On 13 January 2021, Indian Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), the highest decision making body on military and security affairs headed by the Prime Minister, approved procurement of 73 Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas Mk-1A fighter aircraft and 10 LCA Tejas Mk-1 Trainer aircraft for the Indian Air Force (IAF) at the cost of INR 45,696 Crore along with design and development of infrastructure sanctions worth INR 1,202 crore. With this order, IAF will have a total of 123 LCA Tejas in its inventory (IAF had ordered 40 LCAs earlier), equivalent to seven squadrons in future.

Following WhatsApp's newer data policy, concerns arose over the fate of millions of users' data that the social media giant would be collecting. This app has tons of benefits for users on its plate, but what's scaring people more is the association of its parent company Facebook, which has been embroiled in myriads of scandals involving user data.

Twitter has banned US President Donald Trump for using its platform for life. This action by Twitter has made many uncomfortable. There is a view that companies providing digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others have developed a kind of business monopoly, and they behave as per their whims and fancies. Today, such companies control the global digital content and hence there is a need to keep them on a tight leash. Also, there is a talk about how the present nature of legal structures is insufficient to control these tech giants.

Moon is in the news, again. The first human landing on the surface of the Moon was made possible on July 20, 1969, with the landing of Apollo 11. The last human landing on the Moon was during December 1972. The US now is proposing the next human landing on the Moon around 2024. Moon landing during the 1970s was more about the technological one-upmanship amongst the then superpowers, namely the US and USSR, but now in the 21^st century, there is a visible change in the approach.

Recorded history suggests that great powers invariably possess formidable indigenous military industries. In addition to economic and technological prowess and a relatively stable socio-political system, states that aspire to play global roles, also need to possess military-industrial ecosystems that are free from outside pressures at both war and peace times. Two Super Powers dominated post World War II scenario for decades. Rise of China and India with a relative decline of Europe led to an evolving multi-polar configuration.

India successfully tested an indigenously-developed hypersonic technology demonstrator vehicle (HSTDV) powered by a scramjet (supersonic-combustion ramjet) engine on September 07, 2020. This test is an essential step towards building next-generation hypersonic cruise missiles. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)  achieved a significant technological achievement when it flew a cruise vehicle at a hypersonic speed of Mach 6, for 20 seconds.

Understanding the Technology

Several articles were published in the last week mostly speculative, indicating a doomsday scenario for India-Bangladesh bilateral relations.[1]  Three developments were cited as signals of this new low in the bilateral ties.[2] First, one report appeared in Bhorer Kagoj, a Bengali newspaper in Dhaka, that Indian High Commissioner, Riva Ganguly Das was not granted a meeting with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, despite her trying for the last four months to have such a meeting scheduled.[3] This news that Indian High Commissioner was not given

The planet Mars is in the news again. Three missions are expected to be Mars-bound during 2020. Typically, it takes between six to nine months to reach Mars from Earth. The minimum distance from the Earth to Mars is about 54.6 million km. Mars launch windows are available only after a gap of 26 months and the present launch window is open till the third week of August. The first Arab space mission to Mars, an unmanned probe dubbed ‘Hope’ (Al-Amal in Arabic), successfully took off from Japan on 20 July 2020.