QUIZ – 2017: Insights Current Affairs Quiz, 06 April 2017

Solution: b.

These two cases have in recent times repeatedly appeared in the news whenever there has been any issue related to Right to Privacy.

In the news: “When the hearing began, senior advocate K.K. Venugopal, for Facebook, raised the contention that if the WhatsApp-Facebook contract is going to be challenged as a violation of the right to privacy, then a larger Bench than five judges should hear the case. He referred to the 1954 eight-judges Bench verdict in M.P. Sharma’s case and the six-judges Bench judgment of 1962 in Kharak Singh case on the right to privacy. Both judgments had categorically rejected the existence of privacy as a guaranteed right under Article 21 of the Constitution.”

TH: WhatsApp case for Constitution Bench;

Solution: c.

The regulator will perform four primary functions— 1) tariff determination (it will not set the tariffs; it will only recommend tariffs “commensurate with costs”); 2) ensuring fair play and level playing field for stakeholder investment; 3) setting efficiency and performance standards; and 4) dissemination of information.

Livemint;

TH: Rail regulator gets green light;

Solution: b.

McMahon Line: Frontier between Tibet and Assam in British India, negotiated between Tibet and Great Britain at the end of the Shimla Conference (October 1913–July 1914) and named for the chief British negotiator, Sir Henry McMahon.

• It runs from the eastern border of Bhutan along the crest of the Himalayas until it reaches the great bend in the Brahmaputra River where that river emerges from its Tibetan course into the Assam Valley.

Improvisation: TH: Ties severely damaged, says China;

Solution: d.

ASA is the basic legal framework for any air operation between the two countries. According to Wikipedia, “An air transport agreement (also sometimes called an air service agreement or ATA or ASA) is an agreement which two nations sign to allow international commercial air transport services between their territories. The bilateral system has its basis under the Chicago convention and associated multilateral treaties.”

• Additional Information: The Convention on International Civil Aviation, drafted in 1944 by 54 nations, was established to promote cooperation and “create and preserve friendship and understanding among the nations and peoples of the world.” Known more commonly today as the ‘Chicago Convention’, this landmark agreement established the core principles permitting international transport by air, and led to the creation of the specialized agency which has overseen it ever since – the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

PIB;

Solution: a.

You can (hopefully) expect UPSC not to give statements that may cause panic (this is with reference to Statement 2).

• In simple words, according to THIS TH article, a ‘planet’ is a celestial body that “must orbit the sun, must be round, and along with its satellites, must “orbit in a clear path around the sun”.
• The exact definition, according to the IAU (Click HERE), of “a planet in the Solar System would be as follows: A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”

Solution: c.

• ‘Geotagging’ is the process of adding geographical identification like latitude and longitude to various media such as a photo or video. Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information from a device. It provides users the location of the content of a given picture.
• ‘Geomapping’ is a visual representation of the geographical location of geotagged assets layered on top of map or satellite imagery.
• Who does Geotagging? The National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), ISRO (Hyderabad) has a software platform, Bhuvan that allows users to explore a 2D/3D representation of the surface of the Earth. It also acts as a platform for hosting government data.
• Geotagging for monitoring of assets is already started in Ministry of Rural Development for MGNREGA and Department of Land Resources for monitoring of watershed activities in the states. Postal department has also geotagged the post offices using NRSC Bhuvan Platform.
• Several assets are created in the states under various schemes of various Ministries. Monitoring of such wide spread activities is of paramount importance to states and Government of India to understand flow of funds, inventorising the assets, bringing in transparency, planning of assets for future, and finally informing the farmers about the facilities available. Geotagging helps with such monitoring.

PIB: Geotagging;