INDIAN EXPRESS

Ukraine, trade talks on table as Jaishankar visits UK today

Days after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted an emergency meeting of European leaders in support of Ukraine and its President Volodymyr Zelenskyy - after the latter's public showdown with US President Donald Trump and Vice-President J D Vance at the White House External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is headed to London to meet the British government's leadership, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

PM's wildlife push: Cheetahs in more areas, lion survey, conservation plans

Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired his first meeting of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) at the Gir National Park in Junagadh district on Monday, where he announced plans to expand Project Cheetah to Gandhisagar Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh and Banni Grasslands in Gujarat.

On the ground, in makhana fields of Bihar, Budget promise holds out hope

Some years ago, Joginder Mukhiya, 45, took a dip in a pond, but never came back. A few hours later, his fellow workers found his body. "Makhana nikalne paani ke andar gaye the, andar hi reh gaye... (He went inside to pick makhana seeds; never came up)," recalls Joginder's neighbour Sharwan Mukhiya, 29, a makhana farmer from Mahisi village of Bihar's Saharsa district. In Bihar, a state that accounts for 85 per cent of the country's makhana production, farming practices for the crop have seen few advancements, often tied to laborious traditional practices that are fraught with risks and poor pay. Yet, for the generations of mallahs (a community of fishermen) in the state's riverine belts of Kosi and Mithanchal, it's the only livelihood they have known. The makhana's recent

Delhi airport gets AI-enabled system to streamline operations

The Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in Delhi has launched an Al-enabled system to streamline airside operations, including landing and take-off, by collecting real-time data from across the airport. Unified Total Airside Management (UTAM), the new Al-powered system, has been launched by Delhi International Airport Limited or DIAL, the operator of IGIA, in collaboration with Akasa Air. Other airlines will be onboarded in a phased manner in the next two to three months, a press statement underlined.

Report suggests rethink on quota for Muslims, highlights 'lost political relevance'

Sub-categorisation of the OBC reservation category to include Muslims, bringing in Dalit Muslims and Christians under the Scheduled Caste (SC) quota, and a revaluation of the existing 50% ceiling on reservation "on a rational basis". These are among the key suggestions of a report titled "Rethinking Affirmative Action for Muslims in Contemporary India" that was released on February 5 by the Centre for Development Policy and Practice (CDPP) in collaboration with the US-India Policy Institute.

A third of India will be obese by 2050: Lancet

The obesity epidemic just got bigger with a recently published Lancet study predicting that 21.8 crore men and 23.1 crorе women in India will be overweight or obese - totalling up to 44.9 crore or nearly a third of the country's projected population - by 2050. Globally, more than half of all adults and a third of children and adolescents will become overweight or obese by 2050, the study says. Worryingly, prevalence of obesity will shoot up among older adolescents or those between the ages of 15 and 24. Among the young men, the prevalence of overweight or obesity increased from 0.4 crore in 1990, to 1.68 crore in 2021, and is projected to increase to 2.27 crores by 2050. Among young women, this number has increased from 0.33 crore in 1990, 1.3 crore in 2021, and is projected to go up to 1.69 crore in 2050. India topped the chart in this category in terms of absolute numbers in 2021, surpassing China and the United States who were ahead in 1990.

At a global crossroads

When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine met with US President Donald Trump and Vice President J D Vance in the Oval Office on February 28, a curious feature was that this meeting was held under the full glare of the press, replete with cameras. The conversation between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy started out amicably enough with Trump welcoming him to the White House. However, when a reporter from the press pool asked Vance a question, matters quickly unravelled. Vance proceeded to disparage the Biden administration's policies toward Ukraine and then suggested that Trump was offering a diplomatic pathway to end the war. When Zelenskyy intervened, questioning Trump's diplomatic efforts, as is now well known, matters quickly became heated, soon degenerating into a three-way exchange of harsh words. A lunch that had been planned for the Ukrainian presidential delegation was left untouched as Zelenskyy left the White House upset.

IN FULL PUBLIC GLARE

One of the key tenets of diplomacy is that differences between countries and leaders should be dealt with in private and agreements signed in public. This is necessary to ensure and protect room for manoeuvre for all players. On Friday, at the Oval Office in the White House, however, the opposite was on display: The differences political, geopolitical, personal - between US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, on one side and Ukraine's embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the other, were aired in full global view. The agreement on providing the US access to rare earth minerals is now on the back burner. The meeting, which saw Vance and Trump attack the Ukrainian president for "not saying thank you" and all but bullied for "not having the cards", is important for its implications for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and broader European security. It is also an illustration of a more fundamental disruption, in the Trump era, of diplomacy-as-usual.

Mapping her work

The latest rounds of the periodic labour force surveys show that overall employment, particularly self-employment, among rural women, has increased significantly since 2017-18. Most of these women report being helpers in a home-based enterprise. This increase in women's time allocated to income generating work begs the question: How and where are women saving time and reallocating that saved time to work? Women spend a majority of their daily time cooking, as shown by the 2019 Time Use Survey of India. A granular 24-hour time use survey of almost 3,000 primary cooks in households in rural Indore by my co-authors and I finds that of the 60 hours of time spent on domestic work by rural women per week, the majority (more than 40 hours) is spent on cooking and cleaning – almost four hours per day, on average, which is equivalent to a part-time job. Almost 75 per cent of these women use firewood and cow dung for cooking, which not only makes cooking and cleaning more time-consuming, but also exposes these women to cardiovascular and lung disease due to indoor smoke inhalation.

10.

An education for the real world

For a long time, the inability of Indian higher educational institutions (HEls) to integrate job-oriented skill courses in BA, BCom, and Bsc programmes – these attract a significant share of students in higher education – has significantly impacted the employability of graduates. Outdated curricula, regulatory inertia and a substantial disconnect between academia and industry were the immediate reasons for this shortcoming. However, with the introduction of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, regulators such as the UGC are facilitating transformation in higher education through innovative regulations, frameworks and guidelines. Recently, the UGC announced comprehensive guidelines to incorporate skill-based education and micro/nano-credentials as part of the degree programmes offered by HEls. These guidelines, aligned with NEP 2020, extoll skill and experiential education, aim to overhaul the conventional educational framework and bridge the gap between academic learning and the job market.

11.

What Hindi-baiters don't get

India before the 20th century was a deeply multilingual nation. Each region had a language, each language had its own tradition of oral literature and area dialects that fed into the pool. And then there was a particularly fractious history of Hindi vs Urdu. For long, Hindi, Hindvi or Hindustani in spoken form had been the people's language in the area. Controversy and bitterness first began to be crystallised after the Bhakha Munshis appointed by the British carved out two languages from Hindustani. One was Hindi written in Devanagari (or Nagari for short) script borrowed from Sankrit. The other was Urdu, in a slightly indigenised version of the Persian script. Hindi and Urdu thereafter were propagated through school books and governmental correspondence as the languages of Hindus and Muslims, in that order. The term bhasha that the anti-Hindi lobbyists are using freely to underscore its Hindu roots (backed perhaps unknowingly by the venerable JLF) is baffling. Bhasha or bhakha has always been the term for an inclusive mélange of dialects spoken in the northern plains: Braj, Awadhi, Kauravi, Maithili, Bhojpuri et al. Around the 13th century, this prototype of Hindi had begun trickling slowly down south, thanks to a two-way movement that Ramanand introduced the north to ("Bhakti Dravid upji laaye Ramanand"). No one saw it as an "imposition" either in the north or the south.

12.

Number of women seeking retail credit nearly trebles in five years

A significant surge in women seeking credit has been reported in the financial system, with a threefold increase in credit demand from women borrowers between 2019 and 2024. The number of women borrowers availing retail credit in India has increased at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 per cent in the last five years ended 2024, according to a report. This growth reflects a significant shift in financial behaviour, with women increasingly lever-aging credit to meet personal and professional goals. Significantly, around 60 per cent of women borrowers who availed credit are from semi-urban or rural areas, the report released by TransUnion Cibil and ΝITI Aayog said.

13.

Trump reiterates focus on virtual digital assets, backs 5 coins for 'crypto reserve'

After talking about creating a "strategic reserve" of cryptocurrencies during his presidential bid last year, Donald Trump has for the first time announced five virtual coins he plans to include in the US reserve stockpile - a move which has given a booster shot to the crypto trading market, helping it upend the downward trajectory it seemed to be headed on over concerns around Trump's uncertain trade decisions.

14.

Race to secure copper: Decoding recent moves by India, China, US

On February 27, the government announced the securing of a 9,000-sq-km block to explore copper and cobalt in a region in Zambia known for high-grade deposits. With production in domestic mines faltering, the project is a crucial step for India to establish overseas mining operations. On February 25, the White House warned in a fact sheet on "threat to national security from imports of copper" that the "overreliance on foreign copper" could "jeopardise US defense capabilities, infrastructure development, and technological innovation".

15.

After successful private landing on Moon, more missions to follow

An American private space company called Firefly Aerospace successfully landed its spacecraft on the Moon on Sunday, the first of several arrivals that the lunar surface is expecting this year. Firefly's Blue Ghost mission is the second time that a private space company has landed on the Moon, after Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft achieved this feat last year. NASA is currently facilitating a host of private missions to the Moon, as it tries to build a larger ecosystem of space transportation companies in anticipation of more frequent travels to the celestial body in the coming years.

16.

India's agriculture exports

India's agriculture exports have risen 6.5%, from $35.2 billion in April-December 2023 to $37.5 billion in April-December 2024. That's more than the 1.9% overall increase in the country's merchandise exports for this period. That said, the difference is even starker in imports. While India's total goods imports during April-December 2024 were 7.4% up over April-December 2023, there was an 18.7% rise in imports of farm produce (from $24.6 billion to $29.3 billion) for the same period. The agricultural trade surplus has thus reduced from $10.6 billion in April-December 2023-24 to $8.2 billion for the corresponding nine months of the current fiscal (April-March).

17.

Why olive ridleys came to Odisha nesting ground in larger numbers this year

Olive Ridley turtles returned to the Rushikulya rookery in Odisha's Ganjam district for a 10-day mass nesting event last month after having stayed away last year. Nearly seven lakh olive ridleys laid eggs at the nesting ground between February 16 and February 25. The number of turtles was more than in 2023, when around 6.37 lakh laid eggs in the same stretch of the Odisha coast.

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