Current Affairs 22nd & 23rd July 2019

Current Affairs 22nd & 23rd July 2019

Important Current Affairs

Current Affairs 22nd & 23rd July 2019

Hand-in-Hand

India and China plans to hold an annual “Hand-in-Hand” (HiH) combat exercise at Umroi, near Shillong, Meghalaya in December 2019. It will be a two-week long exercise. The planning conference for the 8th edition of the exercise will be held in the month of August 20919.

Aim:
In the exercise, India and China will be focusing on counter-terrorism operations, human assistance and disaster management. 
The countries will discuss the operationalization of the high level communications between their militaries.
The exercise aims to manage the troop confrontations along Line of Actual Control (LAC) by implementing better CBMs, additional border personnel meeting (BPM) points and greater interaction between local commanders on the ground. 

Participants:
Around 120 troops from each side will be participating in the exercise. The complete plan of the drill will be planned out in August 2019 at the planning conference. 

History:
The Joint Military Exercise Hand-in-Hand was initiated in 2007 in Kunming,China. The 2nd exercise was held in Belgaum, Karnataka. HiH was dropped after the 2nd edition. The exercise was then resumed in 2013, when both the countries suspended their military ties because of a staple visa row.
In 2017, the exercise was not held because both the Armies were locked in a 73-day stand-off at Doklam in Sikkim sector. In June-August 2017, the bilateral border tensions were reduced and the two armies moved to additional infantry battalions, tanks, artillery and missile units towards the border.
In April 2018, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held an informal summit at Wuhan. The summit aimed to improve relations between the two countries. Then again the exercise resumed in December 2018. The 7th edition of the exercise was held in Chengdu, China. 

Indian Forest Act amendment 

Why in news: Across India, activists for tribal rights have said the proposed IFA amendments will divest tribals and other forest-dwelling communities of their rights over forest land and resources.

Highlights of the draft amendments:

• The amendment defines community as “a group of persons specified on the basis of government records living in a specific locality and in joint possession and enjoyment of common property resources, without regard to race, religion, caste, language and culture”.
• Forest is defined to include “any government or private or institutional land recorded or notified as forest/forest land in any government record and the lands managed by government/community as forest and mangroves, and also any land which the central or state government may by notification declare to be forest for the purpose of this Act.”
• While the preamble of IFA, 1927, said the Act was focused on laws related to transport of forest produce and the tax on it, the amendment has increased the focus to “conservation, enrichment and sustainable management of forest resources and matters connected therewith to safeguard ecological stability to ensure provision of ecosystem services in perpetuity and to address the concerns related to climate change and international commitments”.
• Increased role of states:The amendments say if the state government, after consultation with the central government, feels that the rights under FRA will hamper conservation efforts, then the state “may commute such rights by paying such persons a sum of money in lieu thereof, or grant of land, or in such other manner as it thinks fit, to maintain the social organisation of the forest dwelling communities or alternatively set out some other forest tract of sufficient extent, and in a locality reasonably convenient, for the purpose of such forest dwellers”.
• The amendment also introduces a new category of forests — production forest. These will be forests with specific objectives for production of timber, pulp, pulpwood, firewood, non-timber forest produce, medicinal plants or any forest species to increase production in the country for a specified period.

Indian Forest Act, 1927:

• The Indian Forest Act, 1927 was largely based on previous Indian Forest Acts implemented under the British. The most famous one was the Indian Forest Act of 1878.
• Both the 1878 act and the 1927 one sought to consolidate and reserve the areas having forest cover, or significant wildlife, to regulate movement and transit of forest produce, and duty leviable on timber and other forest produce.
• It also defines the procedure to be followed for declaring an area to be a Reserved Forest, a Protected Forest or a Village Forest.
• It defines what a forest offence is, what are the acts prohibited inside a Reserved Forest, and penalties leviable on violation of the provisions of the Act.

Concerns with regard to the present Draft Bill:

1. The draft Bill reinforces the idea of bureaucratic control of forests, providing immunity for actions such as use of firearms by personnel to prevent an offence.
2. The hard-line policing approach is reflected in the emphasis on creating infrastructure to detain and transport the accused.
3. To penalise entire communities through denial of access to forests for offences by individuals. Such provisions invariably affect poor inhabitants, and run counter to the empowering and egalitarian goals that produced the Forest Rights Act.
4. For decades now, the Forest Department has resisted independent scientific evaluation of forest health and biodiversity conservation outcomes. In parallel, environmental policy has weakened public scrutiny of decisions on diversion of forests for destructive activities such as mining and large dam construction.
5. Impact assessment reports have mostly been reduced to a farce, and the public hearings process has been
6. The exclusion of ‘village forestry’ from the preview of Forest Right Act (forest official supersedes Gram Sabha) is legally contradictory and would add confusion on the ground.
7. The draft mentions that the state governments could take away the rights of the forest dwellers if the government feels it is not in line with “conservation of the proposed reserved forest” by payment to the people impacted or by the grant of land.

The need for review:

Many reports like the MB Shah report of 2010 and the TSR Subramanian report of 2015, have talked about amending the IFA.

When a juvenile is tried as an adult, when not?

Why in news: In 2016, a 17-year-old was booked for the murder of his three-year-old neighbour in Mumbai. The Mumbai city Juvenile Justice Board as well as a children’s court directed that he be tried as an adult under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015. Last week, the Bombay High Court set aside these orders and directed that the accused be tried as a minor, saying the Act is reformative and not retributive.

When is a child tried as an adult?

The Juvenile Justice Act of 2000 was amended in 2015 with a provision allowing for Children in Conflict with Law (CCL) to be tried as adults under certain circumstances.

The Act defines a child as someone who is under age 18. For a CCL, age on the date of the offence is the basis for determining whether he or she was a child or an adult.

The amended Act distinguishes children in the age group 16-18 as a category which can be tried as adults if they are alleged to have committed a heinous offence — one that attracts a minimum punishment of seven years. The Act does not, however, make it mandatory for all children in this age group to be tried as adults.

Why was this distinction made?

The amendment was proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2014. This was in the backdrop of the gang-rape of a woman inside a bus in Delhi in 2012, leading to her death. One of the offenders was a 17-year-old, which led to the Ministry proposing the amendment (although it could not have retrospectively applied to him).

The then Minister, Maneka Gandhi, cited an increase in cases of offenders in that age group; child rights activists objected to the amendment.

The J S Verma Committee constituted to recommend amendments also stated that it was not inclined to reduce the age of a juvenile from 18 to 16. The amendment was made in 2015.

When can a child be tried as an adult?

As per Section 15 of the JJ Act, there are three criteria that the Juvenile Justice Board in the concerned district should consider while conducting a preliminary assessment to determine whether the child should be tried as an adult or under the juvenile justice system, which prescribes a maximum term of three years in a special home. The criteria are:

1. Whether the child has the mental and physical capacity to commit such an offence.
2. Whether the child has the ability to understand its consequences.
3. The circumstances in which the offence was committed.

If the Board finds that the child can be tried as an adult, the case is transferred to a designated children’s court, which again decides whether the Board’s decision is correct.

Chandrayaan 2 

Context: With the successful launch of India’s Moon mission Chandrayaan-2, all eyes are now on September 7 when the lander and rover modules of the spacecraft will make a soft landing on the surface of the moon.

The 640-tonne GSLV Mk-III rocket successfully injected the 3,850-kg Chandrayaan-2 composite module into the Earth’s orbit. According to the revised flight sequence, Chandrayaan-2 would spend 23 days in the Earth’s orbit.

Chandrayaan-2 mission:

• In September 2008, the Chandrayaan-2 mission was approved by the government for a cost of Rs 425 crore.
• It is India’s second mission to the moon.
• It aims to explore the Moon’s south polar region.
• The mission is an important step in India’s plans for planetary exploration, a program known as Planetary Science and Exploration (PLANEX).
• There are three components of the mission, an orbiter, a lander and a rover.
• The mission payloads include — Terrain Mapping Camera which will generate a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the entire moon, Chandrayaan 2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer which will test the elemental composition of the Moon’s surface Solar X-Ray Monitor which will provide solar X-ray spectrum inputs for CLASS. 
• The orbiter will be deployed at an altitude of 100 kilometers above the surface of the Moon. The lander will then separate from the orbiter, and execute a soft landing on the surface of the Moon, unlike the previous mission which crash landed near the lunar south pole.
• The lander, rover and orbiter will perform mineralogical and elemental studies of the lunar surface.
• The rover is named Pragyan.
• The mission’s lander is named Vikram after Dr Vikram A Sarabhai, the Father of the Indian Space Programme.

Objectives of the mission:

The primary objective of Chandrayaan-2 is to demonstrate the ability to soft-land on the lunar surface and operate a robotic rover on the surface. Scientific goals include studies of lunar topography, mineralogy, elemental abundance, the lunar exosphere, and signatures of hydroxyl and water ice.

GSLV Mk-III:

Developed by ISRO, the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-III is a three-stage vehicle.

Primarily designed to launch communication satellites into geostationary orbit.

It has a mass of 640 tonnes that can accommodate up to 8,000 kg payload to LEO and 4000 kg payload to GTO.

GSLV Mk-III vehicle is powered by two solid motor strap-ons (S200), a liquid propellant core stage (L110) and a cryogenic stage (C25), that has been designed for carrying the four-tonne class satellites.

The C25 is powered by CE-20, India’s largest cryogenic engine, designed and developed by the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre.

Why the south polar region of the moon? 

According to ISRO, the lunar south pole is an interesting surface area, which remains in shadow as compared to the north pole. There is a possibility of the presence of water in permanently shadowed areas around it, the agency said, adding craters in the south pole region have cold traps and contain fossil records of the early solar system.

The challenges along the way:

Challenges involved in the moon landing are identifying trajectory accurately; taking up deep space communication; trans-lunar injection, orbiting around the moon, taking up soft landing on the moon surface, and facing extreme temperatures and vacuum.