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What is wrong with China's economy?There are plenty of things wrong with every country’s economy, so I think the question should be readdressed to “What are the challenges facing China’s economy?”Quantitative historical analysis, in particular the so-called Kondratiev wave, which traces 40- to 60-year economic-growth cycles, reveals that complex human societies are affected by recurrent — and predictable — waves of economic and political instability. For example, in the United States you see stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt and these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. These are often turning points. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability in many countries. China has been developing since its rebirth as the PRC in 1949, and despite initial hiccups , has had a very good run for the past 40 years. However, there are problems arising on the horizon, as it normally does. It now faces tremendous challenges such as fostering innovation, dealing with an ageing problem and coping with a less accommodative global environment.Does China have enough talent and right policy and institutional mix to transit from input-driven to innovation-driven economy? What does ageing mean, in terms of labour supply, consumption demand and social welfare expenditure? Can China contain the environmental and climate change risks? How should the financial system be transformed in order to continuously support economic growth and keep financial risks under control? What fiscal reforms are required in order to balance between economic efficiency and social harmony? What roles should the state-owned enterprises play in the future Chinese economy? In addition, how will technological competition between the United States and China affect each country’s development? Will the Chinese yuan emerge as a major reserve currency, and would this destabilize the international financial system? What will be China’s role in the international economic institutions? And will the United States and other established powers accept a growing role for China and the rest of the developing world in the governance of global institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, or will the world devolve into competing blocs?In the 1950s, the urban industrialisation strategy with the socialist transformation program gave an uneven pace of economic development, sometimes decent, sometimes rapid and the central planning was largely unsuccessful in boosting income levels during that time. But with the 1978 reform, real GDP grew by an average of more than 9.8% from 1978-2008. The free market economy increased allocative efficiency and better use of resources. Adoption of a household farming system in the countryside in the early 1980s, for instance, led to immediate jumps of grain output, as the new scheme helped establish a direct link between efforts and rewards. Again, migration of rural surplus labour to urban areas both raised average labour productivity and supported expansion of industrial production. Coupled with an open door policy and integration of the Chinese economy into the world by 2001, accelerating its domestic structural reforms. Together with favourable demographics, high saving and investment rates, macroeconomic and financial stability, and economic foundations built during the pre-reform period, the country had two waves of improvement, the first wave due to economic reform and the second due to WTO accession. The high savings rate led to high investment rate, leading to capital accumulation and technological progress.The share of the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in total industrial output dropped from 80% at the start of the reform to 20% in recent years although SOEs still dominate in many important economic areas, particularly in some service sectors and upstream industries. Again, the government still intervenes heavily in almost all aspects of the financial system, including interest rates, exchange rate, fund allocation, and cross-border capital flows. Among 130 economies with available data in 2015, China’s financial repression index — or degree of government intervention in the financial sector — ranked 14th. Although scholars criticize some of these policy distortions for causing significant inefficiency and increasing risks, it wasn’t easy to dismantle the central planning system and privatized the SOEs at the very start of reform. Such a reform strategy often caused the initial collapse of output and even social instability, because an economy cannot jump to the market system over night. Market mechanisms take years to develop. In contrast, China implemented the so-called “dualtrack” gradual reform strategy, i.e. the government continued to support the SOEs while creating more favorable conditions on the margin for non-SOEs to expand. This approach could suffer from potential efficiency losses, because SOEs are generally less efficient, but it ensured economic and social stability during the transition period.This “dual-track” reform strategy led to the unique phenomenon of “asymmetric liberalization” between product and factor markets in China: The government almost completely liberalized the product markets, where prices are freely determined by demand and supply. In markets for production factors such as capital, land, and energy, government interventions remain widespread and heavy. Such interventions are actually effective ways of supporting the relatively less efficient SOEs, at least in the initial period. On the one hand, all government interventions have both positive effects and negative effects, and decisions on policy reform should be determined by cost-benefit analyses. A lot of the earlier policy distortions were results of the “dualtrack” reform strategy, the main purpose of which was to ensure smooth transition of the economy. Were China to liberalize its financial system completely in 1978, it would, most likely, have already suffered from a number of financial crises in the decades that followed.During the 40 years between 1978 and 2018, the Chinese economic system converged steadily to the free market regime — although paces of such convergence varied in time, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Because the cost-benefit dynamism of policy distortion changes over time, the government has to formulate timely and flexible policy responses. The latest development suggests that policy distortions in favour of the SOEs are now imposing very high costs on the economy. These imply that further SOE reform and financial liberalization should be both urgent and desirable. Before 2008, the Chinese economy sustained rapid economic growth, and maintained basic financial stability but suffered from serious structural imbalances. After 2008, the economy was hit by persistent growth slowdown, and witnessed rising systemic financial risks but also experienced important structural rebalancing.Now rural surplus labour is almost exhausted and per capita GDP is already close to the high-income level, China has to rely on industrial upgrading to continue economic growth. This is the so-called “middle-income challenge.” As China already lost its low-cost advantage, both the proportion of exports to GDP and the share of industry in GDP are already on the decline. The growth model has to switch from input-driven to innovation-driven. And the key question is: Can China innovate? This requires accumulation of human capital especially in STEM subjects. Also a change in emphasis in financial services to suit innovation support rather than just manufacturing. Then intellectual property rights and an appropriate industrial policy.The working age population could shrink by about 170 million from 2019 to 2049 so there has to be a serious effort to adopt artificial intelligence to cope with declining labour supply. AI is estimated to potentially substitute for about 280 million workers running through three decades. And urbanisation has to increase to developed nations levels for consumption demand. The third problem is the de-globalisation effort since the 2008 financial crisis. And of course we need to mention the trade wars. Also the problem of the environmental changes with climate and possible disruptions together with pollution causing a change in emphasis to green energy which will slow the GDP growth. China has to continue improving productivity in order to attain even the projected lower rates of economic growth. This is why the government is shifting its policy focus from demand-side counter-cyclical measures to supply-side structural reforms.Within the field of economics there is the problem of non-replicability. It is impossible to precisely recreate market conditions or predict an outcome based on how markets have behaved in the past under similar circumstances. The economic problem can be divided into three different parts, which are a) the problem of allocation of resources, b) the problem of full employment of resources and c) the problem of economic growth. And then, there are another set of basic economic considerations which arise from the central problem of how to allocate scarce resources. Society must now choose what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce and what provisions (if any) are to be made for economic growth?China’s economy struggled with slowing growth throughout 2019 and touched the slowest pace of expansion in nearly three decades in the third quarter. A prolonged trade war with the United States took a toll on momentum and sent jitters to the world economy. Disagreements emerged on the fundamental factors causing China’s economic slowdown — whether it reflects long-term structural issues such demographic changes or short-term risks such as the trade frictions — and the scale of stimulus that should be taken to counter the cooling. “The key issue facing China’s economy is structural problems which restrain macro control policies from taking effect,” said Zhu Baoliang, chief analyst with the government-linked think tank State Information Centre. “China is facing growing downward pressures amid intertwined structural, institutional and cyclical problems,” the top-level Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC) said in a statement after this year’s session.China will continue to step up efforts to build a high-standard market system, push forward reforms in state-owned enterprises, improve property rights protection and promote reforms in land, fiscal and tax systems, as well as the financial system. The country will further open its economy in a wider and deeper way, and there is need to “control the pace and strength” of counter-cyclical measures and pledged to “comprehensively assess” the impacts of major policies, indicating leadership’s caution on more aggressive policy moves.Official data showed that local governments had outstanding debt totaling 18 trillion yuan ($2.58 trillion) as of the end of 2018. But researchers estimated the size of hidden government debts, in which local authorities provide an implicit guarantee, could amount 60 trillion yuan. The massive debt overhang would restrain local governments’ capacity to expand infrastructure spending. There is little sign that the central government would significantly loosen stringent controls over the property market that were installed in 2016 to curb market bubbles. The CEWC reiterated President Xi Jinping’s mantra that “houses are for habitation, not for speculation,” and reiterated calls for long-term mechanisms to be implemented to stabilize land and housing prices. Under pressure to keep the economy growing, it is likely that Beijing could marginally ease controls on the housing market and give local authorities more discretion to manage it based on local conditions.China’s current account surplus declined from 10% of GDP in 2008 to less than 0.4% in 2018, according to Lu. Meanwhile, forex reserves shrank by $900 billion between 2014 and 2018, as Chinese companies’ foreign debt surged nearly three-fold. It greatly reduced the space for policies to bolster the economy by adding leverage. China has strictly kept its official budget deficit below 3% of GDP over the past two decades, citing concerns about fiscal risks. Since 2015, China has continued to expand the issuance of special purpose bonds to fund local governments’ infrastructure spending. The bonds, which surged more than 200-fold from around 10 billion yuan annually in 2015 to 2.15 trillion yuan in 2019, are not included in official budget deficit calculations. Analysts have widely predicted that next year’s quota for new special purpose bond issuance would further rise to 3 trillion yuan. If borrowing through special bonds were included, China’s budget deficit ratio would rise to 6.5% this year from 3.7% last year.The policy room for further tax cuts is narrow in 2020/2021 after the government unleashed reductions of 1.3 trillion yuan ($143 billion) in 2018 and 2 trillion yuan in 2019. Because of concerns over inflation, the central bank may prefer low-profile easing measures in the near term, such as rolling over its maturing medium-term lending facility (MLF) and targeted MLF (TMLF) and offering additional liquidity via such lending tools. Preventing financial risks will remain among the top three tasks for 2020 along with poverty relief and pollution control, according to the CEWC statement. But risk prevention was dropped to third place from the top spot of the past two years, indicating reduced urgency. After a nearly three-year crackdown on financial risks, the short-term target has been achieved and further goals will require long-term efforts, so perhaps expect mild easing in the financial sector in 2020. To continue defusing risks at small and medium-sized banks, a focal point of financial regulation over the past year following the seizure of Baoshang Bank, city commercial banks and rural banks, especially those in small cities that enjoyed a land market boom over the past few years, are likely to be the targets of risk clampdowns.Shadow banking has become a hotbed of hidden credit growth and nonperforming assets, which pose a serious threat to financial security and stability. Since 2017, China has significantly reduced the shadow banking sector as part of a massive deleveraging campaign. As the end of 2019, China’s shadow banking sector as defined broadly shrank to 84.8 trillion yuan ($12.98 trillion) from the peak of 100.4 trillion yuan in 2017, according to the report. By a narrower definition the sector also declined by 12 trillion yuan to 39.14 trillion yuan.Then there is the problem of graft. Recently Zhang Qi, former secretary of the Communist Party of China Haikou municipal committee in S China’s Hainan Province, was sentenced to life in prison for accepting bribes amounting to over 107 million yuan (16.3 million U.S. dollars) at a court on Thursday December 4, 2020 . Mao Bihua, former party secretary and director of the Chongqing Supervision Bureau of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), came under investigation for suspected serious violations of discipline and law, reported on 5.12.2020.Another issue is the onset of the digital economy and the digital currency which China has to get right. Listening to Huang Yiping’s speech, the potential is very great because it is coupled with the use of the fourth industrial revolution and the use of online transactions enabling the rural urban divide in banking to be ameliorated largely, and the use of the handphone in commerce will accelerate change, This also can raise problems since shadow banking with P2P lending is also a systemic risk. Only with proper security will the digital currency be a tool for internationalisation of the RMBOther measures may include the following:1. Ending the “dual-track” reform approach and realizing competitive neutrality for SOEs and private enterprises.2. Abandoning birth restrictions and building good baby- and elderly-care facilities to cope with negative consequences of aging.3. Improving innovative capability through human capital accumulation, intellectual property protection, and sensible industrial policies4. Shifting focuses of public finance from underpinning stability to supporting economic efficiency and distributive equity5. Supporting quality development through further financial reform, cautious financial innovation and prudent financial regulation6. Accelerating urbanization to unlock new economic impetuses by eliminating household registration and reforming land tenure7. Applying market-based policies, such as taxes, to build a green and low-carbon development path.8. Further opening unilaterally by giving up “developing country status” and contributing constructively to the international system.Thanks for A2A.David Dollar, Yiping Huang, and Yang Yao, eds., China 2049 Economic Challenges of a Rising Global Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming in May 2020).China 2049In Depth: Whither the Chinese Economy in 2020?Huang Yiping's Speech at 2020 Global Digital Trade Conference (Video)China's $13 Trillion Shadow Banking Sector Gets Clearer Definition

Honestly, as a Caucasian woman raised going to the Reservations in native country in New Mexico, I am sick and tired of white people answering this question. How bout we let a real First Nations person talk? Black Elk - WikiquoteGuess what folks - we stole their land, slaughtered their people and their buffalo, gave them diseases they had never even known about, destroyed them with alcohol when we weren’t outright killing them with firearms they had no initial access to, herded their children to schools far away from their families where the children had their language ripped out of them and were often raped and tortured. How would you deal with this if it happened to your people? The Canadian Government Systematically Tortured And Abused Aboriginal Children For 100 YearsBecause white people write the history books, we refuse to acknowledge that Hitler was studying how well we genocidally massacred entire populations and rewrote them out of history, and he used much of our horrific success as a model for how to get rid of the Jews, gypsies, and other outcast populations when he was writing Mein Kampf. Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?Thanks for yet again perpetuating the white colonizer superiority myth that we whose ancestors were part of the original Holocaust have participated in since the “Founding” (Read Occupation) of this country. I’d love to hear from any First Nations folks out there who can speak to the incomprehensible assault on their land, their peoples, their language, their traditions, their animals, and their spirituality by ruthless, master race colonizers.Read up on this before you rattle on about it white folk!Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of GenocideHistorians/History Native Americans, genocide by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.Mass Grave at Wounded KneeThis paper, written under the title, “U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies,” was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.”ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:(a) killing members of the group;(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.iiiThe followings acts are punishable:(a) Genocide;(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;(d) Attempt to commit genocide;(e) Complicity in genocide.The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man."Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”ivThe so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time.Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.vCreating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.ixThe situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].xAccording to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”xiSuch an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”xiiOther scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xviiGrenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviiiSo, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.xixThis doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision inJohnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States._______________i Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, vol. 4 (December 2006), 387.ii Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.), 4.iii “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html (accessed December 6, 2012). See also Josef L. Kunz, “The United Nations Convention on Genocide,” American Journal of International Law 43, no. 4 (October 1949) 738–46.iv April 17, 1873, quoted in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order(New York: Free Press, 1992), 379.v See Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, North Dakota (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the Act of January 3, 1975.vi See: Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954.vii King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 156.viii For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 89–146.ix There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.x Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010), 77–78.xi Colin G. Calloway, review of Julian Granberry, The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 196.xii Benjamin Keen, “The White Legend Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971): 353.xiii Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 4–5.xiv Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press in cooperation with the Newberry Library, 1983), 2. See also Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography, and Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966), 295–416, and “Reply,” 440–44.xv Woodrow Wilson Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World,” in Actas y Morías XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México 1962,3 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Libros de México, 1964), 381.xvii John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5, 10.xviii http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/25/supreme-court-thwarts-icwa-intent-baby-veronica-case-150103xix Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).xx Eleventh Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://social.un.org/index/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx (accessed October 3, 2013).

First of all this answer is not from an expert but from a person who himself cleared the prelims consecutively in the past many many years.When I was preparing for my first prelims I used to be very afraid when I saw someone reading a different book for the same topic that I was preparing. Those were the very testing times as you require self-confidence as much as knowledge of the subject matter.Below I my am sharing my own plan of action, for Prelims only.You can search our telegram channel with the name Prelims Specific Notes For IAS.Here we update the summaries of the Hindu and PIB daily.Current AffairsIdeally you should cover relevant information from one major newspaper like The Hindu plus Press Information Bureau and Yojana of about one and half years before the date of your exam to increase your chances of attempting more questions from current affairs.Below I am giving my own analysis of how to cover the above things.I don’t know why one should learn the CURRENT AFFAIRS after a gap of one and half months of their being in the news from the so called Current Affairs magzines!!One should prepare the current affairs on daily basis so that you can keep them in memory as well. If you learn a few daily then it will more possibility that you would retain them easily.Besides it is not how detailed notes are available in the market but in how easy language they have been covered and more importantly only that part has been covered which is relevant for the exam only.And one more thing, if there is a neat division of current affairs for Prelims and Mains as both require different sets of mindset at the time of reading it would be a boon!!Below I am giving my own version as to how one can/should prepare current affairs for prelims on the basis of my own experience of clearing the exam again and again.Current Affairs for Prelims:The Hindu Notes 2nd July 2019CONTEMP OF COURTContext: The Supreme Court issued a contempt notice to West Bengal for keeping BJP youth wing leader Priyanka Sharma behind bars overnight despite its order on May 14 to release her immediately on bail.(Pg 1, The Hindu)FactsheetContempt of CourtBoth the Supreme Court and the High Courts have the power to punish for contempt of court, either with simple imprisonment or with fine or both.The term ‘Contempt of Court’ has not been defined by the Constitution.However, it has been defined by the Contempt of Court Act of 1971.The Contempt of Court can be ‘civil’ or ‘criminal’.Civil Contempt: It is the willful disobedience of any judgement, order, writ or other process of a court or willful breach of an undertaking given to a court.Criminal Contempt: It is the publication of any matter or doing an act which:Scandalises or lowers the authority of a court; orPrejudices or interferes with the due course of a judicial proceeding; orInterferes or obstructs the administration of justice in any other manner.However, the following are ‘not’ considered ‘Contempt of Court’:Innocent publication and distribution of some matter;Fair and accurate report of judicial proceedings;Fair and reasonable criticism of judicial acts; andComment on the administrative side of the judiciary.IRAN NUCLEAR DEALContext: Iran acknowledged that it had broken the limit set on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by the 2015 nuclear deal, marking its first major departure from the unraveling agreement a year after the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the accord.(Pg 1, The Hindu)FactsheetIran nuclear dealAlso called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.It was signed in 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers - the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany.Why this Nuclear deal?It came after years of tension over Iran's alleged efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.Iran insisted that its nuclear programme was entirely peaceful, but the international community did not believe that.What was agreed?Under the accord, Iran agreed to limit its sensitive nuclear activities and allow in international inspectors in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions.Under the nuclear deal, Iran agreed to have less than 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to a maximum of 3.67% far below the 90% needed to produce weapons for 15 years.Why did U.S. Pull out of the Deal?U.S. recently pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran's energy, ship building, shipping, and banking sectors, which U.S. considers "the core areas" of its economy.U.S. hopes to compel Iran to negotiate a "new deal" that would cover not only its nuclear activities, but also its ballistic missile programme and what U.S. officials call its "malign behaviour" across the Middle East to destablise the region.The sanctions have led to a sharp downturn in Iran's economy, pushing the value of its currency to record lows, quadrupling its annual inflation rate, driving away foreign investors, and triggering protests.In keeping with its strategy of ‘maximum pressure’, the U.S. designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a foreign terrorist organisation, a move rejected by the U.K. and European allies. It is the first time that U.S. has named the military of another country ‘terrorist’.Value AdditionEnriched uranium is not only used to make reactor fuel, but also nuclear weapons."Weapons-grade" uranium is 90% enriched.Uranium and plutonium can be removed from the spent fuel, and reused. The plutonium can also be used to make weapons.Low-enriched uranium, which has a 3%-4% concentration of U-235, can be used to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.Radioisotopes produced during the process of enrichment are used in medicine, agriculture, industry and science.PROTESTS IN HONG KONGContext: Hundreds of demonstrators stormed into Hong Kong's legislature after smashing their way in as the crisis that has gripped the semi-autonomous Chinese territory for weeks rapidly intensified.Protests have raged in Hong Kong against a controversial extradition bill, which would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial.(Pg 1, The Hindu)FactsheetHong Kong, a former British colony, was handed back to China in 1997 following a 1984 agreement between China and Britain.China agreed to govern Hong Kong under the principle of "one country, two systems", where the city would enjoy "a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs" for 50 years.As a result, Hong Kong has its own legal system, and rights including freedom of assembly and free speech are protected.Its leader, the chief executive, is currently elected by a 1,200-member election committee. A majority of the representatives are viewed as pro-Beijing.Hong Kong's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, says that "the ultimate aim" is to elect the chief executive "by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures".SWATANTRA SAINIK SAMMAN YOJANA (SSSY)Context: The Union Cabinet has approved the continuation of Swatantra Sainik Samman Yojana (SSSY) during 2017-2020 beyond the 12th Five Year Plan which ended on 31/03/2017.(Pg 2, The Hindu)FactsheetSwatantra Sainik Samman Yojana (SSSY)The key objective of Swatantra Sainik Samman Pension Scheme is to provide pension to freedom fighters & their eligible dependents in India.The SSSY implemented by the Central Government of India.Eligibility Criteria for Samman PensionThe following categories of freedom fighters are eligible for the Samman Pension.Dependents of martyrs are eligible for Samman Pension. A martyr is a person who was killed due to participation in the freedom struggle of India.A person who had suffered minimum 6-month imprisonment of participation in freedom struggle is eligible to get pension. Eligibility criteria for women & SC/ST are 3 months for women.If a person’s participation in freedom struggle remained underground for more than six months is eligible for Samman pension.A person whose property was damaged or sold due to participation in the freedom struggle is eligible to get this pension.If a person became permanently incapacitated during firing or lathi charge in Freedom struggle, he/she is eligible for this pension.By participating in freedom struggle if a person lost his Government job he/she is eligible.Any person was awarded the punishment of 10 strokes of caning/flogging/whipping due to his participation in freedom struggle. He/she is eligible to get Samman pension.Person not eligible for Samman PensionIf the property of a person was restored, he is not eligible for Samman Pension.Persons who were reinstated in Government service before the expiry of two years from their dismissal or removal from service and were in receipt of benefits or pay and allowances are not eligible for the pension.Eligible Dependents for Samman PensionSamman pension is provided to Freedom fighter family include (if the freedom fighter is not alive) mother, father, widower/widow if he/she has not since remarried, unmarried daughters.Only one person in the family is eligible for getting Samman pension.Sequence of eligibilityIn the event of availability of more than one dependent in the family, the sequence of eligibility will be as follows.Widow/widowerUnmarried daughtersMotherFatherVECTOR-BORNE DISEASESContext: Rise in the cases of Vector-borne diseases.(Pg 3, The Hindu)FactsheetVectors are living organisms that can transmit infectious diseases between humans or from animals to humans.Vectors and Vector-borne diseases MosquitoesAedesChikungunyaDengue feverLymphatic filariasisRift Valley feverYellow feverZikaAnophelesMalariaLymphatic filariasisCulexJapanese encephalitisLymphatic filariasisWest Nile feverSandfliesLeishmaniasisSandfly fever (phelebotomus fever)TicksCrimean-Congo haemorrhagic feverLyme diseaseRelapsing fever (borreliosis)Rickettsial diseases (spotted fever and Q fever)Tick-borne encephalitisTularaemiaTriatomine bugsChagas disease (American trypanosomiasis)Tsetse fliesSleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis)FleasPlague (transmitted by fleas from rats to humans)RickettsiosisBlack fliesOnchocerciasis (river blindness)Aquatic snailsSchistosomiasis (bilharziasis)LiceTyphus and louse-borne relapsing feverLOCUSTS OUTBREAKContext: An outbreak of desert locusts in the villages of Rajasthan's Barmer district, adjoining the India-Pakistan border, has posed a threat to the crops.(Pg 5, The Hindu)FactsheetThe tropical grasshoppers emerged in January this year from Sudan and Eritrea on Africa's Red Sea Coast and travelled through Saudi Arabia and Iran to enter Pakistan, where they invaded the cotton-producing belt of Sindh.The swarms of locusts are now entering the Thar desert, threatening the crops in western Rajasthan.FLY ASH IN INDIAContext: NGT sought report on fly ash management. (Pg 5, The Hindu)FactsheetFly ash is a fine powder that is a by-product of burning pulverized coal in electric generation power plants.Fly ash is a pozzolan, a substance containing aluminous and siliceous material that forms cement in the presence of water.When mixed with lime and water, fly ash forms a compound similar to Portland cement.When used in concrete mixes, fly ash improves the strength and segregation of the concrete and makes it easier to pump.Fly ash is also recognized as an environmentally friendly material because it is a by-product and has low embodied energy, the measure of how much energy is consumed in producing and shipping a building material.Fly ash requires less water than Portland cement and is easier to use in cold weather.Fly Ash Regulations in IndiaIt is mandatory for power plants to give fly ash free of cost to users within 300-kilometre-radius.It is mandatory for cement industries, within radius of 300 kilometers of a coal or lignite based thermal power plant, to use fly ash for manufacture of the cement as per the specifications of Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).The cost of transportation of fly ash is to be borne collectively by the thermal power plant and the industry concerned.Every construction agency engaged in construction of roads within a radius of 300 kilometers from a coal or lignite based thermal power plant would be bound to use fly ash in accordance with the guidelines or specifications issued by the Indian Road Congress.Following are among the efforts made to make optimum utilization of fly ash as an environmentally sustainable and economically viable product:GST rates on fly ash and its products have been reduced to 5%.To facilitate 100% ash utilization by all coal based thermal power plants, a web portal for monitoring of fly ash generation and utilization data of Thermal Power Plants and a mobile based application titled “ASHTRACK” has been launched by the Ministry of Power.Fly ash can help the agriculture in the following ways:1. Fly-ash as pesticide2. Saving of chemical fertilizers3. Fly-ash for improving crop growth and yield4. Use of fly-ash in composting5. Managing soil pH6. Improving water-holding capacityMore on Fly AshFly-ash has been classified as a Green List waste under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).It is not considered as a waste under Basel Convention.One of the reasons of low fly-ash utilization in India is the unavailability of appropriate cost-effective technologies.POLAVARAM PROJECTContext: Odisha CM urges PM to stop Polavaram Project. "The submergence of tribal villages resulting in mass displacement of primitive tribals, flooding of fertile agricultural lands and submergence of large extent of forest area would be irreversible consequences,” he added.(Pg 6, The Hindu)FactsheetPolavaram ProjectPolavaram is a multi-purpose irrigation project located on river Godavari in Andhra Pradesh.Polavaram project dam being built on River Godavari can help divert and utilise Godavari water to Krishna and other rivers.Polavaram will be the biggest dam dedicated to nation after Sardar Sarovar dam on Narmada river in Gujarat.The project has been declared a National Project.What is a National project?In 2008 (XI Plan), the government approved a scheme of national projects, under which it identified 16 major water resource development and irrigation projects.These projects were previously under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme.However, the progress of these projects had declined due to various factors.These include land acquisition, inter-state coordination, financial constraints, and issues relating to rehabilitation and re-settlement of the affected population.Such projects are provided financial assistance by the Government of India in the form of Central grant which will be 90% of the estimated cost of such projects for their completion in a time bound manner.Criteria For Selection Of National ProjectsThe criteria for selection of National Project will be as under:(a) International projects where usage of water in India is required by a treaty or where planning and early completion of the project is necessary in the interest of the country.(b) Inter-State projects which are dragging on due to non-resolution of Inter-State issues relating to sharing of costs, rehabilitation, aspects of power production etc., including river interlinking projects.(c) Intra-State projects with additional potential of more than 2,00,000 hectare (ha) and with no dispute regarding sharing of water and where hydrology is establishedThe projects proposed for inclusion as National Projects should fulfil all the eligibility criteria required for funding under Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), including the investment clearance of the Planning Commission/NITI Aayog.Only major irrigation/multi-purpose projects shall be eligible for inclusion as National Projects.The progress of work of National Project is monitored by Central Water Commission (CWC).A High Powered Steering Committee headed by Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation also reviews the implementation of National Projects.The 16 National Projects are:Kulsi Dam Project (Assam)Polavaram Project (Andhra Pradesh)Noa-Dihing Dam Project (Arunachal Pradesh)Upper Siang Project(Arunachal Pradesh)Renuka Dam Project(Himachal Pradesh)Gyspa HE Project (Himachal Pradesh)Kishau Multipurpose Project (Himachal Pradesh/ Uttarakhand)Ujh Multipurpose project (Jammu & Kashmir)Bursar HE Project(Jammu & Kashmir)Gosikhurd Irrigation Project (Maharashtra)Ken Betwa Link Project Phase-I (Madhya Pradesh & Uttar Pradesh)Shahpurkandi Dam Project (Punjab)2nd Ravi Vyas Link Project (Punjab)SaryuNaharPariyojna(Uttar Pradesh)Lakhwar Multipurpose Project (Uttarakhand)Teesta Barrage Project (West Bengal)SC ON EWS QUOTAContext: SC to hear pleas for Constitution Bench on EWS quota.(Pg 12, The Hindu)FactsheetThe economic reservation violated the 50% reservation ceiling limit fixed by a nine-judge Bench in the Indra Sawhney case.Further, the 1992 judgment had barred reservation solely on economic criterion.In a 6:3 majority verdict, the apex court, in Indra Sawhney, had held that “a backward class cannot be determined only and exclusively with reference to economic criterion... It may be a consideration or basis along with and in addition to social backwardness, but it can never be the sole criterion”.The Constitution (103rd Amendment) Act of 2019 has provided 10% reservation in government jobs and educational institutions for the “economically backward” in the unreserved category.The Act amends Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution by adding clauses empowering the government to provide reservation on the basis of economic backwardness.This 10% economic reservation is over and above the 50% reservation cap.JAL SHAKTI ABHIYANContext: Jal Shakti Abhiyan has been launched by the Ministry of Jal Shakti.(Pg 12, The Hindu)FactsheetIt is a campaign for water conservation and water security.The campaign will run through citizen participation during the monsoon season, from 1st July, 2019 to 15th September, 2019.An additional Phase 2 will be run from 1st October, 2019 to 30th November, 2019 for States receiving the North East retreating monsoons.The focus of the campaign will be on water stressed districts and blocks.It is a collaborative effort of various Ministries of the Government of India and State Governments, being coordinated by the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation.It aims to ensure five important water conservation interventions. These will bewater conservation and rainwater harvesting,renovation of traditional and other water bodies/tanks,reuse bore well recharge structures,watershed development andintensive afforestation.There is no additional funding or specific targets for the campaign to achieve.ARMED FORCES (SPECIAL POWERS) ACT (AFSPA)Context: AFSPA in Nagaland extended.(Pg 12, The Hindu)FactsheetAs far as the other north-Indian States are concerned, the Act is effective in the whole of Assam, Manipur (excluding seven Assembly constituencies of Imphal) but restricted to eight police stations in Arunachal Pradesh.Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram are free from this Act.However, Jammu and Kashmir is still under this Act.Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA)Disturbed Area:The government (either the state or centre) considers those areas to be ‘disturbed’ “by reason of differences or disputes between members of different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities.”Who can declare a region to be ‘disturbed’?the Governor of that State orthe administrator of that Union Territory orthe Central Government.The whole or a part of a State or Union territory can be declared a disturbed area.Once declared ‘disturbed’, the region has to maintain status quo for a minimum of three months.What about the state government’s role?The state governments can suggest whether the Act is required to be enforced or not. But their opinion can still be overruled by the governor or the centre.Is the Act uniform in nature?No, the Act may contain different sections as applicable to the situation in each state.Is Tripura then the first state to completely do away with AFSPA?No. It was Punjab.Special Powers to Armed Forces:The AFSPA gives power to the Army and Central forces deployed in “disturbed areas” to:kill anyone acting in contravention of law,arrest and search any premises without a warrant andprovide cover to forces from prosecution and legal suits without the Centre’s sanction.PURCHASING MANAGERS’ INDEXContext: Manufacturing PMI dips.(Pg 15, The Hindu)FactsheetPurchasing Managers’ Index‘Purchasing Managers’ index’ is considered as an indicator of the economic health and investor sentiments about the manufacturing sector (there is services PMI as well).The PMI is constructed separately for manufacturing and services sector. But the manufacturing sector holds more importance.In a PMI data, a reading above 50 indicates economic expansion, while a reading below 50 points shows contraction of economic activities.For India, the PMI Data is published by Japanese firm Nikkei but compiled and constructed by Markit Economics.The variables used to construct India’s PMI are: Output, New Orders, Employment, Input Costs, Output Prices, Backlogs of Work, Export Orders, Quantity of Purchases, Suppliers’ Delivery Times, Stocks of Purchases and Stocks of Finished Goods.How PMI is different from IIPIn contrast to volume based production indicator like the IIP, the PMI senses dynamic trends because of the variables it use for the construction of the index.For example, new orders under PMI show growth oriented positive trends and not just volume of past production that can be traced in an ordinary Index of Industrial Production.Hence, the PMI is more dynamic compared to a standard industrial production index.CORE SECTORContext: Core sector growth slows to 5.1%.(Pg 15, The Hindu)FactsheetIndex of Eight Core Industries (base: 2011-12).The Eight Core Industries comprise 40.27 % of the weight of items included in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP).The data relating to core industries is released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.The eight core industries are:Petroleum Refinery Products (weight: 28.04%)Electricity (weight: 19.85%)Steel (weight: 17.92 %)Coal production (weight: 10.33 %)Crude Oil (weight: 8.98 %)Natural Gas (weight: 6.88 %)Cement (weight: 5.37%)Fertilizer (weight: 2.63 %)THE INTERNATIONAL WHALING COMMISSION (IWC)Context: Japan resumed whale hunting after withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC).(Pg 22, The Hindu)FactsheetThe IWC is the global body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling.The IWC currently has 89 member governments from countries all over the world.The Commission's role has expanded since its establishment in 1946.In addition to regulation of whaling, today's IWC works to address a wide range of conservation issues including bycatch and entanglement, ocean noise, pollution and debris, collision between whales and ships, and sustainable whale watching.News in BriefSupplementary DemandA supplementary demand is an additional grant to meet government expenditure, outside the annual budget. (Pg 7, The Hindu)Citizens’ Carbon Footprint AppMaharashtra government will now track citizens’ carbon footprint through an app and reward those who achieve an emission neutral status. (Pg 7, The Hindu)WTO Self-Help GuidelinesRecently, the World Health Organization has released self-help guidelines for sexual and reproductive healthPre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is a way for people who do not have HIV but who are at substantial risk of getting it to prevent HIV infection by taking a pill every day.It's estimated that it takes at least seven days for PrEP to reach high levels of protection in the body.India is yet to come up with guidelines for PrEP use and include it in the national HIV prevention programme. (Pg 10, The Hindu)PISAThe Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study that measures and compares student ability in reading, mathematics, science and global competence, with financial literacy an option. Accordingly, it ranks educational systems of countries. (Pg 10, The Hindu)Wish you all the best!!