Topics Covered
- Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism
- Community Radio and SVEEP
1 . Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism
About Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism
- The Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism is a proposed treaty which intends to criminalize all forms of international terrorism and deny terrorists, their financiers and supporters access to funds, arms, and safe havens.
- The CCIT was proposed by India in 1996
- The negotiations are currently deadlocked even after two decades of proposal i.e. through 1996 till 2016.
Importance of CCIT
- The CCIT provides a legal framework which makes it binding on all signatories to deny funds and safe havens to terrorist groups.
Objectives
- To have a universal definition of terrorism that all 193-members of the UNGA will adopt into their own criminal law
- To ban all terror groups and shut down terror camps
- To prosecute all terrorists under special laws
- To make cross-border terrorism an extraditable offence worldwide.
- To have a universal definition of terrorism that all 193-members of the UNGA will adopt into their own criminal law
- To ban all terror groups and shut down terror camps
- To prosecute all terrorists under special laws
- To make cross-border terrorism an extraditable offence worldwide.
2 . Community Radio and SVEEP
Context : In a first of its kind initiative, the Election Commission of India has reached out to over 150 Community Radio stations from across the country to help educate and inform the voters. 120 Community Radios Attend SVEEP Workshop of ECI at IIIDEM
About Community Radio
- Community radio is a radio station owned, run and maintained by a community.
- Community radio is a radio service offering a third model of radio broadcasting in addition to commercial and public broadcasting.
- Community stations serve geographic communities and communities of interest.
- They broadcast content that is popular and relevant to a local, specific audience but is often overlooked by commercial or mass-media broadcasters.
- Community radio stations are operated, owned, and influenced by the communities they serve.
- They are generally non profit and provide a mechanism for enabling individuals, groups, and communities to tell their own stories, to share experiences and, in a media-rich world, to become creators and contributors of media.
- Permission for starting a community radio station was at first restricted to educational institutions; it was later expanded to include state and centrally managed agriculture research centers, NGOs and charitable institutions.
Challenges
- There are several restrictions keeping community radio stations from raising their own funds in India. For instance, only seven minutes per hour of advertisements are allowed.
- Moreover, the government itself fails to pay promptly for advertisements it puts out over these stations, let alone supporting them in skill development or equipment upgrades. As these radio stations aren’t for profit, these stations mostly rely on government support
- Community radio stations owned by educational institutions and those in urban areas are still able to sustain themselves. But rural-area stations are marred by a lack of local advertiser support and federal and state assistance.
- Bureaucratic structure, involving clearance from multiple agencies, makes the process cumbersome and time-consuming.
About Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation program SVEEP
- Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation program, better known as SVEEP, is the flagship program of the Election Commission of India for voter education, spreading voter awareness and promoting voter literacy in India.
- Primary goal is to build a truly participative democracy in India by encouraging all eligible citizens to vote and make an informed decision during the elections.
- The programme is based on multiple general as well as targeted interventions which are designed according to the socio-economic, cultural and demographic profile of the state as well as the history of electoral participation in previous rounds of elections and learning thereof.