Daily News Prescription - 31st August, 2021

The Hindu

GS1: Modern History

• This is renovation, not restoration According to the historians the new-look Jallianwala Bagh memorial is a distortion of history of the site where British troops massacred Indians on April 13, 1919.

GS2: Governance

• Private hospitals lift less than 10% of vaccines Private hospitals picked up only 9.4% of the COVID vaccines though 25% of the doses were allotted.
• Taliban didn’t take passports: visa agency Application centre in Kabul urges Union government to revoke order cancelling issued visas.
• The vaccine’s last-mile problem. Against a backdrop of vaccine nationalism, debates over intellectual property or technology transfer, fair and equal access to COVID-19 vaccines is at risk.

GS2: Social Justice

• Marital rape: an indignity to women The High Court of Chhattisgarh recently decided a criminal revision petition challenging the rape charges framed against the applicant husband.

GS2: International Relations

• India supports Palestine peace process: Shringla India will support “all efforts” to restart the peace process between Israel and Palestine

GS2: International Bodies

• N. Korea may have restarted N-reactor: IAEA According to UN Atomic agency, Nuclear-armed North Korea appears to have restarted its plutonium-producing reprocessing reactor.

GS3: Economy

• New initiative in J&K to restore lost glory of Pashmina shawls The CFE has decided to double the wages for women from ₹1 per knot, of 10 threads with 10-inch-long yarn, to ₹2.
• Ire over toy train monetisation plan A section of people in the Darjeeling hills of West Bengal are protesting against the Centre’s proposed monetisation of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR) which is UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999.
• A monetisation move that doesn’t tick most boxes The National Monetisation Pipeline, or NMP may not help realise the best value for public assets to kick-start investment demand.

GS3: Environment

• Leaded petrol eradicated, says UNEP Recently UN Environment Programme (UNEP) stated that the use of leaded petrol has been eradicated from the globe.
• India is indeed walking the green talk Is it fair to apply pressure on India to raise its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) committed in the Paris Agreement?

Indian Express

GS2: Governance

• Goa renamed through land ownership bill despite objections by Revenue, law and Finance.  The Goa Legislative Assembly passed the controversial Goa Bhumiputra Adhikarini Bill, 2021
• How pandemic changed nature of Police work, relations with public The national lockdown led to many sections of society faced police action in an unusual context. And the police themselves faced an enormous challenge.

GS2: Polity

• CJI administered the Oath of Office to nine new SC judges today. Nine new judges, including three women, would be administered oath of office as judges of the Supreme Court by the Chief Justice of India (CJI).

GS2: Health

• Is COVID now endemic to India? India seems to be entering some stage of Covid-19 endemicity where there is low- to moderate-level transmission according to the WHO.

GS3: Economy

• PPP model of BharatNet: DoT likely to float bids by Sept-end The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has started pre-bid meetings with various stakeholders with respect to the public-private partnership model implementation for BharatNet.
• Airtel Rs.21K-cr fundraise key to expansion plan Bharti Airtel’s board has approved raising up to Rs 21,000 crore by way of the rights issue.

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