Vamsadhara River

• River Vamsadhara is an important east flowing river between Rushikulya and Godavari, in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh states in India.
• The river originates in the border of Thuamul Rampur in the Kalahandi district and Kalyansinghpur in Rayagada district of Odisha and runs for a distance of about 254 kilometers, where it joins the Bay of Bengal at Kalingapatnam, Andhra Pradesh.

BrahMos missile

• BrahMos, a joint venture between India and Russia, has been demonstrated in various configurations in land-attack, anti-ship and from the air.
• The Army and the Navy have already inducted the missile, while the air launched variant is undergoing trials.
• It has a strike range of around 290 km and is described as the world’s fastest supersonic cruise missile.

Petcoke

• Petroleum coke, abbreviated coke or petcoke, is a final carbon-rich solid material that derives from oil refining, and is one type of the group of fuels referred to as cokes.
• Petcoke is the coke that, in particular, derives from a final cracking process—a thermo-based chemical engineering process that splits long chain hydrocarbons of petroleum into shorter chains—that takes place in units termed coker units.
• Stated succinctly, coke is the "carbonization product of high-boiling hydrocarbon fractions obtained in petroleum processing (heavy residues)."
• Petcoke is also produced in the production of synthetic crude oil (syncrude) from bitumen extracted from Canada’s oil sands and from Venezuela's Orinoco oil sands.

Health Hazards

• Petroleum coke is sometimes a source of fine dust, which can get through the filtering process of the human airway and lodge in the lungs and cause serious health problems.
• However, studies have shown that petroleum coke itself has a low level of toxicity and there is no evidence of carcinogenicity.
• Petroleum coke can contain vanadium, a toxic metal. Vanadium was found in the dust collected in occupied dwellings near the petroleum coke stored next to the Detroit River. Vanadium is toxic in tiny quantities.

The Supreme Court has been urging the government since December 2017 to move forward towards a nationwide ban on the use of petcoke and furnace oil to power up industries in a bid to fight pollution.