6 September 2024

• Polity: West Bengal passed the Aparajita Women and Child Bill 2024, introducing death penalty provisions for rape that face immediate constitutional challenges.
• Governance: The government launched Vishvasya, a Blockchain-as-a-Service platform, for government applications across healthcare, finance and supply chain.
• Science: A quantum gravity study found that gravitons cause measurable noise in gravitational wave detectors like LIGO, supporting gravity quantization theory.
• Schemes: The Poshan Tracker initiative won a National e-Governance Gold Award for monitoring child nutrition across 8.9 crore children.

GS area: Polity (criminal justice), Social justice

The West Bengal Legislative Assembly passed the Aparajita Women and Child Bill 2024, named after the Aparajita Task Force to be created under it. The Bill introduced death penalty provisions for certain categories of sexual crimes.

Key provisions:

• Death penalty for rape resulting in death or permanent vegetative state: The Bill mandates the death penalty (or life imprisonment) in such cases.
• Death penalty for gang rape: Applied to victims above 18 years of age in gang rape cases.
• Faster trials: Investigation must be completed within 21 days (extendable by 15 days); trial within 30 days of chargesheet.
• Aparajita Task Force: A dedicated special task force in each district for rape cases.
• Special Courts: Dedicated courts in each district.

The constitutional problem:

• Mithu vs. State of Punjab (1983): The Supreme Court held that mandatory minimum sentences of death violate Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution. A mandatory death sentence removes judicial discretion, which the Court said is constitutionally impermissible.
• Governor's role: The Bill requires Presidential assent because it amends a central law (the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act). The Governor must withhold assent and forward it to the President.
• Comparable laws: Andhra Pradesh's Disha Bills and Maharashtra's Shakti Bill contain similar death penalty provisions and have faced comparable legal scrutiny.

Static linkage: Criminal law, capital punishment jurisprudence, State legislature powers (Article 254).

GS area: Science and Technology, Governance

The Government of India launched Vishvasya, a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform with geographically distributed infrastructure.

Key features:

• Infrastructure distribution: Three nodes across Hyderabad, Pune and Bhubaneswar for redundancy.
• Permissioned blockchain: The system supports permissioned (private) blockchain applications, where participants are known and vetted, as opposed to public blockchains like Bitcoin.
• NBFLite: A sandbox environment for startups and academia to build and test applications on the Vishvasya stack.
• Praamaanik: A tool within the ecosystem to verify the origin of mobile applications, combating fake-app fraud.
• Application sectors: Healthcare (drug supply chain), finance (loan disbursement tracking), supply chain management, energy trading, government service delivery and media authentication.

The government's blockchain strategy focuses on using the technology for record immutability and transparency in public services, not for cryptocurrency.

Static linkage: Digital governance, Blockchain technology applications.

GS area: Governance (schemes), Social justice

The Poshan Tracker initiative won the National e-Governance Award 2024 (Gold) for its scale and impact in child nutrition monitoring.

• Scale: Covers 8.9 crore children aged 0 to 6 years across India's Anganwadi network.
• What it does: Records height, weight and nutritional status of each child. Tracks stunting, wasting and underweight indicators. Generates alerts for severely malnourished children.
• Portability for migrants: A migrant worker's child can be enrolled in any Anganwadi across India using the Poshan Tracker ID, ensuring continuity of supplementary nutrition services.
• Parent scheme: Poshan Abhiyan (PM Poshan), launched in 2018 as the National Nutrition Mission. Targets reduction of stunting by 2 per cent and underweight by 2 per cent annually.

Static linkage: Child nutrition, Anganwadi system (ICDS), women and child development.

GS area: Science and Technology

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched the India Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre (IGEIC) in Trivandrum, Kerala, under the Graphene Aurora Program.

• Purpose: Bridge the gap between graphene R&D and commercial product development.
• Organisational form: Non-profit entity. This avoids the commercial conflicts of interest that slow down public R&D organisations.
• Graphene properties: Single-atom-thick carbon layer. Extraordinary electrical conductivity, mechanical strength and thermal conductivity. Applications in flexible electronics, batteries, filtration membranes, medical sensors and defence composites.
• India's gap: India produces limited graphene commercially and imports most high-quality graphene for research. IGEIC is meant to change this.

Static linkage: Advanced materials, Make in India, innovation ecosystem.

GS area: Polity (rights), Governance

Government clarifications confirmed that queer couples may open joint bank accounts and nominate each other as beneficiaries in financial accounts and social benefit schemes. This followed the October 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Supriyo vs. Union of India.

The clarification covered:

• Joint bank account opening.
• Partner nomination in insurance and provident fund schemes.
• Ration card listing.
• Access to government survivor benefits where applicable.

The broader ruling retained marriage as an institution for heterosexual couples. Financial inclusion measures fall within administrative discretion and do not require legislative change.

Static linkage: Fundamental rights, equality jurisprudence.

GS area: Science and Technology

Researchers derived uncertainty relations from gravitons (the hypothetical quantum carriers of gravity) and found that quantum effects at small scales produce detectable noise in gravitational wave detectors like LIGO.

• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. First detected gravitational waves in 2015 (Nobel Prize 2017). Located in Hanford (Washington) and Livingston (Louisiana) in the United States.
• India's LIGO-India: A third LIGO detector being built in Maharashtra. Expected to improve sky localisation of gravitational wave sources.
• Gravitons: Hypothetical particles that mediate gravity. Never directly detected. Their existence is predicted by quantum field theory extensions of general relativity.
• Significance: If quantum noise from gravitons is detectable, it would provide the first experimental evidence supporting quantum gravity theory.

Static linkage: Modern physics, LIGO-India project.

• Financialisation: The Chief Economic Adviser (V. Anantha Nageswaran) warned that excessive dominance of financial markets over the real economy distorts macroeconomic outcomes, increases debt and widens inequality. A recurring concern for GS Paper 3.
• California AB 1836: A US law (not Indian law, but a comparative reference) protecting deceased personalities' likenesses, voices and images. Requires heirs' consent for commercial use. Relevant to the broader debate about AI-generated deepfakes of celebrities.