[Mission 2024] STATIC QUIZ, 15 November 2023 – Environment

Solution: b)

Statement 3 is incorrect.

• ‘Green jobs’ refer to a class of jobs that directly have a positive impact on the planet, and contribute to the overall environmental welfare. Jobs involving renewable energy, conservation of resources, ensuring energy efficient means are categorised under the same.
• The Skill Council for Green Jobs was launched by the Union government on October 1, 2015. Aligned to the National Skill Development Missions, it was set up to be a not-for-profit, independent, industry-led initiative. Promoted by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the council aims to help manufacturers and other service providers in India’s ‘green business’ sector to implement industry-led, collaborative skills push the country on the path to truly realising the real potential and significance of ‘green jobs’.
• The International Labour Organisation, the International Trade Union Confederation, the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Employers Organisation collectively launched the Green Jobs Initiative in 2008, aimed at bettering placements, training and creating opportunities for individuals to work in ‘green jobs’.

Solution: c)

National Green Hydrogen (NGH) mission aims to facilitate the production of hydrogen from renewable energy. Hydrogen is an essential industrial fuel that has a range of uses from producing ammonia, making steel and cement, to powering fuel cells that can run buses and cars. However, the cheapest way to manufacture this is to rely on fossil fuel such as coal and natural gas and this produces carbon emissions. The concerns over global warming and the gradual but steady embrace of alternative fuels have stoked the world’s interest in producing hydrogen from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy.

The NGH mission aims to create an enabling environment for the Indian industry to develop the infrastructure to produce and transport green hydrogen from certain nerve centres to production hubs where they can be used in various industrial applications. The NGH mission has committed to finance — the details are not yet available — the manufacturing of electrolysers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Green hydrogen, because of the entailed expenses, currently accounts for less than 1% of global hydrogen production and India’s aim is to become a global, industrial hub and exporter of such hydrogen.

Solution: b)

Statement 3 is incorrect.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority is a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.

The National Tiger Conservation Authority has been fulfilling its mandate within the ambit of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.

Set up under the Chairmanship of the Minister for Environment and Forests.

The NTCA had more power to check poaching and preserve the tiger population. Its mandate included setting up the Tiger Protection Force and funding the relocation of villages from the protected areas.

Solution: b)

Statement 2 is incorrect.

When we recently mapped these Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs), we discovered that they are staggeringly diverse, ranging from woodland savannas, scrublands and grasslands, to rocky outcrops, ravines and dunes.

ONEs also have a remarkable assemblage of animal species, many of which, such as the black buck and the critically endangered great Indian bustard, occur only in the Indian subcontinent.

India’s ONEs continue to be misunderstood, misrepresented, and destroyed. Successive governments have carried forward a colonial legacy of terming ONEs as ‘wastelands’ and sought to make them ‘productive’; they have tried to ‘develop’ them, thereby incentivising their erasure. Unlike with forests, there are no conservation laws that protect against diversion of biodiversity-rich ONEs.

Solution: b)

Statement 1 is incorrect.

‘Deemed forest’ is forest land that has not been notified as such by the Centre or States. The 1996 Godavarman verdict by the Supreme Court enjoined States to bring in such unrecorded land that conformed to the ‘dictionary’ meaning of forest.

Protection under the Forest Act means that land cannot be diverted without the consent of the Centre as well as gram panchayats.

It also puts the onus on those diverting land to grow trees on an equivalent plot of land twice the razed area, along with a significant monetary penalty.

The Forest Act, 1980, now renamed as the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam — translated as Forest Conservation and Augmentation — only accords protection to a forest that has been declared so in accordance with the provisions of the Forest Act, 1927 and also land that has been specifically notified as forest on or after October 25, 1980. In 1996, the Supreme Court expanded the remit of the Act to areas that were not notified as forest but conformed to the “dictionary” definition of forests.