Wednesday, July 08, 2020

THE HINDU NEWSPAPER IMPORTANT ARTICLES 08.07.2020

the hindu articles

VisionIAS 08:25

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FRONT PAGE

Army pulls back 1.5 km from clash site

NATIONAL

Big flap: golden birdwing is India’s largest butterfly

‘Top priority’ to complete strategic roads

U.S. stance on CAATSA unchanged

‘Command posts ruling will be followed soon’

INTERNATIONAL

China censors Internet in Hong Kong

Mining giant told to pay $2 bn for Arctic spill

OPINION

Days of disengagement

Police terror and the theatre of law

More sabre-rattling, more isolation

In stand-off, keeping an eye on the nuclear ball

Bollywood’s many maladies

Ethiopia’s bloody mayhem

BUSINESS

‘Centre won’t extend deadline for levy on foreign e-com firms’

Daily Current Affairs, 07th July 2020

Daily Current Affairs

VisionIAS 19:44

1) World Chocolate Day celebrated on 7th July

•World Chocolate Day or International Chocolate Day is observed on 7th July every year. The day celebrates the existence of chocolate in our lives. It is marked by eating chocolates and sharing with dear ones.

2) India’s 1st NPNT compliant Drone flight successfully completed

•India’s First No-Permission No-Takeoff (NPNT) compliant drone flight on the A200 Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) has been completed successfully by Quidich Innovation Labs and Asteria Aerospace. This NPNT drone flight is under the Ministry of Civil Aviation MoCA & DGCA comprehensive policy on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), which came into effect on 1st Dec 2018.

•Quidich, in collaboration with the Drone Federation of India (DFI), has extended its services to Police Departments across multiple states, providing drones for crowd monitoring and surveillance operations during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.

3) World Bank approves $400 mn for rejuvenation of river Ganga

•The World Bank has signed a loan agreement of $400 million with Government of India to enhance support for the Namami Gange programme. The loan agreement aims to make the Ganga a clean and healthy river. The loan amount of $400 million comprises a loan of $381 million and a proposed Guarantee of up to $19 million. The new project will aim to stem the pollution levels in the iconic river and work towards strengthening the management of the river basin which is home to more than 500 million people.

•The World Bank has been supporting the efforts of Government of India since 2011 via the currently active National Ganga River Basin Project. This project has helped in establishing the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) as the nodal agency to manage the river.

4) Karnataka government launches “Nekara Samman Yojane”

•Karnataka government has launched a relief scheme “Nekara Samman Yojane” for weavers. The state government has allocated a sum of Rs 10.96 crore under the programme. As per the state government, the Silk, cotton, wool and other handloom weavers have been made eligible under the scheme.

•In the first phase of the “Nekara Samman Yojane”, a financial aid of Rs 2,000 will be transferred to 19,744 handloom weavers through Direct Benefit Transfer. The state Government also announced that the workers employed in the powerloom sector would also get a one-time payment of Rs 2,000 each.

5) HP becomes first state where everyone possess LPG connection

•Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur has announced that the Himachal Pradesh has become the first state in India where 100% households have LPG gas connections. The feat was achieved by the state with the help of ‘Himachal Grihini Suvidha Yojana’ with the help of which the state government covered the left out families in the state, who were not covered under the Central government’s Pradhan Mantri Ujjawala Yojna.

•According to the Himachal Pradesh government, about 1.36 lakh families of the state have been benefitted under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjawala Yojna while the remaining 2,76,243 families in the state were provided free gas connections under the Himachal Grihini Suvidha Yojana.

6) Israel successfully launches “Ofek 16” spy satellite into space

•Israel Defence Ministry has announced the successful launch of a new “Ofek 16” spy satellite into orbit by using a locally-developed Shavit rocket from a launch pad at Palmachim airbase in central Israel. This was the first launch of an Israeli spy satellite into space since the Ofek-11 which entered orbit in September 2016.

7) Injeti Srinivas appointed as chairman of IFSCA

•A 1983-batch IAS officer, Injeti Srinivas has been appointed as 1st chairman of the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) for a period of three years. The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved his appointment.

•Besides the Chairman, IFSCA has a member each nominated from RBI, IRDAI, SEBI and PFRDA. There are also two members from the Central Government and full-time or part-time members in the Authority.

8) Railways, BHEL tie up for solar power generation

•Indian Railway in collaboration with Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) has set up a 1.7 Megawatt solar power plant at Bina, Madhya Pradesh. The project involves the adoption of innovative technology for converting Direct Current to single-phase Alternating Current for feeding directly to Railway’s overhead traction system.

•The solar power plant has been established near the Bina Traction Sub Station (TSS). It can produce approximately 25 lakh units of energy annually and will save around ₹1.37 crore for Railways every year. The project was undertaken by BHEL under its Corporate social responsibility (CSR) scheme.

9) Valtteri Bottas wins F1 Austrian Grand Prix

•Mercedes’s, Valtteri Bottas (Finland) has won the Austrian Grand Prix 2020 at Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria. This was the first race of 2020 Formula One season. Charles Leclerc finished second for Ferrari while McLaren’s Lando Norris came third.

The HINDU Notes – 07th July 2020

the hindu notes

VisionIAS 11:23

📰 There’s no one to fill Mahalanobis’s shoes

A top statistician is needed to frame data-based policies for welfare and development

•In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen argued that poor distribution of food, wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding were important reasons for the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, while Madhusree Mukerjee, in her 2010 book, Churchill’s Secret War , wrote of the role of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his wartime Cabinet’s decisions and “denial policy” in exacerbating the famine.

Survey of the Bengal famine

•Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, India’s ‘Plan Man’ and the architect of the country’s statistical system, conducted a large-scale sample survey of Bengal’s famine-ravaged villages between July 1944 and February 1945 for causal analysis, and to assess the extent of the disaster and an estimate of the number of people affected. The planning, preparations, challenges and findings of the survey are documented in an article in Sankhyā , and in another article in The Asiatic Review , both published in 1946, among others. This survey provided very useful findings. It showed that one-fourth of the number of families (1.5 million people) who had owned rice land before the famine had either sold in full or in part their rice land or had mortgaged it. It also showed that the economic position of nearly four million people deteriorated during the famine. Economic differences became further accentuated during the famine. However, roughly 85% of the families maintained their status quo, showing that a large degree of economic inertia had persisted even under famine conditions.

•Bengal’s famine survey reminds us that we need estimates of the millions who will lose jobs or livelihoods and of the hundreds of millions whose economic conditions will deteriorate in today’s COVID-19-hit India. The extent of feasibility, success and problem of online access, for example, also needs to be properly estimated in this new dawn.

•Mahalanobis is perhaps more relevant today when the accuracy of different sorts of data — from economic data to COVID-19 data — is under the scanner. Starting from the first area sample in the whole world for jute forecast in 1934, Mahalanobis built up a strong and trustworthy statistical heritage in India through his tireless efforts over the years, supplemented by his efficiency, wisdom, leadership, innovative ideas and brilliance. Mahalanobis envisaged large-scale sample surveys as statistical engineering rather than pure theory of sampling. He was instrumental in establishing the National Sample Survey (NSS) in 1950 and the Central Statistical Organization in 1951.

Importance of accurate data

•Mahalanobis was very careful about data accuracy in his surveys. In Kautilya’s Arthashastra , there is mention of the need for cross-checking by an independent set of agents for data collection : “Spies under disguise of householders (Grihapatika, cultivators), who shall be deputed by the Collector-General for espionage, shall ascertain the validity of accounts (of Gopas, the village officers and Sthanikas, the district officers) regarding the fields, right of ownership and remission of taxes with regard to houses, and the caste and profession regarding families...” (Chapter XXXV). This, according to Mahalanobis, was the “striking feature in the Arthashastra ”. This might have prompted him to have an independent supervisory staff during the conduct of field operations by the NSS for collection of reliable data.

•Mahalanobis was “a physicist by training, a statistician by instinct and an economist by conviction”. His initial training in Physics might have made him conscious about errors in measurement and observation. Students even called him the Professor of Counting and Measurement, using the initials of his name. The desire to have built-in cross-checks and to get an estimate of errors in sampling led him to introduce the Inter-Penetrating Network of Subsamples, which is now considered as the curtain-raiser for re-sampling procedures like Bootstrap, a revolutionary concept of statistics indeed.

•However, even Mahalanobis could have faced hardship had he wished to conduct surveys now. First, even in pre-COVID-19 India, it’s widely reported that surveyors were facing tremendous resistance from people due to some sociopolitical reasons. None other than Pronab Sen, Chairman of the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics, and former Chief Statistician, expressed his concern that the survey system is already in “deep trouble”, and conducting household surveys with the Census as the frame would be “very tough” going ahead. The problem will intensify due to COVID-19. It was not easy to conduct surveys in famine-hit Bengal either. Through August 1944, 80 field workers were beset by malaria; half of them later dropped out of the project. However, conducting a survey in the age of contagion is understandably much harder.

Use of technology

•What would Mahalanobis have done in this situation? Would he have devised some instrument, like crop-cutting concentric circles, in addition to using masks and sanitisers and sending investigators for a socioeconomic survey? Or would he have used different sorts of secondary data instead? It’s difficult to guess. Who knows, he might have efficiently churned ‘big data’ for this — he could certainly have done a smarter job than most of the present-day big data analysts. Note that Mahalanobis never shied away from technology, whether in bringing statistical technology through volumes of Biometrika in his voyage from England, or even bringing computers to India. The Mahalanobis-led Indian Statistical Institute procured India’s first computer in 1956 and the second in 1959.

•At the end of his 1946 article in The Asiatic Review , Mahalanobis wrote: “Statistics are a minor detail, but they do help.” This is an eternal truth. What Mahalanobis didn’t spell out is that one needs a top statistician for listening to the heartbeats of data and for framing data-based policy decisions for human welfare and national development. And unfortunately, there’s no one to fill Mahalanobis’s shoes, even about half a century after his demise.

📰 Rolling back the induced livelihood shock

The HINDU Notes – 06th July 2020

the hindu notes

VisionIAS 11:04

📰 China doubles down on boundary claims

•“Bhutan has sent a strong message to China,” said one source, adding that Bhutan’s response was also given through the GEF council meeting where China had raised the issue. At the time, Bhutan had assumed that since the Chinese representative was not a Foreign Ministry official, but a Deputy Director General (DDG) in the Chinese Financial and Monetary Cooperation Division, that the decision to stop the grant, which failed, was not thought through.

•According to the GEF Council Chairman’s summary released on June 16, of the virtual meeting held on June 2-3, Aparna Subramani, the World Bank official representing Bhutan, as well as India, Bangladesh, Maldives and Sri Lanka, had said that “Bhutan totally rejects the claim made by the Council Member of China. Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary is an integral and sovereign territory of Bhutan and at no point during the boundary discussions between Bhutan and China has it featured as a disputed area”.

•“Bhutan hoped its response would close the matter,” the source added.

•According to Bhutanese experts, the claim on Sakteng will open new fronts of negotiation when the next round of boundary talks are held.

•“Such claims undermine the boundary talks and wild claims on either side by officials will only exacerbate issues as Bhutan too can lay claims far north,” said Tenzing Lamsang, Editor of T he Bhutanese newspaper in Thimphu, in a series of tweets last week. “Ultimately Bhutan and China need to resolve its boundary disputes or such false claims will come up as a pressure tactic,” he added.

📰 How to counter China