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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 15 October 2014

National

Cyclone Hudhud damages Vizag steel plant

• All major industrial units in Visakhapatnam have suffered extensive damage in Cyclone Hudhud. The international airport is likely to resume commercial operations on a limited scale in a week.
• A public sector official said it was difficult to quantify loss as some more time was needed for assessing the extent of damage.
• Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd., the corporate identity of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, hit hard by grid failure, has shut down operations. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the damage to the plant was estimated at Rs. 700 crore.
• The hull shop and other infrastructure of Hindustan Shipyard Ltd., a Defence Ministry enterprise, were blown away. Heavy winds not only uprooted communication installations but also blew away sheds and workshops. Telephones, both landline and mobile, are dead. Thin attendance was reported at various factories.
• “It’s a colossal loss to the industries. We hope that with timely restoration effort, normality is brought back soon,” CII Vizag Zone Chairman and former Deputy Chairman of Visakhapatnam Port G.V.L. Satya Kumar said.
• The Visakhapatnam and the Gangavaram ports, which together handle 85 million tonnes, have suspended operations.

PSLV launch on October 16

• A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C26) carrying the 1,425-kg Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS-1C) will be launched from Sriharikota at 1.32 a.m.
• The countdown is progressing smoothly and the vehicle’s fourth stage has been filled with liquid propellants. The PSLV-C26 is a four-stage vehicle, with the first and third stages using solid propellants and the second and fourth, liquid fuel.
• The MST is a massive structure in which the four stages of the PSLV are stacked up on the launch platform. A few hours before the lift-off, the MST will be wheeled a kilometre away.
• “Things are normal. There is no problem,” said K. Sivan, Director, Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, and Indian Space Research Organisation.

New Bill in winter session for total ban on child labour

• Among the bills up for consideration in the winter session of Parliament is the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment (CLPRA) Bill, pending since December 2012. The proposed amendments to the Act will for the first time ban employment of children below 14 years in any occupation, bringing the law in consistency with the Right to Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009. The Bill prohibits employment of adolescents aged 14-18 years in hazardous occupations.
• The Ministry had sought public comments on the CLPRA Bill 2012 this June. A majority of the changes in the proposed Bill are the same as those in the Bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha by UPA Minister for Labour and Employment Mallikarjun Kharge in December 2012.
• “The Bill will regulate conditions of work for adolescents, and of children working in audio-visual entertainment industry. In 1996, the Supreme Court had prescribed a penalty of Rs. 20,000 from employers and Rs. 5,000 from State government for every child worker rescued. This will now be introduced in law and indexed to price rise,” a senior official in the Ministry of Labour and Employment said.
• The 1986 law prohibits employing children only in certain occupations such as mines, work in hazardous process and with inflammable substances or explosives.
• Minors working in middle class homes as domestic workers and those employed at hotels, dhabas were included as a category of child labourers only after an amendment in 2006.
• The Standing Committee on Labour and Employment under D.S. Chauhan had in its report on CLPRA Bill, in December 2013, recommended that the Bill give details for regulation for prescribing the conditions of work for adolescents — criteria for wages, hours of work, settlement of disputes. This was incorporated. It had suggested that adolescents should have completed Class VIII before being allowed to join an occupation. It suggested the explicit exception in the Bill granted to children helping their family after school hours be deleted. Both suggestions were not accepted.

Coastal cities need to be climate-proof: study

• A devastated Vishakhapatnam has brought home the need for coastal cities to be climate resilient in terms of extreme events with respect to preparation and infrastructure. Recent studies indicate that there is a long way to go in achieving this. Both the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 and the Environment Ministry had said there would be a high likelihood of increase in the intensity of cyclonic events on the east coast of India.
• A working paper on Planning Climate Resilient Coastal Cities — Learning from Panaji and Visakhapatnam by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), released last week, says that it is highly pertinent to start climate proofing infrastructure and services, given the climate sensitive nature of the existing infrastructure systems in the cities. The study says it is imperative to assess sea level rise combined with other factors like storm surge and cyclones and changes in precipitation.
• According to the IPCC, coastal areas face multiple risks related to climate change and variability. India has 130 towns and cities within 84 coastal districts and according to the Planning Commission; the rise in sea level is in the range of 1.06 to 1.75 mm per year in the past century.

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International

British House of Commons votes in favour of Palestinian state

• In a political development that will have enormous symbolic importance for the cause of Palestine, the British House of Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of recognising Palestine as a state alongside Israel.
• Although it is the government and not the House of Commons that recognises states, the voting result at 274 to 12 will strengthen the moral case for Palestine internationally while simultaneously isolating Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestine.
• Indeed, even though less than half the Members of Parliament (MPs) took part in the voting and Ministers abstained, the debate in the House was sharply critical of Israel’s methods of keeping Palestine under its control.
• The United Kingdom does not recognise the state of Palestine, and was one of the 41 countries that abstained from voting at the U.N. General Assembly in 2012 when a majority voted to upgrade the status of Palestine to that of a ‘non-member observer state.’ Its current policy on Palestine “reserves the right to recognise a Palestinian state bilaterally at the moment of our choosing and when it can best help bring about peace.”
• The full motion, submitted by Grahame Morris (Labour) with the support of Sarah Teather (Liberal Democrat) and Crispin Blunt (Conservative) stated: “That this House believes that the government should recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution.”

13 agreements sign between India & Norway

• As many as 13 agreements were signed between Indian and Norwegian entities on the second and concluding day of President Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to this Scandinavian nation.
• The agreements, which range from a statement of intent between the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO) and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and setting up a state-of-the-art fish farming unit outside Delhi, also had IIT, Kanpur, Hyderabad University and several other educational institutions reaching accord with their Norwegian counterparts.
• The President, in his address to a joint business gathering, announced that Norwegian tourists would soon be given the visa-on-arrival facility even as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said that Oslo would open a new consulate in Mumbai to enhance its business outreach in India.
• As President Mukherjee suggested that Norway’s $900 billion-worth pension fund would increase it’s exposure to India given the new Modi government’s intent to create an enabling business climate, Ms Solberg said pension fund decisions were made independently of the government.
• “Norway’s sovereign wealth [pension] fund decisions are made on the perception of the business environment,” she stressed. “They will invest where they feel they should.”
• The President hoped that there would be an “early conclusion” to ongoing talks for a free trade and investment agreement between India and the four-nation European Free Trade Association, of which Norway is a key member.

US wins WTO case against India

• In a setback, India lost a case filed by the U.S. in the WTO against restrictions it imposed on poultry imports from America.
• Giving its ruling, the World Trade Organisation’s dispute panel said restrictions imposed by India on imports of poultry from America were “inconsistent” with international norms.
• In March 2012, the U.S. dragged India to the WTO against India’s ban on imports of certain American farm products, including poultry meat and eggs. India had banned imports of various agricultural products from the U.S. in 2007, as a precautionary measure to prevent outbreaks of avian influenza in the country.

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Person in news

Richard Flanagan wins Man Booker prize with war story

• Australian author Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, set during the building of the Thailand-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, won Britain’s prestigious £50,000 ($79,530) Man Booker literature prize.
• Mr. Flanagan’s sixth novel beat out what jury chairman Anthony Grayling said was a strong shortlist of six books that for the first time, under a rule change, included works by two Americans, giving rise to fears beforehand that the British prize might come to be dominated by American writers.
• Mr. Grayling said those fears should now be put to rest and went on to say, of the winner, that it was rare to run across a book that “hits you so hard in the stomach, like this, that you can’t pick up the next one in the pile for a couple of days”.

Business & economy

6% rise in indirect tax collections

• Indirect tax collections inched up by 5.8 per cent in the April-September period of this fiscal.
• Indirect tax collections, comprising excise, customs and service tax, stood at Rs.2.42 lakh crore in the first six months of 2014-15 as against Rs.2.29 lakh crore in the corresponding period a year ago, the Finance Ministry said in a statement.
• The growth at 5.8 per cent is far less than 25 per cent annual increase envisaged in the budget for 2014-15. Excise collections contracted marginally by 0.6 per cent during six-month period to over Rs.75,021 crore.
• Customs mop up rose by 5.5 per cent to over Rs.89,324 crore during period under reference against Rs.84,643 crore in the same period a year ago.
• Service tax collections, which have become a new focus area for revenue officials, grew by 13.1 per cent to Rs.77,466 crore, the statement said.
• With an aim to widen the service tax net, the government had introduced the concept of negative list of taxation. As per it, all services except those in the negative list are taxable.
• The indirect tax collections target for 2014-15 stands at Rs.6.24 lakh crore. Indirect tax collections in September grew by 12.3 per cent to Rs.48,012 crore. Excise duty mop up in September contracted by 0.4 per cent to Rs.14,288 crore.

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Sports

National Hobie 16 championships from 15th october

• The Hussain Sagar presents a placid picture on the eve of the inland National Hobie 16 championships, which it will host. Such a portrait would be deceptive though and would mean the going will be tough for sailors of the twin hull, double sail catamaran, an ideal craft for medium to high wind conditions.
• Defending champion Kaushal Kumar Yadav foresees no difficulties though.
• “For the past fortnight or more that I have been practising here, wind speeds have averaged four to five knots. Under the influence of cyclonic conditions in the Bay of Bengal, they had picked up on and off but have now come back to median levels,” he told.
• When asked whether lightly-built sailors like him would have the dice loaded against them in such a scenario, he replied,
• “This sport is contested 60 per cent in the mind and 40 per cent physically. I am ready for low or high winds or for that matter any situation.”

Science and Technology

Mars Orbiter sends pictures of Mars moon Phobos

• His preparedness is understandably high but there could be a slump in the keenness of competition.
• Almost 20 days after it successfully entered the orbit of the Red Planet, ISRO’s Mars Orbiter sent pictures of Phobos — the largest of the two natural satellites that orbit around Mars.
• ISRO, the national space agency, has shared a tiny footage on its social networking site with a caption, “The larger of the two Martian moons, Phobos, is seen travelling west to east over Mars in its typical orbit.”