Sunday, 28th July, 2013

NATIONAL NEWS

• India offers vietnam credit for millitary ware
  • In a first, India has offered a $ 100 million credit line to Vietnam to purchase military equipment. It will be used for purchasing four patrol boats.
  • The credit line was agreed upon around the time India once again expressed its resolve to remain involved in oil exploration activity in the Phu Kanh basin of the South China Sea. Vietnam says it is within its rights to invite India to explore for oil in this area.
  • But China claims that this basin is within the “nine dotted line” or its zone of influence
  • There has been a heavy two-way traffic of high level visitors between the two countries that has led to a $ 45 million credit line for a 200 MW hydel project built by BHEL, offer of export of the Param supercomputer and a breakthrough for the Indian corporate sector though its Vietnamese counterparts have struggled
  • The sources pointed out that India was beefing up security ties with all countries beyond its eastern flank as one of the vital components of its Look East policy.

• Agreement on master partnership signed for giant optical telescope
  • the Master Partnership Agreement (MPA) for the construction of the $1.5-billion Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), what would be the world’s largest optical and infrared telescope, was signed by the five partner countries — Canada, China, India, Japan and the U.S. — in Hawaii, the site for the proposed telescope.
  • Besides the Indian Institute of Astra , the other participating institutions in the TMT-India Programme are the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCCA), Pune, and the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Nainital. While the IUCAA functions under the UGC, the other two are under the DST.
  • With the signing of the MPA, India will be moving from its current observer status to a full-fledged partner in the project and will be a member of what is called the TMT Collaborative Board. This Board will eventually be replaced by a Governing Board, which will manage the TMT International Observatory on behalf of its partners
  • The main promoters of this international project are Caltech and the University of California in the U.S. and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), with China, India and Japan providing additional financial and technical support in return for participation in its construction and observation time.
  • India is a 10 per cent partner in the project, which implies a financial commitment of about Rs. 1,000 crore. Much of India’s contribution will be in-kind. Indian institutes and the industry are collaborating to build much of the telescope’s control systems, whose estimated value is about Rs. 600 crore
  • At present, India has three 2 m class optical-IR telescopes and a 3.6 m telescope waiting to be commissioned. The apertures of the current ground-based large optical-IR telescopes are in the 8-10 m range, though other bigger ones like the TMT are also on the anvil, the 39 m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in particular. Though the Indian astronomical community has been using the existing 8-10 m class telescopes, such usage has largely been limited to individual efforts.
  • The TMT, which belongs to what are called the “new technology” telescopes, was proposed after the enormous success of the first new technology telescope, the twin 10 m Keck telescope on Mauna Kea. The TMT will also be a segmented mirror telescope with its primary 30 m mirror made up of 492 hexagonal segments of 1.44 m each. Precisely aligned, these segments will work as a single reflective surface of 30 m diameter. The TMT has a collecting area of 650 sq. m. and will have observational windows from UV to mid-IR wavelengths (310 nanometres to 28 micrometres). Its large collecting area makes it 81 times more sensitive (measure of the faintest signal that it can detect) than the current largest ground-based telescopes.
  • Like all ground-based observatories, TMT is limited in spatial resolution by the atmospheric turbulence. While the 30 m primary mirror builds on the technological and operational experience of the Keck Telescope, it will be the first ground-based telescope to incorporate the technology of Adaptive Optics (AO) as an integral component of the telescope. AO refers to systems designed to sense atmospheric turbulence in real time, make the appropriate corrections to the beam and enable true image on the ground limited only by optical diffraction. The AO capability will enable the TMT resolve objects by a factor of 3 better than the 10 m-class telescopes and 12 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

• Government plans training programme for cooks and helpers
  • Shaken by the Bihar mid-day meal tragedy that killed nearly 30 children, the government plans to start a training programme for cooks and helpers to educate them about hygiene and the nutritional value of food
  • The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has sought the support of the Tourism Ministry for the purpose.
  • The Tourism Ministry will train about 24.58 lakh cook-cum-helpers engaged in the world’s largest noon meal programme in various training institutes under it.
  • The cook-cum-helpers will be imparted knowledge about the calorific and nutritive value of the mid-day meals, best cooking practices so that the nutritive value of ingredients gets retained, and to create awareness on issues such as malnutrition
  • They will also be trained in hygienic practices and communication skills.
  • The cooks will trained at the Institutes of Hotel Management (IHMs) and the Food Craft Institutes (FCIs) designated by Tourism Ministry. The Ministry plans to train 600 persons in the current financial year
  • The cooks will be nominated by the HRD Ministry, which will make efforts that each person nominated for the 10-day full time course is capable of training fellow cooks-cum-helpers.