Daily CURRENT AFFAIRS

Daily Current Affair - UPSC/KAS Exams - 11th May 2022

NEWS : The Karnataka government has proposed regularisation of properties in capital city Bengaluru by issuing legal documents — khatas — and property identification numbers (PID) to owners

WHAT IS ‘A’ KHATA AND ‘B’ KHATA?

• Currently, there are two types of properties — ‘A’ Khata and ‘B’ Khata
• ‘A’ khata properties are those with genuine documents and are verified by state agencies. The ‘A’ khata document was issued to property owners till 2008
• In 2008, the BBMP stopped issuing ‘A’ khata to properties which were in violation of bylaws. Instead, it began maintaining a ‘B’ register, which came to list ‘B’ khata properties
• ‘B’ khata properties have anomalies in documentation. The list also includes properties in violation of bylaws, and buildings constructed without building plan approval. There are over six lakh ‘B’ khata properties in Bengaluru, which include unauthorised layouts on revenue land
• The ‘B’ khata register has helped the civic body collect property tax from the owners
• ‘B’ Khata property owners can neither avail bank loans, nor get occupancy/completion certificates from the BBMP
• The Karnataka Administrative Reforms Commission, headed by former IAS T M Vijay Bhaskar recommended the conversion of ‘B’ khata to ‘A’ khata

BENEFITS OF REGULARIZATION

The BBMP in its 2022-23 budget projected a total revenue collection of Rs 10,484.28 crore. It estimated that it would collect Rs 3,107 crore from property tax. And, Rs 1,000 crore from the ‘B’ khata to ‘A’ khata regularisation scheme

NEWS : The State of the World’s Birds, an annual review of environmental resources was published recently

WHAT DOES THE REPORT SAY

• 5,245 or about 48% of the existing bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines
• While 4,295 or 39% of the species have stable trends, about 7% or 778 species have increasing population trends
• The trend of 37 species was unknown
•  Draws from BirdLife International’s latest assessment of all birds for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List that shows 1,481 or 13.5% species are currently threatened with global extinction
• 798 species classified as vulnerable, 460 as endangered and 223 as critically endangered while 52 species were considered to be data deficient
• About 73% species are estimated to have fewer than 10,000 mature individuals, 40% have fewer than 2,500 mature individuals, and almost 5% have fewer than 50 mature individuals
• Bird species are non-randomly threatened across the avian tree of life, with richness of threatened species disproportionately high among families such as parrots, pheasants and allies, albatrosses and allies, rails, cranes, cracids, grebes, megapodes, and pigeons
• More threatened bird species (86.4%) are found in tropical than in temperate latitudes (31.7%), with hotspots for threatened species concentrated in the tropical Andes, southeast Brazil, eastern Himalayas, eastern Madagascar, and Southeast Asian islands.

IMPORTANCE OF BIRDS TO ECOSYSTEMS AND CULTURE

• Contribute toward many ecosystem services that either directly or indirectly benefit humanity - which include provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services
• Functional role - as pollinators, seed-dispersers, ecosystem engineers, scavengers and predators
• Facilitate accrual and maintenance of biodiversity but also support human endeavours such as sustainable agriculture via pest control besides aiding other animals to multiply. For instance, coral reef fish productivity has been shown to increase as seabird colonies recovered following rat eradication in the Chagos archipelago
• Wild birds and products derived from them are also economically important as food (meat, eggs)
• Approximately 45% of all extant bird species are used in some way by people, primarily as pets (37%) and for food (14%)
• Cultural role - birdwatching is a global pastime practised by millions of people
• Garden bird-feeding is valued at $5-6 billion per year and growing by four per cent annually

THREATS CONTRIBUTING TO AVIAN BIODIVERSITY LOSS

• Study lists eight factors, topped by land cover and land-use change
• Continued growth of human populations and of per capita rates of consumption lead directly to conversion and degradation of primary natural habitats and consequent loss of biodiversity
• Although global tree cover increased between 1982 and 2016, including by 95,000 sq. km in the tropical dry forest biome and by 84,000 sq. km in the tropical moist deciduous forest biome, this has been driven by afforestation with plantations (often of non-native species) plus land abandonment in parts of the global North, with net loss in the tropics
• Other factors are
  • Habitat fragmentation and degradation, especially in the tropics
  • Hunting and trapping with 11 to 36 million birds estimated to be killed or taken illegally in the Mediterranean region alone
  • Impact of invasive alien species and disease (971 alien bird species introduced accidentally or deliberately to 230 countries over the centuries have affected the native species); infrastructure, energy demands and pollution
  • Agrochemical and pharmaceutical usage (pesticide ingestion kills an estimated 2.7 million birds annually in Canada alone)
  • Global trade teleconnections; and climate change

NEWS : Conference of Parties - 15th session of United Nation’s Conference to Combat Desertification was held in  Cote d’Ivoire

WHAT DID INDIA SAY

• India is COP president
• India has made significant progress in its commitment to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030
• Over 229 million Soil Health Cards have been issued to farmers between 2015 and 2019 and this program has led to a decline of 8-10% in the use of chemical fertilizers and also raised productivity by 5 to 6%
• Following the global call for the submission of nominations for World Restoration Flagships, the Government of India endorsed six restoration flagships that target the restoration of 12.5 million hectares of degraded lands
• India’s rural livelihood programmes have an underlying ethos of natural resource conservation and restoration
• Emphasizing that landscape restoration is more than planting trees, it becomes essential that we recognize the power of local and indigenous knowledge with the close assistance of science
• Parties will discuss drought, land restoration, and related enablers such as land rights, gender equality and youth empowerment

UNCCD

• Established in 1994.
• It is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management.
• It is the only convention stemming from a direct recommendation of the Rio Conference’s Agenda 21.
• To help publicise the Convention, 2006 was declared “International Year of Deserts and Desertification”.
• Focus areas: The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.
• Aim: Its 197 Parties aim, through partnerships, to implement the Convention and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The end goal is to protect land from over-use and drought, so it can continue to provide food, water and energy.
• The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is the nodal Ministry for this Convention

NEWS : Tomato Flu cases on rise in Kerala

TOMATO FLU

• Also called Tomato fever
• Caused by a unexplained virus
• Affects children below five years of age
• Symptoms include rashes, skin irritation and dehydration
• Can also cause tiredness, joint pain, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, high fever, and body ache
• May also change the colour of the legs and the hands
• Self-limiting one and there is no specific drug for this
• Could spread rapidly from one person to another.

NEWS : Thrissur Pooram being celebrated in Kerala

THRISSUR POORAM

• Annual Hindu festival held in Kerala
• Held at the Vadakkunnathan Temple in Thrissur
• Pooram day – the day when the moon rises with the Pooram star in the Malayalam Calendar month of Medam
• Largest and most famous of all poorams
• Brainchild of Raja Rama Varma, famously known as Sakthan Thampuran, the Maharaja of Cochin (1790–1805)
• Processions to pay obeisance to the Shiva, the presiding deity
• Officially begins with a flag hoisting ceremony (Kodiyettam)
• Seventh day of the pooram is the last day. It is also known as “Pakal Pooram”

NEWS : A team of four Indian photographers from Reuters news agency — slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave — have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their coverage of the Covid-19 crisis in India

DETAILS

• Arguably the most coveted award for journalists from across the world, the Pulitzer is announced by America’s Columbia University and bestowed on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
• The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition within the United States.
• It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer.
• Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories.
• A member of the Ghadar Party in America, Indian-American journalist Gobind Behari Lal, was the first from India to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937. He won the award for reporting with four others, for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University

• Veteran Congress leader and former Union minister Pandit Sukh Ram. He is known for his contributions in telecommunications
• Canadian government introduced a Bill that seeks to make Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook pay news publishers for use of their content.