Why in News

As the kharif harvest ends, seasonal migration begins, and drought is turning many seasonal migrants into climate migrants. Their children face broken schooling, and a recent NITI Aayog report highlights their exclusion from education.

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• The last Census counted 9.29 crore migrant children. There is no reliable estimate of how many are out of school.
• Families move to sugarcane fields, brick kilns and construction sites, and children go with them.
• NITI Aayog findings: Schooling breaks often last five to six months. They widen learning gaps, weaken school belonging and raise the risk of dropout and child labour.
• NITI Aayog recommends migration-responsive schooling, bridge learning centres, portable school records, inter-state transfer mechanisms and tracking systems.

About Education for Migrant Children

• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (2001): It made a systematic effort to reach migrant children through seasonal hostels, residential schools, basti shalas, sakharshalas (sugarcane schools), tent schools at construction sites and trans-education centres.
• Legal and policy cover: The Right to Education Act (2009) and the National Education Policy (2020) both recognise the exclusion of migrant children and stress inclusive education.
• Right to education: Article 21A makes education a fundamental right for children aged 6 to 14.
• The gap: The focus has stayed on access and enrolment, not on meaningful learning, remedial teaching, academic and mental-health support.
• Teacher training: Most teacher-education programmes assume settled, formal schooling, so migration-responsive teaching must be added.

Mains Angle

• Access is not learning: Entry into a classroom is not enough. Children also need remedial teaching, counselling and care to keep learning.
• Distress migration: Drought and shrinking livelihoods push families to move, and children then slip into child labour.
• Continuity tools: Portable records, inter-state transfers and tracking let a child continue schooling when the family moves.
• Local work: Guaranteed village wage work can reduce distress migration. The VB-G RAM G Act guarantees 125 days of work in a year.

Why in News

Indian digital trust services provider eMudhra withdrew from the global SSL/TLS certificate business after vulnerabilities were found in its certificates. Major browser companies had already blocked certificates linked to it.

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• Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft blocked certificates linked to eMudhra after a flaw in its key-generation systems.
• Eight intermediate CA certificates had private keys made with insufficient randomness, so attackers could potentially rebuild them in seconds.
• The company says a key-generation exercise on 30 April 2025 created a second set of weak keys, which were published to browser trust stores.
• A researcher reported the flaw on 17 October, and CERT-In issued a warning on 21 October. The company says there was no data breach and the global TLS business is about 1% of its revenue.

About SSL/TLS Certificates and Certification Authorities

• SSL/TLS certificates: They are global security standards that show a website is safe. Such sites have web addresses starting with https.
• Private keys: A private key stays secret and proves the identity of a website or software publisher. It must be made with enough randomness so that outsiders cannot predict it.
• Certification authorities (CAs): They issue certificates, and the internet relies on trust between browsers and CAs. Intermediate CAs issue certificates for websites and software.
• The risk: Attackers could issue fraudulent certificates, impersonate websites, intercept supposedly secure communications or make malicious software look trusted.

About eMudhra

• Founded: 2008, with operations in more than 35 countries.
• Market position: It is India’s largest certifying authority for digital signature certificates, with about 38% share by value, according to its May 2026 investor presentation.
• Business: It issues digital signature certificates and provides e-signing and online identity authentication services.

Why in News

Websites worldwide, including those run by Japan’s Finance Ministry, the Port of Rotterdam and the Wikimedia Foundation, went offline as a precaution.

Two critical flaws in PHP, a widely used programming language, were reported and named PHP2Shell.

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• Wiz says its researchers found the PHP2Shell flaws using AI tools, and OpenAI said security firm Calif found one using an OpenAI model.
• The flaws could let attackers run malicious code on a server remotely, without logging in, or read sensitive data in its memory. PHP’s developers have since released security updates.
• Agencies advised operators to install fixes at once, and sites that could not were taken offline as a precaution.
• Patching is hard because many small sites do not control their server, and older systems and devices cannot be updated easily.

About PHP and PHP2Shell

• PHP: It stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is an open-source language, free to use and maintained by volunteers, and it runs on about 70% of websites whose server-side language can be identified.
• WordPress link: WordPress, which runs over 40% of sites globally, is powered by PHP.
• Memory problem: If an error interrupts the processing of a file or form, PHP may treat the incomplete information as valid, which an attacker can exploit.
• Leftover information: A server may use data left over from an earlier request while handling a later one, and an attacker can exploit the resulting confusion.
• Risk: Attackers need no account or physical access. A malicious request sent over the internet can put personal data, uploaded documents and login credentials at risk.

About AI: Friend or Foe?

• Defence: AI tools helped researchers speed up their investigation of the flaws.
• Offence: AI can also help attackers exploit such flaws faster, leaving companies little time to respond. Both flaws are risky even without AI.

Mains Angle

• Visibility gap: The immediate challenge is not installing a patch but finding and managing every place where PHP runs.
• Open-source dependence: Much of the internet runs on free software kept by volunteers, so a single flaw can have a global reach.
• Speed of threats: AI shortens the time between finding a flaw and exploiting it, so patching must be fast.
• Detection: The advisory on AI agents also found that organisations often failed to detect breaches on their own.

Why in News

The International Criminal Court (ICC) and its staff have won the Sakharov Prize, the European Union’s top human rights honour.

About the Sakharov Prize

• The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought is awarded every year by the European Parliament.
• It honours individuals and organisations that defend human rights and freedom of thought.

About the International Criminal Court

• The ICC is a permanent court that tries individuals, not states, for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression.
• It sits at The Hague (Netherlands) and was set up under the Rome Statute.
• It is independent of the United Nations, though it works with it. This is not the same as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which settles disputes between states.
• India is not a party to the Rome Statute.