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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 23 November 2022

::NATIONAL::

National Suicide Prevention Strategy

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare announced a National Suicide Prevention Strategy.

About:

It is the first of its kind in the country, with time-bound action plans and multi-sectoral collaborations to achieve reduction in suicide mortality by 10% by 2030.
The strategy broadly seeks to establish effective surveillance mechanisms for suicide within the next three years, establish psychiatric outpatient departments that will provide suicide prevention services through the District Mental Health Programme in all districts within the next five years.
It aims to integrate a mental well-being curriculum in all educational institutions within the next eight years.
It envisages developing guidelines for responsible media reporting of suicides, and restricting access to means of suicide.

Suicides in India:

In India, more than one lakh lives are lost every year to suicide, and it is the top killer in the 15-29 years category.
In the past three years, the suicide rate has increased from 10.2 to 11.3 per 1,00,000 population.
The most common reasons for suicide include family problems and illnesses, which account for 34% and 18% of all suicide-related deaths.

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‘Toilets 2.0’ campaign

Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched Toilets 2.0 campaign at a national event organised at Bengaluru, Karnataka on the occasion of World Toilet Day 2022.

About:

The campaign aims to change the face of public and community toilets in urban India through collective action involving citizens and Urban Local Bodies.

Campaign has five thematic areas:

People for Toilets: Cleaning and maintaining the community and public toilets.
Partners for Toilets: Adoption of Public toilets.
Design Toilets: Design Challenge.
Rate your Toilet: Promoting user feedback to improve public toilets and.
My thoughts - Our Toilets: Gathering public opinion for toilets

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::INTERNATIONAL::

India and Gabon Relations

India and Gabon held the first Foreign Office Consultations in New Delhi.
Both sides carried out a comprehensive review of the existing bilateral relations, including strengthening of cooperation in trade and economic relations, defence and maritime.

About:

The two sides also exchanged views on regional and international issues of mutual interest, including cooperation in the UN and other multilateral fora, climate change, International Solar Alliance and sustainable development.
India and Gabon have traditionally enjoyed warm and friendly relations, which are based on shared democratic values and vision.
The bilateral relationship has further strengthened in the past few years with opening of the Gabonese Mission in New Delhi and exchange of high-level visits.
The bilateral trade between India and Gabon is growing at a healthy rate and has touched 1.12 billion dollars in 2021-22 from 440 million dollars in 2017-18.
India is now the second-largest destination for Gabonese exports. Over 50 Indian companies have set up manufacturing units in the Gabon Special Economic Zone.

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India’s soft loans to neighbours up to $15 billion

The volume of India’s softloans to neighbouringcountries has increased fromabout $3 billion to almost$15 billion in the last eightyears.
Soft Loan is a loan with nointerest or a below-marketrate of interest. For ex, Line of CreditThey are often made bymultinational developmentbanks, affiliates of the WorldBank, or federalgovernments to developingcountries that would beunable to borrow at themarket rate.

Significance of Soft loandiplomacy for India:
Strategic:

Help India strategically counter the China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
It has the potential to replace China’s aggressive debt-trap policy.
Strengthens India’s credentials of contributing to global good and emergingas a world leader.

Economic:

Opens up doors for Indian firms to get access to new markets or resources.
Many of India’s investments are in extractive sectors such as infrastructure,logistics or the regulatory system which again helps the Indian companiesin terms of easier access to resources.

::Economy::

Government withdraws export duty on Steel

The removal of export duty on steel products will help the domestic metal producers pull up their profits with now having the freedom to explore overseas markets as well.
The government has cut the export duty on steel products and iron ore to nil with effect from November 19, 2022 -- six months after imposition of the levy on May 21.

About:

Steel is the world’s most important engineering and construction material commonly used in buildings and infrastructure,Automobiles, Equipments, Railways, Shiping, Defence, Space etc.
In India, the steel industry has strong forward and backward linkages leading to an output multiplier effect of nearly 1.4X on GDPand employment multiplier effect of 6.8X.
India is the second largest crude steel producer in the world, with a total production of 103 MT in FY21.

Initiatives taken by government for steel sector

National Steel Policy 2017: It aspired to achieve 300MT of steelmaking capacity by 2030-31.
FDI: 100% FDI through the automatic route is allowed in the Indian steel sector.

::SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY::

Dark Net

Union Home Minister While addressing a session on Global Trends in Terrorist Financing and Terrorism’ at ‘No Money for Terror’ Ministerial Conference on Counter-Terrorism Financing in New Delhihas stressed on the need for coordinated efforts to deal with the challenges posed by the use of dark net and virtual currencies like cryptocurrency by the terrorists.

About:

Dark Net (or Darknet), also known as the dark web, refers to the deep hidden internet platform that is used for narcotics sale, exchange of pornographic content and other illegal activities by using the secret alleys of the onion router (ToR) to stay away from the surveillance of law enforcement agencies.
Darknet is the part of the Internet below the private deep web that uses custom software and hidden networks superimposed on the architecture of the Internet.
Owing to its end-to-end encryption, darknet is considered very tough to crack when it comes to investigating criminal activities being rendered over it.

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How it operates?

The darkweb operates in secrecy using specialized browsers, that prevent eavesdropping and traffic analysis attacks.
It is very tough to penetrate owing to its end-to-end encryption.
The access to darknet is possible only through specialized browsers like Tor, Freenet, I2P and Tails to surf the darknet anonymously.
Tor (The Onion Router) is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication.
The privacy-centric browser like Tor routes the web page requests through proxy servers thus making your IP address untraceable.

The dark web vs. the deep web:

Both the dark and deep web share one thing in common: Neither can be found in search engine results.
The difference between them primarily lies in how their content is accessed.

1. Deep web pages can be accessed by anyone with a standard web browser who knows the URL.
2. Dark web pages, in contrast, require special software with the correct decryption key, as well as access rights and knowledge of where to find the content.

Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 23 November 2022