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Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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India to grow crops for UAE, Saudi Arabia

News

  • UAE and Saudi Arabia had decided to use India as a base to address their food security concerns.

Beyond News

  • The UAE and Saudi Arabia will use India as a base in addressing their social security concerns. For the first time, India’s export policy identifies the potential of agriculture along with horticulture, dairy, plantation and fisheries.
  • The farm-to-port project will be similar to a special economic zone but in the style of a corporatised farm, where crops would be grown keeping a specific UAE market in mind. The concept has been accepted by both governments.
  • Ensuring food security remains an area of high priority for India and the two countries whose partnership has been on the upswing since 2015.
  • The Indian government has already welcomed a proposal from the UAE for establishing food security parks, including through the creation of high-quality food processing infrastructure, integrated cold chains, value addition, preservation technology, packaging of food products and marketing.
  • It was estimated India would produce 290 million tons of agricultural produce, this year. Along with about 310 million tons of horticulture, the produce would total over 600 million tons, besides milk.

India, Afghanistan, Central Asian nations agree to cooperate in countering terror

News

  • India and five Central Asian countries along with Afghanistan condemned terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and agreed to cooperate in countering the menace which poses a threat to people across the world.

Beyond News

  • This was part of a joint statement issued at the end of the first ever meeting of the India-Central Asia Dialogue which also saw the participation of Afghanistan at the ministerial level in Samarkand.
  • It referred to the ancient civilisational, cultural, trade, and people-to-people links between India and Central Asia and expressed commitment to dynamic and fruitful friendly relations and mutually beneficial cooperation between India and the Central Asian countries at bilateral and multilateral formats.
  • The countries reaffirmed their willingness for cooperation, mutual support, joint solution on relevant issues in order to ensure security, stability and sustainable development.
  • Also called for an inclusive Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process and reconciliation, and assistance in economic reconstruction of Afghanistan through the implementation of joint infrastructure, transit and transport, energy projects including regional cooperation and investment projects.
  • The participants welcomed the accession of India into the Ashgabat agreement on creating an international transport and transit corridor.
  • The nations expressed their intention to strengthen cooperation in order to create real opportunities for expanding economic cooperation, and ensuring favourable conditions for mutual free trade.
  • They discussed promising opportunities and areas of cooperation in promoting mutual trade, attracting investments, innovations and technologies in key spheres of industry, energy, information technologies, pharmaceuticals and agriculture, education and training.
  • They also highlighted the importance of concerted efforts to improve the investment climate and the market attractiveness of the region’s economy, business opportunities of the Central Asian countries on the world stage.

Punjab and Haryana account for 46% of stubble burning incidents

News

  • Stubble burning is a pan-Indian problem but is most acute in Punjab and Haryana, which together account for 46% of the crop fires in the country.

Beyond News

  • Stubble burning is the practice of intentionally setting fire to what remains after food grains have been harvested. It is usually done to clear the field quickly for the next season and to burn off weeds and other pests.
  • In 2018, the most number of crop fires were detected in Punjab, Haryana, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
  • Of the top 10 districts where most number of crop fires were detected, eight were in Punjab, one in Jharkhand and one in Odisha.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

GST Council increases exemption limit, extends composition scheme to services

News

  • The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council, took a slew of decisions aimed at reducing the tax and compliance burden on small and medium enterprises, including increasing the threshold limit below which companies are exempt from GST, extending the composition scheme to small service providers, and allowing small companies to file annual returns.

Beyond News

  • It is the GST Council’s 32nd and last meeting before the Union budget.
  • Union Finance Minister announced that the limit for eligibility for the composition scheme would be raised to an annual turnover of ₹1.5 crore from April 1, 2019. Companies opting for the scheme would be allowed to file annual returns and pay taxes quarterly from April 1 onwards.
  • The scheme now allows companies with an annual turnover of up to ₹1 crore to opt for it, and file returns on a quarterly basis at a nominal rate of 1%. So far, only manufacturers and traders were eligible for this scheme.
  • It was decided to extend the scheme to small service providers with an annual turnover of up to ₹50 lakh, at a tax rate of 6%.
  • Regarding the annual turnover limit under which the GST would not be applicable if the company so chooses, the limit had been raised to ₹40 lakh for most States and ₹20 lakh for the north-eastern and hill States, from the earlier limit of ₹20 lakh and ₹10 lakh, respectively.
  • The GST Council also decided to allow Kerala to levy a cess of up to 1% for up to two years on intra-State supplies to help finance the disaster relief efforts following the recent floods.

Study shows solar wind fills the night side of the Moon

New telescopic view for stars

News

  • A study using observations from Chandrayaan 1 mission has found how plasma particles from the solar wind make their way into the Moon’s night side, filling up the wake region, long thought to be devoid of plasma particles.
  • This has significance in understanding bodies like the Moon which do not have global magnetic fields.

Findings

  • In recent times, there has been a huge interest in understanding the plasma environment of the Moon, which is generated mainly by its interaction with the solar plasma wind flowing towards it from the Sun.
  • This plasma wind consists of charged particles such as protons and is partly absorbed by the side of the Moon facing the sun. The rest of the solar plasma wind incident on the Moon flows around it, but leaves a wake (a void) on the side not facing the sun (the night-side of the Moon).
  • Recent Moon missions such as Chandrayaan-1, Kaguya, Chang’e-1 and Artemis have found evidence of refilling of near lunar wake (heights of 100 km to 200 km above the lunar surface on the night side) with solar wind protons.
  • Unlike the Earth, the Moon has no global magnetic field originating from a magnetized core. It has weak crustal fields that are too small to shield it globally from charged solar plasma particles incident on it. At some regions the crustal fields are quite strong and these are known as magnetic anomalies. The plasma particles scatter off these anomalous crustal fields.
  • The present work shows that solar wind protons scattered from the magnetic anomaly located at the South Pole Aitken basin on the Moon can enter the near wake region.
  • The group also characterised the energy and flux of the proton population in the near wake region. They find that the flux, or intensity, of the protons is approximately 0.0005 times the solar wind proton flux.
  • The data for the calculation was collected using the Chandrayaan-1 observations.
  • Small scale crustal magnetic fields on the Moon can also cause scattering of impinging solar wind protons back into space.

Citizen scientists find new planet using NASA telescope

News

  • Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, citizen scientists have discovered a world roughly twice the size of Earth located within its star’s habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where liquid water may exist on the planet’s surface.

Findings

  • The new world, known as K2-288Bb, could be rocky or could be a gas-rich planet similar to Neptune. Its size is rare among exoplanets – planets beyond our solar system.
  • Located 226 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, the planet lies in a stellar system known as K2-288, which contains a pair of dim, cool M-type stars separated by about 8.2 billion kilometers — roughly six times the distance between Saturn and the Sun.
  • The brighter star is about half as massive and large as the Sun, while its companion is about one-third the Sun’s mass and size. The new planet, K2-288Bb, orbits the smaller, dimmer star every 31.3 days.
  • The researchers searched Kepler data for evidence of transits, the regular dimming of a star when an orbiting planet moves across the star’s face.

49 elephants killed in Railway accidents between 2016-18: MoEFCC

News

  • In 2016, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC) released ‘Eco-friendly measures to mitigate impacts of linear infrastructure’, an advisory document for mitigating human-animal conflicts.
  • Despite this advisory, and many others issued by conservationists and organisations, deaths of wild animals in road and railway accidents have continued unabated.

Beyond News

  • The MoEFCC told the Rajya Sabha, that 49 elephants were killed in Railway accidents between 2016-18 (nine in 2015-16, 21 casualties in 2016-17 and 19 in 2017-18). In the same 3-year period, three tigers were killed in road accidents while eight tigers were mowed down by trains.
  • Three lions died in a train accident in the Amerli district of Gujarat in December 2018. Prior to this, 10 lions died in railway and road accidents between 2016-2018.
  • West Bengal and Assam together accounted for 37 out of the 49 deaths of elephants on train tracks across the country.
  • While the number of elephant casualties on railway tracks in West Bengal has fallen from five in 2015-16 to three in 2016-17 to two in 2017-18, the number of elephants dying in railway accidents in Assam have increased in the same period the northeastern State recorded three elephant deaths by accidents in 2015-16, which increased ten in 2016-17 and 14 in 2017-18.
  • Another component of infrastructure low hanging or sagging electric wires become a major threat to wildlife, particularly elephants. Between 2009 and 2017, 461 elephants have been electrocuted in different parts of the country. On January 12, there were reports of two electrocuted elephants in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district.

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