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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 22 January 2021

::NATIONAL::

The Supreme Court has dismissed a batch of petitions seeking review of the Constitution Bench judgment that upheld the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar scheme.
A Bench in a 4:1 majority dismissed the review petitions against the apex court’s September 26, 2018 judgment.
However, the apex court voiced dissent in the dismissal of the review pleas as well, saying that the review petitions should remain pending until a larger bench decided the questions referred to it in the Rojer Mathew case, where some more clarity on some of the provisions of an enactment passed as a Money Bill had been sought.
Earlier, Justice Chandrachud in his dissenting judgement of September 2018 had held the entire Aadhar Act to be unconstitutional and had also termed the passing of Aadhaar Act as a money bill as a fraud on the Constitution.
While upholding the constitutional validity of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, the five-judge Constitution Bench in a 4:1 majority had ruled that the Aadhaar Act didn’t violate your right to privacy when you agree to share biometric data.
While private entities were barred from using Aadhaar card for KYC authentication purposes, Aadhaar was made mandatory for various other purposes including PAN card for filing income tax returns

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Coal India’s production is currently being split according to various methods, including several sectoral auctions and coal linkages based on recommendations from the Union Government and Fuels Agreements (FSAs).
India produced around 729 million tons of coal and imported around 248 million tons in the previous fiscal year.
Coal India accounts for over 80 percent of domestic production.
Releasing coal marketing would reassure buyers that they are getting the product if you want it without going through multiple processes.
The government opened coal mining for commercial use in June 2020.

World Economic Forum releases the 16th edition of Global Risks Report.
Key highlights:
Infectious diseases, followed by climate protection failures, are the greatest global risk for the next decade.
Economic fragility and social divisions will increase as underlying disparities in health care, education, financial stability and technology have caused the crisis to disproportionately affect certain groups and countries.
Digital divisions and technology adoption raise concerns that will be further accelerated by COVID-19.
The economic fragility and long-term health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to be devastating.

Researchers at Oxford are bracing for the production of advanced versions of the Covid-19 vaccine that can fight the emerging and more contagious Covid-19 variants.
The research team that developed vaccines from Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc is now reconfiguring their technology to produce potent doses of vaccine against emerging mutations from the UK, South Africa, Brazil, among others.
The scientists are now estimating how quickly they could reconfigure their ChAdOx vaccine platform.

State Bank of India said it has executed two inter-bank short-term money market deals through its Hong Kong branch with the pricing linked to SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate).

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SOFR is a reference rate that determines pay-offs in a financial contract and that is outside the control ofparties to the contract.
SOFR was designed and implemented by Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Treasury Officeof Financial Research.
SOFR is a replacement for the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) that may be phased out end-2021. Both SOFR and LIBOR reflect short-term borrowing costs.
Recently, State Bank of India has executed two inter-bank short term money market deals with pricing linkedto SOFR.

Indian biotechnologists have found a way to carry out crop improvement that would help reduce the wastage of nitrogenous (N) fertilisers worth billions of rupees.

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According to the researchers, the crops take only about 30 per cent of the N-fertiliser added and the rest gets washed away to water bodies leading to pollution, ill-health and also contributes to climate change.
Improving this poor ‘nitrogen use efficiency’ (NUE) was a major global challenge for decades, as there were no simple visual cues or genetic means to differentiate between high and low NUE cultivars in any crop.
Indian Scientists have found some visually identifiable features determining NUE. They also identified some genes that can help crops improve NUE.

Gene identification:

The scientists compared three high NUE and three low NUE cultivars of rice with normal or low dose of nitrate or urea as the sole source of nitrogen (N).
They found that N-use efficient cultivars tend to be slow in germination and flowering, grow tall and deep with higher biomass and take longer duration to harvest but yield more with lesser N input.
They also identified 34 genes associated with NUE for potential crop improvement.
According to the Indian Nitrogen Assessment (2017), over 70 per cent of all nitrous oxide emission in the Indian environment, of which 77 per cent is contributed by fertilisers, mostly urea.
Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas (GHG) that is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Cereals account for over 69 per cent of the total consumption of N fertilisers in the country with rice topping the list at 37 per cent, followed by wheat (24 per cent).