Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
- The treaty was signed in the year 1987 between United States and Soviet Union.
- It required both countries to eliminate and permanently disown all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
- It did not cover sea-launched missiles.
- The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate entire category of nuclear weapons.
- As a result of this treaty, superpowers destroyed a total of 2,692 short, medium and intermediate-range missiles by the treaty's implementation deadline of June 1, 1991.
- In 2014, United States has alleged that Russia violated the treaty and it has deployed the non-compliant missile.
- Recently, US announced that it is withdrawing from the treaty. USA Congress approval for the same is yet to be taken.
IMPRESS Scheme
- Impactful Policy Research in Social Science (IMPRESS) has been launched by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development.
- It aims to promote policy research in social science.
- The objective is to identify and fund research proposals in social sciences with maximum impact on the governance and society.
- It will provide an opportunity to researchers from all universities (Central and State), private institutions with 12(B) status conferred by UGC.
- Under this, 1,500 research projects will be awarded for two years to support social science research in the higher educational institutions.
- The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) has been entrusted with the task of implementing and monitoring the scheme.
- Some of the identified domains under the scheme are,
- State and democracy,
- Urban transformation,
- Media culture and society,
- Employment skills and rural transformation,
- Governance innovation and public policy, innovation,
- Agriculture and rural development,
- Social media and society,
- Politics law and economics.
- Each project under the scheme will conclude in 3 years.
SPARC Scheme
- A webportal for the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) was recently launched by Union Human Resource ministry.
- It is a scheme for promotion of academic and research collaboration.
- It aims at improving the research ecosystem of India’s higher educational institutions by facilitating academic and research collaborations between Indian and foreign institutions.
- The quality benchmark for SPARC is that only such Indian institutes can apply which are in top 100 NIRF ranking or top 100 NIRF subject ranking.
- For foreign universities the benchmark is either top 500 of QS ranking or top 200 of QS subject ranking.
- IIT-Khargapur is the national Coordinating Institute to implement the SPARC programme.
Report on International Migrants
- Asian Economic Integration Report 2018 was recently released by the Asian Development Bank.
- The report has highlighted that most of the international migrants in 2017 were from India, followed by China and Bangladesh.
- The report further said as many as one third of international migrants were from Asia in 2017.
- According to the report, Asia continued as the largest source of international migrants globally although the number of Asian migrants headed to regional destinations declined slightly.
- According to UN recommendations, International migrants are those persons who have spent at least one year of their lives in a country other than the one in which they live at the time the data are gathered.
Mammals of India (MaOI)
- MaOI is a part of Biodiversity Atlas (India project), which is an initiative of National Centre for Biological Sciences.
- It is an online, peer- reviewed, freely-accessible portal.
- It provides an opportunity to any person to upload geotagged photographic observations about mammals with information on habitat age of the observed individual.
- These observations will be reviewed by subject experts and uploaded on the website.
Source: PIB, The Hindu
