UPSC Daily Current Affairs | Prelim Bits 14-09-2020

Chief Compliance Officer (CCO)

• RBI has issued guidelines for appointment of Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) in banks.
• It aims to ensure uniform approach with regard to compliance and risk management culture across the banking industry.
• The CCO must be appointed for a minimum fixed period of 3 years.
• The person should be a senior executive of the bank, preferably in the rank of a general manager or an equivalent position or he could also be recruited from outside.
• He must not be a member of any committee which brings his/her role in conflict with responsibility as member of the committee, including any committee dealing with purchases/sanctions
• Few important conditions to CCO are

1. There shall not be any responsibility which brings elements of conflict of interest, especially the role relating to business.
2. No vigilance case or adverse observation from the RBI should be pending against the candidate identified for appointment as the CCO.
3. Selection of the candidate for the post of the CCO should be done on the basis of a well-defined selection process and recommendations made by the senior executive-level selection committee constituted by the board for the purpose.

Indian Brain Templates (IBT)

• National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) has developed Indian Brain Templates (IBT) and a brain atlas.
• Brain Template is a gross representation from various brain images to understand brain functionality in diseased conditions.
• India currently uses Montreal Neurological Index (MNI) template, it is based on Caucasian brains, which are different from Asian brains.
• Over 500 brain scans of Indian patients were studied to develop five sets of Indian Brain Templates (IBT) and a brain atlas.
• IBT provides a scale that will measure an Indian brain.
• When most brain scans are taken, they need to be compared to a standard brain template, a model or standard for making comparisons from a group of individual brain scans.
• Brain Atlas has been developed for five age groups covering late childhood to late adulthood (6 to 60 years).
• These new population and age-specific Indian brain templates will allow more reliable tracking of brain development and ageing.
• The templates and atlas will provide more precise reference maps for areas of interest in individual patients with neurological disorders like strokes, brain tumours, and dementia.
• These will also help pool information more usefully in group studies of the human brain and psychological functions, aiding in understanding of psychiatric illnesses.

iRAD

• Ministry of Road Transport & Highways will be implementing ‘Integrated Road Accident Database Project (iRAD)’ which will be applicable across the country.
• In the first instance, it has been decided to implement the proposal in six States, viz.

1. Maharashtra,
2. Karnataka,
3. Madhya Pradesh,
4. Rajasthan,
5. Uttar Pradesh
6.  Tamil Nadu.

• The development and implementation of iRAD has been entrusted to lIT Madras and National Informatics Centre Services Inc.
• iRAD Mobile app will be customized/integrated as per the requirements of concerned States/UTs.
• The App when developed and functional, will enable the stakeholders such as the Police, Transport, Health, etc to use their mobile phones to collect accident data on the spot.

Line In Line out Substation (LILo)

• The substation is the part of an electrical supply system which transmits the high voltage from the generating substations to the local distribution networks.
• In LILo (Line In Line Out) Substation, a long distribution line is brought in and brought out from newly created substation as shown below.
• This scheme is bit expensive because of the need of an extra layout, however it is more secure.
• Recently Union Power Ministry laid foundation for construction of LILO of Kishenganj-Darbhanga 400kV Transmission Line at Saharsa in Bihar.
• Saharsa is located in extreme Northern Part of Bihar and is a flood prone area due to inflow of water from Nepal.

Report on Virtual Courts

• Recently Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice has presented its report on “Functioning of the Virtual Courts”
• Highlights of the Report

1. The report suggests that a full-fledged virtual court should be piloted in the first instance and recommends the continuation of virtual courts in a post-Covid-19 scenario.
2. It argued that transfer of certain categories of cases, like cases pertaining to traffic challans or other petty offences, from regular court establishments to virtual courts will reduce the pendency of cases.
3. Virtual courts are an improvement over traditional courts as they are more citizen-friendly and offer greater access to justice.

E-courts Initiatives in India

• E-Courts Project was conceptualized on the basis of the National Policy and Action Plan for Implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Indian Judiciary-2005.
• The e-Courts Mission Mode Project, is a pan-India Project, monitored and funded by the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, for the District Courts across the country.
• In August 2019, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana launched its first virtual court at Faridabad to deal with traffic challan cases from across the state.

Giant Radio Galaxies

• The universe has billions of galaxies and almost all have supermassive black holes at the center.

• Some of these black holes are active and produce jets travelling almost at the speed of light.
• These jets are visible in radio light or at radio wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
• Such galaxies, which have active black holes shooting high-speed jets, are called radio galaxies.
• A radio galaxy is a strong source of electromagnetic radiation or radio waves.
• They are extremely weak in radio luminosity making it difficult for even a sensitive radio telescope to detect them.

• When some of these radio galaxies grow to enormous sizes, bigger than 33 lakh light years across, they are called giant radio galaxies (GRGs).
• GRGs are large single structures in the universe.
• GRGs were discovered in 1974 and until 2016, only about 300 GRGs were known, the latest findings indicate that they are over 800.
• It is not clearly understood how some objects grow to such large scales and what is the fuel of their respective black holes.
• Indian Researchers are working on giant radio galaxies (GRG) at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune.

Source: PIB, AIR, DD news, Indian Express