Bharat 22 ETF is an open-ended exchange traded fund investing in S&P BSE Bharat 22 Index. Bharat 22 scheme was launched by the Government to fulfil its disinvetsment target in PSUs.

The emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and is endemic to Antarctica. It is the only penguin species that breeds during the Antarctic winter.

Disappearing sea ice impacts Emperor Penguins directly, as the animals use it as a home base for their ninemonth breeding season and for feeding and moulting.

The Simlipal forest reserve area frequently witnesses forest fires during dry weather conditions.

Similipal, which derives its name from ‘Simul’ (silk cotton) tree, is a national park and a tiger reserve situated in the northern part of Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district. Similipal and the adjoining areas, comprising 5,569 sq km, was declared a biosphere reserve by the Government of India on June 22, 1994, and lies in the eastern end of the eastern ghat.

Government of India declared Simlipal as a biosphere reserve in 1994. UNESCO added this national park to its list of Biosphere Reserves in May 2009.

The reasons that can be attributed to the frequent landslides and debris avalanches in Himalayan region are
(i) The Himalayas are tectonically active. Thus, tectonically unstable.
(ii) They are mostly made up of sedimentary rocks and unconsolidated and semi consolidated deposits.
(iii) The slopes are very steep.

Operation ‘Clean Art’: It is first pan India operation to crackdown on the smuggling of mongoose hair.
Conceived by WCCB.
Aim: To ensure that the mongoose hair brush trade should be closed down across the country

The National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) is the apex financing organization of Union Agriculture Ministry.

About NCDC:
It is a statutory corporation set up under the National Cooperative Development Corporation Act, 1962.
The objectives of NCDC are planning and promoting programmes for production, processing, marketing, storage, export and import of agricultural produce, foodstuffs

US crude oil exports to India jumped to 2.11 million metric tonnes in February, helping it dislodge Saudi Arabia as the second largest supplier to India, the world’s third largest oil importer.

This comes in the backdrop of India increasing its oil imports from the US, with the Indian government working on diversifying the country’s energy basket with crude oil supplies from non-Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries (Opec) sources.

India’s dramatic surge in US crude inflows has helped the exporter to displace Saudi Arabia for the first time.

Global crude oil prices have surged after the Opec-plus grouping’s decision to retain supply curbs.

OPEC+ is an alliance of crude producers, who have been undertaking corrections in supply in the oil markets.

OPEC membership is open to any country that is a substantial exporter of oil and which shares the ideals of the organization.

The Ministry of External Affairs too has seen a restructuring with a Cyber Diplomacy Division, an E-Governance & Information Technology Division and a New Emerging & Strategic Technologies Division to manage science and technology issues in the nation’s diplomatic matrix.

The National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP) 2020 is a National Mission document providing the vision and the roadmap for the faster adoption of electric vehicles and their manufacturing in the country. This plan has been designed to enhance national fuel security, to provide affordable and environmentally friendly transportation and to enable the Indian automotive industry to achieve global manufacturing leadership.

As part of the NEMMP 2020, Department of Heavy Industry formulated a Scheme viz. Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (Hybrid &) Electric Vehicles in India (FAME India) Scheme in the year 2015 to promote manufacturing of electric and hybrid vehicle technology and to ensure sustainable growth of the same.

Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is the third generation launch vehicle of India. It is the first Indian launch vehicle to be equipped with liquid stages.

After its first successful launch in October 1994, PSLV emerged as the reliable and versatile workhorse launch vehicle of India with 39 consecutively successful missions by June 2017. During 1994-2017 period, the vehicle has launched 48 Indian satellites and 209 satellites for customers from abroad.

The vehicle successfully launched two spacecraft – Chandrayaan-1 in 2008 and Mars Orbiter Spacecraft in 2013 – that later travelled to Moon and Mars respectively.

WHO gets its funding from two main sources: Member States paying their assessed contributions (countries’ membership dues), and voluntary contributions from Member States and other partners.

Assessed contributions (AC) are a percentage of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (the percentage is agreed by the UN General Assembly). Member States approve them every two-years at the World Health Assembly. They cover less than 20% of the total budget.

The remainder of WHO’s financing is in the form of voluntary contributions (VC), largely from Member States as well as from other United Nations organizations, intergovernmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, the private sector, and other sources.

The WHO Foundation was launched on 27 May 2020. It is legally separate from WHO and it will facilitate contributions from the general public, individual major donors and corporate partners to WHO and trusted partners to deliver on high-impact programmes.

The first UNEP synthesis report is titled: “Making Peace With Nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies” and is based on evidence from global environmental assessments.

An aerosol is a suspension of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in air or another gas. Aerosols can be natural or anthropogenic. Examples of natural aerosols are fog, mist, dust, forest exudates and geyser steam. Examples of anthropogenic aerosols are particulate air pollutants and smoke.

Aerosols influence climate in two primary ways: by changing the amount of heat that gets in or out of the atmosphere, or by affecting the way clouds form.

Some aerosols, like many kinds of dust from ground-up rocks, are light-colored and even a little bit reflective. When the sun’s rays beam down on them, they bounce the rays back out of the atmosphere, preventing that heat from ever reaching Earth’s surface. The effect can be dramatic: The Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, in the Philippines, spewed the equivalent of 1.2 square miles of tiny, reflective rock particles into the high stratosphere—cooling the planet for two full years afterward.

Any member of the Parliament can oppose the introduction of a bill by stating that it initiates legislation outside the legislative competence of the Parliament. There is limited debate, and the house in which the bill is getting introduced does not delve into constitutional niceties. MPs also get an opportunity to discuss a bill’s constitutionality while debating it in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. But on both these occasions, the strength of the argument does not determine the legislative outcome. The Parliament’s decision depends on the numbers that the treasury and opposition benches command on the house floor. So, when the treasury benches have the numbers, the government faces no difficulty getting its legislative proposals through Parliament.

The real opportunity for probing a bill’s constitutionality arises when a parliamentary committee is examining it.

The committee process also has the advantage of drawing on constitutional expertise outside of the law ministry.

But our parliamentary committee process has a fatal flaw. Government bills do not automatically go to committees for examination. Ministers get an option to refer their bill to a select committee. They often don’t exercise this option and request the presiding officers to not send the bill to a ministry specific departmentally related committee.

Prices of milk in the country are decided by the Cooperative and Private dairies based on cost of production.

Under the distribution of legislatives powers between the Union of India and States under Article 246(3) of the Constitution, the preservation of cattle is a matter on which the legislature of the States has exclusive powers to legislate.

As per article 48 of Indian Constitution the state shall endeavour to organize agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall in particular take steps for preserving improving the breed, and prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.

Using the money bill route to bypass the Rajya Sabha, the government introduced regressive amendments to laws, including the Income Tax Act of 1961, the Companies Act of 2013, and the Representation of the People Act of 1951, to introduce electoral bonds.

Shigmo, or Shigmotsav, is the celebration of a ‘rich, golden harvest of paddy’ by the tribal communities of Goa.

Sundari — a tigress shifted as part of India’s first inter-state translocation project in 2018 from Madhya Pradesh to Odisha — returned home.

The tiger relocation project was initiated in 2018 wherein two big cats, a male (Mahavir) from Kanha Tiger Reserve and a female (Sundari) from Bandhavgarh from Madhya Pradesh were relocated to Satkosia Tiger Reserve in Odisha, to shore up the tiger population in the state.

Access to justice for the poor is a constitutional mandate to ensure fair treatment under our legal system. Hence, Lok Adalats (literally, ‘People’s Court’) were established to make justice accessible and affordable to all. It was a forum to address the problems of crowded case dockets outside the formal adjudicatory system.

The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976, inserted Article 39A to ensure “equal justice and free legal aid”. To this end, the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, was enacted by Parliament and it came into force in 1995 “to provide free and competent legal services to weaker sections of the society” and to “organise Lok Adalats to secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity”.

NASA and ISRO are collaborating on developing a satellite called NISAR, which will detect movements of the planet’s surface as small as 0.4 inches over areas about half the size of a tennis court.

The satellite will be launched in 2022 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, into a near-polar orbit and will scan the globe every 12 days over the course of its three-year mission of imaging the Earth’s land, ice sheets and sea ice to give an “unprecedented” view of the planet.

The name NISAR is short for NASA-ISRO-SAR. SAR here refers to the synthetic aperture radar that NASA will use to measure changes in the surface of the Earth. Essentially, SAR refers to a technique for producing high-resolution images. Because of the precision, the radar can penetrate clouds and darkness, which means that it can collect data day and night in any weather.

During the course of three years, the images will allow scientists to track changes in croplands, hazard sites and will help them to monitor crises such as volcanic eruptions. The images will be detailed enough to show local changes and broad enough to measure regional trends.