Today's Editorial

1. SC upholds govt's decision on OROP

GS Paper - 2 (Polity)

The Supreme Court on 16 March 2022 upheld the government's decision on One Rank, One Pension (OROP), and said that it does not find any constitutional infirmity on the OROP principle. The SC has upheld the manner in which the Central Government introduced the OROP scheme in defence forces as per its notification dated 7 November 2015.

What

1. OROP is a policy decision of the government and it is not for the court to go into the adjudication of policy matters.
2. Furthermore, the SC has directed that the pending re-fixation exercise of OROP should be carried out from 1 July 2019 and arrears should be paid in 3 months.
3. A bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud had reserved its verdict on 23 February 2022 asking the Centre whether the hardships of ex-servicemen be obviated to a certain extent if the periodic revision of OROP is reduced from five years to a lesser period.
4. The plea had been filed by the Indian Ex-servicemen Movement (IESM) through advocate Balaji Srinivasan against the Centre's formula of OROP.
5. The ‘one rank, one pension’ rule means that retired soldiers of the same rank and length of service will receive the same pension, regardless of when they retire.
6. As of now, the date of retirement determines the amount of pension. With each Pay Commission coming up with its recommendations every 10 years, the military veterans who retire early receive fewer pensions as compared to those who retired later with the same rank and length of service.
7. Ex-servicemen had been demanding for OROP for almost four decades, and that request came through in 2018 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the 'One Rank One Pension' scheme for ex-servicemen.

2. Consensus on Covid vaccine IP waiver

GS Paper - 3 (IPR)

The United States, European Union, India and South Africa have reached a tentative agreement on key elements of a long-sought limited intellectual property waiver for Covid-19 vaccines. The tentative agreement among the four World Trade Organization members still needs formal approvals from the parties before it can be considered official.

What

1. It would apply only to patents for Covid-19 vaccines, which would be much more limited in scope than a broad proposed WTO IP waiver backed by the United States.
2. The tentative agreement closely mirrors the EU's compulsory licensing approach and does not include Covid-19 treatments or tests, and contained limitations that would likely exclude China from any waiver.
3. The text of the agreement was being circulated in Brussels, Washington, Johannesburg and New Delhi, with decisions on the length of the waivers still to be resolved.
4. The IP waiver would apply only to countries that exported less than 10 per cent of global vaccine doses in 2021.
5. The tentative deal comes after months of negotiations over how to accelerate Covid-19 vaccine production in developing countries, where vaccination rates have lagged far behind wealthy countries.
6. In talks brokered by WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the United States, EU, India and South Africa broke away from negotiations with a broader group of countries late last year amid stiff opposition from countries with big pharmaceuticals sectors, including Switzerland and Britain.

3. Algorithm for Coronal Mass Ejections

GS Paper - 3 (Science and Technology)

TRACING THE near accurate structures of the Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) emerging from the Sun has become easier, thanks to an algorithm which deletes the background solar corona — the outermost solar atmosphere structured by strong magnetic fields. Named Simple Radial Gradient Filter (SiRGraF), the algorithm has been jointly developed by scientists from the Aryabhatta Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital, and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru.

What

1. CMEs are massive and violent explosions in the form of clouds containing energised plasma, bubbles and gaseous matter capable of travelling through the interplanetary media at speeds going up to several million miles per hour.
2. Strong CMEes can affect space weather and activities on other planets, including the Earth. CMEs can travel in any random direction and cut through solar winds. If CMEs are headed towards the Earth, they can cause severe implications.
3. Often, the images of the CMEs suffer from radial variation in intensities and require additional image-processing before they are ready to be studied.
4. The technique is capable of separating the background revealing the dynamic corona for short time-scale transient structures of the corona.
5. As a result, now CME observations and their characteristics can be studied with improved efficiency. However, the researchers noted that this algorithm is not suitable for quantitative analysis on estimations based on intensities.
6. On the need for such a technique, the researchers said, The density of the solar corona decreases with distance radially outwards. As the intensity of the corona observed in white light depends on the density of particles in the atmosphere, it decreases exponentially. If the contrast between the constant corona and transient CMEs is not high, detection of CMEs becomes a challenge.
7. Another advantage of using this technique, scientists say, is that multiple images can be processed in a short time without compromising on the image quality.

UN and the Russia, Ukraine crisis

Source: By The Indian Express

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, cancelled a planned visit to Liberia in the second week of February 2022 to focus instead on UN diplomacy on Russia’s troop build-up near Ukraine as Washington warns Moscow could invade at any time.

Tensions over the Ukraine crisis spilled into the UN Security Council two weeks ago at a public meeting requested by Washington. Russia, which denies planning an invasion, made a failed bid to stop the council discussion.

While all members were able to air their views openly, there was no action by the 15-member council and will not be – even if Russia invades Ukraine. A simple statement needs consensus support and Russia could veto any bid for a resolution.

Russia is one of five permanent, veto-wielding powers on the council along with the United States, France, Britain and China. The Security Council is charged with maintaining international peace and security. Russia also currently holds the council’s rotating presidency for February.

What happened to Crimea?

If Russia’s military escalates the crisis, diplomats and foreign policy analysts say diplomacy and action at the United Nations is likely to mirror what happened in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region.

The Security Council has met dozens of times since then to discuss the Ukraine crisis. In March 2014, it voted on a US-drafted resolution opposing a referendum on the status of Crimea and urging countries not to recognize it. It received 13 votes in favour, China abstained and Russia cast a veto.

Seeking to demonstrate Russia’s international isolation, Western countries then took a similar text to the 193-member General Assembly, which adopted a resolution declaring the referendum invalid. It received 100 votes in favour, 11 against and 58 abstentions, while two dozen countries didn’t vote.

General Assembly resolutions carry political weight but are not legally binding. Unlike the Security Council, no country has veto power in the General Assembly.

What are western diplomats doing?

So far, Western diplomacy at the United Nations during the latest military build-up has largely focused on trying to rally support – should they need it – among UN members by accusing Russia of undermining the UN Charter. The Charter is the founding document of the United Nations, outlining its purposes and principles agreed in 1945. “Russia’s actions toward Ukraine are not only a regional issue,” Thomas-Greenfield said last month.

“They impact every UN member state and we must be prepared to stand together in unity and solidarity should Russia defy the shared values and principles that undergird our international system,” she said.

What can Russia do as Security Council president?

Russia holds the council’s rotating presidency for February. This is largely an administrative role, but does involve scheduling meetings, so some diplomats warn Russia could delay any attempts by council members to request another discussion on actions by Russia.

As things stand, the council is already due to discuss Ukraine on 17 Feb. 2022, diplomats said. It is a regularly scheduled meeting on the Minsk agreements, which were endorsed by the council in 2015 and designed to end a separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.

The General Assembly is also set to hold an annual discussion on “the situation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine” on 23 Feb. 2022.