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Today's Headlines - 19 July 2023
BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers’ meet
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

The first-ever Foreign Ministers’ meeting of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) began in Bangkok, Thailand. India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was also present, and said that areas of coordination challenge that were discussed, including health and energy security.

What is BIMSTEC?

BIMSTEC is a regional organisation that was established in 1997 with the signing of the Bangkok Declaration.
Initially known as BIST-EC (Bangladesh-India-Sri Lanka-Thailand Economic Cooperation), the organisation is now known as BIMSTEC and comprises seven members, with Myanmar joining towards the end of 1997, and Bhutan and Nepal in 2004.
Around 22% of the world’s population lives in the seven countries around the Bay of Bengal, with a combined GDP close to $2.7 trillion.
All seven countries have sustained average annual rates of growth between 3.4% and 7.5% from 2012 to 2016. A fourth of the world’s traded goods cross the bay every year.
Cooperation within the BIMSTEC had initially focused on six sectors in 1997 (trade, technology, energy, transport, tourism, and fisheries) and expanded in 2008 to other areas.
In 2021, a reorganisation led to each of the Member States leading certain sectors. India focuses on security, along with counter-terrorism and transnational crime, disaster management and energy.

Growth of BIMSTEC as a regional forum

Despite having been in existence for many years, the grouping had been largely ignored until India gave it a renewed push in October 2016, a month after the terrorist attack in Uri.
Alongside the BRICS summit in Goa, India hosted an outreach summit with leaders of BIMSTEC countries.
Weeks earlier, some of these countries had supported New Delhi’s call for a boycott of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit scheduled in Islamabad that November.
SAARC includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka as its members. When that summit was postponed, India claimed victory in isolating Pakistan.

China on mind

The Bay of Bengal is crucial for an increasingly assertive China in maintaining its access route to the Indian Ocean.
As China has undertaken a massive drive to finance and build infrastructure in South and Southeast Asia through the Belt and Road Initiative in almost all BIMSTEC countries, except Bhutan and India, BIMSTEC is a new battleground in the India-China battle for dominance.
BIMSTEC could allow India to push a constructive agenda to counter Chinese investments, and instead follow best practices for connectivity projects based on recognised international norms. The Chinese projects are widely seen as violating these norms.
The two organisations — SAARC and BIMSTEC — focus on geographically overlapping regions. However, this does not make them equal alternatives.
SAARC is a purely regional organisation, whereas BIMSTEC is inter-regional and connects both South Asia and ASEAN.
Since the SAARC summit has only been postponed, not cancelled the possibility of revival remains.

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Today's Headlines - 01 August 2023
Key takeaways of WMO report
GS Paper - 3 (Environment)

According to a new report, released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Asia is the world’s most disaster-prone region and it experienced 81 weather, climate and water-related disasters in 2022. These events directly affected more than 50 million people with about 5,000 getting killed and economic damage worth $ 36 billion, the report added. Although, in 2021, the continent had been affected by around 100 natural disasters, the extent of these hazards was more prominent in 2022 — the number of people and facilities affected, and economic damage has increased.

What are the key takeaways from the report?

According to the report, while the mean temperature over Asia in 2022 was about 0.72 degree Celsius above the 1991–2020 average, it was about 1.68 degree Celsius above the 1961–1990 average.
This rise in temperatures has had some severe fallouts, including an uptick in the occurrence of extreme weather events.
For instance, droughts ravaged numerous parts of Asia in 2022. China particularly suffered the most as last year, the Yangtze River Basin, located in the country’s southwest, experienced the worst drought in the last six decades.
This not only affected crops and vegetation, as well as the drinking water supply but also caused an economic loss of about $ 7.6 billion.
Many other regions were hit by severe floods and extreme monsoon rainfalls. Pakistan is the most notable example – it received 60 percent of normal total monsoon rainfall within just three weeks of the start of the 2022 monsoon season, and the heavy rains resulted in urban and flash floods, landslides, and glacial lake outburst floods across the country.
More than 33 million people were affected, over 1,730 people died and almost eight million people were displaced, according to the report.
Apart from natural disasters, climate change has exacerbated glaciers melting in Asia due to high temperatures and dry conditions.
Four glaciers in the High Mountain Asia region, centred on the Tibetan Plateau, have recorded significant mass losses, with an accelerating trend since the mid-1990s.
At the same time, these four glaciers show an overall weaker cumulative mass loss than the average for the global reference glaciers during the period 1980–2022.
Even thesea surface temperatures in Asia are getting warmer than ever before. The report pointed out that in the north-western Arabian Sea, the Philippine Sea and the seas east of Japan, the warming rates have exceeded 0.5 degree Celsius per decade since the 1980s. It is about three times faster than the global average surface ocean warming rate.

India in report

In India, heavy rainfalls “lasting from May to September triggered multiple landslides and river overflows and floods, resulting in casualties and damage”.
In total, this flooding resulted in over 2,000 deaths and affected 1.3 million people — the disaster event caused the highest number of casualties of any disaster event in 2022 in India.
The report also said economic loss due to disasters relating to floods exceeded the average for the 2002–2021 period. Pakistan incurred a loss of over $ 15 billion, followed by China, over $ 5 billion, and India, over $ 4.2 billion.
Another extreme weather event that became a mainstay in Asia last year was heat waves.
The report noted that India and Pakistan experienced “abnormally warm conditions” in the pre-monsoon season (March–May), the report mentioned. China, Hong Kong and Japan also saw the mercury rising to record high levels in 2022.

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Today's Headlines - 12 August 2023
‘Sponge cities’ not stopped the floods
GS Paper - 1 (Geography)

China has been hit by devastating floods, inundating cities and causing deaths and infrastructural damage, as well as raising questions about the effectiveness of its 2015 “sponge city” initiative aimed at reducing urban flood risks. The initiative was launched to boost flood resilience in major cities and make better use of rainwater through architectural, engineering and infrastructural tweaks.

Why was the initiative launched?

China has long sought to improve the way it handles extreme weather, and make highly populated cities less vulnerable to flooding and drought.
The “sponge city” initiative was designed to make greater use of lower-impact “nature-based solutions” to better distribute water and improve drainage and storage.
Those solutions included the use of permeable asphalt, the construction of new canals and ponds and also the restoration of wetlands, which would not only ease waterlogging, but also improve the urban environment.
Breakneck urbanisation has encased vast stretches of land in impermeable concrete, often along banks of major rivers that traditionally served as flood plains. With wetlands paved over and nowhere for surplus water to settle, waterlogging and flooding was commonplace.

What has been done so far?

Studies show that many of the local pilot initiatives launched so far have had a positive effect, with low-impact projects like green roofs and rain gardens reducing run-offs.
But implementation has so far been patchy. A total of 30 pilot sponge cities were selected in 2015 and 2016.
By last year, only 64 of China’s 654 cities had produced legislation to implement sponge city guidelines, researchers said in January.
The researchers said the government had so far paid “minimum attention” to sponge city construction, and called for national legislation to be drawn up as soon as possible.

What are the limitations of sponge cities?

Even if sponge city measures had been implemented in full, they would have been unable to prevent this year’s disasters.
Zhengzhou in Henan province was one of the most enthusiastic pioneers of sponge city construction, allocating nearly 60 billion yuan to the programme from 2016 to 2021. But it was unable to deal with its heaviest rainfall in history in 2021.
Experts believe sponge city infrastructure can only handle no more than 200 millimetres (7.9 inches) of rain per day.
At the height of the rainstorms that lashed Beijing at the end of July, rainfall at one station reached 745 millimetres over three and a half days. In July 2021, Zhengzhou saw rainfall in excess of 200 mm in just one hour.
Authorities are also playing catch-up to climate change. This year’s heavy rain hit cities in the normally arid north, where sponge city development is less advanced.

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Today's Headlines - 12 August 2023
Malabar naval exercise held

GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

India, Japan, the United States and Australia hold the Malabar navy exercise off the coast of Sydney on 11 August 2023, the first time the war games previously held in the Indian Ocean have taken place in Australia. Japanese and Indian navy vessels stopped in Pacific Island countries Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea on the way to Sydney, highlighting the strategic importance of the region at a time of friction between China and the United States.

More about the Exercise

The U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet said in Sydney the exercise was "not pointed toward any one country" and would improve the ability of the four forces to work with each other.
The deterrence that our four nations provide as we operate together as a Quad is a foundation for all the other nations operating in this region.
Oceania, the island nations that are just northeast of Australia...all of our nations now are focusing on those countries.
Indian Navy Vice Admiral Dinesh Tripathi said there had been large changes in the world since the United States and India held the first Malabar Exercise in 1992 at the end of the Cold War. When Australia participated for the first time in 2007, it "sent some signals around the world".
Australia dropped out of the so-called Quad in 2008 after protests from China over its participation in Malabar.
The Quad was revived and Australia rejoined Malabar in 2020, although China continues to criticise the grouping as an attempt to contain it.
Ships from the four nations were joined by Australian F-35 fighter jets, as well as P-8 surveillance aircraft and submarines.
The underwater battlespace is seen to be the front line in terms of competition and potential future conflicts.
Malabar is being held off the east coast of Australia, instead of the west coast which faces the Indian Ocean, because ships were nearby after the larger Talisman Sabre exercise involving 13 nations which closed recently.

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What does the study show?

The new analysis focuses on the environmental dissemination of ARGs. With every 1% rise in PM2.5 pollution, antibiotic resistance increased between 0.5-1.9% depending on the pathogen — a link which has only intensified with time.
The researchers added that this airborne spread may have also caused premature deaths in India and China, among other countries in South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East which are population dense.
An average of 18.2 million years of life was lost in 2018 worldwide, resulting in an annual economic loss of $395 billion (more than Pakistan’s GDP) due to premature deaths.
The paper is unique in its scale and scope: global antibiotic resistance is driven by multiple factors, one being the “effect derived from the environment, which is poorly understood in relation to antibiotic resistance”.
The researchers collected data from 116 countries spanning almost two decades, to observe the link between rising PM2.5 and antibiotic resistance. The researchers also analysed other predictors, including sanitation services, antibiotic use, population, education, climate.
How is air linked to antibiotic resistance?

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and genes travel through different pathways: food, soil, water, air, and even direct contact with sources such as animals.
The hypothesis is that ARGs, when emitted from, say, hospitals or livestock farming, could latch on to pollutant particles, which were found to contain “diverse antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic-resistance genes, which are transferred between environments and directly inhaled by humans, causing respiratory-tract injury and infection.”
When suspended in the environment or breathed into the lungs, the ARGs could enter the bacteria found in the human body and solidify its resistance to drugs. “PM 2.5 can facilitate the horizontal gene transfer of antibiotic-resistant genes between bacteria,” the research found.
PM2.5 contains a high concentration of antibiotic resistance-determinant genes, and these particles can travel far and wide due to wind speed, water evaporation, and dust transport.
ARGs are also more abundant in urban air particles than in sediment, soil or rivers, the analysis showed.

#upsc #news #headline #airpollution #antibiotic #health #diseases #drugs #bacteria #immune #news #globally #malaria #clinical #enviroment #ciprofloxacin #WHO #escherichiacoli #MDRTB #izoniazid #rifampin #nation #cholera #tuberculosis #antibiotics #china #GDP #hypothesis #sources #infection

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Today's Headlines - 21 August 2023
Russia’s Luna-25 crashes
GS Paper - 3 (Space Technology)

Russia’s Moon mission ended in failure after its spacecraft Luna-25 spun out of control and crashed into the moon, Russian space agency Roscosmos said on 20 August 2023.

What happened to Luna-25?

Luna-25 was supposed to land on the Moon on 21 August 2023, days ahead of India’s Chandrayaan-3. Its intended landing site was close to Chandrayaan-3’s, near the lunar south pole.
The crash was confirmed a day after Roscosmos reported an “abnormal situation” which its specialists were analysing.
The space agency had said on 19 August 2023 that it had lost contact with the aircraft as it was shunted into pre-landing orbit.
On 19 August 2023, in accordance with the flight program of the Luna-25 spacecraft, an impulse was provided for the formation of its pre-landing elliptical orbit.
Communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted. The measures taken on 19 and 20 August 2023 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not produce any results. According to the results of the preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface, Roscosmos said.
The space agency also said, A specially formed interdepartmental commission will deal with the issues of clarifying the reasons for the loss of the Moon [mission].
What was the Luna-25 mission?

Although launched on 10 August 2023, almost a month after Chandrayaan-3’s launch on 14 July, Luna-25 rode on a powerful rocket to reach the lunar orbit in just six days.
It was supposed to land on the lunar South Pole before Chandrayaan-3, and its success would have made Russia the first country to do so. Luna-25’s mission life was for one year, and its lift-off mass was 1,750 kg.
It did not carry a rover, but had eight payloads mainly to study the soil composition, dust particles in the polar exosphere, and most importantly detect surface water on the moon.
Significance

The failure of Luna-25 underlines how tricky soft-landings on the Moon are, and echoes India’s heartbreak of 2019.
Since 1976, there has been just one country, China, which has been successful in getting its spacecraft to soft land on the moon.
It has done that twice, with Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4. All other attempts in the last ten years, by India, Israel, Japan and now Russia, have remained unsuccessful.
If Chandrayaan-3 is able to land successfully, India would become just the fourth country in the world, after the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China, to have landed a spacecraft on moon, and the first-ever to land close to the lunar south pole.

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Today's Headlines - 25 August 2023
BRICS currency in BRICS Summit
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

Brazil's President called for the BRICS nations to create a common currency for trade and investment between each other, as a means of reducing their vulnerability to dollar exchange rate fluctuations. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made the proposal at a BRICS summit in Johannesburg. Officials and economists have pointed out the difficulties involved in such a project, given the economic, political and geographic disparities between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Why does Brazil want a BRICS currency?

Brazil's president doesn't believe nations that don't use the dollar should be forced to trade in the currency, and he has also advocated for a common currency in the Mercosur bloc of South American countries.
A BRICS currency "increases our payment options and reduces our vulnerabilities," he told the summit's opening plenary session.
What do other BRICS Leaders think?

South African officials had said a BRICS currency was not on the agenda for the summit.
In July, India's foreign minister said, "there is no idea of a BRICS currency". Its foreign secretary said before departing for the summit that boosting trade in national currencies would be discussed.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the gathering, which he attended via videolink, would discuss switching trade between member countries away from the dollar to national currencies.
China has not commented on the idea. President Xi Jinping spoke at the summit of promoting "the reform of the international financial and monetary system".
Is the US Dollar in trouble?

BRICS leaders have said they want to use their national currencies more instead of the dollar, which strengthened sharply last year as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and Russia invaded Ukraine, making dollar debt and many imports more expensive.
Russia's sanctions-imposed exile from global financial systems last year also fuelled speculation that non-western allies would shift away from the dollar.
The objective, irreversible process of de-dollarisation of our economic ties is gaining momentum, Putin told the summit.

#upsc #news #headline #brics #currency #summit #internationalrelations #bricsnations #investment #ratefluctuations #vulnerability #lunae #economic #political #geographic #disparities #brazil #russia #india #china #southafrica #currency #mercosur #southamerican #leaders #videolink #trade #indiaforeignminister #USDOLLAR #ukraine #globalfinancial #economic

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Today's Headlines - 26 August 2023
BRICS gets six new members
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

The five-member BRICS invited six more countries to join the alliance, in a move which can strengthen its claim of being a ‘voice of the Global South’ on one hand, while raising concerns about China’s increasing dominance on the other. BRICS consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In its ongoing summit at Johannesburg, South Africa, it has invited Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Their membership will begin in January.

Why New Members

Adding new members strengthens the group’s heft as a spokesperson of the developing world. BRICS currently represents around 40% of the world’s population and more than a quarter of the world’s GDP.
With the additions, it will represent almost half the world’s population, and will include three of the world’s biggest oil producers, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran.
The rush towards BRICS is driven by two basic impulses: “First, there is considerable anti-US sentiment in the world, and all these countries are looking for a grouping where they can use that sentiment to gather together.
Second, there is a lot of appetite for multipolarity, for a platform where countries of the Global South can express their solidarity.”
The formation of BRICS in 2009 was driven by the idea that the four emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China would be the future economic powerhouses of the world. South Africa was added a year later.
While the economic performance of BRICS has been mixed, the war in Ukraine — which has brought the West together on the one hand and strengthened the China-Russia partnership on the other — has turned it into an aspiring bloc that can challenge the western geopolitical view, and emerge as a counterweight to Western-led fora like the Group of 7 and the World Bank.
What this means for India

If India’s presence at the recent G7 summit in Hiroshima, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi also participated in an informal Quad summit, was seen as a sign of New Delhi’s US tilt, it continues to attach importance to the “anti-West” BRICS.
India is also part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and despite problems, it has relations with Russia, with China.
While China does want BRICS to be an anti-western group, the Indian view is that it is a “non-western” group and should stay that way.
Among the new members, while India looks at all of them as partnerships worth developing, concerns have been raised that the group could become more pro-China and sideline New Delhi’s voice and interests.

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Today's Headlines - 04 September 2023
G20 agree to boost information flow to small business
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

Trade ministers from G20 nations agreed to a ‘Jaipur Call for Action’ to boost information flow to small businesses to increase their participation, while seeking to build a ‘generic framework’ for mapping global value chains, cautioning against concentration of suppliers and markets.

More about the agreement

In addition, 10 high level principles on digitisation of trade documents were also agreed upon as countries seek to reduce the cost of trading across borders.
Although a communique could not be issued given the divergent position on Ukraine with Russia and China sticking to their stands, and the G7 seeking to highlight the conflict, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal told reporters that the contents of the outcome document and the chairs summary were decided unanimously.
Every country has agreed to all the issues… only paragraph 32, which is less than a quarter of a page out of a 17-page document, is an area where we could not get consensus for obvious reasons.
Since the first G20 ministerial meeting under India’s presidency, a meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Bengaluru, the Ukraine conflict has driven a wedge between the members of the all-powerful alliance.
In the coming years, various agencies will work on putting together the framework to implement the decisions.
The move on global value chains will help all developing countries and cited the example of mobile manufacturing in India, arguing that it will help create a production eco-system and also generate jobs and investment.
The minister underlined the importance of MSMEs, an issue that was flagged by PM Narendra Modi.
There are concerns over Big Tech and its dominance. Equal and affordable access for all has to be ensured.
The push is in line with the government’s initiatives such as ONDC and UPI, which are open source frameworks offering ease to consumers as well as a level playing field to businesses.
The outcome document took note of theuncertain near-term outlook for global trade and investments and underlined the need for “rules-based, non-discriminatory, fair, open, inclusive, equitable, sustainable and transparent multilateral system, with WTO at its core”.
It also called for apredictable and transparent regime for services trade, with easier rules for movement of professionals across borders —an issue which is of particular interest to India.

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Today's Headlines - 05 September 2023
A sunrace of significant global missions
GS Paper - 3 (Space Technology)

In the wake of the Indian Space Research Organisation's successful launch of its inaugural solar mission, Aditya-L1,, let's embark on a journey through key missions from space agencies worldwide, all dedicated to unravelling the enigmatic secrets of the Sun.
A Sunrace
USA
US: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the US space agency, launched the Parker Solar Probe in August 2018. In December 2021, Parker flew through the Sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. This was the first time ever that a spacecraft touched the Sun, according to NASA.
In February 2020, NASA joined hands with the European Space Agency (ESA) and launched The Solar Orbiter to collect data to find out how the Sun created and controlled the constantly changing space environment throughout the solar system.
Other active solar missions by NASA are Advanced Composition Explorer launched in August, 1997; Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory in October, 2006; Solar Dynamics Observatory in February, 2010; and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph launched in June, 2013.
Also, in December, 1995, NASA, ESA and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) jointly launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
Japan
JAXA, Japan's space agency, launched its first solar observation satellite, Hinotori (ASTRO-A), in 1981. The objective was to study solar flares using hard X-rays, according to JAXA. JAXA's other solar exploratory missions are Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) launched in 1991; SOHO (along with NASA and ESA) in 1995; and Transient Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE), along with NASA, in 1998.
In 2006, Hinode (SOLAR-B) was launched, which was the successor to Yohkoh (SOLAR-A), the orbiting solar observatory. Japan launched it in collaboration with the US and the UK. The objective of Hinode, an observatory satellite, is to study the impact of the Sun on the Earth.
Yohkoh's objective was to observe solar flares and the solar corona. It was the first satellite to track almost an entire 11-year solar activity cycle.
Europe
In October, 1990, the ESA launched Ulysses to study the environment of space above and below the poles of the Sun, giving scientists information about the variable effect the Sun has on the space surrounding it. Other than solar missions launched in collaboration with NASA and the JAXA, the ESA launched Proba-2 in October, 2001.
Proba-2 is the second of the Proba series, building on nearly eight years of successful Proba-1 experience, even as Proba-1 was not a solar exploratory mission. On-board Proba-2 were four experiments, two of them were solar observation experiments.
Proba stands for Project for On-Board Autonomy. Upcoming solar missions of the ESA include Proba-3, scheduled for 2024 and Smile, scheduled for 2025.
China
The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) was successfully launched by the National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in October, 2022. The ASO-S mission is designed to reveal connections among the solar magnetic field, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
Solar flares and CMEs are eruptive solar phenomena, thought to be driven by changes in the Sun's magnetic field.

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Today's Headlines - 09 September 2023
India, ASEAN agree to deepen strategic ties
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

India and 10-nation ASEAN agreed to deepen their comprehensive strategic partnership with concrete actions through practical implementation of the 'Plan of Action' to implement the ASEAN-India partnership for peace, progress and shared prosperity.

More about agreement

In a joint statement on maritime cooperation, it was agreed to support India's connectivity initiatives in the region to ensure seamless connectivity in the Indo-Pacific, besides boosting cooperation in a range of areas including blue economy, space and food security among others.
The two sides agreed to deepen their comprehensive strategic partnership with concrete actions through practical implementation of the 'Plan of Action' to implement the ASEAN-India partnership for peace, progress and shared prosperity.
They reaffirmed the importance of maintaining and promoting peace, stability, maritime safety and security, freedom of navigation and overflight in the region, and other lawful uses of the seas and unimpeded lawful maritime commerce and to promote peaceful resolutions of disputes, in accordance with universally recognised principles of international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The two sides agreed to further strengthen ASEAN-India cooperation on maritime safety and security, promote cooperation in a Blue Economy and develop new and renewable energy including marine-based renewable energy, among others.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is considered one of the most influential groupings in the region, and India and several other countries including the US, China, Japan and Australia are its dialogue partners.
ASEAN-India dialogue relations started with the establishment of a sectoral partnership in 1992.
This graduated to a full dialogue partnership in December 1995 and a summit-level partnership in 2002. The ties were elevated to a strategic partnership in 2012.
What is ASEAN?

On 8 August 1967, five leaders – the Foreign Ministers of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – came together in Bangkok.
Thailand was brokering some disputes among Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, and it eventually led to the signing of a document.
The five Foreign Ministers who signed it – Adam Malik of Indonesia, Narciso R. Ramos of the Philippines, Tun Abdul Razak of Malaysia, S. Rajaratnam of Singapore, and Thanat Khoman of Thailand – would subsequently be hailed as the Founding Fathers of probably the most successful inter-governmental organisation in the developing world today. And the document that they signed would be known as the ASEAN Declaration.
The ASEAN Declaration signed by the five leaders conveyed the aspiration to further regional cooperation. These were about cooperation in the economic, social, cultural, technical, educational and other fields, and in the promotion of regional peace and stability and adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter.
Its major pillars that help lay out a blueprint for cooperation are Political-Security Community (APSC), Economic Community (AEC) and Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC).

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1.4K viewsKOL KSG India, 04:30

KSG IAS - KSG India (Official Telegram Channel)

Today's Headlines - 11 September 2023
India-Middle East-Europe mega economic corridor
GS Paper - 2 (International Relations)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the launch of the India-Middle East-Europe mega economic corridor. The project includes India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, France, Italy, Germany and the US.

What is the project?

The rail and shipping corridor is part of the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGII) — a collaborative effort by G7 nations to fund infrastructure projects in developing nations. PGII is considered to be the bloc’s counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The project will aim to enable greater trade among the involved countries, including energy products.
It could also be one of the more ambitious counters to China’s massive infrastructure program, through which it has sought to connect more of the world to that country’s economy, AP said.
The corridor will include a rail link as well as an electricity cable, a hydrogen pipeline and a high-speed data cable, according to a document prepared by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The document also called the project “a green and digital bridge across continents and civilizations.”
Why is the project being proposed?

First, it would increase prosperity among the countries involved through an increased flow of energy and digital communications.
Second, the project would help deal with the lack of infrastructure needed for growth in lower- and middle-income nations.
Third, it could help “turn the temperature down” on “turbulence and insecurity” coming out of the Middle East

#upsc #headline #news #india #middle #East #Europe #mega #economic #corridor #international #relations #UAE #saudiarabia #europeanunion #france #Itlay #germany #US #project #rail #PGII #China #BELT #Road #intiative #ountries #trade #hydrogen #pipeline #speed #data #cable #civilizations #infrastructure #income #nations #turbulence #insecurity #prosperity

1.4K viewsKOL KSG India, 06:01

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