Single water panel
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is receptive to the idea of forming the proposed National Water Commission (NWC) by merging the Central Water Commission (CWC) and the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB).
The NWC was the key recommendation of a report submitted by a committee headed by water expert Mihir Shah that was tasked with reorganising river water management in the country.
Since 1945 the CWC has been tasked with managing surface water and its associated structures such as dams and barrages. The CGWB, on the other hand, is largely concerned with the quality of groundwater. The proposed NWC pushes for an integrated policy, greater cognisance of over-extraction of groundwater. It will also maintain environmental stability by ensuring States that share water do not draw from river basins more than what is ecologically tenable.
As of today, States must get a technical clearance from the CWC before they can go ahead with constructing dams and other reservoirs. Were an NWC to come into being, this power would devolve to the States and other research institutions, with the Central body becoming a research organisation and a repository of data on India’s river basins.
The Shah report was scathing in its assessment of the CWC’s competence to manage India’s future water needs. “CWC and CGWB suffer from a lack of professionals,” said the summary of the report. “Several States testified that huge delays in techno-economic appraisal by the CWC had become a matter of concern.”
NSE’s IPO
The National Stock Exchange (NSE), which is the country’s largest bourse in terms of market share, has appointed merchant bankers to manage its initial public offering of shares (IPO). The exchange has appointed Citigroup Global Markets India, JM Financial Institutional Securities, Kotak Mahindra Capital Company and Morgan Stanley India as joint global co-ordinators for the initial public offer.
The exchange plans to file the public offer document – draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) in market parlance – for listing in India by January 2017. A DRHP contains relevant company information (financials, management structure, segments of the business, risk factors) based on which potential investors can decide whether to invest in the initial public offer.
What is IPO?
Initial public offering is the process by which a private company can go public by sale of its stocks to general public. It could be a new, young company or an old company which decides to be listed on an exchange and hence goes public. Companies can raise equity capital with the help of an IPO by issuing new shares to the public or the existing shareholders can sell their shares to the public without raising any fresh capital.
The company which offers its shares, known as an ‘issuer’, does so with the help of investment banks. After IPO, the company’s shares are traded in an open market. Those shares can be further sold by investors through secondary market trading.
Digital Locker Authority soon to push paperless governance
The Centre will soon appoint an authority to administer and manage its Digital Locker initiative, one of the key projects under Digital India programme, as it looks to push paperless governance. The Government will appoint a Digital Locker Authority to establish, administer, and manage Digital Locker system to preserve and retain information for efficient delivery of services to the users.
It has been proposed that Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) may take up the role of the Authority for regulation purposes, while Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) may be made responsible for drafting and maintenance of specifications and audits.
The Digital Locker Authority will be responsible for granting licenses and to authorise a private entity to offer these services. Besides, it will need to prepare standards and guidelines, while also ensuring compliance by service providers. These guidelines include those for data retention and migration, audit and security and privacy. The authority will also need to notify the fee or service charges a subscriber will have to pay for availing Digital Locker services from authorized service providers. Currently, the services are offered for free.
DigiLocker
DigiLocker is a key initiative under Digital India, the Indian Government’s flagship program aimed at transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. DigiLocker ties into Digital India’s visions areas of providing citizens a shareable private space on a public cloud and making all documents / certificates available on this cloud.
Targeted at the idea of paperless governance, DigiLocker is a platform for issuance and verification of documents & certificates in a digital way, thus eliminating the use of physical documents. Indian citizens who sign up for a DigiLocker account get a dedicated cloud storage space that is linked to their Aadhaar (UIDAI) number. Organizations that are registered with Digital Locker can push electronic copies of documents and certificates (e.g. driving license, Voter ID, School certificates) directly into citizens lockers. Citizens can also upload scanned copies of their legacy documents in their accounts. These legacy documents can be electronically signed using the eSign facility.
The platform has the following benefits:
- Citizens can access their digital documents anytime, anywhere and share it online. This is convenient and time saving.
- It reduces the administrative overhead of Government departments by minimizing the use of paper.
- Digital Locker makes it easier to validate the authenticity of documents as they are issued directly by the registered issuers.
- Self-uploaded documents can be digitally signed using the eSign facility (which is similar to the process of self-attestation).
The following are the key stakeholders in the DigiLocker system:
- Issuer: Entity issuing e-documents to individuals in a standard format and making them electronically available e.g. CBSE, Registrar Office, Income Tax department, etc.
- Requester: Entity requesting secure access to a particular e-document stored within a repository (e.g. University, Passport Office, Regional Transport Office, etc.)
- Resident: An individual who uses the Digital Locker service based on Aadhaar number.
The main technology components of the DigiLocker system are:
- Repository: Collection of e-documents that is exposed via standard APIs for secure, real-time access.
- Access Gateway: Secure online mechanism for requesters to access e-documents from various repositories in real-time using URI (Uniform Resource Indicator).
- DigiLocker Portal: Dedicated cloud based personal storage space, linked to each resident’s Aadhaar for storing e-documents, or URIs of e-documents.
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Scientists find inflated planet
Astronomers claim to have discovered one of the most inflated giant planets known to date, orbiting a mildly evolved star about 2.4 times larger than our Sun. The exoplanet designated KELT-12b was spotted by a team of researchers led by Daniel Stevens of the Ohio State University in the U.S.
Some giant planets expand in size when their parent stars are at the end of their lives. These so-called inflated planets have been known to astronomers for almost two decades, but it is still unclear what causes the inflation processes. In general, the possible explanations could be assigned to two different theories—scientists believe that the inflation is caused by deposition of energy from the host star, or due to inhibited cooling of the planet. This inflation process is often seen in the so-called “hot Jupiters” — planets similar to the solar system’s biggest planet.
Re-inflated planets are born large, but they shrink due to gravity like other gas giants. However, they balloon in size when their stars turn into red giants and grow hotter. Therefore, they appear to observers as giant planets, bigger than they should be, and also farther from their star than usual Jupiter-sized exoplanets.
Hot Jupiters
Hot Jupiters (also called roaster planets, epistellar jovians, pegasids or pegasean planets) are a class of exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital radii. The close proximity to their stars and high surface temperatures resulted in the moniker “hot Jupiters”.
Hot Jupiters are the easiest extrasolar planets to detect via the radial-velocity method, because the oscillations they induce in their parent stars’ motion are relatively large and rapid compared to those of other known types of planets. One of the best-known hot Jupiters is 51 Pegasi b. Discovered in 1995, it was the first extrasolar planet found orbiting a Sun-like star. 51 Pegasi b has an orbital period of about 4 days.