Daily CURRENT AFFAIRS

Daily Current Affair - UPSC/KAS Exams - 11th June 2021

What is in news : Sportz Village Schools conducted survey of fitness in children

Details :

• The national survey covered 2,54,681 children in the age group of 7 to 17 years from 364 schools spread across 250 cities and towns.
• Lack of physical activity during the lockdown has triggered an unhealthy Body Mass Index (BMI) in 53% out of 15,657 children  in Bengaluru
• Of the children surveyed in Bengaluru, three out of five showed unhealthy upper body strength. Two out of three had unhealthy lower body strength. In terms of abdominal strength, 20% of the children were in the ‘unhealthy’ category. Two out of five children also scored poorly in flexibility.
• On aerobic capacity, 3/4th of the children surveyed fell in the unhealthy range. However, in anaerobic capacity, only one out of four were categorised as unhealthy
• At the national level, the survey revealed that one out of two children does not have a healthy BMI. The percentage of children having healthy levels of aerobic capacity and core strength during this period dropped drastically by 33 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.

What is the news : Draft Master Plan of Delhi 2041 was made open for public scrutiny for next 45 days. It will serve as blueprint for development of Delhi for next two decades.

Aims :

• To make Delhi liveable & safe,
• To provide better economic opportunities,
• To offer housing for all. It emphasises on affordable & rental accommodation.
• To redevelop old areas of Delhi.

What it suggests for natural hazards: In a bid to address challenges faced during pandemics, earthquakes & floods, it has suggested for periodic safety audits to ensure structural safety and to establish a Delhi Disaster Response Force.

Regeneration scheme for high-risk zones: MPD 2041 proposes for decentralised workspaces, creation of open areas & public spaces, better habitat design & green-rated developments in order to reduce vulnerability to airborne epidemics & other such diseases and to reduce dependence on mechanical ventilation systems.

What is in news : Recent AISHE rankings was released.

What is AISHE

• The survey, undertaken as an annual, web-based, pan-India exercise on the status of Higher Education since 2010-11, covers all the Higher Educational Institutions in the country
• The GER is a statistical measure for determining the number of students enrolled in undergraduate, postgraduate and research-level studies within the country and expressed as a percentage of the population in the 18-23 years age group

The survey collects data on several parameters like teachers, student enrolment, programmes, examination results, education finance, infrastructure, etc.

Findings for the year :

• Gender divide gets further closer for Bcom programmes. There are 90 female enrollments for 100 male. This is the third major programme in the last five years where the gender gap in enrolment has closed after it happened in B.Sc and MBBS programmes in 2017-18
• Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of India has increased from 24.5% in 2015-16 to 27.1% in 2019-20, a significant portion of this change comes from the female side. The GER for men has gone up from 25.4% to 26.9% over the last five years and the increase is much sharper for women -- from 23.5% in 2015-16 to 27.3% in 2019-20.
• The total enrolment in higher education stood at 3.85 crore in 2019-20 as compared to 3.74 crore in 2018-19, registering a growth of 11.36 lakh (or 3.04 per cent). In 2014-15, this figure was at 3.42 crore.
• The GER is a statistical measure for determining the number of students enrolled in undergraduate, postgraduate and research-level studies within the country and expressed as a percentage of the population in the 18-23 years age group.
• The highest share of foreign students come from the neighbouring countries, of which Nepal is 28.1% of the total, followed by Afghanistan 9.1%, Bangladesh 4.6%.
• The number of students has increased across major disciplines, except engineering. The decline can be attributed majorly to mechanical engineering, electronics engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering and mining.

What is the news : Maharashtra Chief Minister has asked Prime Minister for state-wide implementation of the ‘Beed model’ of the crop insurance scheme Pradhan Mantri Fazal Bhima Yojana

What is Beed Model :

• Located in the drought-prone Marathwada region, the district of Beed presents a challenge for any insurance company. Farmers here have repeatedly lost crops either to failure of rains or to heavy rains. Given the high payouts, insurance companies have sustained losses. The state government had a difficult time getting bids for tenders to implement the scheme in Beed.
• During the 2020 kharif season, tenders for implementation did not attract any bids. So, the state Agriculture Department decided to tweak the guidelines for the district. The state-run Indian Agricultural Insurance Company implemented the scheme. Under the new guidelines, the insurance company provided a cover of 110% of the premium collected, with caveats. If the compensation exceeded the cover provided, the state government would pay the bridge amount. If the compensation was less than the premium collected, the insurance company would keep 20% of the amount as handling charges and reimburse the rest to the state government.
• Last kharif season, Beed reported premium collection of Rs 803.65 crore (farmers’ share was Rs 60.82 crore while the rest was borne by the state and central governments). Kharif claims stood at Rs 8.61 crore, and thus insurance companies reimbursed the state with Rs 6341.41 crore of premium after deducting Rs 160.63 crore as handling charges.
• In a normal season where farmers report minimal losses, the state government is expected to get back money that can form a corpus to fund the scheme for the following year. However, the state government would have to bear the financial liability in case of losses due to extreme weather events.

Why is the government pushing for it for the entire state:  The reason why Maharashtra is pushing for this scheme is that in most years, the claims-to-premium ratio is low with the premium being paid to the company. In the Beed model, the profit of the company is expected to reduce and the state government would access another source of funds. The reimbursed amount can lead to lower provisioning by the state for the following year, or help in financing the paying the bridge amount in case of a year of crop loss. For farmers, however, this model does not have any direct benefit.

Pradhan Mantri Fazal Bhima Yojana

• Launched in 2016.
• Merged schemes include National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and Modified National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (MNAIS). It aims to reduce the premium burden on farmers and ensure early settlement of crop assurance claim for the full insured sum.
• The Scheme covers all Food & Oilseeds crops and Annual Commercial/Horticultural Crops for which past yield data is available and for which requisite number of Crop Cutting Experiments (CCEs) are being conducted under General Crop Estimation Survey (GCES).
• Premium: 2% for Kharif crops, 1.5% for Rabi crops, 5% for commercial and horticultural crops.

What is the news : The State government of Assam notified Dihing Patkai as a National Park, four days after creating the 422-sq. km Raimona National Park in western Assam’s Kokrajhar district.

Details :

• Assam now has the third most National Parks after the 12 in Madhya Pradesh and nine in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
• The five older National Parks in the Assam are Kaziranga, Manas, Nameri, Orang and Dibru-Saikhowa.
• The 234.26-sq. km Dihing Patkai straddling eastern Assam’s Dibrugarh and Tinsukia districts is a major elephant habitat and 310 species of butterflies have been recorded there. The park has 47 species each of reptiles and mammals, including the tiger and clouded leopard.
• The newly-notified national park will be administered by the Soraipung Range of Digboi Forest Division and Jeypore Range of Dibrugarh Forest Division. Additional anti-poaching camps and manpower are being provided for intensive patrolling and conservation of the new park, the Minister said.
• Raimona, on the other hand, will be administered by the Kachugaon Forest Division of Bodoland Territorial Council. The area was one of the oldest reserve forests of the State.
• Raimona adjoins the Buxa Tiger Reserve in West Bengal to its west, Phipsoo Wildlife Sanctuary in Bhutan to its north and the first addition to Manas National Park to the east
• With 11 different forest types and subtypes, Raimona is home to the golden langur, elephant, tiger, clouded leopard and Indian gaur besides sustaining several species of orchids, more than 150 species of butterflies, 170 species of birds and 380 species of plants

Declaration of National Parks: National parks can be declared both by the Central Government and State governments. No alteration of the boundaries of a national park shall be made except on a resolution passed by the State Legislature.

What is in news : Scientists with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Collaboration, who include researchers at the Pune-based Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), have assembled the largest collection of fast radio bursts (FRBs) in the telescope’s first FRB catalogue

About CHIME :

• Location: Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO),British Colombia, Canada
• Operated by the National Research Council of Canada.
• The DRAO site is protected against man-made radio-frequency interference by municipal, provincial and federal regulation.
• The CHIME telescope's large collecting area, wide bandwidth and enormous field-of-view make it a superb detector of FRBs.
• The CHIME FRB event rate is predicted to be between 2 and 50 FRBs per day.So high an event rate promises major progress on this puzzling new astrophysical phenomenon.
• Bright CHIME-discovered FRBs will be found in real time and reported immediately to the worldwide astrophysical community for multi-wavelength follow up.

Fast Radio Bursts

• Fast Radio Bursts are brief (few millisecond) bursts of radio waves coming from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy.
• The phenomenon was first reported in 2007 and as of mid-2017, roughly two dozen have been reported and their origin is unknown.
• However, they are ubiquitous: current best estimates suggest these events are arriving at Earth roughly a thousand times per day over the entire sky.
• Of the known detected FRBs, one, FRB 121102, has been observed to repeat and has been shown to come from a small dwarf galaxy at redshift 0.2.
• Whether all FRBs repeat and/or are in dwarf galaxies is yet unknown.

What is the news : A multi-instrument facility established at IISc, Bangalore can determine concentrations of metals and metalloids spanning a concentration range of ≥100 ppm to 10 ppt (9 orders of magnitude) in water.

Details :

• This Water analysis facility will be key in tracing sources of pollution, quantifying reactive-transport pathways of toxic metals, and assessing the efficiency of remediation methods.
• This facility is under The project ‘Fast Forward to SGD6: Acceptable and affordable water in secondary Indian cities (4WARD)’

Other details : The project ‘Fast Forward to SGD6: Acceptable and affordable water in secondary Indian cities (4WARD)’ under its Urban Water Systems programme, awarded to a cluster of institutions (IIT Bombay, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Amritha Vishwa Vidyapeetham, and IISc) and led by IIT Kharagpur, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) focuses on identification and alleviation of water quality and quantity related challenges faced by Tier-II Indian cities.

What is the news : Through the I-STEM portal academic users in India will now be able to access the COMSOL Multiphysics software suite at no cost.

Details :

• The Indian Science Technology and Engineering facilities Map (I-STEM), the national web portal for sharing R&D facilities, and the COMSOL Group headquartered in Sweden, have entered a collaborative arrangement for this.
• I-STEM is an initiative of Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Govt. of India under the PM-STIAC mission. The goal is to strengthen the R&D ecosystem by connecting researchers with resources, in part by promoting technologies and scientific equipment development indigenously and providing necessary supplies and supports to researchers and enable them to access existing R&D facilities through the I-STEM web portal. The portal hosts the database of facilities across India so that a researcher desirous of using any of them can search for the same and make a booking online for using it.
• The COMSOL Multiphysics software suite, developed by the COMSOL Group, is used worldwide as an indispensable tool for a variety of computer simulations for R&D as well as for learning and instruction.

• The Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIMB) has been ranked the top B-school in India for the third time in a row, in Business & Management Studies, in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

• Antonio Guteress, portugal prime minister has been appointed as secretary general of United Nations security council for second time.

• Former Asian Games gold medalist boxer Ngangom Dingko Singh passed away. He belonged to Manipur

• Indian Military Academy (IMA), Dehradun awarded Junior Under Officer (JUO) Kinley Norbu, a Foreign Gentlemen Cadet (FGC) from the Kingdom of Bhutan with the prestigious motivational trophy for his excellent all round performance during his training at the Academy. The FGC was adjudged to receive the prestigious motivational trophy since he had won the Best in Physical Training, Best in Turn out and the Best in Drill awards among the GCs who have successfully completed their training.

• Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur have developed an early cyclone detection technique using Eddy detection technique. This technique was studied under Climate Change Program with support from Department of Science and Technology. The technique was developed with the aim of identifying initial traces of pre-cyclonic eddy vortices in atmospheric column. It also seeks to track its spatio-temporal evolution

• Airbnb, EaseMyTrip, OYO and Yatra have established a new industry association called “Confederation of Hospitality, Technology & Tourism Industry (CHATT)”. CHATT will help small companies and travel & hospitality technology players.

• Central government has asked states and union territories to include UDID (Unique Disability Identification) card as identity proof while registering on Co-WIN 2.0 platform. It will ensure a smooth and effective Covid-19 vaccination drive.

• UDID project was implemented to create a National Database for persons with disabilities (PwDs). It issues a Unique Disability Identity Card to each PwDs

• India wind energy market outlook was released by Global Wind Energy Council. As per the report, India has a pipeline of 10.3 GW in Central and State markets. These pipelines will drive installations until 2023. Report highlights India will install 20 GW of wind energy capacity by 2021-25. Wind power generation capacity in India has increased in recent times. India’s total installed wind power capacity was 38 GW, as of February 2021. It has fourth largest installed wind power capacity worldwide. Wind power capacity is spread across Southern, Western and Northern regions.

• Doctors from Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi have successfully analysed the monoclonal antibody therapy on two Covid-19 patients. This therapy resulted into fast progression of symptoms within first seven days.REGCov2 (Casirivimab and Imdevimab) was the antibody used

• BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. A high BMI can indicate high body fatness.
• The World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines categorise a normal BMI range as 18.5 to 24.9, overweight as 25 or more, and obesity as 30 or higher.

Monoclonal Antibodies: Monoclonal antibodies are identical copies of antibody that targets one specific antigen. They are made by cloning a unique white blood cell. All subsequent antibodies which are derived this way belongs to a unique parent cell. Monoclonal antibodies have monovalent affinity. They bind only to same epitope which is part of an antigen recognized by antibody). Bispecific monoclonal antibodies can also be made by increasing therapeutic targets of one monoclonal antibody to two epitopes.