16 April 2024, The Hindu
Indian officials can ‘soon’ meet detained crew: Iran
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GS 2: International Relations- Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting the Indian interests
- Iran said that it would “soon” allow Indian officials to meet with the 17 Indian crew members detained after its forces seized an Israel-linked ship MSC Aries after the issue was raised by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, who spoke to foreign ministers of both Iran and Israel late on Sunday night.
- “We have been telling both of them [Israel and Iran] that please do not allow [the situation] to escalate,” Mr. Jaishankar told media persons during a visit to Bengaluru on Monday.
India to get above-normal monsoon rainfall: IMD
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Prelims syllabus: General issues on Environmental Ecology, Biodiversity and Climate Change
- India is likely to receive above normal rainfall during the upcoming June-September southwest monsoon season, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) predicted in its first long-range seasonal forecast issued on April 15, 2024.
- This is the first time, after a gap of eight years, that the IMD has forecast “above normal” rains in the country.
- This above normal seasonal rainfall was “very likely” over most parts of the country, the IMD said, except in some areas over northwest, east and northeast India, where below normal rainfall was “very likely”.
DDA flouts NGT guidelines, continues construction on crowded Yamuna floodplain
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GS 3: Environment- Conservation
- Despite last year marking the worst floods in Delhi’s history, The Hindu has found that the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) is persisting with its plans of constructing permanent structures on the banks of the Yamuna.
- The project, dubbed as “restoration” of the river’s floodplain, violates the guidelines issuedby a committee appointed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), which the States were ordered to “strictly” follow.
Guarantee is precarity, welfare is self-care
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GS 2: Welfare schemes for vulnerable sections of the population by the Centre and the States and the performance of these schemes
- The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) years are often, in mainstream media, lauded as years with a generous welfare agenda. But do budgetary allocations in the Union Budget corroborate this assessment?
- We try to answer this by looking at the trend in welfare spending over the past 20 years. We compare expenditure on what we label “NDA schemes” with United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or “UPA schemes”.
India’s Arctic imperative
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GS 3: Achievements of Indians in science & technology.Indigenisation of technology and developing new technology
- In December 2023, when four Indian climate scientists arrived in Oslo to begin acclimatisation for India’s maiden winter expedition at the Arctic, they had little idea of what lay ahead.
- Himadri, India’s research station in the International Arctic Research Base at Svalbard in Norway, had until then hosted missions only in the summer.
- A winter expedition entails living in the intense cold (as low as -15 degrees Celsius) after a period of rigorous acclimatisation.
- More concerning for Indian researchers was the daunting prospect of polar nights, a period extending weeks when there is no sun, and daily human activity is governed by the clock.
- In March 2024, India’s first winter experience at the Arctic came to a successful end.
- While the scientists will doubtless be proud of their feat, India’s long reluctance to embark on an all-year Arctic mission calls for introspection.
- For over a decade, India’s National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research saw no reason for a winter mission to the Arctic.
- What changed Indian policy, ostensibly, was scientific data showing that the Arctic was warming faster than previously thought.
- When facts tying catastrophic climatic occurrences in India to the melting of Arctic Sea ice emerged, decision-makers felt compelled to act.
Siachen: 40 years of Op Meghdoot
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GS 3: Security challenges and their management in border areas
- “The land is so barren and the passes so high that only the best of friends and fiercest of enemies come by” — reads a Ladakhi saying at Kumar post on the Siachen Glacier located at an altitude of 15,632 feet.
- The saying captures the conflict on the icy glacier between India and Pakistan.
- April 13, 2024 marks four decades since the Indian Army pre-empted Pakistan and occupied the glacier on the Saltoro ridge, overlooking the Nubra valley in the Karakoram ranges.
- Extreme weather is the biggest enemy on the glacier. Around 1,150 soldiers have lost their lives, majority of them to the vagaries of extreme weather.
- Siachen, in Balti language means “land of roses’ — ‘Sia’ is a kind of rose species that grows in the region and ‘Chen’ means “in abundance”.
- However, it is known for being the world’s highest and coldest battlefield. It sits at a very strategic location with Pakistan on the left and China on the right.
How does hydrocarbon extraction happen?
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GS 3: Science and Technology- Recent developments and their applications and effects in everyday life
- Over millennia, mighty geological processes in the earth’s crust heated and compressed together pieces of life-forms that had been dead for a while. Eventually, this mulch of organic matter accumulated as hydrocarbons inside rock formations.
- The two Industrial Revolutions were the result mainly of people finding a way to extract these hydrocarbons and using them to drive many and great engines, whose foul breath polluted the air and water and eventually gave us global warming.
- The most common forms in which these hydrocarbons exist in subterranean rock formations are natural gas, coal, crude oil, and petroleum.
- They are usually found in reservoirs underground created when a more resistant rock type overlays a less resistant one, in effect creating a lid that causes hydrocarbons to accumulate below it.
- Such formations are important because otherwise, the hydrocarbons would float to the surface and dissipate.
Gene variant tied to Parkinson’s may also show a way to beat it
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GS 3: Science and Technology- Recent developments and their applications and effects in everyday life
- Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progress relentlessly.
- It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia.
- In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing.
- There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms.
- Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects.
- Without understanding the fundamental molecular cause of Parkinson’s, it’s improbable that researchers will be able to develop a medication to stop the disease from steadily worsening in patients.
