15-02-23 Daily-Himachal Pradesh-HPPSC Current Affairs

In a bid to promote greener, non-polluting electric vehicles, the Transport Department ofHimachal Pradeshhas pledged to switch its current fleet of petrol and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles. This will make it the first state in the whole country to switch its entire fleet to EVs. As per the plan, all government departments will be equipped with electric vehicles within a year, in order to promote a sustainable and cost-efficient system.

Moreover, a total of 300 electric buses will be added to the fleet of Himachal Road Transport Corporation (HRTC), for which, an outlay of Rs 400 crore has been sanctioned, an official statement quoting Chief MinisterSukhvinder Singh Sukhusaid. The government aims to switch the entireHRTCfleet to e-buses by 2025.

Curtailing pollution created by pharmaceuticals, agricultural and healthcare sectors is essential to reduce the emergence, transmission, and spread of superbugs — strains of bacteria that have become resistant to every known antibiotic — and other instances of antimicrobial resistance, known as AMR.

This is the key message of a report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on the environmental dimensions of AMR, which already is taking a serious toll on the The development and spread of AMR mean that antimicrobials used to prevent and treat infections in humans, animals and Plants might turn ineffective, with modern medicine no longer able to treat even mild infections.

Listed by the WHO among the top 10 global threats to Health, it is estimated that in 2019, 1.27 million deaths were directly attributed to drug-resistant infections globally, and 4.95 million deaths worldwide were associated with bacterial AMR (including those directly attributable to AMR).

AMR is expected to cause 10 million additional direct deaths annually by 2050. This equals the number of deaths caused globally by cancer in 2020.

The report highlights a comprehensive set of measures to address both the decline of the environment and the rise of AMR, especially addressing key pollution sources from poor sanitation, sewage, community and municipal wastes.

The value of foreign portfolio investors’ (FPI) holdings in the domestic equities reached $584 billion at the end of December 2022, which was 11% lower from preceding year, according to a Morningstar report.

This was largely on low return given by the Indian equities and exodus of foreign from the domestic stock market. Going by the report, the value of FPIs investments in Indian equities dropped to $584 billion as of December 2022 as compared to $654 billion at the end of December 2021.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the value of FPIs Investment grew 3% from $566 billion in the three months ended September 2022. This was also the second consecutive quarter, when the value of their investment in the domestic stock market had increased. Consequently, FPIs’ contribution to Indian Equity Market Capitalisation also went up during the quarter to 17.12% from 16.97% in the September 2022 quarter. After posting a robust Growth in 2020 and 2021, the global equity markets went through a turbulent phase in 2022. In fact, 2022 was a difficult year as the world witnessed multiple challenges that weighed on the international markets.

Myanmar’s military-led government, working with Russia’s state atomic energy company, has inaugurated a nuclear power information center as a step toward developing atomic power to fill energy shortages in the strife-torn Southeast Asian nation.

Myanmar hopes to build and operate a reactor under a preliminary agreement between Myanmar and Rosatom that was signed in 2015, the newspaper said. The two sides signed memorandums of understanding in Moscow in July on Nuclear Energy, training and promotion of public understanding of atomic power.

The development is likely to ignite concerns that Myanmar’s military would like to develop a nuclear weapons capability. There were suspicions a decade ago that North Korea was supplying nuclear arms technology to Myanmar, but there was no definitive evidence.

India has jumped to the 55th position from 112th place in the ranking of oversight capability of global aviation Safety. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), after the final report India’s safety oversight capability ranking has climbed from 112 to 55.

The ICAO had last month audited the DGCA to check its effective implementation (EI) of critical safety Elements. The ICAO undertakes audit of all the contracting states under this programme. It may be noted that this ranking is dynamic and is contingent upon the outcomes of various Audits undertaken by ICAO,” it said.