- Hattee community: The Himachal Pradesh state government has finally issued notification to give Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to the Hattee community of Trans-Giri area of Sirmaur district. They are a close-knit community who got their name from their tradition of selling homegrown vegetables, crops, meat and wool etc. at small markets called ‘haat’ in towns. Their homeland straddles the Himachal-Uttarakhand border in the basin of the Giri and Tons rivers, both tributaries of the Yamuna.This community’s men generally don a distinctive white headgear during ceremonies, is cut off from Sirmaur by two rivers called Giri and Tons. Tons divide it from the Jaunsar Bawar area of Uttarakhand. The Hattees who live in the trans-Giri area and Jaunsar Bawar in Uttarakhand were once part of the royal estate of Sirmaur until Jaunsar Bawar’s separation in1815.They are governed by a traditional council called Khumbli. The two Hattee clans, in Trans-Giri and Jaunsar Bawar, have similar traditions, and inter-marriages are common.
- Direct-to-mobile (D2M) technology: Indian telecom operators have asked the government to auction the spectrum that will be used for direct-to-mobile (D2M) technology services. The science behind D2M is similar to that of an FM radio, where a receiver within the device can tap into different radio frequencies. This new-age technology is a combination of broadband and broadcast that uses mobile phones to capture territorial digital TV signals. Using D2M, multimedia content, including live TV matches, can be streamed to phones directly without using the internet. D2M can ensure- Emergency alerts are delivered directly, reliably and without dependence on internet/cellular networks. Disaster Management audio content is delivered directly and authentically in a targeted manner. With D2M, governments can broadcast citizen-centric information. This approach benefits consumers by reducing their reliance on internet data consumption for staying informed and entertained. It is still in the development stage. The biggest challenge in front of the government is to bring different stakeholders, including telecommunications, on board in launching D2M tech on a wide scale.
- Genocide Convention 1948: South Africa moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ), for an urgent order declaring that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The term ‘genocide’ is often loosely used when speaking of attacks against various communities across the world. It has been defined using set criteria in the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, moved in the General Assembly in 1948.It says, “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. As per this convention the genocide is a crime whether committed during wartime or peacetime. India ratified the convention in 1959; there is no legislation on the subject.
