Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2019

Notes:
Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Steel, Dharmendra Pradhan has recently launched Atal Community Innovation Centre (ACIC) in New Delhi to encourage the spirit of innovation at the community level. The aim of the initiative is to encourage the spirit of innovation through solution-driven design thinking to serve society. The ACIC is a new initiative of Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) to support community innovation drive in the country. It will provide a platform in many of the rural, tribal areas and Tier-II and -III cities and unserved regions to have access to latest technologies for innovation and to ideate and create prototypes for innovation.

Notes:
NDTV India’s senior executive editor, Ravish Kumar has been honoured with the prestigious 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for his ‘ethical journalism’. Kumar has won the honour for his news show, Prime Time, which deals with real-life & under-reported problems of ordinary people. He is among five individuals who were declared winners of the award. The four other winners of the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award are Ko Swe Win from Myanmar, Angkhana Neelapaijit from Thailand, Raymundo Pujante Cayabyab from Philippines and Kim Jong-Ki from South Korea. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is the highest honour given to Asian individuals and organisations and often referred to as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.

Notes:
The book “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age” has been co-authored by Microsoft President Brad Smith & Carol Ann Browne, and will release on September 11. The book will provide a behind-the-scene look at the multinational technology company and tell some of the biggest stories to hit the tech industry in the past decade. The book comes at a time when the company finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These include privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of AI, big tech’s relationship to inequality and the challenges for democracy, far and near.

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The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has released a study titled “Economic Valuation of Tiger Reserves in India: A Value+ Approach”. The study is authored by the Centre for Ecological Services Management at the Indian Institute of Forest Management (Bhopal). It estimates the economic valuation of Bandipur Tiger Reserve and 9 other tiger reserves in the country. The purpose behind the report is to enhance tiger conservation by highlighting the holistic economic benefits of protected areas. The researchers used an array of methods to determine the economic, scientific, educational, cultural and recreational services of tiger parks. The reserves surveyed are Melghat Tiger Reserve (Maharashtra), Nagarjunasagar Srisailam (Andhra Pradesh), Anamalai (Tamil Nadu), Bandipur (Karnataka), Dudhwa (Uttar Pradesh), Pakke (Arunachal Pradesh), Palamau (Jharkhand), Panna (Madhya Pradesh), Similipal (Odisha), and Valmiki (Bihar). Founded in 1982, the IIFM is a premier national level institute engaged in education, research, training and consultancy in the area of Forest, Environment and Natural Resources Management and allied sectors.

Notes:
In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court has recently held that a judicial magistrate can order an accused to give his voice samples even against his consent in the course of a criminal investigation. This judgment was rendered by a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and comprising Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna. The bench dealt with the issues, including that whether in the absence of any provision in the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPc), can a magistrate authorise the investigating agency to record the voice sample of the person accused of an offence. The CJI pointed out that the Supreme Court has issued this order under Article 142 of the Constitution following the interpretation of all the pertinent laws.

Notes:
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has launched India’s first large-scale trial for two new TB vaccines – VPM1002 and Immuvac. The initiative would enroll 12,000 healthy household contacts of a patient whose sputum has tested positive for TB and are therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. VPM1002 is produced by the Serum Institute of India (Pune) & Immuvac is manufactured by Cadila Pharmaceuticals. These anti-Tuberculosis vaccines aim to prevent infection (pre-exposure) or prevent primary progression or reactivation of latent TB infection (post-exposure). According to the Global TB Report 2017 issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), India has the highest number of TB cases in the world.

Notes:
Former Indian opener and Bengal captain, Arun Lal has been conferred with Karthik Bose Lifetime Achievement award of the Cricket Association of Bengal’s (CAB’s) in Kolkata. He played 16 Test matches and 13 One-Day Internationals (ODIs) for India between 1982 and 1989. He played six seasons for Delhi before becoming a regular feature for Bengal and was a major figure in Bengal’s Ranji Trophy triumph in 1989. He was credited with instilling a positive attitude in the team’s approach.

Notes:
According to the University Grants Commission (UGC), all universities in India – public and private – will get final subscription to access the Swedish anti-plagiarism software Urkund from September 1, 2019. The Urkund software was chosen through a global tender process. As part of the exercise to prevent plagiarism in the coming years, the software will be provided free of cost anti-plagiarism software to all 900 universities, including private players. It will be available to teachers, students, researchers & everyone. The Union Government also notified the UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 to prescribe the graded punishment for plagiarism. Beside this, a UGC committee on improving research culture, headed by former Indian Institute of Science (IIS) director P. Balaram, noted that Indian academics have contributed 35% of all articles published in about 11,000 fake journals between 2010 and 2014. Most of these articles were in fake engineering journals, followed by articles in fake journals of bio-medicine and social sciences.

Notes:
The Western and Central Railways have introduced a new Biometric Token System (BTS) by which passengers travelling in the general coach, where seats are not reserved, are given a token roughly 3 hours before the train’s departure. These tokens are issued on a first-come, first-served basis after accepting biometric information of individual passengers. The tokens carry a serial number on them, which governs the order in which passengers will board the train. The use of biometrics cuts out the touts and helps genuine passengers. It would provide relief to passengers and prevent jumping of queue. The system is also cost-effective, as an average of Rs 20 was spent on each train.

Notes:
The Delhi government has launched a project titled ‘Oral History Programme’ that seeks to record oral histories of the city as told by its senior citizens. The project is an attempt to democratise knowledge by recording stories told by hundred of common people in Delhi from different strata of society over the next two years. It is undertaken by Delhi Archives in collaboration with Ambedkar University. It aims to document the history of the city from the perspective of its inhabitants. The project will enable a richer representation of the city than allowed by official records and written documents. The Oral History programme is actually reviving a 3-decade old project of the Delhi Archives. In the 1980s, the official repository of the city’s records began an oral history programme that interviewed eminent personalities, including Gulzarilal Nanda, who served as the acting prime minister of the country twice, and Sushila Nayyar, a close aide of Mahatma Gandhi. But the project was stopped after 56 eminent people were interviewed.