Daily Current Affairs : 19th January 2024

Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE

Topics Covered

1. Iran – Pakistan and Baloch Militancy
2. How Satellites track weather
3. Improvised distress alert transmitter (DAT)
4. Facts for Prelims – CB-NAAT   

1 . Iran – Pakistan and Baloch Militancy

Context : Iran violated Pakistan’s airspace and launched multiple missile strikes to target camps of two bases of the Baluchi militant group Jaish-al Adl. Pakistan retaliated with missile strikes on Iran today after warning the country of “serious consequences”.

Background

• Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and accounts for 40 per cent of its gas production and is an important checkpoint in China’s so-called “China Pakistan Economic Corridor”, with the Gwadar port located close to the Gulf of Oman.
• Despite its strategic significance, the region has been ignored by Pakistan’s central leadership, giving rise to an independence movement which began ever since it acceded to Pakistan in 1948.

Militancy in Balochistan

• The Baluch tribe is a group of people from the Balochistan region and the area is divided into three regions. The northern part is in present-day Afghanistan, the western region in Iran is called the Sistan-Baluchistan region and the remaining in Pakistan. The region was the centre of a power struggle during British rule and even after that.
• The Britishers governed the region with the ‘Sandeman system’, where an indirect rule was established with autonomy to tribes governed by ‘sardars’ or ‘jirgars’. It was established by Robert Groves Sandeman and was called the “Sandemization” of tribes.
• Pakistan took control of the region in 1948 and the accession agreement led to the first uprising for autonomy, resulting in systemic suppression of the independence movement in Balochistan with violence.
• The Baluchis believe they were colonised or annexed by Pakistan during the Partition and the ethnic group is different from the dominant Punjabis, Sindhis that have dominated the politics of Pakistan. The Pashtun region’s affinity with Afghanistan and the Baluchis seeking independence has become Pakistan’s ‘Achilles Heel’. Fifty-two years ago, a call for independence in East Pakistan led to the creation of Bangladesh.
• Baloch armed groups were created to “liberate” the region and the Pakistan army and the militants have clashed several times.
• The groups have also targeted Chinese infrastructure to hamper the projects in the region and create a state of fear like it did when a Confucius Institute in Karachi was attacked in 2022.
• There’s a shared sense of subjugation among Balochis on both sides of the border that has created a feeling of Balochi nationalism that aims for independence and also a hotbed for drugs and arms smuggling due to a power vacuum and increased hostility between the state and people.

The Problem In Iran

• The western region of Balochistan (now Sistan-Baluchestan), was annexed by Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi in a coup by overthrowing the Qajar dynasty. The Iranian Revolution in the 1970s took control of the country and a Shia-dominated regime was in power. Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime saw the Sunni Baluchis indifferently over the years. 
• The region was deprived of development, leaving a stark difference in the living conditions of millions of people in the province compared with other regions of Iran. The situation is the same in Pakistan too.
• Years of neglect and suppression led to a resistance movement in Iran, too, and gave rise to Sunni Balcuhi militant groups like, Jundullah and Jaish-al Adl, that have taken shelter in Pakistan. Jaish al-Adl or “Army of Justice” emerged from Junadullah after Abdolmalek Rigi, the founder was killed. Iran calls Jaish a successor of Junadullah.
• The people from both sides of the region help each other and have provided a haven to militant groups on both sides of the border.
• The two countries share the same problem – Baluchi militancy. They have agreed in the past to combat militancy. In 2019, the Jaish-al-Adl claimed to have killed 27 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps members (IRGCs), leading to tensions between the countries over Pakistan’s failure to crack down on militancy.
• A few months later, an attack in the Gwadar district of Balochistan was seen as a retaliation to the Jaish-Al-Adl’s attack. Pakistan claimed the group that killed 14 people was trained in Iran

Geopolitical Differences

• First, as Iran went from being an ally to a sworn enemy of the United States almost overnight, the Americans embraced Pakistan closer. Since 1979, has been a major reason for the Iranian distrust of Pakistan, which increased after 9/11 as Islamabad extended unqualified support to the US “War on Terror”.
• Second, Iran’s post-1979 foreign policy focus on exporting the revolution made its Arab neighbours nervous. Each of these oil-rich kingdoms was effectively controlled by a small group of families, not unlike the Shah’s regime in pre-revolution Iran. Pakistan’s continued strategic ties with these Arab kingdoms added rough edges to its relationship with Iran.
• Third, Pakistan and Iran ended up on opposite sides in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Soviet forces. Iran backed the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, a Pakistani creation — and almost entered the war after the hardline Sunni militia massacred Persian-speaking Shia Hazaras and eight Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998.

India’s Stance on the issue

• Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, both countries were firmly allied to the United States and had, in 1955, joined the Baghdad Pact, later known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), a military alliance modelled on NATO. Iran provided material and weapons support to Pakistan during its 1965 and 1971 wars against India. After the liberation of Bangladesh, the Shah of Iran famously said that he would not tolerate “further disintegration” of Pakistan. When Shiite regime took power in Iran, Sunni-majority Pakistan was undergoing its own Islamisation and the two countries found themselves at opposite ends of the sectarian divide
• Over the past few decades, India’s ties with Iran have developed a meaningful dimension. They have cooperated in the energy sector, despite the US sanctions on Iran, and India’s rapidly improving ties with the Americans.
• India has been involved in the planning and building of the Chabahar port, intended to allow it to bypass the overland route through Pakistan for trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chabahar directly competes with Pakistan’s China-funded Gwadar port. Pakistan has always viewed India’s relationship with Iran with concern.
• Ministry of External Affairs described Iran’s strikes in Pakistan as a matter between those countries, but also mentioned India’s “uncompromising position of zero tolerance towards terrorism”, and said India understood “actions that countries take in their self defence”
• India has long maintained that Pakistan harbours terrorists. Iran is simply making the same claim. India had a similar justification for the Balakot surgical strikes of 2019. “It is but natural that India will support Iran in this case

2 . How Satellites track weather

Context : On the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the IMD has accompanied these alerts with maps from the INSAT 3D satellite, and sometimes from the INSAT 3DR satellite. The fog in these maps is both clearly visible and annotated by the IMD.

How does one read the maps? What do the colours represent?

• INSAT 3D satellite has a red-green-blue, or RGB, imager whose images’ colours are determined by two factors: solar reflectance and brightness temperature.
• Solar reflectance is a ratio of the amount of solar energy reflected by a surface and the amount of solar energy incident on it. Brightness temperature has to do with the relationship between the temperature of an object and the corresponding brightness of its surface. It is different from temperature as we usually understand it — like the temperature we ‘feel’ when we touch a glass of hot tea — because brightness temperature also has to do with how the tea glass emits the thermal radiation, which is at different frequencies in different directions.
• The INSAT 3D’s ‘day microphysics’ data component studies solar reflectance at three wavelengths: 0.5 micrometres (visible radiation), 1.6 micrometres (shortwave infrared radiation) and 10.8 micrometres (thermal infrared radiation). That is, detectors onboard the satellite track radiation coming from over India in these wavelengths.
• The strength of the 0.5 micrometre visible signal determines the amount of green colour; the strength of the 1.6 micrometre shortwave infrared signal, the amount of red colour; and the strength of the 10.8 micrometre thermal infrared signal, the amount of blue colour. This way, the INSAT 3D computer determines the colour on each point of the image.

How does the satellite track snow?

• Major applications of this colour scheme are an analysis of different cloud types, initial stages of convection, maturing stages of a thunderstorm, identification of snow area, and the detection of fires.”
• While the solar reflectance of snow and that of clouds is similar in the visible part of the spectrum, snow strongly absorbs radiation of wavelength 1.6 micrometre, that is the shortwave infrared. As a result, when the satellite tracks snow, the red component of the colour scheme becomes very weak.

How are the colours determined?

• The satellite’s ‘night microphysics’ component is a little more involved. Here, two colours are determined not by a single signal but by the strength of the difference between two signals. The computer determines the amount of red colour according to the difference between two thermal infrared signals — 12 micrometre and 10 micrometre. The amount of green colour varies according to the difference between a thermal infrared and a middle infrared signal — 10.8 micrometre and 3.9 micrometre.
• The amount of blue colour is not a difference but is determined by the strength of a thermal infrared signal of wavelength 10.8 micrometre.
• By combining day and night microphysics data, atmospheric scientists can elucidate the presence of moisture droplets of different shapes and temperature differences over time, and in turn track the formation, evolution and depletion of cyclones and other weather events.

How do the satellites collect weather data?

• Both INSAT 3D and INSAT 3DR use radiometres to make their spectral measurements. A radiometre is a device that measures various useful properties of radiation, typically by taking advantage of radiation’s interaction with matter, for example in the form of temperature or electrical activity.
• Both satellites also carry atmospheric sounders. These are devices that measure temperature and humidity, and study water vapour as a function of their heights from the ground.
• Scientists combine the radiometre and sounder measurements to understand various atmospheric characteristics.

What weather satellites does India have?

• According to the INSAT 3DR brochure, its radiometer is an upgraded version of the very-high-resolution radiometer (VHRR) that the Kalpana 1 and INSAT 3A satellites used (launched in 2002 and 2003, respectively).
• The Space Application Centre’s brief for INSAT 3A states: “For meteorological observation, INSAT-3A carries a three channel Very High Resolution Radiometer (VHRR) with 2 km resolution in the visible band and 8 km resolution in thermal infrared and water vapour bands.” The radiometers onboard 3D and 3DR have “significant improvements in spatial resolution, number of spectral channels and functionality”.
• The Kalpana 1 and INSATs 3A, 3D, and 3DR satellites aided India’s weather monitoring and warning services with the best technology available in the country at the time, and with each new satellite being a better-equipped version of the previous one. So while Kalpana 1 had a launch mass of 1,060 kg and carried a early VHRR and a data-relay transponder, INSAT 3DR had a launch mass of 2,211 kg — in 2016 — and carried an upgraded VHRR, a sounder, a data-relay transponder and a search-and-rescue transponder. India deactivated Kalpana 1 in September 2017, after 15 years in orbit.
• The INSAT 3D and 3DR satellites are currently active in geostationary orbits around the earth, at inclinations of 82 degrees and 74 degrees east longitudes respectively.
• In February 2024, the Indian Space Research Organisation is expected to launch the INSAT 3DS meteorological satellite onboard its GSLV Mk II launch vehicle, with a launch mass of two tonnes. While “3DR” stood for “3D repeat”, “3DS” stands for “3D second repeat”.

3 . Distress alert transmitter (DAT)

Context : The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has developed an improvised distress alert transmitter (DAT) with advanced capabilities for fishermen at sea to send emergency messages from boats.

About Distress alert transmitter (DAT)

• It is an indigenous technological solution for the fishermen at sea to send emergency messages from fishing boats
• The messages are sent through a communication satellite and received at a central control station (INMCC: Indian Mission Control Centre) where the alert signals are decoded for the identity and location of the fishing boat.
• The extracted information is forwarded to Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centres (MRCCs) under Indian Coast Guard (ICG). Using this information the MRCC co-ordinates to undertake Search and Rescue operations to save the fishermen at distress.
• The DAT is operational since 2010 and till now more than 20000 DATs are being used. Further, taking advantage of technological developments in satellite communication and satellite navigation ISRO has improvised DAT with advanced capabilities and features evolving to Second Generation DAT (DAT-SG).

Second Generation DAT (DAT-SG)

• Space Applications Centre (ISRO) has developed the Distress Alert Transmitter-Second Generation(DAT-SG) which is a UHF transmitter based on NavIC receiver module.
• This NavIC receiver module supports position determination as well as broadcast messages reception called NavIC messaging service.
• The end users are mainly fishermen of small boats who can use this device for emergency messages reporting with position information and the unit can also help them receive useful information like Potential Fishing Zone, weather alerts etc. as supported by NavIC messaging service

Features of Second Generation DAT (DAT-SG)

• The DAT-SG has the facility to send back acknowledgement to the fishermen who activates the distress alert from sea. This gives an assurance to him of rescue coming to him.
• Apart from transmitting distress signal from Sea, DAT-SG has the capability to receive messages from control centre.
• Using this, advance alert messages can be sent to the fishermen at sea whenever there are events of bad weather, cyclone tsunami or any other emergencies. Thus, the fishermen will be able to sail back home or go to safe places.
• Information about Potential Fishing Zones (PFZs) are also transmitted to fishermen using DAT-SG on regular intervals. This helps fishermen to get good yield in the catch and savings in terms of time and fuel.
• DAT-SG can be connected to mobile phones using Bluetooth interface and the messages can be read in native language using an App in the mobile.
• The central control centre (INMCC) has a web based network management system called “SAGARMITRA” which maintain a database of registered DAT-SGs and helps MRCCs to access the information about boat, coordinate the boat at distress in real time. This helps Indian Coast Guard to undertake Search & Rescue operations at the time of distresses, without any time delay.

4 . Facts for Prelims

CB NAAT

• Cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification test (CB-NAAT) is a molecular technique that detects Mycobacterium Tuberculosis and rifampicin resistance within two hours. It is also known as GeneXpert
• CB-NAAT is a sputum test used to diagnose tuberculosis. It is recommended for anyone who has symptoms of TB, such as a persistent cough, fever, night sweats, and weight loss