Here are 3 Back2Basics collections from today’s news items

B2B #1: From news-  Supreme Court rules NCMEI has wide powers

National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI)

1. The National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) was established to protect and safeguard the educational institutions which are established by the minorities in India
2. The key objective is to ensure that the true amplitude of the educational rights enshrined in Article 30(1) of the Constitution is made available to the members of the notified religious minority communities
3. This entails, inter alia, addressing all issues that pertain to the denial, deprivation or violation of the constitutional rights of the minorities to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, including all issues related to the grant of NOC, minority status certificates and affiliation to universities, wherever applicable
4. The commission is headed by a Chairman who belongs to a minority community and has been a Judge of a High Court
5. Two members are nominated by Central Government. They too must belong to a minority community and must be “persons of eminence, ability, and integrity”

B2B #2: From news- No relaxation in new bad loan rules, indicates RBI

 Strategic debt restructuring (SDR) 

1. Under SDR, banks who have given loans to a corporate borrower gets the right to convert the full or part of their loans into equity shares in the loan taken company
2. The SDR gives banks more power in the management of the company who has taken the loan and has defaulted
3. The SDR initiative can be taken by the group of banks or JLF that have given loans to the particular defaulted entity

Scheme for Sustainable Structuring of Stressed Assets (S4A)

1. The S4A Scheme aims at a deep financial restructuring of big debted projects by allowing lender (bank) to acquire equity of the stressed project
2. The scheme makes financial restructuring of large projects at the same time helping the lender’s ability to deal with such stressed assets
3. It is intended to restore the flow of credit to critical sectors including infrastructure
4. For an account to be eligible for restructuring under the S4A Scheme, the total loans by all institutional lenders in the account should exceed Rs 500 crore (including rupee loans, foreign currency loans/external commercial borrowings)
5. Under the S4A Scheme, banks would be to allow existing promoter to continue in the management even while being a minority shareholder. Whereas in the case of SDR, the promoter is delinked and ownership is changed

B2B #3: From news- Olive Ridleys return for rare mass nesting

 Olive ridley sea turtle

1. The olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea), also known as the Pacific ridley sea turtle, are smallest and most abundant of all sea turtles found in the world, species of sea turtle found in warm and tropical waters, primarily in the Pacific and Indian Oceans
2. They can also be found in warm waters of Atlantic ocean
3. These turtles, along with their cousin the Kemps ridley turtle, are best known for their unique mass nesting called Arribada, where thousands of females come together on the same beach to lay eggs

As a part of revision for Prelims 2018, Here’s a Factoid to brush up your concepts

Name : Aditya-L1

Details : It is India’s first solar mission. It will study the sun’s outer most layers, the corona and the chromospheres and collect data about coronal mass ejection, which will also yield information for space weather prediction. Significance of the mission: The data from Aditya mission will be immensely helpful in discriminating between different models for the origin of solar storms and also for constraining how the storms evolve and what path they take through the interplanetary space from the Sun to the Earth. Position of the satellite: In order to get the best science from the sun, continuous viewing of the sun is preferred without any occultation/ eclipses and hence, Aditya- L1 satellite will be placed in the halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system. What are Lagrangian points and halo orbit? Lagrangian points are the locations in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other. Any small mass placed at that location will remains at constant distances relative to the large masses. There are five such points in Sun-Earth system and they are denoted as L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. A halo orbit is a periodic three-dimensional orbit near the L1, L2 or L3.

Year of Launch : 2019