vision cse
19:12
Vision IAS Mains 365 Economy 2020 PDF
Click Here to download Vision IAS Mains 365 Economy 2020 PDF
Click Here to Like our Facebook page for latest updates and free ebooks
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Daily Current Affairs, 19th November 2020
vision cse
17:03
1) World Toilet Day: 19 November
•World Toilet Day (WTD) is observed globally on 19 November to inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis. World Toilet Day celebrates toilets and raises awareness of the 4.2 billion people living without access to safely managed sanitation. It is about taking action to tackle the global sanitation crisis and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6: water and sanitation for all by 2030.
•The day was established by the World Toilet Organization in 2001 and officially declared by the UN General Assembly in 2013. This year the theme remarks on the importance of “Sustainable sanitation and climate change”.
2) World Philosophy Day: 19 November
•World Philosophy Day is observed on the third Thursday of November every year. This year World Philosophy Day falls on 19 November 2020. The Day encourages academic exchange and highlights the contribution of philosophical knowledge in addressing global issues. The 2020 edition invites the world to reflect on the meaning of the current pandemic, underlining the need, more than ever before, to resort to philosophical reflection in order to face the multiple crises we are going through.
3) Madhya Pradesh govt announces ‘Gau Cabinet’ for protection of cows
•The Madhya Pradesh government, led by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, has decided to set up a ‘Gau Cabinet’ for the protection, conservation and promotion of cows in the state. The Cabinet will comprise of the departments of animal husbandry, forests, panchayat and rural development, revenue, home and farmers welfare.
•The first meeting of the Cabinet will be held at 12 pm on ‘Gopashtami’ on November 22 at the Cow Sanctuary in Agar-Malwa district named ‘Kamdhenu Gau Abhyaranya ‘. It is India’s first cow sanctuary which was set up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Madhya Pradesh government in September 2017.
4) Japan & Australia signs defence deal to counter China
•Japan and Australia have signed a ‘landmark’ defence pact in a bid to counter China’s growing influence in the South China Sea and over the Pacific island nations. The deal called Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) was signed between Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison.
•RAA will allow Japanese and Australian troops to visit each other’s countries and conduct training and joint operations. The treaty will strengthen its security ties and facilitate cooperation between defence forces.
5) India’s Param Siddhi ranked 63rd in most powerful supercomputers
•According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Indian supercomputer, Param Siddhi has achieved 63rd rank in the list of 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. Param Siddhi is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC. The Top 500 project which ranks the top 500 non-distributed computer systems in the world is published twice a year.
•The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November.
6) BCCI announces MPL Sports as Official Kit Sponsor
•The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced its partnership with Mobile Premier League (MPL) Sports, the athleisure wear and sports merchandise brand from Mobile Premier League, India’s largest esports platform, as the new kit sponsor and official merchandise partner for the Indian Cricket Team.
The HINDU Notes – 19th November 2020
vision cse
16:55
📰 Rural jobs scheme | Getting wages harder than the labour
Multiple bank visits, repeated rejections and biometric errors mar payment system, says study.
•For most rural workers dependent on the Mahatama Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), their labour does not end at the work site. According to a study by LibTech India released on Wednesday, many of them are forced to make multiple trips to the bank, adding travel costs and income losses, and face repeated rejections of payment, biometric errors and wrong information, just to get their hands on their wages.
•For example, take a worker in Jharkhand who puts in a week of hard labour to earn ₹1,026 which the government credits directly into her bank account. The study found that almost 40% of the workers must make multiple trips to the bank branch to withdraw their money.
•It costs an average of ₹53 a trip, and as the branch is usually at the block headquarters a significant distance from her home village, and the time spent at the bank is three to four hours, a worker will also lose the day’s wages while she attempts to withdraw her money. Paying ₹100 for travel for two trips, plus ₹342 for lost wages, plus about ₹25 for food, the worker may spend ₹392, effectively shelling out a third of her weekly wage just to withdraw it.
Pandemic blues
•“Even in regular times, these last mile challenges make it hard for workers to access their own wages in a timely manner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation is exacerbated as transport becomes harder, and there is no question of physical distancing at a rural bank,” says LibTech researcher Sakina Dhorajiwala, who is one of the lead authors of the report.
•The study, based on a 2018-19 survey of almost 2,000 workers in Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, was sponsored by a research grant from Azim Premji University. “In the two years since we did the survey, there has been little change in the number of bank branches per capita in rural areas, so most of these challenges remain. There is only one branch per 20 gram panchayats,” she said.
•The study found that only one in 10 workers get an SMS message that their wages have been credited. A third of workers must visit the bank branch just to find out whether their wages have been credited. Another quarter of respondents said despite being informed that their wages had been credited, they found that the money was not in the accounts.
•At the bank, 42% of respondents from Jharkhand and 38% from Rajasthan had to spend over four hours to access their wages. Only 2% of Andhra Pradesh workers faced such a long delay. Overall, 45% of respondents had to make multiple visits. Average travel costs for each visit amounted to ₹31, even without taking wage losses into account.
•Customer service points and banking correspondents were meant to reduce the gap between workers and banks and bring service delivery to the doorstep. It is true that travel costs are lower at ₹11 per trip, although multiple visits are still needed in 40% of cases. However, 40% of workers reported facing biometric authentication failures at least once in their last five transactions at such agencies, and 7% reported that all five of their last transactions had failed due to biometric authentication issues.
•Almost 13% of workers had rejected payments, which are transactions that are stuck due to technical errors of the payment system, bank account problems or data entry errors. About 77% of them had no idea why their payments had been rejected, which means that rectification is not possible and all future MGNREGS payments to these individuals will also be rejected. In fact, government data show that about ₹4,639 crore worth of payments were rejected in the last five years, and about ₹1,236 crore is still pending to be paid to workers.
•“The pandemic has caused a situation where people are desperate for work. But we have found that people who have faced repeated, unresolved rejections simply lose faith in the system, and drop out of the workforce. Why should they work if they cannot get paid?” said Ms. Dhorajiwala.
📰 Finance panel for public-private partnerships to ramp up health infrastructure
THE HINDU NEWSPAPER IMPORTANT ARTICLES 19.11.2020
vision cse
08:07
Click Here to Like our Facebook page for latest updates and free ebooks
Click Here to Like our Facebook page for latest updates and free ebooks
NATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL
OPINION
Explained: How has the Supreme Court interpreted Article 32 over the years?
vision cse
06:59
Why in the news?
Supreme Court discourages the use of Article 32.
What is Article 32?
· It deals with the ‘Right to Constitutional Remedies’, i.e. the right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of the rights conferred in Part III (Fundamental Rights) of constitution.
Sociology Optional Topic Wise Question Bank 2000-2019 by La Excellence PDF
vision cse
06:47
Sociology Optional Topic Wise Question Bank 2000-2019 by La Excellence PDF
Click Here to download Sociology Optional Topic Wise Question Bank 2000-2019 by La Excellence PDF
Click Here to Like our Facebook page for latest updates and free ebooks
