Current Affairs Question - July 2020

Explanation :

• The Union government on July 28, 2020, launched the Green-Ag Project in Mizoram, to reduce emissions from agriculture and ensure sustainable agricultural practices.
• Other states where the project will be implemented include Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Uttarakhand.

About the Project

• It is funded by the Global Environment Facility, while the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation, and Farmers’ Welfare (DAC&FW) is the national executing agency.
• Other key players involved in its implementation are Food and Agricultre Organization (FAO) and the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC).
• The project seeks to integrate biodiversity, climate change and sustainable land management objectives and practices into Indian agriculture.
• The pilot project is supposed to end on March 31, 2026, in all states.

Targets to Achieve

• Achieve multiple global environmental benefits in at least 1.8 million hectares (ha) of land in five landscapes, with mixed land use systems.
• Bring at least 104,070 ha of farms under sustainable land and water management.
• Ensure 49 million Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) sequestered or reduced through sustainable land use and agricultural practices.

Explanation :

• Located in the Amaravati district of Maharashtra,Melaghat Tiger Reserve is on the southern offshoot of the Satpura Hill Range in Central India, called Gavilgarh Hill.
• The Tapti Riverand the Gawilgadh ridge of the Satpura Range forms the boundaries of the reserve.
• Melghat means 'meeting of the ghats', which describes the area as a large tract of unending hills and ravines scarred by jagged cliffs and steep climbs.
• It was declared a tiger reserve in 1974. It was among the first nine tiger reserves notified in 1973-74 under Project Tiger.
• It was the first tiger reserve of Maharashtra.
• The forest is tropical dry deciduous in nature, dominated by teak (Tectonagrandis).
• The reserve is a catchment area for five major rivers: the Khandu, Khapra, Sipna, Gadga and Dolar. All these rivers are tributaries of river Tapti.
• The main fauna found here are Bengal tiger, Indian leopard, sloth bear, Ussuri dhole, Indian jackal, sambar, gaur, barking deer, nilgai, chital, chausingha, ratel, flying squirrel, wild boar, langur, rhesus monkey, porcupine, pangolin, mouse deer, python, otter, and blacknaped hare.

Explanation :

Tabo Monastery

• Also known as Tabo Chos-Khor Monastery, it is situated in the Spiti valley above Tabo village on the left bank of the Spiti River, Himachal Pradesh.
• It was founded in 996 CE in the Tibetan ‘year of the Fire Ape’ by the Tibetan Buddhist Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo (Mahauru Ramabhadra).
• Tabo is noted for being the oldest continuously operating Buddhist enclave in both India and the Himalayas

Nako Monastery

• Nako is a village in the Himalayas of northern India, located near the Indo-China border in the Trans-Himalayan region of Kinnaur district in Himachal Pradesh.
• Nako Monastery is located in the village as well as several other Buddhist chortens.
• It is also known as 'Lotsava Jhakang' meaning "complex of the translator"named so in honour of Rinchen Zangpo who translated Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit to the Tibetan language.

Alchi Monastery

• Alchi Monastery or Alchi Gompa is a Buddhist monastery, known more as a monastic complex of temples in Alchi village in the Leh District, under the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council of the Ladakh Union Territory.
• Dukhang or Assembly Hall and the Main Temple (gTsug-lag-khang), which is a three-storied temple called the Sumtseg (gSum-brtsegs), are built in the Kashmiri style as seen in many monasteries; the third temple is called the Manjushri Temple (Jam-dpal lHa-khang).

Explanation :

• Bal Gangadhar Tilak (23 July 1856 – 1 August 1920), born as Keshav Gangadhar Tilak, was an Indian nationalist, teacher, and an independence activist.
• He was one of the Lal-Bal-Pal triumvirate.
• He was also conferred with the title of "Lokmanya", which means "accepted by the people (as their leader).Mahatma Gandhi called him "The Maker of Modern India".
• He was one of the first advocates of Swaraj or self-rule.
• He started two weeklies, ‘Kesari’ (The Lion) in Marathi and ‘Mahratta’ in English in 1880–81 with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar as the first editor.
• Both the newspapers actively propagated the cause of national freedom and stressed on making Indians aware to be self-reliant.
• Tilak helped found the All India Home Rule League in 1916–18, with G. S. Khaparde and Annie Besant. He started his Home Rule League in Maharashtra, Central Provinces, and Karnataka and Berar region.
• In 1903, Tilak wrote the book "The Arctic Home in the Vedas". In it, he argued that the Vedas could only have been composed in the Arctics, and the Aryan bards brought them south after the onset of the last ice age.
• Later, he wrote "Shrimadh Bhagvad Gita Rahasya" in prison at Mandalay – the analysis of 'Karma Yoga' in the Bhagavad Gita, which is known to be a gift of the Vedas and the Upanishads.

Explanation :

• Recently, the government has operationalized the first Mega Food Park (MFP) of Mizoram i.e. Zoram Mega Food Park.
• It has been set up under the ‘Mega Food Park Scheme’.
• It is located in Khamrang village in Kolasib District, Mizoram.

Benefits

• It will boost the North-East Region’s potential to become an organic destination of the world due to its rich agricultural and horticultural produce.

Explanation :

• Also known as Mithila painting due to its origins in the Mithila region of India and Nepal, Madhubani is a traditional Indian folk art made on canvas, cloth or cow dung washed hand paper.
• This painting is done with a variety of tools, including fingers, twigs, brushes, nib-pens, and matchsticks and using natural dyes and pigments.
• The paintings were traditionally done on freshly plastered mud walls and floors of huts, but now they are also done on cloth, handmade paper and canvas.
• Madhubani paintings are made from the paste of powdered rice.

Style

• Madhubani art has five distinctive styles: Bharni, Kachni, Tantrik, Godna and Kohbar. In the 1960s Bharni, Kachni and Tantrik styles were mainly done by Brahman and Kayasth women.

Color

• The colors are derived mostly from plants.

Themes

• The themes of these paintings are chiefly nature and mythological events.It revolves around Hindu deities like Krishna, Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga, Rama, and Saraswati.
• The nature-related themes revolve around the Sun, the Moon, and sacred plants such as basil. There are some paintings with themes based on court scenes and social events.
• If any unfilled space is left after painting the central theme, it is filled up with the motifs of animals, birds, flowers or geometric patterns.

Explanation :

• Plea bargaining refers to a person charged with a criminal offence negotiating with the prosecution for a lesser punishment than what is provided in law by pleading guilty to a less serious offence.
• It primarily involves pre-trial negotiations between the accused and the prosecutor. It may involve bargaining on the charge or in the quantum of sentence.
• The Justice Malimath Committee2000) on reforms of the criminal justice system endorsed the various recommendations of the Law Commission with regard to plea bargaining.
• It was introduced in 2006 as part of a set of amendments to the CrPC as Chapter XXI-A, containing Sections 265A to 265L.

Circumstances in which it is allowed

• Cases for which the practice is allowed are limited.
• Only someone who has been charge-sheeted for an offence that does not attract the death sentence, life sentence or a prison term above seven years can make use of the scheme under Chapter XXI-A.
• It is also applicable to private complaints of which a criminal court has taken cognizance.
• Other categories of cases that cannot be disposed of through plea bargaining are those that involve offences affecting the “socio-economic conditions” of the country or committed against a woman or a child below 14.

Benefits

• Prolonged incarceration of undertrials without any progress and overcrowding of prisons were also other factors that may be cited in support of reducing pendency of cases and decongesting prisons.
• Moreover, it may help offenders make a fresh start in life.

Explanation :

• Dibru-Saikhowa is a National Park as well as a Biosphere Reserve situated in the south bank of the river Brahmaputra in the extreme east of Assam.
• The forest type of Dibru-Saikhowa comprises of semi-evergreen forests, deciduous forests, littoral and swamp forests and patches of wet evergreen forests.
• A modern feral horse population (Janghalighura) is found in the National Park.
• It has herd of approximately 79 bright coloured wild horses in India.

Explanation :

• On 20th July, 2020, Chhattisgarh government launched GodhanNyayYojana.
• The scheme aims to put money in the pockets of people living in rural areas and also solve the problem of stray cattle.

Details

• Under the scheme, the Chhattisgarh government will purchase cow dung at the rate of Rs 2 per kg.
• This scheme will turn cow dung into a profitable commodity.
• The scheme also aims to make cow rearing economically profitable and to prevent open grazing in the state, as well as help with the problem of stray animals on roads and in urban areas.

Benefits

• The scheme will generate additional income and increase employment opportunities.
• The government will procure cow dung and prepare vermicompost in order to move towards organic farming.
• Distribution of vermicompost fertilizer to farmers will be done as a commodity loan by cooperative societies, banks.

Explanation :

• A meta material is any material engineered to have a property that is not found in naturally occurring materials.
• They are made from assemblies of multiple elements fashioned from composite materials such as metals and plastics.
• The materials are usually arranged in repeating patterns, at scales that are smaller than the wavelengths of the phenomena they influence.
• These derive their properties not from the properties of the base materials, but from their newly designed structures.

Applications

• Potential applications of meta materials are diverse and include optical filters, medical devices, remote aerospace applications, sensor detection and infrastructure monitoring, smart solar power management, crowd control, radomes, high-frequency battlefield communication and lenses for high-gain antennas, improving ultrasonic sensors, and even shielding structures from earthquakes.
• Meta materials offer the potential to create super-lenses. Such a lens could allow imaging below the diffraction limit that is the minimum resolution that can be achieved by conventional glass lenses.

Explanation :

• Founded in 2002, the Global Fund is a partnership designed to accelerate the end of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as epidemic.
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates was one of the first private foundations among many bilateral donors to provide seed money for the partnership.
• Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of AIDS, TB, and malaria prevention, treatment, and care programs.
• The Global Fund is a financing mechanism rather than an implementing agency.
• Programs are implemented by in-country partners such as ministries of health, while the Global Fund secretariat, whose staff only have an office in Geneva, monitor the programs.

Explanation :

• Article 72 and Article 161 empowers the President and the Governors respectively, the power to grant pardons, reprieves, respites or remissions of punishment or to suspend, remit or commute the sentence of any person convicted of any offence.
• Remission: It implies reducing the period of the sentence without changing its character. For example, a sentence of rigorous imprisonment for five years may be remitted to rigorous imprisonment for one year.
• Respite: It denotes awarding a lesser sentence in place of one originally awarded due to some special fact, such as the physical disability of a convict or the pregnancy of a woman offender.
• Reprieve: It implies a stay of the execution of a sentence (especially that of death) for a temporary period. Its purpose is to enable the convict to have time to seek pardon or commutation from the President.

Explanation :

P-waves

• These are the first waves detected by seismographs (instruments used to detect and record earthquakes).
• These are longitudinal waves which means they vibrate along the same direction as they travel.
• Examples of longitudinal waves include sound waves and waves in a stretched spring.

S-waves

• These waves arrive at the detector after primary waves.
• These are transverse waves which means they vibrate at a right angle to the direction in which they travel.
• Examples of transverse waves include light waves and water waves.

Difference

• Both types of seismic waves can be detected near the earthquake centre but only P-waves can be detected on the other side of the Earth.
• P-waves can travel through solids and liquids (since they are longitudinal waves) whereas S-waves can only travel through solids (as they are transverse waves).
• This means the liquid part of the core blocks the passage of S-waves.

Explanation :

• Chabahar Port is a seaport in Chabahar located on the Makran coast of Sistan and Balochistan Province, next to the Gulf of Oman and at the mouth of Strait of Hormuz.
• It serves as Iran's only oceanic port, and consists of two separate ports named Shahid Kalantari and ShahidBeheshti.
• Development of the port was first proposed in 1973 by the last Shah of Iran, though development was delayed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
• Being close to Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc., it has been termed the "Golden Gate" to these land-locked countries.

Explanation :

• National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) is India’s first infrastructure specific investment fund that was set up by the Government of India in February 2015.
• The objective behind creating this fund was to maximize economic impact mainly through infrastructure investment in commercially viable projects, both Greenfield and Brownfield.

Funds

Master Fund

• The Master Fund is an infrastructure fund with the objective of primarily investing in operating assets in the core infrastructure sectors such as roads, ports, airports, power etc.

Fund of Funds

• The Fund of Funds anchor and/or invest in funds managed by fund managers who have good track records in infrastructure and associated sectors in India.
• Some of the sectors of focus include Green Infrastructure, Mid-Income & Affordable Housing, Infrastructure services and allied sectors.

Strategic Investment Fund

• Strategic Investment Fund is registered as an Alternative Investment Fund II under SEBI in India.
• The objective of National Investment and Infrastructure Fund II (“Strategic Fund”) is to invest largely in equity and equity-linked instruments.
• The Strategic Fund focuses on green field and brown field investments in the core infrastructure sectors.

Explanation :

• Tangam is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language of the Tani subgroup spoken in Arunachal Pradesh state in North-East India.
• It has been marked ‘critically endangered’ by the UNESCO World Atlas of Endangered Languages (2009).

Tangam People

• It is a little-known community within the larger Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh which resides in the hamlet of Kugging in Upper Siang district’s Paindem circle.

Explanation :

• The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is an international measure of acute multidimensional poverty covering over 100 developing countries.
• The original MPI was co-designed and launched in 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at University of Oxford. It was first published in 2010 as part of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Human Development Report (HDR).
• The MPI assesses poverty at the individual level. If a person is deprived in a third or more of ten (weighted) indicators, the global MPI identifies them as ‘MPI poor’. The extent – or intensity – of their poverty is also measured through the percentage of deprivations they are experiencing.

Dimensions

MPI uses three dimensions and ten indicators which are:

• Education: Years of schooling and child enrollment (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
• Health: Child mortality and nutrition (1/6 weightage each, total 2/6);
• Standard of living: Electricity, flooring, drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel and assets (1/18 weightage each, total 2/6)

Explanation :

• Assam government has decided to upgrade the Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary into a national park.

About Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary

• Located in Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts, the 111.19 sq km Dehing Patkai was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 2004.
• It forms the largest stretch of lowland rainforest in the country.
• Dehing is the name of the river that flows through this forest and Patkai is the hill at the foot of which the sanctuary lies.
• The Dehing Patkai Wildlife Sanctuary and a part of Dehing Patkai Rainforest, due to their importance for elephant habitat, were declared as Dehing-Patkai Elephant Reserve under Project Elephant.
• There are more than a dozen different ethnic groups living in the area including the indigenous Assamese communities, particularly Tai Phake, Khamyang, Khampti, Singpho, Nocte, Chutia, Ahom, Kaibarta, Moran and Motok, Burmese, and non-indigenous Nepali people.

Explanation :

• The Gujarat government has decided to form a five-member commission to identify members of Rabari, Bharvad and Charan communities, who are eligible for benefits of Schedule Tribe (ST) status.
• In October 1956, the central government conferred ST status on people of Rabari, Bharvad and Charan communities, living in nesses (tiny, oval-shaped hutments made of mud) of Gir, Barda and Alech areas of Gujarat.

Rabari

• They migrated from Rajasthan via Kutch and now most of them live in the Okhamandal region of Jamnagar district.
• They speak ‘Bhopa’ which is a mixture of Gujarati, Kachchi, Marwari words and Pharasi (Persian) and use Gujarati script.
• Their folk songs are called ‘Siya’.

Bharvad

• The Bharwads are pastorals who are permitted to graze their sheep and cattle in certain demarcated areas of the reserved forest.
• They communicate in Gujarati and use Gujarati script.

Charan

• The Charan, also called Gadhvi, is a small tribe in Gujarat and the name Charan is derived from the word ‘Char’ which means grazing.
• They speak Gujarati and use Gujarati script.
• These are traditionally cattle breeders. They have also adopted agriculture as their secondary occupation.

Explanation :

• The United Arab Emirates Mars Mission called “Hope” was announced in 2015 with the aim of creating mankind’s first integrated model of the Red planet’s atmosphere.
• The mission is officially named the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) and the orbiter has been named Hope or ‘Al Amal’.
• It is scheduled to take off from its launch site, Tanegashima Space Center, Japan.
• Hope weighs over 1500 kg, and will carry scientific instruments mounted on one side of the spacecraft, including the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI), which is a high-resolution camera, the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS), a far-UV imaging spectrograph, the Emirates Mars InfraRed Spectrometer (EMIRS), and FTIR scanning spectrometer.
• The spacecraft will orbit Mars to study the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with outer space and solar winds.
• Hope will collect data on Martian climate dynamics, which should help scientists understand why Mars’ atmosphere is decaying into space.

Explanation :

• The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared that measles and rubella have been eradicated from Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
• This makes them the first two countries in WHO South-East Asia Region to achieve measles and rubella elimination ahead of the 2023 target.
• Maldives reported last endemic case of measles in 2009 and of rubella in October 2015, while Sri Lanka reported last endemic case of measles in May 2016 and of rubella in March 2017.
• Member countries of WHO South-East Asia Region had set 2023 as target for elimination of measles and rubella, revising the goal of the flagship programme that since 2014 had focused on measles elimination and rubella control.
• Bhutan, North Korea and East Timor were also declared to be measles-free.