Current Affairs Exam

The 5th Asean-India Business Summit took place on 6 March 2023 in Kuala Lumpur. Speakers and participants from Asean and India convened to discuss how business linkages, connectivity and supply chain resilience can be enhanced through deeper ASEAN-India cooperation. The Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology addresses the 5th ASEAN-India Business summit.

It is being held as part of the ASEAN-India Year of Friendship to commemorate the more than three-decade-long engagement between India and the 10-member bloc in Kuala Lumpur.

Ministry of Tourism had constituted an inter-ministerial task force for National Digital Tourism Mission on 23rd July, 2021 to undertake consultations with the tourism and domain experts, define the context, mission, vision, objectives, and overall scope of the National Digital Tourism Mission.

The Task Force has prepared a draft report on proposed National Digital Tourism Mission, which inter-alia lays down domain and technology principles, standards, digital stack, Governance structure and plan for implementation of the envisaged National Digital Tourism Mission.

The Ministry of Tourism has invited final comments from the stakeholders on draft report for setting up of National Digital Tourism Mission. The draft report has also been published on website for suggestions and feedback from public.

The draft report takes note of the fact that tourism sector is highly fragmented. Subsectors of tourism such as transport, accommodation, restaurants and catering, and personal Services are all subject to very different challenges and opportunities.

The vision of National Digital Tourism Mission is to bridge the existing information gap amongst different stakeholders of tourism ecosystem through a digital highway.

Indias first refineries for ethanol production from bamboo, with daily capacity of 30,000 litre, will be built in Gadchiroli and Nandurbar districts.

An agreement of the project was signed on Friday in Hyderabad betweenNagarjuna GroupandLodga Bamboo Industries ofLatur district.

Those privy to the development said that the Union Government has committed to blend 20% ethanol with petrol by 2025, eventually creating a huge opportunity for using bamboo-based ethanol. India imports about Rs 8.5 lakh crore worth of diesel and petrol.

As many as 60,000 tonne bamboo grown over 1,500 acres would be needed annually to meet the raw material requirements of the ethanol plant.

The largest reclining statue of Lord Buddha in India is being built in . Indias Buddhist pilgrimage circuit is being proactively revived and Bodh Gaya is an integral part of it. Hence, the site of Gautam Buddhas enlightenment will soon be Home to his largest reclining statue.

Lord Buddhas idol is in the Mahaparinirvana Mudra is very important in Buddhism as he preached to his followers in this pose before attaining Mahaparinirvana. Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh also has an idol of Lord Buddha in this posture as this where he attained Mahaparinirvana.

This statue is being made with fiberglass and is being built by sculptors who are from Kolkata.

From February 2023, the giant statue of Lord Buddha will be opened for the devotees.

The mission, which was only announced after spacecraft deployment, is the first Iranian launch to reach orbit in almost two years.

Indias retail may Average below 6% even if crude oil prices average $100 a barrel in 2022-23, but rising prices remain an elevated risk to Growth especially as private consumption remains subdued, rating firm Crisil said on Thursday.

Assuming a full pass-through of global crude prices to retail fuel prices in India, Crisil expects average consumer inflation to be 5.4% if oil prices average $85-90 a barrel, and rise to 5.8% if the mean crude price is at $100 a barrel through the next fiscal year.

Headline inflation, however, is expected to be lower than the last time oil prices shot past $100 a barrel during 2012-14, a period when food and Core Inflation were also high, Crisil observed, adding that such a scenario was unlikely to repeat in 2022-23.

Municipal Performance Index 2020 has been released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) Highlights:

The 2020 Municipal Performance Index (MPI): MPI reviewed the sectoral performance of 111 cities in five verticals (Delhi was evaluated by NDMC and three municipal companies).

These verticals consist of 20 industries and a total of 100 indicators. The five vertical areas under MPI are service, finance, policy, technology and Governance.

City ranking:

According to the assessment framework of MPI 2020, cities are classified according to their populations of “million+” (cities with a Population of more than one million) and “population of less than one million”.

In the “Millionaire” category: Indore has become the highest-ranked , followed by Surat and Bhopal. In the “less than a million” category: The New Delhi Municipal Council has become the leader, followed by Tirupati and Gandhinagar.

For about 600 years, Mleiha was the political centre of southeast Arabia before it was abandoned in the 3rd century CE. And for decades, the emergence of the tropical plant in the arid Arabian peninsula has been aquestion archaeologistshave tried to answer. Oman, they had concluded, was the source of the ancient Arab cotton trade. But now, scientists from the Museum of Natural HISTORY in Paris have found evidence in Mleiha that the earliest cotton in the Arab region came fromnorthwest India.

The irony, however, is that a fire which ravaged one of its most important buildings of Mleiha is also what preserved it for posterity. Within this Unesco World Heritage Site in the United Arab Emirates lies a tableaux frozen in fire. Its a mud brick building with 15 rooms around a central courtyard with signs of a life hastily abandoned in forgotten objects and prized possessions carelessly thrown around, and, the evidence of an ancient Indian trade route, cotton specifically, 31 whole seeds, 79 fragments and 7 raw fibre clusters.

Maharashtra, Naduand Uttar Pradesh remained the top three states with the highest employable talent, according to the India Skills Report 2021.Karnatakatakes the fourth spot followed byAndhra Pradesh. Bangalore is among the most preferred cities to work for aspiring professionals, the report said.

Rajasthan and West Bengal come in the top 10 states with employable talent, yet remain below Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi,Telanganaand Gujarat respectively. Haryana could not make it to this list again, despite the massive push from numerous Skill development measures.

The report, prepared by Wheebox in PARTNERSHIP with Taggd, CII, AICTE, AIU and UNDP, showed that 46% of the youth were considered highly employable Resources. This is far less than the previous years, indicating a skill gap in Education, it said, adding that this is still an encouraging statistic considering that the Average age of India is 26.8 years old.

More Women were found employable than men. In fact, the number of women enrolled in colleges and degree programs have increased over the past, the report said. The report is based on the assessment of 65,000 candidates.

Indias national accreditation system under the Quality Council of India (QCI) has been ranked 5^thin the world in the recent Global Quality Index (GQII) 2021. The GQII ranks the 184 economies in the world on the basis of the quality infrastructure (QI). Indias overall QI system ranking continues to be in the Top 10 at the 10^thposition, with the standardization system (under Bis) at 9^thand the metrology system (under NPL-CSIR) at 21^stposition in the world.

QI is the technical backbone for international trade, with metrology, standardization, accreditation and conformity assessment Services providing reliability and trust between trading partners.In India, the National Physical Laboratory under the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (NPL-CSIR) is the national metrology institute, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is the national standards body and the constituent national accreditation boards under Quality Council of India support are the custodians of the national accreditation system.

The GQII measures the relative development of countries QI. A formula calculates a score for each country based on its position in the sub-rankings for metrology, standards and accreditation.Geographically, the top 25 QI systems are mainly located in Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, with some exceptions, such as India (10th), Brazil (13th), Australia (14th), Turkey (16th), Mexico (18th) and South Africa (20th).