APSC Assam Yearbook 2021 : Latest Current Affairs

Odisha govt signs MoU with J-PAL South Asia
  • The Odisha government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) South Asia to engage in a strategic evidence-based approach to policy making.
  • The partnership targets to maximise the impact of anti-poverty programmes of the state across a wide range of sectors.
  • J-PAL is co-founded by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, joint winners of 2019 Nobel Prize in economics for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
  • Under this partnership, J-PAL South Asia will provide the Odisha government technical assistance for scaling up evidence backed programmes to improve development outcomes across the state.
  • This partnership aims at bringing transformation in the lives of people through research based intervention in policy formulation.
  • The partnership also establishes an overarching collaboration between J-PAL South Asia and the state government under which J-PAL will work with several departments to conduct policy-relevant randomised evaluations of new anti-poverty and development programmes.
  • Additionally, a diagnostic exercise and subsequent workshops will be conducted to build state capacity in the area of monitoring and evaluation.
  • The MoU was signed by Odisha Development Commissioner Suresh Mahapatra and Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia Shobhini Mukerji in the presence of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik.
  • J-PAL and the state government will conduct an annual policy dialogue to identify the government’s top policy priorities, conduct discussions to share evidence, and jointly come up with innovative solutions that can be field-tested through rigorous randomised evaluations.
  • Topics for the policy dialogues include malnutrition, women’s empowerment, distress migration, health-worker performance, and improving agricultural productivity.

     The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)

  • J-PAL is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.
  • J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty, and builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, donors, and others to generate new research, share knowledge, and scale up effective programs.
  • J-PAL was founded in 2003 as the “Poverty Action Lab” by professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, to support randomized evaluations measuring interventions against poverty on topics ranging from agriculture and health to governance and education.
  • The Lab was renamed in honor of Sheikh Abdul Latif Jameel when his son, MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, supported it with three major endowments in 2005.
  • 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to J-PAL founder Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.
IIT Guwahati, PCBA join hands to tackle air pollution
  • The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati and the Pollution Control Board Assam (PCBA) has joined hands to tackle the problem of air pollution in some major urban centres of the state, including Guwahati.
  • The two have joined hands under the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) launched by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
  • IIT-G and PCBA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) recently in this regard.
  • Under the project, IIT-G and PCBA will work together to deal with air pollution in Guwahati, Nagaon, Nalbari, Sivasagar and Silchar.
  • In these urban centres, the particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) levels exceed the annual average ambient air quality standard of 60 microgram per cubic metre.
  • PCBA will work to prepare city-specific interventions and action plans with the target of reducing PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations by at least 20 to 30 per cent by 2024. IIT-G will act as the technical partner.
  • The institute will assist PCBA in carrying out air pollution studies like identifying critical sources, building state-of-the-art air quality monitoring networks, and investigating mitigations in the five identified towns and cities and implementing them with the help of the Board.
  • NCAP was launched in January as part of the government’s agenda to put in place a time-bound national level strategy for pan India implementation to tackle the increasing air pollution problem across the country in a comprehensive manner.
  • The approach for NCAP includes collaborative, multi-scale and cross-sectoral coordination between the relevant Central ministries, state governments and local bodies.
  • NCAP’s objective is to have comprehensive mitigation actions for prevention, control and abatement of air pollution, besides augmenting the air quality monitoring network across the country and strengthening the awareness and capacity building activities.
India-US Economic and Financial Partnership Meeting
  • At the Seventh Meeting of the India-US Economic and Financial Partnership, India and the US on Friday discussed trade issues and also resolved to boost cooperation in tackling money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT).
  • India and the US discussed policies to stimulate economic growth and noted the significant steps India has taken to strengthen the financial sector, including Public Sector Bank recapitalization and plan to merge some of the state-owned banks.
  • Both sides also discussed capital flows, investment promotion related issues, and the external economic environment.
  • The Indian delegation was led by Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Finance, and the US delegation was led by Steven Mnuchin, US Secretary of the Treasury.
  • Both sides had in-depth exchanges of views on a range of issues such as the global, US, and Indian economic outlooks, global debt sustainability, financial sector reforms, leveraging of capital flows and investment, and tackling money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT)
  • Both sides are committed to greater economic cooperation on global economic issues, both bilaterally and multilaterally in the G20 and other fora.
  • Both sides are working together to attract more private sector capital to finance India”s infrastructure needs and further raise growth for both countries.
  • Both sides took note of the importance of having greater attention to transparency and debt sustainability in bilateral development lending.
  • Both sides appreciated the recent signing of an arrangement that enables automatic exchange of Country-by Country Reports for purposes of high level transfer pricing risk assessment.
  • Both sides are encouraged with the developments that have taken place since the last meeting of the Economic and Financial Partnership and look forward to continued engagement to strengthen our bilateral relationship, our economies and our economic security.
D.C. Raina appointed as the first Advocate General of J&K UT
  • Senior advocate D.C. Raina was appointed as the first Advocate General of Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
  • The appointment was made by Lt Governor G.C. Murmu a day after the Union Territory came into being.
  • The UT was carved out of the state of Jammu and Kashmir along with abolition of its special status granted under Article 370 of the Constitution of India.

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