Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE
- AFSPA Panel
- Super computers
- Increasing Crude oil prices
- Ukraine Breakaway areas
- Facts for Prelims
1 . AFSPA Panel
Context : A committee constituted by the Union Home Ministry in December to study the withdrawal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, from Nagaland, slated to submit a report within 45 days as claimed by Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, is yet to conclude its findings.
About the News
- The panel was formed in the wake of growing civilian anger against the botched ambush by an elite unit of the Army that led to the killing of 13 civilians at Oting in Nagaland’s Mon district on December 4.
- The six-member committee, headed by Registrar-General of India Vivek Joshi, made a solitary visit to the State in January. Though Mr. Rio claimed on December 26 that the panel had 45 days (by February 9) to submit its report, the Home Ministry’s order accessed by The Hindu says the committee is to make “suitable recommendations” within three months (March 26).
About AFSPA
- AFSPA gives armed forces the power to maintain public order in “disturbed areas”.
- They have the authority to prohibit a gathering of five or more persons in an area, can use force or even open fire after giving due warning if they feel a person is in contravention of the law.
- If reasonable suspicion exists, the army can also arrest a person without a warrant; enter or search a premises without a warrant; and ban the possession of firearms.
- Any person arrested or taken into custody may be handed over to the officer in charge of the nearest police station along with a report detailing the circumstances that led to the arrest.
About “disturbed area” and power to declare it?
- A disturbed area is one which is declared by notification under Section 3 of the AFSPA.
- An area can be disturbed due to differences or disputes between members of different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities.
- The Central Government, or the Governor of the State or administrator of the Union Territory can declare the whole or part of the State or Union Territory as a disturbed area. A suitable notification would have to be made in the Official Gazette.
- As per Section 3 , it can be invoked in places where “the use of armed forces in aid of the civil power is necessary”.
- The Ministry of Home Affairs would usually enforce this Act where necessary, but there have been exceptions where the Centre decided to forego its power and leave the decision to the State governments.
Origin of AFSPA
- The Act came into force in the context of increasing violence in the Northeastern States decades ago, which the State governments found difficult to control.
- The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Bill was passed by both the Houses of Parliament and it was approved by the President on September 11, 1958. It became known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958.
Currently AFSPA is applicable in following states:–
- Jammu & Kashmir & Ladakh
- Assam
- Nagaland
- Manipur (except Imphal Municipal Area)
- Three districts of Arunachal Pradesh and its eight police station areas bordering Assam
Why is the law controversial?
- AFSPA has often been criticised as a “draconian Act” for the unbridled power it gives to the armed forces and the impunity that security personnel enjoy for their actions taken under the law.
- Under AFSPA, the “armed forces” may shoot to kill or destroy a building on mere suspicion. A non-commissioned officer or anyone of equivalent rank and above may use force based on opinion and suspicion, to arrest without warrant, or to kill.
- He can fire at anyone carrying anything that may be used as a weapon, with only “such due warning as he may consider necessary”.
- Once AFSPA is implemented, “no prosecution… shall be instituted except with the previous sanction of the central government, in respect of anything done or purported to be done” under this Act.
- The Jeevan Reddy Committee formed in 2004 had recommended a complete repeal of the law. “The Act is a symbol of hate, oppression and an instrument of high handedness,” the body said.
How has this Act been received by the people?
- It has been a controversial one, with human rights groups opposing it as being aggressive.
- Manipur’s Irom Sharmila has been one if its staunchest opponents, going on a hunger strike in November 2000 and continuing her vigil till August 2016.
- Her trigger was an incident in the town of Malom in Manipur, where ten people were killed waiting at a bus stop.
What has Supreme Court said about AFSPA?
- In 2016, the Supreme Court delivered a stinging rebuke to the government over the continuation of AFSPA.
- The SC judgment clarified that the notion that the Act provides a free hand to security forces is flawed.
- Ruling on a petition filed by the Extra Judicial Execution Victims Families Association (EEVFAM), a representative platform of people in Manipur whose kin have allegedly been killed by security forces, the Court held that due process needs to be followed in civilian complaints reported from areas under the AFSPA and that the Act doesn’t provide blanket immunity to army personnel in anti-insurgency operations.
- The continuance of the Act in any region for extended periods symbolises, according to the apex court, “failure of the civil administration and the armed forces”.
- The apex court also ruled that over 1,500 cases of alleged fake encounters in Manipur, over the last 20 years, “must be investigated”.
2 . Supercomputers
Context : Facebook-parent Meta announced in January last week that it is building an AI supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). The company said that this will be the fastest supercomputer in the world once fully built by mid-2022. The device is said to accelerate AI research and help in building the metaverse, the next major computing platform.
What are supercomputers and how are they different from normal computers?
- A supercomputer can perform high-level processing at a faster rate when compared to a normal computer. Supercomputers are made up of hundreds or thousands of powerful machines which use better artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve operations that process huge amounts of data in less time than normal computers.
- They work together to perform complex operations that are not possible with normal computing systems
- Supercomputers require high-speed and specialised chip architectures. The chip performs 660 operations per cycle and thus run up to 230 gigaflops at 350 MHz, Gupta said.
- AI supercomputers are built by combining multiple graphic processing units (GPUs) into compute nodes, which are then connected by a high-performance network fabric to allow fast communication between those GPUs, Meta said in their blog.
What is the RSC?
- Meta considers the RSC as a powerful supercomputer capable of quintillions of operations per second. It can perform tasks like translating text between languages and help identify potentially harmful content on Meta’s platform.
- The RSC, compared with Meta’s legacy production and research infrastructure, can run computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, and train large-scale natural language processing (NLP) models three times faster. Meta estimates that a model with billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared to the nine weeks it was before.
- RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs. RSC’s storage tier has 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade
3 . Increasing Crude oil prices and its impact
Context : Brent crude prices hit $96.7 per barrel, the highest mark since September 2014, following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deployment of troops to separatist areas Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. While the West has termed it a blatant violation of international law, the rising global tensions and threat of invasion in Ukraine have caused oil prices to surge
Why has crude jumped?
- The spike has been driven primarily by fears of supply side disruptions as the threat of Russian invasion in Ukraine looms large following Putin’s deployment of troops to separatist areas Donetsk and Luhansk.
- A Russian invasion of Ukraine could not only disrupt crude supplies globally, but also lead to sanctions by the US and Europe. Oil prices have been rising over the last couple of months on concerns over supply, following tensions between Russia, the world’s second-largest oil producer, and Ukraine.
- There is also concern over the growing imbalance between demand and supply following the opening up and normalisation of the global economy after the Omicron wave subsided.
How will it impact the Indian economy?
- The rise in crude prices poses inflationary, fiscal, and external sector risks. Crude oil-related products have a direct share of over 9 per cent in the WPI basket and, according to a report by Bank of Baroda chief economist Madan Sabnavis, a 10 per cent increase in crude would lead to an increase of around 0.9 per cent in WPI inflation.
- India imports more than 80 per cent of its oil requirement, but the share of oil imports in its total imports is around 25 per cent. Rising oil prices will impact the current account deficit — the difference between the values of goods and services imported and exported.
- The rise in crude oil prices is also expected to increase the subsidy on LPG and kerosene, pushing up the subsidy bill
4 . Ukraine’s Breakaway areas
Context : Russian President Valdimir Putin formally recognised the Luhansk “People’s Republic” and Donetsk “People’s Republic”, two breakaway areas of the Donbass region of Ukraine. Putin has ordered Russian troops into these areas for “peacekeeping”. The deployment is viewed as bringing Russia and the US-European alliance closer to war, even though the international community has not yet pronounced it an invasion of Ukraine.
About the two areas
- Luhansk and Donetsk are areas in south-eastern Ukraine, both major industrial centres in an area collectively known as the Donbass that borders Russia. They had declared themselves independent of Ukraine in 2014, encouraged by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but had remained unrecognised by Moscow and the international community. Western intelligence reports have spoken about the presence of Russian troops in these two areas since then, but this was denied by Russia.
- Donbass has the largest coal reserves in Ukraine. Donetsk, with a population of about 2 million, is the fifth largest city in Ukraine, and is known for a wide range of metallurgical industries. Luhansk, also an industrial city centred on metal industries, has a population of 1.5 million.
- Almost 40% of the people in these two areas are ethnic Russians, forming the largest minority in the Donbass region. While ethnic Russians were present in large numbers in the region even in the pre-war years as part of the industrial workforce, it was after the war, when Stalin undertook a reconstruction of the Donbass, that waves of Russians arrived in the region. Ukraine’s role in the war – some sections collaborated with Nazi Germany – may also have spurred the Russian settlement.
- The Russian language is today spoken by a majority of the people in the both Donetsk and Luhansk, as even non-native Russians identify themselves as Russian speakers. The affinity with Russia is pronounced both in culture and in politics.
Historical background of the Region
- After Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991 through a referendum following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Donbass became the centre of rebellion against Ukrainian centralisation.
- The Kyiv government ignored demands for devolution of powers and recognition of the Russian language. The 1990s were also a time of economic collapse across the former Soviet Union, and Donbass was badly hit. As Ukraine struggled to get on its feet, it undertook economic reforms under the supervision of the World Bank. As with the rest of the former Soviet Union, state assets were sold, creating a new class of power elites who were politically connected, extremely corrupt, and took control of industries and businesses. A great number of these oligarchs rose up in Donbass.
- Ukraine, one of the 15 republics in the Soviet Union, had chafed under Soviet rule and produced one of the earliest dissident movements against Moscow’s control. It had opposed Stalin’s Russification project of the 1930s. Stalin is accused of genocide against Ukrainians after a famine killed a massive number of people,
- After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it was the turn of the government in Kyiv to face accusations of excessive centralisation. The oligarchs of Donbass, with their Russian leanings, became the spearhead of the dissidence against Kyiv.
- In 2004, one of these oligarchs, Viktor Yanukovych, who would go on to become President of Ukraine from 2010-2014, raised autonomy demands in southern and eastern Ukraine after his presidential win that year was cancelled following widespread protests – known as the Orange Revolution — against electoral fraud. When he became President in 2010, Yanukovych became an advocate of closer economic and military ties with Russia. In 2013, his decision to cancel the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, and lean closer to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union, led to a massive uprising in Ukraine called the Euromaidan, and his ouster.
- Putin’s annexation of Crimea came soon after, in a period in which Crimeans also voted in a controversial referendum to accede to Russia. The referendum was not accepted by Ukraine.
- In the civil war situation that prevailed at the time, Donetsk and Luhansk too held their own referendums and proclaimed themselves independent republics. But Moscow did not recognise these two “republics” then, even though the actions were believed to have had Putin’s full backing. The two areas have remained in the grip of violence since then between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russia groups backed by Russian combatants.
Minsk Protocol
- European powers led by France and Germany took the initiative for peace talks, giving rise to what is now known as the “Normandy format”, under which Ukraine, Russia, and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, also called the Trilateral Contact group, began a dialogue.
- On September 4, 2014 they signed an agreement in the Belorussian capital Minsk. Also signatories to this were the leaders of the unrecognised Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic. The agreement included a ceasefire and devolution of powers by Ukraine to these areas. But it failed to end the fighting, and collapsed as separatists took control of the Donetsk airport.
- A second round of negotiations led to Minsk 2, an agreement signed in February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany, more elaborate than the first on ceasefire, and the holding of elections for local governance. This agreement could not be implemented either. However, the international community believed — at least until February 21 when Putin put his signature on the official decree of recognition of the two “republics” — that the Minsk agreement remains the best way forward.
International Reactions
- The US had not described the situation as an “invasion”, announcing only a set of limited financial sanctions against Russia, and continuing to maintain that a diplomatic resolution will continue to be pursued.
- Germany, the most reluctant of the European Union and NATO members on a military resolution of the crisis, has taken the step that it was seen as loathe to consider — suspending the process for certifying Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline project that would double its supply from Russia.
5 . Facts for Prelims
| S.No. | Umbrella Scheme | Schemes included |
| 1. | Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0 | Umbrella ICDS – Anganwadi Services, Poshan Abhiyan, Scheme for Adolescent Girls, National Creche Scheme |
| 2. | Mission VATSALYA | Child Protection Services and Child Welfare Services |
| 3. | Mission Shakti (Mission for Protection and Empowerment for Women) | SAMBAL (One Stop Centre, Mahila Police Volunteer, Women’s Helpline/Swadhar/Ujjawala/Widow Homes etc.) SAMARTHYA (Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Creche, Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana/ Gender Budgeting/Research/ |