Test: October 2022 Weekly Current Affair - 2 - UPSC MCQ

Measures under the different categories of the plan are to be enforced by the pollution control boards of the NCR states and the concerned departments and agencies, including the traffic police, the Transport Department and road owning and construction agencies.
Actions under Stages II, III and IV will be invoked three days in advance of the AQI reaching the projected level
Stage 1 (AQI ‘Poor’ – 201 to 300)

1. Stopping all construction and demolition activities with plot size of 500 square metres or more which have not been registered on dust mitigation monitoring portals
2. mechanised sweeping, water sprinkling on roads
3. enforcing guidelines on use of anti-smog guns at construction sites
4. enforcing ban on open burning of waste and PUC (pollution under control norms) for vehicles
5. DISCOMs to minimise power supply interruptions in NCR
6. Encourage offices to start unified commute for employees to reduce traffic

Stage 2 (AQI ‘Very poor’ – 301 to 400)

1. Not allowing coal/firewood in tandoors at hotels
2. stopping use of diesel generator sets except for essential and emergency services (hospitals, railways, metro services, airports, water pumping stations, “projects of national importance”)
3. enhance parking fees to discourage private transport
4. augment CNG/ electric bus and metro services by procuring additional fleet and increasing the frequency of service

Stage 3 (AQI ‘Severe’ – 401 to 450)

1. Ban on construction and demolition activities except railway, metro, hospitals, sanitation projects etc, linear public projects like highways, roads, flyovers
2. closure of industries that have PNG supply and are not running on approved fuels. In industrial areas that don’t have PNG supply, industries not running on approved fuels will operate only for five days a week
3. State governments in NCR may impose restrictions on BS III petrol and BS IV diesel four wheelers

Stage 4 (AQI ‘Severe +’ – more than 450)

1. Stop entry of truck traffic into Delhi (except for essentials, CNG and electric trucks)
2. Ban on plying of Delhi registered diesel medium and heavy goods vehicles in Delhi, except for essentials
3. Ban on plying of 4-wheeler diesel vehicles in Delhi and districts of NCR bordering Delhi, except BS-VI vehicles and vehicles used for essential or emergency services
4. State Governments may consider additional emergency measures like closure of schools, plying of vehicles on odd-even basis
5. NCR State governments to decide on allowing public, municipal and private offices to work on 50% strength and the rest to work from home
6. Ban C&D activities in linear public projects such as highways, roads, flyovers

• Parliament can also constitute a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) with a special purpose, with members from both Houses, for detailed scrutiny of a subject or Bill. Also, either of the two Houses can set up a Select Committee with members from that House. JPCs and Select Committees are usually chaired by ruling party MPs, and are disbanded after they have submitted their report.
• The time to speak on a Bill is allocated according to the size of the party in the House. MPs often do not get adequate time to put forward their views in Parliament, even if they are experts on the subject. Committees are small groups with relatively less demands on their time; in these meetings, every MP gets a chance and the time to contribute to the discussion. Parliament has only around 100 sittings a year; Committee meetings are independent of Parliament’s calendar.
• There are 16 Departmentally Related Standing Committees for Lok Sabha and eight for Rajya Sabha; however, every Committee has members from both Houses. Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha panels are headed by members of these respective Houses.

E-rupee is the same as a fiat currency and is exchangeable one-to-one with the fiat currency. Only its form is different. It can be accepted as a medium of payment, legal tender and a safe store of value. The digital rupee would appear as liability on a central bank’s balance sheet.

• A solid-state battery is a battery technology that uses solid electrodes and a solid electrolyte, instead of the liquid or polymer gel electrolytes found in lithium-ion or lithium polymer batteries.
• Solid-state batteries have found use in pacemakers, RFID and wearable devices. They are potentially safer, with higher energy densities, but at a much higher cost.
• A solid-state battery can increase energy density per unit area since only a small number of batteries are needed. For that reason, a solid-state battery is perfect to make an EV battery system of module and pack, which needs high capacity.
• Challenges to widespread adoption include energy and power density, durability, material costs, sensitivity and stability.

According to a new World Bank report, titled “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022: Correcting Course”, the Covid pandemic has been the biggest setback to global poverty alleviation in decades.

• Japan will host the 2022 edition of the Malabar naval exercise consisting of India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. in the second week of November.
• End of October, the India-U.S. bilateral Army exercise ‘Yudh Abhyas’ is scheduled to take place in the high-altitude areas of Uttarakhand, around 100 km (aerial distance) from the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
• India is currently hosting the multilateral anti-terror exercise ‘Manesar Anti-terror 2022’ under the ambit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure scheduled from October 8 to 13.
• India and Japan held the sixth edition of the bilateral naval exercise Jimex-2022 in September off Visakhapatnam.

An object that helped create a new domain of history, and is the most-visited item at the British Museum is at the centre of demands by historians in Egypt. The UK is being asked to return the Rosetta Stone, a large stone slab that has fascinated the world since its discovery around two centuries ago.

The Rosetta Stone is a large stone slab with inscriptions on it and is believed to be a piece of a bigger rock. It has inscriptions in three scripts, all of which convey a decree or public message. This is similar to how in Ancient India, King Ashoka ordered stambhas or edicts that had messages of Buddha’s teachings and news about victory in a war inscribed. These were then placed throughout the kingdom for the public to see.

The important thing is that the decree is inscribed three times, in hieroglyphs (suitable for a priestly decree), Demotic (the cursive Egyptian script used for daily purposes, meaning ‘language of the people’), and Ancient Greek (the language of the administration – the rulers of Egypt at this point were Greco-Macedonian after Alexander the Great’s conquest”.

Therefore, the Rosetta Stone stands out for being the discovery that helped develop the specific field of ancient Egypt studies, Egyptology. Before it was found, there was no knowledge of what Egyptian hieroglyphs meant and how they were translated.

• The Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) that governs the appointment of members of the higher judiciary says that the “Union Minister of Law, Justice…would, at the appropriate time, seek the recommendation of the outgoing Chief Justice of India for the appointment of the next Chief Justice of India”.
• As per the process laid down in the MoP, “after receipt of the recommendation of the Chief Justice of India, the Union Minister of Law, Justice…will put up the recommendation to the Prime Minister who will advise the President in the matter of appointment”.
• Article 124(1) of the Constitution says that “there shall be a Supreme Court of India consisting of a Chief Justice of India…and…other Judges”; Article 124(2) lays down that “every Judge of the Supreme Court shall be appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal…”.
• The MoP says that the “appointment to the office of the Chief Justice of India should be of the seniormost Judge of the Supreme Court considered fit to hold the office”.
• Even before the MoP was agreed upon, the seniormost judge of the Supreme Court after the CJI (in terms of the years served) was by convention elevated to the top post. This convention was famously discarded by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose government recommended the appointment of Justice A N Ray as CJI in 1973 superseding three more senior judges, Justices J M Shelat, K S Hegde, and A N Grover.
• The MoP is the playbook agreed upon by the government and the judiciary on the appointment of judges. It is a crucial document — because the Collegium system of appointing judges is a judicial innovation that is not mandated through legislation or text of the Constitution.
• The MoP has evolved as the standard based on three decisions of the Supreme Court, known as the First Judges Case (1981), Second Judges Case (1993) and the Third Judges Case (1998). These three judgments form the basis of a peer selection process for the appointment of judges.

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is a government-backed project aimed at enabling small merchants and mom-and-pop stores in parts of the country to access processes and technologies that are typically deployed by large e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart.

It is an initiative aimed at promoting open networks for all aspects of exchange of goods and services over digital or electronic networks. ONDC is to be based on open-sourced methodology, using open specifications and open network protocols independent of any specific platform. It is being developed as a counter to the current stranglehold of two big players in the Indian e-commerce market, which is largely dictated by Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. In May this year, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) went live with a test run of ONDC in cities like Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong where it plans to onboard 150 sellers.

The ONDC platform lies in the middle of the interfaces hosting the buyers and the sellers.

A Parliamentary Committee is a panel of MPs that is appointed or elected by the House or nominated by the Speaker, and which works under the direction of the Speaker. It presents its report to the House or to the Speaker.
Parliamentary Committees have their origins in the British Parliament. They draw their authority from Article 105, which deals with the privileges of MPs, and Article 118, which gives Parliament authority to make rules to regulate its procedure and conduct of business.

• The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) functions in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC). As per Rules, 1989, it is responsible for appraisal of activities involving large scale use of hazardous microorganisms and recombinants in research and industrial production from the environmental angle. The committee is also responsible for appraisal of proposals relating to release of genetically engineered (GE) organisms and products into the environment including experimental field trials.
• GEAC is chaired by the Special Secretary/Additional Secretary of MoEF&CC and co-chaired by a representative from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

• Although there is no universal legal definition, a sanction can be defined as a measure of coercion of an economic nature, as opposed to diplomatic or military means, taken by states, either collectively or individually. Collective sanctions can be imposed by an international organisation based on a multilateral (UN) or regional (EU) treaty. The UNSC is at the centre of the collective sanctions’ edifice with its Chapter VII, ‘Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression’.
• Sanctions are not defined nor listed, as such, but the allusion is clear. Since 1966, the UNSC has established 30 regimes of sanctions which have taken a variety of shapes from trade measures to embargoes on arms; and financial tools to travel bans.
• UN-supported programmes of sanctions are administered by a sanctions committee chaired by a non-permanent member of the UNSC. 

Bru or Reang is a community indigenous to Northeast India, living mostly in Tripura, Mizoram and Assam. In Tripura, they are recognised as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.

• They did it to Huawei. They used it on Russia. Now, the United States is going after China’s advanced computing and supercomputer industry.
• The rule that enables US regulators to extend their technology export control powers far beyond America’s borders to transactions between foreign countries and China.
• The provision called the foreign direct product rule, or FDPR, was first introduced in 1959 to control trading of US technologies. It essentially says that if a product was made using American technology, the US government has the power to stop it from being sold – including products made in a foreign country.
• Recently, US officials applied the rule to China’s advanced computing and supercomputer industry to stop it from obtaining advanced computing chips.

• Single-cell protein (SCP) refers to edible unicellular microorganisms.
• The biomass or protein extract from pure or mixed cultures of algae, yeasts, fungi or bacteria may be used as an ingredient or a substitute for protein-rich foods, and is suitable for human consumption or as animal feeds.
• Whereas industrial agriculture is marked by a high water footprint, high land use, biodiversity destruction, general environmental degradation and contributes to climate change by emission of a third of all greenhouse gases, production of SCP does not necessarily exhibit any of these serious drawbacks.
• As of today, SCP is commonly grown on agricultural waste products, and as such inherits the ecological footprint and water footprint of industrial agriculture.
• However, SCP may also be produced entirely independent of agricultural waste products through autotrophic growth.

• Fallow is the stage of crop rotation in which the land is deliberately not used to raise a crop.
• Ground may be fallowed as part of a larger crop rotation plan or as a method to conserve moisture as in the summer fallow technique used in dryland farming.
• The practice of leaving fields fallow dates back to ancient times when farmers realized that using soil over and over again depleted its nutrients.
• If the duration of fallow is substantially reduced owing to multiple cropping, the soil does not get enough time to recuperate and allow natural fertilization like nitrogen fixation. If fallow is increased, it will help in nutrient replenishment.

The Food Corporation of India is an organization created and run by the Government of India. It is a statutory body under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Government of India.
Objectives: 

• Effective price support operations for safeguarding the interests of the poor farmers
• Distribution of food grains throughout the country for Public Distribution System (PDS)
• Maintaining a satisfactory level of operational and buffer stocks of food grains to ensure National Food Security
• Regulate market price to provide food grains to consumers at a reliable price.

It has primary duty to undertake purchase, store, and move/transport, distribute and sell food grains and other foodstuffs.

• Assessed contributions are the dues countries pay in order to be a member of the Organization. The amount each Member State must pay is calculated relative to the country’s wealth and population.
• Assessed contributions have declined as an overall percentage of the Programme Budget and have, for several years, accounted for less than one quarter of the Organization’s financing. The balance is mobilized through voluntary contributions.
• In recent years, voluntary contributions have accounted for more than three quarters of the Organization’s financing.

• Government implements the Market Intervention Scheme (MIS) for procurement of agricultural and horticultural commodities which are perishable in nature and are not covered under the Price Support Scheme (PSS).
• The objective of intervention is to protect the growers of these commodities from making distress sale in the event of a bumper crop during the peak arrival period when the prices tend to fall below economic levels and cost of production. The condition is that there should be either at least a 10 percent increase in production or a 10 percent decrease in the ruling market prices over the previous normal year.
• The scheme is implemented at the request of a State/UT government which is ready to bear 50 percent of the loss (25 percent in case of North-Eastern States), if any, incurred on its implementation.

Khadi & Village Industries Commission (KVIC):

• The Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) is a statutory body established by an Act of Parliament (Khadi and Village Industries Commission Act of 1956). In April 1957, it took over the work of former All India Khadi and Village Industries Board.
• Functions: It is an apex organization under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, with regard to khadi and village industries within India, which seeks to – “plan, promote, facilitate, organise and assist in the establishment and development of khadi and village industries in the rural areas in coordination with other agencies engaged in rural development wherever necessary.”

The Commission has three main objectives which guide its functioning. These are:

• The Social Objective – Providing employment in rural areas.
• The Economic Objective – Providing salable articles.
• The Wider Objective – Creating self-reliance amongst people and building up a strong rural community spirit.

Traditional knowledge refers to the knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities around the world. Traditional knowledge is mainly of a practical nature, particularly in such fields as agriculture, fisheries, health, horticulture, forestry and environmental management in general.
In addition to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a number of international bodies, instruments and initiatives are of particular relevance to traditional knowledge. They include but are not limited to the following:

• Agenda 21: Principle 22 of the main document that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro recognizes that indigenous peoples have a vital role to play in environmental management and development because of their traditional knowledge and practices;
• The International Labour Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples: This Convention calls for action to protect the rights of indigenous peoples;
• The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP);
• The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues UNPFII);
• The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO);
• The United Nations Education, Scientific and cultural Organization (UNESCO);
• The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank: These Banks are committed to ensuring that the development process promotes indigenous peoples’ participation;
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank

• Subsistence farming is practiced to meet the needs of the farmer’s family. Traditionally, low levels of technology and household labour are used to produce on small output.
• In mixed farming the land is used for growing food and fodder crops and rearing livestock.
• In commercial grain farming crops are grown for commercial purpose. Wheat and maize are common commercially grown grains. Major areas where commercial grain farming is practised are temperate grasslands of North America, Europe and Asia.

Acharya Hemachandra, a major Jain scholar, poet, mathematician and philosopher, produced his Desinamamala, a treatise on the importance of Prakrit words used in Gujarat of his times as against those from Sanskrit.

• Members of the Security Council retain their right to deny the democratic will of the Assembly when it does not suit them. Global governance is not democratic. 
• After the Asian financial crisis, the G20 was formed in 1999 with the aim of discussing policies in order to achieve international financial stability.