GS-I: Sultanpur Lodhi

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A town in Punjab’s Kapurthala district, Sultanpur Lodhi, is at the centrestage of the 550th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak Dev, founder of the Sikh religion.

The Guru Nanak Dev link:

• It was in Sultanpur Lodhi that the Sikhism founder is believed to have attained enlightenment.
• The janamsakhis depict the birth stories or biographies of Guru Nanak Dev written towards the end of the 16th century.
• It is said that he was a changed man after he took a dip in the rivulet Kali Bein that flowed through the middle of the town, and disappeared for three days.
• The Guru said that he had seen the “navkhand”. Those days, geographers had divided the earth into nine continents.
• It is after this episode in Kali Bein that Guru Nanak said he had seen all the nine continents.

Legacy

• Historians say it was in Sultanpur Lodhi that Guru Nanak came into intimate contact with Islam.
• The janamsakhis depict the tension between a section of the clergy and Guru Nanak following his enlightenment.
• His utterances were not received kindly by the qazi.
• He complained to Daulat Khan Lodhi (then governor of Lahore) that Nanak was being blasphemous.
• Janamsakhis claim Daulat Khan Lodhi became very fond of Nanak and defended him against critics.
• Today the town is home to several gurdwaras in the memory of Guru Nanak.
• Most of them were commissioned during the Khalsa empire when the Sikh rulers staked out the places associated with Guru Nanak and built gurdwaras there.

Architectural history:

• Sultanpur Lodhi was a major centre of Buddhism from the first century to the sixth century when it was called Sarwmanpur.
• In the 11th century, the town was founded by Sultan Khan Lodhi, a general of Mohammad Ghaznavi.
• Sikander Lodhi, assigned the construction of Sultanpur to Daulat Khan in the 15th century.
• It was the central point in the trade route between Delhi and Lahore.
• A footnote in Babarnama, the autobiography of Mughal emperor Babur, mentions Daulat Khan Lodhi as the founder of the town.

GS-III: A road to economic revival runs through agriculture.

News

One of the world’ fastest growing economies,India is now facing sluggish growth with the RBI sharply cutting GDP growth forecast to 6.1% for 2019-2020 which is slowest in last 6 years.

Effects on primary sectors:

The ripples of the slowdown are gradually moving to the primary sectors which are already reeling under an unprecedented confluence of pressure. Real agriculture and allied GVA grew by 2.9% during 2011-12 to 2017-18 while National Agriculture Policy 2000 it should be around 4% to attain an overall economic growth of 8%.

The current growth rate in the farm sector is less than adequate to take on developmental challenges originating from SDGs mainly zero hunger, gender equality, no poverty, and life on land. The key to addressing the slowdown lies in a selective group of reforms in the key sectors.

Reasons for the Slowdown in the Economic Growth:

• The slowdown in the Indian economy is partly cyclical and partly structural.
• Two cyclical factors are Shadow banking stress (NBFC crisis) and weaker global demand.

Structural factors may include:

• The rates of savings and investment in the Indian economy have declined, as also exports and total credit.
• This has led to a slowdown among the major industries, like the automobiles, diamond, and textiles industry, and several Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) are experiencing a continuous decline, which has led to the retrenchment of 3.5 lakh workers so far.
• Agriculture is in crisis today on account of rising costs of inputs and low prices of produce, and low public investments in this sector.
• Apart from it, there is income stagnation in urban areas.
• The slowdown in consumption is the major worry for India’s economic slump(consumption has been the main driver of India’s growth).
• There is a sharp fall in Private Consumption and as well as Public Expenditure.
• Externally, the US-China trade war is the leading dampener in India's growth story.
• In addition to this, the timing of some of the policy changes, the goods and services tax, demonetisation, measures to curb corruption, and the move to flexible inflation targeting led to a combination of lower inflation, higher real rates, and lower nominal growth.

Way Forward:

To occasional dip on growth due to various reasons will slow the pace to achieving the $5 trillion economy by 2024. This is the right time to execute a slew of doable agricultural reforms as the role of agriculture in reversing the slowdown is immense in the light of its nearly 20% contribution to a $5 trillion economy. Therefore, a blend of efforts from a range of sectors agriculture and allied sectors is warranted to enable overall growth.

GS-III: MOSAic Mission

News

Vishnu Nandan, a 32-year-old polar researcher from Kerala, will be the only Indian among 300 scientists from across the world aboard the MOSAiC expedition.

MOSAiC

• MOSAiC stands for Multidisciplinary drifting observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate.
• It aims for studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic and how it could affect the rest of the world.
• MOSAiC is the largest ever Arctic expedition in history, will be the first to conduct a study of this scale at the North Pole for an entire year.
• Previous studies have been of shorter periods as the thicker sea ice sheets prevent access in winter.

Key highlights:

• Under it, the German research vessel Polarstern has been anchored on a large sheet of sea ice in the Central Arctic.
• They will allow the water to freeze around them, effectively trapping themselves in the vast sheet of white that forms over the North Pole each winter.
• They will build temporary winter research camps on the ice, allowing them to perform tests that wouldn’t be possible at other times of the year or by satellite sensing.

Significance:

• The results of MOSAiC mission will contribute to enhance understanding of the regional and global consequences of Arctic climate change.
• It will be helpful in understanding the reasons behind the sea-ice loss and improve weather and climate predictions.
• Its expeditions will support safer maritime and offshore operations, increase coastal-community resilience, contribute to an improved scientific basis for future traffic along northern sea routes.

GS-III: Geotail

News

Recently on board with Chandrayaan-2 mission, an instrument called CLASS, designed to detect signatures of elements in the Moon’s soil, had detected charged particles during the mission.

This happened in September, during the orbiter’s passage through the “geotail”.

Geotail

• The geotail is a region in space that allows the best observations.
• The region exists as a result of the interactions between the Sun and Earth.
• The Sun emits the solar wind, which is a continuous stream of charged particles. These particles are embedded in the extended magnetic field of the Sun.
• Since the Earth has a magnetic field, it obstructs the solar wind plasma.
• This interaction results in the formation of a magnetic envelope around Earth.
• On the Earth side facing the Sun, the envelope is compressed into a region that is approximately three to four times the Earth radius.
• On the opposite side, the envelope is stretched into a long tail, which extends beyond the orbit of the Moon. It is this tail that is called the geotail.

About CLASS

• CLASS stands for Chandrayaan 2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer.
• For the CLASS instrument seeking to detect element signatures, the lunar soil can be best observed when a solar flare provides a rich source of X-rays to illuminate the surface.
• Secondary X-ray emission resulting from this can be detected by CLASS to directly detect the presence of key elements like Na, Ca, Al, Si, Ti and Fe.