Current Affairs Quiz - December, 2022

Notes:
Ten captive-bred Asian Giant Tortoise juveniles were soft-released into the protected Intanki National Park of Nagaland.
It is the first monitored rewilding of the species in India. The Asian Giant Tortoise (Manouria emys phayrei) is the largest tortoise in mainland Asia, listed as ‘critically endangered’ in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Notes:
National Farmer’s Day is being observed on December 23 to commemorate the birth anniversary of the fifth Prime Minister of India, Chaudhary Charan Singh, and his contributions towards the upliftment of farmers in the country.
Various awareness campaigns and drives are organised across the country to educate people about the role of farmers and their contribution to the economy.

Notes:
Indian scientist Professor Thalappil Pradeep, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras received VinFuture special prize on 20th Dec. 2022 in Hanoi.
He was awarded for innovation of a low-cost filtration system to remove arsenic and other heavy metals from groundwater. Thalappil was earlier conferred with the Padma Shri in honour of his work to develop affordable and safe drinking water solutions using nanomaterials.

Notes:
Decacorn is the name given to a business with a value more than USD 10 billion. Unicorns are businesses with a value more than USD 1 billion.
Recently, the collective value of the Indian Premier League (IPL) is estimated to have gone up to USD 10.9 billion, thereby becoming a decacorn. Media rights, sponsorships, ticket sales, and in-stadia revenue are the contributors for its revenue.

Notes:
US President nominated Joe Biden Indian American Richard Verma to top diplomatic position in State Department.
Indian-American lawyer Richard R. Verma has been appointed as the Deputy Secretary of state for management and resources. Verma is currently the chief legal officer and head of global public policy at Mastercard. He has previously served as the U.S. ambassador to India and assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs during former president Barack Obama’s tenure.

Notes:
National Mobile Monitoring Software (NMMS) App was launched by the Minister of Rural Development in 2021.
Digitally capturing the attendance of workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGREGS) has been made universal from January 1, 2023.  The attendance is captured through National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) mobile application.

Notes:
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has appointed senior bureaucrat Santosh Kumar Yadav as Chairman.
Santosh Kumar Yadav, a 1995-batch IAS officer is currently additional secretary in the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education.

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:
Telangana government has launched the 10th phase of Rythu Bandhu, the investment support scheme for farmers.
Under this phase, 7,676 crores will be deposited in the bank accounts of over 70 lakh farmers towards investment support for the Rabi crop season. The investment support is disbursed at a rate of 5000 rupees per acre.

Notes:
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) releases the financial stability report (FSR) twice a year in every June and December.
As per the recent report, the gross non-performing asset (GNPA) ratio of scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) fell to a seven-year low of 5.0 per cent. The net non-performing assets (NNPA) have dropped to ten-year low of 1.3 per cent in September 2022.