Today Trends

Author: Monika Chaudhary, IIHMR University In the 2011 census, the female literacy rate in India was 65.2 per cent. The school dropout rate for girls was 52.2 per cent. The reasons cited for the high dropout rate included the high cost of education, household or subsistence labour, desire to work, early marriage, school accessibility, safety, sanitation concerns in schools and a lack of interest in studies. The right to education was legislated in India in 2009. A declining poverty rate, expanding school infrastructure and changes in social attitudes have increased enrolments over the last decade . A number of initiatives have been key to pushing numbers up, including the Swachh Bharat Mission , a national sanitation and hygiene program . It contributed to the doubling of schools with boundary walls and usable toilets. In 2008, more than 20 per cent of 15–16 year old girls were not enrolled, declining significantly to 13.5 per cent in 2018 . And in 2018, for the first time, the dro...

Author: Nasriddinov Salokhiddin, Tokyo International University On 2 February 2021, Uzbekistan held the event of the century for Central Asia — hosting trilateral negotiations with Afghanistan and Pakistan on the construction of a 600-kilometre railroad through Afghanistan. Government officials agreed on a ‘road map’ for railroad construction that will connect Uzbekistan and other landlocked Central Asian countries to the Indian Ocean through Kabul and seaports in Karachi and Gwadar. This trans-Afghan corridor is the expansion of an agreement signed in late 2017 between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan on the construction of the Uzbekistan–Afghanistan railroad and electricity transmission lines. Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Investment and Foreign Trade (MIFT) estimates concluded that the project will take up to five years and require US$4.8 billion in funding.  But critics have argued that funding figures for the trans-Afghan corridor are misleading. The topography of Afghanista...

Author: Aristyo Rizka Darmawan, University of Indonesia The South China Sea became an important highlight of the recent ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus . All delegations agreed that maintaining peace and security in the disputed area is one of the most important issues in the region and called for unity in the defence sector . To keep the peace it will be necessary to preserve the momentum in the negotiations for a South China Sea Code of Conduct (COC). COC negotiations have already been delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Indonesia had proposed hosting negotiations in person this July , but due to the worsening second wave of COVID-19 in Jakarta, it will was postponed. It is unlikely that the COC will meet previously expected deadlines and conclude later this year. As Evan Laksmana argued , ‘parties should create a high-quality guideline rather than rushing through some artificial timeline proposed by China’. Even though the substance of the negotiations is co...

Author: Jake Read, ANU At the G7 summit in June in Cornwall, participants recognised the need to defend and modernise the multilateral rules-based trade system and agreed to get behind urgent, wholescale trade reform. They acknowledged that the rulebook has long been out of date and that the world trade system is in need of repair. Highlighting issues with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) dispute settlement mechanism, the United States began an informal block on replacing retiring Appellate Body judges in 2016 . That block continues to this day. Transparency in the WTO is also lacking as countries skip WTO reporting obligations and overuse Special and Differential Treatment provisions. The WTO has also been targeted for its inability to deal with market-distorting subsidies , state ownership and interventions in many economies. These system failures and others have eroded trust in the WTO. Yet the global trade system has been overlooked as a potential instrument to deal ...

Author: Lina Gong, NTU The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many disruptions to humanitarian action since 2020. As traditional donors struggled with domestic COVID-19 responses, emerging donors such as China and India seized the opportunity to increase their humanitarian footprint. Both countries provided humanitarian aid to over 150 countries and international organisations in 2020, with online technical support as one important avenue of their aid activities. Their move to online aid delivery conforms with a general trend in the humanitarian sector towards the greater use of remote humanitarian programming.   One of the main motivations behind the shift to remote programming is the need to reduce heightened security risks in a world with shrinking humanitarian access. Remote humanitarian programming facilitates connections between international and local humanitarian organisations, which enables foreign humanitarian actors to connect to those in need without being physically p...

Author: Muhammad Beni Saputra, UIN Sulthan Thaha Saifuddin Jambi Indonesia’s illegal gold mining problems reveal deeper issues with local level corruption and economic inequality. In Sumatra, gold miners have complained about inconsistencies in the police’s tough security measures to eradicate mining. While there was a harsh crackdown on individual miners — with some ending up in jail — most oligarchs behind the lucrative business remain untouched . Illegal gold mining (known in Indonesia as Pertambangan Tanpa Izin or PETI) is a controversial problem, which has worsened since the country’s decentralisation program in 1998. With the loosening of central government control and the diminished role of national oligarchs, local oligarchs were able to take control of the environmentally destructive mining sector. There are generally two types of oligarchs in the PETI business. One is small-scale, local bosses who usually have several floating mining docks or holes. The other type is ...

Author: Tian He, CUHK-Shenzhen The Biden administration has proposed an ambitious plan to build an alliance of techno-democracies to counter the rapid rise of China as a technology superpower. This strategy is quietly taking shape in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, as US President Joe Biden sets out to rebuild the semiconductor sector in the United States. While the United States still dominates chip design, many US firms have outsourced production. The country’s share of global chip manufacturing has fallen from 37 per cent in 1990 to 12 per cent today. Meanwhile, three East Asian semiconductor powerhouses — Japan, Taiwan and South Korea — contribute nearly 70 per cent of global semiconductor production. China is rapidly catching up with its neighbours and is on pace to become the world’s largest chip producer by 2030. The erosion of the US manufacturing base has made the United States dangerously dependent on East Asia for its supply of semiconductors. The recent COVID-19 pan...

Author: Shankaran Nambiar, Malaysian Institute of Economic Research Malaysia continues to grapple with its growing second wave of COVID-19. The country of 32 million people has now exceeded 995,000 infections and 7900 deaths since the start of the pandemic. In early June 2021, the number of infections increased by more than 7000 in a single day, rising to over 10,000 daily cases in July. For a country in political crisis , the poor state of public health has had inevitable economic consequences. In May 2020, unemployment rose by 5.3 per cent after the first lockdown in March 2020 had a severe impact on Malaysia’s economy. The economy picked up as the year progressed — by January 2021, the unemployment rate dropped to 4.9 per cent — but those gains were scuppered by elections in East Malaysia. This was followed by the lax observance of standard operating procedures during the month of Ramadan, requiring a strict Movement Control Order (MCO) to be extended from 1 to 28 June. Up to t...

Author: R Ramakumar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences In May 2021, the Supreme Court of India remarked that the country’s policy of charging those aged between 18–45 for COVID-19 vaccines was ‘ prima facie arbitrary and irrational’. The government has since revised its vaccine policy by covering a larger share of the population with free vaccines. Yet, India’s vaccine policy continues to be based more on politics than on reason or science. Despite its boastful posture of being the ‘pharmacy of the world’ and a vishwaguru (world teacher), India’s vaccine supply has come under strain and cast doubt on its ability to fully vaccinate its population by early 2022. To fully vaccinate everyone above 18 years old, India must administer 1.9 billion doses. As of late July 2021 , 434 million doses were administered. This means that only 26 per cent of India’s population has received at least one dose and 7 per cent has received both doses. To fully vaccinate its population by January 202...

Author: Jinwoo Kim, Sermo Institute of International Studies Sometimes a political earthquake unfolds right before one’s eyes. Such was the case on 11 June 2021, when Lee Jun-seok was elected as the youngest leader of South Korea’s main conservative opposition party, the People Power Party (PPP). Riding the coat-tails of a convincing PPP sweep of by-elections in Seoul and Busan, the 36-year-old, Harvard-educated computer science major vowed to revamp South Korean politics. Lee promises to cure the body politic that he says has fallen ill with President Moon Jae-in’s leftist statism, inflation and corruption. His medicine? A dose of meritocracy and equal opportunity, with transparency thrown in for good measure. It remains unclear whether his medicine is just a placebo. In his acceptance speech, Lee paraphrased the analogy of the US salad bowl to showcase South Korea’s bibimbap , a national dish that consists of different vegetables mixed with rice and sauce into a unified meal. His...