Current Affairs 19 August 2022 – IAS Current Affairs

Current Affairs 19 August 2022 focuses on Prelims-Mains perspective. Major events are :

Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022

Source: PIB
GS II: Policies and Developmental Studies

What is discussed under Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022?

1. Need, primary objectives and key features of Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022.

Why in News?

1. The government has issued the Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022 for stakeholder consultation to repeal and replace the existing ‘Indian Ports Act of 1908’.

Key Facts

• India has a 7,500 km long coastline, 14,500 km of potentially navigable waterways and a strategic location on major global marine trading routes.
• By volume and value, ports enable over 95% and 65% of India’s commerce respectively through sea transport.
• The Indian Ports Act of 1908 is more than 110 years old.
• It has become essential that the act be updated to take into account:
  • The current frameworks
  • Include India’s international agreements
  • Address new environmental issues
  • Support the consultative growth of the ports industry for the benefit of the country

What Is the Need for Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022?

• To harmonise and update the laws related to ports.
• For the control of pollution at ports and its prevention.

  

• To make sure that the nation complies with its obligations under the marine treaties and other international agreements to which India is a party.
• Adopt actions to preserve ports.
• To enable and create State Maritime Boards for the efficient control, management, and administration of India’s non-major ports.
• Establish a national council to promote the planned expansion and development of the port industry and provide adjudicative tools for resolving port-related conflicts.

What Are the Primary Objectives of Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022?

• Promote integrated planning between States inter- and Centre-States through a purely consultative and recommendatory framework.
• Ensure prevention of pollution measures for all ports in India while incorporating India’s obligations under international treaties.
• Address lacunae in the dispute resolution framework required for the burgeoning ports sector.
• Usher-in transparency and cooperation in the development and other aspects through the use of data.

What Are the Key Features of Draft Indian Ports Bill 2022?

• By removing pointless delays, resolving conflicts, and clarifying duties, the proposed bill will standardise and expedite the growth of the marine industry while also boosting the ease of doing business.
• The national framework will include State Maritime Boards.
• The Maritime State Development Council would guarantee cooperative federalism in which the federal, state, and territorial governments will collaborate to create a constructive road map for the nation.
• The Act’s redundant provisions have been eliminated or swapped out with current clauses.
• The existing penalties in the act which are outdated have been updated with respect to amounts and offences relevant to present-day scenario.

Indian Blockchain Platform

Source: Indian Express
GS II: Policies and Developmental Studies; GS III: Indian Economy

What is discussed under the Indian Blockchain Platform?

1. What is digital public infrastructure?
2. India’s initiatives on digital public infrastructure?
3. Limitations of current public digital infrastructure
4. What is Web 3.0?
5. Role of blockchain technology in Web 3.0
6. Need for blockchain platform in India

Why in News?

• India has put a lot of effort in recent years to create a large-scale digital public infrastructure that is accessible to all citizens.
• In 2021, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) also released a draft National Strategy on Blockchain which identifies the potential for the adoption of blockchain in India and envisages the creation of a ‘National Level Blockchain Framework’.

What Is Digital Public Infrastructure?

Digital Infrastructure

• Infrastructures are the technologies and systems necessary for society to function.
• Societies operate on three infrastructures: physical, digital, and social.
• Digital infrastructures are the tools and systems required to make digital life function.
• They include the wiring and circuitry of the internet, institutions such as the domain name system, and the software that keeps the internet running.
• In addition, digital infrastructure likely includes tools we all need to use to make digital spaces accessible and usable.

Digital public infrastructure

• Digital public infrastructures are the infrastructures that let us engage in public and civic life in digital spaces.
• They are digital solutions that help the basic functions required for public and private service delivery such as collaboration, commerce, and governance.

What Are India’s Initiatives on Digital Public Infrastructure?

• The Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been promoting simplification and transparency to increase the speed of interaction between individuals, markets, and the government.
• With the commencement of the Digital India mission in 2015, India’s payments, provident fund, passports, driving licences, crossing tolls, and checking land records all have been transformed with modular applications built on Aadhaar, UPI, and the India Stack.
• The intention is to create low-cost, high-volume, trusted transaction enablement for citizens.

FinTech

• India accounted for more than 40% of all global real-time payment transactions in 2021.
• In the financial year 2021-22, payments via UPI topped $ 1 trillion in value.
• At the start of the new financial year 2022, UPI payments soared to 5.5 billion transactions and more than $127 bilion in value.

Co-WIN or Winning Against COVID-19

• Created for inoculating the country against COVID-19.
• India is about to complete 2-billion vaccine doses, using a common technology backbone to standardise, schedule, track, trace and validate vaccinations.

Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABHA)

• Under this mission, India is working on creating personal health records for all citizens using consumer technology for easy upload and retrieval of this vital information. 
• Users may manage and keep their health information in a private, secure, and discreet setting.
• As the gap in digital literacy and accessibility closes over time, this allows authorised individuals to maintain health information on behalf of others, creating the prospect that someday every family will embrace it.

One Nation, One Ration Card 

• It greatly benefits those who depend on the government’s food security programmes.
• Ration cards are portable and allow the beneficiary to access and claim their entitlement anywhere in the country based on biometric authentication.

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)

• This platform envisages equal-opportunity participation in a burgeoning domestic e-commerce market.
• It allows small merchants to find new markets, improving their discoverability without having to pay deep cuts to the aggregator platforms.

Limitations of Current Public Digital Infrastructure

• Not interconnected: Existing different digital infrastructures are not interconnected as a design. For instance, the information has to travel across multiple systems to complete the interaction.
• Rely on private databases: This makes the validation of data more complex as the network grows, driving up costs and creating inefficiencies.

What Is Web 3.0?

• Web 3.0 refers to a new, improved, and democratized, internet ecosystem.
• It is based on the concept of creating an ecosystem that is free from any sort of central authority.
• Through this technology, the issues faced by the modern internet and online ecosystem can be resolved by utilising the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cutting-edge technologies like blockchain.
• Using blockchain technology through  Web 3.0, people will be able to buy, own, sell and earn by selling their digital content in the form of non-fundable token (NFTs).

How is Web 3.0 differs from the previous versions?

• Web 1.0: 
  • It is the first version of the internet which was only a basic read-only version of the internet.
  • The users were only allowed to read information from the websites.
• Web 2.0:
  • It is the stage of the internet that we are at right now allowed with more flexibility.
  • It gives the users the flexibility to read, write, upload, send and receive various forms of content including text, images and video, via the internet.

Primary features of Web 3.0

• Artificial Intelligence:  Artificial Intelligence or AI can use to filter data and content and customise search results based on the user’s preference.

  

• Semantic Web: It helps the computer to analyze data and decode the meaning and emotions that are being sent providing a better and more pleasing internet usage experience to the users.
• Ubiquity/omnipresence: Maks the internet more widely accessible using the Internet of Things (IoT).
• 3D Graphics: The use of 3D graphics will enhance the user experience and will also be helpful in transforming a variety of sectors like health, e-commerce, real estate, etc.

Role of Blockchain Technology in Web 3.0

• Using blockchain technology the speed of transactions can increase.
• There is no need for third-party service intermediaries like Google, Visa, Amazon, StubHub, etc.
• The key to use blockchain for marketing and moving to Web 3.0 is called a smart contract.
• A smart contract is a collection of code and data that reside at a specific address on the blockchain. 
• This allows users to transact anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free manner without a middleman.
• The smart contract stored in a blockchain defines the rules and penalties around an agreement and automatically enforces those rules.

Benefits

• Transparency
• Data ownership
• Less intermediaries
• Efficient searching and information linking
• Personalized web surfing experience
• Uninterrupted services

Need for Indian Blockchain Platform

• To create national ecosystem on blockchain
  • The ideal solution to solving most of the known issues of decentralized technologies lies in the middle path
  • That is a national platform operating at L1 that interconnects both permissioned and public blockchains, application providers, token service providers, and infrastructure managers.
  • Together they can form a reliable and efficient network for the Indian digital economy.
  • All L2 chains on the public infrastructure L1 will communicate with each other, thus avoiding the need for complex integrations with each other on the Internet for existing Indian digital infrastructures.
• To create interoperability
  • The Indian digital community including fintechs, academia, think tanks, and institutions, should focus on supporting research in standards, interoperability etc.
  • Scalability and performance, consensus mechanisms, and auto-detection of vulnerabilities also need due consideration.
• End-user devices such as smartphones could deliver blockchain-compliant devices by adding extensions.
• The Indian blockchain platform is the need of the hour,  given that the present global climate is favouring blockchain.

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