Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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Microplastic fibres found in groundwater

News

• Scientists have found micro plastics contaminating a groundwater source that accounts for 25% of the global drinking water supply.

Findings

• Microplastics are already known to contaminate the world’s surface waters, yet scientists have only just begun to explore their presence in groundwater systems.
• Fractured limestone aquifers are a groundwater source that accounts for 25% of the global drinking water supply.
• The study, identified microplastic fibres, along with a variety of medicines and household contaminants, in two aquifer systems in the U.S.
• Plastic in the environment breaks down into microscopic particles that can end up in the guts and gills of marine life, exposing the animals to chemicals in the plastic.
• As the plastics break down, they act like sponges that soak up contaminants and microbes and can ultimately work their way into our food supply.
• Groundwater flows through the cracks and voids in limestone, sometimes carrying sewage and runoff from roads, landfills and agricultural areas into the aquifers below.
• The researchers collected 17 groundwater samples from wells and springs 11 from a highly fractured limestone aquifer near the St Louis metropolitan area and six from an aquifer containing much smaller fractures in rural northwestern Illinois.
• All but one of the 17 samples contained microplastic particles, with a maximum concentration of 15.2 particles per litre from a spring in the St Louis area.
• The researchers identified a variety of household and personal health contaminants along with the microplastics, a hint that the fibres may have originated from household septic systems.
• It is estimated that 6.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic waste have been produced since the 1940s, and 79% of that is now in landfills or the natural environment.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

Pilot project on crop colonies on anvil

News

• The Telangana government is gearing up for a major policy initiative in its second term of making its oft-repeated maxim to make agriculture a festival and profitable to farmers, a reality in the near future.

Beyond News

• Enthused with the outcome of priority given to irrigation sector and revival of chain of tanks in its first term to provide water to one crore acres in the next three to four years, the State is now planning ahead to reap the benefits of expected boost in agricultural production in the coming years.
• The crop colonies will be created depending on the cropping pattern, soil type, water availability in various districts and also based on production and consumption matrix locally and at State level.
• The crop colonies and food processing units will work in tandem so that processed agricultural produce will get better price for the farmers.
• On the other hand, large-scale food processing units will be set up by the big entrepreneurs and industry players with high-end technology for processing and to extract various by-products.
• A separate food process policy will be formulated to incentivise those setting up food processing industries.
• The agriculture department already has a good database of farmers ,the implementation of Rythu Bandhu and Rythu Bhima schemes. The field staff will enrich the existing database further by collecting survey number wise information about the types of agriculture and horticulture crops grown and micro irrigation details.

Sri Lanka’s new India-funded train flagged off

News

• A new passenger train, funded by the Indian government, was inaugurated between the Sri Lankan capital Colombo and the northern city of Kankesanthurai.

Beyond News

• The new Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU), a 13-coach train set, was procured under Indian concessional financing by Sri Lanka Railways.
• The contract agreement for supply of six DMUs and 10 locomotives to the Sri Lanka Railways was signed in March 2017.
• The total contract is worth $ 100 million.
• India has so far committed lines of credit worth $ 1.3 billion for the development of Sri Lanka’s railways.

Non-communicable diseases top killers in South-East Asia: WHO

News

• Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) mainly cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes and cancer continue to be the top killers in the South-East Asia Region, claiming 8.5 million lives each year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Findings

• Containing the NCDs has been listed by the WHO as its health goal for this year along with reducing mortality related to air pollution and climate change, global influenza pandemic
• One third of these deaths are premature and occur before the age of 70, affecting economically productive individuals. The four ‘major’ NCDs are caused, to a large extent, by four modifiable behavioural risk factors: tobacco use, unhealthy diet, insufficient physical activity and harmful use of alcohol.
• The NCDs disproportionately affect the poor, impoverish families, and place a growing burden on health care systems.
• Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, are collectively responsible for over 70% of all deaths worldwide, or 41 million people. These include 15 million people dying prematurely, aged between 30 and 69.
• The paper indicates that eating fibre-rich foods reduces the incidence of coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer by 16% to 24%. A higher fibre intake is also associated with lower bodyweight, systolic blood pressure and total cholesterol when compared with lower intake.
• Doctors then recommend eat less and enjoy your food by eating slowly, fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables, avoid oversized portions which causes weight gain, at least half of your grains should be whole grains, limit consumption of food high in trans fats..

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

 ‘India can’t handle more tigers’

News

• While conservation efforts are aimed at increasing the tiger count in India, global experts and officials in the government suggest that India must also prepare for a new challenge of reaching the limits of its management capacity.

Beyond News

• Officially, India had 2,226 tigers as of 2014. An ongoing census is expected to reveal an update to these numbers. But head of the Global Tiger Forum, said that India’s current capacity to host tigers ranged from 2,500-3,000 tigers.
• Moreover, said another official, 25-35% of India’s tigers now lived outside protected reserves.
• With dwindling core forest as well as the shrinking of tiger corridors (strips of land that allow tigers to move unfettered across diverse habitat), there were several challenges alongside the traditional challenges of poaching and man-animal conflict to India’s success at tiger conservation. Recent attempts at translocating tigers to unpopulated reserves, such as Satkosia in Orissa, have ended badly, with one of the tigers dying.
• Overall, given the low availability of prey in some reserves, this is the capacity that can be supported. However, there are vast tracts of potential tiger habitat that can be used to improve prey density, develop tiger corridors and therefore support a much larger population.
• Since 2006, the WII has been tasked with coordinating the tiger estimation exercise. The once-in-four-years exercise calculated, in 2006, that India had only 1,411 tigers. This rose to 1,706 in 2010 and 2,226 in 2014 on the back of improved conservation measures and new estimation methods.

India gears up for drone revolution

News

• In a major step towards drone revolution in India, Andhra Pradesh became the country’s first state to pilot the newly launched ‘Advanced Drone Operators Toolkit’, an open source guide for governments wanting to scale drone delivery.

Beyond News

• The state government announced at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Summit 2019 that it will start testing the policy frameworks developed in the new toolkit to enable state-wide drone delivery operations.
• The open source guide from the WEF, which describes itself as an international organisation for public-private cooperation, was launched at its annual meeting.
• It has been developed after extensive collaboration with the governments of Rwanda and Switzerland and leveraging the work of the Drone Innovators Network. It is the first user manual for governments looking to roll out socially impactful, advanced drone operations.
• Now, governments can learn from the real-world success of leading drone delivery projects in Africa and Europe to develop their own national oversight. Through comparative analysis of shared lessons, learned by governments and private players, this toolkit means governments don’t have to start from scratch and can begin societally important, socially responsible operations.

Mystery orbits in outer solar system not caused by ‘Planet Nine’: Study

News

• The strange orbits of some objects in the outermost reaches of our solar system are not shaped by the hypothesised ‘Planet Nine’, but can be explained by the gravitational force of small bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, scientists say.

Findings

• The alternative explanation to the so-called ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis by researchers proposes a disc made up of small icy bodies with a combined mass as much as ten times that of Earth.
• It is the first such theory which is able to explain the significant features of the observed orbits while accounting for the mass and gravity of the other eight planets in our solar system.
• Neptune and the other giant planets gravitationally influence the objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond, collectively known as trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), which encircle the Sun on nearly-circular paths from almost all directions.
• The ‘Planet Nine’ hypothesis suggests that to account for the unusual orbits of these TNOs, there would have to be another planet, believed to be about ten times more massive than Earth, lurking in the distant reaches of the solar system and ‘shepherding’ the TNOs in the same direction through the combined effect of its gravity and that of the rest of the solar system.

Protect plantations and forests to minimise conflict

News

• Acacia and eucalyptus plantations are notorious for the ecological problems they cause.
• Yet, in southwest Karnataka, these monocultures have become crucial elephant habitats and need to be protected along with natural forest patches to minimise human elephant conflict, suggests a study.

Beyond News

• In Karnataka’s Hassan and Madikeri, a landscape consisting of plantations (teak, coffee, acacia and eucalyptus), paddy fields and small, fragmented forest patches human–elephant conflict is high. Reacting to this, authorities removed 22 elephants from the area in 2014. However, elephants from habitats nearby colonized the area again.
• They first tracked daily elephant movement (using direct observation and indirect signs such as dung). With this, they mapped the intensity of use of each village by elephants. This revealed that the large mammals were present across the landscape during the first year.
• The team found a high concentration of elephant presence in the northern part of the region in the second year. According to them, the logging of trees in abandoned coffee estates in the central zone, and the installation of barriers around these estates, clustered elephant presence in the north. This increased human–elephant conflict here, revealed an analysis of crop damage incidents and human casualties.
• The team also mapped elephant distribution across different habitat types (such as reserved forests, agricultural fields and monocultures of acacia and eucalyptus) to study habitat use. During the day, elephants preferred monoculture refuges (of acacia, teak and eucalyptus) and forest fragments, and avoided other habitats including coffee and human habitations.
• But during the night, they used coffee plantations and agricultural fields the most. Seasons too played a role: while elephants used forests and coffee plantations more during the dry season, they frequented agricultural fields in the wet season.
• Across the years, while the elephants’ use of monoculture refuges and coffee increased, their use of forest fragments drastically decreased (from 15% to 2%).

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