New IT regime for regulated entities from April 1: RBI

New guidelines on Information Technology (IT) Governance for Regulated Entities (REs)

• The REs have been mandated to put in place a robust IT governance framework to cover focus areas like strategic alignment, risk and resource management performance, and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Management.
• This framework should specify the governance structure and processes necessary to meet the RE’s business/strategic
• The framework will specify the roles (including authority) and responsibilities of the Board of Directors, board-level Committee, and Senior Management.
• It will also address the issue of adequate oversight mechanisms to ensure accountability and mitigation of IT and cyber/information security risks.
• The enterprise-wide risk management policy or operational risk management policy will incorporate periodic assessments of IT-related risks (both inherent and potential risks).
• The board of RE would approve the strategies and policies related to IT, Information Assets, Business Continuity, Information Security, and Cyber Security (including Incident Response and Recovery Management/Cyber Crisis Management). They should review such strategies and policies at least annually.

IT strategy committee (ITSC)

• The RE will establish a Board-level IT Strategy Committee (ITSC), which will comprise a minimum of three directors.
• Its chairman would be an independent director and carry substantial expertise in managing/guiding information technology initiatives.
• The ITSC should meet at least on a quarterly basis.
• The committee will ensure that the RE has put an effective IT strategic planning process in place and will guide in preparation of IT strategy and ensure that the IT strategy aligns with the overall strategy of the RE towards accomplishment of its business objectives.
• The guidelines mandate REs to establish an IT steering committee with representation at senior management level from IT and business functions.
• This committee will assist the ITSC in strategic IT planning, oversight of IT performance and aligning IT activities with business needs, and will oversee the processes put in place for business continuity and disaster recovery.
• It will also ensure implementation of a robust IT architecture meeting statutory and regulatory
• Every IT application, which can access or affect critical or sensitive information, shall have necessary audit and system logging capability and should provide audit trails.
• The audit trails shall satisfy a RE’s business requirements apart from regulatory and legal requirements.
• The audit trails must be detailed enough to facilitate the conduct of audit, serve as forensic evidence when required and assist in dispute resolution, including for non-repudiation purposes.

Klyuchevskoy volcano erupts on Russia''s Kamchatka Peninsula

Klyuchevskoy volcano

• It is one of the most famous volcanoes in
• It is one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, with a height of 4,750 metres.
• The volcano consists of a truncated cone with a central crater.
• It is a stratovolcano.
• It has erupted more than 50 times since 1700.

Kamchatka Peninsula

• It lies in far eastern Russia, between the Sea of Okhotskon the west and the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea on the east.
• It is one of the world’s most concentrated areas of geothermal activity, with about 30 active volcanoes.
• It is one of the largest peninsulas in the world.
• **Climate:**Severe, with prolonged, cold, and snowy winters and wet, cool summers.
• It is part of a vast belt of Earth known as the “Ring of Fire” which circles the Pacific Ocean and is prone to eruptions and frequent earthquakes.

Second flood warning issued as water level in Vaigai dam touches 68.5 feet

Vaigai Dam

• It is constructed across the Vaigai River near Andipatti, in the Theni district of Tamil Nadu.
• It was built in 1959 and is often referred to as the lifeline of the region.
• It has a height of 111 feet and can store 71 feet of water.
• It was primarily built to provide water for irrigation in the Madurai district and the Dindigul district, as well as drinking water for Madurai and Andipatti.
• Near the dam, the Government of Tamil Nadu has constructed an Agricultural Research Station for researching the growing of a variety of crops.
• There is a small garden, called Little Brindavan, that is located in close proximity to this dam.

Vaigai River

• It is a river in Tamil Nadu state.
• Origin: It rises in the Varushanad Hills of the Western Ghats.
• It travels through the Pandya Nadu regionof Tamil Nadu.
• It is the major river in the fabled city of Madurai, the capital of the ancient and prosperous Pandya kingdom located in southern Tamil Nadu.
• The river finds a mention in Sangam literature dated to 300 before the Common Era.
• Length: It is 258 kilometres
• Vaigai gets major feed from the Periyar Dam in Kerala. Water from the Periyar Riverin Kerala is diverted into the Vaigai River in Tamil Nadu via a tunnel through the Western Ghats.
• Tributaries: Its main tributaries are Suruliyaru, Mullaiyaru, Varaganadhi, Manjalaru, Kottagudi, Kridhumaal, and Upparu.
• It finally empties into the Palk Strait near the Pamban Bridge in Ramanathapuram district.
• The river fulfils the drinking water requirements of five districts in Tamil Nadu, namely, Theni, Madurai, Ramnathapuram, Sivagangai, and Dindigul. It also provides irrigation for 200,000 hectares of agricultural land.

IIT Madras opens offshore campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania

Tanzania

• It is an African country situated just south of the Equator.
• Dar es Salaam is the largest city and port city of this country.
• Location
• The mainland is bounded by Uganda, Lake Victoria, and Kenya to the north.
• By the Indian Ocean to the east, by Mozambique, Lake Nyasa, Malawi, and Zambia to the south and southwest
• By Lake Tanganyika, Burundi, and Rwanda to the west.
• Highest mountain: Mount Kilimanjaro which is located in northeastern Tanzania.
• Major Rivers: Ruvuma, Rufiji, Wami, and the Pangani (drain into the Indian Ocean).
• Climate
• Mainland Tanzania can be divided into four principal climactic and topographic areas
• The hot and humid coastal lowlands of the Indian Ocean shoreline
• The hot and arid zone of the broad central plateau,
• The high inland mountain and lake region of the northern border,
• The highlands of the northeast and southwest, the climates of which range from tropical to temperate.
• The majority of Tanzanians are of Bantu descent.
• Tanzania has two official languages namely Swahili (kiSwahili) and English.

Govt to monitor agricultural news using AI, launches Krishi 24/7

Krishi 24/7

• It is the first-ever AI-powered solution for automated agricultural news monitoring and analysis, with support from Google.org.
• Features
• The tool scans news articles in multiple languages and translates them into English.
• It extracts essential information from news articles, such as headline, crop name, event type, date, location, severity, summary, and source link, ensuring that the ministry receives timely updates on relevant events published on the web.
• Significance
• It addresses the need for an efficient mechanism to identify and manage agricultural news articles of interest to aid timely decision-making.
• It will aid the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare (DA&FW) to identify relevant news, generate timely alerts, and take prompt action to protect farmers'' interests and promote sustainable agricultural growth through improved decision-making.

Artificial intelligence

• It is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.
• The goals of artificial intelligence include computer-enhanced learning, reasoning, and perception.
• AI is being used today across different industries, from finance to healthcare.

Section 27 Evidence Act | Discovery Can''t Be Proved Against Person If He Wasn''t Accused Of Any Offence & Wasn''t In Custody Of Police At The Time Of Confession: Supreme Court

Section 27 of the Indian Evidence Act

• Section 27 of the Evidence Act highlights an interesting and complex feature related to the admission of confessions within its legal framework.
• Sections 25 and 26 establish protection against self-incrimination and abuse of power by the police authority, deeming confessions made in police custody without the presence of a magistrate as inadmissible before a court of law.
• Section 27adds an exception by enabling the admission of confessions that result in the discovery of facts.
• **Section 27 states: "**Provided that, when any fact is deposed to as discovered in consequence of information received from a person accused of any offence, in the custody of a police officer, so much of such information, whether it amounts to a confession or not, as relates distinctly to the fact thereby discovered, may be proved."
• In simpler terms, any confession made by a person while in police custody that leads to the revelation of a fact is considered admissible in court.
• The basic idea embedded in Section 27 of the Evidence Act is the doctrine of confirmation by subsequent events. This doctrine is founded on the principle that every part of the statement made at the instance of the accused, in a police custody should necessarily be confirmed by the subsequent events of discovery, to make it admissible in court.
• In the case of Asar Mohd. v. State of U.P, the Supreme Court held that the concept of "fact" mentioned in Section 27 is not limited to physical objects alone but also includes essential psychological or mental facts that may be directly relevant to the case.

Russia formally pulls out of Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe

Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE)

• Negotiated during the final years of the Cold War and signed a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, CFE placed limits on the deployment of military equipment to maintain military balance between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the then-Warsaw Pact countries.
• Its purpose was to stop Cold War rivals from building up forces that could be used in a swift assault.
• Twenty-two member states of the two military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact came together in Paris on November 19, 1990, to sign the agreement.
• It finally entered into force on November 9, 1992. The Warsaw Pact by this time had disintegrated, and its treaty obligations were consequently passed to the pact’s successor states.
• Specifically, the Treaty required NATO and Warsaw Pact states to have in total no more than 40,000 battle tanks, 60,000 armoured combat vehicles, 40,000 pieces of artillery, 13,600 combat aircraft, and 4,000 attack helicopters on the whole territory of the respective alliances.
• To reach these targets, the CFE state parties destroyed in subsequent years more than 50,000 weapons systems.
• These steps were supervised under a treaty compliance mechanism requiring information sharing and reciprocal inspections.
• Moreover, the scope of the treaty was soon widened to cover troop numbers. The 1992 follow-up agreement known as the CFE-1A arranged limits on the level of military personnel.
• Meeting at the Istanbul summit of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), CFE Treaty partners finally agreed, on 19 November 1999, on an updated and modified arrangement: the Adapted CFE Treaty.
• A major change was that limitations on conventional weapon systems were no longer aligned to two “blocs” but to the territorial borders of individual states.
• Russia suspended its participation in the treaty in 2007 and halted active participation in 2015.

Warsaw Pact

• The Warsaw Treaty Organisation (Warsaw Pact) was a political and military alliance established on May 14, 1955, between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries.
• The Soviet Union formed this alliance as a counterbalance to the NATO, a collective security alliance concluded between the United States, Canada and Western European nations in 1949.
• The original signatories to the Warsaw Treaty Organization were the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic.
• Although the members of the Warsaw Pact pledged to defend each other if one or more of them came under attack, emphasized non-interference in the internal affairs of its members, and supposedly organized itself around collective decision-making, the Soviet Union ultimately controlled most of the Pact’s decisions.
• It was officially disbanded in March and July of 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

‘3,000-year-old Iron Age’ geoglyph circle discovered in Telangana

Geoglyph

• It is a large design or motif (generally longer than 4 metres) produced on the ground and typically formed by clastic rocks or similarly durable elements of the landscape, such as stones, stone fragments, gravel, or earth.
• A geoglyph is created by arranging or moving objects within a landscape.
• There are two types of geoglyphs, namely positive and negative geoglyphs.
• Positive geoglyph: It is formed by the arrangement and alignment of materials on the ground in a manner akin topetroforms (which are simply outlines created using boulders).
• Negative geoglyph: It is formed by removing part of the natural ground surface to create differently coloured or textured ground in a manner akin to petroglyphs.
• There is another variation of a geoglyph that involves seeding plants in a special design. The design usually takes years to see since it depends on the plants growing. This type of geoglyph is called an arbour glyph.
• Another type of geoglyph often referred to as ‘chalk giants’ are those carved into hillsides, exposing the bedrock beneath.
• Geoglyphs in History:
• From ancient times, the most widely known geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines of Peru, which have been a mystery to this day.
• Other geoglyphs from the past include the Megaliths in the Urals, the Uffington White Horse, the Long Man of Wilmington, and many others.

Features of the geoglyph unearthed from Telangana:

• Etched on a low-lying granitoid hillock, the geoglyph spans 5 metres in diameter and has a perfect circular shape.
• Surrounding the circle is a 30-centimetre-wide rim, and within the circle are two triangles.
• It is dated to the Iron Age, specifically around 1000 BCE.
• It is suggested that this circle might have served as a model for megalithic communities in planning their circular burial sites.

Nazca Lines

• The lines are a group of massive geoglyphs in southern Peru’s Nazca Desert.
• Experts estimate that they were designed anywhere in the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE.
• Some of the lines are straight, while others depict designs of animals and plants.
• All the lines have a combined length of more than 808 miles, while they cover an area of around 19 square miles.
• An individual design has a width of between 0.2 and 0.7 miles.
• All the designs were made by removing the top layer of soil. The depth of a line is anywhere between four and six inches.
• Some of the shapes are visible from a height of as much as 1,500 feet.
• The preservation of the lines over the years can be attributed to the dry and windless climate of the region.

TN govt implements ‘Project Dolphin’ to strengthen marine ecology

Project Dolphin

• It is to strengthen the marine ecology and overall health of the marine environment.
• This project includes strengthening patrolling and surveillance, improving habitat through the restoration of coastal ecosystems, removing ghost nets, and encouraging the involvement of locals with incentives.
• It will be implemented at a cost of 8.13 crore rupees during 2023-2024.
• Funding: While 60% of the amount will be given by the Union government, the State will bear the remaining cost.
• This will be helpful in improving the population of dolphin species and protecting their habitat, while at the same time improving the livelihood of the local communities.
• More than nine species of marine dolphins are found in the coastal waters of Tamil Nadu.
• The major habitats of the dolphins are found in the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve.

Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitat Programme

• It is an ongoing Centrally Sponsored Scheme that has been made operational by adding more components and activities to the erstwhile Centrally Sponsored Scheme - "Assistance for the Development of National Parks and Sanctuaries," during the 11th Plan Period.
• Components of the scheme
• Support to Protected Areas (National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries, Conservation Reserves, and Community Reserves)
• Protection of Wildlife Outside Protected Areas
• Recovery programmes for saving critically endangered species and habitats

Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve

• It is endowed with three distinct Coastal ecosystems, namely coral reefs, seagrass bed and mangroves.
• It is considered one of the world’s richest regions from a marine biodiversity perspective.
• It is the first Marine Biosphere Reserve in South and Southeast Asia.
• It has been recognized by the Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme of UNESCO.
• It is also home to several globally important and highly threatened species like the Dugong, whale shark, sea horses, Balanoglossus, green sea turtle, Hawksbill turtle, dolphins, sacred chanks etc