The Hindu Newspaper Analysis 5th September 2022

The Hindu Newspaper Analysis for UPSC

• The Court’s pointed questions have clearly exposed the malice in the State’s action. More importantly, the same questions remain equally relevant and compelling in hundreds of cases across the country, with an important supplement — that, in many of them, draconian provisions have also been recklessly invoked, to victimise the dissidents.
• Adjournment of regular bail applications for an indefinite period occurs in many High Courts.
• Article 136 deals with the special leave to appeal by the Supreme court. It means that the Supreme Court is authorised to grant in its discretion special leave to appeal from any judgement in any matter passed by any court or tribunal in the territory of India (except military tribunal and court-martial).

• In a significant and welcome move, another layer of discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community is being removed with the National Medical Commission (NMC) declaring conversion therapy a “professional misconduct” and empowering State Medical Councils to take disciplinary action if the guideline is breached.
• Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual or of any other orientation are often subjected to conversion or ‘reparative’ therapy, particularly when they are young, to change their sexual orientation or gender identity by force.
• The therapy can mean anything from psychiatric treatment, use of psychosomatic drugs, electroshock therapy, exorcism and violence. This can lead to trauma, manifesting in depression, anxiety, drug use, and even suicide.

• India will need to assess the security implications of another Taiwan Strait crisis

• The sharing of the waters of the Teesta has remained a thorny issue between the two countries since 1947. For West Bengal, Teesta is important to sustain its impoverished farming districts which comprise 12.77% of its population.
• In 2015, India and Bangladesh resolved the decades-long border dispute through the Land Swap Agreement.

• Teesta river is a tributary of the Brahmaputra (known as Jamuna in Bangladesh), flowing through India and Bangladesh.
• It originates in the Himalayas near Chunthang, Sikkim and flows to the south through West Bengal before entering Bangladesh.
• Originally, the river continued southward to empty directly into the Padma River (main channel of Ganga in Bangladesh) but around 1787 the river changed its course to flow eastward to join the Jamuna river.
• The Teesta Barrage dam helps to provide irrigation for the plains between the upper Padma and the Jamuna.
• Teesta river water conflict is one of the most contentious issues between India and Bangladesh.

• The girl stated in court that the acts were consensual and she had married the accused after she had turned 18. The marriage was registered and a child was born to the couple.
• The High Court observed that “if the court would shut its doors to the couple who are married and bringing up the child, the entire proceedings would result in miscarriage of justice.”
• Since consent of a “child” is immaterial, consensual sexual intercourse with or among adolescents is treated on a par with rape.
• While boys/young men are charged with sexual offences, the girls are treated as victims and institutionalised in children’s homes when they refuse to return to their parents or their parents refuse to accept them.
• Faced with criminal prosecution and incarceration, the only relief available to the couple is to urge the High Court to quash the case by using its inherent power under Section 482 of the Criminal Procedure Code, “to prevent abuse of the process of any Court or otherwise to secure the ends of justice.”

• In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Department of Science & Technology (DST) has announced the setting up of India’s first dark sky reserve at Hanle in Ladakh in the next three months.
• Hanle, which is about 4,500 metres above sea level, hosts telescopes and is regarded as one of the world’s most optimal sites for astronomical observations.
• A dark sky reserve is a designation given to a place that has policies in place to ensure that a tract of land or region has minimal artificial light interference.
• The International Dark Sky Association is a U.S.-based non-profit that designates sites as international dark sky places, parks, sanctuaries and reserves, depending on the criteria they meet.
• ocated atop Mt. Saraswati in the Nilamkhul Plain in the Hanle Valley of Changthang, it is a dry, cold desert with sparse human population.
• The cloudless skies and low atmospheric water vapour make it one of the best sites in the world for optical, infrared, sub-millimetre, and millimetre wavelengths.

• Nano urea, a fertilizer patented and sold by the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd. (IFFCO), has been approved by the government for commercial use because of its potential to substantially reduce the import bill, but several experts have questioned the science underlying its efficacy.
• IFFCO’s nano urea contains nitrogen, an element critical for plant development, in the form of granules that are a hundred thousand times finer than a sheet of paper. At this nano scale, which is about a billionth of a metre, materials behave differently than in the visible realm.
• Chemically packaged urea is 46% nitrogen, which means a 45-kg sack contains about 20 kg of nitrogen.
• Contrastingly, nano urea sold in 500-ml bottles has only 4% nitrogen (or around 20 g).
• Plants need nitrogen to make protein and they source almost all of it from soil bacteria which live in a plant’s roots and have the ability to break down atmospheric nitrogen, or that from chemicals such as urea into a form usable by plants.
• To produce one tonne of wheat grain, a plant needs 25 kg of nitrogen. For rice, it is 20 kg of nitrogen, and for maize, it is 30 kg of nitrogen. Not all the urea cast on the soil, or sprayed on leaves in the case of nano urea, can be utilised by the plant.

• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully tested a technology that could aid cost-effective recovery of spent rocket stages and safely land payloads on other planets.
• The Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (IAD) was designed, developed and successfully test-flown by ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) on a Rohini-300 (RH300 Mk II) sounding rocket from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) here on Saturday.
• As its name suggests, the IAD serves to decelerate an object plunging down through the atmosphere.

Mains Practice Question:

Q) Gender equality or parity will happen only when there is a change in mindset and institutions consider women as assets rather than simply a diversity rectification issue. Explain (150 words)

लैंगिक समानता या समानता तभी होगी जब मानसिकता में बदलाव होगा और संस्थाएं महिलाओं को केवल विविधता सुधार के मुद्दे के बजाय संपत्ति के रूप में मानती हैं। समझाएं (150 शब्द)

Sharing is caring!