Daily Current Affair- UPSC/IAS Exams – 5th July 2019

by Mentors4ias · July 5, 2019

An Ice Trapped Arctic Mission

Topic: Environment and Ecology

In News: In a couple of months, the German icebreaker RV Polarstern, a hulking ship will set out for the Arctic. The icebreaker will be the base for scientists from 17 nations studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic and how it could affect the rest of the world.

More on the Topic:

The MOSAiC mission, which stands for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate, comes about 125 years after Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen first managed to seal his wooden expedition ship, Fram, into the ice during a three-year expedition to the North Pole.
Scientists plan to sail the ship into the Arctic Ocean, anchor it to a large piece of sea ice and allow the water to freeze around them, effectively trapping themselves in the vast sheet of white that forms over the North Pole each winter.
As temperatures drop and the days get shorter, they’ll race against time to build temporary winter research camps on the ice, allowing them to perform tests that wouldn’t be possible at other times of the year or by satellite sensing.
By combining measurements on the ice with data collected from satellites, scientists hope to improve the increasingly sophisticated computer models for weather and climate predictions.
Scientists now believe that the cold cap that forms each year is key to regulating weather patterns across the Northern Hemisphere.

Significance:

The dramatic warming of the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. The mission will produce robust scientific basis for political decisions.
Understanding the processes is crucial for world leaders to tackle climate change effectively.

Source: The Hindu

‘Fingerprinting’ to Track Us Online Is on the Rise.

Topic: Science and Ecology

In News: Advertisers are increasingly turning to an invisible method that pulls together information about your device to pinpoint your identity.

More on the Topic:

Fingerprinting involves looking at the many characteristics of people’s mobile device or computer, like the screen resolution, operating system and model, and triangulating this information to pinpoint and follow people as they browse the web and use apps.
Once enough device characteristics are known, the theory goes, the data can be assembled into a profile that helps identify you the way a fingerprint would.
The technique happens invisibly in the background in apps and websites. That makes it tougher to detect and combat than its predecessor, the web cookie, which was a tracker stored on our devices. The solutions to blocking fingerprinting are also limited.
Security researchers discovered fingerprinting as a tracking method about seven years ago, but it was rarely discussed until recently.
Privacy advocates say fingerprinting is abusive because in contrast to cookies, which people can see and delete, you generally cannot tell it is happening and cannot opt out of it.

Solution:

The most practical thing one can do for mobiles is to delete app rarely in use, especially the ones from obscure brands. Free apps are most likely to be loaded with trackers, though some paid ones track you, too.
Fingerprinting is a complex topic since the tracking method applies to both the web and mobile apps. Needs more studies to find out a solution.

Source: The Hindu

Economic Survey moots central welfare database of citizens

Topic: Economy

In News: The Economic Survey 2018-19, tabled in Parliament on Thursday, pitched for setting up a central welfare database of citizens — by merging different data maintained by separate Ministries and departments — which can be tapped for enhancing ease of living for citizens, particularly the poor.

More on the topic:

While the Survey pointed out that governments can create data as a public good within the legal framework of data privacy, it added that care must also be taken not to impose the “elite’s preference of privacy on the poor, who care for a better quality of living the most.”
It also recommended granting access to select database to private sector for a fee, given that “stringent technological mechanisms exist to safeguard data privacy.”
The Survey noted that there had been some discussions around the “linking” of datasets, primarily through the seeding of an Aadhaar number across databases such as PAN database, bank accounts and mobile numbers.
However, it clarified that the linking is “one-way.” For example, banks can use the tokenised Aadhaar number to combine duplicate records and weed out benami accounts, but this does not mean that the UIDAI or government can read the bank account information or other data related to the individual.
The Survey highlighted that the governments already held a rich repository of administrative, survey, institutional and transactions data about citizens, but these data were scattered across numerous government bodies.

Significance of Data utilization:

Merging these distinct datasets would generate multiple benefits with the applications being limitless.
The datasets talked about inclusion of administrative data such as birth and death records, pensions, tax records, marriage records; survey data such as census data, national sample survey data; transactions data such as e-national agriculture market data, UPI data, institutional data and public hospital data on patients.
The government could utilise the information embedded in these distinct datasets to enhance ease of living for citizens, enable truly evidence-based policy, improve targeting in welfare schemes, uncover unmet needs, integrate fragmented markets, bring greater accountability in public services and generate greater citizen participation in governance, etc.

Source: The Hindu

Redesigning a Minimum Wage System in India for Inclusive Growth

Topic: Economy

In News: Economic survey stated that a well-designed and effective implementation of minimum wages will strengthen the trend towards decreasing wage inequality especially at lower levels. This becomes all the more significant as women constitute the majority of the bottom rungs of the wage distribution.

More on the Topic:

Policy recommendations for an effective design of minimum wages system:

Simplification and Rationalisation: Rationalisation of minimum wages as proposed under the Code on Wages Bill needs to be supported. This code amalgamates the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965 and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 into a single piece of legislation. The definition of ‘wage’ in the new legislation should subsume the present situation of 12 different definitions of wages in different Labour Acts.
Setting a National Floor Level Minimum Wage: Central Government should notify a “national floor minimum wage” that can vary broadly across five geographical regions. Thereafter, states can fix their minimum wages at levels not lower than the “floor wage”. This would bring some uniformity in minimum wages across country and would make all states almost equally attractive from the point of view of labour cost for investment as well as reduce distress migration.
Criteria for setting minimum wage: The Code on Wages Bill should consider fixing minimum wages based on either of the two factors viz; (i) the skilled category e. unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled and highly skilled; and (ii) the geographical region, or else both. This Key change would substantially reduce the number of minimum wages in the country.
Coverage: The proposed Code on Wages Bill should extend applicability of minimum wages to all employments/workers in all sectors and should cover both the organized as well as the unorganized sector.
Regular Adjustment and Role of Technology: A mechanism should be developed to adjust minimum wages regularly and more frequently. A national level dashboard can be created at the Centre with access to the state governments whereby the states can regularly update the notifications regarding minimum wages. This portal must be made available at Common Service Centres (CSCs), rural haats etc., with the required mass media coverage so that the workers are well-informed their bargaining skills and decision-making power are strengthened.
Grievance Redressal: There should be an easy to remember toll-free number to register grievance on non-payment of the statutory minimum wages should be given wide-publicity to provide low-paid workers a forum to voice their grievance.

Source: The Hindu

‘National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology’ (NMEICT)

Topic: Government Policies

In News: Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development is administering a programme ‘National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology’ (NMEICT) to leverage the potential of ICT to make the best quality content accessible to all learners in the country, free of cost.

More on the Topic:

The various initiatives under this programme are:

SWAYAM: The ‘Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds’ (SWAYAM) is an integrated platform for offering online courses and covering school (9th to 12th) to Post Graduate Level.
The online courses are being used not only by the students but also by the teachers and non-student learners, in the form of lifelong learning.
SWAYAM Prabha: SWAYAM Prabha is an initiative to provide 32 High Quality Educational Channels through DTH (Direct to Home) across the length and breadth of the country on 24X7 basis. It has curriculum-based course content covering diverse disciplines. This is primarily aimed at making quality learning resources accessible to remote areas where internet availability is still a challenge.
National Digital Library (NDL): The National Digital Library of India (NDL) is a project to develop a framework of virtual repository of learning resources with a single-window search facility. The NDL is available through a mobile app too.
Spoken Tutorial: They are 10-minute long, audio-video tutorial, on open source software, to improve employment potential of students. It is created for self learning, audio dubbed into all 22 languages and with the availability of online version. The languages are C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, PERL, Scilab, OpenFOAM, OpenModelica,DWSIM, LibreO and many more. The Spoken Tutorial courses are effectively designed to train a novice user, without the support of a physical teacher.
Free and Open Source Software for Education (FOSSEE):FOSSEE is a project promoting the use of open source software in educational institutions (http://fossee.in).
It does through instructional material, such as spoken tutorials, documentation, such as textbook companions, awareness programmes, such as conferences, training workshops, and Internships.
Virtual Lab: The Virtual Labs Project is to develop a fully interactive simulation environment to perform experiments, collect data, and answer questions to assess the understanding of the knowledge acquired
E-Yantra: e-Yantra is a project for enabling effective education across engineering colleges in India on embedded systems and Robotics. The training for teachers and students is imparted through workshops where participants are taught basics of embedded systems and programming.

Source: The Hindu

Financial Stability Report

Topic: Economy

In News: The Reserve Bank of India released the 19th issue of the ‘Financial Stability Report’(FSR). It is a biannual publication.

More on the Topic:

It analyses the overall state of the various segments and it highlights the risk-related issues which can cause potential challenges.It also discusses issues relating to the development and regulation of the financial sector.
According to the report NPAs peaked out in March 2018, are now set to steadily diminish.The state of the banking system as the Gross NPA ratio is 9.3% for all banks as of March 2019 and is likely to come down to 9 % by March 2020.
The report points out that the problem areas in terms of NPAs still remain metals, mining and engineering where the ratios are above 25%.
Recent developments in the NBFCs sector have brought the sector under greater market discipline as the better-performing companies continued to raise funds.
The report further stated that Public Sector Banks showed a noticeable improvement with recapitalisation and hence the efforts to improve the balance sheets of banks should therefore continue.
The number of banks having very high NPA ratio (more than 20%) came down in March 2019 as compared to September 2018.
The credit growth of commercial banks picked up, with PSU banks registering near-double-digit growth.
The report cautioned that CAR (capital adequacy ratio ) for 55 banks is projected to fall from 14% in March 2019 to 12.9% in March 2020.
In short, the system is fairly stable but the risks need to be recognised and worked upon to ensure smooth progress.

Source: The Hindu

Trade Infrastructure for Export Scheme (TIES)

Topic: Government Schemes

In News: The Department of Commerce has approved financial assistance for three trade promotion centres under the ‘Trade Infrastructure for Export Scheme (TIES)’.

More on the Topic:

The scheme replaces a centrally sponsored scheme Assistance to States for creating Infrastructure for the Development and growth of Exports (ASIDE).
The objective of the TIES is to enhance export competitiveness by bridging gaps in export infrastructure, creating focused export infrastructure and first-mile and last-mile connectivity.
The Central and State Agencies, including Export Promotion Councils, Commodities Boards, SEZ Authorities and Apex Trade Bodies recognised under the EXIM policy of Government of India; are eligible for financial support under this scheme.
The scheme would provide assistance for setting up and up-gradation of infrastructure projects with overwhelming export linkages like the Border Haats, Land customs stations, quality testing and certification labs, cold chains, trade promotion centres, dry ports, export warehousing and packaging, SEZs and ports/airports cargo terminuses.

Source : PIB