Retail inflation slows to 25-month low of 8.1 %
Easing onion and potato prices pulled retail inflation in February to a 25-month low of 8.1 per cent, and is likely to increase the clamour for the Reserve Bank of India to cut interest rates in its next monetary policy.
Overall inflation in the food basket, including beverages, slowed to 8.57 per cent in February from 9.9 per cent in the previous month, according to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released by the government on Wednesday.
The RBI, which has maintained a hawkish interest rate regime to tame inflation, is scheduled to announce the next monetary policy on April 1. Industry has been demanding a cut in interest rates to boost economic growth, which has slowed to a decade—low level.
Retail inflation has been easing for three months. The CPI data showed inflation rates for rural and urban areas were at 8.51 per cent and 7.55 per cent, respectively.
Some Gyaan:
Inflation is measured in 3 ways:
1. Wholesale Price Index (WPI)
2. Consumer Price Index (CPI)
3. GDP Deflator
WPI
1. It is compiled by Office of Economic Adviser ->Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
2. It includes 676 items classified into
- Primary Articles (food,fruits etc):22% weightage
- Fuel, Power, Light & Lubricants :14% weightage
- Manufactured Products (biscuit,toothpaste):63% weightage
3. It does not includes services
4. Base year is 2004
5. Laspeyres formula is used for its calculation
6. Also known as Headline inflation
7. When RBI, government makes policies then it is given the most importance.
CPI
It was reformed in 2011 to include 3 subtypes of CPI
- Entire urban population
- Entire rural population
- Urban + Rural (consolidate from above two)
All prepared by Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) -> Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation with a common Base year of 2010.
It includes services and has 200 items.
GDP Deflator
- GDP deflator is calculated by Central Statistical Organisation (CSO)-> Ministry of Statistics and program implementation.
- GDP deflator =GDP (current price) / GDP (constant price)
- GDP deflator is the most comprehensive number to measure inflation, but RBI /Government doesn’t use it much for policy making because GDP deflator data comes quarterly (and not weekly/monthly basis).
Background : killing of 15 Central and State police officers in Chhattisgarh on Tuesday
According to author India’s anti-Maoist counter-insurgency has suffered losses at regular intervals and this has paid off as Maoist insurgency has been in steady decline since 2010. Some facts:
1. From a peak of 1,180 lives lost that year, the authoritative South Asia Terrorism Portal database records, fatalities fell to 421 in 2013
2. Key leaders from Chhattisgarh and Odisha have left the party, and its efforts did nothing to stop a large turnout in the Assembly elections held in Chhattisgarh last year.
3. The fourth central committee meeting of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) issued a resolution admitting to the stark fact of declining public support, even in the party’s heartland regions.
But Such losses were avoidable as near-identical mistakes were made in disaster after disaster.
Some mistakes made in the current incident:
1. The ill-fated patrol, as The Hindu has revealed, headed blithely into an area where State and Central intelligence services had warned Maoists were preparing an ambush.
2. It used vehicular transport, and traversed a fixed route repeatedly, both lethal mistakes in areas where ambushes using improvised explosive devices are common.
3. Little effort seems to have been made to initiate regular offensive patrols along the routes being used by the CRPF and the police, a standard means of making ambushes more difficult.
4. surveillance drones, not for the first time, failed to pick up any signs of an attack that involved over 200 insurgents.
Some more points for the incident.
1. The attack highlights one factor — intensified security, coupled with repression of locals, is no solution to the Maoist problem. State police officials agree that “excessive deployment” may have triggered the attack.
Officials now feel the increased security presence has restricted the movements of the rebels. Since their movements were restricted, they might have retaliated, a senior officer said.
2. The local people say that after Tuesday’s attack, the police have been harassing them. At Elengnarh, Koleng and adjacent villages, innocent civilians are being picked up randomly to squeeze out information. It is natural that a section of these people will join the rebels simply out of panic.
3. Moreover, every March, the rebels start their tactical counter-offensive campaign to push the police out of their base areas and inflict damage. Maoist military commanders earlier told The Hindu that if they did not “engage” the forces between March and June, the rebels would come under attack, with the green forest cover disappearing from winter till the onset of monsoon.
NGO Greenpeace has spent the last few years furiously campaigning against Indonesia’s palm oil companies, which have been the main drivers of massive deforestation across the once-thickly forested archipelago.
The NGO is currently investigating linkages between the global consumer goods giant, Proctor and Gamble, and companies in its palm oil supply chain that are still involved in active deforestation: clearing orangutan habitat, sparking social conflict with indigenous communities and contributing to global warming. The palm oil industry in Indonesia is hugely powerful. The country is the world’s largest producer of the product, and the sector accounts for 11 per cent of Indonesia’s export earnings, second only to oil and gas.
Given the widespread habitat destruction that has resulted from logging for timber, pulp and paper, and most specially, the planting of oil palms, the number of Bornean orangutans has halved over the last half century. According to the World Wildlife Fund, orangutan habitat has been slashed by at least 55 per cent in the last 20 years alone. Deforestation in Indonesia is said to be among the highest in the world.
Gyaan :
Bornean orangutans
The Bornean orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus, is a species of orangutan native to the island of Borneo. Together with the Sumatran orangutan, it belongs to the only genus of great apes native to Asia. Like the other great apes, orangutans are highly intelligent, displaying advanced tool use and distinct cultural patterns in the wild. Orangutans share approximately 97% of their DNA with humans.
Archipelago
An archipelago is a group of islands closely scattered in a body of water. Usually, this body of water is the ocean, but it can also be a lake or river.
Most archipelagoes are made of oceanic islands. This means the islands were formed by volcanoes erupting from the ocean floor. An archipelago made up of oceanic islands is called an island arc.
Many island arcs were formed over a single “hot spot.” The Earth’s crust shifted while the hot spot stayed put, creating a line of islands that show exactly the direction the crust moved.
Early oxygenation of deep ocean
Traditional theories - Theories concerning the rise of oxygen claimed the atmosphere became filled with the gas before the waters.
New Study - waters of the Earth became oxygen-rich before the air.
Sponges may have played a critical role in the evolution of several species, including our own, according to a new study.
The concentration of any gas in water, including oxygen, is dependent on supply an demand.
Living deep under the ocean, sponges use a filtering system to removes organic material from water. A portion of this material is rotting cell matter, which would normally consume oxygen as it decays. But, sponges remove this debris, freeing oxygen.
As tiny oxygen-breathing organisms died, they could sink deep under the water surface, preventing oxygen depletion in shallower waters. All these effects together could have produced enough oxygen in oceans to allow for a tremendous growth in animal populations. Within a hundred million years, the dissolved gas began to fill the waters.
This allowed O2-loving organisms to thrive in the new environment. But, rather than the Earth experiencing one large oxygenation event as many paleontologists believed, this process may have taken place over the course of a chain of events.
Also the sponges inadvertently helped in also “removing” phosphorus found in the ocean. Phosphorus is a nutrient and its removal affected the ecosystem and, in turn, reduced the oxygen demand.
Gyaan:
Continental Shelf
A continental shelf is the edge of a continent that lies under the ocean. Continents are the seven main divisions of land on Earth. A continental shelf extends from the coastline of a continent to a drop-off point called the shelf break. From the break, the shelf descends toward the deep ocean floor in what is called the continental slope.
Even though they are underwater, continental shelves are part of the continent. The actual boundary of a continent is not its coastline, but the edge of the continental shelf.
Oxygenation (environmental)
Environmental oxygenation can be important to the sustainability of a particular ecosystem. Insufficient oxygen (environmental hypoxia) may occur in bodies of water such as ponds and rivers, tending to suppress the presence of aerobic organisms such as fish. Deoxygenation increases the relative population of anaerobic organisms such as plants and some bacteria, resulting in fish kills and other adverse events. The net effect is to alter the balance of nature by increasing the concentration of anaerobic over aerobic species.
Oxygenation by water aeration can be part of the environmental remediation of a usually stagnant body of water.
Oxygen content in water can be measured by adding equal quantities of Manganese and Iodine ions in an alkaline solution to a sample of the water. This is then titrated against sodium thiosulfate with a starch indicator and the oxygen concentration determined. One such test is the Winkler test for dissolved oxygen.
Water aeration is the process of increasing the oxygen saturation of the water.
Water aeration is often required in water bodies that suffer from anoxic conditions, usually caused by adjacent human activities such as sewage discharges, agricultural run-off, or over-baiting a fishing lake. Aeration can be achieved through the infusion of air into the bottom of the lake, lagoon or pond or by surface agitation from a fountain or spray-like device to allow for oxygen exchange at the surface and the release of noxious gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane or hydrogen sulfide.
Dissolved oxygen (DO) is a major contributor to water quality. Not only do fish and other aquatic animals need it, but oxygen breathing aerobic bacteria decompose organic matter. When oxygen concentrations become low, anoxic conditions may develop which can decrease the ability of the water body to support life.
Biochemical Oxygen Demand
Biochemical oxygen demand is a measure of the quantity of oxygen used by microorganisms (e.g., aerobic bacteria) in the oxidation of organic matter.
Natural sources of organic matter include plant decay and leaf fall. However, plant growth and decay may be unnaturally accelerated when nutrients and sunlight are overly abundant due to human influence.
Urban runoff carries pet wastes from streets and sidewalks; nutrients from lawn fertilizers; leaves, grass clippings, and paper from residential areas, which increase oxygen demand.
Oxygen consumed in the decomposition process robs other aquatic organisms of the oxygen they need to live. Organisms that are more tolerant of lower dissolved oxygen levels may replace a diversity of more sensitive organisms.
The dissolved oxygen level of a water sample is measured five days after it was collected. On the day of collection, the DO level is measured in an initial sample. The biochemical oxygen demand is the difference between DO levels in the two samples, so the level of the original sample must be known
The standoff over Crimea’s bid to join Russia spiralled to new heights as the Group of Seven warned Russia to back away or face sanctions in the backdrop of military muscle flexing in the region.
Crimea is set to hold a referendum on Sunday on whether to split Ukraine and join Russia or seek greater autonomy as part of Ukraine.
Gyaan
G7
The G7, or G-7, is a group consisting of the finance ministers of seven developed nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. They are the seven wealthiest developed nations on Earth by national net wealth, as described in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report October 2013
G6 (EU)
The G6 (Group of Six) in the European Union is an unofficial group of the interior ministers of the six European Union member states – Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Poland – with the largest populations and so with the majority of votes in the Council of the European Union.
An expert group has suggested restricting the availability and consumption of junk food or food high in fat, sugar and salt in schools and in a 50 metre radius around them. It has also called for increasing the availability of wholesome food to schoolchildren across the country.
The committee has identified chips, fried foods, sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages, sugar-sweetened non-carbonated beverages, ready-to-eat noodles, pizzas, burgers, potato fries and confectionery items as the common foods containing fat, sugar and salt in high quantities.
It gave this suggestion in draft guidelines for making available quality and safe foods in schools. A copy of the guidelines was on Wednesday submitted to the Delhi High Court.
The guidelines also stress the need to regulate `the exposure and power of advertisements and promotional activities’ that are targeted at children.
``It is recommended that the government may advise the Advertising Standards Council of India or any other relevant body to consider developing such a framework for
(1) regulating advertisements for foods high in fat, sugar and salt
(2) limiting reach of such advertisements in the electronic media where the school children are the key audience
(3) restricting celebrity endorsements for such foods and
(4) regulating promotional activities of such foods targeted at the children,’’ the guidelines pointed out.
It has also been stated that FSSAI should ensure that the labels on all food packets should carry information on the type and quantity of various nutrients and how much the serving size contributes to the total daily requirement.
Gyaan
Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI)
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has been established under Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 which consolidates various acts & orders that have hitherto handled food related issues in various Ministries and Departments. FSSAI has been created for laying down science based standards for articles of food and to regulate their manufacture, storage, distribution, sale and import to ensure availability of safe and wholesome food for human consumption.
It is an agency of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India
It is an agency of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India
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