Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

Context: Amit Shah’s Bengal visit has triggered a race for ownership of one of Bengal’s foremost 19th century scholars, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

• Chattopadhyay was born in the village Kanthalpara in the town of North 24 Parganas, Near Naihati, in an orthodox Bengali Brahmin family, the youngest of three brothers, to Yadav Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Durgadebi.
• Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay or Bankim Chandra Chatterjee(27 June 1838[2]–8 April 1894) was an Indian writer, poet and journalist. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, originally in Sanskrit stotra personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring the activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhyay wrote thirteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treaties in Bengali.
• Chattopadhyay’s earliest publications were in Ishwar Chandra Gupta’s weekly newspaper Sangbad Prabhakar.
• Kapalkundala (1866) is Chattopadhyay’s first major publication. The heroine of this novel, named after the mendicant woman in Bhavabhuti’s Malatimadhava, is modelled partly after Kalidasa’s Shakuntala and partly after Shakespeare’s Miranda. The hero of this novel was Nabakumar.
• Chattopadhyay started publishing a monthly literary magazine Bangadarshan in April 1872.
• One of the many novels of Chattopadhyay that are entitled to be termed as historical fiction is Rajsimha (1881, rewritten and enlarged 1893).
• Anandamath (The Abbey of Bliss, 1882) is a political novel which depicts a Sannyasi (Hindu ascetic) army fighting the British soldiers. The book calls for the rise of Indian nationalism.
• The novel was also the source of the song Vande Mataram (I worship my Motherland for she truly is my mother) which, set to music by Rabindranath Tagore, was taken up by many Indian nationalists, and is now the National Song of India. The plot of the novel is loosely set on the Sannyasi Rebellion. He imagined untrained Sannyasi soldiers fighting and beating the highly experienced British Army; ultimately however, he accepted that the British cannot be defeated.

Pakistan placed on FATF’s ‘grey list’

• The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has placed Pakistan on the ‘grey list’ for failing to curb anti-terror financing despite Islamabad submitting a 26-point action plan
• Being placed on the ‘grey list’ means that Pakistan’s financial system will be designated as posing a risk to the international financial system because of “strategic deficiencies” in its ability to prevent terror financing and money laundering.

Impact on Pakistan economy

• After being placed on the ‘grey list’, Pakistan will be directly scrutinised by the financial watchdog until it is satisfied by the measures taken to curb terror financing and money laundering.
• The country spent three years on the ‘grey list’ between 2012 and 2015, without the designation affecting its ability to float international bonds, borrow from multilateral bodies, receive or send remittances or conduct international trade.
• The status does little more than raising the compliance burden on counterparts, such as correspondent banks, dealing with entities within Pakistan’s financial system, and therefore attaches an additional cost to many external sector transactions.
• If Islamabad fails to comply with rules of grey list and action plan is not adopted then the country runs the risk to being included in to the black list of FATF which currently features Iran and North Korea.

Financial Action Task Force (FATF)

• Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 by the Ministers of its Member jurisdictions.
• FATF currently has 35 members and two regional organisations – European Commission and GCC.
• The objectives of the FATF are to set standards and promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system.
• The FATF is therefore a “policy-making body” which works to generate the necessary political will to bring about national legislative and regulatory reforms in these areas.
• The FATF monitors the progress of its members in implementing necessary measures, reviews money laundering and terrorist financing techniques and counter-measures, and promotes the adoption and implementation of appropriate measures globally.
• In collaboration with other international stakeholders, the FATF works to identify national-level vulnerabilities with the aim of protecting the international financial system from misuse.
• The FATF’s decision making body, the FATF Plenary, meets three times per year.

Mars may have hosted life form before earth

• After analysing grains of the mineral zircon extracted from a Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, scientists have found that Mars’ crust formation — which is the end product of planet formation — took place at least 100 million years earlier than on the earth.
• Scientists have found that the Red Planet’s outer layer hardened 4.547 billion years ago, only 20 million years after the birth of the Sun.
• “Our results indicate that Mars could have had an environment with oceans, and potentially life, much earlier than Earth,” said Martin Bizzarro, a scientist at Denmark’s Centre for Star and Planet Formation and senior author of a study published in Nature.
• Mars was once much more Earth-like, with a thick atmosphere, abundant water and global oceans.
• Up to now, mathematical models have suggested that the solidification of the Red Planet took up to 100 million years.
• The new study tackles the question by examining a chunk of Mars that streaked into the Saharan Desert and was discovered in 2011. The Black Beauty meteorite weighed 320 grams when found. The researchers secured 44 gm of the precious space rock and extracted seven bits of zircon that could be used in experiments.
• By measuring the lead decaying from uranium that had been trapped in zircon as the young Mars’s molten magma hardened, the scientists were able to precisely date the crust from which the zircon formed.
• The new timeline suggests that something similar may have happened on our planet, but only after Earth was “reset” by the giant impact that formed the Moon about 4.4 billion years ago.

James Webb Space Telescope

• NASA said that human and technical errors had caused a fresh delay in the launch of James Webb Space Telescope, which will now not be deployed before March 2021.
• The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope developed in collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency that will be the scientific successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
• The JWST will offer unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, and will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology. One of its major goals is observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.
• These types of targets are beyond the reach of current ground and space-based instruments. Other goals include understanding the formation of stars and planets, and direct imaging of exoplanets and novas
• In development since 1996, the telescope is named after James E. Webb, the American government official who was the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968 and played an integral role in the Apollo program.

Women Entrepreneurship Platform

Context: NITI Aayog’s Women Entrepreneurs Platform (WEP) has signed five separate Statement of Intent (SoIs) with Financial Institutions & Social Organisations. These SOIs will provide financial assistance to women entrepreneurs and address the finance related challenges faced by them through WEP.

About women entrepreneurship platform

• NITI Aayog launched the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP), on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
• The initiative is aimed at building an ecosystem for women across India to realize their entrepreneurial aspirations, scale-up innovative initiatives and chalk-out sustainable, long-term strategies for their businesses.
• The WEP theme song “Naari Shakti” composed and sung by Shri Kailash Kher was released on this occasion.
• Established under the leadership of Ms Anna Roy, Adviser (Industry) of NITI Aayog, the platform aspires to substantially increase the number of women entrepreneurs who will create and empower a dynamic New India.
• These aspirations are manifest in the three pillars on which WEP is built: Ichha Shakti (motivating aspiring entrepreneurs to start their enterprise), Gyaan Shakti (providing knowledge and ecosystem support to women entrepreneurs to help them foster entrepreneurship) &Karma Shakti (providing hands-on support to entrepreneurs in setting-up and scaling up businesses).

Export Credit Guarantee Corporation

• The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved the capital infusion of Rs.2000 crore for strengthening of Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (ECGC).
• The infusion would enhance insurance coverage to MSME exports and strengthen India’s exports to emerging and challenging markets like Africa, CIS and Latin American countries.
• With enhanced capital, ECGC’s underwriting capacity and risk to capital ratio will improve considerably. With a stronger underwriting capacity, ECGC will be in a better position to support Indian exporters to tap new and unexplored markets.
• Increased capital infusion will help ECGC to diversify its product portfolio and provide cost effective credit insurance helping exporters to gain a stronger foothold in the difficult markets.
• Covers from ECGC will help in improving competitive positon of India exporters in International markets. More than 85% of customers benefitted by ECGC’s covers are MSMEs.  ECGC covers exports to around 200 countries in the world.
• ECGC is a premier export credit agency of the Government of India to provide Export Credit Insurance Services to facilitate exports from the country. The ECGC offers credit insurance schemes to exporters to protect them against losses due to non-payment of export dues by overseas buyers due to political and / or commercial risks.