Daily Current Affairs : 4th July

Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE

Topics Covered

1. Wage Code Bill
2. State of the Education Report for India: Children with Disabilities
3. Artificial Gravity
4. Longest Electrified Railway tunnel, Artmeis, Core Investment Companies

1 . Wage Code Bill

Context : The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the Code on Wages Bill, which subsumes existing laws regarding minimum wages and other salary issues.

About the Bill

• The Code on Wages is one of the four codes that would subsume 44 labour laws with certain amendments to improve the ease of doing business and attract investment for spurring growth.
• The four codes will deal with wages, social security, industrial safety and welfare, and industrial relations. 
• The Code on Wages will replace the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, Minimum Wages Act, 1948, Payment of Bonus Act, 1965, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976.
• The bill provides that the Central Government will fix minimum wages for certain sectors, including railways and mines, while the states would be free to set minimum wages for other category of employments.
• The code also provides for setting up of a national minimum wage.
• The Central Government can set a separate minimum wage for different regions or states. The bill also says that the minimum wage would be revised every five years.

2 . State of the Education Report for India: Children with Disabilities

Context : More than one in four children with disabilities between ages 5 and 19 in India have never attended any educational institution, while three-fourths of five-year-olds with disabilities are not in school.

About the Report

• State of the Education Report for India: Children with Disabilities is released by UNESCO and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
• Report showed that there are more than 78 lakh children with disabilities in the country between 5-19 years. Only 61% of the total 78 lakh children them were attending an educational institution. About 12% had dropped out, while 27% had never been to school at all.
• The number of children [with disabilities] enrolled in school drops significantly with each successive level of schooling. There are fewer girls with disabilities in school than boys.
• Differences remain among various types of disabilities : Only 20% of children with visual and hearing impairments had never been in school. However, among children with multiple disabilities or mental illness, that figure rose to more than 50%.
• Situation is worse as the government data on enrolment includes home-based education, which often exists only on paper for children with disabilities.
• In many parts of rural India, if a parent opts for home-based education, the child may not be getting an education at all. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan teacher is supposed to visit and check, but that doesn’t happen often.

Recommendations

• Amending the RTE Act to better align with the RPWD Act by including specific concerns of education of such children.
• Establish a coordinating mechanism under HRD Ministry for effective convergence of all education programmes of children with disabilities, ensuring specific and adequate financial allocation in education budgets to meet the learning needs of children with disabilities, strengthening data systems to make them robust and reliable and useful for planning are among the recommendations made.
• Massively expand the use of information technology for the education of children with disabilities. Give a chance to every child and leave no child with disability behind.
• Transform teaching practices to aid the inclusion of diverse learners.
• Overcome stereotypes and build positive dispositions towards children with disabilities, both in the classroom and beyond
• Attitude of parents and teachers towards including children with disabilities into mainstream education is also crucial to accomplish the goal of inclusive education

3 . Artificial Gravity

Context : A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder is working on making such technology a reality.

About Artificial Gravity

• Artificial Gravity is the concept in which spacecraft generate their own gravity by spinning around in space
• The researchers are examining ways to design revolving systems that might fit within a room of future space stations and even moon bases.
• Astronauts could crawl into these rooms for just a few hours a day to get their daily doses of gravity

Prototype

• Lead researcher Torin Stark lay down on a metal platform, part of a machine called a short-radius centrifuge.
• The platform begins to rotate around the room, gathering more and more speed. The angular velocity generated by the centrifuge pushes feet toward the base of the platform — almost as if he was standing under his own weight.
• The university described this as is the closest that scientists on Earth can get to how artificial gravity in space might work.

Benefits

• It will help keep astronauts healthy as they venture into space, allowing humans to travel farther from Earth than ever before and stay away longer

4 . Facts for Prelims

Longest Electrified Railway tunnel

• The South Central Railway (SCR) has commissioned the longest electrified tunnel of 6.6 km built at a total cost of ₹460 crore between Cherlopalli and Rapuru stations. The tunnel is part of the recently completed Obulavaripalli-Venkatachalam new railway line.

Artemis Mission & Orion Spacecraft

• Artemis is NASA’s ambitious lunar-exploration program, which aims to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole by 2024 and build up a long-term, sustainable presence on and around Earth’s nearest neighbor in the ensuing years.
• NASA’s Orion spacecraft will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability (can pull crew to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency during ascent), sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities. Orion will launch on NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space 

Core Investment Companies

• The six-member panel, headed by Tapan Ray, will “examine the current regulatory framework for CICs in terms of adequacy, efficacy and effectiveness of every component thereof and suggest changes”.
• About Systematically important Core Investment Companies :
  • A CIC-ND-SI is a Non-Banking Financial Company
    • with asset size of Rs 100 crore and above
    • carrying on the business of acquisition of shares and securities and which satisfies the following conditions as on the date of the last audited balance sheet :-
    • it holds not less than 90% of its net assets in the form of investment in equity shares, preference shares, bonds, debentures, debt or loans in group companies;
    • its investments in the equity shares (including instruments compulsorily convertible into equity shares within a period not exceeding 10 years from the date of issue) in group companies constitutes not less than 60% of its net assets as mentioned in clause (iii) above;
    • it does not trade in its investments in shares, bonds, debentures, debt or loans in group companies except through block sale for the purpose of dilution or disinvestment;
    • it does not carry on any other financial activity referred to in Section 45I(c) and 45I(f) of the RBI act, 1934 except investment in bank deposits, money market instruments, government securities, loans to and investments in debt issuances of group companies or guarantees issued on behalf of group companies.
    • it accepts public funds