Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 20 August 2021

::NATIONAL::

The Ministry of Power has proposed to amend rules for facilitating electricity producers to sell power to third party, which can reduce fixed costs and cut retail tariff for end consumers.

The Ministry circulated the draft Electricity (Late Payment Surcharge) Amendment Rules, 2021, seeking comments for the same.
The power generating companies are being given an option to sell power to third parties and recover their costs.
To this extent, the fixed cost burden of the distribution licensee shall be reduced.
If a distribution licensee has any payment, including late payment surcharge, outstanding after the expiry of seven months from the due date as prescribed in the PPA (power purchase agreement), the generating company may sell power to any consumer or any other licensee or power exchanges, for the period of such default.
It added that the claim will be retained on payment of fixed charges or capacity charges from the distribution licensee, after giving a notice of at least 15 days to the distribution licensee.
The claim, if any, shall be reconciled on an annual basis and shall be limited to only under recovery of the fixed charges or capacity charges.

Private sector lender ICICI Bank cut India’s first set of ‘swaption’ deals with HSBC and StandardChartered Bank.

Taliban militants have vandalised and blown up a statue of Shiite militia leader Abdul Ali Mazari in the province of Bamiyan, the unofficial capital of the Hazara ethnic group. Mazari, widely known as a champion of the Hazaras, was executed by the Taliban in 1995.

About:

The Hazaras are an ethnic and religious minority group largely found in the rugged and mountainous central Afghan region of Hazarajat.
They are believed to be descendants of the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, and his army that overran the entire region during the 13th century.
They are targetted by the Taliban because they are primarily Shia Muslims, as opposed to most Afghans who follow the Sunni branch of Islam.
Their distinct Asiatic features and use of a Persian dialect called Hazaragi also sets them apart from the rest of the country.
The Hazaras are one of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic minorities, accounting for about 10-12 per cent of the country’s 38-million strong population.

A nine-foot-tall bronze equestrian statue of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh Empire, was vandalised in Lahore Fort earlier this week.
Ranjit Singh and Lahore
Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839) seized Lahore in 1799 after he was invited to rule the city by its Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh elite.
Lahore, once among the biggest and most developed of the cities of Punjab, was in a shambles at the time — the dying Mughal Empire was no longer able to extend it patronage and protection, it was battered by repeated assaults from bands of Afghan raiders, and weakened by infighting among some Sikh groups. Residents of Lahore complained of being forced to pay exorbitant taxes.
Ranjit Singh brought peace and security to Lahore and revived its economic and cultural glory. He proclaimed himself maharaja of the Punjab in 1801, and proceeded to rule with religious tolerance for communities other than Sikhs.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has put in place Platform for Regulated Entities for Integrated Supervision and Monitoring(PRISM), a web-based end-to-end workflowautomation system, to strengthen compliance by supervised entities (SEs), including banks andnon-banking financial companies.
PRISM will have various functionalities like inspection; compliance; incident functionality for cybersecurity; complaints; and returns functionalities, with built-in remediation workflows, timetracking, notifications and alerts, management information system (MIS) reports anddashboards.
This is aimed at helping SEs to strengthen their internal defences, resilience and bringing focuson root cause analysis (RCA).

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that an experiment carried out in its National Ignition Facility has made a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research.
In the experiment, lasers were used to heat a small target or fuel pellets. These pellets containing deuterium and tritium fused and produced more energy. The team noted that they were able to achieve a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules.
The megajoule of energy released in the experiment is indeed impressive in fusion terms, but in practice, this is equivalent to the energy required to boil a kettle.

About:

Nuclear fusion is defined as the combining of several small nuclei into one large nucleus with the subsequent release of huge amounts of energy.
Nuclear fusion powers our sun and harnessing this fusion energy could provide an unlimited amount of renewable energy.