Daily Prelims Notes 8 May 2021

May 8, 2021
Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
Category: DPN

Daily Prelims Notes

8 May 2021

Table Of Contents

Subject : Polity

Context : Nearly seven months after the previous Lokayukta retired from his post, retired Bombay high court justice Ambadas Joshi took charge as the new Goa Lokayukta.

Concept :

The Lokayukta is an anti-corruption authority constituted at the state level.
It investigates allegations of corruption and mal-administration against public servants and is tasked with speedy redressal of public grievances.
The origin of the Lokayukta can be traced to the Ombudsmen in Scandinavian countries.
The Administrative Reforms Commission, (1966-70), had recommended the creation of the Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayukta in the states.
The Lokayukta is created as a statutory authority under Lokpal and Lokayukta Act, 2013to enable it to discharge its functions independently and impartially.
The lokayukta and upalokayukta are appointed by the governor of the state. While appointing, the governor in most of the states consults (a) the chief justice of the state high court, and (b) the leader of Opposition in the state legislative assembly.
Judicial qualifications are prescribed for the lokayukta in the States of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Orissa, Karnataka and Assam. But no specific qualifications are prescribed in the states of Bihar, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.
In most of the states, the term of office fixed for lokayukta is of 5 years duration or 65 years of age, whichever is earlier. He is not eligible for reappointment for a second term.
The recommendations made by the lokayukta are only advisory and not binding on the state government.

2. SOVEREIGN CREDIT RATINGS

Subject : Economics

Context : S & P Global Ratings on Friday said India’s credit rating would be retained at the current level for the next two years, and the country will see a slightly faster pace of growth in the next couple of years that will support its sovereign rating.

S & P had last year retained India’s rating at the lowest investment grade ‘BBB-‘, with a stable outlook for the 13th year in a row.

Concept :

A credit rating is a quantified assessment of the creditworthiness of a borrower in general terms or with respect to a particular debt or financial obligation.
A credit rating can be assigned to any entity that seeks to borrow money—an individual, corporation, state or provincial authority, or sovereign government.
A sovereign credit rating is an independent assessment of the creditworthiness of a country or sovereign entity.
Sovereign credit ratings can give investors insights into the level of risk associated with investing in the debt of a particular country, including any political risk.
Investors use sovereign credit ratings as a way to assess the riskiness of a particular country’s bonds.
Obtaining good sovereign credit rating is usually essential for developing countries in order to access funding in international bond markets.

Rating Agencies

A rating agency is a company that assesses the financial strength of companies and government entities, especially their ability to meet principal and interest payments on their debts.
The rating assigned to a given debt shows an agency’s level of confidence that the borrower will honour its debt obligations as agreed.
The Big Three Credit Rating Agencies: Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s (S&P) are the big three international credit rating agencies controlling approximately 95% of global ratings business.
In India, there are six credit rating agencies registered under SEBI namely, CRISIL, ICRA, CARE, SMERA, Fitch India and Brickwork Ratings.

Role of Rating Agencies in Capital Markets

Rating agencies assess the credit risk of specific debt securities and the borrowing entities. In the bond market, a rating agency provides an independent evaluation of the creditworthiness of debt securities issued by governments and corporations.
Rating agencies also give ratings to sovereign borrowers, who are the largest borrowers in most financial markets.
Sovereign borrowers include national governments, state governments, municipalities, and other sovereign-supported institutions. The sovereign ratings given by a rating agency shows a sovereign’s ability to repay its debt.
The ratings help governments from emerging and developing countries to issue bonds to domestic and international investors.
Governments sell bonds to obtain financing from other governments and Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

3. STATE OF WORKING INDIA REPORT 2021

Subject : Important Reports

Context : A report titled ‘State of Working India 2021: One Year of Covid19’ brought out annually by Azim Premji University’s Centre for Sustainable Employment, Bengaluru has been released.

Concept :

The report covers the period March 2020 to December 2020, dwells on the impact of one year of Covid-19 on employment, incomes, inequality and poverty.
Impact on Employment:
100 million jobs were lost during the April-May 2020 lockdown.
Though most of these workers had found employment by June 2020, about 15 million remained out of work.
Impact on Income:
For an average household of four members, the monthly per capita income in October 2020 (Rs. 4,979) was still below its level in January 2020 (Rs. 5,989).
Monthly earnings of workers fell on an average by 17% during the pandemic, with self employed and informal salaried workers facing the highest loss of earnings.
Informalisation:
Post-lockdown, nearly half of salaried workers had moved into informal work, either as self-employed (30%), casual wage (10%) or informal salaried (9%).
Regressive Nature of Economic Impact:
The bottom 20% of households earned nothing in the months of April and May 2020.
On the other hand, the top 10% suffered the least during the lockdown, and only lost about 20% of their February income during the lockdown months.
Disproportionate Impact on Women:
During the lockdown and in the post lockdown months, 61% of working men remained employed while 7% lost their job and did not return to work.
But in the case of women, only 19% remained employed while 47% suffered a permanent job loss, “not returning to work even by the end of 2020”.
Increase in Poverty Rate:
The job loss and fall in earnings caused a large increase in poverty.
Households coped with the loss of income by decreasing their food intake, selling assets and borrowing informally from friends, relatives and moneylenders.
With 230 million falling below the national minimum wage threshold of Rs. 375 per day during the pandemic, poverty rate has “increased by 15 percentage points in rural and nearly 20 percentage points in urban areas”.

4. GAVI

Subject : International Organisations

Context : India To Get Between 190 To 250 Million Subsidised Covid Vaccines: Gavi

Concept :

GAVI

Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization is a public-private global health partnership committed to increasing access to immunization in poor countries
It is a global Vaccine Alliance with the goal of creating equal access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries.
It does this by bringing together all the stakeholders – donor governments, developing countries, World Bank, UNICEF, WHO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, international finance and development organizations, and pharmaceutical industry – in one decision making body
Gavi was launched in 2000. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland
India started receiving support for its immunization programme from GAVI in 2002. Apart from that, India is the largest supplier of vaccines to GAVI.

5. NSAIDS

Subject : Science & tech

Context : The use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen, does not lead to higher rates of death or severe disease in patients who are hospitalised with Covid-19, according to a new observational study of more than 72,000 people in the UK published in The Lancet Rheumatology journal.

Concept :

NSAIDs or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are those medications used for reducing pain (analgesic), decreasing fever (anti-pyretic), preventing blood clots (anti-thrombotic) and decreasing inflammation (anti-inflammatory).
NSAIDs are also used to treat non-inflammatory conditions such as migraine, period pain and postoperative pain, and to reduce fever.
Some commonly used NSAIDs include: aspirin (such as Disprin), ibuprofen (such as Nurofen) , naproxen (such as Naprosyn), diclofenac (such as Voltaren), celecoxib (such as Celebrex).

Concerns about NSAID Use

Certain ill effects are associated with long term or heavy use of NSAIDs. It increases the risk of kidney damage, longer prevalence of infections, longer time span in which the virus is shed, etc.
While it reduces the fever, it does not tackle the actual infection. The lowered fever may short circuit the immune system’s defence against the infection.

6. VACCINE DELIVERY BY DRONES

Subject :Sciecne & tech

Context : The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) & Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) have granted conditional exemption to the Government of Telangana for conducting experimental Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone flights for delivery of vaccines.

Concept :

Exemption from Unmanned Aircraft System {UAS) Rules, 2021 has been granted as part of government’s constant endeavour to enhance the scope of drone usage in the country and assist the nation to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last month, the Government of Telangana was granted conditional exemption for conducting experimental delivery of Covid-19 vaccines within Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) Range using drones.
To accelerate the drone deployment process to formulate application-based models, the grant has been extended to Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). The trials may commence by end of May 2021.
This exemption shall be valid for a period of one year from the date of approval of the SOP or until further orders, whichever is earlier.
Earlier this month, 20 consortia were also granted permission to conduct Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) experimental flights of drones. BVLOS trials will help create the regulatory framework for drone deliveries and other major applications.

7. MOUNT SINABUNG

Subject : Geography

Context :Recently, the Mount Sinabung has erupted again and belching a massive column of volcanic ash and smoke 3,000 metres (3 km) into the sky.

Concept :

Mount Sinabung

It is a Pleistocene-to-Holocene stratovolcano of andesite and dacite.
It is located in the Karo plateau of Karo Regency, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
It is located on the seismically active zone known as the “Ring of Fire” i.e. an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Ocean.

Why volcanic eruption is common in Indonesia?

Indonesia is home to many active volcanoes due to its position on the “Ring of Fire” or the Circum-Pacific Belt.
The Circum Pacific Belt is an area along the Pacific Ocean characterised by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes.
The Ring of Fire is home to about 75 per cent of the world’s volcanoes and about 90 per cent of its earthquakes.
It is a horseshoe-shaped seismically active belt of earthquake epicentres, volcanoes, and tectonic plate boundaries that fringes the Pacific basin.
It follows chains of island arcs such as Tonga and New Hebrides, the Indonesian archipelago, the Philippines, Japan, the Kuril Islands, and the Aleutians, as well as other arc-shaped geomorphic features, such as the western coast of North America and the Andes Mountains.

8. COWIN

Subject : Governance

Context : To cut back on data entry errors about vaccination status and inconvenience caused to citizens, the CoWIN system will introduce a four-digit security code from tomorrow, the Health Ministry has said.

Concept :

CoWIN is a national platform for digital ecosystem to be used to effectively roll out and scale up the mechanism for COVID Vaccine Distribution System.
It was launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) to help agencies keep a track of Covid-19 vaccination programme and allow Indian citizens to apply for a Covid-19 vaccine shot.
As part of platform the government developed CoWIN-20 app for real-time monitoring of covid-19 vaccine.
It will integrate with real-time data from cold storage facilities with integration from eVIN (Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network).

eVIN (Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network)

It is an indigenously developed technology system that digitizes vaccine stocks and monitors the temperature of the cold chain through a smartphone application.
It is aimed at strengthening immunization supply chain systems across the country.
eVIN aims to support the Government of India’s Universal Immunization Programme by providing real-time information on vaccine stocks and flows, and storage temperatures across all cold chain points in these states.
It is being implemented under the National Health Mission (NHM) by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

9. KAREN CONFLICT

Subject : International Relations

Context : Guerrilla soldiers from Myanmar’s Karen ethnic minority burned down a government military outpost on Friday after capturing it without a fight when its garrison fled, a senior Karen officer said.

Concept :

Karen Conflict

Marginalised in then Burma’s post-independence political process, the KNU started a rebellion in 1949, which it waged for nearly 70 years.
One of its key grievances was the majority Bamar community’s dominance of Myanmar’s state and military.
The conflict has been described as one of the world’s “longest running civil wars”.
Karen insurgents have been fighting for an independent state known as Kawthoolei since 1949.

Karen National Union

The KNU is the dominant political organisation representing ethnic minority Karen communities in Karen, or Kayin, State, bordering Thailand.
Its aim is self-determination for the Karen people in a region of about 1.6 million people, roughly the size of Belgium, where they are the ethnic majority in the state.