Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 27 September 2016

:: National ::

Declaring that “blood and water cannot flow together,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting of officials from the Water Resources and EAM to discuss the government’s options on the India-Pakistan Indus Waters Treaty.
While the meeting decided to suspend further water talks and increase the utilisation of rivers flowing through Jammu and Kashmir to maximise India’s share, there was no decision on either reviewing or abrogating the 1960 treaty.
The government decided to suspend talks on the Permanent Indus Commission, the dispute redressal mechanism that has met 112 times, until “terror comes to an end.”
According to Article VIII of the Indus Waters Treaty, the Commission must meet once a year, alternately in India and Pakistan. The last meeting was held in July 2016.
According to the sources, the Prime Minister held the meeting as “things have been difficult with Pakistan,” adding that, hence, “this was the appropriate time to review arrangements under the Indus Waters Treaty again.”

Troubled to see the amount of food being wasted in the big, fat Indian weddings, management graduate Ankit Kawatra came up with the solution to redistribute it among the hungry.
Mr. Kawatra, who left his corporate job to start ‘Feeding India’, is among the 17 people selected for the inaugural class of U.N. Young Leaders for Sustainable Development Goals for his initiative.
The young leaders were selected by the U.N. from more than 18,000 nominations from 186 countries.
He established his own NGO, Feeding India, which now claims to have fed 1 million meals with a network of 2,000 volunteers across 28 cities in the country.
They work towards solving hunger and malnutrition in India by redistributing excess food from weddings, corporate, canteens, banquets and households.

Pushing forward the scope of its workhorse rocket PSLV, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a total of eight satellites in two different orbits.
Besides the weather satellite SCATSAT-1, two satellites PRATAM and PISAT from Indian institutions, from Algeria (ALSAT1N, 1B and 2B), from Canada (NLS-19) and the United States (Pathfinder-1) were launched in the longest PSLV mission.
Earlier, ISRO was using separate rockets to launch satellites in different orbits and for the first time ISRO launched satellites in two different orbits in a single mission.
About 17 minutes after it took off from the First Launch Pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here at 9.12 a.m., the rocket placed SCATSAT-1 (371 kg) in the polar sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of 725 km.

India took its campaign to diplomatically isolate Pakistan to the United Nations, with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj asking the world community to hold to account countries that “nurture, peddle and export” terrorism.
A unified global strategy can defeat terrorism, “and if any nation refuses to join this global strategy, then we must isolate it,” she said, speaking in Hindi.
Countering Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who accused India of human rights violations while speaking at the U.N. last week, Ms. Swaraj sought to turn the tables on Islamabad.
“The brutality against the Baloch people represents the worst form of state oppression,” she said, referring to the ethnic minority in Pakistan.
The Minister elaborated on how India’s positions converged with the global concerns on three issues — terrorism, climate change and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
Her narrative also explains — at least partly — India’s decision to ratify the Paris climate pact, in an abrupt turnaround from its recent position that the national process for ratification was still in progress.
Ms. Swaraj reiterated PM Narendra Modi’s announcement on Sunday that India will ratify the pact on October 2, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj mentioned the name of alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist Bahadur Ali arrested in Kashmir two months ago, as a living proof of cross-border terrorism from Pakistan.

Japan’s top government spokesman warned China against expanding its military activity to the skies over disputed East China Sea islands after eight Chinese war-planes flew near the area over the weekend.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Japan scrambled at least one fighter jet after the planes passed over the Miyako Strait on Sunday, east of the Senkaku islands.
Mr. Suga acknowledged that the flights might be part of an exercise, but said that Japan would respond firmly to any violation of Japanese airspace.