National Current Affairs – UPSC/KAS Exams – 16th October 2018
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October 16, 2018
‘12 courts set up to try MPs and MLAs’
- The Supreme Court has upped the ante on the States, Union Territories and High Courts which have not provided it with details of criminal cases pending against sitting lawmakers, warning that their Chief Secretaries and Registrars General will be made personally liable for non-compliance.
The Team
- The Centre informed the court that so far a dozen such courts had been created in 11 States.
- A Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, on October 10, gave 11 States/Union Territories (UTs) and the High Courts of Karnataka, Kerala and Tripura a deadline of four weeks to comply with its September 12 order.
- The order has called on States/UTs to furnish data to determine the number of special courts to be set up across the country to exclusively try accused legislators.
Why was it needed?
- The States/UTs which have not complied with the September 12 order are Goa, Himachal Pradesh Meghalaya, Mizoram, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu and Lakshadweep.
- The apex court had on December 14 last year ordered these courts to be established to fast track the long-pending trials against MPs and MLAs in a bid to weed out corruption and criminality in politics.
- So far, the Centre informed the court that a dozen such courts have been created in 11 other States. The Bench further asked senior advocate Vijay Hansaria and his associates to examine the status reports and affidavits so far filed by the various States, UTs and High Courts about the pending cases which have to be tried by the special courts in each of them.
- Mr. Hansaria has been requested to complete the exercise and file a report in the apex court within a period of 10 days.
- On September 12, the apex court had taken note of the long silence from the States and UTs about their respective legal battles against criminality and corruption in politics.
To monitor progress
- Taking serious note of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the States, the Supreme Court had said it would monitor the compliance of its orders to form the special courts.
- Of the 12 Special Courts already established, six are sessions courts and five are magisterial courts. The case has been listed for hearing in first week of November.
Government begins Youth Road Safety Learners Licence programme in New Delhi
- The Central government has launched a road safety programme in a public-private-partnership (PPP) model in collaboration with Diageo India and the Institute of Road Traffic Education (IRTE).
- The initiative aims to bring a formal and structured training program for young, first-time drivers as they apply for a learner’s license.
- The programme was launched by the Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways and Chemical and Fertiliser, Mansukh L Mandaviya,
- The government is committed to making its vision of safer roads and cities a reality, and this programme will help contribute to the government’s target for achieving 50 percent reduction in road accidents by 2020.
- Every individual road user is a brand ambassador for road safety.
Why was it needed?
- She said that India accounts for 12.5 percent (over 145,000 fatalities a year) of global road accidents, with one road accident occurring every four minutes.
- Alarmingly, 72 percent victims involved in such road mishaps are between the age groups of 15-44 years with speeding, reckless and drunk driving being the top reason accounting for 1.5 percent of road traffic accidents and 4.6 percent of fatalities.
- The government said that IRTE has been successfully running its ‘Road to Safety’ initiative to provide capacity building training to traffic police officials and educate commercial drivers such as truckers and bus drivers and university students on the dangers of drunken driving.
- The programme has trained over 4,624 traffic officials in road safety capacity-building, 6,000 commercial vehicle drivers and over 5,000 university students in more than 64 cities of 17 states.
States to get Rs 100 cr award for being efficient under Saubhagya scheme
- The Power Ministry announced Rs 100 crore award for states that would complete the household electrification early under thee Saubhagya scheme.
- Apart from discoms, the employees would also collectively get Rs 50 lakh award for completing the task of electrifying household under the Rs 16,320 crore Saubhagya scheme launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year in September.
- There are three categories of states to compete under the scheme which include special category states (northeast and other hilly states).
- Besides, the states would be categorised in two other broad categories – one pool of states would have those where number of households to be electrified are less than 5 lakh. Another pool of states would cover states that have more than 5 lakh households to be electrified.
- Out of the Rs 50 lakh award for employees of a discom, Rs 20 lakh can be distributed among employees of its division for commendable work.
- Some of the states have already achieved almost 99 per cent of household electrification work and those eight states would be kept out of this Award scheme. These states are Gujarat, Punjab, Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh.
Saubhagya Scheme
- The Saubhagya Scheme or Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana is an Indian government project to provide electricity to all households.
- The project was announced in September 2017 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said that the aim was to complete the electrification process by December 2018.
- Certain households identified via the Socio-economic and Caste Census (SECC) of 2011 will be eligible for free electricity connections, while others will be charged 500 Rs.
- On 16 November, the government launched a website saubhagya.gov.in to disseminate information about the scheme.
- The total outlay of the project is Rs. 16, 320 crore while the Gross Budgetary Support (GBS) is Rs. 12,320 crore.
- The beneficiary household will get five LED lights, one AC fan, one AC power plug. It also includes the Repair and Maintenance (R&M) for 5 years
Pollution forecast system unveiled
- The Central government announced a pollution forecast system that can alert, three days in advance, about the likelihood of extreme pollution events and dust storms.
- Though unveiled by Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan, the system is yet to go live but is expected to be made available “in the next two days” to the public via the CPCB and the Environment Pollution Control Authority
- The National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, the IMD and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, are involved with developing the application.
The warning system consists of
a) real time observations of air quality over Delhi region and details about natural aerosols like dust (from dust storms) and particulate matter using different satellite data sets
b) Predictions of air pollutants from two different air quality prediction systems based on state-of-the-art atmospheric chemistry transport models and
c) Warning Messages and Alerts and Bulletins.
India hopes to finalise partners for strategic oil reserves within a year
- India hopes to forge partnerships with private players to build out its strategic petroleum reserves within the coming year, the head of Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL)
- India’s government approved two strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) sites with a total capacity of 6.5 million tonnes in June.
- H. Ahuja, the chief executive of ISPRL, said that ISPRL, a government-owned a special purpose vehicle, planned to get bids from investors for the second phase of the storage plan in six to nine months.
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