IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-01

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India open defecation-free, says Narendra Modi

News

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, declared the country open defecation free as a success of the government’s toilet initiative.

Railway cleanliness survey: Jaipur, Jodhpur, Durgapura emerge top three clean stations.

• Three stations in Rajasthan bagged top honours but none in the national capital figured in the top 10 list of railways’ cleanliness survey.Jaipur, Jodhpur and Durgapura were the top three ranking railway stations among 720 stations.
• Among the 109 suburban stations assessed, Andheri, Virar and Naigaon were the top three.
• The North Western Railway, which covers a route length of more than 5,761 km across parts of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana, topped the list of zones, followed by South East Central Railway and East Central Railway.
• The railways have been conducting third-party audit and cleanliness ranking of 407 major stations annually since 2016. This year, the survey was expanded to include 720 stations and suburban stations were also included for the first time.
• Evaluation of green efforts have also been added to the report.
• In the Station Cleanliness Survey, it was found that among the non-suburban stations, 2% have scored above 90% of the total score whereas 5% stations scored below 50%.
• The survey also found that out of 720 stations, 25% had provision for water conservation, 18% of them had mechanism for rainwater harvesting and nine per cent had provision for water reuse.
• Only 2% stations had green certification while 29% had provision for on-site renewable energy using solar panels. The survey also revealed that 66% of the stations were using LED bulbs.

IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-02

U.S. warns allies of sanctions risk

News

• On a day when Indian External Affairs Minister said “reasonably convinced” of persuading the U.S. to accept India’s decision on the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defence system, U.S. officials warned that any such purchases may risk sanctions.

Russian S-400 missile defence system

• India agreed to purchase the surface-to-air missile system from Russia in 2018 for about $5.2 billion, risking sanctions under the 2017 U.S. CAATSA law. Sanctions could kick in when the first payment for the equipment is made, unless the U.S. President grants a waiver.
• S. government officials have repeatedly said, in the Indian context, that countries should not assume that waivers are automatic.

Single-use plastics won’t be allowed inside monuments, says Tourism Minister

News

• Tourism Minister announced that single-use plastics will not be allowed on the premises of historical monuments or within 100 metres of them.
• The announcement comes days after Prime Minister appealed to the nation to shun single-use plastics.

After Maradu, Kerala to conduct survey to map all CRZ violations in coastal districts

News

• A massive exercise to list all violations of Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) norms in the State covering the 10 coastal districts will begin shortly.

Violations

• It is for the first time that an exercise, which is the fallout of the Maradu illegal flats case, of this scale is being planned in the State.
• The exercise, which began on the directive of the Supreme Court, had led to generating data on around 5,000 suspected cases of illegal land-use modifications like removal and destruction of mangroves, reclamation of filtering ponds and wetlands, and construction in wetland areas.
• Satellite images have been used for the process. However, the local bodies that were asked to physically verify the changes sat on the directions, thus defeating the initiative.
• This time, the Environment Department plans to compile the list of violators with the help of the district committees of the Kerala Coastal Zone Management Authority (KCZMA).
• The CRZ violations in Kasaragod, Kannur, Malappuram, Kozhikode, Thrissur, Ernakulam, Kottayam, Alappuzha, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts will be listed under the initiative.
• It is estimated that 245 village panchayats, 36 municipalities and six Corporations of the State come under the CRZ regime.

Satellite imageries

• The survey numbers of the holdings that come under the CRZ areas have also been included in the plan. While the local bodies and the district committees could physically verify the buildings that have come up in the CRZ area, satellite imageries could be used to identify the land use changes.

IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-03

Border Roads Organisation to use plastic to build roads along Sino-India border

News

• The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) has started a pilot project to build roads using plastic waste and environment-friendly technology, primarily along the Sino-India border.

Build roads using plastic

• Six roads in the States of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura have been identified for construction using waste plastic material and work on this pilot project has commenced.
• Tripura has a border with Bangladesh while the other five States share border with China.
• The BRO constructs roads in many areas that are in ecologically sensitive zones where restrictions have been imposed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on the use of construction materials like local aggregates and sand.
• To overcome this problem, BRO has adopted innovative modern technology involving use of non-toxic chemicals, polymers, enzymes etc for soil stabilisation to construct road pavements without depending on conventional materials like stone aggregates and sand.

Border personnel meeting between India and China held at Nathula Pass ‘with lot of warmth’

News

• A border personnel meeting between senior military officials of India and China on the latter’s National Day was held “with a lot of warmth” at Nathula Pass.

Border personnel meeting

• Troops of India and China were locked in the 73-day standoff in Doklam, just 56 km from the Nathula Pass in 2017 after the Indian side stopped the construction of a road in the disputed area by the Chinese Army.
• Bhutan and China have a dispute over Doklam.
• Besides Nathula Pass, India and China held border personnel meetings at four other places, including Kibithu in Arunachal Pradesh and Chishul in Ladakh.

Scientists excavate ‘ancient river’ in Uttar Pradesh

News

• The Union Water Ministry has excavated an old, dried-up river in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) that linked the Ganga and Yamuna rivers.

Aim: to develop it as a potential groundwater recharge source. Groundwater recharge

• The “ancient buried river” is around 4 km wide, 45 km long and consisted of a 15-metre-thick layer buried under soil.
• The discovery was made during a helicopter-borne geophysical survey covering the Prayagraj and Kaushambi region in Uttar Pradesh.
• These paleochannels reveal the course of rivers that have ceased to exist.
• The newly discovered river, was a “buried paleochannel that joins the Yamuna river at Durgapur village, about 26 km south of the current Ganga-Yamuna confluence at Prayagraj.

Bandipur ban

News

• The movement of traffic between the Kerala-Karnataka border through the Bandipur Tiger Reserve is banned from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. to avoid any disturbance to wildlife.

For seven days now, activists of various youth organisations are on a relay hunger strike. Farmers and local people, including women, in the area, took out a march to demand round-the-clock connectivity through the forest stretch of National Highway (NH) 766.

Humans pollute more than volcanoes: study

News

• Human activity churns out up to 100 times more planet-warming carbon each year as all the volcanoes on Earth, says a decade-long study.

Human activity

• The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a 500-strong international team of scientists, released a series of papers outlining how carbon is stored, emitted and reabsorbed by natural and manmade processes.
• They found that manmade carbon dioxide emissions drastically outstrip the contribution of volcanoes which belch out gas and are often fingered as a major climate change contributor to current warming rates.
• Manmade emissions in 2018 alone topped 37 gigatonnes.
• Modern manmade emissions were the “same magnitude” as past carbon shocks that precipitated mass extinction.
• By comparison, the CO2 released annually by volcanoes hovers around 0.3 and 0.4 gigatonnes roughly 100 times less than manmade emissions.

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