30.06.23

The first comprehensive marine fish stock assessment for India reveals a surprisingly positive picture: 91.1% of 135 fish stocks evaluated in 2022 were found to be “healthy”. The two-year break in fishing activity caused by the pandemic may have played a big role, experts said.

Out of the 135 stocks, 86.7% were found to be sustainable – meaning that they had enough Population to support maximum sustainable yields. Sustainable stocks included certain varieties of dolphinfish, eels, lizardfish and snappers, as well as pomfret.

Regionally, the southeast coast had the highest Percentage of healthy stocks (97.4%) in 2022, followed by the southwest (92.7%), the northeast (87.5%), and the northwest was at the lowest at 83.8%.

Overall, the assessment found 8.2% of stocks to be overfished, including varieties of croakers, catfish, groupers, sharks, and lobsters, and about 4.4% were tending to be overfished. An overfished stock is one whose or population is too small and fishing pressure too high to support maximum sustainable yields. However, none of the stocks assessed had collapsed – that is when a population has fallen to such a low level that it does not recover within a certain time.

Union Home and cooperation ministerAmit Shah said a bill to amend the Multi-State Act will be brought inParliamentin the coming (monsoon) session as a parliamentary committee has already completed its works on the amendment with consensus.

The bill was introduced in Parliament in December last year, but it was sent to a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) as opposition members expressed that the proposed amendment would encroach on the rights of state governments.

TheElection Commission came up with an online portal to allow registered file theirfinancial statements, including contribution reports andpoll expenditure accounts, a move seen as an effort to bring in more transparency in disclosures made by political entities.

The move is part of the poll panel’s “3C strategy” comprising clean up, crackdown and compliance to strengthen Transparency and Accountability in thepolitical funding and expenditureon which it had been working for a year now under Chief Election CommissionerRajiv Kumar.

The portal will facilitate the online filing of Contribution Report, Audited Annual Account and Election Expenditure Statement by political parties.
These financial statements are required to be submitted by political parties to the Election Commission/Chief Electoral Officers of States/Union Territories, as per the Representation of People’s Act, 1951 and transparency guidelines issued by the Commission, from time to time, over the last many years.

Prime MinisterNarendra Modiwill host Chinese PresidentXi Jinping, his Russia counterpart Vladimir Putin, Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif and other leaders of theSCOnations at a virtual summit of the bloc on Tuesday that is expected to focus on regional security situation and ways to boost connectivity and trade.

It will be Putin’s first participation in a multilateral summit after a mercenary group launched a short-lived Armed Rebellion last week that rocked Moscow.

The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) under India’s presidency is also set to welcome Iran as the new permanent member of the grouping.

The SCO, comprising India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional .

India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit of SCO on September 16 last year.

Heads of the two SCO bodies — the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) are also set to attend Tuesday’s virtual summit whose theme is “Towards a SECURE SCO’.

The SECURE acronym was coined by Prime Minister Modi at the 2018 SCO summit and it stands for Security; economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.

The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations),CIS(Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia).

The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan became its permanent member along with India in 2017.