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India launches new e-Business visa for Chinese nationals

• India has introduced an e-Production Investment Business Visa called e-B-4 Visa that Chinese businessmen can apply for to travel to India for specific business activities, including installation and commissioning of equipment. A latest advisory on the Indian Embassy website here said the e-B-4 Visa, which was introduced on January 1, can be applied for online without visiting the embassy or agents. The new visa is introduced in view of the growing demand for business visas to travel to India. It will be issued in about 45 to 50 days, with permission to stay in India for up to six months.

Police in States step up social media monitoring

Context: Dedicated cells rise from 262 in 2020 to 365 in 2024; numbers high in Bihar (52), Maharashtra (50), Punjab (48), West Bengal (38) and Assam (37); officials cite evolving crime trends for rise in cells.

• Over the past five years, police forces across States have dedicated significant resources to monitoring social media platforms, an analysis of police infrastructure data shows. The number of dedicated social media monitoring cells rose from 262 across 28 States and eight Union Territories as of January 1, 2020, to 365 as of January 1, 2024.
• Most of such cells are operational in Bihar (52), Maharashtra (50), Punjab (48), West Bengal (38) and Assam (37).
• In Manipur, where ethnic violence erupted on May 3, 2023, the number of police social media monitoring cells rose from three on January 1, 2020, to 16 on January 1, 2024. The expansion occurred despite the Internet being suspended in the State for about 140 days in 2023.
• Assam increased the number of social media monitoring cells from one in 2022 to 37 in 2024. West Bengal expanded its network from two to 38 cells, while Punjab doubled its capacity, increasing the number from 24 to 48 between 2022 and 2024.
• Earlier, social media monitoring cells were not counted separately or were part of the cybercrime police stations. They began to function as distinct units from 2021, according to Data on Police Organisations (DoPO) reports for the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
• The annual DoPO reports are prepared by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), a police think tank under the Union Home Ministry.
• The cells started featuring in the reports since 2021, which includes data for the 2020.
• Meanwhile, the number of cybercrime police stations increased from 376 as of January 1, 2020, to 624 as of January 1, 2024.

‘Evolving crime trends’

• Police officials attribute the need for dedicated cells to track and pre-empt the evolving crime trends on social media platforms such as Facebook, X, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram.
• The 2024 DoPO report said that the number of drones available with police forces in States and Union Territories stood at 1,147, up from 1,010 as of January 1, 2023.
• The report also noted that 5,92,839 police posts were vacant across the country, against the total sanctioned strength of 27,55,274.
• Of the total sanctioned strength of 27.55 lakh, the actual strength comprised 3,30,621 personnel belonging to Scheduled Castes, 2,31,928 to Scheduled Tribes and 6,37,774 to Other Backward Classes.

Source: The Hindu

Bhu Suraksha project launched to digitise land records

Context: Minister for Revenue Krishna Byre Gowda launched the Bhu Suraksha Project to expand the digitisation of land records to the offices of Assistant Commissioners (ACs) and Deputy Commissioners (DCs).

‘To curb malpractice’

• Karnataka’s land records were being fully digitised to curb malpractice and improve transparency.
• The original land records in all taluk offices had been scanned and digitised. Digitisation plays crucial measure to prevent fake entries and the creation of forged documents in land records.
• Work under the Bhu Suraksha project to digitise records in AC and DC offices had begun last month.

Suspicious cases

• Of the forged land documents, treated with seriousness.
• “Each suspicious case will be examined thoroughly. Wherever required, documents will be sent to forensic laboratories to verify their authenticity, and appropriate action will follow,”.

📌 Key Highlights of the Bhu Suraksha Project
Launch Date: January 5, 2026, in Bengaluru.

Launched By: Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda.

Objective: To digitise Karnataka’s vast land records and make them easily accessible online.

Scale: Karnataka has an estimated 100 crore pages of land records, of which 62 crore pages have already been scanned.

Coverage Expansion: Digitisation will now extend to the offices of Assistant Commissioners (ACs) and Deputy Commissioners (DCs).

Technology Use: Advanced scanning and digital archiving to ensure secure, tamper-proof records.

🏛️ Why It Matters
Transparency: Eliminates scope for manipulation of land records.

Accessibility: Citizens can access verified land documents online without middlemen.

Legal Security: Prevents fake entries and forged documents, reducing land disputes.

Efficiency: Streamlines land administration and reduces delays in property transactions.

⚠️ Challenges & Risks
Completion Timeline: Scanning of all records is targeted by March 2026, requiring massive coordination.

Data Security: Ensuring protection against cyber threats is critical.

Training Needs: Revenue staff must adapt to digital workflows.

Citizen Awareness: Rural populations need guidance on accessing digital records.

✨ Significance
The Bhu Suraksha Project is a landmark initiative in Karnataka’s governance, aligning with Digital India goals. By digitising land records, the state aims to provide secure land ownership, reduce disputes, and empower citizens with transparent access to property information.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah equals Urs’s record on tenure

• Chief Minister Siddaramaiah equals the record of D. Devaraj Urs as Chief Minister with the longest tenure in Karnataka. Both hailed from Mysuru.

Karnataka’s Longest-Serving Chief Ministers
While Karnataka is known for its competitive and often volatile political landscape, a few leaders have managed to maintain extended leadership across multiple terms.

List of Chief Ministers of Karnataka (1947–2026)

India’s Longest-Serving Chief Ministers
Nationally, the benchmarks for “long tenure” are significantly higher. In several states, regional dominance has allowed leaders to stay in power for over two decades.

Tiger census gets under way in Karnataka

Context: tiger census got under way in Karnataka across all forest areas of the State, including the Kali, Bhadra, Nagarahole, Bandipur, and B.R.T. Tiger reserves.

• It is the sixth such exercise with the enumeration conducted earlier in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022; in the previous census, it was estimated that Karnataka had around 563 tiger.
• Karnataka has the second highest number of tigers in the country after Madhya Pradesh.
• The census is part of the nationwide tiger estimation exercise which is conducted once every four years.
• The 2026 census is the sixth such exercise with the enumeration conducted earlier in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022. In the previous census, it was estimated that Karnataka had around 563 tigers.
• The census will be carried out in all patrol beats of the 38 forest divisions across every forest range in the State for which training was given to frontline personnel of the all 13 forest circles and the five tiger reserves between October and December last year.

Census in two phases

• During the first phase of the enumeration for three days, teams comprising three members will patrol five km daily in forest areas across the State. They will collect details of pugmarks, scats, and direct sightings of tigers, leopards, and other carnivores and also elephants.
• During the second phase, from January 15 to 17, the estimation will be conducted in 14 forest divisions, during which teams will move through forests to collect data on direct sightings of herbivores such as deer, sambar, wild buffalo, and gaur. “This will help determine where camera traps should be installed.
• Project Tiger Director Ramesh Kumar who has been nominated as the nodal officer to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) will oversee this year’s census.
• “He (Ramesh Kumar) has been instructed to list the number of tigers and other carnivores in each area, assess the population of herbivores in each division, understand how many tigers each forest supports and how much prey is available for them, and thereby identify the forest’s carrying capacity,”.

Camera trap surveys

• Using the data collected in the first two phases, camera traps will be installed at suitable locations in the third phase.
• “There are 2,230 camera traps in the five tiger reserves and camera trap surveys have already begun in all five tiger reserves. Of these, the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve has 600 camera traps, Bandipur Tiger Reserve 550, B.R.T. Tiger Reserve 300, Bhadra Tiger Reserve 330, and Kali Tiger Reserve 450 camera traps,”.
• Steps have also been taken to install camera traps outside tiger reserves.
• Nearby tiger reserves that have completed camera trap surveys will provide cameras for this purpose. “It is observed that tigers are increasingly venturing out of forests into human habitations, and it appears that the tiger population in the State has increased this time. It will help to know the exact numbers through this census,”.

⭐ Karnataka (highlight)

Karnataka’s estimated tiger numbers across census cycles: 290 (2006) → 300 (2010) → 406 (2014) → 524 (2018) → 563 (2022).

In 2022, Karnataka is reported as the #2 state after Madhya Pradesh (785), just above Uttarakhand (560).

Sources: The Hindu

Venezuela crisis unlikely to hit India’s energy security

Context: Venezuelan crude accounted for about 0.3% of India’s total oil import in the current financial year up to November; since 2019, India has been cutting its imports from Venezuela after U.S. sanctions.

• The United States attack on Venezuela is unlikely to have any direct impact on India’s energy security, an analysis of the latest data shows.
• Numbers from the Commerce and Industry Ministry show that India imported $255.3 million worth of oil from Venezuela in the current financial year up to November 2025, about 0.3% of its total oil import during this period.
• In 2013, India had imported as much as $13 billion worth of Venezuelan oil. Since 2019, India has been cutting its oil imports and commercial engagements with Venezuela in response to U.S. sanctions and threats of secondary sanctions.
• “Given the low trade volumes, existing sanctions constraints, and the large geographical distance, the current developments in Venezuela are not expected to have any meaningful impact on India’s economy or energy security,”.

OPEC member

• Venezuela is a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a group of countries that largely dominates the global oil market. However, Venezuela currently produces a relatively small amount of crude oil compared with the other oil-producing nations.
• According to OPEC data, Venezuela accounts for about 3.5% of the OPEC’s total oil exports, and about 1% of global oil supplies.

Heavy oil

• This relatively low supply is due to the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and the heavy nature of Venezuelan oil, which requires special refineries that most countries do not have. Most of Venezuela’s oil supply goes to China.
• Following the U.S. actions in Venezuela over the weekend, Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. would take over Venezuela’s oil supply. “We are going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars, it will be paid for by the oil companies directly,” Mr. Trump said in his address following the attack.

Source: The Hindu

India loses 0.4% of its GDP every year to natural disasters

Context: As the scale of economic loss escalates, disaster risk finance has moved to the forefront of policy.

• Emerging Asian economies that comprise India, China, and the ASEAN-11, face an escalating threat from natural disasters that are growing in both frequency and intensity (Chart 1).
• Over the past decade, the region has had an average of 100 disasters annually, impacting approximately 80 million people.
• The nature of these threats varies by geography: while floods and storms are the primary drivers of risk in India, tropical cyclones frequently batter the Philippines and Vietnam.
• Meanwhile, China and Indonesia contend with significantly higher seismic risks (Chart 2).
• The human and economic toll of this vulnerability has been punctuated by several landmark catastrophes.
• As the scale of economic loss escalates (Chart 3), disaster risk finance has moved to the forefront of regional policy. To design an effective response, governments must first establish a data-driven foundation.
• From 1990 to 2024, India sustained average annual disaster-related losses equivalent to 0.4% of GDP (Chart 4). The composition of these losses is geographically distinct. India’s vulnerability is primarily hydrological (non-storm-related floods and landslides), whereas Myanmar’s losses are predominantly meteorological (extreme temperatures and cyclonic storms).
• The regional risk framework also includes climatological factors (drought and wildfire), and geophysical hazards (seismic activity and volcanic eruptions) too. Among the Asian economies analysed, India ranks second only to the Philippines in the World Risk Index (Chart 5). The index calculates risk as the geometric mean of exposure (population burden) and vulnerability (a combination of structural susceptibility, coping capacity, and long-term adaptation).

Source: The Hindu

Earthlife is made of space stuff, studies of asteroid Bennu hint

OSIRIS-REx samples from Bennu show the asteroid carries ribose, glucose, amino acids, nucleobases; discovery includes nitrogen-rich polymers, presolar grains of supernova origin, raising questions about how earth acquired life’s ingredients

In 2020, a spacecraft more than 3 lakh km away on a small asteroid called Bennu collected samples of its surface. The craft, part of NASA’s OSIRIS REx mission, then launched itself towards the earth, dropping off the canister of samples in September 2023. Since then, scientists in the US and Japan have been studying pieces of Bennu to answer fundamental questions about the formation of the early solar system and life on the earth.

On December 2, three teams published papers reporting Bennu contains sugar and other important molecules required to form RNA, and is also surprisingly abundant in supernova dust from a time before the sun formed.

When the solar system was forming from the cloud of dust and gas swirling around the sun, several smaller rocks were pushed around as well, and often clumped together. Bennu’s larger parent asteroid formed in this way around the same time as the sun, 4.6 billion years ago, somewhere beyond Saturn. When Jupiter migrated to its present orbit, the parent was kicked into the asteroid belt, where it collided with other rocks. Over millennia, fragments from the parent gave rise to Bennu, which today orbits the sun between the earth and Mars.

In a Nature Geoscience paper, scientists led by Tohoku University in Japan reported finding ribose, the sugar molecule present in RNA, and glucose, the sugar molecule required for metabolism, on Bennu. Together with previous findings of amino acids and all the five nucleobases found in DNA and RNA, the entire inventory of molecules scientists believe are needed for life have now been confirmed on Bennu.

“For 5-C to convert to 6-C sugar, the optimal mix of environmental conditions such as very little but liquid brine, the right pH, and extremely low temperatures are required, which the asteroid possessed at formation,” Kuljeet Kaur Marhas, professor and head of the Planetary Labs Analysis Section at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, who works with samples of the asteroid Itokawa, said.

The findings strengthen the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis: that early life used RNA as a source of genetic information and for catalytic functions, before DNA and proteins evolved. According to the study, the abundance of asteroids like Bennu in the inner solar system would have provided sugars and amino acids, leading to the formation of life on the earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Chemical reactions

Scientists have also reported evidence of chemical reactions between ices forming polymer molecules before the ices melted. In a Nature Astronomy paper, a second team from NASA thus explained the discovery of polymers of nitrogen- and oxygen-rich materials on Bennu. This material, called carbamate, would have been soft and gummy when it formed, hardening since. Scientists haven’t found this material in extraterrestrial samples before.

At the time Bennu’s parent formed, volatile compound ices like frozen ammonia, known to accumulate on asteroids’ primordial surfaces, could have been heated by random radioactive decay. This would have liquefied the ices, which seeped into rocky pores and deposited the salts and minerals dissolved in them there. Bennu could have ‘inherited’ a piece of this.

Dust and gas in the early presolar system were formed from other exploding stars. By analysing the dust, astronomers hope to find clues about the elements that made up its counterpart in the early solar system, which could help understand how planets formed.

In a third paper also published in Nature Astronomy, a different NASA team showed the presolar grains on Bennu had indeed been disturbed and moved around by moving liquids on the asteroid’s surface. The concentration of presolar grains was at least 6x higher than in other similar asteroid and meteorite samples.

The team also reported signs the grains had been singed by heat released when the great mass of dust collapsed to form our sun.

Studies of the grains revealed they originated from various types of stars and supernovae. Of these, the concentrations of grains of supernovae-origin were the highest, indicating it was present in abundant quantities in the part of space where Bennu’s parent formed. 

“Why exactly there is an abundance of supernova-origin presolar grains is the biggest question, as Bennu is just like plenty of other asteroids in its neighbourhood,” Dr. Marhas, who also reviewed the presolar grains paper, said.

“Will we find similar concentrations if we sample previously studied asteroids in different locations or is there something specific that makes the ordinary-seeming Bennu extremely special?”

Source: The Hindu

Govt. mulls Aadhaar-like number for EV batteries

The Transport Ministry has proposed assigning Aadhaar-like unique identification numbers to EV batteries to ensure their end-to-end traceability and efficient recycling.

The proposed framework will make it mandatory for battery producers or importers to assign a 21-character Battery Pack Aadhaar Number (BPAN) to batteries, as per draft guidelines from the Ministry. They will also have to upload the relevant Battery Pack Dynamic data on the official portal of BPAN.

Nritya Kalanidhi award conferred on Urmila Satyanarayanan

Bharatanatyam exponent Urmila Satyanarayanan was presented the Nritya Kalanidhi award at the 19th Dance Festival inaugurated at the Music Academy in the city.

Presenting the award, Takahashi Muneo, Consul- General, Consulate General of Japan in Chennai, said the honour recognised not only her artistic excellence but also her lifelong commitment to the preservation and propagation of Bharatanatyam.

Drawing parallels between Indian and Japanese dance traditions, he said classical Japanese forms such as Noh, Kabuki and Nihon Buyo emphasised controlled movement and discipline — aspects that resonate strongly with Indian classical dances. Both traditions, he said, share a deep respect for heritage and the teacher-disciple lineage.

Mr. Muneo said many Japanese students had travelled to India to learn Bharatanatyam, while several renowned Indian dancers had taught and performed in Japan, serving as a powerful example of how culture can connect nations.

Accepting the award, Ms. Satyanarayanan expressed gratitude to her teachers, students and the Music Academy. Recalling that her arangetram was at the Music Academy, she said receiving the award from the renowned institution was a milestone in the life of a dancer.

Earlier, N. Murali, president of the Music Academy and Director of The Hindu Group of Publications, said the award to Ms. Satyanarayanan came at an important stage in her artistic journey — 50 years after her arangetram and 30 years since she founded the dance school ‘Natya Sankalpa’. She is known for her improvisation and innovation, with several acclaimed thematic presentations and dance dramas to her credit, he said.

Source: The Hindu