National Current Affairs – UPSC/IAS Exams- 7th December 2019

by Mentors4ias · December 7, 2019

Mid Day Meal Scheme

Topic: Government Schemes

In News: A recent video revealed one litre of milk was mixed in a bucketful of water for 80 children (mid-day meal scheme) in a school in rural Uttar Pradesh (U.P.).

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The Midday Meal Scheme is a school meal programme of the Government of India designed to improve the nutritional status of school-age children nationwide.
Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which India is a party, India has committed to provide “adequate nutritious foods” for children.
The main objective of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme is to attain the goal of universalization of primary education.
Most countries, advanced as well as developing, have some sort of school meal programme.

Benefits of the scheme:

Promote the participation of the child in school especially the disadvantaged sections (especially girls, Dalits and Adivasis).
Reduce classroom hunger, promote better learning and facilitate the healthy growth of a child
Lead to better enrolment and retention in schools. The increase has been more rapid with respect to girls and children belonging to SC/ST categories.
Promotes good eating habits like washing ones hands, finishing ones food, etc,
Fosters social and gender equality as all children get the same food and must eat together and boosting female attendance in school.
Provides nutritional support to children in drought affected areas during summer vacation.

Concerns:

Implementation issues, including irregularity, corruption, hygiene, inadequate nutritional content, etc.
Despite the success of the program, child hunger as a problem persists in India.
Teachers themselves cooking take away their core duties of teaching.
The number of students in most of the Govt. primary schools in rural areas is meagre, so the effectiveness of this scheme is at stake.

Way Ahead:

Community monitoring, social audits, decentralised grievance redress systems, public display of information on beneficiaries and menus, etc to reduce corruption and increase accountability in MDM.
Teachers should not be assigned the responsibility of implementation of Mid-Day Meal scheme as it can hamper the teaching-learning process.
Mandatory reporting the MDM data regularly by the state to the centre with a view to curtail irregularities.
Ensure timely transfer of funds and good grains to schools.
The quality of food grains and cooked meal must be checked regularly and all complaints regarding the quality must be solved urgently.

Source: Hindu

Carbon Market

Topic: Environment and Ecology

In News: Disagreements over setting up a new carbon market remains contentious in the climate conference in Madrid.

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Carbon markets, which allow for buying and selling of carbon emissions with the objective of reducing global emissions, is an unfinished agenda from last year’s meeting in Katowice, Poland.

The market mechanism:

Under the Paris Agreement, every country has to take action to fight climate change. These actions need not necessarily be in the form of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which can constrain economic growth. India, for example, has said it would reduce its emissions per unit of GDP.
Only the developed countries have included absolute emission cuts in their action plans. Yet, there is scope for absolute emissions reductions in developing countries too. For example, a brick kiln in India can upgrade its technology and reduce emissions. But because India does not need to make absolute reductions, there is no incentive to make this investment.
It is to deal with situations like these that the carbon market mechanism is conceived. Markets can potentially deliver emissions reductions over and above what countries are doing on their own.
For example, if a developed country is unable to meet its reduction target, it can provide money or technology to the brick kiln in India, and then claim the reduction of emission as its own.
Alternatively, the kiln can make the investment, and then offer on sale the emission reduction, called carbon credits. Another party, struggling to meet its own targets, can buy these credits and show these as their own.
Carbon markets also existed under the Kyoto Protocol, which is being replaced by the Paris Agreement next year. The market mechanisms being proposed under the Paris Agreement are conceptually not very different, but are supposed to have more effective checks and balances, and monitoring and verification processes.

How to set up a market:

The provisions relating to setting up a new carbon market are described in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. These are enabling provisions that allow for two different approaches of carbon trading, more or less on the lines described earlier.
Article 6.2 enables bilateral arrangements for transfer of emissions reductions, while ensuring that they do not double-count the reductions. Article 6.4 talks about a wider carbon market in which reductions can be bought and sold by anyone.
Article 6.8 provides for making ‘non-market approaches’ available to countries to achieve targets. It is not yet very clear what these approaches would constitute, but they could include any cooperative action, like collaboration on climate policy or common taxation, that are not market-based.

What is contentious

Developing countries have several million unsold CERs (certified emission reductions), each referring to one tonne of carbon dioxide-equivalent emission reduced, from the Kyoto regime. There is no clarity regarding what will happen to these credits.
The second issue is that of double counting, or corresponding adjustment. The new mechanism envisages carbon credits as commodities that can be traded multiple times among countries or private parties. It is important to ensure that in this process, credits are not counted at more than one place.

Way Ahead:

Carbon markets are not essential to the implementation of Paris Agreement. But with the world doing far less than what is required to prevent catastrophic impacts of climate change, the markets can be an important tool to close the action gap.
Developed countries and many civil society organisations say they would rather have no deal on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement than have a bad or compromised deal that would allow transition of Kyoto regime CERs or any kind of double counting. Some developing countries, on the other hand, prefer to have an agreement finalised in Madrid.

Source: Indian Express

India’s Forex Reserves

Topic: Economy

In News: India’s foreign exchange reserves crossed the $450-billion mark for the first time ever on the back of strong inflows which enabled the central bank to buy dollars from the market, thus checking any sharp appreciation of the rupee.

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India’s Forex reserves consists of Foreign Currency Assets, Gold, Special Drawing Rights (SDR), Reserve Tranche Position in the IMF.
Since the beginning of the current financial year, the forex reserve has gained by $38.8 billion.
The rise in foreign exchange reserves will give the central bank the firepower to act against any sharp depreciation of the rupee.
The Reserve Bank has always maintained that it intervenes in the foreign exchange market to curb volatility and does not target a particular level of exchange rate.

Purpose of keeping foreign exchange reserves:

To keep the value of their currencies at a fixed rate.
Countries with a floating exchange rate system use forex reserves to keep the value of their currency lower than US Dollar.
To maintain liquidity in case of an economic crisis.
The central bank (RBI) supplies foreign currency to keep markets steady.
To ensure that a country meets its foreign obligations and liabilities.

Source: Hindu

Guidelines on Small Finance Banks

Topic: Economy

In News: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has released ‘Guidelines for ‘on tap’ Licensing of Small Finance Banks (SFB) in the Private Sector’. With these new guidelines, RBI has introduced major changes from earlier Guidelines issued by the apex bank on 27 November 2014, for licensing of Small Finance Banks in private sector.

Guidelines:

Licensing window will be open ‘on-tap’. The on-tap facility allows RBI to accept applications and grant licence for banks throughout the year. This policy also allows aspirants to apply for universal bank licence any time, subjected to fulfilling certain conditions. As of now, the RBI has issued licences to 10 SFBs.
Minimum paid-up voting equity capital/ net worth requirement shall be Rs.200 crore.
For Primary (Urban) Co-operative Banks (UCBs), aspiring to voluntarily transit into SFBs, initial requirement of net worth shall be at Rs.100 crores that will have to be increased to Rs.200 crores within 5 years from date of commencement of business. However, the net-worth of all SFBs currently in operation is in excess of Rs.200 crore.
SFBs will have general permission to open banking outlets from date of commencement of operations.
SFBs will be given scheduled bank status immediately upon commencement of operations.
Payments Banks like Paytm an IndiaPost and Fino can apply for conversion into SFB after 5 years of operations, if they are otherwise eligible as per these guidelines.
Any individual or professional having at least 10 years of experience in banking and finance at a senior level can also set up an SFB either singly or jointly.
Promoters of SFB’s shall always hold a minimum of 40% of the paid-up voting equity capital of the bank during the first five years from the date of commencement of business.
RBI has also decided to bring UCBs with assets of ₹500 crore and above, under the reporting framework of the Central Repository of Information on Large Credits (CRILC).

Source: PIB

Fugitive Economic Offender

Topic: Economy

In News: Absconding businessman Nirav Modi has been declared a fugitive economic offender under the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act by the special Prevention of Money Laundering Act ( PMLA) court.

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As per ED, Nirav Modi and his uncle Choksi, in connivance with certain bank officials, allegedly cheated the PNB to the tune of ₹14,000 crore through issuance of fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).
These LoUs were allegedly issued in a fraudulent manner by a Mumbai branch of the PNB to the group of companies belonging to Nirav Modi since March 2011, till the case came to light.
The investigative agency can now confiscate properties of Nirav Modi which are not directly related to the cases against him.
Fugitive Economic Offender: A person can be named an offender under the law if there is an arrest warrant against him or her for involvement in economic offences involving at least Rs. 100 crore or more and has fled from India to escape legal action.

Source: Hindu

Asteroid mission

Topic: Science and Technology

In News: The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the budget of Hera, the European component of the mission to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid. The project aims to study the effectiveness of an impact to ward off an impending asteroid threat.

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NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test, DART, mission is the US component of The Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA). Planned for launch in late 2020 the fridge-sized spacecraft will fly itself to the Didymos system with a xenon-based electric propulsion system, steering with an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software.
DART will reach Didymos in September 2022 and steer itself into Didymoon at a speed of approximately 6.6 km/s. The last thing DART will transmit back to Earth in advance of the collision will a close-up of Didymoon’s surface features, and then nothing.
Potentially DART might also carry a small ‘selfie-sat’ that it deploys beforehand in order to capture imagery of the moment of impact, but past experience of planetary impacts suggests nothing will be directly viewable of the surface after that moment, due to the plume sent up by impact.
Post-impact investigations will be performed initially from Earth and then by the other component of AIDA, ESA’s Hera mission.
Hera is the European contribution to an international double-spacecraft collaboration.
Due to launch in 2024, Hera would travel to a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair of near-Earth asteroids.
NASA will first perform a kinetic impact (DART will deliberately crash itself into the moonlet and change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body) on the smaller of the two bodies with DART mission, then Hera will follow-up with a detailed post-impact survey that will turn this grand-scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defence technique.
at a speed of approximately 6 km per second, using an onboard camera and autonomous navigation software.

Significance:

According to NASA JPL’s Centre for NEO studies, as of now, there are about 900 near-Earth objects measuring more than 1 km. An impact from one of these NEOs can bring devastating effects to Earth.
That is why scientists are working on a number of planetary protection initiatives to deflect asteroids if they threaten to impact the Earth. However, the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) is the most drastic measure of all times.

About Didymos:

Didymoon was chosen because of its close proximity to Earth and its size. Didymoon is small and in a tight enough 12-hour orbit around its parent, that its orbital period can indeed be shifted in a measurable way.
Didymos is a binary asteroid; the primary body has a diameter of around 780 m and a rotation period of 2.26 hours, whereas the Didymoon secondary body has a diameter of around 160 m and rotates around the primary at a distance of around 1.2 km from the primary surface in around 12 hours.

Source: Indian Express