(FREE) UPSC Current Affairs 2024 PDF

Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 20 March 2021

::NATIONAL::

The Lok Sabha passed The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order (Amendment) Bill, 2021, that seeks to put seven castes under one nomenclature of “Devendrakula Vellalars” with some exceptions for some of the castes in certain districts of Tamil Nadu.
The castes include Devendrakulathan, Kadaiyan, Kalladi, Kudumban, Pallan, Pannadi and Vathiriyan.
The State government had earlier accepted a recommendation of a committee to reclassify the seven sub sects under the generic name ‘Devendrakula Velalar’ and forwarded it to the Centre.
The change in nomenclature was a long pending demand of the community and did not involve either the deletion or addition of any community in its ambit.
The reason why a whole new addition wasn’t made to the Scheduled Castes list was to ensure that old caste certificates issued to these communities under the old name not be rejected.

It was launched by Ministry of Jal Shakti (MoJS) in 2020.
It aims to nudge states and all stakeholders to create Rain Water Harvesting Structures suitable to climatic conditions and sub-soil strata, with people's active participation.
Under this, activities that are taken up includes drives to make check dams, water harvesting pits; removal of obstructions in the channels; repairs to step-wells and using defunct bore-wells etc.
To facilitate these activities, states have been requested to open Rain Centers in each district.

Russia has deployed deep underwater telescope, named Baikal-GVD in Lake Baikal.
The telescope is designed to search for neutrinos, which are nearly massless subatomic particles with no electrical charge. Neutrinos are everywhere, but Lake they interact so weakly with the forces around them that they're hugely challenging to detect.
Lake Baikal is situated in south-east Siberia, and is the oldest (25 million/years) and deepest (1,700 m) lake in the world.
It contains 20% of the world's total unfrozen freshwater reserve. Known as the Galapagos of Russia.
It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

An earthquake struck north-eastern Japan, hitting areas devastated by the 2011 disaster and generating a tsunami of one metre.
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, the quake hit the coast of Miyagi Prefecture at 6.26 p.m. (0926 GMT) and had a magnitude of 7.2 at a depth of 60km (40miles).

State-owned Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. has entered into a joint venture with Israel-based battery technology startup Phinergy to develop aluminium-air technology-based battery systems for electric vehicles and stationary storage, as well as hydrogen storage solutions.

What is an aluminium-air battery?

Aluminium-air batteries are said to be a lower cost and more energy-dense alternative to lithium-ion batteries which are currently in widespread use for electric vehicles in India.
Aluminium-air batteries utilise oxygen in the air which reacts with an aluminium hydroxide solution to oxidise the aluminium and produce electricity.
Aluminium-air batteries cannot be recharged like lithium-ion batteries. Therefore, large scale use of aluminium-air battery based vehicles would require the wide availability of battery swapping stations.

Scientists have designed an integrated catalytic system comprising of a photosensitizer (molecules which absorb light and transfer the electron from the incident light into another nearby molecule) that can harness solar power and a catalytic centre that can eventually reduce CO2.
It is based on nature's own process of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, namely photosynthesis.
Photosynthesis is the process used by plants, algae and certain bacteria to harness energy from sunlight and turn it into chemical energy.
Technology is similar to Artificial leaf, that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and which could eventually be used to develop a sustainable liquid fuel.