Indian Society & Social Issue: June 2022 Current Affairs | Current Affairs & General Knowledge - CLAT PDF Download

Tackling Global Water Scarcity

Why in News?

According to a newly published book, unconventional water sources can help beat global water scarcity.

• The book was compiled by experts at the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), UNU Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
• Conventional water sources which rely on snowfall, rainfall and rivers – are not enough to meet growing freshwater demand in water-scarce areas.

What is the Current State of Water Scarcity?

World:

• Only 3% of the world’s water is freshwater, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use.
• As many as 87 countries are projected to become water-scarce by 2050.
• One in four people on Earth face shortages of water for drinking, sanitation, agriculture and economic development.
  • Water scarcity is expected to intensify in regions like the Middle East and North Africa region, which has 6% of the global population but only 1% of the world’s freshwater resources.

India

• About
  • Although India has 16% of the world’s population, the country possesses only 4% of the world’s freshwater resources.
  • In recent times, the water crisis in India has become very critical, affecting millions of people across India.
  • As many as 256 of 700 districts in India have reported ‘critical’ or ‘overexploited’ groundwater levels according to the most recent Central Ground Water Board data (from 2017).
  • Three-fourths of India’s rural families lack access to piped, drinkable water and must rely on unsafe sources.
  • India has become the world’s largest extractor of groundwater, accounting for 25% of the total. Some 70% of our water sources are contaminated and our major rivers are dying because of pollution.
• Related Initiatives:
  • Jal Kranti Abhiyan
  • National Water Mission
  • National Rural Drinking Water Programme
  • NITI Aayog Composite Water Management Index
  • Jal Jeevan Mission
  • Jal Shakti Abhiyan
  • Atal Bhujal Yojana

What are the Recommendations?

Unconventional water resources can provide major relief, provided the following strategies are followed:

• Promoting further research and practice on both technical and nontechnical aspects of unconventional water resources.
• Ensuring that unconventional waters provide benefits, not cost to the environment.
• Positioning unconventional waters as a reliable source of water in times of uncertainty.
• Supporting complementary and multidimensional approaches such as addressing water scarcity and climate change together.

Issue with the Juvenile Justice Amendment Act, 2021

Why in News?

The Juvenile Justice Act Amendment is making it harder to report abuse at child care institutions by making abuse and cruelty by staffers or persons in-charge at Child Care Institutions (CCI) non-cognisable.

• The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act, 2021 was passed to amend various provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015.

What are the Provisions of Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Amendment Act 2021?

• Non-Cognisable Offence:
  Crimes against children which are mentioned in the chapter “Other Offences Against Children” of the JJ Act, 2015 that allow an imprisonment between three and seven years will be deemed “non-cognisable”.
• Adoption:
  The amendment provides strength to the provision of protection and adoption of children. There are many adoption cases pending before the court and to make proceedings of the court faster now the power is transferred to the district magistrate.
• Amendment provides that the district magistrate has the authority to issue such adoption orders.

What is the Concern Associated with the Juvenile Justice Amendment Act, 2021?

• Specifically, the amendment under challenge is the one to Section 86 of the JJ Act, according to which crimes under the special law, with punishment between three to seven years, have been reclassified as non-cognisable.
• While the victims themselves are unable to directly report them due to the imbalance in power, most such crimes are reported to the police by either parents or child rights bodies and Child Welfare Committees (CWC).
  • Parents of these Children: They are mostly daily wage labourers, are either unaware of how to, or not inclined to report the crimes to the police.
  • They do not want to engage with the legal process because that would force them to take time off from work, resulting in loss of wages.
• Child Welfare Committees (CWC): CWCs’ first instinct in most cases is to “talk and arrive at a settlement” without having to escalate the matter to the police.
• Making these crimes non-cognisable along with several other serious crimes under the special law would make reporting an offence to the police even more difficult.

What does the Statistics Say?

• According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), since it started recording these crimes in 2017, they had risen by over 700 percent by 2019.
• The NCRB in 2017 recorded 278 cases of crimes committed by CCI in-charges across India involving 328 child victims. These cases rose to 1,968 by 2019, involving as many as 2,699 child victims.

What are Other Legal Frameworks for the Welfare of children?

• The Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), 2013
• Child Labour (Protection and Regulation) Act, 2016
• United Nation Convention on the Right of the Child (UNCRC)
• National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, 2005

Way Forward

• Along with addressing the procedural lacunae and ensuring faster delivery of justice, there is a need to ease reporting capacity of victims through parents or independent civil society organisations that will provide the necessary support to the victim and ensure that the child returns to a normal life.
  • High conviction rate would go a long way in ensuring a safe world for children.
• Specific training in child protection rules should be imparted, as district magistrates usually are not trained or equipped to deal with these specific laws.
• To ensure safety of the Childrens, District Administration should work in close coordination with all five arms – CWC, JJ Board, CCI, district child protection units and special juvenile police units.

Global Trends Report on Forced Displacement in 2021

Why in News?

Recently, the 2022 annual Global Trends Report was published by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

• June 20 is designated as World Refugee Day by the United Nations. The theme for World Refugee Day 2022 is whoever, whatever, whenever. Everyone has got a right to seek safety.

What are the Highlights of the Report?

Global Overview:

• Globally 100 million people were forced to flee their homes last year due to violence, human rights abuses, food insecurity, the climate crisis, war in Ukraine, and other emergencies from Africa to Afghanistan.
• There were 23.7 million new internal displacements globally due to disasters (these are in addition to those internally displaced due to conflict and violence). This represented a decrease of seven million, or 23%, compared to the previous year.
• The largest displacements in the context of disasters in 2021 occurred in China (6.0 million), the Philippines (5.7 million), and India (4.9 million).
• The number of people forced to flee their homes has increased every year over the past decade and stands at the highest level since records began, a trend that can be only reversed by a new, concerted push towards peacemaking.

India

• Nearly five million people in India were internally displaced due to climate change and disasters in 2021.

What is Internal Displacement?

• Internal Displacement (Meaning):
  • Internal displacement describes the situation of people who have been forced to leave their homes but have not left their country.
• Factors of Displacement: Millions of people are uprooted from their homes or places of habitual residence each year in the context of conflict, violence, development projects, disasters and climate change and remain displaced within their countries’ borders.
• Components: Internal displacement is based on two components:
  • The person’s movement is coerced or involuntary (to distinguish them from economic and other voluntary migrants);
  • The person stays within internationally recognised state borders (to distinguish them from refugees).
• Difference from Refugee: According to the 1951 Refugee Convention, a “refugee” is a person who has been persecuted and forced to leave his native country.
  • A precondition of being considered a refugee is that a person crosses an international border.
  • Unlike refugees, internally displaced people are not the subject of any international convention.
  • At the international level, no single agency or organisation has been designated as the global lead on protection and assistance of internally displaced persons.
  • However, there are United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.
• Challenges Faced by Internally Displacement Persons (IDPs): IDPs can live under threat of physical attack, sexual- or gender-based violence, and run the risk of being separated from family members.
  • They are frequently deprived of adequate shelter, food and health services, and often lose their property, land or their access to livelihoods.

What are the Challenges associated with Internal Displacement?

• Lack of Proper and Commonly Accepted Statistics: In terms of the statistics relating to displacement in the context of climate change, simply put, what is not defined cannot be quantified, and what cannot be quantified cannot be predicted.
• Lack of Legal Status to Climate Refugees: From a legal perspective, UNHCR does not support the term “climate refugee” which does not exist in international law. It is also very difficult to assess whether someone who has been displaced in the context of climate change would have been displaced anyway had there been no climate change.
• Non-existent relationship between climate change and displacement: Finally, the link between climate change and (forced) displacement remains not fully measurable and there is no consensus that it is a direct causal link, with, for example, only limited information available on the impact of climate change on mounting poverty, political instability and armed conflict.

Way Forward

• Return to Home country: For most refugees, returning to their home country based on a free and informed choice would be a preferred solution to bring their temporary status as refugees to an end. To realize this, political stability and economic opportunities are essential to ensure that the environment refugees face upon their return allows them to reintegrate in safety and with dignity. To ensure that the returns are sustainable
• Local Integration: In the absence of the possibility to return safely or be resettled, pathways are available in some countries for refugees to remain long-term or permanently in their country of asylum. Local integration helps ensure that refugees can build new lives in these countries.

Polio

Why in News?

Recently, Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus (VDPV) was detected in the environmental surveillance of sewage samples from Kolkata, Bengal.

• Most likely it has come from someone’s gut who is immune deficient and has since multiplied. It is not a case of human-to-human polio transfer.
• A VDPV is a strain of the weakened poliovirus that was initially included in OPV (Oral poliovirus vaccines) and that has changed over time and behaves more like the wild or naturally occurring virus.

What is Polio?

• About:
  • Polio is a crippling and potentially deadly viral infectious disease that affects the nervous system.
  • There are three individual and immunologically distinct wild poliovirus strains:
    (i) Wild Poliovirus type 1 (WPV1)
    (ii) Wild Poliovirus type 2 (WPV2)
    (iii) Wild Poliovirus type 3 (WPV3)
  • Symptomatically, all three strains are identical, in that they cause irreversible paralysis or even death. However, there are genetic and virological differences, which make these three strains separate viruses which must each be eradicated individually.
• Spread:
  • The virus is transmitted by person-to-person mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, through contaminated water or food).
  • It largely affects children under 5 years of age. The virus multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system and can cause paralysis.
• Symptoms:
  • Most people with polio do not feel sick. Some people have only minor symptoms, such as fever, tiredness, nausea, headache, pain in the arms and legs, etc.
  • In rare cases, polio infection causes permanent loss of muscle function (paralysis).
  • Polio can be fatal if the muscles used for breathing are paralysed or if there is an infection of the brain.
• Prevention and Cure:
  • There is no cure, but it can be prevented through Immunisation.
• Vaccines:
  • Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV): It is given orally as a birth dose for institutional deliveries, then primary three doses at 6, 10 and 14 weeks and one booster dose at 16-24 months of age.
  • Injectable Polio Vaccine (IPV): It is introduced as an additional dose along with the 3rd dose of DPT (Diphtheria, Pertussis and Tetanus) under the Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP).
• Recent Outbreaks:
  • In 2019, polio outbreaks were recorded in the Philippines, Malaysia, Ghana, Myanmar, China, Cameroon, Indonesia and Iran, which were mostly vaccine-derived in which a rare strain of the virus genetically mutated from the strain in the vaccine.
  • According to the WHO (World Health Organisation), if the oral vaccine-virus is excreted and allowed to circulate in an unimmunised or under-immunised population for at least 12 months, it can mutate to cause infections.

India & Polio

• India received polio-free certification by the WHO in 2014, after three years of zero cases.
• This achievement has been spurred by the successful Pulse Polio Campaign in which all children were administered polio drops.
• The last case due to wild poliovirus in the country was detected on 13th January 2011

Drug Resistant Typhoid

Why in News?

Bacteria that cause typhoid fever are becoming more and more resistant to some of the most widely used antibiotics, according to the study published in The Lancet Microbe journal.

• Typhoid fever causes 11 million infections and more than 1,00,000 deaths per year. South Asia accounts for 70% of the global disease burden.

What is Typhoid?

• About:
  • Typhoid fever is a life-threatening systemic infection caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (commonly known as Salmonella Typhi) carried only by humans – no other animal carrier has been found.
• Transmission:
  • Typhoid fever is transmitted by the faecal-oral route, through ingestion of contaminated food or water.
  • Without treatment, about one person in 20 who recovers from typhoid becomes a ‘carrier’. Despite having no symptoms of illness, they have bacteria in their faeces and urine, and can infect others for a period of about three months (sometimes up to one year).
  • Travellers are at high risk of developing typhoid fever in many typhoid endemic countries. This includes parts of Asia (especially India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the Middle East.
• Symptoms:
  • Symptoms and signs of typhoid range from mild to severe, can last for about one month without treatment, and may include: fever, fatigue or tiredness, malaise (general feeling of unwellness), sore throat, persistent cough, headache.
• Prevention:
  • Vaccine:
    (i) The typhoid vaccine is available as an oral medication or a one-off injection:
    (ii) Capsule: For adults and children over the age of 6 years, this is a live, attenuated vaccine.
    (iii) Shot: For adults and children over the age of 2 years, this is an inactivated vaccine a person needs to get 2 weeks before travel.
    (iv) The typhoid vaccine is only 50–80% effective.
• Treatment:
  • Typhoid fever requires prompt treatment with antibiotics.
• Drug Resistance:
  • The effectiveness of antibiotics for typhoid fever is threatened by the emergence of drug resistant strains.
  • The existence of resistant strains of bacteria means antibiotics or drugs designed to kill them no longer work, allowing them to spread rapidly, posing a risk to public health.
• Since 2000, multi-drug-resistant (MDR) typhoid has declined steadily in Bangladesh and India, remained low in Nepal, and increased slightly in Pakistan.
  • However, these are being replaced by strains resistant to other antibiotics, according to the study conducted by researchers from Stanford University, Christian Medical College Vellore and other institutions.
  • Multi-drug resistance (MDR) is defined as lack of susceptibility to at least one agent in three or more chemical classes of antibiotic.
  • Strains were classified as MDR if they had genes giving resistance to antibiotics ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and trimethoprim/ sulfamethoxazole.
• A new type of drug resistance is observed in strains termed XDR typhoid. Strains resistant to the antibiotic (azithromycin) have been seen in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
• Extensive Drug Resistance (XDR) typhoid is caused by a strain that is resistant to at least five antibiotic classes recommended for treating typhoid fever.

Way Forward

• An integrative approach and a comprehensive policy framework are required to be in place for the prevention, control and elimination of typhoid fever.
• India’s Health Ministry is considering introducing new typhoid conjugate vaccines into the national immunization program. Two WHO prequalified vaccines have been developed in India (by Bharat Biotech and Biological E).