Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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National mission on natural language translation soon

News

• The Ministry of Electronics and IT will soon place before the Union Cabinet a ₹450 crore proposal for Natural Language Translation one of the key missions identified by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC).

Beyond News

• The proposal is part of the 100-day action plan charted out by MeitY.
• The national mission on natural language translation aims to make science and technology accessible to all by facilitating access to teaching and researching material bilingually in English and in one’s native Indian language.
• To achieve this, the government plans to leverage a combination of machine translation and human translation.
• The official said the Ministry had proposed an outlay of ₹450 crore for the mission over the next three-year period.
• The official said that to overcome the language barrier, the government planned to set up an ecosystem which involved the Central and State agencies and start-ups.
• Translation activities can also help generate employment for educated unemployed, the mission would help not just students but also teachers, authors, publishers, translation software developers and general readers.
• The PM-STIAC is an overarching body that identifies challenges in certain areas of science and technology. It then creates a road map to deal with these challenges and presents the recommendations to the Prime Minister.
• Besides natural language translation, other missions identified by the body includes Quantum Frontier, Artificial Intelligence, National Bio-diversity mission, electric vehicles, BioScience for Human Health and deep ocean exploration.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

At G20, India stands with developing world not U.S., Japan on 5G and data

News

• Indian Prime Minister and United States President Donald Trump came closer to resolving trade issues when they met in Osaka, but on technological issues such as data storage and 5G network, India placed itself across the divide from Japan and the U.S., and alongside leaders of BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa).

Beyond News

• The initiative for free flow of data, announced by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in January, came after the Reserve Bank of India’s guidelines mandating that the storage of all financial data, including by multinational companies, must be kept on servers in India.
• The move sparked protests from major companies such as Google, MasterCard, Visa and Amazon and the U.S. called it a major non-tariff barrier, adding to trade tensions between the countries.
• Trump hit out at countries like China and India for passing such norms.
• The United States opposes data localisation and policies, which have been used to restrict digital trade flows and violate privacy and intellectual property protections.
• According to its 5G rollout plan, India is preparing to begin technology trials in September, and while that deadline may be postponed, India has not yet decided on whether to include Huawei from the trials. If India drops the company from consideration, Beijing has made it clear it would protest the decision strongly.
• After the meeting, however, India and the U.S. only spoke of collaboration on R&D between their respective telecommunication industries, not on any specific outcomes with regard to Huawei.

Modi, Moon discuss ways to enhance trade ties

News

• Indian Prime Minister met South Korean President Moon Jae-in and discussed ways to enhance trade, economic and people-to-people relations.

Beyond News

• The two leaders met in this Japanese port city on the sidelines of the G-20 
• During their meeting, the two leaders expressed mutual desire to synergise India’s Act East Policy with South Korea’s New Southern Policy.
• The main focus of India’s Act East Policy is to shift the country’s trading focus from the west and neighbours to the booming South East Asian countries.
• The Moon administration’s ‘New Southern Policy’ focuses on South Korea’s development of its relations with Southeast Asia and ASEAN.

Lok Sabha passes Bill on Homoeopathy council

News

• The Lok Sabha passed the Homoeopathy Central Council (Amendment) Bill, 2019, which enables the government to extend the tenure of the Board of Governors for a further period of one year with effect from May 17, 2019.

Beyond News

• The day-to-day affairs of the Central Homoeopathy Council (CHC) had been entrusted with a Board of Governors comprising eminent and qualified homoeopathy doctors and eminent administrators till such time that the council was reconstituted.
• After 2014, 32 new colleges for homeopathy had been established and that to weed out malpractices in colleges, the ordinance had been issued.
• The requests for recognition for all the 237 colleges will be processed and the Ministry will make all efforts to improve the quality of homeopathy education.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Kerala on the verge of grave financial crisis

News

• The Centre has pushed the Kerala State government to the brink of a grave financial crisis by effecting a ₹6,000-crore cut in its annual borrowing limit for the current financial year.

Beyond News

• The decision that is applicable only to Kerala would put the funds-starved government in dire straits and could have a serious bearing on its routine functions. The State has been facing a resource crunch following a steep fall in revenue collection and soaring expenditure.
• The State government’s consistent demand to enhance its annual borrowing limit continues to remain a cry in the wilderness. The State would be constrained to resort to extreme steps to tide over the crisis and that would draw flak from its political opponents.
• While the revenue collection remains static at around 10%, the expenditure has been estimated at 16%. Since 2013-14, the revenue collection has been plummeting from 20% against a steady growth in expenditure.
• A variety of reasons, including the impact of the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax, are being cited as the prime reasons for the current resource crunch.
• The State had been looking forward to shore up its revenue through an amnesty scheme for collecting value-added tax arrears, by bolstering the enforcement to plug GST revenue leak and such others.
• But most of such initiatives had to be deferred once the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha election came into force and now a crisis is looming large over the State.
• Public account borrowing through Treasury Savings Bank was the prime option the State had in its ambit to weather such crises earlier. Once the Centre choked this route since 2016-17, the State finances have been gasping for a revival.

Elephants killed over 2,300 people in last five years: Environment Ministry

News

• Over 2,300 people in India were killed by elephants while tigers claimed over 200 lives in the last five years.

Beyond News

• Nearly 494 persons were killed by the elephants last year alone.
• 2,398 people have died since 2014 up to March 31, 2019 due to human-elephant conflict with West Bengal recording the maximum 403 deaths in last five years.
• West Bengal was closely followed by Nagaland where 397 persons were killed by the elephants while 349 people died in Jharkhand.
• As per the data, the number of human deaths by elephants too came down from 516 in 2017-18 to 494 in 2018-2019.
• According to the data, tiger-human conflict has killed 224 persons in India in the last five years with West Bengal once again recording the maximum number of human deaths in this case at 71.
• The data showed the number of humans killed by the big cats was lower in 2018 at 29 compared to 2017 when 44 people were killed by the tigers in the country.
• The management of forest and wildlife is the responsibility of concerned State governments and incidence of animal-human conflicts are reported in various parts of the country from time to time.
• The Ministry also listed out the steps taken to avoid human-wildlife conflicts.
• A scheme has been initiated to augment fodder and water for wild herbivores in protected/forest areas where poor habitat is known as the cause of significant human-wildlife conflict.
• Physical barriers such as barbed wire fence, solar-powered electric fence, bio-fencing using cactus, boundary wall and so on have been erected to prevent the entry of wild animals into crop field.
• There are 50 tiger reserves in India which are governed by Project Tiger which is administrated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).
• India is home to 70% of tigers in the world. In 2006, there were 1,411 tigers which increased to 1,706 in 2010 and 2,226 in 2014, according to the NTCA.
• As per the last census in 2017 by the Ministry, there were as many as 27,312 elephants in the country. A total of 75 elephants died in 2018 while a total of 373 elephants died between 2015 and 2018, the data added.

Of the total deaths in the country in 2018, 842 people died due to flood and heavy rainfall.

News

• ‘Disastrous’ weather events claimed 1,428 lives in the country in 2018, of which 842 people died due to flood and heavy rainfall, the government said on Friday.

Beyond News

• Of the 842, 112 people died due to floods and heavy rains during Cyclone Gaja that hit Tamil Nadu and Cyclone Titli that battered the Odisha coast.
• Uttar Pradesh recorded 590 deaths due to “disastrous” weather events, he said.
• Around 440 people died due to thunderstorm, dust storm and lightning in Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
• Nearly 135 people died due to cold wave in Uttar Pradesh. Eleven people died due to snow avalanche in Jammu and Kashmir.

Current account deficit tapers

News

• The country’s current account deficit (CAD) for the January-March period narrowed to 0.7% of the GDP, or $4.6 billion, compared with 1.8%, or $ 13 billion recorded during the same period of the previous year.
• The deficit narrowed due to a lower trade deficit.

Beyond News

• The current account deficit was $17.7 billion, or 2.7% of the GDP, in the preceding quarter.
• The contraction of the CAD on a year-on-year basis was primarily on account of a lower trade deficit at $35.2 billion as compared with $41.6 billion a year ago.
• Net services receipts increased by 5.8% year on year, mainly on the back of a rise in net earnings from telecommunications, computer and information services.
• While foreign portfolio investments recorded a net inflow of $9.4 billion, compared with $2.3 billion, on account of net purchases in both debt and equity markets, foreign direct investment at $6.4 billion during the January-March period was at the same level of the fourth quarter of the previous financial year.
• For the full financial year 2018-19, CAD increased to 2.1% of the GDP in 2018-19 from 1.8% in 2017-18 on the back of a widening trade deficit. The country’s trade deficit increased to $180.3 billion in 2018-19 from $160 billion in 2017-18.
• The country’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high of $426.41 billion for the week ended June 21, latest data from Reserve Bank of India showed.
• The previous high was attained on April 13, 2018 when it was $426.08 billion.
• During the week ended June 21, foreign exchange reserves swelled by a whopping $4.2 billion.
• The increase in foreign currency reserves is due to an increase in foreign currency assets of similar magnitude.

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