Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 07 March 2022

::NATIONAL::

Meghalaya has become the 9th state to withdraw the general consent to the CBI investigation.
Earlier, the Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan,West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Kerala have withdrawntheir general consent.

What is general consent?

The CBI is governed by The Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act, 1946, and it must mandatorily obtain the consent of the state government concerned before beginning to investigate a crime in a state.
Section 6 of The DSPE Act (“Consent of State Government to exercise of powers and jurisdiction”) says: “Nothing contained in section 5 (titled “Extension of powers and jurisdiction of special police establishment to other areas”) shall be deemed to enable any member of the Delhi Special Police Establishment to exercise powers and jurisdiction in any area in a State, not being a Union territory or railway area, without the consent of the Government of that State.”
The CBI’s position is in this respect different from that of the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is governed by The NIA Act, 2008, and has jurisdiction across the country.
The consent of the state government to CBI can be either case-specific or general.
General consent is normally given by states to help the CBI in seamless investigation of cases of corruption against central government employees in their states.
This is consent by default, in the absence of which the CBI would have to apply to the state government in every case, and before taking even small actions.

StreeManoraksha Projectwas launched by Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) in collaboration withNational Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS).

About:

NIMHANS is an Institute of National Importance, for patient care and academic pursuit in thefield of mental health and neurosciences.
It is aimed at extending mental health training to 6000 One-Stop Center (OSC) functionariesacross India.
OSC Scheme (by MoWCD) is being implemented since 2015 to provide integrated support andassistance to women affected by violence and in distress, both in private and public spaces.
They provide assistance to women in medical, legal, and crime-related matters.

The V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg has come out with their annual democracy report.

The study is titled ‘Democracy Report 2022: Autocratisation Changing Nature?’. The V-Dem institute uses aggregate expert judgments to produce estimates of critical concepts by gathering data from a pool of over 3,700 country experts who provide judgments on different concepts and cases.
The report classifies countries into four regime types based on their score in the Liberal Democratic Index (LDI): Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy.
It classifies India as an electoral autocracy ranking it 93rd on the LDI, out of 179 countries.
Sweden topped the LDI index, other Scandinavian countries such as Denmark and Norway, along with Costa Rica and New Zealand make up the top five in liberal democracy rankings.
One of the biggest drivers of autocratisation is “toxic polarisation”, a dominant trend in 40 countries, as opposed to 5 countries that showed rising polarisation in 2011.

Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant was hit by Russian shelling, sparking a fire and raising fears of a disaster that could affect all of central Europe for decades, like the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.

About:

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in southeastern Ukraine is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and among the 10 largest in the world.
It was built by the Soviet Union near the city of Enerhodar, on the southern shore of the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnieper river.
It is operated by Energoatom, who operate Ukraine’s three other nuclear power stations also.
The plant has 6 VVER-1000 pressurized light water nuclear reactors (PWR).

Key concern:

Concerns faded after Ukrainian authorities announced that the fire had been extinguished, and while there was damage to the reactor compartment, the safety of the unit was not affected.
But even though the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is of a different design than Chernobyl and is protected from fire, nuclear safety experts and the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that waging war in and around such facilities presents extreme risks.

Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, and other government officials inspected the functioning of Kavach, an automatic train collision protection system, near Vikarabad district.

About:

Kavach, the indigenously-developed train collision avoidance system (TCAS).
It is a set of electronic devices and Radio Frequency Identification devicesinstalled in locomotives, in the signalling system and tracks.
These communicate with each other using ultra-high radio frequencies tocontrol the brakes of trains and also alert drivers.
It is in development since 2012 and is developed by Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) in collaboration with Indian industry and trials facilitated by South Central Railway.

Salient features include:

It automatically takes over and applies sudden brakes — in case of a humanerror in jumping a red signal and prevents rear-end collisions too when theyare on the same line.
The hooter sounds by itself when a level crossing is approached helping theloco-pilots during fog conditions when visibility.

The Indian researchers have conclusively refuted a recent claim of the discovery of a radio wave signal from cosmic dawn, the time in the infancy of our Universe when the first stars and galaxies came into existence.

Key highlights:

Using indigenously invented and built SARAS (Shaped Antenna measurement of the background Radio Spectrum) 3 radio telescope, Indian researchers conclusivelyrefuted a recent claim (2018) of the discovery of a radio wave signal from cosmic dawn.
Cosmic dawn is the time in the infancy of Universe when the first stars and galaxies came intoexistence.

About SARAS 3 radiotelescope: