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UPSC Daily Current Affairs | Prelim Bits 24-02-2021

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February 24, 2021

National Urban Digital Mission

  • National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) was launched by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
  • NUDM will create a shared digital infrastructure for urban India by working across the three pillars of people, process, and platform to provide holistic support to cities and towns.
  • It will create a shared digital infrastructure that can consolidate and cross-leverage the various digital initiatives of the MoHUA.
  • It will institutionalise a citizen-centric, principles-based and ecosystem-driven approach to urban governance and service delivery in 2022 cities by 2022, and across all cities and towns in India by 2024.
  • NUDM has articulated a set of governing principles, and inherits the technology design principles of the National Urban Innovation Stack (NUIS), whose strategy and approach was released by MoHUA in 2019.
  • The principles give rise to standards, specifications, and certifications, across the three pillars of people, process, and platforms.

India Urban Data Exchange

  • India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) is an open-source software platform developed by the Smart Cities Mission and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
  • It facilitates secure exchange of Smart City data amongst data platforms, 3rd party authenticated and authorised applications, and other sources.
  • [This Smart City data could be monetised in the future, similar to the UPI for bank accounts and digital payments.]
  • It serves as an interface for data providers and data users to share, request, and access datasets related to cities, urban governance, and urban service delivery.
  • As the number of cities on IUDX expands, this will scale up to uniform sharing between data producers and data consumers across urban India.

SmartCode Platform

  • It enables all ecosystem stakeholders to contribute to a repository of open-source code for various solutions and applications for urban governance.
  • It addresses the challenges that Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) face in the development and deployment of digital applications to address urban challenges.
  • The source code available on the platform will be free to use without any licensing or subscription fees, thus limiting costs to those involved with customising the code and developing a locally-relevant solution.

Central Employment Guarantee Council

  • The Central Employment Guarantee Council’s (CEGC’s) 23rd Meeting was held recently.
  • In 2006, the Council was constituted under Section 10 of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005.
  • The Central Government has constituted this Council to discharge the functions and perform duties assigned to it by or under the provisions of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005.
  • Chairperson - Minister of Rural Development, Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.
  • It advises the Central Government on all matters concerning the implementation of this Act.
  • It reviews the monitoring and redressal mechanism and recommends improvements required.
  • It prepares annual reports to be laid before Parliament by the Central Government on the implementation of this Act.

Bio-restoration

  • A new technology for ecological restoration (Bio-restoration) was developed by Indian scientists.
  • It is helping in revival of mangroves degraded due to rising sea levels, climate change and human intrusion in the Sunderbans, West Bengal.
  • [The Sundarbans is a protected wetland under the Ramsar Convention and is also a UNESCO World Heritage site.]
  • Ecological restoration means reviving native ecosystem in degraded areas while maintaining diversity of original flora and fauna through regeneration but bringing down the regeneration period to 4 to 5 years.
  • Restoration process begins with stabilising entire site by planting native salt tolerant grasses. It involves the use of growth-promoting bacteria.
  • The restoration project was initiated with help from the Department of Biotechnology in 2013 and is now likely to be extended to 100 acres.
  • The transplantation of propagated mangroves started in 2014, initially at a moderately degraded patch and then at severely degraded zones.

Agriculture Infrastructure Development Cess

  • The Budget 2021-22 has proposed a new levy, Agriculture Infrastructure Development Cess (AIDC) on 29 items.
  • The purpose of the new AIDC is to raise funds to finance spending on developing agriculture infrastructure.
  • The new cess will be levied on 29 products, such as gold, silver, as well as imported alcohol (excluding beer), imported apple, pulses, palm oil, urea, and petrol/diesel including branded ones.
  • The new cess will only offset the reduction in Basic Custom Duty (BCD), Basic Excise Duty (BED) and Special Additional Excise Duty (SAED) on unbranded and branded petrol-diesel.
  • Thus it will not raise the tax incidence for consumers.

Cess

  • Cess is a special-purpose tax levied over and above basic tax rates.
  • Drawing power from Articles 270 and 271 of the Constitution, the Centre collects cess and deposits it in the Consolidated Fund of India.
  • The money collected is then transferred to a segregated fund to be used for specific purpose.
  • But, this cess and surcharge money is not part of the divisible pool, from which devolution of Central taxes takes place to the States.

 

Source: PIB, The Hindu, Business Line, Down To Earth

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