ASSAM

‘320 hectares of Assam forest land encroached’: Assam forest department

The Assam forest department has admitted before the Gauhati high court that 320 hectares of reserved forest land of Longai Reserved Forest in Karimganj district have been encroached by people from Mizoram.

The petitioner’s advocate said the divisional forest officer in its affidavit stated that about two/three families from Mizoram encroached upon 7.58 hectares of the reserved forest land at Chutobubirbond inside Singla reserved forest along the Assam-Mizoram Border and constructed temporary houses and also raised cash crops during the Covid-19-induced lockdown. However, they were evicted and the area was cleared.

NORTH-EASTERN STATES

MHA: Don’t tag Myanmarese entering India as refugees

The ministry of home affairs (NE Division) has written to the chief secretaries of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, which share borders with Myanmar, saying that an “illegal influx from Myanmar has started” and that the three states should not to grant refugee status to any foreigner.

The letter also instructed the three states and the Assam Rifles, the India-Myanmar border guarding force, “to stay alert and take appropriate action to prevent a possible influx from the neighbouring country into Indian territory”.

The ministry said in 2017 instructions were issued to the chief secretaries of all state governments to sensitise all law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take prompt steps to identify illegal migrants and initiate the deportation processes without delay. MHA’s foreigners division had also issued similar instructions to the chief secretaries advising them to restrict illegal migrants to specific locations, capture their biographic and biometric particulars, and cancel fake Indian documents.

Mizoram CM Zoramthanga had earlier said the state government and people of Mizoram would welcome any ethnic Mizo or anyone being persecuted for participating in the pro-democratic movement in neighbouring Myanmar.

INTERNATIONAL

Highlights of Food Waste Index Report

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released the “Food Waste Index Report 2021”. According to the UNEP report, an estimated 931 million tons of food was wasted worldwide in 2019. The agency also emphasized that this amount of wasted food may cause the earth to orbit the earth 7 times. Highlights:

The index report is published by UNEP in cooperation with partner organization WRAP. Of the total waste generation, households accounted for 61% of waste, food services accounted for 26% of foo waste, and retail accounted for 13%.

The report also emphasized that 17% of total global food production was wasted. According to the agency, the weight is approximately equal to 23 million full-loaded 40-ton trucks, enough to make the earth circle seven times.

The annual per capita possession is 91,646,213 tons. According to the report, every country that measures food waste basically has nothing to do with income levels.

Food waste in India: The average household waste in India is 50 kilograms per person per year, which is equivalent to 68,760,163 tons per year. On the other hand, household food waste in the United States is 59 kilograms per capita per year, which is equivalent to 19,359,951 tons per year. The report emphasizes that in China, household waste is 64 kilograms per person per year and 91,646,213 tons per year

NATIONAL

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu & Uttar Pradesh top states in employability: Skills report

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh remained the top three states with the highest employable talent, according to the India Skills Report 2021. Karnataka takes the fourth spot followed by Andhra Pradesh. Bangalore is among the most preferred cities to work for aspiring professionals, the report said.

Rajasthan and West Bengal come in the top 10 states with employable talent, yet remain below Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Telangana and Gujarat respectively. Haryana could not make it to this list again, despite the massive push from numerous skill development measures.

The report, prepared by Wheebox in partnership with Taggd, CII, AICTE, AIU and UNDP, showed that 46% of the youth were considered highly employable resources. This is far less than the previous years, indicating a skill gap in education, it said, adding that this is still an encouraging statistic considering that the average age of India is 26.8 years old.

More women were found employable than men. In fact, the number of women enrolled in colleges and degree programs have increased over the past, the report said. The report is based on the assessment of 65,000 candidates.

Earliest cotton in Arabia came from India: Study

For about 600 years, Mleiha was the political centre of southeast Arabia before it was abandoned in the 3rd century CE. And for decades, the emergence of the tropical cotton plant in the arid Arabian peninsula has been a question archaeologists have tried to answer. Oman, they had concluded, was the source of the ancient Arab cotton trade. But now, scientists from the Museum of Natural History in Paris have found evidence in Mleiha that the earliest cotton in the Arab region came from northwest India.

The irony, however, is that a fire which ravaged one of its most important buildings of Mleiha is also what preserved it for posterity. Within this Unesco World Heritage Site in the United Arab Emirates lies a tableaux frozen in fire. It’s a mud brick building with 15 rooms around a central courtyard with signs of a life hastily abandoned in forgotten objects and prized possessions carelessly thrown around, and, the evidence of an ancient Indian trade route, cotton — specifically, 31 whole seeds, 79 fragments and 7 raw fibre clusters.

Municipal Performance Index by Union Ministry

Municipal Performance Index 2020 has been released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) Highlights:

The 2020 Municipal Performance Index (MPI): MPI reviewed the sectoral performance of 111 cities in five verticals (Delhi was evaluated by NDMC and three municipal companies).

These verticals consist of 20 industries and a total of 100 indicators. The five vertical areas under MPI are service, finance, policy, technology and governance.

City ranking:

According to the assessment framework of MPI 2020, cities are classified according to their populations of “million+” (cities with a population of more than one million) and “population of less than one million”.

In the “Millionaire” category: Indore has become the highest-ranked municipality, followed by Surat and Bhopal. In the “less than a million” category: The New Delhi Municipal Council has become the leader, followed by Tirupati and Gandhinagar.

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