Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: CAPFs
Mains level: Paper 3- Role of CAPFs in disaster management.
The article emphasises the role played by the CAPFs in dealing with the disasters.
Dealing with the disasters
- When disaster strikes our country, be it natural or man-made, the government summons the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) to carry out the task of overcoming the disaster.
- The CAPFs help in carrying out rescue and relief operations, and also mitigates the pains and problems arising out of the disaster.
Role played by CAPFS during Covid
- CAPFs comprise the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Border Security Force, Central Industrial Security Force, Sashastra Seema Bal, Assam Rifles and the ITBP.
- Even before the country got to know about the COVID-19, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) had already set up its 600-bed quarantine centre in Chawla on the outskirts of New Delhi.
- The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had roped in specialists from the Safdarjung Hospital to coordinate with ITBP officials.
- Doctors and paramedical personnel of other CAPFs were also roped in.
- The expertise acquired by ITBP personnel and the Standard Operating Procedure prepared by the ITBP came handy for the States and other police forces in establishing their own quarantine centres and COVID-19 hospitals.
Role of NDRF during Covid-19
- NDRF personnel are wholly drawn from the CAPFs.
- So, they form a good reserve of trained personnel when they go back to their parent force after their stint with NDRF.
- With 12 battalions of the NDRF— each comprising 1,149 personnel — spread across the country, its experts have the core competency to tackle biological disasters like COVID-19.
- Such personnel can be deployed at quarantines centres after short-term courses.
- A proposal mooted by NITI Aayog last year, to conduct a bridge course for dentists to render them eligible for the MBBS degree, could be revived, and such doctors could be on stand-by to help in such emergency crises.
Conclusion
It is these CAPF personnel who give a semblance of existence of government administration even in the remotest corners of the country. Their versatile experience can be utilised to the nation’s advantage.
B2BASICS:
CAPF
The Central Armed Police Forces refers to uniform nomenclature of five security forces in India under the authority of Ministry of Home Affairs. Their role is to defend the national interest mainly against the internal threats.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 2- Equity in education and impact of digital education on it
Fairness and inclusiveness are two important aspects of education system. Growing shift toward digital education in India has implications for these two aspects. The article suggests ways to make the education system fair and inclusive.
Knowledge economy in India
- The new National Education Policy (NEP) as well as other factors have lately brightened up education landscape in India..
- The rise of education technology (ed-tech) incorporating VR, AR, ‘gamification’, 3D immersive learning, etc, is contributing to the knowledge economy’s potential for large market size, calling for requisite policy support.
Barriers to equity in education
- The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) defines two dimensions of equity in education.
- First is “fairness”, which means ensuring that personal and social circumstances do not prevent students from achieving their academic potential.
- The second is “inclusion”, which means setting a basic minimum standard for education that is shared by all students regardless of their background.
- The barriers that make equity difficult to foster in India are varied and complex.
Loss of learning during Covid pandemic
- The latest Annual State of Education Report (ASER) reveals that 20% of rural students lacked textbooks.
- Only one in ten students had access to online classes during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- The Survey provides a glimpse into the levels of learning loss that students in rural India, particularly in states like Bihar, West Bengal, UP, and Rajasthan, are suffering, resulting in sharp digital divides in education.
- Unless remedied with urgency, the digital split may disrupt learning, and jeopardise our hard-won gains resulting in large scale school drop-outs, particularly of adolescent girls.
How to remove barriers to equity?
- To remove these barriers we need to look at several aspects like monetary resources, academic standards, academic content and support.
- Apart from inequality in internet access and access to devices, even the quality of connection and related services and subscription fees exacerbate the digital divide.
- For education to be availed as a social good, access at an affordable cost and reasonable quality is a precondition.
- The availability of content in vernacular languages is yet another issue.
- In digital education along with demand-side issues, supply-side issues need fixing, such as training of teachers in ICT, new learning devices and handling the evolved curriculum.
- Teachers and academic institutions need to ensure that the content they are using is lucid, appropriate, fact-based and relevant.
- Access to education loans from banks and financial institutions are a great support in the cause of education, particularly higher education.
- Education is on the Concurrent List. A cooperative and collaborative spirit will thus be critical to realise the goals.
- The Centre has a task well cut for building consensus on NEP2020.
Consider the question “Fainess and inclusiveness are two important dimensions of equity that should be pursued by any education system. However, push towards digital educations threatens these two dimensions of the education system in India. Comment”
Conclusion
With strong corporate commitment, states’ support, backed by strong policy push and intent by the Centre, and value addition by other stakeholders, the roadblocks on the path of equity and inclusiveness in education, though daunting, could be addressed.
Source-
https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/equity-in-education-matters/2121998/
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Hydrogen fuel cell, H-CNG
Mains level: Paper 3- Adoption of hydrogen as vehicular fuel
Transport sector has been a major contributor of Green House Gases in India. Moving towards cleaner fuels brings to fore two options battery-operated electric vehicle (EV) and hydrogen fuel cell EV. The article compares the two.
Vehicular emission and steps taken to deal with it
- The transport sector in India contributes one-third of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, within which the lion’s share is that of road transport.
- The government has made concerted efforts to tackle vehicular emissions with policies steps and programmes such as the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles (FAME I) scheme, FAME II, tax benefits, etc.
Blending hydrogen
- Typically, hydrogen can be produced in one of three ways, i.e., from fossil fuels (grey hydrogen), through carbon capture utilisation & storage (CCUS) application and fossil fuels (blue hydrogen), or by using renewable energy (green hydrogen).
- Indian Oil Corporation Limited has patented a technology that produces H-CNG (18% hydrogen in CNG) directly from natural gas, without having to undertake expensive conventional blending.
- This compact blending process provides a 22% reduction in cost as compared to conventional blending.
- In comparison to CNG, H-CNG allows for a 70% reduction in carbon monoxide emissions and a 25% reduction in hydrocarbon emissions.
- The new H-CNG technology requires only minor tweaks in the current design of CNG buses.
- However, the issue is that the Hydrogen-spiked CNG is still being produced from natural gas-a fossil fuel.
Electric vehicle Vs. Fuel cell
- From a commercial viability standpoint, two cleaner fuel alternatives come to mind—battery-operated electric vehicles (BEV) and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV).
- Hydrogen FCEVs has reduced refuelling time (5 minutes versus 30-40 minutes with fast charges), higher energy density, longer range, etc.
- However, one needs to focus on is the entire life cycle of these vehicles as opposed to restricting the analysis to just the carbon-free tailpipe emissions.
- According to a report by Deloitte (2020) on hydrogen and fuel cells, the lifecycle GHG emissions from hydrogen FCEVs ranges between 130-230 g CO2e per km.
- The lower end of the range depicts the case of hydrogen production from renewables while the higher end reflects the case of hydrogen production from natural gas.
- The corresponding life cycles GHG emissions for BEV and internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles range between 160-250 g CO2e and 180-270 g CO2e respectively.
- The cost of lithium ion-based battery-operated vehicles has been reducing while hydrogen fuel cell technology is relatively quite expensive.
- A hydrogen-run vehicle achieves an energy efficiency rate of 25-35% (roughly 45% of energy is lost during the electrolysis process alone).
Way forward
- Given that these are early days for FCEV, one can be hopeful that we will be able to achieve economies of scale and attain cost reductions.
- Hydrogen Council (2020) on hydrogen cost competitiveness that states scaling up and augmenting fuel cell production from 10,000 to 200,000 units can deliver a 45% reduction in the cost per unit.
- Similarly, the versatility of hydrogen allows for complementarity across its numerous applications.
- Moreover, based on the numbers quoted by this report, fuel cell stacks for passenger vehicles are expected to exhibit learning rates of 17% in the coming future.
- The corresponding figures for commercial vehicles stand at 11%.
- Efforts are underway in India, and the research activities pertaining to hydrogen have been compiled and recently released in the form of a country status report.
- In their quest for becoming carbon neutral by 2035, Reliance Industries plan to replace transportation fuels with hydrogen and clean electricity.
- Similarly, the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) is considering setting up a green hydrogen production facility in Andhra Pradesh.
- The ministry of road transport and highways issued a notification proposing amendments to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules (1989) to incorporate safety standards for hydrogen fuel cell technology vehicles.
- As per a policy brief issued by TERI, demand for hydrogen in India is expected to increase 3-10 fold by 2050.
Consider the question “What are the benefits and challenges in the adoption of hydrogen as vehicular fuel?”
Conclusion
Against this backdrop, the future of hydrogen, particularly green hydrogen, looks promising in India.
Source:-
https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/fuelling-a-green-future/2121991/
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Fast Radio Burst (FRB)
Mains level: Hunt for extra-terrestrial life
NASA has reported that it observed a mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before in the Milky Way.
Such news makes us think about alien and extraterrestrial life at the first. Do not get carried away with such thoughts. Its simply a space based phenomena.
What is an FRB?
- The first FRB was discovered in 2007, since when scientists have been working towards finding the source of their origin.
- Essentially, FRBs are bright bursts of radio waves (radio waves can be produced by astronomical objects with changing magnetic fields).
- Its durations lie in the millisecond-scale, because of which it is difficult to detect them and determine their position in the sky.
Who discovered it?
- The X-ray portion of the simultaneous bursts was detected by several satellites, including NASA’s Wind mission.
- Further, a NASA-funded project called Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) also detected the radio burst.
Why are they significant?
- First noticed in 2018 by the Canadian observatory the waves have created ripples across the globe for one reason — they arrive in a pattern.
- This gave birth to theories that they could be from an alien civilization.
- Initially, it was believed that the collision of black holes or neutron stars triggers them.
- But the discovery of repeating FRBs debunked the theory of colliding objects.
What is the origin of the FRB detected in April?
- The source of the FRB detected in April in the Milky Way is a very powerful magnetic neutron star, referred to as a magnetar.
- Magnetar is located in the constellation Vulpecula and is estimated to be between 14,000-41,000 light-years away.
- The FRB was part of one of the magnetar’s most prolific flare-ups, with the X-ray bursts lasting less than a second.
What is a magnetar?
- A magnetar is a neutron star, “the crushed, city-size remains of a star many times more massive than our Sun.”
- The magnetic field of such a star is very powerful, which can be over 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet and up to a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars.
- Neutron stars are formed when the core of a massive star undergoes gravitational collapse when it reaches the end of its life.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: CBD, Nagoya Protocol
Mains level: Threats of ABS
A special instrument for access to crop genetic resources, i.e. Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) system, is fraught with challenges.
What is ABS?
- The Nagoya Protocol sought to ensure commercial and research utilization of genetic resources led to sharing its benefits with the government and the community that conserved such resources.
- The Nagoya Protocol deals with Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
- It is a 2010 supplementary agreement to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
- It sets out obligations for its contracting parties to take measures in relation to access to genetic resources, benefit-sharing and compliance.
Try this PYQ:
Q.Which one the following is associated with the issue of control and phasing out of the use of ozone-depleting substances?
(a) Bretton Woods Conference
(b) Montreal Protocol
(c) Kyoto Protocol
(d) Nagoya Protocol
A deviation from its purpose
- The CBD was created with wild biodiversity in mind, especially medicinal plants where the source of a particular genetic resource and associated traditional knowledge can often be established easily.
- The situation is different with respect to genetic resources for food and agriculture, including crops and livestock.
- Humans have modified these in an incremental manner and in many different geographical locations far from where they were originally domesticated.
India at loss
- India was a victim of misappropriation or bio-piracy of our genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, which were patented in other countries.
- Well-known examples of this include neem and turmeric. It was expected that the Nagoya Protocol on ABS, a key missing pillar of the CBD, would address this concern.
Threats to livestocks
- Animal genetic resources composed of breeds and strains of domesticated animals that humans have developed out of 40 wild species in the past 10,000 years were placed under the purview of the Nagoya Protocol.
- India is a key repository of genetic resources related to animals and holds a rich diversity of distinct livestock breeds. It is, therefore, essential that these breeds are protected.
- The impending and on-going implementation of the Nagoya Protocol at national levels, therefore, creates some urgency for the animal genetic resource sector to engage with these questions.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: brown , black carbon
Mains level: Glacial melting of himalayas
A study has highlighted that brown carbon ‘tarballs’ that fasten the glacial melting has been found in the Himalayan atmosphere.
We are still to find a solution for the ill-fated Delhi air, and here comes another blow from the stubble burnings.
What are Brown Carbon ‘Tarballs’?
- Tarballs are small light-absorbing, carbonaceous particles formed due to burning of biomass or fossil fuels that deposit on snow and ice.
- They are formed from brown carbon, emitted during the burning of fossil fuels.
- The median sizes of externally mixed tarballs and internally mixed tarballs were 213 and 348 nanometre respectively.
- Primary brown carbon (BrC) co-emitted with black carbon (BC) from biomass burning is an important light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol.
- The black carbon from the Indo-Gangetic Plain can reach the Himalaya region and influence glacial melting and climatic change.
Highlights of the study
- Until now, black carbon was found to be transported long distances by the wind to the Himalayan atmosphere.
- The study revealed that a dense array of active fire spots — corresponding to large-scale wheat-residue burning on the Indo-Gangetic Plain — occurred along the pathways of Himalaya.
- The percentage of the tarballs increased on days of higher levels of pollution and could contribute to the hastening of glacial melt and global warming.
- The researchers concluded that tarballs from long-range transport can be an important factor in the climatic effect and would correspond to a substantial influence on glacial melting in the Himalaya region.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Kartarpur Corridor, Nirguna cult
Mains level: Piligrimage diplomacy between India and Pakisatan
Pakistan has decided to transfer the management of the Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara from a Sikh body to a separate trust, saying it runs against the religious sentiments of the Sikh community.
Try this PYQ:
Consider the following Bhakti Saints:
- Dadu Dayal
- Guru Nanak
- Tyagaraja
Who among the above was/were preaching when the Lodi dynasty fell and Babur took over?
(a) 1 and 3
(b) 2 only
(c) 2 and 3
(d) 1 and 2
Kartarpur Corridor
- The Kartarpur corridor connects the Darbar Sahib Gurdwara in Narowal district of Pakistan with the Dera Baba Nanak shrine in Gurdaspur district in India’s Punjab province.
- The first guru of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, founded Kartarpur in 1504 AD on the right bank of the Ravi River. The name Kartarpur means “Place of God”.
- The corridor is being built to commemorate 550th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak Dev, founder of Sikhism on 12th November 2019.
About Guru Nanak
- Guru Nanak Dev (1469-1539) also referred to as Baba Nanak was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus.
- He advocated the ‘Nirguna’ form of Bhakti. He rejected sacrifices, ritual baths, image worship, austerities and the scriptures of both Hindus and Muslims.
- He appointed one of his disciples, Angad, to succeed him as the preceptor (guru), and this practice was followed for nearly 200 years.
- The fifth preceptor, Guru Arjan, compiled his hymns along with those of his four successors and also other religious poets, like Baba Farid, Ravidas and Kabir, in the Adi Granth Sahib.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Pusa Biodecomposer
Mains level: Alternatives solutions for stubble burning
Delhi CM has said that the “Pusa bio-decomposer” is a success in Delhi and he will inform the Supreme Court that it is an effective way to prevent stubble burning.
Pusa Bio-decomposer provides a unique alternative against the stubble burning practices.
Pusa Bio-decomposer
- It is a solution developed by the scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa, which can turn crop residue into manure in 15 to 20 days and therefore, can prevent stubble burning.
- It involves making a liquid formulation using Pusa decomposer capsules and readily available inputs, fermenting it over 8-10 days, and then spraying the mixture on fields.
- It is a mix of seven fungi that produce enzymes to digest cellulose, lignin and pectin in paddy straw.
- The fungi thrive at 30-32 degree Celsius, which is the temperature prevailing when paddy is harvested and wheat is sown.
Back2Basics: Decomposition
- Decomposition refers to a biological process of breaking down organic material into smaller constituent parts.
- The decomposition of organic substances is ecologically significant. It plays a part in the nutrient cycle. It is an essential process of recycling matter in the biosphere.
- A decomposer is an organism whose ecological function involves the recycling of nutrients by performing the natural process of decomposition as it feeds on decaying organisms.
- Examples of decomposers are fungi and bacteria that obtain their nutrients from a dead plant or animal material.
- They break down cells of dead plants and animals into simpler substances, which become organic nutrients available to the ecosystem.
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