About:
- These miscreants have been pushed to a few pockets with only 25 districts accounting for 85% of the LWE (Left Wing Extremism) violence in the country.
- Union Home Minister Amit Shah chaired the meeting to review the security and other developmental aspects in the LWE-hit States.
- Addressing the meeting, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren accused the Centre of slashing the number of LWE-affected districts in the State that could avail ₹33 crore under the Special Central Assistance (SCA) and Security Related Expenditure (SRA) scheme for infrastructure-related projects.
- According to the ministry, there has been a gradual decline in the number of LWE incidents in the last decade. The incidents have reduced from 2,258 in 2009 to 349 incidents till August 31 this year. The number of deaths reduced from 908 to 110 during the same period.
2. WOMEN IN JUDICIARY
About:
- “It is your right. It is not a matter of charity... Enough of this thousands of years of suppression,” Chief Justice Ramana said. The CJI paraphrased Karl Marx to say, “Women of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
- The CJI said women constituted only about 30% of the subordinate judiciary. In High Courts, women judges constitute 11.5%. Here in the Supreme Court, we currently have four women Justices out of the sitting 33. That makes it just 12%.
- Of the 1.7 million advocates, only 15% are women.
- Only 2% of the elected representatives in the State Bar Councils are women. There is no woman member in the Bar Council of India. This needs urgent correction,” Chief Justice Ramana said.
3. BEIJING-LHASA EXPRESSWAY
About:
- This section is located at an average altitude of 4,500 metres above sea level, which Chinese state media have termed the world’s highest expressway.
- The Lhasa-Nagqu section is part of the G6 Beijing-Lhasa expressway and is the first expressway linking Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region to north Tibet.
- It also connects the PLA’s Central Theatre Command with the Western Theatre Command which is responsible for the border with India, an official source said.
- An important stretch of the expressway between Nagqu to Yangbaijain of Lhasa-Nagqu section was put into operational trial on August 21. On completion of Lhasa-Nagqu section, the driving time between Lhasa and Nagqu has reduced from six hours to three hours.
- The completed expressway will pass through seven major cities of China including Beijing, Hebei, inner Mangolia, Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai and Lhasa with an approximate length of 3,710 km.
- In June, China had launched a high speed bullet train connecting Lhasa with Nyingchi, a strategically located Tibetan town located close to Arunachal Pradesh
4. STEERING COMMITTEE FOR LOCAL VALUE ADDITION, MANUFACTURING AND EXPORTS (SCALE)
About:
- The Minister asked Pawan Goenka, the Mahindra group’s managing director till April 2021, to drive this introspection.
- The group is now working on such ideas for 17 sectors — from toys, textiles, furniture and e-cycles to drones and even fisheries.
- The SCALE includes the top brass from the industry bodies CII, FICCI and Assocham and three representatives from government, with member secretary Manmeet Kaur Nanda from the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).
The SCALE group is different for a few reasons.
- First, it has no deadlines and drafts and no voluminous reports — all its proposals are laid out in a presentation at best.
- Second, it doesn’t just gather up ideas from various sectoral players and splash them together for the government to consider, as usual industry representations tend to be.
- Third, it follows a rigorous process of consultations to align different factions of industry with varying agendas at multiple levels and tries to nudge an alignment of interests where differences seem intractable, before it takes up the relevant issues with the government.
5. GoM TO RATIONALISE GST RATES
About:
- Currently, the GST regime has five broad tax rate slabs of zero, 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%, with a cess levied over and above the 28% on some goods, and special rates for items like precious stones and diamonds.
- Bommai’s seven-member group constituted by the Finance Ministry on Friday includes West Bengal Finance Minister Amit Mitra and Kerala Finance Minister K.N. Balagopal, as well as GST Council members from Goa, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
- The GoM shall review the current tax slab rates and recommend changes in the same as may be needed to garner required resources (and) review the current rate slab structure of GST, including special rates, and recommend rationalisation measures, including merger of tax rate slabs, required for a simpler rate structure in GST.
6. WORLD TOURISM DAY 2021
About:
- During the event, NIDHI 2.0 (National Integrated Database of Hospitality Industry) and ‘India Tourism Statistics – At a Glance, 2021’ will be launched.
- A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) will also be signed between Ministry of Tourism, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and The Responsible Tourism Society of India (RTSOI) to actively promote and support ‘sustainability initiatives’ in the tourism sector of each other .
7. AYUSHMAN BHARAT DIGITAL MISSION
About:
- The pilot project of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission had been announced by the Prime Minister from the ramparts of Red Fort on 15th August, 2020. Currently, Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is being implemented in pilot phase in six Union Territories.
- The nation-wide rollout of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission coincides with NHA celebrating the third anniversary of Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB PM-JAY).
- Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission is based on the foundations laid down in the form of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile (JAM) trinity and other digital initiatives of the government
- Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission will create a seamless online platform through the provision of a wide-range of data, information and infrastructure services, duly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems while ensuring the security, confidentiality and privacy of health-related personal information.
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- A health ID for every citizen that will also work as their health account, to which personal health records can be linked and viewed with the help of a mobile application;
- A Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) and Healthcare Facilities Registries (HFR) that will act as a repository of all healthcare providers across both modern and traditional systems of medicine.
The key components of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission include
- A health ID for every citizen that will also work as their health account, to which personal health records can be linked and viewed with the help of a mobile application;
- Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission Sandbox, created as a part of the Mission, will act as a framework for technology and product testing that will help organizations, including private players, intending to be a part of National Digital Health Ecosystem become a Health Information Provider or Health Information User.
8. HUNARBAAZ AWARDS
About:
- The virtual award ceremony was organised by NIRDPR with MoRD, in association with State Rural Livelihood Missions (SRLMs) and Rural Self-employment Training Institutes (RSETIs).
- Hunarbaaz Awards have been instituted by the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRD&PR), Hyderabad under the auspices of the Ministry of Rural Development for 75 differently-abled candidates as part of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav.
- The awards are given to the candidates who were trained through Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana (DDU-GKY) and RSETI schemes of the Ministry in various trades, they subsequently got placed and worked in the organizations for more than one year or were successfully settled in the trade of their choice as self-employed.
9. DARK ENERGY
About:
- Dark energy, the mysterious form of energy that makes up about 68% of the universe, has intrigued physicists and astronomers for decades.
- Dark energy has been noted as “the most profound mystery in all of science”.
Dark energy Vs Dark matter
- Everything we see – the planets, moons, massive galaxies, you, me, this website – makes up less than 5% of the universe.
- About 27% is dark matter and 68% is dark energy.
- While dark matter attracts and holds galaxies together, dark energy repels and causes the expansion of our universe.
- Despite both components being invisible, we know a lot more about dark matter, since its existence was suggested as early as the 1920s, while dark energy wasn’t discovered until 1998.
Recent detection
- They noticed certain unexpected results in an underground experiment and write that dark energy may be responsible for it.
- The XENON1T experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment and was operated deep underground at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy.
- The finding also suggests that experiments like XENON1T, which are designed to detect dark matter, could also be used to detect dark energy.
10. ENCROACHMENT OF LAND IN ASSAM
About:
- The eviction drive in Dholpur of Sipajhar, where primarily Bengali-speaking Muslims live, was aimed at removing “illegal encroachers” to free up government land for “landless indigenous communities”.
- Portions of the land in Dholpur — as well as the larger Garukhuti area — have been a site of conflict for decades, with indigenous residents claiming their land has been usurped by migrants.
What is the extent of encroachment of land in Assam?
- Land has long been at the centre of ethnic contestations in Assam, with the common belief that the “indigenous” Assamese were losing its land to “migrants from Bangladesh”.
- The Brahma Committee, formed by the previous Sarbananda Sonowal government to make recommendations on land rights, said in its interim report in 2017 that 63 lakh bighas of government land was under “illegal occupation”.