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An unusually warm winter this year has impacted extreme winter sports like ice hockey and the 105-km Chadar trek in the cold desert mountains of Ladakh, considered the country’s coldest place, where the minimum temperature can drop up to -40 degrees Celsius.
Ice hockey rinks in Ladakh’s Kargil town witnessed rare scenes over the last weekend when the organisers switched on fans at night to bring down the temperature.
The formation of the ice surface was not up to the mark this year. It could have proved dangerous to those practising and playing ice hockey matches. Electric fans helped in the freezing process and made the rink playable and safe,” an ice hockey player from Kargil said. However, ice hockey has not been majorly impacted in Leh.
Officials of the Department of Youth Services and Sports said the extra measure in Kargil was put in place for “the safety of players”. Ice hockey requires a temperature of around -4 degrees Celsius for a favourable playing environment.
Editorial
The problem with India’s science management (Page no. 6)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Sustained economic progress which can satisfy national ambition is invariably fuelled by scientific advances translated into deployable technologies.
This has been the inevitable global experience since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Alive to this reality, the government is overhauling India’s science establishment, which includes setting up the new National Research Foundation (NRF) and restructuring the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
In this scenario, a frank assessment of the current administrative ability to simultaneously optimise Indian science’s efficiency and resilience is necessary.
India’s low overall expenditure on research and development (around 0.7% of GDP, compared to 3.5% for the United States and 2.4% for China) is but one aspect constraining its scientific outcomes. Considering such low expenditure, it is pivotal to allocate money wisely and focus on high-impact projects.
Unfortunately, the scientific administration has failed to do justice to the task at hand. Even the vaunted space programme is witnessing narrowing leads.
In 2022, the Indian Space Research Organisation stood a distant eighth on launch numbers, with foreign startups racing ahead on key technologies such as reusable rockets.
Likewise, the lead in nuclear energy has been frittered away, being latecomers to small modular reactors; thorium ambitions remain unrealised. On critical science and technology themes such as genomics, robotics, and artificial intelligence, the situation is even more alarming. The direction and organisation of science is inconsistent, even unfit, for the vital role which science must play going ahead.
News
NASA spacecraft pings Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon (Page no. 8)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
A NASA spacecraft has successfully pinged India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon. According to NASA, a laser beam was transmitted and reflected between its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Vikram lander for the first time on the lunar surface.
The U.S. space agency said this successful experiment opens the door to a new style of precisely locating targets on the moon’s surface.
NASA’s LRO pointed its laser altimeter instrument toward Vikram. The lander was 62 miles, or 100 km, away from LRO, when LRO transmitted laser pulses toward it.
After the orbiter registered light that had bounced back from a tiny NASA retroreflector aboard Vikram, NASA scientists knew their technique had finally worked.
NASA said sending laser pulses toward an object and measuring how long it takes the light to bounce back is a commonly used way to track the locations of Earth-orbiting satellites from the ground
Rahul Gandhi visits over 350-year-old Vaishnavite monastery in Assam’s Majuli (Page no. 9)
(GS Paper 1, Culture)
On the sixth day of his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday sought blessings at the Sri Sri Auniati Satra, a more than 350-year-old Vaishnavite monastery in Assam’s Majuli district.
Dressed in a white dhoti with a traditional Assamese gamosa (scarf) around the neck, Mr. Gandhi interacted with the head of the monastery, Satradikar Pitambar Dev Goswami, and invited him to Delhi.
The Satradhikar shared a story about a meeting between former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the then-Satradhikar of Auniati Satra, the late Hem Chandra Goswami.
Mr. Gandhi briefly watched a Bhaona, a traditional art form, took photos of artists wearing famed Majuli masks, and tried out a mask of Lord Hanuman, complete with a gada (mace) in hand.
Business
‘Divestment tally for FY24 likely about ₹15,000 crore’ (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The government’s disinvestment receipts tally this year could end up being about ₹15,000 crore, a far cry from the ₹51,000 target set in the 2023-24 Budget, CareEdge Ratings said.
Moreover, most corporate leaders expect the divestment target for 2024-25 to be scaled down to ₹40,000 crore, as per a survey of 120 industry captains on expectations from the upcoming Interim Budget conducted by the firm.
The rating agency also revised its fiscal deficit projection for this year to 6% of GDP, terming it a “slight slippage” from the 5.9% target set in the Budget, and expected the upcoming Interim Budget for 2024-25 to set a 5.3% target.
However, almost half of industry respondents believed it could range between 5.4% and 5.9% of GDP in 2024-25.
The Centre has so far netted ₹10,051.7 crore from shares sales in public sector enterprises or less than 20% of the year’s target, as per data from the Department for Investment and Public Asset Management in the Finance Ministry
With the upcoming election and the imminent implementation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) just months away, there appears to be limited scope for advancement in big-ticket divestment initiatives,” the firm said in a report, noting that the sale of IDBI Bank planned for this year appears uncertain.
Airbus and CSIR-IIP to collaborate on producing sustainable aviation fuel (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Airbus and the CSIR-Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP) have signed an MoU to develop new technologies and to test and qualify indigenous sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
The collaboration will address Indian aerospace industry’s decarbonisation ambitions by supporting SAF production and commercialisation, using a new HEFA technology using locally sourced feedstocks. HEFA refines vegetable oils, waste oils, or fats into SAF through a process that uses hydrogenation.
The entities will work on technical assessment, approvals, market access and sustainability accreditation for the production of SAF.
SAF, including one developed by CSIR-IIP, will act as the measure with the biggest impact on the industry’s decarbonisation effort,” said IIP Director Harender Singh Bisht. Ramping up production and addressing cost differential between SAF and conventional jet fuel were challenges in increasing SAF uptake.