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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 28 February 2022

::NATIONAL::

The Central government’s decision of adopting a new criterion for selecting members of the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB), has evoked sharp criticism from political circles in Punjab and Haryana.

About:

According to the Bhakra Beas Management Board Rules, 1974, the member (power) in BBMB was from Punjab and the member (irrigation) was from Haryana. But in the amended rules of 2022, this requirement has been done away with.
Opposition parties said the abolition of the permanent membership of Punjab and Haryana in the BBMB was an attack on the rights of Haryana.
As per the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, the waters of Ravi, Beas and Sutlej are allocated to India and are available to be utilised for irrigation purposes within the country.
On the Beas and Sutlej, Bhakra Dehar and Beas power projects were constructed.
The BBMB controls these projects, and the expenditure is shared by partner states in the ratio of their shares.
Under the Punjab Reorganisation Act 1966, the share from BBMB was divided between Punjab and Haryana in the ratio of 58:42, with some share to Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh subsequently added.
Primarily, Punjab and Haryana are the two major beneficiaries, and Punjab has the larger share.

The Armed Forces Preparatory School, which is part of the projects announced by the Delhi government in its 2021 ‘Desh Bhakti Budget’, is taking admissions for the first batch.
Aimed at helping students prepare for entry into the National Defence Academy and other services, we take a look at the rationale behind setting up this school, and its curriculum.

Where will it be set up?

It will be the first fully residential school set up by the Delhi government in South West Delhi’s Jharoda Kalan is being built and admissions will be open only to residents of Delhi.

What will the curriculum look like?

It is being counted among the government’s new Schools of Specialized Excellence, in which each school is dedicated to specialization in one particular domain — from STEM to Performing and Visual Arts.
The Armed Forces Preparatory School will have a curriculum that covers both basic subjects and the specialized ones.

The European Union, US, UK and allies have agreed to exclude a number of Russian banks from Swift, an international payment system used by thousands of financial institutions.

What is SWIFT?

The SWIFT system stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is a secure platform for financial institutions to exchange information about global monetary transactions such as money transfers.
While SWIFT does not actually move money, it operates as a middleman to verify information of transactions by providing secure financial messaging services to more than 11,000 banks in over 200 countries.
Based in Belgium, it is overseen by the central banks from eleven industrial countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, besides Belgium.

What does the move aim to achieve?

Excluding Russian banks from the SWIFT platform is expected to hit the country’s economy hard.
While workarounds to SWIFT have been tried, none have proven to be effective.
During the last seven years, Russia, too, has worked on alternatives, including the SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) — an equivalent of the SWIFT financial transfer system developed by the Central Bank of Russia.
The Russians are reported to be collaborating with the Chinese on a possible venture which will be a potential challenger to SWIFT.

On Friday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova announced that if Sweden and Finland were to become members of NATO, the move ‘would have serious military and political consequences’.

Why is Russia objecting to Finland & Sweden’s NATO membership?

Along with Austria, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta, Finland and Sweden are two EU states that are not members of NATO yet. Since the end of the Second World War, both countries remained militarily neutral.
The two countries had also consciously remained politically neutral in the 1990s, but that stance changed when they joined the European Union in 1995.

About NATO:

Established in the aftermath of World War II, the organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949.
NATO constitutes a system of collective security, whereby its independent member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.
The NATO headquarters are located in Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons, Belgium.

The Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (ECGC) has decided to withdraw coverage for shipments to Russia with effect from February 25.

About:

ECGC Ltd., wholly owned by the Government of India which is based in Mumbai.
It was set up in 1957 with the objective of promoting exports from the country by providing credit risk insurance and related services.
ECGC has now put that country in the Restricted Cover Category (RCC-I) from the earlier ‘open cover’ category.
Open cover categories enable policyholders to obtain cover on a more liberalised basis.

A widely circulated comment by the chief of Russian space agency Dimitry Rogozin has ignited fears that the tension following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have consequences for the International Space Station (ISS).
He said that Russia could respond to the US sanctions by letting the ISS fall from space. He said the ISS, a 420-tonne spacecraft, the largest man-made structure in space, could drop over US or Europe, or over India and China. Its orbital flight path usually does not take it over most of the Russian territory.

ISS:

The International Space Station is the only operational space laboratory as of now, orbiting the earth in a trajectory that is about 400 km above the land surface.
It is operated by more than 15 partner countries. Apart from Russia and the United States, Canada, Japan and several members of the European Space Agency are partners in the ISS.
The football-field-sized ISS travels at a speed of about 28,000 km per hour. It completes one journey around the earth in about one and a half hours. In one day, therefore, it makes about 16 trips around the world.
The ISS is not the first space station to be built and operated. Several smaller space stations have been used earlier, the most famous of which have been the Russian Mir space station that operated in the 1980s, and the American Skylab.
The ISS has been in operation since 1998 and is expected to continue at least till 2028. Russia, however, has indicated that it might pull out of the collaboration earlier, possibly by 2024.