Relevance IN - Prelims ( about Exercise Kavach)
What's the NEWS

• A large scale Joint Military exercise ‘Exercise Kavach' involving assets of Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Air Force and Indian Coast Guard is being conducted in the coming week under the aegis of the Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC), the only Joint Forces Command of the country.

Know! all about Exercise Kvach

• The exercise would involve participation and deployment of elements of Army's Amphibious Brigade along with supporting forces including Special Forces of Navy, Armour/Mechanised components, Naval Ships comprising Destroyers, ASW Corvettes and Landing Ships with ship-borne helicopters of Eastern Naval Command and ANC, Jaguar Maritime Strike and Transport aircrafts from Indian Air Force and assets of Coast Guard.
• The exercise involves synergised application of maritime surveillance assets, coordinated air and maritime strikes, air defence, submarine and landing operations.
• Concurrently Joint Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) exercise involving various technical, electronic and human intelligence from three services will be conducted.
• The ISR exercise will validate the capabilities of intelligence gathering from space, air, land and sea-based assets/ sensors, its analysis and sharing to achieve battle field transparency for quick decision making at different stages of operations.
• The joint force would execute multi domain, high intensity offensive and defensive manoeuvres in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and carry out amphibious landing operations, air landed operation, helicopters-borne insertion of Special Forces from sea culminating in tactical follow-on operations on land.
• The tri-services exercise aims to fine tune joint war-fighting capabilities and SOPs towards enhancing operational synergy.

Miscellaneous
7^th Edition of MASCRADE 2021 organized by FICCI inaugurated

Relevance IN - Prelims ( about MASCRADE 2021) + Mains ( GS II government policies and interventions)
What's the NEWS

• Union Minister of Health and Family welfare inaugurated the 7^th Edition of "MASCRADE 2021"- Movement against Smuggled & Counterfeit Trade organised by FICCI Cascade.
• The 7^th edition of MASCRADE will deliberate and discuss actionable, innovative policy solutions that can reverse the rising tide of counterfeit, smuggled and spurious products.
• The aim of MASCRADE 2021 is to foster a healthy discussion on newer and practical strategies to mitigate the challenges of counterfeiting and smuggling especially in a post COVID era.
• Chief among them should be a focus on generating awareness.

Government of India has taken various measures to check menace of spurious drugs.

• The Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 was amended under Drugs & Cosmetics Amendment Act 2008.
• Under this Act, if any drug is deemed to be adulterated or spurious, then the offender or liable person may face imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than ten years but which may extend to imprisonment for life.
• Special Courts for trial of offences under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act for speedy disposal have been established

Science & Technology
AstroSat's Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope spots rare ultraviolet-bright stars in a massive intriguing cosmic dinosaur in the Milky Way

Relevance IN - Prelims ( about UV-bright stars + Astrosat + Globular cluster NGC 2808.) + Mains ( GS III awareness in the field of space)
What's the NEWS

• Astronomers exploring the massive intriguing globular cluster in our Galaxy called NGC 2808 that is said to have at least five generations of stars have spotted rare hot UV-bright stars in it.

UV-bright stars

• These stars whose inner core is almost exposed, making them very hot, exist in the late stages of evolution of a Sun-like star.
• It is not clear how these stars end their lives as not many of them are detected in these fast-evolving phases, making their study crucial.
• The old globular clusters referred to as dinosaurs of the universe present excellent laboratories where astronomers can understand how stars evolve through various phases between their birth and death, scientists at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, looked out for NGC 2808.
• With spectacular ultraviolet images of the cluster from Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard India's first multi-wavelength space satellite, AstroSat, they distinguished the hot UV-bright stars from the relatively cooler red giant and main-sequence stars which appear dim in these images.
• The team of scientists combined the UVIT data with observations made using other space missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia telescope along with ground-based optical observations.
• About 34 UV-bright stars were found to be members of the globular cluster. From the data, the team derived the properties of these stars such as their surface temperatures, luminosities and radii.
• One of the UV-bright stars was found to be about 3000 times brighter than the Sun with a surface temperature of about 100,000 K.
• The properties of these stars were then used to place them on what astronomers call the Hertzsprung-Russel (HR) diagram along with theoretical models to throw light on the characteristics of their parent stars and to predict their future evolution.
• Most of the stars were found to have evolved from a solar stage called the horizontal branch stars with hardly any outer envelope.
• Thus they were bound to skip the last major phase of life called the asymptotic giant phase and directly become dead remnants or white dwarfs.

Globular cluster NGC 2808.

• The Indian multi-wavelength space observatory AstroSat, launched in September 2015,yields another exciting results.
• Using this observatory, astronomers have identified a new population of ultraviolet stars in the globular cluster NGC 2808.
• Globular clusters are collections of thousands to millions of stars, moving as one unit.
• These stars are tightly held together by gravity of the cluster itself, and are believed to have formed together at roughly the same time.
• Some globular clusters could be among the oldest objects in our Milky Way, which hosts over 150 of them.
• A globular cluster contains stars with a variety of masses but with similar chemical composition, a snapshot of it could reveal stars of different masses at different stages of their evolution.
• NGC 2808 is one of the most massive globular clusters that we know of, and is located at a distance of 47,000 light years from us.
• This cluster was observed by the team of researchers using the UltraViolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) on-board AstroSat.

Government Schemes
'Ayushman CAPF' scheme
Relevance IN - Prelims ( about Ayushman CAPF' scheme)
What's the NEWS

• The Union Home Minister Shri Amit Shah launched the 'Ayushman CAPF' scheme for personnel and dependents of the Central Armed Police Forces

Know! about Ayushman CAPF' scheme

• Now all CAPF personnel and their families will receive free treatment with a simple card swipe in 24,000 hospitals.
• The scheme will be fully implemented by 1st May and an effort will be made that the Ayushman shield becomes available to all, through the efforts of the Prime Minister by 1st May.
• A health card will also be given to all CAPF personnel and their families and all CAPF personnel can receive a medical checkup once every year and their families once in three years.
• The Prime Minister Ayushman scheme has already served around two crore people, and provides free treatment upto Rs. five lakh to the poor and the needy
• The patients are also given Rs. 250 to commute back to their homes after treatment. The lives of India's 60 crore poor have been transformed by this cashless system.

Disaster Management
Subhash Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar 2021

Relevance IN - Prelims ( about Subhash Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar + about SEEDS + about Individual category) + Mains ( GS III disaster management)
What's the NEWS

• To recognize and honour the invaluable contribution and selfless service rendered by individuals and organizations in India in the field of Disaster Management, Government of India has instituted an annual award known as Subhash Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar.

Know! about the awards

• The award is announced every year on 23^rd January, the birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose.
• The award carries a cash prize of Rs. 51 lakh and a certificate in case of an institution and Rs. 5 lakh and a certificate in case of an individual.
• For the award this year, nominations were solicited from 1st July, 2020 onwards.
• In response to the award scheme, 371 valid nominations were received from institutions and individuals.
• For the year 2021, (i) Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (in the institutional category) and (ii) Dr. Rajendra Kumar Bhandari (in the Individual category) have been selected for the Subhash Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar for their excellent work in Disaster Management.

Institutional category
Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society

• SEEDS, a non-profit voluntary organization created in 1994, is a collective endeavour of young professionals drawn from development related fields.
• It is involved in research activities in community development, disaster management, environmental planning, transport planning, and urban and regional planning.
• Activities are carried out on behalf of government, semi-government and international development agencies.
• SEEDS has done commendable work in building community resilience to disasters.
• It has been working towards disaster readiness, response, and rehabilitation, building local capacities and enabling risk reduction at the community level in different States of India.
• With a deep understanding of their contexts, local leaders have a unique ability to reach excluded communities who lack access or fall outside the gambit of large-scale programming.

Individual category

• Dr. Rajendra Kumar Bhandari is among the pioneers in India who laid the foundation of scientific studies on geo hazards in general and landslides in particular.
• He established India's first laboratory on landslide studies at CSIR-Central Building Research Institute (CBRI), and three other Centres.
• He also conducted studies on disasters in India, deployed latest technologies of Ground Penetrating Radar; Geotechnical Digital System; vibrating wire Piezometers; Laser Particle Analyser; Pile Drive Analyser and Acoustic Emission Technology for in-depth investigations, instrumentation, monitoring and risk analysis for Early Warning against Landslides.

Other contributions

• The first global example of permanently fixing a major landslide by deep mountain drainage through directional drilling
• The first globally accepted explanation of undrained loading triggered landslides; and the first Landslide Hazard Atlas of India, published by Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC).
• His advocacy for National Disaster Knowledge Network became part of the recommendations of the High Powered Committee in October 2001.
• He led Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) Forum to deliver a set of Actionable Recommendations on Landslide disaster mitigation.

Science & Technology
New ant species discovered from Kerala

Relevance IN - Prelims ( about these new species of ant)
What's the NEWS

• Two new species of a rare ant genus have been discovered in India.

Know! about these new ants

• The species of the ant genus Ooceraea found in Kerala, and Tamil Nadu add to the diversity of this rare genus.
• They differ from others of the same genus on the basis of the number of antennal segments.
• One of them found in the Periyar Tiger Reserve of Kerala, has been named Ooceraea joshii, in honour of Prof. Amitabh Joshi, a distinguished evolutionary biologist from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India.
• The two new species, the first ones spotted with ten-segmented antennae among this rare genus,
• The genus is currently represented by 14 species of which eight possess nine-segmented antennae, while five possess eleven- segmented antennae and one species has recently been reported with eight-segmented antennae.
• In India, the genus was so far represented by two species with nine- and eleven-segmented antennae respectively.
• The newly discovered ant species with ten segmented antennae discovered, establish an old world lineage that contains a species emerging as the only model organism among the ant subfamily.

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