements of solar particles and ions.
- Designed to image the Sun in the 200- 400 nanometre (nm) of the ultraviolet band, SUIT’s imager will continuously record the entire disk of the Sun through 11 filters.
- SUIT’s images of these layers could help improve our understanding of the Sun’s immediate atmosphere.
- By early 2024, scientists are hopeful of being able to commence a series of experiments lasting 2-3 months towards calibrating the instruments before high quality scientific data begin to roll out.
3) Challenges in holding simultaneous polls
Topic:GS2-Polity
Context:
- Parliament and state elections were held simultaneously until 1967, but over the years as Assemblies and Lok Sabhas were dissolved before the end of their terms, the elections fell out of sync with each other.
- Currently, elections to the Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, and Sikkim Houses are held along with Lok Sabha polls.
Voting machines:
- To be able to hold simultaneous elections, the EC will need around 30 lakh EVMs, according to estimates.
- It would require amendments to the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act. Also the ECI would need more time and money to manufacture more EVMs and VVPATs.
- As of March, the ECI had 13.06 lakh control units (CUs) and 17.77 lakh ballot units (BUs) of EVMs.
- Another 9.09 lakh CUs and 13.26 lakh Bus were under production, taking the total to 22.15 lakh CUs and 31.03 lakh BUs.
- It had taken about a year to manufacture 6-7 lakh EVMs, making the task of simultaneous polls in 2024 “difficult”.
Increased costs:
- The chief issue is that simultaneous conduct of elections would require large-scale purchase of Electronic Voting Machines and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail machines.
- For conducting simultaneous elections, an estimated total of Rs 9,284.15 crore will be needed for procurement of EVMs and VVPATs.
- The machines would also need to be replaced every 15 years which would again entail expenditure.
- Further, storing these machines would increase the warehousing cost
- As of now, the ECI delivers the cheapest election in the world—one dollar, one vote. That means each EVM is used over multiple elections.
- If there are simultaneous polls, EVMs would be used for three elections as their lifespan is about 15 years.
- From 2014 to 2019, the Union government gave states and Union Territories a total of Rs 5,814.29 crore for holding elections, asper a reply to Parliament in 2021.
Central forces, poll staff:
- The requirement of central forces to maintain law and order during the poll process may pose another challenge.
- Most states ask for central forces during elections.
- The movement of the forces as well as polling parties is another issue that will have to be addressed.
Way Forward:
- The idea of simultaneous elections has its pros and cons.
- It will save time, expenditure, and administrative labour.
- There are challenges, but they are not insurmountable.
- If the elections are held over a span of three-four months, it would be quite possible to get it done.
4) Russia, Turkey meeting amid efforts to repair Black Sea grain deal.
Topic: GS2-IR, Prelims
Context:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin will host Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan for talks next week, just over six weeks after Moscow broke off a deal brokered by Ankara and the UN that allowed Ukrainian grain to reach world markets safely despite the 18-monthwar.
What is Black Sea grain deal?
- The deal, brokered by the U.N. and Turkey in July 2022, aimed to alleviate a global food crisis by allowing Ukrainian grain blocked by the Russia-Ukraine war to be exported safely.
- Notably, Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest exporters of food grains, such as wheat and corn, and played a significant role in the UN’s food aid programmes.
- Therefore, when Russia invaded and blocked Ukrainian ports, prices of food grains soared across parts of the world.
- To convince Russia to agree to it, a three-year memorandum of understanding was also struck with the United Nations under which U.N. officials agreed to help Russia with its food and fertiliser exports.
- The deal had been extended several times but was due to expire on 17 July 2023.
Reasons for suspension
- None of Russia’s requirements including the resumption of ammonia exports through a pipeline leading from Russia to the Ukrainian port of Odesa, and the reconnection of its state agricultural bank Rosselkhoz bank to the SWIFT international payments system had been met.
- Russia had been saying for months that conditions for its extension had not been fulfilled.
- Russia has also claimed that not enough grain is being sent to the poor countries.
- Moscow also wanted ammonia exports through a pipeline leading from Russia to the Ukrainian port of Odesa to resume.
- Additionally, one of Russia’s key demands has reportedly not been met. Moscow wanted its Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) to be reconnected to the SWIFT international payments system after it was cut off due to sanctions by the European Union in June 2022.
Implications of the move
- This meant the withdrawal of safety guarantees for shipping, the ending of a maritime humanitarian corridor and the disbanding of the Joint Coordination Centre at the mouth of the Black Sea in Istanbul established to monitor the implementation of the deal.
- It meant the northwestern Black Sea would again be designated an area of temporary danger for shipping.
Way Forward
- The Black Sea deal is absolutely critical for the food security of a number of countries and its loss would compound the problems for those facing high debt levels and climate fallout.
- The rising interest rates meant to target inflation as well as weakening currencies “are making it harder for many developing countries to finance purchases in dollars on the global markets.”
- However, analysts don’t expect more than a temporary bump to food commodity prices because places like Russia and Brazil have ratcheted up wheat and corn exports, food insecurity is growing.
5) Typhoon Saola
Topic: Prelims
Context:
- The Asian financial hub of Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Guangdong cancelled hundreds of flights and evacuated nearly 800,000 people as the imminent arrival of Typhoon Saola forced closures of businesses, schools and financial markets.
Details:
- Packing winds of around 200 kph, the super typhoon could make landfall late on Friday or early on Saturday in Guangdong, and rated among the five strongest to hit the populous province since 1949.
- The weather will deteriorate rapidly as typhoon makes landfall, with chances of storm surges of about 10 feet higher than the normal tide and maximum water levels reaching a record.
For Enquiry
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