Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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Dropout rate soaring after school mergers in tribal belts

News

• The flawed policy of the NITI Aayog and the Human Resource Development Ministry to close public schools that have low enrolment rate or single teachers in tribal districts is leading to a huge spike in dropout rates.

Beyond News

• A national convention organised by the Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch, the Students’ Federation of India and the Centre for Adivasi Research and Development which saw participation from Adivasi students, parents and teachers raised this and many other issues that have been leading to exclusion of tribal people from education.
• Research by the Centre for Adivasi Research and Development has revealed that following the NITI Aayog recommendations in Jharkhand, 1,300 primary and middle schools were merged or closed and the government was targeting another 4,600 schools this year.
• In Karnataka, both government and aided schools located within 1 km from other schools and having low enrolments will be merged with the nearest schools. This is expected to result in the merger of 28,847 schools with 8,530 nearest ones.
• In 2014, the Rajasthan government merged 17,000 of the 80,000 government schools in the State into the other schools. Another 4,000 schools are planned to be merged in the near future.
• Odisha has identified 4,200 schools that have under 10 students each for merger or closure. Rayagada district alone has witnessed closure of 121 government schools, followed by 90 schools in Kandhamal. The two districts have more than 60% tribal and Dalit population.
• The Right to Education Act promises neighbourhood schools.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

India building new fighter jet

News

• The Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), India’s next indigenous fighter, is expected to make its first flight by 2032. Development work on the jet is under way.

Beyond News

• There are two major ways of making a military platform stealthier. One is geometric stealth and other is material stealth. In geometric stealth, the shape of the aircraft is designed at such angles so as to deflect away maximum radar waves thereby minimising its radar cross section.
• In material stealth, radar-absorbing materials are used in making the aircraft which will absorb the radio waves thus reducing the radar footprint. The AMCA will initially be based on geometric stealth, they can look at material stealth at a later stage.
• The Indian Air Force has given land to the Defence Research and Development Organisation to set up facilities for the project.
• The plan is to build on the capabilities and expertise developed during the development of the light combat aircraft (LCA) and produce a medium fifth generation fighter aircraft.
• Apart from the technologies developed from the LCA project, the new fighter programme is important as technologies coming in through that will flow into the AMCA project.
• The aircraft will be powered by the same GE-414 engine on the LCA Mk-2 variant which is in the design phase.
• A GE-414 produces 98kN thrust compared to 84kN thrust of the GE-404 engine which is on the LCA Mk1.
• At Aero India 2016, DRDO officials had stated that the basic design configuration has been frozen after wind tunnel testing and there are three critical technologies that need to be developed , stealth, thrust vectoring and super cruise.
• This is India’s only fifth generation aircraft programme following the decision not to go ahead with the fifth generation project with Russia.

In rhino country, a division to boost conservation efficiency

News

• In about a week’s time, an entire forest division in Assam will start moving 160 km northeast. The one-horned rhino of the Kaziranga National Park (KNP) is the reason for this “long march”.
• Assam’s Environment and Forest Department issued a notification saying the KNP had been split into two divisions the existing Eastern Assam Wildlife and the new Biswanath Wildlife  for “intensive wildlife management”.

Beyond News

• The Brahmaputra separates the two divisions straddling a total area of 1,030 sq.km. Kaziranga had an area of only 232 sq.m when it began its journey as a proposed reserve forest on June 1, 1905.
• The creation of the Biswanath Wildlife Division, with headquarters at Biswanath Chariali in northeastern Assam, will entail relocating the Central Assam Afforestation Division at Hojai 160 km away. In fact, the afforestation division has been renamed a wildlife division.
• All these years, the KNP was being administered by the Eastern Assam Wildlife Division with headquarters at Bokakhat on the southern bank of the Brahmaputra. This division was formed in 1966, two years before the State government designated Kaziranga a national park, though it was given the official status in 1974.
• The Eastern Assam Wildlife Division had five ranges Eastern or Agratoli, Kaziranga or Kohora, Western or Bagori, Burapahar and Northern  until the split. All except the Northern Range are on the southern bank of the Brahmaputra. Now, the Northern Range, with an area of 401 sq.km, has been upgraded to the Biswanath Wildlife Division with four ranges of its own  Eastern or Gamiri, Central or Biswanath Ghat, Western or Nagshankar and Crime Investigation Range.
• The KNP, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985, currently has a staff strength of nearly 1,300. Wildlife officials estimate that the park would require at least 3,000 men if they were to be deployed in eight-hour shifts.
• Between 2015 and February this year, 74 rhinos fell to poachers in Assam. Many of these rhinos were from the KNP, though there have been fewer cases of poaching since 2017.
• According to the last rhino census in March, the KNP has an estimated 2,413 rhinos. The park also has 57% of the world’s wild water buffalo population, one of the largest groups of Asian elephants and 21 Royal Bengal tigers per 100 sq.km arguably the highest striped cat density.

Indigenous weapon systems tested

News

• The Ministry of Defence announced that the indigenously designed SAAW (Smart Anti Airfield Weapon) guided bombs were successfully flight tested from Indian Air Force’s Jaguar aircraft at the Chandan range in Rajasthan.

Beyond News

• In the Pokhran range, another indigenously developed helicopter-launched anti-tank guided missile, ‘Helina’, was successfully tested.
• The Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO) Research Centre Imarat (RCI) has been extensively involved in the development of both the weapons, one for the IAF and the other for the Indian Army.
• Defence sources said targets were hit with high precision.

Half of farm households indebted: NABARD study

News

• More than half the agricultural households in the country have outstanding debt, and their average outstanding debt is almost as high as the average annual income of all agricultural households, according to a recent survey by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).

Findings

• The NABARD All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey 2016-17 covered a sample of 1.88 lakh people from 40,327 rural households. Only 48% of these are defined as agricultural households, which have at least one member self-employed in agriculture and which received more than ₹5,000 as value of produce from agricultural activities over the past year, whether they possessed any land or not.
• NABARD found that 52.5% of the agricultural households had an outstanding loan on the date of the survey, and thus were considered indebted. For non-agricultural households in rural India, that figure was 10 percentage points lower, at only 42.8%.
• Agricultural households reporting any outstanding debt also had a higher debt liability compared with non-agricultural ones.
• The average debt of an indebted agricultural household stood at ₹1,04,602 in comparison to ₹76,731 for indebted non-agricultural households.
• According to the survey, the average annual income of an agricultural household is ₹1.07 lakh. That is barely ₹2,500 more than the average outstanding debt of indebted farm households.
• The survey found that only 10.5% of agricultural households were found to have a valid Kisan Credit Card at the time of the survey. The scheme aims to give farmers credit from the banks with a simplified and flexible single-window procedure. Households who had the card utilised 66% of the sanctioned credit limit, the report said.
• The biggest reason for taking loans among agricultural households was capital expenditure for agricultural purposes, with a quarter of all loans taken for this purpose.
• While 19% of loans were taken for meeting running expenses for agricultural purposes, another 19% were taken for sundry domestic needs. Loans for housing and medical expenses stood at 11% and 12%, respectively.
• The southern States of Telangana (79%), Andhra Pradesh (77%), and Karnataka (74%) showed the highest levels of indebtedness among agricultural households, followed by Arunachal Pradesh (69%), Manipur (61%), Tamil Nadu (60%), Kerala (56%), and Odisha (54%).

U.S. tech giants plan to fight India’s data localisation plans

News

• S. technology giants plan to intensify lobbying efforts against stringent Indian data localisation requirements, which they say will undermine their growth ambitions in India.

Beyond News

• S. trade groups, representing companies such as Amazon, American Express and Microsoft, have opposed India’s push to store data locally. That push comes amid rising global efforts to protect user data but is one that could hit planned investments by the firms in the Indian market, where the companies currently have limited data storage.
• The issue could further undermine already strained economic relations between India and the United States.
• Technology executives and trade groups have discussed approaching Prime Minister’s office to appraise him of their worries. Separately, the industry is considering pitching the issue as a trade concern, including at the India-U.S. talks in September in New Delhi, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
• Though a final decision hasn’t been made, the deliberations come while the United States and India are locked in a dispute over U.S. tariff increases and on the Indian policy of capping prices of medical devices, which hurts American pharmaceutical companies.
• Stricter localisation norms would help India get easier access to data when conducting investigations, but critics say it could lead to increased government demands for data access.
• Technology firms worry the mandate would hurt their planned investments by raising costs related to setting up new local data centres.
• Greater use of digital platforms in India for shopping or social networking have made it a lucrative market for technology companies, but a rising number of data breaches have pushed New Delhi to develop strong data protection rules.
• The main government committee on data privacy last month proposed a draft law, recommending restrictions on data flows and proposing that all “critical personal data” should be processed only within the country.
• It would be left to the government to define what qualifies as such data.

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