Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 19 March 2017

:: National ::

Bilateral exercises new way to increase strategic cooperation

India is leveraging bilateral military exercises to further strategic cooperation.
The Indian Army is currently engaged in or has just concluded four separate exercises with the armies of Nepal, Oman, Singapore and the U.S., with a focus on aspects like counter-insurgency, jungle warfare.
The exercise with Nepal also comes at a time when the Himalayan neighbour is expected to conduct its first military drills with China.
The Surya Kiran exercise with Nepal is underway at Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand, while the Al Nagah-II exercise with Oman is underway at Bakloh in Himachal Pradesh.
They are infantry exercises meant to improve interoperability and focus especially on counter-terrorism. Both the exercises are spread over 14 days.
During the last three years India has signed defence agreements/memorandum of understandings (MoU) with 21 countries.
The Army has conducted exercises with 18 countries during the three-year period, including the current year, and Indian military personnel attended training and courses in 34 countries.
This is the ninth edition of the Surya Kiran exercise from March 9-20 with Nepal. The Nepal contingent is represented by 300 personnel, including 26 officers.
There is also a component on the study of Left Wing Extremism in South East Asia and the Indian Army hopes to gain from the experience of the Nepal Army, including their best practices.
Meanwhile, the Army’s Para Special Forces and U.S. Army’s Special Forces honed their skills from February 27 to March 12 in Jodhpur. The exercise covered a range of activities, including advanced marksmanship, sniping techniques and military free fall.
The Bold Kurukshetra exercise with Singapore is an armoured exercise under way at the Babina field firing range in Uttar Pradesh, involving 250 soldiers from each side.
India and Singapore have an agreement that allows the latter to use the Indian Army’s facilities for training and exercises.
The agreement on utilisation of facilities by the Singapore Air Force was initially signed in October 2007 and Army facilities in August 2008.

India’s longest road tunnel to open soon

India’s longest road tunnel, built on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway, will open to traffic very soon following the success of the trial run.
The work on the 9.2-km tube tunnel, which is part of a 286-km, four-lane project, started on May 23, 2011 in the lower Himalayan mountain range and cost Rs. 3,720 crore.
The tunnel, which is located at an elevation of 1,200 metre, will be the first in India to be equipped with the world-class integrated tunnel control system, through which ventilation, fire control, signals, communication and electrical systems will be automatically actuated.
The tunnel will reduce the travel time between Jammu and Srinagar by two-and-a-half hours. The road distance from Chenani and Nashri will now be 10.9 km, instead of the present 41 km.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to inaugurate the highway tunnel by month-end.

Central govt is planning for one lakh toilets in madrassas

The Centre plans to build toilets in one lakh madrassas across the country as part of its efforts to revamp these traditional learning centres.
Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said the government also plans to introduce mid-day meals.

More than one crore face arsenic contamination in West Bangal

West Bengal has the highest number of arsenic-affected people in the country.
There are 83 blocks in eight districts — Bardhaman, Malda, Hooghly, Howrah, Murshidabad, Nadia, North and South 24 Paraganas — where ground water is affected by arsenic contamination.
Bengal topped the list with more than 1.04 crore arsenic-affected persons as on March 4, 2017. Bihar comes second with 16.88 lakh persons, with Assam in third spot with 14.48 lakh victims.
The total number of arsenic-affected people in the country is about 1.48 crore.
According to the WHO’s guidelines for drinking water quality (2011), the permissible limit of Arsenic in groundwater is .01 mg per litre. However, in India the permissible limit in drinking water has recently been revised from .05 mg per litre to .01 mg per litre.
The ruling Trinamool Congress had claimed in its 2016 election manifesto that 91% of the population of arsenic-affected areas in the State have been provided with clean drinking water.
The website of the PHE department also claims that arsenic contamination is “getting under control” and Bengal is expected to be “arsenic free” in another couple of years.

World Bank wants Indus water treaty issue to be resolved

World Bank CEO reiterated that the Bank was keen on resolving the disagreements between the two nations over the interpretation of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) following the construction by India of two hydroelectric power plants.
Though the two nations have had no fresh conflict over the sharing of river waters for more than five decades, differences cropped up after Pakistan opposed the construction of the Kishenganga (330 MW) and Ratle (850 MW) power plants.
These are constructed by India on the Jhelum and Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir, over which Pakistan has unrestricted rights under the treaty.
Even before Partition, the Indus had created problems among the states of British India. The problems became international after the creation of two nations as the political boundary was drawn right across the Indus basin.
The World Bank (then IBRD), under the presidency of Eugene Black, helped in 1952 to settle the dispute between the two nations on the sharing of the Indus river basin waters.
After eight years of hard negotiations, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and President Ayub Khan signed the IWT on September 19, 1960. The Bank is also a signatory to the treaty.
The IWT is a complex instrument, comprising 12 articles and eight annexures. It sets forth provisions of cooperation between the two countries in their use of the rivers, known as the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC).
According to the IWT, India has control over three eastern rivers of the Indus basin — the Beas, the Ravi and the Sutlej — and Pakistan has control over the three western rivers — the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum.
All six rivers flow from India to Pakistan. Among other uses, India is permitted to construct power facilities on these rivers subject to regulations laid down in the treaty.
India had asked the bank for appointment of a neutral expert following Pakistan’s objections to two projects, while Pakistan demanded the formation of a court of arbitration, alleging that India had violated the treaty.
In December 2016, the Bank announced a ‘pause’ and asked both parties to resolve the issue amicably by the end of January 2017.
India welcomed the Bank’s neutral stand, while Pakistan sought intervention of the Bank after being unable to find an amicable solution to the dispute through the commission.
Given that India has remained the Bank’s single largest borrower since its inception with cumulative borrowings from IBRD and IDA touching $103 billion, the bank did not perhaps want to upset it.
With buoyancy in foreign exchange reserves, the Bank needs India more than the other way round and this has created some anxiety in the Bank circles about the future direction of their relationship.
India and Pakistan are important partners and clients of the Bank. In South Asia, Pakistan ($2,280 million) received the highest lending from the Bank after India ($3,845 million) during the fiscal 2016.
Changing its stance, India has agreed to attend a meeting of the commission in Lahore next week. Like in the 1950s, Bank officials are again playing the role of mediator.

Tuberculosis control remains a major challenge in India

At the end of 50 years of tuberculosis control activities, the disease remains a major health challenge in India. As per new estimates, the number of new cases every year has risen to 2.8 million and mortality is put at 4,80,000 each year.
These figures may go up when the national TB prevalence survey is undertaken in 2017-18. Against this backdrop.
Govt in its national strategic plan for tuberculosis elimination (2017-2025), has set a highly ambitious goal of “achieving a rapid decline in burden of TB, morbidity and mortality while working towards elimination of TB by 2025.
Though the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) has treated 10 million patients, the rate of decline has been slow. Providing universal access to early diagnosis and treatment and improving case detection were the main goals of the national strategic plan 2012-17.
But RNTCP failed on both counts, as the Joint Monitoring Mission report of 2015 pointed out.
Going by the current rate of decline, India is far from reaching the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals — reducing the number of deaths by 90% and TB incidence by 80% compared with 2015.
Yet, the latest report for TB elimination calls for reducing TB incidence from 217 per 1,00,000 in 2015 to 142 by 2020 and 44 by 2025 and reduce mortality from 32 to 15 by 2020 and 3 per 1,00,000 by 2025.
Most importantly, the TB control programme plans to do away with the strategy of waiting for patients to walk in to get tested and instead engage in detecting more cases, both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant.
The emphasis will be on using highly sensitive diagnostic tests, undertaking universal testing for drug-resistant TB, reaching out to TB patients seeking care from private doctors and targeting people belonging to high-risk populations.
The other priority is to provide anti-TB treatment — irrespective of where patients seek care from, public or private — and ensure that they complete the treatment.
For the first time, the TB control programme talks of having in place patient-friendly systems to provide treatment and social support.
It seeks to make the daily regimen universal; currently, the thrice weekly regimen is followed by RNTCP, and the daily regimen has been introduced only in five States.
Though Bedaquiline, the drug for people who do not respond to any anti-TB medicine, is provided in six sites in the country, the number of beneficiaries is very small.
The report envisages a countrywide scale-up of Bedaquiline and Delamanid. In a marked departure, the report underscores the need to prevent the emergence of TB in susceptible populations.

Poor health indicator states to get more share in National Health policy

The long awaited National Health Policy (NHP), announced a few days ago, proposes to raise public health expenditure as a percentage of the GDP from the current 1.15% to 2.5% by 2025.
The resource allocation to individual States will be linked with their development indicators, absorptive capacity and financial indicators.
While public health expenditure as a percentage of GDP will reach 2.5% only by 2025, many of the goals listed in the Policy have a deadline of 2025, some of them even sooner.
The policy stresses preventive healthcare by engaging with the private sector to offer healthcare services and drugs that are affordable to all.
It wants to reduce out-of-pocket “catastrophic” health expenditure by households by 25% from current levels by 2025. It wants to increase the utilisation of public health facilities by 50% from the current levels by 2025.
The Centre is working on introducing a health card — an electronic health record of individuals.
Like the Health Ministry’s national strategic plan for tuberculosis elimination 2017-2025 report, the Policy wants to reduce the incidence of new TB cases to reach elimination by 2025.
In a similar vein, the policy has set 2017 as the deadline to eliminate kala-azar and lymphatic filariasis in endemic pockets, and 2018 in the case of leprosy.
In the case of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, it envisages a 25% reduction in premature mortality by 2025.
The policy “aspires” to provide secondary care right at the district level and reduce the number of patients reaching tertiary hospitals.
For the first time, there is a mention of public hospitals and facilities being periodically measured and certified for quality.
But the most ambitious target is providing access to safe water and sanitation by all by 2020. As per the January 2016 Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation’s country paper, sanitation coverage was only 48%.
Other challenging targets set by the Policy include reducing the infant mortality rate to 28 per 1,000 live births by 2019 and under five mortality to 23 per 1,000 live births by 2025.
According to the National Family Health Survey 4 (NFHS-4), IMR was 41 in 2015-16; it took 10 years to reduce IMR from 57 to 41.
As against 62% children 12-23 months old, who were fully immunised in 2015-16 according to the NFHS-4 data, the Policy has set a target of 90% by 2025.

:: International ::

Finance ministers of G-20 dropped an anti-protectionist pledge

Finance ministers from the world’s biggest economies dropped an anti-protectionist pledge and a vow on action against climate change after Washington refused to sign up to the commitment.
After a two-day meeting, ministers from G20 developed and developing nations said they were “working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies” but failed to spell out a pledge to reject protectionism.
The conspicuous omission came amid a push by U.S. President Donald Trump to pursue an “America First" policy that includes penalising companies that manufacture abroad by heavily taxing their products.

:: Business and Economy ::

The Centre should not permit imports of sugar this year says SISMA

The Centre should not permit imports of sugar this year (October 2016-September 2017) as output may outstrip demand, said Palani G. Periasamy, president of South Indian Sugar Mills Association.
The current season started with an opening stock of 7.7 million tonnes and the production this year is expected to be 20.3 million tonnes.
The total sugar consumption will be about 24 million tonnes and the closing stock for the current season is estimated to be four million tonnes.
Though production has been hit in south Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu because of drought, it is expected to be high in Uttar Pradesh this year.
Production in Uttar Pradesh this year was initially estimated to be 8.3 million tonnes. But it might go up to 9.5 million tonnes.
Usually, sugar produced in the south is supplied to the northern States too. But, this year, with production affected in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh, supply to north India might not be there.

:: Science and Technology ::

GRAPES-3 experiment at TIFR’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ootacamund is getting upgraded

The GRAPES-3 experiment at TIFR’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ootacamund is getting upgraded. The telescope made news last year when it detected the effect of a solar storm that hit the earth in June 2015.
The upgrade will play a major role in getting precise information about the propagation of storms in ‘the last million miles’ (from the L-1 point) of their journey from the Sun to the earth.
The upgraded detector will have an increased coverage of the sky and improved capacity to determine the direction of incident cosmic rays.
The latter property, of being able to discern the direction of detected particles, makes it unique among cosmic ray detectors in the world; it can also to measure the intensity of the particles.
Since the enhanced facility can cover a wider field of view (from present 37% to 57%), the chances of spotting solar storms will be higher.
The sun is at a distance of 150 million kilometres from the earth, and satellites have been placed at a distance of nearly 1.5 million kilometres, at the so-called L1 point, where they orbit the Sun along with the Earth.
Since charged particles from a solar storm will first impact the satellites before hitting the earth, they act as an early warning system. Depending on the speed of the storm, it will take about 20-40 minutes to reach the earth from the L1 point.
It is important to know the time when plasma will reach the earth, accurately, so that preventive and protective measures can be put into place in case a solar storm were to strike the earth.
If the earth’s magnetic field were to be weakened by extreme solar storms, charged particles would shower on to the planet.
Apart from rendering electronic devices defunct, charged particles in an extreme solar storm can also short current carrying over-head high voltage lines, leading to large-scale transformers burn out and thereby, power blackouts.
The up side is that the way to prevent such a disaster is well understood: simply switch off the power lines on being informed of an approaching solar storm!
And for this to be possible, an accurate determination of the time taken for the solar storm to travel to the earth is needed, which is where the GRAPES-3 set up comes in.

A group of marine researchers from Kerala is attempting to combat corrosion of steel

Turning to nanotechnology, a group of marine researchers from Kerala is attempting to combat corrosion of steel used for making fishing boats.
Corrosion of steel has been a major cause of concern for the fishing sector of Kerala where steel vessels have almost replaced wooden ones.
There is enhanced threat of corrosion in the case of welding joints and the hull of a vessel. The non-availability of good quality steel (BIS 2062 Grade B steel) as specified for boat-building has compounded the problem.
Conventional methods of coating of steel materials with ceramic, polymeric and electro-deposition are effective only to a limited extent. Corrosion-protection methodologies usually employ organic or inorganic-based coatings on steel.
The researchers pointed out that the major disadvantages shown by these coatings are poor adhesion, coating defects, poor scratch resistance, optical transparency, low coating flexibility and vulnerability to abrasion.
Even the recently introduced nanomaterial-incorporated polymer coatings have their own set of challenges — they tend to develop pinholes and pores, which could lead to the penetration of corrosive agents into the matrix followed by corrosion.