Context: 

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), under the Union Education Ministry, announced the India Rankings 2023 of higher education institutions.

Rankings 2023:

• Best educational institution in overall ranking: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras for the fifth consecutive term.
• Best university in the country: Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru for eight years in a row.
• Best college: Miranda House, Delhi
• Best management institute: Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. 
• Best institute in pharmacy: National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Hyderabad
• Best medical college: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi
• Best dental college: Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, Chennai
• Best law college: National Law School of India University, Bengaluru  
• Best engineering college: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras for the eighth consecutive year.
• Best research institutions in their respective category: 
  • Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
  • National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Hyderabad
  • Indian Agricultural Research Institute 
  • IIT ­Roorkee (in architecture) 
  • National Law School of India University

About NIRF:

• The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) was approved bythe Ministry of Human Resource Development in 2015.
• This framework outlines a methodology to rank institutions across the country. 
• The methodology draws from the overall recommendations broad understanding arrived at by a Core Committee set up by MHRD, to identify the broad parameters for ranking various universities and institutions.

Parameters of NIRF:

• Teaching, Learning & Resources:
  • Student Strength including Doctoral Students
  • Faculty-student ratio with emphasis on permanent faculty
  • Combined metric for Faculty with PhD (or equivalent) and Experience
  • Financial Resources and their Utilisation

• Research and Professional Practice:
  • Combined metric for Publications
  • Combined metric for Quality of Publications
  • IPR and Patents: Published and Granted
  • Footprint of Projects and Professional Practice

• Graduation Outcomes:
  • Metric for University Examinations
  • Metric for Number of Ph.D. Students Graduated

• Outreach and Inclusivity:
  • Percentage of Students from Other States/Countries
  • Percentage of Women 
  • Economically and Socially Challenged Students 
  • Facilities for Physically Challenged Students
  • Perception Ranking

• Peer Perception:
  • Academic Peers and Employers (PR)

News Source: The Hindu

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Context: 

Recently, Nyaya Vikas Portal was created for monitoring the implementation of Centrally Sponsored Schemes

About Nyaya Vikas:

• Nyaya Vikas Portal allows four  efficient ways of logging into the portal, thereby empowering stakeholders with seamless access to information pertaining to funding, documentation, project monitoring and approval.
• The Department of Justice has been implementing the Centrally Sponsored Scheme(CSS) for Development of Infrastructure Facilities for Districts and Subordinate Judiciary since 1993-94.
• This portal has been created for monitoring the implementation of this Scheme.
• Under the Scheme , central assistance is provided to the State Government / UT Administrations for construction of court halls and residential units for Judicial Officers / Judges of District and Subordinate Courts. 
• Fund sharing pattern for Center and State: 
  1. 60:40 in respect of States other than North Eastern and Himalayan States. 
  2. 90:10 in respect of North Eastern and Himalayan States
  3. 100% in respect of Union Territories.

News Source: PIB

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Context: 

Recently, physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle smasher at CERN, in Europe, reported that they had detected a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson particle and a photon.

• This is a very rare decay process that tells us important things about the Higgs boson as well as about our universe.

Image Source: The Hindu

What is a Higgs boson?

• The Higgs boson is a type of boson, a force­ carrying subatomic particles. 
• It carries the force that a particle experiences when it moves through an energy field, called the Higgs field, that is believed to be present throughout the universe. 
• The stronger a particle’s interaction with the Higgs boson, the more mass it has. This is why electrons have a certain mass, protons have more of it, and neutrons have just a little bit more than protons.
• A Higgs boson can also interact with another Higgs boson — this is how we know that its mass is greater than that of protons or neutrons.
  • For example, when an electron interacts with the Higgs field, the effects it experiences are said to be due to its interaction with Higgs bosons. 
• Since all the matter in the universe is made of these particles, working out how strongly each type couples to Higgs bosons, together with understanding the properties of Higgs bosons themselves.

The results of the recent study:

LHC experiment: 

• The LHC creates a Higgs boson by accelerating billions of highly energetic protons into a head-on collision, releasing a tremendous amount of energy that condenses into different particles. 
• As it is a heavy particle, the Higgs boson is unstable and decays into lighter particles.
• The Higgs boson can decay to a lepton pair and a photon in three ways.
• This is the first evidence that shows Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force.
• It can’t always be said which combination of particles it will decay into. 
• Although the Standard Model predicts what happens to the Higgs boson when it dies, until now, researchers hadn’t observed the particle decay before the recent study.

Standard Model of Particle Physics: 

• It says that a Higgs boson will decay to a Z boson and a photon 0.1% of the time. 
• This means the LHC needed to have created at least 1,000 Higgs bosons to have been able to spot one of them decaying to a Z boson and a photon.

Image source: energy.gov

• The Standard Model of Particle Physics is scientists’ current best theory to describe the most basic building blocks of the universe. 
• It explains how particles called quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) and leptons (which include electrons) make up all known matter. 
• It also explains how force carrying particles, which belong to a broader group of bosons, influence the quarks and leptons.
• The Standard Model explains three of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. 
  1. Electromagnetism is carried by photons and involves the interaction of electric fields and magnetic fields. 
  2. The strong force, which is carried by gluons, binds together atomic nuclei to make them stable. 
  3. The weak force, carried by W and Z bosons, causes nuclear reactions that have powered our Sun and other stars for billions of years. 
  4. The fourth fundamental force is gravity, which is not adequately explained by the Standard Model.

Limitations of  Standard Model

• It does not explain how gravity is mediated. There is currently no experimental evidence supporting the existence of the hypothesised gravitons. 
• The Standard Model of Matter is incompatible with the Theory of General Relativity (whose basis focuses on gravity).
• The Standard model currently cannot explain why the mass of sub-atomic particles is greater than the sum of its constituents. 
  • For example, the mass of a proton is greater than 3 quarks combined.
• It does not explain the disproportion between matter and anti-matter.
• It does not explain the composition of dark matter, which makes up the majority of the universe.  

News Source: The Hindu,  Science Ready

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Context: 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to the US for an official state visit from June 21 to 24, where he will be hosted by US President Joe Biden at the White House. 

• This will be his first state visit to the US during his nine-year long reign as prime minister. 

What are State Visits?

• State visits are visits to foreign countries led by a head of state/government, acting in their sovereign capacity. 
• They are, therefore, officially described as a “visit of [name of state]” rather than “visit of [name of leader]”. 
• State visits to the US only occur on the invitation of the President of the United States, acting in their capacity as the head of state.
• Every visit by a foreign leader is not a state visit. 
• State visits are the highest-ranked category of foreign visits with great ceremonial importance and are considered to be the highest expression of friendly bilateral relations. 
• In the US, these ceremonies include, 
  1. A flight line ceremony (where the visiting head of state is greeted at the tarmac after landing)
  2. A 21-gun salute White House arrival ceremony
  3. A White House dinner
  4. Exchange of diplomatic gifts
  5. An invitation to stay at the Blair House (the US President’s guesthouse across the Pennsylvania Avenue) 
  6. Flag streetlining.

Other types of visits:

• Less important visits are classified (in descending order of magnitude, according to US diplomatic policy) as official visits, official working visits, working visits, guest-of-government visits, and private visits. 
• Each of these visits have different protocols to be followed.

Major difference between these visits and a state visit: 

Are state visits more important?

• While officially and ceremonially, state visits are the most prestigious, for actual diplomatic work, the classification of the visit makes little difference. 
• Working visits can accomplish just as much in fostering a healthy relationship with another country as state visits. 
• In fact, given the rarity of state visits and the ceremonial functions they bring with them, most work actually gets done in other visits.

News Source: Indian Express

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Context: 

The recent rail accident in Balasore in Odisha, has exposed the failings in the functioning of Indian Railways and the challenges that India faces in modernising and expanding its rail services. 

Rail safety comparison with other countries:

• Uncommon accidents: Accidents involving passenger trains are extremely uncommon in countries with developed railway systems like Japan, China, Turkey, and several European nations like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. 
• Higher maximum and average speed: In these railways, most passenger trains travel at a maximum speed of 200–350 kmph, clocking an average speed of 150–250 kmph, which is three to five times faster than the speed in India, which is roughly 50 kmph.
• Comparison with China:

• • Rail network: The total length of China’s rail network in 1950 (21,800 km) was less than half that of India (53,596 km). Currently, China’s total route length (1,55,000 km) exceeds India’s (68,100 km) by more than two-fold.
  • No dual track lines: Unlike China, India did not build new dual track lines along the major trunk routes, notably the quadrilateral, and its diagonals that connect Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata.
  • The severe congestion on Indian Railways’ main trunk routes is the primary factor contributing to the trains’ stagnant speeds and their subpar safety record

Challenges faced by Indian Railways:

• Human resource deployment problem
  • Semi-skilled workers: At the ground level, Indian Railways saddled with semi-skilled workers promoted from linemen to handle mechanical or sophisticated electronic systems.
    • These ground level staff simply cannot stand up to pressure from the traffic or civil engineering wings.
• Outsourcing certain works including maintenance of new telecom signal equipment: These firms deploy badly trained and lowly paid technical personnel with no motivation to work in such places. 
• Remote work locations:  Among railway engineers, nobody is willing to work in remote places with bare amenities and boxed into small quarters.
• The issue is also of interdepartmental rivalry despite unified managed structure.

• Vacancy: 
  • • Data available shows 3.12 lakh non-gazetted posts were vacant. 
    • These vacant positions include those responsible for safety, maintenance and engineering. 
    • In the Central Railway alone, 14,203 vacancies out of the 28,650 posts were in the safety category.

• Performance audit on derailment in Indian Railways by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India:
  • It had noted that around 75 per cent of the 217 consequential train accidents between 2017-18 and 2020-21 were due to derailments. And one of the major factors responsible for derailments was related to maintenance of tracks.
  • There were shortfalls ranging from 30% to 100% in inspections by track-recording cars required to assess the geometrical and structural conditions of the tracks
  • The report also pointed to failures in the Track Management System, which is a web-based application for online monitoring of track maintenance activities.
• Safety issues
  • Derailments formed close to 70% of all accidents since 1990­-91, followed by level crossing accidents, collisions and fires in trains.
  • Among the consequential train accidents, 55% had occurred due to negligence or failure of the Railways staff.
  • The major causes of derailments are rail fractures, weld failures, track defects and rolling stock defects.
• Funding and Expenditure
  • In the 2023-­24 Union Budget, the Railways received a record allocation of ₹2.40 lakh crore. However, when capital expenditure on crucial activities related to safety such as track renewal and signalling and telecom are considered, their shares dwindled.
  • A Parliamentary Standing Committee report in 2023 observed that “appropriations to the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh” has been falling short ever since it was introduced.
  • The Committee also noted that the Railways did not meet the target of earmarked allocations for the previous five years. 

Way Forward 

Recommendations of High Level Safety Review Committee ( Anil Kakodkar Committee)

• Stopping the practice of introduction of new trains without commensurate inputs to the infrastructure.
• A switch over from the ICF (Integral Coach Factory) design coaches to the much safer Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) design coaches.
• There is a need for an independent mechanism for safety regulation. The Committee recommends the creation of a statutory Railway Safety Authority with enough powers to have a safety oversight on the operational mode of Railways.
• Restructuring of Research Design and Standards Organization (RDSO) for greater empowerment. 
• A Railway Research and Development Council (RRDC) should be set up directly under the government.
• Adoption of an Advanced Signalling System (akin to the European Train Control System) for the entire trunk route length.

CAG recommendations 

Railways should ensure: 

• Strict adherence to the scheduled timelines for conducting and finalisation of accident inquiries
• Develop a strong monitoring mechanism to ensure timely implementation of maintenance activities by adopting fully mechanised methods of track maintenance and improved technologies. 

News Source: Indian Express, The Hindu

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