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Dec 26, 2021
INDIAN ARMY LAUNCHES INDIGENOUS MESSAGING APPLICATION CALLED ASIGMA
Recently, Indian Army has launched Indian Army launches in-house messaging application named, ASIGMA (Army Secure IndiGenous Messaging Application).
The Karnataka Right to Freedom of Religion Bill, 2021
Abhyas:
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
What are three forms of hunger?
Highlights
Need of the scheme:
What is bottom trawling?
- It is a new generation web-based application.
- It is a replacement of Army Wide Area Network (AWAN) messaging application which has been in service for past 15 years.
- It is developed by team of officers of the Corps of Signals of the Army.
- It will meet real time data transfer and messaging requirements of the Army in the backdrop of current geo political security environment.
- It has multi-level security, message
- prioritisation and tracking, dynamic global address book.
The Karnataka Right to Freedom of Religion Bill, 2021
- It prohibits conversion from one religion to another by misrepresentation, force, fraud, allurement or marriage.
- However, it provides an exemption for those who reconvert to his immediate previous religion.
- Reconversion shall not be deemed to be a conversion under this Act.
- Family members or any other person who is related to the individual, who is getting converted, can file complaint regarding conversion.
- Punishment:
- Conversion from general category, a jail term of three to five years and a fine of Rs 25,000 has been proposed for those violating the law.
- Conversion from SC/St category, a jail term of three to 10 years and a fine of Rs 50,000.
- Double punishment for repeat offence.
- Compensation: It envisages payment of Rs 5 lakh (on court orders) to victims of conversion by the persons attempting the conversion.
- The offence of conversion has been deemed to be a cognizable and non-bailable, that can be tried in a magistrate’s court under the proposed law.
- Marriages conducted with the intention of conversion can be declared null and void by a family court or a jurisdictional court.
- Any person intending to convert to another religion after the law comes into force will have to notify the district magistrate two months in advance.
- The person who is carrying out the conversion must provide one-month notice to district magistrate.
- District magistrate must conduct an enquiry through the police on the real purpose of the conversion.
- Not informing the authorities will result in a prison term of six months to three years for persons who convert, and a term of one to five years for those carrying out conversions.
- The person who gets converted to inform the district magistrate of the conversion within 30 days, and he/she must appear before the district magistrate to confirm their identity.
- Not informing the district magistrate will lead to the conversion being declared null and void.
- It violates the constitutional guarantee of equality because making religious conversions the sole ground for terming the marriage as void.
- It violates article 15 which mandates that the state shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.
- Article 25 of the Constitution of India guarantees the freedom to profess, propagate, and practice religion, and allows all religious sections to manage their own affairs in matters of religion; subject to public order, morality, and health. Thus, it is in contrast with Article 25.
Abhyas:
- It is an Indigenously developed High-speed Expendable Aerial Target (HEAT).
- It is an unmanned aerial target system, operated from the ground. It will be used in future tests and practices of aerial weapons.
- It has a gas turbine engine to sustain a long endurance flight at subsonic speed.
- It is in the development stage.
- The loan money will be used for the implementation of smart meters & Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI).
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
- AMI is a complex system or infrastructure of technologies that connect different technological networks for making a two-way communication network.
- It includes technological networks like Customer Information Systems (CIS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Work Management (WMS), Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) etc.
- System Reliability: Effective monitoring will minimize power outages, making the system more reliable.
- Energy Costs: Easy monitoring will reduce costs and wastages in long term.
- Electricity theft will be reduced.
- Apart from electricity, AMI can be used in other fields like gas and water distribution and billing infrastructure.
- High cost.
- Technological integration and management.
- Interoperability and standardization.
What are three forms of hunger?
- Under Nutrition:
- Insufficient intake of basic foods requirement, causing undernourishment.
- Insufficient Macronutrients.
- Malnutrition:
- Insufficient intake of essential quality vitamins and minerals.
- Micronutrient deficiencies.
- Over Nutrition:
- Intake of excess food causes overnutrition, resulting in Obesity.
- Poverty is the leading economic factor behind it. Poverty causes other co-related problems like ‘Food Deserts’ and ‘Poverty Trap’.
- Food Deserts are the areas where people have limited access to a variety of healthful foods.
- Poor people often live in aggregated poor neighborhoods where merchants have weak incentives to offer higher-cost nutritious products. This creates ‘food deserts.
- The poverty trap or Poverty cycle makes a poor to remain poor for generations.
- It is a self-enforcing mechanism, where due to the unaffordability of good food and quality standard of leaving, a poor could not escape poverty.
- Food Deserts are the areas where people have limited access to a variety of healthful foods.
- Increasing income of people by economic growth and development.
- Social sector schemes by the government distribute quality food.
- Reducing chemical fertilizers used in agriculture.
- De-agrarianizing food production and doing vertical farming for nutritious foods.
- When people abandon agriculture, it is referred to as de-agrarianizing.
- Vertical farming is a method of Off-farm agriculture that focuses on growing crops in vertically stacked layers.
- Aim: To provide safe, reliable, affordable and environment friendly public Mass Rapid Transit System for Agra city.
- It will improve mobility for planned urban development in Agra.
- The project will also enhance economic productivity of the city and catalyze job creation.
- EIB is the European Union's investment bank and is owned by the EU Member States.
- It focuses on the areas of climate, environment, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), development, cohesion and infrastructure.
Highlights
- It is a protocol of waste management for garbage free cities.
- Aim- To give effect to the vision of creating “Garbage Free Cities” (GFC) under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0.
- A total of 299 cities have been certified–
- 9 cities rated as 5-star,
- 143 cities rated as 3-star
- 147 cities as 1-star
- The earlier 25 components/ indicators have now been reduced to 24,
- Only 16 indicators are mandatory for 1-star and 3-star levels.
- The remaining 8 indicators will be relevant for 5-star and 7-star aspirants.
- Multi-step calculation of the previous GFC protocol has now been changed to a single step
- Higher weightages (50%) allotted to Door-to-Door Collection, Source Segregation, Waste processing & Dumpsite remediation;
- The entire process of applying for certification and subsequent assessment have been simplified and made completely digital.
- Capacity building, revenue from sale of waste by-products have been added to strengthen the waste management system.
- Continuous assessment has been introduced to help cities plan assessment.
- Swachh Bharat Mission is a nation-wide campaign in India.
- Launched- 2014
- Phase 1of the mission lasted till October 2019. Phase 2 has been implemented between 2020–21 and 2024-25.
- Objectives-
- Eliminating open defecation through the construction of household-owned and community-owned toilets.
- Establishing an accountable mechanism of monitoring toilet use.
- 4,324 Urban local bodies have been declared Open Defecation Free through the construction of more than 66 lakhs individual household toilets and over 6 lakhs community/public toilets.
- Digital enablement's such as Swachhata App has introduced by MoHUA in 2016.
- It is the digital grievance redressal platform
- Swachh Survekshan, the world’s largest urban cleanliness survey covering over 4,000 Urban Local Bodies was initiated under SBM-Urban in 2016.
- Launched- 2021
- Nodal Ministry- Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA)
- Implementation year-2021 to 2026
- To tap other aspects under the Swachh Bharat mission including safe containment, transportation, disposal of fecal sludge, and septage from toilets.
- All wastewater will be treated properly before it is discharged into water bodies, and the government is trying to make maximum reuse a priority.
- It also focuses on source segregation of garbage, reduction in single-use plastic.
- To ensure complete access to sanitation facilities.
- All statutory towns will become (open-defecation free) ODF+ certified.
- All statutory towns with less than 1 lakh population will become ODF++ certified (focus on toilets with sludge and septage management).
- 50% of all statutory towns with less than 1 lakh population will become Water+ certified.
- All statutory towns will be at least 3-star Garbage Free rated as per Star Rating Protocol for Garbage Free cities.
- Remediation of all legacy dumpsites.
- All the 25 High Courts of India have different usage of the phrases to identify different cases.
- This creates ambiguity in the interpretation leading to delayed justice.
- Different High Courts follow different procedures in matters pertaining to virtual courts, started during the pandemic.
- Court fees differ for the same type of cases in different States.
Need of the scheme:
- National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) have been involved in certification of Process and Products
- NDDB has been awarding Quality Mark to the dairy plants of cooperatives.
- BIS has a product certification scheme for manufacturers, including dairy product processors allowing licensees to use ISI Mark on their products.
- However, there was no unification of product and process certification- making it difficult to dairy plants to avail end to end certification.
- Further the consumer awareness was also lacking towards quality of milk and products.
- Milk and milk products are perishable nature and has short shelf-life, increasing the difficulty for conformity assessment.
- With the initiative of the Department of Animal Husbandry & Dairy, Conformity Assessment Scheme was unveiled by BIS with the help of NDDB.
- It is a first of its kind certification scheme for milk and milk product.
- It has brought ‘Product–Food Safety Management System–Process’ certification under one umbrella with a unified logo featuring the earlier respective logos BIS-ISI mark & NDDB-Quality Mark and Kamdhenu Cow.
- Government of India has notified various products for compulsory compliance to Indian Standards through Quality Control Orders (QCOs);
- These are: Public interest, protection of human, animal or plant health, safety of the environment, prevention of unfair trade practices, national security etc.
- Simplify the certification process.
- Create an instantly recognizable logo for public to be reassured about dairy product quality.
- Increase the sales of milk and milk products in organized sector and in turn enhancing income of farmers.
- Develop a quality culture in the dairy sector.
- Monetary policy refers to the policy of the central bank with regard to the use of monetary instruments under its control to achieve the goals specified in the Act.
- The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)is vested with the responsibility of conducting monetary policy.
- This responsibility is explicitly mandated under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
- It is the (fixed) interest rate at which the Reserve Bank provides overnight liquidity to banks against the collateral of government and other approved securities under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF).
- It is the (fixed) interest rate at which the Reserve Bank absorbs liquidity, on an overnight basis, from banks against the collateral of eligible government securities under the LAF.
- It is a facility that allows banks to borrow money through repurchase agreements (repos) or to make loans to the RBI through reverse repo agreements.
- The LAF consists of overnight as well as term repo auctions.
- Aim of term repo: To help develop the inter-bank term money market, which in turn can set market-based benchmarks for pricing of loans and deposits, and hence improve transmission of monetary policy.
- RBI also conducts variable interest rate reverse repo auctions, as necessitated under the market conditions.
- It is a facility under which scheduled commercial banks can borrow additional amount of overnight money from the Reserve Bank by dipping into their Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR) portfolio up to a limit at a penal rate of interest.
- This provides a safety valve against unanticipated liquidity shocks to the banking system.
- The MSF rate and reverse repo rate determine the corridor for the daily movement in the weighted average call money rate.
- It is the rate at which the Reserve Bank is ready to buy or rediscount bills of exchange or other commercial papers.
- The Bank Rate is published in Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
- This rate has been aligned to the MSF rate and, therefore, changes automatically as and when the MSF rate changes alongside policy repo rate changes.
- It is the average daily balance that a bank is required to maintain with the Reserve Bank as a share of such per cent of its Net demand and time liabilities (NDTL) that the Reserve Bank may notify from time to time.
- It is the share of NDTL that a bank is required to maintain in safe and liquid assets, such as, unencumbered government securities, cash and gold.
- Changes in SLR often influence the availability of resources in the banking system for lending to the private sector.
- These include both, outright purchase and sale of government securities, for injection and absorption of durable liquidity, respectively.
- Surplus liquidity of a more enduring nature arising from large capital inflows is absorbed through sale of short-dated government securities and treasury bills.
- The cash so mobilised is held in a separate government account with the Reserve Bank.
- Financial inclusion is the process of extending the reach of formal banking services and products to the unbanked population in the country.
- Financial inclusion appeared to be the lowest in rural, agriculture-dependent areas where food was the main source of income.
- Financial inclusion leads to preference shifts from cash to interest-bearing bank deposits and other financial assets.
- Financial inclusion is expected to expand the access to bank credit, which is interest sensitive and affected by changes in the policy rate.
- Hence financial inclusion enhances the potency of interest-rate based monetary policy by causing an increasing number of people to become responsive to interest rate cycles.
- The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) introduced the Financial Inclusion Index (FI-Index) to gauge the accessibility of banking and financial services and products and the usage and quality of such facilities to Indian population.
- The index rose from 49.9 in March 2019, to 53.1 in March 2020, and further to 53.9 in March 2021.
What is bottom trawling?
- It is a method of fishing that involves dragging heavy weighted nets across the sea floor, in an effort to catch fish.
- It is a favoured method by commercial fishing companies as it can catch large quantities of product in one go.
- It drags the large, weighted nets across the seafloor, everything that happens to be in the way gets swept up in the net too.
- In addition to the turtles, juvenile fish and invertebrates, deep sea corals are also get swept up in trawling nets.
- Trawlers targets seamounts because they are known hot spots for fish and other marine life.
- Coral forests, often found on seamounts, act as nurseries for juvenile fish and other invertebrates.
- It changes the flow of nutrients and carbon through the food web and alter geomorphological landscapes.
- How: Bottom trawling can both resuspend and bury biologically recyclable organic material.
- Example: Resuspension of nutrient solids like phosphorus can result in oxygen deficient dead zones.
- The boats should be designed in such a way that fishermen get access to the deeper parts of the ocean and fish species.
- A knowledge can be given to fishermen for the construction of tuna long liners with gill nets.
- Imposing a limit on the amount of sponge and coral individual vessels and the entire fleet can pull up as bycatch.
- A system to warn other trawling vessels of an area with high concentrations of coral or sponge can be used.
- A habitat review committee that will meet annually to ensure the measures are working, and potentially improve the fishery even further can be formed.
POSTED ON 26-12-2021 BY ADMIN
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General Studies
Political Science and International Relations
Some Reference Essays
List of previous year essay topics (1997-2019)
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