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The seeds of the conflict were laid in 1917 when the then British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour expressed official support of Britain for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine under the Balfour Declaration. The lack of concern for the "rights of existing non-Jewish communities" i.e. the Arabs led to prolonged violence.
Unable to contain Arab and Jewish violence, Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine in 1948, leaving responsibility for resolving the competing claims to the newly created United Nations. The UN presented a partition plan to create independent Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Most Jews in Palestine accepted the partition but most Arabs did not.
In 1948, the Jewish declaration of Israel's independence prompted surrounding Arab states to attack. At the end of the war, Israel controlled about 50 percent more territory than originally envisioned UN partition plan. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Jerusalem's holy sites, and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip.

Israel - Palestine Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
Palestine was a part of Ottoman empire, later became part of British empire.
The war ended in 1949 with Israel's victory, but many Palestinians were displaced and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.
In another war in 1967 (also known as six day war), Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as most of the Syrian Golan Heights, Gaza and the Egvptian Sinai peninsula

The recently released caste survey data by the Bihar government has once again brought the issue of caste census to the forefront. While the Census of India has been publishing data on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, there has been no estimate for the population of Other Backward
Classes (OBCs) and other groups.

Census in India:

The origin of the Census in India dates back to the colonial exercise of 1881.
Census is used by the government, policymakers, academics, and others to capture the Indian population, access resources, map social change, and conduct delimitation exercises.

SECC (Socio-Economic and Caste Census):

SECC was first conducted in 1931 which aimed to collect information on the economic status of Indian families, both in rural and urban areas, to identify indicators of deprivation

Difference Between Census & SECC:

Census provides a general portrait of the Indian population, while SECC is used to identify beneficiaries of state support.
Census data is confidential under the Census Act of 1948, while personal information in SECC is open for use by government departments to grant or restrict benefits to households.

Mains Question
Q. Discuss the significance and the challenges associated with conducting a caste census in India.

The decision of the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to leave interest rates unchanged even as the central bank warned of the major risk that 'high inflation' poses to macroeconomic stability is a clear sign that monetary authorities find themselves caught in a cleft stick.
After a relatively benign first quarter, when headline retail inflation averaged 4.63% as against the RBI's projection of 4.6%, price gains measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) accelerated sharply in the last quarter with July and August seeing readings of 7.44% and 6.83%, respectively.
Governor Shaktikanta Das underlined the RBI's willingness to resort to Open Market Operation sales of securities to suck out excess funds from the system if it sees reason to believe that liquidity may be rising to a level where it could undermine the overall monetary policy stance.

About Monetary Policy Committee (MPC):

The Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 (RBI Act) has been amended by the Finance Act, 2016 to provide for a statutory and institutionalized framework for a MPC.
Under Section 45ZB of the amended RBI Act, 1934, the central government is empowered to constitute a six-member MPC.
Function: The MPC is entrusted with the task of fixing the benchmark policy rate (repo rate) required to contain inflation within the specified target level.

Composition:

MPC will have six members - the RBI Governor (Chairperson), the RBI Deputy Governor in charge of monetary policy, one official nominated by the RBI Board, and the remaining three members would represent the Government of India.
The external members hold office for a period of four years.
The quorum for a meeting shall be four Members, at least one of whom shall be the Governor and, in his absence, the Deputy Governor, who is the Member of the MPC.
The MPC takes decisions based on a majority vote. In case of a tie, the RBI governor will have the second or casting vote.
The decision of the MPC would be binding on the RBI.

Overlapping prey availability or habitat suitability could dictate a positive association between dholes and tigers, facilitating coexistence or even cooperative behaviours between the two species of carnivores, a new study has found.
The dhole or Asiatic wild dog (Con alpinus) is the only endangered wild pack- living canid in the tropical Indian forests and is considered at high risk of extinction.
The global population of adult dholes, now classified as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List, is estimated to be between 949 and 2,215.
In India, they are found in three clusters across India namely the Western and Eastern Ghats, central Indian landscape and North East India.
Karnataka, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh rank high in the conservation of the endangered dhole in India, according to a study (2020)

Technically called a Glacier Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF), these are instances of large lakes formed from the melting of glaciers, suddenly breaking free of their moraine - natural dams that are formed from rock, sediment and other debris.
The South Lhonak glacier, located in north Sikkim, is reportedly one of the fastest retreating glaciers. The glacier receded nearly two km in 46 years from 1962 to 2008. It further retreated by -400 m from 2008 to 2019. There are an estimated 7,500 glaciers in the Himalayas and GLOFs have been associated with major disasters through the years.
A report in the journal Nature counts the 1926 Jammu and Kashmir deluge, the 1981 Kinnaur valley floods in Himachal Pradesh and the 2013 Kedarnath outburst in Uttarakhand as examples of GLOF related disasters. Among the Himalayan States in India, Sikkim has about 80 glaciers more than any other State. Over the years climatologists have warned that they could be responsible for lake outbursts.
The most visible consequence of the flooding was the destruction of the Chungthang dam.
Both the frequency and severity of such events are going to increase exponentially in the future. The Himalayan ecosystem is the most fragile in the world and any disruption in the way we are managing these resources will have a problematic outcome for the people of the region.