UPSC Daily Current Affairs | Prelim Bits 24-02-2021
iasparliament
February 24, 2021
National Urban Digital Mission
National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) was launched by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
NUDM will create a shared digital infrastructure for urban India by working across the three pillars of people, process, and platform to provide holistic support to cities and towns.
It will create a shared digital infrastructure that can consolidate and cross-leverage the various digital initiatives of the MoHUA.
It will institutionalise a citizen-centric, principles-based and ecosystem-driven approach to urban governance and service delivery in 2022 cities by 2022, and across all cities and towns in India by 2024.
NUDM has articulated a set of governing principles, and inherits the technology design principles of the National Urban Innovation Stack (NUIS), whose strategy and approach was released by MoHUA in 2019.
The principles give rise to standards, specifications, and certifications, across the three pillars of people, process, and platforms.
India Urban Data Exchange
India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) is an open-source software platform developed by the Smart Cities Mission and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
It facilitates secure exchange of Smart City data amongst data platforms, 3rd party authenticated and authorised applications, and other sources.
[This Smart City data could be monetised in the future, similar to the UPI for bank accounts and digital payments.]
It serves as an interface for data providers and data users to share, request, and access datasets related to cities, urban governance, and urban service delivery.
As the number of cities on IUDX expands, this will scale up to uniform sharing between data producers and data consumers across urban India.
SmartCode Platform
It enables all ecosystem stakeholders to contribute to a repository of open-source code for various solutions and applications for urban governance.
It addresses the challenges that Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) face in the development and deployment of digital applications to address urban challenges.
The source code available on the platform will be free to use without any licensing or subscription fees, thus limiting costs to those involved with customising the code and developing a locally-relevant solution.
Central Employment Guarantee Council
The Central Employment Guarantee Council’s (CEGC’s) 23rd Meeting was held recently.
In 2006, the Council was constituted under Section 10 of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005.
The Central Government has constituted this Council to discharge the functions and perform duties assigned to it by or under the provisions of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005.
Chairperson - Minister of Rural Development, Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.
It advises the Central Government on all matters concerning the implementation of this Act.
It reviews the monitoring and redressal mechanism and recommends improvements required.
It prepares annual reports to be laid before Parliament by the Central Government on the implementation of this Act.
Bio-restoration
A new technology for ecological restoration (Bio-restoration) was developed by Indian scientists.
It is helping in revival of mangroves degraded due to rising sea levels, climate change and human intrusion in the Sunderbans, West Bengal.
[The Sundarbans is a protected wetland under the Ramsar Convention and is also a UNESCO World Heritage site.]
Ecological restorationmeans reviving native ecosystem in degraded areas while maintaining diversity of original flora and fauna through regeneration but bringing down the regeneration period to 4 to 5 years.
Restoration process begins with stabilising entire site by planting native salt tolerant grasses. It involves the use of growth-promoting bacteria.
The restoration project was initiated with help from the Department of Biotechnology in 2013 and is now likely to be extended to 100 acres.
The transplantation of propagated mangroves started in 2014, initially at a moderately degraded patch and then at severely degraded zones.
Agriculture Infrastructure Development Cess
The Budget 2021-22 has proposed a new levy, Agriculture Infrastructure Development Cess (AIDC) on 29 items.
The purpose of the new AIDC is to raise funds to finance spending on developing agriculture infrastructure.
The new cess will be levied on 29 products, such as gold, silver, as well as imported alcohol (excluding beer), imported apple, pulses, palm oil, urea, and petrol/diesel including branded ones.
The new cess will only offset the reduction in Basic Custom Duty (BCD), Basic Excise Duty (BED) and Special Additional Excise Duty (SAED) on unbranded and branded petrol-diesel.
Thus it will not raise the tax incidence for consumers.
Cess
Cess is a special-purpose tax levied over and above basic tax rates.
Drawing power from Articles 270 and 271 of the Constitution, the Centre collects cess and deposits it in the Consolidated Fund of India.
The money collected is then transferred to a segregated fund to be used for specific purpose.
But, this cess and surcharge money is not part of the divisible pool, from which devolution of Central taxes takes place to the States.
Source: PIB, The Hindu, Business Line, Down To Earth
