13 JULY 2023

Topic 1: Different kinds of moon missions

Context: The Chandrayaan-3 mission is one of the several space missions lined up to go to the moon, including Russia’s Luna 25 mission and NASA’s Artemis II.

Different kinds of moon missions:

• Flybys:
  • These are the missions in which the spacecraft passed near the Moon but did not get into an orbit around it.
  • These were either designed to study the Moon from a distance or were on their way to some other planetary body or deep space exploration and happened to pass by the celestial body.
  • Examples of flyby missions were Pioneer 3 and 4 by the United States and Luna 3 of the then USSR.
• Orbiters:
  • These were spacecraft that were designed to get into a lunar orbit and carry out prolonged studies of the Moon’s surface and atmosphere.
  • India’s Chandrayaan-1 was an Orbiter.
  • Orbiter missions are the most common way to study a planetary body.
  • So far, landings have been possible only on the Moon, Mars and Venus.
  • All other planetary bodies have been studied through orbiter or flyby missions.
• Impact Mission:
  • These are an extension of Orbiter missions.
  • While the main spacecraft keeps going around the Moon, one or more instruments on board make an uncontrolled landing on the lunar surface.
  • They get destroyed after the impact, but still send some useful information about the Moon while on their way.
    • One of the instruments on Chandrayaan-1, called Moon Impact Probe, or MIP, was also made to crash land on the Moon’s surface in a similar way.
• Landers:
  • These missions involve the soft landing of the spacecraft on the Moon.
  • The first landing on the moon was accomplished on January 31, 1966, by the Luna 9 spacecraft of the then USSR.
• Rovers:
  • These are an extension of the lander missions.
  • Rovers are special wheeled payloads on the lander that can detach themselves from the spacecraft and move around on the moon’s surface, collecting very useful information that instruments within the lander would not be able to obtain.
  • The rover onboard Vikram lander in the Chandrayaan-2 mission was called Pragyaan.
• Human missions:
  • These involve the landing of astronauts on the moon’s surface.
  • So far only NASA of the United States has been able to land human beings on the moon.
  • So far, six teams of two astronauts each have landed on the moon, all between 1969 and 1972.
  • After that, no attempt has been made to land on the Moon.
  • But with NASA’s Artemis III, currently planned for 2025, humanity is set to once again to the lunar surface in more than 50 years.

Chandrayaan-1ISRO’s first attempt was the Chandrayaan 1 (“Lunar Vehicle 1”) mission, which began in October 2008 with a launch of the very successful Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).The rocket carried a lunar orbiter meant to go around the moon, like a satellite and an impact probe.While descending to the moon, the impactor probe collected information on the chemical composition of the lunar atmosphere.This mission established the availability of water molecules on the moon.The probe also carved the national flag of India on the Moon, announcing the country’s arrival. Chandrayaan 2Chandrayaan 2 was launched in 2019 by a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).Its payload included a moon lander that carried a rover to release on the moon.The lander, unfortunately, crashed on the lunar surface due to a software glitch, and the rover did not detach from the lander.

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Topic 2: Sagar Sampark

Context: The Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways inaugurated the indigenous Differential Global Navigation Satellite System (DGNSS) ‘Sagar Sampark’

About Sagar Sampark:

• What is DGNSS?
  • DGNSS is a terrestrial based enhancement system which corrects the errors and inaccuracies in the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) allowing for more accurate positioning information.
• The DGNSS service will help mariners in safe navigation and will reduce the risk of collisions, groundings, and accidents in the port and harbour areas.
• DGNSS further increases the availability and redundancy as per International standards and helps the mariners to improve their positioning within 5 meters.
• Sagar Sampark is now able to transmit corrections of GPS (USA) and GLONASS (RUSSIA).
• The error correction accuracy has been improved from 5 to 10 meters to less than 5 meters for 100 Nautical Miles from Indian coastlines.

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Topic 3: Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana

Context: The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment informed about the Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana.

About the scheme:

• The Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana (AVYAY) was introduced by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
• This scheme recognizes the invaluable contribution made by the elderly to society and seeks to ensure their well-being and social inclusion.
• Aim:
  • Empowering senior citizens in India.
  • Uplift them, ensuring their active participation and inclusion in all aspects of life.
• Previous name:
  • National Action Plan for Senior Citizen (NAPSrc) had been revamped, renamed as Atal VayoAbhyuday Yojana (AVYAY) and subsumed in 2021.
• Sub-schemes:
  • Under the umbrella Scheme, Atal Vayo Abhyuday Yojana (AVYAY), an Integrated Programme for Senior Citizens (IPSrC) provides financial assistance to eligible organization’s for running and maintenance of Senior Citizen Homes/ Continuous Care Homes.
  • Another component under the AVYAY Scheme is Rashtriya Vayoshri Yojana (RVY), to provide eligible senior citizens suffering from any of the age-related disability/ infirmity, with assisted living devices which can restore near normalcy in their bodily functions.
    • Eligibility:
      • Financial criteria for beneficiaries are either the Senior Citizen belongs to ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) category or he/ she has income up to Rs. 15,000 (Rupees Fifteen Thousand) per month.

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Topic 4: Section 144

Context: The Delhi Police imposed prohibitory measures under CrPC section 144 in flood-prone areas of the city.

About Section 144

• Section 144 CrPC is a law retained from the colonial era.
• It empowers a district magistrate, a sub-divisional magistrate or any other executive magistrate specially empowered by the state government in this behalf to issue orders to prevent and address urgent cases of apprehended danger or nuisance.
• The magistrate has to pass a written order which may be directed against:
  • a particular individual, or
  • to persons residing in a particular place or area, or
  • to the public generally when frequenting or visiting a particular place or area.
• In emergency cases, the magistrate can pass these orders without prior notice to the individual against whom the order is directed.

Powers of administration

• The magistrate can direct any person to abstain from a certain act or to take a certain order with respect to certain property in his possession or under his management.
• This usually includes:
  • restrictions on movement,
  • carrying arms and
  • from assembling unlawfully.
• It is generally believed that assembly of three or more people is prohibited under Section 144.
  • However, it can be used to restrict even a single individual.
• Duration:
  • No order passed under Section 144 can remain in force for more than two months from the date of the order, unless the state government considers it necessary.
  • Even then, the total period cannot extend to more than six months.

Criticism of Section 144

• Too much power given to magistrate:
  • The section is sweeping, and allows the magistrate to exercise absolute power unjustifiably.
• Rare remedies in case of violation of rights:
  • Under the law, the first remedy against the order is a revision application that must be filed to the same officer who issued the order in the first place.
  • An aggrieved individual can file a writ petition in the High Court if their fundamental rights are affected by the order.
  • However, in many cases those rights would have already been violated by the state even before the High Court has intervened.
• Unjustifiable imposition:
  • It has also been argued that imposing prohibitory orders over a very large area is not justified because the security situation differs from place to place and cannot be dealt with in the same manner.
    • For eg. it was done in all of Uttar Pradesh during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill —

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Topic 5: Multidimensional Poverty

Context: A total of 415 million people moved out of poverty in India within just 15 years from 2005-06 to 2019-21, with its incidence falling from 55.1% to 16.4% during the period, the United Nations (UN) said recently.

Key details:

• The latest update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
• It said that 25 countries, including India, successfully halved their global MPI values within 15 years.
• These countries include Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Serbia and Vietnam.
• In 2005-06, about 645 million people were in multidimensional poverty in India, with this number declining to about 370 million in 2015-16 and 230 million in 2019-21.
• According to the report, people who are multidimensionally poor and deprived under the nutrition indicator in India declined from 44.3% in 2005-06 to 11.8% in 2019-21, and child mortality fell from 4.5% to 1.5%.
• India was among the 19 countries that halved their global MPI value during one period — for India it was 2005-06 to 2015-16.
• According to the 2023 release, 1.1 billion out of 6.1 billion people (just more than 18%) live in acute multidimensional poverty across 110 countries.

About Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

• The Multidimensional Poverty Index is used to measure acute multidimensional poverty in developing countries.
• The Multidimensional Poverty Index identifies acute deprivations in health, education and standard of living by interrogating 10 indicators:
  • nutrition,
  • child mortality,
  • years of schooling,
  • school attendance,
  • access to cooking fuel,
  • sanitation,
  • drinking water,
  • electricity,
  • housing,
  •  ownership of assets.
• It also includes both incidences as well as the intensity of poverty.

• Multidimensional poverty encompasses the various deprivations experienced by poor people in their daily lives – such as:
  • poor health,
  • lack of education,
  • inadequate living standards,
  • disempowerment,
  • poor quality of work,
  • the threat of violence, and
  • living in areas that are environmentally hazardous
• An individual who is deprived of one-third or more of the weighted indicators is multidimensionally poor.
• While any person deprived of one-half or more of the weighted indicators would fall into extreme multidimensional poverty.

National Multidimensional Poverty Index: NITI Ayog

• In 2021, the government think tank Niti Aayog announced the first-ever Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures poverty at the national, state/UT, and district levels.
• According to the first index, Bihar is the state with the highest level of multidimensional poverty

• The MPI aims to quantify poverty in all of its forms, complementing existing poverty statistics based on per capita consumption spending.
• The National MPI aims to deconstruct the Global MPI and create a globally aligned but customised India MPI for developing comprehensive Reform Action Plans, with the overall goal of improving India’s place in the Global MPI rankings.
• Health, education, and standard of living are the three equally weighted dimensions.

Methodology & Data of National MPI

• The national MPI is based on the internationally recognised and reliable methodology created by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
• This baseline report for the national MPI measure is based on the National Family Health Survey’s reference period of 2015-16 (NFHS-4).
• The NFHS-4 data was used to create a baseline multidimensional poverty estimate in order to understand the reality on the ground prior to the full implementation of several central government programmes.
• Levels of Poverty:
  • Bihar has the biggest proportion of multidimensionally poor persons in the state, followed by Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
  • Kerala has the lowest population poverty rate, with Puducherry, Lakshadweep, Goa, and Sikkim following closely after.
• People that are malnourished:
  • Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh have the largest number of malnourished people, followed by Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh.

Significance of the Index

• Contribution towards Instituting Public policy Tool:
  • The Index’s creation is an important step toward establishing a public policy tool that monitors multidimensional poverty and informs evidence-based and targeted interventions, ensuring that no one is left behind.
• Provides an Overview of Poverty:
  • This provides an overall picture of poverty in the country while also allowing for more detailed and in-depth analyses of areas of interest and specific sectors, and it supplements existing monetary poverty statistics.
• Contribute to the achievement of the SDGs:
  • It contributes to measuring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 1.2, which aims to reduce “at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions.”

MPI 2022: India and the world

• The 2022 Index covers 6.1 billion people across 111 developing countries.
• In the latest MPI one of the most stunning success stories of poverty reduction comes from India, where a historic 415 million people exited poverty in the last 15 years, and the incidence of poverty fell by half.
• In the last five years, India has been able to lift 140 million out of poverty. 

• This sharp reduction of poverty in India has helped lift the South Asian region from being one of the poorest in the world.
• India has seen visible investments in boosting access to sanitation, cooking fuel and electricity – all indicators that have seen large improvements.
• For the first time, the latest MPI Report introduces ‘deprivation bundles’ – recurring patterns of poverty that commonly impact those who live in multidimensional poverty across the world.
• This tool can support the development of integrated policy responses that could tackle more than one deprivation at a time.
  • For instance, a midday meal scheme targets nutrition and school attendance.

Challenges

• Largest number of poor in India:
  • The country has the largest number of poor people worldwide, including 97 million poor children.
• Various disparities:
  • Stark rural-urban disparities persist, female-headed households are significantly poorer than male-headed households, and only one Indian state (West Bengal) exited the ’10 poorest states’ category since the last edition of the report in 2015/16. 
• Insufficient data:
  • Constraints around data availability also mean that this report does not capture the impact of the pandemic and pessimistic scenarios are indeed plausible. 
     

Conclusion:

• In India there is a growing recognition among policymakers of the need for a multidimensional approach to assess deprivation in helping us realize our shared promise of a future in which no one has been left behind.
• India will have to sustain efforts in reducing deprivations across multiple dimensions to eliminate poverty.
• The MPI affords India the opportunity to track poverty and deprivations in a more nuanced manner, and continue the battle to improve the lives of millions of its citizens. 

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Topic 6: Anthropocene epoch

Context: Geologists have said sediments at Crawford Lake in Canada’s Ontario have provided evidence of the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

Key details:

• Members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) have estimated that the new epoch started sometime between 1950 and 1954.
• They revealed the findings after analysing the lake’s bottom sediments, which have over the years captured the fallouts of large-scale burning of fossil fuels, explosion of nuclear weapons and dumping of plastic and fertilisers on land and in water bodies.
• The data show a clear shift from the mid-20th century, taking Earth’s system beyond the normal bounds of the Holocene (the epoch that started at the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago).

About Anthropocene epoch

• The Anthropocene epoch as a term was first coined by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and biology professor Eugene Stoermer in 2000.
• It was used to denote the present geological time interval, in which the Earth’s ecosystem has gone through radical changes due to human impact, especially since the
• There are numerous phenomena associated with this epoch, such as:
  • global warming,
  • sea-level rise,
  • ocean acidification,
  • mass-scale soil erosion,
  • the advent of deadly heat waves,
  • deterioration of the biosphere and

How is the Earth’s geological time divided?

• The planet’s geological time scale is divided into five broad categories:
  • eons, epochs, eras, periods, and ages.
  • While eon is the broadest category of geological time, age is the smallest category.
  • Each of these categories is further divided into sub-categories.
  • For instance, Earth’s history is characterised by four eons, including Hadeon (oldest), Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic (youngest).
• Most of the boundaries on the geological time scale correspond to the origination or extinction of particular kinds of fossils.
• This is also related to the principle of faunal succession, which states that different kinds of fossils characterise different intervals of time.
• As of now we’re in the Phanerozoic eon, Cenozoic era, Quaternary period, Holocene epoch and the Meghalayan age.

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Topic 7: National Research Foundation

Context: The Union Cabinet has approved the introduction of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Bill in Parliament, placing once again the debate on science and technology funding in the spotlight.

About NRF:

• Setting up the NRF was one of the key recommendations of the National Education Policy 2020.
• Aim:
  • To act as a coordinating agency between researchers, various government bodies and industry, thus bringing industry into the mainstream of research.
  • To provide research grants to individuals.
  • The NRF plans to seed, grow and facilitate research in India’s universities, especially State universities, by funding research infrastructure and researchers.
• Funding:
  • The NRF will operate with a budget of ₹50,000 crore for five years, of which:
    • 28% (₹14,000 crore) will be the government’s share, and
    • 72% (₹36,000 crore) will come from the private sector.
  • The NRF draft proposes the government’s share to increase eventually to ₹20,000 crore per year.
• Concern with  funding:
  • This increase in the nation’s gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) seems too meagre, (less than 2% of GERD) especially if one compares the GDP and the comparative spending in other big economies, such as the U.S. and China.
  • As per the last available statistics (2017-18), India’s GERD was ₹1,13,825 crore.
  • While India’s GDP was 7.6 and 5.1 times smaller than that of the U.S and China respectively, India’s GERD was nearly 24 times less than both these countries during the same period.
  • In the last five years, that gap has further widened.

Way forward:

• Minimum time limit:
  • The time between applying for a research grant and receiving the money must be minimal, preferably within six months.
• Digital processes should be adopted:
  • All the paperwork must be digitally processed without sending stacks of papers in hard copies to the NRF.
• Less administrative delays and more focus on research:
  • All finance-related queries, paperwork, approval, and acceptance need to be between the NRF and the finance department of the university/research institution keeping the scientist free to focus on research.
• Independent guidelines:
  • The NRF needs explicit spending guidelines away from the General Financial Rules (GFR) and the government’s e-Marketplace (GeM) usage.
  • Scientific research needs independent guidelines for spending money, which provides flexibility while making scientists accountable.
• Timely release of money:
  • The release of money needs to be timely.
  • Although the NRF draft mentions timely disbursal of funds, a mechanism needs to be in place to facilitate and implement this.

Conclusion:

• The proposed NRF is largely modelled after the National Science Foundation of the U.S.
• It borrows some of the best practices from the German, U.K., Swiss, Norwegian, South Korean, and Singapore science agencies.
• Even if the NRF draft discusses critical thinking, creativity, and bringing innovation to the forefront, it is unclear how the NRF will transparently seed, fund and coordinate research across institutions.
• The success of NRF will lie in how the government sets rules and implements the same, different from what already exists.

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Topic 8: Atlantic menhaden

Context: Atlantic Menhaden play a crucial role in the ecology of coastal waters all along the United States’ Eastern Seaboard.

About the fish:

• The Atlantic menhaden is a North American species of fish in the herring family, Clupeidae.
• Menhaden is also known as mossbunker and bunker.
• The fish are nutrient-rich, a good source of omega-3 fatty acids.
• They consume smaller organisms like plankton, and they filter huge quantities of ocean water.
• They are also a mainstay of the commercial fishing industry, caught in mass quantities to be processed into bait for crabs and lobsters.
• It is also caught in greater volume for so-called reduction fisheries, in which they are ground up and turned into products including fish oil and fish meal.

Significance:

• A key link in the food web
  • Menhaden are filter feeders, capable of filtering up to seven gallons of water each minute.
  • Along with other small fish and invertebrates, menhaden are known as “forage species,” meaning that they function as a critical source of food for larger fish species that support commercial and recreational fisheries.
• Marine mammals and fish-eating birds also rely on menhaden as well as other important forage species as a source of food.
• Economically important fisheries
  • Menhaden support one of the largest commercial harvests on the Atlantic coast.
  • While the fish is too small and oily to eat, menhaden are harvested for other purposes, including:
    • fertilizers
    • animal feed
    • human and animal supplements
    • cosmetics
    • bait