Women Business and Law Report 2023

• The World Bank just published the report Women, Business and the Law 2023.
• The World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2023 study gave India a score that was higher than the average for the region. The research for India uses information about the laws and ordinances in Mumbai, the nation's business capital.

Highlight of the Report

• Due to regulations affecting working women's income and pensions that do not ensure equality with Indian men, India's score on a World Bank index measuring the life cycle of a working woman fell to 74.4 out of a possible 100.
• A score of 100 on the Index, according to the Women, Business and the Law 2023 report from the World Bank, signifies equality for men and women in all areas.
• India did better than the average score for the South Asian region, which was 63.7, but fell short of Nepal, which received the highest score in the region (80.6).
• Of the 190 nations, only 14 (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden) received a score of 100 out of 100.
• According to the study, India scored an A+ for laws affecting women's work opportunities, restrictions on freedom of movement, and marriage-related restrictions.
• In terms of laws affecting women's pay, pensions, and capacity to work after having children, obstacles to women starting and operating their enterprises, and disparities in property and inheritance between men and women, India lags behind other nations in these areas.
• The global average rating in 2022 is 76.5 out of 100.
• In the world, about 2.4 billion women of working age live in societies where they do not have the same rights as men.
• With the current pace of progress, it would take at least 50 years to approach legal gender equality worldwide.
• The rate of advancement towards gender equality has slowed to its slowest level in 20 years.
• The majority of changes emphasised expanding paid parental and paternal leave, removing obstacles to women working, and requiring equal pay.
• The majority of the reforms have been made in the workplace and parenting, with progress across the measured sectors being unequal.

Women in Workforce in India

• In India, the proportion of women in the labour force has remained low.
• Compared to 32% in 2005, 21% of women were employed or seeking for employment in 2019.
• India has the lowest female labour force participation (FLFP) among the BRICS nations and is also less female than several of its South Asian neighbours, like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
• In India, increasing FLFP is essential for achieving Sustainable Development Goals as well as economic growth, inclusive growth, and other objectives.
• India has one of the youngest populations in the world. India's median age in 2020 was close to 29. An important component of India's demographic dividend is women and girls.

Recommended Changes

• The following remedial actions are recommended by the report.
• improvements in women's legal equality
• requiring equal pay for equally valuable labour, allowing women to work at night in the same conditions as males, and enabling women to work in industrial jobs

What areas does India need to concentrate on?

• laws that govern wages, pensions, intestate succession, and property rights. The regulations governing the wage and pensions of working women in India do not guarantee equality with Indian males.
• India should require equal pay for equally valuable work, permit women to work at night, and permit women to perform industrial jobs in the same manner as men to raise the Pay index.
• India could take reforms to enhance legal equality for women in the areas of laws affecting women's pay, laws affecting women's work after having children, restrictions on women starting and running businesses, gender differences in property and inheritance, and laws affecting the size of a woman's pension.

What areas demand India's attention?

• laws governing wages, pensions, heirlooms, and property rights. Indian working women are not treated equally to Indian males under the regulations governing their pay and pension.
• To raise the Pay index, India should require equal pay for equally valuable work, permit women to work at night, and treat women who work in industrial jobs similarly to males.
• India should take reforms to enhance legal equality for women in the areas of women's salary, women's work after childbirth, women's company ownership restrictions, gender inequalities in property and inheritance, and the size of a woman's pension.

Obstacles for women in the workforce:

• Lack of Economic Empowerment: Even employed women are not financially free and are required to give the family's male members their paychecks.
• Women are discriminated against in high jobs due to the "Glass Ceiling" effect. Just 5% of Fortune 500 CEO roles are held by women, who also make up an average of 17% of board positions worldwide.
• Safety Concerns: Women suffer from inadequate policing infrastructure.
• Societal expectations: Women are expected to be submissive and to put their families first.
• Over the course of the Ages, a variety of discriminatory social practices and institutions have been used to exert control over women's choices for their lives and sexuality.
• Gender-based discrimination against women persists in Indian society notwithstanding regulations. The laws and the flaws in their application are shown clearly.

Suggestions to increase women's workforce

• Enhance women's working conditions.
• investments in women's restrooms and childcare facilities across the board.
• Through extensive media advertising, issues like the distribution of sexual labour in the home are made more salient.
• putting minimum wage laws into effect.
• Ensure that all people have access to top-notch public health care facilities and assistance with women's care.
• The Unorganized Sector Social Security Act of 2008 should be implemented for all women employees, and they should all have identification cards.
• Ensure and protect women's ownership rights over fundamentally useful resources, such as land. equalise property rights.

Prioritize primary healthcare to avoid personal debt and expenses related to healthcare and hospitalisation.

Cochlear Implant Scheme

• Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the effectiveness of the Cochlear Implant Plan, which provides free surgery for children under the age of five.

• The Central Government pays the six lakh rupee cost of one operation.

About Cochlea

• The inner ear contains a hollow spiral-shaped bone called the cochlea, which is essential to hearing and takes part in auditory transduction.

• Electrical impulses are converted from sound waves into distinct sound frequencies by the brain.

What is a Cochlear Implant?

• The cochlear implant is a prosthetic device, a part of which is surgically implanted inside the cochlea.

• Children and adults with severe to profound hearing loss who do not benefit from hearing aids but have intact auditory nerves have been proven to benefit from cochlear implants.

• Regular hearing aids and cochlear implants have different features.

• A cochlear implant directly stimulates the nerve endings in the cochlea with electrical stimulation, whereas a hearing aid amplifies sound energy and sends it to the ear.

ADIP Program

• Since 1981, there has been a programme called the ADIP Program (Assistance to Disabled People for Purchase/Fitting of Aids and Appliances).

• Obtaining long-lasting, complex, and scientifically produced modern, standard aids to support the physical, social, and psychological rehabilitation of needed impaired people is the goal.

• The devices that are given under the Scheme must be properly certified.

• The plan also calls for performing remedial operations where necessary before dispensing such aid.

According to the Scheme, grants-in-aid are given to various implementing organisations to buy and distribute aids and assistive technology.

Read Also: Assistance to Disabled Persons ADIP Camp

World Bank Loan to Indian Health Sector

• The World Bank and the Government of India have agreed on two complimentary loans totaling $1 billion to assist and improve India's healthcare system.

Highlight

• The World Bank is providing two complementary loans totalling $500 million to assist India to upgrade its health infrastructure and get ready for upcoming pandemics.
• The loan will be utilised to fund India's premier Pradhan Mantri-Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM), which will enhance the public healthcare infrastructure throughout the nation and was launched in October 2021.
• India's surveillance system will be prepared to find and report epidemics of concern thanks to the $500 million Public Health Systems for Pandemic Preparedness Program (PHSPP).
• The Program-for-Results financing tool, which emphasises outputs above inputs, is used in both loans. The loans' total maturity duration, which includes a five-year grace period, is 18.5 years.
• A second Enhanced Health Service Delivery Program (EHSDP) loan in the amount of $500 million will assist the government's efforts to improve service delivery through a primary healthcare model redesign. Both of these loans make use of the Program-for-Results financing instrument, which emphasizes the achievement of results rather than inputs.
• Delivering health services in seven states—Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Orissa, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh—will also be given priority under one of the loans.

Challenges in the health sector

Lack of medical personnel

• In remote locations, there is a severe lack of infrastructure, last-mile connectivity, and medical personnel. g.: Doctors serve urban India (population of 30%), where there is 1 doctor for every 1800 people.
• Significant shortages of services (human resources, medical facilities, and diagnostic facilities in the public and commercial sectors), are made worse by wildly unequal distribution across and within States.

Infrastructure for public health in disrepair:

• Most patients must visit private hospitals and clinics because of the nation's deteriorating public healthcare system.
• PHCs (22%) and sub-health centres (20%) are in insufficient supply, and only 7% of sub-health centres and 12% of primary health centres adhere to Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS) standards.

Strong Private Player Role:

• The private sector in India provides over 70% of healthcare services. India's overall healthcare system may fail if private healthcare collapses as a result of financial hardships or other circumstances.
• The private sector is responsible for more than 70% of all healthcare spending.
• Although there is a trend towards hyper-specialisation in Tier-1 cities, private hospitals are underrepresented in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

High out-of-pocket costs:

• The most recent National Health Accounts (NHA) estimates, which were published in March 2021, indicate that patients are responsible for a sizable portion of medical costs—up to 61% of the total—by themselves.
• Even the impoverished are compelled to choose private healthcare, which requires them to pay out of pocket. As a result, 63 million individuals are thought to experience poverty each year as a result of health expenses.

Weak Insurance Penetration:

• The cost of healthcare per person is among the lowest in India. In comparison to 83.5 percent in the UK, the government contributes about 32 percent to insurance.
• Because 76 percent of Indians lack health insurance, there are hefty out-of-pocket costs there.

Fake Doctors:

• Eighty percent of outpatient care is delivered by rural medical practitioners (RMPs), who lack formal training in the field.
• Humans fall prey to quacks, frequently resulting in severe impairments and fatalities.

Initiatives :

• The Pradhan Mantri-Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission (PM-ABHIM) intends to improve basic, secondary, and tertiary care services throughout India and develop the nation's health infrastructure.
• Ayushman Bharat: Uses a dual-pronged strategy by
• To bring healthcare closer to households, health and wellness centres have been created.
• the creation of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) to shield families living in poverty and in vulnerable situations from financial risk brought on by health events.
• the Ayushman Bharat The Digital Mission intends to link hospitals all throughout the country's digital health solutions. Every citizen will now have access to a digital health ID, and their medical records will be safeguarded online.
• The National Ayush Mission is a federally funded programme for the advancement of folk remedies.

Way forward

• India requires a comprehensive strategy to address issues in the healthcare sector.
• This entails the participation of all parties, including the governmental, private, and individual sectors.
• Although though it is less than the average public spending in the world, which is 5.4%, there is an urgent need to raise it to 2.5% of GDP.
• The effectiveness of health and wellness centres will be crucial in lowering the higher burden of out-of-pocket health expenses, which will be crucial in achieving a stress-free and comprehensive wellness system for everyone.

Instead of continuing the existing trend of sporadic and insufficient increases in health spending, there is a need to make significant and ongoing investments in public health over the coming ten years.

Phytoplankton Blooms

• Around the coastlines of the world, massive phytoplankton blooms—huge blooms of microscopic algae floating on the ocean's surface—have grown bigger and more frequent.
• According to recent studies, massive phytoplankton blooms have grown bigger and more frequent around the world's coastlines, benefiting fisheries but also having the potential to be harmful.

Findings from the Study

• The expansion: Coastal phytoplankton blooms grew by around 13% in size between 2003 and 2020, adding 4 million square kilometres to the world's oceans.

• The frequency of blooming increased by 59% during this time.

Pros and disadvantages

• While phytoplankton is consumed by marine animals like fish and whales, it can also be hazardous in considerable quantities, depleting the oxygen in the oceans and eventually resulting in "dead zones" that disrupt the food chain and fisheries.

Example: In 2016, a near-Chilean algal bloom damaged salmon farms by $800 million.

Global Contradiction

• In contrast to the California Current, which experienced weaker blooms over the past 20 years, the northern Gulf of Mexico and the East and South China Seas both experienced stronger blooms.

Causes of the rise in phytoplankton include:

• Regional differences exist in the increase in phytoplankton blooms:

• In some instances, the boom is caused by rising sea surface temperatures.

• The mixing of ocean layers and the movement of nutrients can be disrupted by climatic changes in the ocean.

• Agricultural fertiliser runoff can increase the number of nutrients in the ocean, which can cause blooms (Eutrophication).

• Increased aquaculture may be linked to higher algal blooms in regions like Vietnam, China, and Finland.

• Moreover, areas, where residential garbage is inadequately managed, may contribute to an increase in blooms.

Phytoplankton

• Water bodies contain small floating plants called phytoplanktons.

Importance

• More than half of the oxygen in the environment comes from them.
• They stop global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide produced by people.
• In addition, they act as the foundation of the ocean food chain.

The following is a list of some of the most popular online dating sites. The ocean ecosystem's general health is based on its abundance.

Read Also: Water Pollution In India