1) Etikoppaka Toys: The government has conferred Padma Shri in the art category to Etikoppaka Wooden Toy Craft maker. Etikoppaka is a village (known as the toy village) on the banks of Varaha River in Andhra Pradesh which has obtained their GI tag for these toys.
- The toys are made out of soft wood (thus called Turned wood Lacquer craft) and are coloured with natural dyes derived from seeds, lacquer, bark, roots and leaves.
- While making the Etikoppaka toys, lac, a colourless resinous secretion of numerous insects, is used. The toys are also called as lacquer toys because of application of lacquer coating.
2) States fall short of targets to improve Forest Cover, Quality: According to the data accessed via the RTI, against the target of increasing tree cover by around 53,000 hectares (between 2015-16 and 2021-22) under the Green India Mission (GIM), only around 26,000 ha has been achieved.
- Similarly, forest quality improved in only 1.02 lakh ha against target of 1.6 lakh ha under the GIM, which is one of the eight Missions under NAPCC.
- National Mission for a Green India: It is one of the eight Missions under the NAPCC (launched in 2014 for a 10-year period), and which aims at protecting, restoring and enhancing India’s forest cover and responding to Climate Change.
- The target under the Mission is 10 million ha (5 + 5) on forest and non-forest lands for increasing the forest/tree cover and to improve the quality of existing forest.
3) National Investigation Agency (NIA): Established under the National Investigation Agency Act 2008, it is the Central Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Agency under Ministry of Home Affairs.
- It is a central agency to investigate and prosecute offences: affecting the sovereignty, security and integrity of India, security of State, friendly relations with foreign States, against atomic and nuclear facilities and smuggling in High-Quality Counterfeit Indian Currency.
- A State Government may request the Central Government to hand over the investigation of a case to the NIA, provided the case has been registered for the offences as contained in the schedule to the NIA Act. Central Government can also order NIA to take over investigation of any scheduled offense anywhere in the India.
4) Electronic Supreme Court Reports (e-SCR) Portal: The portal is the repository of the electronic version of Supreme Court Reports (SCR). It provides free access and an elastic search facility to about 34,000 of its judgments.
- The move has benefitted law students, young lawyers who cannot afford expensive books which record apex court judgments and even the public.
- Developed with the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which uses elastic search techniques in the database of e-SCR
5) Short Selling: Short Selling or Shorting, is a trading strategy based on the expectation that the price of the security will fall. While fundamentally it is based on the “buy low, sell high” approach, the sequence of transactions is reversed in short selling — to sell high first and buy low later. Also, in short selling, the trader usually does not own the securities he sells, but merely borrows them. Short selling was banned for much of the first decade of the 21st century, but both retail and institutional investors had the option to go short in 2008. Even though Indian authorities lifted the restrictions on short selling, naked shorting remains illegal. This occurs where the seller doesn’t deliver shares within the settlement period.
