Current Affairs - 2019-20

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Nirupama Rao, the former Indian Ambassador to US, has been appointed as a public policy fellow to a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS) where she will work on a project on the Sino-India ties. Rao will be affiliated with the Wilson Centre’s Asia program and spend 3 months in residence at the Wilson Centre from June 2017, which is a key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues. The WWICS is the living, national memorial to President Wilson, created by Congress in 1968 and headquartered in Washington DC. The Wilson Center provides a strictly nonpartisan space for the worlds of policymaking and scholarship to interact.

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The Indian Railways has recently launched a virtual server “RailCloud” with an inbuilt security system to optimise server usage and faster connectivity. The technology is developed by rail PSU RailTel at an estimated cost of approx Rs 53 crore. The RailCloud technology enables maximising the usage of available server and storage resulting in accommodation of bigger data and more applications within same server space. It will cover all management related to various services like human resources, health and hospital, signal assets, freight and logistics and energy among others. Beside this, the first IT application on RailCloud “Nivaran-Grievance Portal” was also launched. Nivaran is a platform for resolution of service-related grievances of serving and former railway employees.

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The Hypersonic Flight Experiment, or HEX, was the first test-flight in the RLV Technology Demonstration Programme. The RLV-TD vehicle was launched from the first launchpad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre on 23 May 2016.

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Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary is located in the state of Madhya Pradesh. In the year 2018, it received the status of national park. It was selected as a probable location to implement the Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project, with an objective of establishing a second lion population in India.

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According to Mercer’s 20th annual Quality of Living survey 2018, Vienna has topped the ranking among 231 cities for the 9th consecutive year. It is followed by Switzerland’s Zurich, while New Zealand’s Auckland and Germany’s Munich tied for third place. In the 2018 survey, Hyderabad and Pune have been jointly ranked at 142, making the best Indian cities to live in. They were closely followed by Bengaluru (149), Chennai (151), Mumbai, (154), Kolkata (160), with New Delhi (162) taking the last spot as it continues to battle rising traffic congestion and air pollution. The quality of living survey is conducted to help governments and major companies place employees on international assignments. The survey also identifies those cities with the highest personal safety ranking based upon internal stability, crime, effectiveness of law enforcement and relationships with other countries.

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The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1989. It is also known as Green Nobel Prize. The prize is awarded annually to grassroots environmental activists, one from each of the world's six geographic regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. The prize includes a no-strings-attached award of US$175,000 per recipient. Prafulla Samantara is an environmentalist from Odisha. He is known for Lok Shakti Abhiyan, a civil rights organisation, which was at the forefront of the protests in Niyamgiri in Lanjigarh district where Sterlite Industries, a subsidiary of Vedanta Alumina, was planning to set up mining operations in a joint venture with state-owned Orissa Mining Corporation (OMC).

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Recently, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, has proposed to develop a dedicated 200 acre industrial park for the manufacture of medical devices in his state. The Park will be having a Common Manufacturing Facility Centre to act as a Hub for SME Sector to enable it to flourish as a Cluster. Focus will be on creating an Eco System for High End Medical Device Manufacturing and Import Substitution with an eye for Export Market. Though the Medical Device Park has been proposed to be set up in three states viz. Gujarat, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, but Andhra Pradesh has become the first to implement the programme. The proposed medical devices park will have ‘Centre of Excellence’ in which research for medical device will be conducted.

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The scheme called “Transforming India by 2022”, aspires to rapidly transform backward districts that are lacking on key development indices in health, nutrition, education, agriculture, skill development, financial inclusion and basic infrastructure.

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As per the recently Index by the Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Gujarat topped the Logistics Ease Across Different States (LEADS) index, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh took the second and third positions, respectively. LEADS (Logistics Ease Across Different States) is a first-ever sub-national logistics performance index. The LEADS index is based on various parameters such as rail and roads network, warehouses, efficiency of regulatory processes, logistics services, unscheduled stoppages etc. The recent report on LEADS has been prepared by consultancy firm Deloitte.