90% of people have gender biases: UN

GS Paper - 2 (Social Issues)

The Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) report has revealed that while about 90% of men and women hold gender biases, the proportion holding a bias is least on the subject of women's education, just 28%. Half of people worldwide still believe men make better political leaders, more than 40% believe men make better business executives and 25% believe it is justified for a man to beat his wife, according to the new GSNI report launched on 13 June 2023 by the UNDP based on data from the World Values Survey.

More about the report

• Worryingly, the report showed that the global GSNI value changed very little over the years (between the last survey in 2010-14 and the latest one in 2017-22) showing the persistence of gender bias in social norms.
• There seems to be marginally greater reduction in bias among men, a reduction of three percentage points, than among women, where it has come down by just 1.5 percentage points.
• While the bias might be least in attitudes towards women's education, the report showed how the link between women's progress in education and economic empowerment was broken.
• Women are more skilled and educated than ever before, yet even in the 59 countries where women are now more educated than men, the average gender income gap remains a staggering 39% in favour of men.
• Even though tertiary education is not compulsory, the norm of educating girls has already shifted, and in most countries more women than men are now in tertiary education.
• It added that as women catch up in education, persistent gender gaps in income can no longer be explained by gaps in education.
• Instead, persistent gender income gaps seem to be related to deep-rooted social norms and gender stereotypes.
• However, women's time spent on unpaid care work relative to men's, regardless of education, accounted for most of the recent variation in the gender gap in income.

APUAPA facing legal challenge

GS Paper - 2 (Polity)

A legislation enacted in Arunachal Pradesh in 2014, the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (APUAPA), is currently under the scanner, with civil society organisations demanding its repeal and a petition challenging it before the Itanagar bench of the Gauhati High Court.

What is APUAPA?

• The APUAPA was notified in 2014 “to provide for more effective prevention of certain unlawful activities of individuals and associations.”
• It enables the state government or any official not below the rank of a Secretary to the State Government or a District Magistrate to make on order for detaining certain categories of people to prevent them from “acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of the State, or maintenance of public order or maintenance of daily supplies and services essential to the public”.
• These categories of people include “any person who is bootlegger, habitual depredator of environment, habitual drug offender, property grabber, dangerous persons, and unlawful persons associated with unlawful activities”.
• The Act defines public order as having been affected adversely as “directly or indirectly causing or is likely to cause any harm, danger or alarm or feeling of insecurity among the general public or any section thereof or a grave or widespread danger to life, property or public health.”
• Within three weeks of detention, the matter is to be placed before an advisory board which will give its opinion on whether there is sufficient cause for detention of an individual.
• If its opinion is that there is sufficient cause, a person can be detained for up to six months under the act.

What prompted the current focus on this Act?

• The Act suddenly drew attention when 41 people were booked and detained under it after a call was issued for a 72-hour bandh in various districts of the state.
• These included prominent anti-corruption activist Sol Dodum, Aam Aadmi Party’s Arunachal Pradesh convener Tana Tamar Tara, and Chairman of Pro-Dam Movement of Arunachal Pradesh Taw Paul.
• The bandh call had been issued in protest against the 2022 Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission paper leak case in which 42 government employees have been arrested so far.
• The protest call was to demand the implementation of 13-point charter of demands, including declaring all examinations conducted by the APPSC where anomalies were found as “null and void”.

Leptospirosis surges in the monsoon

GS paper 2 – (Diseases)

Leptospirosis has emerged as an important infectious disease in the world today. It is a potentially fatal zoonotic bacterial disease that tends to have large outbreaks after heavy rainfall or flooding.

Causes of the diseases:

• The disease is caused by a bacterium called Leptospira interrogans, or leptospira. It is a contagious disease in animals but is occasionally transmitted to humans in certain environmental conditions.
• The carriers of the disease can be either wild or domestic animals, including rodents, cattle, pigs, and dogs.
• The cycle of disease transmission begins with the shedding of leptospira, usually in the urine of infected animals.

Symptoms of leptospirosis

• The severity of a leptospirosis infection ranges from a mild flu-like illness to being life-threatening.
• The infection can affect many organs, reflecting the systemic nature of the disease. This is also why the signs and symptoms of leptospirosis are often mistaken for other diseases.
• In milder cases, patients could experience a sudden onset of fever, chills, and headache – or no symptoms at all. But in severe cases, the disease can be characterised by the dysfunction of multiple organs, including the liver, kidneys, lungs, and the brain.
• Animals exhibit a variety of clinical symptoms and indications. In cattle and pigs, the disease can potentially cause reproductive failure, stillbirths, and weak calves or piglets. Dogs experience a range of symptoms, including fever, jaundice, vomiting, diarrhoea, renal failure, and even death.

More about the Disease

• The disease is more prevalent in warm, humid countries and in both urban and rural areas. It affects an estimated 1.03 million people every year, killing around 60,000.
• The burden of leptospirosis is expected to increase in the future as the urban poor population in tropical countries increases even as sanitary infrastructure falls shorter.
• In India, thousands of people are affected by leptospirosis every year.
• However, the numbers at the global and regional levels aren’t exact because of misdiagnosis (its symptoms mimic those of dengue, malaria, and hepatitis), limited access to reliable diagnostics, lack of awareness among treating physicians, and lack of environmental surveillance.
• Within India, studies have found that leptospirosis is more common in the south, although this could be due to the region’s better healthcare and thus better disease detection.