Biodiversity park to come up in Aravalli
Paper:
Mains: General Studies-III: Technology, Economic Development, Bio diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management
What’s in News?
A biodiversity park will be developed on around 100 acres in Gurgaon’s Kasan village in the Aravalli mountain range.
- The village panchayat has adopted a resolution to pledge land for this park.
- Also, Haryana had the target to increase its reserve forest cover from 3% to 20%.
- 125 million saplings would be planted in the State in 2020.
Aravalli Range
- It is the oldest fold mountain ranges in the world which stretching about 300 miles from the northeast to the southwest.
- The length of the Aravalis is about 1100 km which extends from Delhi to Ahmadabad.
- Guru Shikhar is the highest point which is located in Mount Abu.
- The Aravalli range is very rich in natural resources and gave rise of numerous peninsula rivers like Banas, Luni, Sakhi, and Sabarmati.
- This region is also famous for heavily forested consisting of large areas of sand and stone and of masses of rose-coloured quartzite.
U.S. FDA nod for rapid, inexpensive saliva test
Paper:
Mains: General Studies-III: Technology, Economic Development, Bio diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management
Why in News:
In what could prove a gamechanger in the global battle against COVID19, a new, rapid diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus that uses saliva samples was granted an emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Significance:
- It has high sensitivity and can detect the virus even when the number of virus copies in the saliva sample is as low as 6-12 copies per microlitre.
- According to a preprint, the sensitivity of the new test is about 93%.
- In contrast, tests using nasopharyngeal swabs lead to false negative results due to errors at the time of sample collection.
- The new test makes sample collection non-invasive and reduces the need for trained healthcare workers to collect the samples.
- This reduces the risk of infection during collection.
- The easier saliva test is likely to increase testing compliance. It can allow for at-home, self-administered sample collection for accurate large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing.
- It is an inexpensive test, developed by a team from the Yale School of Public Health.
- Collecting and testing saliva samples involves three steps — collecting saliva without preservative buffers, proteinase K treatment and heat inactivation, and dualplex RT-qPCR virus detection.
Other Tests:
ELISA
- Developed in 1974, ELISA stands for enzyme-linked immuno-sorbent assay.
- It detects whether a person’s immune system has produced antibodies against a particular infection — such as HIV.
- The test is called “enzyme-linked” because it uses enzymes to detect presence of antibodies in a blood sample.
RT-PCR
- For individual diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19, the test used worldwide is RT-PCR (reverse-polymerase chain reaction).
- Earlier it was also used for Ebola and Zika diagnosis.
Rapid antibody test
- This, too, looks for antibodies in the blood, takes hardly 20-30 minutes, and is the cheapest.
- But a rapid test involves a high risk of false results — it may detect antibodies against of some other infection and show that the sample is positive for Covid-19.
- Hence this test is only used for population surveys.
- If a person tests positive through a rapid test, he has to undergo a confirmatory RT-PCR test before treatment.
TrueNat
- This is a privately designed test that works on the same principle as RT-PCR, but with a smaller kit and with faster results.
- TrueNat, designed by MolBio Diagnostics Pvt Ltd, Goa, is commonly used for tuberculosis and HIV testing.
- Recently, the ICMR approved TrueNat for screening and confirmation for Covid-19.
- If a sample test negative, it has to be treated as negative; if it tests positive, a second test called RdRp gene confirmatory assay has to be performed.
What is National Digital Health Mission? How Will Health ID Work?
Paper:
Mains: General Studies- II: Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations.
Why in News:
- Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement of a national health ID on 15 August.
- It finds it roots in a 2018 Niti Aayog proposal to create a centralised mechanism to uniquely identify every participating user in the National Health Stack.
What is the National Digital Health Mission?
This is a digital health ecosystem being announced by the government under which every Indian citizen will have unique health IDs, digitised health records as well as a registry of doctors and health facilities.
What is a Health ID? What will it do?
- The national health ID will be a repository of all health-related information of a person.
- According to the National Health Authority (NHA), every patient who wishes to have their health records available digitally must start by creating a Health ID.
- Each Health ID will be linked to a health data consent manager — such as National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) — which will be used to seek the patient’s consent and allow for seamless flow of health information from the Personal Health Records module.
- The Health ID is created by using a person’s basic details and mobile number or Aadhaar number.
- This will make it unique to the person, who will have the option to link all of their health records to this ID.
How will this Health ID work?
- All information about whatever medicine a doctor prescribed, when it was prescribed as well as what the reports were will be linked to a person’s health ID.
- It will be like a digitised “swasth khata” (health book) for a patient and will contain details of their medical history, physicians consulted, tests done etc.
- The health ID will reportedly be in the form of a mobile app.
Background:
- The National Health Policy 2017 had envisaged creation of a digital health technology eco-system aiming at developing an integrated health information system that serves the needs of all stakeholders and improves efficiency, transparency and citizens’ experience with linkage across public and private healthcare.
- In the context of this, central government’s think-tank Niti Aayog, in June 2018, floated a consultation of a digital backbone for India’s health system — National Health Stack.
Govt prepares economic activity heat map
Paper:
Mains: General Studies-III: Technology, Economic Development, Bio diversity, Environment, Security and Disaster Management
Why in News:
A HEAT MAP based on state-wise Covid-19 data developed by the Department of Economic Affairs in the Union Finance Ministry reveals that economic indicators are looking better in states with higher control over Covid cases and recoveries.
Key Details:
- A HEAT MAP developed by the Department of Economic Affairs reveals that economic indicators including electricity consumption, e-way bill generation and MNREGA work creation, are looking better in states with higher control over cases and recoveries.
- According to the data, the strongest recoveries were seen in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Chhattisgarh
- The value of e-way bills, suggesting improvement in intra and inter-state movements of goods, also picked up strongly in June over May across states, but The rate of year-on-year growth was weaker in states such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi and Haryana, which recorded a higher number of Covid-19 cases.
- E-waybills are required to be generated by a registered GST taxpayer for the movement of goods, if the value of the consignment exceeds Rs50,000 for inter-state movement.
- It is a proxy for a pickup in manufacturing and consumption activity, signified by the improvement in interstate movement of goods.
- The Finance Ministry data uses a sequential comparison for Covid case count and other pandemic-related parameters, while the economic data sets are compared on a year-on-year basis. Two other economic indicators used in developing the heat map — GST collections and vehicle registrations.
- Amongst the different economic indicators, the biggest improvement in June was seen in mobility indicators such as e-waybills with significant rise seen in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, Assam and Jammu & Kashmir, along with MGNREGA work creation.
- One noteworthy trend among the two biggest states in terms of Covid-19 case recovery share Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu has been a corresponding improvement in economic indicators of electricity generation, e-way bills issuance, vehicle registrations, but divergent trend in MGNREGA work creation.
Significance:
- Economic recovery is crucially linked to a dozen states, which also account for 85 percent of the Covid-19 case load.
- Within states, the two biggest growth drivers — Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu — make up 40 per cent of confirmed cases.
In less than five months of FY21, NREGA demand at all-time high
Paper:
Mains: General Studies- II: Governance, Constitution, Polity, Social Justice and International relations.
Why in News:
- The demand for work under the MGNREGA has soared to an all-time high, with about 5.53 crore households availing the rural job guarantee scheme in just four-and a-half months of the current financial year.
- This is the highest demand the scheme has seen since its inception in 2006-07, an analysis of data available on the MGNREGA portal shows.
Key Details:
- After an initial dip in April during the lockdown, the demand for work under MGNREGA continued to rise in the current financial year.
- The number of households that availed work under the scheme rose to 3.30crore in May—55per cent higher than the corresponding month last year.
- The increase was higher in the following months.
- In June 2020, the number of households that availed MGNREGA work reached 3.89 crore—77.95 per cent higher than the 2.16 crore figure in the same month last year.
- The figure crossed 2.70 crore this July—79.96 per cent higher than last July.
- A state wise break-up of the data shows that at least nine states—Goa, Nagaland, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana registered over a 100percent increase in the number of households that worked under MGNREGA in July this year, in comparison to the corresponding month last year.
- The earlier record was in 2010-11, when 5.5 crore households availed of MGNREGA work—but that was the figure for the whole financial year.
- About 5.48 crore households availed MGNREGA work in the last fiscal, shows the data on the portal. However, the number of households that availed MGNREGA during the current year has already reached about 5.53crore till August 16. And if the present trends continue, it may go up further by the end of the fiscal.
Reason:
- The unprecedented spike in the demand for unskilled work under MGNREGA comes in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak, which has disrupted economic activity in cities and forced a large number of migrants to return to their villages.
MNREGA Scheme:
- The scheme, which guarantees 100 days of wage employment to every rural household in one financial year, was launched in the 200 most backward rural districts of the country in 2006- 07.
- It was extended to 130 more districts in 2007-08 and across the country from 2008-09.