Nobel Prize 2013

Economics :

Economics Nobel Prize : Shared by Eugene Fama, Robert Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen. Their work ranges from the foundations of modern finance (Fama) to defects in the mainstream models (Fama and Shiller) and improvements in statistical methodology (Fama and Hansen).

Economics Nobel Prize 2013

Medicine

• The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to Dr. James E. Rothman, Dr. Randy W. Schekman and Dr. Thomas C. Südhof for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.

Higher Education

Introduction

India has a huge pool of potential young population as compared to other countries of the world but still on a sad demise its been a fact that only every seventh children went to college.Also nation has both crippling quality as well as quantity in terms of higher education.

For instance :

• In QS World University Ranking 2013, Indian university is not able to make its place in top most 200 colleges / universities of the world.
• India is at second position in terms of enrollment in higher education institutions (25 million in 2011-12)but still  has poor Gross Enrollment Ratio(GER) .In 2011-12 it is just 17.9 % as compared to average 30% across the world.US,Russia,Australia to name a few has GER as high as 85%.Highest being the Finland having around 95%.For this India’s Human Resources and Development Ministry has set a target to achieve GER to 30% by 2020.

Classification of HE

1. Form of presence (Universities,colleges,diploma granting institutions).
2. Field of study (General courses , Professional Courses)
3. Mode of Delivery (Classroom edu , Distance Learning).
4. Level of Study (UG ,PG , PhD , Diploma)

Challenge

• Expansion :
  • India has around 144 million population in the age group of 15-24.Of this around 25.9 enrolled in 2011-12 which is around 17.9 % GER.For achieving target of 30% enrollment should be around 45 million.
  • For today to accommodate around 25.9 million students there are in total 659 universities having 28% contribution of private institutions.Around 33 thousand colleges having 60% contribution by private players.
  • For achieving the target we need around 508 universities , 25 thousand colleges/institutions .
• Excellence : 
  • Faculty shortage
  • Less Accredited Institutions
• Equity 
  • There is wide disparity in the GER of higher education across states and the GER in urban and rural areas, and gender- and community-wise.

Cause of Deterioration condition

• Lack of private participation and lack of interest shown from government side is the root cause of this problem.
• Only 3% increase in percentage of pvt institutions in India between  2007-2012.

Achievements

• The private sector has played an instrumental role in this growth, with private institutions now accounting for 64% of the total
  number of institutions and 59% of enrollment in the country, as compared to 43% and 33%, respectively, a decade ago.
• The Government has planned expenditure of INR 1,107 billion on higher education during the Twelfth Five
  Year plan, 1.3 times higher than the planned expenditure in Eleventh plan.

Achievements in 11th Five Year Plan

In the Eleventh Plan, the planned expenditure on higher education was pegged at INR849.43 billion, a nine- fold increase over the Tenth Plan outlay of INR96 billion. However, actual expenditure on higher education was 45.6% (INR396.47 billion) of the planned expenditure

Access

1. Increase in GER
2. Increase in number of institutions
3. Increase in pvt institution

Equity :

1. Additional opportunities for minorities / low-income families
2. Support for backward areas

Quality

1. Overcoming some faculty shortages
2. Infrastructure development
3. Strengthening research and development activity.

Bills :

1. Higher Education and Research Bill, 2011 : The Bill aims to consolidate multiple regulations and improve transparency by the creation of a single super regulator, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research, in the place of existing regulators such as the UGC and AICTE.
2. The National Academic Depository Bill, 2011:The Bill seeks to establish a national database of academic awards in electronic format through an identified and registered depository.
3. The National Accreditation Regulatory Authority for Higher Educational Institutions Bill, 2010 : The National Accreditation Regulatory Authority for Higher Educational Institutions Bill aims to make accreditation and rating of all higher education institutions mandatory in India.
4. The Educational Tribunal Bill, 2010 : The Educational Tribunal Bill aims to expedite and enable more effective litigation involving students, teachers, employees and the management of institutions.
5. Foreign Educational Institutions Bill, 2010 : The Foreign Education Institutions Bill aims to regulate the entry and operation of foreign institutes in India. The Bill is a key legislation to encourage private sector participation in India, given the absence of any regulatory framework for FEIs.
   

12th Year Plans 

Excellence :

1. The Twelfth Plan emphasizes on leveraging technology for inter-institutional collaboration,innovation and faculty development to address challenges relating to infrastructure and faculty in India’s higher education system
2. A dynamic and international approach will be adopted by redesigning curricula, focusing on technical knowledge, initiating employability programmes, and aligning Indian education with international standards
3. Promotion and enhancement of research and innovation is a key focus area of the Twelfth Plan, to align research with the national development agenda and better serve the needs of industry and society.

Expansion : 

1. Government’s initiatives will focus on strengthening the infrastructure of Central and state institutions and on establishing research-based institutions.
2.  Private sector participation in the higher education system will be encouraged to provide greater financial flexibility through the relaxation/introduction of laws and regulations. Furthermore, there would be a focus on expanding the realm of higher education through ODL and skill-based programmes

Equity :

1. The Twelfth Plan proposes schemes and initiatives targeted at disadvantaged groups to address equality-related issues. The Plan has a flexible approach to embrace diversity and learning in Indian languages.

Governance :

1. Institutional differentiation, greater autonomy to institutions, decentralization of responsibility, and enhanced transparency in higher education are the key tenets of governance in the Twelfth Five Year Plan

Financing ,Implementing and Monitoring

1. The Plan provides for more public funding, sustainable levels of tuition fees and a more conducive environment for institutes to tap alternative sources of revenue and endowments.
2. Evaluation and monitoring systems will be strengthened by the creation of new institutional mechanisms and national databases.

Patents in Medicines

• An expert committee on compulsory licensing has recommended that the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP) issue a compulsory licence for the manufacture of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s anti-cancer drug Dasatinib to two companies
• It will be India’s second compulsory licence and a significant blow to the New York-based drug maker. A compulsory licence would allow the government to produce a generic version of the patented medicine and sell it at a cheaper price.
• In March 2012, India issued its first compulsory licence to Natco Pharma Ltd for the manufacture of Bayer AG’s Nexavar, another anti-cancer drug.
• Under the Indian patents Act, a compulsory licence for manufacture of a patented pharmaceutical product can be issued if the drug is considered unaffordable by the government.
• The World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement allows a country to issue a compulsory licence without the consent of the innovator if it is in public interest.
• In January 2013, the health ministry approached DIPP for issuance of compulsory licences for three anti-cancer drugs —Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer treatment Herceptin (Trastuzumab); and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s leukaemia medicine Sprycel (Dasatinib) and chemotherapy drug Ixempra (Ixabepilone). India’s patent office comes under the purview of DIPP.
• DIPP forwarded this request to the committee on compulsory licensing, which has reached a decision on all three drugs. A single 50ml vial of 40mg Trastuzumab costs Rs.1.24 lakh, a 45mg vial of Ixempra costs Rs.66,430.60 and 60 tablets of 20mg each of Dasatinib are priced at Rs.1.17 lakh.

Patents in India : Under protection or over protection

• The Indian Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment in April, turned down a request by the pharmaceutical company Novartis to retain the patent on a cancer drug because it judged the drug to be an extension of existing medications, not a groundbreaking advancement.
• In fact, a U.S. court invalidated a Pfizer patent covering a blood pressure medication (Norvasc) on grounds very similar to the Novartis decision, i.e. mere physical advantages cited for the salt form such as increased stability and solubility were not good enough to merit patent protection.
• Between 2005 and 2011, more than 4,000 patents for pharmaceutical inventions were issued by the Patent Office. Of these, more than 85 per cent were awarded to multinational drug companies.

 

Acid Attack

Regulation on sale of ACID

• The Home Ministry has asked the State governments to ban over-the-counter sale of acids as directed by the Supreme Court in its July order to curb growing incidents of attacks on women.
• Sale of acid now comes under The Poisons Possession And Sales Rules, 2013, thereby including at least a dozen acids in the list of poisons to curb their sale.
• Atleast a dozen of acids namely : acetic acid, phosphoric acid, hydrofluoric acid, perchloric acid, formic acid, oxalic acid, perchloride of mercury (corrosive sublimate), sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrocyanic acid, nitric acid, potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide, that would have restricted sale.
• The Ministry has asked the States to impose a fine of Rs.50,000 on sellers who do not maintain a register on personal information about buyers.

Espionage

1. Oct 2013 : National Security Agency boss General Keith Alexander conceded that the Agency recently ran a programme that entailed the collection of Americans’ mobile phone location data.
2. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by The Guardian.
3. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed programme called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.
4. If these allegations are true, then the U.S. has violated Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, of which it is a signatory. That article notes, “The premises of a diplomatic mission, such as an embassy, are inviolate and must not be entered by the host country except by permission of the head of the mission. Furthermore, the host country must protect the mission from intrusion or damage. The host country must never search the premises, nor seize its documents or property.” The nature of the spying, with bugs on crypto-fax machines and on communications cables, clearly breaches the protections enshrined in the convention.
5. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation — classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies — which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme.
6. The NSA access was enabled by changes to U.S. surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under President Obama in December 2012.
7. The programme facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the U.S., or those Americans whose communications include people outside the U.S.
8. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.
9. Since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft — which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” — was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the programme in 2012.
10. The PRISM programme allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.
11. Newly disclosed budget documents for America’s intelligence agencies show how aggressively the United States is conducting offensive cyber-operations against other states, even while the Obama administration protests attacks on U.S. computer networks by China, Iran and Russia.
12. The Post talked of a parallel effort, code-named GENIE, which it described as an effort by U.S. intelligence officials working for the NSA and the military’s Cyber Command to insert surreptitious controls into foreign computer networks. That computer code, a form of malware, allows U.S. officials to hijack the computers or route some of their data to servers that enable U.S. espionage.

Global surveillance Program  : 

1. U.S Government has been tracking global electronic communication traffic, The Guardian newspaper has published new documents that reveal details on an international programme that siphons data directly from Internet networks without judicial oversight or authorisation.
2. Code-named XKeyscore, the programme, the U.S National Security Agency claims, is the “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the Internet. In one 30-day period in 2012, around 41 billion records were retrieved and stored in XKeyscore.
3. One server is in India.

India’s Shocking Response : 

1. Union Minister for External Affairs, Salman Khurshid, said, “It is not snooping. It is only computer study and computer analysis of patterns of calls.”

Media

Pack Journalism / Journalism  

1. According to an essay in the Global Media Journal of Purdue University, Pack Journalism “is a phenomenon by which large groups of reporters from different media outlets collaborate to cover the same story. They cite or draw from the same sources, simultaneously, with the same purpose and employing the same methods. They move in a swarm where they observe carefully what the others are doing. Their main goal is to obtain comments from the important sources.
2. The term Pack Journalism was first coined by Timothy Crouse in his 1973 book “The Boys on the Bus,” on the media coverage of the U.S. presidential elections.
3. There are many reasons for Pack Journalism. The foremost is the desire of journalists to be on the right side of the argument and their dread of being unwittingly caught with the losing side. It is not that Pack Journalism is always without its advantages. The recent Justice Verma Committee’s excellent report on legal reforms for better laws for gender justice following the gruesome Delhi gang-rape and murder would not have been possible but for the power of Pack Journalism
4. Two important beats of modern journalism — politics and business — failed to even embark on a study to understand the diabolic convergence that was taking place in the name of cricket.
5. But a closer reading helps gauge the range of issues journalists are expected to cover, the width and the breadth of issues starting from the structure of sports management in India, the legality of betting, the overlapping, multiple conflict of interests, the extraordinary interplay between high capital, politics, popular appeal, and the level of opaque arrangement that prevails within the Indian business environment even in this era where state secrets are no longer secret, thanks to the efforts of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

Control on Advertisements 

• The fiercest battle the broadcasting industry is fighting today is against the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), whose decision last March to enforce a rule limiting advertisement time on television to 12 minutes-per-hour has news channels up in arms.

 

Match Fixing

1. The present raging controversy over “spot-fixing” in the Indian Premier League (IPL) has occupied a major part of the news coverage over the past two weeks. Given the cult status of the game here, one is not surprised by the anger against the avaricious personalities who brought disrepute to the game
2. The arrest of players belonging to Rajasthan Royals by the Delhi police during the final days of the IPL season six blew the lid.
3. Then came a series of events: the infamous exit of Lalit Modi, the drama of the formation of the Kochi team and the exit of Shashi Tharoor from the Union Cabinet, Shashank Manohar’s promise to clean up the mess, the court cases between A.C. Muthiah and N. Srinivasan, the fight between the Sahara group and the BCCI over Pune, the telecast rights row, the controversy over the termination of the Deccan Chargers franchise, the induction of Dhoni as an employee of India Cements, and finally the appointment of L. Sivaramakrishnan to the International Cricket Council (ICC) panel. Each one of these developments gave journalists ample scope to do a comprehensive investigation into the murky world of IPL.
4. CSK denied the fact that Gurunath Meiyappan is owner or Team principal of CSK team as under the clause of Franchise agreement it has a termination fear : Clause 11.3 (c) of the Franchise Agreement, which says a franchise may be terminated with immediate effect if “the Franchisee, any Franchisee Group Company and /or any Owner acts in any way which has a material adverse effect upon the reputation or standing of the League, BCCI-IPL, BCCI, the Franchisee, the Team (or any other team in the League) and/or the game of cricket.
5. Schedule 3 of the Agreement sets out the franchisees’ obligations, and Clause 2(i) asks the franchisee “not to engage in any activity or practice which may be reasonably anticipated to result in public criticism of or to reflect badly on BCCI-IPL, the League, BCCI, the Team and/or the game of cricket.”
6. Further, the next sub-clause says the franchise should ensure that “all Players, Team officials and/or employees, or any other person acting for or on behalf of the Franchisee and/or the Team comply with the Regulations during each Season and that the Team complies with the Laws of Cricket during matches.” The term ‘regulations’ used here is explicitly defined as all rules and regulations of IPL, BCCI and ICC and includes any regulation relating to anti-corruption, match-fixing and gambling. This, in effect, incorporates the BCCI’s anti-corruption policy in the agreement itself.
7. It may be not be easy for CSK to wriggle out of the problem by saying Mr. Meiyappan is not an ‘owner’, as he may still fall under the definition of ‘Participants’ in the Code. Under Clause 1.3 of the Code, all participants are bound by it, and some instances of cricket corruption listed in Clause 2 are: fixing or influencing the result or progress or conduct or any other aspect of a match or event, betting and misusing inside information.
8. And a ‘participant’ is defined as “any Player, Player Support Personnel, Umpire, Match Referee or Umpire Support Personnel.” Further, “player support personnel” is defined as “any coach, trainer, manager, selector, team official, doctor, physiotherapist or any other person employed by, representing or otherwise affiliated to a playing/touring team or squad that is chosen to represent a National Cricket Federation in any Domestic Match or International Match or series of such Matches.” And IPL matches fall under the term ‘domestic match’, as it is part of the Indian domestic season, run by the BCCI.
9. Of course, there is a legal difference in the consequences of violating the Franchise Agreement and breaching the anti-corruption policy. In the case of the agreement, a franchise may attract termination if it adversely affects the league’s reputation, but a corrupt act under it will only attract disciplinary action under Clause 5 of the Code. The maximum sanction envisaged in that clause is “a period of ineligibility” or a ban for specified periods, including a life ban. In effect, violating the anti-corruption code may not attract termination of a team’s participation, but only a ban on the individuals concerned.

Nuclear Technology

1. http://thediplomat.com/2013/06/10/the-nuclear-suppliers-group-at-the-crossroads/2/?all=true

Water

1. Companies that use the natural resource for profit pay no charge or royalty for the raw water they use — only a nominal ‘cess’ varying from State to State (a few paise per kilolitre).
2. The BIS(Bureau of Indian Standard) has to ensure that any company or individual seeking quality certification for using groundwater as raw material has a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the CGWB(Central Ground Water Board)
3. The 14 States that have adopted the Central Model Ground Water Regulation Bill are free to give permission to beverages and bottled water companies for extraction of groundwater and more often than not, with little monitoring. For the States that do not have the Act in place, permission is taken from the Centre. Again, no permission is required or taken for drawing river, canal or natural spring water for bottling or use in soft drinks
4. Most water sources are contaminated by sewage and agricultural run-off.
5. Rising population, sprawling cities, and an enormous and thirsty farm belt have jeopardized a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.

Environment Realted

1.  The study was conducted in collaboration with World Wildlife Fund For Nature (WWF) and Wildlife Institute of India for counting of Bengal Tiger in SunderBans and the counting came out to be 103.