Table of Contents

Current Affairs 10 October 2023.

Today’s News.

Mental health and the floundering informal worker.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 | Relevant for GS paper-3, Unemployment and growth related issues.

The theme of World Mental Health Day (October 10) this year is ‘mental health as a universal human right’. A segment often overlooked when it concerns mental health is the informal worker.
A study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) says that 15% of working age adults, globally, live with a mental disorder. On one hand, decent work influences mental health in a positive way while on the other, unemployment, or unstable or precarious employment, workplace discrimination, or poor and particularly unsafe working environments, can all pose a risk to a worker’s mental health.
Workers in low paid, unrewarding or insecure jobs, or working in isolation, are more likely to be exposed to psychosocial risks, thus compromising their mental health.
India’s informal workforce accounts for more than 90% of the working population.
These workers often operate without regulatory protection, work in unsafe working environments, endure long hours, have little access to social or financial protections, suffer high uncertainty and deep ProClarity, and face discrimination — all of which further undermine mental health and limit access to mental health care.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), unemployment and poor quality employment have consistently been detrimental to mental health.
The Lokniti group within the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, which interviewed 9,316 youth aged between 15 to 34 years across 18 States in India, has shown that they are highly susceptible to negative emotions.

Moreover, an ILO report highlights how young workers are shifting to more precarious and informal work, accepting less pay and poorer working conditions, out of desperation, and, sometimes, giving up and exiting the labour force altogether.
The State of Inequality in India Report 2022 observes that the unemployment rate actually increases with educational levels, particularly for educated young women who show an unemployment rate of 42%.
India will also become an aging society in 20 years, with no apparent social security road map for this rapidly growing group that is especially vulnerable to poor mental health. The Census of India 2011 shows that 33 million elderly people are working postretirement in informal work.
The absence of proper financial and healthcare security among the working elderly can severely impact their physical and mental health, aggravating their vulnerability.
Informal workers face mental distress due to accumulating debt and rising health care costs, which are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. A study by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) among informal workers in Delhi, mostly migrants, indicates that recovery post COVID19 remains uneven among informal worker cohorts.
While certain schemes have received a higher allocation this year, others such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) have seen their funding slashed.
A relook at the Code on Social Security 2020 shows how glaring issues concerning the social security of India’s informal workforce still remain unheeded. While India should universalise social security, the current Code does not state this as a goal.
Informal workers, despite their significant contribution to national income, are perennially exposed to various economic, physical, and mental vulnerabilities. India’s budgetary allocation for mental health (currently under 1% of the total health budget) has over focused on the digital mental health programme.
There is an urgent need for proactive policies to improve mental health recognition and action. This is critical in upholding the basic human right to good health, including mental health, and in advancing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 3 on ‘good health and wellbeing’ and SDG 8 on ‘decent work for all/economic growth’.

The state of India’s Scheduled Areas.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 | Relevant for GS paper-2, Issues related to SC and ST.

India’s 705 Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities — making up 8.6% of the country’s population — live in 26 States and six Union Territories.
Article 244(1) provides for the application of Fifth Schedule provisions to Scheduled Areas notified in any State other than Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram. The Sixth Schedule applies to these States as per Article 244(2).

Scheduled Areas.

Scheduled Areas cover 11.3% of India’s land area, and have been notified in 10 States: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Himachal Pradesh.
In 2015, Kerala proposed to notify 2,133 habitations, five gram panchayats, and two wards in five districts as Scheduled Areas; it awaits the Indian government’s approval.
However, despite persistent demands by Adivasi organisations, villages have been left out in the 10 States with Scheduled Areas and in other States with ST populations.
In 1995, the Bhuria Committee, constituted to recommend provisions for the extension of panchayat raj to Scheduled Areas, recommended including these villages, but this is yet to be done.
The President of India notifies India’s Scheduled Areas. States with Scheduled Areas need to constitute a Tribal Advisory Council with up to 20 ST members. They will advise the Governor on matters referred to them regarding ST welfare.
The national government can give directions to the State regarding the administration of Scheduled Areas. The Governor can repeal or amend any law enacted by Parliament and the State Legislative Assembly in its application to the Scheduled Area of that State.
The Governor can also make regulations for a Scheduled Area, especially to prohibit or restrict the transfer of tribal land by or among members of the STs, and regulate the allotment of land to STs and money lending to STs.

It was only when Parliament enacted the provisions in various laws applicable to Scheduled Areas, including the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, or PESA, in 1996 that the intent of the Constitution and the Constituent Assembly actually came alive. State panchayat laws had empowered the elected panchayat bodies, rendering the gram sabhas moot.
The Fifth Schedule confers powers exclusively on the President to declare any area to be a Scheduled Area.
Neither the Constitution nor any law provides any criteria to identify Scheduled Areas. However, based on the 1961 Dhebar Commission Report, the guiding norms for declaring an area as a Scheduled area are — preponderance of tribal population; compactness and reasonable size of the area; a viable administrative entity such as a district, block or taluk; and economic backwardness of the area relative to neighbouring areas.
The Bhuria Committee recognised a face to face community, a hamlet or a group of hamlets managing its own affairs to be the basic unit of self governance in Scheduled Areas. But it also noted that the most resource rich tribal inhabited areas have been divided up by administrative boundaries, pushing them to the margins.
However, PESA’s enactment finally settled this ambiguity in law. The Act defined a ‘village’ as ordinarily consisting of “a habitation or a group of habitations, or a hamlet or a group of hamlets comprising a community and managing its affairs in accordance with traditions and customs”.
However, gram sabhas are yet to demarcate their traditional or customary boundaries on revenue lands in the absence of a suitable law.
All habitations or groups of habitations outside Scheduled Areas in all States and Union Territories where STs are the largest social group will need to be notified as Scheduled Areas irrespective of their contiguity.
Secondly, the geographical limit of these villages will need to be extended to the ‘community forest resource’ area on forest land under the FRA 2006 where applicable, and to the customary boundary within revenue lands made possible through suitable amendments to the relevant State laws.

What is multimodal artificial intelligence and why is it important.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 |Relevant for GS paper-3, Science and technology.

For anyone curious about what the next frontier of AI models would look like, all the signs are pointing towards multimodal systems, where users can engage with AI in several ways. People absorb ideas and form context by drawing meaning from images, sounds, videos and text around them.
On September 25, Chat GPT maker Open AI announced that it had enabled its GPT3.5 and GPT4 models to study images and analyse them in words, while its mobile apps will have speech synthesis so that people can have full fledged conversations with the chat bot.
Multimodality itself isn’t a novel thing. The past couple of years have seen a stream of multimodal AI systems being released. Like Open AI’s text to image model, DALL.E, upon which Chat GPT’s vision capabilities are based, is a multimodal AI model that was released in 2021.
DALL.E is in fact the model which kick started the generative AI boom, and is underpinned with the same concept that runs other popular AI image generators like Stable Diffusion and Mid journey — linking together text and images in the training stage.

For multimodal audio systems, the training works in the same way. GPT’s voice processing capabilities are based on its own open source speech to text translation model, called Whisper, which was released in September last year.
Some of the earlier multimodal systems combined computer vision and natural language processing models or audio and text together to perform some of the simpler but rather important functions like automatic image caption generation etc.
But there are other more complex systems still in the works. In May this year, Meta announced a new open source AI multimodal system called Image Bind that had many modes — text, visual data, audio, temperature and movement readings.
The idea behind this is to have future AI systems cross reference this data in similar ways that current AI systems do for text inputs. For instance, a virtual reality device in the future might be able to generate not just the visuals and the sounds of an environment but also other physical elements.
Other industries like medicine are “inherently multimodal,” according to a post by Google Research. Processing CT scans, or identifying rare genetic variations all need AI systems that can analyse complex datasets of images, and then respond in plain words.
AI models that perform speech translation are another obvious segment for multimodality. Google Translate uses multiple models as do others like Meta’s Seamless M4T model, which was released last month.

Urban unemployment rate drops to 6.6% in Q1.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 | Relevant for GS paper-3, Employment and related issues.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), carried out by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), has reported that unemployment rate in urban areas of the country has shown a decrease during the period April June 2023.
Similarly, the labor force participation rate (LFPR) for persons aged 15 and above and the worker population ratio (WPR) have also improved during the period.
This national survey processed details from 5,639 first stage sampling units (FSUs) and 1,67,916 people from 44,190 urban houses.
The LFPR in urban areas increased from 47.5% in April-June 2022 to 48.8% in April-June 2023.
The WPR in urban areas increased from 43.9% in April June 2022 to 45.5% for persons aged 15 and above.
The PLFS claimed a decreasing trend in unemployment rate (UR) for persons aged 15 and above.
The LFPR ranged from 46.2% to 47.8% during the pre pandemic period and in the latest report it was 48.8%.
The unemployment rate ranged between 7.8% and 9.7% during the prep endemic period and at the latest survey it was 6.6%, which, according to the Centre, is lower than the unemployment rates observed in the quarters covered in the pre pandemic period.

Sixth Basic Taste.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 | Relevant for Prelims, Science and technology.

The traditional five basic tastes, such as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, have been part of our understanding of taste for years. However, recent scientific research has unveiled evidence of a sixth basic taste sensation.
A recent study published in Nature Communications reveals the existence of a sixth basic taste.
This new taste is triggered by ammonium chloride and activates the same protein receptor responsible for signaling sour taste.
Research identified the protein called OTOP1 as the one responsible for detecting sour taste.
OTOP1 is situated within cell membranes and forms a channel for hydrogen ions moving into the cell.
To validate their findings, scientists used a technique that measures electrical conductivity, simulating nerve signal conduction.
Normal mouse taste cells responded to ammonium chloride with increased action potentials. Genetically engineered mice lacking OTOP1 had no response. This confirmed their hypothesis that OTOP1 responds to the salt, generating an electrical signal in taste bud cells.

Dandeli forest.

Current Affairs 10 October 2023 | Relevant for Prelims, Ecology.

The Dandeli forest in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district, known for its diverse wildlife and ecosystem, faces substantial environmental shifts due to changing climate patterns and human interventions.
Dandeli forest is located in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka and is part of the Western Ghats, a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot.
The forest is known for its rich biodiversity, including a diverse range of flora and fauna, making it an important wildlife habitat.
The Kali Tiger Reserve is a protected area adjacent to the Dandeli Forest.
The Tiger Reserve comprises two important protected areas of the region viz., Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary and Anshi National Park.

Concerns Related to the Dandeli Forest Ecosystem.

Impact of Climate Change:

Changing rainfall patterns and rising temperatures due to climate change have led to alterations in the forest ecosystem and a decrease in grasses in recent years.

Invasive Species – Eupatorium Weed:

The invasive eupatorium weed is replacing native grasses in the forest undergrowth, impacting herbivores as it is not a preferred food source and is susceptible to fires.

Historical Changes:

Historical changes, including forest transformations during the colonial era, have affected the forest’s character, changing it from semi-evergreen to moist deciduous forests.

Forest Fires and Environmental Impact:

The suppression of controlled fires (Slash and Burn) during the British era and the introduction of non-native eupatorium weed have led to uncontrolled forest fires, affecting the forest ecosystem.

Impact on Herbivores and Predators:

Decreased grasses have impacted the herbivore population, influencing the prey base for predators like leopards and tigers, resulting in increased conflicts with humans and predation on local cattle.

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