Current Affairs Quiz - December, 2022

Notes:
Russia and India planned to drop all use of the US dollar and the euro in bilateral settlements and conduct all trade transactions in rupee and rouble.
As per the officials, it is necessary to address the imbalance in trade for a full-fledged transition to national currencies.

Notes:
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) cautioned that India’s fiscal space is at risk, in its Article IV consultation report.
IMF also called for a more ambitious and well-communicated consolidation to ensure medium-term fiscal sustainability. It called for further structural reforms, including addressing the adverse impact of climate change, to secure strong and sustainable growth.

Notes:
China’s National Health Commission will no longer be publishing daily data on COVID-19 case figures for the country.
The health agency has been publishing the numbers for the past three years. It is also not known how frequently China will now update Covid information. Relevant COVID information will be published by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention for reference and research.

Notes:
The Ministry of Railways has formulated a new scheme to modernise over 1,000 small stations over the coming years.
Amrit Bharat Station Scheme is a part of its station redevelopment drive. The key features of the proposed stations include provisions for roof top plazas, longer platforms, ballast-less tracks, and 5G connectivity.

Notes:
Ladakh is celebrating Losar Festival on December 24, to mark the Ladakhi New Year. The Losar festivities continue for nine more days from the new year.
This is the major socio-religious festival of Ladakh celebrated in winter. The New Year is welcomed with dough Models of Ibex Sun and Moon and flour-painted lucky signs on the walls of the kitchen.

Notes:
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has outlined a 10-point peace plan to end the war with Russia.
He has been promoting his 10-point peace plan, discussing it with U.S. President Joe Biden among others. He also urged the the world leaders to hold a Global Peace Summit based on it. Zelenskiy announced his peace formula at a November summit of the Group of 20 major economies.

Notes:
The Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), ARTPARK (AI and Robotics Technology Park) and Google have partnered together for ‘Project Vaani’ Initiative.
The digital project aims to map the language diversity of India by collecting speech sets of about a million people across 773 districts. The project aims to record over 150,000 hours of speech, part of which will be transcribed in local scripts. The goal is to boost development of automatic speech recognition, speech to speech translation and natural language understanding.

Notes:
The President of India Droupadi Murmu, laid the foundation stone for the project ‘Development of Pilgrimage Facilities at Bhadrachalam Group of Temples’ at Bhadrachalam in the state of Telangana.
She also laid the foundation stone for another project called ‘Development of Pilgrimage and Heritage Infrastructure of UNESCO World Heritage Site at Rudreshwara (Ramappa) Temple’ in the state.  Both these projects have been approved under the PRASHAD (National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Heritage Augmentation Drive) Scheme of the Ministry of Tourism.

Notes:
The Election Commission of India has developed a prototype of a remote electronic voting machine (RVM) for domestic migrant voters.
It has invited political parties for a demonstration. If implemented, migrant voters do not need to travel to their home district to exercise their franchise and this will be a major move to increase voter participation.

Notes:
Union Home Minister Amit Shah recently launched the Mobile App ‘Prahari’ and Manual of Border Security Force in New Delhi.
Through the Prahari app, BSF personnels can get information related to accommodation, Ayushman-CAPF and leaves on their mobiles.