Current Affairs - Uttarakhand

Drones being used commercially to deliver great healthcare to Indians in the rural locations seems to be a possibility now, through a commercial drone corridor.

• Drones being used commercially to deliver great healthcare to Indians in the most rural locations appears to be a possibility now. In the United States’ Redcliffe Labs, a division of Redcliffe Lifetech, has completed its first commercial drone flight in the healthcare sector.
• Between Uttarkashi and Dehradun, the business just launched a commercial drone corridor.
• The collaboration between Redcliffe and Skye Air resulted in 40 successful trials in North India over the last three months.
• Redcliffe Lab transported a payload of 5 kilograms in air temp boxes from Gyansu, Uttarkashi, to Vivek Vihar, Dehradun, a distance of 60 kilometres by air.
• From June 10, 2022, the business stated it will “operate two flights daily for both routine and specialised test sample collecting.”
• By 2027, the diagnostic service provider hopes to have reached at least 500 million Indians. Jain stated that the corporation “plans to employ drone technology to gather Dx samples” as one of the several approaches to meet this goal.

• Uttarakhand Govt. has announced ‘Chief Minister Vatsalya Yojana’ for orphaned children who have lost their parents due to Covid-19.
• Under the scheme, the State Government will make arrangements for their maintenance, education and training for employment up to the age of 21 years.
• They will be given a maintenance allowance of 3000 rupees per month.
• The state government will make laws for the paternal property of these orphans in which no one will have the right to sell their paternal property until they are adults. This responsibility will be with the District Magistrate of the concerned district.
• The children whose parents have died due to Covid-19 will be given 5 percent horizontal reservation in government jobs of the state government.

The Uttarakhand government has issued a notification to declare the state Vigilance Department as an “intelligence organisation”, which in effect will exclude it from the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

Exemption in RTI Act

• The 2nd schedule of the RTI Act provides a list of 26 organisations that are exempted from providing information on grounds of being intelligence and security organisations.
• Section 24 of the Act states: “The Central government has the authority to amend the 2nd schedule from time to time, thereby adding, removing or substituting organisations present…. The state government has a similar authority and is authorised to exempt an intelligence and security organisation by issuing a notification in the official gazette.”
• It states that both the Centre and state governments are “required to present the said notification before their respective legislatures”.