Daily News Digest 13 March 2024

Table of content

• Bharat Shakti programme in Pokhran
• Panel recommends law to regulate Big Tech firms
• India world’s top arms importer between 2019-23: SIPRI
• Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP) 2024
• Nuclear Waste
• Majuli masks of Assam
• Chandi Tarakasi

Bharat Shakti programme in Pokhran

Time to Read :🕑 5 Mins

Why in news?

Prime Minister witnessed a synergised demonstration of indigenous defence capabilities during a Tri-Services Live Fire and Manoeuvre Exercise in Pokhran, Rajasthan.

About Bharat Shakti

• Bharat Shakti will simulate realistic, synergised, multi-domain operations displaying integrated operational capabilities of the Indian Armed Forces to counter threats across land, air, sea, cyber, and space domains.
• Key Equipment and Weapons Systems participating in the exercise include T-90 (IM) Tanks, Dhanush and Sarang Gun Systems, Akash Weapons System, Logistics Drones, Robotic Mules, Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) and an array of unmanned aerial vehicles among others, from Indian Army showcasing the advanced ground warfare and aerial surveillance capabilities. 
  • Indian Navy showcased Naval Anti-Ship Missiles, Autonomous Cargo Carrying Aerial Vehicles, and Expendable Aerial Targets, highlighting maritime strength and technological sophistication. 
  • Indian Air Force deployed the indigenously developed Light Combat Aircraft Tejas, Light Utility Helicopters, and Advanced Light Helicopters, demonstrating air superiority and versatility in air operations.
• In a clear indication of India's readiness to confront and overcome contemporary and future challenges with home-grown solutions, Bharat Shakti highlights the resilience, innovation, and strength of India's domestic defence capabilities on the global stage. 
  • The program exemplifies the nation's strong strides towards Aatmanirbharta in defence, by showcasing the might and operational prowess of the Indian Armed Forces and the ingenuity and commitment of the indigenous defence industry.

Panel recommends law to regulate Big Tech firms

Time to Read :🕑 5 Mins

Why in news?

The Committee on Digital Competition Law, formed by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs last February, released a report recommending legislation to regulate the market power of Big Tech firms like Google and Meta.

Key Recommendation

• The Competition Act of 2002 “intervenes after the occurrence of an anti-competitive conduct,” the committee said. 
  • Such a framework was designed at a time when the extent and pace of digitalisation as is witnessed today could not be foreseen. 
  • The recommendations, if implemented, would better equip the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to rule on competition matters for tech firms.
• The report raises the alarm on the market power of these Big Tech firms, owing to their “network effects,” through which they are able to rapidly increase their user base and establish market power that is difficult for a new entrant in the industry to dislodge. 
  • As such, digital markets bear the risk of becoming irreversibly polarised in favour of the incumbent.
• The report recommends the creation of a new law, the Digital Competition Act, to “introduc[e] an ex-ante legislation specifically applicable to large digital enterprises, to supplement the Competition Act.” 
  • A draft prepared by the committee targets firms with a “significant presence” in the market for a “Core Digital Service,” terming these “Systemically Significant Digital Enterprises,” or SSDEs.
    • Global turnover - The draft would compel firms to themselves determine whether they are SSDEs. 
    • If a firm does not self-designate, the penalty recommended by the committee would be derived from not the individual company’s domestic revenues, but from the entire corporate group’s global turnover. 
    • As for what rules would actually apply to such SSDEs, that would, the report says, be notified after public consultations are held. 

India world’s top arms importer between 2019-23: SIPRI

Time to Read :🕑 5 Mins

Why in news?

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a Swedish think tank, reports that India was the world's top arms importer for the 2019-2023 period.  Compared to the 2014-2018 period, India's arms imports have increased by 4.7%.

More detail on news

• At the same time, arms imports by European countries increased by 94% between 2014–18 and 2019–23, the report said, which comes in the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

Key finding

• According to the report, Russia continues to be India’s main weapons supplier — accounting for 36% of its arms imports — though its overall share has been decreasing as India increasingly depends on Western countries and indigenous suppliers for military hardware and software now. 
  • Followed by Russia, France (33%) is India’s second largest arms supplier.
  • The US (13%) is the third largest supplier of weapons for India.
• India’s arms imports stood at 11% of the global arms sales between 2018-22. Therefore, there is a slight decline in the 2019-2023 period — 9.8% of global sales.
  • Among the top 10 arms importers, India is followed by Saudi Arabia (8.4%), Qatar (7.6%), Ukraine (4.9%), Pakistan (4.3%), Japan (4.1%), Egypt (4%), Australia (3.7%), South Korea (3.1%) and China (2.9%). 
  • The top five countries have received 35% of all arms imports in the 2019-2023 period.
  • The report pointed out that Pakistan witnessed a 43% rise in its arms imports between 2019-23 and 82% of Pakistan’s arms imports are sourced from China.
• Despite the Union government’s thrust on building a strong defence-industrial base, India does not figure among the top 25 arms exporting countries. 
  • The top 10 arms exporting countries are the USA (42% of global arms exports), followed by France (11%), Russia (11%), China (5.8%), Germany (5.6%), Italy (4.3%), UK (3.7%), Spain (2.7%), Israel (2.4%) and South Korea (2%).
  • While India occupies a strategically vulnerable position being the world’s largest arms importer, it remains the biggest arms customer for France, Russia and Israel.

Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP) 2024

Time to Read :🕑 7 Mins

Why in news?

The Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices prohibits sponsored gifts, monetary grants, or foreign trips for healthcare professionals or their families.

About the Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (UCPMP) 2024

• It was issued by the Department of Pharmaceuticals.
  • It specifies the rules of the use of the words “safe’’ and “new’’ for drugs and stated that medical representatives must not employ any inducement or subterfuge to gain an interview and that they must not pay, under any guise, for access to a healthcare professional.
• Engagement of the pharmaceutical industry with healthcare professionals for Continuing Medical Education (CME) should only be allowed through a well-defined, transparent, and verifiable set of guidelines, and conduct of such events in foreign locations is prohibited by the uniform code.
• Companies or their representatives should not pay cash or monetary grants to any healthcare professional or their family members (both immediate and extended) under any pretext.
• Gifting is prohibited by any pharmaceutical company or its agent, that is, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, etc. 
  • Additionally, no pecuniary advantage or benefit in kind may be offered, supplied or promised to any person qualified to prescribe or supply drugs by any pharmaceutical company or its agent.
• The latest UCPMP also notes that paid travel, hotel stays, etc., should not be extended to healthcare professionals or their family members by pharmaceutical companies or their representatives unless the person is a speaker for a CME, etc.
• The UCPMP is to be circulated for strict compliance, and all associations have been requested to constitute an Ethics Committee for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices, set up a dedicated UCPMP portal on their website, and take further necessary steps for the code’s implementation.
• On drugs, the UCPMP states that the promotion of a drug must be consistent with the terms of its marketing approval, and a drug must not be promoted prior to the receipt of its marketing approval from the competent authority, authorising its sale or distribution.
• According to the latest rules, claims for the usefulness of a drug must be based on up-to-date evaluation of all available evidence. 
  • The word ‘safe’ must not be used without qualification, and it must not be stated categorically that a medicine has no side effects, toxic hazards, or risk of addiction. 
  • The word ‘new’ must not be used to describe any drug which has been generally available or any therapeutic intervention which has been generally promoted in India for more than a year.
• All Indian pharmaceutical associations are to upload the UCPMP on their website along with the detailed procedure for lodging of complaints, which will be linked to the UCPMP portal of the Department of Pharmaceuticals.

Nuclear Waste

Time to Read :🕑 11 Mins

Why in news?

Recently, India loaded the core of its long-delayed prototype fast breeder reactor (PFBR) vessel, bringing it to the cusp of stage II — powered by uranium and plutonium — of its three-stage nuclear programme. By stage III, India hopes to be able to use its vast reserves of thorium to produce nuclear power and gain some energy independence. However the large-scale use of nuclear power is accompanied by a difficult problem: waste management.

About Nuclear waste

• In a fission reactor, neutrons bombard the nuclei of atoms of certain elements. 
• When one such nucleus absorbs a neutron, it destabilises and breaks up, yielding some energy and the nuclei of different elements. For example, when the uranium-235 (U-235) nucleus absorbs a neutron, it can fission to barium-144, krypton-89, and three neutrons. 
• If the ‘debris’ (barium-144 and krypton-89) constitute elements that can’t undergo fission, they become nuclear waste.
  • Fuel that is loaded into a nuclear reactor will become irradiated and will eventually have to be unloaded. At this stage, it is called spent fuel.
• Nuclear waste is highly radioactive and needs to be stored in facilities reinforced to prevent leakage into and/or contamination of the local environment.

How to Handle nuclear waste

• Handling the spent fuel is the main challenge; it is hot and radioactive, and needs to be kept underwater for up to a few decades. Once it has cooled, it can be transferred to dry casks for longer-term storage. All countries with longstanding nuclear power programmes have accumulated a considerable inventory of spent fuel. For example, the U.S. had 69,682 tonnes (as of 2015), Canada 54,000 tonnes (2016), and Russia 21,362 tonnes (2014).
• • • Depending on radioactivity levels, the storage period can run up to a few millennia, meaning “they have to be isolated from human contact for periods of time that are longer than anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been around on the planet.

• Nuclear power plants also have liquid waste treatment facilities. 
• • Small quantities of aqueous wastes containing short-lived radionuclides may be discharged into the environment.
• Japan is currently discharging, after treatment, such water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. 
  • Other such waste, depending on their hazard, can be evaporated or “chemically precipitated” to yield a sludge to be treated and stored, “absorbed on solid matrices” or incinerated.
• Liquid high-level waste contains “almost all of the fission products produced in the fuel”. It is vitrified to form a storable glass.

How is nuclear waste dealt with?

• Once spent fuel has been cooled in the spent-fuel pool for at least a year, it can be moved to dry-cask storage, and is placed inside large steel cylinders and surrounded by an inert gas. 
  • The cylinders are sealed shut and placed inside larger steel or concrete chambers.
  • Reprocessing — the name for technologies that separate fissile from non-fissile material in spent fuel — is another way to deal with the spent fuel. 
  • Here, the material is chemically treated to separate fissile material left behind from the non-fissile material. 
    • Importantly, reprocessing also yields weapons-usable (different from weapons-grade) plutonium. 

Issues associated with nuclear waste

• Cost of decontamination project:-  In 2013, Der Spiegel reported on engineers' years' long effort to access the Asse II salt mine, where “thousands of drums filled with nuclear waste” had been kept for “over three decades”. 
• • • The effort — a decontamination project — was prompted by mounting public concerns that the waste may have contaminated water resources (including groundwater) in the area. 
    • The newspaper said it was likely to cost “somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion” and around 30 years, speaking to the demands of waste decontamination.

• The case of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the U.S. to illustrate the issue of “unknown unknowns”. 
• • The facility has been operational since March 1999 with a licence to store waste for a few millennia. 
  • For a long, WIPP had been held up as a model for how radioactive wastes should be dealt with. 
  • But in 2014, an accident at the site released small quantities of radioactive materials to the environment, revealing serious failures in its maintenance.
• The normative problems with the idea of exporting nuclear waste, include the environmental injustice inherent in the exports of such hazardous materials, and the ethical argument that those enjoying the benefits of nuclear power should also incur the costs.

How does waste handling add to the cost of nuclear power?

• • The Nuclear Waste Policy Act 1982 in the U.S. imposed on electricity from nuclear power, to be funnelled into a ‘Nuclear Waste Fund’, which in turn would fund a geological disposal facility. 
    • As of July 2018, the fund had a corpus of $40 billion and attracted criticism for being unspent for the “intended purpose”.

• The 1993 article considered a nuclear power plant of 1,000 MWe capacity “operating at a capacity factor of 70% for 30 years”. 
• • They estimated the waste management at the front end of the cycle leads to about 10% of the total waste management cost. 
  • Of this, about one-third is due to the management of depleted uranium as a waste. 
  • The management of wastes from power plant operation accounts for about 24% of the costs and 15% is due to power plant decommissioning. 
  • The remaining 50% of costs is associated with the back end of the fuel cycle.
• In the final estimate, they added, waste management imposed a cost of $1.6-7.1 per MWh of nuclear energy.

How does India handle nuclear waste?

• According to the Rajya Sabha information: The wastes generated at the nuclear power stations during the operation are of low and intermediate activity level and are managed at the site itself.
  • They are treated and stored in on-site facilities, that “such facilities are located at all nuclear power stations”, and that the surrounding area “is monitored for radioactivity”.

Majuli masks of Assam

Time to Read :🕑 3 Mins

Why in news?

Recently, the traditional Majuli masks in Assam were given a Geographical Indication (GI) tag.

About Majuli Masks

• The handmade masks are traditionally used to depict characters in bhaonas, or theatrical performances with devotional messages under the neo-Vaishnavite tradition, introduced by the 15th-16th century reformer saint Srimanta Sankardeva. 
• The masks can depict gods, goddesses, demons, animals and birds — Ravana, Garuda, Narasimha, Hanuman, Varaha Surpanakha all feature among the masks.
  • They can range in size from those covering just the face (mukh mukha).
  • The masks are made of bamboo, clay, dung, cloth, cotton, wood and other materials available in the riverine surroundings of their makers.

About Majuli manuscript painting

• It is a form of painting — also originating in the 16th century — done on sanchi pat, or manuscripts made of the bark of the sanchi or agar tree, using homemade ink.
• The earliest example of an illustrated manuscript is said to be a rendering of the Adya Dasama of the Bhagwat Purana in Assamese by Srimanta Sankardev. 
  • This art was patronised by the Ahom kings. 
  • It continues to be practised in every sattra in Majuli.

Chandi Tarakasi

Time to Read :🕑 3 Mins

Why in news?

Recently, Cuttack's famous 'Chandi Tarakasi' or silver filigree has been granted the Geographical Indication (GI) tag.

About Chandi Tarakasi

• Odisha’s Cuttack is known for its silver filigree work, of intricate design and fine craftsmanship. 
• In Odia, “tara” means wire and “kasi” means to design. Thus, as part of Rupa Tarakasi, silver bricks are transformed into thin fine wires or foils and used to create jewellery or showpieces.
• It is known to have existed as far back as the 12th century. 
  • The art form received considerable patronage under the Mughals.
• The popular product categories now found in Cuttack are jewellery, decorative artifacts, accessories, home décor and religious/cultural pieces.
• While different grades of silver are used in the main metal alloy, the craftsmen also use other metals like copper, zinc, cadmium and tin.
• The Odisha State Cooperative Handicrafts Corporation Limited had applied for the tag for Cuttack's 'rupa tarakasi' work.