23-05-23 Daily-Gujarat-GPSC Current Affairs

TheCentral Pollution Control Board(CPCB) has not carried out sampling for the comprehensive environmental pollution index (CEPI) since 2019. Industrial entities fromGujaratraised this issue with the Union Environment ministry.

Representatives from the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and (GCCI) on Tuesday met senior officials in the ministry and raised the issues of CEPI sampling and hazardous Waste Management. GCCI said that the performance of common effluent treatment Plants (CETPs) in the state has improved over the last few year, but CPCB last carried out CEPI sampling in 2018 and after that had declared the Ankleshwar, Vapi, Vadodara,Vatva, Narol, Surat, Rajkot industrial clusters “critically polluted” and Bhavnagar as “severely polluted”. These classifications did not follow the revised CEPI guidelines of 2016.

In a move that would make the decentralised (DRE) livelihood applications such as solar dryer, solar or Biomass powered cold storage/chiller, solar charkha, etc affordable, the Government is mooting a mechanism wherein banks will dole out finance for purchase of such solutions which are not only energy efficient but also economically viable.

If a family wants to own a solar dryer, they should be able to get financing from the banks we will work towards it. Manufacturers and users of DRE for livelihoods are pioneers and now the government will scale it up to the next level, said Union Power Minister RK Singh at the national summit on powering sustainable livelihoods held recently. He said that a new scheme for distributed applications of renewable energy (RE) is on anvil. There is already major work happening on the ground and our scheme could benefit lakhs of families across the country. However, for that government will, however, need large scale-manufacturing and standardising of distributed applications of RE to lower prices and expand the sector.

South Korea successfully launched a commercial-grade satellite for the first time as part of its growing space development program, as rival North Korea is pushing to place its first military spy satellite into orbit. The two Koreas, technically in a state of war, have no military reconnaissance satellites of their own and both are eager to possess them.

The domestically built three-stage Nuri rocket lifted off from a launch facility on a southern island with a payload of eight satellites, including a main commercial-grade satellite whose mission is to verify radar imaging technology and observe cosmic radiation in a near-Earth orbit.

The launch boosted South Koreas hopes of catching up with Asian neighbors such as China, Japan and India in a regional space race.

Lee, the science minister, said South Korea plans to conduct three more Nuri rocket launches by 2027 and will seek to develop more advanced launch vehicles.