Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 23 February 2022

::NATIONAL::

The Supreme Court decided to explore the possibility for enforcing the Fundamental Duties as enshrined in the Constitution and agreed to examine a PIL seeking those moral obligations of the duties be converted into legal commitments by enacting a law.

About:

A bench of Justicesissued notice to the Centre and states seeking their response on making a comprehensive well-defined laws/rules.
To ensuring adherence to the provisions of Part IV-A of the Constitution requiring the citizens to perform their Fundamental Duties properly.
The Fundamental Duties obligate all citizens to respect the national symbols of India, including the Constitution, to cherish its heritage, and preserve its composite culture.
They also obligate all Indians to promote the spirit of common brotherhood, protect environment and public property, develop scientific temper, humanism and abjure violence.

Fundamental Duties:

Fundamental Duties of citizens were added to Constitution in Part IV A by 42ndAmendment 1976, upon recommendations of Swaran Singh Committee.
They are not legally enforceable.
The concept of Fundamental duties was taken from the USSR.
They are confined to citizens only and do not extend to foreigners.

The Tamil Nadu government defended the Vanniyar quota law in the Supreme Court, saying the State is the front runner in social justice.

Key highlights:

The State has challenged a Madras High Court decision to quash a State law that granted internal reservation at 10.5% to Vanniyakula Kshatriya and 7% and 2.5% to other communities within Most Backward Classes.
Tamil Nadu has a ‘history of granting reservation traceable to the year 1854 onwards, including the caste census being taken in 1872’.
The High Court’s decision to quash the law was based on the ground that the State has no legislative competence and the special reservation was provided with caste as basis and without quantifiable data.
The Most Backward Classes within the Backward Classes were identified in Tamil Nadu as early as in 1957, when they were considered equivalent to Scheduled Castes but without the factor of untouchability.
It said some of these communities were impacted by the criminal tribes’ laws of the British and enlisted as Most Backward Classes.
The recommendation for 10.5% reservation to the Vanniyakula Kshatriya was made in commensuration with their population as enumerated in a survey held in 1983 by the Tamil Nadu Second Backward Classes Commission.
The State had enacted the Act in 2021 only based on adequate authenticated data on population of the Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities enumerated by the Tamil Nadu Second Backward Classes Commission in 1983.

India and France have adopted a road map on the ‘blue economy’ and ocean governance to enhance partnership for the exploitation and preservation of marine resources through economic, infrastructure and scientific cooperation.

Key highlights:

The road map is part of measures agreed on by the two ministers to deepen the bilateral strategic partnership, especially in trade and investments, defence and security, health, education, research and innovation, energy and climate change.
France is among India’s closest strategic partners in Europe, and the two sides are also working with other countries in areas such as critical technologies and supply chains.
The ‘India-France Roadmap on the Blue Economy and Ocean Governance’ adopted by the two sides envisages enhancing partnership in blue economy through institutional, economic, infrastructure and scientific cooperation.
Blue economy:
Blue economy is sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improvedlivelihoods and jobs, while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.
In India it comprises 4.1% of its total economy. Fisheries, deep sea mining, and offshore oiland gas make up a large section of India’s blue economy.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) and Royal Air Force of Oman (RAFO) are scheduled to participate in a bilateral exercise named Eastern Bridge-VI from 21 to 25 February 2022 at Air Force Station Jodhpur.

About:

This would be the sixth edition of the exercise.
It will provide an opportunity to enhance operational capability and interoperability between the two Air Forces.
The exercise will promote professional interaction, exchange of experiences and enhancement of operational knowledge, besides strengthening bilateral relations between the two countries.

India’s air arsenal in action

For Exercise Eastern Bridge VI, IAF’s contingent will be in action, which comprises MiG-29, Mirage 2000, Jaguar aircraft among others. Earlier Eastern Bridge V was held in October 2019 at the Air Force Base Masirah, Oman.
The IAF contingent at that time comprised MiG-29 and C-17 aircraft. It was the first time that MIG-29 fighter aircraft participated in an International exercise outside India.
Oman: India’s imperative defence partner
Oman is considered one of the strongest defence partners of India in the Gulf region, and all three services have bilateral exchanges and exercises with Oman’s services.

Cashew Processors and Exporters based in Tamil Nadu have sought GI tag for Panruti Cashews.

About:

It is known as the‘goldmine’of Cuddalore, demand for Panruti Cashew is huge because of its uniquetaste and quality.
A GI is a sign used on products that have a specific geographical origin and possess qualities ora reputation that are due to that origin.
Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 seeks to provide forthe registration and better protection of GI relating to goods in India.

Meta announced in January that it is building an AI supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).

About:

Meta considers the RSC as a powerful supercomputer capable of quintillions of operations per second.
It can perform tasks like translating text between languages and help identify potentially harmful content on Meta’s platform.
The RSC, compared with Meta’s legacy production and research infrastructure, can run computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, and train large-scale natural language processing (NLP) models three times faster.
Meta estimates that a model with billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared to the nine weeks it was before.
RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs.