Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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India, Japan sign $75 billion currency swap agreement

News

• India and Japan signed a currency swap agreement worth $75 billion during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan, the government announced .

Beyond News

• The Prime Ministers of India and Japan, building on great friendship between the two countries and to further strengthen and widen the depth and diversity of economic cooperation, agreed during Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Japan, to conclude a Bilateral Currency Swap Agreement for an amount of $75 billion.
• A currency swap typically involves the exchange of interest and sometimes of principal in one currency for the same in another currency. Interest payments are exchanged at fixed dates through the life of the contract.
• It is considered to be a foreign exchange transaction and is not required by law to be shown on a company’s balance sheet.
• This swap arrangement particularly reflects the depth of mutual trust and understanding, personal relationship and warmth between the two leaders built over many years.
• The currency swap agreement, was an important measure in improving the confidence in the Indian market and that it would not only enable the agreed amount of capital being available to India, but it will also bring down the cost of capital for Indian entities while accessing the foreign capital market.
• With this arrangement in place, prospects of India would further improve in tapping foreign capital for country’s developmental needs. This facility will enable the agreed amount of foreign capital being available to India for use as and when the need arises.

Delhi tops national charts in bad air quality

News

• Fourteen out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India as per figures compiled and released earlier this year by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Findings

• Climate Trends, an Indian group working on environmental issues picked up the same 14 cities to analyse the CPCB data in summer and winter months for a comparative analysis just to put it in context with the WHO children’s health report released which notes that 93% of the world’s children under 15 years breathe polluted air.
• It says Delhi tops the charts of bad air quality nationally.
• The report says India faces the highest air pollution-related mortality and disease burden in the world with more than 2 million deaths occurring prematurely every year, accounting for 25% of the global deaths due to poor air quality.
• It adds that apart from Delhi, in most cities the online monitoring was happening with less than 4 monitoring stations and Srinagar had none. Delhi has close to 40 monitoring stations that display data online every day.
• Most cities, unlike Delhi do not have an emergency response plan to tackle air pollution. While some of the cities like Patna and Varanasi have recently formulated action plans, there are none in place to issue advisories or mitigate the pollution at the source level instantly as in the case of the Graded Response Action Plan.
• Meanwhile the summer-time pollution too this year was rampant as the regions around Delhi and NCR experienced dust storms coupled with problems of pollution at the local level.

States of poverty: an exploration of the Multidimensional Poverty Index

News

• While overall poverty in India has come down in 2016 compared to 2006, the progress has been uneven among States and communities.

Beyond News

• A look at the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), calculated by Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and UNDP reveal the variations.
• MPI is a measure that takes into account the incidence of poverty and the extent of deprivation. Going beyond just monetary measures, the MPI takes into account several factors.
• India’s MPI is lower than the global average of 0.159 and the South Asian countries, but is higher (worse) than BRICS countries (excluding Russia). The MPI has been calculated for 105 developing economies.
• India’s MPI stood at 0.121 in 2016, half of what it was in 2006. States above the trend line have reduced poverty at a better rate than India’s average.
• Among districts, Alirajpur (0.402) and Jhabua (0.393) districts in Madhya Pradesh and Shrawasti (0.393) in Uttar Pradesh had the highest MPI. The worst 10 districts were in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
• The lowest MPI was in Kottayam district, Kerala where the MPI stood at 0, indicating no deprivation.
• The MPI has gone down across communities, but it is more than double among Scheduled Tribes compared to Others.

A.P. ranked first, with 10.5% growth

News

• Andhra Pradesh has achieved the number one rank in the country with an average growth of 10.5% during the last four years.

Beyond News

• According to the State Planning Department, the average growth in the country stood at 7.3% during the last four years.
• Probably, Andhra Pradesh is the only State to clock the double-digit growth rate.
• While Telangana has slipped to the second place, Maharashtra is ranked sixth. Punjab is placed 14th and Karnataka third.
• The growth in Andhra Pradesh was 9.2% in 2014-15, the year of bifurcation. Later, it was ranked second. In the subsequent year, it achieved a double-digit growth of 10.6% though its rank had slipped to the 4th place.
• The Per Capita Income (PCI) also increased by more than ₹40,000 during 2017-18 in the State, which started its journey with “the lowest PCI of ₹93,903” in the southern States.
• The PCI crossed the ₹1 lakh mark in 2015-16. The trend has been upward since then.
• Compared with the all-India PCI of ₹1.13 lakh in 2017-18, there is a quantum jump in the State’s PCI in 2017-18 and 2015-16.

526 Pakistanis await Indian citizenship

News

• Nearly half the applications pending for Indian citizenship are from Pakistanis, according to a Home Ministry database. Out of the 1,084 applicants who applied for Indian citizenship before 2011, as many as 526 are from Pakistan.

Beyond News

• There were 103 applications pending from Afghanistan, followed by 72 from Iran and 41 from Bangladesh. As many as 30 applicants are Malaysian, 24 British, seven Tibetans, 13 Sri Lankans and eight Chinese.
• The power to grant citizenship lies with the Home Ministry.
• The decision is taken after examining verifications reports from the State governments and the Intelligence Bureau. Indian citizenship is acquired by birth, descent, registration and naturalisation.
• A parliamentary committee is already examining the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 that proposes citizenship to members of six persecuted minorities Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who came to India before 2014.
• Under the Citizenship Act, 1955, one of the grounds to acquire citizenship by naturalisation is that the applicant must have resided in India during the past 12 months and for 11 out of 14 years in India.
• The Bill proposes to relax the duration from 11 to six years for persons belonging to the six persecuted religions.
• Since 2011, nearly 30,000 Pakistanis have been granted long-term visas, a precursor for citizenship, and currently 1,500 such applications are pending.
• The Ministry has also informed the States that Pakistanis married to Indians, who had applied for citizenship under Section 5 (1) (C) of the Citizenship Act will only be considered on production of marriage certificates issued by the Registrar of Marriage. It informed the States that marriage certificate issued in Pakistan were not valid.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Tigers dwindling: just six sub-species remain, says study

News

• Six different sub-species of tigers exist today, scientists confirmed on October 25, amid hopes the findings will boost efforts to save the fewer than 4,000 free-range big cats that remain in the world.

Findings

• The six include the Bengal tiger, Amur tiger, South China tiger, Sumatran tiger, Indochinese tiger and Malayan tiger.
• Three other tiger subspecies have already gone extinct: the Caspian, Javan and Bali tigers.
• Key threats to tigers’ survival include habitat loss and poaching. How to best conserve the species and encourage both captive and wild breeding has been a matter of debate among scientists, in part because of divisions over how many tiger sub-species exist.
• Researchers analyzed the complete genomes of 32 tiger specimens in order to confirm they fall into six genetically distinct groups.
• Researchers found very little evidence of breeding among different tiger populations. This low genetic diversity indicates that each subspecies has a unique evolutionary history.
• It also sets tigers apart from other big cats like jaguars, which more commonly intermix across entire continents.

Elite China security team arriving

News

• A delegation of a Chinese group that takes care of the security of the top seven members of the nation’s leadership will visit New Delhi in November, as security ties between India and China begin to expand.

Beyond News

• The wing is in charge of the security of seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, headed by President Xi Jinping.
• The delegation will hold talks with India’s elite Special Protection Group (SPG).
• The Chinese team’s visit comes after Zhao Kezhi, Minister of Public Security, concluded a visit to India earlier this month.
• The Indian side is especially keen on learning from Chinese experiences in tackling cybercrimes, as part of a broader security interaction with China.

Mysterious stripes on Saturn’s moon Dione

News

• Mysterious straight bright stripes have been discovered on Saturn’s moon Dione, scientists said.

Findings

• The origins of these linear virgae or stripes are most likely caused by the draping of surface materials like material from Saturn’s rings, passing comets, or co-orbital moons Helene and Polydeuces, according to the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
• The evidence preserved in the linear virgae has implications for the orbital evolution and impact processes within the Saturnian system.
• The interaction of Dione’s surface and exogenic material has implications for its habitability and provides evidence for the delivery of ingredients that may contribute the habitably of ocean worlds in general.
• Dione’s linear virgae are generally long (10 to 100s of kilometers), narrow (less than 5 kilometers) and brighter than the surrounding terrains, researchers said.
• The stripes are parallel, appear to overlie other features and are unaffected by topography, suggesting they are among the youngest surfaces on Dione.

Signs of super massive black holes merging spotted

News

• Astronomers have found evidence for a large number of double supermassive black holes, the likely precursors of gigantic black hole merging events.

Beyond News

• This confirms the current understanding of cosmological evolution that galaxies and their associated black holes merge over time, forming bigger and bigger galaxies and black holes.
• Supermassive black holes emit powerful jets. When supermassive binary black holes orbit, it causes the jet emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy to periodically change its direction.
• The fact that the most powerful jets are associated with binary black holes could have important consequences for the formation of stars in galaxies; stars form from cold gas, jets heat this gas and thus suppress the formation of stars.
• A jet that always heads in the same direction only heats a limited amount of gas in its vicinity. However, jets from binary black holes change direction continuously.
• Therefore, they can heat much more gas, suppressing the formation of stars much more efficiently, and thus contributing towards keeping the number of stars in galaxies within the observed limits, the astronomers explained.

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