9 PM Daily Brief – November 4, 2020

Good evening dear reader.

Here is our 9pm current affairs brief for you today

GS 1

LGBT community rights

GS 2

Academic freedom

DBT Scam

GS 3

Divestment in fossil fuels

9 PM for Preliminary examination

FACTLY

LGBT community rights

Source- The Indian Express

Syllabus- GS 1- Society

Context- Issues and Challenges of same sex marriages in India.

What is Solicitor General Verdict on same sex marriage?

Same-sex marriages are neither a part of “our culture” nor a part of the law, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Delhi High Court Monday, opposing a petition demanding marriage rights for the gay community under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955.

What is the history of same sex marriage in India?

Same-sex marriages are not a new phenomenon in India.

• Hindu scriptures define marriage as the union of ‘two souls’ and the same scriptures also define that a soul has no gender. It is only the human bodies that possess a gender.
• These scriptures are a major source of Hindu Law including the Act. The Act merely codifies the Hindu law and doesn’t try to erode the values imbibed within the Holy Scriptures.
• The 11th-century Sanskrit text, the Kathasaritsagara, provides the same explanation for cross-class and cross-caste couples who want to marry.

What are difficulties faces by LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community?

1. Legal recognition- Same-sex marriages are not legally recognized in India.

• For example- Recently, a PIL was filed in the High Court of Delhi seeking declaration to the marriage rights of the gay community under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955.
• The petitioner avers that the Act allows marriages between “two Hindus” without any discrimination between heterosexual and homosexual couples.
• But still, gay couples can’t get married and register the same under the Act.

2. Deprived in Rights – The rights enjoyed by opposite-sex couples are not enjoyed by same-sex couples. They are prohibited from those rights. For example-

• The lack of a legal structure around their relationship became increasingly stark when they tried to bring each other on as nominees in insurance and financial plans, just as a married couples did.
• Most male-female married couples take for granted that the day after they marry, they can open a joint account, make health and funeral-related decisions for each other, and inherit each other’s property.

3. Families violently separated the same sex couples, often driving them to suicide.
4. Racial Discrimination– Additionally, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer from social and economic inequalities due to continuous discrimination.

Way forward-

• Countries around the world have legalized same-sex marriages. The world is heading towards progressive LGBTQ rights. Therefore, it is time to join the many democracies which recognize the right of a citizen to marry anyone she chooses.

Academic freedom

Source: The Hindu

Syllabus: GS-2- Polity

Context: India’s dull score on the Academic Freedom Index reflects the issues troubling the country’s education system.

What were the findings of academic freedom index?

• India has scored noticeably low in the international Academic Freedom Index (AFI) with a score of 0.352, which is closely followed by Saudi Arabia (0.278) and Libya (0.238).
• The AFI of India has dipped by 0.1 points in the last 5 years.
• Countries like Malaysia (0.582), Pakistan (0.554), Brazil (0.466), Somalia (0.436) and Ukraine (0.422) have scored better than India.
• Uruguay and Portugal top the AFI, with scores of 0.971 each, followed closely by Latvia (0.964) and Germany (0.960).
• The AFI has cited the ‘Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, to suggest that the political tensions in India may have something to do with declining ‘academic freedom’.
• The police brutality against students at Jamia Millia Islamia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and their being labelled as anti-nationals, has raised concerns about the state of academic freedom.

What are the claims in NEP 2020?

• The NEP 2020 claims that it is based on principles of creativity and critical thinking and envisions an education system that is free from political or external interference.
• For instance, the policy states that faculty will be given the “freedom to design their own curricular and pedagogical approaches within the approved framework, including textbook and reading material selections, assignments and assessments”.
• It suggests creating a National Research Foundation (NRF), a merit-based and peer-reviewed research funding, which will be governed, independently of the government, by a rotating Board of Governors consisting of the very best researchers and innovators across fields.
• The new education policy aims at repairing the educational system in the country and making “India a global knowledge superpower”, with a new system that is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal-4 (SDG 4).
• It also emphasises universal access to schools for all children, raising the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), and ending the rise of dropout rate in India.

What were the components used in evaluating AFI scores? Examine India’s performance.

• The AFI used eight components to evaluate the scores:
• Freedom to research and teach
• Freedom of academic exchange and dissemination
• Institutional autonomy
• Campus integrity
• Freedom of academic and cultural expression
• Constitutional protection of academic freedom
• International legal commitment to academic freedom under the International Contract on Economic ,Social and Cultural Rights
• Existence of universities
• India has not done well in components like institutional autonomy, campus integrity, freedom of academic and cultural expression and constitutional protection of academic freedom.
• Most universities in the country are subjected to unwanted interference from governments in both academic and non-academic issues.
• Majority of appointments, especially to top-ranking posts like that of vice-chancellors, pro vice-chancellors and registrars, have been highly politicised.
• Such political appointments choke academic and creative freedom, and also lead to corrupt practices, including those in licensing and accreditation, thus promoting unhealthy favouritism and nepotism in staff appointments and student admissions.
• This reflects a ‘rent-seeking culture’ within the academic community.

Way forward

• The NEP 2020 aims to de-bureaucratise the education system by giving governance powers to academicians.
• It also talks about giving autonomy to higher education institutions by handing over their administration to a board comprising academicians. This may help de-bureaucratise the education system and reduce political interference to an extent.

DBT Scam

Source: Indian Express

Gs2: E-governance- applications, models, successes, limitations, and potential

Context: Central scholarship scam underlines need to tighten checks and balances in DBT architecture, fix accountability

Background

• An investigation by a newspaper has uncovered a nexus of middlemen, government employees and bank staff were involved in cheating students from minority communities of a centrally funded scholarship in Jharkhand.
• It was found that the officials have bypassed the verification processes and have misused the DBT funds sanctioned by the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs.

What is the need for Direct benefit transfer?

• Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) was perceived as a solution for the persistent problem of social welfare and subsidy schemes by elimination of middlemen.
• The use of Aadhaar seeding ensures that nobody else can claim the share of the benefits by impersonation or any other means.
• The recent incident has proved that having a Unique Identification Number (UIN) is no guarantee against being robbed of scholarships, pensions and other welfare entitlements.

How DBT funds are being misappropriated?

• Bank officials and school staff’s steal user IDs and passwords to divert benefits from schools that never applied for any grant.
• Middlemen compel parents to forego a big share of their children’s dues.
• Institutions overstate records to apply for scholarship funds.

There is need to find effective solutions to strengthen DBT schemes so that social welfare funds and subsidies will reach the intended beneficiaries.

Divestment in fossil fuels

Source: The Hindu

GS3: Conservation, Environmental Pollution and Degradation, Environmental Impact Assessment. Context: The divestment movement against fossil fuels.

What do you mean by Divestment movement in Fossil fuels?

• Divestment is the process by which money put into stocks and bonds of certain companies is withdrawn. A divestment is the opposite of an investment.
• For example, recently Goldman Sachs announced that it would no longer finance new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and coal mines such as mountain-top mining
• In this case, divestment has been directed against companies that extract, refine, sell and make profits from fossil fuels.
• The purpose is to restrict fossil fuel companies’ ability to function to limit their impact on climate change.
• As of 2019, it is estimated that more than $11 trillion in assets has been committed to divestment from fossil fuels.

What is the role of Climate activist in divestment process?

• Systematic organised drives for divestment from fossil fuel companies have been undertaken by a large network of activists including Rainforest Action Network, 350.org, Go Fossil Free, university students and faculty etc.
• They systematically attacked equity, investments, loans, or credit, available to the fossil fuel industry.

Read also :- Current affairs

What are the challenges?

• After the Paris Agreement of 2015, where countries agreed to try to limit average global warming to well below 2oC, global banks continue to finance the fossil fuel industry.
• Finances has been increasing to fossil fuel sub-sectors such as oil from tar sands, Arctic oil ang gas etc. For example, coal power financing led by Chinese banks.
• Companies might be divesting not for ethical reasons but because it considers fossil companies to be risky.

What is the way forward?

• India’s contribution to the stock of greenhouse gases is less than two tonnes of CO2/capita.
• Yet, with the costs of production and storage of renewables are falling policymakers should utilise this oppurtunity and foresee to make a just transition away from coal in the near future.
• This process will be complex and necessarily involve many sectors and activities including land restoration, local jobs, and timely transfer of storage technologies for renewable energy, apart from dealing with entrenched vested and political interests

9 PM for Preliminary examination

Click on “Factly articles for November 4, 2020”

https://factly.forumias.com/factly-articles-for-november-4-2020/