Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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Uttar Pradesh Cabinet nod for Faizabad name change

News

• The Uttar Pradesh cabinet approved a proposal to change the name of Faizabad district to Ayodhya, a week after Chief Minister made the announcement on the eve of Diwali.

Beyond News

• Along with the district, Faizabad division has also been renamed Ayodhya. The districts of Ambedkar Nagar, Barabanki, Amethi, Faizabad (now Ayodhya) and Sultanpur comprise the administrative division and the contours will remain the same.
• The government note on the name change said the proposal of the district magistrate was “justified” on the basis of “facts” that Ayodhya had been the capital of the legendary “Ishvaku dynasty” and the birthplace of Lord Ram.
• The State cabinet also changed the name of Allahabad Division to Prayagraj Division, weeks after changing the name of the district.
• The Allahabad Division comprises of Allahabad, Kaushambi, Pratapgarh and Fatehpur districts.

New index to check ease of doing agri-business

News

• States may soon start receiving extra funding for the Agriculture Ministry’s flagship schemes on the basis of their performance in encouraging agri-business, especially with regard to marketing, land and governance reforms.

Beyond News

• The Centre expects to roll out a new Ease of Doing Agri-Business Index early next year, which will rank the States on the basis of such reforms, as well as their investment in agriculture, increased productivity, reduction of input costs, and risk mitigation measures.
• NITI Aayog already brings out a Agricultural Marketing and Farm Friendly Reforms Index, rating States on their implementation of such reforms. In the initial edition of that Index in 2016, Maharashtra stood first in the rankings, followed by Gujarat.
• The proposed index has a wider ambit, but the focus is still on reforms, with marketing reforms (25%) and governance and land reforms (20%) carrying almost half of the weight of the parameters in its scoring system.
• Another major parameter which States will be rated on is their success in reducing the cost of farm inputs (20%) by distributing soil health cards and encouraging organic farming and micro-irrigation. Risk mitigation measures such as crop and livestock insurance carry a 15% weightage, while increased productivity and investment in agriculture carry a 10% weight each.
• The parameters are process-oriented, and are meant to evolve as and when new reforms or initiatives are proposed, says the concept note.
• As agriculture is a State subject, the success of policies and reform initiatives proposed at the Centre is dependent on implementation by the States.
• An online dashboard to track State performances will be developed by the year-end, and a national level workshop to roll out the Index will be held in January 2019.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

NASA releases new image of Jupiter’s swirling clouds

News

• NASA’s Juno spacecraft has beamed back a stunning image of Jupiter, showing the gas giant’s multitude of colourful, swirling clouds.

Beyond News

• The image captures a several bright-white ‘pop-up’ clouds as well as an anticyclonic storm, known as a white oval, in Jupiter’s dynamic North Temperate Belt. The image was taken as the spacecraft performed its 16th close flyby of Jupiter.
• At the time, Juno was about 7,000 kilometers from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstadt and Sean Doran used data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager to create a colour-enhanced image of the planet’s cloud.
• Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation.
• As the primary example of a giant planet in the solar system, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars.
• Juno will investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, and observe the planet’s auroras. Data from Juno will help to understand how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system.

IOR to get information fusion centre

News

• The way forward for the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, a multinational naval forum in the Indian Ocean Region which is in its 10th year, is to translate the deliberations so far into ‘interactions at sea’.

Beyond News

• As part of the efforts to ‘practicalise’ the interactions, an information fusion centre (IFC) for the Indian Ocean Region would be launched by India’s Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
• India is currently chairing the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS) working group on information sharing and interoperability.
• Efforts had already begun to bring operational relevance to the interactions at IONS, with a multilateral search and rescue exercise at sea coordinated by Bangladesh, chairing the working group on SAR, last year.
• India, in the chair of the working group on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), hosted a table top exercise at Visakhapatnam. This was preceded by the preparation of a guidebook on HADR and a listing of the assets possessed by the members for mobilisation during disasters.
• This, along with joint patrols with several nations, EEZ patrols carried out on a regular basis for countries such as the Maldives with their personnel on board Indian ships, bilateral and multilateral exercises, has won the Indian Navy a huge amount of goodwill and trust in the region and beyond.

Jumbo population doubles in Andhra Pradesh

News

• The population of elephants has doubled in Andhra Pradesh in the past decade, despite the pachyderms taking the lives of 13 people in the forests of north Andhra Pradesh since early 2008.

Beyond News

• According to the Elephant Division of the MoEFCC, a total of 28 elephants was reported in A.P in 2007, 41 in 2012 and 65 in 2017.
• Given the regular movements of a few herds between Andhra forests and the ones in Odisha and Karnataka, the number of total elephants was estimated between 55 and 65 as per the ‘direct sighting’ method of the census.
• The census is normally carried out once in four years, the next census will come out in 2022.

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