DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS IAS | UPSC Prelims and Mains Exam –31st May 2024

Syllabus

• Prelims – Current Event

Context: At the UN 4th International Conference on SIDS in Antigua and Barbuda, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) published a Call for Proposals for funding to improve infrastructure resilience in Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Background:-

• The financing appeal, totaling $8 million, was revealed during the SIDS4 Conference in Antigua and Barbuda as a component of CDRI’s Infrastructure for Resilient Island States Programme (IRIS).

About Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure

• The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is a multi-stakeholder global partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions that aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks in support of sustainable development.
• At present, it is not an intergovernmental organization, which are ordinarily treaty-based organizations.
• National governments that endorse the CDRI Charter and become a members have a key role in setting its substantive agenda as well as in its governance.
• It may be noted that the policies, standards and other outputs of CDRI would not be binding on its members.
• The following are CDRI’s strategic priorities:
  • Technical Support and Capacity-building
  • Research and Knowledge Management
  • Advocacy and Partnerships
• It was launched by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019.
• Its objective is to promote research and knowledge sharing in the fields of infrastructure risk management, standards, financing, and recovery mechanisms.
• CDRI’s initial focus is on developing disaster-resilience in ecological (natural waterways, waste management, etc.), social (schools, hospitals, etc.), and economic infrastructure (energy, telecommunication, roads, railways, airports, etc.).
• It aims to achieve substantial changes in member countries’ policy frameworks and future infrastructure investments, along with a major decrease in the economic losses suffered due to disasters.
• As of 2023, the CDRI has 39 members, including 31 national governments such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, United States and 8 organisations . Algeria, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, the Republic of Korea, Spain, and Switzerland were invited, but their membership approval is pending.
• The CDRI Secretariat is based in New Delhi, India.

Source: CDRI

Syllabus

• Prelims – GEOGRAPHY

Context: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has directed Karnataka government to stop any unlawful/illegal sand mining in Sharavathi river.

Background:

• The NGT’s southern zone bench was hearing an application regarding damage caused to flora and fauna due to illegal sand mining.

About Sharavathi River

• Sharavati is a river which originates and flows entirely within the state of Karnataka in India.
• It is one of the few westward flowing rivers of India and a major part of the river basin lies in the Western Ghats.
• The total length of the river is around 128 km and it joins the Arabian Sea at Honnavar in Uttara Kannada district.
• On its way, the Sharavati forms the Jog Falls where the river falls from a height of 253 m.
• Jog Falls is the highest waterfall in India if the single drop water fall and the volume of water are considered for height.Otherwise, it is the third highest waterfall in India (after Kunchikal Falls and Barkana Falls); all three are located in Shivamogga district.
• The river itself and the regions around it are rich in biodiversity and are home to many rare species of flora and fauna.

Source: Deccan Herald

Syllabus

• Prelims – GEOGRAPHY & ENVIRONMENT

Context: Rivers and streams in Alaska are changing color – from a clean, clear blue to a rusty orange – because of the toxic metals released by thawing permafrost.

Background:

• The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world resulting in the thawing of permafrost.

Key Takeaways

• The discoloration and cloudiness are being caused by metals such as iron, zinc, copper, nickel and lead – some of which are toxic to the river and stream ecosystems – as permafrost thaws and exposes the waterways to minerals locked away underground for thousands of years.
• Arctic soils naturally contain organic carbon, nutrients and metals, such as mercury, within their permafrost. High temperatures have caused these minerals and the water sources around them to meet as permafrost melts.

Permafrost:

• Permafrost is soil or underwater sediment which continuously remains below 0 °C (32 °F) for two years or more: the oldest permafrost had been continuously frozen for around 700,000 years.While the shallowest permafrost has a vertical extent of below a meter (3 ft), the deepest is greater than 1,500 m (4,900 ft).
• Around 15% of the Northern Hemisphere or 11% of the global surface is underlain by permafrost. This includes large areas of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. It is also located in high mountain regions, with the Tibetan Plateau a prominent example.
• Only a minority of permafrost exists in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is consigned to mountain slopes like in the Andes of Patagonia, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, or the highest mountains of Antarctica

Alaska

• Alaska lies at the extreme northwest of the North American continent, and the Alaska Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the Western Hemisphere. Because the 180th meridian passes through the state’s Aleutian Islands, Alaska’s westernmost portion is in the Eastern Hemisphere. Thus, technically, Alaska is in both hemispheres.
• Alaska is bounded by the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean to the north, Canada’s Yukon territory and British Columbia province to the east, the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Ocean to the south, the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea to the west, and the Chukchi Sea to the northwest.
• Alaska, constituent state of the United States of America. It was admitted to the union as the 49th state on January 3, 1959. The capital is Juneau, which lies in the southeast, in the panhandle region.

Source: CNN

Syllabus

• Prelims – Current Event

Context: Naik Dhananjay Kumar Singh, who served with the UN Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), was posthumously honoured with the prestigious Dag Hammarskjold medal.

Background:

• Naik Singh’s valour and sacrifice were honoured during a solemn ceremony when the UN commemorated the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers.He was among the 61 military, police and civilian peacekeepers honoured posthumously with the prestigious medal during the occasion.

Key Takeaways

• The Dag Hammarskjöld Medal is a posthumous award given by the United Nations (UN) to military personnel, police, or civilians who lose their lives while serving in a United Nations peacekeeping operation.
• The medal is named after Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, who died in a plane crash in what is now Zambia in September 1961.
• The award is given to any military personnel, police, or civilians who lose their lives while serving in a United Nations peacekeeping operation, so long as the death did not result from misconduct or criminal acts.

Additional Information

• India is the second largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN Peacekeeping.  It currently deploys more than 6,000 military and police personnel to the UN operations in Abyei, the Central African Republic, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, the Middle East, Somalia, South Sudan, and Western Sahara.

Source: The Week

Syllabus

• Mains – GS 2

Context: As summer court break begins, the debate about how much time judges actually put in on the Bench has been rekindled by a casual remark from a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, who said that judges work only for a few hours a day, take long vacations and need to modernise.

Background:

• The eye-watering five million-plus cases pending have prompted all sorts of experiments and sudden ad hoc efforts: Compulsory pre-trial mediation, Lok Adalats, specialist courts, the winnowing out of petty cases, prioritising old cases and cases where delay will bring about loss of liberty and irreparable harm to one or other party, and ever more tribunals.

Reasons behind delay in justice delivery:

• Judicial vacancies:
  • High court vacancies average 30 percent but can touch nearly 50 percent. Subordinate court vacancies average 22 percent. Bihar and Meghalaya clock in vacancies above 30 percent — ongoing for over three years.
  • According to the India Justice Report, as of June 2020, on average, a case remained pending in the subordinate courts for three years and in high courts, at 2022 figures, for five years.
  • Shortfall in judges is measured against “sanctioned” strength — the number designated as necessary, given the workload. However, as long ago as 1987, the 120th report of the Law Commission recommended there should be 50 judges per 10 lakh population. At just 15 judges per 10 lakh population nearly four decades later, even this hugely inadequate figure has not been reached.
• Several other factors contribute to the problem, including the types and complexity of cases each judge must deal with, and the stratagems used by lawyers to prolong trials for their clients’ advantage.
• Lack of Infrastructure, Staff and quality:
  • Courtrooms are being built, but are still in short supply and too many in use are sub-optimal. Nationally, support staff shortages average 26 percent.
  • Quality deficits amplify structural inadequacies. Uneven acumen in both language and learning at the bar and the bench leads to endless procedural delays while the mismatch between proficiency of language, clarity of argument, and final outcome opens the door to ever more appeals.
• Slow pace of technology adoption: Great hope of technology remains hostage to slow and uneven adoption, erratic electricity, uneven bandwidth, and user resistance.
• Excessive government litigation presently accounts for roughly 50 percent of the court load.

Way Forward

• Reducing government litigations: better-drafted laws, cleaning out outdated laws and procedures helps to reduce cases.
• Judges are trained to be adjudicators, not administrators. A permanent administrative secretariat headed by a qualified court manager within each court, on whom the senior judge can rely, has proved a winner in many jurisdictions abroad.
• On the quality side, there is a strong case to be made for higher standards being set at the entry level before anyone can grace a bench, whether high or low, or before being allowed to practise before a court.
• Spending more money on justice delivery. The India Justice Report estimates that the overall per capita spending on judiciary stands at less than Rs 150.
• The eye-watering five million-plus cases pending have prompted all sorts of experiments and sudden ad hoc efforts: Compulsory pre-trial mediation, Lok Adalats, specialist courts, the winnowing out of petty cases, prioritising old cases and cases where delay will bring about loss of liberty and irreparable harm to one or other party, and ever more tribunals.

Source: Indian Express

Syllabus

• Mains – GS 3

Context: Genetically modified mosquitoes have been used in outdoor but controlled conditions in India, Brazil, and Panama which showed promising drops in mosquito populations, around 90% during the trials.

Background:

• Mosquito control has taken centrestage today and the battle continues unrelenting with an array of tools – from mosquito nets to insecticides and the use of symbionts like Wolbachia. But with insecticide resistance in mosquitoes rising to alarming proportions, it has become imperative that newer approaches to mosquito control gain prominence.

Gene-Drive Technology (GDT):

• GDT is a type of genetic engineering technique that modifies genes to alter the typical rules of Mendelian inheritance.
• Mendelian inheritance refers to certain patterns of how traits are passed from parents to offspring.
• A gene drive consists of three key components:
  • The gene to be spread;
  • The Cas9 enzyme to cut DNA; and
  • CRISPR, a programmable DNA sequence that determines where the enzyme should cut.

Outcomes:

• The genetic material that encodes for these three elements gets inserted into an animal’s DNA, in place of the naturally occurring gene.
• It increases the likelihood that a particular suite of genes will be passed onto the next generation, allowing the genes to rapidly spread through a population and override natural selection.

Applications of GDT:

• GDT can be used to exterminate insects such as mosquitoes that can spread malaria, dengue, and the Zika virus.
• Gene drives can also be used to control invasive species such as rodents.

Concerns/Issues related to GDT:

• Long-term disruption in an ecosystem like a disturbance in the balance of food-web, potentially leading to unintended ecological consequences.
• Gene drive could get out of control and spread uncontrollably across international borders.
• It could potentially be used for bioterrorism or other malicious purposes.
• Deciding which species to target and the irreversible nature of GDT raises complex ethical and moral issues.

Source: Live Science

Q1.) Consider the following statements about Coalition For Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI)

1. It is an intergovernmental organization that aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks.
2. The CDRI Secretariat is based in New Delhi
3. It was launched by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019.

How many of the statements given above are correct?

1. Only one
2. Only two
3. All three
4. None

Q2.) Consider the following rivers

1. Narmada
2. Godavari
3. Periyar
4. Sharavathi

How many of the rivers given above are west flowing?

1. Only one
2. Only two
3. Only three
4. All four

Q3.) Bering strait separates

1. Alaska and Chukchi Peninsula of the Russian Far East
2. Alaska and North western Canada
3. Alaska and rest of United States
4. None of the above

Comment the answers to the above questions in the comment section below!!

ANSWERS FOR ’  31st  May 2024 – Daily Practice MCQs’ will be updated along with tomorrow’s Daily Current Affairs.st

Q.1) – b

Q.2) – b

Q.3) – a