Atal Tunnel Inauguration, Pradhan Mantri Van Dhan Yojana- driving Atmanirbhar Bharat for Tribal Communities in North East, New formula to help estimate the mass of Black, Global climate events may caused variations in Indian Summer Monsoon
Atal Tunnel Inauguration
- Atal Tunnel, Rohtang inauguration will be held on 3rd October 2020.
- Atal Tunnel is the longest highway tunnel in the World.
- The 9.02 Km long tunnel connects Manali to Lahaul-Spiti valley throughout the year.
- Earlier the valley was cut off for about 6 months each year owing to heavy snowfall.
- The Tunnel is built with ultra-modern specifications in the Pir Panjal range of Himalayas at an altitude of 3000 Mtrs (10,000 Feet) from the Mean Sea Level (MSL).
- The tunnel reduces the road distance by 46 Kms between Manali and Leh and the time by about 4 to 5 hours.
- The South Portal (SP) of Atal Tunnel is located at a distance of 25 Km from Manali at an altitude of 3060 Mtrs, while the North Portal (NP) of the tunnel is located near village Teling, Sissu, in Lahaul Valley at an altitude of 3071 Mtrs.
- It is horse shoe shaped, single tube double lane tunnel with a roadway of 8 Mtrs.
- It has an overhead clearance of 5.525 Mtrs.
- It is 10.5-metre wide and has a 3.6 x 2.25 Mtrs fire proof emergency egress tunnel built into the main tunnel itself.
- Atal Tunnel has been designed for traffic density of 3000 cars per day and 1500 trucks per day with max speed of 80 km/hr.
- It has the state of the art electromechanical system including semi transverse ventilation system, SCADA controlled firefighting, illumination and monitoring system.
- The Tunnel has ample safety features built into it.
Some of the key safety features are:
(a) Tunnel entry barriers at both portals.
(b) Telephone connections at every 150 Mtrs for emergency communication.
(c) Fire hydrant mechanisms at every 60 Mtrs.
(d) Auto incident detection system with CCTV cameras at every 250 Mtrs.
(e) Air quality monitoring at every 1 Km.
(f) Evacuation lighting / exit signs at every 25 Mtrs.
(g) Broadcasting system throughout the tunnel.
(h) Fire rated Dampers at every 50 Mtrs.
(i) Cameras at every 60 Mtrs.
- The historic decision to construct a strategic tunnel below the Rohtang Pass was taken on June 03, 2000 when late Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister.
- The foundation stone for the Access Road to the South Portal of the tunnel was laid on May 26, 2002.
- The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) worked relentlessly to overcome major geological, terrain and weather challenges that included the most difficult stretch of the 587-metre Seri Nalah Fault Zone.
- The breakthrough from both ends was achieved on October 15, 2017.
- The Union Cabinet met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi on 24th December 2019 and decided to name the Rohtang Tunnel as Atal Tunnel to honour the contribution made by the former Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
- After attending the inauguration function of the Atal Tunnel at South Portal, Manali, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi shall be participating in public functions at Sissu in Lahaul Spiti and at Solang Valley.
Pradhan Mantri Van Dhan Yojana- driving Atmanirbhar Bharat for Tribal Communities in North East
- TRIFED of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs with its Van Dhan Vikas Kendras is driving the socio-economic development of the tribal population in the North East.
- Shri Arjun Munda said that Central Government initiatives are bringing paradigm shift in entrepreneurship and help meet the aspirations of the youth in North East.
- North East region has unique natural resources and this has to be leveraged for making products which would be competitive in global market place and the export of products from tribal areas should be encouraged and has huge potential from perspective of employment.
- ‘Van Dhan Yojana’ is a Market Linked Tribal Entrepreneurship Development Program for forming clusters of tribal SHGs and strengthening them into Tribal Van Dhan Kendras.
- This is for promoting enterprise by developing clusters of tribal SHGs and strengthening them into Van Dhan Vikas Kendras of 300 members each.
- It’s objective is to take the ‘MSP for MFP program’ to the next level through establishing tribal enterprises, generating livelihoods leading to income enhancement.
- It is a program for gathering, value addition, processing, packaging, branding and retail-marketing for MFP products through tribal entrepreneurs.
- Further, the Value-added products such as hill brooms, wild honey, candles and ointments made of rock beeswax, bamboo bottles, aloe vera soaps, amla murabba (gooseberries) are providing income and employment opportunities for tribal communities.
- Moreover, Union Minister for Tribal Affairs will virtually launch India’s largest handicraft and organic products marketplace, Tribes India E-Marketplace (market.tribesindia.com) on the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti(October 2, 2020).
- Tribes India e-Marketplace is an ambitious initiative through which TRIFED aims to onboard 5 lakh tribal producers for sourcing of various handicraft, handloom, natural food products across the country and brings to you the best of tribal produce.
- The suppliers comprise of individual tribal artisans, tribal SHGs, Organisations/ Agencies/ NGOs working with tribals.
- The platform provides the tribal suppliers with an Omni-channel facility to sell their goods through their own retailers and distributors, TRIFED’s network of Outlets and eCommerce partners as well as their own account in e-Marketplace.
- The E-Marketplace will help us in onboarding large number of Tribals and Artisans and give them the immediate benefits of online trade. It will also facilitate B2B trade connecting tribals dependent on Minor Forest Produces and Medicinal plants to large buyers /manufacturers.
- This in turn will help ensure livelihoods for the tribal populations of our country and go a long way in making them self-reliant.
- The E-marketplace is a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform which can be accessed on the web and also mobile (Android and iOS) for both customers and the tribal vendors registered.
New formula to help estimate the mass of Black Hole by ARIES
- A new study has suggested a formula that can help probe black holes.
- Black holes (BH) cannot be observed directly, but their presence can be detected by the huge amount of energy that is liberated through temporary accumulation of matter outside the BH, before it dives into the BH, a process called accretion.
- Scientists have found the formula that can assess the spectrum emitted from the accretion discs around black holes.
- Spectra of accretion discs can help estimate the mass of the black hole.
- Accretion flow around BH is composed of ionised plasma, which is a soup of bare electrons and protons.
- Since electrons are more prone to radiative losses than the protons, it is expected that around a BH, electrons and protons would settle down into two separate temperature distributions.
- Therefore, the two-temperature equations are generally solved to obtain the emitted spectrum from the electron temperature distribution.
- This is known as two-temperature modeling of accretion flows.
- Scientists from Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India, investigated the nature of these two-temperature flows.
- Moreover, looking for a unique solution, scientists have developed a new formula called the Sarkar & Chattopadhyay form of entropy formula that can only be applied near the horizon where gravity overpowers any other interactions like energy exchange terms between ions and electrons.
- This novel approach helped in selecting a unique solution out of the multiple solutions of accretion disc spectrum emission around a BH.
- Entropy is the measure of randomness in any system.
- In two temperature solutions, the formula for measure of entropy does not exist.
- This new formula allows to measure the entropy of the flow close to the black hole horizon.
- According to the second law of thermodynamics, nature selects or prefers those processes which maximize entropy.
- ARIES team showed that there exists one solution for which the entropy is maximum and thereby broke the multiplicity of solutions.
- Using this formula, they found that with the increase of the mass supply to the central BH, the accretion disc becomes brighter and more high energy photons are emitted.
- With the increase of mass of the BH, luminosity increases, and the bandwidth of the emitted spectrum, both in the high energy and low energy range, increases, but the spectral shape does not change.
- In other words, matter around a massive BH will produce a lot of photons in the low energy and high energy band, but around a smaller BH, it will emit predominantly in the X-rays.
- According to the ARIES team, this is the first time any approach of removing degeneracy from two-temperature theory has been proposed.
- It is necessary to obtain a correct solution, and hence a correct spectrum for any accretion flow around BH as any arbitrary choice of solution would give us a wrong picture of the system.
- The results could contribute in the understanding of physical processes around extreme objects like BHs.
Various Global climate events over last 3200 years may have caused variations in Indian Summer Monsoon
- Global climatic events like the Roman Warm Period, Medieval Climate Anomaly, and the Little Ice Age may have had significant impacts on India’s landscape, vegetation, and socio-economic growth, with abrupt shifts in the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) coinciding with these climatic events.
- A new study by the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, shows wet monsoon conditions in the North-Western Himalaya between 1200 and 550 BCE.
- This condition prevailed till 450 AD, coinciding with the Roman Warm Period (RWP).
- It was followed by reduced precipitation and a weak ISM till 950 AD and then strengthened during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) between 950 and 1350 AD. During the Little Ice Age, there was a pronounced reduction in monsoon precipitation.
- The study carried out with lake sediments from Rewalsar Lake, a freshwater lake from Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh, could resolve the long debate among scientists about whether such events were local or global.
- Sediments from this lake preserve signature that can be used as proxies to understand monsoon variability in the past.
- In the recent study published in the journal ‘Quaternary International’, researchers obtained grain size data, stable isotope ratios of carbon and nitrogen, total organic carbon (TOC), and total nitrogen data from the sediments of the lake.
- They retrieved a sediment core of 15-meter length from the center of the lake at a water depth of about 6.5 meters using piston corer, which was used as a sample.
- The chronology of Rewalsar Lake sediment was then established based on the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (a form of mass spectrometry to separate a rare isotope from an abundant neighbouring mass) (AMS) 14C radiocarbon dates of fourteen samples and the age ranges from approximately 2950 years to 200 years ago.
- Calculation of Total organic carbon TOC, Total Nitrogen TN, and depleted Carbon isotope ratio values during the interval 1200 to 550 BCE indicated wet monsoon conditions in the North-Western Himalaya.
- This condition prevailed till 450 AD, coinciding with the Roman Warm Period (RWP).
- This was followed by reduced precipitation and a weak ISM till 950 AD.
- The ISM became comparatively stronger during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) between 950 to 1350 AD.
- During the Little Ice Age, there was a pronounced reduction in ISM precipitation, as indicated by relatively low C/N ratio and decreased TOC content.
- The findings pointed out to revival of wet climatic conditions with a strong ISM around 1600 AD following the Little Ice Age, which prevails in present times.
- The variability of ISM in historical past needs to be ascertained to understand present, and future behaviour of ISM as climate shifts and water supply has dictated flourish and demise of ancient civilizations.
