DAY – 39 ( INSTA REVISION TEST)INSTA REVISION PLAN 3.0, 2020

Solution: D

World Bank’s Human Capital Index

What to study?

• For Prelims: HCI related key facts and performance of various countries.
• For Mains: HCI, HCP and HDI, need for improvements in human capital and ways to achieve it, India’s reservations about HCI.

Context: The World Bank has released a Human Capital Index (HCI) as part of the World Development Report 2019.

Theme for the World Development Report (WDR) 2018: “The Changing Nature of Work”.

Human Capital Project (HCP):

As part of this report, the World Bank has launched a Human Capital Project (HCP).

• The HCP programme is claimed to be a program of advocacy, measurement, and analytical work to raise awareness and increase demand for interventions to build human capital.
• There are three components of HCP- a cross-country human capital measurement metric called the Human Capital Index (HCI), a programme of measurement and research to inform policy action, and a programme of support for country strategies to accelerate investment in human capital.

About Human Capital Index (HCI):

The HCI has been constructed for 157 countries. It claims to seek to measure the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by age 18. The HCI index values are contended to convey the productivity of the next generation of workers, compared to a benchmark of complete standard education and full health.

The HCI has three components:

• Survival, as measured by under-5 mortality rates.
• Expected years of Quality-Adjusted School which combines information on the quantity and quality of education.
• Health environment using two proxies of (a) adult survival rates and (b) the rate of stunting for children under age 5.

Solution: A

Freedom in the World 2020

What to study?

For Prelims: Key findings and performance of various countries.

For Mains: Concerns over India’s poor performance, reasons and what needs to be done?

Context: Freedom in the World 2020 has been released by America based Freedom House.

Top 5: Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are the top five countries in the free category.

 India’s performance:

1. The report has placed India at 83^rd position along with Timor-Leste and Senegal among the bottom five of “free democracies”.
2. India witnessed the worst score decline among the world’s 25 largest democracies.
3. India’s overall score declined from 75 in 2019 to 71 in 2020, with civil liberties taking the biggest hit.

 Background:

Freedom House is a US-based watchdog, which has been tracking global political and civil liberties for almost half a century.

Solution: D

UNESCO world heritage site:

• A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a place that is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as of special cultural or physical significance.
• The list is maintained by the international World Heritage Programme administered by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, composed of 21 UNESCO member states which are elected by the General Assembly.
• Each World Heritage Site remains part of the legal territory of the state wherein the site is located and UNESCO considers it in the interest of the international community to preserve each site.

The World Heritage Committee inscribed seven cultural sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

These sites include:

• Burial Mounds (Bahrain): The burial mounds are evidence of the Early Dilmun civilization, around the 2nd millennium BCE, during which Bahrain became a trade hub, whose prosperity enabled the inhabitants to develop an elaborate burial tradition applicable to the entire population.
• Budj Bim Cultural Landscape (Australia): Composed of channels, dams and weirs, they are used to contain floodwaters and create basins to trap, store and harvest the kooyang eel (Anguilla australis), which has provided the population with an economic and social base for six millennia.
• Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City (China): Located in the Yangtze River Basin on the south-eastern coast of the country, the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu (about 3300-2300 BCE) reveal an early regional state with a unified belief system based on rice cultivation in Late Neolithic China.
• Jaipur City, Rajasthan (India): The fortified city of Jaipur, in India’s northwestern state of Rajasthan was founded in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II. Unlike other cities in the region located in hilly terrain, Jaipur was established on the plain and built according to a grid plan interpreted in the light of Vedic architecture.
• Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto, (Indonesia): Built for the extraction, processing and transport of high-quality coal in an inaccessible region of Sumatra, this industrial site was developed by the Netherlands’ colonial government from the late 19th to the beginning of the 20th century with a workforce recruited from the local population and supplemented by convict labour from Dutch-controlled areas.
• Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group: Mounded Tombs of Ancient Japan (Japan): Located on a plateau above the Osaka Plain, this property includes 49 kofun (old mounds in Japanese). These kofun have been selected from a total of 160,000 in Japan and form the richest material representation of the Kofun period, from the 3rd to the 6th century CE. They demonstrate the differences in social classes of that period and reflect a highly sophisticated funerary system.
• Megalithic Jar Sites in Xiengkhouang — Plain of Jars (Lao People’s Democratic Republic): The Plain of Jars, located on a plateau in central Laos, gets its name from more than 2,100 tubular-shaped megalithic stone jars used for funerary practices in the Iron Age.

Solution: D

Context: The World Happiness Report 2020 has been released.

About World Happiness Report:

It is released by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations by the UN General Assembly.

It is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.

 What’s special about the 2020 report?

This is the eighth World Happiness Report. The 2020 report for the first time ranks cities around the world by their subjective well-being and digs more deeply into how the social, urban and natural environments combine to affect our happiness.

 How the countries are ranked?

• Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0.
• In the reports, experts in fields including economics, psychology, survey analysis, and national statistics, describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations, and other topics.

Solution: D

Operation Thirst is an all- India drive launched by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) to curb menace of selling unauthorized packaged drinking water in railway stations.

Solution: C

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

About WIPO:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is one of the 17 specialized agencies of the United Nations.

    It was created in 1967 “to encourage creative activity, to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world.”

It has currently 188 member states, administers 26 international treaties, and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Non-members are the states of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Solomon Islands, South Sudan and Timor-Leste. Palestine has observer status.

    India is a member of WIPO and party to several treaties administered by WIPO.

Solution: C

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

The IFAD is an international financial institution working in the field of poverty eradication in the rural areas of developing countries. It is a specialized United Nations agency created in 1977 engaged in providing grants and loans with low interest for allied projects.

• The IFAD works with rural people allowing them to enhance their food security, improve nutrition and raise their incomes.
• It also helps people to expand their businesses.
• The organization is an outcome of the World Food Conference of 1974.
• It is headquartered in Rome and headed by a President.
• It has 177 member countries.
• It works with marginalized and vulnerable groups such as farmers with small holdings, foresters, pastoralists, fishermen and small-scale entrepreneurs by giving them disaster preparedness, access to weather information, technology transfer and social learning.
• IFAD brings out the Rural Development Report every year.

Solution: D

FASTag is a simple to use, reloadable tag which enables automatic deduction of toll charges and lets you pass through the toll plaza without stopping for the cash transaction. FASTag is linked to a prepaid account from which the applicable toll amount is deducted. The tag employs Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) technology and is affixed on the vehicle’s windscreen after the tag account is active.

FASTag is presently operational at both, national and state highways.  The tag is valid for five years and comes in seven different colours — violet, orange, yellow, green, and pink, blue, black. Each colour is assigned to a particular category of vehicles.

Solution: B

The BASIC countries (also Basic countries or BASIC) are a bloc of four large newly industrialized countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – formed by an agreement on 28 November 2009.

About the New Development Bank:

It is a multilateral development bank operated by the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

The New Development Bank was agreed to by BRICS leaders at the 5th BRICS summit held in Durban, South Africa in 2013.

It was established in 2014, at the 6th BRICS Summit at Fortaleza, Brazil.

The bank is set up to foster greater financial and development cooperation among the five emerging markets.

In the Fortaleza Declaration, the leaders stressed that the NDB will strengthen cooperation among BRICS and will supplement the efforts of multilateral and regional financial institutions for global development.

The bank will be headquartered in Shanghai, China.

Unlike the World Bank, which assigns votes based on capital share, in the New Development Bank each participant country will be assigned one vote, and none of the countries will have veto power.

Solution: D

The Global Climate Risk Index 2020 analyses to what extent countries and regions have been affected by impacts of weather-related loss events (storms, floods, heat waves etc.). The most recent data available — for 2018 and from 1999 to 2018 — were taken into account. The countries and territories affected most in 2018 were Japan, the Philippines as well as Germany. For the period from 1999 to 2018 Puerto Rico, Myanmar and Haiti rank highest. The index is released by Environment think tank, Germanwatch for 2018 and from 1999 to 2018. Hence, option D is correct.

Solution: B

GoI has signed a 190 million USD loan with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to upgrade road transport in the state of Rajasthan.

About ADB:

• It is a regional development bank
• established on 19 December 1966.
• headquartered — Manila, Philippines.
• official United Nations Observer.

The bank admits the members of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP, formerly the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East or ECAFE) and non-regional developed countries.

Some of the non-regional member countries are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany etc.

Voting rights:

It is modeled closely on the World Bank, and has a similar weighted voting system where votes are distributed in proportion with members’ capital subscriptions.

Solution: B

Indian Ocean Conference

What to study?

For Prelims and Mains: Indian Ocean Conference and its significance.

Context: Fourth Indian Ocean Conference 2019 was recently held in Male, capital of Maldives.

Theme: ‘Securing the Indian Ocean Region: Traditional and Non-Traditional Challenges’.

About Indian Ocean Conference:

Initiated by India Foundation along with its partners from Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

It is an annual effort to bring together Heads of States/Governments, Ministers, Thought Leaders, scholars, diplomats, bureaucrats and practitioners from across the region.

The three broad themes of the conference were:
MARINE ECOLOGY: Climate Change, Global Warming and consequent Rise of Sea Levels, Pollution, Sustainable harnessing of Oceanic Resources
TERRORISM: Rising Spectre of Terrorism in Indian Ocean Region, Marine Terrorism
NAVIGATIONAL SECURITY: Freedom of Navigation, UNCLOS and its effective implementation, Natural and Man-made hazards to Navigation, Piracy

Solution: C

The government has approved the launch of Bharat Bond ETF, India’s first corporate bond exchange traded fund, comprising debt of state-run companies. It is a basket of bonds issued by central public sector enterprises/undertakings or any other government organization bonds.

It will have a fixed maturity of three and ten years and will trade on the stock exchanges. It will invest in a portfolio of bonds of state-run companies and other government entities. It will track an underlying index on risk replication basis, matching credit quality and average maturity of the index.

Solution: A

Commonwealth

What to study?

For Prelims: About commonwealth.

For Mains: Relevance of Commonwealth today and the need for reorganization.

Context: The Maldives re-joined the Commonwealth, more than three years after the Indian Ocean island nation quit amid mounting criticism of its human rights.

In 2016, the Maldives pulled out of the Commonwealth.

Maldives has been formally reinstated into the Commonwealth as its 54th member state.

About Commonwealth of Nations:

1. The Commonwealth of Nations, at one time known as British Commonwealth, is an organisation of fifty three states that were principally below the colonial rule of British Government. They came into existence with the proclamation of sovereignty of the state from the colonial rule of British Empire and were later given self-governance.
2. It proclaims that the Commonwealth nations are “free and equal.” The insignia of this Commonwealth Association is Queen Elizabeth II who is considered the Supreme of the Commonwealth nations.
3. The member states of the commonwealth are not legally liable or bound to each other. They are rather united by language, history, culture, likeness of the democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
4. Their values are listed down within the Commonwealth Charter and the hands of harmony towards the member states are extended by the Commonwealth Games held every four years.
5. Former British mandates that did not become members of the Commonwealth are Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, British Palestine, Sudan, British Somaliland, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Key facts:

Former name — British Commonwealth.

Composition: intergovernmental organisation of 53 member states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire.

It operates by intergovernmental consensus of the member states.

Established in 1949 by the London Declaration.

Structure: Head of the Commonwealth — Queen Elizabeth II is the Head of the Commonwealth. The position is symbolic.

Solution: A

The National Defence Fund was set up to take charge of voluntary donations in cash and kind received for promotion of the national defence effort, and to decide on their utilisation. The Fund is used for the welfare of the members of the Armed Forces (including Para Military Forces) and their dependents. The Fund is administered by an Executive Committee, with PM as Chairperson, and Defence, Finance and Home Ministers as Members. Finance Minister is the Treasurer of the Fund and the Joint Secretary, PMO dealing with the subject is Secretary of the Executive Committee. Accounts of the Fund are kept with the Reserve Bank of India. The fund is entirely dependent on voluntary contributions from the public and does not get any budgetary support.

Solution: B

What is the Open Skies treaty?

Context: The Trump administration is expected to pull out of the “Open Skies” treaty.

What is the “Open Skies” treaty?

The treaty allows 34 countries to conduct unarmed surveillance flights over one another’s territories — including the US and Russia. It was signed in 1992 and went into effect in 2002.

India is not a member of this treaty.

Kyrgyzstan has signed, but not ratified the treaty.

Significance:

It was agreed just after the Cold War to allow signatories to avoid nasty surprises by monitoring rival militaries.

The treaty “was designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information through aerial imaging on military forces and activities of concern to them.”

Implementation of the treaty:

1. The treaty makes it possible to conduct joint unarmed observation flights over the territories and to take images using sensors of a predefined resolution.
2. And it also allows all signatories to request copies of all images taken during overflights carried out by others.
3. Overflights are governed by quotas, negotiated annually and assigned to specific aircraft. The United States, for example, is allowed to operate Boeing OC-135 planes with infrared scanners.
4. The country under surveillance is given 72 hours’ warning of a flight and 24 hours’ notice of the route, to which it can suggest modifications.
5. The treaty lays down which air bases can be used for the flights and at which points they can cross into each other’s air space. Russia and the U.S. have four such bases each.
6. A committee to oversee the implementation of the treaty meets in Vienna every month at the headquarters of the Organisation of Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe.

Solution: D

The Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) is an inter-governmental forum for enhancing cooperation towards promoting peace, security and stability in Asia. It is a forum based on the recognition that there is close link between peace, security and stability in Asia and in the rest of the world. The key idea of the Conference is based on the priority of the indivisibility of security, joint initiative and mutually beneficial interaction of small and large states.

The idea of convening the CICA was first proposed by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev on 5 October 1992, at the 47th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Observer Organizations:

• International Organization for Migration
• League of Arab States
• Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
• Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic Speaking Countries
• United Nations

Solution: B

When the Botanical Survey of India published the first comprehensive orchid census of the country last year, Arunachal Pradesh emerged as its top contributor. It was no surprise because nearly half (612 out of 1256) of India’s orchid species can be found in the Northeastern state — and there is a strong possibility that there could be many, many more.

In fact, just this month, there is confirmation of two new species of orchids (Thrixspermum japonicum and Gastrochilus platycalcaratus) from the state’s Ziro Valley. Reason enough for the state to realise that it is not only important to document its diverse orchid population but to understand and assess the threats that it faces.

https://indianexpress.com/article/north-east-india/arunachal-pradesh/in-a-first-arunachal-pradesh-to-red-list-its-orchids-for-protection-6221893/

Solution: B

About Mekedatu dam project:

Being set up by the Karnataka government, the project is near Mekedatu, in Ramanagaram district, across the river Cauvery from Tamil Nadu. Its primary objective is to supply drinking water to Bengaluru and recharge the groundwater table in the region.

Solution: D

All the above rights are mentioned in Universal declaration of Human rights.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages.

Solution: B

The EU-Iran Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) was born as the brainchild of France, Germany and the UK in January 2019 as a special purpose vehicle to help EU companies do business with Iran and facilitate non-USD and non-SWIFT transactions to avoid breaking US sanctions against the country.

Recently, INSTEX has successfully concluded its first transaction to facilitate the export of medical goods from Europe to the pandemic-hit country.

Solution: D

Context: Canada’s largest pension fund Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) has agreed to invest about $600 million in National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) through the NIIF Master Fund.

With CPPIB’s investment, NIIF Master Fund now has $2.1 billion in commitments and has achieved its initially targeted fund size.

About NIIF:

The government had set up the ₹40,000 crore NIIF in 2015 as an investment vehicle for funding commercially viable greenfield, brownfield and stalled infrastructure projects.

The Indian government is investing 49% and the rest of the corpus is to be raised from third-party investors such as sovereign wealth funds, insurance and pension funds, endowments, etc.

1. NIIF’s mandate includes investing in areas such as energy, transportation, housing, water, waste management and other infrastructure-related sectors in India.
2. NIIF currently manages three funds each with its distinctive investment mandate.The funds are registered as Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

The three funds are:

Master Fund: Is an infrastructure fund with the objective of primarily investing in operating assets in the core infrastructure sectors such as roads, ports, airports, power etc.

Fund of Funds: Managed by fund managers who have good track records in infrastructure and associated sectors in India. Some of the sectors of focus include Green Infrastructure, Mid-Income & Affordable Housing, Infrastructure services and allied sectors.

Strategic Investment Fund: Is registered as an Alternative Investment Fund II under SEBI in India. The objective is to invest largely in equity and equity-linked instruments. It will focus on green field and brown field investments in the core infrastructure sectors.

Solution: B

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has released Global Wage Report 2018-19. As per the report, women are paid the most unequally in India, compared to men, when it comes to hourly wages for labour. On average, women are paid 34% less than men.

Highlights of the report:

The gender wage gap has remained unchanged at 20% from 2016 to 2017.

In advanced economies (G20), real wage growth declined from 0.9 per cent in 2016 to 0.4 per cent in 2017, meaning near stagnation. By contrast, in emerging economies and developing G20 countries, real wage growth dipped marginally from 4.9 per cent in 2016 and 4.3 per cent in 2017.

Inequality is higher in monthly wages, with a gap of 22 per cent.

Overall, real wages grew just 1.8 per cent globally (136 countries) in 2017.

In most countries, women and men differ significantly in respect of working time – specifically, that part-time work is more prevalent among women than among men.

Solution: B

http://niti.gov.in/niti/content/population-density-sq-km

Solution: C

The NBWL is chaired by the Prime Minister according to the WLPA. The NBWL has 47 members including the chairperson. Among these, 19 members are ex-officio members. Every new government constitutes a new board, based on the provisions of the WLPA, with the new PM as the chair.

The Kendriya Hindi Samiti was constituted in the Year 1967. It is chaired by the Prime Minister. It is the apex policy making body for the propagation and progressive use of Hindi as Official Language of the Union.