Comprehensive Current affairs 4 September 2020

 Central government blocks another set of Chinese mobile apps in India.

The Government has blocked 118 mobile apps including PUBG which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, Defence of India, Security of State and Public Order. The move will safeguard the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users.This decision is a targeted move to ensure safety, security and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace. The decision to ban such Apps was taken by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology as it has received many complaints from various sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.

The Ministry in a statement said, the compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereigntyand integrity of India, is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures.

It said, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, of Home Ministry has also sent an exhaustive recommendation for blocking these malicious apps. It said, there have been similar bipartisan concerns, flagged by various public representatives, both outside and inside the Parliament of India.

The Ministry said, there has been a strong chorus in the public space to take strict action against Apps that harm India’s sovereignty as well as the privacy of citizens.

Government launches mission Karmayodha to promote capacity building of civil servants.

The Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister NarendraModi has given its nod to Mission Karmayogi - National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building. The scheme will lay the foundation for capacity building for Civil Servants so that they remain entrenched in Indian culture while they learn from best practices across the world.

Mission Karmayogi aims to prepare the Indian Civil Servants for future by making them more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled. Briefing media yesterday, Union Minister PrakashJavadekar said, the Karmayogi scheme will be the biggest Human Resource development programme of the government.

The institutional framework will consist of Prime Minister's Public Human Resources (HR) Council, Capacity Building Commission, Special Purpose Vehicle for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training, and Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary.

 Defence minister to attend SCO minister’s meet at Russia.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has reached Russia to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Defence Ministers’ Meet. The Defence Ministers of all eight SCO member nations are expected to deliberate on regional security challenges like terrorism and extremism and ways to deal with them collectively in Moscow tomorrow.

➡Mr. Singh is visiting Moscow at the invitation of Russian Defence Minister General ShergeiShoigu. During his three day visit, Mr Singh will also take part in the meeting of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

➡The Defence Minister said in a tweet that he will be meeting his Russian counterpart General Shoigu to discuss bilateral cooperation and issues of mutual interest. He said, India and Russia are privileged Strategic Partners and he is looking forward to further this partnership during the visit.

➡AIR correspondent reports that it is Mr Singh's second visit to Moscow since June. He had represented India at the Victory Day Parade in Moscow on 24th of June that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

➡Russia has also invited External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar to attend the SCO Foreign Ministers' meeting on the 10th of this month.

Saudi Arabia allows UAE flights to overfly its Kingdom

Saudi Arabia has agreed to allow UAE flights to “all countries” to overfly the kingdom, state media reported on Wednesday, days after allowing an Israeli aircraft to pass over en route to Abu Dhabi.

Saudi Arabia has accepted an Emirati request to allow “crossing the kingdom’s airspace for flights heading to the UAE and departing from it to all countries”, the official Saudi Press Agency said, citing a source from the civil aviation authority. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Monday’s historic first commercial flight of an Israeli aircraft direct to the UAE across Saudi Arabia would not be the last.

“Israeli planes and those from all countries will be able to fly directly from Israel to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and back,” Mr. Netanyahu said, without giving any timeline.

The announcements come after a U.S.-Israeli delegation visited Abu Dhabi on Monday, on the first direct commercial flight from Tel Aviv.

India ranks in top 50 in latest Global Innovation Index rankings.

India ranked in the top 50 countries for the first time in the Global Innovation Index, which was released today. India jumped four positions to rank at 48th since 2019.

The index compiled by World Intellectual Property Index (WIPO) presented the latest global trends and annual innovation ranking for 131 countries.

Moving up four positions since last year, India became the third most innovative lower middle economy in the world. According to the report jump can be attributed to newly available indicators and improvements in various areas of the GII.

India ranks in the top 15 in indicators such as ICT services exports, government online services, graduates in science and engineering and R&D-intensive global companies.

The report added that due to universities like IIT Delhi and Bombay, IIS Bengaluru and other top scientific publications, India is the lower middle-income economy with the highest innovation.

JalShakti ministry issues advisory for assuring safe water service to homes.

The Ministry of Jal Shakti has issued supplementary advisory for assured safe water service delivery to every home with focus on various aspects. The Ministry said, hand-washing arrangements with soap and water at the entrance of every water supply establishment may be made to allow everyone to practice it before entering and when leaving.

It said, potable water arrangements are to be ensured at all camp sites, schools, hostels that have been turned into quarantine and isolation centres. The arrangements may include tanker water

 supply, providing temporary stand-posts from near-by potable water sources, and repairing existing functional infrastructure wherever required.

It also advised to undertake a quick gap assessment on potable water facilities in health care centres and immediate arrangements should be made to ensure safe and clean water in all health care facilities.

It also suggested promoting physical distancing of communities while fetching water. It said, wherever community members fetch water from stand posts, efforts should be made to widely communicate the importance of physical distance by maintaining a 6 feet gap, covering their mouth and nose. It said, all persons must wash hands thoroughly before fetching water.

INDRA-2020 military exercise to be held at Andaman sea.

India and Russia are to hold bilateral naval exercise INDRA 2020 in Andaman Sea, close to strategic Strait of Malacca. The exercise is being conducted while the Indian Navy is on high operational alert due to the standoff with China in Ladakh.

➡ Three Russian Naval ships are to take part in the exercise on September 4 and 5. The exercise comes just after India withdrew from Kavkaz-2020 multinational exercise that is to be held in Russia. Also, it coincides with Defence Minister Raj Nath Singh’s visit to Russia for Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

➡Over 60,000 commercial vessels traverse each year through the Andaman waters. China is increasing its presence in the region. Chinese Naval vessels camouflaged as fishing boats have been sighted in the region.

JK govt set up a 10-member council for the conservation of biological diversity.

➡The Jammu & Kashmir government has set up a 10-member council for conservation of biological diversity and sustainable use of its components in the Union territory, officials said. As

per an order issued by the General Administrative Department (GAD), sanction has been accorded to constitute the Jammu and Kashmir Biodiversity Council.

The Council will be headed by the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests as chairman of the 10-member panel.

The council will include five non-official members.

The director of the Forest Research Institute, J&K, will serve as the member secretary of the council.

Other members are the chief wildlife warden, a representative of the Department of Forest, and others. Non-official members include former IFS officers Dr C M Seth, Dr Om Prakash Sharma, professor Geeta Sumbli, Dr Anzar Khuroo and Dr.Sushi Verma.

The term of office of the non-official members of the council will be for a period of three years.

The council will constitute a fund known as "Jammu and Kashmir Biodiversity Council Fund".

All the charges, fees, and benefit sharing amount that are received by the council will be credited to the fund.

The council will perform the functions within the jurisdiction of the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir.

The council will function upon the consultation with the National Biodiversity Authority, notify the format and procedures for seeking approvals with regard to biodiversity issues.

World University Rankings realised.

Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2021 has been released and under the overall category, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, has topped the list. From India, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, has been placed in the 301-350 category in overall global rankings.

Highlights:

The IISc Bengaluru has slightly improved its overall score, from 45.6 to 47.9.

The seven older IITs did not participate in the THE-World University Rankings 2020.

The THE World University Rankings 2021 includes more than 1,500 universities across 93 countries and regions in 2020.

The participating universities are ranked based on their performance in knowledge transfer, teaching, research, and international outlook.

THE World University Rankings analyzed more than 80 million citations across over 13 million research publications and included survey responses from 22,000 scholars globally.

EVIN.

Electronic vaccine intelligence network ensured essential immunisation services

Electronic vaccine intelligence network (eVIN) is an indigenously developed technological solution aimed at strengthening universal immunization by providing real-time information on vaccine stocks and flows.

It combines:

Technology: to facilitate evidence-based decision-making.

Governance: to ensure efficient vaccine logistics management.

Human Resources: to empower state cold chain network by capacity building of government cold chain handlers;

eVIN helps to create a big data architecture that generates actionable analytics encouraging data-driven decision-making and consumption-based planning leading to cost savings.

It also provides the potential to be leveraged for any new vaccine.

At present, eVIN has reached 32 States and UTs (Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Ladakh and Sikkim are remaining).

At present, 23,507 cold chain points across 22 States and 2 UTs routinely use eVIN Vaccine availability at all times has increased to 99% in most health centres.

Presently, many states are using the eVIN application with 100% adherence rate to track State-specific Covid-19 material supplies, ensure availability and raise alerts in case of shortage of 81 essential drugs and equipment.

Special focus on mains..

Q.)Discuss the significance of Institutions of Eminence scheme as under National institutional tanking framework.

Context:

The best indicators of a university’s performance are the learning outcomes and how its education has impacted the students and society.

The hype surrounding the announcement of world university rankings by international ranking organisations is unfortunate.

Regardless of whether the rankings are beneficial or not, more universities than ever before want to get into these rankings.

The obsession to be within the top 100 universities in the world is exasperating.

Since there is a potential danger of creating elitism among universities through this ranking, lower-ranked universities may lose out on many counts.

Some top-ranked universities want to collaborate only with other top-ranked universities, impairingthe less fortunate ones to further sink.

 Perception:

International ranking organisations also force universities to alter their core missions.

This has happened with JNU. Although JNU ranks between 100 and 200 in certain disciplines, it does not find a place in world university rankings. The reason is JNU does not offer many undergraduate programmes.

We were indirectly told to start more undergraduate programmes in order to scale the ranking order while our university is predominantly a research-oriented institution.

First, let me state the obvious. Indian institutions lose out on perception, which carries almost 50 per cent weightage in many world university ranking schemes.

Psychologists know that perception is a result of different stimuli such as knowledge, memories, and expectancies of people.

While one can quantitatively measure the correlation between stimuli and perception, perception cannot be a quantifiable standalone parameter.

Therefore, perception as a major component in the ranking process can easily lead to inaccurate or unreasonable conclusions.

Citations:

Rightly or wrongly, international ranking organisations use citations as a primary indicator of productivity and scientific impact a discipline makes.

However, studies show that the number of citations per paper is highest in multidisciplinary sciences, general internal medicine, and biochemistry.

It is the lowest in subjects such as visual and performing arts, literature and architecture.

It is nobody’s case that the latter subjects are of any less importance.

 By making citations of published papers from a university as a strong parameter for rankings, we seem to have developed an inexplicable blind spot when it comes to the differences among subject disciplines.

It is no wonder that universities such as JNU, whose student intake in science research programmes is less as compared to the other disciplines, will loose out in world university rankings although it has been rated as the second-best university in India.

Rigidity and lack of transparency:

International ranking organisations are too rigid in their methodology and are not willing to add either additional parameters or change the weightage of current parameters.

They are disinclined to employ meaningful and universally fair benchmarks of quality and performance.

This is an absolute requisite to take into account the diversity that prevails among the universities.

Some Indian higher education institutions even decided not to participate in the world university rankings alleging a lack of transparency in the parameters that are used in the ranking process.

Since universities are complex organisations with multiple objectives, comparing universities using a single numerical value is as ineffectual as comparing a civil engineer with a biologist or a linguist and a dancer.

Hence, the danger that such skewed world rankings will downgrade the university education to a mere commodity is a realistic trepidation.

This inelastic stance of ranking organisations has forced more than 70 countries to have their own national ranking systems for higher educational institutions.

National institutional tanking framework:

NIRF will stimulate healthy competition among Indian educational institutes, which should eventually lead to a world-class Indian educational system.

This system will act as a catalyst for the transformation of local universities to world-class institutions.

The MHRD established the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in 2016.

The parameters used by NIRF for ranking Indian institutions are also most suited for many other countries — among the parameters are teaching, learning & resources, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity and peer perception.

Unlike international ranking organisations, NIRF gives only 10 per cent weightage for perception.

In 2016, the NIRF rankings were given in four categories — University, Engineering, Management and Pharmacy. College, Medical, Law, Architecture and Dental were added in 2020.

This shows how NIRF is refining its ranking methodology by taking inputs from the stakeholders, which the international ranking organisations seldom do.

No right-minded person can plausibly argue against such a ranking system, which recognises and promotes the diversity and intrinsic strengths of Indian educational institutes.

Conclusion:

International ranking organisations are often sightless about what it takes to build a world-class educational system as compared to a world-class university.

If a country has a world-class educational system with a focus on innovation, best teaching-learning processes, research-oriented towards social good, affirmative action plans for inclusive and accessible education, it will have a more visible social and economic impact.

Indian higher educational institutes need to ask themselves: What positive role can they play in improving the quality of higher education?

What can we do to adopt innovative approaches to become future ready? And they need to act on those questions to make a change and plan beyond what is obvious.