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Tuesday, April 13, 2021

The HINDU Notes – 13th April 2021

15:12

 


📰 Military exercise in Bangladesh ends

General Naravane attends closing ceremony

•Multinational military exercise Shantir Ogrosena, under way in Bangladesh for the last 10 days, concluded on Monday. Army Chief Gen. Manoj Naravane, who is on a visit to the neighbouring country, witnessed the validation phase of the exercise.

•“The exercise culminated with a validation phase and closing ceremony organised on the theme of robust peace keeping operations jointly undertaken by contingents of Indian Army, Royal Bhutanese Army, Sri Lankan Army and Bangladesh Army, preceded by an Army Chiefs Conclave,” an Army statement said.

•Gen. Naravane also interacted with the senior officers of the participating nations and Military Observers from other countries, the statement said. On Sunday, he had also delivered a keynote address on “Changing Nature of Global Conflicts: Role of UN Peacekeepers.”

•The 10-day long exercise, which started on April 4 at Bangabandhu Senanibas (BBS), has participation by four countries along with observers from the U.S., the U.K., Russia, Turkey, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Singapore. The aim of the exercise is to strengthen defence ties and enhance interoperability amongst neighbourhood countries to ensure effective peace keeping operations, the Army said.

📰 Northeast citizens faced racial discrimination amid COVID-19 outbreak, says govt. study
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Vision IAS PT 365 Economy in Hindi Prelims 2021 PDF

08:38

Vision IAS PT 365 Economy in Hindi Prelims 2021 PDF

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Vision IAS Weekly Focus Transitioning to a Sustainable Energy Ecosystem PDF

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Vision IAS Weekly Focus Transitioning to a Sustainable Energy Ecosystem PDF

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THE HINDU NEWSPAPER IMPORTANT ARTICLES 13.04.2021

08:08
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Daily Current Affairs, 12th April 2021

06:04

 


1)  International Day of Human Space Flight observed globally on 12 April

•The International Day of Human Space Flight is observed globally on April 12 every year. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution on April 7, 2011, had declared April 12 to be celebrated as International Day of Human Space Flight.


2)  National Safe Motherhood Day: 11 April

•National Safe Motherhood Day is observed on April 11 every year. National Safe Motherhood Day is an initiative of the White Ribbon Alliance India (WRAI), to enforce that women must have availability and adequate access to care during pregnancy childbirth and postnatal services. The day also marks the birth anniversary of Kasturba Gandhi, the wife of the father of Nation Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi.


3)  India-Netherlands Virtual Summit

•Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mr Mark Rutte, held a Virtual Summit. During the India- Netherlands virtual Summit, the two leaders reviewed the existing bilateral engagements and also exchanged views on further expanding and diversifying the relationship in trade and economy, water management, agriculture sector, smart cities, science & technology, healthcare and space.


4)  Ramesh Pokhriyal launches implementation plan ‘SARTHAQ’

•Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal chaired a high-level meeting on the implementation of the National Education Policy 2020 and released an implementation plan for school education called ‘Students’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement through Quality Education (SARTHAQ)’.


5)  Indian Business Tycoon Yusuffali MA Gets Top Civilian Award In UAE

•Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan has honoured Indian-origin businessman Yusuffali MA and 11 other individuals with Abu Dhabi’s top civilian award for their noble and charitable contributions to the community. The prestigious award was given to Mr Yusuffali, who was born in Kerala, for his outstanding contribution to Abu Dhabi’s business, industry and support to various philanthropic initiatives.


•Mr Yusuffali, the Chairman and Managing Director of Abu Dhabi-based LuLu Group which operates hypermarkets and retail companies in many countries, was honoured on Friday by the Crown Prince.


6)  Singapore becomes first country to ratify mega free trade agreement ‘RCEP’

•Singapore ratified the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, the world’s largest free trade agreement, led by China. In doing so, Singapore became the first among 15 participating countries to ratify RCEP. The RCEP must first be ratified by at least six ASEAN and three non-ASEAN member states to come into effect. Once implemented, RCEP would be the world’s largest free trade agreement, covering around one-third of the world’s population and about 30% of the world’s economy.


7)  Kiren Rijiju inaugurates Khelo India State Centre of Excellence in Srinagar

•Union Minister for Sports & Youth Affairs, Kiren Rijiju inaugurated the Khelo India State Centre of Excellence (KISCE) for Rowing discipline at the Jammu & Kashmir Sports Council Water Sports Academy at the Nehru Park in the world-famous Dal Lake in Srinagar. This is one of the two KISCEs from Jammu & Kashmir. The other being the Maulana Azad Stadium for Fencing discipline in Jammu.


•There are currently 24 KISCEs across 23 States and Union Territories and each of them focuses on Olympics sports discipline. This is an ongoing endeavour to scale up existing centres from the States and Union Territories to the world standard level keeping in mind the big picture of getting India to excel at the Olympics.


8)  United Arab Emirates names its first female astronaut

•The United Arab Emirates named the next two astronauts in its space programme on 10th April, including the country’s first female astronaut. Noura al-Matroushi is the UAE’s first female astronaut. The announcement gave no biographical information about her or her male counterpart, Mohammed al-Mulla.


•Al-Matroushi works as an engineer at the Abu Dhabi-based National Petroleum Construction Co. Al-Mulla serves as a pilot with Dubai police and heads their training division. The two are set to head to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for training. In 2019, Hazzaa Al-Mansoori became the UAE’s first astronaut. He spent a week on the International Space Station.
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The HINDU Notes – 12th April 2021

05:55

 


📰 Visually impaired struggle with NCERT e-textbooks

Over 60% of NCERT chapters and over 95% of SCERT books are either totally or partially inaccessible.

•For Class VII student Tejasvi Raj, doing his daily homework comes with the double challenge of being a visually impaired student in the COVID-19 era of virtual schooling. His screen reading software can’t access the PowerPoint presentation that his teachers had prepared for online school. E-textbooks provided on the government’s virtual platform DIKSHA, which it has promoted as a transformative resource for digital education, are not fully accessible either.

•“The PowerPoints [presentations] for Zoom classes are sent to students in PDF format, so they are not readable for him. The NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) e-textbooks are only partly readable. Any time they have images or diagrams, it is blank for him. Hindi and Sanskrit books are not readable at all,” said his mother Manorama Yadav, adding that COVID-19 had made everything more difficult for the student of Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram. “Teachers are already coping with so many changes in online school. Even for his assignments and exam papers, I have to keep reminding them to send it in Word format. I worry that if classes don’t restart, he will keep falling behind,” she added.

•According to a recent study by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, more than half of the NCERT textbooks available on the government’s virtual education platform DIKSHA are not accessible for visually impaired students. In fact, the DIKSHA platform itself is difficult to navigate for visually impaired students, said the report.

•“Take for example, the drop down menu for language selection. Rather than clearly stating different language options available, the screen reader announces ‘clickable, clickable, clickable’. This is due to different scripts used for the different languages, which are not readable by a screen reading software,” said the report, adding that the filter for selecting the correct class, and the links for downloading materials were also not accessible.

•Analysis of 65 chapters from e-textbooks published by NCERT and the Tamil Nadu and Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) also found that many pages are published in formats which are not navigable for the screen reader, while visual elements such as images, graphs and watermarks also impede comprehension. More than 60% of the NCERT chapters were either totally or partially inaccessible, the report said, while it was over 95% for the SCERT books. More than half of the 907 learning activities in the NCERT texts were also inaccessible for a visually impaired student, with the worst being 80% for Mathematics.

•For Sanya Gandhi, an 18-year student of Political Science at Delhi’s Hindu College, the challenges are familiar. “I’m a person with a lot of logical and reasoning ability, and I would have liked to do Mathematics. But I could not access so much of my Maths textbooks in school, especially geometry or trigonometry. So I had to compromise on my ambitions,” she said, pointing out that in the U.S. and the U.K., formats and software which can make diagrams and symbols accessible to visually impaired students are in wider use. “In India, in recent years, we have placed a lot of focus on physical infrastructure that aids accessibility for students with disabilities. But we still have a digital divide,” she added.

•Anirban Mukherjee, a visually impaired English teacher in a small town 40 km away from Kolkata, adds that the difficulties are worse for students in vernacular languages. The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education texts are not accessible on the DIKSHA platform, and most books are uploaded in scanned PDF formats that are impossible for a screen reader to access, he says, adding that at least English texts are available in Braille. Even as a teacher, he finds it impossible to correct assignments which his students send in picture formats.

•“At least the better mainstream schools moved to online schooling. But many less privileged visually impaired students study in special schools with hostels which shut down due to COVID-19. Few of them have smartphones. So their education has been completely derailed,” he said.

•Recording someone reading out textbooks, reformatting e-textbooks, and providing direct teacher contact are urgent steps that need to be initiated. “Very minor tweaks are required. But accessibility is simply not a priority,” he added.

📰 Wrong shots: On West Bengal poll violence

ECI must take measures to prevent violence, and keep the election process fair

•Five people were killed on Saturday during the fourth phase of polls in West Bengal, where the first three phases were largely eventless. While one person was allegedly killed by political rivals, four others were killed when security personnel fired more than 15 rounds in a span of two hours at Cooch Behar’s Sitalkuchi Assembly constituency. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has concluded that the police action was necessary, and taken in “self defence,” but the political storm kicked up by the episode continues to rage. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has alleged a conspiracy by the BJP to scare her supporters and called for the resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah. Mr. Shah, in turn, has said the Chief Minister’s call to gherao personnel of the Central security forces led to the flare-up. The Trinamool Congress has alleged that Central forces are restricting it and helping the BJP in the campaign. It is unclear whether the force used to control the mob was proportionate and the deaths were avoidable. Elsewhere in the State, a group of people tried to stop the vehicle of a BJP MP. All these are bad omens, against the backdrop of an intensely competitive political battle between Ms. Banerjee’s Trinamool and the BJP.

•The ECI’s role in Bengal has been called into question by Opposition parties for various reasons. Its explanation for spreading the polls over eight phases over a month has not mitigated the concern that it gave undue advantage to the BJP. Its practice of redeploying civil and police officials is a time-tested measure to keep the election process fair. However, if redeployment leads to administrative chaos and partisanship, it is a matter of concern. While the ECI has been proactive in acting on charges of religious appeals made by Trinamool leaders including Ms. Banerjee, such alacrity has been missing in its dealings with the BJP. BJP leaders have made brazen communal appeals and gone scot-free. ECI advertisements that invoked the sacrifices of security personnel amounted to the Commission overstepping its strictly apolitical role. The personal role of the Prime Minister in a State election has made the task of the ECI much more difficult, and it has not risen up to the challenge. Ms. Banerjee may have gone over the top in trolling the ECI to “rename MCC as Modi Code of Conduct”. But it is not the first time that a Chief Minister has questioned the ECI’s impartiality. Narendra Modi himself had questioned the fairness of the ECI when he was Gujarat Chief Minister. Its reputation built over decades kept public trust intact, through all this. That trust is now being eroded, through acts of commission and omission. There are four more phases of polling in Bengal and the ECI must take measures to prevent violence, and keep the process fair and enabling for voters.

📰 Enforcing claims: On U.S. challenging India’s maritime rights
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Monday, April 12, 2021

NEXT IAS Interview Guide Book CSE 2020 PDF

08:41

NEXT IAS Interview Guide Book CSE 2020 PDF

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Vision IAS Monthly Current Affairs February 2021 [Hindi Medium] PDF

08:31

Vision IAS Monthly Current Affairs February 2021 [Hindi Medium] PDF

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IAS Gazette Prelims Express 2021 Geography PDF

08:26
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THE HINDU NEWSPAPER IMPORTANT ARTICLES 12.04.2021

08:16
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