Ministry of New & Renewable Energy (MNRE) held a ‘Chintan Baithak’ with the stakeholders of Renewable Energy sector here today. The ‘Baithak’ (meet) was chaired by Secretary, MNRE, Shri Anand Kumar and saw good participation from Renewable Energy (RE) sector including the representatives of major RE developers, equipment manufacturers, financers, regulators, think-tanks, industry bodies and skill developers.
The day long meet deliberated upon various issues pertaining to the RE sector viz. solar, wind, bio-energy, small-hydro, regulatory issues, bidding & pricing, demand forecasting, financing of RE projects, energy storage, Make in India, skilling India’s RE work force etc. Various policy interventions were suggested for the sector by the stakeholders at ‘Chintan Baithak’ and MNRE will consider these suggestions.
What is it? It is the pilot project of the Delhi High Court. It is one of its kind project in India aimed to study the life cycles of cases to come up with optimal timelines for cases. The primary goal of the project was to study the flow of cases in the absence of backlog.
The aim of project is to provide information on the judicial time required to dispose of a case together with the gathering stage wise details in each case.
It was undertaken in certain subordinate courts of Delhi to identify benchmarks for different types of cases timelines, number of judges required, case flow management rules and a host of other relevant factors.
Highlights of the report: Need more judges: Delhi needs 43 more Judges above the current strength of 143 to clear all pending cases in one year.
More criminal cases: The number of criminal cases in Delhi is far more than the number of civil cases. As on March 2019, there were 5.5 lakh criminal cases and 1.8 lakh civil cases pending in subordinate courts in Delhi.
Most time spent: The highest amount of time per hearing on average was spent on the final arguments stage followed by the final order or judgement. A considerable amount of time is taken on dictation, researching on case laws etc. before pronouncing the final judgement. Thus, a lot of time is spent on each of the hearings.
Reasons for delays: The absence of witness. Unnecessary Adjournments sought by the advocates or the parties at various stages in the case. There is also a delay in the service of summons, especially outstation parties.
Concerns expressed: Increase in workload: With the lesser number of judges, the workload of an individual judge could increase. Credibility issue: With persisting delays the system becomes less credible as litigants have to wait for the decades to get their cases resolved.
Increase in pendency: With an increase in the number of filings, the pendency of cases is bound to increase if no proper targeted steps are taken to overcome the issue.
Need of the hour: Arrive at an optimal judge strength to handle the cases pending in the system. Increase the current strength of judges from 143 to an ideal 186 judges to clear all the pending cases in one year.
Context: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has imposed a monetary penalty on five Pre-Paid Payment Instrument (PPI) issuers for violating its regulatory guidelines under provisions of payment and settlement Systems act 2007.
Background: As per RBI directions, PPI issuers were required to complete the KYC process by February 28, 2019. PPIs or mobile wallets were mandated by the banking regulator in October 2017 to capture all information required under the know-your-customer (KYC) guidelines by end February.
What are PPIs? Prepaid payment instruments are those which facilitate purchase of goods and services against the value stored on such instruments. Value stored on them is paid by the holder using a medium (cash, debit card, credit card etc). These are generally issued in the form of smart cards, mobile wallets, paper vouchers, internet accounts/wallets.
Features: Prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) come with a pre-loaded value and in some cases a pre-defined purpose of payment. They facilitate the purchase of goods and services as well as inter-personal remittance transactions such as sending money to a friend or a family member.
These payment instruments are licensed and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. There are three types of PPIs—closed system PPIs, semi-closed system PPIs and open system PPIs. The most common example of a closed system PPI is a brand-specific gift card. Such cards, physical or otherwise, can be used only at specific locations, and cannot be used to transfer funds from one account to another.
This proposal, which demonstrates the will of the Commons on the issue but does not legally compel the government to act, was approved without a vote.
What is a climate emergency? There is no single definition of what that means but many local areas say they want to be carbon-neutral by 2030. It’s a much more ambitious target than the UK government’s, which is to reduce carbon emissions by 80% (compared to 1990 levels) by 2050.
Why declare an emergency? The United Nations says we could have just 11 years left to limit a climate change catastrophe. It’s not just about reducing carbon emissions on a local scale, but also raising awareness about climate change and trying to convince MPs so that changes can be made.
The national government needs to declare an emergency and put resources in place to enable councils to help reduce carbon emissions. It’s the first step to radical action.
Way ahead: With the planet to experience further warming from the heat held by the oceans, there is increasing international focus on meeting the United Nation’s Paris Agreement which was signed by 197 countries in 2016. This ground-breaking agreement has the ambitious global aim of preventing global temperatures from reaching 2˚C above pre-industrial levels (the late nineteenth century) by 2100, and ideally should be no more than 1.5˚C.
A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has suggested that meeting this target means annual global carbon emissions must effectively halve between now and 2030, and then fall to zero by 2050. This is a target the UK opposition party Labour are now calling for.
About Aditya- L1 mission: What is it? It is India’s first solar mission. Objectives: It will study the sun’s outer most layers, the corona and the chromospheres and collect data about coronal mass ejection, which will also yield information for space weather prediction.
Significance of the mission: The data from Aditya mission will be immensely helpful in discriminating between different models for the origin of solar storms and also for constraining how the storms evolve and what path they take through the interplanetary space from the Sun to the Earth.
Position of the satellite: In order to get the best science from the sun, continuous viewing of the sun is preferred without any occultation/ eclipses and hence, Aditya- L1 satellite will be placed in the halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system.
What are Lagrangian points and halo orbit? Lagrangian points are the locations in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other. Any small mass placed at that location will remain at constant distances relative to the large masses. There are five such points in Sun-Earth system and they are denoted as L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. A halo orbit is a periodic three-dimensional orbit near the L1, L2 or L3.