Global Slavery Index

GS Paper - 2 (Social Issues)

According to the Global Slavery Index 2023, on any given day in 2021, as many as 50 million people were living in “modern slavery”. Among these 50 million, 28 million suffer from forced labour and 22 million from forced marriages. Of these 50 million, 12 million are children.

What is modern slavery?

• According to the index, “modern slavery” refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuses of power.
• Modern slavery is an umbrella term and includes a whole variety of abuses such as forced labour, forced marriage, debt bondage, sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, forced or servile marriage, and the sale and exploitation of children.
• The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations also resolve to end modern slavery.
• Target 8.7 of the SDGs states: “Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.”

What is the Global Slavery Index?

• The index presents a global picture of modern slavery. It is constructed by Walk Free, a human rights organisation and is based on data provided by the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, which, in turn, is produced by International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration (IOM).
• This is the fifth edition of the Global Slavery Index and is based on the 2022 estimates.
• However, the initial estimates are regional and to arrive at country-wise estimates, the index uses several representative surveys.

What are the country-wise findings?

There are three sets of key findings.

The first looks at the prevalence of modern slavery. The prevalence refers to the incidence of modern slavery per 1000 population. On this count, the following 10 countries are the worst offenders:

1. North Korea
2. Eritrea
3. Mauritania
4. Saudi Arabia
5. Turkey
6. Tajikistan
7. United Arab Emirates
8. Russia
9. Afghanistan
10. Kuwait

• “These countries share some political, social, and economic characteristics, including limited protections for civil liberties and human rights,” states the index.

Following are the countries with the lowest prevalence:

1. Switzerland
2. Norway
3. Germany
4. Netherlands
5. Sweden
6. Denmark
7. Belgium
8. Ireland
9. Japan
10. Finland

However, apart from prevalence, the index also calculates the countries hosting the maximum number of people living in modern slavery. Here the list is as follows:

1. India
2. China
3. North Korea
4. Pakistan
5. Russia
6. Indonesia
7. Nigeria
8. Turkey
9. Bangladesh
10. United States

“Collectively, these countries account for nearly two in every three people living in modern slavery and over half the world’s population. Notably, six are G20 nations: India, China, Russia, Indonesia, Türkiye, and the US,” points out the index.

Cyclone Biparjoy

GS Paper - 1 (Geography)

Developed in the Arabian Sea, cyclone Biparjoy, earlier expected to move towards the Pakistan coastline, has now changed its path and is heading towards the northern Gujarat coast, with landfall. Cyclone Biparjoy, which is expected to generate wind speeds of 125-135 kmph with gusts reaching up to 150 kmph by the time it reaches land, is a tropical cyclone.

What is a cyclone?

• A cyclone is a large-scale system of air that rotates around the centre of a low-pressure area. It is usually accompanied by violent storms and bad weather.
• As per NDMA, a cyclone is characterised by inward spiralling winds that rotate anticlockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
• The National Disaster Management Authority classifies cyclones broadly into two categories: extratropical cyclones and tropical cyclones.

What are extratropical cyclones?

• Also known as mid-latitude cyclones, extratropical cyclones are those which occur outside of the tropic. They have “cold air at their core, and derive their energy from the release of potential energy when cold and warm air masses interact”.
• It added that such cyclones always have one or more fronts — a weather system that is the boundary between two different types of air masses.
• One is represented by warm air and the other by cold air — connected to them, and can occur over land or ocean.

What are tropical cyclones?

• Tropical cyclones are those which develop in the regions between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer.
• They are the most devastating storms on Earth. Such cyclones develop when “thunderstorm activity starts building close to the centre of circulation, and the strongest winds and rains are no longer in a band far from the centre.
• The core of the storm turns warm, and the cyclone gets most of its energy from the “latent heat” released when water vapour that has evaporated from warm ocean waters condenses into liquid water. Moreover, warm fronts or cold fronts aren’t associated with tropical cyclones.
• Tropical cyclones have different names depending on their location and strength. For instance, they are known as hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Atlantic Ocean and the eastern and central North Pacific Ocean. In the western North Pacific, they are called typhoons.

CoWIN data ‘leak’

GS Paper - 3 (ITC)

Following reports that CoWIN data had been accessed by a Telegram bot, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the nodal cyber security agency, had reviewed the alleged breach and has found that the CoWIN portal was not “directly breached”. The data – including citizens’ Aadhaar and passport numbers – that an automated account on Telegram was allegedly sharing was done using previously breached databases.

The Centre’s defence

•  The Ministry of Health press release first lays out the three ways in which data on CoWIN can be accessed:
• a)A user can access their data on the portal through a one time password (OTP) sent to their mobile number.
• b)A vaccinator can access data of a person, and the CoWIN system tracks and records each time an “authorised” user accesses the system
• c)Third party applications that have been provided authorised access of CoWIN APIs can access personal level data of vaccinated people after OTP authentication.
• Then it claims that without an OTP, data can not be shared with the Telegram bot. Some reports said that the bot also showed people’s date of birth, but the Ministry said that CoWIN only collects their year of birth and that there is no provision to capture a person’s address on CoWIN.
• It also said that there is one API that has a feature of sharing the data by using just a mobile number.
• However, even this API is very specific and the requests are only accepted from a trusted API which has been whitelisted by the CoWIN application”.

Was there a breach?

• The Ministry has not explicitly clarified whether or not the CoWIN database was breached recently or in the past.
• Its entire explanation hinges on the fact that the only way to access CoWIN’s system is either through an OTP or through a vaccinator whose access is logged.
• While the Ministry said that it has adequate security measures to protect CoWIN’s database, at no point has it said the database itself has not been impacted. This only leaves the possibility that the Telegram bot was not scraping data from CoWIN in real time.