Prelims Facts
- Pakistan re-elected to UN rights body
The issue in news
Pakistan has been re-elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
Main points
- Among the five candidates from the Asia-Pacific region vying for four seats in the UNHRC, Pakistan secured the highest number of votes.
- This is despite opposition from activist groups over its abysmal human rights records.
- A coalition of human rights groups from Europe, the U.S. and Canada called on UN member states to oppose the election of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, saying their human rights records make them unqualified.
- Pakistan is currently serving on the HRC since January 1, 2018.
- With its re-election, Pakistan will continue as a member for another three-year term commencing on January 1, 2021.
United Nations Human Rights Council:
- The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is a United Nations body whose mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world.
- The UNHRC has 47 members elected for staggered three-year terms on a regional group basis from 5 groups.
- Under the Human Rights Council’s rules, seats are allocated to regions to ensure geographical representation.
- To become a member, a country must receive the votes of at least 96 of the 191 states of the UN General Assembly (an absolute majority).
Note: Except for the Asia-Pacific contest, the election of 15 members to the 47-member Human Rights Council was decided in advance because all the other regional groups had uncontested slates.
- Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
The issue in news
PM to release commemorative coin of Rs 75 denomination to mark the 75th anniversary of FAO.
Main points
- 16th October 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
India and FAO:
- Indian Civil Service Officer Dr. Binay Ranjan Sen was the Director-General of FAO from 1956- 1967.
- India’s proposals for the International Year of Pulses in 2016 and the International Year of Millets 2023 have also been endorsed by FAO.
- Recently, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) developed 17 biofortified varieties of eight crops.
- This will have up to a three-fold increase in nutritional value.
The details of the fortified crops are:
Rice varieties:
- CR Dhan 315 has high zinc.
Wheat varieties:
- HI 1633 is rich in protein, iron and zinc; HD 3298 is rich in protein and iron; DBW 303 and DDW 48 are rich in proteins.
- Ladhowal Quality Protein Maize Hybrid 1, 2 and 3 are rich in lysine and tryptophan.
Millets:
- CFMV1 and 2 of finger millet are rich in calcium, iron and zinc; CLMV1 of little millet is rich in iron and zinc.
- Pusa Mustard 32 has low erucic acid.
Groundnut:
- Girnar 4 and 5 are fortified with enhanced oleic acid.
Yam varieties:
- Sri Neelima and DA 340 are enhanced zinc, iron and anthocyanin content.
- These varieties, along with other food ingredients, will transform the normal Indian thali into nutri-thali.
- These varieties have been developed by utilizing the local landraces and farmer’s varieties.
- The high zinc rice has been developed from landraces of Assam rice collected from the Garo hills and those of finger millets from Gujarat collections of Dang district.
- The production of biofortified crop varieties will be upscaled and linked with government programmes like the mid-day meal, Anganwadi, etc. to reduce malnutrition and make India Kuposhan Mukta (malnutrition-free) through naturally enriched food ingredients.
- This will also usher in higher incomes for farmers and will open new avenues of entrepreneurship development.
ICAR’s NARI:
- ICAR has started Nutri-Sensitive Agricultural Resources and Innovations (NARI) programme for promoting family farming linking agriculture to nutrition, nutri-smart villages for enhancing nutritional security.
- Under this, location-specific nutrition garden models are being developed and promoted by Krishi Vigyan Kendras to ensure access to locally available, healthy and diversified diet with adequate macro and micronutrients.
- ICAR is an autonomous organisation under the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare, Government of India.
- Established in 1929, it is the apex body for co-ordinating, guiding and managing research and education in agriculture including horticulture, fisheries and animal sciences in the entire country.
- With 101 ICAR institutes and 71 agricultural universities spread across the country, it is one of the largest national agricultural systems in the world.
- It is headquartered in New Delhi.
- MoU between India and Australia
The issue in news
Cabinet approves MoU between India and Australia.
Main points
- The MoU signed between the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), Department of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga rejuvenation, India and Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater use through village-level intervention (MARVI) PARTNERS, Australia in October 2019.
- The MoU has been signed to promote cooperation in surface and groundwater training, education and research to achieve water security for agricultural, urban, industrial and environmental purposes.
- Deen Dayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM)
The issue in news
Cabinet approves a special package for Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh under DAY-NRLM.
Main points
- The DAY-NRLM is essentially a poverty relief programme of the Central government. It was launched as‘Aajeevika – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)’ by the GOI’s Ministry of Rural Development in the year 2011. It was renamed as DAY-NRLM in 2015.
The scheme is an improved version of the earlier Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY).
- The programme is supported partially by the World Bank.
- It aims at creating effective and efficient institutional platforms to enable the rural poor to increase their household income by means of sustainable livelihood enhancements and better access to financial services.
- Additionally, the poor would also be enabled to attain improved access to rights, public services, and other entitlements.
- The mission aims at harnessing the inherent capabilities of the poor and equip them with capacities (such as knowledge, information, tools, finance, skills, and collectivization for them to take part in the economy.
- The scheme started with an agenda to cover 7 Crore rural poor households via Self Help Groups (SHGs) and federated institutions and support them for livelihoods collectives in 8-10 years.
NRLM Mission
“To reduce poverty by enabling the poor households to access gainful self-employment and skilled wage employment opportunities, resulting in an appreciable improvement in their livelihoods on a sustainable basis, through building strong grassroots institutions of the poor.”
Features of DAY-NRLM
The chief features of the scheme are as follows:
- Universal social mobilization: A minimum of one lady member of a rural poor household (with particular emphasis on the marginal sections) is to be brought in the network of an SHG.
- Participatory Identification of Poor
- Community Funds as Resources in Perpetuity: this is to strengthen the financial management capacity of the poor
- Financial inclusion
- Livelihoods: the mission focuses on promoting and stabilizing the existing livelihood structures of the poor through its three pillars:
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- Vulnerability reduction & Livelihoods enhancement – through expanding existing livelihoods and tapping new livelihood opportunities in both the farm and non-farm sectors
- Employment – building skills
- Enterprises – promoting self-employment
- Another important feature of this scheme is that it places a high priority on convergence and partnerships with other government schemes of the Rural Development Ministry. It also seeks to have linkages with the Panchayati Raj institutions.
Sub-schemes under NRLM
Aajeevika Grameen Express Yojana (AGEY)
- This scheme was initiated in 2017.
- It aims at providing alternative sources of livelihood to members of SHGs under the parent scheme by enabling them to offer public transport services in backward rural areas.
- The scheme offers affordable, safe, and community-monitored rural transport services to connect villages in remote areas with key amenities & services (access to health, markets, and education) for the overall economic development of the region.
Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP)
- The main objective of this sub-scheme is to empower women in agriculture by making systematic investments to enhance their participation and productivity.
- The programme also seeks to create and sustain agriculture-based livelihoods concerning women in rural areas.
- Other aims are to ensure food and nutrition in the households, enable better access to services and inputs for women, improve the managerial capabilities of women, etc.
Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP)
- The objective of this sub-scheme is to promote startups in rural areas.
- The scheme will address the three key hiccups concerning rural startups:
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- A missing knowledge ecosystem
- A missing financial ecosystem
- A missing incubation ecosystem
- SVEP envisions the generation of sustainable self-employment opportunities for rural poor youth, facilitating them to engage effectively with the market and help generate wealth locally.
National Rural Livelihoods Project (NRLP)
- The NRLP is designed to create ‘proof of concept’ and build capacities at the central and state levels, to have a facilitating environment for all states and UTs to transit to the NRLM.
- Rural livelihood is an important topic from the UPSC CSE exam perspectives. Hence, it is important to cover different aspects of Rural Livelihood i.e. through definition, improvement, and government intervention to enhance it.
- STARS Project
The issue in news
Cabinet approves the implementation of the STARS project.
STARS Project:
- The Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) program would be under the National Education Policy 2020.
- The central idea of the initiative is to enhance the learning outcomes in schools and revolutionize school learning process.
- The project is partly funded by the World Bank.
- It would be implemented as a new Centrally Sponsored Scheme under the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education (MOE).
- The scheme will facilitate enhanced classroom layouts, developmentally appropriate teaching-learning material, academic support systems, parental engagement strategies, and administrative & academic monitoring for early education.
- A National Assessment Centre – PARAKH will be established for continuous tracking of learning, conceptual assessments, and data-driven decision making leading to examination reforms.
- The STARS program will also focus on the training module of teachers, by “bolstering need-based teacher training, peer learning, revamp in-service professional development, & institute effective, transparent systems for performance management.”
- The program will also include career counselling and in-school vocational education along with internships with market relevance.
- Keeping in mind the goal of NEP 2020, STARS program will also train students in soft skills and STEM/STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Math) related skills.
- The project covers 6 States namely Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Odisha.
- The identified States will be supported tor various interventions for improving the quality of education.
- Besides this project, it is also envisaged to implement a similar ADB funded project in 5 states namely Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Assam.
- All states will partner with one other state for sharing their experiences and best practices.
- The STARS project seeks to support the states in developing, implementing, evaluating and improving interventions with direct linkages to improved education outcomes and school to work transition strategies for improved labour market outcomes.
- The Project envisions improving the overall monitoring and measurement activities in the Indian School Education System through interventions.
Two components of the STARS Project:
At the national level, the project envisages the following interventions:
- To strengthen MOE’s national data systems to capture robust and authentic data on retention, transition and completion rates of students.
- To support MOE in improving states’ PGI scores by incentivizing their governance reform agenda through SIG (State Incentive Grants).
- To support the strengthening of learning assessment systems.
- To support MOE’s efforts to establish a National Assessment Centre (PARAKH).
- To have a Contingency Emergency Response Component (CERC) which would enable it to be more responsive to any natural, man-made and health disasters.
At the State level, the project envisages:
- Strengthening Early Childhood Education and Foundational Learning
- Improving Learning Assessment Systems
- Strengthening classroom instruction and remediation through teacher development and school leadership
- Governance and Decentralized Management for Improved Service Delivery
- Strengthening Vocational education in schools through mainstreaming, career guidance and counselling, internships and coverage of out of school children
- Air Quality Early Warning System
The issue in news
IMD operationalises Advanced high-resolution Air Quality Early Warning System for Delhi and India.
Main points
- The new model that has been made operational for Delhi is called ENFUSER (ENvironmental information FUsion SERvice).
- It will identify air pollution hotspots and pollution up to street level.
- It is a high-resolution city scale model.
- The specialty of the ENFUSER is the high utilization of measurement data such as air quality observations, a detailed description of the road network, buildings, land-use information, high-resolution satellite images, ground elevation and population data.
- The ENFUSER natively taps into the operative IMD’s regional SILAM access point. o System for Integrated modelling of Atmospheric composition (SILAM) is another air quality forecast model of the IMD that has been extensively validated against observations over the Indian region.
- The ENFUSER results are being evaluated with the satellite measurements and observations, and the model is found to capture the hotspots over Delhi very well.
- SILAM and ENFUSER have been developed in technical collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI).
- Gov Tech – Thon 2020
The issue in news
National Informatics Centre (NIC), IEEE Computer Society and Oracle to organise Gov Tech- Thon 2020 from 30 Oct 2020 to 1 Nov 2020 under the aegis of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
Main points
- Gov Tech-Thon 2020 is a pan India 36 hours virtual Hackathon.
- The virtual hackathon is open to students, working professionals, start-ups, freelance technologists, faculty, and other IT service firms in India.
- During the hackathon, participants will receive mentorship and advice from technical experts from NIC, IEEE and Oracle, as well as senior domain experts from the Ministries of Agriculture, Education and Transport Departments, Government of India.
- Participating teams will have access to the latest tools from Oracle, Oracle Autonomous Database, built-in and easy-to-use cloud security, and compute – to help them develop prototypes that are practical and scalable.
- Additionally, they will be able to leverage open source technologies that bring benefits of high performance, reliability and data security.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC):
- NIC, established in 1976, is an attached office of the MeitY.
- It provides ICT and e-Governance support to the Government.
- NIC spearheaded “Informatics-Led-Development” by implementing ICT applications in social and public administration and facilitates electronic delivery of services to the government (G2G), business (G2B), citizen (G2C) and government employee (G2E).
- NIC, through its ICT Network, “NICNET”, has institutional linkages with all the Ministries/Departments of the Central Government, 37 State Governments/Union Territories, and about 720+ District Administrations of India.
- Operation Greens
The issue in news
50% subsidy provided under the Operation Greens scheme.
Operation Greens
- Operation Greens is a scheme to fix the right prices for farmers’ produce. It aims to ensure that farmers are given the right price for the resource created by them.
- The program focuses on organized marketing of TOP vegetables i.e. Tomatoes, Onions, and Potatoes by connecting the farmers with consumers.
- Through Operation Greens government plans to provide financial assistance to Farmer Producer Organizations, State Agriculture and other Marketing Federations, cooperatives, companies, food processors, Self-help groups, etc.
- The E-NAM platforms*will be connected to the Agriculture Produce Market Committee* so as to help in the structural and infrastructure part of Operation Greens scheme. The government has also decoded help in the development of 22,000 agricultural markets under this scheme.
- Agricultural Produce Market Committee – APMC is a statutory market committee constituted by a State Government in respect of trade in certain notified agricultural or livestock or horticultural products, under the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act.
- The e-National Agriculture Market (E-NAM) is an important initiative of the Government of India to use electronic trading portal pan-India for bidding and network the existing APMC mandis to create a unified national market for agricultural commodities.
- Thalassemia Bal Sewa Yojna
The issue in news
Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare launched the second phase of “Thalassemia Bal Sewa Yojna” for the underprivileged Thalassemic patients.
Main points
- Launched in 2017, this scheme is a Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation (HSCT) program that aims to provide a one-time cure opportunity for Haemoglobinopathies like Thalassaemia and Sickle Cell Disease for patients who have a matched family donor.
- It is funded by Coal India CSR.
- The CSR initiative was targeted to provide financial assistance to a total of 200 patients by providing a package cost not exceeding Rs. 10 lakhs per HSCT.
Thalassemia:
- Thalassemia is the name for a group of inherited conditions that affect haemoglobin in the blood.
- People with thalassemia produce either no or too little haemoglobin, which is used by red blood cells to carry oxygen around the body.
- This can make them very anaemic (tired, short of breath and pale).
- The patient cannot make enough RBCs and needs to be supplemented with RBC transfusions every 2-3 weeks to stay healthy and to survive.
- It mainly affects people of Mediterranean, South Asian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern origin.
- There are different types of thalassemia, which can be divided into alpha and beta thalassemia. Beta thalassemia major is the most severe type.
- Other types include beta thalassemia intermedia, alpha thalassemia major and haemoglobin H disease.
Symptoms:
- Anaemia – severe tiredness, weakness, shortness of breath, pounding, fluttering or irregular heartbeats (palpitations) and pale skin caused by the lack of haemoglobin.
- Too much iron in the body – this is caused by the regular blood transfusions used to treat anaemia and can cause problems with the heart, liver and hormone levels if untreated.
- Some people may also have delayed growth, weak and fragile bones (osteoporosis), and reduced fertility.
- A child can only be born with thalassemia if they inherit these faulty genes from both parents.
- Thalassemia is caused by faulty genes that affect the production of haemoglobin.
- The main treatments for thalassemia are blood transfusions and chelation therapy (treatment with medicine to remove the excess iron from the body).
- The only possible cure for thalassemia is a stem cell or bone marrow transplant, but this is not done very often because of the risks involved.
Thalassemia in India:
- In India, every year 10,000 children are being born with thalassemia which approximately accounts for 10% of the total world incidence of thalassemia-affected children and one in eight of thalassemia carriers live in India.
- International Solar Alliance (ISA)
The issue in news
India and France re-elected as President and Co-President of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) at its third assembly.
the International Solar Alliance
- The underlying rationale for ISA is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”,
- It also plans to increase the share of renewable energy substantially by 2030. By 2030, it envisages enhancing international cooperation to facilitate access to clean energy research and technology, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, and advanced and cleaner fossil-fuel technology.
- Developing solar projects in silos is not financially viable, despite the involvement of prominent financial institutions such as AIIB, World Bank, NDB and private and public investments towards this.
- Absence of established renewable energy policy.
- There is no proper ecosystem that creates a willingness to buy and set up renewable energy; there is no proper integration method with conventional energy.
- Hence, the focus of ISA will be on policy, ecosystem, and integration concerning solar energy.
Financing options of ISA
- The private sector is willing to contribute $500 million and the public sector another $500 million. This gives ISA financial sustainability.
- ISA has the potential to popularise new financial mechanisms that are popular now in India such as masala bonds as well as green solar bonds, for raising cheap money in other nations also.
India’s Role in ISA?
- India will be one of the largest markets and its domestic policy (to build 100 gigawatts) has sent signals to developers and financiers.
- The country has committed an operational solar power capacity of 100 GW by March 2022. This initiative could be a shot in the arm for India’s energy security.
- Headquarters of ISA will be in India
- Interim Secretariat of the ISA in National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE), Gwalpahari, Gurgaon, has been inaugurated
- India has committed a corpus of 100 crores
- India will also give secretarial assistance of 225 crores for the next five years
- The government of India has offered training support for ISA member countries at NISE and also support for demonstration projects for solar home lighting, solar pumps for farmers, and other solar applications.
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