10 01 20 - tinglado-mediafiles.s3.amazonaws.com · • open source software - software that is not...

10 01 20

SL. NO. TOPICS THE HINDU

PAGE NO.

1 Declare Goa sanctuaries as “tiger reserves”: Activists 07

2 Find out whether automated plants can address pollution 02

3 U.P tops list in crimes against women 09

4 Panel Approves scheme to “trade” in forests 09

5 What is the state of “open source” in India today? 11

Dated: 10. Dec. 2020 DNS Notes

Title Declare Goa sanctuaries as “tiger reserves”: Activists (Page No 7)

Syllabus Prelims: Environment

Theme Tiger reserves

Highlights Context:

• Activists and politicians from Goa have demanded that certain areas in wildlife sanctuaries of the state be notified as “Tiger Reserves”

Dandeli Anchi Tiger reserve

• Or also known as Kali Tiger Reserve is a protected area and tiger reserve.

• It is located in Uttara Kannada district, in Karnataka, India.

• The park is a habitat of Bengal tigers, black panthers and Indian elephants, amongst other distinctive fauna. The Kali River flows through the tiger reserve and is the lifeline of the ecosystem and hence the name.

• The Tiger reserve is spread over an area of 1300 square kilometers.

• The river Kali is the lifeline of the people of Uttara Kannada district and integrates Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary (DWS) spread across 400 km2 and Anshi National Park (ANP) spread across 500 km2. The river cuts across the whole park and the renaming has given the area a single identity.

The Kali River or Kali nadi

• It is a river flowing through Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka state in India. The river rises near Diggi, a small village in Uttar Kannada district.

• The river is the lifeline to some 4 lakh people in the Uttara Kannada district and supports the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people including fishermen on the coast of Karwar.

• There are many dams built across this river for the generation of electricity.

• One of the important dams build across Kali river is the Supa Dam at Ganeshgudi. The river runs 184 kilometers before joining Arabian Sea.


Personal Notes


Title Find out whether automated plants can address pollution (Page number 02)

Syllabus GS III: Environment Pollution

Theme Pyrolysis

Highlights Context:

• The NGT has directed the CPCB to carry out a study within four months to ascertain whether advance batch automated plants can address pollution caused due to burning of waste tyres in pyrolysis industries.

• Pyrolysis is the thermal decomposition of materials at elevated temperatures in an inert atmosphere.

• It involves a change of chemical composition and is irreversible. The word is coined from the Greek-derived elements pyro "fire" and lysis "separating".

• Pyrolysis is most commonly used in the treatment of organic materials. It is one of the processes involved in charring wood.

• In general, pyrolysis of organic substances produces volatile products and leaves a solid residue enriched in carbon, char. Extreme pyrolysis, which leaves mostly carbon as the residue, is called carbonization. Pyrolysis is considered as the first step in the processes of gasification or combustion.

• The process is used heavily in the chemical industry, for example, to produce ethylene, many forms of carbon, and other chemicals from petroleum, coal, and even wood, to produce coke from coal. Aspirational applications of pyrolysis would convert biomass into syngas and biochar, waste plastics back into usable oil, or waste into safely disposable substances.


Personal Notes


Title U.P tops list in crimes against women (Page number 09)

Syllabus GS 1: Social issues

Theme NCRB report

Highlights Context:

• The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) published the annual Crime in India Report 2018 on Wednesday. It was published with provisional data, as five States — West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Sikkim — did not send clarifications sought by the NCRB despite repeated reminders.

Crimes against women

• According to the report, 3,78,277 cases of crime against women were reported in the country, up from 3,59,849 in 2017.

• Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 59,445 cases, followed by Maharashtra (35,497) and West Bengal (30,394).

• The conviction rate in rape-related cases stood at 27.2% even though the rate of filing chargesheets was 85.3% in such cases.

Suicides report

• The NCRB also released the Accidental Death and Suicides in India 2018 report, which said that 10,349 people working in the farm sector ended their lives in 2018, accounting for 7.7 % of the total number of suicides in the country.

• There were 5,763 farmers/cultivators and 4,586 agricultural labourers among those who ended their lives. The total number of people who committed suicide in 2018 was 1,34,516, an increase of 3.6% from 2017 when 1,29,887 cases were reported. The highest number of suicide victims were daily wagers — 26,589, comprising 22.4% of such deaths.


Personal Notes


Title Panel Approves scheme to “trade” in forests (Page number 09)

Syllabus Prelims: Environment

Theme Forest advisory committee

Highlights Issue -

• The Forest Advisory Committee, has approved a scheme that could allow “forests” to be traded as a commodity.

• If implemented, it allows the Forest Department to outsource one of its responsibilities of reforesting to non-government agencies

Present System –

• Presently, industry needs to make good the loss of forest by finding appropriate non-forest land — equal to that which would be razed.

• It also must pay the State Forest Department the current economic equivalent — called Net Present Value — of the forest land.

• It’s then the department’s responsibility to grow appropriate vegetation that, over time, would grow into forests.

• Industries have often complained that they find it hard to acquire appropriate non-forest land, which has to be contiguous to existing forest.

• Nearly ₹50,000 crore had been collected by the Centre over decades, but the funds were lying unspent because States were not spending the money on regrowing forests.

• The Supreme Court intervened, a new law came about with rules for how this fund was to be administered.

• About ₹47,000 crore had been disbursed to States until August, but it has barely led to any rejuvenation of forests.

• The proposed ‘Green Credit Scheme’ allows agencies — they could be private companies, village forest communities — to identify land and begin growing plantations.

• After three years, they would be eligible to be considered as compensatory forest land if they met the Department’s criteria.


Personal Notes


Title What is the state of “open source” in India today? (page number 11)

Syllabus GS III: Science & Technology

Theme Open source software’s and their need

Highlights Context: This interview highlights about Open Source Movement in India which has focused on democratizing technology access and its relevance to digital technology, privacy, and software patenting. Some Important Terms

• Proprietary software is software that is owned by an individual or a company (usually the one that developed it). There are almost always major restrictions on its use, and its source code is almost always kept secret.

• Source code is the form in which a program is originally written by a human using a programming language and prior to being converted to machine code which is directly readable by a computer's CPU (central processing unit). It is necessary to have the source code in order to be able to modify or improve a program.

• Open source software - Software that is not proprietary includes free software and public domain software. Free software, which is generally the same as open source software, is available at no cost to everyone, and it can be used by anyone for any purpose and with only very minimal restrictions.

About Open Source Software Movement

• The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

• "Source code" is the part of software that most computer users don't ever see; it's the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software—a "program" or "application"—works.

• Programmers who have access to a computer program's source code can improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don't always work correctly.

• Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.

• The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, a part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open-source software.

Propriety Software

• Proprietary software, also known as closed-source software, is a non-free computer software for which the software's publisher or another person retains intellectual property rights, either copyright or patent. To use the software, one needs to pay heavily to its licence holder in form of copyright or patent.

• Proprietary software is any software that is copyrighted and bears limits against use, distribution and modification that are imposed by its publisher, vendor or developer.

Need for Open Source in early 2000

• Earlier, there was a need to campaign aggressively for open source for political, cultural and economic reasons. But now, open source has become the new normal.

• Open Source movement helped new age start-ups and business ventures in software industry to become technology independent and also ensured that software was localised to Indian languages.

• This helped in saving cost as it reduced dependency on MNCs for core technology like operating systems. Today, some of the largest e-governance projects and start-ups in India are running on OS.

Diversity, Choice & Delay

• Open Source gave software developers and the industry as a whole diversity and ability to chose among OS or stay with MNCs with heavy price tags on their patented software.

• Lack of fixing technical issues in OS Software was another reason why OS took some time to develop specially in India.

• So, now with democratization of technologies, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) — OS has become much more mainstream idea.


• Commercial use of OS ensured its sustainability such as use of OS in in mission-critical

applications like the stock exchange or e-government applications. This has played a major role in boosting the adoption of OS overall now.

Development of OS

• The pace of innovation in OS, because of its collaborative nature, outstrips that in proprietary software. So, if one looks at the current areas of explosive growth such as Big Data and analytics, the pace of innovation in OS is so rapid that there is no proprietary competitor.

• Now, we are in an era of OS 2.0 where the technology seems to have leapfrogged propriety software and are no more its competitor.

Removing fear of technology from people’s mind

• Mobile phone is in the hands of an estimated 800 million people today. It’s the first computing device that they have been introduced to.

• Use of internet in India has become cheaper. Consumption of online content is also changing including more number of videos generated for purposes other than entertainment (healthcare & education). All these developments are relevant for OS coding.

• Thus, there is a continuous need for skill enhancement and it must be aided by academia, industry as well as government.

• With more number of content been generated online, there is a hope that use of OS coding will develop and nurture in times to come including some being built locally for India.

• So, many of these entertainment apps have played a role in removing the fear of technology from people’s minds.

Debates around Software Patenting

• Multinationals continue to be the biggest patentees in India and with their increasing grip over new technologies such as AI, machine learning, Internet of Things, Big Data, there will be pressure on the Indian government to allow for patenting of software.

• The law says that software per se is not patentable. But the interpretation of ‘per se’ has been twisted and this game has been going on for years.

• The intent of Parliament was that software shouldn’t be patentable. The reason we will continue to see pushback by multinational companies is because these are the largest patent holders anywhere in the world and the balance of power and software patentees is with them.

• If patents are allowed in India, they will be able to charge royalties from domestic software technology players. There are billions of dollars at stake for this and it is never going to go away unless the Indian government removes the term ‘per se’ from Section 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act.

• So, India needs to invest in building its own intellectual property. And that means we need to have our own patents. In, US, everything innovated under the sun is patentable. So, India needs to become patent competitive patents will become an even more important tool for supremacy with more innovations and coming into age of new technologies.

Concerns on Data

• We should be able to build systems where individuals can take control of their data and be in control of how other people monetise it and leverage it for loans, etc.

• In future, in the world of AI in every field, privacy of data will be another major challenge not only for the consumers but also for the government.

• Thus, data privacy issue requires every creator to build trust which will become an important feature for any data-led industry as we move forward in time and technology.

• It is here where OS can play a major role in increasing data safety but for that the government needs to build more trust not only with OS developers but also with consumers of such data.

Conclusion

• The article ends by saying that the government has two roles. One, lawmakers have to ensure that they pass laws that benefit citizens.

• And the second is that the government is also one of the largest data controllers apart from platforms. So what kind of governance they have around the data is going to be a really critical part of the data ecosystem in India.


Personal Notes

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