Prashant Mavani, is an expert in current affairs analysis and holds a MSc in Management from University of Surrey (U.K.). Above all he is a passionate teacher.

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• 12 countries that border the Pacific Ocean signed up to the TPP in February 2016, representing roughly 40% of the world's economic output.

• The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth.

• Donald Trump abandoned the TPP in his very first week after being sworn in as U.S. President

• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had termed the TPP without the United States — which contributed 60% of the combined Gross Domestic Product of the 12 members — as “meaningless”.

• Remaining 11 nations agreed in Danang in principle to a new pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), revising some of the features of the TPP.

• pact requires domestic ratification: expected to be complete by 2019.

• The pact without the U.S. can only be interpreted as yet another step that diminishes American power

• Mr. Trump’s agenda to pull his country out of multilateral agreements has coincided, ironically, with the rise of China as the leading world power promoting globalisation.

• Now the ASEAN-plus-six Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), on which China is pushing for an agreement, could benefit from complementarities with the CPTPP.

• India, which is also negotiating the RCEP, must utilise this opportunity to win concessions on services trade liberalisation as part of the plan.

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• Sustainable Development Goals targets are not just about ‘toilets’ but also suggest improvements to the entire cycle of sanitation, which certainly begins with toilets but has to end with safe waste disposal.

• The full cycle of sanitation has four stages: access to toilets; safe containment; conveyance either through the sewerage network or de-sludging trucks, and treatment and disposal.

• The waste needs to be handled safely at each of these stages in order to gain public health benefits.

• After decades of investment, India has managed to connect only a little more than a third of its urban households, most of which are located in metropolitan cities, to sewerage systems.

• Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) —a preferred system in most western countries

• An alternative to sewerage systems is something known as on-site systems. Septic tanks and pit latrines, which are prevalent in many Indian households, fall into this category.

• If these systems are designed, constructed and managed properly, they can be perfectly safe options.

Multi-stage challenges

• Emerging evidence from across the country indicates that on-site systems are not constructed properly.

• While the designs of ‘septic’ tanks and leach pits have been set out in standards issued in government documents, houseowners and masons are often not aware of these.

• The most severe consequence of these poorly designed pits is the potential contamination of groundwater. In addition, they are not de-sludged at regular intervals. Faecal waste needs to be transported using de-sludgingvehicles (and not manually) but only some States, Tamil Nadu for example, have these vehicles.

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• Once collected, the waste needs to treated properly to ensure that it does not land up in our lakes and rivers. There aren’t enough treatment facilities to guarantee proper treatment of the sludge.

A way forward

• After the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) in 2008, a national policy on Faecal Sludge and SeptageManagement (FSSM) was released earlier this year.

• Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Odisha have released State-wide septage management guidelines and taken concrete steps to execute these policies.

• While de-sludging vehicles and robust informal markets exist for de-sludging services in some States, others are either procuring vehicles for their urban local bodies or encouraging private players to get into this.

• Permission could be granted to new buildings, especially large apartment complexes only when the applicants show proper septage construction designs.

• We must ask our governments to invest in creating treatment facilities that our cities can afford.

• Maybe the biggest victory will come when citizens realise that the focus needs to be on more than just toilets.

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• Tamil Nadu’s politically surcharged atmosphere

• But some of the actions of the enforcement agencies have given the impression that they are selective in nature, leading to charges that they were motivated by the political interests of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the government at the Centre.

• Income Tax officials searched the residence of Jayalalithaa, following up on seizures made at properties held by the family of her friend V.K. Sasikala.

• But curiously, Income Tax officials were insistent that the rooms used by Jayalalithaa were not the object of inquiry, only those used by Sasikala and secretary S. Poongundran.

• Adding to the credibility issue is the evident lack of serious follow-up on searches made earlier.

• Chief Secretary, P. Rama Mohana Rao case: almost a year later, there is little forward movement in the case.

• Health Minister C. Vijaya Baskar, a confidant of Mr. Dhinakaran, have yielded little in terms of framing of charges.

• The political impact of the searches is infinitely greater than their legal consequences.

• Widening the scope of and deepening the probe consequent to the searches are essential for taking the drive against political corruption to its logical end.

• Enforcement agencies to demonstrate their independence and credibility

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• The government, for its part, has created the National Anti-profiteering Authority (NAA) that will supposedly ensure that the tax cuts are passed on to consumers.

Busting a myth

• Sometimes this price is well above the costs incurred by the business in bringing the product to the consumers, which leads to good profits. But at other times, the price is far below the costs incurred by the business, which, in turn, leads to losses. So the accusation that businesses can simply exploit consumers by charging prices at will is a myth.

• It is consumer demand that eventually determines prices, so it is no surprise that businesses don’t care to lower prices when their costs fall — just the way consumers don’t care to pay more when business costs rise.

Killing incentive to invest

• When a government slashes the relative tax on a product, it encourages businesses to invest more in the product as they get to earn more profits from it than elsewhere.

• This leads to an increase in the supply of the product in the market, which naturally leads to lower prices for consumers.

• The process, which eventually destroys any excess profits, however, takes time to complete and does not happen overnight.

• Creating bodies like the NAA, which wants to punish businesses that make abnormal profits and thus kills any incentive to invest in the manufacturing of goods that are now taxed less, will only have counterproductive results.

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• “shadow banning”

• This is a software-driven, algorithm-led editing feature and lacks editorial judgment. For instance, a systematic troll army can derail sane arguments and block them from public knowledge, while giving a push to fake news, doctored videos, and audio files on these platforms.

• Algorithms give weightage to some terms, tags, and traffic, and they are neither neutral nor objective. They are not immune from undesirable manipulations.

• Looking at the transformation of the Internet in the last decade, Emily Bell, of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, said: “For more than a decade, 1,000 flowers bloomed on the open web, and 1,000 tabs opened on each desktop. This diversity is threatened with the commercialised, mobile social web. Smartphones and social media, which work in lock-step to focus our attention on the smaller screen, have been a great rebundling of news services — and a great rebundling of all services.”

• “The ubiquity of social media and the way its business model works, targeting us with more of what we like, is an open invitation to stay in our lane — in our interests, our geographies, our views, our media and our lives,” she said. “The really efficient thing about social media is we don’t have to even try to do that ourselves anymore. The mysterious algorithmic underpinnings of Google and Facebook do it for us, and we don’t even notice. Until we miss something that happened in someone else’s lane. For liberal America, Trump happened in someone else’s lane.”

• Algorithmic accountability is not an easy task. Technology giants, with their focus on market valuation and profitability, are not going to focus on this crucial aspect of our digital life. This will have to be a collective effort, like any struggle for egalitarian values, to retrieve the credible information space.

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New J&K surrender policy to target local militants

• With a fresh surrender policy being framed by the government, the Army and the Jammu & Kashmir Police, in a joint appeal on Sunday, asked all local militants to give up arms and assured them “full cooperation” to return and join the mainstream.

• Over 130 local militants are still active in the Valley.

• “We are after foreign terrorists. We want to give the local boys a chance to surrender. The return of Majid Khan (who had joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba) will start a new phase. I hope mothers of other militants will follow suit [in making an appeal]. I foresee a violence and disturbance-free Kashmir soon,” said J&K DGP S.P. Vaid.

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Padmavati to miss Dec. 1 release date amid furore

• As protests continued in several States, producers of the Hindi film Padmavati, on Sunday deferred its December 1 release.

• “We are a responsible, law-abiding corporate citizen and have the highest respect and regard for the law of the land and all our institutions and statutory bodies, including the Central Board of Film Certification,” the Viacom 18 statement said.

• However, the Rajput Karni Sena, spearheading the agitation against the movie, demanded a complete ban on the film, saying the “distortion of history” and invention of a romantic relationship between Chittorgarh’s Queen Padmini and Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji was not acceptable. The outfit has, however, decided not to go ahead with the Bharat bandh on December 1.

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IFFI: Six more jury members write to Smriti

• Six members of the Indian Panorama jury at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2017 have formally expressed concern to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry over the exclusion of Ravi Jadhav’s Nude and Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s S. Durga from the festival that begins on Monday.

• The letter was emailed on Saturday to the Information and Broadcasting Minister, Smriti Irani, with a copy to Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

• Members of the jury said: “We find it distressing that the two films were removed without any intimation, discussion or recourse to the jury which has the final say, according to the Indian Panorama Regulations.” The letter points out that following the decision, three members of the jury — including the chairman — have resigned in protest.

• The signatories include Ms. Satarupa Sanyal, Mr. Suresh Heblikar, Ms. Gopi Desai, Mr. Sachin Chatte, Ms. RuchiNarain and Mr. Hari Vishwanath.

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A rude shock for diplomat inDurban

• The family of Shashank Vikram, Indian Consul-General in Durban, South Africa, went through an ordeal last Thursday when robbers entered their house and held them at gunpoint demanding money, say local media reports.

• The newspaper The Post, said eight robbers broke the security of India House, official residence of the Consul-General in Morningside and pointed a gun at Dr. Vikram’s wife and briefly held their five-year-old son hostage.

• “Ensuring the safety and security of Indian diplomats and officials posted abroad, and their families is a matter of highest priority for us,” Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

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Diversity keeps us united: Kovind

• Addressing the Arunachal Pradesh Assembly on Sunday, President Ramnath Kovind said the people of India had different food habits, clothing styles, religious beliefs and traditions, and this diversity was the country’s strength.

• “We are all citizens of this country, which is culturally rich and diverse. In India, we find different kinds of food habits, clothes, traditions and religious beliefs. This diversity is our strength and it unites us,” the President said.

• Mr. Kovind said Arunachal Pradesh — where different tribes coexisted and also conserved their own traditions —expressed India’s unity in diversity beautifully.

• Mr. Kovind, who is on a four-day visit to Northeast India, will also inaugurate the Northeast Development Summit in Imphal.

• He will visit the INA War Memorial and Museum at Moirang in Manipur and pay tribute to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose before returning to Delhi.

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‘Dispose of old cases in mission mode’

• Asserting that access to justice is very important to poor people and equally important for good governance, Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Sunday urged judges of the High Courts and the district courts to work in a ‘mission mode’ to dispose of all 10-year-old pending cases as quickly as possible.

• At the same time, Mr. Prasad also called upon lawyers to give pre-litigation services and start pro bono advocacy to give honest, credible and free legal advice to the poor.

• Talking about demonetisation and GST, Mr. Prasad said India was now becoming the biggest investment destination for its demographic dividends, better adjudicating capacity, good teachers, good institutions and good lawyers.

• “Globally there is abundance of capital and the capital will flow where there is good human resources,” he said.

• Mr. Prasad added that he was also in a mission mode to push electronics in every field, specially in judiciary. “I am replicating digital technology to access justice for the poor and at their doorsteps.”

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Fresh start Devotees release lamps into the Krishna river on the occasion of ‘Poli Swargam’, marking the end of the month of Kartika, in Vijayawada on Sunday.

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China offers to mediate dialogue between Bangladesh, Myanmar

• China has expressed its willingness to facilitate a dialogue between Bangladesh and Myanmar to solve the Rohingya refugee crisis.

• Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, on a two-day visit to Bangladesh, met Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Saturday. He said Beijing was willing to facilitate the dialogue, acknowledging that the Rohingya crisis was a “big challenge for Bangladesh”. He was quoted by a Hasina aide as telling that China does not want the Rohingya issue to overshadow or slow down the progress of the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar economic corridor initiative.

• Ms. Hasina reiterated her call to the international community, including China, to mount pressure on Myanmar to take back its nationals. Earlier, at a meeting with his Bangladeshi counterpart A.H. Mahmud Ali, Mr. Wang said that as a friend of both Bangladesh and Myanmar, Beijing would “not be partial to any side”.

• Mr. Wang’s visit came days after the UN revived a resolution on Myanmar that was dropped last year due to the country’s progress on human rights. The UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, called on Myanmar to end operations that have “led to the systematic violation and abuse of human rights” of Rohingya Muslims. A total of 135 countries voted in favour of the resolution and 10, including China, against it, while there were 26 abstentions.

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Swiss Panel Okays Sharing Black Money Info with India

• Paving the way for India to get instant access to details on Indians with Swiss accounts, a key parliamentary panel in Switzerland has approved an automatic information exchange pact between the two countries.

• The Commission for Economic Affairs and Taxes of the Council of States — a key panel of the Swiss Parliament’s Upper House — approved the proposed pact with India as also with 40 other countries, but suggested strengthening the provisions for individual legal claims.

• It has asked the Swiss government to submit to the Parliament an amendment “to strengthen concrete individual legal protection and to ensure that no exchange of information can take place for individual cases where a violation of essential legal claims is likely”, as per the minutes of its last meeting on November 2.

• The proposal will now be submitted for approval from the upper chamber of Swiss Parliament, the Council of States, in the winter session beginning November 27.

• The pact will help provide a continuous access to details about alleged black money hoarders in once-all-secretSwiss banks. The information that could be exchanged under this framework would include account number, name, address, date of birth, tax identification number, interest, dividend, receipts from insurance policies, credit balance in accounts and proceeds from sale of financial assets.

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Questions

1. What is the base year for Paris Climate Change Agreement?• 2005

• 2020

• 2022

• 2015

2. Name the state that has 40 per cent of the minerals of the country.

3. World Diabetes Day was started by United Nations? True or False? Justify

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