DAILY NEWS ANALYSIS

Rat hole mining is being done to rescue the workers in collapsed Silkyara-Barkot tunnel in Uttarakhand.

• Rat hole – It refers to the narrow pits dug into the ground, typically just large enough for 1 person to descend using ropes or bamboo ladders to reach the coal seams.
• Rat hole mining – It is a method of extracting coal from narrow, horizontal seams, typically around 3-4 feet depth.
• They are prevalent in Meghalaya due to challenging terrain and the coal seam here are very thin (less than 2 m) in most cases.
• Types – There are 2 types of rat hole mining.
  • Side cutting – Narrow tunnels are excavated into the hill slopes and workers enter these openings to locate the coal seam.
  • Box cutting – Rectangular openings are created, ranging in size from 10 to 100 square metres
• Issues - They lack safety measures such as proper ventilation, structural support, or safety gear for the workers.
• The mining process can cause land degradation, deforestation, and water pollution.
• Ban - The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has banned rat-hole mining in 2014 citing concerns about its unscientific nature and the safety risks posed to the workers.
• However, in 2019, the Supreme Court set aside the NGT ban and allowed coal mining in Meghalaya through scientific mining methods.

Ahilya Fort is to present the 20th Sacred River Festival in February 2024, after a three year gap due to the Covid pandemic.

• It is a 4 day festival celebrated annually since 2010, a confluence of art and history.
• It was conceived by Richard Holkar of Holkar dynasty to represent the family’s refined cultural sensibilities.
• Venue – Ahilyabai Fort in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh.
• Presented by – The Devi Ahilya Bai Holkar Charitable Memorial Trust and Ms. Mary McFadden.
• Aim - To create a more inclusive art space that celebrates different identities and communities.
• Activities - Music, dance, theatre performances, and craft walks, discussions, food displays and also highlights the Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb (syncretic culture) intrinsic to Awadh.

Safed Baradari (White Palace) in Uttar Pradesh, is a white-marbled building and a place of Mourning by Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab of Awadh.

The Ahilya Fort

• It sits high above the sacred river Narmada in the central Indian town of Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh.
• Maharani Ahilyabai Holkar ruled here from 1765 to 1796 and built Ahilya Wada, her personal residences, offices, and darbaar audience hall, within the fort.
• In the year 2000, her descendant converted his home in Ahilya Wada into Ahilya Fort Hotel.

Recently, Supreme Court asked the Punjab government why it could not fund the costs of crop residue management machines for marginal farmers.

Why stubble burning is practised?

• Also called as parali burning, stubble burning is a method of removing paddy crop residues from the field to sow wheat.
• It is usually done in the last week of September to November.
• It is usually required in areas that use the combined harvesting method which leaves crop residue behind.
• It is practised by the farmers to prepare the land for the next cultivation.
• It is practised mainly in the Indo-Gangetic plains of Punjab, Haryana, and UP to clear the fields for rabi crop sowing.

Why stubble burning is practised?

• Limited duration- Multiple cropping and shortened intervals between crops give a very short window of about 10–15 days during which the field needs to be prepared for the next crop.
• There is only short time available between rice harvesting and sowing of wheat as delay in sowing wheat affects the wheat crop.
• Cheap- It is considered one of the cheapest methods to clean the field after the harvesting season.
• Labour shortage- Use of expensive labour for stubble extraction is not feasible, especially in Punjab and Haryana where farm sizes are large.
• Clears all stubble- The use of mechanized harvesters leaves stubble of 10– 30 cm in the field, depending on the type of crop, which was not the case earlier with manual harvesting.
• Low crop residue- The low commercial and economic value of crop residue, coupled with the high costs of processing, reduces its value for farmers.

What are the impacts of stubble burning?

• Air pollution- It emits toxic pollutants in the atmosphere containing harmful gases like carbon monoxide (CO), methane (CH4), carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC).
• The combustion of agricultural residue is a prominent contributor to air pollution in certain regions of northern India.
• Soil fertility- Soil becomes less fertile and its nutrients are destroyed when the husk is burnt on the ground.
• Heat penetration- Stubble burning generates heat that penetrates into the soil, causing an increase in erosion, loss of useful microbes and moisture.
• Climate change- The release of toxic gases from stubble burning will increase global warming, further aggravating the climate change.
• Uncontrolled firing- Risk of fires spreading out of control, could turn into huge pit of flames.

What are the strategies to reduce stubble burning?

• Promote agri-implements- Punjab has rolled out schemes for providing subsidy for mechanical implements that can mix the crop residue with soil to improve fertility.
• Promote co-ownership models for the agri-implements which can make such implements accessible to farmers.
• Foster awareness- Farmers should understand the value of crop residues and use of agri implements in extraction and packaging.
• Power generation- State governments need to incentivise establishment of biomass-based power plants through fiscal interventions and prioritization. Example- Biomass co-firing
• Promote R&D- Punjab Agricultural University is developing a variant of paddy straw that has lower silica content, thereby making it suitable for utilisation in biomass-based power plants.
• Biofuel production- The State governments, along with appropriate policy interventions from the Central government need to incentivise utilisation of biofuels.
• Industrial application- Biomass pellets can be sold commercially as the main fuel for industrial boilers and replace coal. Micro-pelletization should be incentivised and its local usage promoted.
• Crop residue collection mechanism- Create a uniform decentralised mechanism for the collection, storage and commercial sale of crop residue.

Chhattisgarh model

• A gauthan is a dedicated 5-acre plot, held in common by each village.
• Here, all the unused parali (paira in Chhattisgarhi) is collected through parali daan (people’s donations) and converted into organic fertiliser by rural youth.

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the one thing that connected us virtually was high-speed internet connections through the fibre optic network.

• Optical fibres – They are thin cylindrical strands of glass whose diameter is close to the diameter of a human hair.
• They are surrounded by protectives to make them strong, light, and flexible and thus durable.
• It can carry information like text, images, voices, telephone calls across large distances almost at the speed of light.
• Working – A beam of light falling on a glass surface passes through partially while the rest is reflected away.
• When it passes through, its path bends because the refractive index of glass is different from that of air.
• When the beam travels from glass to air medium, it will be completely reflected back within the glass and this is called as total internal reflection.
• This is how signals encoded as electromagnetic waves can be fed into one end of an optical fibre.

Refractive index is a measure of the bending of a ray of light when passing from one medium into another that determines how fast light can travel in it.

Total internal reflection is the basis of guiding light across long distances without a significant loss of optical power.

• 3 parts of a fibre optic communication system
  • Transmitter – It encodes information into optical signals (A form of rapidly blinking light pulses of 0’s and 1’s).
  • Optical fibre – It carries the signal to its destination.
  • Receiver – It is placed at destination which reproduces the information from the encoded signal.

Advantages

• • Optical waves allow a high data-transmission rate, up to several terabits per second in a single fibre.
  • They are insensitive to external perturbations like lightning and bad weather.
  • They are ideal to be buried underground, drawn underwater, or bent around a spool.

Physicist Charles Kao was the 1^st one to suggest that glass fibres could be a superior medium for telecommunication than copper wires for which he received Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009.

The British Antarctic Survey says that one of the world’s largest icebergs is drifting beyond Antarctic waters after being grounded for more than three decades.

• Origin – It split from the Antarctic’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986 but got stuck to the ocean floor for many years in the Weddell Sea.
• Size – Around 4,000 square kilometres (1,500 square miles).
• Movement – It has now ungrounded and is moving along ocean currents to sub-Antarctic South Georgia.It appears to be picking up speed because of wind and ocean currents.

Amplifi 2.0 portal was launched to facilitate the process of achieving sustainable development by making data available on the crucial issues pertaining to development.

• Amplifi – Assessment and Monitoring Platform for Liveable, Inclusive and Future-ready urban India
• It is a platform to provide raw data across 14 sectors for 440+ parameters for 250+ cities.
• Launched by –Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
• Aim – To enable research, analysis, and evidence-based policymaking for government, citizens, academia and industry.
• Coverage – Currently, 225 urban local bodies (ULB) have been on-boarded, and data for 150 cities is available on the portal.
• Target – To cover data from more than 4,000 ULB.
• Data collection – Through multiple assessment frameworks like
  • Ease of Living Index (EOLI)
  • Municipal Performance Index (MPI)
  • Data Maturity Assessment Framework
  • Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework
  • Urban Outcomes Framework 2022
• It covers range of information like average annual health expenditure, slum population among others.

Urban Outcomes Framework 2022

• An initiative to develop a transparent and comprehensive database based on cross-city outcomes across 14 sectors.
• Designed and developed by – National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA).
• Aim – To democratise data by making it accessible to all urban stakeholders and providing opportunity to create new frameworks based on open data.
• Significance – It shifts the focus from the indices to the data with a comprehensive list of indicators.
• It streamlines the data to increase focus on data collection, and disaggregated data can be analysed by domain experts.

By 2030, India is projected to have 60 crore (40%) of the population living in urban areas compared to 37.7 crore (31%) in 2011. According to the 2011 Census, urban India contributed 63% to the country’s GDP, and this is projected to increase to 75% by 2030.

• The National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) has given approval to construct training walls at the Pazhaverkadu estuary to stabilise the bar mouth, which often gets closed due to silting.
• Pazhaverkadu or Pulicat is a vast brackish water lake with 3 estuaries situated in Thiruvallur district of Tamilnadu.

Pulicat Lake is the 2^nd largest brackish water lake in South Asia, after the Chilika Lake in Odisha.

• The Peralassery Subrahmanya Temple pond in Kannur, Kerala has found place in the list of 75 water heritage sites of India.
• It is locally known as Aynivyal pond. It is situated on the banks of the Anjarakandy River.
• There is no provision under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 to declare a site as a “Water Heritage Site” under Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

However, the Ministry of Jal Shakti had constituted a Committee to identify 75 Water Heritage Structure (WHS) in reference to 75 years of India's Independence.

• US, Britain, 18 other countries ink agreement to make AI 'secure by design' recently.
• The agreement is non-binding, carries mostly general recommendations such as monitoring AI systems for abuse, protecting data from tampering and vetting software suppliers.

18 countries that signed on to the new guidelines include Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Chile, Israel, Nigeria and Singapore.

• India’s 1^st woman Supreme Court Justice Fathima Beevi passes away recently.
• She was born in Pathanamthitta, Kerala in 1927. She was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1989.

She had also served as the Governor of Tamil Nadu from 1997 to 2001.