Quote of the Day

 

“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
Confucius

“जो आप खुद नहीं पसंद करते उसे दूसरों पर मत थोपिए।”
कन्फ्यूशियस

India’s first Centre for Wetland Conservation and Management to be opened in Chennai

 

Why it will be set up?

This Centre for Wetland Conservation and Management will be set in a bid to address the knowledge gaps and specific research needs for the conservation and management of wetlands.

Centre for Wetland Conservation and Management

• The Centre for Wetland Conservation and Management (CWCM) will be set up by the central government in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
• This conservation centre would be a part of the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management. This national centre is an institution under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.
• The CWCM will play a significant role to design and implement the regulatory frameworks and policies. It will also help in monitoring, management planning and targeted research in a bid to conserve the wetlands.
• The conservation centre will also act as a knowledge hub.
• It will enable the exchange between the wetland authorities in States or Union Territories, managers, wetland researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and users.
• The centre will further help in building the networks and partnerships with the relevant international and national agencies.

What are wetlands?

Wetland are a distinct ecosystem that are flooded by water. They are flooded either permanently or seasonally. In such ecosystems, oxygen-free processes prevail. Wetlands helps in water purification, water storage, processing of carbon and the stabilization of shorelines. It also provides support to the plants and animals. They are the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems. They occur naturally on every continent and the water in the can be either freshwater, brackish, or saltwater.

Wetlands in India

India has 42 Ramsar sites that have been designated as Wetlands of International Importance. They cover around 4.6% of Indian landmass.

World Wetlands Day

In a bid to conserve the wetlands, February 2 is observed as World Wetlands Day. In the year 2021, the day marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. This convention was signed at Ramsar in Iran in the year 1971.

Current Affairs – February 05, 2021

 

INDIA

‘Chauri Chaura’ Centenary celebrations inaugurated

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated ‘Chauri Chaura’ Centenary Celebrations at Chauri Chaura, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh on February 4, 2021.  The day marks 100 years of the ‘Chauri Chaura’ incident, a landmark event in the country’s fight for independence. A group of freedom fighters participating in the non-cooperation movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi in 1922 were fired upon by police, leading to death of many of them. In retaliation, protestors attacked and set fire to the Chauri Chaura police station, killing many of its occupants. Gandhi had called off the movement due to the violence.

Rajpath redevelopment project begins

The government’s Central Vista Avenue redevelopment project began on February 4, 2021 with Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA) Minister Hardeep Puri performing a “bhoomi pujan” at India Gate. The avenue, which stretches from North and South Block till India Gate, and includes Rajpath and its lawns and Vijay Chowk, is 3 km long. The project was awarded to Shapoorji Pallonji & Company Private Limited on January 8. After the construction of the new Parliament building began in January 2021, the redevelopment of the avenue becomes the second part of the government’s larger Central Vista revamp project to begin.

PM Modi holds phone talk with Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a telephone conversation on February 4, 2021 with M. Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa. The two leaders discussed the continuing challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in this context the vaccination campaigns being undertaken in their respective countries.

Economy & Corporate

Agreements/MoU signed on Feb 4 at Aero India 2021 in Bengaluru

Several agreements/MoUs were signed on February 4 at the three-day Aero India 2021 in Bengaluru that will conclude on February 5. Israeli defence technology company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) are teaming up for joint induction of an anti-torpedo defence system called ‘SHADE’ for the Indian Navy. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) received a Request for Proposal (RFP) from the Indian Air Force for 70 HTT-40 Basic Trainer Aircraft. HAL and Mishra Dhatu Nigam Limited (MIDHANI) have signed MoU for development and production of composite raw materials that are used in manufacture of aircrafts and are currently being imported. Israel’s SpearUAV, developers and suppliers of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) solutions, has signed an MoU with Paras Aerospace to introduce encapsulated Ninox 40 system to the Indian market.

Banks wrote off Rs 62,000 cr loans of top 100 willful defaulters: RBI

Banks have written off almost Rs 62,000 crore of loans of top 100 wilful defaulters as of March 2020, with Jatin Mehta’s Winsome Diamonds & Jewellery topping the list at Rs 3,098 crores. This data was shared by the Reserve Bank of India shared with Right to Information Act activist Biswanath Goswami.

L&T’s CEO & MD appointed as Chairman of the National Safety Council

The Ministry of Labour & Employment has appointed S.N. Subrahmanyan, CEO and Managing Director, L&T Ltd, as the Chairman of the National Safety Council for a period of three years.

Govt. launched KAPILA for IP Literacy and creating patent awareness

Govt. launched KAPILA (Kalam Program for Intellectual Property Literacy and Awareness Campaign) for Intellectual Property Literacy and creating patent awareness

The Government has launched a campaign namely Kalam Program for Intellectual Property Literacy and Awareness Campaign (KAPILA) on 15^th October, 2020. This information was given by the Union Minister for Education Ministry, Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on February 4, 2021.

Serum Institute, UNICEF enter into long-term supply for Covid-19 vaccines

Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) and UNICEF have entered into a long-term supply agreement for the AstraZeneca/Oxford and the Novavax vaccines, with the UN children’s agency saying it will have access to up to 1.1 billion doses of vaccines for around 100 countries. This was announced by United Nations International Children Education Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

World

US extends New START Nuclear Arms Control Treaty with Russia for five years

United States has extended the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) nuclear arms control treaty with Russia for five years till February 5, 2026. The treaty, which first went into effect in 2011, limits the US and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads each and imposes restrictions on the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.

Pak tests nuclear-capable surface-to-surface ballistic missile Ghaznavi

Pakistan on February 3, 2021 said it has successfully test-fired the nuclear-capable surface-to-surface ballistic missile Ghaznavi which can strike targets up to 290 kilometres.

International Criminal Court convicts former Ugandan warlord of war crimes

The Hague, Netherlands-based International Criminal Court (ICC) on February 4, 2021 convicted former Ugandan warlord Dominic Ongwen of war crimes and crimes against humanity between 2002 and 2004 in northern Uganda when he led a brigade of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

UK revokes China Global Television Network’s license to air its programs

In the United Kingdom, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has revoked China Global Television Network’s (CGTN) license to air its programs in the country. Ofcom said that Star China Media Ltd (SCML), which owns the UK licence for CGTN, does not have day-to-day control over the channel, which is against its rules.

International Day of Human Fraternity celebrated on Feb 4 by UN

The International Day of Human Fraternity was celebrated on February 4, 2021 by the United Nations. 2021 theme: ‘A Pathway to the Future’. A meeting between Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyib, on 4 February 2019 in Abu Dhabi had resulted in the signing of the document entitled “Human fraternity for world peace and living together”.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem launches MA in Smart Cities and Urban Informatics

 The Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem launched MA in smart cities and urban informatics. Taught by the Department of Geography, faculty of social sciences, the programme aims to develop a new generation of urban planners, analysts, and policymakers with the requisite toolbox for addressing the challenges of the smart city.

The university claims that the course capitalists on the existing programme in urban planning at the Hebrew University and the geoinformatics track in the department of geography. “It is curated for social science students who want to acquire a broad-based understanding of contemporary urban development utilising state of the art techniques in spatial analysis,” it added.

The programme focuses on smart cities and urban informatics. Where the former is an urban ecosystem optimising city functions and driving economic growth while improving quality of life, the later is a suite of tools and methods applied to urban issues. Geo-data is crucial for a better understanding of human interactions with the city.

The programme is a one-year, 32-credit course taught in English. “It is structured such that students acquire the key analytic competences in a relatively short-term frame the programme offers an opportunity to study in and experience the City of Jerusalem. With an active technological ecosystem, the city offers the ideal backdrop for the programme,” the university says in official statement.

Interested can apply at smartcities.huji.ac.il/. The application process will be open till April 29. A $200 scholarship will be awarded to students who apply to the programme by April 29, 2021, are accepted, and pay tuition in full by May 13, 2021.

The university will be conducting a Virtual Open Day on March 14, 2021 for students looking to study and gather information about the programme. Anyone who has studied an undergraduate degree from a recognised university in India can apply for the course. The students are required to have an average of 85 per cent or equivalent grade average with a recommended band of 6 or above in IELTS.

Source: Indian Express, 4/02/21

When the violence of Chauri Chaura prompted Gandhi to suspend the non-cooperation movement

 On February 4, 1922, a large group of nationalist volunteers had gathered on the streets of a small, obscure hamlet in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces. More than a year had passed since Mahatma Gandhi had launched the non-cooperation movement with the aim of attaining ‘Purna Swaraj’ (full independence). The volunteers marched through the streets shouting slogans of Gandhi and the Khilafat. Soon they walked into the police. Sticks and stones were thrown from one end in return for bullets from the other. As the crowd grew larger and fiercer, the cops retreated inside the police station. The protestors doused the building in kerosene and set it on fire. Twenty-three policemen perished. A total of 228 people were brought to trial in the incident, out of which 19 were sentenced to death.

The village was Chauri Chaura, and the moment went down the pages of Indian history as one which marked the end of the non-cooperation movement. It is interesting that while the Chauri Chaura incident was abhorred by Gandhi, under whom the national movement practically took shape, in the memory of post-Independent India, it has been commemorated with two memorials and a train being named after it. This year PM Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Chauri Chaura centenary celebration on February 4 through video conferencing. The Uttar Pradesh government has organised for all of the state’s districts to record a video singing Vande Mataram in a salute posture from February 3 to 4 to pay homage to the martyrs of the Chauri Chaura incident.

“‘Chauri Chaura’ is a tale of how the celebrated condemnation of a riot by Gandhi paradoxically entitles it to national importance,” writes historian Shahid Amin in his celebrated book on the incident, ‘Event, memory, metaphor: Chauri Chaura (1922-1992).’ As he explains, “the unforgettable event was largely forgotten in nationalist lore; it came to be remembered only as the episode which forced Gandhi to call off his all-India movement of non-cooperation with the British.” “The ‘true’ significance of Chauri Chaura in Indian history lay outside the time and place of its occurrence.”

The unfolding of the incident at Chauri Chaura

In September 1920, at a special session of the Congress, Gandhi was able to push through a radical programme of non-cooperation with British rule. “The programme provided for surrender of government titles, boycott of schools, courts and councils, boycott of foreign goods, encouragement of national schools, arbitration of courts and khadi (homespun cloth),” writes historian Sekar Bandopadhyay in his book, ‘From Plassey to Partition: A History of modern India’. Further, Gandhi assured that the movement would bring swaraj within a year. In case that did not happen, or if the government resorted to repression, a civil disobedience movement would be carried out.

But Gandhi also realised that the nationalist sentiment of people was in need of a disciplinary reform. Consequently, he put forward a 20-point programme for controlling the ‘mobocracy’ of the crowds. It was mandatory for everyone to obey the instructions in the programme. As written by Gandhi and reproduced by Amin in his book, “Before we can make real headway, we must train these masses of men who have a heart of gold, who feel for the country, who want to be taught and led. But a few intelligent, sincere, local workers are needed, and the whole nation can be organised to act intelligently, and democracy can be evolved out of mobocracy.” By the winter of 1921, thousands of volunteers had turned up to pledge non-cooperation.

A few days before the incident, a few police officers beat up a group of volunteers at Chotki Dumri, a village one mile west of the Chauri Chaura police station. The leaders of the Chotki Dumri volunteer group sent letters to others in the neighbouring villages about the oppression by the local police. They decided to congregate at Dumri on February 4, where the volunteers took an oath and marched to the Chauri Chaura thana to demand an explanation from the officer there and mass picket the Mundera Bazaar nearby.

Gupteshwar Singh, the thanedar, was expecting the crowd and had arranged for more policemen to be sent from Gorakhpur. In the battle of abuses, stones and bullets that followed, three from the crowd were killed and several injured. Seeing the crowd more agitated now, the police retreated into the thaana. The crowd locked it and set it on fire, killing 23 policemen.

By the time of this incident, a year had gone by since the non-cooperation movement had started and independence as Gandhi had promised was still as distant as ever. Gandhi had planned on starting a civil disobedience movement in February 1922, in the taluks of Bardoli and Anand in Gujarat. Peasants were to be asked to stop paying taxes and refuse all cooperation with the government. If it succeeded, Gandhi had hoped to replicate the movement elsewhere in the country.

However, before the movement could take off, he received news of the Chauri Chaura incident. On February 8, he wrote to the Congress Working Committee. “This was the third time he had received a rude shock on the eve of embarking on mass civil disobedience,” notes historian Ramachandra Guha in his book, ‘Gandhi: The years that changed the world: 1914-1948’. “The first occasion was in April 1919, when his fellow Ahmedabadis rioted after he had been stopped from entering Punjab. The second was in November 1921, the violence in Bombay ensuing from the boycott of the Prince of Wales’ visit. Now again he had been violently agitated by the events in Chauri Chaura,” adds Guha.

On February 10, when Gandhi spoke to the Congress workers in Bardoli about whether the non-cooperation movement should be suspended in view of Chauri Chaura, the majority of them responded disagreed. As Guha notes, Gandhi was “dismayed by the response which showed that even the ‘best workers’ of the Congress had failed to understand the message of non-violence.” He immediately resolved to suspend non-cooperation and civil disobedience. Peasants were advised to pay land revenue and not hold public demonstrations.

As a means of penance, Gandhi went on a five-day fast. Even when informed about the ruthlessness of the police, he remained unmoved. As he noted in the Young India, “no provocation can possibly justify the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenceless and had virtually thrown themselves on the mercy of the mob.”

“There was a lot of discussion and debate within the national movement after this incident. There were people who were very disappointed and felt that the movement as a whole could not be held responsible for the actions of a few people. However, even the critics understood later on that there were problems in the movement, and that it was losing steam,” says historian Mridula Mukherjee.

“Nevertheless, before the next phase of mass struggle, which is the civil disobedience movement of 1930s, they discussed with Gandhiji and he too agreed that there could be isolated acts of violence in such a big country, and that would not become the cause for suspending the movement,” she adds.
Mukherjee says there were many other issues for suspending the movement in 1922, violence at Chauri Chaura being one of them. “My understanding is that the non-cooperation movement had already passed its peak by the middle of 1921 and that the popular enthusiasm of people was declining. After all these were ordinary people who had a limited capacity to sacrifice and struggle. Gandhiji understood this and when this incident occurred he took the opportunity of unilaterally withdrawing the movement rather than letting it fizzle out or being suppressed,” she says.

The memory of Chauri Chaura

Despite the unfortunate fate it brought upon the national movement, the incident at Chauri Chaura has been assiduously incorporated and almost ‘celebrated’ within the collective memory of India’s freedom struggle. In 1924, the British erected a memorial for the dead policemen adjacent to the railway station at Chauri Chaura. Amin notes that this monument too was nationalised post the Independence of the country. “The legend the colonial masters engraved on it was gouged out by Baba Ramghav Das, the prominent Gandhian of East UP, On August 15, 1947. This noble worthy was followed by the post-colonial government, which did more than just smoothen the rough cutting edges of nationalist chisels. It chose to inscribe ‘Jai Hind’ on the police memorial,” he writes.

In 1973, the Chauri Chaura Shaheed Smarak Samiti, in their effort to commemorate the 19 people tried and executed in the incident, built a 12.2-metre high triangular monument near the lake at Chauri Chaura. On each side of the monument, a figure is depicted hanging a noose around his neck.

In 1982, the Indira Gandhi-led government built another monument, opposite to the one commemorating the police. It contains the names of the 19 executed engraved upon it. A library and museum containing information on the freedom movement were also built next to the memorial.
Later, in 1990, the Indian railways named a train in honour those executed — the Chauri Chaura Express runs from Gorakhpur to Kanpur.

“Chauri Chaura is a reminder that if certain unfortunate incidents happen, then it can impact the movement as a whole. Gandhiji took responsibility for the incident and in order to protect the people from the wrath of the British who would have used that incident of violence in order to crush the whole movement,” says Mukherjee.

Speaking about the way in which the incident has come to be commemorated a century later, Mukherjee says, “we can observe this incident, but we can’t celebrate the killing of 22 policemen… The freedom struggle does not allow us to glorify these acts of violence.”

Written by Adrija Roychowdhury

Source: Indian Express, 5/02/21

NTA ARPIT 2021 registration begins,

 

• Interested and eligible candidates can apply for the NTA ARPIT 2021 online at arpit.nta.nic.in on or before March 3, 2021.
• The National Testing Agency (NTA) has invited online applications for the Annual Refresher Programme In Teaching (ARPIT) examination 2021 on its official website.

• Interested and eligible candidates can apply for the NTA ARPIT 2021 online at arpit.nta.nic.in on or before March 3, 2021.

  The agency will conduct the computer-based examination on April 10, 2021, in two shifts, i.e from 9 am to 12 noon in the first shift and 3 to 6 pm in the second shift.

  Candidates belonging to the unreserved category are required to pay an application fee of ₹1000. For Gen-EWS/ SC/ST/PwD /OBC-(NCL)/Female/Transgender candidates, the registration fee is ₹500.

  "Annual Refresher Programme in Teaching (ARPIT) is a refresher course for Faculty or Non Faculty Learners for their Career Advancement Scheme. National Testing Agency (NTA) would be conducting the examination and certification would be done through Study Web and Active Learning by Young and Aspiring minds (SWAYAM),"

The new avatar of the encryption wars

 The specific implementation of encryption technology that has worried governments the world over is the Signal protocol (E2EE), which guarantees that even intermediaries who provide these services will not be able to decrypt these messages in transit

The government has proposed a new bill to regulate mathematics. The bill envisages that certain mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, LCM and GCD would be banned, if they are prime numbers and have more than 309 digits and a licensing regime, which would only allow licensed entities to perform these operations.If the above reads like a parody, it may soon cease to be and become reality.

An Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull declared in 2017 that, “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.

In a joint communique issued on October 11, 2020, the Five Eye nations (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada), along with Japan and India, stated, “Particular implementations of encryption technology... pose significant challenges to public safety, including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children” and called upon technology companies to enable “law enforcement access to content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

The specific implementation of encryption technology that has worried governments the world over is the Signal protocol (E2EE), which guarantees that even intermediaries who provide these services will not be able to decrypt these messages in transit. It also guarantees plausible deniability, where if someone receives an encrypted message from you, they can be absolutely sure you sent it (rather than having been forged by some third party), but can’t prove to anyone else that it was a message you wrote.

A variation of their anxieties played out in India, in the “WhatsApp traceability debate”, where the government pushed for traceability (Tell me who the sender is), but also said that it does not want to break end-to-end encryption, an impossible request, as sender deniability is at the heart of the end-to-end encryption. When repeatedly rebuffed by WhatsApp, an attempt was made to resolve the matter through the judicial system to compel the intermediaries (WhatsApp) to stop deploying messaging systems that use E2EE.

Given this background, the use of children in the statement to build a case for banning E2EE is interesting because it uses a propaganda technique called Pedophrasty, where children are invoked to prop up an argument, and make the opponents against the argument look like unprincipled savages and make everyone else suspend all rational and critical thinking, and agree to the argument.

But we must not agree to this dangerous set of proposals, as they are a continuum to the encryption wars, which started in the 1970s, where Western governments tried to limit use of encryption technologies by using export controls and ultimately failed.

In the 1990s, the National Security Agency in the US proposed the use of “Clipper Chip” in every phone, which implemented encryption but gave backdoor access to the US government. After Matt Blaze showed how rogue applications can use the chip to access data without the government backdoor, this attempt was abandoned.

In 2010, Google published a blog post, detailing how Chinese state backed hackers, attacked Gmail to spy on Chinese human rights advocates via a backdoor, installed by Google at the behest of the US government in Gmail to comply with search warrants on users. When Ericsson put backdoors into Vodafone products and deployed these in Greece for aiding law enforcement, these backdoors were used to spy on the Greek prime minister, by unknown perpetrators, who were never found.

All these incidents point out two fundamental realities. The first one is that backdoors are always dual-use and can be used by anyone and, hence, they don’t keep anyone safe. The second is that E2EE is safe and easy enough for anyone to use and hence has achieved mainstream adoption. This has made the usual approach preferred by law enforcement agencies of coercing intermediaries to put backdoors irrelevant and obsolete.

Outlawing E2EE deployment and forcing intermediaries to comply with these proposed rules or leave the country by threatening to shut down their business operations, hence, may become the preferred policy response. But these rules, even if they become the law everywhere, are doomed to fail, in the same way, the discovery of irrational numbers (square root of 2) could not be suppressed by drowning its inventor Hippasus, in the sea, as it takes only a rented computer at ₹700 a month to run a back-end service implementing E2EE.

If existing intermediaries are forced to abandon it, others like EncroChat (popular among drug cartels) will step in and fill the void. The busting of EncroChat, when law enforcement agencies successfully penetrated the drug cartels by putting a “tool” in its servers, also indicates that it is possible to work around E2EE in some cases, using offensive technical measures by compromising endpoints. It would also be a far more proportionate measure than attempting to ban mathematical equations.Anand Venkatanarayanan researches disinformation, cyber weapons and data security and is a privacy advocate

By Anand Venkatanarayanan

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/02/21