Daily Current Affairs : 7th November 2020

Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE

Topics Covered

1. Right to Recall
2. Cyclones in the month of October
3. Kartarpur Corridor
4. Facts for Prelims

1 . Right to Recall

Context : The Haryana Assembly on Friday passed a Bill which provides the right to recall members of Panchayati Raj institutions to those who elected them and gives women 50% reservation in these rural bodies.

About the bill

• The Bill allows the recall of village sarpanches and members of the block-level panchayat samitis and district-level zila parishads if they fail to perform.
• With the enactment of the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Second Amendment) Bill, 2020, people in rural areas will get the right to remove a sarpanch or members of the two bodies even before their tenure is over.

Procedure

• To recall a sarpanch and members of the two bodies, 50% members of a ward or gram sabha have to give in writing that they want to initiate proceedings.
• This will be followed by a secret ballot, in which their recall will require two-third members voting against them.

Other features of the bill

• The Bill is also aimed at enhancing participation of women in the three-tier panchayati raj system and allows 50% reservation to them in gram panchayats, panchayat samitis and zila parishads
• The Bill also proposed 8% reservation to the “more disadvantaged” among the Backward Classes.

Benefits of Right to Recall

• Amendment is aimed at increasing their accountability to the voters.

2 . Cyclones in the month of October

Context : October to December period is among the favourable months for the development of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. This year, however, October passed without witnessing a cyclonic storm.

When do cyclones form and hit Indian coasts?

• About 80 cyclones are formed around the world annually, out of which five are formed in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, together known as the North Indian Ocean. India’s east and west coasts are prone to cyclones with the maximum associated hazards—rain, heavy winds and storm surge— faced by coastal districts of West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.
• Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean are bi-modal in nature, that is, they occur during two seasons— April to June (pre-monsoon) and October to December (post-monsoon). Of these, May and November remain the most conducive for the development of cyclones.

When have cyclones skipped October, previously?

• Cyclonic disturbances— either in the form of a well-marked low pressure, depression or a deep depression (weather systems with varying wind intensities ranging from 31 – 61 km/hr formed either over sea or land)— are common in October.
• Ocean disturbances enter the Bay of Bengal from the South China sea side and head towards the Indian coast. Generally, IMD labels the formation of one cyclone and two cyclonic disturbances in October as normal. This year, however, there was no system which intensified to form a cyclone. Instead, there were three cyclonic disturbances. Two of these cyclonic disturbances in the form of low-pressure systems caused widespread rain in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, north Karnataka and Maharashtra followed by West Bengal and Bangladesh.
• Data on the frequency of cyclone development between 1891-2020 shows no cyclone formation in the month of October on 42 occasions. During the last 130 years, cyclones remained absent for the longest during October of 1950-1954. 

Why were there no cyclone developments this year?

• IMD officials have attributed it to the weak La Nina conditions along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Cooler than normal sea surface temperatures over this region—termed as La Nina— has been prevailing since August this year.
• Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) was positioned in a favourable phase, the low-pressure systems intensified maximum up to a deep depression. MJO is kind of an eastward-moving cyclic weather event along the tropics that influences rainfall, winds, sea surface temperatures and cloud cover. They have a 30 to 60-day cycle.
• Most importantly, there was the high wind shear noted between the different atmospheric levels, last month. The vertical wind shear— created due to significant wind speed difference observed between higher and lower atmospheric levels— prevented the low-pressure systems and depression from strengthening into a cyclone.

3 . Kartarpur Corridor

Context : India summoned the Charge d’Affaires (CDA) of the Pakistan High Commission and lodged a strong protest over Islamabad’s decision to transfer the management of the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara from a Sikh body to a separate trust.

About the News

• Pakistan recently transferred the management and maintenance of the gurdwara from the Pakistan Sikh Gurudwara Prabhandhak Committee to the administrative control of the Evacuee Trust Property Board, a non-Sikh body. MEA had reacted sharply to Pakistan’s decision ]

About Kartarpur Corridor : This topic has been covered Click here to read more

5 . Facts for Prelims

NBFC – MFI

• NBFC MFI is a non-deposit taking NBFC (other than a company licensed u/s 25 of the Indian Companies Act, 1956) that meets the following conditions:
  • Minimum Net Owned Funds (NOF) of Rs.5 crore. (For those registered in the North Eastern Region of the country, Rs. 2 crores is required as minimum NOF).
  • At least 85% of its Total Net Assets are in the nature of “Qualifying Assets.”
• An NBFC, not qualifying as an NBFC MFI, is not to extend loans to the micro-finance sector, which, in aggregate, is more than 10% of its total assets.

Goldilocks Zone, Kepler Mission, TESS

• A habitable zone, also called the “Goldilocks zone”, is the area around a star where it is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on the surface of surrounding planets.
• Earth is in the Sun’s Goldilocks zone. If Earth were where the dwarf planet Pluto is, all its water would freeze; on the other hand, if Earth were where Mercury is, all its water would boil off.
• Kepler Mission : Kepler’s formal goal was to measure a number called eta-Earth: the fraction of sunlike stars that have an Earth-size object orbiting them in the “goldilocks” or habitable zone, where it is warm enough for the surface to retain liquid water.
•  Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS : It was launched in 2018 to scour the entire sky for exoplanets within a few hundred light years of Earth — the local neighborhood. So far TESS has discovered 66 new exoplanets and has cataloged more than 2,000 candidates.