Horticulture For Doubling Farmers’ Income

In News: Keeping in view the huge potential and role of the horticulture sector in increasing farmer’s income, the Government of India has allocated Rs. 2250 Crore for development of horticulture sector during 2021-22 for ‘Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture’ (MIDH), a centrally sponsored scheme.

Context:

  • The Ministry is implementing MIDH with effect from 2014-15, for realizing the potential of the horticulture sector covering fruits, vegetables, root and tuber crops, mushrooms, spices, flowers, aromatic plants, coconut, cashew and cocoa. The allocation is significantly higher than the previous year allocation.
  • There is tremendous scope for enhancing the productivity of Indian horticulture which is imperative to cater to the country’s estimated demand of 650 Million MT of fruits and vegetables by the year 2050. 
  • Government intervention in the horticulture sector has led to the situation wherein horticulture production has surpassed the agriculture production in the country. During the year 2019-20, the country recorded its highest ever horticulture production of 320.77 million tonnes from an area of 25.66 million hectares.
  • As per the 1st Advance Estimates for 2020-21 the total horticulture production in the country is 326.58 lakh MT from an area of 27.17 lakh ha.

‘Mission for Integrated Development of Horticulture’:

MIDH has played a significant role in increasing the area under horticulture crops.

  • Area and production during the years 2014 – 15 to 2019 – 20 has increased by 9% and 14% respectively.
  • Moreover, the mission has boosted best practices to be followed in farms which have significantly improved the quality of produce and productivity of farmland.
  • The initiative of MIDH has not only resulted in India’s self-sufficiency in the horticulture sector but also contributed towards achieving sustainable development goals of zero hunger, good health and wellbeing, no poverty, gender equality etc.

Challenges:

  • High post-harvest loss and
  • Gaps in post-harvest management
  • Inadequate supply chain infrastructure

Initiatives by the government:

  • Planting material production
  • Cluster development program
  • Credit push through Agri Infra Fund
  • Formation and promotion of FPOs are some of the right steps in this direction.

5g Technology and Covid-19 Pandemic unrelated – DoT

In News: It has come to the notice of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) Ministry of Communications that several misleading messages are being circulated on various social media platforms claiming that the second wave of coronavirus has been caused by the testing of the 5G mobile towers.

Context:

  • As per a press statement issued by DoT these messages are false and absolutely not correct. The press statement informs that the general public is hereby informed that there is no link between 5G technology and spread of COVID-19 and they are urged not to be misguided by the false information and rumours spread in this matter.
  • It is informed that the testing of the 5G network has not yet started anywhere in India. Hence, the claim that 5G Trials or networks are causing coronavirus in India is baseless and false.
  • Mobile towers emit non-ionizing Radio frequencies having very minuscule power and are incapable of causing any kind of damage to living cells including human beings.
  • Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has prescribed norms for exposure limit for the Radio Frequency Field (i.e. Base Station Emissions) in India are 10 times more stringent than the safe limits prescribed by International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) and WHO.

Initiatives taken by DoT:

  • Any citizen having any apprehension about any mobile tower emitting radio waves beyond the safe limit prescribed by the department, a request for EMF measurements/testing can be made on Tarang Sanchar portal.
  • To allay the fear of general public several steps have been taken to generate awareness among the public about EMF radiation such as Nation-wide Awareness Programme, distribution of pamphlets/ information brochure on various topics related to EMF, publishing detailed information on EMF related issues on the website of DoT, advertisements in newspapers, launch of “Tarang Sanchar” portal etc.

Indian Naval Ships Reach India As Part Of Samudra Setu II

In News: As part of the ongoing Operation ‘Samudra Setu II’ to support the nation’s fight against Covid-19, INS Kolkata arrived New Mangalore, INS Trikand entered Mumbai and INS Airavat arrived at Visakhapatnam.

Context:

  • These ships are part of nine ships deployed for COVID relief Operation ‘Samudra Setu II’ for shipment of Liquid Medical Oxygen and associated medical equipment from friendly foreign countries in the Persian Gulf and South East Asia.
  • INS Airavat arrived in Visakhapatnam with eight cryogenic oxygen tanks and around 4000 oxygen cylinders along with other critical medical equipment/supplies from Singapore.
  • Indian Naval Ship Trikand was deployed to augment shipment of Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) cryogenic containers from Hamad Port, Qatar to Mumbai. The ship arrived at Mumbai with 40 MT of liquid Oxygen. The consignment carried is part of the French mission “Oxygen Solidarity Bridge” to support India’s fight against COVID-19 pandemic.
  • INS Kolkata arrived at New Mangalore Port on 10 May 21 with 400 bottles of Oxygen and two 27 MT containers of Liquid Medical Oxygen that were embarked at Qatar and Kuwait.
  • While these ships entered ports to augment oxygen supply in three different states, two ships are enroute to India from Kuwait and one ship is at Brunei to embark medical supplies.

Puducherry becomes ‘Har Ghar Jal’ UT

In News: Puducherry has become ‘Har Ghar Jal’ UT by ensuring that every rural home in the Union Territory gets a household tap connection.

Context:

  • With this, the UT becomes the fourth State/UT after Goa, Telangana and Andaman & Nicobar Islands to provide assured tap water supply to every rural home under Union Government’s flagship programme, Jal Jeevan Mission.
  • Punjab, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu cross milestone of covering 75% of rural homes with assured tap water supply.
  • Despite challenges faced due to CoVid-19 pandemic, Jal Jeevan Mission is being implemented in partnership with States/ UTs to provide safe tap water in adequate quantity of prescribed quality on regular and long-term basis to every rural home by 2024.
  • All 1.16 lakh rural households in Puducherry have tap water supply now. The UT has achieved the ‘Har Ghar Jal’ status much ahead of the target fixed.
  • The UT is also planning to get NABL accreditation/ recognition for its water quality testing laboratories and take up testing of all drinking water sources on a campaign mode. It is also planning for effective treatment & reuse of greywater coming out of homes. The UT is actively working towards water source sustainability.
  • Puducherry has been consistently working towards de-silting of ponds & rejuvenation of its local water bodies, which is crucial for drinking water supply schemes. An effective community mobilisation & participation is achieved through a well-charted IEC plan by the UT.
  • JJM is a flagship programme of the Union Government, which aims to provide tap water connection to every rural household of the country by 2024.

NITI Aayog and Mastercard – Report on Digital Connectivity

In News: NITI Aayog and Mastercard released a report titled ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’.

Context:

  • The report identifies challenges in accelerating digital financial inclusion in India and provides recommendations for making digital services accessible to its 1.3 billion citizens.
  • The report highlights key issues and opportunities, with inferences and recommendations on policy and capacity building across agriculture, small business (MSMEs), urban mobility and cyber security. NITI Aayog was a knowledge partner in this endeavour.

Key issues addressed during the knowledge series were:

  1. Acceleration of digital financial inclusion for underserved sections of Indian society.
  2. Enabling SMEs to ‘get paid, get capital and get digital’ and access customers, and ensure their continued resilience.
  3. Policy and technological interventions to foster trust and increase cyber resilience.
  4. Unlocking the promise of digitization in India’s agriculture sector.
  5. The essential elements of a digital roadmap to make transit accessible for all citizens.

Key recommendations in the report include:

  1. Strengthening the payment infrastructure to promote a level playing field for NBFCs and banks.
  2. Digitizing registration and compliance processes and diversifying credit sources to enable growth opportunities for MSMEs.
  3. Building information sharing systems, including a ‘fraud repository’, and ensuring that online digital commerce platforms carry warnings to alert consumers to the risk of frauds.
  4. Enabling agricultural NBFCs to access low-cost capital and deploy a ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) model for achieving better long-term digital outcomes. Digitizing land records will also provide a major boost to the sector.
  5. To make city transit seamlessly accessible to all with minimal crowding and queues, leveraging existing smartphones and contactless cards, and aim for an inclusive, interoperable, and fully open system such as that of the London ‘Tube’.

Asperger’s Syndrome

In News:

  • Tech billionaire Elon Musk announced while hosting the US comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live that he has Asperger’s syndrome.
  • People with Asperger’s often focus obsessively on a complex topic and have trouble with social relationships.
  • It belongs to the autism spectrum, a family of conditions, which can severely inhibit a person’s mental and social development.
  • The disorder is named after German doctor Hans Asperger, who first described it in 1944.

DOGE-1 Satellite to the Moon

In News:

  • SpaceX will launch a satellite to the Moon by 2022 funded entirely with the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, Canadian company Geometric Energy Corporation, which will lead the lunar mission.
  • The satellite, dubbed DOGE-1, will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the first quarter of 2022.
  • The cubic satellite, weighing 88 pounds (40 kilograms), will aim to obtain lunar-spatial intelligence from sensors and cameras on-board.
  • This mission will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency beyond Earth orbit and set the foundation for interplanetary commerce.

Dogecoin:

Dogecoin is a crypto currency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. Dogecoin features the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme as its logo.

“Nature in a Globalised World: Conflict and Conservation” by IUCN

In News: Saving the environment can lead to one step further toward world peace, according to report named “Nature in a Globalised World: Conflict and Conservation” by IUCN.

Context:

  • Countries with scarce natural resources tend to be more prone to armed conflict, so the conservation and sustainable management of those natural resources likely will aid in increasing the chances of building and preserving peace said the report.
  • The authors analyzed how armed conflict events over the past 30 years are related to the availability and productivity of arable land, the prevalence of drought and the percentage of a country’s rural population as a measure of its dependence on nature.
  • Countries are more conflict-prone when less agricultural land is available or if it is less productive, the report found. Countries are also more conflict-prone when they are more dependent on natural resources or when drought events are frequent.
  • Armed conflict also has numerous effects on the environment, including the direct killing of wildlife for food or trade, degradation of ecosystems as both a tactic and a consequence of war, and the disruption of conservation through attacks on protected area staff and other conservationists, according to the report.
  • Armed conflict is “particularly prevalent” in some of the more biodiverse areas of the world, the report found. Civil unrest and military exercises pose a risk to more than 200 threatened species, including the Eastern gorilla, which is critically endangered.
  • Within the boundaries of protected areas, conflict is less frequent than what would be “statistically expected,” the study found.
  • Protected areas cover an estimated 15% of land on Earth but have overlapped with only 3% of the more than 85,000 conflict events over the last 30 years.
  • Armed conflict, defined as an incident where armed force was used by an organized actor and led to at least one death, has been increasing over the past 30 years but not exceeding more than 7,000 events a year, according to the report. While these events are distributed throughout the world, they’re concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and West and South Asia.
  • The report recommends a series of policy options to address links between nature and conflict, including sanctions against those who commit environmental war crimes and the establishment of explicit protections for protected area staff, environmental defenders, and other conservationists.
  • Conservation also must continue, even in war-torn regions, and conservation engagement in post-conflict areas is also essential to mitigate what is often “extremely severe pressures on nature following the cessation of hostilities in war-stricken regions,” the report determined.
  • Juha Siikamaki, IUCN’s chief economist, said “As environmental degradation and climate change intensify, it is becoming increasingly important to factor in the links between conflict and nature when formulating security, development and environmental policy”.

Laureus World Sports Awards 2021

In News:

  • The Laureus World Sports Awards are the ultimate sporting honour, presented each year by the Laureus Academy to celebrate the sporting achievements of the last year.
  • After an extraordinary year, the Laureus Awards will mark the extraordinary contribution of sportsmen and women on and off the court, track or pitch, reflecting the impact of Covid-19 and the social advocacy seen across sport.
  • Winners are selected by the 69 legendary sportsmen and women of the Laureus Academy, based on a list of nominations voted on by a panel of over 1000 sports media from 100 countries.
  • The 2020 Awards are hosted from Seville, Spain as a virtual event to respect ongoing restrictions on movement and gathering around the world.

The list of Awards:

  1. Laureus World Sportsman of the Year – Rafael Nadal (Tennis, Spain)
  2. Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year – Naomi Osaka (Tennis, Japan)
  3. Laureus World Team of the Year – FC Bayern (football, Germany)
  4. Laureus World Comeback of the Year – Max Parrot (Snowboarding, Canada)
  5. Laureus Lifetime Achievement Award – Billie Jean King (tennis, USA)
  6. Laureus Sporting Inspiration Award – Mo Salah (football, Liverpool & Egypt)
  7. Laureus Sport for Good Award – Kickformore by Kickfair (football, German)

WHO approval for Sinopharm

In News:

  • The World Health Organization (WHO) has granted emergency approval for a Covid vaccine made by Chinese state-owned company Sinopharm. It is the first vaccine developed by a non-Western country to get WHO backing.
  • The WHO had previously only approved the vaccines made by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna.
  • It is recommending that the vaccine be administered in two doses to those aged 18 and over.

Why does WHO backing matter?

  • The green light from the global health body is a guideline for national regulators that a vaccine is safe and effective.
  • It also means that the vaccine can be used in the global Covax programme, which was set up last year to try to ensure fair access to vaccines among rich and poor nations.

Sinopharm:

  • It said the vaccine’s efficacy for symptomatic and hospitalised cases of Covid-19 was estimated to be 79%.
  • One of the Chinese vaccines’ main advantages is that they can be stored in a standard refrigerator at 2-8 degrees Celsius, like the AstraZeneca vaccine.
  • The WHO said these “easy storage requirements” made the Sinopharm vaccine “highly suitable for low-resource settings”.
  • The two Chinese vaccines differ significantly from some of the other Covid vaccines currently in use, especially those by Pfizer and Moderna.
  • Developed in a more traditional way, they are so-called inactivated vaccines, which means they use killed viral particles to expose the immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response.

Victory Day – Russia

In News:

  • Victory Day is a holiday that commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945.
  • It was first inaugurated in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, following the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender late in the evening on 8 May 1945.
  • The Soviet government announced the victory early on 9 May after the signing ceremony in Berlin.
  • Although the official inauguration occurred in 1945, the holiday became a non-labour day only in 1965, and only in certain Soviet republics.

‘Black fungus’ in Covid-19 patients

In News: Although rare, it is a serious infection. It is caused by a group of moulds known as mucormycetes present naturally in the environment. It mainly affects people who are on medication for health problems that reduces their ability to fight environmental pathogens, say experts from the Covid-19 task force task force.

What is Mucormycosis?

Mucormycosis, commonly called black fungus, is a rare but serious fungal infection caused by a kind of fungus called mucormycete, which is abundant in the environment. It mainly affects people who have health problems or take medicines that lower the body’s ability to fight germs and sickness.

Symptoms:

* Sinusitis — nasal blockade or congestion, nasal discharge (blackish/bloody);

* Local pain on the cheek bone, one-sided facial pain, numbness or swelling;

* Blackish discoloration over bridge of nose/palate;

* Loosening of teeth, jaw involvement;

* Blurred or double vision with pain;

* Thrombosis, necrosis, skin lesion;

* Chest pain, pleural effusion, worsening of respiratory symptoms.

Who is vulnerable?

Vulnerable groups include people who have health problems or take medicines that lower the body’s ability to fight germs and sickness. These include those with diabetes, cancer, or those who have had an organ transplant.

Prevention:

Use masks if you are visiting dusty construction sites. Wear shoes, long trousers, long-sleeved shirts and gloves while gardening. Maintain personal hygiene including a thorough scrub bath.