Daily News Mail - News of 23/03/2015

Today Civil Services Junction is paying homage to the great martyrs of India’s freedom struggle, Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev on their 84th martyrdom day, today.
You all are still living in our heart....

Saving the Great Barrier Reef

• Australia has released its long-term blueprint to save the Great Barrier Reef.
• Prime Minister Tony Abbott on March 21 said protecting the World Heritage site was a priority and unveiled the 35-year plan for the major tourist attraction off the Queensland coast. It includes a complete and permanent ban on the dumping of capital dredge(Capital dredging - the removal from beneath water and raising through water or soil, rock or debris to create a greater depth than had previously existed) material in the area and sets targets to improve water quality and marine life populations.
• Mr. Abbott said the plan would “secure Australia's majestic Great Barrier Reef as a place of outstanding universal value on the World Heritage List.”
• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has threatened to put the reef on its danger list due to threats from dredging, climate change, farm run-off and the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish.
• The heart of the plan and programme is about better water quality with hard targets including a 50% reduction in nitrogen by 2018 and an 80% reduction in nitrogen by 2025,” he said.
• Pesticide loads in priority areas must drop by at least 60% by 2018 while populations of turtles, dolphins and dugongs must be either stable or increasing by 2020. 
• Greenpeace said it was concerned that the plan still allowed for coal mine expansion in Queensland and port expansion along its coastline. 

Land Bill will push rural industrialisation: Modi

• For Narendra Modi, who reached out to farmers through the “Mann Ki Baat” broadcast on March 22, his efforts to get the Land ordinance converted into an Act of Parliament could not have come at a worse moment: if the Opposition, led by the Congress, has got a head start in critiquing the changes planned by the government, and in painting them as “anti-farmer,” it has also coincided with unseasonal rains that have destroyed crops and rising prices of fertilizers. Thus far, the government has failed to address any of these issues satisfactorily, helping the Opposition to portray the government as ill-disposed to farmers.
• Mr. Modi said government wanted to plug the “lacunae” in the 2013 Act. But on the issues of social impact assessment and consent — that the new Bill has dispensed with — he had interesting explanations. The first had been done away with to protect farmers from red tape, he said; on the second, he said no one could take away land without consent. admitting a second later that consent was not necessary for public-private partnership projects. “Brothers and sisters, do we want farmers’ children to be compelled to settle in the slums of Mumbai and Delhi,” he said, making a case for industrialisation in rural areas.