Daily Current Affairs 13 July 2020 | UPSC Current Affairs 2020

Current Affairs Of Today Are

1) INST scientists formulate nanoparticle to reduce the severity of rheumatoid arthritis

• Scientists from the Institute of Nano Science & Technology (INST), Mohali, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology Government of India, have formulated nanoparticles with chitosan and loaded these nanoparticles with zinc gluconate for reducing the severity of rheumatoid arthritis.
• Element Zinc is vital for maintaining normal bone homeostasis, and its levels are reported to get reduced in rheumatoid arthritis patients and arthritis-induced animals. It is also known that oral supplementation of zinc in the form of zinc gluconate has very low bioavailability in humans.
• Chitosan, the biocompatible, biodegradable natural polysaccharide that is one of the most abundant biopolymers obtained from the exoskeleton of crustaceans have shown absorption promoting characteristics. The INST team has particularly chosen chitosan as it is biodegradable, biocompatible, non-toxic, and mucoadhesive in nature. A previously published report in the journal ‘Magnesium Research’ exhibited that after intraperitoneal administration in rats, zinc oxide in standard form resulted in a slight increase in serum zinc level, whereas that in nano form resulted in significantly high serum zinc levels thus increasing the zinc bioavailability. This motivated the INST team to develop the nanoformulation of zinc gluconate.
• The team prepared Zinc gluconate loaded chitosan nanoparticles using chitosan and sodium tripolyphosphate in double-distilled water, and zinc gluconate was simultaneously added along with the synthesis of chitosan nanoparticles. Nanoparticles were characterized for various physicochemical properties, and then anti-arthritic potential was investigated against collagen-induced arthritis in Wistar rats. They observed that the treatment of rats with both zinc gluconate and zinc gluconate loaded chitosan nanoparticles reduced the severity of arthritis by reducing joint swelling, erythema, and edema but zinc gluconate loaded nanoparticles exhibited superior efficacy. The team assessed various parameters like biochemical analysis, histological observations, and immunohistochemical expression of inflammatory markers and suggested that zinc gluconate-loaded chitosan nanoparticles exerted superior therapeutic effects compared to the free form of zinc gluconate. This they attributed due to the inflammatory potential of zinc gluconate-loaded chitosan nanoparticles.
• Nanobiotechnology provides several effective solutions for the problems that traditional pharmaceutical formulations are often not able to address as effectively, such as the sustained and targeted release of drugs, bioavailability, and efficacy of drugs and nutraceuticals, etc. The nanoformulation of zinc gluconate-loaded chitosan nanoparticles developed at INST Mohali is a creative example of a superior therapeutics for rheumatoid arthritis

Source: PIB

2) JNCASR spinoff launched molecular probes used in COVID-19 test kits

• VNIR Biotechnologies Private Limited, a spinoff by Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India launched indigenous fluorescence probes and Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) mix for Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detection which are molecular probes used in COVID-19 test kits. VNIR Biotechnologies Private Limited is incubated at Bangalore Bio-innovation Centre (BBC) of the Government of Karnataka.
• VNIR has innovated synthesis protocols for a suite of molecular probes, which will be useful for PCR based COVID-19 testing. VNIR will be filing for the protection of its process innovation.
• Molecular diagnostic tests used to be limited to research laboratories or for limited applications. COVID-19 has presented a unique problem that the finest level of the molecular diagnostic test has to be performed almost at a complete population level if needed. Given the scale of tests required for COVID-19, it is very important to become self-reliant with the critical test kit components. Enzyme and oligo needs are partly met by Indian manufacturers, and VNIR envisions to address the third critical component, which is the molecular probes.
• Molecular probe development is a consequence of synthetic organic chemistry, by understanding several aspects of it – the molecule, its target, the availability of chemicals, and optimizing the yields at each step of the synthesis by a judicious choice of protocols. VNIR used its core strengths in molecular probe development to develop the molecular probes using novel synthetic routes.
• In March 2020, with the rest of the world, VNIR also came to a halt briefly. VNIR team used the opportunity of staying at home to contribute to addressing the problem of COVID-19.

Source: PIB

3) India’s Tiger Census sets a New Guinness Record for being the world’s largest camera trap wildlife survey.

• The fourth cycle of the All India Tiger Estimation 2018, results of which were declared to the nation on Global Tiger Day last year by Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi has entered the Guinness World Record for being the world’s largest camera trap wildlife survey.  
• The citation at the Guinness World Record website reads- “The fourth iteration of the survey – conducted in 2018-19 - was the most comprehensive to date, in terms of both resource and data amassed. Camera traps (outdoor photographic devices fitted with motion sensors that start recording when an animal passes by) were placed in 26,838 locations across 141 different sites and surveyed an effective area of 121,337 square kilometers (46,848 square miles). In total, the camera traps captured 34,858,623 photographs of wildlife (76,651 of which were tigers and 51,777 were leopards; the remainder were other native fauna). From these photographs, 2,461 individual tigers (excluding cubs) were identified using stripe-pattern-recognition software.
• The All India Tiger Estimation done quadrennially is steered by the National Tiger Conservation Authority with technical backstopping from the Wildlife Institute of India and implemented by State Forest Departments and partners. The latest results of 2018 had shown that India now has an estimated 2967 tigers out of which 2461 individual tigers have been photo captured, a whopping 83 % of the tiger population, highlighting the comprehensive nature of the survey.
• There is hardly any parallel of such a focused species oriented program like Project Tiger across the world, which started with 9 Tiger Reserves, with 50 tiger reserves currently. India has now firmly established a leadership role in tiger conservation, with its benchmarking practices being looked at as a gold standard across the world.

Source: PIB

4) NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission launches ATL App Development Module for school students nationwide

• In a major step towards revving up the Indian Mobile App Development innovation ecosystem, in line with the clarion call for Aatmanirbhar initiatives of the Hon Prime Minister  Shri  Narendra Modi, NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) launched the ‘ATL App Development Module’ for school children all across the country.
• The ATL App Development modules have been launched in collaboration with Indian homegrown startup Plezmo to hone the skills of school students and transforming them from App users to App makers in the times to come under AIM’s flagship Atal Tinkering Labs initiative.
• The ATL App Development module is a completely free online course. Through 6 project-based learning modules and online mentoring sessions, young innovators can learn to build mobile Apps in various Indian languages and showcase their talent. Additionally, to build capacities and acumen for App Development within school teachers, periodic Teacher Training sessions will be conducted on the AIM App Development course.
• After agricultural and industrial revolutions, global economies are being shaped by a Technology revolution. Plezmo’s mission is to enable everyone to learn 21st Century technology skills like coding, computational thinking, design thinking, and problem-solving. This initiative will empower our young generation in making India a global technology superpower and contribute to the vision of #AatmaNirbharBharat.
• To date, more than 5100 ATLs are established in more than 660 districts across the country by Atal Innovation Mission with more than 2 million students having access to the Tinkering Labs. The vision is to foster creativity and innovation nationwide through its various integrated initiatives including incubators, Startups, community innovation Centers, and Atal New India challenges for product and service innovations enabling socio-economic growth of the country.

Source: PIB

5) Understanding forest fires and their effect on the ecosystem

• During 2003–2017, a total of 5,20,861 active forest fire events were detected in India, and according to the report of the Forest Survey of India, over 54% of the forest cover in India is exposed to occasional fire.
• The study published in Science of the Total Environment used remote sensing-based models to measure primary productivity over an area and also looked at burn indices, which help to demarcate the forest fire burn scars using satellite imagery. 
• The normalized burn ratio is an effective burn index commonly used to identify burnt regions in large fire zones. In normal conditions, healthy vegetation exhibits a very high reflectance in the near­infrared spectral region and considerably low reflectance in the shortwave infrared spectral region. These conditions get dismantled and reversed if a fire occurs
• The spectral differences between healthy vegetation and burnt forest areas can easily be identified and highlighted by remote sensing burn indices. It can be a promising tool for land resource managers and fire officials
• The team notes that the States of northeast India, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand are the most fire­prone in India. 
• Previous studies using forecasting models and in-situ observations in western Himalaya have shown a sharp increase of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and ozone during high fire activity periods. The current paper noted very high to high carbon emissions in the eastern Himalayan states, western desert region, and lower Himalayan region.
• They note that the occurrence of high fire intensity at the low altitude Himalayan hilly regions may be due to the plant species (pine trees) in the area and proximity to villages. Villages make them more susceptible to anthropogenic activities like forest cover clearance, grazing, and so on. 
• Studies have shown that the sharp increase in average and maximum air temperature, decline in precipitation, change in land­use patterns have caused the increased episodes of forest fires in most of the Asian countries.
• The team plans to further work on the prediction of forest fires with the support of advanced machine learning models and AI­based techniques

Source: The Hindu

6) Avg global temperature can rise by 1.5°C in the next 5 years: WMO report

• One of the next five years may be witness to global average temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (defined as the average of global temperatures between 1850-1900), according to a recent World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report. There is a 20 percent possibility of the event. 
• This is significant as the countries under the 2015 Paris Agreement had agreed to try and limit the average global temperature rise to below 2°C by the end of the century.
• If the annual average temperature increase shoots past the 1.5°C-mark more frequently, achieving the Paris targets would be challenging. The last five years have already been the warmest ever recorded, according to WMO.
• The report, The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, also said the global average temperature rise would very likely be above 1°C in each of the next five years. The range of temperatures is likely to be between 0.91 and 1.59°C.
• There is also a 70 percent chance that the 1.5°C rise above pre-industrial levels barrier will happen in one or more months at this time.
• The forecast for global temperatures in the next five years showed a significant upward trend when compared to the temperatures in the recent past, which is considered to be between 1981 and 2010. Between 2020 and 2024, all regions of the world, except the southern oceans, are likely to be warmer.
• The period will also witness an increase in the number of storms in the European region.
• In 2020 alone, the temperatures over large land areas in the northern hemisphere may be 0.8°C more than the recent past. The Arctic region in specific might warm up at more than twice the rate as compared to the global average.
• The region had, till now, warming at twice the rate of the global average. The extreme temperature trend is already visible in the region.
• On June 20, Verkhoyansk in Siberia recorded a temperature of 38°C, possibly the highest ever recorded in the entire Arctic region. The region has experienced heatwaves in the last few months leading to the rapid melting of permafrost. This has, in turn, contributed to the emission of methane, a greenhouse gas.
• The temperature rise in the Arctic has a cascading effect on the weather patterns around the world through the disruption in the Arctic jet stream, especially concerning extreme weather events like heatwaves, cold waves, and extreme rainfall events leading to floods and landslides.
• For instance, in India, the increasingly wavy nature of the Arctic jet stream affects the western disturbances which bring winter rainfall to the north-west, northern and northeastern regions of the country
• Some regions of South America, southern Africa, and Australia will receive less rainfall than the recent past in 2020. This situation might lead to draughts.
• Australia has already experienced extended drought periods in the past two years. Some research papers have suggested that these recent droughts in the country, especially in the southern parts, have been the worst in the last 800 years.
• The situation continues to be dismal as in June 2020, the country received its third-lowest rainfall on record, according to Austalia’s Bureau of Meteorology. 

Source: Down To Earth

7) Do we need a fiscal council?

Fiscal means related to government expenditures and receipts

Council means an advisory, deliberative, or administrative body 

Issues with the present system

• We have a chronic problem of fiscal irresponsibility (Government overstates revenue projections and understate expenditures). 
• There is always a concern with the credibility of the budget numbers. The finance ministry’s overall record in forecasting projections has been consistently poor under successive finance ministers. Generally, they will overestimate GDP and growth figures to disguise that everything is good in the economy.
• The over-ambitious revenue targets combined with the lack of transparency in tax administration lead overzealous taxmen to resort to unwarranted methods to meet unrealistic targets.
• Manipulation of the budget figures by use of ‘off-budget’ entries and deferring payments of FCI (and other bodies) to manage the government’s books.

A fiscal council, at its core, is a permanent agency with a mandate to independently assess the government’s fiscal plans and projections against parameters of macroeconomic sustainability and put out its findings in the public domain. The expectation is that such open scrutiny will keep the government on the straight and narrow path of fiscal virtue and hold it to account for any default. The fiscal council would provide forecasts and advise the government on whether conditions exist for deviation from the mandated fiscal rules. The council will also provide an independent assessment of budget proposals.

The following are various points against and favor of an independent fiscal council.

• Against: The fiscal council will give macroeconomic forecasts which the Finance Ministry is expected to use for the budget, and if the Ministry decides to differ from those estimates, it is required to explain why it has differed.
• As of now, both the NSO and the RBI give forecasts of growth and other macroeconomic variables, as do a host of public, private, and international agencies. Why should there be a presumption that the fiscal council’s forecasts are any more credible or robust than others? Why not leave it to the Finance Ministry to do its homework and defend its numbers rather than forcing it to privilege the estimates of one specific agency? Besides, forcing the Finance Ministry to use someone else’s estimates will dilute its accountability. If the estimates go awry, it will simply shift the blame to the fiscal council.
• Favor: Countries with independent fiscal councils tend to produce relatively more accurate budget forecasts and stick better to fiscal rules, research suggests.
• While most of the fiscal council projections are not biding but can discipline lawmakers through ‘comply or explain’ obligations—which entail governments to at least explain why they diverge from the fiscal council’s views.
• Against: The FRBM Act 2003 enjoins the government to conform to pre-set fiscal targets, and in the event of failure to do so, to explain the reasons for deviation. The government is also required to submit to Parliament a ‘Fiscal Policy Strategy Statement’ (FPSS) to demonstrate the credibility of its fiscal stance for the coming year. Yet, seldom have we heard an in-depth discussion in Parliament on the government’s fiscal stance; in fact, the submission of the FPSS often passes off without even much notice. If the problem clearly is a lack of demand for accountability, how will another instrumentality such as a fiscal council for the supply of accountability be a solution? 
• Favor: But it can be argued that a fiscal council will in fact be a solution because it will give an independent and expert assessment of the government’s fiscal stance, and thereby aid an informed debate in Parliament.
• Against: In its role as a watchdog, it will prevent the government from gaming the fiscal rules through creative accounting (manipulation). But there is already an institutional mechanism by way of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audit to check that. If that mechanism has lost its teeth, then fix that rather than creating another costly bureaucratic structure. 
• Favor: But it is also true that CAG audits the accounts once the government has done with the expenditures and it has no role in forecasting and verifying the sustainability of the budget numbers.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), about 50 countries around the world have established fiscal councils with varying degrees of success.

Source: Mint

8) Tetrastemma Freyae

• Recently, researchers have identified a new species of marine invertebrate i.e. 'Tetrastemma Freyae', found along the coast of Tamil Nadu.
• It feeds on dead and decaying material and helps to recycle nutrients in coastal and deep water sediments.
• It is associated with sediments and is predatory as it has a role in maintaining the food chain.
• It uses its proboscis, similar to a butterfly which does to collect nectar.
• It has neurotoxins in its proboscis which could lead to developing drugs.

Source: The Hindu

9) Ophiocordyceps Nutans

• Recently, researchers have found Ophiocordyceps nutans (fungi) for the first time in central India, at the Kanger Valley National Park in Bastar, Chhattisgarh.
• Earlier, these have been reported in India only from the Western Ghats.
• Ophiocordyceps nutans host on a specific insect, Halyomorpha halys.
• Halyomorpha halys is commonly known as the stink bug and is a pest to forest trees and agricultural crops.
• The stink bug is known to damage the flower and fruits of soybean, green beans, apple, pear, etc.
• Studies have shown that these fungi can be used as a biological pest control agent against the stink bugs.
• Exploring these fungi as a pesticide will help reduce the harmful effect of chemicals in fields.
• In the Western Ghats, the local people use these fungi as an immune stimulator.
• Scientists claim that it contains a component called ‘cordycepin’ which has anti-cancer properties.

Kanger Valley National Park

• Kanger Valley got the status of a national park in 1982.
• It derives its name from the Kanger River, one of the very few perennial rivers of Bastar.
• The park is a typical mixed humid deciduous type of forest, in which the Sal, Saugaun, teak, and bamboo trees are available in abundance.
• The most popular species in this area is the state bird of Chattisgarh, Bastar Hill Myna which is capable of emulating the human voices.
• The park is known for the presence of underground limestone caves.

Source: The Hindu

10) Bon Bibi

• Bon Bibi is a deity of the Sunder ban forest, west Bengal.
• The followers of Bon Bibi are fishermen, crab-collectors, and honey-gatherers who live in the mangroves with wild animals such as tigers and crocodiles to earn a livelihood.
• They believe that only Bon Bibi protects them when they enter the forest and survive in tiger dominated areas.
• People express their belief in Bon Bibi through Bon Bibir Palagaan, it is a centuries-old folk theatre and dramatic storytelling form that is
• enacted throughout the island.
• Traditionally, the performances are held near Bon Bibi temples or villages bordering the forests.

Sundarbans

• The Sundarbans is a mangrove area in the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal.
• It spans from the Hooghly River in India's state of West Bengal to the Baleswar River in Bangladesh.
• The active delta region is among the largest in the world, measuring about 40,000 sq km.
• India's Sundarban was declared as the UNESCO'S World Heritage site in 1987.
• Sunderban Wetland has been accorded the status of ‘Wetland of International Importance’ under the Ramsar Convention in 2019.
• Sunderbans Biosphere Reserve (National Park) is an Important Bird Area under Birdlife International.
• The area is known for many rare and globally threatened wildlife species such as the estuarine crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), royal Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris), Water monitor lizard (Varanus Salvator), Gangetic dolphin (Platanista gangetica), and olive ridley turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea).
• Sajnekhali Bird Sanctuary is a part of Sundarban and is famous for the sight of rare birds.

Source: Indian Express