The Sowa-Rigpa, system of medicine is one of the oldest surviving and well-documented medical traditions of the world with history of more than 2500 years. It is also popularly known as Amchi and popularly practiced in Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Darjeeling.
In line with the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan, the government has launched the “GatiShakti Sanchar” portal for Centralised Right of Way (RoW) approvals. The portal has been developed keeping in view the vision areas of the National Broadband Mission at the core, which are, providing broadband infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen, Governance and services on demand and in particular, digital empowerment of the citizens of our country. National Broadband Mission (NBM) was set up by the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) on December 17, 2019; to facilitate universal and equitable access to broadband services across the country, especially in rural and remote areas. To fulfil this vision, it is imperative that a backbone of infrastructure is created by facilitating smooth and efficient deployment of Digital Communications Infrastructure across the country. To ensure that, DoT, is launching the “GatiShakti Sanchar” portal. This will provide a robust mechanism to achieve the goal of “Broadband for All” as envisaged in the National Digital Communication Policy-2. The portal shall act as an enabler to the objective of “Ease of doing business” for telecommunications infrastructure works. The timely disposal of RoW applications of various Service and Infrastructure providers shall enable speedy infrastructure creation which would be an enabler for timely rollout of 5G Network also.
NITI Aayog recently launched the National Data & Analytics Platform (NDAP) for open public use. The platform aims to democratize access to public government data by making data accessible, interoperable, interactive, and available on a user-friendly platform. It hosts foundational datasets from various government agencies, presents them coherently, and provides tools for analytics and visualization. NDAP follows a use-case based approach to ensure that the datasets hosted on the platform are tailored to the needs of data users from government, academia, journalism, civil society and the private sector. All datasets are standardized to a common scheme which makes it easy to merge datasets and do cross-sectoral analysis. The main value that NDAP adds is making key foundational datasets interoperable with each other. This will enable easy cross-sectoral analysis and democratize the use of Indian government data. NDAP aims to aid India’s progress by promoting data-driven disclosure, decision making and ensuring availability of data connecting till the last mile. India has a rich data ecosystem which generates data that is invaluable for decision making and research. NDAP is adding to these efforts to further strengthen the data ecosystem.
The 15th meeting of the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification (UNCCD COP15) is currently underway in Abidjan, Cote D Ivoire. India had hosted the fourteenth session of Conference of Parties of United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification from 2nd to 13th September 2019, at New Delhi and is the current president of the same. At COP 14, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi announced that “India would raise its ambition of the total area that would be restored from its land degradation status, from twenty-one million hectares to twenty-six million hectares between now and 2030”. The Prime Minister had then stated that, “…this will be focused on restoring land productivity and ecosystem services of 26 million hectares of most degraded and vulnerable land, with emphasis on the degraded agricultural, forest and other wastelands by adopting a landscape restoration approach.”
Atal New India Challenge is a flagship program of Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. The program aims to seek, select, support and nurture technology-based innovations that solve sectoral challenges of national importance and societal relevance.
As one of the steps towards realizing the ambition of self-reliance and a momentous stride towards “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, the government recently announced Digital India RISC-V Microprocessor (DIR-V) Program with an overall aim to enable creation of Microprocessors for the future in India, for the world and achieve industry-grade silicon & Design wins by December'2023. DIR-V will see partnerships between Startups, Academia & Multinationals, to make India not only a RISC-V Talent Hub for the World but also supplier of RISC-V SoC (System on Chips) for Servers, Mobile devices, Automotive, IoT & Microcontrollers across the globe.
NITI Aayog has drafted the Battery Swapping Policy and released it for stakeholder comments.
India Post Payments Bank (IPPB), a 100% government owned entity under Department of Posts (DoP) announced the launch of Fincluvation– a joint initiative to collaborate with Fintech Startup community to co-create and innovate solutions for financial inclusion.
India’s Services exports for the first time achieved the targeted $250 Billion during April-March 2021-22, exhibiting a positive growth of 21.31 per cent over the fiscal 2020-21. For the month of March 2022, the estimated value of Services export is USD 22.52 Billion, exhibiting a positive growth of 8.31 per cent vis-a-vis March 2021.
The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is a pioneering initiative of India, under the joint collaboration of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Ministry of Ayush, to prevent exploitation and to protect Indian traditional knowledge at Patent Offices worldwide. The TKDL includes India’s rich traditional knowledge related to the systems of medicine from classical/ traditional books related to Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Sowa Rigpa as well as practices of Yoga. The information from the ancient texts of medicine and health existing in local languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Tamil, Bhoti, etc. have been digitized in five international languages, namely, English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese in the TKDL database as prior art.
In pursuance of the National Education Policy, 2020, it has been decided to conduct common entrance test for admission in central universities from the academic year 2022-23 to reduce the burden on students, universities and the entire education system. The Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate programme is to assess the students of different boards at the same level, giving them equal opportunity. Students may apply to more than one universities as per their choice with one application form thereby reducing financial burden and increasing access. They can appear in the test in 13 languages over hundreds of examination centres for admission. The syllabus for undergraduate level is based on the understanding of subject at class XII level, irrespective of affiliations to any board like CBSE, making a desirable change for the students of low socio- economic background. The CUET is concerned with Undergraduate (UG) and Post Graduate (PG) programmes only.
POINT IAS 