10-03-22 Daily-Kerala-KPSC Current Affairs

Forest revenue that contributes a significant share to the States non-tax revenue has witnessed a steady decline since 2018.

The Economic Review 2021 which recorded the trends in forest revenue from 2017-18 to 2020-21 found the gradual fall coincided with the decrease in timber production during the last few years.

According to official statistics, the revenue from the Forestry sector by way of sale of timber and other forest produce was 236.8 crore in 2020-21. The returns have declined from 287.21 crore and 251.45 crore in 2018-19 and in 2019-20 respectively.

Notably, the slump began after 2018 when the Forest department had achieved a 17% hike in revenue from 245.42 crore in 2017-18.

The area under forest plantations also decreased marginally by 1.2% from 1.563 lakh hectares in 2019-20 to 1.544 lakh hectares in 2020-21.

Timber sale that generally accounts for over 90% of the forest revenue also fell from 226.52 crore in 2019-20 to 216.82 crore in 2020-21. During the period, the production of teak decreased by 7,402 cubic metres, despite there being a marked increase of 645 hectares in teak plantation. The government has attributed the recent drop in forest revenue to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In spite of a glum scenario, certain other products including honey, reeds, sandalwood and acacia mangium witnessed an increase in production from 2019 to 2020. Among them, sandalwood production increased from 11.7% during the period.

Indian Scientists have designed an electrocatalyst system for energy-efficient hydrogen production with the help of electrolysis of urea. The urea electrolysis is helpful towards urea-based waste treatment with low-cost hydrogen production. This can be utilized for energy production towards our country’s benefits.

The energy requirement for production of hydrogen through water electrolysis can be reduced by 70 % through urea electrolysis. The energy-intensive counterpart of water splitting, Oxygen evolution, can be replaced with urea oxidation in urea electrolysis. The low-cost, earth-abundant Ni-based catalysts are widely applied for this process. The main challenge associated with urea oxidation is retaining the prolonged activity of the Catalyst as the strong adsorption of the reactive intermediate (COx) on the active site, referred to as catalyst poisoning, causes activity loss.

Union Labour and EMPLOYMENT Minister Bhupender Yadav launched the Donate-a-Pension programme under Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-Dhan (PM-SYM) for people to contribute to the pension fund of their support staff.

It is an initiative under (PM-SYM) pension scheme where citizens can donate the premium contribution of their immediate support staff such as domestic workers, drivers, helpers etc,

The Donate-a-Pension programme which was launched today is part of many initiatives by the Labour Ministry to be launched in the Iconic Week being celebrated by the Ministry from March 7 to 13.

The objective of National Festival is to hear the voice of youth between 18 and less than 25 years of age, who will join various careers in coming years, including public Services.National Youth Parliament Festival (NYPF) is based on the idea given by Prime Minister in his Mann Ki Baat Address on 31st December 2017.

Taking inspiration from the idea of Prime Minister, the first NYPF 2019 was organised from 12 January to 27 February 2019 at District, State & National level with the theme Be the Voice of New India and Find solutions and Contribute to Policy.

National Youth Festival is celebrated every year from 12th to 16th January. 12th January being the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, is observed as National Youth Day. This year, NYPF is also being organized along with the National Youth Festival.

Vudris the local name for Karewas in Kashmiri language.

In the Kashmiri dialect,the term Karewa means elevated table land.

Firstly, this term wasused by Godwin Austin in 1859 and later on by Lydekker in 1878forunconsolidated to semi-consolidated sand clay conglomerate sequence.

Karewas are thethick deposits of glacial clay and other materials embedded with moraines.These are unconsolidatedlacustrine deposits.Lacustrine means associated with lakes

A Made in India Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” has been installed at IIT Roorkee on Monday by B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman, Board of Governors, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. The establishment of 1.66 PFLOPS (Peta Floating-Point Operations Per Second) supercomputing at IIT Roorkee by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has been built under the approach of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The new high-performance computational (HPC) facility would aid researchers to solve complex problems of national importance and global significance. The new HPC will serve as an essential compute Environment for the modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work.”

By March 8, almost all Indians were evacuated from Ukraine, under a special effort codenamed Operation Ganga, starting from February 24, when the invasion began. The last of the stranded Indians, from Sumy University, have also been evacuated to safety in neighbouring Poland, Romania etc.

This was possible with support from the Russian and Ukraine governments under the `Green Corridor’ facility they have jointly arranged.

Its the first of its kind mission, with the aim of monitoring the unpredictable and active Sun and help protect the Earth from its outbursts.

ESA Vigil will be the first of its kind. By keeping an eagle eye on the ‘side’ of the Sun, the spacecraft will stream a constant feed of near real-time data on potentially hazardous solar activity, before it rolls into view from Earth.

The mission will give us advance warning of oncoming solar storms and therefore more time to protect spacecraft in orbit, on the ground and explorers now and in the future, unshielded by Earth’s Magnetic Field and vulnerable to our star’s violent outbursts.