Prelims Focus 3rd September 2025

03/09/2025

131 2 minutes read

DIGIPIN Initiative

In News: To enhance the DIGIPIN initiative, the Department of Posts has penned a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ESRI India.

The DIGIPIN, or Digital Postal Index Number, is a digital postal index number.
It is a geo-coded, grid-based digital address system that is open-source, interoperable, and developed by the Department of Posts in partnership with IIT Hyderabad and NRSC, ISRO.
It assigns each grid a distinct 10-character alphanumeric code derived from latitude and longitude coordinates and splits India into around 4m x 4m grids.
Offering Address-as-a-Service (AaaS), a suite of services related to address data management, is a fundamental component of the Department of Posts’ vision to facilitate safe and effective interactions among users, private sector companies, and government agencies.

PRATUSH Mission

In News: For space missions, India has created a credit card-sized computer that is intended to capture the incredibly faint signals from the universe’s earliest moments.

Accurate Radio Astronomy from a High-Lunar Orbit for Transient Universe Research (reported in conceptual stage).
It plans to put a payload into lunar orbit around the far side of the Moon.
The goal of the mission is to use the radio-quiet environment on the far side to carry out low-frequency radio astronomy that is unaffected by the ionosphere’s distortion and the radio interference from Earth.

Dongar cultivation

In News: The Dongar cultivation, a traditional hill-slope mixed cropping system practiced by the Kondh tribal community in Odisha’s Rayagada, is indeed under serious decline due to the spread of eucalyptus monoculture. This shift is primarily driven by outsiders linked to paper mills encouraging eucalyptus plantations on upland plots traditionally used for diverse cropping of millets, pulses, and oilseeds.

Dongar Cultivation Overview

Dongar cultivation is an ancient mixed cropping practice on upland hill slopes where multiple crops (millets, pulses, oilseeds) and uncultivated foods like wild tubers are grown together.
It supports biodiversity, birds, soil fertility, and is resilient to climate variability due to its poly-cropping nature.
It is deeply integrated with Kondh cultural practices like seed conservation and labour exchange and forms a vital part of their food security and nutritional diversity.

Socio-Economic and Ecological Concerns

Tribal farmers face water scarcity and soil infertility where eucalyptus is planted.
Many lands traditionally used for dongar have been leased out to outsiders for long terms (12-20 years), reducing the area available for mixed cropping.
This trend also causes loss of traditional communal land use and cultural rituals related to farming.

NASA-ESA Solar Orbiter

In News: The NASA-ESA Solar Orbiter Mission has recently made a significant breakthrough by tracing the origin of Solar Energetic Electrons (SEE), which advances our understanding of solar activity and space weather.

These Solar Energetic Electrons are streams of high-energy electrons released into space primarily from solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
The mission has for the first time clearly linked the SEE bursts to these solar events through extensive observations of over 300 bursts between 2020 and 2022.
The Solar Orbiter, launched in February 2020, is a joint $1.5 billion mission by ESA and NASA designed to study the Sun up close from a highly eccentric orbit that approaches as close as 0.28 AU, inside Mercury’s orbit.
It carries 10 scientific instruments that perform both remote sensing and in-situ measurements to study solar wind, magnetic fields, solar eruptions, and the heliosphere.
One of its unique capabilities is imaging the solar poles and tracking how solar energetic particles like SEEs are produced and travel through space.