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"As long as one keeps
searching, the answers
come." - Joan Baez
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*There has been no contest for the president’s post in the BJP since it was
founded in 1980.
*Election of the party president cannot be the sole criteria for judging intraparty
democracy
*There is no major difference between the two parties in their internal
democratic structures.
*Nearly all parties are centralised in their decision-making and have been
run from the top down in terms of distribution of party tickets, selection
of Chief Ministers and State party leaders, and party finance.
*What began in the Congress now extends to the bulk of party politics.
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*BJP’s elected MPs, 14.49 % in 2004, 19.13% in 2009 and 14.89% in 2014 were dynastic.
*The BJP had given party tickets to a swing of dynasts in the U.P. Assembly elections.
Other Democracies
*Germany: Parties are required to meet certain conditions in nominating their candidates to party posts. They have to be chosen by a direct secret vote at both constituency and federal levels.
*U.S.: Laws were enacted that required the use of secret ballots in intraparty elections.
*British Labour Party, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada have all seen movements by party activists and by the rank and file to reduce the power of entrenched party elites.
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*Paradox: The electoral process is more representative but political
parties look a lot like oligarchies.
*The biggest weakness of parties is that they are leader-centric and most
leaders are unwilling to institutionalise procedures for the selection of
candidates and increase the participation of members in party
functioning to prevent elite capture from getting entrenched.
*Party organisations into election-winning machines.
*Winning elections has become the only role a party envisages for itself.
*Leaders are valued for their capacity to attract crowds and raise funds
as elections become more and more expensive.
*If party funds are raised and controlled centrally, this weakens the State
units and rank and file vis-à-vis the central leadership on a range of
issues including leadership selection and nominations for elections.
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*Centre’s proposal to make instant triple talaq an offencepunishable with three-year imprisonment and a fine
*Civil wrong into a criminal act.
*Supreme Court: illegal and unenforceable
*Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017
*Protection of women is good.
*But the civil character of marital law must be preserved.
*Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code or provisions of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, already allow the prosecution of a husband for inflicting physical or mental cruelty, emotional and economic abuse, and for deprivation of financial resources.
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*Scientists have announced the discovery of two new
exoplanets, Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g.
*So far we have found 3,567 exoplanets.
*Kepler 90i, orbiting the star Kepler 90, we now know of
another star besides the Sun that has 8 planets orbiting it.
*Another Earth-sized exoplanet, Kepler 80g, orbiting the
star Kepler 80. This is a very stable system in which Kepler
80g and four of its neighbours are locked together in a so-
called resonant chain.
*Good science not only solves problems but also can take a
hard look at itself, at where and how it can improve.
*This is a leap for humankind, a measured leap.
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*The opening of trade walls has accelerated industrial evolution in such a
way that workers have had to learn to adapt to almost every generation.
*The difference, today, is that the evolution didn’t happen within a
lifetime, but a few times within that lifetime.
*Farmer-Call Centre-Uber driver now worried about driverless cars all within
one lifetime.
*Up until 20 to 30 years ago, you could reach your pension age before a
new radical evolution in the job market, which created its winners and
losers.
*Today, the challenge is that evolutionary shifts happen not just once before
reaching pensionable age, but often.
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*This is what causes globalisation’s discontent. Blue collar workers from
the mid-West cannot move to Silicon Valley; it’s a totally different skill
set, and only few can manage it.
*Technological innovations are what accelerate the rhythm of change.
*It is the transformation of technology that affects society, not whatever
that technology delivers (news, electricity, TV series).
*U.S. President Donald Trump’s and Brexit’s victories can be seen as a sort
of “revenge of the losers”.
*little is being done.
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*U.S. manufacturing is down to 11.7% of U.S. GDP (2016), while farming
agriculture is only 1% (2015). America produces services such as Amazon,
Google and Facebook; these are the richest corporations. Their
expansion is thriving globally. And so is the expansion of other
multinational corporations.
*Even though the discontent of globalisation is a leftover of the crisis of
2008, today we don’t see that it will really impact globalisation seriously.
*At least, so far, we don’t see the results of this desire to raise barriers.
Globalisation is here to stay.
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*India has among the youngest populations in the world, which means it can make a resourceful pool of manpower.
*A pre-requisite though is that it receives the right form of education, skills and employment.
*A step in this direction is the Skill Development Mission.
*The concern here is that those who gained employment post-training were found to have dropped out in less than one year.
*The skilling programme has been built such that it provides short-term training to youth who have already dropped out from school.
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*The idea is to provide them with a job by offering short-term
technical/non-technical courses rather than actively enable them to seek
out a career.
*The concern here is that those who gained employment post-training
were found to have dropped out in less than one year.
*For those who completed a year in employment, the system did not offer
a career because career advancement is not just related to skills, but
also to educational qualifications.
*The issue is that the same system that endeavours to provide jobs to
youth restricts their career advancement
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*The skill programme fails to understand how integral it is to incorporate
such a huge initiative within the education system.
*A system that integrates skills and education can go a long way in
ensuring that the youth are better equipped to handle a challenging
employment market.
*Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) is a centrally sponsored
scheme of ‘vocationalisation’ of secondary and higher secondary
education.
*It focusses on enhancing the employability of youth through demand-
driven, competency-based, modular vocational courses, while reducing
drop-out rates.
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*Yet, its biggest drawback is that its modules are not customised to suit
the requirements of children in different age groups.
*Skills at school should be imparted as a hobby and not as a serious trade,
to make learning fun.
*Operational challenges within the schools are barriers to coalesce the
education and skill model.
*Not enough training hours, infrastructure, qualified teachers etc.
*We need strategic thinking while looking at skills at school.
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U.S. failed to walk the talk on Pak.: Karzai
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*India should rethink its support to U.S. President Donald Trump’s
Afghanistan policy, said former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, during a
visit to Delhi to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
*“India has the right to ask the U.S. questions on [continuing support to
Pakistan], and it must think and rethink its policy in view of changes and
developments in Afghanistan,” Mr. Karzai
*Mr. Trump has failed to back his tough words on Pakistan with action.
*Mr. Karzai was referring to the Defense authorisation bill that Mr. Trump
signed into law on Thursday, which provides for up to $700 million to be
transferred to Pakistan for coalition support.
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*.
Residents fled on Saturday, turning downtown Santa Barbara into “a ghost town” as surging winds drove one of the
biggest fires in California’s history toward the city and the nearby enclave of Montecito. Here, firefighters monitor
the flames. AFP
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*.
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Zealous frog fathers guard eggs against
‘cannibals’
*White-spotted bush frog Raorchestes
chalazodes (rediscovered in 2011 after
125 years and found only in the Western
Ghats’ Agastya Hills in Kerala and Tamil
Nadu) breeding inside hollow bamboo
stems.
*Breeding behaviour of the critically
endangered bush frogs in Tamil Nadu’s
Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve for
his recent work.
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China blog raises Doklam heat
*Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s
message to India for maintaining
border peace has been
supplemented with fresh troop
deployments to deter a
confrontation in the Doklam area,
says a Chinese blog.
* Chinese troop presence has been
permanently beefed up in the
Doklam area.
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UN to vote on draft nullifying Jerusalem move
*The UN Security Council is considering a draft
resolution affirming that any change to the
status of Jerusalem has no legal effect and must
be reversed, in response to the U.S. decision to
recognise the city as Israel’s capital.
*Egypt circulated the draft text on Saturday, and
diplomats said the council could vote on the
proposed measure as early as on Monday.
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‘CIA tip-off helped prevent Russia attack’
*Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday to thank him for a tip-off that helped prevent a terrorist bomb attack on a cathedral in the Russia city of St. Petersburg, the Kremlin said.
*Information provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) allowed Russian law-enforcement agencies to arrest the would-be attackers before they could carry out their plan, the Kremlin said in a statement posted on its Internet site.
*The Russian leader has said restoring ties between Moscow and Washington is vital because the two countries need to work together to counter global challenges, in particular the threat from violent Islamist radicals.
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8 killed in attack on Quetta church
*At least eight people were killed and 30 injured
when two terrorists wearing suicide vests attacked a
Methodist church in the southwestern city of Quetta
in Balochistan.
*The Province’s Home Minister Sarfraz Bugti said that
one attacker was intercepted and shot dead at the
gate while the other blew himself up near the
church’s main door but was prevented from reaching
the prayer hall. Two women were among the dead,
said provincial Home Secretary Akbar Harifal.
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‘WTO meet failure: India not blamed’
*For the first time in the more than two-decade history of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), India was not blamed for the failure of a meeting of the global organisation’s apex decision-making body as witnessed in the Argentine capital, a perception — according to Suresh Prabhu, Commerce Minister — that was important for the country.
*Minister further said, “India is not a country that can be just walked over. We stood our ground, and we took a principled stand as well as practical stand.”
*The position of the U.S. to block the demands of more than 100 developing countries, including India and China, for the implementation of their food security programmes without onerous conditions, was widely seen as one of the main reasons for the failure of the talks.
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Foreign funds pump in $30 billion in 2017
*Foreign investors are flocking to the Indian capital markets in a big way
with a net inflow of more than $30 billion (more than C2 lakh crore) of
so-called ‘hot money’ in 2017, with equities alone getting over $8 billion
— an amount bigger than the cumulative investment of the previous two
years.
*As the year draws to a close, the Indian stock market seems to have
regained its status as one of the most favoured destinations for foreign
portfolio investors (FPIs), as they have taken their net investment
position in equities so far in 2017 to C55,000 crore — the highest in three
years after C20,500 crore in 2016 and C17,800 crore in 2015.
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Ministry may face fund crunch for UDAN
*With more routes set to be operational under UDAN, the Civil Aviation
ministry is likely to face paucity of funds in providing viability gap
funding (VGF) to participating airlines, an official said.
*To connect unserved and under-served aerodromes as well as make flying
more affordable, the Ministry unveiled Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik (UDAN)
and 128 routes were awarded in the first round of bidding.
*A total of 141 initial proposals have been received from various players
in the second round of bidding, the results of which are expected this
month. As participating airlines are extended VGF, the Ministry feels that
the amount that will be available towards it may not be sufficient once
more players start operating UDAN flights.
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Questions
1. Union Budget is always presented first in
A. Lok Sabha
B. Rajya Sabha
C. Joint session
D. Union Cabinet
2. The strength of the UPSC is determined by
A. President
B. Parliament
C. Permanently fixed by Constitution
D. Was determined by the Presidential Ordinance in 1952
3. Establishment of NABARD was recommended by which committee?
A. Narshimham
B. Chakraovarti
C. Abhijit Sen
D. Shivaraman
4. Identify:
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PrashantTMavani
