Current Affairs Quiz - April 2022

Notes:
The Union Culture ministry launched a new portal named Temple 360, through which devotees can perform online rituals of prominent pilgrimage sites.
Live camera feeds across temples of India will be made available on the website. At present, live streaming of rituals from four temples: Somnath (Gujarat), Kashi Vishwanath (UP), Trimbakeshwar and Ghrishneshwar (both in Maharashtra) can be viewed on the portal.

Notes:
The Indian government appointed senior Indian Foreign Service officer Vinay Mohan Kwatra as the new Foreign Secretary.
The 1988-batch IFS officer is currently serving as Ambassador in Kathmandu since January 2020. He worked in Prime Minister’s Office from 2015 to 2017 and had served as India’s ambassador to France. Vinay Kwatra will replace the incumbent Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla.

Notes:
The Tamil Nadu government recently formed a 13-member panel to frame the state education policy.
The panel is headed by Delhi High Court retired Chief Justice D Murugesan and the panel members include education experts, writer S Ramakrishnan, former chess world champion Viswanathan Anand and Carnatic musician T M Krishna, among others.

Notes:
Manila-based Asian Development Bank recently released its flagship Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2022.
It projected South Asia’s largest economy India to grow by 7.5 per cent in the current fiscal year (2022-23) and by eight per cent the next year (2023-24). It also estimated a seven per cent collective growth for South Asian economies in 2022. South Asia comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Notes:
April 7 is observed as World Health Day, to celebrate the creation of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948 in the First Health Assembly.
WHO leads the celebration to discuss health-related issues and to draw attention to specific health issues. The theme for this year’s World Health Day is “Our Planet, Our Health”.

Notes:
The Union Health ministry informed the Rajya Sabha that India has 1.96 nurses per 1,000 population, at present.
As per Indian Nursing Council records, there are around 33.41 lakh registered nursing personnel, including  registered nurses and registered midwives, nurse associates and lady health visitors. There are 13,01,319 allopathic doctors registered with the State Medical Councils and National Medical Commission as of November 2021.

Notes:
According to a study released by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), the frequency and intensity of forest fires have increased in the past two decades.
The study, ‘Managing Forest Fires in a Changing Climate’, found that there has been a ten-fold increase in forest fires in the past two decades. More than 62 per cent of Indian states are prone to high-intensity forest fires. Mizoram had the highest number of forest fires in the last two decades, with more than 95 per cent of its districts being forest fire hotspots.

Notes:
A group of lawmakers have introduced a bill in US Congress to recapture nearly 3,80,000 unused family and employment-based visas.
The ‘Jumpstart our Legal Immigration System Act’ seeks to reduce Green Card backlog, particularly affecting immigrants from countries like India and China. It would allow immigrant US residents eligible for adjustment to Legal Permanent Residence (LPR) status.

Notes:
A team of astronomers led by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics- Harvard & Smithsonian, USA has detected the most distant astronomical object ever.
The object named ‘HD1’ is a galaxy candidate 13.5 billion light-years away. The astronomical object is extremely bright in ultraviolet light due to some energetic processes occurring in it. HD1 forms more than 100 stars every single year, which 10 times higher than that of starburst galaxies

Notes:
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has scrapped the charges levied on USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data) messages.
USSD enables financial and banking transactions in feature phones. So far, the charge was 50 paise per USSD session. A charge of 50 paise per USSD session has been deducted so far.