1. Developing
countries will comply with "control measures" on plastic only if they
are compensated for the cost they entail, India said in a proposal at the
Global Plastics Treaty negotiations. This is India's first substantive move
during the talks being held in the South Korean city of Busan.
2. Child
marriages in India halved from 47.4% to 23.3% in 2019-21 since the introduction
of the Prevention of Child Marriage Act in 2006, said Union Women and Child
Development Minister Annapurna Devi. The Minister said around two lakh child
marriages were prevented in the past one year, even as one in five girls in
India is married before reaching the legal age of 18.
3. The
Supreme Court has held in a judgment that religious conversion without any
actual belief, largely intended to procure quota benefits, defeats the social
ethos of the reservation policy and amounts to a fraud on the
Constitution.
4. In
a speech on the occasion of National Press Day last week, Union Minister
Ashwini Vaishnaw called attention to the issue of fair compensation to media
companies for the use of their content by big technology platforms. The
Internet's rapid growth has created a power imbalance between news publishers
and large online enterprises which now set the financial terms for their use of
content created by others.