Draft Water Bill suggests basin-level management 2016 / P-Note data for black money / Human hair used to produce cheaper cathodes for solar cells

Draft Water Bill suggests basin-level management

The draft says that every person has a “right to sufficient quantity of safe water for life” within easy reach of the household regardless of caste, creed, religion, age, community, class, gender, disability, economic status, land ownership and place of residence.

It provides for a mechanism to develop and manage river basin in an integrated manner so that every state gets “equitable” share of a river’s water without violating rights of others.

It pitches for establishing River Basin Authority for each inter-state basin to ensure “optimum and sustainable” development of rivers and valleys.

It also devises an integrated approach to conserve water and manage groundwater in a sustainable manner.

The draft Bill proposes establishing institutional arrangements at all levels within a state and beyond up to an inter-state river-basin level to “obviate” disputes through negotiations, conciliation or mediation before they become acute.

It also says that each River Basin Authority will prepare a master plan for the river basin, under its jurisdiction, comprising such information as may be prescribed. The master plan, so prepared, will be reviewed and updated every five years after due consultation with all other planning agencies and stakeholders.

SIT set to comb P-Note data for black money

P-Notes:

P-Notes are derivative products issued by FPIs in foreign markets which give their holders the right to have a share of the profit and loss from underlying Indian stocks but at the same time help maintain anonymity about the actual owners of those notes.

P-Notes allow foreign investors to take exposure to Indian stocks without registering with Sebi. These instruments are issued by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) registered with Sebi.

Human hair used to produce cheaper cathodes for solar cells

Benefits:

• The cathode shows an impressive performance in converting visible sunlight to electricity much higher than commercially available activated carbon cathodes and is comparable with commonly used cathodes made of platinum metal and metal sulfides.
• Besides its higher efficiency to convert visible sunlight to electricity, the cathode was found to generate high open-circuit voltage, which is at par with conventional platinum and activated carbon cathodes. Thereby, the power conversion efficiencies can also be enhanced.
• They also have the potential to bring down the cost of solar cells.