Extreme weather events such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall can significantly impact the spread of vector-borne diseases in India. Here are some ways in which these events can affect disease transmission:

Heatwaves:

1. Increased mosquito breeding: Heatwaves can accelerate the breeding process of mosquitoes, particularly Aedes aegypti, the primary vector of dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Warmer temperatures and humidity can lead to an increase in mosquito populations, making it easier for them to spread diseases.
2. Changes in mosquito behavior: Heatwaves can alter the behavior of mosquitoes, making them more active and aggressive at night, which increases the risk of human-mosquito contact.
3. Reduced human activity: During heatwaves, people may stay indoors, reducing their exposure to outdoor environments where mosquitoes are more likely to be present. This can lead to a decrease in reported cases of vector-borne diseases.
4. Disrupted water supply: Heatwaves can affect water sources, leading to reduced water quality and availability. This can disrupt treatment plants and distribution networks, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases.

Heavy rainfall:

1. Flooding and standing water: Heavy rainfall can lead to flooding, creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes. Standing water pools can provide a habitat for mosquito larvae, allowing them to thrive and eventually become vectors of disease.
2. Increased mosquito numbers: Heavy rainfall can wash away mosquito larvae-killing insects and pollutants, allowing mosquitoes to multiply rapidly.
3. Displacement and migration: Flooding can displace people from their homes, leading to increased population movement and mixing, which can facilitate the spread of diseases.
4. Waterborne diseases: Heavy rainfall can contaminate water sources, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and leptospirosis.

Impact on specific diseases:

1. Dengue fever: Heatwaves may lead to an increase in dengue cases due to increased mosquito breeding and activity.
2. Chikungunya: Heavy rainfall may contribute to an increase in chikungunya cases due to the creation of breeding sites for mosquitoes.
3. Malaria: Heatwaves may lead to a decrease in malaria cases due to reduced human activity outdoors, while heavy rainfall may increase the risk of malaria transmission through increased mosquito populations.
4. Japanese encephalitis: Heavy rainfall may contribute to an increase in Japanese encephalitis cases due to the creation of breeding sites for Culex mosquitoes.

The Aryan Invasion Theory has a complex and controversial history of development and interpretation. Here is an overview of the timeline and key points regarding this topic:

Timeline of Aryan Invasion Theory Development:

1. 19th Century: The theory first emerged in the 19th century, proposed by European scholars who suggested a migration of Indo-European “Aryan” people into the Indian subcontinent and their subjugation of the indigenous population.
2. Early 20th Century: The theory was further developed and popularized, associating the Aryans with the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization and the rise of Vedic culture in India.
3. Mid-20th Century: The theory faced increasing criticism and scrutiny, with scholars questioning the linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence used to support it.
4. Late 20th Century: Many scholars began to reject the Aryan Invasion Theory, proposing alternative models such as the Aryan Migration Theory or the Indigenous Aryan Theory.

Debate and Controversy:

1. Debunking the Theory: While the Aryan Invasion Theory has been largely discredited by mainstream scholarship, there is still an ongoing debate about the nature and timing of any potential Aryan migration into India.
2. Linguistic Evidence: The linguistic connections between Indo-European languages, including those spoken in India, are well-established. However, the interpretation of this evidence and its implications for population movements remain contested.
3. Archaeological Evidence: The archaeological record does not show evidence of a large-scale invasion or sudden cultural change in the Indian subcontinent. Instead, it suggests a gradual process of cultural development and exchange.
4. Genetic Evidence: Genetic studies have not provided conclusive evidence for a large-scale, sudden migration of people into India. The data suggests a more complex and gradual demographic history, with multiple waves of migration and admixture.
5. Ideological Implications: The Aryan Invasion Theory has been used to justify racial and nationalist ideologies, which has made it a highly contentious and politically charged topic, particularly in India.

In summary, while the Aryan Invasion Theory has been largely debunked by mainstream scholarship, the nature and timeline of any Aryan migration into India remains an active area of research and debate, with ongoing discussions about the linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence.

Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is a systematic approach to identifying, assessing, and reducing the risks of disaster. It aims to reduce socio-economic vulnerabilities to disaster as well as deal with the environmental and other hazards that trigger them. Community resilience is the sustained ability of a community to use available resources (energy, communication, transportation, food, etc.) to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations. This allows for the adaptation and growth of a community after disaster strikes. The scope of community resilience extends beyond natural disasters and includes man made ones too.

Role Of Community Resilience In Drr

1. Communities are getting increasingly complex, and so are the challenges they face. Human-caused and natural disasters are more frequent now and costly too. Factors like climate change, globalization, and increased urbanization can bring disaster related risks to greater numbers of people.
2. In this backdrop community resilience becomes crucial. Developing community resilience benefits disaster planners and community members alike. It expands the traditional preparedness approach by encouraging actions that build preparedness while also promoting strong community systems.
3. In disaster risk reduction key preparedness activities such as continuity of operations plans for organizations, compiling disaster kits etc continue to be essential. A resilience approach adds features like building social connectedness and improving everyday health, wellness, and community systems.
4. Earlier, the approach to Disaster Management (DM) was primarily reactive and relief-centric. However, disaster response alone is not sufficient as it yields only temporary results at a very high cost.
5. Community resilience allows better planning for disasters to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward.
6. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
7. The emphasis on community resilience has emerged from the need to identify principles and measures to protect development gains from shocks and stresses. Thus the aim here is to engage the community to ensure that shocks and stresses do not lead to a long-term downturn in development progress.

Community Resilience Is Not Enough

Communities do not exist in isolation. The level of a community’s resilience is also influenced by capacities outside the community, in particular by emergency management services but also by other social and administrative services, public infrastructure, and a web of socio-economic and political linkages with the wider world. Apart from community resilience we need:

1. Understanding Disaster Risk by promoting the collection, analysis, management, and use of relevant data and practical information and ensuring its dissemination.
2. Strengthening disaster risk governance by establishing and strengthening government coordination forums composed of relevant stakeholders at the national and local levels, and having a designated national focal point for implementing the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030.
3. Enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response and to “Build Back Better” in recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.
4. To enhance international mechanisms, such as the International Recovery Platform, for the sharing of experience and learning among countries and all relevant stakeholders.

Disaster Management has to be a multi-disciplinary and proactive approach. Besides various measures for putting in place institutional and policy framework, disaster prevention, mitigation, community resilience, and preparedness have a key role to play in achieving our goal of moving together, towards a safer India.

BRIC was conceived by British Economist Jim O’Neill signifying the four most dynamic emerging economies. It has over time evolved as the BRICS grouping with the inclusion of South Africa. It has evolved as a symbol of shifting global landscape. It is the acronym coined to associate five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The BRICS members are known for their significant influence on regional affairs. It represents over 40% of the global population and around 22% of Global GDP. Four out of five members are among the world’s ten largest countries by population and by area, except for South Africa, the twenty-fourth in both.

Economic Divergence And Political Differences

However, scholars like Joseph Nye have criticised it as BRICS without mortar, emphasising the internal fractures and divergences within the grouping. Some of these can be identified as divergences in long term economic trajectory and political differences:

Economic Divergences

1. China: China’s share of global GDP has increased from 7.7% in 2001 to 17.4% in 2019, according to IMF data. Even the arrival of a global pandemic has been a chance for China to outperform its fellow BRICS that have had much larger and more sustained epidemics.
2. India: India’s response to COVID-19 has been among the most stringent as the country sought to quell an epidemic that has resulted in the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases —8.3 million — and third-highest death toll — 123,000. India’s GDP fell by 7.5% in July-September, the economy in a technical recession for the first time ever with horrific declines in some sectors including a 50.3% contraction in construction.
3. Brazil: Like India, Brazil has been hit hard by the pandemic. Brazil has had the third most cases and, at over 160,000, the second most fatalities. But unlike India, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government decided against severe lockdowns and turned on fiscal taps, with a stimulus totalling 8.3% of GDP. This creates a threat of a widening fiscal deficit in an already strained economy.
4. Russia: Russia has struggled to broaden the structure of its economic growth away from the volatile energy sector, while sanctions were put in place by the U.S. and European Union in 2014 following Russia’s occupation of Crimea, with further measures imposed in 2017 in response to Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
5. South Africa: South Africa’s ballooning debt burden has adversely affected the health of its economy. It also suffers from lower credit rating by global agencies signifying the mellow investment climate. Economic growth is structurally weak despite a decade of government spending, which has seen a public debt-to-GDP rise from 30.1% in 2010 to 62.2% in 2019, while unemployment is around 30%.

Political Differences

1. Political diversity: China is a one-party state; Russia’s governance is highly centralized; Brazil, India, and South Africa are democracies with significant corruption levels and/or ethnic strife still to deal with. Following is an effort to elucidate country-specific cases:

1. Brazil: Brazil’s political life is wracked by widespread corruption, politicized courts, and fierce divisions within the political elite.
2. Russia: While Russia remains a partial electoral democracy, Russian citizens’ adherence to democratic values and procedures is low. Furthermore, nationalist tendencies within Russian society have become radicalized. Prompted by the developments in Ukraine and the search for a ‘fifth column’ among the liberals and Westernizers, human rights activists have been marginalized and tensions within Russian society have increased.
3. India: India has maintained its credentials of a robust democracy but the multiplicity of cross-cutting cleavages and corruption are underlying faultlines in the political system.
4. China: is the only one of the BRICS to be an outright one-party dictatorship. The government has continued to be responsive to a wide range of social interests and to implement measures to improve public service provision. At the same time, the government tightened the screws on any form of dissent. China features an absence of political and civil rights, competent government, and dizzyingly-fast socio-economic development.
5. South Africa: Ethnic and familial nepotism is rife in South Africa, going right up to the former president, Jacob Zuma, who used public funds to renovate his private home. The country remains racially polarized, with low levels of trust between the country’s historically-defined racial groups and with most South Africans still living in very racially homogeneous neighbourhoods.

2.India-China bilateral issues: Given the disruptions and instabilities that mark India-China relation, for example, the recent border skirmishes at Galwan valley; there is always a threat of derailment of negotiations at a plurilateral platform like BRICS. 3. Similarly, another emerging axis like the Pakistan-Russia axis or the Moscow-Beijing-Islamabad axis may create divergences with Indian interests and adversely affect negotiations. Further, the fact remains that BRICS is still far from achieving its initial goals: reform of global financial governance, the democratisation of the United Nations, and the expansion of the Security Council. It is so, partially because two of its members (China and Russia) do not want the other three members (India, South Africa and Brazil) to obtain parity in the global pecking order. Notwithstanding these divergences and differences, efforts can be made to enable BRICS to achieve its potential:

1. First, the New Development Bank (NDB), the grouping’s flagship achievement, needs to grow as “a global development finance institution”.
2. Second, with a successful Contingent Reserve Arrangement in the bag, BRICS governments should also seek to establish a local currency, Bond Fund.
3. Thirdly, the proposal to launch a credit rating agency should also see the light of the day.
4. Fourthly, following up on the decisions taken at the previous summit, operationalisation of the Partnership on New Industrial Revolution should be prioritised. It is focused on cooperation in digitalisation, industrialisation, innovation, inclusiveness and investment. This partnership can be concretised by establishing industrial and science parks, innovation centres and business incubators.
5. Fifth, the stress on developing people-to-people interaction should be sustained, with each chair-country drawing up a calendar of activities to strengthen links of culture, arts, sports, media and academic exchange.

Cooperation under the aegis of BRICS not only signified the economic potential of emerging economies but also the pinnacle of South-South bonding. Against the backdrop of the continued Western dominance of the world order, development cooperation and enhanced partnership in kindred areas of technology and innovation among BRICS countries will help create a more symmetrical world. It can also act as a bulwark against the rising walls of protectionism and an inward-looking world view driven by deglobalisation and COVID induced economic shock. As PM Modi emphasises, if BRICS can set and lead the agenda of the global world order, a Golden decade can be created for humankind. Alternately, BRICS should stand for “business, regional integration, innovation, culture and statesmanship.”

COVID 19, was an unprecedented health crisis that has resulted in nearly millions of deaths, disrupted healthcare infrastructures, ravaged economies, communities and pushed millions into clutches of poverty again. However, one aspect which was largely neglected until recently in the pandemonium is the child rights crisis due to pandemic. Children who contract COVID-19 may appear to have less severe symptoms and lower mortality rates than other age groups. But in myriad other ways, the COVID-19 crisis has had and is having a devastating effect on children, with potentially far-reaching and long-term negative impacts.

Impact Of Covid-19 On Children

For years to come, children and young people will be living with the longer term, secondary impacts of this pandemic on them, and how the world chooses to respond to those will have a far-reaching impact on children’s lives. 1. Learning loss: The pandemic has resulted in the loss of learning and skills. The World Bank’s simulations at the end of 2020 showed that the Learning Poverty indicator is set to increase from 53% to 63%.

1. More than 1.5 billion students across the world are out of school due to the pandemic. Widespread job and income loss and economic insecurity will likely result in most of these children, especially the poor, never going to school again.
2. Moreover, these uncertain economic conditions and increased poverty levels of the family are likely to increase rates of child labor, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancy, and child marriage.

2. Child abuse: There has been an increase in early marriages, child labor, sexual exploitation, teenage pregnancies, endangering children’s physical and mental wellbeing (UNICEF report, 2020).

1. According to a report published by ChildLine India, the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have proved to be new drivers of child marriages in rural Madhya Pradesh. b.
2. Stresses on families, particularly those living under quarantines, lockdowns, and other restrictions on freedom of movement, have increased the incidence of violence and abuse against children.

3. As the global death toll from COVID-19 increases, large numbers of children will be orphaned and vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. As per NCPCR 3,621 children were orphaned, 26,176 children lost either parent and 274 children were abandoned between April 1, 2021, to June 5, 2021. 4. Impact on marginalized: Marginalized communities were the worst affected. E.g., only 4% of rural SC/ST children were studying online regularly compared with 15% among other rural children as per the SCHOOL survey. 5. Malnutrition: There is reduced access to essential maternal, newborn, and child health interventions. The threat of malnutrition increased due to a halt in critical government schemes such as mid-day meals. 6. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted grave weaknesses in many countries’ protections for children, including inadequate healthcare and social protection systems, overcrowded detention facilities, and the lack of emergency action plans for large-scale school shutdowns. 7. Illegal adoptions: The children who were orphaned during the pandemic were being illegally adopted disregarding rules as per the JJ act and NCPCR guidelines. These illegally adopted children are in danger of being trafficked or used for child labour or sexual abuse.

Role Played By The National Commission For Protection Of Child Rights (Ncpcr) In Upholding Child Rights

1. NCPCR alerted all the district child protection units and child welfare committees through the Chief Secretaries and all the child welfare police officers across the country through the DGP’s.
2. Every child who has lost their parents (one or both) was mandatory to be produced before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). Then the authority of CWC conducts an inquiry based on the Social Investigation Report of the Child.
3. Moreover, NCPCR kept in touch with the authorities to ensure other benefits to the child and that other entitlements like the child’s Right to property, compensation amount, and insurance amount are protected.
4. The NCPCR initiated action and pilot launch mapping of Children & Families vulnerable to child trafficking and matching them with benefits under various Schemes of the Government of India and State Governments.
5. It also recommended that extensive mapping to be undertaken in all the districts of all the States within the country which are potential “Source”, “Transit” and “Destination” Hotspots of Child Trafficking, as per the information available with Anti Human Trafficking Units and NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau).
6. It has launched SAMVEDNA – a toll-free tele-counselling helpline number for children affected during COVID-19. The tele-counselling support will cater to children all over India in various regional languages also.
7. Recently it has taken the issue of illegal adoptions to the supreme court, following which the court has directed States and Union Territories (UTs) to take stringent action against private individuals and NGOs who invite people to illegally adopt children orphaned by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Issues In Working Of National Commission For Protection Of Child Rights

1. The governments often ignore the recommendations completely or furnish a long bureaucratic discourse on how compliance with the recommendation is not in the public interest.
2. Delayed compliance: While recommendations usually obligate governments to take action within 4-6 weeks, compliance is rare within the stipulated time and sometimes action is so delayed that it becomes meaningless.
3. Commission regarded as extension of government: As non-judicial member positions are increasingly being filled by ex-bureaucrats, credence is given to the contention that commissions are more an extension of the government, rather than independent agencies exercising oversight.

Way Forward

1. We need to adopt a whole of society child-centric approach as the costs of the pandemic on children are immediate and can persist for years, if not addressed.
2. Pandemic has exposed children to various risks. These risks can be mitigated through societal solidarity and ownership along with government intervention.
3. UNESCO has recommended that countries “adopt a variety of hi-tech, low-tech and no tech solutions to assure the continuity of learning.
4. There is a need to design programs to sustain child centered services and mitigate the negative impacts of the virus, and of containment and mitigation measures on children.

The risks posed by the COVID-19 crisis to children are enormous. Governments have a responsibility not only to act urgently to protect children during the pandemic, but to consider how their decisions now can best uphold children’s rights long after the pandemic ends.