1) G20 :-

News:- G20 summit now underway in Turkey. Once the meeting is over and concrete document are out, we will publish the take away from Turkey.Meanwhile :-

• The Group of Twenty (also known as the G-20 or G20) is an international forum for the governments and central bank governors from 20 major economies.
• The members include 19 individual countries—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States—along with the European Union (EU).
• The G-20 was founded in 1999 with the aim of studying, reviewing, and promoting high-level discussion of policy issues pertaining to the promotion of international financial stability
• It seeks to address issues that go beyond the responsibilities of any one organization
• Collectively, the G-20 economies account for around 85% of the gross world product (GWP), 80% of world trade (or, if excluding EU intra-trade, 75%), and two-thirds of the world population
• Criticism:-
  • The G-20’s transparency and accountability have been questioned by critics, who call attention to the absence of a formal charter and the fact that the most important G-20 meetings are closed-door.
  • Although the G-20 has stated that the group’s “economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system,its legitimacy has been challenged. With respect to the membership issue, U.S. President Barack Obama has noted the difficulty of pleasing everyone: “everybody wants the smallest possible group that includes them. So, if they’re the 21st largest nation in the world, they want the G-21, and think it’s highly unfair if they have been cut out.”

2)“Swayam” Initiative :-

• Launching the “Swayam” initiative of “Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry” (FICCI) women wing in Guwahati today, Dr Jitendra Singh said, the unique advantage of any women initiative is that it has a wider social and public impact, also because a woman holds stake for at least three generations, that is, the generation of her parents and in-laws, the generation of her husband and brothers, and the generation of her children.
• Appreciating the “Swayam” initiative by FICCI women, he said, it has already been launched in Delhi and other places, resulting in successful engagement of women from all sections, in big and small self-employed vocations and observed that the arrival of “Swayam” in Guwahati will open a new chapter in the growth of Northeast and at the same time also open new vistas of opportunity, not only for women alone but for the entire population of the eight North Eastern States.

3)Schemes Related to Agriculture:-

• Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY):-
  • Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (Traditional Farming Improvement Programme) has been launched by Government of India to support and promote organic farming and thereby improving soil health. This will encourage farmers to adopt eco-friendly concept of cultivation and reduce their dependence on fertilizers and agricultural chemicals to improve yields
  • This is a cluster base programmee.
  • Groups of farmers would be motivated to take up organic farming under Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY). Fifty or more farmers will form a cluster having 50 acre land to take up the organic farming under the scheme.
  • In this way during three years 10,000 clusters will be formed covering 5.0 lakh acre area under organic farming. There will be no liability on the farmers for expenditure on certification.
  • Every farmer will be provided Rs. 20,000 per acre in three years for seed to harvesting of crops and to transport produce to the market.
  • Organic farming will be promoted by using traditional resources and the organic products will be linked with the market.
• Integrated Plant Nutrient Management:Soil Health Card :-
  
  • Soil health card to farmers with establishment of soil testing facility can help farmer customize their crop according to the soil test result there by enhancing productivity and ensuring financial sustainability for farmers.
• Per Drop More Crop :-
  
  • This is rather a concept or a theme to best utilize the available water resource and reducing wastage .
  • Agriculture takes 70% of our total water consumption.Hence method like drip irrigation , sprinkler irrigation etc can help in reducing the wastage of water used in agriculture.
  • Produce more in less land, less water and without any substantial top layer quality loss of soil.
• Pradhanmantri Gram Sinchai Yojana :-
  
  • This scheme envisages to provide irrigation for agriculture in the villages through multipronge approach.

Reform Related to Agriculture can be found here Agricultural Reform

4)Porous Liquid:-Can capture Co2

• Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have devised a class of liquids that feature permanent holes at the molecular level, in a development that could help manipulate gases in new and effective ways
• Porous materials are a jack-of-all-trades of the engineering world. Their larger surface area, lighter weight and filtering abilities are used to create high-performance batteries and supercapacitors, build lighweight supermaterials, or filter out CO2 before it leaves factory smokestacks.
• When it comes to carbon sequestration in particular, scientists have already come up with plenty of readily available materials – including clay and coffee grounds – to do the job. But while effective and inexpensive, such solid-state materials are not easily retrofitted to existing plants.
• To create a porous liquid, the scientists simply designed hollow cage molecules to place in a solvent. The solvent is chosen so its molecules are too big to enter the cages, leaving those spaces available for an external gas to fill. The resulting concentration of empty cages is about 500 times greater than in similar solutions

5)Mega Food park:-

• News – A new foodpark is opened in Telengana
• What is Food Park:-
  
  • The Mega Food Park is an inclusive concept which is aimed at establishing direct linkages from the farm to processing and on to the consumer markets, through a network of collection centres and Primary Processing Centres. Efficient logistics facilities will connect the collection centres to the primary processing centres, which in turn will be connected to a central processing centre.
  • The Mega Food Park will have a Central Processing Centre (CPC) as the nuclei of all value addition activities facilitated by Primary Processing Centres, which will act as point of aggregation and primary handling to provide ready to use raw materials to be processed further in the units to be set up in the CPC.
• Why Food Park:-
  • By processing the food , the shelf life of the food increases. The food which could easily be wasted in few days after processing can stay longer and thus reducing wastage in food.
• Challenges :-
  • Majority of the food park challenges are akin to other infrastructure project  challenges , prominent being Land acquisition.
  • Unlike other societies , for eg – USA and Europe , were processed food is consumed heavily. Indian society shows resilience in adapting to processed food. The resistance arises from the socio-cultural milieu . Processed food sells mostly in urban areas , but India lives in its villages and yet to be urbanized fully. Moreover the penchant for fresh food is quite strong in India.
  • Indian corporate interest in food sector and especially food processing has not been very promising.One of reason why we have few successful Indian brands such as Brittania.

6)Aditya – India’s first dedicated scientific mission to study the sun :-

• The ambitious solar mission will study the sun’s outer most layers, the corona and the chromosphere, collect data about coronal mass ejection and more, which will also yield information for space weather prediction
• It now aims to put a heavy satellite into what is called a halo orbit around the L1 point between the Sun and the Earth. This point is at a distance of about 1.5 million km from the earth. With the excitement about the Mars Orbiter Mission yet to settle down, this could be the next most complicated feat that ISRO has carried out till date.
• In a three-body problem such as this – with the earth and sun engaged in an elliptical orbit and a relatively very light, call it massless in comparison, satellite being placed in between – there are five so-called Lagrangian points in space where the light, third body — in our case, the satellite — may be placed so that it can maintain its position with respect to the two others. One of these is the L1 point, which is about 1.5 million km from the earth.
• A halo orbit would be a circular orbit around the L1 point. The satellite will have to use its own power (spend energy) to remain in position within in this orbit without losing its way. Such orbits have not been attempted too often
• Significance:-
  • Solar storms and space weather affect satellite operations. They may interfere with electronic circuitry of satellites and also, through enhanced drag (friction effects), impact satellite mission lifetimes. They also impact the positional accuracy of satellites and thus impact GPS navigational networks. Space weather also impacts telecommunications, satellite TV broadcasts which are dependent on satellite-based transmission. Hence the study of sun is significance in this regard.

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