• Sample Registration System (SRS) bulletin was released recently by the Registrar General of India.

According to the bulletin based on data collected for 2018:

• Against the National Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) of 32, Madhya Pradesh has an IMR of 48 and Nagaland 4.
• Chhattisgarh has the highest death rate at 8 and Delhi, an almost entirely urban state, has a rate of 3.3, indicating better healthcare facilities.
• Bihar has the highest birth rate at 26.2 and Andaman and Nicobar Islands has a birth rate of 11.2.
• The National Birth rate in 2018 stood at 20, and Death and Infant Mortality rates stood at 6.2 and 32, respectively.
• The rates are calculated per one thousand of the population.

Sample Registration System (SRS)

• The SRS is a demographic survey for providing reliable annual estimates of infant mortality rate, birth rate, death rate and other fertility and mortality indicators at the national and sub-national levels.
• Initiated on a pilot basis by the Registrar General of India in a few states in 1964-65, it became fully operational during 1969-70.
• The field investigation consists of continuous enumeration of births and deaths in selected sample units by resident part-time enumerators, generally anganwadi workers and teachers; and an independent retrospective survey every six months by SRS supervisors.
• The data obtained by these two independent functionaries are matched.

• Recently, the Supreme Court has stated that, ‘Sabarimala case review Bench had the power to frame questions on religious freedom’.

Background

• In 2019, a five-judge Bench led by then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi did not complete its assigned task of reviewing the apex court’s original Sabarimala judgment of 2018, which allowed women of every age to enter and worship at the temple.
• Instead, it had framed “larger issues” concerning essential religious practices of various religions and clubbed other pending cases on subjects as varied as female genital mutilation among Dawoodi Bohras to entry of Parsi women who married inter-faith into the fire temple and Muslim women into mosques and referred them all to a larger Bench.
• Chief Justice Bobde, who succeeded Justice Gogoi as top judge, set up a nine-judge Bench to hear the reference.

• In February 2020, it decided to go ahead and examine “larger issues” of religious freedom across multiple faiths in connection with the Sabarimala review.

Recent Developments

• A nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court has recently declared that superior courts enjoy untrammelled power to take up any cause to do complete justice.
• Being a superior court of record, it is for this court to consider whether any matter falls within its jurisdiction or not.
• Unlike a court of limited jurisdiction, the superior court of record is entitled to determine for itself questions about its own jurisdiction.
• The nine member bench also invoked Article 142 of the Constitution.

Article 142

• Article 142 of the Constitution allows the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it.
• This is not the first time that the Supreme Court has invoked Article 142.
• The apex court has in the past used this constitutional provision in cases between jaypee and homebuyers, in a marriage case, Bhopal gas tragedy, Ayodhya case and others.

• Mastcam-Z is a mast-mounted camera system that is equipped with a zoom function on the Mars 2020 Rover: Perseverance.
• It is the most advanced pair of “eyes” ever sent to Mars.
• Its Mastcam-Z instrument packs a next-gen zoom capability that will help the mission make 3D imagery more easily.
• The Mastcam-Z is located on Perseverance’s head, it is a more advanced version of the Mastcam that helped the Curiosity Mars rover to produce panoramas of the Martian surface.
• The Mastcam-Z will not only produce images that enable the public to follow the rover’s daily discoveries, but it will also provide key data to help engineers navigate and scientists choose interesting rocks to study.
• The Z in Mastcam-Z stands for ‘zoom’.
• Mastcam-Z will provide ‘superhuman vision’ to view the landscape in a variety of colours (wavelengths of light), including some that can’t be detected by the human eye.

• Jharkhand’s Sohrai Khovar Painting was given the Geographical Indication (GI) tag recently by the Geographical Indications Registry headquartered in Chennai.

Sohrai Khovar Painting

• The Sohrai Khovar painting is a traditional and ritualistic mural art being practised by local tribal women during local harvest and marriage seasons using local, naturally available soils of different colours in the area of Hazaribagh district of Jharkhand.
• The Sohrai Khovar painting is primarily being practised only in the district of Hazaribagh.
• However, in recent years, for promotional purposes, it has been seen in other parts of Jharkhand.
• Traditionally painted on the walls of mud houses, they are now seen on other surfaces, too.
• The style features a profusion of lines, dots, animal figures and plants, often representing religious iconography.
• In recent years, the walls of important public places in Jharkhand, such as the Birsa Munda Airport in Ranchi, and the Hazaribagh and Tatanagar Railway Stations, among others, have been decorated with Sohrai-Khovar paintings.

• Telangana’s Telia Rumal was given the Geographical Indication (GI) tag recently by the Geographical Indications Registry headquartered in Chennai.

Telia Rumal

• Telia Rumal cloth involves intricate handmade work with cotton loom displaying a variety of designs and motifs in three particular colours — red, black and white.
• Telia Rumal can only be created using the traditional handloom process and not by any other mechanical means as otherwise, the very quality of the Rumal would be lost.
• During the Nizam’s dynasty, Puttapaka, a small, backward village of the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh had about 20 families engaged in handloom weaving, who were patronised by rich Muslim families and the Nizam rulers.
• The officers working in the court of the Nizam would wear the Chituki Telia Rumal as a symbolic representation of status.
• Telia Rumals are offered at the dargah of Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, with some devotees offering 50 or even 100 cloths.
• Telia Rumals were worn as a veil by princesses at the erstwhile court of the Nizam of Hyderabad; and as a turban cloth by Arabs in the Middle East.