Current Affairs – January 27, 2021

 

India

Bharat Parv 2021 being organised on a virtual platform

Bharat Parv 2021, a festival to celebrate the spirit of India, is being organised on a virtual platform from January 26 to 31, 2021. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla inaugurated the Bharat Parv-2021.

Bangladesh tri-service contingent marches in Republic Day parade

As New Delhi and Dhaka celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the 1971 Liberation War, a 122-member tri-Service contingent of Bangladesh marched on Rajpath at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi on January 26, 2021. It had soldiers drawn from the units of 1971.

Akshay Kumar launches mobile action game FAU-G

Akshay Kumar launched the mobile action game ‘Fearless and United Guards (FAU-G). The initial episode of the game is based in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh and the rest of the episodes will be set in other Indian battlegrounds. The game is free to download and play while the users will have to pay for several premium features like skins of their avatars.

Economy & Corporate

India’s economy to grow 11.5% in FY22 fiscal, 6.8% in FY23 fiscal: IMF

India’s economy is expected to bounce back strongly in the next fiscal year with 11.5% growth, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its World Economic Outlook (WEO) update released on January 26, 2021. India is the only major economy forecast to grow in double digits next year and forecast to follow that up with the highest 6.8% rise in the FY23 fiscal.

India’s economy to grow at 7.3% in 2021: UN DESA

India’s economy is projected to grow at 7.3 per cent in 2021, even as it is estimated to contract by 9.6 per cent in 2020 because of lockdowns and other efforts to control the Covid-19 pandemic slashed domestic consumption, the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2021, produced by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), revealed.

Dhanlaxmi Bank Board approves appointment of Shivan as MD and CEO

Board of Directors of Kerala-based Dhanlaxmi Bank have given approval to appoint J K Shivan as managing director and CEO of the Bank.

World

US: President Joe Biden signs ‘Buy American’ executive order

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on January 25, 2021 to boost government buying from U.S. manufacturers. Biden’s order would modify the rules for the Buy American program, making it harder for contractors to qualify for a waiver and sell foreign-made goods to federal agencies. It also changes rules so that more of a manufactured good’s components must originate from U.S. factories.

US: Joe Biden signs order to reverse Trump’s transgender military ban

President Joe Biden signed an executive order that brought in a policy of including all qualified Americans to serve in the US military, effectively overturning a ban on transgender persons that was introduced by the former Trump administration, the White House said on January 25, 2021.

US: Senate confirms Janet Yellen as first woman treasury secretary

The United States Senate on January 25, 2021 confirmed economist and former Federal Reserve Chairperson Janet Yellen as first woman Treasury Secretary of the United States.

What is Green Tax?

 The Ministry of road transport has decided to impose the additional taxes on old vehicles that are no more fit on road. This additional tax is being called as the “Green Tax”. Th decision was taken to curb pollution. It will also motivate people to switch to environment-friendly alternatives to the vehicles

Highlights

• The Green tax will reduce the pollution level.
• It will also make the polluter to pay for creating pollution.
• Revenue collected from the green tax will be kept in a separate account. The amount will be used for tackling the problem of pollution.
• The states have been asked to set up state-of-art facilities to monitor the emission.

How the vehicles will be taxed?

• Under the Green Tax norms, the transport vehicles older than eight years will be charged with the green tax at the time of renewal of fitness certificate. They will be charged at the rate of 10 to 25% of road tax.
• While, the Public transport vehicles like city buses will be paying lower Green Tax.
• However, the vehicles used in farming like tractor and harvestor will be exempted from the tax.

What is Green tax?

Green tax is also called as the pollution tax or environmental tax. The tax is an excise duty on goods that results into the environmental pollutants. An economic theory says, that if taxes will be charged on emissions causing pollution will lower the environmental impairment in a cost-effective manner. The tax will encourage the behavioural changes in households and firms that are required to reduce the pollution. The tax mainly aims to ensure that polluters are duly punished for their pollution creating activities.

Green Tax in India

This tax in India is relatively new trend. However, the RFID tags are being given and CCTV cameras have been deployed at border entry points. With this, the commercial vehicles that enter the city are monitored for emissions. In the cities like Delhi, Environmental Compensation Charge (EEC) is imposed on pollutants depending upon the vehicle’s size.

What is “Blue Jet Lightning”?

 The Scientists from the International Space Station (ISS) have observed a bright-blue lightning bolt that is shooting upward from the thunderclouds. Such blue jets are hard to observe from the ground because the electrical discharges emerge from the tops of thunderclouds. But from space, one can easily observe the phenomenon.

Highlights

• The instrument at the space station had captured a blue jet shooting from the thunderstorm cell near a small island in the central Pacific Ocean on February 26, 2019.
• Scientists had observed the five intense flashes of blue light.
• Each of the lighting lasting about 10 to 20 milliseconds.
• After that, the blue jet moved out from the cloud towards a narrow cone shape stretching into the stratosphere.

What are blue jets?

• Blue jets are initiated as “normal” lightning discharges.
• It emerges between the upper positive charge region in a thundercloud and a negative screening layer above the charge region.
• The positive end network fills the negative charge region and after that the negative end fills the positive charge region.
• After that, the positive end exits the cloud and starts propagating upward.
• Earlier, it was believed that blue jets are directly related to lightning flashes but it is the result of the hails.
• The blue jets are brighter than sprites and are blue in colour.
• The blue colour of the jets is the result of blue and near-ultraviolet emission lines from neutral and ionized molecular nitrogen.
• The blue jets were recorded on October 21, 1989 for the first time.

Thunderstorm

It is also known as an electrical storm or a lightning storm. It is characterized by the presence of lightning and the acoustic effect on the Earth’s atmosphere that is thunder. This phenomenon is usually taking place in the cumulonimbus cloud, the thunderstorm is also accompanied by strong winds and heavy rain. It could also lead to snow, sleet, or hail.

Cumulonimbus Cloud

It is a dense and towering vertical cloud. This cloud is formed by the water vapor which is carried by the powerful upward air currents.

International Education Day: Engineering, diverse cultural experience attract foreign students to India

Twenty-one-year-old Rhythm Patel, a Qatari resident of Indian origin, chose India to study computer sciences after finishing school. Patel says he had offers from universities in the US and Canada but the quality of education here was a clinching factor for him. He chose IIIT-Delhi for B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering. “Contrary to public opinion, some colleges in India have a very good quality of education. If one graduates from a top institute in India like IITs, IIITs, and NITs, it also opens many doors for securing a job,” Patel tells indianexpress.com.

Promising ‘quality education’ at a reasonable price as compared to other countries, engineering education in India seems to be a preferred choice for foreign students, especially from South Asian countries. According to the Education Ministry’s latest AISHE report, the number of foreign students in India has gone up from 6,988 in 2000 to 47,427 in the academic year 2018-19. Much like Indian students, engineering and medicine courses are popular among foreign students.

Course-wise, BTech is the most preferred choice, with the gender ratio, however, remaining skewed in favour of male students. BTech is followed by BBA, BSc, BA, and MBBS courses. Like with Indian students, in the medicine stream, enrolment of female students is higher for foreign students too; with 58.92 per cent of total foreign enrolments in the stream being that of women.

The recent employability report by the Times Higher Education (THE) reported that India is among one of the biggest study destinations for foreign students because of the ’employability’ factor it offers. The report also claimed that traditional foreign destinations such as the US and the UK are struggling to “compete in terms of value for money” with these younger nations. Students and their parents are motivated by the ability to get a job rather than the brand, as per the report, and in the coming decade, universities will have to focus on their employability more.

Atal Zadran, an Afghanistan national, studied BCA from Bangalore University. Like Patel, he had the option of studying in any other European country but he decided to study in India. After securing high grades in BCA, he got a job in his own country. Three years ago when Zadran wanted to pursue higher studies, he decided to return here. Apart from the “updated MCA curriculum”, he says he prefers India because it offers “peace of mind” and a “cultural familiarity”.

Non-STEM courses not as popular

India is the favourite destination for students from Africa, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. As per the Education Ministry data, Nepal sends the most number of students to India.

Desmond Papa Wusu Mill, a 23-year-old student from Ghana, is in his second year of Mass Communication at Lovely Professional University (LPU), Punjab. But his first choice was engineering because he had heard greatly about India’s reputation as an emerging IT giant. It was during his engineering degree here that he discovered his interest in a course in public relations.  “During my stay here in India, despite initial adjustments to adapt to the culture, I could easily interact with people despite us having different accents in English.

Cultural Mix a USP

Mazharul Miraz, a 24-year-old Bangladeshi student at LPU says that India gives an “experience of not just studying in a country but a united entity with multiple countries”.

“India is a combination of multiple countries. It has such a diversity in terms of languages, cultures, and cuisines that I have learned a lot of management and public dealing skills along with my engineering degree. When I had joined I was a bit scared because people from different parts of the nation have entirely different viewpoints, but they all deal with each other very nicely. This cultural experience helped in giving me a well-rounded experience,” he said.

Shahid Nawaz Khan, a resident of Kuwait and a B.Tech student from IIIT-Delhi, says there is an environment of competitiveness here which drives “me to achieve my full potential”. “Having been brought up in a very protective environment in Kuwait, moving to any other country at that time seemed like a daunting task, and coming to India was not such a big step. My parents were a little skeptical about the pollution in Delhi,” says Khan.

Gopal Rizal, a 34-year-old Bhutanese student pursuing PhD in nanotechnology at IIT-Guwahati, claims that he had to move his classes online due to the pandemic shortly after he had started studying here. Even as his academic studies are continuing online, he says that culturally he had learned a lot.

“Ever since I took admission at IIT-Guwahati, the Covid-19 pandemic led to switch the teaching and learning process to online mode. During my short stay in India, I started to learn how people from cultural and ethnic diversities work together here. I aim to embrace these qualities of Indian citizens and work in building my own country after the completion of my study here. I would also like to collaborate with the friends and the professors of IIT-G to build a strong scientific temper among the youth of Bhutan.”

Are there concerns over women’s safety?

Masoda Khairzada, a 33-year-old Afghan national and a PhD fellow at the chemical engineering department of IIT-Madras, headed back home due to the lockdown but cannot wait to come back and “walk freely on Tamil Nadu’s lush green roads”.

Like many other female foreign students, Khairzada too had apprehensions about studying in India but was surprised by the sense of security she was offered here.

“I really miss working in the lab. I want to go back to labs and perform my experiments but I also miss walking on roads with its green and fresh environment. Chennai really impressed me with its security. When I was in Afghanistan, I was a little worried about staying in Chennai because I was the only Afghan student in IIT-M. However when I lived in Chennai it has started to feel like my second home,” said Khairzada who has worked as a lecturer at Jawzjan University in Afghanistan.

Bangladesh’s Swarna Roy too was skeptical of studying in India. “There was a myth about India that it is not very safe for girls and the system is not women-friendly, but I have found myself completely safe and comfortable during my whole journey in India.” said the 25-year-old student.

Hemlita Mondal, another MTech student at IIT-M recalls, “I heard about alarmingly growing rape cases in India. So, I was worried about women’s safety there.” However, it was the country’s ever-increasing technological education that had made her select it as her study destination.

Source: Indian Express, 25/01/21

DRDO offers online course on artificial intelligence, machine learning, cyber security

 Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, a deemed university and an autonomous organisation funded by the department of defence research and development, is offering short-term programmes on artificial intelligence, machine learning and cybersecurity.

Both the courses are 12-weeks long. The classes will include two hours of contact lectures five days a week. Selection will be based on an online entrance test. Registration for the test is free and anyone who has a graduate or equivalent level of education can apply for these courses.

The “short term programme on Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning” will include a mix between fundamentals and advanced topics of various domains of AI & ML including probability theory, pattern recognition, big data analytics, computer vision, natural language processing, augmented reality, deep learning and related advancements in the domain.

In the “online training and certification course on cybersecurity”, topics such as forensic and incident response, system programming, reverse engineering and malware analysis, basic and advanced vulnerability analysis, exploit mitigation and penetration testing followed by the tools and techniques for cybersecurity professionals will be taught.

For both the courses, candidates will have to register for the entrance exam and crack it. The registration process will start from January 28 and conclude on February 15. The entrance exam will be held on February 20 for the AI, ML course and on February 21 for the cybersecurity course.

The course fees for each of the topics is Rs 15,000. Interested can apply at the official website, onlinecourse.diat.ac.in. The courses will start by February 28

Source: Indian Express, 27/01/21

How the cow came to be debated in Constituent Assembly and why Article 48 was added to Constitution

 On November 16, 1949, as the Indian Constituent Assembly was nearing its end, it made room for the inclusion of a clause in the Directive Principles of State Policy.“That the State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern scientific and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.”

The clause to prohibit the slaughter of cows in the Constitution has been a matter of intense controversy and debate since the new republic was formed, and more so in recent years. But the inclusion of the clause must be seen in the background of the significance the animal held during the nationalist movement and the shades of majoritarian sentiment carried within it. It also needs to be understood in context of the Partition and the atmosphere of religious animosity that it created.

The cow in the Indian national movement

The cow has had an intriguing presence in the Indian psyche. There are mentions of devotion to cows appearing in Hindu scriptures, even though there is evidence to suggest that complete abstinence from beef eating did not exist in the ancient Indian way of life. In the political life of the Indian subcontinent, the cow has come up on numerous occasions before the nationalist movement of the 20th century.
Although the Indian National Congress, which spearheaded the freedom struggle saw itself as an inclusive party, from the 1890s, it increasingly turned to predominantly Hindu-related imagery as a means to connect with the masses. For instance, the imagery of Hindu deities like Ganesh and Ram, religious epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata were appropriated to that end. A similar use was made of the holy cow.

“The purity of cow’s milk was likened to the purity and strength of the nation, and cow killing connected to the British consumption of beef was used to portray the British Raj as a regime indifferent to Hindu values,” writes historian Ian Copland in his 2017 research paper titled, ‘Cows, Congress and the Constitution: Jawaharlal Nehru and the making of Article 48’.

Accusations of the British slaughtering cows in large numbers would be spoken about in public gatherings. Historian William Gould, in his book, ‘Hindu nationalism and the language of politics in late colonial India’, notes, “In a city Congress meeting in Agra on June 14, 1930, Hari Narayan and Narayan Lal Bohra described how the British were killing cows in thousands every year.” He adds: “In Kanpur in the first week of September, Raj Narayan estimated that Europeans alone had slaughtered 44,000 cows. In Bhedpur, Etawah, on September 19, one Ram Dutt speaking at a Congress gathering, claimed that the government was responsible for the death of three crore cows.”

To protect the cow was seen as a means of protecting ‘Mother India’. In 1925, Mahatma Gandhi helped establish the first all-India cow protection organisation, the Gorakha Sabha. Cow protection, urged Gandhi, “was one of the important duties enjoined upon Hindus as a part of their religion.”

Consequently, a group within the Congress asked for a legislation for a complete ban on cow slaughter. However, the higher authorities in the party, vary of Muslim alienation, rejected the claim.

But as discussions of cow slaughter gained momentum, there emerged a feeling of alienation among Muslims. As Gould notes, “it heightened awareness of ‘Muslim rights’ in relation to animal slaughter”.

The cow in the Constituent Assembly

In the centuries before Independence itself, the tendency in rhetoric was to combine foreign rule as both British and Muslim and cow slaughter as being a practise among both. But with the Partition of the country, and the creation of Pakistan, the Hindu right both within the Congress and beyond assumed that the newfound Indian nation would be a land based on Hindu ideals including that of safeguarding the cow. Consequently, a public convention in Delhi in early August recommended that the new polity “provide in its constitution for the stoppage of cow killing.”

“Previously, that part of the cow protection movement bent upon resolving the problem through legislation had been loosely coordinated by the Goraksha Sabha; now it gravitated into the orbit of industrialist Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia and his newly minted Govak Nivak Sangh (Anti- cow slaughter league),” writes Copland. He notes further how the first act as president of the league, Dalmia set up headquarters in the Delhi house formerly owned by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and told his supporters that the green flag of Islam had been replaced by the ‘sacred flag of the cow’.

Consequently, the league arranged for a throng of sadhus to carry out regular sit-ins in front of the house of the prime minister-elect Nehru. August 10 was nominated as National Cow Day. Lastly, a rhetoric was built around saving the cow for the economic needs of the country. “To boost the production of food in India, we have to increase the cattle wealth in our country and we can do that only by stopping cow slaughter,” noted Dalmia, as reproduced in Copland’s work.

Dalmia’s petition found many takers. By August it had attracted around 164,000 signatories. Anti-cow killing resolutions were passed by independent organisations like the Ahmedabad Bullion Association and All India Varnashrama Swarajya Sangh. Several state assemblies and municipal bodies served notices of bills to prohibit cow slaughter. Meanwhile, senior leaders within the Congress were flooded with requests to legislate against cow slaughter.

Correspondence between prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the newly-elected president of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad, is noteworthy here. Nehru confided in Prasad that while he had no problem with protecting cattle, he was deeply worried about the tone the proposal was taking. “India is a composite country. If any such step is taken purely on Hindu sentiment, it means that the governance of India is going to be carried on in a particular way which thus far we have not done,” he wrote to Prasad. Nonetheless, Prasad referred the question to the Constituent Assembly with a request that it be looked as part of its deliberations on ‘Fundamental Rights’.

One of the most vociferous among the cow lobbyists in the Constituent Assembly was Pandit Thakur Dass Bhargava from East Punjab. Arguing from an economic point of view, he asked the question: “How can you improve your health and food position, if you do not produce a full quota of cereals and milk? This amendment is divided into three parts. Firstly, agriculture should be improved on scientific and modern lines. Secondly, the cattle breed should be improved; and thirdly, the cow and other cattle should be protected from slaughter. To grow more food and to improve agriculture and the cattle breed are all inter-dependent and are two sides of the same coin.” Others who supported him included Seth Govind Das, Shibban Lal Saxena, Ram Sahai and Raghu Vira.

R V Dhulekar, on the other hand, made his argument on more religious grounds. “And our Hindu society, or our Indian society, has included the cow in our fold. It is just like our mother. In fact, it is more than our mother. I can declare from this platform that there are thousands of people who will not run at a man to kill that man for their mother or wife or children, but they will run at a man if that man does not want to protect the cow or wants to kill her.”

But the proposal was met with stiff resistance from the chairman of the Drafting Committee B R Ambedkar who informed that it cannot be included as part of Fundamental Rights since ‘rights’ properly applied only to citizens and cows were not citizens. Finally, it was Prasad who came up with a resolution and proposed the needs of the holy cow in the chapter devoted to Directive Principles of State Policy. Thus was born Article 48.

As a consequence of Article 48, several state governments hastened to enact laws prohibiting the killing of cows. At present, 24 out of 29 states in India have laws criminalising cow killing.

Source: Indian Express, 25/01/21

Quote of the Day

 

“People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.”
Brian Tracy

“स्पष्ट और लिखित लक्ष्य जिनके होते हैं, वे कम समय में इतनी ज्यादा सफलता प्राप्त करते हैं जितनी कि बिना ऐसे लक्ष्यों वाले सोच भी नहीं सकते।”
ब्रायन ट्रेसी