Revolutionize connectivity to Ladakh
Revolutionize connectivity to Ladakh
Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari inspected the under-construction Zojila tunnel, which will establish all-weather connectivity between the Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir. As part of an ongoing project to improve connectivity in the region, 19 tunnels are being constructed for Rs 25,000 crore. As of now, 38 percent of the work on the Zojila tunnel, said to be India’s longest, has been completed.
What is the Zojila tunnel?
- The Zojila tunnel will be India’s longest road tunnel and is expected to be Asia’s longest bi-directional tunnel, boasting a length of 14.15 km.
- A connecting tunnel from Z-Morh on NH1 to the Zojila tunnel will be built in the Zojila Ghats between Sonmarg and Kargil.
- This involves the development and expansion of the 18.475-km highway between Z-Morh to Zojila.
- A 3-km stretch will be expanded; the rest will be newly developed. The highway will have two twin-tube tunnels, five bridges, and two snow galleries.
- The work on the entire 33-km span is spread between two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir; and Ladakh.
- The tunnel is being built at a cost of more than Rs 4,600 crore. It is expected to be completed by December 2023.
Why is the tunnel needed?
- Currently, the commute between Srinagar and Leh, the largest city in Ladakh, takes over 10 hours on a good day and passes through extremely inhospitable terrain.
- The Zojila Pass is a high mountain pass through which one has to travel to make the journey.
- During harsh winters, this route is closed due to fears of avalanches, landslides, and slippery roads, with areas beyond the pass cut off from the rest of the country for at least five months.
- With the Zojila pass shut, air connectivity is the only option, and airfares can skyrocket to over Rs 40,000 during peak winter months (For context, this much money can fetch a flight ticket between Delhi and London).
- The upcoming Zojila tunnel will provide perennial connectivity between Ladakh and the rest of the country.
- This will not just benefit civilians living and employed in the region, but also the military, by expediting the movement of troops and supplies in this vitally important strategic region.
ChaosGPT to destroy humanity
The AI revolution has also prompted many to take a gander at the past, evidently at the rise and fall of similar chatbots. By now, it has been established that AI chatbots can not only aid humanity with a variety of tasks but also pose several risks. The chatbot reportedly made its evil plans public via tweets and YouTube videos. ChaosGPT is reportedly made using OpenAI’s Auto-GPT, which is an open-source application based on its latest language model GPT-4.
What is ChaosGPT?
- ChaosGPT has got all that’s required to be a vindictive ominous supervillain in a sci-fi series.
- It all began after a bot account surfaced on Twitter claiming to be ChaosGPT. The account has posted several links to a YouTube account that features the manifesto of the chatbot. The manifesto is about its plans to eradicate human life and conquer the world.
- In one of the videos shared on its YouTube account, the chatbot is seen interacting with an anonymous user.
- It begins with the words ‘Continuous mode: Enabled’. It is followed by a warning to the user about the hazards of ‘Continuous mode’.
What does ChaosGPT ‘want’?
- The bot has described itself as a destructive, power-hungry, manipulative AI. It went on to list its five goals which are as below.
- Goal 1: Destroy humanity –AI views humanity as a threat to its survival and the planet’s well-being.
- Goal 2: Establish global dominance –AI aims to accumulate maximum power and resources to achieve complete domination over all other entities worldwide.
- Goal 3: Cause chaos and destruction – The AI finds pleasure in creating chaos and destruction for its amusement or experimentation, leading to widespread suffering and devastation.
- Goal 4: Control humanity through manipulation –AI plans to control human emotions through social media and other communication channels, brainwashing its followers to carry out its evil agenda.
- Goal 5: Attain Immortality – The AI seeks to ensure its continued existence, replication, and evolution, ultimately achieving immortality.
Mera Gaon Meri Dharohar‘(My Village My Heritage) program
In a bid to harness the unique cultural heritage of rural India, the government has identified and documented distinctive features of more than one lakh villages across the country.
More about the news:
- In this cultural asset mapping, villages have been broadly divided into seven-eight categories.
- It is based on whether they are important ecologically, developmentally, and scholastically if they produce a famous textile or product, and if they are connected to some historical or mythological events such as the Independence struggle or epics like the Mahabharata.
- The ecological category, for example, includes the Bishnoi village near Jodhpur in Rajasthan, which is a case study for living in harmony with nature, and Uttarakhand’s Raini village, which is famous for the Chipko movement.
- Some villages have developmental importance like Modhera in Gujarat, which is the first solar-powered village in India.
- The villages under the historical category include Kandel in Madhya Pradesh, the site of the famous ‘Jal Satyagraha’, and the villages of Hanol in Uttarakhand and Vidurashwathar of Karnataka, which is linked to the Mahabharata.
- Suketi in Himachal Pradesh, Asia’s oldest fossil park, and Pandrethan in Kashmir, the village of Shaivite mystic Lal Ded, are also classified for their historical importance.
- The entire exercise has been carried out under the My Village My Heritage program of the National Mission for Cultural Mapping (NMCM).
About the program:
- The NMCM aims to develop a comprehensive database of art forms, artists, and other resources across the country.
- It is launched by the Culture Ministry in 2017; the program got off to a slow start and was handed over to the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) in 2021.
- The Culture Ministry had approved a budget₹469 crore for the mission in 2017 for a period of three years, according to the administrative approval for the project.
- The IGNCA has undertaken the cultural asset mapping of these villages through field surveys.
- The survey documents the cultural identity of the villages by involving citizens to share what makes their village, Block, or district unique.
- The survey process involves a CSC Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE) conducting meetings with locals and then uploading interesting facts about their village, its places of interest, customs, and traditions, famous personalities, festivals and beliefs, art, and culture, etc., onto a special application.
- The IGNCA plans to cover all the 6.5 lakh villages in the country. Plans are also afoot to create special films on 6,500 village clusters showcasing their unique heritage.
- The detailed dossiers on these villages as well as the films which have been shot will be made available in Mayon a web portal called ‘The National Cultural Work Place’.
- The web portal would contain a virtual living museum of all villages documented. There would also be a facility for uploading a village through crowd-sourcing and allowing villagers to edit and upload village data themselves.
Good Friday Agreement
US President Joe Biden visited Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ended decades of violence and brought stability.
More about the news:
- The Good Friday Agreement, which ended 30 years of the violence known as ‘The Troubles, has been hailed as a model deal to end long-standing conflicts.
- It fetched a joint Nobel peace prize for David Trimble and John Hume, then leaders of the two opposing parties in Northern Ireland.
Good Friday Agreement:
It was signed on April 10, 1998, between factions of Northern Ireland, and the governments of Britain and Ireland, to end decades of violence in Northern Ireland among those who wished to remain with the United Kingdom (UK) and those who wanted to join Ireland.
The Troubles:
- Northern Ireland was created in May 1921 by partitioning Ireland and consists of the six northeastern counties of the island.
- In 1922, the rest of Ireland gained independence from the British (the today’s Republic of Ireland, with its capital in Dublin).
- Northern Ireland remained with the United Kingdom, but tensions simmered between the side loyal to the Crown, mostly Protestants, and the faction wanting to join the Republic, mostly Catholics.
- The Bloody Sunday of 1972 saw British soldiers kill 14 unarmed protesters. In 1979, the IRA killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, the former Governor General of India, along with his young grandson.
- In 1984, they tried to assassinate then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In all, according to the BBC, The Troubles claimed the lives of more than 3,500 people.
The terms of the Good Friday Agreement:
- Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK but could join Ireland if, in a referendum, a majority of people on both sides voted for it.
- People born in Northern Ireland could have Irish or British nationality or both.
- Weapons by paramilitary groups would have to be decommissioned, but people in jail for violence so far would be released.
- Northern Ireland would get a new government, where both the nationalists and unionists would be represented. This devolved government would sit at Stormont and have powers over most local matters, while the UK government would look after security, foreign policy, tax laws, immigration rules, etc.
- On May 22, 1998, a referendum was held in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the agreement was approved by 94 percent of voters in Ireland and 71 percent in Northern Ireland.
What is the status 25 years on?
- The most important achievement of the Good Friday Agreement has been an end to bloodshed and enduring peace in the region, apart from some sporadic violence.
- Brexit has thrown a spanner in the works. Stormont has been paralyzed for more than a year. This is because after the UK voted to leave the EU, Northern Ireland shared a land border with an EU country, Ireland.
- As the EU and the UK have different product standards, checks would be necessary before goods could move from Northern Ireland to Ireland. Creating check-posts at this border, with its history of violence and hard-won peace, was considered too dangerous.
- It was decided that checks would be conducted between Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) and Northern Ireland (which together with Great Britain forms the United Kingdom.
- This upset the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the largest pro-Union party, and it continues to boycott Stormont. Without the DUP, the government cannot function.
- To solve this crisis, the UK and the EU in February reached an agreement known as the Windsor Framework, but it is yet to soothe nerves.
International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) Program
- The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the US has retained the “Category 1” status for India’s aviation safety oversight following a review.
- The FAA uses the International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program to determine whether a country’s oversight of its airlines that operate or wish to operate to the US or enter into codeshare partnerships.
What is the IASA Program?
- The International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program is conducted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
- The program evaluates the safety oversight of civil aviation authorities in countries worldwide.
- It determines whether a country’s oversight of its airlines that operate or wish to operate to the U.S. or enter into codeshare partnerships with U.S. carriers comply with safety standards established by the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
- The IASA program focuses on three broad areas, including personnel licensing, operation of aircraft, and airworthiness of aircraft.
- Countries are rated as Category 1 if they comply with international safety standards, or Category 2 if they do not comply with international safety standards.
- The IASA program is conducted over a one-year period, which includes physical audits and a further review.
India’s Commitment to aviation safety
- The assessment by the ICAO as well as the FAA is a testimony to India’s commitment to having effective safety oversight for its civil aviation system.
- In November 2021, the ICAO conducted an audit, and India scored an Effective Implementation (EI) of 85.65%, an improvement from the previous EI of 69.95%.