National Current Affairs – UPSC/IAS Exams- 22nd August 2019

Kutch desert was once a forest

Topic: Environment and Ecology

In News: A team of Indian and French researchers has said that the hot arid desert of Kutch was once a humid sub-tropical forest with a variety of birds, freshwater fish and possibly giraffes and rhinos.

More on the Topic:

• Their conclusions are based on the discovery of a tranche of vertebrate fossils from nearly 14 million years ago in a geological time period known as the Miocene. After the discovery, they took nearly 12 years for analysis.
• The fossils, consisting mostly of ribs, and parts of teeth and bones, were unearthed from Palasava village of Rapar taluk in Kutch, Gujarat.
• The bulk of fossils unearthed in Kutch have so far been mainly marine organisms, due to their proximity to the Arabian Sea. Geological changes eventually closed off the salt-flats’ connection to the sea and the region turned into a large lake, eventually becoming salty wetlands.
• The findings point to clues on how mammals dispersed between Africa and the Indian subcontinent when part of India was in the Gondwanaland supercontinent that existed nearly 300 million years ago.
• The finds were significant because they showed Kutch to be a potential treasure trove of mammal fossils with possible continuity to vertebrate fossils in the Siwalik, spanning Pakistan to Nepal.
• Gondwanaland Supercontinent: Gondwana was a supercontinent that existed from the Neoproterozoic (about 550 million years ago) until the Jurassic (about 180 million years ago).
• It was formed by the accretion of several cratons. Eventually, Gondwana became the largest piece of continental crust of the Paleozoic Era. During the Carboniferous Period, it merged with Euramerica to form a larger supercontinent called Pangaea.
• Gondwana (and Pangaea) gradually broke up during the Mesozoic Era. The remnants of Gondwana make up about two thirds of today’s continental area, including South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Indian Subcontinent and Arabia.

The Miocene Epoch:

• The Miocene is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about 23.03 to 5.333 million years ago (Ma).
• As the earth went from the Oligocene through the Miocene and into the Pliocene, the climate slowly cooled towards a series of ice ages. The Miocene boundaries are not marked by a single distinct global event but consist rather of regionally defined boundaries between the warmer Oligocene and the cooler Pliocene Epoch.
• The plants and animals of the Miocene were recognizably modern. Mammals and birds were well-established. Whales, pinnipeds, and kelp spread.
• The Miocene is of particular interest to geologists and palaeoclimatologists as major phases of the geology of the Himalaya occurred during the Miocene, affecting monsoonal patterns in Asia, which were interlinked with glacial periods in the northern hemisphere.

Source: The Hindu and Wikipedia

SARAL – ‘State Rooftop Solar Attractiveness Index’

Topic: Renewable Energy

In News: The Union Minister of State for Power and New & Renewable Energy (IC) and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, RK Singh launched the State Rooftop Solar Attractiveness Index-SARAL.

More on the Topic:

• The State of Karnataka has been placed at the first rank in the Index that evaluates Indian states based on their attractiveness for rooftop development. Telangana, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have got 2nd, 3rd and 4th rank respectively.
• SARAL has been designed collaboratively by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation (SSEF), Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and Ernst & Young (EY).
• SARAL currently captures five key aspects: i. robustness of policy framework, ii. implementation environment, iii. investment climate, iv. consumer experience and v. business ecosystem.
• SARAL is the first of its kind index to provide a comprehensive overview of state-level measures adopted to facilitate rooftop solar deployment.
• It encourages each state to assess the initiatives taken so far, and what it can do to improve its solar rooftop ecosystem. This will help states to channelize investments that can eventually help the sector grow. In addition, such an exercise is likely to create a more conducive environment for solar rooftop installations, encourage investment and lead to accelerated growth of the sector.
• The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has set a target of 175 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022, of which 100 GW solar power is to be operational by March 2022, of which 40 GW is expected to come from grid connected solar rooftops.
• On a very positive note, rooftop solar PV has already achieved grid parity for commercial and industrial consumers and is fast becoming attractive for residential consumers as well.
• To achieve rooftop solar targets, it is important to develop an ecosystem that ensures information symmetry, access to financing and clear market signals.

Source: The Hindu, Wikipedia

National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancements (NISHTHA)

Topic: Government Policies

In News: The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) launched the National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancements (NISHTHA).

More on the Topic:

• NISHTHA is the world’s biggest such project and will focus on training 42 lakh teachers from across the country.
• In a bid to boost education and employment, HRD Ministry is focusing on reskilling teaching workforce. Integrated training will motivate and equip tea to encourage and foster critical thinking in students, handle diverse situations and act as 1st level counsellors.
• Participants: It covers all teachers and Heads of school at elementary level in all government school, faculty members of State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs), Block Resource Coordinators and Cluster Resource Coordinators as well as other educational departments of all States and Union Territories (UTs).

Features of the Programme:

• This mega capacity building programme has been integrated with technology to ensure smooth facilitation, availability of digital content and technology enabled teaching methods to support the teachers.
• A Mobile App and Learning Management System (LMS) based on MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) have been developed by NCERT for registration of Resource Persons and Teachers, dissemination of resources, training gap and impact analysis, monitoring, mentoring and measuring the progress online.
• In order to ensure sustainable impact on classroom transactions, this integrated training programme is embedded with post training interventions including provision of mentoring.
• After the completion of KRP training, National Resource Persons will regularly be in touch with KRPs through WhatsApp/Facebook groups etc and will form Quality Circles that will work to share ideas, challenges and their solutions and best practices.
• This will help in building pedagogical skills and connecting with peers, thereby leading to improvement in learning outcomes of the students.

Source: PIB

World Bank report on water pollution

Topic: Environment and Ecology

In News: World Bank has released a report on Water Pollution.

More on the Topic:

• Clean water is a key factor for economic growth. Deteriorating water quality is stalling economic growth, worsening health conditions, reducing food production, and exacerbating poverty in many countries.
• Heavily polluted water is reducing economic growth by up to a third in some countries.
• When Biological Oxygen Demand an index of the degree of organic pollution and a proxy for overall water pollution crosses a threshold of 8 milligrams per liter, GDP growth in downstream regions drops by 0.83 percentage points, about a third for the mean growth rate of 2.33 percent used in the study.
• A key contributor to poor water quality is nitrogen, essential for agricultural production but which leaches into rivers and oceans where it creates hypoxia and dead zones, and in the air where it forms nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.
• Early exposure of children to nitrates affects their growth and brain development, reducing their health and earning potential.
• For every additional kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare, yields may rise up to five percent, but childhood stunting increases as much as 19 percent and future adult earnings fall by up to two percent compared to those not affected.
• Increased salinity as a result of manmade pressures such as irrigation, stormwater runoff, leaching of fertilizer, and urban wastewater discharge is pushing down agricultural yields. The report estimated enough food is lost to saline water each year to feed 170 million people, about the population of Bangladesh.

Recommendations for the Betterment of Water Quality:

• Need for action to address human and environmental harm.
• Information campaigns to raise
• Prevention efforts to stem some of the worst problems.
• Investments to treat pollution once it has occurred, with more modern technologies like reverse-osmosis offering new pathways.

Source: Down To Earth

The ‘Kerala Model’ is unsustainable

Topic: Sustainable Development

In News: Over the years, parties have responded to commercial interests over the welfare of people in Kerala and Lead to a non-sustainable development scenario.

More on the Topic:

• In 2018 Kerala was overwhelmed by an unprecedented natural event. Flooding combined with landslides caused many deaths. Floods were not new to Kerala, which receives high rainfall. What was new compared to the times of equally high rainfall in the early part of the last century was the flooding due to inept dam management and the vulnerability of the terrain induced by the pattern of land use.
• In 2019 we have seen some of this repeated. This year it is the landslides that have caused most deaths. They are a relatively recent phenomenon, pointing to the role of uncontrolled economic expansion.

Kerala Model of Development:

Benefits of the Development:

• Comparatively low levels of basic gender ,Relatively equitable educational opportunities , Extensive social security arrangements , Limited incidence of caste oppression, Low rural-urban disparities, The role of basic education in promoting basic capabilities, The favourable position and informed agency of women crucial to a wide range of social achievements, The access to public utilities, The role of public action in a wide sense, involving the State and the public at large, Lauded for the high human development indicators it is believed to have bestowed upon the State

Negative Aspects of the development:

• The foremost is the inability to meet the employment aspirations of the people, pushing them to live under authoritarian regimes overseas.
• The laudable public provision of health and education has been financed by borrowing.
• Kerala has the highest per capita public debt among States, implying that we are passing on the bill for our own maintenance to future generations.
• Kerala has not done so well when viewed through the lens of gender justice. High levels of female education have not led to an equally high participation of women in the labour force or in governance, even though they participate equally in elections.
• The extraordinary events that we have witnessed this year range from fountains sprouting out of the earth due to the hitherto unknown ‘water piping’ to constructed structures shifting, physical phenomena not yet widely understood.
• There has been overbuilding in Kerala, with absentee owners having invested in luxury houses they do not always occupy. As a result poorer households are crowded out of safe locations on the plains to precarious ones on the hills.
• Public policy has failed miserably to regulate land use including rampant quarrying, which destabilises the earth’s surface, with political patronage. Truth is that public policy is part of the problem
• Kerala’s principal political parties, irrespective of their ideologies, have responded to commercial interests over the welfare of ordinary people.

Conclusion:

• The time has arrived for a reform in the Kerala model development. There is need for change in the consumption pattern. The environmental resources must be with utmost care and the need pf the hour is strong political will and environmentally concerned citizenry.

Source: The Hindu