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.
