Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 04 March 2022

::NATIONAL::

Trade and industry bodies, some tech companies from the US have initiated talks with senior government officials in India to form a new working group to discuss issues related to the data protection Bill, 2019.

About:

The new group, is likely to contain representatives from most of the big tech companies and will function differently from the currently operational India-US working group on information and communication technology (ICT).
Personal Data: Personal data pertains to characteristics, traits or attributes of identity, which can be used to identify an individual.
Non-Personal Data: Non-personal data includes aggregated data through which individuals cannot be identified.

Concerns raised about the bill:

Provisions of the Bill such as insistence on local storage of data and restrictions on cross-border flow of data.
India does not yet have large data centres for data localisation. Small Data centres are not very cost effective and do not meet the safety norms of the companies.
Inclusion of non-personal data will hamper policy decision by the corporates.

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) field assessment for seventh consecutive edition of world’s largest urban cleanliness survey, Swachh Survekshan (SS), was launched on 1st March 2022.

About:

Swachh Survekshan, conducted by MoHUA since 2016, is the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey.
Primary goal of SS is to encourage large scale citizen participation and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities better places to reside in.
It is conducted under the ambit of the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban).
It started in 2016 with 73 cities with million plus population, and covered 4,320 cities in 2021.

175 nation representatives endorsed the resolution at UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in Nairobi to End Plastic Pollutionand forge an international legally binding agreement by 2024.
As per the legally binding agreement, countries will be expected to develop, implement and update national action plan reflecting country-driven approaches to contribute to the objectives of the instrument.

About the resolution:

It is based on three initial draft resolutions of Peru, Rwanda and Japan.
It addresses the full lifecycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.
Establishes an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which will begin its work in 2022, with the ambition of completing a draft global legally binding agreement by the end of 2024.

Extent of plastic pollution:

Plastic pollution soared from two million tonnes in 1950, to 348 million tonnes in2017.This could double by 2040.
By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastic production, use and disposal, would account for 15% of allowed emissions.
More than 800 marine and coastal species are affected by this pollution through ingestion, entanglement, and other dangers.

Human rights groups accused Russia of using cluster bombs and vacuum bombs in the ongoing war.

What are cluster munitions?

The cluster munitions are non-precision weapons that are designed to injure or kill human beings indiscriminately over a large area, and to destroy vehicles and infrastructure such as runways, railway or power transmission lines.
They can be dropped from an aircraft or launched in a projectile that spins in flight, scattering many bomblets as it travels.
Many of these bomblets end up not exploding, but continue to lie on the ground, often partially or fully hidden and difficult to locate and remove, posing a threat to the civilian population for long after the fighting has ceased.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions specifically identifies ‘cluster munition remnants’, which include ‘failed cluster munitions, abandoned cluster munitions, unexploded submunitions and unexploded bomblets’.
Countries that have ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions are prohibited from using cluster bombs.
As of date, there are 110 state parties to the convention, and 13 other countries have signed up but are yet to ratify it.
India, Russia, Ukraine are not signatories.

What is a thermobaric weapon?

Thermobaric weapons — also known as aerosol bombs, fuel air explosives, or vaccum bombs — use oxygen from the air for a large, high-temperature blast.
A thermobaric weapon causes significantly greater devastation than a conventional bomb of comparable size.
The weapons, which go off in two separate stages, can be fired as rockets from tank-mounted launchers or dropped from aircraft.
As they hit their target, a first explosion splits open the bomb’s fuel container, releasing a cloud of fuel and metal particles that spreads over a large area.
A second explosion then occurs, igniting the aerosol cloud into a giant ball of fire and sending out intense blast waves that can destroy even reinforced buildings or equipment and vaporise human beings.

Considering the importance of air connectivity to the capital city of Arunachal Pradesh, AAI has undertaken the work of constructing a Greenfield Airport in Hollongi, 15 Kms from Itanagar.

About:

Itanagar Airport is an under-construction greenfield airport that is being constructed at Hollongi, which is situated 14 kilometres south of Itanagar, in the Papum Pare district of Arunachal Pradesh, India.
The terminal will be an energy efficient building provisioned with Rain Water Harvesting system and sustainable landscape. The development work also includes construction of ATC Tower cum Technical Block, Fire station, Medical Centre and other ancillary works.
It is being built by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) over an area of 320 hectares.
The airport is planned for operationalization on 15thAugust 2022.

Independent experts have criticised a recent modelling study from a group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur that predicts a fourth COVID wave in India around June.
The study, uploaded on the preprint server, Medrxiv, which hosts scientific work that is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal forecasts the wave to begin precisely on June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022 and ending on October 24, 2022.

About:

The SUTRA model has disagreed with the underlying assumptions of the latest study that predicts a fourth COVID wave in India around June.
SUTRA is a mathematical model used for forecasting pandemics developed at IIT-Kanpur.
It is being used to track the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
It explicitly accounts for large numbers of undetected asymptomatic patients; spatial spread of pandemic over time and numerically stable methods for estimating the values of all the parameters using the daily new infections data series.